rhetoric, Latin
rhetoric, LatinOratory at Rome was born early. Rhetoric —reduced to a method—came later, an import from Greece that aroused suspicion. Cato the Elder, himself a distinguished speaker, pronounced rem tene, verba sequentur, ‘get a grip on the content: the words will follow’; and rhetoricians professing to supply the words risked expulsion (as in 161 BC). But Greek teachers trained the Gracchi; the satirist Lucilius teased Titus Albucius for the intricacy of his Graecizing mosaics in words; and Cicero marks out Marcus Aemilius Lepidus Porcina (consul 137) as the first master of a smoothness and periodic structure that rivalled the Greeks. In the last quarter of the 2nd cent. prose rhythms based on contemporary Hellenistic practice appear unmistakably in the orators' fragments. In 92 BC Latin rhetoricians came under the castigation of the censors; Cicero for one wanted to be taught by them, but was kept...
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