Page:Correspondence of Marcus Cornelius Fronto volume 2 Haines 1920.djvu/127

 unequal, these accordant, those discordant; but harmonizing was much better.

9. Perhaps you will say what is there in my speeches new-fangled, what artificial, what obscure, what patched with purple, what inflated or corrupt? Nothing as yet; but I fear

10. I praise the Censor's act, who shut up the gaming nouses because he himself, as he said, when he passed that way could scarce consult his dignity so far as to refrain from dancing to the sound of the castanets or cymbals. Then besides there are many things in that kind of oratory not unlike the genuine thing, if one does not look carefully into it. Sanction granted to wrong, says M. Annaeus; on the other hand Sallust: all right rests with the stronger.

11. A certain Gallic rhetorician, while the Macedonians on Alexander's death from disease were debating whether they should utterly destroy Babylon also, says, What if you hire lions to do your work? Grandiosely too he cries in his peroration, using the same word as Ennius, By you citizens has been wrought, has been wrought a work unsurpassable. It is the Tiber, O Tuscan, the Tiber that thou biddest be penned in: the river Tiber, master and monarch of all 111

