Book: On the Orator

Setting and Framing
Cicero casts On the Orator as a nostalgic dialogue set in 91 BCE at the Tusculan villa of the consummate advocate Lucius Licinius Crassus, shortly before the Social War and the deaths of many participants. The principal voices are Crassus and his rival Marcus Antonius, joined by Q. Mucius Scaevola, Q. Lutatius Catulus, Gaius Julius Caesar Strabo, and the talents-in-training Sulpicius Rufus and Cotta. By choosing an earlier, calmer moment in Roman politics, Cicero lets revered models define the ideal orator and mourns, by implication, a civic culture soon to be shattered.

Book I: The Orator’s Scope
Prompted by the young men’s questions, Crassus argues that genuine eloquence cannot be reduced to a bag of tricks. The orator must command a vast cultural armory: civil law, history, politics, philosophy, human character, and language. While he questions whether rhetoric, as Greeks codify it, is a complete “art,” he insists that speaking well requires wisdom about public affairs and justice. Legal knowledge grounds credibility; acquaintance with philosophy supplies principles of argument and ethical orientation; breadth of reading furnishes exempla and amplifies authority. He stresses natural talent and practice but refuses to separate technique from civic understanding, reproaching narrow teachers who promise eloquence without culture.

Book II: Invention, Arrangement, and Moving the Audience
Antonius counters with a pragmatic emphasis: too much philosophy can encumber a speaker, and what matters is what persuades a Roman jury or assembly. He explains invention from common topics, the need to master both causes-in-general and the specific facts, and the classical parts of a speech, introduction, narrative, proof, refutation, and peroration, adapted to audience mood. Persuasion has three aims: to teach, to delight, and above all to move; nothing equals the power of stirring pity, anger, or fear when verdicts hang in the balance. Caesar Strabo contributes a sparkling excursus on humor, distinguishing character-based wit from situational quips and advising restraint, timeliness, and moral tact. Throughout, Antonius foregrounds judgment: knowing what to omit, which arguments to press, how to frame issues, and how to tailor style to listeners.

Book III: Style, Decorum, and Delivery
Crassus returns to elaborate on elocutio and actio. He identifies the virtues of style, correctness, clarity, ornament, and, most crucial, propriety (aptum), and argues that aptum governs the rest, aligning words with subject, occasion, and speaker. He maps three styles, the plain for instruction, the tempered or middle for charm, and the grand for passion, and urges mastery of all, switching registers as causes demand. Discussion ranges across choice and combination of words, metaphor and tropes, figures of speech and thought, rhythm and the sculpting of the period. Delivery, the management of voice, expression, and gesture, is crowned as the decisive force: eloquence written cold can fail if the body does not make arguments visible and emotions contagious.

Ambition, Limits, and Legacy
The dialogue balances two truths: Antonius’s insistence on practical efficacy and Crassus’s demand that eloquence be the public face of wisdom. Cicero harmonizes them into an ideal of the statesman-orator whose training unites culture with craft, and whose speech serves the res publica by clarifying what is just and expedient. Greek technical doctrines are neither discarded nor slavishly copied; they are naturalized, expanded by Roman legal and political experience, and subordinated to decorum. The closing frame, colored by the later fates of the interlocutors, turns theory into elegy: eloquence is not mere verbal artifice but the fragile guardian of civic life, flourishing only where character, knowledge, and public duty converge.