M. CORNELIUS FRONTO
your hearers by your speech. Do you recognize the Ciceronian turn of the sentence?—so that not more suddenly or more violently was the city stirred by the earthquake than the minds of your hearers by your speech. When a man is deeply in love he kisses even the moles on his beloved's cheek.
5. But believe me you now hold a most distinguished place in eloquence, and will ere long reach its very summit, and speak thence with us from higher ground, and not so much higher only as the Rostrum is than the Forum and the Comitium,[1] but as much as the yards overtop the prow or rather the keel. But above all am I glad that you do not snatch up the first words that occur to you, but seek out the best. For this is the distinction between a first-rate orator and ordinary ones, that the others are readily content with good words, while the first-rate orator is not content with words merely good if better are to be obtained.
6. But I will either write to you or discuss these matters orally with you more fully at some fixed time and place. As you wished, my Lord, and as my health demanded, I have stayed at home and prayed for you that you might keep many happy returns of your children's birthdays.[2] The greater mildness of the weather and his nurse, if he takes more suitable food, will have quieted our little chick's[3] cough, for all remedies and all curatives for throat affections in children are centred in milk.[4]
7. In your Cyzicus-speech, when invoking the Gods, you added and if it be allowed, I adjure them, a use of the word[5] which I do not remember to have
- ↑ Adjoining the Forum. It was where the Romans voted by Curiae.
- ↑ He is referring to Cornificia's birthday.
- ↑ i.e. Antoninus Geminus, see last letter.
- ↑ See Aul. Gell xii. 1.
- ↑ Plautus uses it (Rud. III. iii. 32) of supplication to Venus, and Festus defines it as opem a sacris petere.
