With you, my friends, the case is different:  proceed, as you well can, and in fact, as you do, to adorn our age with all the grace and splendour of true oratory.  It is with pleasure, Messala, that I see you selecting for imitation the liveliest models of the ancient school.  You too, Maternus, and you, my friend, Secundus [h], you both possess the happy art of adding to weight of sentiment all the dignity of language.  To a copious invention you unite the judgement that knows how to distinguish the specific qualities of different authors.  The beauty of order is yours.  When the occasion demands it, you can expand and amplify with strength and majesty; and you know when to be concise with energy.  Your periods flow with ease, and your composition has every grace of style and sentiment.  You command the passions with resistless sway, while in yourselves you beget a temperance so truly dignified, that, though, perhaps, envy and the malignity of the times may be unwilling to proclaim your merit, posterity will do you ample justice [i].

XXIV.  As soon as Aper concluded, You see, said Maternus, the zeal and ardour of our friend:  in the cause of the moderns, what a torrent of eloquence! against the ancients, what a fund of invective!  With great spirit, and a vast compass of learning, he has employed against his masters the arts for which he is indebted to them.  And yet all this vehemence must not deter you, Messala, from the performance of your promise.  A formal defence of the ancients is by no means necessary.  We do not presume to vie with that illustrious race.  We have been praised by Aper, but we know our inferiority.  He himself is aware of it, though, in imitation of the ancient manner [a], he has thought proper, for the sake of a philosophical debate, to take the wrong side of the question.  In answer to his argument, we do not desire you to expatiate in praise of the ancients:  their fame wants no addition.  What we request is, an investigation of the causes which have produced so rapid a decline from the flourishing state of genuine eloquence.  I call it rapid, since, according to Aper’s own chronology, the period from the death of Cicero does not exceed one hundred and twenty years [b].

XXV.  I am willing, said Messala, to pursue the plan which you have recommended.  The question, whether the men who flourished above one hundred years ago, are to be accounted ancients, has been started by my friend Aper, and, I believe, it is of the first impression.  But it is a mere dispute about words.  The discussion of it is of no moment, provided it be granted, whether we call them ancients, or our predecessors, or give them any other appellation, that the eloquence of those times was superior to that of the present age.  When Aper tells us, that different periods of time have produced new modes of oratory, I see nothing to object; nor shall I deny, that in one and the same period the style and manners have greatly varied.  But this I assume, that among the orators of Greece, Demosthenes holds the first rank, and after him [a] AEschynes, Hyperides, Lysias, and Lycurgus, in regular succession.  That age, by common consent, is allowed to be the flourishing period of Attic eloquence.