Abstract

Marcus Tullius Cicero has been best known for his activities as a politician and lawyer in the late Roman Republic, and for his contributions to the theory of rhetoric, or oratory, as he would have called it. This dissertation looks at a singular contribution made by Cicero to the practice of oratory: pro-con argumentation within one speaker's discourse. Some twentieth-century scholars have called this method "controversia" . Cicero most likely developed his theory of argument from two sources, his background in forensics and his studies in philosophy, particularly Academic philosophy with the philosophers Philo of Larissa and Antiochus of Ascalon. This dissertation examines fours discrete main areas: the problems with modern scholarship concerning Cicero and his works, the roots of Cicero's "controversia", forensic and philosophic; the literary working of "controversia" in Cicero's de Oratore, and finally examines the uses of the controversial method in teaching argumentative writing in college composition courses