Amazon.com description: Product Description: A common narrative device in historical writing in antiquity was the use of speeches delivered by a historical person, which the historian composed and rendered in direct speech. This work presents, for the first time, a comprehensive comparison of how the most important historians in antiquity used this device. The focus on the historians´ speeches is less on their fictionality but on their different functions as literary technique. The essays in this volume explore how the speeches were used to characterize the speaker and other historical persons and to describe historical events from multiple perspectives.