HKB
limited time for speaking.[184] Therefore, after saying a few words about its unworthy character, as I found by experience while in those countries, I will return to my original subject.
The tribunals, in former times, when good taste prevailed, were greatly adorned by our advocates, when orators of spirited eloquence--laborious and accomplished scholars--shone pre-eminent in genius, honesty, fluency, and every kind of embellishment of language. As Demosthenes, who, as we learn from the Athenian records, whenever he was going to speak, drew together a vast concourse of people from the whole of Greece, who assembled for the sake of hearing him; and Callistratus, who, when summing up his noble pleading on the subject of Oropus in Euboea, produced such an impression that that same Demosthenes quitted the academy, at the time when Plato was at its head, to become his follower. And Hyperides, and Æschines, and Andocides, and Dinarchus, and Antiphon the Rhamnusian, who is the first man spoken of in ancient history as having received a fee for pleading a cause.
And similarly among the Romans, the Rutilii, and Galbæ, and Scauri, men of eminent reputation for purity of life and manners, and for frugality; and in the succeeding generations, many men of censorian and consular rank, and even many who had celebrated triumphs, such as the Crassi, the Antonii, the Philipii, the Scævolæ, and numbers of others, after having commanded armies with glory, gained victories, and raised trophies, became eminent also for their civil services to the State, and won fresh laurels by their noble contests at the bar, thus reaping the highest honour and glory.
And after them Cicero, the most excellent of them all, who repeatedly saved many who were in distress from the scorching flames of judgment by the stream of his imperious eloquence, used to affirm "that if men could not be defended without their advocate incurring blame, they certainly could not be carelessly defended without his being guilty of crime."
But now throughout all the regions of the East one may see the most violent and rapacious classes of men hovering about the courts of law, and besieging the houses of the rich like Spartan or Cretan hounds, cunningly pursuing different traces, in order to create the occasion of a lawsuit.
Of these the chief is that tribe of men who, sowing every variety of strife and contest in thousands of actions, wear out the doorposts of widows and the thresholds of orphans, and create bitter hatred among friends, relations, or connections, who have any disagreement, if they can only find the least pretext for a quarrel. And in these men, the progress of age does not cool their vices as it does those of others, but only hardens and strengthens them. And amid all their plunder they are insatiable and yet poor, whetting the edge of their genius in order by their crafty orations to catch the ear of the judges, though the very title of those magistrates is derived from the name of Justice.
In the pertinacity of these men rashness assumes the disguise of freedom--headlong audacity seeks to be taken for constancy, and an empty fluency of language usurps the name of eloquence--by which perverse arts, as Cicero tells us, it is a shame for the holy gravity of a judge be deceived. For he says, "And as nothing in a republic ought to be so incorruptible as a suffrage or a sentence, I do not understand why the man who corrupts such things with money is to be esteemed worthy of punishment, while he who perverts them by eloquence receives commendation. In fact, the latter appears to me to do the most harm, it being worse to corrupt a judge by a speech than by a bribe, inasmuch as no one can corrupt a wise man with a bribe, though it is possible that he may with eloquence."