Rhetoric and Our Time in History

I’m not sure I trust Rhetoric. The Romans trusted it very much: they trusted it to get what they wanted. Cicero seems so good because of his words. Marcus Antonius comes off poorly, falling for Cleopatra and running to the East. But Octavian is the one who betrayed Cicero. Antony’s wife pinned his tongue to the rostrum, but Octavian gave her the podium.

Perhaps Cicero’s greatest moment was when he told his slaves to put up their swords: his final speech, a few words to save those who were with him.

I’ve taught the Roman Oratio to Latin students: Exordium, Narratio, etc. We write speeches in English to get the sense of the ways in which a Roman orator might tactically deploy language to trap the audience. Humor and wit engaged the popular mind, not unlike Shakespeare entertaining the pit. Cicero called Caelius his sister’s lover, without a real sense of the consequences for such words. He operated in a world still held together by the Sullan re-constitution, but died with its destruction.

I think we are in such a time.

It is difficult for a Latinist not to make parallel historical connections to the Roman rise and fall. Are we undergoing a Sullan re-constitution? If so, can such an historical rewrite stay longer than the dictator’s life? Are we waiting for Caesar? Will the mob’s rage burn at his murder? Is Octavian waiting to turn brick to marble, prose to poetry?

My natural proclivity is for poetry. I teach Latin students to read Ovid in meter. Perhaps, in an era of political domination, poets are free to explore the soul. Rhetoric becomes a dead art, or propaganda. In poetry, as in painting, we can hide critiques of the ruling class, because they are too dumb to read it.

This does not mean I take poetry to be Romantically reductive. Virgil, while talking about Neptune calming the chaos of unruly seas, also questions the nature of goddesses whose hearts can be turned by base emotion. Somehow poetry, in its magical obscurity, keeps its ability to jab the emperor, like the jester in Lear.

Poetry and Creative Nonfiction have been my strongest forms, probably because they allow me to express truths which even I can’t see. The seeming perfection of an essay is a deception, and I have trouble with lying.

Nevertheless, all words lie. They mean to say what they cannot express. Nonfiction, poetry, and fiction share this limitation. The hand pressed to the cave wall tries to touch the world beyond. Rock whispers in drafts.