ABSTRACT
Some form of speechmaking has been called by a form of the Latin word oratoria, or a derivative, such as the English “oratory,” since the time of the Roman republic. Oratory’s fortunes as human-to-human speech (the word was also applied to prayers) waned under feudalism but waxed under classicism and republicanism in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries in the debate, or myriad of subdebates, over the creation of the modern world. In those centuries, Europeans brought oratory to Indians and, somewhat to their surprise, received oratory back from them. Thus were Indians’ speeches from Metacomet’s (1660) to Chief Joseph’s (1877) entered into anthologies, mostly American, of classic elocution.
