M. CORNELIUS FRONTO
Fronto to Marcus Aurelius as Caesar
To my Lord.
1. As for your thinking that I slept soundly, I lay awake nearly all night considering with myself whether, maybe from too great partiality for you, I did not think too lightly and indulgently of some shortcoming of yours; whether you should not by now be more trained, more advanced in eloquence, were not your abilities hampered either by sloth or carelessness. Turning these things over anxiously in my mind, I found that you had made much greater progress in eloquence than could be expected from your age, youthful as it is; much greater than the time that you have devoted to these studies would warrant, much greater than the hopes, and those no mean ones, which I had formed of you. But as it came to me only in the dead of night, what a subject you are writing on! actually one of the epideictic kind,[1] the most difficult of all. Why? Because of all the three generally received kinds of subject, the epideictic, the deliberative, the forensic, the first is set on a steep hill, the others are much less of a climb, being in many respects on sloping or level ground. In short, while there are similarly three types, as it were, of oratory, the plain, the medium, the luxuriant, in epideictic speeches there is practically no place for the plain style, which in forensic
- ↑ The epideictic kind (genus demonstrativum of Quintilian was for show speech, such as panegyrics, speeches of thanks to the Emperor, and μελέτας, like the set declamations of the Greek rhetoricians. Quintilian (xii. 58) distinguishes three styles in oratory as (1) subtile, (2) floridum (namque id ἀνθηρὁν appellant) or medium, (3) grande ac robustum; but Gellius (vii. 14) as gracilis, mediocris, uber. The subject here referred to as occupying Marcus, may be the speech mentioned in the next letter.
