When the young declaimer has finished the master will arise. He will show how to gesture, making his garments fall in picturesque folds. He will take the subject just handled and repeat the argument showing how each point can be better developed; how new matter can be brought in; how allusions to the gods, the worthies of old, and perhaps to the reigning Emperor will improve the effect; how to use one’s voice at each particular turn, etc., etc. If the only object of oratory is to tickle the ear, the result is magnificent. The students dutifully applaud their master even more loudly than they do their fellows, and each goes home wondering anxiously, “When can I argue my first case before the prætor?” =179. Philosophical Studies: Delight in Moralizing.=--A good many Roman nobles of intellectual type advance a step further than the rhetoric schools. They study philosophy; and even go to Athens (now a quiet, delightful university town) to listen to lectures by the alleged successors of Epicurus or of Zeno the Stoic, but to Greece one need not follow them. It is proper to say, however, that a certain dabbling in philosophy is extremely fashionable.[110] There are plenty of stories about noblemen who have treatises on philosophy read to them while they are being carried to and fro in their litters under the porticoes of their villas; or even of ladies who listen to lectures by a professional philosopher every morning while their maids are arranging their hair. Such personages, needless to say, never improve upon the familiar guesses at the riddle of human existence; but sometimes their desire to moralize becomes worse than comical. People still repeat stories of Agrippinus, a high-born victim of Nero. When he caught a fever he immediately dictated a panygyric on the moral excellencies of fever. He was ordered into exile; he wrote a treatise on the benefits of exile. He was made a high judge; he added to the anguish of those he condemned by giving his victims long orations to prove that he passed sentence on them only for their own good!