Pico’s Oration attempted to remap the human landscape to center all attention on human capacity and human perspective. Arriving in a place near Florence, this famous Renaissance philosopher taught the amazing capacity of human achievement. "Pico himself had a massive intellect and studied everything there was to be studied in the university curriculum of the Renaissance; the Oration in part is meant to be a preface to a massive compendium of all the intellectual achievements of humanity, a compendium that never appeared because of Pico's early death."

The Oration on the Dignity of Man (De hominis dignitate) is a famous public discourse pronounced in 1486 by Pico della Mirandola, an Italian scholar and philosopher of the Renaissance. It has been called the "Manifesto of the Renaissance".

Publius Aelius Aristides Theodorus (117–181 CE) was a Greek orator and author considered to be a prime example of the Second Sophistic, a group of celebrated and highly influential orators who flourished from the reign of Nero until c. 230 CE. More than fifty of his orations and other works survive, dating from the reigns of Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius. His early success was interrupted by a decades-long series of illnesses for which he sought relief by divine communion with the god Asclepius, effected by interpreting and obeying the dreams that came to him while sleeping in the god’s sacred precinct; he later recorded this experience in a series of discourses titled Sacred Tales (Hieroi Logoi). In later life he resumed his career as an orator, achieving such notable success that Philostratus would declare that “Aristides was of all the sophists most deeply versed in his art.”