Introduction : why don't Christians do dialogue? / Simon Goldhill -- Fictions of dialogue in Thucydides / Emily Greenwood -- The beginnings of dialogue : Socratic discourses and fourth-century prose / Andrew Ford -- Plato's dialogues and a common rationale for dialogue form / Alex Long -- Ciceronian dialogue / Malcolm Schofield -- Sympotic dialogue in the first to fifth centuries CE / Jason Keonig -- Can we talk? : Augustine and the possibility of dialogue / Gillian Clark -- 'Let's (not) talk about it' : Augustine and the control of epistolary dialogue / Richard Miles -- Christians, dialogue and patterns of sociability in late antiquity / Richard Lim -- Boethius, Gregory the Great and the Christian 'afterlife' of classical dialogue / Kate Cooper and Matthew Dal Santo -- No dialogue at the symposium? : conviviality in Ben Sira and the Palestinian Talmud / Seth Schwartz -- Dialectic and divination in the Talmud / Daniel Boyarin.