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draw a line between what is ancient and modern? People always praise the past, and disparage the present. Eloquence must change with the time, and. adapt itself to altered conditions. If the eloquence of old days was more trenchant and vigorous, that of the present is more refined and elegant. People now would not tolerate the crudities and extravagances which disfigured the speeches of antiquity. However, both styles have their merits, and the right method is that of judicious combination. Aper fails to convince. Maternus assumes that the superiority of ancient oratory cannot be questioned, and he asks Messala to explain how it is that there has been such an evident decline of eloquence. Messala's reply, of which much is unfortunately lost, contrasts the education of the present with that of the past, and he argues that the methods in vogue in the schools of the rhetoric-professors are responsible for the inferior oratory of his own age. We have an amusing picture of the young barrister's defective and absurd training under these professors, from whom he learns only a certain art of declaiming glibly on some farfetched and preposterous topic. The end of Messala's speech is lost; it would seem that he requested Maternus to give his ideas on the subject, and from this point to the conclusion of the Dialogue Maternus is the speaker. True eloquence, he maintains, can flourish only under a free government, and such a government, in fact, a republic, involves a certain amount of turbulence, which is really favourable to the orator. In such a state of things, political success is unattainable without eloquence. Indeed, the orator's art, if

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146 INTRODUCTION TO THE DIALOGUE ON ORATORY.

it is to flourish to perfection, needs the stimulus of strife and disorder, and can hardly find material for itself in quiet times and under a settled and established government. And so Athens was its home rather than Sparta. Maternus suggests that, if eloquence had declined, it was a cause for thankfulness, as such a fact implied that the conditions of life in their day were at all events better and happier than they had been amid the storms and convulsions of the "good old times." With these reflections the Dialogue concludes.

A DIALOGUE ON ORATORY.

You often ask me, Justus Fabius, how it is that CHAP. I. while the genius and the fame of so many distinguished orators have shed a lustre on the past, our age is so forlorn and so destitute of the glory of eloquence that it scarce retains the very name of orator. That title indeed we apply only to the ancients, and the clever speakers of this day we call pleaders, advocates, counsellors, anything rather than orators. To answer this question of yours, to undertake the burden of so serious an inquiry, involving, as it must, a mean opinion either of our capacities, if we cannot reach the same standard, or of our tastes, if we have not the wish, is a task on which I should scarcely venture had I to give my own views instead of being able to reproduce a conversation among men, for our time, singularly eloquent, whom, when quite a youth, I heard discussing this very question. And so it is not ability, it is only memory and recollection which I require. I have to repeat now, with the same divisions and arguments, following closely the course of that discussion, those subtle reflections which I heard, powerfully expressed, from men of the highest eminence, each of whom assigned a different but plausible reason,

CHAP. I. thereby displaying the peculiarities of his individual

CHAP. II.

temper and genius. Nor indeed did the opposite side lack an advocate, who, after much criticism and ridicule of old times, maintained the superiority of the eloquence of our own days to the great orators of the past.

It was the day after Curiatius Maternus had given a reading of his Cato, by which it was said that he had irritated the feelings of certain great personages, because in the subject of his tragedy he had apparently forgotten himself and thought only of Cato. While all Rome was discussing the subject, he received a visit from Marcus Aper and Julius Secundus, then the most famous men of genius at our bar. Of both I was a studious hearer in court, and I also would follow them to their homes and when they appeared in public, from a singular zeal for my profession, and a youthful enthusiasm which urged me to listen diligently to their trivial talk, their more serious debates, and their private and esoteric discourse. Yet many ill-naturedly thought that Secundus had no readiness of speech, and that Aper had won his reputation for eloquence by his cleverness and natural powers, more than by training and culture. As a fact, Secundus had a pure, terse, and a sufficiently fluent style, while Aper, who was imbued with learning of all kinds, pretended to despise the culture which he really possessed. He would have, so he must have thought, a greater reputation for industry and application, if it should appear that his genius did not depend on any supports from pursuits alien to his profession.

So we entered the study of Maternus, and found CHAP. III. him seated with the very book which he had read the day before, in his hands. Secundus began. Has the talk of ill-natured people no effect in deterring you, Maternus, from clinging to your Cato with its provocations? Or have you taken up the book to revise it more carefully, and, after striking out whatever has given a handle for a bad interpretation, will you publish, if not a better, at least a safer, Cato?

You shall read, was the answer, what Maternus owed it to himself to write, and all that you heard you will recognise again. Anything omitted in the Cato Thyestes shall supply in my next reading. This is a tragedy, the plan of which I have in my own mind arranged and formed. I am therefore bent on hurrying on the publication of the present book, that, as soon as my first work is off my hands, I may devote my whole soul to a fresh task.

It seems, said Aper, so far from these tragedies contenting you, that you have abandoned the study. of the orator and pleader, and are giving all your time to Medea and now to Thyestes, although your friends, with their many causes, and your clients from the colonies, municipalities, and towns, are calling you to the courts. You could hardly answer their demands even if you had not imposed new work on yourself, the work of adding to the dramas of Greece a Domitius and a Cato, histories and names from our own Rome.

This severity of yours, replied Maternus, would CHAP. IV. be quite a blow to us, had not our controversy from

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