In Search of the Lost Testament of Alexander the Great
Page 52
Rome did her fair share of literary damage; the Senate and Caesar had comprehensively inflamed the keepers and the contents of the libraries in Carthage and Alexandria. Although an unrepentant arsonist, Rome did become the most enduring beneficiary of Alexander’s sweat, blood and ichor, his immortal blood.56 Alexander’s reception in the Eternal City, however, was something of a mixed one; whilst Rome displayed respect for the scale of the Macedonian conquests – they had after all paved the way for her own Eastern Empire – that appreciation was tainted by the ‘filial forbearance, which educated Romans showed towards Greece in her childish and petulant decline’.57
A reconstruction of Carthage at the height of its power in the Punic Wars showing the circular Kothon, the military inner harbour in which up to 220 ships could be moored. The merchant harbour is in the foreground. The entrance could be entirely closed off with iron chains. Image from Rome II © The Creative Assembly Limited – under Licence by the Creative Assembly Limited.
‘PERSUASION HAS NO SHRINE BUT ELOQUENT SPEECH’ 58
… whence and how
Found’st thou escape from servitude to sophists,
Their dreams and vanities: how didst thou loose
The bonds of trickery and specious craft?59
A damaging process had already been at work on the legacy of Alexander before Roman-era authors added their contemplations to the subject. Modern scholars bemoan, as did Polybius, that since the 4th century BCE, history had become the servant of rhetoric, the ‘science of speaking well’, according to Quintilian. The power of artful speech had been appreciated as a political tool as far back as Hesiod’s Theogonia when a king’s persuasiveness was portrayed as a gift of the Muses: ‘Upon his tongue they shed sweet dew, and honeyed words flow from his mouth.’60
Hesiod had visited Delphi and had been shown the Omphalos, the sacred stone that assisted communication with the immortals. Possibly because of that he went on to receive posthumous good fortune, for in the Certamen Homeri et Hesiodi (The Contest of Hesiod and Homer, ‘the poets who gave the Hellenes their gods’),61 a narrative now traceable to the 4th century BCE and the Delian festival in honour of Apollo, it is Hesiod who takes the literary prize ahead of the father of the Trojan epics.62 He might have believed that his victory was due to his instruction by the Muses in the pastures of Mount Helicon, but these were the same Muses that explained to him: ‘We know how to tell many falsehoods which are like truths, but we know also how to utter the truth when we wish.’63
The pejoratives associated with ‘artful speech’, as the Muses hinted, remind us that it involved a less than clinical approach to capturing the facts. The writers of the period had a utilitarian view of history itself, considering their overriding responsibility to be the edification of the reader, or to eristic argument.64
As for history – the witness of the ages, the light of truth, the life of memory, the teacher of life, the messenger of the past – with what voice other than the orator’s can it be entrusted to immortality?65
As witnessed by this extract from De Oratore, Cicero believed orators alone should be entrusted with the past, and he outlined a series of noble tenets on how it should be recorded: ‘The first is not daring to say anything false, and the second is not refraining from saying anything that is true. There should be no suggestion of suspicion of prejudice for, or bias against, when you write.’66 Cicero was a trained rhetorician who assumed imperial posts, and he knew his noble tenet was asking too much of the day.67 But, as pointed out to Cicero by his friend, Titus Pomponius Atticus, ‘it is the privilege of rhetoricians to exceed the truth of history’, a point of view the austere Brutus strongly objected to.68 Cicero, no angel of method, further admitted that, ‘unchanging consistency of standpoint has never been considered a virtue in great statesmen’;69 it was a damaging hypocrisy, if it was not espoused satirically, but presented so eloquently, who could object? And who can deny that the artistic flumine orationis of Demosthenes, Aeschines and Isocrates, or Cicero’s powerful use of tricolons, framed some of history’s greatest oils?70
Elsewhere, Cicero praised plain speaking and likened the rhetorical overlay to ‘curling irons’ (calamistra) on a narrative, further remarking that: ‘All the great fourth century orators had attended Isocrates’ school, the villain who ruined fourth century historiography.’71 Unsurprisingly then, that when he branded Herodotus from Halicarnassus ‘the father of history’, he also bracketed him alongside Theopompus as one of the innumerabiles fabulae, the band of notorious liars.72 Alexander was the century’s greatest son, and his story was bound to come under the influence of the rhetorical ‘whetstone’, as Isocrates described himself.73 So there emerged ‘a sort of tragic history’ that merged rhetorical narrative and tragic poetry together, a result that describes reasonably well the Roman Vulgate genre on Alexander.74
We can only touch lightly on a topic that is deep and without conclusion, for neither Cicero nor Marcus Antonius (died 87 BCE, grandfather of the Triumvir better known today as Mark Antony) finished their treatises on an art that encompassed what Ennius termed ‘the marrow of persuasion’, suada.75 Rhetoric is embedded in the nature of a man and his desire to throw his persuasive cloak over another under ‘the systemisation of natural eloquence’.76 Diodorus even suggested that the Egyptians had long been fearful of the influence of such honey-coated speeches in legal proceedings so everything was conducted in writing in court; later papyri fragments suggest the Ptolemies maintained a sophisticated paper trail of written testimony through court clerks and scribes, as a legacy of that:
For in that case there would be the least chance that gifted speakers would have an advantage over the slower, or the well-practised over the inexperienced… for they knew that the clever devices of orators, the cunning witchery of their delivery… at any rate they were aware that men who are highly respected as judges are often carried away by the eloquence of the advocates, either because they are deceived, or because they are won over by the speaker’s charm…77
Timaeus claimed Syracuse in Sicily as the birthplace of rhetoric.78 So its floruit in Athens was more of a ‘categorisation awakening’ than a beginning, and it brought with it a new appreciation of its method and application. There was never a protos heuretes, a single inventor of the art, as the wide corpus of recommended reading in Dionysius’ De Imitatione suggests, for its development was firmly rooted in pre-history and Greece’s Homeric past.79 Homer provided us with a vivid image of Odysseus’ skill with words: ‘snowflakes in a blizzard’, and Phoenix, the tutor to Achilles, encouraged him to ‘… be both a speaker of words as well as a doer of deeds.’80 Here in the Iliad the power of discourse, psychagogia, was being recognised, and it was thought to persuade souls to take the direction of the truth.81
The etymology of rhetorike was formed from rhetor – typically describing a speaker in a court or assembly – and ike, linking it to art or skill, and the compound of the two was possibly first seen in Plato’s Gorgias. Aristotle claimed Empedocles (ca. 490-430 BCE) had developed an ‘art’ that was already expressed in the Greek logon technai, the ‘skills of speeches’,82 and, according to Cicero, the first manual was written by a Sicilian Greek, Corax of Syracuse, in the 5th century BCE.83 Gorgias of Leontini (ca. 485-380 BCE), ‘the father of sophistry’ (the skillful use of false but persuasive arguments, often employed to present the merits of both sides of a case) of and paradoxologia (‘nihilism’ according to some commentators) ferried it to Athens where Tisias and Antiphon dragged rhetoric and sophistry into the Areopagus or the boule (citizen council) when pitting individual rights against the legal code. With them there did, indeed, appear dissoi logoi, the ‘arguments on both sides’.84
The great Isocrates and Protagoras (ca. 490-420 BCE) ‘clarified’ truth in the streets as well as in the courts for fees previously unheard of, for logographers (speechwriters) were extremely well paid ‘to make the weaker argument stronger’, ton hetto logon kreitto poiein.85 Protagoras is said to have charged
10,000 drachmas per pupil for a single course in his sophistry; its value was no doubt persuasively justified with ‘man is the measure of all things’.86 Ironically, at that time, On Nature by Anaxagoras (ca. 510-428 BCE), a revolutionary book full of groundbreaking cosmic theories (including the impiety that the sun was a ball of fire), could be purchased for just one drachma in the street.87
With no public prosecutor’s office in Athens, individuals had to resort to private suits (dike) and self-funded public suits (graphe) to bring charges. Once their speeches had been written, gifted speakers were sought to deliver the desired result, for witnesses were not cross-examined, jurors were often ignorant of the law, and speakers were restricted in delivery time under the watch of a klepsydra, the judicial water clock. Paradoxically, whilst mendacity detected in speeches given at the boule or assembly was punishable by death, court case perjury remained risk-free, encouraging the subordination of ‘fact’ to deimotes, a ‘forcefulness’ of style.88
Isocrates protected the intellectual property of his teachings at his newly opened rhetorical school by penning Against the Sophists in which he claimed it is impossible to write a handbook on the subject,89 and within two generations of its first public appearance in Athens, rhetoric was endemic to debate, whether legal or historical. Timon summed it up: ‘Protagoras, all mankind’s epitome, Cunning, I trow, to war with words.’90 The ‘cunning’ was a verbal mageia, a word first recorded by Gorgias in his Encomium of Helen: ‘The power of speech over the disposition of the soul is like the disposition of drugs… by means of some harmful persuasion, words can bewitch and thoroughly cast a spell…’91
By Alexander’s day, the Akademia had been drawn in. Aristotle launched his Gryllos on Isocrates, prompting a riposte from Cephisodorus, and there followed detailed polemics from both sides: the Protreptikos and the Antidosis. Rhetoric was being vitiated by rhetoric to the detriment of literature in general, and as Aristotle argued, fine language was being disarmed by fine argument, skills that Demosthenes and Aeschines were to refine. Demosthenes had been aided by lessons from actors, by speaking with a mouth full of pebbles, from long nights rehearsing (his arguments were labelled as ‘smelling of lamp wicks’),92 and according to Aeschines, by fancy footwork as well.93 When the great logographos was asked for the most important element in his craft, Demosthenes artfully replied ‘only three things count, delivery, delivery and again, delivery’, so Quintilian claimed.94
Isocrates and the Ten Attic Orators had much to answer for in Athens, because the political and forensic show-speeches, along with the declamations we encounter throughout classical works, were originally crafted here. Demosthenes, Aeschines, Hyperides, Lycurgus and Deinarchus (ca. 361-291 BCE) all had something to say about Philip and Alexander, as well as their successors, and none of it was straight talk. Some of them called themselves ‘philosophers’, a term Pythagoras is said to have invented; it was a label described by Cicero as a ‘lover of wisdom and spectator of the universe, with no motive or profit or gain.’95 That popular claim appears spurious, however, and is challenged as an invention of the Platonist school; the origins of the compound word, ‘philosopher’, were perhaps inspired by Aristophanes’ Thinkery in Clouds, with its farcical treatment of Socrates. In fact Herodotus suggested Croesus came close to the definition of a philosophos in his famous greeting to the Athenian sage and lawgiver, Solon, at Sardis ca. 560s BCE, if the episode is historic.96
A Roman marble herm of Demosthenes inspired by the bronze statue by Polyeuctus, ca. 280 BCE. Now in the Louvre in the Department of Greek, Etruscan and Roman Antiquities.
Lucian said of street ‘philosophers’ in general that their ‘argument is turned upside down, they forget what they are trying to prove, and finally go off abusing one another and brushing the sweat from their brows; victory rests with him who can show the boldest front and the loudest voice, and hold his ground the longest’; the ‘butcher’s meat’ of fact was being garnished ‘with the sauce of their words’.97 Their arguments, however, when preserved with an attached epistolary corpus, are useful indicators of the social currents of the day, but their influence on literature meant epideictic rhetoric fleshed out what might have once been leaner and untainted accounts, so that they now require bariatric surgery under Quellenforschung’s knife to get to the internal organ of fact.98 Whichever way it is bottled, the tumult of rhetoric was drowning out the simpler tones of truth, as the Peripatetic school at Athens was soon vocally pointing out.99
The Lyceum (unearthed in Athens in 1996) and later the Academy churned out manuals which loved to classify, a predisposition taken from Pythagoras. Aristotle quickly had rhetoric hung, drawn, and systematically quartered into a sunagoge technon, a collection of methods (in defiance of Isocrates’ claim) and he then did the same to sophistry.100 When he inherited the subject from Plato, who viewed it as the ‘art of enchanting the soul’,101 he concluded: ‘In the case of rhetoric, there was much old material to hand, but in the case of logic, we had absolutely nothing at all, until we had spent a long time in laborious investigation.’102 Not to be outdone by Plato’s six species, Aristotle saw four uses for the art (panegyric, encomium, funeral oration and invective), with three modes of persuasion and four lines of argument under five main headings for use in the seven courses of human action, discounting the subheadings. Plato didn’t thank Aristotle for being ‘out-classified’ for the Platonists despised kainotomia, innovation; he soon termed him the ‘the foal’, presumably because, as Diogenes Laertius tells us, Plato said of his pupil’s secession, ‘Aristotle has kicked us off…’103
CETERUM CENSEO CARTHAGINEM ESSE DELENDAM
In Rome, the newly imported seductive oratorial arts, and the attendant new philosophies, were not universally accepted, and neither was Greece itself. The sapient Cato the Elder (234-149 BCE, also known as ‘Cato the Censor’), who started life as a rigid Sabine farmer, warned his son:
I shall explain what I found out in Athens about these Graeci, and demonstrate what advantage there may be in looking into their writings (while not taking them too seriously). They are a worthless and unruly tribe. Take this as a prophecy: when those folk give us their writings, they will corrupt everything.104
Cato did, nevertheless, appreciate the practical advantages of rhetoric; something of an antilogy.105 In 181 BCE, newly unearthed Pythagorean manuscripts of Numa Pompilius, the legendary second king of Rome (who supposedly reigned 715-673 BCE), were burned in the forum (they were in any case frauds) for containing unsuitable Greek doctrine (‘subversive of religion’), and Cato went on to warn of Greek doctors that they were ‘sworn to kill all barbarians with medicine…’106 In this censorious environment, the comedies of the home-grown playwright, Plautus (ca. 254-184 BCE), released between 205 and 184 BCE, stood little chance of being aired. There were no permanent theatres in Rome, possibly because drama was still considered a corrupting influence too (no doubt due to its Greek heritage), and it wasn’t until 55 BCE that Pompey (‘the Great’) opened his theatre in the Campus Martius, inspired by a visit a few years earlier to Greek Mytilene.
Clearly xenophobic and a master of invective, Cato fought with distinction in the campaigns against Hannibal in the Second Punic War. It was an experience that furnished him with a call for a rerum repetitio when ending his senatorial orations: ‘ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam’ – ‘furthermore, I maintain that Carthage should be destroyed’. Cato’s rigid virtue would have gladly hurled a spear dipped in blood across the Carthaginian border, whilst the Hellenism of sophisticated and distinguished Roman families continued to offend him.107 They included the gens of Scipio Africanus to whom he remained firmly opposed. Unsurprisingly, a collection of widely read pithy and conservative maxims, the Disticha Catonis, was falsely attached to the brooding censor.108
Cato supported the Lex Oppia (Oppian Law) which restricted women to wearing no more than half-an-ounce of gold adornment as an austerity measure in the troubled days following Hannibal’s victory at Ca
nnae (216 BCE). Rome itself was lucky to avoid an assault, and the two suffetes of Carthage and the Tribunal of One Hundred and Four must have demanded why the Carthaginian general failed to attack the city immediately after;109 some 50,000 Roman soldiers had died in the battle and the path to the gates lay relatively undefended.110 Cato additionally advocated the Lex Orchai, which limited guests at an entertainment, and the Lex Voconia, designed to check the amount of wealth falling in the hands of women. This inspired Livy to wholly construct a speech in which Cato entreated husbands to control their errant wives.111 Though Cato’s invective contributed to the eventual fall of Carthage, the result saw such great wealth arriving in Rome that it forced the repeal of the unpopular laws following street protests by women. The newly arriving funds did, however, justify Cato’s adage, bellum se ipsum alet: ‘war feeds itself’.
The Macedonian Alexander, an ‘orientalist’ who fell into the barbarian trappings of the Persian Great Kings, was not a figure to be rolled out at banquets in the presence of the censor. Cato had also fought at Thermopylae in 191 BCE thwarting the invasion of Antiochus III; it was a battle that ended Seleucid influence in Greece and suffocated the last gasps of Alexander’s Diadokhoi. In the same year Cato gave a speech in Athens and he conspicuously delivered it in Latin although he spoke Greek.112 He was a redoubt that for an influential time threw back many cultural imports, and it has even been proposed that his Latin works were instrumental in halting Greek from becoming the dominant language in Rome. Yet Cato’s Origines (of Italian towns) in which Lucius Valerius had reminded him that he had emphasised the role of women in the founding of the city, and his rustic De Agri Cultura (On Farming) could not distract the populace from finally turning their heads to the more exotic and seductive themes of the Hellenistic Age.