Please note that Mommsen uses the AUC chronology (Ab Urbe Condita), i.e. from the founding of the City of Rome. You can use this reference table to have the B.C. dates
The Greek school-terminology is throughout
and intentionally avoided. Very earnestly the author points out
the danger of many teachers, and inculcates the golden rule that
the scholar ought above all to be induced by the teacher to help
himself; with equal earnestness he recognizes the truth that the
school is a secondary, and life the main, matter, and gives in
his examples chosen with thorough independence an echo of those
forensic speeches which during the last decades had excited notice
in the Roman advocate-world.
It deserves attention, that the
opposition to the extravagances of Hellenism, which had formerly
sought to prevent the rise of a native Latin rhetoric,(37)
continued to influence it after it arose, and thereby secured
to Roman eloquence, as compared with the contemporary eloquence
of the Greeks, theoretically and practically a higher dignity
and a greater usefulness.
