What would it mean to take declamation seriously? In a certain sense, this is the question guiding the whole of this book. Taking declamation seriously would entail reading a despised genre as if it were worthy of our attention, or, worse, of our admiration. Declamation makes a claim upon our interest precisely because it acts to dissolve the distinction between the real and the imagined. Declamation can thus imagine reality or add substance to its imaginings. Declamation allows Romans to allegorize reality, to play with it, and to comment upon it. Similarly reality becomes fodder for declamatory fictions. Thus the allegories are not mere allegories or simple one-to-one mappings of the actual onto the fictive. Instead the whole question of truth and representation becomes complicated within the declamatory setting. In the end declamation invites us to reflect upon the fictive qualities of Roman identity and the usefulness of this imagined rhetoric as a vehicle for articulating the discourse of the self.

This reading of declamation requires us to part from the usual interpretive rubrics to which the genre is subjected. One usually reads declamation within the terms set out by rhetorical handbooks. While such an approach can usefully distinguish certain technical aspects of declamation, it remains unable to account for the contents of the speeches themselves. Moreover this approach also asks of declamation that it fit within a certain tradition of rhetorical training from which the genre has consciously departed.