About the lecture
Cicero’s speech pro Flacco, the longest extant repetundae (extortion) defence speech remains curiously understudied within the orator’s oeuvre. Primarily cited for its xenophobic rhetoric against provincials, the speech was delivered late during the first consulship of Gaius Julius Caesar (59 BCE), a critical turning point in the trajectory of late Republican politics, and dwells extensively on the aftermath of Cicero’s own consular actions vis-à-vis the so-called Catilinarian conspiracy. The speech lies at the centre of several crucial aspects of Late Republican history and warrants reassessment as a source for the period. This paper focuses on two aspects of the speech: how Cicero’s appeal to the jury is predicated upon the political culture of the Roman Republic and is itself a political act; and the role played by documentary evidence from provincial settings in the imperial framework of the late Republic. By doing so, it seeks to stimulate discussion around the place of the speech in contemporary historical scholarship.
About the speaker
Bradley Jordan holds a PhD in Ancient History from the University of Oxford. He has been a research fellow at the University of Köln and the British Institute in Ankara, and is currently a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Oslo.
Interested in attending?
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