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Tuesday, June 16, 2015

Teaching, Cicero

In "Patriarchal Conventions and Convictions in Greece and Rome" today in Berkeley we are leaping forward centuries from Aristotle's Athens to Cicero's Rome. Tomorrow we will take up Cicero's "Ideal Orator" but today we begin with the real orator, Cicero's jeremiads against Verres, against Cataline, and against Antony at the key moments in his political career.  I truly love teaching this material (teaching Cicero and Quintilian seems to me easily as indispensable as Plato and Aristotle for rhetoricians but I don't think the feeling is widely shared), and it pisses me off that I'm still sick as a dog and will not likely be able to draw up the energy and clarity to communicate my passion for these texts this week. Honestly, I'm hoping my voice can actually hold up at all, gravelly and stuffed and quiet as it is now. So frustrating! 

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