sively grasped by that dexterous stylist
and deposited in his copious writings, something of the power
which language exercises, and of the piety which it awakens,
was transferred to the unworthy vessel. The Romans possessed
no great Latin prose-writer; for Caesar was, like Napoleon,
only incidentally an author. Was it to be wondered at that,
in the absence of such an one, they should at least honour the genius
of the language in the great stylist? And that, like Cicero himself,
Cicero's readers also should accustom themselves to ask not what,
but how he had written? Custom and the schoolmaster then completed
what the power of language had begun.

Opposition to Ciceronianism
Calvus and His Associates

Cicero's contemporaries however were, as may readily be conceived,
far less involved in this strange idolatry than many of their successors.
The Ciceronian manner ruled no doubt throughout a generation
the Roman advocate-world, just as the far worse manner of Hortensius
had done; but the most considerable men, such as Caesar,
kept themselves always aloof from it, and among the younger
generation there arose in all men of fresh and living talent
the most decided opposition to that hybrid and feeble rhetoric.
They found Cicero's language deficient in precision and chasteness,
his jests deficient in liveliness, his arrangement deficient
in clearness and articulate division, and above all his whole eloquence
wanting in the fire which makes the orator. Instead of the Rhodian
eclectics men began to recur to the genuine Attic orators
especially to Lysias and Demosthenes, and sought to naturalize
a more vigorous and masculine eloquence in Rome. Representatives
of this tendency were, the solemn but stiff Marcus Junius Brutus
(669-712); the two political partisans Marcus Caelius Rufus
(672-706;(35)) and Gaius Scribonius Curio (d. 705(36);)--
both as orators full of spirit and life; Calvus well known
also as a poet (672-706), the literary coryphaeus of this younger
group of orators; and the earnest and conscientious Gaius Asinius Pollio
(678-757). Undeniably there was more taste and more spirit
in this younger oratorical literature than in the Hortensian
and Ciceronian put together; but we are not able to judge how far,
amidst the storms of the revolution which rapidly swept away the whole
of this richly-gifted group with the single exception of Pollio,
those better germs attained development. The time allotted to them
w