ABSTRACT
As shown above, by the end of the fifth century Bc oratory was increasingly featuring in public life in the form of a learnable technique, side by side with the theory of rhetoric, which was cultivated for didactic purposes. The moral, pedagogical and political implications of this trend involved philosophy, whose approach to rhetoric has already been examined above in Chapter 12 on Plato and Aristotle. By around 400 Bc a man who wrote speeches for others and taught the principles of the art of rhetoric was very much part of the Athenian scene, publishing not only authentic speeches, but also model fictitious ones. This presupposes the existence of a reading public with a taste for such works and the capacity to appreciate their technical prowess. The ancient custom of reading everything aloud helps to explain why the distinction between a real speech and a contrived literary piece was less clear-cut then than it is now. However, the dominant role of the speech composed for performance as a subject for literary theory may be explained by the need for a theoretical assessment and didactic accommodation of the prose genre, which first arose out of the importance of oration for public life.
