Making a New Man: Ciceronian Self-Fashioning in the Rhetorical Works

Cicero (106-43 BCE) is known as Rome's greatest orator, which was precisely his plan. This book shows how Cicero used culturally ambitious works on the nature and history of oratory to fashion his identity as the supreme Roman public speaker and stylist.
In Making a New Man John Dugan investigates how Cicero (106-43 BCE) uses his major treatises on rhetorical theory (De oratore, Brutus, and Orator) in order to construct himself as a new entity within Roman cultural life: a leader who based his authority upon intellectual, oratorical, and literary accomplishments instead of the traditional avenues for prestige such as a distinguished familial pedigree or political or military feats.
Eschewing conventional Roman notions of manliness, Cicero constructed a distinctly aesthetized identity that flirts with the questionable domains of the theatre and the feminine, and thus fashioned himself as a `new man'.