Cicero - Anthony Everitt [146]
Atticus advised his friend to concentrate on historical subjects, but Cicero disagreed. AS he saw it, the first priority was to protect his name as an orator, which was now under some threat. AS early as the mid-50s members of the Catullan/Clodian counterculture had begun to react against the elaborate and ample manner of public speaking which Cicero and, even more so, his onetime rival Hortensius represented. A leading spokesman of this point of view was Catullus’s closest friend, Caius Licinius Calvus. What he called the “Attic” tendency or school of oratory stressed grammatical correctness, simplicity of expression and restraint against the “Bacchic frenzy” of a speaker like Hortensius when he was in full flight. Cicero’s young friend Caelius had probably been another Atticist.
Cicero felt that the time had come to rebut this fashion, partly because it contradicted his own views on oratory but also because he feared that if it got out of hand it would supersede his own achievements. In early 46 he wrote Brutus, a dialogue in which the speakers were Atticus, Brutus (who was an Atticist and to whom the book is dedicated) and himself. It was a history of Latin oratory with brief but telling critiques of Rome’s leading speakers, including an account of his own training and early career. It aimed to be evenhanded and, for example, was highly complimentary of Caesar’s stylistic purity; referring to his histories of the Gallic campaigns and the civil war, Cicero compared them “to nude figures, straight and beautiful; stripped of all ornament of style as if they had stepped out of their clothes.” However, he made it clear that, by definition, public speakers had to attract the interest of the public. Here the Atticists failed because, however correct their Latin, they bored the listener. In the law courts “they are deserted not only by the crowds of bystanders, which is humiliating enough, but by their client’s witnesses and legal advisers.” Brutus was followed later in the year by the Orator, which took the form of a letter to Brutus. It is a technical work and is concerned with the minutiae of rhetorical theory; the focus is on diction and style, for Cicero was aiming his fire once more at the Attic style of oratory.
During the summer of 46 Cicero’s mind turned to questions of philosophy. After producing a squib on the Stoic ethical system, Stoic Paradoxes (Paradoxa stoicorum), Cicero committed himself to a much more ambitious enterprise. This was nothing more nor less than an attempt to give a comprehensive account of Greek philosophy in the Latin language. For one hundred years or so there had been numerous references to Greek philosophers and their doctrines in Roman literature, but there had been few serious books on philosophical themes. Such as there were mainly concerned Epicureanism, a way of life directed at worldly happiness and associated with a materialistic explanation of reality. Cicero deeply disapproved, although he acknowledged that it had given rise to one of the masterpieces of Latin poetry, the epic On the Nature of the Universe (De rerum natura) by Titus Lucretius Carus, a younger contemporary.
In 44 when the series of books was largely complete, he set out a prospectus of what he felt he had achieved.
In the book called Hortensius I advised my readers to occupy themselves with philosophy—and in the four volumes of the Academic Treatises I suggested the philosophical