Part 4 (1/2)
[Footnote 2: No bust, coin, or gem is known which bears any genuine likeness of Cicero. There are several existing which purport to be such, but all are more or less apocryphal.]
[Footnote 3: Quart. Rev., lxi. 522.]
The character of his eloquence may be understood in some degree by the few extracts which have been given from his public speeches; always remembering how many of its charms are necessarily lost by losing the actual language in which his thoughts were clothed. We have lost perhaps nearly as much in another way, in that we can only read the great orator instead of listening to him. Yet it is possible, after all, that this loss to us is not so great as it might seem. Some of his best speeches, as we know--those, for instance, against Verres and in defence of Milo--were written in the closet, and never spoken at all; and most of the others were reshaped and polished for publication. Nor is it certain that his declamation, which some of his Roman rivals found fault with as savouring too much of the florid Oriental type, would have been agreeable to our colder English taste. He looked upon gesture and action as essential elements of the orator's power, and had studied them carefully from the artists of the theatre. There can be no doubt that we have his own views on this point in the words which he has put into the mouth of his ”Brutus”, in the treatise on oratory which bears that name. He protests against the ”Attic coldness” of style which, he says, would soon empty the benches of their occupants. He would have the action and bearing of the speaker to be such that even the distant spectator, too far off to hear, should ”know that there was a Roscius on the stage”. He would have found a French audience in this respect more sympathetic than an English one.[1]
His own highly nervous temperament would certainly tend to excited action.
The speaker, who, as we are told, ”shuddered visibly over his whole body when he first began to speak”, was almost sure, as he warmed to his work, to throw himself into it with a pa.s.sionate energy.
[Footnote 1: Our speakers certainly fall into the other extreme. The British orator's style of gesticulation may still be recognised, _mutatis mutandis_, in Addison's humorous sketch of a century ago: ”You may see many a smart rhetorician turning his hat in his hands, moulding it into several different c.o.c.ks, examining sometimes the lining and sometimes the b.u.t.ton, during the whole course of his harangue. A deaf man would think that he was cheapening a beaver, when he is talking perhaps of the fate of the British nation”.]
He has put on record his own ideas of the qualifications and the duties of the public speaker, whether in the Senate or at the bar, in three continuous treatises on the subject, ent.i.tled respectively, 'On Oratory', 'Brutus', and 'The Orator', as well as in some other works of which we have only fragments remaining. With the first of these works, which he inscribed to his brother, he was himself exceedingly well satisfied, and it perhaps remains still the ablest, as it was the first, attempt to reduce eloquence to a science. The second is a critical sketch of the great orators of Rome: and in the third we have Cicero's view of what the perfect orator should be. His ideal is a high one, and a true one; that he should not be the mere rhetorician, any more than the mere technical lawyer or keen partisan, but the man of perfect education and perfect taste, who can speak on all subjects, out of the fulness of his mind, ”with variety and copiousness”.
Although, as has been already said, he appears to have attached but little value to a knowledge of the technicalities of law, in other respects his preparation for his work was of the most careful kind; if we may a.s.sume, as we probably may, that it is his own experience which, in his treatise on Oratory, he puts into the mouth of Marcus Antonius, one of his greatest predecessors at the Roman bar.
”It is my habit to have every client explain to me personally his own case; to allow no one else to be present, that so he may speak more freely. Then I take the opponent's side, while I make him plead his own cause, and bring forward whatever arguments he can think of. Then, when he is gone, I take upon myself, with as much impartiality as I can, three different characters--my own, my opponent's, and that of the jury.
Whatever point seems likely to help the case rather than injure it, this I decide must be brought forward; when I see that anything is likely to do more harm than good, I reject and throw it aside altogether. So I gain this,--that I think over first what I mean to say, and speak afterwards; while a good many pleaders, relying on their abilities, try to do both at once”.[1]
[Footnote 1: De Oratore, II. 24, 72.]
He reads a useful lesson to young and zealous advocates in the same treatise--that sometimes it may be wise not to touch at all in reply upon a point which makes against your client, and to which you have no real answer; and that it is even more important to say nothing which may injure your case, than to omit something which might possibly serve it. A maxim which some modern barristers (and some preachers also) might do well to bear in mind.
Yet he did not scorn to use what may almost be called the tricks of his art, if he thought they would help to secure him a verdict. The outward and visible appeal to the feelings seems to have been as effective in the Roman forum as with a British jury. Cicero would have his client stand by his side dressed in mourning, with hair dishevelled, and in tears, when he meant to make a pathetic appeal to the compa.s.sion of the jurors; or a family group would be arranged, as circ.u.mstances allowed,--the wife and children, the mother and sisters, or the aged father, if presentable, would be introduced in open court to create a sensation at the right moment. He had tears apparently as ready at his command as an eloquent and well-known English Attorney-General. Nay, the tears seem to have been marked down, as it were, upon his brief. ”My feelings prevent my saying more”, he declares in his defence of Publius Sylla. ”I weep while I make the appeal”--”I cannot go on for tears”--he repeats towards the close of that fine oration in behalf of Milo--the speech that never was spoken.
Such phrases remind us of the story told of a French preacher, whose ma.n.u.scripts were found to have marginal stage directions: ”Here take out your handkerchief;”--”here cry--if possible”. But such were held to be the legitimate adjuncts of Roman oratory, and it is quite possible to conceive that the advocate, like more than one modern tragedian who could be named, entered so thoroughly into the spirit of the part that the tears flowed quite naturally.
A far less legitimate weapon of oratory--offensive and not defensive--was the bitter and coa.r.s.e personality in which he so frequently indulged. Its use was held perfectly lawful in the Roman forum, whether in political debate or in judicial pleadings, and it was sure to be highly relished by a mixed audience. There is no reason to suppose that Cicero had recourse to it in any unusual degree; but employ it he did, and most unscrupulously. It was not only private character that he attacked, as in the case of Antony and Clodius, but even personal defects or peculiarities were made the subject of bitter ridicule. He did not hesitate to season his harangue by a sarcasm on the cast in the prosecutor's eye, or the wen on the defendant's neck, and to direct the attention of the court to these points, as though they were corroborative evidence of a moral deformity.
The most conspicuous instance of this practice of his is in the invective which he launched in the Senate against Piso, who had made a speech reflecting upon him. Referring to Cicero's exile, he had made that sore subject doubly sore by declaring that it was not Cicero's unpopularity, so much as his unfortunate propensity to bad verse, which had been the cause of it. A jingling line of his to the effect that
”The gown wins grander triumphs than the sword”[1]
had been thought to be pointed against the recent victories of Pompey, and to have provoked him to use his influence to get rid of the author. But this annotation of Cicero's poetry had not been Piso's only offence. He had been consul at the time of the exile, and had given vent, it may be remembered, to the witticism that the ”saviour of Rome” might save the city a second time by his absence. Cicero was not the man to forget it.
The beginning of his attack on Piso is lost, but there is quite enough remaining. Piso was of a swarthy complexion, approaching probably to the negro type. ”Beast”--is the term by which Cicero addresses him. ”Beast!
there is no mistaking the evidence of that slave-like hue, those bristly cheeks, those discoloured fangs. Your eyes, your brows, your face, your whole aspect, are the tacit index to your soul”.[2]
[Footnote 1: ”Cedant arma togae, concedat laurea linguae”.]
[Footnote 2: Such flowers of eloquence are not encouraged at the modern bar. But they were common enough, even in the English law-courts, in former times. Mr. Attorney-General c.o.ke's language to Raleigh at his trial--”Thou viper!”--comes quite up to Cicero's. Perhaps the Irish House of Parliament, while it existed, furnished the choicest modern specimens of this style of oratory. Mr. O'Flanagan, in his 'Lives of the Lord Chancellors of Ireland', tells us that a member for Galway, attacking an opponent when he knew that his sister was present during the debate, denounced the whole family--”from the toothless old hag that is now grinning in the gallery, to the white-livered scoundrel that is s.h.i.+vering on the floor”.]
It is not possible, within the compa.s.s of these pages, to give even the briefest account of more than a few of the many causes (they are twenty-four in number) in which the speeches made by Cicero, either for the prosecution or the defence, have been preserved to us. Some of them have more attraction for the English reader than others, either from the facts of the case being more interesting or more easily understood, or from their affording more opportunity for the display of the speaker's powers.
Mr. Fox had an intense admiration for the speech in defence of Caelius.
The opinion of one who was no mean orator himself, on his great Roman predecessor, may be worth quoting:
”Argumentative contention is not what he excels in; and he is never, I think, so happy as when he has an opportunity of exhibiting a mixture of philosophy and pleasantry, and especially when he can interpose anecdotes and references to the authority of the eminent characters in the history of his own country. No man appears, indeed, to have had such a real respect for authority as he; and therefore when he speaks on that subject he is always natural and earnest”.[1]
[Footnote 1: Letter to G. Wakefield--Correspondence, p. 35.]
There is anecdote and pleasantry enough in this particular oration; but the scandals of Roman society of that day, into which the defence of Caelius was obliged to enter, are not the most edifying subject for any readers. Caelius was a young man of ”equestrian” rank, who had been a kind of ward of Cicero's, and must have given him a good deal of trouble by his profligate habits, if the guardians.h.i.+p was anything more than nominal. But in this particular case the accusation brought against him--of trying to murder an amba.s.sador from Egypt by means of hired a.s.sa.s.sins, and then to poison the lady who had lent him the money to bribe them with--was probably untrue. Clodia, the lady in question, was the worthy sister of the notorious Clodius, and bore as evil a reputation as it was possible for a woman to bear in the corrupt society of Rome--which is saying a great deal. She is the real mover in the case, though another enemy of Caelius, the son of a man whom he had himself brought to trial for bribery, was the ostensible prosecutor. Cicero, therefore, throughout the whole of his speech, aims the bitter shafts of his wit and eloquence at Clodia. His brilliant invectives against this lady, who was, as he pointedly said, ”not only n.o.ble but notorious”, are not desirable to quote. But the opening of the speech is in the advocate's best style. The trial, it seems, took place on a public holiday, when it was not usual to take any cause unless it were of pressing importance.