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  • 11 - Cicero and the relationship of oratory to literature

  • from PART III - LATE REPUBLIC
  • Edited by E. J. Kenney, W. V. Clausen
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Classical Literature
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    18 March 1982, pp 230-267

  • Summary

    Marcus Tullius Cicero has been endlessly studied as a character and as a politician, and certainly these aspects of him are of absorbing interest; but his chief historical importance is as a man of letters. Hellenistic criticism recognized three styles, the grand, middle and plain. Not only higher education but literature in general at Rome was founded on oratory. Cicero in the Orator associated these with the three aims of oratory, to move, to please and to convince respectively. The grand style was forceful, weighty, spacious, emotional and ornate, carrying men away: it was what is understood by rhetorical. The ambition to be an orator probably came to the boy from the hill-town of Arpinum, south-east of Rome, through his being entrusted by his father to the care of Rome's leading orator, Lucius Crassus. The nature of Roman legal procedure promotes Cicero's oratorical development.