Cicero's speeches provide a fascinating window into the political battles and crises of his time. In this book, Joanna Kenty examines Cicero's persuasive strategies and the subtleties of his Latin prose, and shows how he used eight political personae – the attacker, the grateful friend, the martyr, the senator, the partisan ideologue, and others – to maximize his political leverage in the latter half of his career. These personae were what made his arguments convincing, and drew audiences into Cicero's perspective. Non-specialist and expert readers alike will gain new insight into Cicero's corpus and career as a whole, as well as a better appreciation of the context, details, and nuances of individual passages.

By its very nature, the art of oratory involves character. Verbal persuasion entails the presentation of a persona by the speaker that affects an audience for good or ill. In this book, James May explores the role and extent of Cicero's use of ethos and demonstrates its persuasive effect. May discusses the importance of ethos, not just in classical rhetorical theory but also in the social, political, and judicial milieu of ancient Rome, and then applies his insights to the oratory of Cicero. Ciceronian ethos was a complex blend of Roman tradition, Cicero's own personality, and selected features of Greek and Roman oratory. More than any other ancient literary genre, oratory dealt with constantly changing circumstances, with a wide variety of rhetorical challenges. An orator's success or failure, as well as the artistic quality of his orations, was largely the direct result of his responses to these circumstances and challenges. Acutely aware of his audience and its cultural heritage and steeped in the rhetorical traditions of his predecessors, Cicero employed rhetorical ethos with uncanny success. May analyzes individual speeches from four different periods of Cicero's career, tracing changes in the way Cicero depicted character, both his own and others', as a source of persuasion--changes intimately connected with the vicissitudes of Cicero's career and personal life. He shows that ethos played a major role in almost every Ciceronian speech, that Cicero's audiences were conditioned by common beliefs about character, and finally, that Cicero's rhetorical ethos became a major source for persuasion in his oratory.

Prologue: Quintilian and John of Salisbury in the Ciceronian tradition -- Rhetoric, emotional manipulation, and morality: the contemporary relevance of Cicero vis-a-vis Aristotle -- Political morality, conventional morality, and decorum in Cicero -- Rhetoric as a balancing of ends: Cicero and Machiavelli -- Justus Lipsius, morally acceptable deceit, and prudence in the Ciceronian tradition -- The classical orator as political representative: Cicero and the modern concept of representation -- Deliberative democracy and rhetoric: Cicero, oratory, and conversation

Cicero's self-portrait as master of Roman prose, philosopher, and statesman has often attracted interest from intellectuals over the times. This volume concentrates on the multiple ways by which different ages created their 'Ciceros'. An internation

Why philosophy was politics by other means for Rome's greatest statesman In the 40s BCE, during his forced retirement from politics under Caesar's dictatorship, Cicero turned to philosophy, producing a massive and important body of work. As he was acutely aware, this was an unusual undertaking for a Roman statesman because Romans were often hostile to philosophy, perceiving it as foreign and incompatible with fulfilling one's duty as a citizen. How, then, are we to understand Cicero's decision to pursue philosophy in the context of the political, intellectual, and cultural life of the late Roman republic? In A Written Republic, Yelena Baraz takes up this question and makes the case that philosophy for Cicero was not a retreat from politics but a continuation of politics by other means, an alternative way of living a political life and serving the state under newly restricted conditions. Baraz examines the rhetorical battle that Cicero stages in his philosophical prefaces—a battle between the forces that would oppose or support his project. He presents his philosophy as intimately connected to the new political circumstances and his exclusion from politics. His goal—to benefit the state by providing new moral resources for the Roman elite—was traditional, even if his method of translating Greek philosophical knowledge into Latin and combining Greek sources with Roman heritage was unorthodox. A Written Republic provides a new perspective on Cicero's conception of his philosophical project while also adding to the broader picture of late-Roman political, intellectual, and cultural life.

Presents the first full-length, systematic study of the reception of Cicero's speeches in the Roman educational system.

Oratory and Political Career in the Late Roman Republic is a pioneering investigation into the role of oratory in Roman Republican politics.