But, when we make a comparison of morals between our own time and a period before Christ, we seem to forget that more should be expected from us than from those who lived two thousand years ago.
There are some of those pleadings, speeches made by Cicero on behalf of or against an accused party, from which we may learn more of Roman life than from any other source left to us.

Much we may gather from Terence, much from Horace, something from Juvenal.

There is hardly, indeed, a Latin author from which an attentive reader may not pick up some detail of Roman customs.

Cicero's letters are themselves very prolific.

But the pretty things of the poets are not quite facts, nor are the bitter things of the satirist; and though a man's letters to his friend may be true, such letters as come to us will have been the products of the greater minds, and will have come from a small and special class.