Creative Eloquence: The Construction of Reality in Cicero’s Speeches by Ingo Gildenhard (review)

Ingo Gildenhard is a scholar who does not shy away from tackling large, complicated questions. Already the author of an innovative study of Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations,¹ in Creative Eloquence he formulates a new way to read Cicero’s oratorical corpus. Gildenhard’s thesis is that what is distinctive about Cicero’s speeches is how they advance constructions of the world that are, as he puts it (7), “highly idiosyncratic and frequently at variance with routine views, approaches, and convictions in Roman public discourse.” His project is one that distills philosophical positions from Cicero’s oratory, using the whole of that corpus to explore how Cicero creates distinctive views on the human condition, politics, even theology. This novel approach pivots away from conventional treatments of the speeches. Instead of culling from Cicero historical realities, Gildenhard highlights Cicero’s own, often peculiar, constructions. Nor does he present us with Cicero as the pragmatic lawyer working within the legal procedures of the late republican courts to defend his clients. Instead, Gildenhard’s rich, erudite, and detailed analysis scrutinizes Cicero as an author with long-range cultural ambitions that transcend the particularities of the forensic and deliberative issues his speeches confronted.

This book’s thesis presents methodological challenges—ones that Gilden-hard himself acknowledges (12–15). The most daunting problem is how one can argue for Cicero’s oratorical creativity when we have only Cicero’s own speeches as evidence. How can we determine what is authentically innovative in Cicero’s constructions of reality without extant comparanda? Gildenhard negotiates this problem with care, prefacing the twelve chapters with a thorough overview of what appear to be typical Roman sentiments for each of the areas of Roman culture where, he argues, Cicero is shaping realities. These introductions establish baseline norms for Roman cultural realities so that Gildenhard can then chart Cicero’s manipulation of those beliefs. The book’s chapters are self-contained, but thematically organized case studies, four in each of three sections devoted to the individual (“Anthropology”), communal and political life (“Sociology”), and the larger universe (“Theology”). The detailed argumentation builds a sustained, if ultimately circumstantial, case for seeing Cicero as a committed cultural innovator with a habit of challenging entrenched ideas.

By combining careful analysis of the lexemes through which Cicero constructs his version of cultural reality in the speeches (e.g., homo, humanitas, natura, virtus), finely grained stylistic analysis of individual passages, and a mastery of the historical context, Gildenhard argues persuasively for seeing Cicero’s oratory as a daring cultural experiment at shaping public beliefs. An intriguing implication of this study is that Cicero felt it advantageous to introduce overarching intellectual abstractions (on human nature, justice, and the like) into his speeches to give thrust to his particular persuasive goals. We may need to recalibrate our views on the sort of arguments that appealed to Roman audiences. The exact relationship between the surviving texts and the actual words Cicero spoke is disputed,² and yet we are left with the fascinating possibility that Cicero’s speeches succeeded because of, rather than despite, his cultural innovations.

The focus of this study is not upon Cicero’s negotiation of practical issues of persuasion. Instead, Gildenhard deals with the speeches as texts comprising (386) “a complex body of thought that merits study not merely as historical source material, but in and of itself.” This distillation of their intellectual contents inevitably shifts attention away from the speeches as unfolding oratorical performances, and, to a degree, we lose sight of Cicero as the improviser of rhetorical strategies within particular persuasive contexts. Yet this important book, by recovering what was new and provocative in Cicero’s formulations of the world, plumbs the sources of the enduring appeal of reading Cicero’s speeches, not as paradigms of eloquence or as historical documents, but rather as a set of texts that engage various aspects of human experience. In...