DE OPERIS VELLEII INDOLE.

after the end of the Macedonian kingdom and the destruction of Carthage and Corinth—from which point the former began to wither and the latter to grow—Velleius directs the minds of his readers to the matter that vehemently moved his own soul: namely, how it happened that the total perfection of literature and arts of every kind was completed within a narrow space of time between both peoples? He teaches that it happened thus in individual genres, investigates the causes, and adds what was no less wonderful, that the talents and arts of the Greeks were almost entirely enclosed within Athens alone. See I. 16–18. Then, after the Gracchan seditions, around which the beginnings of flourishing Roman literature, especially the oratorical art, occur, he enumerates with brief judgment the greatest talents of the orators, poets, and historians of this and the following age. See II. 9. No less, after the narrative reaches the consulship of Cicero—from which point the age of Augustus, and the total perfection of Roman eloquence and other literature begins—he reviews the excellent talents of this age up to his own times. See II. 36.

Now let us see how our historian acted almost the part of an orator. For the very choice of things that affect one in various ways ought to inflame the mind of the writer, and move him in such varied ways by the senses that words might easily follow the emotion, instilling the same in the minds of the readers. Here, the graver sense of the narrated events, and a spirit imbued everywhere with wonder, indignation, pity, joy, and other emotions, breathes throughout. It reveals itself in various forms of propositions and speech, which they call figurae figures of speech, and which naturally follow a mind that is vehemently affected: such as interrogations, exclamations, apostrophes, anaphoras, polysyndeta, asyndeta, etc. And so, he added a greater sound of voice, as it were, to history; and especially in the last part of the work, in which he is deeply imbued with admiration and piety toward Augustus and Tiberius, he ascends almost to panegyrical oratory. See especially II. 126, 129, etc. Everywhere there also reveals itself a desire to equalize the magnitude of his sense with the magnitude of his words, which sometimes seems to exceed moderation and to enlarge both things and persons; everywhere, a desire,