Cicero’s Perorations

Author: Winterbottom, Michael
Title: Cicero’s Perorations
Review/Collection: in : Cicero the Advocate, Powell & Paterson, 2004
Place edition: Oxford
Editor: Oxford University Press
Year edition: 2004
Pages: 215-232
Keywords: Droit - Diritto - Law, Rhétorique - Retorica - Rhetorics
Description: The peroration was the last part of an oration, and typically would have been preceded by proem, narrative, and proofs. This articulation of a speech had been canonical for centuries before the time of Cicero. Around 80 BC, Cicero came to write his youthful De Inventione, he passed on from some Greek source the recommendation assumed in the Palamedes, that a peroration should contain a recapitulation and arousal of pity. His schema only becomes tripartite because anger is given equal weight with pity. The logical step was to produce a twofold scheme, where recapitulation was balanced by arousal of emotion in general; and that is what is found in Cicero's later Partitiones Oratoriae, as well as in later writers like Quintilian. This chapter discusses Cicero's actual perorations without much attention to the precepts he or others laid down for them. [Author]  [Powell & Paterson 2004]
Works:
Author initials: Winterbottom 2004