ABSTRACT
Sometime in the second century ce, somewhere in the eastern regions of the Roman empire, Lucian, a Greek-speaking sophist, purportedly made a speech in a magnificent lecture hall. The room was decorated with gold and with painted scenes but, rather than using this opulent setting as a background for a speech or simply praising it, he made a choice that was as unusual as it was typical of his self-reflexive style: he decided to talk about the very possibility of speaking in such a place. The speech as we have it (under the title “The Hall”) asks whether the visual beauty of the setting was a help or a hindrance to the speaker in his task of finding things to say, and to the audience in their task of listening attentively. In his characteristic manner, Lucian sets out one side of the argument in his own voice before presenting the speech made by an imaginary dissenting voice explaining why the hall could only detract from the performance, distracting the audience and overwhelming the orator.
