ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to contextualize, comment on and explain the use of specific patterns of religious discourse in specific oratorical contexts, examining the means or restrictions that these contexts generate for the speaker. Different institutions have different “logics of appropriateness”: to act appropriately is to proceed according to the institutionalized practices of a collective and mutual understanding of what is true, reasonable, natural, right and good. The idea that people behave in a specific way depending on the institutional etiquette can shed light on the ways in which orators in classical Athens use specific arguments and rhetorical techniques in well-designated contexts, and only in those contexts.
