Chapter 7 - Speaking Silence in Cicero’s Brutus and Tacitus’ Dialogus de Oratoribus

Summary

Cicero’s Brutus and Tacitus’ Dialogus de Oratoribus deal with the silence of eloquence resulting from the change of the political system in the first century BC. This silence leads to a paradoxical effect: it produces all the more eloquent speech, which helps to keep the discourse of the position of eloquence going.

In the Brutus, the narrative is driven by the interlocutors’ desire for eloquent speech while the silence of speech is compensated for by the history of Roman eloquence. The conversation is set in a field of tension between two poles of omnipresent silence: the reason for the political change, Caesar, and the climax of rhetorical history, Cicero himself. The former is explicitly omitted, the latter continually postponed until the climax of eloquence is finally released at the end of the dialogue.

The Dialogus deals in hindsight with the absence of great eloquence. While speech and voices are represented in abundance, small but numerous gaps occur within them, creating a gauze of silence that, unobtrusively, keeps the meaning of the text unstable. The conversation is driven on not by the interlocutors’ desire for eloquent speech but by the speech act of promise, which is renewed throughout the text.