From De Oratore, by Cicero

When I was in high school, a good friend and I read The Republic of Cicero for a class. For whatever reason, we ended up getting really into the work and we would talk and debate about it all the time; we got so into it that his sister named her cat (that she adopted around the same time) Cicero. It was really fun for me to read this work and refamiliarize myself with Cicero's tone, I like that he opens with a greeting to his brother because it makes the rest of the work flow in a more companionable way. I also really love chapter five from this book, where he sums up pretty succinctly most of the parts of rhetoric  general knowledge of a subject, pathos, ethos, logos, kairos, as well as the importance of memorization. Cicero also offers his view of the importance of delivery in this chapter, and I thought it was pretty funny when he said: "everyone knows how few actors there are or ever have been whom we could bear to watch!" However, the thing that I found most interesting from this work was the fact that he kept mentioning over and over again how rare great orators are. during my first read through of this work, I thought that couldn't be true in our day and age because so many people have studied rhetoric so there must be a lot of people who have mastered the art. However, as I was talking to the friend I mentioned earlier about this work, he brought up the fact that politicians and people in positions of power often hire people to write their speeches for them and probably spend hours practicing them, which kind of helped me relate this work more to the present.