Apuleius, lively and daring enough in his narrative,[19] seems in the excerpts preserved from his oratory quite conventional. The _Florida_ show certain typical _encomia_, two passages of critical labels, three long pieces on philosophy, and several of those _exordia_ which traveling lecturers prepared, and still prepare, for extempore adaptation. If the Great Unknown’s _De sublimitate_[20] was a public address—and its suggestiveness is strongly oral—its author rose quite above the type without losing the typical opportunity of oral criticism. One may fancy the close of that noble appeal echoing long in the ears of a rapt audience. But without any flight of fancy one may read the possibilities of ancient oral criticism in certain of the orations of Dio of Prusa, often called Dio Chrysostom.[21] (1). _Dio of Prusa_ Dio’s speech known as the Olympic, and having for subtitle The Primary Conception of God, opens with a proem characteristic of the form, an introduction separable, adjustable, ostensibly impromptu, but none the less following a type. A fable of the owl—occasional oratory seems inevitably to begin with a story—leads to other proverbs, to historical allusions, to the speaker’s profession of modesty, sincerity, and homeliness. “I am just come from the Getæ. Shall I tell you about this interesting people?” A rhetor’s offering the choice of theme to the audience might be merely conventional; for Dio effectively recalls it by adding: “Here at Olympia, beside your wondrous statue of the Olympian, shall I not rather speak of Zeus himself?” So is approached a discourse upon embodiments of deity in poetry and in sculpture, a lecture carefully conducted from point to point, and delivered doubtless in these words, certainly by this plan, in more than one welcoming city. Such a prepared address needed only the adjustment of the proem to the place and the occasion.[22] The lecture itself remained substantially the same. This one makes first the following points. The knowledge of Zeus comes through nature; men become aware of him as the nourisher of them all. To such realization is added that of poetry, of cult, and finally of the arts of painting and sculpture, not to mention the theories of the philosophers. Limiting ourselves to poetry and sculpture, let us begin (49) with Phidias, whose marvelous statue here compels our admiration. Does this statue embody deity truly? That question was answered to the Athenians of the same generation quite differently, by a speaker less different than his conclusion, a Roman Jew of Tarsus, one Paul. Dio goes on, after an encomium of Phidias: Phidias might well reply that it is true to tradition as that is conceived and defined by the poets (55-57), that since we yearn for a personal divine, the human body is its best expression, and that Homer too (62) made his gods human.