the subject; but what seems to others a full answer, with me serves only to increase the difficulty.  What has happened at Rome, I perceive to have been the case in Greece.  The modern orators of that country, such as the priest [b] Nicetes, and others who, like him, stun the schools of Mytelene and Ephesus [c], are fallen to a greater distance from AEschines and Demosthenes, than Afer and Africanus [d], or you, my friends, from Tully or Asinius Pollio.

XVI.  You have started an important question, said Secundus, and who so able to discuss it as yourself?  Your talents are equal to the difficulty; your acquisitions in literature are known to be extensive, and you have considered the subject.  I have no objection, replied Messala:  my ideas are at your service, upon condition that, as I go on, you will assist me with the lights of your understanding.  For two of us I can venture to answer, said Maternus:  whatever you omit, or rather, what you leave for us to glean after you, we shall be ready to add to your observations.  As to our friend Aper, you have told us, that he is apt to differ from you upon this point, and even now I see him preparing to give battle.  He will not tamely bear to see us joined in a league in favour of antiquity.

Certainly not, replied Aper, nor shall the present age, unheard and undefended, be degraded by a conspiracy.  But before you sound to arms, I wish to know, who are to be reckoned among the ancients?  At what point of time [a] do you fix your favourite aera?  When you talk to me of antiquity, I carry my view to the first ages of the world, and see before me Ulysses and Nestor, who flourished little less than [b] thirteen hundred years ago.  Your retrospect, it seems, goes no farther back than to Demosthenes and Hyperides; men who lived in the times of Philip and Alexander, and indeed survived them both.  The interval, between Demosthenes and the present age, is little more than [c] four hundred years; a space of time, which, with a view to the duration of human life, may be called long; but, as a portion of that immense tract of time which includes the different ages of the world, it shrinks into nothing, and seems to be but yesterday.  For if it be true, as Cicero says in his treatise called Hortensius, that the great and genuine year is that period in which the heavenly bodies revolve to the station from which their source began; and if this grand rotation of the whole planetary system requires no less than twelve thousand nine hundred and fifty-four years [d] of our computation, it follows that Demosthenes, your boasted ancient, becomes a modern, and even our contemporary; nay, that he lived in the same year with ourselves; I had almost said, in the same month [e].