In chapter 2, we saw that performance was an essential component of sophistry: if we consider only the disembodied words of the declamation on the page, we shall not understand the power of sophistry’s grip on the Greco-Roman elites of the early empire. In this chapter, I want to turn to the texts that survive, exploring the strategies that we might adopt to unpack the words on the page. It is important, though, not to lose sight of the context, for a highly specific reason. These texts do not envisage themselves as containing some inner core of truth, like a sacred book; they are designed, rather, to have their meanings debated in public space. Sophistry is a profoundly relativizing medium: every assertion is always made in full awareness of the possibility of counterassertion in this competitive forum. As a result, it is impossible to approach the surviving texts simply as documents of their authors’ views. What we need instead is a sense of how they would have been received in society, of the rich range of possibilities for interpreting them. As we shall discover in the course of this chapter, sophistic texts demand a lively and engaged audience, capable of operating on several levels simultaneously.