sometimes brilliant and polished, at others, that they might not be thought to savour too much of the schools, he curtailed them of all ornament, and used only familiar phrases. He also pleaded causes, but rarely, being employed in such as were of the highest importance, and in every case undertaking the peroration only.
In the end, he gave up practising in the forum, partly from shame, partly from fear. For, in a certain trial before the court of the One Hundred 923, having lashed the defendant as a man void of natural affection for his parents, he called upon him by a bold figure of speech, “to swear by the ashes of his father and mother which lay unburied;” his adversary taking him up for the suggestion, and the judges frowning upon it, he lost his cause, and was much blamed. At another time, on a trial for murder at Milan, before Lucius Piso, the proconsul, having to defend the culprit, he worked himself up to such a pitch of vehemence, that in a crowded court, who loudly applauded him, notwithstanding all the efforts of the lictor to maintain order, he broke out into a lamentation on the miserable state of Italy 924, then in danger of being again reduced, he said, into (530) the form of a province, and turning to the statue of Marcus Brutus, which stood in the Forum, he invoked him as “the founder and vindicator of the liberties of the people.” For this he narrowly escaped a prosecution. Suffering, at an advanced period of life, from an ulcerated tumour, he returned to Novara, and calling the people together in a public assembly, addressed them in a set speech, of considerable length, explaining the reasons which induced him to put an end to existence: and this he did by abstaining from food.
END OF THE LIVES OF GRAMMARIANS AND RHETORICIANS. H2 anchor