No More Learning

You know how high you stand, and while in your
general censure of the age you include yourself, the smallest tincture
of malignity cannot be supposed to mingle in a decision, which denies
to your own genius, what by common consent is allowed to be your
undoubted right.

I have as yet, replied Messala, seen no reason to make me retract my
opinion; nor do I believe, that my two friends here, or even you
yourself (though you sometimes affect a different tone), can seriously
maintain the opposite doctrine. The decline of eloquence is too
apparent. The causes which have contributed to it, merit a serious
enquiry. I shall be obliged to you, my friends, for a fair solution of
the question. I have often reflected upon the subject; but what seems
to others a full answer, with me serves only to increase the
difficulty. What has happened at Rome, I perceive to have been the
case in Greece. The modern orators of that country, such as the priest
[b] Nicetes, and others who, like him, stun the schools of Mytelene
and Ephesus [c], are fallen to a greater distance from Æschines and
Demosthenes, than Afer and Africanus [d], or you, my friends, from
Tully or Asinius Pollio.


XVI. You have started an important question, said Secundus, and who so
able to discuss it as yourself? Your talents are equal to the
difficulty; your acquisitions in literature are known to be extensive,
and you have considered the subject. I have no objection, replied
Messala: my ideas are at your service, upon condition that, as I go
on, you will assist me with the lights of your understanding. For two
of us I can venture to answer, said Maternus: whatever you omit, or
rather, what you leave for us to glean after you, we shall be ready to
add to your observations. As to our friend Aper, you have told us,
that he is apt to differ from you upon this point, and even now I see
him preparing to give battle. He will not tamely bear to see us joined
in a league in favour of antiquity.
Certainly not, replied Aper, nor shall the present age, unheard and
undefended, be degraded by a conspiracy. But before you sound to arms,
I wish to know, who are to be reckoned among the ancients? At what
point of time [a] do you fix your favourite æra? When you talk to me
of antiquity, I carry my view to the first ages of the world, and see
before me Ulysses and Nestor, who flourished little less than [b]
thirteen hundred years ago. Your retrospect, it seems, goes no farther
back than to Demosthenes and Hyperides; men who lived in the times of
Philip and Alexander, and indeed survived them both. The interval,
between Demosthenes 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 æra, which you have in view, is that of [b] Cicero and
Cæsar; of Cælius [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 Cæsar back from their
coast.