Political Speeches (Oxford World's Classics) (4 page)

Under Caesar’s dictatorship there was no free political debate in which he could participate, and in any case his advice on political matters was not sought; he attended meetings of the senate, but without speaking. It was now that he found time to resume work on his many philosophical and rhetorical treatises, the bulk of which were written during this period; and he also taught rhetoric to aristocratic pupils. These activities helped take his mind off the fall of the republic, Caesar’s increasing autocracy, and (in 45) the death of his beloved daughter Tullia. In September 46 he broke his silence in the senate. Caesar had unexpectedly agreed to pardon an enemy, one of the most die-hard of the republican leaders, Marcus Claudius Marcellus, and Cicero made a speech of thanks.
Pro Marcello
(‘For Marcellus’) praises Caesar’s clemency and urges him to proceed with his work of reform; it also sets out Cicero’s case to be accepted as a mediator between Caesar and the former Pompeians.
Pro Ligario
(‘For Ligarius’, 46) and
Pro rege Deiotaro
(‘For King Deiotarus’, 45) are other speeches of this period in which Cicero begs Caesar to spare Pompeian enemies. In their circumstances of delivery and in their tone they are a far cry from the speeches in which Cicero addresses a jury and is free to say what he wishes. Here he is addressing a monarch in his palace.

Caesar’s autocracy led of course to his assassination in the senate on the Ides (15th) of March 44, just a few weeks after he had had himself made
dictator perpetuo
(‘dictator for life’). Cicero had offered discreet encouragement to the assassins, or ‘liberators’ as he calls
them, but had not been let into the plot. He was actually present at the murder: Brutus raised his dagger and congratulated him on the recovery of their freedom. As the last of the senior republicans still surviving, Cicero had a symbolic value: he had become a token of the republic. And this time we do have evidence for his joy at the death of his enemy (if
Fam
. 6.15 does indeed refer to it).

After the assassination, political life began again. The surviving consul, Mark Antony (in Latin, Marcus Antonius), arranged a settlement under which Caesar’s assassins would not be prosecuted, but his laws and appointments would remain in force. In April, however, the situation changed with the arrival in Italy of Caesar’s principal heir, his 18-year-old great-nephew Gaius Octavius (who from his posthumous adoption as Caesar’s son is known as Octavian, and from 27 is known as the first emperor, Augustus): calling himself Gaius Julius Caesar, he showed himself to Caesar’s veterans, held games in Caesar’s honour, and began paying Caesar’s legacies to the Roman people. In September, Cicero made an enemy of Antony, for a relatively trivial reason: Antony had denounced him for his failure to attend a meeting of the senate at which posthumous honours for Caesar were to be voted. Cicero replied the next day with the
First Philippic
; Antony then delivered a bitter invective against him in the senate in his absence; and Cicero wrote (but did not deliver) a savage reply, the
Second Philippic
. This speech attacks and ridicules Antony’s entire career, but particularly his behaviour under Caesar and his appropriation of state funds in the months since Caesar’s death; it closes with a warning of assassination. It was Cicero’s view that Antony ought to have been murdered at the same time as Caesar: if Cicero had been invited to the feast (i.e. let into the plot), there would have been no leftovers (
Fam
. 10.28.1, 12.4.1).

In November Antony left Rome for Gaul, which he had taken as his province; and Cicero assumed unofficial leadership of the senate. In the
Third Philippic
, he persuaded the senate to approve the refusal of Decimus Brutus, the governor of Cisalpine Gaul and one of Caesar’s assassins, to hand over his legions to Antony; and in the
Fourth Philippic
, delivered before the people on the same day, he argued that Antony was in effect a public enemy. At the same time, he urged both senate and people to give their support to Octavian. In thinking that the young man could be praised, honoured, and then disposed of (to his embarrassment, his words (
Fam
. 11.20.1) were
reported to Octavian), Cicero made a serious misjudgement. It was also unrealistic of him to suppose that Octavian would stay for long on the same side as Caesar’s assassins. But Antony’s destruction seemed to Cicero the immediate priority, and an alliance with Octavian was the only way to bring it about.

From this point, Cicero controlled events at Rome: nineteen years after his consulship, he was once again leading the republic at a moment of supreme national crisis. In a further ten
Philippics
(January to April 43), he directed the senate in its actions against Antony, urging it not to compromise, and presented his view of events to the people. It was his ‘finest hour’. In April 43 Antony was defeated near Mutina and declared a public enemy. Cicero, it seemed, had saved his country a second time. But events then took an unwelcome turn. Antony escaped and succeeded in acquiring further legions from Marcus Aemilius Lepidus, the governor of Narbonese Gaul and Nearer Spain; and Decimus Brutus was deserted by his troops and killed on Antony’s orders. Octavian, though only 19, demanded the consulship (both consuls had been killed in battle); he may have considered having Cicero as his colleague, but the evidence for this is doubtful. When his demand was refused by the senate, he marched on Rome and, in August, held an irregular election and took the consulship, with his uncle as his colleague. With nothing more to be got from Cicero and the senate, he then changed sides, holding a meeting with Antony and Lepidus near Bononia. The ‘second triumvirate’ was formed, and the three men gave themselves supreme power for five years, and divided out the empire between them. To rid themselves of their enemies and raise funds for their veterans they initiated a proscription, as Sulla had done in 82. So once again the lists of those to be killed were posted in the forum. Cicero met his end, on7 December, with great courage. He was 63. His head and hands were cut off and displayed on the rostra in the forum—the scene of so many of his successes.

Octavian defeated Antony at Actium in 31, and in 30 he chose Cicero’s son as his colleague in the consulship. Many years later, as the emperor Augustus, he happened to catch his grandson reading one of Cicero’s books. He took the book, looked through it, and handed it back saying, ‘He was a master of words, child, a master of words and a patriot’ (Plut.
Cic
. 49.3).

¹
Oxford World’s Classics, 2000.

C
ICERO’S
orations are not written in the language of ordinary speech: instead, they are composed in a highly artificial style which must have impressed, astonished, and mesmerized those who listened to it. Sentences are long, sometimes as long as a third of a page of a modern printed text, and occasionally longer. The style is ‘periodic’; that is, once the sentence or ‘period’ has begun, the listener has to wait some time before the various subordinate clauses have been delivered and the sense is complete. While the period is evolving, the listener has certain expectations about how it is going to continue and end (grammatically, and in sense), and when it is finally completed these expectations are either fulfilled (giving the listener a sense of satisfaction) or, more rarely, cheated (startling the listener). The clauses which make up the period can sometimes be mere padding, but this is unusual; often they make the argument more impressive or powerful, and in addition they serve to delay the completion of the period, providing a greater feeling of satisfaction when the grammar and sense are finally completed. The clauses themselves and the words or groups of words within them are often arranged in carefully balanced pairs, sometimes so as to form a contrast, or sometimes in a symmetrical pattern; or they can be arranged in threes, with increasing weight placed on each item, or greater weight placed on the final or second and final item. Formal English style also uses these techniques; thus I have written ‘impressed, astonished, and mesmerized’ above, providing more terms than is strictly necessary for the sense (‘mesmerized’, the strongest term and therefore placed last, would have sufficed). In periodic style, the most important part of the period is the end (the beginning is the next most important), because it is here that the sense of completion is delivered. In accordance with the techniques of Hellenistic Greek oratory, Cicero always makes sure that the ends of his periods, and even of the more important clauses (‘cola’), sound right: certain rhythmical patterns (‘clausulae’) are favoured and others (mainly those which resemble verse) avoided. This ‘prose rhythm’ is one of the most prominent features of his style. Scholars have tried to analyse it, with varying results. It must have taken a great deal of
training to be able to achieve the appropriate rhythms automatically, without thinking about it, in the way that Cicero could (
Orat
. 200). Roman audiences were discriminating, and appreciated the skilful use of prose rhythm: there is an anecdote about a group of listeners bursting into applause when an orator produced some striking cadences (
Orat
. 213–14; cf. 168). Besides rhythm, there are many other techniques used by Cicero to enliven or adorn his prose, such as rhetorical questions (questions that do not expect an answer), anaphora (repetition of a word or phrase in successive clauses), asyndeton (omission of connectives), apostrophe (turning away to address an absent person or thing), exclamation, alliteration and assonance, wordplay, and metaphor.

In this translation I have followed the same policy as I adopted in
Defence Speeches
: to preserve as much of Cicero’s style and artistry as possible, and to make the translation strike the reader in as near as possible the same way as I think the Latin text would have struck its original readership. I have rendered long Latin sentences by long English ones, and for the most part have chopped up the Latin sentences only where the length was longer than a modern reader would tolerate. Similarly, I have retained the periodicity of the Latin as far as possible: I have tried to keep the clauses, phrases, and sometimes even the actual words in the same order as they occur in the original. Each word contains an idea, and in the original these ideas are conveyed to the reader in a particular order; so I have felt it desirable to refrain as far as possible from doing violence to that order. If a significant idea is withheld until the end of a sentence (as commonly happens in periodic style), then I have also withheld it until the end. This policy has allowed me, I hope, to preserve the movement of the original.

A good example of the desirability of keeping the words in the order in which Cicero presents them is provided by
Marc
. 1. One day in the senate in 46
BC
, in the presence of the dictator Caesar, Cicero rose to speak. The greatest orator Rome had ever known, he had not spoken in public for almost six years. During those six years, a civil war had been fought, the republic had fallen, and a dictatorship had been established. As he stood up, the senate must have been astonished: could Cicero’s self-imposed silence really be about to be broken? He began to speak: ‘Diuturni silenti, patres conscripti …’. The other translators of this speech into English begin their versions
as follows: ‘This day, O conscript fathers …’, ‘This day, senators …’, ‘To-day, Conscript Fathers …’, ‘During this recent period, senators …’. The effect of Cicero’s opening words must have been electrifying—and that effect can only be conveyed by beginning with the same words as the orator himself did: ‘The long silence, conscript fathers …’.

If we turn now from periodicity to prose rhythm, we find that unfortunately there is little that a translator can do, since prose rhythm is a feature of the original that cannot normally be reproduced: crowds do not burst into applause when English speakers produce striking cadences. Good English does, however, avoid certain rhythms—to a greater extent, perhaps, than is commonly realized: without conscious thought, speakers and writers will produce sentences that sound elegant. In writing English translation, then, the translator can at least take care that the English he is writing does not strike the ear harshly.

As for rhetorical devices, I have retained these as far as possible. Questions have been translated as questions, exclamations as exclamations, direct speech as direct speech, and indirect speech as indirect speech. I have also tried to reproduce the many examples of alliteration, assonance, wordplay, and metaphor that feature in Cicero’s writing. It has very often been impossible to provide an alliterative effect using the same letter as Cicero, and in such cases I have introduced alliteration of some other letter (when an ancient author uses alliteration, my feeling is that it is generally the alliteration that is significant, not the letter). I have followed the same policy with regard to assonance.

I have been careful not to introduce material that has no basis in the Latin, and not to omit any of the original—and here I have been presented with a dilemma. Cicero is exceedingly fond of doublets, particularly in the first three of the speeches in this collection, but in good English doublets (‘aims and objectives’, ‘terms and conditions’) are used only sparingly, if at all. When Cicero uses a doublet with two words of identical meaning, as he quite frequently does, should the translator preserve the doublet and write intolerably verbose English or solve the problem by omitting one half of the doublet? It would not be acceptable, in my view, to omit a word that Cicero has included, and especially to omit a stylistic feature, a doublet, when Cicero has wished it to be there; but equally I feel it would not be
acceptable to write bad English. My solution in such cases has therefore been to keep the doublet, but choose two English words which are similar in meaning, but not quite synonymous.

One phrase of Cicero’s that translators are often inclined to omit is
populus Romanus
, ‘the Roman people’: Cicero’s speeches (especially, in this collection,
In Verrem
I and II.5) are full of references to ‘the Roman people’. I have always included such references in full, and not abbreviated them to ‘the people’ (which in British English sounds ideological and rather leaden). The result is that these speeches retain their popular feel, and serve as useful reminders of the prominence of the democratic element in Roman politics. Similarly,
equites Romani
is translated as ‘the Roman equestrians’, and not ‘the equestrians’; the
equites
were, I think, particular about such niceties.