I’ll also agree that the court cases Cicero argued often had to do with the concerns of the boni, and in that had little relevance to the lives of the lower classes. However, revolution was a huge concern for Rome, and the profound loss of individual freedom associated with the turn from republic to empire affected every citizen — and that’s what the Philippics were about, and that’s what the In Catilinam was about, and the concentration of power in the hands of a sole individual is a subtext impossible to ignore in Pro Ligario and the other Caesarean orations. Furthermore, the Verrines (or at least the one that was actually delivered) were of profound imporance to all the citizens of Sicily. So for his political and judicial rhetoric, I don’t think Cicero can be so easily discounted in terms of relevance.

Furthermore, while Quintilian certainly put down in writing the system of rhetorical instruction that the Romans inherited and refined from the Greeks (as is clear in Cicero’s juvenile De Inventione and in the debt he acknowledges to Aristotle’s Rhetoric), let’s not forget that Cicero — building on the ideas of Isocrates — pretty much invented what we now know as the concept of a liberal education.

I completely agree with you that I’d hate to have to choose between them — but y’know, I enjoy reading Cicero and Tacitus, and the fact that the sheer gorgeousness of their prose outshines that of every other Roman writer makes grappling with their ideas only more pleasant. I think that’s part of what Clancy and I were getting at: the Institutio Oratoria, as relevant as the ideas are, is a bit of a slog. And, again, apolitical, which — when we’re talking about someone who wrote in the time of Vespasian and Domitian (!) — is deeply troubling, to say the least. While many today differ on the place of politics in the classroom, I firmly believe that a discipline associated with public discourse can ill afford to wholly ignore political concerns.