Virtually all ancient historians give a high prominence to speeches. This is a complex reflection of various related strands of the societies of Greece and Rome. For one thing, in antiquity persuasion through speeches played a central political role, and hence speeches needed to be represented as a significant causal factor in history. But there is a second aspect too: precisely because of the key political role of oratory, rhetoric was central in the education of the upper classes from whose ranks historians were invariably drawn. Hence historians found it very natural to interpret history through the presentation of speeches that both discussed and putatively influenced that history, and indeed to insert speeches largely or entirely of their own composition to illustrate key themes underlying historical events. Such speeches were often constructed to appear realistic - they were presented in direct speech and thus strongly mimetic, purporting to represent the speaker's actual words. But that formal similarity to real speeches is to some degree an illusion, for it is surprisingly rare for a political speech that appears in an historical text genuinely to be something that could actually have been delivered on the purported occasion. The most obvious point is that real speeches, such as those published by Demosthenes or Cicero, tend to be considerably longer than their counterparts in historians. The latter, though sometimes following a traditional oratorical format in outline, are typically far more terse and selective in developing their arguments.