Selected Letters

Book may have numerous typos, missing text, images, or index. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. 1896. Excerpt: ... NOTES. Ep. 2.--Some editors think that the book which Pliny alludes to in this letter is a copy of a speech which he made before the Centumviri, the court in which he pleaded in behalf of Attia Viriola who claimed to inherit her father's property. He mentions this speech in Ep. 62 'Dedimus vela indignationi, dedimus irae, dedimus dolori: et in amplissima causa, quasi magno mari, pluribus vcntis sumus vecti.' His friends, he says, considered this to hold the chief place among his speeches, as the De Corona among those of Demosthenes. Unfortunately, except the Panegyric on Trajan, we have no specimen of Pliny's orations. 4. Eodem tjvo), 'with so strong an emulation, ' i.e. of Demosthenes. 5. Demosthenen semper tuum, Calvum nuper meum; 'Demosthenes who has always been your model, Calvus whom I have lately taken as mine. ' C. Licinius Macer Calvus is mentioned by Cicero (who was twenty-four years older) as a young orator who would have been eminent for eloquence if he had lived, but he died in his thirty-fifth or thirty-sixth year. Cicero thought his style exact and polished, but wanting in force, and fitted for a learned audience, not for the multitude. Pliny would hardly have joined him with Demosthenes if he had agreed with this estimate; and Quintilian speaks of it as appearing to many too unfavourable, since Calvus could be forcible as well as elegant; 'est et sancta et gravis oratio, et castigata, et frequenter vehemens quoque' Quintil. Inst. Orat. 10. 1. Cic. de Claris Orator. 81; Fam. 15. 21. Smith's Biog. Dict. 6. Dumtaxat flguris orationis; 'at least in the rhetorical forms of the speech.' 'Figurae' are not merely what we call figures of speech, metaphors, or ornaments, but include also the forms in which the sentences were cast, and even their arrangement; answering part...