Cicero’s combination of native oratorical and intellectual gifts with a very thorough education endowed him with every weapon that a pleader in Roman lawcourt, Senate, or Assembly could need.
You, most eloquent of Romulus’ descendants,
Those now living, or dead and gone before them,
And those still to be born in future ages,
To you, Cicero, gratefully Catullus
Gives his thanks – he, the worst of living poets,
Just as surely the worst of living poets,
As you, Cicero, are the best of lawyers.2
Cicero’s gifts, whether they made him a conspicuously good man or not, enabled him to speak and write the unprecedentedly eloquent language which is the foundation of all subsequent European prose. An ancient critic, author of the essay On the Sublitne,3 sees his style in terms of combustion. ‘Like a spreading conflagration,’ he says, ‘Cicero ranges and rolls over the whole field; the fire which burns is within him, plentiful and constant, distributed at his will now in one part, now in another, and fed with fuel in relays.’ Augustus, coming upon one of his grandsons attempting to hide a work of Cicero that he had been reading, summed up the man for whose death he had been partly responsible not only as a patriot but as a master of notable words (the Greek logios) – as befitted an emperor who used Ciceronian clichès in his propaganda. Cicero was also a masterly anecdotist and wit (in whom a German scholar sees foreshadowings of the English sense of humour -although he was more ironical, with increasing effectiveness). These manifold talents made him one of the most persuasive public speakers who have ever lived; this is conclusively proved by the successes that he achieved.
We are able to study this phenomenon by reading Cicero’s fifty-eight surviving speeches, more than half his total output. Nevertheless, this aspect of his versatile genius is not the easiest for a twentieth-century reader to enjoy. In the first place many of his speeches (including unfortunately some of those habitually selected for use in schools) contain legal technicalities and references to contemporary minutiae that were not very important at the time, and are less so now. His private speeches (in addition to a great deal that is valuable) inevitably have their share of such esoteric obscurities. Instead, therefore, of specimens of these, I have included here two orations – those against Verres and Antony1 (Chapters 1 and 2) – which possess an exceptionally great general significance for one of the main themes of this selection, Cicero’s resistance to tyranny. But even these speeches – especially the former of them -requires a certain mental adjustment from the modern reader, who is generally not susceptible to oratory. There has never been a generation, in Britain at least (the situation is very different in, say, the Arab world or the West Indies), so unappreciative and suspicious of the sort of rhetoric of which Cicero was the master.
One of the translator’s principal duties is to be readable: since otherwise he will not be read, and he will then have failed in his task of communicating the writer whom he has translated. And he will not at the present day be readable or be read, if he writes rhetorical English. This consideration adds, for a translator of Cicero, a new and special reason for believing the often-repeated assertion that translation is a task which cannot succeed. The linguistic as well as the other qualities of his speeches are truly daunting. ‘A single page of them contains the results of more concentrated thought, active experience, and training in language man most modern speakers can command in a lifetime’.2 Cicero’s rhetoric is the product of his training in language; it is part and parcel of his style; leave it out, and you have lost one of the things he has been most admired for, and much else besides. Leave it in on the other hand, and, as I have said, you have lost something else – contemporary and readable English. There is no compromise solution to this dilemma. Since therefore I am not prepared to forgo the attempt to approach as closely as I can to adequate modern English, I am obliged, with full consciousness of what the reader is losing, to forgo the rhetoric.
This decision, necessary though I believe it to be, will make any translator’s task singularly vulnerable and exacting: for he has to deny himself precisely those rhetorical means by which Cicero himself captivated his contemporaries – readers and hearers alike – attuned as they were to his methods by native taste and Greek educational influences. Without these stimulations, the modern reader may well become uncomfortably aware of threadbare or irrelevant arguments – Lord Brougham remarked that only one-sixth of the speech defending Archias kept to the point – from which the orator himself, brilliantly haranguing a susceptible and emotionally charged gathering, was evidently well able to distract attention. In these circumstances the translator will have accomplished all that can be expected of him if, in addition to reproducing the Latin as readably as his respect for the original text permits, he manages to acquire just a little of the persuasiveness which was Cicero’s peculiar gift – if, that is, his readers like Cicero’s audiences go away believing that Antony and Verres are really as black, or at least almost as black, as he has painted them!
Yet even if the translator has somehow evolved a method of dealing with the speeches, he has by no means solved his whole problem. For there is a remarkable diversity in Cicero’s style, ranging from the solemn rotundity of his oratorical perorations, through the pellucid but still formal rhythms of his treatises, to the various degrees of colloquialism in his letters. In general, the difficulties encountered by translators of prose have received much less recognition lately than those faced by translators of poetry, though the two sets of problems are different and equally absorbing. Each activity, for example, is faced with its own peculiar difficulties created by the Latin word-order. In prose and poetry this obeys different rules and customs; but in neither case can it be rendered into English without extensive transpositions. And the translator of Cicero, in particular, is faced by quite another problem as well. That is to say, he is easily lulled into an entirely misplaced confidence by the superficial resemblance of Cicero’s language to a certain outworn kind of English:
that easy Ciceronian style,
So Latin, yet so English all the while.
When Alexander Pope wrote that, and even a good deal later, Cicero’s ‘abundant’ and rhythmical prose was by no means alien to contemporary fashion. Now the situation has changed. The translator is still insidiously tempted to utilize these analogies with the English that used to be, and to produce a Ciceronian English. But this is unquestionably not the sort of English which is, or should be, written today. On the contrary, if contemporary readable English is to be written, these blandishments must be resisted and sentences cast in an entirely different mould; to take a single example out of many, a row of rhetorical questions is nowadays scarcely acceptable. In view of the strong temptation which constantly invites the translator to ignore the steady widening of such divergences during the past century and a half, it is in certain respects harder to attempt a version of Cicero than to translate from some language so alien that no such misleading analogies suggest themselves, such as Turkish.
The same seductive familiarities beckon in the case of vocabulary, and these too have to be kept at arm’s length. Res publica, for example, though on occasion it can and should be translated ‘republic’, is more often better rendered as constitution, or government, or state, or nation, or country, or social system. I also mentioned earlier (p. 14) that a good deal of thought is needed before the right word can be found for civiliter – whatever this means in Cicero, it does not often mean ‘civilly’. I then referred to an even more important word humanitas the ideal which he exemplified himself and handed down to Europe. Now there are occasions, as one might expect from Cicero’s views, when this seems to mean just ‘humanity’ – or at least humaneness, or humanism, or hu-manitarianism, or human relations, or knowledge of how human beings behave. But much more often quite a different English word has to be found. A recent discussion1 offers a further series of possible equivalents for humanitas from the whole range of moral, intellectual, and social life, the whole process which civilizes a man and makes him a true man kindliness, helpfulness, consideration for others, tolerance; the liberal arts, culture, and education; as well as those social graces of easy manners, wit, and urbane polish, which are mistaken by some for the main essence of Ciceronianism. When Cicero writes of humanitas, as he frequently does, it is only translatable by context; and although there is a strong Roman element in its total significance, the word is sometimes like many other abstractions in Cicero only translatable after it has been decided which of several Greek terms he had in mind when he was writing.
Indeed, the creation of such fruitfully comprehensive ideals as humanitas was partly due to Cicero’s pioneer difficulties in adapting the smaller vocabulary of his native tongue to Greek philosophical finesses with which it was unfamiliar. He invented the terms ‘qualitas’ and ‘quantitas’, and excuses the description of philosophy as ‘moralis’. But on occasion he employs vocabulary with a certain insouciant vagueness that does not acilitate the translator’s task. The same applies to the structure of his ritings. This is often inorganic, repetitive, and illogical; at times uggestive of the after-dinner monologues which, without their underlying seriousness, they might be. The casual development of one point or topic from another makes easy, attractive reading, but also makes it hard to follow some of the Greek arguments which Cicero is intending to reproduce.
Here the translator is in a dilemma: is he to fog the sequence of thought as effectively as, on occasion, Cicero does himself? At first sight it might seem to be his duty to do so indeed, with distinguished exceptions, this has been the usual practice. But then the reflection recurs that Cicero held the attention of his readers by miraculous stylistic assets which are far beyond the reach of those endeavouring to translate him. Besides, he was writing (as indeed were a number of his translators) for readers of whom many already had some acquaintance with the arguments that he was placing before them. Perhaps then the translator ought after all discreetly to clear up, as best he can, a few of the more insignificant ambiguities along his path. He must not interfere with the construction of a work or with the order of ideas, but he may be justified in inserting a word or two here or there to clarify their sequence. This, it appears to me, is particularly necessary in the treatise On Duties; and if my version of that work seems to some readers not literal enough, I would ask them to consider whether the more literal character at which translations have customarily aimed has not made it unduly difficult to follow the sequence of thought.