Cicero · Politics
Cicero’s lifelong conviction that the ideal is the union of eloquence and wisdom - the philosopher who can speak and the orator who knows - and his defence of rhetoric against those who would divorce it from truth.
Cicero, the greatest orator of the ancient world, held a high and almost reverent view of the power of eloquence - the art of speaking persuasively and well. It was eloquence, he believed, that first drew scattered human beings together out of their wild and solitary state into civilized community: the persuasive power of speech, wielded by wise and gifted men, that convinced people to live under law, to cooperate, to build cities and societies. Speech is the faculty that most distinguishes humans from beasts, the instrument of reason made public and effective; and the art of using it well - rhetoric - is therefore among the noblest and most powerful of human arts, the very means by which reason governs human affairs. In a free republic especially, where matters are decided by debate and persuasion in the senate, the courts, and the assemblies, eloquence is the indispensable tool of public life, the power by which the statesman moves men to wise action and defends justice and the commonwealth.
But Cicero was acutely aware that this great power could be dangerous, even disastrous, when divorced from wisdom and virtue. Eloquence without wisdom - the ability to speak persuasively without the knowledge to speak truly or the virtue to speak rightly - is a weapon in the hands of the unscrupulous, a means by which clever men can deceive and manipulate, make the worse cause appear the better, and lead the people to ruin. Cicero knew this danger from the inside; he had seen demagogues sway the Roman mob, advocates defend the guilty, and the arts of persuasion turned to corrupt and destructive ends. An orator who is eloquent but not wise or good is, he warned, like a madman given a sword - the more skilled the speaker, the greater the harm they can do. Mere fluency and persuasive technique, detached from knowledge and virtue, are not a good but a peril, arming vice with the power to deceive and ambition with the power to mislead.
Cicero’s ideal orator is not a narrow specialist in persuasive technique but a broadly and deeply educated human being - a person of wide knowledge, sound judgment, good character, and cultivated taste, who can speak with power on any subject because they genuinely understand it. The complete orator, he argued, must know philosophy (to grasp truth and reason rightly), history (to draw on the wisdom of the past), law (to argue justly), psychology (to move the emotions appropriately), and much else; must possess virtue (to be trustworthy and to use their power well); and must have the practical wisdom to apply all this to the concrete situations of public life. This ideal - the broadly educated, eloquent, wise, and virtuous person fit for the leadership of a free society - is the origin of the Western ideal of liberal education, the education befitting a free person and a citizen, aimed not at narrow technical training but at the full development of the human being. Cicero’s orator is the prototype of the educated leader the humanities were created to form.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned Cicero’s ideal of the union of eloquence and wisdom - the orator who is also a philosopher. Centuries earlier, Plato had attacked rhetoric as mere flattery divorced from truth. State how Plato’s critique challenged the very art Cicero defended.
Leads to Plato.
Begin this lesson →epoché — a humanities education that remembers you.