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Having studied a single speech of Cicero’s in some depth, the class is now moving on to a very rapid examination of De Oratore. This is usually translated as On the Ideal Orator, and is a bit unusual for its time on focusing on the orator as a person, rather than on oratory as a skill to be developed. Our translation has all sorts of interesting pages and pages and pages of info on this, but the simple version is: Cicero was trying to reconcile the usually opposed schools of philosophy (aiming at the truth) and rhetoric (aiming at persuasion), in an argument for the ideal (and likely unattainable ideal at that) orator being one who fully understands the truth, the matter at hand, and the art of speaking.
Rather than being a treatise with the author arguing his point of view, this is presented in the old Greek style: it’s a dialogue between characters, who argue back and forth over what makes for the best orator. From a modern perspective, it’s almost a piece of historical fiction: it’s set in a specific year, in a meeting that presumably did or could have occurred between specific historical characters, but it’s all written by a later author trying to make his point while keeping the people he represents “in character.” As with a lot of ancient literature, it’s not exactly fiction or non-fiction as we think of them today.
In any case, the parts we’re translating in class--and I use the term “parts” rather than “section”, because we’ll be jumping from one chunk to the next with many intervening bits skipped--come from Book III, which represents the third supposed night of conversation between our characters. The main speakers are Crassus and Antonius, and, unlike in the Socratic dialogues, neither one of them is meant to represent the Real Answers while the other is a fool proved to be wrong; they’re both actual famous orators of yore whom Cicero respected highly. (They both died horribly during a civil war, too; the scene is set a few weeks before their deaths.) Instead, their argument is meant to work out the truth by means of their disagreement, a sort of worked example for Cicero’s argument that rhetoric is a better battleground for the truth than philosophy alone. Part of his point is that just thinking about the truth isn’t sufficient; it’s through the debate over the truth, and putting it into practice in the political sphere, that philosophy finally stops being theoretical and starts getting things done.
With all that preamble out of the way? I expect to botch this translation rather badly. Cicero is using a lot of words in very particular ways, and I’m liable to grab the wrong synonym, even when it’s possible to get a single English word that covers his chosen nuance of Latin word choice. And since this is all very theoretical discussion, the grammar (beyond the helpful ‘Then Crassus said’ bits) gets complex--not in a stylistic sense, but in the sense of having thorny nested relative clauses used instead of nice simple nouns, a lot of the time.
But, hey, some of you have, I believe, actually been reading what I translated for the Pro Caelio. So let’s find out if anyone wants to read this, too!
( In which we learn that style is substance and substance is style )
Rather than being a treatise with the author arguing his point of view, this is presented in the old Greek style: it’s a dialogue between characters, who argue back and forth over what makes for the best orator. From a modern perspective, it’s almost a piece of historical fiction: it’s set in a specific year, in a meeting that presumably did or could have occurred between specific historical characters, but it’s all written by a later author trying to make his point while keeping the people he represents “in character.” As with a lot of ancient literature, it’s not exactly fiction or non-fiction as we think of them today.
In any case, the parts we’re translating in class--and I use the term “parts” rather than “section”, because we’ll be jumping from one chunk to the next with many intervening bits skipped--come from Book III, which represents the third supposed night of conversation between our characters. The main speakers are Crassus and Antonius, and, unlike in the Socratic dialogues, neither one of them is meant to represent the Real Answers while the other is a fool proved to be wrong; they’re both actual famous orators of yore whom Cicero respected highly. (They both died horribly during a civil war, too; the scene is set a few weeks before their deaths.) Instead, their argument is meant to work out the truth by means of their disagreement, a sort of worked example for Cicero’s argument that rhetoric is a better battleground for the truth than philosophy alone. Part of his point is that just thinking about the truth isn’t sufficient; it’s through the debate over the truth, and putting it into practice in the political sphere, that philosophy finally stops being theoretical and starts getting things done.
With all that preamble out of the way? I expect to botch this translation rather badly. Cicero is using a lot of words in very particular ways, and I’m liable to grab the wrong synonym, even when it’s possible to get a single English word that covers his chosen nuance of Latin word choice. And since this is all very theoretical discussion, the grammar (beyond the helpful ‘Then Crassus said’ bits) gets complex--not in a stylistic sense, but in the sense of having thorny nested relative clauses used instead of nice simple nouns, a lot of the time.
But, hey, some of you have, I believe, actually been reading what I translated for the Pro Caelio. So let’s find out if anyone wants to read this, too!
( In which we learn that style is substance and substance is style )