Political Speeches (Oxford World's Classics) Read Online Free PDF Page B

words or groups of words within them are often arranged in carefully balanced pairs, sometimes so as to form a contrast, or sometimes in a symmetrical pattern; or they can be arranged in threes, with increasing weight placed on each item, or greater weight placed on the final or second and final item. Formal English style also uses these techniques; thus I have written ‘impressed, astonished, and mesmerized’ above, providing more terms than is strictly necessary for the sense (‘mesmerized’, the strongest term and therefore placed last, would have sufficed). In periodic style, the most important part of the period is the end (the beginning is the next most important), because it is here that the sense of completion is delivered. In accordance with the techniques of Hellenistic Greek oratory, Cicero always makes sure that the ends of his periods, and even of the more important clauses (‘cola’), sound right: certain rhythmical patterns (‘clausulae’) are favoured and others (mainly those which resemble verse) avoided. This ‘prose rhythm’ is one of the most prominent features of his style. Scholars have tried to analyse it, with varying results. It must have taken a great deal oftraining to be able to achieve the appropriate rhythms automatically, without thinking about it, in the way that Cicero could (
Orat
. 200). Roman audiences were discriminating, and appreciated the skilful use of prose rhythm: there is an anecdote about a group of listeners bursting into applause when an orator produced some striking cadences (
Orat
. 213–14; cf. 168). Besides rhythm, there are many other techniques used by Cicero to enliven or adorn his prose, such as rhetorical questions (questions that do not expect an answer), anaphora (repetition of a word or phrase in successive clauses), asyndeton (omission of connectives), apostrophe (turning away to address an absent person or thing), exclamation, alliteration and assonance, wordplay, and metaphor.
    In this translation I have followed the same policy as I adopted in
Defence Speeches
: to preserve as much of Cicero’s style and artistry as possible, and to make the translation strike the reader in as near as possible the same way as I think the Latin text would have struck its original readership. I have rendered long Latin sentences by long English ones, and for the most part have chopped up the Latin sentences only where the length was longer than a modern reader would tolerate. Similarly, I have retained the periodicity of the Latin as far as possible: I have tried to keep the clauses, phrases, and sometimes even the actual words in the same order as they occur in the original. Each word contains an idea, and in the original these ideas are conveyed to the reader in a particular order; so I have felt it desirable to refrain as far as possible from doing violence to that order. If a significant idea is withheld until the end of a sentence (as commonly happens in periodic style), then I have also withheld it until the end. This policy has allowed me, I hope, to preserve the movement of the original.
    A good example of the desirability of keeping the words in the order in which Cicero presents them is provided by
Marc
. 1. One day in the senate in 46 BC , in the presence of the dictator Caesar, Cicero rose to speak. The greatest orator Rome had ever known, he had not spoken in public for almost six years. During those six years, a civil war had been fought, the republic had fallen, and a dictatorship had been established. As he stood up, the senate must have been astonished: could Cicero’s self-imposed silence really be about to be broken? He began to speak: ‘Diuturni silenti, patres conscripti …’. The other translators of this speech into English begin their versionsas follows: ‘This day, O conscript fathers …’, ‘This day, senators …’, ‘To-day, Conscript Fathers …’, ‘During this recent period, senators …’. The effect of Cicero’s opening words