Choice of The Historical Background of The Dialogue
At that time as much as when Cicero writes the dialogue, the crisis of the state is obsessing everyone and clashes deliberately with the pleasant and quiet atmosphere of the villa in Tusculum. Cicero tries to reproduce the feeling of the last days of peace in the old Roman republic.
Despite De Oratore ("On the Orator") is a discourse on rhetoric, Cicero has the original idea of inspiring himself to Plato's Dialogues, replacing the streets and squares of Athens with a nice garden of a country villa of a noble Roman aristocrat. With this fanciful device, he avoided the arid explanation of rhetoric rules and devices. The work contains the second known description of the method of loci, a mnemonic technique (after the Rhetorica ad Herennium).
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