It was the great eighteenth-century classic and orientalist, Johann Jakob Reiske, who remarked that of all the authors he had read – and he had read many – the orations of Aelius Aristeides came second only to the speeches of Thucydides in difficulty of comprehension; and that their substance was of major importance for the understanding of the Roman empire in the second century, with the exception of the ‘Sacred Tales’, which he dismissed as woeful superstition and absurdity. Today it is the ‘Sacred Tales’ that are most fascinating and revealing, and in their turn the political discourses are left unread, with the regrettable consequence that despite the volume of ink outpoured on the speech ‘To Rome’ there is still no satisfactory study of Aristeides' political ideas in the context of other literature of the period. On the one hand, while individual snippets of information given by him have been subjected to the closest of scrutiny to discover their truth, his general themes and major ideas have been largely neglected: on the other hand, the frequent condemnation of him as a declaimer uttering commonplaces, even if it is acknowledged that in his day the main criterion of literary excellence was an ability to express in beautiful and striking language traditional themes and concepts, obscures the fact that for him and his audience the commonplaces themselves had some value. The general categories in which he and his contemporaries described the benefits of Roman rule, however vague they may be, can be used neutrally to define provincial attitudes to the Roman empire and to construct an ideology in which both orator and audience shared.