Although it now can sound bombastic and flowery, Cicero’s fictional dialogue in defense of oratory as the fount of a liberal education is the classic statement of the broad, humanist programme of rhetoric that underlay Western education for almost two millennia.   Its thesis is that, far from inculcating a superficial polish in speech, rhetorical excellence depends on, and in turn develops, the fullest cultivation.  Here Scaevola the fictional enemy of oratory, inadvertently names, by a kind of negative image, precisely those elements of a liberal education that a humanist rhetoric seeks to cultivate:

 

“In the first place, all the Pythagoreans, and the followers of Democritus, would institute a suit against you, with the rest of the natural philosophers, each in his own department, men who are elegant and powerful speakers, with whom you could not contend on equal terms.  Whole troops of other philosophers would assail you besides, even down from Socrates their origin and head, and would convince you that you had learned nothing about good and evil in life, nothing about the passions of the mind, nothing about the moral conduct of mankind, nothing about the proper course of life; they would show you that you have made no due inquiry after knowledge, and that you know nothing.”  (I.x)

 

Scaevola proceeds to enumerate the army of specialists who would attack the purveyor of eloquence, since eloquence is empty without ethics, knowledge, or wisdom.  The humanists remonstrate that such speech as Scaevola attributes to oratory would not be eloquence.  Beautiful words, in Longinus’ phrase, have the true ring of a noble mind.