Certainly not, replied Aper, nor shall the present age, unheard and undefended, be degraded by a conspiracy. But before you sound to arms, I wish to know, who are to be reckoned among the ancients? At what point of time [a] do you fix your favourite æra? When you talk to me of antiquity, I carry my view to the first ages of the world, and see before me Ulysses and Nestor, who flourished little less than [b] thirteen hundred years ago. Your retrospect, it seems, goes no farther back than to Demosthenes and Hyperides; men who lived in the times of Philip and Alexander, and indeed survived them both. The interval, between Demosthenes and the present age, is little more than [c] four hundred years; a space of time, which, with a view to the duration of human life, may be called long; but, as a portion of that immense tract of time which includes the different ages of the world, it shrinks into nothing, and seems to be but yesterday. For if it be true, as Cicero says in his treatise called Hortensius, that the great and genuine year is that period in which the heavenly bodies revolve to the station from which their source began; and if this grand rotation of the whole planetary system requires no less than twelve thousand nine hundred and fifty-four years [d] of our computation, it follows that Demosthenes, your boasted ancient, becomes a modern, and even our contemporary; nay, that he lived in the same year with ourselves; I had almost said, in the same month [e]. XVII. But I am in haste to pass to our Roman orators. Menenius Agrippa [a] may fairly be deemed an ancient. I take it, however, that he is not the person, whom you mean to oppose to the professors of modern eloquence. The æra, which you have in view, is that of [b] Cicero and Cæsar; of Cælius [c] and Calvus; of Brutus [d], Asinius, and Messala. Those are the men, whom you place in the front of hour line; but for what reason they are to be classed with the ancients, and not, as I think they ought to be, with the moderns, I am still to learn. To begin with Cicero; he, according to the account of Tiro, his freedman, was put to death on the seventh of the ides of December, during the consulship of Hirtius and Pansa [e], who, we know, were both cut off in the course of the year, and left their office vacant for Augustus and Quintus Pedius. Count from that time six and fifty years to complete the reign of Augustus; three and twenty for that of Tiberius, four for Caligula, eight and twenty for Claudius and Nero, one for Galba, Otho, and Vitellius, and finally six from the accession of Vespasian to the present year of our felicity, we shall have from the death of Cicero a period of about [f] one hundred and twenty years, which may be considered as the term allotted to the life of man. I myself remember to have seen in Britain a soldier far advanced in years, who averred that he carried arms in that very battle [g] in which his countrymen sought to drive Julius Cæsar back from their coast.