the bar, was dead. "I grieved," he says, "because I had lost not, as many fancied, an opponent, one who sought to minimize my merits, but an ally rather, a coworker in a glorious field. For if, in the accounts that tradition gives us of devotion to the leviores artes, we read that poets of distinction grieved over the death of contemporaries that were poets, with what feeling, pray, was I bound to bear the death of Hortensius, with whom it was more glorious to vie than to have no rival at all?"

In Cicero's De Oratore 1.209 ff. one of the interlocutors, Antonius, is trying to formulate an exact definition of the term orator. He begins by giving sample definitions of various terms, such as the general, the lawyer, and the statesman. In 212 he continues: "To come now ad leviorum artium studia, should you wish a musician, a teacher of literature, a poet, I should be able to unfold in like manner what each of them professes to do, that something more than which no one would have a right to demand of them." Here, then, the poet and the teacher (critic) of literature are accounted inferior to the soldier, the lawyer, the statesman.

Akin to the statement quoted above from the Tusculan Disputations that no honor was accorded to the painter is the fact that in the Orator, § 5, sculptors and painters are ranked as mere opifices, mere artisans, and distinctly differentiated from poets and philosophers, who are characterized as excellentes viri. We have seen how inferior was the status of the poet himself; of the position of the philosopher something will be said below.

The De Oratore, the first of Cicero's greater rhetorical works, was published in 55 B. C.; Cicero was then in his 52nd year. The chief parts in the dialogue are assigned to Crassus and Antonius, the two great orators of the age immediately preceding Cicero's own. The subject-matter of oratory is first considered, and the degree of intellectual. culture required by the perfect orator. Crassus, who represents Cicero's own views, insists that the orator should be familiar with the whole circle of the liberal arts,,

the higher education, and that he must take all knowledge to be his province. Antonius advances a narrower view: he holds that the province of oratory is simply good speaking, so that oratory can be studied quite independently of law, philosophy and other departments. Here we have, in highly artistic form, the issue joined between vocationalism and culture. We see in Antonius the college or university student of today who will take no course that does not cry aloud its immediate connection with the trade or profession or the form of business by which the student is to earn a livelihood; we see in Crassus (and Cicero, whose views he presents) that other, far wiser student, who will lay, thru devotion to liberal studies, a foundation ample at once for a livelihood and a life.

If we turn now to other writers we easily find similar passages. According to Gellius, 11.2.5, Cato the Censor uttered the following eulogy of the good old days of Rome: "Poeticae artis honos non erat. Si quis in ea re studebat aut sese ad convivia applicabat, grassat or vocabatur," i. e., "To poetry no honor was accorded. If any one had a passion for that sort of thing or applied himself to carousing, men called him a highwayman." We may remember that in Tusculans 1.3 Cicero tells us that Cato "flung it in the teeth of Marcus Nobilior as a grievous disgrace (probrum) that he had taken poets to his province." "Nobilior," explains Cicero, "had taken Ennius to Aetolia." We may also note the direction in which Cato's mental activity exerted itself-towards oratory, history, and the treatment of agricultural subjects, all, to Roman thinking, intensely practical themes. Cato, again, bade his son to look into the writings of the Greeks, not to master them. He declared, further, that "whenever that wretched people shall give us its literature, it will ruin everything for us." Cicero's own grandfather was wont to say, "Our countrymen are much like Syrian slaves: the more one knows of Greek, the worse he is." Sallust makes Marius, the friend of the people, say: "I have never learned Greek, because Greek literature has not helped its teachers to become true men." In 91

B. C. the censors L. Licinius Crassus and Cn. Domitius Aenobarbus sought to prevent the establishment at Rome of schools intended to supply rhetorical training in Latin after Greek models. Aulus Gellius gives their edict (15.11.2):

"Reports have been brought to us that there are men who have established a new sort of training (disciplina), and that young men are going to them to school; they say, too, that these men have called themselves 'Latin Rhetoricians,' and that striplings sit idly there the livelong day. Our fathers determined what they wanted their children to learn and to what schools they wanted them to go. These new-fangled goings-on, contrary to the customs and the practises of the fathers, do not please us and we do not think them right. Wherefore we felt that we should set forth clearly both to those who keep these schools and to those who resort to them what we think about it allthat we do not like it."

So vigorously did the Romans oppose the application of liberal training even to the most practical of all their practises rhetoric, oratory, the art of persuasion!

We may turn now to consider the feelings of the Romans towards the study of philosophy. According to the Captivi of Plautus, the great Roman writer of comedies, the Eleans and the Aetolians are at war. Philopolemus, the son of Hegio, an Aetolian, has been taken prisoner. In the hope of effecting an exchange by which his son will be returned to him, Hegio has been buying up Eleans who had been taken prisoners by the Aetolians. Among the prisoners thus purchased are Philocrates and Tyndarus, his slave; Hegio bought them because he had heard that Philocrates was a personage of distinction in his own country. Before the play opens, Philocrates and Tyndarus have exchanged garments and rôles. In 263 ff. Hegio is questioning Philocrates, whom he confounds with Tyndarus, concerning the social and financial position of Philocrates. Verses 282-284 run thus: "What of his father? is he alive?" "Alive, when we came from home, we left him. Whether

he is alive or not at the present moment, id Orcum scire oportet scilicet (that the Lord of Hades, surely, ought to know not we)." At this Tyndarus cries, as an aside, "Salva res est philosophatur quoque iam, non mendax modo est.” ("Hurrah! Everything's all right! By this time, he's philosophizing, he's not merely lying.") According to this, philosophy is a sublimated form of lying, lying raised to the nth power.

In the Mercator of Plautus 140 ff. occurs the following passage, between Charinus, an adulescens, and Acanthio,

a servus:

"I never saw a human being testier, wrathier than you." "I never saw one more abusive in speech than you." "But what if I am giving you a bit of counsel which I think likely to be of health to you?"

"Go to, with health of your sort, health that brings torment and torture."

"Tell me: is there any good anywhere that anybody can use without any evil at all, or that he can use whenever he wants to use it without having any trouble in the use?"

"Your question is something I can't answer: philosophari numquam didici neque scio." ("Quibbling, hair-splitting have never been, are not now, in my line.")

In the Pseudolus of Plautus 971 ff. we have the following dialogue: "Do you know anybody at all in this lane? Answer me!" "Well, I know myself." "That's something that very few men do, for in the Forum there is hardly one man out of ten that really knows himself." Pseudolus, a bystander, cries "Salvos sum: iam philosophatur." ("I'm all right: he's philosophizing.")

Of these passages the last two must be interpreted in the light of the first; all three condemn philosophy as a form of quibbling and word-juggling closely akin to lying. In the Rudens 986, Gripus, unable to make immediate answer to a nice point urged by Trachalio, seeks to wither him with the one cry "philosophe!" In dealing with Plautus we often find it difficult to draw the line between what is borrowed from the Greek, and what is at once both Roman and Greek.

Here we can appeal to such a passage as Anabasis 2.1.13 as proof that the thought with which we are dealing was entertained by the Greeks themselves-the countrymen of Aristotle and Plato. To Philinus, messenger from the Persian king to the Greeks, one of the latter, Theopompus, says: "We decline to give up our arms; all we have is our arms and our valor. If we keep our arms, we shall be able to bring our valor into play; if we give up our arms, we shall lose life itself. Do not imagine that we shall surrender to you the only good thing we have; rather we shall use our arms to fight with you for the good things you have." Then Philinus said with a smile: "Well, you're like a philosopher, my fine youth, and you talk not unpleasantly; know, however, that you are a fool, if you believe that your valor can overcome the king's power." That the feeling against philosophy was also truly Roman appears in many passages. In the second chapter of his life of Epaminondas, Cornelius Nepos names those who taught Epaminondas to play and sing and dance. He speaks also of Epaminondas's study of philosophy and of his devotion to his teacher, Lysis the Pythagorean. He continues thus: "Now, measured by our habits, these things seem trivial, things to be held lightly; but in Greece, at least in the olden days, they were highly praised." Tacitus, in his biography of his father-in-law, Agricola, the famous general, declares that Agricola himself often said that in his youth he had drunk of philosophy more eagerly than was permissible for a Roman and a senator, had not the good sound sense of his mother restrained the fiery fervor of his soul.

Here again we may cite the testimony of Cicero himself. Mr. Reid (Academica, 23) says: "It is strange to find Cicero making such elaborate apologies for devoting himself to the study of philosophy, and a careless reader might set them down to egotism. But it must never be forgotten that at Rome all literary and artistic pursuits were merely the amusement of the wealthy; the total devotion of a life to them seemed well enough for Greeks, but for Romans