ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the ways in which ancient readers of Thucydides, notably Dionysius of Halicarnassus and Aelius Aristides, evaluated Pericles' last speech as a specimen of deliberative or forensic rhetoric embedded within a larger historiographical narrative. Procopius justifies the maladroit qualities Dionysius and Aristides detect in the opening words of Pericles' last speech are apparent also in Totilia's speech to the Goths prior to the siege of Perusia. Procopius insists that, had Totila bided his time and brought his numerically far superior force to bear in daylight, he would have encircled and captured John's entire force. Belisarius' speech on this occasion opens in a manner that seems fully to conform with Dionysius and Aristides' sense of generic propriety. The Gothic successors of Theodatus/Theodahad are the only monarchs who speak in such a manner in the Wars.
