They give us a really invaluable abundance, in all kinds, of rhetorical _loci communes_, tags, _pointes_, with which, from early [Sidenote: _The Suasories._] and late practice, the mind of every educated man at Rome was simply saturated, and which could hardly fail to colour his style, either directly in the way of imitation, or indirectly in that of repulsion, and preference of extreme severity. For instance, the first _Suasoria_ deals with the question, “Shall Alexander cross the Ocean?” though the exact statement of question is lost altogether, with the beginning of the piece itself. It seems to have opened with a sort of abstract of general commonplaces, and then come the quotations. Argentarius [perhaps Marcus the epigrammatist] addresses the conqueror: “Halt! the world that is thine calls thee back; we have conquered as far as it was lawful for us. There is nothing I can seek at the risk of Alexander.” Oscus said: “It is time for Alexander to leave off where the sun and the earth leave off likewise,” and endeavoured to describe the sea, “immense and untried by human experience, the bond of all the world and the keeper of its lands, the vastness unruffled by any oar, the shores, now harried by the raging tide, now deserted by its ebb, the horrid darkness brooding on the waves, and the eternal night oppressing what nature has withdrawn from human eyes.” And so many. Then there is a section (headed _Divisio_), on the particular kind of suasion to be used in such speeches, the devices which it is safe and proper for orators to address to kings, with gradations as before. It will readily be perceived from this example what sort of dealing is here on the other stock subjects—the deliberation of the three hundred at Thermopylæ, whether they shall go or not; of Agamemnon, whether he shall sacrifice Iphigenia; of Alexander, whether he shall enter Babylon; of the Athenians, whether on Xerxes’ threat of a second invasion they shall remove the Persian war trophies; of Cicero, whether he shall ask mercy of Antony, or burn his Philippics. The quotations are sometimes verse as well as prose, and give us specimens of poets otherwise lost, with an occasional literary anecdote of interest, such as the offence which Asinius Pollio[298] took at the praise given to Cicero in the recitation by a certain poet of Corduba, Sextilius Ena— “Deflendus Cicero est Latiæque silentia linguæ,” which Cornelius Severus borrowed, and improved into— “Conticuit Latiæ tristis facundia linguæ.” This anecdote is interesting in many ways,—first for the protest of Pollio, almost equally piquant whether it proceeded from critical severity, from personal jealousy, or from political feeling; and secondly, for the evidence it gives of the straining for point and rhetorical “hit,” in verse and prose alike. Footnote 298: