inging him into notice, he collected an audience of his own, and
it was his custom to open the question proposed for debate, sitting; but
as he warmed with the subject, he stood up, and made his peroration in
that posture. His declamations were of different kinds; sometimes
brilliant and polished, at others, that they might not be thought to
savour too much of the schools, he curtailed them of all ornament, and
used only familiar phrases. He also pleaded causes, but rarely, being
employed in such as were of the highest importance, and in every case
undertaking the peroration only.

In the end, he gave up practising in the forum, partly from shame, partly
from fear. For, in a certain trial before the court of the One Hundred
[923], having lashed the defendant as a man void of natural affection for
his parents, he called upon him by a bold figure of speech, "to swear by
the ashes of his father and mother which lay unburied;" his adversary
taking him up for the suggestion, and the judges frowning upon it, he
lost his cause, and was much blamed. At another time, on a trial for
murder at Milan, before Lucius Piso, the proconsul, having to defend the
culprit, he worked himself up to such a pitch of vehemence, that in a
crowded court, who loudly applauded him, notwithstanding all the efforts
of the lictor to maintain order, he broke out into a lamentation on the
miserable state of Italy [924], then in danger of being again reduced, he
said, into (530) the form of a province, and turning to the statue of
Marcus Brutus, which stood in the Forum, he invoked him as "the founder
and vindicator of the liberties of the people." For this he narrowly
escaped a prosecution. Suffering, at an advanced period of life, from an
ulcerated tumour, he returned to Novara, and calling the people together
in a public assembly, addressed them in a set speech, of considerable
length, explaining the reasons which induced him to put an end to
existence: and this he did by abstaining from food.

END OF THE LIVES OF GRAMMARIANS AND RHETORICIANS.

FOOTNOTES:

[842] It will be understood that the terms Grammar and Grammarian have
here a more extended sense than that which they convey in modern use.
See the beginning of c. iv.

[843] Suetonius's account of the rude and unlettered state of society in
the early times of Rome, is consistent with what we might infer, and with
the accounts which have come down to us, of a community composed of