Quintilian, the leading rhetor, 'teacher of rhetoric', of the Flavian period, fostered and, in his own writing, represented a reaction in literary taste against the innovations of Seneca, Lucan, and their contemporaries. In the long technical sections of Books 3-9 Quintilian attempts mainly to evaluate existing theories rather than to propound new ones: he is flexible and undogmatic. Cicero is his principal model, but he is no thoughtless imitator. Quintilian exercised vast influence on critics and teachers of the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries: he seemed to offer precepts they could accept and ideals they could try to realize. Fronto is a rhetorician, confirmed by an introduction to his projected history of Lucius' Parthian campaigns: he apparently intended to work up Lucius' own notes. The principal interest of the correspondence lies in language and style. Aulus Gellius retails numerous fascinating details of Greek and Roman life, language, and thought, suitably predigested.