FRONTO, THE ORATOR AND THE MAN
effects of the Ciceronian tradition tended more and more to squeeze the life out of the language, the ingrained feeling that "the old is better" gradually spread among the leaders of literary thought. An immense impetus was given to this tendency by the versatile littérateur Hadrian, who openly preferred Ennius to Vergil and Cato to Cicero.
But Fronto, fond as he was of old words and ancient locutions, insisted that such must be not only old but more expressive and appropriate than modern ones, or they must not be preferred. He himself confesses that he used only ordinary and commonplace words. No one in his opinion has a right to invent expressions—he calls such words counterfeit coin. He availed himself of old and established words, that were genuine Latin and had all the charm of novelty without being unintelligible, drawing largely on the vocabulary and idiom of Plautus, Ennius, Cato, and Gracchus, and interspersing his familiar letters with quotations from Naevius, Accius, Pacuvius, and Laberius. But this was not an affected or repellent archaism, such as Seneca and Lucian mock at.[1] Fronto's attitude somewhat resembled that of Rossetti, who declares that "he has been reading early English ballads in search of stunning old words."[2] It is of such words that Fronto is thinking when he speaks of words that must be hunted out with toil and care and watchfulness and
