This volume is one of several to emerge from scholarly cooperation, workshops and conferences affiliated with the Fragments of the Roman Republican Orators (FRRO), a five-year project funded by the European Research Council (2012–2017), with C. Steel as its Principal Investigator. The project's main aim is to provide an updated, expanded and sorely-needed replacement for H. Malcovati's Oratorum Romanorum Fragmenta Liberae Rei Publicae, first published in 1930 and known to most present-day scholars by the abbreviation of its final, fourth edition of 1976: ORF ⁴. ORF, along with a revised Teubner text (Malcovati) and Oxford commentary (A.E. Douglas) on Cicero's Brutus in the 1960s, had a profound and lasting effect on the study of Roman history, oratory and literature beginning in the middle of the last century. The new, and still forthcoming, FRRO seems, if the volume under review is any indication, to be bearing fruits in this century even before the first sowing. The papers engage variously with how to define, identify and interpret fragmentary or non-traditional (non-Ciceronian?) examples of public utterance from the late Republic (with the bulk of the emphasis squarely on its last generation). I use ‘public utterance’ rather than ‘oratory’ because of the very tantalising, if only obliquely addressed questions of what separates the two categories and how invitingly a new collection of oratorical fragments should look on any form of attested public utterance. Surely these questions will be answered in full in FRRO, which will be one of its signal advances over ORF’s generally taciturn approach to questions of procedure and method.

On display in this volume is a wealth of possibilities for how to think about and interpret the material we have or, as some of the authors argue, ought to have. The contributors, who represent a broad range of generations and countries, seek to enrich the foundation upon which our accounts of Republican oratory are built and, further, to help craft some of those accounts on the new material, taking care to consider the broadest contexts – oratorical, material and social – that influence a given oratorical moment. The editors introduce the material and sensibly lay out the volume's organisation. Roughly half (Chapters 1–8) is devoted to the transmission and assessment of fragmentary material or figures other than Cicero. The second half (Chapters 9–18) focuses on the various ways that one could or should use to recover lost or overlooked voices and utterances from the late Republic. Rather than assess the merits of each piece, it may be best to consider the broadest themes, topics or approaches that emerge from the volume, since these are what best suggest the new types of opportunities for thinking productively about the material once FRRO’s new textual foundations will have been laid.

There is still certainly room for the more traditional approaches, such as the analysis of discrete authors or figures (A. Cavarzere and A. Raschieri) or technical rhetoric (A. Balbo and J. Hilder). Yet the old is combined with the new, for example, in Hilder's examination of actio and its connection to popularis politics in the Rhetorica ad Herennium or Raschieri's statistical accounting of Republican orators in Quintilian. This is complemented by a thorough re-evaluation of known but often overlooked sources: A. Eckert on earlier oratorical luminaries such as Cato, Crassus and Antonius, I. Goh on Lucilius, E. Pagola on Plautus and S.J. Lawrence on Valerius Maximus. These latter contributions are not necessarily assessments of oratorical fragments in the traditional sense, but they are an attempt to show how pervasive rhetorical culture was, how much we must continue to revisit and review material so often overlooked, and how much authors who are not necessarily practising orators still touch on issues so central to Roman oratory: Roman interactions with Greek culture or differing definitions and accounts of freedom, statehood and violence.

Careful attention to cultural context is also marvellously on display. One discernible (if unlabelled) sub-unit was ‘funereal oratory’. H. Beck, C. Pepe and C.W. Gladhill provide distinct yet interconnected readings of oratory about the dead, not just the more well-known, if still undervalued laudatio funebris, but also the larger aura, the sensations and emotions, from the smell of cypress or the visual impression of a domus funesta to the shriek and roar of the crowd, all of which accompanied the rituals of death and framed the attendant or subsequent oratorical performances. Beck draws out the need to realise how much aural and olfactory sensation accompanies the oral production of speech; Pepe (like Beck) emphasises the fundamentally visual nature of the pompa funebris and its culmination in the laudatio. Gladhill insists on the importance of Fulvia's public speaking in response to the death of Clodius, because she signally shaped the context of Cicero's Pro Milone. All three chapters show how social contexts (and not just narrative history) can and should remain central to the study of public speech. Each, it is worth noting, would also work well as a teaching resource at undergraduate level.

Another theme of the volume is the inevitable focus on the implicit silencing of material in the record – or perhaps what C. Rosillo-López diplomatically calls the ‘Grey Zones of Public Speech’. Several approaches to even quite traditional material highlight the extent to which we should be able to wring considerably more out of seemingly ungenerous material. K. Morrell focuses on Cicero's use of vague language (e.g. quidam homines) to refer to but not directly designate figures such as Cato with whom he had ideological disagreements but did not wish to engage with in a direct political challenge. As a result, we may be able to recapture the political views and even statements of Cicero's colleagues and opponents through such references (for example in Prov. cons.). A. Corbeill identifies and sensibly argues for specific additions to the oratorical record of Clodius the Tribune based on statements from Cicero's De haruspicum responsis. Rosillo-López pushes us to think about the extent to which informal yet still public utterances should be included in a project such as FRRO. J. Hallett militates for inclusion of statements by Cornelia, mother of the Gracchi (thus pushing forward by almost a century the ‘beginning’ of the oratorical record of women at Rome). Some of the many arguments for inclusivity are undoubtedly right (Corbeill's examples are convincing, for example), but the difference in approaches among contributors brings up a methodological problem never really addressed head on: at what point does a statement merit inclusion in a collection of fragments of orators or in a book called Reading Republican Oratory? If the imagined collection of oratorical fragments envisioned by these contributors is not going to be called something like Fragments of Roman Republican Talkers, then some clear and justified sense of what merits the label ‘oratory’ or ‘orators’ should be stated and justified with methodological clarity and soundness. It is possible that this volume may not be the most intuitive place for all such deliberations. Yet, testing limits, hammering out preliminaries and taking into account subsequent scholarly objections might be done more profitably in a venue such as this than in the final version of FRRO, for example.

This is a valuable volume with a wealth of contributions. It is also admirable that the editorial inclusivity is not only methodological and national but also demographic. Since Malcovati's publication of ORF the field of Republican prose has changed remarkably, evidenced in good measure by the near gender parity of the volume's contributors. Equally valuable is the openness to sophisticated approaches, many of which are being conducted by early-career scholars. It would be easy to praise the consistently excellent work of seasoned scholars such as Corbeill's semi-fictive Clodian oration, J. Dugan's perceptive and theoretically informed reading of Gaius Titius in Cicero and Macrobius, or Rosillo-López on the communicative dynamics of the late Republic. Yet the volume gives us a glimpse too of a new generation of scholars with big projects recently published or about to appear: Eckert on Sulla, Morrell on Pompey and Cato, Hilder on the Rhetorica ad Herennium (a work in desperate need of comprehensive and subtle study), and C. Burden-Strevens on Cassius Dio and his speeches, not to mention excellent work by Goh on Lucilius and Lawrence on Valerius Maximus. This volume fits nicely in the many new contributions to the study of the late Republic and to a global reassessment of fragmentary material (historiography and poetry are experiencing their own heyday of collections and commentaries). It is also one of many studies that continues to tackle the long-standing problem of the inevitable sway that Cicero has had on our perception of the period, and opportunities for further such studies abound.