Un «canone» di oratori romani ?: Cicerone, il finale del «Brutus» e i dieci oratori attici

At the end of the Brutus, Cicero gives a list of the outstanding orators in Roman history, from Cato to Hortensius. If we count the Gracchi as a unity, the list includes ten names, the same number found in the famous canon of the Attic orators. The first part of the article compares the “canon” of the Brutus with similar lists of excellent orators found in Ciceroʼs rhetorical and philosophical works and in other Roman writers. The second section is about the origin of the canon of the Attic orators. Scholars generally ascribe it to the Augustan rhetorician Caecilius of Caleacte, and so deny its existence at Ciceroʼs time. Against this view, passages from Dionysius of Halicarnassus and Cicero himself may prove that the canon was already known to these authors, though not referred to explicitly. In the conclusion, I suggest that Cicero drew up his list of orators as a Roman counterpart of the Greek canon, that should therefore be seen as the product of Hellenistic scholars working either in Alexandria or Pergamon