him preparing to give battle. He will not tamely bear to see us joined
in a league in favour of antiquity.

Certainly not, replied Aper, nor shall the present age, unheard and
undefended, be degraded by a conspiracy. But before you sound to arms,
I wish to know, who are to be reckoned among the ancients? At what
point of time [a] do you fix your favourite æra? When you talk to me
of antiquity, I carry my view to the first ages of the world, and see
before me Ulysses and Nestor, who flourished little less than [b]
thirteen hundred years ago. Your retrospect, it seems, goes no farther
back than to Demosthenes and Hyperides; men who lived in the times of
Philip and Alexander, and indeed survived them both. The interval,
between Demosthenes and the present age, is little more than [c] four
hundred years; a space of time, which, with a view to the duration of
human life, may be called long; but, as a portion of that immense
tract of time which includes the different ages of the world, it
shrinks into nothing, and seems to be but yesterday. For if it be
true, as Cicero says in his treatise called Hortensius, that the great
and genuine year is that period in which the heavenly bodies revolve
to the station from which their source began; and if this grand
rotation of the whole planetary system requires no less than twelve
thousand nine hundred and fifty-four years [d] of our computation, it
follows that Demosthenes, your boasted ancient, becomes a modern, and
even our contemporary; nay, that he lived in the same year with
ourselves; I had almost said, in the same month [e].


XVII. But I am in haste to pass to our Roman orators. Menenius Agrippa
[a] may fairly be deemed an ancient. I take it, however, that he is
not the person, whom you mean to oppose to the professors of modern