A Pagan’s Proposal
Moral Education for a Decadent Society
by Jeffry Davis
Back in the fifth century B.C., in the Sicilian town of Syracuse, a longtime despot by the name of Thrasybulus fell from power. With his ousting, a democratic form of government emerged that gave newly enfranchised citizens the opportunity to recover lands which had been confiscated during the tyrant’s reign. One of the citizens, Corax, developed a systematic approach to help victims plead their cases in court. In essence, Corax told the people, “Follow my advice: You’ll get your land!” His formula—employing inferential reasoning with arguments of probability—worked. Justice triumphed through the careful use of words. Many citizens who trusted Corax were indemnified by rhetoric.
In a speech given prior to the 1988 United States presidential election, Republican nominee George Bush boldly declared before the American public, “Read my lips: No new taxes!” The words tickled many voters’ ears and brought relief. His plan—a mixture of emotional bravado and pandering—worked. Millions believed and went to the polls to punch their tickets on his behalf. Bush became the forty-first president of the United States. But midway through his four-year term, he raised taxes, and he also raised the ire of the people who put him into power. Some members of the press called it a premeditated act of chicanery. Many citizens who trusted Bush felt bamboozled by rhetoric.
As these two historical anecdotes suggest, the meaning of the term rhetoric has dramatically changed in 2,500 years. As its genesis, rhetoric held an integral place in democratic government. In ancient Greece, men had two distinct roles: to be war makers and speech makers. The renowned historian of rhetoric, George Kennedy, notes that “As the city states developed and there was less room for the hero at arms, the speaker of words became the commoner type of influential man.”1 With civilization came law, and with law came the need for the interpretation of legal matters. This was the role of the true classical rhetor, to master the language of civil life, to support noble causes for the common good, and to eloquently argue worthy cases in the law courts. In fourth-century Athens, the great rhetor Isocrates wrote, “Because there has been implanted in us the power to persuade each other, and to make clear to each other whatever we desire, not only have we escaped the life of wild beasts, but we have come together and founded cities, and made laws, and invented arts.”2 Isocrates taught his students that the study of rhetoric should not be pursued strictly for personal or economic gain, the motivation of many of the sophists of his day. Rather, the guiding principles for the study of rhetoric must be virtue, wisdom, and duty.
Persuasion with words, instead of weapons, ensured humane, civil interaction between individuals, so long as those who persuaded were moral men. Unfortunately, by the first century B.C., moral men were becoming harder and harder to find in the Roman republic. No one knew this better than Cicero. A conservative who spoke powerfully in the Roman Senate, Cicero made several enemies because of his convictions. In his De Oratore, a work on rhetorical education, he expresses many of his beliefs concerning the making of a good orator. Cicero argues that the orator must be a man of broad culture—humanitas—well acquainted with knowledge in every field: “No man has ever become a great orator unless he has combined a training in rhetoric with all other branches of knowledge.”3 Cicero asserts that studying an abundance of matter will provide the orator with an abundance of words. The scholar Aubrey Gwynn makes a salient point concerning Cicero’s focus in the De Oratore: “To be man in all that is most human, and to be human in one’s relations with all other men; that is Cicero’s ethical and social ideal, and his education theory is based on the same principle.”4 For a country to remain humane, Cicero believed that the teaching of rhetoric—the knowledge of how to use words well—ensured healthy pluralism. This is one reason why Cicero wrote De Oratore, and why he continued to speak out against those who despised true rhetoric, those who desired undisputed authority, those who wanted a dictatorship without critics. Ultimately Cicero spoke up too many times. When Antony became the target of his words, Cicero’s life came to an end, and with it, the vibrant rhetoric that flourished during the republican era of Rome.
Marcus Fabius Quintilianus entered Roman history at the treacherous and bloody time when rhetoric was reduced to the inconsequential speech of flattery and proclamation. With the Roman Senate serving as nothing more than an ornamental vestige of the early Republic, imperial rule in Rome ensured totalitarianism, and the culture of the old Republic rapidly began to crumble from the onslaught of new forms of decadence. Born at the approximate moment in time when Jesus Christ was condemned to death on the cross by the procurator Pontius Pilate, Quintilian lived to see ten emperors rise and fall, most by violent means. Each of these Roman rulers exerted a distinct influence that shaped the geopolitical contour of the empire; a cursory reading of Roman history shows this. But what proves more significant, and perhaps more telling in relation to Quintilian and his beliefs, is the way in which these rulers lived and influenced the morality of the Roman people of the first century. A brief examination of a few of these Roman emperors, in particular the four who ruled from Quintilian’s youth through his middle age, reveals the decadent landscape which Quintilian countered through his teaching, writing and rhetoric.5
In A.D. 37, when Quintilian was a small boy, Caligula forcibly took the throne of the Roman Empire by ordering servants to throw heavy rugs over his aged and ailing predecessor, Tiberius Caesar, who then suffocated to death. Intoxicated with power, Caligula engineered several despicable fiats: on a whim he ordered his longtime friend Macro, the prefect of the praetorian guard, to commit suicide with his wife; out of spite he imprisoned his sisters on distant islands; with amusement he abducted brides from Roman noblemen during their wedding ceremonies; for sport he entertained crowds by putting defenseless old men into the arena with half-starved wild beasts; in anger he forced the most respected senators to trot alongside his chariot in the midday sun, like slaves; and on occasion he paraded about in women’s clothes to shock fellow Romans. Caligula’s motto—“Let them hate me, as long as they fear me!”—worked in keeping most citizens in abeyance, but his chief military officer eventually allowed hatred to overcome fear. In a planned conspiracy the officer stabbed the mad emperor, murdered his wife, and dashed out the brains of their young daughter against a wall.
After Caligula’s death, Claudius succeeded as emperor, quite to his own surprise. Upon hearing of the conspiracy against Caligula, he hid himself behind a curtain in the imperial residence, fearing his own demise. But a passing soldier noticed two feet sticking out from under the curtains and dragged the cowering man out, only to hail him as the new leader; Claudius had unwittingly won the confidence of the military. Considered an oaf by many, Claudius tolerated great insolence toward himself in the court, where he was often ridiculed. Being absent-minded, the emperor sometimes forgot when he had ordered the execution of certain citizens; on occasion he would invite executed men to his house, and then wonder where they were when they did not show up. Though not astute in judicial matters, Claudius had a keen eye for women. After divorcing his first two wives and executing his third, he entered into an incestuous relationship with his brother’s daughter, Agrippina, and eventually compelled the Senate to formally decree that marriage between niece and uncle was permissible for the good of the state. A few years after their marriage, Agrippina murdered Claudius by feeding him poisonous mushrooms. She did this in order to secure the throne for her son by a previous marriage—Nero.
Educated by the renowned teacher Seneca, Nero was an advocate of the arts, and at first seemed humane. When he took control of the empire at age seventeen, he let it be known that he had no enemies. Starting out with good intentions, he wanted to do away with the corruption that had preceded him. And in fact, according to Trajan, the first five years of Nero’s reign were the best of the imperial age of Rome. But quickly Nero began to change; suspicions of conspiracy twisted his mind and made him paranoid, defensive and bloodthirsty. After the great fire of Rome, which burned two-thirds of the city, gossip began to spread that Nero himself ordered the fire, possibly to improve the architectural beauty of the city through renovation. To put an end to the gossip, Nero put the blame of the deed onto the common criminals of the day—the Christians. The following account comes from the Annals of Tacitus:
First those who confessed to being Christians were arrested. Then, on information obtained from them, hundreds were convicted, more for their anti-social beliefs than for fireraising. In their deaths they were made a mockery. They were covered in the skins of wild animals, torn to death by dogs, crucified or set on fire—so that when darkness fell they burned like torches in the night. Nero opened up his own gardens for this spectacle and gave a show in the arena, where he mixed with the crowd, or stood dressed as a charioteer on a chariot. As a result, although they were guilty of being Christians and deserved death, people began to feel sorry for them. For they realized that they were being massacred not for the public good but to satisfy one man’s mania.
Such unspeakable treatment was not only reserved for the Christians; in time, Nero poisoned his own mother and ordered his wife’s execution by asphyxiation in a steam bath. Amazingly, Nero intended to poison the whole Senate and murder his military leaders too, but he never got the opportunity. His enemies acted first, deciding that the emperor should be beaten to death with rods. Upon hearing this sentence, Nero hastily ordered his servants to dig a grave according to his body measurements, and shortly after, he stabbed himself in the throat.
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