Let me offer some background: Cornelius Tacitus was a successful politician and orator, about 20 years younger than Quintilian, who retired to write history after his consulship under the emperor Nerva. The stated intent of the Dialogus de oratoribus, as Tacitus indicates from the outset, is to explore the reasons for the decline of oratory. To this end, Tacitus sets up his four interlocutors — Maternus, Aper, Messalla, and Secundus — at the house of Maternus, in a situation clearly intended to echo Cicero’s dialogue on rhetoric. James Mayer and Michael Winterbottom both attest to the difficulties of dating the composition of the Dialogus: the best consensus available seems to be sometime between 101 and 104 AD, during the reign of Trajan, the second of the five “good” emperors (moviegoers: in Russell Crowe’s Gladiator role, Marcus Aurelius was the last of the five “good” emperors, succeeded by Commodus, about whom there was indeed a scandal involving a gladiator, if memory serves), though there are other arguments. In terms of form, Mayer points out that the Dialogus “comprises a trio of paired speeches. Each of the three interlocutors speak twice. The set speeches, six in all, have single themes, and are adversarial in form, since the dialogue parodies a trial. In each of the three pairs, the second is shorter” (17). However, Luce takes the same observation a step further, to point out that the form of the Dialogus comes directly out of Seneca the Elder’s Controversiae. Furthermore, Mayer points out that the dialogues “are set in the context of political strife, and the role of oratory within the Roman state is always the issue,” much in the manner of Cicero’s Brutus, and “the fate of oratory is seen to hang in the balance: despotism has once again silenced the forum” (13). One of Tacitus’s primary interests — as I’ve lately seen from his historiographical work — is in attempting to explore some of the reasons for rhetoric’s decline. More than that, though, the prose of the Dialogus and of the Histories, as well — like Plato’s dialogues — is a live wire. Like Cicero’s prose, this is writing that bites, in a good way.

Anyway. I started this post intending to write about the most recent hundred pages of the Histories, and especially the stuff Tacitus does with Tiberius and his ear-poisoning lieutenant Sejanus and the twelve country houses on the island of Capri (at points, the Histories resemble a grim soap opera), but maybe I can do that tomorrow. I figure I’d best first give some context as a rationale that rhet/comp scholars might take for actually reading Tacitus. Aside from the fact that, in practice, he’s almost as much fun as Cicero.

Yeah, yeah. So here goes.

One of the reasons for rhetoric’s decline is the delatores (discussed recently), of whom Tacitus has the historical character Maternus remark, “The gain-getting rhetoric now in vogue, greedy for human blood, is a modern invention, the product of a depraved condition of society” (Dialogus 261). And Dominik points to “the loss of the senate as a venue for serious political debate” (60) as another of the reasons for oratory’s decline. Dominik is of the opinion that neither Maternus nor Messala represent the views of Tacitus, as opposed to Luce, who argues that Maternus represents the views of Tacitus in the same way that Crassus represents the views of Cicero in De oratore (Luce 17). But from the character Aper in the Dialogus, we should understand that even in Cicero’s time, “very few even of the orators themselves had made acquaintance with the rules of the rhetoricians or the tenets of the philosophers. But now that everything has become common property, what we need is novel and choice methods of eloquence, by employing which the speaker may avoid boring his hearers, especially when addressing a court which decides issues, not according to the letter of the law, but by virtue of its own inherent authority” (283). Increasingly unequal relations of power intersect with the connection between the practicing orator and the rules of the handbook, and — in conjunction with the popular taste for the epigrammatic — this begins to alter the nature of eloquence.

Later in the Dialogus, concerns about political power and stability and their influences on rhetoric become more overt. Maternus notes that, in their time, “orators. . . have. . . succeeded in obtaining all the influence that it would be proper to allow them under settled, peaceable, and prosperous political conditions,” whereas, in earlier days, “in the general ferment and without the strong hand of a single ruler, a speaker’s political wisdom was measured by his power of carrying conviction to the unstable populace” (329). The instability of the political situation in Cicero’s time made it possible for oratory to be the sine qua non for those who desired positions of power; this, naturally, led to the growth of oratory as a practice. Furthermore, according to Maternus, the magnitude of the great and terrible events of unstable times required oratory on a corresponding scale: but now, we have peace, and we respond to the small disturbances of peace in small and private ways, and the diminished scale of the audience for declamation has further contributed to the decline of eloquence. Finally, Maternus links morality to rhetoric in a manner radically different from that of Quintilian, in a striking passage near the dialogue’s conclusion: “The art which is the subject of our discourse is not a quiet and peacable art, or one that finds satisfaction in moral worth and good behavior: no, really great and famous oratory is a foster-child of licence, which foolish men called liberty, an associate of sedition, a goad for the unbridled populace. It owes no alliegance to any. Devoid of discipline, it is insulting, off-hand, and overbearing” (Tacitus 343). The statement seems to sum up the gloomy end to which the study of rhetoric has come, and perhaps the best possible reading available to us is an ironic one detailing the devastating effects wrought upon oratory by the loss of political liberty.

And that loss of political liberty associated with the growth of empire will be tomorrow’s subject. Or at least I hope so. I gotta write it first.

Stay tuned? Arguments, questions, disagreements? Yes, I know this shirt looks terrible. Now: about Tacitus.

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