Ingo Gildenhard, Creative Eloquence. The Construction of Reality in Cicero's Speeches

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Ingo Gildenhard, Creative Eloquence. The Construction of Reality in Cicero's Speeches, Oxford, 2010.

Éditeur : Oxford University Press
464 pages
ISBN : 978-0-19-929155-7
£ 85

The statesman Cicero (106-43 BC) left behind a corpus of about 50 orations, all designed as interventions in the legal and political struggles that marked the final decades of the Roman republic. Ever since their publication during his lifetime they have functioned as models of eloquence. However, they also contain profound philosophical thoughts on the question of being human, on politics, society, and culture, and on the sphere of the divine. Now, for the first time, Ingo Gildenhard systematically analyses this dimension of Cicero's oratory and, in so doing, touches upon many key issues and concepts that still preoccupy us today, such as the ethics of happiness or the notion of conscience, the distinction between civilization and barbarity, or the problem of divine justice.

TABLE OF CONTENTS :
Introduction: Cicero's philosophical oratory
I. Anthropology
Introduction: Ethopoiea and anthropopoiesis
1: Being human
2: Human beings
3: The good, the bad, and the in-between
4: Mental states
II. Sociology
Introduction: Imagining community
5: Definition and the politics of truth
6: Laws and justice
7: Civilization and its discontents
8: Coping with Caesar
III. Theology
Introduction: Rome's civic religion
9: Ontological elevation and divine favouritism
10: Cicero's theodicy
11: Tyranny and the divine
12: Life after death
Conclusion

 

Source : Oxford University Press