Nor are we at present speaking of ourselves, but of eloquence, in which we are so far from having a high opinion of our own proficiency, that we are so hard to please and exacting, that even Demosthenes himself does not satisfy us.  For he, although he is eminent above all men in every description of oratory, still he does not always satisfy my ears; so greedy and capacious are they, and so unceasingly desiring something vast and infinite.

XXX.  But still, since you became thoroughly well acquainted with this orator, in company with his devoted admirer Pammenes, when you were at Athens, and as you never put him down out of your hands, though, nevertheless, you are often reading my works, you see forsooth that he accomplishes many things, and that we attempt many things;—­that he has the power, we the will to speak in whatever manner the cause requires.  But he was a great man, for he came after great men, and he had consummate orators for his contemporaries.  We should have done a great deal if we had been able to arrive at the goal which we proposed to ourselves in a city in which, as Antonius says, no eloquent man had been ever heard before.  But, if Crassus did not appear to Antonius to be eloquent, or if he did not think he was so himself, certainly Cotta would never have seemed so to him, nor Sulpicius, nor Hortensius.  For Cotta never said anything sublime, Sulpicius never said anything gently, Hortensius seldom spoke with dignity.  Those former men were much more suited to every style; I mean Crassus and Antonius.  We feel, therefore, that the ears of the city were not much accustomed to this varied kind of eloquence, and to an oratory so equally divided among all sorts of styles.  And we, such as we were, and however insignificant were our attempts, were the first people to turn the exceeding fondness of the people for listening to this kind of eloquence.

What an outcry was there when, as quite a young man I uttered that sentence about the punishment of parricides! and even a long time afterwards we found that it had scarcely entirely worn off.  “For what is so common, as breath to living people, the earth to the dead, the sea to people tossed about by the waves, or the shore to shipwrecked mariners?—­they live while they are let live, in such a way as to be unable to breathe the air of heaven; they die so that their bones do not touch the earth; they are tossed about by the waves without ever being washed by them; and at last they are cast up by them in such a manner, that when dead they are not allowed a resting-place even on the rocks.”  And so on.  For all this is the language of a young man, extolled not on account of any real merit or maturity of judgment, as for the hopes and expectations which he gave grounds for.  From the same turn of mind came that more polished invective,—­“the wife of her son-in-law; the mother-in-law of her son, the invader of her daughter’s bed.”  Not, however, that this ardour was always visible in us, so as to make us say everything in this manner.  For that very juvenile exuberance of speech in defence of Roscius has many weak passages in it, and some merry ones, such as also occur in the speech for Avitus, for Cornelius, and many others.  For no orator has ever, even in the Greek language, written as many speeches as I have.  And my speeches have the variety which I so much approve of.