a set rhythm, a meter, is appropriate only to verse.[90]

A distinction between the style of poetic and of rhetoric similar to that
of Aristotle is maintained by Cicero, but the distinction was losing its
sharpness. In the _Orator_ he considers the orator and the poet as similar
in style, but not identical. Formerly rhythm and meter were the
distinguishing marks of the poet, but the orators in his days, he says,
made increasing use of rhythm. Meter is a vice in an orator and should be
shunned. The poet has greater license in compounding and inventing words.
Both prose and verse, he adds, may be characterized by brilliant imagery
and headlong sweep.[91] The only essential difference between Cicero's
treatment of style and that of Aristotle is that whereas Aristotle had
shown imagery to be an integral part of poetic, Cicero felt it both in
poetic and in rhetoric to be superadded as a decoration. Whether or not
this difference was caused by lack of discrimination on the part of
Cicero, his position was at least in line with a tendency which in later
criticism received increasing development. Both the poet and the orator,
he says, use the same methods of ornament,[92] and the orator uses almost
the language of poetry.[93] And again, in a phrase which was taken up and
repeated for fifteen hundred years, the poets are nearest kin to the
orators.[94]



2. The Florid Style in Rhetoric and in Poetic


But the public interest in style was increasingly comparable to that in
athletic agility. As Socrates applauded the dancing girl who leaped
through the dagger-studded hoop,[95] the popular audience of imperial Rome