nted
the Roman orators' platform in the person of Quintus Hortensius
(640-704), the most celebrated pleader of the Sullan age,
it adhered closely even in the Latin idiom to the bad Greek taste
of the time; and the Roman public, no longer having the pure
and chaste culture of the Scipionic age, naturally applauded
with zeal the innovator who knew how to give to vulgarism
the semblance of an artistic performance. This was of great importance.
As in Greece the battles of language were always waged at first
in the schools of the rhetoricians, so in Rome the forensic oration
to a certain extent even more than literature set the standard of style,
and accordingly there was combined, as it were of right,
with the leadership of the bar the prerogative of giving the tone
to the fashionable mode of speaking and writing. The Asiatic vulgarism
of Hortensius thus dislodged classicism from the Roman platform
and partly also from literature. But the fashion soon changed
once more in Greece and in Rome. In the former it was the Rhodian school
of rhetoricians, which, without reverting to all the chaste severity
of the Attic style, attempted to strike out a middle course between it
and the modern fashion: if the Rhodian masters were not too particular
as to the internal correctness of their thinking and speaking,
they at least insisted on purity of language and style, on the careful
selection of words and phrases, and the giving thorough effect
to the modulation of sentences.

Ciceronianism

In Italy it was Marcus Tullius Cicero (648-711) who, after having
in his early youth gone along with the Hortensian manner,
was brought by hearing the Rhodian masters and by his own
more matured taste to better paths, and thenceforth addicted himself
to strict purity of language and the thorough periodic arrangement
and modulation of his discourse. The models of language, which,
in this respect he followed, he found especially in those circles
of the higher Roman society which had suffered but little or not at all
from vulgarism; and, as was already said, there were still such,
although they were beginning to disappear. The earlier Latin
and the good Greek literature, however considerable was the influence
of the latter more especially on the rhythm of his oratory,
were in this matter only of secondary moment: this purifying
of the language was by no means a reaction of the language of books
against that of conversation, but a reaction of t