Tacitus · a new plain-English translation from the original language
1| You often ask me, Justus Fabius, why earlier ages flourished with so many great orators, brilliant and famous, while our own age is barren, stripped of the glory of eloquence, and barely holds onto the name "orator" at all -- for we reserve that title for the ancients; the skilled talkers of our own day are called pleaders, advocates, counsel, anything but orators. To answer your question and take up the weight of so large a problem -- where either our talents must be judged poor, if we can't match the old orators, or our taste must be judged corrupt, if we won't -- I'd hardly dare do it in my own words. But I don't have to: I can repeat a conversation I heard as a young man, among some of the most eloquent men of our time, who worked through this very question. So what's needed isn't invention but memory -- to recall what these outstanding men worked out with such subtlety and stated with such weight, each bringing a different but plausible view shaped by his own mind and temperament. I'll follow the same order, the same reasoning, keeping the shape of the debate as it happened. And there was indeed someone who took the opposite side, and -- and after much harrying and ridiculing of antiquity, ranked the eloquence of our age above the genius of the ancients.
2| The day after Curiatius Maternus gave a reading of his Cato, word went round that he had offended some powerful people, since in shaping that tragedy's plot he seemed to have forgotten himself and thought only of Cato. While the city was buzzing with this, Marcus Aper and Julius Secundus came to see him -- the two most celebrated talents of our courts at the time. I attended both of them eagerly, not only in the courts but at home and in public, following them around with a young man's passionate enthusiasm, eager to catch even their private talk, their arguments, the secrets of a style they kept for themselves -- though plenty of people unkindly assumed that Secundus lacked fluency, and that Aper owed his reputation for eloquence to raw talent and force of nature rather than to training and learning. In fact Secundus's speech was clear, precise, and -- as much as was needed -- flowing; and Aper, steeped in every kind of learning, merely affected contempt for literature rather than lacking it, as though he'd win more credit for hard work if his gift seemed to stand on nothing but itself, with no help from other arts.
3| So when we walked into Maternus's room, we found him sitting there, holding in his hands the very book he had read aloud the day before. Secundus said, 'Maternus, scare you off from cherishing the offense your Cato has given? Or is that why you've picked the book back up -- to go over it more carefully, cut whatever gave a hostile reading its opening, and publish a Cato that's not better, maybe, but at least safer?' 'Read it,' Maternus said, 'and you'll see what Maternus owed to himself, and you'll recognize what you heard. And if Cato left anything unsaid, my Thyestes will say it at the next reading -- I've already planned that tragedy out and shaped it in my mind. That's exactly why I'm rushing to finish publishing this one: so that once this piece is off my hands, I can throw myself entirely into the new one.' 'So these tragedies still don't satisfy you,' said Aper, 'that you drop your speeches and courtroom work to spend all your time first on a Medea, and now on a Thyestes -- when so many friends' cases, so many colonies and towns depending on you as their patron, are calling you to the forum? You'd barely have time for them even without inventing new work for yourself -- piling a Domitius and a Cato, that is, our own history and Roman names, onto Greek-style fables.'
4| Maternus answered: 'Your severity would rattle me, if this back-and-forth between us hadn't become almost a habit by now. You never let up hounding the poets, and I, whom you accuse of laziness in taking cases, keep up my daily defense of poetry against you. So I'm glad we've got a judge here -- one who can either forbid me from writing verse ever again, or, as I've long hoped, use his own authority to push me to drop the narrow confines of courtroom cases -- where I've already sweated more than enough -- and cultivate that more sacred, more majestic form of eloquence.'
5| 'Before Aper can object to me as judge,' said Secundus, 'let me do what honest, fair-minded judges do: excuse myself from cases where it's obvious that favor tips the scale for one side. Who doesn't know that no one is closer to me, in friendship and constant companionship, than Saleius Bassus -- as fine a man as he is a complete poet? So if poetry is on trial, I can't think of a richer defendant to point to.' 'Let Saleius Bassus rest easy,' said Aper, 'and anyone else who nurses a love of poetry and the glory of verse, since he can't plead a case. As for me, since I've found an arbiter for this dispute, I won't let Maternus be defended by a crowd of others -- I'll accuse him alone, before this court, of this: born for a virile, oratorical eloquence, by which he could win, guard, and extend friendships, gather connections, and take whole provinces under his wing, he abandons that pursuit -- than which nothing in our state can be imagined more profitable for advantage, sweeter for pleasure, ampler for standing, finer for a reputation in the city, or more brilliant for fame across the whole empire and every nation. If all our plans and actions ought to be aimed at practical use, what is safer than to practice the one art that, always armed, lets you offer protection to friends, help to strangers, rescue to the endangered, and to the envious and hostile alike, fear and dread -- while you yourself stand secure, fortified as if by some permanent power and authority? Its force and value, in times when things run smoothly, is felt as a refuge and shelter for others; but if danger strikes home, no breastplate or sword in battle is a firmer defense for a man on trial and in peril than eloquence -- shield and weapon both, letting you defend and attack alike, whether in court, in the senate, or before the emperor. What else did Eprius Marcellus recently set against the hostile senators but his own eloquence? Armed and menacing with it, he made a fool of Helvidius's wisdom -- eloquent enough, but untrained and green in contests of that kind. I'll say no more about its usefulness -- a point I don't think my friend Maternus means to argue against.
6| Now I turn to the pleasure of oratorical eloquence -- a delight that comes not just at some one moment, but almost every day, almost every hour. What is sweeter to a free, high-minded spirit, born for honorable pleasures, than to see his own house always full and crowded with the most distinguished men flocking to it? And to know it's given not for his money, not because he has no heir, not for some office he administers, but for himself alone? Why, even the childless, the wealthy, the powerful, come as a rule to a young man, and a poor one, to entrust their own troubles or a friend's to him. Is there any pleasure in vast wealth or great power to match watching men grown old, weighed down with the deference of the whole world, and in the height of every abundance, admit that the one thing they lack is the best thing there is? And then -- the retinue and processions of the man in the toga! The figure he cuts in public! The reverence shown him in court! That joy of rising and standing forth among a silent crowd, all eyes turned to one man! The people gathering, crowding around, taking on whatever feeling the orator chooses to put on them! I'm only listing the joys of speaking that are common knowledge, visible even to the untrained eye; the more private ones, known only to the speakers themselves, are greater still. If he delivers a speech carefully worked out and rehearsed, there's a weight and steadiness to his joy that matches the weight of the words themselves; if he brings some fresh, newly-formed concern, not without a certain nervous excitement, that very anxiety enhances the outcome and adds spice to the pleasure. But the sheer daring of speaking off the cuff, the recklessness of it, brings perhaps the keenest delight of all -- for in talent, as in a field, though some things are long sown and cultivated, what springs up on its own is still the more welcome.'
7| Let me confess something about myself: no day made me happier than the day I received the broad purple stripe, or the day I, a new man born in a city not exactly eager to favor newcomers, won the quaestorship, the tribunate, or the praetorship. But even those days don't compare with the days when my own modest talent for speaking let me defend a client successfully, plead a case before the centumviral court with some luck, or stand up for an emperor's own freedmen and agents before the emperor himself. In those moments I feel I've climbed above the tribunate, the praetorship, even the consulship. In those moments I possess something that, if it doesn't spring from within a man, can't be handed to him by letters patent and doesn't arrive through influence. And what about fame and praise? What craft's reputation compares with an orator's glory? Aren't great speakers famous in the city not only among busy men absorbed in their affairs, but even among idle young men and boys, so long as they have decent instincts and good hopes for themselves? Whose names do parents drum into their children before any others? Whom does the ignorant mob, this tunic-wearing crowd, call out by name and point at as they pass? Even visitors and foreigners, once they reach the city, ask after speakers they've heard of back in their own towns and colonies, eager to recognize them as if they already knew them.
8| I'd go so far as to claim that Eprius Marcellus, whom I just mentioned, and Vibius Crispus (I prefer fresh, recent examples to distant, forgotten ones) would be no less great men at the ends of the earth than at Capua or Vercellae, where they're said to have been born. And it isn't the two hundred million sesterces of the one or the three hundred million of the other that accounts for this — though it might look as if they owe even that wealth to eloquence's favor — no, it's eloquence itself. Eloquence is a divine power, and every age has produced plenty of examples of the heights men have reached through sheer talent. But these two examples, as I said, are the closest to us, ones we don't have to take on hearsay but can watch with our own eyes. The lower and more obscure their birth, the more marked the poverty and narrow circumstances that surrounded their early years, the brighter and more striking their examples become, and the more they prove what oratory can do. Neither had the advantage of noble birth or inherited wealth; neither was outstanding in character; one of them was even physically unimpressive. Yet for many years now they've been the most powerful men in the state, and for as long as they cared to be, the leading men of the courts. Now they're leading men in Caesar's friendship, they carry all business before them, and the emperor himself treats them with a certain deference — because Vespasian, that venerable old man with no patience for illusions, understands perfectly well that his other friends depend on what they received from him and on what it costs them nothing to amass and lavish on others, whereas Marcellus and Crispus brought to his friendship something they didn't get from the emperor and that can't be given by him. Busts, inscriptions, and statues count for little among so many greater things — though even these aren't neglected, any more than wealth and riches are, which you'll find plenty of people criticizing but few actually turning down. So we see the houses of men who devoted themselves from early youth to the courtroom and to the study of oratory filled with these honors, these distinctions, these fortunes.
9| As for poetry and verse, on which Maternus wants to spend his whole life (that's what set off this whole conversation) — they win their authors no standing and support no fortunes. They bring only brief pleasure, and praise that's empty and unproductive. Even if you refuse to hear this, Maternus, and what I'm about to say besides — who benefits if, in your play, Agamemnon or Jason speaks eloquently? Who goes home defended and grateful to you because of it? Who escorts our friend Saleius, an outstanding poet, or — if that title honors him more — a truly great bard, home, or calls on him, or walks with him through the streets? If a friend or relative of his, or Saleius himself, runs into some legal trouble, he'll turn to Secundus here, or to you, Maternus — not because you're a poet, not to have you write verses for him. Verses like that are born at home for Bassus, lovely and delightful as they are — yet this is how it ends: after a whole year, day after day, much of the night, polishing and laboring over a single book, he's reduced to begging and canvassing people to deign to listen, and not even for free — he has to borrow a house, build a hall, rent benches, hand out copies. And even if the reading goes as well as it possibly could, all that praise is gathered in a day or two, like grass or a flower picked before it can ripen into any solid, lasting fruit. It brings him no friendship, no clients, no favor that lodges in anyone's mind — just vague applause, empty words, and fleeting delight. We recently praised as a marvelous, extraordinary act of generosity that Vespasian gave Bassus five hundred thousand sesterces. Fine — it's a fine thing to earn the emperor's indulgence through talent. But how much finer, if his own household finances demanded it, to cultivate himself, to court his own genius, to test his own generosity! And consider this too: poets, if they want to produce anything worthwhile, must give up the company of friends and the pleasures of the city, abandon their other duties, and, as they themselves put it, withdraw into the woods and groves — that is, into solitude.
10| Not even reputation and fame — the one reward they claim to serve, the one payment they admit is the whole point of their labor — favors poets the way it favors orators, since nobody knows a mediocre poet, and only a few know the good ones. How often does the fame of even the rarest recitation spread through the whole city, let alone reach into all the provinces? How many men, arriving in the city from Spain or Asia — not to mention our own Gaul — ask after Saleius Bassus? And even if someone does ask, once he's seen him he moves on, satisfied, the way he'd be satisfied after seeing a painting or a statue. I don't want what I'm saying to be taken as discouraging verse for men whose nature has denied them an orator's gift, if writing poetry is how they want to fill their leisure and attach their names to fame. I hold all eloquence, and every branch of it, sacred and worthy of reverence — not just your tragic buskin or the sound of epic verse, but the charm of lyric poets too, and the playfulness of elegy, and the bitterness of iambic, and the wit of epigram, and whatever other form eloquence can take — I believe all of it deserves to be ranked above every other art's pursuits. But my quarrel is with you, Maternus, because though your nature carries you toward the very citadel of oratory, you prefer to wander off course, and settle for less when you could reach the heights. It's as if you'd been born in Greece, where it's honorable to practice even the athletic arts, and the gods had given you Nicostratus's build and strength — I wouldn't stand by and let those huge arms, built for fighting, waste away on the featherweight javelin or the discus throw. In the same way, I'm calling you now, away from recital halls and theaters, into the forum, into real cases, into real battles — especially since you can't even fall back on the excuse that shields most men, the idea that the poet's calling gives less offense than the orator's. The force of your splendid nature boils over, and — more dangerous still — it isn't on behalf of some friend that you give offense, but on behalf of Cato. And the offense can't be excused as owed to some duty of kinship, or the good faith of an advocate, or the impulse of an unplanned, spur-of-the-moment speech: it looks as though you deliberately chose a controversial figure who would speak with real authority. I know what answer you'll give — that this is exactly what wins tremendous applause, that this is what gets praised above all in the recital halls themselves and soon carried on everyone's lips. So drop the excuse of wanting peace and quiet, when you're the one choosing a fight with a stronger opponent. As for me, I'm content to handle the private disputes of our own age — where, if it should ever be necessary to offend the ears of powerful men on behalf of a friend in danger, my loyalty will be proven and my outspokenness excused.
11| Aper had spoken sharply, as was his habit, with an intent look. Maternus answered him relaxed and smiling: 'I was preparing to attack the orators every bit as long as Aper had praised them—I expected that once he'd finished his praise of them he'd turn to running down poets and trampling on the love of poetry—but he softened that with a bit of art, allowing men who can't plead cases to write verse instead. As for me, while I can perhaps manage something and even push myself in pleading cases, it was by reciting tragedies that I first won a name, when I broke the shameless power of Vatinius, a man who profaned even the sacred things of literature, under Nero. And today, whatever reputation and name I have, I think I owe more to the glory of my poems than to my speeches. I've now decided to withdraw from courtroom labor. I don't crave those crowds of escorts, those public appearances, that mob of morning callers—no more than I crave the bronze busts and portrait masks that have forced their way into my house even against my will. A man's standing and safety are better guarded by innocence than by eloquence, and I don't fear ever having to speak in the Senate except to defend someone else in danger.'
12| 'The groves and the woods, and solitude itself, which Aper complained of—these bring me such pleasure that I count them among the chief rewards of poetry: that it isn't composed amid noise, with a litigant sitting at the door, amid the squalor and tears of defendants, but the mind withdraws to pure and untainted places and enjoys its own sacred haunts. These are the origins of eloquence, its inner sanctuary; in this dress and this bearing it first flowed its benefits into mortal hearts, hearts still chaste and untouched by vice: this is how the oracles once spoke. This profitable, blood-soaked eloquence of ours is a recent thing, born of bad morals, and, as you yourself said, Aper, invented to serve as a weapon. But that happy age—golden, to use our own phrase—empty of orators and of crimes, was rich in poets and seers who sang of good deeds done, not men who defended wrongs committed. No one enjoyed greater glory or a more honored place—first among the gods, whose responses they were said to deliver and at whose feasts they were said to sit, then among those kings sprung from gods and held sacred, among whom we hear of no pleader, but of Orpheus, and Linus, and, if you care to look deeper, Apollo himself. Or if that seems too much like fable and invention, you will at least grant me this, Aper: that Homer's honor among later ages is no less than Demosthenes', and that Euripides' or Sophocles' fame is not confined within narrower bounds than Lysias' or Hyperides'. You'll find more people today running down Cicero's glory than Virgil's, and no book of Asinius or Messalla shines as brightly as Ovid's Medea or Varius's Thyestes.'
13| 'And I wouldn't hesitate to set even the fortune of poets, that happy fellowship, against the restless, anxious life of orators. Grant that their struggles and dangers have carried some of them up to the consulship—I still prefer Virgil's safe and quiet retirement, in which he lacked neither the favor of the deified Augustus nor renown among the Roman people. Augustus's letters are witness to that, and so is the people itself, who, on hearing Virgil's verses read aloud in the theater, rose to their feet as one, and honored Virgil, who happened to be present watching, as if he were Augustus. Not even in our own day has Pomponius Secundus taken second place to Domitius Afer, whether in the dignity of his life or the lasting nature of his fame. As for that Crispus and that Marcellus, whose example you hold up to me—what do they actually have in their fortune worth wanting? That they live in fear, or that they are feared? That when they're begged for favors every day, the very people they oblige resent them for it? That, bound hand and foot by flattery, they never seem servile enough to their masters nor free enough to us? What is the sum of their power? Freedmen manage that much. As for me, let the 'sweet Muses,' as Virgil calls them, carry me off, far from anxieties and cares and the daily need to do something against my own conscience, into their sacred places and their springs. I won't go on trembling before the maddening, treacherous forum and its pale, fading fame. Let no crowd of morning callers rouse me with their noise, no panting freedman with news; let me not write my will out of uncertainty about the future as though it were collateral, and let me have no more than I can leave to whomever I choose—for my own fatal day will come sometime. And when I'm set up in my tomb, let it not be grim and gloomy, but cheerful and crowned with garlands; and let no one move a motion or call a vote in honor of my memory.'
14| Maternus had barely finished, still worked up and almost inspired, when Vipstanus Messalla came into the room. Guessing from how intently they'd all been listening that something deeper than usual had passed between them, he said: 'Have I come at a bad moment, breaking in on some private council, or on someone rehearsing a case?' 'Not at all, not at all,' said Secundus. 'In fact I wish you'd arrived sooner—you'd have enjoyed our friend Aper's very polished speech, urging Maternus to turn all his talent and energy to pleading cases, and then Maternus's cheerful defense of his own poetry, a speech more bold and more like a poet's than an orator's, as befitted a defense of poets.' 'That conversation,' Messalla replied, 'would have given me endless pleasure, and it delights me in itself that you—the finest men and the orators of our age—don't spend your talents only on courtroom business and declamatory exercises, but take up discussions of this kind, which both nourish the mind and bring the most delightful pleasure of learning and literature, to you who debate these things and to those whose ears they reach. And so, by Hercules, I see the same admiration given to you, Secundus, for raising people's hopes of more such books by writing the life of Julius Africanus, as to Aper, for not yet having broken free of school debates, and preferring to spend his leisure in the manner of the new-style rhetoricians rather than the old-style orators.'
15| Then Aper said: 'You never stop admiring nothing but the old and ancient, Messalla, and mocking and despising the pursuits of our own age. I've caught this line of yours before, when, forgetting your own eloquence and your brother's, you argued that there's no orator alive today—all the more boldly, I suppose, because you weren't afraid of seeming spiteful, since you were denying yourself the very glory others grant you.' 'I'm not sorry for anything I said then,' Messalla answered, 'and I don't believe that Secundus, or Maternus, or even you, Aper—though you sometimes argue the opposite side—really think otherwise. I'd be glad if one of you could be persuaded to examine and explain the causes of this vast difference, which I often puzzle over myself. And what comforts some people only deepens the question for me, because I see that even among the Greeks it's happened that Sacerdos Nicetes and others like him, who shake Ephesus or Mytilene with the applause and shouting of their schools, stand further from Aeschines and Demosthenes than Afer or Africanus, or you yourselves, stand from Cicero or Asinius.'
16| "You've raised a big question," Secundus said, "and one worth pursuing. But who could handle it more fairly than you, whose deep learning and outstanding talent are backed up by real study and reflection?" "I'll lay out my thoughts," Messalla said, "if I can first get one thing from you both: help me carry this conversation." "I promise on behalf of both of us," Maternus said. "Secundus and I will take up whatever parts we sense you've left to us rather than skipped. You yourself said a moment ago that Aper likes to disagree, and it's obvious enough he's already bracing to argue the other side — he can't stand watching us all agree in praise of the old masters." "I won't let our age," said Aper, "be condemned unheard and undefended just because you've all ganged up on it. But first I'll ask this: who exactly do you mean by 'the ancients'? What generation of orators does that word cover? When I hear 'the ancients,' I picture genuinely old men from long ago — Ulysses and Nestor come to mind, whose era predates ours by nearly thirteen hundred years. But you bring up Demosthenes and Hyperides, who plainly flourished in the time of Philip and Alexander — and outlived them both. Which means not much more than three hundred years separate us from Demosthenes' generation. Measured against the frailty of our bodies, that might look long. Measured against the true scale of the ages and this vast span of time, it's nothing at all, practically next door. If, as Cicero writes in the Hortensius, the great and true Year is the one in which the same arrangement of sky and stars now in place returns exactly as it was, and that Year contains twelve thousand nine hundred fifty-four of the years we count — then your Demosthenes, whom you paint as ancient and old, began not merely in the same year as us, but in the same month.
17| But let me turn to the Latin orators. Among them, you don't rank Menenius Agrippa — who really could pass for ancient — above the great speakers of our own day; you rank Cicero, Caesar, Caelius, Calvus, Brutus, Asinius, and Messalla. I don't see why you'd assign them to ancient times rather than to ours. Take Cicero himself. He died, so his freedman Tiro tells us, seven days before the December Ides fell, in the year Hirtius and Pansa were consuls — the same year the deified Augustus took their place as consul alongside Quintus Pedius. Count fifty-six years for Augustus's reign afterward; add Tiberius's twenty-three; nearly four years for Gaius; fourteen apiece for Claudius and Nero; the long single year shared by Galba, Otho, and Vitellius; and now the sixth year of this happy reign under which Vespasian nurses the state. That comes to a hundred twenty years from Cicero's death to today — one man's lifespan. I myself saw an old man in Britain who claimed to have fought in the battle where the Britons tried to drive Julius Caesar's invading forces back from their shores. So if the man who took up arms against Caesar had been dragged to Rome — by capture, by choice, by some accident of fate — he could have heard both Caesar and Cicero speak, and sat in on our own pleadings too. At the last public handout, you yourselves saw plenty of old men who told how they'd received Augustus's largess not once but twice. From this you can work out that Corvinus and Asinius, too, could have been heard by those same men — Corvinus lived on into the middle of Augustus's reign, Asinius nearly to its very end. So don't chop up the age, and don't keep calling 'ancient' and 'old' orators whom the very same living ears could recognize, could link together, could join as one continuous line.
18| I've laid all this out to show that whatever praise these orators' fame and glory earn from their era belongs to a time much closer to us than to Servius Galba or Gaius Carbo or others we might rightly call ancient — men who are, frankly, rough, unpolished, crude, shapeless, and I wish to God your Calvus or Caelius or Cicero himself had never imitated any part of them. Now I want to press harder and speak more boldly, once I've said this first: styles and genres of speech change along with the times. Compared with old Cato, Gaius Gracchus is fuller and richer; compared with Gracchus, Crassus is more polished and ornate; compared with both, Cicero is more distinct, more urbane, more elevated; and compared with Cicero, Corvinus is gentler, sweeter, more carefully crafted in his diction. I'm not asking who was the most eloquent — for now I'm content to have shown this much: eloquence doesn't wear one single face. Even among the men you call ancient, several different styles can be found, and something isn't automatically worse for being different. It's the fault of human pettiness that the old is always praised and the present always scorned. Do we doubt that some people were found who admired Appius Caecus over Cato? It's well known that even Cicero had his detractors, who found him bloated and swollen, not tight enough, exulting and overflowing past all measure, and not Attic enough. You've surely read the letters Calvus and Brutus sent to Cicero — from which it's easy to see that Calvus struck Cicero as bloodless and dry, and Brutus as slack and disjointed; while Cicero, in turn, was faulted by Calvus for being loose and flabby, and by Brutus — to use his own word — for being 'broken and spineless.' If you ask me, I think they were all telling the truth. But I'll get to individuals later; for now I have business with the whole group.
19| The admirers of the ancients like to set the boundary of antiquity at Cassius Severus, whom they put on trial, so to speak, as the first to swerve from that old, straight road of oratory. I say he turned to a different style of speaking not from any weakness of talent or ignorance of literature, but by judgment and understanding. As I said a moment ago, he saw that as the conditions of the times and the taste of listening ears changed, the shape and form of speech had to change too. That earlier generation, being untrained and unrefined, easily put up with speeches stretched to exhausting length, and actually praised a speaker for using up an entire day. Long, elaborate introductions, a narrative traced back to remote beginnings, an ostentatious display of endless subdivisions, a thousand rungs of argument, and whatever else gets prescribed in the bone-dry handbooks of Hermagoras and Apollodorus — all of that was held in high esteem. And if anyone showed the faintest whiff of philosophy and worked some scrap of it into his speech, he was praised to the skies. No wonder — all this was new and unfamiliar, and even among the orators themselves very few had actually studied the teachings of the rhetoricians or the doctrines of the philosophers. But now, by heaven, all that has become common knowledge — you'll scarcely find anyone standing at the speaker's platform who hasn't at least had a taste of these basic studies, even if not fully trained in them — so new and refined paths of eloquence are needed, paths by which an orator can escape the boredom of jaded ears. That's especially true before judges who decide by force and authority rather than by law and statute, who don't wait on the clock but set it themselves, who won't sit patiently while an orator gets around to the actual matter at hand — who instead interrupt on their own, call him back when he wanders off, and openly show they're in a hurry.
20| Who today would put up with a speaker prefacing his case with excuses about his poor health — the kind of opening Corvinus so often used? Who would sit through five books against Verres? Who would endure those endless volumes on a legal technicality that we read in the speeches for Marcus Tullius or Aulus Caecina? These days the judge races ahead of the speaker, and unless he's caught and carried along by the drive of the argument, the color of the phrasing, the polish and finish of the descriptions, he turns against him. The crowd standing around too, that shifting, drifting audience, has grown used to demanding pleasure and beauty from a speech; they no longer put up with grim, uncombed old-fashioned oratory in the courts any more than they would put up with someone doing the gestures of Roscius or Turpio Ambivius on stage in the old style. And the young men, still being hammered into shape on the anvil of their studies, who follow orators to advance their own careers, don't just want to listen — they want to carry something brilliant home, something worth remembering. They pass it on to each other, and often write it back to their home towns and provinces, whether some thought flashed out in a sharp, brief phrase, or some passage shone with rare, poetic polish. An orator today is expected to have poetic grace too — not the moldy stuff of Accius or Pacuvius, but something drawn from the shrine of Horace, Virgil, and Lucan. It's by answering to these ears and these judgments that our generation of orators has turned out more beautiful, more finished. And our speeches are no less effective for reaching the ears of judges with pleasure. Would you call temples of our day weaker because they aren't built of rough rubble and shapeless tiles, but gleam with marble and blaze with gold?
21| I'll admit to you plainly: with some of the old writers I can barely keep from laughing, and with others I can barely keep from falling asleep. And it's not just some man off the street, but Canutius and Attius, Furnius and Toranius, and the rest who share the same sickroom — these bare bones, this wasted frame — who bear this out. Take Calvus himself: he left behind, I believe, twenty-one books, and yet he barely satisfies me in one or two little speeches. And I don't see the rest of you disagreeing with my judgment — how many people actually read Calvus's speech against Asitius, or against Drusus? Yet by god, the prosecutions against Vatinius are in every student's hands, especially the second of them — it's rich in phrasing and in thought, well-suited to the judges' ears, proof that Calvus himself understood what would work better, and that what he lacked wasn't the will to speak with more grandeur and polish, but the talent and the strength. And take the speeches of Caelius — the ones we like, whole or in part, are exactly the ones where we recognize the polish and elevation of our own age. That stale, coarse vocabulary, that gaping, broken-jointed word order, those half-formed thoughts — those reek of old times, and I don't think anyone is so devoted to antiquity that he praises Caelius for the parts where he's antiquated. Let's grant, by all means, that Julius Caesar — given the scale of his thinking and the demands on his time — achieved less in eloquence than his divine talent demanded, just as we'll leave Brutus to his philosophy. In their speeches, even their admirers confess they fell short of their own reputations — unless someone actually reads Caesar's defense of Decius the Samnite, or Brutus's for King Deiotarus, and the other books of the same sluggish, lukewarm sort — unless he also admires their poetry. Yes, they wrote poetry too, and deposited it in libraries — no better than Cicero's, but luckier, because fewer people know they wrote it. Asinius too, though born closer to our own time, seems to me to have studied among the Menenii and the Appii of old. He certainly channeled Pacuvius and Accius, not just in tragedy but in his own speeches — he's that harsh and dry. But a speech, like a man's body, is only truly beautiful when the veins don't stand out and you can't count the bones, but a healthy, well-tempered flow of blood fills the limbs, swells over the muscle, and a warm color covers the very sinews and gives them grace. I don't want to attack Corvinus — it wasn't his fault that he failed to express the brightness and polish of our times; for we can see how far his force of mind or talent was equal to his judgment.
22| Now I come to Cicero, who fought the same battle with his contemporaries that I'm fighting with you. They admired the old writers; he himself ranked the eloquence of his own time higher. And in nothing did he outstrip the orators of his day more than in judgment. He was the first to refine oratory, the first to bring careful word choice and artful arrangement to it; he ventured into brighter passages too, and coined striking phrases — especially in the speeches he composed later in life, near its end, that is, once he had made more progress and had learned through use and experience what the best style of speaking really was. His earlier speeches aren't free of the flaws of the old school: he's slow in his openings, long-winded in his narratives, lazy in his digressions; he's slow to stir, rarely catches fire; few of his thoughts land neatly, with any real spark. You could pull nothing out to quote, nothing worth repeating — it's like a rough-built house: the wall is solid enough, will last, but isn't polished and gleaming. As for me, I want an orator, like a rich and elegant head of household, housed under a roof that doesn't merely keep out rain and wind, but pleases the eye to look at; I want him furnished not only with what bare necessity requires, but with gold and jewels among his fittings too, things you'd like to pick up and look at again and again. Certain things, though, should be kept well away as already faded and musty: no word should be tainted as if with rust, no thought arranged in the slow, lifeless structure of the old annalists; he should flee ugly, tasteless buffoonery, vary his rhythm, and not end every clause the same way.
23| I don't want to mock the "wheel of Fortune" or the "pig's-law justice" or that phrase — dropped in every third sentence in every speech as if it were a thought — "so it would seem." I've brought these up against my will, and left out plenty more, which are the very things admired and imitated by those who like to call themselves the old-style orators. I'll name no one — it's enough to point at the type — but you certainly have them before your eyes, the ones who read Lucilius instead of Horace, Lucretius instead of Virgil, who find the eloquence of Aufidius Bassus or Servilius Nonianus cheap next to Sisenna or Varro, who despise and loathe the textbooks of our own rhetoricians but admire Calvus. When these men drone on before a judge in the old-fashioned way, no audience follows them, no crowd listens, and even the litigant himself can barely endure it. That's how far their gloomy, unkempt style achieves the very soundness they boast of — not through real strength, but through starvation. After all, even in the body, doctors don't approve of a health that comes from anxiety of mind; it's not enough not to be sick — I want a man strong, cheerful, and full of energy. A health that's praised only for being sound is close to being an illness. But you, my most eloquent friends, as you can, as you do, bring luster to our age with the finest kind of eloquence. I see you, Messalla, imitating the very best qualities of the old writers, and you, Maternus and Secundus, blending gravity of thought with polish and refinement of language — such skill in choosing material, such order in arranging it, such richness whenever the case demands it, such economy whenever it allows it, such grace of rhythm, such clarity of thought, such power in expressing feeling, such restraint in exercising your freedom — that even if envy and ill will slow down the verdict of our own generation, posterity will speak the truth about you.'
24| When Aper had said this, Maternus spoke up: 'Do you recognize the force and fire of our friend Aper? What a torrent, what a drive, in defending our own age! How richly and variously he's harassed the ancients! And how much he's borrowed from them — not only their spirit and energy, but their learning and craft — in order to turn around and attack them with their own weapons! Still, Messalla, that shouldn't let you break your promise. We're not asking for a defender of the ancients, and none of us — though we've just been praised — would compare ourselves to the men Aper has been attacking. Aper himself doesn't really believe what he's said; he's simply taken up the opposing side in the old manner, the one our philosophers so often practice. So give us now — not praise of the ancients, their own fame praises them well enough — but the reasons why we've fallen so far short of their eloquence, especially since our reckoning of the years shows that a hundred and twenty have passed from Cicero's death down to this very day.'
25| Then Messalla spoke: 'I'll follow the outline you set, Maternus. I won't spend long arguing with Aper, who, I think, was the first to raise this quarrel over names, as if it were somehow improper to call men "the ancients" who, everyone agrees, lived only a hundred years ago. I'm not fighting over the word. Call them ancients, or forefathers, or whatever else he prefers, so long as we agree that eloquence was more distinguished in their time. Nor do I resist even that part of his argument where he admits, on closer questioning, that more than one style of speaking existed even within the same generation, let alone across different ones. Just as among the Attic orators the first place goes to Demosthenes, and the next to Aeschines, Hyperides, Lysias, and Lycurgus, while everyone agrees that this whole generation of orators is the most admired, so too among us: Cicero surpassed the other skilled speakers of his own time, while Calvus, Asinius, Caesar, Caelius, and Brutus are rightly ranked above both those before and those after them. It doesn't matter that they differ from each other in style, since they agree in kind. Calvus is tighter, Asinius more rhythmic, Caesar more brilliant, Caelius sharper, Brutus weightier, Cicero more forceful, fuller, and stronger — yet all show the same underlying soundness of eloquence, so that if you picked up all their works together, you'd recognize, despite their different talents, a kind of shared judgment and kinship of purpose. As for the fact that they attacked one another, and that some of their letters contain traces of mutual spite — that's a fault of the men, not of the orators. I imagine Calvus, Asinius, and Cicero himself were prone to envy, jealousy, and the other weaknesses common to human nature. Brutus alone among them, I think, revealed his honest judgment not out of malice or envy but simply and candidly. Would he, who I don't believe envied even Caesar, have envied Cicero? As for Servius Galba, Gaius Laelius, and any other of the older men Aper never stopped needling, they need no defense from me — I'll admit their eloquence, being still in its early growth and not fully mature, lacked certain things.
26| But if, setting aside that best and most perfect style of eloquence, I had to choose a manner of speaking, I would honestly prefer the drive of Gaius Gracchus or the ripeness of Lucius Crassus to the curling-irons of Maecenas or the jingling of Gallio. It's better to dress a speech in rough homespun than to deck it out in gaudy, whorish clothing. What most of today's speakers do isn't oratorical dress — by god, it isn't even manly dress — when through wanton wording, flighty ideas, and undisciplined arrangement they mimic an actor's rhythms. And — this is scarcely fit to say — many of them boast, as if it were praise, glory, and talent, that their speeches get sung and danced to. From this comes that ugly, backward, but common complaint: that our orators are said to speak limply while actors are said to dance eloquently. I won't deny that Cassius Severus — the only one our friend Aper dared to name — could be called an orator if compared to those who came after him, though in much of his work he has more bile than blood. He was the first to trample the proper order of things, abandon restraint and decency in language, and, undisciplined even with the very weapons he uses, so eager to strike that he often loses his footing — he doesn't fight, he brawls. Yet, as I said, compared to those who followed, he far outdoes the rest in range of learning, charm of wit, and sheer strength of style — and Aper didn't dare name a single one of those successors and march them out into the field. I was expecting that after attacking Asinius, Caelius, and Calvus, he would bring out another line of battle for us, naming as many or more names, so we could set one against Cicero, another against Caesar, one by one. Instead, content with having dismissed the ancient orators by name, he didn't dare praise any of his successors except in a vague, general way — afraid, I suppose, of offending many if he singled out a few. For how many aspiring rhetoricians don't privately believe themselves ahead of Cicero, though plainly behind Gabinianus? But I won't be afraid to name names, so that with concrete examples it will be easier to show by what stages eloquence has been broken and diminished.'
27| 'Go easy,' said Maternus, 'and get on with your promise instead. We don't need you to prove that the ancients were more eloquent — I already grant that. What we're after are the causes, which you said you were used to discussing — a little while ago you were milder, and less angry at the eloquence of our own time, before Aper provoked you by attacking your forebears.' 'I'm not offended,' he said, 'by my friend Aper's argument, and you shouldn't be offended either if something happens to grate on your ears, since you know this is the rule of such discussions — to give one's honest judgment without personal injury.' 'Go on,' said Maternus, 'and when you speak of the ancients, use their old freedom of speech — a quality we've degenerated from even more than we have from eloquence.'
28| And Messalla said: 'You're not asking for hidden causes, Maternus, nor ones unknown to you, or to Secundus here, or to Aper — even though you've assigned me the role of stating aloud what we all feel. Who doesn't know that eloquence and the other arts have fallen from that old glory not through any shortage of talented men, but through the laziness of the young, the carelessness of parents, the ignorance of teachers, and the neglect of old tradition? These failings, born first in Rome, then spread through Italy, are now seeping into the provinces — though you know your own provinces better than I do. I'll speak of Rome, and of these homegrown, native vices that seize children the moment they're born and pile up at every stage of life, but first let me say a little about the strictness and discipline our ancestors used in raising and shaping their children. In the old days, every man's son, born of a chaste mother, was raised not in the room of some hired nurse but in his mother's own lap and arms, whose highest praise was to keep the household and devote herself to her children. Some older female relative of proven, respected character would be chosen, to whom all the children of that family were entrusted; in her presence it was forbidden to say anything shameful or do anything improper. She governed not only the children's studies and duties but even their breaks and games with a certain holiness and modesty. This, we're told, is how Cornelia raised the Gracchi, how Aurelia raised Caesar, how Atia raised Augustus — mothers who oversaw their sons' upbringing and produced future leaders. This discipline and strictness aimed at this: that each child's nature, pure and whole and untwisted by any vice, could seize at once, with his whole heart, on honorable pursuits — and whether he leaned toward soldiering, law, or oratory, he would pursue that one thing wholly, and drink it in completely.
29| But nowadays the newborn infant is handed over to some little Greek slave-girl, assisted by one or two others chosen from the whole household — usually the most worthless, unfit for any serious task. Children's still-green, untrained minds are steeped from the start in these slaves' idle chatter and blunders; and no one in the whole house thinks it matters what is said or done in front of the young master. Even the parents themselves don't accustom their little ones to decency and modesty, but to impudence and sharp talk, through which shamelessness gradually creeps in, along with contempt for both self and others. And indeed, the vices peculiar to this city seem to me almost conceived in the mother's womb — the passion for actors, and the obsession with gladiators and horses. When a mind is seized and besieged by these, how little room is left for the finer arts? How many people will you find who talk of anything else at home? What other topics do we hear from young men, whenever we step into the lecture halls? Even the teachers have no more frequent conversations with their students than these; for they gather their pupils not through strict discipline or testing of talent, but through courting attention and the lure of flattery.'
30| I'll skip over the first steps of education, where too little effort is spent already—not enough work goes into knowing the great authors, or working through the classics, or learning the facts of history, the men, the times. Instead people go chasing after what they call rhetoricians. When I explain shortly when that profession was first brought into this city, and how little standing it had among our ancestors, I'll need to turn to the training that produced the orators we've heard about—men whose endless labor, daily practice, and constant drilling across every field of study are recorded even in their own books. You all know Cicero's book called the Brutus. In its final section—the earlier part reviews the old orators—he describes his own beginnings, his own progress, something like an education in eloquence: how he studied civil law under Quintus Mucius, and drank deep of every branch of philosophy under Philo the Academic and Diodotus the Stoic. Not content with the teachers Rome could offer, he traveled through Greece and Asia too, so as to take in the full range of every art. And indeed, you can see in Cicero's books that he lacked no knowledge of geometry, music, grammar, or any liberal art at all. He knew the fine points of logic, the uses of moral philosophy, the causes behind events. That's how it is, gentlemen, exactly how it is: that remarkable eloquence flows and overflows from deep learning, from many arts, from knowledge of everything. The orator's power isn't boxed in by narrow limits like other skills. The true orator is the one who can speak beautifully and elegantly on any question, persuasively, fitted to the dignity of the subject, useful to the moment, and pleasing to the audience.
31| That's what the ancients had convinced themselves of, and they understood that achieving it took more than declaiming in the rhetoric schools, more than exercising tongue and voice on invented disputes that never came near real life. It meant filling the chest with the arts that debate good and evil, honor and shame, justice and injustice—because that is the raw material an orator speaks on. In the courts we generally argue fairness, in deliberative speeches usefulness, in eulogies honor—though these usually blend together. No one can speak on such things fully, variously, and elegantly unless he has grasped human nature, the force of the virtues, the corruption of the vices, and understood the things that count as neither virtue nor vice. From these same springs flows the ability to stir a judge's anger or calm it—easier for someone who knows what anger is—and to move him more readily to pity, for someone who knows what pity is and what stirs it. An orator schooled in these arts and drills, whether he must speak before the hostile, the greedy, the envious, the grieving, or the fearful, will grasp the pulse of their feelings, and shape and temper his speech to fit each person's nature, with every tool ready and in reach for every use. Some audiences trust more in a tight, compressed style that nails down each point at once—for them, training in logic pays off. Others prefer a flowing, even style drawn from common feeling—to move them, we'll borrow ready-made arguments from the Peripatetics, fit for any debate. The Academics will lend us combativeness, Plato loftiness, Xenophon charm; and it won't hurt an orator to borrow, as the case demands, even certain honest outbursts from Epicurus and Metrodorus. We're not training a philosopher, or a disciple of the Stoics, but someone who should drink deeply from some arts and taste all of them. That's why the old orators mastered civil law too, and steeped themselves in grammar, music, geometry. Cases come up—most of them, nearly all—that call for knowledge of the law, and many that call for this other learning as well.
32| No one should object that it's enough to be taught something simple and uniform for the occasion. First, we use what's our own differently from what's borrowed—there's a plain difference between possessing what you offer and merely renting it. Second, knowledge of many arts adorns us even while we're doing something else, and shines through exactly where you'd least expect it. Not just the learned, discerning listener notices this—the general public does too, and praises it at once, admitting the speaker has studied properly, has covered every register of eloquence, is, in short, a true orator. And I maintain no one can be that, or ever has been, except a man who marches into the forum armed with every art, the way a soldier goes into battle armed with every weapon. The clever speakers of our day neglect this so badly that even in their courtroom speeches you catch them making ugly, embarrassing mistakes of everyday language. They don't know the laws, don't grasp the decrees of the senate, openly mock the civil law, and shrink in dread from the study and teachings of the wise. They squeeze eloquence down into the fewest possible ideas and the narrowest phrases—as if driving her out of her own kingdom. Once she filled hearts with the most splendid company, mistress of every art; now she's clipped and pruned, without pomp, without honor, almost without her free birth, as if she were something learned as one of the meanest trades. So I count this the first and chief reason we've fallen so far from the eloquence of the old orators. If witnesses are wanted, who better to name than Demosthenes among the Greeks, who is remembered as the most devoted student of Plato? And Cicero, in words I think I recall, says that whatever he achieved in eloquence, he owed not to the rhetoric shops but to the walks of the Academy. There are other causes too, weighty and serious, which it's only fair I lay open to you—since I've now discharged my own assignment, and, as is usual for me, offended quite enough people already, who I'm sure, if they happen to hear this, will say that in praising knowledge of law and philosophy as necessary to an orator, I've simply been applauding my own foolishness.'
33| Maternus said, 'As for me, you seem far from having completed the task you took on—you seem only to have begun it, sketching out, so to speak, the first outlines and traces. You've told us what arts the old orators trained in, and shown the gap between our own laziness and ignorance and their sharp, fertile studies. But I'm still waiting for the rest—having learned from you what they knew and we don't, I want to learn also what exercises young men, about to enter the forum, used to strengthen and nourish their talents. For eloquence rests not only on art and knowledge but far more on natural ability and practice—and I don't think you'll deny it, and these gentlemen seem to agree by their looks.' Then, when Aper and Secundus had likewise nodded, Messalla began again as if starting fresh: 'Since I seem to have shown enough about the beginnings and seeds of the old eloquence, teaching what arts trained and educated the ancient orators, I'll go on now to their exercises. Though practice is built into the arts themselves, and no one can grasp so many, such recondite and varied things unless the study of knowledge is joined to practice, practice to skill, and skill to the actual use of eloquence. From which it follows that grasping what you're going to say and delivering what you've grasped run on the same principle. But if this seems too obscure to anyone, and he separates knowledge from practice, he'll at least grant this much: a mind stocked and filled with these arts comes far better prepared to the exercises that properly belong to orators.'
34| So among our ancestors, the young man being groomed for the forum and for eloquence, already steeped in the discipline of his household and stocked with honest learning, was taken by his father or his relatives to whichever orator held the leading place in the state. Him he would follow, him he would attend, and he grew used to being present at every speech the man gave, in the courts or before public assemblies alike, catching even the cut-and-thrust of cross-examination and sitting in on quarrels, learning, so to speak, to fight by watching real battles. From this the young men gained great experience, a good deal of steadiness, and above all judgment, and gained it at once, studying in broad daylight amid real risk, where no one can say something foolish or contradictory without paying for it: the judge will reject it, the opponent will throw it back in his face, and even his own advocates will disown it. So they were schooled from the start in a true, uncorrupted eloquence. And though each followed one man in particular, still they came to know all the leading advocates of that generation, in case after case, court after court, and they had at their disposal the whole range of the people's ears, wildly different from one another, from which they could easily learn what pleased and what displeased in each speaker. So they never lacked a teacher -- and the best kind, the most select kind, one who showed them the living face of eloquence, not a mere portrait. Nor did they lack rivals and opponents fighting with real swords, not with wooden practice-blades, nor an audience that was always full, always fresh, made up of both the hostile and the friendly, so that neither a good line nor a bad one could pass unnoticed. For you know well that lasting, genuine fame for eloquence is built no less on the opposing benches than on one's own -- indeed it rises there more solidly and is proved there more thoroughly. And so, trained under teachers of that sort, the young man we are speaking of -- pupil of orators, listener in the forum, follower of trials, schooled and seasoned by other men's real experience, hearing the laws quoted every day until they were second nature, familiar with the judges' faces, constantly in the presence of public meetings, well acquainted with the people's ears -- whether he took up a prosecution or a defense, he stood, alone and by himself, equal to any case at once. At nineteen Lucius Crassus took on Gaius Carbo; Caesar at twenty-one took on Dolabella; Asinius Pollio at twenty-two took on Gaius Cato; Calvus, not much older, went after Vatinius -- and it is their speeches from those cases that we still read today with admiration.
35| But nowadays our young men are taken off to the schools of the people who call themselves rhetoricians -- men who, it's clear, appeared not long before Cicero's time and did not sit well with our ancestors, since the censors Crassus and Domitius ordered their school shut down, calling it, in Cicero's words, a "school of shamelessness." But as I was starting to say, our boys are taken off to these schools, and I could hardly say which does their talent more damage: the place itself, their fellow students, or the very kind of exercises they do. The place commands no respect, since no one enters it who isn't equally green. Their fellow students give them nothing to learn from, since boys speak to boys and young men to young men with the same reckless ease on both sides. And the exercises themselves are, for the most part, the wrong kind entirely. The rhetoricians deal in two types of material: persuasive speeches and controversial cases. Of these, the persuasive speeches, being lighter and requiring less real judgment, are handed to the boys, while the controversial cases go to the more advanced students -- and, heaven help us, how incredibly contrived they are! And naturally, once the subject matter has nothing to do with real life, the delivery follows suit and becomes just as false. So it happens that tyrannicides' rewards, the choices offered to violated women, remedies for plagues, mothers committing incest, and whatever else gets rehearsed daily in the schoolroom but is rarely or never heard in the actual forum -- these they pursue with enormous words. But when it comes time to face real judges...
36| [text breaks off; resumes mid-sentence] ...they had grander things in mind. Nothing low, nothing petty could they bring themselves to say. Great eloquence, like flame, is fed by fuel, roused by movement, and grows brighter by burning. This same principle drove the eloquence of the ancients forward in our own state as well. For although the orators of our own time too have achieved what a settled, peaceful, prosperous republic allows, still, in that earlier age of turmoil and license, men seemed to reach for more, since amid the general confusion, with no single ruler to hold things in check, each orator counted for exactly as much as he could talk a wandering people into believing. From this came the endless stream of new laws and the courting of popular favor; from this came magistrates haranguing crowds from the speaker's platform almost through the night; from this came prosecutions of powerful defendants and feuds handed down to whole households; from this came factions among the leading men and constant clashes between senate and commons. Each of these things, taken alone, tore the republic apart -- yet together they exercised the eloquence of that age and seemed to heap it with great rewards, because the more a man could achieve through speech, the more easily he won public office, the further he outpaced his colleagues once in office, the greater his favor with the leading men, his authority with the senators, his name and reputation with the common people. Such men overflowed even with clients from foreign nations; magistrates on their way to the provinces paid them respect, and on their return paid them court; the praetorship and the consulship themselves seemed to come looking for them; even as private citizens they were never without power, since they steered both people and senate by their advice and their weight. Indeed they had convinced themselves that no one could reach or hold a conspicuous, commanding place in the state without eloquence. And no wonder, since even reluctant men were dragged before the people to speak, since it wasn't enough in the senate to state one's opinion briefly -- one had to defend it with talent and eloquence -- since a man called out for some scandal or charge had to answer in his own voice, and witnesses in public trials were made to testify not from a distance or in writing, but in person, face to face. So alongside the highest rewards for eloquence came an equally great necessity for it, and just as being called eloquent was thought fine and glorious, so being thought mute and tongue-tied was considered shameful.
37| So they were driven no less by shame than by reward, afraid of being counted as mere clients rather than patrons, afraid of letting the connections handed down by their ancestors pass to other families, afraid of seeming too feeble to hold office and so either failing to win it or, having won it, defending it badly. I don't know whether these old records have ever come into your hands -- the ones still kept in the libraries of antiquarians and which Mucianus is right now busy collecting, and which have already been compiled and published, I believe, in eleven books of Proceedings and three of Letters. From these one can see that Gnaeus Pompey and Marcus Crassus owed their power not only to force and arms but to talent and oratory as well; that the Lentuli, the Metelli, the Luculli, the Curios, and the rest of that whole company of leading men put great effort and care into these same pursuits, and that no one in those days won great power without some measure of eloquence. To this was added the splendor of the defendants and the sheer scale of the cases, which by themselves contribute enormously to eloquence. For it makes a great difference whether you have to speak about a theft, or a legal formula, or an injunction, or instead about corruption in the elections, about allies plundered and citizens massacred. Such evils, of course, are better avoided altogether, and the best state of a republic is the one in which we suffer nothing of the kind -- yet when they did occur, they supplied enormous material for eloquence. For the power of talent grows with the greatness of its subject, and no one can produce a famous, brilliant speech unless he finds a cause equal to it. It isn't, I think, the speeches Demosthenes wrote against his guardians that make him famous, nor did defending Publius Quinctius or Licinius Archias make Cicero a great orator: it was Catiline and Milo and Verres and Antony who wrapped that fame around him -- not because it was worth it to the republic to put up with bad citizens just so orators would have rich material to speak on, but, as I keep reminding you, let's remember the question we're discussing and recognize that we're talking about something that arises more readily in troubled, restless times. Who doesn't know that it's better and more useful to enjoy peace than to be tormented by war? And yet war produces more good soldiers than peace does. Eloquence is in the same position. The more often it has stood, so to speak, in the battle line, the more blows it has both landed and taken, the greater and fiercer the opponents and fights it has chosen for itself, the higher and more exalted it stands, ennobled by those very dangers, in the mouths of men -- whose nature is such that they want safety for themselves ... [text breaks off].
38| I move on to the form and custom of the old courts. Even though our present arrangement suits current conditions better, that old forum gave eloquence far more exercise, since no one was forced to finish pleading within a few hours; adjournments were granted freely, each speaker set his own limits, and neither the number of days nor of advocates was fixed. Pompey, in his third consulship, was the first to tighten these rules and put a sort of bridle on eloquence — though he still had everything conducted in the forum, everything governed by law, everything heard before the praetors. And here is stronger proof than any other of how much greater the business handled before them once was: the centumviral cases, which now hold first place, used to be so overshadowed by the splendor of other trials that no published speech survives from that court by Cicero, Caesar, Brutus, Caelius, Calvus, or any great orator at all — except Asinius Pollio's speeches on behalf of Urbinia's heirs, and even those he delivered in the middle years of the deified Augustus, after a long peace, a continuous idleness among the people, an unbroken calm in the senate, and above all the emperor's discipline had pacified eloquence itself, along with everything else.
39| What I'm about to say may look trivial and even laughable, but I'll say it anyway, if only to be laughed at. Consider how much those cloaks we wrap ourselves in, sitting hemmed in and practically boxed up with the judges, have dragged eloquence down. Consider how much strength these lecture-halls and record-offices have stripped from oratory, now that most cases are argued out in them. Just as thoroughbred horses prove themselves on a racecourse with room to run, orators too have their own field, and unless they're allowed to move through it freely and unchecked, their eloquence weakens and breaks. In fact we find the very care and anxious polish of a written style works against us, because the judge often asks when you're going to begin, and you have to start the moment he asks. Frequently the advocate has to call for silence just to get through the evidence and witnesses. One or two people stand by while you speak, and the whole thing plays out as if in an empty room. But an orator needs shouting, applause, something like a theater — the kind old orators got every day, when so many, and such distinguished men, packed the forum together, when whole clienteles and tribes and even delegations from the towns stood by those on trial, when in most cases the Roman people believed their own interests were at stake in the verdict. It's well established that Gaius Cornelius, Marcus Scaurus, Titus Milo, Lucius Bestia, and Publius Vatinius were both prosecuted and defended before a crowd of the whole city — enthusiasm strong enough to fire up and set ablaze even the coldest orators. And indeed the speeches that survive from those cases are, by common judgment, the very ones by which their authors are best remembered.
40| Then there were the constant public assemblies, the license granted to hound even the most powerful men, and the glory attached to making enemies — so many eloquent men wouldn't spare even a Scipio, a Sulla, or a Pompey, and in attacking leading citizens, as envy naturally does, they played to the ears of the mob and the stage crowd alike. Think how much heat that stoked in men's talents, what torches it held to orators' ambitions... We're not talking about some quiet, peaceful pursuit content with honesty and restraint. That great, conspicuous eloquence is the child of license, which fools call liberty; it's the companion of unrest, the goad of an unbridled people, obedient to no one, respecting nothing, defiant, reckless, arrogant — it does not arise in well-ordered states. What orator do we know of from Sparta, or from Crete? Those states are famous for the strictest discipline and the strictest laws. Nor do we know of eloquence among the Macedonians, the Persians, or any people content with settled, stable rule. But a few Rhodians, and a great many Athenians, emerged as orators, in states where the people, the untrained masses, everyone — so to speak — held every kind of power. Our own state too, as long as it went astray, as long as it wore itself out with factions, quarrels, and discord, as long as there was no peace in the forum, no harmony in the senate, no moderation in the courts, no respect for one's betters, no limit to what magistrates could do, produced, without doubt, a more forceful eloquence — the way an untended field grows certain plants more luxuriantly. But the eloquence of the Gracchi was not worth so much to the republic that it should have had to endure their laws too, and Cicero did not pay for his reputation for eloquence with a good enough ending.
41| Even so, what survives of the old style among our orators today is itself proof of a state that isn't yet corrected, isn't yet brought fully into line with what we'd wish. Who calls on us for help, after all, except the guilty or the wretched? What town seeks our patronage except one harassed by a hostile neighbor or torn by internal strife? What province do we defend except one that has been plundered and abused? And yet it would have been better not to have suffered the wrong at all than to be avenged for it. If some state could be found in which no one did wrong, an orator would be as useless among the innocent as a doctor among the healthy. Just as the doctor's art finds least use and least occasion to prove itself among peoples blessed with the soundest health and the healthiest bodies, so too the orator's honor is smaller and his glory dimmer among people of good character, ready to obey their ruler. What need is there for long speeches in the senate, when the best men agree quickly? What need for many public assemblies, when the state's affairs are weighed not by the many and untrained but by one supremely wise man? What need for voluntary prosecutions, when wrongdoing is so rare and so restrained? What need for defenses bitter and excessive, when the mercy of the one who judges meets the accused halfway? Believe me, my excellent and — so far as needed — most eloquent friends: if either you had been born in earlier ages, or those men we admire had been born in ours, and some god had suddenly swapped your lives and your times, you would not have lacked their supreme praise and glory in eloquence, nor would they have lacked your restraint and moderation. As it is, since no one can achieve great fame and great tranquility at the same time, let each of us make the most of the good in his own age, without begrudging another's.'
42| Maternus had finished, when Messalla said: 'There were points I would have argued against, things I'd have liked discussed further, if the day weren't already spent.' 'That can happen,' Maternus said, 'later, whenever you like — and if anything in what I've said seemed unclear to you, we'll go over it again.' And rising at once, he embraced Aper and said, 'I'll denounce you to the poets, and Messalla here to the antiquarians.' 'And I'll denounce the both of you to the rhetoricians and the schoolmasters,' Messalla said. When we had all laughed, we went our separate ways.