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'We have summer heat here still, writes Marcus, 'but since my little girls are pretty well, if I may say so, it is like the bracing climate of spring to us. When little Faustina came back from the valley of the shadow of death, her father at once writes to inform Fronto.
From Fronto I learned to observe what envy, and duplicity, and hypocrisy are in a tyrant, and that generally those among us who are called Patricians are rather deficient in paternal affection.
It ties me fast here, troubled my heart is, and beset by such anxiety; nor does it allow me to make haste to my Fronto, my life and delight, to be near him at such a moment of ill-health in particular, to hold his hands, to chafe gently that identical foot, so far as may be done without discomfort, to attend him in the bath, to support his steps with my arm.
Panegyrics of cities, gods, or heroes, had been a favourite exercise of the orator's art. Now these panegyrics were expended upon the most contemptible themes, infames materiae as they were called. Fronto sang the praises of idleness, of fever, of the vomit, of gout, of smoke, of dust; Lucian, in a speech still extant, of the fly; others of the ass, the mouse, the flea!
Now to set a certain time to every man's acting, belongs unto him only, who as first he was of thy composition, so is now the cause of thy dissolution. As for thyself; thou hast to do with neither. Go thy ways then well pleased and contented: for so is He that dismisseth thee. M. CORNELIUS FRONTO was a Roman by descent, but of provincial birth, being native to Cirta, in Numidia.
A similar quality is shown, not more strikingly, but on a larger scale and with a more certain touch, in the celebrated prose romance of Fronto's contemporary, Lucius Apuleius. Like Fronto, Apuleius was of African origin. He was born at the Roman colony of Madaura in Numidia, and educated at Carthage, from which he proceeded afterwards to the university of Athens.
Eumenius says, "he is the second and equal glory of Roman eloquence;" and Macrobius says, "There are four styles of speech; the copious, of which Cicero is chief; the terse, in which Sallust holds sway; the dry, which is assigned to Fronto; the florid, in which Pliny luxuriates."
In the department of oratory may be mentioned Cornelius Fronto, who flourished under Domitian and Nerva, and was endowed with a rich imagination and a mind stored with vast erudition in Greek and Latin literature, Symmachus, distinguished for his opposition to Christianity, and Cassiodorus, minister and secretary of the Emperor Theodoric.
Fronto Catius spoke in reply, and urged that the prosecution should be confined within the law dealing with extortion: he is wonderfully skilled at drawing tears, and throughout his speech he filled his sails with a breeze of pathos.
If I were made of iron, at this tine I could write no more. It is noteworthy that in his meditations Marcus Aurelius mentions Fronto only once.
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