It was accordingly
usual with our ancestors, when a lad was being prepared for public speaking,
as soon as he was fully trained by home discipline, and his mind was stored
with culture, to have him taken by his father, or his relatives to the
orator who held the highest rank in the state. The boy used to accompany and
attend him, and be present at all his speeches, alike in the law-court and
the assembly, and thus he picked up the art of repartee, and became
habituated to the strife of words, and indeed, I may almost say, learnt how
to fight in battle. Thereby young men acquired from the first great
experience and confidence, and a very large stock of discrimination, for
they were studying in broad daylight, in the very thick of the conflict,
where no one can say anything foolish or self-contradictory without its
being refuted by the judge, or ridiculed by the opponent, or, last of all,
repudiated by the very counsel with him. Thus from the beginning they were
imbued with true and genuine eloquence, and, although they attached
themselves to one pleader, still they became acquainted with all advocates
of their own standing in a multitude of cases before the courts. They had
too abundant experience of the popular ear in all its greatest varieties,
and with this they could easily ascertain what was liked or disapproved in
each speaker. Thus they were not in want of a teacher of the very best and
choicest kind,
PRACTITIONER VERSUS
PROFESSOR |
who could show them eloquence in her true features, not in
a mere resemblance; nor did they lack opponents and rivals, who fought with
actual steel, not with a wooden sword, and the audience too was always
crowded, always changing, made up of unfriendly as well as of admiring
critics, so that neither success nor failure could be disguised. You know,
of course, that eloquence wins its great and enduring fame quite as much
from the benches of our opponents as from those of our friends; nay, more,
its rise from that quarter is steadier, and its growth surer. Undoubtedly it
was under such teachers that the youth of whom I am speaking, the disciple
of orators, the listener in the forum, the student in the law-courts, was
trained and practised by the experiences of others. The laws he learnt by
daily hearing; the faces of the judges were familiar to him; the ways of
popular assemblies were continually before his eyes; he had frequent
experience of the ear of the people, and whether he undertook a prosecution
or a defence, he was at once singly and alone equal to any case. We still
read with admiration the speeches in which Lucius Crassus in his nineteenth,
Cæsar and Asinius Pollio in their twenty-first year, Calvus, when very
little older, denounced, respectively,
Carbo, Dolabella,
Cato, and
Vatinius.