Cicero the Advocate

461 Pages·2004·2.38 MB·English

by  Jonathan Powell

CICERO THE ADVOCATE
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Cicero
The Advocate
edited by
JONATHAN POWELL
and
JEREMY PATERSON
1
1
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PREFACE
Advocacy is a feature of most developed legal systems including, notably,
those of Britain, Europe, and North America. It played a major part in the
legal system of ancient Rome, and Cicero was recognized both in his own
time and afterwards to have been the greatest of Roman advocates. Not
only did he publish a good number of his lawcourt speeches; he was also
the first practising advocate in the Western world to record his reflections
on the theory and practice of oratory. Comparison of Roman advocacy
with modern theory and practice can illuminate general questions about
the nature of this often controversial activity, while ancient Rome can also
provide practical samples of the art which, although they belong to a sys-
tem in some ways alien to our own, may easily seem as striking as anything
in a modern courtroom drama.
This volume follows similar lines to Cicero the Philosopher (ed.
J.G.F.Powell, Oxford University Press, 1995). It may seem strange for the
Advocate to come after the Philosopher, but scholarly research does not
always move in expected directions, and the oddity might have pleased
Cicero, who maintained that his philosophical studies had informed his
practice as an orator. In the meantime scholarship has benefited from, inter
alia, a book-length literary study of Cicero’s letters, G. Hutchinson, Cicero’s
Correspondence (Oxford, 1998), and a major collection of essays on
Ciceronian oratory and rhetoric, Brill’s Companion to Cicero, ed. J. M. May
(Leiden, 2002), which does not, however, focus on advocacy as such. One
particular stimulus to renewed interest in Cicero as advocate was provided
by John Crook’s excellent book Legal Advocacy in the Roman World
(London, 1995). But the most important reason for publishing the present
collection of papers was the realization, as in the case of Cicero the
Philosopher, that a number of scholars were for whatever reason beginning
to move in the same direction, often coincidentally and from different
starting points (whether historical, legal, or rhetorical), and that their work
could benefit from being brought together into one volume. The editors
have also been conscious of fortuitous synergies: this volume might not
have been thought of if one of its editors had not happened to read some
books on advocates and advocacy that had belonged to his father, who
was a barrister, or if an appeal by a Newcastle colleague in 1995 for more
courses suitable for Combined Honours students (without Latin or Greek)
had not prompted the same editor to design courses on ‘Logic and
Rhetoric’ and ‘Cicero as Advocate’. It is equally fortuitous that the other
vi Preface
editor happened to have kept in touch with an Oxford contemporary who
was soon to be promoted to the Appeal Court Bench, and who is the
author of our final chapter.
The volume is, we hope, sufficiently unified by a common conviction of
the interest and importance of advocacy as an activity, and of the need to
study Cicero’s speeches within their original, precise historical context if
one is to make any coherent sense of these texts at all. At the same time,
following the principle adopted in Cicero the Philosopher, we have not inter-
vened to impose an artificial orthodoxy where our contributors disagree
among themselves. It should go without saying that we make no claim to
cover everything: this is a field in which there is much interesting work still
being done. We shall have achieved our aim if the collection succeeds in
casting light on some aspects of the topic, and in stimulating further
enquiry and debate.
The contributions to this volume were gathered between 1999 and
2002, some having been presented at a seminar series on Cicero held in
the Classics Department at Newcastle University in 1997–8. The volume
has been long in maturing, owing to pressure of other commitments, but
we hope that it will after all meet expectations and that it will find readers
of different kinds: we are reasonably confident that there will be something
of interest not only for professional classicists and ancient historians and
for students of the ancient world, but also for those with a more general
interest in rhetoric, advocacy and legal history. Again as in Cicero the
Philosopher, we have provided a substantial introduction, which may func-
tion as a survey of the main issues as well as a way into the subject for
those less familiar with it. (One reviewer of the earlier volume seems to
have thought this was a bad idea; we cannot quite work out why.) We have
arranged the papers in two parts, the first dealing with more general
themes and the second, in which some chapters are unavoidably longer
and more technical than the rest, with individual speeches taken as case
studies, but we are aware that this arrangement (or any other) is to some
extent arbitrary; the general and the particular constantly illuminate one
another. We have also provided an appendix listing Cicero’s known
appearances as an advocate. No attempt has been made to compile a com-
prehensive bibliography (readers may be referred to the useful biblio-
graphical survey by C. P. Craig in the Brill Companion, pp. 503–99), but we
have provided a consolidated list of works cited by our contributors, which
probably covers most important work on the subject. Michael C.
Alexander, The Case for the Prosecution in the Ciceronian Era (Ann Arbor,
2002) appeared too late to be fully taken into account. Alexander’s intro-
duction covers some of the same ground as ours; his general project of
reconstructing the prosecution arguments, in cases where we have Cicero’s
Preface vii
defence speeches, may be recommended as an interesting complement to
our analyses of Cicero’s own strategies as advocate.
We are grateful to the University of Newcastle upon Tyne’s Research
Committee for financial help, to Gaby Wright for translating Chapter 13
from the original German, to Kathryn Tempest for compiling the biblio-
graphy, to Kathryn Tempest and Gábor Tahin for their work on the
indexes, to Lene Rubinstein for help with the Introduction, and to Jeff and
Erica Johnson for the cover design.
J. G. F. P.; J. J. P.
London and Newcastle
April 2003
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CONTENTS
Editors and Contributors xi
Introduction 1
JONATHAN POWELL AND JEREMY PATERSON
i. Approaching Cicero’s Forensic Speeches 1
ii. Advocacy Ancient and Modern 10
iii. Cicero and the Morality of Advocacy 19
iv. The Roman Courts 29
v. Advocacy in Cicero’s Career 37
vi. Rhetoric, Argument, and Style 43
vii. The Publication of the Speeches 52
PART I: THEMES
1. Legal Procedure in Cicero’s Time 61
ANDREW LINTOTT
2. Self-Reference in Cicero’s Forensic Speeches 79
JEREMY PATERSON
3. A Volscian Mafia? Cicero and his Italian Clients
in the Forensic Speeches 97
KATHRYN LOMAS
4. Reading Cicero’s Narratives 117
D. S. LEVENE
5. Cicero and the Law 147
JILL HARRIES
6. The Rhetoric of Character in the Roman Courts 165
ANDREW M. RIGGSBY
7. Audience Expectations, Invective, and Proof 187
CHRISTOPHER CRAIG
8. Perorations 215
MICHAEL WINTERBOTTOM
PART II: CASE STUDIES
9. Being Economical with the Truth: What Really
Happened at Lampsacus? 233
CATHERINE STEEL