This is a book about an extraordinary phenomenon found over all of the Greek-speaking parts of the Roman empire in the first three centuries CE (and some of the Latin-speaking parts, too). In every city worthy of its name, members of the male elite—grown men, and also their younger acolytes—would regularly gather to hear their peers perform oratorical declamations. The aim of these declamations was not to persuade a jury to convict or release a defendant, nor was it to commend a certain course of action to the city. In ancient terms, this was not dikanic (i.e. legal) or symbouleutic (political) oratory, but ‘epideictic’: the speeches, that is, were delivered for the occasion alone, to solicit the pleasure, admiration, and respect of the audience.

Imperial Greece was a culture of the written word. Texts were produced and circulated in impressive numbers., in the form of papyrus scrolls and the new technology of the codex book; some were then annotated, illustrated, commented on, or translated. Cities were stuffed with stone inscriptions recording decrees, awards, honours, donations, and commemorations. The imperial bureaucracy was in large part a machinery for the circulation of writing, in the form of edicts, rescripts, and letters. Even the very bodies of slaves were often tattooed. In an increasingly literate world, even those incapable of reading must have sensed the power and burden of the written words that hovered wherever they turned.

As we saw in the previous chapter, sophistry was, among other things, a space for competition between individual ambitions within the hierarchy of the Greek aristocracy. When a sophist took to the stage, he sought to impress his audience with the vigour and subtlety of his paideia (education, culture); at the same time, though, he exposed himself to real risks: ‘face’ could be lost much more easily than it could be won.

In chapter 2, we saw that performance was an essential component of sophistry: if we consider only the disembodied words of the declamation on the page, we shall not understand the power of sophistry’s grip on the Greco-Roman elites of the early empire. In this chapter, I want to turn to the texts that survive, exploring the strategies that we might adopt to unpack the words on the page. It is important, though, not to lose sight of the context, for a highly specific reason. These texts do not envisage themselves as containing some inner core of truth, like a sacred book; they are designed, rather, to have their meanings debated in public space. Sophistry is a profoundly relativizing medium: every assertion is always made in full awareness of the possibility of counterassertion in this competitive forum. As a result, it is impossible to approach the surviving texts simply as documents of their authors’ views. What we need instead is a sense of how they would have been received in society, of the rich range of possibilities for interpreting them. As we shall discover in the course of this chapter, sophistic texts demand a lively and engaged audience, capable of operating on several levels simultaneously.

This book has focused so far upon the extraordinary popularity of epideictic oratory in the first three centuries of the Roman empire, the ‘Second Sophistic’ in Philostratus’ sense (notwithstanding its distant roots in the fourth century BCE). We have seen that these declamations were performance pieces, and that issues of identity were explored through the observation of the sophist’s body; that language and style were heavily theorized, but also highly experimental; and that the interpretation of these ingenious, mobile texts demands considerable resourcefulness and attentiveness. What I want to explore in this final chapter is the points of intersection between these aspects of sophistic literature and the wider literary culture of Roman Greece. I shall focus particularly on two areas, which are central to both oratorical declamation and wider literary culture: ‘the self and exotic narrative.