This chapter shows how declaimers (and sometimes audiences too) made use of declamation’s parade of characters with great creativity to claim and negotiate status and identity. The following examples are considered: Aristides' return to oratory after illness figured as Demosthenes returning to political life; the hesistant Heliodorus before Caracalla as Demosthenes before Philip; Megistias and Hippodromus sparring for status like warring magicians; the itinerant Alexander Clay-Plato as a nomadic Scythian; Polemo as Cynegirus and Callimachus at the Battle of Marathon, with the sophist's spectacular illness of the joints matching the grisly fates of the two heroes; and numerous other smaller examples. Finally, the ancient rhetorical concept of 'figured speech' is considered as a model for this sort of role-playing: it is argued that the major advantages are not so much literal safety as deniablity and greater impact.

Twenty-four declamations from the Greek imperial period, the work of six authors, survive today: a survey reveals that their authors were prominent in politics and culture on a local and often imperial level. Why did these elite men pour such energy into the classical role-play that was declamation? Further indices of the genre's importance are considered: the centrality of declamation to education in this period, the great outpouring of rhetorical theory, the sheer number of declaimers and declamations that we know of, and the distances that star performers travelled and the fees that they earned. Such an enquiry is urgent: declamation was very influential on other genres, and work here has fallen behind work elsewhere. But the most urgent reason is that the question of the relationship of classical past and imperial present is fundamental for all literature in this period, and indeed for this period’s wider culture. This book rejects traditional explanations of the genre in terms of nostalgia, and instead takes seriously the almost universal ancient belief that the past was useful for the present.

This chapter argues that Lucian’s dialogue Timon is best understood as responding to and critiquing polis politics in the Imperial period. Through a number of thinly veiled references to contemporary honorific culture, and in particular to the controversial super-benefactor Herodes Atticus, Lucian makes clear that the target of his satire is not Roman rule itself, but rather the behaviour of the citizens within the Greek cities who were the greatest winners from Roman rule. These individuals had become wealthy and influential through participating in Roman hegemony and now felt that the duties and obligations which membership of a polis imposed on its citizens no longer applied to them, thus threatening the very fabric of polis life. This breaking of the social contract was an abiding concern for polis society, and indeed Lucian makes extensive intertextual use of Classical works addressing precisely this question. The Timon thus not only illustrates the continuing vitality of polis politics in the Imperial period, but also the extent to which the political values which poleis continued to foster were themselves a central part of Greek cultural identity in the Imperial period.

In the shadows of its Classical past, Athens during the Roman period saw a number of changes at the hands of imperial or local individuals, particularly for political and ideological, religious, and cultural and educational motivations. This chapter explores how the city grew and developed under the Romans, creating a unique urban space that expressed a multifaceted identity.