Extract

Oratory at Rome was born early. Rhetoric—speaking reduced to a method—came later, an import from Greece that aroused suspicion. M. *Porcius Cato (1) (the Censor), himself a distinguished speaker, pronounced rem tene, verba sequentur, ‘get a grip on the content: the words will follow’; and rhetoricians professing to supply the words risked expulsion (as in 161 bce). But Greek teachers trained the Gracchi; *Lucilius(1) teased T. *Albucius for the intricacy of his Graecizing mosaics in words; and *Cicero marks out M. Aemilius Lepidus Porcina (consul 137) as the first master of a smoothness and periodic structure that rivalled the Greeks. In the last quarter of the 2nd cent. prose rhythms based on contemporary Hellenistic practice appear unmistakably in the orators' fragments. In 92 bce Latin rhetoricians came under the castigation of the *censors; Cicero for one wanted to be taught by them, but was kept by his elders to the normal path of instruction in Greek exercises, doubtless declamation. The respectable orator M.