The same may be said of patterned phrases. Native Latin verse, shaped long before Greek was known at Rome, was particularly fond of balance and antithesis because it was a verse that rested on parallelism marked by the strong caesura and bound together by alliteration. Such was the form of the early prayers and proverbs of the Romans:
Postremus dicas, primus taceas.
Pastores, pecua, salve servassis.
Eorum sectam secuntur, multi mortales (Livius).
Immortales mortales, si foret fas flere (of Naevius).
This old, alliterative verse operated with antitheses, balance, contrast, anaphora, and word-play. Cicero needed no more to go to the Greeks for such simple devices than Cato, and I do not think that he did. If he employs them with more delicacy and restraint, it is partly because he learned with practice that his own youthful style had been prone to over-use the obvious tricks of speech.
Cicero also calls attention to the Greek rules for the proper organization of speeches, which must have (1) their introduction, (2) their exposition of the case, (3) their panoply of proof, (4) their refutation of the opponent, and (5) their conclusion. To Cicero this is of course schoolboy stuff.[37] It might save time for a freshman to have these obvious rules of composition called to his attention when he begins, but Cicero did not for a moment suppose that an adult who has had some practice needs instruction like this, or that men like Cato and Gracchus and the hundreds of other statesmen battling with the shrewdest minds of Rome needed to be told that the peroration belonged at the end and not at the beginning of a speech. Roman oratory during its hundred years of progress had never learned anything essential from these precepts. Their purpose was simply to train the Roman schoolboy to observe the processes involved in shaping speeches. The mistake of our modern critics has been to suppose that such rules as these created Roman prose. Nothing in Cicero’s writings or practices justifies that assumption. Roman prose grew to full maturity from native roots, in native soil, and with native nurture.
Ornate Latin speech reached its complete development in the orations of Cicero. To modern Anglo-Saxon taste the more elaborate paragraphs seem overwrought. Our busy courts and legislatures desire facts clearly and compactly presented. This has made us impatient of the style of persuasion in speech. When we have leisure for vacation reading we may resort to polyphonic or imagist prose in essays and occasionally in fiction. We still have a place for protreptic sound in well-written paragraphs, but not during business hours. That is the chief reason why some of the Ciceronian periods now seem misplaced. Another seems to lie in a difference of temperament in the respective peoples. If the Latins were in any respect like the modern Italians in their sensitivity to dramatic utterance, they may have enjoyed emotional persuasion more than some of the ultramontane peoples. The very fact that Cicero’s manner so frequently carried conviction in the courts, in the senate, and on the public platform removes him to that extent from modern ultramontane criticism. But Cicero himself was in his day considered a moderate and urged strongly that elaborate prose must never be used except for themes that could carry its burden. He also knew that the study of rhetoric was for young students only and not for mature statesmen. When in the De Oratore he represented Crassus and Antonius as giving such elementary instruction to the young students, Sulpicius and Cotta, he carefully dismissed the venerable Scaevola as being too dignified to participate in such a conversation. His sense of propriety here reveals the true Roman attitude toward Greek rhetoric.
To be sure Cicero was himself somewhat imposed upon by the claims of rhetoric which Greek teachers had elaborated, or he would not have written the De Oratore—even with apologies. The erroneous belief was still current that some one some day might work out a real science of style. Hence he wished to make his contribution to that science by setting down his own precepts regarding prose rhythm, composition, and figures of speech. But that he had doubts concerning their validity appears in his insistence that the “grand manner” is a gift of nature (Or. 99) and that Roman oratory owed more to ingenium than to doctrina (Or. 143). However, in criticizing his contemporaries—Calvus, Caelius, and Calidius—he always proceeds from the point of view of their effect on him rather than from any reference to rules of rhetoric.