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[Formatted title: Cicero’s De oratore and the Platonic Art of Writing]

Cicero’s De oratore, published in 55 BC, initiates his foray into philosophical dialogue. As befitting the man whom Quintilian would later call Platonis aemulus, the rival of Plato (10.1.123), Cicero did so by self-consciously imitating the form and manner of a Platonic dialogue. Whereas the other two Platonic dialogues of the 50s, De republica and De legibus, portray Plato as the chief (princeps) of political philosophers (Rep. 2.21), De oratore presents Plato as the greatest orator (orator summus; De or. 1.47) and Plato’s Socrates as the chief (princeps) of those who link philosophy and rhetoric (De or. 3.60). Furthermore, Cicero’s own authorial reflection presents De oratore as an oratio (3.9), suggesting that he, like Plato, acts as an orator through his written dialogues. This apparent confusion of writing and speaking parallels the way Cicero in his De legibus, inspired by Plato’s Phaedrus, likewise makes his characters confuse the two (Atkins 2013). The Phaedrus is similarly productive for De oratore. Cicero’s intertextual allusions to Platonic dialogues, especially the Phaedrus, reveal a Platonic art of writing. For Cicero this means that the philosophical dialogue is a form of rhetoric. Our paper investigates and evaluates the characteristics of this Platonic art of writing for Cicero’s political philosophy, an undertaking neglected by the major recent books on the topic (Atkins 2013, Nicgorski 2016, Schofield 2021).

De oratore suggests four different characteristics of the art of writing. First, this art is performative, an idea suggested by the connections between oratory, theater, and poetry discussed in the work. Such mixing of genres is characteristic of Plato (Nightingale 1995). Second, it adapts speech to the particular soul of one’s addressee. On Cicero’s rendering of Plato’s Phaedrus, the successful rhetorician will understand the cosmos, political life, and individual characters. The practitioner will carefully present different arguments to different audiences. Such rhetoric may have an esoteric quality, a feature evident in De oratore when the two main characters, Crassus and Antonius, refuse to speak frankly (cf. 1.44, 2.4, 2.30, 2.189, 2.350-51). Esoteric speech, the third feature of the Platonic art of writing, may have different grounds in philosophers, including fear of persecution, political agendas, pedagogical strategies (Melzer 2014), and the metaphysical possibility that some truths are incapable of full or direct expression. We will explore which, if any, of these reasons for esotericism are suggested by De oratore. Finally, De oratore articulates “logographic necessity,” the view, first offered in Plato’s Phaedrus, that philosophical writing is a whole in which each part fits with the others, like limbs in a body (cf. Phaedrus 264b7-c5 and De or. 2.310, 2.325, 2.359; 3.24; for this idea in Plato, see Clay 2000).    

We conclude by exploring the significance of Cicero’s preceding his De republica and De legibus with De oratore’s treatment of the Platonic art of writing. Speech is indispensable for revealing human nature and for building human community. This is why Cicero places his treatment of philosophical speech prior to his works on the constitution (De republica) and law-code (De legibus).