Cicero’s Orations
This volume of Cicero’s Orations, including annotations in English and the original speeches in Latin, has me thinking about voice. American Victorians learned the art of public speaking from someone whose voice they never heard.
What do we hear of each other these days? Has the pandemic altered our regional dialects, now that we’re speaking through masks or Zoom and listening to home-produced podcasts? Already I’ve heard less of the sibilant “s” that had become a hallmark of young women’s speech in Silicon Valley. The local “hella,” which had flamed up in recent years, is dying out again. Nearly ten years ago, I started using the voice-to-text option in my iPhone notes app. Now I find myself sometimes slipping into this computerized way of enunciating. When leaving a voicemail (sorry exclamation point) I accidentally speak the punctuation. Maybe Siri will become our new Midwest Broadcast English.
While spelling was standardized by Noah Webster’s blue-backed spellers in the late eighteenth century, speech remained local, if historically remote. Cicero, the Roman consul of the first-century BCE, dominated school curricula in the nineteenth century. One American author suggested at the end of the century, “Perhaps Roman antiquity is so much in fashion only because it gives political parties a convenient and less dangerous battle-field where, under ancient costumes present-day passions may struggle.” Americans recognized in antiquity a period of great prosperity and anxiously sought signs of its impending decline in the original Latin texts. Fearing for their own republic’s demise, American Victorians tried to divine their future through the past. They were not alone in their magical thinking. In an 1897 English translation of Gaston Boissier’s Cicero and His Friends, the French author asserted:
“The men of that time knew, just as we do, that discontent with the present and that uncertainty of the morrow which do not allow us to enjoy tranquility or repose. In them we see ourselves… we, like them, live in one of those transitional periods, the most mournful of history, in which the traditions of the past have disappeared and the future is not yet clearly defined.”
Learning Latin and Greek was central to the classical model of elite education that dominated early nineteenth-century America. As one textbook author promised, “When a youth has mastered the difficulties in thought and expression of ‘the ancients,’ he will find it easy work to master whatever studies fall to his lot in Life.” But Cicero, in particular, appealed to the Victorians, even after the classical schools were replaced by more democratic common schools of the mid-nineteenth century. Across both these periods, rhetorical guides were an end in themselves, meant to train young men in the classical style. Speaking was a necessary skill for public life. The American J.S. Watson recommended Cicero in 1895 because:
“At the present…when we are too little on our guard against a tendency to lax construction and prodigality of adornment, it is of importance that a potential voice like Cicero’s should be made to proclaim, in accents intelligible to us all, how fraught with evil omen to our national Literature must be any declension from that symmetry and sobriety of style which, for two thousand years, has constituted…the standards of taste.”
These standards of taste began with the learning of Latin and Greek, which in the nineteenth-century United States was a kind of elite cipher, but the embrace of Cicero continued because his swift rise from the middle class to political prominence resonated with American ideals. The relevance of Cicero to nineteenth-century politics is not only implied through the book’s publication date; it’s also made tangible by the ephemera tucked in its pages.
This paper ballot for a Massachusetts state election should have been turned in to the local voting station. Evidently one of the Eames men forgot, so sidetracked he was by Cicero. It wasn’t until the late 1880s that secret ballot voting became more common, which allowed voters to split the ticket and cast votes for officials of more than one party. Until then, ballots were printed by individual parties and voters simply indicated their allegiance to the party, and thus to the candidates, by returning the entire ballot to the voting station.
This copy of Cicero’s orations came to me via my great-great uncle, Charles Olson, who moved into the Eames house in 1920, along with his parents and siblings. A first-generation American, Charles later served as a Massachusetts state representative and a senator between 1935 and 1965. The Boston Sunday Herald reported on him in 1954: “He is regarded as the ‘safety valve’ of the Senate, for when debate gets tense and bitterness threatens, Charley generally comes up with some pleasantry or bon mot to relieve the situation.” But for Charles, a former amateur light-heavyweight boxing champion, the moves of argument were not always rhetorical. One such example cited by the newspaper: Charles shot a rubber band at a fellow senator’s head to illustrate a point. I can find no evidence of this strategy in Cicero.
