What is best is simply privacy and quiet, which may mean that writing has to be done at night. The vicious practice which nowadays goes by the name of politeness, whereby everything good or bad is praised in turn, is not only unseemly and more worthy of the theatre than of the stern discipline of a school, but also a deadly foe to real study. For care and toil seem superfluous when praise awaits no matter what effusion. Handbooks of preliminary exercises, progymnasmata , were used by rhetoricians to teach young students the basic techniques of composition. The Romans adopted the method from the Greek rhetoricians.
Latin literature shows signs of progymnasmatic compositional blocks as early as the Augustan age.
Among Greek writers of the First Century, Dio Chrysostom probably best exemplifies the adaptation of progymnasmata to extended composition, but the Parallel Lives of Plutarch contain the most famous examples of synkriseis .