The Verrine Orations 2: Second Speech Against Verres, Books 3-5

by Marcus Tullius Cicero, L.H.G. Greenwood (Translator)

Cicero (Marcus Tullius, 106–43 BCE), Roman lawyer, orator, politician and philosopher, of whom we know more than of any other Roman, lived through the stirring era which saw the rise, dictatorship, and death of Julius Caesar in a tottering republic. In his political speeches especially and in his correspondence we see the excitement, tension and intrigue of politics and the part he played in the turmoil of the time. Of about 106 speeches, delivered before the Roman people or the Senate if they were political, before jurors if judicial, 58 survive (a few of them incompletely). In the fourteenth century Petrarch and other Italian humanists discovered manuscripts containing more than 900 letters of which more than 800 were written by Cicero and nearly 100 by others to him. These afford a revelation of the man all the more striking because most were not written for publication. Six rhetorical works survive and another in fragments. Philosophical works include seven extant major compositions and a number of others; and some lost. There is also poetry, some original, some as translations from the Greek.

The Loeb Classical Library edition of Cicero is in twenty-nine volumes.

Genres: Classics

704 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1935

About the author

Born 3 January 106 BC, Arpinum, Italy
Died 7 December 43 BC (aged 63), Formia, Italy

Marcus Tullius Cicero was a Roman philosopher, statesman, lawyer, political theorist, and Roman constitutionalist. Cicero is widely considered one of Rome's greatest orators and prose stylists.

Alternate profiles:
Cicéron
Marco Tullio Cicerone
Cicerone

Note: All editions should have Marcus Tullius Cicero as primary author. Editions with another name on the cover should have that name added as secondary author.

Reviews

[Aggrey Odera · Rating 3 out of 5]

Intended to focus mainly on Cicero's outlining of Verres' sacking of Sicily for a reading group on cultural patrimony at my school but ended up reading the entire thing. Long charge sheet that I did not particularly care much about, though I guess those who care about "justice" were glad that Verres was exiled.

[John Cairns · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm getting more and more into Cicero. This is from his earlier career. The amount of research he did in situ is conscientious, to say the least. He didn't actually deliver this oration because Verres had fled with his spoils into exile (where Antony would pick him off as he would Cicero himself in the proscriptions. Ironic?) That he didn't may account for its exhaustiveness. It's not, however, exhaustng to read and it contains O tempora! O mores! which my quotations book says comes from In Catilinam. (I didn't have a latin version of that to check.) The translation here is good: what an age we live in! What an age it was too because Verres wasn't the only corrupt aristo making his fortune by plundering provinces.