Not even the most febrile fits of authorial vanity would incline me to believe that the world eagerly awaits the present volume. Relatively few know what declamation is, and of those who know something about it, most are satisfied with their knowledge, and do not care to know more. Perhaps the author of a full-length study on such a topic possesses an admirable dedication to the production of knowledge in its own right, to the documenting of every scrap about the past no matter how tattered and uninteresting. Or perhaps such an author is merely dedicated to the production of verbiage and to wallowing in the mire. General readers can be excused from perusing the first sort of text; sensible ones will avoid the second.

Producing knowledge and producing verbiage, though, are themselves – or at least they should be – issues within declamatory criticism. They are not mere metacritical issues. Can seemingly empty speech from antiquity really have been all that empty? Just try to say something and have it mean nothing. Have you come up with a clever bit of non-meaning?