Fragmenta

For I remember that, when I was quite a young man, the question was debated, in the prefaces too, between Pomponius and Seneca, whether the phrase "he steps across the threshold" ought to have been used in a tragedy.

But I know that the declaimers in particular form their conceptions rather boldly, and, by heaven, not without a certain stirring of feeling — as Seneca does in the controversia whose theme is this: that a father, when a second son had brought him in, killed his son and his stepmother, caught in adultery. "Lead on," he says, "I follow: take this old man's hand and press it wherever you wish"; and a little later: "Look," he says, "at what for so long you would not believe. But I do not see; night comes upon me, and a thick darkness."

For to swear at all, except where it is necessary, ill befits a man of weight; and it was elegantly said by Seneca that this is the business not of advocates but of witnesses.

Seneca too has handed down that the poet Julius Montanus used to say that he would steal certain passages from Virgil, if only he could steal his voice as well, and his expression, and his delivery; for the same verses, when Virgil himself recited them, sounded well, while without him they were empty and dumb.