The fine gentlemen and ladies who share these tastes boast that nothing can interrupt their furious pursuit of “letters.” Senators like to inform their friends that even while hunting boars in the Apennines they keep their writing tablets and stylus near them when watching for the beaters to drive the game into the nets--what precious sentences might escape them otherwise! They like also to have freedman or slave “readers” always at their elbows to keep up a flow of poetry or philosophy apparently all the time when they are not eating, exercising, or conversing.[116] It is also a kind of etiquette for all members of the gilded literary circle to keep sending their unpublished effusions around among their friends with demands for “entirely frank and severe criticism”; the response always being a long letter of praise even for very mediocre efforts. “Terse, lucid, brilliant, stately,” or even “keen, impassioned, graceful”--these are grievously overworked adjectives, although perhaps at the end of the answers there are a few polite hints suggesting a slight improvement. The Latin-speaking provinces are said to follow Roman literary celebrities intently. Nothing delights the latter more than to learn that their fame has spread to distant parts. Tacitus was certainly a great historian, but he was a man of his time and also a very warm friend of Pliny the Younger. Oft repeated is the story of a conversation he had in the circus, where on the front benches for notables he met a “certain learned provincial.” The twain, without introduction, fell into a delightful literary conversation, until the stranger who manifestly was very up-to-date asked: “Are you from Italy or the provinces?” “Ah,” said Tacitus, “you know me very well from my books that you’ve read.” “Then,” cried the other, “you are either Tacitus or Pliny!” [Illustration: OLD FORUM: looking towards northern side, with the Curia shown behind the high columns in foreground; restoration by Spandoni.] =190. Zeal for Poetry: Multiplication of Verses.=--Prose compositions in smooth and fastidious Latin, or in very passable Greek are common enough, but even the authors of genuinely superior histories or literary essays, often desire to become something more magnificent--they wish to be poets. Very famous Romans have put forth their energies over iambics, elegiacs, or hexameters; Sulla, Cicero, Hortensius the Orator, Julius Cæsar, Brutus, Augustus, Tiberius, Seneca, Nerva--the list of such celebrities could be made much longer. Of course, every loyal subject knows that the reigning Hadrian is the author of clever epigrams, which would really deserve a certain fame even if their author had lived in the Subura and not upon the Palatine.[117]