Abstract

This article studies how Ciceronian rhetoric developed a more literary approach of its object from 46 BCE on. Addressing the weakening of political oratory during Caesar’s dictatorship, Cicero chose to put forward, in his Orator published in 46 BCE, a new idealistic understanding of rhetoric based on philosophical concepts and not on practical experience since the forum was now empty. This formalization was also meant as a response to the harsh criticism Cicero had suffered from C. Licinius Calvus and his followers, the “Atticists”, who defended a stylistically restrained eloquence: defining the “ideal orator” would give Cicero the opportunity to refute the atticist theory of style. With this new rhetorical approach and its abstract ideal, Cicero was explicitly going back to the ancient Platonic tradition of philosophical rhetoric, of which he claimed to be the last representative. But despite Cicero’s efforts, the very use of philosophy in this treatise would not result in a revival of philosophical rhetoric, as Plato would have understood it, but in the strengthening of a purely utilitarian approach to rhetorical technique. Instead of producing a treatise aimed at ethical progress, Cicero paved the way to the purely technical practice of declamatio as it was to flourish under the Principate. In order to analyze this paradox, I focus on the use of the stoic concept of decorum in the treatise. I show that decorum, formerly understood as a principle of coherence between the ethical agent and his actions, became in the Orator an abstract stylistic norm. Replacing the quod decet principle of stylistic propriety used by Cicero in the De oratore (55 BCE), decorum was meant to bridge the gap between ethics and rhetoric. It therefore became the central point of the treatise and was used by Cicero as the organizing principle of the doctrine. This article explains how the treatise failed to reach this goal, and how the rhetorical understanding of decorum changed its very meaning, paradoxically forcing Cicero to present his readers a theory soon to be turned into a literary – and mainly stylistic – tool, devoid of ethical and political implications.