I’ve gotten up through Book III of the Annals of the imperial Roman historian Tacitus. A couple years ago, I read the Dialogus de Oratoribus for my exams, and loved it, and the more secondary material I’ve read on him, the more I want to know. Composition has completely ignored him, choosing to focus — from the Romans — on Cicero and on the starry-eyed (and frequently blind to political context) educational-theory idealism of Quintilian. Tacitus is much more dark and spiky and gloomy than either of the two, and has a great deal to say about the uses and abuses of rhetorical and imperial power that Quintilian simply ignored. Still, to cut comp some slack, I think he’s largely ignored because he’s a historian rather than a rhetorician or an educational theorist. However, he does have a great deal to say — by implication — about rhetoric, and about the contexts for rhetoric, and what he has to say is worth listening to.
First, let me point out that his style is sharp, prickly, and epigrammatic. He piles participles upon participles, and the translation by Alfred John Church and William Jackson Brodribb makes it clear to an intermediate-level Latin student like myself that he trains dependent clause after dependent clause. Those who read Latin with considerably more skill than I still call him “crabbed” and “difficult” and “terse” — and yet his style, even in the English translation, is unmistakable, and pointedly idiosyncratic. As my good friend the classics scholar and teacher says: “He goes a long way between verbs.” I’ve got a Loeb edition (I dearly love those little red books) of the Dialogus, and, well, one look at the left-side Latin makes me realize how rusty my tranlation skills are.
So perhaps some excerpts from the English version will give a little sense of the historian’s sensibilities. Tacitus writes of Tiberius, whose reign followed that of the deified Augustus (Julius Caesar’s heir), that “speech was restricted and perilous under an emperor who feared freedom while he hated sycophancy” (Annales II.87). Furthermore, concerning the practices of the delatores — informers who told the emperor of treason, and stood to gain a portion of the estate of the accused should he be found guilty — Tacitus writes “there was an increase in the number of persons imperilled, for every household was undermined by the insinuations of the informers; and now the country suffered from its laws, as it had hitherto suffered from its vices” (Annales III.26), which he takes as a starting point for a philosophical rumination on the nature of law, vice, and restriction.
And my favorite quotation so far, which I’ll quote at length, since it gives some insight to the historian’s motivations: “My purpose is not to relate at length every motion, but only such as were conspicuous for excellence or notorious for infamy. This I regard as history’s highest function, to let no worthy action be uncommemorated, and to hold out the reprobation of posterity as a terror to evil words and deeds. So corrupted indeed and debased was that age by sycophancy that not only the foremost citizens who were forced to save their grandeur by servility, but every ex-consul, most of the ex-praetors and a host of inferior senators would rise in eager rivalry to propose shameful and preposterous motions. Tradition says that Tiberius as often as he left the Senate House used to exclaim in Greek, ‘How ready these men are to be slaves.’ Clearly, even he, with his dislike of public freedom, was disgusted at the abject abasement of his creatures” (117). I’m almost tempted here to put in a link to the blind sycophancy of Little Green Footballs — but, well, no.
Still, there’s a reason for the reference: rhetoric scholar Richard Leo Enos, in Roman Rhetoric: Revolution and the Greek Influence, writes that — after the death of Cicero — “In spite of the imperial patronage of rhetoric and its popularity the discipline did come under attack” to the point where it “had lost its relevance and now concerned itself with self-aggrandizement” (Enos 99). I look at the contemporary functions of political weblogs — trolling, flaming, or uncritical univocity, whether on the right or the left — and I wonder, in an increasingly polarized political climate, what rhetoric can actually do.
Enos also notes that “historians of rhetoric — past and present — mark the death of Cicero as both the end of the Republic and the end of rhetoric as a political force in Roman society. The stabilization of politics and society under the Augustan Principate correspondingly signals a shift of rhetoric from a source of power through free speech to an educational subject, facilitating learning and synonymous with the acquisition of literacy and subsequently culture” (36). When we connect this to historian Carlin Barton’s thesis that the increased importance of the public display of emotion as Rome moved from republic to empire, particularly as manifested in a sense of shame (compare to our contemporary post-Freudian concerns with guilt), is what drove the inner emotional lives of Romans, the connection between culture and rhetoric gets a little scary. Barton suggests that the outer lives of the Romans drove their inner lives. The implication from Enos, perhaps confirmed by Seneca and Tacitus, is that rhetoric moved from the public to the private stage.
How like the Romans are we, and where might our rhetorics take us?
I haven’t read Tacitus (yet), but I have read De Oratore, De Officiis, and Institutio Oratoria. When I had to decide whether to put Cicero or Quintilian on my prelims reading list, it was no contest. And do you know that most people in my stage of the program chose Quintilian?! They don’t know what they’re missing.
What’s really fun is seeing Cicero apply his rhetorical theory in the orations. The Pro Milone, In Catilinam, Pro Caelio, and Pro Ligario are all absolutely masterful. It seems to me that Cicero is all about rhetoric, and the politics that accompany rhetoric, while Quintilian is all about education — and, as an imperially-appointed “chair” of rhetoric in an age when you had to be very careful about speaking out, he didn’t much talk about politics.
On the other hand, the “serious, political” rhetoric of Cicero could really only apply to a very tiny fraction of the Roman population, principally elite men while the merely educational Qunitilian (and the formulaic and derivative treatment of rhetoric which he represents) touched the lives of virtually every Roman citizen and their families, directly or indirectly, by enculturating them in a manner of thought, speech and action that reveals itself in the style of Tacitus and the dreams of Artemidorus. I wouldn’t want to have to pick between the two, but I could find lots of reasons to prefer the cultural ubiquity of Q to the political ascendancy of C.
Jim, I’ll certainly agree with you (mostly) on the broad influence of Quintilian, and how that broad influence in terms of a systematic and practical theory of education is essential to composition’s understanding of itself as a discipline. As far as the relevance of classical Rome to rhet/comp as a field goes, Quintilian’s importance can’t be overstated. I’ll quibble a bit, though, about “virtually every citizen”, since Quintilian’s school and the practice of rhetorical education was reserved (as acknowledged by Bonner, if memory serves, and others) for the wealthier classes. And as I think you’re implying with “directly or indirectly”, we all know that there was no rhetorical education for women in ancient Rome. (There’s also the minor quibble that Quintilian really had no influence whatsoever on the style of Tacitus, except as someone for Tacitus to sharply critique with some of his comments in the Dialogus: they’re practically polar opposites.)
I’ll also agree that the court cases Cicero argued often had to do with the concerns of the boni, and in that had little relevance to the lives of the lower classes. However, revolution was a huge concern for Rome, and the profound loss of individual freedom associated with the turn from republic to empire affected every citizen — and that’s what the Philippics were about, and that’s what the In Catilinam was about, and the concentration of power in the hands of a sole individual is a subtext impossible to ignore in Pro Ligario and the other Caesarean orations. Furthermore, the Verrines (or at least the one that was actually delivered) were of profound imporance to all the citizens of Sicily. So for his political and judicial rhetoric, I don’t think Cicero can be so easily discounted in terms of relevance.
Furthermore, while Quintilian certainly put down in writing the system of rhetorical instruction that the Romans inherited and refined from the Greeks (as is clear in Cicero’s juvenile De Inventione and in the debt he acknowledges to Aristotle’s Rhetoric), let’s not forget that Cicero — building on the ideas of Isocrates — pretty much invented what we now know as the concept of a liberal education.
I completely agree with you that I’d hate to have to choose between them — but y’know, I enjoy reading Cicero and Tacitus, and the fact that the sheer gorgeousness of their prose outshines that of every other Roman writer makes grappling with their ideas only more pleasant. I think that’s part of what Clancy and I were getting at: the Institutio Oratoria, as relevant as the ideas are, is a bit of a slog. And, again, apolitical, which — when we’re talking about someone who wrote in the time of Vespasian and Domitian (!) — is deeply troubling, to say the least. While many today differ on the place of politics in the classroom, I firmly believe that a discipline associated with public discourse can ill afford to wholly ignore political concerns.