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Updated: May 19, 2025
Before its first printing the Orator was used as a reference book for advanced students by Guarino in his school at Ferrara. Castiglione's indebtedness to the De oratore is well known, but few notice that his first paragraphs are a close paraphrase of Cicero's dedicatory paragraphs of the Orator.
Cicero, in his book 'De Oratore', in order to raise the dignity of that profession which he well knew himself to be at the head of, asserts that a complete orator must be a complete everything, lawyer, philosopher, divine, etc.
And now alongside of the speeches begins the series of his works on oratory and philosophy, with the De Oratore of 55, and the De Republica of 54 B.C. The three books De Oratore are perhaps the most finished examples of the Ciceronian style.
The De inventione is the source for Alcuin's rhetorical writings, and was the only Ciceronian rhetoric known to Abelard or Dante. Brunette Latini translated seventeen chapters of it into Italian. Although mutilated codices of the De oratore and the Orator were known to Servatus Lupus and John of Salisbury, complete manuscripts of these most important works were not known previous to 1422.
After his exile in 58 and 57 B.C. his political career, except for a brief period just before his death, was over, and it is at this time that his period of great literary activity begins, In 55 he produced the work De Oratore, in 54 the De Re Publica, and in 52 the De Legibus, all three works, according to ancient ideas, entitled to rank as philosophical.
Whatever is said as to all that is requisite in the delivery of an oration by the master of all oratory, applies with equal distinctness to those who are readers or actors professionally. * De Oratore iii., 59.
The De oratore was used but slightly, and the Brutus and the Orator not at all. What little classical rhetoric there is in Stephen Hawes was derived from the Ad Herennium. The survival and popularity of the Ad Herennium during this period is one of the most interesting phenomena of rhetorical history.
He had already written much, but had written as one who had been anxious to fill up vacant spaces of time as they came in his way. From this time forth he wrote as does one who has reconciled himself to the fact that there are no more days to be lost if he intends, before the sun be set, to accomplish an appointed task. He had already compiled the De Oratore, the De Republica, and the De Legibus.
He was born 40 A.D., and taught the younger Pliny, also two nephews of Domitian, receiving a regular salary from the imperial treasury. His great work is a complete system of rhetoric. "Institutiones Oratoriae" is one of the clearest and fullest of all rhetorical manuals ever written in any language, although, as a literary production, it is inferior to the "De Oratore" of Cicero.
The Ciceronianus of Erasmus testifies that by the next century the scholarship of the renaissance had discovered that the Ad Herennium was not from the pen of Cicero, and that the De inventione was considered apologetically by its famous author, who wrote his De oratore to supersede the more youthful treatise.
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