He cultivated a style of speaking that was chaste and elegant, avoiding the vanity of attempts at epigram and an artificial order, and as he himself expresses it, “the noisomeness of far-fetched words,” making it his chief aim to express his thought as clearly as possible. With this end in view, to avoid confusing and checking his reader or hearer at any point, he did not hesitate to use prepositions with names of cities, nor to repeat conjunctions several times, the omission of which causes some obscurity, though it adds grace. He looked on innovators and archaizers with equal contempt, as faulty in opposite directions, and he sometimes had a fling at them, in particular his friend Maecenas, whose “unguent-dripping curls,’ as he calls them, he loses no opportunity of belabouring and pokes fun at them by parody. He did not spare even Tiberius, who sometimes hunted up obsolete and pedantic expressions; and as for Mark Antony, he calls him a madman, for writing rather to be admired than to be understood. Then going on to ridicule his perverse and inconsistent taste in choosing an oratorical style, he adds the following: “Can you doubt whether you ought to imitate that you Annius use the Cimber words or Veranius Flaccus,* which Sallustius Crispus gleaned from Cato’s Origines?® Or would you rather introduce into our tongue the verbose and unmeaning fluency of the Asiatic orators?.”’* And in a letter praising the talent of his granddaughter Agrippina he writes: “ But you must take great care not to write and talk affectedly.”