FRONTO, THE ORATOR AND THE MAN
words. He breaks up the flowing periods of Ciceronian prose and introduces new and abrupter rhythms. For older cadences he substitutes cadences of his own, though he occasionally prides himself on imitating the Tullian mannerisms.[1] Where he affects the staccato style, and the historic present, as in Arion, the result is as unpleasing as it is in modern English. In some cases, for forensic speeches, he recommends a deliberate roughness and studied negligence at the end of sentences; but in epideictic displays everything must be neatly and smoothly finished off.[2] Circumlocution and inversions he utterly condemns.[3] Next to the choice of words their natural and perspicuous arrangement counts most with him. This makes his work easy reading. Such difficulties as we find are chiefly due to the mutilated condition of the text in our copy. We have often not only to interpret but to divine what was written.
It has been supposed that Fronto set himself purposely to renovate and remodel the language by recalling old words and obsolete idioms,[4] and by transferring into the literary language colloquialisms from the common speech. But the novella elocutio of which he speaks seems rather to mean a fresher, more vivacious diction, and a more individual form of expression: in fact originality of style. The
- ↑ Brock, Studies in Fronto, p. 141, and Droz, De Frontonis institutione oratoria, p. 64; and see p. 110 below, and Ad Anton. i. 2.
- ↑ P. 40.
- ↑ De Orationibus, ad fin.
- ↑ cp. Horace, Ars Poet. 70.
