Tacitus - Dialogus 19

The people in the old days were inexperienced and ill-educated: they were quite ready to tolerate long speeches, cluttered up with irrelevancies, and regarded it as a virtue if a speaker took all day. Then there was applause for long introductions, and narratives delving deep in the past, elaborate divisions put in merely for show, innumerable interconnected arguments, and all the other items prescribed in the dry-as-dust handbooks of Hermagoras adn Apollodorus: as for anyone who had an inkling of philosophy, and inserted a philosophic passage in his speech, he was lauded to the skies. And no wonder: these things were new then and unknown, and very few even of the orators themselves were acquainted with rhetorical precept or philosophical dogma. But now that all this is commonplace, and scarcely anyone finds himself in the public seats who isn't at least a dabbler in these studies, if not an expert, one needs new and less obvious routes for eloquence to follow. Only so can an orator escape boring his hearers, especially where judges can decide on their own authority, not under a legal code, and can make their own provisions about the length of speeches, without having this dictated to them.

Isn't this the most counterintuitive analysis of an audience? I must revisit this later.