On the bookshelf in my office sits a copy of a speech by Cicero, in which he defends his friend, the poet Archias, from charges that he had acquired Roman citizenship illegally. Cicero’s speech, however, is more than just a defense of Archias. It is an homage to literature. It was also one of the first pieces of “real” Latin that I read.
I think Cicero is appropriate for a lawyer’s bookshelf, and would be for a politician’s as well. That we don’t have statesmen like Cicero today is not so much a problem as the fact that we don’t have statesmen who even aspire to the level of any exemplar from the past. Few probably know who Cicero was, let alone have read any of his works.
I don’t make the claim here that Cicero was perfect. Indeed, “none is good, save one, that is, God,” says the Lord. In fact, Cicero’s break from tradition to save the republic may have been a factor in its fall. Better, though, the flawed statesman whose broad interests and education enable him to skillfully seek the good of his people, than the perfect technocrat with his perfect authoritarianism. The former may fail to prevent the fall of his nation; the latter guarantees it.
Why? I do not wish to dive deeply into the reasons here; this isn’t a treatise on political philosophy. But Cicero himself gives us a hint when he suggests that there is a relationship between the various fields of human intellectual endeavor:
Ac ne quis a nobis hoc ita dici forte miretur, quod alia quaedam in hoc facultas sit ingeni neque haec dicendi ratio aut disciplina, ne nos quidem huic uni studio penitus umquam dediti fuimus. Etenim omnes artes quae ad humanitatem pertinent habent quoddam commune vinculum et quasi cognatione quadam inter se continentur.
And lest anyone be surprised at my saying this, because his ability is some other skill, and not this system or practice of oratory, I myself have never devoted myself entirely to this one pursuit. For indeed all the arts that pertain to civilized man have a sort of common bond and are held together almost by a certain relationship.
Cicero, after all, was an orator, a practitioner of rhetoric, whose goal was to persuade. Archias was a poet, given to less “practical” pursuits. But extreme specialization is limiting. If your literature faculty knows nothing about history, and your history faculty knows nothing about literature, they cannot be very good historians or literature professors. The same goes for, say, literature and physics, though the connection is less obvious. More to the point, the hyperspecialized are not fit to lead human beings in all their wondrous variety and unpredictability. Even less fit for leadership whose knowledge cannot be described even by a term like “hyperspecialized” because it doesn’t exist.
Plato was suspicious of the rhetors, and particularly the sophists, who used language to gain power over others, often without knowledge of the subject that they would argue on. At least the sophists knew rhetoric. Woe to the nation that has decayed so much that its leaders do not know what they talk about and yet aren’t even talented at rhetoric, because the public demands little more than affiliation with the right party! How awful to have descended even below the sophists! But I’m getting carried away again.
Quaeres a nobis, Gratti, cur tanto opere hoc homine delectemur. Quia suppeditat nobis ubi et animus ex hoc forensi strepitu reficiatur et aures convicio defessae conquiescant.
You ask me, Grattius, why I am so delighted by this man. Because he gives me wherewith I am refreshed by this noise of legal proceedings and wherewith my ears, tired from the clamor, obtain rest.
Cicero has responded to the arguments of his opponent—Grattius, lawyer for Archias’s accuser (possibly Pompey)—and begins his case-in-chief with the above expression of admiration, almost gratitude, for the literary efforts of people like Archias. He goes on to explain that the liberal arts are indeed useful, as they make him better at what he does: He cultivates his mind (“animos nostros doctrina excolamus”) and at the same time relaxes it (“eos doctrina eadem relaxemus”) with the study of literature. In explaining how great it is that books have been written: The sayings of the philosophers and antiquity, full of examples for our enrichment, are available to us through literature.
Quam multas nobis imagines non solum ad intuendum verum etiam ad imitandum fortissimorum virorum expressas scriptores et Graeci et Latini reliquerunt!
How many images of the bravest men, portrayed not only for gazing upon but also for imitation, have the Greek and Latin authors left us!
And, might I add, this statement holds just as true today, nearly 2100 years later.
These are just portions of one of my favorite legal speeches, the Pro Archia Poeta. The whole can be read, both in Latin and English, at the Perseus Project, and undoubtedly elsewhere on the internet.