Cicero the Advocate

ISBN-10: 0191541516
ISBN-13: 9780191541513
Category: Literary Criticism
Pages: 460
Language: English
Published: 2004-07-29
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Authors: Jonathan Powell, Jeremy Paterson

Description

This is the first book in English to take Cicero's forensic speeches seriously as acts of advocacy, i.e. as designed to ensure that the person he represents is acquitted or that the person he is prosecuting is found guilty. It seeks to set the speeches within the context of the court system of the Late Roman Republic and to explore in detail the strategies available to Roman advocates to win the votes of jurors. The volume comprises a substantial introduction, fourteen chapters by prominent Ciceronian scholars in Britain, North America, and Germany, and a final chapter by a current British Appeal Court judge who comments on Cicero's techniques from the point of view of a modern advocate. The introduction deals with issues concerning the general nature of advocacy, the Roman court system as compared with other ancient and modern systems, the Roman 'profession' of advocacy and its etiquette, the place of advocacy in Cicero's career, the ancient theory of rhetoric and argument as applied to courtroom advocacy, and the relationship between the published texts of the speeches as we have them and the speeches actually delivered in court. The first eight chapters discuss general themes: legal procedure in Cicero's time, Cicero's Italian clients, Cicero's methods of setting out or alluding to the facts of a case, his use of legal arguments, arguments from character, invective, self-reference, and emotional appeal, the last of these especially in the concluding sections of his speeches. Chapters 9-14 examine a range of particular speeches as case studies - In Verrem II.1 (from Cicero's only major extant prosecution case), Pro Archia, De Domo Sua, Pro Caecina, Pro Cluentio, Pro Ligario. These speeches cover the period of the height of Cicero's career, from 70 BC, when Cicero became acknowledged as the leading Roman advocate, to 49 BC when Caesar's dictatorship required Cicero to adapt his well-tried forensic techniques to drastically new circumstances, and they contain arguments on a wide range of subject-matter, including provincial maladministration, usurpation of citizenship rights, violent dispossession, the religious law relating to the consecration of property, poisoning, bribery, and political offences. Other speeches, including all the better-known ones, are used as illustrative examples in the introduction and in the more general chapters. An appendix lists all Cicero's known appearances as an advocate.

Get the book

Other editions

Cicero the Advocate
- 2006
- 448 pages
- Paperback
- Oxford University Press on Demand

Similar books

Virginia Woolf and the Great War
By Karen L. Levenback
I owe special thanks to Bruce Martin and Evelyn Timberlake ( at the Library of Congress ) ; Philip Milato and Steve Crook ( at the Berg Collection ) ...
In Search of Elena Ferrante: The Novels and the Question of Authorship
By Karen Bojar
... Alice: “In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens” 157 Warwick Prize for Women in Translation 38 Wertenbaker, Timberlake 21 Wilson, Emily (trans.
Native American Verbal Art: Texts and Contexts
By William M. Clements
HENRY TIMBERLAKE'S CHEROKEE WAR SONG 1. That Timberlake's memoir contains the first English translation of the words of a Native American song seems to have ...
Playing in the Shadows: Fictions of Race and Blackness in Postwar Japanese Literature
By William H Bridges
“Justin Timberlake, 'The 20/20 Experience': Is There a Visual Preference for Whiteness?” Interview with Marc Lamont Hill. HuffPost Live, 27 March 2013.
Shakespeare's Edward III
By William Shakespeare
Thompson , E . in Pollard 1923 . Thompson , J . Shakespeare and the Classics , 1952 . Tillyard , E . Shakespeare ' s History Plays , 1944 . Timberlake , P ...
The Problem with Pleasure: Modernism and Its Discontents
By Laura Frost
In The Problem with Pleasure, Frost draws upon a wide variety of materials, linking interwar amusements, such as the talkies, romance novels, the Parisian fragrance Chanel no. 5, and the exotic confection Turkish Delight, to the artistic ...
The Alice Books and the Contested Ground of the Natural World
By Laura White
Similarly, he deplored the picturestories of A. B. Frost in his Stuff and Nonsense ... When he'd eaten eighteen, He turned perfectly green, Upon which he ...
Fables of Modernity: Literature and Culture in the English Eighteenth Century
By Laura Brown
Renew'd by ordure's sympathetic force, As oil'd with magic juices for the course, ... William Frost (1953; reprint, New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, ...
Questions of Authority: Italian and Australian Travel Narratives of the Long Nineteenth Century
By Laura Olcelli
D'Albertis, Luigi. New Guinea: What I Did and What I Saw. 2 vols. London: S. Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington, 1881. First published 1880.
A Concordance to Conrad's The Arrow of Gold
By Paul L. Gaston, Todd K. Bender
... i ge 3 let S deal ing ge a lings ge at t Joe a f J & at n ce at h-ced ge at hly ue to 3 sec ge is a te debit de cap it a t e u ge c e it ful ge c e i ve ...