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Epideictic rhetoric, or ceremonial rhetoric, is one of the three branches, or "species" (eidē), of rhetoric as outlined in Aristotle's Rhetoric. This is rhetoric of ceremony, declamation, and demonstration, most often the rhetoric of funerals and other formal events. In his book Rhetoric and Poetics in Antiquity, Jeffrey Walker claims that epideictic rhetoric predates the rhetoric of courts and politics, the study of which began in the fourth or fifth century BC with the Sophists. The other two kinds of public speech were deliberative or political speech, and forensic or legal speech.