From the private journals of those Roman penny-a-liners and these official current reports there arose a sort of news-sheet for the capital (-acta diurna-), in which the resume of the business discussed before the people and in the senate, and births, deaths, and such like were recorded.

This became a not unimportant source for history, but remained without proper political as without literary significance.
Speeches Decline of Political Oratory To subsidiary historical literature belongs of right also the composition of orations.

The speech, whether written down or not, is in its nature ephemeral and does not belong to literature; but it may, like the report and the letter, and indeed still more readily than these, come to be included, through the significance of the moment and the power of the mind from which it springs, among the permanent treasures of the national literature.
Thus in Rome the records of orations of a political tenor delivered before the burgesses or the jurymen had for long played a great part in public life; and not only so, but the speeches of Gaius Gracchus in particular were justly reckoned among the classical Roman writings.
But in this epoch a singular change occurred on all hands.
The composition of political speeches was on the decline like political speaking itself.

The political speech in Rome, as generally in the ancient polities, reached its culminating point in the discussions before the burgesses; here the orator was not fettered, as in the senate, by collegiate considerations and burdensome forms, nor, as in the judicial addresses, by the interests--in themselves foreign to politics--of the accusation and defence; here alone his heart swelled proudly before the whole great and mighty Roman people hanging on his lips.

But all this was now gone.