The Trial of Warren Hastings by Chiara Rolli;

Author:Chiara Rolli; [Rolli, Chiara]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781350112759
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Published: 2019-02-06T00:00:00+00:00

In the forum of Laodicea a cruel scene was enacted, which caused all the province of Asia profound unhappiness and distress: here the aged father led forth to execution, and there his son: the one for defending the purity of his children, the other for saving his father’s life and sister’s honour. Both wept, but neither for his own doom: the father for his son’s fate, the son for his father’s.134

Indeed, since antiquity Cicero was renowned as a creator of narratives that elicited empathic feelings by means of vivifying words. Quintilian refers to this scene as an example of the orator’s ability to ‘fan the flame of indignation throughout his account, and fill our eyes with tears’ when he ‘describes, or rather sets before our eyes, the father weeping for his son’s death and the son for his father’s’.135 ‘What more pitiful effect’ – the author of the Institutio Oratoria concludes – ‘could any Epilogue produce?’136

In spite of the undoubted similarities between Cicero’s and Burke’s recourse to sympathy, Burke’s ‘appealing to his audience’s native impulse to sympathize with affliction’, to use Richard Bourke’s expression, had a further aim, that is to say making Indian victims and remote suffering seem somehow familiar to the audience sitting in Westminster Hall.137 While Sicily was, in fact, relatively close to Rome – in order to collect evidence against Verres, Cicero went to the island and made (or so he claims) an almost complete tour of it in fifty days138 – to a British audience, India was a far away, exotic land. This should not be surprising, considering that at the end of the eighteenth century it took several months to reach Indian shores from England.

From this perspective, Cicero and Burke appear to differ significantly. On the one hand, the Roman orator must have devoted a considerable amount of energy and physical effort to his condensed tour of Sicily, as he incessantly stresses in the Actio Prima, through the repetition of the personal pronoun ego, ‘I’ (normally omitted in Latin) and the possessive adjective meus, ‘my’.139 On the other, as I mentioned in Chapter 2, the Anglo-Irish orator never visited the Indian subcontinent. And yet he is very keen on emphasizing his capacity to gather a body of evidence ‘such as cannot leave the least doubt […] of the facts’ (p. 276). As much as Cicero draws attention to his own persona, so does Burke highlight his personal ability to collect substantial evidence against Hastings, in spite of the latter’s influence and powerful position:

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