THE TWO most important accomplishments a man in the ancient world could possess were generally agreed to be skill in the military sphere and skill in speaking. In the Iliad young heroes like Achilles are mighty warriors, while older ones, such as Nestor, are wise and impressive speakers. The elderly Phoenix was sent to Troy with Achilles to make him ‘a speaker of words and a doer of deeds’ (Hom. Il. 9.443). In democratic Athens, generals took their orders from the assembly, which reached decisions after listening to the arguments on either side; Thucydides acknowledged the importance of oratory by including speeches in his history. At Rome, L.Metellus, the consul of 251 and 247 B.C., was praised in the funeral speech given for him by his son as having been ‘a first-class warrior, a brilliant orator and a very brave commander’ (Plin. Nat. 7.140). To any Roman, military ability was, of course, more important than oratory: even Cicero conceded that (Mur. 30; Brut. 256; cf. Off. 2.45–8). Nevertheless, a good general would have to know how to address his troops, and if he was not an orator he would also, like Marius, find himself disadvantaged in the political arena. Marius and Cicero, both novi homines (‘new men’) from the same town, rose to the consulship by their own ability, Marius as a general, Cicero as an orator. Marius, however, viewed all forms of culture with distaste, and Cicero had no taste for soldiering. Caesar, by contrast, was an expert in both fields; but it was his oratory which first brought him to public notice (Plut. Caes. 3–5).
The political system at Rome under the republic was highly conducive to the practice of deliberative oratory.1 Views on political questions were expressed orally by members of a body of elders, the senate, who remained senators for life; the consensus once agreed would be acted upon by magistrates who had been elected to serve for a year only and would not normally be re-elected. Unlike in modern political assemblies, senators had not necessarily decided in advance which way they would vote, and so the debates were real: powerful speakers, regardless of their position in the hierarchy, had a chance of influencing the outcome. On 5 December 63 B.C., for instance, the senate debated what should be done with the five captured Catilinarian conspirators. Sixteen senators, asked for their opinion (sententia) in order of seniority, declared themselves in favour of execution. Then Caesar, who was praetor designate, proposed life imprisonment, and all the previous speakers but one changed their minds and agreed with him. Finally Cato, who as tribune designate was only a junior member of the senate, restated the case for execution and carried the day.2 (The speeches of Caesar and Cato are preserved in a version by Sallust (Cat. 51–2), and Cicero’s speech, which came after Caesar’s but before Cato’s, was published in 60 B.C. as the Fourth Catilinarian.) Deliberative oratory, besides being employed in the senate, was also used in the popular assemblies, when legislation was put before the people, for example, or when a magistrate wished to address the people on some other topic of importance. In the late republic there were many ‘popular’ politicians (populares), such as C.Gracchus and P.Clodius, who made speeches in which they advocated policies with which the senate as a whole was not in sympathy, but which were likely to appeal to the people.
Forensic oratory too flourished under the republic. Whereas in Greece defendants pleaded their own cases, employing a speech-writer (logographos) if necessary, at Rome they turned for help to someone more eloquent than themselves to plead on their behalf. The lex Cincia de donis et muneribus (204 B.C.) forbade payment of fees to advocates, so advocates (patroni) tended to be repaid instead with political support: Cicero’s activity in the courts, together with his speeches to the people, enabled him to attain each office in the cursus honorum (career ladder through the magistracies) at the earliest permitted age. As the speaker Maternus is made to say in Tacitus’ Dialogus (a central text for the understanding of the relation between oratory and its political context),
The more able a man was at speaking, the greater the ease with which he attained to high office and the greater his pre-eminence among his colleagues in office; he obtained more influence with the powerful, carried more weight with the senate, possessed a higher reputation with the people.
(Tac. Dial. 36.4)3
Criminal prosecutions were always undertaken by private individuals, since there was no state prosecutor, and prominent senators were prosecuted not because they had committed a crime (although of course they often had), but because their accuser was an enemy who wanted them removed from political life. Enmities (inimicitiae) could be long-lasting: Tacitus talks of ‘feuds handed down like family heirlooms’ (Dial. 36.3). Trials were great public events, held in the open air in the forum (hence ‘forensic’ oratory). Large crowds turned out to see the spectacle: the praetor and the jury sitting up on the tribunal, the celebrated orators making their speeches, the aristocratic defendant dressed in mourning and the benches packed with his family, advisers (advocati) and supporters. ‘What an orator needs is noise and applause’, says Tacitus,
a theatre for his performance: the old orators had all that every day. An audience large (and well-bred too) packed the forum; clients, fellow tribesmen, municipal delegations, a good proportion of the population of Italy came to support defendants—for in many cases the Roman people believed that what was decided mattered to them. It is well known that when Gaius Cornelius, Marcus Scaurus, Titus Milo, Lucius Bestia, and Publius Vatinius were prosecuted and defended the whole state came running to listen.
(Dial. 39.4–5)
For the audience, a trial was a piece of theatre (Cic. Brut. 290), and the orators were well aware of this dimension: they played to the gallery with direct appeals to the ring of onlookers (corona) surrounding the court, and Cicero’s pro Caelio (56 B.C.) consciously plays on characteristic elements of the comic stage.4 Forensic oratory therefore had a cultural role as well as a political role. Successful speeches were written up and circulated after the trial not just (or even mainly) as vehicles for promoting the orator’s political viewpoint, but as oratorical models for imitation and enjoyment.
Under the empire oratory lost most of its political importance, at least at the higher levels of politics. There was not much scope for deliberative oratory, except perhaps on the part of the emperor, who was required to recommend his decisions to the senate; Nero was said to have been the first emperor to make a speech which he had not composed himself (Tac. Ann. 13.3). Forensic oratory also suffered. With the emperor keeping a watchful eye over the conduct of magistrates, major criminal trials (now held before the senate or the emperor himself) became rare events. Advocates therefore had to content themselves with civil cases in the centumviral court, where restrictions had been placed on the length of speeches and the number of pleaders. The only criminal trials which were political were those for treason (maiestas), a charge which was now taken to mean conspiracy against the emperor: the law of maiestas provided opportunities for unscrupulous informers (delatores) to further their careers and enrich themselves at the expense of their high-ranking victims. For a time the delatores brought oratory into disrepute, by failing to satisfy at least the first half of Cato’s definition (Fil. 14, = 80.1 Jordan orator est…vir bonus dicendi peritus, ‘an orator is an honest man skilled in speaking’).5 Except during the reigns of Tiberius and Domitian, however, trials for maiestas were on the whole relatively rare, and the situation otherwise was as Tacitus’ Maternus describes it:
What need of long speeches in the senate? Our great men swiftly reach agreement. What need of constant harangues to the people? The deliberations of state are not left to the ignorant many—they are the duty of one man, the wisest. What need of prosecutions? Crime is rare and trivial. What need of long and unpopular defences? The clemency of the judge meets the defendants half way.
(Dial. 41.4)
Officially, great oratory and peace were incompatible, and the reduced scope for eloquence was a small price to pay for order and stable government (the view expressed by Maternus). Unofficially, however, there may have been people, very possibly including Tacitus, who would have concurred with the view of Cicero’s Crassus: ‘This [i.e. oratory] is the one art which among every free people, and most especially in states that are peaceful and settled, has always flourished more than others, and always reigned supreme’ (de Orat. 1.30). At the local level, however, oratory did continue to be a valuable weapon: in courts and assemblies throughout the empire, fortunes and reputations were won and lost.
Epideictic oratory, meanwhile, came into its own under the empire. In republican times the Romans had seen it as a Greek practice for which they had little use. The Roman funeral laudatio (eulogy) technically belonged to the epideictic branch of oratory, but that was an ancient genre with its own conventions, which the conservative Romans were reluctant to discard. Once the republican system had given way to one-man rule, however, a suitable subject for panegyric was always to hand in the person of the emperor. The younger Pliny’s Panegyricus (A.D 100, afterwards revised), a eulogy of the emperor Trajan, became the most famous example of the type, partly because Trajan was considered by posterity to have genuinely deserved his title optimus princeps (‘best of emperors’). In epideictic oratory, persuasion is a much less important aim than it is in deliberative or forensic. The epideictic orator may sometimes wish to persuade his subject to live up to the praises heaped on him, or else he may hope to influence future holders of his subject’s post. But otherwise his aim is not to persuade. Instead, he will seek to assure his subject of his loyalty, to place his subject in his debt and to display his eloquence before a distinguished audience.
As a cultural phenomenon, oratory continued to grow during this period. The crowds which under the republic had flocked to the forum now packed the declamation halls, where popular rhetoricians demonstrated the mastery of their art. The analogy with the theatre still applied: the subject matter of declamation, which was made up of tyrants, pirates, stepmothers and other stock characters, could have been taken straight from the comic poets. Rhetoric, the theoretical basis of oratory, was confirmed as the major element in post-elementary education: once Roman boys had learned the three R’s, they hurried off to the rhetorical schools to be taught to speak and to argue. The influence of rhetoric duly extended not just to oratory but to poetry, history, philosophy and every literary genre. Already in the first century A.D. oratory had changed from being primarily a political weapon to being the principal ingredient in Roman education and cultural life, a position it held until the end of antiquity.
The topic which is the subject of this book is therefore one which is central to Roman politics, culture and society. The book opens with an account of the origin and development of rhetoric in Greece from the fifth to the first centuries B.C. (Ch. I): by the time it was adopted by the Romans in the mid-second century, rhetoric was already a discipline with a long history, and was firmly established as one of the main features of Hellenistic culture. Chapter II shows how rhetoric became established at Rome. The Romans seized on rhetoric (Cic. de Orat. 1.14), as on other Greek inventions, because they saw how it could be useful to them, and at the beginning of the first century B.C. Roman rhetoricians, teaching in Latin, found a ready market for their services. The third chapter gives a brief outline of the essential features of rhetorical theory: the three types of oratory (forensic or judicial, deliberative and epideictic), the five functions of the orator or ‘parts of rhetoric’ (invention, arrangement, style, memory6 and delivery), the six parts of a speech (opening, statement of facts, partition or division, proof, refutation and conclusion or peroration), the four issues (conjecture, definition, quality and objection), the three styles (grand, middle and plain) and so on. Chapter IV attempts to assess how far this system influenced Roman oratorical practice in the century before Cicero. The lack of evidence makes certainty impossible, but it would seem that, while the Greek tradition did have an increasing influence on the early Roman orators, the native Roman tradition (to which, as we have seen, the funeral laudatio belonged) also remained strong, and it is this which is largely responsible for such characteristic elements of Roman oratory as pathos and humour.
The three following chapters are devoted to Cicero. Chapter V examines his views on rhetoric as expressed in his treatises: he was aware that the rules of rhetoric were only of limited value in real-life situations, and he insisted that the orator should have a broad general education including, for example, law and philosophy. The next two chapters compare his oratorical practice first with traditional rhetorical theory (Ch. VI), and then with his own views (Ch. VII).7 Cicero did not adhere strictly to the rules of rhetoric, and he was increasingly prepared to depart from them as the situation required (pro Milone (52 B.C.) is the exception); the correspondence with the views expressed in his treatises is naturally closer, since the treatises were written in the light of his own experience. In recent years scholars have paid more attention to the aspects of Ciceronian oratory where there is little connection with traditional rhetorical theory than to the areas where the influence of rhetoric is strong: thus there have been studies of, for example, Cicero’s argumentative strategies, his manipulation of ethos or character (his own, his opponent’s and, in forensic speeches, his client’s) and his exploitation of place or ambience.8 Cicero knew and made use of rhetorical theory, but he also excelled in those aspects of oratory to which theory had made little contribution.
Chapters VIII and IX deal with, respectively, declamation in the early empire and the oratory of this period (most of which is lost). Declamation was, and is, easy to criticise, for the improbability of its themes, its remoteness from real life and its indifference to the procedures and customs of the law courts. Under a poor teacher (and there were probably many of these), declamation was no doubt a pointless activity. With a good teacher, however, it could be useful as an intellectual training for the forum or the senate-house, and it was in any case a highly popular cultural institution which attracted practitioners of all ages. It has been pointed out that the unreality of the declamation themes would in fact have been an advantage from an educational point of view, allowing students to develop general skills of argument without being hampered by the many particular points of detail inherent in actual laws; a more specific training in law, acquired at a law school or simply by attending at the courts, followed later.9 Declamation is in some ways comparable to a modern university education in the arts: the subject studied is not usually closely related to the future occupation of the student, but precisely for that reason it constitutes a general training of considerable value, while also being intrinsically interesting and enjoyable on account of its cultural significance. Quintilian, who was concerned with rhetoric both as an academic discipline (Ch. X) and as an educational tool (Ch. XI), considered declamation a useful training, but wanted to make it more vocational, and nearer to the actual practice of the courts. He was not interested, as Cicero was, in promoting a wide general knowledge (at least at an advanced level) for aspiring orators. The Minor (or Lesser) Declamations, which show Quintilian’s influence, give an idea of what he had in mind, by the practical way in which the themes are treated.
The survey is completed by chapters on the age of the Antonines (Ch. XII), the ‘minor’ rhetoricians of the later Roman empire (Ch. XIII) and the church fathers (Ch. XIV); the story ends with the death of Ennodius in 521. During these centuries rhetoric retained its usefulness (it provided a route into the civil service) and its popularity. Declamation held its place, and epideictic attained a new prominence. From the second century, however, intellectual culture was more exclusively Greek, the leading rhetoricians including men such as Hermogenes, who wrote treatises on style and on issue-theory, and Menander Rhetor, who wrote on epideictic.10 It may seem strange to us that many of the church fathers, such as St Augustine, began their careers as rhetoricians; but, given the status of rhetoric in the Roman empire, one could hardly be counted an educated man unless one had acquired a knowledge of rhetoric.
The final chapter of the book (Ch. XV) gives Professor Clarke’s personal view of the value of rhetoric. It is a view which will strike many readers as unduly harsh, and it would perhaps be more reasonable to put the emphasis not so much on the shortcomings of rhetoric as on its merits: for six centuries it delighted the masses and served to equip the educated élite with the power of thinking logically and speaking with clarity and elegance. One problem is that a great many rhetorical treatises have survived but very few speeches, besides those of Cicero. With more speeches, rhetoric and oratory would be set in their proper relation. It would be instructive, also, to have some specimens of the earliest Roman oratory. If we possessed, for example, the speech in which App. Claudius Caecus opposed peace with Pyrrhus in 280 B.C. (Cic. Brut. 61), we could not but be struck by the contrast with Cicero. To a large extent, the difference between the two would be accounted for by the arrival of rhetoric at Rome in the years which separated them. The first edition of Professor Clarke’s Rhetoric at Rome was published in 1953, and a second edition appeared in 1966. Since then, the book has held its place as the best short introduction to the subject,11 and it remains a work which deserves to be read by every classical sixth-former and undergraduate. For this edition, the reviser, besides supplying this new introduction, has introduced the following changes: a bibliography has been provided for the first time; the sources of the quotations at the head of each chapter have been identified; misprints in the main text have been corrected; the notes have been corrected and rearranged to bring them into line with modern conventions, with quotations in Greek eliminated, the style of reference to ancient works updated and full bibliographical information provided for the first time (the substance of the notes, however, has not been altered); and the index has been corrected and harmonised with the present edition. In preparing this revision, it has been a privilege to assist in making Professor Clarke’s classic study available to a new generation of readers.12
D.H.B.
1995
1 For the three types of oratory, see p.
2 On the course of the debate see E.D.Rawson, Cicero: a Portrait (London, 1975), 82–5; A.Drummond, Law, Politics and Power: Sallust and the Execution of the Catilinarian Conspirators (Historia Einzelschriften 93; Stuttgart, 1995), 23–7.
3 Professor Clarke’s translation (p. 101). The other passages from Tacitus’ Dialogus cited below are taken from the translation by M. Winterbottom in D.A.Russell and M.Winterbottom, Ancient Literary Criticism (Oxford, 1972), 432–59.
4 See K.A.Geffcken, Comedy in the pro Caelio (Leiden, 1973).
5 Cf. Herennius Senecio ap. Plin. Ep. 4.7.5 orator est vir malus dicendi imperitus (‘the orator is a dishonest man unskilled in speaking’), referring to the delator M.Aquillius Regulus.
6 Professor Clarke passes over memory (p. 35). An orator who wished to memorise a speech would do so by associating each word or topic of it in his mind with some physical object. He would then visualise a route with which he was familiar, and mentally place the images (imagines) that he had formed of each object at strategic points (loci) in order along the route. Thus, when he came to give his speech, he would retrace the route in his mind, and the images, and hence the words or topics to be used, would present themselves to his mind in the correct order. After giving the speech, he would erase the images from his mind, but retain the memory of the route and its strategic points for use with his next speech. This system may seem incredible, but it is in fact the one used today by World Memory Champion Dominic O’Brien: ‘My system is based on a series of mental landscapes or routes. When I remember 52 playing cards, I give each one an individual character—the two of diamonds, for example, is a very tall person—and then place the characters along a route I know well. They stay there for life or until I rub them off and put something else in their place…. When I memorised 35 packs of cards for my world record I had to have 35 individual routes in my head…I am sure anyone can do what I have done. My brain is no different from anyone else’s’ (Sunday Times Magazine (29 November 1992), 78). See further H.Blum, Die antike Mnemotechnik (Spudasmata 15; Hildesheim, 1969); D.O’Brien, How to Develop a Perfect Memory (London, 1993). The ancient system of memorisation may be relevant to the debate about the publication of speeches: if an orator really did memorise his speech word-for-word, then he would have been able to write it down afterwards with total accuracy.
7 Professor Clarke’s excellent summary of the Atticist controversy in Ch. VII (pp. 80– 3) should, however, be qualified on one point. When Cicero claims that the Atticists model themselves on Lysias to the exclusion of more notable Attic orators such as Demosthenes he misrepresents their position: Demosthenes was regarded by all parties as the greatest of the Greek orators, but Cicero wished to characterise the Atticists as devotees of Lysias in order that he himself, and not his Atticist opponents, might be considered Demosthenes’ Roman counterpart.
On p. 83 Professor Clarke passes over the important topic of prose rhythm. Hellenistic Greek orators (whose speeches are lost) and the Roman orators who followed in this tradition (Hortensius and Cicero, for example, but not the Atticists) wrote prose in which careful attention was given to the rhythm of the words at the ends of the ‘cola’ (the shorter units which make up a sentence) and particularly those at the ends of entire periods. Scholars have counted and classified the rhythmical patterns (‘clausulae’) which Cicero used: the three most common have been shown to be the cretic-spondee (or cretic-trochee), cretic-double-trochee (or molossus-double-trochee) and double-cretic (or molossus-cretic), together with variations on those rhythms (the frequencies of these clausulae at the major sense-breaks have been calculated as 32.4 per cent, 30.1 per cent and 24.4 per cent respectively). The most common clausulae are essentially those which avoid the rhythms of dactylic verse (the ‘hexameter ending’ rhythm at 0.6 per cent is especially avoided). The end of a colon or period was a prominent point within the orator’s flow of speech, and he wished to make it sound measured and distinctive. We know that audiences did notice and even applaud the effects which were created (Cic. Orat. 168, 213–14), and if modern readers are to attempt to appreciate Latin prose as the Romans did they too must seek to develop an ear for the various rhythms. For the basic facts on Cicero’s prose rhythm see D.H.Berry, Cicero: Pro P. Sulla Oratio (Cambridge, 1996), 49–54, with bibliography at 49 n. 247; more generally, see W.H.Shewring and K.J.Dover in N.G.L.Hammond and H.H. Scullard (eds), The Oxford Classical Dictionary2 (Oxford, 1970), s.v. ‘Prose-rhythm’.
8 See the items in the bibliography by Stroh and Classen (strategy), May (ethos) and Vasaly (place).
9 See M.Winterbottom in B.Vickers (ed.), Rhetoric Revalued (Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies 19, New York, 1982), 59–70.
10 These works have all been recently translated (the first of the two treatises attributed to Menander is unlikely to be his): see C.W.Wooten, Hermogenes’ On Types of Style (Chapel Hill and London, 1987); M.Heath, Hermogenes: On Issues (Oxford, 1995); D.A.Russell and N.G.Wilson, Menander Rhetor (Oxford, 1981). Professor Clarke does not cover the Greek rhetoricians; for a brief account see G.A.Kennedy, The Art of Rhetoric in the Roman World, 300 B.C.–A.D. 300 (Princeton, 1972), 614–41.
11 The books of G.A.Kennedy (see bibliography) will also be found useful, but are of considerably greater length. On the important subject, beyond the scope of the present work, of the influence of rhetoric on Latin literature, see esp. Kennedy, op. cit. (n. 10), 378–427 (on Augustan literature); S.F.Bonner, Roman Declamation in the Late Republic and Early Empire (Liverpool, 1949), 149–67 (on Ovid, Velleius and Seneca’s tragedies); id., AJP 87 (1966), 257–89 (on Lucan).
12 I am grateful to my colleague Dr Malcolm Heath for commenting on a draft of this introduction, identifying three of the quotations at the start of the chapters and providing technological help.