Cicero’s rhetorical theory

Rhetoric was the object of profound meditation throughout Cicero's life. The corpus of his rhetorical writings spans nearly the whole of his career, and survives in a remarkable variety of forms, constituting one of Cicero's major contributions to Roman literature and culture. Recent scholarship has deepened our appreciation of Cicero's ‘minor’ rhetorical treatises: De optimo genere oratorum (an introduction to a Latin translation of a pair of Greek masterpiece speeches by Aeschines and Demosthenes); Topica (a work written for a lawyer friend of Cicero's, Trebatius Testa, that claims to be a distillation of Aristotle's Topics); and Partitiones oratoriae (a catechistic account of the basic structure of rhetorical theory written as a dialogue between Cicero and his son). Nevertheless, it is his most developed and elaborate works (De inventione, De oratore, Brutus and Orator) that reveal Cicero's use of his rhetorical writings as a sustained and evolving cultural project. Each of these major rhetorical treatises is in its own way a powerful melding of rhetorical theory and literary expression, an inextricable weaving of content and form that itself is one of Cicero's more provocative critical insights (De or. 3.19–24). Fundamental shifts in scholars’ approaches to these texts have shaped the recent revival of the study of Cicero's rhetorical theory. The positivistic view of rhetoric as merely a set of abstract guidelines for public speaking has now largely faded. So too scholars no longer limit their investigation of Cicero's rhetorica to extracting nuggets of otherwise lost Greek rhetorical wisdom or gleaning from these texts stylistic principles that may underlie his speeches. In each instance this past scholarship had embraced implicit hierarchies– Greek rhetorical thought over Cicero's Roman adaptation of it, and oratorical practice over theory– that set the terms of these investigations. Such trends in Latin literary studies, and their latent assumptions, have been the focus of considerable scrutiny, and the debunking of these presuppositions has cleared the path to the deeper goals of Cicero's rhetorica.