In theory, and no doubt to some extent in practice also, these _meletæ_, or declamations, were permissible and desirable in [Sidenote: _Their subjects: epideictic_] all the branches of Rhetoric. But the examples which have come down to us, and the references that we possess to others, show us that, as, indeed, we should expect, Epideictic and Dicanic provided the chief subjects. The declamations of the former kind were those at which the satirists chiefly laughed—Hannibal crossing the Alps, Leonidas at Thermopylæ, Whether Cicero could decently have avoided death by making a bargain with Antony, and the like. To this kind of subject there could evidently be no limit, and it might sometimes pass, as in the Orations (which are after all only declamations) of Dion Chrysostom we know that it at least once did pass, into a regular literary Essay. But it seems more generally to have affected the fanciful-historic. The purely forensic declamation had some differences. As its object was not merely or mainly, like that of the other, to [Sidenote: _and forensic._] display cleverness, but to assist the acquisition and display of ability as a counsel, it fell into certain rather narrow and not very numerous grooves. Certain “hard cases,” paradoxes of the law, seem from very early times to have been excogitated by the ingenuity of the rhetoricians, and the game was to treat these—on one side or the other, or both—with as much force, but above all with as much apparent novelty, as the speaker’s wits could manage. A very favourite one was based on the venerable practice of allowing the victim of a rape the choice of death for her violator or requiring him to marry her, with the _aporia_, “Suppose a man is guilty of two such crimes, and one girl demands death, the other marriage, what is to be done?” Or “Suppose a girl, situated like Marina in _Pericles_, but slaying her Lysimachus, not converting him. Released from her bondage, she presents herself as candidate for a priestess-ship. Is she eligible or not?”[291] The extremity of perverse fancy in this direction is perhaps reached by a pair of the declamations attributed to Quintilian,[292] in which the lover of a courtesan brings an action against her for administering a counter-philtre, so that he may love her no longer, and she may accept a wealthier suitor. But there is no limit to the almost diseased imagination of these Cases. A city[293] is afflicted by famine, and a commissioner is sent to buy up grain, with orders to return by a certain day. He executes his commission successfully and quickly, but being driven into port in a third country by bad weather, sells the grain at a high price, buys twice as much elsewhere, and returns by the appointed time. But, meanwhile, the famine has grown so severe that the people have been driven to cannibalism, which his return direct with his first bargain would have prevented. Is he guilty or not guilty? Footnote 291: Seneca, _Contr._, i. 2. Footnote 292: