Killing a tyrant: Remarks on Ciceros Miloniana

Abstract

Pro Milone represents an exception in two aspects both among the speeches left to us as Cicero’s life-work. On the one hand, this is the oratio whose original was delivered by the orator in a lost lawsuit, however, later on, guided by political considerations, he published its revised version. On the other hand, Pro Milone is the speech of which we exactly know that the version published by Cicero and left to us is different from the oration given before the court of justice not only in style and structure but in its essence. Pro Milone is an essential constituent part and source of Cicero’s philosophy of the state that produced hardly overestimatable impact on European thinking, that is, in them Cicero as an orator and a politician, trying in vain to get back to the summit of his former influence, formulates his concept on the theory of the state pointing far beyond the handling of the facts of the case and the rhetorical tactics as well as the rhetorical situation, which later on crystallized and constituted the subject matter in his theoretical works.