Delivered in January 63 b.c.e., Cicero's three preserved speeches De lege agraria have been primarily used as a historical source by scholars, who have usually not given them their due as literary and rhetorical pieces. The recent renewed interest in Roman deliberative oratory has led to several important studies on the speeches in the last fifteen years, but a modern translation of the Agrarian Speeches was still direly wanting: J. H. Freese's Loeb English translation dates back to 1930, A. Boulanger's Budé French translation to 1932, and S. McElduff's 2001 Penguin offers only extracts. And aside from E. J. Jonkers’ 1963 commentary, which focuses on economic realities, A. W. Zumpt's Latin commentary of 1861 remains the only one to deal with the three speeches as a whole. With this book, Gesine Manuwald provides a new English translation, a revised Latin text and the first full-scale commentary on De lege agraria in a modern language, with a scope wide enough for any classicist to find what s/he needs to make full sense of these discourses and open new venues of inquiry.
Building on V. Marek's Teubner edition (1983), M. offers a revised Latin text — although her work is not an edition per se. M. improves on Marek's Agr. in several places — either by selecting other readings (e.g. 2.81 E: quem per iter qui faciunt), by deleting unnecessary additions (e.g. 1.20 optandum, 2.55 eis), by choosing better emendations (e.g. 2.71 Boulanger's in Salpinorum pestilentia) or by rejecting constructions that Marek considered valid (e.g. 2.4 extrema † tribus † suffragiorum). All these choices are convincingly explained in the commentary, and M.'s text, given with a selective apparatus, offers what can currently be considered as the most authoritative and usable version of this difficult and poorly transmitted set of speeches. M.'s translation is highly readable and stays usefully close to the Latin (M. describes it as a ‘guide to the facing Latin text’). It will be tremendously helpful for those of us using Cicero's Agr. as teaching material.
In her fifty-four-page introduction, M. offers a meaningful account of the political context, and covers the procedural, rhetorical, and philological grounds relevant to the speeches. She takes a clear (and, in my opinion, fully convincing) stance in the debates regarding the speeches’ publication, Cicero's strategies and the variations in style and content between the senatorial and popular venues (e.g. xl). M. rightly stresses the double political significance of the orations: with two speeches (Agr. 1 and 2) delivered just after Cicero had entered the consulship, and the third serving as a reply to the vicious attacks which followed the first contio (Agr. 3), the three Agrarian Speeches offer unique examples both of consular inaugural speeches and of the rhetorical strategies used by a Roman magistrate to repel an obviously popular bill. M.'s synthesis thus gives a comprehensive view of Agr., and is particularly useful when it deals with legal technicalities (the bill itself, the agrarian laws in general, the procedure of the contio: xiii–xxxi).
M.'s commentary is thorough without being overwhelming — which it could easily have been, considering the wealth of historical, legal and social material the speeches contain. Everything is done to make the commentary usable and pleasant to read. Outlines of the speeches are provided (112, 185, 420), and each large section of the speech is introduced by a summary. The comments themselves deal extensively with the historical, rhetorical, legal and philological aspects of Agr., and never burden the reader with information that is not strictly relevant. M. does not neglect the linguistic aspects of the speeches either, and provides helpful grammatical and lexical insights.
As such, M.'s Agrarian Speeches offers not only an essential tool for further research in the field, but also a much needed reference book for teaching these speeches.
