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

Scaevola then observed with courtesy, as was always his manner, "I agree with Crassus as to other points (that I may not detract from the art or glory of Laelius, my father-in-law, or of my son-in-law here), 11but I am afraid, Crassus, that I cannot grant you these two points; one, that states were, as you said, originally established, and have often been preserved, by orators; the other, that, setting aside the forum, the assemblies of the people, the courts of judicature, and the senate-house, the orator is, as you pronounced, accomplished in every subject of conversation and learning. For who will concede to you, either that mankind, dispersed originally in mountains and woods, enclosed themselves in towns and walls, not so much from being convinced by the counsels of the wise, as from being charmed by the speeches of the eloquent? Or that other advantages, arising either from the establishment or preservation of states, were settled, not by wise and brave men, but by fluent and elegant speakers? Does Romulus seem to you to have assembled the shepherds, and those that flocked to him from all parts, or to have formed marriages with the Sabines, or to have repelled the power of the neighbouring people, by eloquence, and not by counsel and eminent wisdom? Is there any trace of eloquence apparent in Numa Pompilius, in Servius Tullius, or in the rest of our kings, from whom we have many excellent regulations for maintaining our government? After the kings were expelled (though we see that their expulsion was effected by the mind of Lucius Brutus, and not by his tongue), do we not perceive that all the subsequent transactions are full of wise counsel, but destitute of all mixture of eloquence? But if I should be inclined to adduce examples from our own and other states, I could cite more instances of mischief than of benefit done to public affairs by men of eminent eloquence; but, to omit others, I think, Crassus, that the most eloquent men I ever heard, except you two, 12were the Sempronii, Tiberius and Gaius, whose father { Gracchus }, a prudent and grave man, but by no means eloquent, on several other occasions, but especially when censor, was of the utmost service to the republic; and he, not by any faultless flow of speech, but by a word and a nod, transferred the freedmen into the city tribes; 13and, if he had not done so, we should now have no republic, which we still maintain with difficulty; but his sons, who were eloquent, and qualified for speaking by all the helps of nature and of learning, having found the state in a most flourishing condition, both through the counsels of their father, and the arms of their ancestors, brought their country, by means of their oratory, that most excellent ruler of states as you call it, to the verge of ruin.

"Were our ancient laws, and the customs of our ancestors; were the auspices, over which you, Crassus, and I preside with great security to the republic; were the religious rites and ceremonies; were the civil laws, the knowledge of which has long prevailed in our family, (and without any praise for eloquence,) either invented, or understood, or in any way ordered by the tribe of orators? I can remember that Servius Galba, a man of godlike power in speaking, as well as Marcus Aemilius Porcina, and Gnaeus Carbo himself, whom you defeated when you were but a youth, 14was ignorant of the laws, at a loss in the practices of our ancestors, and unlearned in civil jurisprudence; and, except you, Crassus, who, rather from your own inclination to study, than because it was any peculiar business of an orator, have learned the civil law from us, as I am sometimes ashamed to say, this generation of ours is ignorant of law.

"But what you assumed, as by a law of your own, in the last part of your speech, that an orator is able to speak fluently on any subject, I would not, if I were not here in your own estate, tolerate for a moment, but would head a party who should either oppose you by an interdict, 15or summon you to contend with them at law, for having so unceremoniously invaded the possessions of others. In the first place, all the Pythagoreans, and the followers of Democritus, would institute a suit against you, with the rest of the natural philosophers, each in his own department, men who are elegant and powerful speakers, with whom you could not contend on equal terms. 16Whole troops of other philosophers would assail you besides, even down from Socrates their origin and head, and would convince you that you had learned nothing about good and evil in life, nothing about the passions of the mind, nothing about the moral conduct of mankind, nothing about the proper course of life; they would show you that you have made no due inquiry after knowledge, and that you know nothing; and, when they had made an attack upon you altogether, then every sect would bring its separate action against you. The Academy would press you, and, whatever you asserted, force you to deny it. Our friends the Stoics would hold you entangled in the snares of their disputatious and questions. The Peripatetics would prove that those very aids and ornaments to speaking, which you consider the peculiar property of the orators, must be sought from themselves; and they would show you that Aristotle and Theophrastus have written not only better, but also far more copiously, on these subjects, than all the masters of the art of speaking. I say nothing of the mathematicians, the grammarians, the musicians, with whose sciences this art of speaking of yours is not connected by the least affinity. I think, therefore, Crassus, that such great and numerous professions ought not to be made. What you can effect is sufficiently great; namely, that in judicial matters the case which you plead shall seem the better and more probable; that in public assemblies, and in delivering opinions, your oratory shall have the most power to persuade; that, finally, you shall seem to the wise to speak with eloquence, and even to the simple to speak with truth. If you can do more than this, it will appear to me that it is not the orator, but Crassus himself that effects it by the force of talents peculiar to himself, and not common to other orators."

Crassus then replied, "I am not ignorant, Scaevola, that things of this sort are commonly asserted and maintained among the Greeks; for I listened to their greatest men, when I came to Athens as quaestor from Macedonia, 17and when the Academy was in a flourishing state, as it was represented in those days, for Charmadas, and Clitomachus, and Aeschines were in possession of it. There was also Metrodorus, who, with the others, had been a diligent hearer of the famous Carneades himself, a man beyond all others, as they told me, a most spirited and copious speaker. Mnesarchus, too, was in great esteem, a hearer of your friend Panaetius, and Diodorus, a pupil of Critolaus the Peripatetic; and there were many other famous men besides, highly distinguished in philosophy, by all of whom, as if with one voice, as I observed, the orator was repelled from the government of states, excluded from all learning and knowledge of great affairs, and degraded and thrust down into the courts of justice and petty assemblies, as into a workshop. But I neither assented to those men, nor to the originator of these disputations, and by far the most eloquent of them all, the eminently grave and oratorical Plato; whose Gorgias I then diligently read over at Athens with Charmadas; from which book I conceived the highest admiration of Plato, as he seemed to me to prove himself an eminent orator, even in ridiculing orators. A controversy indeed on the word orator has long disturbed the pedantic Greeks, who are fonder of argument than of truth. For if any one pronounces him to be an orator who can speak fluently only on law in general, or on judicial questions, or before the people, or in the senate, he must yet necessarily grant and allow him a variety of talents; for he cannot treat even of these matters with sufficient skill and accuracy without great attention to all public affairs, nor without a knowledge of laws, customs, and equity, nor without understanding the nature and manners of mankind; and to him who knows these things, without which no one can maintain even the most minute points in judicial pleadings, how much is wanting of the knowledge even of the most important affairs? But if you allow nothing to belong to the orator but to speak aptly, ornately, and copiously, how can he even attain these qualities without that knowledge which you do not allow him? for there can be no true merit in speaking, unless what is said is thoroughly understood by him who says it. If, therefore, the natural philosopher Democritus spoke with elegance, as he is reported to have spoken, and as it appears to me that he did speak, the matter on which he spoke belonged to the philosopher, but the graceful array of words is to be ascribed to the orator. And if Plato spoke divinely upon subjects most remote from civil controversies, as I grant that he did; if also Aristotle, and Theophrastus, and Carneades, were eloquent, and spoke with sweetness and grace on those matters which they discussed; let the subjects on which they spoke belong to other studies, but their speech itself, surely, is the peculiar offspring of that art of which we are now discoursing and inquiring. For we see that some have reasoned on the same subjects plainly and drily, as Chrysippus, whom they celebrate as the acutest of philosophers; nor is he on this account to be thought to have been deficient in philosophy, because he did not gain the talent of speaking from an art which is foreign to philosophy.