Cicero in fact employed few of the figures of speech, the names of which he felt that convention required him to list, and his modulations are so intricate and varied that, despite a score of dissertations on the subject, no one has yet succeeded in analyzing them according to the standard scheme which he transmitted from the accepted authorities. For Cicero himself, living prose had a native movement and a wealth of sound that lay beyond analysis. His rules were for dull minds that required the aid of rules. His own ear required none. The teacher who compels his students to count the specific clausulae of an oration of Cicero commits an unpardonable crime against the holy spirit of a great art. The student must, of course, learn to read that prose with an accurate pronunciation of the sounds and quantities, but after that the rhythm will take care of itself.
Cicero speaks[38] of his own oration Pro Caecina as an example of the “plain style,” employed in explicative demonstration, and the Pro Rabirio as an illustration of the grave and lofty style employed in compelling persuasion, while he cites the De Imperio Pompei as an instance of the “middle style.” He who has read these three speeches conscientiously feels the difference between them, yet he will not be able to convey that feeling by means of the traditional statistics of the stylistic doctorand. There are quite as many examples of the favorite rhythms (clausulae) in the Pro Caecina as in the Pro Rabirio, a fact that shows that Cicero’s ear was remarkably sensitive to this effect and guided his vocal expression even when he was not consciously striving for it. Even in metaphors and in such devices as the rhetorical question, the Pro Caecina does not differ materially from the Pro Rabirio.[39] And this again shows that this orator was by nature luminous and aggressive as a successful speaker must be.
In the final analysis, if we may take the cue from these speeches, it is not the degree of consciously imposed rhetoric that differentiates their styles for Cicero, but the nature of the issues and audiences involved and the resultant quality of the speaker’s inspiration.[40] In the Pro Caecina, an ordinary civil suit called for close argumentation before a small jury of legal specialists. These facts determined the style, as Cicero says. In the Pro Rabirio, which Cicero places at the opposite end of the scale, the critic will not find many more of the standard devices of rhetoric than in the other. But here it becomes apparent from the first sentence that Cicero is tense, that standing at full height he is battling with all his might for what seems to him a great principle. The issue was as serious as any he had ever championed. That accounts for the intensity of his utterance. But there are various ways of fighting, and the audience as well as the theme must determine the manner. Cicero had before him not only the voting public—which standing alone might have tempted him into mere vituperation—but he had also before him the aristocracy of the senate waiting to see whether the auctoritas senatus would be betrayed by that day’s vote because of a possible failure on the orator’s part. Cicero did not fail. The speech in its gravity and dignity of word and period is worthy of the theme and adapted to the audience. And these are the factors which Cicero felt had made that speech. Scholars have catalogued externals in such oratory too assiduously, and Cicero did so himself, because it had not yet been discovered in his day that art is beyond the reach of science.
What we need to do in reading Cicero is first to comprehend the rich endowment of the man: the vast human sympathy that brought him into immediate contact with his audiences, be they ever so diverse, the celerity of his thought, the constructive power of his imagination, the close correspondence between his delicate sense of rhythm and sound and his copious vocabulary, and above all his very sensitive response to the issues of right and justice. Then we must bear in mind the breadth of his studies in philosophy, dramatic literature, history, law, and politics that enriched his mind with principles, illustrations, and points of view.[41] Finally, we must picture to ourselves in each case the nature of his audience, the issue at stake, and the intensity of its appeal to him. When we have done this we shall feel, if we have the gift of insight, and even if we cannot analyze it, the consummate art of Cicero’s Latin prose. To attempt to express the secret of it in statistics of tropes and meters is to miss it wholly.
Before his death Cicero saw the fate of his favorite literary creed that prose should be a work of art. It is well to remember that as he had adopted this creed from his teachers so had his literary opponents adopted from their teachers at least the verbal expression of their own creed, i.e., that it was the business of the speaker to do the task before him simply and honestly without resorting to artifice. However, I do not believe that the literary contest that cost Cicero so much distress in his last days was essentially one of theory; it was rather one that grew out of the milieu in which he lived. Long before Caesar’s day, Cato had expressed his natural aversion to the artifices of Crates and Carneadas when he said with his characteristic impatience: “Get hold of your theme and the words will take care of themselves.” Cicero in his youth had found the same antithesis expressed in Antonius and Crassus. And he lived to see men like Caesar, Brutus, and Calvus win the young men away from his own ideals to those of the matter-of-fact style. The antithesis lies deep in human nature and crops up in the revolt that each generation feels toward its predecessor. It is hardly sound to attribute the dominance of such elementary creeds to schoolroom precepts. The preceptor is usually a man who notes the requirements of his day and tries to prepare his pupils for its needs. He follows more often than he leads, as any one may observe who will examine any twenty standard books on composition produced by teachers during the last fifty years in America. They follow usage, they do not beget it.
Asianic rhetoric, with its advocacy of adornment, had come to Rome in Cicero’s youth. It is true that its rules engaged his attention. But a man as sensitive to artistic expression as Cicero, and as sure of the spirit of his audiences, had little to learn from Anatolian pedagogues who taught Graeculi how to declaim to four walls. Those teachers would hardly have recognized the Pro Rabirio as a product of their precepts. Similarly, Apollodorus came from Pergamum to teach the doctrines of a Lysianic or Attic style. Youths like Calidius, Calvus, and Pollio favored his method. But Apollodorus would have met with little success if so many Romans had not been practical and if the senate, with its traditions of dignity, had not already lost its prestige before the emerging democracy led by Caesar. Apollodorus may have introduced the new style, but had the times not been ripe for him he would not have been heard; moreover, the part of his doctrine that Rome accepted, Rome had possessed already in the 150 speeches of old Cato. It was Caesar’s sword that antiquated senatorial oratory as it antiquated senatorial pretensions to govern Rome. Foreign schoolteachers did not do it. The Greek observer, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, who was an enthusiastic supporter of Atticism in the Augustan day, realized that it was not the Greek schoolteachers but the practical statesmen of Rome who in the last analysis required the new prose to take the form it did. “It is my belief,” he says, “that this great revolution [in stylistic matters] was originated by Rome, the mistress of the world, who compelled entire nations to look to her: Rome, I say, and her nobles, men of high character, excellent administrators, highly cultivated, and of high critical intelligence.” Here we have a keen insight into the fact that a powerful state generates a dominant culture which easily drowns the feeble whispers of the cloistered theorist.
The generation which followed Cicero, represented by Asinius Pollio and Messala, revolted completely against Cicero’s ornate prose and adopted the plain, matter-of-fact speech which was called Atticistic. Again it seems to me not only incorrect but contrary to the penetrating observations of Tacitus[42] to attribute this revolt to the victory of a stylistic theory. Calvus, to be sure, represented the new style in a few speeches as early as 58 B.C. when he was but twenty-four years of age; Calidius began to speak earlier, but whether or not in the new manner is unknown. Brutus, controlled by a temperamental bluntness, supported the same tendency a few years later. But these men would not have been able to undermine the power of Ciceronian style had not events worked in their favor. It was the dominating political influence of Caesar that did the work. The first blow was Caesar’s quiet introduction of stenographers into the senate in 59. By publishing the minutes of the senatorial proceedings he compelled the speakers to consider the outside public, to drop the orotund periods addressed to their colleagues alone, and to confine themselves to pertinent details. Caesar himself had no time to waste on model orations. When opposed by the senate he carried his bills to the assembly to which he put his arguments in plain and pithy sentences. Cicero had scented the meaning of these effects enough to feel the need of stating his doctrine in full in the De Oratore published in 55, and Calvus and Calidius were quietly profiting by the new trend. Presently, in 52, the triumvirs closed the second nursery of ornate prose, by passing a bill which severely limited the time of pleas in court. The purpose was, of course, to expedite the business of the overburdened courts, but the act reveals once more that the new politics were concerned with getting results, not with encouraging a time-consuming oratory. Two years later Caesar crossed the Rubicon, and thereafter, so long as Caesar lived, addresses in the senate all partook of the nature of business-like reports in committees that met before a curt presiding officer; and in the courts, whose judges were now appointed by Caesar, persuasive oratory gave way to a rapid estimation of facts.
Cicero was well aware of all this.[43] During the first few years of Caesar’s dictatorship he complained frequently that there was no longer a place in the state for his gifts, and that his influence had wholly gone. However, hoping for a restoration of senatorial rule, he decided not to yield without some effort. He invited the most promising young politicians of Caesar’s circle to take practical exercises in political oratory with him; in 47 or 46 he wrote a letter of gentle remonstrance to Calvus, the most influential theorist of the “Atticistic school;” and for Brutus, who rejected the means of artistic expression for reasons of taste, he composed (in 46) a full history of Latin oratory in which he tried to show that Caesarian administration threatened to suffocate a great art, that the development of that art during more than a century had demonstrated the correctness of his own doctrine, and that the opposing theorists, men like Calvus and Calidius who had profited from events, could not by their methods create an effective style. Brutus, who of course comprehended the animus of the volume, responded with little enthusiasm and avoided the burden of arguing by asking for a more explicit statement of Cicero’s position. Cicero responded at once with the brilliant brochure called the Orator. But though Cicero sent out many presentation copies the book met with general silence. No one was interested in tropes and prose rhythm at a time when Cato was taking his own life as an offering to the dying Republic. For the next two years the business of state rested on the brief staccato orders of a tyrant. At Caesar’s death the senate came to life again for a brief period and the fourteen Philippics reveal the enduring power of Cicero’s oratory, an art that had been well-nigh silent for ten years. Then Cicero, too, fell by the assassin’s sword.
Presently Augustus established the throne and once more offered freedom of discussion in the senate. But freedom had disappeared. Augustus’ trusted friends reported his views in the senate and before the people in business-like summaries. Cicero’s very name was anathema as that of a rebel to the new régime. Pollio and Messala, who represented the opposition to the unpopular style, who practiced the arts of brevity and directness suited to the needs of the new régime, were accounted the models of Augustan Latin prose. Ciceronian ideals returned in time to the schoolroom but only after the schoolroom had lost touch with politics.