Customer Reviews

Orations: Pro Archia, Post Reditum in Sentu, Post Reditum Ad Quirit (Loeb Classical Library, No. 158)

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1 star:		(1)

 

 

When I was in law school at the University of Florida back in the 70's, our student bar association raised money by selling "looms" on the law courses. Looms were the typed up notes of the students who made the highest grades in each of the classes. Looms were clear, concise statements of the essentials of a course without all the extraneous verbiage that creeps into didactic presentation.

"Rhetorica ad Herennium" reads like a loom. It states its points in clear, concise language without elaboration. The points are well made and highly relevant to the subject of persuasive oratory.

You might well describe "Rhetorica" as an ancient handbook on the subject of arguing a criminal case to a jury. At some trial advocacy school I attended sometime during my career as a lawyer, I learned a basic outline for delivering a final argument. You can imagine my amusement when I learned that this basic outline came from a 2,000 year old book. That isn't the only part of the book applicable to the modern courtroom.

The ancient rhetorician was to be skilled in five areas: 1. Invention: Deciding what to say. 2. Arrangment: Deciding what order to say it in. 3. Style: Saying it well. 4. Memory: Remembering what to say. 5. Delivery: The nonverbals that accompany speech.

"Rhetorica" consists of four books arranged as follows:

Books I & II cover Invention, especially as it relates to Judicial or Forensic Rhetoric, giving an analysis as timely as an article from last week's law journal. Although the technology of rhetoric has changed markedly since the days of Cicero, the general principles of rhetoric haven't changed much at all.

Book III takes up Ceremonial and Deliberative Rhetoric and also deals with Arrangement, Delivery, and Memory.

Book IV, which proves the most tedious, deals with Style.

This is a review of "De Oratore" books I-II and "De Oratore" book III in the Loeb Classical Library.

Marcus Tullius Cicero may not have been the greatest trial lawyer of ancient Rome, but he is the best remembered. He wrote much on many subjects, and some of his private correspondence also survives. He did his best writing in the field of rhetoric. Although he was not an original thinker on the subject of rhetoric, "De Oratore" shows him to have had an encyclopedic practical knowledge of oratory in general and criminal trial advocacy in particular.

Cicero wrote "De Oratore" as a dialog among some of the preeminent orators of the era immediately preceding Cicero's time. The occasion is a holiday at a country villa, and the characters discuss all facets of oratory, ceremonial, judicial, and deliberative. They devote most of the discussion to judicial oratory, and their discussion reveals the trial of a Roman lawsuit to be somewhat analogous to the trial of a modern lawsuit. You have to piece it together from stray references to procedure scattered throughout the work, but it appears that a Roman trial consisted of opening statements, the taking of evidence, and final arguments. Modern trial advocacy manuals devote most of their attention to the taking of evidence, but Cicero dismisses the mechanics of presenting evidence as relatively unimportant compared to the mechanics of presenting argument.

"De Oratore" is divided into three books. The first speaks of the qualities of the orator; the second of judicial oratory, and the third of ceremonial and deliberative oratory. The modern trial lawyer would find the second book most interesting and most enlightening. A lot about trial advocacy has changed since Cicero's day (e.g. no more testimony taken under torture), but a lot hasn't.. Much of what Cicero says holds true even in the modern courtroom.

Trial lawyers cannot congregate without swapping "war stories," and Cicero's characters are no exception. They pepper their discussion with references to courtroom incidents which have such verisimilitude that they could have happened last week instead of 2,000 years ago. I have no doubt that Cicero, had he lived today, would have made a formidable trial lawyer.

The Loeb Classical Library edition of "De Oratore" consists of two volumes. Volume one contains Books I and II of "De Oratore," and volume two contains Book III along with two shorter philosphical works and "De Partitione Oratoria." "De Partitione" purports to be a discussion between Cicero and his son on oratory. "De Partitione" differs so much from "De Oratore," that many (myself included) doubt Cicero wrote it.

I think this is one of the best books on public speaking I have ever read. It is clear and concise. The author lays out what you are to know and do very well. I would recommend Ad Herennium to anyone. I am really glad my 10th grade Rhetoric teacher made me read this!!!

This book is very simple to understand. I used it for a class and found it helpful. The index is very thorough and useful.

Essentially a very short treatise, hard to believe it was written over 2,000 years ago. Nothing he says is outdated, except the names. Old age should be a time of learning and gardening, according to Cicero. And conversation with friends. Old age will be what we bring to it by our past lives, both in soundness of body and character and temperament. We do not change as we age. How true this is! My own parents were no different than they had always been. His belief in the division of body and soul, and in the immortality of the soul, is just what the Catholic Church teaches today. Old age is blessedly free of the passions and sensations of youth. We should begin to separate from the body. I think much of Catholicism drew from Roman philosophy.

Don't be confused by the five star rating in place for this book (at least as I write this review); if you look closely, you'll notice that most of them are for other speeches/ editions of Cicero. The commentary in this book is one of the worst I have ever seen in a Classical text. It provides translations for the most simple of phrases, such as "Leges enim silent" (the laws are silent), but little to no grammatical help on any of the half to full page long sentences. When the commentary does address these harder passages, it simply gives a translation with no explanation of how it reached that translation/ the grammatical function of the words and clauses. Furthermore, the editor felt compelled to insert hundreds (perhaps thousands, no lie) of punctuation marks that make absolutely no sense and trick/misguide the reader rather than offer any help at understanding what Cicero is trying to say; for example, "eum, qui se defendisset, contra rem publicam fecisse, sed, cum invenisset..." (pg. 6). The only comma out of those I just cited that has any reason to exist is the one before 'sed.'

This edition's only saving grace is the commentary by Asconius that is included; otherwise, I'd give it only one star.

Apparently, they scanned an old copy of Cicero's work, and let the OCR software do all the work. They did not even check it. It is functional unreadable, as many of the words are misspelled, and typesetting is awful. It is not worth having even if it was free.

I recently received this book and just started reading it. I bought it mainly for the passages on memory and i have to say so far it has some things that i use that really helps out. Even if its not specifically for that. This book is great in simply learning how to argue or rather, learning how to create an algorithm to arguments. I would recommend this to anyone.