For the critic Quintilian (below, p. 657), Cicero was 'the name, not of a man, but of eloquence itself. In
what did the literary significance of Cicero consist? In oratory first of all, the indispensable
accomplishment of an ancient politician. Cicero excelled in all three branches, deliberative, epideictic
(display speeches), and forensic. His speeches before the Senate and people show us how he could
present issues differently to different audiences, almost always with success. As consul he could turn the
Roman populace against measures of debt relief and land distribution, though there were genuine
shortages of currency and corn. At the end of his life he was able to persuade the Senate to vote official
powers to Octavian, a revolutionary with a private army, in the name of the Republic. Epideictic oratory
was less important as a genre at Rome, but it contributed vital ingredients, invective and eulogy, to
different kinds of speech: if Cicero's praise of Pompey's achievements and Caesar's conquests moves us
less than it did his contemporaries, we still find his absurd portrait of the ex-consul Piso in the speech In
Pisonem, with his tame Epicurean philosopher and his mobile eyebrows, or his caricatures of the stern
Stoic Cato and the pedantic jurist Sulpicius Rufus in the Pro Murena, hard to resist.
The most taxing and the most esteemed type of oratory at Rome was forensic. For at least twenty years,
until his death in 43 B.C., Cicero dominated the Roman courts, where arguments derived from law and
fact counted for less than appeals to passion and prejudice. Though he boasted of being able to 'throw
dust in the eyes of the jury', alleging in one case that there had been bribery in a cause celebre and
denying it in another four years later (and winning both cases), he was particularly famed for his ability
to arouse and calm the emotions of jurors and spectators. He was for that reason regularly asked to give
the concluding speech in defence.
The periodic style that Cicero developed, with its elaborately balanced clauses and careful rhythmic
cadences, was less florid than that of Hortensius, the great rival of his youth, but by the end of his career
it was becoming too ornate for the taste of the younger generation. Hence there is an apologetic element
in his major works on rhetoric, which draw on Greek theory and on his own experience in order to
present a picture of the perfect orator. In the Brutus, a history of Roman oratory written in 46 B.C. and
ostensibly inspired by the death of Hortensius four years earlier, Cicero's own achievement is coyly
represented as the climax of Roman eloquence. Here, as in the earlier De Oratore and the later Orator,
Cicero lays great stress on the proper training for an orator, which he believed should not be just a
matter of mastering techniques but of acquiring a broad education based on Greek culture. Cicero's hero,
L. Licinius Crassus, to whom he had attached himself as an 'apprentice', had, as censor in 92, opposed
the opening of schools to give rhetorical instruction in Latin alone: Greek was a richer language with an
established tradition of great oratory that had to be mastered.
Though he regarded history and law as essential parts of the orator's education, it is Greek philosophy
that Cicero recommends most strongly in these works: first because it imparts wisdom which the
statesman needs to combine with eloquence, but also because it offers training in argument. These
motives for interest in philosophy help to explain Cicero's choice of philosophical sect. Though he
exposed himself to all the major schools, Epicureanism, which preached abstention from public life and
had little interest in fine words, he gladly left to his friend Atticus. A Stoic philosopher named Diodotus
lived in his house while he was still a boy and eventually died there: with him Cicero studied dialectic.
His preference went to the teachers of the New Academy, the name given to a sceptical phase in the