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201 Conclusion “Words MadeVisible” and the Turn against Rhetoric Cicero begins his De inventione worrying about rhetoric’s influence on civil society, confessing that “I have often seriously debated with myself whether men and communities have received more good or evil from oratory and a consuming devotion to eloquence. For when I ponder the troubles in our commonwealth, and run over in my mind the ancient misfortunes of mighty cities, I see that no little part of the disasters were brought about by men of eloquence.”1 As the proponents of the “plain style” quoted in the previous chapter suggest, the sectarian conflict of the Civil War and its aftermath caused a growing number of English writers to conclude that “a consuming devotion to eloquence”had indeed caused more evil than good in their commonwealth. They reached this conclusion despite rhetoric’s longtime prestige in early modern culture, a prestige bolstered by Cicero’s argument that rhetoric is essential to the orderly functioning of the state. For although he begins his famous handbook for orators with an admission of unease about whether or not oratory has produced more good or evil in the world, Cicero goes on to rescue rhetoric from this critique, reasoning that though eloquence has troubled many commonwealths, it has also founded cities, ended wars, and forged strong alliances. He argues that 1. Cicero, De inventione, trans. H. M. Hubbell (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1949), 1.1.1. 202     Conclusion when allied with the study of philosophy, “the man who equips himself with the weapons of eloquence...will be a citizen most helpful and most devoted both to his own interests and those of his community.”2 Cicero then tells his readers that it was an eloquent orator who first founded civilization: For there was a time when men wandered at large in the fields like animals and lived on wild fare; they did nothing by the guidance of reason, but relied chiefly on physical strength....At this juncture a man—great and wise I am sure—became aware of the power latent in man and the wide field offered by his mind for great achievements if one could develop this power and improve it by instruction. Men were scattered in the fields and hidden in sylvan retreats when he assembled and gathered them in accordance with a plan; he introduced them to every useful and honourable occupation,though they cried out against it at first because of its novelty,and then when through reason and eloquence they had listened with greater attention, he transformed them from wild savages into a kind and gentle folk.3 In what would become a powerful origin myth for classical and Renaissance writers, Cicero argues that before rhetoric, there could be no civil culture. From this moment onward, advocates of the art of rhetoric justify its potentially dangerous power with reference to the civilizing force of eloquence and the service a wise orator can provide to the state.4 Quintilian promotes this vision of the orator as a founder of civilization in the Institutio oratoria, confessing that “I cannot imagine how the founders of cities would have made a homeless multitude come together to form a people, had they not moved them by their skilful speech,or how legislators would have succeeded in restraining mankind in the servitude of the law, had they not had the highest gifts of oratory.”5 Such origin myths align rhetoric with civilization, gentility, law, and urban culture, opposing it to the barbarism, savagery, disorder , and provincial obscurity of ungoverned people and ungoverned speech. Rhetoric gives an otherwise “homeless” people a settled place and occupa2 . Ibid. 3. Ibid., 1.2.2. 4. Wayne Rebhorn traces Renaissance versions of the myth of the orator-civilizer to passages in texts written by Isocrates, Cicero, Horace, and Quintilian. Rebhorn, The Emperor of Men’s Minds: Literature and the Renaissance Discourse of Rhetoric (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), 25. 5. Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, trans. and ed. Donald A. Russell (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 2.16.9. “Words Made Visible” and the Turn against Rhetoric     203 tion, and according to these mythic versions of human history, its civilizing force counteracts its potential destructiveness. Renaissance writers from Petrarch and Salutati onward retell Cicero’s myth of the orator as civilizer, and as Wayne Rebhorn observes, their descriptions of the savage state of man before the foundation of the art of oratory tend to be intensified by a Christian...

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