Chapter 1 begins with the “Ciceropaideia” (301–29), the account of Cicero’s education and training. It begins with the end of the Brutus in order to provide a sense of what the dialogue has been building up to. Cicero’s concluding discussion of himself reveals and brings together several assumptions, problems, and techniques of presentation that are crucial to the earlier parts of the dialogue. In the Ciceropaideia he carefully shapes biographical and historical details into a tandem narrative, intertwining his ascent with the decline of Hortensius. The account suggestively documents Cicero’s development of a moderate “Rhodian” style and implicitly undermines his Atticist detractors.

Chapter 3 examines the Brutus as an intervention in contemporary politics. It begins by revisiting the preface but focuses on its discussion of the contemporary civic crisis and the immediate history of the civil war (1–25). In both the preface and the digression on Julius Caesar (254–57) Cicero presents an alternative civic vision as a response to the crisis. The chapter concludes by considering the portrayal of the younger generation of orators: Curio (filius), Caelius, Publius Crassus, and Marcellus. The last figure merits special attention because Cicero’s oratorical canon includes only two living figures: Marcellus and Caesar. Marcellus is accorded a prominent role as part of Cicero’s attempt to offer a coherent vision of the republic, one based on the restoration of the senatorial elite and the reinstatement of the traditional institutions of government.

Hero’s concern for systematization within and between the texts of his corpus, his emphasis on organizing his works to facilitate their legibility and utility, and his respect for the differences between the parts of his complex disciplinary superstructure reflect a belief that the reader should be able to take his works into the world and do things with them. These “things” include building new (and possibly improved) artifacts, measuring or otherwise defining natural and artificial objects, and finding appropriate analytical regimes (mathematical, physical, mechanical, etc.) for further analyzing and describing those objects. It would not be going too far to say that Hero intends that the textual and disciplinary structures discussed in the previous chapter should help his reader learn to see the world in a new way. Just how that process is meant to work is the question that drives this chapter.

Chapter 5 takes up the work’s beginnings: why did Cicero choose Marcus Cornelius Cethegus as the first Roman orator? Appius Claudius Caecus made much more sense, and Cicero’s reasons for excluding Caecus from his canon tellingly reveal his literary-historical principles. The literary history presented ultimately justifies his own role as a literary historian and confirms his prejudices about the past, present, and future of oratory. His manicuring of the past emerges prominently in the perplexing “double history” of Greek oratory (26–51), which is a methodological template for Roman oratorical history, and in Ennius’ special place as a literary historian (57–9).

Strabo portrays the geographer at work, sitting at the nexus of innumerable pathways of information. He collects the data to be inscribed on his pinax from an assortment of witnesses, who have seen the far corners of the Earth and bring their information to him for synthesis.1 Strabo compares these voyagers to sensory organs, each with its own subset of information about an object (he offers an apple by way of example) and each presenting its own part of the story to the understanding (dianoia), which then synthesizes them into a single schēma.2 So eyewitnesses transmit their knowledge to those who want to learn it (οἱ φιλομαθεῖς ἄνδρες), who take responsibility for collecting a world’s worth of information and synthesizing it into a single synoptic diagramma.