Gregory Aldrete
speaker
587 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2024
last heard Sep 2024
Gregory Aldrete’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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So a lot of people like that imagery.
Cicero was a new man. So he's someone who didn't have famous ancestors. So he was at a disadvantage. And I think Cicero is really interesting for a couple of reasons. One is he wrote an incredible amount. I think we have almost more words from Cicero than any other author that survived. And it's all kinds of stuff. It's philosophical treatises. It's books about how to be a good public speaker.
He published volume after volume of his personal letters to his friends. He published these things. So there's tons of stuff from him. And secondly, he's interesting because he lived at this incredibly important time in the late republic when things were falling apart. But he seems to have been born with none of the natural advantages that all these other people had. So he was a lousy general.
He didn't come from a wealthy family. He didn't come from a famous aristocratic family. He didn't have a lot of these advantages, but yet he ended up being right at the center of things, rose to the highest elected office in the Roman state on the basis of one skill, and that was his ability with words, his ability to get up in front of a crowd and persuade them of what he wanted them to believe.
And oratory, public speaking, was absolutely central to life at Rome. There were just all these events where people had to get up and give speeches. So in courtrooms, at funerals, in the Senate, to the people of Rome, at games. I mean, just constantly there were these opportunities for giving speeches. So if you were good at this, that was a huge advantage in your political career.
And Cicero was the best. He was arguably the best public speaker of all time, some people claim. And he lived right in this era, and he parlayed that skill with words into this very successful political career. He was one of the guys involved with all this stuff with Caesar and Pompey and all the other things going on, Octavian, Mark Antony.
Yeah. I mean, one of the things Cicero did is he wrote at least three of these sort of handbooks about how to be a good public speaker. So we know a lot about that. We have his own speeches that survive, and then we have later people after Cicero who wrote about what Cicero did too. So we know a lot about what he did.
And the key to Cicero's whole enterprise about persuading an audience, let's say either in a speech to the people or in the courtroom, is Cicero believed that people are fundamentally ruled by emotion. So if you can touch their emotions, all sorts of other things become less important.
If you can get a jury emotionally worked up and fear, anger are particularly powerful there, then the facts might not matter. The truth might not matter. Evidence might not matter. Reason might not matter. Emotion is the key to everything. So Cicero used what I would arguably call a lot of tricks to get his audiences emotionally riled up.
And you can just go through these, and they're all the stuff you were saying, name-calling, mudslinging, us-versus-them arguments. you know, ad hominem attacks. I mean, incredibly sophisticated. All the stuff that we think of today is, oh, very sophisticated techniques for, you know, propaganda and persuasion. It's not new.
People aren't coming up with that much that's new outside the realm of technology. Human nature is the same. Cicero understood human psychology. He knew how to play on people. He knew how to play on their emotions. And he would do just, I mean, I want to say hilarious, but they're sort of depressingly hilarious things. Like he thought it's important to use props.
So he said, you know, people are visual. They will respond emotionally to visual things in a way that just words alone won't work. So he says, in order is just like an actor. And like an actor, he has to prepare his stage and use props and, you know, things as – visual cues to stir up the audience.
So for example, once he was defending a man in a court case who had just had a new baby born to him, and Cicero literally delivered the defense oration for this guy while cradling his newborn son in his arms. You can imagine, oh, cute little baby, jury, how could you find him guilty and leave this cute baby without a father to take care of him?
Another time he was defending a guy who had a photogenic son, a kind of a young boy. And Cicero literally propped up the kid behind him while he was giving the speech and again said, look at his eyes brimming with tears, thinking about his father being punished. How could you leave this wonderful boy without – You know, a father to care for him.
Another time, someone didn't have photo jet kids, so he propped up his old parents in the courtroom and said, look at this nice old couple. You won't want to take their son away. You know, that kind of stuff. I mean, it's manipulative. Cicero, by the way, I should say, also had –
philosophical beliefs about defending the republic and such but he wasn't above using these things so even though he may have had altruistic or high notions of you know what he was doing he also wasn't above using these kind of rhetorical tricks and also you mentioned to me that you studied the gestures
This was actually my dissertation, and it was my first book as well.
Again, I tell you, I like practical stuff. And this all started with – I kept reading about people like Cicero giving speeches, okay, in ancient Rome, lots of speeches. And they would give a speech in the forum with 10,000, 20,000 people. And the thought occurred to me, well, in ancient Rome, you don't have microphones. You don't have loudspeakers.
So how does someone give a speech outdoors in a windy place, not acoustically sound to 20,000 people? They just can't hear you. And the answer, part of the answer turns out, well, part of it's oratorical training. You learn how to project your voice. But some of it, too, is that the Romans actually had this system of gestures that orators like Cicero would use to accompany their speeches. Right.
And what I ended up doing is combining two types of evidence again. So I looked at the rhetorical handbooks like Cicero's, and also there's this guy Quintilian who lived about 100 years after Cicero, who wrote this long thing called the Institutio Oratoria, which has a description of all types of oratorical stuff, including about 40 pages on gestures.
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