Kenney_and_Clausen B.M.W.(eds.) - Get a Free Blog

CICERO
The main theme is paideia, cultural education, or more widely, humanitas.
Cicero claimed that he owed his oratory to the spacious Academy, not to the
rhetoricians' workshops (Orat. 12). Crassus, who in general represents Cicero's
views, deplores narrow specialization and the utilitarian approach, claiming that
the ideal orator must be highly educated in all subjects, able to speak with
fullness and variety on any topic. That, we remember, was what Gorgias
claimed to teach; and throughout the dialogue Cicero is haunted by the spirit of
the Platonic Socrates. 1 For if Socrates was right, oratory was a mere knack,
morally neutral at best and potentially pernicious, and he himself has been living
all along 'the unexamined life'. Right at the beginning Crassus mentions the
Gorgias only to dismiss it with a quibble (cf. Catulus at 3.29), and he castigates
people who gibe at orators, ut ilk in Gorgia Socrates (3.129). In effect Cicero is
tacitly renewing the great debate between Isocrates the pupil of Gorgias and
Plato the pupil of Socrates; and as we saw (p. 237) he is, for all his veneration of
Plato, an Isocratean. He was bound to be: his own life of practical politics
conducted dirough the influence of oratory, the source of his fame and selfrespect,
committed him irrevocably to that camp. His clever and plausible defence,
perhaps suggested by a thesis of Posidonius, consists in reproaching Socrates
with having split the logos, divorced thought from speech, philosophy from
rhetoric, the contemplative life from the active, so that some have even come to
exalt the former above the latter (as Aristotle did at the end of his Ethics).
He puts into Catulus' mouth at 3.126—30 an encomium of the paideia
of the old Greek Sophists, whom he calls 'orators', and defines the ideal
orator in such wide terms that he might seem to have stolen the diunder of the
Platonic philosopher. In contrasting this 'full man' with the narrow rhetoricians
he is choosing ground on which Plato and Isocrates were united, and thus
avoiding a head-on collision. The fact that he is so much engage imparts to the
work an intensity of intellectual passion. It is his apologia pro vita sua. The
greatest heir of die Sophists is grappling in his soul with the spirit of Socrates.
Into this, his first literary work, he pours all the riches of his own fullness.
His remarkable grasp of cultural history, his sense of period and his fund of
anecdotes and quotations enable him to diversify the work widi such passages
as Caesar Strabo's disquisition on wit (2.216—90). Book 3 alone contains
passages on correct Latin speech (43—6), on the relation between philosophy
and oratory down die ages (56—73), on the actor Roscius' voice-control (101— 2),
on metaphor (155-69), on artistic functionalism (178-80), on the sensitivity of
Roman audiences to style and rhydim (195—8), and on delivery (the orator as
the actor of real life; 215—27).
1 The inevitability of this conflict had been recognized by his brother (if indeed he was the author)
when he said to him, in the brochure of advice on electioneering (Comm. Pet. 46), with reference to
the necessity of time-serving,' But it will probably be rather hard to persuade a Platonist like you of
this.'
258
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008