19 While indeed the admirers of
the ancients fix as the boundary, so to say, of antiquity, the period up to
Cassius Severus who was the first, they assert, to deviate from the old and
plain path of the speaker, I maintain that it was not from poverty of genius or
ignorance of letters that he adopted his well known style, but from preference
and intellectual conviction. He saw, in fact, that, as I was just now saying,
the character and type of oratory must change with the circumstances of the age
and an altered taste in the popular ear. The people of the past, ignorant and
uncultured as they were, patiently endured the length of a very confused
speech, and it was actually to the speaker’s credit, if he took up one of their
days by his speech-making. Then too they highly esteemed long preparatory
introductions, narratives told from a remote beginning, a multitude of
divisions ostentatiously paraded, proofs in a thousand links, and all the other
directions prescribed in those driest of treatises by Hermagoras and
Apollodorus. Any one who was supposed to have caught a scent of philosophy, and
who introduced some philosophical commonplace into his speech, was praised up
to the skies. And no wonder; for this was new and unfamiliar, and even of the
orators but very few had studied the rules of rhetoricians or the dogmas of
philosophers. But now that all these are common property and that there is
scarce a bystander in the throng who, if not fully instructed, has not at least
been initiated into the rudiments of culture, eloquence must resort to new and
skilfully chosen paths, in order that the orator may avoid offence to the
fastidious ear, at any rate before judges who decide by power and authority,
not by law and precedent, who fix the speaker’s time, instead of leaving it to
himself, and, so far from thinking that they ought to wait till he chooses to
speak on the matter in question, continually remind him of it and recall him to
it when he wanders, protesting that they are in a hurry.
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