ultivated society
and the vulgar language of common life. The former itself
was a product of the distinctively Italian culture; even in the Scipionic
circle "pure Latin" had become the cue, and the mother tongue was spoken,
no longer in entire naivete, but in conscious contradistinction
to the language of the great multitude. This epoch opens
with a remarkable reaction against the classicism which had hitherto
exclusively prevailed in the higher language of conversation
and accordingly also in literature--a reaction which had
inwardly and outwardly a close connection with the reaction
of a similar nature in the language of Greece. Just about this time
the rhetor and romance-writer Hegesias of Magnesia and the numerous
rhetors and literati of Asia Minor who attached themselves to him
began to rebel against the orthodox Atticism. They demanded
full recognition for the language of life, without distinction,
whether the word or the phrase originated in Attica or in Caria
and Phrygia; they themselves spoke and wrote not for the taste
of learned cliques, but for that of the great public. There could not
be much objection to the principle; only, it is true, the result
could not be better than was the public of Asia Minor of that day,
which had totally lost the taste for chasteness and purity
of production, and longed only after the showy and brilliant.
To 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