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THE CRAFTSMEN ON THEIR CRAFTS
forensic oratory. He says to his friends: 'Go on brightening this age of ours
with beauty of speech as you can, and as you do' (23.5). Modern eloquence is
brilliant and entertaining; contrast the symptoms of the old manner as seen in,
say, Caelius: 'shabby language, disjointed rhythm, and lack of periodic
structure' (21.4). Cicero developed his style towards somediing more flowery
and epigrammatic, and in doing so showed the way for what was to come. And
•when Cassius Severus took the decisive step into a new era, it was with the
conscious intention of adapting oratory to the requirements of a new age and
more sophisticated audiences. Aper's speech uses Ciceronian arguments to
deflate Cicero's claims to supremacy; for the Brutus (e.g. 68), like, as we shall
see, the critical poems of Horace, has a consistent sense of the inevitability of
progress from crude to polished.
Messala proffers an educational viewpoint not unlike that of Quintilian: the
old wide education has given way to the absurdities of declamation. At the
same time, some of what he says is redolent of the moral outlook of the Senecas;
for he contrasts the old austerities with the vices of modern youth and even
modern children.' The new element comes with the final speech of Maternus.
Earlier he had seemed to accept the view of Aper that eloquence had influence
in modern Rome, while rejecting all that it stood for. Now, as though moving
from the Flavian age in which the dialogue is set to the principate of Trajan
during which Tacitus was probably writing, or perhaps rather from forensic
to political oratory, Maternus cuts the ground from under modern eloquence.
Cicero had had interesting things to say about the influence of audiences on
orators. It is for the ordinary listener that the orator speaks as much as for the
educated critic — perhaps more (JBrut. 183— 2t>o): z and the elegant taste of
Athens fostered Attic oratory as surely as the uncultivated Carians attracted
Asianic (firat. 24—7). But Cicero did not try to think out the effect of a political
system on oratory. He connects the rise of oratory in Sicily, and by implication
in Greece as well, with the peace following the removal of the tyrants, not with
the rise of democracy {Brut. 45—6). And he points out the lack of a Spartan
orator to take up the terse tradition of Menelaus without any attempt to explain
it (50). Maternus picks up that trick. Great eloquence does not arise in wellordered
communities (those, that is, with a king or aristocracy), and the
many Athenian orators were the natural product of a city where ' everything
was in the power of the people. . .everyone, you might almost say, had a
hand in everything' (40.3). Conversely the Rome of the Empire, where for
better or for worse 'the deliberations of state are not left to the ignorant
many-they are the duty of one man, the wisest' (41.4), left no room for
great oratory. For Maternus his friends are 'as eloquent as our day requires'
1 Though it is true that Quintilian was strong on this point also (e.g. i .2.6—8).
1 Compare the intelligent remarks of Dion. Hal. Dem. 15.
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