The impulse to write on this subject came from the invitation to deliver the Gray Lectures at Cambridge in 1981. So my thanks are first due to the Faculty Board of Classics, its officers, and the audience of the lectures, all of whom contributed to my pleasure in the experience. I have not sought to remove the tone of a lecture altogether; but I have added much, particularly the account of the relevant parts of statis-theory in chapter 3, which is essential for understanding what the declaimers were about, but not promising material for a series of afternoon epideixeis.

My other great obligation is to my Oxford colleagues, Michael Winterbottom and Doreen Innes. They have generously allowed me to use their work on the text of Sopatros' Diaireseis Zetematon, including their collation of C (= Corpus Christi College Oxford 90), an important MS, dated by N. G. Wilson to about 1330, and not used by previous editors. Their materials for a new text will be published in a forthcoming supplement of the Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies. I am further in their debt for much help in revising and enriching what I have written; but for all errors and inadequacies I am of course solely responsible.

Some aspects of this subject figure in G. A. Kennedy's Greek Rhetoric under Christian Emperors (1983), especially pp. 73–86 and 133–179.