The demise in 2019 of the literary critic Harold Bloom could be understood as a definitive blow to the concept of the canon. In his The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages (1994), Bloom championed the traditional Western canon as a body of sublime literature whose greatness and superior aesthetic value were self-evident and could not be discussed: Homer, Plato, Shakespeare, Kafka, Dante, Goethe, among others. Bloom's critics pointed out that his canon was mainly a list of ‘dead white males’ (with the lonely presences of Jane Austen and Virginia Woolf).

Bloom insisted that aesthetic judgments constituted the only criteria for admission into the list. No reader would question the literary value of War and Peace or Pride and Prejudice; but, as the two books under review here posit, admission to the canon demands conscious strategies of self-representation and preservation of one's own works. Entering a canon demands hard work; as Giuseppe La Bua and Caroline Bishop argue, Cicero was willing to pay the cost (although Cicero would probably be disappointed to learn that Bloom included only one of his books, De natura deorum, in the canonical list).

So how do you become a classic? In Cicero and Roman Education, L. B. studies how Cicero's oratorical output was put into writing and became canonised throughout the centuries as a source of good Latin (Latinitas) and of elite identity and morality, particularly as a model for young male orators. This was not a straightforward process; Quintilian and the rhetorical and grammatical schools played an important role in turning Cicero into a canonical writer. L. B. elaborates on the importance of the schools not only in the survival of Cicero's speeches, but also on how they influenced how we read Cicero and which texts we read (9). This analysis employs as its sources not only Quintilian's work, but also the scholia Ciceronis.

Ch. 1 addresses how Cicero wrote, revised and published his speeches. L. B. joins the camp of those scholars who consider that Cicero published his speeches with both political and didactic goals in mind, being well aware that he considered writing an ‘amplification and extension of persona’ (21–2). Ch. 2 surveys the transmission of Cicero's speeches from publication to the medieval manuscripts. In antiquity, manuscripts by well-known copyists and editors were much appreciated, especially those by Atticus, Nepos and Tiro, although many of these were in all likelihood forgeries. L. B. surveys collections of Ciceronian orations from the second century onwards and the scholia Bobiensia. It was the narrow canon of Cicero's speeches used in schools which ensured their survival.

In ch. 3, L. B. delves into Ciceronian scholarship in antiquity, with its early history of the debate between admirers and detractors. Cicero's ethics and political choices were discussed and anti-Ciceronian themes were used in rhetorical schools (through Pollio, Livy and Seneca), showing Cicero as a flawed man. His literary work prompted a fierce debate over whether his style should be considered a model or not, but this dispute was closed by Quintilian, who consecrated Cicero as the foundation for a good education. Scholarship of the first and second centuries turned its attention to the stylistic and linguistic features of Cicero, as a fountain of uncorrupted Latin and thus of morality. Finally, L. B. studies how Cicero was read, interpreted and taught in the classroom (ch. 4), from Quintilian to later commentators, who not only presented the historical circumstances of the speech and a step-by-step rhetorical commentary (enarratio), but also discussed different interpretations of certain passages.

L. B. quite rightly highlights that the canonisation of Cicero was limited to his literary output; his political figure was too conflicted, too multifaceted and too controversial to be made into a positive exemplum, as the debate about him in the early Empire shows (with authors like Seneca showing a notorious hostility toward him). The rhetorical schools left aside Cicero as a politician and concentrated on Cicero as ‘an icon of eloquence’ (320), the personification of the power of the word and of free speech. A ‘true’ Roman, L. B. emphasises, should be a ‘new Cicero’.

L. B.'s book is certainly a worthy and intelligent effort to analyse the construction of Cicero as a literary classic through his oratorical work. However, some ideas and aspects are repeated several times; these repetitions could have been edited with no damage to the overall argument.

On a different but similar theme, in Cicero, Greek Learning, and the Making of a Roman Classic B. analyses how Cicero appropriated Greek classical texts and the responses of those texts by previous readers and commentators (mainly texts by Aratus, Plato, Aristotle and Demosthenes), with the objective of turning his own work into a classic. B. has chosen as her subject of study the non-oratorical works, in which she appreciates a more direct use of Greek materials. During his youth, but also well into adulthood, Cicero conceived Greek and Roman education as a ‘mastery of intellectual pursuits’ (19–21). Ch. 1 covers the young Cicero's translation of Aratus’ Phaenomena, a poem about the sky, the planets and astronomy, much admired in antiquity for its content and style. B. shows how Cicero incorporated commentaries on Aratus’ original poem into his own text in order to create an original work, through which he hoped to be noticed by the Roman elite. Cicero's effort in this case was not particularly successful through the ages, since people preferred to read the original in Greek. Ch. 2 addresses Cicero's conflicted relationship with Plato, whose works he used for his De oratore, De re publica and De legibus, presenting a syncretic view of the philosopher. As B. argues, Cicero felt ‘a push and pull between the desire to imitate a figure of towering classical significance and the desire to replace and outdo that figure for a Roman audience’ (89). In ch. 3, B. studies Cicero's use of Aristotle, with a more technical view of him, especially in his De oratore and Topica. Cicero made it seem as if few people had read Aristotle, and developed especially his form of argumentation in utramque partem (on both sides of a question), not only as a rhetorical tool, but also as a method of ethical debate, thus uniting rhetoric and philosophy. In any case, B. claims, Cicero's Aristotle was partly the creation and interpretation of Philo of Larissa, who taught Cicero at Rome.

Ch. 4 addresses how Cicero engaged with the figure of Demosthenes, the most successful of Cicero's attempts to align himself with a Greek model, even though Demosthenes was not the most popular Attic orator of Cicero's times. B. studies not only the Philippics, the least subtle attempt by Cicero to equate himself to Demosthenes, but also his presence in both Cicero's early and late career. Ch. 5 leaves aside the philosophical and political treaties and delves into the question of the letters, positing a contrafactual: what would Cicero's curated collection of letters have looked like? B. surveys Greek letter-collections and epistolography to argue that Cicero would have presented a curated and re-elaborated corpus that would justify his choices at the outbreak and during the war of 49 b.c., conforming to the narrative presented in Philippics 2. While the previous chapters had a closely knit narrative and a coherent structure, ch. 5 sits more uneasily in the book: it does not reach the subtle readings and in-depth arguments of the previous analyses. Finally, ch. 6 reviews Cicero's self-quotation of his earlier poetic works in De natura deorum and De divinatione, thus making them part of the canon. Overall, B.'s book is sometimes too focused on very detailed points of philosophical interpretations, losing perspective on the main argument. However, she convincingly studies Cicero's strategies for textual immortality in his non-oratorical works, which soured as his political career waned. Cicero's genius, as stated by Bishop, ‘was not necessarily, or at least not wholly, comprised of some sort of pure, immanent “greatness”’ (302). It was Cicero's hard work that allowed him to enter the canon: publish or perish, indeed.

In sum, both books under review narrate the history of Cicero's successful strategy for becoming a literary classic, but also his failure to become a renowned political figure and exemplum. They raise debate and suggest new questions, making both books a worthy read. Nevertheless, by focusing too much on Cicero (and reasonably so, since he is the subject of their study), L. B. and B. do not engage with the question of whether Cicero and his career were exceptional. For example, how did Caesar become part of the canon (an answer that would provide a different perspective on the diversity of literary strategies)? Is it possible somehow to free ourselves (at least partly) from the Ciceronian perspective? This is not a moot point, since it would have allowed both authors to frame Cicero's literary output within a larger perspective.

The wealth of information on Cicero's rhetorical and literary output should not let us forget that he was not the only senator publishing and circulating his speeches. L. B. analyses (25) Cicero's refusal to reply to Piso's speech (Cic. Att. 3.1.11), but does not delve into the fact that Piso did in fact publish his own speech. This debate on the publication of speeches will, in all likelihood, shift with the publication of C. Steel's forthcoming Fragments of the Republican Roman Orators, which will provide a thorough view of non-Ciceronian oratory. Likewise, L. B. rightly surveys how Cicero based his career on his rhetorical skills, and promoted such a path as the golden one in his literary output; but he does not take into account H. van der Blom's Oratory and Political Career in the Late Roman Republic (2016), which shows how other politicians used rhetoric in different ways to further their own successful political careers, showing the diversity of models available to Roman senators of the Late Republic. The Ciceronian corpus is a great heritage; breaking up Cicero's perspective is a hard, but necessary exercise.