Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 01.pdf/447

404 In the Third Epistle (Book II.) he, however, describes the orator Isæus as a man of the greatest flow of language, able to bring into play the choicest aids of rhetoric, doing this in a manner which would be an honor to any author; his memory is so wonderful that he is able to repeat what he has previously extemporized without omitting a single word.

The best description of what would now be considered as a contemptible means of procuring an audience, and exciting the sympathies of the judges, is to be found described in the Fourteenth Epistle (Book II.), in which he notices the hired applause known now in France by the word claque. In this letter he regrets that the young men who have lately been called to practise, do not look upon the profession with that reverence which it deserved, and spout their cases before the court of the Centumviri as they would Homer at school. These would-be orators, anxious for applause, hire their audience, and for three denarii a head, crowd the courts with laudiceni, who burst into violent raptures at a given sign from the mesochorus. Juvenal alludes to this custom in the Thirteenth Satire, where he says that heaven and earth are called upon to witness, with a clamor as loud as salutes Fæsidius when pleading, uttered by those who have received the sportula, or reward given to the class known as clients.

The Seventh Satire describes the "dodges" of a lawyer anxious by every means in his power to advertise himself and his practice. He wears a purple robe, and has slaves to follow him, bearing on their shoulders his sedan-chair; around him are numerous, admiring friends. When he pleads, he wears upon his finger a large ring, perhaps hired for the occasion, this being considered such an important item in the dress, that Cicero himself would not have received two hundred sesterces had no ring sparkled on his finger when pleading; "a man in a 'seedy coat' could seldom be eloquent." The lawyer must ever be seen bearing in his hands a roll of papers; his manners must be curt, and he must refer the client to his "clerk," who will be able to say whether the great man can undertake the case. Though it is added that the great man's manner soon changes when he sees a client likely to disappear from his grasp, and he willingly remembers at once his numerous engagements.

Quintilian points out how unworthy it is for some lawyers only to undertake a case on the morning of the trial, to rush into court reading over the brief as if to give the impression that they can solve in an instant any legal difficulty. And when in court how puerile, how affected, their style, which only needed, according to Pliny, the accompaniment of musical instruments to resemble some theatrical performance. How different this was to the advice given by Tacitus, in his description of a true orator: "But no man, I affirm, ever did, or ever can, maintain that exalted character, unless, like the soldier marching to battle, armed at all points, he enters the forum equipped with the whole panoply of knowledge. So much, however, is this principle neglected by our modern professors of oratory, that their pleadings are debased by the vilest colloquial barbarisms; they are ignorant of the laws, unacquainted with the arts of the Senate; the common law of Rome they professedly ridicule, and philosophy they seem to regard as something that ought to be shunned and dreaded. Thus Eloquence, like a dethroned potentate, is banished her rightful dominions, and confined to barren points and low conceits; and she, who was once the mistress of the whole circle of sciences, and charmed every beholder with the goodly appearance of her glorious train, is now shorn and curtailed, stripped of all honors, of all her attendants (I had almost said of all her genius), and is taken up as one of the meanest of the mechanical arts. This, therefore, I consider as the first and the principal reason of our having so greatly declined from the spirit of the ancients."