GENERAL INTRODUCTION
Our fragments have survived because they attracted the interest of later authors for their content, oratorical strategies, or use of language. As is to be expected, the earlier quoting authors generally provide the most reliable evidence, since they had a better grasp of the underlying historical situations, institutions, and cultural practices.
Our best source in general is Asconius, a careful historian, who wrote commentaries on Cicero’s speeches in the mid-first century AD.15 For three of the speeches (nos. 5, 6, 9) we rely primarily on the evidence of Asconius’ surviving commentaries. Asconius is particularly helpful, since his general practice of citing passages in the order of their occurrence in the speeches establishes a framework for reconstructing the whole speech in each case.16 He sometimes also provides helpful guideposts to orient readers to the place of the individual passage within the speech as a whole (e.g., “a little later”); we have included such indications in our text in small capitals.17 One problem, however, is that Asconius’ text survived the Middle Ages in a single corrupt manuscript, discovered by Poggio at St. Gall in 1416, which has since disappeared, and its
- 15For details on his life and work, see the introduction to Ramsey forthcoming; for his working methods, Keeline 2023.
- 16For an exception to this, cf. on 9 F 22.
- 17As to Asconius’ references to numbers of lines, it should be borne in mind that the lines he refers to appear to be about 20 percent shorter than those of an Oxford Classical Text; see further Ramsey forthcoming.
GENERAL INTRODUCTION
reconstruction from extant copies is fraught with difficulties.18
Next in order of importance is Quintilian, a teacher of rhetoric at Rome, whose magnum opus, The Orator’s Education, dates from the 90s AD. He was a fervent admirer of Cicero, whose name was, for him, not that of a man but of eloquence itself19 and whom he often cites to illustrate his points. His value as a source is shown, for instance, by the absence, in his quotation from On Behalf of Q. Gallius (10 F 1a), of the sentence interpolated by the third-century rhetorician Aquila of Rome (10 F 1c), whose “illustrations from Cicero [are] often misquoted from memory”;20 Quintilian’s remark when he cites the same passage elsewhere makes it clear that the point was to give a negative characterization of the prosecutor, not the defendant, as the interpolated sentence implies (10 F 1b). In another instance, however, Quintilian offers a less plausible version of a fragment than another source (cf. 14 F 6). It is not always easy to decide whether points embedded in Quintilian’s argument should be taken as direct quotations from Cicero or merely paraphrases, as 12 F 1 shows. To our benefit, the Flavian rhetorician took a particular interest in the early defenses of Varenus and Oppius (nos. 1 and 3): to him we owe more than half of the testimonia and fragments of these two speeches, including perceptive observations on deviations from the norms inculcated by school rhetoric (cf. 1 T 1, 3).