When They Go Low, We Go High: Speeches that shape the world – and why we need them. Philip Collins
as ‘speaker of nonsense’. More’s text causes us to ponder whether Utopia is his version of the perfect society or a kind of Tudor cabaret act.
The clue to the riddle is also the link between Cicero and the rhetoric of the American republic, and it is found in More’s subtitle Optimus status republicae: ‘The Best State of the Commonwealth’. Or to put it in a current idiom, the perfect state of the union. More sends his narrator Hythloday on a journey to Utopia where he discovers, ready-made in the ocean, a society that dramatises Cicero’s argument for the Roman republic. That argument, which More revives and which Jefferson, Lincoln, Kennedy and Obama all articulate, is how the people are to be heard. More’s answer to that question is politics. The noble life, he argues, is one that is dedicated to public service in the name of the people. This marks a change from the Greek tradition in which it was thought that a citizen had to be of noble birth. Cicero’s argument is that virtue, rather than inherited wealth, should have its reward. It is in the finest speeches about popular power that this idea is expressed.
But it is not just the beauty of the idea that makes these speeches fine. The beauty of the diction counts too. Fixing problems is the purpose of democratic politics but saying so is never enough. As La Rochefoucauld said, ‘the passions are the only orators that convince’. Democratic politics still needs the elevation of Cicero’s case for the Roman republic, Thomas Jefferson’s praise of the blessing of equal liberty for all, Abraham Lincoln’s ability to summarise the promise of democracy in a single phrase, John F. Kennedy’s call for an active citizen body and Barack Obama’s extraordinary, audacious hope. All these speakers express in unforgettable cadences the political virtue of granting power to the people.
But, in our time, an alternative utopia to liberal democratic politics has risen again in the form of populism. If politics is to turn away from this phoney appeal to the people, it can only do so in words that once again resound to the times. If politics has become dry then it needs to be reinvigorated by the precious democratic gift represented by the principle of hope.
Popular politics cannot work without utopian spirit. We need to draw from More’s Utopia its sense of possibility, because the spirit of utopia is a desire for progress. It is a way of thinking that reminds us that the world might be different. This hope needs to be expressed in words that take wing. Rhetoric is the art of public persuasion, and if the ideas of liberal democracy are to retain their hold over the imagination of the people, they need to be argued with clarity and elevation. In the speeches that follow, they are.
MARCUS TULLIUS CICERO
First Philippic against Mark Antony
The Senate, the Temple of Concord, Rome
2 September 44 BC
Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 BC) was the first man to claim that rhetoric can save the state. Cicero was a philosopher, politician, lawyer and writer. He was the first among equals of the rhetoricians, both as a speaker himself and as the man who made the subject a systematic field of study. Cicero’s De oratore is still the best rhetorical instruction manual. He is headmaster of the school of oratory.
Cicero’s five canons of rhetoric still work; they will always work. Invention, he says, is the drafting of good arguments; disposition is the arrangement of those arguments for best effect; style is giving the argument shape in language; memory is recall in an age before autocue; pronunciation is delivery on the day. Cicero also identified three styles. The plain style should be used to teach, the ornate middle style to please, and the grand style to arouse the emotions. But De oratore was more than a book of instructions on how to talk. It was a book of statecraft as well: the subjects were for Cicero indivisible. If rhetoric and democracy were born together with Pericles, then rhetoric and statecraft were united by Cicero.
After a spell as a slum landlord, Cicero devoted his life to the theory and practice of oratory. He learned his trade in Rome under the tutelage of Crassus, the leading orator of his day. Cicero was debarred from a career in politics due to his ignoble plebeian ancestry. He grew up in the provincial town of Arpinum, the son of a fuller, a cloth-maker who soaked wool in urine for cleansing purposes. Cicero instead built a reputation as a lawyer of great integrity and gained public recognition when he acted in the impeachment of the corrupt governor Gaius Verres in 70 BC. Low birth notwithstanding, he did then make it into politics. In 63 BC he exposed a plot by Lucius Sergius Catiline to launch a coup against the Roman republic. The Orations against Catiline are the most ferocious tirades against a rival in the history of speech. The story is told, fictionalised to dramatic effect, in Robert Harris’s trilogy of historical novels about Cicero.
When Cicero said of Catiline in the Temple of Jupiter: ‘Among us you can dwell no longer’, he ended Catiline’s career. But he also damaged himself. Cicero was granted the title of Pater Patriae, Father of the Fatherland, but he was exiled from the republic for having, in the aftermath of triumph, executed a Roman citizen without trial. The law of the republic made no exceptions, even for its saviour.
It is to the curatorial brilliance of Cicero’s devoted secretary Tiro that we owe the fifty-eight Cicero speeches, of the eighty-eight we know he gave, that we have today. We also know Cicero from his letters to Atticus, which were discovered by Petrarch in 1345 and which are the source of the influence that Cicero was to have on the European Renaissance. In the decade of his retreat after fleeing Rome in 55 BC, Cicero composed a series of works that have among their debtors the significant names of Hobbes, Locke, Voltaire, Montesquieu, Burke, Adam Smith and Rousseau.
The speech that follows was delivered in the wake of the slaughter of Julius Caesar on 15 March 44 BC. Cicero had been no supporter of Caesar’s tyranny but, mindful that the republic was bigger than any ruler, he had negotiated a settlement in which Caesar’s late decrees would be honoured. The consul Mark Antony confirmed that he would consent, but then, at Caesar’s funeral, seemed to renege on the commitment by inflaming public opinion against the conspirators. Cicero fled the city, disillusioned at the decline of the republic, but returned, to be greeted by multitudes in the streets. The next day, rather than turn up at the Senate to hear Mark Antony, he pleaded fatigue. The Senate met again a day later, when Cicero delivered this speech.
We know it now as the first in a series of fourteen venomous speeches directed at Mark Antony. In a knowing reference to Demosthenes, who, between 351 and 341 BC, tried to rouse the Athenians against the threat of domination by King Philip II of Macedon, Cicero referred to these speeches as ‘Philippics’. Lest this be thought too much invective to be spent solely on Mark Antony, remember that Cicero’s true purpose was to save the republic. In the Second Philippic, published as a pamphlet rather than spoken, Cicero compares Mark Antony with Catiline. The series then leads towards the explicit conclusion of the Fourteenth Philippic that Mark Antony was the enemy of the people and a threat to the republic. When politics fails, the only option, Cicero warns, is discord. The Philippics are the high point of Cicero’s career. In his fledgling years he had been full of ingenious phrases searching for an appropriate cause. Twenty years before, the Catiline conspiracy had given him his first great moment. The Philippics are his glorious second act. All at once his verbal fluency rhymed with the times.
Before, O conscript fathers, I say those things concerning the republic which I think myself bound to say at the present time, I will explain to you briefly the cause of my departure from, and of my return to the city. When I hoped that the republic was at last recalled to a proper respect for your wisdom and for your authority, I thought that it became me to remain in a sort of sentinelship, which was imposed upon me by my position as a senator and a man of consular rank. Nor did I depart anywhere, nor did I ever take my eyes off the republic …
The opening of a speech, like the first still in a film, should contain the address in miniature. Cicero here defines his Topic: the future of the republic. He gets to the main point quickly, as all speakers ought. The point is the defence of the republic and the liberty of the people against those, the tyrants Caesar and Mark Antony, who would violate its principles. This is rhetoric about crisis which increases the crisis with each utterance. Note how Cicero establishes his credentials as sentinel, senator and consul, which give him standing in the republic. He does this to justify his intervention