Platonic Sights / Ciceronian Insights: Philosophical Artistry in the Orator

Platonic Sights / Ciceronian Insights: Philosophical Artistry in the Orator

This talk considers to what extent Cicero succeeded in crafting a philosophical account of rhetoric in his Orator (46 BCE). It focuses on the roles that Platonic doctrine and visual culture (statuary, painting, visual language and metaphors) play in the work’s examination of composition and prose rhythm. Attention will also be paid to the various translations, quotations, and citations of Plato’s Phaedrus, many of which have received notice in the scholarship but have yet to find sustained treatment (see esp. Long (1995) 47-50; Gildenhard (2013)).

Several mentions of Plato accompany the work’s intense emphasis on vision and visual culture. The preface discusses the Platonic Ideal through the example of Phidias (Pollitt (1974)). There is, a little less than halfway in, a brief but meaningful digression on Timanthes’ painting of the sacrifice of Iphigeneia. And the dialogue is littered with terms of visual language: adumbratio, effigies, figura, forma, imago, similitudo, simulacrum, species. This range partly reflects the ambitious search after Latin equivalents for Platonic concepts, for the idea and eidos of the Forms; but beyond the imperatives of translation the flood of new expressions fills the work with the sense that visual concepts are crucial to explaining oral phenomena. Sight is the analogue of choice to elucidate the sounds and sound rules of oratorical language. For this reason, another crucial term of philosophical and aesthetic judgment, prudentia, is connected to vision; it is etymologized elsewhere as pro-videntia, “foresight” in the literal sense. Prudentia is not just a term for philosophy or philosophical knowledge; it is also the looking forward that allows the true orator to envision the ends of his phrases and thereby conclude them in a way that meets the standards of aesthetic propriety, decorum. Cicero elevates prudentia to the dual status of philosophical concept and artistic technique.

While a handful of chapters and articles discuss the Orator (Bringmann (1971) 41-60; Long (1995); Narducci (1997) and (2002); Dugan (2005); Guérin (2009), (2011); Altman (2016) 277-284; Guérin (2017)), and while Kaster’s (2020) recent translation and commentary will surely generate new interest, a fundamental question still abides: how and in what way is the Orator effective as a philosophically-informed account of rhetoric? Understood in terms of the work’s audio-visual elements and their Platonic forerunners, the Orator emerges as Cicero’s most successful (and thus far misunderstood) attempt to reconcile philosophy and rhetoric, paving the way for his subsequent philosophical encyclopedia under Caesar’s rule (46-44 BCE) and helping us to understand the encyclopedia’s status as an effective surrogate for actual forensic activity (cf. Dugan (2005); Stroup (2010); Baraz (2012)).