Then came the Gracchan proposals which shook the staid government to its foundations. For a dozen years the keenest minds of Rome were pitted against each other, and victory lay not in arms but in the power of persuasion. There was much discussion in the senate, but Tiberius Gracchus carried the battle directly to the popular assembly, and that is where it was fought to the end. For the words of Tiberius we have to rely chiefly upon the paraphrases of Plutarch, which are too general to permit of accurate estimate. From the speeches of Gaius Gracchus, however, we fortunately have some exact quotations.[18]
Gaius Gracchus did as much as any one man to increase the range of Latin forensic prose. Reared in the center of the dominant aristocracy where he imbibed the purest and most copious diction, trained by a mother whose urbane language delighted even Cicero, he nevertheless espoused the cause of democracy, and in the defense of this principle he acquired a lucid directness that Cicero never tires of praising. Gracchus had Greek teachers, who taught him to read and to speak Greek as well as not a little about Greek political ethics, and doubtless also the textbook rules of Greek style. Such stylistic rules, however, were not of much worth in addressing Roman voters, and they are seldom in evidence in the fragments which have survived. Cicero’s one criticism of Gracchus’ style is that he did not know how to modulate his prose so as to secure rhythmical effects. Gracchus would not have attempted to secure them had he known how. He was too concerned with the issues at stake, too fired with zeal for the cause for which he was to suffer death, to worry about the adornments of style. He published his speeches, and he doubtless prepared them beforehand, because in the revolutionary reforms that he proposed, errors of phrasing must be avoided, and the record must be kept for the sake of impressing his arguments. He certainly did not issue his speeches with a view to providing models of style.
In this period Latin prose acquired further versatility and range because Gracchus was a man of genius, believed in a cause which gave full scope to his great powers, and spoke before different audiences that required of him widely varying types of appeal. His was the task of shattering the power of the most stubborn aristocracy that the world has known, of organizing a new democratic machinery of government, of extending the suffrage throughout Italy, of saving the native stock by a vast scheme of colonization. He was stirred by an unflinching devotion to his cause, by bitterness at the murder of his brother, and by the knowledge that he too was marked for death. It is blasphemy against the informing spirit of great art to attribute his effects to rules, and not to acknowledge that genius fighting in such a cause is an independent creative force. Cato had already shaped his weapons for him. Gracchus, more richly endowed with vision, with sympathy, with intellect and wit, filed and hammered the weapons into a finished armory. There is no tool of persuasion that he did not have to employ. He used a simple, rude, staccato narrative when explaining before the rabble conditions that must be cured;[19] in elaborate argument, where the light and shade must be exact, he employed periods as well-packed, though not so musical, as those of Cicero.[20] Before senators his diction was as grave and lordly as theirs, while in the forum, though never coarse, he could be as colloquial as Cato. His vituperation carried the deep thrust of the lance rather than the rapier cut,[21] for he liked to play with lingering irony. His emotional appeal reminds one of the language of Ennius’ tragedies.[22]
And yet Cicero was not quite satisfied with his speeches as works of art. What was lacking was after all what Gracchus would have disregarded even had he lived in Cicero’s day: a more careful modulation, a studied use of rhythm, a concern for the collocation of sounds, a more elaborate sentence structure, and a more apparent contrast of light and shade. Those are qualities that do not belong to the expression of revolutionary reformers who have but a year or two in which to perform a great life-work. They must come with leisure and tranquility when men have time to try the sound and taste of phrases in patient reiteration. Meanwhile Latin prose had been fortunate in finding men like Cato and Gracchus to make it vivid, clear, versatile, and vibrant. After these two men and the scores of speakers that they drew into the arena,[23] no Roman could again write Latin with the shambling gait of Ennius’ Euhemerus without serious apology. And it is safe to say that even writers of history and autobiography, who became numerous in the Gracchan period and after, comprehended now that sentences must have clarity, unity, logic, and precision.
After the death of Gracchus there was a temporary lull in politics; the victorious aristocracy, so nearly crushed, prudently decided to compromise with the populace rather than to risk the awakening of another Gracchus by exploiting their restored power. Young men who had heard the brilliant reformer in their youth, men like Crassus, Antonius, and Catulus, grew up to be distinguished orators. They inherited the results of a great evolution of prose, they directly or indirectly received the benefits of a deeper respect for elaborate style because of a new contact with Greek teachers, and they were granted the leisure and tranquility to consider the needs of a more artistic expression.
Licinius Crassus, in whose orations Cicero found the first mature Latin prose,[24] began as a partisan of Gaius Gracchus and in his youth doubtless imitated his hero’s fiery style. He also gave some attention to the Greek rules though he held that rules did not create style but were merely a collection of deductions drawn by analysts from the practices of the eloquent.[25] He preferred observing Roman speakers to studying the precepts of the Greeks,[26] and he thought Roman oratory sounder than Greek because at Rome the pleaders were the foremost statesmen whereas in Greece only hirelings practiced the art.[27] In these views he was not far from representing orthodox opinions.[28] There were other great men who gave even less credit to scholastic practice. Antonius his rival—by many considered the more brilliant speaker of the two—claimed that rhetoric was useless in that it only formulated the obvious;[29] Scaevola pointed out that Roman statesmen who had brought Roman government to the pinnacle of glory had nothing to learn in expression from inexperienced Greek pedagogues;[30] and Cicero’s account of the style of such great orators as Sulpicius, Caesar Strabo, and Cotta reveals the fact that the oratory of these men was a home product.[31]
On the other hand there were men who tried to make up for the deficiency in practical experience by drilling at doctrine, with the usual result that their language became tangled in artifice. Men like Albucius[32] and the first Curio remind us in type and experience of the courtly Tudor wits who had little to do or say and ended in euphuism.
What was the admirable style of Crassus which Cicero now calls mature? The samples that have been saved for us by the Auctor ad Herennium unfortunately were quoted to illustrate vivid and rapid-fire argumentation, and Cicero’s longest quotation was made to indicate Crassus’ power of spontaneous reaction to a surprising situation. While these examples give proof of celerity of wit, of a forceful, picturesque, and copious diction, of the pungent and concise phrasing for which Crassus was noted, they are not normal forensic prose. They do not reveal the dignity and harmony for which this orator was praised, and they give no certain illustration of the prose rhythms that Cicero liked to find in a “mature” style. From the passages that we have we should say that Crassus spoke as a pupil of Gaius Gracchus, but with the mellowness of age and in causes of less moment.
Perhaps the real reason why Cicero found Crassus’ style mature was that the Latin language was now mature. Latin diction had now become fuller and richer. Not only had the large bulk of Accian tragedy and of hundreds of comedies enriched the language, but hundreds of speeches delivered by men who had worked hard at the task of enlarging the resources of Latin phrase and diction had now been published. The special court instituted by Piso, the frequent cases before the plebeian assembly after the Gracchan period, the new custom of attacking political opponents by means of legal prosecutions had immensely increased the scope of oratory. The factional strife introduced by the Gracchans had divided the senate into debating groups, and brought fire into electioneering oratory and into legislative discussions. Every phase of political philosophy and expediency as well as of legal and moral principles was discussed day after day. Accordingly, the Latin language matured quickly and its prose was a finished product by the time that Cicero was born, although its verse had to wait another century before attaining adequate expression.
This prose was fortunately a fairly musical thing by nature. In comparing the earliest Latin word-forms with those of the Gracchan days we find that they had improved very much in musical quality, due in part, no doubt, to the fact that the Etruscans and Sabines, who had temporarily dominated Rome, had slurred over harsh collocations of consonants till they fell away, and partly to the fact that the plebeians, who were of course less conservative in speech than the patricians, had won great positions in the fourth century. Jouxmenta of the Stele inscription had now softened to jumenta; stlis had become lis; stlocus, locus; forctis, fortis; scandsla, scala; and so on, in hundreds of words. In many positions the harsh sibilants had been eliminated: cosmis had become comis; dusmos, dumus; and intervocalic s had become r: eram was better than esam. This elimination of harsh sounds had wrought so effectively between 500 B.C. and 100 B.C. that a language that was once as rough as Gothic had acquired the mellifluous quality of Italian. Though it still contained too many sibilants for ideal speech and the final m occurred so frequently as to invite monotony, it had few sounds that could jar upon the most delicate ear. The vowels were relatively pure, and because of the abundance in inflections of the sonorous vowels a, o, and u (=oo), they gave the language an orotund quality. The Indo-European i is on the whole apt to be shrill, and the great vowel shift of sixteenth-century England which altered it to the much more musical i (=aye) undid its benefit by raising English e to the thinner sound of the old i. Latin retained the old sound, but in i-stems it frequently went over by analogy to e, and the a̅i̅, a̅ĭ diphthongs fortunately softened to the mellow æ. In all this, mechanistic forces of the speech organs were at work, but one cannot help thinking that a delicate auditory guidance helped select the desirable sounds.