When They Go Low, We Go High: Speeches that shape the world – and why we need them. Philip Collins
the verses made by the people? Or of the extraordinary applause at the sight of the statue of Pompeius? And at that sight of the two tribunes of the people who are opposed to you? Are these things a feeble indication of the incredible unanimity of the entire Roman people? What more? Did the applause at the games of Apollo, or, I should rather say, testimony and judgement there given by the Roman people, appear to you of small importance? Oh! Happy are those men who, though they themselves were unable to be present on account of the violence of arms, still were present in spirit, and had a place in the breasts and hearts of the Roman people.
It is evident from this first Philippic that Cicero is vying to be the leader of the political opposition. Look at how brazenly he enlists the audience in his cause. In mocking Mark Antony’s deafness to popular opinion, Cicero casts himself as the tribune of the people. It is a reminder that the verdict on a public speech in a democracy is settled by the audience. This is an indispensable lesson for every speaker, at every level. It’s not, in the end, you who decides whether a passage works. The audience will decide for you.
Mark Antony reacted with fury to the accusation that he disdained his audience, and seventeen days later delivered a withering attack on Cicero’s career in the Senate. Cicero did not attend because his safety could not be guaranteed. Fearful for his life, he published the Second Philippic as a pamphlet and issued instructions through his friend Atticus for it to be circulated carefully and narrowly. The Second Philippic is written as though it were a speech, with plentiful references to the setting, the occasion, to Antony’s dandy dress sense, and it contains a direct request for a fair hearing. But it was never actually delivered. In his Tenth Satire, Juvenal says that the Second Philippic is Cicero’s masterpiece, the eloquent testament that cost him his life. Antony ordered that Cicero’s right hand, the one which had written the Philippics, be amputated. For good measure the head which had devised and spoken them was cut off. That severed head and hand were nailed to the Rostra on the Forum to discourage imitation. Legend has it that Antony’s wife Fulvia stabbed her hairpins through the dead man’s tongue, which gives chilling meaning to the cliché dangerous rhetoric. Cicero left behind a lament for this and for all times: ‘O tempora, O mores’ – ‘Oh, the times! Oh, the manners!’
Cicero once said that ‘the real quality of an orator can only be deduced from the practical results his speech-making obtains’. By that strict measure the Philippics must count as a failure. Any speaker who ends up with his head and hand nailed to the Rostra is obliged to conclude that the speech might have gone better. Mark Antony went on, with Marcus Lepidus and Caesar’s nephew Octavian, to form a dictatorship known as the Second Triumvirate. The harmony of the group, though, was not helped by Mark Antony, who was married to Octavian’s sister, beginning his affair with Cleopatra. Civil war broke out in 31 BC. Antony and Cleopatra fled to Egypt, where they committed suicide together.
The republic did not end well, but Cicero left a legacy unrivalled in the field. Time and again the speeches of the American republic invoke the spirit of Cicero. It is there in Benjamin Franklin’s defence of the constitution, with all its faults. It is there in Thomas Jefferson’s appeal for exact and equal liberty for all. It is there in Abraham Lincoln’s tribute to popular power and in Barack Obama’s quest for the perfect state of the union. John Quincy Adams said that American democracy had been ‘spoken into existence’. Cicero was one of the scriptwriters.
THOMAS JEFFERSON
Equal and Exact Justice to All Men
First Inaugural Address, Washington DC
4 March 1801
Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) was a Founding Father and the third president of the United States, serving two terms from 1801 to 1809. As the principal author of the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson stood, against Alexander Hamilton, for a version of the American republic in which the power of the federal government would be limited.
Born and educated in Virginia, where he trained as a lawyer, Thomas Jefferson was asked, in 1776, to draft a statement describing to the world America’s break with Britain. The resulting Declaration of Independence, which ‘affirmed the natural rights of humanity to protect itself from arbitrary and autocratic forms of government’, was adopted by the Second Continental Congress in 1776.
For the rest of the American Revolution, Jefferson served as a governor of Virginia, in which position he remains rightly renowned for his Statute on Religious Freedom. He then succeeded Benjamin Franklin as America’s minister to France and, during five years spent in Paris, witnessed the start of the French Revolution, which he regarded – wrongly as it turned out – as an extension of the example lately offered by America. Upon his return, Jefferson accepted President George Washington’s request that he serve as the nation’s first secretary of state.
Jefferson in Cabinet participated in the most creative tension in democratic history. His own preference for a weak constitution that gave the greater power to the states ran into the objections of Alexander Hamilton, secretary of the Treasury, who wanted a stronger mandate for the federal government. The conflict was managed, rather than resolved, with the formation of the young republic’s first opposition party, Jefferson’s Republicans.
This speech is how Jefferson chose to inaugurate his first presidency, with a statement of his mission in politics. As president after 1801 Jefferson set about reducing government, cutting the budgets of the army and navy and closing diplomatic missions. He was elected for a second term and in 1807 signed the Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves – this despite being himself a slave owner and fathering a child with one of his slaves.
Jefferson retired in 1809, aged sixty-five, but went on to found the University of Virginia. He died on 4 July 1826, the fiftieth anniversary of the adoption of his Declaration of Independence.
Friends and fellow citizens, called upon to undertake the duties of the first executive office of our country, I avail myself of the presence of that portion of my fellow-citizens which is here assembled to express my grateful thanks for the favour with which they have been pleased to look toward me, to declare a sincere consciousness that the task is above my talents, and that I approach it with those anxious and awful presentiments which the greatness of the charge and the weakness of my powers so justly inspire … Utterly, indeed, should I despair did not the presence of many whom I here see remind me that in the other high authorities provided by our Constitution I shall find resources of wisdom, of virtue, and of zeal on which to rely under all difficulties.
Jefferson’s modesty would be excessively false were it not for his political purpose. His intention is not so much to diminish himself, but rather – like Cicero in the Temple of Concord – to venerate the republic, beside which any individual must appear small. Jefferson, in fact, had named Cicero as an influence on his drafting of the Declaration of Independence.
We know, from the three handwritten texts that survive in Jefferson’s papers at the Library of Congress, that he amended his script to make it more overtly republican with each iteration. His first sentence originally read ‘executive magistrate’. The final version instead lauds ‘the executive office’, which transfers the honour from himself, the president, to the office, the presidency.
Jefferson sought to embody this humility in the spartan festivities of the day. Even though he had done so much to bring the city of Washington DC into being, Jefferson eschewed the splendid parades that had inaugurated George Washington and John Adams. In the Senate Room, the only completed room in the new Capitol, he dressed in the habit of a plain citizen without any badge of office or ceremonial sword. There was no festive ball afterwards either. Legend has it that after his lecture he walked back to his boarding house, where he stood in line for dinner to be served as usual.
The absence of flourish in the speech was taken to excess in the manner of delivery. Jefferson’s tone was so low that, apart from those at the front, most of the audience had to read what he said in the Washington papers the following morning. Before electronic amplification, to be audible to a sizeable audience was no easy task. Early presidents scattered emissaries around the crowd, whispering the text as the principal spoke.
During the contest of opinion through which we have passed