Book 3

pr.1. I have known certain men, most eloquent, who did not answer to their reputation when they declaimed; speaking in the forum to the greatest admiration of all, the moment they withdrew to these domestic exercises they were deserted by their own talent. That this should happen to a good many is to me as strange as it is certain. And so I remember asking Cassius Severus what the reason was that in declamations his eloquence did not answer to him.

pr.2. For in no one did this happen more remarkably. His speech was vigorous, polished, full of mighty epigrams; no one allowed less of idleness in his pleading; there was no part that did not stand by its own merit, nothing in which a hearer could turn his mind elsewhere without loss, all of it intent, all aiming at some mark; no one held the feelings of his audience more in his own power. True is what our friend Gallio says of him: "When he spoke, he was master of the case, so completely did all do what he bade; when he wished it, they grew angry."

pr.3. "No one, while he spoke, but feared he would leave off." You must not judge him by what he published; there are indeed even these things by which his eloquence may be recognized; yet he was far greater heard than read. This did not happen to him in the proportion in which it happens to almost all to whom being heard is a greater recommendation than being read, but in him the difference is far greater. First, there was as much in the man as in the talent: a striking size of body, the sweetness of a most powerful voice — though these rarely come together, that the same voice be at once sweet and solid — a delivery such as could have produced an actor, and yet not such as could seem an actor's.

pr.4. For there was nothing you would wonder at in him more than that the gravity which was wanting to his life was overflowing in his pleading: so long as he kept himself short of jests, his speech was that of a censor. Then, the very things he spoke were better than what he wrote. For being a man of ready presence of mind, and of greater talent than application, he pleased more in the things he discovered than in the things he had brought prepared. And indeed when angry he spoke better, and so men took the most careful precaution not to interrupt him while speaking.

pr.5. He alone profited by being caught off guard; fortune always deserved better of him than care. Yet this good luck never persuaded him to negligence. In one day he would plead several private cases, and so as to plead one before noon, another after; but a public case never more than one in a day. And yet I do not know of any defendant he undertook except himself: so completely did he find nowhere any subject for speaking except in his own perils.

pr.6. He never spoke without notes, nor was he content with that kind of notes in which the bare facts are set down, but for the most part the pleading was written out in full; even those things that could be said wittily were jotted down; but though he would not come forward unless equipped, he gladly fell away from his apparatus. Forced to speak extempore, he outran himself beyond measure. It was always more useful for him to be caught out than to be prepared; but you would admire him the more for not abandoning his diligence, since rashness served him so well.

pr.7. He had, then, everything that might equip him to declaim well: a diction not common nor sordid, but choice; a manner of speaking not slack or languid, but ardent and impetuous; explanations not slow nor empty, but holding more of thought than of words; diligence, the greatest support even of a middling talent. Yet when he declaimed he was not only far below himself, but below many: and so he rarely declaimed, and not unless forced by friends.

pr.8. But when I asked why in declamations he was unequal to himself, he would say this: "What you wonder at in me happens to nearly all. Even great talents — from which I know I am far removed — when have they excelled in more than one work? Cicero's eloquence forsook him in his verses; that felicity of talent left Vergil in unfettered prose; Sallust's speeches are read for the honour of his histories; the speech of the most eloquent man, Plato, which was written for Socrates, is worthy neither of the advocate nor of the defendant.

pr.9. "This you may see happen not only to talents but to bodies, whose strengths are not suited to all that is done by strength: with this one no one is a match in wrestling; that one is mighty to lift a load of great weight; that one, whatever he grasps, does not let go, but lays his hands, that will hold them back, on vehicles thrusting downhill. I come to animals: some hounds are bred for the boar, some for the stag; the swiftness of horses, though they be very fast, is not fitted for the racecourse in all; some better endure a rider, some the yoke.

pr.10. "To call you to my own malady: Pylades in comedy, Bathyllus in tragedy, fell far short of themselves; to my namesake, since swiftness of foot is not only not conceded but cast in his teeth, the hands are slower; some fight best against the heavy-armed, some against the Thracians, and some so desire to be matched with a left-handed man as . . . In oratory itself, although the subject be one, yet he who argues best narrates more carelessly; that one does not fill out so well as he prepares. Our friend Passienus, when he begins to speak — straight after his exordium there is a general flight; for the epilogue we all return; only those who must, hear the middle parts.

pr.11. "Do you wonder that the same man does not declaim as well as he pleads cases, or that the same man does not speak deliberative themes so well as forensic ones? Pompeius Silo, seated, is both fluent and learned, and would be reckoned eloquent if he would dismiss us after his preface: he declaims so badly that I seem to have wished him well when I said, 'May you never rise.' A great and varied thing is eloquence, and it has not yet so indulged anyone as to fall to him whole; he is fortunate enough who has been admitted to some part of it.

pr.12. "I, however, seem able also to give my own reason: I have grown accustomed to look not at a hearer but at a judge; I have grown accustomed not to answer myself but my opponent; I avoid saying superfluous things no less than contradictory ones. In a school-piece what is not superfluous, when the thing itself is superfluous? I will show you my feeling: when I speak in the forum, I am doing something; when I declaim, it is, as Censorinus very prettily used to say of those who ambitiously sought offices in country towns: I seem to myself to be labouring in a dream. Then the very thing is different:

pr.13. "it is one thing entirely to fight, another to flourish weapons in the air. The school has always been so reckoned to be a kind of training-ground, the forum the arena; and that is why a man about to speak for the first time in the forum is called a raw recruit. Come now, lead those declaimers into the senate, into the forum: they will be changed along with the place; like bodies accustomed to a closed room and a pampering shade, they cannot stand in the open, they do not know how to bear rain or sun, they will scarcely find themselves; for they have grown used to being eloquent at their own pleasure.

pr.14. "You must not look for an orator in this boyish exercise. What if you should wish to judge a helmsman in a fish-pond? I would excuse myself to you more carefully, as if I were not born for this thing, did I not know that both Asinius Pollio and Messala Corvinus and Passienus, who now stands in the first rank, are less well received than Cestius or Latro.

pr.15. "Which, then, do you think is the fault — of those who speak or of those who hear? They do not speak worse, but these judge with worse taste, who, being mostly boys or youths, frequent the schools; these not only prefer their Cestius to the most eloquent men I mentioned a little while ago, but would prefer him even to Cicero, if they did not fear stones. Yet in the one way they can, they do prefer him: for they learn this man's declamations by heart, and read that man's speeches only those to which Cestius wrote replies.

pr.16. "I remember entering his school when he was about to recite his speech against Milo; Cestius, after his custom, said in self-admiration: 'If I were a Thracian, I would be Fusius; if I were a pantomime, I would be Bathyllus; if a horse, Melissio.' I could not contain my bile and cried out: 'If you were a sewer, you would be the Great Sewer.' Huge was the laughter of all; the schoolmen stared at me, asking who I was that had so thick a neck. Cestius, about to reply to Cicero, found nothing to answer me, but said he would not go on unless I left the house.

pr.17. "I said I would not leave a public bath until I had bathed. Then it pleased me to give Cestius satisfaction concerning Cicero in the forum. Catching him soon after, I summon him to law before the praetor, and when I had poured out as much jesting and abuse as I wished, I demanded that the praetor admit his name under the law concerning recorded wrongdoing. So great was his confusion that he asked for an adjournment. Then I brought him before another praetor and prosecuted him for ingratitude. Now before the city praetor I was asking that a guardian be appointed for him; when friends intervened — they had run together for this spectacle — and entreated me, I said I would trouble him no further if he would swear that Cicero was more eloquent than himself. And not by jest nor in earnest could he be brought to do this."

pr.18. "I have told you this little tale," he said, "that you might know that in declamations there is almost another race of men. If I wish to be compared with them, I need not a greater talent, but a smaller taste." And so it could scarcely now be obtained of him that he should declaim; and this could not be obtained at all — that he should be willing to have any hearers but his most intimate friends. And so he did. His declamations were unequal, but those passages that stood out, if you had set them in any declamation whatever, would have made it unequal: a rough arrangement, and one that avoided arrangement, but living epigrams. It will, however, be unfair to judge him by what I shall presently add; for these are not the things he said best, but the things I best remember.

1. The spendthrift blinded by his fellows. Let a blind man receive a thousand denarii from the public funds. Ten young men, when they had eaten up their goods, drew lots, so that the one whose name came out should, by their compact, be blinded and so receive a thousand denarii. The lot of one of them came out; he was blinded. He asks for the thousand denarii. They are refused.

These are the eyes you feared, husbands. O for a law to be repealed, if it blinds men! The commonwealth gives a thousand denarii to no one but him who receives it unwillingly. Say now, "have pity"; this you did not say when you were being blinded. The commonwealth consoles infirmity; it does not buy it. Their patrimonies consumed, they bring in their limbs. It is more useful to the commonwealth that one blind man be turned away than that nine more be made. He does not ask support of you alone, but first of many. I will support the man who is supported because of his infirmity; I will not support the man who is made infirm for the sake of support. So it falls out, when men spend the greater part of their lives in darkness, that at last they loathe the sun as superfluous.

The other side. He will give nothing to those nine: he will be in nobody's favour, if he cheats the men by whom he was blinded . . . The young man, encircled by those nine veteran spendthrifts, says: "Alone, I could not resist nine in agreement." It was all done by arrangement: one made the proposal, all approved it; one was chosen to draw the lots; his lot was put in to come out first. When he resisted, he was blinded. "If he was encircled," he says, "let him pursue the wrong, let him sue for violence, let him seek redress in kind." We shall see; the first thing is that he have something to live on.

2. The parricide acquitted by an even vote. A certain man accused his son of parricide. When the son was acquitted by an even vote, he disowns him.

What I now ask is less; I do not seek that you avenge me against a parricide, but that you separate me from him. I do not accuse the parricide, I flee from him. When will this man spare an accuser, who did not spare a father? Is there, then, nothing between the will and the sack? Not an acquitted parricide, but a doubtful one: to be acquitted you need many votes; to be condemned, one. They did not acquit the defendant, but spared the age. Do you wonder at mercy in a city in which the law grants acquittal even on equal tablets? Do you ask by how many you are disapproved? If I add one, you are a parricide. You owe your acquittal to the law, not to your innocence. "I was acquitted," he says. I do not disown you for parricide, but for other vices that made you so credible a parricide.

The other side. The young man's colour is plain: that he should say he was overborne by his father's authority.

3. The man to be disowned who adopted his disowned brother. Let a father divide the patrimony with a son in his thirtieth year. A certain man had a thrifty son and a dissolute one. He disowned the dissolute one. The thrifty one set out abroad; he was captured by pirates; he wrote to his father about his ransom. While the father held back, the dissolute son forestalled him and ransomed his brother. The thrifty son returned; he adopted his brother. He is disowned.

There is no reason for anyone to praise me: my brother first set between us the example of family devotion; together he sailed, together he ran the risk, together he traversed every land, leaving me only at our father's house. There is no reason for you to use the excuse of age: you can sail. He ought to give thanks to us both: my brother brought me back to this man, I brought this man his brother. If you disowned him as a sluggard, he has sailed; if as undutiful, he has ransomed his own. What a son has received from the law cannot be snatched from him; for how can a father snatch away what he cannot but give?

The other side. Through the one I am compelled to disown the one I do not wish to. In this one thing the two please each other: that each displeases his father. Let us use the medicine to which we are driven, as is wont to be done with dangerous wounds — that the evil be cut out along with the body itself. Do you permit a young man to adopt, whom the law tests in the dividing of a patrimony? The law admitted you to the service of the patrimony, not to its ownership. Is there any age at which a man ceases to be a son? Not even to a thirty-year-old son is it permitted to adopt; for no one can take another into his own power who is himself in another's power. How can it be that you have the power of life and death over a brother, but not over a son? If he had deserved well of you, you would have begged your father on your brother's behalf. For that I did not ransom him was a matter of poverty: nothing was left in the common store; whatever the thirty-year-old had left, the disowned son had carried off. What was I to do, alone, an old man, helpless, whose patrimony one had divided and the other consumed?

4. Saved by his son. Let one who has been saved have no right of action against his saviour. A father who has been saved by his son disowns him. The son enters a plea in bar.

I might have been allowed to perish, if I am not allowed to speak. Do you think me saved? I was taken captive. Give me back to the enemy; captives are allowed to speak. Since he boasts so greatly of the gift of life, hear who gave it first. If anyone gives me back to the enemy, I will call him my saviour. Or do you think disowning an action at law? Even if it is an action, the law that speaks of one saved pertains only to outside persons, to son and father no more than to slave and master, freedman and patron. To depart from a father's power and come to the assessment of the favour: he who gives life, if he first received it, does not bind, but repays. I went into the battle line as an example to my son; not the enemy but age conquered me; he saved the one who had often saved him. A prostitute calls me an old man come back to life, I am matter for the jests of parasites; by all of them, as if they were my saviours, I am bidden to keep silent. Son, if I am not allowed to live, why was I not allowed to perish? "I shielded you," he says. So you, a young man, did not stand before your father in the line? Hear my son's glory: he did not commit parricide; when he could have saved me, he saved me.

The other side. This man begot me; he gave me my breath, he gave me these hands by which he was to be saved.

5. The father who keeps back the ravished woman. Let a ravished woman choose either the death of her ravisher or marriage without a dowry. The ravisher demands that the ravished woman be brought forth. Her father is unwilling.

He is the ravisher, and I am hauled into court. It is not so easy for an honest man to kill as for a desperate one to die. "The law," he says, "is common to both." May the gods grant that you do not force me to try whether all of it is mine. "When, then," he says, "will she make her choice?" At this time she cannot; I am tending her wounds, I am restoring my household, I am mourning my stormed house, I am consoling her ravished virginity, I am guarding one who threatens her own life. When will she choose? When the ravished woman wishes, not when the ravisher. When will she choose? When you do not wish it. "When," he says, "will she choose?" I am preparing myself for the choice, I am steeling my mind; it is not easy to kill a man; meanwhile I press down my groans and drive inward the tears that burst forth. You know what will happen: my face has deceived you. Fool, do you think anyone delays his daughter's marriage? You run upon the axe and call the executioner of your own accord. When you ought to be begging, you offer insult. No one is compelled to avenge himself.

The other side. Nothing is more wretched than to be left in doubt between life and death. It will now be a kindness, even if she chooses death. I fell in love with this man's daughter. I should have approached the father about marriage; I did so; but you see how, even in respect of the law, he is slow. The ravisher has his life at another's discretion, his liberty at his own. This law is common to both. This ravisher has something to fear, and something too that he may hope for. "In the law," he says, "it is not written when." Nay, at once; whenever a time is not added, the present is understood. Shall so long a right over a citizen's life be permitted you? It is crueller than to die — always to fear death.

6. The house burned along with the tyrant. Let there be an action for damage done. A certain man, while pursuing a tyrant who was fleeing from the citadel, drove him into a private house. He set fire to the house: the tyrant was burned up along with the house. He received a reward. The owner sues him for the damage.

Whom did you shut out and whom did you take in? Why did the tyrant make for no other house? Everyone shut his house against him as he came. I had no entrance into the house, who had one into the citadel. Do you not rejoice to have spent something on the public liberty? "This is the man in whose house the tyrant was killed." You are pointed out as a tyrannicide. "Give me back my house," he says. So while the tyrant lived you had not lost it? The tyrant's friend, the tyrant's henchman, certainly — what you cannot deny — his host. Long I waited to see whether the tyrant would be cast out. You can more easily accuse either yourself, who were so intimate with the tyrant that your house most of all pleased him, who took him in; or the tyrant, who did you the damage in fleeing into your house; or, that I may free you from blame, you can more easily accuse fortune, which brought the tyrant to you of all men.

The other side. The damage ought to be his whose the reward is. It is not unfair that the wrong of that thing be charged to you, the fruit of which you have reaped. The tyrant did not choose the house — for he had no leisure for that — but burst into the one he could, when I was not in it. This man, having found an occasion of doing harm, would not enter, but chose a tyrannicide that was doubtful, slow, dangerous to the city. He received a reward, no doubt the greater, as if he ought to make good the damage.

7. Poison given to a frenzied son. A father gave poison to his son, who was frenzied and tearing his own limbs. He is accused by his wife of ill-treatment.

It is no wonder why she lives who has lost her son: he lives who killed him.

The other side. The one I was losing every day, I at last buried. You are mistaken, unhappy woman, as to the time of your bereavement: not then did you lose your son, but then you buried him.

Outside. Alfius Flavus spoke this epigram: "He was himself both his own nourishment and his own undoing." Cestius, rebuking him as though he had spoken with a corrupt taste, said: "It is plain that you read the poets eagerly: that thought is his who has filled this age not only with amatory arts but with amatory epigrams. For Ovid in his books of Metamorphoses says: 'He himself began to rend his own limbs with mangling bite, and the unhappy man fed his body by diminishing it.'"

8. The Olynthian father charged with assembling a mob. Let one who has made a gathering and an assembly be liable to capital punishment. When Olynthus was conquered, an old Olynthian came with his young son to Athens. The Athenians decreed citizenship to all the Olynthians. Invited to dinner by a dissolute young man, he came with his son. There, when there was mention of debauching the son, the father fled, and the young man was held back. The father began to weep before the house; the house was set on fire; ten young men perished, and the Olynthian's son. The father is accused of having made a gathering and an assembly.

If a wretched man is not allowed to weep, he must weep the more. Silence cannot be commanded to grief. There were men among the people who said: "Here he debauched my son, here my wife"; each man brought there both his own fire and his own grief. I fear, my son, that while I seek you I may fall upon the bones of some ravisher. Where is the good faith of Athens? Where are the hospitable hands joined on either side? "We are taken captive, my son," I said; "while we may, let us flee — but as from Philip. At least in Philip's hands we were men together." My tears are turned into a charge, as though from the time Olynthus was taken I had ceased to weep. So great, forsooth, am I, that I could rouse the people in a city in which I could not save my son. It is not, whenever several have come together to some place, a gathering and an assembly, but whenever men have been called together, whenever, prepared as if to their leader, they have run together; not if one neighbourhood has met, or the number of a few passers-by has flowed in, but where the whole people, or the greater part of it, where the city has been divided into parties. A gathering is the name for a great multitude coming together by some common agreement: but there at the start there were few, and then the rest came together not to me, but to the fire — which, even so, the people chose to watch rather than put out. The law punishes not the man on whose account a gathering was made, but the man by whom it was made. Vengeance was not so dear to me that I should be willing to lose my son; and I tried to beg the people, and could not.

The other side. What need of a gathering? There are laws written for the avenging of all wrongs. Once stirred, a multitude keeps no measure. The city might have burned in that fire.

9. The crucifixion of the slave who refused his master poison. A master, being ill, asked his slave to give him poison. He did not give it. He provided in his will that the slave be crucified by the heirs. The slave appeals to the tribunes.

Cornelian law, I call upon you; behold, my master commands what you forbid. That no one may think he had displeased his master, he ordered the cross prepared for him at the same time as the poison for himself. We confess more crimes of the slave: he refused his master, when he wanted them, untimely draughts and harmful foods. For what did he not want, who asked for poison? He chose to suffer the cross rather than to deserve it. If he loses, he is to die; if he does not lose, he is to be the slave of the man by whom he is demanded for the cross. On one side is the law, on the other the will, and on both sides the cross. The madman wanted to kill his slave without cause. Do you seek a proof of his madness? He wanted to kill himself too. "The tribunes," he says, "cannot help a slave." A slave's son we had for a king; by a slave's information the conspiracy of Brutus's sons with the Tarquins was laid bare. Is there, then, no difference whether a man gave his master poison or refused it? Even where to die is a remedy, to kill is a crime. Do you wish a slave to despair of his master's life as quickly as an heir does? If you think death a punishment, why do you ask for it? If a benefit, why do you threaten it? Does anyone reproach a man with poison except given poison? Will you set any limit to the tribunician power, which the Roman people, that it might itself have the most power, willed to be stronger than itself? To have poison is a crime as great as to kill one's master.

The other side. Wishing to die, he chose for this service the most worthless slave, a bold one, one hostile to him. He took thought not for his master's safety, whom he saw wasting away with an incurable disease, but prolonged his torments. A slave is not the censor of his master's command, but its minister. The right of wills is at stake, all the power of which has perished, if slaves disregard the commands of the living and become tribunes of the dead. So then, you gallows-bird, you will not die at your master's pleasure, but your master will die at yours?