xx. 3) by the anecdote commemorating the futile skill of a man who could

throw grains through the eye of a needle. Though he regards it as a gymnastic profitable for mature speakers in providing variety and relief (X. v. 17), he has no patience with the common practise of keeping up indefinitely what is properly a school exercise (XII. xi. 15). Finally he repeats explicitly and implicitly his warning that _declamatio_ should be kept close to actuality; and in a long passage (V. xii. 17-22) concluding his discussion of the _sedes argumentorum_, he indignantly condemns its perversion into prettiness as an emasculation of oratory.

Lucian, whose satire does not spare rhetors, makes specific mention now and then of _declamatio_, using the term μελέτη or μελετᾶν: _Demonax_, 33, 36; _Rhetorum præceptor_, 17. One passage is very like Quintilian’s in the text above: “But the chief exercise and the aim of the art of dancing, as I said, is acting, which is practised in the same way by rhetors, especially by those who cultivate the so-called _declamationes_. Their art is the more applauded for its adaptation to the assigned characters and for its consonance with the persons introduced, whether princes, tyrannicides, poor men, or farmers.” _De saltatione_, 65. Some of his satires, e.g., _Tyrannicida_, _Abdicatus_, and some of the _encomia_, sound like mock _declamationes_.

[11] Watson’s (Bohn) translation quotes (foot-notes to pages 212-13 of