The concepts of progress and decline play a dominant role in ancient views on literary history. Roman culture inherited from Aristotle the idea that the arts gradually mature. Whereas archaic and classical Greek literature was generally known to the Romans as a corpus of canonical works that represented the acme of each genre, Latin literature gave the Romans the image of a long march of advancement towards the Greek models’ perfection. From Aristotle onwards, progress is conceived as an addition of pertinent procedures. The attainment of maturity does not entail decadence, but rather the possibility of creating works fully corresponding to the nature of the genre. If an acme is thought to have been reached, later authors may aim at what they regard as a more authentic acme; the process thus continues. Various Latin texts show that a continuous progress towards an ideal perfection is not excluded. The idea of decadence, in Cicero’s Brutus and in post-Augustan texts, relates to reasons that do not concern ‘internal’ dynamics of artistic development, but the distrust in the conditions and prospects of politics and morality in the ‘external’ context, including the lack of self-discipline in an excessive display of increasingly sophisticated formal virtuosity.

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.