The most famous are the Olympiacus of Gorgias, the Olympiacus of Lysias, and the Panegyricus and Panathenaicus (neither of them, however, actually delivered) of Isocrates. Funeral orations, such as the famous speech put into the mouth of Pericles by Thucydides, also partook of the nature of panegyrics.

The Romans confined the panegyric to the living, and reserved the funeral oration exclusively for the dead. The most celebrated example of a Latin panegyric is that delivered by the younger Pliny (AD 100) in the senate on the occasion of his assumption of the consulship, containing a somewhat fulsome eulogy of Trajan.

Towards the end of the 3rd and during the 4th century, as a result of the orientalizing of the Imperial court by Diocletian, it became customary to celebrate as a matter of course the superhuman virtues and achievements of the reigning emperor, in a formally staged literary event. The well-delivered, elegant and witty panegyric was a vehicle for an educated but inexperienced young man to attract desirable attention in a competitive sphere.

Cassiodorus the courtier and magister of Theodoric the Great and his successors, left a book of panegyrics, his Laudes. As his biographer O'Donnell has said of the genre "It was to be expected that the praise contained in the speech would be excessive; the intellectual point of the exercise (and very likely an important criterion in judging it) was to see how excessive the praise could be made while remaining within boundaries of decorum and restraint, how much high praise could be made to seem the grudging testimony of simple honesty." (O'Donnell 1979, ch. 2).

Qasida is panegyric poetry in Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and Urdu.

References

• This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition.
  

Further reading

• James J. O'Donnell, 1979. Cassiodorus (Berkeley: University of California Press)