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CICERO'S PRO MILONE AND THE ‘DEMOSTHENIC’ STYLE: DE OPTIMO GENERE ORATORUM 10
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 March 2014
Extract
In a passage from the late rhetorical treatise generally known as De optimo genere oratorum, Cicero defends his past forensic competence in the face of Atticist critique by praising his Pro Milone as an example of grand style (9–10):
quod qui ita faciet, ut, si cupiat uberior esse, non possit, habeatur sane orator, sed de minoribus; magno autem oratori etiam illo modo saepe dicendum est in tali genere causarum. (10) ita fit ut Demosthenes certe possit summisse dicere, elate Lysias fortasse non possit. sed si eodem modo putant, exercitu in foro et in omnibus templis, quae circum forum sunt, conlocato, dici pro Milone decuisse, ut si de re privata ad unum iudicem diceremus, vim eloquentiae sua facultate, non rei natura metiuntur.
If anyone speaks in this manner without being able to use a fuller style if he wishes, he should be regarded as an orator, but a minor one. The great orator must often speak in that way in dealing with cases of such a kind. (10) In other words, Demosthenes could certainly speak calmly, but Lysias perhaps not with passion. But if they think that at the trial of Milo, when the army was stationed in the Forum and in all the temples round about, it was fitting to defend him in the same style that we would use in pleading a private case before a single judge, they measure the power of eloquence by their own limited ability, not by the nature of the art.
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References
1 Latin text and English translation of De optimo genere oratorum from Hubbell, H. M., Cicero. De inventione. De optimo genere oratorum. Topica (Cambridge, MA, 1969)Google Scholar.
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4 manet autem illa quoque excepta eius oratio (‘What he actually said was taken down and also survives’; Asc. 42.2C). For the delivery of the ‘first’ Pro Milone, see also Quint. 4.2.25; Plut. Vit. Cic. 35; Cass. Dio 40.54.1–4; Schol. Bob. 111.24–112.17 St.; a fragment from the first speech is preserved in Quint. 9.2.54 and Schol. Bob. 173 St. On the ‘taken down’ version of the speech, see Marshall, B. A., ‘Excepta Oratio, the Other Pro Milone and the Question of Shorthand’, Latomus 46 (1987), 730–6Google Scholar; Dyck, A. R., ‘The Other Pro Milone Reconsidered’, Philologus 146 (2002), 182–5CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Settle, J. N., ‘The Trial of Milo and the other Pro Milone’, TAPhA 94 (1963), 268–80Google Scholar, is sceptical about the diffusion of court stenography in the late Republic, and claims that the first Pro Milone was a forgery or rather a later rhetorical exercise.
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9 Asc. 42.3–4C; Quint. 4.2.25; Plin. Ep. 1.20.4; see also Schol. Bob. 112.12–13 St.
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20 Cf. Cic. Brut. 289.
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