Minucius Felix.

        In connection with Tertullian we may discuss also the admirabl work of another gifted Latin, the Octavius of Minucius Felix. Fo in the Octavius Minucius Felix wrote the finest of all the La apologies for Christianity-Renan called it the pearl of apologeti literature-and he wrote it in reply to an attack on Christiani made by one of the leading pagan Latin writers of the secon century, M. Cornelius Fronto. For what Celsus did so ably 1. Greek in A.D. 178, in his critique of Christianity, had already been: done, though less effectively, in Latin by Fronto.

        We know much more about Fronto than we do about Minu cius. M. Cornelius Fronto (ca. 100-175) was a native of Cirta in Africa who had come to Rome in the time of Hadrian and foun fame and fortune there as a lawyer, orator, and writer. He becam a senator and was consul in A.D. 143 but declined the proconsulship`' of Asia. He undertook to reform Roman literary style, advocating a return to the earliest Latin models; he exalted oratory as the; greatest of arts and was himself considered second only to Cicero. He was invited by Antoninus to become the tutor of the princes Marcus and Verus. His writings had completely disappeared, however, when in 1815 Angelo Mai found in a sixth-century palimpsest at Milan part of a collection of Fronto's letters, written to the emperors Antoninus and Aurelius, among others, from A.D. 143 on. The rest of the manuscript Mai afterward found at Rome. It also contained some of Fronto's smaller literary pieces, but his attack on Christianity has never been found. It may possibly have been part of an address to the senate, uttered when Christianity was beginning to show strength, about A.D. 150-60.