Brutus

Translated by Thothica

3 hr 24 min

When, on my way home from Cilicia, I had come to Rhodes, and news was brought to me there of the death of Quintus Hortensius, I felt a grief greater than the common opinion would have looked for. For in losing a friend I saw myself deprived both of a pleasant companionship and of the bond of many mutual services; and I grieved that by the death of so distinguished an augur the prestige of our college was diminished. In this train of thought I recalled that he had co-opted me into the college, where under oath he had given his judgement of my worth, and that he had inaugurated me — so that by the established usage of the augurs I owed him the reverence due to a parent.
My distress was the greater because, in so great a dearth of wise and good citizens, this excellent man, bound to me as he was by partnership in all our counsels, had been taken from us at the most adverse season of the commonwealth, leaving us a bitter longing for his authority and good sense; and I grieved that I had lost not, as most supposed, a rival and a detractor of my own renown, but rather a companion and partner in a glorious labour.
For if, in the pursuit of the lighter arts, tradition records that famous poets have grieved at the death of poets who were their contemporaries, with what feelings ought I to have borne the death of one with whom it was more glorious to contend than to have no rival at all? — especially since not only was my course never hindered by him, nor his by me, but on the contrary each was always helped by the other, by sharing counsel, by warning, and by goodwill.
But since he, blessed with a kind of unbroken good fortune, departed from life at his own season rather than that of his fellow citizens, and died at the very time when, had he lived, he could more easily have mourned the commonwealth than aided it — and since he lived as long as it was permitted to live well and happily in the state — let us grieve, if grieve we must, over our own loss and disadvantage, but let us attend the timeliness of his death with goodwill rather than with pity, so that, whenever we think of so illustrious and fortunate a man, we may seem to love him rather than ourselves.
For if we grieve only because it is no longer granted us to enjoy his company, that is a misfortune of our own, which we should bear with moderation, lest we seem to refer it not to friendship but to our own private advantage; but if we are tormented as though some bitterness had befallen him himself, we interpret his supreme good fortune with too little gratitude.
For if Quintus Hortensius were still living, he might perhaps regret other things along with the rest of the good and brave citizens; but this grief he would feel beyond all others, or with few to share it, when he saw the forum of the Roman people — which had been, as it were, the theatre of his genius — despoiled and bereft of that learned voice, worthy of Roman and of Greek ears alike.
For my own part I am tormented in spirit that the commonwealth has need of the weapons of counsel, of talent, of authority — the very arts I had learned to handle, to which I had accustomed myself, and which belong both to a man of eminence in public life and to a well-ordered and well-constituted state. For if there was ever a time in the commonwealth when the authority and eloquence of a good citizen could wrench the weapons from the hands of angry fellow citizens, then surely it was when the advocacy of peace was shut out, whether by men's error or by their fear.
So it came about with me that, although there were far other things more to be mourned, yet I grieved at this: that at the very time when, having discharged the highest offices, my time of life ought to have taken refuge as in a harbour — not of idleness or sloth, but of moderate and honourable leisure — and when my own oratory had begun to grow grey and to attain a kind of ripeness and, as it were, old age, just then were those weapons taken up which even those who had learned to use them gloriously could not find how to use for the public safety.
And so it seems to me that those men lived fortunately and happily — in other states, but most of all in ours — to whom it was granted to enjoy at once the prestige and glory of great deeds and the praise of wisdom besides. The memory and recollection of these men was a genuine pleasure to me amid my greatest and gravest cares, when I lately came upon it in the course of a certain conversation.
For while I was walking in the colonnade and was at leisure at home, Marcus Brutus came to me, as was his custom, with Titus Pomponius — men so closely bound to each other, and so dear and delightful to me, that at the sight of them all the anxiety about the commonwealth that had been distressing me subsided. After I had greeted them, "Well," said I, "Brutus and Atticus, is there any news at last?" "None at all," said Brutus, "that you would care to hear, or that I would venture to assert for certain."
Then Atticus said, "We have come to you in such a mind that there should be silence about politics, and that we should rather hear something from you than burden you with any annoyance." "You, Atticus," I said, "both relieve me of care while you are present, and have given me great comfort while absent. For it was by your letter first that I was restored and recalled to my former studies." Then he said, "I read with great pleasure the letter that Brutus sent you from Asia, in which he seemed to me both to advise you wisely and to console you most affectionately."
"You judged rightly," I said; "for you must know that by that letter I was recalled, as if to behold the light, out of a long disorder of my whole well-being. And just as, after that disaster at Cannae, the Roman people first rose up again at the battle of Marcellus near Nola, and afterwards many prosperous events followed one upon another, so, after the gravest reverses of my own and the common fortunes, nothing befell me before the letter of Brutus that I could wish for, or that in any degree lightened my anxieties."
Then Brutus said, "I certainly wished to bring this about, and I reap a great reward, if indeed in so great a matter I have achieved what I intended. But I should like to know what it was in Atticus's letter that delighted you." "That letter, Brutus," I said, "brought me not only delight but, as I hope, salvation." "Salvation?" he said. "What sort of letter, then, was that so admirable one?" "Could there have been," I said, "any greeting more welcome to me, or more suited to this time, than that book of his by which he addressed me and roused me, as it were, when I lay prostrate?"
Then he said, "You mean, no doubt, the one in which he embraced briefly — and, as it seemed to me at least, with great care — the whole record of history?" "That very book, Brutus," I said, "I declare to have been my salvation." Then Atticus said, "Nothing could be more gratifying to me than what you say; but what, after all, did that book contain that could be either new to you or of so great use?"
"It held for me," I said, "many things that were indeed new, and the very usefulness I was seeking — that, with the sequences of the periods laid out, I might see everything at a single glance. And when I had begun to study it eagerly, the very handling of letters proved my salvation, and reminded me, Pomponius, that I should take from you yourself something for my own restoration, and to repay you with a gift that, if not equal, should yet be welcome — although that Hesiodic precept is praised by the learned, which bids us return by the same measure we have received, or even with more, if we can.
For my part I will surely render you full measure of goodwill, but I do not think I am yet able to render the thing itself; and I ask you to pardon me for this. For there is nothing from a new crop, as farmers have, out of which I might repay you what I received — so wholly is every yield checked, and the flower of my old abundance withered and scorched by drought — nor from anything stored away, which lies in darkness and to which all access is blocked for me, though it was once open to me almost alone. So I shall sow something, as it were, in untilled and abandoned soil; and this I shall cultivate so carefully that I may be able even by my pains to increase the bounty of your gift — if only my mind can do what the field can, which, when it has lain fallow for many years, is wont to bring forth more abundant crops." Then he said,
"For my part I shall both await what you promise, and I shall not exact it save at your convenience; and it will be most welcome to me if you discharge the debt." "I too," said Brutus, "must await what you promise to Atticus, although perhaps I, the voluntary agent of his interest, shall demand from you what he himself, to whom you owe it, says he will not exact to your inconvenience."
"But I, Brutus," I said, "will not pay you, unless I first take security from you that no one else, with a claim, shall make demand on that account." "By Hercules," he said, "I would not venture to make you that promise. For this man here, who declines, I can see will be a creditor not, indeed, troublesome to you, but persistent and keen for all that." Then Pomponius said, "For my part, I think Brutus is telling no lie. For I think I shall now venture to dun you, since after a long interval I have just now noticed you a little more cheerful.
And so, since this man has declared that he will exact what is owed to me, I demand of you on his behalf what you owe to him." "And what is that?" I said. "That you write something," he said; "for your pen has long been silent. For since you published those books on the commonwealth, we have certainly received nothing from you afterwards — and it was by these that we ourselves were spurred and kindled to set down a record of our own history. But those works whenever you can; and that you may be able, I beg.
But now," he said, "if your mind is free, set forth for us what we ask." "And what is that?" I said. "What you lately laid out for us at your place at Tusculum, about the orators — when they began to be, and who they were, and of what quality. When I had reported this conversation to your Brutus, or rather our Brutus, he said he was most eager to hear it. And so we have chosen this day, since we knew you to be free. Therefore, if it is convenient for you, set forth for Brutus and me what you had begun."
"For my part," I said, "if I can, I will satisfy you." "You can," he said: "only relax your mind a little, or indeed, if you can, set it free." "It was here, then, Pomponius, that the conversation took its start — from my mentioning that I had heard the cause of Deiotarus, that most loyal and excellent king, defended by Brutus most elegantly and most fully." "I know," he said, "that the conversation was drawn from that beginning, and that you, lamenting Brutus's lot, bewailed, as it were, the desolation of the courts and of the forum." "I did indeed do that," I said, "and I often do it.
For often, Brutus, as I look at you, it comes into my mind to fear what course your admirable nature, your exquisite learning, and your singular industry will at last be allowed to run. For when you had been engaged in the greatest cases, and when my generation was already yielding to you and lowering its fasces, suddenly in the state, when other things fell, that very eloquence too, of which we are beginning to speak, fell silent."
Then he said, "For other reasons I both grieve at this and think it ought to be grieved over; but in speaking it is not so much its fruit and glory that delights me as the pursuit itself and the practice of it — and that nothing shall snatch from me, especially with you so devoted to me. For no one can speak well unless he understands wisely; and therefore whoever gives his pains to true eloquence gives them to wisdom, of which not even in the greatest wars can anyone be deprived without distress."
"Admirably, Brutus," I said, "do you speak; and I am the more delighted by that praise of eloquence because the other things that were once held in the highest esteem in this state, there is no one so lowly as not to think either that he can attain them or that he has attained them; whereas I see no one made eloquent by victory. But, that the conversation may unfold more easily, let us conduct it sitting, if you please." And when the same had pleased them, we sat down in a little meadow beside the statue of Plato.
Here I began: "To praise eloquence, and to set forth how great is its power and how great the dignity it confers on those who have attained it — this is neither our purpose in this place nor necessary. But this I would affirm without any hesitation: that whether it is begotten by some art, or by practice, or by nature, it is the most difficult thing in the world. For of the five elements of which it is said to consist, each single one is in itself a great art. From this it can be estimated how great a power, and how great a difficulty, the concurrence of these five greatest arts must have.
Greece is my witness, which, though it was fired with zeal for eloquence and has long excelled and surpassed all others in it, yet possesses all its other arts older — and not only discovered but even brought to perfection long before this developed power and copiousness of speech. When I look upon it, Atticus, your Athens above all comes to my mind and shines out, as it were — the city in which an orator first stood forth, and in which oratory first began to be entrusted to records and to writing.
Yet before Pericles, of whom certain writings are preserved, and Thucydides — who lived not when Athens was being born but when it was already grown — there is no piece of writing that has any ornament and seems to be the work of an orator. And yet there is an opinion that Pisistratus, who lived many years before these, and Solon, somewhat older still, and afterwards Clisthenes, were men of much power in speaking, as far as those times allowed.
Some years after this age, as can be discerned from the records of Attica, came Themistocles, who is agreed to have excelled both in prudence and in eloquence; after him Pericles, who, though he flourished in every kind of excellence, was yet most renowned for this distinction. Cleon too, in those times, is agreed to have been a turbulent citizen indeed, but eloquent for all that.
Nearly of this age were Alcibiades, Critias, and Theramenes; and what kind of oratory flourished in those times can best be understood from the writings of Thucydides, who himself lived then. They were grand in their words, thick with maxims, brief by their compression of matter, and for that very reason at times somewhat obscure.
But as soon as it was understood how great a power a carefully wrought and, in a manner, composed oratory had, then too many teachers of speaking suddenly arose. Then Gorgias of Leontini, Thrasymachus of Chalcedon, Protagoras of Abdera, Prodicus of Ceos, and Hippias of Elis were held in great honour; and many others in those same times professed to teach — in words arrogant enough, to be sure — how the weaker cause, for so they spoke, could be made the stronger by speaking.
Against these set himself Socrates, who by a certain subtlety of argument was wont to refute their teachings. Out of his most copious conversations there came forth men of the highest learning; and then for the first time philosophy is said to have been discovered — not that earlier philosophy of nature, but this in which there is debate about things good and bad and about the life and morals of men. But since this kind of subject is foreign to what we have proposed, let us put off the philosophers to another time, and return to the orators from whom we digressed.
There arose, then, when those old men I mentioned a little before were already aged, Isocrates, whose house stood open like a school and a workshop of eloquence to all Greece — a great orator and a perfect teacher, though he lacked the light of the forum and within his walls nourished that glory which, in my judgement at least, no one afterwards attained. He both wrote much himself most admirably and taught others; and besides surpassing his predecessors in other respects, he was the first to understand that even in prose, while you avoid verse, a certain measure and rhythm must nevertheless be preserved.
For before him there was no such structure of words, as it were, and no rounding-off to a rhythm; or if there ever was, it was not apparent that it had been deliberately sought — which is perhaps a merit, but still it came about then more by nature and by chance, never by any method or any observation of rule.
For nature herself, by a certain rounding of the words, comprehends and closes the thought; and when this is bound up in fitting words, it usually falls into rhythm as well. For the ears themselves judge what is full and what is empty, and the breath, as if by a kind of necessity, sets a limit to the grouping of the words; and in this it is disgraceful not only to fall short but even to labour.
Then came Lysias — himself, indeed, not engaged in cases before the courts, but an eminently subtle and elegant writer, whom one might now almost venture to call a perfect orator. For one might easily call Demosthenes plainly perfect, a man in whom nothing whatever is lacking. Nothing acute could be devised in the cases that Lysias wrote, nothing, so to speak, cunning, nothing artful, that the other did not see; nothing could be said with subtlety, nothing closely, nothing clearly, by which anything could be made more polished; nothing, on the other hand, grand, nothing impetuous, nothing adorned either with weight of words or of thought, by which anything could be made more sublime.
Next to him came Hyperides and Aeschines and Lycurgus and Dinarchus and the man of whom no writings survive, Demades, and many others besides. For this age poured forth this abundance; and, as my opinion holds, that uncorrupted sap and blood of the orators lasted down to this age, in which there was a natural, not a painted, brilliance.
For Demetrius of Phalerum succeeded those old men — a young man, the most learned indeed of all of them, but trained not so much in the arms as in the wrestling-school. And so he delighted the Athenians more than he inflamed them. For he had come forth into the sun and dust, not as from a soldier's tent, but as from the shaded retreats of Theophrastus, that most learned man.
He was the first to bend oratory and to render it soft and tender, and chose to seem agreeable, as he was, rather than weighty — but with that sweetness by which he might suffuse men's minds, not break through them, and only so far as to leave behind a memory of his own neatness, not, as Eupolis wrote of Pericles, to leave together with delight a sting also in the minds of those who had heard him.
Do you see, then, even in that very city in which eloquence was both born and reared, how late it came forth into the light? — since before the age of Solon and Pisistratus there is no record of anyone as an able speaker. And these men, indeed, by the reckoning of the Roman people's age, are old; but by the reckoning of the generations of the Athenians they ought to seem young. For although they flourished in the reign of Servius Tullius, yet Athens had already existed much longer than Rome has to the present day. Yet I do not doubt that oratory always had great power.
For Homer would not in Trojan times have assigned so much praise in speaking to Ulysses and to Nestor — the one of whom he wished to have force, the other sweetness — had the honour of eloquence not already existed even then; nor would the poet himself have been so ornate in speech and so plainly an orator. And although his dates are uncertain, yet he lived many years before Romulus, if indeed he was not later than the elder Lycurgus, by whom the discipline of the Lacedaemonians was bound fast with laws.
But a zeal for this kind, and a greater power, is recognized in Pisistratus. Finally, in the next age, Themistocles followed him — by our reckoning very ancient, but by that of the Athenians not really so old. For he lived when Greece was already under kings, but our state was not so long since freed from the rule of kings. For that gravest war of the Volscians, in which Coriolanus took part as an exile, fell at almost the same time as the war with the Persians, and the fortune of those famous men was alike;
for each, when he had been an excellent citizen, was driven out by the injustice of an ungrateful people, betook himself to the enemy, and quieted the impulse of his anger by death. For although you have it otherwise about Coriolanus, Atticus, grant me nevertheless that I may agree rather with this manner of death." But he, with a laugh, said: "As you please, indeed; since rhetoricians are permitted to invent in their histories, that they may have something to say more pointedly. For just as you now do about Coriolanus, so Clitarchus, so Stratocles, invented about Themistocles.
For the man whom Thucydides — who was an Athenian, of the highest birth and a man of the highest rank, and a little later in time — wrote to have died merely of disease and to have been secretly buried in Attica, adding that there was a suspicion that he had brought death upon himself by poison: this man, these others say, when he had sacrificed a bull, caught the blood in a bowl, and, having drunk it, fell down dead. For this death they could adorn rhetorically and tragically, while that common death offered no material for ornament. Therefore, since it suits you that everything in Themistocles was matched with Coriolanus, you may take the bowl from me too; I will even provide the victim, that Coriolanus may be plainly a second Themistocles."
"Let it be," I said, "as you please, about that; and I shall hereafter touch history more cautiously when you are listening — you whom I can praise as a most scrupulous authority on Roman affairs. But it was about then that Pericles, son of Xanthippus, of whom I spoke before, first brought learning to bear; and although there was then no rhetorical art, yet, trained by the natural philosopher Anaxagoras, he had readily transferred the exercise of his mind from recondite and abstruse matters to causes of the forum and of the people. By his sweetness Athens was most delighted, his richness and copiousness it admired, and the force and terror of the same man's speaking it feared.
This age, then, first produced at Athens an almost perfect orator. For neither among those founding a commonwealth, nor among those waging wars, nor among the embarrassed and those bound fast by the domination of kings, does the desire for speaking usually arise. Eloquence is the companion of peace and the comrade of leisure, and, as it were, a nursling of a state already well constituted.
And so Aristotle says that when, the tyrants having been overthrown in Sicily, private property was after a long interval reclaimed through the courts, then for the first time — since that people was keen and contentious by nature — the Sicilians Corax and Tisias composed an art and precepts; for before that no one had been wont to speak by method or by art, though most spoke carefully and in due order; and that disputations on illustrious subjects, which are now called commonplaces, had been written and made ready by Protagoras;
that Gorgias did the same — who, he says, composed praises and censures of particular things, because he judged it most especially the orator's task to be able to amplify a thing by praise and again to bring it low by censure; that Antiphon of Rhamnus had certain similar things written, than whom no one ever pleaded a capital cause better, when he defended himself — so the wealthy authority Thucydides wrote, who heard it;
for Lysias was at first wont to profess that there was an art of speaking; then, because Theodorus was subtler in the art but rather meagre in actual speeches, Lysias began to write speeches for others and laid the art aside; and similarly Isocrates at first denied that there was an art of speaking, but was wont to write speeches for others to use in the courts; but since on that account, because he was, as it were, breaking the law against 'circumventing anyone by a judgement,' he was himself often summoned into court, he ceased to write speeches for others and transferred himself wholly to composing arts.
And these, then, are the birth and the springs of the Greek orators that you see — old by the reckoning of our annals, but, by their own, recent enough. For before the Athenian state was charmed with this glory of speaking, it had already accomplished many memorable things both in domestic and in military affairs. But this pursuit was not common to all Greece; it was peculiar to Athens.
For who knows of an Argive or a Corinthian or a Theban orator in those times? — unless one cares to make some surmise about Epaminondas, a learned man. But of a Lacedaemonian I have heard that, down to this present time, there was not one. Menelaus himself Homer represents as agreeable indeed, but speaking few words. Now brevity is at times a merit in some part of speaking, but in eloquence taken as a whole it has no merit.
But outside Greece there were great pursuits of speaking, and the highest honours paid to this distinction made the name of orators illustrious. For as soon as eloquence had once been carried out from the Piraeus, it traversed all the islands and so wandered over the whole of Asia that it smeared itself with foreign manners and lost all that wholesomeness and, as it were, soundness of Attic diction, and almost unlearned how to speak. Hence the Asiatic orators, not to be despised indeed either for swiftness or for copiousness, but too little compressed and too redundant; the Rhodians sounder and more like the Athenians.
But enough of the Greeks; and indeed these very matters were perhaps not necessary." Then Brutus said, "How necessary they were I could not easily say; but they were certainly pleasant to me, and not only not long but even shorter than I could have wished." "Very well," I said; "but let us come to our own countrymen, about whom it is hard to understand more than what one may surmise from the records.
For who would think that quickness of mind was wanting to Lucius Brutus, that famous founder of your nobility? — who from the oracle of Apollo so acutely and cleverly drew an inference about kissing his mother; who veiled the highest prudence under a pretence of folly; who expelled a most powerful king, the son of a most illustrious king, and bound the state, freed from perpetual domination, with annual magistracies, with laws, and with courts; who deprived his own colleague of his office, that he might remove from the state the very memory of the royal name — a thing that certainly could not have been brought about had it not been accomplished by persuasion in speech.
We see likewise that a few years after the kings were driven out, when the commons had encamped near the bank of the Anio at the third milestone and had occupied that hill which was called the Sacred, Marcus Valerius as dictator quieted the discord by speaking, and that for this reason the highest honours were paid to him, and that he was the first, for that very reason, to be called Maximus. Nor do I think that even Lucius Valerius Potitus could do nothing by speaking — he who, after the hatred against the decemvirs, soothed by his laws and his harangues the commons who had been roused against the senators.
We may surmise that Appius Claudius was eloquent, since he recalled the senate, when it was just now inclined toward peace with Pyrrhus; we may surmise it of Gaius Fabricius, since he was sent as an envoy to Pyrrhus about recovering the captives; of Tiberius Coruncanius, because from the commentaries of the pontiffs he seems to have been by far the most powerful in talent; of Manius Curius, because, as tribune of the commons, when Appius the Blind as interrex, an eloquent man, was holding the elections contrary to the laws, and would not accept a consul from the commons, Curius compelled the senators first to give their sanction — which was a very great thing, since the Maenian law had not yet been passed.
We may surmise something too about the talent of Marcus Popilius, who, when he was consul and was at the same time performing a public sacrifice in his cloak, since he was flamen of Carmenta, on news being brought of a stirring-up and sedition of the commons against the senators, came just as he was, wrapped in his cloak, into the assembly, and quieted the sedition by his authority and by his speaking. But that these men were held to be orators, or that there was then any reward of eloquence at all, I do not think I have read anywhere; I am led only by conjecture to surmise it.
Gaius Flaminius too is said — he who as tribune of the commons carried the law for distributing the Gallic and Picene land man by man, and who as consul was killed at Trasimene — to have had power with the people by speaking. Quintus Maximus Verrucosus also was held an orator in those times, and Quintus Metellus, he who in the Second Punic War was consul with Lucius Veturius Philo. But the first of whom it is on record, and of whom it is handed down that he was eloquent and was so held, is Marcus Cornelius Cethegus, for whose eloquence the authority is — and, in my judgement, a competent one — Quintus Ennius, especially since he both heard him himself and writes of him when dead: from which there is no suspicion that he lied for friendship's sake.
The passage is, then, as I think, thus in the ninth book of his Annals:

To these is added an orator, Cornelius, sweet of speech, Cethegus Marcus, colleague of Tuditanus, Marcus's son —

he both calls him an orator and ascribes to him sweetness of speech, which now indeed is not so common in most men — for some orators now bark rather than speak — but is surely the greatest praise of eloquence —

he was called by those of his countrymen of old, the men who then were living and passing their time, the chosen flower of the people —

aptly, indeed;

for as a man's glory is his talent, so the very light of talent is eloquence, in which those men of old admirably said that the excellent man was the flower of the people —

and the marrow of Persuasion.

Persuasion, whom the Greeks call Peitho, of which the orator is the maker — this Ennius called Suada; and he means that Cethegus was its marrow, so that the goddess whom Eupolis wrote to have sat upon the lips of Pericles, of her this orator of ours was, he said, the marrow.

But this Cethegus was consul with Publius Tuditanus in the Second Punic War, and Marcus Cato was quaestor under these consuls, just a hundred and forty years before I was consul; and unless this very fact had been known by the single testimony of Ennius, antiquity, as it has overwhelmed perhaps many others, would have overwhelmed him too in oblivion. And what the speech of that age was can be understood from the writings of Naevius. For under these consuls, as it is written in the old commentaries, Naevius died — although our Varro, a most diligent investigator of antiquity, thinks there is an error here, and prolongs the life of Naevius further. For Plautus died under the consuls Publius Claudius and Lucius Porcius, twenty years after those I mentioned before, when Cato was censor.
This Cethegus, then, Cato followed in age, who was consul nine years after him. Him we reckon a very ancient man — he who died under the consuls Lucius Marcius and Manius Manilius, just eighty-six years before I was consul. Nor indeed have I any one older whose writings I think worth bringing forward, unless this very speech of Appius the Blind about Pyrrhus, and certain eulogies of the dead, chance to please someone.
And by Hercules these at least survive: for the families themselves preserved them as their ornaments and memorials, both for use, if someone of the same line should die, and for the memory of their family's praises, and to illustrate their own nobility. And yet by these eulogies the history of our affairs has been made more faulty. For many things are written in them which were never done: false triumphs, too many consulships, false pedigrees too, and transitions to the commons, when men of humbler station were poured into another family of the same name — as if I were to say that I was descended from that Manius Tullius who, a patrician, was consul with Servius Sulpicius in the tenth year after the kings were expelled.
But the speeches of Cato are well-nigh as many as those of the Attic Lysias — of whom I think there are very many; for he is Attic, since he was certainly both born and died at Athens and discharged every office of a citizen, although Timaeus reclaims him for Syracuse, as if under the Licinian and Mucian law — and there is in a certain way some likeness even between them. They are acute, elegant, witty, brief; but the Greek is more fortunate in every kind of praise. For he has his devoted admirers, who pursue not so much the plump build of body as the slender forms, and whom, provided only the health is good, the very leanness delights — although in Lysias there are often even sinews, so that nothing could be more vigorous; but he is certainly, in his whole kind, more spare — yet still he has his own admirers, who take great pleasure in this very subtlety of his.
But which of our orators — those, at least, who now exist — reads Cato? Or who knows him at all? And yet what a man, good gods! I pass over the citizen, the senator, the general; for it is the orator we are seeking in this place: who was weightier than he in praising? more biting in censure? more pointed in his maxims? subtler in instructing and expounding? His speeches, more than a hundred and fifty of them — those at least that I have so far found and read — are crammed with brilliant words and matter. Let them choose from these the things worthy of note and praise: all the virtues of an orator will be found in them.
And his Origins, again — what flower or what light of eloquence do they not possess? He lacks admirers, just as for many ages already did Philistus of Syracuse and Thucydides himself. For as Theopompus, by the loftiness and elevation of his style, eclipses the clipped maxims of these men — at times too not sufficiently clear, both for their brevity and their excessive pointedness — the same that Demosthenes does to Lysias, so this style of later men, heaped up, as it were, to a greater height, has blocked the lights of Cato.
But there is this ignorance in our countrymen, that these very men who in the Greeks are delighted with antiquity and with that subtlety which they call Attic, do not even know it in Cato. They wish to be like Hyperides and Lysias. I commend them.
But why are they not willing to be like the Catos? They say they delight in the Attic kind of speaking. Wisely, indeed; and would that they imitated it — not the bones only but the blood as well! Yet it is welcome, what they wish. — Why, then, are Lysias and Hyperides loved, while Cato is utterly ignored? His speech is more ancient and some of his words are rather rough. For so they spoke in those days. Change that, which then he could not, and add rhythm, and that the speech may be better knit, arrange and, as it were, cement the very words — which not even the old Greeks practised — and now you will set no one before Cato.
The Greeks think that oratory is adorned if they use those substitutions of words which they call tropes, and those figures of thought and of speech which they call schemata: it is hardly credible how frequent and how distinct Cato is in both kinds. Nor indeed am I unaware that this orator is not yet sufficiently polished, and that something more perfect must be sought; for he is so old by the reckoning of our times that no one's writing survives, worth reading at least, that is older. But in all the arts antiquity is treated with greater honour than in this one art of speaking alone. For who among those who notice these lesser matters does not understand that the statues of Canachus are too stiff to imitate the truth; that those of Calamis, hard indeed, are yet softer than those of Canachus; that those of Myron are not yet sufficiently brought to the truth, yet such as you would not hesitate to call beautiful; and those of Polyclitus more beautiful still and now plainly perfect, as they are wont to seem to me at least? The case in painting is similar; in which we praise the forms and outlines of Zeuxis and Polygnotus and Timanthes and of those who used no more than four colours; but in Aetion, Nicomachus, Protogenes, Apelles, all is now perfect. And I am inclined to think the same happens in all other things too: for nothing is at once both discovered and perfected. Nor ought it to be doubted that there were poets before Homer, as can be understood from those songs which in his work are sung both at the feasts of the Phaeacians and at those of the suitors. And our old verses, where are they? —

which once the Fauns and seers used to sing,

when neither the crags of the Muses . . .

nor was anyone studious of learned words before this man —

so he says of himself, and does not lie in his boasting: for so the matter stands. For both the Latin Odyssey is, as it were, some work of Daedalus, and the plays of Livius are not quite worthy to be read a second time.

And yet this Livius first produced a play in the consulship of Gaius Claudius, son of Caecus, and Marcus Tuditanus, in the very year before Ennius was born, and in the five hundred and fourteenth year after the founding of Rome — so says the man whom we follow. For there is a dispute among writers about the number of the years. Accius, however, wrote that Livius was taken prisoner at Tarentum by Quintus Maximus, in his fifth consulship, thirty years after Livius had produced a play (so both Atticus writes and we have found in the old commentaries),
and that he produced a play eleven years later, in the consulship of Gaius Cornelius and Quintus Minucius, at the games of Iuventas which Salinator had vowed at the battle of Sena. In which Accius's error was so great that under these consuls Ennius was forty years old: and if Livius were his contemporary, then he who first gave a play was somewhat younger than those who had produced many plays before these consuls — both Plautus and Naevius.
If these matters seem less fitted to this conversation, Brutus, lay it to Atticus, who fired me with a zeal for tracing the ages and times of illustrious men." "For my part," said Brutus, "I both take delight in that marking-out, as it were, of the periods, and, with a view to the task you have undertaken — to distinguish the kinds of orators by their ages — I think that diligence of yours well suited to it."
"Rightly, Brutus," I said, "do you understand it. And would that there survived those songs which, many ages before his own time, Cato left written in his Origins to have been sung at feasts by individual banqueters about the praises of famous men! Yet the Punic War of that poet whom Ennius reckons among the seers and Fauns delights us, like a work of Myron.
Let Ennius, to be sure, be more perfect, as he certainly is; yet if he despised that other poet, as he pretends, he would not, in pursuing all the wars, have left out that first Punic War, the fiercest of all. But he himself tells why he does so. "Others," he says, "have written the matter in verse" — and they wrote it brilliantly indeed, even if less polished than you. Nor in truth ought it to seem otherwise to you, who either took much from Naevius, if you admit it, or, if you deny it, stole it.
Older in years than this Cato were Gaius Flaminius, Gaius Varro, Quintus Maximus, Quintus Metellus, Publius Lentulus, and Publius Crassus, who was consul with the elder Africanus. Scipio himself, we are told, was not without speech. His son indeed — he who adopted this younger Scipio from Paullus — had he been sound in body, would have been reckoned among the foremost in eloquence; this is shown both by some little speeches and by a certain history written in Greek most sweetly.
Of the same number was Sextus Aelius, the most learned of all in civil law, but ready in speaking too. And among the younger men, Gaius Sulpicius Gallus, who of all the nobility most studied Greek letters; he too was held among the orators and was in other respects polished and elegant. For there was now a smoother and more brilliant fashion of speaking. For while he as praetor was holding the games of Apollo, and had produced the play Thyestes, Ennius met his death, in the consulship of Quintus Marcius and Gnaeus Servilius.
There lived in the same times Tiberius Gracchus, son of Publius, who was twice consul and censor, and whose speech in Greek among the Rhodians survives; a citizen who is agreed to have been both weighty and eloquent. They say too that Publius Scipio Nasica, who was called Corculum, who likewise was twice consul and censor, was held eloquent — the son of that Scipio who received the sacred objects; they mention also Lucius Lentulus, who was consul with Gaius Figulus; Quintus Nobilior, son of Marcus, now by his father's example devoted to the study of letters — who even gave Roman citizenship to Quintus Ennius, who had served with his father in Aetolia, when he as one of three commissioners had led out a colony — and Titus Annius Luscus, the colleague of this Quintus Fulvius, they say was not without speech;
and indeed Lucius Paullus, the father of Africanus, easily maintained the part of a leading citizen by his speaking. And in truth even then, while Cato was still living — who departed from life at the age of eighty-five, when in that very year he had spoken against Servius Galba before the people with the utmost vehemence, which speech too he left in writing —
but while Cato was living, many younger orators flourished at one time. For both Aulus Albinus, he who wrote a history in Greek, who was consul with Lucius Lucullus, was both lettered and eloquent; and together with him a certain place was held also by Servius Fulvius, and with them Servius Fabius Pictor, well versed both in law and in letters and in antiquity; and Quintus Fabius Labeo was adorned with nearly the same praises. For Quintus Metellus, he whose four sons were of consular rank, was held among the foremost in eloquence — he who spoke for Lucius Cotta when Africanus was the accuser; of him there are both other speeches and one against Tiberius Gracchus, set out in the annals of Gaius Fannius.
Then Lucius Cotta himself was held an old hand; — but Gaius Laelius and Publius Africanus were among the foremost in eloquence, whose speeches survive, from which a judgement can be formed of the orators' talents. But among these, going a little before them in age, Servius Galba without dispute excelled in eloquence; and doubtless he was the first among the Latins to handle those works proper and, as it were, lawful to orators: to digress from his theme for the sake of ornament, to delight the mind, to move it, to amplify a matter, to use appeals to pity and commonplaces. But somehow the speeches of this man, who is agreed to have excelled in eloquence, are rather meagre and smell more of antiquity than do those of Laelius or Scipio or even Cato himself; and so they have withered away, so that now they scarcely appear.
As for the talent of Laelius and Scipio themselves, although the reputation is such that very much is ascribed to both, yet the praise for speaking is more brilliant in Laelius. And yet the speech of Laelius on the colleges is not better than any you please of Scipio's many; not that there is anything sweeter than that of Laelius, or that anything could be said more solemnly about religion, but Laelius is nevertheless much more antique and rough than Scipio; and, since in speaking tastes differ, Laelius seems to me to take more delight in antiquity and gladly to use words too a little more old-fashioned.
But it is the way of men to be unwilling that the same person should excel in several things. For as in military glory no one can aspire to rival Africanus — in which very thing we find that Laelius was distinguished in the war against Viriathus — so in talent, in letters, in eloquence, and finally in wisdom, although they grant the first rank to both, they gladly assign the precedence to Laelius. And it seems to me to have been so awarded not only by the judgement of others, but also by their own concession between themselves.
There was indeed then a custom, as better in other respects, so in this very thing more humane, that men were ready in assigning to each his own. I remember that at Smyrna I heard from Publius Rutilius Rufus, when he said that it had befallen him as a young man that, by a decree of the senate, Publius Scipio and Decimus Brutus, I think, as consuls were holding an inquiry into a great and atrocious matter. For when a slaughter had been committed in the Silan forest, and well-known men killed, and the household was accused — and in part also the freemen of that company which had farmed the pitch-works under the censors Publius Cornelius and Lucius Mummius — the senate decreed that the consuls should inquire into and decide that matter.
Laelius pleaded the cause for the tax-farmers carefully, as he was always wont, and elegantly. When the consuls, having heard the case, had pronounced a 'further hearing' by the advice of their council, after a few days had passed Laelius spoke again, much more carefully and better, and again in the same way the matter was postponed by the consuls. Then Laelius, when the company had escorted him home and given him thanks and begged him not to wear himself out, spoke thus: that what he had done he had done zealously and carefully for their honour's sake, but that he thought that case could be defended more weightily and more vehemently by Servius Galba, because he was more vigorous and keen in speaking. And so on the advice
of Gaius Laelius the tax-farmers brought the case to Galba; but he, because he had to succeed such a man, undertook it modestly and hesitantly. There was one whole intervening day, as in an adjournment, which Galba spent entirely in considering and composing the case; and when the day of the hearing came, and Rutilius himself, at the company's request, had come early in the morning to Galba's house, to remind him and to bring him to the time of speaking, that man, until it was announced to him that the consuls had come down, with everyone shut out, was rehearsing in a certain vaulted room with educated slaves, to whom he was wont to dictate, one this, another that, at the same time. Meanwhile, when it was announced to him that it was time, he came out into the house with such a colour and such eyes that you would have thought he had pleaded the cause, not rehearsed it.
He added too — and he thought this to the purpose — that those secretaries came out badly mauled with Galba; from which he signified that the man had been vehement and fired not only in pleading but also in rehearsing. In short: with great expectation, before very many listeners, in the presence of Laelius himself, Galba pleaded that case with such force and such weight that scarcely any part of the speech was passed over in silence. And so, with many complaints and much appeal to pity employed, the company was freed from the inquiry that day, with everyone's approval.
From this narrative of Rutilius one may surmise that, since there are two chief merits in an orator — one of arguing subtly to instruct, the other of pleading weightily to move the minds of the hearers, and since he who inflames the judge accomplishes far more than he who instructs — there was elegance in Laelius, force in Galba. And this force was most especially recognized when, the Lusitanians having been killed by Servius Galba as praetor against the faith pledged, as it was thought, and when Lucius Libo as tribune of the commons was rousing the people and bringing a bill against Galba resembling a personal enactment, Marcus Cato, in extreme old age, as I said before, said much against Galba in advocating the law; which speech he entered in his Origins, a few days, or months, before he died.
Then Galba, refusing nothing on his own behalf and imploring the good faith of the Roman people, weeping, commended both his own children and the son also of Gaius Gallus, whose orphaned state and weeping was wonderfully pitiable on account of the recent memory of his most illustrious father; and he then snatched himself from the flames, the pity of the people having been stirred on account of the children, as the same Cato has left in writing. And I see too that Libo himself was not without speech, as can be understood from his orations.
When I had said this and had paused a little, "What then," said Brutus, "is the reason, if there was so great a virtue in Galba as an orator, that none of it appears in his speeches? — which I cannot wonder at in those who left nothing at all in writing." "For it is not the same reason, Brutus," I said, "for not writing and for not writing so well as men spoke. For we see that some orators, out of laziness, wrote nothing, lest a labour at home should be added to that of the forum — for most speeches are written down after being delivered, not in order to be delivered —; that others do not trouble to become better —
for nothing so much advances speaking as writing —; and that they do not desire a memorial of their talent for posterity, since they think they have attained a sufficiently great glory in speaking, and that it will seem even greater if their writings do not come before the judgement of critics; that others write nothing because they think they can speak better than they can write — which usually happens to men of very great talent but not sufficiently learned, as it did to Galba himself.
Galba, perhaps, the force not only of his talent but also of his spirit, and a certain natural feeling, kindled as he spoke and made his oratory both impetuous and weighty and vehement; but then, when at leisure he had taken up the pen, and all the movements of his spirit had failed the man like a wind, his oratory grew flabby. This is not wont to happen to those who pursue a more polished kind of speaking, because prudence never fails the orator, by using which he can speak and write in the same way; but the fire of the spirit is not always present, and when it has subsided, all that force and, as it were, flame of the orator is extinguished.
For this reason, then, the mind of Laelius seems to breathe even in his writings, but the force of Galba to have died.

There were too in the number of middling orators the brothers Lucius and Spurius Mummius, whose speeches both survive; Lucius indeed plain and antique, Spurius no more ornate, but yet more compact; for he was learned in the school of the Stoics. There are many speeches of Spurius Albinus. There are also those of Lucius and Gaius Aurelius Orestes, whom I see to have been counted in some number among the orators. Publius too

Popilius was both a distinguished citizen and not without speech; but Gaius his son was a fluent speaker; and Gaius Tuditanus, refined and polished in his whole life and manner of living, had also a kind of style of oratory accounted elegant. And in the same kind was reckoned Marcus Octavius, he who, having received an injury, broke Tiberius Gracchus by his patience — a citizen most steadfast in the best causes. But indeed Marcus Aemilius Lepidus, who was called Porcina, of nearly the same times as Galba, but a little younger, was both held a supreme orator and was, as appears from his speeches, a tolerably good writer.
In this Latin orator first there seem to me to have appeared both that smoothness of the Greeks and the rounding-off of words and a now, so to speak, artful pen. Two most talented young men, almost of an age, were wont eagerly to hear him, Gaius Carbo and Tiberius Gracchus; of whom there will now be a place to speak, when I have said a few words about the older men. For Quintus Pompeius was no contemptible orator in those times — a man who attained the highest offices, known by himself, without any recommendation from his ancestors.
Then Lucius Cassius had great power, not by eloquence, but by speaking nevertheless; a man popular not by liberality, as others were, but by his very grimness and severity; and to his ballot-law Marcus Antius Briso, tribune of the commons, long held out, with the support of the consul Marcus Lepidus; and that matter was a reproach to Publius Africanus, because it was thought that Briso had been led away from his opinion by his authority. Then the two Caepiones much supported their clients by counsel and tongue, but more by authority and influence. There are writings of Sextus Pompeius, not too thin, although like those of the ancients, and full of good sense. Publius Crassus
we are told was a much-approved orator at nearly the same times — one who was both strong in talent and in zeal, and had also certain teachings at home. For he had bound himself by marriage-tie to that supreme orator Servius Galba, to whose son Gaius he had given his daughter; and since he was the son of Publius Mucius and had a brother, Publius Scaevola, he had learned the civil law at home. In him it is agreed there was the highest industry and the greatest influence, since he was both consulted very much and pleaded.
To the ages of these were added the two Gaius Fannii, sons of Gaius and of Marcus; of whom the son of Gaius, who was consul with Domitius, left one speech on the allies and the Latin name against Gaius Gracchus, both a good and a noble one. Then Atticus said, "What then? Is that speech really Fannius's? For there was a varied opinion when we were boys. Some said it was written by Gaius Persius, a lettered man — the one whom Lucilius signifies to have been very learned; others, that many nobles, each what he could, contributed to that speech."
Then I said, "I have indeed heard those things from my elders, but I was never brought to believe them; and I believe that suspicion arose for this reason — because Fannius was held among the middling orators, while the speech was even the best of all the speeches of that time. But it is not of such a kind as to seem put together by several — for there is one tone of the whole speech and the same style —; nor would Gracchus have kept silent about Persius, when Fannius had reproached him about Menelaus of Marathus and the rest; especially since Fannius was never held tongueless. For he both pleaded causes regularly, and his tribunate, conducted by the judgement and authority of Publius Africanus, was not obscure. But the other Gaius Fannius, son of Marcus, son-in-law of Gaius Laelius, was harsher both in character and in his very manner of speaking.
By the instruction of his father-in-law — whom, because he had not been co-opted into the college of augurs, he did not much love, especially since Laelius had preferred to him as son-in-law the younger Quintus Scaevola (to whom, however, Laelius, excusing himself, said that he had given that not to the younger son-in-law but to the elder daughter) — yet by Laelius's instruction he had heard Panaetius. His whole faculty in speaking can be discerned from his own history, written not inelegantly, which is neither too inarticulate nor perfectly eloquent.
Mucius the augur, what was needed for himself, he himself spoke — as concerning extortion against Titus Albucius. He was not in the number of the orators; he excelled in the knowledge of civil law and in every kind of prudence. Lucius Caelius Antipater the writer was, as you see, brilliant for those times, very skilled in law, and the teacher of many, such as Lucius Crassus.
Would that in Tiberius Gracchus and Gaius Carbo there had been such a mind for governing the commonwealth well as there was talent for speaking well: assuredly no one would have surpassed these men in glory. But of them the one, on account of his most turbulent tribunate — to which, angered at the good men through the odium of the Numantine treaty, he had come — was killed by the commonwealth itself; the other, on account of his perpetual inconstancy in his popular policy, freed himself by a voluntary death from the severity of the judges. But each was a supreme orator.
And this we say with the memory of our fathers as witness; for we have speeches both of Carbo and of Gracchus, not yet sufficiently splendid in words, but acute and most full of good sense. Gracchus, by the diligence of his mother Cornelia, was taught from a boy and educated in Greek letters. For he always had choice teachers from Greece, and among them, when already a young man, Diophanes of Mytilene, the most eloquent man in Greece in those times. But the time for increasing and displaying his talent was short for him;
Carbo, to whom life was given in sufficiency, is known from many trials and causes. Those prudent men who had heard him — among whom our friend Lucius Gellius, who used to relate that he had been his tent-mate in his consulship — said that he was a melodious orator and fluent and keen enough, and at once vehement and very sweet and very witty; he added too that he was industrious and diligent, and was wont to put much effort into exercises and rehearsals.
He was held the best advocate in those times, and while he held the forum more trials began to take place. For both the standing courts were established when he was a young man, which before had been none — for Lucius Piso as tribune of the commons first carried the law on extortion in the consulship of Censorinus and Manilius; Piso himself too both pleaded causes and was the author or opposer of many laws, and he left both speeches, which have now faded, and annals written quite meagrely — and the trials before the people, at which Carbo was present, now needed an advocate more, once the ballot was given; which law Lucius Cassius carried in the consulship of Lepidus and Mancinus.
Your kinsman too, Decimus Brutus, son of Marcus — as I was wont to hear from his friend the poet Lucius Accius — used to speak not inelegantly and was learned both in Latin and Greek letters, as far as those times allowed. The same Accius ascribed these qualities also to Quintus Maximus, the grandson of Lucius Paullus; and indeed, before that Maximus, Scipio, under whose leadership as a private man Tiberius Gracchus was killed, he said was both vehement in all things and keen in speaking.
Then too that leading man Publius Lentulus is said to have had eloquence enough, at least so far as was needful for the commonwealth; and in those same times Lucius Furius Philus was thought to speak Latin very well and more learnedly than the rest; Publius Scaevola very prudently and acutely; a little more copiously, and not much less prudently, Manius Manilius. The oratory of Appius Claudius was fluent, but a little too heated. There were also of some account Marcus Fulvius Flaccus and Gaius Cato, the son of Africanus's sister, middling orators; although there are writings of Flaccus, but as of a student of letters. And a rival of Flaccus was Publius Decius, not without speech indeed, but turbulent in his oratory as in his life.
Marcus Drusus, son of Gaius, who in his tribunate broke Gaius Gracchus, a tribune for the second time, was a man weighty both in oratory and in authority; and most nearly joined to him was his brother Gaius Drusus. Your clansman too, Brutus, Marcus Pennus, in his tribunate wittily harried Gaius Gracchus, going a little before him in age. For when Marcus Lepidus and Lucius Orestes were consuls, Gracchus was quaestor, Pennus tribune — the son of that Marcus who was consul with Quintus Aelius; but he, hoping for all the highest honours, died after holding the aedileship. For about Titus Flamininus, whom I myself saw, I have heard nothing except that he spoke Latin carefully.
To these are joined Gaius Curio, Marcus Scaurus, Publius Rutilius, Gaius Gracchus. About Scaurus and Rutilius one may speak briefly; neither of them had the praise of a supreme orator, and each was engaged in many causes. In certain men deserving praise, even if they were not of the greatest talent, their industry was nevertheless commendable; although in these indeed it was not talent altogether, but oratorical talent, that was lacking. For it is of no avail to see what should be said, unless you can say it fluently and agreeably; and not even that is enough, unless what is said is made more seasoned by voice, expression, and gesture.
And what need I say of learning? — without which, even if something is well said with nature helping, yet that, because it happens by chance, cannot always be ready. In the oratory of Scaurus, a wise and upright man, there was the highest weight and a certain natural authority, so that you would think, when he spoke for a defendant, that he was giving testimony rather than pleading a cause.
This kind of speaking seemed only moderately suited to advocacy, but to a senatorial opinion, of which he was the leading man, very much so; for it signified not prudence only, but — what most of all governed the matter — good faith. He had this from nature itself, which he could not easily have had from teaching; although of this very thing too, as you know, there are precepts. Of him there are both speeches and three books written to Lucius Fufidius on his own life, quite useful, which no one reads; but they read the life and education of Cyrus, that famous one indeed, but neither so suited to our affairs nor yet to be preferred to the praises of Scaurus.

Fufidius himself too was of some number among the advocates. Rutilius, however, was engaged in a certain grim and severe kind of speaking. Each was vehement and keen by nature; and so, when they had sought the consulship together, not only did the one who had suffered defeat accuse his elected competitor of bribery, but Scaurus too, when acquitted, summoned Rutilius into court. Rutilius was of much labour and much industry, which was the more welcome because the same man sustained the great office of giving answers on points of law.

His speeches are meagre; many of his observations on law are brilliant; a learned man and educated in Greek letters, a hearer of Panaetius, almost perfect among the Stoics — whose very acute and artful kind of oratory you nevertheless know to be thin and not well suited to popular assent. And so that opinion which is peculiar to this school — the philosophers' firm and unshaken opinion of themselves — was found in this man. For when, most innocent, he was summoned into court — by which trial we know that the commonwealth was deeply convulsed — although there were at that time the most eloquent men, Lucius Crassus and Marcus Antonius, of consular rank, he was unwilling to call in either of them. He pleaded for himself, and Gaius Cotta said a few words, because he was his sister's son — and he too, indeed, like an orator, although he was quite a young man — and Quintus Mucius spoke clearly indeed and politely, as was his wont, but by no means with that force and copiousness which the nature of that trial and the magnitude of the cause demanded.
We have, then, among the Stoic orators, Rutilius, among the antique, Scaurus; let us praise each, however, since through them not even these kinds in the state lacked this oratorical praise. For I would have it that, as on the stage, so also in the forum, not only those should be praised who use a quick and difficult action, but those too whom they call 'stationary,' whose virtue lies in that simple, unforced truth of pleading.
And since the Stoics have been mentioned, Quintus Aelius Tubero lived at that time, the grandson of Lucius Paullus; in no number of the orators, but severe in life and in keeping with that school which he cultivated, a little harsh too; who indeed in his tribunate gave judgement, against the testimony of his uncle Publius Africanus, that the augurs had no exemption from giving attention to trials; but harsh, uncultivated, rough in oratory as in life; and so he could not match the honours of his ancestors. He was, however, a steadfast and brave citizen, and among the foremost troublesome to Gracchus, which the speech of Gracchus against him indicates. There are also speeches of Tubero against Gracchus; he was middling in speaking, most learned in disputing." Then Brutus said,
"How I perceive that the same thing happens with our countrymen as with the Greeks — that nearly all the Stoics are most skilful in arguing and do it artfully and are almost architects of words, but the same, transferred from disputing to speaking, are found to be poor. I make one exception, Cato, in whom, as a most perfect Stoic, I would not miss the highest eloquence — which I see was scant in Fannius, not great even in Rutilius, and none at all in Tubero."
And I said, "Not without cause, Brutus, because all the care of those men is consumed in dialectic, and that wandering and diffuse and manifold kind of oratory is not employed. But your uncle, as you know, has from the Stoics what was to be sought from them; yet he learned to speak from the teachers of speaking, and trained himself in their manner. For if everything were to be sought from the philosophers, oratory would be better moulded by the instruction of the Peripatetics.
The more, then, do I approve your judgement, Brutus, who have followed the school of those philosophers — that is, of the Old Academy — in whose teaching and precepts the method of arguing is joined with sweetness and copiousness of speaking; although that very practice of the Peripatetics and Academics in the method of speaking is such that it can neither by itself perfect an orator, nor without it can the orator be perfect. For as the oratory of the Stoics is more compact and somewhat more contracted than the ears of the people require, so that of these is freer and broader than the custom of the courts and the forum allows. For who is more copious in speaking than Plato?
Jupiter, the philosophers say, if he spoke Greek, would speak so. Who is more sinewy than Aristotle, sweeter than Theophrastus? Demosthenes is said to have read Plato eagerly and even to have heard him — and this appears from the character and grandeur of his words; he says this himself of himself in a certain letter — but the oratory of the one, transferred to philosophy, seems more pugnacious, so to speak, and that of the others, transferred to the courts, more peaceful.
Now let us, if you please, trace the ages and degrees of the remaining orators." "Yes indeed," said Atticus, "and very eagerly, that I may answer for Brutus too." "Curio, then, of nearly the same age, was a really distinguished orator, whose talent can be judged from his speeches: for there are both others and the noble speech for Servius Fulvius on the charge of incest. When we were boys, this was thought the best of all, which now scarcely appears in this throng of new volumes."
"I know full well," said Brutus, "who has produced that throng of volumes." And I said, "I understand, Brutus, whom you mean; for certainly we both brought something good to the young men, a more magnificent kind of oratory than there had been and more ornate; and we did harm, perhaps, in that the old speeches, after ours — not by me, indeed, for I prefer them to my own — but by most people ceased to be read." "Count me," he said, "among the most; although I see I have now much to read, on your authority, which before I despised."
"And yet," I said, "this speech on incest, praised as it is, is boyish in many passages: on love, on tortures, on rumour the passages are quite empty, yet still tolerable in an age when the ears of our countrymen were not yet worn smooth and the state was not yet educated. He wrote some other things too and spoke many illustrious ones and was in the number of advocates, so that I wonder, since life had been granted him in sufficiency and splendour was not lacking to him, that he was not consul.
But behold, here is a man both of the most outstanding talent and of burning zeal, and learned from a boy — Gaius Gracchus. For do not suppose, Brutus, that anyone was fuller or richer for speaking." And he said, "So precisely do I judge, and of the earlier men I read him almost alone." "No," I said, "Brutus, read him, I advise you indeed plainly. For Roman affairs and Latin letters suffered loss by his untimely death.
Would that he had been willing to show his devotion to his country as much as to his brother! How easily, with such talent, had he lived longer, would he have attained either his father's or his grandfather's glory! In eloquence indeed I am inclined to think he would have had no equal. He is grand in words, wise in maxims, weighty in his whole kind. The finishing hand did not come to his works; many things admirably begun, not quite perfected. He is to be read, I say, by the young men, Brutus, if any orator is; for he can not only sharpen but also nourish the talent.
To this age succeeded Gaius Galba, the son of that most eloquent man Servius, the son-in-law of Publius Crassus, the eloquent and learned in law. Our fathers used to praise him, and favoured him too on account of his father's memory, but he fell in mid-course. For under the Mamilian bill, through the odium of the Jugurthine conspiracy, when he had pleaded for himself, he was overwhelmed. His peroration survives, which is called the epilogue; which was in such honour with us when we were boys that we even learned it by heart. He, being in a college of priests, was the first since the founding of Rome condemned in a public trial.
Publius Scipio, who died in his consulship, did not indeed speak much nor often, but in speaking Latin he was a match for anyone and surpassed all in wit and pleasantry. His colleague Lucius Bestia, starting from good beginnings in his tribunate — for he restored by his bill Publius Popilius, expelled by the violence of Gaius Gracchus — a man both keen and not without speech, had a sad end of his consulship. For by an odious law — the Mamilian inquiry — the Gracchan judges did away with Gaius Galba the priest and four consulars, Lucius Bestia, Gaius Cato, Spurius Albinus, and that most distinguished citizen Lucius Opimius, the slayer of Gracchus, though he had been acquitted by the people, since he had stood against the people's wish.
Unlike him in his tribunate and in all the rest of his life, a wicked citizen, Gaius Licinius Nerva was not without speech. Gaius Fimbria, of nearly the same times, but advanced further in age, was held, so to speak, a muddy advocate, harsh and abusive; in his whole kind a little too heated and excitable, yet by his diligence and the virtue of his mind and his life a good authority in the senate; likewise a tolerable advocate, not unskilled in civil law, and free both in his virtue and in the very kind of his oratory; whose speeches we read as boys, which now we can scarcely find.
And Gaius Sextius Calvinus was a man of keen talent and elegant speech, but of poor health; who, although, when the pains in his feet had relented, he was not wanting in causes, yet did not do this often. And so men used his counsel when they wished, his advocacy when it was permitted. In the same times Marcus Brutus — in whom there was a great disgrace, Brutus, to your family — who, although he bore so great a name and had had a most excellent father, most learned in law, made a regular trade of accusing, as Lycurgus did at Athens. He did not seek magistracies, but was a vehement and troublesome accuser, so that you could easily discern that a certain natural good of the stock had degenerated through the vice of a depraved will.
And at the same time there was an accuser from the commons, Lucius Caesulenus, whom I heard when he was already old, when he had claimed a fine from Lucius Sabellius under the Aquilian law. I would not have made mention of an almost lowest man, did I not judge that I had heard no one speak more suspiciously or more accusingly.

Learned in Greek too was Titus Albucius, or rather plainly a Greek. I speak as I think; but one may judge from his speeches. He was at Athens as a young man, and had come out a perfect Epicurean — a school least suited to speaking.

Now Quintus Catulus was learned, not in that ancient fashion, but in this of ours, than which nothing could be more perfect. Much learning, the highest courtesy not only of life and nature but of oratory too, a certain uncorrupted integrity of the Latin tongue; which can be perceived both from his speeches and most easily from that book which, written about his consulship and his own deeds in a soft and Xenophontic kind of style, he sent to the poet Aulus Furius, his friend; which book is no more known than those three books of Scaurus of which I spoke before.

Then Brutus said, "For my part I know neither that one nor those — but this is my own fault, for they never fell into my hands — but now I shall both take them from you and seek them out more carefully hereafter." "There was, then, in Catulus the Latin tongue; which praise of speaking, no small one, has been neglected by most orators. For as to the sound of his voice and the sweetness of pronouncing the letters, since you knew his son, do not wait to hear what I shall say. Although the son indeed was not in the number of the orators, yet he did not lack, in giving an opinion, both prudence and a certain elegant and learned kind of oratory.
Yet the father Catulus himself was not held the leading man in the number of advocates, but he was such that, when you heard certain men who were then preeminent, he seemed inferior, but when you heard him alone, without comparison, you were not only content but would not seek anything better.
Quintus Metellus Numidicus and his colleague Marcus Silanus used to speak about public affairs what was enough for such men and for consular dignity. Marcus Aurelius Scaurus did not speak often, but politely; in Latin indeed he spoke among the most elegant. The same praise of speaking well belonged to Aulus Albinus; for Albinus the flamen too was held in the number of able speakers. Quintus Caepio also, a keen and brave man, to whom the fortune of war was a charge and the people's hatred a calamity.
Then too Gaius and Lucius Memmius were middling orators, keen and bitter accusers; and so they summoned many to capital trial, but did not often plead for defendants. Spurius Thorius had power enough in the popular kind of speaking — he who relieved the public land by a faulty and useless rent-law. Marcus Marcellus, the father of Aeserninus, was not indeed among the advocates, but among the ready and not unpractised in speaking, as was his son
Publius Lentulus. Lucius Cotta too, of praetorian rank, in the number of middling orators, had not advanced very far in the praise of speaking, but of set purpose pursued and imitated antiquity, both in his words and even in the somewhat rustic sound of his speech.

And both in this Cotta himself and in many others I am aware that I both have entered, and shall enter, in the number of orators men not so very eloquent. For my purpose is to gather those who have discharged this office in the state, so as to hold the place of orators; and what their ascent was, and how difficult in all things is the perfection and finish of the best, may be judged from what I shall say.

For how many orators have now been mentioned, and how long are we engaged in their enumeration, when nevertheless slowly and scarcely — as a while ago to Demosthenes and Hyperides, so now to Antonius and Crassus — have we arrived! For so I judge, that these were the greatest orators, and that in them first the copiousness of speaking in Latin was made equal to the glory of the Greeks.
Everything came into Antonius's mind; and each thing was placed in its own place, where it could do most good and have most force — as by a general the cavalry, the infantry, the light-armed, so by him the parts of a speech were placed in their most advantageous positions. He had the highest memory, no suspicion of premeditation; he always seemed to approach speaking unprepared, but he was so prepared that, while he was speaking, the judges sometimes seemed to have been not sufficiently prepared to guard themselves.
The very words were indeed not of the most elegant diction — and so he lacked the praise of careful speaking, yet he did not speak at all foully — but those words which are the proper praise of an orator: for to speak Latin itself is, as I said a little before, to be reckoned among great merits, but not so much for its own sake as because it is neglected by most; for it is not so glorious to know Latin as it is disgraceful not to know it, nor does it seem to me so much the property of a good orator as of a Roman citizen; — but nevertheless Antonius, both in choosing words (and that itself not so much for charm as for weight) and in placing them and binding them together by their rounding-off, directed everything to method and, as it were, to art; but much more this same thing in the ornaments and shapings of the thoughts. And because Demosthenes excels all in this kind, he has therefore been judged by the learned the foremost of the orators. For the schemata, as the Greeks call them, most of all adorn the orator, and have their weight not so much in painting the words as in lighting up the thoughts.

But while these qualities were great in Antonius, his delivery too was singular; which, if it is to be divided into gesture and voice, his gesture was such as did not express the words but agreed with the thoughts: hands, shoulders, sides, stamping of the foot, posture, gait, and every movement in harmony with the words and thoughts; his voice lasting, but by nature somewhat hoarse. But this fault he alone turned to good.

For he had something tearful, suited both to producing belief and to stirring pity: so that there seemed to be truth in that saying which they relate of Demosthenes, who, when someone had asked what was first in speaking, answered 'delivery'; what second, the same; and the same a third time. Nothing penetrates more into men's minds and shapes, forms, and bends them, and makes the orators seem such as they themselves wish to seem.
Some said that Lucius Crassus was equal to him, others preferred him. This at least all judged thus, that there was no one who, with either of these as advocate, would feel the want of any other man's talent. For my part, although I assign so much to Antonius as I said above, yet I judge that nothing could have been made more perfect than Crassus. There was the highest dignity; there was joined with dignity an oratorical, not a buffoonish, charm of wit and urbanity; an accurate and unforced, careful elegance of speaking Latin; in arguing a marvellous power of exposition; when there was a debate about civil law, about the fair and the good, an abundance of arguments and comparisons.
For as Antonius had an incredible force in producing a conjecture or in allaying or arousing suspicion, so in interpreting, in defining, in unfolding equity, nothing was more copious than Crassus; and this was recognized, both often on other occasions and especially before the centumviri in the cause of Manius Curius.
For there he said so much against the letter of the will in favour of the fair and the good that he overwhelmed that most acute man Quintus Scaevola, and most prepared in the law on which that cause turned, with an abundance of arguments and examples; and so that case was then pleaded by these advocates, of an age and now of consular rank, while each defended the civil law from the opposite side, in such a way that Crassus was thought the most learned in law of the eloquent, Scaevola the most eloquent of the learned in law. And Scaevola, although he was most acute in thinking out what in law or in equity was true or not, was yet wonderfully apt in words to the matter, with the greatest brevity.
Wherefore let us reckon him a marvellous orator in this kind of interpreting, explaining, expounding, so that I have seen nothing like it; but in amplifying, in adorning, in refuting, more an assessor to be feared than an orator to be admired. But let us return to Crassus." Then Brutus said,
"Although I seemed to myself to have known Scaevola well enough from those things which I often heard from Gaius Rutilius — whom I knew on account of his familiarity with our Scaevola — yet that great praise of his speaking was not known to me; and so I took pleasure that so accomplished a man and so excellent a talent existed in our commonwealth."
Here I said, "Do not, Brutus, suppose that anything was more excellent in our state than these two. For as I said a little before that the one was the most eloquent of the learned in law, the other the most learned in law of the eloquent, so in other respects they were so unlike each other that you could not nevertheless decide which you would rather resemble. Crassus was the most sparing of the elegant, Scaevola the most elegant of the sparing; Crassus, with the highest courtesy, had also severity enough, while Scaevola, with much severity, did not yet lack courtesy.
One may go on in this way with everything; but I fear these things may seem to be invented, so as to be said by me in a certain way; yet the matter stands thus. Since all virtue, as your Old Academy said, Brutus, is a mean, each of these wished to follow something middle; but it so fell out that the one had part of the other's praise, while each had his own praise entire."
Then Brutus said, "As, from your discourse, I seem to myself to have come to know Crassus and Scaevola well, so, thinking of you and of Servius Sulpicius, I judge that there is a certain likeness between you and them." "In what way, pray?" I said. "Because you too seem to me," he said, "to have wished to know just as much civil law as was enough for an orator, and Servius to have taken up just enough eloquence to be able easily to maintain the civil law; and your ages, like theirs, differ in nothing, or in next to nothing."
And I said, "About myself it is not necessary to say anything; but about Servius both you speak rightly, and I will say what I feel. For I could not easily name anyone who applied more zeal than he, both to speaking and to all the disciplines of good things. For we were engaged in the same exercises at the outset of our age, and afterwards he too set out together with me to Rhodes, that he might be better and more learned; and from the time he returned, he seems to me to have preferred to be first in the second art rather than second in the first. And I am inclined to think he might have been equal to the leading men; but perhaps he preferred — what he attained — to be by far the foremost of all, not only of those of his own age, but even of those who had ever been in the civil law.
Here Brutus said, "Do you say so? Do you set our Servius even before Quintus Scaevola?" "Thus indeed, Brutus, I judge," I said, "that there was a great practical use of civil law both in Scaevola and in many others, but the art in this one man alone; which the mere knowledge of law itself would never have produced, had he not besides learned that art which teaches one to divide a whole subject into parts, to unfold what is hidden by definition, to make plain what is obscure by interpretation, first to see ambiguities, then to distinguish them, and lastly to have a rule by which true and false may be judged, and what things follow from what premises and what do not.
For he brought this art, the greatest of all arts, as a kind of light to those things which were answered or pleaded confusedly by others." "You seem to me to mean dialectic," he said. "You understand rightly," I said; "but he joined to it also a knowledge of letters and an elegance of speech, which can most easily be perceived from his writings, of which there are none like them.
And since, for the sake of learning, he had studied under two most skilled men, Lucius Lucilius Balbus and Gaius Aquilius Gallus, he surpassed by his subtlety and diligence the ready and prepared quickness of Gallus, an acute and practised man, in pleading and in giving answers; and he overcame, in dispatching and finishing matters, the considered slowness of Balbus, a learned and erudite man, in both respects. So he has what each of them had, and supplied what each lacked.
And so, as Crassus seems to me to have acted more wisely than Scaevola — for the latter eagerly took up causes, in which he was surpassed by Crassus; the former did not wish to be consulted, lest in any matter he should be inferior to Scaevola — so Servius most wisely, since the two civil and forensic arts had the most of both praise and influence, brought it about that in the one he excelled all, and from the other took up just as much as was enough both to maintain the civil law and to obtain consular dignity.
Then Brutus said, "Just so, indeed, I thought before too — for I lately heard him eagerly and often at Samos, when I wished to learn from him our pontifical law, in so far as it was joined with the civil law — and now I confirm my judgement much more by your testimony and judgement; and at the same time I rejoice at this, that both your equality, and your equal ranks of honour, and the, as it were, neighbouring nearness of your arts and studies, are so far from that detraction and envy which is wont to tear most men, that it seems not only not to fester your mutual goodwill, but even to win it. For such as I perceive you to be toward him, such have I come to know him to be toward you in goodwill and judgement. And so I grieve that the Roman people lacks both his counsel and your voice for so long — which, while it is to be grieved over in itself, is much more so to one considering to whom these things have not been transferred, but have somehow come down." Here Atticus said, "I had said from the beginning that we should be silent about the commonwealth; so let us do so. For if we wish in this way to miss things one by one, we shall find an end not only of complaining but not even of mourning.
Let us proceed, then," I said, "to the rest, and pursue the order we have set." "Crassus, then, came prepared, was awaited, was listened to; from the very beginning at once — since with him everything was always careful — he seemed worthy of the expectation. There was not much throwing about of the body, no lowering of the voice, no walking about, no frequent stamping of the foot; his oratory was vehement and at times angry and full of just indignation, with much wit and that joined with weight; and — what is difficult — the same man was both very ornate and very brief; and now in altercation he found no equal.
He was engaged in nearly every kind of cause; he came early to the place of the leading orators. He accused Gaius Carbo, a most eloquent man, while quite a young man; he obtained the highest reputation of talent, not only praise but even admiration.
He afterwards defended the Vestal Licinia, when he was twenty-seven years old. In that very cause he was most eloquent, and left certain parts of his speech in writing. As a young man he wished to touch upon something of a popular cause in the colony of Narbo, and himself, as he did, to lead out that colony; there survives a speech of his on that law, more mature, so to speak, than that age bore. Then many causes; but his tribunate was so silent that, had he not in that magistracy dined at the house of the auctioneer Granius, and had Lucilius not twice told us this, we should not know that he had been tribune of the commons.
"Just so," said Brutus; "but neither do I seem to have heard anything of Scaevola's tribunate, and I believe he was a colleague of Crassus." "In all the other magistracies indeed," I said, "but Scaevola was tribune the year after, and with him sitting on the Rostra Crassus advocated the Servilian law; for he held the censorship without Scaevola — for that magistracy none of the Scaevolae ever sought. But this speech of Crassus, when it was published — which I know for certain you have often read — he was then thirty-four years old, and exceeded me in age by just as many years. For he advocated that law in the consulship of those in which we were born, since he himself was born in the consulship of Quintus Caepio and Gaius Laelius, just three years younger than Antonius. Which I have set down for this reason — that it might be noted in what age the first maturity of speaking Latin appeared, and that it might be understood that it had now been brought almost to its summit, so that scarcely anyone could add anything to it, except one who should be better furnished from philosophy, from civil law, from history."
"Is there, or is there already," said Brutus, "that man whom you await?" "I do not know," I said. "But there is also a speech of Lucius Crassus in his consulship for Quintus Caepio, a joined defence, not brief as a eulogy, but, as a speech, brief; and his last, as censor, which he used in his forty-eighth year. In all these there is a certain colour of truth without any paint; nay more, that grouping and rounding-off of words — if it pleases to call it thus a 'period' — was with him contracted and brief, and he distributed his oratory rather gladly into certain members, which the Greeks call cola.
At this point Brutus said, "Since you praise those orators so highly, I could wish that Antonius had pleased to write something more besides that quite meagre little book on the method of speaking, and Crassus more: for they would have left to all a memorial of themselves, and to us besides a discipline of speaking. For we have come to know the elegance of Scaevola's speaking sufficiently from those speeches which he left."
And I said, "For my part, from boyhood that speech on the law of Caepio was, as it were, my mistress; in which both the authority of the senate is adorned, on whose behalf, as an order, those things are said, and odium is roused against the faction of the judges and of the accusers, against whose power one then had to speak in a popular manner. In that speech many things were said weightily, many gently, many harshly, many wittily; more even were said than were written, as can be understood from certain heads set down but not developed. That censorial speech itself against his colleague Gnaeus Domitius is not a speech, but, as it were, heads of matters and a somewhat fuller note for the speech. For there was never an altercation held with greater outcry.
And indeed in this man too the popular style of speaking was excellent; the kind of speaking of Antonius was much more suited to the courts than to public assemblies.

At this point I do not leave out Domitius himself. For although he was not in the number of the orators, yet I judge that there was enough of oratory and talent in him to maintain both the part of a magistrate and consular dignity; the same I would say of Gaius Caelius, that there was in him the highest industry and the highest virtues, and just so much eloquence as was enough for his friends in private affairs, and for his own dignity in public affairs. At the same time Marcus Herennius was counted among the middling orators who spoke Latin carefully; who nevertheless surpassed in the canvass for the consulship Lucius Philippus, a man of the highest nobility, by kinship, fellowship, college, and the highest eloquence too. At the same time Gaius Claudius, although he was great on account of his highest nobility and singular power, yet brought also a certain middling eloquence. Of nearly the same time was the Roman knight

Gaius Titius, who in my judgement seems to have arrived where a Latin orator could nearly arrive without Greek letters and without much practice. His speeches have so much pointedness, so many examples, so much urbanity, that they seem almost written in the Attic style. The same pointed wit he transferred to tragedies acutely enough, but with too little of the tragic. Him the poet Lucius Afranius was eager to imitate, a very pointed man, eloquent indeed even in his plays, as you know.
There was also Quintus Rubrius Varro, who was judged by the senate a public enemy along with Gaius Marius, a keen and vehement accuser, in that kind quite commendable. Learned too in Greek letters and made for speaking was our kinsman Marcus Gratidius, a close friend of Marcus Antonius, while whose prefect he was killed in Cilicia; he it was who accused Gaius Fimbria — the father of Marcus Marius Gratidianus.
And even among the allies and Latins there were held to be orators: Quintus Vettius Vettianus of the Marsi, whom I myself knew, a prudent man and brief in speaking; the Quintus and Decimus Valerius of Sora, my neighbours and friends, not so admirable in speaking as learned both in Greek and Latin letters; Gaius Rusticelius of Bononia, he indeed both practised and naturally fluent; but the most eloquent of all outside this city was Titus Betucius Barrus of Asculum, of whom there are some speeches delivered at Asculum, and one at Rome against Caepio, quite noble; to which speech Aelius answered through the mouth of Caepio — Aelius who regularly wrote speeches for many, but was never an orator himself.
Among our ancestors, however, I find that Lucius Papirius of Fregellae was held the most eloquent from Latium, of nearly the age of Tiberius Gracchus, son of Publius; of him there is also a speech delivered in the senate for the people of Fregellae and the Latin colonists." Then Brutus said, "What, then, do you assign to those foreign orators, as it were?" "What do you think," I said, "except the same as to the city ones? — except for one thing, that their oratory is not, as it were, coloured by a certain urbanity." And Brutus said,
"What, pray, is that colour of urbanity?" "I do not know," I said; "I only know that there is a certain something. This you, Brutus, will already understand, when you come into Gaul; you will hear there even certain words not current at Rome, but these can be changed and unlearned; that other thing is greater, which in the voices of our orators rings and resounds more urbanely. Nor does this appear in orators only, but in others too.
I remember that Titus Tinca of Placentia, a most witty man, used to contend in raillery with our friend the auctioneer Quintus Granius." "Is it he," said Brutus, "about whom Lucilius says much?" "That very man; but Granius, though Tinca said no fewer laughable things, overwhelmed him with a certain native flavour; so that I no longer wonder at that which is said to have happened to Theophrastus, who, when he was inquiring of a certain old woman at what price she was selling something, and she had answered and added, 'Stranger, it cannot be less,' took it ill that he did not escape the appearance of a stranger, though he had passed his life at Athens and spoke best of all. So, as I think, in our people there is a certain sound of the city folk, as there of the Athenians. But let us return home — that is, let us go back to our own.
To the two highest, then, Crassus and Antonius, Lucius Philippus came nearest, but nearest by a long interval, nevertheless. And so, although no one came between to set himself before him, yet I would call him neither second nor third. For in a chariot-race I would not count him second or third who has scarcely come out of the starting-stalls when the first has already received the palm; nor among orators one who is so far from the first that he scarcely seems to be on the same course. But yet there were in Philippus those qualities which, were one to regard them without comparison with those men, he would call great enough: the highest freedom in speech, much wit; frequent enough in discovering his thoughts, fluent in unfolding them; he was also among the foremost, for those times, instructed in Greek learning, and in altercation witty with a certain sting and abuse.
Almost joined to the age of these was Lucius Gellius, an orator not so much in demand, although you would not know what was lacking to him; for he was neither unlearned nor slow at devising, nor unmindful of Roman affairs, and fluent enough in words; but his age had fallen among great orators. Yet he gave much and useful service to his friends, and lived so long that he was bound up with the orators of many ages.
Much engaged in causes too, at nearly the same times, was Decimus Brutus, he who was consul with Mamercus, a man learned both in Greek and Latin letters. Lucius Scipio too spoke not unskilfully, and Gnaeus Pompeius, son of Sextus, held some rank. For Sextus his brother had devoted a most outstanding talent to the highest knowledge of civil law and to a perfect knowledge of geometry and of Stoic matters. Likewise in law, and before these, Marcus Brutus, and a little after him Gaius Billienus, a man great by himself, had come out, by nearly a similar method, supreme; who would have been made consul, had he not fallen upon the Marian consulships and upon those straits of canvassing.
But the eloquence of Gnaeus Octavius, which had been unknown before his consulship, was in his consulship vehemently approved in many assemblies. But from those who were only in the number of speakers, not of orators, let us now return to the orators." "I agree," said Atticus; "for you seemed to wish to seek out the eloquent, not the diligent."
"In festivity, then, and in wit," I said, "Gaius Julius, son of Lucius, surpassed all his elders and all his equals, and was an orator not at all vehement indeed, but no one was ever more seasoned with urbanity, with charm, with sweetness. There are some speeches of his, from which, as from his tragedies of the same kind, his gentleness, not without sinew, can be perceived.
His equal Publius Cethegus, for whom there was speech enough about public affairs — for he held it and had come to know it thoroughly; and so in the senate he obtained the authority of consulars — but in public causes he seemed nothing, in private ones an old hand enough. In private causes there was Quintus Lucretius Vispillo, both acute and skilled in law; for Ofella was more suited to assemblies than to courts. Prudent too was Titus Annius Velina, and in causes of that kind a quite tolerable orator. In the same kind of causes much engaged was Titus Iuventius, too slow indeed in speaking and almost frigid, but both shrewd and cunning in catching his adversary, and besides not unlearned, and with a great understanding of civil law.
His hearer Publius Orbius, of nearly my own age, was not very practised in speaking, but in civil law was not inferior to his teacher. For Titus Aufidius, who lived to extreme old age, wished to be like these men, and was both a good and an innocent man, but spoke too little; nor indeed more did his brother Marcus Vergilius, who as tribune of the commons cited the commander Lucius Sulla to appear. His colleague Publius Magius was nevertheless a little more copious in speaking.
But of all the orators, or rather ranters, who were plainly unlearned and inurbane or even rustic, of those at least whom I have known, I judge the most fluent and the most acute in speaking, of our order, Quintus Sertorius, of the equestrian, Gaius Gargonius. There was also one easy and ready for speaking, of much splendour of life and quite commendable talent, Titus Junius, son of Lucius, of tribunician rank, on whose accusation Publius Sextius, praetor-elect, was condemned for bribery; he would have advanced further in honours, had he not always been of a feeble and even sickly health.
And I perfectly well understand that I am engaged in mentioning men who were neither held to be orators nor were so, and that some are passed over by me from among the old men who deserved mention or praise. But this is through ignorance; for what is there of an earlier age that can be written about those of whom no monuments speak, neither of others nor of themselves? But of those whom we ourselves have seen, we shall pass over almost no one [of those whom we have at some time seen speaking].
For I wish it to be known that, in so great and so old a commonwealth, with the greatest rewards of eloquence set forth, all desired to speak, not very many ventured, few were able. Yet I shall speak of each one in such a way that it can be understood whom I judge to have been a bawler, whom an orator. At nearly the same times, a little younger than Julius, but almost his equals, were Gaius Cotta, Publius Sulpicius, Quintus Varius, Gnaeus Pomponius, Gaius Curio, Lucius Fufius, Marcus Drusus, Publius Antistius; nor was there ever a richer crop of orators in any age.
Of these Cotta and Sulpicius, in my judgement and easily in that of all, bore away the first place." Here Atticus said, "How do you mean that — both in your judgement and in that of all? Does the judgement of the crowd, in approving or disapproving an orator, always agree with the judgement of those who understand? Or are some approved by the multitude, others by those who understand?" "You inquire rightly, Atticus," I said; "but you will perhaps hear from me what not all may approve.
"Do you trouble yourself about that," he said, "if you are about to win the approval only of Brutus here?" "Plainly, Atticus," I said, "I would much rather that this disputation about approving or disapproving an orator should please you and Brutus, but I would have my own eloquence approved by the people. For he who so speaks as to be approved by the multitude must necessarily be approved by the learned too. For what in speaking is right or faulty I shall judge, if only I am such as can or know how to judge it; but what kind of orator he is can be understood from what he accomplishes by speaking.
For there are three things, as I at least feel, which are to be accomplished by speaking: that the one before whom one speaks should be instructed, that he should be delighted, that he should be vehemently moved. By what virtues of an orator each of these is accomplished, or by what faults the orator either does not attain these or even slips and falls in them, some artist will judge. But whether or not it is accomplished by the orator that those who hear are so affected as the orator wishes, is wont to be judged by the assent of the crowd and the approbation of the people. And so there was never a disagreement between the learned and the people about a good orator or a bad one.
Do you think that, while those flourished whom I mentioned before, the gradations of orators were not the same in the judgement of the crowd and of the learned? If you had asked anyone from the people, 'Who is the most eloquent in this state?' he would either hesitate between Antonius and Crassus, or one would name this one, another that. Would no one set before these Philippus, so sweet an orator, so weighty, so witty — whom we ourselves, who wish to weigh these things by some art, have said to have been nearest to them? Surely no one; for this very thing is the mark of the supreme orator, to seem to the people the supreme orator.
Wherefore, as the flute-player Antigenidas said to a pupil who was failing badly with the people, 'Play for me and for the Muses,' so I would say to Brutus here, speaking, as he is wont, before the multitude, 'Play for me and for the people, my Brutus,' that those who hear may know what is accomplished, and I too may understand why it is accomplished. He who hears an orator believes what is said, thinks it true, assents, approves; the speech produces belief: you, the artist, what more do you seek?
The hearing multitude is delighted and led by the speech and, as it were, suffused with a certain pleasure: what have you to dispute? It rejoices, grieves, laughs, weeps, favours, hates, despises, envies, is led to pity, to shame, to regret; it is angered, mollified, hopes, fears; these things happen just as the minds of those present are handled by words and thoughts and delivery; what is there that should await the opinion of some learned man? For what the multitude approves, this same thing the learned must approve. In short, this is the proof of the people's judgement, in which there was never a disagreement of the people with the learned and the understanding.
When there were many orators of varied kinds of speaking, which of these was ever judged to excel by the judgement of the crowd, who was not likewise approved by the learned? And when would it have been doubtful among our fathers, to whom the choice was given of an advocate, that he should choose either Antonius or Crassus? Many others were at hand; yet which of these one might have rather doubted about, but that of the two no one doubted. And when, in our youth, there were Cotta and Hortensius, did anyone, who at least had the power of choosing, prefer anyone to these?
Then Brutus said, "Why do you seek others? About yourself, did we not see what defendants would wish, what Hortensius himself judged? — who, when he shared causes with you — for I was often present — always left to you the place of peroration, where oratory is most powerful." "He did that indeed," I said, "and, led, I believe, by goodwill toward me, ascribed everything to me. But what the people's opinion of me may be I do not know; about the rest I affirm this, that those who were held in the opinion of the crowd the most eloquent were the same most approved in the judgement of the understanding too.
For Demosthenes could not say the same as they relate the famous poet Antimachus to have said: who, when, his hearers having been called together, he read to them that great volume of his which you know, and when all except Plato had left him reading, said, 'I shall read none the less: for to me Plato alone is worth a hundred thousand.' And rightly; for a recondite poem ought to move the approbation of a few, a popular speech the assent of the crowd. But if Demosthenes had this same Plato as his single hearer, when he had been left by the rest, he could not have uttered a word.
What could you do, Brutus, if an assembly should leave you, as it once left Curio?" "For my part," said he, "to declare myself to you, even in those causes in which all our business is with the judges, not with the people, yet if I should be left by the bystanders, I could not speak." "So the matter stands," I said. "As, if blown flutes do not return their sound, the flute-player thinks they should be thrown away, so to the orator the people's ears are, as it were, flutes; if these do not receive the breath blown into them — or if the hearer altogether, like a horse, does not respond — an end must be made of driving.

There is this difference, however, that the crowd sometimes approves an orator who ought not to be approved, but approves him without comparison; when it is delighted by a middling or even a bad one, it is content with him; it does not perceive that there is better; it approves that which is, of whatever kind it is. For even a middling orator holds the ears, provided there is something in him; nor does anything have more force with men's minds than the order and ornament of oratory.

Wherefore who from the people, when he heard Quintus Scaevola speaking for Marcus Coponius in that cause of which I spoke before, would either expect anything more polished or more elegant or altogether better, or think that it could be made?
When he wished to prove this — that Manius Curius, when he had been so instituted heir, 'if the ward should have died before he came into his own guardianship,' could not be heir, the ward not having been born — what did he not say about the law of wills? about the old formulae? how it ought to have been written, if an heir were instituted even in case the son were not born?
how captious it was for the people, that what was written should be neglected, and intentions sought by conjecture, and the writings of simple men perverted by the interpretation of the eloquent?
how much he said about the authority of his father, who had always maintained that this was the law? how much altogether about preserving the civil law? And when he said all these things both skilfully and knowingly, and likewise briefly and closely and ornately enough and very elegantly, who would there be among the people who would either expect or think that anything could be made better? But indeed, as on the other side Crassus began with a young dandy who, walking on the shore and having found an oar-pin, conceived a desire to build a ship on that account, that Scaevola likewise had from one oar-pin made a centumviral trial of an inheritance: by this beginning, with many thoughts of the same kind following, he delighted and led the minds of all who were present from severity to mirth — which is one of the three things which I said must be accomplished by an orator. Then that the man who had made the will had wished this, had meant this, that in whatever way there should be no son to come into his own guardianship, whether unborn or dead before, Curius should be heir; that most men so write, and that this is valid and always has been valid. Saying these things and many of the kind, he produced belief; which is the second of the three duties of an orator.
Then he maintained the fair and good intentions and wishes of wills: how great the captiousness in words would be, both in other matters and especially in wills, if intentions were neglected; how great a power Scaevola would assume to himself, if no one should dare to make a will hereafter except according to his opinion. Unfolding these things both weightily and copiously with examples, and with variety, and even laughably and wittily, he stirred such admiration and assent that it seemed no one had spoken on the other side; — this was the third duty of the orator by division, the greatest in kind. Here that judge from the people, who separately had admired the one, would, when he had heard the other, despise his own judgement; but the understanding and learned hearer, listening to Scaevola, would feel that there was a certain richer and more ornate kind of speaking. But when the cause had been pleaded by each, if it were asked which was the better orator, never indeed would the judgement of the wise man differ from the judgement of the crowd.
In what, then, does the understanding man surpass the unskilled? In a great and difficult thing; if indeed it is great to know by what means is accomplished or lost in speaking that, whatever it is, which either ought to be accomplished by speaking or ought not to be lost. The learned hearer surpasses the unlearned in this too, that often, when two or more orators are approved by the people's judgement, he understands which kind of speaking is best. For that which is not approved by the people cannot be approved even by the understanding hearer. For as from the sound of the strings in the lyre it is wont to be understood how skilfully they have been struck, so from the movement of minds it is discerned what the orator accomplishes in handling them.
And so the understanding judge of speaking, not sitting by and listening attentively, but at a single glance and in passing, often judges of the orator. He sees the judge yawning, talking with another, sometimes even forming a knot of bystanders, sending to ask the hour, asking the president to dismiss the court: he understands that there is no orator present in that cause who can apply his oratory to the minds of the judges as the hand to the lyre. The same man, if in passing he has seen the judges intent and looking up, so that they seem either to be instructed about the matter and to approve it even by their expression, or, as a bird by some song, to be held, as it were, suspended by the oratory, or — what is most needed — to be more vehemently disturbed by pity, hatred, or some movement of the mind: if, in passing, as I said, he has seen these things, though he has heard nothing, he will surely understand that an orator is at work in that trial and that an oratorical work is being done or is already finished."
When I had set forth these things, each assented; and I, as if beginning anew, said, "Since, then, all this discourse flowed from Cotta and Sulpicius, when I said that these were most approved by the judgement of those men and of that age, I shall return to them themselves; then I shall pursue the rest in order, as I have begun. Since, then, there are two kinds of good orators — for these are what we are seeking — one of those who speak thinly and closely, the other of those who speak loftily and amply; although that is better which is more splendid and magnificent, yet in good men all things that are of the highest are rightly praised.
But that close orator must beware of poverty and meagreness, the ample one of an inflated and corrupt kind of oratory. Cotta, then, discovered acutely, spoke purely and fluently; and as, very knowingly, on account of the weakness of his sides, he had relaxed all straining, so to the feebleness of his strength he accommodated his kind of speaking. There was nothing in his oratory but what was genuine, nothing but what was dry and sound; and this was the greatest thing, that, although he could scarcely bend the minds of the judges by force of oratory and did not speak at all in that kind, yet by his handling he impelled them to do the same, moved by him, as those roused by Sulpicius did.
For Sulpicius was, of all whom at least I have heard, perhaps the most grand and, so to speak, tragic orator. His voice was both great and sweet and splendid; his gesture and the movement of his body so graceful that he nevertheless seemed trained for the forum, not for the stage; his oratory impetuous and fluent, yet not redundant nor overflowing. He wished to imitate Crassus; Cotta preferred Antonius; but from the latter the force of Antonius was absent, from the former the charm of Crassus."
"O great art!" said Brutus; "if indeed in those men, when they were supreme orators, each lacked one of the two greatest things which the other had." "And in these orators this is to be noted, that they can be supreme who are unlike each other. For nothing was so unlike as Cotta to Sulpicius, and each greatly excelled his equals. Wherefore it is the part of an understanding teacher to see whither each man's nature carries him, and, using that as a guide, so to train him — as it is recorded that Isocrates said, of the very keen talent of Theopompus and the very gentle one of Ephorus, that he applied spurs to the one, reins to the other.
The speeches of Sulpicius which are in circulation, Publius Cannutius, my contemporary, a man in my judgement most eloquent outside our order, is thought to have written after his death. Of Sulpicius himself there is no speech, and I often heard from him that he was neither accustomed nor able to write. The speech of Cotta for himself under the Varian law, as it is entitled, Lucius Aelius wrote at Cotta's request. He was altogether an excellent man and a Roman knight most honourable among the first, and likewise most learned both in Greek and Latin letters, and lettered and skilled in our antiquity, both in things discovered and in things done and in the old writers. This knowledge our Varro, a man of outstanding talent and of every learning, received from him and increased by himself, and set forth in fuller and more illustrious writings.
But the same Aelius wished to be a Stoic, and as an orator he never either studied or was one. Yet he wrote speeches for others to deliver; as for Quintus Metellus, for Quintus Caepio, for Quintus Pompeius Rufus — although the latter himself also wrote those which he used for himself, but not without Aelius.
For at these writings I myself was present, when I was a young man with Aelius and used to hear him very eagerly. But I wonder that Cotta, himself a supreme orator and least inept, was willing for the slight little speeches of Aelius to be thought his own.

To these two of the same age no third was counted, but Pomponius pleased me most, or rather, displeased me least. There was altogether a place in the greatest causes for no one besides those of whom I spoke above, because Antonius, who was most sought after, was easy in accepting causes; Crassus more fastidious, but he too accepted them. He who had neither of these took refuge generally with Philippus or with Caesar; Cotta and Sulpicius were sought after. So by these six advocates the illustrious causes were pleaded; and there were not so many trials as in our age, nor what now happens, that single causes were defended by several — than which nothing is more faulty.

We answer those whom we have not heard: in which, first, often one thing was said and another reported to us; then it is of great importance that I should see for myself how my adversary asserts about each matter, and especially how each matter is received. But nothing is more faulty than that, when there ought to be one body of the defence, the cause should arise anew, when it has been concluded by another.
For of all causes there is one natural beginning, one peroration; the remaining parts, as members each placed in its own place, hold their own force and dignity. And since it is difficult in a long speech not sometimes to say something so that one is inconsistent with oneself, how much more difficult is it to beware of saying anything that is not consistent with the speech of him who spoke before you? But because both the labour is much greater to plead a whole cause than a part, and because more thanks are won if you speak at one time for several, therefore we have gladly adopted this custom.
There were, however, some to whom Curio seemed the third of that age, because he perhaps used more splendid words and because he spoke Latin not at all badly, owing, I believe, to some domestic usage. For of letters he knew almost nothing; but it is of great importance whom one hears daily at home, with whom one converses from a boy, how fathers, tutors, and even mothers speak. We read the letters of Cornelia, the mother of the Gracchi: it appears that the sons were brought up not so much in the lap as in the speech of their mother. The speech of Laelia, daughter of Gaius, was often heard by us: therefore we saw her tinged with the elegance of her father, and his two daughters the Muciae, whose speech was known to me, and his granddaughters the Liciniae, both of whom we ourselves heard, and the wife of Scipio you too, Brutus, I believe, heard speaking at some time." "Yes indeed, and gladly," said Brutus; "and the more gladly because she was the daughter of Lucius Crassus."
"What of that Crassus," I said, "the son of that Licinia, who was adopted by the will of Crassus?" "He is said indeed to have been of the highest talent," he said; "and indeed this Scipio, my colleague, seems to me really both to speak and to plead well." "You judge rightly, Brutus," I said. "For his stock is begotten from the very root of wisdom. For we have already spoken of his two grandfathers, Scipio and Crassus, and of his three great-grandfathers, Quintus Metellus, of those famous four sons, Publius Scipio, who from the domination of Tiberius Gracchus, as a private man, reclaimed the commonwealth into liberty, and Quintus Scaevola the augur, who was held most skilled in law and likewise very affable. And how illustrious is the name of his two great-great-grandfathers,
Publius Scipio, who was twice consul, who was called Corculum, and the other the wisest of all, Gaius Laelius." "O noble stock," he said, "and, as into one tree several kinds are grafted, so into that house the engrafted wisdom of many!" "Similarly, then, I surmise — to compare small things with great — that the house of Curio, although he was left an orphan, was, by his father's example, accustomed to pure speech; and I judge this the more because I have known no one of those at least who were of any account so unlearned, so rude in every kind of honourable arts.
He had known no poet, had read no orator, had collected no memory of antiquity; he had learned neither public nor private and civil law. Although this indeed was the case in others too, and great orators indeed, whom we saw too little furnished with these arts, such as Sulpicius, such as Antonius. But they nevertheless had that one work of speaking elaborated; and since it consists of five very well-known parts, no one could be utterly nothing in any part of them: for in whichever single one he plainly limped, he could not be an orator; but yet one excelled more in one, another in another.
Antonius found what needed to be said and how it should be prepared and in what place placed, and embraced these in his memory, but excelled in delivery; and he had some of these on a par with Crassus, some even superior; but the oratory of Crassus shone more. Nor indeed can we say that to Sulpicius or to Cotta or to any good orator any one of those five parts was plainly and utterly lacking.
And so in Curio this can most truly be judged, that an orator is commended by no one thing more than by the splendour and copiousness of his words. For he was both slow in thinking and disordered in arranging. The remaining two are delivery and memory: in each he stirred the guffaws of those who mocked. His movement was such as both Gaius Julius marked for ever — when, as he swayed his whole body to either side, he asked who was speaking from a boat — and Gnaeus Sicinius, an impure but very ridiculous man; nor was there anything else in him resembling an orator.
When, as tribune of the commons, he had brought forward the consuls Curio and Octavius, and Curio had said much while his colleague Gnaeus Octavius sat by, who was bound with bandages and smeared with many medicaments on account of the pain in his limbs, Sicinius said: 'Never, Octavius, will you repay thanks to your colleague: who, had he not tossed himself about in his manner, the flies would have eaten you up there today.' His memory was so utterly none that sometimes, when he had proposed three things, he would either add a fourth or look for the third; who, in a private trial, even a very great one, when I had concluded for Titinia, the wife of Cotta, and he was speaking against me for Servius Naevius, suddenly forgot the whole cause, and said that this had been done by the poisons and enchantments of Titinia. Great signs these of a forgetful mind; but nothing is more shameful than that even in his writings he forgot what he had set down a little before — as in that book where he represents himself coming out of the senate and conversing with our Pansa and with the younger Curio, and all that conversation is drawn from the son's inquiry about what had been done in the senate. In which, when Curio inveighed at length against Caesar, and there was a discussion between them, as is the custom of dialogues, since the conversation was begun after the dismissal of the senate which Caesar as consul had held, he censured those things which the same Caesar administered in Gaul a year later and afterwards in the remaining years.
Then Brutus, wondering, said, "Was there so great a forgetfulness, especially in writing, that not even in reading did he ever perceive how great a disgrace he had committed?" "And what," I said, "Brutus, more foolish than, if he wished to censure those things which he censured, not to set the conversation at a time when the times of those things had already passed? But he so wholly errs that in the same conversation he says that he does not enter the senate while Caesar is consul, and says this as he is going out of the senate while that very man is consul. Now, one who in this part of the mind, which is the guardian of the other parts of the talent, was so feeble that not even in writing did he remember what he had set down a little before — for him it is least to be wondered at that, speaking off-hand, his mind was wont to slip away.
And so, although he did not lack official position and burned with zeal for speaking, very few causes were brought to him. As an orator, however, he was counted nearest the best of the living of his age, on account of the goodness of his words, as I said before, and a certain ready and flowing quickness. And so I judge that his speeches should nevertheless be looked at. They are indeed rather languid, but yet they can increase and, as it were, nourish that good which we grant was in him in middling measure: which has such force that alone, without the others, it produced in Curio the appearance of some sort of orator. But let us return to our plan.
In the same number, then, of the same age was Gaius Carbo, the son of that most eloquent man. Not a sufficiently acute orator, but yet counted an orator. There was weight in his words, and he spoke easily, and his oratory had a certain natural authority. More acute was Quintus Varius in finding matter, and no less ready in words; a strong pleader and vehement, and neither poor nor mean in words, and one whom you would plainly dare to call an orator was Gnaeus Pomponius, fighting with his sides, rousing minds, keen, bitter, accusing.
Much inferior to these was Lucius Fufius, who nevertheless from the accusation of Manius Aquilius had reaped the fruit of his diligence. For your great-uncle Marcus Drusus, a weighty orator only so far as when he spoke about public affairs; and Lucius Lucullus, even acute; and your father, Brutus, quite skilled too both in public and private law; Marcus Lucullus; Marcus Octavius, son of Gnaeus, who was so strong in authority and in speaking that he repealed the Sempronian corn-law by the votes of a crowded people; Gnaeus Octavius, son of Marcus; Marcus Cato the father; and Quintus Catulus the son too — let us lead out of the battle-line, that is, from the courts, and place in the garrisons of the commonwealth, which they can easily satisfy.
To the same I would refer Quintus Caepio, had he not, too devoted to the equestrian order, dissented from the senate. Gnaeus Carbo, Marcus Marius, and several of the same kind, least worthy of the ears of an elegant assembly, I have known most fitted to turbulent gatherings. In which kind — to disturb here the order of ages — was lately Lucius Quinctius; more suited even to the ears of the unskilled was Palicanus.
And since mention has been made of this kind, of all the seditious men after the Gracchi Lucius Appuleius Saturninus seemed the most eloquent; yet he caught men more by his appearance and movement and his very dress than by copiousness of speaking or by middling prudence. By far the most wicked since the birth of men was Gaius Servilius Glaucia, but very acute and shrewd and among the foremost ridiculous. He, from the lowest depths both of fortune and of life, in his praetorship would have been made consul, had it been judged lawful for his candidacy to be taken into account. For he both held the commons and had bound the equestrian order to himself by the benefit of a law. He as praetor, on the same day on which Saturninus the tribune of the commons, in the consulship of Marius and Flaccus, was publicly killed; a man most like the Athenian Hyperbolus, whose wickedness the old comedies of the Athenians marked.
These Sextus Titius followed, a talkative man indeed and acute enough, but so loose and soft in gesture that a certain dance was born, to which dance the name 'Titius' was given. So one must beware of doing anything in pleading or speaking, the imitation of which may be laughed at. But we have gone back to a somewhat earlier age; now let us return to that of which we have spoken a good deal.
Joined, then, to the age of Sulpicius was Publius Antistius, a quite commendable ranter, who, after he had been silent for many years and had been wont not only to be despised but even mocked, in his tribunate was first approved, pleading the true cause against that extraordinary candidacy of Gaius Julius for the consulship; and the more because, when his colleague that very Sulpicius pleaded the same cause, this man said more and more acute things. And so after his tribunate at first many causes were brought to him, then all the greatest, whatever they were.
He saw the matter acutely, arranged it diligently, was strong in memory; he used words not indeed ornate but yet not mean; his oratory was ready and ran very easily; and he had a certain bearing, as it were, not inurbane; his delivery limped a little both with a fault of voice and with ineptitudes. He flourished in those times when, between the departure and return of Lucius Sulla, the commonwealth was without law and without any dignity; he was the more approved for this too, that there was a certain solitude of orators in the forum. Sulpicius had fallen, Cotta was away and Curio, of the remaining advocates of that age none was living except Carbo and Pomponius, both of whom he easily surpassed.
Of a lower age the nearest was Lucius Sisenna, a learned man and devoted to the best studies, speaking good Latin, acquainted with public affairs, not without wit, but neither of much labour nor sufficiently versed in causes; and set between the two ages of Hortensius and Sulpicius, he could neither attain the greater nor had necessarily to yield to the lesser. His whole faculty can be perceived from his history, which, while it easily surpasses all earlier ones, yet shows how far it is from the highest and how this kind of writing is not yet sufficiently illuminated in Latin letters. For the talent of Quintus Hortensius, while a very young man, was at once, like a statue of Phidias, looked upon and approved. He first spoke in the forum in the consulship of Lucius Crassus and Quintus Scaevola, and before these very consuls indeed, and he came away approved by the judgement both of those who were present and of the consuls themselves, who surpassed all in understanding. He was nineteen years old at that time, but died in the consulship of Lucius Paullus and Gaius Marcellus: from which we see that he was in the number of advocates for forty-four years. About this orator we shall say more a little later; but in this place we wished to include his age within the unequal age of the orators. Although this indeed necessarily befell all to whom a somewhat longer life fell, that they were compared both with men much older than themselves and with some considerably younger. As Accius says that under the same aediles both he and Pacuvius produced a play, when the latter was eighty and he himself thirty years old: so
Hortensius is joined not only with his own equals but with my age and with yours, Brutus, and with one considerably earlier, if indeed he was wont to speak while Crassus was living, and was now even more in vigour when Antonius and Philippus, now an old man, pleaded for the property of Gnaeus Pompeius in that cause, where, though he was a young man, he was the leading speaker; and he had easily come into the number of those whom I placed in the age of Sulpicius, and among his own equals — Marcus Piso, Marcus Crassus, Gnaeus Lentulus, Publius Lentulus Sura — he far excelled, and, having got me as a young man eight years younger than he was himself, he exercised me for many years in the pursuit of the same praise, and together with you, just as I pleaded for many, so he pleaded for Appius Claudius a little before his death.
You see, then, how we have come to you, the orator, Brutus, with so many orators interposed between our beginning of speaking and yours; of whom, since in this discourse of ours I have resolved to name none of those who were living — lest you should too curiously draw out from me what I judged of each — I shall name those who are now dead." Then Brutus said, "That is not the reason which you give, why you are unwilling to say anything about those who are living." "What, then," I said, "is it?" "I think," he said, "that you fear lest this discourse of yours should leak out through us, and lest those whom you have passed over should be angry with you." "What?" I said; "will you not be able to keep silent?" "We indeed most easily," he said; "but yet I think you prefer to keep silent yourself rather than to try our silence."
Then I said, "I will speak to you truly, Brutus. I did not think that in this discourse I should come down as far as this age; but the order of the ages so drew the discourse that I have now arrived even at the younger men." "Interpose, then," he said, "any you think fit; then let us return to you and to Hortensius." "Nay rather," I said, "to Hortensius; about myself others shall speak, if any wish." "By no means," he said. "For although you have easily held me by all your discourse, yet it seems to me longer because I am eager to hear about you; and not so much about the virtues of your speaking, which are most known both to all and certainly to me, as because I am eager to learn your steps and, as it were, your progress in speaking."
"It shall be done as you wish," I said, "since you wish me to be the proclaimer not of my talent but of my labour. But I will interpose, as you please, others, and will begin with Marcus Crassus, who was the equal of Hortensius.

He, then, moderately furnished with learning, and even more narrowly by nature, by labour and industry and because he brought to bear, for obtaining causes, care too and influence, was for some years among the leading advocates. In his oratory the Latin was good, the words not mean, the matter arranged diligently, no flower however nor any light, great straining of the spirit, little of the voice, everything spoken almost in like fashion and in one manner. For his equal and enemy Gaius Fimbria could not display himself so long; who, saying everything in a loud voice with a certain hurried rush of really good words, yet so raved that you would wonder that the people were doing other things, so that there was a place for a madman among the eloquent. Gnaeus Lentulus, however, by his delivery made a much greater impression of speaking than was the faculty in him; who, although he was neither very acute, although both from his face and from his expression he seemed so, nor abounding in words, although he deceived in this very thing — so by his pauses, exclamations, sweet and melodious voice, and admirable handling, he laughed, he grew warm in pleading, that the things which were lacking were not missed. So, as Curio held the place of an orator by some copiousness of words, with no other good: so Lentulus concealed the middling quality of his other oratorical virtues by delivery, in which he was excellent. And not much otherwise Publius Lentulus, whose slowness both of thinking and of speaking was covered by the dignity of his form, the movement of his body full of both art and grace, and the sweetness and greatness of his voice. So in this man there was nothing besides delivery, the rest even less than in the former.

Marcus Piso, whatever he had, he had from training, and most of all of those who lived before, he was educated in Greek learning. He had from nature a certain kind of keenness, which he had also polished by art, which was cunning and skilful in faulting words, but often peevish, sometimes frigid, at times even witty. He did not endure the labour of the forum, as a kind of race, very long, because he was both weak in body and did not bear the ineptitudes and follies of men, which must be swallowed by us, and spat them out rather angrily, whether peevishly, as was thought, or with an honest and free disdain. He, after he had flourished sufficiently as a young man, began afterwards to be held of less account. Then from the trial of the Vestals he gained great praise, and from that time, as if recalled into the race, he held his place as long as he could bear the labour; afterwards, as much as he took from his zeal, so much he lost of his glory.
Publius Murena, of middling talent, but of great zeal for ancient things, both fond of letters and not unskilled, was of much industry and great labour. Gaius Censorinus, learned enough in Greek letters, unfolding readily what he had proposed, not ungraceful a pleader, but inactive and an enemy of the forum. Lucius Turius, of small talent but of much labour, spoke often, in whatever way he could; and so a few centuries were wanting to him for the consulship.
Gaius Macer always lacked authority, but was a most diligent advocate, well-nigh. If his life, his morals, his very expression had not overturned all the recommendation of his talent, his name among advocates would have been greater. His oratory was not abundant, yet not poor; not very shining, not plainly rough; his voice, gesture, and all his delivery without charm; but in finding and arranging matters a wonderful accuracy, so that I have not easily known a more diligent or greater in anyone — but such that you would call it sooner crafty than oratorical. He, although he was approved even in public causes, yet held a more illustrious place in private ones.
Then Gaius Piso, a 'stationary' orator and full of conversation, not at all slow in devising, but yet by his expression and dissimulation seemed much more acute than he was. For his equal Manius Glabrio, well trained by the diligence of his grandfather Scaevola, his own sluggish and negligent nature had retarded. Lucius Torquatus too was elegant in speaking, very prudent in judging, in his whole kind very urbane. My equal Gnaeus Pompeius, a man born for all the highest things, would have had a greater glory of speaking, had not the desire of greater glory drawn him away to the praises of war. He was ample enough in oratory, saw the matter prudently; his delivery had both in his voice a great splendour and in his movement the highest dignity.
Likewise our equal Decimus Silanus, your stepfather, had not much zeal indeed, but enough of keenness and oratory. Quintus Pompeius, son of Aulus, who was called Bithynicus, perhaps older than us by two years, of the highest zeal for learning and much erudition, of incredible labour and industry — which I can know: for he was joined with me and with Marcus Piso both in friendship and in studies and exercises. His delivery did not sufficiently commend his oratory; for in the latter there was copiousness enough, but in the former too little charm.
His equal was Publius Autronius, of a very keen and great voice but commendable in no other respect, and Lucius Octavius of Reate, who, when he was already pleading many causes, died a young man — yet he came to speaking more boldly than preparedly —; and Gaius Staienus, who had adopted himself and made an Aelius out of a Staienus, of a certain heated and petulant and furious kind of speaking; which, because it was pleasing to many and was approved, he would have ascended to honours, had he not, caught in a manifest crime, paid the penalties to the laws and the court.
At the same time were the brothers Gaius and Lucius Caepasius, who by much effort, obscure and sudden men, were quickly made quaestors, with a certain provincial and unpolished kind of speaking. Let us add to these too, lest we seem to have passed over anyone vocal, Gaius Cosconius Calidianus, who with no keenness yet exhibited to the people that copiousness of words, if he had any, with much running about and great clamour. The same did Quintus Arrius, who was, as it were, Marcus Crassus's understudy. He ought to be an example to all of how much, in this city, it avails to comply with the convenience of many and to serve the honour or the peril of many.
For by these things, born in the lowest station, having attained both honours and money and influence, he had come even into some number among advocates — without learning, without talent. But as unexercised boxers, even if, eager for the Olympic games, they can bear blows and strokes, yet often cannot bear the sun, so he, when he had now prosperously discharged every fortune and had taken up even great labours, did not bear, as it were a sun, the severity of that judicial year.
Then Atticus said, "You are drawing now from the dregs, and have been for a while, but I held my peace; this, however, I did not think — that you would come down even to the Staieni and Autronii." "I do not suppose," I said, "that you think me carried away by partiality, since it is of the dead; but, following the order, I necessarily run into a known and contemporary memory. But I wish this to be perceived: that, all having been sought out who dared to speak among the multitude, very few indeed were worthy of memory, and that those who had any name at all were not so very many. But let us return to our appointed discourse.
Titus Torquatus, son of Titus, both a learned man from the Rhodian school of Molon and by nature loose and ready enough for speaking — to whom, had life been granted, with bribery removed he would have been made consul — had more faculty for speaking than will. And so he did not satisfy his study, but in his duty he was wanting neither in the causes of his own connections nor in giving his senatorial opinion.
Marcus Pontidius too, our townsman, regularly pleaded many private causes, rolling out his words quite quickly and not dull in causes, or rather I would say more than not dull, but boiling over in speaking often too vehemently with bile and anger; so that he often strove in altercation not only with his adversary but even, what was wonderful, with the judge himself, whose soother the orator ought to be. Marcus Messalla, younger than us, by no means poor, but not too ornate in his kind of words; prudent, acute, a least incautious advocate, diligent in learning and arranging causes, of great labour, of much effort and of many causes.
The two Metelli too, Celer and Nepos, somewhat engaged in causes, neither without talent nor unlearned, had attained this popular kind of speaking. Gnaeus Lentulus Marcellinus, however, was never without speech and in his consulship seemed very eloquent, not slow in thoughts, not poor in words, of melodious voice, witty enough. Gaius Memmius, son of Lucius, perfect in letters, but Greek, quite fastidious of Latin ones, a pointed orator and sweet in words, but, fleeing the labour not only of speaking but even of thinking, took as much from his own faculty as he diminished of his industry.
At this point Brutus said, "How I could wish that it pleased you to speak to me about those orators too who are alive today; and, if less about others, yet about the two whom I know you are wont to praise, Caesar and Marcellus, I would hear no less gladly than I have heard about those who have been." "Why, pray?" I said; "do you wait to hear what I judge about those who are equally known to you and to me?" "Marcellus, by Hercules," he said, "is well enough known to me,
but Caesar too little; for the former I have often heard, while the latter, when I could now judge something, was away." "What, then, do you judge about him," I said, "whom you have often heard?" "What do you think," he said, "except that which you are about to have — one like yourself?" "Indeed," I said, "if it is so, I should wish him to please you as much as possible." "And so it is," he said, "and he pleases me vehemently; nor indeed without cause. For he both learned, and, the other studies laid aside, gave himself to this one thing alone, and exercised himself most keenly with daily rehearsals.
And so he both uses choice words and frequent thoughts, and by the splendour of his voice and the dignity of his movement what he says is made specious and brilliant, and everything is so at hand that I think no virtue of an orator is lacking to him; and he is most to be praised, who at this very time, so far as is permitted in this our common and, as it were, fatal evil, consoles himself both with the consciousness of an excellent mind and also with the exercise and renewal of learning. For I saw lately at Mytilene a man, and, as I said, I saw plainly a man. And so, as I had before seen him like you in speaking, so now indeed, furnished by that most learned man Cratippus, and, as I understood, most friendly to you, with every copiousness, I saw him much more like."
Here I said, "Although I gladly hear the praises of an excellent man and most friendly to us, yet I run into the memory of our common miseries, the forgetfulness of which I have sought by prolonging this very conversation. But about Caesar I am eager to hear what after all Atticus may judge." And he said, "You hold to yourself admirably, in being unwilling yourself to say anything about those who are now living; and by Hercules, if you had dealt with them as you have dealt with those who are already dead, so as to pass over no one, you would indeed have run into many Autronii and Staieni. Wherefore, whether you wished to escape this throng, or feared lest anyone might complain that he had either been passed over or not sufficiently praised, you could nevertheless have spoken about Caesar, especially since both your judgement of his talent is most well known, and his judgement of yours not obscure. But yet, Brutus," said Atticus, "about Caesar both I myself so judge, and I very often hear from this most keen assessor of this kind, that he speaks Latin most elegantly of well-nigh all the orators; and that not only by domestic usage, as a while ago we were hearing about the families of the Laelii and the Mucii — but although I believe that too was the case, yet, that the praise of speaking well might be perfected, he has attained it by much study of letters, and those recondite and choice, and by the highest zeal and diligence: who even amid the greatest occupations has written most carefully to you yourself," he said, looking at me, "on the method of speaking Latin, and in his first book has said that the choice of words is the source of eloquence, and has ascribed to this friend of ours" — who preferred that I should speak of him rather than that he should speak of himself — "a singular praise, my Brutus; for he wrote in these words, having addressed him by name: 'And if, that they might express their excellent thoughts, some have laboured with study and practice — of which copiousness you, as well-nigh the chief and the inventor, we ought to judge to have deserved well of the name and dignity of the Roman people — is to have known this easy and everyday speech to be reckoned as a thing left behind?'
Then Brutus said, "Amicably indeed, by Hercules, and magnificently I think you praised — whom he called not only the chief and inventor of copiousness, which was great praise, but also one who deserved well of the name and dignity of the Roman people. For in that one thing in which we were surpassed by conquered Greece, that has either been wrested from them or at least shared by us with them. This glory and testimony of Caesar," he said, "I prefer not indeed to your supplication, but to the triumphs of many." "And rightly, Brutus," I said; "provided only that this is a testimony of Caesar's judgement, not of his goodwill. For surely he has brought more dignity to this people, whoever he is, if indeed there is anyone, who has not only illuminated but even begotten in this city the copiousness of speaking, than those who stormed the strongholds of the Ligurians: from which there are, as you know, many triumphs.
But if we wish to hear the truth, setting aside those divine counsels by which the wisdom of generals has often established the safety of the state in war or in peace, a great orator far excels petty generals. 'But a general is of more use.' Who denies it? But yet — I do not fear that you will cry out against me; for this is a place for speaking freely what you feel — I would rather have one speech of Lucius Crassus for Manius Curius than two triumphs over strongholds. 'But it was of more importance to the commonwealth that a stronghold of the Ligurians should be taken than that the cause of Manius Curius should be well defended.'
I believe it; but to the Athenians too it was of more importance to have firm roofs in their dwellings than the most beautiful statue of Minerva in ivory; yet I would rather be Phidias than even the best carpenter. Wherefore it is not how much each man is of use, but how much each man is worth, that must be weighed; especially since few can paint or model excellently, but workmen and porters cannot be lacking. But proceed, Pomponius, about Caesar, and render what remains."
"You see," said he, "the very ground and, as it were, foundation of the orator, correct and Latin diction, the praise of which has been hitherto in the hands of those whose praise it was not of method or knowledge, but, as it were, of good habit. I pass over Gaius Laelius and Publius Scipio: that praise of that age was, as of innocence, so of speaking Latin — and yet not of all, for we see their contemporaries Caecilius and Pacuvius speaking badly — but almost all then who had neither lived outside this city nor had been infected by any domestic barbarism, spoke correctly. But this matter at least antiquity has made worse, both at Rome and in Greece. For there flowed together both to Athens and to this city many speaking corruptly from various places. The more must speech be purified, and method applied, as a touchstone, which cannot be changed, and the most perverse rule of habit not be used.
Titus Flamininus, who was consul with Quintus Metellus, we saw as boys: he was thought to speak good Latin, but he knew no letters. Catulus indeed was by no means unlearned, as was said by you a little before, but yet the sweetness of his voice and the smooth pronunciation of the letters had made the fame of speaking well. Cotta, who by broadening the letters very much had drawn himself away from the likeness of Greek diction, and sounded the opposite of Catulus, something rather rural and plainly rather rustic, had by another, as it were uncultivated and woodland road arrived at the same praise. Sisenna, however, when he wished to be, as it were, a corrector of the customary speech, could not be deterred even by his accuser Gaius Rusius from using unusual words." "What, pray, is that?" said Brutus; "or who is that
Gaius Rusius?" And he said, "He was an accuser of old, on whose accusation, when Sisenna was defending Gaius Hirtilius, Sisenna said that certain of his charges were 'spit-aroundable.' Then Gaius Rusius said: 'I am circumvented, judges, unless you help me. What Sisenna means I do not know; I fear a trap. Spit-aroundable — what is this? What spit is, I know; aroundable I do not know.' Great was the laughter; but he, my friend, nevertheless thought that to speak unusually was to speak correctly.
Caesar, however, applying method, corrects faulty and corrupt habit by pure and incorrupt habit. And so when to this elegance of Latin words — which, even if you are not an orator and are a freeborn Roman citizen, is yet necessary — he joins those oratorical ornaments of speaking, then he seems, as it were, to set well-painted pictures in a good light. Since he has this special praise, in the common qualities I do not see to whom he ought to yield. He holds a certain splendid and least crafty method of speaking, magnificent and, in a certain way, noble in voice, movement, and even form."
Then Brutus said, "His speeches indeed I greatly approve. And I have read several, and also the commentaries which he wrote of his own deeds." "Greatly indeed to be approved," I said; "for they are bare, straight, and graceful, all ornament of oratory stripped away as a garment. But while he wished others to have material ready, from which those who wished to write history might take, he has perhaps done a favour to the inept, who will wish to crimp those with curling-irons: but sane men he has deterred from writing; for nothing is sweeter in history than pure and brilliant brevity. But let us, if you please, return to those who have departed from life.
Gaius Sicinius, then, the grandson by his daughter of that Quintus Pompeius who was censor, died of quaestorian rank; a commendable orator, nay even an approved one, from this school of Hermagoras, poor for adorning but ready for inventing. It gives sure methods and precepts of speaking, which, if they have less apparatus — for they are meagre — yet have order and certain roads that do not allow one to stray in speaking. Holding these, and coming prepared to causes, not poor in words, by that very equipment and discipline of speaking he had already come into the number of advocates.
There was also a learned man among the foremost, Gaius Visellius Varro, my cousin, who was joined in age with Sicinius. He, when after the curule aedileship he was judge of an inquiry, died; in whom I confess that the judgement of the crowd dissented from my judgement. For he was not sufficiently saleable to the people: a certain headlong oratory, obscure for this very reason that it was very acute, and rapid and blinded by speed; but I could not quickly name another apter in words nor more frequent in thoughts. Besides, perfect in letters, he held the discipline of civil law already handed down by his father Aculeo. There remain, of those who are dead, Lucius Torquatus, whom you would not so quickly have called a rhetor — although oratory was not lacking — as, as the Greeks say, a politikon. There were in him very many letters, and those not common, but certain deeper and more recondite; a divine memory, the highest both weight and elegance of words; and all these the weight and integrity of his life adorned. Me indeed the oratory of Triarius too, in that age full of lettered old age, greatly delighted. What severity in his face! what weight in his words! how nothing came out of his mouth unconsidered!
Then Brutus, moved by the mention of Torquatus and Triarius — for he had greatly loved each of them — said, "Indeed I, to omit the rest which are innumerable, when I think of those two, grieve that your perpetual authority on behalf of peace availed nothing! For the commonwealth would not have lost either those excellent men or many other outstanding citizens." "Let us be silent, Brutus," I said, "about those, lest we increase our grief. For both the recollection of things past is bitter, and the expectation of things to come more bitter. And so let us cease to mourn, and only proclaim how much each man could do by speaking, since that is what we seek.
There are also among those who fell in the same war, Marcus Bibulus, who both wrote carefully, although he was especially no orator, and conducted many things steadfastly; Appius Claudius, your father-in-law, my colleague and friend: he was now both studious enough and a very learned and even practised orator, and well skilled both in augural law and in all public law and in our antiquity. Lucius Domitius spoke indeed with no art, but yet in Latin and with much freedom.
There were besides two Lentuli of consular rank, of whom that Publius, the avenger of our wrongs, the author of our safety, whatever he had, however much it was, all that he had from training; the instruments of nature were lacking; but there was so great a splendour of mind and so great a greatness that he did not hesitate to claim for himself all the things that belong to illustrious men, and obtained them with every dignity. Lucius Lentulus, however, was a strong enough orator, if only an orator, but did not bear the labour of thinking; his voice melodious, his words not rough indeed, so that his oratory was full of spirit and terror; you would perhaps seek something better in the courts, but in public affairs you would judge that what there was, was enough.
Nor indeed is Titus Postumius to be despised in speaking; in public affairs indeed he was no less vehement an orator than a warrior, unbridled and too keen, but he had well learned the laws and institutions of public law."

At this point Atticus said, "I should think you ambitious, if, as you said, those whom you have now for a long time been collecting were living. For you mention all who ever dared to speak standing up, so that you seem to me unwittingly to have passed over Marcus Servilius."

"I am not ignorant of this, Pomponius," I said, "that there were many who had never uttered a word in public, although they could speak somewhat better than these orators whom I collect; but by mentioning these I attain this also, that you may understand, first, out of all the number, how not many dared to speak, and then, out of these very men, how few were worthy of praise.
And so I shall not omit even these Roman knights, our friends, who lately died: Publius Cominius of Spoletium, on whose accusation I defended Gaius Cornelius, in whom there was both a composed and a keen and ready kind of speaking; Titus Accius of Pisaurum, to whose accusation I answered for Aulus Cluentius, who both spoke carefully and copiously enough, and was besides learned in the precepts of Hermagoras, by which, although not very rich ornaments of speaking, yet, as javelins fitted with thongs for the light-armed, so certain arguments fitted and ready are handed down for the several kinds of causes.
And of greater zeal or industry I have known no one, although not even in talent could I easily say who surpassed Gaius Piso, my son-in-law. No time was ever free to him either from forensic pleading or from rehearsal at home or from writing or from thinking. And so he made such great progress that he seemed to fly rather than to run; and there was both an elegant choice of words and a fitting and, as it were, rounded construction; and while many and firm arguments were thought out by him for proving, there were besides neat and acute thoughts; and his gesture by nature so graceful that even art, which there was not, and a certain movement from training, seemed to come to it. I fear lest I may seem from love to say more than there was in him; which is not so; for other and greater things can be said about him. For neither in self-control nor in piety nor in any kind of virtue do I think anyone of the same age to be compared with him.
Nor indeed do I think Marcus Caelius is to be passed over, whatever his fortune or his mind was at the end; who, as long as he obeyed my authority, was such a tribune of the commons that no one stood more steadfastly against the popular and turbulent madness of abandoned citizens, on behalf of the senate and the cause of the good. His somewhat old-fashioned style of pleading was nevertheless commended much both by splendid and grand oratory and likewise among the foremost witty and very urbane. Some of his harangues were weighty, his accusations keen — three, and all undertaken from a contest of public affairs; his defences, although those things which I mentioned were better in him, were yet not to be despised and quite tolerable. He, when with the highest goodwill of the good he had been made curule aedile, somehow at my departure departed from himself and fell, after he began to imitate those whom he himself had overthrown. But about
Marcus Calidius let us say something, who was not one orator out of many, but rather among many was almost singular: so did a soft and translucent oratory clothe his recondite and choice thoughts. Nothing so tender as that grouping of his words, nothing so flexible, nothing that was more moulded at his own will, so that it was in the power of no orator equally: which first was so pure that nothing more limpid, so freely it flowed that nowhere did it stick; you would see no word except set in its place and, as it were, constructed in a mosaic inlay, as Lucilius says; nor indeed any word either harsh or unusual or low or drawn out too far; and not the words proper to things, but most of them transferred, yet so that you would say that they had not rushed into another's place but had migrated into their own; nor indeed were these loose or flowing apart, but bound up by rhythm, not openly nor always in the same way but variously and dissemblingly rounded off.
There were too both of words and of thoughts those lights which the Greeks call schemata, by which, as by ornaments in adornment, his whole oratory was distinguished. And that 'point at issue,' which is included in many places in the formulae of the jurisconsults, he saw where it lay.
There was added an order of matters full of art, a free delivery, and a whole kind of speaking placid and sound. And if it is best to speak agreeably, there is nothing that you should think better than this to be sought. But since it was said by us a little before that there seem to be three things which an orator ought to accomplish — to instruct, to delight, to move — two he held in the highest degree, both to illustrate the matter by argument and to bind the minds of those who heard with pleasure; that third praise was lacking, by which he should thoroughly move and rouse minds, which we said had the most power; nor was there any force or straining: whether from design, because he judged that those whose oratory was loftier and delivery more ardent were raving and revelling, or because he was not so made by nature, or because he was not accustomed, or because he did not know how. This one thing was absent in him — if it had no usefulness; if it was needed, it was lacking.
Nay more, I remember that, when in his accusation he had charged Quintus Gallius with having prepared poison for him, and that this had been detected by him, and said that he was bringing forward handwritings, depositions, informations, examinations, the matter manifest, and had argued about that charge carefully and choicely, I, in answering, when I had argued as much as the matter bore, set this very thing also as an argument — that he, when he said that he had discovered the destruction of his own life, the proofs of his death, manifestly, and held them in his hand, had pleaded so loosely, so gently, so yawningly: 'Would you, Marcus Calidius,
unless you were inventing this, plead in this way? — especially since with that eloquence of yours you are wont most keenly to defend the perils of other men, would you neglect your own? Where is the grief? where the ardour of mind, which is wont to draw out cries and complaints even from the talents of infants? No disturbance of mind, none of body, no striking of the brow, none of the thigh; not even, what is the least thing, a stamping of the foot. And so so far was it from your inflaming our minds, that at that point we could scarcely keep from sleep.' So we used the soundness or the fault of a supreme orator as an argument to dissolve the charge."
Then Brutus said, "And do we doubt whether that was soundness or a fault? For who would not confess that, since of all the praises of the orator that is by far the greatest — to inflame the minds of the hearers and to bend them in whatever way the matter demands — he who lacked this virtue was lacking in that which was the greatest?" "Let it be so indeed," I said; "but let us return to him who now alone remains, Hortensius, and then we shall say a few words about ourselves, since that too, Brutus, you ask. Although mention is to be made, as at least it seems to me, of two young men, who, had they lived longer, would have attained a great praise of eloquence."
"You mean," said Brutus, "Gaius Curio and Gaius Licinius Calvus." "You judge rightly," I said; "of whom the one rolled out so easily and fluently thoughts at times acute enough, frequent at least certainly, that nothing could be more ornate, nothing readier. And this man, too little trained by teachers, had an admirable nature for speaking; his industry I have not tried, his zeal certainly there was. Who, had he been willing to hear me, as he had begun, would have preferred to attain honours rather than power." "What, pray," he said, "is that? and how do you distinguish it?" "In this way," I said.
"Since honour is the reward of virtue conferred upon someone by the judgement and zeal of the citizens, he who has attained it by their opinions, by their votes, seems to me both honourable and honoured. But he who by some chance has obtained command even against the will of his fellow citizens, as that man desired, has, I think, attained the name of honour, not honour. Which, had he been willing to hear, he would have come, with the greatest favour and glory, to the highest greatness, ascending by the steps of the magistracies, as his father had done, as the other more illustrious men. These very things I think I often discussed with Publius Crassus, son of Marcus, too, when at the outset of his age he had betaken himself to my friendship, when I vehemently exhorted him to consider that the straightest road of praise was that which his ancestors had left worn for him.
For he was both most excellently trained and also perfectly and plainly learned, and there was in him both a talent keen enough and a not inelegant copiousness of oratory; and besides he seemed weighty without arrogance and modest without sloth. But this man too a certain tide of glory unusual for young men absorbed; who, because he had done good service as a soldier to a general, desired at once to be a general himself — an office to which the custom of our ancestors left a fixed age, an uncertain lot. So by his most grievous fall, while he wished to be like Cyrus and Alexander, who had run through their own course, he was found most unlike Lucius Crassus and many Crassi.
But let us return to Calvus — for he was the one set before us; who was an orator both more learned in letters than Curio, and also brought a certain more careful and more choice kind of speaking; which, although he handled it knowingly and elegantly, yet, too much inquiring into himself and observing himself and fearing lest he should gather something faulty, he lost even the true blood. And so his oratory, attenuated by excessive scruple, was brilliant to the learned and to attentive hearers, but by the multitude and by the forum, for which eloquence was born, was swallowed up.
Then Brutus said, "Our Calvus wished to be called an Attic orator: thence was that meagreness which he attained of set purpose." "He said so," I said; "but he both erred himself and forced others too to err. For if anyone thinks that those who speak neither ineptly nor odiously nor affectedly speak in the Attic manner, he rightly approves no one except an Attic. For he hates insipidity and extravagance, as a kind of madness of oratory, but approves soundness and integrity, as a kind of scruple and modesty of the orator. This ought to be the same opinion of all orators.
But if he places meagreness and dryness and poverty, provided only it be polished, provided urbane, provided elegant, in the Attic kind, this is right only so far; but because among the Attics some are better than others, let him beware lest he be ignorant of the degrees and the differences and the force and the variety of the Attics. 'I wish to imitate the Attics,' he says. Which? for there is not one kind. For what is so unlike as Demosthenes and Lysias? as the same and Hyperides? as of all these Aeschines? Whom, then, do you imitate? If someone: did the rest, then, not speak in the Attic manner? if all: how can you, when they themselves are most unlike one another? In which I ask this too — whether that Demetrius of Phalerum spoke in the Attic manner. To me indeed Athens herself seems to breathe from his speeches. But he is more florid, so to speak, than Hyperides, than Lysias: a certain nature or a will of speaking thus there was.
And indeed there were two at the same time unlike each other, but Attic nevertheless; of whom Charisius was of many speeches, which he wrote for others, when he seemed to desire to imitate Lysias; Demochares, however, who was the son of Demosthenes's sister, both wrote some speeches and wrote out the history of those things which were done at Athens in his own age, not so much in a historical as in an oratorical kind. And Hegesias wishes to be like Charisius, and so thinks himself Attic that he thinks those true Attics almost rustic in comparison with himself.
But what is so broken, so minced, so puerile in that very neatness which nevertheless he attains? 'We wish to be like the Attics.' Excellent; are these, then, Attic orators? 'Who can deny it? These we imitate.' How — they who are both unlike one another and unlike others? 'We imitate Thucydides,' he says. Excellent, if you think of writing history, not if of pleading causes. For Thucydides was a genuine and even grand narrator of deeds; this forensic, contentious, judicial kind he did not handle. But the speeches which he interposed — for there are many — those I am wont to praise; to imitate I could not, if I wished, nor would I perhaps, if I could. As if someone delights in Falernian wine, but neither so new that he would wish it born in the last consulship, nor again so old that he would seek a consul Opimius or Anicius — 'and yet these vintages are the best,' I believe; but excessive age has not that sweetness which we seek, nor is it now really tolerable —
would he, then, who feels this, if he wished to drink, think he must draw for himself from the vat? By no means; but let him follow a certain age. So I should advise those men that both this new oratory, as it were hot from the must and the vat, is to be fled, and that excellent one of Thucydides, too old, like the Anician vintage, is not to be pursued. For Thucydides himself, had he lived later, would have been much riper and milder. 'Let us, then, imitate Demosthenes.' O good gods; what else, I ask, do we do, or what else do we wish? But we do not attain it. For these our Attics, forsooth, attain what they wish.
They do not even understand this — not only that it is so recorded, but that it was necessarily so, that, when Demosthenes was about to speak, gatherings for the sake of hearing took place from all Greece. But when these Attics speak, they are left not only by the bystanders — which is itself pitiable — but even by their own supporters. Wherefore if to speak narrowly and meagrely is the mark of the Attics, let them indeed be Attic; but let them come into the comitium, let them speak before a standing judge: the benches demand a grander and fuller voice.
I wish this to fall to the orator's lot — that when it has been heard that he is about to speak, a place on the benches is taken, the tribunal is filled, the clerks are obliging in giving and yielding a place, the throng manifold, the judge erect; when he who is about to speak rises, silence is signified by the throng, then frequent assents, many expressions of admiration; laughter when he wishes, weeping when he wishes: so that he who sees these things from afar, even if he does not know what is being done, understands nevertheless that he is pleasing, and that a Roscius is on the stage. He to whose lot these things fall, know that he speaks in the Attic manner, as we hear of Pericles, as of Hyperides, as of Aeschines, and indeed of Demosthenes himself most of all.
But if they approve an acute, prudent, and likewise genuine and solid and dried-up kind of oratory, and do not use that weightier oratorical ornament, and wish this to be the property of the Attics, they praise rightly. For in an art so great and so varied there is a place even for this minute subtlety. So it will come about that not all who speak in the Attic manner speak likewise well, but that all who speak well speak likewise in the Attic manner too. But let us return again to Hortensius."
"Certainly indeed," said Brutus; "although that digression of yours from the proposed discourse was most pleasant to me." Then Atticus said, "Several times I have attempted to, but I was unwilling to interrupt. Now, since your discourse seems already to look toward concluding, I shall say, I think, what I feel." "Do indeed, Titus," I said. Then he said, "I think that irony which they say was in Socrates, which he uses in the books of Plato and Xenophon and Aeschines, witty and elegant. For it is the mark both of a least inept man and likewise of a witty one, when there is a dispute about wisdom, to take this away from himself, to ascribe it, mocking, to those who arrogate it to themselves — as in Plato Socrates extols to heaven with praises Protagoras, Hippias, Prodicus, Gorgias, and the rest, but feigns himself ignorant and rude in all things. This somehow becomes him, nor do I agree with Epicurus, who censures it. But in history, which you have used in your whole discourse, when you set forth what kind of orator each man was, see, pray," he said, "lest irony be as much to be censured as in giving testimony." "To what end is that?" I said; "for I do not understand.
Because, first," he said, "you praised certain orators in such a way that you could lead the inexperienced into error. For my part, in some cases I could scarcely keep from laughing, when you compared to the Attic Lysias our Cato — a great man, by Hercules, or rather a supreme and singular man — no one will say otherwise — but an orator? but even like Lysias? than whom nothing can be more polished. A pretty irony, if we were jesting; but if we are asserting, see lest scruple be as much to be applied by us as if we were giving testimony.
For I approve your Cato as a citizen, as a senator, as a general, as a man, in short, excellent both in prudence and diligence and in every virtue; his speeches I greatly praise for those times — for they signify a certain form of talent, but very unpolished and plainly rude — but when you said that his Origins were crammed with all the praises of an orator, and compared Cato with Philistus and Thucydides, did you think you would approve that to Brutus or to me? For to those whom not even any of the Greeks can imitate, you compare a man of Tusculum not yet even suspecting what it was to speak copiously and ornately.
You praise Galba. If as the leading man of that age, I assent — for so we have been told —; but if as an orator, produce, pray, his speeches — for there are some — and say that this Brutus, whom you love more than yourself, you wish to speak in that manner. You approve the speeches of Lepidus — here, Paulus, I assent to you, provided you praise them as ancient; which likewise I say of Africanus, of Laelius, than whose oratory you say nothing can be made sweeter, and you add too something or other more solemn. You catch us with the name of a supreme man and with most true praises of a most elegant life. Remove these: lest that sweet oratory be so mean that no one would wish to look at it.
I know that Carbo was held among the supreme orators; but, as in other things so in speaking, what is now the best, that, of whatever kind it is, is wont to be praised. I say the same of the Gracchi, although about them those things have been said by you to which I assent. I pass over the rest; I come to those in whom you think eloquence now perfected, whom I have heard, without dispute great orators, Crassus and Antonius. To their praises I wholly assent to you, but yet not in that manner: as Lysippus said that the Doryphorus of Polyclitus was his master, so you say that the advocacy of the Servilian law was your mistress; this is genuine irony. Why I think so I shall not say, lest you think I am flattering you.
I pass over, then, what you said about these very men, what about Cotta, what about Sulpicius, what just now about Caelius. For these were certainly orators; but how great and of what kind, you may see for yourself. For that I care less about — that you have heaped together all the workmen; so that some seem to me to have wished to die, in order to be entered by you in the number of orators." When he had said this: "You have set in motion the beginning of a long discourse, Atticus," I said, "and have stirred a matter worthy of a new disputation, which let us put off to another time.
For the books both of others and especially of Cato are to be turned over. You will understand that nothing was lacking to his outlines except the bloom and colour of those pigments which had not yet been discovered. For about the oratory of Crassus I judge thus, that he himself perhaps could have written better, but no one else, as I think. For in this you would not take me to be an ironist, because I have said that that speech was my mistress. For although you yourself seem to judge better of that faculty, if any, which we now have, yet as young men we had nothing in the Latins rather to imitate.
But that more were named by me, this pertained to it, as I said a little before, that I wished it to be understood, in that which all were most eager for, how few came out worthy of the name. Wherefore I would not have myself thought an ironist, not even if Africanus was one, as Gaius Fannius says in his history." "As you will," said Atticus. "For I did not think it foreign to you, what had been both in Africanus and in Socrates."
Then Brutus said, "About that later; but you," he said, looking at me, "will you set forth for us the old speeches?" "Indeed, Brutus," I said; "but at my place at Cumae or at Tusculum at some time, if only it shall be permitted, since in each place we are neighbours. But now let us return to that from which we digressed.
Hortensius, then, when as a quite young man he had begun to speak in the forum, was quickly taken up for greater causes: and although he had fallen upon the age of Cotta and Sulpicius, who were ten years older, with Crassus and Antonius then excelling, then Philippus, afterwards Julius, with these very men his glory of speaking was compared. First, a memory so great as I think I have known in no one, that what he had rehearsed with himself, that he rendered without writing in the same words in which he had thought it. This aid he used, so great, in such a way that he remembered both his own things rehearsed and written, and, with no one prompting, all that all his adversaries had said.
And he burned with eagerness so that in no one have I ever seen a more flaming zeal. For he allowed no day to pass without either speaking in the forum or rehearsing outside the forum. Very often, however, he did both on the same day. And he had brought a by no means common kind of speaking; two things indeed which no one else: divisions of the matters about which he was to speak, and recapitulations, mindful both of what had been said against him and of what he himself had said.
He was elegant in the splendour of his words, apt in arrangement, copious in faculty; and these he had attained both by the highest talent and by the greatest exercises. He embraced the matter from memory, divided it acutely, and passed over almost nothing that was in the cause either for confirming or for refuting. His voice melodious and sweet, his movement and gesture had even more art than was enough for an orator. While he, then, was flourishing, Crassus died, Cotta was driven out, the courts were interrupted by the war, and we came into the forum.
Hortensius in the war was in the first year a soldier, in the second a military tribune; Sulpicius a lieutenant; Marcus Antonius too was away; the courts were exercised by the one Varian law, the rest interrupted on account of the war; at which I was frequently present, although the orators pleaded for themselves not indeed leading ones, Lucius Memmius and Quintus Pompeius, but orators nevertheless, with the eloquent witness, at any rate, Philippus, in whose testimony the straining had both the force and the copiousness of an accuser.
The rest who were then counted leading men were in magistracies and were heard by us almost daily in the assemblies. For the tribune of the commons then was Gaius Curio, although he indeed was silent, as he had once been left by an entire assembly; Quintus Metellus Celer, not indeed an orator, but yet not without speech; but eloquent were Quintus Varius, Gaius Carbo, Gnaeus Pomponius, and these indeed dwelt on the Rostra; Gaius Julius too, the curule aedile, held almost daily carefully prepared assemblies. But me, most eager to hear, the first grief struck, when Cotta was expelled. Frequently hearing the rest, I was held by a most keen zeal, and daily both writing and reading and rehearsing I was not content with oratorical exercises alone. Now in the following year Quintus Varius, condemned by his own law, had departed;
but I gave much labour to the study of civil law with Quintus Scaevola, son of Quintus, who, although he gave himself to no one for teaching, yet, by answering those who consulted him, taught those eager to hear. And the year next to this was that of the consuls Sulla and Pompeius. Then we came thoroughly to know the whole kind of speaking of Publius Sulpicius, haranguing daily in his tribunate; and at the same time, when Philo, the head of the Academy, with the optimates of the Athenians, had fled from home in the Mithridatic war and had come to Rome, I gave myself wholly to him, roused by a certain admirable zeal for philosophy, in which I dwelt the more attentively — although the variety and great magnitude of the matters themselves held me with the highest delight — because the method of the courts seemed now to have been taken away for ever.
Sulpicius had fallen that year, and in the next three orators of three ages had been most cruelly killed, Quintus Catulus, Marcus Antonius, Gaius Julius. In the same year too at Rome we gave our attention to Molon of Rhodes, both a supreme pleader of causes and a teacher. These things, although they seem to be foreign to the proposed discourse, are nevertheless brought forward by me for this reason — that you may be able to discern our course, since you wished it, Brutus — for to Atticus these things are known — and to see how, in the race, we followed Quintus Hortensius in his very footsteps. For nearly three years the city was without arms, but by the death or departure or flight of the orators — for the young men Marcus Crassus and the two Lentuli were also away — Hortensius pleaded the first parts in causes; Antistius was more and more approved daily, Piso spoke often, Pomponius less often, Carbo rarely, Philippus once or twice. But I at all this time, nights and days, was engaged in the meditation of all the disciplines.
I was with the Stoic Diodotus, who, when he had dwelt with me and lived with me, lately died in my house. By him I was exercised, both in other things and most eagerly in dialectic, which is to be thought, as it were, a contracted and compressed eloquence; without which even you, Brutus, have judged that you could not attain that genuine eloquence, which they think to be dialectic dilated. To this teacher and to his various and many arts I was nevertheless so devoted that no day was free from oratorical exercises.
I rehearsed, declaiming — for so they now speak — often with Marcus Piso and with Quintus Pompeius or with someone daily, and I did this much in Latin too, but more often in Greek, either because Greek oratory, supplying more ornaments, brought a habit of speaking similarly in Latin, or because by the supreme Greek teachers, unless I spoke Greek, I could neither be corrected nor taught.
Meanwhile there was tumult in the recovery of the commonwealth and the cruel death of the three orators Scaevola, Carbo, Antistius, the return of Cotta, Curio, Crassus, the Lentuli, Pompeius, the laws and courts established, the commonwealth recovered; but from the number of orators Pomponius, Censorinus, Murena were taken away. Then first we began to come to causes both private and public, not in order to learn in the forum, which most did, but in order that, as much as we could accomplish, we might come into the forum already learned.
At the same time we gave our attention to Molon; for, in the dictatorship of Sulla, he had come as a lieutenant to the senate about the rewards of the Rhodians. And so our first public cause, pleaded for Sextus Roscius, had so much of commendation that there was none which did not seem worthy of our advocacy. Then thereafter many, which we brought diligently elaborated and, as it were, worked out by lamplight.
Now, since you seem to wish to know me not by some mole or rattle but by the whole body, I shall embrace some things too which may perhaps seem less necessary. There was at that time in me the highest slenderness and weakness of body, a long and thin neck: which habit and which figure are thought not to be far from peril of life, if labour and a great straining of the sides is added. And this moved the more those to whom I was dear, because I said everything without remission, without variety, with the highest force of voice and straining of the whole body.
And so, when both friends and physicians urged me to cease pleading causes, I thought that any peril whatever was rather to be undergone than that I should depart from the hoped-for glory of speaking. But since I judged that by remission and moderation of the voice and by changing the kind of speaking I could both avoid the peril and speak more temperately, that I might change my habit of speaking was the cause of my setting out into Asia. And so, when I had been engaged in causes for two years and my name was now celebrated in the forum, I set out from Rome.
When I had come to Athens, I was six months with Antiochus, the most noble and most prudent philosopher of the Old Academy, and the study of philosophy, never interrupted and cultivated from earliest youth and always increased, I renewed again with this supreme author and teacher. At the same time, however, at Athens with Demetrius the Syrian, an old and not ignoble teacher of speaking, I was wont to be exercised eagerly. Afterwards all Asia was traversed by me, with the supreme orators indeed, with whom I was exercised, they themselves being willing; of whom the chief was Menippus of Stratonicea, in my judgement in all Asia in those times the most eloquent; and, if to have nothing of the troubles and ineptitudes of the Attics is to be Attic, this orator can rightly be numbered among them.
But most constantly with me was Dionysius of Magnesia; there was also Aeschylus of Cnidos, and Xenocles of Adramyttium. These were then counted the chief of the rhetors in Asia. Not content with whom, I came to Rhodes and applied myself to the same Molon whom I had heard at Rome, both an outstanding pleader in real causes and a writer, and most prudent in marking and noting faults and in training and teaching. He gave his attention, if only he could attain it, to repressing us, too redundant and overflowing with a certain juvenile licence and unrestraint of speaking, and to confining us, as it were flowing beyond our banks. So I returned, two years later, not only more practised but almost changed. For both the excessive straining of the voice had subsided and the oratory had, as it were, boiled down, and strength had come to the sides and a moderate habit to the body.
Two orators then excelled who might rouse me with a desire of imitating them, Cotta and Hortensius; of whom the one was relaxed and gentle and embracing the thought loosely and easily in proper words, the other ornate, keen, and not such as you, Brutus, knew him, already fading, but more excitable in his kind of words and delivery. And so I judged that my business was rather with Hortensius, both because in ardour of speaking I was nearer and in age more closely joined. For indeed I had seen, in the same causes — as for Marcus Canuleius, for the consular Gnaeus Dolabella — that, although Cotta had been employed as the leading man, yet Hortensius pleaded the first parts. For a keen orator, kindled and active and melodious, the concourse of men and the noise of the forum demands.
For one year, then, when we had returned from Asia, we pleaded noble causes, while I was seeking the quaestorship, Cotta the consulship, Hortensius the aedileship. Meanwhile the Sicilian year received me as quaestor, Cotta set out from his consulship into Gaul, Hortensius both was and was held the leading man. But when, a year later, I had returned from Sicily, that thing in me, whatever it was, now seemed to be perfected and to have a certain maturity of its own. I seem to say too much about myself, especially as I am myself the one; but the purpose of all this discourse is not that you should perceive my talent and eloquence, from which I am far, but my labour and industry.
When, then, I had been engaged for nearly five years in very many causes and among the leading advocates, then in my Sicilian advocacy I came into the greatest contest, as aedile-elect with the consul-elect Hortensius. But since all this discourse of ours requires not only an enumeration of orators but also certain precepts, what is, as it were, to be marked and noted in Hortensius may be briefly said.
For he, after his consulship — I believe because he saw that none of the consulars was to be compared with him, and neglected those who had not been consuls — relaxed that highest zeal of his with which from a boy he had been kindled, and in the abundance of all things wished to live more happily, as he himself thought, certainly more relaxedly. The first and second and third year had taken away just so much, as it were, from the colour of an old picture, as not any one of the people, but a learned and understanding assessor could perceive. Proceeding further, however, as in the other parts of eloquence, so most of all sticking in the swiftness and continuation of words, he seemed to become daily more unlike himself.
But we did not cease, both with every kind of exercise and most of all with the pen, to increase that thing of ours, whatever it was, however much it was. And, to omit many things in this interval and in these years after the aedileship, I was made both praetor first and, with incredible goodwill of the people, consul. For both on account of my assiduity in causes and my industry, and on account of a more choice and least common kind of oratory, I had turned the minds of men to me by the novelty of my speaking.
I shall say nothing about myself: I shall speak of the rest, of whom there was no one who seemed to have studied letters, in which the source of perfect eloquence is contained, more choicely than the common run of men; no one who had embraced philosophy, the mother of all well-done deeds and well-said words; no one who had learned the civil law, a thing most necessary for private causes and for the prudence of the orator; no one who held the memory of Roman affairs, from which, if ever there were need, he might raise from the dead the most wealthy witnesses; no one who, briefly and pointedly, his adversary mocked, could relax the minds of the judges and lead them for a while from severity to mirth and laughter; no one who could dilate, and lead the oratory from a proper and definite discussion of a person and a time to a common question of the whole kind; no one who, for the sake of delighting, could digress for a little from the cause; no one who could lead the judge greatly to anger, no one who could lead him to weeping; no one who could impel his mind — which alone is most especially the property of the orator — in whatever direction the matter demanded.
And so, when Hortensius had now almost faded away, and I had been made consul in my own year, but in the sixth after he was consul, he began to recall himself to industry, lest, when we were equal in honour, I should seem to be superior in some respect. So for twelve years after my consulship we were engaged most closely together in the greatest causes, while I preferred him to myself, and he me to himself; and my consulship, which at first had lightly grazed him, the same had joined us by the praise of my deeds, which he admired.
But the practice of each of us was most especially perceived a little before this pursuit of ours, terrified by arms, Brutus, suddenly fell silent and grew dumb: when, under the Pompeian law with three hours given for speaking, we came new every day to causes most like one another, or rather the very same. At which causes you too, Brutus, were present, and pleaded several both with us and alone, so that Hortensius, though he did not live long enough, yet completed this course: he began to plead causes sixteen years before you were born; the same man, in his sixty-fourth year, very few days before his death, together with you defended your father-in-law Appius. But what the kind of speaking was in each, the speeches of each will show even to our posterity.
But if we ask why Hortensius flourished more in speaking as a young man than as an older one, we shall find two most true causes. The first, that his kind of oratory was Asiatic, more granted to youth than to old age. Now there are two kinds of Asiatic diction: one sententious and pointed, with thoughts not so much weighty and severe as neat and graceful, such as Timaeus in history, but in speaking, when we were boys, Hierocles of Alabanda, and even more his brother Menecles, of both of whom the speeches are among the foremost praiseworthy in the Asiatic kind. The other kind is not so much crowded with thoughts as winged and impetuous in words, such as is now all Asia, and not only in the flow of oratory, but also in an embellished and witty kind of words, in which were Aeschylus of Cnidos and my contemporary Aeschines of Miletus. In these there was an admirable run of oratory, but the ornate neatness of thoughts there was not.
But these kinds of speaking, as I said, are fitter for young men; in old men they have no weight. And so Hortensius, flourishing in each kind, raised loud applause as a young man. For he had both that Meneclean zeal for frequent and graceful thoughts — in which, as in that Greek, so in him there were certain thoughts more graceful and sweet than either necessary or sometimes useful — and his oratory was both impetuous and vibrant and also careful and polished. These things were not approved by old men — I often saw Philippus both mocking and even growing angry and peevish — but young men admired, the multitude was moved. He was excellent in the judgement of the crowd and easily held the first place as a young man. For although that kind of speaking had too little of authority, yet it seemed suited to his age. And certainly, because both a certain form of talent shone out and a perfect exercise of words bound up in a compact grouping, he excited the highest admiration of men. But when now honours and that older authority required something weightier, he remained the same, and the same did not become him; and because he had let go his exercise and zeal, which in him had been most keen, that former neatness and frequency of thoughts remained, but it was not adorned with that dress of oratory with which he had been wont. This, perhaps, Brutus, pleased you less than it would have pleased, if you had been able to hear him flaming with zeal and flourishing in faculty."

Then Brutus said, "For my part I both see of what kind those things are which you say, and I always thought Hortensius a great orator, and most especially approved him speaking for Messalla, when you were away." "So they report," I said, "and his speech, written, as they say, in just as many words as he spoke, declares it. Therefore he flourished from the consulship of Crassus and Scaevola down to the consuls Paullus and Marcellus; we were in the same course from the dictatorship of Sulla to nearly the same consuls. So the voice of Quintus Hortensius was extinguished by his own fate, ours by the public fate.

"Make a better omen, pray," said Brutus. "Let it be indeed as you wish," I said, "and that not so much for my sake as for yours; but fortunate was his end, who did not see, when they happened, those things which he foresaw would come. For often between ourselves we bewailed the impending disasters, when we saw the causes of civil war shut up in the desires of private men, and the hope of peace shut out from the public counsel. But his own good fortune, which he always enjoyed, seems to have rescued him by death from those miseries which followed.
But we, Brutus, since after the death of Hortensius, that most illustrious orator, we have been left as the, as it were, guardians of orphaned eloquence, let us keep her at home, hedged about with a free protection, and let us repudiate these unknown and shameless suitors, and guard her as a grown maiden, chastely, and as far as we can keep her from the assault of lovers. For my part, although I grieve that I entered upon life a little too late, as it were upon a road, and, before the journey was completed, fell into this night of the commonwealth, yet I am sustained by that consolation which you, Brutus, applied to me in your most pleasant letter, in which you judged that I ought to be of brave spirit, because I had done those things which would speak of me even with me silent, and would live when I was dead; which, if all went rightly, by the safety of the commonwealth, but if otherwise, by its very destruction, would give testimony of my counsels concerning the commonwealth.
But looking on you, Brutus, I grieve — you, whose youth, as it rode, as it were, in a four-horse chariot through the midst of praises, the cross-blow of the commonwealth's wretched fortune has run athwart. This grief touches me, this care troubles me, and this man with me, the partner of the same love and judgement. We favour you, we desire that you may enjoy your virtue, we wish for you that commonwealth in which you may be able to renew and increase the memory of two most distinguished families. For yours was that forum, yours that course; you had come there, you alone, who had not only sharpened your tongue by the practice of speaking, but had also enriched eloquence itself with the equipment of weightier arts, and by those same arts had joined every glory of virtue with the highest praise of eloquence.
From you a twofold anxiety afflicts us — that you yourself are deprived of the commonwealth and it of you. Yet you, Brutus, although this untimely calamity of the state checks the course of your talent, hold yourself to your perennial studies, and accomplish that which you had now well-nigh, or rather plainly, accomplished — that you may rescue yourself from that throng of advocates which I have gathered into this discourse. For it does not befit you, adorned with the richest arts, which, since you could not draw them from home, you summoned from that city which has always been held the home of learning, to be numbered among the common crowd of advocates. For why did Pammenes, by far the most eloquent man of Greece, train you? why that old Academy and its heir Aristus, my host and friend, if indeed we are going to be like the greater part of orators?
Do we not see that scarcely in single ages have two praiseworthy orators stood forth? Galba was, among so many of his contemporaries, the one outstanding man, to whom, as we have been told, both the elder Cato yielded and those who were younger in those times — Lepidus afterwards, then Carbo; for the Gracchi in their harangues with a far easier and freer kind of speaking, although even to their age the praise of eloquence had not yet been perfected; Antonius, Crassus, after them Cotta, Sulpicius, Hortensius. I say no more, I only say this: if it had befallen me to be numbered among the many . . . if the running-about of the more opportune is laborious . . .