INTRODUCTION

For Jill Harries, the anonymous Rhetorica ad Herennium and Cicero's early De Inventione, written in the 80s Bc, read ‘at times like textbooks on law rather than rhetoric’. This is surely a reflection of the great emphasis both works place on the Judicial type of oratory, to which the Rhetorica ad Herennium devotes two books. Law and the legal context are manifest in the examples used in these two handbooks written in the 80s Bc, giving an insight into the practice as well as the theory of legal oratory in this period.

In fact, the two handbooks are a rich source of information for several aspects of trials– from the jurists who advise on civil law cases to the advocates who speak at trials and the jurors who judge them. In this chapter I will explore these three groups of people involved in trials (who may not, in reality, be separate individuals) to build a picture of the legal system in Cicero's youth.

The Rhetorica ad Herennium and Cicero's De Inventione are often studied together, to the detriment of one or other of the texts. As will become apparent, the two texts are significantly different, although this is often not explicitly recognised. There is little to gain, therefore, from trying to reason away their disagreements. Instead, these points of difference make the picture of the Roman Republic richer, emphasising the choices that were available to the people involved in the legal world and giving a glimpse of the variety that is frequently lacking in the surviving sources.

Despite their differences, the texts are still worth studying together for two reasons: their date and their common source. Both texts were almost certainly written in the 80s Bc before Cicero began his legal career and before his earliest surviving speech, Pro Quinctio (81 Bc). The commonly agreed dating of the Rhetorica ad Herennium falls between 86 and 82 Bc. The termi- nus post quem refers to the death of Marius in 86 Bc,the latest datable event mentioned in the text, and the fact that there is no mention of Sulla's dictatorship is used as evidence for it being written before 82 Bc.