[296]. V. inf., p. 279 sq.
[297]. I use the text of Kiessling. Leipsic, 1872.
[298]. See Suas., vi. Pollio, a great friend of Antony, was both an orator of high reputation and a very severe critic. It was he, it should be remembered, who found “Patavinity” in Livy; though it has been ingeniously suggested that this was only an excessive propriety of speech, such as enabled the old woman to detect Theophrastus as not an Athenian.
[299]. Insolenti Græciæ (op. cit., p. 59). I hope it may be hardly necessary to quote certain lines, “To the memory of my beloved Master, William Shakespeare, and what he hath left us.” It is already known to students of Ben Jonson that Ben was soaked in Latin, especially of the silver age: and Professor Schelling of Philadelphia has done good work by indicating sources in his edition of the Discoveries. But the vein is not exhausted. Seneca and Quintilian were to Ben almost more than Browne and Fuller were to Lamb.
[300]. Seneca was born about 60 B.C., and was thus eighteen at Cicero’s death.
[301]. It has always to be remembered that they are not integral and complete, but centos of quoted flights, conceits, &c., on the stock hard cases.
[302]. Varro was happier in the phrase filo et facetia sermonis applied to Plautus: and he seems to have been genuinely devoted to the dramatist whose canon he constituted, v. Noctes Atticæ, III. iii.
CHAPTER II.
THE CONTEMPORARIES OF QUINTILIAN.
PETRONIUS—SENECA THE YOUNGER—THE SATIRISTS—PERSIUS—THE PROLOGUE AND FIRST SATIRE—EXAMINATION OF THIS—JUVENAL—MARTIAL—THE STYLE OF THE EPIGRAMS—PRÉCIS OF THEIR CRITICAL CONTENTS—STATIUS—PLINY THE YOUNGER—CRITICISM IN THE ‘LETTERS’—THE ‘DIALOGUS DE CLARIS ORATORIBUS’—MR NETTLESHIP’S ESTIMATE OF IT—THE GENERAL LITERARY TASTE OF THE SILVER AGE—“FAULTLESSNESS”—ORNATE OR PLAIN STYLE.
From the later years of Augustus, and the earlier of his immediate successors, we have no criticism of importance |Petronius.| except Seneca’s. But the Neronian time has left us interesting approaches to the subject in the works of Petronius and Seneca the younger, as well as in the poet Persius; while, somewhat later, the satires of Juvenal and the epigrams of Martial are, the former not destitute, the latter full, of literary allusion and opinion. These, with a certain contribution from Pliny’s Letters and the Dialogus de Claris Oratoribus (usually included among the works of Tacitus, but not resembling him in style, and sometimes attributed to Quintilian), must be successively dealt with. Quintilian himself is of too great importance not to deserve a separate chapter.