Conclusion

Consideration of how and why speeches get written down can also lead to identifying some of the more interesting and promising questions to ask of oratory. Much of the discussion in this chapter has been pessimistic about the use of oratory by historians, stressing the extent to which the factual content of oratory is distorted by the need to be persuasive. But oratory can nevertheless be a productive genre for ancient historians to explore. Given the importance of oratory to political careers in both Athens and Rome, surviving speeches are a valuable indicator of an individual’s position and alliances at various points in his career; with the further factor that we can normally be confident that what we are reading is something that an orator positively wanted an audience to read. The processes of selection become an advantage when one approaches oratory as a corpus relating to a particular individual.

Oratory, too, is an extraordinarily rich source for social history. It can be informative about habits. We know more, for example, about the use of domestic space in fourth century Athens, from Lysias’s On the murder of Eratosthenes, and about baths as a location for socializing in the late republic, thanks to Cicero’s On behalf of Caelius, than we might otherwise do: both orators are drawing on shared and accepted behaviors in order to sketch a background for what they claim happened on a specific occasion. Forensic oratory tells us a great deal about how the law operated and was conceptualized; passages of invective indicate what qualities were admired and what behaviors could be presented as disgraceful at different periods. As an index of a variety of broader themes in ancient social and political history, then, oratory has a substantial contribution to make. What it is much less good at indicating, however, is what happened at a particular time and place; and if we are to make good use of oratory, we need to begin with attitude of profound mistrust of what orators tell us.