It was precisely this kind of politics that Plato most despised. He had seen plenty of it in the Athens of his day. As he made clear in his Gorgias, Plato had learned to hate all orators, just as he hated all theater and all representational art. Oratory, Plato says, has the same relation to justice as cosmetology does to bodybuilding: “a mischievous, swindling, base, servile trade which creates an illusion by the use of … makeup and depilation and costume, and makes people assume a borrowed beauty to the neglect of the beauty that is the result of training and discipline.”27 And for the same reason: both politics and makeup appeal to the emotions instead of reason.
The orator lurks in the dark like the artist in the Republic’s cave, the realm of opinion and illusion (art and theater were the worst, since they created an illusion of the material world, which is already an illusion). In Plato’s view, the democratic politician’s verbal dexterity is a direct index to his level of moral corruption.
Aristotle, as we might expect, took a different and more moderate position. Yes, orators don’t use the same rigorous arguments as the philosopher or dialectician; and yes, sometimes demagogues misuse their rhetorical skills to purvey lies or to lead their audience into evil and vice, like a Hitler or a Huey Long. But eloquence in the hands of a Winston Churchill or a Martin Luther King can also be used to lead men and women to do good instead of evil. For Aristotle, everything depends on the character of the orator and the integrity of the art of speaking itself. Given the right rules and restraints, Aristotle argued and Cicero would affirm, rhetoric can be a way to guide human beings to practice virtue and wisdom almost, if not quite, as surely as philosophy itself.
Cicero believed Roman orators, like the one portrayed in this Etruscan statue, could use Aristotle to save the Republic.
This is what Aristotle set out to do in his Rhetoric. It offered all the rules a speaker needed so that he could appeal to an audience’s emotions and its common opinions (topoi in Greek) in order to get the audience to do the right thing—namely, to make a moral judgment or draw a logical conclusion.
This was, Aristotle warned, a method for arriving at the truth less rigorous and certain than scientific demonstration.28 The speaker in a political debate or legal case has to deal with particular facts rather than universal propositions, and with future probabilities rather than the formal necessities of a science like physics. However, Aristotle devised a set of rules that adapted the formal rules of logic to suit a popular audiencec—the very people, in fact, who in a free society will be voting on a jury or in an election. By following Aristotle’s rules for organizing the material for a speech, a speaker learns how to build a compelling case that allows no contradiction, while excluding cheap emotion or false reasoning. At the end of his speech, he will be able to say to his audience, “You all have heard; you have the facts; give your judgment,” and sit down confident that he and justice will have won the day.29
Aristotle’s Rhetoric showed how public oratory could be a creative force for virtue and truth instead of prevarication and “spin.” It had a compelling influence on teachers of rhetoric in both Greece and Rome, including Cicero. Cicero hailed Aristotle as the mighty river of which all subsequent theories of rhetoric, including his own, were only minor tributaries.30 However, Cicero’s interest was more than theoretical. Cicero seized on Aristotle’s notion of the orator turning his audience’s emotions into a force for good rather than evil with the desperation of a drowning man clinging to a spar. With violence and civil war looming, Cicero turned Aristotle’s ideal orator into the savior of the Roman state.
Aristotle’s orator had to have a philosopher’s knowledge of right and wrong in order to distinguish good from evil and truth from falsehood. But above all, he had to know his country’s laws, “for the salvation of the state is in its laws.”31 For Cicero, the core of those laws was Rome’s mixed constitution. Echoing Polybius, he insisted that Rome’s constitution was not like Plato’s ideal republic: it was “the product not of one genius but of many … the work of several men in several generations.” The task of future Roman statesmen had to be exhorting the Senate, the magistrates, and the people to carry out their different duties in order to preserve the republic’s balanced mixture and to prevent Rome from falling into Plato’s cycle of decay and dissolution, which Cicero now believed could be evaded or at least indefinitely postponed.32
Cicero’s De Oratore (On the Orator) is the essential companion piece to his De Re Publica. One is useless without the other. Cicero’s orator is a man built to heroic proportions. He must be a man of eloquentia, with the speaking skills necessary to move great crowds. He must be a patriot whose profound love of country allows him to identify with his audience, to feel what they feel and understand their needs and desires. And he must be a man who understands the true nature of good and evil.
As with Aristotle, this last is the most important quality for a great statesman and orator. Like Archimedes’s lever, the statesman’s ability to draw moral distinctions allows him to lift up the hearts and minds of his fellow citizens, to show them that they are all in this together, as citizens in a free commonwealth: a “coming together of men united by a common agreement about laws and rights,” Cicero says, “and by the desire to participate in mutual advantages.”33 Once they realize they have a common destiny, they will be ready to do the right thing. And by doing the right thing, they will save their country.
It is Cicero who made public speaking one of the essential tools of Western self-government and democracy. His own orations would be studied over the centuries to teach the skills of the trade to everyone from trial lawyers and presidents to high school debating societies. Together with Aristotle, he created a civic tradition founded on the heroic image of the orator, who inspires his countrymen by a combination of eloquence, rational argument, and moral vision, and by doing so rallies his nation in a time of crisis. From Washington’s farewell speech to Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and Kennedy’s inaugural, Cicero and Aristotle would inspire a vital part of American political culture.
In his own time, however, Cicero’s plea for the creative power of civic eloquence had an air of desperation. As he himself said, “Advice is judged by results, not intentions.” In 54 BCE, when he began De Re Publica, Rome was dominated by an uneasy troika of ruthless power brokers led by Julius Caesar. Street brawls and assassinations plagued every election; bitterness and cynicism were everywhere. In a few short years, Rome would be plunged into civil war.
The hole in the Roman soul was growing wider. Cicero believed that his Aristotelian formula represented the republic’s last best hope.
His reward would be ignominy and death.
* * *
* In fact, today we still have no idea where exactly the tomb was.
† Cicero’s account of the making of the universe in the last book of his De Re Publica (the so-called Dream of Scipio) is taken almost entirely from Plato’s Timaeus. For many later medieval scribes and scholars, it was the one source for knowing anything about Plato at all.
‡ P. Scipio Africanus (so called because of his crushing victory over Hannibal at Zama on the North African plain in 202 BCE) was young Aemilianus’s grandfather.
§ That is, from the final defeat of Hannibal in 202 BCE to the fall of Carthage in 146.
‖ Polybius was certainly thinking of a figure from the Lyceum and the Great Library, Demetrius of Phalerum, who had predicted Macedonia’s decline as a matter of fate.
a See chapter 28.
b Indeed, actor was the formal term Roman law designated for the plaintiff, just as the different phases of the trial were known as acts, almost as if they were parts of a play.
c For example, Aristotle’s classic syllogism of three elements, such as “All men who commit murder deserve the death penalty; Archias has committed murder; therefore Archias deserves the death penalty,” is simplified for rhetorical purposes to just two: “Archias has committed murder; he deserves the death penalty.”
; Like other Romans, Marcus Aurelius (emperor 161–80 CE) could find no solace in ruling the world.
Nine
DANCING IN THE LIGHT: THE BIRTH OF NEOPLATONISM
I have tried everything, and it’s no good.
—Attributed to Emperor Alexander Severus, c. 230 CE
Aristotle had shown how the Roman republic could save itself, or so it seemed to Cicero. Cicero had worked out the means to do it. His ideal commonwealth built on the free association of citizens inspired by great men to do great deeds would be rediscovered with delight by the buoyant age of the Renaissance and be passed along down to America’s founders.1
Cicero’s fellow Romans, however, paid no attention to his program of reform. Leading statesmen turned their backs on him. Although Cicero had held Rome’s highest office, they blocked his entry into the Senate. Men like the younger Cato, Julius Caesar, and his rivals Pompey and Crassus all knew something was seriously wrong with the Roman political system: it was suited to running a small city-state, not a vast empire. Each simply assumed he could ride out the coming chaos and emerge on top. Instead, all four would die violent deaths—while the republic itself, much as Polybius had predicted, passed into history.
As Cicero pointed out, Rome’s rot was moral and self-inflicted, and it started at the top. Julius Caesar proved that it was not just intellectuals who felt the chill of Polybius’s pronouncement of doom. He was descended from an ancient noble family, fluent in Greek, and widely read. As a young man, he set out to study the art of rhetoric on the island of Rhodes, an important center of Aristotelian learning.
On the way, however, he had been captured by pirates. By sheer force of personality, Caesar virtually took over the band of brigands. He made them applaud his speeches and admire the poems he wrote for them. After thirty-eight days his ransom was paid and the pirates released him, pledging to be friends forever. Caesar returned to Rome, raised a vigilante force of men and ships at his own expense, and sailed back to capture and crucify the pirates to the last man.
This was the kind of ruthless alpha male destined to rise to the top of Roman politics. Caesar did this in short order by crossing the Rubicon River north of Rome with his legions in order to bend the Senate to his will in 49 BCE; then by crushing his rival Pompey at the battle of Pharsalus two years later; and finally by being named dictator for life by the Senate two years after that, in 45 BCE.
It was a remarkable success, unprecedented in Roman annals. Still, Caesar suffered as much as anyone from the hole in the soul Plato and Polybius had left. There was no inward sense of triumph to match the outward of becoming sole ruler of Rome. When he stood and gazed out over the field of enemy dead at Pharsalus, which included the fine flower of Rome’s aristocracy, he said bitterly, “They would have it thus.”2 Caesar knew that his new extraordinary powers would only provoke jealousy and hatred (one of those he hoped would cooperate, Cato the Younger, chose suicide instead). He took them anyway because, “for all his genius,” as a friend later said in a striking remark, “Caesar could see no way out.”
During his dictatorship, Caesar sometimes spoke about carrying out important social reforms, especially relieving the crushing debt on Rome’s working families. In the end, he did little or nothing. As for himself, “my life has been long enough,” Caesar said at the height of his fame and adulation, “whether reckoned in years or in renown.” Victory had left the taste of ashes—and cost him a taste for living.3
On March 14, 44 BCE, Julius Caesar attended a dinner party at a friend’s house. At the height of the banquet, as the dishes were cleared away and the wine cups were refilled, the conversation turned to death.
Someone asked what kind of death would be best. Before anyone could speak, Caesar gave his answer. “An unexpected one,” he said.
The next day, on the ides of March, he got his wish.4
We don’t know if Caesar read Polybius’s Histories. We know his killer, Marcus Brutus, was steeped in it. While campaigning in Greece, he wrote a digest of Polybius’s work (now lost). He was also familiar with Cicero’s reform proposals, concocted out of Aristotle. Cicero’s own son was part of Brutus’s circle. However, as the descendant of one of Rome’s most illustrious houses, Brutus convinced himself something more drastic was needed to restore libertas as well as the mos majorum, the upright ways of Rome’s ancestors. He chose action over words, a dagger rather than a speech.
Caesar’s murder has been immortalized by Shakespeare’s play Julius Caesar. This is appropriate, since the assassination was itself a piece of performance art in the tradition of Roman politics. Brutus and the other Liberators, as they dramatically called themselves, had no plans or strategy once Caesar was dead. They assumed the gesture would be enough to restore the old system. Instead, Caesar’s former allies Mark Antony and Caesar’s adopted son, Gaius Octavianus, rallied the Roman army and herded the Liberators out of the city. To paraphrase the French statesman Talleyrand, the murder of Caesar proved to be worse than a crime. It was a blunder—and the last act of the old Roman republic.
In that sense, the murder of Cicero five days later was the first act of the new Roman Empire. It came on the orders of Mark Antony, who had been the subject of some of Cicero’s most excoriating speeches (indeed, Antony demanded that the executioner bring him not just Cicero’s head, but also his hands, which had written them. With Cicero died the last hopes of a revived republic. After Brutus’s defeat at Philippi in 42 BCE, he and his fellow Liberator Cassius took their own lives. Twenty-one-year-old Octavianus, grandson of Caesar’s sister, emerged as the dictator’s heir in political as well as personal terms. His decisive victory over Egypt’s queen Cleopatra and Mark Antony at the battle of Actium in 31 BCE put the last touch on his supreme power.
Still, the decades of mob violence, gangster politics, and fashionable despair were finally over. Octavianus took the name Caesar Augustus, and the title princeps et imperator. However, Augustus was shrewd enough to see that the best way to secure his reign was to present it not as the establishment of something new, namely a Roman empire, but as the restoration of something old: Polybius’s and Cicero’s balanced constitution.
Augustus was like the architect who renovates an old apartment building by keeping the original Gilded Age façade but putting in completely brand-new fixtures. The façade included the conveniently dead figure of Cicero, who would be posthumously elevated to the status of a Roman Socrates—the virtuous man made impotent by the viciousness of his enemies, including the hated Mark Antony. It was a reputation Cicero would retain without interruption through Victorian times.
The façade also included the Roman Senate and the consulate, although the latter was now reduced to a merely ceremonial office. The new fittings included taking personal command of Rome’s legions, the largest army in the world, as imperator, or emperor—the key to stabilizing Rome all along—and taking personal control as princeps, or head of the Senate, of the provinces of Rome’s increasingly far-flung empire. The finished product, or principate, would be reviled by Romans who yearned for a return to the republic and also by some historians. But it worked. For almost three hundred years, the Augustan system maintained a solid and steady Pax Romana that protected one generation of critics after another from Rome’s enemies, even as those critics devoted their energy to trying to tear it down.
To his credit, Augustus sensed what was coming. He assembled a stable of writers, poets, and propagandists to convey the image that his principate had halted Plato’s cycle of inevitable decay and dissolution in its tracks. The poet Virgil composed an entire epic poem in the manner of Homer, the Aeneid, to persuade readers that everything in Rome’s history since its founding had been leading up to this magic moment:
Caesar Augustus, son of a god,* destined to rule
Where Saturn ruled of old in Latium, and there
Bring back an age of gold: his empire shall expand
Past Garamants and Indians to a land beyond the zodiac
And the su
n’s yearly path …
To these I set no bounds, in space or time;
Unlimited power I give them.
“A great new cycle of centuries begins,” Virgil proclaimed. For Romans, “the lords of creation,” a bright new future had started.5 The problem was, no one believed him.
However, Rome’s educated elite remained plunged in gloom. “Too happy indeed, too much of a ‘Golden Age’ is this in which we are born,” wrote one with genuine bitterness.6 Augustus died in 14 CE. Literary Rome proceeded to portray his successors as corrupt and incompetent monsters, from Tiberius and Nero and Caligula to Domitian and Caracalla (the emperor who appears in all his malignant splendor in the film Gladiator). Gifted writers like Catullus and Juvenal painted imperial Rome as a cesspool of moral depravity. The image has persisted to this day. The historian Tacitus made his reputation, then and later, by tracing how the “trickle down” of corruption at the top by Tiberius, Nero, and Caligula triggered a decay of private morals and a blank passivity among Rome’s leading families in the face of tyranny.
The poet Lucan, who mourned rather than celebrated Caesar’s victory in his epic Pharsalia, wrote: “Of all the nations that endure tyranny our lot is the worst: we are ashamed of our slavery.” The satirist Propertius proclaimed that proud Rome was being destroyed by its own prosperity.
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