As editor he has “avoided imposing a stringent set of requirements on the authors or any sort of artificial uniformity. May explains his policies in the Preface. The whole has been handsomely produced in terms of typography, layout and binding. Craig arranged by author’s name and then cross-referenced to Ciceronian works, a General Index and an Index locorum. The volume concludes with a Bibliography by C.P. The penultimate chapter is on the influence of the orations and rhetorica, the final one surveys “selected recent work on Cicero’s rhetorica and speeches.” Chapters on Cicero’s use of rhythm and on the language and style of his speeches 1 and rhetorica would have been welcome. A chapter entitled “The Intellectual Background of Cicero’s Rhetorical Works” is then followed by four chapters on the various rhetorical treatises (except De inventione, handled in chapter 2). Thus there is a crossing of several categories (chronology, tone, and state of preservation) with some overlapping.
#Liberas rhetoric pro#
The contents are as follows: three introductory chapters on 1) Cicero’s life, 2) the state of rhetorical education in his youth and 3) “Ciceronian oratory in context” are followed by chapters on the speeches of the five major periods (whereby, however, Pro Archia and Pro Sulla, falling into the crack between the consular speeches and the ones delivered post reditum, inevitably get short shrift) there is also a chapter on Ciceronian invective and one on the lost and fragmentary speeches. Though any editor is, of course, constrained by the availability of willing collaborators, this volume would have been enriched if contributors representing the distinct styles of scholarship practiced in France, Germany, Poland, and/or the U.K. In this volume, after a brief editor’s Preface, follow seventeen chapters by thirteen different authors, all but three of them Americans: Hall (Otago, but trained in the U.S.), Wisse (Newcastle, but trained in the Netherlands), and Narducci (Florence). An alternative would have been to divide the material between two volumes, one combining rhetorical theory with philosophy, the other the speeches with the letters, which shed so much light on them (this volume contains, however, no hint that another is contemplated to deal with the rest of the corpus).Ĭiceronian studies are, of course, international in character, and it seems reasonable to expect such a “companion” to reflect that fact.
#Liberas rhetoric series#
Admittedly, given the massive extent of Cicero’s corpus, some division of material may have been needed on pragmatic grounds of series format.
non ex rhetorum officinis sed ex Academiae spatiis extitisse).
2.1-4) and to regard his work as an orator as tied to his philosophical training (Orat. The “companion” to an author as produced in the past is dedicated to his entire oeuvre the subtitle of this volume, “Oratory and Rhetoric,” therefore comes as a surprise, not least since Cicero himself tended to lump his writings on rhetorical theory together with those on philosophy (Div. It is welcome that Brill is bucking that trend with this new volume and another recent one on Herodotus. The new “companions” specify an author or genre, and so far the most “companionable” authors seem to be the poets, with “companions” to Greek tragedy, Virgil, and Ovid already in print, and the philosophers (early Greek philosophy, Plato, Aristotle). Hall’s Companion to Classical Texts and Sir Paul Harvey’s Oxford Companion to Classical Literature, with the publisher specified in the title, as is now standard. For decades classicists had to content themselves with the Companions to Greek and Latin Studies by Leonard Whibley and Sir John Edwin Sandys respectively, later joined by F.E. The “companion” seems to have come into its own as a scholarly genre in recent years.
0 kommentar(er)
