It is true enough that
public vituperation, in senate or law-courts, was a fact of every day,
and the wealth of violent personal abuse which a gentleman like Cicero
could expend on one whom for the time he hated, or who had done
him some wrong, passes all belief.[158] But the history of this
vituperation is a curious one; it was a traditional method of hostile
oratory, and sprang from an old Roman root, the tendency to defamation
and satire, which may itself be attributed in part to the Italian
custom of levelling abuse at a public man (e.g. at his triumph) in
order to avert evil from him.[159] To single out a man's personal
ugliness, to calumniate his ancestry in the vilest terms,--these were
little more than traditional practices, oratorical devices, which the
rhetorical education of the day encouraged, and which no one took
very seriously.[160] But we are concerned in this chapter mainly with
private life; and there we find almost universal consideration and
courtesy. In the whole of the Ciceronian correspondence there is
hardly a letter that does not show good breeding, and there are many
that are the natural result of real kindly feeling and true sympathy.
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