Page:Meditations of the Emperor Marcus Antoninus - Volume 1 - Farquharson 1944.pdf/19

 collection of familiar letters and original compositions was recovered by Cardinal Angelo Mai from the palimpsest pages of a Christian manuscript, in the Ambrosian and Vatican libraries, in the early nineteenth century.

Sadly fragmentary and partly ruined by chemical reagents, it consists partly of notes exchanged by Fronto and his royal pupils, Marcus and Lucius, and their adoptive father, the Emperor Pius; partly of more studied compositions in epistolary form by the correspondents, models of the new or revived Latin style, the elocutio novella, which Hadrian himself encouraged and practised. Mainly written in this archaizing Latin, the collection includes a few Greek epistles as well as a speech in which Fronto attempts an erotic discourse in imitation of those in Plato's Phaedrus. This and another Greek essay were designed in compliment to Domitia Lucilla, the mother of Marcus, herself a patroness of Greek letters, in whose father's house Herodes Atticus had stayed in his youth. Fronto encloses it under cover to Marcus, begging him to remove any blunders in the unfamiliar tongue before submitting it to Domitia.

This correspondence, evidently in part written for publication, proves that Marcus had, at this period, literary aims which went beyond the official oratory which Fronto had been engaged to teach him. We read of hexameter verses by Marcus, the subject of playful secrecy between him and his tutor, and Fronto devotes two long letters to the outlines of Latin eloquence and historical composition. Marcus once writes: 'I prefer now to write in Greek. You ask me why! Because I want to experiment, to see whether what I have not been taught will be more obedient than what I have, for indeed what I have xi