This chapter argues that Cicero’s discussion of decorum in De Officiis (1.93-151) represented a striking innovation—both within Cicero’s Roman milieu and in the Greek tradition of his source, Panaetius—for its importation of an aesthetic term, to prepon, into the sphere of ethics. Panaetius’ adoption of this term for philosophical purposes was clever, and one of several innovations that foreshadowed important trends in later philosophy. For Cicero, writing during dramatic social and political upheaval, Panaetius’ innovation represented an opportunity that suited the times. Caesar’s accession had brought profound changes, encouraging a shift from the traditional activities of public self-display to a focus on private self-care and a self-display predicated on written works; as Cicero himself puts it at Off. 2.3, if Caesar had not abolished republican governance, he would still be delivering speeches, not writing philosophy. Moral behavior at Rome had long been governed by exempla, public acts by (usually) public men. By borrowing Panaetius’ suggestion that moral goodness could also be understood in private (and expressly literary/rhetorical terms), Cicero laid the groundwork for a remarkably durable idea in Roman culture, and one with particular resonance in the Augustan period, as Horace’s Ars Poetica shows.

In his discussion of decorum Cicero supposes that most people would agree to the general principle that in our speech, bodily deportment, and actions we should avoid giving offence to others. This is because we possess a sense of shame or verecundia. The particular details are very culture-specific: customs and conventions largely set the parameters of verecundia, and we do well to follow them. Cicero also admits that philosophical figures often flaunt established customs and conventions: he points to Socrates, who is justified in doing so owing to his great and godlike virtue, and the Cynics, who are not justified in doing so at all (1.148). He then sets out a bold thesis: ‘Indeed the reasoning of the Cynics must be rejected absolutely; for it is inimical to a sense of shame (verecundia), without which nothing can be upright (rectum), nothing honourable (honestum)’. For the Cynics, verecundia is not natural; hence we are justified in flaunting customs and conventions. Cicero develops a counter-argument against the Cynics: the source of shame or verecundia is indeed natural. I explore his argument for this thesis (which appears at 1.126ff.) and assess his critique of the Cynics.

In a striking passage from the last book of his Tusculan Disputations, Cicero claims to live from day to day (nos in diem vivimus; 5.33). He always opts for what he deems probable, and this, he argues, also constitutes his freedom. This remarkable statement, which is obviously rooted in Cicero’s Academic philosophy, is far from unproblematic. This contribution aims at a better understanding of Cicero’s claim, through an analysis of his argumentative strategies in Tusculan Disputations. More precisely, attention is given to Cicero’s use of (1) the argument from common sense, (2) the argument from dignitas and decorum, (3) illustrative examples, and (4) to his approach in introducing the philosophical topics of the conversation. Finally, I deal with the complicated question as to whether Cicero’s sophisticated attitude of in diem vivere can be reconciled with the therapeutic goal of Tusculan Disputations.

This chapter draws on Cicero’s letters to propose the existence of an “economy of goodwill” in the late Roman Republic. Through voluntas mutua, the mature statesman handles sensitive transactions and vouchsafes his allies’ support. I examine potential antecedents to Cicero’s goodwill in Aristotle’s theories of friendship (eunoia and philia), as well as in the system of “friendly loans” (mutuom argentum) in the comedies of Plautus. Cicero’s economics of friendship, though informed by these others, aim at problems particular to Rome’s fast-growing empire. Unlike normal currency, “spending” voluntas only increases one’s supply of it, allowing for mutual reinforcement of political support over time. Additionally, voluntas may be exchanged regardless of facultas, facilitating long-distance governance by low-cost trades of support across the empire when concrete beneficia are unfeasible. In his philosophical works, finally, Cicero shows an intriguing ambivalence about the economy of goodwill that served him so well in practice. Are reciprocal favors a defensible part of friendship? Though he excludes the possibility in De amicitia, in De officiis, voluntas mutua is redeemed in decorum, the ideal by which proportion and mutuality yield virtue.

This chapter is dedicated to the theory of selfhood Cicero presents in the De officiis: each person being a player of four personae. The allegory of four dramatic roles or masks (from the Greek prosopon) is borrowed from the Stoic Panaetius, whose ethical theory adapts the stringent demands of the sage to a morally imperfect and multifarious public. He who wishes to progress, Cicero explains, must play the roles of reason, of nature, of fortune, and, finally, the role “we ourselves may choose sets forth from our will” (quam personam velimus, a nostra voluntate proficiscitur). In this final treatise, the will comes most clearly into view as a mental capacity and rational force. I argue that when read in conjunction with related uses of voluntas and persona in other texts, Cicero’s will serves a recursive purpose within each of the other personae. Whether in actualizing reason, refining our inborn qualities, or navigating the forces of necessity and civic duty, voluntas creates a dialectic of actor and mask from which emerges a conscious moral self. Though the will develops richly as a moral faculty and principium individuationis in the hands of later thinkers, its terrestrial purposes disappear as divine ones take hold.

Sherman argues that Marvell contributes to the secularization of the ars moriendi by exploring problems of taste in scenes of death. Sherman situates Marvell’s interest in taste by glancing at French and Italian forays into literary aesthetics and by Marvell’s own disquisitions on offensive style in his prose polemics. It is no surprise then to find Marvell experimenting with problems of good and bad taste in poems describing death like 'An Horatian Ode', 'The Unfortunate Lover', 'The Nymph Complaining for the Death of her Fawn', and in the tableaus featuring the demise of Captain Douglas. Sherman suggests that Marvell taps into Catholic iconography associated with the arts of dying to overstep the bounds of aesthetic and rhetorical decorum. He appropriates the sensuality of the Counter-Reformation’s aesthetic exalting the martyred body and the literature of tears (ars lachrimandi). With his focus on moments of sudden death, Marvell casts doubt on the value of preparing for a good death, instead preferring to observe how beauty is cut down in its prime. In this way, Marvell’s poetry of memorialization aestheticizes mortality and the work of mourning.

The seventeenth-century microscopists Robert Hooke and Henry Power sought to rhetorically establish the truthfulness of the visual images produced by their instruments, but a counter-rhetoric of visuality was established by Margaret Cavendish in Observations upon Experimental Philosophy (1666). The microscopists’ belief that magnification revealed the truth of nature ran counter to Cavendish’s probabilistic belief that no individual could grasp the infinite truth of nature and sought explanations from the superficies of observed objects rather than the ‘interior figurative motions’ which Cavendish saw as the universal cause of all natural phenomena. While the microscopists emphasized the aesthetic beauty of the micro-visible world, Cavendish emphasized its monstrosity: for her the truth could only be perceived by the ‘natural’ eye observing things in their unmagnified state. Exploiting the microscopists’ complaints about the variability of their images and the defects of their instruments Cavendish redefines the microscopic image as definitively outside the ‘real’.

Chapter 1 engages in a close reading of the most important Roman work on eloquence, Cicero’s De oratore. In the face of the late-stage crisis of the Roman Republic, Cicero reconceives oratorical virtus as a capacity to endure risk in confrontation with an unruly public. From this reconception flows a rejection of systematized rhetoric, in which Cicero valorizes the uncertainties of language: the absence of predictable, manipulable links between speech and audience response. This model of eloquence stresses the unreliability of the orator’s persuasive tools and claims that it is the very possibility of failure that makes oratory worthwhile, virtuous, and even interesting. The pursuit of eloquence pushes Cicero toward a surprising stress on the autonomy of the audience. It is just because Cicero stresses the difficulty of eloquence that he finds himself invested in constructing an unpredictable and unconstrained public. Though he was no democrat, his treatment of eloquence is relevant to democratic theory because of the unexpected pressures it places on his elitism. Cicero’s critique of technical rhetoric also anticipates dissatisfaction with the contemporary routinization of rhetoric. The chapter contrasts this view with the more rationalized model of speech developed in De analogia, Julius Caesar’s work on style.

Chapter 2 focuses on Cicero’s last work of rhetorical theory, the Orator, and its defense of decorum. Cicero positions the pursuit of decorous, adaptable, polyvocal speech as a political commitment: the orator ought to cultivate speech across the recognized range of styles. Cicero claims that the speech of contemporaries who refuse the challenges of decorum is not just stylistically inert but politically deficient. He advances these claims by constructing a useable stylistic past centered on the Athenian orator Demosthenes. In stressing Demosthenes’s stylistic range, Cicero draws a polemical contrast between his own brand of highly stylized speech and his contemporaries who confine themselves to plain speech. Cicero’s discussion of style also constitutes a critique of the rhetorically circumscribed world that Caesar’s preeminence promised. In such a world, the speaker-audience responsiveness that accounts for much of rhetoric’s normative value would be significantly curtailed – a loss in epistemic, political, and moral terms. In the final section, I consider more general questions about stylized speech. How could Demosthenes’s range of voices be consistent with his reputation for parrhesia, or frankness? As I argue, an embrace of stylized speech can open the way for less intuitive, but more challenging and more rewarding, forms of frankness.

Cicero conceives of rhetoric, politics, and philosophy as so interconnected that they are, or at least should be, a unity under the rubric “eloquence.” To be sufficiently capacious to include all three, eloquence means something different to Cicero than to us, with its current meaning of fluent or persuasive expression. Rather than simple (or even outstanding) facility in language, eloquence for Cicero is public speech, especially political speech, rooted in wisdom. Cicero, most especially in his rhetorical masterpiece, De oratore, deems the eloquens, the man of (true) eloquence, to be the perfect orator, who is simultaneously the ideal statesman, articulating his ideas in words so powerful that he can move his audience in whichever direction he so desires. Because of the danger inherent in such forceful persuasion, the eloquent orator must apply his rhetorical skills only after having acquired “all-embracing knowledge.” Thus, Cicero’s orator-cum-statesman is also a philosopher of a sort – a philosopher who is a man of action, who uses his wisdom to promote the common welfare, unlike those philosophers who shirk “politics and its responsibilities on deliberate principle,” and who criticize and scorn the orator-statesman’s practice of speaking.

King Lear was considered as David Garrick’s most significant part. I argue that this judgement depends on the extent to which this play (following Nahum Tate’s and Garrick’s alterations of Shakespeare’s text) offered a remarkable sequence of contrasting emotions through the performance of madness. The representation of Lear’s insanity required a mastery of the art of transition, yet Garrick’s practice of such an art was not without its challenges. While his critics explored the aesthetic, sociological, and psychological questions of how to perform a king’s madness, performance editions and promptbook markings reveal Garrick’s own efforts to render the part’s transitions with everything from innovative make-up to minute textual editing. Such transitions, and those of Edgar’s pretend madness, ultimately performed an essential function, moderating and so maintaining spectators’ emotional engagement in the Tate-Garrick tragedy. Such moderation is alien to Shakespeare’s play of 1608, and, while the eighteenth-century Lear can tell us much about a celebrated performance in Georgian London, it thus also serves as a critical standpoint for re-evaluating the structures of Jacobean tragedy.