XII

THE AGE OF THE ANTONINES

Quae nunc sunt aures hominum hoc tempore, quanta in spectandis orationibus elegantia.

Fronto, ad M. Caesarem et invicem 2.2.1

THE AGE of the Antonines was in a sense a golden age for the art of speech. If little that was said was of any value, seldom in human history have so many words been uttered in public and seldom has the spoken word been so highly honoured. It was the age of the so-called Second Sophistic, of those virtuosi described by Philostratus, who travelled round from city to city, charming their audiences with their displays and winning for themselves applause and honour, statues and privileges.

Rhetoricians were honoured in the highest quarters. Hadrian consorted with them and rewarded them; Antoninus Pius gave them privileges.¹ Marcus Aurelius was attentive to their words and their needs; he attended a declamation of Aristeides, and rewarded Hermogenes and Adrian.² He established and endowed the state chair of rhetoric at Athens, and took a personal interest in appointments.³ The Emperors’ interest was shared by their subjects; Romans of high position took sides in the quarrels of rival rhetoricians, and senators left displays of dancing to hear a star declaimer.⁴

The Second Sophistic was essentially a Greek phenomenon. The famous performers of the day were Greeks, or, if not Greek, like Favorinus from Gaul, spoke in Greek. Greek declaimers were as much at home in Rome as in the eastern parts of the Empire; they could draw to their audiences even those who did not understand their language.⁵ There was a close connection between Greek and Roman literati; Favorinus and Herodes Atticus joined in literary discussions with Roman men of learning;⁶ Fronto was familiar with Greek and on occasion wrote in it; Apuleius was eloquent in both languages, and adorned his Apology with numerous Greek quotations.⁷

There was of course nothing new about much of this. Educated Romans had always been bilingual and Greek men of learning had always been at home in Rome. Vespasian had founded a chair of Greek rhetoric there along with the Latin chair, and Greek declaimers had performed in the capital before the time of the Antonines.⁸ What is new is the weakening of the Roman tradition. It now becomes increasingly hard to recognise a distinctively Roman rhetoric. Apuleius owes little to Rome except his language. An African educated in Athens, he belongs essentially to the cultural tradition of the Greek-speaking world, and his oratory, in so far as it is not purely individual, is that of the Second Sophistic. Fronto, though long resident in Rome, and the tutor of an Emperor, has little of the Roman tradition in him. Quintilian had had his roots in this tradition; to him the political and forensic battles of the Ciceronian age were still living and real. It was not so with Fronto; though he knows and admires the orators of the past, their speeches are for him books rather than events in history. His age has lost touch with the Roman past.

In the field of rhetorical theory the Greeks were now active as ever; Hermogenes, a sophist who lost his powers and took to writing, added new refinements to traditional theory. The only Latin writer of the age who touches on rhetorical theory is Fronto,⁹ and his letters provide illuminating evidence of the change that had come over Roman rhetoric. They show epideictic, which had been more or less neglected by earlier theory, and which Cicero’s Antonius had dismissed with the words ‘Everyone knows what to praise in a man’,¹⁰ exalted to a high place of importance.

Roman usage, says Quintilian, gave epideictic a place in the practical affairs of life.¹¹ Praise and blame were chiefly required in the course of forensic and deliberative speeches, and by Cicero the genus was hardly recognised as entitled to independent existence.¹² There was indeed the old established institution of the funeral laudatio, but this had its own traditions different from those of the Greek formal panegyric.¹³ But under the Empire epideictic oratory begins to creep in. Within the framework of traditional Roman oratory the consular gratiarum actio developed into a full-blown eulogy of the Emperor; outside this framework we hear of the praise of Jupiter Capitolinus as a regular feature of the contest in his honour founded by Domitian.¹⁴ Quintilian gives fairly detailed directions for praising gods and men and a brief paragraph on the praise of cities.¹⁵ This is the nearest any Roman writer gets to the elaborate and detailed instructions given by the later Greek writers on epideictic, Menander and pseudo-Dionysius.

Fronto’s interest lay less in the topics of eulogy than in the style it required.¹⁶ Its exacting nature, in his view, gave it an especial claim to the attention of the stylist; whereas in other types there was room for all three styles, plain, middle and grand, in epideictic the grand style must be used throughout.¹⁷ Fronto was himself a skilled eulogist; not only was he an admired performer in the senate when the occasion demanded that the Emperor’s praises should be sung; he also practised the sophistic art of paradoxical eulogy, and wrote the praises of Negligence, of Smoke and Dust, and the like. This kind of composition was a novelty in Latin,¹⁸ and Fronto, sending to Marcus Aurelius his eulogy of Smoke and Dust, gives his views as to how it should be done. Frequent sententiae are required, closely packed together and neatly joined, but there should be no superfluous words. Nothing should be left rough and unconnected; sentences should close with a snap like a brooch. The aim of such speeches is to give pleasure and amusement. But the topic should be treated as if it were grand and important; tales of gods and heroes should be inserted, together with verses, proverbs and ingenious fictions. Finally Fronto claims that it is a sign of a generous disposition to distribute one’s praises as widely as possible, in particular to include what has hitherto been neglected as the object of eulogy.¹⁹

But Fronto has a greater interest for us than as the exponent of the art of eulogy. It fell to his lot as the most eminent orator of his day to tutor the two adopted sons of Antoninus Pius, Marcus Aurelius and Verus. In the correspondence of Fronto and Marcus we can see the tutor at work, and we can see both from the correspondence and from the Emperor’s Meditations how he lost his pupil’s allegiance. Fronto is the last important representative of rhetoric in its age-old fight with philosophy, and it is not difficult to understand how it was that in this case rhetoric was defeated.

Rhetoric was still not without its practical value, for Emperors no less than others needed to be able to express themselves. Indeed they alone perhaps could make full use of the art of speaking. As Fronto writes to his ex-pupil Verus, now a successful military commander, the old ideal of the perfect orator takes shape as the imperial orator. Eloquence to Fronto is the property of imperium, command. The word, he writes, ‘implies not only power, but also speech, since command is exercised through bidding and forbidding. The commander is false to his name and unjustly so styled, if he does not commend good deeds, blame ill deeds, exhort to goodness and dissuade from evil.’²⁰ ‘Eloquence inspires fear, wins love, encourages effort, puts an end to impudence, commends virtue, confounds vice, persuades, soothes, instructs, consoles.’ It is the true sovereign of the human race, and now for the first time is embodied in the sovereign Emperors.²¹ Elsewhere, writing in more practical vein to Marcus Aurelius, Fronto points out that the Emperor’s duties include giving counsel in the senate, addressing the people, sending out dispatches, and so on. Eloquence is therefore a necessary function of the imperial office.²²

Rhetoric, the creation of the now far off city-state republics, is thus adapted to the imperial age; Fronto fully recognised the imperial age, and did not delude himself that he was living in the age of Cicero. On the other hand there is nothing practical about his rhetorical teaching. His rhetoric is directed not to persuading but to pleasing; it is the art of elegant self-expression, which has lost touch with the world of politics and power.

So Fronto has much to say about style, and little about the matter of oratory. He found Marcus Aurelius already possessed of nobility of mind and dignity of thought; he therefore exercised him in the beauties of style, and under his guidance the future Emperor collected synonyms and unusual words and paraphrased the older writers, adding refinements, inserting images and figures, producing ‘the patina of age’.²³ Old words were indeed Fronto’s hobby, almost his passion. He pictures the orator as a commander enrolling an army; not only does he make use of the volunteers, the words, that is, that immediately present themselves; he seeks out the skulkers too, the less obvious words, and presses them into his service.²⁴ Few of the ancient orators, in Fronto’s view, had devoted sufficient pains to seeking out choice words. Cato and Sallust were the chief exceptions; Cicero, for all his beauty and grandeur of style, had very few unexpected words ‘such as are not hunted out except with study and care and watchfulness and an extensive familiarity with old poems’.²⁵

Fronto made much use of such exercises as the composition of maxims (gnomae) and similes . In one place he expresses his delight at the brilliance with which Marcus has turned a maxim, and recommends turning the same maxim twice or three times, as well as the copying out of sententiae from Sallust.²⁶ As regards similes, Fronto had been trained in their use by his own rhetoric master and himself attached great importance to them. On one occasion Marcus writes that he has almost completed ten; there is one, however, that is causing him difficulty, and he applies to his master for help.²⁷ Fronto’s method at first was to supply Marcus with the image and leave him to find the application; later he preferred to leave his pupil to discover the image for himself.²⁸

Such was the training to which Marcus Aurelius was subjected. Though outwardly he was all that a dutiful and enthusiastic pupil should be, he was not at heart satisfied. Rhetoric’s old rival, philosophy, exercised a powerful appeal. With his obstinate conscience he could not reconcile himself to the insincerities of rhetoric.²⁹ The books of the philosopher Aristo kept him away from his rhetorical tasks and made him disinclined to argue on both sides of a question.³⁰ He found, too, that whenever he had said anything good he felt pleased with himself, and this to him was a reason for shunning eloquence.³¹ Fronto did his best to secure his pupil’s continued allegiance. To the charge that rhetoric encouraged self-conceit he replied that if Marcus’s good sayings pleased him too much, he must blame himself rather than eloquence; he should cure himself of self-conceit, not reject the cause of his gratification.³² He points out, too, that many philosophers had laid down precepts which they did not always live up to in practice; even if Marcus was as wise as Zeno and Cleanthes he would still have to wear the imperial purple, not the philosopher’s cloak.³³ Even philosophers, he argues, do not neglect the use of words; Chrysippus does not simply expound, define and explain; he uses the various methods of the orator. Marcus is exhorted to use words worthy of his sentiments; to raise himself and shake himself free of the crabbed style of the dialecticians and to make eloquence the companion of philosophy.³⁴

Elsewhere Fronto resorts to the old theme that we found in Quintilian, the easiness of philosophy in comparison with rhetoric. He professes to believe that Marcus has abandoned rhetoric from a dislike of drudgery. In philosophy there is no exordium to be carefully elaborated, no narratio to be briefly, clearly and skilfully set out, no dividing up of the subject into heads, no arguments to be sought out, no amplification, et cetera.³⁵ The philosopher’s pupil has merely to listen in silence while his master expounds; he has nothing to prepare or write, nothing to recite to his master or say by heart; he need not hunt out words, embellish with synonyms, make translations from the Greek.³⁶

Fronto did his best, but it was not good enough. In spite of all the affection and intimacy of their relationship there was a great gulf between master and pupil. In one of his letters Marcus remarked that he was forgetting all that he had learnt. Fronto protests in reply that on the contrary he is speaking better than ever: witness a recent speech which contained, among other virtues, a remarkable example of paraleipsis. ‘You have shown’, the letter ends, ‘originality in beginning your speech with this figure; and I am sure you will do many other original and remarkable things in your speeches. So outstanding is your ability.’³⁷ But Marcus Aurelius had other ambitions than to go down to history as the author of a neat paraleipsis. How far Fronto was from understanding him we can see if we turn to the first book of the Meditations, where Marcus records what he owes to his various teachers. Looking back on Fronto’s teaching he remembers only that he learnt from him ‘to observe how vile a thing is the malice and caprice and hypocrisy of absolutism; and generally speaking that those whom we entitle “Patricians” are somehow rather wanting in the natural affections.’³⁸ From Rusticus, on the other hand, he had learned ‘to avoid rhetoric’; and in the closing section of the book he counts it as a blessing owed to the gods that he made no further progress than he did in rhetoric and similar studies.³⁹

To conclude this chapter we must turn once more to declamation, for though Fronto shows little interest in this traditional method of rhetorical teaching,⁴⁰ there is no doubt that it enjoyed continued popularity in his day and after. This is shown by the declamations of Calpurnius Flaccus, generally supposed to belong to the second century, of which excerpts survive,⁴¹ and by the pseudo-Quintilianic Greater Declamations, a collection which was certainly in existence in the fourth century and may date in part from considerably earlier.⁴²

Little need be said about declamation in the later part of the Empire, for there was little development, and the themes and treatment remained much as they were in the Augustan age. When we turn to Calpurnius Flaccus or the Greater Declamations from the elder Seneca we find ourselves in a familiar atmosphere. The same laws and the same situations recur, and though relatively few of the themes are actually identical,⁴³ there is a strong family likeness between those in the later collections and those of Seneca. Even where a theme appears to be new we cannot assume that it was not current long before. In Calpurnius Flaccus there is a sensational controversia about some young men burnt to death in a trap laid by a brothelkeeper; we might well have supposed that this was an invention of later antiquity if it had not been referred to incidentally by Seneca.⁴⁴

There is little realism or contemporary reference in these later declamations. Public affairs are treated on wholly conventional lines. The valiant soldier and the deserter belong to an imaginary world; the tyrant and the pirate are faded stage property. Most of the themes concern private affairs and deal with such occurrences as adultery, incest, rape, remarriage and disinheritance, that had long been the staple of declamation. A number of themes are based on the enmity of rich and poor.⁴⁵ A rich man sprinkles the flowers in his garden with poison and so kills the bees of his poor neighbour.⁴⁶ This theme, which produces what is perhaps the most attractive of the Greater Declamations is, as far as we know, new. More often the theme of enmity is combined with one of the traditional situations. In one case a rich man adopts the three sons of a poor man. One is caught in adultery and killed; the second is accused of aiming at tyranny; the poor man asks to have the third back.⁴⁷ In another the poor man is put on sale on the ground of being a foreigner, bought by the rich man and made tutor to his son; the son is caught in adultery and killed, and the poor man is sent to be crucified.⁴⁸ It is unnecessary to quote at length. We are already familiar with the world of the declamations. We have met the man who raped two virgins, one of whom demanded his hand in marriage, the other his death.⁴⁹ We meet him again in Calpurnius Flaccus, but find that the story has developed and a new complication has arisen from the birth of a child to one of the victims and the adoption of the child by the father, now married to the other victim.⁵⁰ We may not have met the father who lost his sight from weeping after the death of two of his sons and dreamed that he would recover his sight if the third died too. But we are hardly surprised when his son, hearing of the dream through his mother, kills himself and the father recovers his sight, whereupon he divorces his wife and is accused by her of wrongful divorce.⁵¹ Such complications beset family life as depicted in the rhetorical schools.

There is nothing of interest in the meagre excerpts of Calpurnius Flaccus, but the Greater Declamations, though they make tedious reading on the whole, have at least the interest of being the only complete Roman declamations that have come down to us. They vary in manner. Some are quite sensible and well argued; others are declamatory in the worst sense. On the whole the manner is similar to that of the Augustan declaimers, and by reading them we can obtain some idea of what the declamations from which Seneca quotes were like in completed form. The declamations of Latro and Gallio were probably cleverer and more entertaining than anything in the Greater Declamations; those of the minor Augustan rhetoricians were probably sillier. The outrageous ‘colours’ preserved by Seneca are little in evidence in pseudo-Quintilian. We have already met the case of the son whose father attempted three times to disinherit him, and who was found mixing a potion which he claimed was poison designed for himself, and we have seen what ingenious ‘colours’ were used by some of the Augustan declaimers.⁵² The declaimer of the Greater Declamations, where the theme recurs, indulges in none of these eccentricities, and confines himself to what may be called the standard ‘colour’, that used by Latro in the Augustan age, which accepted the son’s intention to kill himself and explained it as due to his finding life with his father intolerable.⁵³

There is little in the Greater Declamations of the sober legal analysis which, as we saw in the last chapter, belongs to the genuine Quintilianic tradition. Instead we have the forced sententiae, the exaggerated descriptions, the highflown emotional outbursts which had become associated with declamation. The tricks are somewhat stale; the tradition, one feels, had lasted too long. Declamation in later antiquity could hardly justify itself as training for the advocate; and as a literary activity in its own right it does not attract. The modern reader of the Greater Declamations is left with the impression of misplaced effort. These declaimers try very hard; but for all their efforts and all their arts, they fail to impress.