Non hominis nomen, sed eloquentiae (‘‘the name not of a person, but of eloquence,’’ Quint. Inst. 10.1.112) - thus Quintilian’s most famous judgment of Cicero. For us, as for his ancient admirers, Cicero stands as the greatest name in Roman oratory. The fifty-eight complete or largely complete speeches that have come down to us, spanning almost four decades (81-43 bce), exemplify his persuasive powers before the senate (twenty-one speeches), before the people in the Forum (nine speeches, if we here include Pro C. Rabirio), and in the law courts (twenty-eight speeches, including In Vatinium, a free-standing treatment of an opposing witness). We have fragments of sixteen more (Crawford 1994), and know of another five that were published but do not survive. Besides these seventy-eight, we know of at least eighty-three more that were presumably never published (Crawford 1984). The published speeches that we have offer an enormous variety of circumstances and emphases, everything from the high drama of preserving the Roman state in time of crisis to the righteous task of punishing the guilty to (far more often) the compassionate duty of saving the innocent and the not-so-innocent (cf. Cic. Off. 2.51). Representing the successful public utterances of a leading statesman, politician and lawyer of his day, Cicero’s speeches were and are exemplars of the art of persuasion. Their abundance of arguments grounded in facts, character, authority, and emotion, woven together in a dizzying variety of styles, offers an invaluable window on Roman attitudes and values. In doing so, the speeches also offer a compelling self-portrait of Cicero the public man.
This chapter will present an overview of Cicero’s speeches through a brief look at several individual works. We will comment only sparingly upon the development of Cicero’s styles (for which see Albrecht 1973, 2003 with literature; cf. more generally chapter 14), and not at all on the rich but technical topic of Cicero’s prose rhythms (see Berry 1996: 49-54). Some orations will be treated more fully, others noted for specific traits that they embody. But before considering individual speeches, it will be useful to emphasize the first origins and primary purposes of the texts we have.
World History
