in time to every man's acting, belongs
unto him only, who as first he was of thy composition, so is now the
cause of thy dissolution. As for thyself; thou hast to do with
neither. Go thy ways then well pleased and contented: for so is He that
dismisseth thee.

APPENDIX

CORRESPONDENCE OF M. AURELIUS ANTONINUS AND M. CORNELIUS FRONTO'

M. CORNELIUS FRONTO(1) was a Roman by descent, but of provincial birth,
being native to Cirta, in Numidia. Thence he migrated to Rome in the
reign of Hadrian, and became the most famous rhetorician of his day.
As a pleader and orator he was counted by his contemporaries hardly
inferior to Tully himself, and as a teacher his aid was sought for the
noblest youths of Rome. To him was entrusted the education of M.

Aurelius and of his colleague L. Verus in their boyhood; and he was
rewarded for his efforts by a seat in the Senate and the consular rank
(A.D. 143). By the exercise of his profession he became wealthy; and if
he speaks of his means as not great,(2) he must be comparing his wealth
with the grandees of Rome, not with the ordinary citizen.

Before the present century nothing was known of the works of Fronto,
except a grammatical treatise; but in 1815 Cardinal Mai published a
number of letters and some short essays of Fronto, which he had
discovered in a palimpsest at Milan. Other parts of the same MS. he
found later in the Vatican, the whole being collected

1 References are made to the edition of Naber, Leipzig
(Truebner), 1867.

2 Ad Verum imp. Aur. Caes., ii, 7. and edited in the year
1823.

We now possess parts of his correspondence with Antoninus Pius, with M.
Aurelius, with L. Verus, and with certain of his friends, and also
several rhetorical and historical fragments. Though none of the more
ambitious works of Fronto have survived, there are enough to give proof
of his powers. Never was a great literary reputation less deserved. It
would be hard to conceive of anything more vapid than the style and
conception of these letters; clearly the man was a pedant without
imagination or taste. Such indeed was the age he lived in, and it is no
marvel that he was like to his age. But there must have been more in him
than mere pedantry; there was indeed a heart in the man, which Marcus
found, and he found also a tongue which could speak the truth. Fronto's
letters are by no means free from exaggeration and laudation, but they
do not show that loathsome