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If Antony's style be a criterion, this new master of Vergil's was a rhetorician of the elaborate Asianistic style, then still orthodox at Rome. This school except in so far as Cicero had criticized it for going to extremes had not yet been effectively challenged by the rising generation of the chaster Atticists.
The crusade for purity of speech had been given a new impetus a decade before by the Atticists, and we may here infer that Varius, the quondam friend of Catullus, was considered the guardian of that tradition. Vergil, despite his devotion to neat technique, may have had his misgivings about rules that in the end endanger the freedom of the poet.
As time went on, the over-refinement and literary sophistication of the florid school of oratory became more and more powerful. The puritan reaction of the Roman Atticists in the direction of the simplicity of Lysias defeated itself in over emphasis and ended in establishing coldness and aridity as literary ideals.
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