The declamations of antiquity had an influence on its prose style—and consequently an effect on its critical opinions of |“Declamations.”| style both in verse and prose—which it is almost impossible to exaggerate. The practice of them began in boyhood; it formed almost the greater part of the higher education; and it appears to have been continued in later life not merely by going to the Schools to hear novices, but in actual practice, half exercise, half amusement, by orators and statesmen of the most established fame. It was a sort of mental fencing-school or gymnasium, to which those who wished to keep their powers in training resorted, even to the close of life. We know that Cicero composed, if he did not actually deliver, declamations up to the very end of his career; and, in a very different department of letters, we know from Seneca himself that Ovid, though not a constant, was a by no means infrequent, attendant of the schools, and either acquired or exercised his well-known fancy for turns and plays of words in prose as well as in verse.
In theory, and no doubt to some extent in practice also, these meletæ, or declamations, were permissible and desirable in |Their subjects: epideictic| all the branches of Rhetoric. But the examples which have come down to us, and the references that we possess to others, show us that, as, indeed, we should expect, Epideictic and Dicanic provided the chief subjects. The declamations of the former kind were those at which the satirists chiefly laughed—Hannibal crossing the Alps, Leonidas at Thermopylæ, Whether Cicero could decently have avoided death by making a bargain with Antony, and the like. To this kind of subject there could evidently be no limit, and it might sometimes pass, as in the Orations (which are after all only declamations) of Dion Chrysostom we know that it at least once did pass, into a regular literary Essay. But it seems more generally to have affected the fanciful-historic.
The purely forensic declamation had some differences. As its object was not merely or mainly, like that of the other, to |and forensic.| display cleverness, but to assist the acquisition and display of ability as a counsel, it fell into certain rather narrow and not very numerous grooves. Certain “hard cases,” paradoxes of the law, seem from very early times to have been excogitated by the ingenuity of the rhetoricians, and the game was to treat these—on one side or the other, or both—with as much force, but above all with as much apparent novelty, as the speaker’s wits could manage. A very favourite one was based on the venerable practice of allowing the victim of a rape the choice of death for her violator or requiring him to marry her, with the aporia, “Suppose a man is guilty of two such crimes, and one girl demands death, the other marriage, what is to be done?” Or “Suppose a girl, situated like Marina in Pericles, but slaying her Lysimachus, not converting him. Released from her bondage, she presents herself as candidate for a priestess-ship. Is she eligible or not?”[[291]] The extremity of perverse fancy in this direction is perhaps reached by a pair of the declamations attributed to Quintilian,[[292]] in which the lover of a courtesan brings an action against her for administering a counter-philtre, so that he may love her no longer, and she may accept a wealthier suitor. But there is no limit to the almost diseased imagination of these Cases. A city[[293]] is afflicted by famine, and a commissioner is sent to buy up grain, with orders to return by a certain day. He executes his commission successfully and quickly, but being driven into port in a third country by bad weather, sells the grain at a high price, buys twice as much elsewhere, and returns by the appointed time. But, meanwhile, the famine has grown so severe that the people have been driven to cannibalism, which his return direct with his first bargain would have prevented. Is he guilty or not guilty?
A very little consideration will show that both these classes of composition must have had great, permanent, and not altogether |Their influence on style.| good effects on style. Both dealt with hackneyed subjects, and in both success was most likely to be achieved by “peppering higher,” in various ways. The epideictic subjects suggested various forms of bombast, conceit, trick, from the use of poetical, archaic, or otherwise unfamiliar diction to the device of the mouther of whom Seneca tells us,[[294]] and who, declaiming on Greeks and Persians, stood a-tiptoe and cried, “I rejoice! I rejoice!” and only after a due pause explained the cause of his rejoicing. The forensic subjects tempted the racking of the brain for some new quibble, some fresh refinement or hair-splitting. Especially was this the case in the subdivision of what were called the colores—ingenious excuses for the parties, whence comes the special sense of our word colourable, and whereof Seneca makes a special heading, usually at the end of his articles. No pitch of mental wiredrawing, no extravagance of play on word or phrase, was too great for some declaimers, of whom a certain Murredius is Seneca’s favourite Helot. In fact, in both classes, epideictic and forensic, one can see that a plain, forcible, manly style could only be commended by a combination of very unusual genius on the part of the speaker, and still more unusual taste and receptivity on the part of the audience. Their sophos, their euge, their belle,[[295]] were much more likely to be evoked by ingenious and far-fetched conceit than by solid reasoning and Attic style, which latter, indeed, on such trite subjects were nearly impossible.
For illustration of what has been said, the hodge-podge of Seneca is more valuable than the finished declamations of the Pseudo-Quintilian. These latter,[[296]] despite the absurdity, or at any rate the non-naturalness, of their subject, are sometimes rather accomplished pieces of writing in a very artificial style. The speech, Pro Juvene contra Meretricem, referred to above, is, in its whimsical way, a decidedly remarkable example of decadent prose. The crime of making some one cease to love is odd in itself; the complaint that you have been injured by being made to cease to love odder still. Besides, if you complain of this as an injury, do you not still love, and have you not, therefore, nothing to complain of? The topsyturvyfication is, it will be seen, complete. And the declaimer, whoever he was, treats his subject con amore. The tricks of his thought are infinite, and well suited with the artifices of his speech. In particular, every paragraph leads up to, and winds up with, a sort of variation on one general theme or Leitmotiv.
“To be compelled to hate is the one incurable form of disease.”
“There is some solace in being miserable in love. 'Tis a more cruel destiny to hate a harlot.”
“He who cannot leave off hating a harlot is still her lover.”
“The victim of a counter-philtre may hate one: he can love none.”
Thinker and writer, it will be seen, are a sort of pair of bounding brothers: they stand on their heads, fling circles, intertwine limbs, take every non-natural posture, to the utmost possibility of intellectual acrobatics.