Ricerc@Sapienza

Cicero saw publication as a means of perpetuating a distinctive image of statesman and orator. He memorialized his spiritual and oratorical self by a very solid textual body. Educationists and schoolteachers in antiquity relied on Cicero’s oratory to supervise the intellectual maturation of the young. By reconstructing the main phases of textual transmission, from the first authorial dissemination of the speeches to the medieval manuscripts, and re-examining the abundant evidence on Ciceronian scholarship from the 1st to the 6th century CE, this book traces a history of the exegetical tradition on Cicero’s oratory and reassesses the ‘didactic’ function of the speeches, whose preservation was largely determined by pedagogical factors.