“That’s just rhetoric!” So we dismiss statements we have little respect for. Readers of Tacitus’ Dialogue on Orators will remember that the Roman historians thought that eloquence is a sign of a free state. There was a time when the speeches of Burke and Canning, of Daniel Webster and Abraham Lincoln were studied in school and sat in stately volumes on the bookshelves of educated readers. What would Tacitus think of the state of public speaking today?

As William Butler Yeats made his own persona a key element in his poetry, so the great Roman orator Cicero (103-43 B.C.) molded an ethos that developed over time and yet provided a basis for persuasion and great literature. As with Yeats, the persona was based on reality. In Trials of Character, Professor James M. May provides students with the first thorough investigation into the interaction of fact and fancy in Cicero’s life and works that produced some of the most brilliant speeches ever delivered. Since Cicero’s carefully wrought persona was rooted in his changing status as he climbed the Roman ladder of success to the top, May’s book often amounts to a biography of Cicero from the perspective of his literary art. May’s painstaking analyses of important orations make it clear that a literary technique often associated with literary modernism was used by a master craftsman in the ancient world to create not “rhetoric,” but passion and persuasion.

Cicero lived in a society where enormous prestige belonged to the powerful, who were not afraid to flaunt it. In his early speeches Cicero developed rhetorical strategies premised on his real position as an underdog standing up to powerful and dangerous leaders.

May blames Cicero because in the glory days after he became consul he emphasized ethos to the exclusion of clear narrative and proper presentation of evidence. May seems to forget that by that time, Cicero no longer spoke alone for a client, but as one of a number of distinguished advocates. Each speech concentrated on the special skill of the orator, and while narrative and proof were allotted to other speakers, Cicero was typically asked to speak last and concentrate on character and emotion. That he was given this position so often indicates that Cicero’s use of ethos was recognized in his own day as brilliant and original. It would have made no sense for him to repeat the work of earlier speakers.

The passages from Cicero’s speeches are given in the translation found in the Loeb Classical Library, with the Latin reserved for the notes in the back, to help make the book accessible to more readers. When May deals with Latin that is not Cicero’s, problems arise. In quoting the famous first simile of Vergil’s Aeneid, May translates Furor arma ministrat (1.149) as “fury ministers to arms,” but the phrase means “Fury supplies the arms.” (See Oxford Latin Dictionary, ministro, 3.) A few. similar slips make one wish that the referees at the University of North Carolina Press had been more vigilant.

Cicero, young and old, knew, as did Jefferson and Adams in their correspondence, that freedom and character are indissoluble. Without one, the other soon vanishes. James May has reminded us vividly how both elements worked together in the life of a great man to create great literature.

Kopff_Review

[Trials of Character: The Eloquence of Ciceronian Ethos, by James M. May (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press)]