Catherine Steel
Fragmentary oratory raises a specific and challenging set of problems for the classicist. As with other
genres, fragmentary texts pose familiar questions of authorship, ordering and the interpretation of
syntactically and semantically incomplete material. In addition, however, the ambiguous relationship
between oratory as performance and oratory as text generates fresh concerns. The importance of
oratory within ancient historiography makes authorial ascription of ‘fragments’ highly problematic: it
is often impossible to determine whether a quoting author was reading the text of a speech as
disseminated by its author or the reconstruction of a speech in a historian’s account of the events
during which it was delivered. Moreover, all oratorical texts, even those which happen to survive
complete, are arguably themselves fragments of a larger and more extensive corpus of all an orator’s
public speech: no orator engaged in total self-record, nor could have done so. Cicero’s surviving
speeches are defined both by the occasions which he chose not to record (Crawford 1984) as well as
by those texts which have not survived (Crawford 1994).
The existence of Cicero’s unpublished speeches can be traced in a wide variety of texts by both
Cicero himself and other writers. Texts in a variety of genres also provide testimonia for the activity
of other orators; the contention of this paper, and of the European Research Council project of which
it is a product (‘The Fragments of Republican Roman Oratory’, #283670)), is that fragmentary oratory
from the Roman Republican period can only be understood by combining what purport to be textual
fragments with a comprehensive collection of the testimonia to oratorical performance, whether or not
such performances were then recorded in textual form. The absence in any consistent format of
testimonia from Malcovati’s standard edition of the fragments (1976-1979) is thus a serious limitation
to this invaluable work.
By bringing testimonia to bear on the fragments of Republican oratory we can record oratorical
activity which was not subsequently disseminated in written form. Recent studies of the political
history of the Roman Republic have emphasised the central importance of oratory in political
decision-making (Millar 1984, 1986; Morstein-Marx 2004), but we lack so far the tools to understand
oratory and orators in detail. A comprehensive account of Republican oratory also allows us to trace
the historiography of oratory through its quoting authors and explore the reception of public speech in
the literature of imperial Rome. The evolution of key concepts, including the res publica, libertas and
imperium, can then be traced within an account of how Republican oratory and the political system it
operated within came to be understood from antiquity onwards. This paper will use the data generated
by the FRRO project to demonstrate the challenges and gains which testimonia bring to the study of
oratorical fragments.