19th century cartoon of Cicero denouncing Catiline
When and how to use them, and how to defend against them.
In rhetoric, an ad hominem (“to the man”) is an attack, not on the argument itself, but on the person making it. It is, in simpler words, an attempt to shoot the messenger.
When Winston Churchill called Mahatma Gandhi “a seditious Middle Temple lawyer now posing as a fakir,” he was attempting to undermine Gandhi’s character, or ethos.
Ad hominem, which is essentially an attack on a speaker’s ethos, is older than the books. It was not beneath Churchill, or even the Roman orator Cicero, who used it often, and went so far as to call Piso, Julius Caesar’s father-in-law, a “most foul and inhuman monster” (inhumanissimum ac foedissimum monstrum).
The first and most famous line of the most famous speech in all of Latin literature, Cicero’s First Catilinarian, is no more than an extended ad hominem:
When, O Catiline, do you mean to cease abusing our patience? How long is that madness of yours still to mock us? When is there to be an end to that unbridled audacity of yours, swaggering about as it does now?
When and how to use ad hominem
In academic circles, the ad hominem is regarded as a logical fallacy and frowned upon. It is uncivil, it stifles debate, and it is a tacit admission that you are losing the argument. It is forbidden in formal debates, and there has been a petition to ban it from the U.K.’s House of Commons.
But in rhetoric, anything goes, and an ad hominem can be legitimate if it serves to undermine the ethos, or pro hominem claims, of your opponents.
Even so, when attacking an opponent, it is better to put one’s words into the mouth of some third person, or to use paralipsis (mentioning something by saying that you will not mention it), as Cicero did in his speech Pro Caelio:
Clodia, I am not thinking now of the wrongs you have done me. I am putting to one side the memory of my humiliation. I pass over your cruel treatment of my family when I was away. Consider that nothing I have said has been said against you.
While debating Ron DeSantis, former Florida gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum succeeded in doing both at the same time, to great effect:
I’m not calling Mr. DeSantis a racist; I’m simply saying the racists believe he is a racist.
Such is the power of rhetoric that, had it not been for this single sentence, I may never have heard of Andrew Gillum. Often, when all is said and done, all that remains of a life is one or two sententiae, if even that.
How to defend against ad hominem
If you find yourself on the receiving end of an ad hominem, you can respond in one of four ways:
Ignore it.
Call it out as an ad hominem, e.g. “Instead of attacking me, could you please return to the argument, which you seem afraid of losing.”
Own it.
Bite back with an ad hominem of your own.
Which strategy to use depends on the context and the available material (so always do your research). But in the absence of a killer riposte, it is best and easiest to ignore the insult while looking slightly dismayed.
Finally, if returning an ad hominem, consider accompanying or accenting it with some gesture—the rhetorical device known as mycterismus. If the audience laughs, which it probably will, your opponent will not recover from it.
Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 BCE) was born in Arpinium, around 60 miles south of Rome, into a wealthy equestrian family. His cognomen, or personal surname, derives from the Latin for ‘chickpea’ [cicer], by which his ancestors may have prospered. He lived through a time of great civil unrest, famously decrying, O tempora, O mores [‘Oh the times, oh the customs’]. Despite his frail and sickly constitution, he served in the army in 89-88, notably under Pompey’s father, Pompeius Strabo. But what he lacked for in virility and nobility he more than made up in study and oratory. In 87, Philo of Larissa, the last undisputed scholarch of the Academy, arrived in Rome, and Cicero came to sit at his feet—later opining that, if Zeus were to speak, it would be in none other than the language of Plato. He studied law under Quintus Mucius Scævola, who founded the study of law as a systematic discipline.
Cicero began practising the law in around 83-81, and, in 80, made his reputation on the back of his brilliant defence of Sextus Roscius against a fabricated charge of patricide. In 79, he made a marriage of convenience to Terentia, who came with property and a dowry of 400,000 sesterces, and who bore him a daughter, Tullia, and a son, Cicero Minor (later, Cicero the Younger). In the same year, partly on account of his health, he travelled to Greece, Asia, and Rhodes, and met with several leading philosophers including, in Athens, Antiochus of Ascalon. Antiochus had studied under Philo of Larissa but had come to reject Academic Skepticism. By seeking to fold the doctrines of the other schools into Platonism, he inaugurated the stage of Platonic philosophy known as Middle Platonism. While in Greece, Cicero asked the oracle at Delphi how he might attain the greatest glory. The pythoness [high priestess] replied, ‘By making your own genius and not the opinion of the people the guide of your life.’
Ladder of Offices
In the next period, Cicero climbed the cursus honorum, or ‘ladder of offices’, holding each office at or near the youngest possible age: quæstor in 75, ædile in 69, prætor in 66, and consul in 63. He became consul at the age of just 42, making him the youngest non-patrician to serve as consul in the five-hundred-year history of the Republic. As quæstor in Western Sicily, he 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. In Sicily, he took it upon himself to rediscover the tomb of Archimedes, which he described as surmounted by a sphere and cylinder. He then chided the Syracusans for leaving it to a man from Arpinium to remember their most illustrious citizen. As prætor, he made his first big speech, 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 during 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 Patriæ [‘Father of the Fatherland’] from his ally Cato, but lived forever after in fear of reprisal for having put Roman citizens to death without trial.
In 62, Cicero added a large townhouse on the Palatine Hill to his portfolio of properties. The house, which he described as ‘in sight of nearly the whole city’ [inconspectu prope totius urbis], had belonged to Rome’s richest citizen, Crassus, and cost him 3.5 million sesterces. In 60, Cæsar pressed Cicero to join his alliance with Pompey and Crassus (later called the First Triumvirate), but he rejected the offer on the grounds that their arrangement undermined the Republic. He also refused Cæsar’s offer of a place on his staff in Gaul, leaving him exposed and vulnerable to the many enemies that his sharp tongue had left in its train.
Exile
When Publius Clodius Pulcher became tribune in 58, he passed a law, with retroactive effect, to exile any official who executed a citizen without trial. The law was squarely aimed at Cicero, who fled to Greece while Clodius’ supporters ransacked his house on the Palatine and his villas at Formiæ and Tusculum.
Cicero now fell into a deep depression, and wrote to his friend Atticus:
I say this deliberately—that no one was ever afflicted with so heavy a calamity, that no one had ever greater cause to wish for death; while I have let slip the time when I might have sought it most creditably. Henceforth death can never heal, it can only end my sorrow.
In the wise words of Plutarch,
He was become so poor-spirited, so humiliated and dejected by his misfortunes, as none could have expected in a man who had devoted so much of his life to study and learning… But the desire for glory has great power in washing the tinctures of philosophy out of the souls of men.
Cicero returned in 57 after being recalled by the Senate, with Clodius casting the single vote against the motion. He was met by a cheering crowd all the way from Brundisium [modern-day Brindisi] to the Capitol, and his properties, which had been destroyed, were rebuilt at public cost.
Governorship of Cilicia
He took to opposing Cæsar, but this only drove Cæsar closer to Pompey and Crassus. So he swallowed his principles and made a show of supporting them, before quietly withdrawing into his library. In 53, the year that Crassus died, he freed Marcus Tullius Tiro ‘to be our friend instead of our slave’, and it is Tiro who, after his death, collected his letters and speeches for publication. In 51, Tiro, himself a prolific writer, accompanied him to Cilicia (in modern-day Turkey) after he reluctantly accepted the governorship of the province. He restored calm and order to the entire region, repulsing Parthian incursions, suppressing brigands, and stemming corruption. He stopped in Rhodes and Athens on the return to Rome, where the Senate granted him a supplicatio, or period of public thanksgiving—instead of the full-blown triumph that he had been coveting.
Caesar’s demise
Only six days after Cicero’s return to Rome, Cæsar crossed the Rubicon into Italy, thereby declaring war on the Senate. Cicero hesitated in picking a side, reasoning that all outcomes led to a tyrant, but in the end crossed the Adriatic to join Pompey’s camp—where he had words with Cato, who thought that he would have done better to remain in Rome. After Pompey’s defeat to Cæsar at Pharsalus, Cato offered him the command of the Pompeian forces, but he preferred to return to the Eternal City to be pardoned by Cæsar.
He had divorced Terentia in 51, and in 46 or 45 wedded a wealthy girl called Publilia, who had been his ward, and who jealoused the great love that he bore for his daughter Tullia. The marriage did not withstand Tullia’s sudden death in 45, with Cicero writing to Atticus that he had ‘lost the one thing that bound me to life’. For solace, Cicero went to Atticus, and in his library mined the Greek philosophers, especially Crantor, to write his Consolatio. Sadly, the Consolatio has largely been lost, as has Crantor’s On Grief, which, according to the Stoic Panætius, deserved to be learnt by heart.
Cicero was not a party to Cæsar’s assassination in 44, although Brutus did call out his name upon raising his blood-soaked dagger, beseeching him to ‘restore the Republic’. He 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.’
Suite et fin
Mark Antony, as consul, leader of the Cæsarian faction, and unofficial executor of Cæsar’s public will, began throwing his weight around. Cicero, who had been hoping to restore the Republic, responded by playing the young Octavian, Cæsar’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 failed when Octavian and Antony reconciled and joined forces with Lepidus to form the Second Triumvirate.
Estimating that Cæsar 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. The proscription also served to fund the Triumvirate’s war, the so-called Liberators’ Civil War, against Brutus and Cassius, who were finally defeated at the Battle of Philippi in 42. When Antony put Cicero at the head of the proscription list, Octavian tried to have him removed, but did not insist or prevail. Also on the list were Cicero’s son, brother, and nephew. The Triumvirate, in the words of Plutarch, ‘let their anger and fury take from them the sense of humanity, and demonstrated that no beast is more savage than man, when possessed with power answerable to his rage.’
On 7 December 43, Cicero, betrayed by a freedman of his brother, was intercepted near his villa at Formiæ, travelling down to the coast in a bid to escape to 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 fashion of Marius and Sulla. According to the historian Cassius Dio, Antony’s wife Fulvia took up Cicero’s severed head, pulled out his tongue, and jabbed it repeatedly with her hairpin.
Cicero’s brother and nephew were also murdered, but his son, who was then in Greece, escaped unscathed.
Twelve years later, in 31, Cicero the Younger took part in the Battle of Actium, in which Octavian defeated Antony; and in 30, he had the satisfaction, as consul, of announcing Antony’s suicide to the Senate.
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.”
Many Oxford University students have thanked me for teaching them the six parts of discourse—which, for many centuries, used to be common knowledge.
Since at least Cicero (d. 43 BCE), speeches have been divided into six parts, known as the ‘six parts of discourse’:
Introduction (exordium)
Narration (narratio)
Division (divisio or partitio)
Proof (confirmatio)
Refutation (confutatio)
Conclusion (peroratio)
The six parts of discourse are, of course, just as good for structuring essays, so let’s look at each one in turn.
1. Introduction
In the exordium, you might announce the subject and purpose of the speech/essay and lay out your credentials for speaking/writing.
All the better if, at the same time, you can hook your audience, for instance, by creating a sense of urgency.
Keep the exordium as short and clear as possible, A speaker/writer should never bore, confuse, or test their audience, and the beginning would be the worst time to do so.
2. Narration
In the narration, you lay out the facts of the case and issues at stake. What is the background to this problem, how did it arise, what has it led to, what has so far been said and done about it, what does the research indicate, have there been any similar problems, and so on.
The narration may seem neutral and objective, but is in fact an opportunity to frame the debate/discussion.
3. Division
Division is the turning point in your speech/essay. ‘So this is what is at stake, this is why you should care about it, and this is what we should do about it.’
Like the exordium, the division ought to be brief if it is not to reek of artifice.
The rhetorical handbook Ad Herennium (c. 80 BCE) provides a couple of examples of division, concerning dilemmas in Greek mythology.
Orestes killed his mother [Clytemnestra]; on that I agree with my opponents. But did he have the right to commit the deed, and was he justified in committing it? This is in dispute.
You admit that Clytemnestra killed Agamemnon; yet despite this they say that I ought not to have avenged my father.
4. Proof
The proof is your argumentation. This includes logos (arguments), of course, usually in the form of enthymemes (informal arguments) and examples, but it also includes non-technical proofs such as laws, witnesses, and contracts.
In the Rhetoric, Aristotle (d. 322 BCE) advises that if the written law is against us, we should claim that it is more equitable to fall back on the general law (natural law), as Antigone did when she buried her brother Polynices against Creon’s edict. Alternatively, we might argue that the law is antiquated, that it contradicts itself or another law, or that it is ambiguous or open to interpretation.
For Aristotle, witnesses can include ‘ancient witnesses’ such as Homer, Hesiod, Solon, proverbs, and received wisdom … and, nowadays, old Aristotle himself. Ancient witnesses can be appealed to indirectly, as when Barack Obama echoed Martin Luther King, who himself echoed Abraham Lincoln, who himself echoed the King James Bible, notably in the first line of the Gettysburg Address of 1863:
Four score and seven years ago [i.e. 87 years ago] our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
5. Refutation
Refutation, in which you acknowledge and address the other side of the argument, need not be fair or principled. You might exaggerate, misrepresent, or caricature your opponent’s stance (for example, refer to their plan to fund social care as a ‘dementia tax’ or ‘death tax’), indignantly deny a made-up or unrelated charge, or equivocally deny an actual charge.
If it helps, you can also concede an argument while framing it within your own, stronger argument. Far from being a retreat or capitulation, concession (concessio, synchoresis, paromologia) makes you seem agreeable, honest, and fairminded, while deflating your opponent and reframing the debate to suit your strengths: ‘Yes, that’s correct. I’ve read the report myself and seen the numbers. But the real question is…’
If your proof is insubstantial, you might instead begin with a vehement refutation in the hope that no one notices your lack of argument. Since Plato’s Phaedo, and even a little before, the Western mind has been marked by deep divisions or dualities, such as soul and body, mind and matter, reason and sense experience, reason and emotion, reality and appearance, good and evil, heaven and hell… This binary thinking carries over to dialectic and rhetoric, in which it is often one thing or the other, rather than both or several or neither. Thus, in the Western mind, knocking down your opponent’s argument is tantamount to validating your own. Notice that the very concept of a debate with an ‘opponent’ is confrontational, when the exercise could instead be cooperative and conversational, as in the Upanishads.
6. Conclusion
Finally, the peroration often includes a forceful summarising of the key points together with a pathetic (emotional) appeal and call to action.
For example, this is how President Franklin D. Roosevelt concluded his Day of Infamy Speech, delivered to a Joint Session of Congress on December 8, 1941, a day after the Attack on Pearl Harbour:
Hostilities exist. There is no blinking at the fact that our people, our territory, and our interests are in grave danger.
With confidence in our armed forces, with the unbounding determination of our people, we will gain the inevitable triumph—so help us God.
I ask that the Congress declare that since the unprovoked and dastardly attack by Japan on Sunday, December 7th, 1941, a state of war has existed between the United States and the Japanese empire.
Caveats
Although many great talks deliberately or naturally follow this six-part scheme, it is important to remember that a speech should sound artless and authentic rather than contrived and formulaic.
Once they have been assimilated, it is possible to break the rules, as Cicero himself did in the first line of the First Catilinarian, first, by addressing Catiline directly in the Senate chamber, and, second, by overlooking his own advice ‘not to spring at once into the passionate portion of your speech’ [Orator 2.213-14].
When, O Catiline, do you mean to cease abusing our patience? How long is that madness of yours still to mock us? When is there to be an end to that unbridled audacity of yours, swaggering about as it does now?
In some speeches, entire parts may be missing, or not clearly distinguished. Indeed, Aristotle identified only two necessary parts, statement and argument, that is, narration and proof, which might be supplemented by an introduction and conclusion [Rhetoric 3.13]. Other ways of seeming natural are to use simple and direct language, express doubt about what to say (dubitatio), and correct yourself aloud (epergesis). Dubitatio and epergesis can also make you seem more even-minded and scrupulous.
Craft is something that you learn; art, that you unlearn.
According to the historian Suetonius, the emperor Augustus wrote an invitation (or exhortation) to philosophy. If this is true, it would have been inspired by Cicero’s famous Hortensius, which was, in turn, informed by Aristotle’s Protrepticus. Tragically, all three protreptics have been lost, except for fragments of the Hortensius and Protrepticus—depriving us of antiquity’s most popular, and improving, genre of philosophy.
This short, readable book is an imaginative reconstruction of the first Roman emperor’s invitation to philosophy, based on arguments and anecdotes gleaned from other ancient authors, including Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, Cicero, Epictetus, Seneca, and Marcus Aurelius. It features Augustus in conversation with his two young grandsons (who were also his adopted sons and heirs), Gaius and Lucius, in the forlorn hope that they might one day rise into philosopher-emperors.
At his trial, Socrates declaimed that the unexamined life is not worth living. But what are the arguments behind this slogan, and why should we, today, take up the study of philosophy?
There is much more to mental health than the mere absence of mental disorder. Today, I write about all the things that I was never taught. Click here to find out more.
You must be logged in to post a comment.