mosthenes and the present age, is little more than [c] four
hundred years; a space of time, which, with a view to the duration of
human life, may be called long; but, as a portion of that immense
tract of time which includes the different ages of the world, it
shrinks into nothing, and seems to be but yesterday. For if it be
true, as Cicero says in his treatise called Hortensius, that the great
and genuine year is that period in which the heavenly bodies revolve
to the station from which their source began; and if this grand
rotation of the whole planetary system requires no less than twelve
thousand nine hundred and fifty-four years [d] of our computation, it
follows that Demosthenes, your boasted ancient, becomes a modern, and
even our contemporary; nay, that he lived in the same year with
ourselves; I had almost said, in the same month [e].

XVII. But I am in haste to pass to our Roman orators. Menenius Agrippa
[a] may fairly be deemed an ancient. I take it, however, that he is
not the person, whom you mean to oppose to the professors of modern
eloquence. The aera, which you have in view, is that of [b] Cicero and
Caesar; of Caelius [c] and Calvus; of Brutus [d], Asinius, and Messala.
Those are the men, whom you place in the front of hour line; but for
what reason they are to be classed with the ancients, and not, as I
think they ought to be, with the moderns, I am still to learn. To
begin with Cicero; he, according to the account of Tiro, his freedman,
was put to death on the seventh of the ides of December, during the
consulship of Hirtius and Pansa [e], who, we know, were both cut off
in the course of the year, and left their office vacant for Augustus
and Quintus Pedius. Count from that time six and fifty years to
complete the reign of Augustus; three and twenty for that of Tiberius,
four for Caligula, eight and twenty for Claudius and Nero, one for
Galba, Otho, and Vitellius, and finally six from the accession of
Vespasian to the present year of our felicity, we shall have from the
death of Cicero a period of about [f] one hundred and twenty years,
which may be considered as the term allotted to the life of man. I
myself remember to have seen in Britain a soldier far advanced in
years, who averred that he carried arms in that very battle [g] in
which his countrymen sought to drive Julius Caesar back from their
coast. If this veteran, who served in the defence of his country
against Caesar's invasion, had been