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How to Read Oratory
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Politics of the Late Republic: Cicero the Orator
In this course, Professor Catherine Steel (University of Glasgow) explores Cicero as an orator in a set of lectures designed to be used alongside the OCR A Level Classical Civilization option, ‘Politics and the Late Republic’. In the first module, we think about the genre of oratory as a whole, its importance in the political culture of the late Republic, and the various different contexts in which oratory might be delivered/heard. After that, in the second module, we think about the importance of oratory to an elite Roman’s political career, before turning in the third and final module to look more closely at Cicero’s first speech against Verres (In Verrem 1).
How to Read Oratory
In this module, we think about the genre of Roman oratory as a whole, focusing in particular on: (i) the importance of oratory compared to other genres (e.g. poetry, philosophy) to the elite of Rome; (ii) the importance of oratory as works of art in their own right, especially the speeches of Cicero; (iii) the importance of public speaking in the political culture of the ancient world in general, and of Republican Rome in particular; (iv) the most common kinds of votes in Republican Rome – votes in elections (i.e. voting for a magistrate) and votes on legislative proposals (i.e. voting for or against a piece of legislation); (v) the different potential contexts for these votes – a public meeting, a court case and (for a select few) in the Senate; (vi) the art of rhetoric, including the three main categories of speech – deliberative (political), forensic (legal) and epideictic (display); (vi) some of the fundamental principles of deliberative and forensic oratory; and (vi) two key things to keep in mind when reading oratory.
Hello, I'm Catherine Steel.
00:00:05I'm professor of classics at the University of Glasgow.
00:00:07And welcome to the short series of lectures
00:00:09designed to fit with the Classical Civilisation.
00:00:12A level topic, ‘Politics in the Late Republic’.
00:00:15And I will be looking particularly at the Cicero
00:00:18bit of the prescription for that that option.
00:00:20So what I want to do in these lectures is to look both at the speeches
00:00:24and the letters,
00:00:30and I'm going to start with the speeches.
00:00:30And what I'm going to think about first of all is how do we study oratory? Because
00:00:32if you read an ancient speech, whether it's Demosthenes or Lysias or Cicero,
00:00:40they can be quite difficult, I think, to get to grips with them,
00:00:46to enjoy in the way that other genres
00:00:48of ancient literature are much more accessible.
00:00:50So Catullus seems to speak to us, and perhaps oratory doesn't,
00:00:53so it can be a difficult trying to get to grips with.
00:00:58And there are some things that I think help just in general to
00:01:01make this a more accessible and understandable and interesting and
00:01:05important type of writing to get to grips with.
00:01:09And it is important because one of the things we
00:01:12have to remember is that, for members of the elite
00:01:13throughout classical antiquity,
00:01:16oratory was the genre that they themselves would expect to have to practise.
00:01:18In the course of their public lives,
00:01:22they might write poetry, perhaps
00:01:24they might enjoy hearing other people perform poetry or dramatic performances.
00:01:26They might enjoy reading philosophy.
00:01:31They might even consider themselves to be philosophers.
00:01:33But it's oratory, public speech, that members of the elite need to be able to do.
00:01:35And that, I think,
00:01:41is one of the reasons why it makes sense to look at oratory
00:01:42seriously because this is the genre of writing that shows us the elite in antiquity,
00:01:45at work.
00:01:53It mattered in practical ways.
00:01:54The other reason we should take oratory seriously is that some of
00:01:58the surviving texts of oratory from antiquity are magnificent works of art.
00:02:03Once one understands what it is they're trying
00:02:09to achieve and how they achieved that.
00:02:11And Cicero is a wonderful example of that,
00:02:13because his speeches are magnificent examples of oratory
00:02:15and were regarded as such one of the reasons why Cicero was so influential
00:02:20and one of the reasons why his work survives is because people recognised in them
00:02:24masterpieces. So much so, in fact, that Cicero is the only
00:02:29public speaker from the Republican period whose speeches
00:02:34survive in their own independent manuscript tradition.
00:02:37We've got fragments of other speakers that are quoted by later writers,
00:02:39which suggests that some texts did survive at least into
00:02:43the Empire and into Late Antiquity. But it's only Cicero who makes it through
00:02:46to survive in manuscript tradition
00:02:52after the end of antiquity to be available,
00:02:54then to make the transition into print.
00:02:57So what is it about Cicero that meant that he so dominated
00:03:00the canon of oratory that no one else really wanted, got a look in afterwards.
00:03:05So that's another reason why we should at
00:03:13least try to understand what's going on here.
00:03:14So by way of introduction, let's touch briefly on why public speech matters.
00:03:17in antiquity.
00:03:22It matters fundamentally because of the political
00:03:25systems of the city states of antiquity.
00:03:27And if we think about Rome, focusing in for this course, in the Republican period,
00:03:30public speech matters because in some sense, at least,
00:03:36Republican Rome was a participatory democracy
00:03:39that is, citizens voted,
00:03:42and their votes directed public policy.
00:03:44Now, of course,
00:03:47the challenge in working out the political system
00:03:47of the Republic is how do we balance
00:03:50the role of the citizen body as a whole with the role of the aristocratic elite,
00:03:52the elected magistrates who made up the Senate? Because that group
00:03:58of men was not representative of society as a whole.
00:04:02So that's a bigger challenge about thinking about late Republican politics.
00:04:06But because the people vote,
00:04:10public speech matters because it's the chief way in which
00:04:13you can influence people to change their minds about something.
00:04:16Now the voting that the citizen body engages in can be broadly split.
00:04:20I think, into two categories. We've got votes in elections, choosing magistrates,
00:04:25and we've got votes on legislative proposals.
00:04:29One of the interesting things about the Republic is
00:04:32there doesn't seem to have been electoral oratory as a specific category.
00:04:35There aren't hustings,
00:04:39but, within that framework,
00:04:41oratory really matters in terms of creating public reputation
00:04:45that will then transmit into votes at elections.
00:04:48And I'll come back to that in the next lecture
00:04:50when thinking about why Cicero turned to oratory when he,
00:04:52started his public career.
00:04:56But in terms of direct changing of minds where oratory matters in the Republic
00:05:00in relation to the people as a whole
00:05:06is around legislative proposals, because laws are voted on by the people as a whole
00:05:08and they vote after they have heard
00:05:13arguments for and against that legislative proposal.
00:05:15And they hear those arguments that things which we call contiones.
00:05:18A contio is a public meeting,
00:05:21and the speeches delivered at contiones were incredibly important
00:05:23in directing public policy.
00:05:27The other way that oratory mattered for members
00:05:29of the elite was within the Senate itself,
00:05:32which was an important deliberative body
00:05:34set policy in a whole range of
00:05:36areas particularly influential around foreign policy.
00:05:37And so there was an expectation that men should be able to speak effectively
00:05:41in the Senate as well.
00:05:46It's also the case in Rome
00:05:48that
00:05:50the law courts determined on issues that we might consider to be political
00:05:51and that very often the defendants
00:05:58in the courts were men in public life who might be accused, for example, of
00:06:01misconduct in provincial government.
00:06:07And we'll see that when we turn to the Verrines,
00:06:10there's a charge of maiestas, ‘treason’,
00:06:12and so
00:06:16oratory within the courts also was a
00:06:17forum where political matters could be discussed
00:06:20and where members of the elite
00:06:23could
00:06:25create advantage for themselves by being able to speak effectively.
00:06:27And we should remember that in Rome, unlike, for example, classical Athens,
00:06:31there is the possibility of advocacy, that is,
00:06:34a defendant is not obliged to speak on his own
00:06:36behalf and can get somebody else to do it for him.
00:06:38Before closing this first lecture on how to study oratory
00:06:45and why we might be interested in doing oratory,
00:06:49let's think a little bit about rhetoric as
00:06:51the formal training and underpinning of public speech.
00:06:55Now the ability to speak well doesn't depend on training,
00:07:00and we know that the Romans were speaking in public and assessing their
00:07:05performance long before they incorporated ideas about
00:07:10how to speak effectively from Greece.
00:07:16Most of the rhetorical theory we know of at Rome is
00:07:18at least in origin and import from the Greek-speaking world.
00:07:23But rhetoric codifies oratory,
00:07:27and it helps us understand what sorts of things public speakers
00:07:29thought were important when they came to write and deliver speeches.
00:07:32There are three basic categories of oratory in
00:07:36the ancient world: there is deliberative oratory,
00:07:39which is, if you like, political oratory, what should we do?
00:07:42There's forensic oratory,
00:07:46the oratory in the law courts,
00:07:48and there's also a category called epideictic oratory,
00:07:49which is broadly speaking, display oratory.
00:07:52And we don't have very much epideictic oratory as such.
00:07:55Funeral speeches really are the only
00:07:58freestanding type of speech that falls into that category,
00:08:01and we don't actually have any complete
00:08:04funeral speeches surviving.
00:08:06But epideictic elements, particularly invective,
00:08:08are quite prominent in other kinds of oratory.
00:08:11Now rhetoric becomes an incredibly complicated, codified system,
00:08:15huge amounts in it about style and figures of speech.
00:08:20But if we cling onto some kind of simple headings
00:08:23as a way through that jungle,
00:08:27deliberative oratory poses the question ‘What should we do?’
00:08:30And you derive the arguments you need from thinking
00:08:35that the course of action you're proposing is either beneficial
00:08:40or honourable.
00:08:44So it's the right thing to do, or it's a useful, helpful thing to do.
00:08:45Within forensic oratory, a system develops, which helps you identify the issue,
00:08:48that is the question you're debating about, and in particular it can help you help.
00:08:55In order to determine is the issue one of fact –
00:08:58did Caelius murder the Egyptian ambassadors? –
00:09:02or a question of law – does this particular offence fall under the statute?
00:09:06That kind of thing
00:09:11and in the case of Verres, as we'll see, quite a lot of it is questions of fact.
00:09:13When you open a speech and ask yourself what's going on here,
00:09:19some basic questions I think, to pose.
00:09:23Who is the orator speaking to? Who is the audience?
00:09:25And what is the outcome of this speech? What is the decision
00:09:29that the speaker is trying to influence? So is it a verdict in a court?
00:09:35Is it a decision that the Senate is going to make?
00:09:39What is it that's at stake here?
00:09:42Of course, as we’ll
00:09:45see,
00:09:46what's at stake in a speech doesn't always need to be what's apparently at stake.
00:09:46So there's often a set of ulterior motives or additional factors,
00:09:53and for those we need to understand the context in the background of a speech.
00:09:58But basic questions of ‘Who is the orator speaking to?’ and
00:10:01‘What is he trying to achieve?’ are always helpful starting points.
00:10:05
Cite this Lecture
APA style
Steel, C. (2020, September 05). Politics of the Late Republic: Cicero the Orator - How to Read Oratory [Video]. MASSOLIT. https://massolit.io/courses/politics-of-the-late-republic-cicero-the-orator/how-to-read-oratory
MLA style
Steel, C. "Politics of the Late Republic: Cicero the Orator – How to Read Oratory." MASSOLIT, uploaded by MASSOLIT, 05 Sep 2020, https://massolit.io/courses/politics-of-the-late-republic-cicero-the-orator/how-to-read-oratory