Plutarch’s various comments about wealth are usually recognizable as springing from the same personality, but the emphasis is different in different contexts. This chapter explores this variety within the Lives, and in particular the characteristic connection with moral decadence and decay. Two pairs are explored as test-cases, Agis–Cleomenes–Gracchi and Agesilaus–Pompey. Rome, with signs of luxury and decadence everywhere, might be expected to be particularly in focus, but talk of decadence is most frequent in the Spartan Lives. Is this an indirect way of passing comment on Rome without causing offense That may also explain his frequent reluctance to talk as openly about Roman corruption and bribery as one might expect, especially in connection with a Life’s central figure. He may also be sidestepping too great an emphasis on Roman luxury as this had traditionally been associated with the Greek East.

The classical past, for Plutarch, offered a huge reservoir of history, art, and traditions, from which he drew examples of virtue for inspiration and encouragement. He expected that his readers should do the same. But he also insisted that the examples that we draw from that reservoir must be carefully strained and tested, using investigative acumen and skeptical discussion and evaluation, to remove the inevitable debris, the inescapable outcome of human ambition, competition, greed, and desire. Internecine war and personal rivalries polluted those great times even as they did his own day, and still do the present world. The best qualities of the classical past could be reacquired only by the constant exercise of prudent reason and controlled passion. Plutarch dared his readers to accept this challenge.

This chapter deploys the modes of relating to the classical past established in the previous chapter to survey the contemporary resonances of the full range of declamation scenarios, paying particular attention to the realm of the imaginary. The interpersonal conflicts (murder, rape, disownment, etc.) of the genre are very close to the gossip about and probably some of the reality of many star declaimers' lives. Similarly, declamations on war tapped into a major Greek imperial discourse as well as the civil wars and foreign incursions about which most of our sources keep a diplomatic silence. Declamations on tyranny tapped into another common discourse and offered space for reflection on illegitimate power. The survey continues with civil strife and misconduct in public life and and moves on to consider honours, embassies, religion, migration, both collective and personal, and construction projects. In these areas, too, declamation speaks both to contemporary realities and to contemporary discourses.

This chapter shows how declaimers (and sometimes audiences too) made use of declamation’s parade of characters with great creativity to claim and negotiate status and identity. The following examples are considered: Aristides' return to oratory after illness figured as Demosthenes returning to political life; the hesistant Heliodorus before Caracalla as Demosthenes before Philip; Megistias and Hippodromus sparring for status like warring magicians; the itinerant Alexander Clay-Plato as a nomadic Scythian; Polemo as Cynegirus and Callimachus at the Battle of Marathon, with the sophist's spectacular illness of the joints matching the grisly fates of the two heroes; and numerous other smaller examples. Finally, the ancient rhetorical concept of 'figured speech' is considered as a model for this sort of role-playing: it is argued that the major advantages are not so much literal safety as deniablity and greater impact.

Through a careful examination of all aspects of the experience of hearing or reading a declamation, this chapter explores how in practice the audience could move from the declamatory past to the extra-declamatory present. The framing of declamations, whether by prefaces (prolalia, protheoria) or in Philostratus’ Vitae sophistarum, blurred the line between text and context. The location of a performance was also often suggestive: declamations were texts to a significant degree experienced by audiences in the same physical spaces that its fictions traversed. A declaimer’s language was another way in which the fiction remained tethered in reality: declaimers had distinct personal styles and often partook in the ‘Asian’ style so different from that of their historical subjects. Finally, by means of their body language and by means of a running ‘metarhetorical’ commentary declaimers frequently ‘dropped the mask’ in the course of their performances. In short, this was a genre that far from shutting out the world beyond its fiction, repeatedly included it in the performance.

After rejecting as tendentious ancient and modern accounts of declamation that stress the difference between classical past and imperial present, this chapter explores the ways in which audiences could relate to declamation's classicism. It was the almost universal assumption of antiquity that history was useful, and declamation, which frequently uses the same materials and even the same language as contemporary biography and political oratory, was no exception; indeed, this was a natural continuation of educational practice. Declamation offered not simply examples to follow or avoid, but also helped in gaining a sense of the distinctive qualities of a situation, appreciating a situation’s true scale, and recognising abiding truths about human life. Many of the imagined speakers of declamations actually model these processes for us in their speeches, a phenomenon I term 'meta-exemplarity'. Finally, I consider what was distinctive about declamation's invocation of the past, vivid, oblique yet powerful, and open-ended. Imperial declamation accordingly represents an important development in the historiographical culture of ancient Greece.

This chapter looks at the broader contemporary significance of declamation, focusing on (Macedonian) imperialism, and taking as its major case study Aristides' To the Thebans: concerning the alliance I–II (Orr. 9–10), in which Aristides recreates Demosthenes' speech urging alliance between Thebes and Athens before Chaeronea. The image of an attack by a despotic and barbaric king echoed some presentations of the Parthian menace, potentially ennobling a contemporary conflict. But the image of the greedy despot also echoed discourses about 'bad' emperors, thereby offering a negative exemplum to heed. Finally, Macedon in these texts further recalls the Roman empire more generally: accordingly, these texts make available an unusually negative attitude to the empire, but also, I argue, a celebration and a justification of Rome's power over Greece. I compare the discourses present in a fragment of Pollux's declamation On the Islanders, where the Persian court recalls Lucian's denunciation of the vulgarity of rich Romans in his De mercede conductis. In closing, I note the particularly high number of potentially meta-exemplary remarks in Aristides' declamations, encouraging audiences to ponder these texts' meaning deeply.

Twenty-four declamations from the Greek imperial period, the work of six authors, survive today: a survey reveals that their authors were prominent in politics and culture on a local and often imperial level. Why did these elite men pour such energy into the classical role-play that was declamation? Further indices of the genre's importance are considered: the centrality of declamation to education in this period, the great outpouring of rhetorical theory, the sheer number of declaimers and declamations that we know of, and the distances that star performers travelled and the fees that they earned. Such an enquiry is urgent: declamation was very influential on other genres, and work here has fallen behind work elsewhere. But the most urgent reason is that the question of the relationship of classical past and imperial present is fundamental for all literature in this period, and indeed for this period’s wider culture. This book rejects traditional explanations of the genre in terms of nostalgia, and instead takes seriously the almost universal ancient belief that the past was useful for the present.

Certain oddities and omissions in two pseudo-Aristidean declamations on Leptines' proposal to abolish exemptions from liturgies are explained with reference to their composition in thirteenth-century Byzantium: their author, Thomas Magistros, seems to be alluding to contemporary debates about the pronoia, a Byzantine tax exemption. But the same scenario was also being performed as early as the third century BCE, for which period it has also been argued to be relevant. Further examples of declamations covering topics of importance to their own time are considered from the Hellenistic era to Late Antiquity and Byzantium and even the English reniassance. That Greek imperial declamation too should speak to the times in which it was written ought not therefore to be surprising. Declamation's ability to do so depends on a careful balance. There is much in its scenarios that seems of relevance to any age, and moral foundations theory helps us put such intuitions on a firmer footing. But it is equally important that the world of declamation is not our own. As a result, issues are approached obliquely, declaimers are safer, audiences are more receptive, and the resulting interpretations themselves are more diverse.