The two volumes here reviewed are publications of the proceedings of two conferences (UCL 2014, Turin 2015) organised under the aegis of the Fragments of the Roman Republican Orators (FRRO) project, led by Catherine Steel. They join two other recent volumes closely affiliated with the project: an earlier conference volume edited by Steel and van der Blom, Community and Communication (2013), and a monograph on various non-Ciceronian late republican orators by van der Blom, Oratory and Political Career in the Late Roman Republic (2016), reviewed in this journal by I. Gildenhard (105 (2015), 425–7) and H. Čulík-Baird (108 (2018), 203–4) respectively. These conferences and publications serve as prolegomena to the imminent publication of an authoritative new corpus of republican oratorical fragments, which will set on a new basis the historical study of Roman oratory, hitherto dependent on E. Malcovati's invaluable yet somewhat flawed and now outdated Oratorum Romanorum Fragmenta. Thus the FRRO project has already prompted a refreshing and fruitful reorientation of our study of the history of Roman rhetorical culture, one which strives (sometimes struggles) to escape from the overwhelming gravitational pull of its greatest representative, Cicero, and thereby seeks to tell a larger story diachronically but also within the ‘last generation’ itself.

Of the two books here reviewed, Institutions and Ideology looks beyond oratory specifically into political culture more generally, foregrounding ‘two distinct frameworks within which political action in Rome took place’: ‘the institutional context’ and ‘political belief’ (1), which in combination appear to explain much of the unique character of the workings of Roman politics (3). More specifically, the editors explain in their introduction that their framing of the questions is ‘a way to put the categories of deliberative oratory … into dialogue with the other forms of pressure that directed decisions’ (7). This is, of course, an intentionally capacious remit, which may have worked better to put together an exciting conference and attract a critical mass of A-list scholars than to assemble a cohesive volume. It is not clear to me, for example, that F. Santangelo's look at the role of Theophanes of Mytilene as Pompey's advisor (128–46), interesting and informative as it is, actually belongs in a volume about institutions and ideology — but it is good to have it and I will happily use it in the future.

Institutions and Ideology consists of four nearly equal parts, ‘Modes of Political Communication’, ‘Political Alliances’, ‘Institutions in Theory and Practice’ and ‘Memory and Reputation’. In the first, A. Yakobson leads off by deconstructing the old dichotomy between ‘oligarchy’ and ‘democracy’, emphasising how aristocrats faced the risk of humiliation as well as of applause in the contio; he is followed by C. Tiersch's analysis of ‘optimate’/popularis opposition in public debate. It would have been helpful if Tiersch had more explicitly contrasted her interpretation of these ‘semantic battles’ from earlier stabs at the same question, including that of V. Arena and my own ‘ideological monotony’, which in some respects it seems to resemble. I am puzzled why Tiersch thinks that T. Annius Luscus’ intervention against Ti. Gracchus came just in the midst of the voting on the agrarian law rather than some time after it (39; cf. Plut., Ti. Gracch. 14–15), and especially why she supposes that ‘Nasica's claim that the Gracchans and their adherents had been killed in the interest of the Roman state’ won ‘astonishing acceptance on the part of the Roman population’ (43; contra Plut., Ti. Gracch. 21). Yet these details do not touch fundamentally on her thesis and thus do not detract much from this ambitious contribution to the debate about the ideological dimensions of Roman public speech. C. Rosillo-López finds that ordinary citizens appear often to have recognised their leaders by sight, evidence that they ‘participated’ in the political system more widely than we might think simply from debatable calculations of voter turnout. Last in this section, A. Clark offers a close reading of two notable cases of oratorical invocation of divinities or divine epithets to explore ‘some of the ways in which deities … could feature in public oratory in ways that allowed the speaker to take a stand against perceived changes’ (104).

In Part Two (‘Political Alliances’), F. Pina Polo gives a convenient summary of the use of the contio by magistrates and especially those ‘invited’ by them to speak in order to further debate and prosecute their rivalries before the people; F. Santangelo, as noted above, examines Theophanes’ extraordinary position as an advisor to Pompey, ‘an exceptional man at an exceptional historical time’ (146), whose eclipse after Pharsalus prevented him from serving as a model for others; C. Valachova reviews the short list of likely or possible adherents to Epicureanism among the notable politicians of the Late Republic and seeks to find common features, such as an emphasis on ‘friendship’ and a relative disregard for traditional arenas for political advancement in preference for attachment to powerful individuals; and K. Morrell rounds out the section with a study of the Cato–Pompey rapprochement of 52 b.c., arguing that this was indeed a significant realignment, not a purely transactional marriage of convenience.

A variety of ‘institutions’ come into focus in Part Three: the auspices and their falsification (L. G. Driediger-Murphy demonstrates that the binding quality of auspicial announcements did after all depend on their being considered authentic), the senatorial lectio (described by G. Clemente as a foundation of the aristocracy's moral and political authority), elections (A. Haimson Lushkov reconstructs some of the ideology of election from Pro Murena), coetus/contiones (whose semantic though often unreal distinction is traced by R. M. Frolov) and family consilia (H. Flower on two famous examples apparently presided over by Brutus's mother, Servilia). In the fourth and final Part, highlighting public perception of political figures and their reception, E. Jewell looks at the rhetorical exploitation of perceived continuities or contrasts within families across generations; A. Eckert refutes Sulla's claims of felicitas (though I doubt that the general public, not just philosophers, insisted that uncannily successful late republican generals had to be ‘moral’ in order to be recognised as felix); and in a posthumous paper M. Stone, in whose memory the volume is dedicated, delightfully rehabilitates C. Verres as a governor largely of the traditional mould, attentive and successful in his military duties, and agent of the post-Sullan Senate caught in the cross-hairs of Pompey's consular agenda.

In the second volume, Reading Republican Oratory, Steel and her team narrow the focus mostly to issues more directly central to the FRRO project, that is, contextualising and interpreting republican, non-Ciceronian, oratorical fragments. The editors group the contributions into two parts, one focusing on the transmission of oratorical fragments (this subdivided into republican witnesses and imperial ones, thus highlighting the changes of historical perspective that may affect selection and interpretation), the other on reconstruction of fragments, largely consisting of case-studies of fragments or fragmentary genres, such as eulogies. The first section, while not without interest, is a bit scatter-shot, given the number of fragmentary republican orators (M. Caelius Rufus is barely mentioned in the entire volume) and even genres which might have been brought into better focus. Here, however, we learn of a more sceptical response to the Greek embassy of philosophers of 155 b.c. (A. Eckert), the rhetoric of the trial of Q. Scaevola the Augur parodied by Lucilius (I. Goh), the form and style of triumphal reports and ultimatums to the enemy parodied by Plautus in Amphitruo (E. Torregaray Pagola) and Cicero's assessment of the eloquence of P. Sulpicius and C. Cotta in the Brutus (A. Casamento).

In the second section of Part One, devoted to the imperial transmission of republican oratorical fragments, A. Raschieri provides interesting data about Quintilian's selection of orators mentioned in the Institutio (after Cicero, Asinius Pollio is most cited and quoted; next come Caelius and Messalla Corvinus); S. J. Lawrence puzzles over the relative absence of Cicero from Valerius Maximus — indeed, his complete absence from the chapter Quanta vis sit eloquentiae (8.9)! — despite serving as a major source for his project as a whole (107); C. Burden-Strevens makes a strong case that Cassius Dio took considerable care in (at least some of) the major speeches embedded in his history to reflect details of argument and circumstance that he found in his sources; and J. Dugan subjects the notorious wolf-fish fragment of C. Titius found in Macrobius to a rhetorical ‘thick description’ in order to demonstrate its embeddedness in the source text and complicate our tendency to treat the fragment in splendid, but often perhaps deceptive, isolation.

Part B (‘Reconstruction’) turns first to some stimulating case-studies. A. Cavarzere returns to Titius and his wolf-fish fragment, this time focusing on the identity and date of the orator. (But I doubt that an eques (Cic., Brut. 167) would have delivered a suasio legis Fanniae, doubts which seem only confirmed by Cavarzere's heroic struggles against the ensuing chronological difficulties.) In a highlight of the volume, A. Corbeill reconstructs and even composes an imaginary English version (but then why not Latin?) of P. Clodius's contio delivered in response to the Response of the Haruspices. However, the implausibility of some of the results (such as actually accepting Cicero's joke that Clodius himself called the ‘Good Goddess’ ‘good’ because she had forgiven him his sacrilege against her: 173–4, 186: Har. resp. 37) only highlights the grave difficulty of reconstructing an oration from the attacks of the speaker's bitterest enemy. (I also cannot quite bring myself to believe that Clodius's apparitores would have provided handouts of the haruspices’ response: 171.) K. Morrell reconstructs Cato's possible line of argument for the legitimacy of Clodius’ legislation (which would seem incidentally to let Caesar's consular legislation off the hook). There follow two pieces on the fragmentary history of delivery (J. Hilder on the Ad Herennium and A. Balbo on suavitas, in particular) and an argument by C. Rosillo-López that sermo is worthy of consideration as public speech despite its informality.

In a paper that seems poorly fitted to the final subsection of the book (‘Gender’), H. Beck reminds us of the lost sensory experience that must have enveloped the audience of much Roman oratory — funeral orations in particular, with their striking resurrection of the dead, their songs, chants, and possibly the burning of fragrant woods and spices. (Alas, this last is only a conjecture (267, 280), an example of the evidentiary difficulties faced by such sensory reconstruction.) Finally, three papers do in fact focus on gender: C. Pepe discusses funeral eulogies for women, especially the distinction between those for members of aristocratic families and the more ordinary women celebrated in our celebrated epigraphic samples, the Laudationes Turiae and Murdiae; B. Gladhill recategorises the lamentations and tearful testimony of Clodius’ wife Fulvia as nothing less than ‘oratory’ (308), apparently because they were public and evidently had an strong emotional effect on the trial; and J. P. Hallett urges the inclusion of Cornelia, mater Gracchorum, in FRRO on the strength of a surviving fragment of a possibly authentic letter, although, as the editors drily note in the Introduction, ‘there is no evidence that she ever spoke in public’ (14).

The two volumes should not be expected to present a coherent vision of the contexts and ideological content of non-Ciceronian republican oratory. This is no shortcoming if the goal be understood as one of directing the attention of a wide variety of scholars with a large range of expertise to many dimensions of a complex phenomenon. These volumes are clearly intended as preparatory to the publication of the FRRO corpus, which will provide the basis for further advances in our understanding of that phenomenon and its history. In the meantime, one might regret that even in the second volume, explicitly dedicated to fragments, the editors let slip an opportunity to prompt a focused debate on the very definition of a ‘fragment’. Steel and her collaborators hold in FRRO to a precise but narrow definition (‘a faithfully transmitted excerpt copied from a text which was published by an orator and records the exact words which he spoke … on the occasion’: 4), yet many of the contributors explicitly or implicitly reject this definition in their papers — explicitly in Corbeill's case (12, 189), but implicitly also, apparently: Goh, Rosillo-López, Gladhill, Hallett and perhaps others as well. Collectively the papers in this volume may problematise the editors’ own definition of ‘fragment’ more than validate it.