Yet he did not scorn to use what may almost be called the tricks of his art, if he thought they would help to secure him a verdict.  The outward and visible appeal to the feelings seems to have been as effective in the Roman forum as with a British jury.  Cicero would have his client stand by his side dressed in mourning, with hair dishevelled, and in tears, when he meant to make a pathetic appeal to the compassion of the jurors; or a family group would be arranged, as circumstances allowed,—­the wife and children, the mother and sisters, or the aged father, if presentable, would be introduced in open court to create a sensation at the right moment.  He had tears apparently as ready at his command as an eloquent and well-known English Attorney-General.  Nay, the tears seem to have been marked down, as it were, upon his brief.  “My feelings prevent my saying more”, he declares in his defence of Publius Sylla.  “I weep while I make the appeal”—­“I cannot go on for tears”—­he repeats towards the close of that fine oration in behalf of Milo—­the speech that never was spoken.  Such phrases remind us of the story told of a French preacher, whose manuscripts were found to have marginal stage directions:  “Here take out your handkerchief;”—­“here cry—­if possible”.  But such were held to be the legitimate adjuncts of Roman oratory, and it is quite possible to conceive that the advocate, like more than one modern tragedian who could be named, entered so thoroughly into the spirit of the part that the tears flowed quite naturally.

A far less legitimate weapon of oratory—­offensive and not defensive—­was the bitter and coarse personality in which he so frequently indulged.  Its use was held perfectly lawful in the Roman forum, whether in political debate or in judicial pleadings, and it was sure to be highly relished by a mixed audience.  There is no reason to suppose that Cicero had recourse to it in any unusual degree; but employ it he did, and most unscrupulously.  It was not only private character that he attacked, as in the case of Antony and Clodius, but even personal defects or peculiarities were made the subject of bitter ridicule.  He did not hesitate to season his harangue by a sarcasm on the cast in the prosecutor’s eye, or the wen on the defendant’s neck, and to direct the attention of the court to these points, as though they were corroborative evidence of a moral deformity.  The most conspicuous instance of this practice of his is in the invective which he launched in the Senate against Piso, who had made a speech reflecting upon him.  Referring to Cicero’s exile, he had made that sore subject doubly sore by declaring that it was not Cicero’s unpopularity, so much as his unfortunate propensity to bad verse, which had been the cause of it.  A jingling line of his to the effect that

  “The gown wins grander triumphs than the sword"[1]