Reading Republican Oratory

Abstract

This collection of essays explores the oratory of the Roman Republic as practised by everyone apart from Cicero. It addresses the problems arising from the partial and often unreliable evidence for these other Roman orators and investigates new ways of interpreting this evidence. The contributors seek to contextualize these fragments and testimonia, both in their original settings and over the course of their subsequent transmission, to explore a range of questions: what was said in the Roman Republic, and what counted as public speech or ‘oratory’ at Rome? Who did the speaking, and to what extent can we identify anonymous speakers? What were the formal and informal scenarios in which public speech took place? What non-verbal signals should be considered together with the speakers’ words? How reliable and selective is our evidence? How does the development of rhetoric as a discipline affect the reception and transmission of public speech? The resulting discussions reshape our understanding of public speech in the Roman Republic and enable us to move the study of Republican oratory decisively beyond Cicero.