As driving instructors and philosophers alike tell us, where you look has a lot to do with where you end up going. Focusing on a billboard may result with you and your car in a ditch. And where your imagination lovingly lingers forms who you become. This book examines a moment when authors were struggling to redirect the gaze, and thereby the path, of a generation during the period of the “Crisis of the Third Century,” the tipping-point between the period typically referred to as the “Second Sophistic” and the period that has come to be known as “Late Antiquity.” Through the prism of a particularly creative author of the late third century, I will argue in this book that Greek Imperial literature can be read with more depth and subtlety as an aesthetic battle between a rhetoric of the old and a rhetoric of the new.