Book 3

As I set myself, brother Quintus, to record and to consign to this third book the conversation which Crassus held after the discourse of Antonius, a bitter recollection renewed in my mind its old care and distress. For that genius worthy of immortality, that humanity, that excellence of Lucius Crassus was suddenly extinguished by death scarcely ten days after the day contained in this book and the one before.

For when he had returned to Rome on the last day of the theatrical games, deeply stirred by that speech which was reported to have been delivered in the assembly by Philippus—who, it was agreed, had said that he must look for another counsel, since with that senate he could not conduct the public affairs—on the morning of the Ides of September both he and a crowded senate, summoned by Drusus, came into the senate-house; and there, when Drusus had complained much about Philippus, Crassus brought before the senate that very matter, namely that the consul had so heavily inveighed against that order in the assembly.

Here, as I have often seen agreed among the wisest of men, although it had nearly always befallen Crassus, whenever he had spoken with more than ordinary care, that he was thought never to have spoken better, yet by the common consent of all it was then so judged: that, while all others had always been surpassed by Crassus, on that day Crassus had been surpassed even by himself. For he lamented the misfortune and bereavement of the senate, whose patrimony of dignity was being plundered by the consul—who ought to be as it were a good parent or a faithful guardian—as though by some wicked brigand; nor indeed was it any wonder, if, having ruined the commonwealth by his own counsels, he now rejected the counsel of the senate from the commonwealth.

Here, when he had applied, as it were, certain firebrands of words to a man both vehement and eloquent and pre-eminently bold in resisting, Philippus could not bear it, but blazed up violently, and, having taken pledges, set about to coerce Crassus. And in that very place many things were reported to have been said by Crassus with a more than human inspiration, when he denied that the man was a consul to him, to whom he himself was not a senator. 'Or do you,' he said, 'when you have reckoned the whole authority of the entire order as a pledge and have cut it to pieces in the sight of the Roman people, suppose that I am to be terrified by these pledges of yours? It is not those things you must cut down, if you wish to coerce Lucius Crassus: this tongue of mine must be cut out; and even when it is torn away, by my very breath my liberty shall rebuke your lust.'

It was agreed that very many things were then said by him with the most vehement straining of mind, of genius, of strength; and that the resolution—which the crowded senate followed—was uttered by him in words most elaborate and most weighty: that the Roman people might be satisfied that the senate had never failed the commonwealth either in counsel or in fidelity; and that he himself, as appears in the recorded decrees, was present at the drawing up of it.

That was, as it were, the swan-song, the voice and oration of a divine man; and after his death we used to come into the senate-house as though expecting it, that we might gaze upon that very spot in which he had taken his last stand: for we heard that then, as he was speaking, his side had pained him and that much sweat had followed; from which, when he had shuddered with cold, he returned home with a fever, and on the seventh day was consumed by the pain in his side.

O the deceiving hope of men, the fragile fortune, and our vain strivings, which are often broken and fall to ruin in mid-course, or are overwhelmed in their very race before they can catch sight of the harbour! For so long as the life of Crassus was distracted by the labour of seeking office, so long he flourished more by his private services and the praise of his genius than by the fruit of high station or the dignity of public office; but that year which, with the consent of all, was first opening to him, now that he had finished the course of honours, the way to the highest authority—that year, by his death, overthrew all his hope and all the designs of his life.

This was grievous to his own people, bitter to his country, heavy to all good men; yet such disasters afterwards befell the commonwealth that to me it seems that life was not snatched from Lucius Crassus by the immortal gods, but rather that death was given to him as a gift. He did not see Italy ablaze with war, nor the senate burning with hatred, nor the leading men of the state arraigned for unspeakable crime, nor the mourning of his daughter, nor the exile of his son-in-law, nor the most bitter flight of Gaius Marius, nor, after Marius' return, that most cruel slaughter of all, nor, in short, that state disfigured in every kind of evil, in which he himself, when it was most flourishing, had far excelled all men.

And since I have touched in thought upon the power and the changefulness of fortune, my discourse shall not wander further afield, but shall be bounded almost by those very men who are contained in this conversation which I have undertaken to relate. For who would not justly call blessed that famous death of Lucius Crassus, which has often been bewailed by many, when he recalls the end of these very men who then spoke with him almost for the last time? For we hold in memory Quintus Catulus, a man pre-eminent in every praise, who, when he was begging not for an unimpaired fortune, but only for exile and flight, was compelled to deprive himself of his own life.

Already on those very Rostra, on which he as consul had most steadfastly defended the commonwealth, and which as censor he had adorned with the spoils of his command, was placed the head of Marcus Antonius, by which the heads of many had been saved; nor indeed far from it lay the head of Gaius Julius, betrayed by the crime of an Etruscan host, together with the head of his brother Lucius Julius—so that he who did not see these things may seem both to have lived together with the commonwealth and to have been extinguished together with it. For he did not see his kinsman, that man of the greatest spirit, Publius Crassus, slain by his own hand, nor the image of Vesta sprinkled with the blood of his colleague the pontifex maximus; and for his grief—such was his disposition toward his country—the death of Gaius Carbo, his most bitter enemy, on that very same day, would have been a wicked thing.

He did not see the horrible and pitiable misfortunes of those very young men who had then devoted themselves to Crassus: of whom Cotta, whom he had left flourishing, was a few days after the death of Crassus driven through hatred from his tribunate, and not many months from that time was cast out of the state; while Sulpicius, who had been in the same flame of hatred, set himself in his tribunate to strip of all dignity those with whom, as a private man, he had lived most closely; and from him, while he was blossoming to the highest glory of eloquence, life was snatched away by the sword, and a penalty for his rashness was exacted not without great evil to the commonwealth.

But you, Crassus, I judge to have been both adorned and extinguished by a divine counsel, alike in the flower of your life and in the opportune moment of your death; for either, by reason of the virtue and steadfastness of your spirit, you would have had to undergo the cruelty of the civil sword, or, if some fortune had delivered you from the horror of such a death, that same fortune would have compelled you to be a spectator of your country's funerals; and not only would the domination of the wicked have grieved you, but, because of the slaughter of citizens mingled with it, even the victory of the good would have been a sorrow to you.

To me indeed, brother Quintus, when I consider both the misfortunes of those of whom I spoke before, and the things which we ourselves, through our incredible and singular love for the commonwealth, have undergone and suffered, your judgement often seems true and wise—you who, on account of so many, so great, and so headlong disasters of the most illustrious men and the best citizens, have always called me back from all contention and conflict.

But since these things can now no longer remain whole for us, and since our highest labours are softened by being compensated with great glory, let us pass on to those consolations which can be not only pleasant to us when our troubles are appeased, but even wholesome while they still cling to us; and let us hand down to memory the remaining and almost the last discourse of Lucius Crassus, and pay him, if by no means equal to his genius, yet according to our zeal a deserved and due gratitude.

For there is none of us who, when he reads the wonderfully written books of Plato, in nearly all of which Socrates is portrayed, does not, although those writings are divine, yet suspect something greater concerning the man of whom they are written; and this same thing we ask, not indeed of you, who grant us everything of the highest, but of the rest who shall take these books into their hands: that they suspect something greater about Lucius Crassus than the measure of what is expressed by us.

For we, who had not ourselves been present at the conversation, and to whom Gaius Cotta had handed down only the topics and sentiments of this discussion, have attempted to sketch in their conversation that very manner of speaking in which we had recognized each orator; so that if there shall be anyone who, led by the common opinion, thinks that Antonius was more meagre, or Crassus more full, than the way in which each of them has been brought in by us, he will be one of those who either never heard them or cannot judge; for each of them was, as I set forth before, both pre-eminent above all men in zeal and genius and learning, and perfect in his own kind—so that neither was this ornament of speech wanting in Antonius, nor did it overflow in Crassus.

So then, when they had departed before midday and rested a little, Cotta used to say that he himself had especially noticed this: that Crassus had spent all that midday time in the keenest and most intent reflection; and that he, who well knew Crassus' countenance when he was to speak, and the fixed gaze of his eyes in meditation, and had often seen it in the greatest causes, had then, on purpose, while the others were resting, come into that recess in which Crassus, with a couch set down, was reclining; and when he perceived that he was fixed in thought, he at once withdrew; and in that silence nearly two hours were spent. Then, when all had come to Crassus, the day now declining toward the afternoon, 'What is it, Crassus,' said Julius, 'shall we go and take our seats? Though we come to remind you, not to demand.'

Then Crassus: 'Do you think me so shameless as to suppose that I can owe you this service any longer, especially this one?' 'Where, then,' said he, 'is that place? Does the midst of the wood please you? For it is the most shady and cool.' 'Indeed,' said Crassus, 'for there is in that place a seat not unsuited to this conversation of ours.' When this same thing had pleased the rest, they went into the wood, and there, with great expectation of hearing, they sat down.

Then Crassus said: 'Both your authority and friendship, and the obliging temper of Antonius, took from me, in my best of causes, the liberty of refusing; although, in dividing our discussion, when he took for himself the matters which ought to be said by an orator, but left to me to explain in what manner those things ought to be adorned, he separated things which cannot be separated. For since all speech consists of matter and words, neither can the words have a place, if you take away the matter, nor the matter have light, if you remove the words.

And to me indeed those men of old, who in their minds embraced something greater, seem to have seen much more than the sharpness of our genius can discern—those who said that all these things, both above and below, are one, and are bound together by one force and one harmony of nature; for there is no kind of thing which can either, torn away from the rest, stand of itself, or which, if the rest were to lack it, could preserve their own force and eternity.

But if this seems too great a system to be comprehended by the sense or thought of men, there is also that true saying of Plato, certainly not unheard by you, Catulus: that all the teaching of these liberal and humane arts is held together by a single bond of fellowship; for when once the power of that reason has been perceived, by which the causes and the issues of things are known, then a certain wonderful, as it were, consent and concord of all the branches of learning is found.

But if this too seems to be loftier than that we, prostrate upon the ground, can look up to it, yet certainly that at least, which we have embraced, which we profess, which we have undertaken, we ought to know and to hold. For there is one eloquence—as both I said yesterday and Antonius signified in several places in his morning discourse—into whatever shores or regions of discussion it may be carried;

for whether one speaks of the nature of the heavens or of the earth, whether of divine power or of human, whether from a lower place or from an equal or from a higher, whether to impel men or to teach or to deter or to rouse or to turn aside or to inflame or to soothe, whether to few or to many, whether among strangers or among one's own people or with oneself, the speech is divided into channels, not into separate springs; and wherever it goes, it is accompanied by the same equipment and adornment.

But since we are now overborne by the opinions not only of the common crowd, but even of men slightly educated—who, since they cannot grasp whole what they cannot embrace, handle it more easily when it is pulled apart and, as it were, torn in pieces, and who, as it were, separate the body from the mind, so do they separate the words from the thoughts, though neither can come to pass without the destruction of both—I shall not take upon myself in my discourse more than is laid upon me; I shall only signify briefly that no ornament of words can be found except in well-shaped and well-expressed thoughts, nor is there any thought made brilliant without the light of words.

But before I attempt to touch upon those things by which I think speech is adorned and illumined, I shall set forth briefly what I feel about the whole kind of speaking. There is no nature, as it seems to me, which does not have in its own kind a number of things unlike one another, which nevertheless are accounted worthy of a like praise; for we perceive many things with our ears which, although they delight us with their sounds, are yet often so various that the one you hear next seems the most pleasant; and with our eyes there are gathered almost innumerable pleasures, which so take us that they delight one and the same sense in unlike kinds; and the remaining senses are charmed by various pleasures, so that the judgement of the greatest excellence of sweetness is difficult.

And this same thing which is found in the natures of things can be transferred also to the arts: there is one art of sculpture, in which Myron, Polyclitus, and Lysippus were pre-eminent, who were all unlike one another, but in such a way nevertheless that you would not wish any of them to be unlike himself; there is one art and theory of painting, and yet Zeuxis, Aglaophon, and Apelles were most unlike one another, nor is there any of them to whom anything seems to be wanting in his art. And if this is to be wondered at, and yet is true, in these arts that are, as it were, mute, how much more admirable is it in oratory and in speech? Which, although it deals with the same thoughts and words, has the greatest dissimilarities; not in such a way that some are to be blamed, but that those who are agreed to be praiseworthy are nevertheless praised in unlike kinds.

And this may first be discerned in the poets, who have the closest kinship with orators: how unlike to one another are Ennius, Pacuvius, and Accius; how, among the Greeks, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides—and yet to all almost equal praise is assigned in an unlike kind of writing!

Look now at those men, and behold them, about whose faculty we are inquiring: Isocrates had sweetness, Lysias subtlety, Hyperides acuteness, Aeschines sonorousness, Demosthenes force. Which of them was not excellent? yet which was like any other than himself? Africanus had gravity, Laelius gentleness, Galba asperity; Carbo had a certain flowing and tuneful quality. Which of these was not the first in those times? and yet each was the first in his own kind.

But why should I search out old examples, when I am permitted to use present and living ones? What was ever more pleasant to our ears than the speech of this Catulus? which is so pure that he seems almost the only one who speaks Latin, and yet so weighty that, amid his singular dignity, all humanity and charm is nevertheless present. Why say more? When I hear him, I am wont so to judge that, whatever you should add or change or take away, it would be more faulty and worse.

And what of our friend Caesar here? has he not brought in a certain new method of oratory and introduced a kind of speaking almost singular? Who ever, except this man, has handled tragic matters almost comically, sad matters with ease, severe matters cheerfully, forensic matters with an almost theatrical grace, and that in such a way that neither was the jest excluded by the greatness of the matters, nor the gravity lessened by the wit?

Behold, present here, are two who are nearly of equal age, Sulpicius and Cotta. What is so unlike each other? what so excellent each in its own kind? The one polished and subtle, unfolding the matter in proper and apt words; he sticks always in his cause, and, when he has seen most keenly what is to be proved to the judge, he, leaving the other arguments aside, fixes his mind and his speech upon that one point; while Sulpicius, with a certain most courageous onset of spirit, with the fullest and greatest voice, with the utmost exertion of body and dignity of movement, has also such gravity and abundance of words that he seems alone to have been most fully equipped by nature for speaking.

I return now to ourselves, since we have always been so paired that we are summoned, as it were, by the talk of men into a kind of judgement of comparison. What is so unlike as I in speaking and Antonius? Since he is such an orator that nothing can be more excellent than he, while I, although I am dissatisfied with myself, am yet for the most part joined with him in this comparison. Do you see what this manner of Antonius is? Bold, vehement, ardent in pleading, fortified beforehand and hedged about on every side of the case, keen, sharp, exact, lingering on each point in its turn, retiring honourably, pursuing fiercely, terrifying, supplicating, with the utmost variety of speech, with no satiety to our ears.

But we, whatever we are in speaking—since we seem to be of some account in your eyes—are yet certainly far distant from his kind; of what sort that is, it is not for me to say, because each man is least known to himself, and each judges most hardly of himself; but nevertheless the dissimilarity can be understood both from the moderation of my movement, and from this, that I am wont generally to end my speech upon the very tracks where I first set foot, and because somewhat greater labour and care torment me in the choosing of words, since I fear lest, if my speech be a little too plain, it may seem not worthy of the expectation and the silence.

But if among us who are present there are such great dissimilarities, such fixed qualities proper to each, and if in that variety the better is generally distinguished from the worse by faculty rather than by kind, and everything is praised which is perfect in its own kind—what think you, if we should wish to embrace all who anywhere are or have been orators, will it not come to pass that there are found almost as many kinds of speaking as there are orators? From which discussion of mine perhaps this objection may occur: if there are almost innumerable, as it were, forms and figures of speaking, unlike in appearance, praiseworthy in kind, then those things which differ among themselves cannot be formed by the same precepts and one method of instruction.

But this is not so; and it is to be most diligently observed by those who train and educate others, toward what each man's nature seems most to incline. For we see that from the same school, as it were, there have come forth disciples unlike one another and yet praiseworthy, when the instruction of the teacher was accommodated to the nature of each.

Of which the most signal example—to pass over the other arts—is what Isocrates, that singular teacher, used to say: that he was wont to use spurs upon Ephorus, but, on the contrary, reins upon Theopompus; for the one, who exulted in a boldness of words, he restrained, while the other, who hesitated and was, as it were, bashful, he urged on. Nor did he make them like one another, but added something to the one, and pared something from the other, so that he might shape in each what the nature of each would allow.

These things had to be premised by me, so that, if not all the things which I should set forth were suited to the zeal of every one of you and to that kind which each of you approves in speaking, you might yet perceive that the kind expressed by me was that which I myself most approve. Therefore these things which Antonius has explained are both to be done by the orator and to be spoken of in some way. What better manner of speaking is there, then—for of delivery I shall see afterwards—than that we should speak in Latin, plainly, with adornment, and aptly and suitably to whatever is being treated?

And of those two which I named first, namely of pure and clear speech, I do not think a method is to be expected from me; for we do not attempt to teach a man to speak who does not know how to talk; nor to hope that he who cannot speak Latin will speak with adornment; nor indeed that he who does not say what we can understand can say what we may admire. Let us leave these things, then, which have an easy understanding and a necessary use. For the one is handed down by letters and by boyish instruction, and the other is employed for this reason, that it may be understood what each man says, which we see to be so necessary that yet nothing can be less than it.

But all elegance of speech, although it is polished by the knowledge of letters, is yet increased by the reading of orators and poets; for those men of old, who could not yet adorn what they said, almost all spoke excellently; and those who have been accustomed to their language will not be able, even if they wish it, to speak otherwise than in Latin. Nor yet must we use those words which our own custom no longer uses, except sometimes, for the sake of adornment, sparingly, as I shall show; but of the customary words he will be able so to use them, as to use the choicest, who shall have been studiously and much versed in the old writings.

And, that we may speak Latin, we must take care not only that we utter such words as no one may justly censure, and that we so preserve them in their cases and tenses and gender and number that there be nothing disordered or discordant or out of place, but also the very tongue and breath and sound of the voice are to be regulated.

I would not have the letters pronounced too affectedly, I would not have them obscured too carelessly; I would not have the words come forth thinly and lifeless, I would not have them inflated and, as it were, panted out too heavily. For about the voice I do not yet speak of those things which belong to delivery, but of this which seems to me joined, as it were, with mere speech: for there are certain faults which everyone desires to avoid; a soft voice, or womanish, or, as it were, beyond measure discordant and absurd.

There is, moreover, a fault which some pursue on purpose: a rustic and countrified voice delights certain men, that thereby their speech may seem the more to retain antiquity, if it so sound; as your companion, Catulus, Lucius Cotta, seems to me to take pleasure in the broadness of his tongue and the rustic sound of his voice, and thinks that what he speaks will appear ancient, if it shall be thoroughly countrified. But me your sound and that subtlety delight—I say nothing of words, though that is the chief thing; that indeed reason supplies, letters teach, the habit both of reading and of speaking confirms; but I mean that sweetness which issues from the mouth, which indeed, as among the Greeks it is most proper to the Attic speakers, so in Latin speech is most proper to this city.

At Athens learning has now long since perished among the Athenians themselves, and there remains in that city only the dwelling-place of those studies, of which the citizens take no part, while strangers enjoy them, captivated in a way by the name and the authority of the city; yet any unlettered Athenian will easily surpass the most learned Asiatics, not in words, but in the sound of his voice, and by speaking not so much well as sweetly. Our men study letters less than the Latins; yet of those city-folk whom you know, in whom there is the least of letters, there is none who would not easily surpass, in the smoothness of his voice and in the very compression and sound of his mouth, Quintus Valerius Soranus, the most lettered of all who wear the toga.

Wherefore, since there is a certain voice proper to the Roman stock and city, in which nothing can offend, nothing displease, nothing be remarked, nothing sound or savour of the foreign, let us follow this, and let us learn to flee not only rustic asperity, but also foreign strangeness.

For my part, when I hear my mother-in-law Laelia—for women more easily preserve antiquity uncorrupted, because, having no experience of the speech of many, they always retain what they first learned—but I so hear her, that I seem to be hearing Plautus or Naevius, so right and simple is the very sound of her voice, that she seems to bring with it nothing of ostentation or of imitation; from which I judge that her father so spoke, and so her ancestors: not harshly, like the man I mentioned, not broadly, not rustically, not with a gaping sound, but with compression and evenness and smoothness.

Wherefore our Cotta, whose broad pronunciation, Sulpicius, you sometimes imitate—so that you suppress the letter Iota and pronounce a most full E—seems to me to imitate not the ancient orators, but the reapers.' Here, when Sulpicius himself had laughed, Crassus said: 'So will I deal with you, that, since you wished me to speak, you may hear something about your own faults.' 'Would that you might!' said he; 'for that is the very thing we wish, and if you will do it, we shall, I think, lay aside many faults here today.'

'But indeed not without my own peril,' said Crassus, 'can I, Sulpicius, reprehend you, since Antonius said that you seemed to him most like himself.' Then he replied: 'But you remember that the same man advised that we should imitate in each the qualities that were greatest in him; from which I fear that I have imitated nothing of you except the stamping of the foot, and a few words, and perhaps some gesture.' 'Then those things,' said Crassus, 'which you have from me, I do not reprehend, lest I mock myself—though they are much more both in number and in greatness than you say—but those which are plainly your own, or copied by imitation from someone, of these, if perhaps some occasion shall remind me, I will admonish you.

Let us then pass over the precepts of speaking Latin, which boyish instruction hands down, and which a subtler understanding and theory of letters nourishes, or the habit of daily and domestic speech, and which books confirm, and the reading of the old orators and poets; nor indeed let us linger longer over that second matter, to discuss by what means we may attain that the things we say be understood:

namely by speaking in Latin, with customary words that properly point out the things we wish to be signified and declared, without an ambiguous word or expression, without too long a stringing-together of words, without an over-extended drawing-out of those things which are transferred from other matters for the sake of likeness, without disjointed thoughts, without preposterous tenses, without confused persons, without disordered arrangement. Why say more? The whole matter is so easy that it often seems to me very strange that it should be harder to understand what the advocate wishes to say than if the man himself who employs the advocate were to speak of his own affair.

For those who bring their causes to us mostly instruct us themselves in such a way that you would not wish it to be said more plainly; but as soon as Fufius, or your contemporary Pomponius, begins to plead the same matters, I do not equally understand what they say, unless I attend most closely; so confused is their speech, so disordered, that there is nothing first, nothing second, and there is such a strangeness and crowd of words that the speech, which ought to bring light to the matters, brings to them obscurity and darkness, and they seem in a way to drown out their own selves in speaking.

But, if you please, since I hope these things seem—to you at least, who are older—tiresome and tedious enough, let us pass on to the rest, which are somewhat more wearisome.' 'And yet you see,' said Antonius, 'how concerned we are with other matters—for I conjecture from myself—that we can be brought, all things being laid aside, to follow you; so much is your speech, of harsh matters, polished, of meagre matters, full, of common matters, something new.'

'For easy,' said he, 'Antonius, were those two parts which I just now ran over, or rather almost passed by, of speaking Latin and of speaking plainly; the remaining parts are great, intricate, varied, weighty, in which all admiration of genius and all praise of eloquence is contained; for no one ever admired an orator because he spoke Latin; if it is otherwise, they laugh, and think him not only no orator, but not even a man; no one ever extolled with words a man who had so spoken that those present understood what he said, but they despised him who was less able to do so.

In what, then, do men shudder? Whom, as he speaks, do they gaze upon in amazement? At whom do they cry out? Whom do they think, so to speak, a god among men? Those who speak distinctly, clearly, copiously, with illumination both in matter and in words, and who in the very speech produce, as it were, a certain rhythm and verse-like cadence—that is what I mean by speaking with adornment. And those who likewise so moderate this, as the dignities of the matters and of the persons require, are to be praised in that kind of praise which I call apt and congruous.

Antonius denied that he had as yet seen any who so spoke, and said that to these alone the name of eloquence should be assigned. Wherefore, on my authority, deride and despise all those who think that they have embraced the whole power of oratory by the precepts of those who are now called rhetoricians, and who have not yet been able to understand what character they hold or what they profess. For to the true orator, since all that is in the life of men—seeing that the orator is conversant in it, and it is the material set beneath him—all things must be sought out, heard, read, discussed, handled, and turned over.

For eloquence is one of the highest virtues; although all the virtues are equal and on a par, yet one is more beautiful and brilliant in appearance than another, like this power which, having embraced the knowledge of things, so expounds in words the feelings and counsels of the mind that it can impel those who hear it whithersoever it has leaned; and the greater this power is, the more must it be joined with probity and the highest prudence; for if we should hand over a copiousness of speech to men devoid of these virtues, we should not indeed make them orators, but should put certain weapons into the hands of madmen.

This faculty, I say, of thinking and of uttering, and this power of speaking, the ancient Greeks named wisdom; from this came their Lycurguses, from this their Pittacuses, from this their Solons; and by likeness to these were our own Coruncanii, Fabricii, Catones, Scipiones—not so learned, perhaps, but of a like impulse of mind and purpose. Others, however, with the same prudence, but with a different design as to the pursuits of life, sought quiet and leisure—as Pythagoras, Democritus, Anaxagoras—who, from the governing of states, transferred themselves wholly to the knowledge of things; which life, on account of its tranquillity, and on account of the very sweetness of knowledge—than which nothing is more pleasant to men—delighted more men than was useful to the commonwealths.

And so, since men of the most excellent genius gave themselves to that study, from that supreme faculty of vacant and free time the most learned men, with too much leisure and abounding in most fertile genius, thought that many more things than was necessary were to be cared for and sought out and investigated by them. For that old teaching indeed seems to have been one and the same mistress both of right doing and of fine speaking; nor were the teachers disjoined, but the same men were instructors both of living and of speaking—like that Phoenix in Homer, who says that he was given by Peleus the father as a companion to the young Achilles for the war, that he might make him a speaker of words and a doer of deeds.

But as men accustomed to assiduous and daily labour, when by reason of weather they are kept from work, betake themselves to the ball, or to the dice, or to the gaming-tables, or even devise for themselves some new game in their leisure, so those men, shut out from public business as from work, either by the times or by their own will keeping holiday, betook themselves wholly, some to the poets, some to the geometers, some to the musicians; others, as the dialecticians, begot for themselves a new study and game, and in those arts which were invented in order that the minds of boys might be shaped to humanity and virtue, they consumed all their time and all their years.

But since there were certain men, and those many, who either flourished in the commonwealth by reason of that twofold wisdom of doing and of speaking which cannot be sundered—as Themistocles, as Pericles, as Theramenes—or who were less themselves engaged in public affairs, but were nevertheless teachers of this same wisdom—as Gorgias, Thrasymachus, Isocrates—there were found men who, although they themselves abounded in learning and genius, but by a certain judgement of mind shrank from civil affairs and from business, harassed and despised this exercise of speaking;

of whom the chief was Socrates, who, by the testimony of all the learned and the judgement of all Greece, was easily the first—in prudence and acuteness and charm and subtlety, and indeed in eloquence, in variety, in copiousness, into whatever direction he had betaken himself—and who took away this common name from those who handled, practised, and taught these things which we now inquire into, although they were called by one name, because all knowledge of the best things and the exercise therein was named philosophy; and he separated by his discussions the knowledge of thinking wisely and of speaking with adornment, things in fact coherent; whose genius and various conversations Plato handed down to immortality in his writings, though Socrates himself left not a single letter.

From this arose that divorce, as it were, of the tongue and the heart, an absurd thing surely, and useless and to be censured: that some should teach us to be wise, and others to speak. For since there were several who sprang in a manner from Socrates, because from his various and diverse discussions, diffused on every side, one had grasped one thing, another another, there were sown, as it were, families dissenting among themselves and much disjoined and unlike, although nevertheless all the philosophers both wished to be called Socratics and judged themselves to be such.

And first, from Plato himself, Aristotle and Xenocrates, of whom the one obtained the name of the Peripatetics, the other of the Academy; then from Antisthenes, who in the Socratic conversation had most loved patience and endurance, came first the Cynics, then the Stoics; then from Aristippus, whom those discussions of pleasure rather delighted, flowed the Cyrenaic philosophy, which he and his successors defended without disguise, while these men who now measure all things by pleasure, since they do it more bashfully, neither satisfy dignity, which they do not despise, nor maintain pleasure, which they wish to embrace. There were also other kinds of philosophers, who all said that they were nearly Socratics—the Eretrians, the Erillians, the Megarians, the Pyrrhonians; but these have now long since been broken and extinguished by the force and discussions of these others.

Of those, however, which remain, that philosophy which has undertaken the patronage of pleasure, even if it should seem true to anyone, is yet far from the man whom we are seeking, and whom we wish to be the author of public counsel, the leader in the governing of the state, and the chief of opinion and eloquence in the senate, among the people, and in public causes. Yet no injury shall be done by us to that philosophy; for it shall not be driven from the place to which it wishes to approach, but it shall rest in its own little gardens, where it will, where also, reclining softly and delicately, it calls us away from the Rostra, from the courts, from the senate-house—wisely, perhaps, especially in such a commonwealth as this.

But I do not now inquire which philosophy is truest, but which is most closely joined to the orator; wherefore let us dismiss these men without any insult; for they are both good men and, since they so seem to themselves, happy; and let us only admonish them so far, that, even if it be most true, they should yet keep silent, as though it were a mystery, that thing which they assert—that it is not for the wise man to engage in the commonwealth; for if they shall persuade us and every best man of this, they themselves will not be able to be, what they most desire, at leisure.

The Stoics, however, whom I by no means disapprove, I yet dismiss; nor do I fear that they will be angry, since they know not at all how to be angry; and I have this thanks to give them, that they alone of all men said that eloquence was a virtue and a wisdom. But assuredly there is in them something which is much at variance with this orator whom we are equipping; either because they say that all who are not wise are slaves, robbers, enemies, madmen, and yet that no one is wise: but it is very absurd to commit an assembly or a senate or any gathering of men to one to whom none of those present seems sane, none a citizen, none free.

There is added to this that they have also a kind of speech which is perhaps subtle and certainly acute, but, for an orator, meagre, unwonted, abhorrent to the ears of the multitude, obscure, empty, dry, and yet of such a sort that it can by no means be used before the multitude: for other things seem good and evil to the Stoics than to the rest of the citizens, or rather of the nations; the force of honour, of disgrace, of reward, of punishment is otherwise with them; whether truly or not is nothing to the present purpose; but if we should follow these, we could never set forth any matter by speaking.

There remain the Peripatetics and the Academics; although the name of the Academics is one, the opinions are two; for Speusippus, the son of Plato's sister, and Xenocrates, who had heard Plato, and Polemo and Crantor, who had heard Xenocrates, dissented in no great matter from Aristotle, who had heard Plato along with them; in copiousness, perhaps, and variety of speaking they were not equal: Arcesilaus first, who had heard Polemo, snatched chiefly this from the various books of Plato and the Socratic conversations—that there is nothing certain which can be perceived either by the senses or by the mind; and they say that he, using a certain exquisite charm of speaking, scorned every judgement of mind and sense, and first instituted—although this was most Socratic—not to show what he himself felt, but to argue against that which each man had said he felt.

From this flowed this more recent Academy, in which arose, with a certain divine swiftness of genius and copiousness of speech, Carneades; of whom, although I have known many hearers at Athens, I can yet cite the most trustworthy authorities—both my father-in-law Scaevola, who heard him at Rome as a young man, and Quintus Metellus, son of Lucius, my friend, a most illustrious man, who said that he, when a young man, had for many days heard that man at Athens, then already affected by old age.

But these, as the divisions of the rivers from the Apennine, so were the partings of the branches of learning made from the common ridge of wisdom, so that the philosophers flowed down, as it were, into a certain Greek and harbour-filled upper sea, while the orators slipped down into this lower one, Tuscan and barbarous, full of rocks and perils, in which even Ulysses himself had wandered astray.

Wherefore, if we are content with this eloquence and this orator, who knows either that he ought to deny what is charged, or, if you cannot do that, then to show that what the accused has done was either rightly done, or by another's fault, or by injury, or in accordance with law, or not against law, or through imprudence, or of necessity, or that it is not to be designated by that name by which it is charged, or that the matter was not carried on as it ought to have been and as was lawful—and if you think it enough to learn those things which these writers of the art teach, which Antonius nevertheless explained much more ornately than they are stated by them, and more fully—but if you are content with these, and with those things too which you wished to be said by me, then you drive the orator from a certain vast and immense field into a very narrow ring indeed.

But if you wish to follow that ancient Pericles, or this man too, who is more familiar to us by reason of the multitude of his writings, Demosthenes; and if you have come to love that splendid and surpassing image of the perfect orator and his beauty—then you must comprehend either this Carneadean or that Aristotelian power.

For, as I said before, those men of old, down to Socrates, joined the knowledge and science of all things which pertained to the manners of men, to life, to virtue, to the commonwealth, with the theory of speaking; but afterwards, the philosophers, dissociated, as I have set forth, from Socrates and thereafter from all the Socratics likewise, despised eloquence, and the orators despised wisdom, and neither touched anything from the other's portion, except so far as the former borrowed from the latter, or these from those; from which they might have drawn indiscriminately, if they had wished to remain in their old community.

But as the old pontiffs, on account of the multitude of the sacrifices, wished there to be three epulones, although they themselves had been instituted by Numa to perform also that banquet-sacrifice of the games, so the Socratics separated the pleaders of causes from themselves and from the common name of philosophy, although the men of old had wished there to be a wonderful fellowship of speaking and of understanding.

Since these things are so, I, for my part, will plead a little on my own behalf, and will ask of you that you account the things which I shall say to be said not about myself, but about the orator. For I am one who, although I was taught in boyhood with the highest zeal of my father, and brought to the forum only so much genius as I myself am aware of—not so much as perhaps I seem to you to have—cannot say that I learned these things which I now embrace just as I shall say they ought to be learned; inasmuch as I came earliest of all to public causes, and at the age of one-and-twenty summoned to trial a most noble and most eloquent man; to whom the forum was my school, my master was practice, and the laws and institutions of the Roman people and the custom of our ancestors.

A little thirsting for those arts of which I speak, I tasted them, when I was quaestor in Asia, having got hold of a rhetorician from the Academy nearly of my own age, that Metrodorus of whose memory Antonius made mention; and departing thence, at Athens, where I should have lingered longer, had I not been angry with the Athenians because they would not repeat the mysteries, to which I had come two days too late; wherefore this, that I embrace so great a knowledge and force of learning, is not only not in my favour, but rather against me—for I am discussing not what I can do, but what the orator can do—and all these men who set forth the rhetorical arts I hold most ridiculous; for they write about the kinds of suits, and about exordia, and about narrations;

but that power of eloquence is so great that it holds the origin, the force, and the changes of all things, of the virtues, of the duties, and of all that nature which contains the manners of men, their minds, and their life; the same eloquence describes manners, laws, and rights, governs the commonwealth, and speaks ornately and copiously of all things to whatever matter they pertain.

In which kind we for our part are engaged so far as we can, so far as we have strength by genius, by our middling learning, by practice; nor yet do we much yield in disputation to those who have placed, as it were, the tent of their whole life in philosophy alone.

For what can my friend Gaius Velleius bring forward, as to why pleasure is the highest good, which I could not maintain more copiously, if I wished, or refute, from those topics which Antonius set forth, by this exercise of speaking, in which Velleius is unskilled and in which each of us is versed? What is there that either Sextus Pompeius, or the two Balbi, or my friend Marcus Vigellius, who lived with Panaetius, the Stoic, could say about the virtue of men, in which disputation I, or any of you, ought to yield to them?

For philosophy is not like the rest of the arts: for what will he do in geometry who has not learned it? what in music? Either he must be silent, or not even be accounted sane. But these things which are in philosophy are dug out by the genius, for the eliciting of what is probable in each matter, by keen and sharp minds, and are polished by a practised speech. This our common orator, if he be less learned, yet, if he be practised in speaking, will by this very common practice belabour those men, and will not allow himself to be despised and looked down upon by them;

but if there shall some day arise one who, after the manner of Aristotle, can speak on both sides of all matters, and in every cause, the precepts of that man being known, can unfold two contrary speeches—or who, in this manner of Arcesilaus and Carneades, can argue against everything that is proposed, and who shall join to that theory this practice and exercise of speaking—he will be the true, he the perfect, he the only orator. For neither without the forensic sinews can an orator be sufficiently vehement and weighty, nor without the variety of learning sufficiently polished and wise.

Wherefore let us indeed allow that ancient Corax to hatch his own chicks in the nest, that they may fly forth as hateful and troublesome bawlers; and let us suffer some Pamphilus or other to paint so great a matter, as it were, in toy-pictures upon his tablets, like some childish playthings; and let us ourselves, in this short discussion of yesterday and today, explain the whole office of the orator—provided only that the matter be so great as to seem comprehended in all the books of the philosophers, which none of these men has ever touched.'

Then Catulus said: 'By Hercules, Crassus, it is by no means to be wondered at that there is in you so great a force, or sweetness, or copiousness of speaking; whom indeed I formerly supposed to speak so by nature, that you seemed to me not only a most accomplished orator, but also a most wise man; now I understand that you have always counted those things even more important which looked toward wisdom, and that from these this copiousness of speaking has flowed. But yet, when I recall all the stages of your age, and when I consider your life and pursuits, I neither see at what time you learned these things, nor do I understand that you were greatly devoted to those studies, those men, those books. And yet I cannot determine whether I more wonder that you were able, amid such great occupations of yours, to learn thoroughly those things which you persuade me are the greatest helps, or, if you were not able, that you can speak in this manner.'

Here Crassus said: 'I should wish you first to persuade yourself of this, Catulus: that I do not act much otherwise, when I discuss the orator, than I should do if I had to speak about the actor. For I should deny that he could give satisfaction in gesture, unless he had learned the palaestra, unless he had learned to dance; nor, when I said this, would it be necessary that I should be an actor, but perhaps a not foolish appraiser of another's art.

Similarly now I speak about the orator at your impulse—the highest orator, of course; for always, whenever inquiry is made about any art or faculty, it is wont to be made about the absolute and perfect. Wherefore, if you now wish me to be an orator, even a fairly good one, or, in short, a good one, I will not resist; for why should I now be foolish? I know that I am so esteemed: but if it is so, yet certainly I am not the highest; for among men there is no thing more difficult, nor greater, nor which requires more helps of learning.

And yet, since we must discuss the orator, I must of necessity speak of the highest orator; for the force and nature of a thing, unless it be set before the eyes in its perfection, cannot be understood of what sort and how great it is. But I confess, Catulus, that I neither today live among those books and with those men, nor indeed—which you have rightly remembered—ever had any time set apart for learning, nor gave so much time to learning as my boyish age and the forensic holidays allowed me.

And, if you ask, Catulus, what I feel about that learning, I do not think that so much time is needful to an ingenious man, and to one who looks toward the forum, the senate-house, causes, the commonwealth, as those have taken to themselves for whom life failed while still learning: for all the arts are handled otherwise by those who transfer them to use, otherwise by those who, delighting in the very handling of the arts, are going to do nothing else in life. This master of the Samnite gladiators is now of extreme old age and practises daily, for he cares for nothing else: but Quintus Velocius had learned it in addition as a boy; yet, because he was fit for it and had thoroughly mastered it, he was, as it is in Lucilius, "though himself a good Samnite, in the school and with the foils sharp enough for anyone;" but he gave more pains to the forum, to his friends, to his household estate. Valerius sang daily, for he was an actor: what else should he do?

But Numerius Furius, our friend, sings when it suits him, for he is a head of a household, he is a Roman knight; as a boy he learned what had to be learned. The same principle holds for these greatest arts; day and night we used to see Quintus Tubero, a man of the highest virtue and prudence, giving his attention to philosophy; but his uncle Africanus you could hardly understand to be doing it, when nevertheless he was doing it. These things are easily learned, if you both take as much as is needful, and have one who can teach faithfully,

and know also yourself how to learn; but if for your whole life you wish to do nothing else, the very handling and inquiry daily begets of itself something which you may track down with a slothful delight. Thus it comes about that the agitation of these matters is infinite, the knowledge easy, if practice confirms the learning, moderate pains are bestowed, and memory and zeal remain. But it is always pleasant to learn; as I, if I wished to play excellently at dice, or were held by the zeal of the ball-game, perhaps even though I could not attain it; but others, because they do these things excellently, take delight in them more vehemently than the matter demands—as Titius in the ball, Brulla in the dice.

Wherefore there is no reason why anyone should dread the magnitude of the arts from this, that old men learn them; for either old men have approached them, or are detained in their studies even to old age, or are the slowest of learners; the matter, indeed, in my opinion, so stands that, unless each man could learn a thing quickly, he could never learn it thoroughly at all.'

'Now, now,' said Catulus, 'I understand, Crassus, what you say; and, by Hercules, I assent; I see well enough that you, a man most keen to learn thoroughly, had time enough to know those things which you speak of.' 'Do you persist,' said Crassus, 'in thinking that I say the things I say about myself, not about the matter? But now, if you please, let us return to our subject.' 'Indeed,' said Catulus, 'it pleases me.'

Then Crassus said: 'To what, then, does this so long and so deeply-fetched discourse look? These two parts, which remain to me—of illuminating speech and of crowning the whole of eloquence, of which the one demands that we speak ornately, the other aptly—have this power: that the speech may be as pleasant as possible, may flow as much as possible into the senses of those who hear, and may be furnished with as many things as possible;

but this forensic, litigious, sharp instrument, drawn from the opinions of the crowd, is scanty and indeed beggarly; that again, which these men hand down who profess to be teachers of speaking, is not much greater than that common and forensic kind: we need apparatus and choice materials, gathered, fetched, and brought together from every side, as you, Caesar, must do for next year, as I laboured to do in my aedileship, because I did not think I could satisfy this people with everyday and homely materials.

The choosing and arranging and rounding-off of words is a matter of easy method, or even of mere practice without method; but of matter there is a great forest, which, since the Greeks now no longer held it, and for that reason our youth nearly unlearned it in the very learning, even Latin teachers of speaking have, if you please, arisen within these two years; whom I, as censor, had removed by my edict—not because, as some said they alleged, I did not wish the genius of the young to be sharpened, but, on the contrary, I did not wish their genius to be blunted and their effrontery strengthened.

For among the Greeks, of whatever sort they were, I saw nevertheless that there was, besides this exercise of the tongue, some learning and some science worthy of humanity; but these new teachers I understood could teach nothing except to be bold, which, even when joined with good things, is of itself greatly to be shunned; since this one thing was being handed down, and since it was a school of effrontery, I thought it was the part of a censor to provide that it should not creep further.

Although I do not so settle and decree this as to despair that the things of which we have discussed can be handed down and perfected in Latin; for both our language and the nature of things suffers that ancient and excellent prudence of the Greeks to be transferred to our use and custom; but there is need of learned men, of whom in this kind there have hitherto been none among us; but if ever they shall arise, they are even to be preferred to the Greeks.

Speech, then, is adorned first by its character and by, as it were, a certain colour and flavour of its own; for that it be weighty, that it be sweet, that it be learned, that it be liberal, that it be admirable, that it be polished, that it have as much of feeling and of grief as is needful—this does not belong to single joints; these things are regarded in the whole body. That, furthermore, it be besprinkled, as it were, with the flowers of words and thoughts, this ought not to be spread evenly through the whole speech, but so distinguished that there be, as it were, certain ornaments and lights disposed as in an adornment.

A kind of speaking, therefore, is to be chosen which most holds those who hear, and which not only delights, but delights without satiety; for I do not now think it is to be expected of me that I should warn you to take care lest your speech be thin, lest it be uncultivated, lest it be common, lest it be obsolete; something else, greater, both your genius and your age urge me to.

For it is hard to say what is the cause why those things which most strike our senses with pleasure and most keenly move us by their first appearance are also those from which we are most quickly estranged by a certain disgust and satiety. How much more florid in the beauty and variety of colours are most things in new pictures than in old ones! Which, nevertheless, even if at the first sight they take us, do not long delight us; whereas we are held, in old paintings, by that very roughness and antiquity.

How much softer and more delicate in singing are the modulations and false notes than the sure and severe ones! Against which, however, not only the austere, but, if they are too often repeated, the multitude itself protests. This may be seen in the rest of the senses also: that we are less long delighted by unguents seasoned with the highest and sharpest sweetness than by these of moderate scent, and that what is felt to smell of the earth is more praised than what is felt to smell of saffron; that in the very touch there is a measure both of softness and of smoothness. Nay, even taste, which is of all the senses the most given to pleasure, and which is moved beyond the rest by sweetness, how quickly does it scorn and spit out what is very sweet! Who can use a sweet drink or food for any length of time? whereas in both kinds those things which lightly move the sense with pleasure most easily escape satiety.

So in all things satiety is the nearest neighbour to the greatest pleasures; at which we may the less wonder in speech, in which we can judge, both from poets and from orators, that a thing which is neat, distinct, ornate, festive, without intermission, without reprehension, without variety, however brightly painted in vivid colours, whether poetry or oratory, cannot be lasting in its power to please. And the more quickly is offence taken at the curls and rouge of the orator or the poet, because in too much pleasure the senses are sated by nature, not by the mind; in writings and in speeches not by the judgement of the ears only, but even more by that of the mind, are the rouged faults detected.

Wherefore, "well and excellently" let it be said to us as often as you please; but "prettily and festively" I would not have said too often; though I should wish that very exclamation "it could not be better" to be frequent; yet let that admiration and highest praise in speaking have nevertheless some shade and recess, that thereby what is illuminated may seem the more to stand out and be eminent.

Roscius never delivers this verse with the gesture that he could: "for the wise man seeks honour as the reward of virtue, not as plunder;" but he casts it off utterly, that in the next he may—"but what do I see? Hedged about with steel he holds the sacred seats"—rush upon it, look, admire, be struck with amazement. And what of that other—"what protection shall I seek?"—how gently, how remissly, how unactively! for then he presses on: "O father, O fatherland, O house of Priam!"—in which so great an action could not be aroused, if it had been spent and exhausted by the previous movement. Nor did the actors see this sooner than the very poets, sooner, in short, than even those who composed the measures, by both of whom something is let down, then increased, attenuated, inflated, varied, distinguished.

So let our orator be ornate and sweet—nor indeed can it be otherwise—but in such a way that he have a sweetness austere and solid, not sugary and over-boiled. For the very precepts for adorning which are given are of such a sort that any orator, even the most faulty, can unfold them; wherefore, as I said before, first the forest of matter is to be procured, on which part Antonius has spoken; this is to be shaped by the very thread and kind of speech, illuminated by words, varied by thoughts.

But the highest praise of eloquence is to amplify a matter by adornment, which avails not only to augment something and to raise it higher by speaking, but also to attenuate and cast it down. This is required in all those topics which Antonius said were employed for producing belief in a speech, whether when we explain something, or when we conciliate minds, or when we rouse them;

but in this which I named last, amplification has the most power, and this one thing is most properly the praise of the orator. Even greater is that exercise with which Antonius equipped us in the last part of his discourse, though at first he rejected it—the exercise of praising and blaming; for there is nothing more fitted to the exaggerating and amplifying of a speech than to be able to do both of these in the fullest measure.

There will follow also those topics which, although they ought to be proper to the causes and inherent in their very sinews, yet, because they are wont to be treated of the whole matter in general, have been called by the ancients "common"; of which some have a certain keen reproach or complaint of faults and crimes, joined with amplification, against which nothing is wont or can be said—as against an embezzler, against a traitor, against a parricide; which it behoves to use when the charges have been established, for otherwise they are meagre and empty;

others, again, have entreaty or commiseration; others, indeed, are ambiguous disputations, in which it is permitted to discourse copiously on both sides about the whole kind. Which exercise is now thought proper to those two philosophies of which I spoke before, but among the ancients belonged to those from whom all the theory and copiousness of forensic speaking was sought; for of virtue, of duty, of the equitable and good, of dignity, utility, honour, disgrace, reward, punishment, and similar matters, we too ought to have both the force and the art of speaking on both sides.

But since we have been driven from our possession and left in a small and that a litigious little estate, and, being the patrons of others, could not keep and protect our own, let us borrow what we need from those who—which is most unworthy—have broken into our patrimony.

They say, then—those who now indeed have a name from a small part of a city and place and are called Peripatetic or Academic philosophers, but who formerly, on account of their excellent knowledge of the greatest matters, were called by the Greeks "political" philosophers under the name of the universal commonwealths—they say that every civil discourse is engaged in one or the other of these two kinds: either about a controversy defined by fixed times and persons, in this manner—"is it pleasing that our captives be recovered from the Carthaginians, theirs being returned?"—or in inquiring indefinitely about the whole kind—"what at all is to be determined and judged about a captive?" And of these the former kind they call a "cause" or "controversy," and define it by three: by suit, or by deliberation, or by encomium; while this second, the indefinite question, is named a "consultation," and as it were a proposed deliberation.

And they use this division also in the teaching of it; but in such a way as to seem to recover the lost possession not by right or by judgement, in short by force, but as it were by breaking off a twig in token of usurpation. For that other kind, which is defined by times, places, persons, they hold—and that itself only by a fringe—for now under Philo, who, I hear, flourishes in the Academy, even the knowledge and exercise of these causes is now practised; the other, however, they only name in the first teaching of the art, and say it belongs to the orator; but they set forth neither its force nor its nature, neither its parts nor its kinds, so that it would have been better to pass it over altogether than, having touched it, to abandon it; for now they are understood to be silent through poverty, whereas then they would have seemed to be so through judgement.

Every matter, then, about which inquiry and disputation can be made, has the same nature of debate, whether it be debated in indefinite consultations, or in those causes which are engaged in the state and in forensic disputation; nor is there any which is not referred to the force and method either of knowing or of acting;

for either the very knowledge and science of a thing is sought out, as whether virtue is to be sought for its own dignity or for some fruit; or counsel of action is inquired into, as whether the commonwealth is to be taken up by the wise man.

Of knowledge, however, there are three modes—conjecture, definition, and, so to speak, consequence: for what a thing is, is sought by conjecture, as that, whether wisdom is in the human race; what force each thing has, definition explains, as if it be asked what wisdom is; consequence, again, is handled when it is inquired what follows upon each thing, as that, whether it is ever the part of a good man to lie.

They return again to conjecture, and distribute it into four kinds; for either it is asked what a thing is, in this manner: whether justice among men is by nature or by opinion; or what is the origin of each thing, as what is the beginning of laws or of commonwealths; or the cause and reason, as if it be asked why the most learned men disagree about the greatest matters; or about change, as if it be disputed whether virtue can perish in a man, or whether it can be turned into vice.

Of definition, again, the debates are either when it is asked what is, as it were, stamped upon the common mind, as if it be discussed whether that is justice which is useful to the greatest part; or when it is sought what is proper to each thing, as whether to speak ornately is proper to the orator, or whether someone besides can also do it; or when a thing is distributed into its parts, as if it be asked how many kinds of things to be sought there are, as whether there are three—of the body, of the mind, and of external things; or when the form and, as it were, the natural mark of each thing is described, as if it be asked what is the appearance of an avaricious man, of a seditious man, of a vainglorious man.

Of consequence, again, two first kinds of questions are set down; for either the debate is simple, as if it be discussed whether glory is to be sought; or from comparison, as whether praise or riches are more to be sought; and of the simple there are three modes: about things to be sought or shunned, as whether honours are to be sought, whether poverty is to be shunned; about the just or unjust, as whether it is just to avenge injuries even of kinsmen; about the honourable or base, as this, whether it is honourable to meet death for the sake of glory.

Of comparison, again, there are two modes: one, when it is asked whether a thing is the same or whether something differs—as to fear and to revere, as a king and a tyrant, as a flatterer and a friend; the other, when it is asked which thing surpasses another, as that, whether the wise are led by the approval of each best man or by popular praise. And those debates indeed which are referred to knowledge are thus generally described by the most learned men.

But those which are referred to action are engaged either in the debate of duty, in which kind it is asked what is right and to be done—to which place the whole forest of the virtues and vices is subjected—or are handled in some emotion of the mind, to be either begotten, or appeased, or removed. To this kind are subjected exhortations, rebukes, consolations, commiserations, and every impulse, and, if the matter so requires, mitigation, of every movement of the mind.

These kinds and modes of all debates, then, being explained, it makes no difference to the matter if in any point our partition has differed from the division of Antonius: the same members are in the discussion of each of us, but parted and distributed a little otherwise by me and by him. Now I shall proceed to the rest, and call myself back to my office and task. For from those topics which Antonius set forth, all arguments are to be taken for the several kinds of questions; but to some kinds some topics will be more fitting; concerning which there is no need to say anything, not so much because it is long as because it is plain.

The most ornate speeches, then, are those which range most widely and which, from a private controversy, betake and turn themselves to setting forth the force of the universal kind, so that those who hear may, the nature and kind and the universal matter being known, be able to determine about the several accused persons and charges and suits.

To this practice of exercise Antonius exhorted you, young men, and thought that you were to be led across from minute and narrow contentions to all the force and variety of discoursing; wherefore this office is not the work of a few little books, as those think who have written about the theory of speaking, nor of the Tusculan villa and this morning walk, or of our afternoon sitting; for not only must the tongue be sharpened and hammered by us, but the breast must be loaded and filled with the sweetness, the copiousness, the variety of the greatest and most numerous matters.

For ours—if only we are orators, if we are to be employed in the debates of citizens, in their perils, in public deliberations, as authorities and leaders—ours, I say, is all that possession of prudence and learning, into which men abounding in leisure have rushed, while we were occupied, as though it were a thing fallen and vacant, and now either mock the orator, as Socrates does in the Gorgias, and rail at him, or teach something about the art of the orator in a few little books, and inscribe them "rhetorical"—as though those were not proper to the rhetoricians which by these same men are said about justice, about duty, about the founding and governing of states, in short about the whole theory of living and even of nature.

Since now we cannot get these things elsewhere, they are to be taken by us from those very men by whom we have been despoiled; provided only that we transfer them to this civil science, to which they belong and toward which they look; and that we do not, as I said before, wear out our whole life in learning these things; but when we have seen the springs—which, unless one shall have known them quickly, he will never know at all—then, as often as need shall be, we shall draw from them as much as the matter shall demand.

For neither is the keenness of vision in the natures and minds of men so great that anyone can see such great matters unless they have been pointed out, nor yet is there so great an obscurity in matters that a man of keen genius does not discern them thoroughly, if only he has looked upon them. In this so great and so immense a field, then, since the orator is permitted to range freely, and wherever he has taken his stand to stand in his own ground, all the apparatus and adornment of speaking easily comes to hand;

for a copiousness of matter begets a copiousness of words; and, if there is honour in the very matters of which one speaks, there arises from the matter a certain natural splendour in the words. Let only the man who shall speak or write be liberally trained by education and boyish learning, and burn with zeal, and be aided by nature, and, exercised in the indefinite debates of the universal kinds, have chosen the most ornate writers and orators to know and to imitate—and assuredly that man will by no means inquire of these masters how he should construct and illuminate his words; so easily, in the abundance of matter, does nature itself, if only it be exercised, glide of itself to the ornaments of speech, without a guide.'

Here Catulus said: 'Immortal gods, what a variety of matters, what force, what copiousness, Crassus, have you embraced, and from what narrow straits have you dared to lead the orator out and to place him in the kingdom of his ancestors! For we have received that those ancient teachers and authors of speaking thought no kind of discussion foreign to themselves, and were always versed in every method of speech;

of whom Elian Hippias, when he had come to Olympia at that great quinquennial celebration of the games, boasted, almost in the hearing of all Greece, that there was nothing in any art, of all things, which he himself did not know; and that he held not only these arts in which the liberal and ingenuous studies are contained—geometry, music, the knowledge of letters and of poets, and those things which are said about the natures of things, about the manners of men, about commonwealths—but that he had made with his own hand the ring which he had, the cloak in which he was clad, and the shoes with which he was shod.

To be sure, he indeed went too far; but from this very thing the conjecture is easy how much those orators claimed for themselves of the most excellent arts, who did not reject even the meaner ones. What shall I say of Prodicus of Ceos, of Thrasymachus of Chalcedon, of Protagoras of Abdera? each one of whom, for those times, both discoursed and wrote very much about the nature of things.

That very Gorgias of Leontini, to whom, as a patron, the orator yielded to the philosopher, as Plato would have it—who either was never conquered by Socrates, and that conversation of Plato is not true; or, if he was conquered, then doubtless Socrates was the more eloquent and the more fluent, and, as you call him, the more copious and the better orator—but he, in that very book of Plato, professes that he will speak most copiously about any matter whatever that is brought into debate and question; and he first of all dared in an assembly to demand on what subject each man wished to hear; to whom so great an honour was paid by Greece that to him alone of all men a statue not gilded, but golden, was set up at Delphi.

But these whom I have named, and many besides, the highest teachers of speaking, existed at one time; from which it can be understood that the matter so stands as you, Crassus, say, and that the name of orator flourished among the ancients in Greece with a certain greater copiousness or glory.

And on this account I the more doubt whether more of praise is to be assigned to you, or of blame to the Greeks: since you, born in another tongue and amid other manners, in a most busy state, distracted either by the affairs of private men, almost all of them, or by the administration of the whole world and the governance of the highest command, have nevertheless comprehended so great a force and knowledge of matters, and joined all of it with the science and exercise of one who is to prevail in the state by counsel and oratory; while they, born amid letters and ardent for these studies, but melting away in leisure, have not only acquired nothing, but have not even preserved what was left and handed down and their own.'

Then Crassus said: 'Not in this one matter alone, Catulus, but in many others besides, the magnitudes of the arts have been diminished by the distribution of the parts and by separation. Or do you suppose that, when there was that famous Hippocrates of Cos, there were then other physicians who healed diseases, others who healed wounds, others who healed the eyes? Was geometry, when Euclid or Archimedes handled it, was music when Damon or Aristoxenus handled it, were letters themselves when Aristophanes or Callimachus handled them, so torn in pieces that no one embraced the whole kind, and that one set apart for himself one part, another another, in which to labour?

For my part I have often heard this from my father and from my father-in-law: that our own men too, who wished to excel in the glory of wisdom, were wont to embrace all things which at least this state then knew. They remembered Sextus Aelius; but Manius Manilius we ourselves even saw walking across the forum; which was a sign that he who did this offered to all his fellow-citizens the abundance of his counsel; to whom of old, both as they thus walked and as they sat at home in their chairs, men came in such wise as to consult them not only about the civil law, but also about the marrying of a daughter, the buying of a farm, the tilling of a field, in short about every duty or business.

This was the wisdom of that ancient Publius Crassus, this of Tiberius Coruncanius, this of the great-grandfather of my son-in-law, Scipio, a most prudent man—all of whom were pontiffs maximi, so that to them reference was made about all matters divine and human; and the same men in the senate and before the people and in the causes of their friends and at home and in war showed forth their counsel and their fidelity.

For what was wanting to Marcus Cato, besides this most polished learning, transmarine and foreign? Did he, because he had learned the civil law, not plead causes? or, because he was able to plead, did he neglect the knowledge of law? In both kinds he both laboured and excelled. Was he, on account of this favour gathered from the affairs of private men, the slower in undertaking the commonwealth? No one was braver before the people, no one a better senator; and the same man was easily the best general; in short, nothing in this state in those times could be known or learned which he did not both investigate and know, and then also set down in writing.

Now, on the contrary, most men come to the obtaining of honours and to the governing of the commonwealth bare and unarmed, furnished with no knowledge of matters, with no science. But if anyone, one out of many, excels, he gives himself airs, if he brings one single thing—either warlike valour, or some military experience, which indeed have now grown obsolete; or knowledge of the law, and not even of the whole of it; for the pontifical law, which is connected with it, no one learns; or eloquence, which they think placed in shouting and in the running of words; but of the fellowship and kinship of all the good arts, in short of the very virtues themselves, they know nothing.

But, to bring my discourse back to the Greeks—whom we cannot do without in this kind of conversation, for, as examples of virtue are to be sought from our own men, so of learning from them—seven men are said to have existed at one time who both were held and were called wise: all these, except Thales of Miletus, presided over their own states. Who in those same times is recorded to have been more learned, or whose eloquence more furnished with letters, than Pisistratus'? who is said to have been the first to arrange the books of Homer, formerly confused, in the order in which we now have them. He indeed was not useful to his fellow-citizens, but he so flourished in eloquence that he excelled in letters and learning.

What of Pericles? of whose force of speaking we have so received it, that, when he spoke against the will of the Athenians, more severely, for the safety of his country, yet that very thing which he said against the popular men seemed to all popular and pleasant; on whose lips the old comic poets, even when they spoke ill of him (which was then permitted to be done at Athens), said that charm had dwelt, and that there was in him so great a force that he left, as it were, certain stings in the minds of those who had heard him. But this man no declaimer had taught to bark at the water-clock, but, as we have received, that famous Anaxagoras of Clazomenae, a man supreme in the knowledge of the greatest matters: and so this man, excelling in learning, in counsel, in eloquence, presided over Athens for forty years, both in civil affairs and at the same time in war.

What of Critias? what of Alcibiades? not good indeed to their own states, but certainly learned and eloquent—were they not trained in the Socratic discussions? Who polished Dion of Syracuse with all the branches of learning? Was it not Plato? And the same man, a master not only of his tongue but also of his mind and his virtue, impelled, equipped, and armed him for the liberating of his country. Did Plato, then, instruct this Dion in other arts, Isocrates that most illustrious man Timotheus, the son of Conon a most excellent general—himself a supreme general and a most learned man—in others? or that Pythagorean Lysis the Theban Epaminondas, perhaps the one supreme man of all Greece, in others? or Xenophon Agesilaus? or Philolaus Archytas of Tarentum? or Pythagoras himself all that ancient Greece of Italy, which was once called Magna?

For my part I do not think so; for I see thus: that there was one single learning of all things which were worthy of a learned man and of one who wished to excel in the commonwealth; and that those who had received it, if they had been likewise strong in genius for delivery, and had given themselves also to speaking, nature not resisting, had excelled in eloquence.

And so Aristotle himself, when he saw that Isocrates flourished in the nobility of his disciples, because he had transferred his discussions from forensic and civil causes to an empty elegance of language, suddenly changed almost the whole form of his teaching, and uttered a certain verse of Philoctetes a little altered: for he says it is base for him to be silent, while he suffers barbarians—the other, while he suffers Isocrates—to speak; and so he adorned and illuminated all that learning, and joined the knowledge of things with the exercise of speech. Nor indeed did this escape that most wise king Philip, who summoned this man as a teacher for his son Alexander, that from the same man he might receive both precepts of action and of speaking.

Now if anyone wishes to call that philosopher who hands down to us copiousness of matter and of speech an orator, he may, so far as I am concerned; or if he prefers to call this orator, whom I say has wisdom joined to eloquence, a philosopher, I will not hinder it; provided only this be agreed: that neither the speechlessness of him who knows a matter but cannot explain it by speaking, nor the ignorance of him to whom matter is wanting but words are not lacking, is to be praised; of which, if one or the other were to be chosen, I for my part should prefer an inarticulate prudence to a talkative folly; but if we inquire what one thing excels above all, the palm must be given to the learned orator;

whom, if they suffer to be also a philosopher, the controversy is removed; but if they shall sever them, they will be the lower in this, that in the perfect orator is contained all their science, while in the knowledge of the philosophers eloquence is not necessarily contained; which, however much it be despised by them, must nevertheless be seen to add a certain crown to their arts.' When Crassus had said these things, both he himself was silent for a little while, and there was silence on the part of the rest.

Then Cotta said: 'For my part, Crassus, I cannot complain that you seem to me to have discussed something other than that which you had undertaken; for you have brought forward somewhat more than was assigned and announced to you by us; but certainly, as your parts were that you should speak about the illuminating of speech, and you had yourself already entered upon it and had distributed all the praise of speech into four parts, when, about the first two, you had spoken sufficiently for us indeed, but, as you yourself said, quickly and scantily, you had made two remaining for yourself—in what manner we might speak first ornately, then aptly:

when you had entered upon this, suddenly, as it were, a certain tide of your genius snatched you far from the land and drew you away into the deep, almost out of the sight of us all; for, having embraced all knowledge of things, you did not indeed hand it down to us—for there was not time so short for that—but among these I know not what you have accomplished; me at least you have driven wholly into the Academy. In which I should wish that to be true which you have often laid down—that it is not necessary to spend one's age, and that he can discern all those things who has only looked upon them; but even if it is sometimes thicker going, or if I am the slower, assuredly I shall never rest nor be wearied before I have grasped those ambiguous ways and methods of theirs, of disputing both for all things and against all things.'

Then Caesar said: 'One thing out of your discourse, Crassus, has especially moved me—that you denied that one who had not quickly learned a thing could ever learn it thoroughly at all; so that it is not difficult for me to make the trial, and either at once to grasp those things which you with your words have lifted to the sky, or, if I shall not be able, not to waste time, since I can nevertheless be content with these our own attainments.'

Here Sulpicius said: 'For my part, Crassus, I long neither for that Aristotle of yours, nor for Carneades, nor for any of the philosophers. Either you may suppose that I despair of being able to learn those things thoroughly, or—which I do—that I despise them; for me this common and ordinary knowledge of forensic and public matters is great enough for that eloquence which I aim at; from which itself, however, I am ignorant of very much, which I then at last inquire after, when some cause which has to be pleaded by me requires it. Wherefore, unless perhaps you are now wearied, and if we are not burdensome to you, return to those things which pertain to the praise and splendour of the very speech; which I wished to hear from you, not that I might despair of being able to attain eloquence, but that I might learn something in addition.'

Then Crassus said: 'You ask for common things, Sulpicius, and not unknown to you: for who has not taught, instituted, even left in writing, about that kind? But I will humour you, and will briefly set forth to you only those things which are known to me; I shall think, however, that we must return to those who are the authors and inventors of these, to be sure minute, matters.

All speech, then, is made up of words; of which we must first see the principle singly, then in combination. For there is a certain adornment of speech which is from single words; another, which consists of words joined together. Therefore we use words either those which are proper and are, as it were, the fixed names of things, born almost together with the things themselves; or those which are transferred and placed, as it were, in another's place; or those which we coin and make ourselves.

In proper words, then, is that praise of the orator, that he shun the abject and obsolete, and use the choice and brilliant, in which there seems to be something full and sonorous. But in this kind of proper words a certain selection is to be made, and that is to be weighed by a certain judgement of the ears; in which the habit also of speaking well avails most.

And so this, which is commonly said about orators by the unskilled, "this man uses good words," or "someone uses words not good," is not weighed by any art, but is judged by a certain, as it were, natural sense; in which there is no great praise in avoiding a fault, though it is a great thing; but yet this is, as it were, a certain ground and foundation—the use and supply of good words.

But what the orator himself may build, and in what he may add art, this it seems we must inquire. There are, then, three things in a single word which the orator may bring to the illuminating and adorning of speech: either an unusual word, or a coined one, or a transferred one.

Unusual words are generally those that are antique and, by reason of antiquity, now long since disused from the practice of daily speech; which are freer for the license of poets than for ours; but yet rarely some poetic word has dignity even in oratory. For I would not shun to say, as Caelius does, "at what season the Carthaginian came into Italy," nor "offspring," or "progeny," or "to declare," or "to name," or, as you are wont, Catulus, "I did not deem" or "I supposed"; or many other words, which, placed in their proper places, often make speech seem grander and more antique.

Words are coined, again, which are begotten and made by the speaker himself, either by the joining of words, as these: "then terror, when I was unsouled, expectorates all wisdom from me;" "do you not wish me to . . . the wile-speaking malices of this man"—for you see that both "wile-speaking" and "expectorates" are words made by joining, not born; but often even without joining words are coined, as "that deserted old man," as "the begetting gods," as "to grow bent with the abundance of berries."

That third mode, of transferring a word, is widely extended; which necessity begot, compelled by poverty and want, but afterwards pleasantness and delight made common. For as clothing, devised first for the purpose of repelling cold, afterwards began to be employed also for the adornment and dignity of the body, so the transference of a word was instituted by reason of poverty, but made frequent for the sake of delight. For "the vine buds," "there is luxuriance in the grass," "joyful crops"—even rustics say. For what can scarcely be declared by a proper word, when it is said by a transferred one, the likeness of that thing which we have set down by an alien word illuminates what we wish to be understood.

These transferences, then, are, as it were, borrowings, when you take from elsewhere what you have not; those a little bolder, which do not indicate poverty, but fetch some splendour for the speech; of which what reason of finding, or what kinds, shall I set before you?

. . . but those things ought to be transferred which either make a matter clearer, as all these: "the sea bristles up; the darkness is redoubled, and the blackness of night and storm-cloud blinds; the flame flashes amid the clouds, the sky trembles with thunder; hail, mingled with abundant rain, suddenly rushing headlong falls; from every side all the winds burst forth, savage whirlwinds arise, the sea boils with surge"—almost all of which, that they might be clearer, are said by words transferred through likeness;

or whereby a whole matter is the more signified, whether of some deed or of some design, as that man who, indicating by the very likeness, with two transferred words, one concealing on purpose, lest what was being done could be understood: "since he clothes himself round about with words, hedges himself with guile." Sometimes also brevity is achieved by transference, as that, "if the weapon has fled from the hand": the imprudence of a weapon thrown could not be set forth more briefly by proper words than it is signified by one transferred.

In this kind it very often seems to me a thing to be wondered at, what it is that all men are more delighted by transferred and alien words than by proper and their own. For if a thing has not its own name and proper appellation, as "foot" in a ship, as "nexum," which is transacted by the balance, as "divorce" in a wife, necessity compels one to take from elsewhere what one has not; but, in the greatest abundance of one's own words, men are nevertheless delighted far more by alien ones, if they are transferred with reason.

This happens, I believe, either because it is a certain sign of genius to leap over the things placed before the feet and to take others fetched from far off; or because the hearer is led elsewhere in thought, and yet does not stray, which is the greatest delight; or because in single words a thing and a whole likeness is achieved; or because every transference which is taken with reason is applied to the very senses, especially to the eyes, which is the keenest sense.

For both "the odour of urbanity" and "the softness of humanity" and "the murmur of the sea" and "the sweetness of speech" are drawn from the other senses; but those of the eyes are much keener, which place almost in the sight of the mind those things which we cannot discern and see. For there is nothing in the nature of things whose name and appellation we cannot use in other matters. For whence a likeness can be drawn—and it can be drawn from all things—from the same source one word, which contains the likeness, being transferred, will bring light to the speech.

In which kind, first, dissimilarity is to be shunned: "the huge arches of the sky"; though Ennius brought a "sphere" upon the stage, as it is said, yet in a sphere the likeness of an arch cannot be contained. "Live, Ulysses, while you may; with your eyes snatch the last radiant light!"—he did not say "seek," nor "take"—for that would have had the delay of one hoping to live longer—but "snatch": this word is fitted to that

which he had said before, "while you may." Then it must be seen that the likeness be not fetched from too far: I would more willingly say "the Syrtis" of a patrimony, the "rock"; "the Charybdis" of goods, rather "the whirlpool"; for the eyes of the mind are more easily borne to those things which are seen than to those which are heard; and since this is, as it were, the highest praise in transferring words, that what is transferred strike the sense, all baseness of those things is to be shunned, to which the likeness will draw the minds of those who hear.

I would not have it said that the commonwealth was "castrated" by the death of Africanus; I would not have Glaucia called "the dung of the senate-house"; though there be a likeness, yet in each there is a deformed thought of likeness; I would not have it greater than the matter requires: "the tempest of a revel"; or less: "the revel of a tempest"; I would not have the word that is transferred narrower than that proper and its own word would have been: "what is it, pray? Why do you nod me away from approaching you?"—it were better to say "forbid," "prohibit," "frighten away"; since the other had said, "there on the spot, lest my contagion or my shadow harm the good . . ."

And also, if you fear lest the transference may seem a little too harsh, it is often to be softened by a word set before it; as if of old, Marcus Cato being dead, anyone should say the senate was left an "orphan," it is a little hard; but if "an orphan, so to speak," it is somewhat milder: for the transference ought to be modest, so that it may seem to have been led into another's place, not to have burst in, and to have come on sufferance, not by force.

There is no mode, however, more florid in single words, nor which brings more light to a speech; for that which flows from this kind is not in one transferred word, but is connected from several joined together, so that one thing is said and another to be understood: "Nor will I suffer myself to strike a second time, as once the fleet of the Achaeans, upon one rock." And that: "you err, you err; for, as you exult and presume upon yourself, the strong reins of the laws shall restrain you and set you under the yoke of command."

A like thing being taken, the words proper to that thing are next transferred, as I said, to another thing. This is a great ornament of speech, in which obscurity is to be shunned; for from this kind generally are made those things which are called riddles; but this mode is not in a word, but in the speech, that is, in the joining-together of words. Nor indeed has that turning and changing in a word a certain fabrication: "Africa, the rough land, trembles with terrible tumult"—nor is a word coined, as "the sea with rock-breaking waves," nor transferred, as "the sea is softened," but for the sake of adornment proper is changed for proper: "cease, Rome, [to dread] thy foes . . ." and "the great plains are witnesses . . ." Weighty is this mode in the adornment of speech, and often to be employed; of which kind are these: to call Mars the common lot of war, Ceres for crops, Liber for wine, Neptune for the sea, the senate-house for the senate, the field for the assemblies, the toga for peace, arms and weapons for war;

of which kind likewise the virtues and vices are called by the names of those in whom they are: "what luxury has burst into that house," and "to where avarice has penetrated"; or "good faith prevailed, justice accomplished it." You surely see this whole kind, in which, a word being bent and changed, the same matter is uttered more ornately; to which are akin those less ornate, but yet not to be unknown, modes, when we wish something to be understood either from a part the whole, as when for buildings we say walls or roofs; or from the whole a part, as when we call one squadron the cavalry of the Roman people; or from one many: "but the Roman man, although the affair was well managed, trembles in his heart"; or when from many one is understood: "we are Romans, who before were men of Rudiae"; or in whatever manner it is understood, not as it is said in that kind, but as it is meant.

We often misuse a word too, not so elegantly as in transferring, but, even if more licentiously, yet sometimes not shamelessly; as when we say a "grand" speech for a long one, a "minute" mind for a small one. But do you not see that those are not of a word, but of a speech, which are connected from several transferences, as I set forth? while these, which I said were either changed, or to be understood otherwise than they were said, are transferred in a certain way.

So it comes about that all the virtue and praise of single words arises from three things: if either there be an antique word, which yet usage can bear; or one made either by joining or by novelty, in which likewise the ears and usage are to be spared; or transferred, which most of all, as by certain stars, marks and illuminates a speech.

There follows the joining-together of words, which especially demands two things: first, arrangement, then a certain measure and form. It belongs to arrangement to compose and construct words so that their meeting be neither harsh nor gaping, but in a certain way cemented and smooth; in which the person of my father-in-law was wittily played upon by him who could do that most elegantly, Lucilius: "how prettily the little words are set together! like little squares all, by art, in a pavement and a worm-wrought mosaic." When he had said this, jesting at Albucius, he did not spare even me: "I have Crassus for a son-in-law; do not be more of a rhetorician than he." What, then? This Crassus, since you misuse his name, what does he accomplish? That, surely; namely, as he wishes and as I should wish, somewhat better than Albucius: but in me indeed that man jested, as he is wont.

But yet this arrangement of words of which I speak is to be preserved; which makes the speech bound together, coherent, smooth, evenly flowing; this you will attain, if the final words be so joined with the first that follow, that they neither clash harshly nor be drawn too widely apart.

This diligence is followed by a measure also and form of words, which now I fear may seem childish to Catulus here; for those men of old thought that almost verses, that is, certain rhythms, were to be employed by us in this loose prose: for they wished the clauses in speeches to be punctuated not by the marks of our breathing-space or weariness, nor by those of the copyists, but by the measure of words and thoughts; and this Isocrates is reported first to have instituted—that he might bind with rhythms the unpolished manner of speaking of the ancients, for the sake of delight and of the ears, as his disciple Naucrates writes.

For these two things the musicians, who were once also the same as the poets, contrived for pleasure—verse and song—that they might overcome by the rhythm of words and the measure of sounds the satiety of the ears by delight. These two things, then—I mean the moderation of the voice and the conclusion of words—as far as the severity of prose could bear it, they thought were to be transferred from poetry to eloquence.

In which this is even the greatest point: that if a verse is made in a speech by the joining of words, it is a fault, and yet we wish that joining, like a verse, to fall rhythmically and to be squared and finished. Nor is there among many things one which more distinguishes the orator from the unskilled and ignorant of speaking, than that the rude man pours out in disordered fashion as much as he can, and determines what he says by his breath, not by art, while the orator so binds his thought to words that he embraces it in a certain rhythm both bound and loose.

For when he has bound it by form and measures, he relaxes and frees it by a change of order, so that the words be neither bound, as by some fixed law of verse, nor so loose that they wander. In what manner, then, shall we set ourselves to so great a task, as to think that we can attain this power of speaking rhythmically? It is not a thing so difficult as it is necessary; for there is nothing so tender, nor so flexible, nor which so easily follows wherever you lead, as speech.

From this verses, from this same the various rhythms are made; from this this loose prose also, of various measures and many kinds; for the words of conversation are not other than those of debate, nor are some taken from one kind for daily use, others for the stage and pomp; but we, when we have raised them, lying low, from the midst, fashion and shape them at our own will, like the softest wax. And so as we are now weighty, now subtle, now hold a certain middle quality: so the kind of speech follows our established thought, and is changed and turned to every pleasure of the ears and movement of minds.

But as in most things nature herself has incredibly fashioned this, so in speech, that those things which contain in themselves the greatest utility have the same most of dignity or often even of beauty. For the safety and preservation of all things we see that this is the state of this whole world and of nature, that the sky be round, and that the earth be in the middle and held by its own force and inclination, that the sun be borne around it, that it approach the wintry sign and thence by degrees ascend into the opposite part; that the moon by the approach and recession of the sun receive its light; that the five stars accomplish the same courses by an unequal motion and orbit.

These things have so great a force that, if a little changed, they could not cohere; so great a beauty that no fairer appearance can even be conceived. Turn now your mind to the form and figure of men, or even of the other animals. You will find no part of the body fashioned without some necessity, and the whole form, as it were, perfected by art, not by chance. What of those trees? in which neither trunk, nor branches, nor leaves, in short, are there save for retaining and preserving their own nature, and yet nowhere is there any part that is not graceful.

Let us leave nature, and let us look at the arts. What is so necessary in a ship as the sides, as the holds, as the prow, as the stern, as the yards, as the sails, as the masts? which yet have such grace in their appearance that they seem to have been devised not only for the sake of safety, but also of pleasure. Columns sustain temples and porticoes; yet they have no more of utility than of dignity: that gable of the Capitol, and of the other temples, not grace but necessity itself fashioned; for, when reckoning had been taken in what manner the water might run down from either part of the roof, the dignity of the gable followed upon the utility of the temple; so that, even if the Capitol were set up in the sky, where there could be no rain, it seems it would have had no dignity without a gable.

This happens likewise in all the parts of speech, that a certain sweetness and charm follows upon utility and almost upon necessity; for the clauses and the punctuations of words were brought in by the closing-off of the breath and the straits of breathing: this device is so pleasant that, even if to anyone an unlimited breath were given, yet we should not wish him to make the words perpetual; for that is grateful to our ears which could be not only tolerable but even easy to the lungs of men.

The longest grouping of words, then, is that which can be rolled out in one breath; but this is the measure of nature, another that of art. For though there be several rhythms, Aristotle, your countryman, Catulus, sets apart the iamb and the frequent trochee from the orator—which yet by nature themselves run into our speech and conversation; but there are conspicuous beatings of these rhythms, and minute feet. Wherefore he first invites us to the heroic, in which one may proceed unpunished two feet at most, or a little more, lest we plainly fall into a verse or the likeness of a verse. "Lofty are the twin [peaks], in which": these three feet fall decorously enough at the beginnings of words to be continued.

But the paean is most approved by that same man, which is twofold: for either it begins from a long, which three shorts follow, as these words, "cease, begin, restrain," or from three shorts in succession, the last drawn out and long, as those are, "they had subdued, the steeds." And it pleases that philosopher to begin from the former paean, to end with the latter; but this latter paean is, not by the number of its syllables, but by the measure of the ears—which is a keener and surer judgement—almost equal to the cretic, which is of a long and a short and a long: as "what protection shall I seek, or pursue, or whither now . . ." From which rhythm Fannius began: "if, Quirites, the threats of that man." This last Aristotle thinks more fit for clauses, which he wishes generally to be ended by a long syllable.

Nor indeed do these things demand so keen a care and diligence as is that of the poets; whom necessity, and the very rhythms and measures, compel so to include the words in the verse that there be nothing even by the smallest breath shorter or longer than is necessary. Freer is prose, and, as it is said, plainly is truly loose—not so, however, as to flee or to stray, but so as to govern itself without bonds. For I assent to that of Theophrastus, who thinks that prose which is indeed polished and in a manner wrought ought to be rhythmical not strictly, but more loosely.

For, even as that man surmises, both from those measures by which this usual verse is made there afterwards bloomed forth the anapaest, a somewhat taller rhythm, and thence flowed that more licentious and richer dithyramb, whose members and feet, as the same man says, are diffused in every rich prose; and, if there is rhythm in all sounds and voices, which has certain beats and which we can measure by equal intervals, this kind of rhythms is rightly placed among the praises of speech, provided only they be not continuous. For if that perpetual and flowing loquacity without intervals is to be thought rude and unpolished, what other reason is there why it should be rejected, except that nature herself modulates the voice for the ears of men? Which cannot be done unless there be rhythm in the voice.

But in continuity there is no rhythm; distinction, and the beating of equal or often varied intervals, makes rhythm, which we can mark in falling drops, because they are distinguished by intervals, but cannot in a rushing river. But if this loose joining-together of words is much more fit and pleasant, if it is distinguished by joints and members, than if it is continuous and drawn out, those members must be measured; and if at the end they are shorter, that, as it were, circuit of words is broken; for so the Greeks name these turnings of speech. Wherefore the latter parts ought either to be equal to the former, and the last to the first, or—which is even better and more pleasant—longer.

And these things indeed have been said by those philosophers whom you most esteem, Catulus; which I therefore the more often attest, that, by praising authorities, I may escape the charge of trifling.' 'Of what trifling, pray?' said Catulus; 'or what can be brought forward more elegant than that discussion of yours, or said altogether more subtle?'

'But indeed I fear,' said Crassus, 'lest these things seem either too difficult for these men to pursue, or, because they are not handed down in that common teaching, lest we seem to wish them to appear greater and more difficult.' Then Catulus said: 'You err, Crassus, if you think that either I or any of these expect from you these everyday and common labours. Those things which you say, we wish to be said; and not so much to be said, as to be said in that manner of yours; and this I answer to you, not for myself alone, but for all these, without any hesitation.'

'For my part,' said Antonius, 'I have now found him whom, in that little book which I wrote, I had said I had not found—the eloquent man. But I have not interrupted you, even for the sake of praising, lest anything should be diminished by a single word of mine from this so scanty time of your discourse.'

'By this rule, then,' said Crassus, 'our speech is to be shaped both by exercise and by the pen, which both adorns and polishes other things and this most of all. Nor yet is this of so much labour as it seems, nor are these things to be directed by the keenest rule of the metricians or musicians; this only is to be brought about by us: that the speech do not flow loosely, that it do not wander, that it do not halt too soon, that it do not run out too long, that it be distinguished by members, that it have completed turnings. Nor is perpetuity, and, as it were, a circling of words, always to be used; but often the speech is to be cut up into more minute members, which yet, the members themselves, are to be bound by rhythms.

Nor let the paean or that heroic disturb you: they will of themselves meet the speech; they, I say, will offer themselves and answer unbidden. Let only that habit of writing and speaking be such, that the thoughts be ended by words, and the joining of those words spring from the lofty and free rhythms—chiefly the heroic, or the former paean, or the cretic—but let it settle variously and distinctly. For likeness is chiefly noted in the coming to rest. And, if the first and last feet are preserved by this method, the middle ones can lie hid, provided only the circuit itself of the words be not shorter than the ears expect, or longer than the strength and the breath can bear.

But the clauses I think are to be even more diligently observed than the foregoing, because in these especially are the perfection and the completion judged. For in a verse the first and the middle and the last part is equally regarded—which is weakened, if there be a stumble in whatever part; but in a speech few discern the first parts, most the last: which, since they appear and are understood, are to be varied, lest they be rejected either by the judgements of minds or by the satiety of the ears.

For two or about three are the last feet to be preserved and marked, provided only the foregoing be not shorter and abrupt; which ought to be either chorees, or heroes, or alternating, or in that latter paean which Aristotle approves, or in the cretic equal to it. The alternations of these will effect that neither shall those who hear be sated by the disgust of likeness, nor we seem to do, on purpose, that which we shall do.

But if that Antipater of Sidon, whom you well remember, Catulus, was wont to pour forth hexameter verses and others in various measures and rhythms on the spur of the moment, and the exercise of a man so ingenious and of so good a memory prevailed so far that, when he had thrown himself by mind and will into verse, the words followed—how much more easily, in prose, exercise and habit being applied, shall we attain it!

But let no one wonder at this, in what manner the common crowd of the unskilled note these things in hearing, since both in every kind and in this very one there is a certain great force and incredible power of nature. For all men, by a certain silent sense, without any art or reason, distinguish what is right and what is wrong in arts and reasonings; and as they do this in pictures and in statues and in other works, for the understanding of which they have less of equipment from nature, so they show it much more in the judgement of words, rhythms, and voices; because these are fixed in the common senses, and nature has not willed that anyone be utterly devoid of these things.

And so all are moved not only by words artfully placed, but also by rhythms and voices. For how few there are who hold the art of rhythms and measures! Yet in these, if there be offence even a little—so that something be made shorter by contraction or longer by lengthening—whole theatres cry out. What, does not the same thing happen in voices, so that not only choirs and harmonies, but even single performers out of tune are cast out by the multitude and the people, and indeed by their very selves?

It is wonderful that, although there is the greatest difference in performing between the learned and the rude, there is no great difference in judging. For art, since it has proceeded from nature, would seem to have done nothing at all, unless it move and delight by nature; and there is nothing so akin to our minds as rhythms and voices; by which we are both roused and inflamed, and soothed and made languid, and often led to mirth and to sadness; the highest force of which is more fitted to songs and chants—not neglected, as it seems to me, by Numa, that most learned king, and by our ancestors, as the lyre and pipes of the solemn banquets and the verses of the Salii indicate; but most of all cultivated by ancient Greece. Would that you had preferred to discuss these and like matters, rather than these childish transferences of words!

But as the common crowd, in a verse, if there be a fault, sees it, so, if anything halts in our speech, it feels it; but it does not pardon the poet, while it allows us license: yet all, in silence, discern that what we have spoken is not apt and perfect. And so those men of old—as we see even today some not a few—when they could not make a circuit and, as it were, an orb of words (for that indeed we have but lately begun either to be able or to dare), used to say three words or two, or some even single ones; who, in that infancy, nevertheless held to that natural thing which the ears of men demanded—that the things they said should be equal, and that they should use equal breathing-spaces.

I have set forth, almost as I could, those things which I thought pertained most to the adornment of speech. For I have spoken of the praise of single words, I have spoken of their joining-together, I have spoken of rhythm and form; but if you require also the habit and, as it were, some colour of speech, there is both a certain full, yet rounded, kind, and a slender, not without sinews and strength, and that which, partaking of either kind, is praised by a certain mean. Upon these three figures a certain colour of grace ought to sit, not smeared on with rouge, but diffused from the blood.

Then at last this orator of ours is so to be shaped, both in words and in thoughts, that, in the manner of those who use arms or the palaestra, he think that he must have a method not only of avoiding or striking, but also that he be moved with grace, as those who are versed in the handling of arms . . . But words and thoughts are shaped almost innumerably, which I know well enough is known to you; but between the shaping of words and that of thoughts there is this difference, that the shaping of words is destroyed, if you change the words, while that of thoughts remains, whatever words you wish to use.

Which indeed, although you do it, yet I think you are to be admonished not to think there is anything else of the orator that is distinguished and admirable, except, in single words, to hold those three things—that we use transferred words frequently, sometimes coined ones, but rarely also very antique ones. In continuous speech, again, when we shall have held both the smoothness of joining and that method of rhythms which I have mentioned, then the whole speech is to be distinguished and made frequent, as with lights, by thoughts and by words.

For both the lingering upon one thing moves very much, and the brilliant explanation, and the placing, as it were, of matters almost under the very sight, as though they were being transacted; which both avail most in the setting-forth of a matter, and toward illuminating that which is set forth, and toward amplifying it; so that to those who hear, that which we shall augment seems to be as great as the speech can effect. And contrary to this is often a running-over, and a signifying of more to be understood than you have said, and a brevity distinctly cut, and an extenuation, and, joined to this, a banter not abhorrent from the precepts of Caesar;

and a digression from the matter, in which, when there shall have been delight, then the return to the matter ought to be apt and neat; and a setting-forth of what you are about to say, and a separation from that which has been said, and a return to the proposition, and a repetition, and an apt conclusion of the reasoning; then, for the sake of augmenting or diminishing, an exaggeration and hyperbole of the truth; and a question, and, near akin to this, as it were, an inquiry, and a setting-forth of one's own opinion; then that which especially, as it were, creeps into the minds of men—a dissembling, saying one thing and signifying another; which is very pleasant, when it is handled not by the straining of speech, but by conversation; then doubt, then distribution, then correction, either before or after you have spoken, or when you reject something from your own self; there is also a fortifying beforehand of that which you are about to assail, and a transferring to another;

communication, which is, as it were, a deliberation with those very men before whom you speak; the imitation of manners and life, either in persons or without them, a certain great ornament of speech and apt especially for conciliating minds, and often also for moving them;

the feigned introduction of persons, even the weightiest light of amplification; description, the introduction of error, the impulse to mirth, anticipation; then those two things which most move, likeness and example; partition, interruption, contrast, reticence, recommendation; a certain free, even unbridled, utterance for the sake of amplification; anger, rebuke, promise, deprecation, entreaty, a brief turning-aside from the proposition—not like that former digression—justification, conciliation, wounding, wish, and execration. With these lights, well-nigh, thoughts illuminate speech.

But of the speech itself, as of arms, there is both a menacing, as it were, and a kind of thrust for use, and a handling for grace itself. For both the doubling of words sometimes has force, at other times charm, and a word a little changed and turned aside, and the frequent repetition of the same word, now from the beginning, now its turning to the end, and an onset upon the same words, and a concourse, and a joining, and a progression, and a certain distinguishing of the same word more often placed, and a recalling of the word, and those which similarly end, or which fall similarly, or which are matched, equal to equal, or which are similar among themselves.

There is also a certain gradation, and a turning-about, and a neat transposition of words, and the contrary, and the dissolute, and declination, and reprehension, and exclamation, and diminution, and that which is placed in many cases, and that which, drawn from single matters set forth, is referred to single ones, and a reason subjoined to the proposition, and likewise a reason supplied in things distributed, and concession, and again another doubt, and something unforeseen, and enumeration, and another correction, and dispersion, and the continued, and the interrupted, and image, and an answer to one's own self, and change, and disjunction, and order, and relation, and digression, and circumscription.

For these things, well-nigh, and things like these—or even more than these can be—are such as illuminate speech by thoughts and by the shapings of words.' 'These indeed,' said Cotta, 'I see, Crassus, that you have poured out without definitions and without examples, because you think they are known to us.' 'For my part,' said Crassus, 'I did not think those things which I said above to be new to you either, but I obeyed the wish of you all.

But concerning these matters that sun there has admonished me to be the briefer, which, itself now sinking, has compelled me too to roll out these things almost headlong. But yet the demonstration and the teaching of this kind is itself common; the practice, however, is the weightiest and, in this whole study of speaking, the most difficult.

Wherefore, since concerning all the adornment of speech the topics are all, if not laid open, at least pointed out, let us now see what is apt—that is, what is most becoming in speech. Although this indeed is plain, that one single kind of speech does not suit every cause, nor every hearer, nor every person, nor every occasion; for both capital cases require a certain sound of words, and another sound is required by private and small matters;

and one kind of speaking deliberations demand, another encomiums, another trials, another conversations, another consolation, another rebuke, another disputation, another history. It matters too who hear—the senate, or the people, or the judges; whether many or few or single; and of what sort; the very orators too, of what age, honour, authority they are, must be considered; the time, of peace or of war, of haste or of leisure.

And so in this place there is nothing at all that seems able to be taught, except that we should choose the figure of speech—the fuller, the slenderer, and likewise that middle one—accommodated to what we shall be treating. It will generally be permitted to use the same ornaments at one time more vigorously, at another more subduedly; and to be able, in every matter, to do what is becoming is of art and of nature, to know what is becoming on each occasion is of prudence.

But all these things are even as they are delivered. Delivery, I say, in speaking alone holds sway; without this the highest orator can be of no account, while a middling one furnished with this can often surpass the highest. To this Demosthenes is said to have given the first place, when he was asked what was first in speaking; to this the second, to this the third; whence even better seems to me that saying of Aeschines; who, when on account of the disgrace of the trial he had withdrawn from Athens and betaken himself to Rhodes, being asked by the Rhodians, is reported to have read that excellent speech which he had delivered against Ctesiphon, in opposition to Demosthenes; and when it had been read through, he was asked on the next day to read also that which had been delivered on the other side by Demosthenes, on behalf of Ctesiphon: which, when he had read it with a most sweet and mighty voice, all marvelling, "How much more," said he, "would you marvel, if you had heard the man himself!" by which he sufficiently signified how much there is in delivery, since he thought that the same speech would be another thing, the deliverer being changed.

What was there in Gracchus—whom you better remember, Catulus—which, when I was a boy, was so greatly extolled? "Whither shall I betake myself, wretched man? Whither shall I turn? To the Capitol? But it is wet with my brother's blood. Or home? That I may see my mother, wretched, lamenting and cast down?" Which were so delivered by him with the eyes, the voice, the gesture, that even his enemies could not restrain their tears. These things I say at greater length, because this whole kind the orators—who are the actors of the very truth—have abandoned; while the imitators of truth, the actors of the stage, have seized upon it.

And without doubt in every matter truth surpasses imitation; but if it could of itself effect enough in delivery, we should assuredly have no need of art; but because the emotion of the mind, which is chiefly to be declared or imitated in delivery, is often so disturbed that it is obscured and almost overwhelmed, those things which obscure it are to be shaken off, and those which are eminent and ready are to be taken.

For every motion of the mind has from nature its own countenance and sound and gesture; and the whole body of a man, and all his countenance and all his voices, like the strings in a lyre, so sound as they have been struck by the motion of the mind. For the voices, like strings, are stretched, which answer to each touch—sharp, grave, quick, slow, great, small; among all which, however, there is in each kind a middling tone; and from these too have flowed yet more kinds—smooth, rough, contracted, diffused, with breath sustained or interrupted, broken, split, with a bent sound attenuated, inflated;

for there is none of these kinds which is not handled by art and moderation. These are set before the actor, as colours before the painter, to vary. For anger takes to itself one kind of voice, sharp, excited, frequently broken off: "my brother himself urges me, wretched, to give my children to the jaws . . ." and those things which you brought forward a while ago, Antonius—"have you dared to sever them from yourself . . ."—and "will anyone heed this? bind ye . . ."—and almost the whole Atreus. Commiseration and grief take another, flexible, full, interrupted, with a tearful voice: "whither now shall I turn? what journey shall I begin to enter? to my father's house? or to the daughters of Pelias?" and that—"O father, O fatherland, O house of Priam!" and what follows—"all these I saw set on fire, and Priam's life reft from him by violence."

Fear takes another, low, hesitating, cast down: "in many ways am I beset—by disease, by exile, and by want; then terror, when I am unsouled, expectorates all wisdom from me; my mother threatens a terrible torment of my life and death; than which there is no one of so firm a spirit and of so great confidence but that his blood flees back in terror and he grows pale with fear." Force takes another, strained, vehement, threatening with a certain incitation of weight: "again Thyestes comes to assail Atreus, again now attacks me and rouses me from my quiet; a greater mass, a greater evil, must be stirred up by me, wherewith I may crush and curb his bitter heart." Pleasure takes another, poured out, gentle, tender, gladdened and relaxed: "but when she brought the garland to bind the nuptials, she bore it to you, when she feigned to give it eagerly to herself, then, playfully, learnedly and daintily, she brought it to you." Trouble takes another, without commiseration, weighty and overspread with a single pressure and tone: "at what season Paris joined Helen in unwedded wedlock, I then was with child, with the months already fulfilled for bringing forth; at the same time Hecuba bore Polydorus in her last childbirth."

(the rest of this section is taken up by these passages.)

But all these movements gesture ought to follow—not this stage-gesture expressing the words, but declaring the whole matter and meaning not by demonstration but by signification, with this strong and manly bending of the sides, drawn not from the stage and the actors, but from arms or even from the palaestra; the hand, again, less expressive, following the words with the fingers, not expressing them; the arm thrown out somewhat far, as a certain weapon of speech; the stamping of the foot in contentions, either at the beginning or at the ending of them.

But all is in the countenance; and in that itself the dominion belongs wholly to the eyes; wherefore our old men did the better, who did not greatly praise even Roscius when masked; for all delivery is of the mind, and the countenance is the image of the mind, the eyes its indicators: for this is the one part of the body which can effect as many significations as there are movements of the mind; nor indeed is there anyone who can effect the same with eyes closed. Theophrastus indeed says that a certain Tauriscus, an actor, was wont to say that he who, in acting, delivered his lines gazing at any one fixed thing, performed with his back turned.

Wherefore there is great moderation of the eyes; for the appearance of the mouth is not to be too much changed, lest we be carried off either to absurdities or to some distortion; it is the eyes, by whose now intensity, now relaxation, now glance, now mirth, we may signify the motions of our minds aptly with the very kind of speech; for delivery is, as it were, the speech of the body, and therefore ought the more to agree with the mind; and the eyes nature has given us, as to a horse or a lion their mane, their tail, their ears, to declare the motions of the mind.

Wherefore in this delivery of ours, next after the voice, the countenance prevails; but that is governed by the eyes. And in all these things which belong to delivery there is a certain force given by nature; wherefore by this even the unskilled, by this the common crowd, by this in short barbarians are most moved: for words move no one save him who is joined by the fellowship of the same tongue, and keen thoughts often fly past the perception of men not keen; delivery, which bears before it the motion of the mind, moves all men; for by the same motions of the mind all men are stirred, and they recognize them in others by the same marks and betray them in their own selves.

But to the use and praise of delivery, without doubt, the voice holds the greatest part; which first is to be wished for by us; then, of whatever sort it shall be, it is to be cherished; concerning which that matter—in what manner the voice is to be tended—is nothing now to this kind of precept-giving: for my part, however, I think very much that it is to be tended; but this seems not abhorrent from the office of this our discourse, that, as I said a little before, in very many things that which is most useful, that, by some means or other, is also most becoming. For toward maintaining the voice nothing is more useful than frequent change; nothing more pernicious than straining poured out without intermission.

What is more apt, for our ears and for the sweetness of delivery, than alternation and variety and change? And so the same Gracchus—as you can hear, Catulus, from Licinius your client, a lettered man, whom that man kept by him as a slave at hand—was wont, when he addressed the assembly, to have a skilled man with a little ivory pipe, who stood secretly behind him, to sound quickly that note by which he might either rouse him when slack or recall him from straining.' 'I have heard it, by Hercules,' said Catulus, 'and have often marvelled at the man's diligence, and likewise at his learning and knowledge.'

'For my part,' said Crassus, 'I have indeed, and I grieve that those men fell into such guilt in the commonwealth; although such a web is being woven, and such a method of living is being shown to posterity in the state, that we may now desire to have men like those citizens whom our fathers did not endure.' 'Cease, I beseech you, Crassus,' said Julius, 'that discourse of yours, and bring yourself back to the pipe of Gracchus; the method of which I do not yet plainly understand.'

'In every voice,' said Crassus, 'there is a certain middle, but proper to each voice: from this to ascend the voice by degrees is both pleasant—for to shout from the beginning is a rustic thing—and that same is salutary for strengthening the voice; then there is a certain extreme of straining, which yet is more inward than the sharpest shouting, to which the pipe will not suffer you to proceed, and will recall you even from the very straining; there is likewise, on the contrary, a certain deepest point in relaxation, to which one descends, as it were, by degrees of sounds. This variety, and this course through all the sounds of the voice, will both protect itself and bring sweetness to delivery. But you will leave the piper at home, and carry with you to the forum the sense of this habit.

I have set forth what I could, not as I wished, but as the straits of time have compelled me; for it is a wise thing to lay the blame upon time, when, even if you wished it, you could not bring forward more.' 'But indeed,' said Catulus, 'you have gathered all things together, as far as I can judge, so divinely, that you seem not to have taken them from the Greeks, but to be able to teach these very things to the Greeks themselves; and I for my part rejoice that I have been made a partaker of this discourse; and I should wish that my son-in-law, your companion, Hortensius, had been present; who indeed I am confident will be pre-eminent in all those praises which you have embraced in your speech.'

And Crassus said: 'Do you say he will be? I for my part judge that he is so already, and judged it then, when, in my consulship, he defended in the senate the cause of Africa, and lately even more, when he spoke on behalf of the king of Bithynia. Wherefore you see rightly, Catulus; for I perceive that nothing is wanting to that young man, either from nature or from learning:

on which account it is the more for you, Cotta, and for you, Sulpicius, to be watchful and to labour; for he grows up no middling orator, as it were, into your generation, but one of most keen genius and of burning zeal and of excellent learning and of singular memory; whom, although I favour him, yet I wish to excel his own age—but that he should outrun you, who are so much his elders, is scarcely honourable.' 'But now let us rise,' said he, 'and refresh ourselves, and at length relax our minds and our care from this strain of disputation.'