For an introduction to the social significance of classical rhetoric and oratory, see Thomas Habinek, Ancient Rhetoric and Oratory (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005). Laurent Pernot, Rhetoric in Antiquity, trans. W. E. Higgins (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2005), provides a historical narrative of the key moments in the development of rhetorical theory and practice. Indispensable for studying the use of rhetorical techniques in ancient and later literature is Heinrich Lausberg, Handbook of Literary Rhetoric, trans. D. E. Orton and R. D. Anderson (Leiden: Brill, 1998). Lausberg also helps the reader find his or her way through the competing yet overlapping systems of terminology adopted by different rhetoricians. Essays touching on many of the topics treated in this volume can be found in the Oxford Handbook of Rhetorical Studies, ed. Michael MacDonald (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).
Translations of the major ancient treatises on rhetoric, with facing Greek and Latin texts, can be found among the volumes of the Loeb Classical Library, published by Harvard University Press. Numerous studies of Aristotle, Cicero and Philostratus are available, including George Kennedy (trans. and ed.), Aristotle on Rhetoric: A Theory of Civic Discourse (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Elaine Fantham, The Roman World of Cicero’s De Oratore (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); Maud Gleason, Making Men: Sophists and Self-Presentation in Ancient Rome (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995); and Philostratus (Greek Culture in the Roman World), ed. Ewen Bowie and Jaś Elsner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
English-language scholarship on the Rhetoric to Herennius and on Quintilian is less well developed, apart from the volumes in the Loeb Classical Library. Ancient declamation is the subject of an important work by Erik Gunderson, Declamation, Paternity, and Roman Identity: Authority and the Rhetorical Self (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). The political value of ancient rhetoric is the subject of Josiah Ober, Mass and Elite in Democratic Athens: Rhetoric, Ideology, and the Power of the People (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989). W. M. Bloomer, The School of Rome: Latin Studies and the Origins of Liberal Education (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2011) considers the educational function of rhetorical training in and beyond antiquity, while Raffaella Cribiore, Gymnastics of the Mind: Greek Education in Hellenistic and Roman Egypt (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005) examines papyrological and other evidence for rhetorical training in Egypt under the Greeks and Romans.