Genre issues in the Catilinarian Orations

Abstract

This article intends to explain, preliminarily, the structure of rhetorical genres in Classical Antiquity, which are deliberative, epideictic and forensic. This division into three genres, seen by theorists and by the very orators as descriptively and normatively useful, will be examined as means to apply these concepts in the Catilinarian Orations Prima and Secunda. Because of the mixture of genres, Marcus Tullius Cicero’s wellknown speeches challenge ancient classification. I shall, then, explain these difficulties, by using principally the instruments offered by French Semiotics, but also calling on concepts formulated by Bakhtin and by the French School of Discourse Analysis, which have been incorporated by French Semiotics. As I understand it, genre, defined by Semiotics as “a class of discourse, recognizable thanks to criteria of socioletal nature”, is indeed constitutive of the sense of discourse, for it reveals the enunciator’s choices and, at the same time, determines a posture for the reception of discourse, as it concerns to the enunciatee. Going further, genre is determinant in cenography, which means it has coercions, which affect the way the enunciator reveals and constructs himself, giving him specific rules to play with; thus genre studies seem to be indispensable to the comprehension of the ethos of Cicero in both of his Catilinarian orations.