But the most famous of Pliny’s letters in connection with this subject is the twentieth of the first book,[358] to Tacitus, in which he deals with a set question of literary criticism. “A certain learned and skilful man” maintains that in oratory brevity is everything. In certain cases, Pliny admits, but only in certain cases. The adversary objects Lysias among the Greeks, the Gracchi and Cato among the Romans. Pliny retorts with Demosthenes, Æschines, Hyperides, Pollio, Cæsar, Cælius, Cicero. Indeed he does not fear to lay it down as a general principle, “the bigger the better.”[359] The adversary says that the orators spoke less than they published. Pliny dissents. And then he discusses the matter generally—from the point of view of oratory in the main, but partly also from that of literature. And his general view, like that of his generation (I hardly know whether to include his master Quintilian or not), may be taken as put in the phrase, _Non enim amputata oratio et abscissa, sed lata et magnifica et excelsa tonat, fulgurat, omnia denique perturbat ac miscet_.[360] Footnote 358: P. 16. Footnote 359: _Ut aliæ bonæ res, ita bonus liber melior est quisque, quo major._ Footnote 360: This letter contains an interesting _mot_ of Aquilius Regulus, the brilliant and questionable orator-informer, of whom Pliny frequently speaks with a sort of mixture of admiration and dislike, reminding one of the way in which men used to speak of Lord Chancellor Westbury. “You,” said Regulus to him, “hunt out everything in your brief. I see the throat at once, and go for it”—_ego jugulum statim video, hunc premo_. There is some point in Pliny’s retort that people who do this not infrequently hit knee or ankle instead. The third letter of the second book is a set panegyric of Isæus,[361] which would be of more interest if criticisms of orators were not so common; the fifth of the third is the notice of the life, literary and other, of Pliny the Elder. The obituary criticism of Martial, to which reference has been made, occurs in the 21st of this third book, and is a little patronising. But the contemner of brevity, even if he were a private friend and a flattered one, and if he had (as most Romans would have had) no objection to Martial’s freedom of subject and language, could hardly be expected to do full justice to the epigrammatist. Footnote 361: _Not_ the great Attic; but an Assyrian rhetor of Pliny’s own time, supposed to be also referred to by Juvenal in the well-known phrase, _Isæo torrentior_ (iii. 74).