Roman oratory consists of two distinct phenomena. One is the occasions when men – and, very seldom, women – spoke in public. The other is the body of written texts of speeches which survive from antiquity. These are distinct objects of study: not all speeches were written down, not all those which were written down have survived; and even if we had all the speeches ever delivered, the written text can only convey a part of the experience of hearing an orator, in a particular place and time and with all the non-verbal aspects of rhetoric which contributed to an oratorical performance. In this first chapter, I consider the various occasions on which individuals spoke at Rome, reserving until the second chapter the processes by which spoken performances were transferred into written texts.