WorkCicero

Brutus or History of Famous Orators

Every Roman orator ranked and dated by the man who thought he was the last of them; the only manuscript surfaced in 1421 and was gone again after 1428.

by Cicero317 passages held

English, a translation held here, and your language

Original title: Brutus; Orator
First published: 46 BCE(aged 60)
Original language: Latin

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Overview

By 46 BCE the courts had stopped sitting, Caesar held the state, and the platform Cicero had spent thirty-five years on was empty. He wrote about speaking instead. The dialogue puts him with Atticus and with Marcus Brutus — two years before Brutus killed Caesar — working through every Roman orator anyone could still name, from the first men whose speeches were written down to his own contemporaries, saying which had a voice and which had merely had a career. Nothing of the kind existed before it: a history of an art, written from inside the art, and built on a device nobody had tried — each orator fixed by when he lived. Roman eloquence acquires a chronology, and a chronology acquires a peak, which Cicero locates, without ever quite saying so, at himself. That placement is not only vanity. If speaking well is something that develops and can be dated, it is also something that can stop, and the survey was made by a man who thought there was nowhere left to practise what he was cataloguing. Orator, the companion piece written the same year, answers Brutus's request for a description of the ideal speaker and defends the full, worked, rhythmic manner against younger men who wanted their Latin plain. Both came near to being lost. Medieval Europe had never seen the Brutus at all; in 1421 Gherardo Landriani, bishop of Lodi, turned up a codex in his own cathedral containing it complete, along with complete texts of De oratore and Orator, which had circulated only in damaged copies. Humanists copied it at speed, and just as well: the manuscript vanished after 1428, and every modern text descends from those copies.

Key concepts

Why does Cicero date each Roman orator?

Cicero dates each orator to show eloquence developing through Roman time, rather than appearing fully formed in one generation. The sequence turns style into history: beginnings, changes, and a possible peak can be judged against one another. It also makes decline thinkable.

What kind of speaker does Cicero present as ideal?

Cicero’s ideal speaker commands the full resources of language—careful argument, cultivated expression, and rhythm shaped for public judgment. The companion Orator, written in 46 BCE for the same dedicatee, defends this worked manner against younger advocates who preferred plain Latin. Eloquence must be made, not merely displayed.

Why does Cicero defend elaborate and rhythmic Latin?

He defends elaborate, rhythmic Latin because he treats style as part of an orator’s power, not as decoration added after thought. In 46 BCE, younger speakers were pressing for plainer expression; Orator answers that demand by defending a full, worked manner. The dispute concerns what public speech must accomplish.

What does Cicero gain by writing history from inside eloquence?

Writing from inside the art lets Cicero judge Roman speakers by standards that a detached chronicle could not supply: he knows the craft, its demands, and its failures. Brutus therefore records more than names and dates; it asks which men possessed a voice and which possessed only a career. The historian is also an advocate.

Why does Cicero place his own age at the end of the story?

Cicero places his own age near the end of the story because chronology lets him present eloquence as a developed art whose highest achievement may already have passed. The move also places him at the summit without stating the claim directly: the catalog of Roman speakers becomes a measure of his own authority. The history argues by arrangement.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

Eloquence and the Republic

When courts fell silent in 46 BCE, could eloquence still serve public judgment, or could a history of speakers preserve an art whose institutions had failed?

Cicero treats public speech as a civic practice that can be dated, judged, and lost. In 46 BCE, with the courts no longer sitting and Caesar holding the state, he places himself beside Atticus and Marcus Brutus to rank Roman speakers from the earliest recorded voices to his contemporaries. The chronology quietly makes his own career the summit, while Orator answers the same crisis by defending the trained, rhythmic speaker against younger advocates who wanted plain Latin. The claim is political: eloquence needs institutions in which judgment can occur.

leadership
history
tradition
authority
political philosophy
politics
public service
legacy
truth
wisdom
ethics
virtue
justice
rhetoric
style

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Within this work

passages held: 317
distinct concepts: 385
by passages held, corpus-wide: #234

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “rhetoric” and “style”.

Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 26 pairings. 78 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
Concept	Paired concept	Shared passages
rhetoric	style	76
eloquence	rhetoric	70
persuasion	rhetoric	50
oratory	rhetoric	48
education	rhetoric	45
language	rhetoric	25
emotion	rhetoric	23
persuasion	style	19
eloquence	style	18
emotion	persuasion	14
language	style	14
eloquence	oratory	12
education	eloquence	10
eloquence	persuasion	10
oratory	style	9
emotion	style	7
oratory	persuasion	7
education	language	6
education	oratory	6
eloquence	language	5
emotion	oratory	5
education	style	4
eloquence	emotion	3
education	emotion	1
language	oratory	1
language	persuasion	1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

-70 Orations
Four volumes of the speeches themselves — some delivered, some, like the case against Verres, only published. The philosophical books that fill the rest of the shelf came later, most of them once he had been shut out of that life.
EN
-54 The Republic (De re publica)
Plato wrote a Republic and then a Laws; Cicero set out to do both, and the treatise on law is this book's companion — begun a couple of years later and left unfinished.
EN
-52 Treatise on the Laws (De legibus)
Unfinished, unpublished, and on the available evidence never released at all. For centuries it travelled as the lesser half of a pair whose better half had gone missing.
EN
-46 Brutus or History of Famous Orators (Brutus; Orator) you are here EN
-45 A Treatise on the Chief Good and Evil (De finibus bonorum et malorum)
Cicero's fullest treatment of ethics: three conversations, set years apart and in different places, bound into one survey of what the leading schools said a life is for.
EN
-45 On the Nature of the Gods (De natura deorum)
Finished after the Tusculan Disputations, it opened a run of three books on religion: On Divination and On Fate followed in 44 BCE.
EN
-45 The Academic Questions (Academica)
Readers who wondered why Cicero sided with the sceptical Academy were sent here by On the Nature of the Gods, written later the same year: this is where he defends arguing every side of a question and settling for the probable.
EN
-45 The Tusculan Disputations (Tusculanae Disputationes)
The practical sequel to the treatise on the chief good, written next: that book compares what the schools say the good is, and this one puts the answer to work against fear and grief.
EN
-44 On Friendship (De Amicitia)
Copyists kept this and On Old Age bound together for so long that printers followed them. The edition prints the Dream of Scipio after it, which belongs to De re publica.
EN
-44 On Moral Duties (De officiis)
The last of his philosophical books, and the one that travelled furthest: for centuries afterwards it was simply the standard book of conduct.
EN
-44 On Old Age (Cato Maior de Senectute)
Written alongside On Friendship and sent to the same friend, Atticus; the later book refers back to this one by name.
EN

— or open another of their works