ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on one unique aspect of Dio Chrysostom’s opus: as far as we can tell from the surviving writings of the major orators of the period, and from testimonia about their writing in other authors, Dio is unique among them in making his identity as a traveler a central part of his oratorical persona. The Euboean Discourse is famous for the story Dio tells of being shipwrecked on a remote part the Aegean island of Euboea, where he is taken in by a humble but proudly self-sufficient huntsman, an embodiment of the honest and unpretentious country folk he praised in his First Oration. Dio’s orations served as models of elegant and engaging rhetorical discourse in the high and late Roman Empire and as a result, more of his works survive than most other ancient Greek authors—more than seventy orations more or less intact, along with many fragments of lost orations.
