Aelius Aristides, ΕΙΣ ΒΑΣΙΛΕΑ

Abstract

A short speech preserved among the writings of Aelius Aristides is addressed to an unnamed emperor. At present, it is generally agreed to be spurious, spoken by an unknown orator before the emperor Philip the Arab. It has been called ‘the only preserved specimen of the oratory of the third century’, ‘perhaps the only speech preserved in the corpus of Aristides of which the authenticity can be denied with confidence’, and it has been used as a primary document for the history of Philip's reign.It was not always so. Up to the end of the nineteenth century, the authenticity of the speech was never questioned, though there was disagreement about the identity of the emperor.