Abstract

This paper starts from the question of how the perception of an invective in Late Republican Rome is influenced, when it follows strictly the rules of the ars rhetorica. Since speaker and audience will have undergone the same rhetorical training, both sides have clear ideas about the rules of the genre, as they can be reconstructed from the surviving textbooks. At the same time, it can be shown on the basis of ancient evidence that insults were perceived not only more effective, but also as socially moreacceptable if they arose unprepared from the situation – or if they gave exactly this impression. In the case of invective, thus, a speaker must make a special effort not to let his preparation become visible. For this purpose, he can, on the one hand, resort to the technique of artificial orality and apparent spontaneity and, in this way, take the usual dissimulatio artis to extremes. On the other hand, he can deliberately deviate from the rules of textbooks, resulting in a strong tendency of invective to a permanent innovation. This will be demonstrated by the example of some passages from Cicero's speech pro Caelio from 56 BC.