A Short History of Rhetoric in Rome

The first Roman orator of whom we can form a distinct impression is Marcus Porcius Cato (234-149 BCE), also known as Cato the Elder or Cato the Censor—known, ironically, for his austere conservatism and staunch opposition to Hellenization [Greek influence]. Despite his high senatorial rank, Cato rode a packhorse laden with saddlebags. He made a point of writing his history of Rome and his treatise on agriculture in Latin instead of the more usual and scholarly Greek. ‘The words of the Greeks’ he said, ‘are born on their lips, but those of the Romans in their hearts.’ Today, his De agri cultura [On the Cultivation of the Fields] is the oldest extant work of Latin prose.

Cato wrote a kind of encyclopaedia for his son, which includes a part on rhetoric. In it, he says, ‘An orator, son Marcus, is a good man skilled at speaking.’ Cato is reputed to have ended every speech in the Senate with the words, Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam [‘Moreover, I think Carthage should be destroyed]—often abbreviated or simplified to Carthago delenda est. His speech, On His Own Expenses, is remembered for mentioning the topics that he will not mention, a figure of speech known as apophasis, paralipsis, or praeteritio—a classic example being, ‘No point saying that I told you so.’ Or Monica from Friends: ‘Chandler, you know, the old Monica would remind you to scrub that Teflon pan with a plastic brush. But I’m not going to do that.’

The Gracchi

The most notable orators of the late second century are the aristocratic grandsons of Scipio Africanus, Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus, also known as the Gracchi brothers.

In 133 BCE, as tribune of the plebs, Tiberius introduced a land reform to benefit the poor. When he met with opposition, he persisted with his reform and was beaten to death.

Some ten years later, Gaius in turn became tribune of the plebs and took up the mantle of his late brother—and ended up either being killed, or committing suicide to avoid being killed.

His most famous words, spoken on the last day of his life and recorded by Cicero as an epitome of delivery, brought even his enemies to tears:

Whither shall I, unhappy wretch, betake myself? Whither shall I turn? To the Capitol? But that is drenched with the blood of my brother! Or to my home, that I may see my afflicted mother in all the agony of lamentation?

Cicero

The greatest of all Roman orators is, of course, Cicero himself.

The name of Cicero is regarded not as the name of a man, but of eloquence itself. Let us, therefore, fix our eyes upon him, take him as our pattern, and let the student realize that he has made real progress if he is a passionate admirer of Cicero. —Quintilian X, 2.

Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 BCE) was born in Arpinium, around 60 miles south of Rome, into a wealthy equestrian family. He began practising the law in around 83-81, and, in 80, made his name on the back of his brilliant defence of Sextus Roscius against a fabricated charge of patricide. He climbed the cursus honorum, or ‘ladder of offices’, holding each office at or near the youngest possible age: quaestor in 75, aedile in 69, praetor in 66, and consul in 63. He became consul at the age of just 42, making him the youngest non-patrician to serve as a consul in the five-hundred-year history of the Republic.

As quaestor in Western Sicily, Cicero seemed so formidable that the locals asked him to prosecute Gaius Verres, who, as governor, had plundered the province. He fought the case with such aplomb that he came to be regarded as the greatest orator in Rome. As praetor, he made his first big speech in the senate, in favour of conferring upon Pompey the command of the campaign against Mithradates VI, King of Pontus. But the crowning glory of his career came in his consulship, when, by the force of his four Catiline Orations, he put down the Catiline conspiracy to overthrow the Republic. He had five of the conspirators executed and announced their deaths to a cheering crowd with the single word, Vixerunt [‘They lived’]. For ‘saving the Republic’ (as he liked to boast), he received the honorific Pater Patriae [‘Father of the Fatherland’] from his ally Cato the Younger (the Stoic great-grandson of Cato the Elder), but lived forever after in fear of reprisal for having put Roman citizens to death without trial.

Cicero was not a party to Caesar’s assassination in 44, although Brutus did call out his name upon raising his blood-soaked dagger, beseeching him to ‘restore the Republic’. Cicero later wrote to one of the conspirators, ‘How I wish that you had invited me to that most glorious banquet on the Ides of March.’

Mark Antony, as consul, leader of the Caesarian faction, and unofficial executor of Caesar’s public will, began throwing his weight around. Cicero, who had been hoping to restore the Republic, responded by playing the young Octavian, Caesar’s grandnephew, adopted son, and heir, against Antony. More than that, he overtly and vehemently attacked Antony in a series of speeches which he referred to as the Philippics, after the speeches delivered by Demosthenes to rouse the Athenians into fighting Philip II of Macedon. But this strategy backfired when Octavian and Antony reconciled and joined forces with Lepidus to form the Second Triumvirate.

Estimating that Caesar had been undone by his clemency, the Second Triumvirate brought back the ruthless proscription [the legally sanctioned murder of opponents and rivals], not seen in Rome since the time of Sulla. When Antony put Cicero at the head of the proscription list, Octavian tried to have him removed but, it would seem, did not insist or prevail. On 7 December 43, Cicero, betrayed by a freedman [former slave] of his brother, was intercepted near his villa at Formiae, travelling down to the coast in a bid to escape to his son in Greece. He literally bowed to his assassins, extending his neck out of his litter to ease their task. After killing him, they hacked off his head and hands so that Antony could have them displayed on the Rostra in the manner of Marius and Sulla. According to the historian Cassius Dio (d. 235 CE), Antony’s wife Fulvia took up Cicero’s severed head, pulled out his tongue, and jabbed at it with her hairpin.

Many years later, Octavian, now Augustus, chanced upon one of his grandsons reading a book by Cicero. The boy tried to hide the book in his gown, but the emperor took it from him and stood a long time leafing through its pages. Finally, he handed it back, saying, ‘My child, this was a learned man, and a lover of his country.’

Atticism vs Asianism

In his 12-volume Institutes of Oratory, Quintilian contrasts the style of Cicero to that of the Athenian orator Demosthenes, whom both Cicero and Quintilian held in the highest esteem:

Demosthenes is more concentrated, Cicero more copious… from Demosthenes’ speeches nothing can be taken away, to Cicero’s nothing can be added…

In the Orator, one of his latest works, Cicero paints a picture of the ideal orator, and responds to criticisms, from Brutus and other so-called Atticists, of his abundance and elaboration of style.

The Atticists, so called because they took for models the Attic writers of the fifth and early fourth centuries BCE (Lysias, Demosthenes, Hyperides…), argued that the spread of Greek into Asia in the wake of Alexander had led to a degeneracy of style, and called for a return ad fontes [to the sources]. This unadorned plain speaking chimed with the Stoicism or Stoic leanings of many Atticists, including Brutus himself.

Hortensius

The orator Quintus Hortensius Hortalus (114-50 BCE), second only to his friend Cicero, and more florid, had the good fortune of dying a year before Caesar crossed the Rubicon—of dying, if you will, with the Republic that had afforded him the freedom to speak. A noted piscinarius [‘fish-fancier’], Hortensius bred fish (possibly lampreys, eels, or mullet) in pools, and may have introduced the peacock to the Roman table. As an orator, he so perfected the swish of the toga that actors came to watch and learn from him. Cicero entitled his invitation to philosophy, the Hortensius, after him, and dedicated his history of Roman oratory, the Brutus, to his memory.

Rhetoric After the Republic

Fortunately, rhetoric, unlike Hortensius, did not die with the Republic. Au contraire, as if to compensate for its newfound impotence, it rose into the pinnacle of education.

In the Hellenistic period, a distinction had been drawn between the elementary teaching of the grammarian and the more advanced instruction of the rhetorician, which boys of a certain background might begin between the ages of 12 to 14. Even before Cicero, who listed them, rhetorical instruction consisted of five parts, or canons: invention (what to say), arrangement (how to lay it out), style (how to say it), memory (how to commit it to memory), and delivery (how to convey it with more than just words).

For centuries after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, rhetoric remained the cornerstone of Western education. Five of the major Latin fathers of the Church had been teachers of rhetoric prior to their conversion: Tertullian (d. 240 CE), Cyprian (d. 258), Lactantius (d. c. 325), Arnobius (d. c. 330), and Augustine (d. 430). In 425, to train administrators, the Eastern Roman emperor Theodosius II founded the Pandidacterium, the first incarnation of the University of Constantinople, with 31 chairs—of which ten in Greek grammar, five in Greek rhetoric, ten in Latin grammar, three in Latin rhetoric, two in law, and one in philosophy.

During the Middle Ages down to Shakespeare’s time at school, boys began with the study of grammar, dialectic (or ‘logic’), and rhetoric. Having completed this so-called trivium, they could progress to the quadrivium of arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy. These seven ‘liberal arts’ were regarded as ‘thinking skills’, and distinguished from practical arts such as medicine and architecture.

Cicero’s On Invention

At the age of just 16 or 17, Cicero had written a handbook of rhetoric, On Invention, which contains the first recorded use of the term ‘liberal arts’. During the Middle Ages through to the Renaissance, On Invention became the standard text for the teaching of rhetoric, alongside the anonymous Rhetoric for Herennius, which benefited from being attributed (or rather, misattributed) to the great Cicero. Cicero himself regarded On Invention as superseded by his mature works on rhetoric, On the Orator, Brutus, and Orator, but these were little known after the classical period, until the Renaissance.

Although practical in scope, On Invention opens with a preface in which Cicero reflects upon the relationship between dialectic and rhetoric, concluding from the height of his teenage years that

wisdom without eloquence has been of little benefit to states, but eloquence without wisdom has for the most part been a great hindrance and never an advantage’.

Until recently, everyone who was anyone would have read this.

Rhetoric Today

Cicero’s influence perdured well into the twentieth century, and it is not until the 1960s that the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge dropped the matriculation [entry] requirement for an O level in Latin.

Speaking at her old school in 1982, Margaret Thatcher, by then Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, recounted her struggle to learn Latin to apply for chemistry at Oxford:

Well, there you are, I was taught Latin and I must tell you—anyone who wishes to do an O level in Latin can do it in ten weeks flat.

A decade later, in a 1991 KERA interview, the journalist Lee Cullum challenged Thatcher on the benefits and relevance of a classical education:

I read several years ago in the Sunday Times that a classical education, for which Oxford and Cambridge are so famous, is fine for running an empire, but not so good for running an economy. Do you think there is any truth in that?

No, I don’t. If you excel at a classical education, Latin and Greek, not only at the language but at learning the literature, you will have learnt a great deal about the philosophy of life, about democracy, about fundamental principles, and you will have a very good mind … Heaven knows, these days, we are still up against human nature rather more than anything else.

Neel Burton is author of How to Think Like Plato and Speak Like Cicero.