ABSTRACT
The monody is one of late antique rhetoric's forgotten genres, sitting in the corner largely ignored while panegyrics and encomia attract most of our attention. The corpus of late antique Greek monodies is small and most of what survives appears to descend from a narrow set of exemplary texts. This chapter focuses on Himerius Oration 8, the monody that the Bithynian-born and Athenian-based sophist delivered following the premature death of his son Rufinus. The most detailed discussion of how to organize a monody appears in the second treatise on epideictic oratory ascribed to Menander. Himerius oration also shows some important things about how monodies themselves evolved in the fourth century. Menander places the monody alongside the epitaphios and the paramuthetikos in a group of three related types of speeches that honor the dead. Himerius offers the most extreme example of a tendency common to other fourth-century monodies in which authors placed themselves and their experiences at the center of the speech.
