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

DIALOGUES AND TREATISES
Yet the De oratore is in some ways an exasperating work. The great issue is
repeatedly sidestepped. Scaevola at the outset suggests that oratory may have
done more harm than good and puts forensic eloquence in a cynical light (35—
41), but no one takes up the challenge. We are fobbed off with 'it's all a matter
of nomenclature' (1.47; 3.142-3); as if it made no difference whether philosophia
denoted dialectic or cultural knowledge! There is too much repetition.
Nor is there any real tension of argument: for Antonius, the purely utilitarian
orator, after acting as a foil to Crassus in Book 1, is made to confess next day
that he was only arguing for the sake of arguing (2.40), and thereafter is merely
complimentary to him. Moreover Cicero tries to do too many things at once.
In his eagerness to portray Crassus, whom he considers to be misconceived by
his contemporaries, he blurs the distinction between him as speaking in character
and as mouthpiece of himself (compare Plato and Socrates). Books 2 and 3 are
a ' technologia'', as he himself calls it, to supersede the De inventione (An. 4.16.3).
Sending a copy to Lentulus, he says he hopes it will be helpful to his son (JFam.
1.9.34). It is true that, by a salutary innovation, ars is subordinated to artifex;
also that the texdiook is camouflaged as literary sermo, the underlying subdivisions
being disguised (compare Horace's Ars poetica), and the disiecta
membra wrapped up in words of philosophic discourse. Yet the bones do sometimes
obtrude. Thus Antonius, after saying that panegyric needs no rules,
proceeds to give some (2.441?.); Caesar Strabo ridicules the idea of analysing
wit, then analyses it (2.217—18; 2 35ff-) : an< ^ strangest of all, in Book 3 Crassus
is constrained to do what all along he has protested against doing - to go into
technical details of style of the most scholastic kind (2ooff.) (Cicero himself
would never have belittled the importance of style; and in the Orator he made
amends nine years later for what he must have felt to be inadequate treatment.)
Like other Romans, Cicero could not shake off the framework of the rhetoricians
with their pigeon-holes, Graeculi whom he represents his Crassus as
despising. 1 He does not start from his own experience, any more than Horace
does in the Ars poetica.
In the summer of 54 we find Cicero deep in a dialogue on his other interest,
politics, which he thought would be well "worth all the labour involved, if he
could bring it off. The prologue to De re publica 1 movingly expresses his
bitterness at what has given him leisure to write, his being excluded from active
participation after all his services to the state. For the dramatic occasion he
chose the Latin Festival of the winter of 129, and as his spokesman the younger
Scipio. As in the De oratore, the conversation purports to have been retailed by a
survivor: Cicero reminds his brother, the dedicatee, how on their youthful tour
they heard about it at Smyrna from the exiled Rutilius Rufus. The choice of a
1 Clarke (1953) ch. v gives a fair critique of the De oratore.
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