In the early years of the elder Seneca's life-time it appears that literary Latin had undergone a profound and rapid change. A startling indication of the rapidity with which it had come about is that he found it remarkable (Contr. IV pr. 9) that Haterius used words which were antiqua et a Cicerone dicta, a ceteris deinde deserta. Consequently, though he does occasionally distinguish between an old style and a new, for example in his descriptions of Scaurus and Labienus in the tenth preface, it is not to be imagined that men described as antiqui in his criticism, for example the declaimer named Crispus whom he calls an antiquum rhetorem in Contr. VII.4.9, were the kind of stylists whom Augustus would have referred to as antiquarii (Suet. Aug. 86.2). It is evident from his remarks on the old and new types of divisio in Contr. 1.1.13 that to the elder Seneca veteres meant the generation of Porcius Latro. For he promises, ‘ego exponam quae aut veteres invenerunt aut sequentes adstruxerunt’, and yet he never gives examples of the simple divisio controversiarum antiqua earlier than those of Latro and the rhetoricians active at the time when he rose to fame. Extreme archaism does not appear, from anything the elder Seneca says, to have been a strong force in early Imperial declamation. Even such a stylist as Pollio, of whom Quintilian was to write, a nitore et iucunditate Ciceronis ita longe abest ut videri possit saeculo prior (X.I.113), became extraordinarily self-indulgent when he declaimed.