Brutus: The History of Roman Eloquence

Abstract

Brutus marks Cicero's return to literary activity after the civil war; the composition of the work was probably completed in the spring of 46 B.C., before Cato's suicide in Africa. Cicero proposes to reconstruct the history of Roman eloquence by means of a dialogue set in his Roman house, with himself and his friends Brutus and Atticus acting as interlocutors. Cicero emphasizes that, following the civil war, the forum is practically deserted: many of the better orators have disappeared, either as a result of the conflict or because of the inexorable necessity of nature. The 'death of eloquence' that Brutus so often laments also has causes less incidental: in recent decades, the crisis of the Republic and the ever more dominant role of the armies of the great potentates had progressively relegated to a secondary level the word as an instrument of persuasion and of political mediation. Keywords: Atticus; Brutus ; Cato; Cicero; civil war; Roman eloquence

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