The Flavian age succeeded to this great heritage. Already there were ominous signs of a decay of originality and force, of decadence in the language itself.(971) The controversy between the lovers of the new and the lovers of the archaic style was raging in the reign of Vespasian, and can be still followed in the _De Oratoribus_ of Tacitus, or even in the verses of Martial.(972) Already the taste for Ennius and the prae-Ciceronian oratory had set in, for the dialect of the heroes of the Punic Wars, even for “the Latin of the Twelve Tables,”(973) a taste which was destined to produce its Dead Sea fruit in the age of the Antonines. But whoever might cavil at Cicero,(974) no one ever questioned the pre-eminence of Virgil, and he and his contemporaries were still the models of a host of imitators. The mass of facile talent, thrown back on itself by the loss of free republican life and public interests, fascinated from earliest infancy by the haunting cadences of the grand style, rushed into verse-writing, to beguile long hours of idleness, or to woo a shadowy fame at an afternoon recital, with a more shadowy hope of future fame. The grand style was a charmer and deceiver. It was such a perfect instrument, it was so protean in its various power, it was so abundant in its resources, that a man of third-rate powers and thin commonplace imagination, who had been trained in skilful manipulation of consecrated phrase, might for the moment delude himself and his friends by faint echoes of the music of the golden age. The brilliancy of inherited phrase concealed the poverty of the literary amateur’s fancy from himself. And, even if he were not deluded about his own powers, the practice in skilful handling of literary symbols, which was acquired in the schools, furnished a refined amusement for a too ample leisure. It is clear from the dialogue _De Oratoribus_, and from Pliny’s Letters, that the meditative life, surrounded by the quiet charm of stream and woodland, far from the din and strife and social routine of the great city,(975) attracted many people much more than the greatest oratorical triumphs in the centumviral court, which, after all, were so pale and bourgeois beside the glories of the great ages of oratory. And although Aper, in the Dialogue of Tacitus, sneers at the solitary and unsocial toil of the poet, rewarded by a short-lived _succès d’estime_,(976) there can be no doubt that the ambition to cut a figure, even for a day, was a powerful inspiration at a time when the ancient avenues to fame had been closed.