Parallel latin & English texts.

Roman secondary education aimed principally at training future lawyers and politicians. Under the late Republic and the Empire, the main instrument was an import from Greece -- declamation, the making of practice-speeches on imaginary subjects. There were two types of such speeches: controversiae on law-court themes, suasoriae on delibertaive topics. On both types a prime source of our knowledge is the work of Lucius Annaeus Seneca, a Spaniard from...

The Lesser Declamations perhaps date from the second century CE and are perhaps derived from Quintilian. The collection originally consisted of 388 sample cases for legal training. 145 survive. Comments and suggestions the instructor adds to his model speeches for fictitious court cases offer insight into Roman law and education.

"These rhetorical texts by Apuleius, second-century Latin writer and author of the famous novel Metamorphoses or Golden Ass, have not been translated in English since 1909. They are some of the very few Latin speeches surviving from their period, and constitute important evidence for Latin and Roman North African social and intellectual culture in the second century A.D. They are the work of a talented writer who is being increasingly viewed as the...

"As the Roman Republic lurched to its close, amid corruption, ruthless power struggles and gross inequality, Cicero produced some of the most stirring and eloquent speeches ever written. Whether he is quashing the Catiline conspiracy, defending the poet Archais or railing against Mark Anthony in the Philippics--The magnificent speeches in defense of liberty that cost him his life--cicero vividly evokes for us the cut and thrust of the Roman assembly,...