With the fall of the republic the assemblies and the great political trials ceased. Eloquence perished for the want of matter, and the Roman writers remarked this with bitterness.[160] Then the rhetors commenced to multiply, who taught the art of speaking well.[161] Some of these teachers had their pupils compose as exercises pleas on imaginary rhetorical subjects. The rhetor Seneca has left us many of these oratorical themes; they discuss stolen children, brigands, and romantic adventures. Then came the mania for public lectures. Pollio, a favorite of Augustus, had set the example. For a century it was the fashion to read poems, panegyrics, even tragedies before an audience of friends assembled to applaud them. The taste for eloquence that had once produced great orators exhibited in the later centuries only finished declaimers. =Importance of the Latin Literature and Language.=--Latin literature profited by the conquests of Rome; the Romans carried it with their language to their barbarian subjects of the West. All the peoples of Italy, Gaul, Spain, Africa, and the Danubian lands discarded their language and took the Latin. Having no national literature, they adopted that of their masters. The empire was thus divided between the two languages of the two great peoples of antiquity: the Orient continued to speak Greek; almost the entire Occident acquired the Latin. Latin was not only the official language of the state functionaries and of great men, like the English of our day in India; the people themselves spoke it with greater or less correctness--in fact, so well that today eighteen centuries after the conquest five languages of Europe are derived from the Latin--the Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and Roumanian. With the Latin language the Latin literature extended itself over all the West. In the schools of Bordeaux and Autun in the fifth century only Latin poets and orators were studied. After the coming of the barbarians, bishops and monks continued to write in Latin and they carried this practice among the peoples of England and Germany who were still speaking their native languages. Throughout almost the whole mediæval period, acts, laws, histories, and books of science were written in Latin. In the convents and the schools they read, copied, and appreciated only works written in Latin; beside books of piety only the Latin authors were known--Vergil, Horace, Cicero, and Pliny the Younger. The renaissance of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries consisted partly in reviving the forgotten Latin writers. More than ever it was the fashion to know and to imitate them.