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'Do not let your friends, says Fronto, 'envy each other, or think that what you give to another is filched from them. Keep away envy from your suite, and you will find your friends kindly and harmonious. Here and there we meet with allusions to his daily life, which we could wish to be more frequent.
4 Several of these words are Greek, and the meaning is not quite clear. Sometimes Fronto descends from the heights of eloquence to offer practical advice; as when he suggests how Marcus should deal with his suite. It is more difficult, he admits, to keep courtiers in harmony than to tame lions with a lute; but if it is to be done, it must be by eradicating jealousy.
In Suetonius and Florus we already see the pioneers of a pigmy race; in Gellius, Fronto, and Apuleius, they are present in all their uncouth dwarfishness. Meanwhile the clamours of the world for guidance grow louder and louder, and there is no one great enough or bold enough to respond to them.
The reign of the Spanish school was now over; Fronto was of African origin; and though it does not follow that he was not of pure Roman blood, the influence of a semi-tropical atmosphere and African surroundings altered the type, and produced a new strain, which we can trace later under different forms in the great African school of ecclesiastical writers headed by Tertullian and Cyprian, and even to a modified degree in Augustine himself.
The other monks slept a hungry sleep about him, dreaming of delicious things to eat. Now and then one of them would cry out: "Another help of pudding, please;" or "Brother, will you pass the toast?" or "Thank you, I will have an egg, brother." And Fronto wept as he heard how faint their voices were.
The single cause for complaint that Fronto had against his pupil was that, as he advanced in life, he gradually withdrew from the study of literature to that of philosophy. To Fronto, literature was the one really important thing in the world; and in his perpetual recurrence to this theme, he finds occasion to lay down in much detail his own literary theories and his canons of style.
And when he had prayed he said to Fronto, "Depart, and be healed." And when he resisted, and remained within some days, Antony continued saying, "Thou canst not be healed if thou remainest here; go forth, and as soon as thou enterest Egypt, thou shalt see the sign which shall befall thee."
There were seventy camels, soft-eyed gentle creatures, whose flat feet held them up on the soft sand like snowshoes. They bore packs upon their backs which promised good things, and they came straight to the cell of Fronto, where they stopped. And what a welcome they received!
"Do not be troubled," said Fronto, "you do not understand what I have been about." Now it fell out that whilst at Tarascon Fronto was engaged in burying Martha, he had taken off his glove and ring, and had put them into the hands of the sacristan. When Fronto informed the congregation at Perigeux what he had been about, they disbelieved.
Between these and their object lies an insuperable barrier, the formed and finished prose of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; between Fronto and his lay the whole mass of what, in the sustained and secure judgment of mankind, is the classical prose of the Latin language, from Cicero to Tacitus.
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