By setting philosophy in opposition to poetry, Plato was able to distinguish his version of wisdom and the wise man from those of the poetic tradition. But an equally menacing opponent presented itself in the form of rhetoric – a mode of discourse whose difference from “philosophy” was far more difficult to mark. Plato, of course, went to great lengths to differentiate philosophical from rhetorical discourse. But he did not simply attack the “art of rhetoric” as a whole: as a cultural critic, he was acutely aware of the ways in which different genres of rhetoric reflected and reinforced Athenian ideology. While Plato was clearly concerned with rhetoric in all its aspects, there was one genre that he found especially pernicious: the rhetoric of praise. This kind of rhetoric was a beast with many heads. It found its way into many different genres of discourse and was offered up to disparate audiences in a number of different performative contexts. It was thus much more difficult to target than the deliberative rhetoric of the assembly and the forensic rhetoric of the lawcourts, which had a distinct form, purpose, and context of performance.