ABSTRACT
While Cicero was so outstanding a figure as to dominate the fields of oratory, rhetorical study, and what passed for philosophy, there were other authors of merit in some of those branches during his lifetime, and others again busy in departments of literature and scholarly activity to which he made no important contribution, although they interested him. According to Cicero, he was possessed of every oratorical virtue except the power to excite his audience. Cicero is throughout damned with cleverly faint praise; he is an honest man enough, if not very courageous nor always very scrupulous, who cannot be induced to descend to the utter baseness of accusing Caesar of any part in Catiline’s intrigues.
