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

"For if it is allowed amongst the learned that Aratus, a man ignorant of astronomy, has treated of heaven and the constellations in extremely polished and excellent verses; if Nicander, 26of Colophon, a man totally unconnected with the country, has written well on rural affairs, with the aid of poetical talent, and not from understanding husbandry, what reason is there why an orator should not speak most eloquently on those matters of which he shall have gained a knowledge for a certain purpose and occasion? For the poet is nearly allied to the orator; being somewhat more restricted in numbers, but less restrained in the choice of words, yet in many kinds of embellishment his rival and almost equal; in one respect, assuredly, nearly the same, that he circumscribes or bounds his realm by no limits, but reserves to himself full right to range wherever he pleases with the same ease and liberty. For why did you say, Scaevola, 27that you would not endure, unless you were in my estate, my assertion, that the orator ought to be accomplished in every style of speaking, and in every part of polite learning? I should certainly not have said this if I had thought myself to be the orator whom I conceive in my imagination. But, as Gaius Lucilius used frequently to say (a man not very friendly to you, 28and on that account less close to me than he could wish, but a man of learning and good breeding), I am of this opinion, that no one is to be numbered among orators who is not thoroughly accomplished in all branches of knowledge requisite for a man of good breeding; and though we may not put forward such knowledge in conversation, yet it is apparent, and indeed evident, whether we are destitute of it, or have acquired it; as those who play ball-games do not exhibit, in playing, the gestures of the palaestra, but their movements indicate whether they have learned those exercises or are unacquainted with them; and as those who shape out anything, though they do not then exercise the art of painting, yet make it clear whether they can paint or not; so in orations to courts of justice, before the people, and in the senate, although other sciences have no peculiar place in them, yet is it easily proved whether he who speaks has only been exercised in the parade of declamation, or has devoted himself to oratory after having been instructed in all liberal knowledge."

Then Scaevola, smiling, said: "I will not struggle with you any longer, Crassus; for you have, by some artifice, made good what you asserted against me, so as to grant me whatever I refused to allow to the orator, and yet so as to wrest from me those very things again I know not how, and to transfer them to the orator as his property. 29When I went as praetor to Rhodes, and communicated to Apollonius, that famous instructor in this profession, what I had learned from Panaetius, Apollonius, as was his manner, ridiculed these matters, 30threw contempt upon philosophy, and made many other observations with less wisdom than wit; but your remarks were of such a kind as not to express contempt for any arts or sciences, but to admit that they are all attendants and handmaids of the orator; and if ever any one should comprehend them all, and the same person should add to that knowledge the powers of supremely elegant oratory, I cannot but say that he would be a man of high distinction and worthy of the greatest admiration. But if there should be such a one, or indeed has ever been, or can possibly be, you alone would be the person; who, not only in my judgment, but in that of all men, have hardly left to other orators (I speak it with deference to this company) any glory to be acquired. If, however, there is in yourself no deficiency of knowledge pertaining to judicial and political affairs, and yet you have not mastered all that additional learning which you assign to the complete orator, let us consider whether you do not attribute to him more than possibility and truth itself will allow." Here Crassus responded: "Remember that I have not been speaking of my own talents, but of those of the true orator. For what have I either learned or had a possibility of knowing, who entered upon pleading before I had any instruction; whom the pressure of business overtasked amidst the occupations of the forum, of canvassing, of public affairs, and the management of the cases of friends, before I could form any true notion of the importance of such great employments? But if there seem to you to be so much in me, to whom, though capacity, as you think, may not greatly have been wanting, yet to whom learning, leisure, and that keen application to study which is so necessary, have certainly been wanting, what do you think would be the case if those acquirements, which I have not gained, should be united to some greater genius than mine? How able, how great an orator, do you think, would he prove?"

Antonius then observed: "You prove to me, Crassus, what you propose; nor do I doubt that he will have a far greater fund of eloquence who shall have learned the reason and nature of everything and of all sciences. But, in the first place, this is difficult to be achieved, especially in such a life as ours and such occupations; and next, it is to be feared that we may, by such studies, be drawn away from our exercise and practice of speaking before the people and in the forum. The eloquence of those men whom you mentioned a little before, seems to me to be of a quite different sort, though they speak with grace and dignity, as well on the nature of things as on human life. Theirs is a neat and florid kind of language, but more adapted for parade and exercise in the schools, than for these tumults of the city and forum. For when I, who late in life, and then but lightly, touched upon Greek learning, was going as proconsul into Cilicia, and had arrived at Athens, I waited there several days on account of the difficulty of sailing; and as I had every day with me the most learned men, nearly the same that you have just now named, and a report, I know not how, had spread amongst them that I, like you, was involved in cases of great importance, every one, according to his abilities, took occasion to discourse upon the office and art of in orator. Some of them, as Mnesarchus himself, said, that those whom we call orators were nothing but a set of mechanics with glib and well-practised tongues, but that no one could be an orator but a man of true wisdom; and that eloquence itself, as it consisted in the art of speaking well, was a kind of virtue, 31and that he who possessed one virtue possessed all, and that virtues were in themselves equal and alike; and thus he who was eloquent possessed all virtues, and was a man of true wisdom. But their phraseology was intricate and dry, and quite unsuited to my taste. Charmadas indeed spoke much more diffusely on those topics; not that he delivered his own opinion (for it is the hereditary custom of every one in the Academy to take the part of opponents to all in their disputations), but what he chiefly signified was, that those who were called rhetoricians, and laid down rules for the art of speaking, understood nothing; and that no man could attain any command of eloquence who had not mastered the doctrines of the philosophers.

"Certain men of eloquence at Athens, versed in public affairs and judicial pleadings, disputed on the other side; among whom was Menedemus, lately my guest at Rome; but when he had observed that there is a sort of wisdom which is employed in inquiring into the methods of settling and managing governments, he, though a ready speaker, was promptly attacked by the other, 32a man of abundant learning, and of an almost incredible variety and copiousness of argument; who maintained that every portion of such wisdom must be derived from philosophy, and that whatever was established in a state concerning the immortal gods, the discipline of youth, justice, patience, temperance, moderation in everything, and other matters, without which states would either not subsist at all, or be corrupt in morals, was nowhere to be found in the petty treatises of the rhetoricians. For if those teachers of rhetoric included in their art such a multitude of the most important subjects, why, he asked, were their books crammed with rules about proems and perorations, and such trifles (for so he called them), while about the modelling of states, the composition of laws, about equity, justice, integrity, about mastering the appetites, and forming the morals of mankind, not one single syllable was to be found in their pages? Their precepts he ridiculed in such a manner, as to show that the teachers were not only destitute of the knowledge which they arrogated to themselves, but that they did not even know the proper art and method of speaking; for he thought that the principal business of an orator was, that he might appear to those to whom he spoke to be such as he would wish to appear (that this was to be attained by a life of good reputation, on which those teachers of rhetoric had laid down nothing in their precepts); and that the minds of the audience should be affected in such a manner as the orator would have them to be affected, an object, also, which could by no means be attained, unless the speaker understood by what methods, by what arguments, and by what sort of language the minds of men are moved in any particular direction; but that these matters were involved and concealed in the profoundest doctrines of philosophy, which these rhetoricians had not touched even with the extremity of their lips. These assertions Menedemus endeavoured to refute, but rather by authorities than by arguments; for, repeating from memory many noble passages from the orations of Demosthenes, he showed that that orator, while he swayed the minds of judges or of the people by his eloquence, was not ignorant by what means he attained his end, which Charmadas denied that any one could know without philosophy.