2
the conversation represented in De oratore takes place in September of 91 bce at the villa of Lucius Licinius Crassus in Tusculum. The date is precise: it is during the first week of the Ludi Romani, in other words between September 5 and September 11. That was (although Cicero does not say so) four months before Cicero’s sixteenth birthday on January 3, 90 bce, the earliest point at which he could have received the toga virilis and thus gained full access to the forum.1 The participants in the dialogue were people he knew and from whom he had himself—as he tells us both in the prefaces to De oratore itself and in the Brutus—learned about oratory and public life.
The conversation of De oratore falls into two unequal parts occupying two days of narrative time with slightly different casts of characters.2 The figures present throughout are two pairs of men. Crassus (consul 95, censor 92) and Marcus Antonius (consul 99, censor 97) were distinguished political leaders and, at least in Cicero’s opinion, the two greatest orators of their generation.3 They are joined throughout by their two younger disciples, Gaius Aurelius Cotta and Publius Sulpicius Rufus, at the dramatic date of De oratore both about thirty-three years old;4 it is Cotta from whom Cicero claims to have learned about the conversation. The first day’s conversation (Book 1) also includes the active participation of a much older man, Crassus’ father-in-law Quintus Mucius Scaevola (consul 117, known as Scaevola Augur to distinguish him from his homonymous younger cousin, the jurist Quintus Mucius Scaevola Pontifex, consul 95);5 the book contains a broad discussion of the knowledge and skills necessary for a great orator, with a particular emphasis on the importance of law, Scaevola’s special expertise. At the end of the first day, Scaevola departs for his own villa, and the next morning he is replaced by the half-brothers Quintus Lutatius Catulus and Gaius Iulius Caesar Strabo Vopiscus, who claim to have come because they met Scaevola on the road and heard about this discussion from him. The second day’s conversation (Books 2 and 3) is a far more technical discussion of rhetoric (as Cicero himself says in the letter to Atticus discussing the role of Scaevola), structured in terms of the five officia of the orator standard in rhetorical education in Cicero’s day: inventio (finding arguments), dispositio (arranging them within a speech), elocutio (stylistic elaboration), memoria (memorization), and actio (delivery). Antonius in Book 2 presents his views about inventio (with a long excursus on jokes by Caesar Strabo), dispositio, and memoria, while Crassus in Book 3 discourses on style and delivery.
The occasion for the gathering in Book 1 is explicitly political: Crassus and Antonius and their two younger disciples were meeting to discuss strategy in the political crisis then taking place over the legislation of the tribune Marcus Livius Drusus; when they returned to Rome a few days later, Crassus played a major role in senatorial debate, opposing the consul Philippus and supporting Drusus’ goal of enfranchisement for Rome’s Italian allies.6 The conversation reported in De oratore took place after the political discussion was over: it purports to represent the leisured conversation of cultivated Roman nobles in their retreat at Tusculum. Politics, however, is never far away: the central role of the orator in public life and political debate as well as in the courts is a recurrent theme of the discussion. Many of the examples of oratory, both good and bad, are taken from important cases, some of them political in nature, and it is no accident that the first Roman orators named in an exemplum are the Gracchi (1.38), who were, according to Scaevola, far greater orators but far more harmful statesmen than their father. The orator, in Cicero, is not simply a courtroom tactician, but a public figure with influence and responsibilities.
But who are these characters, and why did Cicero select them? As far as the two central figures are concerned, Antonius and Crassus were both great orators—although not a word of Antonius’ speeches survives, and not very many of Crassus’.7 Even before De oratore, Cicero referred to them together as exemplars of outstanding oratory and indeed morality. Thus, in the Verrines, Cicero asks how Verres’ advocate Hortensius can defend someone with no virtues at all: Crassus and Antonius were lucky enough always to have clients who had at least some redeeming qualities that they could offer in defense, while Verres has none whatsoever.8
The participants in the dialogue also bring particular kinds of expertise into this gathering: Catulus, who was about a decade older than Crassus, was known for the elegance of his oratory, but he was also very learned and an occasional poet: we have two epigrams by him adapted from the Greek. His maternal half-brother Caesar Strabo, who was about ten years younger than Crassus and only slightly older than Sulpicius and Cotta, was known as a wit—and was also a tragic poet.9 The two brothers are thus men of education and culture, and they are specifically known for their familiarity with Greek literature; and the role of Greek culture in Rome is, as will be seen below, central to the dialogue. Scaevola Augur is present in two capacities, as a legal expert and as the oldest participant, Crassus’ father-in-law. Taken with the two younger disciples (Cotta of Antonius, Sulpicius of Crassus), the assemblage in Book 1 represents the transmission of knowledge and experience from one generation to the next;10 that of Books 2 and 3 perhaps places greater emphasis on Roman cultural values and their relationship to Greece. The whole scene, of course, is significant: Roman senators talking about rhetoric and philosophy at a villa in Tusculum during the brief otium of the Ludi Romani. The contrast between the occasional and limited leisure of a Roman senator and the permanent otium of Greek professors is pointed, and the scene itself exhibits what turns out to be one of the major concerns of the dialogue as a whole: the extent to which Greek learning has a place in Roman public life and in Roman minds.
The way Cicero sets the stage for De oratore, moreover, extends the transmission of knowledge outward, to encompass the act of memory that allows Cicero to report it. Any expository work is supposed to transmit knowledge from author to reader, but De oratore enlarges that fundamental didactic relationship to include not only the three generations represented in the dialogue but the transmission of knowledge of the conversation from Cotta to Cicero himself; and that transmission is itself reinforced because Cicero uses his own memory of these men to supplement and extend Cotta’s account.11 De oratore is unique among Cicero’s dialogues in the multiple channels of transmission Cicero constructs: Cotta may, in the dialogue’s fiction of verisimilitude, be Cicero’s source for what was said, but Cicero himself contributes his own memories of the characters and their actions.
Cicero’s voice in the prefaces to the three books plays a crucial role in shaping our perceptions of the dialogue. In Book 1, after explaining the occasion for writing and offering his readers a praise of and protreptic to oratory, he introduces the scene and the speakers. In Book 2, Cicero discusses at some length the veracity of his own portrait of Crassus and Antonius, claiming (and thus inevitably making the reader doubt) that they were as familiar with Greek culture (philosophy and rhetorical theory in particular) as he has presented them. In Book 3, finally, he looks ahead to the experiences of his speakers after the dramatic date of the dialogue, beginning with a detailed and emotional account of Crassus’ return to Rome, his last impassioned speech in the senate against the consul Philippus, his sudden collapse in the senate, and his death a few days later. With the single exception of Cotta, who was merely exiled for some years, the other five participants died, all but Scaevola violently, not long after the dramatic date of the dialogue in the vicious brutality of the first Roman civil war. Cicero, in the prefaces to both Book 2 and Book 3, emphasizes his first-hand memories, both of conversations with Antonius and Crassus in their lifetimes and of having gone into the Curia after Crassus’ death to see the spot where he had last spoken.12
The urbane conversation of De oratore in September of 91 bce occupies a fleeting instant, the last otium before the world of Cicero’s youth came to a sudden and violent end. It was, both in fact and in Cicero’s construction, a moment of tragic significance. The political circumstance which led to the gathering of senators in De oratore was the legislative program put forward by the tribune Livius Drusus in 91. His goal was to reinforce the power of the senate relative to the equites; his legislative package consisted of several elements including a judiciary law, a colonial and agrarian law for the distribution of land, and, in the event most important, a law extending Roman citizenship to the Italians.13 But by late summer, support had waned, and the crucial citizenship law was never passed; in the weeks after the dramatic date of the dialogue, Drusus was assassinated, the laws he had already passed were annulled, and Rome’s Italian allies revolted. Cicero’s account of the setting of De oratore reveals obliquely that, at the time of the Ludi Romani (the dramatic date of the dialogue), the consul Philippus was gaining ground in his opposition to Drusus;14 the meeting at Tusculum is imagined to be a strategy session among Drusus’ supporters. In the event, Crassus returned to Rome a few days later to oppose Philippus. His final speech and collapse in the senate are the moment when (at least from Cicero’s point of view) the troubles began: the Social War; the Mithradatic War leading to conflict between Sulla and Marius; Sulla’s first march on Rome, the persecution of Marians, and (after Sulla’s departure) Marius’ revenge; Sulla’s second march on Rome and the proscriptions, leading on to the political upheavals that, again from Cicero’s point of view, were still affecting both Roman public affairs and his own life.
That Cicero intended to make a direct connection between the events of 91 and the circumstances in which he wrote De oratore is clear from the preface to Book 1, which serves to introduce both the topic of the dialogue and its dramatic setting. Cicero begins by expressing his regret that it is no longer possible, as it was in earlier times, to imagine a safe and honorable retirement from public life, and he describes in vivid language the frustration of his expectations (1.2):15
The spot that seemed as if it would be most full of quiet and calm was where the greatest heaps of troubles and the most violent storms arose.
He continues with similarly metaphorical language to explain the circumstances in which his own political career had been conducted (1.3):
When I was quite young I encountered the upheaval of the old way of life (perturbationem disciplinae veteris); in my consulate I entered the heart of a critical contest involving everything; and since my consulate I have spent every moment opposing those floods which I had beaten back from our common destruction but which then flowed back onto me.
Despite the abstract language, the underlying historical narrative is not hard to discern:16 the perturbatio is the time of troubles that began with the tribunate of Livius Drusus. In this very abbreviated account, moreover, the sequence of events (and in fact a chain of causation) leads directly from that moment to the conspiracy of Catiline, while Cicero’s treatment of the conspirators leads directly to his exile and other troubles, including the political circumstances that led him to write De oratore itself. The imprecision of this account is consistent with its location: it is at the very beginning of De oratore, part of the first paragraph, and at this point Cicero has not yet mentioned the subject of the book, far less the events of 91 or the dramatic setting of the dialogue. Its meaning, and the specific events to which it refers, become clear only in retrospect, as one reads not only the preface to Book 1 but the set of prefaces to all three books.
De oratore is addressed to Cicero’s brother Quintus; the opening dedication demonstrates just how closely Cicero meant the dramatic and the real contexts of his book to reflect one another (1.1):
Cogitanti mihi saepenumero et memoriavetera repetenti perbeati fuisse, Quinte frater,illi videri solent qui in optima re publica, cum et honoribus et rerum gestarum gloria florerent, eum vitae cursum tenere potuerunt, ut vel in negotio sine periculo vel in otio cum dignitate esse possent.
I frequently think about old times and go back over them in my memory, and as I do so, Quintus, those people seem to me highly blessed who, living in a commonwealth in its best condition, while they flourished, holding offices and gaining glory through their deeds, were able to hold to a course of life such that they could either take part in public life without danger or live in retirement with honor.
This elaborate sentence describes the ideal conditions for public life in Rome: optima res publica—stable, ordered, and conservative—with the opportunity both for a successful public career and for respectable leisure and retirement, otium cum dignitate.17 At the same time that he describes an ideal world, however, Cicero structures the sentence in such a way as to show both that this state of affairs lies in the past and that the only way to experience it is as an act of creative memory: the men of the past are blessed, perbeati, but Cicero stresses, by placing it at the very beginning, the act of thought and recollection necessary to restore them to life (cogitanti . . . et memoria vetera repetenti).
Memory is central to De oratore, particularly in Cicero’s prefaces, just as it is a necessary element of oratory itself: it is what relates the time of writing to the dramatic date of the dialogue, in the same way that it allows an orator to bring his case before the judges.18 In the middle of describing Quintus’ request and his own promise to write something to replace De inventione, Cicero includes a sentence that not only looks back to the first sentence (quoted above), but also forward to the dialogue itself (1.4):
Ac mihirepetenda est veteris cuiusdam memoriae non sane satis explicata recordatio, sed ut arbitror apta ad id quod requiris ut cognoscas quae viri omnium eloquentissimi clarissimique senserint de omni ratione dicendi.
I must go back to the recollection of an old memory, one that has not yet been adequately opened up, but is, as I believe, suitable for your request, that you learn what the most eloquent and illustrious men of all thought about the entire discipline of speech.
The idea of going back to the past, resurrecting an old memory, is the same as in the opening sentence, but Cicero has narrowed his memory of the fortunate men of the past to focus specifically on men of eloquence. That these eloquent men are exceptional is clear also from the beginning of the next section of the introduction, in which Cicero explores the fact that true eloquence is much rarer than excellence in the other artes (1.6):
Ac mihi quidem saepenumero in summos homines ac summis ingeniis praeditos intuenti quaerendum esse visum est quid esset cur plures in omnibus artibus quam in dicendo admirabiles extitissent.
I frequently look back to great men endowed with great intellect, and I think it is necessary to ask why there have been more admirable figures in all the arts than in speaking.
That these generalized men of eloquence are in fact the speakers of the dialogue itself becomes clear when Cicero introduces its setting (1.23):
. . . repetamque non ab incunabulis nostrae veteris puerilisque doctrinae quendam ordinem praeceptorum, sed ea quae quondam accepi in nostrorum hominum eloquentissimorum et omni dignitate principum disputatione esse versata.
I will go back not to some set of instructions taken from the cradle of our old and childish instruction, but to what I once heard was discussed in a conversation of our most eloquent men, the first citizens in every kind of eminence.
And within a few lines he introduces Crassus, Antonius, and their friends.
The references to the past, then, gradually narrow their focus to the scene of the dialogue itself: from the broad illi of the opening sentence to viri . . . eloquentissimi to the particular group whom he introduces in 1.23–24. These passages are linked not only by their substance—the idea of looking back to great men in happier times—but by Cicero’s language. The repetition of repetere, which occurs only four more times in De oratore, of memoria, and even of saepenumero, which occurs in De oratore only at 1.1 and 1.6, ties these passages together; they are also connected through the repeated use of the dative present participle in its reciprocal use, paired with videre. This idiom, linking the mental activity of the agent (cogitanti . . . et . . . repetenti, intuenti) to the object of thought (“as I looked . . . they seemed”) is rare and seems to have been fostered, and perhaps invented, by Cicero.19 A similar effect, using the dative participle this time with the noun recordatio rather than a verb, appears in the opening sentence of Book 3, where Cicero is about to tell the grim tale of Crassus’ last speech and death (3.1):
Instituentimihi, Quinte frater, eum sermonem referre et mandare huic tertio libro, quem post Antoni disceptationem Crassus habuisset, acerba sane recordatioveterem animi curam molestiamque renovavit.
As I began, Quintus, to report and place in this third book the talk given by Crassus after Antonius’ speech, a truly bitter memory renewed the old worry and disturbance of my mind.
And after describing Crassus’ end, Cicero goes on to describe him as beatus (3.9) for not having had to witness the fates of his interlocutors.
The use of beatus to describe the life of someone who met a timely end is apposite; Cicero uses it again in describing the life and death of Hortensius at the beginning of the Brutus (4). But while beatus is very common in Cicero’s later philosophical writings (particularly De finibus and the Tusculan Disputations) as a standard epithet for a philosophically good life, it is not so frequent in De oratore; it is used in only two other passages, both jokingly, of lawyers at 2.145 and of Epicureans at 3.64. At 3.9, given the other links among the prefaces, it seems to be a deliberate echo of perbeati at the beginning of Book 1, but there the blessedness attributed to the men of old at the outset was the ability to live an honorable and decent public life and to retire with respect, while in the obituary for Crassus—who is one of the men about whom he generalized in the preface to Book 1—it is his good fortune in dying when he did. A blessed life may precede a blessed death and (as here) a timely death may make a life seem in retrospect to have been blessed, but those are not the same thing at all.
The good old days of the preface to Book 1 may have existed, but in Cicero’s prefaces it becomes clear that if so, they came to an end during the dialogue itself. The death of Crassus is the death of the world Cicero so admired, and the conversation of De oratore is the last gasp, almost literally, of the ideal Roman republic. Following Plato’s description of the death of Socrates in the Phaedo, Cicero describes Crassus’ last speech in the senate as his swan song (3.5). De oratore, like its companion De re publica, is set at a moment just before the protagonist’s death; and in these two dialogues at least it is not hard to see that setting not only as Phaedo-like in implying the inspired truth of the protagonist’s words but as marking the end of an era.
What Cicero says about the setting and about the death of Crassus can be taken as a sober judgment about Rome’s recent history and Cicero’s own life; it is also reasonable to see it as a wishful vision of an ideal past. The two are not incompatible. Cicero himself, through what he says and through the verbal links that he creates among the prefaces, draws the reader’s attention to the complexity (or ambiguity) of his vision of the past and makes it very clear that the past as recollected and described inevitably implicates the viewer in what is viewed. The broad perspective of the first sentence, a general makarismos of a better time and a better society, gives way to Cicero’s description of his own life, a life that did not live up to this recollection of the past. His reference to the lack of otium that his circumstances have caused leads to a promise to Quintus that he will spend whatever otium he does have on writing: “as much leisure as the hostility of my enemies or the interests of my friends or the republic allows me, I will spend above all on writing” (1.3), and that, in turn, leads to his desire to fulfill a request from Quintus.20
Only at this point does the topic of De oratore begin to come into focus: we turn from nostalgia for the past to a rumination on how different Cicero’s own career has been from what he had expected. Although he once thought that he would be able to devote an honorable retirement after a successful career (decursu honorum) to the love of letters shared by himself and Quintus, the disasters of recent years have afforded him only trouble and no rest: no matter how much he and Quintus may desire it, the need for public engagement and struggle against the storms of politics overwhelms the possibility of true otium (1.3, quoted above). Even so, Cicero will respond to Quintus’ desire that he devote whatever otium he may have to writing, and he will do so by reporting the views of the most eloquent and famous men de omni ratione dicendi, a memory that he says is apta ad id quod requiris (1.4). Only then does Cicero reveal what Quintus has asked for: Cicero should supplement or replace his juvenile writings on rhetoric (De inventione, not named) which are now unworthy (in Quintus’ opinion) of Cicero’s vast experience and skill, with “something more polished and finished on the same subject” (1.5). The dialogue that follows is, like the act of creative memory exemplified in the opening sentence of the preface, two things at once: it provides Cicero’s own mature replacement for the crude rhetorical writings of his youth, but it is also a record of the ideas of the great statesmen of the past. And not only of their ideas: these are just the same men whose dignified otium, praised in the opening sentence of the preface, is now so much less available to Cicero himself. It is a world that exists no longer, one in which Roman statesmen and orators could employ their leisure in discussing eloquence itself.
At the very end of this prologue, before launching into an extended praise of eloquence (1.6–23), Cicero identifies a fundamental difference of opinion between his own view of eloquence and that of his brother: is it an ars, a matter of study and learning, or is it, as Quintus sees it, a matter of ingenium and exercitatio (1.5)? The divergence between Cicero and his brother anticipates—or, in the chronology created by the dialogue, repeats—the similar divergence between Crassus and Antonius: while none of them has much respect for the formal ars rhetorica except as elementary instruction, Crassus, like Cicero, firmly believes in the necessity of learning (philosophical, legal, historical) as a prerequisite for good oratory, while Antonius, like Quintus, holds that training, exercitatio, is much more important than doctrina. And (reversing the roles) just as Cicero had written a juvenile tract on rhetoric that he is now attempting to replace, Antonius had also written a short work in which he discussed the nature of eloquence.21 Quintus, and presumably others, would also recognize one more detail: the juvenile De inventione was written at about the same time as the fictional conversation of De oratore.22 De oratore is thus a later replacement by Cicero for De inventione, and the dramatic date of the conversation it contains is more or less contemporary with De inventione: a genuine discussion of eloquence rather than an elementary textbook of rhetoric. At the same time, as will be seen below, there are some close links between De inventione and the starting point of the discussion in De oratore: the dialogue is a demonstration of how the Hermagorean theory of De inventione and earlier Greek rhetorical writings can be made more complex and more Roman.23
Cicero’s choice of Antonius and Crassus and of the Ludi Romani of September 91 as the framework for his discussion of oratory is not simply for the sake of vividness and the benefits that dialogue as such can provide; it is part of his subject. When he describes his knowledge of the oratorical style and intellectual equipment of Antonius and Crassus in the beginning of Book 2, Cicero makes explicit that his goal is to make them come alive again, not to be forgotten: “in order to liberate to the extent that I can their glory, which has now grown almost old, from men’s forgetfulness and from silence” (2.7). In other words, Cicero intends not only to give a general account of what oratory and rhetoric are, but to construct a very particular account of Roman oratory, both in its function within Cicero’s world and in its history: Crassus and Antonius are part of the story as well as its narrators. But that complex construction itself raises questions about what Cicero is doing: is the revived Crassus a faithful representation of the genuine article? Is a laudatio (as Cicero seems to call it in the preface to Book 2) bound to the truth?
In certain respects, the veracity of Cicero’s portrayal of his characters—even of their oratorical training and ability—is not a crucial issue:24 the validity of the ideas expressed is independent of the historicity of the characters who express them. At the same time, however, as we are reminded more than once by both Cicero and his characters, this dialogue is more than a textbook of rhetoric: it also incorporates a history of oratory and rhetoric that stretches back as far as Plato and of which Crassus and Antonius are themselves a significant part. De oratore is an artful book about the arts of speech, and the setting is an essential element of that art. Cicero in the prefaces emphasizes the importance of memory, but he also makes us aware that remembering is a creative process, not a documentary record. The setting of De oratore, of any dialogue, is historical fiction: as Cicero himself wrote to Varro in dedicating the second version of the Academica to him, he should not be surprised to find himself saying things in the dialogue that he never in fact said.25 That is, he says, the mos dialogorum. And yet Cicero takes great pains in the prefaces to De oratore to demonstrate at one and the same time not only the accuracy of his account but also how idealized and indeed anachronistic it is. He gives detailed evidence about his sources; he also draws attention to the fact that one might well not believe him.26 Cicero shows the reader how much he admired and learned from Crassus and Antonius; but it is not hard to see that Cicero’s characters Crassus and Antonius have acquired as much learning from the words of the fifty-year-old author as the real Crassus and Antonius ever imparted to their fifteen-year-old pupil.
At the outset of the dialogue, Cicero claims to have an authentic source for his knowledge of what was said. After introducing the setting and the characters (1.24–25), he reports that on their first day at Crassus’ villa in Tusculum the five men conversed until late at night de temporibus deque universa re publica. Cicero then tells us how he knows about this gathering: he was told by Cotta, one of the younger participants in the conversation. Cotta, indeed, is the only person who could possibly have told Cicero about it; as we learn in the preface to Book 3, he is the only one who survived the events of September 91 long enough to report it to Cicero as an adult. Cicero cites Cotta’s description of that initial political discussion (26):27
Cotta used to report that in that conversation a great many things were bewailed and described by those three god-like consulars [Crassus, Antonius, Scaevola] in such a fashion that nothing evil happened to the state later that they had not foreseen so long before.
The events that the consulars predicted in 91 must be the same events described by Cicero at the outset of De oratore as having disrupted his own plan of life—and the same events that Cicero describes in the preface to Book 3.28 Here Cicero claims to follow Cotta’s report very closely: the evening that follows the political conversation and the meeting of the group the next morning are described in indirect discourse, and Cicero reminds us of that by having the indicative verb dicebat introduce (28) as a verbatim quotation Scaevola’s invocation of the Platonic plane tree as an inspiration for the conversation that is to ensue.29 Crassus’ response (29) is introduced by another dicebat, in turn followed by the beginning of the discussion proper: ibi . . . solebat Cotta narrare, Crassum sermonem quendam de studio dicendi intulisse. Only after one more sentence of indirect discourse does Cicero take over with the narrator’s inquit and direct quotation of the conversation.
The implication of this passage, with its emphasis on Cotta’s repeated reports of the conversation at Tusculum (imperfect verbs, solebat . . . narrare) and apparent verbatim quotation of Scaevola’s first speech, is that De oratore is in fact an accurate report of a real conversation.30 On the other hand, in the only other passage where Cotta is mentioned as Cicero’s source, in the preface to Book 3 (3.16) when Cicero rebuts possible suspicions that Cicero’s Crassus is a greater orator than the genuine Crassus, he offers as an explanation that while Cotta had only given him an outline of the conversation, tantummodo locos ac sententias huius disputationis tradidisset, Cicero himself had tried to represent accurately what he knew of Crassus’ and Antonius’ styles. In other words, while in Book 1 Cotta is said to have given a complete report of the conversation, in Book 3 he has merely given a summary, and the bare tradidisset suggests not repeated descriptions of the scene but a simple narrative.
The complex role that Cicero assigns to Cotta in the transmission of the (fictional) conversation portrayed in De oratore goes beyond what one might expect. A few years later, in De amicitia, Cicero actually seems to mock the fiction of transmission by first giving a precise account of how he knew about the conversation between Laelius and his sons-in-law (Am. 2–3) and then making it perfectly clear in the next paragraph (4–5) that the whole scene is entirely his own invention.31 In De re publica, written immediately after De oratore, Cicero is careful to provide an explanation of how he knows about a conversation that took place twenty-three years before he was born—his meeting with the exiled Rutilius Rufus in Asia in 79 bce—but he does not emphasize the accuracy of Rutilius’ report as he does with Cotta, nor does he, as in De oratore, present the setting of the dialogue as somehow central to his own intellectual formation. In De oratore, on the other hand, the two modes of constructing the past exist in almost constant tension with one another.
Cotta’s role as reporter of De oratore becomes attenuated as the work progresses, but Cicero’s own role as memorialist becomes stronger. At the outset, consistent with the emphasis on the completeness of Cotta’s account, Cicero presents his narrative as a true account: he is reporting to Quintus not his own views but the views about eloquence of the greatest orators of the previous generation. The deeply emotional preface to Book 3, however, tells another story. Cicero does not conceal his point of view: this is acerba sane recordatio (3.1). His account of Crassus’ return to Rome, the meeting of the senate on September 13, Crassus’ last speech, and his death on September 19 is remarkable for its precision and detail, and Cicero is very careful to account for his knowledge of events which he—not yet sixteen—could not witness in person although he was apparently in Rome at the time.32 The narrative leading up to the meeting of the senate occupies one complex sentence (3.2):
When he came back to Rome on the last day of the dramatic performances [Sept. 12], seriously disturbed by the speech that Philippus was said (ferebatur) to have given in a contio, in which it was generally agreed (constabat) that he had said that he needed to find some other counsel because he could not conduct public business with the senate he had, on the morning of the Ides of September [Sept. 13], along with a great many other senators, at the summons of Drusus, Crassus entered the Curia.
The main clause is a precise factual statement in the indicative: the dates of Crassus’ return to Rome and of the senate meeting on the Ides, followed by in curiam venit at the very end of the sentence. But the circumstances leading up to Crassus’ entry into the senate and the reasons for his emotional state are said to be based on the reports of others (ferebatur and constabat), and the report of Philippus’ earlier speech is given in indirect discourse. So too the first part of the narrative of the senate meeting itself: Drusus’ speech and motion censuring Philippus are reported as fact (rettulit), briefly, and the description of Crassus’ speech, though containing an evaluation of its greatness, is carefully based on the opinions of others, ut saepe inter homines sapientissimos constare vidi (“as I saw was often agreed on by men of great wisdom”), followed shortly by omnium consensu sic esse tum iudicatum (“by the agreement of everyone it was so judged”). The summary of the speech itself and Philippus’ reply are told in the indicative, clearly to be understood as a factual narrative based on the evidence supplied by eyewitnesses.
When Cicero reports Crassus’ reply to Philippus, however, Crassus’ last speech, the manner changes: although it begins as a report (multa a Crasso divinitus dicta esse ferebantur, 3.4), it rapidly turns into direct quotation of a highly emotional passage; after that (5) it subsides again into historical report: constabat, followed by Cicero’s reference to the written document of the auctoritas with Crassus’ name on it. And again, after the dry reference to documentary evidence, the emotional tone returns, and brings Cicero himself into the scene:
That speech was the swan song of a god-like man, and after his death we used to come into the Curia almost as if expecting it, so that we might gaze on that very spot on which he had stood for the last time.
Cicero’s presentation is artful and very deliberate. The highly wrought selection from Crassus’ speech is the only verbatim quotation of Crassus that Cicero gives in his own voice; the other quotations in De oratore are introduced by speakers in the dialogue. And yet Cicero, through his careful source-references in the narrative, makes it absolutely clear that he did not himself hear Crassus’ speech. We are left with the same possibilities of truth and fiction that pervade the setting of De oratore: either Crassus’ words were reported to Cicero verbatim, and he turns to direct quotation because they are so vivid, or Cicero has imagined Crassus’ last speech himself, carried away by remembered emotion.33
The move from narrative report to an outburst of direct speech under the spell of the moment is a powerful rhetorical technique, and one that Cicero used to good effect in his own speeches. Here, he does it once more in the final stage of this narrative: the precise account of Crassus’ sudden illness, collapse, and death a few days later is told at second-hand with reference to Cicero’s sources (consecutum esse audiebamus), but that is followed by Cicero’s own deeply emotional exclamation of despair at the frustration of Crassus’ life and hopes (7):
Men’s hopes are treacherous, their fortunes fragile, and all our struggles are in vain! They are often broken and crash in the middle of the course or are overwhelmed along the way before they could see the harbor. For as long as Crassus’ life was constrained by the labor of a political career he flourished more through private obligations and praise of his talent than through the rewards that come from greatness or the honor that comes from public service. The very first year after the completion of his career in office was giving him, by universal accord, access to the greatest auctoritas—but it overturned all his hopes and all his plans for life.
This should sound familiar: it is very much like Cicero’s expression of his own regrets about the frustrations of his career at the beginning of the preface to Book 1 (1.1–2):
There was a time when I too thought that the beginnings of retirement and of bringing my mind back to our wonderful studies would be right and granted by almost everyone, if the unending toil of the courts and the pressures of a political career came to a halt with the end of my cursus honorum and my turn to old age. But that hope of my thoughts and plans was frustrated, both by the serious disasters of shared crises and by my various private misfortunes.
There are many links between the prefaces to Books 1 and 3: the repeated grammatical construction of the first sentences, the emphasis on memory, the echo from perbeati (1.1) to beatam (3.9) have all been noted above. This echo, however, does something more, in linking Crassus’ death to Cicero’s own misfortunes. And to make the connection clearer, he does it once more: after listing the violent deaths of four of the participants in the conversation, he returns to Crassus’ good fortune in dying when he did, again using direct speech in an apostrophe (3.12), then addressing Quintus, praising his opinion that, given all the disasters that attend public service, Cicero himself should have stayed out of it. Again the language echoes the first preface (13):
As I think over (mihi . . . cogitanti) these men’s misfortunes about which I have already spoken and what I have myself endured and experienced because of my incredible, unique love of my country, it seems to me (videri solet) that your opinion is both true and wise: because of so many, so great, and such sudden misfortunes of the most famous and best men you have always summoned me back from all struggle and futile strife.
Cicero’s sense of his own worth comes through very clearly in this passage, as does his repeated emphasis on the ingratitude of fate or of the res publica. But above all, we cannot escape recognizing how deliberately Cicero is modeling Crassus on himself—while at the same time claiming that his portrait is true and accurate, and perhaps implying that he had modeled himself on Crassus. In any case, Cicero repeatedly and emphatically ties the scene of De oratore to his own memory, his own experience, and his own disappointment. It is an emotional recreation, or invention, of his own lost past and future.
1. On the prohibition on participation in public life before the age of sixteen, see below, n. 32.
2. On the setting and characters, see Becker 1938: 12–30. The fullest treatment of the historicity of De oratore is Meyer 1970.
3. For an account of their careers, see Fantham 2004: 26–48.
4. On their dates, see Sumner 1973: 109–10.
5. The two Scaevolas are not always easy to distinguish in our sources, and Cicero learned from both of them. Q. Mucius Q.f. Scaevola Augur was the son-in-law of Scipio Aemilianus’ great friend C. Laelius (more on them below, Chapter 8); he died, apparently of natural causes, in 88 or 87.
6. On Livius Drusus’ legislative program, see further below. A great deal has been written about the political situation in 91, without any very clear results; LPW 1: 84–86 wisely decline to offer a solution but give some bibliography, and their introduction to the characters and their historicity (1: 86–96) is valuable. Like them, I am less interested in what happened than in Cicero’s presentation of it; my understanding of the characters differs somewhat from theirs.
7. Although there is no reason for excessive skepticism, it is worth bearing in mind that Cicero himself (in De oratore and Brutus in particular) is the source for almost everything we know about Antonius and Crassus. Ten speeches of the former are known, of which eight are attested exclusively in Cicero and sources clearly derived from him; we know of sixteen speeches of Crassus, of which twelve are attested only in Cicero. Only one of the surviving verbatim quotations of Crassus does not come from De oratore. For the sources, see ORF nos. 65 and 66. The skepticism rightly expressed by Görler 1988: 232–33 about the accuracy of Cicero’s report of Crassus’ last speech is applicable to every speech known only from Cicero.
8. Verr. 2.2.191–92 (cf. Meyer 1970: 91); see also Quinct. 80, Div. in Caec. 25. It may be no more than coincidence that in the Verrines they are compared to Hortensius, who is mentioned in the last paragraph of De oratore, and in Pro Quinctio they are named together with Philippus, Crassus’ opponent in the senate debate leading to Crassus’ death. LPW 1: 91 rightly note that the cast of characters in De oratore includes every great orator of the day except for Philippus, who, as Crassus’ enemy and opponent, obviously could not be included, although several of his speeches are mentioned.
9. On Catulus and Caesar Strabo, see Meyer 1970: 149–77, LPW 2: 206; on their chronology, see also Sumner 1973: 77–78, 105–6. On Caesar Strabo, see also Dugan 2005: 104–37.
10. See Zoll 1962: 126–27.
11. On the interplay between fiction and history in the setting of the dialogues and the accounts of their transmission, see Gildenhard 2013b: 253–56.
12. The detail of Cicero’s visit to the Curia is compelling rather than accurate: he could not have entered the Curia until he received the toga uirilis, several months after Crassus’ death. See below, n. 32.
13. Much of the detail of this period is uncertain and disputed, and the sources are poor; for a useful summary of the sources for Livius Drusus and his laws, see MRR 2: 21–22.
14. Furthermore, it is clear that Crassus was not successful in his last senate meeting: Cicero’s description of the senate’s resolution against Philippus at De or. 3.5 as auctoritas rather than senatus consultum shows that it must have been vetoed (see LPW ad loc.). Cotta’s failure to be elected tribune later in 91 is also an indication of the waning power of Drusus’ supporters.
15. On Cicero’s use of the language of storm and calm, see Görler 1990: 62–64. I have not attempted to reproduce in my translation the alliterative language employed here.
16. One of the greatest difficulties in discussing (or translating) De oratore is that Cicero avoids precise and above all technical terminology. Thus here disciplina refers broadly to a whole set of social and educational practices (translated “order” by May and Wisse 2001), while elsewhere (e.g., 1.75, 1.180) it is used of a discipline in the modern academic sense, i.e., a defined field of knowledge, and in yet other passages (e.g., 3.74, 3.141) it applies to education in general. The problems of terminology will be discussed below in connection with both oratory and rhetoric. Disciplina also plays a key role in De re publica: see below, Chapter 12.
17. On otium cum dignitate, see also above, Introduction.
18. On the importance of memory in De oratore, see also Zoll 1962: 75–82 and LPW 2: 186.
19. See Laughton 1964: 37–38, who cites the same construction from the first sentence of De divinatione Book 2 (Quaerenti mihi multumque et diu cogitanti . . . occurrebat), also addressed to Quintus. LPW on 1.1 point out the variation on the opening words of De inventione, Saepe et multum hoc mecum cogitavi: there cogito is a finite verb and saepe is used rather than saepenumero. See also their note on 1.6.
20. The hyperbaton of quantum . . . otii in this sentence (see LPW ad loc.) emphasizes the importance of otium here: the contrast between the earlier (imagined?) otium cum dignitate and Cicero’s own condition is an essential element in Cicero’s train of thought.
21. Cicero uses similar language to draw the two works together. Cicero (1.5): quae pueris aut adulescentulis nobis ex commentariolis nostris incohata ac rudia exciderunt; Antonius (1.94): in libello, qui me imprudente et invito excidit et pervenit in manus hominum. Antonius’ work was written at a more advanced age, after his visit to Athens (on which see below, Chapter 5), and thus no more than ten years before the dramatic date of the dialogue.
22. Cf. Dugan 2005: 81–83.The precise date of De inventione is uncertain. It refers to a trial (the causa Curiana) that took place in 93, and it mentions no event after that. Cicero was precocious, but perhaps did not write such a careful study of rhetoric at the age of fourteen; I suspect that he wrote it sometime in the mid-80s. The reason for taking the terminus post quem of the causa Curiana seriously is that there are so few references in De inventione to historical events, much less to recent ones; that suggests that the trial was not long in the past. In any case, the writing of De inventione cannot be very long after the dramatic date of De oratore.
23. On Hermagorean rhetoric, see below, Chapter 4.
24. Dyck 1998 comes to the unsurprising conclusion that Cicero at times constructed his characters in line with his own oratorical approach or philosophical beliefs. Fox 2007: 122–34 has a valuable discussion of the importance (and semi-unreality) of the characters and setting as central to the argument of the dialogue.
25. Fam. 9.8.1.
26. Dugan 2005: 90–104 offers a different and more psychological approach to what he rightly calls (90) Cicero’s “complex game of hide-and-seek.”
27. I have translated divinitus as “god-like” (“inspired” in May and Wisse 2001) so as not to diminish the power of the word (see Cole 2013), which plays an important role in De oratore (see Stull 2011).
28. See also LPW 4: 103. Obviously, they did not predict their own deaths, merely the upheavals of which their deaths were a part and (so LPW) the chain of events extending to the time of writing.
29. One humanist corrector omits dicebat in 1.28, and Lambinus and some later editors have deleted it. That is unnecessary, and in any case the infinitive dixisse in the next line requires that this section still be seen as a report of Cotta’s words; whether it is explicit or implied indirect discourse makes no difference.
30. The use of solebat seems to suggest repetition, but should be treated with a degree of caution (even in the case of a fictional repetition): Cicero uses soleo to indicate a characteristic utterance as well as one that is literally repeated. Thus at De or. 2.25 he says that Lucilius used to say (dicere solebat) that he wanted to be read neither by the most learned nor by the completely ignorant—but that is in fact a paraphrase of a statement in Lucilius’ Satires and may not have been spoken at all, and was in any case presumably written only once.
31. On the double explanation in De amicitia and its implications for the historical veracity of the so-called Scipionic Circle, see Garbarino 1973: 19–20 with reference to earlier literature.
32. On Cicero’s narrative technique in this passage, see Rawson 1972: 43–44 = Rawson 1991: 77–78; also LPW 4: 103–7. It is again worth emphasizing that until Cicero received the toga virilis (no earlier than January of 90), he could not witness a senatorial debate in the Curia in person (cf. the story of Praetextatus in Gellius, NA 1.23). Hence the dramatic date of September 91 is not only the end of Crassus’ life and the beginning of the Social War, but the last moment when Cicero could, with historical verisimilitude, rely on a reported narrative of events in which he was not yet eligible to participate.
33. It is very doubtful that any accurate text of Crassus’ last, impromptu speech was ever published, as he died within a few days and war broke out within a few weeks.