The chivalrous courtesy which he showed to the captive princesses was a favourite theme for later rhetoricians.
Marx, puts forward the theory that Cicero and the Auctor have not produced original works, but have merely given the substance of two r xvai (both emanating from the Rhodian school); that neither used the 'r xvat directly, but reproduced the revised version of the rhetoricians whose school they attended, the introductions alone being their own work; that the lectures on which the Ciceronian treatise was based were delivered before the lectures attended by the Auctor.
His oracular reserve, personal honesty and consistency of aim had gained him the suffrages of all who hoped to save France from the harpies of the Directory and the violent rhetoricians of the now reconstituted Jacobin Club.
Among contemporaries he passed for one of the most formidable polemical or gladiatorial rhetoricians; and a considerable section of his extant works are invectives.
Hadrian was fond of the society of learned men - poets, scholars, rhetoricians and philosophers - whom he alternately humoured and ridiculed.