The rhetor chose some subject from imagination or from literature (from the books which the grammarian had been reading with his class) for his pupils to exercise their ingenuity upon. Three stages may be distinguished[425] in the schools of the later Empire. First, the _Vergilian stage_ (_locus Vergilianus_), at which the students paraphrased some speech in the _Aeneid_. The point was to portray as closely as possible the emotions of the original speaker. ‘Proponebatur mihi negotium animae meae’ (says Augustine) ‘ut dicerem verba Iunonis irascentis et dolentis quod non posset Italia Teucrorum avertere regem.’[426] Next there came the _Dictiones Ethicae_—soliloquies which persons in history or mythology would have made on certain occasions: e.g. Juno’s words when she saw Antaeus matched with Hercules, or Thetis before the body of Achilles. Ennodius gives several examples of this type: ‘Verba Didonis cum abeuntem videret Aeneam,[427] Verba Menelai cum Troiam videret inustam,’[428] and so forth. Thirdly, there were the _Controversiae_, nearer to the oratory of public life, on some more general subject, e.g. against an ambassador who betrays his country, against one who refuses to support an aged father, against a tyrant who has honoured a parricide with a statue, ‘in eum qui in lupanari statuam Minervae locavit.’[429] The influence of Vergil did not decline with the entry into the rhetor’s school. The rhetors of Ausonius’s day could hardly write a page without a Vergilian reminiscence. And Servius[430] tells us of the rhetors Titianus and Calvus that they chose all their subjects from Vergil, adapting them for rhetorical exercises. They gave as examples of the _controversia_ the speeches of Venus and Juno in _Aeneid_ x. 17 and x. 63. When Venus says to Juno: ‘A cause of peril hast thou been to these whom Fate has granted the land of Italy,’ she is using the ‘status absolutivus’. Juno, in her reply, uses the ‘status relativus’.