75. Cicero: Peroration

Timeless and Borderless

In the Introduction, I promised to show you that effective presentations share the same essential elements required in many other forms of communication, and that all these elements traverse time and place to make them universal:

• Telling a clear, logical story

• Designing simple, effective graphics

• Delivering with confidence and authority

• Handling challenging questions effectively

I hope that I have fulfilled my promise. I also promised to conclude with a bookend by the great Roman orator, Marcus Tullius Cicero. I’ve chosen an excerpt from his essay, “On the Character of the Orator,” to serve as the peroration because it perfectly summarizes the principal best practices in this book —and he identified them more than two thousand years ago:

Eloquence, in fact, requires many things: a wide knowledge of very many subjects (verbal fluency without this being worthless and even ridiculous), a style, too, carefully formed not merely by selection, but by arrangement of words, and a thorough familiarity with all the feelings which nature has given to man, because the whole force and art of the orator must be put forth in allaying or exciting the emotions of his audience.

Further than this it requires a certain play of humour and wit, a liberal culture, a readiness and brevity in reply and attack, combined with a nice delicacy and refinement of manner. It requires also an acquaintance withal history, and a store of instances, nor can it dispense with a knowledge of the statute-books and all civil law.

I need hardly add, I presume, any remarks on mere delivery. This must be combined with appropriate movement of the body, gestures, looks, and modulation and variety of tone. How important this is in itself may be seen from the insignificant art of the actor and the procedure of the stage; for though all actors pay great attention to the due management of their features, voice, and gestures, it is a matter of common notoriety how few there are, or have been, whom we can watch without discomfort.

One word I must add on memory, the treasure-house of all knowledge. Unless the orator calls in the aid of memory to retain the matter and the words with which thought and study have furnished him, all his other merits, however brilliant, we know will lose their effect.

We may therefore well cease to wonder why it is that real orators are so few, seeing that eloquence depends on a combination of accomplishments, in each one of which it is no slight matter to achieve success.¹