CHAP. V. JULIUS CESAR AN ADVOCATE.

175

How interesting it would have been to read some of his orations if time had spared them, but none exist, and we know only the names of a few of which incidental mention is made by other writers. These consist of three speeches against Dolabella, who was accused of pecuniary corruption, and three against Domitius and Memmius. He appeared also on behalf of some of the provincial dependencies of the state, speaking on one occasion for the Greeks, and on another for the Bithynians, who, according to the usual custom, sought redress for their grievances by committing their causes into the hands of some powerful advocate at Rome.

We may close the list of orators in the time of the republic with the names of Junius Brutus, Cælius Rufus, Licinius Calvus, Asinius Pollio, and Messala Corvinus, of whom Rufus and Corvinus, or, as he is usually called, Messala, attained considerable eminence in the Forum. They were men of very

different characters, the former being as conspicuous for his vices as the latter was distinguished by his virtues. Rufus was defended by Cicero when brought to trial on the charge of having suborned the slaves of a Roman matron, named Clodia, a woman of no good repute, to poison their mistress, and the speech of the advocate reveals a corrupt condition of morals at Rome. Society must have been in a vicious state when a counsel could thus address a grave court of judicature: Verum si quis est, qui etiam meretriciis amoribus interdictum juventuti putet, est ille quidem valde severus; negare non possum : sed abhorret non modo ab hujus sæculi licentiâ, verum etiam a majorum consuetudine, atque concessis.

THE BAR UNDER THE EMPIRE AND IN THE MIDDLE AGES.

Roma, Roma, non è più com' era prima.

Roman Song.

THE palmy days of forensic oratory at Rome passed away with the republic. And this is no more than might be expected; for eloquence withers under the cold shade of arbitrary and irresponsible power, and without free institutions few if any opportunities can exist for exercising that godlike gift, except in opposing some act of tyranny at the peril of fortune and of life. And it would be absurd to

N

suppose that a profession would be embraced for such a purpose, and that the advocates of imperial Rome would devote themselves to martyrdom in the hopeless cause of liberty. The fate of Cremutius Cordus, in the reign of Tiberius, was a sufficient warning of the danger incurred by even alluding in terms of praise to the patriots of the republic; for he was accused of the crime of having eulogised Brutus, and designated Cassius as "the last of the Romans," and feeling that the charge was of too heinous a nature to admit any chance of escape,-after a spirited speech, he starved himself to death, and his book was ordered by the senate to be publicly burnt.1

With the exception of Quintilian and the younger Pliny, our minds are familiar with the names of none of the advocates who flourished during the five centuries that intervened between Augustus and Justinian; and the former are known to us as writers rather than speakers, for neither of them was remarkable for any high order of eloquence. In the dialogue, De Causis corrupta Eloquentiæ, which was written little more than a century after the death of Cicero, Tacitus feelingly laments that oratory was extinct. "Often," he says, "have you asked me, Justus Fabius, why, when former ages were so distinguished by the genius and renown of orators, our own age, destitute and bereft of glory, scarce retains the very name. For we style none such now except the ancients; but the speakers of the present day are called pleaders, and advocates, and barristers, and anything rather than orators." He proceeds afterwards to investigate the causes of the decline of eloquence, and draws a comparison between the mode of education in former days and that pursued in his own time; dwelling with just severity upon the pernicious custom which had crept in of mothers abandoning the care and nurture of their offspring to servants, instead of, like the noble matrons of old, such as Cornelia and Aurelia, 1 Tac. Ann. iv. 34, 35.

CHAP. VI.

COMPLAINTS OF DEGENERACY.

179

watching over and superintending their education themselves. The consequence was, that those who were destined for the bar were trained up in no habits of study, and took no pains to qualify themselves, by laborious preparation, for their profession; but deemed it sufficient to pick up in the schools of the rhetoricians meretricious and tinsel ornaments of style. Thus they were accustomed to deliver "miserable show speeches," as Niebuhr calls them, and furnished with such commonplaces as their stock in trade, they retailed them in the courts, under the delusive notion that their empty declamation was eloquence. Tacitus complains strongly of their ignorance of law, which they affected to despise, as a branch of knowledge by no means necessary for them to acquire. If, indeed, we may implicitly trust the accounts which have been left us of the state of the Roman bar at different periods under the Cæsars, we shall have a very low opinion of it. But it is necessary to bear in mind the proneness of every writer to depreciate the merits of his own times, and exalt those of the past. Hesiod, one of the earliest of profane authors, laments that his lot was cast in an iron age, and sighs for that golden period which tradition represented, and his imagination pictured, as one of happiness and virtue.

O that my lot had not been cast on earth
In this fifth age of man! would I had died
Before, for now an iron race succeeds!1

And from the time when Hesiod wrote, to the present day, Is it not each generation has made the same complaint. characteristic of every kind of literature, whether it be that of the historian, the poet, or the divine, to look back upon the past, and contrast it with the present, always to the disadvantage of the latter? Each speaks of himself as Milton

did :

1

Opp. et Dies, 174. The Hindus call the present period Cali Yaga, or evil age.