IV The Orator's Education

The order of chapters in this book may seem paradoxical: the finished orator is considered before the processes by which he reached that state are examined. The order is indeed back-to-front from the perspective of an individual orator's trajectory, whose training must inevitably precede his activity. But in the wider context of an attempt to understand the nature of oratorical training in the Roman world it makes sense to move from the practising orator back to the embryonic form, since the expectations and norms imposed on the fully fledged orator are the foundations which support the system of oratorical education. This observation does not imply any necessary confidence that Roman oratorical education was designed for the creation of orators who met the criteria for and defused the anxieties about oratory which I discussed in the previous chapter. And even if the material which a modern audience can access did suggest that Roman oratorical education was indeed good at producing Roman orators, there is of course no guarantee that actual practice in classrooms across the Empire bore any relation to these writings or displayed any competence at its task. But an awareness of the practice of oratory can usefully inform analysis of how orators were trained.