This is a book about an extraordinary phenomenon found over all of the Greek-speaking parts of the Roman empire in the first three centuries CE (and some of the Latin-speaking parts, too). In every city worthy of its name, members of the male elite—grown men, and also their younger acolytes—would regularly gather to hear their peers perform oratorical declamations. The aim of these declamations was not to persuade a jury to convict or release a defendant, nor was it to commend a certain course of action to the city. In ancient terms, this was not dikanic (i.e. legal) or symbouleutic (political) oratory, but ‘epideictic’: the speeches, that is, were delivered for the occasion alone, to solicit the pleasure, admiration, and respect of the audience.

We know that Virgil, like Milton, spent many preliminary years in planning an epic poem, turning over the possibilities, practising his skill and techniques on other genres before undertaking the most ambitious of all the literary types. He tells us himself at the beginning of the sixth eclogue that when he wished to sing of kings and battles, Apollo warned him to keep to pastoral poetry; and in the proem to Geo. iii he promises to make a temple of song whose shrine shall be Caesar’s, and on the doors will be pictures of the conquering Romans and of their glorious ancestors.

He did not in the end sing of Alban kings, nor yet (directly) of the battles of Caesar: he selected instead a subject which offered wide scope within his chosen area of interest.

The Republic is the name we use to describe the characteristic political system of the Romans from the fall of the monarchy until the establishment of the new, though disguised, monarchy of Augustus and his successors. It is a system that we know quite well from its last century or so, because the writings of Cicero, Caesar, and Sallust as well as those of many others survive from that period. From the earlier years of the Republic we have only the historical tradition preserved by Livy and Dionysius of Halicarnassus, both of whom wrote in the period of Augustus; their tradition is in fact dependent on earlier writers, but even these only take us back to the middle of the second century BC at the earliest. There is therefore a great gap between the creation of the system in the late sixth century BC and the recording of it at least three centuries later. For the most part what follows describes the situation in the second and first centuries; how far the picture can safely be projected backwards into earlier centuries is, as we have seen, very much an open question. Given the Romans’ reluctance to make basic changes in their institutions, it would not be surprising if the evolution from the monarchic system of archaic Rome to the developed Republican system we know took some generations to achieve.

The focus of this survey is on oratory as a spoken phenomenon, intimately related to politics and government at Rome. Its chronological scope is roughly from the beginning of the second century B.C. until the end of the first century A.D.; it has no pretensions to offer a guide to oratory in the later Empire. Its geographical focus is firmly on Rome, reflecting the overwhelming bias in our source material. I start with the occasions for oratory in Rome and turn then to the issues which arise from the process of turning a speech, delivered in front of an audience on a particular occasion, into a written text which can be accessed and enjoyed in private and at any time. I then consider some of the means by which orators of the imperial period explored different means of preserving their oratorical activities for posterity. In the final two chapters I concentrate on orators themselves: how they carried out their task, and reflected upon it, as adult practitioners, and then how boys became the next generation of orators.

Roman oratory consists of two distinct phenomena. One is the occasions when men – and, very seldom, women – spoke in public. The other is the body of written texts of speeches which survive from antiquity. These are distinct objects of study: not all speeches were written down, not all those which were written down have survived; and even if we had all the speeches ever delivered, the written text can only convey a part of the experience of hearing an orator, in a particular place and time and with all the non-verbal aspects of rhetoric which contributed to an oratorical performance. In this first chapter, I consider the various occasions on which individuals spoke at Rome, reserving until the second chapter the processes by which spoken performances were transferred into written texts.

The oral dimension to classical literature as a whole has, rightly, become an object of increasing interest to interpreters. The process of composition of any text usually involved a spoken element; public or private readings could be a medium by which a text was disseminated; and individual reading could involve audible speech, or having another person read aloud. All Roman literature involves some oral dimension. Within this broad framework, however, oratory occupies a distinctive space. A speech is prepared for a specific time and place, to be directed at a specific audience and, in the case of forensic and deliberative oratory, with the aim of securing a specific outcome. Moreover, this first performance is, logically, oral and does not imply the existence of a written text; indeed, there was a strong convention within ancient rhetoric that speeches were delivered from memory, and even though written texts might well feature in preparation, orators would often find themselves in situations where improvisation was necessary. The sense of being created for a particular time and place is a characteristic which oratory shares with drama but, unlike drama, subsequent performances in a similar manner are difficult to envisage. Plays in both Greece and Rome were revived after the festival for which they had been initially composed; but the circumstances in front of the Roman people, in the Senate, or in a court which demanded a speech would never be repeated.

In what follows I shall look either at competing interpretations of an entire play, or at a more specific issue or issues – whichever seems the more useful in a given case. The works are ordered alphabetically.

Ajax

Sometimes a problem arouses so much interest that the criticism relating to it becomes self-perpetuating. This has happened with the ‘deception speech’ (646-92), now the object of a minor industry. But in spite of the conflicting advice one can make some progress.