st: that is their simple meaning. At the end of the
book he introduces a compliment to Hortensius, who during his life had
been his great rival, and who was still living when the De Oratore was
written.

[Sidenote: B.C. 52, aetat. 55.]

The next on the list is the De Optimo Genere Oratorum--a preliminary
treatise written as a preface to a translation made by himself on the
speeches of AEschines and Demosthenes against Ctesiphon in the matter of
the Golden Crown. We have not the translations; but we have his reasons
for translating them--namely, that he might enable readers only of Latin
to judge how far AEschines and Demosthenes had deserved, either of them,
the title of "Optimus orator." For they had spoken against each other
with the most bitter abuse, and each spokesman was struggling for the
suppression of the other. Each was speaking with the knowledge that, if
vanquished, he would have to pay heavily in his person and his pocket.
He gives the palm to neither; but he tells his readers that the Attic
mode of speaking is gone--of which, indeed, the glory is known, but the
nature unknown. But he explains that he has not translated the two
pieces verbatim, as an interpreter, but in the spirit, as an orator,
using the same figures, the same forms, the same strength of ideas. We
have to acknowledge that we do not see how in this way he can have done
aught toward answering the question De Optimo Genere Oratorum; but he
may perhaps have done something to prove that he himself, in his
oratory, had preserved the best known Grecian forms.

The De Partitione Oratoria Dialogus follows, of which we have already
spoken, written when he was an old man, and was in the sixty-first year
of his life. It was the year in which he had divorced Terentia, and had
been made thoroughly wretched in private and in public affairs. But he
was not on that account disabled from preparing for his son these
instructions, in the form of questions and answers, on the art of
speaking.

We next come to the Brutus; or, De Claris Oratoribus, a dialogue
supposed to have been held between Brutus, Atticus, and Cicero himself.
It is a continuation of the three books De Oratore. He there describes
what is essential to the character of the optimus orator. He here looks
after the special man, going back over the results of past ages, and
bringing before the reader's eyes all Greek and Roman orators, till he
comes down to Cicero. I cannot but say that the fee