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CICERO
Tradition, represented by Ennius, celebrated the eloquence of Appius
Claudius the Blind, who persuaded the Senate not to compromise with Pyrrhus,
and of M. Cornelius Cethegus in the Hannibalic War; but the first real figure in
the story was the elder Cato (234—149 B.C.). Before his time the scope for
rhetoric was limited.. Apart from funeral orations (buried in family archives)
there were speeches to the Senate; but its decisions would often have been preempted
behind the scenes by groups of noble families. A magistrate would
sometimes address the popular assembly, a general exhort his troops. But there
was none of the 'epideictic' (display) oratory of Hellenistic Greece; and the
'formulaic' system of the praetorian law courts lent itself more to argumentation
and cross-examination.
Things changed in the second century with the establishment of larger juries,
as in the centumviral court and the standing tribunals (guaestiones perpetuae).
Henceforward the chief theatre of eloquence was to be the law courts, where
many of the cases tried were really political. Trials were held publicly, in the
Forum or an adjoining basilica, and amid a ring {corona) of bystanders. At the
same time the revolutionary activities of tribunes such as the Gracchi were
furthered by rhetorical harangues to the inflammable popular assembly. (Mark
Antony's in Julius Caesar plausibly conveys the effect.) 1
Coincidental with these changes of circumstance was the influx of Greeks and
Greek ideas. Under the Hellenistic monarchies eloquence had had less political
scope than in such milieus as democratic Athens of the fourth century. It
concentrated on display, and at the same time established a scholastic discipline
of definition and classification, on Aristotelian principles, which was inculcated
into the young by catechism and repetition in unison. In Roman pupils the
Greeks found at last a political outlet for their skills; conversely the Romans
were captivated by the rhetorical virtuosity of Greek embassies, increasingly
frequent as the empire grew, notably that of the three philosophers from Adiens
in 156—155, which so excited the young and incensed Cato. Expelled by the
Senate in 161, the Greek rhetoricians crept back, first perhaps as tutors in
private houses. One difference the Greeks will have found at Rome was the
persuasive power of auctoritas, the prestige of the speaker. Advocacy was much
more personal: your advocate was called your patronus, and he might say more
about himself than about you.
Romans were predisposed in two quite different ways in their attitude to
rhetoric. On the one hand the image of themselves cultivated by Romans
favoured a pithy, laconic, unadorned directness. In this they were abetted by the
Stoics, to whom any oratorical device was meretricious and the only permissible
rhetoric was dialectic — argument aimed at persuading by truth. The most
famous example was that of P. Rutilius Rufus (consul 105), condemned on a
1 Kennedy (1972) 7-ii.
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