Reading Republican Oratory: Reconstructions, Contexts, Receptions

by: Gray, Chr. Balbo, A. Marshall, R.M.A. Steel, C.E.W.

Focuses on Roman Republican oratory as a whole, adding context to a subject dominated by analysis of Cicero and contributing to a broader understanding of its workings
Offers original and pragmatic combinations of philological and historical approaches to the fragmentary evidence, yielding new insights for an interdisciplinary readership
Contains imaginative and methodologically rigorous reconstructions of non-Ciceronian Roman oratory
Includes contributions from a wide-ranging international author team, making available in English research usually published in other European languages

Description
Public speech was a key aspect of politics in Republican Rome, both in theory and in practice, and recent decades have seen a surge in scholarly discussion of its significance and performance. Yet the partial nature of the surviving evidence means that our understanding of its workings is dominated by one man, whose texts are the only examples to have survived in complete form since antiquity: Cicero.

This collection of essays aims to broaden our conception of the oratory of the Roman Republic by exploring how it was practiced by individuals other than Cicero, whether major statesmen, jobbing lawyers, or, exceptionally, the wives of politicians. It focuses particularly on the surviving fragments of such oratory, with individual essays tackling the challenges posed both by the partial and often unreliable nature of the evidence about these other Roman orators-often known to us chiefly through the tendentious observations of Cicero himself-and the complex intersections of the written fragments and the oral phenomenon. Collectively, the essays are concerned with the methods by which we are able to reconstruct non-Ciceronian oratory and the exploration of new ways of interpreting this evidence to tell us about the content, context, and delivery of those speeches. They are arranged into two thematic Parts, the first addressing questions of reception, selection, and transmission, and the second those of reconstruction, contextualization, and interpretation: together they represent a comprehensive overview of the non-Ciceronian speeches that will be of use to all ancient historians, philologists, and literary classicists with an interest in the oratory of the Roman Republic.

Table of Contents
Frontmatter
List of Abbreviations
List of Contributors
0: Introduction
A: TRANSMISSION
i. Republican Rome
1: Roman Orators between Greece and Rome: The Case of Cato the Elder, L. Crassus, and M. Antonius, Alexandra Eckert
2: Republican Satire in the Dock: Forensic Rhetoric in Lucilius, Ian Goh
3: Plautus and the Tone of Roman Diplomacy of Intervention, Elena Torregaray Pagola
4: The Eloquence of Publius Sulpicius Rufus and Gaius Aurelius Cotta in Cicero's Brutus, Alfredo Casamento
ii. Imperial Rome
5: The Fragments of Republican Orators in Quintilian's Institutio oratoria, Amedeo Raschieri
6: Vis and Seruitus: The Dark Side of Republican Oratory in Valerius Maximus, S. J. Lawrence
7: Reconstructing Republican Oratory in Cassius Dio's Roman History, Christopher Burden-Strevens
8: Netting the Wolf-Fish: Gaius Titius in Macrobius and Cicero, John Dugan
B: RECONSTRUCTION OF THE FRAGMENTS AND THEIR SOCIAL AND POLITICAL CONTEXTS
i. Reconstructions in the Literal Sense
9: Gaius Titius, Orator and Poeta. (Cic. Brut. 167 and Macrob. Sat. 3.16.4-16), Alberto Cavarzere
10: Clodius' Contio de haruspicum responsis, Anthony Corbeill
11: Certain gentlemen say . . .': Cicero, Cato, and the Debate on the Validity of Clodius' Laws, Kit Morrell
ii. Oratorical Performance
12: The Politics of Pronuntiatio: The Rhetorica ad Herennium and Delivery in the Early First Century BC, Jennifer Hilder
13: Traces of Actio in Fragmentary Roman Orators, Andrea Balbo
14: I Said, He Said: Fragments of Informal Conversations and the Grey Zones of Public Speech in the Late Roman Republic, Cristina Rosillo-López
iii. Gender in Fragmentary Oratory
15: Of Fragments and Feelings: Roman Funeral Oratory Revisited, Hans Beck
16: Fragments of Epideictic Oratory: The Exemplary Case of the Laudatio Funebris for Women, Cristina Pepe
17: Women from the Rostra: Fulvia and the Pro Milone, Bill Gladhill
18: Oratorum Romanarum Fragmenta Liberae Rei Publicae: The Letter of Cornelia, Mater Gracchorum, and the Speeches of her Father and Son, Judith P. Hallett
Endmatter
Bibliography
Index

Reading Republican Oratory: Reconstructions, Contexts, Receptions

by: Gray, Chr. Balbo, A. Marshall, R.M.A. Steel, C.E.W.

• ISBN-13: 9780198788201 / 978-0-19-878820-1
• ISBN-03: 0198788207 / 0-19-878820-7
• Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2018