Never have patriotism, tradition, order, expediency, been so powerfully represented as there; never have change, passion, or fear had so little place. We can well believe that every effective speech began with the words, so familiar to us, _maiores nostri voluerunt_, and that it ended as it had begun. The aristocratic stamp necessarily impressed on the debates of such an assembly naturally recalls our own House of Lords. But the freedom of personal invective was far wider than modern courtesy would tolerate. And, moreover, the competency of the Senate to decide questions of peace or war threw into its discussions that strong party spirit which is characteristic of our Lower House. Thus the senatorial oratory of Rome united the characteristics of that of both our chambers. It was at once majestic and vehement, patriotic and personal, proud of traditionary prestige, but animated with the consciousness of real power. In judicial oratory the Romans, like the Greeks, compare unfavourably with us. With more eloquence they had less justice. Nothing sets antiquity in a less prepossessing light than a study of its criminal trials; nothing seems to have been less attainable in these than an impartial sifting of evidence. The point of law is obscured among overwhelming considerations from outside. If a man is clearly innocent, as in the case of Roscius, the enmity of the great makes it a severe labour to obtain an acquittal; if he is as clearly guilty (as Cluentius would seem to have been), a skilful use of party weapons can prevent a conviction. [1] The judices in the public trials (which must be distinguished from civil causes tried in the praetor's court) were at first taken exclusively from the senators. Gracchus (122 B.C.) transferred this privilege to the Equites; and until the time of Sulla, who once more reinstated the senatorial class (81 B.C.), fierce contests raged between the two orders. Pompey (55 B.C.), following an enactment of Cotta (70 B.C.), threw the office open to the three orders of Senators, Knights, and Tribuni Aerarii, but fixed a high property qualification. Augustus added a fourth _decuria_ from the lower classes, and Caligula a fifth, so that Quintilian could speak of a juryman as ordinarily a man of little intelligence and no legal or general knowledge. [2]