Critics and Rhetoric: The Sense of Decline
A literature with such exacting formal standards and so closely linked with education was bound to be self-conscious and self-critical. It is no wonder that this was the great
age of literary criticism, though not, strictly speaking, of literary theory. In particular, the progress and decline of letters were anxiously monitored. Some saw improvement,
more saw decline. This was a conventional pessimism, a literary application of the idea, which is as old as Homer and Hesiod, that men are 'not what they were'. Often a
convenient mode of polemic, it is not therefore necessarily insincere.
Dionysius of Halicarnassus arrived in Rome very soon after Octavian's victory at Actium (31 B.C.). He settled there for a career which included rhetorical teaching, literary
criticism, and the composition of an elaborate history of early Rome. In the preface to his series of studies on the Attic orators, he sets out the achievement of his age as he
sees it. There have been great changes. The 'old philosophic rhetoric'-which embraces the Attic orators down to Demosthenes-was displaced 'after the death of Alexander the
Macedonian' by an 'ill-bred' substitute, a new immigrant from some Asiatic hell-hole; but this vulgar and abandoned upstart has miraculously been put in her place by a
revival of classical standards, the result of the good taste of the educated Roman governing class. This is a polemical picture, but it makes important points. The new
mandarin prose is the expression of a rhetoric which is not just a bag of tricks, a technique of fallacious advocacy and intellectual blackmail, but 'philosophical
rhetoric' (philosophos rhetorike), a proper moral and social formation for an age of good government. Essentially, this was the ideal of Isocrates, 350 years earlier, restated
for a larger world.
The three stages of development presupposed by Dionysius' account-acme of perfection, degeneration, and revival-are a familiar pattern in Greek theoretical accounts of
literary and artistic history. It was at first not easy for the Romans to adapt this scheme to the circumstances of their own development. When Horace, Dionysius'
contemporary, glories in the Augustan poetic achievement, his pride is in the techniques that have superseded the immaturity and imperfections of the past, not in the
displacement of a corrupt or degenerate fashion. But it is not long before the pattern appears. In oratory, the Ciceronian age was seen to be the acme, corresponding to the
period of Demosthenes. Everything that followed was a decline. The Elder Seneca, writing under Tiberius or Caligula, is an early witness to the discussion of corruption and
decline which is prominent in first-century speculation. He gave weight to three causes of deterioration: a political cause, the loss of republican liberty; a moral cause, the
idleness and indiscipline of sensation-seeking youth; and finally the mere malevolence of the natural order which lets nothing stay at the peak of its development. His son,
the philosopher Seneca, urged the moralists' view. Style, he thought, reflects a way of life, both in the individual and in the society: 'Where you see oratio corrupta give
pleasure, you may be sure that morals also have strayed from the right path' (Epistles 114. 11). He wrote this in AD 62. A generation later, he himself is pilloried in the
Roman replay of a sort of Dionysian classicism, initiated by the great teacher Quintilian (c. A.D. 35-100), in whose eyes the very charm of Seneca's faults makes him a
particularly pernicious model. From Quintilian's point of view, this is not unjust. Seneca's short sentences, unselective vocabulary, and jaunty fluency make him the type of
a Latinity radically opposed to Ciceronian dignity and decorum. But Seneca too, we must not forget, writes Kunstprosa; in no writer is the beat of the clausulae more
insistent.
Quintilian's important Institutio Oratoria, in twelve books, describes the education and training of the orator in greater detail than any other ancient work. It insists on
morality as the basis of oratory, and it is especially interesting on education. He also wrote a book, now lost, on the causes of 'corruption' in style, doubtless a statement of
his programme. Tacitus' Dialogue on Orators, the dramatic date of which is A.D. 73 though it was probably written nearly thirty years later, is concerned to state both
'conservative' and 'modernist' points of view. Another statement of the problem is in Greek, in the last chapter of 'Longinus', On Sublimity (Peri hypsous). This little book is
a detailed discussion of the means by which grand, solemn, and emotionally powerful effects may be obtained in literature. It is the most stimulating of ancient critical
works, as well as one of the most influential. Some uncertainty about its date must be admitted. It is transmitted as the work of a famous third-century scholar and
statesman; but this attribution is widely disbelieved, and with reason, for the links with first-century speculation and interests are unmistakable. 'Longinus' represents 'a
philosopher' as advocating the view that the inferiority of contemporary oratory is due to loss of liberty and of 'democracy', but he himself, though rhetorician by trade and
not philosopher, very pointedly takes the more moral line: it is the war of the passions and the corruption of the heart that inhibit the creation of great thoughts. It is difficult
to cash these statements in terms of a specific historical situation. In a Greek context, On Sublimity, taken as a whole, makes sense as a reaction against Hellenistic
extravagance and frivolity. Indeed, it seems a more sophisticated and profound reaction than Dionysius' frigid classical revival, because 'Longinus' puts the primary
emphasis on the importance of emotional impact in oratory and in literature generally, and the thrust of his argument is to show how this is involved with high thinking and
moral ideals. He thus makes a contrast between classical Greek literature, in which all the worth-while models are to be found, and the rhetors and sophists of his own
degenerate day, whose only chance of salvation lies in a supreme moral and imaginative effort.