The Circulation and Delivery of Cicero's Post Reditum ad Populum

This article calls into question recent suggestions that Cicero circulated but failed to deliver the Post reditum ad populum. Cicero's own habits, late-Republican practices of publication, and the political necessities of the moment make such claims unlikely. The various contradictions in the surviving oration are easily resolved if we posit an early circulation, that is, of a pre-delivery version of the speech. Suspected omissions in Cicero's account of the delivery of the speech are shown to be illusory. The speech of thanks to the people was delivered, as Cicero himself tells us, on 7 September 57 B.C.E.