Orators and Rhetors.—The true national art at Rome was eloquence. Like the Italians of our day, the Romans loved to speak in public. In the forum where they held the assemblies of the people was the rostrum, the platform for addressing the people, so named from the prows of captured ships that ornamented it like trophies of war. Thither the orators came in the last epoch of the republic to declaim and to gesticulate before a tumultuous crowd.
The tribunals, often composed of a hundred judges, furnished another occasion for eloquent advocates. The Roman law permitted the accused to have an advocate speak in his place.
There were orators in Rome from the second century. Here, as in Athens, the older orators, such as Cato and the Gracchi, spoke simply, too simply for the taste of Cicero. Those who followed them in the first century learned in the schools of the Greek rhetors the long oratorical periods and pompous style. The greatest of all was Cicero, the only one whose works have come down to us in anything but fragments; and yet we have his speeches as they were left by him and not as they were delivered.[159]
With the fall of the republic the assemblies and the great political trials ceased. Eloquence perished for the want of matter, and the Roman writers remarked this with bitterness.[160] Then the rhetors commenced to multiply, who taught the art of speaking well.[161] Some of these teachers had their pupils compose as exercises pleas on imaginary rhetorical subjects. The rhetor Seneca has left us many of these oratorical themes; they discuss stolen children, brigands, and romantic adventures.
Then came the mania for public lectures. Pollio, a favorite of Augustus, had set the example. For a century it was the fashion to read poems, panegyrics, even tragedies before an audience of friends assembled to applaud them. The taste for eloquence that had once produced great orators exhibited in the later centuries only finished declaimers.
Importance of the Latin Literature and Language.—Latin literature profited by the conquests of Rome; the Romans carried it with their language to their barbarian subjects of the West. All the peoples of Italy, Gaul, Spain, Africa, and the Danubian lands discarded their language and took the Latin. Having no national literature, they adopted that of their masters. The empire was thus divided between the two languages of the two great peoples of antiquity: the Orient continued to speak Greek; almost the entire Occident acquired the Latin. Latin was not only the official language of the state functionaries and of great men, like the English of our day in India; the people themselves spoke it with greater or less correctness—in fact, so well that today eighteen centuries after the conquest five languages of Europe are derived from the Latin—the Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and Roumanian.
With the Latin language the Latin literature extended itself over all the West. In the schools of Bordeaux and Autun in the fifth century only Latin poets and orators were studied. After the coming of the barbarians, bishops and monks continued to write in Latin and they carried this practice among the peoples of England and Germany who were still speaking their native languages. Throughout almost the whole mediæval period, acts, laws, histories, and books of science were written in Latin. In the convents and the schools they read, copied, and appreciated only works written in Latin; beside books of piety only the Latin authors were known—Vergil, Horace, Cicero, and Pliny the Younger. The renaissance of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries consisted partly in reviving the forgotten Latin writers. More than ever it was the fashion to know and to imitate them.
As the Romans constructed a literature in imitation of the Greeks, the moderns have taken the Latin writers for their models. Was this good or bad? Who would venture to say? But the fact is indisputable. Our romance languages are daughters of the Latin, our literatures are full of the ideas and of the literary methods of the Romans. The whole western world is impregnated with the Latin literature.
THE ARTS
Sculpture and Painting.—Great numbers of Roman statues and bas-reliefs of the time of the empire have come to light. Some are reproductions and almost all are imitations of Greek works, but less elegant and less delicate than the models. The most original productions of this form of art are the bas-reliefs and the busts.