In the final analysis, if we may take the cue from these speeches, it is not the degree of consciously imposed rhetoric that differentiates their styles for Cicero, but the nature of the issues and audiences involved and the resultant quality of the speaker’s inspiration.[40] In the _Pro Caecina_, an ordinary civil suit called for close argumentation before a small jury of legal specialists. These facts determined the style, as Cicero says. In the _Pro Rabirio_, which Cicero places at the opposite end of the scale, the critic will not find many more of the standard devices of rhetoric than in the other. But here it becomes apparent from the first sentence that Cicero is tense, that standing at full height he is battling with all his might for what seems to him a great principle. The issue was as serious as any he had ever championed. That accounts for the intensity of his utterance. But there are various ways of fighting, and the audience as well as the theme must determine the manner. Cicero had before him not only the voting public—which standing alone might have tempted him into mere vituperation—but he had also before him the aristocracy of the senate waiting to see whether the _auctoritas senatus_ would be betrayed by that day’s vote because of a possible failure on the orator’s part. Cicero did not fail. The speech in its gravity and dignity of word and period is worthy of the theme and adapted to the audience. And these are the factors which Cicero felt had made that speech. Scholars have catalogued externals in such oratory too assiduously, and Cicero did so himself, because it had not yet been discovered in his day that art is beyond the reach of science. What we need to do in reading Cicero is first to comprehend the rich endowment of the man: the vast human sympathy that brought him into immediate contact with his audiences, be they ever so diverse, the celerity of his thought, the constructive power of his imagination, the close correspondence between his delicate sense of rhythm and sound and his copious vocabulary, and above all his very sensitive response to the issues of right and justice. Then we must bear in mind the breadth of his studies in philosophy, dramatic literature, history, law, and politics that enriched his mind with principles, illustrations, and points of view.[41] Finally, we must picture to ourselves in each case the nature of his audience, the issue at stake, and the intensity of its appeal to him. When we have done this we shall feel, if we have the gift of insight, and even if we cannot analyze it, the consummate art of Cicero’s Latin prose. To attempt to express the secret of it in statistics of tropes and meters is to miss it wholly.