ABSTRACT
During the Flavian period, there was an intellectual backlash against what many saw as the literary excesses of the Neronian era. The chief vestal Cornelia was buried alive late in ad 89 on a charge of incest, the rhetorician Maternus was executed in ad 91 for reciting an exercise against tyranny, and Pliny's friend Helvidius Priscus was executed because Domitian thought that this man had criticised him through a farce about Paris and Oenone. The executions of Maternus and Helvidius Priscus by Domitian perhaps indicate that expertise in a figure of speech such as schema could have been useful. A more pragmatic assessment of contemporary oratory can be found in the mouths of Marcus Aper and Curiatius Maternus from Tacitus' Dialogus, although these two are counterbalanced by the Quintilianesque portrait of Vipstanus Messalla, who believed that the decline in modern oratory could be reversed by a return to oldfashioned methods of education.
