This chapter analyzes historical declamation as an advanced stage of fiction training in the Roman rhetorical curriculum. It argues that rhetorical exercises, especially controversiae and suasoriae, fostered the skills of fictionalization through revisionist reimaginings of the Greek past. Exploring a wide corpus of exercises about Alexander the Great, the chapter demonstrates how students were trained to compose plausible fictions within recognizable historical frameworks. Drawing on rhetorical handbooks, school papyri, and declamations, it reconstructs four dominant themes: impersonations of Alexander and his circle; inter-polis disputes in the shadow of Macedonian conquest; “travel advisories” debating the limits of Alexander’s empire; and “postmortem” scenarios reflecting Alexander’s legacy. These exercises strengthened students’ command over the techniques of impersonation, pseudo-documentarism, and meta-exemplarity. The chapter also shows how historical declamations modelled indirect reflection on imperial power. Rather than transmitting historical truth, revisionist fictions taught students how to manipulate exempla and construct immersive alternatives to the Roman present.

This chapter traces key moments in the rhetorical tradition in the context of which the problematic relationship of difference and similarity between rhetorical and poetic discourse is evoked and discussed. The competing claims of affinity and difference between poetic and rhetorical discourse in Gorgias’ Helen, Isocrates, Aristotle, Cicero, Kant and others are analyzed as aspects of rhetoric’s self-definition.

Seneca the Elder’s account of Ovid’s relationship to the declaimers has typically been used to construct an argument for the growing influence of rhetoric on poetic practice. A close reading of the work and of Seneca’s cultural agenda reveals that the author has a stake in using poetry and the poetic to foreground his own version of a more wholesome model of rhetorical education embodied by Latro’s Spanish school.