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reports. The only way to reach a lot of people at once was to use one’s own voice in front of an assembly of the people. Ambitious Romans had frequent opportunities to do just that, and the higher up the scale they were, the more important it was to be able to perform well in that context. Their careers depended on their ability to speak convincingly in public.
The most important speeches were obviously those made by politicians and those in power when big issues were decided, especially in the Senate. There were no fixed divisions between parties, so a single individual could sometimes bring about a shift in opinion. But it was not easy, as the senators were experienced men who had heard many fine words on other occasions. To succeed you had to be very good.
It was also important to be able to speak in court. In the modern world that is something lawyers do, but in Rome things worked very differently. Rome was truly a city ruled by law, not least in the sense that the citizens of Rome brought lawsuits against each other about everything under the sun. Landowners and the wealthy sued each other over business deals, loans, the boundaries of their land, or the collapse of a roof, while public officeholders could be prosecuted for abuse of power and corruption. Then, of course, there was always murder, robbery, and riot.
A person who was summoned to court normally engaged someone he trusted to defend him, and it was seen as a civic duty to defend one’s friends in court. A training in the law was not compulsory for someone who took on the role of defender, although it might well be a very useful asset. But you did have to be able to speak well in public if you were going to help a friend out of a difficult situation. Trials were always open to the public; there were often several judges, who themselves did not always have any legal training, so it was more important to present a generally persuasive argument than to have mastered the legal subtleties of the case.
A Roman, then, had to be a good public speaker, and if he was, the road to success lay open to him. The best example, and the most able of all the Roman orators, was Marcus Tullius Cicero.
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Cicero and rhetoric
Cicero was born in 106 and died in 43 BCE, and he lived during the turbulent era of the revolutions. He was born into what we would call the upper middle class, those who in Rome were called équites ‘knights’. He received an exceptionally thorough education, the purpose of which was to train him to appear in court, to speak well in all situations, and, if need be, to take part in war. He studied first in Rome and later in Athens, where he had the chance to plumb the considerable depths of a Greek education.
When he was about twenty-five he began to appear for the defence in controversial trials and soon made a name for himself. He was elected to high office and thereby entered the Senate. He became a homo novus ‘a new man’, that is to say someone who became a senator even though no one in his family had ever been before. In the year 63 BCE he also became consul and hence head of state. It was truly exceptional for a homo novus to get that far.
In the remaining twenty years of his life Cicero played the power game at the highest level, with varying degrees of success. After the assassination of Caesar he was briefly the leading political figure in Rome, but he lost a battle for power with the general Antonius— known to cinema and theatregoers as the Antony of Antony and Cleopatra—and was in turn himself assassinated.
Cicero made many important speeches during his career, to the Senate and to the people as a whole. He published most of them in his own lifetime and some fifty still survive. These speeches were much admired. Cicero was an extremely skilful orator: he had a good voice, expressed himself very well, argued convincingly, and was above all a master at making his audience think and feel what he wanted them to. He was also amazingly successful. As counsel for the defence, he managed to get some of the dodgiest characters acquitted, and in the Senate he several times succeeded in winning the argument when there was no real political basis for his position, relying only on his ability to persuade.
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Here is a small example. It is the beginning of his speech against Catiline, a senator who was secretly planning a coup d’état in the year in which Cicero was consul. Cicero found out what was brewing and called a meeting of the Senate, where he made a frontal attack on his fellow senator. The speech begins as follows:
Quo usque tandem abutére, Catilina, patiéntia nostra? Quam diu etiam furor iste tuus nos elúdet? Quam ad finem sese effrenata iactabit audácia? Nihílne te nocturnum praesídium Palati, nihil urbis vigíliae, nihil timor pópuli, nihil concursus bonorum ómnium, nihil hic munitíssimus habendi senatus locus, nihil horum ora vultusque moverunt?
How far will you, Catiline, abuse our patience? How long will this mad rage of yours mock us? Is there no limit to your boastful ambition and unbridled audacity? Does the nightly setting of guards on the Palatine hill mean nothing to you, nothing too the watches posted in the city, nothing the people’s anxiety, nothing the coming together of all the loyal citizens, nothing the fact that the Senate is meeting in this heavily fortified place, nothing the looks and faces of these men gathered here?
Linguistically this is rather a difficult text, which you cannot read in Latin until you have had quite a lot of experience with the language. Here we will just look at a few of the things which show how the speaker went about his oratorical task. It is easy to see that Cicero’s tactic was to show Catiline up as a dangerous man from whom everyone should keep their distance. The aim was not to debate whether Catiline was or was not a rebel against the state, but to make everyone feel that he was. The tactic was so successful that he did not think it was even worth trying to speak in his own defence in front of the Senate, and so he simply left Rome. Cicero succeeded in what is always an orator’s chief aim: to make his audience think what he wanted them to think.
To that end, he exploited many of the orator’s tricks of the trade. Some of these are easy to recognize. For example, he starts out with three provocative questions one after the other. They were not meant to be answered, for there is no reasonable answer that could be given; in reality, they are statements.Today we call such questions rhetorical. In the following sentence, Cicero repeats the word nihil
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‘nothing/not at all’ six times to hammer home the fact that Catiline is ruthless and callous. These are just two examples of devices which could be used to make a speech effective.
Many others wanted to be able to perform like this, and Cicero’s speeches were used as models which were carefully studied in Roman schools. But although these speeches are in fact incredibly well constructed, not many people read them today, for the simple reason that they are designed for specific occasions and you often have to know a good deal about Roman politics and law to understand them at all. They are rich and varied in their choice of vocabulary, but to the modern reader this can make them seem wordy and even boring; the effect must have been completely different when they were delivered.
Cicero was not just a master of public speaking himself; he was also a great theorist. He wrote several important books about what he called ars oratória ‘the art of public speaking’. Ars obviously means ‘art’, and oratoria ‘oratorical, having to do with public speaking’ is an adjective which has been formed from the noun orator ‘speaker’. This word in turn comes from the verb orare ‘to make a speech, to orate’. The same discipline was also known by the Greek name ars rhetorica ‘the art of rhetoric’, from the Greek word for a public speaker, which was rhetor.
Rhetoric was one of the many disciplines that the Greeks invented. It was linked, in their view, on the one hand with poetics, the theory of poetry or of creative writing in general, and on the other with politics, the theory of the state. Rhetoric was about how to persuade people by means of the spoken word and by Cicero’s time the Greeks had already written textbooks and theses on this subject and had been teaching it for several hundred years. Cicero learnt everything the Greeks had to teach in his youth and thereafter honed his skills through a lifetime of practice, while in his spare time he wrote books in Latin on rhetoric.A hundred years after his death, another Roman, Quintilian, wrote the most detailed and best-known handbook on the subject, the Institutio Oratoria ‘Training in Oratory’.
In most other subjects, what was taught in the ancient world has long been superseded. The physics of antiquity, for example, is of
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interest only to historians of science, and the same goes for for most other fields of study. But rhetoric is different. Those whose concern is the arts of public speaking and persuasion often take Quintilian and Cicero as a foundation. The reason probably lies in the fact that this subject was so important to the Romans that their best talents consumed much of their energy and imagination on it, and hence their views still hold good today. The most successful modern handbooks of rhetoric owe much of their contents to the teachings of the ancient writers on the subject.
You can get some idea of what it is all about by looking at the basic terms. If you were planning a speech, you had to concentrate on five things: the first was invéntio or ‘invention’, in other words finding the line of reasoning and the arguments which were to be used in the speech. The next phase was disposítio or ‘arrangement’ of the different parts, which was followed by elocútio or ‘expression’, that is to say putting the argument into the right words. This particular sub-area of rhetoric is the origin of the modern discipline of stylistics. After this comes memória or ‘memory’: when the speaker had worked out and written down a speech he had to learn the whole thing by heart, and rhetorical teaching included a number of interesting techniques for training the memory which are still useful today. Finally, there was pronuntiátio or the ‘delivery’ of the speech, including modulation of the voice, gestures, and so forth.
In a sense, then, making a speech was the most important literary activity in ancient Rome. But there were other ways of using the language which were of great importance, and to which other prominent Romans eagerly devoted their energies.
The language of history
In this book I have written quite a bit about the history of the Romans from the earliest times and down through the centuries.That we know anything about this is due to the fact that the Romans themselves
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were very interested in writing their history.The idea was another one which came originally from the Greeks, who had started to record their own history several hundred years before the Romans, and many of the sources we still have for the history of Rome were actually in Greek. But once the Romans got started, they produced a number of excellent works. Several of the Roman historians are still well worth reading today if you are interested in the subject.
The first to get a mention is usually Sallust (in Latin Sallustius), who was one of the officers closest to Caesar, and who also became a senator and governor of the province of Numidia (roughly, modern Algeria). He probably plundered his province, since he became rich enough to buy himself a house with a huge garden in the best part of Rome. When he was about forty, he retired there and devoted himself to writing.
What has survived are just two short books, of which one is about that same Catiline whom Cicero had attacked. It is very readable, and was used in schools for many hundreds of years. Sallust writes very well, in an abrupt style, and he spices his narrative with neatly phrased reflections about the way people are, and the way they should be, as for example Régibus boni quam mali suspectiores sunt ‘To a king good people are more to be suspected than evil ones’ (word for word in Latin: ‘To kings, good than bad more suspected are’). He set a fashion among Roman historians to look for moral lessons in the events of history.
One of the things that distinguishes Roman historians from modern ones is the fact that they often had their main characters perform and make speeches. This was actually historically accurate in the sense that the Romans did make speeches to the Senate and to the troops before a pitched battle, or to the people at times of crisis. Of course, the historian could not know exactly what had been said, but it was part of his task to try to render the important speeches as he imagined they might have been delivered. This is the same technique as is employed by the scriptwriters for historical documentaries on television. History books could often be used as tools in the training of future orators.
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Caesar, Sallust’s commander and protector, was himself a very skilled writer, and the works of his that survive are also historical, in a way. He wrote his own account of the war he waged in Gaul, which is seven books long (but remember that a Roman book or liber is much shorter than a modern one), and another one, three books in length, about the subsequent civil war which he precipitated. Both these works are deliberately couched in a seemingly neutral and objective style, as if they were simply reports home to Rome about the events that had taken place. A characteristic feature of his style is that Caesar never writes about himself as ‘I’ but always writes ‘Caesar’ as if he was discussing someone else. However, when you look more carefully at what Caesar says, you soon find that it is to a large extent propaganda which aims to explain and defend his actions. For the most part he marched his army around and fought pitched battles, which makes the narrative rather monotonous, as millions of schoolchildren have discovered, since his account of the Gallic war has quite undeservedly taken up a great deal of time in the traditional Latin syllabus. For many, its opening sentence has been the first authentic text in Latin which they have encountered:
Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres, quarum unam íncolunt Belgae, áliam Aquitani, tértiam qui ipsorum lingua Celtae nostra Galli appellantur.
The whole of Gaul is divided into three parts, of which the Belgians inhabit one, the Aquitanians another and the third is inhabited by those who in their own language are called Celts and in ours Gauls.
In this sentence Caesar gives us a brief introduction to the inhabitants of the new country. In the north-east were the Belgae and in the south the Aquitani, while in the large area between the two, that is to say most of modern France, lived the Gauls. Many of the words in the text are easy to recognize. Divisa means and is clearly related to ‘divided’, partes tres means ‘three parts’ (‘one part’ would be una pars). The three words unam, aliam, tertiam obviously correspond to ‘one’, ‘another, i.e. second’, and ‘third’. The word for language is lingua and lingua nostra means ‘our language’. Appellantur ‘they are called’ reminds us of the French verb appeler ‘to call’.
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Many others came after Sallust and Caesar. One of the bestknown is Livy, who lived around the time of the birth of Christ and devoted his whole life to writing a complete history of Rome from 753 BCE, the year of the city’s foundation, until 9 BCE. This work is called Ab urbe cóndita ‘From the foundation of the city’. It contains 142 books, corresponding to about 6,000 printed pages, and about a quarter of it has been preserved. There were probably not many complete copies in any case, even in antiquity, for, as we have said, the expense involved in producing each individual copy was enormous.
The parts that have survived are from the early period. It was Livy who passed on most of the tall stories about brave and just Roman warriors. He saw it as the duty of the historian to provide posterity with an example. He was not therefore so interested in examining and criticizing his sources, although he did not consciously lie or make things up. He sought to give the Romans a splendid and glorious version of their own history, and one that was also readable. In this he succeeded; he is a very adept storyteller, and very good at giving lively descriptions of situations and events. It is most fun to read the very first part, where the sources were few and fanciful, and where Livy was able to embellish the stories using his own imagination. The bit about the Roman war against the Carthaginians used to be required reading for schoolchildren, and here we find such pearls as the description of Hannibal’s march across the Alps. Unfortunately, there are also a great many descriptions of pitched battles and stratagems, which are hardly of interest to anyone except military historians.
Imperium romanum: Augustus and the Roman empire
After Caesar had been assassinated, it transpired that in his will he had adopted the nineteen-year-old grandson of one of his sisters. In our
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source it says: Gaium Octávium in famíliam noménque adoptavit ‘He adopted Gaius Octavius into the family and the name’. From that day forth the young man was called Gaius Julius Caesar, with the additional name Octavianus (in English Octavian). At first the established politicians tried to ignore him, but in so doing they made a big mistake. Within a couple of years, he was camped outside Rome with his own army and had forced the Senate into appointing him as consul at the tender age of twenty-one. There followed some fifteen years of intrigue and civil war, in which the main protagonists were Octavian and Antony, who had been Caesar’s closest ally. When Antony and Cleopatra, the Queen of Egypt, were finally defeated and died, Octavian, who was then thirty-five, became the unchallenged leader of the empire. He had shown himself to be ruthless and cruel, and it seemed likely that he would preside over a reign of terror, but things turned out differently.
Octavian did not want to be dictator or consul for life, and he explained to the Senate that he was restoring power into their hands. However, he retained for himself a number of powers which in practice were crucial. It is fair to say that he gave Rome a new constitution according to which one man had most of the power, but the Senate and consuls and other officers of state were still there as before and had a great deal of say in government. One way in which the Senate thanked him was to give him the name Augustus which means ‘venerable’ or ‘majestic’. That is the name by which he has become known to posterity, and he bore it from 27 BCE until his death at the age of seventy-six in 14 CE.
Augustus was the first of a new kind of ruler. He was succeeded by his stepson Tiberius, and after him there came a long line all the way down to the last ruler of the western empire, who was deposed in the year 476 CE, half a millennium after Augustus had introduced his new form of government. In English these rulers are called emperors, but in German the word is Kaiser, a word which derives from the name Caesar, and which entered the Germanic language family at an early stage and is also found in modern Germanic languages like Swedish, Danish, Dutch, and Icelandic. This of course is not
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incorrect, since Caesar was part of the full title of all the emperors; but their official designation was Augustus, the honorary name which they all bore. Their title also included the word imperator, which is the source of the English word ‘emperor’ and which in turn came to us via the French empereur.
The word imperator literally means ‘commander’ and belongs with the verb imperare ‘to command’ and with the abstract noun imperium ‘command, power, authority’. Whoever had been given the power to command by the Senate, usually for a year or for the duration of a particular military undertaking, had imperium and was called imperator. What Augustus introduced was the principle that he always had the highest power, summum imperium, and therefore was always imperator. Of course, that also meant that he was always able to get his own way, by force if necessary, throughout the whole territory in which his authority ran. Hence this territory was also called imperium, from which comes our modern word empire. The Roman empire was then the imperium romanum.
Augustus ruled for a long time and by and large he ruled well; civil strife came to an end, the economy was strong, and the quality of the administration in the provinces was improved. This was the beginning of a very long period of stability. It was more than two centuries before the empire was beset once more by a lengthy crisis; but even that passed, and imperial rule continued until the dissolution of the empire in the fifth century AD, when various Germanic tribes invaded the western part and divided it up amongst themselves.
Name and family
The Roman way of naming people was very different from ours. Roman men from distinguished families always had three names, as in Marcus Porcius Cato or Gaius Julius Caesar or Marcus Tullius Cicero. Just like us, there was a first name, called the praenómen
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