but there is always a chance to read, not always to hear. Besides, the living voice, as the phrase goes, is far more moving. For though what you read may be more vehement, yet what is fixed by the delivery, the mien, the bearing, the very gesture of a speaker abides deeper in the mind. Else we give the lie to the story of Æschines, who when he had read aloud to the Rhodians a speech of Demosthenes, and every one was admiring it, is said to have added: “What if you had heard the beast himself?” And Æschines, on the testimony of Demosthenes, had a most brilliant delivery. None the less he admitted that the man who had begotten that speech delivered it far better. All this goes to prove that you should hear Isæus, if only to say that you have heard him. Pliny, _Epist._ II. 3. In essentials this description applies to the _controversiæ_ preserved by Seneca. The Greek rhetor Isæus whom Pliny heard at the end of the first century is recognizably like the Roman rhetors whom Seneca heard some hundred years before.[41] A century had only fixed the type as a distinct form of oratory, and extended its vogue. Succeeding centuries repeated it, in Greek and in Latin, throughout the Roman world. Meantime Tarsus may have taught _declamatio_ to its most famous citizen. Certainly St. Jerome knew it well. “We have been rhetoricated,” he says with grim humor, “and have played a bit in the way of the _declamatores_.”[42] Indeed, the rhetoric that came first and most actively to the Fathers of the Church must have come through _declamatio_.[43] Its influence as late as the fourth century on St. Augustine throws into sharp relief his ignoring of it in his rhetoric for preachers, the fourth book of _De doctrina christiana_. With such real work of oratory _declamatio_ has nothing to do. C. SENECA’S CLASSIFICATION AND TREATMENT Instead of giving his specimens entire, Seneca divides them by a threefold critical classification: (1) _sententiæ_, (2) _divisio_, (3) _colores_. The treatments of the same case by different _declamatores_ are thus compared specifically as to (1) the significances, (2) the analysis, (3) the imaginative handling.