Balance has never been pursued more anxiously. The teaching of Probus is praised for handing down: the loftiness of the epic poet and the wit of the comic, the lyrist’s tunefulness and the orator’s declamation, the historian’s truth and the satirist’s figure, the grammarian’s regularity and the panegyrist’s plausibility, the sophist’s seriousness and the epigrammatist’s liberty, the commentator’s lucidity and the barrister’s obscurity.[18] The letter of welcome to Constans has a similar series of balanced contrasts. For days there was in each mind the paradox that your person, with the weight of age and the frailty of illness, lofty in rank and venerable in religion, with mind bent only on giving pleasure, broke so many bars, so many difficulties in the way of your coming: the journey’s length, the shortness of the days; the snows’ abundance, the poverty of provisions; deserts’ wideness, narrowness of lodgings; in the roads chasms miry with the wetting of showers or rutted with the dryness of frosts; besides, either banks rough with rocks or rivers frozen slippery, hills rugged to climb or valleys scoured by the frequency of landslides. Through all these discomforts, because you sought not your private comfort, you brought back the public love.[19] Such contrasts in series are sometimes made even more artificial by word-play. He responds as Pythagoras, discriminates as Socrates; evolves as Plato, involves as Aristotle; as Æschines soothes, as Demosthenes provokes; as Hortensius is in spring, as Cethegus in summer; hurries as Curio, lingers as Fabius; simulates as Crassus, dissimulates as Cæsar; has the suasion of Cato, the dissuasion of Appius, the persuasion of Cicero.[20] This is the “pomp of Roman speech.”[21] The aristocracy bent on discarding the scales of Celtic speech was indoctrinated now with the style of oratory, now with the modes of the Muses.[22] Sidonius feels himself the representative of a great tradition.[23] That tradition was generally ceremonious regard for usage and a certain anxiety to exhibit culture by literary allusions and by command of the technic of style. Generally, that is, the literary tradition of Gaul was sophistic. Specifically it was _declamatio_.[24] The school tradition celebrated by the elder Seneca, and made by him and by the _declamatores_ after him the exemplar of oratory, is seen in the pages of Sidonius equally to monopolize the schools and the platforms of Gaul. This is rhetoric, and there is no other. It is fully displayed in the long letters to Lupus[25] and to Claudianus Mamertius,[26] not only in conclusive evidence of detail, but as a conception that is pervasive because it is exclusive. As in the letter above to Probus, there is frequent use of the words _declamatio_, _declamare_, _controversia_, etc.