Llewelyn Morgan at Literary Review:
Ancient Rome was a culture governed by the spoken word and Cicero was the most articulate public speaker Rome ever produced. Furthermore, the Middle Ages were comparatively kind to his legacy and fifty-eight speeches that he delivered to the Roman people, the Senate and to juries in court have survived; alongside them we have a number of treatises on aspects of philosophy, politics and rhetoric, including what has probably been his most influential work, De Officiis (‘On Duties’). The Cicero that Strossmayer consulted no doubt encompassed both categories of writing, but the implication in any case is that, should one want to address complex intellectual subjects in Latin with clarity, elegance and persuasiveness, Cicero is the only sensible model. But Strossmayer was also aware that Cicero’s exceptional oratorical skills had been forged in the ruinous last decades of the Roman Republic. Ciceronian oratory was the mode proper for a crisis, whether in the Rome of 63 BC or 1870.
Another class of documents relating to Cicero is available to the historian beside the speeches and the treatises, and it is surely the most remarkable survival of all.
more here.
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