One important innovation of Cicero's Brutus is the way in which it represents the transmissio... more One important innovation of Cicero's Brutus is the way in which it represents the transmission, reception, and development of oratorical skills. Cicero dismantles and transforms existing family rhetoric of descent by using traditional vocabulary describing talent and familial influence in new ways. He emphasizes the possibility of learning from and differentiating oneself from age-mates and colleagues within the same generation. The result is an incipient republican aesthetic of oratory.
Abstract I argue that rhetorical appeal to the'ancestral constitution,'that is, one kind ... more Abstract I argue that rhetorical appeal to the'ancestral constitution,'that is, one kind of argument from precedent, can be found in Cicero's speeches and that the most interesting use of it is in the contio speeches, which constitute a genre unto themselves. Chapter I ...
Cicero’s first speech as praetor before a contio meeting, De Imperio Cn. Pompei, gives us a sense... more Cicero’s first speech as praetor before a contio meeting, De Imperio Cn. Pompei, gives us a sense of the early stages of the development of imperial metaphor. De imp. Cn. Pomp. is an ingenious attempt at articulating a vocabulary of consensus for its audience, which consisted of a large swath of Roman inhabitants in addition to the reading public cultivated by Cicero. It reveals to us the creation of several different areas of public discourse. Many biographers of Cicero and historians of the Roman republic seek the impulses toward their creation in the socio-economic position of Cicero himself, and in his own original assimilation of Greek rhetorical techniques to Roman circumstances. But this explanation is clearly insufficient to explain the public appeal of the extension of the idea of personal patronage (clientela) into the realm of foreign affairs, for instance, and its institutionalization in the late republic and early empire. Certainly, emphasizing the virtus and auctoritas of Rome as compared with its foreign peers and allies was one important way in which the Roman ruling class could legitimate its own imperialist ideology. But the appeal of the argument was also an eminently popularis one. Metaphorical claims to ancestry and precedent consequently play a prominent role in the opening speech of Cicero’s praetorship: they provide a “pre-text” for Roman imperium as it was embodied by first the late republican warrior-generals, and then the emperor himself. They lay the necessary rhetorical groundwork for linking populist claims to imperial politics. This paper will concentrate on three of these: the relationship of Roma/socius as imitative of the traditional Roman relationship of patronus/cliens; the idea that virtus historically grounds the claim of the Roman people to rule over groups that might alternatively have been imagined as peers or rivals within the world of the Hellenistic Mediterranean; and the idea that there is a kind of auctoritas that belongs to the Roman people as a whole.
One important innovation of Cicero's Brutus is the way in which it represents the transmissio... more One important innovation of Cicero's Brutus is the way in which it represents the transmission, reception, and development of oratorical skills. Cicero dismantles and transforms existing family rhetoric of descent by using traditional vocabulary describing talent and familial influence in new ways. He emphasizes the possibility of learning from and differentiating oneself from age-mates and colleagues within the same generation. The result is an incipient republican aesthetic of oratory.
Abstract I argue that rhetorical appeal to the'ancestral constitution,'that is, one kind ... more Abstract I argue that rhetorical appeal to the'ancestral constitution,'that is, one kind of argument from precedent, can be found in Cicero's speeches and that the most interesting use of it is in the contio speeches, which constitute a genre unto themselves. Chapter I ...
Cicero’s first speech as praetor before a contio meeting, De Imperio Cn. Pompei, gives us a sense... more Cicero’s first speech as praetor before a contio meeting, De Imperio Cn. Pompei, gives us a sense of the early stages of the development of imperial metaphor. De imp. Cn. Pomp. is an ingenious attempt at articulating a vocabulary of consensus for its audience, which consisted of a large swath of Roman inhabitants in addition to the reading public cultivated by Cicero. It reveals to us the creation of several different areas of public discourse. Many biographers of Cicero and historians of the Roman republic seek the impulses toward their creation in the socio-economic position of Cicero himself, and in his own original assimilation of Greek rhetorical techniques to Roman circumstances. But this explanation is clearly insufficient to explain the public appeal of the extension of the idea of personal patronage (clientela) into the realm of foreign affairs, for instance, and its institutionalization in the late republic and early empire. Certainly, emphasizing the virtus and auctoritas of Rome as compared with its foreign peers and allies was one important way in which the Roman ruling class could legitimate its own imperialist ideology. But the appeal of the argument was also an eminently popularis one. Metaphorical claims to ancestry and precedent consequently play a prominent role in the opening speech of Cicero’s praetorship: they provide a “pre-text” for Roman imperium as it was embodied by first the late republican warrior-generals, and then the emperor himself. They lay the necessary rhetorical groundwork for linking populist claims to imperial politics. This paper will concentrate on three of these: the relationship of Roma/socius as imitative of the traditional Roman relationship of patronus/cliens; the idea that virtus historically grounds the claim of the Roman people to rule over groups that might alternatively have been imagined as peers or rivals within the world of the Hellenistic Mediterranean; and the idea that there is a kind of auctoritas that belongs to the Roman people as a whole.
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