ABSTRACT
Concerned with contemporary conditions, for the most part, were Martial and the younger Pliny, the latter of whom was a member of that famous literary coterie which included Tacitus and Suetonius, and in which were discussed questions of interest at the time. Interest of a kind is attached to the critical work of the younger Pliny who, less direct and positive in his doctrine than Martial, reflects in a more comprehensive fashion the literary tastes and opinions of his day. From a brief summary of Plutarch's essay it is evident that the positive value of his thesis is but slight, his argument being pedantic, trivial, and even naive in places. The matter had already been raised by Dio Chrysostom; and since the present discussion proceeds on much the same lines, it would seem that Philostratus was not uninfluenced by earlier theorists.
