[Footnote 60: Juvenal, i, 1.]
The time for retaliation came at last. A desire seized him during the reign of Adrian to bring forward the satires so long kept under lock and key, and to emulate those whom he had ridiculed. He bored no one, it is true, but none the less fatal were the results to himself: Several passages, cordially received by the public, and invidiously interpreted among courtiers, seemed to contain hostile allusions to an imperial favorite; and the emperor, under pretext of appointing the poetic octogenarian to a military command, sent the satirist to the extreme recesses of Egypt to finish his days in honorable exile. [Footnote 61]
[Footnote 61: Suetonius, Juvenal]
The subjects of Roman lectures were exceedingly various; sometimes serious and long-winded poems like those we have mentioned; sometimes comedies; but oftener short poems, light and trifling, or sweet and tender, according to the poet's vein. On exceptional occasions, some eloquent voice, disdaining vulgar platitudes, aroused, with its noble accents, genuine Roman sentiments; as on that day, in the Augustan era, when Cornelius Severus deplored the death of Cicero and cursed his assassin in the glorious lines that have been preserved to us. [Footnote 62]
[Footnote 62: Pliny the Younger, Letters, iv, 27; v. 17; vi. 15, 21; viii.21.]
We notice as a singular fact that a lecturer endowed with a fine voice, would sometimes content himself with reading passages from some ancient poet, Ennius, for example; and with success too, if he read with taste. [Footnote 63] But this was too low an aim to satisfy ambition. Men desired fame and applause for themselves, and cared little to offer any works but their own to the public.
[Footnote 63: Seneca, the Rhetor, Suasor, 7.]
No style was banished from these assemblies. One day an audience listened to dialogues, or to philosophical and moral dissertations; on the next, some lawyer, already well known to fame through important law-suits, claimed a hearing. The lawyer who had gained his client's cause before the tribunal, came to argue in behalf of his own intellect before the public, [Footnote 64] caring more, perhaps, to win in the second suit than in the first. History, too, seems to have held an important place in lectures, nor did the speaker limit himself to events long since gone by. Rome within a few years had lost several distinguished men, whose death Titinius Capito commemorated. [Footnote 65] Strictly speaking, it might be considered a funeral oration, intended to console friends and relatives without wounding any individual. But the intrepid lecturer ventured upon volcanic soil, and portrayed the history of recent years with so great liberty of speech that, at the close of the first assembly, he was surrounded and urged to silence: why wound the feelings of auditors who blushed to hear of acts they had not blushed to commit? [Footnote 66]
[Footnote 64: Pliny the Younger, Lett. ii. 19; vii. 17.]