XV

CONCLUSION

Sequitur quaestio an utilis rhetorice.

Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria 2.16.1

‘RHETORIC’, SAID Renan, ‘is, with poetic, the only mistake the Greeks made.’¹ If this is so, it was a costly mistake for their pupils, the Romans. For of all the arts and sciences invented by the Greeks rhetoric was the one which the Romans adopted most whole-heartedly. It formed the basis of their education, it absorbed the interests of some of their best men and it deeply influenced their literature. Was it all a mistake?

Let us first consider the most obvious function of rhetoric, to teach men how to speak well. If Roman rhetoric succeeded at all in doing this, it was to some extent justified. And undoubtedly it did succeed. The intensive training in speaking which the Roman received made him a ready speaker, a good debater, quick to see the pros and cons in any situation, able to put his material in order, to hold it in his mind and produce it as required. The advocate in the forum, the politician in the senate or outside it, the commander among his troops, the man of letters in conversation, could say what he wanted to say easily and effectively.

The influence of rhetoric was of course felt outside speaking in most branches of writing, and its influence was in many respects good. It developed the capacities of the Latin language as an effective instrument, disciplined its rough vigour, modified its stiffness, taught it new rhythms and turns of expression. It encouraged a care for form and artistry, and discouraged waywardness and eccentricity and incoherence. It imposed a standard of literary Latin which enabled educated men of different ages and races to understand one another. On the other hand one may well ask whether equally good results could not have been achieved with less expenditure of effort. One must study, says Quintilian, at all times and in all places.² Was such an exacting training really necessary? In fact there is evidence that, at any rate under the Empire, the rhetorical education did not always result in that facility of speech at which it was aimed. Some pupils of the Roman schools seem to have been rather reduced to silence by the training they received, and Quintilian ruefully contrasts the ease with which the uneducated spoke with the anxious self-criticism which afflicted some of those who had been elaborately trained in the art of speech.³

Moreover, an excessive concentration on the art of writing has other dangers. There was a tendency to avoid the direct and straightforward and to resort to the involved and far-fetched and unnatural.⁴ Even in Augustan times, or perhaps earlier, there was a teacher who, when his pupils’ compositions were too clear, used to say , Darken it.⁵ In Quintilian’s day there were many who were convinced that one could not write elegantly unless what one wrote required interpretation.⁶ Some of the least attractive writing in Latin is that of professed teachers of style, the rhetoricians whose work is preserved by the elder Seneca. Even Cicero perhaps is not at his best when the rhetorical note sounds loudest; there are passages in his speeches which remind one of the Emperor Augustus’s characterisation of the Asiatic style, ‘a flow of words without meaning’.⁷ The cultivation of the art of words for its own sake was apt to lead to neglect of words as a means of conveying meaning.

Among the bad influences must be reckoned the cult of ornatus. No doubt it was easier to teach this than the other virtues of style. The figures of speech and of thought which were considered to contribute so powerfully to ornatus had been conveniently classified; whereas nothing of the sort had been done for clarity and appropriateness. Thus overmuch attention was paid to writing in a distinguished and elevated manner, and it was generally believed that distinction and elevation could be produced by the mechanical use of certain tricks of style. Rhetoric tended to teach the Roman to write finely before he could write simply and clearly. The easy natural manner which the men of the Ciceronian age had at their command in addition to the grand style was lost as time went on, and in the final decay of Roman culture we find Sidonius so anxious to write elegantly that he can hardly write intelligibly.

Declamation, as we have seen, encouraged many faults. The taste for epigram, though it produced much poor stuff, was not perhaps the most serious of these. Lucan and the younger Seneca, the two writers other than professional rhetoricians most influenced by the fashion, were in their way powerful writers, who added something to Latin literature. More serious perhaps was the enfeeblement of the Latin language which the schools of declamation encouraged. In the interests of refinement any words which might possibly be objected to were disallowed, and thus, according to Quintilian, a large proportion of the vocabulary of Latin was excluded.⁸

It was not only in the matter of style that the influence of rhetoric was felt. It taught inventio as well as elocutio, and thus influenced habits of thought as well as of expression. From an early age the Roman was taught to find the materials for his compositions and practice speeches according to certain rules. He was taught the topics to be drawn on and the arguments to be used. He was not taught to think for himself; all his material was drawn from outside himself, from the theme with which he was presented and from the traditional topics of the schools. Rhetoric would thus inevitably encourage a certain conventionality of thought.

Moreover, though the topics were ultimately based on experience, generations of teachers had reduced them to a system, so that observation and personal experience played little or no part in rhetorical inventio. Rhetoric provided a ready-made set of arguments and modes of treatment, and the danger was that those who were brought up on it might go through life without enlarging and deepening the inherited common stock from their own experience and observation. Rhetoric thus tended to destroy curiosity. If the old Greek spirit of enquiry is so weak in later antiquity, it is partly the effect of the all-pervading influence of rhetoric.

Nor did rhetoric encourage a love of truth. It is no doubt wrong to suppose that rhetoric inevitably involves insincerity; it is only an instrument, which can be used by the sincere and the insincere, in the service of truth and of falsehood. None the less the practice of speaking on either side of a case and of saying what the occasion demanded, if it was not modified by other influences, could hardly fail to blur the distinction between true and false. To give a small example, Quintilian records two images that were particularly popular with the scholastici of his youth: ‘Even the sources of mighty rivers are navigable.’, and ‘The generous tree bears fruit when it is still a sapling.’⁹ This may seem trivial, but it is symptomatic of the reckless disregard for facts that rhetoric encouraged. Augustine described his panegyric of the Emperor as full of falsehoods. Probably it was no more false than others of its kind. But how many panegyrists were really conscious of their falsehood? For the complete rhetorician truth is irrelevant. It is enough for him if he makes his case effectively or treats his theme with elegance and eloquence.

It might be maintained, however, that the rhetorical education should be judged mainly as a practical training for public life. Its uses under the Republic, when speaking was such an important accomplishment for the politician, are more obvious than its uses under the Empire. Yet even in the later Empire the rhetorician prided himself on educating men for the public service, and the fact that the system was accepted without question for so long suggests that it served its purpose well enough. The administrator does not require to be a philosopher or a scientist or a creative artist. He needs to be able to see the relevant factors in a situation or a problem and to express himself clearly and accurately, and a rhetorical education, if well conducted, is perhaps as good a training as any for such a career. One may well suppose that the habits of accurate thought and expression which would be learnt in Quintilian’s school would stand a man in good stead in a public career. But whether other schools provided so good a training is open to question. The flowery language, the false sentiment and the studied ambiguities of declamation as it was so often practised seem to be a poor preparation for the official dispatch. We learn from Quintilian that the young man who had practised giving advice in the suasoriae had a good deal to unlearn before he could give real advice in the senate or elsewhere.¹⁰ Yet the Empire continued to be administered, and those who administered it were products of the rhetorical schools. Perhaps their education mattered little in comparison with what they imbibed from tradition. The Romans had administrative capacity in their bones, and it could survive even the follies of the lesser rhetoricians.

To some extent, perhaps, criticism of ancient rhetoric on intellectual or practical grounds is beside the mark, for there is an element in it which is impervious to such criticisms, an element of pure art. When one reads of the triumphant progress from city to city of some famous sophist, the applause he arouses and the rewards he receives, one is reminded of a popular operatic singer of today.¹¹ The singer’s audience do not judge him by the quality of his libretto; it is the music and the voice which charm. So with the ancient sophist, the speaker for display. The meaning was unimportant; it was the sound of the words and the delivery that produced the effect. The speech was a work of art in itself; that was enough. Whether the words made sense or nonsense, were true or false, was indifferent. Such was the oratory of the Greek Second Sophistic and of Apuleius’s Florida. The element of pure art entered even into speeches like those of Cicero, where the meaning was by no means unimportant. It entered, too, into school declamation. And if one considers such declamation as playing a part not unlike that of the school play or the singing class today, one can better understand its popularity. The aesthetic side of human nature, having no other outlet, was satisfied through the medium of speech. So much we may allow. We may admit the enjoyment of the beauty of words and the pride in their artistic use to be in some degree legitimate and understandable. But the primary purpose of speech and writing is to express thought and feeling, and in so far as this was forgotten the culture of the ancient world lost its vitality. It is easy to understand how in the fourth century men like Augustine reacted against a culture which overvalued the aesthetic side of self-expression.

There is yet another aspect of rhetorical education that remains to be considered. The pupil in the schools, in addition to showing off on the platform, had to put in a good deal of hard work on rhetorical theory. Besides the excitements of declamation there was the hard narrow discipline of formal rhetoric; there were the endless divisions and subdivisions to be learned and the obscurities of the status doctrine to be mastered. This certainly provided a mental exercise, and in so far as it was taught thoroughly and followed intelligently it must have been of value educationally. And yet, would not all the mental energy that went into rhetorical theory have been better employed on something else? If the verdict of posterity is to be trusted, rhetoric was one of the least valuable intellectual creations of the ancients. The Greek achievements in other arts and sciences are recognised as the foundation of modern developments, whereas rhetoric has led to nothing and is now more or less forgotten. What was valuable in the system was small in comparison to what was of no real importance. It is safe to say that the world would have been none the worse without the status doctrine. Much of ancient rhetoric seems to be little more than what Quintilian calls a , ‘an unprofitable imitation of a science, which is neither good nor bad, but merely involves a useless expenditure of labour’.¹²

Even if rhetoric was of more value than these criticisms would suggest, it can hardly be denied that it was given an excessively large place in the system of Roman education. The medieval system was better balanced. In this one began by learning the three subjects of the trivium, grammar, logic, and rhetoric, and then went on to the quadrivium, arithmetic, music, geometry and astronomy. One thus first equipped oneself with the instruments of thought and expression and then went on to the various branches of science as they were then understood. The division of the two branches of study recalls Aristotle’s distinction of dialectic and rhetoric from the , the sciences with their own specific subject matter. Indeed the medieval system, based as it was on the liberal arts handed down by the encyclopaedists of later antiquity, was a return to a Greek ideal of general education which had never been adequately represented in the Roman system. The Roman education was founded on two only of the liberal arts, grammar and rhetoric.

So much may be said in criticism of the rhetorical education of the Romans. But it should always be remembered that there was more in Roman culture than was embodied in the educational system. There was philosophy, independent of rhetoric and at times in opposition to it; there were also the various branches of literature other than oratory, which the rhetoricians might analyse according to their rules and subordinate to their purposes, and which might themselves adopt much of the rhetorical manner, but which were never wholly absorbed by rhetoric. The vitality of Roman culture, it may be suggested, depended on the survival of independent influences to counteract the dominance of rhetoric in the school system. If we regard the last century before Christ as the golden age of Latin literature, it is surely in part due to the fact that rhetoric was then kept in its place and that other studies flourished by its side. Cicero studied in the Academy as well as under the rhetoricians; Lucretius was an adherent of a school which regarded rhetoric with hostility. Virgil had experience of the same school; he passed from his rhetoric master to the Epicurean Siro, and who can doubt that he profited by the variety in his education? Horace, if we can judge from his own account, missed the rhetoric school and passed straight from studying literature at Rome to studying philosophy at Athens. It is doubtful whether for all the learning and love of literature which flourished among the educated in the imperial period the general level of culture was ever so high as in the first century before Christ. Pliny’s range of interests is narrower than Cicero’s, and Fronto’s is narrower than Pliny’s. The decline reflects the growing influence of rhetoric and the weakening of other elements in Roman culture.

The answer to the question with which this chapter began would then appear to be something like this: Rhetoric is well enough, if kept within limits. But it should not be allowed to dominate the educational system and absorb the interests of the educated man so far that other more valuable studies languish. In short, as the Emperor Julian put it: ‘Do not despise the art of words; do not neglect rhetoric, do not give up your familiarity with the poets. But devote more attention to the sciences.”¹³