How to Read Oratory

Hello, I'm Catherine Steel.

I'm professor of classics at the University of Glasgow.

And welcome to the short series of lectures

designed to fit with the Classical Civilisation.

A level topic, ‘Politics in the Late Republic’.

And I will be looking particularly at the Cicero

bit of the prescription for that that option.

So what I want to do in these lectures is to look both at the speeches

and the letters,

and I'm going to start with the speeches.

And what I'm going to think about first of all is how do we study oratory? Because

if you read an ancient speech, whether it's Demosthenes or Lysias or Cicero,

they can be quite difficult, I think, to get to grips with them,

to enjoy in the way that other genres

of ancient literature are much more accessible.

So Catullus seems to speak to us, and perhaps oratory doesn't,

so it can be a difficult trying to get to grips with.

And there are some things that I think help just in general to

make this a more accessible and understandable and interesting and

important type of writing to get to grips with.

And it is important because one of the things we

have to remember is that, for members of the elite

throughout classical antiquity,

oratory was the genre that they themselves would expect to have to practise.

In the course of their public lives,

they might write poetry, perhaps

they might enjoy hearing other people perform poetry or dramatic performances.

They might enjoy reading philosophy.

They might even consider themselves to be philosophers.

But it's oratory, public speech, that members of the elite need to be able to do.

And that, I think,

is one of the reasons why it makes sense to look at oratory

seriously because this is the genre of writing that shows us the elite in antiquity,

at work.

It mattered in practical ways.

The other reason we should take oratory seriously is that some of

the surviving texts of oratory from antiquity are magnificent works of art.

Once one understands what it is they're trying

to achieve and how they achieved that.

And Cicero is a wonderful example of that,

because his speeches are magnificent examples of oratory

and were regarded as such one of the reasons why Cicero was so influential

and one of the reasons why his work survives is because people recognised in them

masterpieces. So much so, in fact, that Cicero is the only

public speaker from the Republican period whose speeches

survive in their own independent manuscript tradition.

We've got fragments of other speakers that are quoted by later writers,

which suggests that some texts did survive at least into

the Empire and into Late Antiquity. But it's only Cicero who makes it through

to survive in manuscript tradition

after the end of antiquity to be available,

then to make the transition into print.

So what is it about Cicero that meant that he so dominated

the canon of oratory that no one else really wanted, got a look in afterwards.

So that's another reason why we should at

least try to understand what's going on here.

So by way of introduction, let's touch briefly on why public speech matters.

in antiquity.

It matters fundamentally because of the political

systems of the city states of antiquity.

And if we think about Rome, focusing in for this course, in the Republican period,

public speech matters because in some sense, at least,

Republican Rome was a participatory democracy

that is, citizens voted,

and their votes directed public policy.

Now, of course,

the challenge in working out the political system

of the Republic is how do we balance

the role of the citizen body as a whole with the role of the aristocratic elite,

the elected magistrates who made up the Senate? Because that group

of men was not representative of society as a whole.

So that's a bigger challenge about thinking about late Republican politics.

But because the people vote,

public speech matters because it's the chief way in which

you can influence people to change their minds about something.

Now the voting that the citizen body engages in can be broadly split.

I think, into two categories. We've got votes in elections, choosing magistrates,

and we've got votes on legislative proposals.

One of the interesting things about the Republic is

there doesn't seem to have been electoral oratory as a specific category.

There aren't hustings,

but, within that framework,

oratory really matters in terms of creating public reputation

that will then transmit into votes at elections.

And I'll come back to that in the next lecture

when thinking about why Cicero turned to oratory when he,

started his public career.

But in terms of direct changing of minds where oratory matters in the Republic

in relation to the people as a whole

is around legislative proposals, because laws are voted on by the people as a whole

and they vote after they have heard

arguments for and against that legislative proposal.

And they hear those arguments that things which we call contiones.

A contio is a public meeting,

and the speeches delivered at contiones were incredibly important

in directing public policy.

The other way that oratory mattered for members

of the elite was within the Senate itself,

which was an important deliberative body

set policy in a whole range of

areas particularly influential around foreign policy.

And so there was an expectation that men should be able to speak effectively

in the Senate as well.

It's also the case in Rome

that

the law courts determined on issues that we might consider to be political

and that very often the defendants

in the courts were men in public life who might be accused, for example, of

misconduct in provincial government.

And we'll see that when we turn to the Verrines,

there's a charge of maiestas, ‘treason’,

and so

oratory within the courts also was a

forum where political matters could be discussed

and where members of the elite

could

create advantage for themselves by being able to speak effectively.

And we should remember that in Rome, unlike, for example, classical Athens,

there is the possibility of advocacy, that is,

a defendant is not obliged to speak on his own

behalf and can get somebody else to do it for him.

Before closing this first lecture on how to study oratory

and why we might be interested in doing oratory,

let's think a little bit about rhetoric as

the formal training and underpinning of public speech.

Now the ability to speak well doesn't depend on training,

and we know that the Romans were speaking in public and assessing their

performance long before they incorporated ideas about

how to speak effectively from Greece.

Most of the rhetorical theory we know of at Rome is

at least in origin and import from the Greek-speaking world.

But rhetoric codifies oratory,

and it helps us understand what sorts of things public speakers

thought were important when they came to write and deliver speeches.

There are three basic categories of oratory in

the ancient world: there is deliberative oratory,

which is, if you like, political oratory, what should we do?

There's forensic oratory,

the oratory in the law courts,

and there's also a category called epideictic oratory,

which is broadly speaking, display oratory.

And we don't have very much epideictic oratory as such.

Funeral speeches really are the only

freestanding type of speech that falls into that category,

and we don't actually have any complete

funeral speeches surviving.

But epideictic elements, particularly invective,

are quite prominent in other kinds of oratory.

Now rhetoric becomes an incredibly complicated, codified system,

huge amounts in it about style and figures of speech.

But if we cling onto some kind of simple headings

as a way through that jungle,

deliberative oratory poses the question ‘What should we do?’

And you derive the arguments you need from thinking

that the course of action you're proposing is either beneficial

or honourable.

So it's the right thing to do, or it's a useful, helpful thing to do.

Within forensic oratory, a system develops, which helps you identify the issue,

that is the question you're debating about, and in particular it can help you help.

In order to determine is the issue one of fact –

did Caelius murder the Egyptian ambassadors? –

or a question of law – does this particular offence fall under the statute?

That kind of thing

and in the case of Verres, as we'll see, quite a lot of it is questions of fact.

When you open a speech and ask yourself what's going on here,

some basic questions I think, to pose.

Who is the orator speaking to? Who is the audience?

And what is the outcome of this speech? What is the decision

that the speaker is trying to influence? So is it a verdict in a court?

Is it a decision that the Senate is going to make?

What is it that's at stake here?

Of course, as we’ll

see,

what's at stake in a speech doesn't always need to be what's apparently at stake.

So there's often a set of ulterior motives or additional factors,

and for those we need to understand the context in the background of a speech.

But basic questions of ‘Who is the orator speaking to?’ and

‘What is he trying to achieve?’ are always helpful starting points.