Orations

What It Is

Fifty-eight speeches survive of the eighty-odd Cicero is known to have delivered, in the law courts, in the senate and from the rostra, between 81 and 43 BC. They are the sound of the Roman Republic arguing with itself in its last generation, made by the man who was better at it than anyone.

What you read is not a transcript. Cicero revised his speeches for publication, sometimes heavily, and at least one of the most famous was never delivered at all: the Second Philippic, his assault on Mark Antony, was circulated as a pamphlet because delivering it would have been suicide. He paid for it anyway. The published texts are what he wanted posterity to hear, which makes them a different and more interesting object than a record of what was said.

They are also advocacy. Cicero is not telling you the truth. He is winning, and he will use anything: evidence, character assassination, a joke at the right moment, an appeal to the ancestors, tears. Read him as a hostile witness and he becomes twice as good.

Why It Matters

Latin prose is Cicero's prose. The long periodic sentence, held in suspension and closed with a rhythmic fall, became the model for written Europe for the next fifteen hundred years. Schoolboys learned to write by copying him. Petrarch found a lost cache of his letters in 1345 and set the Renaissance in motion. When Jefferson and Burke and Lincoln reach for a cadence, it is his.

The content matters more. These speeches are the primary documents of a republic dying. In the Verrines a young and untested lawyer takes on a governor who has looted a province, in a court stacked against him. In the Catilinarians a consul stands in the senate during a state of emergency and asks how far the law may be bent to save the state, and the question has never stopped being asked. In the Philippics an old man attacks a warlord in public, in a city where the warlord has troops, and does it anyway.

Every prosecutor's opening, every political denunciation, every closing argument that appeals over the heads of the jury to the watching public, descends from these pages.

Before You Read

You do not read the Orations. You read an oration. Each is a self-contained performance of twenty to sixty pages, built to be taken whole in one sitting, and that is how to take it.

Start with Pro Caelio, which is the funniest thing in Latin: a defence conducted almost entirely by ridicule. Then the First Catilinarian, which is thirty minutes and the most famous opening in oratory. Then the Second Philippic, if you want to know what courage sounds like in prose.

Read them aloud. They were written for the ear, and the rhythm is doing half the work. And read the notes, because the speeches are dense with local reference to men and scandals every listener knew and you do not.

Which Translation to Read

• D. H. Berry (Oxford World's Classics) — recommended. Berry has done two volumes, Defence Speeches and Political Speeches, and between them they hold everything a first-time reader wants: Verres, the Catilinarians, the Second Philippic, Pro Caelio, Pro Milone, Pro Archia. His English keeps the shape of Cicero's sentences without turning stiff, and his notes are fuller and more reliable than anything else in a popular edition. The cost: you need both books to get the range, and the notes are at the back. View on Amazon →
• Michael Grant (Penguin Classics), in Selected Political Speeches, Murder Trials and On Government. Three cheap paperbacks covering much of the same ground, fluent and easy to read. The cost: the translations date from the 1960s and 70s, the apparatus is thin, and Grant smooths Cicero's rhetoric into something more reasonable than it was. The extravagance is the point, and he tames it.
• The Loeb Classical Library (ten volumes, various translators). The complete speeches, Latin on the facing page. The only way to read the ones nobody anthologises. The cost: uneven, and several of the translations are a century old and sound it.

Buy both Berry volumes and stop there. Go to the Loeb only when Berry has left out the speech you now want.

Getting the Most From This Book

Watch him when his case is weak. That is when he is at his best, and you can see the machinery: he changes the subject, he attacks the man, he tells a joke, he invokes the fatherland. It works. Knowing exactly how it is working on you is the most useful thing this book can teach.

Read Sallust's short account of the Catiline conspiracy alongside the Catilinarians. Two hostile intelligences on one event, and the gap between them is where history lives.

Read the introduction first. Berry sets the political scene without pre-empting the speeches, and Roman politics is unfollowable cold.

The common mistake is to read Cicero as a historical source. He is a performance. Judge him the way the jury had to.