Gone are the days when Cicero’s treatises could be dismissed as lifeless copies of lost Greek sources. And here is a book that fully brings out the intellectual and literary adventure involved in reading and interpreting De oratore and De re publica, the two earliest, most innovative among them. It is, however, also a book of extremes. On the one hand, many passages receive illuminating literary interpretations, and all readers will learn from Zetzel’s insistence on probing the works with questions old and new. On the other, the overall interpretation of the two works is approached in puzzlingly different ways, and that of De oratore is highly doubtful and based on a problematic use of the evidence.