What Quintilian deplores, then, in the practise of _declamatio_ Tacitus shows to have been none the less common. All the more significant is the slight and as it were unwilling consideration that Quintilian gives to these fashionable aspects. Even while he insists on the value of _declamatio_ for general training, he deprecates that wide departure from actual pleading in themes, conception, and style which Seneca records as a matter of course and Tacitus derides as habitual. The use of _declamatio_ by mature speakers not for exercise, but for exhibition, he passes over incidentally in a few sentences as a perversion. Its undoubted prevalence he admits sadly as something that a serious teacher should ignore.[31] Both the scorn of the historian and the reservations of the teacher spring from the older, larger tradition of rhetoric. To this both Tacitus and Quintilian discerned in _declamatio_ a menace. How far their fears were justified will appear in later narrowing and perversion. Meantime they have supplied for interpreting the collection of Seneca not only the ancient standard, but also the necessary information. B. CHARACTER AND SCOPE OF SENECA’S COLLECTION Seneca’s _Controversiæ_[32] is a collection of the _declamationes_ made by celebrated rhetors. Though Seneca may well have used published material, his extensive reports, as it were verbatim,[33] at once attest the grasp of the ancient _memoria_ and suggest, amid considerable variety, a fund of stock cases. To exhibit the rhetors’ skill by competition, his plan is to show side by side different treatments of the same theme. He interpolates specific, and, in the prefaces to the several books, general criticism. Though he does not offer his collection of models explicitly as a comprehensive guide, his pervasive implication is that _declamatio_ exhibits the cardinal virtues. Rhetoric might with more safety tend to monopolize education so long as it had its old comprehensiveness; but as it was narrowed, it tended to put the cart before the horse. “Give your mind to eloquence,” says Seneca; “from this you can range easily into all arts.”[34] The idea is almost opposite educationally to Cicero’s view that eloquence is nourished by all studies; and the eloquence exhibited by Seneca is itself much smaller than that intended by Cicero. (1) _Subjects for Suasoriæ_ _Suasoriæ_ were deliberative; _controversiæ_, forensic. Though in actual practise the one field of oratory seems as difficult as the other, in pedagogical use _suasoriæ_ were generally assigned as elementary exercises, the boy’s first extended compositions with the rhetor.[35] The seven surviving specimens of Seneca’s collection are on the following themes:— 1. Alexander debates whether to embark on the ocean. 2. The three hundred Spartans sent against Xerxes debate, after the flight of the expeditionary forces from the rest of Greece, whether they too shall flee.