Tacitus (Donne)/Chapter 9
CHAPTER IX.
ON THE ORATORS; OR THE CAUSES OF THE DECLINE OF ELOQUENCE.
'The Dialogue on the Orators' is now generally admitted to have been written by Tacitus, although formerly it was ascribed to others—among them to Quintilian or the younger Pliny. The grounds of doubt arose from a fancied dissimilarity in its style to that of the unquestioned works of the historian. But there is nothing in the language of this dialogue that need disentitle it to a place among his writings. On the contrary, it displays several marks of his authorship, as well in the construction of sentences as in a sarcastic turn of mind. The 'Annals' are his latest, the 'Dialogue' is probably his earliest composition. The latter is more diffuse, the former more condensed; and this would naturally be the difference between the style of a young and that of a mature and perhaps aged writer.
The time at which Tacitus was training himself for the bar was one of conflict between those who desired to return to a healthier period of eloquence—and especially to the era of Hortensius and Cicero—and those who clung to modern fashion, maintaining that it was better suited to their more polished age. The Ciceronian manner, the former argued, attained to the highest perfection of a natural style. They applauded the graceful and often the dignified character of his sentences, the richness of his diction, his art in opening a speech, his felicity in shaping it, and the force or splendour of his perorations. Yet these virtues, it was maintained by the latter, would be accounted tedious by a generation of jurors and hearers less patient than their forefathers were of long sentences and artistically-constructed periods. The champions of the new fashion had some ground for their opinion. Not only are the races of men like leaves on trees, but their tastes also. The pulpit eloquence of Isaac Barrow might perplex rather than edify a modern congregation; the speeches of Chesterfield or Burke would more astonish than persuade a House of Commons at the present day. Sensational speeches were, in the earlier years of Tacitus, as much in vogue as sensational plays and novels are now in Britain. The fashion in style set in great measure by Seneca, and against which Quintilian, while admitting that author's great gifts, so warmly protested, affected the language of the bar as well as that of philosophy or literature. In Nero's time, when this half-prosaic, half-poetic diction reached its height, nothing would go down with those who frequented law courts or lecture rooms except short, sharp, epigrammatically-turned sentences. Commonplace thoughts, in order to make them appear new, rare, or ingenious, were twisted into innumerable forms, for the construction of which professors of rhetoric drew up rules and supplied examples. The Controversial and Suasorian essays of the oldest of the Senecas, who might have listened to Cicero himself, are a sort of recipe-books for a culinary process of dealing with eloquence. A better day, however, was at hand. Tacitus marks as the period of the greatest sensual excesses in Rome that which separates the battle of Actium from the accession of Nerva; and he speaks of Vespasian's reign as the beginning of an epoch of improvement in morals and of amended taste in literature. The 'Dialogue on the Orators,' composed, if not made public, in the fifth year of that emperor's reign, displays the leading features of the controversy between the reformers and the corrupters of the Latin language. The advocates of a simpler and less artificial manner did not gain a complete victory, nor their opponents suffer an entire defeat. Even Quintilian, who, as he himself tells us, was the first to uplift his voice against a depraved fashion in writing and speaking, does not recommend a complete return to the theory or practice of the Ciceronian time. And he judged wisely and well. No sensible critic of the present moment would advise a recurrence to the language of Bacon or Addison. In his own writings Quintilian obeyed the laws which he prescribed to his pupils and readers. But although he set the example of a better form, he could not rekindle the spirit and passionate heat of the Catilinarian and Philippic orations. Some of the vices of the Neronian period were abandoned; yet even Tacitus himself is not quite free from the blemish of epigrammatic sentences, while in the verse of the time the reaction was even less complete.
Besides its proper subject, the decline and the possible revival of Roman oratory, the 'Dialogue' contains much information on literature generally. This will appear from a short sketch of its plot and dramatis personæ. Like many of Cicero's treatises on oratory and philosophy, it professes to be a reminiscence of a conversation heard by the author himself, and reported by him afterwards to a friend. "You have often inquired of me, my good friend Justus Fabius," says Tacitus, "how and whence it comes that, while former times display a series of orators conspicuous for ability and their renown, the present age, devoid of them, and without any claim to the praise of eloquence, has scarcely retained even the name of an orator. By that appellation we understand only men of a bygone time; whereas in these days eloquent men are entitled speakers, pleaders, advocates, patrons; in short, everything else except—orators."
The dispute, like so many controversies, polemical or political, before and since, began upon a question not very neatly related to it. Caius Curiatius Maternus, a promising young barrister, was giving much anxiety to his friend Marcus Aper, a pleader then in high repute, by his passion for writing plays and by his neglect of the weightier matters of the law. In the first place, Maternus could not serve two masters. If he went on at his present rate in such unprofitable studies, he must lose many good clients. "Your friends," said Aper to him, "expect your patronage; the colonies invoke your aid; and municipal cities call for you in the courts. Such practice as you could command would soon make you rich. Think, I beseech you, what pretty pickings Eprius Marcellus and Vibius Crispus have already made by their profession, and no one knows who their fathers were; though everybody is aware that they were as poor as rats a few years ago. But neglect of your business is not the worst of it. Those blessed tragedies of yours will, by Hercules! get you into a serious scrape. Yesterday you read to an audience your last tragedy, 'Cato.' You must have heard already, for all the town is talking of it, that this piece is not relished in high quarters. Folks are saying that you have thought much more of your hero than of yourself. Him, a grumbling old commonwealth man, you have drawn in the brightest colours. And what is Cato to you, or you to Cato, that you should run the risk of being sent on his account into exile, to starve on some barren island?"
Aper was accompanied on this visit by another ornament of the Forum, and a common friend of Maternus and himself—Julius Secundus, an orator, of whom Quintilian entertained great expectations. They were not fulfilled, for Julius died young. The remonstrances of Aper were heard with equanimity by Maternus. "I was quite prepared for this," he says; "to differ on this subject is grown familiar to us both. You wage incessant war against poetry: I consider it a client whom I am bound to defend. But it happens, luckily, that on this occasion a competent arbiter of our standing feud is present. Our friend Secundus, after hearing what we have each to say, will either enjoin me to give up writing verses, or, as I hope, will encourage me to abandon a profession I am weary of, and to pursue one in which I delight." Secundus doubts whether Aper will accept him as an umpire. "To tell you the truth," he says, "though I cannot myself make verses, I feel a partiality for those who can, especially for that excellent man and no less excellent poet, Saleius Bassus."
"Hang Saleius Bassus," retorts Aper, "and all his generation! Let him and all of his sort spin verses as they list without interruption. His is not a case in point. He could not make tenpence a-day at the bar. But Maternus is something more and far better than a verse-monger. Why should he waste precious hours on his 'Cato' or 'Thyestes,' his 'Agamemnon' or 'Domitius?'—he who is formed by nature to reach the heights of manly eloquence. As for your Saleius Bassus, it was very kind in Vespasian to give him lately fifty pounds; nay, the more so because our Cæsar is not usually so free of his money. But why should you, Maternus, who can earn thrice that sum when the courts are sitting, desire to put yourself on a level with an imperial pensioner? At the best, poets are very slenderly paid." And Aper then goes on pointing out the privations and difficulties of the worshippers of the Muses, much in the strain of Johnson's lines:―
And pause awhile from letters to be wise;
There mark what ills the scholar's life assail—
Toil, envy, want, the patron, and the jail."
The vehement attack on poets by Aper is rebutted with great energy by Maternus; but their combat is but a skirmish preparatory to the main battle that follows, on the comparative merits of the old and the new schools of oratory. And now a fourth speaker is introduced in the 'Dialogue'—Vipstanus Messala, a soldier, and a pleader of great reputation, to whom Tacitus in his 'History' pays this singular tribute, that he was the only man of note who went over from Vitellius to Vespasian from honest motives. It is now seen that the 'Dialogue on Oratory' is constructed on the plan often adopted by Cicero in similar treatises. In the first place, the subject of the conversation is said to have been heard in his youth by the author of it—and in that respect Cicero follows the example set him by Plato; next, there is a little preliminary discussion that soon branches out into the main argument; thirdly, a friend joins the company after the debate has made some progress; and lastly, Aper in Tacitus, and Antonius in Cicero, are nearly counterparts of each other in the character of their eloquence. It was said of Aper at the time that he owed his fame, not to art or literature, but to the natural powers of a vigorous understanding; and Antonius is made to say that "his fame would be the greater if he were regarded as a man wholly illiterate and void of education." In the chapter on his 'Life,' it was only possible to conjecture what was the training of Tacitus at the bar; but the dialogue now under examination may help us to perceive that he was a student of the oratorical works of the Ciceronian age, while his 'Annals' afford many tokens of his having been well versed in the poetry of Virgil, and perhaps also in that of many other writers of the Augustan period, Livy included.
"English Readers" cannot be expected to take any lively interest in the respective merits of the old or new Roman orators. But they may not object to a brief sketch of what was thought to constitute a liberal education in Tacitus's day. The future historian may often be traced in the opinions of the juvenile author of this 'Dialogue.' His allusions to the bygone time are frequently a covert satire on the age in which he wrote. Some of the following extracts will show that even if Juvenal and Tacitus never met each other amid the vast population of Rome—where the one probably rented a fifth-story chamber, and the other a well-appointed house—yet that their views of the general corruption of literature, as well as of morals, coincided as closely as if they had sat at the same table, or exchanged opinions in a library or a lecture-room.
Messala takes the side of the older orators against Aper, the advocate of the new eloquence. He says: "Before entering on the subject of the decay of eloquence, it will not be useless to look back to the system of education that prevailed in former times, and to the strict discipline of our ancestors, in a point of so much moment as the formation of youth. In the times to which I now refer, the son of every family was the legitimate offspring of a virtuous mother." This not very charitable, yet perhaps not untrue, statement, is in the very spirit of Juvenal and Martial, who "knew the town" as well as the Higgins of Pope did. "The infant, as soon as born, was not consigned to the mean dwelling of a hireling nurse, but was reared and cherished in the bosom of a tender parent. To regulate all household affairs and attend to her children was, at that time, the highest commendation of women. Some kinswoman of mature years, and distinguished by the parity of her life, was chosen for the guardian of the child. In her presence no indecent word or act was permitted. To her was intrusted the direction of the studies of her charge; nay more, his sports and recreations also, so that all might be conducted with modesty and respect for virtue. The tendency of this strict discipline was, that the nature of the young being trained up in purity and honesty, and not being warped by evil desires, they with their whole heart embraced sound instruction, and were fitted for their future calling, whether their inclination led them to a military career, to the knowledge of law, or the pursuits of eloquence."
"Whereas, nowadays," Messala continues, "an infant, as soon as it is born, is handed over to some paltry Greek maid-servant, who has for her assistants one or more of the most rascally of the slaves, utterly unfit for any grave business. By their idle tales and blunders the tender and uninstructed minds of the children are stained, and not a soul in the house cares what he does or says before his young master. Nay, the parents themselves do not accustom them to honesty or modesty, but make them familiar with ribaldry and chattering, so that m time they grow shameless and void of respect for themselves or others. Vices that may be said to be proper and peculiar to this city, it seems to me, they catch before their birth—such as a passion for stage-plays, gladiators, and horse-races. What room for honest pursuits is left for minds so occupied, or rather blockaded?"
This was a worshipful system of education to begin with, and it did not improve with the removal of the children from the nursery to school. No pains were taken to cultivate taste by reading the best authors; history and every branch of useful knowledge were neglected; even the study of men and manners was ignored. Preceptors were chosen at hap-hazard, and all educational duties supposed to be fulfilled, provided only there was a decent form of instruction, in which the tutor was often incompetent to give, and the pupil reluctant to gain, any useful knowledge. After such a scholastic programme as this, we are prepared for Messala's saying—"It is notorious that eloquence, with the rest of the polite arts, has lost its former lustre, yet these evil effects are not owing to a dearth of men or decay of ability. The true causes of this decadence are the apathy of parents, the ignorance of instructors, the total neglect of sound discipline. The mischief began at Rome, it has overrun Italy, and is now rapidly pervading the provinces."
Messala proceeds to contrast the education of the young orator in his time with that which had prevailed in a better age. He describes the toil, the discipling, the exercises by which the aspirant to public honours was trained for his profession. His home-education had been sound. When arrived at the proper age for higher instruction, he was taken by his father, or some near relative, his guardian, to some eminent orator of the day. He attended his instructor on all occasions. With him he visited the Forum, listened to his pleadings in the courts of justice, noted in his books or his memory his public harangues, marked him when moved by passion, or when calmly stating his case, and admired his art or facility when the subject required a prompt and unstudied reply. Thus on the field of battle he learned the rudiments of rhetorical warfare. Nor did he confine his attention to his patron alone; he watched diligently the methods and the habits of other speakers, and so was the better able to distinguish between excellences and defects, or al least to select the species of eloquence most adapted to his own powers or temperament. This practical education was in strict conformity with the general character of the Roman mind. The greatest of Latin poets had told his countrymen that to other nations had been granted, in a measure denied to them, the arts of the sculptor and the painter, of the natural philosopher, nay, even of eloquence itself. But the lot assigned by the poet to the Roman people was to govern the human race, to lower the haughty, to spare the humble, to promote and cherish peace; and among the instruments by which their destiny would be accomplished, a liberal eloquence was not the least effective.
The discipline of the orator, indeed, was scarcely less severe in the good old times than that which qualified the soldier for his duties in war. "Military exercises were the important and unremitted object of the discipline of the legions. The recruits and young soldiers were constantly trained, both in the morning and in the evening, nor was age or knowledge allowed to excuse the veterans from the daily repetition of what they had completely learnt."[1] Even Cicero, when at the zenith of his fame, did not permit himself to forego the exercises of his assiduous youth; and the wary Augustus prepared for his speeches to the senate by declamation in his closet. "The orator," proceeds Messala, "was a real combatant matched and mated with an earnest antagonist, not a gladiator in a mock contest, fighting for a prize. His was a struggle for victory, before an audience always changing, yet always 'frequent and full.'" He addressed enemies as well as admirers, and both were severe critics of his merits or defects. In this clash of opinions the true orator flourished. He did not depend on the plaudits of the benches occupied by his friends only, but on the cheers extorted by him from those on which his opponents, and perhaps his personal or political foes, were seated; and the best of suffrages is reluctant applause.
Messala then goes on to describe the modern system of oratorical training. "Our young men," he says, with palpable indignation, "are taken to the schools of professors, who call themselves rhetoricians, whereas a more fitting name for them would be 'impostors.' Such gentry as now educate our youth were, in better times than ours, silenced by the censors, and ordered, as Cicero tells us, 'to shut up their schools of impudence.' But no such wholesome discipline exists now, and our students are put in charge of oratorical mountebanks." He cannot decide whether the lecture-room itself, the company frequenting it, or the course of instruction employed, were the more prejudicial to the pupils, at least to such of them as have any true vocation for the art and mystery of eloquence. Boy-novices were set to declaim to boys, young men to young men. Ignorant speakers addressed hearers as ignorant as themselves. The very subjects on which they wrangled were useless. "They are of two kinds—persuasive or controversial. The former, supposed to be the easier, is usually assigned to the younger scholars; the latter is reserved for the more advanced. But for the real business of the bar, and for the objects of the advocate, both sorts are equally idle. No judge, deserving the name, would be persuaded, no opponent confuted, by these windy declamations. The topics chosen for exercise are alike remote from truth or even probability. 'Is it lawful to slay a tyrant? if not, what should be the punishment of the tyrannicide?' 'What rites and ceremonies are proper to be used during a raging pestilence?' 'If married women break their nuptial vows, or if maidens are wronged, how ought the adulterer or the seducer to be dealt with?' Such is the skimble-scamble stuff with which our budding orators are now crammed! Even in the lecture-room these themes are hackneyed, while in the courts of justice they are never debated. The language in which such frivolous exercises are written is on a par with the emptiness of the questions. It is unnatural, gaudy, bombastic. The superstructure is answerable to the foundation. In such 'schools of impudence' our lads may be taught to chatter, but not to speak either in the senate or at the bar."[2]
The close of Messala's portion in the 'Dialogue,' and the earlier sections of that of Maternus, are unfortunately lost. He is made to discourse at the end, as he is reported to have done at first, with a fervour that seemed to lift him above himself. He evidently in part agreed with the defender of the moderns, Marcus Aper, and partly with the defender of the ancients, Vipstanus Messala. That we no longer produce such orators as adorned the commonwealth, as well in its decline as in its "most high and palmy state," is owing to the character of the times more than to the men living in them. Rarely does a quiet, settled, and uniform government afford an opportunity for eloquence of the highest order. "Great"—that is, passionate "eloquence"—such as pervades the Verrine, Catilinarian, and Philippic speeches of Cicero—"like flame, demands nourishment." Political commotions excite it; and the longer it burns the brighter its light. The spirit of the older speakers was fed by the turbulence of their age. He who could wield to his will a fierce democracy became its idol. Then every grade of society took a deep interest in public events and public men. Then few were content to give a silent vote in the senate, or shrank from the turmoil of the hustings and the Forum. In the conflict of parties, laws were multiplied; and scarcely a bill became law without a fierce opposition to it. The leading chiefs were the favourite demagogues. The magistrates were often engaged entire days in debate; and sometimes it was midnight before the assembly broke up. The people and the senate were generally at war with each ether: the nobles themselves were divided by constant factions: even members of the same house were at variance; and no citizen was so revered as to be exempt from impeachment. Hence that flame of eloquence which blazed continually under the republican government; and hence the fuel that kept it alive.
"And remember," continues Maternus, "the position of the orator at that time." His importance and influence were not confined to the senate or the people. Foreign nations courted his friendship. Prætors and proconsuls going out to their provinces, or returning from them, did him homage. He could not stir from his house without observation and an obsequious crowd following him to the rostrum or the senate-house, or to the city gates if he were going to his country seat. Even if he were not entitled to lictors or fasces at the moment, yet as a private citizen his opinion influenced gowned senators; and his fame was well known even to the inhabitants of garrets and cellars, who picked up the crumbs from rich men's tables, when the sacrifices in the temples did not afford them meat, or the measure of corn supplied by the State was exhausted.
Maternus admits that the forms of proceeding and the rules of practice in his time were more conducive than those observed by the ancients to the purposes of truth and justice. There was then more freedom for the orator. He was not, as he is now, limited to a few hours in the delivery of a speech. If his genius prompted him, he might expatiate on the case in hand; if it suited his convenience, he might adjourn it. Maternus descends to minute particulars, though he thinks it not unlikely that his hearers will smile at them. The Greek or Roman orator was always in some degree an actor also. Hortensius, Cicero's most formidable antagonist, was very particular as to the plaits in his gown and the arrangement of his hair; and Caius Gracchus modulated his voice by a sort of pitch-pipe sounded when he spoke in too high or too low a key by an attendant slave. "But such niceties," says Maternus, "are no longer observed. The very robe now worn at the bar has an air of meanness. It sits close to the person: it renders graceful gestures impossible. Again, the courts of judicature are unfavourable to the speaker in them. Causes are now heard in small narrow rooms, in which it is not necessary to raise the voice, or to display energy in pleading. Whereas the true orator, like a noble horse, requires liberty and space. Before a few hearers his spirit droops: in a confined room his genius flags."
He winds up his argument with some timely and sound consolation to the men of his time. Oratory may be on the decline; but have we nothing to counterbalance the loss of it? Would we, if the choice were offered to us, return to the days when Rome exhibited one perpetual scene of contention? Could all the eloquence of the Gracchi atone for the laws which they imposed on their country? Did the fame that Cicero won by eloquence compensate him for the tragic end to which his orations against Marcus Antonius brought him? Believe me, my excellent friends, had it been your lot to live under the old republic, you would have been as famous, and perhaps as much harassed by anxiety and envy, as the orators you so much admire; and had it been their lot to live in these piping times of peace, the heroes of the bar would have acquiesced in the tranquillity we enjoy. It may not be easy—it may be impossible—for us to attain a great and splendid reputation as orators; but we can at least be content with the calmer tenor of the present age, and applaud, without envying, our ancestors.
It would be idle to speculate whether Tacitus imaged himself in the characters of Julius Secundus, of Vipstanus Messala, or of Curiatius Maternus. The speeches he ascribes to them respectively display oratorical qualities of a very high order, especially when we remember that the 'Dialogue' is one of his earliest works.
- ↑ Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall,' ch. i.
- ↑ Juvenal, often the best commentator on his contemporary, Tacitus, notices the depraved fashion of these mock discourses:—
"But Vectius, O that adamantine frame!
Has opened a Rhetoric school of no mean fame,
Where boys, in long succession, rave and storm
At tyranny, through many a crowded form.
The exercise he lately, sitting, read,
Standing, distracts his miserable head,
And every day, and every hour, affords
The self-same subject, in the self-same words," &c.
—Sat. vii. [Gifford].