Through the voice of Crassus, Cicero presents us with one vision of the ideal orator/statesman, clearly articulating a connection between the orator’s virtue and the stability of the state. The simple idea here is that citizens’ virtue, as upheld in good public discourse, can maintain a virtuous democracy, or, to borrow Cicero’s terms: “the wise control of the complete orator is that which chiefly upholds not only his own dignity, but the safety of countless individuals and of the entire state” (p. 294). Based on Crassus’s discussion of what the good orator should know, study, and be able to do, what do you think he believes most important to rhetorical virtue? Who is the good orator, and how did s/he get to be that way?