Martínez Fernández, Iker2024-05-212024-05-212021-04-22978-88-6969-512-4http://doi.org/10.30687/978-88-6969-511-7https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14468/20658La comprensión de la idea de imitatio que Cicerón defiende en su obra desvela un pensamiento en diálogo con una tradición que el orador romano no deja de construir con fines políticos. De ahí que el estudio del Cicerón imitador nos proporcione un extraordinario ejemplo de esa necesidad que toda comunidad humana tiene de construir un relato integrador recurriendo a la memoria de los textos y de los hechos que favorecen la convivencia y de aquellos que la imposibilitan. La memoria de los primeros nos debe incitar a la imitación; la de los segundos, al rechazo.This book describes the implications of the concept of imitatio in Cicero’s work as a starting point for the construction of models of excellence or virtue for politics. In this regard, an in-depth reading of De oratore, Brutus and Orator, texts in which imitation and the problems surrounding it are explicitly discussed, is carried out. In this way, two proposals that end up converging in Cicero’s work are analysed: on the one hand, a kind of rhetoric whose links with philosophy must be indissoluble (eloquentia philosophica, EPh). On the other, the role of imitatio of the great speakers of the past. To imitate a model is not about mechanically reproducing its fundamental features or, as we would say today, uncritically, but to use it as a reference to extract our own qualities from ourselves. Once trained in the imitation of the greatest speakers, it will be possible to develop a style that Cicero calls perfectus, that is, complete, and that it is called ‘distinctive style’: a style that allows us to be recognised as distinct speakers from those previously existing. The speaker who practices EPh is the politician. Hence, the question of the speaker’s exemplary nature is very pertinent, as well as our legitimate interest as citizens to know the models that serve him as a reference. Cicero’s programme of institutional renewal defined a politician model that had to live up to the traditional Roman vir bonus dicendi peritus capable of achieving a necessary consensus omnium bonorum. This idea is observed more closely with the study of Cicero’s anti-model of politician, which we find mainly in his political and forensic discourses, where he recreates an antagonist for his proposal, who dialectically confronts the orator perfectus. The use of the translation of texts from the past with the purpose of constructing a collective memory, and the system of government in which the orator perfectus should acquire the maximum prominence, are analysed in the last chapter of the book.esinfo:eu-repo/semantics/openAccessbookeloquentia philosophicaexemplumimitationmemoryorator perfectus