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DIALOGUES AND TREATISES
As his primary form he chose dialogue — not the Platonic dialogue in which
conclusions emerge from discussion (the Symposium is exceptional), but the
Aristotelian, 1 more congenial to an orator, in which the various characters
express, in speeches that may be lengthy, opinions already formed. Indeed the
speeches may be complementary, as they mainly are in the De oratore, which
therefore approximates to a treatise; or they may express differing views, as in the
De natura deorum, to encourage the reader, in the spirit of Philo, to make up his
mind for himself (I.IO). In either case he would be able incidentally to portray
humane intercourse. We are spoiled by Plato's excellence; but anyone who
belittles Cicero's skill in the dialogue should read Varro's Res rusticae.
The De oratore was begun in 55 and completed next year. For its dramatic
occasion Cicero chose three days during a crisis over the Italian allies in September
of 91 B.C., when the Senate had adjourned for the Roman Festival. The
setting is the villa at Tusculum of that Lucius Crassus who had been his mentor
in boyhood. Another of Cicero's old mentors is present at first, Scaevola the
Augur, now old and infirm. Cicero is, in fact, escaping into his youth, and
though he could hardly introduce himself, as a boy of fifteen, into that company,
he probably remembered that house. One feels his involvement. In the prologue
to Book 3 he tells his brother that he has wanted to do for Crassus what Plato
did for Socrates, and indeed Plato is never far from his thoughts. Scaevola plays
the part of Cephalus, the old man who is present for a while at the beginning of
Plato's Republic. A fine plane tree reminds him of the one at the beginning of the
Phaedrus, and he suggests they sit under it. And as Socrates at the end of the
Phaedrus prophesies a great future for the young Isocrates without mentioning
Plato, so Crassus at the end of the De oratore prophesies a great future for the
young Hortensius, who in that year made his debut as an orator, without
mentioning Cicero — a graceful compliment whose irony however would not be
lost on the reader. As in the Phaedo, the occasion is described to the author by a
survivor. But it is the Gorgias that haunts the dialogue, as we shall see. In the
prologue to Book 3 Cicero bitterly recalls how within four years, of those seven
courteous participants, Crassus and Scaevola had soon died, both after brave
resistance to threatened tyranny, Catulus had killed himself, and Antonius,
Caesar Strabo and Sulpicius had been murdered, either by Marians or Sullans.
Only Cotta survived to tell the tale. The heads of those three had been spiked
on the Rostra, including, to Cicero's especial horror, that of the orator Marcus
Antonius, whom he admired almost as much as Crassus. For us there is an
added poignancy in the thought that twelve years later his own head and hands
were to be displayed there by Antonius' grandson and namesake.
1 Aristotle's ' exoteric' works, admired in antiquity for their ' golden eloquence', are unfortunately
lost (Acad. 2.119; Quint. Inst. 10.1.83).
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