Chapter 1 provides essential orientation for the rest of the volume’s contents. It begins by introducing some key issues including recent attempts to define ‘law’ and the challenges of undertaking a comparative history of ancient law (past and present). The next section moves on to introducing the different types of source material covered in the volume, introducing seven ‘rough categories’ of evidence: normative texts; commentaries; documentary records; ‘reports’ or ‘records’ of ‘cases’; portrayals of legal processes, and model forensic speeches; ritual forms; and ‘law’ in other forms of text. The final part of the chapter gives an overview of the major features and specific historical contexts for the principal legal traditions, intended as both introduction and information to be referred back to when consulting the volume as a whole.

By 1660 the number of common criminals hanged in England had fallen dramatically: but England still executed far more people than other European states. That practice was sustained in part, in the minds of England’s urbane peoples, by a time-honoured perception of crime as a moral failing akin to others, albeit of far greater social consequence. By the third quarter of the eighteenth century, however, that vision was being eroded by two cultural transformations. First, a more worldly (secular) vision bred impatience with the idea that the most lasting and certain punishment of serious crime must be left to God’s Last Judgment rather than achieved in the here and now. Such views were reinforced, secondly, by a new culture of feeling, which inspired not only distaste for the physical and emotional sufferings inflicted upon serious criminals, but also (contrarily) greater anxiety about the threat of their crimes.

This chapter argues that the authorial persona of Herodotus Book 2 is much closer to that of the rest of his work, and suggests that Herodotus’ use of speeches in historical narrative was not (as suggested by Fornara) a momentous innovation but a technique he owed to narrative elegy, some of it presenting as early as the seventh century an account of conflict between Greeks and non-Greeks in western Asia Minor.

This chapter investigates the function of speeches in Thucydides’ work. It shows how speeches are used to advance the action of the story (using the examples of Brasidas’ speeches in Book 4 to illustrate this) and how they play on the expectations and assumptions of Thucydides’ rhetorically aware audience. The function of messengers is also discussed, along with the ‘soundscape’ evoked by less formal speech. Finally, the long-standing debate about of the composition and selection of the speeches is addressed, along with the question of how the speeches (and what Thucydides claims for his speeches) bear on the wider problem of the purpose of the work.

The chapter places Churchill’s lifespan firmly within ‘the golden age of print’. It looks at his apprenticeship as a writer, served while in the army, explaining how his early books helped him earn the war chest that allowed him to launch his political career, before showing how his shrewd and selective use of sources for his biography of Lord Randolph Churchill allowed him to reconcile his role as a defender of his father’s political legacy with his own move to the Liberal Party. Churchill’s working methods also changed as he entered government. He used a team to help produce his multi-volume history of the First World War in order to defend his role in the Dardanelles operation. Thereafter, Churchill had to juggle managing his tax liability as an author with his need for more income, but by the 1930s he was committed to several major publishing projects. After the war, he sought to capitalise on his premiership through his multi-volume histories of the Second World War and the History of the English-Speaking Peoples. The chapter analyses how Churchill managed his various literary projects, sheds light on his own role in the creative process and looks at how this changed over time.

Churchill has become the archetypal embodiment of the modern war leader, in part as a result of his own writings, but this chapter strips away the layers of hindsight and looks in detail at the challenge he faced in 1940 and the actions he took in response. By making himself minister of defence, he united the civilian and military administrative machines and established a streamlined decision-making process at the heart of government. He led from the front, both through the projection of his image and through his distinctive oratory. His strategy was to weather the immediate crisis and then to find means of taking the fight to the enemy, even if it meant prioritising the Mediterranean over the Empire in Asia, while also courting the United States and seizing the opportunity of the Soviet alliance. The strain undoubtedly took a toll on his health and, as the war progressed, his room for manoeuvre became more limited and fractures began to emerge over the future, both within his government and in his relations with his key allies.

Chapter 9 surveys the biblical exempla that appear in the most example-packed section of the work, the speeches made by the narrative character Josephus before the walls of Jerusalem to his Jewish comrades (De Excidio 5.15–16). This chapter most clearly illustrates Pseudo-Hegesippus’ hermeneutical ingenuity and intensive use of biblical exempla, while also showing how he infused the examples he drew from the Jewish Scriptures (the Christian Old Testament) with not only Roman but also overtly Christian ideology.

The Introduction frames the study as an argument about the use of biblical figures within the narrative of On the Destruction of Jerusalem (De Excidio Hierosolymitano). Bay maintains that a survey of the scriptural characters that appear in this text suggest that these remembered heroes were an important tool for how Pseudo-Hegesippus conceived of and communicated late Second Temple period Jewish history from a late antique Christian perspective. This chapter also recommends the Old Testament exempla of On the Destruction of Jerusalem as a good place to start literarily for approaching and understanding the background, aims, and inner logic of this text. Bay further explains how the biblical exempla of Pseudo-Hegesippus often appear within speeches placed into the mouths of historical characters in the narrative, a typical literary feature of ancient historiography. Finally, the Introduction helps situate this study within the history of scholarship – not only within the little work done on Pseudo-Hegesippus, but also in the context of various scholarly discussions in Classics, biblical studies, early Christianity, Jewish-Christian relations, and late antique literature.

Chapter 8 assesses De Excidio 3.16–17, a set of speeches made after the Battle of Jotapata (66 CE) by Josephus’ Jewish comrades and then by Flavius Josephus, the Jewish general, himself. The chapter shows how Pseudo-Hegesippus articulates and plays with very Roman ideas of death, war, and virtue by inserting biblical exempla into these two speeches, which are radically changed and rewritten from the Greek versions found in Josephus’ Jewish War.

A breakdown of Cicero’s quotation of Latin poetry according to the genre in which he was writing: philosophy, oratory, speeches (Pro Roscio Amerino, Pro Murena, Pro Sestio, Pro Caelio), letters.

This paper re-evaluates Dio’s famous passing reference to Caracalla’s universal grant of citizenship by recontextualizing it within Dio’s larger narrative. Dio was the first historian to see the spread of Roman citizenship as we do – as a progressive expansion culminating in universal citizenship. Dio’s treatment of the topic of enfranchisement repeatedly returns to the question of whether an exclusive citizenship distorts or affirms the natural hierarchy of honour in the empire. The question is explored almost exclusively through the medium of embedded speech, with various voices within the text contributing to an emerging opposition between two competing visions of the proper relationship between citizenship and honour. This emerges in the tension between two important texts in Dio’s Augustan narrative: the speech of Maecenas, which recommends the enfranchisement of all the emperor’s subjects in order to erase the distinction between Romans and subjects (52.19.6), and the political testament of Augustus, which urges against mass enfranchisement and insists on the importance of the very same distinction (56.33.3). The narrative voice offers no explicit guidance on how to resolve these contradictory visions, leaving individual readers to confront the questions that they raise, with significant implications for their evaluation of Caracalla’s grant.

This chapter reviews the varied and creative ways people have taught Frederick Douglass’s four autobiographies and weighs methods for inspiring critical thought and performance skills through Douglass’s speeches. Douglass’s 1845 Narrative is used at multiple levels of education as a platform for reflecting on what literacy is and how Douglass – and students themselves – have become literate in their world. Other teachers consider how Douglass has constituted himself in relation to audiences he wished to move to political action, reflecting on his self-portraits and shaping of key incidents in his life. The chapter also advocates for offering students a choice of speech events to analyze and perform. This helps them to refine their thinking about contemporary issues and make performance decisions, imagining how Douglass – and they, too – wish to move an audience.

This chapter examines three subjects relating to the themes of authority and allegiances. The first section considers the qualities that Romans considered important for effective generalship, including calculated displays of courage and a reputation for good fortune, which astute generals could foster as a way of strengthening their authority and the morale of their men. The much-debated subject of pre-battle speeches is also discussed, with less familiar but highly relevant late Roman evidence brought to bear. The second section examines the strategies deployed for maintaining the obedience of soldiers and changing patterns of military mutiny over the course of Roman history, with a view to identifying factors which influenced its incidence. The third and final section addresses the subject of civil war: its incidence and impact, and the ways in which commanders sought to negotiate the strains that internal conflicts placed on soldiers’ loyalties.

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.

Chapter 4 examines the tone of presidential discussions of Supreme Court cases, focusing on why presidents discuss cases in positive, negative, and neutral lights. We argue that presidents alter the tone of their remarks about the Court’s decisions in an effort to build public support for their presidencies, shape how the public views the constitutional issues at play, and influence the implementation of the Court’s decisions in the bureaucracy and in Congress. For example, a president happy with the Court’s decision can praise the decision and assure the country that he will take all steps necessary to ensure it is implemented. Conversely, a president displeased with a decision can criticize that decision and encourage Congress to take action to alter or reverse the decision, thus signaling that the fight over the case has not ended. Consistent with our theoretical expectations, we find that presidents criticize cases they disagree with ideologically; those that declare laws unconstitutional; and those decided by minimum winning coalitions. Conversely, presidents tend to praise salient Supreme Court decisions that support their preferred ideological positions.

Chapter 3 explores presidential rhetoric on cases that have already been decided by the Supreme Court. To investigate this, we examine all mentions of Supreme Court cases, by month, from 1953 to 2017. We differentiate written and spoken comments and show that while the former are used almost exclusively to direct the implementation of the Court’s decisions, the latter are designed to allow presidents to take positions on Court cases that are important to their electoral bases given the primacy of presidential speeches to presidents’ permanent campaigns for public support. Often, presidents will comment on recently decided cases to speak to issues that are timely and salient to the national policy conversation in an effort to guide those conversations. Indeed, we find that the presidents are especially likely to discuss Supreme Court cases during reelection years and when those cases garner media attention.