Deceptive Oratory: Cicero in Sinon’s Speech (Verg. Aen. 2. 57-198)

This paper draws attention to Sinon’s speech in the second Book of the Aeneid as a specimen of deceptive oratory, profoundly indebted to Cicero’s rhetorical and political manipulation of exilic topoi. It also points to the association of Sinon and Cicero as masters of dissimulatio in rhetorical theory in late antiquity. Although the comparison between Sinon and Cicero may have originated in anti-Ciceronian propaganda, Vergil’s depiction of Sinon as a ‘Ciceronian’ orator suggests that Cicero’s manipulative exploitation of the psychagogic power of the logos impacted on his reception from the Augustan period onwards and contributed to the establishment of his figure as a ‘sophist’ in the educational system of late antiquity.