Marcus Aurelius was emperor over the last generation
of classicists and himself a classicist;      In Cruttwell's
view which had not been expressed by Teuffel,
Silver Latin was a "rank, ****-grown garden"
in decline. Cruttwell had already decried what he saw
as a loss of spontaneity             in Golden Latin
[an entirely fictitious phenomena composed               by  
writers of the Latin Silver Age  by fic·ti·tious supposed Golden Latin
authors                            fikˈtiSHəs/adjective
adjective: fictitious
not real or true,                 being imaginary or
having been fabricated.
"she pleaded guilty         to stealing thousands
in taxpayer dollars by having
a fictitious employee on her payroll"
synonyms: false, fake, fabricated,
sham; bogus, spurious,            assumed,
                                  a­ffected,
        adopted, feigned,      invented, made up;
informal:                                 pretend, phony
"a fictitious name"
antonyms: genuine
   relating                     to or denoting the imaginary
characters                     and events found in Silver Age fiction.
"the people in this novel are fictitious;
the background                                      of public events is not" ;
early 17th century:                                     from Latin ficticius
(from fingere ‘contrive, form’)
+ -ous (see also -itious).created
by the Silver Age as a fancied
juxtaposition to the decay of their own times].
That Teuffel                                     should regard the Silver Age as a loss
of natural language                          and therefore of spontaneity,
implies                           that there was a (              ) Golden Age,
                        passing over w/out comment
the discomfiting aspect for time-travelers
being              the impossibility of a Golden Silver Age:           excluding the bronze & Copper                     [cultures whose technologies
had more to do w/               agricultural duties,
leading to astronomy                 .               Instead, Tiberius                     brought  about a sudden collapse of letters.
The idea of a decline               had been dominant in English
society since Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall
of the Roman Empire. But once again, Cruttwell
evidenced some unease with the stock pronouncements:
"The Natural History                         of Pliny [typical of Dark Age Scholasticism]      shows how much remained to be done in every    
                              field of great interest."
However,       the idea of Pliny as a model is not consistent  
         with any sort of decline; moreover, Pliny did his best
work under emperors at least as tolerant
as Augustus had been. To include some of the best
writings of the Silver Age, (                        ),  Cruttwell
found he had to extend the period through the death
of Marcus Aurelius, 180 AD. The philosophic prose
of that good emperor was in no way compatible
with either [Teuffel's view of unnatural language]
or [Cruttwell's depiction of a decline].
Having created these constructs,   the two erstwhile
philologists found they could not then justify them;
apparently, in the worst implications of their views,
[there was no Classical               Latin by the ancient definition] at all  
                                 .
Some of the very best writing
of any period in world history
is a combination of stilted &
degenerate unnatural language.
                                 .
The Silver Age also furnishes the only
two extant Latin novels: Apuleius's
The Golden *** and Petronius's      Satyricon.
                                ☉
Per­haps history's best-known example
of fictitious Classical Latin was written by Pontius Pilate
on the placard placed above Jesus' Cross:
IESVS NAZARENVS REX IVDAEORVM,
which translates to Jesus the Nazarean
the King of the Judeans (Jesus of Nazareth
the King of the Jews).