ABSTRACT
Cestius, one of the most popular of the Augustan declaimers, was bitterly hostile to Cicero, and his pupils, so it was said, would have preferred him to Cicero, ‘if they were not afraid of being stoned’. One of Cestius’s contemporaries, Cassius Severus, a practising advocate rather than a rhetorician, deliberately abandoned the Ciceronian style of pleading; he was the first, according to a speaker in Tacitus’s Dialogue, to despise the orderly arrangement of subject-matter, to take no account of moderation or restraint in the use of words, to brawl rather than fight. Yet Cicero was not without his admirers even in this period of reaction against him. It is recorded that Livy, in a letter addressed to his son, laid down that one should read first Cicero and Demosthenes and then such writers as were closest to them. Quintilian’s pupil, the younger Pliny, shared his master’s admiration for Cicero, and in some degree took him as a model.
