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The history of Rome. Book VTo say nothing of the spurious forms of art that sprang out of this tendency - especially the romance and the history assuming the form of romance - the very style of these Asiatics was, as may readily be conceived, abrupt and without modulation and finish, minced and effeminate, full of tinsel and bombast, thoroughly vulgar and affected; "any one who knows Hegesias", says Cicero, "knows what silliness is". Roman Vulgarism - Hortensius - Reaction - The Rhodian School Yet this new style found its way also into the Latin world. When the Hellenic fashionable rhetoric, after having at the close of the previous epoch obtruded into the Latin instruction of youth[4], took at the beginning of the present period the final step and mounted the Roman orators' platform in the person of Quintus Hortensius (640-704), the most celebrated pleader of the Sullan age, it adhered closely even in the Latin idiom to the bad Greek taste of the time; and the Roman public, no longer having the pure and chaste culture of the Scipionic age, naturally applauded with zeal the innovator who knew how to give to vulgarism the semblance of an artistic performance ...» |
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