Roman Political Thought by Jed W Atkins

Author:Jed W Atkins
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9780521374651
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2018-03-31T04:00:00+00:00

Cicero on Rhetoric, Deliberation, and Judgment

Cicero thought hard about rhetoric throughout his life. He devoted the first of his theoretical writings to the topic, De inventione (On Invention) – a handbook that he would later dismiss as a crude work of his youth (de Orat. 1.5). His next work on the topic was his masterpiece, De oratore (On the Orator). Written in 55 bce as the first of a trilogy of Platonic-style dialogues that also included De republica and De legibus, De oratore presents a fictional conversation from 91 bce at the outset of the Social War and just a few years before the beginning of the civil wars that would end with Sulla’s dictatorship; its main characters featured two of the most accomplished orators of the day, Marcus Antonius and Lucius Crassus, Cicero’s teacher. A decade after composing De oratore, Cicero continued to deal with rhetoric in his works Brutus and Orator – the Brutus in particular provides an invaluable history of rhetoric and rhetoricians in Republican Rome. His final theoretical work, De officiis, also contains relevant material. While Cicero’s treatment of rhetoric, deliberation, and judgment matured, it is nonetheless possible to see a general approach to these issues emerging from De inventione, De oratore, Brutus, Orator, and De officiis. In these works, he grapples with some of rhetoric’s most longstanding criticisms.

Early in De inventione (1.6) Cicero establishes rhetoric as “part of political science” and articulates a crucial distinction between the function (officium) of rhetoric, to speak appropriately for persuasion, and the end (finis) of rhetoric, to actually persuade. The function and end of rhetoric do not always align. Just as a doctor’s function to use appropriate medical techniques to treat a patient might not result in healing, so the function of a rhetorician to find the appropriate means of persuasion might not lead to his audience being persuaded. Indeed, Antonius suggests in De oratore that the better the orator, the more profoundly he is aware of the potential gap between delivering a good speech and actually persuading one’s audience (1.120–22). Thus, one problem for persuasion is how to ensure that the orator’s function and end coincide.

A second set of problems raised by Cicero involves Plato’s concerns with the orator either manipulating or pandering to his audience. Indeed, Plato’s Gorgias was one of two Platonic dialogues (the Phaedrus is the other) that establishes the theoretical challenges to which the De oratore responds (Fantham 2004: ch. 3). The potential for manipulation is inherent in the power of oratory “to get a hold on assemblies of men, win their good will, direct their inclinations wherever the speaker wishes, or divert them from whatever he wishes” (1.30; cf. 1.202; 2.32, 176; trans. Rackham and Sutton, Loeb). The dialogue puts this dangerous capacity on the table early when one of the characters, Scaevola, challenges Crassus’ initial praise of rhetoric as essential for establishing and maintaining polities. On the contrary, Scaevola suggests, when orators succeed, people are “not so much convinced by the reasoning of the wise as snared by the speeches of the eloquent” (1.

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