y the writings praising and censuring Cato(33)
are remarkable. This is easily explained. Gaius Gracchus
had addressed the burgesses; now men addressed the populace;
and as the audience, so was the speech. No wonder that the reputable
political author shunned a dress which implied that he had directed
his words to the crowd assembled in the market-place of the capital.

Rise of A Literature of Pleadings
Cicero

While the composition of orations thus declined from its former
literary and political value in the same way as all branches
of literature which were the natural growth of the national life,
there began at the same time a singular, non-political, literature
of pleadings. Hitherto the Romans had known nothing of the idea
that the address of an advocate as such was destined not only
for the judges and the parties, but also for the literary edification
of contemporaries and posterity; no advocate had written down
and published his pleadings, unless they were possibly at the same time
political orations and in so far were fitted to be circulated
as party writings, and this had not occurred very frequently.
Even Quintus Hortensius (640-704), the most celebrated Roman advocate
in the first years of this period, published but few speeches
and these apparently only such as were wholly or half political.
It was his successor in the leadership of the Roman bar,
Marcus Tullius Cicero (648-711) who was from the outset quite as much
author as forensic orator; he published his pleadings regularly,
even when they were not at all or but remotely connected
with politics. This was a token, not of progress, but of an unnatural
and degenerate state of things. Even in Athens the appearance
of non-political pleadings among the forms of literature was a sign
of debility; and it was doubly so in Rome, which did not,
like Athens, by a sort of necessity produce this malformation
from the exaggerated pursuit of rhetoric, but borrowed it
from abroad arbitrarily and in antagonism to the better traditions
of the nation. Yet this new species of literature came rapidly
into vogue, partly because it had various points of contact
and coincidence with the earlier authorship of political orations,
partly because the unpoetic, dogmatical, rhetorizing temperament
of the Romans offered a favourable soil for the new seed, as indeed
at the present day the speeches of advocates and even a sort
of literature of law-proceedings are of some import