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.

In this chapter, I explore the aesthetic and cultural appeal of imperial Greek declamations that stage scenes of resistance, focussing on Polemo’s two declamations on the Battle of Marathon. I argue that in an era when ‘spectacular resistance’ (steadfast and ultimately in some sense triumphant resistance to oppression) was in vogue, as seen in the careers of figures such as Peregrinus the Cynic, Apollonius of Tyana, and early Christian martyrs, such declamations allowed elites to enjoy some of the glamour and rhetorical possibilities that spectacular resistance normally offered only to the powerless; there is a parallel here with the great play that Aelius Aristides and Polemo made of their struggles with illness. In particular, these declamations offered opportunities to indulge in the exuberant ‘Asian’ rhetorical style very fashionable at the time; moreover, artistic (rather than real) resistance allowed for the selection, full narration, and endless replay of the most attractive scenes. Finally, I suggest that the ‘controversial’ nature of the genre, in which counterarguments are always implied, and, in the case of Polemo’s duelling declamations, actually present, allowed Polemo simultaneously to present himself as in some degree superior to the trope of spectacular resistance.