What is here is not poetic, but rhetoric. That these pieces were written for recitation, not for acting, the external evidence is strong, though not conclusive,[20] but the internal evidence is abundant.[21] Most significant is the feebleness of plot. More obvious is the rhetorical method of characterization by typical traits,[22] the method of the character sketches (ἠθοποιίαι) in schools for boys as it was expanded in the schools for men under the masters of _declamatio_. A method essentially oratorical, it developed under the _declamatores_ of the Empire not creative conception, but inventive ingenuity and a preoccupation rather with striking expression than with consistency. Most obvious of all, written large on every page, is the swelling rhetoric of the style. Not for nothing did this poet bear the name of Seneca.[23] To deny that such writing has a certain force is to forget what it might become in the mouth of a trained speaker and before an audience taught to admire its distinctive effects; to forget also how eagerly Seneca was appropriated fifteen centuries later; to forget finally that oratory in the theater has not yet lost all its appeal. But while we grant to rhetoric some share in the poetic art, we cannot put Senecan tragedy beside the tragedy of Athens without seeing unmistakably that such art as it has is not the distinctive art of drama. C. LATIN COMEDY The plays of Plautus and Terence keep the dramaturgy known as the New Comedy,[24] the comedy of Menander. Its figures, alike in Greek and in Latin, are types. Such individualizing as may be discerned, in the _Menæchmi_ for instance, or the _Self-tormentor_, stands out as exceptional. Comedy, perhaps, tends more than tragedy to the typical. At any rate, Latin comedy has a set of _personæ_ quite fixed:[25] two fathers, two sons in love and in debt, two daughters of romance or of pleasure, and two slaves to stir the intrigue. There might be a matron, a slave-trader, and a braggart soldier; and there would be pretty surely a parasite. Stock figures involve conventionality also in plot. One of them may have a double,[26] and the plot may consist largely of mistaking one for the other; or the long-lost daughter, as in the _declamationes_ and the Greek romances, may have been kidnapped by pirates. Typical is the plot of Terence’s _Phormio_: