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apotheosis in a stiff, rather official style, Atticist and laboured. Agrippa also
wrote an autobiography — this, in addition to his cartographical enterprise: in
letters, according to Pliny the Elder, he was rustic. Messalla published pamphlets,
and, more likely than not, memoirs. Cicero praised his oratory: for
Tacitus, he was Cicerone mitior. . .et dulcior et in uerbis magis elaborates, a
verdict substantiated by the fragment in Suetonius, which offers Augustus the
title of pater patriae. A classicist through and through: Appian, as well as
Suetonius, seems to have used his autobiography in Book 5 of the Civil war.
Maecenas too may have written memoirs, but of this we cannot be certain.
According to Suetonius, Augustus had no time for affectation and archaism;
he was equally dismissive of the very different styles of Maecenas, Tiberius
and Antony; and Sallust's thefts from Cato were as objectionable to him as the
volubility of the Asianists. His own style was
chaste and elegant, avoiding the variety of attempts at epigram and an artificial order,
and as he himself expresses it, the noisomeness of far-fetched words, making it his
chief aim to express his thoughts as clearly as possible. With this end in view, to
avoid confusion and checking his reader or hearer at any point, he did not hesitate to
use prepositions with names of cities, nor to repeat conjunctions several times, the
omission of which causes some obscurity, though it adds grace.
Not to say that Augustus had no quirks: Suetonius tells us that he was sometimes
popularist in questions of orthography, and had an eccentric preference
for baceolus over stultus, for uacerrosus over cerritus, for beti%are, a facetious
coinage, over languere, and for uapide se habere instead of male se habere. In his
letters, too, he shows an individuality which is hardly a sign of the purist. But
the Res gestae, a list of Augustus' exploits and achievements, was written to be
set up as an inscription; and as we might expect, the manner is official, cold and
formal. There is no doubt that in Augustus we have lost a stylist of some
interest and accomplishment: but that judgement must be based upon the
fragments and what we glean from the critics, not the inscription from Ancyra.
Augustan oratory, despite the impression given by the elder Seneca's
collection of specimens, was not all puerile brilliance: the generation prior to
the declaimers, and of it, notably Messalla, showed that the style of Cicero —
or at least a version of it — was a viable alternative to the follies and extravagances
of the schools. Renowned in antiquity for the purity of his manner, Messalla
was a moderate, a classicist who translated Hyperides, and wrote on philology.
A Republican of the civil war period, he attracted a circle of writers, including
Tibullus, thus continuing the system of patronage which appertained in pre-
Augustan times.
Vitruvius, the author of ten books on architecture, left style to the experts
and schools. A practical fellow, he did not find it easy to write, and he tells us
as much. Often obscure, his pages are full of Grecisms, most of them neces-
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