Inasmuch as the noble Latin language, just before it perished as a national idiom, was once more as it were comprehensively grasped by that dexterous stylist and deposited in his copious writings, something of the power which language exercises, and of the piety which it awakens, was transferred to the unworthy vessel.

The Romans possessed no great Latin prose-writer; for Caesar was, like Napoleon, only incidentally an author.

Was it to be wondered at that, in the absence of such an one, they should at least honour the genius of the language in the great stylist?
And that, like Cicero himself, Cicero's readers also should accustom themselves to ask not what, but how he had written?
Custom and the schoolmaster then completed what the power of language had begun.
Opposition to Ciceronianism Calvus and His Associates Cicero's contemporaries however were, as may readily be conceived, far less involved in this strange idolatry than many of their successors.
The Ciceronian manner ruled no doubt throughout a generation the Roman advocate-world, just as the far worse manner of Hortensius had done; but the most considerable men, such as Caesar, kept themselves always aloof from it, and among the younger generation there arose in all men of fresh and living talent the most decided opposition to that hybrid and feeble rhetoric.
They found Cicero's language deficient in precision and chasteness, his jests deficient in liveliness, his arrangement deficient in clearness and articulate division, and above all his whole eloquence wanting in the fire which makes the orator.

Instead of the Rhodian eclectics men began to recur to the genuine Attic orators especially to Lysias and Demosthenes, and sought to naturalize a more vigorous and masculine eloquence in Rome.

Representatives of this tendency were, the solemn but stiff Marcus Junius Brutus (669-712); the two political partisans Marcus Caelius Rufus (672-706;( 35)) and Gaius Scribonius Curio (d.