Note 192 — Chapter XVIII · THE COURTS AND THE ORATORS. THE GREAT BATHS. THE PUBLIC PARKS AND ENVIRONS OF ROME

Space lacks for a discussion of the formal training of the Roman lawyer-orators, or concerning those public recitations which sometimes were the means of winning even greater reputation than any ordinary successes in the courts.

Some of these recitations in hired halls, with the audience carefully sprinkled with a paid claque, were worse than pedantic and artificial. Pliny the Younger, although he denounced the use of a claque, repeated with pleasure how he gave a reading from his own works and plays which lasted two days, “necessitated by the applause of my audience”; and boasted how he “had not allowed himself to skip one word.”