BMCR 2017.02.19 on the BMCR blog
Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2017.02.19
Henriette van der Blom, Oratory and Political Career in the Late Roman Republic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Pp. xiii, 377. ISBN 9781107051935. $120.00.
Reviewed by Joanna Kenty, University of New Hampshire (joanna.kenty@unh.edu)
Preview
Henriette van der Blom’s new monograph is an exciting and important
contribution to a new wave of scholarship on Roman oratory and
rhetoric. She has gathered a trove of useful information about
well-known figures of the late Republic, but much of that information
will be new to her readers, who know figures like Pompey, Caesar, and
Antony better as military leaders than as practitioners of oratory.
Likewise, scholars familiar with these individuals have a strong sense
of each man’s personality; van der Blom argues that each man in fact
constructed and communicated that personality through speech above all.
She therefore leads us back to the orations that helped the Roman
populus to get to know each man in the first place.
In her first monograph,
Cicero’s Role Models (2010, BMCR
2011.07.49), van der Blom focused on Cicero’s orations (and particularly his use of
exempla).
Here, she removes Cicero from the picture (insofar as that is possible
in any study of the late Roman Republic) to examine oratory in the
context of the careers of six of his fellow statesmen: Gaius Gracchus,
Pompeius Magnus, Julius Caesar, Piso Caesoninus (cos. 58), Cato the
Younger, and Marcus Antonius. Cicero, she rightly observes, exploited
oratory more than any of his contemporaries in carving out a political
niche for himself. He is not representative or typical, and his
tendency to describe Roman politics as if his own behavior and career
were normative can further distort our understanding of the world in
which he operates. As a corrective, van der Blom’s selection is intended
to offer a representative sample of the full spectrum of ways in which
and the degree to which oratory was used as a tool in Roman public
life, as opposed to other means of self-promotion (p. 9). She also
seems to have chosen generally well-attested figures, even those of no
more than adequate eloquence (see especially Piso), at the expense of
lesser known individuals whose eloquence was more noteworthy but whose
biography would necessarily be incomplete or spotty because of a lack of
evidence. van der Blom offers a condensed political biography of each
of these individuals in discrete chapters, focusing particularly on the
important orations that each delivered in the course of his life.
Throughout these case studies, van der Blom provides clear,
straightforward, and meticulous discussion of what we know about a
given speech occasion, why the individual in question might have chosen
to use oratory as a tool on that occasion, and what (if anything) we
can reliably know about the content of what he said. van der Blom’s
experience working on Catherine Steel’s
Fragments of the Republican Roman Orators
database, a much-needed update to Malcovati’s collection, clearly
offered inspiration and facilitated the research for the monograph. van
der Blom often translates fragments of orations in the course of her
chapters and even extracts some speculations about the orator’s style as
evident in the fragment. Much of her material derives from Plutarch’s
Roman lives, and she attempts to sort fact from Plutarch’s
embellishments, especially when it comes to the personality or character
of each of her case study subjects. She also explores the implications
of choosing to run for the tribunate and of balancing military service
with political office, and notes how each man foregrounded certain
features of his persona (ancestry, ideological bent, military exploits,
e.g.) at the expense of others in campaigning for office. Each
political biography, in her view, amounts to the sum of a sequence of
conscious choices of career paths, and a series of choices about
self-presentation, primarily but not exclusively through oratory. In her
words, “the most important factor for political success in Rome was
the willingness and ability to communicate the various elements in a
politician’s public profile ... in a credible, consistent and appealing
manner through a range of communicative means..., not least, public
oratory” (285).
In Part I (Chapters 1-2), van der Blom offers a concise, basic
introduction to oratory and Roman public life more generally, which
undergraduates might find extremely helpful. She reviews the main
venues of oratory (
contio, senate, and courts) and the relative
importance of oratory for various magistracies. She discusses the import
both of the mere act of speaking and of the opportunity to communicate
particular messages, which could allow the orator to publicize his
ideological stance for the long term or to influence events in the
short term. Those with noteworthy oratorical ability could seek out or
generate occasions to display their skill and use it to achieve their
goals, while others chose not to manufacture those opportunities, or
deliberately avoided them, choosing to operate through other means. van
der Blom’s discussion of changes in the political arena in the first
century BCE, including the under-studied era of Sulla’s dictatorships
and the Social Wars, is particularly useful.
The real meat of the project, however, comes in Part II with the case
studies, beginning with Gaius Gracchus in Chapter 3. van der Blom’s
thorough scrutiny of the sources, contexts, and historicity of our
well-known portrait of Gaius Gracchus is fascinating, delving beyond
the apocrypha of a semi-mythologized martyr to reveal a canny political
actor of great eloquence and energy. Gracchus knew that in the arena of
speech, he had an advantage over his opponents, and van der Blom shows
that he consistently shifted his political battles to that arena in
order to exploit his abilities. By contrast, in Chapter 4, van der Blom
argues that Pompeius Magnus, while “a master of staged events and
planned speeches of self-praise” (p. 123), generally turned to other
means of self-fashioning and avoided giving speeches when he could.
Oratory helped him to nurture and maintain his popularity, but he
benefited more often from orations by other speakers than from his own
speaking efforts. When he did speak, he was perceived as either
diffident or evasive. Whether or not van der Blom is right to give him
the benefit of the doubt in arguing that he consciously cultivated that
effect,
1
oratory was not one of his preferred tools. Julius Caesar, the subject
of Chapter 5, falls more on Gracchus’ end of the spectrum, both in his
inclination to deploy his eloquence whenever possible for political
ends, and in his use of
popularis political markers in his
orations. His funeral speech for his aunt Julia shows a rather
opportunistic exploitation of one such occasion. From his spectacular
debut — prosecutions of Dolabella and Antonius Hybrida for
maladministration (
de pecuniis repetundis), the “springboard”
referred to in the title of van der Blom’s chapter, and speeches
against Sullan reforms — to his controversial consulship, Caesar’s use
of the
contio as a vehicle for political self-promotion is, as
van der Blom shows, distinct and consistent. van der Blom emphasizes
the important question of when Caesar chose to publish his speeches, and
when our later sources seem to be relying on notes taken by others or
on mere hearsay for their evidence of Caesar’s eloquence.
In chapter 6 we move on to Caesar’s father-in-law Piso Caesoninus,
the least familiar of van der Blom’s subjects, and a politician whose
speaking abilities allowed him to function adequately in public, but
hardly made oratory a preferred medium. Cicero includes oratory among
Piso’s many failings in his bilious
In Pisonem, for instance. van
der Blom’s assertion that Cicero’s scornful assessment is shown “to be
misleading, even wrong” (p. 202) seems to me to be overly kind to Piso,
but the discussion of his career is useful nonetheless in raising
awareness of a senator like Piso, who was (after all) a consul and a
prominent public figure who is usually allowed to fall into obscurity as
we focus obsessively on Caesar, Pompey, and Cicero. In developing a
sense of Piso’s
persona, van der Blom elucidates a pattern in
Piso’s oratory (such as it is) of appealing to precedent and the letter
of the law, as well as principled and perhaps Epicurean insistence on
not getting involved in other men’s battles. This kind of rigidity
emerges much more strongly, of course, in chapter 7, in van der Blom’s
profile of Cato the Younger. No Late Republican politician, as van der
Blom notes, impressed his contemporaries with a stronger sense of his
idiosyncratic personality, and no politician relied more on his
personality for
auctoritas, for Cato’s influence is quite
striking given his electoral failures. Cato, like Gracchus, is often
seen distorted through the lens of hero worship, but van der Blom’s
portrait is detailed and careful, avoiding over-generalization or
speculation. Cato was principled in the extreme, but demonstrably
capable of pragmatism and occasionally guilty of nepotism. Like Piso’s
Epicureanism, Cato’s Stoicism appears to have been an element that he
could but did not always invoke as a driving principle of political
action. A strong pattern of resistence to the “first triumvirate”
emerges from the assembled testimonia, as does the proclivity to
nonconformity and obstructionism for which Cato is so well known, and
which, as van der Blom shows, Cato made the centerpiece of his own
spectacular self-fashioning.
The monograph concludes with a chapter on Marcus Antonius, a man
whose career is well known and who delivered several famous speeches of
great historical import. Nevertheless, van der Blom notes, no
fragments survive to confirm or refute assessments of Antonius’ oratory
or Plutarch’s characterization of Antonius’ oratory as Asianist.
Indeed, the lack of specific information about Antony’s speeches means
that this chapter remains rather frustratingly speculative. van der
Blom does make the important point, however, that Antonius’ clash with
Cicero in late 44 challenged the great orator on his own turf, so to
speak, and that Antony must either have chosen or been forced by
circumstance to use oratory as a tool on this occasion nonetheless (p.
271).
The importance of oratory as an arena of political action in this
tumultuous period thus emerges clearly. Brief mention is also made of
the importance of propaganda in the triumviral period, much of which was
disseminated through oratory. van der Blom occasionally remarks in
the course of the book on the apparent increase in the relative
importance of oratory as a component of public life in the first
century BCE, as military achievements and provincial administration
experienced a corresponding decline in their potential to confer
prestige and influence. This comes out most prominently in van der
Blom’s conclusion, in which she sets aside Cicero’s schema in the
Brutus
of good versus bad orators in favor of a new schema: good versus
(unstudied) bad builders of public profiles. Politicians could use
oratory to as great or as small an extent as they liked in creating
such a public profile, and speech was hardly their only tool; in fact,
van der Blom notes, this flexibility opened all kinds of possibilities
for accessing political influence and made the Roman political elite
rather more open to outsiders than has previously been thought by some
scholars. This all bears directly on Cicero’s own career, of course:
his
Philippics offer our best evidence for the oratorical fray
of 44-43 BCE, and more broadly, his published speeches and spectacular
career spurred, if they did not initiate, the growing importance of
oratory. This, however, remains unstated in van der Blom’s project, as
a result of her more general goal of avoiding Cicero.
This study exposes myriad opportunities for further study,
investigation, and analysis, in the best possible way. By shedding
light on the speech-making activities of these prominent late Republican
politicians, van der Blom has convincingly demonstrated that oratory
was an essential tool for them, and has broadened our perspective on
oratory in the period, far beyond a myopic spotlight on Cicero.
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