Cornelius Tacitus, A Dialogue on Oratory
Alfred John Church, William Jackson Brodribb, Ed.

So we entered the study of Maternus, and found him seated with the very book which he had read the day before, in his hands. Secundus began. Has the talk of ill-natured people no effect in deterring you, Maternus, from clinging to your Cato with its provocations? Or have you taken up the book to revise it more carefully, and, after striking out whatever has given a handle for a bad interpretation, will you publish, if not a better, at least a safer, Cato?

You shall read, was the answer, what Maternus owed it to himself to write, and all that you heard you will recognise again. Anything omitted in the Cato Thyestes shall supply in my next reading. This is a tragedy, the plan of which I have in my own mind arranged and formed. I am therefore bent on hurrying on the publication of the present book, that, as soon as my first work is off my hands, I may devote my whole soul to a fresh task.

It seems, said Aper, so far from these tragedies contenting you, that you have abandoned the study of the orator and pleader, and are giving all your time to Medea and now to Thyestes, although your friends, with their many causes, and your clients from the colonies, municipalities, and towns, are calling you to the courts. You could hardly answer their demands even if you had not imposed new work on your-

PERSONS AND SITUATION INTRODUCED

self, the work of adding to the dramas of Greece a Domitius and a Cato, histories and names from our own Rome.