Roman poet[158] appeared, Caesar the
most elegant prose-writer, and Cicero the greatest orator. It was in
the following age that Seneca, Lucan, Tacitus, Pliny, and Juvenal
wrote. Between Lucretius and Tacitus there were for three centuries
many great writers in Rome. One might also add another century by
recurring to the time of Plautus, the second century before Christ.

Of these great authors a few had their origin in Roman families; but
the majority of them were Italians. Many came from the provinces,
Vergil from Mantua, Livy from Padua (in Cisalpine Gaul), while Seneca
was a Spaniard.

=Orators and Rhetors.=--The true national art at Rome was eloquence.
Like the Italians of our day, the Romans loved to speak in public. In
the forum where they held the assemblies of the people was the
rostrum, the platform for addressing the people, so named from the
prows of captured ships that ornamented it like trophies of war.
Thither the orators came in the last epoch of the republic to declaim
and to gesticulate before a tumultuous crowd.

The tribunals, often composed of a hundred judges, furnished another
occasion for eloquent advocates. The Roman law permitted the accused
to have an advocate speak in his place.

There were orators in Rome from the second century. Here, as in
Athens, the older orators, such as Cato and the Gracchi, spoke simply,
too simply for the taste of Cicero. Those who followed them in the
first century learned in the schools of the Greek rhetors the long
oratorical periods and pompous style. The greatest of all was Cicero,
the only one whose works have come down to us in anything but
fragments; and yet we have his speeches as they were left by him and
not as they were delivered.[159]

With the fall of the republic the assemblies and the great political
trials ceased. Eloquence perished for the want of matter, and the
Roman writers remarked this with bitterness.[160] Then the rhetors
commenced to multiply, who taught the art of speaking well.[161] Some
of these teachers had their pupils compose as exercises pleas on
imaginary rhetorical subjects. The rhetor Seneca has left us many of
these oratorical themes; they discuss stolen children, brigands, and
romantic adventures.

Then came the mania for public lectures. Pollio, a favorite of
Augustus, had set the example. For a century it was the fashion to
read poems, panegyrics, even tragedies before an audience of friends
assembled to applaud them. T