Please note: In some of the following examples we have quoted only part of the speech in character. Some speeches in character are quite lengthy, and quotation of these long passages in their entirety is unnecessary for the purposes of this web page.
Cicero, De Finibus, 4.61. Cicero calls up the dead pupils of Plato:
What if those pupils of Plato were to come to life again, and their pupils again in succession, and were to address you in this fashion? “As we listened, Marcus Cato, to so devoted a student of philosophy, so just a man, so upright a judge, so scrupulous a witness as yourself, we marveled what reason could induce you to reject us for the Stoics….”
Cicero, De Inventione 1.100:
A thing is brought on the stage if in the enumeration the words are given to something of this sort, a law, a place, a city, or a monument; for example, “What if the laws could speak? Would they not make this complaint against you: ‘What more do you desire, gentlemen of the jury, when this and this has been made plain to you?’”
Cicero, In Catilinam 1.17-18. Cicero is addressing his enemy, Catiline:
As it is, your native land which is the mother of us all hates you and dreads you and has long since decided that you have been planning nothing but her destruction. Will you not respect her authority, bow to her judgment, or fear her power?: “For some years now you have been behind every crime, involved in every scandal….”
If my country, which means much more to me than my own life, if all Italy, if the whole commonwealth were to say this to me: “What are you doing, Marcus Tullius? Are you going to let this man, who is, as you had discovered, a public enemy; who will, as you see, be the leader in war; who, as you know, is awaited in the enemy’s camp as their general; who is the instigator of crime, the leader of the conspiracy…, are you going to let him leave not apparently dispatched by you from the city but let into it?
Nevertheless I will first inquire of herself, whether she prefers me to deal with her severely, solemnly, and in an old-fashioned manner, or mildly, gently, and in a modern way. If in the old grim mode and method, then I must call up from the dead one of those full-bearded men of old – not with a trim modern beardlet that she delights in, but a rough one, like those we see on old statues and busts – to rebuke the women and speak instead of me, so that she may not perhaps be angered with me. Let me therefore call up some member of this very family, above all Appius Claudius the Blind, for he will feel the least sorrow since he will not be able to see her. If he appears, this assuredly is how he will plead, this is how he will speak: “Woman, what hast thou to do with Caelius, with a stripling, with a stranger? Why hast thou been either so intimate with him as to lend him gold, or such an enemy as to fear poison?”
Cicero, Pro Cnaeo Plancio 12-13. Cicero is defending Plancio, who had won an election for the aedileship, against charges of illegally recruiting votes:
Let me view the matter now from the standpoint of the people itself, and argue with you through its mouth rather than my own. Could it meet and hold discourse with you now, it would say, “I have not preferred Plancius to you, Laterensis, but since there was no choice between you as good patriots, I chose to bestow my favours upon the man who importuned me for them, rather than upon the man who would not demean himself to the homage of a supple knee…. My eyes searched for you in vain,” it says, “when you were at Cyrene. I had rather that the benefit of your virtues should be at my disposal rather than at those of my allies, and, when I say you not, my sense of loss was bitter in proportion to the value to me of what I had lost….”
Lucretius, De Rerum Natura 3.931-51:
Besides, if nature should suddenly utter a voice, and thus take her turn to upbraid one of us: “What ails you so, O mortal, to indulge overmuch in sickly lamentations? Why do you groan aloud and weep at death…?” what have we to answer, but that nature urges against us a just charge and in her plea sets forth a true case?
Maximus of Tyre 4.2: Maximus is discussing the need for medicine to adapt to changes that occur in the human constitution over the generations:
“So do not think,” Asclepius would continue, “that my famous sons, Machaon and Podalirius, were any less skilled in the art of healing than those who have set their hands to it subsequently, and thought up their various clever cures. At the time my sons were working, the bodies that their arts had to treat were not degenerate and over-sophisticated and completely enervated….”
Plato, Crito 50a-b. Socrates, in a conversation with Crito, enters into hypothetical dialogue with the laws. The following passage is part of a much longer prosōpopoiia:
Consider it in this way. If, as I was on the point of running away (or whatever it should be called), the laws and the commonwealth should come to me and ask, “Tell me, Socrates, what have you in mind to do? Are you not intending by this thing you are trying to do, to destroy us, the laws, and the entire state, so far as in you lies? Or do you think that state can exist and not be overturned, in which the decisions reached by the courts have no force but are made invalid and annulled by private persons?”
Plato, Protagoras, 361 A-B. Plato recounts a discussion between Socrates and Protagoras, in which Socrates says:
Our discussion, in its present result, seems to me as though it accused and mocked us like some human person; if it were given a voice it would say, “What strange creatures you are, Socrates and Protagoras! You on the one hand, after having said at first that virtue cannot be taught, are now hot in opposition to yourself, endeavoring to prove that all things are knowledge – justice, temperance, and courage – which is the best way to make virtue appear teachable….”
Plutarch, Moralia vol. 13. 1048F:
At any rate, if the gods should change and wish to injure, maltreat, torment, and finally crush us, they could not make our condition worse than now it is, as Chrysippus declares that life admits no higher degree either of vice or of unhappiness, so that, if it should get the power of speech, it would recite the line of Heracles:
I’m now replete with woes, and there’s no room.
Rhetorica Ad Herennium 4.54.67. The following examples may represent sentiments such as those expressed “by tribunes of the plebs in the time of Marius”:
“But if this invincible city should not give utterance to her voice, would she not speak as follows? ‘I, city of the renown, who have been adorned with numerous trophies, enriched with unconditional triumphs, and made opulent by famous victories, am now vexed, O citizens, by your dissensions. Her whom Carthage with her wicked guile, Numantia with her tested strength, and Corinth with her polished culture, could not shake, do you now suffer to be trod upon and trample underfoot by worthless weaklings?’” Again: “But if that great Lucius Brutus should now come to life again and appear here before you, would he not use this language? ‘I banished kings; you bring in tyrants. I created liberty, which did not exist; what I created you do not wish to preserve….’”
Seneca, Epistle 95.10:
You are indeed mistaken if you think that philosophy offers you nothing but worldly assistance; her aspirations are loftier than that. She cries: “I investigate the whole universe, nor am I content, keeping myself within a moral dwelling, to give you favourable or unfavourable advice.”
Sources:
Apinses. Art of Rhetoric. In Two Greek Rhetorical Treatises From the Roman Empire: Introduction, Text, and Translation of the Arts of Rhetoric Attributed to Anonymous Seguerianus and to Apsines of Gadara. Edited by Mervin R. Dilts and George A. Kennedy. Leiden: Brill, 1997.
Babrius. Aespoic Fables of Babrius in Iambic Verse. In Babrius and Phaedrus. Translated by Ben Edwin Perry. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1965.
Cicero. De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum. Translated by H. Rackham. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1951.
________. De Inventione, De Optimo, Genere Oratorum, Topica. Translated by H. M. Hubbell. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1949.
________. In Catalinam I-IV, Pro Murena, Pro Sulla, Pro Flacco. Translated by C. Macdonald. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1977.
________. The Speeches of Cicero. Translated by R. Gardner. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1958.
________. The Speeches of Cicero. Translated by N. H. Watts. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1923.
Dio Chrysostom. Dio Chrysostom In Five Volumes, vol. IV. Translated by H. Lamar Crosby. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1946.
Epictetus. The Discourses as Reported by Arrian, the Manual, and Fragments. Translated by W. A. Oldfather. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1928.
Lucretius. De Rerum Natura. Translated by W. H. D. House. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1966,
Maximus of Tyre. The Philosophical Orations. Translated by M. B. Trapp. Oxford: Clarendon, 1997.
Philo. Philo In Ten Volumes, vol II. Translated by F. H. Colson and G. H. Whitaker. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1929.
Plato. Plato I: With an English Translation. Translated by Harold North Fowler. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1947.
Plato: Plato IV: With an English Translation. Translated by W. R. M. Lamb. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1924.
Plutarch. Plutarch’s Moralia In Seventeen Volumes, vol. XIII. Translated by Harold Cherniss. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1976.
Rhetorica Ad Herennium. Trans. Harry Caplan. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1989.
Seneca. Ad Lucilium Epistulae Morales In Three Volumes. Translated by Richard M. Gummere. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1953.