The Correspondence of Pronto and M. Aurelius

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Excerpt from The Correspondence of Pronto and M. Aurelius: A Lecture Delivered in the Hall of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, December 3, 1903, With an Appendix of Emendations of the Letters At the beginning of the nineteenth century all that survived of the once famous orator M. Cornelius Fronto was a few short fragments quoted in Charisius, in Servius' Commentary on Vergil, and in the short treatise de Abstrusis Sermonibus of Fulgentius Planciades. Yet his greatness as a speaker had been attested not only by the fact of his being selected to train the young Caesars M. Aurelius and L. Verus in rhetoric, but by the united verdict of the Panegyrist Eumenius and the poet Ausonius, the former of whom comparing him with Cicero had pronounced Fronto the second, but not inferior, glory of Roman eloquence, while Ausonius, contrasting his own elevation to the Consulship with Fronto's two months' tenure of the same office, deprecates any rivalry with Fronto's acknowledged eloquence, but prefers his own Emperor Gratianus to Fronto's patron M. Aurelius. It was remembered too that M. Aurelius, in the very first chapter of his Reflexions, had ascribed to Fronto his perception of the jealousy, artifice, and insincerity which mark tyrants, as well as the want of natural affection often found in the so-called aristocracy. These were recommendations of no slight kind to that 'great age' in which the French Revolution was still new, and the monarchs of Europe had one after another been dispossessed by Napoleon. Great, therefore, was the curiosity which greeted the announcement in 1815 that an Italian scholar, the now famous Mai, had discovered in the Ambrosian Library at Milan a palimpsest containing on 282 pages of double columns, 24 lines in each column, part of the correspondence between Fronto and his pupil M. Aurelius. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.