Abstract Did the practice and function of oratory change at Rome during the second century bce, and if so, what was the relationship between that change and the range of demonstrable change visible in other elements of Roman politics, society, and culture? At least two distinct stories can be told in response to this question. One sees the second century as a time of significant change in public speech, as the strains of imperial power create new arenas for debate and a consequent enthusiasm among the elite for new technique of speaking imported from the Greek-speaking world. The embassy of Athenian philosophers in 155 would be the emblematic moment for this story. But one can also develop a story of continuities, in which both circumstances and methods remain broadly similar, and the most significant innovation is the increasing use of written texts to preserve a record of oratory. The Elder Cato is the mascot for this story. Confusingly, Cicero proposes both narratives in different works. The underlying difficulty is the inaccessibility of public speech to those who were not present; texts are only a partial remedy. Cicero filled the gaps in the evidence available to him in different ways driven by differing priorities during his career. Oratory’s contribution to analyzing the second-century transformation is thus fundamentally historiographical, revealing points of stress and uncertainty that subsequent generations of Romans had in grasping the nature of the changes that took place between the defeat of Hannibal and the death of Tiberius Gracchus.
Loading…
Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 16 citations exist upstream.
Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.
Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.