Rhetoric

The Head Rots First

preterite Politics, Rhetoric, Rome

Done with the secondary sources: Benario’s Introduction, Dorey’s edited collection, and Mellor’s Tacitus. Syme’s magisterial two-volume work will have to wait until next summer, although I might do some JSTOR work within the next week or two, depending on how much time I find. I’ll say, though, that if you have any interest in ancient Rome, Tacitus is a wonderful read: his style glitters, especially (for English readers) in the Church and Broadribb translation, which only begins to capture the historian’s beautifully pointed brevity.

And Tacitus suits my left melancholia, writing of a time when “truth was regarded as treasonous” (Mellor 92). There are, certainly, truisms: “The lasting lesson of the Dialogue is that art and society are intertwined, and both depend on the structure of political life. It is a lesson that cultural critics have revived with great enthusiasm in our own time” (Mellor 19). Furthermore, “In our age of ‘disinformation,’ secrecy hardly seems extraordinary. Tiberius’s unforthcoming silence at meetings of the Senate is a form of control popular among Renaissance princes and modern business tycoons. Tyrants from political dictators to football coaches prefer to instill insecurity through control of information and calculated ambiguity” (Mellor 92). This, to me, seems a lesson that applies as well to the writings of Lawrence Lessig as it does to those of the proponents of composition’s critical pedagogy.

Mellor remarks that “Tacitus’s account of the first century of the Empire makes it clear that ‘private profit is preferred to the public interest.'” (59) We gain our words capital and capitalism from the Latin caput, capitis. It means “head”. We seem to have largely forgotten the Roman proverb that Of the fish, the head rots first.

So Much Better Now

preterite Rhetoric, Rome

In AD 65, Nero chose to believe the dream-vision of a man who told that great masses of gold lay under his land, and sent a massive expedition to recover the gold, which — as it was thought — would increase the imperial treasury. The passage is worth quoting at length.

“Nothing else at the time was the subject of the credulous gossip of the people, and of the very different conversations of thinking persons. It happened, too, that the quinquennial games were being celebrated for the second time, and the orators took from this same incident their chief materials for eulogies on the emperor. ‘Not only,’ they said, ‘were there the usual harvests, and the gold of the mine with its alloy, but the earth now teemed with new abundance, and wealth was thrust upon them by the bounty of the gods.’ These and other servile flatteries they invented, with consummate eloquence and equal sycophancy, confidently counting on the facility of his belief.” (344)

Of course, nothing was found, and “the expectation of riches was one of the causes of the poverty of the State” (344). And we should not at all think it appropriate to draw any sorts of parallels to contemporary notions of wealth thrust upon a nation by some mysterious providence, or the credulity of leaders who might believe in such things, or those whose agreeable public words might encourage them. The United States is, after all, a democracy, and we have not a ruler who thinks his own power supreme.
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Oratory and Terror

preterite Rhetoric, Rome

Tacitus points out that liberty fell with the coming of Augustus and the principate, but suggests that circumstances, still, were not so bad. People still had a fair degree of individual freedom, even into reign of Tiberius. But with the ascension of Sejanus, the ambitious and treacherous head of the Praetorian Guard, the terrors began. According to Tacitus, Sejanus secretly poisoned Drusus, the only son of Tiberius, so that he might have sole and unimpeded access as a counsellor to Tiberius. After the death of Drusus in 23 AD, the role of delatores, or political informants who stood to gain a portion of the estates of those upon whom they informed, grew considerably in Roman political life. As Tacitus remarks, “the informers, a class invented to destroy the commonwealth, and never enough controlled even by legal penalties, were stimulated by rewards” (138), and “every day a stronger and fiercer host of informers pursued its victims, without one alleviating circumstance” (156). Sejanus cultivated a wide network of these delatores, who he used to take out his numerous political enemies, “and the good will of Sejanus was to be gained only by a crime” (157). Tiberius, in 27 AD, retreated to his twelve villas on the island of Capri, leaving Sejanus effectively in charge of Rome, and “Never was Rome more distracted and terror-stricken. Meetings, conversations, the ear of friend and stranger were alike shunned; even things mute and lifeless, the very roofs and walls, were eyed with suspicion” (158).
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Why I Love Tacitus

preterite Rhetoric, Rome

Let me offer some background: Cornelius Tacitus was a successful politician and orator, about 20 years younger than Quintilian, who retired to write history after his consulship under the emperor Nerva. The stated intent of the Dialogus de oratoribus, as Tacitus indicates from the outset, is to explore the reasons for the decline of oratory. To this end, Tacitus sets up his four interlocutors — Maternus, Aper, Messalla, and Secundus — at the house of Maternus, in a situation clearly intended to echo Cicero’s dialogue on rhetoric. James Mayer and Michael Winterbottom both attest to the difficulties of dating the composition of the Dialogus: the best consensus available seems to be sometime between 101 and 104 AD, during the reign of Trajan, the second of the five “good” emperors (moviegoers: in Russell Crowe’s Gladiator role, Marcus Aurelius was the last of the five “good” emperors, succeeded by Commodus, about whom there was indeed a scandal involving a gladiator, if memory serves), though there are other arguments. In terms of form, Mayer points out that the Dialogus “comprises a trio of paired speeches. Each of the three interlocutors speak twice. The set speeches, six in all, have single themes, and are adversarial in form, since the dialogue parodies a trial. In each of the three pairs, the second is shorter” (17). However, Luce takes the same observation a step further, to point out that the form of the Dialogus comes directly out of Seneca the Elder

On Starting Tacitus

preterite Rhetoric, Rome

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.
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