You often ask me, Justus Fabius, why, when the earlier ages flowered with the talents and the glory of so many eminent orators, our own age above all—abandoned and stripped of any praise for eloquence—scarcely keeps the very name of orator; for we do not so style any but the ancients, while the fluent men of these times are called pleaders and advocates and counsel and anything you please sooner than orators. To answer that inquiry of yours, and to take up the weight of so great a question—which must imply a poor verdict on our talents, if we cannot reach the same heights, or on our judgement, if we will not—I should hardly dare, by Hercules, were it my own opinion I had to put forward, and not rather to recall the conversation of men most eloquent, as our times go, whom I heard, when I was quite young, debating this very question. So it is not invention I need, but memory and recollection, that I may now pursue in the same measures and on the same grounds—keeping the order of the debate—what I took in from those most distinguished men, finely conceived and weightily spoken, when each brought forward his own divergent yet plausible case, and each rendered the cast of his own mind and genius. For there was no lack of one to take up the opposite side as well, and, after much harrying and mockery of antiquity, to set the eloquence of our own times above the talents of the ancients.

For on the day after Curiatius Maternus had given a reading of his Cato—when he was said to have wounded the feelings of the powerful, as though in that tragic theme he had forgotten himself and thought only of Cato, and the talk of it was running thick through the city—Marcus Aper and Julius Secundus came to him, the most celebrated talents then of our bar, men whom I not only listened to eagerly in the courts but attended at home too and in public, out of a remarkable hunger for their studies and a kind of youthful ardour, so as to drink in even their casual talk, their disputations, and the inner secrets of their withdrawn conversation—although a good many spitefully held that Secundus had no ready flow of speech, and that Aper had won his name for eloquence by talent and the force of his nature rather than by training and letters. For Secundus too had a style pure and compact and, so far as was enough, fluent; and Aper, steeped in every kind of learning, despised letters rather than was ignorant of them, as though he would carry off a greater glory for diligence and toil if his talent were seen to lean on no props borrowed from other men’s arts.

So, as we entered Maternus’s chamber, we found him seated, with the very book he had read aloud the day before in his hands. Then Secundus said: “Do the tales of the spiteful not frighten you at all, Maternus, into loving your Cato’s offences less? Or have you taken up that book to work it over more carefully, and—with whatever gave matter for a malicious reading struck out—to send your Cato forth not better, indeed, but at least safer?” Then he: “You shall read what Maternus owed to himself, and you will recognize what you heard. And if Cato left anything out, at the next reading my Thyestes shall say it; for I have already laid out that tragedy and shaped it within myself. And it is for that reason I hasten the publication of this book, that, the earlier care discharged, I may bend my whole breast to the new conception.” “Those tragedies of yours leave you so unsated,” said Aper, “that, dropping the study of speeches and cases, you spend all your time now upon Medea, and now, look, upon Thyestes—when so many friends’ cases, so many clientships of colonies and townships, call you to the forum, for which you would barely suffice even had you not loaded a fresh task upon yourself, of adding Domitius and Cato—that is, our own history too, and Roman names—to the fables of your little Greeks.”

And Maternus said: “I should be thrown by this severity of yours, had not our frequent and constant sparring all but turned into a habit. For neither do you leave off baiting and hunting the poets, and I, whom you charge with the idleness of the advocate’s bench, ply this daily defence of poetry against you. So I rejoice the more that a judge has been offered us, who will either forbid me to make verses for the future, or—what I have long wished—will, by his authority too, compel me to leave behind the narrow straits of forensic cases, in which I have sweated quite enough and to spare, and to cultivate that more sacred and more august eloquence.”

“For my part,” said Secundus, “before Aper challenges me as judge, I shall do what upright and moderate judges are wont to do, and excuse myself from those hearings in which it is plain that one side has the advantage with them of personal favour. For who does not know that no one is more closely joined to me, both in the practice of friendship and in the constant fellowship of our lives, than Saleius Bassus, a man at once most excellent and a most accomplished poet? And further, if poetry is on trial, I can see no defendant of richer estate.” “Let him rest easy,” said Aper, “both Saleius Bassus and whoever else cherishes the study of poetry and the glory of song, since he cannot plead cases. For I, now that I have found an arbiter for this dispute, will not suffer Maternus to be defended in the company of many, but will arraign him alone before them: that, born for a manly and oratorical eloquence by which he might at once win and guard friendships, take on connections, and embrace whole provinces, he forsakes the study than which nothing in our state can be devised more fruitful for advantage, or sweeter for pleasure, or fuller for dignity, or more splendid for the city’s fame, or more illustrious for renown throughout the whole empire and among all nations. For if all our counsels and acts are to be directed to the usefulness of life, what is safer than to practise that art by which a man, always under arms, may bear protection to his friends, aid to strangers, deliverance to those in peril, and to the envious and his enemies, unasked, fear and terror—himself secure, and as it were fortified by a kind of perpetual power and authority? Its force and use, when matters flow prosperously, are recognized in the refuge and shelter of others; but if a man’s own danger has sounded, then, by Hercules, breastplate and sword are no firmer defence in the line than eloquence is to a defendant in peril—shield and weapon at once, with which you may both fight in your own behalf and assail another, whether in a court, or in the Senate, or before the emperor. What else, but lately, did Eprius Marcellus set against the hostile Fathers but his own eloquence? Girt and threatening with it, he played upon the wisdom of Helvidius—eloquent, indeed, but unpractised and raw at contests of that kind. Of usefulness I say no more; on that part I judge my friend Maternus least of all will speak against me.

I pass to the pleasure of oratorical eloquence, whose delight falls not at some one moment, but nearly every day and nearly every hour. For what is sweeter to a free and well-born spirit, born for honourable pleasures, than to see his house ever full and thronged with a concourse of the most distinguished men? And to know that this is granted him not for his money, not for his childlessness, not for the discharge of some office, but for himself alone? Why, the childless and the rich and the powerful come, more often than not, to a man young and poor, to entrust to him the crises of their own or their friends’ affairs. Is there any pleasure of vast wealth and great power so great as to look upon men old and aged, propped by the favour of the whole world, who, amid the utmost abundance of all things, confess that they lack the one thing that is best? And then—what processions and escorts of clients! What a figure in public! What veneration in the courts! What a joy it is to rise and to stand among the silent, with all eyes turned to one man! To see the people gather and pour round him face to face and take on whatever feeling the orator has put on! These are the well-worn joys of speakers, displayed even to the eyes of the unlearned, that I am reckoning up; those more secret ones, known only to the speakers themselves, are greater. Whether he brings forth a speech worked over and meditated, there is a certain weight and steadiness of joy, as of the delivery itself; or whether he has brought a fresh and recent effort, not without some trembling of spirit, the very anxiety commends the outcome and lends a charm to the pleasure. But of extempore boldness, and of rashness itself, the delight is perhaps the keenest of all; for in talent too, as in a field, although some things are long sown and laboured at, yet more welcome are those that spring up of their own accord.

For my own part, to confess about myself, I have not spent a day more glad than the one on which the broad stripe was conferred on me, or than those on which—a new man, born in a community far from favourable—I received the quaestorship, or the tribunate, or the praetorship, than the days on which, in proportion to the modesty of this trifling skill of mine in speaking, it is given me to defend a defendant with success, or to plead some case before the centumvirs to a happy end, or before the emperor himself to protect and defend those very freedmen and procurators of the emperors. On those days I seem to mount above tribunates and praetorships and consulships; I seem to possess what, if it does not arise in a man himself, is given by no codicil and comes with no man’s favour. Again: with the fame and praise of what art is the glory of orators to be compared? Are they not illustrious in the city, not only among the busy and those bent on affairs, but even among the idle young and the youths, provided only that they have a sound nature and good hopes of themselves? Whose names do parents din into their children sooner? Whom does the unlearned crowd too, and this tunic-clad populace, more often name and point at with the finger as they pass? Newcomers also, and strangers, having heard of them already in their townships and colonies, ask after them the moment they have reached the city, and long, as it were, to recognize them.

I would venture to maintain that this Eprius Marcellus of whom I spoke just now, and Vibius Crispus—for I use new and recent examples more gladly than remote and worn-out ones—are no less great at the farthest ends of the earth than at Capua or Vercellae, where they are said to have been born. Nor does this come to them from the two hundred millions of the one, the three hundred of the other—although they may be thought to have come to these very riches by the gift of eloquence—but from eloquence itself; whose divine power and heavenly force has indeed brought forth in every age many examples of the fortune to which men have attained by the strength of their genius, but these, as I said above, are the nearest, and such as we may have not to learn by report but to behold with our eyes. For the more sordid and abject their birth, and the more notable the poverty and the straits that beset them as they came into the world, the more shining and the more illustrious are the examples for showing the usefulness of oratorical eloquence: that without the recommendation of birth, without the substance of means, neither of them distinguished in character, the one despised even in the bearing of his body, they have been for many years now the most powerful men in the state, and—for as long as it pleased them—chiefs of the forum, and now are chiefs in Caesar’s friendship, doing and carrying all before them, and loved by the emperor himself with a certain reverence: because Vespasian, a venerable old man and most patient of the truth, well understands that his other friends lean on what they have received from him, and what it is easy for them to heap up for themselves and pile upon others, whereas Marcellus and Crispus brought to his friendship something they had not received from the emperor, and that cannot be received. The least place, amid so many and so great things, is held by images and titles and statues—which, however, are not themselves neglected, no, by Hercules, any more than riches and resources, of which you will more easily find one to disparage them than one to disdain them. Crammed, then, with these honours and ornaments and resources we see the houses of those who from their first youth have given themselves to forensic cases and the study of oratory.

For songs and verses, on which Maternus longs to spend his whole life—for from there all his discourse flowed—win their authors no dignity and nourish no advantages; they bring a brief pleasure, an empty and fruitless praise. Grant that these very things, and what I am about to say next, your ears reject, Maternus: whom does it profit, if at your house Agamemnon or Jason speaks eloquently? Who on that account goes home defended and bound to you? Who escorts or greets or attends our Saleius—an excellent poet, or, if this be the more honorific word, a most renowned bard? Why, if a friend of his, if a kinsman, if in the end he himself falls into some affair, he will run back to this Secundus or to you, Maternus—not because you are a poet, nor that you may make verses for him; for those are born for Bassus at home, fine indeed and delightful, and yet their end is this: that when, through a whole year, through all its days, through a great part of its nights, he has hammered out and burned the lamp over a single book, he is forced to go begging and canvassing besides, that there may be men to deign to hear it—and not even that for nothing; for he both borrows a house, and fits up a hall, and hires benches, and scatters programmes about. And though the most blessed success attend his reading, all that praise, cropped as it were in the blade or the flower within a day or two, comes to no sure and solid fruit, and he carries away from it no friendship, no clientship, no benefit to abide in any man’s mind, but only a wandering shout and empty voices and a fleeting joy. We praised lately, as a marvellous and signal generosity in Vespasian, his having given Bassus five hundred thousand sesterces. A fine thing indeed, to earn a prince’s indulgence by talent; yet how much finer, if one’s estate so requires, to cultivate one’s own self, to propitiate one’s own genius, to draw upon one’s own liberality! Add that poets, if only they wish to labour out and accomplish something worthy, must give up the society of friends and the delight of the city, must forsake their other duties, and—as they themselves put it—withdraw into the woods and groves, that is, into solitude.

Not even opinion and fame—the one thing they serve, and the one thing they confess to be the reward of all their labour—follows poets as evenly as it does orators, since no one knows the mediocre poets, and few the good ones. For when does the fame of those rarest of readings make its way into the whole city? Far less is it known through so many provinces. How few, when a man comes to the city from Spain or Asia—to say nothing of our Gauls—ask after Saleius Bassus? And if anyone does ask, then, having seen him once, he passes on and is content, as though he had seen some painting or statue. Nor would I have this discourse of mine taken as though I were frightening off from songs those to whom their nature has denied an oratorical talent, if only in this department of study they can charm their leisure and insert their name among the famous. For I hold all eloquence and all its parts sacred and venerable, and believe that not only your tragic buskin, or the sound of heroic verse, but the sweetness of the lyric poets too, and the wantonness of the elegists, and the bitterness of the iambics, and the play of epigrams, and whatever other form eloquence may have, is to be set before the pursuits of the other arts. But my business is with you, Maternus, because, when your nature bears you to the very citadel of eloquence, you prefer to stray, and—on the point of attaining the heights—you halt among lesser things. As, if you had been born in Greece, where it is honourable to practise even the arts of the show, and the gods had given you the brawn and strength of a Nicostratus, I should not suffer those huge arms, born for the fight, to be frittered away on the lightness of a javelin or the throw of a discus, so now I call you from the lecture-halls and theatres into the forum, to cases and to real battles—especially since you cannot even take refuge in what gives most men their plea, that the study of poetry is less liable to give offence than that of oratory. For the force of your most beautiful nature boils over, and you give offence not for some friend, but—what is more dangerous—for Cato. Nor is the offence excused by the bond of duty, or the good faith of an advocate, or the impulse of a chance and sudden speech: you seem to have deliberately chosen a notable character, one that would speak with authority. I feel what may be answered: that from this came the huge applause, that these are the things praised above all in the very lecture-halls and presently carried on the lips of all. Drop, then, the plea of quiet and security, when you take to yourself a stronger adversary. For us let it be enough to defend the private disputes of our own age, in which, if at any time it be necessary, for a friend in peril, to offend the ears of the more powerful, our good faith is approved and our boldness excused.”

When Aper had said this rather sharply, in his usual way, and with an intent face, Maternus, relaxed and smiling, said: “As I was making ready to accuse the orators no less long than Aper had praised them—for I supposed that, turning aside from praising them, he would run the poets down and lay low the study of song—he softened me by a certain art, in conceding to those who cannot plead cases that they may make verses. Now I, just as in pleading cases I can perhaps achieve something and strive to some effect, so by the recitation of tragedies I both began my entry upon fame—when indeed I broke, against Nero, the wicked power of Vatinius, which was profaning even the sacred things of letters—and today, if there is any notice and name about me, I judge it has been won more by the glory of my songs than of my speeches. And now I have resolved to unyoke myself from forensic labour; nor do I covet those escorts and processions, or the throng of morning callers, any more than the bronzes and the busts that have burst into my house even against my will. For each man’s standing and security is better guarded by innocence than by eloquence, and I do not fear that I shall ever have to make a speech in the Senate save in defence of another’s peril.

The woods, indeed, and the groves, and that very solitude which Aper was decrying, bring me so great a pleasure that I count it among the chief fruits of song that they are composed not in an uproar, nor with a litigant sitting before one’s door, nor amid the squalor and the tears of defendants, but the spirit withdraws to places pure and innocent, and enjoys hallowed seats. These are the first beginnings of eloquence, these its inmost shrine; in this guise and habit it first came, a blessing to mortals, and flowed into those breasts chaste and untouched by any vice: so the oracles spoke. For the use of this lucrative and bloody eloquence is recent, and born of evil ways, and—as you were saying, Aper—invented to serve in the place of a weapon. But that happy and, to speak in our own fashion, golden age, barren of orators and of crimes, abounded in poets and bards, who sang of deeds well done, not who defended ill deeds committed. Nor had any men greater glory or more august honour, first among the gods—whose responses they were said to deliver and at whose banquets to be present—and then among those god-born and sacred kings, among whom we are told of no pleader, but of Orpheus and Linus and, if you would look deeper, of Apollo himself. Or, if these things seem too fabulous and made up, this at least you will grant me, Aper: that Homer has no less honour with posterity than Demosthenes, and that the fame of Euripides or Sophocles is shut within no narrower bounds than that of Lysias or Hyperides. You will find more today who disparage the glory of Cicero than of Virgil; and no book of Asinius or Messalla is so illustrious as the Medea of Ovid or the Thyestes of Varius.

And I should not fear even to compare the fortune of the bards and that happy fellowship with the restless and anxious life of orators. Though their contests and dangers have raised them to consulships, I prefer the secure and quiet retreat of Virgil—in which, however, he lacked neither favour with the deified Augustus nor renown with the Roman people. Witness the letters of Augustus, witness the people itself, which, on hearing Virgil’s verses in the theatre, rose as one and did reverence to Virgil, who chanced to be present and looking on, just as if to Augustus. Not even in our own times would Pomponius Secundus yield to Domitius Afer either in the dignity of his life or the durability of his fame. For that Crispus and Marcellus, to whose example you summon me—what have they in this fortune of theirs to be coveted? That they are afraid, or that they are feared? That, while something is asked of them every day, those to whom they grant it are aggrieved? That, bound by every flattery, they never seem servile enough to those who command, nor free enough to us? What is this supreme power of theirs? Freedmen are commonly able to do as much. But as for me, may “the sweet Muses,” as Virgil says, bear me, far from cares and anxieties and the necessity of doing something every day against my conscience, to those sacred haunts and those fountains; nor would I, trembling, make any further trial of the mad and slippery forum and of fame gone pale. Let no din of morning callers, no panting freedman, rouse me; let me not, uncertain of the future, write a will as a pledge, nor have more than I can leave to whom I will; for whenever my own fated day shall come, let me be set upon my tomb not mournful and grim, but cheerful and crowned—and for my memory let no man either consult an oracle or make petition.”

Maternus had scarcely finished, stirred and as it were inspired, when Vipstanus Messalla entered his chamber, and, suspecting from the very intentness of each man that there was some deeper discourse among them, said: “Have I come in too unseasonably upon men handling a private counsel, or the preparation of some case?” “By no means, by no means,” said Secundus, “and indeed I could wish you had come in earlier; for you would have been delighted both by the most careful discourse of our Aper, when he exhorted Maternus to turn all his talent and study to pleading cases, and by Maternus’s speech on behalf of his own songs—joyful, and, as became one defending the poets, bolder, and more like a poet’s than an orator’s.” “For my part,” said he, “that discourse would have affected me with boundless pleasure, and this very thing delights me, that you, the best of men and the orators of our times, exercise your talents not only on forensic business and the study of declamation, but take up debates of this kind too, which both nourish the mind and bring the most delightful recreation of learning and letters—to you who debate these things, and to those as well whose ears they reach. And so, by Hercules, I see it approved no less in you, Secundus, that by composing the life of Julius Africanus you have given men hope of more books of the kind, than in Aper, that he has not yet withdrawn from scholastic disputes, and prefers to spend his leisure in the manner of the new rhetoricians rather than of the old orators.”

Then Aper: “You do not cease, Messalla, to admire only the old and the ancient, and to mock and despise the pursuits of our own times. For I have often caught this talk of yours, when, forgetful both of your own eloquence and your brother’s, you maintained that there is no orator at all in this age—the more boldly, I suppose, because you did not fear the imputation of spite, since the glory which others grant you, you denied to yourself.” “I feel,” said he, “no repentance for that talk of mine, nor do I believe that Secundus or Maternus or you yourself, Aper—although at times you argue to the contrary—think otherwise. And I could wish it obtained from one of you that he should search out and render the causes of this boundless difference, which I commonly hunt out with myself. And what is a solace to some, increases the question for me: because I see it has befallen the Greeks too, that that Sacerdos, Nicetes, and any other who shakes Ephesus or Mytilene with the concert and clamour of his scholars, is further removed from Aeschines and Demosthenes than Afer or Africanus or you yourselves have receded from Cicero or Asinius.”

“You have raised,” said Secundus, “a great question and one worthy of handling. But who will unfold it more justly than you, to whose supreme learning and most distinguished talent care also and meditation have been added?” And Messalla: “I will open my thoughts,” said he, “if I first obtain this of you, that you too aid this discourse of ours.” “For two,” said Maternus, “I promise: for both I and Secundus will carry through those parts which we understand you to have not so much omitted as left to us. For that Aper is wont to dissent both you said a little while ago, and he himself is plain enough, this good while, in girding himself for the contrary, nor does he bear with an even mind this concord of ours in praise of the ancients.” “Indeed,” said Aper, “I will not suffer our age to be condemned, unheard and undefended, by this conspiracy of yours: but I will first ask this, whom you call ancients, what age of orators you mark off by that term. For when I hear “ancients,” I understand certain men of old, born long ago, and before my eyes there hover Ulysses and Nestor, whose age precedes ours by nearly thirteen hundred years; but you bring forward Demosthenes and Hyperides, who, it is well established, flourished in the times of Philip and Alexander, and indeed outlived them both. From which it appears that not much more than three hundred years lie between our age and that of Demosthenes. And this span of time, if you refer it to the frailty of our bodies, may perhaps seem long; if to the nature of the ages and the regard of this immense span of time, it is exceedingly short and close at hand. For if, as Cicero writes in the Hortensius, that is the great and true year in which the same position of the sky and stars that there is at this moment shall come round again, and that year embraces twelve thousand nine hundred and fifty-four of these years that we call years, then your Demosthenes, whom you make out to be of the elder and ancient world, begins to have existed not only in the same year as we, but even in the same month.

But I pass to the Latin orators, among whom it is not Menenius Agrippa, I take it—who might seem ancient—that you are wont to set before the fluent men of our times, but Cicero and Caesar and Caelius and Calvus and Brutus and Asinius and Messalla: why you should assign these to ancient times rather than to ours, I do not see. For, to speak of Cicero himself: he was killed, as his freedman Tiro writes, in the consulship of Hirtius and Pansa, on the seventh day before the Ides of December, in the year in which the deified Augustus appointed himself and Quintus Pedius consuls in the room of Pansa and Hirtius. Set down the six-and-fifty years in which the deified Augustus thereafter ruled the commonwealth; add the three-and-twenty of Tiberius, and nearly four years of Gaius, and twice fourteen years of Claudius and Nero, and that long, single year of Galba and Otho and Vitellius, and the now sixth term of this happy principate, in which Vespasian fosters the commonwealth: a hundred and twenty years from Cicero’s death to this day are reckoned up—the lifetime of a single man. For I myself in Britain saw an old man who declared that he had been present at that battle in which they attempted to bar Caesar, as he brought arms against Britain, from their shores and to drive him off. So, if the man who took up arms and withstood Gaius Caesar had been drawn to the city by captivity, or by his own will, or by some chance, he could equally have heard both Caesar himself and Cicero, and have been present at our pleadings too. At the last largess, indeed, you yourselves saw a good many old men who told how they had received a largess from the deified Augustus also, once and again. From which it can be gathered that both Corvinus and Asinius could have been heard by those men; for Corvinus lasted into the very middle of Augustus’s principate, Asinius almost to the end—so do not divide off the age, and call those orators ancient and of old whom the ears of the same men were able to recognize and, as it were, to join and couple together.

I have said this beforehand so that, if any praise accrues to the times from the fame and glory of these orators, I might show it to lie in the midst and nearer to us than to Servius Galba or Gaius Carbo and the others whom we may rightly call ancient; for they are rough and unpolished and crude and shapeless, and would that your Calvus or Caelius or Cicero himself had imitated them in no part. For I wish now to proceed more strongly and more boldly, if I have first laid down this: that with the times the forms too and the kinds of speaking change. So, compared with old Cato, Gaius Gracchus is fuller and richer; so, than Gracchus, Crassus is more polished and ornate; so, than either, Cicero is more finished and more urbane and loftier; than Cicero, Corvinus is gentler and sweeter and more elaborated in his words. Nor do I ask who is the most eloquent: for the moment I am content to have proved this, that there is not one face of eloquence, but that even in those whom you call ancients several forms are to be discerned, and that what is different is not at once worse, but that, by the vice of human spite, the old is ever in praise, the present in contempt. Do we doubt that men have been found to admire Appius Caecus more than Cato? It is well established that not even Cicero lacked detractors, to whom he seemed inflated and swollen, and not compact enough, but exulting and overflowing beyond measure, and too little Attic. You have surely read the letters of both Calvus and Brutus sent to Cicero, from which it is easy to gather that Calvus seemed to Cicero bloodless and dry, and Brutus listless and disjointed; and again, that Cicero was ill spoken of by Calvus as loose and nerveless, and by Brutus—to use his very words—as “broken and spineless.” If you ask me, all of them seem to me to have spoken the truth: but presently I shall come to them singly; for now my business is with them all together.

For inasmuch as the admirers of the ancients are wont to set up as it were this boundary-stone of antiquity, reaching down to Cassius—whom they make the defendant, whom they affirm to have been the first to bend away from that old and straight road of speaking—I maintain that he transferred himself to another kind of speaking not from weakness of talent nor ignorance of letters, but from judgement and understanding. For he saw, as I was saying a little before, that with the condition of the times and the diversity of ears the form too and the appearance of speech must be changed. That earlier people, being unskilled and rude, bore easily the long stretches of the most encumbered speeches, and praised that very thing, if a man used up the day in speaking. And then a long preparation of openings, and a chain of narrative fetched from far back, and the parade of many divisions, and a thousand steps of arguments, and whatever else is prescribed in the most arid books of Hermagoras and Apollodorus, was held in honour; and if a man seemed to have got a whiff of philosophy, and inserted some passage of it into his speech, he was carried to the skies with praises. Nor was it any wonder; for these things were new and unknown, and even of the orators themselves very few had learned the precepts of the rhetoricians or the doctrines of the philosophers. But, by Hercules, now that all of it is common property—when scarcely a man stands in the ring who is not, if not equipped, at least steeped in the elements of these studies—new and choice paths of eloquence are needed, by which the orator may escape the disdain of the ears, especially before those judges who decide by force and power, not by right and law, who do not receive their time but appoint it, and who have no need to wait for the orator until it pleases him to speak of the case itself, but often of their own accord admonish him and call him back when he strays elsewhere and protest that they are in a hurry.

Who now will endure an orator prefacing his remarks with the weakness of his health? Such are mostly the openings of Corvinus. Who will wait through five books against Verres? Who will sit out those immense volumes on the demurrer and the formula which we read for Marcus Tullius or for Aulus Caecina? At this time the judge runs ahead of the speaker, and unless he has been invited and won over by the course of the arguments, or the colour of the maxims, or the brilliance and finish of the descriptions, he turns away from the speaker. The crowd of bystanders too, and the casual, drifting listener, has by now grown used to demanding charm and beauty of speech; nor does it any more put up in the courts with grim and unkempt antiquity than if a man should want to reproduce on the stage the gestures of Roscius or Ambivius Turpio. The young men, too, set on the very anvil of study, who follow the orators for the sake of their own advancement, want not only to hear but to carry home something brilliant and worthy of remembrance; and they pass it on in turn, and often write to their colonies and provinces—whether some thought has flashed out in a pointed and brief maxim, or a passage has shone with choice and poetic adornment. For now there is required of the orator even a poetic grace, not befouled with the mustiness of Accius or Pacuvius, but brought forth from the sanctuary of Horace and Virgil and Lucan. And so, obeying the ears and judgements of these men, the age of our orators has come forth fairer and more ornate. Nor on that account are our speeches the less effective, because they reach the ears of those who judge with pleasure. Why—would you believe the temples of these times the weaker, because they are not built of rough rubble and shapeless tiles, but gleam with marble and are radiant with gold?

For my part I will confess to you plainly that in some of the ancients I can scarcely hold back laughter, in others scarcely sleep. Nor do I mean some one of the common herd—Canutius or Attius—but Furnius and Toranius and the others who in the same sick-ward approve these bones and this leanness. Calvus himself, who has left, I think, one-and-twenty books, scarcely satisfies me in a speech or two. Nor do I see that others dissent from this judgement of mine: for how few read Calvus against Asitius or against Drusus? But, by Hercules, in the hands of all students there circulate the prosecutions inscribed against Vatinius, and especially the second of these speeches; for it is adorned in words and maxims, accommodated to the ears of the judges, so that you may know that Calvus too understood what was better, and that not the will failed him to speak more loftily and with more finish, but the talent and the strength. What of the speeches of Caelius? Those of them please, surely, whether whole or in parts, in which we recognize the brilliance and loftiness of these times. But those sordid words, and the gaping construction, and the disordered thoughts, smack of antiquity; nor do I think anyone so much an antiquary as to praise Caelius for the part in which he is ancient. Let us grant, by all means, to Gaius Caesar, that, owing to the greatness of his designs and his preoccupation with affairs, he achieved less in eloquence than his divine talent demanded—just as, by Hercules, we leave Brutus to his philosophy; for in his speeches that he falls short of his fame even his admirers confess: unless perchance anyone reads Caesar’s speech for Decius the Samnite, or Brutus’s for King Deiotarus, and the rest of the books of the same slowness and lukewarmness—unless he is one who admires their verses too. For they made verses as well, and stored them in libraries, no better than Cicero, but more luckily, because fewer men know that they made them. Asinius too, although he was born in nearer times, seems to me to have studied among the Menenii and the Appii. Pacuvius certainly and Accius he reproduced not only in his tragedies but in his speeches as well; so hard and dry is he. But a speech, like a man’s body, is then at last beautiful when the veins do not stand out nor the bones can be counted, but a tempered and healthy blood fills the limbs and swells in the muscles, and a ruddy glow covers and a comeliness commends the very sinews. I will not pursue Corvinus, because it was not through any fault of his own that he failed to express the charm and brilliance of our times: for we see how far the force of his spirit or his talent answered to his judgement.

I come to Cicero, who had the same battle with his contemporaries that I have with you. For they admired the ancients, while he set the eloquence of his own times before them; nor did he outstrip the orators of the same age in anything more than in judgement. For he was the first to refine his oratory, the first to apply both a choice of words and art in their arrangement; he tried his hand too at richer passages and invented certain maxims—at least in those speeches which he composed when already older and near the end of his life, that is, after he had advanced further and learned by practice and trial what was the best kind of speaking. For his earlier speeches are not free from the faults of antiquity: he is slow in his openings, long in his narratives, idle about his digressions; he is roused tardily, seldom kindles; few thoughts are aptly and with a certain brilliance brought to a close. There is nothing you could excerpt, nothing you could carry away; and, as in a rough building, the wall is firm indeed and will last, but is not finished and splendid enough. But I would have the orator, like a rich and elegant head of a household, sheltered not only by a roof that wards off rain and wind, but by one that delights the sight and the eyes too; furnished not only with such gear as suffices for necessary uses, but let there be in his equipment gold also and gems, that it may be a pleasure to take them in hand and look at them oftener. Some things, indeed, are to be kept far off as now outworn and rank: let no word be infected as it were with rust, let no thoughts be arranged in a slow and inert structure after the manner of the chronicles; let him shun foul and tasteless buffoonery, let him vary his composition, nor end all his clauses in one and the same way.

I do not care to mock the “wheel of Fortune,” and the “Verrine right,” and that “so it would seem,” placed in every third thought of all the speeches in lieu of a maxim. For these things too I have reported against my will, and I have passed over more, which yet are the only things that those admire and reproduce who style themselves the ancient orators. I will name no one, content to have indicated the kind of men; but they hover before your eyes, surely—those who read Lucilius instead of Horace and Lucretius instead of Virgil, to whom the eloquence of Aufidius Bassus or Servilius Nonianus seems sordid by comparison with Sisenna or Varro, who turn up their noses at and hate the handbooks of our rhetoricians, and admire Calvus. When these men play the orator before a judge in the old fashion, no listeners follow them, no people hears them, scarcely even the litigant endures them: so dismal and unkempt are they that the very soundness they boast of they achieve not by strength but by starvation. And further, even in the body, physicians do not approve a health that comes from anxiety of mind; it is too little not to be sick: I want a man strong and cheerful and brisk. He is close to weakness in whom soundness alone is praised. But you, most eloquent of men, as you can, as you do, illuminate our age with the fairest kind of speaking. For I see you too, Messalla, imitating all the most joyful things of the ancients, and you, Maternus and Secundus, so blend brilliance and finish of words with weight of thought, there is such a choice in invention, such an order of matter, such fullness whenever the case demands, such brevity whenever it permits, such a grace of composition, such an evenness of maxims, you so express the emotions, so temper your boldness, that even if spite and envy retard our judgements, posterity will speak the truth about you.”

When Aper had said this, “Do you recognize,” said Maternus, “the force and ardour of our Aper? With what a torrent, with what an onset he has defended our age! How copiously and variously he has harried the ancients! With how much—not only of talent and spirit, but of learning and art—has he borrowed from the ancients themselves the very means by which presently he might assail them! Your promise, however, Messalla, this ought not to have changed. For we do not demand a defender of the ancients, nor do we compare any of us—though we have just been praised—with those whom Aper attacked. Nor does he himself even think so, but, in the old fashion, often practised by our philosophers, he took to himself the part of arguing the contrary. Bring forth for us, then, not a panegyric of the ancients—for their own fame praises them enough—but the causes why we have receded so far from their eloquence, since especially the reckoning of the times has gathered that a hundred and twenty years are made up from the death of Cicero to this day.”

Then Messalla: “I will follow the form you have prescribed, Maternus; for there is no need to argue long against Aper, who first, as I take it, raised a controversy of name—as though those were too improperly called ancients who, it is well established, lived a hundred years ago. But with me there is no fight over a word; whether he calls them ancients, or ancestors, or by whatever other name he prefers, provided only it be agreed that the eloquence of those times was more eminent. Nor do I resist even that part of his discourse, if he confesses, when it comes to close quarters, that several forms of speaking existed even in the same ages, much more in different ones. But as among the Attic orators the first place is assigned to Demosthenes, and the next is held by Aeschines and Hyperides and Lysias and Lycurgus—while, by the consent of all, this age of orators is most approved—so among us Cicero, indeed, outstripped the rest of the eloquent men of the same times, while Calvus and Asinius and Caesar and Caelius and Brutus are rightly set both before their predecessors and after their successors. Nor does it matter that they differ among themselves in appearance, since they agree in kind. Calvus is more compressed, Asinius more rhythmical, Caesar more splendid, Caelius more bitter, Brutus weightier, Cicero more vehement and fuller and stronger: yet all alike display the same soundness of eloquence, so that if you take up the books of them all together, you will know that, for all the diversity of their talents, there is a certain kinship and likeness of judgement and intention. For the fact that they disparaged one another in turn, and that there are some things inserted in their letters from which a mutual spite is uncovered, is not the fault of orators, but of men. For I believe that Calvus and Asinius and Cicero himself were wont both to envy and to grudge and to be afflicted with the other faults of human frailty: only among these, I judge, did Brutus lay bare the verdict of his mind not from spite nor envy, but plainly and frankly. Would he envy Cicero, who seems to me not even to have envied Caesar? As for Servius Galba and Gaius Laelius, and any others of the more ancient sort whom Aper has not ceased to harry, the case needs no defender, since I confess that to their eloquence, as still being born and not yet fully grown, certain things were lacking.

But for the rest, if—setting aside that best and most perfect kind of eloquence—a form of speaking is to be chosen, I would by Hercules rather have the impetuosity of Gaius Gracchus or the maturity of Lucius Crassus than the curling-irons of Maecenas or the tinklings of Gallio: so much better is it to clothe a speech even in a shaggy toga than to deck it out in painted and harlot’s garments. For that is no orator’s dress—no, by Hercules, not even a man’s—which most of the pleaders of our times so use that, by the wantonness of their words and the lightness of their thoughts and the licence of their composition, they reproduce the measures of the stage. And—what should scarcely be lawful to hear—most of them boast, in the place of praise and glory and talent, that their speeches are sung and danced to. Whence arises that foul and preposterous, but nonetheless frequent, exclamation: that our orators speak prettily and our actors dance eloquently. For my part I would not deny that Cassius Severus—the only one our Aper dared to name—may be called an orator, if he is compared with those who came after, although in a great part of his books he has more bile than blood. For he was the first to despise the order of matter, to lay aside modesty and restraint of words, and—undisciplined even in the very weapons he uses, and often thrown by his eagerness to strike—he does not fight, but brawls. Yet, as I said, compared with those who followed, he far surpasses the rest both in variety of learning and in the charm of his urbanity and in the very strength of his powers—none of whom Aper had the heart to name and lead, as it were, into the line. But I was expecting that, having indicted Asinius and Caelius and Calvus, he would bring out for us another array, and name more, or at least as many, of whom we might set one against Cicero, another against Caesar, and then man against man. Now, content to have run down the ancient orators by name, he has dared to praise none of the moderns save in a general and common way—fearing, I suppose, lest he offend many if he singled out a few. For how few among the men of the schools do not enjoy this conviction of theirs, that they rank themselves before Cicero, but plainly behind Gabinianus? But I will not be afraid to name them singly, that, the examples being set forth, it may the more easily appear by what steps eloquence has been broken and diminished.”

“But spare us,” said Maternus, “and rather discharge your promise. For we do not desire it to be concluded that the ancients are the more eloquent—which with me, at least, is admitted—but we seek the causes, which you said you were wont to handle: a little while ago plainly milder, and less angry with the eloquence of our times, before Aper offended you by provoking your forefathers.” “I am not offended,” said he, “by my friend Aper’s disputation, nor will it become you to be offended, if perchance something graze your ears, since you know that this is the law of conversations of this kind, to bring forth the verdict of the mind without harm to the affections.” “Go on,” said Maternus, “and, since you speak of the ancients, use the ancient freedom, from which we have degenerated even more than from eloquence.”

And Messalla: “You ask, Maternus, for no hidden causes, nor such as are unknown either to yourself or to this Secundus or this Aper, even if you assign me the part of bringing into the open what we all feel. For who does not know that eloquence and the other arts have fallen away from that old glory not through any dearth of men, but through the idleness of the young, and the carelessness of parents, and the ignorance of teachers, and the forgetting of the old discipline? These evils, first born in the city, then spread through Italy, are now flowing into the provinces. Though your own affairs are better known to you: I will speak of the city and these home-bred and native vices, which take up children at their very birth and are heaped up through each stage of their age—if I first say a few words about the severity and discipline of our ancestors in rearing and forming their children. For in old days each man’s son, born of a chaste mother, was reared not in the cell of a bought nurse, but in the lap and bosom of his mother, whose chief praise it was to keep the house and to serve her children. Moreover, some elder kinswoman was chosen, to whose approved and tested character all the offspring of the same family was committed; in whose presence it was not lawful to speak what was base to say, or to do what seemed dishonourable to do. And not only the studies and concerns, but the relaxations too and the games of the children she tempered with a certain sanctity and modesty. So we are told that Cornelia, the mother of the Gracchi, so Aurelia, the mother of Caesar, so Atia, the mother of Augustus, presided over the rearing and brought up sons who were princes. This discipline and severity tended to this end, that the nature of each, sincere and whole and warped by no depravities, should at once seize with its whole breast upon honourable arts, and—whether it had inclined to soldiering, or to the knowledge of law, or to the study of eloquence—should do that alone, should drink that in entire.

But now the new-born infant is handed over to some little Greek serving-maid, to whom is joined one or another out of all the slaves, for the most part the basest and fit for no serious service. By their tales and errors the green and raw minds are at once steeped; nor does anyone in the whole house reckon what he says or does before the infant master. Nay, the very parents accustom their little ones not to uprightness and modesty, but to wantonness and pertness, through which little by little shamelessness creeps in, and contempt for themselves and for others. Indeed, the proper and peculiar vices of this city seem to me to be conceived almost in the mother’s womb: the passion for actors and the zeal for gladiators and horses; and when the mind is occupied and besieged by these, how little room does it leave for the good arts? How few will you find who talk of anything else at home? What other talk of the young men do we catch, whenever we have entered the lecture-halls? Not even the teachers have any more frequent conversations with their hearers; for they gather their pupils not by the strictness of their discipline nor by proof of talent, but by the canvassing of morning calls and the enticements of flattery.

I pass over the first elements of learners, on which themselves too little pains is spent: neither in getting to know the authors, nor in unrolling antiquity, nor in the knowledge of things or men or times is enough labour expended. But those are sought after whom they call rhetoricians; when this profession was first brought into this city, and how little authority it had with our ancestors, I shall presently tell—but I must turn my mind to that discipline which we are told those orators used, whose boundless labour and daily meditation and constant exercises in every kind of study are contained in their own books too. You all know, surely, Cicero’s book that is entitled Brutus, in whose latter part—for the earlier has a commemoration of the old orators—he relates his own beginnings, his own steps, and as it were a certain education of his own eloquence: that he learned the civil law with Quintus Mucius, and with Philo the Academic and Diodotus the Stoic drank in to the depths all the parts of philosophy; and, not content with those teachers whose abundance had fallen to him in the city, he travelled over Achaia and Asia too, that he might embrace the whole variety of all the arts. And so, by Hercules, in Cicero’s books it is possible to perceive that the knowledge neither of geometry, nor of music, nor of grammar, nor in fine of any liberal art, was wanting to him. He had learned the subtlety of dialectic, the usefulness of moral philosophy, the motions and causes of things. For so it is, my excellent friends, so it is: out of much learning and very many arts and the knowledge of all things flows and overflows that admirable eloquence; nor is the force and faculty of the orator, like that of other things, shut within narrow and brief bounds, but he is an orator who on every question can speak finely and ornately and aptly for persuasion, in keeping with the dignity of the matters, to the advantage of the times, with pleasure to his hearers.

This those ancients had persuaded themselves of; and to accomplish it they understood there was need, not that they should declaim in the schools of the rhetoricians, nor that on fictitious disputes, in no way approaching the truth, they should exercise merely the tongue and the voice, but that they should fill their breast with those arts in which there is debate about good and evil, about the honourable and the base, about the just and the unjust; for this is the matter set under the orator for his speaking. For in the courts we discourse generally about equity, in deliberations about advantage, in panegyrics about honour—yet so that for the most part these very things are mixed in turn: of which no one can speak copiously and variously and ornately, save he who has come to know human nature, and the force of the virtues and the depravity of the vices, and the understanding of those things which are reckoned neither among virtues nor among vices. From these fountains those things also flow: that he the more easily either stirs up or soothes the anger of the judge who knows what anger is, the more readily impels to pity who knows what mercy is and by what motions of the spirit it is roused. The orator versed in these arts and exercises, whether he has to speak before the hostile, or the eager, or the envious, or the sorrowful, or the fearful, will hold the veins of their minds, and—as each one’s nature shall demand—will apply his hand and temper his speech, with every instrument ready and laid by for every use. There are some with whom a compressed and gathered manner of speaking, concluding each argument at once, earns more credit: with these it will profit to have given attention to dialectic. Others a diffuse and even speech, drawn from common feelings, more delights: to move these we shall borrow from the Peripatetics topics apt and ready for every dispute. The Academics will give combativeness, Plato loftiness, Xenophon sweetness; nor will it be foreign to the orator to take up even certain honourable exclamations of Epicurus and Metrodorus and to use them as the matter demands. For we are not forming a wise man, nor a companion of the Stoics, but one who ought to drink in certain arts and to taste of all. And therefore the old orators embraced the knowledge of the civil law too, and were steeped in grammar, music, geometry. For cases arise—very many indeed, and almost all—in which the knowledge of law is wanted, and a good many in which this knowledge too is required.

And let no one answer that it suffices that we be taught, for the occasion, something simple and uniform. For, first, we use our own things in one way, borrowed things in another, and it is plainly of great moment whether a man possesses what he brings forth or borrows it. Then the very knowledge of many arts adorns us even when we are doing something else, and stands out and excels where you would least believe it. And this not only the learned and prudent hearer perceives, but the people too, and at once so attends it with praise that it confesses the man to have studied in due form, to have gone through all the numbers of eloquence, to be, in fine, an orator: which I affirm none can become, nor ever has become, save him who, as into the battle-line equipped with all arms, has so gone forth into the forum armed with all the arts. And this is so neglected by the fluent men of these times that in their pleadings the foul and shameful faults even of this everyday speech are detected; so that they are ignorant of the laws, do not hold the decrees of the Senate, openly deride the law of this state, and dread to their depths the study of wisdom and the precepts of the prudent. They thrust down eloquence, as if driven from her kingdom, into the fewest thoughts and narrowest maxims; so that she who once, the mistress of all the arts, filled the breast with the fairest retinue, now, clipped and lopped, without equipment, without honour, almost—I had nearly said—without free birth, is learned as one of the meanest of trades. This, therefore, I judge to be the first and chief cause why we have receded so far from the eloquence of the ancient orators. If witnesses are wanted, whom shall I name in preference to Demosthenes among the Greeks, who is recorded to have been a most studious hearer of Plato? And Cicero relates, in these words, I think, that whatever he accomplished in eloquence he won not in the workshops of the rhetoricians, but in the walks of the Academy. There are other causes, great and grave, which it is fair should be opened up by you, since I for my part have now fulfilled my task, and—as is my custom—have offended quite enough men, who, if perchance they hear these things, I hold it certain will say that, while I praise the knowledge of law and philosophy as necessary to the orator, I have been applauding my own follies.”

And Maternus: “To me, indeed,” said he, “you seem so far from having carried through the task you took up, that you seem only to have begun it, and as it were to have shown certain traces and outlines. For with what arts the old orators were wont to be equipped, you have told, and you have demonstrated the difference of our sloth and ignorance from their keenest and most fruitful studies: the rest I await; so that, as I have learned from you what either they knew or we do not know, I may come to know this too, by what exercises the young men, now on the point of entering the forum, were wont to strengthen and nourish their talents. For that eloquence is contained not only in art and knowledge, but far more in faculty and practice, you, I think, will not deny, and these men seem by their looks to signify it.” Then, when Aper too and Secundus had nodded the same, Messalla, as if beginning afresh: “Since I seem to have sufficiently demonstrated the beginnings and seeds of the old eloquence, by teaching with what arts the ancient orators were wont to be trained and instructed, I will now pursue their exercises. Although in the arts themselves there is exercise, nor can anyone grasp matters so many, so recondite, so various, unless to knowledge be added meditation, to meditation faculty, to faculty the practice of eloquence. From which it is gathered that there is one and the same method both of grasping what you would bring forth and of bringing forth what you have grasped. But if to anyone these things seem too obscure, and he separates knowledge from exercise, this at least he will grant, that a mind equipped and full of these arts will come far readier to those exercises which seem proper to orators.

Therefore, among our ancestors, that young man who was being prepared for the forum and for eloquence, already steeped in domestic discipline, filled with honourable studies, was led by his father or by his kinsfolk to that orator who held the chief place in the state. Him he grew accustomed to follow, him to escort, to be present at all his deliveries, whether in the courts or in the public assemblies, so as to catch even the altercations and to be present at the wranglings, and, so to speak, to learn to fight in the battle. Great practice came from this, much steadiness, very much judgement, to the young men at once, studying in the open light and amid the very perils, where no one says anything foolishly or contradictorily without paying for it—lest the judge reject it, and the adversary throw it in his teeth, and the advocates themselves at last disdain it. So they were at once steeped in a true and uncorrupted eloquence; and although they followed one man, yet they came to know all the patrons of the same age in very many cases and courts; and they had an abundance of the people’s own most diverse ears, from which they might easily perceive what in each was either approved or displeased. So there was no lack of a teacher—the best, indeed, and most choice—who should present the face of eloquence, not its image; nor of adversaries and rivals fighting with the sword, not with foils; nor of an audience always full, always new, of the spiteful and the favouring, that neither things well said nor ill might be passed over. For you know that that great and lasting fame of eloquence is won no less on the benches of the adversary than on one’s own; nay, that thence it rises more steadily, there is more faithfully strengthened. And, by Hercules, under teachers of this kind, that young man of whom we speak—the disciple of orators, the hearer of the forum, the follower of the courts, schooled and habituated by others’ trials, who, hearing daily, knew the laws, found the faces of the judges not new, with the practice of the assemblies frequent before his eyes, and the ears of the people often tested—whether he had undertaken a prosecution or a defence, was at once, alone and single, a match for any case. In his nineteenth year Lucius Crassus prosecuted Gaius Carbo, in his twenty-first Caesar prosecuted Dolabella, in his twenty-second Asinius Pollio prosecuted Gaius Cato, and Calvus, not much older, prosecuted Vatinius, in those speeches which to this day we read with admiration.

But now our young lads are led off into the schools of those who are called rhetoricians—men who, it is plain, arose a little before Cicero’s time, and did not please our ancestors, from this, that they were ordered by the censors Crassus and Domitius to shut up, as Cicero says, “the school of impudence.” But, as I had begun to say, they are led off into the schools, in which I could not easily say whether the place itself, or their fellow-pupils, or the kind of studies, bring more harm to their talents. For in the place there is no reverence, since no one enters it who is not equally unskilled; in the fellow-pupils no profit, since boys among boys and youths among youths both speak and are heard with equal unconcern; while the exercises themselves are for the most part contrary to their purpose. For there are, you know, two kinds of subject-matter handled with the rhetoricians, the persuasive and the controversial. Of these the persuasive, as plainly the lighter and demanding less prudence, are assigned to the boys, while the controversial are allotted to the sturdier—and, by my faith, of what sort, and how incredibly composed! It follows that to matter remote from truth a declamation too is applied. So it comes about that the rewards of tyrant-slayers, or the choices of ravished maidens, or the remedies for a plague, or the incests of mothers, or whatever is daily handled in the school but in the forum either rarely or never, are pursued in huge words: but when it has come to real judges——

——they ponder the matter. He could utter nothing low, nothing abject. Great eloquence, like a flame, is fed by its material, and roused by motions, and grows bright by burning. The same principle advanced the eloquence of the ancients in our state too. For although the orators of these times also have attained those things which could be granted in a settled, quiet, and prosperous commonwealth, yet in that disorder and licence they seemed to win more for themselves, when, all being in confusion and lacking one to govern, each orator was as wise as could be made plausible to a wandering people. Hence the unceasing laws and the popular name; hence the harangues of magistrates almost spending the night on the rostra; hence the prosecutions of powerful defendants and enmities assigned even to households; hence the factions of the nobles and the constant struggles of the Senate against the plebs. Each of these things, though they tore the commonwealth apart, yet exercised the eloquence of those times and seemed to heap great rewards upon it, because the more a man could do by speaking, the more easily he attained honours, the more, in the honours themselves, he outwent his colleagues, the more favour he won with the great, the more authority with the Fathers, the more notice and name with the plebs. These overflowed even with the clientships of foreign nations; these the magistrates setting out for their provinces revered, these on their return courted; these the praetorships and the consulships seemed of their own accord to call; these even as private men were not without power, since they governed both people and Senate by counsel and authority. Nay, they had persuaded themselves that without eloquence no one could either attain in the state, or guard, a conspicuous and eminent place. And no wonder, since they were brought before the people even against their will, since it was too little in the Senate to vote briefly, unless a man defended his opinion by talent and eloquence, since, called into some odium or charge, they had to answer with their own voice, since they were compelled to give their testimony too in the public courts not in absence nor by a written tablet, but face to face and present. So to the highest rewards of eloquence a great necessity also was added, and as it was held fine and glorious to be reckoned eloquent, so, on the contrary, it was held base to seem mute and tongue-tied.

Therefore they were spurred no less by shame than by rewards, lest they be reckoned in the place of clients rather than of patrons, lest the connections handed down from their ancestors pass to others, lest, as men sluggish and not equal to the honours, they either fail to obtain them or, having obtained them, guard them ill. I do not know whether there have come into your hands these old records, which still remain in the libraries of the antiquaries and are at this very moment being collected by Mucianus, and have now, I think, been composed and published in eleven books of Acta and three of Letters. From these it can be understood that Gnaeus Pompey and Marcus Crassus prevailed not by strength and arms only, but by talent and oratory too; that the Lentuli and the Metelli and the Luculli and the Curiones and the rest of that band of nobles put much labour and care into these studies, and that no one in those times attained great power without some eloquence. To this was added the splendour of the defendants and the magnitude of the cases, which themselves too contribute very much to eloquence. For it makes a great difference whether you have to speak about a theft, or a formula and an interdict, or about bribery at the elections, allies despoiled, citizens butchered. And these evils, though it is better they should not happen—and that is to be held the best state of the commonwealth in which we suffer nothing of the kind—yet, when they did happen, furnished a huge material for eloquence. For the force of talent grows with the greatness of the matters, nor can anyone produce a bright and illustrious speech unless he has found a cause to match it. Demosthenes, I take it, is not made illustrious by the speeches he composed against his guardians, nor is it Publius Quinctius defended or Licinius Archias that make Cicero a great orator: it is Catiline and Milo and Verres and Antony that have thrown this fame about him—not that it was worth so much to the commonwealth to bear evil citizens, that the orators might have a rich material for speaking, but, as I admonish from time to time, let us remember the question and know that we are speaking of that thing which more easily arises in troubled and unquiet times. Who is ignorant that it is more useful and better to enjoy peace than to be harried by war? Yet wars produce more good fighters than peace. The condition of eloquence is like. For the oftener it has stood, as it were, in the line, the more blows it has both dealt and taken, the greater the adversaries and the keener the battles it has chosen for itself, the loftier and the higher and ennobled by those perils it moves on the lips of men, whose nature is such that they want to be safe.

I pass to the form and custom of the old courts. Though it is now better suited, yet eloquence was the more exercised by that forum, in which no one was compelled to plead his case through within the fewest hours, and the adjournments were free, and each man took his own measure in speaking, and the number neither of days nor of patrons was limited. Gnaeus Pompey was the first, in his third consulship, to draw these in and to impose as it were bridles on eloquence—yet so that all should be transacted in the forum, all by the laws, all before the praetors: with whom how much greater business was once wont to be transacted, what greater proof is there than that the centumviral cases, which now hold the first place, were so overwhelmed by the splendour of the other courts that no book of Cicero, nor of Caesar, nor of Brutus, nor of Caelius, nor of Calvus, nor in fine of any great orator, is read as spoken before the centumvirs, save the speeches of Asinius which are inscribed “for the heirs of Urbinia”—delivered, however, by Pollio himself in the middle of the deified Augustus’s times, after a long quiet of the times, and an unbroken leisure of the people, and a constant tranquillity of the Senate, and above all the discipline of the emperor, had pacified eloquence too, like everything else.

It will perhaps seem a small and ridiculous thing that I am about to say—I will say it nonetheless, even that it may be laughed at. How much lowliness do we think those cloaks of ours have brought to eloquence, in which, bound and as it were shut up, we chat with the judges? How much strength do we believe has been taken from oratory by the lecture-halls and record-offices, in which now nearly the most of our cases are unfolded? For just as racecourses and open stretches test noble horses, so there is a certain field of orators, through which, unless they are borne free and loosed, eloquence is weakened and broken. Nay, we find the very care and anxiety of a diligent style to be a hindrance, because often the judge asks when you mean to begin, and you must begin from his asking. Frequently the patron enjoins silence for the proofs and the witnesses. Amid all this one or another man stands by the speaker, and the business is conducted as it were in a solitude. But the orator needs shouting and applause and, as it were, a kind of theatre; such as daily fell to the old orators, when so many at once, and so noble, crowded the forum, when clientships too, and tribes, and even the deputations of townships, and a part of Italy, stood by those in peril, when in very many cases the Roman people believed its own interest was at stake in what was judged. It is well established that Gaius Cornelius and Marcus Scaurus and Titus Milo and Lucius Bestia and Publius Vatinius were both accused and defended amid the concourse of the whole state, so that the very zeal of a contending people could rouse and kindle even the coldest of orators. And so, by Hercules, books of that kind survive, such that the very men who pleaded are esteemed by no other speeches more than these.

And then the constant harangues, and the granted right of harrying each most powerful man, and the very glory of enmities—when most of the eloquent abstained not even from a Publius Scipio or a Lucius Sulla or a Gnaeus Pompey, and, to assail the leading men, used (as is the nature of envy) the ears of the people and even of the players—what ardour they applied to talents, what torches to orators!... We are not speaking of a peaceful and quiet thing, one that rejoices in uprightness and modesty, but that great and notable eloquence is the foster-child of licence, which fools call liberty, the companion of seditions, the goad of an unbridled people, without obedience, without strictness, contumacious, rash, arrogant—a thing which does not arise in well-ordered states. What orator of Sparta, what of Crete, have we heard of? The discipline and the laws of those states are handed down as most severe. Nor do we know the eloquence of the Macedonians or the Persians, or of any nation that was content with a settled rule. There arose some orators among the Rhodians, very many among the Athenians, where the people had all power, the unskilled all, all—so to speak—everyone. So our own state too, while it strayed, while it wore itself out with parties and dissensions and discords, while there was no peace in the forum, no concord in the Senate, no moderation in the courts, no reverence for superiors, no measure in the magistrates, bore without doubt a stronger eloquence, just as an untamed field has certain more luxuriant herbs. But neither was the eloquence of the Gracchi worth so much to the commonwealth that it should endure their laws too, nor did Cicero, by such an end, well requite the fame of his eloquence.

So too the forum, which is what remains to the orators of antiquity, is a proof of a state not corrected, nor composed to the point of our wish. For who calls us in but either the guilty or the wretched? What township comes into our clientship but one that either a neighbouring people or a domestic discord harasses? What province do we protect but one despoiled and harried? And yet it had been better not to complain than to be avenged. But if some state could be found in which no one offended, the orator among the innocent would be superfluous, as the physician among the healthy. As, however, the art of healing has its least use and least profit among those nations which enjoy the firmest health and the most wholesome bodies, so the honour of orators is lesser and their glory dimmer among good morals and men ready in obedience to one who rules. For what need is there of long opinions in the Senate, when the best agree quickly? What of many harangues before the people, when it is not the unskilled and the many that deliberate on the commonwealth, but the wisest and the one? What of voluntary prosecutions, when men offend so rarely and so sparingly? What of invidious and immoderate defences, when the clemency of the magistrate who takes cognizance goes to meet those in peril? Believe me, excellent men, and—so far as is needful—most eloquent: if either you had been born in earlier ages, or those whom we admire in these, and some god had suddenly changed your lives and times, neither would that highest praise and glory in eloquence have failed you, nor they their measure and moderation. Now, since no one can at one and the same time attain great fame and great quiet, let each man use the good of his own age without disparagement of another’s.”

Maternus had finished, when Messalla said: “There were things in which I would have spoken against you, things of which I would have wished more said, were not the day now spent.” “It shall be done,” said Maternus, “hereafter at your pleasure, and if anything in this discourse of mine has seemed to you obscure, of those things we will confer again.” And, rising at the same time and embracing Aper, “I,” said he, “will arraign you to the poets, and Messalla to the antiquaries.” “And I you,” said he, “to the rhetoricians and the men of the schools.” When they had laughed, we parted.