Theory

Greco-Roman handbooks on rhetorical theory have very little to say about oratory in the Roman senate. One reason why this is so is that rhetorical theory in the Roman world was chiefly grounded on a system worked out by the Greeks, and the Greeks had no institution precisely comparable to the Roman senate (Mack 1937: 15). The senate evolved from a council of noblemen that was formed by the early kings of Rome. Throughout its history, it functioned in a strictly advisory capacity, first to the king and later to the annually elected magistrates who replaced the king. It was convened most often by one of the two consuls, who were the chief executives of the state, and sometimes by one of the praetors, elected officials who ranked just below the consuls and were eight in number in the Ciceronian age. Eventually, the ten plebeian tribunes gained the right to call a meeting of the senate and lay a question before it for debate. This large number of potential conveners virtually guaranteed that the senate was consulted on every matter of importance. Membership was for life, barring removal for disgraceful conduct or a criminal conviction, and under the major reforms of the dictator Lucius Sulla in 81 bce, the size of the senate was increased from 300 to 600. After Sulla, admission to the senate was henceforth gained by election to the quaestorship, for which the minimum age was thirty. Because of its stable membership, and because of the wealth of collective experience shared by its members, who were all ex-magistrates, the senate became a locus of considerable power. This elite body exercised almost absolute control over both foreign and domestic policy, and yet it could not enact laws; that power resided with the several voting assemblies.

A second reason why senatorial oratory received little theoretical discussion, even in handbooks written by Romans who were well acquainted with the senate, has to do with the nature of oratory practiced in that body. Of the traditional, threefold division of oratory into forensic (judicial), epideictic (display), and deliberative

(Arist. Rh. 1.3), speeches delivered in the senate naturally tended to be deliberative for the most part or, on occasion, epideictic, which is further divisible into encomium and invective. Rhetorical handbooks devote far more attention to forensic oratory because the Greeks, and hence their Roman followers, regarded that type of oratory as more complex than the other two classifications. Aristotle (Rh. 3.13), for instance, asserts that deliberative oratory is comprised of basically just two elements, a statement of a position (the prothesis or propositio) and the presentation of reasons for its adoption (the pistis or confirmatio). The rules for making a successful speech of that type tend to be rather simple and briefly stated (e. g., Cic. Tnv. Rhet. 2.15576; cf. Rhet. Her. 3.2-9). By contrast, rhetorical treatises distinguish up to six distinct parts of a forensic oration (exordium, narratio, partitio, confirmatio, refu-tatio, and peroratio), and these handbooks lavish much attention on describing the requirements of each of those parts.

Of course, theory did not always govern practice. Deliberative speeches do sometimes exhibit all six divisions, most notably Cicero’s De Imperio Cn. Pompeii of 66 BCE, his first address to the Roman people. Most deliberative speeches, however, had no need for a narratio because the facts of the matter under debate were usually well known and agreed upon by the audience. Apartitio, the section where a speaker gives an overview of the points he intends to cover, was sometimes included but was by no means obligatory. Rarely, but on occasion, a senatorial speech will even dispense with introductory remarks comprising a formal exordium. Since the aim of an exordium was to make an audience benivolus (‘‘well disposed’’), attentus (‘‘attentive’’), and docilis (‘‘receptive to the argument,’’ Cic. Inv. Rhet. 1.20; Rhet. Her. 1.6), it could be omitted when the senatorial audience was sufficiently on the orator’s side in advance of his speech, or when special circumstances called for a speech to have a more abrupt beginning. For instance, Cicero’s First Philippic plunges directly into a narratio, a feature sufficiently unusual to call for comment by the fifth-century CE grammarian Grillius (Rhet. Lat. Min. 604.9-14; Halm 1863).

Usually, however, there is a readily distinguishable exordium and peroratio in Cicero’s extant senatorial speeches. Moreover, Cicero’s bitter invectives in the senate against his political enemies Lucius Piso and Mark Antony contain many of the elements typically found in judicial speeches. Given the overlap that deliberative and epideictic oratory could have with forensic speeches (Inv. Rhet. 2.110), rhetoricians generally left it to the users of their rhetorical treatises to apply the rules for composing a successful forensic speech to other types of oratory.