Kenney_and_Clausen B.M.W.(eds.) - Get a Free Blog

TECHNICAL WRITING
others exploited. If it was Pliny, his stylistic weaknesses, as seen in the Natural
history, would further have tempted his successors to do better themselves.
The size and technicality of the Natural history condemn it to few readers.
And, after all, the information provided is now mainly of antiquarian interest.
Yet students of Latin language and style neglect Pliny at their peril. Here, better
than in most other places, we may see the contortions and obscurities, the
odd combinations of preciosity and baldness, and the pure vacuity to which
rhetorical prose, handled by any but the most talented, could precipitously
descend and would indeed often descend again.
4. FRONTINUS
Frontinus' two surviving works, De aquis and Strategemata, have somewhat
limited pretensions to be literature. He calls them commentarii, a description
comprising or overlapping with our 'notes', 'memoranda*, 'records', and
'treatises'. A commentarius could be a polished composition in the plain style,
or lack polish altogether: there was no firm tradition, as for the major genres
of prose. The subject matter and the author's personality, rather than rules of
genre, determined the character and quality of the writing.
The De aquis is exactly what it claims to be, a systematic account of the
water-supply of Rome. This practical, business-like and perhaps original
treatise (we know of no antecedents, though, of course, hydraulic engineering
was not a new field) is mainly of historical interest, and otherwise concerns the
linguist more than the literary critic. Its language seems in general unaffected,
though one finds occasional embellishments and may fairly suppose that
Frontinus wrote for a wider public than experts like himself. The Strategemata
pose considerably more questions. Frontinus asserts that this work too is
practical: the information he has arranged and classified will be of use to
generals. Yet the book is strangely divorced from reality. Frontinus scarcely
calls at all upon recent experience, such as his own, but purveys a mass of
hackneyed material, Greek and Roman, compiled from literary sources, some
of them, like Livy, painfully familiar. Restriction on freedom of speech under
Domitian provides no complete explanation. Frontinus probably conformed
with fashion. The Romans of the Empire had no little liking for the collection
and retailing of snippets of information, historical, legendary, and anecdotal.
One cannot fail to note the similarity, in type and mixed provenance of material
(Roman and foreign), between Frontinus' work and the wider ranging Facta
et dicta memorabilia of Valerius Maximus. The language of the Strategemata,
while sometimes diverging from the commonplace (perhaps under the influence
of history), is on the whole impoverished and repetitive. Of course a long
series of brief items gave scant opportunity for elaboration, and Frontinus may
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