The correspondence of Marcus Cornelius Fronto with Marcus Aurelius Antoninus
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| Marcus Aurelius' correspondence |
Lucius Verus, Antoninus Pius, and various friends. Edited and for the first time translated into English by C.R. Haines,
Time has not dealt kindly with Fronto. For more than a millennium and a half, his name stood high in the lists of fame.
On the strength of ancient testimony he was looked upon as the Cicero of his age; if not indeed his equal, yet as an Isocrates to a Demosthenes. Numenius, writing late in the third century, described him as " not the second but the alternative glory of Roman eloquence." A century or more later he is singled out by Macrobius as the representative of the plain, precise, matter-of-fact style, contrasted with the copious, in which Cicero is supreme, the laconic, which is the province of Sallust, and the rich and florid, in which Pliny the Younger and Symmachus luxuriate.
Though Fronto's reputation stood so high for 300 years after his death, scarcely a line of his works had survived, as it seemed, to modern times, until in 1815 Cardinal Mai discovered in the Imperial Library at Milan a palimpsest MS. containing many of his letters, the existence of which in classical times had indeed been occasionally intimated, though little was known of their contents. When deciphered the work proved to consist mostly of his educational correspondence with his royal pupils, afterwards the joint Emperors
Marcus Antoninus and Lucius Verus. There were included, however, one or two letters between Fronto and their adoptive father, Emperor Pius, and some, chiefly commendatory, letters to the orator's friends, of whom the only one whose answer is preserved was the historian Appian. Some of the letters are in Greek.
In judging this correspondence it should not be forgotten that Fronto disclaims the habit of letter-writing, and declares that no one could be a worse correspondent than himself.
Translator: C.R. Haines
Publication date: 1919
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