Trials of Character
The Eloquence of Ciceronian Ethos
James M. May
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
Imprint: The University of North Carolina Press
Published: 02/2014
Pages: 224
Subject: Literary Criticism
| University of North Carolina
Print ISBN: 9.78E+12
eBook ISBN: 9781469615929
DESCRIPTION
Ciceronian ethos was a complex blend of Roman tradition, Cicero's own personality, and selected features of Greek and Roman oratory. More than any other ancient literary genre, oratory dealt with constantly changing circumstances, with a wide variety of rhetorical challenges. An orator's success or failure, as well as the artistic quality of his orations, was largely the direct result of his responses to these circumstances and challenges. Acutely aware of his audience and its cultural heritage and steeped in the rhetorical traditions of his predecessors, Cicero employed rhetorical ethos with uncanny success.
May analyzes individual speeches from four different periods of Cicero's career, tracing changes in the way Cicero depicted character, both his own and others', as a source of persuasion--changes intimately connected with the vicissitudes of Cicero's career and personal life. He shows that ethos played a major role in almost every Ciceronian speech, that Cicero's audiences were conditioned by common beliefs about character, and finally, that Cicero's rhetorical ethos became a major source for persuasion in his oratory.
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