Orations, Volume II

Meticulous eloquence.Publius Aelius Aristides Theodorus was among the most celebrated, versatile, and influential authors of the Second Sophistic era and an important figure in the transmission of Hellenism. Born to wealthy landowners in Mysia in AD 117, he studied in Athens and Pergamum and had begun a promising oratorical career when in the early 140s he fell chronically ill and retreated to the healing shrine of Asclepius in Pergamum. There he began to follow a lifelong series of dream revelations and instructions from the god that inspired the six autobiographical books of Sacred Tales, an invaluable record of both temple therapy and personal religious experience published in the 170s. By 147 Aristides was able to resume his public activities as a member of the landed and gubernatorial elite and to pursue a successful oratorical career. Based at his family estate in Smyrna, he traveled between bouts of illness and produced speeches and lectures for both public and private occasions, declamations on historical themes, polemical works, prose hymns, and essays on a wide variety of subjects, all of it displaying deep and creative familiarity with the classical literary heritage. He died between 180 and 185.This edition of Aristides' complete works offers fresh translations and texts based on the critical editions of Lenz-Behr (Orations 1-16) and Keil (Orations 17-53). Volume II contains Oration 3 (In Defense of the Four) and Oration 4, (A Reply to Capito), which along with Oration 2 take issue with the attack on orators and oratory delivered in Plato's Gorgias.

Product details

• Authors: Aelius Aristides, Publius Aelius Aristides Theodorus, Michael Trapp
• Assisted by: Michael Trapp (Editor), Michael Trapp (Translation), Michael Trapp (Editor and translation)
• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 30.11.2020
• EAN: 9780674997363
• ISBN: 978-0-674-99736-3
• No. of pages: 400
• Dimensions: 110 mm x 170 mm x 35 mm
• Series: Loeb Classical Library; Loeb Classical Library *CONTINS TO [e-mail]
• Subjects: Education and learning > Teaching preparation > Vocational needs; Humanities, art, music > History > Antiquity; LITERARY CRITICISM / Ancient & Classical, PHILOSOPHY / History & Surveys / Ancient & Classical, HISTORY / Ancient / Greece, LANGUAGE ARTS & DISCIPLINES / Rhetoric, LITERARY COLLECTIONS / Speeches, Literary studies: classical, early & medieval, Ancient History, Classical history / classical civilisation, Literary reference works, Ancient (Classical) Greek, Literary studies: ancient, classical and medieval