On the Orator: Books 1-2

by Cicero, H. Rackham, E. W. Sutton

Overview

The philosopher-statesman on ethics and rhetoric.

Cicero (Marcus Tullius, 106–43 BC), Roman lawyer, orator, politician and philosopher, of whom we know more than of any other Roman, lived through the stirring era that saw the rise, dictatorship, and death of Julius Caesar in a tottering republic. In his political speeches especially and in his correspondence we see the excitement, tension and intrigue of politics and the part he played in the turmoil of the time. Of about 106 speeches, delivered before the Roman people or the Senate if they were political, before jurors if judicial, fifty-eight survive (a few of them incompletely). In the fourteenth century Petrarch and other Italian humanists discovered manuscripts containing more than 900 letters of which more than 800 were written by Cicero and nearly 100 by others to him. These afford a revelation of the man all the more striking because most were not written for publication. Six rhetorical works survive and another in fragments. Philosophical works include seven extant major compositions and a number of others; and some lost. There is also poetry, some original, some as translations from the Greek.

The Loeb Classical Library edition of Cicero is in twenty-nine volumes.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780674993839
Publisher:	Harvard University Press
Publication date:	01/01/1942
Series:	Loeb Classical Library , #348
Edition description:	7th printing/1st pub.1942
Pages:	512
Product dimensions:	4.25(w) x 6.38(h) x 1.00(d)
Language:	Latin

About the Author

Harris Rackham (1868–1944) was a Fellow of Christ’s College, Cambridge.

Table of Contents

Preface

Introduction

De Oratore

Book I

Book II

Appendix

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Catullus 49