Author: Tempest, Kathryn
Title: Staging a prosecution: aspects of performance in Cicero’s Verrines
Review/Collection: In : Christos Kremmydas, Jonathan Powell & Lene Rubinstein, Profession and Performance: Aspects of Oratory in the Greco-Roman World, Institute of Classical Studies, University of London, 2013, 140 p.
Place edition: London
Editor: Institute of Classical Studies, University of London
Year edition: 2013
Pages: 41-72
Keywords: Éloquence - Eloquenza - Eloquence, Rhétorique - Retorica - Rhetorics
Description: Tempest’s chapter goes on to examine the prosecution speeches themselves to demonstrate how Cicero put his own prescriptions into practice. While we may suspend judgement on whether Cicero was right in his claim that Caecilius has none of the requisite skills and is incapable of conducting the prosecution as it deserves, we can at least accept that the repertoire of skills and competences required by advocates in major public trials at Rome was very considerable. As Tempest further demonstrates, the text of the second Actio against Verres provides numerous examples of precisely those oratorical skills. This speech (for it is a single speech in five sections, not five speeches as customarily presented) has been signally neglected in recent times as a source of examples of effective oratory, probably because of the common persuasion (which is not in fact securely founded in the evidence) that it was never delivered but only circulated in writing. But for all that, it can still be treated as a text for performance, in which (as this analysis reveals) the phrasing itself often suggests a particular manner of delivery [Jonathan Powell, Lene Rubinstein, and Christos Kremmydas, pp. 11-12]
Works:
Author initials: Tempest 2013
Title: Staging a prosecution: aspects of performance in Cicero’s Verrines
Review/Collection: In : Christos Kremmydas, Jonathan Powell & Lene Rubinstein, Profession and Performance: Aspects of Oratory in the Greco-Roman World, Institute of Classical Studies, University of London, 2013, 140 p.
Place edition: London
Editor: Institute of Classical Studies, University of London
Year edition: 2013
Pages: 41-72
Keywords: Éloquence - Eloquenza - Eloquence, Rhétorique - Retorica - Rhetorics
Description: Tempest’s chapter goes on to examine the prosecution speeches themselves to demonstrate how Cicero put his own prescriptions into practice. While we may suspend judgement on whether Cicero was right in his claim that Caecilius has none of the requisite skills and is incapable of conducting the prosecution as it deserves, we can at least accept that the repertoire of skills and competences required by advocates in major public trials at Rome was very considerable. As Tempest further demonstrates, the text of the second Actio against Verres provides numerous examples of precisely those oratorical skills. This speech (for it is a single speech in five sections, not five speeches as customarily presented) has been signally neglected in recent times as a source of examples of effective oratory, probably because of the common persuasion (which is not in fact securely founded in the evidence) that it was never delivered but only circulated in writing. But for all that, it can still be treated as a text for performance, in which (as this analysis reveals) the phrasing itself often suggests a particular manner of delivery [Jonathan Powell, Lene Rubinstein, and Christos Kremmydas, pp. 11-12]
Works:
Author initials: Tempest 2013
