Reading Republican Oratory ― Reconstructions, Contexts, Receptions

Public speech was a key aspect of politics in Republican Rome, both in theory and in practice, and recent decades have seen a surge in scholarly discussion of its significance and performance. Yet the partial nature of the surviving evidence means that our understanding of its workings is dominated by one man, whose texts are the only examples to have survived in complete form since antiquity: Cicero.

This collection of essays aims to broaden our conception of the oratory of the Roman Republic by exploring how it was practiced by individuals other than Cicero, whether major statesmen, jobbing lawyers, or, exceptionally, the wives of politicians. It focuses particularly on the surviving fragments of such oratory, with individual essays tackling the challenges posed both by the partial and often unreliable nature of the evidence about these other Roman orators-often known to us chiefly through the tendentious observations of Cicero himself-and the complex intersections of the written fragments and the oral phenomenon. Collectively, the essays are concerned with the methods by which we are able to reconstruct non-Ciceronian oratory and the exploration of new ways of interpreting this evidence to tell us about the content, context, and delivery of those speeches. They are arranged into two thematic Parts, the first addressing questions of reception, selection, and transmission, and the second those of reconstruction, contextualization, and interpretation: together they represent a comprehensive overview of the non-Ciceronian speeches that will be of use to all ancient historians, philologists, and literary classicists with an interest in the oratory of the Roman Republic.

Christa Gray, Lecturer in Classics, University of Reading,Andrea Balbo, Lecturer, University of Turin,Richard M. A. Marshall, Lecturer and Research Associate on the 'Fragments of the Republican Roman Orators' project, University of Glasgow,Catherine E. W. Steel, Professor of Classics, University of Glasgow

Christa Gray has been a Lecturer in Classics at the University of Reading since January 2016 and was previously a Research Associate on the ERC-funded project 'Fragments of the Republican Roman Orators' at the University of Glasgow. She will be on research leave at the Humboldt University in Berlin until 2018 as a postdoctoral fellow of the Alexander-von-Humboldt Foundation, working on an edition of Jerome's Vita Hilarionis.

Andrea Balbo is a Lecturer at the University of Turin and also teaches Latin language and literature at the University of Italian Switzerland in Lugano. His research interests include Roman oratory and rhetoric, declamation, late antique Latin literature, digital humanities, and the reception of Classics in modern literatures. He is currently preparing, with Catherine Schneider, a critical edition of Calpurnius, and an edition for Teubner of the fragmentary oratory of the Imperial period.

Richard Marshall is a Lecturer at the University of Glasgow and Research Associate on the ERC-funded project 'Fragments of the Republican Roman Orators'. His research interests include the Republican polymath Varro, the history of the book, and the transmission of classical literature. He is currently preparing a monograph on the reception of Varro in Late Antiquity.

Catherine Steel is Professor of Classics at the University of Glasgow, where she is Principal Investigator on the ERC-funded project 'Fragments of the Republican Roman Orators'. Her research centres on the Roman Republic, with a particular focus on political history and oratory. Among her recent publications are The End of the Roman Republic, 146-44 BC: Conquest and Crisis (Edinburgh UP, 2013) and, as editor, The Cambridge Companion to Cicero (Cambridge UP, 2013).