Marcus Tullius Cicero (106 to 43 BC), without the benefit of coming from a patrician or aristocratic family, rose by hard work to become the leading Roman lawyer and orator of his day. For a generation he dominated the Roman courts, usually appearing for the defence. We know of 88 law speeches he gave and an amazing 58 of them survive in whole or in part. The Oxford University Press publish an excellent paperback containing five of his most famous defence speeches.

(Note that the Latin word pro simply means ‘for’ and takes the ablative case i.e. changes the ending of words and names to ‘o’, so that the speech ‘for Caelius’ is known as ‘Pro Caelio’ and so on – unless the name ends in ‘a’, in which case it stays the same, or already ends in ‘o’ in which case it adds ‘ne’ to the end. These are examples of the kind of rules you have to learn when studying Latin.). The five features speeches are:

1. Pro Roscio Amerino: his defence of Quintus Roscius Gallus, falsely accused of murdering his father
2. Pro Murena: defence of the consul-elect Lucius Licinius Murena, accused of electoral bribery (39 pages)
3. Pro Archia: defence of the poet Archias, on a citizenship charge
4. Pro Caelio: of Marcus Caelius Rufus , ex-lover of Clodia Metelli, on charges of poisoning and violence
5. Pro Milone: defence of Titus Annius Milo, accused of murdering Cicero’s hated enemy Clodius

The most obvious thing about the speeches is how long they are. I’ve no idea how long a modern defence address is but Cicero’s speeches occupy 30 to 40 pages of an average paperback and must have taken some time to deliver, especially stopping for all the dramatic pauses, the appeals to the jury and the strategic bursting into tears (he refers to his own tears of grief in several of the speeches). Did he memorise them and deliver them without notes? That, also, is an impressive feat.

The next most obvious thing is how complex the background and context of each case is. If you look them up online, you discover that each of Cicero’s major speeches has an entire Wikipedia article devoted to it because each one requires a meaty explanation of the context of the case: where it stood in Cicero’s career, and then the (generally very complicated) background of the case, including biographies of all the main participants, which themselves only make sense when carefully located within the feverish and tortuously complicated politics of the late Roman Republic.

Many law cases brought in ancient Rome were not objective products of what we think of as ‘justice’ but were entirely motivated by personal rivalries, sparked by the never-ending competition for office, but often just personal feuds or vendettas.

There was no police force in ancient Rome and, crucially, no office of public prosecution, no Crown Prosecution Service such as we have in modern England. In other words, you didn’t take your grievance to the authorities, who then carefully assessed whether there was a case to answer and decided whether to bring a criminal or civil case against a suspect or defendant. None of that framework existed. So people (generally rich and well-connected people) brought cases against individuals off their own initiative, using their own interpretation of the law.

And many of the cases were what I think are, in modern law, called ‘vexatious’, meaning they were not attempts to achieve objective justice but were nakedly biased attempts to game the system in the prosecutor’s favour, often shameless attempts to get political rivals convicted, exiled or maybe even executed. And this was accepted because everyone else was gaming the system, too. Personally motivated accusations and counter-accusations and counter-counter-accusations were the normal procedure.

The courts were one of the principal arenas in which the business of politics in Rome was played out: if you wanted to get rid of a political opponent, you prosecuted him and brought about his exile; if you failed, he might then prosecute you.
(Defence Speeches by Cicero, translated and edited by D.H. Berry, Introduction p.xxvii)

It was also the case that no one could be prosecuted while holding political office. Therefore a lot of the fiercely competitive vying to be elected to ‘magistracies’ or political offices in late Republican Rome was motivated not by keenness to serve, but as a tactic to dodge prosecution.

(This rose to a kind of climax with the political impasse which developed when Caius Julius Caesar refused to give up his command in Gaul and return to Rome unless he could be promised the opportunity to run for consul in his absence [an election he knew he could bribe his way to winning]. His sole reason for doing this being to avoid the prosecutions for corruption and malpractice which he knew he would face if he returned to Rome as a private citizen. Caesar knew this would happen because stentorian Republicans like Cato had made umpteen speeches promising to prosecute him. Therefore he had no choice but to seek election in order to win immunity, and he could only run in his physical absence because he knew that, as soon as he entered Rome as a private citizen, he knew he’d be tried, multiple times until his enemies got the result they wanted. When the senate rejected all his and his supporters’ attempts to negotiate this deal, he was left with no alternative but to enter Italy backed by his legions for security – thus triggering the civil war.)

D.H. Berry’s introductions

So before the reader gets anywhere near the speeches themselves, you have to mug up on their very complex background. And that’s where the OUP edition of Cicero’s Defence Speeches is outstanding. The editor and translator D.H. Berry not only provides an excellent general introduction to the volume, giving us a thorough and vivid overview of Cicero’s life and how it entwined with the complicated political context of the 70s, 60s and 50s BC, before going on to explain at some length the quirks of the Roman legal system…

But he also precedes each of the speeches with an in-depth summary of the political context and specific events which gave rise to it. This sounds simple but is, in each case, impressively complicated and absolutely vital: without a full understanding of the context you wouldn’t know what Cicero was trying to achieve in each speech. Berry is excellent at not only explaining the factual background but the strategy and tactics Cicero adopts in each speech.

General introduction

There were two main types of oratory: ‘forensic’ (from the Latin forensis meaning ‘of the forum’, which is where the public law courts were sited, also known as judicial) and ‘deliberative’ (the display of public oratory in political assemblies).

The Roman first court or ‘public inquiry’ was only set up in 149 BC and was followed by the establishment of further courts set up to try specific types of cases. Juries were large (sometimes hundreds of citizens) and if no court existed for the type of case, the trial was held in front of the entire people in the forum.

The system grew piecemeal for the next 70 years or so until it was swept away by the dictator Lucius Cornelius Sulla in 81 BC. He set up seven courts, designed to try specific types of case, namely murder, forgery, extortion, treason, electoral malpractice, embezzlement and assault.

The make-up of juries was a subject of controversy for decades – as you can imagine, if many cases were politically motivated, then who was allowed to sit on the jury was vitally important to both sides – until a law of 70 BC decreed they should be made up of one third senators, one third equites (or knights) and one third ‘tribunes of the treasury’ (who seem to have been a minor sort of equites).

In the decades that followed, more permanent courts were added, such as one devoted to violence, and other ad hoc types were created as and when required, such as the ‘sacrilege court’ set up to try Publius Clodius Pulcher for his famous dressing-up as a woman to infiltrate the women-only celebration of the Bona Dea being held at Julius Caesar’s house in 61 BC.

There were no public prosecutors. A defendant was prosecuted by the man who brought the case against him and any advocates or eminent men he could persuade to join him. The scope for doing deals and sharing prosecutions with social or political allies who stood to gain from a victory were endless.

Something else surprising: successful prosecutors were awarded their victim’s marks of honour and acceded to their rank in the senatorial hierarchy. So, on the face of it, a very strong motive to bring a prosecution and win.

However, they didn’t gain respect from doing this, often the reverse, and prosecuting was generally seen as an invidious role, unless you were obliged to carry it out by civic or family duty or gross injustice. The role of defender was much more socially respected, which explains why in almost all of Cicero’s cases he appears for the defence. The general idea was to mount one spectacular prosecution to make your name, then seek the safety of defending (a career path Cicero explicitly recommends in Pro Caelio, 73).

Also surprising is that it was forbidden by law to pay a defence attorney. This law had been passed as long ago as 204 BC to prevent bribery, but in a roundabout way led to subtler corruption. Roman society functioned via complex webs of clients and patrons. Patrons gave protection and assistance to clients who in turn waited on their patrons in their houses, in the street, rallied support for them at elections and so on. (These scenes are described by Cicero himself in Pro Murena, 70.)

In a legal setting an advocate (actually called, in Latin, a patronus) was a continuation of this intricate web of allegiances. Cicero might choose to defend a client because he owed them favours (he defended men who had supported him during the Catiline crisis of 63) or to put someone in his debt. It was never done out of charity or public duty. Every relationship, every act in ancient Rome, had undertones of politics and power.

Another surprisingly important factor was personal charisma. Roman trials put less weight on the evidence (they didn’t have the tradition of presenting forensically objective evidence that we do) and much more on the character of the people involved. Often a legal speech spent more time assassinating the character of the accused, or the accuser, than querying any of the supposed facts.

And this extended to the character of the advocate himself. Many of Cicero’s speeches not only defend his client’s character and denigrate the character of the plaintiff, but they also viciously attack the character of the prosecuting attorneys. By the same token, all the speeches in the volume draw heavily on Cicero’s own character and record as part of the defence.

Cicero obsessively invokes the auctoritas he acquired after ‘saving the nation’ during the Catiline crisis, repeatedly describes the risks he ran, the danger he faced, his boldness of action.

In my own consulship I undertook a bold venture for the sake of yourselves and your children. (Pro Milone, 82)

He is not slow to remind everyone that Cato had called him ‘the Father of the Nation’. He does all this in order to bring his (he hoped) huge moral authority to bear on the case.

(For example, when he reminds the jury of his role in saving the nation and then uses this authority to personally vouch for Marcus Caelius Rufus’s good character in Pro Caelio, 77, let alone the half or dozen or more references to it throughout Pro Milone.)

[This emphasis on character and personality is not restricted to Cicero’s speeches. It permeates the histories written at the time. Lacking any theories of society or economics, otherwise intelligent men like Sallust, Plutarch and Suetonius fall back again and again on individual character as the primary engine of history and human affairs, in a manner which we, as heirs to 2,000 years of evermore sophisticated social theory, frequently find naive and simplistic.]

Trials took place in the open air (what happened if it rained?). The presiding magistrate and scribes sat on a raised platform (tribunal) at the front of the court, while the jury (probably) sat on benches slightly raised off the ground. The plaintiff, defendant, their advocates, legal advisers, friends and families sat in two groups to one side. And this diorama was open to the forum and to sometimes huge crowds of the general public who gathered to watch and follow every trial, especially if it was of someone eminent or promised juicy gossip.

Trials were more like theatre than we are used to. The defendant had to wear mourning clothes and not shave or wash for several days in order to present a piteous spectacle. Berry gives examples of defendants who refused to comply with this ridiculous convention and were promptly convicted, regardless of the proceedings, solely because of their affront to tradition.

The prosecution spoke first, laying out the case, then the defence rebutted the prosecution points – only then was any evidence presented. Oddly, to us, in some of Cicero’s speeches he guesses at what the evidence will be.

Slaves could be made to give evidence but only under torture. Nowhere does Cicero refer to the shocking inhumanity of this tradition, which sheds light on the fear of all the slaves in the ‘comedies’ of Plautus and Terence that they might find themselves being tortured if their master gets into any kind of legal difficulty.

The magistrates (praetors) overseeing a case often knew nothing about the law (praetors were elected to hold office for only one year). They simply kept the peace and ensured the rules were complied with. (Cicero is on record as complementing the father of the future Augustus, Gaius Octavius, for his fairness and calm in supervising trials.)

How many jurors were there? Evidence is mixed, but it seems to have been a surprising 75, 25 from each of the three categories mentioned above. Jurors were not allowed to confer and voted immediately after the evidence was presented in a secret ballot. They were each given a wax table with A for absolvo on one side and C for condemno on the other. They rubbed out the letter they didn’t want and popped the table in an urn, then a court official totted up the votes.

If a defendant was found guilty the official penalty was death. But since there were no police and the defendant was never in anyone’s ‘custody’, it was generally pretty easy for them to leave the court, the forum, pack up their things and go into voluntary exile. Before most Italian tribes were given Roman status in 90 BC, this might mean retiring to places like Praeneste (only 23 miles from Rome) but by the time Cicero was a prosecutor it meant having to leave Italy altogether. Massilia, the large thriving port on the south coast of Gaul (modern Marseilles) was a popular destination and was where both Verres, who Cicero successfully prosecuted for corruption, and Milo, who he failed to defend from prosecution for murder, ended up living out their lives in well-heeled exile there.

Rhetorical style

Following his extremely useful and informative summary of Cicero’s career and the apparatus of Roman laws, Berry gives an equally useful explanation of the rhetorical techniques Cicero used in his speeches.

Cicero’s prose style is highly artificial. Sentences are long, sometimes a third of a modern page, sometimes longer. The style is ‘periodic’, meaning the sentences only achieve closure and make their meaning clear right at the end. The result is suspense: the audience hangs on the orator’s words and the succession of subordinate clauses, waiting to find out whether the sentence will end as they expected (with a nice sense of completion) or will deliver a surprise (gasps of delight). You can see how, done well, this could enthral a crowd.

Sometimes clauses are in pairs, to create balance, either/or.

‘For it is not my enemies who will take you away from me but my dearest friends; not those who have on occasion treated me badly, but those who have always been good to me,’ (Pro Milone, 99)

Sometimes they come in threes, to provide a crescendo effect. Pairs and trios create a balanced civilised effect. By contrast, sometimes his sentences pile up 4, 5, 6 7 short clauses to create a machine gun effect, to create something more feverish and frantic.

‘No witness, no accomplice has been named. The entire charge arises out of a malevolent, disreputable, vindictive, crime-ridden, lust-ridden house.’ (Pro Caelio, 55)

Cicero took great care to make sure his clauses ended with certain rhythms. Apparently these cadences were named, categorised and taught by teachers of oratory, although Berry doesn’t list or explain any, and they’re not really detectable in English translation.

The jurors and the public watching the trial knew all about these techniques and assessed speakers on their skill at deploying them. Cicero tells an anecdote about a crowd bursting into applause at an advocate’s particularly elegant turn of phrase.

In addition to rhythm a trained orator could deploy:

Anaphora

The repetition of words or phrases in a group of sentences, clauses, or poetic lines.

If you restore Caelius to me, to his family, and to the country, you will have a man who is dedicated, devoted and bound to you. (Pro Caelio 80)

Asyndeton

The omission of the conjunctions that ordinarily join coordinate words or clauses, as in ‘I came, I saw, I conquered’.

Apostrophe

A speech or address to a person who is not present or to a personified object. Cicero frequently addresses the spirit of dead, venerable Romans, or addresses the spirit of murdered Clodius, or addresses figures not physically present in the court (such as Pompey, directly addressed in Pro Milone).

Exclamation

For example, ‘O gods!’ the speaker pretending to give way to moments of emotion.

Alliteration, assonance and wordplay

Berry assures us these are everywhere present in Cicero but it is, of course, impossible to judge in translation.

Metaphor

One consul handing over to another informs him of the current challenges and issues in much the same way that the captain of a ship putting into port tells the captains of ships just setting out about the weather and pirates (Pro Murena, 4). A metaphor which is revived later in the speech, in the extended comparison of elections to unpredictable ocean currents or storms in (35 to 36).

Rhetorical strategies

At a higher level than specific tricks of rhetoric are larger-scale rhetorical tactics.

Appropriating the prosecution

Often he repeats the points the prosecution has made in order to rebut them. He does this by quoting them but often twisting the points in such a way as to suit himself, to tee up the kind of rebuttal he wants to make – as when he repeats a series of points allegedly made by Cato in Pro Murena, 67 onwards).

Inventing opposition points

One step beyond twisting prosecution points is inventing possible objections to what he’s saying in order to easily counter them. There are hundreds of instances along the lines of:

• ‘You will no doubt ask me, Grattius…’ (Pro Archia, 12)
• ‘Someone will surely ask…’ (Pro Archia, 15)

In which he attributes to the opposition lines of attack which he then easily refutes.

Rhetorical questions

Why do I mention his mother and his home when the penalty of the law deprives him of his home, his parent, and the company and sight of his friends? Shall the poor man go into exile, then? Where? To the east, where for many years he serves as a legate, led armies and performed heroic deeds? (Pro Murena, 89)

If Caelius had really given himself up to the kind of life that is alleged, would he, when still a young man, have brought a prosecution against an ex-consul? If he shied away from hard work, if he were enslaved to pleasure, would he do battle here every day, go in search of personal enmities, bring prosecutions, and run the risk of being prosecuted himself? And would he also maintain for so many months now and in full view of the entire Roman people a struggle for one of two things – his own political survival or glory? (Pro Caelio, 47)

Mimicry

As when Cicero imagines the feelings of soldiers called on to vote for Murena and remembering his many achievements in the army of the East (Pro Murena, 36) or mimics the voices of sceptical voters on election day (Pro Murena, 45).

Or the great sequence in Pro Caelio where he pretends to be one of Clodia’s ancestors brought back from the dead to thunder against her immoral behaviour.

There’s another type of mimicry. Surprisingly, the defendant was not allowed to speak at their own trial and so Cicero sometimes speaks for them, in the sense of putting words into their mouths and telling the jury, this is what X said to me, these are his very words.

This is notable at the climax of Pro Milone where sections 94 , 95 and 98 purport to be the sad but stoic speech of Milo himself.

If you combine this technique with ‘apostrophe’, addresses to people either absent or dead, you can see why the speeches are highly dramatic in the sense that there are a surprising number of characters in them, not as in a play, obviously, but being named, addressed, invoked and even attributed whole speeches which are then performed in another voice.

Changing the subject

In Pro Milone Cicero doesn’t bother denying that Milo was responsible for the murder of Clodius, but tries to shift the ground of argument to the issue of whether Milo was acting in justifiable self defence. Specifically, he argues that the incident wasn’t a random accident but a carefully contrived ambush by Clodius and so his client was only responding as Great and Eminent Romans Throughout History had responded i.e. by defending himself. This strategy failed and Milo was convicted.

Invoking famous men

In all the speeches Cicero invokes the memory of Great and Noble Romans from history who he says behaved like his client. It is a variation on invoking his own auctoritas.

Closely related is the Appeal To Patriotism. All of the speeches invoke the idea that jury must acquit his client because The Very Existence of the State is at stake!

‘In this trial you hold the whole country in your hands!!’ (Pro Murena, 83)

Invoking the sad family

At the end of Pro Murena and Pro Caelio Cicero invokes the tragic spectacle of the defendant’s family, his aged father, his weeping mother or wife, on their knees, begging for their son or husband or father to be freed and their family happily reunited.

The Appeal to the Romans’ very strong sense of Family Values seems to have been a tried and trusted, standard strategy (Pro Caelio, 79 and 80).

Crying

In several of the speeches Cicero refers to the fact that he himself is weeping, crying at the spectacle of such a valiant, heroic, brave, virtuous, patriotic, dutiful and wonderful person having been brought low by his fiendish enemies and so utterly deserving of vindication and acquittal that he, Cicero, cannot help bursting into floods of tears, he cannot see the jury, he cannot see the court, he can barely speak for grief!

‘But I must stop now. I can no longer speak for tears…’ (Pro Milone, 105)

Repetition

Obviously the rule of three, or using multiple clauses to say the same thing, or asking a series of rhetorical questions are all types of repetition. But a big feature of all the speeches which Berry doesn’t really address is their repetitiveness. Cicero often says he’s going to address a point, addresses it, tells us he’s finished with it, and yet several pages (a few minutes) later, brings it up again.

I can’t find the precise references now but in the three longest speeches, he has a tendency to make a point, wander off to something completely different, then revert to the same point later. This was the single factor which made reading them difficult for me, the sense that they didn’t have a clear logical flow – a beginning, middle and end – but on the contrary, I found all the speeches rambling and digressive and often hard to follow, with no higher level logic.

Conclusion

The cumulative effect of all these techniques is that the speeches, especially when written down and published (as Cicero took care to have done) are emphatically not the language of ordinary speech. The orator has done a lot of work preparing them and he expects the audience to do some work to appreciate them. It is intended to sound ‘theatrical and high flown’ in Berry’s phrase. The fact that I found them long-winded and often quite confusing maybe says more about my taste, shaped as it is by the 20th century taste for laconic brevity, than Cicero’s verbose and long-winded achievement.

P.S. Adrian Goldsworthy’s comments

Dr Adrian Goldsworthy’s big biography of Augustus contains lots of factual asides about aspects of late Republican Rome. Some of these concern the law and provide context to these speeches:

Legal attacks could easily end a career and so were far more high-stakes than in our society (p.94).

Goldsworthy gives an example of the rhythm of Cicero’s sayings in Latin. This was a throwaway remark he made about young Octavius, laudanum adulescentum, ornandum, tollendum – which means ‘we will praise the young man, reward and discard him’ – and, apparently, caused a serious breach in their relations (p.122) – but it’s one of the few examples I have of the rhythm of Cicero’s language in Latin.

He reinforces the notion that a) since there was no equivalent of the Crown or State, legal cases could only be brought by individuals and b) prosecuting was seen as invidious, unless one was defending family pride or there was a really gross example of wrongdoing – and so accusers tended to be young men out to make a name for themselves with one or two eye-catching prosecutions, before settling into the more congenial and socially accepted role of defence counsel, exactly the career Cicero followed (Augustus: From Revolutionary to Emperor by Adrian Goldsworthy p.43). He repeats the point on page 281:

Prosecution was generally left to the young, and had long provided an opportunity for youthful aristocrats to catch the public eye at an early stage in their careers.

Goldsworthy refers to ‘the aggressive and abusive tone common in Roman trials’ which we’ve seen plenty of evidence of (p.280).

Above all, Goldsworthy makes the most devastating single point about Cicero’s speeches with striking simplicity:

A glance at Cicero’s speeches is enough to show the readiness with which Roman advocates distorted the truth. (p.278)

For all his pontifications about Justice, for all his exhaustive descriptions of Law epitomising Reason In Action – Cicero was a highly professional and convincing liar.

Credit

Defence Speeches by Cicero, translated and edited by D.H. Berry, was published by Oxford University Press in 2000.

Cicero reviews

• The letters of Cicero
• On the nature of the gods 1
• On the nature of the gods 2
• On the nature of the gods 3
• De republica
• De legibus
• On old age
• On friendship
• Introduction to Cicero’s defence speeches
• Pro Murena
• Pro Archia
• Pro Caelio
• Pro Milone
• Imperium by Robert Harris
• Lustrum by Robert Harris
• Dictator by Robert Harris

Roman reviews

• Complete list of my Roman reviews