Ornate Latin speech reached its complete development in the orations of Cicero. To modern Anglo-Saxon taste the more elaborate paragraphs seem overwrought. Our busy courts and legislatures desire facts clearly and compactly presented. This has made us impatient of the style of persuasion in speech. When we have leisure for vacation reading we may resort to polyphonic or imagist prose in essays and occasionally in fiction. We still have a place for protreptic sound in well-written paragraphs, but not during business hours. That is the chief reason why some of the Ciceronian periods now seem misplaced. Another seems to lie in a difference of temperament in the respective peoples. If the Latins were in any respect like the modern Italians in their sensitivity to dramatic utterance, they may have enjoyed emotional persuasion more than some of the ultramontane peoples. The very fact that Cicero’s manner so frequently carried conviction in the courts, in the senate, and on the public platform removes him to that extent from modern ultramontane criticism. But Cicero himself was in his day considered a moderate and urged strongly that elaborate prose must never be used except for themes that could carry its burden. He also knew that the study of rhetoric was for young students only and not for mature statesmen. When in the _De Oratore_ he represented Crassus and Antonius as giving such elementary instruction to the young students, Sulpicius and Cotta, he carefully dismissed the venerable Scaevola as being too dignified to participate in such a conversation. His sense of propriety here reveals the true Roman attitude toward Greek rhetoric. To be sure Cicero was himself somewhat imposed upon by the claims of rhetoric which Greek teachers had elaborated, or he would not have written the _De Oratore_—even with apologies. The erroneous belief was still current that some one some day might work out a real science of style. Hence he wished to make his contribution to that science by setting down his own precepts regarding prose rhythm, composition, and figures of speech. But that he had doubts concerning their validity appears in his insistence that the “grand manner” is a gift of nature (_Or._ 99) and that Roman oratory owed more to _ingenium_ than to _doctrina_ (_Or._ 143). However, in criticizing his contemporaries—Calvus, Caelius, and Calidius—he always proceeds from the point of view of their effect on him rather than from any reference to rules of rhetoric.