precepts of Aristotle; of another to Cnæus Pompey on Plato and the Historians; of a second to Ammæus on the idioms of Thucydides; of a celebrated and interesting examination, at great length, of the chief historians of Greece; and of another, also well known, which is usually quoted by its Latin title, _De Admiranda Vi dicendi Demosthenis_, where δεινότης, perhaps, might be more properly translated “Of Demosthenes' oratorical resourcefulness.” Footnote 186: 6 vols., Leipsic, 1775-77. The first four contain the historical, the two last the rhetorical work. A pamphlet edition of rhetorical fragments, by C. T. Rössler (Leipsic, 1873), may be usefully bound in with this. But Usener’s still more recent edition of the so-called περὶ μιμήσεως and the Epistles of Ammæus and Pompey (Bonn, 1889) is of great importance for its remarks on Dionysius and Quintilian, and for other animadversions. Of these the least interesting by far is the professed _Rhetoric_: and it is with the less reluctance that we may resign it to those [Sidenote: _The_ Rhetoric.] who pronounce it, in whole or in part, spurious. It opens, in the very worst and most sterile form of the ancient Rhetoric, by a series of chapters on the different commonplaces available for orations on different stock subjects and occasions,—a panegyric, a marriage, a birthday, a funeral, an exhortation to athletes—things trite and obvious to desperation, the very cabbage of the schools, the opprobrium of all ancient literature, though perhaps not worse than our own frantic efforts to avoid the obvious. It passes to the favourite sub-subject of the Figures, but does not treat these in the worst way, gives the usual, chiefly poetical, illustrations, and concludes with observations on the (again usual) subdivisions of the matter. There is nothing in it that is original and nothing that is characteristic, and the most Dionysian traits, such as the curious stress laid upon the Herodotean episode of Gyges, might as well have been copied by an imitator as duplicated by the author himself.