5
we know nothing about what the real Crassus and Antonius thought about the major issues of De oratore; indeed, Cicero, in his own voice in the preface to Book 2 and through the characters themselves elsewhere, draws attention both to the doubtful veracity of his own portrait of them and to the disingenuousness that he has built into the self-portraits of Crassus and Antonius themselves.1 In the middle of his learned account of Greek historiography (2.55), Antonius claims not to know much about Greek literature; when challenged by Catulus, he reluctantly admits that he views such books as holiday reading only, and while he can understand Greek historiography, he can’t make any sense of Greek philosophical writing (2.60–61). Later on, Antonius describes his knowledge of what Greek philosophers say as a kind of eavesdropping, subauscultando . . . excipere voces eorum (2.153)—and yet a few minutes after that he reports having read Aristotle’s collection of rhetorical tekhnai (2.160). Crassus, who is supposed to be more learned, does this sort of thing less frequently, but in his account of philosophical elocutio (3.74) he talks about his lack of formal study after childhood and again, in discussion with Catulus, describes his learning as modest and accomplished only in passing (3.82–86). Both orators, in short, demonstrate beyond any doubt their familiarity with philosophy and rhetoric while regularly disclaiming knowledge of both subjects.
The disingenuous dissimulation of Crassus and Antonius serves more than one purpose. It is part of the polite self-disparagement that well-bred Roman aristocrats were supposed to display and thus serves to characterize both the society and the individuals; it goes along with Crassus’ repeated refusal to be ineptus and lecture like a Greek.2 This display of (false) modesty also helps make De oratore sound considerably less didactic, or at least only reluctantly didactic. At the same time, however, Cicero quite deliberately offers a double perspective on the sources of outstanding oratory: the need for extensive study of Greek philosophy and rhetorical theory is simultaneously asserted and denied.
The two perspectives are not limited to the portrayal of Crassus and Antonius, nor do they simply concern the nature of rhetorical training. There are two fundamentally different ways to talk about speech and public speaking: we can think of speech in terms of its substantive content, the range of subjects about which an orator must speak, or in terms of its technique, the training and practice in public speaking that are the essential components of rhetorical education. In the various polemics between rhetoricians and philosophers reported in De oratore, there is general agreement that technique belongs to the rhetorician, the material incorporated in an ars rhetorica. The problem arises with substance: to what extent does the orator need to know (in a strong, almost Platonic, sense of that word) what he is talking about? Is that content an essential part of rhetoric itself, or can the orator simply draw information from outside as needed, by picking the brains of an expert in law or architecture or music? There is a further related question: if we consider—as Cicero and his characters all do—that a major part of the orator’s responsibility is to be persuasive, and in particular to sway the emotions of his audience, is a knowledge of psychology and the human mind a necessary part of inventio, and thus of rhetoric, or is it a part of ethics, and thus of philosophy?
These various ways of understanding the role and content of rhetorical theory run through the whole dialogue, starting with the preface to Book 1. There, Cicero contrasts his views of oratory with those of his brother Quintus: Cicero placed eloquence among the artes of erudition, while Quintus thought that it had nothing to do with elegantia doctrinae and instead was a matter of talent and practice (1.5).3 In the preface Cicero gestures toward many of the problems about the nature of oratory (and rhetoric) that are addressed first in broad terms in Book 1, and then with more precision in Books 2 and 3. Thus, within his discussion of the difficulty of oratory and the paucity of great orators, he first compares oratory to other demanding intellectual areas (such as mathematics, philosophy, or music), then expresses surprise at the difficulty involved in the one area of human expertise which employs common language and is therefore a kind of knowledge shared by all people (12). This connection between “speech” meaning oratory and “speech” meaning human verbal communication is one that Crassus elaborates in his praise of oratory a few pages later (1.31; see Chapter 4 above), and the relationship between oratory and other areas of study is central to Scaevola’s rebuttal of Crassus and to Crassus’ response to Scaevola.
The second section of Cicero’s account of oratory sketches its development from normal speech to artful speech and the discovery of rhetoric as an art (1.12–15). Greece is passed over in a praeteritio, then the development of Roman oratory is summarized: first Romans were completely ignorant of both ars and exercitatio and relied only on ingenium;4 then, after hearing Greek orators, they became more enthusiastic about public speaking and acquired doctrina and usus to go with their native talent (at which, Cicero tells us, Romans obviously and always surpass everyone else). This summary narrative of the development of Roman eloquence gains detail over the course of the dialogue: the Greek orators who excited young Romans are presumably the philosophers’ embassy of 155 (particularly Carneades) described at De oratore 2.155, while the reference to doctrina and magistrorum praecepta anticipates a recurring theme of De oratore, the contested value of rhetorical training and the relationship between this kind of training and true oratory.5 That, in fact, is a central problem of the middle section of Book 1, Crassus’ very short introduction to rhetorical theory.
The mention of rhetorical training leads to the third and final section of Cicero’s explanation of the rarity of great orators: not merely does the creation of oratory from speech require the application of theory and education, but the content of that education itself incorporates several areas of learning that are themselves demanding (1.16–19).6 Cicero again anticipates in vague language material that will become more precise and more technical over the course of De oratore: he not only alludes to the basic subdivisions of rhetorical theory, but he also includes the need to move hearers’ emotions (ethos and pathos), a subject on which Antonius dwells at length in Book 2, as well as humor, on which Caesar Strabo speaks in Book 2, and legal knowledge, which occupies the last part of Book 1.7 The whole section is rounded off by a restatement of his basic point: oratory is difficult and orators are rare; we should encourage our children to strive and excel as orators—well beyond the technical training of the rhetoricians.
After this, however, the conclusion to Cicero’s preface takes a different tack. Instead of talking about the internal and technical qualities of oratory—oratory as speech and oratory as rhetorical technique—he now addresses its external, substantive requirements and needs. Students of rhetoric should not expect to become orators just from standard rhetorical education (“by the rules or teachers or exercises that everyone uses,”1.19): they need something more, aliis quibusdam. He then explains what those alia quaedam are (20):8
My own view is this: no-one can be a totally admirable (omni laude cumulatus) orator unless he has attained a total knowledge of all important subjects and disciplines (omnium rerum magnarum atque artium scientiam). His speech should blossom and overflow with substantive knowledge; and if there is no underlying substance recognized and known by the orator, his eloquence is empty and almost childish.
Crassus takes the same position several times: res are at least as important as verba, and without this kind of learning the budding orator will never blossom but will remain trapped by the elementary education of the rhetorical schools. The internal difficulties of technique are in fact not really difficult: the substantive content of speeches is what requires effort. And this frames, for the first time in De oratore, the issue between philosophy and rhetoric: is the content of a speech an intrinsic part of rhetoric itself, or is it something external to rhetoric?
Cicero’s claim in the preface, that oratory must incorporate knowledge of everything, is the strongest possible claim for rhetoric and made in emphatic language: the repetition of omnis, res (three times), and cognitio/cognita as well as the doubling of verbs (efflorescat et redundet; percepta et cognita). At that point, however, Cicero steps back from such a broad claim and away from the image of the ideal orator toward the more realistic world of Roman public life. Even though oratory claims the ability to speak about anything (echoing Gorgias in Plato, specifically referred to later at 1.102–3), we Romans are too engaged in the real world for that (in hac tanta occupatione urbis ac vitae, 1.21).9 Greek theoreticians (clever men with too much time on their hands) have, however, conveniently divided up the artes so that the orator only has to deal with forensic and deliberative speaking; Cicero will therefore limit himself to that (22). On the other hand, he concludes, he is not going to deal with the kind of childish praecepta covered by De inventione: those obvious things are the province of Greek teachers of rhetoric, and Cicero will instead report the views of Roman men of distinction and eloquence (23):
I imagine you will forgive me, brother, if I prefer the auctoritas of people who are awarded by Romans (nostris hominibus) the highest praise for their speaking over Greeks.
And with that, we proceed to Tusculum in September of 91 bce.
Within the framework of this introduction, Cicero addresses, sometimes obliquely, most of the issues that occupy the rest of the dialogue. At the simplest level is the question of the value of rhetorical education, represented here in part by Greek magistri and praecepta, in part by Cicero’s own juvenile De inventione. It is a necessary element in oratorical training, to be sure, but it is puerilis, both in the sense that it is part of the education of adolescents and in the sense that Cicero had written about it when he was in fact a puer.10 Another question Cicero raises is the relationship of oratory to other areas of knowledge: is the Gorgianic claim to be able to speak about anything appropriate, and should the orator, as Cicero suggests, attain mastery of all realms of knowledge? The alternative is to limit the orator, as Greek theoreticians do, to the most public forms of speech, forensic and deliberative oratory; and that is yet another question addressed in De oratore. The division of the artes which Cicero cites, the limitation of oratory to forensic and deliberative speech, was not made by orators, but by philosophers: who has the right to define the limits and the place of speech? Is oratory a technical discipline concerned with constructing a detailed set of rules for public speaking—Cicero here speaks of Graeci dicendi artifices et doctores (1.23)—or is it artful and persuasive speech on any subject, to any audience? The end of the preface, the last sentence in particular, points very clearly to one set of answers to these questions: Romans, not Greeks; auctoritas, not praecepta; experience, not books. And yet, of course, De oratore is itself a book; it contains praecepta; it owes a great deal to Greek learning. Above all, Crassus in his speech on elocutio in Book 3 and even Antonius in his discussion of inventio in Book 2 make very broad claims about the philosophical underpinnings of oratory, a far more theoretical (and Greek) understanding of oratory than normal Roman experience would suggest. The answers are not so tidy as we might hope.
The issue of Greek learning and Roman experience appears, albeit in a peculiar fashion, almost immediately. The Roman statesmen walking in the ambulatio of Crassus’ garden come to a plane tree; it reminds Scaevola of Plato’s Phaedrus (1.28). In context, the Platonic tree is there to provide an excuse for the old man to suggest that they sit down (with pillows); but like the plane tree itself, the scene has ramifications. In the first place, Scaevola’s remark, that the tree of the Phaedrus had grown not so much from the water of the stream as Platonis oratione, points not only to the power of eloquence (in this case, Plato’s) but also to the self-conscious fiction of the dialogue itself.11 Scaevola’s comment also juxtaposes Greek and Roman, just as more explicitly later in De oratore Crassus’ Tusculan villa is compared favorably to the Academy and Lyceum as a source of education and locus for discussion. And, of course, the subject of the Phaedrus, rhetoric, leads Crassus by a chain of associations that is never made explicit to begin a conversation de studio dicendi, starting by praising his younger friends and exhorting them to continue their devotion to oratory.
The conversation under the plane tree which occupies the first day (Book 1) of De oratore falls into three large sections, with breaks for less formal conversation and comment by the younger members of the group. The opening discussion deals broadly with the goals and capacities of oratory and its relationship to philosophy (1.30–95); that is followed by Crassus’ discourse on the three basic elements on which rhetorical skill is based (ingenium, ars, and exercitatio, 1.113–59); and the book concludes with a pair of balanced speeches, by Crassus and Antonius, on the requirements of oratory, using as an example (in honor of the presence of Scaevola) the orator’s need to know law (1.166–262). Each of these three parts, moreover, introduces a major element of the argument of De oratore as a whole. The broad discussion of oratory explores in particular the relationship between rhetoric and philosophy in post-Platonic thought. Crassus’ lecture on rhetorical theory is elaborated and altered significantly in the large ars rhetorica that shapes Books 2 and 3. Finally, the Academic debate between Crassus and Antonius that concludes the book (“Academic” in that it consists of balanced speeches on either side of a question in the manner of the skeptical Academy) raises the most fundamental questions of De oratore: what is the relationship between any theory of oratory and the actual practice of speech in Rome, and above all, what is the place of Greek philosophy in Roman public life?
Crassus’ opening speech, his hyperbolic praise of oratory and language in general, has been discussed above; it ends with a senatorial sententia (1.34):12
It is my settled belief (sic enim statuo) that the moderation and wisdom of the complete orator preserve not only his own honor but the well-being of a great many individual citizens and of the commonwealth as a whole.
The breadth and vagueness of Crassus’ claims in this speech are very clear, as is the fact that what Cicero puts into Crassus’ mouth at times echoes what Cicero himself had said in the preface (speech as the differentia of human beings (1.12) and speech as characteristic of peace and otium (14)).13 Scaevola’s response also blends Cicero’s preface with Crassus’ speech. He makes two objections: the first is to Crassus’ major claim, that oratory is responsible for the foundation and preservation of commonwealths, but the second is to the idea that the orator can speak most eloquently about everything, in omnis sermonis disputatione, which he says that Crassus had said in extrema oratione (1.41). Neither part of that second statement is true: the only phrase that could possibly be construed as suggesting the universal ability of the orator to talk about everything is Crassus’ comment about sermo (1.32)—but that is very clearly not what he meant there, and it was not at the end of his speech.14 On the other hand, just that claim is made by Cicero himself at the end of his preface (1.20).
This peculiarity can scarcely be inadvertent. Over and over, Cicero seems to identify himself with Crassus: Cicero’s view of the importance of learning to eloquence matches Crassus’ views, just as Quintus’ view of eloquence as the product of exercitatio and talent matches Antonius’ statements. It is Crassus, throughout, who expresses the most elevated notions of both oratory and intellectual life; they are views to which Cicero is sympathetic, and not just in De oratore. And it is perhaps not the least important feature of the identification of Cicero and Crassus that Crassus’ villa at Tusculum is described in a way that corresponds not to the style of his own generation but to that of Cicero’s own villa at Tusculum, with its Academy, Lyceum, and walks and gardens laid out in the Greek fashion.15 This identification is deliberate: Crassus and Cicero are reflections of one another.
And yet, as discussed in Chapter 4, the dialogue offers a valid and more practical alternative to the all-knowing and complete orator advanced by Crassus and apparently endorsed by Cicero himself: Antonius parodies the perfectus orator at the opening of Book 2; Scaevola early in Book 1 and Antonius at the end of the book offer fairly compelling objections to what Crassus proposes; and even Crassus himself does not hold fast to his own idealized orator but occasionally admits that this kind of perfection is not exactly practical in the real world. Thus, at 1.65 in replying to Scaevola, he admits that some people would find his requirements for the orator nimium infinitum, but resists too much reduction of them; at the beginning of his speech on elocutio in Book 3, after admitting that the veteres had conceived an ideal loftier “than the gaze of our abilities can look on” (3.20), he resists cutting back the realm of eloquence: “But if this too seems too lofty for those of us lying on the ground to be able to look up to, still we should know and grasp the subject which we have embraced, claim to know, and have taken up” (3.22).
The presence of more than one model for oratorical education and achievement in De oratore is scarcely surprising: as Woldemar Görler has shown, in both De oratore and many of his more philosophical dialogues, Cicero generally offers his reader three models of belief or the middle level is represented by Antonius’ expert practical orator; and the lowest level is the mere technical rhetorician.16 We look up to the highest level of commitment (e.g., belief in the immortality of the individual soul; belief in virtue as sufficient for happiness; and here, belief in the orator as the representative of perfect wisdom); we recognize it as desirable but not generally attainable; we look down at the bottom level—in this case technical rhetoric—as beneath our proper aspirations, and we strive to rise above it. As in his later dialogues, Cicero in De oratore recognizes and makes effective use of the dissonance between his skeptical belief that such ideals (the perfect orator; virtue as sufficient for happiness; the immortality of the soul) can never be proven or considered true in any absolute sense, and his recognition that the desire to attain such ideals, even if unattainable as well as unverifiable, is an important element in a good life. Each level is in its own way coherent and valid; and the middle level is at least something that we can, without hubristic ambition, hope to attain ourselves. Thus, while the complete orator is an aspiration, and the model represented by Antonius is less lofty, it is no less cogent and far more realistic. The skepticism of Scaevola and, even more, Antonius about Crassus’ lofty aims for the orator raises legitimate objections not to the ideal itself, but to its relevance in real life.
Scaevola’s criticism of Crassus’ exalted claims begins with an obvious objection, centered on the disconnections between his perfectus orator and the real world: Romulus or Numa or Brutus the first consul did not establish Rome or its republican government through fancy oratory; they did so through foresight and wisdom, consilio et sapientia singulari (1.37). What is more, oratorical skill may do more harm than good: witness the Gracchi (38). And besides, there are talents and important aspects of statesmanship other than speaking: what about religion and Scaevola’s own familial expertise, law (39–40)? Equally damning is Scaevola’s second criticism of oratory’s claim to universal competence (which, as noted above, Crassus had in fact not made, but Cicero had). Marshaling a set of legal metaphors from the law of property, Scaevola imagines a set of claimants attacking the right of orators to own or even possess their areas of expertise.17 The majority of these claimants are philosophers, in chronological order from the Pythagoreans and atomists through Socrates to the major Hellenistic schools (omitting, as Cicero often does, the Epicureans); objections from other disciplines are passed over rapidly (41–44). Scaevola ends by rejecting Crassus’ broad definition, offering instead a description of the orator as someone who can be convincing in public speech, “so that you appear to men of wisdom to speak well and to fools to speak the truth” (44).18
The opening speeches of Crassus and Scaevola are starkly opposed to one another. In describing the orator either as a person of wisdom and knowledge with unlimited possibilities based on the power of language itself or as someone who simply has a talent for persuasion, Cicero outlines the extreme positions that the remainder of the dialogue will elaborate and modify and between which it will move. But the differences between Crassus and Scaevola are not limited to their understanding of what oratory is and does but also affect their whole approach to debate of this kind: while Crassus does not mention a single person by name and sticks to broad generalities about the power of speech, Scaevola deals in particulars. Specifically, the first half of his rebuttal uses examples from Roman history, while the second half is filled with the names of Greek philosophers and philosophical schools. There is not a single Greek name in the first half, nor a single Roman one in the second.
Hence the two speeches in fact offer three perspectives: one broad and universal; one based on Roman experience; and one rooted in the history and debates of Greek philosophical schools. But this last perspective is complicated: the imagined objections of Greek philosophers to Crassus’ ideas about oratory are couched in metaphors drawn from Roman law. This blending of elements—Greek and Roman, historical and theoretical, legal and philosophical—is only sketched here, and to some extent it is necessary to separate these strands in order to talk about De oratore. Nevertheless, they are all parts of the same fabric and raise the central question of the dialogue: not “what is oratory?” or “what is a complete orator?” but “what allows an orator to function successfully in Rome?”
In answering Scaevola, Crassus does not really address Scaevola’s first argument (although he admits, in passing, that the decemviri who wrote the Twelve Tables might have been prudentes rather than orators, 1.58), but instead focuses on Scaevola’s second argument, about oratory’s claim to own (or at least possess) a vast subject matter. He first (1.48–51) makes the claim that, even if the domain of rhetoric is restricted to forensic and deliberative oratory, the speaker must be able to control the subject matter and the relevant law; he also must have some understanding of human character, at least enough to be able to convince the humans on a jury or in a public meeting. Conversely, rhetoric is a well-defined skill, and if experts in other fields manage to be eloquent about their own subjects, that is because they are orators as well as, for example, philosophers. What is more (and this looks back to the res/verba distinction Crassus made earlier) oratory itself, although defined as artistic language, must have substance as a part of its stylistic success and therefore must incorporate material that some people attribute to other disciplines.
Crassus’ second argument (52–57) concerns the definition of rhetoric itself. In its present state, it has been limited to the technical aspects of forensic and deliberative oratory, but granting that philosophers study their material differently from orators, there is a large common area of interest, particularly concerning human psychology. And in fact, philosophers seem to recognize that they share materials with rhetoric; oratory cannot permit itself to be limited in either content or methods to the narrow field defined for it by philosophers. Most of the remainder of Crassus’ speech (58–73) contains illustrations of his basic points: that insofar as anyone speaks well on the subject of his expertise, he does so as a speaker, not as an expert; and conversely to speak intelligently on any subject requires the speaker to understand it. On the other hand, he admits that there have been lawgivers who were not capable speakers. Crassus is willing at one moment to allow that there can be non-eloquent experts, but at the next to deny that anyone can explain his own field of expertise without eloquence. Similarly, he is willing at some moments (68) reluctantly to concede that of the three divisions of philosophy only ethics is essential to the orator as a matter of technique; but on the other hand, the perfect orator must be master of all trades—except that he will seek advice from experts when he needs it. It is hardly surprising that Scaevola, at the end of Crassus’ speech, calls it a kind of sleight of hand: Crassus began by conceding the limits of the orator’s necessary toolkit and ended by making it unlimited again.19
Crassus’ speech is a rhetorical tour de force and demonstrates exactly what he is saying: his argument shows that he has seriously studied philosophy; his illustrations show that he is capable of borrowing expertise from anyone. And at the end, after Scaevola has complimented him on his rhetorical skill but questioned how realistic his demanding requirements for the orator are (1.74–77), Crassus, as noted above, denies that he has ever really studied any of this because he began to argue cases before receiving any serious education. Antonius has the last word in this debate, eirenically quoting his own dictum from his libellus on oratory, that he had seen many diserti but no one who was truly eloquens. In other words, he admits the hypothetical existence of the complete orator only in the context of pointing out how many very good ones there have been who do not meet Crassus’ exacting and indeed impossible standards.
In terms of the practical questions of how much an orator needs to know and whether Crassus’ ideal of the complete orator is either possible or desirable, the discussion is aporetic: the ideal is made more definite in terms of its contents, but Crassus regularly disagrees with himself about how much the orator really needs to know. And neither Scaevola nor Antonius seems remotely convinced that Crassus’ complete orator bears any resemblance to anyone in the real world, past, present or future—unless it is perhaps Crassus himself.
But this initial debate does more than simply set out various points of view about the nature of oratory. The second half of Scaevola’s rebuttal of Crassus’ first praise of eloquence includes a list of angry Greek philosophers, and that serves an important narrative function. The ensuing speeches of Crassus, Scaevola, and Antonius all speak about the status of rhetoric in Greek philosophical terms, something completely absent from Crassus’ first speech: Scaevola’s legal-philosophical joke makes a radical change in the discussion seem natural and almost predictable. Scaevola talks as if Greek philosophers were seeking redress in a Roman court; but in what follows, all three Romans travel in the opposite direction: to Athens and to Rhodes, the homes in this period of the leading philosophical and rhetorical schools. Each visit takes place as a detour from an official tour of duty in the east: Crassus recounts his visit to Athens while returning from his quaestorship in Asia, probably in the autumn of 110 bce; Scaevola visited Rhodes during his praetorship in Asia, probably in 120 or 119; and Antonius went to Athens on his way to fight the pirates in Cilicia as praetor in 102.20 The down-to-earth lawyer Scaevola tells the briefest story: he says that on Rhodes he told the rhetorician Apollonius about his own earlier conversations (presumably on the subject of rhetoric and oratory) with his friend the Stoic philosopher Panaetius, and Apollonius simply made fun of Panaetius’ arguments. Scaevola says that Crassus’ arguments are more serious than that; nevertheless, his attitude toward the philosophic Crassus is very much that of Apollonius toward the Stoics: contempt, albeit benign contempt.
The other two Eastern encounters, involving Crassus and Antonius, are more substantial, and they overlap: they both take place in Athens, and they both involve Charmadas, the leading Academic of the late second century. But what they (and we) get from these two encounters differs greatly. Crassus’ narrative takes off from Scaevola’s reference to Greek philosophers and their expected opposition to Crassus’ claims, and he shows his familiarity with that opposition by telling of his visit to Athens. Where Scaevola had listed philosophical schools but no individual philosophers later than Aristotle, Crassus lists a large group of contemporary philosophers: when he went to Athens, the Academy was led by Charmadas, Clitomachus, Aeschines, and Metrodorus, all pupils of Carneades; the leading Stoic was Mnesarchus, a pupil of Panaetius, and the leading Peripatetic was Diodorus, a pupil of Critolaus. And there were others, whose names Crassus does not drop (1.45–46).21 What united them, according to Crassus—and of course he too leaves out the Epicureans, for whom such questions would be irrelevant—was that they all limited rhetoric to forensic and deliberative oratory and denied orators any wider role or greater knowledge (46):22
There were many other famous and noble philosophers, and I saw that they all, almost in unison, drove the orator from a leading role in government, excluded him from all learning and knowledge of important matters, and shut him into the courts and small public meetings as if into some mill.
Crassus of course rejects this, and rejects the opinion of Plato, whom he describes as the inventor of such arguments; and in Athens he went so far as to read Plato’s Gorgias with Charmadas (47). He then proceeds to deliver the argument (summarized above) in favor of his own, larger understanding of what oratory is—but it is not until Crassus finishes making his case that we learn that he is not simply responding to Scaevola on his own, but that he claims actually to have said this before, to Charmadas in Athens: “I argued these claims with the philosophers themselves at that time in Athens” (1.57). Only the particular examples that he gives in the remainder of his speech are presented as being spoken for the first time in the conversation at Tusculum.
The narrative implicit in Crassus’ story about his conversation with Charmadas extends much further back than 110 bce. Not only do we learn (after the fact) that Crassus can respond to Scaevola in the same words (this time in Latin, earlier presumably in Greek) that he had used to Charmadas, in other words, that the debate opening De oratore is one that is not new, and that Crassus had taken the same position twenty years earlier in Athens. We also learn, however, that the debate that takes place in 91 and that took place in 110 was not new even then: it goes back to Plato’s Gorgias, which established the basic argument centuries before Charmadas and his friends revived it. There is thus yet another layering of time and conversation in De oratore: the dialogue at Tusculum in 91 is a repetition of one that took place in 110 in Athens, on the occasion when Crassus was reading Plato’s dialogue on the same subject with the Academic Charmadas. This sequence perhaps provides a deeper context for Scaevola’s initial invocation of the Phaedrus: this is a conversation that has been going on for nearly 300 years. Crassus adds some Roman particulars to the speech he gave to Charmadas, and De oratore of course has a great deal to add (in addition to pillows) to the Phaedrus, but Cicero wants us to see it as an argument with a long history.
Antonius’ visit to Athens, some eight years after Crassus’, is recounted in a very different tone, suitable to the less philosophical Antonius. He was kept in Athens, he says, by bad winds while he was on his way to fight the pirates in Cilicia, and when he got to Athens he was immediately surrounded by the same people that Crassus had mentioned because, he says, they had heard that he, like Crassus, was a major courtroom orator (1.82). But while Crassus himself had debated with Charmadas, Antonius seems to have had the Greeks stage their own debate for him to listen to. Antonius begins by explaining his objections to Crassus’ exalted view of oratory. His first is one with which Crassus has in fact already agreed: Roman statesmen simply do not have the time for that kind of education. That is not a problem, so long as it is recognized (as it is throughout) that Crassus is portraying the best possible orator, not one who really exists. But his second objection is much more pointed: that Crassus’ kind of orator is likely to lose touch with the practical realities of Roman public life (1.81):
We also have to be careful not to be drawn away from this kind of activity, the custom of speech to the people and in the courts. The kind of speech used by those men you just mentioned seems to me to be something very different, no matter how beautifully and seriously they speak about science or about human affairs: it’s a sleek and smiling kind of language that belongs to well-greased athletics (palaestrae magis et olei) more than to the citizen crowd of the forum.
“Those men” are of course the Greek philosophers whose beliefs Crassus has just reported, and the reference to the palaestra is barbed: Crassus had, at the end of his speech, compared the orator’s philosophical training (which underlies his rhetorical skill, even when it is not immediately obvious in his speech) to the training men receive in the palaestra, which is apparent when they play ball even if they do not use the wrestling moves in which they had been trained. What Antonius means, by his choice of words, is that philosophers’ speech (and Crassus’?) is sleek and well-oiled like the bodies of the athletes, and that both belong not in the forum but in a palaestra.23 There is a degree of irony in these references to the palaestra: at least part of the conversation of De oratore itself takes place in Crassus’ palaestra (2.20, 21), and when Crassus grudgingly agrees to talk about rhetoric, Sulpicius happily exclaims: “I will be very grateful, Crassus, to this palaestra and to your Tusculan villa” (1.98): in fact, Sulpicius says that he will prefer them to the Academy and the Lyceum. Greek education is to be both appropriated and eschewed: when Catulus arrives on the next day, he reports to Crassus that Scaevola had described the first day’s conversation as a debate tamquam in schola prope ad Graecorum consuetudinem (2.13). Cicero and his characters consistently deride Greek schools and Greek teachers as too unconnected with the real world; the transfer of the discussion from a Greek gymnasium to a Roman villa—even if that villa includes a Greek palaestra—and from teachers to senators is an important aspect of Ciceronian dialogue as a whole.24
Antonius’ subsequent account of his visit to Athens adds substance to his criticism of the slippery abstraction of philosophers attempting to deal with real life. Once the Greeks have latched onto him as a famous orator, they display their talents by lecturing him de officio et de ratione oratoris (1.82), something, we later learn, Antonius knows to be a bad habit of Greek intellectuals: “Does any of those Greeks think any of us understands anything?” (2.77). He is here responding to Catulus’ anecdote about the Peripatetic Phormio, who had foolishly attempted to instruct Hannibal de imperatoris officio (2.75). The first person to lecture Antonius about oratory is the Stoic Mnesarchus, who criticizes orators as no more than laborers with fast tongues, operarios lingua celeri et exercitata (1.83), and rattles on about the unity of the virtues, claiming that only the sapiens is a true orator.25 Antonius’ scornful comment is the standard joke about Stoic rhetoric: while claiming that (Stoic) philosophers are the only true orators, Mnesarchus’ own speech was awful, spinosa quaedam et exilis oratio. Then the Academic Charmadas gets his turn; he claimed that teachers of rhetoric know nothing and can’t talk unless they have studied philosophy. But of course, as Antonius ironically notes, these Academics always speak in opposition and are never giving their own opinions anyway (1.84).26
At this point what was apparently a typical philosophical display of oratory against oratory turns into an actual debate. Antonius brings on some people to oppose these philosophers, “Athenian men of eloquence who were experienced in political and legal affairs” (1.85), led by his friend Menedemus; Menedemus’ brief statement that there is a kind of prudentia involved in public affairs is immediately contradicted with great energy and verbosity by Charmadas, “a man who was quick off the mark, full of all kinds of learning and an amazing range and supply of material” (85). After a long list of things that orators need to get from philosophy, Charmadas points out that none of these things is found in rhetorical handbooks, which are concerned with trivia like prologues and conclusions and contain nothing about public affairs or human character. Charmadas goes on to emphasize the lack of rhetorical skill in rhetorical handbooks on the one hand, and on the other the orator’s need for psychological understanding to present his own character and move the audience’s emotions, all of which comes from philosophy, penitus in media philosophia retrusa atque abdita, something completely unknown to rhetors (86–87).
It is now Menedemus’ turn, and in rebuttal he takes a completely different approach, exemplis magis quam argumentis: Menedemus is an orator, not a philosopher, and the use of exempla is a basic technique of oratorical argument (88). He recites passages of Demosthenes to show that the orator did know how to move an audience, and Charmadas responds that Demosthenes had studied with Plato. After that, Charmadas goes on to argue that eloquence is something natural, that it increases with experience and talent (using Antonius himself as an example, 91), and that there could be no ars except one based on genuine and infallible knowledge, which is not the case with rhetoric (92). That this last argument is Stoic rather than Academic is odd: it is either that, as an Academic, Charmadas can argue any way he wants to, or that Antonius (or Cicero) has deliberately muddled the philosophical schools.27
Whether or not Charmadas’ arguments are consistent, at the time they overwhelmed Antonius (93–94):
He seemed to me so persuasive at that moment (tunc) that there was no ars of speaking and that nobody except someone who knew what was said by the most learned philosophers had either the wit or the words to be an orator. And Charmadas used to add, since he so admired your genius, Crassus, that I was a very good listener, but you were very combative in argument. Led by that conviction I wrote that statement in the little book that escaped from me when I wasn’t looking and reached people’s hands, that I knew quite a few good orators (disertos), but so far none that was eloquent (eloquentem).
There is at least a modicum of self-mockery in this statement: when Antonius reports Charmadas as repeatedly (solebat) telling him that he was a good listener but Crassus a good debater, he is implying that Charmadas thought him nice, but not very bright.28 Antonius seems to play along with that, and perhaps throughout to be mocking not only himself but all these wordy Greeks, with the contempt that Greeks generally receive in De oratore: despite the fact that they have proven, at least to their own satisfaction, that Antonius could not be a real orator, we know, and he knows, that he was one of the greatest speakers of his generation. What is more, tunc at the beginning of the sentence and his disparagement of his own libellus at the end make it likely that, at the dramatic date of the dialogue, he no longer believes in the extraordinary rarity of eloquence that he announced in his book: Charmadas pulled the wool over his eyes, but it was only temporary.
Antonius’ report of his visit to Athens leaves the impression of very voluble Greeks, both Charmadas and Menedemus, who are talking past one another entirely: the arguments Charmadas uses—and Antonius’ full summary of his ideas makes up for Crassus’ rather exiguous report—rely largely on tying oratorical eloquence to rhetorical education: if rhetoric consists only of learning the parts of a speech and the technical methods of composing it, and if it is equated with the written artes in which that kind of rhetoric is embodied (and even the best of them are pretty dull), then it obviously is small, trivial, and inadequate, as it contains nothing of the things which true eloquence requires: knowledge of human character, of ethics, and of public affairs. Menedemus, on the other hand, argues from experience and example: he is described as a figure experienced in public life, and he illustrates by quoting Demosthenes that an orator in fact has a mastery of all the substantive material and psychological understanding that he needs—without bothering to study with a philosopher. What is more, just as Charmadas and Menedemus are speaking different languages, so too on a larger scale all three Romans experience Greek learning differently: Crassus sees only philosophers and talks with them only in philosophical arguments; Scaevola only talks to a rhetorician who makes fun of (Stoic) philosophy; and Antonius talks to both, and shows (as he does regularly throughout De oratore) that while he claims to be an innocent overwhelmed by philosophical sophistication, he in fact looks on all these quarrels about the definition of oratory or rhetoric or eloquence as entertainment more than education.
Whether Crassus, Scaevola, and Antonius actually held the conversations they describe is unknown: what they say in De oratore is the only information that we have (other than Antonius’ inscription at Corinth, discussed below), and it will be clear by now that while Cicero is true to the course of major historical events and the careers of individuals, there is no reason to believe everything he says about his protagonists. In this case, these visits to Rhodes and Athens are completely unverifiable. What is more, the relationship among the three visits is much too convenient not to consider in a little more detail the historicity of these conversations as evidence for Cicero’s methods and the artistry of De oratore rather than as objective evidence for historical events.29
First in Cicero’s narrative, if not in absolute chronology, is Crassus. Cicero makes Crassus refer to his quaestorship three times (1.45, 2.365, 3.75), all in connection with his encounters with Greek intellectuals and his visit to Athens; each has slightly different, and possibly conflicting, details. The exact date cannot be determined; Crassus was tribune in 107, and therefore must have been back in Rome after his quaestorship in time for the tribunician elections in 108; that makes it just possible that he was quaestor in 109, but it is more likely that he held the office in 111 or 110, and if his statement at 1.45 that Clitomachus (who died in 110/09) was still alive when he visited Athens is accurate, then his quaestorship must have been in 111 and his visit to Athens in 110.30 De oratore provides the only evidence for his quaestorship, and precise chronology is not Cicero’s goal. According to 3.75, he was quaestor in the province of Asia; and yet when he first refers to his visit to Athens (1.45), he says he was coming from Macedonia (cum quaestor ex Macedonia venissem Athenas). That is possible, but strange: travel from Asia to Athens would normally be by sea.31 When he talks about the same visit to Athens at 3.75, he says that because he was angry at the Athenians for not repeating the Mysteries for him (he arrived two days late) he did not stay long; in Book 1, he says nothing about that, but he was there long enough to read the Gorgias with Charmadas, and that does not suggest haste or anger. Wisse’s complex chronological argument (that it is in fact possible to find a set of synchronisms between the Athenian and Roman calendars that would permit Crassus to travel by land from Asia to Athens and just miss the Mysteries by two days) remains implausible: only if Cicero knew these details (very unlikely) and thought it important to report them accurately in De oratore (equally unlikely) is it possible to argue that the details are genuine. The details in Cicero’s three references to Crassus’ visit are difficult to reconcile with one another, and there is no reason to think they are all truthful—although some of them may be, and Crassus may even have had a tutorial on Plato’s Gorgias with Charmadas.32
Much less can be said about Scaevola’s visit to Rhodes, for which this passage is the only evidence. Scaevola was praetor in Asia in 120, as he was consul in 117, and other evidence shows that he was praetor after the death of Gaius Gracchus in 121. Aside from this passage, only one event of Scaevola’s praetorship is known and that, strikingly, is his visit not to Rhodes but to Athens, where he had a hostile encounter with the philhellene Albucius (who subsequently prosecuted him for repetundae in 119), which was immortalized by Lucilius in Book 2 of his Satires (88–94 Marx) and in turn quoted by Cicero in the preface to De finibus (1.8–9). It is perhaps not overly suspicious to suggest that Cicero put Scaevola on Rhodes not only because Apollonius Molon taught rhetoric there but because Scaevola’s visit to Athens was already famous for another reason.
Last, but by no means least, is Antonius. Of these three visits, his is the only one for which there is any corroborative evidence: a beautifully carved ten-line Latin epigram from Corinth commemorates the transfer of his fleet across the diolcus on the way to fight the pirates. Again, the precise date is not clear, but he received a triumph for his victory late in 100, and so 102 or 101 (or both) is possible.33 But the epigram (CIL I2 2662 = ILLRP 342) says that after the fleet had been taken across the Isthmus, Antonius went off to Side in Pamphylia and his legate Hirrus took the fleet to winter in Athens (anni e tempore). The chronology is uncertain, but the epigram makes it likely that it was not Antonius but Hirrus who spent time in Athens because of the weather (propter navigandi difficultatem, 1.82).34 Thus, while it is certainly possible to fit the visits Cicero describes into the careers of all three speakers, each of the encounters has chronological or historical problems.
Whether or not these sojourns in Athens and Rhodes actually took place is, in the context of De oratore, far less important than their role in Cicero’s construction of Roman intellectual history. They are designed as a linked set of stories about how different types (and ages) of Roman nobles reacted to Greek culture. The two Athenian stories form a single artful narrative, in which the Greek philosophers who had met Crassus in 110 remembered his visit well enough to compare Antonius to Crassus nearly a decade later. While these visits may be imaginary, moreover, the arguments that appear in these stories are not. The kinds of argument reported and used by Crassus both for and against rhetoric were circulating in Athens in the later part of the second century: we know from Sextus Empiricus that there were treatises written by Clitomachus and Charmadas attacking the rhetoricians, and it was certainly a regular practice for Cicero in his dialogues to turn written texts into conversation.35 And while Crassus may not have studied the Gorgias with Charmadas, the mutual hostility between rhetoric (or sophistic) and philosophy that was active in Plato’s lifetime and quiescent in the third century did in fact revive in the second century; Academics, including Carneades as well as Charmadas and his contemporaries, may well have looked on their own contributions to the polemical debate as a continuation of the argument of the Gorgias.
The opening discussion of Book 1 starts with Crassus’ broad encomium of oratory, but it rapidly narrows to one particular issue, the relationship between rhetoric and philosophy. Several different arguments appear, but by and large they all hinge on the definition of rhetoric: if it is seen to encompass, as Crassus argues, all forms of rational and articulate speech, then it obviously must include a vast range of knowledge, particularly of human life, society, and psychology. On the other hand, defined (as Charmadas and other philosophers define it) either as the technical training in rhetoric that prepares a person for speaking in public or as the written ars rhetorica that provides instruction in such matters, then it is perfectly clear not only that people who write that kind of book have no pretensions to eloquence but also that the ars omits a huge amount of material that as a practical matter a public speaker needs to control, both in terms of his effect on the audience and in terms of the subject matter of a law case or public debate. The problem lies in what is meant by “control”: how much substantive knowledge does one actually need to be considered a true orator?
1. On the preface to Book 2, see also Fox 2007: 132–34.
2. On the politeness and self-disparagement displayed by Cicero’s characters, cf. Becker 1938: 15–23; Zoll 1962: 105–24; Hall 1994.
3. Just what Cicero means when he says that eloquence belongs among the artes (as I have translated it above), artibus eloquentiam contineri, is unclear, and probably deliberately so. “Founded upon the intellectual accomplishments” is May and Wisse’s translation, and it rightly leaves open the question whether Cicero is defining eloquence as itself an ars or merely a skill that relies on other artes.
4. Unusually for De oratore, Cicero employs standard terminology, albeit in more elaborate phrases: exercitationis ullam viam, praeceptum artis, and ingenio et cogitatione.
5. On the importance of Carneades’ speeches for Roman oratory (rather than philosophy), cf. Garbarino 1973: 362–65. See also LPW ad loc.
6. The fact that rhetoric is not a unified system of knowledge but borrows from various other disciplines is one of the most important arguments against seeing rhetoric itself as an ars: see Barnes 1986: 13–14.
7. Both Cicero’s introductions and Crassus’ various later statements show a striking emphasis on the need to move audiences, and hence to understand human psychology. That is not Aristotelian but drawn either directly from the Phaedrus or from a later Academic source—such as Charmadas, whom Antonius reports to have spoken on the subject; on this, see Schütrumpf 1990. It is notable, however, that while Crassus (like Cicero) draws on Platonic ideas of psychagogia, Antonius does not appear to do so.
8. On this passage, see also above, Chapter 4.
9. Crassus (perhaps also Cicero) goes back and forth between a maximalist version of the complete orator and one more realistically limited by practical considerations; on this, see the succinct discussion of LPW 1: 58–60.
10. For a description of the form and content of elementary rhetorical training, see Fantham 2004: 78–101.
11. Cicero makes the fictionality of his dialogues even more evident in the opening of De legibus, where Marius’ oak is also linked to the Phaedrus and to De oratore, and it is explained as the product more of Cicero’s poetry than of nature; see Görler 1988: 216–20.
12. For discussion of Crassus’ first speech see also above, Chapter 4. On Cicero’s use of the language of juristic responsum and senatorial sententia in the dialogues, see Steidle 1952: 13–14.
13. There are also close similarities between Crassus’ first speech and De inventione 1.2–5. That can be taken in two ways: either Cicero is pointing out the synchronism between De inventione and the dramatic date of De oratore, or he is implying that De inventione, as used by Crassus, is the starting point from which the far more complex view of rhetoric in De oratore will be developed.
14. “Irreführend” is the comment of LPW 1: 112; see also 1: 121–22. They do however connect it to Crassus’ comment rather than to Cicero’s preface.
15. See Görler 1988: 222–23.
16. Görler 1974: 27–42 on De oratore; the entire argument is briefly summarized in Gawlick and Görler 1994: 1099–116. There are helpful charts of various forms of the system of three levels of belief or philosophical commitment at Görler 1974: 61 and Gawlick and Görler 1994: 1101–2.
17. For the linguistic and legal details, see LPW ad loc.
18. See above, Chapter 4.
19. LPW 1: 128–31 see Crassus’ speech as far more coherent than I (and many other earlier critics) do, but their own claim that Crassus in 1.68–69 is speaking of praxis rather than the orator perfectus makes a distinction that Crassus himself does not make. He is inconsistent, and often deliberately so: after all, he is making a rhetorical argument about rhetoric.
20. That these men held these offices is all but certain, but except for Antonius’ Cilician campaign the dates are inferred from the pattern of their careers. Whether they visited Athens and Rhodes and spoke to the people with whom they are made to claim to have conversed is another matter. The collection of visits is curiously anticipatory of Cicero’s own itinerary in the east in 79–77, which included Athens, Asia, and Rhodes.
21. A fuller list of philosophers of this period who attacked rhetoric in Barwick 1963: 25–26; see also LPW 1: 114–15. On Crassus and Antonius in Athens, see also Lévy 1992: 84–87.
22. I translate oratorem as “orator” hesitantly; when Crassus then says (1.47) that the whole problem rests on verbi controversia, the word in question is clearly rhetor (not, as Barnes 1986: 8 believes, “art”) which, as noted above, means both orator and rhetorician. Crassus here uses orator as the more elevated translation of rhetor in order to support his argument.
23. Even Crassus (1.157) accepts Antonius’ contrast between the sheltered rhetoric of the schools and the active struggles of the forum; the imagery underlies Milton’s famous sentence in Areopagitica: “I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race, where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat” (Milton 1958: 158). Cf. West 1978.
24. On the differences between Greek and Roman philosophizing in Cicero, cf. Gildenhard 2013b: 260–63; on C.’s pejorative use of schola, cf. Gildenhard 2007: 12–14.
25. Note also that at the end of the book, in response to Antonius’ second major speech, Crassus accuses him of making the orator operarium quendam. Crassus has a certain sympathy for Stoicism, although he knows perfectly well that effective Stoic oratory is an oxymoron. On Crassus and Stoicism, see Görler 1974: 30–31.
26. Once more, the ambiguity of the word rhetor (see above, n. 22) is reflected in these descriptions. The Stoic is saying that orators are just workmen; Antonius in paraphrasing him says that he is talking about “the people we call oratores,” but whom Mnesarchus clearly called rhetores. The Academic, on the other hand, is talking about eos, qui rhetores nominarentur et qui dicendi praecepta traderent. The two philosophers clearly use the same Greek word to mean in one case public speakers and in the other teachers of Rhetoric 101, and both rely on the ambiguity of the word to make their cases.
27. Antonius himself borrows this argument in claiming in Book 2 that rhetoric is not an ars; see above, Chapter 4.
28. LPW 1:171 recognize the irony in Antonius’ report of Charmadas’ opinion; the irony and humor extend much further than that.
29. Ferrary 2007: 38–39 rightly warns against believing Cicero’s exaggerations about the importance (or philosophical content) of such visits.
30. Wisse 2017 provides a very detailed and thorough discussion of the chronology of Crassus’ visit to Athens. Broughton MRR 1: 546 listed Crassus as quaestor in 109, tentatively, as that is the latest possible date; in MRR 3: 118 he allowed (following Sumner) that either 111 or 110 or both is also possible. Sumner 1973: 96–97 takes all Cicero’s references as historically precise, and thus infers from 3.75 that Crassus’ visit to Athens on his way home shows that he was not in a hurry to reach Rome in 108 for the tribunician elections (hence not quaestor in 109) and from 2.365, when Crassus says that his service as quaestor was his longest absence from Rome, that he may have served two years. The latter passage says nothing like that, and it is parallel (and may allude) to Cicero’s description of his own absence from Rome as quaestor in Sicily in Pro Plancio 64–66. Perrin-Saminadayar 2017: 112–14 assumes a date of 109 without argument, and takes that as evidence that Crassus did not stay long, as he needed to get back to Rome for the elections. He takes the whole story of Crassus’ Athenian visit to demonstrate Crassus’ desire to impress his interlocutors with his culture—but this is Cicero’s version, not Crassus’ own.
31. Wisse 2017: 127–30 gives an unsatisfactory explanation; there are very few known parallels for anyone going from Asia to Athens by road.
32. Meyer 1970: 44–47 believes that the visit took place, but rightly doubts that Crassus engaged in any serious philosophizing. Fantham 2004: 52 rightly observes that “Crassus may never have read Plato’s Gorgias, as he claims to have done . . . but Cicero certainly did.”
33. There is considerable uncertainty about the chronology and whether Antonius’ command was prorogued. For details and further bibliography, see Broughton 1946: 35–40 and MRR 3: 19.
34. So, rightly, Perrin-Saminadayar 2017: 114–15. Antonius’ visit to Athens is accepted as fact by Eckert 2018: 20.
35. On the second-century philosophical arguments about whether rhetoric should be considered an ars (attested in Sextus Empiricus Contra Mathematicos Book 2, but also in Philodemus, Quintilian, and De oratore itself), see particularly Barnes 1986: 2–4; on Cicero’s transformation of written argument into dialogue, see Hendrickson 1906.