When They Go Low, We Go High: Speeches that shape the world – and why we need them. Philip Collins
stakes are high, hence Cicero’s dramatic language. The conspirators against Caesar knew, and Cicero himself knew, that his voice in the Temple of Concord could be decisive. Defeat would probably mean death. There is also a personal frailty on display. Cicero had at first struggled to break into politics because his family were plebeian rather than patrician. If he sounds more than a little defensive, ostentatiously reading out his curriculum vitae, this is why. He also has a material reason for defending his calling. The republic thrives on argument; dictatorship would banish his skill. Cicero’s standing as a man of repute rests on the credentials he begins with and the mastery of argument that he commands.
I declare my opinion that the acts of Caesar ought to be maintained; not that I approve of them (for who indeed can do that?) but because I think that we ought above all things to have regard to peace and tranquillity. I wish that Antonius himself were present, provided that he had no advocates with him. But I suppose he may be allowed to feel unwell, a privilege he refused to grant me yesterday. He would then explain to me, or rather to you, O conscript fathers, to what extent he would defend the acts of Caesar. Are all the acts of Caesar that may exist in the bits of notebooks, and memoranda, and loose papers, produced on his single authority, and indeed not even produced, but only recited, to be ratified? And shall the acts he caused to be engraved on brass, in which he declared that the edicts and laws passed by the people were valid for ever, be considered as of no power? I think, indeed, that there is nothing so well entitled to be called the acts of Caesar as Caesar’s laws.
This speech registers Cicero’s deep disapproval of the way in which Mark Antony is squandering Caesar’s legacy. Cicero dismisses Mark Antony with bitterly feigned generosity about the privilege of being deemed unwell. Later passages in this Philippic make it clear that Cicero’s absence the previous day had been as pointed as Antony’s is today. Cicero therefore hardly deserves the high moral ground on which he stands to make his central accusation that Antony is betraying the legacy of Caesar. Framed as a battery of rhetorical questions – always a tactic to sound reasonable while delivering a vicious blow – Cicero here fatally undermines Antony’s claim to be the guardian of Caesar’s legacy. Later in the speech Cicero bluntly accuses Mark Antony of ‘branding the name of the dead Caesar with everlasting ignominy, and it was your doing – yours I say’.
The vivid passage about the notebooks shows how a good image adorns an argument. An audience gets only one hearing, and pictures dwell longer in the mind than abstract arguments. As Cicero describes them, we can see the contents of Caesar’s office. This is the only time Caesar is depicted as a person rather than a representative of the lost republic. The image has a brutal purpose. Cicero is insinuating that Antony is abusing his access to Caesar’s private papers, entrusted to his care by Caesar’s widow. Cicero requests that Mark Antony supply an explanation, not to himself but to the fathers of the republic. That act of transference identifies his own status and perspective with that of the wider republic itself.
And yet, concerning those laws that were proposed, we have, at all events, the power of complaining; but concerning those that are actually passed we have not even had that privilege. For they, without any proposal of them to the people, were passed before they were framed. Men ask, what is the reason why I, or why any one of you, O conscript fathers, should be afraid of bad laws while we have virtuous tribunes of the people? … The forum will be surrounded, every entrance of it blocked up; armed men placed in garrison, as it were, at many points. What then? – whatever is accomplished by those means will be law. And you will order, I suppose, all those regularly passed decrees to be engraved on brazen tablets. ‘The consuls consulted the people in regular form’ – (is this the way of consulting the people that we have received from our ancestors?) – ‘and the people voted it with due regularity.’ What people? That which was excluded from the forum? Under what law did they do so? Under that which has been wholly abrogated by violence and arms? But I am saying all this with reference to the future, because it is the part of a friend to point out the evils that may be avoided; and if they never ensue, that will be the best reflection of my speech. I am speaking of laws that have been proposed, concerning which you have still full power to decide either way. I am pointing out the defects; away with them! I am denouncing violence and arms; away with them, too!
There are direct and deliberate echoes of the Philippics of Demosthenes throughout Cicero’s speeches against Mark Antony. Rhetoric, even at this early stage, is already a tradition. We can see this first at the level of style. Cicero’s interest in Demosthenes was a reaction to a movement of orators in Rome known as the Neo-Attics, who criticised the elder statesmen, of whom Cicero was the sovereign example, of being stylistically weighed down by decoration. The criticism, that Cicero was, to use the contemporary term, an “Asiatic” orator, was always unfair; Cicero never set much store by purple prose. He insisted that a sentence needed rhythm rather than the ‘embroidery’ he found in some Greek examples, notably the work of Gorgias. The Philippics are, though, plainer in style than Cicero’s previous work.
Not having a style is, of course, a style of its own. ‘I am no orator, as Brutus is, but as you know me all, a plain, blunt man, that love my friend,’ says Antony in Julius Caesar, which is about as rhetorically effective as it gets. The Philippics do not, by the standards of the day, set off many fireworks. They are exact and precise, perhaps to a fault, and they are rather light on memorable imagery. The picture of Antony’s wife Fulvia, in the Second Philippic, with the blood of innocent soldiers splashed on her clothes, is exceptional. For the greater part, the series is forensically argued.
There are also echoes of Demosthenes in Cicero’s argument. Both profess that liberty is in peril, threatened by a dominant individual whose seizure of arbitrary power must be resisted. This is a threat to peace because, as Cicero argues later, peace follows liberty. Both Cicero and Demosthenes before him were seeking to persuade a divided and hesitant audience to take action. There is a choice for both between self-government and tyranny, between true peace and illusory peace, between liberty and slavery.
What I am more afraid of is lest, being ignorant of the true path to glory, you should think it glorious for you to have more power by yourself than all the rest of the people put together, and lest you should prefer being feared by your fellow citizens to being loved by them. And if you do think so, you are ignorant of the road to glory. For a citizen to be dear to his fellow citizens, to deserve well of the republic, to be praised, to be respected, to be loved, is glorious; but to be feared and to be an object of hatred, is odious, detestable; and moreover, pregnant with weakness and decay.
This short section is a clear definition of the philosophical tradition of the Roman republic. This is the argument that was passed down from the classical world to the European Renaissance. The esteem in which Cicero is held is satirised by Erasmus in his 1528 treatise Ciceronianus, written in the form of a dialogue, which contains a character who has emptied his library of all books except those by Cicero.
The idea of the Roman republic begins with the fact that the central goal of the city was peace. The greatest danger to peace, says Cicero, is discord. The setting for this speech is the Temple of Concord, but how is concord to be attained? Concord requires justice for all, and that can only be achieved if all the citizens live in liberty. There can be no freedom except in a republic, and the citizen of the free republic is the engaged man, the political man. This is an echo of an argument Cicero uses in De re publica, where he suggests that political participation can overcome the constant dangers of complacency, ‘the blandishments of pleasure and repose’.
The law of the republic is a vital institution, but Cicero argues that the actions of those who will defend the republic, even to the extent of murder, are legitimate all the same because they uphold the honour of the republic. The story goes that when Caesar was murdered on the Ides of March in 44 BC by a group of senators who called themselves the liberatores, one of their number lifted his bloodstained dagger and cried out the name of Cicero, imploring him to ‘restore the republic!’ Cicero’s primary objective in the speech was therefore the restoration of the res publica libera – the free republic.
And, indeed, you have both of you had many judgements delivered respecting you by the Roman people, by which I am greatly concerned that you are not sufficiently influenced. For what was the meaning