He saw himself already a gallant and effective leader, innovating or conservative as occasion might require, in the rehabilitation of the mother-tongue, then fallen so tarnished and languid; yet the sole object, as he mused within himself, of the only sort of patriotic feeling proper, or possible, for one born of slaves.
The popular speech was gradually departing from the form [95] and rule of literary language, a language always and increasingly artificial.
While the learned dialect was yearly becoming more and more barbarously pedantic, the colloquial idiom, on the other hand, offered a thousand chance-tost gems of racy or picturesque expression, rejected or at least ungathered by what claimed to be classical Latin.

The time was coming when neither the pedants nor the people would really understand Cicero; though there were some indeed, like this new writer, Apuleius, who, departing from the custom of writing in Greek, which had been a fashionable affectation among the sprightlier wits since the days of Hadrian, had written in the vernacular.
The literary programme which Flavian had already designed for himself would be a work, then, partly conservative or reactionary, in its dealing with the instrument of the literary art; partly popular and revolutionary, asserting, so to term them, the rights of the proletariate of speech.

More than fifty years before, the younger Pliny, himself an effective witness for the delicate power of the Latin tongue, had said,--"I am one of those who admire the ancients, yet I do not, like some others, underrate certain instances of genius which our own times afford.

For it is not true that nature, as if weary and effete, no longer produces what is admirable." And he, Flavian, would prove himself the true master of the opportunity thus indicated.

In [96] his eagerness for a not too distant fame, he dreamed over all that, as the young Caesar may have dreamed of campaigns.