The enormous collection of the scholia on Hermogenes fortunately requires no detailed notice.[142] At most could we pick out a few isolated passages bearing more or less directly on our subject, and even these would be of scarcely any value, seeing that the authorship and date of most of them are quite unknown, and that hardly any can be said to possess that intrinsic literary interest which might make questions of date and authorship unimportant. Footnote 142: An exception, for reasons to be given later, will be made in favour of the work of John the Siceliote (see chap. vi. of this book, p. 187 _sq._) The eighth and ninth volumes (really the ninth and tenth) present matter of more individual interest—the eighth because of the principal subject, which with comparatively little alteration is treated by a great number of authors, the ninth for other reasons. This subject—a subject which was to exercise a disastrous attraction on the Rhetoric of the Renaissance and even of later times—consists of the famous, or infamous, Figures.[143] Footnote 143: About half of the eighth volume, however, is occupied by a long distribution of “questions” (ζητήματα) into heads, by one Sopater, who gives many specimen declarations. And it is followed by a short treatise, assigned to a certain Cyrus, on difference of _stasis_, and by a collection of problems for declamatory use. We know from a contemptuous phrase of Quintilian (see _post_) that long before his time the facility of compounds in [Sidenote: _Treatises on Figures._] Greek had induced the Greeks to multiply Figures beyond all sense and endurance. Yet as we have partly seen, in the so numerously attended school of Hermogenes, these famous playthings, though not exactly neglected, did not receive the first attention. Others, however, made up for any apparent neglect of them. We have, specially devoted to the subject, under the head of σχήματα or of τρόποι, some fifteen or sixteen treatises—some by named authors, others anonymous. The first, by a certain Alexander, divides Figures as usual into those of the meaning and those of the style, and enumerates twenty of the former and twenty-seven of the latter; Phœbammon deals more shortly with a somewhat smaller number of figures, brought under more general heads; and Tiberius the rhetorician confines himself to the figures in Demosthenes. Herodian has a very large number of _poetical_ examples—a device which, as we shall see, served to keep Rhetoric nearer and nearer to literature as time went on. The little treatise of Polybius of Sardis deals less with figures individually than with figurativeness; while an Anonymus, neglecting to some extent the usual phraseology, but reducing the usual procedure unawares to the absurd, manages to give a vast number by taking individual expressions from Homer and making a figure out of each. Zonæus follows more succinctly on the lines of Alexander; another