Cicero: Style and Content

Style or content? Which matters more in the cultivation of the truly educated human being? Which should the teacher care more about?

I know from long experience that students often want their teachers to divide style from content; they want to be judged more on the accuracy of the information in their papers and less on how they expressed it. I understand that desire. Students easily get frustrated when their long hours and hard work researching a paper seems not to be reflected in the final grade when it is lower than their expectations, lower than their own judgment of the value of their work. It can even seem unjust.

I don’t criticize teachers who separate style from content even if they take that separation to the point of assigning two grades to written work—a style grade and a content grade. I can recall fellow graduate students more than 30 years ago wanting two grades. I am thankful that my dissertation director (the late historian John G. “Jack” Sproat) refused to separate style from content, starting in the first seminar I took with him in 1986 through the final stages of my dissertation and then its first major revision as a book manuscript. He was a fine writer himself, a worthy mentor, well-trained by some of the giants among historians of the mid-twentieth century, strict but never harsh. I have carried on this tradition with my own students. I work hard with them to help them understand why we must not delude ourselves that style can be separated from content. Clear thoughts demand clear words; clear words demand clear thoughts.

Cicero insisted on this unity. His ideal orator embodied this unity. He regretted the separation of philosophy and rhetoric into separate specialized fields, going so far as to blame Socrates for the division and the subsequent suspicion philosophers heaped on orators. Indeed, Cicero seemed to envision eloquence broadly as encompassing both philosophy and rhetoric into one whole. In some ways, this desire reflected his unwillingness to separate theory and practice. What he wrote about public speaking applies just as well to writing. It is eminently practical for teachers today.

I constantly ask the question Wendell Berry addressed to the modern American university: What are we making here? How did Cicero answer that? The ideal he pursued was the virtuous statesman, the public servant equipped with wisdom, virtue, and eloquence—the three-legged stool of education in Western civilization. The welfare of the city needed leaders intelligent, knowledgeable, honorable in all things, and able to persuade those who depend on them for the peace, safety, and prosperity of the realm. To fulfill these duties, statesmen required an encompassing and combining mind wedded to moral excellence and the highest skills.

In the voice of his teacher, Crassus, Cicero praised eloquence in its broadest conception. Notice the word “combined” and what precisely must be combined as we avoid a false choice: 

For eloquence is one of the supreme virtues—although all the virtues are equal and on a par, but nevertheless one has more beauty and distinction in outward appearance than another, as is the case with this faculty, which, after compassing a knowledge of facts, gives verbal expression to the thoughts and purposes of the mind in such a manner as to have the power of driving the hearers forward in any direction in which it has applied its weight; and the stronger this faculty [of eloquence] is, the more necessary it is for it to be combined with integrity and supreme wisdom, and if we bestow fluency of speech on persons devoid of those virtues, we shall not have made orators of them but shall have put weapons in the hands of madmen.

That last part has become one of my favorite insights from the whole great tradition. I used to give these lines to applicants to an honors program I directed and ask them to respond with an essay. Why must eloquence be combined with integrity and wisdom? Why do we dare not divorce the tongue from the heart and the mind? For no more important reason than that a smart, highly trained scoundrel is a monster. The very skills that would have been gifts to the man of virtue become weapons in the hands of those driven by the lust for power, wealth, and glory.

If he had to choose between wisdom and eloquence, Cicero said he would of course choose wisdom. But why choose? Why leave wisdom without the clarity and beauty of excellent speech? Why divide our education instead of cultivating the complete human being? Why choose between Plato and Demosthenes, between Aristotle and Isocrates?

I mentioned last week my frustration with Cicero’s conspicuous absence from some Great Books lists. I will take that one step further and say that any curriculum that emphasizes the speculative philosophers at the expense of the rhetoricians distorts the history of education over the past 2,500 years and risks “intellectualizing” students as if they were all-brain and no heart or tongue or hand.

Cicero counseled his own son Marcus, who was away studying in Athens, to follow his father’s example and combine the study of Latin and Greek, of oratory and philosophy. The orators and philosophers ought not to “look coldly” on each other. Both draw from the common supply of wisdom, he wrote elsewhere, like the rain falls on the Apennines, some flowing eastward into the Greek waters and some flowing westward into the seas of “outlandish Tuscany.” The Roman achievement, Cicero hoped, would be to fashion that “glorious and supreme ideal, that thing of beauty, the perfect orator.”

Descending from these dizzying heights down to the everyday world of teacher and student, it ought to be clear why under this ideal of education every teacher is a writing teacher. Good writing is not the exclusive provenance of the specialist. We must insist on clarity of thought and word and excellence of character from all our students and hold each other accountable in what is after all meant to be a common enterprise toward a common goal.