Presently, when through the exercise of
that art of his which Cicero pronounced incomparable, he felt that
the sympathy of the audience was won, it would have been
interesting, indeed, to have heard him argue point after point--
clearly, brilliantly, wittily; insulting the plaintiff in poetic
terms; consigning him gracefully to the infernal regions;
accentuating a fictitious and harmonious anger; drying his
forehead without disarranging his hair; suffocating with the
emotions he evoked; displaying real tears, and with them a
knowledge, not only of law, rhetoric, philosophy, but of geometry,
astronomy, ethics and the fine arts; blinding his hearers with the
coruscations of his erudition; stirring them with his tongue, as
with the point of a sword, until, as though abruptly possessed by
an access of fury, he seized the plaintiff by the beard and sent
him spinning like a leaf which the wind had caught.
It would have bored no one either to have assisted at his triumph
when he returned from Gaul, when he returned after Spain, after
Pharsalus, when he returned from Cleopatra's arms.
On that day the Via Sacra was curtained with silk. To the blare of
twisted bugles there descended to it from the turning at the hill
a troop of musicians garmented in leather tunics, bonneted with
lions' heads. Behind them a hundred bulls, too fat to be
troublesome, and decked for death, bellowed musingly at the
sacrifants, who, naked to the waist, a long-handled hammer on the
shoulder, maintained them with colored cords.
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