Explanation: Rome was a very story-oriented culture, but not necessarily in the same way later literary cultures were. While reading is associated with silence in many later European cultures, as part of the wider monastic and religious tradition of Christian contemplation integrated into even processing secular literature, the Romans were all about reading aloud. Fancy dinner parties often included a younger relative showing their skill at recitation - or a specialized slave with the same skill (less prestigious, but just as fun for the listeners) - reciting lines from poetry or literature while the guests ate. The equivalent of putting on a movie during dinner!

Lift up your hearts! All will come right. Out of the depths of sorrow and of sacrifice shall be born again the glory of mankind.

We cannot yet see how deliverance will come, or when it will come, but nothing is more certain that every trace ofHitlers’s bootstep every stain of his corrupt and corroding finger will be scrubbed and purged and of need be, BLASTED, from the surface of the Earth.

-Winston Churchill backed by band from the future Ca. 2009

We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like “I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive. . . .” And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about a hundred miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas. And a voice was screaming “Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?”

Something tells me the working class Roman wasn’t doing that shit.

The first lines of Virgil’s Aeanid:

Arms, and the man I sing, who, forc’d by fate,

And haughty Juno’s unrelenting hate,

Expell’d and exil’d, left the Trojan shore.

Long labours, both by sea and land, he bore,

And in the doubtful war, before he won

The Latian realm, and built the destin’d town;

His banish’d gods restor’d to rites divine,

And settled sure succession in his line,

From whence the race of Alban fathers come,

And the long glories of majestic Rome.

Uns ist in alten mæren / wnders vil geseit / von heleden lobebæren, / von grôzer arebeit, / von frevde vn hôchgecîten, / von weinen vn klagen, / von kvner recken strîten / mvget ir nv wnder horen sagen.

Or, a little bit more modern:

The boys were early for the hanging.

https://theonion.com/bush-regales-dinner-guests-with-impromptu-oratory-on-vi-1819567929/