Oratory in the Republic was the place where various versions of Romanness were most publicly performed, practiced, constructed, and contested (see also Chapter 20). The process of making claims and counter-claims about what is just and Roman is ultimately a process of self-interrogation (What does it mean to be a Roman?) and self-representation (How do I represent myself as Roman?), and it is not surprising that these are the same forces that shape Roman comedy and satire.
Roman oratory for us begins with Greek rhetoricians (who were expelled from Rome in 161) and the same Cato who opposed excessive Greek influence. Still, Cato wrote on rhetoric and kept written versions of his own speeches, revised them in his old age, and used them in his Origines (see also Chapter 2). They were part of his public record, and they illustrate how oratory at Rome depended upon a deeply rhetorical sense of self and was one place where Romanness, and not just prudence or policy, was contested. In 168, during the fourth year of an inconclusive war with Macedonia, an embassy from Rhodes arrived in the Senate hoping to change the terms of their allegiance. Hitherto they had been allied with Rome, but now they wished to play the role of negotiator between Rome and Macedonia’s king Perseus. Unfortunately, they arrived just after news of Perseus’ capture had been received. Some Romans were angry and wanted to attack the haughty and arrogant Rhodians. Cato opposed any such action, and addressed the Senate in terms of human
Psychology: ‘‘I know,’’ he said, ‘‘that it often happens that most people swell with anger and increase and grow in pride and ferocity when ambitions flourish and prosper and succeed’’ (ORF4 Cato no. 8, 163 = Gell. NA 6.3.14). Cato makes two brilliant moves here. First, he assigns to the Romans the very characteristics they wanted to punish: pride and arrogance. Second, he exonerates the Roman response as typical and human. While his prudential concern is that the Romans not do anything rash, he argues for restraint by collapsing the difference between the haughty Rhodians and the haughty Romans. At the end he comes back to Romanness and, like the satirists, asks his audience to step back a bit from their own impulses and see themselves more clearly:
They say that the Rhodians are haughty and proud, and in making this objection they point to a flaw that I would not want alleged about me or my children. But let them be haughty and proud! What difference does that make to us? Are you going to get angry just because someone is more haughty and proud than we are? (ORF4 Cato no. 8,169 = Gell. NA 6.3.50)
For all his alleged moral severity, Cato in this speech exemplifies the tolerant humanity we associate with the best of Roman ethics. His manipulation of argument here entails a complex interchanging of roles: Cato would not like to be a haughty Roman (which gives him credentials to judge others) but provides in himself an example of how haughty Romans can be tolerant, if not indifferent to, Rhodian haughtiness. The speech constructs a place where Romans can accept their Roman responsibilities in terms of what it means to be a Roman - both a haughty, arrogant Roman and a tolerant prudential Roman.
Cato’s awareness of the complex negotiations between speaker and audience is given theoretical expression in the Roman revision of Aristotelian rhetoric. Aristotle had analyzed argument in terms of three ‘‘proofs’’: logos (logic), pathos (emotion), and ethos (character). Thus, a speaker might convince a jury by the rigor of his logic, or he might win sympathy for his position by the appeal to and display ofemotions, or he might evince a presumption of good faith because of his character and sincerity. The Romans adopted the Greek analysis, but revised its articulation of specific technical elements and focused on the effect that a speech had upon the audience as a dynamic process that bound speaker, speech, and listener together. ‘‘Logic’’ became probare, that is, ‘‘to win cognitive assent, to get accepted as true.’’ In many of its uses, it has nothing explicitly to do with logic, but only with the belief that something is true. ‘‘Emotion’’ became movere, that is, ‘‘to move the audience,’’ which emphasizes the active role of the orator in manipulating feelings. And, finally, ‘‘character’’ is reimagined as conciliare, ‘‘to reconcile the audience to the judgment it is being asked to make,’’ that is, to make the audience feel that the position which the orator takes is one that their character also allows them to take. If he demands justice be done because of a heinous crime, conciliare means that the orator uses his character, his measured outrage, his capacity to feel the pain and fear of others, as a way to reconcile a cruel punishment with a healthy state. Conciliare, then, refers not just to the recognized status of the orator, but to his display of emotions and capacities to respond. While this confounds the neat Greek division between emotion and character, it recognizes that persuasion is not the result of specific techniques, but a relationship between audience and speaker, one that involves a sense that something is true combined with emotions that are appropriate to the verdict. This is how community is formed, and in nearly all of his performances, Cicero constructs Romanness as a contest for the hearts and minds (conciliate) of good citizens to feel (movere) certain things in making a judgment (probate).
Both the need to revise Greek rhetoric and the representative powers of Roman rhetoric are implicit in a feature of the Roman forensic system that makes it formally different from the Greek system (see also Chapters 11 and 20). In Athens, the rhetor wrote speeches for the client who spoke for himself. In Rome, the orator spoke as a patron on behalf of his client.14 This difference had enormous consequences: for instance, what a husband could say about finding another man in bed with his wife had to be revised for the public character of the patron. The patron’s outrage could not be the naked emotions of betrayal and anger that a husband might, even should, express; he had to show the civic emotions that protect husbands from betrayal and society from acts of unrestrained vengeance. Furthermore, the simplest part of the oration, the narrative statement of facts, could, even must, now become a fiction of community. The orator had to represent to the jury what had been the experience of another. He had to speak as if he had seen what another had seen and felt what another had felt. His own persona became the site where the demands of justice and vengeance faced the demands of community. This position between the victim and the law allows Cicero to turn the prosecution of Verres into a defense of both Sicily and the senatorial courts. In fact, what Cicero does is to trope successful and honest prosecution as a defense of law and order (the courts) and a defense of the victim (Sicily). It is a trope the Sicilians, who are demanding recompense for extortion, cannot use without what would appear as self-serving arrogance. They cannot say, ‘‘Save yourselves and your system by giving us back our money.’’ But Cicero can say, ‘‘Let’s save ourselves and our system by returning the money.’’ Similarly, in the pro Caelio Cicero’s position as the representative of Caelius, who is charged with violence and attempted murder, allows him to portray the entire affair as a silly comedy of unrequited love. To do this, he adopts the persona of the pleasant old man of comedy and argues, in essence, ‘‘What’s the fuss? Boys will be boys.’’ Surely, Caelius, the defendant, cannot defend himself by playing the role of a callow lover!
The advocate, like the clever slave, plays a role and manipulates the symbolic capital of Rome on behalf of his client and himself.15 This is a representational system in which the orator, while contesting justice and equity, constructed and contested Romanness as well. It is fitting, then, that Cicero’s primary claim on behalf of the citizenship of the Greek poet Archias is that he is and should be a Roman citizen because he represents Rome to Romans and to others: ‘‘shall we reject this man... who is our man by his own desire and according to our laws. . . especially when he, Archias, has devoted all his energy and all his genius to spreading the glory and renown of the Roman People?’’ (Arch. 9.19).
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