Provides the educational and political context of a key work in European literary history
An ideal introduction to the De oratore; all Latin quotations are translated
A serious and invaluable contribution to Ciceronian studies
The Roman World of Cicero`s De Oratore aims to provide an accessible study of Cicero`s first and fullest dialogue, on the ideal orator-statesman. It illustrates the dialogue`s achievement as a reflection of a civilized way of life and a brilliantly constructed literary unity, and considers the contribution made by Cicero`s recommendations to the development of rhetoric and higher education at Rome. Because Cicero deliberately set his extended conversation in the generation of his childhood teachers, a study of the dialogue in its historical setting can show how the political and cultural life of this earlier period differed from Cicero`s personal experience of the collapse of senatorial government, when the overwhelming power of the `first triumvirate` forced him into political silence in the last decade of the republic. After an introductory chapter reviewing Cicero`s position on return from exile, chapters include a comparative study of the careers of M. Antonius and L. Licinius Crassus, protagonists of the dialogue, a discussion of Cicero`s response to Plato`s criticisms of rhetoric in the Gorgias and Phaedrus , and his debt to Aristotle`s Rhetoric , analysis of the dialogue`s treatment of Roman civil law, existing Latin literature and historical writing, Strabo`s survey of the sources and application of humour, political eloquence in senate and contio , theories of diction and style, and the techniques of oral delivery. An epilogue looks briefly at Cicero`s De re publica and Tacitus` Dialogus de oratoribus as reflections on the transformation of oratory and free (if oligarchic) republican government by debate to meet the context of the new autocracy.