it were a
capital charge.

5. As to my eloquence--if only eloquence were mine--it would be small
matter either for wonder or envy if I, who from my earliest years to
the present moment have devoted myself with all my powers to the sole
study of literature and for this spurned all other pleasures, had
sought to win eloquence to be mine with toil such as few or none have
ever expended, ceasing neither night nor day, to the neglect and
impairment of my bodily health. But my opponents need fear nothing
from my eloquence. If I have made any real advance therein, it is my
aspirations rather than my attainments on which I must base my claim.
Certainly if the aphorism said to occur in the poems of Statius
Caecilius be true, that innocence is eloquence itself, to that extent
I may lay claim to eloquence and boast that I yield to none. For on
that assumption what living man could be more eloquent than myself? I
have never even harboured in my thoughts anything to which I should
fear to give utterance. Nay, my eloquence is consummate, for I have
ever held all sin in abomination; I have the highest oratory at my
command, for I have uttered no word, I have done no deed, of which I
need fear to discourse in public. I will begin therefore to discourse
of those verses of mine, which they have produced as though they were
something of which I ought to be ashamed. You must have noticed the
laughter with which I showed my annoyance at the absurd and illiterate
manner in which they recited them.

6. They began by reading one of my _jeux d'esprit_, a brief letter in
verse, addressed to a certain Calpurnianus on the subject of a
tooth-powder. When Calpurnianus produced my letter as evidence against
me, his desire to do me a hurt blinded him to the fact that if
anything in the letter could be urged as a reproach against me, he
shared in that reproach. For the verses testify to the fact that he
had asked me to send him the wherewithal to clean his teeth:

_Good morrow! friend Calpurnianus, take
The salutation these swift verses make.
Wherewith I send, responsive to thy call,
A powder rare to cleanse thy teeth withal.
This delicate dust of Arab spices fine
With ivory sheen shall make thy mouth to shine,
Shall smooth the swollen gums and sweep away
The relics of the feast of yesterday.
So shall no foulness, no dark smirch be seen,
If laughter show thy teeth their lips between._

I ask you