The declaimers of Augustan and Tiberian Rome professed admiration for Cicero, but their preferred oratorical style was not very Ciceronian and nor was the theoretical basis of their educational method. 'Declamation' of the sort that they practised, was, according to the elder Seneca, a new art, born after his own birth. So far as Rome was concerned, we must believe him. If its characteristic concentration on the bizarre kind of imaginary lawsuits known as "controversiae" had earlier precedent in the schools somewhere in the Greek-speaking world - as is likely, in view of the remoteness of the subject-matter and legal suppositions of these declamatory themes from the realities of Roman law-courts - Seneca the Elder seems to have been totally unaware of it. He was, however, aware of the activity of a number of Greek rhetoricians, teaching in Rome alongside those who taught their art in Latin.