to prostitution.  Her person being rendered venal, a soldier made his offers of gallantry.  She desired the price of her prostituted charms; but the military man resolved to use force and insolence, and she stabbed him in the attempt.  For this she was prosecuted, and acquitted.  She then desired to be restored to her rank of priestess:  that point was decided against her.  These instances may serve as a specimen of the trifling declamations, into which such a man as Seneca was betrayed by his own imagination.  Petronius has described the literary farce of the schools.  Young men, he says, were there trained up in folly, neither seeing nor hearing any thing that could be of use in the business of life.  They were taught to think of nothing, but pirates loaded with fetters on the sea-shore; tyrants by their edicts commanding sons to murder their fathers; the responses of oracles demanding a sacrifice of three or more virgins, in order to abate an epidemic pestilence.  All these discourses, void of common sense, are tricked out in the gaudy colours of exquisite eloquence, soft, sweet, and seasoned to the palate.  In this ridiculous boy’s-play the scholars trifle away their time; they are laughed at in the forum, and still worse, what they learn in their youth they do not forget at an advanced age. Ego adolescentulos existimo in scholis stultissimos fieri, quia nihil ex iis, quae in usu habemus, aut audiunt aut vident; sed piratas cum catenis in littore stantes, et tyrannos edicta scribentes, quibus imperent filiis, ut patrum suorum capita praecidant; sed responsa in pestilentia data, ut virgines tres aut plures immolentur; sed mellitos verborum globos, et omnia dicta factaque quasi papavere et sesamo sparsa.  Nunc pueri in scholis ludunt; juvenes ridentur in foro; et, quod utroque turpius est, quod quisque perperam discit, in senectute confiteri non vult. Petron. in Satyrico, cap. 3 and 4.

[d] Here unfortunately begins a chasm in the original.  The words are, Cum ad veros judices ventum est, * * * * rem cogitare * * * * nihil humile, nihil abjectum eloqui poterat. This is unintelligible.  What follows from the words magna eloquentia sicut flamma, palpably belongs to Maternus, who is the last speaker in the Dialogue.  The whole of what Secundus said is lost.  The expedient has been, to divide the sequel between Secundus and Maternus; but that is mere patch-work.  We are told in the first section of the Dialogue, that the several persons present spoke their minds, each in his turn assigning different but probable causes, and at times agreeing on the same.  There can, therefore, be no doubt but Secundus took his turn in the course of the enquiry.  Of all the editors of Tacitus, Brotier is the only one who has adverted to this circumstance.  To supply the loss, as well as it can now be done by conjecture, that ingenious commentator has added a Supplement, with so much taste, and such a degree of probability, that it has been judged proper to adopt what he has