Texts and contexts

Abstract

This chapter analyzes how rhetorical training and the literary culture used and abused historical evidence during the Roman imperial and Byzantine eras to maintain cultural continuity insofar as intellectual life and education (paideia) remained rooted in material from classical Greece. The largely uniform rhetorical curriculum helped to create a class of educated people, the pepaideumenoi, with similar social norms, cultural tastes, and intellectual expectations. While relying on real or alleged classical records, progymnasmata, or preliminary exercises in rhetoric, approached that material in a liberal fashion: students were expected to attain a more powerful effect by improvising; switching out the lead characters in the same situation or putting the same person in different settings; adding and molding direct speech; and combining different types of exercises. This imagined rhetorical past acquired a life of its own, concealing, obscuring, and effectively replacing the historical reality. This environment produced most of our evidence about Demades.