Pro Rabirio Postumo Sparknotes

Cicero also makes use of storytelling, just as a tragedian would, in Pro Rabirio Postumo, and that would have held the audience’s rapt attention. The storytelling would have interacted with the emotions that Cicero had cultivated, and would have even provided Cicero with more emotions from the crowd that he could use to his advantage. In his first bout of storytelling, Cicero compares Postumus to Scipio and other famous Roman men in order to show that “fall[ing] through imprudence” was just a symptom of human nature and that punishing someone who has already fallen was something that should not be done whatsoever. As mentioned, the storytelling, along with the comparison to fallen heroes, brings about emotions in the crowd, to a point that some may even have compared Postumus to one of those heroes, or may have told the judges that if even Scipio did it , then it must indeed be just a portion of human nature.
Cicero utilizes the storytelling even more in the next section by talking of Postumus’s father who was both kind and great, as well as someone who worked within the government’s military as a chief of the equestrian order . People who may have known the man in question, Caius Currius, or may have heard of him would have seen Postumus as someone who was the seed of this kind and great man and thought that Postumus might not have been so terrible after all. In further, yet a different storytelling move, Cicero also makes use of damaging the plaintiff’s, Ptolemaeus of Alexandria, reputation in a time period when there was not much of a goodwill towards the Alexandrian rulers. Cicero tells the court that Ptolemaeus was exiled from Alexandria due to “treachery” and found himself in Rome where Postumus lent him money, with which Ptolemaeus used towards “scandalous”