M. CORNELIUS FRONTO
that now more than ever is blossoming all that you have learnt and growing to maturity. Or do you fail to notice the eagerness, partiality, and pleasure with which the Senate and the Roman People listen to your speeches? And I go bail for it, the oftener they listen the more passionately will they love, so many and so ingratiating are the charms of your genius, your countenance, your voice, and your eloquence. In fact, is there one among former Emperors-—I prefer to compare you with Emperors that I may not compare you with contemporaries—is there one who used these rhetorical figures which the Greeks call σχήματα?[1] Not to go further back, even at the last sitting of the Senate, when you spoke of the serious case of the Cyzicenes, you embellished your speech with a figure, which the Greeks call παράλειψις, in such a way that while waiving a point you yet mentioned it, and while mentioning it you yet waived it. In this speech many things at once call for praise: the first, that you most judiciously grasped the fact that the heavy trials of the allies should not be made too prominent by a continuous or direct or lengthy speech upon them, but should at the same time be pointed out with earnestness, so as to seem worthy of the compassion and help of the Senate; then you set forth the whole case so briefly, and yet so forcibly, that all that the subject demanded was summed up in the fewest words; so that not more suddenly or more violently was the city stirred by the earthquake[2] than the minds of
- ↑ These are the technical figures of rhetoric, whether of language, such as alliteration, antithesis, eto., or of thought, such as παράλειψις (= a passing by) here.
- ↑ The earthquake at Cyzicus is apparently alluded to again in the De Eloquentia 1 ad fin. It has a bearing on the date of the disputed Letter to the Commune of Asia relative to the Christians (Euseb. H.E. iv. 13; Justin, Apol. i. ad fin.).
