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Lastly there sprang up in the aesthetic literature of this period the artistic treatment of subjects of professional science in the form of the stylistic dialogue, which had been very extensively in use among the Greeks and had been already employed also in isolated cases among the Romans[37]. Cicero especially made various attempts at presenting rhetorical and philosophical subjects in this form and making the professional manual a suitable book for reading. His chief writings are the De Oratore (written in 699), to which the history of Roman eloquence (the dialogue Brutus, written in 708) and other minor rhetorical essays were added by way of supplement; and the treatise De Republica (written in 700), with which the treatise De Legibus (written in 702?) after the model of Plato is brought into co
The scientific groundwork of these rhetorical and political writings of Cicero belongs of course entirely to the Greeks, and many of the details also, such as the grand concluding effect in the treatise De Republica the Dream of Scipio, are directly borrowed from them; yet they possess comparative originality, inasmuch as the elaboration shows throughout Roman local colouring, and the proud consciousness of political life, which the Roman was certainly entitled to feel as compared with the Greeks, makes the author even confront his Greek instructors with a certain independence. The form of Cicero's dialogue is doubtless neither the genuine interrogative dialectics of the best Greek artificial dialogue nor the genuine conversational tone of Diderot or Lessing; but the great groups of advocates gathering around Crassus and Antonius and of the older and younger statesmen of the Scipionic circle furnish a lively and effective framework, fitting cha
In this way no doubt a multitude of thick tomes might very quickly come into existence - "They are copies", wrote the author himself to a friend who wondered at his fertility; "they give me little trouble, for I supply only the words and these I have in abundance". Against this nothing further could be said; but any one who seeks classical productions in works so written can only be advised to study in literary matters a becoming silence.
Of the sciences only a single one manifested vigorous life, that of Latin philology. The scheme of linguistic and antiquarian research within the domain of the Latin race, pla
The eulogy of his contemporaries was well deserved, that Varro had enabled his countrymen - strangers in their own world - to know their position in their native land, and had taught the Romans who and where they were. But criticism and system will be sought for in vain. His Greek information seems to have come from somewhat confused sources, and there are traces that even in the Roman field the writer was not free from the influence of the historical romance of his time. The matter is doubtless inserted in a convenient and symmetrical framework, but not classified or treated methodically; and with all his efforts to bring tradition and personal observation into harmony, the scientific labours of Varro are not to be acquitted of a certain implicit faith in tradition or of an unpractical scholasticism[38]. The co