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government to the results of degeneration due to empire.

But

although Cicero appeals to the virtues of an idealized past in his

treatises, his speeches on empire show us a politician attempting

to be persuasive when dealing with the issues without the

beneﬁt of hindsight. They are thus a valuable corrective to the

mournful schematization of a Livy or a Sallust.

The inﬂation in the system of special commands was the

crucial area where the possession of empire contributed to the

end of the Republic, and two of Cicero’s speeches, de imperio

Cn. Pompei and de prouinciis consularibus, directly address

issues arising from this development. In the former, delivered

in 66, Cicero argues in support of a law giving Pompeius excep-

tionally wide-ranging powers, which in the event enabled him

to bring large tracts of land under Roman control and establish

a formidable personal power base, and in the latter, some ten

years later, Cicero supports Caesar’s desire to be allowed to

retain the command which was giving him the opportunity to

emulate in Gaul Pompeius’ eastern successes.

The other speeches which I examine deal with issues, pro-

vincial misgovernment and access to citizenship, which are not

on the surface so crucial to the transition from Republic to

Empire, but which were matters for considerable concern and

debate about the running of the empire at the time when Cicero

spoke. The repetundae trials are ultimately concerned with the

duties of the holder of imperium, and with the mechanisms by

which the Roman state can control such individuals. This is

precisely the same issue, albeit on a smaller scale and relating to

more obscure people, as the one raised by the exceptional

commands held by Pompeius and Caesar. How to control the

behaviour of governors was a considerable problem: we know

of a large number of convictions on extortion charges and it

would be overly cynical to deny that the Senate was concerned

about the behaviour of its members.

Various attempts at legis-

lation from 149  onward did not eliminate the problem, but it

6 Introduction

See esp. Sallust, Catiline 10–13, Jugurtha 41–2; Livy, Preface; A. W.

Lintott, ‘Imperial Expansion and Moral Decline in the Roman Republic’,

Historia, 21 (1972), 626–38; B. Levick, ‘Morals, Politics, and the Fall of the

Roman Republic’, G&R 29 (1982), 53–62.

On the development of repetundae legislation, see A. W. Lintott, ‘The

Leges de Repetundis and Associate Measures under the Republic’, ZRG 98

(1981), 162–212.

01_Steel chapters 19/12/2001 11:43 am Page 6

is clear that the possibility of being prosecuted for corruption

was a considerable anxiety even for governors who kept their

hands clean. However, the autonomy of governors in the ﬁeld

meant that the only actual constraint on their behaviour was the

threat of prosecution, and the legal system in Rome was

suﬃciently uncertain, and indeed corrupt, that it was if not

an empty at least a far from compelling threat. Moreover,

measures to control corruption were liable to subversion even

when they were not ignored. A good example of this comes

from the notorious case of Brutus’ loan to the Salaminians: it

was illegal to lend this money, and so Brutus covered himself

by a special senatorial decree.

Claims to the citizenship did not play any prominent part in

the ﬁnal round of civil war, but this had been, on most

accounts, the grievance which had sparked the Social War,

which in turn had contributed to the turbulence of the last ﬁfty

years of the Republic. The conclusion of the Social War had led

to the extension of the franchise throughout Italy, but without

any transformation in the structures of Roman government to

accommodate a vast number of new citizens who were not resi-

dent in the city.

The logical next step was the granting of

citizenship to those domiciled outside Italy, and in ad hoc ways

this was beginning to happen. A law was passed to enable

Pompeius Magnus to grant citizenship in Spain, and both

Crassus and Caesar attempted to raise the peoples beyond the

Po from the Latin status they had acquired in 89 to full Roman

citizenship.

Yet there was in fact no further enfranchisement

of signiﬁcant numbers after the resolution of the Social War

until Caesar’s dictatorship. The citizenship cases in which

Cicero appeared were thus not simply anomalies, but nor were

Introduction 7

See Sect. 5.1 below.

On citizenship in general, see A. N. Sherwin-White, The Roman

Citizenship, 2nd edn. (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1973); on the enfranchise-

ment of Italy in particular, H. Mouritsen, Italian Uniﬁcation (London: BICS

suppl. 70, 1998).

Crassus attempted to enrol the Transpadanes as citizens while he was

censor in 65: that is the deduction from Dio 37. 9. 3. (Dio says merely that the

censors disagreed about the issue, to the extent that they both resigned their

oﬃce, and does not say which censor was proposing it. It seems much more

probable, however, that Crassus was in favour and Catulus resisted, than vice

versa.) For Caesar and the Transpadanes, see Sect. 5.2.2 below.

01_Steel chapters 19/12/2001 11:43 am Page 7

they standard and frequently encountered situations: rather,

they touched on a potentially explosive area which was none the

less ignored in the political debates of the post-Sullan period.

These speeches oﬀer, therefore, a way into key political

debates of the late Republic. Who should command the

Republic’s armies, and what controls, if any, could be imposed

on the commanders? What was the appropriate remuneration

for a provincial governor, and how should the state intervene to

balance the wishes of its representatives and the welfare of its

subjects? What were the criteria for being a Roman citizen?

This last question—who is a Roman?—relates to an area

which is currently receiving a great deal of scholarly attention,

namely the eﬀects of Roman conquest and empire upon the

cultural and ethnic identities of both the Romans and their new

subjects.

This material, however, tends to be concerned either

with the Hellenization of Rome in the second century  or

with the Romanization of the empire during the ‘Empire’, that

is the period of monarchic government after 27 . There is

a curious gap in between, part of a wider historiographical

phenomenon which makes events at Rome the key to under-

standing the late Republic, and indeed which concentrates on

the transformation of republican government into monarchy

to the exclusion of other historical developments of the last

century . And insofar as attention is directed outside Rome,

it is to the military activity which can be invoked as an impor-

tant factor in this historical process. Cicero’s tactics in his

citizenship and repetundae speeches suggest considerable

anxiety about the nature of Roman identity: important evi-

dence for the wider debate on culture and empire which has not

hitherto been fully exploited.

8 Introduction

E. S. Gruen, Culture and National Identity in Republican Rome (Ithaca:

Cornell Univ. Press, 1992); S. E. Alcock, Graecia Capta: The Landscapes of

Roman Greece (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1993); E. Gabba, Aspetti

culturali dell’imperialismo Romano (Florence: Sansoni, 1993); S. Swain,

Hellenism and Empire: Language, Classicism, and Power in the Greek World,

AD 50–250 (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1996); D. J. Mattingly (ed.), Dia-

logues in Roman Imperialism (JRA suppl. ser. 23, 1997); R. Laurence and

J. Berry (eds.), Cultural Identity in the Roman Empire (London: Routledge,

1998); G. Woolf, Becoming Roman (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press,

1998). For a non-classical perspective, cf. E. Said, Culture and Imperialism

(London: Chatto and Windus, 1993).

01_Steel chapters 19/12/2001 11:43 am Page 8

I.2. APPROACHES TO CICERO

Cicero’s speeches would, then, provide valuable material for

the study of late republican imperialism. But I should stress

that this book is not intended as a direct contribution to the

debate on Roman imperialism, nor even, primarily, is it about

the conceptualization of empire at the end of the Republic;

the focus of my inquiry is about the practice of oratory: the

strategies through which Cicero makes oratory a politically

eﬀective tool.

To study Cicero’s speeches as ‘politically eﬀective tools’ is a

question-begging exercise, and leads straight to the problem of

how best to contextualize oratory: to provide readings of

speeches which take account both of their generic conventions

and of their aims. Another, cruder, way of expressing this is to

ask how one can provide readings of the speeches which are

both historical and literary.

The dominant mode of literary criticism of Cicero’s oratory

is, perhaps unsurprisingly, rhetorical. The focus of this kind of

work is, ultimately, on the question of how Cicero constructs

eﬀective arguments, and the approach is often to apply the

rules of the genre, the rhetorical theory which Cicero had

absorbed during his training, in order to understand his mature

practice. So Craig explores Cicero’s use of one particular form

of rhetorical argument, dilemma; Berger, the construction of

narratives within speeches; May, his manipulation of ethos;

Cerutti and Loutsch, the dynamics of a particular part of a

speech.

A purely rhetorical approach can be very illuminating

in relation to a speciﬁc part of a speech, but has quite severe

limits if one is attempting to make sense of an entire speech.

As Vasaly points out, the precepts of rhetorical theory are a

framework, which was not only used but also transcended by

Introduction 9

C. P. Craig, Form as Argument in Cicero’s Speeches: A Study of Dilemma

(Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1993); D. Berger, Cicero als Erzähler: forensische und

literarische Strategien in den Gerichtsreden (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 1976);

J. May, Trials of Character: The Eloquence of Ciceronian Ethos (Chapel Hill:

Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1988); S. M. Cerutti, Cicero’s Accretive Style:

Rhetorical Strategies in the Exordia of the Judicial Speeches (Lanham: Univ.

Press of America, 1996); C. Loutsch, L’Exorde dans les discours de Cicéron

(Brussels: Collection Latomus 224, 1994).

01_Steel chapters 19/12/2001 11:43 am Page 9

practising orators;

and one might hypothesize that Cicero’s

pre-eminence as an orator implied that he did much more than

simply reproduce the rules which were openly available to all

his contemporaries. And indeed there has been work that has

acknowledged the need to look beyond rhetorical theory.

Stroh’s brilliant book, for example, moves beyond rhetoric

alone to examine, through a number of case-studies, the ways

in which Cicero manipulates facts in his forensic speeches to

produce a persuasively distorted account of events; and Classen,

too, seeks to incorporate legal and political contexts into his

study of six discrete speeches.

It is striking how prominent Cicero’s forensic speeches are in

much of this work. Stroh, Berger, and Cerutti concentrate

exclusively on judicial oratory, and of the eight speeches to

which Craig devotes detailed discussions seven are forensic. A

similar bias is apparent among commentaries on the speeches:

of the eight commentaries which Berry picks out as ‘substantial

[and] modern’, seven are on forensic speeches (and Berry’s own

commentary deals with a forensic speech).

These ﬁgures

should be set against the ratio between forensic and non-foren-

sic in the corpus of speeches as a whole; disputes over what

counts as a speech rather than a fragment aﬀect the ﬁgures

slightly, but of the sixty speeches which are printed separately

in the Oxford Classical Text, thirty are forensic and thirty are

not. Cicero the orator, as he emerges from much modern

scholarship, is a creature of the lawcourts to a misleading extent.

A number of reasons can be put forward to explain this

imbalance. Perhaps the most obvious is that some of the most

striking and enjoyable of the speeches are forensic: this alone

would explain the attraction of, for example, the pro Caelio, the

pro Cluentio, or the pro Roscio Amerino. Murder, in particular,

is a subject of enduring fascination.

And, from a pedagogical

10 Introduction

A. Vasaly, Representations: Images of the World in Ciceronian Oratory

(Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1993), 3–7.

W. Stroh, Taxis und Taktik: Die advokatische Dispositionskunst in Ciceros

Gerichtsreden (Stuttgart: Teubner 1975); C. J. Classen, Recht — Rhetorik —

Politik: Untersuchungen zu Ciceros rhetorischer Strategie (Darmstadt: Wissen-

schaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1985).

D. C. Berry, Cicero, Pro P. Sulla oratio (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ.

Press, 1996), ix.

One of the Penguin volumes of Cicero’s speeches is entitled Murder Trials

01_Steel chapters 19/12/2001 11:43 am Page 10

point of view, the more straightforward of the forensic speeches

are attractive to teach because it is not necessary to know a great

deal about the historical background to understand them

(whereas the non-forensic speeches often demand a breadth of

historical knowledge which is beyond many students). But

the bias is also due in large part to the sorts of approaches

which Ciceronian scholars have been using. Stroh is explicitly

interested in forensic tactics; and for those using the insights of

rhetorical theory, the forensic speeches are the obvious quarry

because ancient rhetorical theory was elaborated largely to deal

with forensic cases. The complexity of inuentio in the hand-

books relates directly to the challenges of presenting a legal

case: how to deal with witnesses, with arguments from proba-

bility, how to determine whether a case involves a question of

fact or of law, and so on. Inuentio is only one of the ﬁve partes

orationis, yet inuentio as it relates solely to judicial cases takes

up half of the only surviving republican treatise on oratory,

the ad C. Herennium, and was the only one of the ﬁve which

Cicero covered in his uncompleted early work on rhetoric, the

de inuentione. Rhetorical theory and oratorical practice relate

to one another much more closely in judicial cases than in

deliberative speeches, and so a rhetorical approach is much

more enlightening and useful if one looks at forensic speeches:

but this entrenches the neglect of the non-forensic speeches,

and the failure to develop analytical tools to deal with them.

A more general potential weakness of a rhetorical approach

is to accept the speech’s own premises without analysis. In

particular, it becomes easy not to ask why Cicero chose to speak

at this trial or on this issue, when silence was an option; and why

he then published his speech, when he did not always produce

a written version; and why he chose a particular rhetorical

strategy. It becomes too easy to regard the form which a speech

takes as inevitable, and to explain it without regard for the

choices which have shaped it.

Historical approaches to Cicero have been dominated by

the biography;

unsurprisingly, perhaps, given how much we

Introduction 11

(trans. M. Grant; Harmondsworth, 1973); one can cite too the series of detec-

tive novels by Stephen Saylor, based largely on forensic cases in which Cicero

was involved: see C. Steel, ‘The Gordianus Knot’, Omnibus, 38 (1999), 32–3.

See e.g. D. L. Stockton, Cicero: A Political Biography (Oxford: Oxford

01_Steel chapters 19/12/2001 11:43 am Page 11

know about his life, and in particular given the survival of some

of his correspondence, which features more prominently

among the textual sources for biography than do either the

speeches or the treatises. This is not perhaps a suitable place for

an extended disquisition on the dangers of treating the letters as

though they provided us with direct and unmediated access to

Cicero’s ‘real’ beliefs and character; but it can be remarked that

biographers of Cicero are often more interested in the fact that

Cicero gave a particular speech that in its content.

The other historical approach to the speeches is as sources

for particular events or beliefs; for example, attitudes to

empire. The information which Cicero’s speeches provide is so

extensive that their use is inescapable; but oratorical texts do

not present a direct and straightforward representation of the

world; they are the products of a highly sophisticated technical

system, central to which is the need to subordinate facts to the

argument which the speaker is propounding. It is dangerously

naïve, therefore, to believe anything Cicero may say in a

speech, without considering why he is saying it and who, in his

audience, might be in a position to challenge the statement.

This is fairly obvious, however often historians disregard it in

practice. More diﬃcult is the relationship between oratory, that

is the text which has survived, and its success or failure: that is,

whether the Senate, or assembly, or jury, voted in the way that

the orator was advocating and if so, why. Cicero was rarely the

only orator speaking in support of a case or issue, and of the

speeches I deal with this is true only of the Verrines; not only

need we take account of his opponents, but also the other

speakers arguing for the same course of action or verdict as he

is. Apart from the trial of Verres—which never, of course, came

to a vote—the voting audience would have made up their minds

on the basis of what a number of speakers had said, and none of

this has survived apart from Cicero’s contribution. But it is also

clear that, in the late Republic, the eﬀectiveness of an orator did

12 Introduction

Univ. Press, 1971); Shackleton D. R. Bailey, Cicero (London: Duckworth,

1971); E. D. Rawson, Cicero: A Portrait (London: Allen Lane, 1975); W. K.

Lacey, Cicero and the End of the Roman Republic (London: Hodder and

Stoughton, 1978); T. N. Mitchell, Cicero: The Ascending Years (New Haven:

Yale Univ. Press, 1979), and Cicero: The Senior Statesman (New Haven:

Yale Univ. Press, 1991); M. Furhmann, Cicero and the Roman Republic, trans.

W. E. Yuill (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992).

01_Steel chapters 19/12/2001 11:43 am Page 12

not depend solely on the quality of the oratory. Auctoritas, that

elusive but vital mix of personal impressiveness and charisma

with inﬂuence and connections, cannot be disregarded. An

audience voted not just on the basis of what was said, but who

said it, quite apart from its assessment of the issues which lay

behind any one speech. It is only when we assess personal

proﬁle more generally that the oratorical success of, for

example, Crassus, can be explained, since most accounts of

his performances suggest that he was a dull and uninspired

speaker.

Instead of concentrating exclusively on the brilliance

of what was said, we need to envisage a range of ways of being

an eﬀective speaker, with oratorical ﬁreworks at one end and

overwhelming auctoritas at the other, and most orators of the

period existing in the middle, bolstering their skill at speaking

with the projection of a public persona derived from visible

activities other than oratory.

The failure of either the biographical or the rhetorical

approach to give fully convincing analyses of the speeches can

be linked with a general unease about the role of oratory in late

republican politics. Did it matter, and if so, how? If what

Cicero says in a speech is not to be taken as an expression of his

political beliefs, then the biographer need not pay close atten-

tion to it; and if the link between speech and speaker is weak,

then there is little need to contextualize. And while it might

seem self-evident that an activity into which so much energy

was poured by so many politicians was important, the domin-

ant trends in the study of the late Republic have indeed tended

to focus the attention of historians away from oratory.

One of

these is the concentration on factions as a way of explaining

the results of elections and thus the distribution of power: if

magistrates are chosen primarily on the basis of the identity of

their friends and relatives, then what aspiring candidates say

matters less, or not at all. And while the limitations of the

prosopographical approach are being recognized, the percep-

tion that Roman politicians do not appeal to programmes when

seeking election, but to personal popularity—dependent on a

Introduction 13

On Crassus’ abilities as a speaker, see Cicero, Brutus 233; Plutarch, Life

of Crassus 3.3–4.

Though cf. G. Achard, Pratique rhétorique et idéologie politique dans les

discours ‘optimates’ de Cicéron (Leiden: Mnemosyne suppl. 68, 1981).

01_Steel chapters 19/12/2001 11:43 am Page 13

range of factors—has the unfortunate eﬀect of distracting

attention away from the content of their public pronounce-

ments.

One recent attempt to deal with the political aspect of

deliberative rhetoric has been the article by Rose, which is also

the only work of which I know to deal explicitly with Cicero’s

oratorical discussion of empire.

He considers the speeches de

imperio Cn. Pompei and de prouinciis consularibus; his approach,

ﬁrmly based in the Marxist tradition, is to use the theoretical

insights of Macherey in order ‘to explore the internal contra-

dictions of the texts as pointers to the contradictions of late

Republican society’.

He oﬀers an analysis which looks past

the focus on Rome in Cicero’s career to the way that his actions

were nevertheless implicated in the empire, and in particular he

shows how Cicero’s analysis of imperial expansion in the speech

de imperio Cn. Pompei is riddled with contradictions. More-

over, the article throws open the question of what sort of

account we want to give of the workings of political oratory. My

reservations about this one arise because it does not give suﬃ-

cient autonomy to Cicero, whose oratory, I would argue, can

support more complex explanations. Rose himself seems un-

clear as to whether Cicero was conscious of the contradictions

he reproduces in his oratory, and it is revealing that, while his

discussion of the de imperio Cn. Pompei (in which Cicero con-

ceals his own persona for much of the speech) is highly illumi-

nating, the analysis of the de prouinciis consularibus, in which

Cicero’s advice is explicitly and inextricably linked with his

own experiences and attitudes, is much less convincing.

A more widespread corrective to prevailing approaches has

been the growing interest in the democratic element, and

consequently on the ﬁgure of the speaker.

Public speech is

14 Introduction

P. W. Rose, ‘Cicero and the Rhetoric of Imperialism: Putting the Politics

back into Political Rhetoric’, Rhetorica, 13 (1995), 359–99.

Rose, ‘Rhetoric of Imperialism’, 359.

See F. G. B. Millar, ‘The Political Character of the Classical Roman

Republic, 200–151 B.C.’, JRS 74 (1984), 1–19, ‘Politics, Persuasion and the

People before the Social War (150–90 B.C.)’, JRS 76 (1986), 1–11, and The

Crowd in Rome in the Late Republic (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,

1998); P. J. J. Vanderbroeck, Popular Leadership and Collective Behaviour in

the Late Roman Republic (Amsterdam: Gieben, 1987); F. Pina Polo, Contra

Arma Verbis: der Redner vor dem Volk in der späten römischen Republik, trans.

01_Steel chapters 19/12/2001 11:43 am Page 14

stressed as the means of communication between politician and

people, and it matters because if the people’s voting choices,

whether electoral or legislative, are not irrevocably decided in

advance by the forces of patronage and bribery, then speech is

given the opportunity to be persuasive: it can aﬀect the course

of events. It is interesting, however, that the surge of interest in

the crowd and the orator has not yet spread to close studies of

the means of communication themselves. In part this may be

precisely because our only complete surviving republican

speeches are those of Cicero, who was not sympathetic to the

democratic element in the republican constitution; one might

even suggest that the liberal sentiments which lead scholars to

search for democracy tend also to prejudice them against a man

who referred to the Roman people as scum.

Moreover, the concept of the ‘political’ needs to be used with

extreme care. Riggsby has recently argued very persuasively

that Roman trials are not political in the sense that the verdicts

were decided by the political allegiances of the jurors: rather,

the Romans did believe their verdicts and a vote for guilty

meant that they believed the defendant had done what he was

charged with. Therefore, the aim of a forensic speech is to

prove that the defendant is innocent or guilty.

But, this still

allows room for Cicero’s forensic speeches to be political in at

least two weaker senses: one being that they were a means of

showing where his political allegiances lay through the identity

of the men he chose to defend, and the other being that if

oratory is a form of political capital then every successful

oratorical outing—and, by and large, Cicero only published

his successes—is an opportunity for Cicero to increase his

stock.

That there is a political value, at least in a general sense, to

Cicero’s oratory is a recurrent feature in this study, and is a

useful method of approaching the non-forensic speeches. They

Introduction 15

E. Liess (Stuttgart: F. Steiner, 1996); G. Laser, Populo et scaenae serviendum

est: Die Bedeutung der stadtischen Masse in der späten Römischen Republik

(Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 1997); C. Döbler, Politische Agitation

und Öﬀentlichkeit in der späten Republik (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 1999).

ad Quintum fratrem 2. 5. 3; in Pisonem 9 (faex); in Catilinam 2. 7 (sentina)

(with de lege agraria 2. 70!).

A. M. Riggsby, Crime and Community in Ciceronian Rome (Austin: Univ.

of Texas Press, 1999), 5–20.

01_Steel chapters 19/12/2001 11:43 am Page 15