Book: Brutus

Overview and Setting
Cicero’s Brutus, composed in 46 BCE, is a dialogue set amid the political quiet that followed Caesar’s civil-war victories. Cicero speaks with Marcus Junius Brutus and Titus Pomponius Atticus about the rise and character of Roman eloquence. Their conversation is prompted by the death of the great advocate Hortensius and by the sense that the Forum, once the theater of civic speech, has fallen mute under the pressure of armies and autocracy. The book’s title points not to its subject but to its principal interlocutor and dedicatee: Brutus, a champion of the austere Attic style and a touchstone for questions of taste.

Scope and Method
Cicero undertakes a chronological survey of Latin oratory from the earliest Republic to his own day, interweaving mini-biographies, critical judgments, and anecdotes. He assesses orators by native talent, training, moral purpose, stylistic character, and efficacy before juries and in public assemblies. The dialogue gives equal weight to practice and art: Roman eloquence grew from rough civic speech to polished craft as Greek rhetorical theory, imported from Athens, Rhodes, and Asia Minor, was naturalized in Latin. The recurring question is how a Roman could be both forceful and pure in style, avoiding both rustic crudity and exotic excess.

From Early Voices to the Age of Crassus and Antonius
The survey begins with figures like Appius Claudius Caecus and the stern Cato the Elder, whose blunt, sinewy speech embodied old Roman virtue more than technical polish. With the Scipionic circle and speakers such as Laelius and Galba, diction gains suppleness and rhythm; the Gracchi inject passion and political electricity into public oratory. By the late second and early first centuries BCE, Cicero identifies a decisive convergence of art and power in Lucius Crassus and Marcus Antonius, masters of the bar whose complementary talents, Crassus refined and architectonic, Antonius vigorous and adaptive, mark a classical apex before his own career. These portraits are not mere eulogies; they measure how delivery, memory, arrangement, and ethical ethos shape persuasion.

Hortensius, Caesar, and Contemporary Styles
Hortensius, Cicero’s rival and colleague, receives an elegiac tribute. Cicero tracks his evolution from florid youth to mature advocate, praising his inventiveness, memory, and showmanship while noting a preference for ornamental brilliance over sinewy argument. The dialogue also reaches into the present: Julius Caesar is acknowledged as an orator of remarkable clarity and purity of diction, with a limpid, well-turned Latin that reveals long practice under Greek discipline. Calvus and Brutus represent an Atticist reaction, lean, restrained, careful about cadence, that resists Asianic luxuriance. Cicero sympathizes with their pursuit of purity yet warns that narrow austerity risks anemia where the lawcourts demand amplitude, pathos, and variation of tone.

Cicero on Cicero and the Ideal Orator
Turning to his own career, Cicero sketches an education under Greek masters like Molon of Rhodes, a discipline of reading, declamation, and rigorous self-critique. He presents his Verrine prosecution as a public debut that fused moral indignation with artful arrangement; the Catilinarian speeches as examples of urgent, civic eloquence; later defenses and prosecutions as experiments in rhythm, humor, and emotional coloring. He defends prose rhythm as integral to persuasion without lapsing into singsong excess, and he articulates an ideal orator who can move freely among the plain, middle, and grand styles, matching register to audience and cause. This self-portrait doubles as a theory of versatility against monolithic taste.

Tone, Politics, and Legacy
The closing mood is both mournful and hortatory. Violence has silenced the courts; juries and assemblies no longer rule the city’s fate; eloquence seems to wane with liberty. Yet Cicero urges Brutus to cultivate a Roman Atticism enlarged by breadth and feeling, not cramped by severity. Brutus thus becomes custodian and critic, while Cicero preserves, in elegant catalog and candid appraisal, a memory palace of Latin speech. Brutus stands as a history of orators, a manifesto for flexible excellence, and a meditation on how public speech and public freedom rise and fall together.