The utility of oratory evidently created a market for education in rhetoric. We see this in the rhetorical handbooks published in the nineties and eighties, such as Cicero’s De Inventione and the anonymous Rhetorica ad Herennium, whose pedestrian presentation testifies to their practical utility. People wanted to learn this ‘‘high tech.’’ Indeed, the teaching of rhetoric became a contentious political issue in the context of the unrest that led to the Social war. Suetonius records two official actions, one dating from 161 bce regarding both teachers of rhetoric and philosophers, and the other taken in 92 bce with regard to certain teachers of rhetoric (see chapter 3). The first was a decree of the senate instructing the urban praetor to see to it that both rhetores and philosophi were absent from Rome, and the second was an edict of both censors to the effect that people calling themselves Latini rhetores had introduced a novel form of instruction that violated mos maiorum (‘‘ancestral [Roman] custom’’), and that both the teachers in these schools and their students were displeasing to them (Suet. Rhet. 25.2; Kaster 1995: 272-5; Gell. NA 15.11.1-2; Kennedy 1972: 93-6). Suetonius also relates that Cicero wrote in a letter (no longer extant) that he remembered that in his youth a certain Lucius Plotius Gallus taught in Latin, and that all the most enthusiastic students went to him for training; but cicero was not allowed to do so because doctissimi homines (‘‘very learned men’’) thought that he should be educated through traditional Greek training (Rhet. 26.1). The sources indicate that Plotius was just the best known of several rhetores Latini (pace Schmidt 1975: 215).
Not surprisingly, since one of the censors, Lucius Licinius Crassus, is one of cicero’s interlocutors in the De Oratore, cicero has crassus comment on his censorial ruling. He explains that he acted to remove the Latini magistri because he felt that their teaching dulled the talents of their students, and he calls such a school an impudentiae ludus (‘‘a school of shamelessness,’’ De Or. 3.94; see also Sen. Controv. 2 praef. 5; Quint. Inst. 2.4.42; Tac. Dial. 35.1) - hardly a surprising sentiment in a work that argues that the orator must be a complete statesman, trained more by example and experience than by formal instruction. Paradoxically, Roman traditionalists who distrusted rhetoric as a Greek art had come to insist that rhetoric be taught through the medium of the Greek language and Greek culture.
Clearly much had changed between 161 and 92 bce. Whereas the senate and praetor in 161 had sought to remove all philosophers and teachers of rhetoric, who must have been Greek, by 92 the censors were excluding Latin teachers of rhetoric (that is, those who used Latin as the language of instruction, not teachers of Latin status). In effect, they were protecting the traditional methods of education that men such as Cicero had received, ones that depended on the Greek language and Greek writings, including Greek philosophy. The edict was aimed not at the citizenship status of the teachers, but at their novel method of instruction, which vastly increased the number of potential students, since instruction offered a shortcut to a superficial mastery of rhetoric. Kaster agrees with Gruen’s dismissal of the earlier explanation that connected the Latini rhetores with a Marian, popularis, or ‘‘democratic’’ faction, pointing out that the passage that has been used to support this connection reveals no political alignment between Marius and Lucius Plotius Gallus; it merely states that Marius hoped to be glorified by the prose of Plotius (Kaster 1995: 293; Cic. Arch. 20; see also Schol. Bob. 178, Stangl 1964; Gruen 1990: 17991). Gruen is also probably right to dissociate the censorial decree of 92 from the Lex Licinia Mucia of 95, which attempted to remove some Italians from Rome. Although the statute and the censorial edict both bear the name of Licinius Crassus, they need not have had the same aim.
Kaster outlines two possible explanations for the censorial edict, explanations that are not mutually exclusive (Kaster 1995: 273-4). First, as Gruen points out, by 92 rhetorical education based on Greek instruction and Greek models had long been established at Rome, and therefore opponents of Latin rhetorical education could appeal to mos maiorum to justify their restrictions. Greek sources formed the basis of rhetorical handbooks, even those written in Latin (Clarke 19963: 15), such as Cicero’s De Inventione (ca. 91 bce) and the anonymous Rhetorica ad Herennium (written at some point after 86 and probably before 82 bce), though the latter work, unlike the former, strains to downplay its Greek heritage (4.10; Corbeill 2002a: 3146). Traditionalists may have argued that rhetorical education lacking a thorough grounding in the Greek classics would be superficial. Second, the censors may well have thought that the creation of ludi (‘‘schools’’) threatened the practice of tirocinium fori, the public apprenticeship by which adult aristocrats molded their successors, and that these ludi therefore promoted demagoguery and undermined the Roman elite’s supremacy (Schmidt 1975: 210). However, soon after the dramatic date of the De Oratore (91 bce) the Romans faced far more pressing problems than rhetorical pedagogy, as the Social war challenged their domination of Italy, and such schools may have made a comeback only in the sixties bce (Schmidt 1975: 215-16).
The restrictions on these teachers of rhetoric may reveal a more profound development in Roman political culture and institutions. The parallel with the development of jurisprudence is instructive. Jurisprudence during much of the republic had depended on a tirocinium fori for transmission from one generation to the next, as young men listened to jurists provide legal responsa (‘‘answers’’) to real-life legal issues that lay persons brought to them. But starting in the latter half of the second century bce a jurisprudential literature had emerged that allowed the layperson to gain some legal education through a written rather than oral medium. Frier identifies three factors that led to this process: first, the enfranchisement of Italians; secondly, a vast rise in wealth among the Italian upper classes that created a need for litigation and a legal substitute for personal social relationships; and thirdly, general instability (Frier 1985: esp. 155-8, 279-82).
Rhetorical education may, for similar reasons, have moved away from a long apprenticeship (which in this case, unlike jurisprudence, involved absorption of a foreign intellectual tradition) toward formal instruction and textbooks that simplified the discipline to make it more accessible. Though the enfranchisement of Italians in the aftermath of the Social war must have advanced this process faster and to a greater extent than before, in the case of both jurisprudence and rhetoric the pressure in this direction must have started before that conflict. David (1979) shows that an increase in criminal statutes and criminal prosecutions fostered the growth of rhetoric. But at least as important must have also been the growth of private litigation, as non-Roman residents of Italy were increasingly pulled into the economic orbit of Rome. They now needed to use Roman law and the Roman courts to defend their property rights, and wanted to learn what they needed to know to exploit them. Therefore the market for the two skills needed to function in a Roman judicial context - jurisprudence and rhetoric - must have been expanding already in the second century bce, and both jurists and rhetoricians met that demand. The rise of Marcus Tullius Cicero of Arpinum to become consul and Rome’s leading orator is just the most obvious manifestation of a widespread phenomenon in a Romanized Italy.
FURTHER READING
The most important Roman sources for the relationship between oratory and politics in the Roman republic are Cicero’s De Oratore and Brutus. The former can now be found in an annotated translation with introduction and notes (May and Wisse 2001). Fantham (2004) situates the ideas presented in this work within the realities of Roman politics and institutions. Millar (1998) stresses the importance of Roman voters as autonomous participants in political decisions, and therefore the importance of speeches in contiones as a way to persuade them. Morstein-Marx (2004), while agreeing that those speeches are important, views them as a tool for elite control of the voters.
Readers can gain an understanding of the prosopographical approach to trials from Gelzer (1969), Taylor (1949: 98-118), and Broughton (1972). Badian (1957) is the exemplar that many other practitioners of this approach strove to emulate. Brunt’s analysis of clientela (1988c) undercuts a premise of the approach. Frier (1985), Riggsby (1999), and Alexander (2002) in their analysis of trials give greater scope to the law as opposed to factional analysis, while still contextualizing the trials. Crook (1995) presents the role of the advocates and their speeches in Roman trials. Powell and Paterson (2004) deals with Cicero in the role of advocate; while all the chapters are relevant to the subject of this chapter, the editors’ introduction (2004: 1-57) is particularly useful for understanding the function of forensic advocacy in the Roman republic.
A Companion to Roman Rhetoric Edited by William Dominik, Jon Hall Copyright © 2007 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd
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