Rhetoric held a position in the ancient world that the modern reader has difficulty in understanding. Democratic government, including the popular administration of justice, at a time when all discussion was necessarily oral, created an ideal condition in Athens and the other Greek states for the development of oratory. In the life of the Roman republic, too, there was enough of the popular element to make public speaking of the greatest importance. The art of rhetoric was therefore in close touch with the real interests of life. It was not merely a school discipline, but a preparation for a definite activity that held a high place in the esteem of the people, and it embodied a set of sensible ideas on public speaking in which the tendency to over-elaboration and artificiality characteristic of scholastic disciplines was kept in check by the wholesome influences that came from practical application. With the establishment of the Roman Empire public discussion of political matters quickly disappeared, and forensic oratory for the same reason tended to decline. Thus the chief element which had given vitality to ancient rhetoric was eliminated. Roman oratory, however, died hard. It nursed itself on various pretences and shows. Much of the old interest in oratory turned back on rhetoric, which was thus exposed to a double danger, as an educational discipline that had lost connection with practical life and as a subject that had become too fashionable. When once the new influence had gained headway a strong tendency to artificiality was revealed. Rhetoric became scholastic and ridiculously overburdened with classification and terminology; it grew more lifeless as it grew more systematic. Interest then gradually subsided. Treatises grew shorter and drier, and consisted largely of long lists of terms defined without critical understanding of their meaning. The subject now held its place by the mere force of authority. This was the state of rhetoric in Isidore’s time, and his treatment reflects the condition to which it had been reduced. He says that “it is easy for the reader to admire but impossible to understand” the books on rhetoric, and, further, that when they are laid aside “all recollection vanishes.” From a writer with this attitude little need be expected. His few miserable pages, compared with Quintilian’s interesting treatise, measure fully the decline of rhetoric during the first six centuries A.D. What Isidore gives is merely a summary, so cursory and disjointed that it frequently cannot be understood without liberal reference to the fuller treatises of his predecessors.