Cicero's Pro Murena and the Strong Case for Rhetoric

Cicero's Pro Murena and the Strong Case for Rhetoric Michael Leff Prologue My purpose in this essay is to bring together two strands of recent scholarship that have proceeded independently up to this point. The first of these is part of a broad, multidisciplinary effort to reconsider the relationship between theory and practice in the human sciences; in the study of rhetoric and politics this development has fostered interest in concepts such as prudence, decorum, and judgment that are grounded in practice and strain against the bias of abstract, theoretical categories .1 For the purposes of this essay, I will take Richard Lanham's concept of the "strong defense of rhetoric" as a representative anecdote for this development and use it to direct my own inquiry.2 The other strand of scholarship comes from a much narrower and more technical area of scholarship—the study of Ciceronian oratory. This area is itself only a subfield within the relatively small domain of Ciceronian scholarship, and the work done in it has attracted little interdisciplinary interest. Nevertheless, I believe that the recent literature suggests some important points of affinity between problems involved in reading Cicero's speeches and problems encountered in the effort to understand how prudence and judgment enter into political deliberation. I want to develop these affinities first by examining the origins and characteristics of the currently dominant model of criticism for Ciceronian studies, the "persuasive process" model. And then I will analyze one of the major works in Cicero's oratorical corpus —the speech in defense of Lucius Murena—to see whether and in what sense it is possible to connect Cicero's rhetorical practice with current issues in the study of rhetoric and public policy. Michael Leff is Professor of Communication Studies at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. © Rhetoric & Public Affairs Vol. 1,No. 1,1998, pp. 61-81 ISSN 1094-8392 62 Rhetoric & Public Affairs Strong and Weak Defenses of Rhetoric Efforts to connect rhetoric and public policy encounter two objections. On the one hand, rhetoric is treated with suspicion because of the fear that it imparts too much power to the agents who wield it. On the other hand, rhetoric is dismissed as a corruption because it drains genuine ethical power both from those who use it and those influenced by it. The first of these objections rests upon an instrumental conception of rhetoric. The art is viewed as a tool or weapon that has the capacity to do much harm, and since nothing in the art regulates its ethically proper use, rhetoric threatens to become a politically destructive force. The other objection is more fundamental, for it strikes at the nature of rhetoric rather than its applications. Perhaps its best known formulation appears in the Gorgias, where Plato defines rhetoric as a species of flattery and warns that the "love of demos" it engenders destroys a genuine commitment to truth and goodness.3 Such categorical attacks against rhetoric recur throughout the Western tradition, and they reach a very strong pitch in the Enlightenment, where rhetoric, as contrasted to either science or poetry, represents "utter heteronomy."4 Thus, in another famous indictment of rhetoric as an art of political deliberation, Kant asserts that when he reads even the best speech of a "Roman political orator, a modern parliamentary debater, or a preacher," he experiences an unpleasant sense of disapproval of an insidious art that knows how, in matters of moment, to move men like machines to a judgment that must lose all its weight with them upon calm reflection__Oratory (ars oratoria), being the art of playing for one's own purposes upon the weaknesses (let this purpose be ever so good in intention or even in fact) merits no respect whatsoever.5 Corresponding to these objections, there are two familiar defenses of rhetoric, which Richard Lanham has labeled "weak" and "strong."6 The weak defense refers to the instrumental conception of rhetoric and makes a distinction between the neutral rhetorical tool and the purposes for which it is used. Aristotle offers one of the oldest and best known versions of this position: "And if it is argued that great harm can be done by unjustly...