Piso the Rambler: Travelling and Tracking in Cicero’s Rhetoric Discourse

Travelling was not less popular in ancient times than nowadays. People would set out for distant lands with various purposes: to trade, to do business, to gain information, to further develop science, to fight a battle, to visit sacred sites, and last but not least, they travelled with political-administrative purposes. Those who returned from these voyages often shared their exotic experiences; sometimes they even put them down on paper (like Herodotus, Pausanias, Caesar, etc.]. When somebody’s journey or delegation had not been very successful, they could still cosmeticize the story when telling it in the City, in case there had not been any witnesses to tell otherwise. On the other hand, such cases could easily be exploited by the prosecutor in critical situations such as a trial: Cicero used this exact method in his attack against Piso.