Chapter 4 turns to the pedagogical workings of the Brutus: it instills in the reader a new sense of how to organize and assess the literary past. Syncrisis is central to conceptualizing the past and to portraying individuals and groups across cultures and generations. The dialogue also spends a considerable amount of time reflecting on historical accuracy, for example in the discussions of Coriolanus and Themistocles (41–44), the laudatio funebris (62), the beginning of Latin literature with Livius Andronicus (72–73), and Curio’s dialogue about Caesar’s consulship (218–19). Taken together these reflections on rhetorical presentation of the past help us to understand the freedom with which Cicero handles the data of his literary history. Several claims, exaggerations, and fabrications can be explained by Cicero’s desire to craft meaningful parallels in his history of Latin oratory and literature, including his insistence on Naevius’ death in 204 BCE (60). Such parallels reveal in turn the close interconnection of his intellectual and ideological commitments.

This chapter examines the significance of wonder in ancient conceptions of music, choral song and dance. The essential role of wonder in ancient religious thought as an effect which often accompanies epiphanic encounters between gods and humans and which naturally arises within the ritual space created by song performance is explored. The Homeric Hymn to Hermes is examined as a case study in which the rich relationship between music, semata (signs) and thauma in the Greek imagination is particularly evident. This chapter also discusses the Homeric Hymn to Apollo, the Odyssey and the story of Arion in Herodotus’ Histories.

This chapter focuses on the increasingly ambivalent attitudes towards wonder which arose in Athens in the late fifth and early fourth century BCE. The chapter begins by examining Aristotle’s thoughts about the connections between wonder, language and rhetoric. The perceived power of rhetoric and language to create effects of wonder which destabilise previously clearly drawn boundaries and cultural oppositions is then explored further through examinations of the place of marvels and the marvellous in Aristophanes’ Birds and Thucydides’ History. The association between wonder, Athens and Athenian imperial power in this period is also explored.

This chapter focuses on the increasingly ambivalent attitudes towards wonder which arose in Athens in the late fifth and early fourth century BCE. The chapter begins by examining Aristotle’s thoughts about the connections between wonder, language and rhetoric. The perceived power of rhetoric and language to create effects of wonder which destabilise previously clearly drawn boundaries and cultural oppositions is then explored further through examinations of the place of marvels and the marvellous in Aristophanes’ Birds and Thucydides’ History. The association between wonder, Athens and Athenian imperial power in this period is also explored.

This chapter explores the complicated relationships between visual, verbal and textual wonder in the Greek literary tradition. Thauma is shown to be an important term of aesthetic response by the beginning of the fourth century BCE. The place of thauma in Greek traditions of poetic ekphrasis is examined. The transition from the conception of a marvel as a purely visual object or as an oral report to the sense of a marvel as something which is written down is explored through texts from Plato, Alcidamas, Homer, Theocritus and Posidippus.

Tacitus’ Germania is notable for its absences: lacking a preface and programmatic statements, and being the only ethnographic monograph to have survived from Greco-Roman antiquity, readers have often leapt to fill in its perceived blanks. This chapter aims at redressing the effects of overdetermined readings by interpreting the text’s absences as significant in their own right.

A dreary overstuffed catalogue of bygone orators or a magnificent intellectual achievement? A swan song for public speech or an apology for the art of eloquence? A timid retreat into academic leisure or a brazen challenge to civil war and Caesar? Despite the divergent viewpoints of these questions, it is hard to come away from Cicero’s Brutus without seeing merit in each of them. There is some of almost everything in Cicero’s stunning dialogue, and for that reason its seeming hodgepodge of intellectual curiosity, political statement, and documentary diligence has spurred modern observers to widely differing interpretations.

Chapter 7 considers stylistic imitation and appropriation in the debate over Atticism and Asianism, with a special focus on how Cicero distorts the aims and positions of his detractors in the diatribe against the Atticists (285–91). He trades on various meanings of Atticus/Attici in order to make a rhetorical – rather than strictly logical – case. He downplays Atticism as outdated and relegates its stylistic virtues to the plain style (genus tenue). Rejecting Atticism does not entail rejecting the plain style. Instead he acknowledges it as one of many oratorical virtues to be subsumed under the capable orator’s broad stylistic repertoire. Cicero promotes a model of stylistic diversity, examples of which are found in the long histories of Greek and, especially, Roman oratory.