FOOTNOTES
[1] Horace, Epist. I, 13: he mentions Pyrrha’s posture on the stage.
[2] Terence, Hecyra, 15-20.
[3] See Wessner, Aemilius Asper. E.g., the refusal of Charinus to win his love by unworthy threats (317), and Pamphilus’ refusal to take credit for a deed which he says a gentleman could not fail to perform (330). It should also be noticed that in the Perinthia Menander had a scene of brutal slave-torturing which Terence took the liberty of eliminating.
[4] Cf. especially Leo, Plaut. Forsch. chap. IV; Legrand, Daos, 490 ff.; Michaut, Plaute, II, 116 ff.; Wilamowitz, Menander, Das Schiedsgericht, 142 ff. A part of this chapter has appeared in the Am. Jour. Phil., 1928, 309.
[5] One may add that if he was more explicit than one would think necessary he was perhaps giving aid to the many strangers that came to the theater in his day.
[6] For other instances see Miles, 238, 381, 767, 904, 1170; Pseud., 725; Casina, 683; Most., 662; Menaechmi, 831; Trin., 1137; cf. Legrand, Daos, 533 ff.
[7] The Merry Wives of Windsor, though it contains no prologue, is fully as explicit in the preparation of every incident—even the two basket-scenes—as any play of Plautus. Indeed most of Shakespeare’s plays give more attention to preparation than is customary on the stage today even though his plots were usually familiar ones. The Romeo and Juliet even has a prologue which goes so far as to disclose the outcome.
[8] The expository dialogue between the two slaves gives the immediate situation so plainly that a Heros would hardly have been employed for the prologue except to reveal the secret hidden to the characters.
[9] In Class. Phil. 1916, 125 ff.; 1917, 405 ff.; 1918, 113 ff.; 1919, 108 ff.
[10] The Epidicus probably once had a prologue (Wheeler, Am. Jour. Phil. 1917, 264). One may suspect that the play in its present form—which requires as patient reading as the Hecyra—was due to a post-Terentian revision. The Mercator has a prologue that does not reveal much of the plot but in the second act the outcome is hinted at by way of a dream. The play as we have it is a revision.
[11] According to Donatus, Menander’s play also contained the marriage, but without objection on the part of Micio. Since in Terence Micio is represented as resisting, the marriage must have been considered as punishment.
[12] The Hecyra according to Donatus was modeled upon a play of Apollodorus, but it is now clear that that play was in turn modeled upon Menander’s Arbitrants. That Terence suppressed the prologue of Apollodorus is apparent from the comment of Donatus (who had a copy of the Greek play at hand) on 1.58: Hoc (the use of protatica prosopa) maluit Terentius quam per prologum narraret argumentum aut θεὸν ἀπὸ μηχανῆς induceret loqui. Since the list of characters and the beginning of Menander’s Arbitrants are lost, there may be some doubt regarding his use of preparation in this play, but since the whole play operates with “dramatic irony” and since Apollodorus had a prologue, it is more than likely that he “prepared” his audience here as elsewhere. At any rate Menander’s audience discover the owner of the finger ring in the second act.
[13] I assume that Menander had revealed something about the escapades of Chremes’ own son in the prologue, since Chremes’ pretenses at knowing how to bring up children (152 ff.) were doubtless written in the first place to amuse an audience that foresaw his failure.
[14] Leo, Gesch. Lit., 218, assumes that Caecilius had used the prologue for personal criticism; Euanthius III. 2 says deos argumentis narrandis machinatos ceteri Latini ad instar Graecorum habent, Terentius non habet, which of course does not exclude an occasional use of the personal prologue. After Terence, Afranius sometimes employs superhuman prologues (Priapus, Sapientia, and Remeligo), but he seems also to have used the prologue for personal statements in the manner of Terence (lines 25-8).
CHAPTER V
THE PROSE OF THE ROMAN STATESMEN
“Ciceronian prose is practically the prose of the human race,” says Mackail, a critic who is unusually sensitive to qualities of style. In saying this, he doubtless had in mind not only the orotund periods of the Pro Milone, the elaborately rhythmical movement of the Pro Archia, the vehement force of the first Catilinarian or the easy colloquialism of the familiar letters. It was rather the lucid and copious exposition of essays like the De Oratore in which, without revealed effort, a versatile mind found appropriate and dignified expression for all its concepts and moods. How did such prose come to be?
Cicero worked incessantly for years to acquire his command of the tools of expression. When very young he memorized the standard rules of rhetoric that emphasized the need for clarity, arrangement, conciseness, luminosity, and all the rest. Do such rules make great writers? On that point Cicero did not deceive himself. He knew that adults did not need them, but he recognized that schoolboys would save time by having their attention called to what practice would eventually reveal. Such rules might prove guide posts to intelligent beginners, but one has only to read the three books of the De Oratore[1] to discover that rhetoric was for Cicero a schoolroom crutch to outgrow and forget. Another device much recommended by the Roman teachers of his day was imitation, the study of the masters of diverse styles. It is a method that has recently been employed to good effect in the classroom for the awakening of taste and sharpening of critical acumen. Cicero did not scorn its use, but he knew too well that style is personal[2] to attempt to acquire in this way a garb that would not fit his own mental processes. When he sought out Apollonius of Rhodes as a critic it was not in order to adapt himself to that teacher’s mode of expression. He first decided what his own taste and capacity needed, and what the Roman Forum and Curia would require of him; then he sought for the teacher who could best help him by his criticism. His complete independence is shown by the fact that he traveled long, trying one after the other of the famous teachers of the east, abandoning them one by one as soon as he discovered that they did not suit his purposes.[3] Cicero did not impose the Rhodian style upon himself. He made his own curriculum to fit his temperament and sought out the tutor who could help him attain what he demanded. This procedure seems to me characteristic of the great Roman stylists. Cicero and Caesar, Sallust and Livy, Seneca and Tacitus, betray themselves in their sentence structure. The secret of their expression will never be disclosed by a search for their models nor in the rhetorical rules then current.
The aim of this chapter is limited. It cannot even attempt the important task of illustrating from a study of Cicero the valid rule that style is the man. It will attempt only to sketch the growth of Latin prose up to Cicero’s day in order to suggest how that prose became adequate to clothe the varied expression of so versatile a genius.
Roman, like English, prose developed its sonority, dignity, and rhythm in persuasive speech. As in England during the religious reformation, pulpit oratory molded speech, so in Rome, during the period of political reformation from Cato to Cicero, forensic contests in the senate house and at the tribunals transformed Roman expression. This parallel may seem obvious, but one offers it with hesitation because Roman oratorical style is generally supposed to have been shaped by the study of Greek rhetoric in the schoolroom. Quite apart, however, from the fact that true art is seldom amenable to the compulsion of precept, chronology militates against this theory. Roman prose had traveled far before it resorted to any guidance from Greece.
Like the English of Wycliffe, early Roman prose was formless. It merely followed the habits of unshaped spontaneous conversation. If anything was to be recorded with care, it employed the forms of art, that is, of verse. Naevius and Ennius wrote their chronicles in meter. Even Chaucer, who is so luminous in his verse narratives, becomes involved and at times almost incoherent in his few attempts to write prose, unless in fact he yields to the temptation of admitting rhythm into his sentences. But Chaucer is one of the last of the great writers to flounder thus. The Wyclifite Bible marked the beginning of a religious contest that continued for two centuries with more or less intensity, and finally with passionate vehemence. It was a contest that, to many, involved a question of life and death and to even more the problem of eternal salvation. The gravity of the theme called for the noblest possible expression, while the deep concern of all classes, even the most ignorant, required clarity and directness of utterance. The temptation of the learned to exaggerate rhetoric into Euphuism was immediately checked by the need of being intelligible to the congregation, while the tendency of plain persons toward colloquial formlessness was checked both by the deep respect for the sacred theme and by the high level of cultural taste among the clergy of the time. We need not deny the great influence of Ciceronian and Augustinian models upon these learned men, and in Lyly’s courtly group we know how ancient rhetoric ran pell-mell into preciosity. But that was an aberration that affected only those who had a thin message to convey. When men are intensely engaged in saving their fellows, speech will grow clear, and when these men are at the same time persons endowed with great intellects, their speech will take on dignity of structure and of sound. Before that contest English prose had babbled thus:[4]
And in that country is an old castle that stands upon a rock, the which is cleped the Castle of the Sparrowhawk, that is beyond the city of Layays, beside the town of Pharsipee, that belongeth to the lordship of Cruk, that is a rich lord and a good Christian man, where men find a sparrowhawk upon a perch right fair and right well made, and a fair Lady of Fayrye that keepeth it, etc.
This sentence rattles on unhaltingly through “and’s” and “that’s” for a solid page before it falls down to a stop from sheer exhaustion.
After the battle was over we have the Authorized Version with its magnificent directness:
The sun shall be no more thy light by day; neither for brightness shall the moon give light unto thee; but the word shall be to thee an everlasting light, and thy God thy glory.
Briefly, the parallel between early Latin and early English prose can be indicated thus. The prose of Ennius, like that of Chaucer, was very much inferior to his verse. Before Ennius died, however, the mighty struggle of statesmen had begun in the polemics of Cato, a contest which was destined to build up in time a dignified and versatile language. Cato represented the native, middle-class, agrarian population of Italy that feared the expensive and ambitious foreign entanglements which the philhellenic party of Scipio had incurred and hated the foreign culture which followed in the wake of philhellenism. Cato spoke incessantly. A hundred and fifty of his speeches were available in Cicero’s day. He attacked the Scipionic group in the senate, in public harangues, and in court. And not only he but his lieutenants—and of course his opponents—had constantly to be on their feet. This was the beginning of the party divisions that led through the Gracchan reforms and through the debating period of the civil wars to the final defeat of the Roman Republic a hundred years later. The contest of words was as bitter as in the England of Wycliffe, Tindall, Cranmer, Latimer, and Hooker. Here, too, the best intellects of the nation were exercised in the debate; here, too, the gravity of the theme and the demands of aristocratic audiences required dignified expression, while the constant necessity of winning the populace required entire clarity and lucidity of expression. The struggle was not indeed for eternal salvation, but it often involved the question of life and death, and always the future of the state. And from men like Cato, the Gracchi, Cicero and Brutus, the state claimed and won a devotion more intense than religion could. Thus there is a certain similarity between the growth of Latin prose from Ennius to Cicero and that of English from Chaucer to Hooker. And though Greek rhetorical theory and models were factors in shaping Latin prose, as Roman theory and models were factors in shaping English, it seems to me quite probable that both languages would have taken the course they did without those models, for both were determined by forensic expression, by great causes, and by intense devotion to those causes on the part of the most intelligent men of their day.
In following the evolution of Latin prose[5] we unfortunately have to deal largely with fragments quoted by later writers, and we cannot always be sure that these fragments are representative. For our purposes however they may legitimately be considered so. Before Ennius’ time very few speeches had actually been published. Cicero had at hand an old oration of Appius Claudius of about 281 B.C. and some funerary laudations, but he did not think either worth considering in a history of oratory. So far as we know, written prose documents before these were confined to laws, treaties, and meager official records. The fragments of the Twelve Tables (450 B.C.) are too scanty to afford any basis for judging style. Some of them are so wanting in lucidity, because of an ambiguous use of pronominal subjects, that a modern lawyer might readily manipulate them to prove any point. A few fourth- and third-century inscriptions from headstones and votive tablets[6] contain only blunt sentences which reveal chiefly an obvious desire to save the expense of stone-cutting. They do however show the native Latin word order and its fondness for the deferred verb. Orcevia Numeri (uxor) nationu gratia, Fortuna Diovo fileia primogenia donum dedi. This is of course a tendency in all inflected languages where the verb can be postponed till the subject and object have been visualized, since the inflectional endings indicate the direction of the verbal action. And in Latin, the hierarchy of what is important can be and was recognized by the word order. “Orcevia, Numerius’ wife, for the gift of childbirth, to Fortuna, Jove’s daughter the firstborn, this gift I give.” Strictly speaking Cicero’s best-shaped sentence is not more periodic than that colloquial tablet of a humble woman a century before any Roman scholar thought of studying style. It was not the study of Greek that determined the form of Latin prose.
The Duilian inscription of 260 B.C.—doubtless authentic in the main though found in an imperial copy[7]—is our only pre-Ennian fragment of prose that contains several complete sentences. This inscription is far more fulsome and boastful than the modest Scipionic epitaphs of two generations later, a fact probably due to Duilius’ sojourn in Sicily where he could see verbose honorary tablets at every hand. In spirit and content it is Sicilian, but its phrasing and diction are normal Latin. Its longest sentence is rambling, badly coordinated and illogically constructed despite its periodic placement of the verbs. The man who composed it had no feeling for lapidary style:
enque eodem mac [istratud bene]
[r]em navebos marid consol primos c[eset copiasque]
[c]lasesque navales primos ornavet pa[ravetque],
[c]umque eis navebos claseis Poenicas omn[is, item ma-]
[x]umas copias Cartaciniensis praesente[d Hanibaled]
[d]ictatored ol[or]om in altod marid pucn[andod vicet]
[v]ique nave[is cepe]t cum socieis septer[esmom unum quin—]
[queresm]osque triresmosque naveis X[XX, merset XIII] etc.
[—and in the same magistracy he was the first consul to fight successfully upon the sea with ships, and he first equipped and prepared a fleet, and by fighting on the high seas he with his ships overcame the Punic fleet and the very great Carthaginian forces commanded by their dictator Hannibal, and by force he captured their ships with their marines, one septereme, and thirty quinqueremes and triremes, and sank thirteen, etc.]
A man who composes thus is not only “hypnotized by the exuberance of his own verbosity” but unpracticed in the art of logical expression.
Our first passage of continuous prose comes from Ennius’ Euhemerus, quoted verbatim by Lactantius. A fair example is the following:[8]
Exim Saturnus uxorem duxit Opem. Titan qui maior natu erat postulat ut ipse regnaret. ibi Vesta mater eorum et sorores Ceres atque Ops suadent Saturno, uti de regno ne concedat fratri. ibi Titan, qui facie deterior esset quam Saturnus, idcirco et quod videbat matrem atque sorores suas operam dare uti Saturnus regnaret, concessit ei ut is regnaret. itaque pactus est cum Saturno, uti si quid liberum virile secus ei natum esset, ne quid educaret. Id eius rei causa fecit, uti ad suos gnatos regnum rediret. tum Saturno filius qui primus natus est, eum necaverunt. deinde posterius nati sunt gemini, Iuppiter atque Iuno. tum Iunonem Saturno in conspectum dedere atque Iovem clam abscondunt dantque eum Vestae educandum celantes Saturnum. item Neptunum clam Saturno Ops parit eumque clanculum abscondit, etc.
For this passage I shall use Professor Rand’s translation though it introduces a modicum of style into the expression:
“Then Saturn took Ops to wife. Titan, his elder brother, wished to be king himself. Then their mother Vesta and their sisters Ceres and Ops induced Saturn not to yield the throne to Titan. Then Titan, who was not so handsome a man as Saturn, both on that account and because he saw that his mother and sisters were bent on having Saturn reign, allowed him so to do. He therefore secured an agreement with Saturn, that if the latter had any male offspring thereafter, he should not rear them. This he did for the purpose that the kingdom might revert to his own sons. Then a first son was born to Saturn, and they killed him. Then later twins were born, Jupiter and Juno. Then they openly showed Juno to Saturn, and hid Jove and gave him to Vesta to bring up, concealing him from Saturn. Likewise Ops bare Neptune unbeknownst to Saturn, and carefully hid him away.”
This Ennian passage is even more simple and devoid of stylistic qualities than is the English of Wycliffe or Chaucer. The brief plodding sentences are clear enough; in fact there is a dry legalistic explicitness in phrases like id ejus rei causa fecit uti, and deinde posterius. But the whole rattles to pieces like a mosaic set in clay. It is in the main a string of coordinate clauses loosely hung on que, atque, ibi, tum, and without any appreciation of the differences that we attempt to convey by commas, semicolons and full stops. It has not even the normal feeling for periodic structure which the epitaphs of the time reveal. It is naïve, primitive prose, and the evidence that Ennius could drivel thus is indeed illuminating to the student of literature. A nation which could be satisfied with such a medium of expression had not been very verbose.
During the next few decades, however, there was much legislation, and from the interesting Senatus Consultum de Bacchanalibus of 186 B.C. we have considerable fragments which prove that the ambiguities found in the Twelve Tables were being gradually removed and that there were enough shysters at Rome to compel legislators to evolve the intricate and all-inclusive “if-and-but style” which has ever since characterized legal expression. To this source the great prose of Rome owed very little except precision of diction. There was also not a little historical writing, chiefly however in Greek, for the use of statesmen who needed to know their precedents. But this type of prose, so far as we can judge from the fragments preserved and from Cicero’s adverse judgments,[9] made no appreciable advance upon the narrative manner of Ennius, illustrated above. Nor did such commonplace textbooks as Cato’s De Agri Cultura.
As we have said, it was public speech that moulded prose style at Rome, as in England. Among the first to make a marked impression was Cato, whose great activity on the platform begins about the year of the decree de Bacchanalibus. Nothing could be more innocent of form than Cato’s De Agri Cultura. This however, is by no means true of his speeches, several pages of which survive in the typical paragraphs quoted by later writers. Cato had not taken any course in the art of eloquence, he had not studied the Greeks to the point of appreciating stylistic qualities, and there was no literary Latin prose published for him to study, but he had, as a member of the senate, heard many elaborate arguments advanced by the foremost statesmen of his day on such weighty questions as the peace with Carthage, the proposed expedition into Macedonia in aid of the Greek democracies, the terms of peace with Philip, and the proposed war with Antiochus the Great. There can be no doubt that these debates brought out many of the characteristic qualities of Latin style. The men who argued these questions had to think soundly and to form their arguments as clearly, as definitely, as incisively, and as persuasively as they knew how. When scholastic students of style attribute Greek learning to Cato[10] because he stops to make definitions, balance arguments, and employ logical enthymemes, they astound us by their naïvete. One might as well say that Confucius, Hesiod, and Isaiah had studied Demosthenes. Indeed I doubt not the Aurignacian mother defined words for her children and that the lord of the cave had often tried to argue his wife into silence by conclusions ex contrario.
There has recently arisen another explanation for the occasional artistry of the pre-hellenistic Roman writers which has been held to apply to all of the early Latin authors including Plautus. This is that the so-called “Gorgianic figures,” used by even the earliest Romans, are of Sicilian origin, that the Romans must therefore have come into cultural contact with the Sicilians through commerce two centuries before Plautus, and that Latin prose may thus have taken on rhetorical devices in its infancy.[11] I mention these entertaining conjectures only to guard against any possible supposition that they may seem acceptable simply because they have found their way successively into recent textbooks. Cato was a man who, despite his faults, possessed a very keen and versatile mind, a visualizing, picture-making imagination, a sharp tongue, an agile as well as a retentive memory, and a penetrating power of analysis. His style, to be sure, is not malleable; the clauses cohere by logic rather than by the cement of conjunctions; he is repetitious, chiefly because he likes to hammer his nails firm; his transitions are blunt when he is impatient to be on with his argument; he does not take time to modulate his phrasing and his style has little chiaroscuro, because he is in deadly earnest all the way. His vocabulary is often of the barn and field and his imagery is apt to draw from the farmstead, as for instance when he shouts at Thermus: “You cut those ten worthy men into strips of bacon.”[12] In his Brutus, Cicero somewhat slyly likened Cato’s simple straightforward Latin to the style of Lysias.[13] Cicero, of course, knew the difference, for he later permitted Atticus to correct him on this point, but at the time he desired to recall Brutus to the logical consequences of a contemporary doctrine which somewhat naïvely overstressed the simplicity of the studied artlessness of Lysias. Cato was, of course, conscious of his effects; he drove his arguments home with intentional care, for he wrote out his speeches even though he delivered them without notes. He published them of course not as literary essays to be read by later students of oratory, but as documents designed to carry on the battles that he had begun in the court or the senate. Their art, such as it is, derives not from rhetoric but from his temperament and his fiery conviction. His philosophy of style lay in four words: rem tene, verba sequentur.
Cato’s prose was admirably suited to forensic attack. Its qualities, however, were those that spring from a practical, quick-witted, imaginative debater. Cato probably directed every word and every clause toward the precise argumentative effect that he wished to obtain. He did not pronounce them slowly in order to taste their harmony of sound or to listen to their rhythm. If they had beauty, it was by chance or by reason of the beauty inherent in the Latin of his day. He probably deleted whatever created the impression of being far-sought. Spontaneous imagery might stand if it made his meaning more clear. His antithesis, anaphora, and balance therefore belong not to the schools but spring from the instinct to strike quickly, often, and with both fists. During his fifty years of strenuous speaking he did much for Latin prose, by proving that it could be clear, pointed, and precise; that it was adapted to senatorial deliberations over world politics, as well as to legal battles in the courts and in the assembly. Cato did not have an ear for the organ qualities of the language. Nor was the time yet ripe for the elaboration of artistic effects. When Cato spoke with deepest earnestness, he could hardly escape attaining to some of the dignity that Latin speech so readily acquires, but his vocabulary was too fresh from the soil to sustain that quality for long. However, it is likely that men of taste and restraint even in his day were more concerned than he for the proprieties of diction that belonged to themes of gravity. Nobles who were learning to rule provinces the wide world over and to give commands to kings did not have to go to Greek pettifoggers to acquire dignity of address.
Toward the end of Cato’s period some nobles kept Greek teachers in their homes to teach their sons the language and the literature that prevailed in all the eastern half of the Empire. But the spirit of Rome was not then very friendly toward such teachers. The interminable wrangling of scores of Greek legations begging for favors, the disillusioning visits of Roman statesmen to Greek cities, the demoralizing influence of the country upon the soldiers stationed in Greece, the inane display of logical antinomies in the philosophical disputations, and the superficiality of a rhetorical doctrine concerned with adornments superimposed upon vacuity, these very quickly disgusted Rome. Cato’s friends succeeded in having the Greek teachers banished from Rome in 161 and again in 154.[14] It would be as great a mistake to attribute lasting cultural effects to the ambassadorial visits of Crates and Carneades to Rome as to assume that the American senate could have adopted continental rhetoric and style from the exuberant prose spoken by the French and Italian envoys, Viviani and Francesco Nitti, who were sent to Washington in 1917 to present the cause of the allied nations.
After Cato’s death more Greek teachers came, and among these the stoic Panaetius, who remained for some time and became a real cultural force in the group that gathered about the younger Scipio. Some attempt has been made to trace the Stoic rhetorical doctrine of the plain style to this contact.[15] But it is difficult to see what lessons Rome needed after Cato to illustrate the desirability of the qualities emphasized by stoic teaching: (1) pure diction, (2) clarity, (3) precision, (4) conciseness, (5) propriety. The first four of these qualities were the very spirit of Cato’s practiced though untutored Latin. The last quality concerned Cato very little in all probability, but other Roman statesmen knew the need of sloughing off barnyard diction in speaking before the august senators at Rome. Propriety of diction is after all a quality that could hardly be foreign to a people who had for centuries respected the triumphal garb, the fasces, and the august pontifical ceremonies, and it was not a quality that could be acquired from foreign teachers who did not know the tone of Latin words. We must also bear in mind that what Roman statesmen were eager to learn from men like Panaetius and Polybius and what these men desired to teach was not some clever trick of phrasing but the essence of political philosophy and of ethics. Polybius’ sixth book and Cicero’s De Republica and De Officiis are the real results of the early Stoic teaching at Rome, and Polybius’ own unwieldy sentences should warn us that contact with Stoic teaching could do little for stylistic beauty.
As the Gracchan times approached, a new division of parties became apparent at Rome. The senators were suspected of promoting expansion in the provinces for the sake of their own profit and glory, and several tribunes gained popularity by opposing the recruiting and by haling nobles into court on the charge of maladministration. Piso devised the first of the special courts, which Cicero considered of great importance for the training of orators. Then for several years there was agitation over ballot reform advocated by the populace who desired a secret ballot. Many important speeches were delivered in the senate and before the people on these measures, and if we may judge from the remarks of Cicero regarding Galba,[16] Lepidus Porcina, and Scipio Aemilianus, all this activity conduced to create a feeling for a smoother and more coherent style. Aemilianus especially, who represented the finest aristocracy in its dignity of birth and high accomplishment, spoke with that auctoritas and gravitas that were the natural concomitants of great empire.[17]
Then came the Gracchan proposals which shook the staid government to its foundations. For a dozen years the keenest minds of Rome were pitted against each other, and victory lay not in arms but in the power of persuasion. There was much discussion in the senate, but Tiberius Gracchus carried the battle directly to the popular assembly, and that is where it was fought to the end. For the words of Tiberius we have to rely chiefly upon the paraphrases of Plutarch, which are too general to permit of accurate estimate. From the speeches of Gaius Gracchus, however, we fortunately have some exact quotations.[18]
Gaius Gracchus did as much as any one man to increase the range of Latin forensic prose. Reared in the center of the dominant aristocracy where he imbibed the purest and most copious diction, trained by a mother whose urbane language delighted even Cicero, he nevertheless espoused the cause of democracy, and in the defense of this principle he acquired a lucid directness that Cicero never tires of praising. Gracchus had Greek teachers, who taught him to read and to speak Greek as well as not a little about Greek political ethics, and doubtless also the textbook rules of Greek style. Such stylistic rules, however, were not of much worth in addressing Roman voters, and they are seldom in evidence in the fragments which have survived. Cicero’s one criticism of Gracchus’ style is that he did not know how to modulate his prose so as to secure rhythmical effects. Gracchus would not have attempted to secure them had he known how. He was too concerned with the issues at stake, too fired with zeal for the cause for which he was to suffer death, to worry about the adornments of style. He published his speeches, and he doubtless prepared them beforehand, because in the revolutionary reforms that he proposed, errors of phrasing must be avoided, and the record must be kept for the sake of impressing his arguments. He certainly did not issue his speeches with a view to providing models of style.
In this period Latin prose acquired further versatility and range because Gracchus was a man of genius, believed in a cause which gave full scope to his great powers, and spoke before different audiences that required of him widely varying types of appeal. His was the task of shattering the power of the most stubborn aristocracy that the world has known, of organizing a new democratic machinery of government, of extending the suffrage throughout Italy, of saving the native stock by a vast scheme of colonization. He was stirred by an unflinching devotion to his cause, by bitterness at the murder of his brother, and by the knowledge that he too was marked for death. It is blasphemy against the informing spirit of great art to attribute his effects to rules, and not to acknowledge that genius fighting in such a cause is an independent creative force. Cato had already shaped his weapons for him. Gracchus, more richly endowed with vision, with sympathy, with intellect and wit, filed and hammered the weapons into a finished armory. There is no tool of persuasion that he did not have to employ. He used a simple, rude, staccato narrative when explaining before the rabble conditions that must be cured;[19] in elaborate argument, where the light and shade must be exact, he employed periods as well-packed, though not so musical, as those of Cicero.[20] Before senators his diction was as grave and lordly as theirs, while in the forum, though never coarse, he could be as colloquial as Cato. His vituperation carried the deep thrust of the lance rather than the rapier cut,[21] for he liked to play with lingering irony. His emotional appeal reminds one of the language of Ennius’ tragedies.[22]
And yet Cicero was not quite satisfied with his speeches as works of art. What was lacking was after all what Gracchus would have disregarded even had he lived in Cicero’s day: a more careful modulation, a studied use of rhythm, a concern for the collocation of sounds, a more elaborate sentence structure, and a more apparent contrast of light and shade. Those are qualities that do not belong to the expression of revolutionary reformers who have but a year or two in which to perform a great life-work. They must come with leisure and tranquility when men have time to try the sound and taste of phrases in patient reiteration. Meanwhile Latin prose had been fortunate in finding men like Cato and Gracchus to make it vivid, clear, versatile, and vibrant. After these two men and the scores of speakers that they drew into the arena,[23] no Roman could again write Latin with the shambling gait of Ennius’ Euhemerus without serious apology. And it is safe to say that even writers of history and autobiography, who became numerous in the Gracchan period and after, comprehended now that sentences must have clarity, unity, logic, and precision.
After the death of Gracchus there was a temporary lull in politics; the victorious aristocracy, so nearly crushed, prudently decided to compromise with the populace rather than to risk the awakening of another Gracchus by exploiting their restored power. Young men who had heard the brilliant reformer in their youth, men like Crassus, Antonius, and Catulus, grew up to be distinguished orators. They inherited the results of a great evolution of prose, they directly or indirectly received the benefits of a deeper respect for elaborate style because of a new contact with Greek teachers, and they were granted the leisure and tranquility to consider the needs of a more artistic expression.
Licinius Crassus, in whose orations Cicero found the first mature Latin prose,[24] began as a partisan of Gaius Gracchus and in his youth doubtless imitated his hero’s fiery style. He also gave some attention to the Greek rules though he held that rules did not create style but were merely a collection of deductions drawn by analysts from the practices of the eloquent.[25] He preferred observing Roman speakers to studying the precepts of the Greeks,[26] and he thought Roman oratory sounder than Greek because at Rome the pleaders were the foremost statesmen whereas in Greece only hirelings practiced the art.[27] In these views he was not far from representing orthodox opinions.[28] There were other great men who gave even less credit to scholastic practice. Antonius his rival—by many considered the more brilliant speaker of the two—claimed that rhetoric was useless in that it only formulated the obvious;[29] Scaevola pointed out that Roman statesmen who had brought Roman government to the pinnacle of glory had nothing to learn in expression from inexperienced Greek pedagogues;[30] and Cicero’s account of the style of such great orators as Sulpicius, Caesar Strabo, and Cotta reveals the fact that the oratory of these men was a home product.[31]
On the other hand there were men who tried to make up for the deficiency in practical experience by drilling at doctrine, with the usual result that their language became tangled in artifice. Men like Albucius[32] and the first Curio remind us in type and experience of the courtly Tudor wits who had little to do or say and ended in euphuism.
What was the admirable style of Crassus which Cicero now calls mature? The samples that have been saved for us by the Auctor ad Herennium unfortunately were quoted to illustrate vivid and rapid-fire argumentation, and Cicero’s longest quotation was made to indicate Crassus’ power of spontaneous reaction to a surprising situation. While these examples give proof of celerity of wit, of a forceful, picturesque, and copious diction, of the pungent and concise phrasing for which Crassus was noted, they are not normal forensic prose. They do not reveal the dignity and harmony for which this orator was praised, and they give no certain illustration of the prose rhythms that Cicero liked to find in a “mature” style. From the passages that we have we should say that Crassus spoke as a pupil of Gaius Gracchus, but with the mellowness of age and in causes of less moment.
Perhaps the real reason why Cicero found Crassus’ style mature was that the Latin language was now mature. Latin diction had now become fuller and richer. Not only had the large bulk of Accian tragedy and of hundreds of comedies enriched the language, but hundreds of speeches delivered by men who had worked hard at the task of enlarging the resources of Latin phrase and diction had now been published. The special court instituted by Piso, the frequent cases before the plebeian assembly after the Gracchan period, the new custom of attacking political opponents by means of legal prosecutions had immensely increased the scope of oratory. The factional strife introduced by the Gracchans had divided the senate into debating groups, and brought fire into electioneering oratory and into legislative discussions. Every phase of political philosophy and expediency as well as of legal and moral principles was discussed day after day. Accordingly, the Latin language matured quickly and its prose was a finished product by the time that Cicero was born, although its verse had to wait another century before attaining adequate expression.
This prose was fortunately a fairly musical thing by nature. In comparing the earliest Latin word-forms with those of the Gracchan days we find that they had improved very much in musical quality, due in part, no doubt, to the fact that the Etruscans and Sabines, who had temporarily dominated Rome, had slurred over harsh collocations of consonants till they fell away, and partly to the fact that the plebeians, who were of course less conservative in speech than the patricians, had won great positions in the fourth century. Jouxmenta of the Stele inscription had now softened to jumenta; stlis had become lis; stlocus, locus; forctis, fortis; scandsla, scala; and so on, in hundreds of words. In many positions the harsh sibilants had been eliminated: cosmis had become comis; dusmos, dumus; and intervocalic s had become r: eram was better than esam. This elimination of harsh sounds had wrought so effectively between 500 B.C. and 100 B.C. that a language that was once as rough as Gothic had acquired the mellifluous quality of Italian. Though it still contained too many sibilants for ideal speech and the final m occurred so frequently as to invite monotony, it had few sounds that could jar upon the most delicate ear. The vowels were relatively pure, and because of the abundance in inflections of the sonorous vowels a, o, and u (=oo), they gave the language an orotund quality. The Indo-European i is on the whole apt to be shrill, and the great vowel shift of sixteenth-century England which altered it to the much more musical i (=aye) undid its benefit by raising English e to the thinner sound of the old i. Latin retained the old sound, but in i-stems it frequently went over by analogy to e, and the a̅i̅, a̅ĭ diphthongs fortunately softened to the mellow æ. In all this, mechanistic forces of the speech organs were at work, but one cannot help thinking that a delicate auditory guidance helped select the desirable sounds.
Another great advantage inherent in the Latin language from the beginning was that quantities were carefully observed by it and were in fact the determining factor in its rhythm; and since time rather than stress is the guiding principle of music in human song, as in the flute and organ, Roman speech was to an unusual degree suited to modulated utterance. To be sure, in the century before Plautus, stress had threatened for a while to gain dominance in vulgar speech—enough in fact to question the rights of measured verse—, nevertheless the timely spread of the conservative, aristocratic pronunciation through political and forensic oratory, as it was heard almost daily in the open forum during the second century, gradually checked the process and standardized a precise observance of longs and shorts.
The emphatic dominance of quantity over speech went so far in controlling word-accent that about two centuries before Cicero it had drawn the accent to the penultimate vowel if that was long. Hence, in the sentence endings which so often consisted of weighty words, word-accent to a remarkable degree coincided with a natural quantitative utterance. Latin, therefore, lent itself to a rhythmical close of sentences, often combining word-stress and length of utterance in a way that Greek prose rhythm did not. Cicero had studied Greek and had observed that various writers advocated the use of iambs, dactyls, and paeans[33] for clause-endings, and he labored somewhat confusedly to justify those rhythms since Greek theory seemed to demand them, but modern analysis has proved that his ear had shaped a truer Latin rhythm than his scholarship or his logic. His favorite clausulae, though he was not fully aware of it, were cretics and trochaics, producing a rhythm that adapted itself excellently to the dominance of longs, to the penultimate law, and to a strong close. As usual, a true appreciation of the genius of the Latin language saved the art from the effect of rules that were made for another medium. Here again Latin shows its independence.
But this is not all. Cicero’s books of rhetoric emphasize periodic sentence structure with careful attention to a mobile arrangement of clauses within the period. The Greek orators had of course practiced this art, and the teachers had drawn up the rules of the game afterwards. Cicero, for instance, often patterns his clauses with care in order to reach a periodic climax. In the Orator[34] he quotes an example from a speech of his own in which he follows two pairs of balanced phrases and a pair of clauses with a tranquil dignified close.
Domus tibi deerat? At habebas; pecunia superabat? At egebas;
incurristi amens in columnas; in alienos insanus insanisti:
depressam caecam jacentem domum pluris quam te et quam fortunas tuas aestimasti.
In such studied prose as in much of our free verse, the modulation depends not only upon the measured clausulae but also upon the parallelisms of phrase.[35] It is the two-fold rhythm that we so often find in the Authorized Version, in Hooker and in Browne, before English writers knew very much about the classical theories of prose rhythm. Now the point that needs to be emphasized is that Cicero would probably have written thus had he never known rules, had he only used with his infallible ear the prose that came to him shaped by a hundred great speakers. For, in the first place, the periodic structure was native to Latin, as we have seen, from the time of the earliest inscriptions. That structure is natural in highly inflected languages where the verb can be deferred in order to make room early for the important words and concepts, while unimportant phrases can be appropriately subordinated because their inflectional forms keep them tethered in thought to their owners even though separated by space. All this invites the service of taste to provide the contrast and balance, to give light and shade, to lift and to subdue, and then to bind the whole between introductory subject and concluding verb. No speaker of taste, given leisure and rich diction, could resist the temptation of thus elaborating such a language as Latin. The sentence of the untutored Cato, quoted above, though lacking in modulation, reveals a structural form not unlike the sentence of Cicero just cited.
Cicero repeatedly calls attention to what he designates as the adornment of good prose, adornments associated in Greek learning with the name of Gorgias. These are the tropes, i.e., the figures of speech, and the schemata, i.e., the patterned expressions of sentences. But he also tells us, fortunately, that there were none of these adornments which could not be found in the works of untutored old Cato,[36] and that even unschooled rustics employed metaphor. We have already remarked how modern scholars have sought to explain their presence. Explanations are of course not necessary. Men used metaphor and simile in the caves of the Dordogne 20,000 years ago; language began in metaphor when the primitive savage first called a dog “bowwow.” Half the words of any language are still metaphorical. When a Roman tried to find some expression for thinking, whether he used puto or intelligo or concipio or cogito or arbitror or existimo or opinor or censeo, or sentio, he had to use a figure of speech. Men like Cato, Scipio, Gracchus, Cicero became powerful because they had imagination, saw visions, and put their visions into their words.
The same may be said of patterned phrases. Native Latin verse, shaped long before Greek was known at Rome, was particularly fond of balance and antithesis because it was a verse that rested on parallelism marked by the strong caesura and bound together by alliteration. Such was the form of the early prayers and proverbs of the Romans:
Postremus dicas, primus taceas.
Pastores, pecua, salve servassis.
Eorum sectam secuntur, multi mortales (Livius).
Immortales mortales, si foret fas flere (of Naevius).
This old, alliterative verse operated with antitheses, balance, contrast, anaphora, and word-play. Cicero needed no more to go to the Greeks for such simple devices than Cato, and I do not think that he did. If he employs them with more delicacy and restraint, it is partly because he learned with practice that his own youthful style had been prone to over-use the obvious tricks of speech.
Cicero also calls attention to the Greek rules for the proper organization of speeches, which must have (1) their introduction, (2) their exposition of the case, (3) their panoply of proof, (4) their refutation of the opponent, and (5) their conclusion. To Cicero this is of course schoolboy stuff.[37] It might save time for a freshman to have these obvious rules of composition called to his attention when he begins, but Cicero did not for a moment suppose that an adult who has had some practice needs instruction like this, or that men like Cato and Gracchus and the hundreds of other statesmen battling with the shrewdest minds of Rome needed to be told that the peroration belonged at the end and not at the beginning of a speech. Roman oratory during its hundred years of progress had never learned anything essential from these precepts. Their purpose was simply to train the Roman schoolboy to observe the processes involved in shaping speeches. The mistake of our modern critics has been to suppose that such rules as these created Roman prose. Nothing in Cicero’s writings or practices justifies that assumption. Roman prose grew to full maturity from native roots, in native soil, and with native nurture.
Ornate Latin speech reached its complete development in the orations of Cicero. To modern Anglo-Saxon taste the more elaborate paragraphs seem overwrought. Our busy courts and legislatures desire facts clearly and compactly presented. This has made us impatient of the style of persuasion in speech. When we have leisure for vacation reading we may resort to polyphonic or imagist prose in essays and occasionally in fiction. We still have a place for protreptic sound in well-written paragraphs, but not during business hours. That is the chief reason why some of the Ciceronian periods now seem misplaced. Another seems to lie in a difference of temperament in the respective peoples. If the Latins were in any respect like the modern Italians in their sensitivity to dramatic utterance, they may have enjoyed emotional persuasion more than some of the ultramontane peoples. The very fact that Cicero’s manner so frequently carried conviction in the courts, in the senate, and on the public platform removes him to that extent from modern ultramontane criticism. But Cicero himself was in his day considered a moderate and urged strongly that elaborate prose must never be used except for themes that could carry its burden. He also knew that the study of rhetoric was for young students only and not for mature statesmen. When in the De Oratore he represented Crassus and Antonius as giving such elementary instruction to the young students, Sulpicius and Cotta, he carefully dismissed the venerable Scaevola as being too dignified to participate in such a conversation. His sense of propriety here reveals the true Roman attitude toward Greek rhetoric.
To be sure Cicero was himself somewhat imposed upon by the claims of rhetoric which Greek teachers had elaborated, or he would not have written the De Oratore—even with apologies. The erroneous belief was still current that some one some day might work out a real science of style. Hence he wished to make his contribution to that science by setting down his own precepts regarding prose rhythm, composition, and figures of speech. But that he had doubts concerning their validity appears in his insistence that the “grand manner” is a gift of nature (Or. 99) and that Roman oratory owed more to ingenium than to doctrina (Or. 143). However, in criticizing his contemporaries—Calvus, Caelius, and Calidius—he always proceeds from the point of view of their effect on him rather than from any reference to rules of rhetoric.
Cicero in fact employed few of the figures of speech, the names of which he felt that convention required him to list, and his modulations are so intricate and varied that, despite a score of dissertations on the subject, no one has yet succeeded in analyzing them according to the standard scheme which he transmitted from the accepted authorities. For Cicero himself, living prose had a native movement and a wealth of sound that lay beyond analysis. His rules were for dull minds that required the aid of rules. His own ear required none. The teacher who compels his students to count the specific clausulae of an oration of Cicero commits an unpardonable crime against the holy spirit of a great art. The student must, of course, learn to read that prose with an accurate pronunciation of the sounds and quantities, but after that the rhythm will take care of itself.
Cicero speaks[38] of his own oration Pro Caecina as an example of the “plain style,” employed in explicative demonstration, and the Pro Rabirio as an illustration of the grave and lofty style employed in compelling persuasion, while he cites the De Imperio Pompei as an instance of the “middle style.” He who has read these three speeches conscientiously feels the difference between them, yet he will not be able to convey that feeling by means of the traditional statistics of the stylistic doctorand. There are quite as many examples of the favorite rhythms (clausulae) in the Pro Caecina as in the Pro Rabirio, a fact that shows that Cicero’s ear was remarkably sensitive to this effect and guided his vocal expression even when he was not consciously striving for it. Even in metaphors and in such devices as the rhetorical question, the Pro Caecina does not differ materially from the Pro Rabirio.[39] And this again shows that this orator was by nature luminous and aggressive as a successful speaker must be.
In the final analysis, if we may take the cue from these speeches, it is not the degree of consciously imposed rhetoric that differentiates their styles for Cicero, but the nature of the issues and audiences involved and the resultant quality of the speaker’s inspiration.[40] In the Pro Caecina, an ordinary civil suit called for close argumentation before a small jury of legal specialists. These facts determined the style, as Cicero says. In the Pro Rabirio, which Cicero places at the opposite end of the scale, the critic will not find many more of the standard devices of rhetoric than in the other. But here it becomes apparent from the first sentence that Cicero is tense, that standing at full height he is battling with all his might for what seems to him a great principle. The issue was as serious as any he had ever championed. That accounts for the intensity of his utterance. But there are various ways of fighting, and the audience as well as the theme must determine the manner. Cicero had before him not only the voting public—which standing alone might have tempted him into mere vituperation—but he had also before him the aristocracy of the senate waiting to see whether the auctoritas senatus would be betrayed by that day’s vote because of a possible failure on the orator’s part. Cicero did not fail. The speech in its gravity and dignity of word and period is worthy of the theme and adapted to the audience. And these are the factors which Cicero felt had made that speech. Scholars have catalogued externals in such oratory too assiduously, and Cicero did so himself, because it had not yet been discovered in his day that art is beyond the reach of science.
What we need to do in reading Cicero is first to comprehend the rich endowment of the man: the vast human sympathy that brought him into immediate contact with his audiences, be they ever so diverse, the celerity of his thought, the constructive power of his imagination, the close correspondence between his delicate sense of rhythm and sound and his copious vocabulary, and above all his very sensitive response to the issues of right and justice. Then we must bear in mind the breadth of his studies in philosophy, dramatic literature, history, law, and politics that enriched his mind with principles, illustrations, and points of view.[41] Finally, we must picture to ourselves in each case the nature of his audience, the issue at stake, and the intensity of its appeal to him. When we have done this we shall feel, if we have the gift of insight, and even if we cannot analyze it, the consummate art of Cicero’s Latin prose. To attempt to express the secret of it in statistics of tropes and meters is to miss it wholly.
Before his death Cicero saw the fate of his favorite literary creed that prose should be a work of art. It is well to remember that as he had adopted this creed from his teachers so had his literary opponents adopted from their teachers at least the verbal expression of their own creed, i.e., that it was the business of the speaker to do the task before him simply and honestly without resorting to artifice. However, I do not believe that the literary contest that cost Cicero so much distress in his last days was essentially one of theory; it was rather one that grew out of the milieu in which he lived. Long before Caesar’s day, Cato had expressed his natural aversion to the artifices of Crates and Carneadas when he said with his characteristic impatience: “Get hold of your theme and the words will take care of themselves.” Cicero in his youth had found the same antithesis expressed in Antonius and Crassus. And he lived to see men like Caesar, Brutus, and Calvus win the young men away from his own ideals to those of the matter-of-fact style. The antithesis lies deep in human nature and crops up in the revolt that each generation feels toward its predecessor. It is hardly sound to attribute the dominance of such elementary creeds to schoolroom precepts. The preceptor is usually a man who notes the requirements of his day and tries to prepare his pupils for its needs. He follows more often than he leads, as any one may observe who will examine any twenty standard books on composition produced by teachers during the last fifty years in America. They follow usage, they do not beget it.
Asianic rhetoric, with its advocacy of adornment, had come to Rome in Cicero’s youth. It is true that its rules engaged his attention. But a man as sensitive to artistic expression as Cicero, and as sure of the spirit of his audiences, had little to learn from Anatolian pedagogues who taught Graeculi how to declaim to four walls. Those teachers would hardly have recognized the Pro Rabirio as a product of their precepts. Similarly, Apollodorus came from Pergamum to teach the doctrines of a Lysianic or Attic style. Youths like Calidius, Calvus, and Pollio favored his method. But Apollodorus would have met with little success if so many Romans had not been practical and if the senate, with its traditions of dignity, had not already lost its prestige before the emerging democracy led by Caesar. Apollodorus may have introduced the new style, but had the times not been ripe for him he would not have been heard; moreover, the part of his doctrine that Rome accepted, Rome had possessed already in the 150 speeches of old Cato. It was Caesar’s sword that antiquated senatorial oratory as it antiquated senatorial pretensions to govern Rome. Foreign schoolteachers did not do it. The Greek observer, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, who was an enthusiastic supporter of Atticism in the Augustan day, realized that it was not the Greek schoolteachers but the practical statesmen of Rome who in the last analysis required the new prose to take the form it did. “It is my belief,” he says, “that this great revolution [in stylistic matters] was originated by Rome, the mistress of the world, who compelled entire nations to look to her: Rome, I say, and her nobles, men of high character, excellent administrators, highly cultivated, and of high critical intelligence.” Here we have a keen insight into the fact that a powerful state generates a dominant culture which easily drowns the feeble whispers of the cloistered theorist.
The generation which followed Cicero, represented by Asinius Pollio and Messala, revolted completely against Cicero’s ornate prose and adopted the plain, matter-of-fact speech which was called Atticistic. Again it seems to me not only incorrect but contrary to the penetrating observations of Tacitus[42] to attribute this revolt to the victory of a stylistic theory. Calvus, to be sure, represented the new style in a few speeches as early as 58 B.C. when he was but twenty-four years of age; Calidius began to speak earlier, but whether or not in the new manner is unknown. Brutus, controlled by a temperamental bluntness, supported the same tendency a few years later. But these men would not have been able to undermine the power of Ciceronian style had not events worked in their favor. It was the dominating political influence of Caesar that did the work. The first blow was Caesar’s quiet introduction of stenographers into the senate in 59. By publishing the minutes of the senatorial proceedings he compelled the speakers to consider the outside public, to drop the orotund periods addressed to their colleagues alone, and to confine themselves to pertinent details. Caesar himself had no time to waste on model orations. When opposed by the senate he carried his bills to the assembly to which he put his arguments in plain and pithy sentences. Cicero had scented the meaning of these effects enough to feel the need of stating his doctrine in full in the De Oratore published in 55, and Calvus and Calidius were quietly profiting by the new trend. Presently, in 52, the triumvirs closed the second nursery of ornate prose, by passing a bill which severely limited the time of pleas in court. The purpose was, of course, to expedite the business of the overburdened courts, but the act reveals once more that the new politics were concerned with getting results, not with encouraging a time-consuming oratory. Two years later Caesar crossed the Rubicon, and thereafter, so long as Caesar lived, addresses in the senate all partook of the nature of business-like reports in committees that met before a curt presiding officer; and in the courts, whose judges were now appointed by Caesar, persuasive oratory gave way to a rapid estimation of facts.
Cicero was well aware of all this.[43] During the first few years of Caesar’s dictatorship he complained frequently that there was no longer a place in the state for his gifts, and that his influence had wholly gone. However, hoping for a restoration of senatorial rule, he decided not to yield without some effort. He invited the most promising young politicians of Caesar’s circle to take practical exercises in political oratory with him; in 47 or 46 he wrote a letter of gentle remonstrance to Calvus, the most influential theorist of the “Atticistic school;” and for Brutus, who rejected the means of artistic expression for reasons of taste, he composed (in 46) a full history of Latin oratory in which he tried to show that Caesarian administration threatened to suffocate a great art, that the development of that art during more than a century had demonstrated the correctness of his own doctrine, and that the opposing theorists, men like Calvus and Calidius who had profited from events, could not by their methods create an effective style. Brutus, who of course comprehended the animus of the volume, responded with little enthusiasm and avoided the burden of arguing by asking for a more explicit statement of Cicero’s position. Cicero responded at once with the brilliant brochure called the Orator. But though Cicero sent out many presentation copies the book met with general silence. No one was interested in tropes and prose rhythm at a time when Cato was taking his own life as an offering to the dying Republic. For the next two years the business of state rested on the brief staccato orders of a tyrant. At Caesar’s death the senate came to life again for a brief period and the fourteen Philippics reveal the enduring power of Cicero’s oratory, an art that had been well-nigh silent for ten years. Then Cicero, too, fell by the assassin’s sword.
Presently Augustus established the throne and once more offered freedom of discussion in the senate. But freedom had disappeared. Augustus’ trusted friends reported his views in the senate and before the people in business-like summaries. Cicero’s very name was anathema as that of a rebel to the new régime. Pollio and Messala, who represented the opposition to the unpopular style, who practiced the arts of brevity and directness suited to the needs of the new régime, were accounted the models of Augustan Latin prose. Ciceronian ideals returned in time to the schoolroom but only after the schoolroom had lost touch with politics.