M. CORNELIUS FRONTO
unequal, these accordant, those discordant; but harmonizing was much better.
9. Perhaps you will say what is there in my speeches new-fangled, what artificial, what obscure, what patched with purple, what inflated or corrupt? Nothing as yet;[1] but I fear . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .[† 1]
10. I praise the Censor's[2] act, who shut up the gaming nouses because he himself, as he said, when he passed that way could scarce consult his dignity so far as to refrain from dancing to the sound of the castanets or cymbals. Then besides there are many things in that kind of oratory[3] not unlike the genuine thing, if one does not look carefully into it. Sanction granted to wrong, says M. Annaeus; on the other hand Sallust: all right rests with the stronger.
11. A certain Gallic rhetorician,[4] while the Macedonians on Alexander's death from disease were debating[5] whether they should utterly destroy Babylon also, says, What if you hire lions to do your work? Grandiosely too he[6] cries in his peroration, using the same word as Ennius, By you citizens has been wrought, has been wrought a work unsurpassable. It is the Tiber, O Tuscan,[7] the Tiber that thou biddest be penned in: the river Tiber, master and monarch of all
- ↑ This passage, if no other, makes impossible the suggestion of Mommsen that this treatise was written as late as 177. Fronto died, almost certainly, in 166 or 167.
- ↑ It is not known who the Censor was.
- ↑ The Senecan style.
- ↑ Probably not Favorinus, the Gallic orator of Hadrian's circle, who was a friend of Fronto's.
- ↑ i.e. in the orator's show speech on the subject.
- ↑ The Gallic orator.
- ↑ Who the Tuscan was who canalised the Tiber is not clear, nor whether the whole of this is not another extract from the rhetorician.
- ↑ Three lines lost.
