Abstract

Reviews 319 readable manner, there are frequent strange turns of phrase, sometimes bordering on the incomprehensible. For instance: Aristotle...viewed politics and rhetoric as an inherent relationship" (3), "[In Verrem] provides an indirect index of the value Rome felt for such acquisitions" (12); "Rhetoric is always under a state of metamorphoses" (21); "We know that by Cicero's time the heavy emphasis in Greek rhetoric was being transformed to Latin" (63). Given the number of typographical errors and minor factual errors, it looks as if this book were written and edited in a great hurry.5 Andrew M Riggsby Jane W. Crawford M. Tullius Cicero, The Fragmentary Speeches, Second Edition, American Classical Studies No. 37 (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1994) x + 350pp. Cicero's status as Rome's pre-eminent orator has helped most of his published speeches survive the ravages of time and caprice of Fortuna. Fifty-eight orations are transmitted by manuscripts more or less complete and only sixteen or so exist as fragments, usually as single words or lines quoted by grammarians and rhetoricians, but a few as lines quoted in the systematic commentary of Asconius and the Bobbio Scholiast. We have information about approximately ninety other speeches which Cicero delivered, but most of those he chose not to publish and the rest have been completely lost. Since the corpus of complete 5 E.g. p. 7: for Euthydemus 217 B.C. read (apparently) Euthydemus 271b-c; p. 12: for Archaean read Achaean; p. 22 for lex pecuniis repetundis read lex de p. r. and for questio read quaestio; p. 23: for 196 read 106; p. 31: for agnostic read agonistic; p. 44: for Altratinus read Atratinus; p. 77: for Dipnosophistae read Deipnosophistae p. 80: Gellius is cited (without explanation) by OCT page number (then conventional numeration in brackets), then Plutarch's lives are similarly cited in the following sentence, except that the main reference is to the Teubner pagination; throughout: the date of Bonner's seminal Roman Declamation is 1949, not 1969. Cicero's works are sporadically referred to by paragraph numbers as well as sections, and on two pages (39-40) book numbers for Pliny's letters are given in Roman numerals. RHETORICA 320 speeches is fairly large, students of Cicero have paid little attention to the fragmentary ones. There have been several editions of the fragments themselves, including two in this century, but the last edition with a commentary appeared in the sixteenth century. Jane Crawford has now given us a much needed new edition and commentary of the fragmentary speeches that forms a useful companion to her earlier work, M. Tullius Cicero: The Lost and Unpublished Speeches (Gottingen, 1984). For each of the sixteen speeches in this book Crawford provides a detailed historical introduction, gives the ancient testimonia and surviving fragments, and comments extensively on each fragment. This second edition appeared less than a year after the first, correcting errata and adding the fragmenta incertae sedis and an appendix on the fragments which have been falsely identified. A few minor errors still remain and there is, unfortunately, no commentary on the fragmenta incertae sedis, but the latter was not in the original plan. She does include a valuable commentary on the "fragment" of Pro Vatinio, tacitly correcting her own previous omission of the oration as a lost speech, and makes a convincing argument for not considering it a true fragment. Crawford states that her aim "has been to put each speech into the context of Cicero's career as a politician, advocate, and orator" (p. 3). Readers of this journal will be most interested in the last two categories, but it should be noted that Crawford's goal is quite broad. It requires the skills of a textual critic, historian, and rhetorician. The great strength of her work lies in the historical perspective she brings to the speeches. The introductions and commentary provide a wealth of useful background material against which one must view each speech. Crawford generally follows the views of other scholars on historical events and is generous about citing opposing views. Readers will be grateful for her balanced discussions since controversy surrounds most of the events she covers. Footnotes and the...