As we look back on the long line of rhetorical teachers, we can trace an increasing degree of narrowness and futility. The conditions of life in the city-state had made public speaking a practical and personal necessity. What Isocrates strove to do in his rôle as pamphleteer was to raise oratory from the personal to the national level, to connect education with statesmanship,[914] and to unify it by setting before it the ideal of a united Greece. The sphere of rhetoric in his view was wide and humane.[915] It is true that he himself was a theorist, unskilled in the practical issues of politics.[916] He was what Crito in the Euthydemus called a ‘Boundary Stone’—one who tried to combine practical politics and philosophy, avoiding the extremes of each. His attempt was unpopular, though ultimately he succeeded, for his school became the university of Greece.[917] But the ideal which he put forward had a real inspiration, and had none of the cramping restrictions of later rhetoric. Moreover, he taught the unity of moral and intellectual education: ‘The more strongly a man desires to persuade his audience’ (the intellectual practice of the rhetorical school) ‘the more will he train himself in culture of mind and manners and in gaining the esteem of his fellow citizens.’[918] Speech is regarded as the instrument of Persuasion, from which all the blessings of human society proceed,[919] and its function is to advance civilization by educating the ignorant and testing the wise.
Such was the high educational ideal of Isocrates, and we find much of it reflected in Cicero, his admirer and his imitator. The breadth of view is not impaired. For Cicero maintains that the power of eloquence is such that it embraces the rise, the force, the vicissitudes of all affairs, virtues, and duties; of everything in nature—character, mind, life. It defines the moral code, the principles of law and right. It regulates the State, and on every subject and in all its relations its words are many and eloquent.[920] There is the same attempt to connect rhetoric with politics, the same insistence that intellectual issues (doctrina bene dicendi) cannot be separated from moral ones (doctrina recte faciendi).[921] Wide and all-round knowledge is required of the orator: ‘mea quidem sententia, nemo poterit esse omni laude cumulatus orator, nisi erit omnium rerum magnarum atque artium scientiam consecutus.’[922] Yet Cicero was a panegyrist, and he followed the artificial rules of the game in exactly the same way as the Gallic rhetoricians of the third and fourth centuries did; and when he warns against spending too much time on philosophy,[923] which may be lightly learned, he says, we feel that he is giving rein to a natural Roman tendency to discount thought, and that this tendency proved the bane of rhetoric.
Cicero’s attempt to make the oratorical education something of wide scope, and to make it bear upon practical politics, was doomed to failure. More and more the tyranny of rhetorical rules, co-operating with the restriction of liberty under the Empire, produced a narrow and formal result. The sciolists of the fourth century believed that philosophy could be so easily learned that they hardly troubled to make its acquaintance. A political connexion with oratory was kept up, but it consisted in the degenerate panegyric. More and more rhetorical education narrowed its range, and retired within the academical atmosphere of the school.[924] As for moral education, we must find in the criticisms of Tacitus and Juvenal an element of truth. The emperor set the fashion, and the subject did not always find an inspiring example.
The change that came over oratory was not entirely one of artificiality. This there had been in Isocrates, whose rules were just as artificial as those of the ‘Panegyrici Latini’. It was rather a question of ideal. Isocrates had a national ideal, which could give meaning and life to his utterances; Cicero had the interests of a party to inspire him; but the panegyrists of the fourth century were confined to the emperor; his birthday or his benefits are the sort of subjects that stimulate their oratory, and Pliny could praise with equal fervour the political reforms and the white horses of Trajan.
Thus the rhetorical tradition, the ideal of oratory as the goal of education, came down through the centuries to our period. It came to Gaul, and flourished exceedingly on account of the natural aptitude of the Gauls for eloquence. Lucian, in the Herakles,[925] gives a picture of the Gallic Hercules who drags all men after him by fine chains attached to his tongue and their ears, and they follow gladly though it is in their power to break away. Cerialis, in addressing the Treveri and Lingones, maintained that the Roman way of establishing justice was the sword, but that words had most influence with the Gauls.[926]
And Jerome said of the Gauls: ‘The fact that they are prolific of orators points not so much to the studious character of the country as to the noise made by the rhetors: especially as Aquitaine boasts of its Greek origin.’[927] This is borne out by the inscriptions. We are struck in the south by the frequency of long-winded and ornate epitaphs, e.g.[928]
D.M.
Memoriae aeternae
Socchiae Enneanis
Dulcissim. et. super. ae