The focus of this survey is on oratory as a spoken phenomenon, intimately related to politics and government at Rome. Its chronological scope is roughly from the beginning of the second century B.C. until the end of the first century A.D.; it has no pretensions to offer a guide to oratory in the later Empire. Its geographical focus is firmly on Rome, reflecting the overwhelming bias in our source material. I start with the occasions for oratory in Rome and turn then to the issues which arise from the process of turning a speech, delivered in front of an audience on a particular occasion, into a written text which can be accessed and enjoyed in private and at any time. I then consider some of the means by which orators of the imperial period explored different means of preserving their oratorical activities for posterity. In the final two chapters I concentrate on orators themselves: how they carried out their task, and reflected upon it, as adult practitioners, and then how boys became the next generation of orators.

Roman oratory consists of two distinct phenomena. One is the occasions when men – and, very seldom, women – spoke in public. The other is the body of written texts of speeches which survive from antiquity. These are distinct objects of study: not all speeches were written down, not all those which were written down have survived; and even if we had all the speeches ever delivered, the written text can only convey a part of the experience of hearing an orator, in a particular place and time and with all the non-verbal aspects of rhetoric which contributed to an oratorical performance. In this first chapter, I consider the various occasions on which individuals spoke at Rome, reserving until the second chapter the processes by which spoken performances were transferred into written texts.

The oral dimension to classical literature as a whole has, rightly, become an object of increasing interest to interpreters. The process of composition of any text usually involved a spoken element; public or private readings could be a medium by which a text was disseminated; and individual reading could involve audible speech, or having another person read aloud. All Roman literature involves some oral dimension. Within this broad framework, however, oratory occupies a distinctive space. A speech is prepared for a specific time and place, to be directed at a specific audience and, in the case of forensic and deliberative oratory, with the aim of securing a specific outcome. Moreover, this first performance is, logically, oral and does not imply the existence of a written text; indeed, there was a strong convention within ancient rhetoric that speeches were delivered from memory, and even though written texts might well feature in preparation, orators would often find themselves in situations where improvisation was necessary. The sense of being created for a particular time and place is a characteristic which oratory shares with drama but, unlike drama, subsequent performances in a similar manner are difficult to envisage. Plays in both Greece and Rome were revived after the festival for which they had been initially composed; but the circumstances in front of the Roman people, in the Senate, or in a court which demanded a speech would never be repeated.

We have already seen how public speaking was central, during the Republican period, to the operation of the Roman state; and how, despite radical political change between Republic and Empire, oratory retained its position as a key skill for the politically active elite. The importance of oratory made it, in turn, both the vehicle of and the focus for sustained critiques of the behaviour and values of Rome in general and the elite in particular. In this chapter I turn to the figure of the orator and consider how the expectations concerning his behaviour are set up. Technical works on rhetoric, anecdotes about individual orators and surviving oratorical texts can supplement surviving texts of speeches in the task of establishing what the Romans thought their speakers should do and be and how they criticised those who failed to meet these criteria.

The order of chapters in this book may seem paradoxical: the finished orator is considered before the processes by which he reached that state are examined. The order is indeed back-to-front from the perspective of an individual orator's trajectory, whose training must inevitably precede his activity. But in the wider context of an attempt to understand the nature of oratorical training in the Roman world it makes sense to move from the practising orator back to the embryonic form, since the expectations and norms imposed on the fully fledged orator are the foundations which support the system of oratorical education. This observation does not imply any necessary confidence that Roman oratorical education was designed for the creation of orators who met the criteria for and defused the anxieties about oratory which I discussed in the previous chapter. And even if the material which a modern audience can access did suggest that Roman oratorical education was indeed good at producing Roman orators, there is of course no guarantee that actual practice in classrooms across the Empire bore any relation to these writings or displayed any competence at its task. But an awareness of the practice of oratory can usefully inform analysis of how orators were trained.

On the front cover of this book is an image of a coin minted in 45 B.C. It shows the speaker's platform (rostra) in the Roman forum, decorated with the beaks of ships captured from the Antiates in 341 B.C., and the tribunes' bench. Above the image is the name of the coiner: ‘PALIKANUS’. It is an appropriate image for a book which has been concerned above all with oratory as a series of occasions which happened at specific times and places and which derived its importance from the fact of performance. However, from that perspective any image of the rostra would be suitable.