It so happened that Porcius Latro, a great friend from the elder Seneca's Corduban childhood, became one of Rome's leading rhetoricians in the Augustan era. Together they had studied at the rhetorical school of one Marullus. In his friend's view Latro's only serious rival for supremacy among Rome's declaimers was the orator Junius Gallio, another close family connection of the Senecas. Latro cultivated the sort of 'fiery and agitated style' that Seneca particularly admired. He was characterized by his friend as a man of both gravity and charm, pre-emininently worthy of the eloquence he possessed. But the end of Seneca's tribute to him illustrates how both men inhabited a literary world far distant from Cicero's, one in which delight in neat contrasts and paradoxes had become all-consuming: 'no one' wrote Seneca of Latro, 'was more in command of his intellect: no one was more indulgent towards it'.