Oratory in Rome

Hello, my name is Henrietta van der Blom.

I'm a lecturer in Classics at the University of Glasgow.

I'm going to talk today about oratory at Rome and Cicero’s speech,

De Imperio Gnaei Pompei.

In this first module, I will talk about what oratory was, who the orators were

and who were the people that they addressed.

When Cicero delivered his speech, De Imperio Gnaei Pompei, in 66 BC,

he was speaking from the rostra.

The rostra was placed at the north-west corner of the Roman Forum,

and it was so called because it displayed the ship's prows

that had been taken as trophies

in the first war against Carthage two hundred years previously.

So the place itself reverberated with the history of Rome

and all the glorious moments that formed part of that history.

Cicero’s speech was delivered at a meeting which in Latin is called a contio.

Now contio could be translated as an informal meeting,

but really it's a meeting where information is

delivered out and where discussion is had,

but no conclusion or no vote is taken

at the end.

The contio was convened by a magistrate or a tribune of the plebs,

so it had to be a person who had an official capacity in order to call the meeting,

and he could also decide who were to speak at this

meeting, either himself only or he could call people to speak.

He could ‘produce’ people, as it said in Latin, producere.

And so we know that Cicero was called to speak at this meeting,

probably by the tribune Manilius, who had proposed the piece

of legislation that was to be discussed at this meeting.

The audience in the contio were all those people who wanted to come.

When I said that the rostra was placed in the Roman Forum,

that means that anybody who wanted to go or happened to simply be in the

Forum at that time could stroll along and go and listen to the speaker.

That meant that it could be Roman citizens, whether male,

female or children or grown-ups,

but it could also be foreigners; for example, tradesmen travelling through Rome,

people on state visit, or just slaves even.

Anybody who was around and had the time to spend could

stop for a moment or longer and listen to the speech.

It was therefore a place for sharing information.

It was a place for swaying minds,

and it was also a place for displaying

political credibility and oratorical ability of the speaker.

And when I say that,

I'm reminded of a phrase that Cicero gives us in one of his later rhetorical

works. In a work on the history of oratory at Rome called the Brutus,

Cicero says that the characteristic feature of a great orator

is that he is considered great by the people.

By that Cicero underlines the crucial importance

of what the people thought about an

orator and also underlines the importance of

addressing the people in public oratory.

And that is where the contio, this informal meeting, is of very big importance.

Now there were other occasions at which

an orator could address the people at Rome, and when I say the people,

I mean everybody around.

One of these was the

legal courts,

which actually took place in the Roman Forum too.

So if you had a court case,

the court case would be heard in public in front of anybody who wanted to listen to it.

That, of course,

meant that the speech you would deliver, either in prosecution or

defence, was not only directed at the judge or the jury,

or even the people implicated like the defendant or the prosecutor or the councils,

but also you have to think about who the people were, who were listening around,

the people were standing in ‘the circle’ or, as it's called,

the ‘corona’ around the court case.

So this is another venue, you could say, of

addressing a very broad popular audience in Rome.

Now the third big venue for public oratory at Rome was not really public –

it was the Senate –

and these meetings of the Senate, where speeches could be held,

were attended only by senators;

that is, in the Ciceronian period at least, only ex-magistrates.

That meant that normal people could not be present,

but when I say it's semi-public,

I mean that usually one or more senators would go out afterwards

and talk about the discussion that had been held in the Senate.

Sometimes a contio would be called to tell

people more about what had happened in the Senate,

so often the discussions in the Senate would be

trickling down

into society

and not just be confidential to the senators only.

I should say that the speeches delivered in these three venues ¬– the contio,

the courts, and the Senate – were slightly different from each other.

It was known that in the contio you had a large audience,

so you had to first of all speak quite loudly for people to be able to hear you,

and also there was a sense that what you were saying had to appeal broadly.

And one of the ways in which to do

that was to use colourful language and emotional appeal.

That could also be used in what we call ‘forensic’ speeches, that is,

speeches delivered

in the courts.

When we say ‘forensic’ speech,

we are actually referring to the fact that court

cases in Rome were conducted in the Forum,

the Forum Romanum, so ‘forensic’ comes from ‘forum’,

and it's not often known

but it's one of those nice things about knowing a bit of Roman

history and Latin that you can understand why a word is a word.

So forensic speech is speech delivered in the forum in a court case.

The rhetorical handbooks that we have from this

period give lots of information and guidance to

any budding orator as to how to construct and deliver a speech in the court cases,

but very little on how to deliver speeches in the contio or in the Senate.

So we know relatively much about these court cases,

but not so much about the other types of speeches,

but what we do know

is that Senate speeches were usually shorter,

snappier

and

seemingly more factual than the other types of speeches,

and that related to the audience, the difference in audience.

In a contio and in a court case, you would have the whole people around you,

and, as I said before, you would have to be broadly appealing to this big group,

whereas in the Senate you had only other senators who had also had an oratorical

education like yourself, who were not necessarily prone

to be manipulated by cheap oratorical tricks.

They would know all those themselves, so you had to be more factual.

Secondly, you would also be

stepping on other people's toes if you were taking up all

the time at a Senate meeting with your own speech,

so you had to cut it down short.

That is not to say that all Senate speeches were very short –

we have examples of longer ones – but that was the norm, essentially.

When I say that the senators were all educated in oratory,

I think I need to explain a little bit more about oratorical education at Rome.

Usually, starting school, the children would learn Latin and then Greek.

They would learn the grammar, and they would learn some literature.

If one was from a wealthy family, one would continue,

and one of the things that was very helpful, if one hoped that

one's children, one's sons, would go into politics, was a rhetorical education –

so how to make and deliver speeches – but also, increasingly,

education in history and in philosophy.

Cicero is an example I will speak about in one of the next modules,

but generally speaking they would be trained in speeches,

both by reading other people's speeches –

so there's a tradition of preserving written versions of speeches –

also by reading some handbooks, if they were available,

but also by practising speeches,

and we have examples of speeches, or two sides of an argument, that school

children had to practise delivering, and also make up their own arguments for it.

When a young man, then, had gone through this education,

he would usually then attach himself to a more

senior politician and follow him around in the Forum,

to see how was he addressing other people,

how was he delivering speeches, simply shadowing this master, so to speak,

to see how it could work.

And that was part of the education of an orator.

When I say an ‘orator’,

I mean the politicians who delivered speeches as part of their political activity,

and these people were the elite of Roman society.

These were the people who had the time and the money to spend on a political career,

which was unsalaried, and there was no kind of compensation for the time you spent.

So it was only the elite who had the money,

the time and usually also the networks to pursue

a political career who had a success of that.

And so

the politicians that we're looking at and their speeches are

both the political and the social elite at Rome.

In my next module,

I'll be talking a bit more about the political and historical context of

the speech that we're looking at, De Imperio, to get us to understand

more about how it was that it was important to get a command

for Pompey and why it was that Cicero was speaking on this occasion.