S. is principal investigator of a five-year (2011–2016) ERC grant to replace ORF⁴ (1976) with a much-needed, more current and comprehensive collection of the testimonia and fragments of Roman Republican Oratory (hereafter FRRO). Prior to the grant period, S. and the volume's co-editor, v.d.B., organised a conference on ‘Oratory and Politics in Republican Rome’ in Oxford in September 2010. The conference volume comprises the editors' introduction and nineteen studies, all in English, that showcase the variety of current scholarship on oratory and its contexts in the republican period, as well as demonstrating conclusively the need for FRRO. Its five parts are devoted to (1) the contio (four papers), (2) strategy and tactics in public speech (five papers), (3) judgements and criticisms of oratory (three papers), (4) oratory involving non-Romans (three papers), and (5) orators other than Cicero (four papers). These are followed by a bibliography and a thorough general index. The quality of the contributions is uniformly high.

Part 1, ‘Citizens, Speech, and the Roman Res Publica’, presents previously argued views and further reflections on the contio. K-J. Hölkeskamp, ‘Friends, Romans, Countrymen’, stresses that the contio is an inclusive solemn process enacting and symbolising what it means to be Roman. Since one consensus Roman value is the hierarchical organisation of the state, it is inherent in the role of ‘the Roman People’ to defer to their meritocratic leadership. R. Morstein-Marx, ‘“Cultural Hegemony” and the Roman Elite’, examines successful assertions of popular sovereignty (‘SAPS’) between 140 and 50 b.c.e., and concludes that these do not in fact mark opposition to the hierarchical system of governance, only to individuals who seem to abuse it. Thus they actually reinforce the hegemony of the elite. M. Jehne, ‘Feeding the Plebs with Words: the Significance of Senatorial Oratory in the Small World of Roman Politics', primarily focusing on Pro lege Manilia, argues that the Roman plebs participate in the contio not for material advantage, but for the credit of representing the collective auctoritas of the Roman people. H. Mauritsen, ‘From Meeting to Text: the Contio in the Late Republic’, considers the written circulation of contional speeches to argue that, although the contional audience, symbolically ‘the Roman People’, was very fluid, it was most likely the extended elite rather than the urban plebs. This minor elite also constituted a readership, an aspect that grew more important as this audience became more dispersed throughout Italy.

Part 2, ‘Strategy and Tactics in Public Speech’, is an omnium gatherum. H. Flower, ‘Beyond the Contio’, argues that Tiberius Gracchus' political trajectory can be best understood not in terms of formal eloquence, but of political networks and strategic connections, first in the rural then in the urban voting tribes. A. Russell, ‘Speech, Competition, and Collaboration’, undercuts the term ‘popularis’ by using the positions taken by three tribunes in 99–97 to show that the pressure of competition among tribunes militated against ideological consistency. J. Tan, ‘Publius Clodius and the Boundaries of the Contio’, applies boundary theory to the atypical and extreme contional activity of Clodius. J. Tatum, ‘Campaign Rhetoric’, paying proper attention to the Comm. Pet., explores the verbal and visual strategies for soliciting votes in a society where connection to voters is ostensibly founded on gratia, elite losers are shielded from popular contempt and proper stump speeches are taboo. S., ‘Pompeius, Helvius Mancia and the Politics of Public Debate’, focuses upon the famous speech (ORF ⁴ #71) that labels Pompeius an adulescentulus carnifex. S. contextualises the quotation within its source, Val. Max. 6.2, musters what can be known of Mancia and of the context, and posits that the passage, which Valerius Maximus has completely repurposed, comes from a historical account rather than from a speech. It likely represents a piece of impromptu repartee, another kind of public communication that could have substantial political consequences. This exposition, like those noted in Part 5 below, gives a vivid example of the promise of FRRO.

In Part 3, ‘Judgements and Criticisms’, J. Wisse on ‘The Bad Orator’ sorts out the technical vs moral meanings of ‘bad’, and offers a characteristically thorough and occasionally controversial exposition of the Roman rhetorical tastes and broader cultural values and dynamics to be inferred from (mostly Ciceronian) descriptions of oratorical faults. Wisse explicitly rejects as reductive for the Ciceronian era consistent use of certain behaviours or styles as warrants for essential inferences about character (pace Corbeill et al.), and further unsettles any generalisations about traits of a populist vs a pro-senatorial style. V. Arena, ‘The Orator and his Audience’, reframes the nature of emotional appeals. In the face of the modern Habermasian bias, in which rational argument signals a climate of participant autonomy necessary for democracy, while emotional argument moves in the opposite direction, she uses Cicero's rhetorica to argue that the ancient rhetorical tradition conceives of emotional argument as a complementary support for rational argument. This broader conception of rational argument allows one to see the centrality of meaningful popular deliberation in the Romans' understanding of their own public discourse. J. Dugan, ‘Cicero and the Politics of Ambiguity: Interpreting pro Marcello’, sketches the speech's hermeneutical history in order to reflect on the greater importance of reader's understanding over writer's intention, the deliberate ambiguities that characterise communication with and by Caesar in this period, and the strategies of exclusion that define interpretative communities.

In Part 4, ‘Romans and Non-Romans’, E. Torregaray Pagola, ‘The Roman Ambassador's Speech: Public Oratory on the Diplomatic Stage’, explains the dominance of Greek sources, explores the historically strict controls on ambassadors' speeches and the developing possibilities for persuasive discourse as the empire expands, and provides a convenient typology for such speeches, which are more concerned to project authority, demand respect and communicate senatorial decisions than to persuade. F. Pina Polo's complementary chapter, ‘Foreign Eloquence in the Roman Senate’, neatly rehearses the differential treatment of the embassies from friendly states and others, the protocol for obtaining an audience, the senate's ad hoc ordering of the embassies it would receive, and the fact that with one exception (Apollonius Molon), foreign ambassadors' speeches were translated into Latin, and thus required a cadre of translators. So native eloquence could be lost in translation. Still ambassadorial gestures that were appropriately deferential (or obsequious) were palpably persuasive, and the oratorical performances of ambassadors could serve to model eloquent speech for the senatorial audience. J. Prag, ‘Provincials, Patrons, and the Rhetoric of Repetundae’, forcefully argues that Cicero's portrait of repetundae legislation as the defence of the provincials, and his implicit claim that he is in any formal social sense the patron of Sicily, are grossly tendentious. Using the Verrines and other repetundae trials, Prag presents a more nuanced picture of the patronage relationship between provincial individuals and communities and individual Roman senators, and one that had greater value for defendants than for prosecutors. Repetundae trials were finally not about advocacy of provincials' interests born of a Roman's patrocinium of a whole province, but were part of a more segmented, heavily politicised and thoroughly Romano-centric process.

The four meticulous papers in Part 5, ‘Cicero's Rivals', can be taken with S.'s contribution noted above as models of worthwhile new work that FRRO will enable. I can note here only their programmatic titles: C. Rosilla López, ‘The Common (Mediocris) Orator of the Late Republic: the Scribonii Curiones’; v.d.B., ‘Fragmentary Speeches: the Oratory and Career of Piso Caesoninus’; A. Balbo, ‘Marcus Junius Brutus: between Philosophy and Rhetoric’; T. Mahy, ‘Antonius, Triumvir and Orator: Career, Style’.

This collection of studies, widely varying in their focus but of uniformly high quality, gives a lively sense of the current variety and promising directions in research on Roman oratory and society.