Cicero on Tone and Accent

De Oratore 3.11.40-3.12.46 (LCL, Rackham)

(Crassus) “And in order to speak correctly we must not only be careful both to produce words that no one can justly object to and to arrange them in respect of cases, tenses, gender and number in such a manner that there may be no confusion and false concord or wrong order, but we must also regulate our tongue and breath and actual tone of voice. I want neither excessive precision nor yet slackness in the pronunciation of the letters, neither faintness and feebleness nor yet excessive fullness and volume in the utterance of the words.
    For on the question of voice I am not yet speaking of points that concern delivery, but about a matter that seems to me to be connected with utterance as such: there are certain faults which everyone without exception desires to escape—a soft or effeminate tone of voice, or one that is unmusical and out of tune.
    But there is one fault that some persons deliberately affect: certain people enjoy using a rustic countrified pronunciation, with the object that if their speech is in this tone it may seem to preserve a greater flavor of antiquity; just as your friend Lucius Cotta, Catulus, appears to me to take pleasure in a heavy tone and a rustic pronunciation, and thinks that what he says will seem to have a flavor of the good old days if it is downright countrified. I on the contrary like your tone of voice and delicate precision—I do not at the moment mean precision of language, though that is of chief importance, but it is the product of method, and learnt from literature, and strengthened by practice in reading and speaking—but I mean actual charm in utterance, a merit which as among the Greeks it is peculiar to Attica so in Latin speech is specially the attribute of the city. At Athens erudition among the Athenians themselves has long ago perished, and that city only continues to supply a lodging for studies from which the citizens are entirely aloof, and which are enjoyed by foreign visitors who are under the spell of the city’s name and authority; nevertheless any uneducated Athenian will easily surpass the most cultivated Asiatics not in vocabulary but in tone of voice, and not so much in the correctness as in the charm of his way of speaking. Our citizens study literature less than the people of Latinum, and yet there is not one of the fine gentlemen of your acquaintance, virtually devoid as they are of literature, who does not easily beat Q. Valerius Soranus, the most erudite littérateur of all who have Roman citizenship, in smoothness of voice and in actual distinctness of pronunciation and tone.
    [XII] “Consequently as there is a particular accent peculiar to the Roman race and to our city, involving no possibility of stumbling or causing offense or unpleasantness or objection, no note or flavor of provincialism, let us make this accent our model, and learn to avoid not only rustic roughness but also provincial solecisms. For my own part when I hear my wife’s mother Laelia—since it is easier for women to keep the old pronunciation unspoiled, as they do not converse with a number of people and so always retain the accents they heard first—well, I listen to her with the feeling that I am listening to Plautus or Naevius: the actual sound of her voice is so unaffected and natural that she seems to introduce no trace of display or affectation; and I consequently infer that was how her father and her ancestors used to speak—not harshly, like the person I mentioned, nor with a broad or countrified or jerky pronunciation, but neatly and evenly and smoothly. Consequently our friend Cotta, whose broad pronunciation referred to before you occasionally copy, Sulpicius, in dropping the letter I and substituting a very full E, is in my opinion copying not the orators of old days but the farm-laborers.