I

Tacitus' Dialogus de oratoribus (c. 100 c.e.) may be the most perplexing of the extant Roman dialogues, quite possibly, of the entire Greco-Roman tradition. Despite advances in the rhetorical and literary appreciation of ancient dialogues, this text continues to elude understanding.Footnote ¹ Oddly, the difficulties stem neither from obscurities of subject matter and presentation nor from any anomalism vis-à-vis the norms of the genre. Six compelling speeches lucidly detail the value, history and development of eloquentia (‘skilled speech’) from the perspective of the late first and early second centuries c.e. They provide convincing accounts of rhetoric and its evolution: the social and political efficacy of eloquentia (Marcus Aper's and Curiatius Maternus' prescriptions on how best to assert oneself with and against the powerful, and the famous yet notoriously tumultuous oratory of the Late Republic), evaluative categories for rhetoric, including the competing discourses that prized renown and canonical status (Vipstanus Messalla's praise of the ancients), or external and absolute aesthetic criteria; and lastly, exemplary instances (e.g. past luminaries) or suitable models for imitation (ancient and modern orators and poets). The richness of these diverse emphases, along with the complex and ambiguous reworking of literary forerunners, not to mention the open-endedness at the work's conclusion, all conspire against the expectation of a uniform message.

The pitfalls lie less in having to choose between so many persuasive points of view than in the repercussions of favouring one or another in search of the dialogue's main point. Instinct prompts many readers to look to the opening question of the work's addressee, Fabius Iustus, which many have read as Tacitus' masked avowal of oratory's decline:

The ensuing speeches, on this account, should take that inquiry as their guide. Yet recent challenges to the once unshakeable assumption of decline have shifted attention, and criticism, on to its guiding assumption, that the dialogue promotes a single response to a single problem.Footnote ²

Assumptions about decline have greatly influenced our sense of what the dialogue is trying to do and what we in turn should do with it: by positing one exclusive answer (or, more inclusively, a select group of answers), readers are forced to side with the opinion of an individual interlocutor. When scholars in their search for the dialogue's definitive response to this issue pare down the list of candidates, Aper is the first to go; few have made his cause their own.Footnote ³ While Messalla has attracted some attention, mostly for similarities to Quintilian's precepts on education and training, Maternus has fared best, in part because he speaks last and in part because his quasi-historical answer – the emptiness of oratory's role in the present dispensation – seems to square well with the predilections of an author known chiefly as the wry chronicler of imperial vices.Footnote ⁴

At the same time contradictions in the interlocutors' statements make it difficult to embrace any single speaker as the work's mouthpiece. Those who wish to glimpse more of Tacitus in only one speaker find themselves not only explaining away a good deal of the text, but also facing a great number of resultant problems. Aper and Maternus both cite evidence in the first debate that seems on closer inspection to undermine their arguments. The former mentions Vibius Crispus and Eprius Marcellus, two notorious delatores (‘prosecutors’, ‘informants’), as models of success; the latter adduces Orpheus and Linus (who both met gruesome ends) to argue that poetic eloquentia is free from the violence that rhetoric fosters. Additionally, Maternus' praise of Vespasian and of the imperial system's tranquil circumstances seems at odds with his avowed attacks on Vatinius, the scurra favoured by Nero.Footnote ⁵ The besting of Vatinius contradicts his espousal of a poetry removed from the public sphere. Even Maternus' oft-championed final speech (37.1–41.5) seems to unite two contradictions, the ruining of eloquentia under the Empire and unapologetic praise for the emperor Vespasian. Those committed to the idea of Tacitus' disaffection under the imperial dispensation will simultaneously find in Maternus a very familiar and a very alien Tacitus. Likewise, we cannot overlook how Messalla idealizes oratorical preparation of the Late Republic, making, as he so often does, ‘an illegitimate deduction from the unique case of Cicero’.Footnote ⁶

Deficits of presentation would seem to mar the entire work; numerous perceived flaws in its design present a significant challenge – how do we account for the first two speeches, which deliberate between two modes of eloquentia, oratorical and poetic, but do not address the question of decline? And if Maternus has the final single answer, why does Tacitus devote so much space to false ones? In the face of such problems T.J. Luce justifiably remarked some two decades ago: ‘the discovery of inconsistencies and contradictions seems to have grown exponentially in number: the entire fabric of the Dialogus appears shot through with them’.Footnote ⁷

These obstacles may explain the Dialogus' enduring ability to captivate readers. Recent decades have witnessed intense scholarly interest along with frequent calls to revisit basic hermeneutic assumptions.Footnote ⁸ Paradoxically for this rhetorical text, the difficulties are at root rhetorical: if we take rhetoric to be the art of creating and communicating meaning – good rhetoric does so effectively – then the fundamental problem, the reasons why we struggle so to explain the Dialogus, might be found in a misunderstanding of its rhetorical workings. How does Tacitus create meaning and impart it to readers? Or, from a different perspective, by what processes do readers contribute to the production of meaning? In the light of these questions it might prove useful to consider whether Tacitus, like many authors of antiquity, provides clues to guide interpretation.

To address these larger interpretive questions, this discussion first turns to recent claims about the influence of declamatory culture on the Dialogus, which has been posited as one way to account for the work's inconsistencies (§II). It then tests that thesis by considering the intratextual contradiction (2.1 and 34.1–2) of Vipstanus Messalla. Messalla explicitly condemns the practical and theoretical pedagogy of his day, including the tirocinium fori (‘the orator's apprenticeship’) and declamation. However, careful consideration of this intratext and of other dramatic interjections will show how Tacitus paradoxically transforms Messalla's criticisms into a defence of modern practices (§III). This leads into a small set of pressing hermeneutic issues, specifically, the rhetorical workings of the individual speeches and their interconnections with the organic structure of the dialogue. Rather than explain away the work's inconsistencies, this study explains them as a positive feature of its artistic design, and allows us better to understand the apparent criticism of declamation (§IV) and of oratorical preparation generally (§V). The main emphasis is twofold: 1) to clarify the work's attitudes towards oratorical preparation, including its continued viability as a model in the Empire; 2) to outline how the Dialogus manipulates rhetorical set pieces as literary devices in order to create argument. The first is more practical in nature and relates to Tacitus' Dialogus as evidence for attitudes towards rhetorical practice and its evolution in the first centuries b.c.e. and c.e. The second involves the dialogue's ability to engage a reader's faculties of analysis, disclosing its rhetorical and literary workings. The essay concludes by considering Tacitus' artistry in the light of the intellectual potential of the genre and its traditions (§VI).

II

The Dialogus bears the impress of the suasoriae and controversiae (declamatory set pieces) and its resemblances to the forensic world are unmistakable.Footnote ⁹ The arguments for these influences found a first airing some two decades ago in a seminal article by T.J. Luce (quoted above, p. 300). His conclusions bear repeating in brief, because they rightly emphasize a significant context for the Dialogus, and because their consequences have not really been taken on board by the scholarship, even by many who otherwise acknowledge the speeches' rhetorical character.Footnote ¹⁰

Luce argued that apparent errors could be excused by reference to the declamatory nature of the speeches. They are products of a world which expected mere plausibility of argument, not watertight argumentation. Thus inconsistencies within a single speech, as long as they were not thoroughly inept, would still meet the basic expectations of an audience. In addition, interlocutors argue each case to the best of their abilities and need not be consistent across topics. The rhetorically trained reader, in turn, evaluates speeches not only on the merits of presentation, but also ‘selects the arguments of the several speakers that convince him and, in effect, creates in his mind a composite case of his own’.Footnote ¹¹ The insights have opened new avenues of analysis, but also determine our sense of the formal coherence of the dialogue. Because the permissive norms of rhetoric allow for inconsistencies within or across speeches, it follows that the inconsistencies are not connected, that is, they have no bearing on interpretation, except to vitiate in varying degree the persuasiveness of a position on closer examination.Footnote ¹²

This model, furthermore, essentially restricts the message of a dialogue to the statements of the speakers. Lately scholars have come to recognize correspondences among the speeches,Footnote ¹³ suggesting, for example, that ‘[t]he real Tacitus is not to be found in any one character's ipsissima verba, but must be deduced from them all’.Footnote ¹⁴ Yet to focus on the speeches alone is to neglect the significance of what lies outside them. An alternative approach can be put in slightly – yet significantly – different terms: ‘the artistic unity to which the whole work adds up’.Footnote ¹⁵ The more inclusive idea, for all its New Critical baggage, stresses the contributions to the larger argument made in all parts of the dialogue, including the dramatic sections.Footnote ¹⁶

In many passages outside the speeches Tacitus directs the process of evaluation, modifying arguments or delivering metacritical commentary on the values and the argumentation in the text. When, for example, Aper finishes his grand defence of modern eloquence, Maternus remarks:

Maternus points out the use of material from previous authors, especially the numerous citations and reminiscences of Cicero. In this case the metacritical comments do not markedly direct our sympathies, as Tacitus intervenes only minimally, slyly revealing the guiding hand in the work's fiction without championing any position. The passage does, however, signal to the reader something already in evidence: criticism of the past issues from the figure with the greatest knowledge of it. The critical appreciation of literature and rhetoric, of Cicero's works in particular, sounds throughout Aper's speeches. Maternus' implicit reminder – even if he claims to disagree with Aper – reinforces an intuition triggered on a first reading: Aper speaks not in ignorance of the past but as a result of meticulous study and careful judgement. It is no surprise that a few generations later Minucius Felix would adapt the device in the response to the speech of the Christian apologist Octavius, the first interlocutor of the eponymous dialogue.Footnote ¹⁷ Such statements – and this may be their most visible effect – are self-referential; they shed light on the author through the judgement of an interlocutor. Tacitus insinuates himself into the text both as a surrogate reader and as the main beneficiary of that reading: calling attention to Aper's use of the past implicitly lauds his own learning, emphasizing the erudition that suffuses the entire dialogue. Such interjections bring out key themes in the dialogue or modes of exposition in the speeches: pleasure as a motivating force for learned discussion (14.3, examined below); the significance of fame (11.1, 15.1, 24.2); and styles of argument (11.1, 14.2, 24.1, 24.3, 27.1), among other topics.

Tacitus' oblique interventions can also shed light on inconsistency in the Dialogus, through which Tacitus implicitly urges a reader to take special notice and to consider the various, and sometimes contradictory, implications of an argument or piece of evidence. In his magisterial study nearly half a century ago, Ronald Syme remarked that ‘the inconsistencies of Tacitus are a merit’. Jim O'Hara's recent work also fruitfully outlines a ‘framework for understanding the poetic or rhetorical use of inconsistencies in any ancient author’.Footnote ¹⁸ A significant but hitherto unexamined intratext in the Dialogus meaningfully demonstrates the potential of such presentational strategies.

III

With ebullient nostalgia for the lost habits of past generations (oblivio moris antiqui, 28.2), Messalla outlines the failures of modern rhetorical education and training. Deficiencies plague student, parent and teacher alike: infants are passed off to Greek wet nurses (29.1) and the youth care only for the theatre and games (29.3). Students undertake rhetorical drills too early, neglecting the study of great authors and events of history (30.1–2). Cicero, however, was the model for broad learning, without which today's orators enter the forum fully unprepared (30.3–32.6). With some urging from Maternus, Messalla at last turns to practical experience, decrying the abeyance of the tirocinium fori (the apprenticeship of the orator):Footnote ¹⁹

But Messalla's account of the long-gone tirocinium fori itself echoes Tacitus' earlier account of his own training in the preface:

The formal likenesses are striking, and similar content only heightens the nearly identical meaning. Tacitus has adjusted the wording some: qui principem in civitate locum habebat becomes celeberrima tum ingenia fori nostri;Footnote ²⁰ the sense of dictionibus is taken up by fabulas, that of contionibus by in publico; altercationes (‘legal question and answer’) and iurgiis (‘strife’, ‘altercations’) become disputationes (‘discussions’, ‘disputes’).Footnote ²¹ Arrangement and syntax further contribute to the overall effect, as an ut-clause (one expressing purpose, one result) is followed by a word designating speech, each then emphasized by a postpositive quoque. The parallels meaningfully shape the message that emerges from Messalla's speech, but in a number of ways that are not immediately evident. Most obviously, the first (and at this point in the text, only) speech on the causes of oratory's demise is contradicted by the work's mise en scène.Footnote ²² Although the parallelism forcibly indicates that the tirocinium fori still flourished as an institution in Tacitus' day – or at least that Tacitus thought so and was its beneficiary – still the more difficult question is how this conflict guides our readings.

This intratextual contradiction is extremely productive for Tacitus, at least, who memorializes himself in the parallel. Even as the noun iuvenis (34.1) does not correspond exactly to the adjective iuvenili (2.1) it points us to the preface's description, only a few lines earlier, of Tacitus as a young man (iuvenis, 1.2). Stepping back from the dramatic setting to the moment of composition will make apparent how intricately Tacitus has overlaid the various temporal planes on to one another. Messalla in 75 c.e. gazes back nearly two centuries upon the activities of iuvenis ille. Though naming no individual in particular, he summons to life the relationship of Cicero to his role model, L. Licinius Crassus of De oratore, whom that dialogue of c. 55 b.c.e. immortalized in a conversation set a few decades earlier in 91 b.c.e., when Cicero was still a young man. Similarly, a contemporary reader of the early second century looks back a few decades to Tacitus as yesteryear's iuvenis ille, who is now a forensic powerhouse at Rome, with his own ‘coterie of eager followers’ (copia studiosorum), as Pliny would come to describe it only a few years after the appearance of the Dialogus.Footnote ²³ Messalla's complaints about the abeyance of the tirocinium fori serve as an interpretation of Tacitus' own youth and liken its details to a venerated rhetorical exemplar known from the works of Cicero.

Tacitus deftly manipulates not only biography but also the literary tradition to authorize his pre-eminence. He draws on a near-topos of rhetorical dialogues, which presages the advent of a rhetorical luminary. Plato's Phaedrus would retrospectively champion the young rhetorician Isocrates through Socrates' predictions about his promising future (278e–279b). Cicero's De oratore adopted this strategy in celebrating Q. Hortensius Hortalus as the next luminary to grace Rome's forum (3.228–30).Footnote ²⁴ The parallels between the lives of Hortensius and Cicero are later made evident in the Brutus of 46 b.c.e., where the syncrisis of orators unites the two rivals as the best of their age and, as Messalla's citation of the Brutus indicates (Dial. 30.3–4), credits Cicero's educational model for his ascendancy (Brut. 301–33). Cicero, in turn, will celebrate Brutus, urging him to adopt Cicero's stylistic (and political) precepts. Tacitus' alterations are telling even as he hides the details of the device. Cicero had modified Plato's text to thrust himself into the limelight, while Tacitus reverses Cicero's move: he obscures self-aggrandizement in a deftly placed intratext and behind the underlying tradition of rhetorical dialogues.

Whereas Messalla expresses nostalgia for Cicero's bygone model, the intratext makes Cicero Tacitus' foil, undercutting Messalla's reasons for decline. Tacitus places himself in a continuous line of oratorical apprenticeship, which bodes success for its youthful adherents. The intratext retrospectively predicts Tacitus' own rise to prominence, and participation in the scheme now guarantees him the mantle of authority among his younger contemporaries. The generational transfer of rhetorical authority demands due regard for past luminaries, even as one imposes similar expectations of reverence upon one's contemporaries. Pliny eagerly notes his own fostering of oratorical talents, advising Suetonius (Ep. 1.18), hoping for the future renown of his imitators, Fuscus Salinator and Ummidius Quadratus (Ep. 6.11), and assisting Cremutius Ruso, whom Pliny will introduce to the forum as Ruso will then be expected to introduce others (Ep. 6.23). In the Dialogus the relaying of authority to future generations is hidden in Aper's claim that the interlocutors too will one day be famous among posterity: verum de vobis dicturi sint posteri nostri (‘Our descendants will speak the truth about you’, 23.6). It is, of course, Tacitus in writing the Dialogus who makes true Aper's prognosis. Metatextual commentary of this sort is familiar from the passages discussed thus far, though it occurs here within a speech rather than a dramatic interjection, as Aper's laudatory prediction is a fictional screen for Tacitus' self-aggrandizing retrodiction.

Now, this understanding of the Dialogus cannot be derived from the opinion that Messalla holds; indeed, it runs counter to the basic tenets of his position. If Messalla believes in decline, especially the decline of students and pedagogical institutions, he is an unlikely source through which we ought to be convinced of Tacitus' rhetorical prowess. The intratext contributes to our understanding of the Dialogus not through Messalla's opinion, that is, not through his credibility as a speaker or the strict plausibility of his arguments, but rather through the function of those arguments within the meaningful structures of the work.Footnote ²⁵ In the case of Messalla, this line of interpretation may be particularly necessary, since, more visibly than any other character, he draws from the traditional storehouse of moral discourses and topoi. Put somewhat glibly, his arguments are hackneyed, and recognizably so. This does not nullify them, but rather points up the gap between the holding of opinion in a speech and what that speech signifies for the dialogue.Footnote ²⁶

An approach based on the characters, which attempts to gauge the coincidence of the author with the ethos and argument of the interlocutors, would read this as an outright rejection of Messalla's anti-contemporary stances. What stronger evidence exists that Tacitus does not ‘side with’ Messalla than this unmistakable intratextual slight? Scholars have justifiably taken issue with Messalla's exaggerated complaints and reactionary Ciceronianism, casting him as ‘too predictable and lacking in subtlety to be a good advocate’.Footnote ²⁷ Indeed, as Aper's stock has risen of late Messalla's has tumbled in inverse proportion.

Doubtless, the nostalgic mischaracterization of both the past and the present warrants circumspection on the part of readers, but to dismiss Messalla's statements forces us on to the same shifting quicksand that the outright rejection of Aper has in the past. Tacitus devotes considerable space to Messalla, through whom he voices moral and educational precepts for the orator. In this regard Messalla reiterates the two cornerstones of Quintilian's programme: broad training, both of a theoretical and practical nature and in moral probity, elements so traditional, and so essential, that rhetorical education is virtually unimaginable without them.Footnote ²⁸ The problem becomes how to interpret such inconsistencies in the larger structure of the Dialogus. To put a more general formulation to the problem: can we approach the phenomenon as an intentional feature of the dialogue's workings and can Messalla's ‘failures’ demonstrate a broader principle about argument in the Dialogus?

IV

Tacitus has employed an argument by Messalla, the exponent of decline, to demonstrate the opposite: his plausible causa ultimately shows that a key component of Republican oratorical training persists as a valuable and effective institution in the Empire. Given that at least one programme or ideal has been cast in the form of a complaint, the possibility remains that not only has the tiroconium fori thrived into the present, but also an entire group of key institutions for training and education. The apparent anomaly begins to form a coherent pattern if we consider the further example of declamation: Messalla's criticisms conflict meaningfully with statements both in and beyond the Dialogus in such a way as to justify the practice of declamation.

As might be expected Messalla sees declamation as one of the main plagues of modern oratory and levels various charges at it (35.1–5). The tirocinium fori has since been supplanted by the mock speeches of the declaimers, the suasoriae and the controversiae. Cicero, we are told, did not bother with such trifles, even if the schools of the rhetores had established themselves in Rome before Cicero's career. For this reason, Messalla alleges, the censors Crassus and Domitius banned the rhetores, who promulgated the use of declamation.Footnote ²⁹ These speeches are not a viable form of oratory, but merely fatuous displays of rhetoric on inconsequential topics, at which students of equal age and calibre hardly test themselves or the skills of their fellow declaimers. The last discernible charge against declamation – its unreal topics cannot prepare speakers for the realities of the forum – unfortunately disappears into the lacuna between chapters 35 and 36. Messalla's deprecations (and others like them) long served the modern prejudice against declamation as an insalubrious by-form of proper oratory. With revised assessments of the diversity of rhetorical training at Rome, Messalla's complaints can only lead to perplexity.Footnote ³⁰

Once again, closer examination of the inconsistencies and exaggerations results in a more nuanced overall picture. Readers of Cicero will remember his avowal of declamation for the discussion of significant topics in the Tusculan Disputations (1.7), or perhaps even the mention of Crassus's practice speeches in De oratore (1.154–5): he would regularly adapt passages of Ennius or Gracchus or take passages from Greek and render them into Latin.Footnote ³¹De inventione gives examples of declamatory topics (e.g. 1.11, 1.17) and Cicero himself would declaim with younger orators, such as Hirtius and Dolabella and most famously with Hirtius and Pansa, the eventual consuls of 43 b.c.e., whom Cicero jokingly styled his ‘grown-up students’ (grandes praetextatos).Footnote ³² The Rhetorica ad Herennium, the oldest fully extant Roman treatise, shows clear reliance on the practice, as the author works up progymnasmata like those with which students of oratory first honed their skills.Footnote ³³ Cicero's sweeping history of Roman orators noted the importance of practice speeches to the eminent career of G. Carbo (cos. 120).Footnote ³⁴ Quintilian, writing perhaps only a few years before the Dialogus, traces back declamation to at least Demetrius of Phalerum in the fourth century b.c.e., remarking on the origins of Latin declamation towards the end of Crassus' life, presumably in the 90s b.c.e. (2.4.41–2).Footnote ³⁵

In the details surrounding the origins of Latin declamation, Messalla's odd rewriting of the past also give reason for pause:

Crassus had remarked that:

Crassus and Domitius disapproved of the rhetores Latini not because they taught declamation, but because they taught rhetoric in Latin rather than Greek.Footnote ³⁶ A reader with Cicero's text in mind (and perhaps the original edict) will find that Crassus supports, though somewhat reluctantly, education among Greek rhetores precisely because of its pedagogical and moral efficacy: apud Graecos, cuicui modi essent, videbam tamen esse praeter hanc exercitationem linguae doctrinam aliquam et humanitate dignam scientiam (‘Nevertheless I saw that there was among Greek teachers, whatever their value, in addition to exercise of the tongue, a certain learning and knowledge worthy of culture’, De or. 3.94). It was the brazenness (impudentia) acquired at the hands of the rhetores Latini to which Crassus objected, since it allegedly dulled young men's natures (ingenia obtundi, 3.94).Footnote ³⁷ Messalla picks up on a central term in Crassus' explanation when he remarks that the schools or their pupils damage individual talent (plus mali ingeniis adferant, Dial. 35.2).Footnote ³⁸ The ultimate irony in Messalla's citation of Crassus lies in Crassus' prediction about the co-option of Greek intellectual subject matter into Latin:

Crassus believes that Greek prudentia, including the material integral to the orator's education, can be adapted to Roman customs by men of deep learning, who would, accordingly, surpass their Greek predecessors.Footnote ³⁹ In the Ciceronian account to which Messalla's citation directs us, the prospect of Latin prudentia is cast as a benefit to the development of oratory. Cicero's Latin writings on rhetoric and philosophy, as well as the rise of a figure such as Quintilian to the chair of rhetoric under the Flavians, would bring to fruition this development in rhetorical history at Rome.

Yet most tellingly of all Messalla himself, through a dramatic interjection, gave evidence in support of declamation. Upon arriving he lauds the assembled party:

We have here yet another reference to the immediate mise en scène, an implicit justification of Tacitus' own dialogue by appeal to the principles of education and pleasure, cherished by interlocutor and audience alike.Footnote ⁴⁰ Messalla will subsequently rib Aper for adhering to the rhetorician's techniques – one of many touches of humorous relief – but at this point he bears no trace of disdain for the usefulness of declamation in training the orator. The term ingenium is twice used to assess the beneficent influence of declamatory training, courtroom practice and domestic discussions. Although Messalla's later speech attacks declamation, other portions of the dialogue, including this dramatic interjection, produce a different picture.Footnote ⁴¹ Mock speeches contribute to oratorical education when complemented by other methods and when practitioners remain aware of the difference of declamatory practice from actual forensic practice; hence Messalla's distinction of forensia negotia from declamatorium studium in a sentence that nevertheless praises both sources of oratorical facility.

The larger picture that emerges from Messalla's dramatic espousal and his subsequent criticism is fully in consonance with other observers of declamation in the Empire.Footnote ⁴² Quintilian adamantly espoused declamation while pointing up its potential misapplication. Declamation must always look to the forum: declamatio, quoniam est iudiciorum consiliorumque imago, similis esse debet ueritati (‘declamation, since it's an imitation of court cases and deliberative counsels, ought to resemble real circumstances’, Inst. 2.10.12). Pliny effusively praises the Greek declaimer Isaeus (Ep. 2.3), but at the same time complains of young men who appear in the centumviral courts fresh from the schools, inadequately prepared, and with a band of claqueurs to applaud their follies (Ep. 2.14). Warnings against over-reliance on declamation were equally commonplace in earlier authors. Seneca the Elder saves for us the notorious example of the declaimer Latro, who fell flat in a real court of law.Footnote ⁴³ Seneca likewise documents similar complaints of orators such as Asinius Pollio, Cassius Severus and Votienus Montanus.Footnote ⁴⁴

Messalla draws on a staple of Roman rhetorical texts: the need to distinguish carefully the orator's task from some allied practice or body of knowledge. In Cicero it is both the punctilious rhetores and the quibbling philosophers who are unfit for the bar.Footnote ⁴⁵ The common point in all these complaints is that allied practices or fields contribute to the orator's training, but should not be confused with oratory proper. Messalla's exaggerations, his admission of declamation's value, and the meaningful misreading of Cicero all demonstrate that, in the overall picture, declamation does not necessarily lead to decline but, in accord with thoroughly conventional prescriptions, should move the advancing orator towards the real goal of forensic achievement.Footnote ⁴⁶ Tacitus has brilliantly orchestrated a critical yet nuanced espousal of declamation through the disparate statements of a single character.Footnote ⁴⁷

V

It has been claimed that Messalla outlines a programme for oratorical education, but without reconciling the programmatic elements with the pessimistic context in which they occur.Footnote ⁴⁸ Attention to that pessimism can make it seem, on the other hand, as if Messalla argues against the neo-Ciceronian program of Quintilian's Institutio Oratoria.Footnote ⁴⁹ Repeated inconsistencies suggest a coherent pattern among the alternatives: the more Messalla complains, the more he discloses a vibrant programme for the budding orator. Two examples confirm the paradoxical tendency and once again point us toward dramatic and narrative moments which contextualize and shape Messalla's arguments.

First, according to Messalla, the schools only pit speakers of equal age and calibre against one another: cum pueri inter pueros et adulescentuli inter adulescentulos pari securitate et dicant et audiantur (‘since they are boys among boys and youths among youths, speaking and being heard with equal negligence’, 35.3). The Dialogus itself pits skilled orators against one another with representatives of two generations: 1) Aper, Maternus and Secundus; 2) Messalla. Tacitus' status as listener depicts a situation in which a younger man listens to older and more skilled orators, an essential part of the conditions whose evanescence in the modern age Messalla decries.Footnote ⁵⁰ The phrase pari securitate indicates the lack of an actual challenge that equal partners offer one another in a debate. Securitas is a key term in the Dialogus and mention of it here takes the reader back to 5.3, when Aper had stated: securus sit … et Saleius Bassus et quisquis alius (‘let both Saleius Bassus and anyone else remain untroubled’) – at which point he foregoes criticism of Bassus and poets in general and registers his specific complaint against Maternus.Footnote ⁵¹ Unlike those who will not have to defend themselves, such as Saleius Bassus, Maternus cannot remain securus – Aper presses him in debate. The contrast between claim and context once again highlights the exemplary status of the Dialogus. True enough, the disputatio or sermo which describes the discussion is not a mere forensic exercise, but it does demonstrate an alternative to the formulas of the schools, as Messalla remarks upon arrival: disputationes assumitis quae … ingenium alunt (‘you take up discussions which foster talent’, 14.3, quoted above). Messalla, however, had argued as if the rhetorical schools were the only possible avenue for training, even as his own admission and his participation dramatize a feasible alternative. That other avenues exist once again redounds to Tacitus' credit, highlighting his own educational achievements as a beneficiary of learned discussions such as those of the Dialogus itself.

Second, Messalla condemns modern oratorical preparation tout court, but descriptions of both Messalla and Aper offer strong evidence to the contrary. Drawing on Ciceronian doctrine Messalla had desiderated broad learning for the orator and proposed a recognizably Ciceronian ideal:

When Secundus urged Messalla to discuss the failures of modern oratory, he did so in language that recalled the prerequsities and achievements of an orator:

The terms eruditio, ingenium and cura/meditatio allude to the traditional rhetorical triad (ars, ingenium, exercitatio).Footnote ⁵² Secundus offers these remarks not out of mere politeness; social wrangling in pointedly urbane cast such as we find in De oratore does not acquire the same extensive and productive function in the Dialogus as it did in De oratore.Footnote ⁵³ Messalla, it would appear, is one of the work's great paradoxes, somehow the successful product of a system whose failures he denounces.Footnote ⁵⁴ Yet Tacitus will also detail Aper's educational achievements:

Aper's dissimulating pose plays down the erudition which he none the less possesses and which his second speech ably demonstrates. He cites numerous poets and orators and evinces detailed knowledge of Cicero's oratory and technical writings. His bashful erudition is itself modelled on the description of Antonius and Crassus in Cicero's De oratore.Footnote ⁵⁵ Thus the dramatic presentation of Aper further colours Messalla's criticisms of the present day. Aper's achievements bear the same Ciceronian pedigree which Messalla had found so wanting. In the broader dynamics of the dialogue we are yet again presented with incontrovertible evidence in support of contemporary education.Footnote ⁵⁶

Admittedly, praise of Aper or Messalla (or Tacitus himself) might suggest their exceptional status, thereby underscoring contemporary shortcomings. Yet the exceptional nature of the interlocutors only reinforces the similarities of past and present – the pre-eminent orators in Cicero likewise stood out from their peers. Cicero could greatly credit the skills of his interlocutors while bemoaning the paucity of truly eloquent orators.Footnote ⁵⁷ Messalla's emphasis on the Ciceronian model allows Tacitus to suggest its continued viability as an ideal, but as one that has always been exceptional. Messalla's failure to distinguish the two only highlights the dangers of believing in retrospect that Cicero's ideal faithfully portrays common practice.

VI

Tacitus' contradictions of Messalla are telling for our conception of how the speeches relate to the dialogue and its interpretation. Luce argued that the Roman reader would evaluate the speeches ‘on two levels, as a connoisseur who appreciates rhetorical expertise and ingenuity, and as a critic who is able to size up the underlying strengths and weaknesses of a case’.Footnote ⁵⁸ But Messalla's case, when examined for its persuasive effect, cannot stand up to scrutiny. It is not simply that his exaggerations are too pointed; rather, Tacitus pre-emptively wrests the right of judgement from even the most astute critic of rhetorical argument. The rhetorical effects are not at all those of persuasion, but rather the assertion of Tacitus' authority and literary enterprise through the dramatic mechanisms of the work. Rhetorical judgement of the kind Luce proposed seems to have freed us from the constraints of logical consistency by recognizing the permissiveness of rhetorical argumentation without discounting it. But when applied too strictly the model is, in its own way, a false freedom. It forces us to examine not only the speeches, but the entire work, in rhetorical terms, whereas the Dialogus works against the impulse to judge the speeches solely on the basis of their persuasiveness.

The emphasis on persuasion derives from the idea that readers command the process of evaluation and that they do so on the basis of the plausibility of the arguments. Such an approach appeals to the modern sense of an autonomous community of readers just as it acknowledges a pervasive sophistication in producing and evaluating rhetorical argument at Rome. The set pieces of the Dialogus are evaluated, to be sure, for their plausibility – this is part of the appealing facade that Tacitus has given them. We can readily imagine this style of debate at a domestic gathering of disputants or in the declaimers' public halls. However, it would be wrong to conflate the form of the speeches with the form of the dialogue and the meaning which it creates. The Dialogus consists of six rhetorical set pieces that argue one side of an issue but the work itself cannot be adequately evaluated as a speech. The dialogue's various arguments (or the statements that it makes or invites us to infer) cannot be reconstructed solely on the basis of the speakers' opinions, however forcibly presented they are, and however well positioned we are to judge them. Thus, to recognize the rhetorical nature of the speeches is necessary to understand their form – to appreciate the cultural milieu which Tacitus so capably evokes – but it is by no means sufficient to explain the significance of the speeches for the work as a whole.

From the perspective of the writer rather than the reader, the issue is essentially one of intent: do the contradictions spring from the inadvertency of the author, who, because of the creative licence accorded to rhetorical argument, eschewed or did not know any norm of consistency? Or, alternatively, do inconsistencies indicate features of the dialogue's design, an integral part of its argument to be overlooked only at great peril? I do not wish to reject Luce's observations on the speeches' rhetorical elements, but rather to incorporate them into an understanding of the dialogue's design. Declamation opens up a possibility for incorporating inconstistencies, but without necessarily providing the means to understand such inconsistencies for the dialogue, just as speeches in historiography or epic rarely serve to persuade the reader of a single, immediately crystallized viewpoint. To regard inconsistencies as part of the dialogue's design – as meaningful devices rather than as inconsequential by-products – allows us to explain them pragmatically, that is, in terms of their function for the larger meaning.Footnote ⁵⁹ Rather than shutting down individual arguments, the natural result of judging arguments by a strictly rhetorical canon, the present interpretive model opens up perceived flaws to interpretation and allows them to further the work's message.

Such cases remind us of the gap that separates brute propositional content from the intellectual or expository possibilities of literary dialogue. With decorum, light-hearted banter, and especially with virtuoso displays of rhetorical prowess, the Dialogus delivers ostensibly straightforward, persuasive lines of argument, only then to revise them through alternative sources of meaning: pregnant inconsistencies, interconnections among arguments or other pieces of language in the work and, beyond it, by intertextual reference. These strategies contribute essentially to the intellectual complexity of the dialogue, allowing the author to voice ambiguity or to engage the reader's interpretive faculties. The countless inconsistencies and contradictions of the Dialogus thus reflect the complexity of the issues with which Tacitus has grappled so innovatively.