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His farewell to rhetoric written probably in 48 shows unmistakably the nature of the stuff on which he had been fed. It is the bombast and the futile rules of the Asianic creed against which he flings his unsparing scazons. Begone ye useless paint-pots of the school; Your phrases reek, but not with Attic scent, Tarquitius' and Selius' and Varro's drool: A witless crew, with learning temulent.
The non-Aryan, "Asianic," group of languages, to which certainly Lycian and probably Karian belong, has been shown by the German philologer Kretschmer to have spread over Greece into Italy in the period before the Aryan Greeks entered Hellas, and to have left undoubted traces of its presence in Greek place-names and in the Greek language itself.
It is strange to meet with this great name on an Egyptian monument of the thirteenth century B.C. But yet not so strange, when we recollect that it is precisely to that period that Greek legend refers the war of Troy, which was an attack by Greek tribes from all parts of the Ægean upon the Asianic city at Hissarlik in the Troad, exactly parallel to the attacks of the Northerners on Egypt.
Before the true Hellenes reached Crete, an Asianic dialect must have been spoken there, and to this language the word "labyrinth" must originally have belonged. The classical labyrinth was "in the Knossian territory." The palace of Knossos was emphatically the chief seat of the worship of a god whose emblem was the double-axe; it was the Knossian "Place of the Double-Axe," the Cretan "Labyrinth."
And ye begone, ye tinkling cymbals vain, That call the youths to drivelings insane. Epidius, to be sure, is not mentioned, but we happen to know that Varro if this be the erudite friend of Cicero was devoted to the Asianic principles. And Epidius, the teacher of the flowery Mark Antony, may well be concealed in Vergil's list of names even if mention of him was omitted for reasons of propriety.
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