A husband and a wife made an oath that if anything happened to either, the other would die. The husband, traveling abroad, sent a messenger to his wife to announce that her husband had died. She threw herself from a cliff. Having recovered, she is bidden by her father to leave her husband. She refuses. She is disinherited. [Speak for either the wife or her father.] _Poison Given to a Maniac Son_ (III. 7) A father has given poison to a son who was raging mad and did violence to himself. The mother brings action for cruelty. [Speak for either the father or the mother.] _Crucifixion of a Slave who Refuses Poison to his Master_ (III. 9) A sick man has asked his slave to give him poison. The slave has not given it. The master provides in his will that his heirs shall crucify the slave. The slave appeals to the tribunes. [Speak for either the appellant or the respondent.] _An Exiled Father Excluded from his Lands_ (VI. 2) “Aiding an exile with shelter or food is prohibited.” “The penalty for homicide shall be exile for five years.” The father of a son and a daughter was found guilty of homicide and exiled. He used to come to one of his properties near the frontier. The son learned this and punished the overseer. The overseer excluded the father. The father began to go to his daughter’s. Tried for harboring an exile, she was acquitted on the plea of her brother. The five-year period having expired, the father disinherits the son. [Speak for either the father or the son.] Against such subjects, against others equally subtle and unreal, even indecent and perverted, both Tacitus and Quintilian protest in the name of education. Training for actual pleading, they urge, is not to be had from tyrannicide, rape, incest, wizards, pestilence, and stepmothers. Seneca leaves no doubt that such subjects were typical; but he expressly repudiates the assumption that _controversiæ_ should be exercises to train for the bar.[38] That _declamatio_ was quite different not only in his view, but in fact, there is no room to doubt. The difference between what Tacitus and Quintilian urge on principle and what they themselves, as well as Seneca and Pliny, record as practise is decisively sharp. It is the difference between the old rhetoric and the new. Even in Seneca’s time, much more in that of Quintilian, _declamatio_ was measured as a special form of public speaking. As such Seneca seems to regard it with complacency. That he thinks it self-sufficient and self-justifying seems evident from his pains to give its oral triumphs the permanence of written record. _Declamatio_ might be cursed by the older tradition as bad education, or justified as originally good by ignoring what it had become. None the less it had gone quite out from the old rhetoric, and had been accepted and widely applauded as an end in itself.