M. CORNELIUS FRONTO
though the swiftness of steeds is equally well exercised whether they run and practise at a gallop or a trot, yet the more serviceable qualities must be the more frequently put into requisition.
4. For by now I do not treat you as if I thought you were twenty-two[1] years old. At an age when I had scarcely touched any of the ancient authors you, by the grace of the gods and your own merit, have made such progress in eloquence as would bring fame to greybeards, and that, too—a far from easy task—in every branch of the art. For your letters, which you write so regularly, are enough to shew me what you can further do in that more familiar and Ciceronian vein.
5. Instead of Polemo the rhetorician, whom you lately presented to me in your letter as a Ciceronian, I have given back to you in my speech, which I delivered in the Senate, a philosopher,[2] if I am not mistaken, of the hoariest antiquity. Come, what say you, Marcus, how does my version of the story of Polemo strike you? Of course, Horatius Flaccus, a famous poet, and one with whom I have a connexion through Maecenas and my "gardens of Maecenas,"[3] supplied me with plenty of smart things on that subject. For this Horatius, in his second book of Satires,[† 1] brings in the story of Polemo, if I remember rightly, in the following lines:—
Would you the marks of mental ill forswear,
The scarf, spats, lappet, that the rake declare?
Be changed, like Polemo, who, in drunken rage,
Scoffed at the teaching of the sober sage;
But cut to the heart by what he heard, 'tis said,
Plucked off by stealth the garlands from his head.
- ↑ Marcus was born April 26, 121 A.D.
- ↑ Polemo, a tipsy gallant, bursting into the lecture room of Xenocrates, was converted by what he heard to better ways, and succeeded him as head of the Academy.
- ↑ Augustus gave the site of the cemetery on the Esquiline to Maecenas, who covered it with 25 feet of earth and there laid out his "gardens," of which Fronto was now the owner. See Lanciani, Ancient Rome, p. 67 (1889).
- ↑ Satires, ii. 3, 254
