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:
| Titles of theWorks | Nature of theWork.
| The date ofPublication | ||||||||||||
| Rheticorum ad. C. Herennium. | Four books, giving lessons in Rhetoric; supposedto have been written, not by Cicero, but by one Cornificius.*[240] | b.c. 87, 86. Ætat. 20, 21. | ||||||||||||
| De Inventione. | Four books, giving lessons in Rhetoric, supposedto have been translated from the Greek. Two out of four have come to us.* | |||||||||||||
| De Oratore. | Three dialogues, in three books—supposed tohave been held under a plane-tree, in the garden at Tusculumbelonging to Crassus, forty years before—in which are laiddown instructions for the making of an orator.* | b.c. 55. Ætat. 52. | ||||||||||||
| De Republica. | Six political discussions—supposed to havebeen held seventy-five years before the date at which they werewritten—on the best mode of governance. We have but afragment of them.‡ | b.c. 53. Ætat. 54. | ||||||||||||
| De Legibus. | Three out of six books as to the best laws forgoverning the Republic. They are carried on between Atticus,Quintus, and Marcus. They are supposed to have been written b.c. 52 (ætat. 55 but were not publishedtill after his death.‡ | b.c. 52. Ætat. 55. | ||||||||||||
| De Optimo Genere Oratorum. | A preface to the translation of the speeches ofÆschines and of Demosthenes for and against Ctesiphon—in thematter of the Golden Crown.* | b.c. 45. Ætat. 61. | ||||||||||||
| De Partitione Oratoria. | Instructions by questions and answers, supposedto have been previously given to his son in Greek, on the art ofspeaking in public.* | b.c. 46. Ætat. 61. | ||||||||||||
| The Academica. | Treatises, in which he deals with the variousphases of Philosophy taught by the Academy. It has been altered,and we have only a part of the first book of the altered portionand the second part of the treatise before it was altered. In itsaltered form it is addressed to Varro.† | b.c. 45. Ætat. 62. | ||||||||||||
| De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum. | A treatise in five books, in the form ofdialogues, as to the results to be looked for in inquiries as towhat is good and what is evil. It is addressed toBrutus.† | b.c. 45. Ætat. 62. | ||||||||||||
| Brutus: or, De Claris Oratoribus. | A treatise on the most perfect orators of pasttimes. It is addressed to Brutus, and has, in a peculiar manner,been always called by his name.* | b.c. 45. Ætat. 62. | ||||||||||||
| Orator. | A treatise, addressed to Brutus, to show what theperfect orator should be.* | b.c. 45. Ætat. 62. | ||||||||||||
| Tusculanæ Disputationes. | Or the Tusculan Inquiries, supposed to have beenheld with certain friends in his Tusculan villa, as to contempt ofDeath and Pain and Sorrow, as to conquering the Passions, and thehappiness to be derived from Virtue. They are addressed toBrutus.* | b.c. 45. Ætat. 62. | ||||||||||||
| De Natura Deorum. | Three books addressed to Brutus. Velleius,Balbus, and Cotta discuss the relative merits of the Epicurean,Stoic, and Academic Schools.† | b.c. 44. Ætat. 63. | ||||||||||||
| Divinatione. | He discusses with his brother Quintus theproperty of the gods to "divine," or rather to enable men to readprophecies. It is a continuation of a former work.† | b.c. 44. Ætat. 63. | ||||||||||||
| De Fato. | The part only of a book on Destiny.† | b.c. 44. Ætat. 63. | ||||||||||||
| The Topica. | A so-called translation from Aristotle. It isaddressed to Trebatius.* | b.c. 44. Ætat. 63. | ||||||||||||
| De Senectute. | A treatise on Old Age, addressed to Atticus, andcalled Cato Major.‡ | b.c. 44. Ætat. 63. | ||||||||||||
| De Amicitia. | A treatise on Friendship, addressed also toAtticus, and called Lælius.‡ | b.c. 44. Ætat. 63. | ||||||||||||
| De Officiis. | To his son. Treating of the Moral Duties of Life.Containing three books— | b.c. 44. Ætat. 63. |
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 Quæstor, Ædile, Prætor, 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 Cæsar 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 Cæsarean, or must be quiet, or he must go. He would not be Cæsarean, 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 Cæsar 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 τὸ καλόν.[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.