Ten Legal Cases in Cicero's De oratore 1.175-184: Examples of Famous Historical Trials or School Thesies and Controversiae?

Abstract

In the first book of Cicero’s De oratore (1.175-184) Crassus criticizes the shameless (impudentia) of those advocates who neglect the civil law and illustrates his argumentation with 10 legal cases. The aim of the paper is to discuss the function of all of them, arguing that they were not only famous cases well known to the interlocutors of the Cicero’s dialogue, which have taken place in September 91 BC, but also could be regarded as theseis, causae or controversiae practiced in schools of rhetoric in the 50’s of the first Century BC. when Cicero wrote De oratore and well known most of all from Seneca’s Controversiae, e.g. the pronoun “ille” in the first case (1.175: causa illius militis) can suggest the well known real case (cf. Valerius Maximus, 7.7.1), but also a case known because similar topics were studied in schools of rhetoric, the examples concerns exiled foreigner “who had come to live in Rome, having the right to do so provided that he attach himself to someone who would act as a kind of patronus , subsequently died without leaving a will” (1.177) contains no detailed information on person, time and place of the law suit and as such can be regarded as sui generis example of quaestio legalis analysed by Cicero in De inventione (2.116-122), while famous causa Curiana (1.180) was already analyzed (without names of parties and advocates) by him in De inventione (2. 122-127) as an example of controversia ex scripto et sententia. The analysis of 10 legal cases / controversies shows that Cicero’s goal is to authenticate the exercises, inspired by the Greek school theseis, in assessment of particular legal controversies by including them in the real reports on legal disputes of the second century BC. and the nineties of the first century BC.