VII

CICERONIAN ORATORY II

Ieiunas igitur huius multiplicis et aequabiliter in omnia genera fusae orationis aures civitatis accepimus casque nos primi, quicumque eramus et quantulumcumque dicebamus, ad huius generis audiendi incredibilia studia convertimus.

Cicero, Orator 106

IN THE preceding chapter we have discussed Cicero’s oratory in relation to school rhetoric. But Cicero’s own rhetorical theory included much more than was contained in the scholastic system, and it is pertinent to pursue our enquiry further and ask how far his oratory corresponds with the characteristic ideas expressed in his rhetorical works.

He himself considered his way of speaking novel and out of the ordinary. ‘I will say nothing of myself, he wrote in the Brutus, ‘I will speak only of the other orators, none of whom gave the impression of having studied literature more deeply than the common run of men, literature which is the fountain head of perfect eloquence; no one who had embraced philosophy, the mother of all good deeds and good words; no one who had learnt civil law, a subject most necessary for private cases and essential to the orator’s good judgment; no one who had at his command the traditions of Rome, from which if occasion demanded he could call up most trustworthy witnesses from the dead; no one who by rapid and neat mockery of his opponent could unbend the minds of the jurymen and turn them awhile from solemnity to smiling and laughter; no one who could widen an issue and bring his speech from a limited dispute referring to a particular person or time to a general question of universal application; no one who could delight by a temporary digression from the issue, or could move the judge to violent anger or tears, or in fact— and this is the special quality of the orator—could turn his feelings whithersoever the occasion demanded.’¹

It is evident that the qualities absent in others were those on which Cicero prided himself, and these qualities, literary culture, knowledge of philosophy, law and history, wit, ability to pass from the particular to the general, emotional power, play a large part in his own theory of oratory.² Thus he considered himself, naturally enough, to exemplify the ideal which he set out in De Oratore.

How far do the speeches bear out Cicero’s conception of his own qualities? In the first place we may say that in them we find as good an example of the doctus orator as we can expect in the circumstances. Cicero does not of course display the full range of his learning before the audiences of the courts and public assemblies, but he contrives to introduce a number of literary and historical references and philosophical, or quasi-philosophical, disquisitions which showed that he was an orator of no ordinary education.

That literary allusions were something of a novelty in the courts is suggested by a passage of the early speech Pro Roscio Amerino. ‘Do you think’, says Cicero, ‘…that the old man in Caecilius had less regard for Eutychus his country-loving son than for the other—Chaerestratus, I think his name is—, that he kept one in the town as an honour and banished the other to the country as a punishment?’ Here it seems there was an interruption from the other side: ‘Why do you resort to such puerilities?’³ and Cicero proceeds to explain the reason for the literary reference. The explanation is rather awkward, and in later years, when he was more sure of himself, Cicero managed things better. But there were still occasions when some apology was needed. In the speech against Piso he forbears to quote from the Greek poetry of Philodemus, fearing that even what he has already said on the subject may be out of keeping with the traditions of the senate where he is speaking, and in Pro Sestio he is careful to defend himself for describing a scene in the theatre: ‘At this point, gentlemen, I ask you not to suppose that frivolous motives have induced me to resort to the unusual procedure of speaking in the courts about poets, actors and public festivals.’⁴

Cicero knows, too, how to make himself acceptable to an audience which may be a little suspicious of learning by means of adroit flattery. ‘I am not speaking to an ignorant audience, but, as I suppose, in a highly educated and humane company.’⁵ So Cicero speaks to the senate. In the law courts, too, when defending Archias, he begins by paying a compliment to the learning and refinement of his hearers before coming forward as the champion of literature.⁶

On occasion Cicero even quotes poetry in his speeches. As Quintilian remarks, the practice pleased the hearers as well as showing the speaker’s learning, since the charms of poetry provided a pleasant relief from the severity of the forum; moreover the sentiments of the poet could be used like witnesses to support the orator’s statements.⁷ There is a line from Ennius in Pro Roscio Amerino, but quotations are most frequent in the period following Cicero’s return from exile, the period of De Oratore.⁸ They are usually from the older Roman drama; they are introduced in an easy, allusive manner and often ingeniously woven into the argument, as in Pro Caelio, where Cicero purports to be in doubt as to what attitude he should adopt towards the young Caelius’s misdeeds. Is he to play the part of the stern father in Caecilius or that of the lenient father in Terence? The quotations from comedy help to induce the right atmosphere of easy tolerance.⁹

Cicero does not of course go so far as to quote Greek in his speeches, but he does on occasion show his knowledge of Greek legend and literature. In Pro Scauro he refers to the story celebrated in one of Callimachus’s epigrams, of Cleombrotus, who committed suicide after reading Plato’s Phaedo.¹⁰ Even in a speech before the people such allusions were not out of place; in Pro Lege Manilia he compares Mithridates to Medea scattering her brother’s limbs in order to retard her father’s pursuit.¹¹

Towards the end of his life, when some people expressed surprise at his output of philosophical works, Cicero answered that he had always been interested in the subject, and pointed to the fact that his speeches were full of philosophic maxims.¹² It is true that even if Cicero had written no philosophical treatises, his speeches would reveal that he was at any rate familiar with the main tenets of the contemporary philosophies; he could criticise with knowledge the Stoicism of Cato, and the Epicureanism of Piso,¹³ and allude briefly to the views of the philosophers on pleasure or on immortality.¹⁴ But when he spoke of his speeches being full of philosophy he was using the term in a wide sense, to include maxims and disquisitions on such themes as gratitude, glory and piety,¹⁵ or such a passage as that in Pro Sestio, where to assist in demonstrating the absurdity of accusing Sestius of vis he gives an account of the origin of society. ‘At one time, when there was as yet no natural law or civil law, men wandered over the land scattered and dispersed, and owned only what they could obtain or keep by force of hand through killing and wounding. So those who first showed themselves to be of outstanding wisdom and strength of character, perceiving the nature of the human mind and its capacity for learning, brought men together into one place and transformed them from barbarity to justice and gentleness. Then grew up those institutions for the common benefit which we call constitutions and those unions of men that were afterwards called states, then those conjunctions of dwelling places which we call cities were fortified and divine and human law began to be recognised. And the great difference between this civilised and humane life and that old barbarous one lies in the contrast between law and violence.’¹⁶ This is philosophy adapted to the courts; it is not definite enough to be unacceptable; it is vague, uplifting and almost wholly irrelevant, a mere adornment, but designed to give the impression that Cicero’s case was based on a sure intellectual foundation.

Besides literature and philosophy the other two elements in the learning Cicero brought to oratory were law and history. As regards law Cicero had evidently taken considerable pains to equip himself adequately,¹⁷ and in his early period did not refuse to undertake civil cases of considerable complexity, such as the defence of Caecina. After his consulship he gave up this type of pleading, and most of his criminal cases did not make any great demands on his legal knowledge. In one case, however, that of Balbus, although he had been preceded by other advocates, who, he said, had left him little to say,¹⁸ he argued the legal point in detail and with a wealth of precedent.

Almost any speech will provide examples of Cicero’s use of history. The great names of the past were constantly on his lips. Precedents are useful weapons to any advocate or political orator, but the Roman respect for tradition and belief in the virtues of past ages gave them perhaps a greater weight at Rome than they have had in other societies. ‘Precedents’, says Cicero, ‘drawn from age-old tradition and from literary records, rich in grandeur, rich in antiquity…these afford the weightiest proof to the mind, the sweetest sound to the ear.’¹⁹ ‘No man’, observed Charles James Fox of Cicero, ‘appears to have had such a real respect for authority as he, and therefore when he speaks on that subject, he is always natural and in earnest and not like those among us who are so often declaiming about the wisdom of our ancestors, without knowing what they mean, or hardly citing any particulars of their conduct, or of their dicta.’²⁰ In fact Cicero does not always give particulars, and there are in his speeches many general appeals to the authority of maiores nostri. He could, however, produce details where necessary, and whenever he wanted precedents to prove his point he had them ready. Some are the stock examples from the rhetorical schools, but more come from Cicero himself, from the well stored mind of one who had a real interest in history for its own sake and whose equipment in this respect was at least as good as can be expected of a practising orator.

Examples have now been given of the way in which Cicero applied his learning in his speeches, and it remains to discuss those other features of his oratory, his wit and humour, his power of seeing the general question behind the particular case, his digressions and his pathos and emotional power.

Cicero was famous in antiquity for his wit, or perhaps one should say notorious, for he was thought by some to have used this weapon to excess and not always with taste.²¹ After his death a collection of his witticisms was published in three books. It was too many; not all of the witticisms were up to standard.²² Cicero’s quickness in retort would be exercised not in the formal speech but in replies to interruptions and examinations of witnesses. In the actual speeches there was often occasion for other types of humour, ranging from the notorious puns on the name Verres²³ to the light urbanity of Pro Caelio. To classify and exemplify the various types of Ciceronian humour would not be a very profitable task;²⁴ it will suffice to mention one speech, Pro Murena, where the humour is integral to the conduct of the case. A large part of the speech is taken up with mockery of Cicero’s

opponents, Sulpicius and Cato, both unusually honest men. Though he respected Sulpicius’s legal lore and Cato’s Stoicism, his speech makes the former appear trivial and ridiculous, the latter inhuman and fantastic. Cicero’s humour was successful. He made all the judges laugh, and Cato himself smiled and observed: ‘What a witty consul we have!’²⁵ Cicero won his case.

Cicero’s claim that he could see the general question behind a particular case may seem impertinent in view of such speeches as Pro Murena, where he is more anxious to get away from than behind the issue. Indeed it must be admitted that in this respect Cicero does not live up to his theory. The theory was that in any case the particular persons and circumstances were of little importance in comparison with the general principle involved, and that in all questions with which he was confronted the orator could and should pass from the particular to the general. But more often than not such treatment would have been far from profitable. The particular person concerned mattered much, the general principle little. Cicero knew this well enough, and his theory, attractive and plausible as it sounds when expounded in his rhetorical works, was in fact of little relevance to his oratory. He does indeed discuss general questions on occasion, but only incidentally. In Pro Murena he treats of the relative merits of the military and the legal career, but this is of no relevance to the question of Murena’s guilt.²⁶ In Pro Caelio he discourses on the upbringing of the young; but this is hardly the general question behind the charges against Caelius.²⁷ Cicero’s genus does not in fact amount to more than that predilection for general themes of a quasi-philosophical nature to which we have already alluded.²⁸

A digression in Cicero’s view might occur at any point in the speech if the occasion demanded it,²⁹ a convenient theory which allowed any amount of departure from the point. But theory had little to do with most of Cicero’s irrelevancies, which sprang from the exigencies of debate and from the need to answer opponents, to divert the attention of the audience and to induce the right atmosphere. Cicero did, however, sometimes make use of the formal digression, designed to entertain and followed by a return to the point, as in the praise of Sicily and the story of the rape of Proserpine in the Verrines.³⁰ There was a famous example, too, in the lost Pro Cornelio, where, having mentioned the name of Pompey, Cicero broke off abruptly and digressed to sing the praises of the great commander.³¹

Finally we come to Cicero’s emotional power. We have seen how, following precept and precedent, he regularly introduced the pathetic into his perorations. But his theory did not confine emotional appeal to any particular part of the speech, and his practice agrees with his theory. One has only to think of the Verrine orations, where Cicero does not confine himself to a bare narration of Verres’s misdeeds, but repeatedly takes occasion to arouse the indignation of his imaginary audience. Quintilian instances the account of the wrongs suffered by Philodamus and the description of the scourging of a Roman citizen,³² and many other examples could be added. Even the third speech, the most factual and least adorned, has its outbursts of indignation.³³

Cicero tells us that there was no method by which the feelings of an audience could be aroused or calmed that he had not tried.³⁴ But what made his use of pathos so effective was his power of feeling the emotions he wished to arouse. He would be as much affected by his pathetic passages as his audiences; his tears would flow and his voice falter. ‘I have seen that little teardrop of yours’, said Laterensis, referring to one of Cicero’s unsuccessful defences; to which Cicero replied unrepentantly ‘You could have seen not only a little drop, but a flood of tears and weeping and sobbing.’³⁵ After his description in Pro Caelio of the death-bed scene of Metellus Celer he has to pause for a while to recover himself before going on; the mention of Metellus has made his voice falter with weeping, and sorrow has checked the flow of his thoughts.³⁶ Cicero’s sorrow in this and similar cases was perhaps as genuine as an emotion so easily aroused can be. At any rate it seemed convincing, and it generally had the required effect. Even Caesar, when Cicero pleaded for Ligarius before him, shook with emotion and dropped his papers from his hand.³⁷ If such was the effect of Cicero’s oratory in an uncongenial atmosphere, what must it have been in the familiar surroundings of the courts? Under the spell the jurymen would dissolve in tears, forget their reasoning powers and follow their feelings. ‘In my opinion’, says Quintilian, ‘the audience did not know what they were doing, their applause sprang neither from their judgment nor from their will; they were seized with a kind of frenzy and, unconscious of the place in which they stood, burst forth spontaneously into a perfect ecstasy of delight.’³⁸

The qualities we have so far considered were not the only ones that made Cicero’s oratory what it was. He also had a style of his own, and one which was not universally admired. Some of his contemporaries, according to Quintilian, ‘dared to attack him as too turgid, as Asiatic and redundant, as too much given to repetition and sometimes insipid in his witticisms, as feeble, diffuse, and even, incredible as it may seem, effeminate in composition…. He was particularly attacked by those who wished to appear imitators of the Attic orators.’³⁹

What did Cicero’s critics mean when they called his style Asiatic? In origin Asiatic and Attic were not critical terms at all, but merely referred to the place where the oratory was composed. But critics observed a difference between the oratory of Attica and that of Asia Minor, the former direct and unaffected, the latter too often lacking these qualities. It would be probably true to say that ‘Asiatic’ oratory was in essence the oratory of the Hellenistic age rather than that of Asia. Its faults were due to the temptation to idle display which sprang from the divorce of oratory from practical affairs.⁴⁰ But however that may be, the term ‘Asiatic’ came to be used of a certain type of oratory, or rather of more than one type. Cicero distinguished two, one pointed and epigrammatic, neat and graceful rather than solemn and dignified, the other marked by a rapid excited flow of words and an ornamental type of diction.⁴¹ It is not easy to grasp the essence of a prose style from descriptions of this sort, and the information that Hortensius combined the two types only leaves us more in the dark.⁴² But it would be idle to find a precise critical meaning in what was not much more than a catchword adopted by the would-be revivers of the Attic style who came into prominence about the middle of the first century B.C.⁴³ It was their aim to reproduce the straightforward simplicity of Lysias,⁴⁴ and they rejected as Asiatic the opposite type of oratory, the bombastic, elaborate and over-rhythmical.

The two leaders of this movement among Roman orators, indeed the only two whom we can with certainty reckon as Atticists, were Brutus and Calvus.⁴⁵ Their period of popularity was brief,⁴⁶ but they were sufficiently formidable to provoke Cicero to friendly controversy. There was an exchange of letters (now no longer extant) between him and the two Atticists,⁴⁷ and for the benefit of a wider public Cicero took up once more the general theory of rhetoric in the Orator, where he repeated some of the principles enunciated earlier in De Oratore and added much more designed to convert his critics and justify his own style of oratory. The same purpose underlies De Optimo Genere Oratorum, and is faintly perceptible in the Brutus.

Cicero’s method of self-defence is to accept his opponents’ premise that Athens provides the best models, but to show that he had as much right as they had to be called Atticist. He does not defend the Asiatic manner; indeed he has many criticisms to make of it. He maintains that his critics’ conception of Atticism is limited and inadequate. Lysias was the chief model of the neo- Attic school, though sometimes they tried to imitate Thucydides⁴⁸ or Xenophon, in spite of these writers not having been orators.⁴⁹ Cicero recognised Lysias’s merits, but did not think him the best model. Calvus had learned from him a dull and arid style.⁵⁰ Cicero does not deny that the Lysianic qualities of clarity and good taste were truly Attic, but he maintains that they were only a part of Atticism. Demosthenes was as much an Attic orator as Lysias, and Cicero, who claimed to take Demosthenes as his model,⁵¹ had a perfect right to be considered a true Atticist. Popular opinion, he maintains in the Brutus, is the final judge of oratory; the audience decides whether an orator is successful, though the expert may judge by what means he achieves his success. Demosthenes was a popular orator; so was Cicero. The Atticists on the other hand were too cold and stiff to hold their audiences.⁵²

The model for oratory was admittedly to be found in Athens, but the virtues of the Attic style were not merely, as the neo- Atticists seemed to think, those of negative good taste. The Attic orators were not content with mere health; they had strength, muscle, blood. One should if possible imitate the power and variety of Demosthenes rather than the narrow range of Lysias. To speak in a full, rich and ornate style is perfectly compatible with Attic purity and faultlessness. A speech should not merely be unobjectionable; it should also arouse positive admiration. These qualities were present in Demosthenes, and the man who took him as a model would be not only a good Atticist, but also, what was more important, a good orator.⁵³

In order to emphasise his point Cicero in the Orator makes play with the division of the three styles, genus tenue, genus medium and genus grande. He associates with it another tripartite division, that of the three aims of the orator, to instruct, to please and to win over. The plain style was suited for instruction, the middle style was that which gave pleasure, the grand style that which carried the audience away. The perfect orator should be master of all three styles, should be able to instruct, to please and to persuade.⁵⁴ Lysias, and his Roman imitators, excelled only in the plain style, whereas Demosthenes and Cicero had all three styles at their command.⁵⁵ Different types of speech would demand different styles, but in most speeches all three should be brought into play. The orator will know on what occasion and in what parts of his speech to use the different styles; he will be able to speak of ordinary things simply, great things magnificently and things in between in a middle way.⁵⁶ He must be guided by his good taste and sense of propriety: ‘Always in every part of a speech as of life one must consider what is appropriate or befitting.’ ‘The foundation of eloquence as of everything else is sapientia’, and sapientia is here not so much the wisdom of the philosophers as good taste, that quality which according to Horace is the principium et fons of good writing.⁵⁷

With the same intention, that of justifying his own style, Cicero included in the Orator a careful and detailed study of prose rhythm and periodic structure, a subject which he had only briefly treated in De Oratore.⁵⁸ He was convinced that the use of rhythmical prose contributed in no small degree to the effect of the varied and vigorous style which he advocated. The Atticists had no use for the rounded period and preferred broken and abrupt sentences; Brutus favoured an iambic rhythm which suggested the language of ordinary speech.⁵⁹ In answer Cicero appeals to a number of Greek authorities and to the sensitive ear which expects and delights in harmonious rhythm. He compares the Atticists to those who would attempt to break up the shield of Phidias; the individual beauties would remain, the general effect be lost.⁶⁰ He suggests, too, that their rejection of the Ciceronian style was due to inability to use it rather than deliberate choice.⁶¹ He was well aware that rhythmical prose without good matter and good vocabulary was an empty thing, that it must not approach too near to the rhythms of poetry and that it must only be used sparingly in forensic speeches.⁶² But he insisted that it was a valuable element in good speaking, without which ideas and beauties of diction lost much of their effect. ‘There is no thought’, he says, ‘which can help the orator unless it is expressed aptly and with finish, nor does any verbal beauty shine forth unless the words are carefully arranged, and in both of these cases the effect is due to rhythm.’⁶³

While Cicero’s claim to be a true Atticist was little more than clever argument designed to cut the ground from under the feet of Brutus and Calvus, his remarks on rhythm are founded on his own practice, and point to an important and recognised element in his oratory. There is no room here for the detailed study of his prose rhythm that would be necessary for an adequate treatment of this subject.⁶⁴ We must content ourselves with observing that the use of rhythm and periodic structure was certainly one of the most characteristic features of Cicero’s style, and though he did not introduce it to Roman oratory, he developed it further than any of his predecessors. And he believed, no doubt rightly, that it contributed much to his success. ‘My ears certainly delight in a completely rounded period, are conscious of abruptness and dislike redundancy. Mine, do I say? I have often observed a public meeting to break into cries at a rhythmical sentence ending.’⁶⁵ The appeal to the ear was as important as the appeal to the head and the heart.

It remains to add a brief note on Cicero’s contemporaries. How far did they share his characteristics? There is not much evidence on which to go, but it seems that, whether owing to his influence or because of the intellectual atmosphere of the period, there were others who went some way towards realising the ideal of the doctus orator. Quotations from poetry were, we are told, common in the speeches of his contemporaries.⁶⁶ Others besides him displayed something of their philosophical education in their speeches; Cato succeeded in making his rigid Stoicism acceptable to Roman audiences, and Caesar, on that memorable occasion when the senate debated the fate of Catiline, argued much in the style of Cicero’s philosophical oratory that death was no punishment but rather a release.⁶⁷ Pompey defending Balbus showed his accurate knowledge of law,⁶⁸ and there is evidence that others besides Cicero could produce precedents from history.⁶⁹ Nor was he the only Roman speaker who could sway his audience by emotional appeals. Hortensius was skilled in the use of pathos.⁷⁰ Scaurus, speaking in his own defence, made a deep impression on the court by his tears and by his references to his past popularity and his father’s prestige.⁷¹ In the debate in the senate on the return of Cicero from exile Publius Servilius Isauricus reduced Metellus to tears, according to Cicero, by his appeal to the family traditions of the Metelli.⁷²

In the matter of style, as Cicero’s controversy with the Atticists shows, there was something of a reaction from Ciceronianism among his younger contemporaries. But even the difference between Cicero on the one hand and Brutus and Calvus on the other may well have been less than it appeared at the time. Such at any rate was the impression of Tacitus. ‘Cicero’, he writes, ‘admittedly surpassed the other orators of his day, but Calvus and Pollio and Caesar and Caelius and Brutus are rightly placed above their predecessors and their successors. The differences between them are irrelevant in comparison with their general similarity. Calvus is conciser, Pollio more rhythmical, Caesar grander, Caelius more biting, Brutus weightier, Cicero more vigorous, full and powerful; yet all are distinguished by the same healthy quality. If you looked at their works at the same time, you would recognise that for all the individual differences of talent there was a kind of family likeness as regards their taste and their aims.’⁷³