Cicero on Oratory and Orators Author:Marcus Tullius Cicero Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CTCERO'S DIALOGUES DE ORATOKE; ON THE CHARACTER OF THE OBATOR. BOOK I. THE ARGUMENT. These Dialogues were written, or at least published, by Cicero ... more »in the year B.c. 55, when he wns about fifty,two years old. in the second consulship of Pompey and Crassus. He composed them at the request of his brother Quintus, in order that he might set forth in better form, at a more advanced period of life, and after his long experience, those opinions on oratory which he had somewhat hastily and crudely advanced in his early years in his books on Invention. The Dialogues are supposed to have been held B.c. 91, when there were great contentions at Rome respecting the proposal of the tribune Marcus Livius Drusus to allow the senators, in common with the equites, to be judges on criminal trials. The persons present at the dialogue related in the first book are Lucius Licinius Crassus, Marcus Antonius, his friend, the two most eminent orators of their day; Quintus Mucius Scsevola, the father,in,law of Crassus, who was celebrated for his knowledge of the civil law, and from whom Cicero himself received instruction in his youth; and two young men, Caius Amelius Cotta, and Publius Sulpicius Rufus, youths of much ability and promise, who were anxious to distinguish themselves in oratory, and for whose instruction the precepts and observations conveyed in the Dialogues are supposed to have been delivered. The scene of the conversations is the Tusculan villa of Crassus, to which he had retired from the tumults at Rome, and where he was joined by the rest of the party. The object of Cicero, in these books, was to set before his reader all that was important in the rhetorical treatises of Aristotle, Isocrates, and other ancient writers on oratory, divested of technicalities, and presente...« less