Jerise
FOGEL Omnis est: Middles of
Sentences in Cicero
Ita,
si numerus orationis quaeritur qui sit, omnis est, sed alius alio
melior atque aptior; si locus, in omni parte verborum; si unde
ortus sit, ex aurium voluptate; si componendorum ratio, dicetur
alio loco, quia pertinet ad usum...; si ad quam rem adhibeatur, ad
delectationem; si quando, semper; si quo loco, in tota
continuatione verborum; si quae res efficiat voluptatem, eadem
quae in versibus, quorum modum notat ars, sed aures ipsae tacito
cum sensu[m] sine arte definiunt. (Or. 203)
This paper will
focus attention on one important part of Cicero's theory of rhythm
in oratorical sentences: how
their middles sound. My contribution is to bring out the
structural importance of some elements often treated as ancillary
or trivial, by placing them in their context as builders of the
soundscape of the middle of the Ciceronian sentence.
I argue that relative weight or lightness of words and
clauses, assonance, alliteration, end-rhyme, euphonic consonants
and vowels (esp. with reference to De Oratore 3.171-2), and
consciously applied elision are more essential components of
rhythmic prose than the flashier but easier to achieve metrical
sentence endings (clausulae) upon which so much scholarly
attention has focused. I
demonstrate the importance of internal soundscape elements for
defining genre and emotional content by analyzing, then
interpreting orally, passages from Cicero's speeches against
Verres and for P. Sulla. I
end by applying these ideas to the problem of relative linguistic
aesthetic systems.
Periods
(defined in Or. 204), as has often been pointed out, are
not natural rhythmic phenomena (Cicero says this in essence as
well: Orator 216, Part. Or. 21, De Oratore
3.191). Cicero found them
rousing and very important for gaining crowd reactions (Or.
210-213): and yet they are a
dead-end when one wants to hear the sound patterns within a
Ciceronian sentence, because they are the culmination of that
rhythm, not its source. The ìrhythmî of a sentence,
Cicero's numerus orationis, lies in the orator's artful
arrangement of membra (cola) and the sounds and
colors within them. That
Cicero's practice confirms this principle has been established by
many scholars (e.g. Laurand 1907; De Groot 1926).
Cola as constructive elements of Latin prosody have
long been understood (progressively better, e.g. Zielinski
1904; Fraenkel 1921, 1932 etc.; Habinek 1985 [reviewing
previous literature]), but not often applied on a practical
plane: where did an orator
pause in mid-sentence, and for how long? if consonant-clusters for
instance were thought to slow down, and vowels to speed up,
delivery, what speed patterns are displayed in Ciceronian
sentences? did one attempt
to vary the speed of similar-weight clauses within a sentence, or
was it more effective to emphasize their similarities by
performing them at the same speed? how
did elision or hiatus affect speed patterns?
how frequent are short cola with end-rhyme, and in what
meaning contexts? what emotional overtones did speed, slowness,
assonance, pitch, rhyme have?
I conclude by
pointing out that cola-aesthetics as well as
clausulae rely, for Cicero and consequently for his
readers, on training the ear to hear the ìnaturalî
rhythms of a language (Or. 203; De Oratore 3.191;
Quintilian 9.4.33-36). This
means the building up of a store of ìnaturalî sounds
within one's ear while learning Latin or Greek:
these sounds will not be the same across languages.
To illustrate, I end by examining one significant aesthetic
difference between Greek and Latin sentence middles: their
treatment of elision and hiatus (Or. 77; 150-152; De
Or. 3.190).
Abstracts
Index