Philology at the Imperial Court

Abstract

In contrast to philosophy the study of language and literature always enjoyed in Rome an unqualified esteem. For experiments such as Plato undertook with Dion in Sicily a Roman would scarcely have had much sympathy. We recall too how disappointed and irritatedthe rhetorician Fronto was when his illustrious pupil Marcus Aurelius was converted to philosophy: ‘May the immortal gods forbid,’ he wrote years later to the emperor, ‘that the Comitium, the Rostra, and the tribunals, which resounded to the speeches of Cato, Gracchus, and Cicero, should fall silent in this very age of ours, that the whole world, which was eloquent when you received it, should through you lose its powers of speech!… [For if] someone should write using the language of the dialecticians, he would describe a Jupiter who sighs, or rather coughs, not one who thunders.’