Page:Plutarch's Lives (Clough, v.5, 1865).djvu/68

 60 CICERO. used to call Theophrastus Lis special luxury. And being asked which of Demosthenes's orations he liked best, he answered, the longest. And yet some aflfected imitators of Demosthenes have complained of some woi-ds that occur in one of his letters, to the effect that Demosthenes sometimes fixUs asleep in his speeches; forgetting the many high encomiums he continually passes upon him, and the compliment he paid him when he named the most elaborate of all his orations, those he wrote against Antony, Philippics. And as for the eminent men of his own time, eitlier in eloquence or philosophy, there was not one of them whom he did not, by writing or speaking favorably of him, render more illustrious. He obtained of Caesar, when in power, the Roman citizenship for Cratip- pus, the Peripatetic, and got the coiu't of Areopagus, by l^ublic decree, to request his stay at Athens, for the in- struction of their youth, and the honor of their city. There are letters extant from Cicero to Herodes, and others to his son, in which he recommends the study of philosophy under Cratippus. There is one in which he blames Gorgias, the rhetorician, for enticing his son into luxury and drinking, and, therefore, forbids him his com- pany. And this, and one other to Pelops, the Byzantine, are the only two of his Greek epistles which seem to be written in anger. In the first, he justly reflects on Gor- gias, if he were what he was thought to be, a dissolute and profligate character ; but in the other, he rather meanly expostulates and complains with Pelops, for neg- lecting to procure him a decree of certain honors from the Byzantines. Another illusti'ation of his love of praise is the way in which sometimes, to make his orations more striking, he neglected decorum and dignity. When Munatius, who had escaped conviction by his advocacy, immediately prosecuted his friend Sabinus, he said in the wannth of