Cicero's Brutus (46 BCE), a tour-de-force of intellectual and political history, was written amidst political crisis: Caesar's defeat of the republican resistance at the battle of Thapsus. This magisterial example of the dialogue genre capaciously documents the intellectual vibrancy of the Roman Republic and its Greco-Roman traditions. This book studies the work from several distinct yet interrelated perspectives: Cicero's account of oratorical history, the confrontation with Caesar, and the exploration of what it means to write a history of an artistic practice. Close readings of this dialogue-including its apparent contradictions and tendentious fabrications-reveal a crucial and crucially productive moment in Greco-Roman thought. Cicero, this book argues, created the first nuanced, sophisticated, and ultimately 'modern' literary history, crafting both a compelling justification of Rome's oratorical traditions and also laying a foundation for literary historiography that abides to this day. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Cicero's Brutus and Orator constitute his final major statements on the history of Roman oratory and the nature of the ideal orator. In the Brutus he traces the development of political and judicial speech over the span of 150 years, from the early second century to 46 BCE, when both of these treatises were written. In an immensely detailed account of some 200 speakers from the past he dispenses an expert's praise and criticism, provides an unparalleled resource for the study of Roman rhetoric, and engages delicately with the fraught political circumstances of the day, when the dominance of Julius Caesar was assured and the future of Rome's political institutions was thrown into question. The Orator, written several months later, describes the form of oratory that Cicero most admired, even though he insists that neither he nor any other orator has been able to achieve it. At the same time, he defends his views against critics-the so-called Atticists-who found Cicero's style overwrought and favored a more restrained and plainer approach.

"These translations of the Brutus and Orator were conceived as a sequel to the excellent translation of the De oratore by James May and Jaap Wisse, also published by Oxford University Press (Cicero: On the Ideal Orator, Oxford 2001). The book's raison d'être is easily stated. No new, complete, and readily available English versions of the two texts have appeared since the Loeb Classical Library edition was published in 1939, with translations by G. L. Hendrickson and H. M. Hubbell. Though both translations are accurate and still readable (Hendrickson's, in fact, is excellent), the introductions to the two works are brief and insufficient, and the annotation (in the manner of older Loebs) is still less adequate. Furthermore, our understanding of Cicero and the late Roman Republic has changed significantly in the eighty years since the Loeb appeared, and the resources available to students of the Brutus, in particular, are much more ample. I have reason to hope, therefore, that this book will be of some use. There is no need to discuss here the overall plan of the book, which the table of contents makes clear, or the approach taken to the translation and annotation, addressed in Introduction par. 5. The annotation very likely provides more detail than some readers will require, but I thought it best to err on the side of inclusion and leave it to readers to ignore-as readers can be relied on to do-material that does not speak to their needs or interests. I should add two notes. First, because Brutus and Orator are the most important sources for our understanding of Roman "Atticism" (Introduction par. 3), I have included in Appendix A a translation of the third Ciceronian text that bears on that subject, On the Best Kind of Orator (De optimo genere oratorum), a brief fragment that Cicero wrote but abandoned in the interval between the composition of Brutus and Orator in 46 BCE. Second, for the fragmentary remains of orators other than Cicero I have retained references to the fourth edition of Enrica Malcovati's Oratorum Romanorum Fragments (e.g., "ORF4 no. 8 fr. 149"), despite the fact that its successor, Fragments of the Roman Republican Orators (FRRO)-the work of a team led by Catherine Steel-will soon appear. The orators in FRRO will not be numbered and ordered chronologically, as they are in ORF4, but will be organized alphabetically by clan name for ready location, and a set of concordances will facilitate movment back and forth between the two editions"--

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Special problems are presented to prospographers and historians of the Roman Republic who attempt to determine the chronological structure of Cicero’s Brutus. Over two hundred orators who figured actively in Roman politics from the time of the Punic Wars to that of Civil War are cited in the dialogue. Professor Sumner presents their probable birth-dates and careers in the form of a register, followed by a commentary concentrating on the controversial points in the Brutus, to give a systematic basis to our understanding of the problems of the historical aspects of the dialogue and Cicero’s organization of it. Professor Sumner has worked primarily from the historian’s viewpoint. In his words: ‘the study of the chronological structure of the Brutus should be considered the vertebra of the monograph, but the body of the work is the prosopographical commentary, while the examination of Cicero’s prosoporgraphical and chronographic resources and methods is an essential adjunct.’ For scholars and students of early Rome this analysis is a valuable addition to current knowledge.

"Cicero's Brutus or History of Famous Orators" from Cicero. Roman philosopher, statesman, lawyer, orator, political theorist, consul and constitutionalist (106-43 BC).