Seneca has been treated already in his proper place. The Pseudo-Quintilian (for there is hardly a page of the _Declamations_ which does not fly in the face of the _Institutes_) gives us speeches, adjusted to the strict canons of _status_ and the rest, written in the well-known style of the Ciceronian superlative (one wonders that, simply to save breath and time, the bar of Rome did not agree that any one who said _-issimus_ should be sconced an amphora, or, if that seem excessive, at least a _congius_), extremely ingenious now and then, but of the most fantastic and arbitrary quality. The chief interest of them, at least from our point of view, is, that in the mere reading one understands how impossible it was that attention to such things should consist with attention to true literary criticism. The _Dialogus de Claris Oratoribus_, traditionally ascribed to Tacitus, though some will have it to be nothing less than the [Sidenote: _The_ Dialogus de Claris Oratoribus.] otherwise lost _De Causis corruptæ Eloquentiæ_ which Quintilian, as we know from himself, certainly wrote, is a much more meritorious performance. The style is very unlike[372] that of the surely unmistakable author of the _Germania_ and the _Annals_, the method does not seem, to me at least, after a good deal of study of Quintilian, to be his. But it is very likely about their date, and by no contemptible author. The opening certainly chimes in not ill with the title of Quintilian’s missing treatise. A certain Justus Falinus had asked why, after the magnificent crops of oratory which former ages had yielded, the very name of _orator_ had almost died out, and had been supplanted by “counsel”[373] and “advocate” and “patron.” The author replies, with a due Ciceronianism, that he had better rub up his memory of a remarkable conversation on the subject heard in his youth. Curiatius Maternus, both poet and orator, had recited a tragedy on Cato which excited the town nearly as much as another piece of the same name sixteen hundred years later; and Marcus Aper, a man of Gaulish origin, consular rank, and great fame, and Julius Secundus, met (with the writer) at Maternus’ house to talk over it. The first of these rather despised literature, relying on mother-wit; the second was said to be indebted more to art than to nature: but both were among the leading counsel of their day. Secundus gently suggests that Cato is a dangerous subject, and Maternus says that he has another tragedy in hand (_Thyestes_) with which to follow it. Then Aper opens fire upon him: first, for deserting oratory and the bar for idle play-writing; secondly, for choosing foolish fancy subjects like Thyestes. Maternus appeals to Secundus. He is accustomed to Aper’s denunciations of poetry. Will not Secundus act as judge? Secundus says that he is not quite impartial because of his friendship for Saleius Bassus (a contemporary epic poet of whom we hear in Quintilian as a particular friend of his).