For illustration of what has been said, the hodge-podge of Seneca is more valuable than the finished declamations of the Pseudo-Quintilian. These latter,[296] despite the absurdity, or at any rate the non-naturalness, of their subject, are sometimes rather accomplished pieces of writing in a very artificial style. The speech, _Pro Juvene contra Meretricem_, referred to above, is, in its whimsical way, a decidedly remarkable example of decadent prose. The crime of making some one cease to love is odd in itself; the complaint that you have been injured by being made to cease to love odder still. Besides, if you complain of this as an injury, do you not still love, and have you not, therefore, nothing to complain of? The topsyturvyfication is, it will be seen, complete. And the declaimer, whoever he was, treats his subject _con amore_. The tricks of his thought are infinite, and well suited with the artifices of his speech. In particular, every paragraph leads up to, and winds up with, a sort of variation on one general theme or _Leitmotiv_. Footnote 295: Of these equivalents of “Hear! hear!” or “Bravo!” the second is good adopted Latin of all times. The first, well known from Martial, is post-Augustan; the third (which Cicero did not much like) seems to have been both lukewarm and affected. Footnote 296: _V. inf._, p. 279 _sq._ “To be compelled to hate is the one incurable form of disease.” “There is some solace in being miserable in love. 'Tis a more cruel destiny to hate a harlot.” “He who cannot leave off hating a harlot is still her lover.” “The victim of a counter-philtre may hate one: he can love none.” Thinker and writer, it will be seen, are a sort of pair of bounding brothers: they stand on their heads, fling circles, intertwine limbs, take every non-natural posture, to the utmost possibility of intellectual acrobatics. The Seneca book,[297] much more fragmentary, is also of its nature richer. It consists of one book of “Suasories” (examples [Sidenote: _Seneca the Elder._] of the symbouleutic or epideictic kind), and ten (by no means completely extant) of “Controversies” (Forensic subjects), the latter sometimes including introductions of interest to the writer’s three sons—Novatus, afterwards Gallio, Seneca the Philosopher, and Mela, father of the poet Lucan—and usually concluding with a kind of _résumé_ (called Excerpta) of their contents. The substance is made up of short extracts from the most celebrated declaimers of Rome, and a few Greeks, on the various subjects. Footnote 297: I use the text of Kiessling. Leipsic, 1872.