In the Brutus, Cicero discusses the difficulties that even people like him face if they want to access, understand or reconstruct Roman oratory. Speeches from the earliest period of Roman history have vanished, but even more recent oratory is difficult to assess. Cicero has Brutus ask (Brut. 91), if this orator was so good, why do we not see evidence of his eloquence in his speeches? The response: while some orators are not interested in keeping a record of themselves for posterity, others do not write as well as they speak, and some deliberately do not write down their speeches in order to keep the oratorical record out of the hands of their critics. In some cases, we have no evidence at all for an orator's eloquence, but we have to ‘infer’ (suspicari, Brut. 55: see J. Dugan, Making a New Man (2005), 291) his eloquence from historical circumstances. In her new study, Henriette van der Blom meditates upon the questions raised by Cicero's Brutus by examining the evidence for the oratorical careers of six Romans whose eloquence survives in only fragments or allusions: Gaius Gracchus, Pompey, Julius Caesar, Piso Caesoninus (cos. 58), Cato Uticensis and Mark Antony.
B.’s work comes at a time when there is an increased scholarly interest in fragments. Characterising Malcovati's old edition of the oratorical fragments as ‘confusing, misleading or lacunose’ (9), B. seeks to present an alternative approach towards the understanding and reconstruction of fragmentary Roman oratory. The monograph is a preview of the wealth of new research that will be facilitated by the Fragments of the Republican Roman Orators (FRRO) project, which B. helps to advise.
The question of what a fragment of oratory even looks like lies at the very heart of this book. Fragments of prose are more difficult to identify than fragments of verse, which are usually easier to discern because of their metre or poetic diction. In contrast, as B.’s study makes clear, there is no guarantee that style, one of the ways both ancients and moderns analyse oratorical capability, will be transmitted in the fragments of an orator. Fragments of Latin oratory are also frequently transmitted in Greek — e.g. Plutarch and Dio ‘seemingly citing’ (132) Pompey — which presents a significant challenge, even if B. thinks that ‘the catchy nature of Pompeius’ words could have secured its safe transmission in the sources, even if adapted in the translation from Latin to Greek’ (133). In addition to being dislodged from their original language (and therefore their original style and diction), many of the fragments are also dislodged from their political circumstances. The fact that we cannot date many fragments of oratory (129, 156) means that we are missing information that is essential for the speech's interpretation. As a result, we are often left with what B. calls ‘sound bites’ (77, 91, 130, 169), i.e. not word-for-word quotations but instead a general but consistent sense of the orator as he is represented in the sources.
Inference, therefore, becomes an important technique for B. as she teases out the qualities of each orator, which is why much of her discussion is not about oratory at all, but in fact political history. A focus on oratory as primarily political marginalises its literary qualities and its many connections to other parts of Roman culture. The difficulty of the primary sources creates a slippage concerning what actually constitutes ‘oratory’, with a blurring of formal speech acts (contional or forensic) with private persuasion and political ‘stunts’ like Gaius Gracchus pulling down seats at the games (101) or Cato shouting in the street (223). I agree that Pompey's theatre complex (130–1) has a certain ‘rhetoric’ to it, but is this oratory? The title of the monograph does set up the expectation that oratory and political career will be discussed, but when she concludes (281–2) that oratory was an important and deliberate part of career building for some Roman politicians (Gaius Gracchus, Caesar, Cato) but not others (Pompey, Piso, Mark Antony), the reader questions why the latter group was included at all. Even though B. is sensitive to the different factors in oratorical success, I find myself unsatisfied in certain cases that oratorical capability rather than personal charisma or political circumstances, both discussed at length, can explain specific historical outcomes.
The study's greatest strength is its sensitivity to the different historical processes which created the image of each orator, and is a useful model for how we should proceed if we wish to get beyond that constructed image. Her discussion of Augustus’ intervention into the oratorical legacy of Julius Caesar (152) is especially interesting, and her reverse engineering of Cicero's In Pisonem (191–4) arrives at a fresh perspective on Piso Caesoninus. B.’s interest in whether her sources actually read physical copies of the speeches results in useful discussions of ancient books passim (11, 88, 89 n. 85, 146, 147, 152, 154, 164, 172, 173, 175, 196, 216, 227). I admire that B. decentralises Cicero as model for oratorical success, stressing that accepting him as a normative example has skewed our view of oratory in Republican Rome. Her phrase ‘Cicero is unrepresentative’ (5) should become the refrain of all future Ciceronian scholarship. The Appendices documenting the known occasions of each orator's public speeches are exceedingly useful.
