Abstract

Whole books devoted to the second-century philosophical (Platonist) orator Maximus of Tyre are not all that frequent, so when one does appear it is well worth pausing to ask what one might ideally hope from it. What are the really important questions to ask about his forty-one surviving discourses (‘dialexeis’), and how they can best be used to illuminate the larger issues that we care about in the thought and culture of the ancient world (or at least, the thought and culture of the Greek-spe...