ABSTRACT
While there are innumerable speeches extant from the classical period, those that follow have been chosen to support the academic purposes of this book. First, there are speeches from both the Greek and Roman period. Some readers may have preferred more speeches from the Roman or perhaps an equal number from each period, and that is understandable. Our main criterion was to choose “classic” speeches, those that we believed were essential reading for students of classical rhetoric. Of course, the decision to choose one speech over another was quite difficult, but we have sought to assemble a collection of speeches that we think capture the ideas of leading figures from the Greek and Roman periods, and which lend themselves to a certain “cultural literacy” of the classical period.
