PERSUASIVE LANGUAGE IN CICERO’S PRO MILONE BULLETIN OF THE INSTITUTE OF CLASSICAL STUDIES SUPPLEMENT 121 DIRECTOR & GENERAL EDITOR: JOHN NORTH DIRECTOR OF PUBLICATIONS: RICHARD SIMPSON PERSUASIVE LANGUAGE IN CICERO’S PRO MILONE: A CLOSE READING AND COMMENTARY LYNN S. FOTHERINGHAM INSTITUTE OF CLASSICAL STUDIES SCHOOL OF ADVANCED STUDY UNIVERSITY OF LONDON 2013 The cover image is by Matt Brooker. © Matt Brooker 2013. All rights reserved. First published in print in 2013 This PDF edition published in 2017 This book is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial- NoDerivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0) license. More information regarding CC licenses is available at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ Available to download free at http://www.humanities-digital-library.org ISBN: 978-1-905670-68-0 (2017 PDF edition) DOI: 10.14296/917.9781905670680 ISBN: 978-1-905670-48-2 (2013 paperback edition) ©2013 Institute of Classical Studies, University of London The right of Lynn Fotheringham to be identified as the author of the work published here has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 Designed and typeset at the Institute of Classical Studies For Matt, sine quo nihil. TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgments ix Introduction – how to use this book xi Essay on approach: reading style for substance 1 1. Introduction 1 1.1. Trial, text, commentary 1 1.2. Historical issues 5 1.3. Style and close reading 14 2. The structure of the text 19 2.1. General principles 19 2.1.1. A note on paragraphs and sections 25 2.2. Rhetorical theory 26 2.3. ‘Topic’ and the Topic-Sentence 32 2.3.1. Topic-sentences and existing structural analyses 39 3. Style 41 3.1. General principles 41 3.2. Syntax and complexity 45 3.2.1. A note on ‘Periodicity’ and other terminology 49 3.3. Complexity and structure 52 3.3.1. Complexity and existing structural analyses 61 4. Vocabulary 62 4.1. General principles 62 4.2. Vocabulary and structure 69 4.2.1. Vocabulary distribution and existing structural analyses 76 5. Interaction 77 5.1. Shifts in speaker and addressee 77 5.2. Speakers, addressees and structure 81 6. Conclusion 84 Text 85 Commentary 109 Bibliography 401 Indices 405 vii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This book has taken a long time to write. There are, no doubt, many reasons for this; but one of the most significant must surely be my diagnosis, in autumn 2000, with clinical depression. I have two motivations for mentioning this. The first is my belief that we still draw an unwarranted distinction between the so-called ‘mental’ and ‘physical’ illnesses, and that one important response to this situation on the part of those who suffer from the former is to be more open about their experiences. Over the last thirteen years I have seen numerous students suffering from depression who, because of the stigma still sometimes attached to mental illness, feel unable to acknowledge the situation and seek appropriate help. But acknowledgement and help are both vital. The impact of depression on my life and work has been immeasurable, but neither has been destroyed; the book has, finally, got written. My second motivation is a desire to thank a variety of people for their support. Firstly, numerous healthcare professionals: Felicity Armitage, J. D. Dornan, M. Hussain, Matthew Mills, Heather Nelson, Lindsey Rogers, Sharon Sharp. Secondly, my Department, School, University and Union (especially successive Heads of Department, Steve Hodkinson, Doug Lee, Judith Mossman, John Rich, Betine Van Zyl Smit; then, among many others, Mike Byrne, Karen Cox, Julian Henderson, Harprit Samrai, Beverley Szatter, Gemma Tovey). On a more traditional note, I have many to thank on the academic side. My interest in the language and structure of Cicero’s speeches goes back to John Richardson’s inspiring undergraduate class on the Pro Caelio in Edinburgh, many years ago. John has remained a steady source of encouragement and comment through all the intervening years. This interest eventually produced an Oxford doctorate, supportively supervised first by Michael Winterbottom and then by Chris Pelling, to both of whom I owe more than I can say. I also received valuable input while at Oxford from Angus Bowie, Brian Hainsworth and Doreen Innes; and I should acknowledge specifically that I was first alerted to the potential usefulness of Discourse Analysis, after a seminar-paper I had given on internal closure, by the late Don Fowler. I must also thank my thesis examiners, Dominic Berry and Christina Kraus, for their penetrating insights. This is not the book of the thesis, but the thesis underlies the book. Over the years I have received support and encouragement, as well as insight, from many Ciceronians (and others!) met at seminars and conferences. If I were to attempt to list them, I would be bound to forget someone. I must single out Jonathan Powell, whose faith in my work has been demonstrated time and again since I was a doctoral student, and Jaap Wisse, with whom I have had many an enjoyable and simultaneously thought-provoking discussion; I would also like to thank Robert Morstein-Marx for supportive comments about the book at a very late stage in its development. Colleagues at Nottingham who have commented on my work despite lack of interest in Cicero per se deserve particular thanks: Patrick Finglass, Katharina Lorenz, Helen Lovatt, Alan Sommerstein. Work for the book was carried out in a variety of places, including the National Library of Scotland and the libraries of the Universities of Vienna, Edinburgh and Thessaloniki as well as Nottingham. ix x CICERO PRO MILONE Doreen Innes must be thanked again for facilitating visits to the Bodleian and Sackler with innumerable opportunities to house- and cat-sit in Oxford. I must thank Mike Edwards and John North at the Institute of Classical Studies for committing to publish the work and for their comments on it, as well as Richard Simpson and Gemma Watson for their hard work in preparing the manuscript. In Nottingham, Danielle Frisby, Will Leveritt, Mike Welbourn, and Nick Wilshere all contributed to the tedious and thankless work of checking the Indices. Finally, it is impossible to express how much I owe to Catherine Steel. From the time we were doctoral students together in the 90s her existence as a contemporary Ciceronian has made me feel less alone, and since then she has been my most constant consultant through innumerable drafts and lengthy telephone calls. And now to the personal, where brevity must not be taken as a sign that the gratitude is any the less heartfelt. My parents’ patience has been infinite. Friends (other than those already mentioned) are too many to list; but I single out those who contributed to making my stay in Thessaloniki in 2009-10, when the project at long last really came together, so enjoyable and productive: Georgia Bergidou, Litsa Tsopanoglou, and their families. In the process of compiling and checking the Indices and Tables, life was made more bearable by the music of Guy Clark, the Dixie Chicks, Steve Earle, Nanci Griffith and (of course) Emmylou Harris. Last but not least, my debt to my partner, Matt Brooker, is stated in the dedication; further verbiage would add nothing. INTRODUCTION – HOW TO USE THIS BOOK This book presents a close reading of Cicero’s Pro Milone in order, first, to support the view that that text can be read as a unified whole, and second, to demonstrate an approach to the question – which could also be applied to other texts – of what impact style can have on the substance or meaning of a text. Cicero is an author for whom this question is particularly important and difficult, due to his key position both as supplier of evidence for events in the last years of the Republic, and in the development of Latin prose literature: the highly worked nature of his language can make it difficult to evaluate the evidence that he provides (as well as, sometimes, making it just difficult to read), while the intensely political nature of his work makes it difficult to judge its literary quality. The problem is particularly acute in the explicitly persuasive context of the speeches: the picture of the world he presents in these texts may not conform precisely to anything that could be described as historical truth, but it is a picture of whose truth he was attempting to persuade his audience. An extraordinary ability to use language to this end, often successfully even if the success was not lasting, is the hallmark of his entire career; understanding that career, and the world in which it could take shape, is therefore impossible without a thorough explanation of his use of language: how the way he said things (style) affected what his audience understood him to have said, and what they believed (substance). The assumption throughout is that style is not mere decoration added to substance, but affects how that substance is understood: expression creates an impression. While the most likely readership for this work consists of Latin scholars already familiar with the Pro Milone, along with those working on Latin linguistics more generally, it is hoped that other constituencies will also find here something to interest them: historians of the late republic; those with an interest in rhetoric, stylistics, or discourse analysis/text linguistics; and Latin students. Different readers will find different parts of the book useful. It is therefore worth stating immediately what the book does and does not contain. Readers will find here: o an essay on the approach taken, ‘Reading Style for Substance’;1 o a re-punctuated and re-paragraphed version of Clark’s 1900 OCT text of the speech; o a sentence-by-sentence Commentary; o Lexical and Syntactic Indices (as well as the usual Thematic Index).