See _Suas._, vi. Pollio, a great friend of Antony, was both an orator of high reputation and a very severe critic. It was he, it should be remembered, who found “Patavinity” in Livy; though it has been ingeniously suggested that this was only an _excessive_ propriety of speech, such as enabled the old woman to detect Theophrastus as not an Athenian. The Preface of the First Book of the _Controversies_—addressed to the three sons—gives a rather interesting view of the scheme [Sidenote: _The_ Controversies: _their Introductions_.] of these curious compositions, which seems to have been that Seneca the father should brush up his memory of the golden or nearly golden age of Latin Rhetoric which immediately followed Cicero, and illustrate it from more strictly literary sources. A good deal in the piece (as is usual in the better class of rhetorical writing) bears directly on our subject. The old rhetorician commends his sons for extending their view beyond their own age, for wanting to know what Roman eloquence there was to set against “insolent Greece”[299]—in short, for endeavouring to take that comparative view of at least one division of literature the want of which (as we have so fully set forth) was the crying sin and yet the inevitable weakness of Greek criticism. He has the usual complaint of luxury withdrawing men from literature, which was doubtless as true, and as little peculiar, then as at all other times. He lets us know that there were none (or no good) _commentarii_ of the best declaimers, that he himself had heard them all except Cicero, whom, as far as chronology went, he might have heard,[300] but for the confusions of the state: he points out that the regular declamation was a rather late growth, and extols the character of Porcius Latro, one of its oldest practitioners. The Introduction to the Second Book is much shorter, and principally celebrates the ability of Arellius Fuscus. The Third (for the text of which we only have the Excerpts, not the full articles) has an important preface, which starts from the fact or assertion that Cassius Severus, a great orator on serious occasions, was not a good declaimer, though he had good bodily advantages, a voice at once powerful and sweet, a delivery with all the merits and none of the drawbacks of the stage, and an extraordinary faculty of improvisation. It seems that Seneca once asked him why these faculties failed him in set _agonismata_, and his answer (whether to the point or not) is of the very first interest, as illustrating that difficult point of the ancient conjunction of oratory and literature, and also as a counterblast to the Plinian idea (_v. infra_) of the poly-historic _littérateur_. “What great wit,” said he, “has ever been good at more than one thing [whereby, let it be observed, he separates declamation from oratory]? Did not Cicero’s eloquence fail him in verse? Virgil’s genius in prose? We read the orations of Sallust