This passage gives a single instance of that intricate system of technical terminology which the study of rhetoric had elaborated. But in our period there is no writer who explains that system in any way. It had become traditional, covering a large space of time; it had become almost universal, covering a large part of the Roman Empire. The text-books we hear of belong to a previous time: Cicero’s _Rhetorica_, the anonymous _Rhetoricorum ad Herennium libri quattuor_, and Quintilian. The work of C. Chirius Fortunatianus,[431] it is true, dates from the fifth century, and that of Sulpicius Victor[432] from the fourth. But Fortunatianus drew mainly from Quintilian and Cicero, and Sulpicius Victor, in the fragments of his book that survive, professes his dependence on the traditional statement of the subject. ‘I have set in order’, he says, ‘the general rhetorical principles that have come down to us, and have been taught me by my masters. Yet I have reserved the right to pass over points as I thought fit, adhering in the main to the traditional substance and order, and inserting from other authors a number of points which I considered necessary.’[433] In fact, all the fourth- and fifth-century writers on rhetoric (in that age of summaries) are merely compilers or epitomizers. Solid and persistent is the body of tradition which runs through the centuries. The precepts and examples[434] which we find in Seneca, the rhetorician, are almost identical with those of Ennodius at the end of the fifth century; and Quintilian is found again in Hilary of Poitiers. In these circumstances it need not distress us that there is no contemporary account of the activities of the rhetor’s school. We do not even possess the title of a declamation at Bordeaux, and the very silence is significant: the rhetorical system was too widespread and too well known to need special mention or explanation. Not only the Latin rhetoricians were bound together by this common tradition: the Greek of the East shared in it as well. Libanius is on familiar terms with Symmachus,[435] who loved pagan oratory next to pagan religion, and mentions the books of Favorinus who was a native of Arles, and lived in the time of Hadrian.[436] One of the Theodori to whom Libanius wrote, was, according to Ammianus, a Gaul,[437] and so was Rufinus, the ‘Praefectus praetorio’, of whose praises the letters are full. Intercourse between East and West was free and frequent. But the most convincing proof of the unity of the tradition is found in a comparison of the Greek rhetoricians with men like Quintilian or Seneca: there is hardly any difference of importance.[438] But the _Rhetores Graeci_ give us a much more detailed and lively picture of means and methods than any other body of evidence.