Already in the time of Augustus, a dearth in literature begins which is a striking contrast to the great number of poets in the days of the dictator Cæsar: not one poet can be named who was young in the latter years of Augustus. I could not undertake to explain this; yet it is a phenomenon which has very often been repeated in modern times. But prose was likewise barren. Even in the best days of Roman literature, the influence of the Greek Rhetoricians had become very considerable, and the writers after Cicero, Cæsar, and Sallust, are not altogether free from the effects of these school exercises: many passages may be shown in Livy, which he would not have written had he not passed through the declamation school. But in the later times this influence became still more powerful, and of this period we may get the best idea from the _Suasoria_ and the Controversies of the elder Seneca: those symptoms then broke out, which are described in Tacitus’ excellent dialogue _de Oratoribus_. From this school, of which it was the sole task, without regard to the contents of a work, without any subject-matter to awaken thought, to make an effect merely by unexpected turns, a swell of words, far-fetched thoughts, and a jingle of periods, arose the era of Seneca; for it must in justice be ascribed to him. The elder Seneca still belongs to a different age, and he remembers very well the earlier and better taste. From what he writes to his sons, it may be seen to how low an ebb taste had then fallen: he rails at them for their fondness for the new manner, but has himself already acquired a sort of relish for it: he wrote his Controversies when an old man upwards of eighty. The philosopher Seneca is the most remarkable character of that time, and one of the few eminent persons living in it: not to be unjust to him, one must know the whole range of that literature to which he belonged, and then one sees how well he understood how to make something even of what was most absurd. To the self-same school of literature belongs the elder Pliny, although his is quite a different mind: this is what is called the _argentea ætas_. This sort of division is very silly; one should divide Roman literature quite differently: it is a senseless thing to put Tacitus, Seneca, and Pliny side by side; they do not bear the smallest resemblance to each other. This literary period began as early as the reign of Augustus, and it lasted down to that of Domitian, when absurdity reached its height; only we have lost its _coryphæi_, such as Aufidius, and others. Tacitus does not by any means belong to this rabble, as the earlier school continues along with a modern one.