_CICERO'S RHETORIC._
It is well known that Cicero's works are divided into four main parts.
There are the Rhetoric, the Orations, the Epistles, and the Philosophy.
There is a fifth part, indeed--the Poetry; but of that there is not
much, and of the little we have but little is esteemed. There are not
many, I fear, who think that Cicero has deserved well of his country by
his poetry. His prose works have been divided as I have stated them. Of
these, two portions have been dealt with already--as far as I am able to
deal with them. Of the Orations and Epistles I have spoken as I have
gone on with my task, because the matter there treated has been
available for the purposes of biography: the other two, the Rhetoric and
the Philosophy, have been distinct from the author's life.[239] They
might have been good or bad, and his life would have been still the
same; therefore it is necessary to divide them from his life, and to
speak of them separately. They are the work of his silent chamber, as
the others were the enthusiastic outpourings of his daily spirit, or the
elaborated arguments of his public career. Who has left behind him so
widely spread a breadth of literature? Who has made so many efforts, and
has so well succeeded in them all? I do not know that it has ever been
given to any one man to run up and down the strings of knowledge, and
touch them all as though each had been his peculiar study, as Cicero has
done.
His rhetoric has been always made to come first, because, upon the
whole, it was first written. It may be as well here to give a list of
his main works, with their dates--premising, however, that we by no
means in that way get over the difficulty as to time, even in cases as
to which we are sure of our facts. A treatise may have been commenced
and then put by, or may have been written some time previously to
publication. Or it may be, as were those which are called the Academica,
that it was remodelled, and altered in its shape and form. The Academica
were written at the instance of Atticus. We now have the altered edition
of a fragment of the first book, and the original of the second book. In
this manner there have come discrepancies which nearly break the heart
of him who would fain make his list clear. But here, on the whole, is
presented to the reader with fair accuracy a list of the works of
Cicero, independent of that continual but ever-changing current of his
thought which came welling out from him daily in his speeches and his
letters. Again, however, we must remember that here are omitted all
those which are either wholly lost or have come to us only in fragments
too abruptly broken for the purposes of continuous study. Of these I
will not even attempt to give the names, though when we remember some of
the subjects--the De Gloria, the De Re Militari--he could not go into
the army for a month or two without writing a book about it--the De
Auguriis, the De Philosophia, the De Suis Temporibus, the De Suis
Consiliis, the De Jure Civili, and the De Universo, we may well ask
ourselves what were the subjects on which he did not write. In addition
to these, much that has come to us has been extracted, as it were
unwillingly, from palimpsests, and is, from that and from other causes,
fragmentary. We have indeed only fragments of the essays De Republica.
De Legibus, De Natura Deorum, De Divinatione, and De Fato, in addition
to the Academica.
The list of the works of which it is my purpose to give some shortest
possible account in the following chapters is as follows:
NATURE OF THE WORK.
TITLES OF Those as to Rhetoric are marked [a] THE DATE
THE WORKS. " " Philosophy " [b] OF
The Moral Essays " [c] PUBLICATION.
Rheticorum { Four books, giving lessons in Rhetoric; }
ad C. { supposed to have been written, not by Cicero, } B.C.
Herennium. { but by one Cornificius.[a][240] } 87, 86.
} AEtat.
De { Four books, giving lessons in Rhetoric, } 20, 21.
Inventione. { supposed to have been translated from the }
{ Greek. Two out of four have come to us.[a] }
{ Three dialogues, in three books--supposed to }
{ have been held under a plane-tree, in the }
De Oratore. { garden at Tusculum belonging to Crassus, } B.C. 55.
{ forty years before--in which are laid down } AEtat. 52.
{ instructions for the making of an orator.[a] }
{ Six political discussions--supposed to have }
De { been held seventy-five years before the date } B.C. 53.
Republica. { at which they were written--on the best mode } AEtat. 54.
{ of governance. We have but a fragment of them. }
{ [c] }
{ Three out of six books as to the best laws for }
{ governing the Republic. They are carried on }
De Legibus. { between Atticus, Quintus, and Marcus. They } B.C. 52.
{ are supposed to have been written B.C. 52 } AEtat. 55.
{ (aetat. 55), but were not published till after }
{ his death.[c] }
De Optimo { A preface to the translation of the speeches }
Genere { of AEschines and of Demosthenes for and against } B.C. 52.
Oratorum. { Ctesiphon--in the matter of the Golden Crown. } AEtat. 55.
{ [a] }
De { Instructions by questions and answers, }
Partitione { supposed to have been previously given to his } B.C. 46.
Oratoria. { son in Greek, on the art of speaking in public.} AEtat. 61.
{ [a] }
{ Treatises, in which he deals with the various }
{ phases of Philosophy taught by the Academy. It }
The { has been altered, and we have only a part of } B.C. 45.
Academica. { the first book of the altered portion and the } AEtat. 62.
{ second part of the treatise before it was }
{ altered. In its altered form it is addressed }
{ to Varro.[b] }
De Finibus { A treatise in five books, in the form of }
Bonorum et { dialogues, as to the results to be looked for } B.C. 45.
Malorum. { in inquiries as to what is good and what is } AEtat. 62.
{ evil. It is addressed to Brutus.[b] }
Brutus: or, { A treatise on the most perfect orators of past }
De Claris { times. It is addressed to Brutus, and has, in } B.C. 45.
Oratoribus. { a peculiar manner, been always called by his } AEtat. 62.
{ name.[a] }
Orator. { A treatise, addressed to Brutus, to show what } B.C. 45.
{ the perfect orator should be.[a] } AEtat. 62.
{ Or the Tusculan Inquiries, supposed to have }
Tusculanae { been held with certain friends in his Tusculan }
Disputa- { villa, as to contempt of Death and Pain and } B.C. 45.
tiones. { Sorrow, as to conquering the Passions, and the } AEtat. 62.
{ happiness to be derived from Virtue. They are }
{ addressed to Brutus.[a] }
{ Three books addressed to Brutus. Velleius, }
De Natura { Balbus, and Cotta discuss the relative merits } B.C. 44.
Deorum. { of the Epicurean, Stoic, and Academic Schools. } AEtat. 63
{ [b] }
{ He discusses with his brother Quintus the }
De { property of the gods to "divine," or rather } B.C. 44.
Divinatione.{ to enable men to read prophecies. It is a } AEtat. 63.
{ continuation of a former work.[b] }
De Fato. { The part only of a book on Destiny.[b] } B.C. 44.
{ } AEtat. 63.
The Topica. { A so-called translation from Aristotle. It is } B.C. 44.
{ addressed to Trebatius.[a] } AEtat. 63.
De { A treatise on Old Age, addressed to Atticus, } B.C. 44.
Senectute. { and called Cato Major.[c] } AEtat. 63.
De { A treatise on Friendship, addressed also to } B.C. 44.
Amicitia. { Atticus, and called Laelius.[c] } AEtat. 63.
{ To his son. Treating of the Moral Duties of }
De { Life. Containing three books-- } B.C. 44.
Officiis. { I. On Honesty } AEtat. 63.
{ II. On Expediency }
{ III. Comparing Honesty and Expediency. }
It is to be observed from this list that for thirty years of his life
Cicero was silent in regard to literature--for those thirty years in
which the best fruits of a man's exertion are expected from him.
Indeed, we may say that for the first fifty-two years of his life he
wrote nothing but letters and speeches. Of the two treatises with which
the list is headed, the first, in all probability, did not come from his
pen, and the second is no more than a lad's translation from a Greek
author. As to the work of translation, it must be understood that the
Greek and Latin languages did not stand in reference to each other as
they do now to modern readers. We translate in order that the pearls
hidden under a foreign language may be conveyed to those who do not read
it, and admit, when we are so concerned, that none can truly drink the
fresh water from a fountain so handled. The Romans, in translating from
the Greek, thinking nothing of literary excellence, felt that they were
bringing Greek thought into a form of language in which it could be thus
made useful. There was no value for the words, but only for the thing to
be found in it. Thence it has come that no acknowledgment is made. We
moderns confess that we are translating, and hardly assume for ourselves
a third-rate literary place. When, on the other hand, we find the
unexpressed thought floating about the world, we take it, and we make it
our own when we put it into a book. The originality is regarded as being
in the language, not in the thought. But to the Roman, when he found the
thought floating about the world in the Greek character, it was free for
him to adopt it and to make it his own. Cicero, had he done in these
days with this treatise as I have suggested, would have been guilty of
gross plagiarism, but there was nothing of the kind known then. This
must be continually remembered in reading his essays. You will find
large portions of them taken from the Greek without acknowledgment.
Often it shall be so, because it suits him to contradict an assertion or
to show that it has been allowed to lead to false conclusions. This
general liberty of translation has been so frequently taken by the Latin
poets--by Virgil and Horace, let us say, as being those best known--that
they have been regarded by some as no more than translations. To them to
have been translators of Homer, or of Pindar and Stesichorus, and to
have put into Latin language ideas which were noble, was a work as
worthy of praise as that of inventing. And it must be added that the
forms they have used have been perfect in their kind. There has been no
need to them for close translation. They have found the idea, and their
object has been to present it to their readers in the best possible
language. He who has worked amid the bonds of modern translation well
knows how different it has been with him. There is not much in the
treatise De Inventione to arrest us. We should say, from reading it,
that the matter it contains is too good for the production of a youth of
twenty-one, but that the language in which it is written is not
peculiarly fine. The writer intended to continue it--or wrote as though
he did--and therefore we may imagine that it has come to us from some
larger source. It is full of standing cases, or examples of the law
courts, which are brought up to show the way in which these things are
handled. We can imagine that a Roman youth should be practised in such
matters, but we cannot imagine that the same youth should have thought
of them all, and remembered them all, and should have been able to
describe them.
The following is an example: "A certain man on his journey encountered a
traveller going to make a purchase, having with him a sum of money. They
chatted along the road together, and, as happens on such occasions, they
became intimate. They went to the same inn, where they supped, and said
that they would sleep together. Having supped they went to bed; when the
landlord--for this was told after it had all been found out, and he had
been taken for another offence--having perceived that one man had money,
in the middle of the night, knowing how sound they would sleep from
fatigue, crept up to them, and having taken out of its scabbard the
sword of him that was without the money as it lay by his side, he killed
the other man, put back the sword, and then went to his bed. But he
whose sword had been used rose long before daylight and called loudly to
his companion. Finding that the man slumbered too heavily to be stirred,
he took himself and his sword and the other things he had brought away
with him and started alone. But the landlord soon raised the
hue-and-cry, 'A man has been killed!' and, with some of the guests,
followed him who had gone off. They took the man on the road, and
dragged his sword out of its sheath, which they found all bloody. They
carried him back to the city, and he was accused." In this cause there
is the declaration of the crime alleged, "You killed the man." There is
the defence, "I did not kill him." Thence arises the issue. The question
to be judged is one of conjecture. "Did he kill him?"[241] We may judge
from the story that the case was not one which had occurred in life, but
had been made up. The truculent landlord creeping in and finding that
everything was as he wished it; and the moneyless man going off in the
dark, leaving his dead bedfellow behind him--as the landlord had
intended that he should--form all the incidents of a stock piece for
rehearsal rather than the occurrence of a true murder. The same may be
said of other examples adduced, here as afterward, by Quintilian. They
are well-known cases, and had probably been handed down from one student
to another. They tell us more of the manners of the people than of the
rudiments of their law.
From this may be seen the nature of the work. From thence we skip over
thirty years and come at once to B.C. 55. The days of the Triumvirate
had come, and the quarrel with Clodius--of Cicero's exile and his
return, together with the speeches which he had made, in the agony of
his anger, against his enemies. And all this had taken place since those
halcyon days in which he had risen, on the voices of his countrymen, to
be Quaestor, AEdile, Praetor, and Consul. He had first succeeded as a
public man, and then, having been found too honest, he had failed. There
can be no doubt that he had failed because he had been too honest. I
must have told the story of his political life badly if I have not shown
that Caesar had retired from the assault because Cicero was Consul, but
had retired only as a man does who steps back in order that his next
spring forward may be made with more avail. He chose well the time for
his next attack, and Cicero was driven to decide between three
things--he must be Caesarean, or must be quiet, or he must go. He would
not be Caesarean, he certainly could not be quiet, and he went. The
immediate effect of his banishment was on him so great that he could not
employ himself. But he returned to Rome, and, with too evident a
reliance on a short-lived popularity, he endeavored to replace himself
in men's eyes; but it must have been clear to him that he had struggled
in vain. Then he looked back upon his art, his oratory, and told himself
that, as the life of a man of action was no longer open to him, he could
make for himself a greater career as a man of letters. He could do so.
He has done so. But I doubt whether he had ever a confirmed purpose as
to the future. Had some grand Consular career been open to him--had it
been given to him to do by means of the law what Caesar did by ignoring
the law--this life of him would not have been written. There would, at
any rate, have been no need of these last chapters to show how
indomitable was the energy and how excellent the skill of him who could
write such books, because--he had nothing else to do.
The De Oratore is a work in three divisions, addressed to his brother
Quintus, in which it has undoubtedly been Cicero's object to convince
the world that an orator's employment is the highest of all those given
to a man to follow; and this he does by showing that, in all the matters
which an orator is called upon to touch, there is nothing which he
cannot adorn by the possession of some virtue or some knowledge. To us,
in these days, he seems to put the cart before the horse, and to fail
from the very beginning, by reason of the fact that the orator, in his
eloquence, need never tell the truth. It is in the power of man so to
praise--constancy, let us say--as to make it appear of all things the
best. But he who sings the praise of it may be the most inconstant of
mankind, and may know that he is deceiving his hearers as to his own
opinions--at any rate, as to his own practice. The virtue should come
first, and then the speech respecting it. Cicero seems to imply that, if
the speech be there, the virtue may be assumed.
But it has to be acknowledged, in this and in all his discourses as to
the perfect orator, that it is here as it has been in all the inquirers
after the [Greek: to kalon].[242] We must recognize the fact that the
Romans have adopted a form of inquiry from the Greeks, and, having
described a more than human perfection, have instigated men to work up
toward it by letting it be known how high will be the excellence, should
it ever be attained. It is so in the De Oratore, as to which we must
begin by believing that the speech-maker wanted is a man not to be found
in any House of Commons. No Conservative and no Liberal need fear that
he will be put out of court by the coming of this perfectly eloquent
man. But this Cicero of whom we are speaking has been he who has been
most often quoted for his perfections.[243] The running after an
impossible hero throws a damp over the whole search. When no one can
expect to find the thing sought for, who can seek diligently? By degrees
the ambitious student becomes aware that it is impossible, and is then
carried on by a desire to see how he is to win a second or a third
place, if so much may be accorded to him. In his inquiries he will find
that the Cicero, if he look to Quintilian or Tacitus--or the Crassus, if
he look to Cicero--is so set before him as the true model; and with that
he may be content.
The De Oratore is by far the longest of his works on rhetoric, and, as I
think, the pleasantest to read. It was followed, after ten years, by the
Brutus, or De Claris Oratoribus, and then by the Orator. But in all of
them he charms us rather by his example than instructs us by his
precepts. He will never make us believe, for instance, that a man who
talks well will on that account be better than a man who thinks well;
but he does make us believe that a man who talks as Cicero knew how to
do must have been well worth hearing, and also that to read his words,
when listening to them is no longer possible, is a great delight. Having
done that, he has no doubt carried his object. He was too much a man of
the world to have an impracticable theory on which to expend himself.
Oratory had come uppermost with him, and had indeed made itself, with
the Romans, the only pursuit to be held in rivalry with that of
fighting. Literature had not as yet assumed its place. It needed Cicero
himself to do that for her. It required the writing of such an essay as
this to show, by the fact of its existence, that Cicero the writer stood
quite as high as Cicero the orator. And then the written words remain
when the sounds have died away. We believe that Cicero spoke divinely.
We can form for ourselves some idea of the rhythm of his periods. Of the
words in which Cicero spoke of himself as a speaker we have the entire
charm.
Boccaccio, when he takes his queen into a grassy meadow and seats her in
the midst of her ladies, and makes her and them and their admirers tell
their stories, seems to have given rise to the ideas which Cicero has
used when introducing his Roman orators lying under a plane-tree in the
garden of Tusculum, and there discussing rhetoric; so much nearer to us
appear the times of Cicero, with all the light that has been thrown upon
them by their own importance, than does the middle of the fourteenth
century in the same country. But the practice in this as in all matters
of social life was borrowed from the Greeks, or perhaps rather the
pretence of the practice. We can hardly believe that Romans of an
advanced age would so have arranged themselves for the sake of
conversation. It was a manner of bringing men together which had its
attraction for the mind's eye; and Cicero, whose keen imagination
represented to him the pleasantness of the picture, has used the form of
narrative with great effect. He causes Crassus and Antony to meet in the
garden of Crassus at Tusculum, and thither he brings, on the first day,
old Mucius Scaevola the augur, and Sulpicius and Cotta, two rising
orators of the period. On the second day Scaevola is supposed to be too
fatigued to renew the intellectual contest, and he retires; but one
Caesar comes in with Quintus Lutatius Catulus, and the conversation is
renewed. Crassus and Antony carry it on in chief, but Crassus has the
leading voice. Caesar, who must have been the wag among barristers of his
day, undertakes to give examples of that Attic salt by which the
profundity of the law courts is supposed to have been relieved. The
third conversation takes place on the afternoon of the second day, when
they had refreshed themselves with sleep; though Crassus, we are
specially told, had given himself up to the charms of no mid-day siesta.
His mind had been full of the greatness of the task before him, but he
will show neither fatigue nor anxiety. The art, the apparent ease with
which it is all done, the grace without languor, the energy without
exertion, are admirable. It is as though, they were sitting by running
water, or listening to the music of some grand organ. They remove
themselves to a wood a little farther from the house, and there they
listen to the eloquence of Crassus. Cotta and Sulpicius only hear and
assent, or imply a modified dissent in doubting words.
It is Crassus who insists that the orator shall be omniscient, and
Antony who is supposed to contest the point with him. But they differ in
the sweetest language; and each, though he holds his own, does it with a
deference that is more convincing than any assertion. It may be as well,
perhaps, to let it be understood that Crassus and Caesar are only related
by distant family ties--or perhaps only by ties of adoption--to the two
of the First Triumvirate whose names they bear; whereas Antony was the
grandfather of that Cleopatra's lover against whom the Philippics were
hurled.
No one, as I have said before, will read these conversations for the
sake of the argument they contain; but they are, and will be, studied as
containing, in the most appropriate language, a thousand sayings
respecting the art of speech. "No power of speaking well can belong to
any but to him who knows the subjects on which he has to speak;"[244] a
fact which seems so clear that no one need be troubled with stating it,
were it not that men sin against it every day. "How great the
undertaking to put yourself forward among a crowd of men as being the
fittest of all there to be heard on some great subject!"[245] "Though
all men shall gnash their teeth, I will declare that the little book of
the twelve tables surpasses in authority and usefulness all the
treatises of all the philosophers."[246] Here speaks the Cicero of the
Forum, and not that Cicero who amused himself among the philosophers.
"Let him keep his books of philosophy for some Tusculum idleness such
as is this of ours, lest, when he shall have to speak of justice, he
must go to Plato and borrow from him, who, when he had to express him in
these things, created in his books some new Utopia."[247] For in truth,
though Cicero deals much, as we shall see by-and-by, with the
philosophers, and has written whole treatises for the sake of bringing
Greek modes of thought among the Romans, he loved the affairs of the
world too well to trust them to philosophy. There has been some talk of
old age, and Antony, before the evening has come, declares his view. "So
far do I differ from you," he says, "that not only do I not think that
any relief in age is to be found in the crowd of them who may come to me
for advice, but I look to its solitude as a harbor. You indeed may fear
it, but to me it will be most welcome."[248]
Then Cicero begins the second book with a renewal of the assertion as to
oratory generally, not putting the words into the mouth of any of his
party, but declaring it as his own belief: "This is the purpose of this
present treatise, and of the present time, to declare that no one has
been able to excel in eloquence, not merely without capacity for
speaking, but also without acquired knowledge of all kinds."[249] But
Antony professes himself of another opinion: "How can that be when
Crassus and I often plead opposite causes, and when one of us can only
say the truth? Or how can it be possible, when each of us must take the
cause as it comes to him?"[250] Then, again, he bursts into praise of
the historian, as though in opposition to Crassus: "How worthy of an
orator's eulogy is the writing of history, whether greatest in the flood
of its narrative or in its variety! I do not know that we have ever
treated it separately, but it is there always before our eyes. For who
does not know that the first law of the historian is that he must not
dare to say what is false: the next, that he must not dare to suppress
what is true."[251] We wonder, when Cicero was writing this, whether he
remembered his request to Lucceius, made now two years ago. He gives a
piece of advice to young advocates, apologizing, indeed, for thinking it
necessary; but he has found it to be necessary, and he gives it: "Let me
teach this to them all; when they intend to plead, let them first study
their causes."[252] It is not only here that we find that the advice
which is useful now was wanted then. "Read your cases!" The admonition
was wanted in Rome as it has been since in London.
But the great mistake of the whole doctrine creeps out at every page as
we go on, and disproves the idea on which the De Oratore is founded. All
Cicero's treatises on the subject, and Quintilian's, and those of the
pseudo-Tacitus, and of the first Greek from which they have come, fall
to the ground as soon as we are told that it must be the purport of the
orator to turn the mind of those who hear him either to the right or to
the left, in accordance with the drift of the cause.[253] The mind
rejects the idea that it can be the part of a perfect man to make
another believe that which he believes to be false. If it be necessary
that an orator should do so, then must the orator be imperfect. We have
the same lesson taught throughout. It is the great gift of the orator,
says Antony, to turn the judge's mind so that he shall hate or love,
shall fear or hope, shall rejoice or grieve, or desire to pity or desire
to punish.[254] No doubt it is a great power. All that is said as to
eloquence is true. It may be necessary that to obtain the use of it you
shall educate yourself with more precision than for any other purpose.
But there will be the danger that they who have fitted the dagger to the
hand will use it. It cannot be right to make another man believe that
which you think to be false.
In the use of raillery in eloquence the Roman seems to have been very
backward; so much so that it is only by the examples given of it by
themselves as examples that we learn that it existed. They can appall us
by the cruelty which they denounce. They can melt us by their appeals
to our pity. They can terrify; they can horrify; they can fill us with
fear or hope, with anger, with despair, or with rage; but they cannot
cause us to laugh. Their attempts at a joke amuse us because we
recognize the attempt. Here Caesar is put forward to give us the benefit
of his wit. We are lost in surprise when we find how miserable are his
jokes, and take a pride in finding that in one line we are the masters
of the Romans. I will give an instance, and I pick it out as the best
among those selected by Cicero. Nasica goes to call upon Ennius, and is
informed by the maid-servant that her master is not at home. Ennius
returns the visit, and Nasica halloos out from the window that he is not
within. "Not within!" says Ennius; "don't I know your voice?" Upon which
Nasica replies, "You are an impudent fellow! I had the grace to believe
your maid, and now you will not believe me myself."[255] How this got
into a law-case we do not know; it is told, however, just as I have told
it. But there are enough of them here to make a small Joe Miller; and
yet, in the midst of language that is almost divine in its expressions,
they are given as having been worthy of all attention.
The third book is commenced by the finest passage in the whole treatise.
Cicero remembers that Crassus is dead, and then tells the story of his
death. And Antony is dead, and the Caesars. The last three had fallen in
the Marian massacres. There is but little now in the circumstances of
their death to excite our tears. Who knows aught of that Crassus, or of
that Antony, or of those Caesars? But Cicero so tells it in his pretended
narrative as almost to make us weep. The day was coming when a greater
than either of them was to die the same death as Antony, by the order of
another Antony--to have his tongue pierced, and his bloody head thrust
aloft upon the rostra. But no Roman has dared to tell us of it as Cicero
has told the story of those others. Augustus had done his work too well,
and it was much during his reign that Romans who could make themselves
heard should dare to hold their tongues.
It would be useless in me here to attempt to give any notion of the laws
as to speech which Cicero lays down. For myself I do not take them as
laws, feeling that the interval of time has been too great to permit
laws to remain as such. No orator could, I feel sure, form himself on
Cicero's ideas. But the sweetness of the language is so great as to
convince us that he, at any rate, knew how to use language as no one has
done since: "But there is a building up of words, and a turning of them
round, and a nice rendering. There is the opposing and the loosening.
There is the avoiding, the holding back, the sudden exclamation, and the
dropping of the voice; and the taking an argument from the case at large
and bringing it to bear on a single point; and the proof and the
propositions together. And there is the leave given; and then a
doubting, and an expression of surprise. There is the counting up, the
setting right; the utter destruction, the continuation, the breaking
off, the pretence, the answer made to one's self, the change of names,
the disjoining and rejoining of things--the relation, the retreat, and
the curtailing."[256] Who can translate all these things when Quintilian
himself has been fain to acknowledge that he has attempted and has
failed to handle them in fitting language?
And then at last there comes that most lovely end to these most charming
discourses: "His autem de rebus sol me ille admonuit, ut brevior essem,
qui ipse jam praecipitans, me quoque hac praecipitem paene evolvere
coegit."[257] These words are so charming in their rhythm that I will
not rob them of their beauty by a translation. The setting sun requires
me also to go to rest: that is their simple meaning. At the end of the
book he introduces a compliment to Hortensius, who during his life had
been his great rival, and who was still living when the De Oratore was
written.
[Sidenote: B.C. 52, aetat. 55.]
The next on the list is the De Optimo Genere Oratorum--a preliminary
treatise written as a preface to a translation made by himself on the
speeches of AEschines and Demosthenes against Ctesiphon in the matter of
the Golden Crown. We have not the translations; but we have his reasons
for translating them--namely, that he might enable readers only of Latin
to judge how far AEschines and Demosthenes had deserved, either of them,
the title of "Optimus orator." For they had spoken against each other
with the most bitter abuse, and each spokesman was struggling for the
suppression of the other. Each was speaking with the knowledge that, if
vanquished, he would have to pay heavily in his person and his pocket.
He gives the palm to neither; but he tells his readers that the Attic
mode of speaking is gone--of which, indeed, the glory is known, but the
nature unknown. But he explains that he has not translated the two
pieces verbatim, as an interpreter, but in the spirit, as an orator,
using the same figures, the same forms, the same strength of ideas. We
have to acknowledge that we do not see how in this way he can have done
aught toward answering the question De Optimo Genere Oratorum; but he
may perhaps have done something to prove that he himself, in his
oratory, had preserved the best known Grecian forms.
The De Partitione Oratoria Dialogus follows, of which we have already
spoken, written when he was an old man, and was in the sixty-first year
of his life. It was the year in which he had divorced Terentia, and had
been made thoroughly wretched in private and in public affairs. But he
was not on that account disabled from preparing for his son these
instructions, in the form of questions and answers, on the art of
speaking.
We next come to the Brutus; or, De Claris Oratoribus, a dialogue
supposed to have been held between Brutus, Atticus, and Cicero himself.
It is a continuation of the three books De Oratore. He there describes
what is essential to the character of the optimus orator. He here looks
after the special man, going back over the results of past ages, and
bringing before the reader's eyes all Greek and Roman orators, till he
comes down to Cicero. I cannot but say that the feeling is left with the
reader that the orator optimus has been reached at last in Cicero's
mind.
We must remark, in the first place, that he has chosen for his friend,
to whom to address his piece, one whom he has only known late in life.
It was when he went to Cilicia as governor, when he was fifty-six years
old, that he was thrown by Atticus into close relations with Brutus. Now
he has, next to Atticus, become his most chosen friend. His three next
treatises, the Orator, the Tusculan Disquisitions, and the De Natura
Deorum, have all been graced, or intended to be graced, by the name of
Brutus. And yet, from what we know, we can hardly imagine two men less
likely to be brought together by their political ambition. The one
compromising, putting up with the bad rather than with a worse, knowing
that things were evil, and contented to accept those that were the least
so; the other strict, uncompromising, and one who had learned lessons
which had taught him that there was no choice among things that were
bad! And Brutus, too, had told Cicero that his lessons in oratory were
not to his taste. There was a something about Cicero which enabled him
to endure such rebukes while there was aught worthy of praise in the man
who rebuked him; and it was to this something that his devotion was
paid. We know that Brutus was rapacious after money with all the greed
of a Roman nobleman, and we know also that Cicero was not. Cicero could
keep his hands clean with thousands around him, and with thousands going
into the pockets of other men. He could see the vice of Brutus, but he
did not hate it. He must have borne, too, with something from Atticus of
the same kind. The truth seems to me that to Cicero there was no horror
as to greediness, except to greed in himself. He could hate it for
himself and yet tolerate it in others, as a man may card-playing, or
rackets, or the turf. But he must have known that Brutus had made
himself the owner of all good gifts in learning, and took him to his
heart in consequence. In no other way can I explain to myself the
feeling of subservience to Brutus which Cicero so generally expresses:
it exists in none other of his relations of life. Political subservience
there is to Pompey; but he can laugh at Pompey, and did not dedicate to
him his treatises De Republica, or De Legibus. To Appius Claudius he was
very courteous. He thought badly of Appius, but hardly worse than he
ought to have done of Brutus. Of Caelius he was fond, of Curio, of
Trebatius. To Paetus he was attached, to Sulpicius and Marcellus. But to
none of them did he ever show that deference which he did to Brutus. I
could have understood this feeling as evinced in the political letters
at the end of his life, and have explained it to myself by saying that
the "ipsissima verba" have not probably come to us. But I cannot say
that the name of Brutus does not stand there, written in imperishable
letters on the title-pages of his most chosen pieces. If this be so,
Brutus has owed more to his learning than the respect of Cicero. All
ages since have felt it, and Shakespeare has told us that "Brutus is an
honorable man."
There is a dispute as to the period of the authorship of this treatise.
Cicero in it tells us of Cato and of Marcellus, and therefore we must
suppose that it was written when they were alive. Indeed, he so compares
Caesar and Marcellus as he could not have done had they not both been
alive. But Cato and Marcellus died B.C. 46, and how then could the
treatise have been written in B.C. 45? It should, however, be remembered
that a written paper may be altered and rewritten, and that the date of
authorship and that of publication cannot be exactly the same. But the
time is of but little matter to those who can take delight in the
discourse. He begins by telling us how he had grieved when, on his
return from Cilicia, he had heard that Hortensius was dead. Hortensius
had brought him into the College of Augurs, and had there stood to him
in the place of a parent. And he had lamented Hortensius also on behalf
of Rome. Hortensius had gone. Then he goes on to say that, as he was
thinking of these things while walking in his portico, Brutus had come
to him and Pomponius Atticus. He says how pleasantly they greeted each
other; and then gradually they go on, till Atticus asks him to renew the
story he had before been telling. "In truth, Pomponius," he says, "I
remember it right well, for then it was that I heard Deiotarus, that
truest and best of kings, defended by our Brutus here," Deiotarus was
that Eastern king whose defence by Cicero himself I have mentioned when
speaking of his pleadings before Caesar. Then he rushes off into his
subject, and discusses at length his favorite idea. It must still be
remembered that neither here are to be traced any positive line of
lessons in oratory. There is no beginning, no middle, and no end to this
treatise. Cicero runs on, charming us rather by his language than by his
lessons. He says of Eloquence that "she is the companion of peace, and
the associate of ease."[258] He tells us of Cato, that he had read a
hundred and fifty of his speeches, and had "found them all replete with
bright words and with great matter; * * * and yet no one in his days
read Cato's speeches!"[259] This, of course, was Cato the elder. Then we
hear how Demosthenes said that in oratory action was everything: it was
the first thing, the second, and the third. "For there is nothing like
it to penetrate into the minds of the audience--to teach them, to turn
them, and to form them, till the orator shall be made to appear exactly
that which he wishes to be thought.[260] * * * The man who listens to one
who is an orator believes what he hears; he thinks everything to be
true, he approves of all."[261] No doubt! In his power of describing the
orator and his work Cicero is perfect; but he does not describe the man
doing that which he is bound to do by his duty.
He tells us that nothing is worse than half a dozen advocates--which
certainly is true.[262] Further on he comes to Caesar, and praises him
very highly. But here Brutus is made to speak, and tells us how he has
read the Commentaries, and found them to be "bare in their beauty,
perfect in symmetry, but unadorned, and deprived of all outside
garniture."[263] They are all that he has told us, nor could they have
been described in truer words. Then he names Hortensius, and speaks of
him in language which is graceful and graphic; but he reserves his
greatest strength for himself, and at last, declaring that he will say
nothing in his own praise, bursts out into a string of eulogy, which he
is able to conceal beneath dubious phrases, so as to show that he
himself has acquired such a mastery over his art as to have made
himself, in truth, the best orator of them all.[264]
Perhaps the chief charm of this essay is to be found in the lightness of
the touch. It is never heavy, never severe, rarely melancholic. If read
without reference to other works, it would leave on the reader's mind
the impression that though now and again there had come upon him the
memory of a friend who had gone, and some remembrance of changes in the
State to which, as an old man, he could not give his assent;
nevertheless, it was written by a happy man, by one who was contented
among his books, and was pleased to be reminded that things had gone
well with him. He writes throughout as one who had no great sorrow at
his heart. No one would have thought that in this very year he was
perplexed in his private affairs, even to the putting away of his wife;
that Caesar had made good his ground, and, having been Dictator last
year, had for the third time become Consul; that he knew himself to be
living, as a favor, by Caesar's pleasure. Cicero seems to have written
his Brutus as one might write who was well at ease. Let a man have
taught himself aught, and have acquired the love of letters, it is easy
for him then, we might say, to carry on his work. What is it to him that
politicians are cutting each other's throats around him? He has not gone
into that arena and fought and bled there, nor need he do so. Though
things may have gone contrary to his views, he has no cause for anger,
none for personal disappointment, none for personal shame; but with
Cicero, on every morning as he rose he must have remembered Pompey and
have thought of Caesar. And though Caesar was courteous to him, the
courtesy of a ruler is hard to be borne by him who himself has ruled.
Caesar was Consul; and Cicero, who remembered how majestically he had
walked when a few years since he was Consul by the real votes of the
people, how he had been applauded for doing his duty to the people, how
he had been punished for stretching the laws on the people's behalf, how
he had refused everything for the people, must have had bitter feelings
in his heart when he sat down to write this conversation with Brutus and
with Atticus. Yet it has all the cheerfulness which might have been
expected from a happy mind. But we must remark that at its close--in its
very final words--he does allude with sad melancholy to the state of
affairs, and that then it breaks off abruptly. Even in the middle of a
sentence it is brought to a close, and the reader is left to imagine
that something has been lost, or that more might have been added.
The last of these works is the Orator. We have passed in review the De
Oratore, and the Brutus; or, De Claris Oratoribus. We have now to
consider that which is commonly believed to be the most finished piece
of the three. Such seems to have become the general idea of those
scholars who have spoken and written on the subject. He himself says
that there are in all five books. There are the three De Oratore; the
fourth is called the Brutus, and the fifth the Orator.[265] In some MSS.
this work has a second title, De Optimo Genere Dicendi--as though the
five books should run on in a sequence, the first three being on oratory
in general, the fourth as to famous orators, while the last concluding
work is on the best mode of oratory. Readers who may wish to carry these
in their minds must exclude for the moment from their memory the few
pages which he wrote as a preface to the translations from AEschines and
Demosthenes. The purport is to show how that hitherto unknown hero of
romance may be produced--the perfect orator.
Here as elsewhere we shall find the greatest interest lies in a certain
discursive treatment of his subject, which enables him to run hither and
thither, while he always pleases us, whatever attitude he may assume,
whatever he may say, and in whatever guise he may speak to us. But here,
in the last book, there does seem to be some kind of method in his
discourse. He distinguishes three styles of eloquence--the simple, the
moderate, and the sublime, and explains that the orator has three duties
to perform. He must learn what on any subject he has to say; he must
place his arguments in order, and he must know how to express them. He
explains what action should achieve for the orator, and teaches that
eloquence depends wholly on elocution. He tells us that the
philosophers, the historians, and the poets have never risen to his
ideas of eloquence; but that he alone does so who can, amid the heat and
work of the Forum, turn men's minds as he wishes. Then he teaches us how
each of the three styles should be treated--the simple, the moderate,
and the sublime--and shows us how to vary them. He informs us what laws
we should preserve in each, what ornaments, what form, and what
metaphors. He then considers the words we should use, and makes us
understand how necessary it is to attend to the minutest variety of
sound. In this matter we have to acknowledge that he, as a Roman, had to
deal with instruments for listening infinitely finer than are our
British ears; and I am not sure that we can follow him with rapture
into all the mysteries of the Poeon, the Dochmius, and the Dichoreus.
What he says of rhythm we are willing to take to be true, and we wonder
at the elaborate study given to it; but I doubt whether we here do not
read of it as a thing beyond us, by descending into which we should be
removing ourselves farther from the more wholesome pursuits of our
lives.
There are, again, delightful morsels here. He tells us, for instance,
that he who has created a beautiful thing must have beauty in his
soul,[266]--a charming idea, as to which we do not stop to inquire
whether it be true or not. He gives us a most excellent caution against
storing up good sayings, and using them from the storehouse of our
memory: "Let him avoid these studied things, not made of the moment, but
brought from the closet."[267] Then he rises into a grand description of
the perfect orator: "But that third man is he, rich, abundant,
dignified, and instructed, in whom there is a divine strength. This is
he whose fulness and culture of speech the nations have admired, and
whose eloquence has been allowed to prevail over the people.[268] * * *
Then will the orator make himself felt more abundantly. Then will he
rule their minds and turn their hearts. Then will he do with them as he
would wish."[269]
But in the teeth of all this it did not please Brutus himself. "When I
wrote to him," he said to Atticus, "in obedience to his wishes, 'De
Optimo Genere Dicendi,' he sent word, both to you and me, that that
which pleased me did not satisfy him."[270] "Let every man kiss his own
wife," says Cicero in his letter in the next words to those we have
quoted; and we cannot but love the man for being able to joke when he is
telling of the rebuff he has received. It must have been an additional
pang to him, that he for whom he had written his book should receive it
with stern rebuke.
At last we come to the Topica; the last instructions which Cicero gives
on the subject of oratory. The Romans seem to have esteemed much the
lessons which are here conveyed, but for us it has but little
attraction. He himself declares it to have been a translation from
Aristotle, but declares also that the translation has been made from
memory. He has been at sea, he says, in the first chapter, and has there
performed his task, and has sent it as soon as it has been done. There
is something in this which is unintelligible to us. He has translated a
treatise of Aristotle from memory--that is, without having the original
before him--and has done this at sea, on his intended journey to
Greece![271] I do not believe that Cicero has been false in so writing.
The work has been done for his young friend Trebatius, who had often
asked it, and was much too clever when he had received it not to
recognize its worth. But Cicero has, in accordance with his memory,
reduced to his own form Aristotle's idea as to "invention" in logic.
Aristotle's work is, I am informed, in eight books: here is a bagatelle
in twenty-five pages. There is an audacity in the performance--especially
in the doing it on board ship; but we must remember that he had spent his
life in achieving a knowledge of these things, and was able to write down
with all the rapidity of a practised professor the doctrines on the
matter which he wished to teach Trebatius.
This later essay is a recapitulation of the different sources to which
an orator, whether as lawyer, advocate, philosopher, or statesman, may
look for his arguments. That they should have been of any great use to
Trebatius, in the course of his long life as attorney-general about the
court of Augustus, I cannot believe. I do not know that he rose to
special mark as an orator, though he was well known as a counsellor;
nor do I think that oratory, or the powers of persuasion, can be so
brought to book as to be made to submit itself to formal rules. And here
they are given to us in the form of a catalogue. It is for modern
readers perhaps the least interesting of all Cicero's works.
There is left upon us after reading these treatises a general idea of
the immense amount of attention which, in the Roman educated world, was
paid to the science of speaking. To bring his arguments to bear at the
proper moment--to catch the ideas that are likely to be rising in the
minds of men--to know when the sympathies may be expected and when
demanded, when the feelings may be trusted and when they have been too
blunted to be of service--to perceive from an instinctive outlook into
those before him when he may be soft, when hard, when obdurate and when
melting--this was the business of a Roman orator. And this was to be
achieved only by a careful study of the characters of men. It depended
in no wise on virtue, on morals, or on truth, though very much on
education. How he might please the multitude--this was everything to
him. It was all in all to him to do just that which here in our prosaic
world in London we have been told that men ought not to attempt. They do
attempt it, but they fail--through the innate honesty which there is in
the hearts of men. In Italy, in Cicero's time, they attempted it, and
did not fail. But we can see what were the results.
The attention which Roman orators paid to their voices was as serious,
and demanded the same restraint, as the occupations of the present
athlete. We are inclined to doubt whether too much of life is not
devoted to the purpose. It could not be done but by a people so greedy
of admiration as to feel that all other things should be abandoned by
those who desire to excel. The actor of to-day will do it, but it is his
business to act; and if he so applies himself to his profession as to
succeed, he has achieved his object. But oratory in the law court, as in
Parliament, or in addressing the public, is only the means of imbuing
the minds of others with the ideas which the speaker wishes to implant
there. To have those ideas, and to have the desire to teach them to
others, is more to him than the power of well expressing them. To know
the law is better than to talk of knowing it. But with the Romans so
great was the desire to shine that the reality was lost in its
appearance; and so prone were the people to indulge in the delight of
their senses that they would sacrifice a thing for a sound, and
preferred lies in perfect language to truth in halting syllables. This
feeling had sunk deep into Cicero's heart when he was a youth, and has
given to his character the only stain which it has. He would be
patriotic: to love his country was the first duty of a Roman. He would
be honest: so much was indispensable to his personal dignity. But he
must so charm his countrymen with his voice as to make them feel while
they listened to him that some god addressed them. In this way he became
permeated by the love of praise, till it was death to him not to be
before the lamps.
The "perfect orator" is, we may say, a person neither desired nor
desirable. We, who are the multitude of the world, and have been born to
hold our tongues and use our brains, would not put up with him were he
to show himself. But it was not so in Cicero's time; and this was the
way he took to sing the praises of his own profession and to magnify his
own glory. He speaks of that profession in language so excellent as to
make us who read his words believe that there was more in it than it did
in truth hold. But there was much in it, and the more so as the
performers reacted upon their audience. The delicacy of the powers of
expression had become so great, that the powers of listening and
distinguishing had become great also. As the instruments became fine, so
did the ears which were to receive their music. Cicero, and Quintilian
after him, tell us this. The latter, in speaking of the nature of the
voice, gives us a string of epithets which it would be hopeless to
attempt to translate: "Nam est et candida, et fusca, et plena, et
exilis, et levis, et aspera, et contracta, et fusa, et dura, et
flexibilis, et clara, et obtusa; spiritus etiam longior,
breviorque."[272] And the remarkable thing was, that every Roman who
listened would understand what the orator intended, and would know too,
and would tell him of it, if by error he had fallen into some cadence
which was not exactly right. To the modes of raising the voice, which
are usually divided into three--the high or treble, the low or bass, and
that which is between the two, the contralto and tenor--many others are
added. There are the eager and the soft, the higher and the lower notes,
the quicker and the slower. It seems little to us, who know that we can
speak or whisper, hammer our words together, or drawl them out. But then
every listener was critically alive to the fact whether the speaker
before him did or did not perform his task as it should be done. No
wonder that Cicero demanded who was the optimus orator. Then the
strength of body had to be matured, lest the voice should fall to "a
sick, womanly weakness, like that of an eunuch." This must be provided
by exercise, by anointing, by continence, by the easy digestion of the
food--which means moderation; and the jaws must be free, so that the
words must not strike each other. And as to the action of the orator,
Cicero tells us that it should speak as loudly and as plainly as do the
words themselves. In all this we find that Quintilian only follows his
master too closely. The hands, the shoulders, the sides, the stamping of
the foot, the single step or many steps--every motion of the body,
agreeing with the words from his mouth, are all described.[273] He
attributes this to Antony--but only because, as he thinks of it, some
movement of Antony's has recurred to his memory.
To make the men who heard him believe in him was the one gift which
Cicero valued; not to make them know him to be true, but to believe him
to be so. This it was, in Cicero's time, to be the optimus orator.
Since Cicero's time there has been some progress in the general conduct
of men. They are less greedy, less cruel, less selfish--greedy, cruel,
and selfish though they still are. The progress which the best among us
have made Cicero in fact achieved; but he had not acquired that
theoretic aversion to a lie which is the first feeling in the bosom of a
modern gentleman; therefore it was that he still busied himself with
finding the optimus orator.