Cicero - Anthony Everitt [18]
At the best schools lessons were given in rhetoric, or the art of public speaking. The Romans and the Greeks before them believed that it was possible to establish a system of oratory that could be taught. They spoke of training public speakers under five traditional headings: inventio, seeking out ideas or lines of argument; collocatio, structure and organization; elocutio, diction and style; actio, physical delivery; and memoria, memory (speeches could last for hours and as they were spoken not read they had to be learned by heart). There were different opinions as to the best form of elocutio. Some advocated an elaborate, ornate style and others plainness and simplicity. There was a middle way, grand but not exaggerated, which the adult Cicero came to favor.
The good public speaker recognized that he had to be a performer, like an actor. Later in his life Cicero wrote books on oratory and in them he underscored the point:
A leading speaker will vary and modulate his voice, raising and lowering it and deploying the full scale of tones. He will avoid extravagant gestures and stand impressively erect. He will not pace about and when he does so not for any distance. He should not dart forward except in moderation with strict control. There should be no effeminate bending of the neck or twiddling of his fingers or beating out the rhythm of his cadences on his knuckles. He should control himself by the way he holds and moves his entire body. He should extend his arm at moments of high dispute and lower it during calmer passages.… Once he has made sure he does not have a stupid expression on his face and or a grimace, he should control his eyes with great care, for as the face is the image of the soul the eyes are its translators. Depending on the subject at hand they can express grief or hilarity.
Students were taught how to turn fables and other kinds of stories into simple narrative; to develop arguments from quotations from famous poets; and to compose speeches inspired by actual or fictional situations and events. They would declaim them to the class. Although by Cicero’s day the teaching of rhetoric had been reduced to a complicated and arid system of rules, it lay at the heart of the curriculum. At one level rhetoric was a vocational subject, for it was the key to a political career, to which all men of good birth should aspire. They would be able to do so only if they acquired the necessary skills to persuade people of the rightness of their point of view. In Rome reputations were made not only at public meetings and in the Senate but also in the law courts. Ambitious young men in their early twenties often appeared as prosecutors in criminal trials in order to make a name for themselves, not just as lawyers but as potential future politicians.
Both rhetoric and the study of literature were also intended to give students an ethical grounding, a moral education which inculcated the virtues of fortitude, justice and prudence.
Public speaking in this complex sense is extinct and it is difficult now to conceive of its power, immediacy and charm. Just as Samuel Pepys in seventeenth-century England would spend a Sunday going from sermon to sermon for the sheer pleasure of it, so crowds of Romans would pack the Forum, where trials were held in the open air, to listen to and applaud the great advocates of the day as they presented their cases. The “Friends, Romans, countrymen” speech in Shakespeare