[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.