[14] Leo, _Gesch. Lit._, 218, assumes that Caecilius had used the prologue for personal criticism; Euanthius III. 2 says _deos argumentis narrandis machinatos ceteri Latini ad instar Graecorum habent, Terentius non habet_, which of course does not exclude an occasional use of the personal prologue. After Terence, Afranius sometimes employs superhuman prologues (Priapus, Sapientia, and Remeligo), but he seems also to have used the prologue for personal statements in the manner of Terence (lines 25-8). CHAPTER V THE PROSE OF THE ROMAN STATESMEN “Ciceronian prose is practically the prose of the human race,” says Mackail, a critic who is unusually sensitive to qualities of style. In saying this, he doubtless had in mind not only the orotund periods of the _Pro Milone_, the elaborately rhythmical movement of the _Pro Archia_, the vehement force of the first Catilinarian or the easy colloquialism of the familiar letters. It was rather the lucid and copious exposition of essays like the _De Oratore_ in which, without revealed effort, a versatile mind found appropriate and dignified expression for all its concepts and moods. How did such prose come to be? Cicero worked incessantly for years to acquire his command of the tools of expression. When very young he memorized the standard rules of rhetoric that emphasized the need for clarity, arrangement, conciseness, luminosity, and all the rest. Do such rules make great writers? On that point Cicero did not deceive himself. He knew that adults did not need them, but he recognized that schoolboys would save time by having their attention called to what practice would eventually reveal. Such rules might prove guide posts to intelligent beginners, but one has only to read the three books of the _De Oratore_[1] to discover that rhetoric was for Cicero a schoolroom crutch to outgrow and forget. Another device much recommended by the Roman teachers of his day was imitation, the study of the masters of diverse styles. It is a method that has recently been employed to good effect in the classroom for the awakening of taste and sharpening of critical acumen. Cicero did not scorn its use, but he knew too well that style is personal[2] to attempt to acquire in this way a garb that would not fit his own mental processes. When he sought out Apollonius of Rhodes as a critic it was not in order to adapt himself to that teacher’s mode of expression. He first decided what his own taste and capacity needed, and what the Roman Forum and Curia would require of him; then he sought for the teacher who could best help him by his criticism. His complete independence is shown by the fact that he traveled long, trying one after the other of the famous teachers of the east, abandoning them one by one as soon as he discovered that they did not suit his purposes.[3] Cicero did not impose the Rhodian style upon himself. He made his own curriculum to fit his temperament and