Chapter 5 takes up the work’s beginnings: why did Cicero choose Marcus Cornelius Cethegus as the first Roman orator? Appius Claudius Caecus made much more sense, and Cicero’s reasons for excluding Caecus from his canon tellingly reveal his literary-historical principles. The literary history presented ultimately justifies his own role as a literary historian and confirms his prejudices about the past, present, and future of oratory. His manicuring of the past emerges prominently in the perplexing “double history” of Greek oratory (26–51), which is a methodological template for Roman oratorical history, and in Ennius’ special place as a literary historian (57–9).

Chapter 5 takes up the work’s beginnings: why did Cicero choose Marcus Cornelius Cethegus as the first Roman orator? Appius Claudius Caecus made much more sense, and Cicero’s reasons for excluding Caecus from his canon tellingly reveal his literary-historical principles. The literary history presented ultimately justifies his own role as a literary historian and confirms his prejudices about the past, present, and future of oratory. His manicuring of the past emerges prominently in the perplexing “double history” of Greek oratory (26–51), which is a methodological template for Roman oratorical history, and in Ennius’ special place as a literary historian (57–9).

In this paper I use speeches taken over or adapted from speeches in Ennius’ Annals as a window onto the treatment of Ennius as a historical source and the attitudes of Roman prose writers to the representation and transmission of historical speech acts. I argue first that allusions to the content of speeches and the specific language of speakers in the Annals draw productively on Ennius’ cultural authority with or without the presumption of parallel episodes. Next, I consider the question of accuracy in relation to the citation of Ennius. Finally, I attempt to draw these two strands together through the Ennian speech in which Hannibal addresses his troops before one of the major battles of the second Punic War, as adapted by Cicero, Livy, and Silius Italicus, arguing that these allusions do not presume that the Ennian version offers a through line to what was really said, but rather incorporate the authoritative Ennian tradition in a self-conscious nod to the “culturally truest” account of the Roman past.