Chapter 1 - Exempla and Exemplarity

Summary

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.