of Antony's, Annius Cimber, a despised rhetorician who had been helped
to high political office by Antony. Again Cicero's _Philippics_ (XI. 14)
serve as our best guide for the background.

Corinthiorum amator iste verborum,
Iste iste rhetor, namque quatenus totus
Thucydides, Britannus, Attice febris!
Tau Gallicum min et sphin ut male illisit,
Ita omnia ista verba miscuit fratri.

It might be paraphrased: "a maniac for archaic words, a rhetor indeed, he
is as much and as little a Thucydides as he is a British prince, the
bane of Attic style! It was a dose of archaic words and Celtic brogue, I
fancy, that he concocted for his brother."

There seem to be three points of attack. Cimber, to judge from Cicero's
invective, was suspected of having risen from servile parentage, and of
trying, as freedmen then frequently did, to pass as a descendant of
some unfortunate barbarian prince. Since his brogue was Celtic (_tau
Gallicum_) he could readily make a plausible story of being British.
Vergil seems to imply that the brogue as well as the name Cimber had been
assumed to hide his Asiatic parentage. The second point seems to be that
Cimber, though a teacher of rhetoric, was so ignorant of Greek, that
while proclaiming himself an Atticist, he used non-Attic forms and
vaunted Thucydides instead of Lysias as the model of the simple style.
Finally, it was rumored, and Cicero affects to believe the tale, that
Cimber was not without guilt in the death of his brother. Vergil is, of
course, not greatly concerned in deriding Atticism itself: to this school
Vergil must have felt less aversion than to Antony's flowery style; it is
the perversion of the doctrine that amuses the poet.