Ciceros Accretive Style

Download or read book Cicero's Accretive Style written by Steven M. Cerutti and published by University Press of America. This book was released on 1996 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cicero's Accretive Style is a book about the nature of the Ciceronian exordium and its rhetorical structure and function. Through a sentence-by-sentence stylistic analysis of the exordia of a selection of Cicero's judicial speeches, this book explores how Cicero uses a variety of rhetorical strategies to fulfill the aims of the exordium as he himself defined them. The speeches selected for study include the Pro Quinctio, Pro Roscio Amerino, and Pro Rege Deiotaro, and cover the span of Cicero's career. The focus of the analysis is on Cicero's "accretive" style--not a rhetorical device in the formal sense, but a conscious, stylistic effort whose effect is rhetorical. Because Cicero also wrote important treatises on oratory and rhetoric, this book measures how closely Cicero followed his own guidelines laid down for the exordium, and how and under what circumstances he deviated or departed from them.