Life and literature in the Roman republic

by Tenney Frank

“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]