In addition to well-known texts such as Aristotle's Poetics, Horace's Art of Poetry, and Longinus's On Sublimity, the book includes complete versions of Aristotle's Rhetoric Book III, Demetrius's On Style, and Tacitus's Dialogue on Orators. It's shorter passages range from Homer to Hermogenes of Tarsus, in addition to selections from Plato, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Cicero, the two Senecas, and Quintilian.