The speeches to the People in Cicero's oratorical corpora

Bibliographic Data

ID9308024
AuthorsGesine Manuwald (0000-0002-3930-7822, Professor of Latin, Department of Greek and Latin, University College London, Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT, United Kingdom. [email protected], corresponding author)
Year2012
Volume30
Issue2
Pages153-175
Publication date2012-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueRhetorica (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0734-8584 • E-ISSN: 1533-8541
PublisherUniversity of California Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1525/rh.2012.30.2.153
OpenAlexW1722879852
LanguageEN
Citations received10

This paper discusses the function of speeches given by Cicero to the popular assembly (contio) as reports about recent political events or decrees. Several of the few extant examples are part of oratorical corpora consisting of speeches from politically difficult periods, namely from Cicero's consular year (63 BCE; Catilinarians) and from his fight against Mark Antony (44–43 BCE; Philippics). Cicero is shown to have applied his oratorical abilities in all these cases to exploit the contio speeches so as to present narrative accounts of political developments in his interpretation and thus to influence public opinion in the short term during the political process and particularly, within an edited corpus, in the long term

Art · Cicero · Extant taxon · Interpretation (philosophy · Linguistics · Literature · Narrative · Physics · Political science · Politics · Public opinion · Term (time · Classical Antiquity Studies · History · Law · Organic Chemistry Synthesis Methods · Philosophy

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