Gnipho, M. Anto'nius
a distinguished Roman rhetorician, who lived in the last century before the Christian aera.
He was born in B. C. 114, and was a native of Gaul, but studied at Alexandria.
He was a man of great talent and extraordinary memory, and was thoroughly acquainted with Greek as well as Roman literature, and he is further praised as a person of a kind and generous disposition.
After his return from Alexandria, he taught rhetoric at first in the house of J. Caesar, who was then a boy, and afterwards set up a school in his own house.
He gave instruction in rhetoric every day, but declaimed only on the nundines. Many men of eminence are said to have attended his lectures, and among them Cicero, when he was praetor.
He died in his fiftieth year, and left behind him many works, though Ateius Capito maintained that the only work written by him was
De Latino Sermone, in two books, and that the other treatises bearing his name were productions of his disciples. (Suet.
De Illustr. Granm. 7;
Macr. 3.12.) Schütz, in his preface to the
Rhetorica ad Herennium (p. 23, &c.), endeavours to show that that work is the production of M. Antonius Gnipho; but this is only a very uncertain hypothesis. [
CICERO, p. 727.]
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L.S]
