“You who are sufficiently acquainted with his talent, hear briefly of his end. Or will you hear somewhat also of his talent? This Philemon was a poet, a writer of the Middle Comedy. He wrote pieces for the stage in the time of Menander, and in competition with him, perhaps not as an equal, but certainly as a rival. In these contests, I am sorry to say, he was often the winner. At any rate, you will find in him much that is piquant, plots neatly woven, recognitions clearly unfolded, characters adequate to the action, thoughts approved by experience, humor not too low for comedy, seriousness not involving tragedy. Seductions in his plays are rare; even legitimate loves are treated as aberrations. None the less he shows the perjured pimp, the passionate lover, the shrewd slave, the deceiving mistress, the interfering wife, the indulgent mother, the scolding uncle, the conniving crony, the bellicose soldier, not to mention greedy parasites, stingy fathers, and voluble harlots.” Apuleius, _Florida_, XVI. Nor was the habit confined to rhetors. It was widespread in the “three styles”[8] of oratory, in the ten canonical Attic orators, in “Asianism” versus “Atticism,” in the bias of even Dionysius of Halicarnassus[9] toward classification. True, it appears generally in criticism of rhetoric, and is common enough in modern times; but in ancient criticism it amounts to a preoccupation,[10] and is more readily carried over into poetic. Grammar in those wider reaches now comprehended in the term philology has much to contribute to the criticism of older poets. Theon, for instance, whose manual of school exercises (προγυμνάσματα[11]) has come down to us from the time of Augustus, annotated with _scholia_ the tragic and the comic poets. The tradition of the Alexandrian grammarians included, besides syntax and exegesis, textual criticism. But such criticism depends for much of its value on science little explored by the ancients; and typically it makes little contribution to poetic.[12] By no good fortune, then, “philology and poetry went hand in hand in the ancient and classical literature of Italy.”[13] The result of this companionship was not, indeed, always nor necessarily so arid and confined as the criticism of the second-century lexicographer Aulus Gellius;[14] but at most it had little range. C. CRITICISM FROM PROFESSIONAL PUBLIC SPEAKERS