Heart, why quiverest thou? Tongue, why tremblest? Eyes, why are ye dulled? It is not yet the thirtieth day. You beg for life? I gave it; and you have lost it. It is your will that your son should die. My will? No, your madness, your blind and rash desire, yes, and her father, too soon overborne by your prayers. Seneca, _Controversiæ_, II. 3. 1. That such dramatization is obviously an extension of the school _prosopopœiæ_[48] shows how pervasive was the preoccupation with imaginative development. “Asinius Pollio used to say that the _color_ was to be exhibited in the statement of facts, and carried out in the arguments.”[49] What was left of the old rhetoric? The interpretations demanded by _sententiæ_ and _divisio_ were at least intellectual; but the main interpretation, the goal and measure of skill, was imaginative. The surest way to fame was through _colores_. Through _colores_ what had once been useful as a school exercise was artificially extended, and forensic was turned into a form of occasional oratory. _Sententiæ_, _divisio_, _colores_, epigrams, ingenious analysis, imaginative development, seem a poor substitute for the traditional five parts of rhetoric. Especially impoverishing was the restriction of the ancient _inventio_. With investigation supplanted by fiction, debate lost its typical training and its typical power. With the shift of emphasis to imagination, rhetoric was confused with poetic,[50] to the impairing of both. Nor was _dispositio_ furthered by _sententiæ_ and _divisio_. Salience, instead of being used to further consecutiveness, became an end in itself. The whole was sacrificed to the parts. _Elocutio_, thus left to itself, tended inevitably toward an art of display. The history of rhetoric has no more striking proof that style, when cultivated in artificial isolation, goes bad. So wide a departure suggests a divergence in conception, a divergence older and deeper than the particular innovations of _declamatio_. Beside Aristotle’s conception of rhetoric as the art of giving effectiveness to truth there had persisted the conception of it as the art of giving effectiveness to the speaker. Though the two conceptions are not mutually exclusive, the dominance of the one or of the other tends either to give rhetoric those manifold relations and that constant answer to reality which mark its great ancient achievements, or on the other hand to narrow it toward virtuosity and display. The large pedagogy of Quintilian is animated by the Aristotelian conception. The other conception, brilliant in Gorgias and his like, had already animated not only the _declamatores_ at Rome, but that larger “second sophistic”[51] which became pervasively the rhetoric of the imperial centuries, in Greek and in Latin, throughout the Roman world. Ancient rhetoric offers the historic example, then, of a divergence that has remained typical. FOOT-NOTES: