Creative eloquence : the construction of reality in Cicero's speeches

Abstract

In this innovative study of Cicero's orations, Ingo Gildenhard argues that a distinctive hallmark of his oratory is a conceptual creativity that one may loosely characterize as philosophical. It manifests itself in striking and original views on human beings and being human, politics, society and culture, and the sphere of the supernatural. After an introduction addressing questions of method, Gildenhard focuses, in turn, upon the anthropology, the sociology, and the theology contained within Cicero's oratory. Each of these parts begins with a substantial introduction that situates Cicero's thought within its wider historical and intellectual context, not least by identifying where and how he departed from established habits of thought in the late-republican field of power. The nature of the argument involves close analysis of key terms or concepts such as conscientia, fatum, humanitas, natura, and tyrannus, as well as attention to larfger figures of thought such as agency and accountability, the ethics of happiness, laws vs. justice, the enemy within, civilization vs. Barbarity, the problem of theodicy, and life after death. Examples are drawn from the entire corpus of Ciceronian oratory, from the pro Quinctio to the Philippics, with in-depth analysis of a representative cross-section of particularly relevant speeches. Overall, Creative eloquence offers a fundamental reappraisal of a canonical body of texts, while also touching upon many issues in rhetoric and philosophy that still preoccupy us today.