7
from the moment that Scaevola suggests that he, Crassus, and the others imitate Plato’s Phaedrus and sit down under the plane tree, it is clear that the relationship between De oratore and Phaedrus, and between Cicero and Plato, is not a simple one.1 It is, on the one hand, serious: Cicero is attempting to re-create the atmosphere of Platonic dialogue in a Roman context; he is also trying to create a complex response to Plato’s denigration of rhetoric and oratory by simultaneously demonstrating and explaining the extraordinary intellectual requirements for successful oratory and rejecting Plato’s version as an inadequate oversimplification of a truly grand and noble calling. On the other hand, the Platonizing of De oratore is consistently ironic and self-mocking. The setting of the Phaedrus is transformed by more than pillows: while the background to the Phaedrus is Phaedrus’ just having heard a display speech on love by Lysias, which is reproduced in the first part of the dialogue, the conversation on oratory in De oratore is the sequel to a serious political discussion.2 What is more, the setting of De oratore conveys a portrait of Roman statesmen self-consciously playing at Platonic dialogue, seeing in Crassus’ Tusculan villa their Academy and palaestra.3 The characters of the dialogue themselves recognize that the literary setting in which they place themselves is no more than a clever refraction of the real and serious world of Roman public life, a world in which—at least in Antonius’ view—Plato has no place at all.
But, of course, while the place of Greek theorizing in general and of Plato in particular in Roman politics was (to say the least) limited, its role in the intellectual formation of the Roman statesmen themselves is something very different; the complexity of the relationship between those two aspects of the place of Greek philosophy in Rome constitutes what one might call the plot of De oratore. Antonius’ devastating description of the trial of Rutilius Rufus at the end of Book 1 represents an extreme position: that playing Socrates is not only counterproductive forensic behavior but also damaging to Rome itself; Greek philosophy may be entertaining and even thought-provoking, but it is for holidays only. Antonius’ position is consistent with what Cicero says about Antonius’ public attitude to Greek culture in the preface to Book 2, that while both Antonius and Crassus knew quite a lot about Greek philosophy, Crassus found it more expedient to express disdain for such stuff, while Antonius (who also knew a fair amount) thought it better to deny any knowledge of it at all. What Crassus says about the Twelve Tables and Greek philosophical writing in Book 1 is also consistent with this: to claim that innate Roman wisdom is just as good as Greek philosophy requires not only denial of the importance of Greek philosophy, but also knowledge of Greek philosophy in order to deny its importance. Both these positions require a high degree of dissimulation: Antonius’ rejection of the philosophers both in his account of his visit to Athens and his narration of the trial of Rutilius in Book 1 is matched by his obvious knowledge of Aristotelian topic-theory and Greek historiography in Book 2. But it is not until Book 3 that the complexity of Crassus’ ideas about Greek philosophy and rhetoric is fully explored, and not until Book 3 that Cicero re-opens the question about the relationship of his own dialogue to Plato’s. In Chapter 6, I concentrated on the importance of Antonius’ arguments in his debate with Crassus; now it is Crassus’ turn.
As usual, Crassus is reluctant to say anything about rhetoric, and he has to be persuaded to contribute his share to the great ars rhetorica of Books 2 and 3. He frames his account of elocutio in fairly traditional terms: the definition of its elements at the beginning (3.37–51) and the discussion of verbal ornatus at the end (3.148–207) are relatively close to the standard account, but—just as Antonius’ version of inventio is quite different from standard Hermagorean theory—most of Crassus’ theory of style would have looked very odd to any practicing rhetorician.4 Crassus begins by defining the four elements of good style, “that we speak good Latin (Latine), clearly (plane), expansively (ornate), and in a manner appropriate and fitting (apte congruenterque) for whatever is at issue” (3.37).5 The first two criteria (Latinity and clarity) are dismissed rapidly as obvious and straightforward; it is above all the third on which he concentrates. At the very outset of his speech (3.19), Crassus had already emphasized that elocutio is not simply a matter of words but must involve substance as well: the interconnection of res and verba is a repeated and central theme of De oratore. The combination of verbal and substantive elaboration is the theme of his account of ornatus: the strictures about elocutio given by rhetorical handbooks are only a small part of the story, and the material of the verus orator comprises every aspect of human life (3.54).
So far, this is all familiar from the first discussion of Book 1: Crassus had argued then that the content of oratory is an essential part of eloquence. Earlier, that was part of an argument in favor of the wide learning necessary for the orator: if content is part of eloquence, then substantive knowledge is part of rhetoric. Here, however, Crassus takes the argument in a different direction. Eloquence, he says, is a virtue like other virtues, and rather more formosa et inlustris than many of them. And as eloquence has the capacity to sway people’s minds, the more powerful it is, the more it needs to be linked to other virtues, specifically probitas and prudentia (55–56):
If we should have handed over the ability to speak to men who lack these virtues, we would not indeed have made them orators, but we would have given weapons to madmen. This sense of thinking and speaking and this power of speech the old Greeks called sapientia.
And he then goes on to talk about the great men of old who combined the ability to speak with the moral force of virtue. The speed of this transition is astonishing: Crassus moves from oratory as a matter of substance, to eloquence as one of the virtues which must be combined with the other virtues in order to be true oratory rather than (as in the Gorgias) a dangerous weapon in the hands of madmen, to the unity of thought and action among the early statesmen of Greece; he even makes a swift and oblique detour through the Stoic unity of the virtues in order to get from the requirements of elocutio to the history of early Greek thought.6
What follows is an account of the historical relationship between words and substance, between eloquence and sapientia, from the Seven Sages to Socrates, who was responsible for the split between the two elements of what had previously been a single, unified philosophia (3.56–61). Crassus’ main point here is to show that there was no quarrel between rhetoric and philosophy prior to Socrates, because there had been no division between them: they were two aspects of the same thing, which might be called either philosophia or sapientia. With Socrates arose what Crassus famously calls discidium . . . quasi linguae atque cordis, the divorce of tongue and brain (then located in the cor rather than the head), the separation of sapienter dicere and ornate dicere (61).7
From this cause of all our woe, Crassus follows the further post-Socratic subdivisions of philosophy into schools, from Platonists and Aristotelians to the variety of early Hellenistic schools, focusing on those that survived down to Crassus’ time (3.62–63). Why he is telling this tale is not explained at the outset, but once he mentions the Epicureans, its point becomes clearer: we can ignore the Epicureans because Epicureanism is irrelevant to the orator (63):
It [Epicureanism] is a long way away from the man we’re looking for and whom we want to be a source (auctorem) of public counsel, a leader in the guidance of the state, a man to be first (principem) in giving his advice and in eloquent speech in the senate, before the people, and in the public courts.
Crassus begins his historical account of eloquence with the primeval unity of speech and knowledge, then describes its breakdown in the division that came with Socrates and the subsequent further splintering of philosophy once it had become separated from eloquence. He now makes it clear that the goal is not simply eloquence but the restoration of unity between statesmanship and eloquence that marked Solon and Lycurgus. And for that, in an age of fragmented philosophies, we clearly need to find a philosophical school that will lend itself to this re-unification: “Right now I’m not looking for the philosophy that is most truthful, but the one that fits the orator best” (64). Having eliminated the Epicureans’ candidacy for this position, Crassus now proceeds to reject the Stoics (65–66) in language reminiscent of the attack on Stoicism in Pro Murena; that leaves a short list of only two acceptable branches of philosophy, the school of Aristotle and the Academy, the subsequent metamorphosis of which from Platonic to New Academy he then explains in a long footnote (67–68).
This extended doxographical account of post-Socratic philosophy is something of a digression from Crassus’ main argument, but it has a genuine point beyond simply displaying Crassus’ knowledge of Greek intellectual history: it narrows the focus of the argument from a broad discussion of the relationship of thought and speech to the particular question of which philosophical approach is most suitable for an orator. Crassus repeats one basic argument several times, in slightly different forms: the division between philosophy and oratory; the multiplicity of philosophy and the consistent sameness of rhetoric; the emptiness of oratory that relies solely on the training of the rhetorical schools; the need for philosophical knowledge in order to elevate the substance of oratory. He is not consistent on the amount of philosophical expertise the orator really needs: at one point it is the knowledge contained in all the books of philosophers, omnibus philosophorum libris . . . comprehensa (81), while at the end of his account, in responding to the slightly incredulous Catulus he reduces the orator’s need to a quick (if intensive) study (89). This variation may be in order gradually to accustom a Roman audience to the degree of Greek learning Crassus would like to impose;8 it also reflects the continuing difference between what Crassus knows—and has picked up rapidly and, he says, superficially—and that perfectus orator who does not and may never exist, who controls not only rhetoric but all aspects of philosophy and indeed all knowledge. But what is most significant in Crassus’ account is his construction of the relationship between philosophy and rhetoric: it makes no difference which philosophy actually offers a correct approach to a good life; what matters is that its methods be useful to the orator. That is true of the Peripatetics, who have the habit of setting out arguments on both sides of a question, and even more true of the Carneadean Academics, who train themselves to refute all arguments. In Crassus’ narrative, philosophy has been transformed from a body of knowledge or a way of life to a method of training minds and sharpening thought; it is the argumentative amplification of the methods of rhetoric—and it is unquestionably subordinate to rhetoric. Just as, in Book 1, it was clear that most philosophical schools reduced rhetoric to no more than a method of training, so here Crassus takes his revenge: philosophy is now no more than a method for training orators.
Crassus’ version of the history of speech is both descriptive and normative. On the one hand, it is simply a narrative—tendentious to be sure, and probably based on the teachings of one Academic (Philo) or another (Antiochus)—about intellectual history, about how academic disciplines feud, splinter, and recombine in various strange ways.9 As Cicero had learned this narrative, it was almost certainly teleological, designed to culminate in and justify genealogically the kind of philosophy practiced by whoever told the story to Cicero.10 But the story Crassus creates out of the narrative he received is something very different: it is not designed to lead up to one particular sect of philosophers as the privileged bearers of truth; his story is not even designed to explain the changing philosophical approaches in the schools. Instead, it is a normative history of oratory rather than philosophy, and a demonstration of the ways in which a choice of philosophical orientation may be relevant to the creation of the (perhaps imaginary) perfectus orator. Crassus’ story of the development of the philosophical schools, whatever its philosophical sources, is deliberately and strongly anti-philosophical; it is meant to put philosophers in their place.
The story Crassus tells here concerns not just the relationship of oratory and philosophy, and does not merely serve the (rhetorical) goal of establishing the proper hierarchy of the two. In the first place, it should be emphasized that the Socrates of 3.60–61 has a very different place from his usual spot in doxographic genealogy. The most familiar, and generally standard, description of Socrates’ role in the history of philosophy is given by Cicero most famously in the Tusculan Disputations, that Socrates was responsible for the shift from natural philosophy to moral philosophy: “Socrates was the first to call philosophy down from the sky and place it in cities and bring it even into houses, and to compel it to investigate human life and manners and good and evil” (TD 5.10; similarly TD 3.8).11 In Crassus’ narrative, Socrates has a place not in the development of philosophy but in the development of the arts of language: just as the later history of the philosophical schools is seen purely in terms of their utility for rhetorical training, so Socrates himself is seen as a figure in the history of oratory, or rather in the history of moral speech. Unlike most rhetorical treatises, De oratore does not worry about the need for orators to be moral individuals, but part of the implicit narrative surrounding Socrates’ separation of tongue from mind involves precisely that: by creating two realms of speech, he ends up with one that is eloquent and one that is moral. The lack of concern in De oratore about the moral element of rhetoric is significant, in part (looking ahead) because of the stark contrast with the emphasis on moral statesmanship in De re publica, in part because it is so unusual. Antonius has no interest at all in the moral element of oratory; he cares purely about effectiveness. Crassus approaches the issue only here, but it is not (as for instance in De inventione) a sanctimonious concern about the education of orators, but a regret that the unity of all the elements of sapientia in the prelapsarian public world before Socrates, of which an unquestioning and unquestioned morality was one, has been lost.12 That is not the way things were supposed to be.
Crassus’ story is unusual too in that it explicitly extends the realm of sapientia beyond the boundaries of Greece. After Crassus has made his sharp turn from oratory to virtue at 3.55–56, he talks about the unity of language and thought in the great days of old, and he makes it very clear that such unity was not found only in Greece (56):
As I say, the Greeks of old called this system of thought and speech and oratory sapientia. That was the origin of men like Lycurgus, Pittacus, and Solon; the source of our own men like Coruncanius, Fabricius, Cato, and Scipio was like that. They may not have been so well educated, but their force of mind and character was similar.
This statement not only provides a context and an explanation for Crassus’ comment in Book 1 about the philosophic merits of the Twelve Tables; it creates a fuller picture of a world in which morality, and moral speech, are not dependent on doctrina: the history of Roman virtue need not be dependent on Greece, but can be seen as parallel to it. But Rome is clearly not just parallel to Greece: Crassus goes on to link the later history of the Academy to those Romans who heard Carneades and his successors speak—Scaevola in Rome in 155 and Metellus Numidicus in Athens when Carneades was old (3.68)—and Crassus himself had heard Carneades’ successors on his visit to Athens. There is thus a double source of sapientia (to the extent that we can still call it that): the natural wisdom from which we began and the infused wisdom (rhetorical skill?) that came with hearing Greek philosophers in the recent past.13
The peculiar relationship between Greek and Roman intellectual attainments and aspirations is made clear by the metaphor Crassus uses when he turns back from Roman encounters to offer a broad description of the original division caused by Socrates (3.69):14
This continental division of learning flowed down from the shared ridge of wisdom the way rivers do from the Appennines, as if the philosophers were flowing into the Ionian sea on the East, which is filled with Greek harbors, while the orators slid down into the barbarian Tyrrhenian sea on the West, filled with rocks and dangers. Even Ulysses got lost there.
Crassus’ image of the effect of the division made by Socrates is of waters flowing down on one side or the other of the ridge of the Appennines. Philosophi go in one direction, down to the Adriatic coast to their east. But the Adriatic coast is portuosum: in other words, philosophy, while remaining in Greek hands, has a great many little divisions. Oratores go in the other direction, down to the Tyrrhenian sea on the west, which is so dangerous that even Ulysses got lost there—but even if it is lost among the barbarians (Romans), there is no sense that rhetoric has lost its unity of purpose. Crassus’ geography is shaky, but his point is clear: philosophy is at home, in its manifold forms, in Greece, while rhetoric is in the West—in Rome.
Crassus is oversimplifying, of course, but in terms of the argument of De oratore, his simile makes significant contributions. One is that, for the most part, philosophy has to this point been considered something Greek, and Romans have gone east to learn about it; that is the point of the Athenian narratives of Book 1. There is also the strong suggestion that while philosophy is Greece’s share of the Socratic division, rhetoric belongs to Rome. The very choice of simile is a third: this division is compared not to a Greek geographical feature, but to an Italian one. The argument between rhetoric and philosophy in Greece, whatever its real meaning, provides a background and a past for De oratore, but it is placed very firmly in the past. Cicero’s argument, as well as the debate within De oratore between Crassus and Antonius, needs to have a Roman context and a Roman solution. To what extent, we have to ask, is any of these Athenian debates about rhetoric and philosophy or among the various schools of philosophy relevant to a Roman senator?
At this point, Crassus begins to answer that question, first by summarizing his previous argument and claiming that only Peripatetics and Carneadean Academics can possibly supply the vis that permits us to re-create the eloquence of a Pericles or a Demosthenes (3.71–72), then by repeating his attack on Socrates and the Socratics. Since the time of Socrates, philosophers have generally had contempt for eloquence in their separation of docti from diserti. And he again brings in a Roman comparison: the Socratic division of the uses of speech is comparable to the Roman pontifices who set up a separate college of epulones because they were too busy to perform the sacrifices, even though Numa had given that job to the priests. Both divisions, quite clearly, were mistaken: artificial divisions for convenience or misplaced belief are damaging, and the current scorn for rhetoric on the part of the philosophical schools and the ignorance of one another evident on both sides of the divide do not mean that that is how things are supposed to be. He outlines his own career to explain how he acquired the breadth of knowledge and sympathy that he so obviously has. Crassus learned not from professors but from experience: “my school was the forum, my teacher was experience and the laws and institutions of the Roman people and ancestral custom” (3.74). He went on, when older, to learn from the rhetorician Metrodorus while he was in Asia and from the philosophers in Athens, but the rhetoricians are perridiculi in their technicalities and the philosophers are narrow in sticking just to one school, as if in a tabernaculum (75–77).15 But again, Crassus slides from Greece to Rome: his examples of narrow philosophers are the Roman Epicurean C. Velleius and the Roman Stoics Sex. Pompeius and others.
During the course of his discussion of elocutio, Crassus takes various positions about the need for broad learning, particularly philosophical expertise, in the successful orator. He denies that he is himself the perfectus orator, owing to his lack of a structured and serious education in philosophy; he also recognizes that the well-trained orator will always be a more convincing and powerful speaker than the philosopher who does not know rhetoric. He varies between claiming that the orator needs only a general philosophical knowledge and asserting that the true orator must have a complete education in all subjects. His final statement on the subject is a maximalist one; but whether the changes are Cicero’s attempt gradually to accustom the Roman audience to the need for serious philosophical study or should be seen simply to reflect Crassus’ shifts between his ideal of the perfectus orator and his recognition that the best possible orator is not likely to reach perfection is not really answerable. In either case, the orator (perfect or best possible) needs to bring back together the two things that Socrates tore apart, causing such terrible effects on both.
At this point, Catulus interrupts Crassus’ argument briefly by exclaiming over the breadth of knowledge that Crassus demands, comparable to the great sophists of old. Crassus’ response is a renewed attack on post-Socratic specialization, the effect of which has been to diminish the arts (3.132):
Not in this field alone, Catulus, but in many others the greatness of the artes has been diminished by distribution and separation of its parts.
He illustrates this by examples both pre- and post-Socratic: in the time of Hippocrates there was no medical specialization, nor were litterae divided up in the time of Callimachus and Aristophanes of Byzantium. And he then turns to Roman examples of the versatile men of old, ending with Cato the Elder (3.135):16
What did Cato lack except this shiny, overseas, immigrant learning (politissimam doctrinam transmarinam atque adventiciam)? Because he had studied civil law, did that mean he didn’t argue cases? Because he could speak, did that mean he neglected knowledge of the law? He worked at both fields and was outstanding in both. Surely the goodwill he collected from private business didn’t make him slower to take up public business? Nobody was a braver man in the eyes of the people, nobody was a better senator. And he was also easily our best general. In short, there was nothing that could be known or studied in Rome in those days that he not only studied and knew but even wrote about.
Crassus is consistent in his beliefs about early Roman wisdom: the Twelve Tables show just as much ethical sense as does Greek philosophy (1.193–95); Roman prudentia is far greater than that of the Greeks (1.197); early Roman heroes like Fabricius and Scipio showed the same combination of speech and thought as did the Seven Sages, albeit with less education (3.56); early Romans like Cato had the same wide range of knowledge as did pre-Socratic Greek statesmen. This kind of natural wisdom was destroyed in Greece by too much education, and by Socrates in particular: the separation of words from thoughts leads to the loss of the kind of wisdom the true orator needs. For Crassus, as for Cicero, it should not be forgotten that eloquence and oratory are not at all the same thing as rhetoric: when Crassus dismisses Epicureanism from his list of worthwhile post-Socratic philosophies, he does so because their way of life does not encompass the man we are looking for, the true orator of Cicero’s title: “a source of public counsel, a leader in the guidance of the state, a man to be first in giving his advice and in eloquent speech in the senate, before the people, and in the public courts” (quoted above). In other words, by orator Crassus (and Cicero) mean the same thing that we would mean by “statesman”—despite that fact that for most of De oratore, Crassus emphasizes the orator’s knowledge almost to the exclusion of his public role.
In Greece, as is obvious from its history, men of that kind are long gone, and the blame lies squarely, if not solely, on Socrates. In Rome they are no longer there either, but the loss of wise political speech (true oratory) happened not so long ago: Cato, who died in 149, still had it. But we know when it was lost: the elder Tiberius Gracchus was still truly wise; his sons were eloquent, but had lost the political wisdom that unified and sustained Rome. What Crassus imagines is the possible future re-combination of thought and speech, using those philosophies that encourage verbal and mental dexterity to return content to rhetoric and to re-create the wisdom of an earlier Rome. But there is no easy answer.
Just what is wrong with Socrates? For Antonius, in describing the trial of Rutilius Rufus, the answer is simple: the philosopher, as an individual, is helpless in the face of powerful political emotions and oratory; and that helplessness (or stubbornness) makes him equally useless for civic life. His entire objection to Socrates and thus to Plato has to do with performance: when Antonius cites Socrates’ view that rhetoric is not a tekhne because it requires lying (2.30, citing Phdr. 260e), he agrees—but unlike Socrates, he sees nothing wrong with that. When he borrows metaphors of hunting and medicine from Plato, what he is hunting for and observing is not an otherworldly Platonic ideal but the strategies that will assist a clever orator; and he follows his use of those metaphors almost immediately (1.224) by stating his belief that Plato’s books belong in Tusculum, not in the working and practical environment of Rome. Tellingly, when Antonius cites the Gorgias (485e–486a), it is Callicles’ rejection of excessive philosophizing that he quotes, again with approval (2.155–56).17 Throughout, his attitude toward Plato, Socrates, and philosophy in general is one of patronizing scorn because in the real world (rather than in Tusculum or in the Kallipolis) they are not merely useless but risk causing harm through their arrogant naivete.
Crassus’ objection is both deeper and more ambivalent. On the one hand, Crassus himself is clearly inclined to sympathize with Plato’s idealism. While at 1.134, Crassus is presumably making a Platonic joke when he echoes Socrates’ erotike mania (Phaedrus 265b) in telling Cotta that in addition to talent one needs ardorem quendam amoris, the references to Platonic psychagogia and the unity of all speech at 1.53 and 3.21–23 seem completely serious and display Crassus’ own Platonic fervor.18 And of course Crassus is the person who has actually taken the trouble to study the Gorgias with Charmadas in Athens. At the same time, however, his narrative of the history of speech in Book 3 makes a far more serious charge against Socrates than Antonius’ charge of mere uselessness: here, Socrates is responsible for the long-term damage his separation of mind from tongue has caused not just to rhetoric and philosophy as particular arts of speech but to that combination of ethical seriousness and oratorical power that was characteristic of statesmanship before the Socratic divide. Where now are men like Solon or Lycurgus in Greece? And more important, where are men like Coruncanius or Cato? In Greece, that devastating loss came with Socrates; but what about in Rome? When did morality and statesmanship divide? The repeated emphasis on the Gracchi gives one part of that answer: between the elder Tiberius Gracchus and his sons there is a huge chasm. But one might also suspect that, for Crassus, part of the cause of that divide is the arrival of post-Socratic philosophy in Rome: the philosophers’ embassy of 155. Making Carneades and his colleagues the villains of the story may overstate the case, but the fact remains that Crassus is torn between his love of Plato and his genuine belief that a grounding in philosophy is an essential component of great oratory on the one hand, and on the other his sense that the technicality, specialization, and perhaps amorality of the philosophical and rhetorical cultures of his own time have done possibly irreparable damage to the civic life of Rome itself—not to mention the triviality of contemporary Greece.
Just as Crassus’ statements and ideas about Socrates and Plato lead in more than one direction, however, so too does the context in which Cicero places him. Antonius imagines one avatar of Socrates in the person of Rutilius Rufus, but there is another: Crassus himself. In a broad sense, that is his role in the dialogue as a whole: he is the (reluctant) teacher, he is the protagonist of a dialogue based on Plato’s Phaedrus, and he is the host of the conversation. More important than that is his sudden death soon after the dramatic date of De oratore, which Cicero describes in the preface of Book 3: after the participants in the dialogue returned to Rome, the great debate between Crassus and the consul Philippus took place on September 13, and Crassus’ emotional final speech led to his fatal attack of pleurisy; and although he remained in the senate long enough to sign the auctoritas that concluded the debate, he went home and died a few days later. That last speech Cicero describes (3.6) as tamquam cycnea . . . divini hominis vox et oratio, a swan song comparable to the divinely inspired speech of Socrates in the Phaedo about the immortality of the soul.19
The preface to Book 3—Cicero’s final words about the dialogue—provides a complex frame both for the conversation as a whole and for Crassus himself. The swan song of the Phaedo follows Socrates’ statement about the swan—his account of the soul and its afterlife. What follows Cicero’s description of Crassus’ swan song is rather more grim: his account of the violent ends of most of the participants in the dialogue within a few years of Crassus’ death, concomitantly conveying the sense that the harmony of that group as depicted in De oratore was at least partly a fiction.20 One might think of that narrative as Cicero’s swan song: although he did not die from it, it is an account of death, the revelation not of an afterlife but an aftermath. The framing of the dialogue calls the picture itself into question.
In addition to Cicero’s own swan song of coming disaster, however, he clearly gives Crassus himself not one, but two veridical utterances.21 One is the speech (or pair of speeches) that he gave in the senate on September 13; the other is his speech about the orator and eloquence in De oratore itself. What he says in Book 3 is both Socratic and anti-Socratic: he envisages the perfectus orator who might never exist in reality and offers a utopian vision of the reunification of speech and thought in a Roman context, but at the same time he condemns Socrates for the damage he has done that causes the need for such re-unification. Crassus is a Socrates attacking Socrates, just as Cicero’s dialogue is itself simultaneously an homage to and an attack on Plato’s Phaedrus.
Crassus’ other swan song, his last speech in the senate, also points in more than one direction. Crassus’ first speech on September 13 against Philippus is described as his greatest: “by general agreement it was decided that everyone else was always outdone by Crassus, but on that day he was even outdone by himself” (3.3).22 The dominant image he used, in Cicero’s summary of the speech, was of the senate as an orphan, abandoned and indeed stripped of its inheritance, in this case its dignitas, by a man who was supposed to be its tutor fidelis but instead behaved like a praedo; he thus attacked Philippus as someone who, in his own attack on the senate, had violated some of the most sacred bonds of Roman society, fides and tutela. But this powerful metaphor is mild compared to the image Crassus used in response to Philippus’ violent and threatening reply, and in this case, Cicero quotes from the speech verbatim (3.4):
Even if you think the entire authority of the whole senate worth no more than a security deposit (pro pignore) and you destroy that deposit in the sight of the Roman people, do you think I can be frightened by [your threats to] such deposits? That’s not what you have to cut to pieces if you want to bring pressure against Lucius Crassus; you have to cut my tongue out, and even if it is ripped out my freedom will show the falseness of your greed by my breath alone.
It is in every respect a breathtaking speech, in the image, in the language, and in the fact that it literally took Crassus’ breath from him: he was stricken with pleurisy and died a few days later. It is a swan song in more than one way: it is, given the immediate aftermath, the swan song of the idealized world that Cicero has created in De oratore, which rapidly led to the Social War and to the violent deaths that followed Crassus’ death, described by Cicero in the next paragraph; it is Crassus’ last plea for senatorial dignity, for libertas against libido; and it is Cicero’s own epitaph for senatorial rule from the point of view of the situation in 55 rather than 91. What Crassus’ last speech is not, of course, is philosophic or Socratic, except perhaps in the contrast between libertas and libido in favor of the former. And, if Cicero is giving us Crassus’ actual words (which is probable, but not certain), then his manner of oratory here—lurid and elaborate emotional imagery—is consistent with the fragment we have of his other great deliberative speech, his speech on behalf of the lex Servilia, which Antonius at the end of Book 1 held up as an example of just how unphilosophically effective Crassus’ oratory was.
It is probably appropriate that a work on oratory and rhetoric should create characters and scenes built on persuasive illusion. Crassus’ own oratory and theories of oratory are a bundle of contradictions: between the raw emotional power of his actual public speeches and his emphasis in De oratore on the orator’s need for precise and rational knowledge; between the perfected orator and the perfectible orator; between the public pose of a man who has contempt for Greek learning and the range of his actual knowledge of Greek philosophy and rhetorical theory. Crassus is a Socrates-figure who blames Socrates for what has gone wrong; he is a Platonist who recognizes the impossibility of his Platonic ideals. This fits perfectly with Cicero’s own Platonic manipulations, his demonstration of how the dialogue he has written is both like and unlike the Phaedrus, how the conversation he records is both true and imagined, how Crassus and Antonius both were and were not as learned as he makes them appear, how the group of men he brings together both were and were not as tightly bound to one another by friendship and politics as he claims. The preface to Book 2, in which Cicero describes Crassus’ and Antonius’ knowledge of Greek culture and their denial of such knowledge, is a masterpiece of simulated dissimulation, something that hides the truth (whatever it may be) in plain sight.23
And in creating this hall of mirrors, Cicero might well claim that he is merely imitating Plato himself. He does so, in fact, in the preface to Book 3, where—in expressing the hope that readers will believe that Crassus was a greater orator than he appears in Cicero’s representation of him—he compares his own book to Plato’s dialogues (3.15):24
There isn’t one of us, who, when he reads Plato’s beautifully written books in virtually all of which Socrates is portrayed, doesn’t suspect that there was something greater about the man who is their subject, no matter how divinely Plato’s books are written. In the same way, I request—not from you, who always have the highest opinion of me, but from other readers who pick this book up—that they suspect something greater about Lucius Crassus than he is portrayed by me.
It is the very brilliance of Plato’s writing (and Cicero’s as well, apparently) that makes us imagine that Socrates was even greater than he is portrayed: part of its brilliance is that it arouses suspicions (to use Cicero’s repeated word) that it would be possible to surpass it. This is a form of double dissimulation: Plato’s greatest rhetorical ability is to make it seem that he is less brilliant than in fact he is, and the greater he makes us suspect Socrates to be, the more we believe that Plato himself was not up to the task of representing him. On the other hand, if Plato (and Cicero) are as brilliant as they seem, then in fact it is part of that brilliance to make us think that Socrates and Crassus were greater than they really were—by making us think that Plato (and Cicero) were less brilliant than they really are. It is indeed a hall of mirrors, and in De oratore we are constantly given the choice of believing that Cicero is telling the truth or that he is inventing; or, more probably, both at the same time.
There is one more stage to Cicero’s representation of Plato’s representation of Socrates, however. In the middle of Crassus’ speech on elocutio, there is a brief exchange between Crassus and Catulus. Catulus exclaims (Di immortales!) at the breadth of Crassus’ demands on the orator and compares it to the claims of the sophists of old: Hippias boasted that he knew everything, and so did Prodicus, Thrasymachus, and Protagoras (3.126–28). His last example, however, is Gorgias, and that in fact brings the discussion back to Socrates and Plato (3.129):25
Gorgias of Leontini himself, whose advocacy led to the defeat of the orator by the philosopher according to Plato—either Gorgias was never defeated by Socrates and that dialogue of Plato’s is false, or, if he was defeated, then Socrates was more eloquent and, as you say, a more fluent and better orator—but Gorgias in that very book of Plato’s announces that he will speak with great fluency on every subject that comes into question.
Catulus is here referring back to Crassus’ statement (1.47) that in the Gorgias Plato proved himself a great orator in attacking oratory, but he extends it: if Plato’s dialogue is truthful, then Socrates was himself more effective a speaker than Gorgias; if it is false, then in fact Gorgias will have won the contest. But we know from Antonius’ devastating description of Socrates in court in Book 1 that Socrates was not an orator, and we know the same thing from Crassus’ explanation of Socrates’ separation of tongue from mind. We are therefore entitled to infer that the entire story of Plato’s Gorgias is false: Socrates never succeeded in demonstrating the evils of rhetoric, and the argument attributed to him should not convince us. If Plato’s dialogue is true, it is false—Socrates was a great rhetorician, despite his denials. But we know that he was not, and so it is false; but if it is false, then it is true—Socrates lost the debate, and rhetoric is indeed more effective than philosophy. And what then are we to make of De oratore itself?
One can overdo paradoxes of this kind; the point is simply that Cicero in De oratore composed a remarkably complex representation of oratory and the orator, both in terms of the relationship of rhetoric and oratory to Greek philosophy (and thus, more broadly, of Roman culture to Greek) and in terms of the relationship between wisdom and performance in Roman public life itself; and along the way, the dialogue draws attention to the inconsistencies and improbabilities of its own account. His subject includes, but is not limited to, the perfectus orator: that kind of Platonic ideal does not do justice to the range of oratorical talents and requirements, from Antonius’ brilliant and pragmatic approach to strategy to Crassus’ emotional (and deeply irrational) use of image and pathos, to that ideal orator who can reunite mind and tongue and recreate the kind of ethical and civic speech that was found both in early Rome and in Greece before Socrates. Nor, indeed, should we forget the multiple and paradoxical qualities of Socrates and his Roman avatars. The Socrates who defeated Gorgias but did not heed the warning given by Callicles in the Gorgias about the need to use rhetoric effectively on his own behalf is one paradox, representing in his own person both the mind and the tongue which he had severed from one another. In Rome, it may be useful to see the two sides of Socrates as embodied in his two Roman representatives: Rutilius Rufus, who emulates the moral rigor and rhetorical incapacity of the Socrates of the Apology, and Crassus, the master of powerful and emotional public speech. Neither orator succeeds in his task: Rutilius was exiled, the legislative program supported by Crassus failed. But where Rutilius’ moral rhetoric was, at least as Antonius understands it, a futile gesture of no use to anyone except perhaps to his own image of himself, Crassus’ ends his life as a martyr to his civic obligations and dies because of his willingness to use his oratorical ability in the service of Rome. And while his last speech killed him, it still lives in Cicero’s—and therefore his readers’—recollection.
One last feature of Crassus’ swan song brings the story back to what is probably most important to Cicero in this narrative of Rome’s intellectual and moral crisis: Crassus’ last words in defense of liberty against a hostile consul are the first oratorical quotation in Book 3; the last oratorical quotation (followed, to be sure, by some tragic quotations), cited by Crassus himself, is from the last speech of Gaius Gracchus: Quo me miser conferam? quo vertam? (“Where am I to go in my wretchedness? Where am I to turn?” 3.214, #55). The Gracchi begin and end De oratore; they are the manifestation of what has gone wrong with Roman oratory and Roman public life. At the same time, however, Gaius’ questions, and his tragedy, complement Crassus’. Where are we to turn for the recovery of true oratory and statesmanship in Rome?
1. A valuable analysis in Stull 2011. It is sometimes assumed (e.g., by Fantham 2004: 54–70) that Cicero’s goal is, at least in part, to respond specifically to Plato’s arguments against rhetoric in Gorgias and Phaedrus, but that is extremely unlikely: Plato provides a frame, but the arguments to which Cicero is replying are almost entirely Hellenistic.
2. The same is true—although the subsequent discussion is far more concerned with politics and public life than is the case with the Phaedrus—of Plato’s Gorgias, one of the other dialogues Cicero has in mind in De oratore: there too, the conversation follows a rhetorical display by the sophist. Cicero’s dialogue on oratory takes place in the middle of serious political problems and reflects them, while Plato’s dialogues on rhetoric take their start from frivolous and irrelevant verbal display.
3. See above, Chapter 5.
4. There is a useful and relatively brief analysis of Crassus’ speech on elocutio in LPW 4: 88–95; the extended discussion of the speech by Barwick 1963: 34–71 is a valuable running commentary, emphasizing Cicero’s originality and his independence from particular Greek philosophical sources. I have discussed Crassus’ treatment of the topics and thesis in 3.104–19 separately in connection with rhetorical theory; see above, Chapter 4.
5. That this list of the constituent elements of elocutio is meant to be a standard definition is shown by the fact that it is repeated nearly verbatim from Crassus’ potted version of school rhetoric, 1.144. The translation of ornate is almost impossible; May and Wisse’s “with distinction” catches part of it. In traditional rhetorical writings the word refers to the use of tropes and figures as the principal means of elevating prose above normal speech, but here (as will be seen below) Crassus stretches it to include substantive as well as verbal adornment.
6. The sword given to the madman appears in Gorgias 456c–457c; it is also used in Republic 1 in the preliminary discussion of justice. LPW rightly see the Stoic language as ironic (4: 198–99), but give no clear explanation of how the reader is to understand Crassus’ intentions here; neither does Barwick 1963: 34–35. Fantham 2004: 248 rightly says that “Crassus is leaping across a chasm here, and Cicero knows it.” This paragraph remains one of the most perplexing passages in De oratore, and I do not pretend to understand entirely either Crassus’ logic or Cicero’s intention in presenting it this way.
7. On this passage, in addition to the extensive discussion in LPW 4: 210–23 see also Görler 2001: 241–43 and McConnell 2019.
8. Cf. LPW 4: 93–94.
9. Philo as source was proposed by von Arnim 1898: 99–111; Antiochus by Kroll 1903: 552–76. Lévy 1992: 110 suggests Metrodorus of Skepsis. Barwick 1963: 37 rightly recognizes that the history of philosophy given here is Cicero’s own creation, whatever his sources; so too LPW 4: 222–23.
10. This kind of narrative is particularly associated with Antiochus and the “Old” Academy, who sought to justify their philosophical position by demonstrating their intellectual descent from Plato and by arguing (as happens in Cicero’s later dialogues) that Platonists, Peripatetics, and Stoics were all talking about the same thing in slightly different language. The claim of unity is genealogical as well as doxographic.
11. On these characterizations of Socrates in Cicero, see DeGraff 1940: 150–52; Görler 2001: 235, 239–40; McConnell 2019.
12. The fundamental treatment of De oratore’s lack of interest in the morality of the orator is Classen 1986; see also LPW 4: 99–100, 200–201, rightly emphasizing the remarkably small role that the orator’s morality (a major theme of Plato’s Gorgias) plays in the dialogue. As Classen makes clear, Antonius in particular emphasizes the need for the orator to appear ethical; whether he actually is ethical matters very little to any of the speakers in the dialogue.
13. Bretone 1978: 54–55 notes that it was Rutilius Rufus in his memoirs who discussed the rhetorical importance of the visit of the three philosophers; cf. FRHist 21 F12 (= Gellius, NA 6.14 = Polybius 33.2) with commentary.
14. On this passage, and on Cicero’s use of river and source metaphors, see Görler 2017: 229–31.
15. For this Metrodorus (of Skepsis), see also 3.360, 365; he is to be distinguished from Metrodorus (of Stratonike) the pupil of Carneades whom Crassus encountered in Athens (1.45; cf. Lucullus 16); cf. LPW on 1.45 and 3.75. Pédech 1991: 66–71 wrongly combines the two, but then separates Metrodorus of Skepsis into father and son; the father Crassus’ teacher and the son a fanatical supporter of Mithradates. That is unnecessary: although one might expect Crassus to mention Metrodorus’ hatred of Rome and support for Mithradates, the omission of that detail might well be a part of Cicero’s smoothing out of unpleasantnesses in the setting of De oratore.
16. I take it that in Crassus’ argument here, shiny foreign learning is not necessarily something desirable; for a different interpretation, see LPW 5: 106–7.
17. The same passage of Gorgias is cited more fully in Rep. 1.30; see below, Chapter 8.
18. See esp. Phaedrus 261ab, combined in 3.21 with the earliest extant reference to the Epinomis as Platonic (Epin. 992a); see LPW 4: 136 for fuller discussion.
19. Socrates’ description of the inspired last song of the swan is at Phaedo 84e–85b; for further discussion, see LPW ad loc. See also Stull 2011: 257–59 for comparison of swan songs in Plato and Cicero.
20. On Cicero’s narrative as the equivalent of Socrates’ speech about the soul, see LPW ad loc.; for the overly amiable portrait of the group, see above, Chapter 3.
21. See also Görler 1988: 228–35 on Crassus’ last speech.
22. On Cicero’s narrative technique in this section, see above, Chapter 2.
23. On the preface to Book 2, see above, Chapter 3.
24. On this passage, see also Stull 2011: 260–61.
25. On this passage, see also LPW 5: 109–12 with a summary of references to Plato in De oratore; they consistently downplay the importance of Plato in the dialogue.