Lucius Seneca - Yale Required Reading - Collected Works (Vol. 2)

Here the orator’s effort is to arouse his hearers to maintain the dignity and glory of the republic, whose greatness is brought home to their minds by the references to the deeds of their ancestors. This passage is also a good example of the effective use of repeated contrasts.

In the speech For the Manilian Law Cicero addresses the assembled Roman people on a political question of immediate and great importance. His tone is exalted and earnest, his eloquence stirring and inspiring. The same qualities are found in all the political orations, and in many of the private speeches, delivered in cases involving the life of the accused or Cicero’s own character. In speeches dealing with less urgent matters the tone is more gentle and the effect more graceful. Quotations from the poets are numerous, and the rhythmical structure of the sentences is more marked than in the stirring and excited passages of the political harangues. The oration For the Poet Archias is the best example of Cicero’s less stirring and more graceful oratory. After establishing by a brief statement the fact that Archias had a valid claim to the citizenship, Cicero devotes the remainder of his speech to the praise of literary pursuits:

These studies nourish youth, delight old age, adorn prosperity, furnish a refuge and solace in adversity, gladden us at home, are no hindrance abroad, spend the nights with us, are with us in our foreign travels, and at our country seats. 43

In this oration Cicero appears as the man of letters whose literary interest was not bounded by the career of the politician or the orator, and who, in spite of political successes and disappointments, was to achieve greater fame as an author than any other writer of Latin prose.

Few passages are more striking or characteristic in the orations of Cicero than those in which he turns to address directly either the opposing party in the case or his advocate. In these passages, which vary in length from a brief exclamation to an elaborate invective, the stinging words shoot forth with quick and passionate directness. One of the longer passages of this kind, in which additional force is lent to the words by the suggestion that they are uttered by the culprit’s own father, is the following:

Here you will even dare to say, “Among the judges, that one is my friend, that one a friend of my father.” Is not every one, the more closely he is connected with you in any way, the more ashamed of you for being subject to a charge of this kind? He is your father’s friend. If your father himself were a judge, what, in the name of the immortal gods, could you do when he said to you: “You, the prætor of the Roman people in a province, when you had to carry on a naval war, excused the Mamertines for three years from supplying the ship which they were bound by treaty to supply; for your private use a freight ship of the largest size was built at public expense by those same Mamertines; you exacted money from the cities under the pretext of the fleet; you dismissed rowers for bribes; you, when a pirate vessel had been captured by the quæstor and the lieutenant, removed the leader of the pirates from the sight of all; you could put under the headsman’s axe men who were said to be Roman citizens, who were known as such by many; you dared to take pirates to your house, and to bring the pirate captain to the court from your own dwelling; you, in that splendid province, in the sight of our most faithful allies, of most honorable Roman citizens, lay for days together on the shore at festive banquets at a time when the province was in fear and danger; during those days no one could find you at your house, no one could see you in the forum; you brought to those banquets the wives of allies and friends; among women of that sort you placed your youthful son, my grandson, that his father’s life might offer him examples of wickedness at the age which is especially unsteady and lacking in fixed principles; you, the prætor, were seen in the province in a tunic and purple cloak; you, for the gratification of your passion and lust, took away the command of the ships from a lieutenant of the Roman people and gave it to a Syracusan; your soldiers in the province of Sicily were in want of food and grain; owing to your luxury and avarice a fleet of the Roman people was captured and burned by pirates; in your prætorship pirates sailed their ships in that harbor which no enemy had ever entered since the foundation of Syracuse; and these disgraces of yours, so many and so great, you did not care to hide by concealment on your part, nor by making men forget them and keep silent about them, but you tore away to death and torture even the captains of the ships, without any cause, from the embraces of their parents, your own friends, nor in seeing the grief and tears of those parents did any memory of me soften you; to you the blood of innocent men was not only a pleasure, but even a source of profit.” If your father should say this to you, could you ask pardon from him? could you entreat him to forgive you? 44

These few examples, perhaps not the most striking to be found in the great body of his orations, may give some idea of the variety of Cicero’s oratory. In his youth the Roman orators were divided into two parties on the question of style; the elder men, chief among whom was Hortensius, favored the Asian style, with its wealth of rhetorical adornment, while the younger men, the Atticists, as they called themselves, aimed at extreme simplicity, taking Lysias as their model. Cicero perceived that a middle course was best. His natural tendency was toward exuberance, but he tempered it by careful study. He does not avoid rhetorical adornment, but he seldom uses it to excess. Like Demosthenes, whom he regarded as the greatest of the Greek orators, he varies his style to suit the occasion, and, like him, he stands forth as the greatest orator of his nation.

In his philosophical writings Cicero’s purpose was to be useful to his fellow citizens by making them acquainted with the results of Greek speculative thought. As he himself says:

As I sought and pondered much and long by what means I could be of use to as many men as possible, that I might never cease to care for the welfare of the republic, nothing greater occurred to me than if I should make accessible to my fellow citizens the paths of the noblest learning. 45

With this end in view he wrote his treatises, for the most part in the dialogue form, after the manner of Plato, in which he set forth the doctrines of the Greek philosophers on the most important subjects, such as the chief end of life, the means of attaining happiness, duty, the nature of the gods, and the like, laying the chief stress upon what he believed to be true and correct. He lays no claim to great originality of thought, but only to independence of judgment. In general, he regards himself as a disciple of the Academic school, which did not claim to establish absolute truth, but to show what was most probable. He uses, however, the works of Stoic and even of Epicurean philosophers, whenever they express views in accordance with his own, as well as when he wishes to refute their teachings. He is not entirely consistent in all his writings, but his high moral sense, his belief in the divine government of the world, and his hope of immortality are the foundations of his philosophy. His style in these writings is, as befits his subject, dignified and serene, but enlivened by the occasional interruptions incident to the dialogue form.

To the professional student of ancient philosophy these treatises are of great importance chiefly because of the information they contain concerning the writings and doctrines of Greek philosophers whose works have been lost; to the student of literature they offer admirable examples of learned works in popular form, with all the charm of exquisite literary workmanship; and their influence upon later ages was so great that no one who is interested in the progress of human thought can disregard them. St. Augustine, and many other writers of the early Christian Church, acknowledge their indebtedness to them; they are the foundation of the speculative thought of the middle ages; and it is in great measure due to their influence that the Latin language has remained, almost to our own day, the great medium for the expression of philosophical and scientific speculation. Cicero made “the paths of the noblest learning” accessible not only to his Roman fellow citizens, but to countless generations of men of all lands. His noble purpose was accomplished more grandly than he ever hoped or dreamed. Let those who will, accuse him of shallowness and superficiality; mankind owes him an immeasurable debt of gratitude.