Before his formal period of military service as tribune of the 3rd Gallic legion in Syria, Pliny had, in his nineteenth year, entered on that forensic career which was perhaps the greatest pride of his life.(879) He practised in the Centumviral court, which was chiefly occupied with questions of property and succession. Occasionally he speaks with a certain weariness of the trivial character of the cases in which he was engaged. But his general estimate is very different. The court is to him an arena worthy of the greatest talent and industry,(880) and the successful pleader may win a fame which may entitle him to take rank with the great orators of the past. Pliny, inspired by memories of Quintilian’s lectures, has always floating before him the glory of Cicero.(881) He will prepare for publication a speech delivered in an obscure case about a disputed will.(882) He is immensely proud of its subtlety and point, and the sweep of its indignant or pathetic declamation, and he is not unwilling to believe his legal friends who compared it with the _De Corona_! The suppression of free political life, the absence of public interests, and the extinction of the trade of the delator, left young men with a passion for distinction few chances of gratifying it. The law courts at any rate provided an audience, and the chance of momentary prominence. In the Letters of Pliny, we can see the young advocate pushing his way through the dense masses of the crowded court, arriving at his place with torn tunic, holding the attention of his audience for seven long hours, and sitting down amid the applause even of the judges themselves.(883) Calpurnia often arranged relays of messengers to bring her news of the success, from point to point, of one of her husband’s speeches.(884) Youths of the highest social rank—a Salinator, or a Ummidius Quadratus—threw themselves eagerly into the drudgery which might make an ephemeral name.(885) Ambitious pretenders, with no talent or learning, and arrayed perhaps in hired purple and jewels, like Juvenal’s needy lawyer, forced themselves on to the benches of the advocates, and engaged a body of claqueurs whose applause was purchased for a few denarii.(886) Pliny has such a pride in this profession, he so idealises what must have been often rather humdrum work, that he feels a personal pain at anything which seems to detract from the old-fashioned, leisurely dignity of the court. In his day the judges seem to have been becoming more rapid and business-like in their procedure, and less inclined to allow the many _clepsydrae_ which men of Pliny’s school demanded for the gradual development of all their rhetorical artifices. He regrets the good old times, when adjournments were freely granted,(887) and days would be spent on a case which was now despatched in as many hours. It is for this reason that he cannot conceal a certain admiration for Regulus, in other respects, “the most detestable of bipeds” but who redeemed his infamy by an enthusiasm and energy as an advocate which rivalled even that of Pliny.