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The next work in the series is the invaluable Brutus sive de claris Oratoribus, a vast mine of information on the history of the Roman bar, and the progress of oratorical excellence. The scene is laid in the Tusculan villa, where Cicero meets some of his younger friends shortly after the death of Hortensius.
Not Tacitus, as I think, but some author whose essay De Oratoribus was written about the time of Tacitus, and whose work has come to us with the name of Tacitus, has told us of Cicero that he was a master of logic, of ethics, and of physical science. Everybody remembers the passage in Juvenal, "Sed Roma parentem Roma patrem patriæ Ciceronem libera dixit."
Not the least interesting point in the study of the writings of Tacitus is the way in which we can see his unique style gradually forming and changing from his earlier to his later manner. The dialogue De Oratoribus is his earliest extant work. Its scene is laid in or about the year 75. But Tacitus was then little if at all over twenty, and it may have been written some five or six years later.
The last of these works is the Orator. We have passed in review the De Oratore, and the Brutus; or, De Claris Oratoribus. We have now to consider that which is commonly believed to be the most finished piece of the three. Such seems to have become the general idea of those scholars who have spoken and written on the subject. He himself says that there are in all five books.
In the dialogue De Oratoribus, attributed to Tacitus, the story of it is given by Messala when he is praising the orators of the earlier age. "We know well," says Messala, "that book of Cicero which is called Brutus, in the latter part of which he describes to us the beginning and the progress of his own eloquence, and, as it were, the bringing up on which it was founded.
There are in the dialogue De Claris Oratoribus which has had the name of Brutus always given to it some passages in which the orator tells us more of himself than in any other of his works. I will annex a translation of a small portion because of its intrinsic interest; but I will relegate it to an appendix, because it is too long either for insertion in the text or for a note.
It was, as he informs us in its proem, drawn up from memory on his voyage from Italy to Greece, soon after Cæsar's murder, and in compliance with the wishes of Trebatius, who had some time before urged him to undertake the translation. Cicero seems to have intended his De Oratore, De claris Oratoribus, and Orator, to form one complete system.
The conversations "De Claris Oratoribus" and the "Tusculan Questions" seem like the talk of the last generation, as we wander on the heights of Tusculum, or over the grounds of that charming villa on the banks of the Liris, which the great Roman orator so graphically describes in his treatise "De Legibus." The landscape of Horace has not changed.
But it was as little objected by others, as dreamed of by the poet himself, that he preferred careless and prosaic lines on rule and of forethought, or indeed that he pretended to any other art or theory of poetic diction, except that which we may all learn from Horace, Quinctilian, the admirable dialogue, De Oratoribus, generally attributed to Tacitus, or Strada's Prolusions; if indeed natural good sense and the early study of the best models in his own language had not infused the same maxims more securely, and, if I may venture the expression, more vitally.
But he was not on that account disabled from preparing for his son these instructions, in the form of questions and answers, on the art of speaking. We next come to the Brutus; or, De Claris Oratoribus, a dialogue supposed to have been held between Brutus, Atticus, and Cicero himself. It is a continuation of the three books De Oratore.
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