The title of Gildenhard's ambitious work immediately attracts the reader, but what exactly is meant by ‘creative eloquence’? Is it about Cicero being a bit too creative with the truth or does the book concern a particular area of his oratory in which Cicero is particularly talented? Rather, as G. quickly begins to explain, the title refers to Cicero's conceptual creativity and is meant to encapsulate a wide array of abstract concepts and ideas employed across Cicero's speeches and related to his theoretical works.

The aim of the book is not to look for philosophical doctrines in Cicero's speeches as sign of his own philosophical beliefs or the ways he employs them for rhetorical purposes, but instead to analyse and then discuss Cicero's use of concepts and ideas to formulate original views and interpretations and to situate these in the cultural context of Cicero's time. A few examples illustrate some of the elements in G.'s analysis: Cicero's use and development of terms such as boni, natura, humanitas and fortuna, his employment of conceptual ideas such as natural law, the relationship between the city of Rome and the empire and the relationship between gods and humans, and his reliance on abstraction and definition to carry through his oratorical argument. These examples are by no means exhaustive as the book is dense with ideas (Cicero's and G.'s) and discussions of how Cicero made them work in day-to-day speech situations.

The book is organized in three parts — Anthropology, Sociology, Theology — each with an introduction and four chapters. Although clearly well versed in the terminology and discussions of these disciplines, G.'s discussions are never an attempt to press down a modern theory over Cicero's text and it is to G.'s credit that his usage of anthropological and sociological terminology is always used with a clear focus on describing and analysing Cicero's concepts and ideas in their ancient setting.

In the first part on anthropological themes, G. explores the various ways in which Cicero describes human beings and uses such descriptions to create relationships or distance enemies from himself or groups of people. One theme is Cicero's construction of his own public personae and those of others in relation to concepts such as fortuna and natura, and G. argues (73) that describing someone as a ‘human being’ allowed Cicero to re-evaluate someone not to traditional ideas of rank and status (e.g. nobilitas — here it would have been nice to see G.'s response to M. Robb, Beyond Populares and Optimates (2010)) but to criteria formulated and manipulated by Cicero to categorize this person as ‘good’, ‘bad’ or ‘in-between’. Here, G. picks up on existing studies into specific instances of Cicero's re-categorization of his friends and enemies, but takes the further step of showing how Cicero's strategies and tactics run across his oratorical oeuvre. G.'s treatment of the slippery term natura is particularly illuminating.

The sociological part looks at the construction of society and how is it regulated by law and customs. The analysis of how definition and re-definition of central political offices (tribunate, consulship), terms (e.g. nobilitas), and status (citizen, senator, consular) influenced events and shaped future events shows the great extent to which Cicero used abstractions and philosophical tools to promote his own agenda. It is also here that G. looks at Cicero's complex understanding of law and justice: Cicero's views of the challenges to Roman legal practice and, essentially, to justice lead into a discussion of Cicero's innovative usage of oratory to mete out justice where the legal system has failed (e.g. in the in Pisonem, pp. 181–90) and of the dichotomy between natural and positive law in Cicero's speeches. After a dissection of the term humanitas, this part ends with an analysis of the three ‘Caesarian speeches’, the pro Marcello, the pro Ligario, and the pro Rege Deiotaro.

In the final part on theology, Cicero's employment of all aspects of divine and religion is examined in order to understand his handling of the dilemma of choosing between exceptional individuals such as Pompey (and Cicero himself) and the needs of the civic community of equals. G.'s introduction to and schematization of Rome's civic religion (246–54) sets out the religious questions, the traditional answers developed over time, and the alternative answers. This illustrates in an exceptionally clear way how civic religion at Rome was based on evolved (and evolving) practices and that the traditional practice was never the only one available. G. himself makes the link between the religious and the political realities, arguing that the late Republican picture is one where traditional beliefs and practices were challenged by alternative views and agendas which led them, ultimately, to break down. This underlines the current trend of seeing these two spheres of Roman public life as intertwined, and the subsequent chapters support this idea.

Many of the ideas and concepts taken up are well known to any Ciceronian scholar, some even to non-specialists, but G. provides a theoretical superstructure to these themes which allows them to be understood as part of a broader system, not simply as ideas used for any particular situation even if they were carefully chosen in each instance to have an impact on the immediate situation. One of the many strengths of the book lies precisely in the systematization of Cicero's many usages of concepts and ideas to demonstrate how they fit into a grander scheme of understanding the world and all its parts, a scheme in which Cicero and his views play a central rôle. While Cicero does not explicitly describe such an overarching system to his ideas, G.'s analysis makes it clear that the various elements can be made to fit together and it suggests that Cicero could have thought of them as such.

One of the best aspects of this book is the clear signalling of when Cicero is innovative and when not. We tend to take Cicero as representative of far more than his unusual background (for a consular senator), unusual career trajectory, and unusual oratorical talent warrants — a fact which G. duly notes (11–14). But what could have been interesting would be to see to what extent his conceptualizations hit home with his audience. While the analysis is admirably strong on the philosophical, literary and religious contexts, we hear little of the responses to Cicero's speeches in their historical context (the Conclusion (385–90) makes an attempt but from a Ciceronian perspective). Were his audiences persuaded by his elaborately constructed ideas or rather by his brilliant delivery? It may be unfair to ask this question when it is so difficult to answer, but some discussion of the problem would have benefited the analysis.

The book is eloquent and well structured, which helps the reader to get through the rich material and aids further thinking on both individual elements and the entire project. Another strength of the book is that it invites discussion and one does not have to agree with all the analyses or conclusions to benefit from this extravaganza of ideas. Indeed, G.'s systematization of Cicero's concepts and ideas proves an original and clever approach to Cicero's oeuvre and one with which any serious Ciceronian scholar must engage.