ABSTRACT
It is widely known that both history and rhetoric arise in the Greek world and travel thereafter to Rome. Both are integral parts of what came to be known as the classical legacy, and the origin of each is proclaimed by its Greek etymology: historein, to observe, and retoreuein, to deliver a speech. My own research in late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century European intel lectual history drove home for me the central importance of this heritage of thought and methodology, and the fact of how closely related history and rhetoric have been for the modems as well as the ancients. A case in point quite familiar to me is the intellectual dependence of the Irish-English statesman and political theorist Edmund Burke upon the Roman orator Cicero. Burke’s critique of eighteenth-century social contract theory, going back to John Locke, has an explicitly Ciceronian point of departure. This connection is explained in detail by the Austrian classicist (and a devotee of Burke) Thomas Chaimowicz in a doctoral dissertation submitted at Salzburg in 1953. Chaimowicz shows to what extent Burke’s attempt to anchor ethical practice and statesmanship in community and historical life not only foreshadows the romantic philosophies of the nineteenth century. Equally significant, Burke’s statements point back to Roman concepts of law and society and to Cicero’s foundational tracts on these subjects, De legibus and De Officiis. Similar connections have been established by Donald Livingston for David Hume. His defense of custom and convention, according to Livingston, indicates the debts owed by that Scottish philosopher to classical, and particularly Roman, thought.
