A Companion to Roman Rhetoric

I suppose there are innumerable instances of accused criminals looking at the evidence accumulated against them and promptly pleading guilty, but I was always amused by the story of Verres returning to Rome after a spectacularly corrupt governorship of Sicily, reading the orations prepared for his prosecution by Cicero and promptly taking himself off into exile (presumably with his ill‐gotten gains), despite his many powerful friends at Rome. But poor Cicero, too, deprived of the opportunity actually to deliver his orations. My own experience of Roman oratory was as literary texts to be translated and analysed, but with scant reference...