It aims less at clearness and vividness than at epigrammatic point.
The style is quaint and epigrammatic;.
His style ranges from the brilliancy of his youth to the sternness and sombre gravity of age, passing almost to poetic expression in its epigrammatic terseness.
Emerson's style is brilliant, epigrammatic, gem-like; clear in sentences, obscure in paragraphs.
The general results of the last fifty years of the first period (130 to 80) may be thus summed up. In poetry we have the satires of Lucilius, the tragedies of Accius and of a few successors among the Roman aristocracy, who thus exemplified the affinity of the Roman stage to Roman oratory; various annalistic poems intended to serve as continuations of the great poem of Ennius; minor poems of an epigrammatic and erotic character, unimportant anticipations of the Alexandrian tendency operative in the following period; works of criticism in trochaic tetrameters by Porcius Licinus and others, forming part of the critical and grammatical movement which almost from the first accompanied the creative movement in Latin literature, and which may be regarded as rude precursors of the didactic epistles that Horace devoted to literary criticism.