38 I pass now to the forms and
character of procedure in the old courts. As they exist now, they are indeed
more favourable to truth, but the forum in those days was a better training for
eloquence. There no speaker was under the necessity of concluding within a very
few hours; there was freedom of adjournment, and every one fixed for himself
the limits of his speech, and there was no prescribed number of days or of
counsel. It was Cneius Pompeius who, in his third consulship, first restricted
all this, and put a bridle, so to say, on eloquence, intending, however, that
all business should be transacted in the forum according to law, and before the
praetors. Here is a stronger proof of the greater importance of the cases tried
before these judges than in the fact that causes in the Court of the Hundred,
causes which now hold the first place, were then so eclipsed by the fame of
other trials that not a speech of Cicero, or Caesar, or Brutus, or Caelius, or
Calvus, or, in short, any great orator is now read, that was delivered in that Court,
except only the orations of Asinius Pollio for the heirs of Urbinia, as they
are entitled, and even Pollio delivered these in the middle of the reign of
Augustus, a period of long rest, of unbroken repose for the people and
tranquillity for the senate, when the emperor’s perfect discipline had put its
restraints on eloquence as well as on all else.
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