W hat nice ears men have nowadays! What taste in judging of speeches! You can leam from our Aufidius1 what shouts of applause were evoked in my speech, and with what a chorus of approval were greeted the words in those days every bust was decorated with patrician insignia; but when, comparing a noble with a plebeian race, I said, As if one were to think the flame kindled on a pyre and on an altar to be the same because both alike give light, at this a few murmurs were heard.
Why have I told you this? That you, my Lord, may be prepared, when you speak before an assembly of men, to study their taste, not, of course, everywhere and by every means, yet occasionally and to some extent. And when you do so, remind yourself that you are but doing the same as you do when, at the people's request, you honour or enfranchise those who have slain beasts manfully in the arena;2 criminals even they may be or felons, yet you release them at the people's request. Everywhere, then, the people prevail and get their way. Therefore must you so act and so speak as shall please the people.
Herein lies that supreme excellence of an orator, and one not easily attainable, that he should please his hearers without any great sacrifice of right eloquence, and should let his blandishments, meant to tickle the ears of the people, be coloured indeed, but not along with any great or wholesale sacrifice of dignity: rather that in its composition and fabric there should be a lapse into a certain softness but no wantonness of thought. So, too, in a garment, I should prefer it to be of the softness that belongs to wool rather than to an effeminate colour; it should be of finely woven or silken thread, and itself purple not flame-red3 or saffron. You and your father, moreover, who are bound to wear purple and crimson, must on occasion clothe your words, too, in the same dress. You will do this and be restrained and moderate with the best moderation and restraint. For this is what I prophesy, that what has ever been done in eloquence will be done to the full by you, so great is your natural capacity, and with such zeal and application do you devote yourself to learning;4 although, in others, either application without capacity, or capacity alone without application, has won outstanding glory. I feel sure, my Lord, that you spend no little time in writing prose also. For though the swiftness of steeds is equally well exercised whether they run and practise at a gallop or a trot, yet the more serviceable qualities must be the more frequently put into requisition.
For by now I do not treat you as if I thought you were twenty-two5 years old. At an age when I had scarcely touched any of the ancient authors you, by the grace of the gods and your own merit, have made such progress in eloquence as would bring fame to greybeards, and that, too—a far from easy task—in every branch of the art. For your letters, which you write so regularly, are enough to shew me what you can further do in that more familiar and Ciceronian vein.
Instead of Polemo the rhetorician, whom you lately presented to me in your letter as a Ciceronian, I have given back to you in my speech, which I delivered in the Senate, a philosopher,6 if I am not mistaken, of the hoariest antiquity. Come, what say you, Marcus, how does my version of the story of Polemo strike you? Of course, Horatius Flaccus, a famous poet, and one with whom I have a connexion through Maecenas and my "gardens of Maecenas,"7 supplied me with plenty of smart things on that subject. For this Horatius, in his second book of Satires,8 brings in the story of Polemo, if I remember rightly, in the following lines:—
Would you the marks of mental ill forswear, The scarf, spats, lappet, that the rake declare? Be changed, like Polemo, who, in drunken rage, Scoffed at the teaching of the sober sage; But cut to the heart by what he heard, 'tis said, Plucked off by stealth the garlands from his head.
The verses which you sent me I have sent you back by our Victorinus, and this is how I have sent them. I have carefully sewn the paper across with thread, and so sealed the thread that that little mouse should poke his nose in anywhere. For he himself has never given me any information about your hexameters, so naughty is he and knavish. But he says that you purposely recite your hexameters so glibly and so fast that he cannot commit them to memory. So I have paid him back in his own coin: tit for tat—not to hear a line out of the packet. I remember, too, that you have often impressed upon me not to let anyone see your verses.
How is it with you, my Lord? Surely you are cheerful, surely you are well, surely sound in all respects. Other things are of little consequence, so you never give us the bad fright you did on your birthday.9 If any evil threatens you, "may it fall on the Pyrrhaeans' heads."10 Farewell, my joy, my refuge, happiness, glory. Farewell, and love me, I beseech you, every way in jest as in earnest.
I have written your mother a letter, such is my assurance, in Greek, and enclose it in my letter to you. Please read it first, and if you detect any barbarism in it, for you are fresher from your Greek than I am, correct it and so hand it over to your mother. I should not like her to look down on me as a goth. Farewell, my Lord, kiss your mother when you give her my letter, that she may read it the more gladly.
143 A.D.
Fronto to the Emperor Antoninus Pius Augustus.11