It was on the basis of his experiences in the schools and "auditoria" of the declaimers of Augustan and Tiberian Rome that the elder Seneca wrote, in his old age, the work on which his fame rests today, the "Oratorum et Rhetorum Sententiae Divisiones Colores". This work, originally comprising ten books on the subject of "Controversiae" (fictitious lawsuits) together with at least one additional book on "Suasoriae" (fictitious speeches of persuasion), was written ostensibly at the request of his sons and ostensibly from memory. It is not a collection of his own declamations, or of complete fair copies of those delivered by any other declaimer but instead it presents representative extracts and analyses of the declamatory art of a considerable number of the rhetorical celebrities of his younger days. It certainly does not have the character of a theoretical treatise. The elder Seneca's own input is confined to pen-portraits of the famous declaimers whom he cites, plus analytical and critical comments about details of their work and anecdotes remembered from the literary chatter of long ago.