II

RHETORIC AT ROME UNDER THE REPUBLIC

Post autem auditis oratoribus Graecis cognitisque eorum litteris adhibitisque doctoribus incredibili quodam nostri homines dicendi studio flagraverunt.

Cicero, de Oratore 1.14

ACCORDING TO Suetonius, the introduction of rhetoric to Rome was similar to that of grammar, which after being unhonoured and indeed unknown at first, had made a humble start in the first half of the second century B.C.¹ At that period Rome’s horizon was expanding. Her own undeveloped culture was coming into rapidly closer contact with the sophisticated civilisation of Greece. Romans were becoming familiar with the Greek-speaking lands of the Eastern Mediterranean, and Greek teachers were beginning to find their way to Rome. Among them were the rhetoricians.

They found a fruitful field for their activities. In the Roman republic great rewards were offered to the successful speaker, and useless though much of Greek learning might seem to the practical Roman, rhetoric at least could claim to open the way to success. The clever Greeks, who had reduced the art of speaking to a system, foresaw that in this active and powerful republic there would be a market for their wares. And they were right. As Cicero said: ‘At first our countrymen knew nothing of art and did not realise that there was any value in practice or that there were any rules or system, but they achieved such success as could be attained by talent and reflection. Afterwards however, when they had listened to Greek orators, become acquainted with Greek literature and come into contact with Greek teachers, there was a remarkable burst of enthusiasm among our countrymen for the study of the art of speaking.’²

But the story was not quite as straightforward as Cicero suggests. The rhetoricians did not establish themselves at Rome without difficulty. In the year 161 B.C. the senate empowered the praetor Marcus Pomponius to expel both philosophers and rhetoricians.³ This decree is clear evidence of opposition if not to rhetoric, at least to the Greeks who taught it. It falls within the lifetime of that vigorous opponent of Greek influences, Cato the Censor, and it is possible that his influence may have been in some degree responsible for it. For though he was an able orator himself, he may well have viewed with suspicion the subtle professionalism of the Greek rhetorician. His two recorded remarks on oratory, the definition of the orator as vir bonus dicendi peritus and the precept rem tene, verba sequentur, reveal a sturdy simplicity and a probably conscious opposition to all that was involved in the Greek .⁴

Cato was the first Roman to write on oratory,⁵ but he did not become the founder of a tradition. The Greeks were to conquer here as elsewhere, and Roman rhetoric was to become little more than an adaptation of Greek rhetoric. For the Greeks could not be kept out. They were expelled in 161 B.C., but must soon have returned, though perhaps at first only as tutors in private houses and not as public teachers. It is recorded that rhetoricians were among the numerous Greek teachers employed to train the sons of Aemilius Paulus, while Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus both had Greek masters of rhetoric, the former Diophanes of Mitylene, the most eloquent Greek of his day, and the latter Menelaus of Marathus.⁶

What we know of the oratory of the latter part of the second century suggests that rhetoric exercised an increasing influence, and it must have been firmly established in Rome by the end of the century.⁷ But it was still mainly, perhaps even wholly, in the hands of Greeks. Early in the first century however there was a new development.⁸ In the year 92 B.C. the censors Licinius Crassus and Domitius Ahenobarbus issued an edict to the following effect: ‘It has been reported to us that there are men who have introduced a new kind of teaching, and that the youth are going to their schools; that these men have assumed the name of Latin rhetoricians; and that young men spend whole days in idleness with them. Our forefathers laid down what they wished their children to learn and what schools they were to frequent. These innovations, which run counter to the customs and traditions of our forefathers, do not please us, nor do we think them right. Wherefore we deem it proper to make it clear to those who hold the schools and those who frequent them that we do not approve.’⁹

Who were these Latin rhetoricians and why did they incur the censors’ displeasure? We know the name of at least one of them, for Cicero recorded in a letter that when he was a boy ‘one Plotius’ started to teach rhetoric in Latin. Crowds flocked to his classes, and Cicero wanted to go too, but he was prevented from doing so by some unnamed advisers, who considered that a better training could be provided in Greek.¹⁰ The Plotius to whom Cicero refers was L.Plotius Gallus, a rhetorician of some note, who survived to provide Sempronius Atratinus with a speech in his action against Caelius in 56 B.C.¹¹

Some further light on the affair of the Latin rhetoricians is provided by Cicero’s De Oratore, for the Crassus who was jointly responsible for the edict of 92 B.C. was none other than the famous orator who takes the leading part in the dialogue,¹² and Cicero, who had made the dramatic date of the dialogue a year after the attempted suppression of the Latin rhetoricians, felt it necessary to make Crassus offer an apology for his action. ‘It was not,’ he is made to say, ‘that I did not want the wits of the young to be sharpened; on the contrary, I did not want their wits to be blunted, while their impudence was strengthened.’ The Greek teachers had some learning and culture, whereas these new Latin teachers were qualified to teach nothing but impudence. He hoped that the time would come when Latin teachers would be adequate, but it was not yet.¹³

So Crassus explains his action, on purely educational grounds. It may be that this is not the whole truth, and that political motives played some part in the affair. At that time Greek culture was the mark of the optimates, to whom Crassus adhered; Plotius Gallus was a supporter of Marius, and Marius was notoriously lacking in Greek culture.¹⁴ He and the Latin rhetoricians were perhaps consciously opposed to the aristocratic circle who prided themselves on their knowledge of Greek; Crassus and Ahenobarbus sensed a dangerous atmosphere in the school and became alarmed at the prospect of the instrument of persuasion being put into the hands of demagogues through the medium of popular teaching in Latin. This reconstruction of the background of the censors’ decree has found favour with a number of modern scholars.¹⁵ It may be right; but Cicero gives no hint of political motives, and perhaps it is vain to try to be wiser than he.¹⁶

Whatever the cause of the attempted suppression of the new schools, it seems to have had little effect. Rhetorical teaching in Latin evidently continued in the years immediately following. The two earliest extant Latin treatises on rhetoric, that addressed to Herennius and Cicero’s De Inventione, date from only a few years after the censors’ edict, and it is evident that something of a tradition of Latin teaching lies behind them. Of the two writers Cicero was certainly, and the author of Ad Herennium possibly, young and inexperienced;¹⁷ yet both move with ease in the complications of an elaborate technical terminology. This terminology appears to have been in the main already familiar when they wrote.¹⁸ Moreover both use examples from Roman history and literature, examples which in many cases have all the appearance of being already established by school tradition. It seems highly probable that the teaching of rhetoric in Latin had continued in the years between 92 B.C. and the two treatises.

In the creation of the tradition of Latin rhetoric some part may have been played by one who would hardly have wished to be classed with the rhetoricians. Next after Cato, according to Quintilian, among Roman writers on rhetoric was the famous orator Antonius, a contemporary of Crassus and like him a protagonist in De Oratore.¹⁹ His book on oratory, written at some time before 91 B.C., was incomplete, and in Cicero’s opinion a meagre affair.²⁰ In De Oratore Antonius claims that it was based not on school learning but on experience,²¹ but Quintilian records an extract which shows some acquaintance with the scholastic doctrine. All speeches, said Antonius, arose from one of three issues: whether a thing had been done or not done; whether it was lawful or unlawful; and whether it was good or bad.²² Antonius is concerning himself with the status or constitutio causae. Evidently the influence of Hermagoras was beginning to make itself felt.²³

Of the two works mentioned above, the treatise addressed to Herennius and De Inventione, neither can be dated exactly. Internal evidence points to a date between 86 and 82 for Ad Herennium,²⁴ while De Inventione dates from when Cicero was a puer or adulescentulus.²⁵ This could not be later than 81, when he delivered his first speech at the age of twenty-five, and might be considerably earlier; 87 or 86, when he was nineteen or twenty, seems as likely a date as any. Scrutiny of the resemblances and differences between the two treatises has failed to produce any general agreement as to their relationship one to another.²⁶

No more need here be said of De Inventione than that it shows the elaboration of the scholastic rhetoric by now established at Rome and the thoroughness with which a gifted and zealous student had mastered it. The treatise Ad Herennium is a more interesting production. Its author is unknown, for it has long since ceased to be regarded as the work of Cicero, and the plausible attribution to Cornificius based on references in Quintilian has not won general acceptance.²⁷ Whoever he was, the author has a high opinion of himself; at the outset he expresses a desire to devote himself to philosophy in preference to his present task,²⁸ but he has no doubts about his competence. In one place there is a rather naïve reference to noster doctor which almost suggests a schoolboy,²⁹ but whatever his age, it was no bungler who compiled this brisk handbook, which, after remaining unknown in the ancient world (unless it is the treatise by Cornificius known to Quintilian), survived to attain great popularity in the Middle Ages.

The recipient of the treatise, Gaius Herennius, cannot be identified, but we know that the gens Herennia was connected with Marius,³⁰ and from this we may assume Marian sympathies in both author and recipient. If therefore it is correct to associate the Latin rhetoricians with the Marian party, Ad Herennium may well derive from their school.³¹ The character of the treatise itself bears out this surmise. It shows signs of sympathy with the populares,³² and its author’s confident tone and concentration on simplicity and clarity in preference to scholarly subtlety remind us of the charges of impudence and lack of culture brought by Crassus against the Latin rhetoricians. Though he is entirely dependent on Greek theory the writer does not acknowledge his debt, and in his opening paragraph allows himself a scornful reference to the inanis arrogantia of the Greeks, who thought up irrelevances through fear of seeming ignorant and in order to make the whole thing more difficult.³³

If then the tradition of the Latin rhetoricians survives in Ad Herennium, we can get from this work some idea of what the innovation of Plotius Gallus was and what it was not. It was an attempt to popularise rhetoric and adapt it to Roman needs by teaching it in Latin, by dispensing with some of the complications of Greek theory and by using illustrations from Roman history and literature. It was not the invention of a new system. The Romans could never get away from the Greek . They continued to abuse the Greek rhetoricians—and to use them.

Let us now attempt to reconstruct the rhetorical education of the earlier part of the first century B.C., the period when Cicero and his contemporaries were learning the art of oratory. It must be said at the outset that at this time there was nothing in the nature of a regular educational system, with an orderly progression from one stage to another, such as we find recommended by Quintilian. The professions of grammaticus and rhetor were not at first clearly distinguished at Rome, and the early grammatici also taught rhetoric. Moreover different teachers used different methods and each individual teacher varied his methods.³⁴ But at some stage in his career the student had to master the elaborate formal system of rhetoric developed by the Greeks, with its fivefold division into inventio, dispositio, elocutio, memoria and actio, and its numerous definitions, divisions and subdivisions. This was the indispensable foundation, the discipline that all had to undergo, much like Latin grammar in the old grammar school education of this country. The system was embodied in textbooks and was also the subject of oral exposition in lectures.³⁵ If we can generalise from the method followed by Cicero in teaching his son, the pupil was expected to memorise the system and might be subjected to a thorough catechism on it.³⁶

In addition to learning formal rhetoric the student engaged in various exercises to promote fluency in self-expression. Suetonius, writing apparently of the Republican period, gives a list of exercises in use: chriae, fables, narrations, translations from Greek, praise and blame of famous men, theses, refutation and confirmation of legendary stories.³⁷ These, with the exception of translation, were the already referred to. The general idea behind them was to teach one to say the same thing in a number of different ways. The most elementary exercise was the ‘declension’ of a chria. In this exercise a sentence recording some memorable saying was developed so as to illustrate the use of the various cases; for example, one would begin with M. Porcius Cato dixit litterarum radices amaras esse fructus iucundiores, go on to the genitive M. Porci Catonis dictum fertur litterarum radices amaras esse fructus iucundiores, and proceed through all the cases, singular and plural.³⁸ So too fables were recounted in a variety of forms, and narratives given first in précis form, then at length. In some of the exercises it was not forgotten that the pupil was training to be an orator, and he learned to argue for and against: to praise famous men and to blame them, to commend some common practice and to depreciate it (thesis), to confirm a legend and to refute it.³⁹

An interesting glimpse of the methods of one Republican teacher is provided by a passage in Ad Herennium. The author is dealing with what he calls expolitio, that is, the developing of a theme in a number of different ways. His example is: ‘The wise man will shun no danger on behalf of the state.’⁴⁰ This can be put in different words, thus: ‘No danger is so great that the wise man thinks it should be shunned on behalf of the state. When it is a question of the perpetual safety of the state he who is inspired by sound reason will surely hold that no risks in life should be avoided on behalf of the prosperity of the state, and so firmly will he hold to that opinion that he will eagerly face the severest conflicts in life on behalf of his country.’ Another way of varying is by the introduction of an imaginary conversation; ‘The wise man will hold that every danger should be undertaken on behalf of the state. He will often say to himself: “I am not born for myself alone, but also, and even more, for my fatherland. My life is owed to fate, but let me pay the debt for the safety of my country. My country nourished me; it brought me in safety and honour to my present age; it nurtured me with good laws, excellent traditions and honourable upbringing. What adequate repayment can I make to the source of all these blessings?” The wise man will often speak thus to himself, and he will himself shun no danger on behalf of the state.’ A further method of variation is by introducing an emotional heightening: ‘Who is there whose thoughts are so lowly, whose mind is so hemmed in by the narrow bounds of envy, that he does not account that man as wisest and most worthy of praise, who on behalf of the safety of his fatherland, the security of his city and the prosperity of his state readily undertakes and willingly submits to dangers however great and terrible? For my part I cannot praise such a man as worthily as I would wish to; and I am sure that it is the same with all of you.’

There follows an example, too long to quote, of a more elaborate way of developing the same theme. First it is given in simple form, with a reason added; then two variants follow, either with or without reasons; next it is expressed in negative form (‘It is wrong not to give your life for your country.’); then it is supported by a simile and an example. Finally we end with a peroration.⁴¹

The theory was that the pupil started with these preliminary exercises of a general character, and went on to those involving particular persons and circumstances, exercises, that is, more closely related to the speeches of the courts and deliberative assemblies. In Quintilian’s day the tendency was for the general exercises to be squeezed out of the curriculum of the rhetorical schools by the demands of declamation.⁴² According to Quintilian this had not always been so; indeed he tells us that exercises on general themes were for a long time the sole method of rhetorical teaching.⁴³ It is difficult to believe that this is true so far as the ordinary schools of Rome are concerned. We have already seen that fictitious cases on the lines of those likely to arise in the courts and assemblies were debated in Greece as early as the later fourth century B.C., and if this type of exercise was in use in contemporary Greek teaching it presumably came to Rome when rhetoric first arrived there.⁴⁴

At any rate there is no doubt that it was established in the first half of the first century B.C. Crassus in De Oratore is made to approve the practice of debating cases similar to those of the courts, and elsewhere in the same work we are told that cases involving the letter versus the spirit of the law were a regular part of the school curriculum.⁴⁵ We are given an example of the sort of easy case that was set as an exercise to the young: ‘The law forbids a foreigner to ascend the walls; he does so, and drives off the enemy. An action is brought against him.’⁴⁶ If Cicero was consistent in avoiding anachronism in De Oratore these passages are evidence that the controversia, as it was later called, was established at the dramatic date of the dialogue, 91 B.C. If he was not, they are at least evidence that it was established at the date of composition, 55 B.C.

Ad Herennium and De Inventione both contain numerous examples of cases of different kinds, and we can legitimately assume that these, or at least some of them, were the subject of practice debates in the schools.⁴⁷ As declamation played so large a part in later Roman teaching, it is worth while to give some examples of the sort of themes that were debated in the Republican schools. ‘A certain commander, being surrounded by the enemy and unable to escape, came to an agreement with them, by which he was to withdraw his men, leaving behind their arms and equipment. This was done, and so his men were saved from a hopeless situation with the loss of arms and equipment. The commander was accused of high treason.’⁴⁸ Then there is the case, familiar to us from Livy, of Horatius, who, returning from his victory over the three Curatii, met his sister, whom he found indifferent to the loss of her two brothers and lamenting the death of one of the Curatii to whom she was betrothed, whereupon he killed her, and was put on trial.⁴⁹ Another case given is that of some Rhodians deputed to go on an embassy to Athens. The authorities refused to give them the allowance to which they were entitled. They therefore refused to go and were indicted for their refusal.⁵⁰ Then there is the following case: ‘The law forbids the sacrifice of a bull calf to Diana. Some sailors caught by a storm on the high seas vowed that if they reached a harbour which was in sight they would sacrifice a bull calf to the deity of the place. It so happened that at the harbour there was a temple of Diana, the very goddess to whom a bull calf might not be sacrificed. Ignorant of the law, they made their sacrifice on reaching shore and were brought to trial.’⁵¹

Of the cases quoted it will be seen that one is specifically drawn from Roman history, one from the history of Rhodes, while two are given no historical or geographical setting, though one of these, the first quoted, is known to be derived from an incident in Roman history.⁵² The themes were chosen to illustrate certain types of case, and no objection was felt to fictitious examples,⁵³ or to those involving wild improbabilities:

The law ordains that those who leave their ship in a storm shall lose everything; the ship and its cargo become the property of those who remain on it.

Two men were sailing on the high seas, one the owner of the ship, the other of its cargo. They saw a shipwrecked man swimming and stretching out his hands to them; overcome by pity, they brought the ship alongside him and took him on board. Some time afterwards they too ran into a heavy storm, with the result that the owner of the ship, who was also the helmsman, betook himself to a boat, from which he guided the ship as best he could with the tow rope, while the owner of the cargo fell on his sword. The shipwrecked man went to the helm, and did his best to save the ship. When the waves subsided and the weather changed, the ship was brought into harbour. The man who had fallen on his sword was only slightly wounded and his wound quickly healed. Each of the three claimed the ship and its cargo.⁵⁴

In Imperial times the controversies were notorious for their remoteness from life, but the development in this direction had already begun in Cicero’s youth. There is no doubt a difference; the ingenuities of the case just quoted sprang not so much from a love of the melodramatic and picturesque for its own sake as from a desire to exercise the young in all possible varieties of argument. But there is no doubt that even in Republican times the divorce between school teaching and the practice of the courts, which later became notorious, was already showing itself.⁵⁵

Themes of the type later known as suasoriae are also referred to in the Republican treatises, and some of them too were no doubt the subject of practice speeches. Famous senatorial debates were recalled in such themes as Should Carthage be destroyed? or Should Scipio be allowed to hold the consulship under age?⁵⁶ Or an imaginary speech might be put into the mouth of a famous character like Hannibal.⁵⁷ We know from Juvenal that Hannibal was a stock subject for declamations under the Empire, and it seems that even in the Sullan period the schools were echoing with his deliberations.⁵⁸

In addition to these school exercises the student read speeches and sometimes learned them by heart. Cicero as a boy memorised the peroration of C.Galba’s speech in his own defence, while Crassus’s speech against the law of Caepio was to him quasi magistra.⁵⁹ One method which dates back to the second century B.C. was that of Carbo, who memorised passages from existing speeches and then tried to paraphrase them. This however was not entirely satisfactory, for the paraphrase could hardly improve on or equal the original, and Crassus, who had followed Carbo’s method, gave it up, and took to translating speeches from the Greek.⁶⁰

The various exercises that we have described form a marked contrast to the practical training which Crassus in De Oratore claims to have received. ‘My school’, he says ‘was the forum, my masters experience, the laws and institutions of Rome and the customs of our ancestors.’⁶¹ An important part of the young orator’s training in the old Republican tradition was the so-called tirocinium fori, a kind of apprenticeship served with a leading orator. ‘In the days of our ancestors’, writes Tacitus, ‘a young man who was being prepared for the forum and oratory, after having been trained at home and thoroughly instructed in the liberal arts, was brought by his father or relations to the leading orator at Rome. By following him and frequenting his company he had the opportunity of listening to all his speeches in the law courts or at public meetings; he could hear him in argument and debate, and, so to speak, learn to fight by taking part in the battle.’⁶² This practice dates from the days when the professional teacher was unknown and the father directed his son’s early education, after which he learned the ways of public life by personal association. It still survived in the Ciceronian age alongside the new methods of Greek rhetoric. Cicero’s father put him in the charge of Scaevola the augur, and Cicero himself in later life took the young Caelius under his wing.⁶³

The best orators continued to engage in practice exercises long after they had ceased their formal training. It was Hortensius’s failure to keep up his early assiduity in this respect that, according to Cicero, accounted for the decline of his oratory.⁶⁴ Cicero himself practised constantly throughout his life. No one, he claimed, went on declaiming for as long as he did.⁶⁵ He did so in Greek and Latin up to his praetorship and in Latin even when he was quite old.⁶⁶ Declamation at that time meant a practice speech delivered in private; it was not yet a public performance aimed at display. One or two friends would join together for practice of this nature; in his youth Cicero declaimed with Marcus Piso or Quintus Pompeius or with Vibius Curius, in his old age with his ‘big schoolboys’, as he called them, Hirtius and Pansa.⁶⁷ Pompey is said to have resumed the practice of declaiming just before the Civil War, and Antonius and Augustus kept it up even during the war at Mutina.⁶⁸

How serious a matter training for oratory was, and how it continued after schooldays were over, can be seen from Cicero’s autobiography in the Brutus.⁶⁹ After assuming the toga virilis in 91 B.C., at the age of fifteen, he entered the forum, where he daily listened to the leading orators of the day, at the same time reading and writing and engaging in exercises oratorical and otherwise. He studied law under Quintus Scaevola and philosophy under Philo. In the year 88 the famous rhetorician Molo of Rhodes was in Rome and Cicero was studying under him. The following years were devoted to the study of dialectic and other branches of philosophy under Diodotus the Stoic, but in spite of these philosophical studies he did not let a day pass without practising speaking. This he did more often in Greek than in Latin, partly because there were more of the graces of style in the former language, and having once formed the habit one could apply it to Latin, and partly because the best teachers were Greek and they could not correct his exercises except in their own language.⁷⁰ In the year 81, at the age of twenty-five, Cicero began to practise at the bar, but it was not long before he discovered that his health was in danger. He was in the habit of speaking at the top of his voice with no change of tone, and his delivery involved a great and continuous physical effort; if he went on in this way, he was told, the results might be fatal. So he decided to go abroad, and in Greece and Asia Minor he continued his studies, rhetorical and philosophical. In Athens he attended the lectures of a rhetorician called Demetrius, and during his lengthy tour of Asia Minor he visited, or took about with him, all the leading rhetorical teachers. Finally he came to Rhodes, where he found Molo, and once more submitted to his instruction. When he returned to Rome his delivery was quieter and more varied, his style less exuberant and his lungs stronger. After his long education he was prepared for the exacting life of the Roman orator.