The Oxford Handbook of the Second Sophistic 9780199837472, 0199837473

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T h e Ox f o r d H a n d b o o k o f

T H E SE C ON D S OP H I ST IC

The Oxford Handbook of

THE SECOND SOPHISTIC Edited by

DANIEL S. RICHTER and

WILLIAM A. JOHNSON

1

3 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America. © Oxford University Press 2017 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. CIP data is on file at the Library of Congress ISBN 978–​0–​19–​983747–​2 1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2 Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America

Contents

List of Contributors  Abbreviations 

ix xi

PA RT I   I N T RODU C T ION 1. Periodicity and Scope  William A. Johnson and Daniel S. Richter

3

2. Greece: Hellenistic and Early Imperial Continuities  Tim Whitmarsh

11

3. Was There a Latin Second Sophistic?  Thomas Habinek

25

PA RT I I   L A N G UAG E A N D I DE N T I T Y 4. Atticism and Asianism  Lawrence Kim

41

5. Latinitas  W. Martin Bloomer

67

6. Cosmopolitanism  Daniel S. Richter

81

7. Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity  Emma Dench

99

8. Retrosexuality: Sex in the Second Sophistic  Amy Richlin

115

PA RT I I I   PA I DE IA A N D P E R F OR M A N C E 9. Schools and Paideia  Ruth Webb

139

vi   Contents

10. Athletes and Trainers  Jason König

155

11. Professionals of Paideia?: The Sophists as Performers  Thomas A. Schmitz

169

12. Performance Space  Edmund Thomas

181

PA RT I V   R H E TOR IC A N D R H E TOR IC IA N S 13. Greek and Latin Rhetorical Culture  Laurent Pernot

205

14. Dio Chrysostom  Claire Rachel Jackson

217

15. Favorinus and Herodes Atticus  Leofranc Holford-​Strevens

233

16. Fronto and His Circle  Pascale Fleury

245

17. Aelius Aristides  Estelle Oudot

255

PA RT V   L I T E R AT U R E A N D C U LT U R E 18. Philostratus  Graeme Miles

273

19. Plutarch: Philosophy, Religion, and Ethics  Frederick E. Brenk

291

20. Plutarch’s Lives  Paolo Desideri

311

21. Lucian of Samosata  Daniel S. Richter

327

22. Apuleius  Stephen J. Harrison

345

Contents   vii

23. Pausanias  William Hutton

357

24. Galen  Susan P. Mattern

371

25. Chariton and Xenophon of Ephesus  J. R. Morgan

389

26. Longus and Achilles Tatius  Froma Zeitlin

405

27. The Anti-​Sophistic Novel  Daniel L. Selden

421

28. Miscellanies  Katerina Oikonomopoulou

447

29. Mythography  Stephen M. Trzaskoma

463

30. Historiography  Sulochana R. Asirvatham

477

31. Poets and Poetry  Manuel Baumbach

493

32. Epistolography  Owen Hodkinson

509

PA RT V I   P H I L O S OP H Y A N D P H I L O S OP H E R S 33. The Stoics  Gretchen Reydams-​Schils

527

34. Epicureanism Writ Large: Diogenes of Oenoanda  Pamela Gordon

539

35. Skepticism  Richard Bett

551

36. Platonism  Ryan C. Fowler

563

viii   Contents

37. The Aristotelian Tradition  Han Baltussen

581

PA RT V I I   R E L IG ION A N D R E L IG IO U S L I T E R AT U R E 38. Cult  Marietta Horster

597

39. Pilgrimage  Ian C. Rutherford

613

40. Early Christianity and the Classical Tradition  Aaron P. Johnson

625

41. Jewish Literature  Eric S. Gruen

639

42. The Creation of Christian Elite Culture in Roman Syria and the Near East  William Adler

655

43. Christian Apocrypha  Scott Fitzgerald Johnson

669

Notes  Index 

687 743

Contributors

William Adler  (North Carolina State University) Sulochana R. Asirvatham  (Montclair State University) Han Baltussen  (University of Adelaide) Manuel Baumbach  (Ruhr-​Universität Bochum) Richard Bett  (Johns Hopkins University) W. Martin Bloomer  (University of Notre Dame) Frederick E. Brenk  (Pontifical Biblical Institute, Rome) Emma Dench  (Harvard University) Paolo Desideri (Università degli Studi di Firenze) Pascale Fleury (Université Laval) Ryan C. Fowler  (Franklin & Marshall College) Pamela Gordon  (University of Kansas) Erich S. Gruen  (University of California, Berkeley) Thomas Habinek  (University of Southern California) Stephen J. Harrison  (Corpus Christi College, University of Oxford) Owen Hodkinson  (University of Leeds) Leofranc Holford-​Strevens  (independent scholar) Marietta Horster  (Johannes Gutenberg-​Universität Mainz) William Hutton  (College of William and Mary) Claire Rachel Jackson  (University of Cambridge) Aaron P. Johnson  (Lee University) Scott Fitzgerald Johnson  (University of Oklahoma) William A. Johnson  (Duke University) Lawrence Kim  (Trinity University)

x   Contributors Jason König  (University of St. Andrews) Susan P. Mattern  (University of Georgia) Graeme Miles  (University of Tasmania, Australia) J. R. Morgan  (Swansea University) Katerina Oikonomopoulou  (University of Patras) Estelle Oudot  (University of Burgundy Franche-​Comté.) Laurent Pernot  (University of Strasbourg) Gretchen Reydams-​Schils  (University of Notre Dame) Amy Richlin  (University of California, Los Angeles) Daniel S. Richter  (University of Southern California) Ian C. Rutherford  (University of Reading) Thomas A. Schmitz (Universität Bonn) Daniel L. Selden  (University of California, Santa Cruz) Edmund Thomas  (Durham University) Stephen M. Trzaskoma  (University of New Hampshire) Ruth Webb (Université de Lille) Tim Whitmarsh  (University of Cambridge) Froma Zeitlin  (Princeton University)

Abbreviations

Abbreviations follow those in The Oxford Classical Dictionary, 4th ed., edited by S. Hornblower, A. Spawforth, and E. Eidinow (Oxford, 2012). Further abbreviations are as follows: Alex. Aphr. De Mixt.

Alexander of Aphrodisias, De mixtione

Athenaeus Deipn. Athenaeus, Deipnosophistae CID

Corpus des inscriptions des Delphes, Paris 1977-​ .

Epictetus Diss. Epictetus, Dissertationes ab Arriano digestae Favorinus Or.

Favorinus of Arelate, Orationes

Fronto Addit.

Additamentum Epistularum Variarum Acephalum

M. Caes.

Epistulae ad M. Caesarem

Galen De alim. facult.

de alimentorum facultatibus libri III

In Hipp. Artic. comment.

in Hippocratis de articulis librum commentarii IV

De meth. med.

de methodo medendi libri XIV

De san. tuenda

de sanitate tuenda libri VI

De praecogn.

de praecognitione ad Epigenem

De libr. propr.

de libris propriis

De an. aff. dign. et cur.

de propriorum animi cuiuslibet affectuum dignotione et curatione

De puls. differ.

de pulsuum differentiis libri IV

De ord. libr. suor.

de ordine librorum suorum ad Eugenianum

De simpl. medicament. temp.

de simplicium medicamentorum facultatibus libri XI

IGLSyr

Inscriptions grecques et latines de la Syrie

I. Ephesos

Die Inschriften von Ephesos (Inschriften griechischer Städte aus Kleinasien, Bonn 1972-​ )

I. Kyme

Die Inschriften von Kyme (Inschriften griechischer Städte aus Kleinasien, Bonn 1972-​ )

xii   Abbreviations I. Smyrna

Die Inschriften von Smyrna (Inschriften griechischer Städte aus Kleinasien, Bonn 1972-​ )

IvPergamon

Die Inschriften von Pergamon, Berlin 1890-​95

Jos. As.

Joseph and Aseneth

Lucian Eikones

Eikones (=Imagines)

Icarom. Icaromenippus Philo Congr.

De congressu quaerendae eruditionis gratia

Hyp.

Hypothetica

Leg. All.

Legum allegoriae

Mut.

De mutatione nominum

Q Genesis

Quaestiones et solutiones in Genesim

Somn.

De somniis

Spec. Leg.

De specialibus legibus

Philoponus, in Cat. Philoponus, In Aristotelis Categorias commentarium Plut. De Stoic. Repug. Plutarch, De Stoicorum repugnantiis Res Gestae

Res Gestae Divi Augusti

Seneca Vit. Beat. Seneca, De Vita Beata Str. Strabo, Geographica

Pa rt  I

I N T RODU C T ION

Chapter 1

Pe riodicit y a nd  S c ope William A. Johnson and Daniel S. Richter

1.1 Periodicity Periodization has come under sharp scrutiny in recent years. There are good reasons for that. The stipulated boundaries of a period can lead to a blinkered approach, by which continuities are missed or minimized; similarly, disruptions and disconnections within the period can be facilely smoothed over. Descriptions of the movement from one period to the next too readily take on a devolutionary character, such that the transition from classical to Hellenistic or Augustan to imperial becomes a narrative not simply of change but of change and decline, with substantial ideological implications (further, Whitmarsh, ­chapter 2). Implicit in the marking of boundaries with dates like 480 bce or 323 bce or 31 bce is an undertheorized hypothesis that cataclysmic military-​ political events and changes in art and literary culture can or even should align. Most critical, however, are the ways that examining literature, art, or culture as artifacts of a period affect analysis and understanding. The preconceived idea of a period becomes normative, leading to sometimes bizarre results. Distortions can be not just deep-​seated but determinative. Herodotus’s style is “archaic” in opposition to Thucydides, though he is writing in the 440s and 430s at the height of the Classical Period; Sophocles (497/​ 6–​406/​5 bce) is “classical,” Euripides (480s–​406 bce) not so much; Ovid is a transitional figure to the Silver Age, not entirely “Augustan,” though Ovid lived from 43 bce to 17 ce and Augustus ruled from 31/​27 bce to 14 ce; Callimachus is somehow “more Hellenistic” than his contemporary Apollonius. Within the constellation of ancient periods, as commonly defined, none is quite so vexed as the Second Sophistic. As is well known, Philostratus introduces the term to denote a species of epideictic oratory rather than an historical period (VS 1 pref. 481; see Whitmarsh, c­ hapter 2). As well, the idea of a second sophistic allows Philostratus to establish a classical pedigree for the oratory of his time. In Philostratus’s account, the late classical orator Aeschines is the founding figure, though his biographical history, Lives of the Sophists, skips most of the early period to focus on orators from the

4   IntroductION Neronian era up to his own (ca. 230 ce). In modern times, scholars have taken over the term to designate the period of the late first to early third centuries, as it is seen from a Greek view and with focus on the sophistical oratory of the time. Quite a few, however, as we do in this Handbook, turn the screw further, appropriating the term for a more general designation, to signal an era centered on the second century with defining characteristics (see below) that go well beyond Greek sophists or even Greek literature. The term itself thus brings with it some considerable fogginess. The extent to which this era, grounded firmly in the second century, projects into the first or third centuries is inconsistently determined (we are hardly consistent here). How much, or even whether, writers in Latin can be said to be part of the Second Sophistic is variously answered (again, that ambivalence is in evidence in this volume as well). How properly or, better, how usefully the idea of “sophism” can be extended metaphorically to capture phenomena that are far afield from oratorical display also receives a range of answers. Some therefore would like to avoid the designation altogether.1 Indeed both of the authors of this chapter chose to avoid the term in their books on the era (Johnson:  Readers and Reading Culture in the High Roman Empire:  A  Study of Elite Communities; Richter, Cosmopolis: Imagining Community in Late Classical Athens and the Early Roman Empire). Part of the challenge of this volume is, then, the exploration of whether the broader notion of an era known, for better or worse, as the Second Sophistic is good to “think with.” Is the assumption of an “era” simply distorting, as it must be, cramming all sorts of apples and oranges into the same fruit basket willy-​nilly, or does it also help bring into view certain shared characteristics and viewpoints that might develop our understanding? A typical laundry list of Second Sophistic characteristics includes various points of focus: nostalgia for an idealized (Athenian) classical past; archaism and purity of language; sophistic performance and contest and display; paideia and erudition; anxieties over (Hellenic) self-​definition and identity. Used in the manner of checking off boxes, such lists would be crude instruments for analysis; but recent scholarship, including the essays here, have deployed and explored these points of focus in ways far more interesting. So, for example, the distinctive way that many of the texts from the period seem to look past contemporary affairs toward an idealized past has typically been part of a triumphalist narrative of Hellenic revivalism or seen as a strategy of resistance to Roman domination, variously spun. Here, such tendencies are treated differently. Kim (­chapter 4) locates in the era not a simple celebration of the past but a deep ambivalence about old and new: “it is this combination of both a deep appreciation for the language and culture of the classical past and an enthusiasm for more flamboyant, artificial, and anticlassical literary and oratorical styles that makes the period so interesting.” Writing in a similar vein about Antonine Latin literature, Bloomer observes. “The Roman author must search the ancient literature rather like a cook looking for a sparkling ingredient, but only the old cookbooks will do and one must not follow a

Periodicity and Scope   5 recipe. The composition must be new and tasty—​the Antonine author wants to read Cato, select from Cato, and have his reader know that his diction is the result of long scholarship and selective taste, but he does not want to ape Cato.” There could also be a collision of idealized past with present, with complex and varying results. Mattern (­chapter 24) describes Galen as a doctor who lived long in Rome but who “in some ways avoided engagement with Roman culture. He did not use his Roman name. Although he is interested in Latin words, he does not cite Latin authors. His Rome is, in the anecdotes to which it forms a shadowy background, indistinguishable from a Greek city. In its tense and awkward combination of aloofness and superiority with dependency and even servility, Galen’s attitude is typical of the cultural environment.” Oudot (­chapter  17), by contrast, shows how for Aelius Aristides, the “real empire” created by Athens was cultural, “presenting the city as an incarnation of refinement and civilization, untouched by the vagaries of history”; for that reason, she writes, in Aristides’s view, “Rome simply took up where Greece left off,” destined to use Greek values and concepts so as “to historicize the perfection of Greece.” Quite differently, Aaron Johnson (­chapter 40) sees “culture wars” of “imperial Hellenism” in Plutarch and Lucian that empowered early Christian intellectuals to have the confidence to “speak to power” in their writings. These are but a few of many examples, but the pluralism with which the subject is approached does suggest that this core characteristic of the Second Sophistic can indeed be good to “think with.” A central association with the Second Sophistic is performance and contest and self-​conscious display, in the first instance with reference to the educational training and public performances of the sophists (Webb, ­chapter 9; Schmitz, ­chapter 11; Thomas, c­ hapter 12; cf. Koenig, ­chapter 10), but by metaphorical extension to many other realms. Our authors speak in a wide variety of contexts to the acute awareness of persona that comes from institutionalized role-​playing and self-​fashioning, an awareness that shows up on stage but also in society and in the act of writing. Jackson, for example, finds in Dio (­chapter 14) that contrasting categories like past/​present, Greek/​Roman, philosophical sincerity/​sophistic flippancy, far from being fixed allegiances, can be used as “fluid models for self-​posturing” and serve well his “manipulation of rhetorical personas,” showing thereby his “awareness of the constructed, complex, and multifaceted nature of Second Sophistic identity positioning.” A playful seriousness (or just plain playfulness: see Holford-​Strevens, ­chapter 15, on Favorinus) is found in many authors, as varied as Philostratus (Miles, ­chapter 18), Alciphron (Hodkinson, ­chapter 32), and Lucian (Richter, ­chapter 21), and often linked, as Miles puts it, to “the consistent avoidance of allowing a final authority.” Several of our contributors take this a step further, seeing in writers of the era a sophisticated self-​awareness of their works as fiction (e.g., Zeitlin, ­chapter 26) and a similarly self-​conscious experimentation with matters of genre (Hodkinson, ­chapter 32; Oikonomopoulou, c­ hapter 28). Not all writers of the period display such tendencies, but where they do not they still seem aware of this sort of “sophistication” as a norm to set themselves against (see especially Selden on the antisophistic novel, ­chapter 27; also Hutton on Pausanias, ­chapter 23). The serious playfulness of

6   IntroductION the sophists had a didactic element as well, and this aspect is put in productive dialogue with Christian texts of the era by Scott Fitzgerald Johnson (­chapter 43), who points out that, like the sophists, the storytelling in Christian apocrypha is “never merely entertainment.” Another feature identified as central for the Second Sophistic is paideia, a concept that served, as Morgan puts it (­chapter 25), as “the crucial differentiator between elite and nonelite. The investment of large resources of time and money in nonpractical education, so as to master archaic but culturally endorsed linguistic modes and to deploy the whole intertextual arsenal of the classical canon was a signifier of wealth and status so powerful that the education itself came to be seen as the necessary qualification for membership of the elite.” Paideia was, however, not simply to be had, but to be performed. The very public agon of early imperial intellectual life, with its scrupulously policed codes of deportment and persistent evaluation of cultural competencies, was, in an important sense, a zero-​sum game: one pepaideumenos’s loss of cultural capital signaled the gain of another. Thus, the period is replete with texts that show intense interest in virtuoso display of learnedness, especially as it regards language (e.g., the Latin writer Gellius and the Greek Athenaeus:  Oikonomopoulou, ­chapter 28), myth (Trzaskoma, c­ hapter 29; cf. Horster, c­ hapter 38), and philosophical thought (e.g., Brenk, c­hapter  19), but also showcasing polymathic command of intertextuality, and specific trained rhetorical elements like ekphrasis (showing up in works as different as Apuleius and the Greek novels, Pausanias, and the Posthomerica: ­chapters 22, 23, 31). All this speaks to the bookish, lamplight culture that predominated even as live performance remained central in the mentalité. Philosophy, for example, has now become primarily an exercise in textual interpretation (see Baltussen, ­chapter 37). Finally, we come to the theme of self-​definition and identity. Here the contributors follow recent scholarly trends in leaving to one side the well-​worn discussion of the ways that Greeks could retain and promote their cultural identity within the context of Roman rule. Instead, there is interesting analysis of the hybrid and ambivalent self-​ positioning we find in an Aelian or Favorinus (Oikonomopoulou, c­ hapter 28; Dench, ­chapter 7; cf. Asirvatham, ­chapter 30, on Cassius Dio), or the sorts of multiple identities, with an ability to self-​reinvent, that are found in Apuleius or Julius Africanus (Harrison, ­chapter 22; Adler ­chapter 42). Jewishness is found to retain its core identity even while making informed use of the “modalities of Hellenism” (Gruen, ­chapter 41), and Syrian Christians are likewise found to participate in a Hellenized Roman East in ways that are textually, as well as socially, interesting and important (Adler, c­ hapter 42). The broad spectrum of literature and culture included in this volume (see below) should allow the reader a strong sense of the vibrant, multicultural environments from which these texts emanated, and the surprisingly cosmopolitan views that form a core feature of the era (Richter, ­chapter 6). The characteristics traditionally identified with the Second Sophistic are, on close and nuanced inspection, indeed good to think with.

Periodicity and Scope   7

1.2  Purpose and Scope As will already be clear from the discussion above, our purview for the Second Sophistic is unusually broad-​reaching (if, however, not as broad-​reaching as it might be). Both in its scope and in its pluralism of voices the Handbook represents a somewhat new approach to the Second Sophistic, one that attempts to integrate Greek literature of the Roman period into the wider world of early imperial Greek, Latin, Jewish, and Christian cultural production, and one that keeps a sharp focus on situating these texts within their socio-​cultural context. Scholarly interest in the literature and society of the second century has grown rapidly in the last generation, but there remains an inadequate supply of foundational instruction and instructional materials. This is the gap we hope to help fill. The student or teacher of Classics who comes to the literature of this era seldom has had a course of study that includes the likes of major figures such as Gellius, Galen, Aristides, Fronto; even Plutarch and Lucian are usually no more than a small and quickly passed over part of the graduate curriculum. Standard resources like the Cambridge History of Greek Literature (1982), Cambridge History of Latin Literature (1985), or Conte’s Latin Literature: A History (1987, trans. 1994) fall off quickly in detail of treatment for authors after Pliny and Tacitus. Symptomatic is the history of Latin Silver Age literature by J. W. Duff (1931), which ends with Suetonius and treats the second century in an appendix of under ten pages; similarly, Lesky’s History of Greek Literature (1957, 1963, trans. 1966) takes only ninety of its 900 pages for materials following the Hellenistic era. Duff and Lesky are, to be sure, now much out of date, but these two books were standard resources up through the 1980s, and bear witness to a long-​held and still-​influential view that “classical” Latin and Greek literature effectively ends with Pliny, Tacitus, and Plutarch. Albrecht Dihle’s Greek and Latin Literature of the Roman Empire (1989, trans. 1994) is more even in coverage, but by its nature exceedingly summary (under 100 pages for the entirety of the second century). B. Reardon’s magisterial Courants littéraires grecs des IIe et IIIe siècles après J.-​C. (1971), which was never translated, is limited to Greek and strictly literary in its viewpoint, and is thereby not only out of date but also lacking much of the basic matter that today’s student will need. T. Whitmarsh’s excellent G & R survey The Second Sophistic (2005) is in many respects the best summary overview for the student who lacks grounding in the era, but at eighty-​nine pages it is necessarily limited in concept and scope. The Handbook, then, attempts to serve a real need. For the student curious about the literary remains of the second century, and how those remains may be relevant for his or her research, there is call for a much more comprehensive and accessible overview of the principal texts from the period. The second century boasts an extremely valuable set of materials for all sorts of inquiries, many of particularly current interest (e.g., gender studies, cultural history of the body, sociology of literary culture, history of education and intellectualism, history of medicine, cultural linguistics), and yet most teachers as

8   IntroductION well as students of the Classics have only a dim idea of what these materials entail or how best to go about accessing them. Many of the authors from this period have large or very large corpora (e.g., Galen, Lucian, Plutarch, Dio Chrysostom, Aristides, Cassius Dio, Appian) and practical guidance within those corpora would be a useful tool for the student new to this era. But in addition to content and bibliographical guidance, there is a strong need for a volume that helps to situate the textual remains within the period and its society, to describe and circumscribe not simply the literary matter but the literary culture and societal context. Thus we devote considerable space at the front to various contextual essays, and we have tasked all our authors with keeping the contextual demands in mind. The creation of the volume has involved hard choices, and some are more strategic and practical than philosophical. Authors well treated in other handbook accounts are generally underplayed, or even omitted. It might have been, for instance, interesting to consider how Second Sophistic culture finds analogs within the work of authors like Martial and Juvenal (who do, however, get some attention in Richlin, ­chapter 8), or, differently, Tacitus. Despite the many hundreds of pages here, there remain authors who deserve treatment (Pseudo-​Longinus and Julius Pollux are two obvious examples); the many technical treatises (Ptolemy and Aristides Quintilianus, for example) need situating within the era; an exploration of how the narratives here might intersect with the art and material culture of the age seems in order. With that said, our aim has been to offer a rich and varied exploration of social, literary, and intellectual history from the period, with emphasis on the core authors and movements usually associated with the era but with a broader range, as stated earlier. We make no claim for completeness. The Handbook is too hefty to serve as a literal vade mecum, but we hope nonetheless that it will offer helpful guidance to that fascinating cultural era known as the Second Sophistic.

1.3  Why a Handbook to the Second Sophistic? “To place men such as Favorinus and Aristides . . . next to Protagoras, Hippias, Gorgias and Prodicus as their heirs is near to blasphemy.” Erwin Rohde’s (1886) assessment of the sophists now smacks of racially tinged connoisseurship—​a judgment rooted in an aesthetic conditioned to privilege the purity of the original model beside the derivative, belated copy. It is, as well, a limiting and distorting perspective, one that reduces the literary and cultural production of the early imperial period to a single manifestation and elides the diversity of early imperial intellectuals. The view of the Second Sophistic that animates this volume is more holistic and ecumenical than that of Philostratus and his successors. This Handbook assembles essays from a range of scholars whose competencies, we hope, to some extent reflect the variety of early imperial cultural production. Finally, in light of the recent surge of interest in the Second Sophistic, it is worth

Periodicity and Scope   9 remembering how young the field is. In an important sense, Bowersock (1969) and Bowie (1970) inaugurated the serious study of the Second Sophistic only a generation ago and the contours of the field—​our fundamental questions—​are still very much contested. It is our hope that this volume of essays will enable another generation of scholars to see early imperial Greek and Latin cultural production in a way that allows for its complexity, heterogeneity, and ambiguity.

Bibliography Bowersock, G. W. 1969. Greek Sophists in the Roman Empire. Oxford. Bowie, E. L. 1970. “Greeks and Their Past in the Second Sophistic.” P&P 46: 3–​41. Johnson, W. A. 2010. Readers and Reading Culture in the High Roman Empire: A Study of Elite Communities. Oxford and New York. Richter, D. S. 2011. Cosmopolis: Imagining Community in Late Classical Athens and the Early Roman Empire. Oxford. Rohde, E. 1886. “Die asianische Rhetorik und die zweite Sophistik.” Rh. Mus. 41: 170–​190. Whitmarsh, T. 2013. Beyond the Second Sophistic:  Adventures in Greek Postclassicism. Berkeley, CA.

Chapter 2

Greec e Hellenistic and Early Imperial Continuities Tim Whitmarsh

According to the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics, famously parodied by Erwin Schrödinger, subatomic matter has the properties of both waves and particles simultaneously, to the extent that its description can only ever be probabilistic; it is only the act of measurement itself that causes wave function to collapse, and hence the position and state of a given particle to become definite; “Which is not to say that human observers determine the results . . . but rather the specific nature of the material arrangement of the apparatus is responsible for the specifics of the enactment of the cut.”1 The Second Sophistic is usually thought to operate like a historical particle: bounded more or less by the dates 50 and 250 ce (the period of the High Roman Empire),2 situated in the Greek-​speaking part of the Roman Empire, and defined by certain characteristics, it appears to have all the hallmarks of a determinate “cultural phenomenon.”3 That its location is imagined as defined by fixed spatio-​temporal parameters is indicated by the choice of prepositions scholars use. When we indicate that a certain text or author is “in the Second Sophistic,”4 we imply a specific set of coordinates: the Second Sophistic is imagined as a container with a defined volume, or a map with certain territories, or some other hypostatized image. There are clearly gains to be had from considering the Second Sophistic in a conventionally particulate way, as localized in the Greek-​speaking world between 50 and 250: it allows us to consider the distinctive role played by rhetoric, Atticism, Homeric reception, and so forth in the shaping of Greek paideia. Yet it also obscures certain continuities, and thereby certain wider features of the imperial subjectivity shared between the Hellenistic and Roman worlds.5 Any apparent particle-​like behavior is in fact determined by the experimental setup itself. Classicists’ lab equipment is designed to test for a limited range of phenomena: the solidity and durability of elite Greco-​Roman culture, the centrality of elite literary traditions to ancient societies, the decisive impact of top-​down political change. It is this restricted range of questions that produces the illusion that the Second Sophistic is in an eigenstate. In this chapter I wish to argue that

12   Introduction the Second Sophistic also has a wave function, which reifying accounts collapse. (This analogy is of course intended to provide a refreshing model to think with, rather than to indicate exact correspondences between the fields of quantum physics and classical cultural history.) There are two crucial features of what I am calling this wave function. First, let us imagine a wave-​form on a graph: its significance lies in the pattern as a whole rather in the individual points on the graph. From this perspective, the value of the “Second Sophistic” as a heuristic lies not in its ability to fix particular individuals, texts, or artifacts within a defined cultural context, but to trace broader relationships over time and space. It is of course conventional even in particulate accounts to acknowledge the haziness of the term and the arbitrariness of chronological limits, but this acknowledgment is typically presented as an embarrassment to be apologized for rather than as a prompt to rethink the model. Second, if we take this view, then the Second Sophistic by definition cannot be localized in any one place or one time. Many of the properties often considered to be characteristic of the Second Sophistic will thus be found in neighboring periods and cultures. Considering the phenomenon in these terms—​as simultaneously particulate and wave-​like—​has the additional advantage of respecting the concertina-​like properties of the very phrase “the Second Sophistic.” As has often been remarked, it can be used in a range of senses, from the highly specific (with reference to the tradition of rhetorical epideixis in persona, as described by Philostratus)6 to the general. The general, expanded definition covers all imaginative Greek literary production of the period, and sometimes material culture too.7 When understood in this latter way, its hallmarks are thought to be a preoccupation with archaism and a desire to root identity in the deep past, a concern with rhetoric and self-​presentation, and a certain joy in fictive discourse. If we use this second definition, then we are already beginning to treat it as a wave, since we are grouping together cultural artifacts by general affinity rather than robust definitional criteria. It would be hard to come up with a strict list of rules of inclusion for a corpus of texts that included, say, Dio Chrysostom’s Euboicus, Chariton’s Callirhoe, Aelius Aristides’s Sacred Tales, and the hymns of Mesomedes; yet we could all no doubt agree that this fuzzy set has a kind of coherence, and captures something of the ludic, revisionist, but nonetheless self-​assertive vitality of the era. Acknowledging the “wave function” of the Second Sophistic helps us to recognize its nondeterminate aspects not as challenges but as opportunities. The specific focus of this chapter is chronology. Why do we tend to assume the date range of approximately 50–​250 ce? The short answer is simple: Philostratus. The Lives of the Sophists, which provides the only mention of the “second sophistic” (deuterê sophistikê) until the nineteenth century, was composed in the 230s, and (a few isolated earlier mentions notwithstanding) focuses on the period reaching from the reign of Nero up to his own day. That the Second Sophistic is largely centered on what we now call the second century is a coincidence, but has probably contributed to the apparent naturalization of the concept. These explanations, however, suggest that the label is all but entirely arbitrary. Philostratus was not in a position to offer a systematic overview of

Greece: Hellenistic and Early Imperial Continuities    13 Greek cultural history. His interest lay in anecdotes illustrating the magnificent eccentricities of the sophists, and for these he depended primarily upon oral reports and letters,8 which were for obvious reasons recent. The distorting effect of the Philostratean fish-​eye is why some scholars have argued, with Wilamowitz, that the Second Sophistic has no value as a historical category at all.9 Wilamowitz was probably right to argue that display oratory in persona was continuously fashionable from classical times right through to late antiquity, and in this respect the early imperial period was undistinctive. Even Philostratus sees the Second Sophistic as beginning with Aeschines in the late fourth century bce (VS 481). The way had already been pointed by such texts as Gorgias’s Palamedes, Antisthenes’s Ajax and Odysseus, and the Apologies of Plato and Xenophon. We know very little about Hellenistic oratory, but papyri suggest that sophisticated declamation in persona was indeed practiced during this period. A  fragment from the time of Ptolemy Philadelphus (283–​46 bce) offers an excellent example.10 The speaker assumes the role of an Athenian statesman urging his fellow citizens to make a swift attack on an unspecified foe. It displays a clearly “sophistic” self-​consciousness about role-​playing, both in the Demosthenic urging of speedy reprisal and in the insistence that his audience “imitate” someone (56: the papyrus is lacunose here) and live up to their predecessors at Marathon and Salamis (106–​ 9). Philostratus himself speaks of three Hellenistic orators:  Ariobarzanes of Cilicia, Xenophron of Sicily, and Peithagoras of Cyrene (VS 511). (He speaks of them as nonentities, but that probably means nothing more than that he knew very little about them.) There is no reason, then, to put unconditional trust in Philostratus’s depiction of a sudden blossom in the early principate. At the other end of antiquity, we go from famine to feast, with a superabundance of rhetorical evidence. The works of Himerius (fourth century ce), Libanius (fourth), Procopius (fifth to sixth), and Choricius (early sixth) among others testify to the continuity of the tradition. Bernadette Puech’s epigraphic dossier of “orators and sophists of the imperial period” covers the first to the fifth centuries ce, and indeed a recently published prosopography of rhetors and sophists in the Roman Empire goes right up to the seventh century.11 Not only is it misleading to suggest that the rhetorical production of the period 50–​250 sits apart as a discrete unit, it is actually impossible to write systematically about that period without importing late-​antique evidence (notably for the school exercises known as progymnasmata, for which Libanius is such a rich source). A more complex and prima facie attractive explanation for the focus on the period 50–​250 lies in the distinctive socio-​political makeup. The Second Sophistic as conventionally defined covers the period from the establishment of the principate through to the third-​century crisis; and given the limited amount of extant material from the second half of the third century (which may or may not be an accident of survival), it in effect covers all the material up until Constantine and the advent of Christianity. With a little elasticity, then, the Second Sophistic can be thought of as coterminous with “non-​ Christian Greek cultural production of the principate.” But here, too, we are in danger of arbitrariness, for grouping artifacts purely on the basis of chronology does not necessarily make for a more inherently cogent arrangement than grouping them (say)

14   Introduction alphabetically or in order of the relative height of their authors. To make sense of the chronological definition we would need to argue in addition that there are historical factors particular to this period that explain the form that its literature takes—​and this is where the difficulties arise. Rome was a dominant force in much of the Greek-​speaking world from the second century bce onward, and many major Greek-​speaking intellectuals from that period onward (among them Polybius, Posidonius, Diodorus, the epigrammatists Antipater and Crinagoras, Strabo, and Dionysius) benefited from Roman sponsorship: what then is the justification for beginning in 50 ce?12 At the other end, Christianization was hardly instantaneous: “pagan” culture continued in full health well into the sixth century, and arguably later.13 The most explicit attempt to justify 50–​250 as a unit comes courtesy of Simon Swain, who, while admitting that his parameters are “only approximate,” nevertheless insists that the earlier date is a point of “significant difference” and the later one marks a “perceptible break.”14 For Swain, the crucial factor is economic independence: elite Greeks within his period were, he claims, financially independent of Romans, whereas those before “were not overly prosperous” and those after were afflicted by the general “political, military, and economic instability” that characterized the later third century as a whole. But this model raises all sorts of questions. First of all, is it really true that second-​century Greek intellectuals like Plutarch and Lucian “were part of a world that did not need Rome”? Was it then just intellectual like-​mindedness that drew Plutarch to superrich Romans like Philopappus and Sosius Senecio? What is Lucian’s On Salaried Posts if not evidence for the continued dependence of certain Greeks on Roman financial support? What of a text like Athenaeus’s Deipnosophists (not treated by Swain), which presents an array of Hellenized intellectuals dining with a Roman patron? Conversely, there is no firm evidence to my knowledge that the pre-​50 intellectuals Strabo, Diodorus, and Dionysius (to take three names) were financially dependent on Roman support. The problem is that our understanding of the exact nature of any relationships of dependence is obscured by the (no doubt designedly) opaque language of “friendship.” What does it mean when for example Strabo cites Aelius Gallus as a “friend and a companion” (ἀνὴρ φίλος ἡμῖν καὶ ἑταῖρος, 2.5.12)? Is the nature of that friendship identical to that of Dio Chrystostom and Nerva, “a philanthropic emperor who cherished me and was my long-​time friend” (αὐτοκράτορος φιλανθρώπου κἀμὲ ἀγαπῶντος καὶ πάλαι φίλου, 45.2)? Or Plutarch’s with Philopappus (to whom he addresses his How to Tell a Flatterer from a Friend, which strongly implies that their own relationship teeters between the two)? There is no obvious reason to conclude that Greeks became more financially autonomous in the mid-​first century ce. What of the distinctive characteristics of the literature of the Second Sophistic? Do these offer any support for the idea of a chronologically defined period? In the midst of a general problematization of the term, Goldhill argues that “it emphasises the constant importance of rhetorical training and the rewards of rhetorical success in Empire society, and stresses the constant pull backwards to the glorious traditions of Classical Greece, the so-​called first Sophistic, a return which is marked most strongly by the regular use of a highly literate classical Greek through different genres.”15 This assessment (which is not atypical) suggests that there are four interrelated elements that are thought

Greece: Hellenistic and Early Imperial Continuities    15 to be constitutive of Second Sophistic culture: rhetoric, archaism, Greek identity, and literariness. None of these is, however, really distinctive. We have already dealt with rhetoric; and none of the other categories (which are rather vague) is of course exclusive to the imperial era. What did the intellectual culture of Hellenistic Alexandria represent if not an archaizing, highly literary, generically experimental reassertion of Greek identity in a multicultural, patronal context? There are disparities in the mode of expression, certainly: the early imperial era’s preference for Atticizing prose is different from the poetic “archaeology” undertaken by Callimachus, Theocritus, Apollonius, et al.16 The Second Sophistic might also be said to be less bookish and more performative (although there are problems with such a distinction).17 Such distinctions are particulate; but the reassertion of Greekness through classicizing literature, generic self-​awareness, and archaic language is a wave that begins at least in the Hellenistic era, and arguably even earlier. What is more, once we start probing then any distinction between Hellenistic and imperial in terms of verse and prose begins to look suspect. As is now relatively well understood (even if the implications are still too often ignored), poetry remained absolutely central in the imperial era, whether performed in festivals, inscribed on stone, or circulated in books.18 Conversely, the fact that the bulk of our surviving Hellenistic literature (Polybius aside) is poetic can easily—​but misleadingly—​feed the perception of historical rupture. Let us exemplify this briefly with a glance at one of the literary forms often taken to embody the Second Sophistic. Erwin Rohde’s Der griechische Roman und seine Vorläufer (“The Greek novel and its precursors”) of 1876, the book that gave us the Second Sophistic in its modern form, argued that despite the appearance of exoticism the Greek romance was a genre firmly rooted in the Greek tradition.19 The reconstruction of lost Hellenistic “precursors,” Rohde believed, showed that there was no reason to posit “oriental” influence in order to explain the romance (as Pierre-​Daniel Huet had done back in 1670).20 For Rohde, the important Hellenistic ingredients were love poetry and travel narratives. Other scholars following in Rohde’s footsteps proposed alternative forerunners,21 but Ben Perry’s 1967 The Ancient Romances powerfully argued the case against such biogenetic models of origination.22 For Perry and his followers, the romance is a new creation of the imperial era, and talk of Hellenistic precedents is misplaced. In this vein, one recent book has argued that Chariton’s Callirhoe, in the mid-​first century ce (on this author’s dating), represents the “invention of the Greek love novel.”23 Rohde’s methodology was, to be sure, fundamentally flawed, particularly because it was vitiated by his nationalist concern to protect Greek culture from the stain of near eastern influence. (The Second Sophistic, indeed, was in his view a rear-​guard defense of cultural Hellenism against the twin threats of Rome and the East.) Yet there are a number of problems with the idea that the romance emerged ex nihilo around 50 ce—​which also happens to be the conventional start date for the Second Sophistic. Even if we leave aside the problems with dating Chariton (the only secure terminus ante quem is a second-​ century ce papyrus), the claim runs into immediate conceptual difficulties as soon as we start trying to identify what it is that Chariton is supposed to have invented. As has often been said, there was no single word for the romance as genre in antiquity. It is fairly clear

16   Introduction that a cohesive sense of genre developed over time, so that we can be sure that the latest of the romance writers—​Achilles Tatius, Longus, and Heliodorus—​manipulate conventions and tease the reader’s generic expectations.24 Yet Chariton could not have invented the genre as it appeared from the vantage of later antiquity, for obvious reasons. What he was doing was (presumably) weaving together a generically experimental blend of romantic historiography, new comedy, and existing prose romance. What models did Chariton have to hand? To answer this question we need, in a sense, to return to Rohde, and rediscover the world of nineteenth-​century source criticism. Those who wish to see the novel as a new invention of the Second Sophistic must satisfy themselves that what Chariton was creating was wholly innovative, rather than a creative intervention in a complex intertextual web. Our evidence is not, in fact, so tenuous that this issue cannot be addressed. It seems to me that we know of four possible sources for pre-​Chariton romance. The first is mime. It seems highly likely that at least some of the erotic plots that we know of through novels were also circulated far and wide in mimes and pantomimes;25 and it seems probable that the well-​known reference to what seems to be a literary work called Callirhoe at Persius 1.134 refers to a theatrical version of the story. The second source is Xenophon of Ephesus’s Anthia and Habrocomes: there is not a shred of meaningful evidence to support the general consensus that it postdates Chariton’s novel.26 The third is the Greco-​Jewish Joseph and Aseneth, a romance between the biblical patriarch and his Egyptian bride, which may well be Hellenistic, and to which we shall return. This displays a number of erotic motifs that have often been thought characteristic of the later romances: Aseneth’s initial preference for virginity, the purity and beauty of the young couple, their immediate falling in love on sight, the disastrous effects on the girl’s wellbeing, and so forth.27 Finally, there is Ctesias’s love-​ across-​ the-​ battlelines story of the Saka (Scythian) Zarinaea and the Mede Stryangaeus. Ctesias’s original text, the Persica (composed near the end of the fifth century bce) does not survive, and Diodorus Siculus (our main source for Ctesias) omits this story. The romance, however, is known thanks to a mention in Demetrius’s On Style (probably second century bce), and a brief papyrus fragment that partly overlaps with a quotation in Demetrius.28 Whether the romance was present already in Ctesias29 or not does not matter for our purposes: the important point is that it was read in Hellenistic times and was apparently influential on Chariton. For it has long been recognized that even the fragmentary papyrus has novelistic motifs in it: it refers, notably, to persecution by eros and to threatened suicide, in the context of a rhetorically persuasive love letter.30 Yet in the more recent editions of Ctesias by Lenfant and Stronk31 an additional version of the story has been included, and the implications of this for scholarship on the ancient novel have not yet been fully processed. The passage is a fragment of the Augustan historian Nicolaus of Damascus preserved in a Byzantine compilation called On Virtues and Vices, created on the orders of the emperor Constantinus Porphyrogenitus. It is worth quoting in full, so as to illustrate the density of novelistic reference: After the killing of Marmareus, Stryangaeus was possessed for a long time with silent love for Zarinaea. She felt the same for him. When he approached the city of

Greece: Hellenistic and Early Imperial Continuities    17 Rhoxanake where the Saka had their palace, Zarinaea approached him and on seeing him greeted him with great joy, kissing him in the full view of all. She mounted onto his chariot, and they arrived at the palace deep in discussion. Zarinaea also received the army that followed him with great honor. Next Stryangaeus retired to his quarters, secretly bewailing his desire for Zarinaea. Being unable to bear it (ou karterōn) he confided in the most trusted of the eunuchs in his retinue. This eunuch urged him to take heart, and advised him to cast off his timidity (atolmian) and speak to Zarinaea. Stryangaeus was persuaded, and leaped to his feet to go and visit her. She received him warmly. He prevaricated repeatedly, groaning and blushing; but he told her all the same how he was burning with intense love, provoked by his desire for her. She, however, refused him with great gentleness, saying that the situation was disgraceful and damaging for her—​and in fact much more disgraceful and damaging for him, since he had as his wife Rhoetaea daughter of Astibaras (whom she had heard to be much more beautiful than herself and many other women). He must, therefore, (she said) be a man in the face not only of the enemy but also of this kind of situation, when something attacks the soul. He must not suffer long-​term grief (if Rhoetaea should find out) for the sake of short-​term satisfaction of the kind that concubines can offer. If he relinquished this request, she said, he could ask anything: she would deny him nothing. Upon hearing these words, he fell silent for a long time; then he bade her farewell and departed. He was now in a greater state of despair, and he lamented to his eunuch. Finally, he wrote a message on a piece of parchment, and extracted an oath from the eunuch to the effect that he would give the parchment to Zarinaea, without any forewarning, only after he had done away with himself. The letter read: “Stryangaeus writes to Zarinaea as follows: I was the one who saved you, and was responsible for your present good fortune. But you have killed me and robbed me of everything. If you have acted justly, may you reap all the benefits, and be blessed forever; if however you have acted unjustly, may you experience the suffering I  did; for it was you who advised me to become such as I am now.” On writing this he placed the letter under his pillow, and, destined for Hades, manfully demanded his sword. But the eunuch . . .” [passage breaks off]32

The novelistic motifs in this passage are unmistakable: the focus on the debilitating effects of passion, the mutual passion, the emotional vulnerability and hesitation particularly of the male, the sense of despair (athumia), the recourse to a confidant who offers constructive advice, the accusation of unmanliness, the parallelism between war and love as spheres for the performance of masculinity, the accusatory letter, the threatened suicide (which may actually be achieved here). Now, Nicolaus’s version of the story is clearly based on Ctesias’s, without being identical to it. By chance, the one substantial papyrus fragment of Ctesias that survives contains the letter, which in the original version begins “I was the one who saved you, and you were saved by me; but I have been destroyed by you”—​an opening that is also quoted by Demetrius On Style 213, where it is directly attributed to Ctesias.33 The papyrus letter then elaborates on the reproach leveled at Zarinaea, then turns to a meditation on the god Eros. Whether the papyrus is in fact verbatim Ctesias or another different version of the story does not matter greatly here.34 The point is rather that Ctesias and his Hellenistic imitators

18   Introduction already supplied many of the erotic motifs, displayed within a rhetorical frame (a letter), that an incautious reader of Chariton would otherwise assume to have originated with him. Our knowledge of Hellenistic “romantic” historiography in the Ctesian vein is woefully deficient; it is, however, I submit, highly likely that if we had more of the latter then Chariton would look much less like an innovator, and this supposed gulf between Hellenistic literature and the Second Sophistic (as conventionally understood) would close to the point of invisibility. In other words, the Greek novel too should be seen as a postclassical wave pattern rather than as securely demarcated by the temporal parameters 50–​250. Let us return now to Joseph and Aseneth, the romance between the biblical Joseph and his Egyptian wife. The dating of this text is extremely problematic: estimates have varied from the second century bce right through to the fifth century ce; and scholars are still undecided as to whether it is fundamentally a Jewish or a Christian text.35 This is not the place to intervene in this complex and irresoluble debate. In fact, given that we know that at least two different versions (which scholars imaginatively call the “long version” and the “short version”) existed in antiquity, it is probably better to consider Joseph and Aseneth, alongside the Alexander Romance and the Life of Aesop, as a “textual wave”: rather than treating it as a particle-​like work with a single, definite point of origin, it is rather a cross-​temporal and cross-​cultural pattern, constituted not by its identity at any particular point in time and space but by the sum of those identities.36 Hellenistic near-​eastern cultures, indeed, provide an excellent opportunity to test the wave function of the Second Sophistic. If the Greeks’ archaism, intellectual brio, and concern with the rooting of identity in the period 50–​250 ce is to be seen as the response of an ancient, literate culture to foreign occupation, then we might expect to detect the same kinds of patterns in Egyptian and Jewish literature of the Ptolemaic period. Martin Braun, indeed, argued that the origins of the Greek romances of the imperial era (if we can again use them as Second Sophistic barometers) lay in the responses of near eastern subjects to Greco-​Macedonian domination.37 Braun argued that both Egyptians and Jews began to focus on great figures of the past (the legendary Egyptian warrior-​ pharaoh Sesonchosis; the Israelite patriarchs of the Bible), as a means of engendering resistance to the dominant political order of the present. He also argued that the focus on sexual integrity and the management of erotic urges, such a dominant theme in the imperial romances, originates in biblical rewritings in Hellenistic Jewish Aggadah: the Testaments of Joseph and Reuben (which in fact many scholars now date to the imperial era) and particularly Josephus, whose amplification of the Potiphar’s Wife story includes a number of nonbiblical motifs (such as falling in love at a festival and love-​ sickness) that look “novelistic.”38 When we add Joseph and Aseneth (which Braun did not consider) into this mix, then the interrelationship between Jewish and Greek begins to look even more suggestive. Another shared element, again not noted by Braun (but of great importance to any colonial-​imperial reading), is the emphasis on the human body as a site of resistance to tyrannical violence, particularly rape and torture. This is a theme of the latter part of Joseph and Aseneth (23–​29), where the Pharaoh’s son, smitten

Greece: Hellenistic and Early Imperial Continuities    19 by jealousy, kidnaps Aseneth. The Pharaoh is, no doubt, to be read as a biblical analog of the Ptolemaic rulers of present-​day (for the text’s earliest readers) Egypt. Analogously, 3 and 4 Maccabees, which are set in the Hellenistic age, depict Ptolemaic violence against virtuous Jews. Structurally speaking, these narratives perform the same function as the scenes in the imperial Greek romances that show virtuous protagonists resisting threats of rape and torture.39 Indeed, Jewish literary culture of the Hellenistic or Second-​Temple period offers an intriguing parallel to the cultural conditions of the Greek Second Sophistic (see also Gruen, ­chapter 41 in this volume). Like literary Greeks in the Roman Empire, literary Jews in the Greco-​Macedonian period indexed their identity to canonical written works of the past, specifically the Torah. The project of translating, updating, and rewriting this body of text was in one respect crucially different—​the Torah was sacred—​but that fact seems to have done nothing to prevent an extraordinary interest in hybridizing biblical narrative and Greek literary form. We can now only glimpse what must have been a thrilling intellectual traffic, exemplified by fragmentary works such as the Exagoge of Ezekiel (a retelling of the Exodus story in the form of an Attic tragedy) and the hexameter epics on Biblical and Jewish themes of Philo and Theodotus.40 Jews living in Hellenistic cities were engaged in the same kind of process of cultural self-​definition as Greeks would be later under the Roman Empire: they were updating narrative traditions self-​consciously to fashion continuities with the past in a way that responded to the needs of the present. Thus, for example, in Ezekiel Moses’s account of the travails imposed by the Pharaonic administration on Jews suggests a continuity with the Ptolemaic present: “Right up until these times we have been ill-​treated by evil men and a powerful regime” (Exagoge 5–​6). There are even parallels with the Greek vogue for Attic diction. With the creation of the Septuagint, Greek-​ speaking Jews manufactured a language that was both new, in the sense that it was unprecedented, and ancient, in the sense that it sought to capture the antique sacrality of the Bible.41 Some have also seen parallels between the Greek Second Sophistic and the rabbinical reinvention of Hebrew and Aramaic as literary languages in the aftermath of the destruction of the Temple in 70 ce. The effect of this devastating action was to accentuate the division between Jews on the one hand and Greeks and Romans on the other. This gulf was then further widened by the Christian adoption of Greek, Latin, Coptic, and Syriac, which underlined the isolation of Jews, who turned away from Greek as a language of literary composition. A number of recent scholars of Rabbinical Judaism have argued that the process of constructing intellectual traditions in an “indigenous” language as a response to Roman imperialism—​a process that ultimately yielded the Talmud—​can be understood as a broader manifestation of the Second Sophistic.42 The cross-​cultural wave function is visible in Egyptian culture too. Demotic Egyptian literature survives in geographically scattered papyri, not all of it published; such is the difficulty of the material that “it is not yet possible to write a linear history of Demotic and Greco-​Egyptian literature.”43 Even so, it is possible to trace specific points of contact between Demotic texts and the Greek writing of the period associated with the Second

20   Introduction Sophistic, particularly in the area of fiction: works like the Setne Khaemwas stories and the Inaros cycle—​forged in the first half of the first millennium bce, and written down from around 400 onward—​are apparently shaped by interaction with Greek narrative traditions, and in turn may well be one stream that fed into the Greek romance of the imperial era.44 Stories of ingenuity and military success, set in a more glorious Egyptian past, circulated at a time when Egypt was under foreign occupation; much the same could be said not only of the Greek romances (particularly the overtly classicizing ones of Chariton and Heliodorus) but also of many historical works and rhetorical declamations composed by Greeks under the Empire. Let me reemphasize in conclusion that my intention in this chapter has not been to argue that the Second Sophistic should never be understood in particulate terms, but to demonstrate (on the analogy with quantum physics) that it has a wave function simultaneously. The particulate model of course places greater emphasis on historical specificity, on those peculiarly elite-​Greek features that are not necessarily replicated in other cultures. As I have claimed, however, the particulate model is (even on its own terms) less robust than it is often thought to be: if we interrogate the evidence more critically, we can see just how indistinct the line is that separates the Hellenistic from the imperial eras. More importantly, perhaps, we should not blind ourselves to the political implications of this way of carving the historical pie. After centuries of indoctrination into the myth of Greek exceptionalism, classicists tend to be committed to a belief that elite Hellenic literary culture has a distinctive paradigmatic value. The narrative of the decline and renaissance of Greek literary vigor has played a central role in the articulation of European and (to a lesser extent) American cultural superiority. This belief is most starkly visible in Rohde’s Der griechische Roman, the book that initiated modern interest in the Second Sophistic. For Rohde (and his many successors), the Second Sophistic was a parable of the deleterious effects on the intellectual classes of industrial mechanization (which appears in the allegory as Rome) and religion (“the east”). Like so many a philologist, Rohde looked into the mirror of classical antiquity and saw himself reflected back. The terms of the debate have of course changed substantially since Rohde, but as a historiographical construct the Second Sophistic remains firmly bolted onto a particular view of Greek literature as somehow hermetically sealed and independent of wider historical processes that governed the eastern Mediterranean over a longer period. Indeed, the very constructs of “Greek culture” and “Greek identity” have been lent a false solidity and intellectual coherence, precisely thanks to an exclusively particulate way of perceiving the ancient world. Rather than positing Greekness as a coherent category with its own determinative power, we might instead treat ancient eastern Mediterranean culture as a broad and open field, within which semi-​autonomous45 agents—​such as individuals, guilds, cities, intellectual and religious communities—​ improvised and adapted networks of affiliation, sometimes insisting on particular forms of identification (e.g., as Greek, Jewish, Naucratite, Christian . . . ), but sometimes not. That is to say, they behaved sometimes like particles and sometimes like waves. In this sense, the Second Sophistic marks, rather than a strictly delineated period or cultural

Greece: Hellenistic and Early Imperial Continuities    21 phenomenon, a pattern of self-​consciously archaizing responses to imperial domination that is visible across a number of ancient societies. Consideration of the wave pattern would, in fact, help us to locate the particle more accurately, since it would allow for a crisper definition of what is distinctive about the Greek (or indeed any other) Second Sophistic.

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22   Introduction Elsner, J. 1995. Art and the Roman Viewer: The Transformation of Art from the Pagan World to Christianity. Cambridge. Elsner, J. 2007. Roman Eyes: Visuality and Subjectivity in Art and Text. Princeton, NJ. Furstenberg, Y. 2012. “The Agon with Moses and Homer: Rabbinic Midrash and the Second Sophistic.” In Homer and the Bible in the Eyes of Ancient Interpreters, edited by M. R. Niehoff, 299–​328. Leiden. Geiger, J. 1994. “Notes on the Second Sophistic in Palestine.” ICS 19: 221–​230. Giangrande, G. 1962. “On the Origins of the Greek Romance: The Birth of a Literary Form.” Eranos 60:  132–​ 159. Reprinted in Beiträge zum griechischen Liebesroman, edited by H. Gärtner, 125–​152. Hildesheim, 1984. Giangrande, G. 1976. “On an Alleged Fragment of Ctesias.” Quaderni Urbinati di Cultura Classica 23: 31–​46. Goldhill, S. 2001a. “Introduction—​Setting an Agenda: ‘Everything is Greek to the Wise.’” In Being Greek under Rome:  Cultural Identity, the Second Sophistic and the Development of Empire, edited by S. Goldhill, 1–​28. Cambridge. Goldhill, S., ed. 2001b. Being Greek Under Rome: Cultural Identity, the Second Sophistic and the Development of Empire. Cambridge. Gruen, E. S. 2002. Heritage and Hellenism: The Reinvention of Jewish Tradition. Berkeley, CA. Hägg, T., and B. Utas. 2003. The Virgin and Her Lover: Fragments of an Ancient Greek Novel and a Persian Epic Poem. Leiden. Hall, E. 2013. “Pantomime: Visualising Myth in the Roman Empire.” In Performance in Greek and Roman Theatre, edited by G. W. M. Harrison and V. Liapis, 451–​475. Leiden. Holzberg, N. 1992. “Ktesias von Knidos und der griechische Roman.” WJA 19: 79–​84. Huet, P.-​D. 1971. Lettre-​traité de Pierre-​Daniel Huet sur l’origine des romans; Édition du tricentenaire, 1669–​1969: Suivie de La lecture des vieux romans, par Jean Chapelain. Édition critique. Paris. Humphrey, E. M. 2000. Joseph and Aseneth. Sheffield. Hunter, R. 1996. Theocritus and the Archaeology of Greek Poetry. Cambridge. Janiszewski, P., K. Stebnicka, and E. Szabat. 2015. Prosopography of Greek Rhetors and Sophists of the Roman Empire. Oxford. Kremmydas, C., and K. Tempest, eds. 2013. Hellenistic Oratory: Continuity and Change. Oxford. Lavagnini, B. 1922. “Le origini del romanzo Greco.” ASNP 28: 9–​104. Reprinted in Beiträge zum griechischen Liebesroman, edited by H. Gärtner, 41–​101. Hildesheim, 1984. Lenfant, D. 2004. La Perse; l’Inde; Autres fragments de Ctésias de Cnide. Texte établi, traduit et commenté. Paris. Merkelbach, R., and J. Stauber. 1998–​2004. Steinepigramme aus dem griechischen Osten. 5 vols. Stuttgart. Nasrallah, L. S. 2010. Christian Responses to Roman Art and Architecture: The Second-​Century Church amid the Spaces of Empire. Cambridge. Niehoff, M. R., ed. 2012. Homer and the Bible in the Eyes of Ancient Interpreters. Leiden. Perry, B. E. 1967. The Ancient Romances:  A  Literary-​Historical Account of Their Origins. Berkeley, CA, and London. Puech, B. 2002. Orateurs et sophistes grecs dans les inscriptions d’époque impériale. Paris. Rajak, T. 2009. Translation and Survival:  The Greek Bible of the Ancient Jewish Diaspora. Oxford. Rohde, E. 1914. Der griechische Roman und seine Vorläufer. 3rd ed. Leipzig. Russell, D. A. 1983. Greek Declamation. Cambridge.

Greece: Hellenistic and Early Imperial Continuities    23 Rutherford, I. 2013. “Greek Fiction and Egyptian Fiction: Are They Related, and If So How?” In The Romance Between Greece and the East, edited by T. Whitmarsh and S. Thomson, 23–​37. Cambridge. Schmitz, T. 1997. Bildung und Macht:  Zur sozialen und politischen Funktion der zweiten Sophistik in der griechischen Welt der Kaiserzeit. Munich. Schmitz, T., and N. Wiater, eds. 2011. The Struggle for Identity: Greeks and Their Past in the First Century bce. Stuttgart. Selden, D. 2010. “Text Networks.” Ancient Narrative 8: 1–​23. Shaw, B. D. 1996. “Body/​Power/​Identity: Passions of the Martyrs.” Journal of Early Christian Studies 4: 269–​312 Stephens, S. 2013. “Fictions of Cultural Authority.” In The Romance between Greece and the East, edited by T. Whitmarsh and S. Thomson, 91–​101. Cambridge. Stronk, J. P. 2010. Ctesias’ Persian History: Introduction, Text, and Translation. Düsseldorf. Swain, S. 1991. “The Reliability of Philostratus’s Lives of the Sophists.” Cl. Ant. 10: 148–​163. Swain, S. 1996. Hellenism and Empire: Language, Classicism, and Power in the Greek World, ad. 50–​250. Oxford. Tilg, S. 2010. Chariton of Aphrodisias and the Invention of the Greek Love Novel. New York. Tropper, A. 2004. Wisdom, Politics, and Historiography: Tractate Avot and the Context of the Graeco-​Roman Near East. Oxford. Vanderspoel, J. 2007. “Hellenistic Rhetoric in Theory and Practice.” In A Companion to Ancient Rhetoric, edited by I. Worthington, 124–​138. Malden, MA. Vogel, M. 2009. “Einführung.” In Joseph und Aseneth: Herausgegeben, eingeleitet, ediert, übersetzt und mit interpretierenden Essays versehen, edited by E. Reinmuth, 3–​31. Tübingen. Webb, R. 2013. “Mime and the Romance.” In The Romance between Greece and the East, edited by T. Whitmarsh and S. Thomson, 285–​299. Cambridge. West, S. 1974. “Joseph and Asenath: A Neglected Greek Romance.” CQ 24: 70–​81. Whitmarsh, T. 2001. Greek Literature and the Roman Empire: The Politics of Imitation. Oxford. Whitmarsh, T. 2005. The Second Sophistic. Cambridge. Whitmarsh, T. 2007. “Josephus, Joseph and the Greek Novel.” Ramus 36: 78–​95. Whitmarsh, T. 2013. Beyond the Second Sophistic: Adventures in Greek Postclassicism. Oxford. Whitmarsh, T., and S. Thomson, eds. 2013. The Romance between Greece and the East. Cambridge. Wilamowitz-​Möllendorff, U. von. 1900. “Asianismus und Atticismus.” Hermes 35: 1–​52.

Chapter 3

Was There a L at i n Sec ond Soph i st i c ? Thomas Habinek

During the period known as the Greek Second Sophistic, Latin literary and intellectual culture continued apace. Although the Latin textual record from the first and second centuries ce is dominated by genres which the Romans either claimed they had invented (satire) or had long since made their own (history, epic, drama, epistolography), Latin authors were aware of, and in many instances participated in, discourses and practices previously regarded as Greek, such as display speeches, poetry contests, certain types of panegyric oratory, and learned dispute. Engagement with contemporary Greek culture is unsurprising—​after all, most elite Romans were bilingual in Greek and Latin, Roman education included study of Greek history and literature, and Roman national mythology, as transmitted in classic works by Cicero, Vergil, Ovid, and others, had long presented the Romans as inheritors and protectors of Greek art and thought. What is perhaps surprising, or at least in need of explanation, is the guarded attitude with which Roman authors approached the vibrant culture of contemporary Greece. There was a Latin Second Sophistic, of a sort, but during the period treated in this volume it never quite eclipsed more traditional forms of literary and cultural activity. Why this was the case, and what the similarities and disparities between Greek and Latin intellectual cultures under the early empire tell us about both, are the concerns of this chapter.

Declamation and Downward Mobility The fate of one Valerius Licinianus as reported by Pliny the Younger provides useful insight into the actions and attitudes of elite Romans in the face of Greek cultural assertion. A man of praetorian rank, and, as Pliny tells it, among the most eloquent orators at Rome (“inter eloquentissimos causarum actores”; Plin. Ep. 4.11.1), Licinianus

26   Introduction was implicated in a scandal involving the Vestal Virgin Claudia under the emperor Domitian. Although Nerva reduced Licinianus’s sentence by relegating him to Sicily, the former praetor was now a mere professor. Forced to abandon the toga of citizenship, he dressed like a Greek (“cum Graeco pallio amictus”; Ep. 4.11.3) while declaiming (declamare) in Latin. Once a senator, Licinianus had now become an exile; once an orator, now a rhetor (“ut exsul de senatore, rhetor de oratore”; Ep. 4.11.1). In telling the tale of Licinianus, Pliny’s primary concern is to reflect on the vagaries of fortune under the emperor Domitian and, it would seem, to offer at least a partial rehabilitation of his victim’s reputation. But the language Pliny uses is highly informative, with regard to both Licinianus’s activities and his assessment of them. To be an orator is to use eloquence to real-​world ends, to have an impact on the fate of others. To be a rhetor or, as Licinianus is also called, a professor is to fall short as a Roman and perhaps as a man. The Greek dress, the Sicilian location, the bilious and self-​pitying tone of the remarks attributed to Licinianus together differentiate him from his former Roman self and mark him as, in effect, a Latin sophist. Indeed, like the Greek sophists familiar from Philostratus, Licinianus gives an informal preface (Latin praefatio, Ep. 4.11.2, 4.11.14, corresponding to Greek prolalia) to his declamatory performance, a practice Pliny elsewhere derides (Sherwin-​White 1985, 115–​116). And although Pliny transmits only a few phrases, they smack of sophistic self-​consideration (“What sort of game are you playing, Fortune, making professors out of senators—​and senators out of professors?”) while also alluding to the (contravened) expectation of performance in Greek: “for after he had composed himself and examined his garb, he intoned ‘in Latin shall I declaim’ ” (“Latine, inquit, declamaturus sum”; Ep. 4.11.3). To Pliny the performance is distressing, even pitiable (“tristia et miseranda”), just what you would expect of someone who sullied his studies with sexual crimes (“qui haec ipsa studia incesti scelere macularit”; Ep. 4.11.4), but the implication seems to be that Licinianus’s behavior would be demeaning even if it were not the outcome of a charge of inchastity. The tone Pliny adopts with regard to Licinianus is representative of the Roman elite’s take on rhetorical exercise and the men who profess it more generally: it’s good and useful, but only if directed toward practical ends. Even if the language is Latin, there’s something vaguely Hellenic about the practice, and only a Greek, or failed Roman, would indulge in it exclusively. Yet behind the pity and disdain lies the realization that Latin speakers had long practiced declamation and other types of competitive verbal performance. The anomaly in Licinianus’s case is not that he declaims in Latin, but that he does so while dressed like a Greek and that for him declamation marks a step down from real oratory rather than a preparation for a practical career. Latin declaimers are well known from Seneca the Elder’s memoirs of the rhetoric schools of the early principate, where they perform alongside a handful of speakers of Greek; public contests in oratorical display were held by Caligula at Lyons; the emperor Claudius was a competent declaimer as a youth (Suet. Claud. 4.6); Nero was awarded the crown in Latin oratory and poetry in the face of stiff competition from other eminent men (Suet. Ner. 12.3); oratorical contests in both Latin and Greek seem to have formed part of the cycle of Domitianic festivals as well; Vespasian acknowledged the importance of rhetorical training by establishing

Was There a Latin Second Sophistic?    27 chairs of Greek and Latin eloquence (Suet. Vesp. 18.1); and a collection of Latin school declamations, possibly dating to the second century ce, has survived the great triage of textual history (Shackleton Bailey 2006; Winterbottom 1984). Most of this information would have been familiar to Pliny’s audience, as would the stern critique of other-​wordly declamation by the Latin rhetorician Quintilian and, quite possibly, the satirization of the practice in Petronius’s Satyricon. Pliny’s attitude toward Licinianus is thus shaped by a cultural discourse that regards public display of verbal fluency as admirable, but only to a point. A similar anxiety about self-​serving exhibitionism is also manifest in Pliny’s remarks on the circulation and recitation of his own speeches. Pliny is proud of his work as a practical orator, mentioning especially his achievements in the centumviral courts (Ep. 4.16.1–​2, 6.33) and in trials before the senate (Ep. 5.20, 7.6), but evinces a certain reticence when it comes to recitation and publication. For example, he leaves it up to Saturninus to decide whether the speech he gave at the dedication of the municipal library in Como is worthy of further distribution (Ep. 1.18). Similarly, he agrees to give a recitation of one of his speeches (“oratio”; Ep. 2.19.1) as a favor to his addressee Cerealis, but only if Cerealis first reviews it. Pliny discusses the conflicting expectations of audiences at a trial or a recitation, but he convinces himself of the validity of the latter occasion provided the audience is limited to the “highly erudite” (“eruditissimum quemque”; Ep. 2.19.9). Presumably their judgment will not be swayed by the charm (“dulcia”; 2.19.6) and aural pleasure (“sonantia”; 2.19.6) that in Pliny’s view appeal to the ignorant (“imperiti”; 2.19.8). In other letters, we learn that recitation (before a select group of friends) is an aid not to legal understanding but to the literary quality of the work in question, since those in attendance will be expected to offer corrections and suggestions for improvement (5.13, 7.17). As Pliny succinctly puts it, “I want praise not when I am reciting but when I am being read” (“Nec vero ego dum recito laudari, sed dum legor cupio”; Ep. 7.17.7). In his view, the primary aim of recitation is to produce an edifying text rather than a pleasurable embodied performance (cf. Gurd 2012, 105–​126). Yet such performance is precisely what Pliny ascribes to the visiting Greek sophist Isaeus in a detailed description contained in Letter 2.3 (see also Philostr. VS 1.20; Juv. 3.74). Isaeus receives a more positive assessment than Licinianus, but then Isaeus is never more (or less) than a virtuoso performer. Pliny in effect recounts the various stages of the display speech—​proem, invitation to others to pose a challenge, narrative, enthymeme, and so on—​expressing special admiration for Isaeus’s memory and volubility. But the story is not without bite: Isaeus can afford to be sweet, genuine, and straightforward (“dulcis . . . sincerus . . . simplex”; Ep. 2.3.1, 2.3.5) because he deals with unreality (“ficta causa”; 2.3.6). In contrast, says Pliny, those of us who work in the forum and engage in real-​life disputes inevitably acquire a streak of malice (“Nos enim, qui in foro verisque litibus terimur, multum malitiae quamvis nolimus addiscimus”; Ep. 2.3.5). Ultimately, Isaeus’s display oratory is wholesome entertainment, a useful occupation for a genial senior citizen or a young man in training—​and a curiosity piquant enough to entice Pliny’s correspondent back to Rome, or so Pliny hopes. Pliny makes no mention of Isaeus’s role as tutor of the future emperor Hadrian (on which Oliver 1949; Smith

28   Introduction 1997), yet it is hard not to read his cautious praise of Isaeus as an attempt to balance a variety of political, social, and cultural concerns. Pliny’s studied reluctance to play the sophist puts him in a bind when he is called upon to deliver and then repeat a panegyric, or formal speech of praise, in honor of the emperor Trajan. The original speech fulfilled Pliny’s political duty as consul and thus required no apology. But the three-​day recitation, to discerning friends, of an amplified version elicits an elaborate justification:  they insisted, not me (Ep. 3.18.4), the learned audience was most approving of the most serious sections (no pleasure-​seekers they!: Ep. 3.18.8), and besides there is precedent, not among today’s Greeks, but among the idealized ancients, such as Aeschines and Demosthenes (Ep. 2.3; 4.5). It is as if Pliny is embarrassed by the very artificiality of the setting for his encore performance—​the same artificiality that made possible some of the great achievements of Greek Second Sophistic, such as Dio Chrysostom’s orations on kingship. Perhaps the strongest evidence of Pliny’s desire to contain and redirect the force of sophistic display is the very form of his letters. Unlike Cicero’s, which for the most part provide a transcription of daily events, comings and goings, even mood swings; or Seneca’s, which illustrate and impart a Stoic-​inflected moral pedagogy, Pliny’s read like a display of the writer’s broad knowledge and wide range of cultivated interests. Even the pretense that Pliny’s letters are a response to queries from multiple correspondents echoes the sophistic practice of responding extempore to any topic proposed by the audience. The difference is that through the barrier of written correspondence or invitation-​only recitation from a script, Pliny avoids making his physical presence the focus of attention, nor does he suffer the humiliation (for an elite Roman) of appearing to be at the beck and call of others. Cultural capital mattered for a Roman as it did for a Greek, but the case of Pliny suggests that it needed to be exhibited through different means.

Performing Erudition If Pliny supplies a Latin response to the challenge of sophistic oratory or declamation, the miscellanist Aulus Gellius exemplifies Roman awareness of and reaction to Greek sophistic claims to erudition. A significant aspect of the sophistic movement was purification of language—​in effect the creation of a stylized classical idiom that differentiated the intellectual elite from the common folk (Swain 1996). Thanks in part to their careful study of earlier texts, Greek sophists came to be known as experts on all sorts of antiquarian matters. The renowned Gallo-​Greek intellectual Favorinus composed a Miscellaneous History that “crossed the boundaries between philosophy, natural history, geography, mathematics, ethnography, and so forth” (Whitmarsh 2001, 115). Aelian, although Italian-​born, boasted of having relied entirely on Greek sources in compiling his treatise On the Characteristics of Animals (Sandy 1997, 75). According to Philostratus (VS 565), Herodes Atticus, the sophist turned consul, wrote “handbooks and epitomes

Was There a Latin Second Sophistic?    29 containing in small compass the plucked flowers of classical learning” (Sandy 1997, 73). Other works of the sort are ascribed to Pamphila of Epidauros and Pamphilus of Alexandria (both first century ce). So commonplace were miscellanies that Gellius could poke fun at their authors’ search for novel titles in the proem to his own compilation, named after the nights in Attica it (allegedly) recalled. Yet despite Gellius’s modest claim to use excerpting and note-​taking as an honorable pastime to fill long winter nights, it’s clear that recondite knowledge, both his own and others’, carried social force, at least in his view. Indeed, Gellius seems as much concerned with displaying the proper attitude toward erudition as he does with getting his facts straight (Keulen 2009; Rust 2009). In the preface to Attic Nights he expresses the hope that he will save his busy readers from making errors of language that are disgraceful and boorish (“turpis, agrestis”: Gell. NA praef. 12), but throughout the twenty volumes of anecdotes that follow, those terms of disapprobation are as likely to apply to actions as to words. Already in book 1 we watch Herodes Atticus silence a prattling young pseudo-​Stoic with a brief citation from a book of Epictetus. Although the young philosopher considered others clumsy and boorish (“rudis, agrestis”; NA 1.2.4), it is clear by the end of the episode that he has really only named his own failings. Later in the same book (1.10) Favorinus is shown chiding a young man who uses excessively archaic and recherché language in everyday conversation, while in yet another chapter (1.15) Gellius mobilizes his own set of citations against volubility (the standard vice of contemporary Greeks according to Romans: see Petrochilos 1974), quoting authors from Homer and Hesiod to Sallust and Cicero. Of Gellius’s numerous interlocutors, Favorinus receives the most attention, almost all of it favorable, at least at first glance. Repeatedly he is shown not just to have extraordinary control of the canons of Greek and Latin literature (e.g., NA 20.1) but also to know how to pose questions or present citations that will allow his challengers to defeat themselves. For Gellius, he is Favorinus noster (NA 3.3.6; 5.11), ours, as if there is a theirs against whom Gellius and Favorinus are to be positioned. But whether the connection between the two men is personal, ideological, or social in basis, it is not primarily linguistic, for while Gellius composes exclusively in Latin, Favorinus—​as far as we can tell from other sources—​wrote and declaimed in Greek. Indeed, the ease with which Gellius incorporates Favorinus into Latin-​speaking contexts is striking, perhaps part of an attempt to rehabilitate the author and teacher who had suffered exile from Rome under the emperor Hadrian (Keulen 2009: 98–​104). Favorinus is shown accompanying Gellius (or vice versa) in Athens (1.2), Ostia (18.1), Antium (17.10), and Rome (14.1, 16.3), including the Palatine (4.1, 20.1), the library in Trajan’s forum (13.25), and the Temple of Carmentis (18.7). Favorinus’s cultural and political crossover potential may also explain Gellius’s repeated insistence that his learning, as opposed to that of his challengers, serves useful ends for human life. In contrast to the image of Favorinus presented by the Greek sources, Gellius depicts him as specifically avoiding ostentation (e.g., 4.1.19). Gellius’s Favorinus, like Gellius himself, sticks to locales favored by Roman gentlemen—​indeed a striking feature of the “Attic” Nights is that the bulk of the anecdotes in which location is specified take place in and around

30   Introduction Rome (Johnson 2010, 101–​102), in contrast to the moveable feast characteristic of a work like Plutarch’s Sympotic Questions (see König 2007). Favorinus’s role as a traveling showman is virtually written out of Gellius’s record, and his immense erudition is shown as applied in socially constructive ways. The one instance in which Gellius translates a lengthy Greek dissertation by Favorinus involves a defense of maternal breast-​feeding (NA 12.1), a medical or scientific topic appropriate for the “richness and abundance” of Favorinus’s Greek (at NA 16.3.2, Favorinus, although in Rome, switches to Greek to converse with doctors). Even when Favorinus stoops to embarrassing topics, such as the praise of quartan fever, it’s to sharpen his wits or practice verbal agility or gain experience in overcoming difficulties (NA 17.12.1–​2), and in any event the outcome seems to have been a series of sententiae consigned to books rather than a long-​winded declamation. When Favorinus issues a guideline against monopolizing conversation at a convivium (2.22), Gellius immediately puts it into action by contradicting Favorinus on the topic at hand, even as he admires the elegance and affability (elegantia, comitas) of his presentation. As Gellius explains in another context, the point of learned inquiry is not to create material for declamation but to acquire knowledge (7.8.4). Despite his seeming domestication in Attic Nights, the Gellian Favorinus is not quite up to tangling with the most powerful Latin-​writing intellectual of the Antonine era, namely the consul Fronto, tutor and (on his telling) lifelong friend of Marcus Aurelius. The historical Fronto, it should be noted, had many of the hallmarks of Greek sophists, yet like his Roman predecessor Pliny, evinced reluctance to flaunt his talents (on Fronto in relationship to Greek sophistic, see Swain 2004). He is and was known primarily as a teacher. He achieved great wealth and political prominence, again on his telling, thanks to his eloquence and intellectual cultivation. He wrote laudes or encomia on seemingly trivial or unexpected topics, such as smoke, dust, and negligence (Laudes Fumi et Pulveris, Laudes Neglegentiae: Hauler and van den Hout 1988, 215 and 203 respectively), as well as on the emperors Hadrian and Antoninus Pius (M. Caes. 2.4; Eumenius, Panegyrici Latini 8 (V) 14). In his letters, he tells Marcus that an orator must always seek to please the populus, in contrast to predecessors like Seneca, and especially Pliny, who express discomfort with too direct an appeal to the common listener. Elsewhere he defends rhetoric, or rather the eloquence it produces, against the pretentious attacks of some philosophers (Ad M. Antoninum de Eloquentia liber and De Orationibus liber: Hauler and van den Hout 1988, 135–​142, 153–​160). He voices no objection when Marcus writes enthusiastically of the Greek encomiasts he has been listening to in Naples (M. Caes. 2.11), a demurral that contrasts with Antonius Iulianus’s critique of a young Roman student, also in Naples, who rather too enthusiastically adopts the style and manner of a Greek declaimer (Gell. NA 9.15). Yet in other respects Fronto shies away from the exhibitionist and quarrelsome tendencies of the sophists. When Marcus wants to talk about the sophist Polemon (the archrival of Favorinus), Fronto deflects the query into a discussion of his own remarks on a different Polemon, the earlier philosopher, in a speech before the Senate (“pro Polemone rhetore  .  .  .  philosophum reddidi, peratticum”; M. Caes. 2.2.5). Fronto is proud of his learning, even admits to taking some of his ideas from Horace, but it is

Was There a Latin Second Sophistic?    31 learning put to an immediate practical end in senatorial debate. Elsewhere, Fronto asks his son-​in-​law to compare his speech on behalf of the Bithynians with Cicero’s defense of Sulla: although little is known of the context of Fronto’s speech, his remarks suggest that it deals with a genuine legal controversy (Ad Am. 1.14.2, 1.15.1; Champlin 1980, 67–​68). More generally, much of Fronto’s correspondence reads like an updated version of Isocrates’s (and perhaps other Greek writers’) advice to princes. For Fronto, as for Pliny, publicity for one’s erudition is achieved at second hand—​through the circulation of writings, the testimony of important friends, and a reputation for hosting events in which others compete for attention (Johnson 2010, 138–​148). Only in the senate or courtroom does one put oneself on display, and even then as a means to an external end. The restraint that Fronto communicates through his letters to Marcus and others becomes a theme of his appearances in Aulus Gellius’s Attic Nights, where he is treated with the ancient equivalent of kid gloves. In one episode, Favorinus approaches Fronto, Gellius in tow, and starts a discussion about the paucity of color words in Latin versus Greek (NA 2.26). Fronto gently corrects Favorinus, while acknowledging that Greek in general is more verbose than Latin. Fronto’s little speech manages to cite Vergil, Pacuvius, Ennius, and Nigidius, all in short compass, and Favorinus is suitably impressed, indeed he gushes over (“exosculatus”; NA 2.26.20) Fronto’s knowledge and choice manner of speaking, before trumping his citations with another from Ennius. But Fronto, unlike other interlocutors in Gellius, doesn’t take the bait, and the episode ends as a genteel standoff. In another incident, Fronto gently chides an acquaintance for wrongly using a plural of the collective noun arena, or “sand” (NA 19.8.3–​18). Fronto’s recollection of what Julius Caesar had to say on the point is verified when a copy of Caesar’s De Analogia “is brought forward” (“prolato libro”; NA 19.8.7) by some unnamed participant in the event. But Fronto modestly admits to not knowing the full story on why some nouns are only singular, some only plural, and encourages his interlocutor to keep an eye out for telling examples when reading reputable authors from the past. It’s left to Gellius to explain that Fronto almost certainly knew what would be found in those other authors, but wanted his audience to get in the habit of looking things up for themselves (which Gellius, characteristically, proceeds to do). Fronto, even more than Favorinus, knows when to speak and when to remain silent and how to use erudition to socially productive ends. Like Favorinus, the Latin rhetor Antonius Romanus, and Gellius’s respected teacher Sulpicius Apollinaris, the Fronto of the Attic Nights serves as an antitype to all of those brash and boorish characters whose learning is superficial and eloquence too ready for their own good. To what extent any of these characters resembled in real life their depictions by Gellius is impossible to say. But through them Gellius constructs an idealized Roman intellectual coterie composed of those who are neither too young nor too brash nor, it would seem, too Greek. Like Pliny before him, he seeks to adapt contemporary Greek cultural practices to longstanding Latin norms of practicality and restraint. His network of gentlemen-​scholars, like Greek sophists in their own cities, of course uses cultural capital and linguistic discrimination to differentiate themselves from the common people in their midst. But in the writings of Pliny and Gellius that differentiation

32   Introduction still must follow distinctively Roman or Latin protocols of self-​presentation. Latin literary and intellectual culture, on their view, has the power and right to establish and enforce its own norms.

Belated Belatedness For all their apparent confidence, Pliny, Fronto, and perhaps especially Gellius protest too much. That is to say, their representation of a distinctively Latin style of erudition and distinctively Roman use of declamation may be, in historical terms, too little too late. Or to put it yet another way, they (unfortunately) got what they wished for: practical, political Latin contrasted with cultural, sophisticated Greek. The rise of Hellenophile emperors, such as Hadrian and Marcus Aurelius, seems to have precipitated just such a split and with it a diminution in the quantity and quality of Latin letters (Bardon 1952, 2:190–​248). Indeed, emperors had long been promoters of a certain version of Hellenism in opposition to the Western aristocracy’s insistence on the preeminence of Latin. In this context it’s unsurprising that the early emperors most often cited for their philhellenism (i.e., Nero and Domitian) receive the harshest treatment in Latin literary and historical sources. But their indulgence in Greek-​style amusements was indeed child’s play compared to what came later, such as the disproportionate role of Greek under the Severans. Although the role of empress Julia Domna in fostering Greek intellectual culture is still subject to debate (e.g., Bowersock 1969; Levick 2007, 107–​123), it is nonetheless noteworthy that Greek writers such as Philostratus, Galen, Dio Cassius, Athenaeus, and perhaps Diogenes Laertius plied their trade in Rome without evident pushback from a Latin intelligentsia. (Surviving Latin writing from the period deals chiefly with juridical matters.) The Greek Second Sophistic ended in part because Greek intellectuals became central to the cultural life of Rome. What would be the point of articulating a nostalgic Greek alternative to Roman dominance at a time when the Roman court consisted of Greek-​speaking royals of African and Syrian descent? For a writer like Philostratus, the history to be recovered is that of the sophists themselves, in particular the stories of intellectual showmen like Apollonius of Tyana (to whom he devoted eight books of biography), Polemon of Smyrna (VS 530–​543), or Favorinus of Arelate (VS 489–​492). As so often in cultural history, to assign a name to a movement—​as Philostratus did to the Second Sophistic—​is akin to writing its obituary. If the spread of Roman power was a key factor in the rise of the Greek Second Sophistic, the fracturing and reconfiguration of the Roman Empire eventually led to a Latin movement of a comparable sort. A sense of displacement and deracination and a perceived need to reconnect with a lost past through erudition and purification of language characterize the Latin literature not of the first and second centuries ce but of the fourth. Figures like Symmachus, Praetextatus, the various writers of the late antique Latin panegyrics (panegyrici latini), and the professors of Bordeaux commemorated by

Was There a Latin Second Sophistic?    33 Ausonius are perhaps the closest equivalents Latin literature offers to the writers of the Greek Second Sophistic. To take but one example, Attius Tiro Delphidius, born at Bordeaux in the early fourth century ce, victor as a boy in a poetry contest to honor Jupiter, abandoned poetry and instead used his “tidal rush of eloquence” (Auson. Prof. Burd. 5.9) to curry favor with the emperor Julian through prosecution of an ex-​governor who probably also hailed from a distinguished intellectual clan (Sivan 1993a, 91–​93, and 1993b). Although his lawsuit failed, he achieved sufficient prominence to attach himself to the imperial usurper Procopius when he moved to Constantinople, only to be expelled upon his death. The poet—​and imperial advisor—​Ausonius expresses a certain malicious pleasure at Delphidius’s swift rise and fall, yet nonetheless admires his “eloquence, learning, and speed of thought and speech” (Auson. Prof. Burd. 5.1), applying a phrase—​“more torrentis freti”—​reminiscent of earlier Latin depictions of Greek sophists (e.g., “Isaeo torrentior” at Juv. 3.74; cf. Smith 1997). Like Pliny writing of Licinianus, Ausonius uses the case of Delphidius implicitly to reflect on his own situation. Ausonius, too, had used rhetorical and poetic prowess to approach the heights of power, serving as tutor and adviser to the emperor Gratian, only to find himself confined to the hinterlands when the political pendulum swung in another direction (Green 1991; Shanzer 1998). And like Delphidius, Ausonius made the circuit of Gallic cities in pursuit of learning and fame, without neglecting his early local ties. What differentiates the pair Ausonius-​Delphidius from Pliny-​Licinianus is of course Pliny’s ability to remain near the center of power. His authority as a writer depends to a large degree on his political and social standing. Ausonius, Delphidius, and Licinianus must continually draw upon their cultural capital to remain in the public eye. In this sense, they are no different from the vast majority of Greek sophists. And like the earlier Greek sophists, the Latin writers of the fourth century frequently evoke a classical past from which they are separated by an almost unbridgeable gap. For example, in his speech of thanksgiving to Gratian for naming him consul, the most recent example of a teacher so honored by an emperor that Ausonius can cite is Fronto, who flourished some two centuries earlier (Auson. Grat. act. 32). On the one hand, Ausonius valorizes his relationship with Gratian by citing Seneca, Quintilian, and Fronto as predecessors; yet, on the other hand, he calls attention to the gulf separating his historical period from theirs. As various modern historians have argued, Ausonius and his fellow Gallic aristocrats grappled with a displacement from the mainstream of Roman culture that was both geographic (Gaul versus Italy, Trier versus Constantinople) and temporal (i.e., the rupture caused by the breakaway imperium Galliarum of the third century ce). In their attempts to reestablish a connection with classical Rome, Gallic aristocrats like Ausonius echo the recovery efforts of Greek sophists with respect to their own past. Display oratory, erudition, renewed study of early imperial authors, attention to local tradition (on which, see König 2007), and especially the self-​conscious classicizing of the Latin language all correspond to the efforts of first-​and second-​century ce Greek intellectuals to resist the disorienting effects of Roman military and political domination. Ausonius, his contemporaries, and the professors and kinsmen he honors in his

34   Introduction poetry faced an historical situation that had little in common with the early imperial Rome whose Latin authors they echoed, imitated, and praised, but resembled, perhaps more than they knew, the challenges and opportunities faced by Plutarch, Dio Chrysostom, and Herodes Atticus.

The Exception that Proves the Rule? Modern scholars’ identification of displacement as both the historical origin and governing trope of a Second Sophistic, whether Latin or Greek, receives corroboration from the career of the one second-​century writer who unabashedly plays the part of Latin sophist, namely Apuleius of Madaura. As Sandy and Harrison have noted, Apuleius’s career and writings follow the pattern of contemporary Greek intellectual performers (Harrison 2000; Sandy 1997; the critique of Swain 2001 seems overstated). Apuleius is wealthy, from the provinces, has important connections outside his home town, and uses his superior education to maintain and improve his social standing. Although his novel The Golden Ass is his best-​known work, his oeuvre included popularizing philosophy and translations of Greek scholarly or technical studies. Especially relevant to his reputation as a sophist is the collection known as Florida, or “Choice Blooms,” which seems to be an editor’s selection of passages from Apuleius’s writings and speeches that can be used to illustrate rhetorical devices and motifs (Harrison 2000). The process of selection turned Apuleius’s writing into a miscellany of its own, with topics ranging from description of Carthage, to extended metaphor of philosopher as bird, to edifying anecdotes about Socrates. Another important work by Apuleius, his Apologia, or defense speech at a trial on a charge of magic, reveals the extent to which sophistic developments could inform the tried-​and-​true Roman genre of courtroom oratory. On the one hand, the speech reflects the ample style, legal knowledge, respect for written documents, and attention to the characteristics of the particular audience that are manifest in the best of Ciceronian oratory and serve as hallmarks of traditional Roman rhetorical training (e.g. Quintilian). Yet, on the other hand, the speech also contains passages that would have struck Cicero and probably even Pliny as strange digressions: a discourse on mirrors that closely resembles Seneca’s diatribe in Natural Questions; an exploration of ichthyology; long citations, with analysis, of amatory poetry. Unlike the proper Roman orator, who through strict adherence to rules of dress and deportment strives not to make a spectacle of himself, Apuleius is all too happy to have the audience inspect his looks, his finances, his taste in food. These innovations are in some sense justified by the most striking innovation of all, namely that Apuleius defends himself, in contrast to the classical practice of having a patron do one’s talking. Apuleius even goes so far as to boast that he baited his opponents into filing their suit against him. Whatever the circumstances of the trial that prompted the Apology, Apuleius leaves the impression that he relishes the opportunity to put himself and his skills onstage, and repeatedly

Was There a Latin Second Sophistic?    35 contrasts his virtuosity with his rivals’ ineptitude and imperfect education (e.g., Apol. 55, 66, 83, 100). Trying to win based on who one is rather than the facts of the case is a standard feature of classical rhetoric. But Apuleius aims to win based on what he knows and how he talks. His confidence in linguistic surface, more than anything else, marks him as a Latin sophist. But not a Roman sophist, or at least not a Latin sophist at Rome. As far as we can tell, Apuleius spent his career almost exclusively in Roman North Africa. Like his Greek counterparts, he is linked to but not part of the imperial metropole. His education and rhetorical skill differentiate him from the vast majority of locals, but aren’t enough to allow integration into the center of power. If Greek sophists, generally speaking, reclaim an idealized Greek past as an alternative source of cultural authority to the political and military power of Rome, Apuleius replicates their strategies of self-​promotion in an equivalently non-​Roman context. Both he and his Greek sophistic contemporaries strive to overcome a sense of displacement from an authorizing past or present sources of power, through self-​promotion, agonism, wit, and erudition. Their style—​both personal and literary—​is strikingly different from that of their Latin rivals and contemporaries, who promulgated, for as long as possible, the myth of the self-​contained, practical, concise, manly Roman.

Conclusion Was there a Latin Second Sophistic during the first and second centuries ce? Yes, but not one that most Latin authors would care to admit to. Although they interacted with Greek intellectuals, practiced and listened to declamations, studied the classics of their own and of the Greek literary tradition, and were proud of their learning, much of it Greek in origin, they insisted that their efforts were directed toward utility rather than enjoyment, communal rather than individual improvement, and circulation among readers rather than performance before adoring crowds. Although they sought to transmit knowledge, they resisted becoming teachers for pay. They prided themselves on their ethical comportment rather than their physical presence and charisma as performers. Through their subtle self-​definition in contrast to Greek sophists, writers like Pliny, Gellius, and Fronto both sought and promoted the political and social advantages that still accrued to a Latin-​speaking intellectual elite centered on the city of Rome.

Further Reading On Pliny’s self-​presentation, and especially his attitude toward performance and reading, see Gurd 2012. The history of declamation at Rome is treated succinctly by Winterbottom 1984. Gunderson 2000 and Habinek 2005 discuss the centrality of proper oratorical comportment for elite Roman male identity. Roman writers’ disdain for Greeks is well documented by Petrochilos 1974, but there seems to be no corresponding study of Roman imitation or

36   Introduction adaptation of Greek practices during the period in question. Aulus Gellius has received a great deal of attention in recent years: Holford-​Strevens and Vardi 2003, Gunderson 2009, Keulen 2009, and Rust 2009 offer a range of perspectives on his aims and achievements. On Fronto, Champlin 1980 is still the standard work. Swain 2004 is insightful on his relationship with Marcus Aurelius. Harrison 2000 is a good introduction to the literary career of Apuleius. For Latin literature of the fourth century ce, Green 1991 is a helpful starting point. Herzog 1989 is a comprehensive reference, in German. For key issues and themes characteristic of early imperial Latin literature, see Bartsch 1993 and Vout 2007. In general, study of Roman intellectual culture is still hampered by longstanding disciplinary divides between Greek and Latin, poetry and prose, and literature, philosophy, and history. The present chapter is a small attempt at offering a more integrated account.

Appendix: Key Latin Authors, 60–​250 ce Persius Flaccus, Aulus, 34–​62. Satire Lucan, 39–​65. Epic poetry, epigram Seneca the Younger, 4 bce to 65 ce. Prose dialogue, letters, tragedies Petronius Arbiter, ob. 66? Novel, prose and verse Pliny the Elder, 23/​24–​79. History, natural history Silius Italicus, ca. 26–​102. Epic poetry Quintilian, ca. 35 to ca. 95. Treatises on rhetoric Frontinus, ob. 103/​4. Technical manuals. Martial, ca. 40 to before 104. Epigram Statius, Publius Papinius, ca. 50 to ca. 96. Poetry, epic and praise Pliny the Younger, 61–​112. Letters, panegyric Tacitus, ca. 56 to ca. 125. Prose dialogue, history Suetonius, ca. 70 to ca. 130? Prose biography, miscellany Juvenal, fl. 110–​130. Satire Fronto (= Marcus Cornelius Fronto), ca. 95 to ca. 166. Oratory declamation, letters Marcus Aurelius, 121–​180. Latin letters (included in correspondence with Fronto), Greek philosophical memoirs Apuleius, b. ca. 125. Novel, declamation, forensic oratory Aulus Gellius, b. ca. 125. Prose miscellany. Hyginus, perhaps second century ce. Handbooks of mythology and astronomy Sextus Pompeius Festus, late second century ce. Scholar, abridger Aemilius Papinianus, ob. 212. Jurist Domitius Ulpianus, ob. 223. Jurist Iulius Paulus, fl. first quarter third century ce. Jurist Tertullian, ca. 160 to ca. 240. Christian doctrine and apologetic Minucius Felix, fl. 200–​240. Christian apologetic Censorinus, fl. 238. Grammarian

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Was There a Latin Second Sophistic?    37 Bowersock, G. W. 1969. Greek Sophists in the Roman Empire. Oxford. Champlin, E. 1980. Fronto and Antonine Rome. Cambridge, MA. Green, R. 1991. The Works of Ausonius. Oxford. Gunderson, E. 2000. Staging Masculinity: The Rhetoric of Performance in the Roman World. Ann Arbor, MI. Gunderson, E. 2009. “Nox Philologiae”: Aulus Gellius and the Fantasy of the Roman Library. Madison, WI. Gurd, S. 2012. Work in Progress:  Literary Revision as Social Performance in Ancient Rome. Oxford and New York. Habinek, T. 2005. Ancient Rhetoric and Oratory. Oxford and Malden, MA. Harrison, S. J. 2000. Apuleius: A Latin Sophist. Oxford. Hauler, E., and P. J. van den Hout, eds. 1988. M. Cornelii Frontonis epistulae schedis tam editis quam ineditis. Leipzig. Herzog, R., ed. 1989. Handbuch der lateinischen Literatur der Antike. Vol. 5, Restauration und Erneuerung, 284–​374 n. Chr. Munich. Holford-​Strevens, L., and A. Vardi, eds. 2004. The Worlds of Aulus Gellius. Oxford. Johnson, W. 2010. Readers and Reading Culture in the High Roman Empire. Oxford. Keulen, W. 2009. Gellius the Satirist: Roman Cultural Authority in “Attic Nights”. Mnemosyne Supplement 297. Leiden and Boston. König, J. 2007. “Fragmentation and Coherence in Plutarch’s Sympotic Questions.” In Ordering Knowledge in the Roman Empire, edited by J. König and T. Whitmarsh, 43–​68. Cambridge. Leach, E. 1990. “The Politics of Self-​Presentation: Pliny’s Letters and Roman Portrait Sculpture.” Cl. Ant. 9: 14–​39. Levick, B. 2007. Julia Domna: Syrian Empress. London and New York. Petrochilos, N. 1974. Roman Attitudes to the Greeks. Bibliotheke N. Saripolou, 25. Athens. Oliver, J. H. 1949. “Two Athenian Poets.” Hesperia supplement 8: 243–​258. Rust, E. 2009. “Ex Angulis Secretisque Librorum”: Reading, Writing, and Using Miscellaneous Knowledge in the “Noctes Atticae”. PhD dissertation, University of Southern California, Los Angeles. Sandy, G. 1997. The Greek World of Apuleius: Apuleius and the Second Sophistic. Leiden. Shackleton Bailey, D. R. 2006. [Quintilian]. The Lesser Declamations. 2 vols. Cambridge, MA. Shanzer, D. 1998. “The Date and Literary Context of Ausonius’s Mosella.” Historia 47: 204–​233. Sherwin-​White, A. N. 1985. The Letters of Pliny: A Historical and Social Commentary. Oxford. Sivan, H. 1993a. Ausonius of Bordeaux: Genesis of a Gallic Aristocracy. London. Sivan, H. 1993b. “Numerian the Intellectual.” Rh. Mus. 136: 360–​365. Smith, W. S. 1997. “Juvenal and the Sophist Isaeus.” CW 91: 39–​45. Swain, S. 1996. Hellenism and Empire: Language, Classicism, and Power in the Greek World, ad 50–​250. Oxford. Swain, S. 2001. Review of Harrison 2000. CR 51: 269–​270. Swain, S. 2004. “Bilingualism and Biculturalism in Antonine Rome.” In The Worlds of Aulus Gellius, edited by L. Holford-​Strevens and A. Vardi, 3–​40. Oxford. Vout, C. 2007. Power and Eroticism in Imperial Rome. Cambridge. Whitmarsh, T. 2001. Greek Literature and the Roman Empire: The Politics of Imitation. Oxford. Winterbottom, M. 1984. The Minor Declamations ascribed to Quintilian. Berlin and New York.

Pa rt  I I

L A N G UAG E A N D I DE N T I T Y

Chapter 4

At ticism and Asia ni sm Lawrence Kim

Introduction In 1900, Ulrich von Wilamowitz-​Möllendorff published an article entitled “Asianismus und Atticismus” in which he sought to put to rest a scholarly debate, by then almost twenty-​five years old, over the essential nature of the Second Sophistic. The dispute involved a number of prominent German scholars—​including Erwin Rohde, Georg Kaibel, Wilhelm Schmid, and Eduard Norden—​and centered on the relative importance of two stylistic tendencies within the Second Sophistic: on the one side, an “Asianic” (asianisch) style, described in predominantly pejorative terms and associated with word-​ play, musical rhythms, repetitive sound effects, parallelism, and balanced clauses; on the other, an “Attic” (attisch) style, self-​consciously set against the “Asianic,” that hearkened back to the prose of fifth-​and fourth-​century Athenian writers. In his groundbreaking book on the ancient novel, Rohde had characterized imperial orators as “Asianic” (1876, 288–​291), a view that he clarified (e.g., exempting Aelius Aristides) and amplified in his 1886 response to Kaibel (1885), who had argued that Atticism was in fact the driving ideology of the Second Sophistic. A year later, in the first volume of his monumental Der Atticismus (1887–​1897, 1:27–​7 1), Rohde’s student Schmid proposed that, while the initial generations of sophists may have been asianisch, an “Attic” turn had occurred in the second century ce, under the influence of the sophist Herodes Atticus. Finally, Norden (1898), in a spirit of compromise, suggested that Kaibel and Rohde had both been correct: the Second Sophistic (and indeed the entire history of Greek and Latin prose) was but one stage in an eternal struggle between what he now called the “new” (Asianic) and “old” (Attic) styles (cf. Norden 1898, 353–​354). Wilamowitz’s article famously recast the terms of the debate. In fact, the article is much more expansive than its title might suggest; in it Wilamowitz provides a sweeping sketch of imperial Greek culture as a whole, one that would prove immensely influential for the better part of a century. To begin with, he pointed out that the term “Asian” was primarily a derogatory label cast upon one’s opponents and never used by individual

42   Language and Identity orators to characterize their own style (1900, 7, 24–​25). Moreover, it was only in use for roughly two generations, from ca. 50 bce to ca. 20 ce; later uses of “Asian” all refer back to this era (1900, 1–​7). Any reference to an “Asian” style for this period, or to an Attic vs. Asian split, was thus technically anachronistic. Nevertheless, Wilamowitz, following Rohde and Norden, asserted that Second Sophistic oratorical style could indeed be seen as connected to what was called “Asian” rhetoric in the late Hellenistic period; in this respect the Second Sophistic introduced nothing new (9–​15). But in a more sweeping and significant move, Wilamowitz claimed that any alleged dispute about style in the Second Sophistic was of far less importance than the fact that all of the educated imperial Greek elite, whatever style it chose, strove to write and speak in the long-​dead dialect of classical Attic in order to differentiate their language from the “regular” Greek of the masses (38–​52). Wilamowitz’s argument thus fell in line with what was to become the standard view of the Second Sophistic in the twentieth century: a society caught in the grip of the past, inspired to “imitate” the great classical writers in a fossilized and lifeless Attic dialect rather than to employ the naturally developing language to create a truly contemporary literature. Nowadays, of course, this picture of a decrepit, epigonal culture has fallen out of favor, replaced by visions of vibrancy, innovation, and the creative transformation of literary heritage and tradition. But Wilamowitz’s article was successful in one respect; in its wake, scholars lost interest in Asianism, and focused their attention upon the linguistic or lexico-​grammatical (rather than stylistic) Atticism that he had identified as the hallmark of Second Sophistic literature and culture. The most important recent work in this vein, for example, has taken up Wilamowitz’s insistence on the separation of elite, literary language from that of the masses and shown more extensively how central a role language played in the construction of elite Greek identity (Schmitz 1997, 67–​96; 110–​27; Swain 1996, 17–​64). At the same time, the influence of Wilamowitz has perhaps masked the fact that some of the problems motivating the nineteenth-​century debate have not yet fully been resolved. The scholarly proponents of Atticism and Asianism were focused on prose style (largely ignored in recent Second Sophistic literary criticism), but they were also arguing over the definition, vision, and evaluation of the Second Sophistic, and of Greek culture under the High Roman Empire as a whole. The scholars who felt that Second Sophistic culture was Asianic were responding to evidence provided by the texts themselves; the name itself may be misleading, pejorative, and inaccurate, but the tendencies it describes, especially those related to the styles of sophistic oratory, are very real. Moreover, the picture of the Second Sophistic presented by this evidence is somewhat at odds with the staid and conservative image suggested by accounts that focus on linguistic Atticism and the concomitant veneration of the past in imperial Greek culture. The tension between “old” and “new” styles articulated at the close of the nineteenth century speaks to a genuine ambivalence within the Second Sophistic, and, as I hope to show, it is this combination of a deep appreciation for the language and culture of the classical past and an enthusiasm for more flamboyant, artificial, and unclassical literary and oratorical styles that makes the period so interesting (cf. Whitmarsh 2005, 8–​10).

Atticism and Asianism    43

Atticism in the Second Sophistic Let us begin with the words ἀττικισμός, “Atticism,” and ἀττικίζειν, “to Atticize” (the cognate terms ἀττίκισις, also “Atticism,” and ἀττικιστής, “Atticist,” are much rarer). In the classical era, ἀττικισμός primarily refers to the political or military act of “siding with Athens”; similarly, the verb ἀττικίζειν means “to side with the Athenians.” But in the Hellenistic and early imperial periods ἀττικίζειν is used more often in the sense of “to speak in the Attic (Athenian) dialect” and tends to appear in discussions where a contrast is being made between speaking Attic and other Greek dialects, like Doric or Aeolic (e.g., [Dem.] On Style 177; Dio Chrys. 10.23). By the mid-​to late second century ce, however, we see a further broadening of usage:  ἀττικίζειν means not only “to side with Athens” or “to speak Attic,” but also “to speak classical Attic,” that is “to Atticize.”1 The doctor and philosopher Galen of Pergamum (129 to ca. 215 ce) makes this clear in a passage criticizing the word usage of οἱ ἀττικίζοντες (“those speaking Attic”): “I have used words [τοῖς ὀνόμασιν] as people today use them [ὡς οἱ νῦν ἄνθρωποι χρῶνται], since I believe that it is better to teach matters clearly than to speak Attic in an archaic manner [τοῦ παλαιῶς ἀττικίζειν: De aliment. facult. p. 359 K].” Elsewhere, he is more specific, distinguishing the Greek spoken by the Athenians of his day (νῦν) from the Attic spoken by their counterparts “six hundred years ago” (οἱ πρὸ ἑξακοσίων ἐτῶν Ἀθηναῖοι: De aliment. facult. p. 585 K), that is, the fifth century bce—​in the period we call “classical.” Similar phrasing by Galen’s contemporaries suggests that by the second half of the second century ce the primary meaning of ἀττικίζειν is “to Atticize,” that is, to reproduce the orthography, morphology, vocabulary, and syntax of a dialect that had long since “died” out as a spoken tongue. Galen’s frequent fulminations against the Atticizing insistence on using obsolete terms for various fruits, vegetables, and plants illustrate how concerns about language purity had entered even into the more esoteric realms of pharmacology and dietetics (Herbst 1911; Manetti 2009; Swain 1996, 56–​62). But the heart of Atticizing culture was undoubtedly the competitive sphere of imperial Greek oratory. Here our best sources are the satirist Lucian of Samosata (ca. 120–​180 ce) and the biographer and belle-​lettrist Philostratus of Lemnos (ca. 170–​250 ce). Lucian’s corpus features several memorable figures whose language failings are mercilessly ridiculed or skewered: Lexiphanes, who is so obsessed with linguistic novelty that he produces unintelligible prose (Lexiph., esp. 22–​25); the Solecist, who not only commits but does not even recognize egregious solecisms; the False Critic (Pseudol.), who is viciously attacked for laughing at Lucian’s incorrect use of the word ἀποφράς (“ill-​omened”); and the Teacher of Rhetoric (Rhet. praec. 16), who cynically recommends learning only a few characteristically Attic expressions and sprinkling them into speeches to affect an Atticist manner (on these and other figures, see Hall 1981, 252–​309; Jones 1972; Swain 1996, 45–​49). In a lighter vein, the satirical Judgement of the Vowels (Hopkinson 2008, 151–​160), where a jury of vowels hears Sigma’s suit against Tau for usurping his rightful position in many words (alluding to the characteristic -​ττ-​of Attic, preferred by Atticists over the -​σσ-​ of koinê),

44   Language and Identity shows how important dialectal details could be to those in Lucian’s social and intellectual circles (cf. further Demonax 26, Hist. conscr. 15; Ind. 26). In his Lives of the Sophists (VS), written in the 230s, Philostratus speaks of the Atticizing skill of several second-​and early third-​ century ce orators (Herodes Atticus and Aristocles: VS 568; Pollux of Naucratis: 592; Athenodorus: 594; Aelian of Praeneste: 624), and tells the occasional anecdote illuminating the sophistic fascination with language purity: the orator Philagrus (whom some have identified with Lucian’s Lexiphanes) utters a word criticized as “outlandish” (ἔκφυλον: 578) by a rival’s students; when asked “in which of the eminent authors” such a word appears, he defiantly responds, “In Philagrus!” Herodes Atticus manages to obtain an interview with a primitive man from the interior of Attica who speaks a pure, unadulterated Attic (553); he also has a slave from India whose incongruous insertion of Attic words into his native tongue serves as amusement for his guests (490). Even the language of Philostratus’s Apollonius of Tyana is “Attic” (ἡ γλῶττα Ἀττικῶς εἶχεν: Vit. Apoll. 1.7)—​never mind that the real Apollonius lived in the first century ce, prior to the advent of full-​blown linguistic Atticism. Then again, Philostratus assures us that it was not “hyper-​Atticizing” (οὐδ’. . . ὑπεραττικίζουσαν); “for [Apollonius] thought that an excessive degree of Attic was unpleasant” (ἀηδὲς γὰρ τὸ ὑπὲρ τὴν μετρίαν Ἀτθίδα ἡγεῖτο: 1.17). These examples point to the importance that speaking proper Attic commanded in rhetorical circles. Language use was one of the most obvious markers of “culture” or paideia, and by extension, elite status (Schmitz 1997, 83–​91; Swain 1996, 17–​42; Whitmarsh 2005, 45–​47). In the intensely competitive, face-​to-​face performance culture of the Second Sophistic, one’s correct employment of language, and of Attic in particular, was under constant scrutiny and hence cause for considerable anxiety, especially since fluency in classical Attic, an artificial construct learned in school, was ultimately impossible for imperial speakers to attain. The potential for mistakes and the resulting humiliation and ridicule was always lurking in the background. The Philagrus anecdote testifies to this, as does the vehemence with which Galen and Lucian defend their language choices and attack those of others. But as the examples of Lexiphanes and Apollonius show, one could be accused of Atticizing too much as well as too little; the ideal—​a proper, moderate, Attic—​remained an elusive, constantly moving target.

The Attic Lexica The existence of so-​called Attic lexica—​compilations of Attic words and forms along with their “translation” into “ordinary” Greek—​suggests that the task faced by the would-​be Atticist was difficult indeed (Strobel 2005, 2009; Swain 1996, 51–​56). The Greek language, had, after all, undergone significant changes since the classical period. While details of its development are still debated, a prevalent view sees koinê, or

Atticism and Asianism    45 “common” Greek (I use the term to refer to spoken and written postclassical Greek as a whole), as derived from a version of classical Attic, tinged with Ionic elements, that had spread throughout the eastern Mediterranean in the late fifth and fourth centuries bce; in the wake of Alexander the Great’s conquests, this Greek established itself as the lingua franca of the Hellenistic and Eastern Roman empires (e.g., Adrados 2005, 175–​198; Horrocks 1997, 32–​47; López-​Eire 1993; Thumb 1901). Although koinê was basically derived from classical Attic, it had from the beginning avoided many of Attic’s morphological peculiarities, such as the use of ττ instead of σσ (e.g., γλῶττα vs. γλῶσσα) and ρρ instead of ρσ, the “Attic” second declension (νεώς instead of ναός), the contracted forms of certain first and second declension nouns, athematic verb endings, and γίγνομαι and γιγνώσκω for γίνομαι and γινώσκω. In addition, certain syntactical features of classical Attic were no longer used as frequently or in the full range of their earlier functions, such as the dual number, the dative case, the middle voice, the perfect tense, the future infinitive, and the optative mood, among others (Blass, Debrunner, and Rehkopf 2001; Browning 1983, 24–​43; Debrunner and Scherer 1969, 104–​125; Schmid 1887–​1897, 4:579–​734). Lexically, the vocabulary of koinê was far more extensive than its Attic counterpart; at the same time various Attic terms had fallen out of use, while others that remained had developed different meanings. Although Hellenistic scholars like Aristophanes of Byzantium and Crates of Mallus had devoted studies to the Attic dialect (Broggiato 2000; Tosi 1997), the first extant Attic dictionaries—​by Pausanias, Aelius Dionysius, and Irenaeus—​date from the first century ce. These, however, were neither concerned with prescribing the proper use of Attic nor intended as Atticizing aids, but were presumably designed to help people read canonical works written in classical Attic (Erbse 1950; Strobel 2011, 16–​72). It is only in the second century ce that explicitly prescriptive lexica appear, devoted to assisting the budding orator in speaking or writing it, a much more onerous undertaking. The best examples of this latter type from our period are two late second-​century ce works by Phrynichus (from Bithynia or Arabia)—​the Selection of Attic Words (Eclog. = Ἐκλόγη ὀνομάτων: Fischer 1974; Rutherford 1881) and the Sophistic Toolbox (Praep. = Σοφιστικὴ προπαρασκεύη, extant only in a tenth-​century epitome:  de Borries 1911)—​and the more laconic Atticist by the otherwise unknown Moeris (probably third century ce: Hansen 1998). Moeris’s work is more user-​friendly; the entries are in alphabetical order (albeit only as far as the first letter), and usually consist of an “Attic” word or form, indicated by a word such as Ἀττικοί, i.e., “[the word which] the Attic [speakers use],” followed by its “Greek” equivalent, identified by the word Ἕλληνες, i.e., “[the word which] the Greeks [use]” (on the enigmatic third term, κοινόν, “common,” see Hansen 1998, 9; Strobel 2011, 192–​208; Swain 1996, 52). A glance at some of Moeris’s entries illustrates the range of mistakes to which students or sophists might have been susceptible without his help: Ζ 1: ζεύγνυμι Ἀττικοί· ζευγνύω Ἕλληνες [loss of athematic ending] “I gird myself ”: Attics; “I gird myself ”: Greeks.

46   Language and Identity Σ 23: Σωκράτη Ἀττικῶς· Σωκράτην Ἕλληνες [assimilation of third declension contracted accusative ending to first declension] “Socrates [acc.]”: Attic; “Socrates [acc.]”: Greeks.

Ε 7: εὐσχολῶ οὐδεὶς τῶν παλαιῶν, ἀλλὰ σχολὴν ἄγω [vocabulary] None of the ancients [say] “I am well-​leisured,” but “I have leisure.” As one can see, Moeris’s primary concern is to provide Attic equivalents for “Greek” words; he is extremely terse, only rarely listing a source, and even less frequently offering a comment (it should also be noted that many of Moeris’s recommendations do not accurately represent the usage of either classical Attic or koinê). Phrynichus, on the other hand, is not afraid to express his opinions: his language not only is insistently prescriptive—​“say x,” “x must be said,” “don’t say y,” etc.—​but also betrays his purist ideals (on Phrynichus’s life and tastes, see Jones 2008). Consider the following representative examples from his Selection: Φάγομαι βάρβαρον· λέγε οὖν ἔδομαι, τοῦτο γὰρ Ἀττικόν. (Eclog. 300 Fischer) φάγομαι [“I eat”] is barbaric; so say ἔδομαι, for this is Attic.

Ἐλουόμην, ἐλούου, ἐλούετο . . . λούεσθαι· πάντα οὕτω λεγόμενα ἀδόκιμα· εἰ δὲ δόκιμα βούλει αὐτὰ ποιῆσαι, τὸ ε καὶ τὸ ο ἀφαίρει καὶ λέγε λοῦσθαι, ἐλούμην, ἐλοῦτο . . . οὕτω γὰρ οἱ ἀρχαῖοι λέγουσιν. I was bathing, you were bathing, he/​she/​it was bathing  .  .  .  to bathe:  all of these things said are unapproved; but if you want to make them approved, remove the ε or the ο and say λοῦσθαι, ἐλούμην, ἐλοῦτο . . . ; for the ancients speak in this way. (159 Fischer) For Phrynichus, Atticism is not merely a refinement of contemporary Greek, but a purification, from which “unapproved” and “barbaric” words are explicitly banned. Moreover, he leaves no doubt about what he thinks of those who fail to adhere to his Atticizing standard: they are “the ignorant” (οἱ ἀμαθεῖς: e.g., 80), “the common folk” (οἱ ἀγοραῖοι: 176), or “the rabble” (οἱ σύρφακες: 407). By contrast, those who Atticize properly are called “the cultured” (οἱ πεπαιδεύμενοι: 176) or “those speaking in an approved manner” (οἱ δοκίμως διαλεγόμενοι: 269; on the terminology, see Strobel 2011, 126–​168).

Atticism, Diglossia, and Koinê In Phrynichus’s eyes, then, the choice to Atticize is more than just a matter of linguistic taste; it signals membership in a “cultured” elite distinguished from the “ignorant” masses. A sociolinguistic situation of this sort, where the language is split into two distinct registers that correspond to cultural and class divisions, is characteristic of diglossic

Atticism and Asianism    47 speech communities (Ferguson 1959; Niehoff-​Panagiotidis 1994, 106–​120). Diglossia features, on the one hand, a “low” register, which is learned by everyone “naturally” as they grow up and is used in private, popular, or informal settings; and, on the other, a “high” register, which is considered purer and more elegant than the “low,” learned in school, standardized in grammars, linked to the literary tradition, and reserved for more official and formal settings. On this model, Atticizing Greek, as an artificial, learned variety cultivated by the elite, is the high register, while regular Greek, spoken by everybody else, is the low. In imperial Greek society, however, Atticizing Greek was not the only occupant of the “high” register of imperial Greek. Consider this well-​known passage by the Skeptic philosopher Sextus Empiricus (Adv. Gramm. 233–​ 235:  translation adapted from Blank 1998): .  .  . and in life we shall line up with the customary, unaffected, local usage (τῇ συνηθεστέρᾳ καὶ ἀπερίττῳ καὶ ἐπιχωριαζούσῃ). . . . For example, the same thing is called artophorion and panarion [breadbasket]; again stamnion and amidion [chamber pot] are the same, as are igdis and thuïa [mortar]. But aiming at what is right and clear and at not being laughed at by our slaves (ὑπὸ τῶν διακονούντων ἡμῖν παιδαρίων), we shall say panarion, even if it is foreign (βάρβαρόν), not artophoris, stamnion not amis, and thuïa rather than igdis. Again in discussion we shall consider those present and avoid common words, seeking out a more urbane and literary usage ( μὲν ἰδιωτικὰς λέξεις τὴν δὲ ἀστειοτέραν καὶ φιλολόγον συνήθειαν), for as literary usage is mocked by laymen, so is lay usage ridiculed among the literary set (ὡς γὰρ ἡ φιλολόγος γελᾶται παρὰ τοῖς ἰδιώταις οὕτως ἡ ἰδιωτικὴ παρὰ τοῖς φιλολόγοις). So, deftly responding to each occasion with just the right word, we shall seem to speak faultless Greek (δόξ-ομεν ἀμέμπτως ἑλληνίζειν).

This passage is an excellent example of the distinct registers in imperial Greek—​an “urbane and literary” opposed to a “lay” usage, each with its own separate, marked vocabulary (Niehoff-​Panagiotidis 1994, 117–​118). But note that Sextus nowhere refers to Attic or Atticism, preferring ἑλληνίζειν (“to speak proper Greek”) and συνήθεια (“the standard [language]”), both customary Hellenistic and imperial grammatical terms. Moreover, his advice does not always match Atticist orthodoxy: thuïa, which Sextus considers colloquial, is recommended as Attic by Phrynichus (Eclog. 136 Fischer; cf. Pollux 10.103), and neither of Sextus’s terms for “breadbasket” (panarion, artophoris) is attested in classical Attic (Blank 1998, 252). Sextus, who was probably writing in the second or early third century ce, is thus describing a diglossic system that features lay vs. intellectual usage (ἡ ἰδιωτικὴ vs. ἡ φιλολόγος συνήθεια), but one in which the “high” register is not “Attic,” but simply “urbane” Greek, and the “low” is what laymen or slaves speak. In fact, this sort of diglossia, featuring a “high,” non-​Atticizing register and a “low” colloquial, had probably been in place since the rise of the koinê in the fourth century bce. While “low” koinê Greek displayed considerable regional and social variations and underwent significant linguistic development over time (Brixhe and Hodot 1993),

48   Language and Identity the “high” register, as is typical in diglossic situations, remained remarkably stable (this is the koinê described above). Throughout the Hellenistic and imperial Greek worlds this literary koinê, as I will refer to it, continued to be the language that was used by the elite, taught in schools, and in which any prose with artistic ambitions was composed (Blomqvist 2010; Colvin 2009; Jannaris 1903; Versteegh 2002). In the Hellenistic period, the only writers of literary koinê whose work survives in significant volume are the historians Polybius of Megalopolis (ca. 180–​120 bce) and Diodorus of Sicily (ca. 100–​40 bce).2 But in the early imperial era (under Augustus and Tiberius:  27 bce to 37 ce), we have the rhetorician and historian Dionysius of Halicarnassus, the geographer and historian Strabo of Amasia, and the Jewish scholar Philo of Alexandria. After a gap of nearly thirty-​five years, another crop of authors, flourishing under the Flavians, Nerva, and Trajan (69–​117 ce), employs this brand of literary language: the Jewish historian Josephus, the orator Dio of Prusa, the biographer and essayist Plutarch of Chaeronea, and (if current dating is correct) the novelist Chariton of Aphrodisias and the anonymous author of On the Sublime. Despite the variation in language use among these texts, they can be clearly differentiated as a group from koinê texts aimed at a less educated audience, such as Tobit, the Life of Aesop, the Septuagint, and the New Testament (an excellent overview in Kaczko 1993). By the second century ce, however, certain Atticizing critics no longer deemed the “high” register of written koinê practiced by these writers as sufficiently “pure” or “cultured.” Consider Phrynichus’s criticism of Plutarch’s use of the word σύγκρισις (Eclog. 243 Fischer): Among his works, Plutarch wrote a certain “Comparison (σύγκρισις) of Aristophanes and Menander.” And I  am amazed at his use of unapproved language (ἀδοκίμῳ φωνῇ), given that he had reached the heights of philosophy and was clearly aware of what σύγκρισις once meant [i.e., “combination”]. And he similarly misuses συγκρίνειν [as meaning “to compare” instead of “to combine”] and συνέκρινεν [“he/​ she/​it compared” instead of “he/​she/​it combined”]. So one should say ἀντεξετάζειν and παραβάλλειν [“to compare”].

This entry shows that, in addition to avoiding non-​Attic words and forms, the Atticist had to beware of legitimate classical Attic words that had changed their meaning. As far as we can tell, Phrynichus is right: συγκρίνειν means “to combine” in classical Attic prose and is used mostly in philosophical treatises (hence Phrynichus’s comment on Plutarch’s reputation in that field). But συγκρίνειν as “compare” had been standard, “high” koinê for centuries, and had never been considered “colloquial” or “unapproved” (e.g., Polyb. 6.47.10; Dion. Hal. Dem. 33). For Phrynichus, however, this is no longer sufficient; now, any deviation from Classical Attic is attacked as a vulgarism or barbarism. Plutarch may have written an elegant, literary koinê, inspired by the great works of the classical past, but his failure to replicate “pure” Attic, or even worse, his lack of interest in doing so, has indelibly tarnished his status as a pepaideumenos (cf. Eclog. 160 Fischer).

Atticism and Asianism    49 Atticism can thus be seen primarily as a reaction against the perceived “impurities” of literary koinê, which it is trying to displace at the top of the sociolinguistic hierarchy, and only secondarily against the “low” colloquial speech of the masses, which had always been considered inferior and inappropriate for literary discourse. When Galen ridicules the Atticists and defends “contemporary” Greek, he is obviously not talking about the Greek spoken on the streets (cf. De differ. puls. 583, 1–​2k, where he differentiates the Greek of “sailors, merchants, and traders” from his own) but the educated standard (Sextus’s συνήθεια) that he and other elite writers employ in writing and speaking. Whereas before it had been enough to avoid inappropriate words and constructions from the lower registers to write literary Greek, now one was required, at least in the opinion of strict Atticists, to only use terms, forms, and syntax “approved” by or “attested” in, classical Attic texts. It is essential to stress the amount of effort this required. Any speaker could sound Attic relatively easily, by incorporating some unmistakably Attic forms and words into his speech or by alluding to a well-​known Platonic or Demosthenic passage; we might call this “positive” Atticism (cf. Luc. Rhet. praec. 16; Lucilius, Anth. Pal. 11.142; Ammianus, Anth. Pal. 11.157). But “negative” Atticism—​which stipulated avoiding words, forms, and even meanings unattested in classical Attic—​ required either a prodigious memory or grammatical and lexical aids. To sum up: the Atticists did not introduce a “high” register into an otherwise undifferentiated imperial Greek; they added an even higher register on top of the one that already existed. Knowledge of the classical Attic dialect now became an essential prerequisite for entry into elite literary and rhetorical circles.

Atticism and Classicism When did Atticism usurp the position of literary koinê? Our primary testimony for negative Atticism derives from writers active after 140 ce—​Lucian, Galen, Philostratus, Phrynichus, and Moeris—​and the first sophist whom Philostratus refers to as “Atticizing” (VS 568) is Herodes Atticus (fl. 130–​177 ce). The authors whose prose shows evidence of the conscious avoidance of koinê vocabulary and forms—​e.g., Arrian of Nicomedia, Aelius Aristides, Lucian, Maximus of Tyre, Aelian of Praeneste, and Philostratus—​were all writing in the period ca. 140–​250 ce. According to this evidence, it appears that a full-​ fledged linguistic Atticism began to first take shape under Hadrian and subsequently flourished under the Antonines and the Severans (Schmid 1887–​1897, 1:210). The origins and practice of positive Atticism, however, are more obscure. The earliest references implying that the use of “Attic” language was thought to enhance one’s style occur in the late first and early second centuries ce: Plutarch criticizes those who “use Plato and Xenophon only because of their style, and pluck off only what is pure and Attic” (διὰ τὴν λέξιν . . . τὸ καθαρόν τε καὶ Ἀττικόν: De prof. virt. 79D; cf. also Quaest. Plat. 1010C, but De aud. 42D refers to Attic style, not language) and ca. 100 ce,

50   Language and Identity Pliny the Younger refers to the “Greek, or rather Attic language” (sermo Graecus, immo Atticus:  Epist. 2.3) of the sophist Isaeus of Syria. The first examples of “positive” Atticizing practice, in which recognizably “Attic” words, phrases, and forms are ostentatiously strewn throughout a work that is otherwise written in literary koinê, are found in the surviving speeches of the sophists Favorinus of Arelate and Polemon of Laodicea (both active in the first half of the second century ce). That the former’s Atticism was deliberate is confirmed by his boast in his Corinthian Oration, probably delivered in the 120s ce, that he deserved a statue at Athens because of his “Atticizing” prowess (ὅτι ἀττικίζει τῇ φωνῇ: [Dio] Or. 37.26; cf. the criticisms by Galen, Opt. Doctr. 1.41–​42K, and Phrynichus, at Fischer 1974, 139). Polemon’s interest in Atticizing is suggested by the anecdote that the grammarian Secundus had helped him with the language of his speeches (Phryn. Eclog. 236; cf. 140, 396). In rough outline, then, there are some indications that using the classical Attic dialect lent prestige to one’s prose around the turn of the second century ce; this “positive” Atticism was most likely well established by the 120s at the latest, but only in the 130s or 140s would it have been allied with a purist “negative” variety that condemned literary koinê. It is often asserted, however, that Atticism had its beginnings much earlier, in the Augustan period, under the auspices of Dionysius of Halicarnassus, who championed the imitation of “ancient,” or what we call “classical,” authors in his works On Ancient Orators and On Composition (e.g., Dihle 2011, 47–​48; Horrocks 1997, 51 and 73; Kennedy 1972, 242–​243 and 553–​556).3 Because Dionysius’s primary models were Attic writers such as Demosthenes, Thucydides, and Plato, his program is often referred to as “Atticism,” occasionally with the modifier rhetorical or stylistic added to differentiate it from the linguistic or lexico-​grammatical variety of the second century ce (Swain 1996, 20–​27). The potential for confusion here is obvious. The emulation of the style of Attic authors should be clearly distinguished from the use of the forms, vocabulary, and characteristic constructions of the Attic dialect. Despite Dionysius’s insistence on following “Attic” authors as stylistic models, he does not extend this mimesis to morphology or vocabulary like the later Atticists. In fact, even “stylistic Atticism” is something of a misnomer: Dionysius does not restrict his models to Attic writers—​for him Homer, Herodotus, and the lyric poets are also worthy of emulation. For these reasons, we should refer to his program as classicism (on which, see Hidber 1996 and Wiater 2011), rather than the potentially misleading “Atticism.” Dionysius’s classicism, that is, his concern to “imitate” the style of the great prose writers and poets of the pre-​Hellenistic past, would become an essential feature of imperial education and paideia. The linguistic Atticism of the mid to late second century ce can be seen as a particular outgrowth of this broader classicism, but the two movements should not be equated: for this reason it is best to reserve the term “Atticism” exclusively for the practice of speaking and writing in the Classical Attic dialect. While Dionysius’s style may owe something to that of various classical authors, and his prose may display an increase in certain Attic trademark features (such as optative use: Anlauf 1960; cf. Wahlgren 1995, 30n1 for other scholarship) and a concomitant reduction in the use of some koinê terms (Usher 1960, 364–​365), his language, like that of his contemporaries

Atticism and Asianism    51 Strabo and Philo, is still basically the literary koinê employed by his Hellenistic predecessors Polybius and Diodorus (Palm 1955, 206).4 The same goes, more or less, for the prose of late first-​century ce writers, such as Chariton, Plutarch, and Dio of Prusa. While each of them, in the course of emulating or alluding to particular literary models, may have on occasion used certain Attic words or phrases associated with classical authors (e.g., Wegehaupt 1896 on Dio), there is little conclusive evidence for either the systematic “revival” of classical Attic forms or words that had disappeared from literary koinê or the consistent, conscious rejection of koinê features. The surviving evidence thus points to the deliberate pursuit of Atticism as a second-​and third-​century ce phenomenon: an initial stage, represented by Favorinus and Polemon in the first part of the second century ce, that featured a “positive” Atticism, followed by the flowering of Atticism proper, personified by figures such as Phrynichus and Herodes Atticus.

Varieties of Atticism Even after the advent of purist Atticism, however, the levels of strictness in Atticist practice could vary considerably. Many Greek texts from this period continue to be written in a koinê similar to that of Dionysius and Plutarch, despite some concessions to Atticizing tastes:  e.g., Pausanias’s Periegesis, Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations, the work of Galen, and significantly, treatises by the grammarians of the period (like Herodian or Apollonius Dyscolus). But one also encounters figures such as the orator Aelius Aristides (117–​181 ce), undoubtedly the most rigorous extant Atticizing author. His declamations, particularly those on classical themes, are prodigious feats of prose composition, in which he not only reproduces the Attic dialect, assiduously avoiding classically unattested words and forms (although even he is not perfect), but also imitates the style of Demosthenes and Isocrates (Boulanger 1923, 395–​412; Pernot 1981, 117–​146). Aristides’s adherence to Attic purity is often taken as the norm for the Antonine era, but the only other surviving works that display a similar level of rigor are three short declamations by Lesbonax (Kiehr 1907, 8–​18) and one by Herodes Atticus (Albini 1968, 12–​16; Schmid 1887–​1897, 1:195–​200). Other, less strict Atticists include Lucian and the historian Arrian of Nicomedia (writing ca. 130–​160).5 Arrian is an example of a typical Atticist, taking special care to avoid certain koinê forms and constructions and to ensure that his vocabulary adheres to the strictures of the Attic lexica (Tonnet 1988, 1:299–​350); that Arrian, despite his efforts, is not as successful as Aristides should be attributed to the latter’s skill, rather than any inadequacy on the part of the former. Lucian, on the other hand, displays a more profound familiarity with the Attic dialect than Arrian, reflected in the enviable ease with which he employs it in a wide range of genres—​narrative fiction, comic dialogue, satirical essay—​for which no precise classical models existed. But his attitude toward vocabulary contrasts starkly with that of Aristides; Lucian does not feel the need to restrict

52   Language and Identity his choice of words to those attested in Attic prose, but frequently employs terms taken from Attic comedy as well as new words that he has built from a classical Attic base. As André Boulanger (1923, 410; cf. Schmid 1887–​1897, 2:311) succinctly put it, while both are Atticists, “Lucian only intends to enrich and improve the language of his time . . . while Aristides tries to repudiate it.” The discrepancy between Aristides and Lucian might also have something to do with the different genres in which they worked (Wilamowitz-​Möllendorff 1900, 25–​27). Nearly all of Lucian’s oeuvre stands apart from the declamations and speeches that form the core of Aristides and other purists’ literary production. And within Aristides’s corpus, works such as the private, informal Sacred Tales are far less rigorous than his historical speeches set in the classical period, like the Sicilian Orations. In fact, in the third volume of Der Atticismus, Schmid (1887–​1897, 3:346–​349), following ancient rhetorical treatises, separated Atticizing prose into two categories: (1) “political discourse” (λόγος πολιτικός), used in declamation and formal oratory and modeled on Thucydides and the Attic orators, and which required a relatively strict Atticism; and (2) “simple discourse” (λόγος ἀφελής), which took its inspiration from Herodotus, Xenophon, and Plato, and featured a relaxed Atticism, more appropriate for belle-​lettristic writing, that actively sought out poetic and Ionic words and forms. The chief surviving representatives of “simple” discourse are Philostratus and Aelian (ca. 170–​230). In their attempt to cultivate an air of informality and naturalness, they avoid taking an overly judgmental attitude toward koinê, poetic, or Ionic forms, but they also frequently employ certain attested, but rare, Attic features thought to convey “simplicity,” like the nominative absolute or the unaugmented pluperfect (Schmid 1887–​1897, 3:346–​347). The result does not resemble any existing classical prose, but neither is it closer to the contemporary “living” language—​if anything, it is more artificial, more recherché, than that of their purist counterparts. The goal of the “political discourse” practiced by Aristides, Lesbonax, and Herodes seems to have been to replicate classical Attic oratory, in dialect and style, while Lucian applied his impeccable classical Attic to novel content and literary forms. Philostratus and Aelian, on the other hand, work in genres far removed from the purist demands of “political discourse” (letters, miscellanies, dialogue) and no longer feel the need to have their language resemble actual classical Attic, preferring to shape it for their own creative ends. This more relaxed attitude toward Atticist practice can also be observed in the lexicography and scholarship of the second and third centuries ce. The “purist” Phrynichus in his Selection of Attic Words restricts his sources for proper Attic to the tragedians, Plato, Xenophon, Thucydides, the Attic orators, and especially Old Comedy (thought to represent particularly “pure” Attic). But other “Attic” lexica, like Pollux’s Onomasticon (Bethe 1900–​1937) and that of the so-​called Anti-​Atticist (Bekker 1814, 75–​116), are far less strict, frequently citing non-​Attic authors, like Homer, Pindar, and Herodotus, as authorities. This broadening of linguistic interests to encompass poetic dialects and vocabulary should be viewed in the wider context of imperial antiquarianism; from this perspective, Pollux’s work on the vocabulary of classical Athens could be seen as stemming from a passion for knowledge about

Atticism and Asianism    53 classical Athenian customs and culture as a whole, rather than merely Atticizing purism (Radici Colace 2000; Tosi 2007). The linguistic banter in Athenaeus’s Sophists at Dinner, a massive compendium of literary, cultural, and political trivia written in the early third century ce, could be interpreted in a similar way (Strobel 2005, 143–​144). For instance, Ulpian of Tyre, the character in Athenaeus known as “the Attico-​Syrian” (Συραττικέ: 3.126f, 9.368c), and whose refusal to utter any word unless it was attested in an ancient author earned him the nickname Keitoukeitos (“Attested-​Unattested”: 3.97c–​d), is not so much an Atticist as an “archaist” (φιλάρχαιος: 3.126e)—​dozens of the sources he cites date from the postclassical period (cf. 97c–​99e and, e.g., 2.94c: Posidippus of Pella; 4.167c: Duris of Samos; 2.58b–​c: Phylarchus). Ulpian may treat contemporary language with the same contempt as Phrynichus, and even be called an Atticist, but he has an antiquarian love of all things “ancient” (Swain 1996, 51). Indeed, Athenaeus’s work as a whole, which quotes and discusses texts both earlier and later than the classical period, is a reminder that imperial interest in the past could encompass far more than just “Attic” or “classical” literature. Atticism is thus just one element of a broad and variegated set of imperial engagements with the past. To recap: the period from Augustus to the end of the first century witnessed the birth and subsequent evolution of stylistic Atticism, which I prefer to call classicism because of its focus on emulating “classical” (and not just “Attic”) authors. This classicism remains in force throughout the Second Sophistic. The development of linguistic Atticism, on the other hand, took place in three stages: the early second century ce, when we begin to see the first signs of a “positive” Atticism that reflects the growing prestige of the “Attic” dialect; the middle of the second century, when “positive” Atticism is joined by its purist “negative” counterpart, and when figures such as Arrian, Lucian, and especially Aelius Aristides thrive; finally, the late second and early third centuries, when a more relaxed kind of Atticism, that of the anti-​Atticist, Aelian, and Philostratus, comes to the fore. Throughout this timespan, classicizing and Atticizing strictures did not act as shackles, forcing authors only to produce pale imitations and pastiches of the great works of the past; there was always considerable room for innovation and creativity. One need look no further than the extant work of Dio in the first century ce, Lucian in the second, and Philostratus in the third, to see three authors, each with a different relationship to Atticism, who have succeeded in producing some of the most accomplished Greek literary prose that has come down to us from antiquity.

Defining “Asianism” Thus far, I have been speaking only of Atticism. What about “Asianism”? How does it fit into the linguistic developments laid out in the preceding section? First of all, Asianism is a stylistic phenomenon that is unrelated to the language purity central to Atticism. The two are thus not mutually exclusive; a given work can be written in the Attic dialect

54   Language and Identity and in an “Asian” style. The Atticism to which Asianism has been opposed by modern scholars is not the linguistic, but the stylistic variety, or what I call “classicism.” Asian style, then, is the opposite, not of an Attic, but of a classical way of writing, based on the imitation of canonical Greek authors from Homer to Demosthenes. In the imperial period, as I have mentioned, a number of authors strive, in varying degrees, to write in such a classical style: e.g., Aristides, Herodes, Lesbonax, Dio, and Lucian (Norden 1898, 387–​402, for an attempt at categorization). Asian style, however, looks quite different. Consider the following passage, quoted by Philostratus from a declamation by the late second-​century ce sophist Apollonius of Athens on a fifth-​century bce theme: “Callias tries to dissuade the Athenians from burning the dead” (VS 602: I have placed the clauses on separate lines to highlight the verbal effects). 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

ὑψηλὴν ἆρον, ἄνθρωπε, τὴν δᾷδα. τί βιάζῃ καὶ κατάγεις κάτω καὶ βασανίζεις τὸ πῦρ; οὐράνιόν ἐστιν, αἰθέριόν ἐστιν, πρὸς τὸ ξυγγενὲς ἔρχεται τὸ πῦρ. οὐ κατάγει νεκρούς, ἀλλ’ ἀνάγει θεούς.

Lift the torch high, man. Why do you do violence and lead down and torment the fire? Heavenly it is, ethereal it is, fire tends toward that which is akin to itself. It leads not the corpses down, but leads the gods up.

A translation can hardly do justice to the peculiarities of the original: four short sentences, broken up into clauses and balanced by isocolon (identical number of syllables [six] in lines 5–​6, 8–​9), homoeoteleuton (identical, rhyming, word endings: -​εις, -​ιόν, -​άγει, ούς), antithesis (κατ-​ vs. ἀν-​), repetition of words (κατάγει[ς], τὸ πῦρ, ἐστιν), and the recurrence of the same quantitative rhythms (e.g., at the end of lines 5–​6 and 8–​9; cf. Norden 1898, 414). The impression given by these lines is that of a song or a hymn, rather than a deliberative speech modeled on the prose of Lysias or Demosthenes. The setting, putative speaker, and content may be thoroughly “classical” and even Athenian, but the form is anything but. Another example from the late second century ce, from the beginning of a speech by the philosopher-​orator Maximus of Tyre on a familiar Platonic topic (Or. 4.1), displays similar characteristics, with an even more striking use of antithesis and parallelism (Trapp 1997, 1960–​1964). καὶ γὰρ ποιητικὴ τί ἄλλο ἢ φιλοσοφία, τῷ μὲν χρόνῳ παλαιά, τῇ δὲ ἁρμονίᾳ ἔμμετρος, τῇ δὲ γνώμῃ μυθολογική; καὶ φιλοσοφία τί ἄλλο ἢ ποιητική,

For what else is poetry if not a philosophy that is ancient in age, metrical in rhythm, mythological in thought? And what else is philosophy if not a poetry that is

Atticism and Asianism    55 τῷ μὲν χρόνῳ νεωτέρα, τῇ δὲ ἁρμονίᾳ εὐζωνοτέρα, τῇ δὲ γνώμῃ σαφεστέρα;

younger in age, more ordinary in rhythm, clearer in content?

Finally, a description of a painting from the first book of Achilles Tatius’s second-​ century ce novel Leucippe and Cleitophon (1.2–​3), in which the antitheses, parallelisms, and sound effects are more varied in their interplay, but just as evident: Εὐρώπης ἡ γραφή· Φοινίκων ἡ θάλασσα· Σιδῶνος ἡ γῆ. ἐν τῇ γῇ λειμὼν καὶ χορὸς παρθένων. ἐν τῇ θαλάττῃ ταῦρος ἐπενήχετο, καὶ τοῖς νώτοις καλὴ παρθένος ἐπεκάθητο, ἐπὶ Κρήτην τῷ ταύρῳ πλέουσα.

The painting, of Europa; the sea, of the Phoenicians; the land, of Sidon. On land a meadow and a band of maidens. On sea a bull is swimming, and on his back a beautiful maiden is sitting, sailing to Crete on the bull.

For all of their differences, these three passages share a set of stylistic features—​ extremely short clauses, simple syntax with little to no subordination, and a constant use of devices designed to emphasize rhythm, balance, and repetition—​that occur in such combinations only occasionally, if at all, in classical authors. Other examples of this so-​ called Asian style from the second and third centuries ce are found in Longus’s Daphnis and Chloe, the fragments of Iamblichus’s Babylonian Tales, the speeches of Favorinus and Polemon, other sophistic passages quoted in Philostratus’s Lives of the Sophists, and in some of Philostratus’s Letters (Norden 1898, 344–​450; Pernot 1993, 381–​394). On occasion, it even appears in orations by otherwise classicizing writers, such as Aelius Aristides’s Monody to Smyrna or Lucian’s On the Hall. While some of these Second Sophistic authors hail from Asia Minor or Asia understood more broadly, many do not (e.g., Favorinus is from Gaul; Apollonius is from Athens). Moreover, the stylistic label “Asian” is never used of contemporary orators in the Second Sophistic (unless one counts Philostratus’s enigmatic references to “Ionic” style at VS 598, 619). Every reference found in imperial texts of the late first and early second centuries ce—​Petron. Sat. 2, Plut. Ant. 2, Quint. 9.4.103 and 12.10.16, Suet. Aug. 86.3, Theon, Prog. 71—​alludes to the earlier first-​century bce Asian-​Attic debates (on which, see below), and the latest orators who are called “Asian” in antiquity are five Augustan-​ era declaimers mentioned by Seneca the Elder, writing in the 30s ce (Controv. 1.2.23, 9.1.12, 9.6.16, 10.5.21: Fairweather 1981, 245–​303; Winterbottom 1983).6 So why do modern scholars call this style “Asian”? A proper explanation of the complicated history of this term would require much more space than I have here; what follows is an extremely selective and simplified account, highlighting aspects I feel are important for an understanding of the Second Sophistic (see Kim forthcoming for a more detailed treatment). The first use of “Attic” and “Asian” as stylistic labels occurs in the Brutus and Orator of Cicero, written in 46 bce. Later authors reveal, however, that Cicero was defending

56   Language and Identity himself against certain Roman orators (the Attici, or Attics) who had disparagingly labeled his rhetorical style as “Asian” (Quint. Inst. 12.10.12–​18; Tacit. Dial. 18). At first, the distinction was simply between the Attici’s “direct” and “plain” manner of speaking, associated with Lysias and Hyperides, and Cicero’s “bombastic,” extravagant rhetoric, linked to first-​century bce Greek orators from the Roman province of Asia (under whom Cicero had studied: Brut. 314–​316).7 In their polemic against Cicero’s style, the Attici had apparently adapted ethnic “Asian” stereotypes inherited from the classical Athenians—​of luxury, effeminacy, and extravagance—​to rhetorical discourse (Delarue 1982; Cicero’s comments on “Asiatic” oratory: Brut. 51, 314–​ 316, 325–​327; Orat. 25, 27, 212, 230–​231); in a sense, the Attici could be said to have “invented” the concept of “Asian” oratory (de Jonge 2008, 14–​16 and Wisse 1995; a Greek origin is posited, wrongly, I believe, by many others, e.g. Dihle 1977; Hidber 1996; Norden 1898, 149). But over the course of the next sixty years or so, the labels took on a life of their own, until they came to represent two more abstract, but similarly opposed, stylistic aesthetics: an exemplary, classical “Attic” moderation, prudence, and restraint vs. a categorically negative Hellenistic “Asian” extravagance, rashness, and excess (Hose 1999; Whitmarsh 2005, 49–​54). Nowhere is this better evident than in the first Greek text where the terms appear, Dionysius’s preface to On Ancient Orators (ca. 25 bce). There, the “ancient and philosophical” rhetoric (ἀρχαία καὶ φιλόσοφος), which is said to have held sway until the death of Alexander the Great, is personified as a “temperate [σώφρων] Attic muse” ousted from her rightful position by “some Mysian or Phrygian woman, or a Carian monstrosity, who has arrived just the other day from the execution pits of Asia”; this “new” rhetoric is “vulgar,” “bombastic,” “shamelessly theatrical,” and “lives in luxury” (φορτική, ψυχροὺς, ἀναιδείᾳ θεατρικῇ, τρυφώσῃ) (de Jonge 2014; Hidber 1996). Dionysius’s description is unfortunately rather short on stylistic details, and only a few lines survive from the various first-​century bce Greek orators whom he and others malign as “Asian.” The particular stylistic features that inspired such vitriol can, however, be illustrated in the prose of a third-​century bce orator from Asia Minor, Hegesias of Magnesia-​on-​Sipylus (FGrH 142). Although he apparently thought of himself an “Attic” orator in the mold of Lysias (Cic. Brut. 286), by the first century ce he was considered the “founder” of “Asian” rhetoric (Str. 14.1.41; cf. Cic. Orat. 231); he also happens to be the only “Asian” orator whose work survives in sufficient quantity for stylistic analysis. For example, (F 24 = Str. 9.1.16): 1. 2. 3. 4.

ὁρῶ τὴν ἀκρόπολιν, καὶ τὸ περιττῆς τριαίνης ἐκεῖθι σημεῖον, ὁρῶ τὴν Ἐλευσῖνα, καὶ τῶν ἱερῶν γέγονα μύστης·

5. 6. 7.

ἐκεῖνο Λεωκόριον, τοῦτο Θησεῖον· οὐ δύναμαι δηλῶσαι καθ’ ἓν ἕκαστον·

I see the acropolis, and the mark of the huge trident there; I see Eleusis, and I have become an initiate into its mysteries; there the Leokorion, here the Theseion; I cannot point them out one by one.

Atticism and Asianism    57 The similarity with the passages quoted above is notable: short, clearly defined clauses with no subordination, but replete with repetitions and parallelisms: e.g., the anaphora of ὁρῶ, the antithesis of τοῦτο and ἐκεῖνο, the homoeoteleuton of -​ον in lines 2 and 5–​7, the isocolon in 1 and 3 (= seven syllables). In addition, five out of the seven clauses conclude with one of two rhythms, the cretic-​trochee (–​ υ –​  | –​  ×: 2, 3, 6) or one of its resolutions (–​ υ υ υ | –​ ×: 4, 7), both of which occur far less frequently in classical authors (for details, see the tables in de Groot 1919; on Hegesias: Skimina 1937, 144–​148). The remarkable consistency in the endings of the clauses (clausulae) combined with the other effects of sound and rhythm gives the sentence a repetitive, incantatory feel (Blass 1905, 27–​33; Calboli 1987; Norden 1898, 134–​138). Modern scholars, struck by the resemblance of Hegesias’s quintessentially “Asian” prose to that of certain Second Sophistic authors, have thus also designated the later style as “Asian,” even though the term itself was no longer in use in the imperial era. It should have become obvious by now, however, that this “Asian” style is reminiscent of an older and far more illustrious figure, the fifth-​century bce sophist Gorgias of Leontini. Norden, for instance, established close links between the “new,” “Asianic” style of the Hellenistic and imperial periods and that of Gorgias and the sophists (1898, 379–​ 381). After all, the balancing and echoing devices characteristic of our texts—​isocolon, paromoiosis, homoeoteleuton, paronomasia, etc.—​were named “Gorgianic figures” by ancient critics (Noël 1999), and are on display, for example, in the opening sentence of Gorgias’s Encomium of Helen: Κόσμος πόλει μὲν εὐανδρία, σώματι δὲ κάλλος, ψυχῆι δὲ σοφία, πράγματι δὲ ἀρετή, λόγωι δὲ ἀλήθεια· τὰ δὲ ἐναντία τούτων ἀκοσμία.

The kosmos of a city is courage, and of a body, beauty, and of a soul, wisdom, and of a deed, virtue, and of a speech, truth; And the opposites of these is akosmia.

But if we are to call the imperial prose of, say, Achilles Tatius and Favorinus, “Asian” because of its resemblance to Hegesias’s Hellenistic “Asian” prose, should we not, for consistency’s sake, also refer to Gorgias’s older style as “Asian”? As is clear from Cicero’s reference to the third-​century bce Sicilian historian Timaeus as an “Asian” orator (Brut. 325), employing an Asian style implied nothing about one’s ethnicity or geographical origin. At any rate, Gorgias was certainly censured by ancient literary critics for the same reasons that Hegesias and “Asian” orators were. For instance, Cicero attributes identical stylistic qualities to both Hegesias and Gorgias:  the “cutting up” of sentences into short rhythmic, verse-​like clauses and an enthusiasm for balanced arrangement, sound effects, and poetic devices (Brut. 287, Orat. 39–​40, 167, 231; cf. Dion. Hal. Comp. 4, 18; Agatharchides in Photius, Bibl. 250). The very words Dionysius uses to malign the “new” “Asian” rhetoric—​vulgar, bombastic, and theatrical—​are repeated in his criticisms of Gorgias and Gorgianic figures (Lys. 3; Isaeus 19; Dem. 4–​6, 25; Thuc. 24). The style that inspired such disapproval was thus by no means an “invention” of

58   Language and Identity the postclassical period, but had been a part of Greek rhetoric from a very early stage. It featured brief, balanced clauses, conspicuous rhythms, repetitions of sound, poetic vocabulary, ambitious metaphors, and other embellishing effects, and was considered by its critics as excessive, affected, and undisciplined. This is the style that I am calling “Asian,” employed by authors throughout antiquity—​not only Gorgias, Hegesias, and certain Second Sophistic writers, but presumably also by many others whose work has been lost (the only other extant Hellenistic examples are the fragments of the third-​ century bce periegete Heraclides Criticus [see Pasquali 1913, 16–​17; Pfister 1951], and an encomium to Isis preserved in a first-​century bce inscription from Maroneia in Thrace [Grandjean 1975]).8

Asian Style in the Second Sophistic: An Anticlassical Aesthetic Prior to the imperial period, we possess only scattered examples of “Asian” prose, and critical opinion is overwhelmingly negative, condemning “Asian” stylists’ deviations from the norms of moderation, restraint, and judiciousness. Similar attitudes can be found under the empire as well: in the late first century ce, Plutarch (Alex. 3; F 186 Sandbach) and Pseudo-​Longinus (3.2) each single out the style of Gorgias and Hegesias for their disapproval, and in the second, the rhetorician Hermogenes of Tarsus points to imperial sophists as well as Gorgias and his followers as the chief representatives of the ostentatious, artificial, and false virtuosity he despises (Id. 377). The critics’ ideal, conversely, is a “natural” and “temperate” style that repudiates “Asian” extravagance and hews more closely to that of “classical” authors. As I mentioned above, many imperial authors employ such a “classical” style (while others, such as Aelian, for example, adapted it for their own ends). But in the second and third centuries ce, the nature of our evidence changes. For the first time, we have a significant amount of surviving “Asian” prose, and, just as important, a critic—​Philostratus—​who appreciates that prose. In his Lives of the Sophists, Philostratus explicitly links the sophists of his own time with those of the fifth and fourth centuries bce (VS 481); he anoints Gorgias the spiritual leader of the first and Second Sophistics, and unabashedly praises his often derided prose style for its beauty, its loftiness, its paradoxical thoughts and poetic words (492; cf. his defense of Gorgias against Plutarch in Letter 73). The late fourth-​century bce orator Aeschines may have nominally been the first representative of the Second Sophistic, but it was Gorgias who “founded the art of extempore oratory” (482) and to whom Philostratus “believes the art of the sophists carries back as though he were its father” (492). In Philostratus’s eyes, moreover, the imperial sophists, particularly those of the first two generations, are worthy heirs of Gorgias (de Romilly 1975, 75–​88; Norden 1898, 379–​392). The style of Nicetes of Smyrna, the late first-​century ce sophist with whom Philostratus begins his account of the Second Sophistic proper, distanced itself “from

Atticism and Asianism    59 the ancient, political [discourse]” (τοῦ . . . ἀρχαίου καὶ πολιτικοῦ: 511), that is, from the classical oratory of Lysias and Demosthenes; like Gorgias, Nicetes was renowned for his “idiosyncratic and paradoxical content” (511). Nicetes’s student Scopelian of Clazomenae unrepentantly sought out a “poetic” style and devoted himself to studying “the sophists, especially Gorgias of Leontini” (518; cf. influence of the first sophistic at 590 on Hadrian of Tyre and at 604 on Proclus of Naucratis). Philostratus’s descriptions of his sophists’ style often commend “Asian” stylistic features that were traditionally disdained by rhetoricians; for instance, Philostratus explicitly rejects unnamed critics who scorned Scopelian’s style as “inflated, unrestrained and overabundant” (διθυραμβώδη . . . ἀκόλαστον καὶ πεπαχυσμένον: 514), and calls it “inspired” instead. A few pages earlier, he had used one of those pejorative terms—​ διθυραμβώδης, “inflated”—​in a positive sense when describing the style of Nicetes (511). An even better example concerns the “Asian” propensity for rhythmic, musical effects, which aroused special indignation (indeed, differences in prose rhythm are what distinguish Hellenistic and imperial “Asian” rhetoric from its classical counterpart: see Kim forthcoming). In the first century bce, Cicero had derided “singing in the Asiatic manner, in a wailing voice with violent modulations” (inclinata ululantique voce more Asiatico canere: Orat. 27; cf. 57), and in the imperial period, complaints about “singing” sophists, modulating their voices and rhythms, are found in Dio (32.68), Plutarch (De aud. 41D), Lucian (Dem. 12, Pseudol. 7), and Aristides (34.47). Philostratus, however, singles out musical and vocal effects for special praise: he marvels at Favorinus’s ability to “bewitch” members of his audience who did not even understand Greek “by the tone of his voice . . . and the rhythm of his speech” (VS 491–​492); the same power is also attributed to the sophist Hadrian of Tyre, whose non-​Greek audience was “astounded at . . . the ease with which he could modulate his voice and his rhythms, both in prose and with his song” (589). Philostratus is thus the first writer who treats “Asian” rhetoric with respect, and even enthusiasm; many of the very features of “Asian” prose that critics had censured are now the objects of his admiration (although cf. 514, 522, 527, 528 for praise of sophists hewing to a “natural” style [κατὰ φύσιν]). While “Asian” style had existed before, it is only in the Second Sophistic that we are able to discover the kind of evidence that allows us to appreciate its virtues—​a wealth of surviving “Asian” texts and Philostratus’s positive, vivid, and influential portrait of certain “Asian” writers. This prominence is precisely what led Rohde and others in the nineteenth century to characterize Second Sophistic oratory as asianisch. For many of them, however, “Asian” was an unqualifiedly negative term (as in antiquity), signifying a corrupt, effeminate, and disgusting rhetorical style (Norden 1898, 131–​133; Rohde 1886). If we want to move away from the ethnic prejudices that have colored this term from its birth onward, it might be more fruitful to call the rhetorical style extending from Gorgias to the Second Sophistic by a more neutral name—​e.g., “sophistic” style (suggested by Papanikolaou 2009 for Hellenistic oratory), or “virtuosic” (Pernot 1995, 381: “virtuosité”)—​that would either emphasize its connection with the first sophistic or highlight its preoccupation with stylistic artistry and brilliance (on the modern attempt to see Asianism as an early manifestation of Mannerism, see Robling 1992).

60   Language and Identity Throughout the twentieth and twenty-​ first centuries, scholars have pointed to the central role played by the classical past in the literature and culture of the Second Sophistic; in the first part of this chapter, I discussed what remains probably the best example of that centrality: linguistic Atticism, which was focused on reproducing the Attic dialect of the fifth and fourth centuries bce. But in the second part, I have tried to highlight a style or aesthetic that is also popular in the Second Sophistic, but stands somewhat apart from the “classical” canon. A number of orators, novelists, and writers from this period may employ the classical Attic dialect, display an intimate knowledge of classical literature and history, or declaim in the persona of classical figures on topics ripped from fifth-​and fourth-​century bce headlines, but they do so in a style that strikes us as very un-​classical—​overtly rhythmic, repetitive, musical, poetic, and employing to an extreme degree all of the rhetorical figures and devices that many of our surviving ancient critics insisted should be used only occasionally and in moderation. Of course, such writers could temper their exuberant style when necessary—​for example, in narrative or expository passages—​but on the whole, instead of abiding by “classical” tenets of stylistic tastefulness and restraint, they prefer to embrace artifice, theatricality, and novelty. In fact, one can detect traces of this aesthetic stance beyond matters of prose style; one thinks of Polemon’s and Achilles Tatius’s delight in depicting paradoxical, shocking, and grotesque scenes that risk overstepping the boundaries of “good taste” (paralleled in the longest fragment of Hegesias [FGrH 142 F 5 = Dion. Hal. Comp. 18.26]), or of sophists like Hadrian, Favorinus, and Polemon, whose stylistic conceits are reflected in their flamboyant costumes, ostentatious performances, and unusual lifestyles (Connolly 2001; Gleason 1995; Whitmarsh 2005, 23–​40). In fact, much of the recent surge of scholarly interest in the Second Sophistic can be attributed to a renewed appreciation of this “Asian” aesthetic; it serves as a reminder that for all of their immersion in the classical past, certain authors of the Second Sophistic were also able to resist its pull.

Further Reading References to scholarship on specialized topics (such as Attic lexicography, koinê, “Asian” inscriptions, etc.) are found in the text; I concentrate here on Atticizing and Asianizing language and style. For overviews of the nineteenth-​century Attic-​Asian debate, see Boulanger 1923, 58–​73; Desideri 1978, 524–​36; Reardon 1971, 80–​96; Sirago 1989, 43–​56; cf. Robling 1992 on the continuity of the concepts beyond antiquity. Accounts of linguistic Atticism in general surveys of Greek literature or language are often unreliable; better are Kim 2010; Schmitz 1997, 67–​96 and 110–​127; Swain 1996, 17–​64; Whitmarsh 2005, 41–​56; cf. Anderson 1993, 86–​100. On the relation of Atticism with Latin archaism in the second century ce, see Holford-​Strevens 2003. On the linguistic Atticism of individual authors, Schmid 1887–​1897 covers Dio, Herodes, Polemon, and Lucian (vol. 1), Aristides (vol. 2), Aelian (vol. 3), and Philostratus (vol. 4), but does not systematically compare their language use with Hellenistic or early imperial authors. Better analysis of Herodes in Albini 1968, of Polemo in Boulanger 1923, 87–​94,

Atticism and Asianism    61 and of Aristides in Boulanger 1923, 395–​412, and Pernot 1981, 117–​146; for Lucian, see also Bompaire 1994, Chabert 1897, and Deferrari 1916; for Philostratus, de Lannoy (2003). For Second Sophistic authors not treated by Schmid, good accounts of Favorinus in Amato 2005, 192–​211, and Barigazzi 1966, 29–​73; of Arrian in Tonnet 1988, 299–​350; and of Maximus of Tyre in Dürr 1899 and Trapp 1997, 1964–​1966. Less helpful but still useful are Sexauer 1899 on Achilles Tatius, Valley 1926 on Longus, and the comments of Hutton 2005, 181–​190, on Pausanias. For earlier imperial authors, less work has been done; there is still no systematic treatment of the language of Dionysius, Strabo, Dio (Schmid’s treatment is not comprehensive), Josephus (cf. Ledouceur 1983; Redondo 2000), or Plutarch. On the last, see provisionally Weissenberger 1895 and on vocabulary, Schmid 1887–​1897, 4:635–​643; Pérez Molina 1994; Giangrande 1990, 1992; see also the introduction to Hunter and Russell 2011. Chariton is better served, by Ruiz-​Montero 1991 and Hernández Lara 1994; Mann 1896 on Xenophon of Ephesus and Tröger 1898–​1899 on Ps.-​Longinus are not as helpful. For the Augustan Greek writers, Wahlgren 1995 is fundamental, but limited in scope; on Dionysius of Halicarnassus, see also Ek 1942, Lasserre 1979, and Usher 1982. Palm 1955 is an exemplary treatment of the Hellenistic koinê of Diodorus, as is de Foucault 1972 on Polybius; cf. Lightfoot 1999, 283–​296 on the language of Diodorus’s contemporary Parthenius of Nicaea. On the style of imperial Greek authors, Norden 1898 (2nd ed., 1914), 344–​450, is still standard (“Asian” style at 407–​450), but Pernot 1993, 333–​421 (“Asian” style at 371–​394), is more nuanced and better overall. For individual authors, see on Philostratus: Anderson 1986, 14–​ 17, and 1993, 97–​98; Pausanias: Hutton 2005, 190–​233, and Pasquali 1913; Aristides: Boulanger 1923, 413–​435, and Pernot 1981, 87–​116; Favorinus: Amato 2005, 72–​106; Achilles: Laplace 2007, 365–​410; Longus: Hunter 1987, 84–​98; Philostratus’s sophists: Boulanger 1923, 83–​108. Of the voluminous scholarship on the first-​century bce Attic-​Asian controversy in Rome, see Adamietz 1992; Bowersock 1979; de Jonge 2008, 9–​20; Calboli 1986, 1050–​73, and 1988; Dihle 1957 and 1977; Gelzer 1979; Hendrickson 1926; Hose 1999; Kennedy 1972, 97–​100; Leeman 1963, 91–​111; Radermacher 1899; Spawforth 2011, 21–​26 and 70–​80, and Wisse 1995. For discussion specifically focused on Hellenistic Greek Asian oratory, see also Blass 1865, Norden 1898, 126–​51, Papanikolaou 2009 and 2012; Wooten 1972 and 1975; on Hegesias, Calboli 1987, Donadi 2000, and Staab 2004. On the vexed topic of Greek prose rhythm, identified as an essential element of “Asian” rhetoric since the nineteenth century, the work of Norden 1898 vol. II, 909-​923, Blass 1905, and others was superseded by the studies of de Groot 1919, 1921, 1926; cf. Shewring 1930 and 1931, the extremely useful overview of Skimina 1937, and the studies of Favorinus by Goggin 1951 and of Appian by Hutchinson 2015.

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Atticism and Asianism    65 Noël, M.-​P. 1999. “Gorgias et l’«invention» des γοργίεια σχήματα.” Rev. Ét. Grec. 112: 193–​211. Norden, E. 1898. Die antike Kunstprosa vom VI. Jahrhundert v. Christus bis in die Zeit der Renaissance. 2 vols. Leipzig. O’Sullivan, N. 1997. “Caecilius, the Canons of Writers, and the Origins of Atticism.” In Roman Eloquence: Rhetoric in Society and Literature, edited by W. J. Dominik, 32–​49. London. Palm, J. 1955. Über Sprache und Stil des Diodoros von Sizilien: Ein Beitrag zur Beleuchtung der hellenistischen Prosa. Lund. Papanikolaou, D. 2009. “The Aretalogy of Isis from Maroneia and the Question of Hellenistic ‘Asianism.’” ZPE 168: 59–​70. Papanikolaou, D. 2012. “IG V.2, 268 (= SIG3 783) as a Monument of Hellenistic Prose.” ZPE 182: 137–156. Pasquali, G. 1913. “Die schriftstellerische Form des Pausanias.” Hermes 48: 161–​223. Pérez Molina, M. E. 1994. “Características léxicas en la obra de Plutarco.” In Estudios sobre Plutarco: Ideas religiosas, edited by M. García Valdés, 291–​303. Madrid. Pernot, L. 1981. Les discours siciliens d’Aelius Aristide (Or. 5–​6): Étude littéraire et paleographique, édition et traduction. New York. Pernot, L. 1993. La rhétorique de l’éloge dans le monde gréco-​romain. 2 vols. Paris. Pfister, F. 1951. Die Reisebilder des Herakleides. Vienna. Radermacher, L. 1899. “Studien zur Geschichte der antiken Rhetorik. IV. Ueber die Anfänge des Atticismus.” Rh. Mus. 54: 351–​374. Radici Colace, P. 2000. “Dai testi ai vocabolari tra ricordo e nostalgia.” In Letteratura scientifica e tecnica greca e latina: atti del Seminario internazionale di studi: Messina, 29–​31 ottobre 1997, edited by P. Radici Colace and A. Zumbo, 267–​283. Messina. Reardon, B. P. 1971. Courants littéraires grecs des IIe et IIIe siècles après J.-​C. Paris. Redondo, J. 2000. “The Greek Literary Language of the Hebrew Historian Josephus.” Hermes 128: 420–​434. Robling, F.-H. 1992. “Asianismus. II.” In Historisches Wörterbuch der Rhetorik, vol. 1: A-Bib, edited by Gert Ueding, cols. 1120–1121. Tübingen. Rohde, E. 1886. “Die asianische Rhetorik und die zweite Sophistik.” Rh. Mus. 41: 170–​190. Rohde, E. 1876. Der griechische Roman und seine Vorlaüfer. Leipzig. Ruiz-​Montero, C. 1991. “Aspects of the Vocabulary of Chariton of Aphrodisias.” CQ 41: 484–​489. Rutherford, W. G. 1881. The New Phrynichus. London. Rydbeck, L. 1967. Fachprosa, vermeintliche Volkssprache und Neues Testament. Uppsala. Schmid, W. 1887–​1897. Der Atticismus in seinen Hauptvertretern von Dionysius von Halikarnass bis auf den zweiten Philostratus. 5 vols. Stuttgart. Schmitz, T. A. 1997. Bildung und Macht:  Zur sozialen und politischen Funktion der zweiten Sophistik in der griechischen Welt der Kaiserzeit. Zetemata 97. Munich. Sexauer, H. 1899. Der Sprachgebrauch den Romanschriftstellers Achilles Tatius. Karlsruhe. Shewring, W. H. 1930. “Prose-​Rhythm and the Comparative Method.” CQ 24: 164–​173. Shewring, W. H. 1931. “Prose-​Rhythm and the Comparative Method. II.” CQ 25: 12–​22. Sirago, V. A. 1989. “La seconda sofistica come espressione culturale della classe dirigente del II sec.” ANRW 2.33.1: 36–​78. Skimina, S. 1937. État actuel des études sur le rythme de la prose grecque, I. Krakow. Spawforth, A. J. S. 2012. Greece and the Augustan Cultural Revolution. Cambridge. Staab, G. 2004. “Athenfreunde unter Verdacht:  der erste Asianist Hegesias aus Magnesia zwischen Rhetorik und Geschichtsschreibung.” ZPE 148: 127–​150.

66   Language and Identity Strobel, C. 2005. “The Lexicographer of the Second Sophistic as Collector of Words, Quotations and Knowledge.” In Selecta colligere, vol. 2, edited by R. M. Piccione and M. Perkams, 131–​157. Alexandria. Strobel, C. 2009. “The Lexica of the Second Sophistic: Safeguarding Atticism.” In Standard Languages and Language Standards: Greek, Past and Present, edited by A. Georgakopoulou and M. Silk, 93–​107. Aldershot. Strobel, C. 2011. Studies in Atticistic Lexica of the Second and Third Centuries ad. Unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Oxford. Swain, S. 1996. Hellenism and Empire: Language, Classicism, and Power in the Greek World, ad 50–​250. Oxford. Thumb, A. 1901. Die griechische Sprache im Zeitalter des Hellenismus. Strasbourg. Tonnet, H. 1988. Recherches sur Arrien: Sa personnalité et ses écrits atticistes. 2 vols. Amsterdam. Tosi, R. 1997. “Osservazioni sul rapporto fra Aristofane di Bisanzio e l’Antiatticista.” In Scritti per G. Morelli, 171–​177. Bologna. Tosi, R. 2007. “Polluce:  struttura onomastica e tradizione lessicografica.” In L’Onomasticon di Giulio Polluce. Tra lessicografia e antiquaria, edited by C. Bearzot, F. Landucci, and G. Zecchini, 3–​16. Milan. Trapp, M. 1997. “Philosophical Sermons:  The ‘Dialexeis’ of Maximus of Tyre.” ANRW 2.34.3: 1945–​1976. Tröger, G. 1898–​1899. Der Sprachgebrauch in der pseudolonginianischen Schrift Peri Hupsous und deren Stellung zum Atticismus. Vol. 1. Burghausen. Usher, S. 1960. “Some Observations on Greek Historical Narrative from 400 to 1 BC: A Study in the Effect of Outlook and Environment on Style.” AJPhil. 81: 358–​372. Usher, S. 1982. “The Style of Dionysius of Halicarnassus in the ‘Antiquitates Romanae.’” ANRW 2.30.1: 817–​838. Valley, G. 1926. Über den Sprachgebrauch des Longus. Uppsala. Versteegh, K. 2002. “Dead or Alive? The Status of the Standard Language.” In Bilingualism in Ancient Society: Language Contact and the Written Word, edited by J. N. Adams, M. Janse, and S. Swain, 52–​74. Oxford. Wahlgren, S. 1995. Sprachwandel im griechisch der frühen römischen Kaiserzeit. Göteborg. Waldis, J. 1920. Sprache und Stil der großen griechischen Inschrift vom Nemrud-Dagh in Kommagene (Nordsyrien). Ein Beitrag zur Koine Forschung. Heidelberg. Wegehaupt, J. 1896. De Dione Chrysostomo Xenophontis sectatore. Gothae. Weissenberger, B. 1895. Die Sprache Plutarchs von Chaeronea und die pseudoplutarchischen Schriften. Straubing. Whitmarsh, T. 2005. The Second Sophistic. Oxford. Wiater, N. 2011. The Ideology of Classicism:  Language, History, and Identity in Dionysius of Halicarnassus. Berlin and New York. Wilamowitz-​Möllendorff, U. von. 1900. “Asianismus und Atticismus.” Hermes 35: 1–​52. Wisse, J. 1995. “Greeks, Romans, and the Rise of Atticism.” In Greek Literary Theory after Aristotle: A Collection of Papers in Honour of D. M. Schenkeveld, edited by J. G. J. Abbenes, S. R. Slings, and I. Sluiter, 125–​134. Amsterdam. Woerther, F. 2015. Caecilius de Calè-Actè. Fragments et temoignages. Paris. Wooten, C. 1972. A Rhetorical and Historical Study of Hellenistic Oratory. Unpublished PhD dissertation, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Wooten, C. 1975. “Le développement du style asiatique pendant l’époque hellénistique.” Rev. Ét. Grec. 88: 94–​104.

Chapter 5

L atini tas W. Martin Bloomer

Latinitas is the quality of writing and speaking a pure Latin. The concept of Latinitas has a long and complex history for three chief reasons. The first is the process by which Latin became a standard language, for the city of Rome, for Latium, and eventually for the Roman Empire. Related to this process, a second complex development was the formation of a Kunstsprache, sophisticated prose and verse styles, in great part spurred on by Roman intellectual ambitions to have a literary language that emulated Attic Greek and by the increasingly sophisticated practices of Latin literature, which pushed the language to new expressive potentialities. There were additional symbolic and real interests driving the development of a high standard Latin, both the needs of social distinction within Roman society and the needs of governmental, legal, and religious institutions for written communication. A final factor is simply the long tradition of teaching and learning standard Latin. The last sphere, the scholastic, has given us the term Latinitas, but here great care is needed. The schoolmen of Rome taught pupils of varied background and were themselves of varied background. The first recorded teachers of the mid-​third century bce were themselves bi-​and trilingual. Later there would be schools in the provinces and schoolmen from the provinces coming to Rome. The grammarians of the Roman Empire devoted careful attention to what seems to posterity a colossus, the tradition of the Latin grammar. In the successive polities and schools that sought to impart Latin, Latinity became the criterion of linguistic correctness, often for those whose native language was not Latin. From the time of the great teacher of Roman style, Quintilian, at the end of the first century ce, there has been anxiety, in his case acknowledgment, that the language has changed and that it is only with great care and industry that Latinity can be learned. Latinity can thus be understood as a properly socio-​linguistic term or a prescriptive (or critical) stylistic term (or at times both). The spheres of application for the two usages are quite diverse. For the former it is not simply that one group says it speaks Latin while its neighbors speak a different language. By the time the abstract noun Latinitas is used, perhaps even by the time that linguistic difference was thought to be somehow

68   Language and Identity significant, there were varieties of Latin. Latinity thus did not simply distinguish speakers of Latin from the speakers of the other chief languages of the ancient Italian peninsula (Greek, Etruscan, Oscan, Umbrian). Rather, it seems to mark “good” Latin usage from less good versions, less good as contaminated by contact with other languages or perhaps as rural, immigrant, colloquial, or low class. Here it could of course be as much a social as a regional distinction. Second, as a prescriptive term, Latinitas reflects the self-​confidence among the literate about the stylistic level of Latin literature, prose and poetry. This self-​confidence is also a gesture of distinction: with a sense of Latinity, Roman culture has now a correspondent to Hellenismos, that excellence of language that marked for Greek speakers their ancestral, literary patrimony. A recurrent difficulty in trying to understand how the ancients understood or applied principles of linguistic and stylistic correctness is their lack of systematicity. Principles were advanced, but from the first extant censor of Latin usage, the satirist Lucilius, through the literary figures of the Antonine age, the masters of Latin style will allege that they employ taste and judgment and not mere system. They will admire the old stylists and search the old literature for words but will not undertake a program to purify language by returning it to some pristine era. They will follow usage and yet admit the old expression. They will follow Cicero but avoid his fullness or Cato but avoid his aridity. The metaphorical terms employed likewise are not of much help. Further, there is a strong self-​serving element in claims that the present author is the true judge or exemplar of Latinity. Targets can include foreigners, slaves, freedmen, women, provincials, lower classes, the less educated (Bloomer 1997; of course, the elite writer could employ a low register, see Ferri and Probert 2010, 14–​15). And finally, the Roman writers, despite recycling a definition of Latinity from Varro and ultimately from Stoic theory of language, in fact proceed by making individual observations. In the hands of the school grammarians, these will devolve to lists of approved and disapproved words. Pronunciation, syntax, and style fade away as the search for Latinitas comes to resemble a mania for Latin diction.1 This chapter considers first briefly the linguistic environment in which Latin developed, and then within the context of the development of linguistic self-​awareness the theorization that the term Latinity (and synonyms) implied. Third, the later significance of the term among the grammarians of the Roman Empire is considered. With the empire, or more precisely in the second century ce, which is the proper concern of this volume, Roman writers and educated Latin speakers were firmly in the grip of Latinitas. It may be unfair to call this a mania, but Latinitas is at this period an intellectual pursuit. For Cicero, a proper Latin was a prerequisite. His attention and intellectual effort lay with later stages of education and composition. Varro and Quintilian had provided magisterial sources of and models for Latinitas. Their methods of etymology and strictures about which words to use and which authors to read and to imitate certainly underlie the new culture. Aulus Gellius and Fronto, on the other hand, love to make literature about philology.2 They love to draw a scene or center a letter on some dispute about Latinity. Indeed, life seems to be made up of philological inquiry and dispute. It is not simply that the evenings are taken up with literary conversation

Latinitas   69 (really discussions about whether this or that is a good Latin word or making fine distinctions about the meaning of a Latin word—​and thus finding fault with the careless). Gellius depicts his circle walking through the city of Rome and discussing the old words found on inscriptions (NA 13.25). Repeatedly, like Cicero and Quintilian before him, Gellius intervenes to show that the grammarians are extreme, too systematic and rigid. He then presents himself and his readers not simply as the pars sanior but as reasonable, Roman gentlemen, the descendants of Cicero and Quintilian in an oratorical tradition now gone to books. This is far more than an enthusiasm for more ancient forms of the language. The search for Latinity defines the literary life, and especially in the pages of these two authors, the literary life is the best and most Roman of lives, wrapped up in the discovery and appreciation of the old Roman ways. And it must be said that such a life is imperiled not simply by barbarisms and solecisms but by customary or banal expressions and by the experts. The Roman author must search the ancient literature rather like a cook looking for a sparkling ingredient, but only the old cookbooks will do and one must not follow a recipe. The composition must be new and tasty—​the Antonine author wants to read Cato, select from Cato, and have his reader know that his diction is the result of long scholarship and selective taste, but he does not want to ape Cato.

Origins and Development of Latin The question of how Latin speakers came to the area of Rome and differentiated their language from the other Italic languages (all varieties of Indo-​European) is complex, and beyond our proper subject, since we are interested in that sensibility to a particular variant of the language which declares it correct and superior. It must suffice here to say that an archaic variant of Latin was the language of the early settlement of Rome (from the eighth century bce). The language takes its name from the Latini, apparently a group of tribes; so did the wider region about Rome, Latium. After this murky beginning, a solitary piece of concrete evidence: a sixth-​century inscription shows that Latin was now written. There was of course nothing inevitable about the spread of Latin. A different Italic language, Oscan, widely spoken south of Rome, was only displaced by Latin as a consequence of Rome’s victory in the Social Wars (89 bce). The spread of Latin does follow the history of Rome’s conquests, but it is important to stress that Latin was adopted for reasons of its prestige and not simply its functionality in law, trade, or diplomacy. The adoption of the language was one part of cultural assimilation. Again, for our purposes the real history of the development of Latin alongside the many languages of Italy is not quite relevant (Adams 2007, 37 suggests that there were as many as forty languages before Rome took control of the peninsula). We can leap over the ethnic and linguistic variety of early Rome. Nor must we trace the complex question of how Latin became a standardized language (certainly the language was diffused from Rome, but there was regular movement from the provinces back to the capital).

70   Language and Identity To judge from the literary record, Romans from the Republic on treated Latin as their ancestral language—​modified by a certain number of loan words especially from the Sabines and Etruscans, but essentially the language of a tribe that had grown to rule the world. They did not, however, understand Latin as an immobile monolith. Partly on the spur of Hellenistic theories of linguistic change and in great measure for reasons of their own atavism, Roman intellectuals viewed their language through a double lens. On the one hand, proper Latin was a recent, sophisticated, literary and cultural project. Only those who studied rhetoric, literature, and Greek could attain to the best Latin style. There is also at play here the ineffable factor of taste. The lyric poet Catullus and his set have it, for example. Others are stigmatized for linguistic blunders. “Taste” and “judgment” are not very helpful for the modern scholar. They tend of course to mystify native attitudes. On the other hand, the countryside and the past had for the Romans strong cultural authority. Older versions of the language would be authentic and could be recuperated, especially by the diligent studies of the great scholar Marcus Terentius Varro but also by one’s own reading. From the first poets at Rome in the mid-​third century bce, tussles about who has the authority to judge Latinity mark this intellectual discourse as much as any question of method. Still we see that urbanitas and rusticitas and vetustas (the style of speech but also social and cultural attitudes associated with the city of Rome, the countryside of Latium, and the older Latin writers and speakers) will continue as the charged fields, to be traveled in the hopes of finding something old or distinct and valuable, and to be fought over.3 They are both sources for material and aesthetic principles or at least weapons with which to criticize. Thus some writers will be faulted as too urbane, too rustic, or too fond of archaism. Always at play seems to be the Ciceronian principle of balance, even when a Ciceronian fullness of expression may be the target of criticism. When the grammarians of the empire take the field, they will appeal far more to written Latin. Then perhaps we have truly arrived in the arena of Latinity—​the effort to police the writing and speaking of the language which has no living regional or familial support but rather the traditions of literature itself.

The Development of a Sense of Latinity No doubt judgments about a speaker’s or writer’s Latinity involved issues of sociolect and dialect, but the vocal and scribal conventions came to be taught in schools and derived from a canon of writers. This is a literary not a fixed or rigid linguistic project. The first poets at Rome were also the first schoolteachers of a new school culture arising from the Hellenistic world and adapting to Roman realities. These figures, preeminently Livius Andronicus, Ennius, and Naevius, in the mid-​third century produced works of literature in Latin and provided schooltexts in Latin, especially epic and dramatic. The need to forge a Latin literary language found in these Greek-​speaking and Greek-​educated scholar-​poets able proponents. For the first time, the Hellenistic literary expert was challenged to translate his literary heritage into a foreign culture.

Latinitas   71 The consequences for Latin literature were profound: Greek genres were imbued with Roman realities; Greek metrical forms had to be adapted to the Latin language; a literary language had to be constructed along with a technical lexicon with calques like versutus to mirror the epithet for Odysseus polytropos, litteratura for grammatica, translatio for metaphora, and indeed Latinitas for Hellenismos. As much later with the European vernaculars, a great “translation” effort helped develop the lexicon, syntax, and stylistics of the target language. But one should add that there was from the start a doubleness or self-​consciousness to the idea of translation. The Latin text was not a replacement for the Greek. It drew attention to its status as a translated object through the inclusion of scholarly gestures, such as comments on the act of translating and on the need for calques, and through the deliberate introduction of Roman elements that tended to rupture the fiction that one was reading a Greek work or even a literary work set in its original world.4 The first Latin poets evidently took pride in their achievement at writing in Latin (Latin had been written for at least four centuries—​their achievement was to write Latin literature, plays and poems modeled on Greek genres written in a literary language of their invention). Two epitaphs, one by Ennius and one ascribed to Naevius, depict a rivalry of sorts for the crown of writing Latin. Ennius, originally from Rudiae in southern Italy, famously said of himself that he had three hearts, Greek, Latin, and Oscan. His epitaph concludes with a statement of the poet’s immortality, certainly a topos for Greek poets, but in this case stated in terms of the Roman speech community. He imagines his undying fame not as a fixed monument but as ongoing performance in the speech of the Roman community: Volito vivos per ora virum. The v alliteration in the Latin, which means “I fly alive on the mouths of men,” suggests the vitality of his verba, words. The insistent alliteration is a feature of the old poetry, and the very repetition performs the ongoing life of the poet’s verba, as the v’s continue to color the o’s, so the poet shapes the sound of his speech community (the vibrating consonant buzzing through the ora). The poet Naevius from Campania has likewise a poetic epitaph which declares his claim to literary immortality (Courtney 1993, 47–​48). As has recently been well demonstrated, the poem reflects the aesthetics of a century after the generation of the two poets (Krostenko 2013). His concluding line makes a striking response to Ennius’s: obliti sunt Romae loquier lingua latina (“At Rome [after the poet’s death] they have forgotten how to speak Latin”). His liquid, alliterative tongue is perhaps one step better than Ennius’s vital assonance, but both frame their claim to poetic excellence in terms of a living speech community. The fabricator of Naevius’s epitaph may in fact have been disparaging contemporary poets and wishing that stylistic norms had remained those of the older poet. Both epitaphs then make claims to Latinity (avant la lettre) with a particularly pointed claim to correctness or preeminence: literary Latin is important for the constitution of the speech community. Correct spoken Latin, which should be a birthright, the product of a living society and particular place, is in fact dependent on literature. A supplement to this claim is needed: literature is not yet imagined as a self-​consistent whole (as say Atticism will treat the Greek of the Athenian orators and Plato as the nucleus of a canon, ignoring individual differences). The epitaphs declare the authority

72   Language and Identity of one author. Of course, the claims are exclusionary, even polemical (both in the sense that the commemorated poet is preferred to everybody at Rome and because the epitaph of Naevius seems to be an invention a century after the poet’s death which promotes the old style against more recent developments in Latin literary style). A strong current in the ongoing claims to linguistic authority is the presentation of the author as a persona. The auctor has auctoritas, and at this stage this does not mean that he is a bookworm with enviable command of the Latin literary record. The authority has a connection to living speech (even as this shrouds the fact that his achievement comes through the written word), and the proof of his authority comes in demonstrations of his eccentric, personal, and thus perhaps authentic usage. Eccentricity of speech is marked in the Roman tradition not so much as a key to idiosyncrasy of habits as an emblem of authority. Within Latin literature, peculiarities of speech on behalf of the author indicate his remove from the common. The father of Roman satire, the aristocrat Lucilius writing in the late second century, takes a marked pleasure in his own linguistic peculiarity. His interest in the deficient language, especially speech, of others is part of his claim to be writing authoritatively. So he advises (frag. 356) to use fervo not ferveo (Quint. Inst. 1.6.8; Lucilius book 9). Some notices of linguistic peculiarity reflect a political agenda—​L. Cotta adopted a rustic Latin, Clodius changing the pronunciation of his name from the aristocratic Claudius to the plebeian ō. As with the example from Lucilius, it is clear that biforms did exist: ferveo becomes classical, fervo is used before and after the classical period. The aristocrat rather aristocratically shows his taste and judgment. Lucilius in fact seems to launch the tradition of lexical and phonetic recommendations. Instead of giving a rule, the great man recommends individual features of his own practice. Lucilius does censure some pronunciations as rustic; so there are some patterns that can be generalized. He makes fun of a certain Caecilius, a candidate for the praetorship, by extending the rustic pronunciation of his name, with e for ae, to the name of the magistracy: Cecilius pretor ne rusticus fiat (1130 Marx, see Adams 2007, 20). Morphology and phonology continued to be in some flux, and the high valuation of the speech of the city of Rome is a constant; but at least according to the man of letters, we need a guide, or rather a censor. The great aristocrats at the end of the republic cultivated a highly personal mode of speech, and part of this stylization extended to matters as basic as the elements of Latinity. The recommendations of Augustus and Lucilius for what seem to history nonstandard morphology or phonology did not win the day, no doubt because their writings did not become basic school texts (unlike Cicero's). Our own school grammars present a standardized version of the language, heavily dependent on Cicero and Caesar—​staples of the school curriculum for which the grammars were and are prepared, but Augustus himself, though his official inscriptions appear in standard Latin, had certain eccentricities of speech which he recommended. According to the biographer Suetonius (Aug. 87–​88), he counseled to write as one spoke, used prepositions with the names of towns, and said domos as the genitive of domus. According to Quintilian, Augustus objected strongly to calidus for caldus (see Adams 2007 29–​30 for his other censures). It is of course the case that the contemporaries Varro and Octavian had as

Latinitas   73 much claim to be speaking and writing proper Latin as Cicero or Caesar. By the terms of later Latinitas, as codified by the Latin grammarians, Lucilius, Varro, and Augustus were wrong. But even to make Cicero right required a certain restrictive focus. Cicero himself varied his grammar and lexicon by genre and changed his practice over time (Johnson 1971; Lebreton 1901). It is true here that we may be confusing Latin style with Latinity. And we should be clear that literary or oratorical style, correctness of morphology and syntax, and accent are distinct. (Further, a regional written Latin was not a feature of classical or imperial times. Prof. Adams has written, “No reader of Cicero and Martial, however attentive and learned, could possibly tell from their Latin that the one came from Arpinum in the Volscian territory and the other from Spain.”5) Cicero himself, as we shall see, takes Latinity as a prerequisite, and is concerned with sermo not verba, with speech and style and rhetoric, not individual points of morphology or grammar more generally. The later tradition of Roman linguistic science would be far more concerned with grammar. It is also true that questions of Latinity can never be settled—​unless everybody involved agrees on the period of Latin and a rather small canon of authors. But given later Romans’ veneration for their early literature, and indeed given ongoing literary polemics, questions of verba did abide. The issues will become if not more difficult certainly different as Latin writers cease to be Latin speakers or rather speakers of the Latin of their venerated models.

Latinitas Theorized By the time that the anonymous author of a series of lectures on rhetoric used the term Latinitas about 90 bce, Latin was both the dialect of Latium, the sociolect of the ruling elite, the language of imperial and military administration, and as a consequence of the last a far-​flung language, with all the varieties that one would expect from soldiers and colonists meeting other peoples, perhaps being cut off from the changing Latin of the city of Rome (but not in language islands, since trade and war continued, new colonists came, members of the families of the original colonists moved about, books circulated; see Adams 2007, 18). From its very start, Roman literature records not simply variants of the language but attitudes toward that variance. Direct theoretical reflection on the issues of correct speech comes through the efforts of rhetoricians at Rome, and their translation of Greek theoretical terms and ideas to the realities of second-​century Rome. Romans had been interested in Greek rhetoric for perhaps a century before the first translation of a Greek treatise into Latin. Crates of Mallos, visiting Rome as an ambassador in the mid-​second century, offered lectures, showpieces of Greek rhetoric, that were well attended, but the first extant Latin manual of rhetoric, which has the first attested use of the word Latinitas, dates from the very beginning of the first century bce. The anonymous author of the Rhetorica ad Herennium writes simply, “Latinitas est quae sermonem purum conservat, ab omni vitio remotum” (4.17: “Latinity is that which keeps speech pure, removed from any mistake”). This definition anticipates,

74   Language and Identity indeed directs, the long subsequent tradition of the purity of Latin style. Latinity is not the same as the Latin language. Cicero is quite clear on this, which is to say he recognizes the need to fashion a literary language from the spoken language of his day. Mere reproduction of spoken Latin would not do. Cicero often joins the terms for pure and Latin to signify the artistic language he has in mind as the orator’s duty (De or. 1.144, “ut pure et Latine loquamur”; Opt. Gen. 4, “ut pure et emendate loquentes, id est Latine”; Orat. 79, “sermo purus erit et Latinus”). How to find sermo purus is what the grammarians will explain and catalog. Cicero will have Crassus in the De oratore (3.45) say that his mother-​in-​law Laelia spoke an ancestral, pure Latin, but she is of course a memory in a dialogue of fabricated memories (Cicero writing in 55 bce set his dialog in September 91. He also is seeking a feminine familial authenticity or even primitivism, as he says, “facilius enim mulieres incorruptam antiquitatem conservant”). Cicero never heard her, nor could his readers. Latinity is then a norm of preservation and discovery. It is often predicated as pure, but this almost immediately needs explanation, and the explanation is given and seems to be understood in negative terms.6 In other words, Latinity is not an aesthetic ideal; it is a default expectation and it is detected not by virtues of style but by faults, chiefly of accidence and idiom, and to a lesser extent syntax.7 Cicero shows the same understanding. Writing to Atticus on December 9, 50 bce, first about political matters and then about various private persons and property, Cicero mentions in passing a usage for which Atticus must have faulted him. He had made two alleged mistakes by using the Greek form of a place name and by using a preposition with it (he acknowledges that “all our people” use the Latin form). This is more venial it seems than his use of the preposition with the accusative to denote motion toward a place. The latter is not right with the names of towns (this is the same “fault” that Augustus recommended). Cicero evades the charge by a shift in categories, the place in question, the port of Athens, is not a town but a deme. Two elements of the succeeding discussion are of interest. First, Cicero turns to precedent to defend his usage: he cites two authors who had used the same phrase, “in Piraeum,” Caecilius and Terence. He acknowledges that Caecilius was not a good precedent (“for he was a poor authority of Latinity”). Terence is his trump card. Second, to conclude this little display of erudition and to pass on to a more serious matter, he writes “But since you are a schoolmaster, you will deliver me from a great annoyance if you solve the following cavil” (he uses the Greek word for an academic question, zêtêma). In sum, questions of Latinity are an attack on the authority of the author. He is accused of a slip. An explanation of the correctness of the author’s usage follows, in this case at first with a typical Ciceronian sleight of hand, through redefining the terms of the dispute. The other elements of defense are found more generally: some account of contemporary usage, especially reference to older literary authors, and finally an attack upon the critic as an academic.8 This practical, performative strain of Latinitas lived on in the grammarians and also in such literature as the Attic Nights of Aulus Gellius and the Saturnalia of Macrobius. Theoretical discussion of Latinitas is circumscribed, by its original place, as a calque, for Hellenismos in rhetorical theory and by the preoccupation of the earlier Latin

Latinitas   75 rhetoricians with more advanced stages in the curriculum. The author of the Rhetorica ad Herennium had mentioned Latinitas as one component to one of the three virtues of speaking (Cicero, on the other hand, eschews further theoretical treatment and we must turn to Quintilian as an enlarging footnote to Cicero in the De oratore). The author of the Rhetorica ad Herennium (4.17), in enumerating the three virtues of style (with the elimination of the fourth Theophrastan virtue of decorum), distinguished elegantia, compositio (sonorous word patterning), and dignitas (by which he means ornamentation—​ figures of style and of thought). Elegantia consists of Latinitas and explanatio. The latter is “clarity,” but he means by this proper diction, the use either of common language or of appropriate terms. In turn, the “appropriate” means nonmetaphorical terms. Elegantia, then, hardly qualifies as much of a virtue: the absence of faults of grammar and diction is elegantia. Latinitas is thus the default state of the Roman orator—​he uses plain Latin words with a morphology, idiom, phrasing, and syntax which do not offend the Roman ear. In the theoretical progression of the triad, Latinitas is something like the inventio of words. The right words come; these are the stuff of speech (as inventio provides the stuff of argument). Then the orator will form these into oratorical speech. Cicero at De oratore 3.48 considers Latinitas as a prerequisite beneath theoretical attention. He actually has Crassus deliver a praeteritio: “Let us pass over therefore the rules for speaking Latin [praecepta Latine loquendi].” He asserts that early education, the study of literature, conversation within the family, and reading the old orators suffice for our topic. As A. D. Leeman put it succinctly, “Cicero’s subject is sermo rather than verba” (Leeman 1963: 123). Quintilian, however, points the way for the developing interest of the imperial grammarians in the precepts for diction and pronunciation. In his first book (1.11) and briefly at 11.3.30 of the Institutio Oratoria, Quintilian treats the faults of speech to be avoided by careful teaching. The latter passage takes up pronunciation and proceeds in a familiar fashion, not so much by argument as by flat declaration that pronunciation should be good. In fact he gives a string of terms for good: pronunciation should be emendata dilucida ornata apta (faultless, clear, artistic, appropriate). The positive characterization does not last: he chooses to explain only the first of these adjectives, emendata, which is in fact a negative compound. It means free from faults. Quintilian explains, “It will be faultless, that is it will lack faults, if the accent is easy, clear, pleasant, and Roman, that is, in which there is not the slightest hint of the country or the foreign” (“Emendata erit, id est vitio carebit, si fuerit os facile explanatum iucundum urbanum, id est in quo nulla neque rusticitas neque peregrinitas resonet”). Of course, Cicero and Quintilian could hear the language of Rome’s elite and detect a foreign accent or a country word, but with the spread of education in Latin and the rise of the provinces and provincials (in participation in government, in schooling, and in literary culture) came the necessity to retheorize Latinity. Indeed, the nonstandard target of censure shifts from the variants outside the city proper of Rome to variants described as provincial. In positive terms, the model speaker is no longer the urbanus but the Italus, the citizen of the Italian peninsula (see Morin 2001, 192–​201). The later grammatical tradition inherited a fairly advanced linguistic science to help them in this task and a canon of Latin writers to mine for words and idioms. The gap between

76   Language and Identity grammaticality and acceptability would widen as no single living speech community could provide the norms of acceptability. Instead, these had to be preserved and recreated by arguing about, for example, what precedent in earlier literature there was for some peculiar term in Cicero or Vergil. So in addition to research into Rome’s early literature, the grammarians could make use of Hellenistic scientific methods, communicated to Romans chiefly by the voluminous writings of Varro and by the monograph on analogy by Julius Caesar. But before we review the ancient principles that aimed to distinguish proper diction and morphology, it is important to stress how plain and schoolmasterly the teaching of Latinitas could be. The Appendix Probi, probably a third-​or fourth-​century text, gives a list of dos and donts: “formica non furmica,” for instance, which is to say that the Latin word for “ant” is to be written with an o.9 We are here encountering orthography and perhaps not rules for pronunciation. Low-​class classical Romans, late Roman speakers, and the subsequent Romance traditions all share many of the mistakes stigmatized in the Appendix Probi, but just as one can say nait and learn to write “knight” or “night,” so the schoolchildren might at this stage have simply been learning spelling (which of course becomes part of Latinity). Still, this is illustrative of the greater importance of Latinitas as Latin became a school language. The great scholar of the Latin language, also a contemporary and peer of Cicero and Caesar, Marcus Terentius Varro, had discussed etymology, morphology, and syntax in the twenty-​five books of his De lingua latina. This would prove a treasure trove for the pedants’ hunt for peculiar words, but it also explained, to a degree, and modeled method for deciding the right form of a word. His purpose was to explore the development of words, not to standardize Latin, but his methods could be put to the more utilitarian task. Books 2–​7 of the De lingua latina explained impositio verborum, the coinage of words. His topic here was etymology, both uncovering the first form of a word and revealing the connections between words (both phonological and semantic). Books 8–​13 treated declinatio verborum, those changes from an original form, which include all the ways that a stem is changed—​to another word or to another form of the original word. He set out two extreme approaches, those of analogy and anomaly, and then in dialogic mode pursued a mean.10 Extreme analogy would eliminate irregularities. Varro, however, was not interested in recovering an older strain of the language as the norm for present speech or writing. His etymology aims ultimately at explaining why a current word means what it does. In explaining Latin words he relies on customary usage, the old Latin poets, and Greek loan words. These are not simply different sources of words but his explanatory categories. Together, they are strikingly traditional. Varro approaches the Latin language with a certain reverence. He will not toss out words because their form is not analogous to other words. Equally, he is no linguistic reactionary or modernist. He presents himself as the careful guide engaged in a vast campaign to restore and make clear the connections among the old Roman things that are Latin words. Despite some ancient efforts at radical analogy and despite modern scholars’ reification of the two tendencies into opposed schools, the traditionalists Varro and Quintilian won the day. The Latin language was not to be reformed but to be conserved and defended.

Latinitas   77 The subsequent grammatical tradition used Varro’s linguistic science (or rather a derivative that had made its way into the tradition of Roman grammatical writings) to interesting, different ends. But again, their theory is more systematic than their actual practice (no one will be so radical as the late republican authorities in advocating change in phonology or simplification of syntax). The fourth-​century Diomedes (Ars grammatica 2.439) demonstrates the particular orientation of the Roman schools: Latinitas est incorrupte loquendi observatio secundum Romanam linguam. Constat autem, ut adserit Varro, his quattuor, natura analogia consuetudine auctoritate. Latinity is the reverent pursuit of speaking without fault following the norms of the Latin language. Further it is based on four things, as Varro maintains, nature, analogy, custom, and authority.

He continues that nature is immutable. He means by nature something like the received facts of language (including irregularities like the feminine gender of a noun ending in -​us). The restricted and secondary function of analogy is important: analogia sermonis a natura proditi ordinatio est secundum technicos neque aliter barbaram linguam ab erudita quam argentum a plumbo dissociat. Analogy is the recasting of a word provided by nature following the [rules of the] grammarians, and it works by distinguishing a barbarous word from a scholarly word just as silver [coin] is distinguished from lead.

Custom is explained as tertiary, subordinate to analogy. It is supported by the numbers of its advocates. In last place, authority has not even this, for it is one old reading employed without the writer even knowing why. There is a clear hierarchy here and a sequence of operations should we find a flexion, word, or idiom that seems irregular. First, natura—​ the general practices of Latin—​is not to be questioned. Then the grammarians can be checked. This is interesting, for it is not simply the case that we are employing analogy: we follow the grammarians where first we followed (secundum) the Latin language. Should this fail, we can rely on customary usage. This is presented as third, but the deeply conservative features of the whole enterprise should be remembered: this is not a third prompt to change but a third reason to maintain what we see written before us. Diomedes writes of consuetudo that linguistic science does not take second place to but indulges customary practice (“illi artis ratio non accedat sed indulgeat”). Finally, there is authority: auctoritas in regula loquendi novissima est. namque ubi omnia defecerint, sic ad illam quem ad modum ad ancoram decurritur. Authority comes last in the norms of speaking. When all else fails, we fly to that as to an anchor.

The science and the conservatism of the grammarians are strongly indebted to Varro. As with Varro, science—​nature, analogy, etymology—​reveals the underlying structures of

78   Language and Identity language, even its deep systematicity without impelling us to change the surface forms. Excepted are individual cases where we may have to make the decision between two options: whether the form is corrupt (deviant from the various norms of the received language) or erudite (an old word which should not be rejected). This does not amount to positive aesthetic—​there is no compulsion to restore an older variant nor to seek archaisms for one’s compositions. The impulse is to preserve, like a very conservative textual critic who will let the text stand just so long as its elements can be found to be Latin or that there is some way it can be construed.11 In fact, the grammarians have worked significant changes. Latinitas has become a synonym for the Latin language, a fourfold method of conservation or determination of the legitimacy of a form, and as a consequence something of an intellectual template. Diomedes attributed his definition to Varro. This may ultimately be correct, but the extant parallel or source for his words comes from Quintilian, who wrote at 1.6.1 “sermo constat ratione, vetustate, auctoritate, consuetudine” (“speech is determined by reason, antiquity, authority, and custom”). Varro, according to Diomedes, had nature and analogy not reason and antiquity. In fact, ratio would have included analogy (the proportional, rational evaluation of forms—​some of the grammarians restrict ratio to analogy and etymology, see Morin 2001, 200). Perhaps Quintilian has substituted vetustas for natura.12 Ratio stands against consuetudo and auctoritas as these two champion inconsistent forms. But what is the role of natura? “Nature” has here the broad Roman meaning of the inartificial world, all that we might call the “extra social.” That language is not a social artifact seems very strange to the modern. But the ancient grammatical tradition sees language as a given, a received system just as the atomic process of the physical world is a received system. (It is a bit inconsistent that Stoic linguistic theory undergirds Varro and the subsequent tradition. On the Stoic understanding, an original nomothete imposed words on things, but this act of imposition was natural in that there was of old a transparent relation between signifier and signified.) In fact, the naturalness of language is a bit more complex. The grammatical tradition treats language (Latinitas) as a microcosm that reproduces the macrocosm of nature. Latinitas is produced and maintained by nature. Ratio in turn has become the process of seeing the correct correlation of language with nature (Morin 2001, 189). This later tradition defines nature rather broadly as the force which brings things to birth.13 It is then the generative system of language, including errors which human ratio will detect and prune. But ratio has a strongly circumscribed role: it is to be brought to bear on the fecund state of language so as to reveal the system of that natural world. Human beings are not to use ratio to reform language. We have traveled significantly beyond the stock of words and manner of delivery that Cicero would not deign to elaborate. Latinitas is now both the literary and linguistic tradition and a species of natural reality to which men must bring their reason. Sedulius Scottus (58.34) could write simply “Doctrina eloquentiae, hoc est logica” (“The discipline of speech, which is to say logic”).14 This genus of logic can be divided into grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric. The old precepts of speaking have become the science of grammar, itself a reflection of and mirror into the very order of nature.

Latinitas   79

Bibliography Adams, J. N. 2007. The Regional Diversification of Latin, 200 bc–​ad 600. Cambridge. Baehrens, W. A. 1922. Sprachlicher Kommentar zur vulgärlateinischen Appendix Probi. Gröningen. Bloomer, W. M. 1997. Latinity and Literary Society at Rome. Philadelphia, PA. Cavazza, F. 1981. Studio su Varrone etimologo e grammatico: La lingua latina come modello di struttura linguistica. Florence. Charpin, F. 1977. L’Idée de phrase grammatical, et son expression en Latin. Paris. Courtney, E., ed. 1993. The Fragmentary Latin Poets. Oxford. Cousin, J. 1935. Études sur Quintilien. Paris. Ferri, R., and P. Philomen. 2010. “Roman Authors on Colloquial Language.” In Colloquial and Literary Latin, edited by E. Dickey and A. Chahoud, 12–​41. Cambridge. Goldberg, S. M. 1986. Understanding Terence. Princeton, NJ. Holford-​Strevens, L. 2003. Aulus Gellius: An Antonine Scholar and His Achievement. Rev. ed. Oxford. Johnson, W. R. 1971. Luxuriance and Economy: Cicero and the Alien Style. Berkeley, CA. Kaster, R. A. 1988. Guardians of Language. Berkeley, CA. Krostenko, B. A. 2013. “The Poetics of Naevius’ ‘Epitaph’ and the History of Latin Poetry.” JRS 103: 1–​19. Lebreton, J. 1901. Études sur la langue et la grammaire de Cicéron. Paris. Leeman, A. D. 1963. Orationis ratio: The Stylistic Theories and Practice of the Roman Orators, Historians, and Philosophers. Amsterdam. Morin, J. 2001. Latinitas: Permanence et transformations d’une formule de norme linguistique latine. Villeneuve d’Ascq. Short, W. M. 2007. Sermo, Sanguis, Semen: An Anthropology of Language in Roman Culture. Unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Berkeley, CA. Smiley, C. N. 1906. “Latinitas and Hellēnismos: The Influence of the Stoic Theory of Style as Shown in the Writings of Dionysius, Quintilian, Pliny the Younger, Tacitus, Fronto, Aulus Gellius, and Sextus Empiricus.” Bulletin of the University of Wisconsin, Philology and Literature Series 3, no. 3: 205–​272. Taylor, D. J. 1996. Varro—​De lingua latina X: A New Critical Text and English Translation with Prolegomena and Commentary. Amsterdam. Vainio, R. 1999. Latinitas and Barbarisms According to the Roman Grammarians:  Attitudes towards Language in the Light of Grammatical Examples. Turku.

Chapter 6

C osmop oli ta ni sm Daniel S. Richter

Definitions In the Politics, Aristotle described the polis as belonging to “the class of compounds in the same way as all other things that form a single whole, but a whole composed, nonetheless, of a number of different parts (Pol. 1274b). In doing so, Aristotle created a paradox: for a compound to be considered a “whole,” its constituent parts must be at once same and different—​same to the extent that they constitute a properly unified entity and yet different enough to remain parts. The question is, what are the elements that the parts must have in common to properly create a whole? In human terms, this is a social, political, and genealogical question, the answer to which must address the relative importance of various criteria according to which human communities define themselves (emic) and are defined (etic): ethnicity, class, gender, religion, language, and so on. For much of human history, biological kinship has been the central determining factor of group identity. Indeed, any human collectivity that locates its cohesion in these terms must engage in the discursive process of locating the boundaries of the descent group: the nuclear family? The extended family? The tribe? The descendants of a common eponymous ancestor? The history of cosmopolitan thought is largely a story about the ways in which those who would proclaim the unity of the human race formulate the nature and claims of kinship;1 few aspects of political and intellectual history are more implicated in the ideological commitments of one’s own time (e.g., Appiah 2005, 2006; cf. Balibar 2004; Nussbaum 1996; Singer 2002). The autonomous, autochthonous, and homogeneous classical polis is one of purest expressions of the idea that the political collectivity is or ought to be coterminous with the boundaries of the ethnic group (Cohen 2000; Lape 2014; Ober 1989; Rosivach 1987). The Hellenistic period, by contrast, produced a radically new set of models of political community (Nussbaum 1994). For centuries, scholars have located a revolution in human thought in the world left behind by Alexander and theorized by Zeno. But where the generation of George Grote and Johann Gustav Droysen saw the

82   Language and Identity Verschmelzung of East and West as the cause of the dilution and decline of the “Greek genius” (e.g., Droysen 1877; Grote 1857), those who followed William Woodthorpe Tarn idolized “Alexander the dreamer” as the true author of the idea of the “Unity of Mankind” (Tarn 1933; see Badian’s response 1958). Tarn’s Alexander, the genius behind the marriages at Susa and the Oath at Opis, was “the pioneer of one of the supreme revolutions in the world’s outlook, the first man known to us who contemplated the brotherhood of man or the unity of mankind (Tarn 1933, 148).” For Tarn, Alexander’s policies of Greek and barbarian intermarriage, the exchange of populations between Europe and Asia, the foundation of Alexandrias from Bactria to Babylon, and the Greek education of Persian children all aimed at the realization of a cosmopolitan oikoumenê in which birth counted for nothing in the construction of (Greek) identity (e.g., Arrian, Anab. 7.4.4–​5.6). Others have suggested that it was, in fact, Zeno of Citium who originated and elaborated the theoretical basis of the idea of the unity of the human community (Baldry 1965, 151–​166; Richter 2011, 55–​86). To the particularism of the classical polis, the Hellenistic Stoa offered definitions of citizenship and kinship that lay at the foundation of centuries of ancient cosmopolitan thought, culminating in the philosophical and rhetorical writings of the early Roman Empire and Pauline universalism (Engberg-​ Pedersen 2000; Lee 2006). I have argued elsewhere that the early Hellenistic Stoa adopted and adapted a late classical, Athenian critique of democratic birth for ethnic purposes—​that the rejection of aristocratic claims for the heritability of virtue (aretê) by the fifth-​and fourth-​century Athenian demos provided a conceptual vocabulary for those who would challenge the specialness of birth (autochthony) itself in the third century bce and beyond (Richter 2011, 21–​54; cf. Ober 1989). The Stoa, in particular, elaborated modes of thinking about ethnicity and community in ways that were distinctly cosmopolitan (Schofield 1991; for a more abstract reading of Zeno’s cosmopolitanism, see Vogt 2008). In what follows, I want to explore how certain intellectuals of the Second Sophistic made further use of this rich vocabulary of descent in an effort to conceptualize the unity of the Roman Empire. I begin with the philosophical underpinnings of early imperial cosmopolitanism—​above all in the works of the Stoics. I then turn to more properly rhetorical formulations of the unity of the human community in an effort to explain how specific performance contexts determined how certain sophists articulated a cosmopolitan worldview. Finally, I briefly sketch the ways in which certain early imperial intellectuals adopted the trope of exile to cosmopolitan ends. Overviews of ancient cosmopolitan thought can be easily found (e.g., Baldry, Richter) and so what follows here does not aim to be a comprehensive survey. I have also chosen not to focus on the engines that created an ostensibly unified Roman oikoumenê in practice, such as language, imperial administration, and pedagogy—​subjects well treated elsewhere in this volume. What I offer is a set of analyses of some representative and influential formulations of cosmopolitan ideas in the Second Sophistic. As will become clear, an account of early imperial cosmopolitan thought must begin where the intellectuals of the period themselves began, in the political and philosophical writings of the late classical and Hellenistic periods.

Cosmopolitanism   83

The Philosophers The idea that one ought to live according to nature (ζῆν κατὰ φύσιν), while not strictly limited to any single philosophical school, was most closely associated with the Stoics in antiquity and beyond.2 Indeed, Stoic conceptions of the physical nature of the universe stand at the base of all Stoic political and ethical thought and enabled the Stoa, over the course of the Hellenistic and Roman periods, to elaborate a truly revolutionary conception of the human soul. To begin with a brief sketch of Stoic physics: Chrysippus described the Cosmos as a “completed body”3 which is entirely and perfectly pervaded by the divine principle, which is variously described as pneuma, nous, theos, or Zeus.4 Because this physical divine principle (which I will call pneuma) is “totally blended” into the entirety of the cosmos, each and every physical object in the universe is essentially one.5 And because the divine is reason, the entire universe is itself rational. Alexander of Aphrodisias paraphrased Chrysippus: “God is mixed with matter and pervades the whole of it and in this way shaping it and forming it and creating the universe. . . .God is body, an intelligent and eternal pneuma.”6 That said, the Stoics did admit of a scala naturae; the pneuma might pervade all matter equally, but the ways in which it does so differ according to the internal organization of the matter itself and depends upon the matter’s capacity for movement: at the top of the scale are human beings who move “by themselves,” meaning that humans possess both the ability to move as well as the rational intelligence to decide to do so.7 This particular understanding of the physical nature of the universe had vast implications for Stoic ideas about the nature of the human soul. In stark contrast to Aristotelian ideas about the various types of human souls (that the male soul possesses reason [logos], which in the female soul is “without authority” and which the natural slave possesses not at all),8 Stoic psychology allowed for only one type of human soul, regardless of gender or ethnicity. Indeed, the Stoics addressed the question of the rationality of the souls of women and slaves from an early date. Zeno’s student Cleanthes is said to have written a text called “Concerning the Idea that the Virtue of the Man and the Woman is the Same,” and Lactantius adduces the evidence of the Stoics when he argues, if wisdom is given to humankind, it is given to all without discrimination . . . because if human nature is capable of wisdom, it is fitting that craftsmen, peasants, and women—​in short, all who bear the human form [qui humanam formam gerunt]—​be taught to be wise; and it is also fitting that the people be brought together from every language, condition, sex, and age . . . the Stoics understood this to such an extent that they said that even slaves and women ought to do philosophy.9

Musonius Rufus is said to have put the matter even more succinctly: “women as well as men have taken the same capacity for reason [logos] from the gods.”10 It is this universalizing aspect of Stoic psychology—​the idea that the human soul is always and everywhere the same regardless of the type of embodiment (Greek or

84   Language and Identity barbarian, male or female)—​that makes a cosmopolitan ethics and politics necessary. The theoretical basis for Stoic cosmopolitanism is the idea of oikeiôsis—​the affective disposition of a human soul towards that which it feels is oikeios or “akin” to itself (Görgemanns 1983; Pembroke 1971; Pohlenz 1940; Striker 1983). All ancient accounts of oikeiôsis—​including the Stoic—​locate the source of this affective disposition in kinship. However, the Stoic understanding of oikeiôsis proceeds from a materialist model of the cosmos and differs radically from other ancient formulations of the idea. Indeed, if Stoic physics stands at the beginning of Stoic psychology, the peculiarly cosmopolitan Stoic understanding of oikeiôsis (as opposed to other ancient formulations) is the foundation of a distinctly cosmopolitan Stoic ethics. To get a sense of the peculiar character of Stoic oikeiôsis, compare the formulation of Theophrastus: Those from whom we have been born, I mean father and mother, we say are naturally oikeios to ourselves. And indeed, we consider oikeios to ourselves those who trace their descent back to common ancestors. (Arist. Pseudep. I.98 (Rose))

This idea that we ought to feel a stronger affinity for those who are “closer” to ourselves is echoed in a fragment of the ostensibly Aristotelian Arius Didymus, where we read that although we feel a natural friendliness (philia) for members of our immediate and extended families, our fellow citizens, as well as for those of our own ethnos and phulon, and, indeed, for the entire human race, we naturally experience this philia more strongly for those closer to us (Görgemanns 1983; cf. Inwood 1983). By contrast, the Stoa will embrace a distinctively cosmopolitan understanding of philia-​oikeiôsis which will claim, in its most stringent form, that the intensity of our obligations to others ought not to decrease with distance from the self, that the moral universe that we inhabit is populated by symmetrically placed persons.11 For some early imperial intellectuals, such as an unnamed Academic scholiast on Plato’s Theaetetus, Stoic cosmopolitan ethics rooted in oikeiôsis seemed untenable: In his attack on the Stoics, the scholiast argued that in reality, one has a greater appropriative relationship with one’s own fellow citizens since appropriation [oikeiôsis] increases in intensity and slackens; they [the Stoics] say that one’s own appropriative relationship to oneself is equal to that of the most distant Mysian . . . this is contrary to the datum of experience and our self-​consciousness.12

The scholiast might have had in mind Stoics such as Hierocles (second century ce) who, in spite of his acceptance of the idea that the individual is enmeshed in various sorts of familial and civic structures, nevertheless elaborated a version of oikeiôsis that tasked the wise man to reconfigure his participation in these relational matrices in ways that transcended traditional notions of social allegiance.13 Hierocles’s well-​known image of the individual at the center of a series of concentric circles exhorts the sage to reimagine human relationships toward cosmopolitan ends. Each human being, Hierocles wrote,

Cosmopolitanism   85 inhabits an innermost ring that “almost touches the center itself.” Immediately following the circle of self is the circle of parents, brothers, wives and children, followed by a circle of members of the extended family, followed by a circle of the kin group as a whole, a circle of demesmen and tribesmen, a circle of one’s ethnos, and then finally, in the outermost circle, the “entirety of humankind.” But having acknowledged the fact that our social universes are defined by varying degrees of distance, Hierocles tasks the wise man to “somehow draw the circles together toward the center,” and to transfer the affection that one traditionally directs toward the innermost circles toward the outermost. Hierocles allows that distance of blood will remove some affection but nevertheless insists that it is incumbent upon the wise man to acknowledge the absolute unity of the human race and to attempt to act accordingly. The hostile version of Stoic cosmopolitan ethics that the scholiast to Plato’s Theaetetus offers is not, it seems, entirely off the mark; Hierocles does seek to orient the attention of the individual toward the “most distant Mysian,” as the scholiast puts it, but to do so in full acknowledgment of the difficulties of this ethical position. Hierocles, then, represents in some ways what Martha Nussbaum describes as an “extreme Stoic cosmopolitanism,” which dictates that the individual ignore the special claims of kith and kin as contrary to logic and antithetical to one’s responsibilities to the unified nature of the human community. By contrast, other early imperial Stoics such as Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus advocated what Kwame Anthony Appiah would characterize as a “rooted cosmopolitanism”14 in which local affinities do not exclude global responsibilities but, in fact, enable and are enabled by them. This early imperial “rooted cosmopolitanism” stands in stark contrast to the radical approach to traditional ideas about kinship and citizenship that characterized the early Stoa. For example, in the Politieia, Zeno is said to have explicitly rejected ties of biological kinship in favor of the natural affinity that the virtuous have for one another: Those men who are not virtuous are as enemies, foes slaves, and foreigners to one another, even parents to their children, brothers to brothers, even kin to kin . . . only the virtuous are citizens, friends, kin to one another, and free.15

Cassius the Skeptic (in Diogenes Laertius) is the overtly hostile source for this passage and indeed, Cassius emphasizes the extremity of this Stoic position by claiming that, “for the Stoics, parents are enemies [exthroi] to their children, since they are not wise.”16 As early as the Hellenistic period, these “anti-family” teachings of Zeno had come to prove an embarrassing liability for the Stoa—​so much so that a certain Athenodorus, librarian at Pergamum, is said17 to have excised these “disturbing theses” from his authoritative copy of the Politeia (Goulet-​Cazé, 2003; see also Vogt 2008, 20–​64). Whether Zeno did, in fact, take such radical positions in his Politeia (he is also said to have advocated community of women, cannibalism, and incest) or, as Malcolm Schofield has suggested, these charges are nothing more than Skeptic calumny (Schofield 1991, 3–​21), by the Roman imperial period, the cosmopolitanism of the Stoa had come to explicitly embrace the naturalness of affective local ties—​the idea that affection is a good. Of

86   Language and Identity the many ways of defining this shift, perhaps the most astute is Gretchen Reydams-​ Schils’s observation that in the imperial period, the Stoa developed a model of the self that “functions as a mediator between philosophical and traditional values” (Reydams-​ Schils 2005, 1). Indeed, already in the Augustan period, it seems that the general contours of a peculiarly kin-​oriented Stoic cosmopolitanism had taken shape. In the third book of Cicero’s De Finibus, Cato begins his exposition of Stoic ethics with the observation that each animal is born with an “awareness of itself ” (sensus sui) that drives it toward self-​preservation (3.16). Cato continues to argue that it is, according to nature that children are loved by their parents, from which beginning we attain the effected social community of the human race . . . thus it appears that we are driven by nature herself to love those whom we have borne. From which arises that communal natural affection of human beings for human beings, with the result that it is fitting that a human being never be perceived as alien to another human given the fact that he is a human being. (De Finibus 3.62–​63)

Cato’s effort to accommodate both the claims of the immediate kin group and an ethical orientation toward the whole of humanity stands in stark contrast to Zeno’s alleged rejection of traditional familial and polis-​centered loyalties. Epictetus’s cosmopolitan ethics are similarly at once local and global. On the one hand, Epictetus subscribed to a strong cosmopolitan position. Concerning the practical consequences of the idea of the kinship of gods and men, Epictetus urges his students to consider the scope of their affinities as wider than that of their immediate kin or fellow citizens. It is in this regard that Epictetus foisted upon Socrates a most-​unsocratic idea. Epictetus said that to a man who might inquire after one’s origins, Socrates counseled, “never say that ‘I am an Athenian or a Corinthian,’ but that ‘I am a Cosmian’ ” (κόσμιος). In a statement that hearkens back to the cosmopolitanism of the early Stoa, Epictetus asks, why would you say that you were an Athenian and not from that small corner into which your bodily part was thrown at birth? Or do you clearly take the place that is more lofty and encompasses not only your own corner but your entire house and, in a word, from where the lineage of your ancestors has come down to you at this spot, whence you call yourself Athenian and Corinthian? (Diss. 1.9)

And with a nod to Stoic materialist physics, Epictetus corrects such limited parochialism by reminding us that anyone who has carefully studied the nature of the cosmos must become aware of the “seeds” (σπέρματα) of the divine which have descended not simply from grandfather to father but, “to all things that are born and grow upon the earth and, above all, to the reasoning beings (ta logika) since according to nature, they alone are in communion with the society of the divine and are implicated in him through reason (Diss. 1.9.1–​6). But as with Cato, Epictetus’s cosmian ethics do not preclude an awareness and even a celebration of the natural affection that we feel toward those who are closest to us. Epictetus does not aim, as had Hierocles, to place the individual at the

Cosmopolitanism   87 center of circles of symmetrically placed others. Rather, Epictetus insisted that a human being must “eat as a human being, drink as a human being, adorn oneself, marry, have kids, participate in the life of the polis” (Diss. 3.21.5). To the man whose love for his own daughter was so great that he abandoned her during her illness lest he see her suffer, Epictetus responds, “affection for family is according to nature and good” (Diss. 1.2.17).

Political Cosmopolitanism Although Epictetus’s student Marcus Aurelius never self-​identifies as a Stoic, the Meditations reveal a strong Stoic cosmopolitan outlook (Asmis 1989). But if Epictetus’s ethics seem very grounded in the ethical world of the day-​to-​day, Marcus’s perspective, perhaps inevitably, is more global. When Marcus speaks of the cosmic city, the kinship of gods and humans, and the nature of the universe, he does so in consistently ambiguous terms that leave the reader wondering whether he is formulating an abstract cosmopolitanism or a model for enlightened citizenship in the world of the Roman Empire. Certainly, the two aims are not incompatible, and perhaps this is precisely the point. Consider, for example, a passage in the Meditations in which Marcus engages in a sort of object lesson—​a reasoning animal using reason to establish his own nature: If our cognitive ability is common to us all, then our reason [logos], on account of which we are reasoning beings [logikoi] is also common to us all; if this is true, then that reason which instructs us in what we must do and what we must not do is also common to us all; if this is true, then law [nomos] is common to us all; if this is true, we are fellow citizens [politai]; if this is true, we participate in some sort of polity; if this is true, the cosmos is like a polis, for of what other thing could someone say that the entire human race participates in a common polity? And thence, from this same common polis, we get our cognitive, reasoning, and legal abilities. From where else? (MA 4.4)

Although he does not use the word, Marcus’s reasoning process in this passage echoes classical Stoic formulations of oikeiôsis. What is missing here is explicit mention of the underpinning physics according to which the universality of the pneuma enables all rational beings to possess reason. But Marcus works out the ethical implications of the universal human possession of cognition and logos in orthodox Stoic fashion. Interestingly, Marcus seems to extend the logic of the idea beyond the ethical sphere to that of politics. It is possible that the polis that Marcus has in mind here is the (arguably) abstract city of the wise envisioned by Zeno. But the language that he uses is suggestive enough to raise the possibility that he is thinking here as well of an idealized imperial oikoumenê—​a totally unified space in which the common possession of reason leads to a uniformity of law under which all men live as if in a single polis. Marcus, therefore, seems to articulate what I shall call “political” cosmopolitanism, by which I mean a cosmopolitan vision that takes as its model the unity of an idealized polis.

88   Language and Identity Like its philosophical forms, this “political” cosmopolitanism also has its roots in the late classical period. In particular, Isocratean panhellenism provided a rich conceptual vocabulary for early imperial intellectuals who would imagine the Roman Empire as an entirely unified and homogenous space (Richter 2011, 100–​111). In 380 bce, six years after the King’s Peace and two years before the establishment of the second Athenian League, Isocrates, the éminence grise of Athenian political life, delivered his Panegyricus, a speech ten years in the crafting. Isocrates hoped to rally the Greeks—​in particular, the Athenians and the Spartans—​behind Philip II of Macedon in a panhellenic war against Persia: “I have come to offer council concerning the war against the barbarians and concord amongst ourselves.”18 In this speech, Isocrates mingled arguments for the absolute superiority of Athens among the Greek poleis with calls for Greek unity. Isocrates spoke of Athens’s past service to the rest of the Greeks and various inventions and dwelled extensively on the special character of Athenian autochthony. Since we are autochthonous, we are able to address our city with the very same names with which we address those of our own oikos. It is fitting that we alone of all the Greeks call our city nurse, father and mother.19

And having offered this praise of the purity of the Athenian genos, in a justly famous and much-​discussed passage, Isocrates then proceeds to articulate his vision of a unified Hellas. As we shall see, the terms in which Isocrates elaborates this ecumenical vision of Hellas will become central to early imperial cosmopolitan imaginings of the unity of the Roman world. Isocrates declared, By so great a distance has our city surpassed all men in both thought and speech that her students have become teachers of others and our city has brought it about that the name of Greeks no longer indicates a kin group [genos] but rather a manner of thinking [dianoia]. We ought now properly call those men Greeks who have a share in our education [paideia] than in some common nature [phusis]. (Isoc. Panegyr 50)

It is often suggested that this passage marks a shift away from an ethnic conception of Greekness and toward the sorts of “post-​ethnic” constructions of identity that will come to flourish in the world that Alexander will create (e.g., Isaac 2004, 113–​114; Jones 1999, 135; Saïd 2001). There is a good deal of truth in this, but Isocrates’s opposition of genos and paideia here is considerably more complex than a simple shift in the relative importance of ethnic and cultural factors in the construction of identity. In particular, any reading of the elevation of cultural criteria in this passage must account for Isocrates’s praise of the purity of the autochthonous Athenian genos earlier in the oration. The solution to this seeming problem—​which several authors of the Second Sophistic seem to have understood, lies in an appreciation of the ways in which Isocrates has formulated more than one mode of defining identity in the Panegyricus. While Greekness may be understood as a cultural category defined by the possession of paideia and dianoia, the special quality of Athenianness seems to lie apart. Indeed, in c­ hapter 50, Isocrates never

Cosmopolitanism   89 mentions Athenianness—​except to suggest that “Greekness” consists of the possession of Athenian paideia as well as Greek (not Athenian) descent. In other words, Isocrates allows for the simultaneous existence of both ethnic (Athenian) and cultural (Greek) modes of defining communal identity. While an Athenian could legitimately identify as a Greek, it is not certain that Isocrates would have allowed the reverse to be true in a general sense. Half a millennium later, the Mysian orator Aelius Aristides reformulated Isocrates’s terms in an effort to describe the unity of the oikoumenê of his own day. Like Isocrates, Aristides will articulate more than one mode of defining identity in these two speeches and will make use of both ethnic and cultural models of community. I want to think here about two orations that Aristides seems to have delivered in 155 ce: the Panathenaicus, whose performance context was Athens, and the Roman Oration, which Aristides probably delivered in the court of Antoninus Pius (Behr 1981, 373; Swain 1996, 275). These are, as we shall see, very different texts—​the Panathenaicus is a more traditional city encomium while the Roman Oration seems to inaugurate the genre of the encomium of empire. The Panathenaicus insists upon the purity of Athenian blood while the Roman Oration displays a much more playful and metaphorical approach to the language of kinship. What is interesting is that in spite of these differences, both texts seek to describe the cosmopolitan unity of the Roman oikoumenê in terms that balance the claims of ethnicity and culture in strikingly similar ways.

The Panathenaicus In language that closely echoes classical formulations of Athenian autochthony, Aristides declares that the genos of the Athenians, “arose from the pockets of the earth” (25); that, “it is given to you [Athenians] alone to boast of pure nobility of birth and citizenship (26–​27). And in a passage that recalls Hierocles’s series of concentric circles but to opposite ends, Aristides deploys the image of a shield to describe the ways in which geography has guaranteed the absolutely unmixed and unadulterated character of the city: Alone she [Athens] has purely taken up the face of the Greeks and is the most ethnically distinct from the barbarians; for as removed as it is in the nature of the place, so far does it stand apart in the customs of its men. As if to the bearing of a shield all things Greek tend to this central land from every extreme and the encircling Greeks—​some from the sea, others from the land—​surround this land all on all sides as if it were the common hearth of the race. (13)

Aristides’s insistence on the ethnic purity of the Athenians in this passage recalls not just Isocrates but a raft of late classical articulations of Athenian exceptionalism. Compare the Funeral Oration that Socrates attributes to Aspasia in Plato’s Menexenus, in which

90   Language and Identity Aspasia claimed that to praise of the land of Attica is to praise the nobility of birth of her children the Athenians themselves. Aspasia locates the source of this Athenian exceptionalism in the autochthonous relationship that the first Athenians had with the soil; only the Athenians can call the earth mother—​all other peoples live on the land as the foster-​children of a stepmother.20 It must be said that this very special praise of the city seems somewhat out of place in the world of the “culture Greeks” of the Second Sophistic. Indeed, pace Herodes Atticus, this ethnically pure center could boast very few native sons among the ranks of the celebrity sophists. And even though Aristides will engage in some special pleading for his native Ionia in another oration (On the Aegean Sea), the ethnic logic of the Panathenaicus seems stunted. That said, we must remember that in an important sense, Aristides was contending with a problem similar to the one that Isocrates had faced half a millennium before: how to accommodate the exceptional otherness of Athens in the context of an oration whose central conceit is the cause of Greek unity? For Isocrates, however, the problem was simpler because the world was larger: his ecumenical Hellenism needed to extend only as far as the Hellespont: as Julius Jüthner argued almost a century ago, Isocrates’s Greeks were those who possessed both Greek genos and Athenian paideia (Jüthner 1923). After all, the point of the oration was war with the barbarians. Aristides’s world, by contrast, was smaller and populated by Greek, Roman, and barbarian sophists from every corner of the Roman oikoumenê, and the vision of Greekness that Aristides articulated needed to be appropriately flexible. For Aristides, it is precisely the purity of the Athenian center that authorizes the diversity of the periphery; as it had for Isocrates, the genius of Athenian paideia flows up from the land to the Athenians and thence outward to the “Greeks”—​but for Aristides, this paideia had longer and more diverse roads to travel. The question is, how to articulate the cosmopolitan unity of this cultural field in the traditional terms that Aristides had chosen? At least part of the answer lay in an act of rehabilitation of the status of Aspasia’s foster-​children. In the Theaetetus, Aspasia casts the foster-​parentage of the land as a mark of inferiority; those who dwell in their land as foster-​children have no real connection to it. Aristides, however, rearranges the metaphor. In the first sentence of the oration he declares, There is an ancient custom among the Greeks, and I think among most of the barbarians as well, of rendering all of the gratitude one can to one’s foster-​parents [tropheis]. And it would be difficult to find someone who would consider any to be foster-​ parents before yourselves, men of Athens—​I mean someone who, indeed, considers himself to belong in some way to the Hellenes [δοκῶν γε δή πως εἰς Ἕλληνας τελεῖν]. At least, that is how it appears to me. (Panath 1)

As Plato’s Aspasia remarked, it is not the land underneath Thebes or Sparta that is the foster mother here but Athens herself. In contrast to Aspasia’s use of the image, for Aristides, Athens can be both mother to her own autochthonous children and foster mother to the entire oikoumenê, both Greek and barbarian. It is a striking cosmopolitan

Cosmopolitanism   91 vision—​one that simultaneously accommodates the claims of both ethnicity (for some) and culture (for all). Also striking is the rather odd periphrasis that Aristides uses to describe those “Greeks” who would identify themselves as the foster children of Athens: δοκῶν γε δή πως εἰς Ἕλληνας τελεῖν. The particle δή, particularly when following verbs of cognition as here (δοκῶν), often denotes irony (Denniston 1934, 229–​ 230, 244–​246). In other words, the Greekness of at least some of Athens’s foster children is not entirely unproblematic. There are those of the periphery, Aristides seems to be saying, whose claims upon the center ought to be accepted with a certain amount of knowing complicity in a fiction. But complicity in an ethnic fiction—​and biologically speaking, fictive kinship is precisely the point of foster parentage—​does not deny the reality of the Greekness of these “culture Greeks”—​a point that Aristides makes more explicit toward the end of the oration in the context of a passage about the universality of the Athenian dialect in the Roman Empire, You [Athenians] alone of men, have raised a bloodless trophy not over Boeotians or Lacedaimonians or Corinthians either but over all those of the same phulon; I say this, not as one might name Hellenes contrasting them with barbarians but with the common family of mankind.21

This “bloodless” trophy, Aristides continues, celebrates the fact that “all the cities and all the ethnic groups of mankind have inclined toward you and your way of life and your language” (Panath. 225). It’s tempting to read “bloodless” as an intentional pun here. The trophy is “bloodless” insofar as it commemorates a cultural, rather than an ethnic unity—​the various ethnic groups still exist as distinct entities but the cosmopolitan whole that they form fulfills the Aristotelian requirement that the whole be composed of parts that share some essential quality that makes them truly part of the whole. In the Panathenaicus, this quality is explicitly cultural rather than ethnic. In the Roman Oration, when Aristides came to articulate a cosmopolitan vision of the Roman world in the city of Rome itself, he used the language of ethnicity and culture in a very different way. The category of Romanness, as Aristides must have known well, had a long history of explicitly nonethnic and universalizing inclusivity; Livy’s Romulus had instructed his companions to persuade prospective in-​laws of neighboring tribes that “men should not be reluctant to mix their blood and lineages with men”22—​an episode Claudius referenced when attempting to shame the native Italian senate into accepting provincials from Gaul into their number, “so that men, not just one at a time, but as countries and peoples might grow strong under our name.”23 And so in the Roman Oration, it is perhaps unsurprising that there is no talk of an ethnically pure center. In fact, the manifest diversity of the imperial center (the city of Rome) models the integrated diversity of the empire itself. One can view the empire in microcosm by walking through the city of Rome, “the factory common to the whole earth . . . the cargoes from India and Arabia Felix” (12), the city is the place at which all the inhabitants of the oikoumenê, “assemble as at a common meeting place” (60) (see Edwards and Woolf 2003). This is not to say that Aristides abandons the vocabulary of ethnicity in this text;

92   Language and Identity quite the opposite in fact—​Aristides consistently returns to notions of kinship in his praise of the Roman Empire—​but he does so in terms that are far more playful and metaphorical than praise of Athens would have allowed. While the Panathenaicus described a world in which a single ethnically pure polis lay at the center of a culturally unified world, the Roman Oration constructs a human space in which all participate equally in a common ethnic group. The central conceit of the Roman Oration is the idea that under Rome, the oikoumenê has become a single polis and that this polis in turn is so perfectly integrated that it functions as an oikos (28, 36). As we have seen, for Marcus Aurelius and the Stoics since Zeno, the cosmos is a polis; Aristides has enclosed the community into a still smaller space. Aristides has not attempted to collapse the rings, as Hierocles had. Rather, he asks his audience to imagine that the outermost ring—​that of the oikoumenê—​is organized according to the principles of the innermost circle—​the oikos. Elsewhere in the oration, Aristides claims that the Romans have brought it about that the Romans have offered citizenship and kinship to all men of nobility throughout the entire oikoumenê. In a famous passage of the Republic which Aristides might well have known, Socrates explained the logic behind this conceit: the polis, Socrates argued in the fifth book, would function most harmoniously if its citizens considered themselves to be members of a single family—​an idea that led Socrates to advocate the dissolution of the nuclear family and the communal possession of women. Aristides will adopt the metaphor if not the radical social agenda. When Aristides articulates the metaphor more fully in the Roman Oration, he returns to the passage of the Panegyricus in which Isocrates had attempted to redefine the name “Hellene.” Aristides wrote, you [Romans] have brought it about that the name “Roman” refers not to a city, but to a sort of common ethnic group [genos]—​and this ethnic group is not one among many, but a compensation for all other ethnic groups. For you do not divide the ethnic groups [genê] into Greek and barbarian . . . rather you have divided the ethnic groups into Romans and non-​Romans. To such a degree have you expanded the name of your city.24

Aristides’s reworking of the Isocratean passage is a brilliant synthesis of Greek ethnic particularism and Roman universalism: Isocrates claimed that the name Hellene no longer refers to a genos; Aristides, by contrast, has declared that the entire human race, under Rome, is properly considered a single genos. The distinction of Roman and non-​Roman is precisely nonethnic but is rather a matter of citizenship that is, in theory, open to all. Aristides’s repeated use of the language of kinship in the Roman Oration is intended, it seems, to remind his listeners that the meaning of these sorts of terms and the obligations which they engender have been irrevocably altered by the fact that the boundaries of the Roman Empire and the edges of the oikoumenê are coterminous. Aristides declares, “conditions no longer differ from island to mainland, but all, as one continuous country and one people heed quietly” (Or. 30). The space of the oikoumenê is, moreover, as homogenous as a single polis: “the Red Sea and the cataracts of the Nile

Cosmopolitanism   93 and Lake Maeotis, which formerly were said to lie on the boundaries of the earth are like the courtyard walls of your city” (28)—​a fact that enables the Romans to administer the oikoumenê as if it were a single polis (36).

The Exiles Oh fatherland, oh home, may I never be without a polis . . . Of troubles, there is none greater than being deprived of one’s native land.25

The chorus of Euripides’s Medea cannot imagine a fate worse than exile. To be without a polis, to be without a patris, is to lack an essential defining feature of what makes us human—​a point shared by many ancient thinkers, perhaps most famously by Aristotle whose dictum, “a human being is a polis animal,” has had long innings in ancient and modern political thought (Pol. 1253a). And yet, the trope of the wanderer whose wisdom is found at the edges of the earth (Odysseus) and the philosophical exile who apprehends truth in solitude appears early in the Greek tradition, particularly among the Cynics. In response to the man who reproached him with his exile, Diogenes responded, “but it was because of it that I became a philosopher” (Diog. Laert. 6.49). Cynic exile, however, is a negative ideal; the wise man cuts his ties with the dross of the world of men. By contrast, there existed a tradition of a more positive ideal of exile, associated particularly with certain Stoic philosophers: if the Cynic rejected the ties of the polis, the Stoic wise man aspired to become a Cosmopolitês—​a citizen of the cosmic polis. We have seen that for Marcus Aurelius and other Stoic thinkers, the logical consequence of the universal kinship of the human race was a cosmos that was itself a polis—​an idea that Aelius Aristides worked out in explicitly political terms in both the Panathenaicus and the Roman Oration. In this last section, I want to think about the ways in which certain early imperial intellectuals articulated the classical trope of exile as a further way of articulating a cosmopolitan worldview. Exilic literature largely breaks down into the two categories of lament (e.g., Ovid, Cicero) and consolation of self and others (e.g., Epictetus, Plutarch, Favorinus, Musonius Rufus)—​although certain authors such as Cicero vacillate between the modes in their exilic writings (Claassen 1999; Whitmarsh 2001). The consolatory exilic literature of the early imperial period is largely a Stoic affair and proceeds naturally from Stoic cosmopolitan visions of the oikoumenê as a polis. Epictetus, for example, reminds those forced to leave their homes, families, and native cities that the philosophers teach that, “the cosmos is a single polis and essence” (Diss. 3.24.10); Epictetus returns to the social function of oikeiôsis and teaches that human beings are “naturally disposed to be of one household” (Diss. 3.24.11). Zeus, the common father of all men, rules over the human

94   Language and Identity race as a single polis and so takes care of all human beings as his own “citizens” (politai) (Diss. 3.24.19). To limit the scope of one’s affections and responsibilities to one single corner of the earth is contrary to reason—​“we are not rooted in the earth,” Epictetus taught (Diss. 3.24.12).26 Elsewhere, in a discourse about the things that wise men ought not to fear, Epictetus points out that since one may practice virtue everywhere, there is no place on earth where the wise man cannot be happy—​a sentiment echoed by Apollonius of Tyana, who remarks to his companion Damis that the wise man must always comport himself nobly wherever he might be since, “for the wise man, Greece is everywhere” (σοφῷ ἀνδρὶ Ἑλλὰς πάντα) (V A 1.35). Musonius Rufus, Dio Chrysostom, Favorinus, and Plutarch all develop these sorts of tropes in their own exilic writings.27 The fact that Musonius, Dio, and (possibly) Favorinus were echte exiles and that Plutarch’s treatise seems to be addressed to one speaks to the implications for practical ethics of Stoic oikeiôsis.28 In his On Exile, a treatise that takes the form of a consolatory epistle to an unnamed exiled citizen of Sardis, Plutarch, much like the Stoics (with whom Plutarch generally had little affinity) argues from nature: Plutarch reminds his friend that a fatherland (patris) is a matter of convention rather than nature and that because the entire earth is a single fatherland, “there is no exile, foreigner or alien” (601a). In an echo of Marcus Aurelius’s formulation of a common nomos for the entire human race, Plutarch declares that since justice (Dikê) is from Zeus, it is likewise according to nature that “all human beings make use of it towards all other human beings as towards fellow citizens” (601b).29 Plutarch’s friend Favorinus of Arelate30 wrote an ostensibly autobiographical On Exile in which he seeks to refute the opinion of the many that exile is a great evil.31 Like Plutarch, Favorinus argues that the idea of a fatherland is an illusion: “it is nothing more than the land in which my forbears settled or resided” (10.1). All men are descended from colonists, travelers, or exiles, Favorinus explains—​a position particularly congenial to a man like Favorinus, whose public persona was very much that of a traveler, an ethnic outsider and acculturated insider who prided himself on his ability to adapt himself to a variety of cultural codes (Gleason 1995, 3–​20; König 2001; Richter 2011, 142–​ 143). After all, the third of the three paradoxes that Favorinus was said to use of himself was that, “although a Gaul, he acted as a Greek” (Γαλατὴς ὦν ἑλληνίζειν) (Philostr. VS 489]. Those who claim to be autochthonous are merely boasting, since only mice and “other more insignificant animals are born in the earth” (10.4). In a particularly interesting passage, Favorinus reflects on the misguided human preoccupation with divisions: They separate Asia, Europe, and Libya form one another with rivers; neighboring peoples with mountains; local inhabitants with city walls; fellow citizens with houses; cohabitants with doors; and even those who share the same ceiling with coffers and boxes. This is the reason for wars. (11.3)

For Favorinus, Plutarch, Dio, Musonius, and Epictetus, exile forces the wise man to confront the natural unity of the oikoumenê and his proper place in it. The philosophical approach to exile begins with the premise that the cosmos is a unified whole and that all forms of localism are ethically suspect and logically untenable.

Cosmopolitanism   95

Conclusion Socrates was asked where he came from. He replied, “not Athens, but the world.” He, whose imagination was fuller and more extensive, embraced the universe as his city and distributed his knowledge, his company and his affections to all mankind, unlike we who look at only what is underfoot.

So Michel de Montaigne in The Education of Children foisted upon Socrates perhaps the most famous thing the Athenian philosopher never said, at least not in the extant dialogues of Plato. Montaigne, however, ought to be forgiven—​he was, after all, following such eminent early imperial authorities as Cicero, Plutarch, and Epictetus, each of whom attributed to Socrates some version of this cosmopolitan sentiment. Nevertheless, it’s ironic that Socrates, of all classical Athenian intellectuals, should have been made to voice a view so manifestly at odds with the rather parochial attitudes that his student Plato had him espouse. In the Theaetetus, for example, Socrates informs the enthusiastically Libyan geometer Theodorus that he has no interest in the youth of Cyrene, since Socrates, “loves those men over there less than those right here (in Athens).” Plato’s Socrates is very much a citizen of Athens—​not of the world—​a point to which Socrates returned in the Apology, where he observed that it is the philosophical training of the “locals” (astoi) that concerns him, not the virtue of “foreigners” (xenoi), “since you locals are closer to me with respect to descent [genos].” Socrates was no traveler; death was preferable to exile. Socrates Cosmopolitês was the creation of a later age, one in which the Socrates of Plato and Xenophon had to compete with the mythic martyr or founder of the philosophios bios—​an exemplar who, over time, was coopted by various schools and compelled to take responsibility for a host of often mutually contradictory ideas. That the early imperial Socrates emerged as a cosmopolitan figure—​against the evidence of the dialogues—​is unsurprising, given the myriad ways in which cosmopolitan thought influenced postclassical ideas about the nature of the oikoumenê (inhabited world) and the place of the enlightened pepaideumenos within it. I have sketched here the contours of early imperial cosmopolitan thought in the writing of several authors of the Second Sophistic and I have suggested that many of these intellectuals looked to late classical Athens for models and a conceptual vocabulary with which to describe their own early imperial Roman world. In particular, early imperial intellectuals found in late classical Athenian discussions about the nature of the polis a potent analog with which to explore the fluidity and confusion of boundaries in their own imperial present.

Further Reading For an overview of the major trends of cosmopolitan thought in Greek antiquity, see Baldry 1965. Richter 2011 is an account of late classical Athenian and early imperial formulations of the unity of the human community. For Stoic cosmopolitan ethics, see the very

96   Language and Identity different perspectives of Schofield 1991 and Vogt 2008. Of particular historiographical interest is Badian’s 1958 critique of Tarn’s 1933 hagiographic portrait of “Alexander the Dreamer,” published one year after Tarn’s death. Dench 2005 is an excellent account of Roman formulations of the nature of the unity of the inhabited world. Appiah 2006, Balibar 2004, Nussbaum 2008, and Singer 2002 provide good introductions to contemporary debates about globalism and cosmopolitan ethics.

Bibliography Ackerman, B. 1994. “Rooted Cosmopolitanism.” Ethics 104: 516–​535. Appiah, K. A. 2005. The Ethics of Identity. Princeton, NJ. Appiah, K. A. 2006. Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. New York. Asmis, E. 1989. “The Stoicism of Marcus Aurelius.” ANRW 2.36.3: 2228–​2252. Badian, E. 1958. “Alexander the Great and the Unity of Mankind.” Hist. 7, no. 4: 425–​444. Baldry, H. C. 1965. The Unity of Mankind in Greek Thought. Cambridge. Balibar, E. 2004. We the People of Europe: Reflections on Transnational Citizenship. Translated by J. Swenson. Princeton, NJ. Barigazzi, A. 1966. Favorino di Arelate, Opere: Introduzione, testo critico e commento. Florence. Barth. F., ed. 1969. Ethnic Groups and Boundaries:  The Social Organization of Cultural Difference. Oslo. Bastianani, G., and A. A. Long. 1992. Corpus dei papiri filosofici Greci e Latini. Florence. Behr, C. 1981. Aelius Aristides: The Complete Works. Leiden. Claassen, J.-​M. 1999. Displaced Persons:  The Literature of Exile from Cicero to Boethius. Madison, WI, and London. Cohen, E. E. 2000. The Athenian Nation. Princeton, NJ. Dench, E. 1995. From Barbarians to New Men: Greek, Roman, and Modern Perceptions of Peoples from the Central Apennines. Oxford. Dench, E. 2005. Romulus’ Asylum: Roman Identities from the Age of Alexander to the Age of Hadrian. Oxford. Denniston, J. D. 1934. The Greek Particles. Oxford. Droysen, J. G. 1877. Geschichte Alexander des Grossens. 2nd ed. Gotha. Edwards, C., and G. Woolf. 2003. “Cosmopolis: Rome as World City.” In Rome the Cosmopolis, edited by C. Edwards and G. Woolf, 1–​20. Cambridge. Engberg-​Pedersen, T. 2000. Paul and the Stoics. Edinburgh. Eriksen, T. 1993. Ethnicity and Nationalism: Anthropological Perspectives. London. Evans-​Pritchard, E. E. 1951. Kinship and Marriage among the Nuer. Oxford. Fox, R. 1967. Kinship and Marriage: An Anthropological Perspective. Cambridge. Gleason, M. W. 1995. Making Men: Sophists and Self-​Presentation in Ancient Rome. Princeton, NJ. Görgemanns, H. 1983. “Oikeiôsis in Arius Didymus.” In On Stoic and Peripatetic Ethics: The Work of Arius Didymus, edited by W. W. Fortenbaugh, 165–​189. New Brunswick, NJ. Goulet-​Cazé, M.-​O. 2003. Les Kynica du stoicism. Stuttgart. Grote, C. 1857. History of Greece. London. Hall, J. M. 1997. Ethnic Identity in Greek Antiquity. Cambridge. Inwood, B. 1983. “Comments on Professor Görgemann’s Paper: The Two Forms of oikeiôsis in Arius and the Stoa.” In On Stoic and Peripatetic Ethics: The Work of Arius Didymus, edited by W. W. Fortenbaugh, 190–​201. New Brunswick, NJ.

Cosmopolitanism   97 Inwood, B. 1985. Ethics and Human Action in Early Stoicism. Oxford. Isaac, B. H. 2004. The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity. Princeton, NJ. Jones, C. P. 1999. Kinship Diplomacy in the Ancient World. Cambridge, MA. Jüthner, J. 1923. Hellenen und Barbaren: Aus der Geschichte des Nationalbewussteins. Leipzig. König, J. 2001. “Favorinus’ Corinthian Oration in its Corinthian Context.” PCPS 47: 141–​171. Lape, S. 2014. Race and Citizen Identity in Classical Athens. Cambridge. Lee, M. V. 2006. Paul, the Stoics, and the Body of Christ. Cambridge. Lévi-​Strauss, C. 1949. The Elementary Structures of Kinship. Translated by J. H. Bell and J. R. von Sturmer. London. Long, A. A., and D. N. Sedley. 1987–​1989. The Hellenistic Philosophers. 2 vols. Cambridge. Nussbaum, M. 1994. The Therapy of Desire:  Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics. Princeton, NJ. Nussbaum, M. 1996. For Love of Country? Boston. Nussbaum, M. 2008. “Toward a Globally Sensitive Patriotism.” Daedalus 137: 378–​393. Ober, J. 1989. Mass and Elite in Democratic Athens: Rhetoric, Ideology, and the Power of the People. Princeton, NJ. Pembroke, S.  G. 1971. “Oikeiôsis.” In Problems in Stoicism, edited by A.  A. Long, 114–​149. London. Pohlenz, M. 1940. Grundfragen der stoischen Philosophie. Göttingen. Ramelli, I. 2009. Hierocles the Stoic: Elements of Ethics, Fragments, and Excerpts. Translated by D. Konstan. Atlanta, GA. Reydams-​Schils, G. 2005. The Roman Stoics: Self, Responsibility, and Affection. Chicago. Richter, D. S. 2011. Cosmopolis: Imagining Community in Late Classical Athens and the Early Roman Empire. Oxford. Rosivach, V. 1987. “Autochthony and the Athenians.” CQ 37, no. 2: 294–​306. Saïd, S. 2001. “The Discourse of Identity in Greek Rhetoric from Isocrates to Aristides.” In Ancient Perceptions of Greek Ethnicity, edited by I. Malkin, 275–​299. Cambridge, MA. Schofield, M. 1991. The Stoic Idea of the City. Cambridge. Singer, P. 1997. “The Drowning Child and the Expanding Circle.” New Internationalist, April, 28–​30. Singer, P. 2002. One World: The Ethics of Globalization. New Haven, CT. Striker, G. 1983. “The Role of Oikeiôsis in Stoic Ethics.” Oxford Studies in Classical Philosophy 1: 145–​167. Swain, S. 1996. Hellenism and Empire: Language, Classicism, and Power in the Greek World, ad 50–​250. Oxford. Tarn, W. W. 1933. “Alexander the Great and the Unity of Mankind.” PBA 19: 123–​166. Vogt, K. M. 2008. Law, Reason, and the Cosmic City. Oxford. Whitmarsh, T. 2001. Greek Literature and the Roman Empire: The Politics of Imitation. Oxford.

Chapter 7

Ethnicit y, C u lt u re , and Iden t i t y Emma Dench

Engagement with issues of identity might not quite be the defining feature of Second Sophistic literature for modern scholars, but it has been undoubtedly one of the more appealing aspects in recent years. Three partially overlapping areas have proved to be particularly fascinating to our postmodern sensibilities. The first is Greekness: the residual allure of Greek primacy, and the trajectory of nations that underpin our discipline, were overlaid, in more recent years, by the intriguing power dynamics of colonialism.1 The second is the bold and quirky performance of selfhood that disrupts ancient expectations that language, appearance, religious allegiances, and behavior should line up neatly with homeland.2 The third is the kind of protoglobalization engendered by the Roman Empire, whether envisaged as the degree to which (at least in theory) inhabitants experienced and enacted the empire as a single world in terms of value systems and commodity exchange, as the internationalism of the elite, or as the interconnection of microworlds within broader networks.3 In this chapter, I explore three different ways in which identities were articulated in Greek literature of the first to third centuries ce: the separation out of traits and costumes into distinct personae, including “Greek” and “Roman” figures; a contrasting insistence on “essentialist” criteria for membership of groups that include descent and the vocabulary of “purity”; finally, Philostratus’s “Second Sophistic” as a case study of the processes of making and writing groups. Throughout this discussion, I scrutinize our tendency to exaggerate some aspects of identity articulation and to overlook others, and I question the exceptionalism of certain traits such as a preoccupation with the past, and the performance of complex identities associated with the Second Sophistic, setting such traits within a Roman imperial context that is broader in both time (between the later Republic and the second century ce) and space (beyond the Greek-​speaking world of the eastern Mediterranean).

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Personae In a frequently cited passage of Plutarch’s Precepts of Statecraft, “Plutarch” addresses “Menemachus” as follows: And when entering upon any office whatsoever, you must not only call to mind those considerations of which Pericles reminded himself when he assumed the cloak of a general: “Take care, Pericles; you are ruling free men, you are ruling Greeks, Athenian citizens,” but you must also say to yourself: “You who rule are a subject, ruling a State controlled by proconsuls, the agents of Caesar; ‘these are not the spearmen of the plain,’ nor is this ancient Sardis, nor the famed Lydian power.” You should arrange your cloak more carefully and from the generals’ headquarters keep your eyes upon the platform, and not have great pride or confidence in your crown, since you see the shoes [kaltious; cf. Latin calceos] just above your head. (Prae. ger. reip. 813d–​e, trans. Fowler 1936 with adaptations)

This vivid passage zooms in on three outfits that symbolize power: the cloak worn by “Pericles,” stratēgos of fifth-​century Athens, the crown and carefully arranged cloak of the contemporary occupant of the stratēgion, and the shoes worn, we must assume, by the Roman proconsular agent of Caesar who sits on the “platform,” the tribunal. Modern attempts to understand what Second Sophistic literary production and, in more recent years, habitus, is “about” in terms of power, culture and relative statuses of “Greeks” and “Romans,” have relied heavily on these stark oppositions of past autonomy versus the compromised present, and the vanity of the crown of local office versus shoes and tribunal of the Roman authorities.4 Interestingly, modern interpretations have often picked up the Loeb translator’s original translation of kaltioi (a Grecized form of the Latin calcei, blandly “shoes”) as “boots of Roman soldiers.”5 One way of encapsulating Roman rule, sitting in judgment, is replaced by another, that of military force, shifting the passage further along a scale that would reach its extremity in New Testament writings, some of the grittiest depictions we have of living with an alien force of occupation.6 The passage is important for classic arguments about the Second Sophistic as a retreat into the cultural kudos of the glorious Greek past, in response to the realities of Roman political power. Even in recent accounts that emphasize the performance and writing of Greekness and the political leverage of individuals associated with the Second Sophistic, the passage is quoted as a bottom-​line reality check.7 This passage of Plutarch’s Precepts of Statecraft is perhaps so peculiarly seductive because it goes one further than the Horatian tag (quoted just as frequently in similar contexts), “Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit et artes /​intulit agresti Latio” (“captured Greece took captive her uncivilized victor and brought arts to uncouth Latium”; Ep. 2.1.156–​157), visualizing individuals rather than these more abstract personifications of “Greece” and “Latium.” Plutarch’s portrait of the crowned contemporary stratēgos who is counseled to look to the tribunal and the shoes above his head appears in the context of

Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity    101 an unusual, idealized and philosophical vision of living a good political life that involves turning one’s back on the value system that made the Roman imperial world go round.8 Plutarch’s stark portrayal of the realities of power that lie behind the insignia separate out and assign to different ethnic or cultural groups the dual (or more) roles which a single individual might regularly perform. The archaic and classical Greek world had long been fascinated by the possibility (and sometimes danger) of entering or appropriating “barbarian” zones, from the attractions of habrosyne (“delicacy”), or parasols and peacocks, to the institutions and monumental language of empire itself.9 Meanwhile, Athenian imperial ideology made Greekness a possession of the Athenians and themselves the prime exemplars of it.10 For the Ptolemies, the relocation of Greek cultural capital, and its canonization in the Museum of Alexandria, was as important as securing the body of Alexander and the claim to be sole heirs that this entailed. Tax registers from the Ptolemaic period reveal the existence of “Hellenes” who held a privileged tax status and who included Jews, individuals from Egyptian families, and teachers and doctors. A single individual might perform multiple roles, using different names (e.g., Egyptian and Greek) as appropriate to the particular context.11 In the Roman imperial world, such tendencies were exaggerated by the cooption of local elites and systems of rule, by the progressive extension of the Roman citizenship as a marker of favor and prestige, and by the appropriation and transformation of Greekness into a “high” culture of empire, of Greek as one of “our” two languages, and of Atticizing as an index of extreme refinement, policed in numerous different ways by various arbiters of class and distinction.12 It is this complex, elitist world that is evoked in Philostratus’s biographies in his Lives of the Sophists, with its protagonists’ standing measured by the prizes and esteem of a single network in which old centers of learning are intertwined with international cultural capitals, famous sophists combine impeccable Athenian pedigrees with those of the Roman nobility, and public intellectuals hover between being the darlings of the court and unworldly sages. The trope of individuals dressing up in different costumes and thereby taking on different roles is a playful expression of the multiple zones that an individual might enter. In the earlier second century bce, when two alternative models of expansionist power, kingship and the Roman Republic, were still in competition in the Mediterranean, the madness of Antiochus IV Epiphanes (also known as Epimanes) was allegedly evident from his habit of dressing up as a Roman magistrate, canvassing for office, and sitting in judgment. When Rome alone dominated the known world, Augustus’s insistence that the Greeks and the Romans in his party at Capri should swap clothing, togas for himatia, played up the availability of alternative registers between which aspirant Romans could code-​switch.13 The representation/​self-​representation of individuals in multiple guises that is a striking feature of funerary monuments in the Roman Empire, such as the monument of Philopappus in Athens, appearing as both Athenian archon and Roman consul, is a graphic version of conceptualizing such zones as separable entities marked by different dress.14 Elsewhere, a single individual may be represented in such a way as to occupy both zones simultaneously, as in R. R. R. Smith’s study of the seemingly nonchalant second-​century portraits of local dignitaries in Asia Minor, wearing

102   Language and Identity ultratraditional civic dress of the polis, their international, and specifically Roman elite status signaled by the accessories of an imperial priest, or reference to senatorial relations.15 The deliberate shock value of Plutarch’s vignette of shoes and tribunal in the Precepts of Statecraft is brought out further by the studiedly broad horizons of the rest of the work, where the statesman is encouraged to think of Roman exemplars as often as he is to think of Greek ones.16 This passage of Plutarch’s Precepts of Statecraft is not, then, a bottom-​line reality check of the kind that has often been imagined. Nevertheless, some evidence, particularly relating to Roman administration, might suggest the possibility that lines were drawn more firmly in certain contexts. In the first and fourth Cyrene edicts, Augustus gives judgments on the criteria for choosing “Greek” as opposed to “Roman” juries, while in the third he upholds the continued civic obligations of “Greeks with the Roman citizenship.” In a recently published letter from Hadrian to Aphrodisias, conditions are established for trials under Roman law versus trials under local law, depending on whether a “Greek” defendant is a citizen of Aphrodisias or another city. In these contexts, “Greek” is the default category for locals who do not hold the Roman citizenship: usage in a Roman administrative context does not contribute any particular baggage, unlike for example the Roman redeployment of formerly ethnic categories such as “Latin” or “Italic” in juridical contexts.17 The more deliberate process of assigning individuals to categories, especially through drawing provincial and tax boundaries, occurs rather in more localized contexts, although even in these cases imperial authority may not necessarily override completely older and alternative identification.18 We do of course have evidence of imperial value judgments about what it is to be Greek between the late Republic and the second century ce, such as Cicero’s letter to his brother Quintus reflecting on governing the province of Asia Minor, or Trajan’s infamous remark, about Graeculi (“Greeklings love gymnasia”) in his letter to Pliny about local ambitions in Nicaea. In these contexts, we are dealing with imperial attitudes, whose connection to action and categorizations that determine conditions are more nebulous and possibly more insidious.19 While the majority of scholarly energy in recent years has been directed toward the writing and performance of Greekness in first-​to third-​century ce Greek literature, it may have been the case that more “real world” energies were directed toward the identification of “Romans.” Such “Romans” were a significant minority presence across the Mediterranean world, shifting from being predominantly Italian and Roman businessmen and traders in the second to first centuries bce toward an increasing number of local holders of the Roman citizenship together with imperial authorities between the first and third centuries ce.20 Two revealing examples that illustrate this phenomenon between the later Republic and the second century ce are the mass slaughter of Romans and Italians in 88 bce on the orders of Mithridates, and Artemidorus’s association of a dream of decapitation with becoming a Roman citizen and dreaming of Pan in Roman dress with losing a case. These are salutary reminders of the disproportionate attention we pay to the identity games of a tiny minority of Greek speakers.21 A further blind spot is our very focus on “Greekness” and “Romanness,” encouraging us to overlook other means of self-​identification and claiming prestige. These include

Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity    103 the specificities of local community identities that regularly invoke “barbarian” pasts, including the ultraloyal Aphrodisias.22 Most famously, perhaps, Philopappus’s self-​ representation draws heavily on the prestige of being the heir of the (defunct) kingdom of Commagene, as well as being descended from Seleucus I. The radiate crown of Commagene that adorns his portrait as Roman consul reminds us of the various “active” potential sources from which power might be drawn down, including ones that were not sponsored by Rome.23

The Limits of Cultural Performance? Current discussions of “Greekness” tend to privilege ancient evidence that comes closest to late twentieth-​and early twenty-​first-​century emphasis on, variously, cultural rather than biological difference, the social construction of identities, and the performance of selfhood.24 It is, then, the ironic “Greekness” of Favorinus that speaks most to us, one aspect of his defiance of categorization and essentialism: “although a Gaul he went Greek, although a eunuch he was tried for adultery, although he had quarreled with a king he was still alive” (VS 489; cf. Favorinus Cor. 22–​36).25 The Greek novel has recently been read not so much as a search for salvation as it was a few decades ago, but as a journey of self-​discovery, an exploration of Greekness and its limits.26 The gap between ancient notions of selfhood, and our own, with its basis in a rather different understanding of individualism and autonomy, is particularly due to be revisited within the next few years.27 Late twentieth-​century studies of ethnicity and cultural identity were reacting in part to earlier scholarship that understood race or national identity as historical agents and explanatory frameworks. Traditional treatments might read ancient depictions of “barbarians” as statements about empirical reality, calculate “race mixture,” or identify discrete races on the grounds of cultural behavior (such as cremation versus burial of the dead), or on biological grounds (e.g., by the shape of skulls).28 To think instead of how material culture might reveal something of the symbolic systems used to articulate identity, or what might be at stake in the depiction of other peoples in classical texts, focusing on the mechanics and significance of representation and self-​representation on the part of ancient peoples themselves, was revolutionary.29 Ancient strategies of self-​representation and the relative placement of selves and other peoples included genealogies that underwrote networks within and well beyond the Mediterranean world, a fascination with bodily difference and how this came about (with explanations that might variously focus on things that happened at or before conception, during pregnancy, through the agency of the environment or via human intervention), and the language of blood, which might be said to be “pure” or “tainted.” This language can remind us uncomfortably of the nineteenth-​and early twentieth-​century discourse of race, although it actually comes a little closer to the less self-​consciously “scientific” language of blood and descent of earlier centuries. Although the overlap is

104   Language and Identity never very exact, the reminiscence is not coincidental: the reception of classical and biblical language in Western education informs many modern disciplines.30 Edith Hall’s classic exposé of fifth-​century Athenian representations of the barbarian in tragedy, Inventing the Barbarian, engaged with these aspects of ancient ideology, but drew a firm line between the largely cultural criteria with which her study was predominantly concerned and the anachronistic modern concept of “racism.”31 Jonathan Hall’s Ethnic Identity in Greek Antiquity and his Hellenicity emphasized the importance of genealogy and notions of ethnic descent in conceptualizing Greekness, but only for the archaic period. While concepts of Greekness were genealogically based and “aggregative” in the archaic period, constructing descent lines from an original mythological ancestor, Hellen, the process shifted in the course of the fifth century, progressively emphasizing the distinction from “barbarians” on the basis of culture as opposed to ethnic descent.32 A  famous passage of Isocrates’s Panegyric (50), where concerted, Panhellenic action is urged against the Persian barbarian under Athenian leadership, is read here and elsewhere as a turning point, a new consciousness of the possibility of Greekness as an acquired characteristic. Isocrates takes the sentiment that Thucydides had put into the mouth of Pericles in the Funeral Oration, proclaiming Athens as the paideusis, the “education” of Greece (2.41.1), but tips it over, so that sharing in paideusis rather than in physis (“nature”) becomes a criterion for a Greekness that is also envisaged as a “mindset” rather than a genos (“descent group”).33 Ethnic discourses are, of course, liable to shifts and changes in emphasis, even if there is often an investment in maintaining a sense of unchanging timelessness in the articulation of group identities. But we should err on the side of imagining a whole series of different dynamic, and sometimes very heated, conversations being conducted at any one time, of which we pick up only stray threads. In the case of Isocrates’s Panegyric, the inclusive definition of Greekness is a provocation, a statement about how things should be, rather than a description of how things are. Contemporary fifth-​and fourth-​century Athenian idealization of blood purity and legitimacy, including restrictive citizenship laws, marks the other extreme.34 We might well expect ideologies of Greekness as an acquired characteristic, based on culture rather than descent, to have been dominant in the mobile, multiethnic worlds of the Hellenistic kingdoms and Roman Empire, but descent-​and genealogy-​based criteria remained very much alive, creating and underwriting multiple networks of the Mediterranean and beyond. Such criteria were the prime basis for privilege and connection sought through “kinship diplomacy.” Examples of “kinship diplomacy” that survive in epigraphic texts and that can be reconstructed from literature, with their emphasis on descent from prestigious ancestors and links with other communities through ancestral family ties, suggest the vibrancy and multiple translocal focuses of the Hellenistic and Roman worlds. “Kinship diplomacy” is rarely aimed directly at the ruling power: there are few cases in which connections of kin are asserted by poleis or koina (“leagues”) with Hellenistic kings or the Roman people, underlining the preciousness of this commodity and allaying any lingering doubts about how meaningful such claims continued to be.35 Genealogical claims were regularly invoked in the competitions for privileges

Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity    105 increasingly controlled by kings or emperors, such as rights of asylum or place in an imperially ordained hierarchy of cities. At the same time, they were also invoked in the creation and maintenance of more traditional intercity and intercommunity networks that had little or nothing to do with the big, centralizing powers and that persisted throughout the Roman Empire. It should be emphasized that the appeals to antiquity and distinctiveness that are so characteristic of genealogical competitions and networking generally do not invoke Greekness, presumably because one could generally do better both on the distinctiveness and on the antiquity fronts by claiming pre-​Greek origins.36 Perhaps precisely because Greekness per se could be so widely claimed in the Roman Empire, we find an intensification of qualifying adjectives and more precise criteria during the second century ce, including the vocabulary of “purity” with reference to language, physiognomy, and blood.37 This is one of a number of attempts to give shape to a changing world. It coexists with the cosmopolitanism of the early centuries ce that is ultimately just as ethnocentric as this language of exclusivism, even while it minimizes boundaries.38 Favorinus’s scorn for autochthony as a quality boasted about, when in fact the lowliest creatures, such as mice, partake in it (Cor. 27), is in all likelihood doing more than simply resurrecting fifth-​century Athenian preoccupations:  the contemporary debate seems to have been very much alive.39 Contemporary concern with exclusivity runs through documentation relating to membership of the Hadrianic Panhellenion, a particularly elite variety of religious league founded in 131–​132 and centered on Athens and the imperial cult. It is unclear whether the initiative for the Panhellenion came from a core group of Greek cities or from Hadrian himself, but the enterprise reflects a contemporary focus on Panhellenic sentiment and the revival and “refoundation” of Athens as a cultural and international capital, including extensive benefactions on the part of the emperor himself. Surviving documentation relating to the Panhellenion reveals the importance of proofs of Greekness for communities seeking to qualify for membership. Being able to prove genealogical descent from a “core” Greek city or ethnos was all important, as it had been for centuries as a qualification for entry to Panhellenic games. The emperor’s key role in arbitrating over the criteria for membership of this flagship of Greekness, also revealed in this documentation, is an excellent example of the manner in which imperial authority could underwrite local and translocal identities, an aspect that is sometimes overlooked in our preoccupation with identity as performance. Not every community that sought membership was equally qualified, as we see from a fascinating, fragmentary letter of Hadrian to Cyrene adjudicating the relative statuses of Cyrene and another city in Cyrenaica (probably Ptolemais-​Barca) within the Panhellenion. While both cities retained their membership, Hadrian apparently upheld differentiated voting rights within the organization. Cyrene was granted more votes on the grounds of her demonstrable descent from the recognized genealogy of Hellen, while the citizens of the other city were granted lesser rights on the grounds of being “authentic Greeks” who nevertheless lacked the ability to prove tighter criteria of descent.40 The surviving evidence for membership of the Panhellenion, in its

106   Language and Identity geographical narrowness, reinforces this sense of competing contemporary notions of the criteria for Greekness.41 We can certainly see correspondence between the restrictive criteria for membership of the Panhellenion, with its basis in eugeneia, nobility of descent, and some of the discussions associated by Philostratus with members of the group he calls the “Second Sophistic,” involving the language of purity, including the notion of pure blood. Nevertheless, we should also think of the Panhellenion within a much broader context of ways of imagining groups in more restrictive terms based on descent, race and blood that extend far beyond the Greek polis. These more restrictive ways of configuring groups were superimposed on a broadly shared worldview that privileged genealogy as a means of explaining who everyone was. Networks formed by wandering gods and heroes crisscrossed the known world in antiquity.42 While the broad tendency was to write peoples in rather than out, thinking genealogically could be to express with some subtlety the relative place of different peoples in the world. Ancestral encounters that ran along a spectrum of returns to former kingdoms; couplings of heroes and mortals, including local princesses; and mere visits suggest the rich landscape of a “middle ground” and fused local mythologies together with more international ones.43 The language of heredity was both persistent and flexible in antiquity. By the fourth century bce, the Greek noun genos could be extended to refer to a group whose members shared a profession or outlook, like philosophers, while in Roman society the high social value of continuing the traditions of ancestors was franchised out well beyond the immediate family, a “virtual heredity” that operated both on the individual level, through adoption or patronage, and on the level of the state, through the telling and display of exemplary individuals.44 We might usefully compare early imperial debates around the Roman citizenship with debates about exclusive and inclusive notions of Greekness around the Panhellenion. The retelling of myths such as Romulus’s asylum and the rape of the Sabine women projected the origins of a citizenship that had been vastly expanded in recent years back to Rome’s very beginnings, and social and ethnic plurality back to Romulus’s opening up of an asylum for newcomers, and cunning ruse to obtain wives for the Romans by snatching them from neighboring peoples. But the versions we have hint at anxieties and tensions around this very plurality and the potential ignobility of origins. In some versions, the tension hangs in the air, contributing potentially both to Rome’s future strength and her future weakness. In others, the details are sanitized, for example by excluding slaves from the asylum, or minimizing any hint of ethnic “mixing” in these early days. The myth of the asylum engages with the myth of Athenian autochthony, inviting comparisons as well as contrasts with the earthborn, indigenous Athenians.45 Emperors were praised for exercising caution in extending the citizenship, such as by paying attention to criteria such as the ability to speak Latin, and pilloried for broad and inappropriate extensions to “barbarians.”46 During the reign of Hadrian, Suetonius wrote of Augustus’s intentions in tightening up the conditions under which former slaves and foreigners were admitted to the Roman citizenship, to “keep the Roman people pure and unsullied by any mixing in of foreign and servile blood” (Aug. 40.3). The extension of the Roman

Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity    107 citizenship strained to absurd extremes the ancient ideal of the community of citizens as a unit of being and belonging, which is perhaps precisely why we see so much insistence on Romanness expressed by Latin, togas, blood, and descent.47 In this context, it is perhaps less surprising that early Christians should have depicted themselves as “a new race,” the most obvious means available of writing a radical estrangement from customs, rituals, and allegiances that ought to line up with fatherland.48

The Second Sophistic: Social Network? Modern discussions of Second Sophistic identity tend to glide between at least three partially overlapping focuses of enquiry. The first is Philostratus’s own notion of the Second Sophistic, a group of individuals named in his Lives and fleshed out in his biographies. The second is broader socio-​historical analysis of the correspondence between traits manifested in Philostratus’s account and the external record in a reasonably strict sense, including individuals self-​identifying or referred to as sophists, intellectuals brokering relationships between local communities and the imperial court, a high premium placed on paideia as an exclusive quality of which sophists are exemplars, and participation in festivals and games that fostered literary and athletic competition. The final one is more narrowly literary, and involves identifying common traits identified with Second Sophistic writings in authors (and genres of literature) not included in Philostratus’s list. Recent discussions of identity have tended to concentrate on the second and third focuses of enquiry, both of which raise questions about the exceptionalism of traits that have been associated with “Second Sophistic” writing or habitus, or indeed with the Greek-​speaking world of the first to third centuries ce more generally. Leaving aside the “special relationship” with Greek that is indicated by linguistic appropriation and sponsorship, it is clear, for example, that writing complex selves is a phenomenon that runs through the Jewish Greek works of Philo and Josephus, Latin letter-​writing and the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, not to speak of Augustine’s Confessions.49 While Greek culture and Greek pasts had a particular value within the Roman Empire, many other communities (especially those of the Near East and Italy, and even, to some extent, those of northern and western Europe) were able to capitalize on the distinctiveness and antiquity of their origins and pre-​Roman histories, and many of these distinctive identities were evoked in similar ways in the international cultures of empire.50 The third focus of enquiry has the distinct advantage of engaging directly with the ancient processes of adjudicating on the membership of groups. Philostratus’s delineation of the “Second Sophistic” engages extensively both with traditional and contemporary ethnic and cultural discourses, but creates a group that consistently challenges norms about being and belonging. Thus, the group is characterized by debate rather than by consensus on whether or not one can become Greek, or the value and desirability of “pure” Attic. Representing the poles of the argument are freakish personifications;

108   Language and Identity Favorinus, the hermaphrodite Gaul at one extreme, and “tall as a Celt” Agathion, who can detect the stench of impurity of milk milked by a woman, at the other extreme, the living paragon of the “pure” Atticism of the interior of Attica (VS 552–​554). If the group cannot be classified by ethnic descent, it cannot be classified by domicile either, or by audience, or even by language. The group is studiedly international in terms of both origins and domicile, including Aelian, another master of the purest Atticism, “a Roman” who had never left Italy (VS 624). The best reach unexpectedly broad audiences, beyond fanatics of the Greek language, or even those who understand Greek (VS 491–​492, 589). Philostratus’s group sets the agenda rather than following one, even and especially when it comes to crunch points like looking like a sophist or speaking “correctly.” Marcus of Byzantium appears to some, including Polemon, to be too “rustic” to be a sophist, and has a Doric accent, but is a master of the art of extemporizing (VS 529), while Philagrus, the most distinguished pupil of Herodes Atticus, lets slip a foreign word in anger but, when this is queried, claims it as his own neologism (VS 578–​579). In terms of imperial dynamics, they do not always know their place, confronting and quarreling with emperors, or not needing conventional patronage (e.g., VS 534–​535, 582–​583, 610, 614). Philostratus is nevertheless determined to show that his “Second Sophistic” is a group, its membership controlled both through internal and authorial arbitration and by the big question about the value of kinship, the most conventional and traditional ancient language of identity, that runs through the work.51 The work is framed by questions about the value of genealogy from the beginning: Philostratus’s addressee, Gordian, is linked to Herodes Atticus, the central figure of the Lives, both by technê (“skill”/​“training”) and by genos (“kin”) (VS 479–​480). It is in fact unclear whether this Gordian was literally a relative of Herodes rather just than his pupil. This uncertainty is suggestive in the light of Philostratus’s tendency in the Lives to elide actual with virtual descent, as he weaves his web around Herodes Atticus at the center, reaching down all the way to “Philostratus.”52 It is at the programmatic beginning of the work too that Philostratus criticizes the principle of including everyone’s father rather than just illustrious ones, and without ascertaining the man’s “own virtues and vices, or what he got right and what he got wrong, either by fortune or by judgment” (VS 480), a wonderful compression of major ancient debates about how to account for success. Genealogical thinking perhaps also accounts for the puzzling beginning of the Second Sophistic, with its stray, fourth-​century bce founder, Aeschines, and its looping back to the “ancient” Sophistic of Gorgias, like several founding fathers punctuating the genealogy of a people or city with their “watershed” contributions. When Philostratus highlights real descent, we can expect that this is doing work, as in the case of his emphasis on Herodes’s real family ancestry, and particularly his impeccable connection with old and new world powers, with the Aeacids, Miltiades and Cimon, and Roman “double consuls” (VS 546–​547): for all the language of “virtual ancestry,” it was still hard to conceive of a central figure without a real ancestry. In the case of others, however, the value of real ancestry is questionable, as in the case of Polemon, whose actual descendants are all unworthy of the name, with the sole exception of his great-​ grandson Hermocrates (VS 544, cf. 609).53 At the same time, teacher-​pupil relationships

Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity    109 form branches of a virtual family tree, and these are invariably mentioned, sometimes explicitly as kinds of reproduction and heredity. Thus, for example, Herodes regards Favorinus as both a father and a teacher (VS 490), and also acknowledges Polemon as a father (VS 537), perhaps signaling in part his joint heredity, combining the shape-​ shifting, “culture Greek” qualities of Favorinus with the ultraconservative old school “purity” of Polemon. Herodes’s students in turn are chips off the old block or, in exact imagery, “slices” of their teacher, an apparent allusion to something that Aeschylus was supposed to have said about being a “slice” of Homer, reception and reproduction rolled into one (VS 574, with Civiletti 2012 ad loc.). Drawing the boundaries of a group is in general extraordinarily complicated, and typically differs according to perspective and context, while the authority of different agents to police membership will vary.54 Modern attempts to reconstruct on more “objective grounds” the boundaries of a group are fraught with difficulty, as we can see from the variety of modern arguments about the ease or complexity of distinguishing between sophists and philosophers.55 Careful prosopographical reconstruction of biographies and networks from a variety of evidence is better at answering questions about who is included than about who is excluded.56 In terms of judging whether or not someone was a sophist, we might think of the different processes, agencies, and levels of stability involved in being judged to look like a sophist or a philosopher,57 being endorsed by other sophists (raising the immediate question of which other sophists),58 and being offered the chair of rhetoric in Athens or Rome, or granted tax breaks by the Roman emperor. Philostratus’s view of who is “in” the specific sophistic circle of his Second Sophistic and who is “out” of it is deeply idiosyncratic, cutting across very different ideological positions, and counting individuals “in” or “out” in ways that contradict their own self-​ identification or the estimations of others.59 At the most immediate level, this suggests both the multiplicity and the inherent instability of intellectual groupings, not unlike the plurality of contemporary notions of Christianity and Judaism that is implied by the insistent line-​drawing that we observe in contemporary writings.60 This also complicates notions of implied audience and might encourage us to imagine the possibility of audiences or fan bases for different authors or performers and different genres configured in numerous different ways.61 We might also want to zoom out from the boundary policing of contemporaries and observe the bigger picture that is suggested by all this energy: the proliferation in the Roman imperial period of means of self-​identifying that are not based primarily on the realities of fatherland, family descent, or place of residence, but on profession (sometimes in a double sense of occupation and declaration of who one “really” is).

Further Reading For aspects of “Greekness” in general, excellent places to start include: Hall 1989, 1997 and 2002; Malkin 2001; and Saïd 1991. For identity as a prime focus of enquiry into Greek literature

110   Language and Identity and society of the first to the third centuries ce, see, e.g., Gleason 1995; Goldhill 2002; Swain 2007; Whitmarsh 2010, 2011; Woolf 1994. The focus of Eshleman 2012, on the formation of groups, is a very stimulating new approach to the Second Sophistic. For identity dynamics in the Roman Empire more generally, see e.g., Buell 2005, Dench 2005, Wallace-​Hadrill 2008; Johnston 2017.

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112   Language and Identity Jones, C. P. 2004. “Multiple Identities in the Age of the Second Sophistic.” In Paideia: The World of the Second Sophistic, edited by B. E. Borg, 13–​22. Berlin and New York. Jones, C. P. 2010. “Ancestry and Identity in the Roman Empire.” In Local Knowledge and Microidentities in the Imperial Greek World, edited by T. Whitmarsh, 111–​124. Cambridge. Kim, L. 2010. “The Literary Heritage as Language: Atticism and the Second Sophistic.” In A Companion to the Ancient Greek Language, edited by E. J. Bakker, 468–​482. Malden, MA, and Oxford. Kleiner, D. E. E. 1983. The Monument of Philopappos in Athens. Rome. König, J., and T. Whitmarsh, eds. 2007. Ordering Knowledge in the Roman Empire. Cambridge. Krebs, C. B. 2011. A Most Dangerous Book: Tacitus’ Germania from the Roman Empire to the Third Reich. New York. Kurke, L. 1992. “The Politics of ἁβϱοσύνη in Archaic Greece.” Cl. Ant. 11: 91–​120. Lape, S. 2010. Race and Citizen Identity in the Classical Athenian Democracy. Cambridge. Leonard, M. 2005. Athens in Paris: Ancient Greece and the Political in Post-​War French Thought. Oxford. Malkin, I. 2011. A Small Greek World: Networks in the Ancient Mediterranean. New York. Malkin, I., C. Constantakopoulou, and K. Panagopoulou, eds. 2009. Greek and Roman Networks in the Mediterranean. London. Martzavou, P. 2012. Review of T. Whitmarsh, Narrative and Identity in the Ancient Greek Novel: Returning Romance 2011, Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2012.02.20. http://​bmcr.brynmawr.edu/​2012/​2012-​02-​20.html. Meyer, E. A. 2006. “The Justice of the Roman Governor and the Performance of Prestige.” In Herrschaftsstrukturen und Herrschaftspraxis:  Konzepte, Prinzipien und Strategien der Administration im römischen Kaiserreich, edited by A. Kolb, 167–​180. Berlin. Millar, F. G. B. 1983. “The Phoenician Cities. A Case-​Study of Hellenisation.” PCPS 29: 54–​7 1. Miller, M. C. 1997. Athens and Persia in the Fifth Century:  A  Study in Cultural Receptivity. Cambridge. Most, G. W. 2006. “Athens as the School of Greece.” In Classical Pasts: The Classical Traditions of Greece and Rome, edited by J. I. Porter, 377–​388. Princeton, NJ. Moyer, I. S. 2011. Egypt and the Limits of Hellenism. Cambridge. Ogden, D. 1996. Greek Bastardy in the Classical and Hellenistic Periods. Oxford. Price, S. R. F. 2005. “Local Mythologies in the Greek East.” In Coinage and Identity in the Roman Provinces, edited by C. Howgego, V. Heuchert, and A. M. Burnett, 115–​124. Oxford. Oliver, J. H. 1989. Greek Constitutions of Early Roman Emperors from Inscriptions and Papyri. Philadelphia, PA. Purcell, N. 2005. “Romans in the Roman World.” In The Cambridge Companion to the Age of Augustus, edited by K. Galinsky, 85–​105. Cambridge. Raaflaub, K., 2009. “Learning from the Enemy: Athenian and Persian ‘Instruments of Empire.’” In Interpreting the Athenian Empire, edited by J. Ma, N. Papazarkadas, and R. Parker, 89–​124. London. Reynolds J. 1978. “Hadrian, Antoninus Pius and the Cyrenaican cities.” JRS 68: 111–​121. Rigsby, K. 1996. Asylia: Territorial Inviolability in the Hellenistic World. Berkeley, CA. Rochette, B. 2010. “Greek and Latin Bilingualism.” In A Companion to the Ancient Greek Language, edited by E. J. Bakker, 281–​294. Malden, MA, and Oxford. Romeo, I. 2002. “The Panhellenion and Ethnic Identity in Hadrianic Greece.” CPhil. 97: 21–​40. Saïd, S., ed. 1991. Hellenismos: Quelques jalons pour une histoire de l’identité grecque. Leiden and New York.

Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity    113 Schäfer, T. 1989. Imperii insignia, sella curulis und fasces:  Zur Repräsentation römischer Magistrate. Mainz. Schmitz, T. A. 1997. Bildung und Macht:  Zur sozialen und politischen Funktion der zweiten Sophistik in der griechischen Welt der Kaiserzeit. Zetemata 97. Munich. Sidebottom, H. 2009. “Philostratus and the Symbolic Roles of the Sophist and Philosopher.” In Philostratus, edited by E. L. Bowie and J. Elsner, 69–​99. Cambridge. Smith, R. R. R. 1998. “Cultural Choice and Political Identity in Honorific Portrait Statues in the Greek East in the Second Century a.d.” JRS 88: 56–​93. Späth, T. 2005. “Das Politische und der Einzelne:  Figurenkonstruktion in Biographie und Geschichtsschreibung.” In The Statesman in Plutarch’s Works, Vol. 2, The Statesman in Plutarch’s Greek and Roman Lives, edited by L. De Blois, J. Bons, T. Kessels, and D. M. Schenkeveld, 27–​42. Leiden and Boston. Spawforth, A. J. S. 1999. “The Panhellenion again.” Chiron 29: 339–​352. Spawforth, A. J. S. 2001. “Shades of Greekness: A Lydian Case Study.” In Ancient Perceptions of Greek Ethnicity, edited by I. Malkin, 375–​400. Washington, DC, and Cambridge, MA. Spawforth, A. J. S. 2012. Greece and the Augustan Cultural Revolution. Cambridge. Spawforth, A. J. S., and S. Walker. 1985. “The World of the Panhellenion 1: Athens and Eleusis.” JRS 75: 78–​104. Spawforth, A. J. S., and S. Walker. 1986. “The World of the Panhellenion 2: Three Dorian Cities.” JRS 76: 88–​105. Swain, S. 1996. Hellenism and Empire: Language, Classicism, and Power in the Greek World, ad 50–​250. Oxford. Swain, S. 2007. “Polemon’s Physiognomy.” In Seeing the Face, Seeing the Soul:  Polemon’s “Physiognomy” from Classical Antiquity to Medieval Islam, edited by S. Swain, 125–​202. Oxford. Swain, S. 2009. “Culture and Nature in Philostratus.” In Philostratus, edited by E. L. Bowie and J. Elsner, 33–​48. Cambridge. Thompson, D.  J. 1997. “The Infrastructure of Splendour:  Census and Taxes in Ptolemaic Egypt.” In Hellenistic Constructs: Essays in Culture, History, and Historiography, edited by P. Cartledge, P. Garnsey, and E. S. Gruen, 242–​258. Berkeley, CA. Trapp, M. 2004. “Statesmanship in a Minor Key?” In The Statesman in Plutarch’s Works, Vol. 1, Plutarch’s Statesman and his Aftermath: Political, Philosophical, and Literary Aspects, edited by L. De Blois, J. Bons, T. Kessels, and D. M. Schenkeveld, 189–​200. Leiden and Boston. Valentine, D. 2007. Imagining Transgender: An Ethnography of a Category. Durham, NC. Veyne, P. 1988. Did the Greeks Believe in Their Myths? An Essay on the Constitutive Imagination. Translated by P. Wissing. Chicago. Wallace-​Hadrill, A. 1998. “To Be Roman Go Greek: Thoughts on Hellenization at Rome.” In Modus Operandi: Essays in Honour of Geoffrey Rickman, edited by M. Austin, J. Harries, and C. J. Smith, 79–​92. London. Wallace-​Hadrill, A. 2008. Rome’s Cultural Revolution. Cambridge. Whitmarsh, T. 2001. Greek Literature and the Roman Empire: The Politics of Imitation. Oxford. Whitmarsh, T. 2004. Ancient Greek Literature. Cambridge. Whitmarsh, T. 2005. The Second Sophistic. Oxford. Whitmarsh, T., ed. 2010. Local Knowledge and Microidentities in the Roman Imperial World. Cambridge. Whitmarsh, T. 2011. Narrative and Identity in the Ancient Greek Novel: Returning Romance. Cambridge.

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Chapter 8

Retrosexua l i t y Sex in the Second Sophistic Amy Richlin

The history of sexuality is notoriously difficult to write due to the general lack of first-​ hand records of events (not that historians trust these, either, any more).1 The problem is exacerbated by a distance of two thousand years from the events we would like to know about, in a society where free men wrote almost all the extant texts and where slaves were commonly used for sex; even more so, in a period during which the traditional penchant for looking backwards had reached the point where life was lived, as it were, in quotation marks. Or so it would seem from those texts most characteristic of the Second Sophistic itself, so that it is hard to tell when we are looking at second-​century experience and when we are looking at what might be called “retrosexuality.”2 That is, does a text attest to something in the writer’s own experience? Or does it attest to a period costume he likes to wear, perhaps only on paper or on stage? If all gender is performed anyway, can some sex acts be more performed than others? After all, the mask is always all we have to go on. Correcting “likes to wear”: all masks were not worn voluntarily; slaves did not choose the name Ganymedes or Tiro.

A Dinner Party In a chapter of the Attic Nights, Aulus Gellius describes a birthday dinner at which some early Latin epigrams were recited by one of the guests (19.9).3 The epigrams are of interest in themselves and are regularly taken out of their setting to attest to the times in which they supposedly originated (Richlin 1992, 39; Stroup 2010, 289; Williams 2010, 70; cf. Stephens 2002 on the problems caused by disembedding fragments). Here the frame narrative itself will establish some themes (19.9.1–​5): A young man [adulescens] of equestrian rank from the land of Asia, of a happy disposition and graced with both fortune and manners, and with talents eagerly

116   Language and Identity inclined toward things musical, was giving a dinner to his friends and teachers outside the city in his little country place to celebrate that day of the year that marked the beginning of his life. There had come with us to the same dinner Antonius Julianus the rhetor, a teacher who offered public instruction to young men, of the Spanish tongue, a person of blooming eloquence and well versed in the history and literature of the ancients. He, when an end came to the victuals and it was now time for cups and conversation, expressed his desire for a display of those of both sexes, very clever at singing and playing, whom he knew that young man owned. And after the boys and girls were brought in, they sang to a pleasing beat many Anakreonteia and Sapphic songs and certain erotic elegeia also of modern poets, sweet and lovely. Indeed we were delighted, apart from many other things, by very charming little verses of Anacreon in his old age, which I in fact wrote down . . .

And Gellius proceeds to quote the verses in Greek. However, the harmony of the scene is shattered by “quite a number of Greeks” present (Graeci plusculi), who begin to insult Julianus as a “boorish barbarian,” unfit by his birth for elegant speech and trainer of students in a language “that had no loveliness, none of the charm of Venus and the Muse” (that is, Latin); what could he know of Anacreon? Who of “our poets” (nostrarum poetarum—​Gellius’s point of view) could write that well, except Catullus and Calvus? In reply, Julianus covers his head with his pallium, “as they say Socrates did in a certain none-​too-​chaste speech” (quod in quadam parum pudica oratione Socraten fecisse aiunt), and begins to sing Latin epigrams of the generation before Catullus, which Gellius praises highly. This story has a coda of sorts two chapters later, when Gellius repeats a two-​line Greek epigram, attributed to Plato, about kissing Agathon; a young friend, he says, has done an expanded translation (19.11.3), and Gellius proceeds to quote all seventeen lines. He introduces this bilingual young person bilingually: ouk amousos adulescens, “a young man pas sans Muse.” The attention of the reader is directed toward the poems, which attest not only to the existence of pederastic love poetry in Latin before Catullus, but to antiquarianism in the 100s ce, including the transposition of paradigmatic Greek pederastic poetry (by actual Plato!) into a robustly erotic Latin in Gellius’s own day: “While with half-​wide-​ open kiss /​I kiss my laddie. . . .” The author of this poem is now held to be Apuleius, and echoes of it, I have argued, show up in the letters between Fronto and the young Marcus Aurelius.4 Let us also note, however, the structural elements in the dinner party and its coda: only male guests are mentioned; they are differentiated by place of origin (Asia, Spain, Greece), yet are all together; the relative value of Latin and Greek literature is at stake; Gellius displays his own and his friends’ bilingualism in the face of Greek disdain for Latin; and the floor show is made up of a mixed chorus of young slaves trained to sing erotic poetry. Antonius Julianus, the Latin-​speaking Spaniard, acts the part of Socrates making a “none-​too-​chaste speech” in the Phaedrus (237a), a familiar school text in this period, and a move, as will be seen below, not unique to him. Indeed, Julianus pegs the reader firmly onto Gellius’s lifetime, being a real-​life famous professor of oratory,

Retrosexuality: Sex in the Second Sophistic    117 Gellius’s own teacher, and a recurring character in the Attic Nights (see Gunderson 2009, 173–​174, 235–​236; Holford-​Strevens 2003, 86–​88). In this exemplary scene of sex in the Second Sophistic, then, we have a kind of antiquarian sex, scripted and acted out by well-​known contemporary figures, quoting and imitating lines venerated due to their age, and staged using slaves: retrosexuality. The slaves and Julianus remind us that, however bedecked by quotation marks, these acts involved living people. Are the quoted poems, the translation, and the performance of lyric poetry evidence for the continuation of the old sex/​gender system? Or is this costume drama? Both, surely. There are still “modern poets”; Plato’s poem is not only expanded but the expansion is first-​person, the speaker describing meum puellum, “my laddie.” The only females mentioned as present are the puellae, the singing girls. Still, taking the Second Sophistic to be the time from Domitian to the Severans mapped out by Philostratus, and taking it to be transnational, we can occasionally see women as sexual subjects, or at least deduce them. Let us trace, as best we can, women and other sexual subjects through the mirror-​box of retrosexuality: women, boys, eunuchs, cinaedi, and sophists. The shape of this box is peculiar to the Second Sophistic in that the accidents of time have left us a particularly rich store of technical texts—​from law, medicine, dream analysis, physiognomy, astrology—​which serve, along with satire, history, and moral philosophy, a policing function.5 The contents of the box are both Roman and Greek, for the owners, despite their mutual frictions, their differing motives for nostalgia, were all attending the same dinner parties.

Women One woman speaks for herself in this period: the satirist Sulpicia. Cryptically, in a fragment quoted by a scholiast on Juvenal, who borrows a rare word from her, she sets a condition: “If, the straps of my cadurcum having been restored, /​[someone? something?] should show me lying naked with Calenus. . . .” The cadurcum is an article of bedding, something like a mattress. Satire thrives on exposing the female body; Sulpicia does it for herself and, according to Martial’s poems on her, her husband. Autobiographical texts by ancient women are rare, texts where women writers talk about sex with men much more so; this image is unique, and its fragmentary nature only underscores the gaps in our sources.6 Martial’s version of her in his book of epigrams is much tamer; here she is a faithful wife, eminently chaste, writer of chastely naughty poems, her husband congratulated by the poet on their anniversary (10.35, 10.38). She here inhabits a conventional frame, familiar in depictions of Roman women from all periods, like other contemporary women named in Martial’s poems: Nigrina places her husband’s ashes in the tomb (9.30), the chaste (casta) Arria heroically addresses her heroic husband (1.13). Yet in this period the frame is literary and amatory in a particular way. So Lucan’s widow, Polla Argentaria, is addressed on the anniversary of Lucan’s birth and their marriage, and the

118   Language and Identity wicked Nero reproached (7.21); then again, she is asked not to wrinkle her brow at the poet’s obscene poems, since her husband wrote ones just as obscene (10.64; the wrinkled brow is conventionally associated with prudish readers). Jane Stevenson remarks that “a public reputation for verse seems to have been compatible with chaste and respectable marriage” (2005, 47); rather, chaste marriage was the public armor for the verse we hear about. These women’s leading sexual characteristic, indeed their leading characteristic, is marital fidelity. The same would be true for female members of the household of the adoptive emperors as commemorated in relief sculpture and coins; slogans and inscriptions celebrate their wifely loyalty, also the fecundity of Marcus’s wife, Faustina the younger (fourteen children).7 Remarkably, under Hadrian, the court included women writers among the retinue of his wife, Sabina—​writers of Greek poetry who were also respectable ladies (Hemelrijk 1999, 119, 164–​170, 173, 178; Pomeroy 2007, 83–​84; Rosenmeyer 2008). Whereas male writers of erotic verse followed Catullus’s apologia in claiming their lives were chaste though their verse was not, the chastity of female subjects was part of their labeling by male writers. Accordingly, then, we hear only in retrospect about negative role models in the imperial household: within this period, Domitian’s niece Julia, with whom he is said to have committed incest (Juv. 2.29–​33; Plin. Ep. 4.11.6; Suet. Dom. 22); his wife, Domitia, notorious for her love of the actor Paris (Suet. Dom. 3.1, 10.4). Xenophon’s Cyropaedia, popular in the Second Sophistic, is used by Lucian to achieve another sort of distance; he writes an extravagant double panegyric to a woman whose name he avoids mentioning, although he identifies her as having the same name as “the beautiful wife of Abradatas” (that is, Xenophon’s romantic heroine Pantheia) and as being the companion of “our kind and gentle emperor,” usually identified as Verus (Eikones 10, 22; compare In Defense of Eikones, where she is “the woman”).8 Lucian’s praise of this living woman is almost entirely expressed through a mash-​up of famous classical statues, allusions, quotations, and abstractions; in the Defense, Pantheia’s rebuttal appears, not in direct speech, but quoted by one of the dialogue speakers. Letters in Latin likewise present a refracted view of contemporary women in love. The younger Pliny’s letters to his much younger wife Calpurnia portray her as besottedly in love with him (esp. 4.19), while he describes himself in the language of an elegiac lover, haunting his beloved’s doorstep (Ep. 7.5, cf. 6.7); Pliny’s wife, however, is only away, not shutting him out. The letter-​book of Cornelius Fronto allows an oblique look at the relationship between Fronto’s wife, Cratia, and the mother of the young Marcus Aurelius, Domitia Lucilla, the four of them being engaged in a sort of love quadrangle (Richlin 2011; Taoka 2013b): “my Cratia . . . could live on your mother’s kisses alone and be happy,” writes Fronto to Marcus (M. Caes. 2.13). Apuleius’s Apology, on the other hand, turns his wife Pudentilla into a character in a melodrama starring himself. Once the contemporary women depicted are anonymous or obscure—​fictional—​all inhibition is lost. In keeping with his poem to Polla Argentaria, Martial claims a readership among matronae, just as lustful as his male readers despite their pretensions to moral purity; his epigrams portray many varieties of female sexual subject—​lesbians, dozens of adulteresses, women who like or even marry cinaedi, old women who still

Retrosexuality: Sex in the Second Sophistic    119 want to have sex, ugly women, pretty women, prostitutes who charge too much, women naked in the public baths, women who have sex with their slaves (Richlin 1992, 11, 53–​ 56, 133–​134). He even discusses sex between husbands and wives, again rarely seen in Roman texts: sometimes he urges “his wife” to be sexy (11.104), sometimes he rejects her attempts to compete with pueri (11.43, 12.96). The stereotypes in this poetry, common to all ancient literature, must have policed the lives of real women (see Richlin 2014, 36–​80). Similar stereotypes populate the pages of the satires of Martial’s younger friend Juvenal, most notably his massive sixth satire, a monument of misogyny; yet he also lets one female speaker in his second satire talk back to a cinaedus who castigates women’s promiscuity (2.36–​63; cf. Braund 1995). This hypocritical moralist invokes the lex Julia, an Augustan law that criminalized adultery, revived by Domitian (2.30–​31, 37); Martial had praised Domitian directly for its revival (6.2, 6.4, 9.6), but also made jokes about women who got around it.9 Laws, like jokes, aim to regulate real women contemporary with them. These moral norms were not applied to slave women, whose status incorporated sexual availability, and the jurist Ulpian in the Severan period specifies that women dressed like prostitutes or slaves have no legal recourse against public sexual harassment (Frier 1989, 183–​184). An outspoken concern with women’s intimate sexual lives, emphatically the lives of women contemporary with the writer, thus shows up in two other policing regimes, medicine and moral philosophy. The pages of Galen display case studies of his own female patients—​among them, a famous detection of lovesickness (On Prognosis 6)—​ alongside stories of famous cases past (see King 2011; Flemming 2000, 263–​266, who notes the novelistic nature of the lovesickness tale). Some medical handbooks advised clitoridectomy as a treatment for “women with masculine desires” (Brooten 1996: 143–​ 174). Plutarch addresses his Advice on Marriage to Pollianus and Eurydice, a young couple of his acquaintance (or so the piece is framed); here Plutarch addresses the questions of sex between husband and wife and of how a wife should behave when her husband has sex with other women, and recommends the wife not to use love charms on her husband.10 An evidently popular set piece, the comparison between women and boys as sexual partners for men appears in Plutarch’s Erôtikos (Mor. 748f–​771e) as well as in Achilles Tatius’s novel Leucippe and Cleitophon (2.35–​38) and in the later dialogue associated with the name of Lucian, the Erôtes (see Goldhill 1995; Halperin 1993; Konstan 1994: 28–​29; Morales 2008; and below). In the final section of his Euboean Oration, Dio Chrysostom, a contemporary of Martial, declaims against prostitution as leading to the corruption of upper-​class women and, the ultimate depravity, young men, and this has been taken seriously as testimony to then-​current sexual definitions (Or. 7.133–​152, cf. Houser 1998); as will be seen below, Martial was also capable of deploring prostitution when it suited him, and Dio’s fantastical, even adoxographic speech, named for its opening tour of the romantic countryside, displays the talents of one of Philostratus’s star sophists (VS 487–​488). As D. A. Russell says of this speech (1992, 12), “We began in the world of Theocritus; we end in the world of Juvenal”—​a retrosexual countryside and a contemporary Vanity Fair. Certainly the rhetorical curriculum was as jam-​packed as ever with the Clytemnestras of classical literature, while poisonous, adulterous wives

120   Language and Identity still fill the Latin declamation exercises attributed to Quintilian, as well as contemporary Greek exercises (Russell 1983). Arguably, the female characters in Greek novels of this period, as well as in Apuleius, are even further removed from reality and serve a more complex function. As in the modern “bodice-​ripper” (Elsom 1992; Montague 1992), the always endangered, sexually alluring, never quite ravished heroine is available for all to try on, like a costume. That these novels were read as aphrodisiac in antiquity is explicitly attested by the fourth-​ century physician Theodorus Priscianus (Elsom 1992, 215); although David Konstan has argued that the female and male characters in these novels exhibit a “sexual symmetry” suitable for conditions of Greek diaspora and world citizenship under the Roman Empire (1994, 229–​231), Helen Morales points out the “sheer relentlessness” with which women in the novels are threatened with rape and violence (2008, 53). The female characters in Apuleius’s Metamorphoses conform to the norms of invective, like the lust-​ thwarted hag Meroe, or the adulterous witch Pamphile, or the adulterous wives of books 9–​10, while the slave Fotis (2.6–​11, 16–​18) acts out at length the myriad scenarios of erotic epigram, both in Latin and in Greek (Anth. Pal. 5, 11). These texts are fantasies, as are the captive women who cringe from the soldiers in military relief sculpture, for example on the columns of Trajan and Marcus Aurelius; like Ovid’s nymphs, they have trouble keeping their clothes on as they resist (see Dillon 2006, Uzzi 2015). Real women walked past them every day, as they walked past the frieze of Arachne in Domitian’s Forum Transitorium (see D’Ambra 1993). Indeed the Second Sophistic was haunted by obsessive retrosexual visions of women’s bad behavior. Juvenal actually begins his Satires, in a famously cryptic programmatic statement, by saying he will satirize the dead (1.170–​171); this is what he does in several of his most famous set pieces. For Juvenal, the sexual doings of the empresses Messallina (6.115–​135), Caesonia (6.614–​617), and Agrippina (6.620–​626) belong to a time safely in the past. All the more so for the great historical and biographical works of the period: Suetonius’s Lives of the Caesars, Plutarch’s Parallel Lives, Tacitus’s Annales, and Cassius Dio’s history, even farther separated from its parade of wicked women. Cleopatra; Julia, daughter of Augustus; Antony’s wife, Fulvia—​the monsters of female sexuality these writers created were made possible by their removal from the writer’s present, that he could not or would not write about; taken to be historical for the next two millennia, they are deeply engraved in Western popular culture. But theirs are not the lives being told by the biographers; they only embellish the lives of men; as Sandra Joshel has shown for Tacitus’s Messallina, they are constructed figures on an imperial stage set (1997). So, in a different way, Lucian’s courtesans (Dialogues of the Courtesans) and wealthy women (Paid Companions 33–​34, 36) mask their bad behavior in Attic Greek; the women of Paid Companions are carefully marked as Roman, and the occasional Greek women who are criticized are either anonymous or located in the far past (Defense of “Eikones” 3–​4). Particular to Lucian is a prurient interest in the sexual initiation of very young girls (Dial. meret. 6; Dial. Mar. 8, 15), and his courtesans go into unusual detail on pregnancy and lesbian customers (Dial. meret. 2, 5; cf. ps.-​Lucian Erôtes 28). 11 The influence

Retrosexuality: Sex in the Second Sophistic    121 of Juvenal, or a common pool of jokes, may be detected here—​unsurprising, in light of the lengthy account of Roman after-​dinner entertainment in Paid Companions. Alciphron’s courtesans, following Lucian, are even more clearly marked as historical fictions (see Costa 2001; Rosenmeyer 2001). The wives (few and disappointing) in Philostratus’s Lives of the Sophists, the beauties in his Love Letters, wear a similar period guise, necessarily separate from the court of Julia Domna, his patron. As for Athenaeus, he deals exclusively in the witticisms of courtesans dead for five hundred years and more. Madeleine Henry (1992) points out that these women are treated as consumables in the same way as the food at the dinner, forming part of a prescriptive etiquette for the properly educated; Laura McClure (2003) sees their quoted voices as fetish objects that serve the needs of an eroticized literary nostalgia typical of the Second Sophistic. So the story of Regilla, for Philostratus, is really about her husband, Herodes Atticus, his (long-​ dead) hero, and her murder is in the Lives for Herodes to be absolved of it (Pomeroy 2007). Herodes’s extravagant mourning, and the monuments he built for Regilla, Maud Gleason (2010) argues, mark his own bicultural identity, along with the lost Roman half of his bicultural marriage, while the Appian Way shrine he retrofitted as a memorial casts Regilla in terms of Greek and Roman mythical pasts. The placid faces of Augustae stared away from these writers on the coins in their hands.

Boys The sheer volume of pederastic texts from this period poses a “lamppost problem” for the historian: these voices give details only sparsely available earlier, and so might be seized upon to represent times and places not their own.12 Retrosexuality makes it even more difficult to know what these texts mean. Martial and Strato provide graphic descriptions of sex acts; Strato specifies the desirable age-​span for boys; Apuleius explains what underlay the pen names given to beloved boys and women by famous writers, and remarks that Hadrian himself liked to write amatory verses (Apol. 9–​13); Athenaeus retails gossip about how the Stoics broke age norms, pursuing younger partners well into their twenties who needed to shave (Deip. 563d–​e, 564f–​565b, 565d–​f, 605d). The model of Plato as versifying paiderastês circulates from Gellius (19.11) to Apuleius (Apol. 10) to Diogenes Laertius (Lives of the Philosophers 3.29, 31), the point being that Phaedrus and his ilk were not just characters in dialogues, but boys actually loved by actual Plato. A lengthy stretch of Athenaeus lists role models from Zeus to Alexander, quoting from famous poets and learned historians (601a–​605d). We might cautiously conclude that a retrosexual valorization of Platonic and Stoic philosophy boosted a practice already fully enabled by the slave trade, and made it a topic for elegant boasting. Again we are fortunate in this period to have a rare first-​person voice; this one, unlike Sulpicia’s, is both well preserved and famous, although not for its testimony to pederastic affection. Marcus Aurelius, at the age of eighteen, long before he was emperor, was assigned M. Cornelius Fronto as his teacher of Latin rhetoric. The letters they exchanged

122   Language and Identity for the next five years or so are pervasively amatory. That their relationship in these years was sexual has been doubted, and the letters mention no physical contact other than kisses; the deeply allusive nature of the language in which this correspondence is carried out perhaps also suggests a sort of paper romance.13 Here, a single exchange must represent how retrosexuality worked in the Marcus/​Fronto letters. In an early exchange, Fronto writes for Marcus a version of the erôtikos logos of Lysias as set out in Plato’s Phaedrus (Addit. 8). The Phaedrus was a common part of the second-​century curriculum (Trapp 1990), and Fronto’s letter is cast as an exercise, part of Marcus’s education, and written in Fronto’s best Attic Greek. Yet this costume allows Fronto to address Marcus O phile pai, as if Marcus were Phaedrus, and to conflate them throughout; to profess that he wants the same thing from Marcus “that lovers do”; to speculate in lurid detail about what a lustful lover might want from Marcus; and to end by inviting him to take a stroll down by the Ilissus—​just as Socrates strolled with Phaedrus. That Marcus took this all as referring to himself and Fronto is clear from his response (Addit. 7.1): Go ahead, as much as you like, threaten me, accuse me, with whole clumps of arguments, but you will never put off your erastes—​I mean me. Nor will I proclaim it any less that I love Fronto, or will I be less in love, because you’ve proven . . . that those who love less should be helped out and lavished with more. God, no, I am dying so for love of you, and I’m not scared off by this doctrine of yours, and if you’re going to be more ripe and ready for others who don’t love you, I will still love you as long as I live and breathe.

Notably, however, Marcus has switched roles, making himself the lover and Fronto the beloved, showing not only that historical costume can be assumed for a living love affair, but that improvisation is perfectly possible. Marcus begins the finale of this letter with further role-​switching and a dollop of a different love code (Addit. 7.3): But this I’ll personally swear to, no fear: If that Phaedrus guy of yours ever really existed, if he was ever away from Socrates, Socrates didn’t burn more with desire for Phaedrus than I’ve burned during these days—​did I say days? I mean months—​for the sight of you.

The topos of the lover’s slow time is a very old one in Greek and Latin literature, and belongs, around 140 ce when this letter was written, to the world of Greek epigram (cf. Rufinus, Anth. Pal. 5.9, with Rosenmeyer 2001, 107).14 Examples of this kind of well-​ worn theme are all over these letters, especially in the closings, where the recipient of a letter looks for the emotional bonus. Fronto and Marcus learned to write in terms of Socrates and Phaedrus in school, and learned to write in hearts and flowers most immediately, perhaps, in the literary milieu at the court of Hadrian (Bowie 1990); then there was their voluminous reading in Republican Latin literature, from which they borrow Plautine love songs and flirtatious witticisms. Marcus tells Fronto that his erôtikos logos

Retrosexuality: Sex in the Second Sophistic    123 has surpassed “those oh so self-​satisfied and teasing Atticists” (multo placentis illos sibi et provocantis Atticos, Addit. 7.2), by whom he must mean Fronto’s rival sophists at court—​ one of whom was Herodes Atticus. The competitive aspect recalls the Greeks at Gellius’s dinner party, suggesting that, as here, the performance of love in historic guise could also serve as a move in courtship, a form of display. Other pederastic relationships are much less well documented. Under Domitian, Statius wrote a long poem commemorating a puer who had belonged to his friend Atedius Melior (Silv. 2.1; this poem is picked up by Martial in two epigrams (6.28, 6.29).15 If Statius’s poem did not exist, Martial’s would be indistinguishable from the hundreds of poems he wrote for generic slave boys. In the reign of Antoninus Pius, Apuleius records in his Apologia (9–​13) the accusations made against him for writing verses to two slave boys not his own. He responds with a long defense that cites as precedent the poems written to actual boys by poets and philosophers—​Lucilius, Vergil, Plato—​along with a long list of love poets Greek and Roman, among them the three quoted at Gellius’s dinner party. This defense paradoxically casts doubt on the use of any love poem as testimony to any real experience of desire, since the stimulus to write may as easily be an earlier poem as a present love: a notable instance of retrosexuality. The love of Hadrian for Antinous, of course, is lavishly documented. The scandal of future historians (HA Hadr. 14.5–​9, Aurelius Victor [14]), it is attested as real by contemporary evidence from poems to statuary (see Kampen 2007; Vout 2007, 52–​135). This high-​profile romance perhaps contributed to the literary atmosphere at Hadrian’s court, fostering the tropes that show up in the Marcus/​Fronto letters. According to the HAwriter, Marcus was “raised in Hadrian’s bosom” and attended Hadrian’s banquets (Marc. 4). Certainly, Marcus in later life shows no nostalgia for the house where he spent the last six months of Hadrian’s life (HA Marc. 5); in the Meditations, he says nothing of what it meant to move there at the age of sixteen, but cryptically thanks the gods “that I preserved the flower of my youth and did not play the man before my time, but even delayed a little longer” (1.17.2, trans. Farquharson 1944). Bringing with them a parade of notorious partners, the sex lives of famous men now became a topic for lubricious depiction. The commonplace accusation that a man had served as the object of pederastic lust in his youth, along with outrageous stories of effeminacy and licentious pederasty, peps up Suetonius’s Lives of the Caesars and Plutarch’s Parallel Lives (Richlin 1992, 87–​96). Cassius Dio is a wellspring of calumny, and provides a searing portrait of the vices of Commodus, of whose reign he was a direct witness (Gleason 2011). Of Domitian, Suetonius even claims that a certain man of praetorian rank had in his possession, and often showed, a handwritten note in which the young Domitian “promised a night” to him (Dom. 1.1). Invective of a different sort appears in Suetonius’s De Grammaticis et Rhetoribus, where several famous teachers, particularly Remmius Palaemon (Gram. et rhet. 23), are rumored to have been untrustworthy with their students: this is an issue of class—​many of these men rose from slavery themselves, they are supposed to keep their hands off the clientele. Again, Remmius Palaemon lived in the reigns of Tiberius and Claudius; he is addressed as the type of the schoolmaster by Juvenal (7.219). Lucian indeed complains that the philosopher or sophist aspiring to

124   Language and Identity tutor the sons of a wealthy house must submit to a background check for pederastic inclinations (Paid Companions 12, 15, 29); suspicions turn out to be justified at Lapiths 26, 29. The retrosexual payoff here is the glamor associated with the behavior of role models, and the spectacular scandal associated with a pair like Julius Caesar and King Nicomedes of Bithynia, whose relationship reverberates in Philostratus’s many tales of Asiatic sophists putting Caesar in his place. The Second Sophistic also saw the last great blooming of pederastic fantasy texts: epigrams in Greek and Latin, lyric poetry, Philostratus’s Love Letters, even vignettes in satire. The general view expressed in later historiography that the reign of Marcus Aurelius was the last golden age before a calamitous era perhaps explains why the poem from Gellius 19.11 gets recycled later in an unlikely place:  Macrobius’s Saturnalia (2.2.15–​ 17). But it was in the nature of epigrams to be recycled, like jazz riffs; for the historian, epigrams are the music in the air, intangible, and stock themes about boys go back to Callimachus; it is the sheer number of pederastic epigrams in Martial and Strato that makes them seem characteristic of this period.16 As seen above, Lucian liked stories about forced sex with young girls; his Ganymede is similarly and shockingly childish (Dial. D. 10, see Richlin 2015, 366–​367). As for the Love Letters of Philostratus, they are unique in both format (prose poems) and obsession (feet); Simon Goldhill has argued that they constitute an erotic manual that “teach[es] you how to speak the role of the educated lover, the erastês pepaideumenos” (2009b, 297). The younger Pliny provides a perfect retrosexual moment in a letter describing a poem he was moved to write (a ) when a slave read him (b) Asinius Gallus’s book (c) comparing his father Asinius Pollio with Cicero; this book included “an epigram of Cicero to his Tiro” (Ep. 7.4.3)—​a triple remove. Pliny’s response—​set, oddly, in hexameters—​ moves from this inspiration, to Cicero’s writing praxis, to the content of Cicero’s poem, to Pliny’s decision to proclaim his own similar experiences (7.4.6): When I was reading the books of Gallus in which he dared to award the prize and glory to his father, not Cicero, I found a sexy play-​piece of Cicero, to be watched with the same state of mind in which he wrote serious things, and by which he shows that the minds of great men rejoice in human wit, in many and various graces. For he complains Tiro cheated his lover by trickery; Tiro owed him a few little kisses after dinner, but, in the nighttime, absconded. When I read this, “Why, after this,” I said, “should I hide my own loves, too timid to publish a thing? Why don’t I confess that I’ve known the tricks of a Tiro, the fleeting flirtations of Tiro, and teases that only add new flames to old ones?”

Apart from the other fascinating aspects of this text, it is an explicit case of a poem about a poem, one motivated more by desire to imitate a long-​dead role model than by desire to express love for a boy (here, generically, “a Tiro”). What brings us back to Gellius’s

Retrosexuality: Sex in the Second Sophistic    125 dinner party here is what Pliny says about the book of lyric verse he has gone on to publish: “It is read, it is copied over, it is even sung, and by Greeks, too, whom the love of this book has taught Latin; they play it on the cithara, they play it on the lyre” (7.4.9). Pliny’s general self-​delusion about the success of his oeuvre here takes on the air of transcultural competition we have seen not only in Gellius but in Fronto. The epigrammatists’ role model was Callimachus (in Martial’s case, via Catullus), while Pliny’s is Cicero and a long list of other senators, even emperors (5.3.5–​6), but the impulse is the same: to put old wine in new bottles. The numerous images of Antinous suggest that there was real wine, somewhere, but you cannot get at it through a poem like Pliny’s. The debates over the relative merits of boys and women likewise dress up in period garb. Plutarch sets the model in his Erôtikos, with a frame narrative modeled on Plato’s Symposium surrounding a decidedly local setting in Plutarch’s Boeotia, while the topic itself recalls the Symposium of Xenophon; the same pederastic verse by Solon quoted here (751b–​c) reappears in Apuleius’s Apology (9) and in Athenaeus (602e); among the oceans of Attic quotations float bits of the elder Cato (759c) and stories about Maecenas (759f–​760a). The frame narrative in ps.-​Lucian’s Erôtes entails a voyage to Italy from Asia Minor, the inner dialogue taking place at a tourist stop on Cnidos; the pro-​pederasty speaker brings in the plane tree of the Phaedrus (31) and improves on Plato’s Symposium while incorporating a Juvenal-​like tirade against women’s vices (38–​43); the closing frame responds with a bawdy sendup of the ladder of love in the Symposium. In these dialogues, the arguments against pederasty are generally outweighed by the arguments in favor; ps.-​Lucian’s Charicles and Theomnestus express skepticism over the supposedly chaste loves of the philosophers (23, 53–​54), and the moderator, Lycinus, concludes that all men should marry, pederasty being reserved for philosophers (51). Arguments against pederasty, however, are fully laid out, including the argument that the boy experiences physical pain (27). That Severus Alexander attempted to end male prostitution we are told by the unreliable HA-​writer (Alex. Sev. 39.2), but there is little police activity around pederasty in the Second Sophistic as compared with the sex lives of women.17 Marcus Aurelius, late in life, gives thanks (Med. 1.17.7) that he never touched Benedicta or Theodotus—​the latter “a court Catamite,” as an eighteenth-​century translator speculated (Richlin 2012, 500). An indication of what lay ahead is seen in Marcus’s ambiguous statement that he learned from his adoptive father, Antoninus Pius, “to put a stop to things having to do with the love of boys” (to pausai ta peri tous erôtas tôn meirakiôn, 1.16.2).

Eunuchs Eunuchs hover around the edges of the Second Sophistic, freakish figures whose future prominence at the imperial court could not yet have been foretold (see Gleason 1995, 6–​ 8; Hopkins 1978, 172–​196). Not only Martial’s epigrams but Juvenal’s satires, carrying on from Petronius, treat the eunuch as a joke: a household slave performing personal duties

126   Language and Identity that often include sexual use, by female owners (Martial 6.67, 10.91; Juvenal 6.366–​376) as well as by male (Martial 2.54, 3.82.15, 8.44.15, 11.75.1–​6). These slaves are either purchased from a dealer already castrated, or castrated by the owner, as Juvenal puts it, “after [his testicles] have gotten to be two-​pound bags” (6.372)—​that is, well past adolescence, so that he can be used as a human dildo (but see Parker 2007, 290–​292, arguing that this is a fantasy). Suetonius’s Life of Titus, in its obligatory chapter on Titus’s sex life, reports rumors about his “flocks of exoleti and eunuchs” (Tit. 7.1), and the epitome of Dio (67.2.1–​23) suggests that Domitian illegalized the process of making eunuchs to cast aspersions on his brother’s memory: such a bad emperor.18 For Suetonius, this act still counts among Domitian’s good deeds; he notes that the emperor also made the dealers drop their prices on current stock in trade (Dom. 7.1). If Juvenal’s eunuchs are not the retrosexual property of a nostalgic household, the law seems not to have been well enforced. Martial’s honorific poems pay lip service to a fate he treats as horrific (9.6, 9.8): To you, supreme conqueror of the Rhine and father of the world, chaste emperor, the cities pay thanks: they will be populated; it is no longer a crime to give birth. No boy [puer] cut by the skill of the greedy dealer mourns the loss of his ripped-​away manhood, nor does the wretched mother give her prostituted boy-​baby [infanti] the wages counted out by the arrogant pimp. That chastity which never, before you, belonged to the bedroom, has now begun to exist even in the whorehouse. *** As if small were the injury to our sex that males were prostituted to be made foul by the public, now cradles belonged to the pimp, so that, snatched from the teat, a boy [puer] asked for the dirty money with his wailing: bodies too young [inmatura] were paying unspeakable penalties. The Italian father did not tolerate such monstrous deeds, that same father who recently rescued tender youths [ephebis], lest barbarous lust should make men sterile. Before now boys [pueri] and young men [iuvenes] and old men loved you, but now boy-​babies [infantes], Caesar, love you, too.

This is one of the few places in Latin that expresses a sense that persons sold into prostitution by their families deserved better, or that child prostitutes were pitiful; surprising in Martial, who elsewhere treats boys mainly as commodities whose occasional inaccessibility inconveniences him. The reader’s sense of hypocrisy is not helped by the appearance on the same page of the first in a series of epigrams praising Domitian’s puer, the eunuch Earinus (9.11–​13, 16–​17, 36)—​ille puer tota domino gratissimus aula, “that boy most pleasing to his owner in the whole palace” (9.16.3). This juxtaposition has often been commented on.19 That Earinus was freed we know from the preface to book 3 of Statius’s Silvae, in which Statius, stating the occasions for which each poem was written,

Retrosexuality: Sex in the Second Sophistic    127 claims that “Earinus, too, the freedman of our Germanicus [that is, Domitian], knows how long I forestalled his longing, when he had asked that I should dedicate by my verses the locks which he was sending, with a jeweled box and mirror, to Pergamene Asclepius.” That is, Earinus, an historical subject, requested a poem from Statius about the dedication of a lock of hair, an action that (in poetry) evoked Callimachus’s Coma Berenices but (in real life) generally marked the end of a boy’s status as a sex object. Evidently not so in this case, for the poem itself (Silv. 3.4) treats Earinus as an exotic piece of luxury goods from Asia Minor, working in tactless praise of Domitian’s law (nunc frangere sexum /​  . . . nefas [“now, to break sex—​a sin,” 3.4.74–​75]) alongside a treatment of Earinus’s own surgery as a sort of immaculate castration. As analyzed by Carole Newlands, the poem exhibits a “set of tensions . . . : between East and West, past and present, traditional and contemporary mores, male and female, the simultaneous power and subjection of Earinus himself ” (2002, 108; full discussion 106–​116). She takes him to be a figure for the predicament of the courtier. This predicament was fully realized by the most famous eunuch of the Second Sophistic, Favorinus: lionized by Gellius and Philostratus, satirized by his rival Polemon and by Lucian in Eunuch and Demonax. According to Philostratus, Favorinus himself saw his life in terms of paradox: “a Gaul who practiced as a Greek, a eunuch prosecuted for adultery, one who quarreled with the emperor and lived” (VS 489). Favorinus inhabited a world in which his body made him a freak, and yet, as Maud Gleason argues, he constructed himself as a paragon, through paideia (Gleason 1995, 3–​20, 131–​158, 166–​168).

Cinaedi The figure of the cinaedus or kinaidos pervades the Second Sophistic as never before, and I want to suggest here that what we are seeing may in fact be specific to the period: retrosexual, but only in some respects. The word appears in Latin and Greek as a generalized pejorative term for an adult male with a set list of physical features, behaviors, and characteristics: a special sort of glance, bent neck, fluting or cracking (fractus) voice, swaying walk; scratches his head with one finger, wears makeup, curls his hair with a curling-​iron, puts his hand on his hip; often characterized as mollis or malakos (“soft”), or by words meaning literally “effeminate.” These men are also said to desire to be on the receiving end of anal intercourse with another adult male, and to wish to seem to be boys long after youth has left them; also, as satirists warn, to like to have sex with women. Numerous other words in both languages denote this person, and I have argued elsewhere that these wide attestations strongly suggest an actual subculture of such men (1993), although nowhere do we have a first-​person statement about such behaviors or desires by an historical person, or a self-​identification as a cinaedus. In Latin, the word cinaedus appears long before the Second Sophistic, used, for example, as a pejorative, but also in association with a song-​and-​dance, in Plautus (see Moore 2012, 106–​114); in

128   Language and Identity Catullus, just a pejorative (c. 16, 25); and in Petronius (23.3), again in connection with a song. The dozens of uses by Martial and Juvenal (Domitian to Hadrian), and the similar uses by Lucian (Antoninus Pius to Commodus), may be more representative of their own than of earlier periods. The fact that Juvenal devotes an entire satire to such men (2), and another (9) to a male prostitute who services a rich man who acts like a cinaedus—​adorned though these are with retrosexual insets like Domitian’s sex laws and incest with his niece (2.29–​33), or the primping of the emperor Otho before the battle of Bedriacum (2.99–​109), or an obscene twist on a line from Homer (9.37)—​perhaps responds to a current trend.20 For Juvenal, oddly, describes a cinaedus as installed in a household as a wife’s confidant and dance instructor—​also as her lover (Sat. 6.O.1–​29). What would he be doing there? Kinaidoi seem originally to have been dancers (see Williams 2010, 193–​194), as were kinaidologoi—​men hired to do a particular kind of song-​and-​dance at parties; this performance genre was associated with a verse form invented by the Hellenistic poet Sotades, and Athenaeus puts the story of Sotades along with kinaidologoi among a list of naughty performers (Deip. 620e–​621f).21 We see this earlier, of all places, in a letter of Pliny’s, in which he responds to a complaint from his friend Julius Genitor, a teacher of Latin rhetoric, about the entertainment at a recent lavish dinner party (9.17): scurrae, cinaedi, moriones, “running about the tables.” Here we find cinaedi in the company of stand-​up comics and fools. The tolerant Pliny says he does not mind this sort of thing, although it hardly comes as an entertaining surprise “if a cinaedus utters something effeminate [molle], a scurra utters something insolent, a morio utters something stupid” (see Parker 2009, 205 for context). Indeed, Pliny himself, if the emended text is correct, gives “Sotadics” in a list of performance types he enjoys, as a parallel with his own production of not-​so-​moral verses (5.3.2). The household role of the kinaidos who plagues the learned man in Lucian’s Paid Companions is developed at length. First, the learned man is warned that he might be edged out by a kinaidos or a dancing teacher or an Alexandrian dwarf who rattles off erotic songs (erôtikôn aismatôn)—​that is, by the lowest sort of entertainer (27; cf. Lapiths 18–​19). Then the story is told (33–​34) of a teacher, Thesmopolis the Stoic, who went with his wealthy employer to her villa and was made to sit in the wagon next to a depilated kinaidos called Chelidonion (“Little Swallow,” with an obscene pun on a slang term for the female genitalia). Again recognizable by his heavy makeup, darting glance, and bent neck, this character would have liked to wear a hairnet, hummed and whistled during the journey, and would have been happy to dance (all these elements except the neck appear in Juvenal 2). As if this were not enough of an indignity, Thesmopolis is forced to hold the woman’s lapdog, which urinates on him, providing material for the kinaidos to joke about that night at dinner. The currency of Sotadic performance in the 100s ce receives its most surprising attestation at the end of the Second Apology of Justin Martyr (on the circumstances, see Minns and Parvis 2009, 32–​41). A Greek-​speaking Samaritan rhetorician/​philosopher living in Rome—​what might be called a Christian sophist—​Justin wrote to defend his marginal creed and explain its tenets. The First Apology, possibly a petition, possibly

Retrosexuality: Sex in the Second Sophistic    129 in Justin’s possession at the time of his arrest some time between 163 and 168, addresses Pius, Marcus, and Verus directly, and assumes a taste for philosophy in its audience, evidently to win favor. The Second, which bears an uncertain relation to the first, likewise ends with a final effort to align Christianity with philosophy (in fact Minns and Parvis have tacked this section onto the First as 70.2 [15.3]): And our teachings are not shameful, according to a temperate judgment, but are more elevated than all human philosophy, or, even if not, they are nothing like what is in the Sotadean and Philaenidian and Archestratean and Epicurean and other such poetic teachings, which all are allowed to encounter, both in performance and in writing.

Here performers of Sotadic verse are lumped together with the writings of Philaenis, the fabled authoress of pornography (see Parker 1992a), and other enthusiasts of the flesh, and their “teachings,” according to Justin, are available to the public. So, about twelve years earlier, when Marcus and Fronto read the Sota of Ennius together, with its vivid description of cinaedi (M. Caes. 4.2.6), they were reading about performances familiar in their own day, among the houses in their neighborhood: not in Pliny’s house, and probably not in Fronto’s own house, or Pius’s, but perhaps in the house of Hadrian. At the same time—​and perhaps this is part of what made cinaedi popular in this period—​ Fronto and Marcus are enjoying a form with the perfect pedigree: the Latin of the mid-​ Republic; the Greek of the Alexandrian court. A  fine example of how retrosexuality allowed the participants to eat their cake and have it.

Sophists The shabby hirelings at Lucian’s dinner parties are the guests of honor in Philostratus’s Lives. We might expect Philostratus to have endowed his heroes with sex lives resembling Plato’s as represented by contemporary biography; surprisingly, not so, although almost all Philostratus’s sophists are surrounded by crowds of adoring fanboys who come, like the suitors in a fairy tale, from far and wide. The teacher-​student relationship is sometimes figured as father-​son, especially for Hadrian the Phoenician, who is loved by the young “as sons love a sweet and gentle [praios] father” (VS 587), and Hippodromus, who is “the father of Greek learning” (VS 617). This relationship shows up in one startlingly erotic story about Herodes and Favorinus: Herodes considers Favorinus his “teacher and father” and writes to him asking, “When will I see you and lick your mouth?” (VS 490: pote se idô kai pote sou perileixô to stoma). Herodes here puts himself in the first person into a famous line from Aristophanes (frg. 598 KA), quoted by Dio Chrysostom (52.17), in which some eloquent person “has licked the mouth of Sophocles, smeared with honey”; this image forms part of the Second Sophistic theme of the honey-​sweet lips of Sophocles, seen also in the Imagines of the younger Philostratus (Telò 2005). Perhaps

130   Language and Identity Herodes’s adaptation attests to a flamboyant style belonging to the reign of Hadrian and Pius; we have seen how Fronto and Marcus insert themselves into the Phaedrus: retrosexual self-​aggrandizement, in both cases.22 Considering the number of anecdotes about Sophocles paiderastês in Athenaeus, we might see Herodes here as taking a daring step into the position of the erômenos; even more daring, considering contemporary descriptions of Favorinus’s freakish body (Gleason 1995, 7). Herodes’s Romanized ways appear incidentally in a story where he “very warmly greets” Polemon by embracing him and kissing him on the mouth (VS 537). Dio was Favorinus’s teacher (VS 490); Herodes, as well as Fronto, was Marcus’s teacher; Fronto, writing to Herodes, describes himself as Herodes’s anterastês, his rival for Marcus’s love, and again as loving (êrôn) his own teacher Athenodotus, who is elsewhere his “teacher and father” (M. Caes. 2.1.3, 4.12.2 magistro et parente). But we have only Philostratus’s word for what Herodes said to Favorinus. The Lives, with their emphasis on male relationships and descent lines, manifest more of a butch aesthetic than do texts from before the reign of Commodus. Although Philostratus addresses women as well as boys in his Love Letters, women in the Lives are few and despised. Philostratus writes to the empress Julia Domna as his patron in his Life of Apollonius, and addresses her as a well-​educated literary critic in Letter 73 of the Love Letters (Goldhill 2009b, 303–​305); by the time the Lives were written, in the reign of Gordian, she was long dead, leaving Philostratus free to express a virulent misogyny.

What Came Next A similar misogyny was already playing out in the writings of Christian apologists taking their cue from Paul and Philo (Gaca 2003). Asceticism was in the air; Justin addressed Marcus on the low morals of the old gods, but Marcus’s own Meditations would express a thoroughgoing loathing for the carnal body (Perkins 1995; Richlin 2012). Under the Severans, Clement in Alexandria and Tertullian in Carthage, both trained in rhetoric, signposted the path to sex-​for-​procreation-​only; anonymous Tours of Hell taught nascent congregations what penalties awaited the sinner; in Judaea, rabbis surrounded by their own fanboys began a long argument about sex (Boyarin 2003; Himmelfarb 1983; Jaffee 1998; Satlow 1995). Love poetry was about to disappear from view. Yet both Clement and Tertullian complained about the sexual “deviants” and brazen women they saw daily in the streets (Clement Paedagogus 3.3, Tertullian De Pallio 4.9; Upson-​Saia 2011), and, at dinner parties like Gellius’s, the choirs of young slaves still sang sweetly the songs of Anacreon and Sappho.

Further Reading Although texts from the Second Sophistic have played a large part in overviews of the ancient sex/​gender system, no study has dealt comprehensively with the question of sexuality within

Retrosexuality: Sex in the Second Sophistic    131 this cultural formation; Goldhill 1995, concise and still compelling, comes closest. The reader is left to piece together a picture mostly from special studies. Among overviews, Kathy Gaca’s The Making of Fornication (2003), which traces ideas about sexuality from classical Greek philosophy through Paul and Philo to the Christian thinkers of the 100s ce, is unmatched for its scope and intellectual rigor. Michael Satlow’s sourcebook (1995) provides a useful, wide-​ranging, and clearly organized introduction to rabbinic thought on sex; Thomas Hubbard’s sourcebook (2003) includes many texts from the period related to same-​sex love. On medicine and technologies of the body, see Brooten 1996 (as related to lesbians), Flemming 2000 (gynecology), and Gleason 1995 (physiognomy). Studies focused on sexual subjects include Henry 1992 and McClure 2003 (courtesans in Athenaeus), my own translation of the Marcus-​Fronto letters (2006b), and Williams 2010, which covers Roman male-​male sex from Plautus to Augustine, organized thematically. On the Greek novel, a hotbed of sexual issues, see esp. Goldhill 1995, Konstan 1994, Morales 2008; on smaller-​scale texts, see Bowie 1990 (lyric poetry), Floridi 2007 (Strato’s epigrams), Goldhill 2009b (Philostratus’s Love Letters), and Rosenmeyer 2001 (Greek fictional letters).

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134   Language and Identity Parker, H. N. 2009. “Books and Reading Latin Poetry.” In Ancient Literacies: The Culture of Reading in Greece and Rome, edited by W. A. Johnson and H. N. Parker, 186–​229. Oxford. Perkins, J. 1995. The Suffering Self: Pain and Narrative Representation in the Early Christian Era. London. Pomeroy, S. B., ed. 1999. Plutarch’s “Advice to the Bride and Groom” and “A Consolation to his Wife”: English Translations, Commentary, Interpretive Essays, and Bibliography. Oxford. Pomeroy, S. B. 2007. The Murder of Regilla:  A  Case of Domestic Violence in Antiquity. Cambridge, MA. Richlin, A. 1992. The Garden of Priapus: Sexuality and Aggression in Roman Humor. Rev. ed. Oxford. Richlin, A. 1993. “Not before Homosexuality: The Materiality of the Cinaedus and the Roman Law against Love between Men.” Journal of the History of Sexuality 3: 523–​573. Richlin, A. 2006a. “Fronto + Marcus: Love, Friendship, Letters.” In The Boswell Thesis: Essays on Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, edited by M. Kuefler, 111–​129. Chicago. Richlin, A, ed. and trans. 2006b. Marcus Aurelius in Love: The Letters of Marcus and Fronto. Chicago. Richlin, A. 2011. “Parallel Lives:  Domitia Lucilla and Cratia, Fronto and Marcus.” Eugesta 1: 163–​203. Richlin, A. 2012. “The Sanctification of Marcus Aurelius.” In The Blackwell Companion to Marcus Aurelius, edited by M. van Ackeren, 497–​514. London. Richlin, A. 2013. “Sexuality and History.” In The SAGE Handbook of Historical Theory, edited by N. Partner and S. Foot, 294–​310. London. Richlin, A. 2014. Arguments with Silence: Writing the History of Roman Women. Ann Arbor, MI. Richlin, A. 2015. “Reading Boy-​Love and Child-​Love in the Greco-​Roman World.” In Sex in Antiquity: Exploring Gender and Sexuality in the Ancient World, edited by M. Masterson, N. S. Rabinowitz, and J. Robson, 352–​373. London. Rosenmeyer, P. A. 2001. Ancient Epistolary Fictions: The Letter in Greek Literature. Cambridge. Rosenmeyer, P. A. 2008. “Greek Verse Inscriptions in Roman Egypt: Julia Balbilla’s Sapphic Voice.” Cl. Ant. 27: 334–​358. Russell, D. A. 1983. Greek Declamation. Cambridge. Russell, D. A., ed. 1992. Dio Chrysostom: Orations VII, XII, and XXXVI. Cambridge. Satlow, M. L. 1995. Tasting the Dish: Rabbinic Rhetorics of Sexuality. Brown Judaic Studies 303. Atlanta, GA. Stephens, S. A. 2002. “Commenting on Fragments.” In The Classical Commentary: Histories, Practices, Theory, edited by R. K. Gibson and C. S. Kraus, 67–​87. Leiden. Stevenson, J. 2005. Women Latin Poets: Language, Gender, and Authority, from Antiquity to the Eighteenth Century. Oxford. Stroup, S. C. 2010. Catullus, Cicero, and a Society of Patrons:  The Generation of the Text. Cambridge. Taoka, Y. 2013a. “The Correspondence of Fronto and Marcus Aurelius:  Love, Letters, Metaphor.” Cl. Ant. 32: 406–​438. Taoka, Y. 2013b. “Liminal Women in Fronto’s Letters.” CJ 108: 419–​445. Telò, M. 2005. “Sofocle, Socrate e gli inganni della mimesi (Philostr. Iun. Imag. 13.3).” Eikasmos 16: 265–​281. Trapp, M. 1990. “Plato’s Phaedrus in Second-​Century Greek Literature.” In Antonine Literature, edited by D. A. Russell, 141–​173. Oxford. Upson-​Saia, K. 2011. Early Christian Dress: Gender, Virtue, and Authority. New York.

Retrosexuality: Sex in the Second Sophistic    135 Uzzi, J. D. 2015. “The Age of Consent: Children and Sexuality in Ancient Greece and Rome.” In The Archaeology of Childhood: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on an Archaeological Enigma, edited by G. Coşkunsu, 251–​274. Albany. Van Nijf, O. 2001. “Local Heroes:  Athletics, Festivals and Elite Self-​ fashioning in the Roman East.” In Being Greek Under Rome: Cultural Identity, the Second Sophistic and the Development of Empire, edited by S. Goldhill, 306–​334. Cambridge. Vardi, A. D. 2000. “An Anthology of Early Latin Epigrams? A  Ghost Reconsidered.” CQ 50: 147–​158. Vout, C. 2007. Power and Eroticism in Imperial Rome. Cambridge. Walters, J. 1998. “Making a Spectacle:  Deviant Men, Invective, and Pleasure.” Arethusa 31: 355–​367. Williams, C. A., ed. 2004. Martial “Epigrams” Book 2. Oxford. Williams, C. A. 2010. Roman Homosexuality. 2nd ed. Oxford. Williams, C. A. 2012. Reading Roman Friendship. Cambridge. Winkler, J. J. 1990. The Constraints of Desire. New York.

Pa rt  I I I

PA I DE IA A N D P E R F OR M A N C E

Chapter 9

Sch o ols and Paide ia Ruth Webb

Given the importance of education (paideia) to the construction of the Second Sophistic by Philostratus and others and to the self-​presentation of the Sophists themselves,1 it is surprising how little mention is made in contemporary texts of schools and their organization. This may be an accident of history: there is no second-​ century Libanius, whose Letters and Autobiography (Or. 1) tell us so much about the detail of education in the fourth century (Cribiore 2007). But one suspects that the lack of explicit discussion is deliberate. Even Philostratus, who makes clear that his sophists were also teachers, prefers the vocabulary of sociability (sunousia, sumphoitaô, etc.) to the vocabulary of teaching (didaskô, paideuô) and the most direct access to the pure Attic dialect is provided not by books or schoolmasters but through the marvelous figure of Agathion, the wild man of Attica who claims to have been taught (paideuô) by the land itself (VS 553). It is left to Lucian, the perpetual outsider and ironic commentator, to provide some depiction of schools and the educational process in, among other pieces, the Teacher of Rhetoric and The Dream. These are entertaining texts but they are deeply ambiguous: Lucian’s characteristically ironic and allusive presentation makes them challenging to use as sources of facts though rich in ideas. The Dream or the Life of Lucian purports to recount a moment from Lucian’s adolescence when he had finished one stage of his education and, after a family meeting, was briefly and disastrously apprenticed to his stonemason uncle. In the dream of the title, personifications of Sculpture and Paideia, rhetorical education, appeared to him, competing for his loyalty in a reworking of the Prodican Choice of Heracles. The narrator’s (Lucian’s?) choice is made clear by the form, the classical allusions, and the Atticizing language of the piece itself, which are all the results of the training offered by Paideia; the piece as a whole would be incongruous, inconceivable even, in the mouth of a Syrian craftsman. In the Teacher of Rhetoric, by contrast, Lucian offers a jaundiced portrait of competing versions of the rhetorical training that the young narrator of The Dream went on to pursue: the hard graft involved in the assiduous study of classical texts, or the soft and easy path of superficial imitation. That these two paths to the prize of rhetoric, figured as a bride, are represented by very different models of masculinity

140   Paideia and Performance reveals the place of the schools in establishing not just social and ethnic (i.e., Hellenic) identity but gender identity as well, an aspect of the Second Sophistic explored by Maud Gleason (1995). Lucian and Philostratus can be supplemented by some less obviously attractive texts: the surviving rhetorical treatises from the imperial period and Late Antiquity which give us an idea of the contents and methods of teaching.2 With a few exceptions, such as the treatises by Hermogenes, these textbooks belong to the periods before and after the Second Sophistic, strictly defined, a fact that underlines the continuities in Greek education from the Hellenistic period to Late Antiquity. What was distinctive about the Second Sophistic was the stringent demand for Attic purity (Swain 1996) and the development of the school exercise of declamation into a performance art in its own right that provided a public forum for the display of Greek identity and for intense negotiations of status between its star exponents. Looking at the details of what was taught in the less glamorous forum of the schools, often by men whom Philostratus would qualify as simple rhetores rather than performing sophists, provides a reminder of other, more technical aspects of the art of declamation that help to explain its longevity as a form of rhetorical training. Another domain of Second Sophistic activity in which the effects of education are visible is the characteristic attitude toward the products of the past, particularly Homeric poetry, as objects of reverence that are nevertheless open to endless questioning and reappropriation, a phenomenon that has its origins, as I suggest below, in the different stances adopted at different stages of the curriculum.

The Organization of Education The first concern of the parents in Lucian’s Dream is the cost of education—​reflecting the hard fact that schooling was almost always private with the result that anything but the most basic education was beyond the reach of the vast majority of people. Some cities did provide education to the children of citizens (Harris 1989, 244) and some individual teachers accepted pupils at little or no cost. Aelius Aristides claims, for example (Or. 32.16), that his former teacher, Alexander of Cotiaion, even gave money to the neediest, perhaps to offset the loss of the income that the pupil could otherwise have brought in.3 Overall, though, there was no sense that educating the poor was a public duty and, on this point, the author of the treatise On the Education of Children, attributed to Plutarch, appears to represent the consensus when he acknowledges the difficulties faced by the less well-​off but advises them to do what they can to educate their offspring despite their circumstances (Mor. 8e–​f ). In an essentially private system, the provision of education was uneven and it is important to note that, in many cases, education was not dispensed in buildings designated as “schools.”4 In the major centers like Antioch, Alexandria, Rome, and the “university town” of Athens, the availability of high-​level training in rhetoric

Schools and Paideia   141 and philosophy was ensured by the existence of imperial and municipal chairs (see Schmitz, ­chapter 11 in this volume), though, even there, students could find it hard to find exactly the training they were looking for (Joyal, McDougall, and Yardley 2009, 226–​228).5 Cities often granted exemption from taxation to teachers to encourage their activity, but the fact that in small towns and villages the provision depended entirely on the abilities of the local teacher meant that students had to move away from home to continue their studies. One of the greatest compliments that could be paid to a teacher was to say that his presence brought crowds of students (and with them their retinues and their money) to a city: Philostratus (VS 613k) claims, for example, that Heraclides attracted young men to Smyrna not just from the local region but from all over the Eastern Mediterranean (Asia Minor, Egypt, Old Greece). For the biographer, this influx of students brought considerable economic and social benefits. For potential students and their families, however, the cost of living away from home was a significant extra burden: one of Sculpture’s strongest arguments in Lucian’s Dream is that she would allow him to stay at home and avoid the trouble of traveling.

The Work of the Schools Given the degree of improvisation involved in the organization of education, it is surprising to see how unified the curriculum appears to have been. This unity is partly illusory in that the rhetorical textbooks that have survived were the ones selected (and sometimes adapted) by Byzantine teachers who weeded out different versions and the dissenting voices that we hear now only in fragments or in disparaging claims about what “certain authors” (tines) say. However, the underlying unity is real and reflects the final aim of education: mastery of rhetoric in all its dimensions. The first stage in education was learning to read and write, probably with some basic arithmetic.6 In many cases, these basic skills would have been taught at home to both girls and boys, as well as to the household’s slaves. The wealthiest families hired tutors for the further stages of education too,7 but, for most of those who continued their education, the first stage of formal schooling was the teaching of grammar and poetry at the school of the grammatikos followed by the study of prose writers (oratory and historiography) and the mastery of the art of composing of speeches at the school of the rhetor. As Quintilian (Inst. 1.2.27–​31) makes clear, the social microcosm of the school was a necessary part of rhetorical training and the acculturation it represented (Bloomer 2011, 119–​120). There was therefore a general progression from reading and absorbing grammatical, poetic, and prose models to the active production of rhetorical compositions of increasing complexity, compared by the rugged representative of the traditional methods in Lucian’s Teacher of Rhetoric 3, to climbing a steep and rocky slope. Some other areas of knowledge that we identify as separate disciplines with their own methods, such as history or geography, were treated as ancillary to the reading of classical texts, while geometry was taught by specialized teachers.8 The philosophers, of course, had their own schools in

142   Paideia and Performance both senses of the term (identifiable buildings where lectures were given and groups of individuals with the same or similar ideas), on which see Watts (2006). The Latin term curriculum, like its Greek equivalent dromos (used by Philostratus VS 587), implies a straight line followed by the student from the starting point to the finishing line. This line has often been divided into discrete sections by modern scholars such as Henri-​Irénée Marrou (1956, 150–​216) by analogy with the modern transition from primary school (reading and writing) to secondary education (the reading of the poets and the study of grammar at the school of the grammarian grammatikos—​compare the British “grammar schools”), and then to “higher education” in rhetoric, consisting essentially of a progression from the elementary exercises of the Progymnasmata to the complex and demanding art of declamation. Marrou’s scheme reflects the fact that pupils acquired a cumulative series of skills, each built on the previous stage, and that the number of years spent at school was variable. Students who, for one reason or another, abandoned their studies en route had acquired skills in reading and oral and written expression that they could put to use, even if they would never have been accepted among the true pepaideumenoi. Marrou’s model, however, involves a severe oversimplification of both the organization of education and the presentation of the curriculum. On a purely practical level, it is clear that many schools grouped together students at different stages in their education for some or all teaching, meaning that students could revisit the same activities for different purposes as they moved through the curriculum.9 Similarly, texts could recur at different points for different purposes: the poets served as models for teaching handwriting—​as shown by the shards of pottery and writing tablets with lines from Homer, inexpertly copied by a child’s hand10—​then as examples of grammatical constructions, then of rhetorical figures, before finally being used as sources for the last stage of rhetorical training: style (cf. Hermogenes, On Types of Style).11

Grammar and Poetry The main tasks of the grammarian were the teaching of correct (i.e., classical Attic) grammar, a question that took on particular importance in the Second Sophistic, and the exegesis of the poets. Students whose education ended with the grammarian’s class would have mastered the basics of composition in an acceptably classicizing idiom as well as acquiring a veneer of literary culture, mostly through the memorization of short extracts. We can find a taste of the questions posed in the schools in the Homeric scholia which ask, among many other things, why Homer began the Iliad with the wrath of Achilles, a question that the narrator of Lucian’s True Histories (2.20) gets to put to the deceased poet, who does not remember why. This scene was Lucian’s take on a topos of the grammarian: Aelius Aristides (Or. 32.34) envisages Alexander of Cotiaion discussing poetry with Homer and the other poets in Hades after his death. The teaching of poetry also bore a strong moral component which encouraged teachers to focus on a selection of potentially improving quotations, often read in isolation

Schools and Paideia   143 from their contexts and presented as the thought of the poet, not as the expression of a particular character in a particular situation. This aspect of grammar was ridiculed by the skeptic philosopher Sextus Empiricus, who gleefully points out the inadequacies both of the poets (who contradict themselves) and of the grammarians (who are unable to agree on their interpretations).12 The interconnection between morality, poetry and grammar may seem as inappropriate to us as it did to Sextus Empiricus, but self-​ restraint, the principal concern of these readings, was considered an essential element of paideia (see, for example, Chariton, Chaereas and Callirhoe, 2.4.1, 3.2.6, etc.) even if it was not always among the qualities displayed by Philostratus’s sophists. The moralizing approach also reveals the potential power that texts were thought to hold over their readers, particularly malleable young readers, as we see from Plutarch’s warning about protecting the young from the wrong type of reading as carefully as from the wrong type of people (Mor. 15a).

From Grammar to Rhetoric The transition from the grammatikos to the elementary stages of rhetorical composition, taught in principal by the rhetor, is a good example of how fluid the boundaries between stages could be, since there was great deal of overlap between the work of the grammarian and the early steps in rhetorical training.13 Students learned to write by copying, among other things, improving quotations (an exercise that in itself helped grammatical models to lodge themselves in the memory) (Morgan 1998, 185–​189). These same quotations then became the basis for one of the first Progymnasmata exercises, the chreia (see Hock and O’Neil [1986] 2002), which took as its basis a brief saying, often related to education and its benefits, or action attributed to a known personality. In one example given by Theon (96.20–​22), Diogenes the Cynic dismisses an uneducated wealthy young man as “silver-​plated filth”; another is attributed to Olympias, the mother of Alexander, who complains that her son is casting doubt on her fidelity by claiming to be the son of Zeus (99.27–​30). The pupils had to subject the chosen phrases to grammatical gymnastics (changing singulars to plurals or to duals and back again, recasting the words in indirect speech or rewriting them in abbreviated or expanded form) all the time preserving the original thought. The rhetorical function of the exercise emerges in the second type of activity: the composition of a brief discussion inspired by the model. The relevance to rhetorical training is also apparent in the classification of sayings which include syllogisms and enthymemes as well as demonstrations (a saying backed up by an action as evidence). A grammatical component was also incorporated in the two narrative exercises, muthos (an Aesopic fable with animal characters, illustrating a moral)14 and diêgêma (a narration, usually based on a well-​known myth or historical event). These too could be expressed in different modes: in simple sentences (“Medea killed her children”) or in indirect speech using the accusative and infinitive construction (“Medea is said to

144   Paideia and Performance have killed her children”).15 As narratives, muthos and diêgêma had a more direct connection to rhetorical compositions and provided training in the construction of the coherent and clear account of events that was crucial to judicial oratory (as well as to the other rhetorical genres) and, of course, to different types of prose, both literary and administrative. Crucially, it was through these exercises that students encountered the peristaseis or “elements of narration,” the “who,” “what,” “when,” “where,” “why” (and “how”) that enabled them to analyze and organize a sequence of events into a story.16 Other exercises, such as êthopoiia (a speech that might have been given by a particular historical or mythological character in a particular situation), ekphrasis (the vivid evocation of an event, person, place, or moment), and synkrisis, comparison, provided practice in techniques that could be used in the presentation of a full-​scale speech.17 Theon’s Progymnasmata reveal another aspect of this spiraling structure. In his conception, many of the exercises were suitable for treatment in progressively more difficult ways. Muthos and diêgêma, for example, were approached first as exercises in composition that ranged from the simple exposition of the story to increasingly complex narratives containing speeches (êthopoiiai) and scene-​setting (ekphrasis). Later still, they provided the raw material for exercises in confirmation and refutation which provided students with their first encounter with techniques of argumentation. In some versions of the Progymnasmata, these were defined as independent exercises but Theon saw them as processes, as a further level of activities to be applied to a basic narration in order to argue that the version of events was credible or not. Here, the peristaseis take on a new importance: Theon shows how a basic set of criteria or topoi (possibility, credibility, advantage, etc.) could be applied to each of the elements of a given narrative. In his example he argues that it is improbable that as a mother (person) Medea would murder her own sons, or that she would do it at a moment (time) when she was in a position of weakness or in order to harm Jason (cause). The same techniques were used to prove the reverse, that a particular story was credible, and even to refute and confirm the same story, as in Libanius’s refutation and confirmation of the story of the rape of Cassandra.18 Other exercises also lent themselves to debate: thesis, an argument for or against a certain course of action (like whether one should marry) prepared for deliberative types of speech. (Although Theon does not make this explicit, one can easily imagine all of these exercises being organized in schools as duels between students or groups of students.) More surprisingly, perhaps, enkômion, the miniature speech of praise that was the students’ initiation into the increasingly important art of epideictic rhetoric, could also be opened up to contradiction. We tend to think of the rhetoric of praise as a univocal rehearsal of a subject’s qualities, serving if anything to suppress debate, but, in the Progymnasmata, it was paired with psogos, blame (vituperatio in Latin). Like confirmation and refutation, the two could be applied to the same subject matter as Libanius shows with his praise and blame of Achilles (Prog. 8.3 and 9.1) that, when taken together, create a dynamic, dialectical presentation of the subject that reflects the complexity of this particular hero and the multifarious traditions about him.

Schools and Paideia   145 Theon’s Progymnasmata are also particularly interesting in that his original text (parts of which are preserved only in an Armenian translation from Late Antiquity) included some exercises not found in other collections.19 These include reading aloud (anagnôsis), listening (akroasis), and paraphrase, all of which help us further to understand the use of classical models in the rhetorical schools. Reading ancient texts, copied without word division, was difficult in itself but the exercise of anagnôsis demanded even more. The student had to understand the speech and its strategies and, above all, to think himself in to the situation of the speaker and his persona. This exercise therefore involved an internalization of both the character and the words of the ancient model and provided a first experience of the rhetorical performance, hypokrisis, that was a defining feature of the Second Sophistic portrayed by Philostratus and an essential skill for any member of the elite.20 The identification of listening as a further skill to be developed gives us a further insight into the context of Sophistic performances (Philostratus, moreover, uses the term akroatês, “listener” as a synonym for pupil). Like Plutarch (Mor. 37c–​48d), Theon conceived of being a member of an audience as an active process requiring effort and concentration, making the listener into a participant in the performance, whether of a teacher, a fellow student, or a sophist. Theon’s introduction is also a rich source of observations about teaching methods. Like his Roman counterpart, Quintilian, he shows surprising sensitivity to the needs of his pupils and advises the teachers not to correct every single mistake in their compositions.21 The most important piece of information that he gives though is on the ideal teacher’s role within the classroom: he is less a purveyor of information in the “talk and chalk” mode and more a model to be actively imitated by his pupils. At the level of the Progymnasmata, Theon makes it clear that the teacher should provide his own models of the exercises for his students to copy, and Libanius did just that, leaving a full set of sample exercises. This is vitally important as it shows how mastery of rhetoric, the end goal of this schooling, was a set of practical skills inculcated as much by demonstration as by precept. In this, rhetorical training was similar to other types of technical training and Theon makes precisely this point when he compares the role of practice in rhetoric to the work of the apprentice painter, who needed to combine knowledge of the works of the past with constant practice (62.1–​10). As the use of the term gymnasma (literally, “physical exercise”) suggests, the training of the rhetorical schools was closer to a practical training in the way to do things than to the communication of disembodied facts (as echoed in the title of Raffaella Cribiore’s Gymnastics of the Mind). Theon also makes clear the importance of absorbing models at this stage of the boy’s education: the student was to be thought of as a wax tablet ready to receive the impressions made by his teacher and by the classical authors transmitted by the teacher.22 But, at the stage of the Progymnasmata, he was already beginning to make his own compositions from this material, just as Lucian describes his younger self creating new figures out of the wax scraped from his writing tablets (previously impressed with words from classical texts).23 The transition from grammar to rhetoric can therefore be seen as a transition from receiving models to receiving and producing, putting the models that had been absorbed along the way into active use. This change in the student’s relationship to language

146   Paideia and Performance was accompanied by a parallel shift in attitude toward the authority of the poets the effects of which are perceptible in Second Sophistic texts. The grammarians treated the poets, as we saw, as authorities on a wide range of questions, but the rhetorical exercises just discussed encouraged a rather different approach: a distanced, ironic stance which was far from reverent. The example of Medea demanded that Euripides’s play be conceived of (if only temporarily) as illogical in its action; the enkômion of Thersites presents the deformed and cowardly common soldier of the Iliad as a free-​speaking proto-​Demosthenes who did not let his physical disability prevent him from joining the expedition to Troy and thus showed greater courage than Achilles or Agamemnon.24 Among Libanius’s refutations there is also a critique of the opening of the Iliad itself (Prog. 5.1). In these exercises we can see the seeds of an important feature of the Second Sophistic: the freedom with which classical models (particularly Homer) are rewritten, questioned, and subverted, often in ways that show the more or less direct imprint of the author’s rhetorical training, as in Dio Chrysostom’s Trojan Oration, which applies the techniques of refutation to the story of the Trojan War (Auger et al. 2012, lxi–​xlvi; Kim 2010, 116–​118 and 128–​130). In the hands of Dio and Philostratus (in the Heroicus) the grammarian’s authoritative Homer becomes an unscrupulous manipulator of the truth. The classics were respected but not revered to the point of being untouchable: rather, they were a common property to be actively used.25

After the Progymnasmata: Declamation The Progymnasmata therefore provided a basic training in exposition and argumentation, in speaking in public and taking on a persona. These were all skills that could be useful in themselves for students who needed simply to master techniques of oral and written communication, and, for many, formal education would have ended here. A student who left school after this preliminary training (or even part way through it) could have gained some valuable skills.26 For those who went further along the road, the next steps were represented by the full-​scale speeches, epideictic and, above all, declamation: the composition and oral presentation of speeches on fictional or historical-​ fictional themes. Again, the boundaries between stages were not hard and fast. The preliminary exercises led the students in to declamation: narration trained them in the clear exposition of facts, ekphrasis showed them how to involve their audiences imaginatively and emotionally in those facts, êthopoiia (and reading aloud) how to adopt a suitable persona and how to make other characters come alive as necessary. Most importantly, confirmation, refutation, and thesis provided an introduction to argumentation. The exercises of enkômion and psogos were miniature epideictic speeches in their own right. Although we have less evidence for the teaching of epideictic rhetoric in schools at this period, these speeches were part and parcel of the civic and private life of the elite

Schools and Paideia   147 and were practiced in the schools themselves, as Aelius Aristides’s speech for his dead pupil Eteoneus shows (Or. 31). Declamation (or simply meletai, “exercises,” in Greek) was the school exercise that spread out of the classroom to become the major rhetorical performance art of the imperial period and the defining skill of the Second Sophists, according to Philostratus (VS 481). This exercise was thus at the junction between the schools and adult rhetorical activity in more ways than one. The most striking feature of these performances for the modern reader is the speaker’s adoption of a persona belonging to classical Greek history or to a vaguely classical polis (aptly named “Sophistopolis” by Donald Russell 1983) inhabited by stock characters such as generals, heroic fighters, tyrants, orators, rich men, and poor men. The exercise of reading, with its strong element of role play, prepared for this and involved a similar process of internalizing the past and certain character types (not all of them morally positive models). This apparent obsession with the past has often been diagnosed as a symptom of a certain nostalgia for the classical period and proof of its continuing hold. While this may have been the case for some Greek inhabitants of the empire, other reasons for the restricted range of themes emerge if we look at declamation first and foremost as an educational practice. The most important feature of declamation was not its use of êthopoiia but rather the intensive training it offered in analysis and argumentation. Themes involving tyrannicides and imaginary laws, virgins kidnapped by pirates, or characters from history in less than historical situations may seem to us (as they did to some Roman critics) to be pure fantasy, but they were carefully shaped in order to pose a specific problem (Heath 2007). The student, or professional sophist, presented with a problem (which was “thrown at” [proballô] them) had to identify the issue at stake and then to come up with the best strategy for dealing with it. The restricted range of themes ensured that the subjects were distant enough from speaker and audience to allow for an objective treatment while remaining part of a shared culture without which it would be difficult, if not impossible, to evaluate a speech. The restricted range of characters and contexts meant that everyone could be in agreement about a basic set of “facts” about the characters and their actions (as Hermogenes says, a case involving Socrates as a brothel-​keeper transgressed the bounds of credibility too far to be debatable).27 Systems for identifying the questions at the heart of declamation subjects had existed since the Hellenistic period. The treatise On Issues by Hermogenes of Tarsus, who makes an appearance in the Lives of the Sophists (VS 577–​578) as a brilliant youth who failed to live up to his promise in later life, presents one system for identifying the issue. His contribution to what was already a well-​established art was to identify thirteen types of issue and to create a series of questions, like a decision chart, to help students work out which type of problem was presented by any particular situation (Heath 2007, 10–​11; Patillon 2009, xliii). If a murder victim has been found, the question concerns the perpetrator (“whodunit?”) and is called conjecture (stochasmos). But other cases raised different issues: that of the pickpocket who operated in a temple and is accused of the more serious offence of sacrilege is a question of definition—​he admits the act but argues about its nature. Once the issue was identified, Hermogenes provided blueprints for treating each of these types of case.

148   Paideia and Performance Hermogenes’s system can appear to be abstruse and arbitrary at first sight, but it is a powerful tool for analyzing problems and helping speakers to deal with them. What it does not do is give advice about the other aspects of composing a speech: what sort of introduction to use, how to present the narration, when to include appeals to the emotions and so on (Heath 2007, 8). These elements are provided by the treatise On Invention that was wrongly attributed to Hermogenes and by the late antique commentaries to the works of the real Hermogenes. One later rhetorician named Sopater (fourth century ce) gives a glimpse into how declamation might actually have been taught in the classroom. In contrast to Hermogenes, who starts from his categories and then discusses various examples very briefly, Sopater analyzes one declamation theme at a time and talks us through it at greater or lesser length, identifying the issue and outlining the speech that could be made, switching back and forth as he does so between example and precept.28 Reading Sopater, it is easy to imagine a teacher talking through a theme in this way before asking his students to compose and present the speech in full. Another, perhaps more realistic, image of the realities of teaching declamation is given in the anonymous treatise, once attributed to Dionysius of Halicarnassus, On Mistakes in Declamation, a catalog of common blunders made by students, from failing to set out the purpose of their speech in the prologue to forgetting the importance of representing the speaker’s character (êthos) through his words, not paying enough attention to the order in which arguments are presented (and thus failing to hide the weaker ones in the middle), or including overlong narrations and irrelevant ekphraseis.29 Even the professionals were not immune from making mistakes: Philostratus (VS 595–​596) tells how Ptolemy of Naucratis failed to realize that the case he was addressing was “without issue” (i.e., not suitable for debate). These glimpses into the rhetors’ workshops show what declamation involved, away from the performances of Philostratus’s stars and gives some idea of why Lucian’s speaker in the Teacher of Rhetoric could liken one path to it as a hard uphill slog. Philostratus gives us one further piece of information about teaching practices. Describing his own experience of school, he explains that, when his teacher declaimed, both the younger and the older boys were in the audience, the younger ones (neoi) sitting in front separated from the older boys (meirakia) by the slaves who accompanied them (paidagôgoi).30 Since students of various stages and abilities were grouped together in the audience for these displays they must have listened to and watched their teacher declaiming long before they were ready to start doing the same. Such a mixed public is a further sign of the distance of this rhetorical education from our own system (imagine a single lecture addressed simultaneously to advanced undergraduates and school children) and seems more suited to a practical training in a performance art or a trade (like that of the sculptor in Lucian’s Dream). Through this process, the younger pupil’s act of listening was gradually transformed from that of a nonexpert to that of an expert. By the same token, the audiences of the sophists’ public demonstrations must also have contained a mix of levels of competence, with experienced listeners, able to copy and critique the performances they saw, sitting side by side with individuals of more limited competence (current students or adults who had not completed the full course of study).

Schools and Paideia   149 The demonstrative nature of ancient audiences, as illustrated in several anecdotes in Philostratus and others, meant that these public demonstrations could in themselves be an important educational experience for members of the audience who learned by listening to the reactions of others what was prized in a declamation and what was to be avoided (Webb 2006). Philostratus’s Lives also show how closely the world of the schools was interconnected with the performance circuit. The sophists he portrays were usually teachers themselves: it was understandable, he claims, for Heraclides to suffer an attack of nerves when delivering an extempore speech in front of the emperor Severus as he spent most of his time teaching boys (meirakia; VS 614) In fact, as Kendra Eshleman (2008) has shown, the sophists selected for inclusion in Philostratus’s work can all be connected to a network of teachers and students clustered around the central figure of Herodes Atticus. From the formal sense of “school” as a place of education and practical training we therefore come to the looser sense of a group sharing similar approaches to their discipline. It is at the level of the sophists that we are able to perceive, largely thanks to Philostratus’s comments, the individual styles and qualities that distinguished the different exponents of the education outlined above and that were shared by their regular students.31 Dionysius of Miletus, for example, is said (VS 523–​524) to have imitated the “natural style” (kata phusin) and the careful ordering of the thoughts of his own teacher, Isaeus, and to have developed in his own students phenomenal powers of memorization (i.e., of his manner of declaiming). It is also clear from Philostratus’s anecdotes that being a “student of ” a sophist involved assimilating not just technical skills but also a far more personal manner of being: Hadrian’s students imitated not just his speaking style but also his gait and his sumptuous dress (VS 587). These were characteristics that even the youngest students could absorb as they watched their teacher’s displays, achieving membership of the group by assimilation. An extreme version of this phenomenon is represented by the second type of teacher caricatured in Lucian’s Teacher of Rhetoric (15) who recommends that his young followers imitate his mannerisms and dress as well as his superficial Atticism since this is all that matters. Students also varied in their degrees of “discipleship”; Ptolemy of Naucratis, for example, is described as a “listener” of Herodes (akroatês) but not a zealous imitator (zêlôtês; VS 595), and others departed—​deliberately or, as Philostratus implies, though lack of judgment—​from their models, as in the case of one of Hadrian’s students, Apollonius (VS 601). This system of personal emulation is a logical development of a style of education in which the teacher presented himself not just as a conduit to classical authors but also (and, in the case of the star sophists, above all) as a model in himself. Its effects are reflected in the importance, noted above, of the language of sociability to describe the teacher-​pupil relationship in terms of “association” (sunousia), acquaintance (pupils are gnôrimoi), or fatherhood (Hippodromos at VS 617), all of which sit uneasily with the occasional reminders of the fees (misthos) charged by teachers. A particular version of this sociability is attributed to Herodes, who is said by Philostratus to have favored his best pupils with invitations to a special gathering, called the Clepsydrion, at which he lectured on verses over dinner (VS 585–​586). Unlike Athenaeus’s gathering of equals,

150   Paideia and Performance these particular dinner parties seem to have featured only one speaker, Herodes himself. But he is said to have encouraged his pupils to carry on their studies over wine, which they did in the form of discussions (on the occasion recounted by Philostratus, the subject of conversation was the style of different contemporary sophists). There are hints by both Lucian and Philostratus that this sociability could be erotically charged.32 The Teacher of Rhetoric presents rhetoric herself as a tantalizing object of desire, while Philostratus notes that an Ionian student visiting Athens who never stopped praising his own teacher was said, perhaps only half in jest, to be “in love” with him. The separation of neoi from the meirakia by the phalanx of paidagôgoi at Philostratus’s school was no doubt inspired by concern about the potential for erotic contact (cf. Quint. Inst. 2.2.14).

Conclusion Even if the education offered by schools during the period of the Second Sophistic did not differ markedly from that of the preceding or following centuries, the relationship between schools and wider society was particular. Beyond the small differences of approach or style noted by Philostratus and satirized by Lucian, the training offered by the schools was essentially uniform: only Sextus Empiricus challenged the principles on which it was based, others simply offered variations. This meant that pepaideumenoi from any area where Greek was known, from Gaul to Samosata, shared a common culture that transcended geographical and ethnic boundaries: an educated Roman like Aelian, who had never even left Italy, could be praised for his mastery of Attic and counted among Philostratus’s Sophists (VS 624–​625; Whitmarsh 2001, 116–​129). At the same time, it reinforced social distinctions: these educated non-​Greeks were more “Hellenic” than a koinê-​speaking craftsman (Paideia in Lucian’s Dream [13] intimates that the artisan does not even deserve to be considered a free man). As we have seen, the expense of education, particularly when travel was involved, made it the preserve of the few and an ostentatious sign of wealth and leisure (scholê). At the same time, schools do seem to have offered some opportunities for a tiny minority, like Lucian himself, to achieve a degree of both cultural and social mobility. At a more humble level, Aelius Aristides (Or. 32.10) claims that the grammarian Alexander of Cotiaion made a point of finding jobs for students who did not have the necessary contacts. As Tim Whitmarsh (2001, 129–​130) has pointed out, the possibility of mobility was inherent in the role of education in shaping elite identity and clearly caused some degree of anxiety, as evidenced by the hostility with which outsiders could be viewed. This same anxiety may help to explain why the role of the schools is elided by Philostratus in favor of a more personal, aristocratic (and, in the case of Agathion, autochthonous) vision of the source of paideia. A final question is that of the function of imperial Greek education, beyond the acquisition of the trappings of elite Hellenic culture. Malcolm Heath (2004) has shown that, in the ancient context, the skills acquired through declamation could have practical

Schools and Paideia   151 applications in courtrooms and we know that Philostratus’s sophists were involved in pleading cases. The displays of professional sophists may have pushed the mechanics of rhetorical training to the point where they became performances of the performance of rhetoric (as well as of status and Hellenism), but the standard training of the schools could impart skills in analysis, close reading (in order to find the flaws in a narrative for the exercise of refutation), and exposition. Equally, if not more, importantly, the practice of debating for and against the same point, whether in confirmation and refutation, praise and blame or thesis, not only developed the ability to foresee and forestall an opponent’s arguments but also encouraged the intellectual flexibility necessary to see other points of view (Danblon 2013, 127–​148; cf. Heath 2007, 16–​17) as well as an acute awareness of persona, all of which could be seen as hallmarks of Second Sophistic writers such as Lucian and Philostratus himself.

Further Reading A great deal of light has been shed on the methods used in teaching language and literature by the work of Teresa Morgan and Rafaella Cribiore. The latter’s book on Libanius’s school is particularly valuable for the detailed information it draws from Libanius’s copious writings on the running of a school and the relationships between teacher and pupil. It is impossible to know how representative Libanius’s fourth-​century school was of earlier practices but it is the best-​documented example. Another valuable source of information on the methods used in rhetorical training is represented by the Greek rhetorical manuals of the imperial period. Many of these are now accessible in new editions and translations. The various versions of the Progymnasmata are available in English in Kennedy 2003 and in new editions with facing translation and commentary in Patillon and Bolognesi 1997 (Theon) and Patillon 2008 (Aphthonius and Ps.-​Hermogenes). Libanius’s own examples of the Progymnasmata exercises have been translated by Gibson 2008. Russell 1983 provides an accessible introduction to the complexities of declamation. Hermogenes’s treatise on status theory has been translated and elucidated by Heath 1995 and Patillon 2009. The latter’s Corpus Rhetoricum also includes texts, translations, and very detailed commentaries to several other important rhetorical treatises. The ideology behind the education dispensed in schools of the period and the sociological implications of the organization and content of elite education have also received much attention, notably in Schmitz 1997 and Swain 1996, the latter making use of the theories of Bourdieu, Whitmarsh 1998 (focusing on the figure of Dio Chrysostom) and 2001, and Connolly 2001. The organization and nature of philosophical training from the second century onward are explored in Watts 2006.

Bibliography Auger, D., C. Bréchet, M. Casevitz, S. Minon, E. Oudot, and R. Webb, trans. 2012. Ilion n’a pas été prise: Dion de Pruse, Discours “Troyen” 11. Paris. Bloomer, W. M. 2011. “Quintilian on the Child as a Learning Subject.” CW 105: 109–​137. Bowie, E. L. 1994. “The Readership of Greek Novels in the Ancient World.” In The Search for the Ancient Novel, edited by J. Tatum, 435–​459. Baltimore, MD.

152   Paideia and Performance Chiron, P. 2013. “Imiter, modeler, trouver, créer . . . : Métaphores et conceptions de la fiction dans les Progymnasmata d’Aelius Théon.” In Théories et pratiques de la fiction à l’époque impériale, edited by C. Bréchet, A. Videau, and R. Webb, 37–​47. Paris. Connolly, J. 2001. “The Problems of the Past in Imperial Greek Education.” In Education in Greek and Roman Antiquity, edited by Y.-​L. Too, 339–​372. Leiden. Cribiore, R. 2001. Gymnastics of the Mind: Greek Education in Hellenistic and Roman Egypt. Princeton, NJ. Cribiore, R. 2007. The School of Libanius in Late Antique Antioch. Princeton, NJ. Danblon, E. 2013. L’Homme rhétorique: Culture, raison, action. Paris. Eshleman, K. 2008. “Defining the Circle of Sophists: Philostratus and the Construction of the Second Sophistic.” CPhil. 103: 395–​413. Gibson, C. 2004. “Learning Greek History in the Ancient Classroom:  The Evidence of the Progymnasmata.” CPhil. 99: 103–​129. Gibson, C. 2008. Libanius’s Progymnasmata: Model Exercises in Greek Prose Composition and Rhetoric. Atlanta, GA. Gleason, M.  W. 1995. Making Men:  Sophists and Self-​ Presentation in Ancient Rome. Princeton, NJ. Hall, E. 2013. Adventures with Iphigeneia in Tauris: A Cultural History of Euripides’ Black Sea Tragedy. Oxford. Harris, W. 1989. Ancient Literacy. Cambridge, MA. Heath, M. 1995. Hermogenes “On Issues”: Strategies of Argument in Later Greek Rhetoric. Oxford. Heath, M. 2004. “Practical Advocacy in Roman Egypt.” In Oratory in Action, edited by M. J. Edwards and C. Reid, 62–​82. Manchester. Heath, M. 2007. “Teaching Rhetorical Argument Today.” In Logos:  Rational Argument in Classical Rhetoric, edited by J. G. F. Powell, 105–​122. BICS Supplement 96. London. Hock, R. F., and E. N. O’Neil. (1986) 2002. The Chreia in Ancient Rhetoric. 2 vols. Atlanta, GA. Johnson, W. A. 2010. Readers and Reading Culture in the High Roman Empire: A Study of Elite Communities. Oxford and New York. Joyal, M., I. McDougall, and J. C. Yardley. 2009. Greek and Roman Education: A Sourcebook. London and New York. Kennedy, G. A., trans. 2003. Progymnasmata:  Greek Textbooks of Prose Composition and Rhetoric. Atlanta, GA. Kim, L. 2010. Homer between History and Fiction in Imperial Greek Literature. Cambridge. Kleijwegt, M. 1991. Ancient Youth: The Ambiguity of Youth and the Absence of Adolescence in Greco-​roman Society. Amsterdam. Lalanne, S. 2006. Une éducation grecque: Rites de passage et construction des genres dans le roman grec ancien. Paris. Marrou, H.-​I. 1956. A History of Education in Antiquity. Madison, WI. Morgan, T. 1998. Literate Education in the Hellenistic and Roman Worlds. Cambridge. Morgan, T. 2007. “Rhetoric and Education.” In A Companion to Greek Rhetoric, edited by I. Worthington, 303–​319. Malden, MA, and Oxford. Patillon, M., ed. and trans. 2008. Corpus Rhetoricum 1. Paris. Patillon, M., ed. and trans. 2009. Corpus Rhetoricum 2. Paris. Patillon, M., and G. Bolognesi, ed. and trans. 1997. Theon, Progymnasmata. Paris. Penella, R. J. 2011. “The Progymnasmata in Imperial Greek Education.” CW 105: 77–​90. Puech, B. 2002. Orateurs et sophistes grecs dans les inscriptions d’époque impériale. Paris. Romm, J. 1990. “Wax, Stone, and Promethean Clay: Lucian as Plastic Artist.” CA 1: 74–​98.

Schools and Paideia   153 Russell, D. A. 1983. Greek Declamation. Cambridge. Schmitz, T. A. 1997. Bildung und Macht:  Zur sozialen und politischen Funktion der zweiten Sophistik in der griechischen Welt der Kaiserzeit. Zetemata 97. Munich. Swain, S. 1996. Hellenism and Empire: Language, Classicism, and Power in the Greek World, 50–​250, ad. Oxford. Watts, E. J. 2006. City and School in Late Antique Athens and Alexandria. Berkeley, CA. Webb, R. 2001. “The Progymnasmata as Practice.” In Education in Greek and Roman Antiquity, edited by Y. L. Too, 289–​316. Leiden. Webb, R. 2006. “Fiction, Mimesis and the Performance of the Greek Past in the Second Sophistic.” In Greek on Greekness: Viewing the Greek Past under the Roman Empire, edited by D. Konstan and S. Saïd, 27–​46. Cambridge. Webb, R. 2009. Ekphrasis, Imagination and Persuasion in Ancient Rhetorical Theory and Practice. Farnham. Webb, R. 2011. “Between Poetry and Rhetoric:  Libanios’ Use of Poetic Themes in His Progymnasmata.” Quaderni Urbinati di Cultura Classica NS 95: 131–​152. Whitmarsh, T. 1998. “Reading Power in Roman Greece: The Paideia of Dio Chrysostom.” In Pedagogy and Power: Rhetorics of Classical Learning, edited by Y. L. Too and N. Livingstone, 192–​213. Cambridge. Whitmarsh, T. 2001. Greek Literature and the Roman Empire: The Politics of Imitation. Oxford.

Chapter 10

Athletes and T ra i ne rs Jason König

The late first to mid-​third centuries ce saw not only an intensification of interest in prose writing and display oratory in the Greek east, but also renewed prominence for athletic activity. Moreover, the literary and athletic spheres had a remarkable amount of common ground, even if their relationship was also often marked by rivalry and mutual criticism. My primary aim in this chapter is to sketch out some of the most important elements of that relationship, and in the process to illustrate some of the ways in which athletic skill could in itself be presented as a form of paideia (“learning,” “education,” “erudition”), or at any rate an attribute dependent upon or linked with paideia. I look first at day-​to-​day training in the gymnasium, focusing particularly on the use of athletics in the education of young men of the Greek elite. I then turn to the athletic contests which flourished at festivals across the Mediterranean world and to the professional athletes who flocked to them. Finally, I look at a series of attempts by imperial Greek authors to redefine athletic training in line with their own intellectual priorities. For the most part there was a fairly clear distinction between those who underwent gymnasium training in educational contests (the focus of my first main section) and professional athletes who competed at a much higher level, and very lucratively, in festival contests (the focus of the second). However, I should stress that I do not mean to imply a completely solid dividing line between the two groups. Some of those undergoing a gymnasium education would have competed in the festivals of their home cities, or even, in promising cases, competed in the boys’ category at more high-​profile festivals. Some of these must then have used that experience as a launch-​pad for full-​ time careers touring around the many hundreds of athletic festivals which were spread across the Mediterranean world by the Roman period. The majority of athletic trainers were probably employed as gymnasium educators, whereas those who specialized in training adult athletes for professional competition would presumably have been in the minority. Once again, however, we should not imagine a clear dividing line: presumably many individuals would have moved from one category to the other during their careers; we also have evidence for trainers linked with the gymnasium accompanying particularly promising young athletes to festivals. Nevertheless, the cultures of

156   Paideia and Performance gymnasium and festival were in some ways quite distinct from each other, and linked with literary and rhetorical paideia in rather different ways, hence my decision to deal with them separately here.

Gymnasia Education in the gymnasium was often taken as a sign of high social status. Young men were trained first in the junior age range, as paides (“boys”), and then in their late teens as “ephebes.” This latter institution in particular, the ephebeia, was a standard feature of civic life across the Greek-​speaking world from the early Hellenistic period and on into the Roman world. Many ephebes clearly came from wealthy, well-​ educated families: participation in athletic training seems to have been viewed, along with basic literary and rhetorical education, as one of the accomplishments a young man required in order to take his place in the day-​to-​day elite life of the Greek city. That had been the case in classical Greece too, even well before the formalization of the ephebic system:1 Plato’s stress on the importance of balancing physical and intellectual education (although he is also critical of athletes and athletics in some parts of his work) draws on and reshapes attitudes which were widespread among his contemporaries.2 Not only that, but there is also a great deal of evidence to suggest that a gymnasium education could itself include elements of rhetorical and literary training.3 Vitruvius, writing in roughly 30 bce, makes space at least for informal displays of learning in his description of the standard architectural pattern of a palaestra: “In three of the colonnades spacious exedrae [i.e., recesses for sitting] should be set up, with seats on which philosophers and rhetoricians and others who take pleasure in studies can sit and debate their subjects” (De arch. 5.11.2) That detail is not just an idealizing nod towards the Socratic image of philosophical talk in the gymnasium, inherited from Plato’s Lysis and other dialogues. It is also supported by archaeological evidence for specific gymnasium buildings: a good example is the so-​called East-​Bath Gymnasium in Ephesus, which seems to have included a room with rows of seating, apparently intended as a lecture theater of some sort.4 It was also common for gymnasia to contain libraries.5 In addition, we have numerous examples of grammarians employed as gymnasium staff members (although the bulk of evidence for that comes from the Hellenistic period, because of the decline in habits of writing up records of students and staff in most cities in the Roman period).6 Many inscriptions record lectures given by learned visiting speakers. For example, a gymnasiarch (benefactor and head of the gymnasium—​a yearly appointment) from the city of Erythrai in Asia Minor is praised, in an inscription dating from roughly 100 bce, among other things for having provided “at his own expense a teacher of rhetoric and a weapons instructor, who gave classes in the gymnasium for the paides and the ephebes and for anyone else who wants to benefit from such things.”7 In addition to the common sporting components in the end-​of-​year ephebic contests held in

Athletes and Trainers    157 the gymnasium, there are numerous examples of competitions in literary subjects. For example, in an inscription set up to record the activities of the Athenian ephebeia, dating from the late second century ce, we read the following: “These won the contests of the ephebes . . . at the festival of the Antinoeia in the town: the contest for heralds—​ Niketes son of Glaukos; encomium—​Statios Athenogenes; poetry—​Protogenes son of Apollonios; dolichos [i.e., long-​distance running race]—​Zosimos son of Apollonios,” and so on through a number of other athletic events.8 It is also common in epitaphs for young men who have died young to find praise of their erudition and their virtue, together with their sporting accomplishment.9 Moreover, the artwork of Greek gymnasia in the Roman period often linked the athletic activity of the present with the classical and mythical past. The resemblances to literary and rhetorical practice in the same period, with its obsessive replaying of the classical heritage, are immediately clear. Gymnasia regularly contained classicizing athletic statues (following the models made famous by Polyclitus and other classical sculptors), many of them depicting gods and heroes like Hermes and Heracles who were particularly associated with the gymnasium.10 Some gymnasia also associated themselves with specific episodes from myth and history:  for example the naval contests of the Athenian ephebeia, attested for the second and third centuries ce, and the artwork associated with them, seem to have been designed to recall the glorious naval victories of Athens over the Persians at Salamis in the fifth century bce.11 We also have evidence for the Athenian ephebeia participating in a peri alkes (“strength”) contest at Eleusis in the second century ce, where they would be divided into two teams, one representing Heracles and the other Theseus.12 Sarcophagus sculptures often included mythical stories involving groups of young men (for example Hippolytus with his hunting companions), depicted as ephebic figures, and so linking the deceased both with the mythical past and with the contemporary culture of the gymnasium.13 The instructors and benefactors in the gymnasia of the Greek east, like their charges, could be represented as intellectual figures.14 Honorific portraits set up for the cosmêtês, the magistrate responsible for the Athenian ephebeia in a particular year, regularly use the iconographic conventions of the intellectual, with furrowed brow and himation (i.e., cloak).15 There is even some epigraphical evidence for trainers (paidotribai) holding political office in their home cities16 and using rhetorical skills in presenting requests for funding.17 Plutarch’s Quaestiones Convivales, which claim to record many decades of Plutarch’s dinner-​party conversations with philosophically minded friends, includes one long account of a symposium in Athens presided over by Plutarch’s great philosophical teacher Ammonius: “While he was holding the office of strategos [i.e., ‘general’] at Athens, Ammonius attended a demonstration held in the Diogeneion [a building which seems to have been used for musical and literary activity by the Athenian ephebeia] by the ephebes who were studying literature, geometry, rhetoric, or music, and then invited to dinner those teachers who had been successful. Pretty well all of our friends were present, and many other scholarly people in addition” (9.1.1, 736d). One of the guests is an athletic trainer: “Afterwards honey cakes were brought in as a prize for the boys

158   Paideia and Performance for dancing. My brother Lamprias was appointed as judge together with Meniskos the trainer [paidotribês], for he [i.e., Lamprias] had given a convincing performance of the pyrrhic dance and was thought to be the best of the boys in the palaestra at shadow-​ boxing” (9.15.1, 747a–​b). Here we see a gymnasium instructor taking his place in the most elevated intellectual company, and mixing with others who are closely involved in the education of the young men of the city. Plutarch and his brother Lamprias were still young men at the date at which the dialogue is set, and it is clear that athletic training has been a part of their education, along with more obviously intellectual pursuits. The passage projects a fleeting impression of a world where gymnastic education stands in a harmonious relationship with its musical and rhetorical equivalents. Finally, we need to take account of another group of athletic experts who had an even more obvious claim to paideia—​those who practiced the medical art of dietetics, sometimes referred to as gymnastikê. The precise definition of that art, its value by comparison with other branches of medical practice, and its relationship with the kinds of training actually practiced in the gymnasium, were matters of debate. It tended, however, to stress the maintenance of health and the prevention of poor health, through good diet, the right kinds of physical exercise and massage, rather than the treatment of illness. And it had a long pedigree, looking back to the writings of Herodicus (who is said to have been himself an athletic trainer)18 in classical Greece, and to the Hippocratic writings (especially the Hippocratic work On Regimen). Clearly some of its practitioners would have been viewed as learned figures whose expertise was likened to the expertise of the doctor. Presumably it could also have given an air of intellectual respectability even to the trainers who drew on dietetic writings only in a relatively cursory fashion, whether in the context of ephebic education or in preparing athletes for festival competition—​although in the imperial period at least most writers in the dietetic tradition are hostile to professional trainers, as we shall see further in the final section below. Admittedly not all gymnasium staff had equally high status. As far as we can tell from the few surviving inscriptions recording gymnasium regulations, some of the lower ranks of gymnasium instructors seem to have been treated as subordinate figures, far below the gymnasiarch in prestige, with a limited amount of autonomy.19 And clearly the expertise of some trainers would have been confined to an understanding of different techniques of athletic competition.20 We even see evidence for that in one remarkable papyrus text which seems to be a wrestling manual, probably written by and for trainers whose main interest was in coaching rather than health, and which falls far short of the more intellectually ambitious, medicalized writings referred to above, consisting of brief instructions for particular wrestling holds.21 Nevertheless, the basic point is clear: gymnasium education was a matter for the elites, and brought high status both for students and (in some cases) for the various experts and benefactors who were involved in it. In that sense it performed many of the same social functions as rhetorical education in imperial Greek society; it could also be represented as a close companion to rhetorical and other intellectual accomplishment.

Athletes and Trainers    159

Festivals Festivals too played a key role in the performance of Greek tradition, which was also central to literary and rhetorical practice in the Roman Empire. Most Greek cities in the Roman Empire had at least one (and often more than one) major agonistic (i.e., competitive) festival. These were not just occasions for athletic contest; they were also times when the city put itself on show to visitors, and acted out its own identity and its own links with the mythical and classical past through sacrifices and processions which wove their way through iconic sites of local cult worship (and which often included groups of ephebes, along with representatives from other areas of city life).22 Not only that, but athletic contests also often shared a stage in those events with musical, rhetorical, and other literary competitions. The greatest Greek festival of all, the Olympics, involved athletic and equestrian contests only, but it was relatively unusual in that respect, and there were almost equally prestigious models for combined athletic and musical contest in the Pythian and Isthmian games, which similarly dated back to the archaic period. Musical victors were honored in similar terms to victorious athletes in honorific inscriptions. Both musical performers and professional athletes also had guilds representing their interests (and we hear about athletic trainers associated closely with these institutions as well). These seem to have been closely parallel to each other in their function and organization.23 Moreover, literary people often took a close interest in athletic institutions, athletic performance, and athletic history. For example, one of the agonistic festivals of the Lycian city of Oenoanda (in what is now southwest Turkey) was founded by a wealthy grammatikos (teacher of grammar) by the name of Euarestos (hence the name Euaresteia applied to the festival). His benefaction is recorded in the following terms: “Agonothete [i.e., festival funder and organizer] for life, I have provided prizes for the strong in the renowned stadia of athletic Heracles. But as one who has earned his livelihood from the Muses I am obliged also to give gifts to my own Muses. Therefore, having celebrated the festival myself for the fifth time, I have provided prizes welcome to the Muses for artistic performances.” In this extract, it is the musical contests which get the star billing, but it is striking that it is only now, the fifth time that the games have been held, that they have been added: the first four editions seem to have been athletic-​only.24 Many well-​ educated men clearly saw an interest in sporting topics as perfectly compatible with their learned identities.25 Many of the conversations Plutarch records in his Quaestiones convivales are set at festivals, including several at the Pythian festival at Delphi, where Plutarch was a priest. Plutarch and his companions show an interest in the musical and athletic contests alike. 2.4, for example, opens as follows: We were celebrating the victory party for Sosicles of Coronea, who had won the prize for poetry at the Pythian games. Since the athletic contests were approaching, most of the conversation concerned the wrestlers, for lots of famous ones had come for the contest. And Lysimachus, an epimelêtês [i.e., festival organizer] of the Amphictyons

160   Paideia and Performance who was present, said that he had recently heard a grammarian show that wrestling was the oldest of the sports. (Quaest. conv. 2.4 [638b])

The ensuing discussion, which explores the plausibility of Lysimachus’s suggestion at length, is closely parallel to a similar conversation (Quaest. conv. 8.4 [723a–​724f]), also set at a symposium at the time of the Pythian Games, on the antiquity of the poetry contest at Delphi. More generally speaking, athletic, and especially Olympic, history was a great treasure store for authors who were interested in delving into the Greek past and tracing its links with the landscape of contemporary Roman Greece: books 5 and 6 of Pausanias’s Periegesis, on Olympia, are the most obvious example of that.26 Finally, athletic competition was also parallel in many ways to the prestigious rhetorical practice of the sophists. Like the great sophists of the Roman Empire, victorious professional athletes were linked prominently with particular cities eager to appropriate something of the glow of their victories, and happy to hand out citizenship in order to achieve that.27 Like the sophists, the great athletes of the empire were valued partly because they had a very high level of expertise in areas mastered at a much more casual level by other members of the elite, who could therefore point to them as examples of what could be achieved through elite virtues and elite education without having to prove it within their own lives.28 In some cases they would even have been on display in similar contexts. For example, Philostratus in his Lives of the Sophists mentions several classical orators who gave speeches at Olympia or Delphi (Gorgias 1.9, 493; Hippias 1.11, 495–​496; Isocrates 1.17, 505), in addition to similar performances by a number of second-​century sophists, among them Herodes Atticus (1.25, 539; 2.1, 557).29 The sophist Herodes Atticus was also a prominent athletic benefactor in the city of Athens: he built the great stadium there, which in its restored form is still a major tourist attraction;30 and he was also a benefactor of the Athenian ephebes, who are said to have escorted his body after his death to be buried in the stadium.31 It should be no surprise that athletic metaphors are used so often as a metaphor for sophistic activity, as they also were for many other kinds of intellectual accomplishment.32 One classic example comes in a story told by Philostratus in Lives of the Sophists (22, 525–​526) about a series of encounters between the sophists Polemon and Dionysius of Miletus, where they represent themselves playfully as wrestlers: on hearing Polemon speak for the first time Dionysius is said to have exclaimed “This athlete has strength, but not from the palaestra” (VS 1.22, 525); and later Polemon is said to have approached Dionysius and “leaned his shoulder against him, just like those who are embarking on a wrestling match in the stadium” (1.22, 526), and teased him with a line about the degeneracy of the men of Miletus. That is not to say that Polemon and his sophistic contemporaries would always have been complimentary about athletes and athletics if asked. If anything, the opposite seems more likely: there seems to have been a tendency for the sophists, Polemon especially—​at least as Philostratus represents him—​to denigrate the representatives of other professions, and there is no reason to think that he would have viewed his athletic contemporaries any differently.33 But even if the sophists and professional athletes of the Roman Empire were rivals, it is

Athletes and Trainers    161 clear that they did sometimes move in the same circles and that their target audiences overlapped to some degree: cultivated, educated Greeks who no doubt enjoyed the spectacle and theatricality of sophistic and athletic performance, but who could also appreciate the way in which they displayed traditionally Greek skills, and the way in which they acted as living links with the classical past.

Criticisms and Adaptations I have tended so far to emphasize the connections and overlaps between athletic and literary activity. For many, these two strands would have been viewed as complementary and similarly valuable elements in the education of the young, and as complementary components in the empire’s cultural life. It is also important to stress, however—​in line with what I have just suggested for Polemon—​that this was not always a mutually supportive relationship. There was an extensive and longstanding tradition of criticizing athletes for their stupidity, and complaining about the way in which they receive public adulation which could better be directed at intellectuals.34 In line with that tradition, athletes and their trainers are regularly denigrated by imperial Greek authors who feel that enthusiasm for athletics distracts from more important educational goals. In the process some of these authors attempt to appropriate and redefine the skills of the trainer according to their own criteria. The most often-​cited example is Galen’s vehement criticism of athletic trainers in several works dating from the late second century, especially the Thrasyboulos and the Protrepticus. He is hostile especially to those who train full-​time athletes, although his criticism also extends to those who work with young men in the ephebeia. He represents them as intruders into the field of philosophical medicine, incapable of providing good health or intellectual nourishment for their charges. And he outlines instead his own views on the proper uses of physical exercise—​designed for day-​to-​day use rather than the dangerous rigours of festival contest—​from a medical-​ philosophical perspective. Equally important is Philostratus’s Gymnasticus, written (probably at least partly in response to Galen), in the 220s or 230s ce. Like Galen, Philostratus expresses dissatisfaction with some aspects of contemporary training,35 and sets out to construct a version of the art of training which is acceptable. In doing so, like Galen, he draws heavily on traditional dietetic writing. The difference, however, and the thing which makes the Gymnasticus so remarkable by the standards of writing in the medical-​philosophical tradition (also by comparison with the work of Plutarch, which I discuss further below), is the fact that Philostratus’s positive version of gymnastic expertise is aimed not so much at private individuals trying to look after their own health, but rather at professional athletic trainers, preparing athletes for competition—​in other words precisely the figures reviled by Galen most viciously of all.36 That point is made quite clear when he sums up toward the end of the work: “If we follow the advice I have given, we will demonstrate that athletic training is a variety

162   Paideia and Performance of wisdom [sophia], and we shall give strength to the athletes, and the stadia will regain their youth thanks to good training practices” (54). Here, however, I want to focus primarily on Plutarch’s work Precepts of Healthcare, which has many features in common with Galen’s work, despite having been written a couple of generations earlier, in the late first or early second century ce, but which has had much less attention in recent studies of imperial athletic culture. The text is in dialogue form, but the bulk of it is taken up with the words of a single speaker, Zeuxippos, who offers a common-​sense version of the principles which were central to much ancient dietetic writing, recommending above all moderate consumption of food and drink, and moderate exercise, all based on careful observation of the specific needs of the individual. In one striking passage, Precepts 20.133b–​d, Zeuxippos makes a number of scathing comments about athletic trainers.37 We should not be ashamed, he suggests, to distract our appetites by reading or music or mathematical puzzles in order to prevent ourselves from over-​indulging, nor should we pay much attention to those who disagree: “the utterances of aleiptai and the talk of paidotribai [these two words both refer to athletic trainers, and are almost indistinguishable in their meaning in other contexts], who claim at every opportunity that scholarly discussion at dinner spoils the food and makes the head heavy, are to be feared” (133b) only by those who attempt to introduce inappropriately complicated logical puzzles into sympotic conversation. But if they do not allow us to investigate or philosophize about anything else at dinner, or to read any of those things which have pleasurably alluring and sweet qualities as well as being beautiful and useful, we shall order them not to annoy us, but to go off to the gymnasium colonnades and the palaestras and talk about these things with their athletes, whom they have made as shiny and stone-​like as the pillars of the gymnasium by tearing them from their books, and by accustoming them to spend their days in mockery and coarse joking. (133c–​d)

The anti-​intellectual qualities of professional training seem to be Plutarch’s main target here. The athletes are deprived of books and accustomed to a style of conversation which relies on uncultivated mockery (for Plutarch, knowing how to joke and tease in a cultivated way was a central part of admirable, philosophical sympotic behaviour).38 And his comparison between athletes and glossy gymnasium pillars is presumably intended to suggest that the athletes have no inner, philosophical life beneath their physically imposing surfaces. Plutarch’s denigration of athletes and their trainers in this work is in many ways similar to what we find in Galen—​in fact, it is a strikingly close precursor to Galen’s more lengthy rejection of athletic training (although there is no particular evidence to suggest that Galen knew this text by Plutarch) and a sign that Galen’s views were far from unusual, based on a long history of defining common-​sense dietetic knowledge by contrast with the excesses of professional training which stretches back into the Hellenistic and even classical Greek literature. For both Galen and Plutarch, the criticism of rival intellectuals and rival disciplines is a key element in the process of displaying one’s own

Athletes and Trainers    163 authority. The point about the lack of interiority in athletes finds parallels in several passages within Galen’s work, most stridently in Protrepticus 11 (K1.27): “they are so busy accumulating a mass of flesh and blood that their soul is extinguished as if beneath a heap of filth, and they are incapable of thinking about anything clearly.” There are admittedly differences between them too. For one thing, the presence of the paidotribês Meniskos as fellow symposiast to Plutarch in Quaestiones conviviales 9.15, already referred to above, should perhaps make us pause for a moment: it suggests that Plutarch’s criticisms in Precepts of Healthcare might have been read as rather more playful and teasing than Galen’s astonishingly vehement mockery of trainers. That view seems all the more likely when we remember that these points are not being made in Plutarch’s own voice, but rather ascribed to his character Zeuxippos. Plutarch and Galen also represent medicine in rather different terms. Galen’s anti-athletic writing is a response to what he perceives as a threat specifically to the medical profession—​that is the intrusion of ignorant upstarts who are attempting to take over the territory of the doctor when in fact their own relatively trivial area of expertise in training should be viewed as subordinate to the wider medical art.39 By contrast, Plutarch’s speaker Zeuxippos identifies his own perspective primarily as a philosophical one, which tends to prefer commonsense self-​care without any particular interest in technical medical knowledge. But even here the gap between Plutarch and Galen is not so wide as it initially appears, given that Zeuxippos and his interlocutor Moschion are characterised as figures who accept (as Galen repeatedly does in his writing) the importance of combining medicine and philosophy. In the opening paragraphs of the dialogue they are contrasted with another doctor, Glaukos, who is said to be hostile to Zeuxippos’s views and who is keen (in a way which would have scandalized Galen) to keep philosophy and medicine separate. Clearly, then, it is not medicine per se that Plutarch (or Zeuxippos) objects to, but rather excessively specialist medicine which separates itself from the guidance of philosophy (1.122b–​e).40 Plutarch (or at least Plutarch through the mouthpiece of Zeuxippos) not only denigrates the techniques of the athletic trainer; he also, again like Galen, constructs an alternative model of training for good health, based on dietetic traditions, rather than rejecting physical exercise outright. However, the remarkable thing about Plutarch’s version is the fact that it is presented—​much more explicitly so than is the case for Galen—​ as a set of principles particularly well suited to pepaideumenoi (“those who have been educated”) like himself. That point is made most clearly in paragraph 16 (130a​–​31b).41 Here Plutarch announces first that he is moving on to the subject of “exercises [gymnasia] suitable for scholars [philologoi]” (130a). He then suggests that it is hardly necessary to do so, given that people of this sort already practice one of the most valuable exercises of all, that is the use of their voices: For it is amazing what kind of exercise [gymnasion] is daily use of the voice in speaking aloud, not only for health but also for strength, not the strength of wrestlers which makes the external parts of the body fleshy and thick like a building, but instead the kind of strength that produces ingrained vigour and real energy in the most vital and most important parts of the body. (130a–​b)

164   Paideia and Performance In that passage we see not only another rejection of professional training, in this case on the grounds that it produces only an illusion of strength rather than real strength of the kind that is useful for everyday life (again, that is a criticism echoed by Galen),42 but also, more remarkably, the claim that the best strength-​giving exercise—​speaking—​is one perfectly suited to the lifestyle of the learned.43 That point is extended in what follows: For that reason neither a journey by sea nor a stay in an inn should be used as an excuse for silence, not even if everyone mocks you. For surely it is not disgraceful to take exercise, in a place where it is not disgraceful to eat. More disgraceful is to be afraid and shy in front of sailors and mule-​drivers and innkeepers, who direct their mockery not at the man who plays ball or shadow-​boxes but at the man who speaks, if in the process of exercising he teaches and enquires and learns and uses his memory. . . . For a man who exercises through singing or speaking, every place provides for him a gymnasion with enough room, whether he is standing up or lying down.

For the learned man, it seems, the gymnasium is everywhere. On Precepts of Healthcare, in summary, is an ingenious attempt to make the athletic and the literary compatible with each other, even as it rejects the value of the bulk of day-​to-​day athletic training.

Further Reading Until relatively recently, scholarship on the Second Sophistic has paid little attention to the expansion of interest in athletic festivals and athletic training in this period: Gleason 1995 and Schmitz 1999 are good examples of important studies of elite self-​definition which have little to say on the matter, concentrating primarily on rhetorical training. A series of articles by van Nijf (1999, 2001, 2003, 2004, and 2007, among others) stresses the elitist character of athletics in imperial culture. Van Nijf 2004 in particular covers similar ground to this chapter in examining the links between athletics and paideia, although his main aim is to demonstrate the greater popularity of athletics by comparison with literary paideia, rather than the compatibility between the two, as I have tended to do here. König 2005 examines the ways in which the Greek and Latin authors of the Roman Empire responded to the athletic culture which was so important to their contemporaries, with comparisons between literary and epigraphical representations of athletic activity. Newby 2005 covers the athletic art of the Roman Empire; on the whole she too stresses the way in which athletic art allowed its owners and viewers in both the Greek east and the Roman west to associate themselves with traditional high-​status skills linked with the classical past. All of those works deal at length with the festivals of the Roman Empire and with commemoration of victorious athletes, as do many of the recent introductory works on sport in the ancient world: e.g., Kyle 2007, esp. 300–​338 and Potter 2011, esp. 225–​320. Lying behind the assumptions outlined above about the elitist character of imperial athletics is a set of earlier debates about the links between athletes and social status: e.g., see Young 1985 and Fisher 1998 for accounts which stress the openness of athletic training and athletic competition to young men from below the upper levels of society; Pleket 1975 and Pritchard 2003 for the opposite view (of these two, only Pleket focuses at any length on the imperial period). On gymnasium education and especially the ephebeia, much of the most important evidence comes from the Hellenistic period: e.g., see Delorme 1960, Kah and

Athletes and Trainers    165 Scholz 2004, and Gauthier 2010. For the ephebeia in the Roman period, see Kennell 2010; and on the Athenian ephebeia specifically, see Newby 2005, 168–​201; also Graindor 1931, 85–​97, and 1934, 98–​102. For Galen’s writings on athletics, see König 2005, 254–​300; and for translation of his Thrasyboulos and Protrepticus, see Singer 1997. For Philostratus’s Gymnasticus, and its relation with Galen’s work, see König 2005, 301–​344, and König 2009b; also Jüthner 1909, esp. 3–​131, for a long and still very useful introduction to the work’s relationship with earlier writing on athletic topics, including a useful survey of earlier writing on dietetics; and for translation of the Gymnasticus, see Rusten and König 2014 in the Loeb Classical Library series. For Plutarch’s Precepts of Healthcare (not discussed in König 2005), see Van Hoof 2010, 211–​254; and translation in volume 2 of Plutarch’s Moralia in the Loeb Classical Library series.

Bibliography Borg, B. E., ed. 2004. Paideia: The World of the Second Sophistic. Berlin and New York. Delorme, J. 1960. Gymnasion:  Étude sur les monuments consacrés à l’éducation en Grèce. BEFAR 196. Paris. Ewald, B.  V. 2004. “Men, Muscle, and Myth:  Attic Sarcophagi in the Cultural Context of the Second Sophistic.” In Paideia: The World of the Second Sophistic, edited by B. E. Borg, 229–​275. Berlin. Fisher, N. 1998 “Gymnasia and the Democratic Values of Leisure.” In Kosmos:  Essays in Order, Conflict and Community in Classical Athens, edited by P. Cartledge, P. Millett, and S. von Reden, 84–​108. Cambridge. Reprinted in Greek Athletics, edited by J. König, 66–​86. Edinburgh, 2010. Forbes, C.A. (1945). “Expanded Uses of the Greek Gymnasium”. CPh 40: 32–​42. Gauthier, P. 1995 “Notes sur le rôle du gymnase dans les cités hellénistiques.” In Stadtbild und Bürgerbild im Hellenismus, edited by M. Wörrle, and P. Zanker, 1–​11. Munich. Gauthier, P. 2010 “Notes on the Role of the Gymnasion in the Hellenistic City.” Translation of Gauthier 1995, in Greek Athletics, edited by J. König, 87–​101. Edinburgh. Gleason, M.  W. 1995 Making Men:  Sophists and Self-​ Presentation in Ancient Rome. Princeton, NJ. Graindor, P. 1931. Athènes de Tibère à Trajan. Cairo. Graindor, P. 1934. Athènes sous Hadrien. Cairo. Hall, A. and Milner, N. (1994) “Education and Athletics. Documents illustrating the festivals of Oenoanda,” in Studies in the History and Topography of Lycia and Pisidia (In Memoriam A.S. Hall), edited by D. French, 7–​47. London. Jüthner, J., ed. 1909. Philostratos über Gymnastik. Leipzig. Kah, D., and P. Scholz, eds. 2004. Das hellenistische Gymnasion. Berlin. Kennell, N. 2010. “The Greek Ephebate in the Roman Period.” In Sport in the Cultures of the Ancient World: New Perspectives, edited by Z. Papakonstantinou, 175–​194. London. König, J. 2005. Athletics and Literature in the Roman Empire. Cambridge. König, J. 2007. “Greek Athletics in the Severan Period: Literary Views.” In Severan Culture, edited by J. Elsner, S. Harrison, and S. Swain, 135–​145. Cambridge. König, J. 2009a. Greek Literature in the Roman Empire. London. König, J. 2009b. “Training Athletes and Explaining the Past in Philostratus’ Gymnasticus.” In Philostratus, edited by J. Elsner and E. Bowie, 251–​283. Cambridge. König, J., ed. 2010. Greek Athletics. Edinburgh.

166   Paideia and Performance König, J. 2011. “Competitiveness and Anti-​ competitiveness in Philostratus’ Lives of the Sophists.” In Competition in the Ancient World, edited by N. Fisher and H. van Wees, 279–​ 300. Swansea. König, J. 2014. “Images of Elite Community in Philostratus:  Re-​reading the Preface to the Lives of the Sophists.” In Roman Rule in Greek and Latin Writing: Double Vision, edited by J. Madsen and R. Rees, 246–​270. Leiden. Kyle, D. G. 1987. Athletics in Ancient Athens. Leiden. Kyle, D.G. 2007. Sport and Spectacle in the Ancient World. Malden, MA. Meinburg, E. 1975 “Gymnastische Erziehung in der platonischen Paideia.” Stadion 1: 228–​266. Miller, S. G., ed. 2004. Arete: Greek Sports from Ancient Sources. Rev. ed. Berkeley, CA. First published in 1979. Newby, Z. 2005. Greek Athletics in the Roman World: Victory and Virtue. Oxford. Pleket, H. W. 1975 “Games, Prizes, Athletes and Ideology.” Stadion 1: 49–​89. Revised reprint in Greek Athletics, edited by J. König, 145–​197. Edinburgh, 2010. Poliakoff, M. 1986. Studies in the Terminology of Greek Combat Sports. Frankfurt am Main. Potter, D. S. 1999. “Entertainers in the Roman Empire.” In Life, Death, and Entertainment in the Roman Empire, edited by D. S. Potter and D. J. Mattingly, 256–​325. Ann Arbor, MI. Potter, D. S. 2011. The Victor’s Crown: A History of Ancient Sport from Homer to Byzantium. London. Pritchard, D. 2003. “Athletics, Education and Participation in Classical Athens.” In Sport and Festival in the Ancient Greek World., edited by D. J. Phillips and D. M. Pritchard, 293–​349. Swansea. Rogers, G. M. 1991. The Sacred Identity of Ephesos: Foundation Myths of a Roman City. London and New York. Russell, D. A., and N. G. Wilson, eds. and trans. 1981. Menander Rhetor. Oxford. Rusten, J. and J. König (eds.) 2014. Philostratus. Heroicus, Gymnasticus, Discourses 1 and 2. Cambridge, MA. Schmitz, T. A. 1997. Bildung und Macht:  Zur sozialen und politischen Funktion der zweiten Sophistik in der griechischen Welt der Kaiserzeit. Zetemata 97. Munich. Scholz, P. 2004. “Elementarunterricht und intellektuelle Bildung im hellenistischen Gymnasion.” In Das hellenistische Gymnasion, edited by D. Kah and P. Scholz, 103–​128. Berlin. Singer P. N., ed. 1997 Galen: Selected Works. Oxford. Tell, H. 2007. “Sages at the Games:  Intellectual Displays and Dissemination of Wisdom in Ancient Greece.” Cl. Ant. 26: 249–​275. Themelis, P. 2001. “Roman Messene: The Gymnasium.” In The Greek East in the Roman Context, edited by O. Salomies, 119–​126. Helsinki. Van Hoof, L. 2010. Plutarch’s Practical Ethics: The Social Dynamics of Philosophy. Oxford. van Nijf, O. 1999. “Athletics, Festivals and Greek Identity in the Roman East.” PCPS 45: 176–​200. Reprinted in in Greek Athletics, edited by J. König, 175–​197. Edinburgh, 2010. van Nijf, O. 2001. “Local Heroes: Athletics, Festivals, and Elite Self-​Fashioning in the Roman East.” In Being Greek under Rome: Cultural Identity, the Second Sophistic and the Development of Empire, edited by S. Goldhill, 306–​334. Cambridge. van Nijf, O. 2003. “Athletics, Andreia and the Askesis-​Culture in the Roman East.” In Andreia: Studies in Manliness and Courage in Classical Antiquity, edited by R. Rosen and I. Sluiter, 263–​286. Leiden.

Athletes and Trainers    167 van Nijf, O. M. 2004. “Athletics and Paideia: Festivals and Physical Education in the World of the Second Sophistic.” In Paideia: The World of the Second Sophistic, edited by B. E. Borg, 203–​227. Berlin. van Nijf, O. M. 2007. “Global Players: Athletes and Performers in the Hellenistic and Roman World.” In Zwischen Cult und Gesellschaft, edited by I. Nielsen, 225–​235. Hamburg. von Staden, H. 2000. “The Dangers of Literature and the Need for Literacy:  A.  Cornelius Celsus on Reading and Writing.” In Les textes médicaux latins comme literature, edited by A. Pigeaud and J. Pigeaud, 355–​368. Nantes. Whitmarsh, T. 2001. Greek Literature and the Roman Empire: The Politics of Imitation. Oxford. Young, D. C. 1985. The Olympic Myth of Greek Amateur Athletics. Chicago.

Chapter 11

Professiona l s of Pai de ia ? The Sophists as Performers Thomas A. Schmitz

While the last decades have greatly advanced our understanding of the Second Sophistic, we still have to acknowledge that the precise meaning and ancient usage of the term “sophist” remain somewhat elusive. There was no formal degree which gave graduates the right to carry this title; there was no guild in which sophists had to enroll; no official body appointed aspirants to the rank of sophist. The epigraphic record reveals that there were many individuals who were proud to call themselves “sophists,” but most of them are unknown to us from other sources, so we cannot even guess how they went about being sophists.1 Hence, when we explore the sophists as professionals, we must keep in mind that we are looking at the tip of an iceberg—​we can only study sophists about whose “professional” behavior we have some kind of information. Nevertheless, the questions of whether the sophists were professionals and to what degree it makes sense to consider the Second Sophistic a profession is an excellent way to gain insight into the nuts and bolts of this cultural movement. The most important source for our knowledge about the Second Sophistic is Philostratus’s Lives of the Sophists, written in the third century ce and dedicated to Gordian.2 Its lively narrative and colorful anecdotes provide unmatched insights into the professional and private lives of the great sophists. However, we have to be wary of the fact that Philostratus does not intend to write an accurate history of the movement; instead, he aims to entertain and sometimes bedazzle his readers.3 One of his striking anecdotes (VS 2.27, 618) about one of the sophistic superstars will provide the starting point for our exploration of the sophists as professionals.4 Hippodromus of Larissa held one of the chairs of rhetoric in Athens during the early years of the third century.5 However, as Philostratus tells us, he abandoned this position after just four years to manage his estates, which had begun to deteriorate in his absence. But even after retiring from his teaching position, he still attended public festivals and declaimed, and he always kept up his reading of classical authors and his rhetorical training.

170   Paideia and Performance Hippodromus’s semi-​retirement occasioned an encounter with another sophist, which reveals the mechanisms of sophistic performances: he arrives in Smyrna, one of the most important centers of the Second Sophistic in Asia Minor. As a true pepaideumenos, he is eager to meet the local sophists and learn from them. As he walks through the town, he sees pedagogues and slaves with books in front of a temple and concludes (rightly) that this must be the place where some well-​known sophist teaches. He enters, greets the sophist Megistias,6 and quietly takes a seat in the audience. Megistias at first thinks that he must be the father of one his students, and asks him why he has come. Hippodromus replies: “Let us exchange garments.” He was in fact wearing a traveling-​cloak, while Megistias wore a gown suitable for public speaking. “And what do you mean by that?” asked Megistias. “I wish,” he replied, “to give you a display of declamation.” Now Megistias really thought that he was mad in making this announcement and that his wits were wandering. But when he observed the keenness of his glance and saw that he seemed sane and sober, he changed clothes with him. When he asked him to suggest a theme, Megistias proposed “The magician who wished to die because he was unable to kill another magician, an adulterer.” And when he took his seat on the lecturer’s chair, and after a moment’s pause sprang to his feet, the theory that he was mad occurred still more forcibly to Megistias, and he thought that these signs of proficiency were mere delirium. But when he had begun to argue the theme and had come to the words: “But myself at least I can kill,” Megistias could not contain himself for admiration, but ran to him and implored to be told who he was. “I am,” said he, “Hippodromus the Thessalian, and I have come to practice my art on you in order that I may learn from one man so proficient as you are the Ionian manner of declaiming. But observe me through the whole of the argument.” Toward the end of the speech a rush was made by all lovers of learning in Smyrna to the door of Megistias, for the tidings had soon spread abroad that Hippodromus was visiting their city. Thereupon he took up his theme afresh, but gave a wholly different force to the ideas that he had already expressed. And when later on he made his appearance before the public of Smyrna, they thought him truly marvelous, and worthy of being enrolled among men of former days.

Dress for Success: Professional Attire Required The first detail of this anecdote that I wish to emphasize is Hippodromus’s change of dress: he does not wish to declaim in his traveling cloak, but wants to wear Megistias’s gown, which is more suitable for a sophist. This can be interpreted as an outward sign of the separation of professional persona from private individual: sophists did not wear a uniform, but some sort of festive dress was expected from a sophistic performer.7 Philostratus mentions the sumptuosity that some sophists displayed: Hadrian of Tyre

Professionals of Paideia?: The Sophists as Performers    171 “wore very expensive clothes, bedecked himself with precious gems, and used to go down to his lectures in a carriage with silver-​mounted bridles” (VS 2.10, 587); when Alexander “Clay-​Plato” performed in Athens for the first time, “a low buzz of approval went round as a tribute to his perfect elegance” (VS 2.5, 572). To some observers, the sophist’s attire might appear foppish and pretentious, as Lucian’s description of the transparent tunic and effeminate shoes of the charlatan sophist makes clear.8 For this sophistic dress code, we might compare the tuxedo or gown that a modern soloist in a concert of classical music is expected to wear: it emphasizes that the performance represents a special cultural space and that the performer transcends his usual private self. In the case of the sophist, it may also have helped his role playing: in their formal recitations, sophists usually embodied historical figures (such as Demosthenes or Themistocles), speaking in their name, adopting their classical Attic language and style, which was far removed from the spoken Greek of their own time. Wearing particularly elegant garments that were unlike their everyday clothing emphasized that they were stepping out of their usual environment. While the sophistic performance was thus symbolically marked off as a privileged cultural space, the anecdote shows that such declamations were not spatially removed from the real world: sophists were not restricted to any professional venue. Megistias teaches in a temple. Sophists often declaimed in concert halls or theaters, but we know that they also used town halls (bouleutêria) or market places for their performances. Korenjak, after an overview of the available evidence, rightly concludes that there was hardly a place in a town of the Roman Empire from which sophistic declamations would be excluded.9 And as we see in Philostratus, not only these formal occasions, but also sophistic teaching was a semipublic affair, conducted in a space that was accessible to anyone. While Megistias is surprised to see a stranger whom he does not recognize, it was obviously possible to sit in on a sophist’s lesson; a similar event occurs when the sophist Marcus of Byzantium attends the school of his famous contemporary Polemon: while some members of the audience recognize him, Polemon himself at first does not know him but is surprised that his listeners all look to “the rustic” (es ton agroikon, VS 1.24, 529). These anecdotes make it clear that sophistic teaching was performed in a public setting. News of Hippodromus’s success spreads like a wildfire in town, and “all educated people in Smyrna” (tōn kata tēn Smyrnan pepaideumenōn) flock to the place where Megistias teaches to listen to Hippodromus’s declamation. We often hear similar stories about the popularity of sophistic performances: Aelius Aristides boasts that when he announced a declamation in Pergamon, the crowd in the town hall was so dense “that you could not even push a hand through it” (while a competing sophist drew an audience of seventeen only).10 We will not take these allegations at face value: they are certainly exaggerated, and audiences were more often in the hundreds than in the thousands of listeners.11 But they demonstrate that publicity was an important part of a sophist’s business. His was not a profession which was exercised for a few customers only, but it was, at least in his own mind, addressed to a larger public, to all members of the educated elite in the Greek speaking world.

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Were Sophists in it for the Money? One of the elements which drives Philostratus’s narrative is the cognitive advantage that we readers have over one of the characters: we know that the man who enters Megistias’s classroom incognito is a famous sophist while Megistias himself is completely unaware that he may be a colleague. These different levels of knowledge create a tension; we are looking forward to the moment when he will see his error, and we are not disappointed: the scene in which Hippodromus is taken for a madman but proves that he is a superb speaker is well prepared and narrated. Hippodromus may have retired, but he has kept up his rhetorical exercises (meletai), and the opening of his speech demonstrates his rhetorical abilities. It is clear that he would not have been able to hold his own in the elite group of Megistias’s school if he had not been scrupulous about his rhetorical exercises even in his retirement. Sophistic declamation was a highly specialized business that required systematic training and continuous practice, and Hippodromus takes it seriously: “he learned more by heart than any of the Greeks, and he was the most widely read.” Sophistry is more than a mere hobby-​horse:  it is a serious occupation which demands a good deal of energy and attention. The training took several years and was expensive,12 and from Philostratus’s Lives we can see that this was the formative period of a young member of the social elite in which he found friends, learned to admire his teachers and to despise their competitors. When we look at Hippodromus’s behavior after he has revealed his name, we can also observe some pride in good craftsmanship: even after his declamation has been acknowledged as being of superb quality, he insists on continuing his speech to the end (“but observe me through the whole of the argument”), a further indication that for him, a sophistic declamation is a serious matter which demands the full attention of both performer and audience. In this sense, then, sophistry was certainly a profession. Schools of rhetoric were ubiquitous in the Roman Empire; every town could be expected to have some sort of establishment where basic competence could be acquired; major centers hosted “graduate schools” in which some well-​known sophist taught advanced students, who might spend several years in such a city solely for the purpose of learning from such a celebrity. The casualness with which Hippodromus takes the presence of some slaves with books as a sign of the presence of such a school is an indication of how commonplace they must have been. Megistias runs such a school; the exchange between him and Hippodromus takes place after the regular lesson has finished.13 At first, he assumes that Hippodromus is the father of one of his students; such parent-​ teacher conferences seem to be a common aspect of his occupation. All of this could be interpreted as a sign that Megistias was a professional teacher, very much like a modern professor at an institution of higher education (even if his establishment seems to be a one-​man show). Was he a professional sophist in the sense that he made a living from his teaching? Unfortunately, in the case of Megistias, we do not have enough evidence to answer this question. We have more knowledge about

Professionals of Paideia?: The Sophists as Performers    173 Hippodromus: he held the imperial chair of rhetoric at Athens and thus received a regular salary of 10,000 drachmae per year.14 Such endowed chairs (thronos or kathedra) existed not only in Athens, but also in Rome and in some other major centers of Asia Minor.15 Their holders received a regular salary, which was paid by the emperor or by the cities. Competition for these positions was stiff, and holding one of them brought immense prestige.16 However, Philostratus’s narrative makes it clear that Hippodromus is independently wealthy: he leaves his Athens chair to administer his property (ploutou) which had begun to deteriorate—​the salary he receives is obviously less than he could make from managing his assets. Hence, Watts (2006, 34) is certainly right when he asserts: “the appeal of these chairs derived from the status attached to the position and not from the salaries they paid.” Nevertheless, it is true that sophists charged for their teaching, and Philostratus often mentions that large amounts of money changed hands: Proclus of Naucratis demanded a lump sum of 100 drachmae from each student (VS 2.21, 604); Damianus of Ephesus offered a discount on his fees when he saw that students had trouble paying (2.23, 606); Polemon asked 12,000 drachmae for representing a rich Lydian in court (1.22, 525). All of which suggests that sophists were professionals so far as they demanded payment for exercising their skills. However, some details might give us pause. Philostratus (VS 1.25, 539) relates that when Polemon had performed a series of declamations in Athens, Herodes Atticus sent him the sum of 150,000 drachmae, or fifteen times the annual salary of the imperial chair of rhetoric at Athens.17 But Polemon refused to accept the money—​until Herodes raised the sum to 250,000 drachmae. Polemon was a powerful and rich individual, and he certainly was not in need of this money (or else he would have accepted the initial payment). He found the sum insufficient for his perceived status as the foremost sophist of his period. Refusing it showed that he was not somebody who had to work for wages;18 instead, he demonstrated that he was receiving a donation from a peer; the exorbitant amount reflects and enhances his dignity and honor. When Polemon refused the initial payment, he was not haggling over a particular sum of money, he was heightening and demonstrating his social status. When Philostratus highlights the enormous sums that sophists received, he is eager to depict them as members of the upper class who are not wage earners but receive lavish gifts from members of their own group. One reason why he is so eager to emphasize this aspect of sophists may be that in terms of social status, sophists were in a somewhat delicate position: on the one hand, many of them came from rich and powerful families and considered themselves representatives of the cultural and social elite of the Roman Empire. On the other hand, most were involved in some sort of teaching and demanded money for their services. This made them perilously similar to members of a much lower class, schoolteachers, who taught basic literacy and cultural skills to younger students. Philostratus wants to depict sophistry as one of the most noble and important occupations, hence the stress he puts on the nature of these payments. We may compare the modern use of the word “honorarium,” which certain professions use instead of “fees” or “wages.” The etymological origin connects this term with

174   Paideia and Performance “honor”: an honorarium is given as a point of honor; it is a “voluntary donation.” This emphasizes that the money which is given for certain services is not a form of payment, but represents a free exchange of help and gifts among equals.

The “Circle of Sophists” Even if sophists were not card-​carrying members of a formal club, Philostratus uses the expression “the circle of sophists” several times, most often when he considers whether or not certain individuals are worthy of being included into this circle.19 There can be no doubt that sophists were perceived as a group of practitioners who shared certain traits; this is especially visible when they are opposed to other groups such as philosophers.20 It is thus not surprising that for Philostratus, sophistry is a technê,21 consisting of skills and systematic knowledge, comparable to occupations such as medicine or architecture. Who was competent to decide if an individual deserved to be admitted into this circle? When we analyze Philostratus’s account, it becomes clear that there is an intricate network of academic affiliations and competitions and that he is unabashedly subjective in his judgments: practitioners of sophistry who are affiliated with his teachers and friends are included, while others are disparaged as “playthings rather than real sophists” (VS 2.23, 605) or as declaiming “in low wine-​shops” (2.33, 627).22 As our anecdote about Hippodromus and Megistias shows, for the public perception of a sophist, the most important factor was the recognition by his peers. The culminating point of Philostratus’s narrative is the long-​awaited moment when Hippodromus proves his sophistic competence. His behavior indicates the self-​confidence (or even arrogance) of the man who is certain that he knows his trade: he lets Megistias propose a topic (hypothesis) for his declamation, and after a moment’s preparation, he begins his speech. Improvisation was considered an important part of a sophist’s trade, and Hippodromus demonstrates that he is able to give an impromptu speech on an arcane topic.23 Yet it is not only Hippodromus who is put to the test. As we have seen, Philostratus’s readers know more than his Megistias, and thus his reaction to the declamation of this person (unknown to him and potentially a madman) is as significant as Hippodromus’s artful declamation. As a true connoisseur, he has to hear only a few words of Hippodromus’s speech to recognize that the speaker must be a sophist in his own right. When Philostratus says that Megistias was “besides himself ” (exepesen heautou) with admiration, he is not claiming that he had lost control of himself and of the situation;24 much rather, this is the only reaction that is adequate to such a superb performance. We may compare an encounter between Alexander and Herodes Atticus (VS 2.5, 574). Again, a few words suffice to elicit the admiration of the true expert: “In the course of his argument, with tears in his eyes, [Herodes] uttered that famous and often quoted supplication: ‘Ah, Nicias! Ah, my father! As you hope to see Athens once more!’ Whereupon

Professionals of Paideia?: The Sophists as Performers    175 they say that Alexander exclaimed [anaboêsai]: ‘O Herodes, we sophists are all of us merely small slices of yourself!’ ” Alexander’s exclamation is a sure indication that he is a true specialist, that he has grasped the sheer brilliance of Herodes’s words. As often, Philostratus’s story invites (or rather coerces) his readers to adopt this interpretation:  if we want to be worthy members of the educated elite (pepaideumenoi), we had better understand the overwhelming mastery of Hippodromus’s or Herodes’s words.25 By his sound judgment, Megistias thus demonstrates that he too is a real professional whose spontaneous judgment is right on target. And it is immediately confirmed: when more and more people gather to listen to Hippodromus, he improvises a new speech on the same topic, but manages to give it a completely different turn, an exploit for which other sophists are also praised in Philostratus’s Lives of the Sophists.26 It is this mutual recognition which is key to understanding the anecdote. Similar scenes occur several times in Philostratus’s work, as in a tale about Marcus of Byzantium who attends a class in the school of Polemon, one of the greatest of all sophists (VS 1.24, 529). Like Hippodromus, he is at first mistaken for someone who is far below the status of a famous sophist. But when he speaks up and offers to perform a declamation, “Polemon, who recognized him partly by his Doric dialect, addressed himself to Marcus in a long and wonderful speech on the spur of the moment, and when he had declaimed and heard the other declaim he both admired and was admired.” Philostratus’s style, with its word play on ethaumasthê kai ethaumasen, underlines the reciprocity that is the defining moment of the scene: ultimately, a successful sophist is the only judge competent to decide who should be included into the “sophistic circle.” However, as all these anecdotes make clear, you had to fight to obtain this form of recognition: sophists were alpha males and reluctant to give you respect and honor unless you were willing to challenge them. Philostratus points out that “having quarreled with a sophist was evidence enough” for those who claimed that Favorinus was a sophist himself, “for that spirit of rivalry of which I spoke is always directed against one’s competitors in the same craft” (VS 1.8, 491).27 Competition and “cultural one-​upmanship”28 were hallmarks of the sophist: Plutarch tells the gruesome story of the sophist Niger who had swallowed a fish bone; nevertheless, he insisted on declaiming when another sophist wanted to perform for fear “that he might be perceived as giving in” (Advice about Keeping Well 131a–​b). Niger died in the exercise and provided Plutarch a paradigm of competitiveness gone wrong.29 Yet there are also examples of a more playful mode of rivalry. When Polemon was still a young man, Dionysius of Miletus made an ambiguous remark about him, claiming that he “possessed strength, but it does not come from the wrestling-​ground” (VS 1.22, 525). Dionysius had heard Polemon speak in an actual lawsuit and wanted to imply that his style had impressed him, but he was less efficient as an advocate than as a sophist. When Polemon heard this he came to Dionysius’ door and announced that he would declaim before him. And when he had come and Polemon had sustained his part with conspicuous success, he went up to Dionysius, and leaning shoulder to shoulder

176   Paideia and Performance with him, like those who begin a wrestling match standing, he wittily turned the laugh against him by quoting “Once O once they were strong, the men of Miletus.”

Polemon’s witty quotation of a well-​known proverb demonstrates not only his willingness to take up Dionysius’s challenge, but also his skillful manipulation of the cultural code of the pepaideumenos. Sophistry is thus one of the numerous playing fields (or sometimes even battlegrounds) on which members of the social elite found an outlet for the competitiveness which pervaded ancient society.30 Wealthy individuals were willing to ruin their families to outdo rivals in lavish public spending (euergetism);31 inscriptions go to great lengths to find new superlatives honoring an individual as the “first and only among the sophists”;32 and even in a private setting, Plutarch warns against “sophistic competitions” which may spoil a dinner party by letting it degenerate into “ambitious or aggressive rivalry.”33 Hence, every sophistic performance was a crisis: what was at stake was the social status of the speaker. Something of this social relevance is visible in our anecdote about Hippodromus and Megistias: the tension here is halfway between Polemon’s witty wrestling match and Niger’s deadly fish bone. The unknown stranger offering to declaim is a challenge to Megistias’s authority, a riddle which he solves successfully. The decisive moment when this stranger triumphantly pronounces his name (“I am Hippodromus the Thessalian, and I have come to practice my art on you”) is similar to a number of other anecdotes in Philostratus where sophists reveal their identity. One of the most memorable examples can be found in his biographical sketch of Dio of Prusa, who has been forced into exile by the emperor Domitian and has been hiding in anonymity. When Dio learns that the emperor has been killed, he quotes a line from the Odyssey (22.1) in which Odysseus gives up his disguise as a beggar, “and thus revealed that he was no beggar, nor what they believed him to be, but Dio the sage, [and] he delivered a spirited and energetic indictment of the tyrant” (VS 1.7, 488). However, this significant act of revealing your name and thus your identity as a sophist was not without risks: if the audience or your interlocutor failed to recognize you (or pretended they did not know you), you were in danger of losing your face. This is what happened to Philagrus: he got into a heated argument with a student of Herodes Atticus who pretended he had no idea who he was (VS 2.8, 579): “ ‘And who are you?’ inquired the other. . . . Whereupon Philagrus said that it was an insult to him not to be recognized wherever he might be.”34 As a sophist, you had to make a name for yourself; you always had to confirm and uphold your status by showing your knowledge, your mastery of the sophistic technê, and your unswerving confidence. And the sophists found this challenging themselves: “when [Polemon] saw a gladiator dripping with sweat out of sheer terror of the life-​and-​death struggle before him, he remarked: ‘You are in as great an agony as though you were going to declaim’ ” (VS 1.25, 541). If keeping your calm when faced with difficulties and critical challenges is an aspect of professionalism, the sophists certainly were professionals.

Professionals of Paideia?: The Sophists as Performers    177

“To Thine Own Self Be True” So far, we have seen a number of factors which seem to suggest that the sophists were indeed professionals. We will now return one last time to our anecdote to gain a more nuanced view. Let us look at the reason for which Megistias was willing to exchange garments with Hippodromus and to listen to his declamation: “when he observed the keenness of his glance and saw that he seemed sane and sober, he changed clothes with him.” In fact, this small detail is the peg on which Philostratus hangs his entire anecdote, which he claims he heard from Megistias himself: “Though he was somewhat rustic in appearance, yet an extraordinary nobility shone out of his eyes, and his glance was at once keen and good-​natured. Megistias of Smyrna also says that he noticed this characteristic of his, and he was considered second to none as a physiognomist.” Physiognomy was a subject with which several sophists were fascinated; we still have some meager fragments of a treatise by Polemon on this “science.”35 It is reputed to detect the true nature of a person, no matter how much she or he tries to conceal it; a number of anecdotes relate that some famous physiognomist was able to see through the veils of pretense that people put on to hide the unsavory traits of their character. Philostratus occasionally takes some care to describe the look of his sophists:36 Marcus of Byzantium was, like Hippodromus, somewhat “rustic” (agroikoteros; VS 1.24, 529), yet “the expression of his brows and the gravity of his countenance proclaimed Marcus a sophist. . . . This was evident from the steady gaze of his eyes.” Such passages show that for Philostratus and for his readers, sophistry was a curious mixture of ingredients which we moderns would consider contradictory. On the one hand, as we have seen, he emphasizes that it demanded rigorous preparation and hard work. He has a somewhat ambivalent attitude toward laborious studies:37 while he admires natural abilities and does not believe that they can be replaced by training and instruction, he reserves his highest praise for sophists (like Scopelian or Herodes Atticus) who provided an outward image of effortlessness, yet spent their nights studying.38 Hippodromus receives praise for his wide reading and good memory, and it is his rhetorical training that enables him to emerge victorious from his encounter with Megistias. On the other hand, this sophistic training is regarded as a natural character trait which is visible in a person’s countenance; it is something which cannot be acquired, but is an inborn talent. Take the case of Agathion:39 when this somewhat mysterious, superhuman figure meets Herodes Atticus, the sophist is struck by the purity of his language and asks him: “ ‘How were you educated, and by whom? For you do not seem to be an uneducated man.’ ‘The interior of Attica educated me,’ Agathion replied, ‘a good school for a man who wishes to be able to converse’ ” (VS 2.1, 553). Philostratus seems to suggest that Agathion received no formal education, but is a survivor, as it were, from

178   Paideia and Performance the classical age; he is a sophist’s dream come true: his pure Attic is a natural gift, not the result of hard work. The entire cultural elite aspired to this ideal, as we can see in numerous inscriptions, where concepts such as “education” (paideia) are combined with words denoting the character (êthos) or overall excellence (aretê) of a person:40 being a pepaideumenos is more than simply having received an education, it underlines the natural superiority of every member of the social and political elite. This conception of sophistry as a mark of your entire personality is what separates it most from our modern notion of “profession.” As we have seen, there was some kind of separation between the sophist as an individual and his public role. Nevertheless, each and every performance showed who you really were: it was not primarily about what you had learned and read, but about your general superiority. Hippodromus’s declamation simply confirms what his physiognomy had already indicated: his “extraordinary nobility” (amêchanon eugeneian; the Greek expression directly refers to the “genetic” dimension of this power). This is also expressed when the audience at Smyrna pays him the highest compliment that any sophist could aspire to: he is deemed “worthy of being enrolled among men of former days” (hoios en tois pro autou graphesthai). One of the most important aspects of sophistic performances was the effort to embody the great heroic figures of the classical Greek past, to imitate their language as closely as possible, to become one of them. When Herodes Atticus is called “one of the Ten,”41 he has reached the highest pinnacle that a sophist could hope for, and Hippodromus is here “counted among the classics.” Being a sophist connected imperial Greeks with what they considered their most valuable and important heritage, the classical past.42 Hence, sophists were much more than simple professionals: they were representatives of what an entire culture found important about itself.

Further Reading Korenjak 2000 and Whitmarsh 2005, 23–​40 provide lively and informative descriptions of the sophists as public performers and their interactions with audiences. Schmitz 1999 and Connolly 2001 explore some of the implications of sophistic performances. Schmitz 1997 is a book-​length study of the function of sophistic rhetoric in imperial Greek society. Eshleman 2012 analyzes the ways in which sophists defined their professional in-​groups. Gleason 1995 is an excellent study of the role of physiognomy in sophistic self-​fashioning.

Bibliography Anderson, G. 1986. Philostratus: Biography and Belles Lettres in the Third Century a.d. London. Anderson, G. 1993. The Second Sophistic:  A  Cultural Phenomenon in the Roman Empire. London and New York. Avotins, I. 1975. “The Holders of the Chairs of Rhetoric at Athens.” Harv. Stud. 79: 313–​24. Bowie, E. L. 1970. “Greeks and Their Past in the Second Sophistic.” P&P 46: 3–​41. Revised reprint in Studies in Ancient Society, edited by M. I. Finley, 166–​209. London and Boston, 1974.

Professionals of Paideia?: The Sophists as Performers    179 Bowie, E. L., and J. Elsner, eds. 2009. Philostratus. Cambridge. Castelli, C. 2001. “Le fatiche del sofista:  Note sul lessico dell’attività letteraria nelle ‘Vitae Sophistarum’ di Filostrato.” Rend. Ist. Lomb. 135: 247–​259. Connolly, J. 2001. “Reclaiming the Theatrical in the Second Sophistic.” Helios 28: 75–​96. Cribiore, R. 2007. “Lucian, Libanius, and the Short Road to Rhetoric.” GRBS 47: 71–​86. Eshleman, K. 2012. The Social World of Intellectuals in the Roman Empire: Sophists, Philosophers, and Christians. Cambridge. Fisher, N., and H. van Wees, eds. 2011. Competition in the Ancient World. Swansea. Gleason, M.  W. 1995. Making Men:  Sophists and Self-​ Presentation in Ancient Rome. Princeton, NJ. Jones, C. P. 2002. “Philostratus and the Gordiani.” Mediterraneo Antico 5: 759–​767. Kasulke, C. T. 2005. Fronto, Marc Aurel und kein Konflikt zwischen Rhetorik und Philosophie im 2. Jh. n. Chr. Beiträge zur Altertumskunde 218. Munich. König, J. 2011. “Competitiveness and Anti-​ competitiveness in Philostratus’ Lives of the Sophists.” In Competition in the Ancient World, edited by N. Fisher and H. van Wees, 279–​ 300. Swansea. Korenjak, M. 2000. Publikum und Redner: Ihre Interaktion in der sophistischen Rhetorik der Kaiserzeit. Zetemata 104. Munich. Lauwers, J. 2014. “Systems of Sophistry and Philosophy: The Case of the Second Sophistic.” Harv. Stud. 107: 331–​363. Naechster, M. 1908. De Pollucis et Phrynichi controversiis. Unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Leipzig. Puech, B. 2002. Orateurs et sophistes grecs dans les inscriptions d’époque impériale. Paris. Roskam, G., M. De Pourcq, and L. Van der Stockt, eds. 2012. The Lash of Ambition: Plutarch, Imperial Greek Literature and the Dynamics of “Philotimia.” Collection d’Études Classiques 25. Namur. Rothe, S. 1989. Kommentar zu ausgewählten Sophistenviten des Philostratos. Sammlung Groos 38. Heidelberg. Russell, D. A. 1983. Greek Declamation. Cambridge. Schmitz, T. A. 1997. Bildung und Macht:  Zur sozialen und politischen Funktion der zweiten Sophistik in der griechischen Welt der Kaiserzeit. Zetemata 97. Munich. Schmitz, T. A. 1999. “Performing History in the Second Sophistic.” In Geschichtsschreibung und politischer Wandel im 3.  Jh. n.  Chr., edited by M. Zimmermann, 71–​92. Historia Einzelschriften 127. Stuttgart. Schmitz, T. A. 2009. “Narrator and Audience in Philostratus’ Lives of the Sophists.” In Philostratus, edited by E. L. Bowie and J. Elsner, 49–​68. Cambridge. Schmitz, T. A. 2013. “Plutarch and the Second Sophistic.” In A Companion to Plutarch, edited by M. Beck, 32–​42. Oxford. Sidebottom, H. 2009. “Philostratus and the Symbolical Roles of the Sophist and Philosopher.” In Philostratus, edited by E. L. Bowie and J. Elsner, 69–​99. Cambridge. Swain, S. 1996. Hellenism and Empire: Language, Classicism, and Power in the Greek World, ad 50–​250. Oxford. Van Hoof, L. 2010. Plutarch’s Practical Ethics: The Social Dynamics of Philosophy. Oxford. Veyne, P. 1990. Bread and Circuses: Historical Sociology and Political Pluralism. London. First French edition Paris 1976. Whitmarsh, T. 2005. The Second Sophistic. Oxford.

180   Paideia and Performance Wright, W. C. 1921. Philostratus, Lives of the Sophists; Eunapius, Lives of the Philosophers and Sophists. London and Cambridge, MA. Zuiderhoek, A. 2009. The Politics of Munificence in the Roman Empire: Citizens, Elites, and Benefactors in Asia Minor. Cambridge. Zweimüller, S. 2008. Lukian, “Rhetorum praeceptor”:  Einleitung, Text und Kommentar. Hypomnemata 176. Göttingen.

Chapter 12

Perform anc e  Spac e Edmund Thomas

12.1  Sophistic Performance and Its Setting One day in the reign of Antoninus Pius, the rhetorical teacher Favorinus waited in Trajan’s Forum in Rome to meet the consul of the day. As a group of devotees, including the young Aulus Gellius, gathered around him, Favorinus used the time to improvise a display of literary learning, which took its starting point from the decoration of the building. Pointing to the inscription beneath the gilded statues of horses and standards that adorned the roof of the colonnade, he embarked on a learned explanation of the phrase ex manubiis (Gell. NA 13.25; Gleason 1995, 138–​9). One might have thought that Favorinus would have shown more awareness of the visual or spatial aspects of this complex, which, still very recent in construction, continued to be regarded as sensational a generation later (Paus. 5.12.6); and indeed he may have done so, but we are dependent for our knowledge of this episode on the selective memory of the hyper-​philologist Gellius, who took little interest in architectural details and with other monumental complexes in Rome also preferred to dwell on the semantics of inscribed text than on the surrounding buildings (Gell, NA 10.1.6–​9; Holford-​ Strevens 2003, 325). For Favorinus’s companions, a spatial turn around the porticoes of this grandiose new complex was a valued opportunity to learn from this celebrated intellectual. For the sophist himself, it gave him a chance to step out of the classroom and exercise his talents in an architectural setting. Extemporizing was an essential part of the sophistic repertoire, allowing the rhetor space, literally, to expand on questions posed by the architecture of the city. But the urban environment did not only offer rich material for reflection and improvisation, it also provided a constructive physical environment in which to speak. The first-​century orator Scopelian regarded his native city Smyrna as “a grove in which he could practice his melodious voice and thought it best worth his while to let it echo there” (Philostr. VS 1.21, 516). The teachers

182   Paideia and Performance of the Second Sophistic were not just aware of their architectural surroundings; they positively fed off them. There was, in fact, a very real equivalence between architecture and rhetoric. The two arts were analogous, each directed toward achieving utility as well as pleasure (Thomas 2014, 37–​38, and passim). Their methods, too, could be similar, winning over audience or spectators by theatrical effects. The brilliant oral style of orators like Lollianus of Ephesus, with its “flashes of brilliance like lightning” (Philostr. VS 1.23, 527), was commended in similar terms (lamprotes) as the contemporary architecture of sophists (Thomas 2007, 219). Even where the subject matter of epideictic oratory was not explicitly architectural, speeches reflected the orator’s immediate experience of the setting. Unlike a text read in the schoolroom, a rhetorical address had to adjust to the built surroundings. The acoustics of a venue determined the tone of the speaker’s delivery and the success of his speech. He either stood out in the location and was remembered, or proved unworthy of the architectural grandeur, like Peregrinus at the Nymphaeum of Herodes Atticus at Olympia, who was almost stoned to death for his criticism of the expensive structure filled with marble statuary of the donor’s and emperor’s families (Bol 1984) as an effeminate waste (Lucian, De mort. Peregr. 19). It was in order to fit most effectively within their environment that speakers cultivated their outward appearance, in order to make spectacular entrances into the public settings where they performed. Orators studied the proper posture and the correct manner of walking, made appropriate bodily gestures, and wore clothes, which, like the architectural decoration, were beautiful without being distracting or ostentatious (Gleason 1995, 155). Hadrian the Phoenician would arrive at his lectures in Rome in a carriage with silver bridles (Philostr. VS 2.10, 587). His destination, the emperor Hadrian’s Athenaeum (Philostr. VS 2.10, 589), was no ordinary lecture room. Excavations between 2006 and 2010 have shown that it consisted of three adjacent auditoria, each paved in grey Egyptian granodiorite and Numidian yellow marble, with walls in colored marbles including Phrygian pavonazzetto and Africano from Teos in Asia Minor (Egidi 2010, 107–​121). There was a sense of mutual expectation between the ostentatious style of sophistic performance and its glamorous and impressive settings. There was no more consummate rhetorical performer than the sophist Antonius Polemon. Herodes Atticus recalled his mannerisms in a letter to the Roman Consul M. Vettulenus Civica Barbarus (Alföldy 1977, 328): He would come forward to declaim with a serene expression and full of confidence, and he always arrived in a litter, because his joints were already diseased. When a theme was proposed, he did not rehearse it in public, but would withdraw from the crowd for a short time. His utterance was clear and incisive, and there was a fine ringing sound in the tones of his voice. According to Herodes, he used to rise to such a pitch of excitement that he would jump up from his chair when he came to the most striking conclusions in his argument, and whenever he rounded off a period he would utter the final clause with a smile, as if to show that he could deliver it without effort, and at certain places in the argument he would stamp the ground just like the horse in Homer. (Philostr. VS 1.25, 537)

Performance Space   183 As André Boulanger has discussed, his declamations and delivery consisted of “a rolling fire of wordplays” and other verbal effects: There is plenty of overkill, and considerable bad taste, but also a good deal of passion and enthusiasm. . . . If his schoolroom declamations hardly justify the reputation of the rhetor of Smyrna, it should be remembered that he owed his immense success above all to the public glamour of his eloquence. It was “the prodigy himself ” [le monstre lui-​même] that one needed to hear, his fervent delivery, his passionate impersonations. These declamations, edited and corrected for reading, as in particular the systematic exclusion of hiatuses shows, are for us like the librettos of cantatas whose music has been lost. (Boulanger 1923, 93–​94; adapted from translation by Gleason 1995, 27)

Yet it would be even more appropriate to compare these works to operas, since their impact derived not just from the words and music, but from the rhetor’s theatrical use of the spatial settings in which they took place. Polemon’s most famous oration, and “perhaps the symbolic event for the Second Sophistic” (Anderson 1986, 105), was a prose hymn delivered, at the invitation, or bidding (Philostratus uses the word ἐκέλευσε), of the emperor Hadrian, at the inaugural sacrificial ceremony of the Temple of Olympian Zeus in Athens in 131 or 132 ce (Weber 1907, 268–​275; Benjamin 1963; Halfmann 1986, 208). Speaking at the open-​air sacrifice in the temple precinct, he was inspired by the religiousness of the occasion, and, as he declared in the prelude of his oration, spoke “not without divine impulse” (Philostr. VS 1.25, 533). Religious sanctuaries, the high-​point of cities’ architecture and esteem, had by now become the locus for theatrical performances (Gödde 2015) and correspondingly offered the most compelling space for orators to demonstrate their virtuosity. By the third century ce it was common for rhetors to conduct classes inside temples. Philostratus recalls of the performer Hippodromus of Thessaly that “when he saw a temple with attendants sitting near it, and slaves in waiting carrying loads of books in satchels, he understood that someone of importance was holding his school inside.” Once inside, he would take his seat on the lecturer’s chair (τοῦ θρόνου), intermittently jumping up from it for rhetorical effect (VS 2.28, 618–​19). Polemon stood outside, addressing presumably the large crowd that could fill the gigantic precinct. Reputedly fixing his own gaze on his inner thoughts, he was nonetheless himself an object of spectacle: he stood on the stylobate (ἀπὸ τῆς κρηπῖδος) of this vast dipteral temple, with three rows of columns at the front and rear (a feature of the legendary Archaic sanctuaries at Ephesus and Samos), so that its overhanging ornamental cornices of the Corinthian order overshadowed him as he spoke (Hellmann 1992, 242–​243; Willers 1990, 26–​67). The variety of points of visual interest in this prestigious subject of his speech offered both potentially distracting fascination for the audience and convenient loca for the orator, from the supposed relics of the temple’s mythical foundation by Deucalion, the hackneyed starting point of many an oration (Lucian, Rhetorum Praeceptor 20), to the new statues of the living emperor (Paus. 1.18.6–​8). It was no wonder that Philostratus described that final dedication by Hadrian as a “great contest of time” (χρόνου μέγα

184   Paideia and Performance ἀγώνισμα: VS 1.25, 533), a formulation so rhetorical that it may even have been drawn directly from Polemon’s own words. For such ceremonial occasions, architecture and rhetoric came together in a harmonious synergy which could not be compromised. The unfinished state of the propylon on the north side of the precinct seems to indicate the haste in completing the work in time for this portentous event (Willers 1990, 38).

12.2  The Civic Theater and Other Loca of Sophistic Rhetoric More commonly, the rhetors of the eastern provinces took up their station in a range of custom-​built locations for the performance of rhetorical texts. These settings varied in audience and purpose. The largest and most public space for rhetorical display was the theater, the hub of civic identity, where oratorical performances were now among the most frequent activities (Hanfmann 1975, 53), delivered to large crowds who constituted the whole community of a city and sometimes even a province or region. Standing on the stage platform, backed by the authority of an engaged columnar façade of two or more stories, the orator could gain more attention than anywhere else. In the theater at Alexandria, Dio Cocceianus, “the golden-​mouthed,” reprimanded the Alexandrians for the “deceitfulness” of declaiming in the theater (Or. 32; Winter 2002, 40–​50). At Smyrna it was in the theater that an “Egyptian fellow [ἀνθρωπίσκου] burst on the scene” to great popular acclaim and Aelius Aristides’s chagrin; yet subsequently, after giving a rival performance himself in the civic council chamber (bouleuterion), Aristides took pleasure in sharing the report that there had been only seventeen people to hear the Egyptian in the Odeum (Or. 51.30–​34). Audience numbers mattered. At festivals the crowds were vastest, and the stakes were highest. The Scythian Anacharsis is told of “the great multitude of people gathering to look at such festivals, theaters filling up with tens of thousands, the competitors praised, and the winner regarded as equal to the gods” (Lucian, Anach. 10). In the 160s Apuleius addressed an enormous gathering in the theater at Carthage:1 You have come in such great numbers to hear, that I  should rather congratulate Carthage on having so many friends of learning than make excuses for being a philosopher and for not refusing to speak. For the size of the gathering suits the scale of the city, and the place of the gathering has been chosen for its size. (Apul. Flor. 18, ed. Helm, 33–​34)

Theaters were the ultimate test of an orator’s rhetoric. These huge cavea constructions offered sensational acoustics, which were sometimes enhanced by devices like those described by Vitruvius (De Arch. 5.5): at Aezani in upland Phrygia, twelve pairs of rectangular compartments between the upper and lower tiers of the theater may have

Performance Space   185 contained sounding vessels of terracotta (Plommer 1983, 137–​138); at Scythopolis-​Nysa in the Syrian Decapolis and Caesarea in Syria Palestine similar mechanisms, perhaps using bronze vessels, benefited not only theater performances but the public orator’s voice (Plommer 1983, 133–​137, 138–​139). The stage buildings, too, could be constructed so as to allow the performers’ voices to travel more clearly to their audiences. In the theatre at Aspendus a wooden roof built out from the inner wall of the stage building with a backward slope provided a sounding board (Dodge 1999, 222). If the grandeur of the theater architecture and the cavernousness of its space seemed too overwhelming or intimidating for an orator, he might take refuge in a virtual space, signaled by the columnar architecture of the stage building (cf. Vitr. 5.6) and developed for his audience through his rhetorical skills. In that oration in the theater at Carthage, Apuleius pointed first to its dizzying furnishings—​marble pavements, proscaenium beams, columns of the stage building, high roofed spaces, glowing coffers, and encircling seats in the cavea (Apul. Flor. 18, ed. Helm, 33–​34)—​before appealing to the audience to avert their gaze from those enticing features and focus instead on his own oration. His rhetoric conveyed them to a different architectural setting, inventing its own fictive spaces to transport them to the senate house or library of Carthage, just as a playwright conveyed his audience to a dramatic scene, suggested by the otherworldliness of the stage architecture; and the balance of his own verbal phrases paralleled the balanced structure and contrasting materials of the real stage building. The theater was only the largest of many different locations where orators could declaim. Less overawing were the many smaller auditoria for city councils, assemblies, or public performances of poetry and epideictic oratory. Many sophists, like Heraclides of Lycia (Philostr. VS 2.26, 614), declaimed in law courts (dikasteria) and received high fees for their trouble. Others spoke in theater-​like city council buildings (bouleuteria). Aristides’s celebrated oration on the occasion of the dedication of the Temple of Hadrian at Cyzicus was delivered not in the sanctuary, but in the city bouleuterion from where the temple was not directly visible. Yet he used the distance to create a virtual architectural environment in his rhetoric, bringing the temple to his listeners. Singled out by ancient and modern writers alike as a model of sophistic ekphrasis (Menander Rhetor 345.20–​21, in Russell and Wilson 1981, 30–​31; Boulanger 1923, 344), the speech visualized the tripartite structure of the building and unfolded to the audience “the greatest work ever seen by man” (Aristid. Or. 27.1). Not intimidated by the scale of his subject, Aristides took comfort in the way that architecture provided an easy subject to describe in words, while at the same time he rose to the challenge of doing so in a manner that was not commonplace but distinctive and effective: “As for beauties of public buildings and the overall construction and size of the city, no one is so resourceless in words that he cannot praise them nor so competent in speaking that he can easily make a show” (Or. 27.13). In the West the equivalent of the bouleuterion was the room for the civic assembly (curia). At Carthage, where Apuleius spoke in the 160s (Flor. 4.18.85), this was probably a small room at the end of the basilica (Gros 1985, 151n86); at Oea the basilica was “the site of the auditorium” (Apul. Apol. 73.2). These western assembly rooms usually took the form of a rectangular space lined by benches (Balty 1991, 33–​81). But some western

186   Paideia and Performance curia buildings adopted the semi-​circular cavea of eastern cities, as most dramatically at Augst (Augusta Raurica) in modern Switzerland, where the speakers addressed a civic assembly perched high above the Violenried plain (Balty 1991, 271–​275). In the Greek world purpose-​built, roofed theater-​like settings for oral performances went back to the Odeum of Pericles in Athens, built around 440 bce, which seems to have been used primarily for musical contests at the Panathenaea, for dramatic performances at the City Dionysia, especially the Proagon (Csapo and Slater 1994, 109–​110), and as a lawcourt (Ar. Vesp. 1109; Dem. 59 (In Neaeram) 52, 54). But by the third century bce the building is called a mouseion or philosophical school, where, among others, Chrysippus is reported to have lectured (Diog. Laert. 7.183–​185; Robkin 1976, 66–​67); a fragment attributed to the comic writer Alexis projects this back to the sophists of the fourth century bce, “babbling nonsense at the Lyceum, Academy, and gates of the Odeum” (Kassel–​Austin, PCG 2, fr. 25. 1–​3), but this is most likely a forgery written a century later (Arnott 1996, 819–​823). Yet the forest of columns that supported the roof would undoubtedly have severely compromised the visual and acoustic experience of the spectators (Izenour 1992, 32). The construction, however, in 16–​14 bce of the new Odeum of Agrippa (Agrippeion), with its broad timber-​truss roof, provided the Athenians with a much more commodious space for oral performances. Decorated entirely in marble, it developed Hellenistic spaces such as the Bouleuterion at Miletus by producing an auditorium space without any internal supports, in the manner of smaller Italian examples such as the covered theater at Pompeii; the roof span of some 25 meters created an impressive acoustic space for speakers (Baldassarri 1998, 130–​133). Here in the second century ce, the Cilician Philagrus, a pupil of Herodes Atticus, performed improvised recitals, although Herodes’s other students were less impressed by the content, claiming that they were in fact taken from his own hackneyed declamations (Philostr. VS 2.8, 579). Philagrus also declaimed in the probably more modest council chamber of the Technitai of Dionysus, “near the Cerameicus Gates not far from the Knights’ Grounds” (Philostr. VS 2.8, 580; Csapo and Slater 1994, 255–​258). The demand for such covered spaces for rhetorical performance increased. At Rome a large odeum was constructed under Domitian in the Campus Martius, to the design of the architect Apollodorus of Damascus (Dio 69.4.2), which was decorated with column shafts of Euboean cipollino and Corinthian capitals, and which continued to be admired three centuries later for its vast size, with a cavea about 100 m in diameter (Virgili 1996); in the fifth century it was listed among the seven wonders of Rome (Polemius Silvius, in Valentini and Zucchetti 1940–​1953, 1:310). As if to reassert the cultural preeminence of Athens, the millionaire sophist Herodes Atticus paid for the construction of an even larger odeum around 140 ce in memory of his wife Regilla. Modern acousticians have argued that, like other roofed theaters in antiquity, the Odeum was less well suited for the human voice than for musical performances (Vassilantonopoulos and Mourjopoulos 2009); but this overlooks that it was designed to respond specifically to the needs of orators, with its innovative and expensive ceiling of cedar wood (Paus. 7.20.6; Philostr. VS 2.1, 551), a material chosen not just for its exoticism and expense, but for its acoustic properties. As modern theory confirms, cedar wood is a natural sound

Performance Space   187 absorber which only enhances the sound of the human voice, rendering it into a crisp and clear sound. Today, the vast Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels in Los Angeles, designed by José Rafael Moneo and opened in 2002, and at 195,000 square feet the third-​ largest cathedral in the world, has an 85-​foot-​high ceiling of cedar wood to absorb the services crisply for its vast congregations (Bradley, Ryherd and Ronsse 2016, 304). In the same way, in sixteenth-​century Venice, the Franciscan friar Francesco Zorzi claimed in his Memoriale of 1533 that flat wooden coffered ceilings were preferable for listening to sermons (Howard and Moretti 2009, 55), an assertion which accords with more recent acoustic analysis. However, such analysis also finds that even more effective than the material in absorbing sounds are the human spectators: the larger the audience, the better the acoustics as the audience absorbs the sound best (Davis and Kaye 1932, 142–​ 143; Watson 1930, 33); this is also noticed in a study of the acoustics of ancient auditoria (Canac 1967, 82). Herodes’s Odeum is still substantially preserved on the south slope of the Acropolis, but now lacks its iconic ceiling, and, although roof tiles are recorded as having been stamped with their destination θέατρον Ἡρώδου καὶ Ῥηγίλλης, it remains disputed whether the enclosed space was roofed entirely (Meinel 1980, 110) or only partially, with cantilevered beams over the rear of the auditorium and a sloping roof over the stage platform where orators and other artists performed (Izenour 1992, 137–​140, fig 2.13). The building would have seated up to 5000 spectators for epideictic performances, as well as musical shows, creating an audience comparable in numbers to civic theaters. Herodes was, of course, a thunderous speaker himself, and when he spoke at other venues, he relished the huge audiences that such buildings offered. An inscribed statue base, reused in the Byzantine aqueduct but which perhaps originally came from the sanctuary of Artemis, has encouraged the hypothesis that he was invited, at the instigation of the leading Ephesian citizen M. Claudius P. Vedius Antoninus Sabinus, whose portrait was found in the 1990s at Herodes’s Peloponnesian villa at Loukou (Smith 1998, 82; Szewczyk 2015), to give an oration at Ephesus, possibly in his role as corrector of the cities of Asia in 134 ce (Keil 1953, 12–​13; see Barresi 2007, 148n73). At that date he must have delivered the oration in the city’s theater, then recently enlarged with a third level of orders behind the stage, and, as he stood in this architectural space, he persuaded the emperor Hadrian to donate funds for the aqueduct of Alexandria Troas. The sophists’ oratory was frequently harnessed to efforts by cities to seek imperial funding for their local projects. In the same way Polemon had very recently convinced the emperor Hadrian to finance architectural developments in Smyrna (Philostr. VS 1.25, 533), and the oratory of Aristides would later persuade Marcus Aurelius to rebuild Smyrna after the earthquake of 177 ce (Or. 19; Philostr. VS 2.9, 582). Some fifteen years after Herodes’s oration, Vedius’s son, the senator M. Cl. P. Vedius Antoninus Sabinianus, prytanis, grammateus, gymnasiarch, and panegyriarch at Ephesus, who has been called “some kind of Ephesian Herodes” (Smith 1998, 81), enlarged the Domitianic or Trajanic bouleuterion behind the Stoa Basileios on the city’s State Agora to create a vast new theater-​like structure for rhetorical performances both in and outside meetings of the city council. A statue erected in the orchestra in Vedius’s

188   Paideia and Performance honor by a group calling itself “the teachers in the Museum” (hoi peri to Mouseion paideutai) (IvE 2065) seems to attest to their use of this space for educational purposes and to Vedius as being the patron of such groups (Steskal 2001, 187). Although a local aristocrat and not himself a sophist, Vedius seems to have identified with sophistic culture, as emerges from his own self-​presentation: his likely portrait from the East Baths exhibits the studied facial expression of an intellectual (Dillon 1996; Smith 1998, 82). In this vast new Roman-​style setting, mounted on a substructure of mortared rubble, orators addressed not only the Ephesian bouleutai, but, every few years, the provincial assemblies of the Ionian cities. The exceptional appearance here of a double-​scotia, composite or “Ionic” base follows the stylistic taste of Rome, where it occurs in some Augustan examples and especially in the Flavian period (Strong and Ward-​Perkins 1962, 5–​12; Iara 2015, 37–​40). Its use in the Bouleuterion of Vedius, instead of the Attic-​Ionic form more commonly used in the province, has not been explained (Bier 2011, 65–​66). Yet its adoption in the second century ce as an iconic image of Ionian historical culture, as in the restored Temple of Artemis at Sardis, where an inscription draws attention to these formal elements, suggests that it could have been intended as a visual reflection of the Ionian idea of oratory practiced at Ephesus (Philostr. VS 2.18, 598). The “baroque” character of the architectural ornament in the dynamic, syncopated design of jutting aedicules in two levels of the new scaenae frons behind the speakers—​projecting the statuary more visibly toward the audience than in the previous, flatter arrangement—​and the disposition of exotic material elements, including shafts of red Egyptian granite (Bier 2011, 51, 57–​64), would have been well suited to this florid and ostentatious Gorgianic style (Kennedy 1994, 231; Kim, ­chapter 4 of this volume, on second-​century Asianism).

12.3  The Sophist as Builder: Gymnasia as Sophistic Space As these examples illustrate, a remarkable feature of the world of the Second Sophistic in the eastern empire was that the exponents of spoken rhetorical performance were also frequently those who financed the venues in which they took place. Herodes Atticus had access to exceptional wealth through his marriage to the Roman Annia Regilla, descendant of the prodigious Annii family, and when Flavius Damianus married the daughter of Vedius Antoninus Sabinianus, Vedia Phaedrina, who inherited Vedius’s substantial estate, he acquired considerable spending power. But other sophists acquired substantial fortunes from their work which gave them the opportunity to finance extraordinary building projects. The sophist and legal advocate Nicetes of Smyrna is credited not only with restoring the art of oratory, but also with building a grand approach road between the inner city of Smyrna and the city gate leading to Ephesus. The sheer physical scale of this project was said to have brought his actions to the level of his words (Philostr. VS 1.19, 511) and, apparently, to have matched the grand style of his oral delivery

Performance Space   189 (megalophonia, Philostr. VS 1.21, 518). If that is so, this term may suggest that Nicetes’s architectural work was a portico roofed by a barrel vault, which created loud echoes for the orator’s voice. Nicetes’s wealth no doubt accrued from his successful legal advocacy. If so, he was not the only sophist to amass a huge personal fortune. Others accumulated prodigious earnings from their lectures or declamations. Nicetes’s pupil Scopelian adjusted his fee according to the means of his clients, which suggests that for the richer ones he charged a pretty sum; meanwhile, Lollianus of Ephesus charged “handsome fees” (misthous gennaious), though he was sometimes known to remit them altogether (Philostr. VS 1.21, 518; 1.23, 527). With their diverse building projects, the sophists had a dual and bicultural focus: on the one hand, they set out to satisfy the needs of the crowds according to the fashions of the Imperial period; on the other hand, they respected Greek cultural traditions, not only in the objects of benefaction—​gymnasia, stoas, and nymphaea (Philostr. VS 2.26, 613)—​but also in their cultivation of virtues in the qualities of philotimia, bringing honour and lasting esteem to the donor, and eunoia, which they showed by offering utility to the inhabitants (Barresi 2007, 141). The projects of the highly rich Herodes Atticus were exceptional. In addition to his odeum, he paid for the reconstruction in white marble of the Panathenaic Stadium at Athens (Philostr. VS 2.1, 549–​551); a new aqueduct for Alexandria Troas (VS 2.1, 548), which supplied a new bath building at that city; a stadium and odeum at Athens (VS 2.1, 551); and the notorious nymphaeum at Olympia, inscribed in the name of his wife, Regilla (Bol 1984; Settis 1968, 25). Following Trajan’s example at Rome and the contemporaneous Library of Celsus at Ephesus, libraries were also an object of patronage. C. Flavius Antesthianus Memnon constructed the library at Cremna with ten statues (Horsley 1987), and other examples were built at Nysa (Ídil 1999, 440-​1; Hiesel and Strocka 2006) and Sagalassus (Devijver 1993; Waelkens and Poblome 2011). Yet the space which symbolized most of all the sophists’ cultural mission and their self-​presentation to an audience was the gymnasium, both the site of many oral performances and a hub of intellectual life in general, so it was natural that it was the focus of much of their financial attentions. In this, as in much else, they followed a classical tradition (Delorme 1960). The fourth-​century bc Athenian orator Lycurgus is said to have used his immense wealth not only to complete the Theater of Dionysus but also to build a “gymnasium near the so-​called Lyceum,” in addition to sponsoring several state projects (Paus. 1.29.16; cf. IG II2.457.7–​8, with Delorme 1960, 42–​43). By the Roman Empire, gymnasia were among the largest public buildings of the cities of Roman Greece and Asia Minor, and had become symbols of education and Greek culture. As Trajan famously put it, “gymnasiis indulgent Graeculi” (Plin. Ep. 10.40.2). As is well known, the gymnasia of Asia Minor evolving between the first and third centuries ce had spacious palaestras devoted to athletic activities. The vast open spaces at the center of the palaestras accommodated athletic exercise and agonistic competitions, as at the Harbor Baths in Ephesus, probably associated with the revival of contests in honor of Zeus Olympios under Domitian (Barresi 2007, 138; Engelmann 1998, 305–​307); an even larger area was given over to the palaestra in the gymnasium

190   Paideia and Performance at Aezani, and in the Theater Baths at Ephesus rows of steps alongside the palaestra provided seating for spectators. At Aphrodisias, the vast “Portico of Tiberius” which gave access to the Baths of Hadrian was fortified with seating along the long sides which could have been used for sporting contests (Chaisemartin 1996). These settings were sumptuously decorated with marbles and mosaics in an ostentatious, almost glitzy manner. In the Harbor Baths at Ephesus, the prestigious colored marble from Docimium in Phrygia (pavonazzetto), with its bright purple vein polished to look like porphyry—​a privilege of wealthy and well-​connected donors (Fant 1993, 156)—​was used for both the columns of the palaestra and the marble revetment of the back walls of the xystus (IvE 430, 661). The marbles used to decorate the Hadrianic gymnasium at Smyrna—​Synnadic marble from Docimium, marble from Simitthus (Chemtou) in North Africa, and Egyptian porphyry—​offered a gaudy combination of purple and blood-​stained hues (ISmyrna 697.41–​42). Alongside their buildings and exercise courts were sheltered colonnades (xystoi) enclosing garden areas, which offered ambulatories for strolling and discussing literary or philosophical concerns, and purpose-​built structures for declamations. Such a space is found in the gymnasium at Pergamon (Schazmann 1923). Originally built in the early second century bce, the upper terrace of the gymnasium was embellished under Trajan (Mathys, Stappmanns, and von den Hoff 2011, 273) or Hadrian (Radt 1988, 146), its Doric colonnades replaced by a marble architecture of the Corinthian order. The rebuilding involved the construction of a large auditorium on the west side of the main hall at the rear of the rectangular court which was excavated in 1906–​7 (Dörpfeld 1908, 334–​336; Schazmann 1923, 62; Radt 1988, 146–​7; Mathys, Stappmanns, and von den Hoff 2011, 273). With a marbled exterior and a painted interior, its capacity is estimated at around 1,000. There was no stage, but the orator stood directly on the wooden floor (Radt 1988, 146). A sumptuous room was added, probably in the 160s, on the other side of the main hall (Dörpfeld 1907, 200–​202; Hepding 1907, 347–​349 no. 99; Schazmann 1923, 57; Radt 1988, 145). The gymnasium at Pergamon also probably included other spaces that were used as lecture halls. The first proper attempt to introduce the Greek gymnasium to Rome was the inauguration in 60 ce of the Gymnasium of Nero, “the most remarkable such building at Rome [θαυμασιώτατον τῶν ἐκεῖ].” The Cynic philosopher Demetrius infiltrated the ceremony and, in front of the emperor, senate, and equestrian order, in a manner not unlike the later Cynic Peregrinus at Olympia, “declaimed a speech against bathers, saying that they were effeminates who defiled themselves. Such things he tried to show were a useless extravagance” (Philostr. V A 4.42, trans. C. P. Jones). Yet if the bathing activities in the adjacent areas could be despised in this way as a modern fashion which sapped the strength—​a specious argument, of course, as the now extensive evidence of Greek bathing culture demonstrates (Lucore and Trümper 2013)—​the sporting and cultural activities of the gymnasium were a prized asset of Greek culture at Rome and in the Greek world, and were thought to encourage the mental and physical improvement of the citizen body. Little remains of Nero’s complex, which was completely rebuilt under Alexander Severus, but it seems to have consisted of the extension of Agrippa’s

Performance Space   191 Horti by a new bathing area, the particular butt of Demetrius’s criticisms, and a palaestra comparable in size to classical Greek models (Krencker 1929, 264–​265). It was of this complex that Domitian’s odeum, and the adjacent stadium, formed the western boundary, completing the creation in Rome of a gymnasium area in the Greek manner with gardens and spaces for reading and declamation (Ghini 2000; Nielsen 1990, 46). In the outer precinct of Trajan’s Baths it is even clearer how this imperial Roman concept of thermae was strongly shaped by the idea of a Greek gymnasium. Like Domitian’s odeum the work of Apollodorus, it continued to be known as a gymnasium into the third century (Dio Cass. 69.4.1; Volpe 2007, 428–​429). Excavations between 2003 and 2006 have thrown more light on the imposing curvilinear exedras of brick-​ faced concrete still visible on the Oppian Hill, revealing a semicircular hall with marble seats incorporated off the portico of the palaestra in the manner of Vitruvius’s xystus, with seats for “philosophers, rhetors, and others” (Vitr. 5.11.1–​2; Volpe 2007, 427). An inscription found in the area in the sixteenth century (Caldelli 1992) suggests that this space was used for ἡ ἱερὰ ξυστιχή σύνοδος, an athletic association established by the grandfather of the Ephesian athlete M.  Ulpius Domesticus (IG 14.1054–​1055; Volpe 2007, 431). The great third-​century bath complexes of Caracalla and Domitian included not just spaces for athletics and gymnastic exercise but lecture rooms and rooms for intellectual discussion. At Ephesus, Vedius Antoninus Sabinianus did not only enlarge the Bouleuterion or Odeion, but also sponsored a new gymnasium building near the stadium (Steskal 2001). Yet Vedius’s gymnasium, now extensively analyzed and published in full (Steskal and La Torre 2008), shows no sign of custom-​built auditoria for oral performances like that at Pergamon. The “marble hall” on the west side of the palaestra (formerly called the Kaisersaal), with its marbled walls, opus sectile floor, and statuary, might be imagined as an imposing setting for orations, but there is no clear evidence that it performed this role. The orator Flavius Damianus (Fischer 2014, 128–​131) had extensive means at his disposal after marrying the daughter of Vedius Antoninus, Vedia Phaedrina. For Damianus, who allegedly paid 10000 drachmas to study with Aelius Aristides at Smyrna and Hadrian of Tyre at Ephesus, it was as important to make a show of wealth (ploutou epideixin) as a display of rhetoric (Philostr. VS 2.23, 605–​606). In 166, in the tradition of the extravagant state benefaction of the Athenian Lycurgus, he donated 7000 tons of grain to Lucius Verus’s legions passing through Ephesus on his Parthian campaign. Damianus was himself magnificently endowed with wealth of various sorts, and not only maintained the poor of Ephesus, but also gave most generous aid to the State by contributing large sums of money and by restoring any public buildings that were in need of repair. Moreover, he connected the temple with Ephesus by making an approach to it along the road that runs through the Magnesian Gate. This work is a portico a stade in length, all of marble, and the idea of this structure is that the worshippers need not stay away from the temple in case of rain. When this work was completed at great expense, he inscribed it with a dedication to his wife, but the banqueting-​hall in the temple he dedicated in his own name, and in size he built

192   Paideia and Performance it to surpass all that exist elsewhere put together. He decorated it with an elegance beyond words, for it is adorned with Phrygian marble such as had never before been ­quarried. (Philostr. VS 2.23, 605)

In such architecture Damianus found a real opportunity for self-​expression. His covered stoa from the Temple of Artemis (Knibbe and Langmann 1993, 16–​27; Knibbe and Thür 1995, 26–​33; Engelmann 1995, 77–​85; Knibbe 1999, 449 and 2002, 207–​211; Steskal, Grossschmidt, Heinz, Kanz, and Taeuber 2003) recalls Nicetes’s work at Smyrna and seems almost certainly designed not only in the context of the well-​known civic competition between the two cities, but as an act of personal competition with the Smyrnaean sophist. The tomb monument of Damianus and Phaedrina, a Corinthian tholos, was erected beside this kathodos street, possibly close to Damianus’ villa estate (IvE 2100; Koenigs and Radt 1979, 317–​318 and 345–​348; Fischer 2014, 130n23). The banqueting hall in Phrygian marble offered a space for speaking to more select gatherings (Barresi 2007, 143 and fig. 3; Engelmann 1995, 79). Damianus might be thought to have been particularly interested in creating buildings that promoted his sophistic expertise more widely and enhanced his oratory. Two statue bases attest to his benefactions, including an oikos in the Baths of Varius on the Curetes Street (IvE 672, 3080). Nothing is said of the function of this room, but that his benefaction included “both the structure and the whole decoration.” At the same time, it has often been claimed that the palaestra of the East Baths was restored by Damianus and Phaedrina. In the later second century, this new space was given a monumental modern approach, a propylon entering a vestibule area of which the side walls had apses each crowned by an aedicule with composite capitals and decorated with statues of Dionysus, Venus, and Pan (Keil 1930, 30). Just inside the palaestra were two statues of barbarian prisoners emulating the Dacians of Trajan’s Forum in Rome (Keil 1930, 38), but presented instead as Persians, evoking both the legendary Persian Stoa at Sparta and Verus’s recent Parthian campaign (Barresi 2007, 148; Thomas 2013, 177–​179). This architecture was also geared to more intellectual pursuits. The original porticoes were narrowed and two spacious rooms flanked the open space like exedras on either side, one of which served as an auditorium (Keil 1931, 31). On the east side of the palaestra and opposite the Kaisersaal, a room with benches running around the walls on three sides seems to have been used as an auditorium for declamations (Keil 1933, 9–​10; Maccanico 1963, 44). It opened onto the palaestra by two side doors and one wider central door, which on the inner side had a porch supported by two columns carrying an acanthus frieze (Keil 1933, fig. 3). As the rear of the room was taken up by a base for statuary, the speaker is thought to have stood below or in front of the porch. So the excavator of the area, Josef Keil, imagined the scene (1933, col. 10): Anyone who recalls the splendid entrances of the rhetors and sophists of the second and third centuries described in Philostratus’s Lives and reflects that this newly discovered hall and the exedra were in all likelihood built by the famous Ephesian

Performance Space   193 sophist Flavius Damianus, will understand that in the building of the auditorium was foreseen such a sumptuous context for the person of the speaker.2

More recently, it has been suggested that a statue of Damianus himself, as both orator and donor of the building, may have stood here (Barresi 2007, 148). But Keil’s identification of the dedicator of the palaestra (IvE 439), whose wife or daughter seems to be named Anto[nina], with Damianus himself remains questionable (Burrell 2006, 448n45; Dillon 1996, 272; Steskal 2003, 232–​233). To discover the true benefactor of the East Gymnasium awaits further analysis of the building. Nevertheless, the archaeology of the spaces here presents clear evidence of a change in the spatial uses of the palaestra from the later second century, from an essentially athletic character to one of intellectual activities and musical-​cultural pursuits (Steskal 2003, 234–​235). This also seems to be reflected in the choices of statuary, with images of religious and cultural subjects, including the Muses, replacing the athletic themes of Vedius’s earlier gymnasium (Barresi 2007, 147). In the earlier Harbor Baths at Ephesus, a bronze statue in the palaestra of an athlete cleaning his strigil evoked Lysippus’s notorious original on the theme (Lattimore 1972; Newby 2005, 232–​233), but in the Severan period more moralizing themes became popular, such as the Punishment of Dirce, whose fountain at Thebes had become a symbol of the Greek gymnasium (Plut. De cup. 7, 526b; Favorinus fr. 96.7). Such a statue was installed in the hypaithron, an open-​air space in the gymnasium at Thyateira in Lydia, by Aelius Aelianus (TAM 5.2.926), perhaps in emulation of the colossal version of the same story in the Baths of Caracalla at Rome, the celebrated ‘Farnese Bull’ (DeLaine 1997, 79). Aelianus also contributed statue groups with Heracles and Ganymede, but it was the Dirce group which was represented on the city’s coins (BMC Lydia 125–​127). In the late Antonine period the enigmatic Building M at Side, which has all the characteristics of a gymnasium, was provided with lecture rooms; and the column façade facing onto the palaestra-​like court was adorned with sculptures derived from classical models. A similar hall was built in the early third century in the gymnasium at Sardis and has been reconstructed as the “Marble Court.” The fifth-​or sixth-​century epigram, inscribed on the podium of its aedicular façade, appears to describe this hall as an “immense, high-​roofed, gold-​gleaming chamber,” and its new restoration as “with a golden ceiling” (Yegül 1986, 171–​172 no. 8), like Lucian’s hall. Here one should probably not imagine a timber truss roof across the whole court, let alone a masonry roof, but, despite the grandiose rhetoric, a more modest structure like the “fountain for olive oil (elaiou krene) with a golden roof ” in the gymnasium of Asclepius at Smyrna, which the sophist Heraclides of Lycia restored, “contributing to the beauty of Smyrna” (Philostr. VS 2.26, 613; Barresi 2007, 142). Archaeologists have suggested that it took the form of a cantilevered canopy with gilt wooden coffers projecting out over the aediculae (Yegül 1986, 65). If this was the case, the structure would have provided orators with both an august setting and an acoustic space with a sounding board like those at Aspendus and elsewhere. Alternatively, the innovative vaulted architecture of the early second-​century baths gymnasium complex at Argos (BCH 98 [1974]) also offered an appealing receptacle for the orator’s voice (Lancaster 2015). Indeed, the arch poetic language of an inscription

194   Paideia and Performance from the Agora, referring to waters “brought down from above” (BCH 102 [1978], 782–​4 E 92; Spawforth and Walker 1986, 102–​103 Walker 1987, 64), may preserve the rhetorical language of an oration delivered at the building’s dedication. The building at Athens itself that most resembles these gymnasia in Asia Minor is the so-​called “Library of Hadrian.” As several scholars have recognised, its form of open precinct surrounded by spaces that might be used for lecture rooms or meetings is very similar to that of Greek gymnasia, as well as the Temple of Peace in Rome (Boatwright 1997; La Rocca 2014). The arrangement of columns around the complex suggests that the space might be the same as the location described by Pausanias, “the Hundred Columns of Phrygian marble,” which had rooms with gilded ceilings and ἀλαβάστρῳ λίθῳ (Paus. 1.18.9).

12.4  Domestic Space and Sophistic Rhetoric The inclusion of a gilt ceiling recalls Lucian’s description of the hall which he presents a remarkable venue for rhetorical delivery (De domo 4): Anyone who sees it and is trained in the arts of rhetoric would surely have an equal longing to make a speech in it, fill it with shouting and become himself a part of its beauty, rather than looking it all over, feeling amazed, and leaving, as if deaf and dumb, without a word to anyone.

The writer goes on to describe how this “finest of halls” is filled with “fine speaking” (εὐφημία), echoing like a grotto and enhancing the speaker’s delivery, stretching out the last syllables of each phrase and lingering on the last words of each period to create a harmony between building and viewer that hints at the relationship of Echo and Narcissus. Lucian draws particular attention to the golden ceiling, the radiant “head” of the room and “decorated as much with gold as the sky is with the stars” (De domo 8), and he also describes the paintings with potential for evoking moralising themes. Yet this inspirational and acoustically convenient environment threatens to undermine the speaker with its distracting allure (Thomas 2007, 231–​235). The gilt decoration and concern with acoustics may suggest the grandeur of a public auditorium, and it has been suggested that this hall was part of a public gymnasium (Barresi 2007, 148). However, its spatial and decorative characteristics could equally have found place in a private house. The recently excavated houses on the terrace south of the main Kuretenstresse at Ephesus provide a good archaeological parallel. In House 1, for example, the heightening of Room B in the Antonine era (Period 3 of the house’s history) would have created a commodious space for recitations; the walls were painted with faux marbles and the flat wooden ceiling could have been gilt or painted gold (Lang-​Auinger 1996, 197–​199, figs. 71a–​b).

Performance Space   195 That Lucian’s description seems to refer to the highly embellished room of a private house, rather than a public building, emerges not so much from the ambiguous name later given to this work as from the writer’s comparison of experience of the space to Telemachus’ response to the house of Menelaus (De Domo 3): The response is not just a eulogy of the hall—​it was perhaps appropriate for the young islander in this way to be bowled over by Menelaus’s house and to compare its gold and ivory to the beauties in heaven, as he had seen no other beautiful thing on earth—​but actually speaking in it and assembling all the best men and making a display [epideixin] of words would itself be a part of the eulogy.

The same Homeric passage (Od. 4.300) is cited by Plutarch, who commented on the self-​ indulgent materialism of contemporary private houses (De Cup. 9): Most of us make the mistake of Telemachus, who, through inexperience, or rather lack of good taste, when he saw Nestor’s house furnished with beds and tables, garments and carpets, and well stored with sweet and pleasant wine, did not look upon his host as so happy a man in being thus well provided with things necessary and useful; but when he saw the ivory, gold, and amber in Menelaus’s house, cried out in amazement: Such, and not nobler, in the realms above, My wonder dictates is the dome of Jove. [Od. 4.74] Whereas Socrates or Diogenes would instead have said: What vain, vexatious, useless things I’ve seen, And good for nothing but to move one’s spleen. You fool, what are you saying? When you ought to have stripped your wife of her purple and gaudy attire, so that she might cease to live luxuriously and run mad after strangers and their fashions, instead of this, do you adorn and beautify your house, so that it may appear like a theatre or a stage to all comers? (trans. W. W. Goodwin, 1874, adapted)

Many rhetors, like Proclus of Naucratis, Philostratus’s own teacher (Philostr. VS 2.21, 603–​4), who shared his substantial private library with his own students, rehearsed their declamations in their own houses, but this did not mean that the architectural setting was more modest than public spaces. Polemon’s house was reputed to be the finest in Smyrna (Philostr. VS 534; Gleason 1995, 26). The covered porticoes of ancient houses would have offered a suitable space not just to converse or contemplate, but to practice oratory, inspired by thematically appropriate decoration. Herodes Atticus’s father is reputed to have “instructed that all the herms of ancient orators that were in the colonnades [dromoi] of [Herodes’s] house should be pelted with stones, because they had ruined his son” (Philostr. VS 1.21, 521). This may refer to Herodes’s villas in Greece

196   Paideia and Performance or in the Triopion outside Rome. If the Younger Pliny’s villas seem more suited for quiet reading than public recitations (Pliny, Ep. 2.17.7), the two theaters at Hadrian’s Villa at Tivoli, on a grander level—​the South Theater with twelve rows of seats in Greek marble and an Imperial loggia, and the smaller so-​called ‘Greek Theater’ (Sear 2006, 46)—​must have served rhetorical performances as well as plays and poetry. In the light of what we know of the great set-​piece speeches by Polemon and Aristides, there is no reason to believe that sophistic rhetoric was confined to purpose-​built interior spaces. Just as many theaters demanded open-​air delivery, other external venues could also offer potential for epideictic oratory. Public space offered opportunities as much as religious precincts. Aristides’s great Rome oration must have been delivered in one of the great public spaces of the capital. While the auditoria of Hadrian’s Athenaeum would have offered a suitable theater for such an oration, perhaps nowhere would have been more appropriate for that extravagant set-​piece than the recently completed and consecrated Temple of Venus and Rome, the Templum Urbis, whose festival on April 21, 143 Aristides undoubtedly attended.3 The showpiece court erected by the benefactress Plancia Magna in front of the Hellenistic city gate at Perge in Pamphylia invited orators to exalt the city and dwell on its founding legends. Among the statues of local mythological heroes arranged in the lower-​story niches of the horseshoe-​shaped court were images of the seers Calchas and Mopsus, whose legendary poetic contest presented a model for Second Sophistic orators. The Panhellenic associations of the whole group with their links to the tale of the Argonauts would have formed an easy visual reference point for local speakers seeking evidence of a link to Hadrian’s Panhellenion or a counterweight to arguments that this Pamphylian community did not belong to the genos Hellenikon (Scheer 1993, 201). By late antiquity the imperial fora where we began this chapter had become the venue not just for learned conversations, but for public recitals. Around 380 ce, a space known as the schola Traiani, very likely the curved exedra of Trajan’s Forum, appears to have been used by the Syrian rhetor Hierius and his brother Dracontius to revise declamations. Some fifteen years later, the Christian rhetor Severus Sanctus Endelechius used the Forum of Augustus as a schoolroom in which his pupil Sallustius rehearsed a critical reading of the ninth book of Apuleius’s Metamorphoses (Marrou 1932). If this seems a more formalized version of the improvisations of the second century, it very probably continues that tradition and may hint that Favorinus’s excursus was not untypical of the earlier period. It witnesses the very real nexus between architecture and rhetoric and how the intellectual endeavours of the Second Sophistic were constantly played out in formal architectural space.

Further Reading For more detail on the architectural aspects of the theaters and odea discussed here, see Izenour 1992 and Dodge 1999; and, for the gymnasia of Rome, Greece, and Asia Minor, see Nielsen 1990 and Yegül 1992. Newby 2005 surveys athletic decoration in gymnasia in the

Performance Space   197 context of the Second Sophistic. An analysis of the odeum at Cos is offered by Chlepa 1999, but the fullest and most enlightening discussions of such buildings are the studies by Steskal and La Torre 2008 of Vedius’s Gymnasium and Bier 2011 of the Bouleuterion at Ephesus. Lucian’s text is discussed in more detail in the context of monumental architecture of the Antonine period by Thomas 2007, and Newby 2002 provides an excellent close discussion of the relations between this text and sophistic performance. The essays collected in Borg 2004, Cordovana and Galli 2007, and Elsner 2002 provide good explorations of the relations between verbal and visual culture in the Second Sophistic. For a consideration of the deeper relations between architecture and rhetoric in particular, see Thomas 2014.

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Performance Space   201 Steskal, M. 2003. “Bemerkungen zur Funktion der Palästren in den Ephesischen Bad-​ Gymnasium-​Komplexen.” JÖAI 72: 226–​239. Steskal, M., K. Grossschmidt, M. Heinz, F. Kanz, and H. Taeuber. 2003. “Die Damianosstoa in Ephesos. Bericht über die Ausgrabung 2002 im Abscnitt Kathodos III.” Österreichische Jahreshefte 72: 241–​273. Steskal, M., and M. La Torre. 2008. Das Vediusgymnasium in Ephesos. Forschungen in Ephesos 14/​1. Vienna. Strong, D. E., and J. B. Ward-​Perkins. 1962. “The Temple of Castor in the Forum Romanum.” PBSR 30: 1–​30. Szewczyk, M. 2015. “Nouveaux éléments pour l’étude d’un portrait de notable.” Rev. Ét. Anc. 117: 129–​151. Thomas, E. V. 2007. Monumentality of the Roman Empire: Architecture in the Antonine Age. Oxford. Thomas, E. V. 2013. “Translating Roman architecture into Greek regional identities.” In Les Grecs Héritiers des Romains, Entretiens sur l’Antiquité Classique 59, edited by Paul Schubert, 147–​202. Vandœuvres. Thomas, E. V. 2014. “On the Sublime in Architecture.” In Art and Rhetoric in Roman Culture, edited by J. Elsner and M. Meyer, 37–​88. Cambridge. Valentini, R., and G. Zucchetti. 1940–​1953. Codice topografico della città di Roma. Rome. Vassilantonopoulos, S. L., and J. N. Mourjopoulos. 2009. “The Acoustics of Roofed Ancient Odeia: The Case of Herodes Atticus’ Odeion.” Acta Acustica United with Acustica 95: 291–​299. Virgili, P. 1996. “Odeum, Odium.” In Lexicon Topographicum Urbis Romae, edited by E. M. Steinby, 3:359–​360. Rome. Volpe, R. 2007. “Le Terme di Traiano e la ξυστιχή σύνοδος.” In Res bene gestae: Ricerche di storia urbana su Roma antica in onore di Eva Margareta Steinby, edited by A. Leone, D. Palombi, and S. Walker, 427–​437. Rome. Waelkens, M., and Poblome, J. 2011. Sagalassos:  eine Römische Stadt in der Südwesttürkei. Cologne. Walker, S. 1987. “Roman nymphaea in the Greek world.” In Roman Architecture in the Greek World, edited by S. Macready and F. H. Thompson, 60–​7 1. London. Watson, F. R. 1930. Acoustics of Buildings, Including Acoustics of Auditoriums and Sound-​ Proofing of Rooms. 2nd ed. New York and London. Weber, W. 1907. Untersuchungen zur Geschichte des Kaisers Hadrianus. Leipzig. Willers, D. 1990. Hadrians panhellenisches Programm:  Archäologische Beiträge zur Neugestaltung Athens durch Hadrian. Basel. Winter, B. W. 2002. Philo and Paul among the Sophists. 2nd ed. Grand Rapids, MI. Yegül, F. 1986. The Bath-​Gymnasium Complex at Sardis. Cambridge, MA. Yegül, F. 1992. Baths and Bathing in Classical Antiquity. New York and Cambridge, MA.

Pa rt  I V

R H E TOR IC A N D R H E TOR IC IA N S

Chapter 13

Greek and L at i n Rh etorical C u lt u re Laurent Pernot

Rediscovering prosperity and prestige after the troubled times of the Roman conquest, the Greek world, from the first century ce, experienced a cultural renaissance of which rhetoric was a major manifestation. An imposing body of preserved texts is witness to rhetoric’s importance: in the field of practical oratory, the collections of orations and other works by Dio of Prusa, Aelius Aristides, and Lucian; in rhetorical theory, the treatises handed down under the name of Hermogenes, as well as the other handbooks gathered under the name of Rhetores Graeci. These sources belong to the period of the High Empire (first to third centuries ad), which corresponds to the era traditionally assigned to the Second Sophistic; they testify to massive and omnipresent rhetorical activity. In Latin, the works of Quintilian, Fronto, and Apuleius represent, in certain ways, a community of spirit with the Greek Second Sophistic.

13.1  Rhetorical Formation Rhetoric was an educational system, a social practice, and a mental tool. Already present in secondary schooling, rhetoric was the core curriculum of higher education. Instruction rested on three pillars: reading, exercises, and theory. Students were encouraged to read and comment upon the major authors of the classical period, in order to steep themselves in the procedures of those writers’ artistry and habits of language. Rhetoric, with its companion, grammar, thus encompassed what we call “literary criticism” and “linguistics.” Exercises—​the second pillar—​formed a graduated series:  first the “preparatory exercises” (in Greek progymnasmata, in Latin praeexercitamenta), that is, prose composition exercises in the fable, narrative, commenting upon maxims, confirmation or refutation of a tale, commonplaces (topoi), praise, invective, comparisons, speeches

206   Rhetoric and Rhetoricians “in  character”  (prosôpopoiia), description, outlining a thesis to be argued, and proposal of a law. Next came “declamation” (in Greek meletê, literally “training”; in Latin declamatio), which involved composing a fictional speech under the guise of an actual oration, dealing with actions mythological or historical, or with an unspecified time or place. In Latin terminology, controversiae, belonging to the legal genre and imitating a courtroom speech, whether for the plaintiff or the defense, were distinguished from suasoriae, which belonged to the deliberative genre and imitated advice given before an assembly or council, supporting or opposing some measure or action. A progressive principle informed these exercises, leading the students from the easiest to the more difficult, from the more narrative types of exposition to those requiring the greatest argumentative effort. Thus they provided an apprenticeship in discursive structures, by means of creative written work and spoken and written handling of varied texts. At the same time, precise heuristic rules framed this inventive pedagogy. Finally, theory training dealt with the five components of discourse, which the imperial age codified down to the smallest details, following the research of classical and Hellenistic theorists: discovery (“invention”) of key ideas, arranging of arguments (whether to prove or disprove), style, memorization, and oral delivery. The teaching of rhetoric developed the aptitude for reasoning and for synthesizing complex and intricate sources of information. It fostered deepening familiarity with the great classics, aiming at perfecting language and imitating the major authors. It developed and employed a linguistic, literary, and historical culture, as well as legal knowledge. After this training, students were equipped for the major literary, political, and administrative careers to which rhetoric led. A complementary method of oratorical education was the “apprenticeship in public life” (tirocinium fori), which formed part of the Roman “ancestral custom” (mos maiorum). The young man was placed under the care of some leading citizen; he escorted him everywhere and was instructed by his example (Tac. Dial. 34). Additionally, rhetoric, as a discipline meant for the education of the young, inculcated in them a certain sense of what a man was supposed to be, in the ways of thinking, speaking, upholding one’s social rank, choosing one’s words and ideas, placing the voice, dressing. It was a school of citizenship and also, given the male dominance of the time, a school of manliness. The characters and texts on which it focused conveyed values relating to morality, cultural identity, and society. Rhetorical training was not just instruction, it was cultural formation (paideia) as well.

13.2  The Omnipresence of Public Speaking Shifting from the classroom to public life, one observes that the Roman Empire provided numerous opportunities for speaking. Some authors, both ancient and modern

Greek and Latin Rhetorical Culture    207 (beginning with the Tacitus of the Dialogus), have written that a decline in oratory marked the imperial era, since a monarchy had replaced the Roman Republic and the cities of Greece were subservient to Roman power. The rhetoric of this period, they say, when it was not academic, was empty and artificial. But this is too quick a judgment. In fact, rhetoric retained a usefulness and effectiveness in many situations that were not insignificant. In the Greek world, the council and assembly continued to debate real issues; the cities and orators preserved some room for maneuvering under the control of Roman authority. The works of the sophist-​philosopher Dio of Prusa, for example, include a series of speeches that shed light on the realities of municipal politics. In the reign of Vespasian, Dio strove to calm the citizenry after a grain riot: the rioters meant to stone the orator and burn down his house with his wife and child inside, and his speech aims at preventing the recurrence of such agitation (Or. 46). Under Nerva and Trajan, Dio steps up his speaking, especially on behalf of his pet project of large public works and on the relations of Prusa with its neighbor, Apamea (Or. 41–​51). With their fellow citizens’ mandate, the sophists—​and politicians in general—​gave repeated advice, exhortations, requests: their deliberative orations involved addresses before municipal and provincial assemblies, ambassadorial missions to provincial governors and emperors, and speeches on general policy concerning the empire, such as Dio’s four orations On Kingship (Or. 1–​4) and the Roman Oration of Aelius Aristides (Or. 26). As for courtroom oratory, it obviously remained in use before all the tribunals of the empire, and the sophists pleaded cases on a regular basis. The father of Alexander Peloplaton was an expert in legal speeches, and Chrestos of Byzantium counted three celebrated lawyers among his students (Philostr. VS 570, 591). Often the sophists pleaded on their own behalf, for example, before the proconsul or the emperor, when they were accused of homicide—​a charge attested several times (555–​556, 588, 626)—​or when they had to justify their exemption from public duties, or defend their property and political influence (512, 517, 560–​561, 614, 622–​623). Besides these cases where they had no choice, Philostratus informs us that Nicetes, Ptolemy of Naucratis, Apollonius of Athens, and Philostratus of Lemnos were court regulars (511 and 516, 595, 600, 628); Scopelian, Polemo, and Damian of Ephesus are expressly presented as lawyers, taking fees but also agreeing to speak gratis on occasion (519, 524–​25, 606). Thanks to their legal expertise, certain sophists obtained the post of advocatus fisci, and the missions they led in the name of their city could make authentic pleas before the emperor’s tribunal.1 They spoke for themselves, because it would be strange were a professor of rhetoric to have recourse to a borrowed mouthpiece; they paraded their influence before the municipal tribunals, which remained places of political rivalry; they particularly hankered after major cases, the sort that worked their way up to the emperor. The third form of oratory, called epideictic (“display”), acquired an unprecedented importance during the empire. There was no ceremony without its speech, whether it was the big events of private life, life in the schools, or political and religious life. Orators tirelessly lauded members of the leading families, holders of public office, the emperor,

208   Rhetoric and Rhetoricians cities, the gods. In humorous counterpoint, the mock encomium dealt with topics like hair, a fly, or a parrot.

13.3  Knowledge and Power The figure of the sophist combines literary activity and political influence. Rhetoric is their secret link. Consider the standard image of the sophist as it emerges from the Lives of the Sophists by Philostratus. Declamation is the defining activity of the Second Sophistic, in the two forms of ethical declamation and historical declamation: “the Second Sophistic described the types of the poor man, rich man, valiant man, and tyrant, and dealt with the nominative subjects history furnishes” (VS 481).2 The sophist in the strict sense, according to Philostratus, was a professor of declamation. This definition explains Philostratus’s choices, and especially the overwhelming importance of declamation in his biographies. It also explains the author’s interest in kindred elements: improvisation, because talent in this area was a characteristic of the successful declaimer; the genre of prolalia, or dialexis, which served as a “warmup” to declamations; stylistic issues, because style in the eyes of Philostratus represents the most difficult facet of oratory and, therefore, the principal topic of higher education; finally, everything to do with teaching, like anecdotes of life in the schools, collegial relations, the ties of master to disciple. Yet Philostratus makes it quite clear that the sophists were not sequestered in schools and that they indeed had a public function. Declamation was not cut off from social life. Performances of declamations were open to outside, nonacademic listeners; performances might take place in the theater, and the emperors themselves did not disdain attendance. Moreover, on a larger scale, political and social issues were at stake in instructional activity. Star sophists attracted the sons of the leading families: Chrestos of Byzantium had a hundred paying students, many of whom went on to successful careers (VS 591). Nominations to the chairs of rhetoric at Athens and Rome depended on the emperor. One point particularly worth stressing is the role sophistic teaching played in affirming Hellenic identity. The schools of declamation were the conservatories of the Greek language (Atticism was the practice there) and Greek culture (they revered the great authors of the past and brought back to life the famous figures of ancient history). They were Panhellenic sites, melting pots of students from all the provinces of the Greek-​speaking East communing in a shared paideia. So the sophists, as such, propagated Greek identity, which was inextricably bound up with its cultural standards and fundamental myths. They maintained the uniqueness of the Greek-​speaking East within the heart of the Roman Empire. Moreover, the life of the sophists was not reduced to teaching. They delivered public speeches, to which Philostratus sometimes alludes, and the majority of them performed various civic functions, whether in the city of their birth or in their adopted homeland;

Greek and Latin Rhetorical Culture    209 they held magistracies and acted as benefactors through the largess they personally disbursed or that they obtained from governing authorities. They traveled, and cities honored them; the greatest received the accolades of emperors. The most celebrated cases are Polemon of Laodicea and Herodes Atticus, two very important figures, whose biographies represent, at the center of Philostratus’s work (one at the end of book 1, the other at the beginning of book 2), the culminating point of his presentation. The portrait of Scopelian of Clazomenae provides a telling example, in which description of declamations is framed, on the one hand, by mention of addresses to the assembly and the tribunal, and by the recounting, on the other, of missions he undertook to Domitian on behalf of the city of Smyrna and the province of Asia. The professor stands revealed as both orator and politician (VS 519–​520). Philostratus does not explicitly establish a connection between the two panels of the diptych, declamation on one side, social influence on the other. But he suggests that based on their ability as professor and declaimer, the sophists extended their reach in public life. Rhetoric (with all that accompanies it, such as teaching, culture in general, language, the values of Hellenism, etc.) contributed to the sway many sophists exercised. It is a key to understanding the period. And the witness of epigraphic and archeological evidence echoes that of the Life of the Sophists.3 It is understandable why, in the Greek of the imperial age, use of the words sophistês and rhêtôr overlaps, each being equally applicable to the same individual. The sophist was defined first by rhetoric, and even by what was the most rhetorical aspect of rhetoric: the fictional oration, the school. That is the source from which the sophist acquired his specialty, his technê. Rhetoric, for the ancients, was simultaneously an intellectual discipline and the instrument of political and social life. The sophist, as master of the art of oratory, was not confused with a man of letters or with a specialist who excelled in some skill removed from the world. His domain was the spoken word, and through it public action; it implied, ipso facto, some social influence. In ancient civilization, one who masters speech and transmits this mastery to others is a model of man useful to the community and worthy of success. Through rhetoric, the art of the sophist effected the alliance of knowledge and power.

13.4  The Art of the Encomium The principal rhetorical innovation of the Second Sophistic was the development of the epideictic genre. In the realm of theory, treatises devoted exclusively to the encomium appeared for the first time. The handbooks of preparatory exercises included a chapter on the enkômion that provided small studies, still quite simple, but already free-​standing, on praise and invective, as is readily apparent in Aelius Theon, Hermogenes, and their successors. More extensive treatments divide into two groups. Some (for example, the first treatise attributed to Menander Rhetor, third century ce) consider successively the different objects: praise of a god, of a city, of a man,

210   Rhetoric and Rhetoricians of an animal, of a thing. Others (for example, the Rhetoric of Pseudo-​Dionysius of Halicarnassus and the second treatise attributed to Menander Rhetor) classify epideictic material according to types of speech: no more question of praise of a god, a city, a man, but of welcome speech, bon voyage speech, epithalamium, funeral oration, address to a governor, praise of the emperor, panegyric, and so on. One cannot insist too much on the importance of this latter group, which has no equivalent in the treatises concerned with the two other genres: the encomium is no longer conceived of as an abstract rhetorical form, but as a social activity incarnated in speeches given on specific occasions. The preserved treatises represent only a fraction of a much larger theoretical output that responded to need. Epideictic practice was indeed quite rich. The Second Sophistic developed traditional forms, like praise of the sovereign or the funeral oration. It gave unprecedented frequency to types of orations previously rare, like the civic encomium, the inaugural address, the prose hymn. The imperial age also witnessed the development of encomiastic competitions. The encomium achieved a greater importance in genres whose deliberative aspect was previously more marked, like the panegyric and the embassy speech. Finally, occasions for speaking grew in number. Throughout the empire, ceremonial addresses, delivered by sophists, punctuated the circumstances of public and private life. During the High Empire, the Greeks had a ruler, over and above the governors: cities were in the control of leading men; prosperity encouraged civic growth, peace favored travel, festivities in honor of the gods and emperors multiplied. All these developments, culminating in the second century ce, offered new objects and new opportunities for rhetorical praise, prompting it and making it more useful than before. Teaching adapted itself to this situation by offering students an at least rudimentary training in encomiastic studies. As for the masters of ceremonies, they were the sophists, who turned epideictic oratory into one of their principal activities. The Roman world on its own had long been familiar with the laudatio funebris. The emperor and imperial family was the object of speeches delivered on birthdays and jubilees, at weddings, and so on. A frequent type of oration was the consuls’ gratiarum actio. Fronto delivered several encomia of Hadrian before the Senate, and he congratulated Antoninus Pius on the success of the war in Britain (Fronto, M. Caes. 2.4). The rhetorical encomium was a refined, coded instrument, which served to express approval, certainly, and often hyperbolically, but which also aimed at communicating veiled messages, at making requests, negotiating, and indeed criticizing. The encomium was particularly effective in setting forth models. It was called upon to reinforce public adherence to accepted and recognized standards. Gods, cities, sovereigns, leaders, institutions: it praised what everyone already respected or was thought to respect. Its function was to reaffirm and constantly to recreate the consensus on prevailing values. It established a moment of communion, during which society presented to itself the spectacle of its own unity.

Greek and Latin Rhetorical Culture    211 Epideictic orators enlightened the collectivity on its own feelings, provided a reasoned basis for its traditional practices, and translated its convictions into the respected language of rhetoric. In this light, they can be described as ideologues. They shaped understandings and elaborated a vision of the world. While other types of thinkers played a similar role at the same time, the uniqueness of epideictic rhetoricians consisted in considering things from the angle of the praiseworthy and the collective interest. Epideictic orators presented the shining and concordant face of the social conscience, to the detriment of any concern for strictly impartial and critical observation. The encomium was a speech removed from reality, and it owed all its richness to this remove, which allowed it to extol values. Its persuasive force derived simultaneously from its beautiful language, culture, and morality, as well as from public and ceremonial oratorical “performance.” Still, hidden meanings often lurked in the background. For example, concerning the welcoming speech addressed to a governor taking up office, Menander Rhetor advises thinking about what is to come, by positioning the encomium in the future (2.379–​381). Beginning with praise for the new governor’s justice, the orator must avow his conviction that the magistrate will show, through his administration, that he is a better judge than Minos, Aeacus, and Rhadamanthus, that no one will be arbitrarily imprisoned, that the rights of different social classes will be respected. Moving on to courage, the speaker ought to declare that the governor will have the necessary tenacity to defend his province’s cause before the emperor. Other encomia follow in the same vein, concluding: “Is it not obvious that the governor is going to execute his office in a manner conducive to the good of his subjects?” At first glance, this blatant confidence might seem so much flattery, or even naïveté resulting from the desire to cover the encomium’s standard topics at all cost. But just consider things from the governor’s point of view. Barely arrived, in the presence of all the city’s leading lights, he listens to the local sophist describe to him the program his administration is meant to fulfill, a description which, while studded with mythological and historical references and grounded in the Platonic system of the four virtues, is no less replete with specific allusions to the province’s concrete problems. Far from naïve, this address indicates to the new governor, with a great deal of elegance, what the governed expect of him. It is a program outlined upon entry into office, a midpoint between an entreaty and a bill of particulars. The encomium conveys an implied request. In other rhetorical encomia of the Second Sophistic, admonitions, veiled criticisms, or frank thoughts may be surmised. In particular, when it comes to the rapport between Greeks and Romans, the Greek encomia of Rome suggest an interpretatio Graeca of the Roman domination. Written in Greek, by Greeks, in the name of Greek interests, these speeches put forth a proud and partisan reading of the reality of empire; they set down the terms of Hellenic acceptance of Roman conquest. Thus, the rhetorical encomium was a subtle instrument of communication in the sophists’ hands. Behind the parroting and hyperbole, lie discernible messages, claims, warnings, expressions of pride, self-​respect, ill humor.

212   Rhetoric and Rhetoricians

13.5  First Sophistic, Second, Third . . . How Many Sophistics? In 1993, I used the expression “Third Sophistic,” and this term has been repeated and discussed.4 The debate it has aroused is helpful in understanding the Second Sophistic better. When modern scholars speak of the “Second Sophistic,” following Philostratus (VS 480–​481), they mean the literary and social movement that existed in the Greek world from the end of the first century ce until the third. Philostratus offered this designation to describe his contemporary situation, as he saw it, and to relate the present to the great models of the past. He aimed to trace a parallel between classical Greece and the High Roman Empire by observing that a category of individuals with similar characteristics existed in both these historical periods: the “sophists,” those virtuosos of oratory, at once professors of rhetoric, traveling lecturers, and civic leaders. In speaking of the “Third Sophistic” or of the “Second Sophistic Encored,” apropos of the fourth century and beyond, I wanted to emphasize that the phenomenon of the Second Sophistic did not disappear at the moment where Philostratus’s Lives breaks off (that is, toward the end of the first third of the third century ce) and that some sophistic figures continued to flourish in the Christian empire, in the world of Late Antiquity, presenting the same characteristics as before and still displaying a combination of literature and politics under rhetoric’s auspices (for example, Libanius, Themistius, the Cappadocian Fathers of the Church). Pursuing this line of thought, one may note that sophists existed in other periods as well. Thus in the second half of the third century ce, Callinicus of Petra was a notable personage, who conversed with emperors and high government officials and involved himself in public life. The rhetoric of the encomium, in which he specialized, enabled him to convey messages with a political dimension concerning the emperor and the empire. His career, highlighted by teaching, rivalry with colleagues, and the writing of speeches and treatises on rhetoric, as well as a work of history, is a typical sophistic career. It demonstrates how, in the full “crisis” of the Roman Empire, in the void apparent between the “Second Sophistic” and the “Third Sophistic,” between the Lives of the Sophists of Philostratus and the Lives of the Philosophers and Sophists of Eunapius, there was still room for teaching and culture, for travel and exchanges, for the oral delivery and written publication of speeches, for the Greek sophists’ political and ideological influence.5 Going back in time, toward the end of the Hellenistic Age and the beginning of the empire (between the “First Sophistic” and the “Second Sophistic,” therefore), one can see still other individuals who merit the name of “sophists.” These include the contemporary sophists to whom the third book of Philodemus’s Rhetoric alludes; the orator, statesman, and professor, Potamon of Mytilene (FGrH 147); or certain declaimers whom the Elder Seneca cites.

Greek and Latin Rhetorical Culture    213 So it is essential to understand the Second Sophistic within a continuum, especially in its rhetorical dimension. The Sophist is one of the cultural icons of Greco-​Roman civilization, just like the Philosopher. In every period, sophists existed, in the sense, defined above, of professor of rhetoric, orator, lecturer, and civic figure. But in certain, particularly brilliant and well-​documented eras, the figure of the Sophist took on special importance and prominence: so in late classical Greece, or during the High Empire. This phenomenon can be compared, mutatis mutandis, with that of Neoplatonism: Platonism and Platonists existed throughout antiquity, but the third to sixth centuries ce were a special time. Likewise, in the case of sophistic, the period of the High Empire witnessed the development of a new, or renewed, style of public figure, designated by the quite ancient name of “sophist,” but endowed with novel importance and influence and characterized by political activity, especially at the local level, and by social success based on rhetorical teaching and oratorical ability. This evolution gave the sophists of the Second Sophistic a rhetorical and political stature all their own.

Further Reading For an overview of rhetoric during the Second Sophistic, see Kennedy 1972; Pernot 2005, 128–​ 201. On the linguistic, literary, historical, and religious context, see Anderson 1993 and 1994, Bowersock 1969, Swain 1996, Whitmarsh 2005. The Lives of the Sophists by Philostratus provides a colorful and detailed description that especially stresses the rhetorical aspects of the sophists’ activity (English translation in Wright 1921). On the teaching of rhetoric, see Kennedy 2003. Quintilian’s Education of the Orator offers the best guide for learning about rhetorical theory, not only Roman, but also Greek (English translation in Russell 2001). The treatises On Epideictic Discourses by Menander Rhetor complement Quintilian by analyzing the genre of the encomium, about which Quintilian has little to say (English translation in Russell and Wilson 1981). On the rhetoric of the encomium, see Pernot 1993, 2015; on hinting and allusions, Pernot 2008a and 2008b, 2011. The works of Aelius Aristides display different aspects of sophistic rhetoric:  declamations, hymns, solemn orations in cities and on ceremonial occasions, discussions on the definition and worth of rhetoric, polemic against colleagues, autobiographical memoirs. The works of Dio of Prusa, among other remarkable features, provide glimpses into municipal political oratory (Bithynian Orations) and the connections between rhetoric and philosophy (On Kingship, Olympian Oration). Lucian practiced rhetoric and also satirized it, for example, in the juicy pamphlet entitled Rhetorum Praeceptor (commentary by Zweimuller 2008). For further reading on these three authors see the bibliographical chapters in this volume, respectively ­chapters 17, 14, and 21.

Bibliography Amato, E., A. Roduit, and M. Steinrück, eds. 2006. Approches de la Troisième Sophistique: Hommages à Jacques Schamp. Brussels. Anderson, G. 1976. Lucian: Theme and Variation in the Second Sophistic. Leiden. Anderson, G. 1986. Philostratus: Biography and Belles Lettres in the Third Century a.d. London.

214   Rhetoric and Rhetoricians Anderson, G. 1993. The Second Sophistic:  A  Cultural Phenomenon in the Roman Empire. London and New York. Anderson, G. 1994. Sage, Saint and Sophist: Holy Men and Their Associates in the Early Roman Empire. London and New York. Bekker-​Nielsen, T. 2008. Urban Life and Local Politics in Roman Bithynia: The Small World of Dion Chrysostomos. Aarhus. Behr, C. A. 1968. Aelius Aristides and the Sacred Tales. Amsterdam. Behr, C. A. 1981–​1986. P. Aelius Aristides: The Complete Works. 2 vols. Leiden. Bompaire, J. 1958. Lucien écrivain: Imitation et création. Paris. Borg, B. E., ed. 2004. Paideia: The World of the Second Sophistic. Berlin and New York. Boulanger, A. 1923. Aelius Aristide et la sophistique dans la province d’Asie au IIe siècle de notre ère. Paris. Bowersock, G. W. 1969. Greek Sophists in the Roman Empire. Oxford. Bowersock, G. W., ed. 1974. Approaches to the Second Sophistic. University Park PA. Bowie, E.  L. 1970. “The Greeks and Their Past in the Second Sophistic.” P&P 46:  3–​41. Revised reprint in Studies in Ancient Society, edited by M. I. Finley, 166–​209. London and Boston, 1974. Bowie, E. L. 1982. “The Importance of Sophists.” In Later Greek Literature, edited by J. J. Winkler and G. Williams, 29–​59. Cambridge. Bowie, E. L., and J. Elsner, eds. 2009. Philostratus. Cambridge. Campanile, M. D. 1999. “La costruzione del sofista: Note sul bios di Polemone.” Studi ellenistici 12: 269–​315. Cohoon, J. W., and H. L. Crosby. 1932–​1951. Dio Chrysostom: Discourses. 5 vols. Cambridge, MA. Cordovana, O.  D., and M. Galli, eds. 2007. Arte e memoria culturale nell’età della Seconda Sofistica. Catania. Desideri, P. 1978. Dione di Prusa:  Un intellettuale greco nell’impero romano. Messina and Florence. Fleury, P. 2006. Lectures de Fronton: Un rhéteur latin à l’époque de la Seconde Sophistique. Paris. Franco, C. 2005. “Elio Aristide e Smirne.” Mem. dei Lincei 9.19.3: 345–​584. Gleason, M.  W. 1995. Making Men:  Sophists and Self-​ Presentation in Ancient Rome. Princeton, NJ. Goeken, J. 2011. Aelius Aristide et la rhétorique de l’hymne en prose. Turnhout. Goldhill, S., ed. 2001. Being Greek under Rome: Cultural Identity, the Second Sophistic and the Development of Empire. Cambridge. Harmon, A. M., K. Kilburn, and M. D. Macleod, eds. and trans. 1913–​1967. Lucian. London and Cambridge, MA. Harrison, S. J. 2000. Apuleius: A Latin Sophist. Oxford. Heath, M. 1995. Hermogenes “On Issues”: Strategies of Argument in Later Greek Rhetoric. Oxford. Heath, M. 2004. Menander: A Rhetor in Context. Oxford. Jones, C. P. 1978. The Roman World of Dio Chrysostom. Cambridge, MA. Jones, C. P. 1986. Culture and Society in Lucian. Cambridge, MA. Kennedy, G. A. 1972. The Art of Rhetoric in the Roman World. 300 b.c.–​a.d. 300. Princeton, NJ. Kennedy, G.  A., trans. 2003. Progymnasmata:  Greek Textbooks of Prose Composition and Rhetoric. Atlanta, GA. Kennedy, G. A. 2005. Invention and Method: Two Rhetorical Treatises from the Hermogenic Corpus. Atlanta, GA.

Greek and Latin Rhetorical Culture    215 Korenjak, M. 2000. Publikum und Redner: Ihre Interaktion in der sophistischen Rhetorik der Kaiserzeit. Zetemata 104. Munich. Krause, C. 2003. Strategie der Selbstinszenierung: Das rhetorische Ich in den Reden Dions von Prusa. Wiesbaden. Malosse, L., and B. Schouler. 2009. “Qu’est-​ce que la troisième sophistique?” Lalies 29: 157–​224. Mestre, F., and P. Gómez, eds. 2010. Lucian of Samosata: Greek Writer and Roman Citizen. Barcelona. Milazzo, A. M. 2002. Un dialogo difficile: La retorica in conflitto nei Discorsi Platonici di Elio Aristide. Hildesheim. Milazzo, A. M. 2007. Dimensione retorica e realtà politica: Dione di Prusa nelle orazioni III V VII VIII. Hildesheim. Miletti, L. 2011. L’arte dell’autoelogio: Studio sull’orazione 28 K di Elio Aristide, con testo, traduzione e commento. Pisa. Ostenfeld, E. N., ed. 2002. Greek Romans and Roman Greeks: Studies in Cultural Interaction. Aarhus. Pernot, L. 1993. La rhétorique de l’éloge dans le monde gréco-​romain. 2 vols. Paris. Pernot, L. 1997. Éloges grecs de Rome: Discours traduits et commentés. Paris. Pernot, L. 2002. “Christianisme et sophistique.” In Papers on Rhetoric, vol. 4, edited by L. Calboli Montefusco, 245–​262. Rome. Pernot, L. 2003. “L’art du sophiste à l’époque romaine:  Entre savoir et pouvoir.” In Ars et ratio: Sciences, arts et métiers dans la philosophie hellénistique et romaine, edited by C. Lévy, B. Besnier, and A. Gigandet, 126–​142. Brussels. Pernot, L. 2004. “Un témoignage sur l’histoire de la sophistique: Le livre III de la Rhétorique de Philodème.” In Papers on Rhetoric, vol. 6, edited by L. Calboli Montefusco, 151–​164. Rome. Pernot, L. 2005. Rhetoric in Antiquity. Washington, DC. Pernot, L. 2006–​2007. “Seconda Sofistica e Tarda Antichità.”Koinonia 30–​31: 7–​18. Pernot, L. 2008a. “Aelius Aristides and Rome.” In Aelius Aristides between Greece, Rome and the Gods, edited by W. V. Harris and B. Holmes, 175–​201. Leiden and Boston. Pernot, L. 2008b. “Les faux-​semblants de la rhétorique grecque.” In République des lettres, république des arts: Mélanges offerts à Marc Fumaroli, de l’Académie française, edited by C. Mouchel and C. Nativel, 427–​450. Geneva. Pernot, L. 2010a. “Callinicos de Pétra, sophiste et historien.” Rev. Ét. Grec. 123: 71–​90. Pernot, L. 2010b. “Philodème, La Rhétorique [Livre III].” In Les Épicuriens, edited by D. Delattre and J. Pigeaud, 635–​645, 1279–​1284. Paris. Pernot, L. 2011. “Elogio retorico e potere politico all’epoca della Seconda Sofistica.” In Dicere laudes: Elogio, comunicazione, creazione del consenso, edited by G. Urso, 281–​298. Pisa. Pernot, L. 2015. Epideictic Rhetoric. Austin, TX. Puech, B. 2002. Orateurs et sophistes grecs dans les inscriptions d’époque impériale. Paris. Quiroga, A. 2007. “From Sophistopolis to Episcopolis: The Case for a Third Sophistic.” Journal in Late Antique Religion and Culture 1: 31–​42. http://​orca.cf.ac.uk/​78230/​1/​A%20Quiroga%20 Third%20Sophistic.pdf. Robert, L. 1948. Hellenica: Recueil d’épigraphie, de numismatique et d’antiquité grecques. Vol. 5. Paris. Robert, L. 1980. À travers l’Asie Mineure: Poètes et prosateurs, monnaies grecques, voyageurs et géographie. Paris. Romilly, J. de. 1975. Magic and Rhetoric in Ancient Greece. Cambridge, MA, and London. Russell, D. A. 1983. Greek Declamation. Cambridge.

216   Rhetoric and Rhetoricians Russell, D. A. 2001. Quintilian: The Orator’s Education. Cambridge, MA, and London. Russell, D. A., and N. G. Wilson, eds. and trans. 1981. Menander Rhetor. Oxford. Rutherford, I. 1998. Canons of Style in the Antonine Age: Idea-​Theory in Its Literary Context. Oxford. Schmitz, T. A. 1997. Bildung und Macht:  Zur sozialen und politischen Funktion der zweiten Sophistik in der griechischen Welt der Kaiserzeit. Zetemata 97. Munich. Swain, S. 1996. Hellenism and Empire: Language, Classicism, and Power in the Greek World, ad 50–​250. Oxford. Swain, S., ed. 2000. Dio Chrysostom: Politics Letters and Philosophy. Oxford. Van Hoof, L. 2010. “Greek Rhetoric and the Later Roman Empire: The Bubble of the ‘Third Sophistic.’” Antiquité tardive 18: 211–​224. Veyne, P. 2005. L’Empire gréco-​romain. Paris. Vix, J.-​L. 2010. L’enseignement de la rhétorique au IIe siècle ap. J.-​C. à travers les discours 30–​34 d’Ælius Aristide. Turnhout. Webb, R. 2009. Ecphrasis:  Imagination and Persuasion in Ancient Rhetorical Theory and Practice. Abingdon. Whitmarsh, T. 2005. The Second Sophistic. Oxford. Wright, W. C. 1921. Philostratus, The Lives of the Sophists; Eunapius, Lives of the Philosophers and Sophists. London and Cambridge, MA. Zweimuller, S. 2008. Lukian, “Rhetorum praeceptor”:  Einleitung, Text und Kommentar. Hypomnemata 176. Göttingen.

Chapter 14

Dio Chrys o stom Claire Rachel Jackson

This chapter examines Dio Chrysostom and his place within the Second Sophistic. The first section considers Dio’s biography and the ways later interpreters have sought to categorize Dio based on his biographical experiences, with the second section demonstrating a more nuanced approach to his self-​presentation. The third explores Dio’s self-​positioning between Greek and Roman in the imperial world and his interrogation of these identity models, while the fourth considers how his literary-​critical speeches directly question the role of the Greek literary canon and mythic tradition in the Second Sophistic, despite their seeming superficiality. Although unable to cover Dio’s works in full, this chapter uses specific case studies to explore major themes in his works and offers detailed approaches to situating Dio and his eclectic corpus within the Second Sophistic.

Biography Many of the facts about Dio’s life are shrouded in the speculation of later interpreters. According to Pliny his full name was Cocceianus Dio (Ep. 10.81–​82; Gowing 1990), and he later acquired the epithet Chrysostom (“golden-​mouthed”), seemingly on account of his eloquence. He was born into a wealthy family from Prusa in the province of Bithynia around 40–​50 ad, and seems to have inherited Roman citizenship from at least one of his parents (Or. 41.6; Jones 1978, 6–​7; Swain 1996, 190–​191). It is clear from his work’s literary allusiveness and rhetorical underpinning that he received an elite education, and it has been suggested that he was a pupil of the philosopher Musonius Rufus, although this is far from certain.1 In Philostratus’s fictional biography The Life of Apollonius of Tyana, Dio appears as a philosophical advisor to Vespasian (V A 5.27–​38), but no evidence supports this (Sidebottom 1996). During the reign of Domitian, Dio was sentenced to exile, and while it has been proposed that this was on account of imperial disfavor incurred through active opposition, unsavory friendships, or his activities as

218   Rhetoric and Rhetoricians a philosopher, the precise cause and extent of his exile remain unclear (Verrengia 1999, 66–​85 outlines the evidence and a plausible reconstruction; see also Desideri 2007). He was apparently recalled after the accession of the emperor Nerva, and according to the chronology proposed by Jones 1978, 133–​140, Dio thereafter immersed himself in local politics in Prusa, but still traveled widely, even being part of an embassy to Nerva’s successor, Trajan. Based on this biography, therefore, Dio emerges as an elite, well-​educated orator whose experiences from the provinces to the heart of Rome have the potential to reveal the interaction between Greek culture and Roman power at the heart of the Second Sophistic. In his own works, however, Dio presents a more complex picture of this relationship, one which challenges any attempt to ignore the complexities of Dio’s self-​presentation in favor of a more linear biographical reading. Dio’s extant corpus comprises eighty speeches (listed in full in Swain 2000a, 8–​10), of which at least two (Orr. 37 and 64) are almost certainly falsely attributed and were written instead by Dio’s pupil Favorinus (on which see Amato 1995), and two are probably a single speech which was separated at some point (Orr. 77, 78). Across these speeches, Dio covers a tremendous variety of subjects, including addresses to the emperor Trajan, speeches on local politics in his Bithynian homeland and other provincial cities, polemical literary-​critical pieces, discussions of philosophical topics, and others which resist simple classification (Russell 1992, 7–​8 offers a self-​admittedly imperfect schema for categorizing Dio’s works). Moreover, when considered holistically, it becomes clear how frequently Dio adopts different rhetorical personas and inconsistent, even contradictory positions. For example, Dio often styles himself as a Cynic philosopher (e.g., Or. 72), but he also incorporates Socratic or Stoic perspectives into his work, as Brancacci (2000) discusses. Similarly, he sometimes criticizes canonical authors such as Homer and Euripides for their gauche style or deceptive content (Orr. 11, 66.6), but elsewhere he praises their work effusively (Or. 53). Finally, while at times Dio emphasizes his personal connection to the emperor and his involvement in the political system (Orr. 1, 3, 45, 47), at other times he criticizes sycophantic attitudes toward Rome and advocates for a life free of politics (Orr. 7.103–​108, 36.17). Combined with what we know of his life, this diversity of subject-​ matter, inconsistent tone, and contradictory positioning raises questions about how to understand and categorize Dio and his corpus. Is he a moral philosopher with a coherent agenda, or a sophist adopting whatever position fits the occasion? Does he embrace Roman imperial power sincerely, or is this pose just a foil for the greater value of Greek culture? Is Dio’s appreciation of canonical Greek authors genuine, or are they merely deployed as antiquated models against which Dio can define his own originality and authority? How, in other words, do we situate Dio within the Second Sophistic? These ambiguities have led later writers to adduce Dio’s biography, and his exile in particular, as the key to structuring his corpus. For the fifth-​century Synesius, Dio’s exile was the catalyst for a conversion from sophistry to philosophy, a conversion so definitive and absolute that for Synesius all of Dio’s writings can and should be labeled as written either before or after his exile (Dion 1.15). While it is true that Dio does adopt philosophical positions as well as the characteristically indirect flippancy of sophistry,

Dio Chrysostom   219 none of Synesius’s examples of Dio’s pre-​exilic sophistry, such as the Encomium to a Parrot, have survived, making it difficult to uncritically adopt this binary categorization (see Desideri 1973 for more on Synesius). By contrast, Philostratus categorizes Dio in his third-​century Lives of the Sophists as one of the philosopher-​sophists, as opposed to those who are pure rhetoricians, which breaks down the kind of dichotomy advocated by Synesius. Indeed, Philostratus denies that Dio was ever officially sentenced to exile, and states instead that he chose to go into hiding voluntarily out of fear of the despots in the capital (VS 488), which undermines Dio’s own claims to have been exiled for speaking out bravely against the tyrannical Domitian (Or. 45.1). And yet, Philostratus’s denial of Dio’s exile is not merely polemical or insincere, as by denying Dio an official exile, he excludes him from the iconic fate of imperial philosophers, for whom exile legitimized their reputations for speaking truth to power (Whitmarsh 2001, 134–​180, esp. 140–​141). In other words, Philostratus reinforces his categorization of Dio as a quasi-​philosopher who seems to be a sophist by denying him the distinguishing trait of a “true” imperial philosopher, meaning that his works cannot be so easily separated out into playfully sophistic and sincerely philosophical. Despite their opposed conclusions, for both Philostratus and Synesius, Dio’s exile (or lack thereof) is a way of structuring Dio’s eclectic corpus and situating him within an imperial world. This use of Dio’s exilic biography as a structuring principle for his corpus is still visible in modern scholarship, most obviously deriving from von Arnim 1898’s magisterial work (on the significance of which, see Swain 2000b, 27–​33). This view, however, ignores the complexity with which Dio himself manipulates his own exilic self-​presentation. In a now-​seminal article, John Moles (1978) has demonstrated not only how unproductive Synesius’s conversion narrative is for understanding Dio’s corpus, but also how it derives from Dio’s own presentation of his exile. Similarly, Tim Whitmarsh (1998) has shown how Philostratus’s denial of Dio’s exile responds to and questions Dio’s rhetorical manipulation of this exilic narrative, which reactivates the ambiguity surrounding Dio’s position in the imperial world. As a result, by comparing Synesius’s and Philostratus’s perspectives, it is clear not just how Dio’s biography can be used to interpret his corpus but also how Dio himself manipulates this biography. In Oration 13 (On Exile), for example, Dio presents his banishment as the result of an unfortunate friendship with a powerful, unnamed man (1), and states that although he did become a philosopher after his exile, this was not deliberate but instead the result of so many people mistaking him for one (10–​13). As Moles (2005) has shown, Oration 13 is an artfully constructed piece, balancing Greek and Roman, sincerity and irony, and Dio’s self-​consciously flippant “accidental” conversion to philosophy slyly highlights this rhetorical role-​playing and his strategic construction of an exiled-​philosopher persona. This becomes even clearer when put in contrast with Oration 45.1, where Dio states that his exile was due to his frank criticisms of Domitian, a claim which better fits with this particular speech’s overall tone of self-​justification before his native city. The malleability and fictionality of Dio’s own presentation of his exile, explored further in Jouan 1993a, demonstrates his capacity to adopt and manipulate different rhetorical personas, and consequently the impossibility of taking Dio at face value.

220   Rhetoric and Rhetoricians So how do we situate Dio within the Second Sophistic? It is clear that it is impossible to extricate Dio’s biography from his speeches, but equally clear that it cannot be taken literally. Instead, the autobiography Dio puts forward through his own orations needs to be appreciated as a facet of his rhetorical role-​playing, where it can be manipulated, exaggerated, or rewritten entirely. The case studies which make up the remainder of this chapter, drawn from both well-​known (the Kingships, Euboicus, Trojan Oration) and lesser-​discussed works (On Beauty, the Libycus), demonstrate the value of this approach, as they allow Dio’s inconsistencies of persona to be put into dialogue with broader themes of the period, including relationships between past and present, Greek and Roman, philosophical sincerity and sophistic flippancy. In other words, by appreciating Dio’s manipulations of narrative and characters rather than positing a linear relationship between biography and rhetoric, we can better understand how Dio actively explores his own position within the Second Sophistic.

Euboicus (Or. 7) The practical impact of Dio’s manipulation of these rhetorical masks can be seen in Oration 7, often called the Euboicus or Euboean Oration. In the first place, the Euboicus itself is a problematic text, given its uneven tone, unstable structure, and unclear context. In this speech, the narrator describes how, having been shipwrecked in Euboea, he met a huntsman with a troubled experience of local politics, and then observed the hunter’s rural lifestyle (1–​80). Just over halfway through this lengthy speech, the narrator explains that the preceding narrative is an example of the morality of poverty, as demonstrated by classical poets such as Homer and Euripides (81–​102). The remainder of the speech then becomes an invective against the vices of the city, particularly homosexuality and prostitution (103–​152). As Donald Russell (1992, 12) puts it, “we began in the world of Theocritus; we end up in the world of Juvenal.” This abrupt tonal shift from pastoral idyll to urban social critique has prompted a number of questions about the structural integrity of the speech as a whole, in particular whether it is incomplete or whether it is actually an amalgamation of two speeches (Moles 1995, 179; Russell 1992, 12; Swain 1994, 169). The performance context of the speech is also unclear, as while there seems to be particular reference to Rome, with the mention of aqueducts (106), and the implicit exclusion of the Greeks (122), much depends on how we interpret the closing invective. This could be read as an attack on Roman decadence from the distance of a Greek city or, given the familiar literary basis of such criticisms, a self-​reflexive reference to the city’s reputation, or even a sincere admonition to Romans themselves. In any case, as Moles (1995, 177–​178) points out, the speech would have significance for multiple contexts, but this uncertainty demonstrates the ambiguities which surround the Euboicus. These structural and contextual issues are made more potent by the self-​ consciousness with which the Euboicus manipulates the audience’s awareness of Dio’s biography. At the very beginning of the speech, the unnamed narrator (never explicitly

Dio Chrysostom   221 identified with Dio) sets up an overarching tension between fact and fiction by stating that he will narrate something he experienced personally rather than heard from others (1). On the one hand, such assertions of a narrative’s veracity through personal experience are a hallmark of much imperial fiction, as Ní Mheallaigh (2008) demonstrates, and given the Euboicus’s potential connections to New Comedy (Highet 1973)  and the Greek novel (Jouan 1977), this might well act as a knowing comment about its fictionality. On the other hand, for an audience aware of Dio’s exile such a claim problematizes this relationship between oration and biography rather than anchoring it, as Dio knowingly draws parallels between the huntsman’s isolated existence and his own experiences. When describing the purpose of the rustic narrative, the narrator calls it an example of both the life he himself has assumed (ὑπεθέμην) and that of the poor (81), with the double meaning of ὑποτίθμι as both “propose” and “assume,” encouraging the audience to compare Dio’s life with his subject-​matter (Moles 1995, 179; Russell 1992, 132). And yet, throughout the text Dio consistently aligns himself with paradigmatic Greek literary models, which is perhaps slyly suggested by the opening comment that these experiences took place “practically in the middle of Greece” (1).2 For example, the narrator’s experiences of rustic hospitality after being shipwrecked while wandering round Greece are unavoidably Odyssean, and his philosophical persona ranges from Cynic to Socratic to Platonic (Moles 1995, 179). Moreover, the narrator’s oscillation between the rustics’ naïveté and the sophistication of his implied audience creates an ironical detachment which further destabilizes the audience’s perception of how far they should interpret the narrator’s experiences through Dio’s (Whitmarsh 2004, 460–​ 463).3 The Euboicus, therefore, demonstrates not just the impossibility of separating Dio’s biography from his work, but also the extent to which Dio problematizes this relationship for his audience. This all leads on to a final question, namely the purpose of the speech. According to Synesius, if the Euboicus is not considered to belong to Dio’s philosophical period, then it is impossible to see any of his works as philosophical (Dion 2.1–​3). By contrast, in his Lives of the Sophists, Philostratus cites the Euboicus as an example of Dio’s sophistic works alongside the Encomium of a Parrot (VS 487), a decision strongly criticized by Synesius in the passage above. These contradictory reactions reflect the Euboicus’s ambiguity, as although the speech explicitly outlines its own moral stance about halfway into its lengthy narrative (81), there is no denying that if Dio aims to make a philosophical point, he does so in a remarkably indirect way. But as we have already seen, setting Dio as philosopher against Dio as sophist risks missing the larger point about the combination of these perspectives in Dio’s works. Instead, if we take the Euboicus in its extant form rather than trying to split it along its perceived fractures, it emerges as a deliberate problematization of these different facets of Dio’s self-​presentation. For example, much like Dio’s “accidental” conversion to philosophy in Oration 13, his insistence upon having told a serious story rather than an idle one actually draws attention to his self-​ conscious digressiveness and flippancy, even when he claims to be advocating a moral point. By reading the Euboicus in this way, it becomes clear not only that it is impossible to distinguish Dio as sophist from Dio as philosopher, his biography from his rhetoric,

222   Rhetoric and Rhetoricians but more importantly, that Dio himself actively problematizes and draws attention to the problems of such a rigid categorization of his life and work.

Greece and Rome How, then, does Dio’s rhetorical manipulation of his own positioning fit into the broader context of the Second Sophistic? As has already been touched upon, Dio’s self-​ presentation as a wandering philosopher-​exile is a distinctively imperial construction, and one which relies upon a contrast between Roman political power and Greek culture to make a claim for the meaning of the latter in the context of the former. But whether or not we take this contrast at face value has a long history of scholarly debate. Study of the Second Sophistic has long been dominated by the tendency to see Greek and Roman identities as a mutually exclusive binary, which reduces Greek writers to either obsequiously supportive or defensively subversive of Roman power. On this model, Dio’s position within this Second Sophistic context is defined by whatever pro-​ or anti-​Roman attitude can be uncovered from his works, a position which we might already suspect to be inconsistent and difficult to assess as genuine. Recent scholarship, however, has challenged this simplistic dichotomy of Greek versus Roman and demonstrated the flexibility of such identities as constructs to be manipulated rather than innate, rigid forms (most prominently Gleason 1995; Goldhill 2001; Whitmarsh 2001). Viewed through this lens, Greek and Roman become instead fluid models for self-​positioning rather than fixed allegiances, which can indeed be set in opposition but can also be combined, challenged, or collapsed entirely. Consequently, to situate Dio within his Second Sophistic context is a matter not simply of recognizing his manipulation of rhetorical personas, but also of exploring why Dio adopts such diverse, compound, and even contradictory positions. These issues are epitomized by the Kingship Orations (Orr. 1–​4), which outline the characteristics and duties of the ideal king (1.11). Moles (1990) in particular has explored these speeches extensively, but in this context they are most striking for how directly they address the stakes of this relationship between Greek culture and Roman power. Indeed, Orationes 1 and 3 purport to address the emperor himself, although they do not specify one by name, and Orationes 2 and 4 adduce Alexander the Great as an internal addressee, a key exemplar for Trajan (Moles 1990, 299–​300). Consequently, Orationes 1 and 3 in particular have often been considered to have been delivered in Trajan’s presence, a context which raises the issue of Dio’s stance toward Rome. Dio’s flattery of his addressee as a noble ruler with near-​godlike and yet well-​disciplined power (Or. 3.3; see also Or. 1.36, 3.1–​24) suggests that he is at the very least conscious of his audience, if not actually entirely sycophantic. By contrast, the more critical tone of Oration 4, with its disparaging presentation of Alexander, seems to suggest a more critical evaluation of Trajan, and validates Dio’s self-​presentation elsewhere as a philosopher speaking truth to Roman power (as in Or. 45, discussed above). Consequently, this assumption that these

Dio Chrysostom   223 speeches were performed before the emperor forces a false interpretive choice between the Kingships as obsequiously supportive of Roman power, or critically subversive of it. And yet, there is no external evidence that any of the Kingships were performed in Trajan’s presence. Another speech, the Nestor, claims that it will introduce words spoken before the emperor (Or. 57.11), and has led various scholars, most thoroughly Whitmarsh (2001, 325–​327), to suggest that the Kingships were (re)performed in a Greek civic context. Rather than replicating a restrictive pro-​or anti-​Roman model, therefore, this new perspective instead questions the value of this imperial framework, whether recontextualized or entirely fictitious, and explores the stakes of Dio’s self-​presentation as the emperor’s advisor within the broader possible performance contexts of the Second Sophistic. This can be seen clearly in the inset parallels Dio adduces throughout the Kingships as paradigms for his own relationship with his addressee, as they demonstrate how actively Dio manipulates this imperial framework to enhance his own authority. For example, the criticisms of Alexander in Oration 4 are voiced by the philosopher Diogenes, a frequent model for Dio (as in Orr. 6, 8–​10; Branham 1996, 101–​103; Jouan 1993b) and one which reinforces his self-​presentation elsewhere as a Cynic philosopher challenging authority. And yet, as Moles (1983 and 1990, 348–​350) demonstrates, this sharp criticism is tempered by both an ironization of the Cynic framework and subtle references to Trajan’s virtues, which complicate any superficial anti-​Roman conclusions and reinforce Dio’s own philosophical and rhetorical authority. Similarly, at the opening of the First Kingship, Dio compares himself to Timotheus, Alexander’s favorite musician, who modulated his performance to the king’s character so effectively that it brought the ruler running to him like one possessed (Or. 1.1–​2), and wonders how he, a mere wanderer and self-​taught philosopher (ἄνδρες ἀλῆται καὶ αὐτουργοὶ τῆς σοφίας), might find a similarly appropriate subject for Trajan (1.9). By comparing himself to someone with such power over Alexander, Dio makes a claim for his own influence over the emperor (Jones 1978, 116–​117) and seems to contradict his critical, distant stance elsewhere, but this comparison is self-​consciously ambiguous. This characterization aligns Dio with a tradition of wandering philosophers, thus bolstering his philosophical credentials (Moles 1990, 309–​311), and resists location in any Greek-​Roman binary, instead insisting upon his mobility and independence as self-​taught and itinerant. Rather than simply aligning himself with either a pro-​or anti-​Roman framework, therefore, these seemingly contradictory examples demonstrate how Dio manipulates this imperial framework, much as he did with his exile, to cast himself as an outsider and to enhance his philosophical credibility. By contrast, Dio constructs a different kind of relationship between Greek culture and Roman power when situating himself in a more distant, less directly imperial context. In Orationes 38–​50, Dio discusses matters of local politics in a number of addresses to provincial cities, most prominently his own home town of Prusa, but also various nearby Bithynian cities as well, including Nicaea and Apamea. In these speeches, Dio promotes civic harmony, defends himself against the slanders of political rivals, and discusses his involvement in local building projects to glorify the town, the political and social

224   Rhetoric and Rhetoricians dynamics of which are discussed at length in Jones (1978, 95–​103), Salmeri (1982, 14–​45), Salmeri (2000), and Swain (1996, 225–​241). Unlike in the Kingships, where Dio presents himself as a wandering philosopher immersed in Greek culture, Dio here consistently emphasizes his local origins and loyalty to the region, positioning himself more as an insider than an outsider. For example, while at various points Dio mentions his political influence, in particular his friendship with the emperor Nerva, he often frames it as a benefit for the whole city rather than a mark of personal favor (e.g., Orr. 40.15–​16, 45.2–​ 3). Indeed, Swain (1996, 232–​233) suggests that Dio’s references to being criticized for his connections to corrupt officials (e.g., 43.11–​12), as well as to the emperor and other Roman elites (47.22), was a consequence of Dio’s continual repositioning from imperial insider to provincial outsider. And yet, there are continuities between these positions, as Oration 42 demonstrates a similar sly self-​deprecation to that at Oration 1.9, and in Oration 47.8 his description of himself as a “wanderer and idle talker” (ἀνθρώπου πλάνητος καὶ ἀδολέσχου) recalls his Cynic persona used elsewhere. These shifts in Dio’s self-​positioning reflect the negotiations of identity particularly prominent in the Second Sophistic, where Roman and Greek affiliations are more overtly recontextualized and reconfigured for different performance contexts and audiences. Similar negotiations can be seen in the works of Lucian and Apuleius, both Second Sophistic writers who at times emphasize the foreignness of their origins (Syrian and North African, respectively), and at others their entanglement in imperial culture.4 These (re)negotiations of identity found across different performance contexts and audience perspectives, therefore, put in practice Dio’s awareness of the constructed, complex, and multifaceted nature of Second Sophistic identity positioning. This consciousness of the mutability of imperial identity can be seen in a more playful way in Oration 21, On Beauty. Like many of Dio’s works, this title does not really encompass the full range of topics on display in the speech, as while Dio and his interlocutor do discuss the contemporary disregard for male beauty, they also cover the differences between Greek and Persian conceptions of beauty (3–​6), Nero’s personal life (6–​10), and Homer’s descriptions of beautiful men (16–​17). Although there is no indication of a specific performance context, the speech is generally considered to be Domitianic based on the mentions of Nero, as the two are frequently paralleled in contemporary literature (for example, Juv. Satires 4.38; Plin. Pan. 53.4; see also Swain 1996, 213). Dio, however, does not stop at implicitly criticizing Domitian by casting him as worse than Nero, but goes on to sharply and explicitly condemn the whole system of imperial power, stating that whenever an emperor is needed, the richest man is chosen regardless of his other qualities for the profit of those around him (Or. 21.8). While it is possible to see this as a bitter but sincere criticism of the imperial system, possibly exacerbated by the injustice of exile (as in Jones 1978, 127–​128), the discussions of Nero’s excesses which frame this statement question its sincerity. This corrupt system, Dio concludes, brought about Nero’s downfall, but even now these events are not fully understood, and although some revolted against Nero, the majority would be happy for him to be emperor forever (Or. 21.9). By emphasizing the obscurity of the matter while simultaneously clarifying it for his audience, Dio questions whether we want to

Dio Chrysostom   225 interpret his criticisms of the emperor as a serious complaint against a corrupt system, or as a polemical and self-​aware manipulation to enhance Dio’s own authority, as his interlocutor implicitly suggests (10). Dio’s adoption of such a critical anti-​Roman position, therefore, highlights this juxtaposition of moral outrage and sophistic flippancy, and self-​consciously challenges the audience to consider how seriously they want to take Dio’s stance here. Moreover, when the interlocutor tries to move the conversation on, Dio complains that he is being looked down upon because he is discussing Nero instead of Cyrus and Alcibiades, as wise men do (Or. 21.11). By drawing a contrast between the established value of classical paradigms with the more shameful subjects of more recent history, Dio taps into the tension between past and present which underpins Second Sophistic culture, in which the use of ancient models demonstrates the speaker’s elite education and reaffirms their Hellenic self-​definition. Although Dio seems to challenge this value judgment by declaring his distaste for classical writers and claiming a precedent for his use of modern examples, the fact that he bases this on the ancients’ own willingness to name contemporary figures (11) reinforces rather than undermines this attitude. Dio compares this desire for the ancient with contemporary booksellers forging cheap, new books to look old (12), which emphasizes both the potential superficiality of this position and the importance of the ability to distinguish between shallow and authentic models of antiquity, as Dio himself claims to demonstrate. This same image is also used by Lucian throughout The Ignorant Book Collector, where the title character’s inability to distinguish between forged books and genuinely ancient ones is used to illustrate the same point about the dangers of inadequate paideia. Moreover, Dio’s interlocutor complains that he has not even had an opportunity to get to the main point yet (10–​13), which casts all of these preceding criticisms as mere digressions. By adopting these critical points of view on both Roman power and Greek imperial identity while framing them in such a flippant way, Dio draws attention to his different rhetorical personas and invites the audience to consider the implications of their insincerity. Finally, these challenges to identity are thoroughly interrogated in Oration 36, the Borystheniticus, through the speech’s interest in double perspectives and contradictory positioning. This name derives from the speech’s dramatic setting of Olbia, located at the fringes of empire on the Black Sea, and whose ancient pedigree as a Greek colony Dio recalls by using its more ancient name of Borysthenes. In his opening remarks, Dio explains that he happened to be in the city because he intended to travel into Scythia from there and visit the Getae (Or. 36.1), which casts this location as a stepping-​stone on a journey into barbarian territory. He then goes on to discuss the city’s liminal position on the shore where two rivers meet (2–​3), and contrasts the disconnect between its ancient glory and modern state of ruin, which testifies to its turbulent history of foreign conquest (4–​6). By framing the speech in this way, Dio establishes the double vision evident throughout the whole speech (Porter 2001, 86; Trapp 1995, 165–​166), a contradiction compounded by the Borystheniticus’s dissonance between internal and external audiences. Although the speech shows Dio talking to the Borysthenites, it is framed as a recounting of this experience to another audience, most often believed to be

226   Rhetoric and Rhetoricians Dio’s fellow Prusans based on its traditional subtitle (“which he spoke in his own city”) and the comment that he undertook this travel after his exile (Or. 36.1). This speech-​ within-​a-​speech construction, discussed in Whitmarsh (2004, 459), epitomizes the Borystheniticus’s obsession with double perspectives and juxtapositions of viewpoint, particularly the multiple contradictions which can be held within a single entity. This becomes more potent with the introduction into the narrative of the Borysthenites, whose Hellenic tendencies in their barbarian setting challenge any simplistic models of identity. Dio’s description of the Borysthenite Callistratus emphasizes both his foreign appearance on account of his barbarian trousers and Scythian clothes (Or. 36.7) and also his love of oratory, philosophy, and Homer (8–​9). Indeed, the Borysthenites are so fond of Homer that even though they cannot speak Greek clearly because of their barbarian neighbors, they nonetheless all know the Iliad by heart (9), and Dio states that they demonstrated themselves to be truly Greek in their desire to hear him speak (16–​17). This juxtaposition of Greek identification and barbarian appearance exposes a tension inherent in the construction of imperial Greek identity, as while the expanding borders of empire allow for such Hellenic affiliations to be adopted rather than purely ethnic this raises questions about the limits of such acculturations (see Porter 2001, 85–​90). Moreover, although the majority of the Borysthenites are long-​haired in accordance with Homer’s Greeks, the one who shaves is hated by his countrymen on suspicion that he does it to flatter the Romans, something which Dio describes as shameful and inappropriate (Or. 36.17). This statement can easily be read as an anti-​Roman critique of perceived capitulation to Rome, but as Moles (1995, 186) points out, this is an uncomfortable moment for the supposed Prusan audience, to whom Dio has repeatedly emphasized the benefits of their friendship with Rome, as we saw above. If indeed Moles is right that the point of Dio’s comment is to insist that the essence of Greek identity must not be compromised, then this self-​conscious juxtaposition of identity models surely also questions how secure this essence can ever be perceived to be. Rather than simply aligning himself within a binary opposition of Greek and Roman, therefore, Dio instead explores the fluidity and complexity of such identity negotiations, and actively interrogates their significance within the imperial world.

Myth and Literature Much of Dio’s corpus, however, seems disconnected from the kind of direct engagement with political and cultural concerns outlined above. This is particularly visible in the orations covering mythic and literary topics, which perhaps originated as short introductory speeches (prolaliae), as their seemingly superficial discussions of mythic narratives leave them most at risk of being dismissed as mere sophistic flippancy. Recent scholarship, such as Saïd (2000) and Gangloff (2006), however, has demonstrated the complexity and originality of Dio’s engagement with mythic topics, and it is clear that

Dio Chrysostom   227 they cannot so easily be isolated from their broader cultural context. Indeed, when viewed through the lens of Dio’s rhetorical role playing, such speeches epitomize the value of the kind of reading advocated in this chapter, as they demonstrate how Dio’s inconsistencies and seeming indirectness can be used productively to situate Dio within the Second Sophistic and to reveal his own self-​consciousness about his relationship with its key themes and concerns. As discussed above, the Borysthenites’ Homeric self-​ identification in the Borystheniticus demonstrates the role of Homer in defining and negotiating Greek identities in the Second Sophistic, while the contrast this makes with their foreign setting challenges the limits of such self-​positioning. These challenges, however, are deepened further by the “myth of the Magi,” which concludes the speech. After discussing the ideal city (Or. 36.18–​23), the elderly Borysthenite Hieroson interrupts Dio and requests that he now describe the order of the heavens, which Dio agrees to do. Following some initial cosmological remarks (29–​38), Dio introduces the myth itself, which he claims is a story told in the secret rites of the Magi (39) describing the four horses of Zeus’s chariot and their role in maintaining the order or disorder of the universe (39–​60). Although this myth was “once taken all too eagerly as genuine ‘Zoroastrian’ or ‘Mithraic’ lore, [it] is now better understood as a deliberately colourful product of Greek thought” (Swain 1996, 198, with further references). Indeed, not only does the pseudo-​Eastern myth share a number of fundamental similarities with Plato’s Phaedrus, as Michael Trapp (1990, 148–​150) has shown, but this juxtaposition is self-​ consciously highlighted in the framing of the myth. When he interrupts Dio, Hieroson describes himself as a lover of Plato, despite the irony of barbarians admiring the most Greek of writers (26), and asks Dio to discuss cosmology in Platonic style, which Dio disingenuously refuses to do (28–​29). Moreover, at the end of the myth, Dio repeatedly apologizes for the derivative quality of the myth and slyly shifts the blame for this onto the Borysthenites as the instigators of Dio’s speech (61). By superficially defamiliarizing this Platonic core with a foreign framework, as Trapp (2000, 214–​219) discusses more thoroughly, Dio draws the audience’s attention to the continually blurred boundaries between the two and destabilizes their perceptions of such Greek identification. In other words, just as the Borysthenites’ earlier Homeric identifications interrogated any simplistic opposition of “Greek” and “barbarian,” this juxtaposition of Platonic and pseudo-​ Zoroastrian models deepens this challenge further, questioning the limits of Greek imperial identity. In addition to Plato, Homer is a constant presence in Dio’s corpus, with Homeric epics appearing at times within philosophical and political paradigms (e.g., Orr. 2, 56, 57), at others as models for reinterpretation. For example, the Chryseis (Or. 61), which claims to uncover the nature of this marginal character from Iliad 1, ends by asking provocatively: “do you want to hear how it happened, or how it should have happened?” (18), demonstrating detailed knowledge of Homer while simultaneously threatening to supplant him (Kim 2008; Saïd 2000, 174–​175). Nowhere, however, is Dio’s challenging of Homeric authority clearer than in Oration 11, the Troicus or Trojan Oration. In this speech, Dio takes the polemical position that not only was Troy never

228   Rhetoric and Rhetoricians captured by the Greeks, but that Homer definitely knew the true story and deliberately concealed it, instead choosing to fabricate an implausible lie. Dio’s argument follows in a long tradition of Homeric supplements and corrections, a tradition which appears to have become especially potent in the imperial period, to judge from the presence of pseudodocumentary “true” stories of the Trojan War such as Dares Phrygius and Dictys of Crete (Ní Mheallaigh 2008). In particular, his assertion that Menelaus’s eyewitness account of the “true” story was recorded by Egyptian priests (38, 135) recalls Herodotus’s use of the same source for his own revisionist version of the Trojan War (2.118–​119), later adapted by Plato in his Timaeus (21e–​22b), as Saïd (2000, 176–​177) and Hunter (2009, 48–​51) demonstrate. Dio’s statement that he will refute Homer using his own poetry (Or. 11.11) has often been considered a reference to the Homeric interpreter Aristarchus, suggesting Dio’s awareness of and engagement with the traditions of Homeric criticism (Kim 2010, 85; Saïd 2000, 181). Dio’s arguments, however, work from rhetorical standards of plausibility (τό εἰκός), as Ritoók (1995) and Hunter (2009, 51–​57) show, leading him to dismiss the story that Helen fell in love at first sight and immediately left her husband, on the grounds of being unlikely (Or. 11.54–​55). Such arguments are strikingly inappropriate, since they apply standards of truth and falsehood from oratorical training to epic poetry, but this juxtaposition draws attention to these differences and questions the vested interest the audience has in Homer’s value as a literary or historical source, and thus his significance for Greek imperial culture. But whether we take Dio’s attack on Homer as sincere or sophistic, political allegory or literary frippery, representative of wider imperial views of Homer or a uniquely polemical approach has been a subject of intense scholarly debate. Most prominently, Kindstrand (1973, 141–​162) argued for the Trojan Oration as a piece of pro-​Roman propaganda based on the emphatic superiority of the Trojans (Or. 11.137–​144) and a reference to the contemporary subjugation of the Greeks (150). Desideri (1978, 431–​434, 496–​503) refines this position by arguing that this mythic reworking reflects the new imperial world order, but both of these interpretations have been criticized for basing such an ideological weight upon a relatively small section of the overall text (Or. 11.137–​150; Kim 2010, 88–​90 with further references). Other possible interpretations include the Trojan Oration as a rhetorical exercise or parody of Homeric scholarship, but as Saïd (2000 177–​180) suggests in her overview, all of these perspectives are possible, and this multifaceted approach opens up the range of challenges posed by the speech. Indeed, by eschewing easy classification and so problematizing its own relationship to the literary texts it tackles, the Trojan Oration exposes and probes key questions about the significance of Homer and the literary canon more generally for Second Sophistic writers. In these examples, however, Dio’s polemical arguments and challenges to identity have been positioned through and against canonical writers, situating them within literary traditions even as they challenge their conventions. While the orations discussed in this chapter so far have frequently been provocative and challenging, none have been yet so structurally, thematically, and contextually eclectic as Oration 5, often called the Libycus or Libyan Myth. This speech has often been seen to be closely connected to the Kingships, to the extent that Photius described it as dependent upon

Dio Chrysostom   229 those four orations (165b41–​2 Bekker), on account of a section of the Fourth Kingship where Diogenes, surprised that Alexander does not already know “the Libyan myth,” is said to narrate it (Or. 4.72–​74). Since the myth is not included in the Fourth Kingship, it has been suggested that Oration 5 is a possible narrative variant or alternate ending of this former speech, but this cannot be confirmed (Whitmarsh 2001, 326). Despite this, “it is difficult to be certain about what this narrative is or what it does,” as Graham Anderson (2000, 155) says, largely because of Dio’s continual insistence upon the moral purpose of the speech and equally persistent obfuscation of what this moral is meant to be. In this speech, Dio describes a race of deadly half-​women, half-​snake hybrids who devastate the Libyan landscape (Or. 5.5–​15) until Heracles appears and destroys the whole species (18–​21). Dio interprets these acts as a moral allegory for the destructive nature of the emotions (16–​18), but a final coda detailing the resurgence of the species challenges that interpretation (22–​23). In many ways the reception of this speech is emblematic of attitudes toward Dio generally, as while some emphasize the sincerity of its philosophical morality (Blomqvist 1989, 169–​179, 186–​205), others instead focus upon the slipperiness of its sophistry (Anderson 2000, 154–​157; Saïd 2000, 172–​173). But as we have already seen throughout this chapter, Dio is remarkably resistant to such false dichotomies. Instead, the Libycus not only breaks down these kinds of dichotomies, but also demonstrates how even such a seemingly superficial work can explore Greek imperial identity and Second Sophistic culture. First, Dio actively sets philosophical utility and irrelevant myth in opposition by emphasizing his laborious attempts to graft a moral onto the otherwise useless Libyan myth (Or. 5.1–​3), but he also undermines this dichotomy by repeatedly questioning the authority of both myth and moral. While the story’s antiquity is implied throughout the speech (Or. 5.5; Anderson 2000, 154–​157), Dio repeatedly emphasizes that its value derives from the moral allegory he has attached to it (Or. 5.3, 16–​18, 22–​24). By oscillating between moral sincerity and mythic frivolity, Dio questions the source of the narrative’s authority, while simultaneously highlighting his own originality in crafting such a complex tale. Second, a tension between Greek and barbarian runs throughout the speech, as while the Libyan king cannot conquer the deadly Libyan women (18–​21), the Greek hero Heracles alone can (23). This parallels the myth’s original uncultured state, which needs the application of a Greek allegory to civilize it, but the resurgence of the creatures and the deaths of Greek tourists in the speech’s coda directly challenge this interpretation. As in the Borystheniticus, this juxtaposition of Greek and barbarian draws the audience’s attention to their own position on this spectrum. Moreover, Dio’s suggestion that the original myth was composed enigmatically and metaphorically as a sign for those able to interpret its meaning correctly (3) invites the audience to wonder whether they should discern another meaning hidden under the myth’s superficial shallowness. Consequently, Dio’s seemingly disjointed and irrelevant Libyan myth implicates the audience within these questions about identity, philosophy, and sincerity, and questions the value of such sophistic flippancy. In the Libycus, therefore, Dio’s rhetorical role playing, blurring of the boundaries between moral philosophy and insincere sophistry, challenges to the

230   Rhetoric and Rhetoricians constructed nature of Greek imperial identity, and interrogation of literary authority combine to actively explore his and his audience’s position within and relationship to the Second Sophistic.

Further Reading The most accessible text and translation of Dio is the five-​volume edition of the Loeb Classical Library, edited and translated by Cohoon and Crosby (1932–​1951). The final volume, Dio Chrysostom V: 61–​80, also contains a number of testimonia to Dio, including those by Synesius, Photius, and Pliny, with Philostratus as the only notable exception. The articles in Swain 2000a provide a helpful introduction to major themes of Dio’s corpus, and the survey of Dio’s reception in Swain 2000b draws out key trends and concerns accessibly. Jones 1978 and Desideri 1978 are two of the most prominent monographs devoted to Dio, with the former taking a more historical and the latter a more political approach. The work of John Moles remains extremely influential, both for its subtle argumentation and detailed close reading: see 1978, 2005 on Dio’s rhetorical manipulation of his exilic biography, 1983, 1990 on the Kingships in particular. For excellent readings of Dio in larger volumes dedicated to imperial Greek literature more generally, see the relevant chapters in Swain 1996 and Whitmarsh 2001.

Bibliography Amato, E. 1995. Studi su Favorino: Le Orazioni Pseudo-​Crisostomiche. Salerno. Anderson, G. 2000. “Some Uses of Storytelling in Dio.” In Dio Chrysostom: Politics, Letters, and Philosophy, edited by S. Swain, 143–​160. Oxford. Blomqvist, K. 1989. Myth and Moral Message in Dio Chrysostom:  A  Study in Dio’s Moral Thought, with a Particular Focus on his Attitudes towards Women. Lund. Brancacci, A. 2000. “Dio, Socrates, and Cynicism.” In Dio Chrysostom: Politics, Letters, and Philosophy, edited by S. Swain, 240–​260. Oxford. Branham, R. B. 1996. “Defacing the Currency:  Diogenes” Rhetoric and the Invention of Cynicism.’ In The Cynics: The Cynic Movement in Antiquity and its Legacy, edited by R. B. Branham and M.-​O. Goulet-​Cazé, 81–​104. Berkley, CA, and London. Cohoon, J. W., and H. L. Crosby. 1932–​1951. Dio Chrysostom: Discourses. 5 vols. Cambridge, MA. Desideri, P. 1973. “Il Dione e la politica di Sinesio.” Atti della Accademia delle Scienze di Torino II: Classe di Scienze Morali, Storiche e Filologiche 107: 551–​593. Desideri, P. 1978. Dione di Prusa:  Un intellettuale greco nell’impero romano. Messina and Florence. Desideri, P. 2007. “Dio’s Exile: Politics, Philosophy, Literature.” In Writing Exile: The Discourse of Displacement in Greco-​Roman Antiquity and Beyond, edited by J. F. Gaertner, 193–​207. Leiden and Boston. Elsner, J. “Describing Self in the Language of Other:  Pseudo (?)  Lucian at the Temple of Hieropolis.” In Being Greek under Rome:  Cultural Identity, the Second Sophistic, and the Development of Empire, edited by S. Goldhill, 123–​153. Cambridge. Gangloff, A. 2006. Dion Chrysostome et les mythes: Hellénisme, communication et philosophie politique. Grenoble.

Dio Chrysostom   231 Gleason, M. W. 1995. Making Men:  Sophists and Self-​ Presentation in Ancient Rome. Princeton, NJ. Goldhill, S. 2001. “Introduction. Setting an Agenda: ‘Everything is Greece to the Wise.’” In Being Greek under Rome:  Cultural Identity, the Second Sophistic, and the Development of Empire, edited by S. Goldhill, 1–​25. Cambridge. Goldhill, S. 2002. Who Needs Greek? Cultural Contests in the History of Hellenism. Cambridge. Gowing, A. 1990. “Dio’s Name.” CPhil. 85, no. 1: 49–​54. Highet, G. 1973. “The Huntsman and the Castaway.” GRBS 14, no. 1: 35–​40. Hunter, R. 2009. “The Trojan Oration of Dio Chrysostom and Ancient Homeric Criticism.” In Narratology and Interpretation: The Content of Narrative Form in Ancient Literature, edited by J. Grethlein and A. Rengakos, 43–​61. Berlin and New York. Jones, C. P. 1978. The Roman World of Dio Chrysostom. Cambridge, MA. Jouan, F. 1977. “Les thèmes romanesques dans l’Euboïcos de Dion Chrysostome.” Rev. Ét. Grec. 90: 38–​46. Jouan, F. 1993a. “Les récits de voyage de Dion Chrysostome: Réalité et fiction.” In L’invention de l’autobiographie d’Hésiode à Saint Augustin, edited by M.-​F. Baslez, P. Hoffmann, and L. Pernot, 189–​198. Paris. Jouan, F. 1993b. “Le Diogène de Dion Chrysostome.” In Le Cynisme Ancien et ses Prolongements, edited by M.-​O. Goulet-​Cazé and R. Goulet, 381–​397. Paris. Kim, L. 2008. “Dio of Prusa. Or. 61, Chryseis, or Reading Homeric Silence.” CQ 58: 601–​621. Kim, L. 2010. Homer between History and Fiction in Imperial Greek Literature. Cambridge. Kindstrand, J. F. 1973. Homer in der Zweiten Sophistik: Studien zu der Homerlektüre und dem Homerbild bei Dion von Prusa. Uppsala. Moles, J. L. 1978. “The Career and Conversion of Dio Chrysostom.” JHS 98: 79–​100. Moles, J. L. 1983. “The Date and Purpose of the Fourth Kingship Oration of Dio Chrysostom.” Cl. Ant. 2: 251–​278. Moles, J. L. 1990. “The Kingship Orations of Dio Chrysostom.” In Papers of the Leeds International Latin Seminar 6, edited by F. Cairns and M. Heath, 297–​375. Leeds. Moles, J. L. 1995. “Dio Chrysostom, Greece, and Rome.” In Ethics and Rhetoric: Classical Essays for Donald Russell on his Seventy-​Fifth Birthday, edited by D. Innes, H. Hine, and C. Pelling, 177–​192. Oxford. Moles, J. L. 2005. “The Thirteenth Oration of Dio Chrysostom: Complexity and Simplicity, Rhetoric and Moralism, Literature and Life.” JHS 125: 112–​138. Ní Mheallaigh, K. 2008. “Pseudo-​Documentarism and the Limits of Ancient Fiction.” AJPhil. 129: 403–​431. Porter, J. I. 2001. “Ideals and Ruins:  Pausanias, Longinus, and the Second Sophistic.” In Pausanias: Travel and Memory in Roman Greece, edited by S. E. Alcock, J. F. Cherry, and J. Elsner, 63–​92. Oxford. Ritoók, Z. 1995. “Some Aesthetic Views of Dio Chrysostom and Their Sources.’ In Greek Literary Theory after Aristotle: A Collection of Papers in Honour of D. M. Schenkeveld, edited by J. G. J. Abbenes, S. R. Slings, and I. Sluiter, 125–​134. Amsterdam. Russell. D. A., ed. 1992. Dio Chrysostom: Orations VII, XII, XXXVI. Cambridge. Saïd, S. 2000. “Dio’s Use of Mythology.” In Dio Chrysostom: Politics, Letters, and Philosophy, edited by S. Swain, 161–​186. Oxford. Salmeri, G. 1982. La politica e la potere saggio su Dione di Prusa. Catania. Salmeri, G. 2000. “Dio, Rome, and the Civic Life of Asia Minor.” In Dio Chrysostom: Politics, Letters, and Philosophy, edited by S. Swain, 53–​92. Oxford.

232   Rhetoric and Rhetoricians Sidebottom, H. 1996. “Dio of Prusa and the Flavian Dynasty.” CQ 46: 447–​456. Swain, S. 1994. “Dio and Lucian.” In Greek Fiction: The Greek Novel in Context, edited by J. R. Morgan and R. Stoneman, 166–​180. London and New York. Swain, S. 1996. Hellenism and Empire: Language, Classicism, and Power in the Greek World, ad 50–​250, Oxford. Swain, S., ed. 2000a. Dio Chrysostom: Politics, Letters, and Philosophy, Oxford. Swain, S. 2000b. “Reception and Interpretation.” In Dio Chrysostom:  Politics, Letters, and Philosophy, edited by S. C. R. Swain, 13–​50. Oxford. Trapp, M. 1990. “Plato’s Phaedrus in Second-​Century Greek Literature.” In Antonine Literature, edited by D. A. Russell, 141–​173. Oxford. Trapp, M. 1995. “Sense of Place in the Orations of Dio Chrysostom.” In Ethics and Rhetoric: Classical Essays for Donald Russell on his Seventy-​Fifth Birthday, edited by D. Innes, H. Hine, and C. Pelling, 163–​175. Oxford. Trapp, M. 2000. “Plato in Dio.” In Dio Chrysostom: Politics, Letters, and Philosophy, edited by S. Swain, 213–​239. Oxford. Verrengia, A. 1999. Dione di Prusa: In Atene, sull’esilio (or. XIII). Naples. von Arnim, H. 1898. Leben und Werke des Dio von Prusa. Berlin. Whitmarsh, T. 1998. “Reading Power in Roman Greece: The Paideia of Dio Chrysostom.” In Pedagogy and Power: Rhetorics of Classical Learning, edited by Y. L. Too and N. Livingstone, 192–​213. Cambridge. Whitmarsh, T. 2001. Greek Literature and the Roman Empire: The Politics of Imitation. Oxford. Whitmarsh, T. 2004. “Dio Chrysostom.” In Narrators, Narratees, and Narratives in Ancient Greek Literature, edited by I. J. F. de Jong, R. Nünlist, and A. M. Bowie, 451–​464. Leiden and Boston.

Chapter 15

Favorinu s a nd Herodes At t i c u s Leofranc Holford-​S trevens

The straddling of the boundary between the philosopher and the sophist (understood value-​neutrally as the show-​orator) is by no one better illustrated than by Favorinus of Arelate in Gallia Narbonensis (the modern Arles). He is treated as a philosopher not only by his admirer Aulus Gellius, who constantly calls him Favorinus philosophus, but by Philostratus, who accords him only a brief account (VS 1.8) as being rather an eloquent philosopher than a sophist proper, and by Galen, who took him seriously enough to write three books in answer to him (On the Best Education and two lost works, For Epictetus and Against Socrates); but his rival sophist M. Antonius Polemon, in a poisonous pen-​portrait, states that he was called a sophist (Physiognomy A20, p. 378 Hoyland 2007 at n. 159; for the identification see Anonymus Latinus, p. 582 Repath 2007), and the Byzantine lexicon entitled Suda makes him a philosopher who leaned more to rhetoric. Favorinus’s date of birth is not on record; however, his rivalry with Polemon, who was born in 88 ce, suggests that they were not very far apart in age; and since Herodes Atticus could call either man his teacher as occasion served, there is no need for Favorinus to have been much older. He was ethnically Gaulish as he himself states, but evidently born a Roman citizen since not even Polemon casts aspersions on his status; although most inscriptions from Arelate are in Latin, his cultural allegiance was Greek. As a young man he was a pupil of Dio Chrysostom and belonged to Plutarch’s circle in Delphi, appearing in his Sympotic Questions and receiving the dedication of his treatise On the Primal Cold; in turn he would entitle one of his philosophical treatises Plutarch, or the Academic Disposition, and write on several of the same subjects, as also on some treated by Dio. He seems also to have spent some time in Asia Minor, becoming the favorite orator of Ephesus even as Polemon was of Smyrna (Philostr. VS 1.8.3); this civic rivalry, which in a later generation attached itself respectively to Aelius Aristides and Hadrian of Tyre (VS 2.25.2), was replicated by the two sophists’ supporters in Rome, and brought about a personal enmity that showed neither man at his best.

234   Rhetoric and Rhetoricians According to Philostratus (VS 1.8.4) Favorinus’s oratory charmed his listeners, even those who did not understand Greek, with his high-​pitched voice, his expressive look, his rhythmical delivery, and the singsong of the closing sentences—​a regular affectation of such speakers that disgusted critics and delighted the public. It may be possible to gain some idea of his vocal style, as well as some insight into his personality, if we imagine that the great castrati had been trained for oratory instead of opera, for he appears to have suffered from a congenital condition, perhaps Reifenstein’s syndrome with cryptorchidism, that conferred secondary female characteristics and infertility without impairing potency; Polemon indeed accords him a vigorous and varied sex life. Even at Rome, Favorinus spoke mainly in Greek, although Gellius represents him as highly knowledgeable, though not infallible, in Latin and in Roman law; but being a Gaul who conducted himself like a Greek was one of the three paradoxes that Favorinus claimed to embody (Philostr. VS 1.8.2). It was through his education that he made himself a Hellene, as he made himself a man (Gleason 1995, 131–​158), though not to the total exclusion of mockery; but he could also make play with his outsider’s status when that suited his argument (Whitmarsh 2001, 167–​178). Another paradox was that though a eunuch, he had been tried for adultery; from an allusion in Lucian (The Eunuch 10) it appears that he was caught in bed with an ex-​consul’s wife, but acquitted of adultery by a medically ignorant jury. This may have been the occasion of the third paradox, that he quarreled with an emperor and lived to tell the tale. The emperor was Hadrian, to whom he had dedicated a philosophical treatise and at whose court he had for a time been foremost amongst the alternately pampered and humiliated intellectuals; the Princeps relished their company but relished demonstrating his superior learning even more. (It must also have amused him that it was he, not the philosopher, who wore the beard.) Having firm views on the correct use of language, he once rebuked Favorinus for using a word that lacked proper authority; when Favorinus, having given him best, was faulted by his friends for not standing his ground, since the word was perfectly defensible, he replied that it was bad advice to deny superior learning in the lord of thirty legions (Hist. Aug. Hadr. 15.12–​13). On another occasion, Favorinus showed poorer judgment: appointed to a highly expensive honor in his native province, he claimed exemption from the burden as a philosopher. This gave Hadrian the opportunity to question whether he really was one; in order to limit the damage he withdrew his plea, reporting a timely dream in which his master Dio restated the commonplace that men were born for their fatherlands as well as for themselves (Philostr. VS 1.8.2). Some have seen in this undated incident the occasion for his loss of imperial favor; more probable is Philostratus’s report that Hadrian was simply having fun. To be sure, he also claims that in consequence the citizens of Athens made haste to overthrow the statues they had erected to him in his days of glory; but on Favorinus’s own showing it was the adultery scandal that caused the Corinthians to do likewise. It would certainly be more economical to suppose the same cause for both incidents. In 1931, a speech preserved in a third-​century papyrus was published that incorporated three known quotations from Favorinus; it is spoken in the person of an exile

Favorinus and Herodes Atticus    235 on Chios. In the absence of any historical or mythical personage in whose character Favorinus might be speaking, editors, most recently Amato (2005, 19–​29), have taken it to be autobiographical despite a reference to the speaker’s progeny, which has to be dismissed as conventional; historians have been more doubtful (Bowie 1997, 5; Fein 1994, 244–​245; Swain 1989, 156–​157), though the hypothesis of a fictitious exile is also problematic (Holford-​Strevens 2015, 124–​126). It is no objection that Philostratus does not mention any such episode, for he refuses—​and in the life of Dio says as much (VS 1.7 2)—​to acknowledge any exile not imposed by formal sentence; we may well suppose that Hadrian had dealt with Favorinus as his political model Augustus had with Ovid, privately instructing him to depart for a specified location but sending him, not to the remote Tomi, but to the far from unpleasant island of Chios. Unlike Ovid, however, in the next reign Favorinus was back in the capital, where he appears to have spent the rest of his life, becoming a friend of the leading Roman orator M. Cornelius Fronto and winning the devotion of the young Aulus Gellius. Since the latter, born in the mid-​120s and at least twenty-​five when appointed as a judge, claims to have consulted him on an ethical scruple about a case he was hearing (NA 14.2), he must have been alive in the early 150s; we shall see that he may have lived on into the next decade, but a reference in Lucian makes it clear that he was dead by the late 170s. Many titles of works by Favorinus are preserved, and numerous fragments, especially from his twenty-​four-​book miscellany Παντοδαπὴ ἱστορία (Learning of All Kinds) and at least five books of Ἀπομνημονεύματα (Reminiscences), whose title recalls Xenophon’s stories about Socrates but which is fact is a collection of anecdotes about philosophers in general. However, the only works to survive complete are two speeches, one praising Corinth to the detriment of Athens and answering the charges that had caused his statue to be removed, the other celebrating the very fickleness in Fortune that it was customary to deplore. These two speeches were preserved through misattribution to Dio (Amato 2005, 53, 66–​7), yet as Philostratus observes, Favorinus’s style is completely different; he aptly describes it as rambling but ingenious and palatable (VS 1.8.4). Neither in those speeches nor in that on exile (a well-​worn philosophical topic) is profundity of thought in evidence; ingenuity of argument is, particularly in the speech on Fortune, an example of the paradoxical praise in which Favorinus was said by Gellius to have excelled (NA 17.12). Their language at times falls short of the pure Attic that was the ideal of the age (despite a claim made in the speech at Corinth, §26), but few orators even approached it, and certainly not Polemon. Literary quotations abound, along with historical and mythological examples; so do the Gorgianic figures and rhythmical sequences of short parallel phrases (Amato 2005, 89–​93; Goggin 1951, esp. 192–​201) that Gellius imitates in reproducing two discourses he claims to have heard (NA 12.1, 14.1; Holford-​Strevens 2003, 108–​109 and literature cited), one on a mother’s duty to breastfeed her baby, the other denouncing the fraud of astrology, both obviously translated from written texts. Although Gellius professes not to know whether the latter was meant for truth or for display, Ptolemy’s defense of astrology in his Tetrabiblos may have been in part an answer to Favorinus’s attack.

236   Rhetoric and Rhetoricians Like other philosophers, and like the clergy of later days, Favorinus spent much of his time giving ethical advice; in his day, when not based on traditional commonplaces (which he is known to have collected) this generally had a Stoic flavor, as when Gellius represents him as quoting the great Stoic moralist Epictetus (NA 17.19.5–​6); Favorinus also admired the suave Cynic Demetrius (Philostr V A 4.25), but admiration for eminent and dead adherents of those sects may have served, as in our own day praise for deceased presidents and prime ministers of the other party, as a stick to beat their contemporary successors, who on Lucian’s showing passed personal remarks about his unphilosophical appearance (Eunuchus 7, cf. Demonax 12–​13). There is also much Stoic and Cynic matter in the speech on exile, as inseparable from that subject as Peripatetic matter was from displays of curious learning; even Plutarch uses Stoic arguments when they suit him, and Dio had demonstrated that selected Cynic sentiments were not incompatible with civilized discourse. Like any philosopher other than an Epicurean, Favorinus invokes Socrates with constant praise; he wrote about his art of love (F 24 Amato 2010)—​a subject indeed in which he notoriously took great interest—​and related a romantically exaggerated version of the mental abstraction recounted in the Symposium (Gell. NA 2.1); he also wrote about his trial (F 41). His statement that Socrates and his pupil Aeschines were the first teachers of rhetoric (F 67) was apparently borrowed from the Epicurean Idomeneus of Lampsacus, who meant it in a hostile spirit hardly shared by the rhetorician Favorinus; but when he remarked that the slightest textual change in Plato impaired the style, but in Lysias the sense (NA 2.5), which is hardly in the spirit of the Phaedrus, he seems to have shown a certain want of reverence paralleled in the assertion, lifted from the embittered Aristoxenus, that almost the entire Republic was to be found in Protagoras (F 60), which demonstrates at best a naïve credulity in the face of fourth-​century polemic. The balance might be redressed if we knew his treatises on Plato and the Ideas. In natural philosophy, Favorinus had leanings toward the Peripatetic school (Plut. Quaest. conv. 8.10, 734 f); but when in Attic Nights 18.1 he umpires a debate between a Stoic and a Peripatetic on whether virtue alone is sufficient for happiness, Gellius makes him disallow one of the latter’s arguments as fallacious. However, the narrative can hardly be taken as factual, since it reenacts the debate between the two schools on that topic recorded by Cicero at Tusculan Disputations 5.120, and in view of Gellius’s own sympathies with Stoic moralism, at least if not taken too far, it cannot be shown to reflect Favorinus’s own outlook rather than the author’s. The original debate was overseen by Carneades, the exponent of the Academic skepticism that looked through Plato to Socrates not for dogmatic exposition but for dialectic method, the practice of arguing on both sides of any question and withholding judgment, at most allowing that one case was more probable than the other. Although the Academy had abandoned this position in the first century bce (on which see further ­chapter 35 in this volume), both Plutarch and Favorinus adopted it, in contrast to the Platonists who claimed to teach what Plato taught despite their disagreements about what it was.

Favorinus and Herodes Atticus    237 Favorinus’s first link with skepticism is Plutarch’s jeu d’esprit on the principle of cold, in which the author, having settled to his own satisfaction that cold is no mere privation of heat but a quality in its own right, sets out the respective reasons of those who have identified that principle with air and with water, then submits the previously unargued case for its being earth. Favorinus is addressed in three places: the first, an opening sentence posing the question whether there is a principle of cold (945 F), is mere routine; the second, at the end of the arguments for air, declares that the case “rests on such probabilities as these” (949 F), the third is the last sentence of the book, inviting Favorinus to compare the case for earth with the others, “and if it neither falls short in probability nor is far superior, to abandon dogmatic assertion, holding suspension of judgement more philosophical than assent” (955 A). The skeptical language and the examination of conflicting hypotheses seem well enough matched to the recipient; and if Plutarch does not seem to be wholly serious, that too is appropriate in a work addressed to a budding sophist. Favorinus’s arguments for skepticism provoked Galen to write the treatise On the Best Form of Education against him. It begins: “Favorinus says that the best form of education is arguing on both sides of a question,” a process that led “the older Academics” (taken to include Carneades) to suspend judgment; by contrast, “the younger ones” (for Favorinus is not alone) sometimes uphold an extreme form of skepticism, suspension of judgment that will not allow even the sun to be apprehended, and sometimes suppose their students can determine the merits of rival arguments (Peripatetic and Stoic) by mere intuition. This is a hostile report by one whose fairness is often in doubt; since we lack the treatises on which Galen is commenting, we cannot tell whether the contradictions he claims to find in them result from changes in Favorinus’s views over time or are tendentious misrepresentations of arguments offered on both sides of the question. In this treatise, as elsewhere, he lumps together Academics and Pyrrhonians; nevertheless, it is as an Academic, even if an unsound one, that he treats Favorinus, throwing in the Pyrrhonians only to establish guilt by association. In all, Galen reviews four of his victim’s treatises, one of them in three books, but nowhere does he discuss his most important contribution to the debate, the ten books of Pyrrhonian Discourses, in which Favorinus discussed the ten Modes or systems of argument that Pyrrhonians deployed against all other schools in order to undermine belief, slightly varying the order in which they were considered (F 30) and in all likelihood devoting one book to each Mode. The work was not only said by Gellius to have been written with the greatest subtlety and sharpness (NA 11.5.5) but described by Philostratus as the best of his philosophical writings (VS 1.8.4); even if neither Gellius nor Philostratus was a philosopher, we may infer that it commanded some respect and ought to have been noticed by Galen had it already been in circulation. It would be more plausible, indeed, to suppose that it was written after Galen’s polemic, even in part as a response; if so, the words εἴπερ ἦν in §3 of the latter work (p. 98. 10 Barigazzi 1991), “if [Favorinus] really existed [I should like to ask him],” which are clearly absurd, must be emended to εἰ παρῆν, “if he were present,” and not εἰ περιῆν, “if he were still alive.”

238   Rhetoric and Rhetoricians Philostratus’s attention was caught by the statement that Pyrrhonians, albeit suspenders of judgement, yet had the capacity to hear lawsuits (F 31). This answers the charge that the skeptic could make no contribution to civic or human life; but it is not what we should have expected to hear from Favorinus, whose assertion that both Academics and Pyrrhonians were skeptics (Gell. NA 11.5.6) puts him firmly in the former camp, had he been intent on distinguishing Academic skeptics like himself, who could find that one case was more probable than another, from a Pyrrhonian whose motto “this is no more the case than that or than neither” (NA §4) would render him incapable of returning a verdict. It would appear that Favorinus’s approach to Pyrrhonism was sympathetic, holding that the two schools differed only in one point, whether uncertainty itself was certain, though Gellius’s statement of that difference appears to be flawed (NA §8; Holford-​Strevens 1997, 214n97 and 215–​216 for another possible of point of disagreement that Favorinus may have tried to smooth away).

Herodes Atticus Among Favorinus’s closest friends was the great orator and plutocrat Herodes Atticus, to whom he left not only his books and his house in Rome but his Indian slave who amused them both with his broken Greek—​and perhaps more, since in this context his name Autolekythos probably means not “Pauper” but “Wellhung” (Holford-​Strevens 2003, 438). Herodes’s wealth, culture, eloquence, and munificence brought him general admiration except in his native Athens, where he was widely detested. Both opinions were amply justified. According to Philostratus (VS 2.1.2), Herodes’s grandfather Hipparchus had been condemned by Domitian to confiscation of his property for tyrannical conduct, as if in the tradition of the like-​named tyrant assassinated in the late sixth century bce whose name Herodes would also bear; his father Atticus had found a treasure hidden from the authorities in one of his own houses (evidently made over to him before execution of the sentences), obtained imperial permission to keep it, and consolidated his new-​found riches by marrying a wealthy wife, Vibullia Alcia, like him of an Athenian family with Roman citizenship, and by becoming a successful banker. Herodes’s date of birth is commonly reckoned back from his consulate in 143 to 101, though Ameling 1983, 2:2 proposes 103; under the empire the consular age was more flexible than in republican times (Morris 1964, 325–​332). His education laid more emphasis on the classical orators than Atticus cared for until Scopelian was engaged to teach him extemporization (Philostr. VS 1.21.7); it did not exclude Roman culture, which he studied with P. Calvisius Tullus Ruso, maternal grandfather to Marcus Aurelius, though he remained firmly Greek in outlook. Despite an unfortunate entry into public life, when he broke down in an address to the emperor Hadrian (Philostr. VS 2.1.14; probably congratulating him on behalf of the Athenian ephebes for his accession, Graindor 1930, 47), he rose quickly enough to become eponymous archon at Athens in

Favorinus and Herodes Atticus    239 summer 126; some nine years later he was made corrector Asiae, inspector of finances for the cities of Asia Minor, where he encountered the proconsul T. Aurelius Antoninus, soon to become the emperor Antoninus Pius; at one point there was some pushing and shoving between their respective entourages in a narrow defile, but Philostratus denied (VS 2.1.8) that the incident ended in fisticuffs. No less well aware than other people of his own magnificence, Herodes claimed kinship with the house of Aeacus, sought as allies by the Athenians at the time of the Persian War, with Miltiades, the victor of Marathon, and with his son Cimon, who had taken the war to Asia Minor; in due course he would name his eldest daughter Elpinice after Cimon’s half-​sister despite the latter’s doubtful reputation. He was equally aware of the social expectations attaching to great wealth: over the course of his life he would erect or rebuild many splendid buildings, including the Panathenaic stadium at Athens, the theater that bears his name, and the aqueduct that after nine centuries at last relieved the thirst of spectators at the Olympic Games. In such munificence he took after his father, yet it was his father’s very munificence that brought Herodes lasting unpopularity in his native city. Atticus’s will contained a bequest to the Athenian demos of a hundred drachmae to each citizen every year for life; this was said to be at the behest of his freedmen, between whom and Herodes there was no love lost (Philostr. VS 2.1.4). However, they had forgotten that the descent of a Roman citizen’s property was governed by Roman law, which forbade bequests to noncitizens; nor can Atticus have attempted to circumvent the prohibition through a fideicommissum or trust, since by that time not only were fideicommissa to noncitizens legally void, but at Hadrian’s instance the Senate had ordained that the money should escheat to the fisc (Gaius, Institutes 2.285). Herodes was therefore not obliged so grievously to impair his fortune; instead he compounded with the Athenians for a single payment of 500 drachmae a head, which they soon found had been eaten away by their fathers’ and grandfathers’ debts to Atticus and Vibullia Alcia. He was never forgiven; even the Panathenaic stadium in gleaming Pentelic marble was bitterly said to deserve its name, having been paid for by all Athenians. The discontent and indeed disorder provoked by Herodes’s conduct was reflected in a legal case at Rome between Herodes and his enemies. The legal basis is uncertain, and scholars are not even agreed which side brought the action; but when one of Herodes’s opponents engaged the services of Fronto, the latter’s pupil in Latin rhetoric, Marcus Caesar—​Pius’s adopted son and the future Marcus Aurelius—​became alarmed at the bad blood that might arise between them. He first urged Herodes not to launch a personal attack on Fronto, then requested Fronto to observe the like restraint; Fronto, not previously aware that Herodes was his grandfather’s pupil, promised to concentrate on the facts, which were grave enough: “I must speak of free men brutally beaten and robbed, one even killed; savagery and greed; I must speak of an undutiful son who paid no heed to his father’s pleas; I must denounce avarice and greed; in this case I must present Herodes as a kind of murderer.” Nevertheless, if Marcus so wished, he would pull his punches. Despite the allegations (which modern scholars are too quick to dismiss as commonplaces, as if things often said could not sometimes be true), Herodes emerged

240   Rhetoric and Rhetoricians with sufficient credit to be made consul ordinarius in 143 and tutor in Greek rhetoric to Marcus; despite the speech, he and Fronto became firm friends. (What little we know of the case comes entirely from Fronto’s correspondence: Ad M. Caesarem et invicem 3.2–​6, Ad M. Antoninum Imp. 3.4, Ad L. Verum Imp. 1.8, van den Hout 1988, 36–​39, 102, 113; cf. van den Hout, 1999, 94–​96, 278–​279, who, however, does not, as Graindor and Ameling could not, know that Fronto’s consulate has been documented as July–​August 142 not, as had been thought, 143.) While in Rome, Herodes married Appia Annia Regilla, often supposed on no evidence a kinswoman of Marcus’s biological father M. Annius Verus; her name points rather to Perusia (now Perugia), where the Appii Annii were a leading family (Torelli 1969, 301–​302), but hardly grand enough for Herodes. In any case, such intercultural marriages were unusual; but Herodes was ready to assume either a Greek or a Roman identity at will (Gleason 2010). The date is uncertain, but in the summer of 142 a stillborn son caused Herodes to display the excess of grief for which he would become notorious. Once Herodes’s consulate ended (Febuary 28, 143; cf. Graindor 1930, 89), Regilla accompanied him on his return to Greece, where she too made benefactions (Pomeroy 2007, 85–​111); at Olympia, his aqueduct fed into her nymphaeum and may even have been due to her service as priestess. However, after bearing him several children she was killed in the eighth month of another pregnancy by a kick in the stomach from Herodes’s freedman Alcimedon, allegedly on his orders; Herodes was prosecuted at Rome by her brother Bradua but acquitted for want of evidence, and because Bradua, a pompous ass, had made a hash of his case (Philostr. VS 2.1.8). Whatever the facts (one possibility is an attempt at inducing an abortion), Herodes mourned her with his usual extravagance of grief, which some saw as a mark of innocence; not even all those who thought it excessive deemed it insincere. The same extravagance was also shown in the monuments erected to his three foster-​ sons, on whom he had lavished the love he withheld from his stupid playboy son, named Bradua after his uncle: Achilleus, Memnon (so called because he was black), and above all Polydeucion (“Little Pollux”), more formally L. Vibullius Polydeuces, whose portraits were modeled on those of Hadrian’s beloved Antinous (Meyer 1985 and 1989). It is usually thought to have been Polydeucion for whom his excessive grieving was censured by a Stoic as unmanly; to this he replied in a speech reported by Gellius (NA 19.12) upholding the Peripatetic doctrine of moderation against the Stoic ideal of no passion with the warning fable of the Thracian who, learning from his neighbor the virtues of pruning, cut his whole farm down to nothing. This Latin paraphrase is as near as we come to the eloquence of a man regarded as the greatest of the sophists, worthy to be ranked amongst the classic Ten Orators of Athens (“Well, I am better than Andocides,” he modestly admitted); no Greek speech survives, only a miserable composition (Albini 1968) transmitted under his name, set in Thessaly during the late fifth century bce and more plausibly attributed by Russell (1983, 111) to Hippodromus of Larisa, which not only contains Latinisms such as συντιθέασιν “they compare,” calqued on componunt, instead of παραβάλλουσιν, but exhibits toward the end an obtrusive replication of the Thucydidean ὀρρωδεῖν, “to fear,” evidently a

Favorinus and Herodes Atticus    241 good classical word that the author has just remembered or discovered. We are therefore unable to judge Herodes’s oratory against Philostratus’s description at VS 2.1.14, which, as often with the language of literary criticism, is not always easy to understand, let alone translate: The structure of his discourse was well enough disciplined and its vehemence crept up on one rather than burst in; grandeur was united with simplicity, its sonority recalled Critias, there were conceits that no-​one else would have thought of, his ready wit was not dragged in but arose from the subject-​matter, and his style was pleasant, full of figures, elegant, with skillfull variation; his manner was not vehement but smooth and calm, and his style gave the overall impression of a gold-​dust gleaming beneath the silver eddies of a river.

Such mastery was not achieved without hard work and much reading; on one occasion, so he told Galen, he fell short of his usual standard after being too busy in the previous three days to read or write anything (On Examinations 9.19, pp. 112.11–​114.1 Iskandar 1988). Normally, however, he read even while drinking, and encouraged his best students to do the same; these were the members of his Waterclock Club (Philostr. VS 2.10.1), who met after his public lectures. Intellectual conversation over wine is also attested by Gellius, who was more than once his guest at Cephisia and Marathon (NA 1.2, 18.10) and who shows only his good side. The reading that Herodes practiced was requisite, not merely for a stock of arguments and exempla, but for command of Attic Greek, which even in Athens was no longer the current mode of speech; but Herodes symbolized that command through his familiar, variously called Heracles and Agathion, a strapping up-​country lad, allegedly eight feet tall, who spoke (in fluent and complex periods) the true Attic dialect uncorrupted by the koinê of the city—​or so Herodes informed a correspondent. There is not a little of the folk-​tale about this Heracles, who is also credited with such primitive traits as wrestling with wild beasts and such marks of purity as detecting that a bowl of milk had been polluted by a woman’s touch (Philostr. VS 2.1.7); but this much is clear, that in showing him favor Herodes was favoring himself, and demonstrating that he was Ἀττικός in more than name. Herodes’s wealth naturally gave him a dominant position in Athenian politics that no less naturally was resented, doubtless even by those who had acquiesced in his changing the traditional black cloaks of the ephebes to white, or had voted to remove the day on which his daughter Athenais had died from the calendar. When in 171 the two Quintilius brothers were sent to Greece as correctores Achaiae, they were invited to a meeting of the Athenian assembly at which speakers complained of his tyrannical conduct and requested them to lay these grievances before the emperor. They lost no time in doing so, whereupon Herodes (in the best tradition of tyrants ancient and modern) accused them of plotting against him by stirring up the Athenians, and even tried to prosecute his enemies in the proconsul’s court for arousing the people against him; but they forestalled him by approaching Marcus directly.

242   Rhetoric and Rhetoricians The case was heard at Sirmium (now Sremska Mitrovica). After an outstanding speech by his enemy Demostratus (scholars debate whether he was Fronto’s client in the earlier case), Herodes, out of his mind with grief at the death by lightning of Alcimedon’s two daughters, who had served him since childhood, instead of defending himself threw a tantrum; Marcus, though clearly disturbed by the accusations, transferred the blame to Herodes’s freedmen. Freedmen, unlike slaves, were legally responsible for their actions; excessive sway over a former master had been illustrated for Marcus not only by Herodes’s account of his father’s will, but by the reign of his predecessor Claudius. Nevertheless, his primary motive was no doubt to protect Herodes; although for a time he displayed a certain coolness toward him not only by ceasing to write him letters but by appointing Theodotus, who had been in league with Demostratus’s party, to his new chair of rhetoric in Athens, when Theodotus died soon afterwards, Marcus nominated Herodes’s favourite pupil Hadrian of Tyre, and on his visit to Athens in 176, when he attempted to reconcile the citizenry with the great man, it was Herodes whom he appointed to nominate the first holders of his philosophical professorships. When, a year or so afterwards, Herodes died at the age of seventy-​six, the Athenians put aside their resentments and gave him a magnificent civic funeral, overriding his wish to be buried at Marathon; Hadrian’s funeral oration moved his audience to tears.

Further Reading For various opinions on Hadrian’s dealings with Favorinus, see Bowie 1997, Fein 1994, Holford-​ Strevens 2015, Swain 1989. The view of Favorinus’s philosophical writings expressed here were set out at greater length in Holford-​Strevens 1997, 207–​217; see too Bonazzi 2003, 158–​163; Glucker 1978, 256–​292; Ioppolo 1993; Opsomer 1997; 1998, 213–​240. For Herodes, see, besides Graindor 1930 and Ameling 1983: Bowersock 1969, Kennell 1997, and Tobin 1997. The education received and imparted by Herodes is considered by Papalas 1981. On his buildings see Galli 2002.

Bibliography Albini, U. 1968. [Erode Attico]: Περὶ πολιτείας. Florence. Amato, E. 2005. Favorinos d’Arles, Œuvres: Introduction générale, témoignages, Discours aux Corinthiens, Sur la Fortune. Paris. Amato, E. 2010. Favorinos d’Arles, Œuvres III: Fragments. Paris. Ameling, W. 1983. Herodes Atticus. 2 vols. Hildesheim. Barigazzi, A. 1991. Galeno: Sull’ottima maniera d’insegnare; Esortazione alla medicina. Berlin. Bonazzi, M. 2003. Academici e Platonici: Il dibattito antico sullo scetticismo di Platone. Milan. Bowersock, G. W. 1969. Greek Sophists in the Roman Empire. Oxford. Bowie, E. L. 1997. “Hadrian, Favorinus, and Plutarch.” In Plutarch and His Intellectual World, edited by J. Mossman, 1–​13. London.

Favorinus and Herodes Atticus    243 Fein, S. 1994. Die Beziehungen der Kaiser Trajan und Hadrian zu den Litterati. Stuttgart and Leipzig. Galli, M. 2002. Die Lebenswelt eines Sophisten: Untersuchungen zu den Bauten und Stiftungen des Herodes Atticus. Mainz. Gleason, M.  W. 1995. Making Men:  Sophists and Self-​ Presentation in Ancient Rome. Princeton, NJ. Gleason, M. W. 2010: “Making Space for Bicultural Identity: Herodes Atticus Commemorates Regilla.” In Local Knowledge and Microidentities in the Imperial Greek World, edited by T. Whitmarsh, 125–​162. Cambridge. Glucker, J. 1978. Antiochus and the Late Academy. Göttingen. Graindor, P. 1930. Un milliardaire antique: Hérode Atticus et sa famille. Cairo. Goggin, M. G. 1951. “Rhythm in the Prose of Favorinus.” YClS 12: 149–​201. Holford-​Strevens, L. 1997. “Favorinus: The Man of Paradoxes.” In Philosophia Togata II: Plato and Aristotle at Rome, edited by J. Barnes and M. Griffin, 188–​217. Oxford. Holford-​Strevens, L. 2003. Aulus Gellius: An Antonine Scholar and His Achievement. Rev. ed. Oxford. Holford-​Strevens, L. 2015. “L’exil de Favorinos eut-​il réellement lieu?” In Le Traité “Sur l’exil” de Favorinos d’Arles:  Papyrologie, philologie et littérature, edited by E. Amato and M.-​H. Marganne, 123–​132, Rennes. Hout, M. P. J. van den. 1988. M. Cornelius Fronto: Epistulae. Leipzig. Hout, M. P. J. van den. 1999. A Commentary on the Letters of M. Cornelius Fronto. Leiden. Hoyland, R. 2007. “A New Edition and Translation of the Leiden Polemon.” In Seeing the Face, Seeing the Soul: Polemon’s “Physiognomy” from Classical Antiquity, edited by S. Swain, 329–​463. Oxford. Ioppolo, A. M. 1993. “The Academic Position of Favorinus of Arelate.” Phronesis 38: 183–​213. Iskandar, A. Z., ed. 1988. Galen: On Examinations by which the Best Physicians Are Recognized. East Berlin. Kennell, N. M. 1997. “Herodes Atticus and the Rhetoric of Tyranny.” CPhil. 92: 346–​362. Meyer, H. 1985:  “Vibullius Polydeukion:  ein archäologisch-​epigraphischer Problemfall,” MDAI(A) 100: 393–​404 and pls. 87–​90. Meyer, H. 1989: “Zu Polydeukion, dem Archon Dionysios und W. Ameling in Boreas 11, 1988, 62 ff.” Boreas 12: 119–​122 and pls. 32, 23. Morris, J. 1964, “Leges Annales under the Principate, I: Legal and Constitutional.” Listy filologické 87: 316–​337. Opsomer, H. J. 1997. “Favorinus versus Epictetus on the Philosophical Heritage of Plutarch: A Debate on Epistemology.” In Plutarch and His Intellectual World, edited by J. Mossman, 17–​39. (London, 1997) Opsomer, H. J. 1998. In Search of the Truth: Academic Tendencies in Middle Platonism. Brussels. Papalas, A. J. 1981. “Herodes Atticus: An Essay on Education in the Antonine Age.” History of Education Quarterly 21: 171–​188. Pomeroy, S. B. 2007. The Murder of Regilla:  A  Case of Domestic Violence in Antiquity. Cambridge, MA. Repath, I. 2007. “Anonymus Latin, Book of Physiognomy.” In In Seeing the Face, Seeing the Soul: Polemon’s “Physiognomy” from Classical Antiquity, edited by S. Swain, 549–​635. Oxford. Russell, D. A. 1983. Greek Declamation. Cambridge. Swain, S. 1989. “Favorinus and Hadrian.” ZPE 79: 150–​158.

244   Rhetoric and Rhetoricians Swain, S, ed. 2007. Seeing the Face, Seeing the Soul: Polemon’s “Physiognomy” from Classical Antiquity to Medieval Islam. Oxford. Tobin, J. 1997. Herodes Attikos and the City of Athens:  Patronage and Conflict under the Antonines. Amsterdam. Torelli, M. 1969. “Senatori etruschi della tarda repubblica e dell’impero.” Dial. di Arch. 3: 285–​363. Whitmarsh, T. 2001. Greek Literature and the Roman Empire: The Politics of Imitation. Oxford.

Chapter 16

F ronto and H i s  C i rc l e Pascale Fleury

Recent studies on the Second Sophistic have shown that the characteristics of this movement and this period differ according to the observer’s point of view. If we look beyond the desire we have to find a steady definition for this cultural phenomenon, it becomes clear that the literature of this period, for Greek and Latin writers, shares some common traits and themes. Fronto, the great orator of the second century and teacher of Latin rhetoric to the future emperors Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus, cannot be included among the sophists, at least as defined by Philostratus, first because he is not Greek, an essential feature in Philostratus’s rather narrow definition, but also because he does not seem to have practiced declamation, nor did he possess the spectacular eloquence of his contemporaries. However, Fronto practiced some sophistic genres and shares with his Greek homologues an epideictic vision of rhetoric, a love for archaisms and an interest in similar themes.1 Therefore, this contribution will attempt, initially, to show the connections that Fronto maintains with the sophists that he encounters and, second, to illustrate the commonality of thought and literary style between the Roman orator and the Greek sophists.

16.1  Fronto and the Sophists: Herodes Atticus, Favorinus, Polemon Fronto’s letters include few judgments on the contemporary sophists as sophists. Thus, the interactions between the Latin orator and Herodes Atticus are essentially social. Indeed, in the preserved Correspondence, the Greek sophist is not judged on literary criteria nor on his sophistic actions, but on a moral basis.2 From a literary perspective, Fronto alludes probably to Favorinus in the third paragraph of the Laudes neglegentiae: “ de Fauorini nostri pigmentis fuci quisnam appingerems licet?”3

246   Rhetoric and Rhetoricians Fronto seems to know the sophist’s adoxographies, but it is not likely that the reference to the red color (pigmentis fuci) recalls the color debate staged in the Attic Nights (2.26). Indeed, the makeup metaphor is not unusual in the theoretic expositions on style and in ancient literary criticism (Fleury 2006b: 236–​252). This allusion to Favorinus, when reframed in the context of the Laudes neglegentiae, where Fronto demonstrates the superiority of natural beauty over artificial charms, seems to be a criticism of rhetorical ornamentation compared to the beauty of natural speech, a frequent theme in Fronto (Fleury 2002). The philological difficulties of the text prevent us from going further with this hypothesis. Polemon the Sophist (Philostr. VS 1.25.530–​544) receives a fuller treatment in the letters since Marcus Aurelius writes to his teacher of rhetoric (Ad Marcum 2.10) to report on a declamation that he has heard.4 Fronto answers this letter with a jest (Ad Marcum 2.2.5): “Pro Polemone rhetore, quem mihi tu in epistula tua proxime exhibuisti Tullianum, ego in oratione, quam in senatu recitaui, philosophum reddidi, nisi me opinio fallit, peratticum” (“Instead of Polemon the rhetorician, whom you lately presented to me in your letter as a Ciceronian, I have given back to you in my speech, which I delivered in the Senate, a philosopher, if I am not mistaken, of the most Attic type”; Haines 1919–​1920, 1:123, slightly modified). Then, Fronto cites Horace (Sat. 2.3.254–​257) to talk about the conversion of Polemon the Philosopher.5 It is clear that the basis of Marcus Aurelius’s criticism was stylistic in nature.6 However, for our purpose, it is more pertinent to point out the amalgam that Fronto seems to make between philosophy and sophistry. Philostratus does not report any philosophical pretentions when he writes Polemon’s biography and it is safe to think that Polemon had no more claims to philosophy than the other sophists (cf., inter alia, Anderson 1993, 133–​143). Polemon’s portrayal as an Attic philosopher is paradoxical. The terms used by Fronto closely associate two notions that are somewhat contradictory: the search for reason, as Fronto himself calls philosophy (Ad Marcum 4.12.2; cf. Fleury 2006b, 133–​143) and style.7 Furthermore, the two stages of the assimilation are not wholly positive. For Fronto, a Ciceronian rhetor is probably more commendable than an Attic philosopher, but first, the word rhetor is sparsely used in the Correspondence,8 where orator is preferred, and second, Fronto’s opinion on Cicero, positive as it may be, is not devoid of criticism.9 Even if it is challenging to understand the issues clearly, Fronto’s observation seems to establish a sharp dichotomy between Latin rhetoric and Greek philosophy; Fronto positions Polemon the Sophist in a world opposite to his own. This division is similar to other devices used in the Correspondence (Fleury 2002 and 2007), where Fronto establishes through the use of speech clear distinctions and oppositions between the Greek world, associated with shameful philosophy and dialectic, and the Latin world, associated with respectable eloquence and lifestyle. Still, it is clear that these speeches are only words. Fronto’s circle, as we can see it in the Attic Nights and in the Correspondence, in his rhetorical display, in his use of Greek and in his idea of the world are, after all, more closely related to the Greek sophists than Fronto would admit.

Fronto and His Circle    247

16.2  Fronto’s Circle in the Attic Nights Fronto’s portrait as the center of an intellectual circle comes primarily from the writing of Aulus Gellius, who uses the Latin orator as the protagonist in five chapters.10 The anecdotes in the Attic Nights show Fronto in standard social situations. The orator is most of the time pictured in familiar settings, surrounded by friends and scholars, young and old, debating casually about the subtleties of the Latin language. The scene is usually staged in his villa on the Esquiline hill, but on one occasion it takes place in the hall of the Palatine palace. The members of Fronto’s circle, most of the time, are not really identified. To describe the attendees of the orator in his villa, Aulus Gellius uses periphrasis highlighting their number (“plerisque uiris doctis presentibus,” 2.26; “nobis ac plerisque aliis adsidentibus,” 13.29; “sedentibus multis doctrina aut genere aut fortuna nobilibus uiris,” 19.10; “cum quibusdam aliis,” 19.13) and the interlocutors are usually identified by a cultural function (a grammarian, a poet). The first and last chapters where Fronto is a character in the Attic Nights seem peculiar, at the same time, by their staging and by the results of the lexical investigation. In both cases, the interlocutors are named (Favorinus in 2.26; Postumius Festus and Sulpicius Apollinaris in 19.13) and in both cases, the discussions revolve around the relationship between Greek and Latin (the comparison of the number of words for colors in Greek and Latin in 2.26; the Latinity of the adjective nanos in 19.13). In the first chapter, Favorinus concedes victory to Fronto, while in the last chapter, Fronto asks the opinion of Apollinaris on the subject of the adjective nanos and Festus proceeds to ask an unnamed grammarian to give some Latin examples of the word. The example in question is then taken from an Augustan poet. This is a practice that is not characteristic of the depiction of Fronto in the other stories told in the Attic Nights.11 The confrontation between Fronto and Favorinus, which takes place in the first chapter where Fronto is mentioned, is very instructive. As highlighted by Baldwin (1973), the important characters in the Attic Nights have rare interactions. Aulus Gellius seems to build impervious parallel worlds that rotate around one character and do not replicate the sociability and rivalry set forth by Philostratus in his presentation of the Second Sophistic. The biographer speaks of encounters or relations, inter alia, between Favorinus, Herodes Atticus, and Polemon. According to Fronto’s Correspondence, the Latin orator knew Polemon and was engaged in a lawsuit against Herodes Atticus.12 These relationships are not mentioned by Aulus Gellius. In the Attic Nights, Fronto is the only character of importance who meets other sophistic personalities. Fronto is not the main hero of the Attic Nights, the part played by Favorinus (see Holford-​Strevens 2003, 98–​130). Yet, the positive features attributed to him by Aulus Gellius make Fronto seem an authority in grammatical matters and an expert in the Latin language. The anecdotes show Fronto as a respected model, but a model that is a little old-​fashioned, representative of a conservative Roman fundus, a complement to the originality introduced by the Gallic sophist Favorinus. The victory that is conceded by Favorinus

248   Rhetoric and Rhetoricians to Fronto on the number of words to say the colors red and green in Greek and in Latin seems to reveal Aulus Gellius’s desire to show Latinity as the foundation of culture. The narrative of the last chapter where Fronto intervenes as a character is interesting in many respects. It is the only chapter among the five where Fronto intervenes in a public setting, the hall of the Palatine palace, where many learned men are mentioned by name and where the orator does not lead the discussion. These features could indicate that Aulus Gellius builds, by means of the anecdotes concerning Fronto, some character progression, from an academic authority in an intimate setting to a more humble purveyor of culture. The situation at the end of the miscellany confirms in sum the minor part played by Fronto in Aulus Gellius’s intellectual construction. Aulus Gellius’s testimony is essential, because it sheds light on the impact that the imperial tutor could have on the Roman cultural circle. This testimony should, however, be considered with caution, since Aulus Gellius’s construction of the narrative and of the character serve primarily the purposes of the author of the Attic Nights and cannot be considered as an exact reflection of reality. Modern commentators, on the basis of Aulus Gellius’s and Sidonius Apollinaris’s testimonies (Epist. 1.1, 2), which mention a rhetorical school claiming Fronto as their master, have quickly concluded that the orator had an immense influence on later literature (cf. in particular Marache 1952: 206–​207; 335–​ 338). Even if Fronto’s renown in the following centuries is revealed by the mention of his name in Macrobius’s (Sat. 5.1.7) and Mamertus Claudianus’s (Ad Sapaudum, p. 206 Englebrecht) canons of style, the absence in the Latin corpus of real imitators should urge caution. We follow on that point the prudence wished for by Holford-​Strevens, who shows that Fronto is not the originator of the archaic movement of the second century and that his younger contemporaries, Aulus Gellius and Apuleius, even if they also value archaisms and pre-​Ciceronian authors, do not necessarily make the same choices as Fronto (Holford-​Strevens 2003, 354–​358). The writers of the period do not all conceive this return to the lexical past in the same way. The practices are not identical in the Greek and the Roman worlds, even though they both seem to feel a general need to curb the evolution of language by anchoring it in a sure and revivifying lexical past (Holford-​Strevens 2003, 362–​363). Nevertheless, it is obvious that Fronto’s portrayal in Aulus Gellius enhances the importance of Latinity and its relationship with Hellenism (Keulen 2009, 5–​6), themes that are also observable in his correspondence, but that are not, as we have said, discernible in the real practice of the Latin orator.

16.3  Fronto’s Circle in the Correspondence If the Correspondence were not accessible, Fronto’s portrayal would be one of a picky man with a narrow outlook on literature. Aulus Gellius has no concern for Fronto’s oratory, the activity on which his ancient renown was based (Cass. Dio, 69.18.3). The

Fronto and His Circle    249 Correspondence gives a more nuanced picture of his vision of the belles-​lettres, but also a diversified portrait of his entourage. This reality can largely be explained by the way that the letters were published. It seems likely that the epistolary corpus was put together not by the author, but by one of his descendants, who would have tried to emphasize and give concrete examples of the relations between his ancestry and that of Antonines and other important persons of the time.13 It is then normal to find as correspondents, besides the emperor and the Caesars, a variety of important persons, especially in the political and forensic spheres.14 A detailed account of the constitution of Fronto’s circle is beyond the limits set here, and in any case the detailed treatment in Champlin (1980) and elsewhere makes it unnecessary. But we can recall some remarks about the orator’s relations on prosopographical grounds. Modern prosopographical studies have yielded multiple readings of Fronto’s circle in the correspondence, in accordance with the particular angle pursued.15 It is, however, obvious that the correspondents and the people mentioned in the two books Ad amicos distinguish themselves by their proximity to imperial power. Moreover, Champlin has clearly shown how much this cultural circle is varied. Fronto’s entourage is primarily bound by culture and literature, with no real barrier between the Greek and the Roman worlds, nor sharp distinctions between various disciplines (rhetoric, poetry, philosophy). Champlin (1980, 29–​44) also points out the connections, not always tight, but existing, between the Latin orator and some Greek sophists.

16.4  A Discourse on Cultural Identity It is not possible in the assigned limits of this contribution to address all the topics in the letters that establish parallels between the Frontonian approach and the sophistic movement.16 Therefore, in order to give a picture of the way Fronto builds his cultural identity, two specific points will be discussed: his discourse on Greek and his idea of political power. In a letter in Greek addressed to Marcus Aurelius’s mother, Domitia Lucilla, Fronto asks his correspondent to forgive the poor quality of his Greek and he likens himself to Anacharsis; he then affirms his African origin: After all, [Anacharsis] was a Scythian of the nomad Scythians, I am a Libyan of the Libyan nomads. So it’s common to both of us, Anacharsis and me, to be driven to pasture; and it will be our common deed to baa when we are grazing as best anyone can baa. Well, now I’ve made a simile between talking like a barbarian and baaing. (Ad Marcum 2.3.5, Richlin 2006, 91–​92)17

Fronto’s posture is to exclude himself from the two cultural spheres, Greek and Latin, so as to excuse his barbarisms, even though these, as Norden and others (Brock 1911, 41; Norden 1915, 364) have shown, are extremely rare in his very classical and

250   Rhetoric and Rhetoricians Platonician Greek. The same attitude can be seen in the exordium of the eroticos, a letter also written in Greek, which takes Plato’s Phaedrus as model to talk about amatory and pedagogical relations: This is the third letter, beloved Boy, that I am sending you on the same theme, the first by the hand of Lysias, the son of Kephalus, the second of Plato, the philosopher, and the third by the hand of a barbarian, but as regards judgement, as I think, not wholly wanting in sagacity. (Additamentum epistularum 8.1; Haines 1919–​1920, 1:21)

Furthermore, Marcus Aurelius, in a letter to his teacher, recalls that Fronto had scolded his student for writing in Greek, while the teacher himself was guilty of the same offense. The Princeps also says that he never learned the Greek language (Ad Marcum 3.9.2). It is difficult to say if Fronto’s remonstrances were motivated by the impropriety of the language in some circumstances, or by an absolute rejection of Greek for writing. The prohibition against the use of Greek does not seem unilateral in the orator’s mind. The composition of several letters in Greek and the quite common use of that language in the Correspondence seem to show that Fronto was more flexible than he says.18 To this example, we can add another of Marcus Aurelius’s observations, which is a compliment to his teacher: “nam de elegentia quid dicam? nisi te latine loqui, nos ceteros neque graece neque latine” (“for as to its style what can I say? except that you talk Latin while the rest of us talk neither Latin nor Greek”; Ad Antoninum 1.4.2; Haines 1919–​1920, 2:123). The emphatic expression puts Fronto in a category apart where he is alone, where his Latin surpasses the language of all the inhabitants of the empire. This construction, made by Fronto and adopted by Marcus Aurelius, enables the orator to go beyond cultural limitations and to place himself above all the intellectuals, Greek or Roman, of his day. The way Fronto considers the values that should be at the basis of the hierarchy of power follow an analogous strategy.19 This transformation can be seen in Fronto’s political ideas, although the Correspondence is not very eloquent on the topic (André 1982, 29–​55; Portalupi 1995). This is in part due to the epistolary form of the corpus, in part due to the professorial function of the letters and in part due to Fronto’s social status. Nevertheless, the hierarchies built, especially in the letter to Antoninus Pius (Ad Pium 3.5; Fleury 2006b, 148–​ 151), in the letters on the Princeps’s eloquence (Ad Marcum 4.3.6; Ad Verum 2.3 and 25; Fleury 2001) and in the letters on the consulate (Fleury 2009; Martin 2003), show that Fronto changes the center of authority from a political to a cultural entity. For Fronto, indeed, the foundation of society is friendship, or more exactly what he calls philostorgia (Aubert 2011; Lana 1966; Steinmayer 1961–​1962), a specific kind of natural love, that he also puts in evidence in the letters of recommendation (Béranger-​Badel 2000; L’Huillier 2002; Plantera 1977–​1978); however, this love cannot be without culture and especially without rhetoric. It is speech capacity, given to man by the gods, that makes the social link possible (Ad Marcum 1.3). Friendship is a value that transcends human and imperial laws. Nobody can coerce the Princeps to surrender to the law of culture (Ad Marcum 4.3.6), but it is laudable, indeed necessary, for the men in power to take into account

Fronto and His Circle    251 the opinions of the learned. In this perspective, the power of culture surpasses political power. Fronto, because he is a man of unsurpassable culture, rebalances the relations with the men in power by portraying himself as the judge of what is and what is not culture (Fleury 2001; Pennacini 1983). These devices are sometimes used, of course, to serve some individual and particular goal. That is to say, the direct relationship of Fronto with the imperial family requires some concrete strategies. Nevertheless, these kinds of constructions can also be seen in the way that the Greek contemporary authors negotiate with political authorities, even though the definition of culture, of paideia, is not the same (see, inter alia, Whitmarsh 2005, 41–​56). There is, therefore, from Fronto a sharp difference between the way he talks about Greek culture and the way he lives it, which is much more nuanced. In the Correspondence, speech is used to delimit categories and exclude some type of intellectuals; the same process can be seen in the Fronto anecdotes of the Attic Nights. Nonetheless, the social relations of the orator, according to what we can deduce from the prosopographical analysis, do not show the same dichotomy. Fronto, while building his position on the Greek language, presents himself as a barbarian, opening thus a third category, which is specific to him. Actually, Fronto is not a Libyan, nor a barbarian.20 These strategies of humility and exclusion can also be observed in the literary criticism of Polemon and in the self-​construction of the censorial character, able to judge all men on oratorical et cultural matters (Graverini and Keulen 2009, 197–​217). The virulent metaphors against philosophy seem part of the same strategy. The exclusionary discourse, however, is never applied in the way Fronto conceives and practices literary genres and models, in his cultural conceptions and in his social relations. The teacher had obviously a global conception of rhetoric, but also of the relationship that eloquence should have with civic life, that is to say the relationship between eloquence and power. This type of reflection on the rhetorical and the political can also be seen in the writings of the Greek sophists of the first and second centuries of our era. In this, Fronto seems to take part in this intellectual movement. In speech, Fronto is anything but a philhellene. Drawing parallels between the Greek language and the philosophical lifestyle, he builds multiple associations that segregate the Greek and Latin languages into philosophy and rhetoric, idle and civic life. The teacher lives, however, in a Mediterranean world, where the elites are more and more homogeneous, where sophists think of speech as a triumphant, unifying, founding, civilizing force (Fleury 2011; Pernot 1993, 621–​635). Therefore, Fronto’s writing gives a specific example of how a Roman teacher of rhetoric can negotiate his place in the geography between the two cultural spheres.

Further Reading Fronto’s Correspondence has not frequently been translated in English. Haines’s (1919–​1920) translation is a little archaistic and not always easy to follow, but it is complete. Richlin (2006) has translated a selection of letters, in a gender studies approach. My translation in French (Fleury 2003) only has the letters of Fronto and not those of Marcus Aurelius. The 1999 linear

252   Rhetoric and Rhetoricians commentary of Van den Hout is helpful, but dense. For the English-​speaking world, the reference is still Champlin’s (1980) historical study of the man and the period. In recent studies, we should note the original literary approaches of Keulen (2009) and Johnson (2012).

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Fronto and His Circle    253 Fleury, P. 2012. “Letters of Marcus Aurelius.” In The Blackwell Companion to Marcus Aurelius, edited by M. van Ackeren, 62–​76. Oxford and Malden, MA. Garcea, A., and V. Lomanto. 2004. “Gellius and Fronto on Loanwords and Literary Models: Their Evaluation of Laberius.” In The Worlds of Aulus Gellius, edited by L. Holford-​ Strevens and A. Vardi, 41–​64. Oxford. Graverini, L., and W. Keulen. 2009. “Roman Fiction and Its Audience: Seriocomic Assertions of Authority.” In Readers and Writers in the Ancient Novel, edited by M. Paschalis, S. Panayotakis, and G. Schmeling, 197–​217. Ancient Narrative Supplement 12. Gröningen. Haines, C., ed. and trans. 1919–​1920. Correspondence. 2 vols. Cambridge. Harrison, S. J. 2000. Apuleius: A Latin Sophist. Oxford. Holford-​Strevens, L. 2003. Aulus Gellius: An Antonine Scholar and His Achievement. Rev. ed. Oxford. Johnson, W. A. 2012. Readers and Reading Culture in the High Roman Empire: A Study of Elite Communities. Oxford and New York. Kemezis, A. 2010. “Lucian, Fronto, and the Absence of Contemporary Historiography under the Antonines.” AJPhil. 131: 285–​325. Keulen, W. 2009. Gellius the Satirist: Roman Cultural Authority in “Attic Nights”. Mnemosyne Supplement 297. Leiden and Boston. Lana, I. 1966. “Simplicitas, philostorghia e curiositas nella letteratura latina delle II sec. d. C.” Cultura e Scuola 18: 90–​97. L’Huillier, M.-​C. 2002. “Fronton et ses amis: L’orateur dans la cité.” In Antiquité et citoyenneté, edited by S. Ratti, 293–​306. Besançon. Martin, J.-​P. 2003. “Fronton magister imperatorum.” In Vrbs aeterna: Actas y colaboraciones del coloquio internacional “Roma entre la literatura y la historia”: Homenaje a la profesora Carmen Castillo, edited by A. del Real, 65–​81. Pampelune. Marache, R. 1952. La critique littéraire de langue latine. Rennes. Mathieu, N. 1994. “Les Aufidii de Pisaurum et la mémoire de Cornelius Fronto.” In Mélanges R. Chevallier, edited by C. M. Ternes, 1:301–​312. Luxembourg. Méthy, N. 1983. “Fronton et Apulée, Romains ou Africains?” Rivista di cultura classica e medioevale 25: 37–​47. Norden, E. 1915. Die antike Kunstprosa vom VI Jahrhundert v.  Christus bis in die Zeit der Renaissance. Stuttgart. Pellini, S. 1912. “Aulo Gellio e Frontone.” Classici e neolatini 1: 415–​425. Pennacini, A. 1983. “Eloquenza dell’imperatore e prosa dei dotti nella dottrina di Frontone.” Retorica e classi sociali: Atti del IX Convegno interuniversitario di Studi (Bressanone, 1981), edited by M. A. Cortelazzo, 31–​38. Padua. Pernot, L. 1993. La rhétorique de l’éloge dans le monde gréco-​romain. 2 vols. Paris. Pflaum, H. G. 1964. “Les correspondants de l’orateur M.  Cornelius Fronton de Cirta.” In Hommages à Jean Bayet, edited by M. Renard and R. Schilling, 544–​560. Brussels. Plantera, A. 1977–​1978. “Osservazioni sulle commendatizie latine da Cicerone a Frontone.” Annali della Facolta di magistero dell’Università di Cagliari 2: 5–​36. Portalupi, F. 1961. Marco Cornelio Frontone. Turin. Portalupi, F. 1995. “Il pensiero politico di Plutarco in Frontone.” In Teoria e prassi politica nelle opere di Plutarco: Atti del V convegno plutarcheo, edited by I. Gallo and B. Scardigli, 391–​397. Naples. Ramírez de Verger, A. 1973. “Fronton y la segunda sofistica.” Habis 4: 115–​126. Richlin, A. 2006. Marcus Aurelius in Love. Chicago.

254   Rhetoric and Rhetoricians Richter, D. S. 2011. Cosmopolis: Imagining Community in Late Classical Athens and the Early Roman Empire. Oxford. Russell, D. A. 1990. “Greek and Latin in Antonine Literature.” In Antonine Literature, 1–​17. Oxford. Sacerdoti, A. 2003. “Echi frontoniani nelle praefatio delle Noctes Atticae.” Bolletino di Studi latini 33: 534–​541. Schwierczina, T. 1925. “Fronton und die Briefe Ciceros.” Philologus 81: 72–​85. Steinmayer, G. 1961-​1962. “La filostorgia.” Atti e memorie della Accademia di agricoltura scienze e lettere di Verona 13: 307–​325. Swain, S. 2004. “Bilingualism and Biculturalism in Antonine Rome.” In The Worlds of Aulus Gellius, edited by L. Holford-​Strevens and A. Vardi, 3–​40. Oxford. Swain, S. 1996. Hellenism and Empire: Language, Classicism, and Power in the Greek World, ad 50–​250. Oxford. Van den Hout, M. P. J. 1988. Epistulae. Leipzig. Van den Hout, M. P. J. 1999. A Commentary of the Letters of M. Cornelius Fronto. Leiden. Whitmarsh, T. 2005. The Second Sophistic. Oxford. Zetzel, J. E. G. 1974. “Statilius Maximus and Ciceronian Studies in the Antonine Age.” Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies of the University of London 21: 107–​123.

Chapter 17

Aelius Ari st i de s Estelle Oudot

Presenting Aelius Aristides in a work on the Second Sophistic means presenting a sophist who vigorously rejected the term, and who called himself a rhêtôr.1 But despite himself, a sophist is what he was, if only with regard to his declamations (meletai), this being the first of the formal criteria by which Philostratus, in his Lives of the Sophists 1. 481,2 differentiated the Second (deutera) Sophistic from the original movement. He also delivered orations in political forums and ceremonies, gave lectures, took part in meetings and made informal presentations (laliai). In many ways, he corresponded to the typical portrait that was multiplied by the fifty or so personalities in Philostratus’s Lives. But in his rejection of this denomination, he was asserting a singularity that could not be reduced to a manifestation of overweening pride. We clearly perceive the tension that traverses a personality who was both emblematic of a cultural, literary, and social phenomenon, and idiosyncratic—​a man who lived in symbiosis with a God, was wary of certain rhetorical practices, refused to take on the civic responsibilities that would normally have been incumbent on a person of his milieu, often preferring reclusion to society, and yet was occupied with promoting language and rhetoric among his contemporaries, and defined himself as the incarnation of the ideal orator in his century.

An Emblematic Figure of the Second Sophistic If one follows, in a summary way, the defining criteria of the Second Sophistic—​a period, a privileged geographical area and the manifestation of paideia—​Aristides was objectively a writer-​orator who typified this social and cultural movement. Historically, Aristides’s life coincided with the Pax Romana and the Antonine era, which favored the travels and activities of orators and their cultivated audience. The

256   Rhetoric and Rhetoricians activities of Greek-​speaking intellectuals won the favor of philhellene emperors such as Hadrian and Marcus Aurelius. Aristides would profit much from living in an age of such stability and prosperity. He was born in 117 ad, the year in which Hadrian came to power, and he lived until at least 180.3 His adult life coincided with the reign of Antoninus Pius, and in particular Marcus Aurelius, who, apart from being an emperor, was a scholar and philosopher who chose to write in Greek. Aristides and Marcus Aurelius shared two teachers, Herodes Atticus and Alexander of Cotiaeum, and they had an epistolary relationship. The major part of Aristides’s life was also spent in the cradle of the Second Sophistic. He was a native of Hadrianoutherai, in Mysia, a city recently founded by Hadrian. But he had close ties with Smyrna, “the hearth of the continent” (Or. 17.13)4 in terms of education and culture, of which he became an eminent citizen, and which he praised in high-​flown terms (Or. 17 and Or. 18–​20).5 He also had ties with Pergamum, which was a center of culture and religious debate,6 and where he made visits to the sanctuary of Asclepius over many years. Finally, his education and activities spanned the pedagogical and professional gamut of the Second Sophistic. He came from a wealthy family, and was a Roman citizen (on the base of a statue there are the tria nomina, Πόπλιος Αἴλιος Ἀριστείδης, along with the epithet Θεώδορος).7 He received a thorough rhetorical and literary education. In Smyrna he studied with Alexander of Cotiaeum,8 and he attended lectures by Polemon of Laodicea. In Pergamum, he frequented Aristocles, and in Athens, Herodes Atticus. Through his studies, he acquired an uncommon knowledge of the classical authors: Plato; the poets Homer, Simonides, and Pindar; the historians; and the orators Isocrates and Demosthenes. He acquired a precise knowledge of Greek history, and was a distinguished practitioner of the Attic dialect.9 At an early age, his mentors assured him that he could look forward to a literary career of the first rank (prôteuein, Or. 33.17). In order to complete his studies, and to develop his activity as an orator and teacher, he undertook a number of journeys. In 141, he set out for Egypt, where he spent two years. He honed his talent in the places he visited: Cos, Knidos, Rhodes, and Alexandria. He also began teaching, notably in Cyzicus, and subsequently visited Rome, Athens, and other cities, where he made speeches. He argued in favor of concord, so as to limit the rivalries between Smyrna, Ephesus, and Pergamum for the attribution of honors, and advocated the resolution of internal strife, notably in Rhodes (Or. 23 and Or. 24). He attended ceremonies during which he delivered, among others, the Panathenaikos, hymns in honor of divinities, a discourse on Apellas’s birthday (Or. 30), and funeral orations for his student Eteoneus and his master Alexander (Or. 31 and Or. 32).10 In this way he built up a considerable body of work. Some of his orations were given in public, some were meant only to be read. But all, it would seem, were intended for publication; which no doubt required one or more rewritings.11 Though being without question a cultured individual (pepaideumenos), with links to the domains of knowledge and power, practicing epideictic and deliberative eloquence as a counselor, declaimer, and formal speaker, Aristides was also, as Philostratus said, an idiosyncratic member of his intellectual milieu.

Aelius Aristides   257 Throughout his career he was stricken with bouts of illness,12 though in fact his physical and mental states were the mainspring of his creativity. During his first visit to Rome (between late 143 and some time in 144), which he hoped would bring him professional success, he became seriously indisposed (Or. 48.60–​70). And from then on he oscillated between periods of good health, during which he traveled around Asia Minor, delivering orations and lectures, and periods of treatment, often at the Asclepieion, for pathologies both acute and chronic. The unexpected benefits produced by Aristides’s physical condition were a result of the personal relationship he established with the god Asclepius, in whom he found not just a doctor capable of assuaging his maladies (Or. 48.5–​7; 50.32–​37), but also a mentor in rhetoric. He quotes Pardalas, “the greatest expert of the Greeks of our time in the science of oratory,” as saying that “he believed that I had become ill through some divine good fortune, so that by my association with the god, I might make this improvement” (Or. 50.27). From then on, Aristides regarded his activity as a divine mission. And with oratory having received the divine seal of approval, he saw it as the discipline that dominated, ordered, and educated the world.13 Another of Aristides’s distinguishing features was his ambiguous relationship with fame and power. Though he claimed to value only the judgment of his peers (Or. 34.38–​ 47), he clearly courted the approval of both the public and the Roman authorities. He ended a hymn to Athena, for example, with the hope that he would win “honor from both our emperors,” and also be “best in wisdom and oratory” (Or. 37.29).14 Acclaim was not lacking, indeed. Aristides spoke of it himself, both in passing (Or. 42.14) and in detail,15 painting a self-​portrait of a rhetor lauded for his eloquence and the masterful nature of his performances. This image, though suspect in its complacency, was in fact corroborated by the award of several honors (Or. 51.56),16 besides his personal relationships with emperors. The oration he delivered before Marcus Aurelius and Commodus in Smyrna in 176 won him their official recognition, and this encouraged him to write to them, on his own initiative, a letter that has remained famous, asking for their help in the reconstruction of the city after its destruction by an earthquake in 178.17 But he had to put up some stern resistance in order to avoid taking on the civic functions that would normally have been accepted by a person in his position: eirenarch in Adriani, prytan in Smyrna, tax collector, priest of Asclepius. This suggests that, although he had a number of students, including Eteoneus in Cyzicus, Damian of Ephesus, and Apellas, he did not hold a teaching position (see Or. 50.87) of the kind that would automatically have exempted him from such “liturgies.”18 Another of Aristides’s distinguishing traits was his avoidance of what Philostratus considered to be the touchstone of oratorical prowess, namely improvisation on a theme suggested by a member of the audience. But in Philostratus’s view, which he set out at some length, this was a deliberate choice, not a weakness. During the aforementioned imperial visit to Smyrna, Aristides postponed his address to the emperors for a day because, as he stated, he was “one of those who do not vomit their speeches but polish

258   Rhetoric and Rhetoricians them.”19 And when he gave his address, he did so with “an admirable impetuosity of speech.”20 That being said, Philostratus was persuaded that in private he worked assiduously on his improvising skills.21 At any rate, in order to absolve Aristides for what, in the end, he evidently could not but see as a shortcoming, Philostratus depicted him as an orator of great erudition (eupaideusia)22 who was also the most skilled (technikos) of the sophists, and who worked to eliminate excess and triviality (kouphologia). In his text on Aristides, Philostratus plays up the value of technical and formal talent, while playing down the kind of bravura display that is commented on approvingly elsewhere in the Lives of the Sophists. And in fact Aristides’s broad-​ranging work included metadiscursive reflection and comments on rhetoric itself. While remaining to some extent within the framework of classical oratory, he adapted its forms to his own purposes, and reflected on its object, the logos. His is the largest extant body of work by an orator of the Second Sophistic, comprising fifty complete orations, two that are incomplete (Or. 52, the sixth Sacred Tale, and Or. 53, A Panegyric on the Water in Pergamum) and one that is considered apocryphal23 (Or. 35, Regarding the Emperor).24

A Bridge between the Two Sophistics Aristides was among those who bore out Philostratus’s view that the Sophistic of the Roman era was indeed “second” (deutera), rather than “new” (nea). And in formal terms, the classical Greek heritage was apparent in many of his orations, with their pure Atticism and their exemplification of rhetorical genres. But in a world where political messages were no longer delivered at the same times or places as before, he favored epideictic rhetoric. A prime example of this is the Panathenaikos, a long eulogy to Athens with a title that echoes an oration by Isocrates, to whose Panegyricus it also looks for inspiration, while part of its topos and its periodization of history come from classical funeral orations.25 Other works, such as the orations on Pergamum, Ephesus, Smyrna (Or. 23), and Rhodes (Or. 24), fall into the category of deliberative rhetoric. Nor is the forensic mode absent, given that the “Platonic discourses” (Or. 2–​4) present themselves as defenses of oratory. But Aristides goes further still in his work on literature. He reproduces the traits of the classical age by donning the personas of ancient orators. On one occasion, for example, “I immediately accepted the omen of Demosthenes speaking again” (Or. 50.18).26 He gives a voice to real or imagined orators, translocating the enunciative situation to the classical era in such a way as to enter into the Peloponnesian war in medias res,27 or to grapple with the complexity of relations between Greek cities during the fourth century bc.28 Beyond the appearance of an academic exercise, this is a novel form of mimesis. But it also involves a genuinely creative process that modern critics have tended to overlook.

Aelius Aristides   259

Rhetoric and Literary Innovation This creative process resulted from conscious work on the part of Aristides. He reworked and modified the precepts and topoi laid down by the theoreticians. His eulogy of Rome, for example, is totally silent about the history of the city and the empire. The hymns to the gods claim the right to use prose, not poetry. The Sacred Tales represent a personalization of the hieros logos. These are among the indications that Aristides was acutely conscious of genres, and that he wanted to work on rhetoric with a view to literary innovation. Such an approach to rhetoric was infused with the importance he ascribed to the function, and the power, of the logos in the human world, and the vocation of the orator. His work derives its underlying coherence from the logos, and it can only benefit from being read in that light. What was unusual was not so much his vision (one may recall Isocrates’s eulogy of the gift of speech) as the strength of his identification with it. “For me, oratory means everything, signifies everything. For I have made it children, parents. . . . This is my play, this is my work. In this I rejoice, this I admire, its doors I haunt” (Or. 33.20).

Oratory as a Mission, and the Sacred Tales as Its Manifesto According to Aristides, it was at an early age that he formed the conviction of having been chosen by Asclepius, and of being given unique protection by the god. This resulted in an experience that was both intellectual and therapeutic; which is what he relates in the Sacred Tales, whose themes are clinical and medical (with a combination of psychological and affective components), and also rhetorical, building up, little by little, a picture of an orator mandated by a god to assume the mantle of his art. The Sacred Tales have no parallel in ancient literature. They take the form of a narration29 that evokes the visions and dreams in which Asclepius regularly appeared to Aristides over a total of almost twenty years (143–​155, then 165–​171). Only a god could cure his maladies (Or. 47.57): acute conditions such as septicemia and tumors, or chronic respiratory and digestive problems.30 And the different remedies he describes—​ some conventional, others of the nature of paradoxical therapy—​did make a significant contribution to the medical lore of the time. But Asclepius also took in hand Aristides’s soul and mind, influencing his psychological and intellectual activities as a teacher (didaskalos), encouraging and advising him in his oratorical practice (Or. 42.11–​12; 50.26),31 and introducing him to his illustrious predecessors (Or. 50.24). In the Sacred Tales, Aristides is carrying out a threefold task. Like Helen relating the misfortunes of Odysseus, he is thanking Asclepius by making a selective list (though it could not, in any event, have been exhaustive) of

260   Rhetoric and Rhetoricians “all the achievements of the Savior, which I have enjoyed to this very day” (Or. 47.1); he is celebrating the god whose manifestations of solicitude he reports; and he is bearing witness to a consummate experience by giving structured form to a collection of notes compiled over a long period (Or. 48.1–​4, 8).32 Retracing the history of a personal relationship with a god, and a divine cure, the Sacred Tales tell us of a pilgrimage that brings together a body, a voyage, and a miracle,33 clothed in the religious character of the Second Sophistic. Aristides is both praising a god and talking about himself; or rather, he is talking about himself through his praise of a god.34 In the triangular relationship between his ill health, his god, and his orations,35 he portrays himself as an inspired author, hypocritès, both the god’s voice and actor (Or. 42.12) who claims divine inspiration for his logos. He thus uses this covert strategy of self-​promotion36 to build an image of a rhetor who, as a prophet of Asclepius (Or. 50.48), and in the eyes of the Roman authorities, is the “first of the Greeks and supreme in oratory” (Or. 50.87). Apart from the Sacred Tales, the way in which he saw the prestige and consistency of his intellectual career is clearly demonstrated in An Address concerning Asclepius (Or. 42): it was Asclepius who inspired the works that won him plaudits both from people and authorities, friendships with the “divine emperors,” and marks of favour on the part of “the whole Imperial chorus” (Or. 42.11–​14). In formal terms too, the title Hieroi Logoi merits attention. It stakes a claim for the work to be regarded as a manifestation of devotion to Asclepius, with the same degree of legitimacy as ex votos, aretalogical inscriptions, and confessional stelae. Furthermore, it uses a textual form that is generally reserved for aetiological reports of religious activities or ceremonies to talk about its author’s literary work and oratory, along with his psychological, somatic, and intellectual experience, thereby giving a clearly religious tone to what were among the traditional secular aspirations of the Roman Empire’s Greek-​ speaking elite: oratorical success and honors. The work is also important for its style of presentation of the self, with a narrative based on an anamnesis whose combination of reality and dreams37 goes beyond the mnemotechnics to which the rhetors’ technique has often been reduced. Though not exactly an autobiography in the generally accepted sense, the Sacred Tales do mark an important stage in the literary history of sensibility and subjectivity.38 They have been given different types of reading—​biographical, psychological, psychoanalytic, medical, etc.39 They had no real contemporary equivalent, but nor were they entirely unique. They are related to oneiromancy as it was practiced at the time, and to Marcus Aurelius’s spiritual exercises. They also bring to mind certain Christian accounts of mystical journeys and miraculous healing.40 The image of eloquence and the orator is not set down once and for all in a text manifesto. Far from it! Aristides brandished his conception of the oratorical art like a flag of war. He turned it into a combat that fed into the entire polemical side of his work. To begin with, it was against Plato that he opened the conflict, across the centuries, in order to reply to Socrates’s attacks on rhetoric (Or. 2–​4). It was also with different groups of his contemporaries (rival sophists, students, philosophers) that he crossed

Aelius Aristides   261 swords (Or. 28, 33, 34). And finally, he competed with poetry to impose prose in religious hymns (Or. 37–​46).

A Polemic across the Centuries: The Platonic Discourses Aristides’s most serious disagreement was with a philosopher who had lived five centuries before his own time. In response to the attacks elaborated by Plato in the Gorgias, he composed two long orations in defense of rhetoric, and of four great Athenian politicians: Pericles, Cimon, Miltiades, and Themistocles.41 Rhetoric, for him, was no mere shadow (eidôlon) of technê; nor was it marked by the kolakeia that Socrates saw in it (Grg 462b–​466a). And in his view, the accusation that the four statesmen had flattered their fellow citizens rather than striving to make them better human beings (Grg 151c–​517c) flew in the face of reason and justice. For Aristides, the stakes were high: it was a question of vindicating rhetoric against philosophy, and showing that oratory could be wholly beneficial to individuals and societies. In order to do so, the tactic he chose was to present Plato, whom he actually admired,42 as nothing less than an unwitting rhetor. He used Platonic terminology and concepts against Plato himself—​though sometimes, it has to be said, in a distorted interpretation. He would regularly “construe a sentence in a positive light, where Plato was in fact being critical.”43 Thus he was able to postulate that Plato had a correct conception of rhetoric (Or. 4.8), and could even be termed “the father and teacher of orators” (Or. 2.465).44 In this way, Aristides killed two birds with one stone: he cleared rhetoric of Socrates’s accusations, and he preserved—​indeed he co-​opted—​the prestige of Plato, whose work, he argued, lent itself to a moralistically sophist reading. This was an operation of fundamental importance. By substituting rhetoric for philosophy in the current of intellectual history, he put it forward as the foundation of politics, responsible (like Isocrates’s logos) for maintaining social cohesion and the fundamental possibility of life in common (Or. 2.210), while preventing force from becoming dominant, and also preserving the conditions for constitutional governance (Or. 2.205–​234). Rhetoric both creates and, “like some sleepless guard” (Or. 2.401), preserves justice, law, and social life. What emerges from this defense of speech—​and speeches—​is a portrait of the orator as a man of virtue (anêr aristos: Or. 2.429) who mirrors the four facets of Platonic virtue: intelligence, moderation, justice, and courage (Or. 2.235–​236; 3.597). This political and ethical definition of eloquence as being both practically beneficial and morally instructive is in line with Isocrates’s philosophia and its pedagogical applications;45 to which must be added, in keeping with the Sacred Tales, the religious dimension that allowed Aristides to rediscover Plato via the Phaedrus. Oratory was inspired by the

262   Rhetoric and Rhetoricians gods, and what for Aristides is real rhetoric could take its place beside prophetic and poetic mania.46 This view of the orator as an individual with a mission47 bears a strong resemblance to the way Aristides saw himself. Like Socrates, in particular, he stood aside from politics.48 In Oration 2.429–​433, for example, he describes an era in which political debate no longer makes sense, since “the government is now differently constituted.” Glory, distinction, and honor accrue to Aristides (Or. 2.430). But he himself is not interested in pandering to the mob, or in monetary gain. He is devoted to rhetoric for its own sake, with Asclepius as “the leader and patron of my life and speech” (Or. 2.429).49 Steeped in rhetoric, he imagines a new version of the Prometheus myth, in which it is not aidôs (mutual respect) and dikê (justice) that make life in society possible, but the oratorical art. This, however, is a gift that is now possessed only by “the best, the noblest, and those with the strongest natures . . . so that at the same time they could save themselves and others.” And thus the myth of Prometheus—​he who founded the principles of democratic expression—​can be used to justify the domination of an elite. Oratory is no longer characterized by the power of persuasion alone, as Isocrates had it,50 but by a force acting “from the top to the bottom, with orators who prefer law and order to confusion, preach internal as well as external concord, and prevent uproar, disorder, and faction.”51

A Polemic in the Debates of the Day Aristides’s image of himself and his art casts light on the different polemics in which he engaged with his contemporaries. Several of his works (notably Or. 28, 33, and 34) allude to the intellectual debates, jealousies, and quarrels that littered the careers of these men of letters and culture, while also providing insights into his personality. In Or. 28, Concerning a Remark in Passing,52 he answers criticisms that had been directed at him because a hymn to Athena that he recited during an informal meeting of the faithful at the Asclepieum contained some incidental remarks (paraphthegmata) in praise of his own rhetorical and literary merits. He does not recant his words, but claims that they were dictated to him by the goddess herself: in fact, there had been many poets, orators, historians, and philosophers before him who had sung their own praises, and had met with no reproach. On the contrary, they had won approval for their haughty, noble stance. Oration 28 is illuminating in several respects. It presents pride as something inherent in the Greek character (Or. 28.152); and the “incidental remarks” are a “eulogy of oneself ” which, far from being a source of embarrassment, situates Aristides in a prestigious literary lineage. In any case, the numinous nature of the subject indemnifies it against any hint of impropriety.53 Aristides wishes to “lay claim to his rights as an author.”54 In a manner redolent of the Sacred Tales, he adduces divine inspiration as a vindication of his claim to total freedom of expression, and his right to formulate his viewpoint as he sees fit.55

Aelius Aristides   263 Another aspect of the friction that existed between Aristides and his contemporaries is illustrated by Oration 33, To Those Who Criticize Him because He Does Not Declaim, written in 166/​167 as a reply to those of his followers who would have wished him to give them more guidance in the techniques of rhetoric. He finds them insufficiently studious, and once again there is the self-​image of someone who affirms that he has always been a “true lover” of orations (Or. 33.19–​20), who delivers as many of them as he can, and who is attentive to his followers (Or. 33.21–​22, 23). And in the final polemical oration, Oration 34, Against Those Who Burlesque the Mysteries (of Oratory), probably written in 166, Aristides talks about the issues that divide the “Atticist” and “Asianist” modes of rhetoric. As a fervent Atticist himself, he criticizes his adversaries for the way they deform and debase the art. Declaiming in a melodic mode, they are like hermaphrodites or eunuchs, lyrists, or courtesans (Or. 34.45–​47, 48, and 55). They bow to the whims of the public, like “the chorus leader who made quite a pretty picture by following his chorus” (Or. 34.47). In sum, they are lacking in classical oratory’s essential qualities, reflection, and argumentation (Or. 34.45), which are the sources of its persuasive power and its ability to improve the citizen’s soul (Or. 34.53).56 It is clear that the difference was far from being purely lexical or stylistic. For Aristides, Asianism was a corruption of rhetoric, in the moral sense. Worse still, its deviations from the rules that governed liberal education posed a threat to the established order.

Against the Hegemony of Poetry Aristides’s promotion of the religious hymn in prose was another exercise of a polemical nature, in which he set out to renew a literary genre that had up to then been the preserve of poetry. The ten surviving examples by him (Or. 37–​46) were composed at different points in his career. Most are addressed to gods (Athena, Heracles, Dionysus, Zeus, Sarapis, Poseidon, Asclepius, and the sons of the latter), but there are two that deal with sacred or “divinized” subjects: the well in Asclepius’s sanctuary and the Aegean sea. They are notable for the literary credo they advance, which is that prose is more appropriate than poetry as a vehicle for hymns in honor of the gods. Aristides gave this type of discourse a new characteristic form,57 and in the long methodological prologue to his hymn Regarding Sarapis (Or. 45)58 he accords it a privileged status. He discusses the respective merits of poetry and prose in speaking either of or to the gods; and in both cases he finds prose to be more suitable for the purpose. Not that he rejects the idea of hymns in verse out of hand. Poetry has undeniable value (Or. 45.1). But it must be grasped in its totality, not subjected to intellectual or logical analysis. He recognizes the efficacy of poetry, but intends to promote the clarity and truth telling he associates with prose. Its topoi allow it to treat its subjects rigorously, without ornamental epithets or abstruse metaphors; which means that it can attain a high degree of precision (Or. 45.9). Prose is truth, because it does not indiscriminately incorporate the various mythological canons. And finally, although

264   Rhetoric and Rhetoricians the poets use “metron,” in the technical prosodic sense, they possess neither its literary form, which lays down “the correct, economical use of words and intervals,”59 nor its moral form, which implies a sense of measure such as is indispensable to an accurate vision of the world. In raising the question of religious language, Aristides makes an important contribution to the long-​running debate about the relationship between the poetic and the divine.60 Thus is the portrait of the ideal orator completed. Not only is he a beneficiary of divine inspiration, but he is in direct contact with the world of the deities. And there is an oracular character to Aristides’s accounts of his dreams—​he sees himself as an intermediary between men and gods. For him, more than an art, rhetoric is a mystical activity, a sacred technê.

A New Vision of the World Aristides’s views on the purpose and power of oratory are framed by a world that is under Roman domination, but whose adornments are the cities of Greece and Asia Minor. And this opens up a certain way of looking at his eulogies of cities, which constitute the finest examples of his epideictic work, in particular On Rome (Or. 26), no doubt composed in 144,61 and the Panathenaikos (Or. 1), celebrating a city that had been reinvigorated by Hadrian, and which was also delivered there, possibly during the Great Panathenaea of 155. The two orations could well be seen as a diptych, contrasting the cultural power of Athens with the political and administrative power of Rome.62 But beyond this demarcation of attributes, one might also look at the exchanges that took place between the two representations. At first sight, the Panathenaikos is an extended historical overview of Athens from the time of the autochthons to that of Alexander, then moving on to Aristides’s own day. And in this respect it deviates from the usual topos of the eulogy, with chronology taking precedence over axiology.63 But this history is in reality an immobile history, being that of a people seen not as individuals but as a collective entity whose virtues derive from an original philanthropia. This opens up an interpretive schema in which the history of the Greeks is seen as a twofold movement involving, first, refuge and protection for other peoples (and here, Aristides is being faithful to Isocrates, and to the tradition of the funeral oration), and second, the propagation of Greek values across the world. So Athens is both philanthropic and (culturally, at least) hegemonic, and can now view itself in the light of a new dunamis: its real empire is not ephemeral, or limited by the action of three hundred triremes that win the occasional victory (Or. 1.322), but embodied in its culture, and the Greek language, with their subtle but irresistible aura (Or. 1.322–​329). Presenting the city as an incarnation of refinement and civilization, untouched by the vagaries of history, Aristides makes it clear that Hellenism, by its very nature, is not to be evaluated according to contingent, temporal considerations. The values celebrated by Pericles

Aelius Aristides   265 are still there, but they have shifted their nature and become imperial values, centered on concord and consensus.64 Where the Panathenaikos sets Athens firmly within the Roman world, On Rome is a vibrant tribute to the projection of political, military, and administrative power. But what it describes is not an entirely new dispensation. And Aristides is clear about this: Rome simply took up where Greece left off. Governing the world as a single polis (Or. 26.36), it has imposed a type of order that it defines as a “common democracy of the world,” under the authority of “one man, the best ruler and director” (Or. 26.60). Rome sees Greece as its forebear, to be respected as such; it also enlightens the barbarians (Or. 26.96) and showers gifts on cities, “with an equal generosity toward all” (Or. 26.98), true to the founding ethos of Athens. Rome’s destiny, in conclusion, is to historicize the perfection of Greece. The world can identify and judge itself only through Greek concepts. Rome may be the dominant influence, but the template remains Greek. Aristides’s eulogies, while reflecting the idea of a distinction between a civilizing power and a ruling power, also touch on the loans and borrowings that have taken place between them, with the implication that in the end they are interdependent. It is difficult to gauge the true nature of Aristides’s loyalty to Rome.65 It was a sentiment he frequently expressed, for example in his exchanges with the emperors, or in the prayers for the perpetuation of the imperial dynasty that round out a number of his orations (e.g., Or. 26.109; 30.28; 46.42). But this does not nullify the lucidity of various remarks he makes about the situation of Athens and Greece under the Roman Empire (Or. 1.332), or a few of his silences that speak louder than words.66 And like Plutarch, or Dio of Prusa, he notes that Rome habitually reserves a right of intervention in the affairs of others. Between Aristides’s acceptance of the Roman political order and his reverence for the Greek past, are there inconsistencies, or even contradictions? The fact is that his vision of the world was not predicated on a logic of either distinctive or exclusive values, but came about as an accretion of viewpoints. Each of his works brought together a different combination of qualities. And the qualities in question were essentially those of the world as he found it. Though he was sometimes seen as backward-​looking, Aristides’s interest in the past was quite specifically orientated. The quotations and references with which his work is strewn are indicative of the pleasure he took in the cultural heritage he shared with his audience of listeners and readers. And it is clear that the past was something he made use of in constructing an ideal image of Hellenism, for example in his encomiums to Athens, or his defense of the statesmen pilloried by Plato. But these references, far from being colored by denial or nostalgia, were prisms through which he looked at his own world. Thus, the history of Athens was the materialization of Hellenism. Rome had no past. And Plato, unbeknown to himself, had been an orator of an “imperial” age. In the end, it was his own world that Aristides exalted. He celebrated the grandeur of Greece, and of the provinces that had been Hellenized, with their religious festivals and hymns, the beauty of their architecture, their language and literature. He imagined the

266   Rhetoric and Rhetoricians cities of Asia Minor coming together to bury their rivalries. But he was also on familiar terms with the Romans. And he gave a running account of his dealings with gods and humans. For him, rhetoric was the mode of writing and thinking that connected the world as he knew it to the classical period as he viewed it. Though pedantic and prickly, Aristides was lavish in his praise of the peace and prosperity the Roman Empire had brought into being. War having been relegated to the past as myths (Or. 26.70), this was a time for festivals (Or. 26.97–​99) and for travel, which was facilitated by maritime corridors rendered safe from depredation (e.g., Or. 1.9–​12; 26.101–​106). His work is a ringing endorsement of urban civilization during the Antonine era.67 But in his celebration of the Aegean sea and the Cyclades, he also talks about the opulence and unity of that region in a way that denotes a certain eastward shift in the center of gravity of the world. Among the cities that “shine with radiance and grace,” so that “the whole earth has been adorned like a pleasure garden” (Or. 26.99),68 he talks in particular about those to which he is most attached: Smyrna, a seat of culture and beauty (Or. 17.13; Or. 29.2 and 33);69 Pergamum, which at that time was experiencing a regeneration of its intellectual and religious life, centered on the Asclepieum, with its library, theater, and new temple; and Corinth, whose wealth and splendor he so admired (Or. 46). In a world like this, it is clear that if rhetoric was to further common values then it had to be epideictic (Or. 2.411). Over time, there have been significant changes in attitudes to Aristides’s work.70 That he was no stranger to success in his own lifetime can be seen not only from the official recognition he achieved, but also, if indirectly, from the types of attack that were leveled at him. Early on, he won favor with the theorists and exponents of oratory (Pseudo-​ Aristides’s The Art of Rhetoric, Menander Rhetor, and Sopater who, in the fourth century, wrote the Prolegomena to Aristides), along with the grammarians and lexicographers who saw his work as the acme of Atticism (Pseudo-​Longinus,71 Thomas Magister in the fourteenth century). Libanius was so fascinated by his work and opinions that he modeled his own oratorical output on that of his predecessor, whom he admired so much.72 Somewhat more surprisingly, he was a subject of interest to exegetes of Plato: up to the time of Michael Psellos in the eleventh century, at least, the Platonic discourses featured in philosophical discussions. In Late Antiquity and the Byzantine Middle Ages, it was the Panathenaikos and the major epideictic and moral orations73 that shone most brightly. But there were other works—​e.g., the Platonic discourses, notably To Plato: In Defense of the Four, Or. 3, and the Sacred Tales—​which, while standing outside the traditional typology of rhetorical genres, attracted attention.74 During the Renaissance, Aristides faded into the shadows, being rediscovered only in the twentieth century by W. Schmid, U. von Wilamowitz-​Moellendorff, A. Boulanger, F. W. Lenz, and C. A. Behr. This rediscovery was, however, often accompanied by pejorative judgments which limned Aristides as a representative of a scholastic, artificial form of literature, often cut off from the real, contemporary world, and which introduced serious misreadings inspired by outdated prejudices.

Aelius Aristides   267 Since the 1970s, Aristides has been the subject of a fresh evaluation. He is now seen as a source of material for new institutional, social, and religious approaches to history—​that of the Antonine period, that of rhetoric, that of worldviews. In sum, he has recovered something of the reputation for which, as an orator-​writer, he worked so hard. As he himself said, it was also with future generations that he wanted to converse (Or. 51.52).

Further Reading For overall studies of Aristides, see Behr 1968, Boulanger 1923, Bowie 1996, Cortés Copete 1995, Harris-​Holmes 2008, Pernot, Abbamonte, and Lamagna 2016. Essential work on Aristides’s historical and intellectual context include Anderson 1993, Bowersock 1969, Pernot 1993a, Swain 1996, and Whitmarsh 2005. More specifically, on Aristides’s relationship with Asclepius, see Jones 1998, Nicosia 1979, and Petsalis-​Diomidis 2010. On his posterity of Aristides, see Robert 2009. On some particular discourses: Oration 1 (The Panathenaic Oration), see Oliver 1968, Oudot 2006a, 2006b; Orationes 2–​4 (The Platonic Discourses), see Flinterman, 2002a and 2002b, Milazzo 2002, and Pernot 1993b; Orationes 17–​21 (Smyrnaean Orations), see Franco 2005 and Quet 2006; Oration 26 (Regarding Rome), see Oliver 1953; Oration 28 (Concerning a Remark in Passing), see Miletti 2011, Rutherford 1995; Orationes 30–​34, see Vix 2010; Orationes 37–​46 (Hymns), see Goeken 2012; Orationes 47–​52 (Sacred Tales), see Downie 2013, Pernot 2002, Quet 1993; on his lost work, Robert 2012. English translations in Behr 1981–​1986. A regularly updated bibliography concerning Aelius Aristides can be found at www. classicalsace.unistra.fr. See also Harris and Holmes 2008 for all the contributions and bibliography. Boulanger 1923 is ancient and in French, but was the real first monograph upon this author.

Bibliography Anderson, G. 1993. The Second Sophistic:  A  Cultural Phenomenon in the Roman Empire. London and New York. Behr, C. A. 1968. Aelius Aristides and the Sacred Tales. Amsterdam. Behr, C. A. 1981–​1986. P. Aelius Aristides: The Complete Works. 2 vols. Leiden. Behr, C. A. 1994. “Studies on the Biography of Aelius Aristides.” ANRW 2.34.2: 1140–​1233. Boulanger, A. 1923. Aelius Aristide et la sophistique dans la province d’Asie au IIe siècle de notre ère. Paris. Bowersock, G. W. 1969. Greek Sophists in the Roman Empire. Oxford. Bowie, E. L. 1989. “Greek Sophists and Greek Poetry in the Second Sophistic” ANRW 2.33.1: 209-​258. Bowie, E. L. 1996. “Aristeides [3, P. Ailios],” DNP I, cc. 1096–​1100. Cortés Copete, J. M. 1995. Elio Aristides: Un sofista griego en el Imperio Romano. Madrid. Cribiore, R. 2008. “Vying with Aristides in the Fourth Century: Libanius and His Friends.” In Aelius Aristides between Greece, Rome and the Gods, edited by W. V Harris and B. Holmes, 263–​278. Leiden and Boston. Downie, J. 2013. At the Limits of Art: A Literary Study of Aelius Aristides’ “Hieroi Logoi”. Oxford.

268   Rhetoric and Rhetoricians Flinterman, J.-​J. 2002a. “‘. . . Largely Fictions . . .’: Aelius Aristides on Plato’s Dialogues.” Ancient Narrative 1: 32–​54. Flinterman, J.-​J. 2002b. “The Self-​Portrait of an Antonine Orator: Aristides, or. 2, 429sqq.” In Greek Romans and Roman Greeks: Studies in Cultural Interaction, edited by E. N. Ostenfeld, 198–​211. Aarhus. Franco, C. 2005. “Elio Aristide e Smirne.” Mem. dei Lincei 9.19.3: 345–​584. Gigli, D, 1977. “Stile e linguaggio onirico nei Discorsi Sacri di Elio Aristide.” Cultura e Scuola 61: 214–​224. Goeken, J. 2012. Aelius Aristide et la rhétorique de l’hymne en prose. Turnhout. Harris, W. V., and B. Holmes. 2008. Aelius Aristides between Greece, Rome and the Gods. Leiden and Boston. Jones, C.  P. 1998. “Aelius Aristides and the Asclepieion.” In Pergamon:  Citadel of the Gods, edited by H. Koester, 63–​76. Harrisburg, PA. Jones, C. P. 2008. “The Survival of the Sophists.” In East and West: Papers in Ancient History Presented to G. W. Bowersock, edited by T. C. Brennan and H. I. Flower, 113–​125. Cambridge, MA, and London. Karadimas, D. 1996. Sextus Empiricus against Aelius Aristides: The Conflict between Philosophy and Rhetoric in the Second Century ad. Lund. Milazzo, A. M. 2002. Un dialogo difficile: La retorica in conflitto nei Discorsi Platonici di Elio Aristide. Hildesheim. Miletti, L. 2011. L’arte dell’autoelogio: Studio sull’orazione 28 K di Elio Aristide, con testo, traduzione e commento. Pisa. Nicosia, S. 1979. Elio Aristide nell’Asclepieio di Pergamo e la retorica recuperata. Palermo. Nicosia, S. 1988. “L’autobiografia onirica di Elio Aristide” In Il sogno in Grecia, edited by G. Guidorizzi, 173–​189, Bari. Oliver, J. H. 1953. “The Ruling Power: A Study of the Roman Empire in the Second Century after Christ through the Roman Oration of Aelius Aristides.” TAPhS 43: 871–​1003. Oliver, J. H. 1968. The Civilizing Power: A Study of the Panathenaic Discourse of Aelius Aristides against the Background of Literature and Cultural Conflict, with Text and Translation and Commentary. TAPhS, NS, vol. 58, pt. 1. Philadelphia, PA. Oudot, E. 2006a. “Au commencement était Athènes: Le Panathénaïque d’Aelius Aristide ou l’histoire abolie.” Ktèma 31: 247–​261. Oudot, E. 2006b. “L’Athènes primitive sous l’empire romain:  L’exemple du Panathénaïque d’Aelius Aristide.” Anabases 3: 195–​212. Pearcy, L. T. 1988, “Theme, Dream and Narrative: Reading the Sacred Tales of Aelius Aristides.” TAPhA 118: 377–​391. Pernot, L. 1993a. La rhétorique de l’éloge dans le monde gréco-​romain. 2 vols. Paris. Pernot, L. 1993b. “Platon contre Platon:  Le problème de la rhétorique dans les Discours platoniciens d’Aelius Aristide.” In Contre Platon. Vol. 1, Le platonisme dévoilé, edited by M. Dixsaut, 315–​338. Paris. Pernot, L. 1997. Éloges grecs de Rome: Discours traduits et commentés. Paris. Pernot, L. 1998. “Periautologia: Problèmes et méthodes de l’éloge de soi-​même dans la tradition éthique et rhétorique gréco-​romaine.” Rev. Ét. Grec. 111: 101–​124. Pernot, L. 2002. “Les Discours sacrés d’Aelius Aristide entre médecine, religion et rhétorique.” Atti della Accademia Pontaniana 6: 369–​383. Pernot, L. 2003. “L’art du sophiste à l’époque romaine:  Entre savoir et pouvoir.” In Ars et ratio: Sciences, art et métiers dans la philosophie hellénistique et romaine, edited by C. Lévy, B. Besnier, and A. Gigandet, 126–​142. Brussels.

Aelius Aristides   269 Pernot, L. 2007. “Hymne en vers ou hymne en prose? L’usage de la prose dans l’hymnographie grecque.” In L’Hymne antique et son public, edited by Y. Lehmann, 169–​188. Turnhout. Pernot, L. 2008. “Aelius Aristides and Rome.” In Aelius Aristides between Greece, Rome and the Gods, edited by W. V. Harris and B. Holmes, 175–​201. Leiden and Boston. Pernot L., Abbamonte G., Lamagna M. 2016. Aelius Aristide écrivain, Turnhout. Petsalis-​Diomidis, A. 2010. Truly beyond Wonders: Aelius Aristides and the Cult of Asklepios. Oxford. Puech, B. 2002. Orateurs et sophistes grecs dans les inscriptions d’époque impériale. Paris. Quet, M.-​H. 1992. “L’inscription de Vérone en l’honneur d’Aelius Aristide et le rayonnement de la seconde sophistique chez les Grecs d’Egypte.” Rev. Ét. Anc. 94: 379–​401. Quet, M.-​H. 1993. “Parler de soi pour louer son dieu:  Le cas d’Aelius Aristide (du journal intime de ses nuits aux Discours sacrés en l’honneur du dieu Asklépios).” In L’invention de l’autobiographie d’Hésiode à saint Augustin, edited by M.-​F. Baslez, P. Hoffmann, and L. Pernot, 211–​221. Paris. Quet, M.-​H. 2001. “Athéna, inspiratrice onirique d’un orateur aimé des dieux au IIe siècle de notre ère.” In Dieux, héros et médecins grecs: Hommage à Fernand Robert, edited by M. Woronoff, S. Follet, and J. Jouanna, 211–​225. Paris. Quet, M.-​H. 2006. “Appel d’Aelius Aristide à Marc Aurèle et Commode après la destruction de Smyrne (177/​8 après J.-​C.).” In La “crise” de l’Empire romain de Marc Aurèle à Constantin: Mutations, continuités, ruptures, edited by M.-​H. Quet, 237–​278. Paris. Robert, F. 2009. “Enquête sur la présence d’Aelius Aristide et de son œuvre dans la littérature grecque du IIe au XVe siècle de notre ère.” Anabase 10: 141–​160. Robert, F., ed. 2012. Les œuvres perdues d’Aelius Aristide: Fragments et témoignages. Édition, traduction et commentaire. Paris. Rutherford, I. C. 1995. “The Poetics of the Paraphthegma: Aelius Aristides and the Decorum of Self-​Praise.” In Ethics and Rhetoric: classical essays for Donald Russell, edited by D. Innes, H. Hine, and C. Pelling, 195–​204. Oxford. Saïd, S. 2008. “Aristides’ Uses of Myths.” In Aelius Aristides between Greece, Rome and the Gods, edited by W. V. Harris and B. Holmes, 51–​68. Leiden and Boston. Sartre, M. 1991. L’Orient romain: Provinces et sociétés provinciales en Méditerranée orientale d’Auguste aux Sévères (31 avant J.-​C.–​235 après J.-​C.). Paris. Swain, S. 1996. Hellenism and Empire: Language, Classicism, and Power in the Greek World, ad 50–​250. Oxford. Vix, J.-​L. 2010. L’enseignement de la rhétorique au IIe siècle ap. J.-​C. à travers les discours 30–​34 d’Ælius Aristide. Turnhout. Whitmarsh, T. 2005. The Second Sophistic. Oxford. Wissmann, J. 1999. “Zur Rezeption des ‘Protagoras-​Mythos’ durch Aelius Aristides.” Philologus 143: 135–​147.

Pa rt  V

L I T E R AT U R E A N D C U LT U R E

Chapter 18

Phil ostr at u s Graeme Miles

Flavius Philostratus is increasingly recognized as a towering presence in the Greek literature written under the Roman Empire. His is an astonishingly varied corpus, of real subtlety and finesse. The scholarly consensus is now that one Philostratus was the author of almost the whole of the Corpus Philostrateum; though some doubt must remain regarding the old questions of authorship, a growing agreement has emerged along with the recent reassessment of Philostratus as a writer. A new vibrancy has come into Philostratean studies in recent years, due both to the intrinsic interest of the texts themselves and to the light they can shed on a wide range of topics in the culture of their time. Despite the current tendency to attribute most of these works to one Philostratus, we know that there was a literary family employing the name for several generations. The entry regarding these Philostrati in the Suda, a Byzantine encyclopaedia, does almost as much to muddy as to clear the waters.1 There are, at least, some stable points: The Life of Apollonius of Tyana was certainly written by the author of the Lives of the Sophists, as he tells us himself in the latter work (VS 570). Most would now agree that the Heroicus, a dialogue regarding the cult of heroes and the correction of Homer, is almost certainly by the same author.2 Regarding the Imagines, it is somewhat more difficult to be certain: here too, however, despite differences of genre there are numerous similarities in thought and expression to the other works.3 The author of the second series of Imagines, however, identifies himself in the work’s opening as the grandson of the Elder Philostratus (proem 2), author of the first series. The Letters of Philostratus also appear to be by the author of the Life of Apollonius: the speaking voice in one of these presents himself, at any rate, as on friendly terms with Julia Domna, wife of Septimius Severus, who also prompted the writing of the Life, and there are numerous overlaps of motif and expression. The Gymnasticus, a work on the proper training of athletes, shares characteristic interests with the Heroicus and Life. The brief dialogue Nero, which survives among the works of Lucian, again shows close similarities of interest to these same works.4 Finally a short piece on the relation of nomos and physis survives, normally

274   Literature and Culture entitled a Dialexis (or Dialexis 2); the other so-​called Dialexis is in fact a letter on epistolary style by Philostratus of Lemnos.5 The chronology and circumstances of composition of these works are largely unknown.6 The statements regarding Julia Domna in the introduction to the Life of Apollonius, expressed as they are in the imperfect tense, indicate a date at some point after her death in 217 ce.7 The interest of the Heroicus in hero cult has sometimes been taken to indicate the influence of Caracalla;8 this is an unnecessary supposition, but the close connections between this text and the Life of Apollonius do suggest dates of composition not far from each other.9 Given the range of topics from athletics to art, and from holy men to the pleasure of being trodden on by an attractive pair of feet, it is no surprise that scholarship on Philostratus tends to emphasize the variety of his output, his polymathic learning, his Protean character.10 Does anything relatively constant emerge from this group of texts taken as a whole? Or as Billault asked, “Is there a universe of Philostratus?”11 There is indeed a central bundle of cultural concerns and authorial tendencies which inform all of these works: for all of the metamorphic quality of Philostratus’s writing and the avoidance of repetition, either of his own or other people’s earlier developments, there remains a consistent interest in the nature of Hellenism, including traditional religion, in the nature of wisdom or intelligence (sophia), and relatedly a concern with acts of interpretation. For all that the newer scholarship is almost unanimous in asserting the great interest of Philostratus, his skill as a writer, and the light that his works can shed on the culture of his time, the various portraits of him that we find in the secondary literature are far from uniform. Each thematic strand in the Philostratean texts turns out, on closer inspection, to come with its own set of knots, and readers are presented with difficult choices in the unpicking of them. All of the works which survive are concerned in their own ways with Hellenism, but determining the exact nature of this Hellenism is far from simple. Philostratus is often described as stridently insistent on the superiority of Greek culture, and on occasion this is certainly the case, but what of the critique of this same culture by outside voices (the Brahmans) who are clearly privileged by the text in which they appear? Equally clear is Philostratus’s interest in religion, especially in the Life of Apollonius and Heroicus, but how serious is this interest? One image of Philostratus which has recently come to prominence, especially in the German-​language scholarship, is as an essentially ironic writer, undermining the ostensibly serious statements of the characters in his texts.12 At the opposite end of the spectrum appears Philostratus the promoter and reviver of traditional cult.13 Such a multifarious corpus raises problems of structure for any attempt at an overview. My approach here will be to discuss first the biographical works (The Lives of the Sophists and Life of Apollonius of Tyana) and then the works primarily concerned with myth and its representation in art and literature (Heroicus and Imagines). Many other arrangements are possible, and as always when reading Philostratus, where one emerges from the interpretive labyrinth has much to do with the chosen point of entry.14

Philostratus   275

18.1  Lives of the Sophists and the Life of Apollonius of Tyana The two broadly biographical works in the Philostratean corpus take ostensibly very different subject matter: sophists, especially those of the movement which Philostratus himself named the Second Sophistic (VS 481), and the Pythagorean holy man and philosopher Apollonius of Tyana. There is, in fact, substantial overlap between these two works in the geographical centers (Athens, Asia Minor), and in some similarities of incident and character.15 Apollonius himself is mentioned in the Lives of the Sophists (488 and 570) and in the Life itself receives more than a little sophistic characterization. He is a Theios Sophistes, indeed, who despite his expressed disdain for sophists engages in many of the same forms of self-​representation as them.16 Both of these texts are concerned with the construction of ideals: Apollonius, as Hellenic ideal, absorbs into himself much that could be considered Greek, and the Lives of the Sophists defines the intellectual and cultural movement to which Philostratus himself belonged.

18.1.1 Lives of the Sophists The Lives of the Sophists is the principal historical document for the cultural movement which Philostratus himself called “the Second Sophistic” (deuterê sophistikê). As is generally, and rightly, noted in discussions of this text, the meaning which Philostratus gives to the phrase is not the same as the sense in which it is generally employed in recent scholarship.17 As a volume like the present one indicates, the term “Second Sophistic” has become a broad one, denoting the literature of the second and third centuries, a literature which was intensely concerned with the maintenance, interpretation, and transformation of its cultural inheritance.18 There is nothing wrong with using the term in this broad sense, as a shorthand reference for this particular Zeitgeist, but for Philostratus, the Second Sophistic is coupled and contrasted with the “ancient” or “more ancient” sophistic which was, he says, concerned with philosophy (VS 481). He insists that his Second Sophistic is also ancient, having been initiated by Aeschines (390 to ca. 314 bce), and hence not a “New Sophistic”; it is, he says, concerned with representing character (VS 481) rather than with philosophy. What emerges in the Lives that follow is an ideal of the sophist as eloquent, Atticizing,19 egotistical and jealously competitive in claiming status, quick with witticisms and adept at improvised declamation.20 Already in the proem to the Lives, Philostratus names declamation-​in-​character as the defining trait of his Second Sophistic, by contrast with the philosophical nature of the first. This leads him to establish a class of philosophers who were called sophists because of their eloquence, a group which he discusses prior to the sophists proper (484–​510). Within this group of philosopher-​sophists, however, come his two founding figures: Aeschines and Gorgias. Both are praised for their abilities as improvisers;

276   Literature and Culture Gorgias is named as the founder of sophistry in general, while Aeschines appears as the founder specifically of the Second Sophistic (VS 481). Philostratus’s desire to give his sophistic a respectable, classical origin is clear. It does, however, produce a gap of 350 years, which he populates only with some extremely shadowy, and by his own admission less than stellar figures (511). The “lives” which constitute the bulk of the work are not conventional biographies, either to a modern or to an ancient understanding.21 They vary widely in length, from just a few lines to the longest one, that of Herodes Atticus, which runs to approximately seventeen Teubner pages. These generally brief accounts concentrate in particular on the sophists as performers, and on the contests of wit between rivals. Insofar as the accuracy of Philostratus’s reports can be checked, he is generally correct in his facts.22 More contentious, however, are the selection of sophists, the assessment of their ability and standing, and the arrangement of the work. The centrality of Herodes Atticus has long been remarked,23 and as Eshleman has argued,24 this is in part a matter of Philostratus’s own sophistic self-​presentation, playing up the centrality of the intellectual lineage to which he himself belonged. Philostratus also tells us at the outset that the work’s dedicatee, Gordian,25 had a familial connection with Herodes, so his centrality in the Lives becomes in addition a piece of flattery by association. There are, undoubtedly, major omissions from the Lives: Lucian is often mentioned in modern discussions, though his absence might well be accounted for by a relatively low profile as a sophist on Philostratus’s definition. More strikingly, perhaps, undoubtedly prominent sophists and even entire groups are clearly omitted or given relatively little space.26 Despite its pretense of casualness, this is not a haphazardly constructed text, but one which presents an image of the sophistic that is knowingly partial in every sense. As Eshleman has observed, the “circle of sophists” is defined by Philostratus almost entirely in terms of his own intellectual ancestry and affiliations. The right to stand within that circle is, however, treated as self-​evident, and the apparent challenges to inclusion reinforce its supposedly self-​evidential nature. The Lives of the Sophists works to reinforce both the definition of the movement and the authoritative position of the narrator.27 This text, like the others in the corpus, demonstrates an acute interest in how one interprets. In its descriptions of sophistic style, evaluations of performance, and occasional quotations of declamations, the narrating voice provides a model for the interpretation of sophists which readers are implicitly asked to follow. The frequent comments that the sophists of the Lives make on the performances of others demonstrate the importance of such critical activity in the broader repertoire of sophistic activity. Goldhill has noted the importance of anecdotal form in this text, allowing as it does for easy memorizing and repeating of sophistic snippets to demonstrate one’s status as pepaideumenos.28 The text offers not only the conceptual and lexical apparatus for pinning down rhetorical excellence or failure, but also a set of readily extractable observations on all of the past sophists who matter: almost always those with some relationship to Herodes Atticus and so to Philostratus himself.

Philostratus   277

18.1.2 Life of Apollonius of Tyana The Life of Apollonius of Tyana is a sprawling work, part biography (or hagiography), part travel story, part novel. At eight books in length, it is the longest surviving ancient biography. Though its protagonist, a Pythagorean philosopher of the first century, certainly did exist, the pre-​Philostratean traditions concerning him are tenuous and difficult.29 Whatever the character of the historical Apollonius may have been, the figure who emerges from Philostratus’s narrative is a devotee of Pythagoras from his youth, a traveler in search of wisdom who visits the ends of the earth (India, Spain, Ethiopia), an adviser of emperors and corrector of religion and custom. Philostratus’s Apollonius is certainly ascetic, but he is at the same time a socially acceptable holy man.30 Pythagoreanism appears in this text in reduced form: there is little mention of music or mathematics, but a great deal of emphasis is placed on Apollonius’s vegetarianism and abstinence from wine and sex, and on belief in metempsychosis.31 In this, we can see the popular tendency to regard philosophy predominantly as ethics, and as centered in, or even consisting of, the philosophical bios. One of the most appealing aspects of this extraordinary text is the narrative of Apollonius’s travels. It remains possible that the historical Apollonius did, in fact, travel to India, but it is unlikely that this journey bore much resemblance to the account of Philostratus:32 Apollonius, rather, is made to follow in the footsteps of Alexander the Great and Dionysus and to outdo both. The journey narrative, drawing on the repertoire of Indian travels established in the Alexander historians and Megasthenes, presents a symbolic geography, concerned not with factual accuracy but with establishing the nature of Apollonius himself.33 The notion of India as a source of wisdom was hardly a new one,34 but in a text which has so wholehearted an investment in Hellenism as this one, the superiority of the wisdom of the Brahmans to that of the Greeks should give readers pause. On the one hand, this elevated portrait of Brahmanic wisdom creates an external authority to validate the eminently Greek wisdom of Apollonius and Pythagoras. Moreover, the teachings of the Brahmans as reported in the Life are themselves based firmly in Greek thought, and are treated as having a common origin with Pythagoreanism.35 In this light, as Swain observes, “Philostratus sent [Apollonius] to India to be told how important true Greek culture was.”36 And yet, the very notion of an alien wisdom which can sit in judgment of the best of Greek thought, even if that alien wisdom is imagined in terms of Greek popular philosophy, must raise the possibility that Hellenic wisdom is not, after all, the last word. If the journey to the Brahmans is a means of establishing Hellenic authority, it is one which bears the possibility of its own reversal. One of the most discussed issues regarding the Life of Apollonius, especially, though not exclusively, in the older scholarship, has been its relationship to Christianity.37 Though the text never mentions the new religion or Christ, the similarities between Apollonius and Jesus are not difficult to observe:  an annunciation to the expectant mother shortly before the birth (V A 1.4), similar miracles (for instance, raising a

278   Literature and Culture woman from the dead: 4.45), a trial before a representative of Roman power (book 8). So the question remains: should the text be regarded as a response to Christianity? It is impossible to know Philostratus’s “intentions” in this as in anything else. That said, it is very likely that Philostratus did know something about Christianity, given its increasing prominence generally, and also the known interest of some of the Severan dynasty in the new religion.38 It is usual in this connection to cite the examples of Julia Mammaea and the personal shrine of Severus Alexander, which is said to have contained images of Apollonius of Tyana and Orpheus beside Christ (Historia Augusta, Life of Alexander Severus 29.2). It is quite probable that a rising Christianity is one of the societal pressures in response to which Philostratus builds his Apollonius as paragon of Hellenism. If this is polemic, however, it chooses to construct a counter-​example rather than to attack directly. Whatever Philostratus’s unknowable intentions may have been, the Life of Apollonius certainly has been taken throughout its reception as a pagan response to Christianity, and Apollonius as the pagan answer to Christ. The first extant Christian critique of the text is Eusebius’s Contra Hieroclem,39 which responds to the persecutor Hierocles’s claim that Apollonius was superior to Jesus. This essay, which has generally accompanied modern editions of Philostratus’s text, stands at the beginning of a long tradition of such polemical comparisons.40 Related to the question of the text’s religious implications is that of its positioning as ostensibly factual or as overt fiction. This is, of course, not simply a question of whether it is truthful; about a great deal it plainly is not. The Life of Apollonius has generated profound uncertainty as to how seriously it should be taken: is it merely a vast sophistic game or an earnest pagan hagiography? One possible indicator of overt fiction has been identified in the text’s opening: the story of an account of Apollonius’s life, written by his disciple Damis, on which the narrator of the Life of Apollonius claims to base his narrative, has been considered “a conscious evocation of a novelistic tone and setting.”41 If this is the case, then the text is marked from the beginning as an essentially novelistic one, and the efforts which it makes to establish a historiographic pose are merely part of the fiction. It remains possible, however, that there was a pseudepigraph under the name of Damis given to Philostratus. Pythagoreanism was, after all, hugely productive of pseudepigraphic literature.42 Certainty on these points is impossible, but there is quite enough later in the text to make readers feel that they are reading a work which is essentially playful and fabulous: the levitating Brahmans and wonders of India, the extraordinary prominence of Apollonius in the public life of his time, and the miracles of Apollonius themselves are all enough to make this conclusion difficult to escape. Yet a fiction, even a fabulous one, can have serious cultural purposes.43 The highly rhetorical and richly allusive style in which the Life is composed may appear a further impediment to seeing it as “serious.” Yet such a dichotomy of rhetoric and religious seriousness is a false one. Readers raised on the Gospels may expect a more restrained style for the narrative of a “divine man,” but even if Philostratus is writing (in part) as a response to Christianity in general and the Gospels in particular, it does not mean that he had them in mind as any sort of stylistic norm for a “serious” religious text. There is no reason, in other words, to see the sophistic as necessarily contradicting or

Philostratus   279 undermining the religious content. Formal rhetoric is in any case so pervasive an influence on all forms of literature in this period, that identifying elements of a text as “rhetorical” means little regarding its “seriousness.” Nonetheless, the narrative appears to set its readers the challenge of grappling to establish its tone. There has been an important turn in recent scholarship on Philostratus to see in his works, especially the Life of Apollonius and Heroicus, elements which render them ironic. Schirren, in particular, sees the Life as a metabiographical fiction, which can be read by a naïve reader as a straightforward biography but which to the knowing reader offers a double image of “the superman and his partial deconstruction as well.”44 Somewhat similarly, Gyselinck and Demoen read the Life as simultaneously “a sophistic pièce de résistance” and “a literary monument . . . in honour of Apollonius,”45 though they do not take the text’s intertextual and ironic elements as undermining its seriousness to the same degree. Whitmarsh argues convincingly that both the Heroicus and Life grapple with issues of believability.46 In this respect these two texts are closely related as meditations on the difficulties of religion, rather than ironic dismissals of it. The playful and fabulous elements of the Life of Apollonius have invited comparisons between this work and the texts which are now described as ancient novels. There are, indeed, clear similarities between the Life and the novel: the theme of travel and some of the geography in which the narrative takes place, the generic playfulness and “sophistic” style, and the digressions on curiosities of natural science and other wonders. The Life differs markedly from the novels, however, in its rejection of the erotic.47 Where desire plays any part in the text, it is a negative one, as a force to be resisted by the heroically celibate Apollonius. In order to represent Apollonius’s celibacy as heroic, the Life presents his victories over supernatural sexual predators (the Lamia [4.25], a pederastic demon in India [3.28]), and contrasts his own self-​control (sôphrosynê) with the self-​mutilation of eunuchs (1.33–​36). The story of Hippolytus is also replayed in two separate incidents which concern secondary characters and contribute to an ideal of heroic celibacy (6.3; 7.42). All this is far from the eventual union of a happy couple in the canonical novels, despite their much-​tested chastity prior to that union, and brings the Life of Apollonius closer to the ascetic ideals of hagiography. The idealizing of Apollonius takes place in part through some artful arrangement of his actions relative to those of eminent predecessors. Pythagoras is a point of reference throughout, the memory of Odysseus is frequently evoked, and Apollonius’s resistance to Domitian is said to go beyond the resistance of other philosophers to other tyrants.48 It is easy to mock this type of rhetorical comparison (synkrisis), but these echoes of the past are in general deployed with care to produce some subtle resonances. Apollonius becomes much more than just a first-​century holy man; he is rather a kind of walking embodiment of the Hellenic tradition. Beyond this, he is also made into a human, or superhuman, ideal; great emphasis falls on the notion of the ideal human being as the ideal interpreter. Here too, a view of Greece as the culture of insight and intelligence, able to make sense of the rest of the world, even if not able to dominate it politically or militarily, is important.

280   Literature and Culture A number of scenes throughout the Life show Apollonius the exegete in action, interpreting works of art, dreams, and omens. A recurring structure here is the interpretive dialogue, in which an interlocutor (often Damis) offers an interpretation, only to be corrected by Apollonius.49 In this hermeneutic interest, the Life of Apollonius has a great deal of common ground with the Imagines. It also shares with that text some overt theorizing concerning the nature of interpretation. In the Indian city of Taxila, Damis and Apollonius, stand before some bronze relief sculptures and discuss the nature of mimêsis (2.22). Much later, Apollonius defends the Greek cult of images against the Naked Sages (Gymnosophists) of Ethiopia, and proposes phantasia as a faculty beyond mimêsis, which is able to approach the gods without suffering astonishment (ekplêxis), and to represent them for human beings (6.19).50 Theorizing about and representing interpretation are central to the depiction of Apollonius as Hellenic ideal. These same scenes, moreover, act as cues to readers in their reception of the text itself. The Life is a work of balances and tensions, which despite the apparent closing down of interpretive possibilities through the dominant figure of Apollonius, in fact leaves a great deal of room for its readers, and leaves the ontological status of its protagonist, as a god incarnate or an exceptional man, an open question.

18.2  Heroicus and Imagines 18.2.1 Heroicus The Heroicus is a dialogue on the nature of heroes, that is, of the figures of traditional epic still potent in the contemporary landscape. The speakers in the dialogue are an initially skeptical Phoenician merchant and a Vinetender, who communes regularly with the soul of Protesilaus, the first Achaean warrior to leap ashore at Troy. The first parts of the dialogue set the scene in the Vinetender’s idyllic property, sketching a suitable place both for the continued epiphanies of Protesilaus and for the conversation on the “real story” of the Trojan War that follows. This early part of the dialogue sees the Phoenician’s rapid conversion from skepticism to belief, the very rapidity of which makes it difficult for readers to follow him.51 With the Phoenician’s conversion complete, the Heroicus moves into its central and longest section, on the correction of Homer. Rewriting Homer, as has often been noted, was a popular sophistic pastime; perhaps the best-​known example is Dio Chrysostom’s eleventh (“Trojan”) discourse, but there are also the supposed eyewitness accounts of Dictys of Crete and Dares of Phrygia.52 Like these texts, Protesilaus, as reported by the Vinetender, has some revisions to make to the Homeric account of the Trojan War. Homer, we are told, contacted the ghost of Odysseus, who acted as the poet’s inside source, but who made Homer swear that he would not mention Palamedes (43.12–​14). This Faustian pact has vitiated Homer’s account, at least according to the Vinetender, who has his own source from beyond the grave.

Philostratus   281 The long central section of the text gives details of the physiognomy, activities during life, and posthumous habits of all of the major heroes of the Trojan War. Dominating the dialogue are the figures of Protesilaus and Achilles. The former appears primarily as a hero of cult rather than of epic, unsurprisingly perhaps given his very brief appearance at Troy. Achilles receives the longest narrative of any of the heroes, beginning with his childhood53 and ending with his posthumous existence on the island of Leuke in the Black Sea (54), where he is now married to Helen. Perhaps the most remarkable development is the musical Achilles whom we see performing his own song, an invocation of Echo (55). The potential for this transformation lies in the fact that Achilles is the only character in the Iliad who sings (Il. 9.189) and is also the Homeric character whose style of speaking is closest to that of the narrating voice of the poem.54 The Philostratean Achilles becomes a metaliterary figure, embodying the echoing aesthetic of the Heroicus (and of the Corpus Philostrateum), with his invocation of Echo as Muse, and a song in which he immortalizes Homer, who had immortalized him. It is the image of Achilles’s afterlife, as a reflective yet still potentially violent presence, with which the catalog of heroes ends. We return briefly to the frame to see the lengthening shadows of evening as the dialogue comes to a close. The text as a whole moves from the arrival of the Phoenician from his mercantile world into the slower rhythms of the pastoral idyll, from there into the Homeric past and the heroic afterlife. This is a text, in other words, carefully structured around shifts in temporal mode, which brings its readers step by step to a state as near timelessness as narrative can approach: the afterlife of Achilles is not merely a thing of circles and echoes, it is also without growth and decay, and without consequences. As is the case with the Life of Apollonius, divergent views have been and are taken regarding the purpose of the Heroicus. It has been considered a piece of propaganda for the revival of hero cult,55 a merely playful piece of Homeric revision,56 and a secretly Epicurean and ironic critique of its religious subject matter.57 Even if readers are to see some degree of religious “seriousness” in the text, it is important not to lose sight of its sophistic and playful elements. Nonetheless, it is a recurrent feature of Philostratus’s works that such elements do not undermine the possibility of “serious” content. The Heroicus seems equally intent on undermining and establishing its own authority: the rapid conversion of the Phoenician should raise some disbelieving eyebrows, and an astute reader will note how similar the Vinetender’s reliance on Protesilaus is to Homer’s on Odysseus; we are told that Protesilaus is far more reliable, but by the close associate of Protesilaus himself. This subtle calling into question of its own sources does not go so far as to negate its contents altogether, but it does encourage a certain readerly distance and wariness: the serious play with traditions can only take place if there is no final authority to close interpretation down.58

18.2.2 Imagines Like the Heroicus, the Imagines engages with the mythic past, this time through descriptions of sixty-​five paintings in a private collection in the Bay of Naples. Here

282   Literature and Culture too, there is a striking treatment of time, freezing particular moments of myth within the painted image.59 When speaking of “the Imagines,” it is generally the first series of ekphraseis that are meant. The second set of Imagines which come down to us are written by a grandson of the author of the first set, in imitation, and as a kind of homage, to his grandfather’s work.60 To return though to the first: these share with the other texts of the corpus an interest in interpretation; much as Apollonius had spoken of the practices of educated viewers (V A 2.22), so the Imagines teach their readers how to achieve an educated viewing. The heaping or cataloguing approach which this text takes to myth can readily be paralleled in the central section of the Heroicus, and in the gradual accumulation of mythic predecessors used to characterize Apollonius, as well as in the serial approach of the Lives of the Sophists. Beyond offering descriptions of particular works of art, the text presents itself as a lesson in how to view. In the introduction, the Sophist who speaks these descriptions, states that he was staying in the house of a wealthy friend and admiring his gallery of paintings, when he was asked to give an account of them for his friend’s son and some other, slightly older, local youths. The aim of the text is not, he says, to recount the history of painting, but to give descriptions for the young, “from which they can learn to interpret and pay attention to what is admirable” (proem 3). It is in this light, as instructions in the art of viewing, that the following descriptions should be taken. They are far more than simply rhetorical exercises; they obliquely and with great sophistication enact issues in the viewing of art. One recurrent pattern in the Imagines is the reduplication of some aspect of the painting qua painting through the actions of the figures and objects within it. That is, some feature which all paintings must have by their nature is taken and explored through the objects represented: the arousal of the viewer’s desires and their inevitable rejection by the image are doubled by the figures who emphatically reject all desires (2.32  “Palaestra,” 2.5  “Rhodogoune”); the memorializing of the dead which images can perform is doubled by the depiction of such memorializing, whether verbally (2.7 “Antilochus”) or in the form of an image within the image (1.7 “Memnon”). In all of these instances, the content of the image is turned to a consideration of the nature of images in general. Blurring of the line between representation and reality is another recurrent move in the Imagines and one with complex ramifications. It is, firstly, part of what Newby has aptly called the text’s oscillation between erudition and absorption, that is, between a cool, intellectual control of the painting and an emotive immersion in it.61 Moreover, this blurring of reality and representation also adds a note of disquiet to the sophist’s contemplation of the aesthetic appeal of blood and violence. While the image remains an image, we can perhaps follow him in his appreciation of the bloom of blood against skin, but when the frame of the painting proves to be permeable and its contents accessible to our own world, the aesthetic distancing dissolves.62 Further questions arise when we move beyond the individual image: the overall structure of the series of ekphraseis becomes more elusive the more closely it is examined. Sometimes, images which are widely separated from each other form an evident

Philostratus   283 pair (for instance, Memnon [1.7] and Antilochus [2.7]). On other occasions, there are sequences of related paintings (paintings of Heracles, 2.20–​2.25). Attempts have been made to reconstruct the gallery, most notably in the ingenious study of Lehmann-​ Hartleben, who argued that Philostratus had on some occasions misunderstood the images and their relationship to each other.63 Another eminent restructuring of the images is that of Goethe.64 What the text offers, rather than any final “correct” structure, are countless possible associations between pairs and groups of images; it is in this respect a work which leaves itself remarkably open to reconfiguration and recombination. What the “corrections” of Goethe and Lehmann-​Hartleben really demonstrate is the need felt by some readers to arrive at a finality which the Imagines themselves refuse.

Conclusions The defining trait of these very different works is a profound and creative engagement with the Hellenic past. How this engagement takes place is, however, quite different in the various works. The Life of Apollonius condenses the Hellenic tradition into the person of Apollonius, while the Heroicus imagines the ghostly continuity of foundational events; the Imagines meditate on the past in miniature, and the Lives of the Sophists construct a partial history of the Second Sophistic, a movement which, as Philostratus depicts it, turned obsessively to the past, interpreting and performing it in the Roman present. The educative tone of Philostratus has often been observed,65 but this is not a bossy didacticism: the works are saved from this partly by the ingenuity and wit of their author, and partly by the consistent avoidance of allowing a final authority. What may appear to be such an infallible authority is invariably undermined in subtle ways. In a group of texts for which, I would argue, the nature of interpretation is a leading concern, this preservation of room to interpret is important; readers are not merely provided with models of interpretation but also with the opportunity to hone their own hermeneutic skills.66

Further Reading There has been a marked growth in scholarship on the Corpus Philostrateum in recent years. Nonetheless, there are still relatively few volumes addressing the corpus as a whole: in addition to Anderson 1986 and Billault 2000, there is more recently the volume of essays edited by Bowie and Elsner 2009, and Miles 2017. There have also been several valuable books dedicated to specific Philostratean texts. For the Life of Apollonius, see Demoen and Praet 2009, Flinterman 1995, Schirren 2005, Bäbler and Nesselrath 2016; on the Heroicus, Aitken and Maclean 2004, and the German translation and extensive commentary by Grossardt 2006. Beschorner’s earlier translation and commentary (1999) remain useful, and the monograph of Hodkinson 2011 is a valuable addition. The Imagines have

284   Literature and Culture attracted some recent interest, including Baumann 2011; Costantini, Graziani, and Rolet 2006; Primavesi and Giuliani 2011; Squire 2013; and on the reception, Ballestra-​Puech, Bonhomme, and Marty 2010. There are a growing number of important articles and book chapters. The work of Bowie on Apollonius of Tyana (1978), on Philostratus’s relationship to the novel (1994), and on the Lives of the Sophists and Philostratus’s own life (1982, 2009) are fundamental. Elsner’s studies of the Imagines (2007a, 2007b, 2001) and the geography of the Life of Apollonius (1997) have been justly influential. Along with the extension of secondary literature have come translations of the texts. The Imagines is still served by the aging Loeb of Fairbanks 1931; in French, see the translation of Bougot, revised by Lissarrague 1991, and in Italian, Abbondanza 2008, and Pucci and Lombardo 2010. Jones’s 2005 translation of the Life of Apollonius replaces Conybeare 1912. For the Heroicus there is the German translation of Grossardt 2006 and in English, Maclean and Aitken 2001, as well as the Loeb of Jeffrey Rusten, in a volume with the Gymnasticus translated by Jason König (Rusten and König 2014). In Italian, see Rossi 1997. The Philostratean Letters are available in a Loeb by Benner and Fobes 1949, and the Lives of the Sophists in the translation of Wright 1921. The Dialexis is translated by Swain in Bowie and Elsner 2009, 356–​357, and also in Rusten and König 2014. For the text of Philostratus, we are still largely dependent on the edition of Kayser 1870–​1871. A new edition of the Life of Apollonius, under preparation by Boter, is eagerly awaited; see the preliminary study of the manuscripts: Boter 2009. For the Heroicus, Kayser is superseded by De Lannoy 1977. Stefec 2016 improves the text of the Lives of the Sophists in innumerable details. Commentaries or extensive notes exist for some, but by no means all, of the texts in the corpus. On the Imagines, see Abbondanza 2008 and Schönberger 1968; on the Heroicus, Grossardt 2006. A commentary on the Life of Apollonius is in preparation by multiple authors, under the direction of Flinterman. In the meantime, the fullest notes remain those of Mumprecht 1983. For the Lives of the Sophists, see Civiletti 2002.

Bibliography Abbondanza, L. 2008. Filostrato maggiore: Immagini. Turin. Abraham, R. 2014. “The Geography of Culture in Philostratus’ Life of Apollonius of Tyana.” CJ 109.4: 408–465. Aitken, E. B., and J. K. B. Maclean, eds. 2004. Philostratus’s “Heroikos”: Religion and Cultural Identity in the Third Century c.e. Atlanta, GA. Anderson, G. 1986. Philostratus: Biography and Belles Lettres in the Third Century a.d. London. Anderson, G. 1989. “The Pepaideumenos in Action: Sophists and Their Outlook in the Early Empire.” ANRW 2.33.1: 79–​208. Anderson, G. 1993. The Second Sophistic:  A  Cultural Phenomenon in the Roman Empire. London and New York. Bäbler, B., and H.-​G. Nesselrath. 2016. Philostrats Apollonios und seine Welt. Berlin. Ballestra-​Puech, S., B. Bonhomme, and P. Marty, eds. 2010. Musées de mots:  L’héritage de Philostrate dans la littérature occidentale. Geneva. Barnes, T. D. 1968. “Philostratus and Gordian.” Latomus 27: 581–​597. Baumann, M. 2011. Bilder Schreiben: Virtuose Ekphrasis in Philostrats “Eikones”. Berlin. Benner, A. R., and F. H. Fobes, eds. and trans. 1949. Alciphron, Aelian, Philostratus: The Letters. Cambridge, MA.

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288   Literature and Culture Platt, V. J. 2009. “Virtual Visions: Phantasia and the Perception of the Divine in The Life of Apollonius of Tyana.” In Philostratus, edited by E. L. Bowie and J. Elsner, 131–​154. Cambridge. Primavesi, O. and L. Giuliani. 2011. “Bild und Rede. Zum Proömium der Eikones des zweiten Philostrat.” Poetica 44: 25–​79. Pucci, G., and G. Lombardo. 2010. Filostrato Maggiore. La Pinacoteca. Palermo. Puech, B. 2002. Orateurs et sophistes grecs dans les inscriptions d’époque impériale. Paris. Richter, D. S. 2011. Cosmopolis: Imagining Community in Late Classical Athens and the Early Roman Empire. Oxford. Romm, J. S. 1992. The Edges of the Earth in Ancient Thought. Princeton, NJ. Rommel, H. 1923. Die naturwissenschaftlich-​paradoxographischen Exkurse bei Philostratos, Heliodoros und Achilleus Tatios. Stuttgart. Rossi, V. 1997. Filostrato: Eroico. Venice. Rusten, J., and J. König, eds. and trans. Philostratus: Heroicus, Gymnasticus, Discourses 1 and 2. Cambridge, MA. Schirren, T. 2005. Philosophos Bios: Die antike Philosophen-​biographie als symbolische Form. Studien zur “Vita Apollonii” des Philostrat. Heidelberg. Schirren, T. 2009. “Irony Versus Eulogy. The Vita Apollonii as Metabiographical Fiction.” In Theios Sophistes. Essays on Flavius Philostratus’ “Vita Apollonii,” edited by K. Demoen and D. Praet, 161–​186. Leiden. Schmidt, T., and P. Fleury, eds. 2011. Perceptions of the Second Sophistic and its Times /​Regards sur la Seconde Sophistique et son époque. Toronto. Schönberger, O. 1968. Philostratos:  Die Bilder. Griechisch-​ deutsch, nach Vorarbeiten von E. Kalinka. Munich. Sedlar, J. W. 1980. India and the Greek World: A Study in the Transmission of Culture. Totowa, NJ. Solmsen, F. 1940. “Some Works of Philostratus the Elder.” TAPA 71: 556–​572. Squire, M. 2013. “Apparitions Apparent: Ekphrasis and the Parameters of Vision in the Elder Philostratus’ Imagines.’ Helios 40: 97–​140. Swain, S. 1991. “The Reliability of Philostratus’s Lives of the Sophists.” Cl. Ant. 10: 148–​163. Stefec, R. S. 2016. Flavii Philostrati Vitas Sophistarum. Oxford Swain, S. 1995. “Apollonius in Wonderland.” In Ethics and Rhetoric: Classical Essays for Donald Russell on his Seventy-​Fifth Birthday, edited by D. Innes, H. Hine, and C. Pelling, eds. 251–​ 254. Oxford. Swain, S. 2009. “Culture and Nature in Philostratus.” In Philostratus, edited by E. L. Bowie and J. Elsner, 33–​48. Cambridge. Van Dijk, G.-​J. 2009. “The Odyssey of Apollonius: An Intertextual Paradigm.” In Philostratus, edited by E. L. Bowie and J. Elsner, 176–​203. Cambridge. Webb, R. 2009. Ekphrasis, Imagination and Persuasion in Ancient Rhetorical Theory and Practice. Abingdon. Weisser, U. 1980. Das ‘Buch über das Geheimnis der Schöpfung’ von Pseudo-​Apollonios von Tyana. Berlin and New York. Whitmarsh, T. 1999. “Greek and Roman in Dialogue:  The Pseudo-​Lucianic Nero.” JHS 119: 142–​160. Whitmarsh, T. 2004a. “The Harvest of Wisdom: Landscape, Description, and Identity in the Heroikos.” In Philostratus’s “Heroikos”: Religion and Cultural Identity in the Third Century c.e., edited by E. B. Aitken and J. K. B. Maclean, 237–​249. Atlanta, GA. Whitmarsh, T. 2004b. “Philostratus.” In Narrators, Narratees, and Narratives in Ancient Greek Literature, edited by I. J. F. de Jong, R. Nünlist, and A. Bowie, 423–​476. Leiden.

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Chapter 19

Plu tarc h Philosophy, Religion, and Ethics Frederick E. Brenk

Introduction Plutarch (ca. 40 to ca. 120 ce), born in Chaeronea, in Boeotia, significantly received later in life the full Roman name, L. Mestrius Plutarchus. He possibly traveled to Smyrna when young and also to Alexandria, perhaps taking part in an embassy. With his teacher, Ammonius, he evidently attended the Pythian Games on the occasion of Nero’s visit to Delphi in 67. Possibly he also witnessed Nero’s proclamation of freedom to Greece at the Isthmian Games in 68 (Stadter 2015, 70–​97). He visited Rome and Italy on several occasions, probably for relatively brief stays. At first, he may have arrived as a philosopher but later most likely represented Chaeronea on official business or simply traveled with his Roman friends. Under Domitian, some of these were accused of conspiracy, executed, or sent into exile. Plutarch would have attempted to “keep a low profile” in Chaeronea during this period. With the accession of Trajan, the winds of fortune changed, and his writing flourished. Trajan even granted Plutarch the ornamenta consularia (the equivalent of a distinguished service award), and toward the end of his life, he became under Hadrian “procurator of Greece” (supervisor of the imperial properties), a distinguished even if only honorary title. His writings are voluminous. Besides the Parallel Lives of the Greeks and Romans, which occupy ten Loeb volumes, there are sixteen volumes of Moralia (Moral Essays), comprising a wide variety of subjects and genres. Yet, his extant writings may be only half his original oeuvre. What is more amazing is his broad cultural sweep, including familiarity with other traditions, in particular, Roman and Egyptian. His interests were stimulated by an international network of friends, not only Greek and Roman but also from nations once called barbarian. What generally distinguishes them is their prominent role in the Greco-​Roman imperial cosmopolis. In so many ways, Plutarch thoroughly belongs to the Second Sophistic. He memorializes not only the Athenian past and its language but

292   Literature and Culture also his local Boeotian heritage within the “inhabited world.” He writes in the elevated literary koinê or “the classical language, without the pedantic concern for exactness of linguistic imitation, that is, a reformed Hellenistic Greek with very few non-​classical features of syntax or morphology, enormously enriched by his vast reading” (Russell 1973, 21–​22; see Kim on Atticism and Asianism, ­chapter 4 in this volume).

Philosophy Plutarch is arguably “by far the most interesting and rewarding philosopher, not only of Middle Platonism but of his entire age” (Donini 2011c, 390). He arrived on the philosophical scene just as Middle Platonism was rising, a phenomenon of the first century bce to the third century ce. After the death of Plato, the Academy continued, but toward the end of its existence became the “New Academy,” which turned sharply toward skepticism. Long before Plutarch’s birth, the Academy had ceased as an institution. There was, however, a rebirth of Platonism, with a reaction against skepticism and a return to the teaching of Plato’s major dialogues. A turning point came with Antiochus of Ascalon (ca. 130–​69/​68). He reacted against New Academy skepticism, returning to the teachings of the Old Academy, and apparently attempted to subordinate Stoicism to Platonism (Bonazzi 2009, 34; 2012, 314, 331–​332). Plutarch thus represents the new intellectual currents of the early Imperial period. His teacher, Ammonius, came from Alexandria, though he became a major figure at Athens. A long speech of his appears at the end of The E at Delphi (see Opsomer 2009, esp., 147–​79). The exalted and unusually dogmatic speech suggests that Ammonius was influenced by Alexandrian Platonism in its exaltation of God as One or the One. Possibly he was influenced by the somewhat mysterious Eudorus of Alexandria (fl. ca. 50 bce), generally considered the founder of Middle Platonism. Thus, Plutarch’s philosophical training, though Platonic and in Athens, was cosmopolitan. As typical of the time, philosophy included many genres, such as natural science, which we today might not consider philosophical. His mainly nonethical philosophical works consist of combative attacks on the Stoics and Epicureans, and commentaries on Plato. The first group of writings is very technical and biased, assailing long-​dead adversaries, such as the major Stoics and Epicureans. Representative are On the Contradictions of the Stoics and Reply to Colotes (for the last, see Kechagia 2011b). That Epicurus Actually Makes a Pleasant Life Impossible and Is “Live Unknown” a Wise Precept are similar but more popular and rhetorical in tone. He particularly disliked the Epicureans. The strategy is often to reveal how the adversary gets trapped in contradictions, or to demonstrate how a doctrine defies common sense and ordinary experience. The works are, however, filled with rhetorical flourishes, citations from poetry, and probably deliberate misrepresentations of the adversary’s positions. In Against the Stoics on Common Conceptions, a Platonist tries to dissuade an enthralled convert to Stoicism. Stoics and Epicureans, however, were real and formidable adversaries. Only much later did Platonism triumph over the others.

Plutarch: Philosophy, Religion, and Ethics    293 A third group of philosophical essays is hard to categorize since they merge, as in Plato, philosophical speculation, ethics, and myth. A splendid and successful example of this group is Concerning the Face which Appears on the Moon. One could set out on different philosophical paths in Plutarch’s day. Primarily, in the past the choice had been between Epicureanism and Stoicism, but now Platonism’s star was rising. Plutarch stood firmly against the first schools, perhaps in part for religious reasons. Both the Stoic and Epicurean philosophies were centered on this world. Epicureans held, moreover, an anti-​Platonic, atomistic, physiological view of the universe and human beings. The universe and its creatures evolved without a guiding intellect, and there were an infinite number of bodies and worlds (Mor. 1012c, 1114a–​b, 1087b). If Epicureans believed at all in the real existence of God or the gods, they still denied providence or any divine influence on human beings. On atomistic grounds, they also denied the survival of the soul. Plutarch opposed both schools on technical grounds, such as their epistemology. For instance, the Epicureans claimed that “all perceptions are true” (e.g., 1109b–​c, 1121c–​d; 1092c–​d, 1119a–​b; 1102a–​b, 1034b). The Stoic God was materialistic and immanent in the world, an intellect or spirit always attached to pneuma (a gas-​like type of matter). The universe continually dissolved itself in fire, and then recommenced again, destroying not only human souls but even the gods themselves. Only two Platonic works have survived, of which The Generation of the Soul in the Timaeus was very important. Both are in the tractate style, but Platonic Questions was written in the “question” (zetemata) genre. These begin with puzzling quotations or propositions from Plato and attempt to offer a convincing answer. The “Lamprias Catalogue,” a late list of Plutarch’s works, suggests that besides these two Platonic treatises, he composed at least nine or ten others on Plato or on the Academy which are no longer extant. Both extant ones exhibit the sober, philosophical style of a commentary. On the Generation of the Soul in the Timaeus was very timely in the Platonic revival of the first and second centuries. Reaffirming Plato, it implicitly rejects the Epicurean conception of the creation of the world and its future disintegration, as well as the Stoic view of an impersonal, immanent intellect or God as the binding force of the universe, along with its eternal, cyclic dissolutions in a great conflagration. Here and elsewhere, Plutarch reasserts the authority of Plato, while “interpreting Plato through Plato,” that is, using one Platonic dialogue to interpret another, an approach that would make a modern scholar’s hair stand on end. Plutarch’s optimistic, wholesome cosmology and eschatology, based on Plato, evidently had a strong appeal for the changing intellectual world of his time. His major contributions here consist of a literal interpretation of the Timaeus and an apparently original theory to explain the “precosmic world soul.” He claims that his literal, rather than symbolic or allegorical interpretation went against the whole tradition up to his time. This, and Plutarch’s identification of God with the Demiurge—​and with Being and the Good in his other writings, something not in Plato—​was apparently not as original as Plutarch (and some modern scholars) have claimed (Opsomer 2005, 52–​ 53, 65, 77, 94). Apparently quite original, though, was his theory of Plato’s world soul.

294   Literature and Culture According to this interpretation, the “precosmic” universe was disorderly, guided by soul (psyche) without a mind (nous). Once, however, the world soul received intellect, its fortunes changed. Order entered into the universe, it truly became a cosmos, and time could begin (1013a, 1014b–​e). The idea of the human composite as mind (nous or daimon), soul, and body, comes from Plato’s Timaeus (90a). Plutarch, however, applied it to the world soul and emphasized the importance of the soul, as distinguished from intellect, as the seat of the passions. The theory then became fundamental not only for his cosmology but also for his ethical theory and practical ethics. One of the Platonic Questions is entitled “Why Plato calls God the Father and Maker.” Plutarch claims that since God has endowed the world soul with mind, He has given it a part of Himself, and, thus, can be called its father and not just its maker. Though technically about the world soul, the theory can be applied to human beings (e.g., De tranq. anim. 473d–​e). The answer may be a reaction against the extreme distance in “being” between mortals and God as apparently developed in Alexandrian Platonism and as emphasized in Ammonius’s speech at the end of The E at Delphi. The confrontations between the philosophical schools in the Hellenistic period may have been sterile exercises. During the Second Sophistic, however, such engagements offered a real stimulus to philosophical creativity. Plutarch, along with other Platonists, was able to undermine the predominance of Stoicism and Epicureanism and offer what he considered a better option. But he could draw upon a long tradition of philosophical literature, especially Stoic ethical treatises, and incorporate their doctrines, methods, and examples. Another important contribution was his integration of the aporetic side of Platonism, typified by Socrates and the Platonic dialogues, with the systemization of Platonism developed after Plato in the Academy and by later Platonists after the Academy’s demise. In doing so, he was arguably “the most faithful reader of Plato in his age” (Donini, as quoted in Bonazzi and Sharples 2011, 11–​12). The Face on the Moon is one of the mixed philosophical or cosmological-​religious-​ ethical works. More a pseudodialogue than a dialogue, it is split into two parts. The first consists of an extremely long, technical section on the composition of the moon, comprising about three-​quarters of the work, while the second is a shorter, mythical part. The first, the best that antiquity has left us, is a highly technical astronomical treatise, and the result is basically correct. The moon is a solid body reflecting the sun’s light. The mythical part involves a “double death” of the souls, first the separation of the soul (psyche) from the body on earth, followed by that of the intellect (nous) from the soul with its passions, on the moon (944e–​f ). Some scholars argue that this double death and seemingly materialistic conception of soul could not derive from Plato alone (but see Donini 2011a, 330). The scientific side in any case is influenced by an Aristotelianizing source. Then, in the myth Plutarch deliberately seems to contradict the scientific section just presented (cf. 943e–​f and 923c–​d). As with the scientific and mythical parts, no speaker seems to be completely reliable or possess the whole truth. Plutarch apparently chose this somewhat aporetic approach in order to stimulate the reader toward further and more promising speculation along Platonic lines (Donini 2011b, 98–​99).

Plutarch: Philosophy, Religion, and Ethics    295 The Daimonion [supernatural voice or sign] of Socrates has been considered a masterpiece. Involving history, ethics, and religion, it is more than philosophical. Plutarch stresses the importance of philosophical inquiry, offers an original answer to the meaning of Socrates’s daimonion, and underscores the continuum between human and divine worlds. The dialogue is framed by one of the greatest moments in Boeotian history, the revolt of the Thebans against the Spartans and their puppets in December 379 bce. One of Plutarch’s most stirring “dramatic dialogues,” it may be, like the Dialogue on Love, influenced by the rise of the novel in this period. As elsewhere in Plutarch’s dialogues, one sees an apparent disconnect between the parts, in this case, the myth, the history, the discussion of the presumed idealism of Epaminondas, and the exposition of the daimones (spiritual beings, whose voices Socrates may have heard; for “flawed characters,” see Brenk 2016). A central theme supposedly is the daimonic guidance of certain chosen men. Surprisingly, though, Plutarch barely mentions that Epaminondas himself, much like Socrates, is being guided by a daimon. At 585f–​586a, however, we learn that the daimon that once guided Lysis, the recently dead Pythagorean teacher of Epaminondas, is now instructing the Theban hero. Plutarch here introduces an element of “daimonic” time. The daimones, mediators between the divine and men as in Plato’s Symposium, seem to have knowledge of past, present, and future (Brenk 1996, esp. 50–​51 [80–​81]). The dialogue is an exercise in local Boeotian identity and pride but includes cosmopolitan perspectives. In this case, the Socrates and Athens of Plato’s dialogues are evoked through the theme and through the presence of Simmias, a pupil of Socrates and Plato, who appears in his dialogues. Simmias and a stranger also bring to life the Pythagoreans of faraway Magna Graecia. Epaminondas absents himself from the philosophical discussions and for other reasons seems to represent a defective ideal. Thus, the dialogue seems to revolve primarily around the importance of philosophical discussion and deeper probing into Plato’s thought. Epaminondas and events, however, seem to move in another world. Still, the emphasis on paideia and the philosophically determined life certainly had a strong appeal for his readers. Plutarch’s philosophical writings include a large number of Table Talks (or Sympotic Questions), associated with an institution still relevant during the Second Sophistic (Stadter 2015, 98–​107). These have a familiar or festive setting and include participants without philosophical education. The discussions generally occur at festivals and formal occasions, with important guests present, and they reveal the representation, preservation, and “performance” of cultural memory. In this respect, they resemble other means of preserving cultural memory, such as the processions and ceremonies which were taking place at the same time. In Question 9.14, for example, the number of the Muses is discussed, but also their role as handed down in Greek philosophy, religion, literature, art, music, Delphic folklore, astronomy, and everyday life. Also, while attention is paid to local diversity, the Sympotic Questions contribute to the creation of the imperial type of Panhellenism (König 2007, 63–​68). As such, they are particularly relevant for understanding the culture and ideals of the Second Sophistic. Until recently, scholars usually discounted these essays with their frequent off-​hand and pseudo-​scientific answers. They serve, though, at least superficially, as exercises

296   Literature and Culture in becoming an intellectual (pepaideumenos) in the Second Sophistic. One apparent goal is to demonstrate how, through apparently trivial speculation, one can learn important philosophical principles (Kechagia 2011a, 93–​94, 104; König 2007, 52–​64). The Sympotic Questions, then, are a kind of handbook intended not only for the young but even for important adults, such as the Roman Sosius Senecio, to whom they, like the Lives, were dedicated. The longest of them, in fact, deals with the art of conversation, a topic suggested by Sosius Senecio himself (Wright 2008, 144–​146). The range of topics to which the speakers are expected to give sophisticated answers is vast. They range from natural science to folklore, literature, and philosophy. Surprising is the lack of a definitive answer, especially since the authoritative and final voice is often that of Plutarch himself. In some cases, though, he appears as a young man, and is not averse to presenting himself as the “star pupil” of his teacher, Ammonius, as in 3.1, and possibly in 9.2 and 9.3 (Klotz 2011, 171–​178; König 2007, 52). The speaker’s prestige offers some help for evaluating the answer, as does the length and position of the speech, for example, at the end. Sometimes one can test an opinion against Plutarch’s in another work. Still, rarely do the opinions of a speaker seem to coincide perfectly with those expressed by Plutarch elsewhere. Evidently, his primary purpose was to stimulate philosophical inquiry and to characterize the speaker individually. A conflict, moreover, seems to exist between two separate criteria, plausibility and “sympotic harmony.” Was there method in this madness of “interpretive pluralism”? Evidently the idea is to challenge the readers to decide for themselves and formulate their own answers, thus entering, in a sense, into the sympotic discussion contained in this work (König 2007, 45, 50). Out of ninety-​five Sympotic Questions, Plutarch is the principal speaker in thirty-​ three. Moreover, each has a preface, and his voice is very strong at the opening of each book. Oddly, his philosophy teacher, Ammonius, has a relatively minor role, though his monologue ends the work (9.15 [747b–​748D]; Klotz 2011, 177). One should not exaggerate the strictly philosophical content. Plutarch asserts that philosophy should not be excluded (716d–​f ), but defines it as “the art of life” (613b) (Kechagia 2011a, 91–​93). Then, we find a cautious note: since not all the participants are philosophers, the topics should be familiar, simple, and easy (641d), not pedantic, abstruse, or belligerent (614f). In fact, though, the crafty participant (and reader), quickly learns that to create una bella figura, he had better “bone up” on natural science. Most topics discussed fall within the categories of biology, botany, physiology, health, and astronomy (forty-​two cases). Next comes sympotic behavior (seventeen), literature (including mythology and grammar) (eleven); then sociology (including ethnicity, strange customs, and religious behavior; five); music (four); theater, choruses, dance (four); sports (four); philosophy (two); and religion (one). For other Questions, only nonhelpful titles remain (four). The only real philosophical question in the modern sense seems to be 8.2 (718b–​720c), “What Plato meant by saying that God is always doing geometry.” The four solutions are based on epistemology, ethics, cosmology, and metaphysics. Like a name on an empty tomb, another question exists only as a title, “On the subject of our having no permanent identity, since our substance is always in flux” (9.11 [741c]). This, at least literally, represents Ammonius’s position at the end of The E at Delphi. Plutarch’s own position

Plutarch: Philosophy, Religion, and Ethics    297 elsewhere was the contrary. Yet, two “questions” do not represent a great deal of philosophical involvement in the modern sense of the term. The topics of the Sympotic Questions, nonetheless, reveal much about the interests, strengths, weaknesses, foibles, and aspirations of Greco-​Romans of the Second Sophistic.

Religion For many readers the most memorable parts of Plutarch’s Moralia are his religious writings, in particular his intimations of horrendous demons, or more properly, good and bad daimones. Some essays are exercises in comparative religion, such as his Roman and Greek Questions, while others are Platonic-​style dialogues with developed myths. An often-​cited work, On Superstition, surprisingly treats superstition as worse than atheism, but it may be spurious. On Isis and Osiris treats a part of Egyptian religion, offering the basic data and different interpretations. Three dialogues, each from a different perspective and written separately, discuss the Delphic Oracle. Finally, major eschatological dialogues recreating the spirit of Plato, examine the fate of the soul after death (for an overview, Hirsch-​Luipold 2016). Plutarch’s Roman and Greek Questions, among other works, arguably reveal him as the best scholar of comparative religion of his time. Although he knew Latin reasonably well (Stadter 2011) and Roman culture, he has been accused of using Greek answers for Roman questions (Preston 2001, 93–​94, 105, 112–​113). This is misleading. Any count of the categories of the responses is bound to be arbitrary, and there are some cross-​ references. However, of the 113 Roman Questions, only twenty-​eight answers are based on Greek customs or religion. Moreover, these explanations are generally offered as Greek parallels in confirmation of answers based on Roman culture. The majority of the answers are what Plutarch terms common-​sense ones (κατὰ λόγον, e.g., 281c), not really Greek answers. He normally rejects myth-​ritual-​or myth-​history-​type explanations. True, the principal Roman authority, Varro, is cited only eight times, but in the entire Greek Questions only three Greek authorities are cited, Aristotle and Mnasigeiton (295f), and Architimus, who wrote a History of Arcadia (300b), the last two of which are very obscure. A rough count gives 119 answers based on Roman culture (some questions with more than one answer) and only eleven, or around 10 percent, based on Greek culture, while 102 answers are neutral. Plutarch’s treatment, rather than being excessively grecocentric, reveals a broad Roman and cosmopolitan sweep. As typical of the Second Sophistic, he was interested in foreign religions, but his treatment is rather paradoxical (see Pelling 2016). He devotes an entire, very long essay to the cult of Isis and Osiris, based on early Hellenistic sources, but treats Persian religion only briefly. A conspiracy of silence seems to surround his approach to Christians, though the Neronian persecution had given them notoriety and famous letters between Pliny and the Emperor Trajan discuss them. Among extant Greek and Roman authors on Jews and Judaism, he stands out, but the bar is low. His contribution is

298   Literature and Culture minimal and disappointing by modern standards (Quaest. conv. 4.5 [669e–​671c]) and 4.6 [671c–​672c]). Still, by contemporary standards the passages are, like those on other religions, reasonably sympathetic. Tacitus was contemptuous of the Jews but praised their monotheism and aniconic worship (Hist. 5.5.4). Plutarch, surprisingly, never mentions this defining characteristic. The passages on the Jews appear in the Sympotic Questions, notorious for unreliable statements. Moreover, the speaker, not Plutarch but his brother Lamprias, explains “Levites” from Lysios or Euïos (names for Dionysus), and “Sabbath” from Saboi (a rare name for Bacchics). In Sympotic Questions 8.5 (726e), Lamprias offers absurd etymologies on another subject. In On Isis and Osiris, contrary to his practice, Plutarch does employ Greek etymologies for foreign words but interprets them allegorically. The Jewish matter, however, may be based on an excellent source, Hecataeus of Abdera (Geiger 2011, 217–​219). Pilgrimages to religious sites were very popular during the Second Sophistic (see Rutherford on pilgrimage, ­chapter 39 in this volume). Pausanias devotes a major section of his Description of Greece to Delphi. Not surprisingly, Plutarch, who was a priest there, dedicated three major dialogues to the shrine, The E at Delphi, The Oracles of the Pythia, and The Obsolescence of the Oracles. Rather than offering a comprehensive description of the shrine, each dialogue is concerned with one major question, namely: the nature the Pythia’s inspiration, the significance of the mysterious letter E erected there, and the reason for the present decline of oracular sites. Of these, The Oracles of the Pythia most resembles Lucian’s On the Syrian Goddess and Pausanias’s description of Delphi. In contrast to Pausanias’s treatment, though, it devotes only ten pages or about 25 percent of the work to the actual site. In Lucian’s On the Syrian Goddess, the guides’ fantastic tales stir shock and awe. Here they drive the skeptical viewers to the exits (De Pyth. or. 395a–​b). Plutarch’s Delphic essays are concerned with the past, as in Pausanias and Lucian, especially the extremely distant past, without romantic idealization. In The Oracles of the Pythia, the main speaker, Theon, eulogizes the present (406b–​c). Though the Pythia has been reduced to prose today, the literary quality of the ancient verse oracles was rather miserable. Once persecutions of ethnic groups, internecine struggles, tyrants, and horrible ills abounded. Now the world enjoys profound peace and tranquility (408b–​c). In Lucian’s On the Syrian Goddess, the shrine at Hierapolis is rife with wondrous events, but in Plutarch they are minimal. He avoids them almost entirely in The Oracles of the Pythia, with the exception of five common statue “miracles” (397e–​f ), indicative of their being “filled with divinity” (398a). More stupendous wonders occur in The Obsolescence of the Oracles. They include the story of the “death of the Great Pan,” supposedly a great daimon passing away off the west coast of the Adriatic (419a–​e), the death of daimones off the coast of Britain (419–​420a), and the “true story” of a sage living near the Persian Gulf, the companion of roaming nymphs and daimones (420f–​421f). Unfortunately, the gullibility of these tellers of tall tales diminishes their credibility (Brenk 1977, 85–​112). In his major dialogues, which recapture the spirit of Plato’s Phaedrus and Republic, however, Plutarch indulged in stupendous eschatological scenes of torture and torment in the next life, with release to divine status for the virtuous. Like monotheism,

Plutarch: Philosophy, Religion, and Ethics    299 conversion and salvation seem to characterize the age. There is no standard eschatology. Each myth is shaped to fit a particular dialogue. In both The Daimonion of Socrates and The Face on the Moon, the myth is essentially based upon Plutarch’s division of the human composite into body, soul, and intelligence (nous or logos). Though the concept comes from the Timaeus, Plato himself did not exploit this tripartite division in his brief myth on the destiny of the souls. In Plutarch we find a novel, physical application of the theory. Souls are punished and reincarnated on the moon. If not sufficiently purified, they are then reincarnated and descend to earth. For others, though, their soul (psyche), treated as a physical substance, dies and is absorbed into the moon, but through love for the “desirable, and beautiful and divine and blessed” their purified nous escapes from the moon, presumably to enjoy the Platonic “blessed vision” (944e). In The Daimonion of Socrates, the eschatological vision is colored by local identity. The mythical part is triggered by the visionary Timarchus, descending into the oracular cave of Trophonius at Lebedaea, not far from Plutarch’s Chaeronea. Here the scheme of nous, soul, and body appears again. This time souls ascend after death guided by nous, which floats above them like a cork. Souls most docile to nous have straight upward movements and attain their goal after passing through several spheres, each presided over by a Gnostic-​sounding divinity (591b–​592b). The myth of The Delay of the Divinity is more traditional but ends with a startling contemporary reference. The emperor Nero, who once was distinguished for his arias, is being horribly tormented, when suddenly a mysterious supernatural voice directs the hellish fiends to reincarnate him as a “vocal creature of the marshes,” since he had granted freedom “to the nation most loved by the gods” (567f–​568a). These myths are quite original, even if their inspiration is from Plato. They also draw upon centuries of philosophical interaction with the Timaeus and the history of its interpretation. Though quite different, each myth fulfills a specific task but connects, at least remotely, with the others. At the same time they defy a comprehensive synthesis or any overarching scheme (Deuse 2010, 173–​174, 193, 197). Transcending personal experience, as the visionary gazes upon the eschatological scene above, he unveils the fears and hopes, the doubts and beliefs of human beings below. One of the most profound religious passages is the speech of Plutarch’s teacher, Ammonius, at the end of The E at Delphi (391e–​394c). Behind Apollon, the god of the shrine, is a supreme, monotheistic God living in instantaneous eternity (apparently for the first time in intellectual history). He alone can truly be called Being, in contrast to mere mortals (392a–​393b). Thus, the real meaning of the mysterious E (or Ei) which greeted visitors arriving at Delphi is “Thou art,” or better, “Thou art One” (393b). God is simple, without parts and is One, or the One, but is also the Creator (Demiurge), who exercises providence over the world. A lesser god or daimon is responsible for the destructive aspects of the sun. Parts sound like Plutarch, but the dogmatic tone is uncharacteristic. Moreover, in On Isis and Osiris, which employs a similar allegorical interpretation, he identifies God with Being and the Good, but not with the One (352a, 372e–​f ). The transitoriness of human beings, their life in constant flux, and the denial of real being to them (392c–​e) runs counter to On Tranquility of Mind (473d–​e). Plutarch answers

300   Literature and Culture Platonic Question 2 (“Why Plato calls God ‘Father and Maker’ ”) by declaring that since the World Soul possesses intelligence, it has a part of God (Quaest. Plat. 1001b–​c), “not by his agency but both from him as source and out of his substance” (Loeb). This implies that human beings as well as God possess real being (cf. De tranq. anim. 473d). Thus, behind the Apollo of popular belief, and the Sun, Ammonius reveals the supreme God of Middle Platonism, identifiable with Being, the Good, and, at least here, the One. The allegorical interpretation of religious texts offered new possibilities to educated Greco-​Romans. One could remain faithful to the patrios pistis (the traditional religion) in this case, while simultaneously worshipping a Middle Platonic monotheistic God (Brenk 2012, 81–​84). Since the setting is the religious shrine of Delphi and the reference is to worship of the god there, this is not just philosophical, but a form of religious “pagan monotheism.” There are parallels in the thought, terminology, and method of Philo of Alexandria, a generation before Plutarch, in particular, the personalization of the philosophical God. Ammonius signifies this by the use of both the neuter and the masculine forms in Greek for “being” or “one.” Like Philo, at times Plutarch even speaks as though the ultimate basis of knowledge about the supernatural is not to be found in philosophy but in religion (Hirsch-​Luipold, 2005, 144–​148, 153, 156–​161). Almost from its creation, the Hellenistic Isis cult was an international religion of the elite. In this respect, it resembles the later Imperial Cult. The cult enjoyed imperial favor both in the Julio-​Claudian and Flavian dynasties. Plutarch’s interest may have been stirred while young, when he had traveled to Egypt, and several of his friends had connections there, for example, the family of Philopappus, whose monument still stands at Athens. Another friend, Cornelius Pulcher, would become under Hadrian, a iuridicus Aegypti (an equestrian official under Trajan and Hadrian whose functions are not clear). The parents of Clea, the addressee of On Isis and Osiris, already belonged to the cult when Clea was young (De Is. et Os. 364e). Besides being a priestess of Apollo at Delphi, Clea herself, evidently a wealthy landowner at Chaeronea, was a priestess of Isis there (351e, 352c). The religion, moreover, had existed for decades at Chaeronea. Plutarch’s strategy, in any case, is through allegory to domesticate and Platonize the religion, thus neutralizing it. Essentially, he created for it a Middle Platonic theology, thus following a tradition of allegorical interpretation which had already had some success in Judaism and which would have a remarkable future in Christianity. Through the long descriptions and enormous detail involving Egyptian myths and rituals, and his Platonic theology, he undoubtedly and perhaps unintentionally, contributed to the popularity of the cult. From the start, the religion is seen as monotheistic, much as “Ammonius” treated the Delphic cult. The goal is the “assimilation to God” of Middle Platonism (De Is. et Os. 351c–​f ), to a God identified with Osiris, “who is the First, the Lord, the Intelligible” (352a), the Good (372e–​f ), and the destiny of the soul (374d). The vast majority of On Isis and Osiris, however, consists of minute descriptions of Egyptian myth and ritual. Plutarch does not bowdlerize these but explains at one point, rather lamely, that “nothing unseemly really happened this way” (355b). Different interpretations are offered,

Plutarch: Philosophy, Religion, and Ethics    301 such as the euhemeristic, the dualistic, and the daimonic, but the final and best consists of Middle Platonic philosophical allegory. Thus, the foreign religion is absorbed into Greco-​Roman culture along the lines suggested by Dawson (1992, 74, 109–​110), but he also seems somewhat influenced by Egyptian religion (Brenk 2017, 18–​19; Pelling 2016, 48). While doing so, Plutarch dazzles the reader with the impression of his impeccable authority in Egyptology. Here and elsewhere, Plutarch champions the primacy of Greek culture and religion, and, in effect, subtly disparages Egyptian wisdom (Richter 2011, 213–​214, 218–​219, 226). For example, he had earlier claimed, incredibly, that Egyptian religion contained nothing irrational, fabulous, or superstitious. Everything had moral or practical value, or at least a foundation in history or science (De Is. et Os. 353e–​f ). Immediately, Egyptian animal worship comes to mind, against which Philo and other Greco-​Roman authors railed. For Plutarch, the Egyptian practice is a dangerous superstitious (379e). Yet, he finds a religious justification for it, provided the god, not the animal is worshipped (382a–​b). Plutarch’s erudite essay, then, based on the rather ancient practice of the religion, stands in contrast to Apuleius’s satirical account of the contemporary cult in Cenchrae and in Rome. Apuleius’s “Isis Book” seems hardly designed to encourage conversion among a skeptical well-​educated elite. On the other hand, Plutarch’s treatise, with its impressive sources and philosophical interpretations could easily inspire interest and respect, if not conversion.

Ethics One of Plutarch’s greatest contributions was to Platonize ethics, a field long dominated by Stoics and Epicureans. Against both of them, he reaffirmed the essential unity of a human being, citing Plato in virtually every essay. In the strictest form of their teaching, the Stoics had emphasized fate and determinism. They also held that all virtues were one, that all other goods were “indifferent” in respect to virtue, and that progress in virtue was nonexistent (one was either good or bad). In Plutarch’s view, Stoicism often went against common sense, for example, in its definition of good and evil (De Stoic. 1034c, 1040d–​e, 1053b–​c, 1055d–​f; Comm. not. 1063a–​b, 1069f–​1070b). Plutarch condemned the Epicureans’ highest good as pleasure, claiming that they indulged in unworthy ones, while rejecting the highest (e.g., 1088d–​e). He based his own ethics on an acknowledgment of the weakness of human nature but with the optimistic view that we can control this weakness through reason. He also believed that a natural disposition was not enough. One could achieve the philosophical goals of self-​sufficiency, immunity to pain, inner tranquility, and assimilation to God, only through effort (Becchi 2012, 43, 48). Strict Stoic teaching sought the elimination of all passions, themselves regarded as “judgments.” For Plutarch, passions, properly guided by reason, which he calls ­eupatheiai, are actually necessary for virtue (Bonazzi 2012, 330). He was, however, profoundly

302   Literature and Culture influenced by the Platonic doctrine that vice arose in great part from ignorance. This belief, in a close relationship between false judgments and vice, brings him close to the Stoics. Another fundamental element of his moral teaching was his understanding of the human composite as body, soul (psyche), and intellect (nous), with the passions located in the psyche. With these views in mind, not surprisingly, he wrote a large number of essays in which he attempted to get to the intellectual errors, especially profound, underlying ones, behind vices. Besides Stoic teaching, Plutarch’s “practical ethics” owe much to the Cynic-​Stoic and Epicurean tradition (Roskam and Van der Stockt 2011; Van Hoof 2010). However, Stoics and Epicureans in general avoided reference to the supernatural or to life after death. Somewhat surprisingly, with a few rare exceptions, Plutarch seems to follow this tradition both in his essay On Moral Virtue and in his “practical ethics.” Also, he generally makes no explicit appeal to self-​sufficiency (autarkeia), a prominent part of the Cynic-​Stoic and Epicurean tradition. Besides their philosophical content, his essays open a window into the interests, worries, fears, and hopes of the Second Sophistic elite. To modern eyes, their quest for moral improvement is inspiring, something evident in their statue portraits. All, apparently, were sages or philosophers (cf. Sidebottom 2009, 82–​99). In Plutarch’s On Anger, the pepaideumenos should possess good breeding (εὐγένεια, 456f), prudence (φρόνησις, 456f), greatness (μέγεθος, 456f), courage (ἀνδρεία, 457d), liberality (ἐλευθεριότης, 458a–​b), gentleness (πραότης, 457d, 458e), temperance (σωφροσύνη, 460d), and cheerfulness (εὐκολία, 462a), the last an unexpected but profound touch. He uses a number of strategies to motivate his reader, often an important Roman or Greek with links to the imperial administration, directing his therapy to the reader’s both psyche and nous. As for general method, he first offers some general principles, then enhances his advice with exempla (mini “case studies”), poetic citations, and includes practical steps for improvement. Apart from some fondness for Boeotian heroes, the exempla are very international. One can begin with Plutarch’s theoretical treatise On Moral Virtue and then examine some individual essays. On Moral Virtue, like his anti-​Epicurean essay That Epicurus Actually Makes a Pleasant Life Impossible, is directed against a particular school, this time, the Stoics. The anti-​Epicurean one is heavily rhetorical and obviously misrepresents Epicurean positions. In contrast, On Moral Virtue is quite objective, demonstrating an excellent understanding of Stoic ethics, and separating more extreme opinions like those of Chrysippus, from more moderate Stoic positions. The major thrust is against the passions as belonging to the rational order (“passions are judgments”). In the Platonic view, the passions are irrational, thus setting up a conflict within a human being between the passions and reason. After that, he draws swords against the Stoic goal of eradicating all passions (apatheia). In his Platonic approach, the passions should be ordered through reason, and where helpful, harnessed for good. He first, however, attacks the Stoic idea that all virtue is one (440e–​441b), then the Stoic monistic, intellectualist concept of moral struggles (441b–​443c). This involves appeals to personal experience and examples of how, with our mind, we can control our movements and impulses. After dismissing the absurdity of passions consisting of two swiftly oscillating contrary

Plutarch: Philosophy, Religion, and Ethics    303 judgments (447b–​450e), he exemplifies at great length how reason can control passions (450f–​452d), ending with the importance of correct moral paideia (452d). Most of the appeals are to experience and common sense. Still he cannot restrain his Schadenfreude when noting that even the great Chrysippus twice described the irrational part (τὸ ἄλογον, τὸ παθητικόν) as essentially different from and warring with judgment (κρίσις, λογισμός; 450b–​c). Modern scholars distinguish between “part based” ethics (based on a conflict within the parts of the soul) and “core centered” (based on a unified conception of the soul) (Gill 2006, 220, 227, 238). Plutarch’s approach is mostly “part based,” and he often divides the soul into psyche and nous. In a part-​based ethics, one has difficulty explaining the unity of the soul. Plutarch’s solution is based on his theory of the world soul in the Timaeus. Despite its passions, the soul, something distinct from the intellect (nous), has an innate longing for logos and form, which are partly diffused within the soul. Thus, in contrast to Stoic teaching, even the passions can collaborate in virtue (Castelnérac 2007). On Moral Virtue advocates Aristotelian metriopatheia (a moderation of the passions) for the body-​soul-​mind composite (443c–​d, 444e, 445f–​446c), rather than Stoic apatheia (the elimination of all passions). Original with Plutarch is his conception of the Aristotelian mean in musical terms, that is, as a pleasant note between two others (444d–​445a). Plutarch, however, then applies this to the emotions themselves, rather than to the result, as in Aristotle (449b; 444d–​445f) (Gill 2006, 5–​6, 235–​37). His ethics are also “nonconsequential,” that is, not based on whether the result was good (Martin 2011). The remedy is generally Greek paideia, conceived as heavily, if not exclusively, moral (e.g., 451c–​d, 452d–​e). Putting theory into practice was another matter. We have about twenty-​one essays of “practical ethics,” written especially for the elite. In his Lives of the Greeks and Romans, Plutarch often cites the dangers of excessive ambition (philotimia), which is associated with a lack of Greek paideia. A condemnation of philotimia enters in Precepts of Statecraft, obviously directed at the upper class. In other essays, we can distinguish different vices or situations which are particular afflictions of the elite: anger (toward a subordinate), excessive borrowing, being taken advantage of through flattery, dealing with enemies, distinguishing true from false friends, excessive love of wealth, offensive self-​praise, and the trials of exile. In general, these essays are gems of Plutarch’s literary production, with an elevated style, numerous poetic quotations, and, especially, positive and negative exempla of (usually) famous persons affected by the particular virtue or vice. Only three can be discussed here, on Control of Anger, Advice to a Bride and Groom, and, briefly, The Dialogue on Love. Control of anger evidently was a favorite of this genre, and the essay is only one of two conceived of as a dialogue. The speakers are Sextius Sulla, a Carthaginian from Plutarch’s stays in Rome, a man of letters, a philosopher, and one of the principal speakers in The Face on the Moon, a dialogue probably set at Rome. The second speaker, Minicius Fundanus (who seems mostly at a loss for words) from the north of Italy, became suffect consul in 107, legate to Dalmatia, and then proconsul of Asia in 122/​123. Sulla, a reformed irascible, is eager to relate his

304   Literature and Culture conversion through reason, to triumph over his passion. Toward the beginning, he cites the Roman philosopher Musonius Rufus for how “to come through life safe and sound” (453d). One needs constant treatment and preparation with good philosophical advice “before the storm strikes” (453f–​454a). One victory brings future confidence. Nip anger in the bud and avoid occasions for it (454e–​455c). Servants are excellent subjects for practicing control of anger. Nor is he loath to explain how he conquered the enemy. As an aid, he collects (surprisingly like Plutarch) “sayings and deeds,” especially of illustrious “kings and despots” (457d–​e), and in the essay cites thirteen exempla, five from the Roman world. Sulla has, however, a profounder message, as he turns to deeper, underlying causes. Beating servants or slaves only makes them worse, while winning their respect can lead to real improvement (459d–​e). A major cause of anger is the inability to do without luxuries (461a). An optimistic and cheerful outlook on life can be a tremendous help to overcoming anger (462a). Righteous indignation may be justified, but one should keep it within bounds. Sudden, unexpected events can trigger anger. Therefore, one should cultivate a philosophical attitude ahead of time. For instance, should one’s son die, one has already been prepared, and can say to oneself, “I knew my son was mortal” (462a, 463b). Sulla confesses to liking people too much and needing to take to heart Plato’s advice about not being overtrustful (463c–​d). Neither he nor Plutarch, however, seems to consider this an element in his victory over anger. As a final bit of wisdom, Sulla reveals his own vow, “no less sacred and pleasant in the sight of God,” to begin by letting a short interval pass without giving way to anger, then gradually to increase the time between outbursts. By such means and “with the help of God,” he overcame his anger and learned by experience how a placid, gentle, and humane nature is even more agreeable to oneself than to those around one (464d). Admissions of divine help are unusual in this genre and may represent a gentle tweaking of Sulla’s quaint admissions. Two essays with almost completely different tones treat ethics within love and marriage. Plutarch addressed Advice to a Bride and Groom with a traditional, conservative approach to the upper-​class daughter of Clea, the addressee of On Isis and Osiris. Much of his counsel seems antifeminist today, such as the seemingly total submission of the wife to the husband, the undisputed head of the household (e.g., 139b–​c, 140a–​b, 140d, 142e, 145d–​e). One classicist, however, interprets the essay as a manual for an intelligent and self-​controlled bride to obtain the upper hand in a marriage (McNamara 1999). Some aspects of the essay may reflect social changes by the time of the Second Sophistic. Plutarch especially exploits these in his later Dialogue on Love. Like Musonius Rufus, even here he advocates marriage as companionship (κοινονία) and equality (though qualified) (140e–​f ). A husband should treat a wife with consideration and respect and not try to humiliate her, especially if she is wealthy (138d–​e, 139b, 139e–​f, 140a). The bride, Eurydice, is to entertain her husband’s guests, engaging in the same type of banter and jokes as he (140a–​b, 140d, 142a). Beside character and companionship, Plutarch lists conversational skills as among a wife’s most desirable qualities (141a–​b). As in the Dialogue on Love, he argues that erôs is a positive factor in a successful marriage (143d).

Plutarch: Philosophy, Religion, and Ethics    305 Plutarch harshly condemns the double standard, not for the moral harm it does the man, as in some philosophers, but for the suffering it causes the wife. Since this essay is more than just a “practical essay,” we find a religious element toward the end: marriage and procreation are holy and sacred affairs, under the protection of the patron gods of matrimony (144b–​c, 145a, 144c–​d). Plutarch, who elsewhere advocates women’s education, had personally taught philosophy to Eurydice (138c). As a future childbearing wife, she would be rather constricted. Nonetheless, she is to continue her philosophical education as best she can, by discussing topics discussed in the classes of her husband (145d–​e). Plutarch probably conceived this as primarily ethical instruction, but in any case, a wife’s education was not to stop with marriage. At the end, Plutarch reworks a famous poem of Sappho, praising Eurydice’s literary and philosophical accomplishments and extolling the paideia she has received (146a). The Dialogue on Love differs radically from Advice to a Bride and Groom in its defense of women’s intelligence and virtue, even if Advice contained some seeds of a new approach. This was a late work, possibly even completed by Plutarch’s son, and is a full-​scale, novelistic, dramatic dialogue, with complex framing, play on past and present, local, foreign, and cosmopolitan identities, and exaltation of the intelligence and heroism of women. The dramatic part involves a wealthy young widow in tiny Thespiae in Boeotia who falls in love with a handsome boy, the kalos, kidnaps, and marries him, while his guardians, and Plutarch (the persona) and his friends debate the fine points of homo-​versus heteroerotic love. Basically, it extols the role of erôs in marriage, defends married love against boy love, envisages the constant influence of the gods Eros and Aphrodite in love and marriage, and suggests that the goal of married love is progress toward the Platonic “vision of the beautiful” (764d–​765a). Whether provocative (Goldhill 1995, 158–​161) or serious, the essay carries to its logical conclusion Plato’s theory that the superior person in intellect and virtue should lead. While seemingly presenting a topsy-​turvy world, the essay corresponds to some new realities in the Greco-​Roman world of the Imperial period and may be inspired by the emerging novel. Plutarch’s role is complex. As one scholar puts it, he was a person “well-​equipped to understand what the rich, the powerful, the poor, the self-​interested demos, the over-​ smart and the over-​philosophical will miss,” . . . and, thus, represents the idea of the educated pepaideumenoi in the Second Sophistic (Pelling 2011, 56).

Further Reading There are two companions to Plutarch: Beck 2014, and Titchener and Zadorozhnyy, forthcoming. For Plutarch’s life, important are Jones 1971 and Russell 1973. More recent is Boulogne 1994. For Plutarch’s place in the Second Sophistic, Richter 2011. Basic for Middle Platonism is Dillon (1977) 1996. More recent are Boys-​Stones 2001; Roskam 2007; Bonazzi 2011; Kechagia 2011b. For philosophy and religion, Roig Lanzillotta and Muñoz Gallarte 2012. For religion,

306   Literature and Culture Brenk 1987a and 1987b; Hirsch-​Luipold 2005; Van der Stockt, Titchener, Ingenkamp, and Jiménez 2011. For ethics, valuable are Pomeroy 1999; Gill 2006; Van Hoof, 2010; Roskam and Van der Stockt, 2011; and Klotz and Oikonomopoulou 2011; on several topics, Opsomer, Roskam, and Titchener 2016.

Bibliography Becchi, F. 2012. “The Doctrine of the Passions: Plutarch, Posidonius and Galen.” In Plutarch in the Religious and Philosophical Discourse of Late Antiquity, edited by L. Roig Lanzillotta and I. Muñoz Gallarte, 43–​54. Studies in Platonism, Neoplatonism, and the Platonic Tradition. Leiden and Boston. Beck, M., ed. 2014. A Companion to Plutarch. Oxford. Bonazzi, M. 2009. “Antiochus’ Ethics and the Subordination of Stoicism.” In The Origins of the Platonic System: Platonisms of the Early Empire and their Philosophical Contexts, edited by M. Bonazzi and J. Opsomer, 33–​54. Collection d’Études Classiques 23. Louvain, Namur, Paris, and Walpole, MA. Bonazzi, M., ed. 2011. Pierluigi Donini. Commentary and Tradition: Aristotelianism, Platonism, and Post-​Hellenistic Philosophy. Berlin and New York. Bonazzi, M. 2012. “Antiochus and Platonism.” In The Philosophy of Antiochus, edited by D. Sedley, 307–​333. Cambridge. Bonazzi, M., and R. W. Sharples. 2011. “Introduction.” In Pierluigi Donini. Commentary and Tradition: Aristotelianism, Platonism, and Post-​Hellenistic Philosophy, edited by M. Bonazzi, 7–​12. Berlin and New York. Boulogne, J. 1994. Plutarque: Un aristocrat grec sous l’occupation romaine. Lille. Boys-​Stones, G. R. 2001. Post-​Hellenistic Philosophy: A Study of Its Development from the Stoics to Origen. Oxford. Brenk, F. E. 1977. In Mist Apparelled: Religious Themes in Plutarch’s Moralia and Lives. Leiden. Brenk, F. E. 1987a. “An Imperial Heritage:  The Religious Spirit of Plutarch of Chaironeia.” ANRW 2.36.1: 248–​349. Brenk, F. E. 1987b. Indices. ANRW 2.36.2: 1300–​1322. Brenk, F. E. 1996. “Time as Structure in The Daimonion of Sokrates.” In Plutarchea Lovaniensia, edited by L. Van der Stockt, 29–​51. Leuven. Reprinted in F.  E. Brenk, Relighting the Souls:  Studies in Plutarch, in Greek Literature, Religion, and Philosophy, and in the New Testament Background, 59–​81. Stuttgart, 1998. Brenk, F. E. 2012. “Plutarch and ‘Pagan Monotheism.’” In Plutarch in the Religious and Philosophical Discourse of Late Antiquity, edited by L. Roig Lanzillotta and I. Muñoz Gallarte, 73–​84. Studies in Platonism, Neoplatonism, and the Platonic Tradition. Leiden and Boston. Brenk, F. E. 2016. “Plutarch’s Flawed Characters: The Personae of the Dialogues.” A Versatile Gentleman. Consistency in Plutarch’s Writing, edited by J. Opsomer, G. Roskam, and F. Titchener, 89–​100. Leuven. Brenk, F. E. 2017. “‘Searching for Truth’?: Plutarch's On Isis and Osiris.” In Platonismus und spätägyptische Religion: Plutarch und die Ägyptenrezeption in der in der römischen Kaiserzeit, edited by M. Erler and M. Stadler, 1–​21. Berlin.

Plutarch: Philosophy, Religion, and Ethics    307 Castelnérac, B. 2007. “Plutarch’s Psychology of Moral Virtue: ‘Pathos,’ ‘Logos,’ and the Unity of the Soul.” Ancient Philosophy 27: 141–​164. Dawson, D. 1992. Allegorical Readers and Cultural Revision in Alexandria. Berkeley, CA. Deuse, W. 2010. “Plutarch’s Eschatological Myths.” In Plutarch. On the Daimonion of Socrates: Human Liberation, Divine Guidance and Philosophy, edited by H.-​G. Nesselrath, 169–​200. Tübingen. Dillon, J. (1977) 1996. The Middle Platonists:  80 b.c. to a.d. 220. 2nd ed. Ithaca, NY, and London. Donini, P. 1988. “Science and Metaphysics:  Platonism, Aristotelianism, and Stoicism in Plutarch’s On the Face in the Moon.” In The Question of Eclecticism:  Studies in Later Greek Philosophy, edited by J. M. Dillon and A. A. Long, 126–​1 44. Berkeley, CA, and London. Donini, P. 2011a. “Platonism, Aristotelianism, and Stoicism in Plutarch’s On the Face in the Moon.” In Pierluigi Donini. Commentary and Tradition: Aristotelianism, Platonism, and Post-​ Hellenistic Philosophy, edited by M. Bonazzi, 327–​339. Berlin and New York. Donini, P. 2011b. Il volto della luna. Corpus Plutarchi Moralium 48. Naples. Donini, P. 2011c. “L’eredità academica e i fondamenti del platonismo in Plutarcho.” In Pierluigi Donini. Commentary and Tradition:  Aristotelianism, Platonism, and Post-​ Hellenistic Philosophy, edited by M. Bonazzi, 375–​402. Berlin and New York. First published in ΕΝΩΣΙΣ ΚΑΙ ΦΙΛΙΑ: Unione e amicizia, edited by M. Barbanti, G. Rita Giardina, and P. Maganaro, 247–​273. Catania, 2002. Geiger, J. 2011. “Plutarch, Dionysus, and the God of the Jews Revisited (An Exercise in Quellenforschung).” In Daimones, Rituals, Myths and History of Religions in Plutarch’s Works, edited by L. Van der Stockt, F. Titchener, H. G. Ingenkamp, and A. Pérez Jiménez, 211–​ 220. Logan, UT, and Malaga. Gill, C. 2006. The Structured Self in Hellenistic and Roman Thought. Oxford. Goldhill, S. 1995. Foucault’s Virginity:  Ancient Erotic Fiction and the History of Sexuality. Cambridge. Hirsch-​Luipold, R. 2005. “Der eine Gott bei Philon von Alexandrien und Plutarch.” In Gott und die Götter bei Plutarch: Götterbilder, Gottesbilder, Weltbilder, edited by R. Hirsch-​Luipold, 141–​168. Berlin. Hirsch-​Luipold, R., ed. 2005. Gott und die Götter bei Plutarch:  Götterbilder, Gottesbilder, Weltbilder. Berlin. Hirsch-​Luipold, R. 2016. “Plutarch.” In Reallexikon für Antike und Christentum, edited by G. Schöllgen et al., 1010–​1038. Stuttgart. Jones, C. P. 1971. Plutarch and Rome. Oxford. Kechagia, E. 2011a. “Philosophy in Plutarch’s Table Talk: In Jest or in Earnest?” In The Philosopher’s Banquet: Plutarch’s Table Talk in the Intellectual Culture of the Roman Empire, edited by F. A. Klotz and K. Oikonomopoulou, 77–​104. Oxford. Kechagia, E. 2011b. Plutarch against Colotes: A Lesson in History of Philosophy. Oxford. Klotz, F. 2011. “Imagining the Past: Plutarch’s Play with Time.” In The Philosopher’s Banquet. Plutarch’s Table Talk in the Intellectual Culture of the Roman Empire, edited by F. A. Klotz and K. Oikonomopoulou, 161–​178. Oxford. Klotz, F., and K. Oikonomopoulou, eds. 2011. The Philosopher’s Banquet: Plutarch’s Table Talk in the Intellectual Culture of the Roman Empire. Oxford.

308   Literature and Culture König, J. 2007. “Fragmentation and Coherence in Plutarch’s Sympotic Questions.” In Ordering Knowledge in the Roman Empire, edited by J. König and T. Whitmarsh, 43–​68. Cambridge. König, J. 2011. “Self-​Promotion and Self-​Effacement in Plutarch’s Table Talk.” In The Philosopher’s Banquet: Plutarch’s Table Talk in the Intellectual Culture of the Roman Empire, edited by F. Klotz and K. Oikonomopoulou, 179–​203. Oxford. Martin, H. M. 2011. “Plutarchan Morality:  Arete, Tyche, and Non-​Consequentialism.” In Virtues for the People: Aspects of Plutarchan Ethics, edited by G. Roskam and L. Van der Stockt, 133–​150. Leuven. McNamara, J. A. 1999. “Gendering Virtue.” In Plutarch’s Advice to the Bride and Groom, and A Consolation to His Wife, edited by S. B. Pomeroy, 151–​161. Oxford. Opsomer, J. 2005. “Demiurges in Early Imperial Platonism.” In Gott und die Götter bei Plutarch:  Götterbilder, Gottesbilder, Weltbilder, edited by R. Hirsch-​Luipold, 51–​100. Berlin. Opsomer, J. 2009. “M. Annius Ammonius, a Philosophical Profile.” In The Origins of the Platonic System: Platonisms of the Early Empire and their Philosophical Contexts, edited by M. Bonazzi and J. Opsomer, 123–​186. Collection d’Études Classiques. Leuven. Opsomer, J., G. Roskam, and F. Titchener, eds. 2016. A Versatile Gentleman. Consistency in Plutarch’s Writings. Leuven. Pelling, C. 2011. “What is Popular about Plutarch’s Popular Philosophy?” In Virtues for the People: Aspects of Plutarchan Ethics, edited by G. Roskam and L. Van der Stockt, 41–​58. Leuven. Pelling, C. 2016. “Plutarch the Multiculturalist: Is West Always Best?” Ploutarchos 13. 33–​52. Pomeroy, S. B., ed. 1999. Plutarch’s Advice to the Bride and Groom and A Consolation to His Wife: English Translations, Commentary, Interpretive Essays, and Bibliography. Oxford. Preston, R., “Roman Questions, Greek Answers: Plutarch and the Construction of Identity.” In Being Greek under Rome edited by Simon Goldhill, 86–​119. Cambridge. Richter, D. S. 2011. Cosmopolis: Imagining Community in Late Classical Athens and the Early Roman Empire. Oxford. Roig Lanzillotta, L., and I. Muñoz. Gallarte, eds. 2012. Plutarch in the Religious and Philosophical Discourse of Late Antiquity. Studies in Platonism, Neoplatonism, and the Platonic Tradition. Leiden and Boston. Roskam, G. 2007. Live Unnoticed. Λάθε βιώσας: On the Vicissitudes of an Epicurean Doctrine. Leiden and Boston. Roskam, G., and L. Van der Stockt, eds. 2011. Virtues for the People: Aspects of Plutarchan Ethics. Leuven. Russell, D. A. 1973. Plutarch. New York. Sidebottom, H. 2009. “Philostratus and the Symbolic Roles of the Sophist and Philosopher.” In Philostratus, edited by E. L. Bowie and J. Elsner, 69–​99. Cambridge. Stadter, P. A. 2011. “Plutarch’s Latin Reading:  The Case of Cicero’s Lucullus.” In Daimones, Rituals, Myths and History of Religions in Plutarch’s Works, edited by L. Van der Stockt, F. Titchener, H. G. Ingenkamp, and A. Pérez Jiménez, 407–​418. Logan, UT, and Malaga. Stadter, P. A. 2015. Plutarch and His Roman Readers. Oxford. Titchener, F., and A. Zadorozhnyy, eds. 2017. The Cambridge Companion to Plutarch. Cambridge.

Plutarch: Philosophy, Religion, and Ethics    309 Van Hoof, L. 2010. Plutarch’s Practical Ethics: The Social Dynamics of Philosophy. Oxford. Van der Stockt, L., F. Titchener, H. G. Ingenkamp, and A. Pérez Jiménez, eds. 2011. Daimones, Rituals, Myths and History of Religions in Plutarch’s Works. Logan, UT, and Malaga. Wright, R. A. 2008. “Plutarch on Moral Progress.” In Passions and Moral Progress in Greco-​ Roman Thought, edited by J. T. Fitzgerald, 136–​150. London and New York.

Chapter 20

Plu tarch’ s  Li v e s Paolo Desideri

The Context The body of Plutarch’s biographical works began an era in the Greek culture of the second-​century empire marked by renewed interest in the history of Greece and Rome. In the first century this interest in history had survived only in grammar and rhetoric schools, in the form of readings and comments on history passages, or in expository exemplification while preparing students for proper oratorical activities.1 The nearly complete silence of true political historiography would finally be broken in the second half of the century by great writers such as Arrian, Appian, and Cassius Dio, whose works are, even today, essential documents for reconstructing the history of the Hellenic and Roman ages.2 But even earlier, immediately following Plutarch, and in fact at least in part contemporaneously with his writings, we find that neverending series of historical commemorations in the form of theatrical oratory that made up the fundamental core of the cultural activity carried out by the most important exponents of the Second Sophistic, from Isaeus the Assyrian to Polemon of Laodicea, Scopelian of Clazomenae and Aelius Aristides (to list only some of the best-​known orators).3 Local historiography would also experience a substantial new blossoming, whatever political or cultural value we might wish to attribute to this phenomenon.4 Furthermore, Pausanias’s Periegesis would give an idea of the importance of the historical and antiquarian interests of the time, aimed at bringing out the value of Greece’s monuments and urban heritage, to which the work bears essential witness even today.5 And lastly, we cannot forget that this interest is also noticeably displayed in monuments and the figurative arts—​but naturally, the scope of this chapter does not permit us to give this type of documentation the attention it deserves.6 It is therefore reasonable to think that the biographical works by Plutarch,7 which clearly corresponded to a renewed demand for history on the part of the Greek cultural context in which our author lived, might also have exerted a considerable influence on the age immediately following his8—​though, as we shall see, not without elements of distinction, some of which are

312   Literature and Culture substantial. And the importance that the Parallel Lives (Vit.) in particular, having been preserved almost in their entirety during the Byzantine era,9 later had in the history of modern European culture confirms a posteriori (so to speak) that the underlying reasons for writing this work had been so profound and intense as to enable them to survive for centuries after the end of that world in which and for which the work itself had been conceived and written. In any case, all the evidence leads us to believe that Plutarch’s attention to history, which always took form as a biographical sort of writing10 with an ethical and political purpose, did not assume the form of “parallel lives” from the very beginning. In fact, there are extant Lives of his which do not correspond to this formula—​that is, they involve individual figures and not pairs: thus we have an Aratus and an Artaxerxes, as well as the two Lives of emperors, Galba and Otho, which belonged, as we can ascertain from the Lamprias catalog, to a series that included all the emperors from Augustus to Vitellius.11 We may thus imagine, as far as these first writings by Plutarch are concerned, a sort of intellectual progression from simple political biography—​a well-​traveled path in Greek literature, starting in the fourth century (and later in Roman literature)—​to a plan of Lives which cover a specific spatium historicum in order. The latter is an original formula of Plutarch’s, but only in the sense that he gives a diachronic direction to a formula which had already been in use in Hellenic and Roman times: the series of Lives of figures who are similar in type.12 Finally, with the Parallel Lives (that is, Lives conceived as a system of pairs, in which Greek and Roman “protagonists” are set side by side), this progression arrives at a revolutionary and highly personal model of biographical writing. And we ought immediately to specify, as far as this last formula is concerned, that this is an “open” system, that is, one that does not develop according to an original plan that is slowly achieved, and which flows into a unified publication at the end. Rather, it gradually accumulates—​so to speak—​and does so in an unorganized way,13 with pairs or groups of pairs published separately over time. We return later to the biographical nature, especially in its final, parallelistic variant, of Plutarch’s interest in historiography, a feature which, as we shall see, is not merely of technical interest.14 Actually, we must first raise the question of the reason, or reasons, why this new interest in history arose in Plutarch, an interest which would later lead to such considerable developments in second-​century Greek culture. Before examining the explanations for this phenomenon that may be gathered from passages of a “theoretical” nature in the Lives, we ought to seek out clues in the rest of his writing: indeed, in the Lives we find above all ideas that might be termed “inside of ” the historiographical discourse itself, that is, that relate to the way history is written, or to the specific purposes undertaken in using a given style. Yet the deeper reasons which may have led Plutarch to history must be sought elsewhere, in the series of writings on various subjects (philosophy, science, politics, etc.) forming the other great set of his writings, those which from the Byzantine era forward were grouped to form the collection Ἠθικά, later translated as Moralia in the humanistic literary tradition. And from this point of view, we discover the three dialogues set in Delphi, which go in fact by the name of Delphic (or Pythian) Dialogues, to be particularly insightful. When examined for our specific purposes, these dialogues effectively

Plutarch’s Lives   313 confirm the benefit of approaching Plutarch’s works with a consideration, beyond the Byzantine divide, for their markedly unified character (in accordance with the theme that guided the 2002 Rhetymnon Convention of the International Plutarch Society [IPS] organized by Anastasios Nikolaidis).15

Cosmic Order and History It seems to me, then, that certain passages of these Dialogues might be considered good starting points for understanding why Plutarch felt it important to think in historical terms, and for understanding what advantage in particular could be derived from an overall rethinking of the history of Greek and Roman political and cultural experience, with a view to defining the future prospects that could be opened up in his own times. Returning to some ideas that I developed in a recent study,16 I believe I can show that in these three Dialogues Plutarch reveals, in addition to the specific points discussed therein, profound psychological distress due to the uncertainty regarding his place in time on the world’s stage, a sense of disorientation which furthermore is not just personal, but seems to be part of the entire cultural environment in which the dialogues take place.17 The situation of severe crisis faced by the Delphic oracle—​this being the objective premise that, in the De defectu oraculorum, forms the starting point for a work which we might say is in three parts—​appears to be a sign of a more general strain in the ideological structure supporting Greek civilization, which by then had merged with Rome.18 Here, this supporting structure reveals with increasing clearness the limits of its ability to maintain a sense of existential, individual, and collective security, so to speak, in the face of a cosmic order which at the same time was taking shape as a moving system of different worlds succeeding one after another, introducing continuous transformations into the precarious balance of contemporary life into which that civilization threw itself so irresponsibly. This multiplicity of worlds—​as the enigmatic ξένος of the Red Sea had revealed to Cleombrotus, one of the speakers in the Dialogues—​has a reference point and center of production: a “plain of truth” (πεδίον ἀληθείας), in which “the accounts, the forms, and the patterns of all things that have come to pass and of all that shall come to pass rest undisturbed; and round about them lies Eternity.”19 These elements make up the kaleidoscope of the worlds which continuously and momentarily join together, while eternity sends forth the breath (ἀπορροὴν) of time onto them.20 Thus, change is the sovereign law of the universe, and there is nothing riskier and more short-​sighted than getting too comfortable in the reality that surrounds us, the stability of which is pure illusion: “the very instant when anything comes to pass, that is the end of it—​of actions, words, experiences alike; for Time like an ever-​flowing stream bears all things onward.”21 However, there is a way, according to Plutarch, to ensure ourselves of a mooring which could give meaning to our existence in this rush of constant change: the ability we have to remember the past and make predictions for the future.

314   Literature and Culture Just as memory, which is a function of the soul, manages to carry out the incredible act of saving and preserving things of the past, better said that no longer exist, investing them with “semblance and being,” in the same way “it is no wonder that it. . . anticipates many things which have not yet come to pass, since these are more closely related to it, and with these it has much in common; for its attachments and associations are with the future, and it is quit of all that is past and ended, save only to remember it.”22 Memory of the past and prediction of the future are actually two sides of the same coin, as Plutarch (through Theon) explains in greater detail in the De E apud Delphos. Here he offers his interpretation of the mysterious E, one of the sacred symbols of Delphi, which to him is emblematic of the two faces of Apollo, the god of the sanctuary, who is turned toward that which will be and, in the same way, that which has been. The god is a prophet, and the prophetic art concerns the future that is to result from things present and past. For there is nothing of which either the origin is without cause or the foreknowledge thereof without reason; but since all present events follow with close conjunction with past events, and all future events follow in close conjunction with present events, in accordance with a regular procedure which brings them to fulfilment from beginning to end, he who understands, in consonance with Nature, how to fathom the connexions and interrelations of the causes one with another knows and can declare “what now is, and in future shall be, and has been of aforetime”: τά τ’ ἐσσόμενα πρό τ’ ἐόντα. (Il. 1.70).23

As I see it, in this direct reference to Homer, Plutarch formulates the true founding principle of his idea regarding the need for historical knowledge—​a complex and socialized, so to speak, form of memory—​and more specifically of his decision to devote himself to the research on the past that is the primary condition for attaining this knowledge. Historical knowledge provides an indispensable tool for orienting oneself in the present in view of the transformations which shall arise in the future, transformations which can be predicted in proportion to one’s ability to examine their premises and causes in the past. And Plutarch’s declarations in the De Pythiae oraculis regarding the universal state of well-​being in which we live today—​“ There is, in fact, profound peace and tranquility; war has ceased, there are no wanderings of peoples, no civil strife, no despotisms, nor other maladies and ills in Greece requiring many unusual remedial forces”24—​are not to be interpreted as an expression of a belief that this apparently optimal state of matters may last indefinitely; rather, these statements simply serve to explain in a consolatory way why the questions addressed to the oracle of Delphi are irrelevant compared to those which were once proposed: and this is, indeed, a clear sign of decline.25 To Plutarch, faith in the oracles should in any case be protected, as it was a guarantee of the ability to plan a future for a Greek world which was by then unified and integrated with the Roman world. The duty of educated men was to offer both worlds, through a modern reinterpretation of the reasons behind their great past, a sure point of reference in order to give to that future a meaning and a specific direction.

Plutarch’s Lives   315

Why Biography? It is not a given that these philosophical and ideological principles, which can be deduced from a cross-​analysis reading of the Delphic Dialogues, were active in Plutarch’s mind when he began writing history,26 though he likely had developed at least a basic core of these ideas when he began writing the twenty-​three books of the Parallel Lives, that is at the beginning of Trajan’s reign.27 In any case, it seems difficult to deny that one of the most demanding theoretical passages of the Lives, the proem of Aemilius Paullus, which was likely composed during the central phase of writing the work, assumes that set of ideas at least in part.28 Here, Plutarch, in clarifying the nature of his activity as a historian who evokes great figures of the past, writes: “the study of history and the familiarity with it which my writings produce [τῇ περὶ τὴν ἱστορίαν διατριβῇ καὶ τῆς γραφῆς τῇ συνηθείᾳ], enables me, since I always cherish in my soul the records of the noblest and most estimable characters, to repel and put far from me whatever base, malicious or ignoble suggestion my enforced associations may intrude upon me, calmly and dispassionately turning my thoughts away from them to the fairest of my examples.”29 Plutarch here demonstrates his conception of historical inquiry as a tool serving to set the present in perspective, which is defined explicitly in terms which are anything but flattering: it is a present that finds its place in an alternative position, if not an opposing one, with respect to the superior examples of living which can be salvaged from the past, and which suggest ethical and political behaviors uncommon to the world in which he lives. The aim of this process is that which Plutarch himself describes in another “moral” writing, the De profectibus in virtute, in which he appreciates its effects on individual psychology: For not only, as Alcibiades used to say, must the heart feel such anguish at the philosopher’s words that tears will flow; but more than that, the man who is truly making progress, comparing himself with the deeds and conduct of a good and perfect man, . . . is ready in the words of Simonides “To run like weanling colt beside its dam.” . . . With men of this sort it has already become a constant practice, on proceeding to any business, or on taking office, or encountering any dispensation of Fortune, to set before their eyes good men of the present or of the past, and to reflect: “What would Plato have done in this case? What would have Epaminondas have said? How would Lycurgus have conducted himself, or Agesilaus?” And before such mirrors as these, figuratively speaking, they array themselves or readjust their habit, and either repress some of their more ignoble utterances, or resist the onset of some emotion.30

Similarly, in the proem of Pericles, when justifying his decision to continue writing the Lives, which highlight the positive characters of great figures, Plutarch declares that “the Good creates a stir of activity towards itself, and it implants at once in the spectator an active impulse.”31

316   Literature and Culture Although this way of thinking is not a direct historiographical translation of the cosmological theories (with psychological implications) that we have seen formulated in the Delphic Dialogues, it is evident that these theories do, however, represent the background from which historiography derives its legitimacy and its effectiveness, especially in that it is articulated in biographical terms, that is, in reconstructing the history of lives. In the reflection on the reasons behind the greatness of each past figure, for the purpose of perfecting one’s ability to achieve ethical and political aims, the connection between past, present, and future is most immediately and convincingly presented. This is certainly an important reason for explaining, from a philosophical point of view, why Plutarch’s interest in historiography took form in biographical terms.32 But we should not underestimate the role exerted by the historical context in which Plutarch lived, that is, the fact that for nearly a century politics in the Mediterranean world had been dominated by a series of men endowed with an autocratic power: the Roman emperors. As Plutarch’s contemporary Tacitus (Ann. 4.32–​33) and later Cassius Dio (53.19.3) would openly admit,33 this aspect required a reformulation in a markedly personalist sense of that pragmatic historiography espoused by Polybius: a reformulation which has been so aptly termed a “biostructuring” of history.34 Thus, besides experimenting with Lives conceived individually, without any plan that might transcend them, like Aratus or Artaxerxes (and the others, which were lost), it comes as no surprise that Plutarch’s historical writing was primarily engaged in using biography as a tool for constructing a true narration of a unified historical period—​such as the history of the early Roman Empire—​achieved by ordering the Lives of the emperors from Augustus to Vitellius. Although only Galba and Otho have survived of this series, and it is difficult to judge the character and overall value of the work, there is no doubt that, as Christopher Jones has written, Plutarch is “the first author in Greek or Latin known to have written a series of imperial lives”;35 therefore he can be considered the first writer responsible for “formalizing in terms of historiographical expression the recognition of the decisive importance that the individual personality had by then taken on in unravelling historical events.”36 Only after Plutarch could we have such works as the De vita Caesarum by Suetonius or, despite all the differences involved, the Life of Apollonius of Tyana or the Lives of the Sophists by Philostratus.

Parallelism Plutarch’s next and final step in perfecting the technique of biographical composition would be the conception and creation of the Parallel Lives: a much more complex and ambitious project, in which there would be numerous, and considerable, elements of distinction compared to the project of the imperial lives, despite maintaining the idea of a “biographical system” of historical writing.37 We have already referred to how interest in the figures’ ethical and political aspects came now to the forefront, along with all that this implies in terms of connection to a more general historical and cosmological

Plutarch’s Lives   317 concept. But we must immediately add two elements of even greater importance that belong more to the method used in investigation and historical writing: firstly the above-​mentioned open character of the work, that is, its lack of a predefined diachronic sequence—​an aim that is achieved by the very fact of the separate publication of what Plutarch calls the “books” (βιβλία) of the work, that is, the individual pairs;38 and secondly, its proceeding by pairs of lives, that is, in a parallelistic manner (Plutarch himself uses the expression “parallel lives” at times to indicate the element that he considers perhaps most characteristic of his biographical writing).39 Thus, we ought now to draw our attention to the analysis of these two elements; and we begin with the latter, the parallelistic structure, which is the most immediately evident element. It is clear that Plutarch conceives of parallelism in the sense of constructing pairs of figures, specifically a Greek and a Roman figure set side by side: indeed, in several cases Plutarch informs the reader that, once he has decided to dedicate a Life to a given figure, whether Greek or Roman, he then sets about determining the other figure to set at his side in the other political or cultural sphere.40 However, nowhere in the surviving Lives can we track down an explanation for the reason behind this compositional technique; therefore it has been rightly suggested that such a necessary explanation must have featured at the start of the only pair that was lost, Epaminondas and Scipio, which for the same reason has been assumed to have been the first of the series to be conceived and published. In any case, it seems reasonable to think that this idea of parallelism between the men of Greece and Rome can only represent the achievement of a process of reciprocal acculturation between the two worlds, which had begun at a time well before Plutarch.41 In fact, this acculturation had already generated, in Cicero’s historical vision, the idea that the Greeks had originally conceived of a system of values—​subsequently received by the Romans—​that thus became the common heritage of both peoples (but which could also be extended to others, through paideia);42 and it had also generated, in the vision of Dionysius of Halicarnassus, the historian of archaic Rome, the idea of the Romans having a Greek origin, and therefore of a fundamental affinity between the two cultures.43 It is obvious that in giving this idea a sort of formal recognition, to the extent that it was converted into the guiding principle of his historical enterprise, Plutarch aimed also at reinforcing the sense of a Greek cultural identity, as distinguished from the Roman cultural identity, and even superior to it.44 An important role in Plutarch’s thought was most certainly played by the principle that in order to construct a more effective ethical message it is useful to compare different experiences; this principle is most explicitly formulated at the beginning of De mulierum virtutibus.45 But the application of this epistemological tool is complicated by the idea of a special parallelism between Greece and Rome: indeed, the affinity between the two cultural worlds called for a particularly sophisticated investigation on the part of anyone wishing to learn from diversity, with a view to achieving its proclaimed ethical and political aims.46 In the end, under these conditions, if one aspires to highlight the variety of human behaviors in order to define their virtuous (to various extents) character, there is one real aspect one can play on: the diversity of historical context in which the protagonists of each pair expressed their shared ethical and

318   Literature and Culture political values. Furthermore, as we shall soon see, this contextual diversity seems to be built upon a vision of the history of what could be called the two general subjects of the work—​Greece and Rome—​in terms of a politically identical, or at least highly similar, rise-​and-​fall pattern, repeating itself after a number of centuries. Recently, Christopher Pelling pointed out how completing the project of the Parallel Lives achieved, though in an apparently unorganized way, a specific aim: it retraced—​“biostructurally,” to reuse his apt definition—​the whole of this dual history, which lent itself to being transformed into a sort of ethical and political education system for the elite of Plutarch’s time.47 In fact, the project broke down the diachronic sequence of the two parallel rise-​and-​fall patterns, and put them back together according to themes. Thus, the primary aim in each pair is to focus on one or more of the two protagonists’ behavioral traits, compared with each other so as to highlight, above all, the way in which they succeeded in facing the conditions imposed by their respective historical contexts. Let us come now to the second element to which we have referred: the open character of the project. Plutarch effectively creates, on an originally unlimited timeline cut short only by his death,48 a series of themed explorations which go hand in hand with the publication of the individual books (or rather, pairs of lives) in which the work unfolds. This sequence was not determined ab initio; rather, it was developed by making internal connections which Plutarch sometimes explains. However, he always allows himself the option of preparing the material for several pairs simultaneously (as is clear in the cases of the history of Athens in the fifth century or of the history of Rome during the civil wars), and publishing them later in the order in which each reached maturity.49 Only gradually do we discover the unifying design guiding the overall composition of the work. Given this method of working, we can also recognize a heuristically useful aspect of the underlying parallelistic structure: in making his next transition, Plutarch has two options—​choosing either the Greek or the Roman figure from the previously described pair—​and once the choice is made, he then identifies another figure who shares some quality with the one chosen (see, for example, his transition to Romulus from Numa). All that remains at this point is for him to find a suitable parallel for this newly identified figure.

A History Devoid of Divine Design Plutarch gave ample indications regarding the timeframe in which the Lives were composed and/​or published, and though we cannot reconstruct the entire sequence with confidence, the careful work of many scholars has enabled us to arrive at a substantial agreement regarding the main points.50 Naturally, the scope of this work does not permit us to account for the results of their labours analytically, nor do we discuss how the individual Lives—​and above all the individual pairs—​were developed in order to construct an overarching system.51 However, what we can and must say in general terms is that this historiographical plan overturns any basic idea of divine design that

Plutarch’s Lives   319 the previous Greek historiography, from Polybius to Diodorus and beyond, could have given the political history of the ancient world, in glorifying the global unity achieved by Roman conquest. And yet Plutarch apparently shares—​whether before starting the new biographical project or not, it is difficult to say—​such a concept of divine design, at least in the reflections at the beginning of the De fortuna Romanorum.52 It is clear that the very choice of biography, even though made for different reasons, called for adopting a rise-​and-​fall pattern: such in fact is the ratio behind telling the story of an individual’s life, from birth to death. But, beyond this, it is also the parallelistic arrangement, as we have previously mentioned, that leads Plutarch to shape the historical development both of Greece and of Rome—​at different times, of course—​in terms of a rise-​and-​fall pattern, which entails a growth period culminating in an ἀκμή inevitably followed by decline and death. The idea of a parallelism set against such a rise-​and-​fall pattern is particularly clear in two passages, in the Comparison between Aristides and Cato and in the proem of Phocion, in which Plutarch emphasizes this idea in order to focus better on the qualities of the figures, using “the tool, so to speak, of subtle logic.” In the Comparison between Aristides and Cato, Plutarch declares that the former “rose to eminence when Athens was not yet great, . . . whereas Cato (the Elder) plunged headlong into the boundless sea of Roman politics when they were no longer conducted by such men as Curius.”53 In Phocion, on the other hand, comparing the abilities of Phocion and Cato (the Younger) to fight against the evils of the times, he says of the former that “his virtue found an antagonist in a grievous and violent time,” and that “the fortunes of Greece rendered [it] obscure and dim”; and of the latter that his struggle took place “when his native city was not already prostrate . . . but struggling with great tempest and surge.”54 What is certain is that, just as in Greece, the rise-​and-​fall pattern of Rome, or at least of the Rome that Plutarch chose to consider in planning his Parallel Lives, was destined to come to an end with the civil wars and the end of political freedom, whatever Plutarch might have thought of the subsequent experience under the autocratic Empire. These and other passages of the Lives55 confirm that Plutarch subscribed to, and perfected, an idea that had already been Cicero’s (especially in Brutus): that of an affinity between the political (and cultural) evolution of Athens (that is, of Greece) and that of Rome, taking place in different periods.56 Plutarch gives this concept a kind of formal sanction in the conception of the pair Philopoemen and Flamininus—​the only pair in which the protagonists are contemporaries, though not of the same age—​the former being the last fighter for Greek freedom, and the latter the gracious restorer of that freedom, by then already dead.57 Here we come upon a kind of generational handover loaded with symbolic value, no less than the reference to the Philippics—​with which Demosthenes had tried to prevent the enslavement of Athens and Greece to Macedonia58—​had been for Cicero in fighting for freedom against Anthony: Plutarch associates these figures, too, in order to form a pair, the meaning of which is certainly not limited to both figures’ exceptional oratory talent, within which a ranking might be attempted.59 Perhaps the strongest reason Demosthenes and Cicero resembled one another was precisely in the fact that both had fought a political battle in which freedom was at stake; and their defeat in this battle had marked the end of the downward

320   Literature and Culture curve for Athens (foreshadowing the general decline of Greece) and for Rome, respectively. But the most interesting point for us, which brings us back to our initial reflections on the nature of Plutarch’s interest in history, is that the historiographical formula of the Parallel Lives, that is, the system of biographies articulated in a parallelistic form, appears particularly suited to satisfying the conditions set by the cosmic order for memory to function as a tool for predicting the future. If the kind of social memory involved in investigation and writing history is to fulfil its task of orienting the present and directing toward the future, it cannot be limited to retracing in a pure and simple diachronic order the well-​worn tale of past glories (which, incidentally, is the history of not one but two rise-​and-​fall patterns which had by then come to an end). Rather, it must approach in a fresh way the problem of why present reality is unsatisfactory, so as to make preparations for a better reality in the future. This implies, first of all, putting the individual at the center of attention, with his strengths and weaknesses; which implies reclaiming, while reconstructing the great figures of the past, previously forgotten documentary elements that serve to bring the figures into better focus.60 This is biography. But it also implies a different way of recomposing the complex relationships, scattered in different and complementary ways across the centuries, involved in the two fundamental components—​Greek and Roman—​forming the peculiar characteristic of the world in which the author lived. This is parallelism, a translation in historiographical terms of the intrinsic dualism of that world. Once all paradigms involving a divine design have been definitively set aside, history becomes the most complete source for the multiplicities of the past, the most significant pieces of which must serve to construct a world better than the present. We may thus attempt to guide the change that is inevitably produced according to cosmic law, using a different arrangement of the same components: those that lie in the “plains of truth,” quietly waiting to be reused in the construction of new worlds, when eternity will breathe forth the breath of time upon them. It comes as no surprise that such a staunch opponent of any idea of divine providence as Friedrich Nietzsche discovered in Plutarch a kind of prototype for his antihistoricist way of understanding history, precisely by putting together the message of the Delphic Dialogues with the lesson that can be deduced from the Parallel Lives. In the image-​rich and almost oracular style so particular to him, the great German philosopher thus demonstrated, in the second of his Untimely Meditations (Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen), his profound intellectual kinship with one of the most original minds of an ancient civilization, by then in decline. History is to be written by the man of experience and character. He who has not lived through something greater and nobler than others will not be able to explain anything great and noble in the past. The language of the past is always oracular: you will only understand it as builders of the future who know the present. We can only explain the extraordinarily wide influence of Delphi by the fact that the Delphic priests had an exact knowledge of the past: and, similarly, only he who is building up the future has a right to judge the past. If you set a great aim before your eyes, you control at the same time the itch for analysis that makes the present into a desert

Plutarch’s Lives   321 for you, and all rest, all peaceful growth and ripening, impossible. Hedge yourselves with a great, all-​embracing hope, and strive on. Make of yourselves a mirror where the future may see itself, and forget the superstition that you are Epigoni. You have enough to ponder and find out, in pondering the life of the future: but do not ask history to show you the means and the instrument to it. If you live yourselves back into the history of great men, you will find in it the high command to come to maturity and leave that blighting system of cultivation offered by your time: which sees its own profit in not allowing you to become ripe, that it may use and dominate you while you are yet unripe. And if you want biographies, do not look for those with the legend “Mr. So-​and-​so and his times,” but for one whose title-​page might be inscribed “a fighter against his time.” Feast your souls on Plutarch, and dare to believe in yourselves when you believe in his heroes. A hundred such men educated against the fashion of to-​day, made familiar with the heroic, and come to maturity, are enough to give an eternal quietus to the noisy sham education of this time.61

Conclusion Unlike Nietzsche, Plutarch naturally could not know that his world would encounter, in a short space of time, transformations of a truly epochal nature; this can explain the less dramatic and combative tone found in the Lives as compared to the Untimely Meditations of Nietzsche. Rather, Plutarch hoped that it would be possible to control a change, that he felt nonetheless imminent, through skillfully managing the relationship between sameness and diversity, such as might suggest a “parallel” rethinking of the experience of the past. As we mentioned earlier, his invocation of history was promptly received in the Greek world, giving way to those cultural phenomena which we briefly touched upon at the beginning; but it was a very partial reception, which almost exclusively involved the history of Greek identity, ignoring that of Rome.62 This was particularly true as far as the culture of the Second Sophistic was concerned; though, as we recalled, the use of exemplification and historic exposition had always been a characteristic element of rhetorical training, it seems likely that Plutarch’s biographical work—​ or at least its Greek side—​may have contributed to spreading awareness of people and events of the distant past even beyond the schools, paving the way for that extraordinary “mass” publicizing of history which formed the basic core of the “new Sophists’ ” theatrical and oratorical performances. Perhaps the fact that each pair of Lives was published separately, at more or less regular intervals (we might say instalments), could have further aided this expansion of interest in history. In any case, we learn from Philostratus—​ who has provided us with the names and biographical information of many of these orators-​actors as well as the themes of their performances—​that for decades they successfully continued to commemorate particularly significant moments in Greek history on the stages of crowded theaters in Greek cities large and small throughout the eastern side of the empire.63 The sophist of the day would appear in the theatrical guise of one of the great figures of the past, from Solon to Alexander the Great (and not beyond him),

322   Literature and Culture and debate the pros and cons of a decision, heavy with future consequences, which had to be made: a sort of counterfactual history exercise, yet one conducted with historically plausible arguments. In these terms, Plutarch’s lesson appeared to have been considerably altered: these orators no longer searched through Greece’s and Rome’s shared past for elements capable of suggesting new perspectives to a weary contemporary culture; rather, they just aimed to rediscover in the “classical” age of Greek culture the identifying foundations of a present which had to be kept stable, so that it might preserve the privileged status of the Greek people in the Roman Empire. Perhaps the Greek historians straddling the two centuries, the Roman officials Appian and Cassius Dio, who wrote in Greek the history of the Roman Empire, were the intellectuals who best corresponded, though in different and more traditional historiographical forms, to the most vital urgings of Plutarch’s cultural message.

Further Reading The main point of reference for Plutarchan studies is now Beck 2014, with ample references to relevant bibliography; many of the contributions therein are concerned with Plutarch’s biographical works, and some of them are quoted in my text (even though it has been written before the Companion’s appearance). But I list below other important studies on Plutarch’s cultural and political context which have not been included in my bibliographical list: they may be of use for delving into those themes which could not be thoroughly investigated in my text. Boulogne, J. 1994. Plutarque: Un aristocrate grec sous l’occupation romaine. Lille. Brenk, F.  E. 1977. In Mist Apparelled:  Religious Themes in Plutarch’s “Moralia” and “Lives”. Leiden. Carrière, J.-​C. 1977. “À propos de la politique de Plutarque.” DHA 3: 237–​251. Fein, S. 1994. Die Beziehungen der Kaiser Trajan und Hadrian zu den Litterati. Stuttgart and Leipzig. Forte, B. 1972. Rome and the Romans as the Greeks Saw Them. Rome. Gabba, E. 1959. “Storici greci dell’Impero Romano da Augusto ai Severi.” Rivista Storica Italiana 71: 361–​381. Gascó, F. 1998. “Vita della polis di età romana e memoria della polis classica.” In I Greci. Storia Cultura Arte Società 2. Una storia greca III. Trasformazioni, edited by S. Settis, 1147–​1164. Turin. Goldhill, S., ed. 2001. Being Greek under Rome: Cultural Identity, the Second Sophistic and the Development of Empire. Cambridge. Hartog, F. 2005. “Un Ancien chez les Modernes: Plutarque.” In Anciens, modernes, sauvages, edited by id., 125–​188. Paris. Mossman, J., ed. 1997. Plutarch and His Intellectual World. London. Palm, J. 1959. Rom, Römertum und Imperium in der griechischen Literatur der Kaiserzeit. Lund. Richter, D. S. 2011. Cosmopolis: Imagining Community in Late Classical Athens and the Early Roman Empire. Oxford. Schmitz, T. A., and N. Wiater, eds. 2011. The Struggle for Identity: Greeks and Their Past in the First Century bce. Stuttgart.

Plutarch’s Lives   323 Stadter, P.A. 2015. Plutarch and his Roman Readers. Oxford and New York. (And cf. my review article in Histos 11 [2017] 1–​13.) Swain, S. 1989. “Plutarch: Chance, Providence, and History.” AJPhil. 110: 272–​302. Swain, S. 1996. Hellenism and Empire: Language, Classicism, and Power in the Greek World, ad 50–​250. Oxford. Theander, C. 1951. Plutarch und die Geschichte. Lund. Touloumakos, J. 1971. Zum Geschichtsbewusstsein der Griechen in der Zeit des römischen Herrschaft. Göttingen. Wardman, A. 1974. Plutarch’s Lives. London. Woolf, G. 1994. “Becoming Roman, Staying Greek:  Culture, Identity, and the Civilizing Process.” PCPS 40: 116–​143.

Bibliography Beck, M., ed. 2014. A Companion to Plutarch. Oxford. Bowersock, G. W. 1969. Greek Sophists in the Roman Empire. Oxford. Bowersock, G. W. 1998. “Vita Caesarum: Remembering and Forgetting the Past.” In La biographie antique, edited by S. M. Maul and W. W. Ehlers, 193–​210. Entretiens sur l’Antiquité Classique 44. Vandoeuvres and Geneva. Bowie, E. L. 1970. “Greeks and Their Past in the Second Sophistic.” P&P 46: 3–​41. Revised reprint in Studies in Ancient History, edited by M. I. Finley, 166–​209. London and Boston, 1974. Bowie, E. L. 1996. “Past and Present in Pausanias.” In Pausanias historien: Huit exposés suivis de discussions, edited by J. Bingen, 209–​230. Entretiens sur l’Antiquité Classique 41. Geneva. Cordovana, O.  D., and M. Galli, eds. 2007. Arte e memoria culturale nell’età della Seconda Sofistica. Catania. Del Corno, D. 1983. “Introduzione.” In Plutarco, Dialoghi delfici. Milan. Desideri, P. 1967. “Studi di storiografia eracleota: I, Promathidas e Nymphis.” Studi Classici e Orientali 16: 366–​416. Desideri, P. 1970–​1971. “Studi di storiografia eracleota: II, La guerra con Antioco il Grande” Studi Classici e Orientali 19–​20: 487–​537. Desideri, P. 1989. “Teoria e prassi storiografica di Plutarco: Una proposta di lettura della coppia Emilio Paolo-​Timoleonte.” Maia NS 41: 199–​214. Desideri, P. 1992a. “Filostrato:  La contemporaneità del passato greco.” In El Pasado Renacido:  Uso y abuso de la tradición clásica, edited by F. Gascó and E. Falque, 55–​70. Seville. Desideri, P. 1992b. “La formazione delle coppie nelle Vite plutarchee.” ANRW 2.33.6: 4470–​4486. Desideri, P. 1992c. “I documenti di Plutarco.” ANRW 2.33.6: 4536–​4567. Desideri, P. 1995. “‘Non scriviamo storie, ma vite’ (Plut., Alex. 1.2): La formula biografica di Plutarco.” In Testis temporum: Aspetti e problemi della storiografia antica, Pavia, 16 marzo 1995, 15–​25. Como. Desideri, P. 1997. “Passato e presente nella storiografia greca alto-​imperiale.” In Chaire:  II Reunion de Historiadores del mundo griego antiguo (Sevilla, 18–​21 de diciembre de 1995). Homenaje al Prof. Fernando Gascó, edited by R. U. Martínez, F. J. Presedo Velo, P. G. Díaz, and J. M. Cortés, 365–​371. Seville. Desideri, P. 1998a. “Forme dell’impegno politico di intellettuali greci dell’ Impero.” RSI 110: 60–​87.

324   Literature and Culture Desideri, P. 1998b. “L’impero bilingue e il parallelismo Greci/​Romani.” In I Greci: Storia Cultura Arte Società 2. Una storia greca III. Trasformazioni, edited by S. Settis, 909–​939. Turin. Desideri, P. 2001. “Quale storia per i Greci nell’Impero romano?” In Identità e valori: Fattori di aggregazione e fattori di crisi nell’ esperienza politica antica (Bergamo, 16–​18 dicembre 1998), edited by A. Barzanò, C. Bearzot, F. Landucci, L. Prandi, and G. Zecchini, 171–​181. Rome. Desideri, P. 2005. “Impero di Alessandro e impero di Roma secondo Plutarco.” In Plutarco e l’età ellenistica: Atti del Convegno internazionale di Studi Firenze, 23–​24 settembre 2004., edited by A. Casanova, ed., 3–​21. Florence. Desideri, P. 2007. “I Romani visti dall’Asia:  Riflessioni sulla sezione romana della Storia di Eraclea di Memnone.” In Tra Oriente e Occidente: Indigeni, Greci e Romani in Asia Minore. Atti del Convegno internazionale Cividale del Friuli, 28–​30 settembre 2006, edited by G. Urso, 45–​59. Pisa. Desideri, P. 2011. “Roma: Le buone ragioni di un impero.” In Plutarco transmisor: Actas del X Simposio Internacional de la Sociedad Española de Plutarquistas, Sevilla, 12–​14 de Noviembre de 2009, edited by J. M. Candau Morón, F. J. González Ponce, and A. L. Chávez Reino, 99–​ 112. Seville. Desideri, P. 2012a. “I documenti di Plutarco.” In Saggi su Plutarco e la sua fortuna, 247–​279. Florence. Desideri, P. 2012b. “La formazione delle coppie nelle Vite plutarchee.” In Saggi su Plutarco e la sua fortuna, 229–​245. Florence. Desideri, P. 2012c. “Forme dell’impegno politico di intellettuali greci dell’Impero.” In Saggi su Plutarco e la sua fortuna, 45–​69. Florence. Desideri, P. 2012d. “L’impero bilingue e il parallelismo Greci/​Romani.” In Saggi su Plutarco e la sua fortuna, 17–​43. Florence. Desideri, P. 2012e. “Impero di Alessandro e impero di Roma secondo Plutarco.” In Saggi su Plutarco e la sua fortuna, 141–​154. Florence. Desideri, P. 2012f. “‘Non scriviamo storie, ma vite’ (Plut., Alex. 1.2): La formula biografica di Plutarco.” In Saggi su Plutarco e la sua fortuna, 219–​227. Florence. Desideri, P. 2012g. “Plutarco e la storia:  Una lettura obliqua dei Dialoghi Delfici.” In Harmonia: Scritti di filologia classica in onore di Angelo Casanova, edited by G. Bastianini, W. Lapini, and M. Tulli, 295–​307. Florence. Desideri, P. 2012h. “Plutarco e la storia: Una lettura obliqua dei Dialoghi Delfici.” In Saggi su Plutarco e la sua fortuna, 355–​366. Florence. Desideri, P. 2012i. Saggi su Plutarco e la sua fortuna. Edited by A. Casanova. Florence. Desideri, P. 2012j. “Teoria e prassi storiografica di Plutarco: Una proposta di lettura della coppia Emilio Paolo-​Timoleonte.” In Saggi su Plutarco e la sua fortuna, 201–​218. Florence. Desideri, P. 2013. “La città di Pericle.” In Figure d’Atene nelle opere di Plutarco, edited by A. Casanova, 19–​30. Florence. Desideri, P. 2015. “βίος.” Lexicon Historiographicum Graecum et Latinum, fasc. 3: 9–​20. Desideri, P. 2016. “Plutarch on the Future of an Ancient World.” In Knowing Future Time in and through Greek Historiography, edited by A. Lianeri, 267–​280. Berlin and Boston. Duff, T. E. 1999. Plutarch’s Lives: Exploring Virtue and Vice. Oxford. Edwards, M. J., and S. Swain, eds. 1997. Portraits: Biographical Representation in the Greek and Latin Literature of the Roman Empire. Oxford. Erler, M., and S. Schorn, eds. 2007. Die griechische Biographie in hellenistischer Zeit: Akten des internationalen Kongresses vom 26.–​29. Juli 2006 in Würzburg. Berlin and New York.

Plutarch’s Lives   325 Finley, M. I., ed. 1974. Studies in Ancient History. London and Boston. Geiger, J. 2002. “Felicitas temporum and Plutarch’s Choice of Heroes.” In Sage and Emperor: Plutarch, Greek Intellectuals, and Roman Power in the Time of Trajan (98–​117 a.d.), edited by P. A. Stadter and L. Van der Stockt, 93–​102. Leuven. Geiger, J. 2008. “Lives and Moralia:  How Were Put Asunder What Plutarch Hath Joined Together.” In The Unity of Plutarch’s Work: “Moralia” Themes in the “Lives”, Features of the “Lives” in the “Moralia”, edited by A. G. Nikolaidis, 5–​12. Berlin and New York. Geiger, J. 2014. “The Project of the Parallel Lives:  Plutarch’s Conception of Biography.” In A Companion to Plutarch, edited by M. Beck, 292–​320. Oxford. Gentili, B., and G. Cerri. 1983. Storia e biografia nel pensiero antico. Rome and Bari. Georgiadou, A. 2014. “The Lives of the Caesars.” In A Companion to Plutarch, edited by M. Beck, 251–​266. Oxford. Giua, M. A. 1985. “Storiografia e regimi politici in Tacito, Annales IV 32–​33.” Athenaeum, NS 43: 5–​27. Habicht, C. 1985. Pausanias’ Guide to Ancient Greece. Berkeley, CA, and London. Hirzel, R. 1912. Plutarch. Leipzig. Humble, N., ed. 2010. Plutarch’s Lives: Parallelism and Purpose. Swansea. Jones, C. P. 1966. “Towards a Chronology of Plutarch’s Works.” JRS 56: 61–​74. Reprinted in Essays on Plutarch’s Lives, edited by B. Scardigli, 95–​123. Oxford, 1995. Jones, C. P. 1971. Plutarch and Rome. Oxford. Jones, C.  P. 1982. “Plutarch.” In Ancient Writers:  Greece and Rome, edited by J. T. Luce, 2:961–​983. New York. Marrou, H. I. 1966. Storia dell’educazione nell’antichità. Italian translation. 2nd ed. Rome. Mazzarino, S. 1983. Il pensiero storico classico. 3 vols. Rome and Bari. McGing, B., and J. Mossman, eds. 2006. The Limits of Ancient Biography. Swansea and Oakville, CT. Mewaldt, J. 1907. “Selbstcitate in den Biographieen Plutarchs.” Hermes 42: 564–​578. Nicolai, R. 1992. La storiografia nell’educazione antica. Pisa. Nietzsche, F. 2010. The Use and Abuse of History. New York. Nikolaidis, A. G. 2005. “Plutarch’s Methods: His Cross-​References and the Sequence of the Parallel Lives.” In Historical and Biographical Values of Plutarch’s Works: Studies Devoted to Professor Philip A. Stadter by the International Plutarch Society, edited by A. Pérez Jiménez and F. Titchener, 283–​324. Malaga and Logan, UT. Nikolaidis, A.  G., ed. 2008. The Unity of Plutarch’s Work:  “Moralia” Themes in the “Lives”, Features of the “Lives” in the “Moralia”. Berlin and New York. Pelling, C. 1979. “Plutarch’s Method of Work in the Roman Lives.” JHS 99: 74–​96. Reprinted (with a Postscript) in Essays on Plutarch’s Lives, edited by B. Scardigli, 265–​318. Oxford, 1995. Reprinted in Plutarch and History: Eighteen Studies, 1–​44. London and Swansea, 2002. Pelling, C. 1990. “Truth and Fiction in Plutarch’s Lives.” In Antonine Literature, edited by D. A. Russell, 19–​52. Oxford. Reprinted in Plutarch and History: Eighteen Studies, 143–​170. London and Swansea, 2002. Pelling, C. 1997a. Introduction and Notes. In Plutarco, Vite parallele, “Filopemene” e “Flaminino”. Milan. Pelling, C. 1997b. “Biographical History? Cassius Dio on the Early Principate.” In Portraits: Biographical Representation in the Greek and Latin Literature of the Roman Empire, edited by M. J. Edwards and S. Swain, 117–​144. Oxford. Pelling, C. 2002. Plutarch and History: Eighteen Studies. London and Swansea.

326   Literature and Culture Pelling, C. 2006. “Breaking the Bounds: Writing about Julius Caesar.” In The Limits of Ancient Biography, edited by B. McGing and J. Mossman, 255–​280. Swansea and Oakville, CT. Pelling, C. 2010. “Plutarch’s ‘Tale of Two Cities’:  Do the Parallel Lives Combine as Global Histories?” In Plutarch’s Lives:  Parallelism and Purpose, edited by N. Humble, 217–​235. Swansea. Piccirilli, L. 1997. “Cronologia relativa e fonti della Vita Solonis di Plutarco.” ASNP ser. 3, 7: 999–​1016. Ramón Palerm, V. M. 2009. “Plutarco y la biografía política en Grecia: aspectos de innovación en el género.” In Las biografías griega y latina como género literario: De la Antigüedad al Renacimiento. Algunas calas, edited by V. Valcárcel Martínez, 41–​67. Vitoria and Gasteiz. Scardigli, B., ed. 1995. Essays on Plutarch’s Lives. Oxford. Schepens, G. 2007. “Zum Verhältnis von Biographie und Geschichtsschreibung in hellenistischer Zeit.” In Die griechische Biographie in hellenistischer Zeit: Akten des internationalen Kongresses vom 26.–​29. Juli 2006 in Würzburg, edited by M. Erler and S. Schorn, 335–​361. Berlin and New York. Schmitz, T. A. 2014. “Plutarch and the Second Sophistic.” In A Companion to Plutarch, edited by M. Beck, 32–​42. Oxford. Stadter, P.  A. 1965. Plutarch’s Historical Methods:  An Analysis of the Mulierum Virtutes. Cambridge MA. Stadter, P.  A. 2002. “Introduction:  Setting Plutarch in his Context.” In Sage and Emperor: Plutarch, Greek Intellectuals, and Roman Power in the Time of Trajan (98–​117 a.d.), edited by P. A. Stadter and L. Van der Stockt, 1–​26. Leuven. Stadter, P. A. 2010. “Parallels in Three Dimensions.” In Plutarch’s Lives: Parallelism and Purpose, edited by N. Humble, 197–​216. Swansea. Stadter, P. A., and L. Van der Stockt, eds. 2002. Sage and Emperor: Plutarch, Greek Intellectuals, and Roman Power in the Time of Trajan (98–​117 a.d.). Leuven. Swain, S. 1997. “Biography and Biographic in the Literature of the Roman Empire.” In Portraits: Biographical Representation in the Greek and Latin Literature of the Roman Empire, edited by M. J. Edwards and S. Swain, 1–​37. Oxford. Tatum, W.J. 2010. “Why Parallel Lives?” In Plutarch’s Lives: Parallelism and Purpose, edited by N. Humble, 1–​22. Swansea. Van der Stockt, L. 2014. “Compositional Methods in the Lives.” In A Companion to Plutarch, edited by M. Beck, 321–​332. Oxford. Walker, S., and A. Cameron, eds. 1989. The Greek Renaissance in the Roman Empire: Papers from the Tenth British Museum Classical Colloquium. Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies Supplement 55. London. Ziegler, K. 1965. Plutarco. In RE 21, 1, 639–​962. Brescia. Italian translation of Plutarchos von Chaironeia.

Chapter 21

Lu cian of Sa mo s ata Daniel S. Richter

The Syrian satirist Lucian of Samosata has been something of a growth industry in recent years—​a sort of Second Sophistic answer to early twenty-​first-​century questions about cultural and ethnic hybridity (Bartley 2009; Goldhill 2002; Mestre and Gómez 2010). It was not always so. Eduard Norden, while he confessed to a certain amount of youthfully indiscreet contact with the Syrian satirist, reported that in his sober adulthood, he returned to Lucian’s work only with reluctance, for he had come to see Lucian as an “Oriental without depth or character . . . who has no soul and degrades the most soulful language” (Norden 1898).1 Similarly disappointed in the quality of Lucian’s soul was Rudolf Helm, another towering figure of turn-​of-​the-​century Lucian scholarship: Lucian was a “thoughtless Syrian,” Helm lamented, who, “possesses none of the soul of the tragedian”; the best contemporary parallel to be found for Lucian’s writings, Helm suggested, could be found in the work of Heinrich Heine, the “mockingbird in the German poetry-​forest” (der Spottdrossel im deutschen Dichterwalde) (Helm 1906, 6–​7). Heine’s and Norden’s concern with the status and character of Lucian’s “soul” is ironic, given the conclusion of the Sudas that it is burning in hell for all eternity as a result of Lucian’s blasphemous remarks about the Christian Peregrinus Proteus. But Helm’s comparison of the Syrian Lucian and the Jew Heine is also instructive; preconceived notions about the “oriental character” of both men have tended to inflect the ways in which readers have understood the nature and the worth of their literary projects. In the case of Lucian, earlier generations of readers spoke of the “oriental” qualities of his satire with a tone that resembled the reflexive and genteel anti-​Semitism that marked so much scholarly discourse in the Anglo academy prior to the Second World War (Fredrickson 2002, 2; Hollinger 2006). More recently, however, Lucian’s Syrianness has come to dominate discussion of his work once again, as the postcolonial critique has caused scholars of the ancient world to embrace Lucian—​often productively but sometimes reductively—​as an early imperial paradigm of the “ethno-​cultural hybrid.” Although certainly interesting in many ways, this ancient and modern attention to what we might call Lucian’s “identity” has resulted in some of the worst excesses

328   Literature and Culture of biographical criticism of Lucian’s texts. The trouble is that while Lucian himself speaks of many of his contemporaries, none appear to have returned the favor. In spite of the fact that Lucian does not appear in Philostratus’s Lives of the Sophists or any other surviving contemporary text or inscription, scores upon scores of biographies of Lucian have been confidently written since the Byzantine period on “evidence” drawn exclusively from Lucian’s own texts (Richter 2005). To take a single example that highlights the circular nature of this kind of argumentation:  M.  D. Macleod, the editor of the eighth Loeb volume of Lucian’s works, argues for the authenticity of the text Gout by pointing out that “Lucian probably suffered from gout himself ”—​the only evidence for which ailment is the text Gout itself (Macleod 1967)! But with Lucian—​as with so many satirists whose speaking personae seem so fully engaged in their particular worlds—​the siren song of biographical criticism has never been easy for many of his readers to resist. This is perhaps unsurprising, given the fact that Lucian’s texts themselves clearly and repeatedly seem to challenge the reader to imagine and engage with their author in a multitude of complex ways, perhaps the most obvious of which is the frequency with which Syrians and characters with names that echo Lucian’s own appear in the corpus: “Lukinos,” “Lukianos,” “Lucius,” “The Syrian.”2 The analysis of Lucian’s works that follows proceeds from a few fundamental premises: first, while I am interested in the question of the intentionality of the author “Lucian” behind these texts, I in no way conflate this author with the speaking personae of the texts themselves (cf. Kim 2010; Ní Mheallaigh 2014). These various “Syrians” and “Lucian-​like” figures are not, in my view, “masks” or “alter-​egos” or “mouthpieces” of the author through which Lucian expresses his own views about culture, ethnicity, and the proper role of the pepaideumenos in the early Roman Empire. Rather, I  approach these texts as object lessons and the characters within them as precisely that: characters. In other words, the “Lucian” of the biographical tradition is, himself, a fictional character. The many “Lucians” and “Syrians” in the texts, I will argue, are particularly good for Lucian the author to “think with” when he writes about the interplay of ethnicity and culture in the Second Sophistic. Second, this recent interest in Lucian’s “identity” has, in my view, tended to become somewhat reductive and has served to limit our appreciation of other aspects of what is an exceptionally large and diverse body of work. This chapter will seek to present a more holistic view of Lucian’s corpus and to give a sense of the various subjects and perspectives that inform his texts. Lastly, I am only tangentially interested here in Lucian’s views of Rome and the Romans (see Jones 1986, 78–​89; Swain 1996, 298–​329; Whitmarsh 2001, 247–​294). I remain convinced that Lucian found the problem of being Syrian in a Greek world far more compelling than he did the related but distinct difficulty of being a Greek in the Roman world. I have chosen to structure this discussion around Lucian’s own interests as they emerge from his vast and variegated corpus: Greeks and barbarians; cultural and literary mimesis; the gods; and imposters. Lucian’s corpus is large and while I cannot discuss each text, I focus here on those texts that best address ideas that Lucian seems to have found interesting and important.3

Lucian of Samosata    329

Greeks and Barbarians: Syrians and Non-​Syrians On my reading, Syrianness and, by extension, barbarianness are, for Lucian, authorial strategies. Lucian’s Syrians appear most frequently in those dialogues that explore the nature of Lucian’s literary project; in particular, Lucian’s Syrians find themselves constrained in these texts to rebut the charge that the Syrian author—​the inventor of the comic dialogue, we are often told—​has somehow outraged the purity of a Greek idiom or genre. I want to suggest that Lucian uses barbarianness as a literary trope—​as a means of positioning his various internal authors as both insiders and outsiders able to simultaneously embody mastery of the tradition and the critical distance necessary for innovation; Syrianness enables this distance while the linguistic proficiency—​demonstrated by the text itself—​guarantees fidelity to ancient models. Indeed, ideas about literary and cultural mimesis in Lucian’s work are so interwoven that disentangling them from each other would do more to obscure than to clarify. Literary mimesis of the ancients is inextricably linked in Lucian’s work with the cultural mimesis of Hellenism by ethnic non-​Greeks.4 As we shall see, Lucian uses these various “Syrians” to define good and bad mimesis in both literary and cultural terms. For example, in the dialogue the Dead Come to Life, the “Son of Free Speech” (Parrhêsiadês) finds himself before the tribunal of Philosophy, accused by the great philosophers of old for libel. The offending text was Lucian’s Philosophies for Sale in which Hermes, in a slave market, auctioned off personifications of the various philosophical “lifestyles.” In the Dead Come to Life, Lucian acknowledged the greatness of the ancient worthies but nevertheless pointed out that they had all missed the point of the joke; it was not Plato, Aristotle, and the rest who were the butt of the satire but their sham-​philosopher descendants. Still, Philosophy herself demands to know who this Parrhêsiadês might be. “I am a Syrian, Philosophy, from the banks of the Euphrates,” Parrhêsiadês answers: But so what? I know for a fact that some of my accusers are no less barbarian than I am with respect to ethnicity [genos]. But their manner [tropos] and their culture [paideia] are not that of men of Soli or Cyprus, Bablyon or Stageira. And yet, in your eyes, it would make no difference even if a man were a barbarian with respect to his language if only his mind were to appear to be straight and just. (Dead Come to Life 19–​20)

“You have spoken well, whereas I asked the question without a purpose,” Philosophy answers. The passage is typical of Lucian; he puts into play the antithesis of ethnicity (genos) and culture (paideia) in a way that obliquely engages in the simultaneous mimesis and subversion of a well-​known iconic intertext5—​in this instance, the Panegyricus of Isocrates, in which the aged Athenian statesman attempted to rally the Greeks in support of a Macedonian-​led invasion of Persia. Isocrates famously declared that Athens had brought it about that,

330   Literature and Culture the name of the Hellenes seems to belong no longer to an ethnic group [genos] but to a way of thinking; they ought rather to be called Hellenes who have a share of our culture [paideia] than those who share in some common nature [phusis]. (Isoc. Paneg. 50)

But Isocrates elaborated a notion of cultural Greekness for a community of ethnic Greeks (Hall 2002, 209–​210; Jüthner 1923, 34–​36; cf. Saïd 2001); the Panegyricus’s fourth-​century bce ecumenical vision of paideia was not intended for literal consumption east of the Hellespont. For Isocrates, whose avowed purpose in the Panegyricus was “war against the barbarian and concord amongst ourselves” (Paneg. 3), they ought to be called Greeks who were Greek in terms of both ethnicity and (Athenian) paideia. Lucian, by contrast, sought to theorize Greekness in a way that explicitly celebrated the cultural legitimacy of the type of the Hellenized barbaros. In doing so, Lucian was not alone; such contemporaries and near contemporaries as Favorinus of Arelate (Or. 37.27), Apuleius of Madaura (Apologia 24), and even Marcus Aurelius’s teacher Fronto (Ep. Gr. 1.5) also explored the dialectic of ethnicity and culture in their own work (Richter 2011a, 135–​176). Lucian, however, figured barbarism as an integral aspect of his own literary project. Of central importance to Lucian is the legendary figure of Anacharsis, the Scythian sage who, according to Herodotus (4.76), so memorably demonstrated the truth of the dictum that the Scythians abhor the usage of foreign nomoi (in general, see Hartog 1988; Kindstrand 1981). The Herodotean Anacharsis, like his countryman Scyles, meets a gruesome death as a result of his transgressive practice of Greek religious rites. In the prolalia the Scythian, however, Lucian’s Anacharsis represents the ideal type of the Hellenized barbarian who successfully travels to Greece to satisfy a wholly legitimate “desire for Greek paideia” (Scythian 1).6 In this text, Anacharsis, a “foreigner and a barbarian” (xenos kai barbaros), arrives in Athens to find his fellow Scythian Toxaris (“Bowman”) already long resident in the city and so thoroughly Hellenized that his Scythianness is completely illegible, even to Anacharsis: Anacharsis could in no way recognize [Toxaris] as a fellow-​ethnic [homoethnês] for Toxaris was dressed in the Greek manner, clean shaven, without a belt, without a sword, already fluent in speech, one of those very Attic autochthonoi, so much had he been changed by time. (Scythian 3)

Toxaris introduces Anacharsis to Solon—​a man who “contains all of Hellas in his own person” (5)7—​and Solon in turn acquaints Anacharsis with all that is best in Hellas, effecting such a complete transformation of Anacharsis that he becomes a “true-​born citizen [politês gnêsios] of Hellas” who forgets “all that he left behind in Scythia” (7). The text of the Scythian ends with a direct appeal on the speaker’s part for patronage; as Anacharsis received the cultural largesse of Solon, so the speaker of the Scythian hopes to benefit from that of a local wealthy Macedonian father and son. The speaker makes the parallel between himself and the Scythian sage explicit: “for he too was a barbarian and there is no way that you could say that we Syrians are inferior to the Scythians” (9).

Lucian of Samosata    331 The transmission of Greekness in this text is complex and somewhat ambiguous. In the first place, Anacharsis, a tragic and infamously unsuccessful convert to Greek culture, seems like an odd choice with which to figure the Hellenization of a self-​professed barbarian. But this is, perhaps, precisely the point. The fates of Herodotus’s Anacharsis and his countryman Scyles serve to demonstrate the truth of the dictum that, “the Scythians abhor the use of nomoi that are not their own, particularly those of the Greeks.” Lucian’s Anacharsis, however, presents the type of the latter-​day Second Sophistic barbarian whose Hellenism is the direct result of his perfect and hard-​won mimesis of Greekness through the acquisition of Greek paideia. He is the self-​conscious embodiment of what Whitmarsh has called “new style Hellenism” (Whitmarsh 2001, 25). For Lucian, however, this process of cultural mimesis in which the barbarian becomes a Hellene is fraught with danger, and Lucian explores the nature of “good” mimesis in several texts that feature various Syrians on trial for offences related to their cultural claims on Greekness (Bhabha 1994). We have already encountered the Syrian Parrhêsiadês in the Dead Come to Life. A  similar figure appears in Lucian’s Twice Accused, a dialogue in which another author must stand trial—​this time before the court of Justice herself—​for his outrageous treatment of the genres of dialogue and oratory, the personifications of which have come to accuse the Syrian of neglect and hubris respectively. In the Twice Accused, however, the accused remains anonymous; the defendant is entered by Hermes “without a name” as “the Syrian” (14) and when Oratory describes how the Syrian has mistreated her, she foregrounds the Syrianness of the defendant in terms that cunningly conflate literary and ethno-​cultural transgression: When this man here was just a boy, gentleman of the jury, still a barbarian with respect to his speech and, I have to say it, still wearing a caftan in the Assyrian manner, I found him wandering around Ionia having no idea what he ought to do with himself. And I took him in hand and I gave him paideia. (Twice Accused 27)

What is more, Oratory continues, she enrolled the Syrian into her own tribe and made him a local (astos); the Syrian, however, once he became famous and successful, abandoned his patroness for Dialogue, the son of philosophy. The response of the Syrian, as so often with Lucian, consists of a brilliant deconstruction of a well-​known model. The Syrian argues that Oratory herself is not the respectable matron whom Demosthenes had once married but a wanton woman who makes herself up in the manner of a prostitute (eis to hetairikon) and gives herself freely to all drunken lovers (methuontôn erastôn) who nightly knock on the door. In other words, the Syrian suggests that there are, in words that clearly recall the famous prologue of Dionysius of Halicarnassus’s Lives of the Ancient Orators, two rhetorics: Dionysius wrote that while once the ancient and respectable Attic Muse held sway, in his own day “some other [hetera tis] rhetoric” has taken her place. Dionysius likens the old rhetoric to the “lawful wife;” the new rhetoric, by contrast, is like “some whore” (hetaira tis) arrived from the death holes of Asia (Lives, preface). Again, Lucian subverts the logic of the model: while Dionysius’s metaphor describes two distinct rhetorics—​the illegitimate Asian whore

332   Literature and Culture and the lawful Attic wife, Lucian’s Syrian speaks of a single rhetoric whose virtue has been degraded over time. There is a close parallel here with the structure of the Dead Come to Life—​in both texts, the Syrian distinguishes between the purity of the ancient models and the degeneracy of their imitators of Lucian’s own day. And in both texts, it is incumbent upon the Syrian—​the outsider—​to expose and correct the “bad” mimesis of the “insiders” of his own day. The ethnic logic of Dionysius’s preface has been reversed: in Lucian’s rewriting of the metaphor, the “Asiatic” has come to correct the errant would-​ be Attic muse. A definition of the nature of the proper mimesis of the ancients is clearly central to Lucian’s authorial project, as well as his exploration of the cultural politics of the Second Sophistic.8 What is interesting is that Lucian constructs modern literary mimesis of the ancients as an analog for the barbarian pepaideumenos’s cultural mimesis of Hellenism. Indeed, it is precisely the independence of the outsider, in Lucian’s terms, that enables the success of the literary project of good mimesis. And this is why Lucian so often casts the “Syrians” of the dialogues as generically transgressive while at the same time culturally and linguistically competent. For Lucian, good literary mimesis balances the competing claims of tradition and innovation in the same way that good cultural mimesis acknowledges both ethnicity and culture—​and a good way to make this claim is to remind readers of the Syrianness of his authors in those works in which he defines the innovative nature of his literary project. For instance, at the end of the Twice Accused, the Syrian responds to Dialogue’s accusation that the Syrian’s invention of the comic dialogue has demeaned his philosophical dignity by pointing out that, I don’t think that he could censure me to the effect that I have taken off his Greek cloak and dressed him in some barbarian one, even though I myself seem to be a barbarian. (33)

The Syrian, it seems, has retained the Hellenizing kit in which rhetoric first found him. But as in the Dead Come to Life, it is precisely at the point of the text in which the speaker defends his own literary project that he foregrounds his Syrianness. Compare the diatribe Against the Ignorant Book Collector, a text in which Lucian again presents his readers Syrian on Syrian cultural invective (cf. The Mistaken Critic): the Gatsbyesque wealthy target of the text who collects rare and costly editions of ancient texts in an effort to seem educated; and the speaking/​writing author of the text which is itself an object lesson of a Syrian author’s ability to produce a written display of his perfect Attic Greek. By presenting both the author and the object of this invective as Syrians, Lucian is able to juxtapose for his readers two very different models of the type of the Hellenized barbarian. While the speaker is witty, urbane, and possessed of flawless linguistic competency, the book collector stumbles humiliatingly as he reads Greek texts aloud while lack of paideia has rendered him bereft of proper literary judgment (diagnôsis). While the allusive text itself demonstrates the speaker’s familiarity with the writings of the ancients, the book collector cannot discern which ancient authors wrote, “according to a proper standard” (pros ton orthon kanona) (2). The speaker boasts of his

Lucian of Samosata    333 high social position and his secure status among the pepaideumenoi; the book collector cannot produce the name of a single teacher of his own.9 These differences between the two Syrians are the result of their very different understandings of the nature of cultural mimesis. For the speaker, cultural mimesis is, strictly speaking, an illegitimate project. One should not strive to imitate—​to seem to be a Hellene—​but rather to internalize cultural praxis to the point that one is a Hellene. Ultimately, the superior, authentic cultural transformation of the speaking Syrian enables him to produce culture (the text) rather than simply consume it. This concern with authentic Hellenism and its opposite, as we shall see, inform Lucian’s construction and definition of his own literary project, and it is to these texts that we now turn.

Greeks and Barbarians: The Literary Project In 1906, Rudolf Helm published Lukian und Menipp, in which he argued that Lucian’s various claims to generic originality—​in particular, his claim to have invented the comic dialogue—​were intended to mask his almost complete debt to the third-​century bce Cynic philosopher and satirist Menippus of Gadara. Menippus’s satires, in which he combined prose and verse, were widely read and highly influential in antiquity (e.g., Varro’s Saturae Menippeae) and Lucian is sure to have known the work of his fellow Hellenized Syrian; Helm, however, certainly overstated the nature of this influence on Lucian and there is no reason to doubt Lucian’s claim to have invented the form of the comic dialogue.10 But Lucian consistently couches his claims to originality in terms that insist upon his faithfulness to proper ancient models. Indeed, as we have seen, this concern with proper mimesis of ancient models informs much of Lucian’s work. That said, the texts in which Lucian explicitly addresses the nature of his literary project offer his clearest formulations of his ideas about the nature of mimesis. Again, the question is why Lucian consistently foregrounds Syrianness in texts that explore the nature of the literary project? We have already seen how in the Twice Accused the “Syrian” defends his creation of the hybrid comic dialogue by pointing out that although he himself is “considered to be a barbarian,” he has nevertheless clothed his texts in a “Hellenic” rather than a “barbarian” cloak. To have stripped dialogue of his “native costume,” the Syrian tells the jury, would have been unjust. Similarly, in the Dead Come to Life, the Syrian “barbarian” Parrhêsiadês reminds Philosophy that his barbarism is meaningless since his mind is “straight and just.” Again, in the Scythian, the speaker compares his own barbarism to that of Anacharsis in his bid for literary patronage. Nor is it without importance that the speakers of two of Lucian’s literary invectives (Against the Ignorant Book Collector and Slip of the Tongue) are self-​described Syrians. It seems clear, then, that Lucian invites his readers to understand the nature of his literary project as in some sense the product of his Syrianness. I suggest that we might

334   Literature and Culture understand what Lucian is up to here in terms of a functional analogy: as barbarian is to Greek, so the present is to the past. In other words, as Lucian’s literary project seeks balance between innovation and proper mimesis of ancient models, the Greekness of his Syrian authors depends upon the establishment of a proper combination of outsider ethnic status and insider cultural fluency. Success—​authenticity—​in both endeavors is a function of a complete internalization of the essence of the model; only then does the Syrian cease simply to seem but to be Greek; just so, although Lucian’s texts might look odd, in their “thought” they are entirely traditional—​pros ton orthon kanona, as the Syrian says in The Ignorant Book Collector. Consider You Are a Prometheus in Words, Lucian’s response to a man who has called him a “Prometheus.” Lucian is at pains in this text to qualify the label of “innovator;” he would deflect the notion that his writing has no model: to the man who praises his “new manufacture [kainourgon] that imitates no exemplum [archetupon],” Lucian responds that it is not enough for him “to seem to be an innovator, unless someone should also say that there is something more ancient [arxaioteron ti] than my creation which is its ancestor [apogonon]” (3). The new, Lucian points out, always runs the risk of monstrosity—​like the black camel and the half-​black/​half-​white man that Ptolemy presented in Alexandria to the horror of the citizenry. “Newness” is nothing without “proper proportion” (euruthmon) and “beauty of form” (eumorphon) (5), and it is according to these ancient principles that Lucian claims to have created a harmony out of the forms of comedy and dialogue. Another prolalia, the Zeuxis, makes much the same point in even more explicit terms: Lucian is annoyed by the audience who praises only, “the strange conception of his work and its great newness,” while refusing to acknowledge, its excellent vocabulary in accordance with ancient standards [ὀνομάτων δὲ ἄρα καλῶν ἐν αὐτοῖς καὶ πρὸς τὸν ἀρχαῖον κανόνα συγκειμένων], or its penetrating thought, perceptivity, Attic grace, harmony, or the skillfulness of the whole. (2)

Lucian’s Dream, perhaps his most widely read work, is a rather complicated meditation on a young man’s acquisition of paideia. The text, which has long occupied pride of place in “biographies” of Lucian seems to be a prolalia. The question of whether the text is truly autobiographical, as most have assumed, I leave to the side. What is more interesting is the way in which Lucian again interweaves autobiography (fictive or sincere) with the characterization of his literary project. As in the Teacher of Public Speaking, the Dream describes a young man’s moment of choice but here, the youth (prosêbos) chooses not between two roads to Rhetoric but decides rather to abandon the trade that his family has chosen for him (sculpture) and to follow paideia (Romm 1990). The speaker’s family had initially rejected training in letters for him on the grounds of straightened circumstances: Paideia seemed to most of them to require much effort [ponos], a lot of time, not a small amount of money, and high social rank, while our affairs were small and required quick support. (1)

Lucian of Samosata    335 The family resolves to apprentice the young man to his uncle, a sculptor, since he has shown an aptitude for the work; at school, he tells us, he would collect the wax from his writing tablet and mold it into shapes of animals and even images of human beings that were “indeed lifelike” (2). The boy enters his uncle’s shop, accidentally smashes a valuable piece of marble, is soundly beaten by his uncle, and runs home, where he falls asleep and has the “dream.” In this dream, like the adept in the Teacher of Public Speaking, the youth of the Dream faces an explicitly Prodicean choice presented to him by two female personifications of trades; but here the youth must choose to follow either sculpture or paideia rather than decide between the rough or the easy roads to rhetoric. In the Professor of Public Speaking, for instance, Lucian takes aim at those teachers of rhetoric and their students who would gain a reputation for stylistic and lexical excellence without the necessary study and emulation of the ancients. The satire takes the form of a teacher’s address to a young student who would become a sophist; what is interesting about this text is the way that Lucian essentially equates sham sophistry with bad mimesis. This text is, of course, entirely satirical and the reader is invited to mock all the advice that this sham teacher offers. The teacher, in other words, is the personification of bad mimesis—​an illegitimate and perverted approach to classical models. The teacher begins, “You ask, my boy, how you might become a rhetor and how you might come to be seen as a sophist—​that most august and universally admired title” (1). The teacher holds that there are two roads that lead to Rhetoric and the wealth, fame, and power that she offers her “lovers.” The rough road, as we might expect from the Prodicean model, is the path of good mimesis; here the student will find a “manly muscular man” (anêr huposklêros andrôdês) who will point out the footprints of men such as Plato and Demosthenes, “great ones indeed and even greater than the men of today [huper tous nun] but already dim and unclear through the passage of time” (9). This man, the teacher warns, will insist upon long hard work and study that will involve the “mimesis of ancient corpses” (10). At the beginning of the easy road to Rhetoric, by contrast, the student will find a rather different man whose very feminine and coquettish manner and whose “woman’s glance” (gunaikeion to blemma) contrasts with the “manly man” of the rough road. If the student will follow this man, the teacher promises, he will, with a modicum of effort, “become a rhetor immediately” (11). The more specific advice that follows lays out a road map of bad mimesis and offers one of the great parodies of early imperial sophistic performance and pseudo-​intellectualism in general. The student is instructed to bring from home the following kit: ignorance, senselessness, arrogance, and shamelessness; a loud voice, a mincing gait, a see-​through gown; and a book to carry around. In terms of vocabulary, Pull together fifteen but no more than twenty Attic words and practice them well; have them on the tip of your tongue—​“sundry,” “eftsoons,” “prithee,” “in some wise,” “fair sir,” and the like11—​and in every speech, drizzle on a few as a sweetener. And don’t be concerned if they are inconsistent with rest of the speech or unrelated or unharmonious. Just be sure that your purple stripe is beautiful and clean, even if your cloak is but a blanket of the thickest sort. (16)

336   Literature and Culture Such a display, the teacher is confident, so long as it includes “forbidden and strange words, rarely spoken by the ancients” (ἀπόρρητα καὶ ξένα ῥήματα, σπανιάκις ὑπὸ τῶν πάλαι εἰρημένα) will be more than enough to convince “the many” of his paideia. The satire of the Teacher of Public Speaking raises interesting questions about the appropriateness of a “straight” reading of the Dream. For starters, the two texts display two markedly different perspectives on the value of labor (ponos) in the attainment of cultural competency. Similarly, the Dream’s antithesis of the pursuits of sculpture and rhetoric seems ambiguous and is destabilized by the fact that Lucian’s dialogues present figures much like the small figurines the boy creates with the wax of his writing tablets. But if the Dream lightly conceals its own intentional self-​subversion, both texts direct our attention to the importance of the conspicuous consumption of ponos in the training of the pepaideumenos.

Lucian’s Gods The gods wander in and out of Lucian’s texts with a casualness that has led many readers to doubt his piety (in general, Caster 1937). Indeed, the question of the authorship of Lucian’s On the Syrian Goddess has depended upon precisely this point. Lucian, it was long felt, as a soulless oriental, was without religious feeling and so incapable of genuine piety. And so because the text about the Syrian goddess seemed to generations of scholars genuinely reverent, it was removed from Lucian’s corpus;12 more recently, the text has been restored to Lucian by those who have come to appreciate its satirical nature (Elsner 2001; Richter 2011b; in general, Lightfoot 2003). If the conclusions of both groups of scholars differ, their underlying assumptions are shockingly similar. But the Dialogues of the Gods, Dialogues of the Dead, and the Dialogues of the Sea Gods have long been understood to accurately reflect Lucian’s purely literary and even belletristic interest in stories about the gods (Branham 1989, 125–​178). Indeed, these Dialogues, though much admired and imitated in the early modern period, read somewhat flat today. Those set among the dead return repeatedly to the vanity of human nature; Lucian presents us with a parade of the rich and famous reduced to an anonymous skeleton by the radically democratic power of mortality. The Dialogues of the Gods and the Dialogues of the Sea Gods are clever send-​ups of traditional myths told from unfamiliar perspectives. In short, these texts are more belles-​lettres than serious reflections on the nature of the divine. In any event, I would argue that the question of Lucian’s piety—​like all purely biographical problems—​is something of a red herring. Rather, in what follows, I am interested in how certain of Lucian’s writings about the divine display the sorts of problems and issues that animate the rest of his corpus. Lucian’s gods inhabited as variegated a space as the world of their believers and much of Lucian’s writing about these diverse divinities reflects the sorts of concerns that animate his thought about the cultural and ethnic politics of his own human world. It seems that gods, like men, must contend with the varieties of confusion that result from the

Lucian of Samosata    337 claims of outsiders to belong on the inside. In the Twice Accused, for instance, Justice demands of Hermes what the Syrian is doing in Athens—​and on the Areopagos, no less—​in the first place: “wouldn’t it be more seemly,” Justice inquires, “for him to receive judgment on the other side of the Euphrates?” (14). Similar concerns animate several texts in which Lucian writes about the problems arising from the presence of “foreign” divinities among the Olympians. In Zeus the Tragedian, for instance, when Hermes calls all the gods to an assembly, problems about precedence immediately arise in the seating arrangement. Since Lucian’s gods, here as elsewhere, appear in the form that their mortal worshippers have given them (a topos of ancient critiques about the anthropomorphism of the gods since at least Xenophanes of Colophon), Hermes proposes to arrange them according to “material and workmanship” (7). Awkwardness arises when the barbarian gods Bendis, Anubis, Attis, Mithras, and Men—​who are all made of solid gold—​wind up sitting in front of the Olympians who are made of marble. “How is it just,” Poseidon demands, “that this dogface Egyptian [Anubis] should sit in front of me when I am Poseidon?” (9). What is more, Hermes complains in the same vein, these “Scythians and Persians and Thracians and Celts don’t even understand the language of the Greeks” (oux . . . tên Hellênôn phônên suniasin) (13). Similarly, Lucian plays for laughs the ethnic and linguistic confusion of Olympus in the Parliament of the Gods, a text which opens with Hermes declaring an open meeting of the gods “concerning the question of resident aliens and foreigners [ἡ δὲ σκέψις περὶ τῶν μετοῖκων καὶ ξένων]” (1). Momus, the god of blame, begins to berate those divinities who have “fraudulently registered themselves on Olympus;” interestingly, the verb, paragraphô, that Lucian uses here is the same word that Rhetoric uses in the Twice Accused (discussed above) to describe her registering of the Syrian in her own phulê in Athens. And on Olympus as well, Lucian foregrounds the criterion of ethnic origin to explore issues of belonging: Momus points out that Dionysus is, “not even Greek on his mother’s side, but the grandson of some Syro-​Phoenician trader named Cadmus” (4); what’s more, Momus continues, Dionysus has brought with him Lydians and Phrygians. Momus strongly objects to the presence of this polyglot rabble on Olympus: “But Attis, Zeus, really? And Korybas, and Sabazios—​how did we get surrounded by all these? And then there is that Mithras, the Mede, with his caftan and tiara, who can’t even speak Greek” (10). A tirade against the outrageousness of Egyptian gods follows. Attacks on Egyptian animal worship are, of course, common in ancient literature and need not have an ethnically charged component (Isaac 2004, 356ff). But Lucian focuses his satire on these gods precisely on this point. At the end of the dialogue, in conspicuously litigious language (in which seating arrangements again appear prominently), Momus declares that, Whereas many aliens [xenoi]—​not only Greeks but barbarians as well . . . have pushed aside the ancient and true gods and claimed pride of place [proedria] for themselves and, contrary to ancestral usages, wish to be worshipped on earth, be it resolved that seven gods of full legitimacy be chosen—​three from the ancient Boulê of the time of Cronos and four from the twelve, including Zeus—​that

338   Literature and Culture they come with witnesses prepared to swear on oath and with proofs of lineage [ἀποδείξεις τοῦ γένους]. (15)

The “legitimate” gods, Momus stipulates, will purge the lists of any god unable to produce such tokens of their right to be counted among the gods of Olympus. The language and the tenor of the passage evoke the long history of Athenian struggles over the citizenship franchise. The metabolai of the fifth and fourth centuries bce—​the cyclical expansion and contraction of the citizen rolls—​as J. H. Oliver noted (Oliver 1980), continued into the early Imperial period. Indeed, Oliver suggested that Marcus Aurelius’s rescript about Athenian “trigonia” might have provided the immediate background of the Parliament of the Gods. While Oliver’s suggestion seems somewhat overdetermined to me, it is, nevertheless, true that in the Parliament of the Gods, Zeus the Tragedian, and other texts, Lucian’s “barbarian” gods must defend their presence in Hellas in ways similar to Lucian’s Syrian producers and consumers of Greek paideia. Nor is it surprising that the “proofs of decent” that Lucian’s outsider gods must produce are textual in nature. Legitimacy, on Olympus as on the written page, is rooted in a connection to the ancient, authoritative textual past.

Imposters: Sages, Sophists, and Philosophers Related to Lucian’s ideas about good and bad mimesis is his concern with various sorts of imposters—​people who gain undeserved reputations for virtue or holiness or learning by preying upon the ignorance and gullibility of the masses (in general, see Anderson 1994, 131–​150). Several of Lucian’s texts seek to expose these poseurs either as a generic class (such as philosophers, sophists, or holy men) or, on occasion, in the context of a directed attack on a particular historical individual. The fatal flaw that all these would-​be great men share is a love of fame (erôs tês doxês) (Passing of Peregrinus 22)—​a passion that causes them always to choose the easier (and false) path to excellence in whatever field they wish to gain a reputation. A celebration of labor (ponos) and various forms of expertise is implicit in each of these critiques and Lucian often alludes in these texts to the Prodicean “Choice of Heracles”—​the path to virtue (expertise) is long, rough, and steep while that leading to vice (empty reputation) is short, smooth, and even. There is some overlap between these fame seekers, the ideal student of the sham sophist of the Teacher of Public Speaking discussed above, and the hyper-​Atticizer Lexiphanes, whose desire to gain a reputation for excellent Attic diction Lucian mocks in the satire of the same name. The Lexiphanes opens as “Lukinos” encounters Lexiphanes, the “Word Flaunter,” carrying a copy of a dialogue that he has recently composed. The text, which Lexiphanes insists on reading aloud to Lukinos, is a sort of Platonic symposium

Lucian of Samosata    339 but without plot, character, or philosophical interest. Rather, Lexiphanes’s dialogue is essentially a string of the most absurdly recherché locutions that are so obscure as to almost constitute neologisms. As so often in Lucian’s corpus, we have another satire of bad mimesis. Indeed, the trouble with this kind of wordplay, as Lukinos points out, is that it is not enough to rummage around in the dusty basements of the ancients’ vocabulary if one has not internalized their stylistic virtues of clarity and correctness of expression; and while Lexiphanes might have succeeded in fooling the many with his display, the pepaideumenoi know better. And so the dialogue ends when a physician (whom scholars have often wanted to identify as Galen [Baldwin 1973, 36ff; cf. Jones 1972]) arrives who produces an emetic with which Lukianos succeeds in purging Lexiphanes’s bloated lexicon. Lukinos then sets about “re-​teaching and instructing [Lexiphanes] how he must speak” (21). This “metapaideia” takes the form of a course of learning precisely antithetical to that advocated by the teacher of public speaking: to be fully cured, Lexiphanes must carefully study the ancients—​the poets first, to be followed by the orators, Thucydides, Plato, and finally comedy and tragedy. Above all, Lukinos advises Lexiphanes (again, in contrast to the teacher of public speaking) to avoid the writings of those who have lived only recently.13 Lucian’s corpus contains a rogues’ gallery of poor practitioners of the mimetic art—​all of whom desire to seem rather than to be learned: the ignorant book collector’s books only serve to throw his lack of paideia into relief; the teacher of public speaking advocates a superficial training in rhetoric whose emptiness would be instantly apparent to the truly learned (the pepaideumenoi); the parody of the Lexiphanes itself depicts lexical display for its own sake run amok. But there are other sorts of sham intellectuals who come in for similar scrutiny under Lucian’s censorious eye. Closely related to these wretched sophists are the self-​styled philosophers and sages who milk public credulity for their own private gain. We have already come across the degenerate Platonists, Cynics, Aristotelians, and Stoics in Philosophies for Sale and the Dead Come to Life. The holy men Peregrinus Proteus and Alexander the False Prophet are villains of a somewhat different order. Whatever other ancient authors might have felt about the sometime Cynic philosopher and erstwhile Christian Peregrinus,14 for Lucian, he was a charlatan who, like the sham sophists and philosophers, was motivated more by a love of reputation (erôs tês doxês) (1.22) than a search for truth (Koenig 2006). By Peregrinus’s own account (according to Lucian), Peregrinus threw himself into a fiery pit at the Olympic games of 165 ce in an effort to teach his followers not to fear death (23); Lucian, however, who claims to have witnessed the event, suggests that Peregrinus’s death was the final act of a lifetime of performances of shameless self-​promotion—​a judgment confirmed by the fact that Peregrinus had announced his intention to self-​immolate four years previously at the Olympic games of 161, thereby giving himself and his followers ample lead time to propagate the cult of this latter-​day Socrates. Lucian recounts the scene at the pit itself and boasts to his friend Cronius (to whom the text is addressed) that after the spectacle ended, he mocked Peregrinus’s followers on precisely this point:

340   Literature and Culture I said, “let’s go, you idiots—​it’s not a pleasant spectacle, this looking upon an old, roasted man while our noses get filled with this nasty stench. Or are you waiting around for some painter to arrive and paint you as the companions of Socrates in prison are portrayed beside him?” (37)

Not surprisingly, Peregrinus’s grieving students chase off Lucian with sticks. But this criticism of Peregrinus—​that his attempt to imitate the ancients only serves to cast his own inadequacy into high relief—​is programmatic in the text. Peregrinus was no “new Socrates” (kainos Socrates), as his students styled him (12); neither was he an Empedocles, whose own solitary and unwitnessed leap into the caldera of Aetna was no publicity stunt (1); neither was Peregrinus “the one and only rival [zêlôtês] of Diogenes and Crates” as the Parians claimed (15); similarly, Peregrinus’s comparison of his own trials to those of Musonius Rufus, Dio, and Epictetus rang hollow (19). Much like Lucian’s sham sophists and false philosophers, Peregrinus Proteus is incapable of proper mimesis of the ancients. And again, the success that Peregrinus enjoyed was a function of the ignorance of the crowd; it is only the true pepaideumenos who can distinguish true mimetic art from counterfeit. This is the central conceit of Lucian’s dialog Runaways—​a sequel of sorts to the Death of Peregrinus—​which begins with Apollo asking Zeus whether it’s true that some old “wonder-​worker” (thaumatopoios) had thrown himself into the fire at the Olympic games. Runaways begins with reference to Peregrinus’s death (Zeus recalls the awful stench) but the text is a more general indictment of the class of charlatans to which Peregrinus belonged. Philosophy reappears here to complain to Zeus about the rogues who presently claim to be her adepts and in doing so, cause the many to cease to honor her. Runaways resembles the satire of the Teacher of Public Speaking in accusing the false philosophers of desiring to seem rather than to be learned; unwilling to submit themselves to the rigors of actual philosophical study, Philosophy compares these would-​be wise men—​with their philosopher’s capes, long beards, and staffs—​to Aesop’s story of the ass of Cumae who covered himself in a lion’s skin and brayed (rather than roared) that he was a lion. Again, like Aesop’s Cumaean lion, who deceived some, so the false philosophers who “dress and adorn” (sxêmatizousin kai metakosmousin) (13) themselves to seem learned, convince all but the pepaideumenoi that they are truly sages: Moreover, they saw, I think, that they could stand on the same level with those who philosophize correctly, and that there would be no one who could judge and discern in such matters, if only the externals (ta exô) were similar. (15)

The satirist as cultural watchdog appears frequently in Lucian’s texts. His task is to expose the various ways in which sham intellectuals of various descriptions delude the masses with hollow mimesis of the ancients. Whether philosophers, sophists, or sages, these charlatans consistently adopt the forms of intellectual practice while neglecting its actual content. And the content—​true paideia—​is attainable only through labor (ponos)—​long, difficult, and careful study of “correct standards of usage.” Only the

Lucian of Samosata    341 well-​trained man, as the Syrian says in Against the Ignorant Book Collector, is able to read and understand the ancients properly. It is not enough to own beautiful editions of the ancients’ works unless you know what is excellent and base in each passage’s contents and understand the sense of the whole, what the arrangement of the words is, how much has been accurately expressed by the author in accordance with correct standards [πρὸς τὸν ὀρθὸν κανόνα] and what is false, illegitimate, and counterfeit. (2)

In other words, not just their imitators but also the ancients themselves are subject to the censorious eye of the true pepaideumenos; good mimesis, then, involves proper discernment of worthy objects of imitation. But all good mimesis, and this is central for Lucian, begins with careful study—​what Bourdieu describes in something of a mixed metaphor as the conspicuous consumption of intellectual capital (Bourdieu 1991).

The Outsiders Lucian is not the only author of the early Imperial period to play with the tension between ethnic origin and cultural identity. Philostratus tells us that first of the three paradoxes of self-​definition of the Gallic sophist and philosopher Favorinus of Arelate was, “although a Gaul, he spoke Greek” (VS 489). Indeed, in passage of the Corinthian Oration in which Favorinus describes himself as a Roman and a barbarian Celt, Favorinus presents his own status as a Hellene as a paradigm so that the “inhabitants of Greece” can understand that, “having been acculturated [τὸ παιδευθῆναι] differs nothing from birth with respect to reputation” and as a model for the Celts, “so that no one even of the barbarians will despair of attaining Hellenic culture [paideia] once they have looked upon this man” (Or. 37.27). The Romanness of the Corinthian context, of course, provides ample space for Favorinus to explore the theme of Hellenism and acculturation. Compare two early Imperial north African writers: in his Apology Apuleius acknowledges that his “half-​Numidian and half-​ Gaetulian” ancestry is a part of his public persona as a rhetor (Keulen 2014; Richter 2011 173–​174) and explains that, I don’t see that there is anything I should be ashamed of on this account—​any more than Cyrus the Great since in his mixed lineage he was half-​Mede and half-​Persian. For one must look not to where each man was born but how he conducts himself; one must consider not in which region but according to which reason he has determined to live his life.15 (Apol. 24)

The language of the claim is strikingly similar to those passages in which Lucian draws attention to the Syrianness of a speaker only to then declare that ethnicity is

342   Literature and Culture meaningless—​only character matters. And also like Lucian, Apuleius further in the passage cited above, deploys the figure of Anacharsis as the ideal type of the cultured barbarian. Indeed, Apuleius’s fellow north African Fronto, the teacher of Marcus Aurelius, also found in Anacharsis a means of expressing his own ideas about the claims that he himself has made upon Greek culture. In a letter written in Greek to Domitia Lucilla, Marcus’s mother, Fronto asks that, “if any word in the letter is obsolete or barbaric, or unauthorized or insufficiently Attic, look not at this, but at the essential idea [dianoia] of the word” (Ep. Graec. 1 = Naber p. 239). And in words strikingly similar to those of Lucian in the Scythian and those of Apuleius in the Apology, Fronto ends the letter by comparing his own daring foray into Attic speech with the Hellenic travels of Anacharsis: I compare myself to Anacharsis not, by Zeus, with respect to his wisdom but with respect to the fact that we are both alike barbarians. For he was a Scythian of the nomadic Scythians and I am a Libyan of the nomadic Libyans.

Apuleius and Fronto, as Stephen Harrison and Amy Richlin have argued elsewhere in this volume (­chapters 22 and 8, respectively), are Latin authors very much attuned to the concerns and predilections of the Greek authors of the Second Sophistic. It is, then, unsurprising that we would find tropes of self-​fashioning in their work that we also find in an author such as Lucian. What interests me here is the fact that the “ethnic outsider” appears to have been such a trope in the world of the Second Sophistic—​a world that privileged and policed the centrality of Attic diction—​that so often valued the ethnic and cultural purity of Athens that Aelius Aristides so memorably invoked in the Panathenaicus in a passage indebted to hymns to Athenian autochthony that we find in the various Funeral Orations of the fifth and fourth centuries bce. I suggest that this seeming disconnect is not as paradoxical or counterintuitive as it might seem. For Lucian and several of his contemporaries, the status of “self-​professed outsider”—​and there is no better available ancient Greek metaphor for the outside than barbarism—​offered the multilingual and multiethnic intelligentsia of the Second Sophistic a means of deflecting a very Roman discourse about Greek decline in the present versus Greek greatness in the past. In other words, by advertising—​indeed, insisting upon—​their non-​Greek origins, intellectuals such as Fronto, Apuleius, Favorinus, and Lucian were simultaneously dodging the label of “Graeculi”—​little Greeks.

Bibliographic Essay Lucian’s fortunes have improved since the late nineteenth century. For Rudolf Helm (1906), Lucian was a pale plagiarist of Menippus of Gadara—​a thesis effectively demolished by McCarthy 1934 (cf. Bompaire 1958). For much of the twentieth century, Lucian was valued primarily as a source for early imperial social, cultural, and religious attitudes (e.g., Baldwin 1973; Betz, 1961; Caster 1937; Jones 1986). Studies more

Lucian of Samosata    343 sympathetic to Lucian’s literary worth include Anderson 1976; Billault 1991; Branham 1981; Hall 1981; and Ní Mheallaigh 2014; for analysis of Lucian’s language, see Deferrari 1916. An overview of the reception of Lucian’s work in Europe from the Byzantine period may be found in Robinson 1979; Marsh 1998 focuses on the Italian Renaissance, while Baumbach 2002 traces Lucian’s fortunes in Germany from the Renaissance to the nineteenth century. For an account of the biographical tradition, see Richter 2005, with bibliography. MacLeod’s OCTs (1972–​1987) are to be used with caution; Bompaire’s Budé (1993–​2008) editions are more reliable. There are, as well, good editions of individual texts, e.g., Avenarius 1956; Georgiadou and Larmour 1998; and Lightfoot 2003. The present chapter does not address Lucian’s attitudes toward fiction, since two excellent studies (Kim 2010 and Ní Mheallaigh 2014) have so recently appeared.

Bibliography Anderson, G. 1976. Lucian: Theme and Variation in the Second Sophistic. Leiden. Anderson, G. 1994. Sage, Saint and Sophist: Holy Men and Their Associates in the Early Roman Empire. London and New York. Avenarius, G. 1956. Lukians Schrift zur Geschichtschreibung. Meisenheim. Baldwin, B. 1973 Studies in Lucian. Toronto. Bartley A., ed. 2009. A Lucian for Our Times. Newcastle. Baumbach, M. 2002. Lukian in Deutschland:  Eine forschungs-​und rezeptionsgeschichtliche Analyse vom Humanismus bis zur Gegenwart. Munich. Betz, H. D. 1961. Lukian von Samosata und das neue Testament. Berlin. Bhabha, H. 1994. “Of Mimicry and Man:  The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse.” In The Location of Culture, 85–​92. London. Billault, A., ed. 1991. Lucien de Samosate. Lyon. Bompaire, J. 1958. Lucien écrivain: Imitation et création. Paris. Bourdieu, P. 1991. “The Production and Reproduction of Legitimate Language.” In Language and Symbolic Power, edited by J. B. Thompson, translated by C. Raymond and M. Adamson, 43–​65. Cambridge, MA. Branham, 1989. B. Unruly Eloquence: Lucian and the Comedy of Traditions. Cambridge. Caster, M. 1937. Lucien et la pensée religeuse de son temps. Paris. Deferrari, R. J. 1916. Lucian’s Atticism: The Morphology of the Verb. Princeton, NJ. Elsner, J. 2001. “‘Describing Self in the Language of the Other’: Pseudo (?) Lucian at the Temple of Hierapolis.” In Being Greek Under Rome: Cultural Identity, the Second Sophistic and the Development of Empire, edited by S. Goldhill, 125–​153. Cambridge. Fredrickson, G. 2002. Racism: A Short Introduction. Princeton, NJ. Georgiadou, A., and D. Larmour. 1998. Lucian’s Science Fiction Novel True Histories: interpretation and Commentary. Leiden. Goldhill, S. 2002. “Becoming Greek with Lucian.” In Who Needs Greek? Contests in the Cultural History of Hellenism, 60–​107. Cambridge. Hall, J. M. 1981. Lucian’s Satire. New York. Hartog, F. 1988. The Mirror of Herodotus: The Representation of the Other in the Writing of History. Translated by J. Lloyd. Berkeley. Hall, J. M. 2002. Hellenicity: Between Ethnicity and Culture. Chicago.

344   Literature and Culture Helm, R. 1906. Lukian und Menipp. Leipzig. Hollinger, D., ed. 2006. The Humanities and the Dynamics of Inclusion since World War II. Baltimore. Isaac, B. H. 2004. The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity. Princeton. Jones, C. P. 1972. “Two Enemies of Lucian.” GRBS 13: 475–​487. Jones, C. P. 1986. Culture and Society in Lucian. Cambridge, MA. Jüthner, J. 1923. Hellenen und Barbaren: Aus der Geschichte des Nationalbewussteins. Leipzig. Keulen, W. 2014. “Fronto and Apuleius: Two African Careers in the Roman Empire.” In Apuleius and Africa, edited by B. T. Lee, E. Finkelpearl, and L. Graverini, 129–​153. London. Kim, L. 2010. Homer between History and Fiction in Imperial Greek Literature. Cambridge. Kindstrand, F. 1981. Anacharsis: The Legend And The Apophthegmata: Uppsala. Konig, J. P. 2006. “The Cynic and Christian Lives of Lucian’s Peregrinus.” In The Limits of Biography, edited by B.Mcging and J. Mossman, 227–​254. Swansea. Lightfoot, J. L., ed. 2003. Lucian, “On the Syrian Goddess.” Oxford. Marsh, D. 1998. Lucian and the Latins: Humor and Humanism in the Early Renaissance. Ann Arbor, MI. McLeod, M. D. 1967. Lucian. Volume VIII. Cambridge, MA. McCarthy, B. 1934. “Lucian and Menippus.” YClS 4: 3–​58. Mestre, F., and P. Gómez, eds. 2010. Lucian of Samosata: Greek Writer and Roman Citizen. Barcelona. Ní Mheallaigh, K. 2014. Reading Fiction with Lucian:  Fakes, Freaks, and Hyperreality. Cambridge. Norden, E. 1898. Die antike Kuntsprosa vom VI. Jahrhundert v.  Christus bis in die Zeit der Renaissance. 2 vols. Leipzig. Oliver, J. H. 1980. “The Actuality of Lucian’s Assembly of the Gods,” AJP. 101:304–​13. Richter, D. S. 2005. “Lives and Afterlives of Lucian of Samosata.” Arion 13: 75–​100. Richter, D. S. 2011a. Cosmopolis: Imagining Community in Late Classical Athens and the Early Roman Empire. Oxford. Richter, D. S. 2011b “How Not to Translate: Lucian’s Games with the Name(s) of the Syrian Goddess.” In Complicating the History of Western Translation: The Ancient Mediterranean in Perspective, edited by S. McElduff and E. Sciarrino, 131–​145. Manchester. Robinson, C. 1979. Lucian and his Influence in Europe. London and Chapel Hill, NC. Romm, J. 1990. “Wax, Stone, and Promethean Clay: Lucian as Plastic Artist,” Classical Antiquity 9:74–​98. Said, S. 2001. “The Discourse of Identity in Greek Rhetoric from Isocrates To Aelius Aristides.” In Ancient Perceptions of Greek Ethnicity, edited by I. Malkin, 275–​99. Cambridge. Swain, S. 1996. Hellenism and Empire: Language, Classicism, and Power in the Greek World, ad 50–​250. Oxford. Whitmarsh, T. 2001. Greek Literature and the Roman Empire: The Politics of Imitation. Oxford.

Chapter 22

Apule iu s Stephen J. Harrison

Introduction The remarkably versatile output of Apuleius (ca. 125 to after 164 ce) shows multiple links with the literary culture of the Second Sophistic (see, e.g., Harrison 2000, Sandy 1997, Tatum 1979); though he could not match the major Greek sophists in their international fame and imperial contacts, he seems to have operated as a Latin-​speaking sophist in his home province of Roman North Africa. Based in at least the 160s ce in Carthage, one of the great cities of the High Roman Empire, he took pupils and delivered speeches and declamations, thus pursuing an evidently sophistic career, as well as producing the Latin novel Metamorphoses or Golden Ass, thus participating in one of the key literary genres of sophistic culture (see ­chapters 25, 26, 27 in this volume). This chapter will consider his life and output from this perspective, and give brief accounts of his two most important works (the Apologia and Metamorphoses), drawing on and adding to my detailed earlier arguments (Harrison 2000); I will say more on the less-​known and more sophistic Apologia than the famous novel (for more of my own approach to the latter, see Harrison 2013).

Biography and Literary Career Apuleius was born in the 120s ce at Madauros, now M’daurouch in Algeria, an inland city then in the Roman province of Africa Proconsularis, and a place of strongly Latin culture, though Punic was clearly the local vernacular. He was fundamentally Roman in cultural identity and in effect a native speaker and writer of Latin: it is crucially important for a true appreciation of Apuleius to realize that he belongs not to an African subculture but to the mainstream of Latin culture and literature, with his much-​vaunted fluency in Greek acquired as it would be by a well-​educated Roman. This is the obvious

346   Literature and Culture but fundamental difference separating Apuleius and other Roman literary figures with sophistic interests from the contemporary Greek figures of the Second Sophistic, who otherwise appear to match Apuleius in their interests in rhetorical and philosophical performance. Apuleius was contemporary not only with the Latin writer Aulus Gellius, whom he may have known in Athens, but also with the Greek writers Galen, Lucian, and Aelius Aristides (see ­chapters 24, 21, and 17 in this volume). His family background was prosperous. He tells us that his father achieved the duumvirate, the “miniconsulate” which was the highest magistracy of a Roman colonia and that he himself had held the same rank at Madauros by 158/​9 (Apol. 24.9). Apuleius and his brother were left substantial wealth by their father when he died some time before 158/​9 (Apol. 24.9), while Augustine, not a friendly witness, states that Apuleius was of high rank in his own country (Ep. 138.19). This wealth enabled him to study at a high level: élite literary education was then as throughout antiquity the preserve of the prosperous, and Apuleius’ background was similar to those of other literary figures of the period in this respect. Madauros itself was a center of teaching by Augustine’s time more than two centuries later (he learnt literature and rhetoric there: Conf. 2.5), but Apuleius implies that his own studies began at Carthage, the provincial capital and proconsular seat, where he acquired his basic education in letters, grammar and rhetoric (Flor. 18.15, 20.3); he also claims that his first instruction in Platonic philosophy occurred there (Flor. 18.15), though here as elsewhere in his statements about Carthage in the Florida it needs to be recalled that they are made to a Carthaginian audience to whom such claims would naturally be pleasing. Subsequent study took him to Athens, where he claims with characteristic self-​ promotion to have imbibed poetry, geometry, music, dialectic, and general philosophy (Flor. 20.4). These subjects, and Apuleius’s self-​description (Apol. 10.6) and later reputation as a “Platonic philosopher,” show that he plainly studied in the Platonist tradition (cf. Flor. 15.26). He tells us in the Apologia (23) of his “distant travels and long studies” undertaken before 158/​9 ce. This is partly boastful self-​presentation as a globe-​trotting intellectual in the manner of the great Greek sophists of the time, but apart from his studies in Athens, he seems to have spent time in Rome (Flor. 17.4), and was on the way to Alexandria at the beginning of the events which led to the Apologia (Apol. 72); thus he clearly knew some of the major intellectual centers of the Second Sophistic at first hand. Apuleius seems to have been a Latin speaker competent in Greek, but was probably unable to compete effectively with the great Greek sophists of his time on their own territory; he appears to have had direct knowledge of sophistic activity, but not to have joined the sophistic circus of the Greek East, settling instead for the life of a public lecturer and declaimer in Latin in North Africa. In the Apologia of 158/​9 (for this work and its context see further below) he appears in his thirties as a fully-​fledged public performer, declaiming at Oea, the modern Tripoli in Libya (Apol. 55, 73), and producing in the Apologia itself what has been justly seen as a masterpiece of the Second Sophistic. Other evidence for Apuleius’s rhetorical activities derives from the Florida, an extant collection of twenty-​one extracts from his speeches and two complete short orations; some were clearly originally

Apuleius   347 delivered at Carthage and can be dated to the 160s (Flor. 9, 15, 16, 17, 18). The extracts provide useful models of particular rhetorical techniques (extended simile or metaphor: Flor. 1, 11, 13, 20, 23) and basic exercises or progymnasmata (celebrity anecdote with pithy punchline [chreia]: Flor.2, 14, 18, 20; panegyric—​Florida 7, 9, 15, 19, 22; formal description [ekphrasis]: Flor. 6, 12, 15). There are also broader links of subject matter between the extracts. Florida 3 and 4 both begin from famous musicians, 6 and 7 concern India and Alexander who first reached it, 12 and 13 talk of birds, 16 and 17 are both praise of great men at Carthage, and there are a large number of extracts about famous philosophers (2, 14, 15, 18, 22). It seems likely that these extracts are selected by a post-​Apuleian editor as thematic and technical models for the rhetorical instruction of later generations, but they give a good idea of Apuleian rhetoric, especially the complete Florida 9 and 16. The De deo Socratis discusses the topic, popular in Middle Platonism (e.g., in Plutarch’s dialogue De genio Socratis, Mor. 575a–​598f), of the daimonion of Socrates, the personal divine voice or guardian spirit recorded in the works of Plato and Xenophon as giving Socrates advice on crucial occasions. This (like the Florida) is likely to have been delivered to a Carthaginian audience in the 160s; it is a popular philosophical lecture of the kind widespread in the Greek Second Sophistic, adapted for a Latin-​speaking audience. Similar lively rhetorical treatments of philosophical commonplaces, presented in the first person rather than dialogue form and embellished with poetical quotations, are to be found in the works of Dio Chrysostom and Plutarch; especially close are the two Dialexeis (8 and 9) of Apuleius’s younger contemporary Maximus of Tyre on the same subject, which are very likely written after Apuleius’s lecture but may draw on a lost common source. It thus seems that after the triumph of the Apologia, the publication of which could not have harmed his career, Apuleius was primarily based in Carthage, which as a cosmopolitan provincial capital relatively close to Rome served as a good showcase for his talents. He may have retained some kind of connection with his native town; the famous inscription found at Madauros recording the setting up of a statue to a “Platonic philosopher” (Inscriptions latines d’Afrique 2115) is very likely to honor Apuleius, given that the title was applied to him by himself and others. Scholars have disagreed about the dating of the Metamorphoses or Golden Ass, the novel which is Apuleius’s most celebrated and widely read work (see further below). Some regard this exuberant fiction as a youthful production, aimed at a Roman readership with whom Apuleius had greater contact in the earlier part of his career, while others see its consummate style and dense literary texture as belonging to the mature period of his life (e.g., Harrison 2000, 9–​10; Walsh 1970, 248–​251). Objective dating criteria are hard to find; but a number of considerations suggest with some probability that the Metamorphoses belongs at least after the Apologia of 158/​9. First, the Metamorphoses, which contains stories of magic and much obscenity, was apparently not known to Apuleius’s accusers in his trial on charges of sorcery: there is no hint at all of it in the Apologia. Second, the Metamorphoses seems to display allusions to Apuleius’s own career in the period of the Apologia. Like Apuleius, Lucius in Metamorphoses

348   Literature and Culture 3 faces a trial on trumped-​up charges in which he defends himself with brilliant rhetoric (Met. 3.4–​7), and after which, like Apuleius at Carthage and probably at Madauros, he is rewarded by the honor of a statue (Met. 3.11). Like the marriage of Apuleius and Pudentilla, that of Cupid and Psyche in the Metamorphoses is impugned by opponents for its secretive location in a country villa (Met. 6.9). Third, Apuleius’s own list of the various literary genres he has attempted in Florida 9.27–​28, dated to 162/​3, does not include prose fiction, though it mentions a wide range of works (see below). Fourth, there may be some reason to date the Metamorphoses after the publication of the Sacred Tales of Aelius Aristides, which dates from the 170s ce (see Harrison 2000–​2001). It is thus reasonable to argue that the Metamorphoses was probably written after the Apologia, perhaps at a late date in Apuleius’s career. There is no firm evidence for Apuleius’s career after the mid-​160s ce. Two works, De Mundo (a version of Aristotle’s treatise on the universe) and De Platone (a summary of Platonic doctrine), are ascribed to Apuleius, with some probability. Both books in their prefaces address a “son Faustinus”: if Apuleius had a son old enough to be concerned with such matters, likely to have been born after the Apologia, then these works would belong to the 170s or later; their use of a different system of prose rhythm would also fit a later date, though some have seen it as a major barrier to Apuleian authenticity (for discussion see Harrison 2000, 178–​180). Their content would also suggest that the writer was concerned with didactic exposition in Latin of the major authorities of Greek philosophy, a credible development in Apuleius’s career given his track record as a Platonic philosopher and all-​round intellectual who gives a Latin-​speaking audience the benefit of his studies. The evidence of an encyclopedic trend in his writings (see below) and for the existence of pupils who studied with Apuleius (clear from Flor. 18) suggests an interest in education; it is possible to imagine a career of rhetorical performance and teaching for Apuleius continuing at Carthage into the 170s and 180s. Unlike some writers of the period, such as Fronto (see Fleury, ­chapter 16 in this volume), Apuleius did not pursue a political career after literary or rhetorical successes; Augustine, admittedly a jaundiced witness against a leading pagan, records that he never achieved a judicial magistracy in the province of Africa, and that the priesthood mentioned in Florida 16 was the highest public office he attained (Ep. 138.19). There are two other significant extant works ascribed to Apuleius. The De Inter­ pretatione is a brief Latin version of Aristotelian logical doctrine in dry and technical language which offers little of stylistic or literary interest; it has a textual tradition separate from that of other Apuleian works, but has been attributed to Apuleius in its manuscript transmission and in the indirect tradition since Late Antiquity. Apuleian authorship is not impossible, and this work played an important role in transmitting Aristotelian logic to the Middle Ages (cf. Harrison 2000, 11–​12). The Asclepius, a version of a largely lost Greek Hermetic treatise, has the same textual transmission as the philosophical works of Apuleius, but is unlikely to be Apuleian (cf. Harrison 2000, 11–​12). Both these works may show the capacity of later writers and editors to compose para-​ Apuleian works or attach such works to the genuine Apuleian tradition; such pseudepigraphic additions are particularly common for writers in the period of the Second

Apuleius   349 Sophistic with a large and varied output, inviting accretions of this kind (e.g., Plutarch, Dio Chrysostom, and Lucian). Variety is already strongly evident in this extant output, of style as well as of genre: the Metamorphoses, Apologia, Florida, and De deo Socratis are written in a characteristically rhythmical style, highly archaic and colorful, while the De Platone and De Mundo demonstrate a much drier style appropriate to the technical treatise. Both Apuleius’s literary versatility and his close connections with the intellectual currents of his time are considerably extended if we add the fragments of and allusions to lost works found both in Apuleius himself and in other writers (for a basic discussion, see Harrison 2000, 14–​38). His own characteristically immodest claims of wide versatility in prose and poetry (Flor. 9.27–​28, 20.5–​6) are almost justified by what we can piece together about his lost output, and no doubt there was more of which we know nothing. Apart from evidence of other speeches now lost to us (Apol. 24 and 55; Augustine Ep. 138.19), lost Apuleian works (in the numeration of Beaujeu 1973) include a collection of humorous archaizing poems (fr. 1); a work on proverbs (fr. 2); Hermagoras, another low-​life novel (fr. 3–​8); Phaedo, a rendering of Plato’s dialogue (fr. 9–​10); an historical compilation (fr. 11–​12); a work On the Republic (fr. 13); a work on medicine (fr. 14); one on agriculture (fr. 15); one on trees (fr. 16); a work on love (fr. 21); one on astronomy (fr. 22–​25); zoological works in both Greek and Latin (cf. Apol. 36 and 38); another on topics for discussion at banquets (Sid. Apoll. Epist. 9.13.3, Macrob. Sat.7.3.23–​24); and works on music and arithmetic (Cassiod. 2.4.7, 2.10). Such an output is characteristic of Apuleius’s time and place as a Latin writer in the second century ce, fundamentally influenced by the Second Sophistic. Forensic oratory (the Apologia) was the field where Fronto and other North Africans had achieved fame at Rome in the previous generation (see Champlin 1980, 18–​19), while epideictic speeches, such as those evidenced by the Florida, and popular philosophical lectures, such as the De deo Socratis, were the intellectual life-​blood of the Second Sophistic (see Part IV, “Rhetoric and Rhetoricians” in this volume). Works of prose fiction, too, such as the Metamorphoses, seem to have been particularly common in Apuleius’s time (see ­chapters 25–​27 in this volume): of the two Latin novels and the seven complete Greek ones, at least four may belong to the later second century ce (see Bowie 2002). Finally, the kind of philosophical doxography found in the De Platone reflects the revival of interest in Platonic philosophy in this period, shown in similar contemporary handbooks of Platonic doctrine such as that by Alcinous (see Fowler on Platonism, c­ hapter 36 in this volume). As noted at the outset, such success as Apuleius achieved in his lifetime seems to have been limited to his home region. Roman North Africa, though Carthage itself was in many ways a cosmopolitan city, was clearly something of a cultural backwater when compared to Rome or the great cities of the Greek Mediterranean, the normal arenas of sophistic operation. However, this gave Apuleius many advantages. He is able to present himself as the purveyor of Greek intellectual culture to an audience for whom he himself is the major source for such material; and though there were clearly rival performing intellectuals at Carthage, he could there avoid many of the problems of the sharp

350   Literature and Culture competition amongt contemporary sophists in the Greek world. Though he never uses the word “sophist” of himself, Apuleius can freely compare himself both implicitly and explicitly with the great sophists of the fifth century (Hippias in Flor. 9, Protagoras in Flor. 18), a characteristic sophistic move, while also maintaining his status as a Platonic philosopher. Such things were clearly permissible in the Latin West, where the cultural polemics of the Greek Mediterranean found only a distant echo. But though Apuleius proclaimed himself a philosopher, his status as a star public speaker in Carthage, his obvious self-​promotion and cult of his own personality, and his prodigiously displayed literary and scientific polymathy plainly allow us to designate him a sophist, a Latin-​ speaking version of the great Greek rhetorical performers of his own time.

The Apologia I first summarize Apuleius’s own account in the Apologia of the genesis of this speech and the trial at which it was delivered (this is our only source and is of course likely to be biased by its forensic circumstances). During a period of study in Athens, perhaps in the early 150s ce, Apuleius met and shared rooms with a fellow student named Pontianus, like himself from Roman North Africa, from Oea, the modern Tripoli in Libya (Apol. 72). Several years after his first acquaintance with Pontianus, probably toward the end of 156, Apuleius set out (perhaps from Carthage) on the long journey to Alexandria, and rested with friends at Oea on the way. He was there visited by Pontianus, who persuaded him to stay for a whole year and eventually to marry his mother Pudentilla, a rich widow, in order to protect her fortune for her sons: the marriage seems to have taken place in late 157 or early 158. Subsequently, in the course of appearing for his wife at the proconsular assizes in a case concerning a property dispute, Apuleius was accused by several relations of Pudentilla’s of having induced her to marry him through magic means. This case was heard (presumably during the same assizes) at Sabathra, near Oea, by the proconsul Claudius Maximus, apparently in late 158 or early 159. Though we are nowhere told so, it is clear that Apuleius was acquitted; the publication of such a tour de force as the Apologia is not the act of a defeated party, and it is an impressive advertisement of Apuleius’s talents as a public speaker. In its basic texture, the Apologia combines tight forensic argument with expansive epideictic elements more naturally at home in sophistic declamation. The model on the forensic side is Cicero (see the evidence at Harrison 2000, 44n17; Hunink 1997 is more skeptical): in the Apologia Apuleius takes the opportunity to emulate the greatest orator of the Roman courts, and his language, though close to the jingling and colorful style of the Metamorphoses, is profoundly influenced by that of the great Ciceronian speeches. More particularly, the colorful characters and charges of the Apologia recall some of the more vivid criminal cases in which Cicero appeared, in particular the Pro Cluentio, where the scheming Oppianicus, impoverished and acquiring funds through marriage, inheritance, and a series of poisonings, is a more vicious and successful ancestor of the

Apuleius   351 villains Aemilianus and Rufinus in Apuleius. The pillorying and ridicule of Apuleius’s opponents in the Apologia, one of its fundamental techniques, recalls Cicero not only in rehearsing the standard topics of invective used (for example) in the Verrines and Second Philippic (e.g., drunkenness, venality, sexual insatiability), but also in its use of humor as a forensic weapon. The charges made are often laughed out of court, just as they were in the Pro Caelio, where Cicero’s comic presentation of Clodia as the villain of the piece and as a “Medea of the Palatine” is similar to Apuleius’s ridicule of the rustic Aemilianus and use of mythological figures from literature (Charon and Mezentius: Apol. 56) in attacking him. But, as already indicated, the Apologia is not only an imitation of the Ciceronian forensic manner. Its many didactic digressions mark the speech out as (at least in part) an epideictic performance in the manner of the Florida and the De deo Socratis. This is clearly the work of a sophistic speaker, anxious to demonstrate his learning and intellectual interests and to produce a stylistic tour de force, just as much as the self-​defense of a man accused of serious charges in a court of law. Some have criticized the Apologia for its learned digressions and found them inimical to Apuleius’s defense, but it is clear, on the contrary, that these are at the center of Apuleius’s forensic strategy, based according to the traditions of Greco-​Roman rhetoric on the character and situation of the audience which the orator needs to persuade, here in particular on the proconsul of Africa Proconsularis presiding at the trial, C. Claudius Maximus. This Maximus, consul in 142 ce and proconsul in 158/​9, is surely to be identified with the Claudius Maximus who was one of the teachers of Marcus Aurelius in Stoic philosophy (M. Aur. Med. 1.17.5). One of Apuleius’s fundamental strategies is to praise and flatter Maximus in every way, lauding his moral virtues as well as his intellectual qualities; here we get a glimpse of the Apuleius who was soon to compose the lavish tributes to proconsuls at Carthage to be found in the Florida (cf. Flor. 8, 9, 17). The prosecution is accused of wasting Maximus’s precious time and trying his patience with their frivolous and ill-​educated calumnies (1.1, 1.6, 23.3–​4, 35.7, 46.5), and Apuleius seeks to develop a complicity between himself and Maximus, men of literary education, philosophical learning, and elegant taste (cf. 41.4 ego et Maximus), against what he presents as the ignorance and rusticity of his accusers. Passages of Greek are cited in extenso to assert their mutual close acquaintance with the classic philosophical texts (10.9–​10, 22.5, 25.10, 26.4, 31.5–​6, 38.8, 65.5–​7, 82.2, 83.1). Thus the so-​called digressions are strategically important to Apuleius as a continued captatio benevolentiae directed toward the presiding magistrate. Just as Apuleius and Maximus share an understanding and appreciation of high intellectual culture, so Apuleius’s opponents are represented as ill-​educated and uncivilized; just as Maximus is continually praised for his wisdom and other qualities (2.5, 11.5, 19.1, 25.10, 36.5, 38.1, 41.4, 48.5, 53.4, 63.6, 64.4, 81.2, 84.6, 85.2, 91.3, 98.8), so Apuleius’s opponents are repeatedly pilloried for their ignorance and lack of comprehension of higher things (5.6, 9.1, 9.6, 16.7, 23.5, 30.3, 33.2-​3, 34.5, 42.1, 66.6, 74.7, 86.3, 87.4, 91.1). This is not purely gratuitous invective, but like the common ground between defendant and proconsul is essential for the details of Apuleius’s argument in making his case. His

352   Literature and Culture defense asserts above all that the charges of magic have been brought through ignorant misunderstanding and wilful misinterpretation of harmless and indeed highly respectable scientific, philosophical, and medical activities. An elaborate self-​defense on a charge of magic is not a particularly surprising literary work to find in the age of the Second Sophistic; self-​presentation and occasional self-​ justification against attack, whether forensic or other, were central to the activities of the Greek sophists. Philostratus in his Lives of the Sophists narrates a number of cases where sophists were accused in law-​suits, and they were well known for their highly publicized disputes with each other, which sometimes ended in court (cf. Anderson 1993, 35–​39; Bowersock 1969, 89–​100). The particular charge of magic is also not astonishing. Magical abilities were also suspected or alleged in the case of one or two of the more extraordinary sophistic performers, whether from malice or sheer astonishment at their capacity to persuade (Philostr. VS 1.22, 523; 2.10, 590). In terms of content, the Apologia bears the unmistakable stamp of sophistic discourse. The constant deployment of material from literature both Greek and Latin shows that Apuleius, like all sophists, is anxious to impress with the breadth of his reading, which can sometimes be traced to handbooks and summaries rather than original texts, but nevertheless shows a considerable width of knowledge. The interest throughout in philosophical topics, and in particular Plato, is not only forensically important in supporting Apuleius’s view of himself as a misunderstood philosophus and appealing to the personal tastes of Maximus, but also stresses Apuleius’s considerable reading in the works of one of the central intellectual and stylistic inspirations of the Second Sophistic. The Apologia shows a complete command of all rhetorical techniques, both forensic and epideictic, the everyday tools of the performing sophist. Apuleius can be seen demonstrating his ability in narrative, comparison, invective, encomium, description, and anecdote, all progymnasmata, the basic elements of speaking and composition taught to students in ancient rhetorical schools (see Pernot on Greek and Latin rhetorical culture, ­chapter 13 in this volume). He is also skilled in diatribe, popular moralizing on the Cynic model, a type of writing much favored by sophistic writers such as Dio Chrysostom and Aelius Aristides, and which is found again in the final section of the De Deo Socratis. The Apologia, like all Apuleius’s works, bears the mark of its time and of the particular culture of its author, one who had some experience of Athens and other Greek sophistic centers, but who had also studied in Rome and returned to live in his home province of Roman Africa.

The Metamorphoses Apuleius’s work has been well described as “a sophist’s novel” (Tatum 1979, 135); as already suggested above, the novel seems to have been a favorite literary form of Greek writers in the period of the Second Sophistic, and here as elsewhere we can see Apuleius following sophistic lines. The novel’s protagonist and first-​person narrator Lucius is a

Apuleius   353 foolish young man, who in the search for magic secrets is metamorphosed into a donkey and experiences a series of picaresque adventures in beast form, and is eventually retransformed into human shape through the agency of the goddess Isis, whose service he then enters. In effect, Lucius is a kind of sophist in the making, highly educated and able to rise to an elaborately fictional Ciceronian speech of self-​defense (Met. 3.4) or to earn money by speaking in the law-​courts (Met. 11.28); he is linked by family with Plutarch (Met. 1.2), and the famous twist at the end of the novel which seems to identify him with Apuleius as a man from Madauros (Met. 11.27) perhaps points similarly to the shared sophistic status of the two. Also sophistic in color is the complex function of the first-​person narrative voice in this largely autodiegetic (formally autobiographical) novel. The main narrative voice we hear within the text, the primary intradiegetic voice, is that of Lucius, the elite young Greek; but we are aware from information both inside and outside the text that the novel is in fact written by a person of Roman culture, the extradiegetic author and narrator Apuleius, and there are several occasions in the novel when the author’s Roman identity is indicated in a way which compels the reader to look to Apuleius rather than Lucius (see van der Paardt 1981). This problem of the narrative voice is famously highlighted at the novel’s opening, where the speaker could be Lucius, Apuleius, or the book itself (1.1.1–​6; cf. Kahane and Laird 2001), and at its close, with the already mentioned suggestion that Lucius is somehow Apuleius, the “man from Madauros” (11.27). This kind of problematizing of the speaker’s identity and voice can be found in the Greek novels of the sophistic period: Longus’s Daphnis and Chloe is presented by an initial speaker as his own summary of an account given by an exegete of a picture in a grove of the Nymphs (1 praef.), a double distancing effect, while the prologue to Achilles Tatius’s Leucippe and Cleitophon (1.1–​1.2) presents the novel as reporting the words of Cleitophon spoken to the author, without returning at the end to this original frame. The literary texture of the Metamorphoses contains many further elements which can be labelled “sophistic”: a fondness for ekphrasis, and a continuous interest in alluding to and playing with classical literary texts (cf. Finkelpearl 1998), showing sophistic paideia; especially pronounced are the echoes of epic texts (cf. e.g., Harrison 2013) and drama (cf. e.g., May 2007). The work of Plato (especially Phaedrus) also serves as a source, as often in the Second Sophistic, but largely for literary learning and entertainment rather than ideological content (see Harrison 2000, 252–​259). Many of the broad range of Apuleian intellectual interests evident from his many and varied technical works (see above) also emerge in his novel, for example elements from zoology, medicine, and law. Perhaps the most sustained display of technical knowledge is in the account of the Isis-​cult in book 11, where much religious detail is deployed. In my view this is not a token of Apuleian promotion of the Isis-​cult, though Apuleius himself may well have been an initiate (at Apol. 55.8 he claims to have been initiated into a number of Greek cults), but a demonstration of the “cultural capital” of elite learning (cf. Bourdieu 1984, applied well to sophists by Schmitz 1997); here as elsewhere Apuleius displays recondite and prestigious knowledge to impress a readership or audience. In general, scholars are deeply divided on the seriousness of Apuleius’s account of the Isis-​cult: some argue

354   Literature and Culture for a straight religious reading, some opt for a mixed view of both humor and religious significance, and some (like myself) advocate a satirical approach. A satirical reading of Lucius’s cult narrative can be supported by other evidence in both Apuleius himself and other contemporary writers. The only other religious cult which appears in the main narrative of the novel, that of the Syrian Goddess in Books 8-​9, is shown as unambiguously corrupt: its priests are plainly charlatans, matching the false prophet Alexander of Aboutneichos in Lucian’s Alexander, and the Syrian Goddess herself is the subject of an apparently serious treatise in Lucian’s De dea Syria (see Lightfoot 2003), which could be satirized here. It can even be suggested that Apuleius’s satirical approach to Lucius’s religious experience in Metamorphoses 11 firmly locates the novel within the sophistic world as a scathing response to the self-​promoting and improbable narrative by Aelius Aristides in the Sacred Tales of his visions of and connections with the god Asclepius (cf. Harrison 2000–​2001). On this view, Apuleius would be sending up his age’s taste for writing about religious cults and personal religious experience, and in particular attacking the self-​important pretensions of a well-​known sophistic author.

Conclusion In conclusion, it is clear even from this brief exploration that in his training and interests, his career as rhetorical performer and educator, his range of works, and his prominent deployment of the especially sophistic novel form, Apuleius can be plausibly described as a sophistic figure. More than any other Latin writer of the period, such as Fronto or Gellius, he deserves the label of “Latin sophist.”

Further Reading An extensive and up-​to-​date bibliography on all Apuleius’s works (Harrison 2011) is available in Oxford Bibliographies Online http://​www.oxfordbibliographies.com/​. This should be consulted for more detailed scholarly material, especially the many commentaries available, alongside the earlier and much fuller Schlam and Finkelpearl 2000. There are two current complete editions of the works of Apuleius in Latin, for the Teubner series (philosophical works by Moreschini 1991; the other works by Helm 1910, 1912, 1931) and for the Budé series (philosophical works and fragments by Beaujeu 1973, Apologia and Florida by Vallette 1924, and Metamorphoses by Robertson 1971); an important new critical edition of the Metamorphoses has been published for the Oxford Classical Texts (Zimmerman 2012). A good bilingual edition of the Metamorphoses is available in the two Loeb volumes of Hanson 1989, while modern annotated translations of the Apologia, De Deo Socratis, and Florida can be found in Harrison, Hilton, and Hunink 2001; of the Metamorphoses in Kenney 1998 and Walsh 1994.

Apuleius   355 Among general critical works, apart from the basic orientation for the whole author to be found in Harrison 2000, there are excellent accounts of the Metamorphoses in Walsh 1970 (pioneering in valuing Apuleius as a literary artist), Winkler 1985 (especially sophisticated and influential), and Schlam 1992 (clear and balanced); Tatum 1979 and Sandy 1997 anticipate Harrison 2000 in stressing the Greek sophistic elements of Apuleius’s output, while Finkelpearl 1998 and Harrison 2013 demonstrate in full the modern emphasis on Apuleius’s subtle literary texture with much further bibliography. On Apuleius’ Platonism see Fletcher 2014. On the issue of the seriousness of the novel’s religious ending, see Merkelbach 1995 (serious), Winkler 1985 (sophisticated mixed approach), Harrison 2000, 238–​259 (satirical), and especially Keulen and Egelhaaf-​Gaiser 2012 (presenting the latest research on the Isis book) and Keulen and Egelhaaf-​Gaiser 2015 (the new commentary). On the Apologia, see Hunink 1997 (a useful and modern literary commentary), Riess 2008 (a conference volume with several papers of interest), both with extensive bibliography, and Bradley 2012 (important historical contextualisation),

Bibliography Anderson, G. 1993. The Second Sophistic:  A  Cultural Phenomenon in the Roman Empire. London and New York. Beaujeu, J. 1973. Apulée: Opuscules philosophiques et fragments. Paris. Bourdieu, P. 1984. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Theory of Taste. London. Bowersock, G. W. 1969. Greek Sophists in the Roman Empire. Oxford. Bowie, E. L. 2002. “The Chronology of the Earlier Greek Novels since B. E. Perry: Revisions and Precisions.” Ancient Narrative 2: 47–​63. Bradley, K. 2012. Apuleius and Antonine Rome, Toronto. Champlin, E. 1980. Fronto and Antonine Rome. Cambridge, MA. Finkelpearl, E. 1998. Metamorphosis of Language in Apuleius. Ann Arbor, MI. Fletcher, R. 2014. Apuleius’ Platonism. Cambridge. Hanson, J. A. 1989. Apuleius: Metamorphoses. 2 vols. Cambridge, MA. Harrison, S. J. 2000. Apuleius: A Latin Sophist. Oxford. Harrison, S. J. 2000–​2001. “Apuleius, Aelius Aristides and Religious Autobiography.” Ancient Narrative 1: 245–​259. Harrison, S. J. 2011. “Apuleius.” In Oxford Bibliographies Online. http://​www.oxfordbibliographies. com/​view/​document/​obo-​9780195389661/​obo-​9780195389661-​0100.xml. Harrison. S. J. 2013. Forming the Ass: Literary Texture in Apuleius’ “Metamorphoses”. Oxford. Harrison, S. J., J. Hilton, and V. Hunink, eds. 2001. Apuleius: Rhetorical Works. Oxford. Helm, R., ed. 1910. Apulei Florida. Leipzig. Helm, R., ed. 1912. Apulei Apologia. Leipzig. Helm, R., ed. 1931. Apulei Metamorphoseon Libri XI. Leipzig. Hunink, V. 1997. Apuleius of Madaura: Pro se de magia (Apologia). 2 vols. Amsterdam. Kahane, A., and A. Laird, eds. 2001. A Companion to the Prologue of Apuleius’ Metamorphoses. Oxford. Kenney, E. J., trans. 1998. Apuleius, “The Golden Ass”. Harmondsworth. Keulen, W. and U.Egelhaaf-​Gaiser, eds. 2012. Aspects of Apuleius' Golden Ass Volume III: the Isis Book. Leiden.

356   Literature and Culture Keulen, W/​amd U.Egelhaaf-​Gaiser, eds. 2015. Apuleius Madaurensis Metamorphoses, Book XI, The Isis Book. Leiden. Lightfoot, J. L., ed. 2003. Lucian, “On the Syrian Goddess”. Oxford. May, R. 2007. Apuleius and Drama: The Ass on Stage. Oxford. Merkelbach, R. 1995. Isis Regina –​Zeus Sarapis. Stuttgart. Moreschini, C. 1991. Apuleius: De Philosophia Libri. Stuttgart and Leipzig. Riess, W., ed. 2008 Paideia at Play: Learning and Wit in Apuleius. Groningen. Robertson, D. S. 1971. Apulée: Les Métamorphoses. 3 vols. Paris. Sandy, G. 1997. The Greek World of Apuleius: Apuleius and the Second Sophistic. Leiden. Schlam, C. C. 1992. The Metamorphoses of Apuleius: On Making an Ass of Oneself. London. Schlam, C. C., and E. Finkelpearl. 2000. “A Review of Scholarship on Apuleius’ ‘Metamorphoses,’ 1970–​1998.” Lustrum 42: 7–​224. Schmitz, T. A. 1997. Bildung und Macht:  Zur sozialen und politischen Funktion der zweiten Sophistik in der griechischen Welt der Kaiserzeit. Zetemata 97. Munich. Tatum, J. 1979. Apuleius and the Golden Ass. Ithaca, NY. Vallette, P. 1924. Apulée: Apologie, Florides. Paris. van der Paardt, R.  T. 1981 “The Unmasked I:  Apuleius Metamorphoses XI.27.” Mnemos. 34: 96–​106. Walsh, P. G. 1970. The Roman Novel. Cambridge. Walsh, P. G., ed. 1994. Apuleius: The Golden Ass. Oxford. Winkler, J.  J. 1985. Auctor & Actor:  A  Narratological Reading of Apuleius’ “Golden Ass”. Berkeley, CA. Zimmerman, M. 2012. Apulei Metamorphoseon Libri XI. Oxford.

Chapter 23

Pausanias William Hutton

Pausanias’s Periegesis Hellados (Description of Greece), a ten-​volume topographical account of the antiquities of the Hellenic homeland, is one of the more frequently cited texts from the period of the Second Sophistic, yet until recently the work and its author have played at best a marginal role in studies of the literature and culture of the era. The Periegesis is hardly a typical work of the period, and there is no evidence that Pausanias had the sort of career as a public intellectual that many of the other notable authors of the time did. However, his text reflects and responds to a number of literary and cultural trends of the age, and serves as an important piece of evidence for the variety of discourse that made up the intellectual context in which the sophists flourished. As late as the early nineteenth century it was commonly supposed that the author of the Periegesis was identical with the Pausanias of Caesarea mentioned by Philostratus (VS 594) and thus that he inhabited the innermost circles of the sophistic world (Harloe 2010). Since then, that identification has been abandoned in favor of the clear indications within the text that he was an otherwise unknown native of the region around Magnesia-​on-​Sipylos, close to the epicenter of sophistic culture on the Ionian coast (Diller 1955). Although it is not written as a first-​person travelog, Pausanias’s Periegesis adopts the point of view of a visitor who arrives from the direction of Ionia and proceeds on a step-​by-​step tour of the cities and shrines of the southern and central mainland. For a lengthy prose work of this or any period the Periegesis is uncommonly well organized (Hutton 2005, 54–​82). Each of the ten volumes covers one of the traditional divisions of the mainland (with the exception of books 5 and 6, which are both devoted to Elis and Olympia) and the places within those territories are linked by a complex series of itineraries that tend to radiate out from central locations. Despite its structural coherence, internal references make clear that the Periegesis was composed not in one sitting but over a long period that extended, at a minimum, from the early 160s to the mid-​170s ce (Bowie 2001). Pausanias attests to his own presence at many of the sites he writes about, and archaeological research has made it clear that the vast majority of his assertions about what there was to see in Greece were based on his own eyewitness experience.

358   Literature and Culture For the places he visits, Pausanias offers descriptions of buildings, temples, statues, and other things that he deems “worth seeing.” For modern readers who are not passionately interested in ancient Greek material culture (and even for many who are), this can make reading the Periegesis from cover to cover a bit of a slog. Large stretches of the work resemble this excerpt from Pausanias’s description of the central forum of Corinth, with catalogs of monuments listed in the order one might see them on a stroll through the city (2.2.8): There is also a temple of Tyche; upright statue of Parian stone. And beside it is a shrine for all the gods. Nearby a fountain has been constructed, and a bronze Poseidon is on it and a dolphin under the feet of the Poseidon spouting water. And an Apollo with the surname Klarios is in bronze and there is a statue of Aphrodite sculpted by Hermogenes of Kythera.

Such tracts of colorless prose have tried the patience even of some of Pausanias’s most devoted modern students, including J. G. Frazer, who lamented that this sort of thing might cause the ordinary reader “to yawn  .  .  .  and shut up the book” (Frazer 1898, 1:xxxiv). At first glance nothing could be further from the rhetorical panache and literary showmanship that are the stereotypical hallmarks of Second Sophistic writing. Yet the existence of such contemporary texts as Athenaeus’s Deipnosophistae and Aelian’s Varia Historia suggests that there was an audience for works that that offered generous helpings of punctilious detail (Arafat 2000). In any case, there is much more to the Periegesis than spare catalogs of temples and statues. Pausanias also produces a considerable amount of historical and mythographical information related to places and monuments that he visits. The amount of text devoted to sights and narratives, or, to use Pausanias’s own terms (1.39.3), theôrêmata and logoi, is roughly equal (Akujärvi 2005, 182–​187), giving rise to the question of whether it is better to think of Pausanias’s account as a topography with extended historical supplementations or a history arranged topographically rather than chronologically. As an eyewitness account of what there was to see in Greece in the second century ce, the Periegesis has been of inestimable value to modern scholars, particularly to archaeologists, who have come to rely on the work as a treasure map for the discovery and identification of ancient monuments. Pausanias’s usefulness has ironically contributed to the tardiness of his appreciation as a denizen of the cultural landscape in which he operated. Archaeologists and philologists alike have tended to think of him primarily as a sedulous collector of accurate information whose intellectual pretensions and literary aspirations, such as they are, could be safely disregarded (Elsner 2010; Hutton 2005, 20–​29). An additional inducement to such an attitude is the superficial similarity of the Periegesis to modern travel guides, a resemblance that has earned for the Periegesis the nickname of “Ancient Baedekers” (Casson 1974, 292–​299; Habicht 1998, 21–​23), with the concomitant assumption that such works are utilitarian and subliterary. This assumption does little more than beg important questions about Pausanias’s methods and aspirations (Pretzler 2007, 45).

Pausanias   359 In discussing Pausanias’s aims we are hindered by the fact that the author himself offers us little guidance on the topic. While Pausanias frequently expresses his views on other subjects, such statements as he makes about the intent of his work are general and open to varying interpretations. Most famously, in book 1 he refers in passing to his intention of “pursuing all things Greek in like fashion” (πάντα ὁμοίως ἐπεξιόντα τὰ Ἑλληνικά: 1.26.4). This phrase has been interpreted as an unfulfilled promise to write topographical accounts of all the Greek lands, but it is probably better understood as a somewhat tautologous undertaking to deal with all the Greek matters that his prospective audience would likely find interesting. The fact that the phrase is also a deliberate echo of Herodotus’s famous promise near the beginning of his Histories to “pursue in like fashion” cities great and small (1.5) provides insight into how Pausanias views his relationship to his subject matter and his predecessors, but that insight is more allusive than explicit. In the absence of a specific authorial statement of purpose, modern scholars have come to divergent conclusions about Pausanias. Those who prefer to see in Pausanias a diligent if uninspired antiquarian can find plenty to support their view in the text. Those who wish to see him as an active participant in the self-​conscious urbanities of the Second Sophistic can find evidence if they look for it, particularly since the latter often involves multiple levels of authorial role-​playing in which a “guileless and enthusiastic antiquities buff ” could be as much a pose as any other. Given the state of the evidence, neither hypothesis is susceptible to proof, yet since we are dealing with an educated author from western Anatolia of the same general period as Lucian, Arrian, Athenaeus, and Longus, the former cannot be taken for granted as the default hypothesis. A basic question to ask regarding Pausanias and his contemporaries is whether any of them were aware of his work. Apart from a single citation in Aelian (VH 12.61), which is often rejected as an interpolation, there are no explicit citations of the Periegesis in the preserved literature until we get to Stephanus of Byzantium in the sixth century ce (Diller 1956). This silence has given rise to the suggestion that Pausanias “failed to find the audience he hoped for” (Habicht 1998, 22), but if the measure of an author’s importance were the number of times s/​he was cited by name in his own era, then few authors of the period of the Second Sophistic would be considered noteworthy. Possible traces of Pausanias’s influence have been found in the works of numerous near-​contemporary authors including Athenaeus, Lucian, Philostratus, Athenagoras of Athens, Longus, and Pollux.1 In most cases the material that the authors are alleged to have taken from Pausanias is factual information about sites and artifacts. The possible reference in Longus stands out, however, in that it would be a stylistic rather than an informational borrowing. Bowie (2001, 30–​31), who suggested this possible connection, compares the wording and imagery of Longus’s description of an epiphany of Pan (2.25.3) to Pausanias’s description of portents that occur when a band of Gaulish marauders approach Delphi (10.23.1–​7). If there is validity to this parallel, it suggests that at least one writer of Pausanias’s own era not only read his work, but appreciated it as a model for evocative narrative. In the final analysis, however, the paucity of references in the works of authors who dealt deeply with the sort of information that Pausanias

360   Literature and Culture had to offer, such as Athenaeus, Aelian, and the lexicographers, suggests that even if the Periegesis was known in some circles it was not considered an indispensible part of many libraries. Nevertheless, the Periegesis exhibits enough commonalities with the literature of the period that it is hard to maintain that Pausanias was alien to the general ethos of the Second Sophistic. One area in which Pausanias is often associated with his contemporaries is in his attitude toward the past. The pepaideumenoi of the Roman empire displayed little interest in recent history in their literature and oratory, favoring instead the distant glories of the Greece’s bygone heyday. Similarly, Pausanias’s choice of subject matter is slanted toward antiquity: he describes few structures, monuments, or historical events more recent than about 150 bce. The image of Greece he provides is thus in many respects the Greece that the elite of his day were interested in (Bowie, 1996), and even if the Periegesis was not meant as a travel guide for the increasing numbers of educated tourists who were coming to Greece (Galli 2005), such as those we meet in Plutarch’s essay On the Delphic Oracle, one can easily imagine the work being read and appreciated by such travelers. The Periegesis may also have had a message for the people in the cities the text describes. Pointing to the contemporary prevalence of competition among the Greek city-​states for prominence as lieux de memoire, Frateantonio (2009) has suggested that the text may have been designed as a contribution or response to such debates. At the same time, there are some ways in which Pausanias’s attitude toward the past is atypical. Auberger (2011) has recently noted that Pausanias does not seem as interested as some of his contemporaries in idealizing Greece’s classical period, and particularly the classical period of Athens. In Pausanias’s reckoning Athens is only one of several important places in Greece, and while he hardly ignores classical artifacts and histories, he spends as much if not more of his efforts on the preclassical and Hellenistic periods (Akujärvi 2005, 182–​192). In part the attention Pausanias pays to less familiar periods seems to be precisely because they are less familiar; he avoids rehashing parts of Greek history that were well known from the texts of Herodotus and Thucydides, and instead pursues stories that were not common knowledge even to an educated readership. For instance, in his first book, before launching on a series of miniature biographies on Hellenistic kings, Pausanias claims that he is doing so because of the general ignorance of the period in his time (1.6.1). Regardless of whether this is a fair assessment of the historical knowledge of his contemporaries (Ameling 1996, 134; Bowie 1996, 211–​213), it does suggest at least that Pausanias was aware of—​and reacted to—​ideologies about the past that were common in his era. Another way in which Pausanias displays a distinct historical perspective is in his insistence on portraying Greece’s monuments not as they were in their glory days, but as they actually were in his own time. Pausanias does nothing to disguise the fact that Greece had suffered much in the centuries that preceded his own. His itineraries visit many deserted towns and shrines, and he reports on many temples that had lost their roofs or cult statues to decay or depredation. One plausible suggestion is that Pausanias intended his work as a corrective to the idealization of Greece that was common in

Pausanias   361 Greek oratory of the period (Akujärvi 2005, 296–​306), but Porter (2001) has also noted that the quasi-​mystical sense of communion with a glorious past that is imparted by Pausanias’s ruins bears a resemblance to the way the author of On the Sublime attempts to communicate the essence of sublimity through fragmentary quotations of classical masters. Pausanias’s onsite experience involves him with sources that few historiographers of the time seem to have bothered with, including oral sources (Pretzler 2005) and inscriptions. Pausanias quotes and refers to nearly 200 inscriptions, and in the handful of cases where we can check his readings against the surviving stones he seems to be generally accurate (Habicht 1998, 64–​94; Zizza 2006). When it comes to the writing of narrative history, however, Pausanias is not always as careful. Like many in the period, Pausanias tends to employ historical accounts more as vehicles for moralistic rhetoric than as a means of communicating accurate information. His histories of Hellenistic kings, for instance, contain a number of inaccuracies and focus on the titillating topics of palace intrigue and sexual indiscretion (Hutton 2005, 275–​295). Despite Pausanias’s claim to be introducing something new with this series of brief biographies, Hellenistic monarchs are put to much the same use by Lucian in Icaromenippus, where they serve as prime examples of the earthly corruption and decadence that Menippus gazes down on from the air (15). Of Pausanias’s two longest historical narratives, his account of the Achaean War is replete with moralistic scorn for the corrupt Achaean leaders who brought the wrath of Rome down on Greece, and it also seems to have been composed with only a moderate concern for accuracy (Gruen 1976). For his account of the Messenian Wars in book 4, he names as his sources Douris of Samos and the epic poet Rhianos (4.6.6). This source citation recalls, and is perhaps modeled on, Arrian’s citation of Ptolemy and Aristoboulus in the prologue of the Anabasis, but the particular sources named betray a higher level of historiographical naiveté or playfulness. The narrative itself is a rollicking mixture of Thucydidean battle-​orders, epic heroism, divine epiphanies, and even a bit of novelistic adventure and romance (Auberger 1992; Hutton 2010). One gets the sense upon reading it that Pausanias is less concerned with the facts of the matter than he is with constructing an entertaining tour-​de-​force to compensate for the relative dearth of noteworthy monuments to talk about in Messenia (Alcock 2001). Despite that, the Messenian narrative is not merely random entertainment. Pausanias’s account of the Messenians’ honorable loss and subsequent recovery of freedom also provides stark counterpoise to the Greeks’ dishonorable (and unredeemed) loss of freedom following the Achaean War, as narrated in book 7. The fact that Pausanias’s two longest historical narratives are linked thematically, and are placed on opposite sides of the central books devoted to the preeminently pan-​Hellenic site of Olympia (books 5 and 6) suggests that the author has more of a flair for the rhetorical and the dramatic than he is normally given credit for (Hutton 2010). In addition to his predilection for antiquity, Pausanias also exhibits a distinct preference for religious monuments and artifacts, but what particularly attracts his notice are elements of the traditional religions of the Greeks that existed in pre-​Roman

362   Literature and Culture times (Pirenne-​Delforge 2008). This becomes clear, for example, in his description of Corinth when he notes, with evident disapproval, that the current-​day Roman colonists in Corinth do not conduct cult ceremonies for Medea’s children in the traditional manner (2.3.7). Pausanias’s religious interests are inseparable from his archaism; religion for him was one thing that gave the golden-​age Greeks their distinctive identity. In this and other areas, it is clear that his notion of what “all things Greek” consists of is not homogeneous. He records the often discordant local traditions and cult practices in the places he visits (Jost 2006), and on more than one occasion he criticizes local informants when they present him with a commonly known version of a myth in place of what he feels to be the genuine local tradition (e.g., 2.20.5). The Periegesis exhibits what seems to be a desire on the author’s part to resist the homogenization of Greek traditions that accompanied the integration of Hellenism within the cosmopolitan culture of the empire. In addition to describing shrines, temples, and cult statues, Pausanias portrays himself as a participant in some of the cults that he visits. He frequently refuses to write about a topic in deference to religious taboos (Foccardi 1987), and he presents the travels he undertakes as a sort of rite de passage that brings him to a deeper understanding of Greek religious traditions (Veyne 1988, 95–​102). Nearly three-​quarters of the way through the Periegesis, he makes the following statement after recounting a local Arcadian tradition about the birth of Poseidon (8.8.3): When I began my account I tended to attribute these stories of the Greeks to simple-​ mindedness, but when I came to Arcadian matters I started adopting the following attitude toward them: Those of the Greeks who were considered wise said what they had to say not directly but through riddles, and I supposed the things said about Kronos to be some kind of Greek wisdom. When it comes to things pertaining to the gods I will employ what is said.

The personal religious devotion that Pausanias attests to and the attitudinal transformation he claims as a result of his travels have led some to compare the Periegesis to pilgrimage literature (Elsner 1992; Rutherford 2001). Others have objected to this characterization (Arafat 1996, 10; Swain 1996, 342), but the argument hinges more on the definition of “pilgrimage” than it does on particular phenomena in Pausanias’s text. A work that reflects the personal religious experience of the author is by no means out of place in the Second Sophistic. What is distinctive about Pausanias is the resolute conservatism and archaism of his religious persona. As is typical of the age he professes a particular reverence for mystery religions, but among mysteries his devotions are mostly confined to those of Demeter and related figures from the traditional Greek pantheon (Pirenne-​Delforge 2008, 291–​346). He occasionally acknowledges the existence of newer cults such as those of Isis and Serapis, but by and large imported cults of postclassical vintage are poorly represented in his text: the Isis shrine of Kenchreai that features in the last book of Apuleius’s Metamorphoses, for instance, merits only the briefest of acknowledgments in Pausanias’s description of the port (2.2.3). One innovation in

Pausanias   363 the religious life of Greece toward which Pausanias exhibits not just disregard but disdain is the worship of deified Roman emperors, which falls afoul not only of Pausanias’s preference for the genuinely ancient but also of the moralizing sentiment he expresses (8.2.5) that in his own age the gap between divine and human had grown too great to be bridged (Pirenne-​Delforge 2008, 148–​171). In general, to judge by the frequent listing of imperial-​cult priesthoods in their epitaphs and honorary inscriptions, the elite of the Sophistic era viewed participation in the cult as a means of acquiring social capital, While few preserved authors of the period make mention of their own advancement in this sphere, no author, apart from the occasional Christian polemicist, expresses as openly hostile an attitude toward the cult as Pausanias does. This is only one of many instances in which Pausanias takes a distinctive stand on the interactions between Roman and Greek culture. Passages such as his glowing praises of Hadrian (1.5.5) and the Antonines (8.43.3–​6) make it difficult to cast him as subversive or “anti-​Roman,” but there are times when he seems distinctly less interested than many of his contemporaries in embracing an amalgamation of the two cultures (Swain 1996, 330–​356). Another area in which Pausanias both resembles and diverges from his contemporaries is in his penchant for description. Rhetorical training of the period included exercises in ekphrasis, which could include descriptions of visible objects like the buildings and artworks that occupy much of Pausanias’s text, and a number of works of the period, such as the Imagines of Lucian and Philostratus, clearly show the effects of that training. Yet despite the sheer mass of things that Pausanias describes, there is relatively little in his text that can be compared to the sort of rhetorical and emotionally effusive ekphrasis that these works engage in (Snodgrass 2001). Pausanias’s descriptions of artworks generally focus on objective features such as the pose of a statue (e.g., standing or seated) and the identity of the artist. Even when Pausanias describes a work of art in great detail, as with the paintings of Polygnotus at Delphi (10.25.1–​10.31.12), his comments are confined largely to the identification of the figures depicted. Only rarely does Pausanias record his own subjective response to an artwork or monument. Rather than as sources of aesthetic sensations or as springboards for rhetorical showmanship, Pausanias seems to value monuments as tangible points of contact between the physical world and the world of mythical and historical narrative. Given Pausanias’s affinity for Herodotus (see below), it would not be too much of a stretch to suggest that the Periegesis was Pausanias’s attempt to recreate on a Greece-​wide scale the effect that Herodotus achieves when he corroborates his narratives of Gyges and Croesus by describing the exact appearance and position of the kings’ offerings that were still on display at Delphi in his time (1.14.1–​3; 1.50–​51). There are numerous works of the period that express a kindred sensibility. For instance, many of Philostratus’s biographies of the sophists are rounded out with a description of the location of the sophists’ tombs and other relevant monuments (e.g., VS 518, 526), and two of the most Pausanias-​ like passages in the surviving literature come at the beginnings of novels of the era: in Daphnis and Chloe, the narrator casts himself as a visitor to Lesbos who seeks out local interpreters to explain a painting he sees in a shrine of the nymphs; and in Leucippe and Cleitophon the author-​narrator begins by describing a painting of the abduction of

364   Literature and Culture Europa he sees while touring the shrines of Sidon. In the two examples from the novels, there is much more of the evocative detail and affective response of canonical ekphrasis than one normally finds in Pausanias, but the use of physical monuments as means of access to the universe of logos and mythos is a distinctive similarity. If we look to the style and language of Pausanias’s work, we find some of the most tantalizing connections to his contemporaries and to his predecessors. No surviving work from antiquity is quite like Pausanias’s. We know of a number of other works entitled periegesis, but these exhibit such a wide variety of forms that the amount of light they shed on Pausanias’s generic affinities is limited. For instance, one of the extant examples from Pausanias’s own era is the Periegesis of the known world by Dionysius “the Periegete,” a poem consisting of over 1100 hexameters with information largely derived from previous geographical texts. A number of fragmentary prose texts, dating mostly to the Hellenistic period, seem more similar to Pausanias’s, such as those of Polemon of Ilion and Heliodorus of Athens (Bischoff 1938). These share a number of characteristics with Pausanias, including a focus on visible antiquities, an antiquarian rather than an aesthetic interest in artworks, and a fondness for associating logoi with monuments. Pausanias differs from these predecessors in several ways: first, there is no evidence that any of these authors attempted to cover an area as large as “Greece” in a single work. Second there is no evidence that they anticipated Pausanias’s characteristic method for organizing his copious data along sequential itineraries, a tactic that seems more akin to the coastal catalogs typical of periplous (“circumnavigation”) texts. Finally, while the earlier periegetes do attach historical and mythical narrative to the monuments they describe, there is no evidence that any of them went to the lengths that Pausanias does in even some of his shorter narratives, to say nothing of his lengthy accounts of the Messenian and Achaean wars (Hutton 2005, 247–​265). One plausible explanation for the shaping of Pausanias’s text is that he took the idea of the Hellenistic periegesis, lent it some of the territorial ambition of geographies such as Strabo’s, and crafted an organizational principle based partly on a desire to replicate the experience an actual traveler. If this scenario is anything like the truth, we can see Pausanias as an active participant in one element of the literary ethos of the period of the Second Sophistic: the deliberate and creative manipulation of the boundaries of established genres (Whitmarsh 2001, 71–​87). On more solid ground is Pausanias’s energetic embrace of another important element of Second Sophistic discourse, the creative mimesis of canonical authors of the past. Chief among the models whom Pausanias pays homage to in his writing is Herodotus (Hutton 2005, 190–​213; Strid 1976). Like Pausanias, Herodotus writes from firsthand knowledge about places to which he traveled, and combines historical accounts with detailed descriptions of monuments and social customs. Pausanias clues his readers in to this affinity with homages of various sorts. We have already noted the echo of Herodotus in Pausanias’s quasi-​programmatic promise to “pursue all things Greek in like fashion.” (1.26.4; cf. Herodotus 1.5). In another such example, Pausanias adapts Herodotus’s description of his skeptical attitude toward his sources. After reporting what he feels to be dubious information about an Olympic athlete, Pausanias announces,

Pausanias   365 “While it is my duty to say what is said by the Greeks, I have no further duty to believe it all” (6.3.8: ἐμοὶ μὲν οὖν λέγειν μὲν τὰ ὑπὸ Ἑλλήνων λεγόμενα ἀνάγκη, πείθεσθαι δὲ πᾶσιν οὐκέτι ἀνάγκη). Compare Herodotus: “I am obliged to say what is said; I am not obliged to believe it at all (7.152: ἐγὼ δὲ ὀφείλω λέγειν τὰ λεγόμενα, πείθεσθαί γε μὲν οὐ παντάπασιν ὀφείλω). Despite such echoes, however, Pausanias’s style in toto would never be mistaken for Herodotean. As Frazer trenchantly observed (1898, 1:lxix): “a style that has less of the unruffled flow, the limpid clearness, the exquisite grace, the sweet simplicity of the Herodotean prose it might be hard to discover.” Pausanias’s text is full of phrases and manners of expression that recall other authors, including Thucydides, whose almost anti-​Herodotean opaqueness Pausanias frequently seems eager to emulate (Strid 1976, 30–​33, etc.). One figure of speech that is not particularly common in Herodotus is hyperbaton, the splitting of sentence elements normally found together, of which multiple examples can usually be found in any given section of Pausanias’s text. For instance, at one point Pausanias comments (as he often does) on the mutability of human fortune, saying ἄνδρα δὲ συμφορῶν ἀεὶ στάντα ἐκτὸς ἢ τὰ πάντα οὐρίῳ ναῦν χρησαμένην πνεύματι οὐκ ἔστιν ὅπως δυνησόμεθα ἐξευρεῖν (8.24.14, with elements involved in hyperbaton underlined). It is very difficult to communicate the effect of hyperbaton in English, where more rigid rules of word order can make even slight deviations from the norm seem far more bizarre than their Greek counterparts, but this is something like saying, “there is no way we will be able to find a man always free from difficulties being [instead of ‘being free from difficulties’] or a ship a breeze in every case favorable enjoying [instead of ‘a ship enjoying a breeze that is favorable in every case’].” In the nineteenth century, Augustus Boeckh suggested, largely on the basis of the abundance of hyperbaton in both authors, that Pausanias was imitating the style of his countryman Hegesias of Magnesia, the notorious father of “Asianic” rhetoric (Boeckh 1874, 4:208–​212). This theory is generally out of favor nowadays, since apart from hyperbaton none of the stylistic singularities Hegesias was known for feature prominently in Pausanias’s work (Strid 1976), but if Pausanias’s mimesis of Herodotus consisted of borrowing a few diagnostic features and statements rather than wholesale imitation, it is by no means out of the question that he might have similarly pursued a partial and allusive mimesis of his Magnesian predecessor. Adding something to his style that was pertinent to his own identity as a native of Magnesia would not have been an unusual move in the Second Sophistic. The self-​conscious crafting of a unique voice that recalls the style of ancient masters associates Pausanias with the mainstream of Second Sophistic literature, although the particular choices that he makes in doing so are somewhat idiosyncratic. This is particularly the case if it is true that Hegesias is among his models, since the Asianism associated with Hegesias was considered the antithesis of the preferred Attic canon. Regardless of his relation to Hegesias, Pausanias’s stance on Atticism is interesting in itself (Hutton 2005, 181–​190). Pausanias’s lexicon is for the most part indistinguishable from that of a classical Attic prose author. In the realm of orthography, however, Pausanias eschews more than most authors of the period the distinctive classical Attic spellings of words like θάλασσα (Attic θάλαττα, “sea”) and ναός (Attic νεώς, “temple”).

366   Literature and Culture Many scholars of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, themselves weaned largely on Attic and Atticizing prose, considered Pausanias’s style bizarre and clumsy. Frazer, for instance, concludes his comparison of Herodotus and Pausanias as follows, “The sound of one is like the chiming of a silver bell; that of the other like the creaking of a corn-​ crake” (1898, 1:lxix). Yet whatever one thinks of Pausanias’s style, he maintains it with remarkable consistency throughout the work. Most of the features that modern readers have found unpleasant are surely there by design—​however unorthodox that design may be—​rather than by error or incompetence (Strid 1976, 103). Pausanias’s choice of Herodotus as a model is not without ambiguities as well. Herodotus, while admired for his mellifluous style, was also frequently criticized by authors of the period as a teller of tall tales, as in Lucian’s True Stories, where he is among those authors consigned to the Isle of the Damned for their deliberate falsehoods (2.31), or in Plutarch’s On the Malice of Herodotus, where mendacity is but one of many Herodotean faults that come under attack. Emulation of a model with the ambiguous reputation for accuracy of a Herodotus—​and literary role-​playing in general—​may seem inappropriate for a work that appears to have the delivery of accurate information as one of its goals, but there are some illuminative parallels from Pausanias’s own lifetime. Lucian’s On the Syrian Goddess and Arrian’s Indika are both written in Herodotean Ionic and both, particularly the latter, seem intended at least in part to purvey genuine information. Another work of Arrian’s, his Periplous of the Black Sea, provides, along with echoes of Xenophon’s Anabasis, a topographical description of the seacoast cast in the format of an epistle to Hadrian from Arrian in his role as proconsul. Also worth mentioning in this regard is the Dionysius’s hexameter periegesis, which, despite its obvious poetic stylizations, served as a textbook of geography for centuries, Like Pausanias, all of these texts do the work of topography, geography, ethnography, and history, but pursue these sober topics with a learned literary mannerism typical of the age. In sum, while it may be difficult to see Pausanias as a wholly typical representative of the intellectual and literary trends commonly associated with the term “Second Sophistic,” there are a number of aspects of his work that make it difficult to imagine him operating in any other period. All attempts at describing Pausanias’s personality should be taken with several grains of salt, but it is tempting to see in him someone whose investment in the contemporary ethos of archaism, religion, and literary antiquarianism was so strong that it led him to devote many years of travel and study in search of the realities behind Hellenism, and what he discovered ended up giving him a viewpoint on these and other subjects that was distinct from those of his contemporaries who knew of Greece only from books.2

Further Reading The most authoritative edition of the Greek text is the Teubner edition of Rocha-​Pereira (1989–​ 1990), which takes account of the seminal work on the manuscripts by Diller (1957). The most accessible English translation of the Periegesis is the Penguin edition by Peter Levi,

Pausanias   367 which is generally readable, but takes numerous liberties with the text. More reliable, if less jaunty, are the translations of W. H. S. Jones and H. A. Ormerod in the Loeb Classical Library, which are also available online through the Perseus Digital Library (http://​www. perseus.tufts.edu). The best up-​to-​date introduction to Pausanias in English is Pretzler 2007, and still fundamental is the Pauly-​Wissowa article (in German) by Regenbogen (1956). The only complete commentary in English remains that of Frazer (1898), which is monumental but outdated in many respects. More recently teams of scholars writing in Italian (Musti, Beschi, Maddoli, Moggi, Torelli, et al. 1983–​2003) and French (Casevitz, Auberger, Jacquemin, Jost, Pouilloux, et al. 1992–​2005), have produced commentaries for most (but not all) of the books. The recent renaissance in Pausanias studies began in the 1980s, when Habicht (1998) made Pausanias the subject of his Sather Lectures at Berkeley and Veyne (1988) devoted a chapter to Pausanias in his book Did the Greeks Believe in Their Myths? In addition to numerous individual articles, subsequent decades have seen the publication of three important essay collections, one on Pausanias as historian (Bingen 1996), one by scholars involved in the French and Italian commentary projects (Knoepfler and Piérart 2001), and one including a number of scholars from other fields, attesting to the potential of fruitful dialogue between Pausanias and other areas of inquiry (Alcock, Cherry, and Elsner 2001). Recent monographs include Arafat 1996, on Pausanias’s treatment of artworks; Hutton 2005 on matters of structure and style; Akujärvi 2005, who presents a thorough narratological analysis; Zizza 2006 on Pausanias’s use of inscriptions; Pirenne-​Delforge 2008 on Pausanias and religion; Frateantonio 2009 on Pausanias’s response to contemporary rivalry among Greek city-​states; and Juul 2010 on oracular tales in the text. There is a special issue of the Classical Receptions Journal (2010: 2.2) devoted to reception studies.

Bibliography Akujärvi, J. 2005. Researcher, Traveller, Narrator: Studies in Pausanias’ “Periegesis”. Lund. Alcock, S.  E. 2001. “The Peculiar Book IV and the Problem of the Messenian Past.” In Pausanias: Travel and Memory in Roman Greece, edited by S. E. Alcock, J. F. Cherry, and J. Elsner, 142–​166. Oxford. Alcock, S. E., J. F. Cherry, and J. Elsner, eds. 2001. Pausanias: Travel and Memory in Roman Greece. Oxford. Ameling, W. 1996. “Pausanias und die hellenistischen Geschichte.” In Pausanias Historien, edited by J. Bingen, 117–​160. Fondation Hardt Entretiens sur l’Antiquité Classique 41. Geneva. Arafat, K. 1996. Pausanias’ Greece: Ancient Artists and Roman Rulers. Cambridge. Arafat, K. 2000. “The Recalcitrant Mass:  Athenaeus and Pausanias.” In Athenaeus and His World: Reading Greek Culture in the Roman Empire, edited by D. Braund and J. Wilkins, 191–​202. Exeter. Auberger, J. 1992. “Pausanias romancier? Le témoinage du livre IV.” DHA 18: 187–​197. Auberger, J. 2011. “Pausanias le Périégète et la Seconde Sophistique.” In Perceptions of the Second Sophistic and Its Times, edited by T. Schmidt and P. Fleury, 133–​145. Toronto. Bingen, J., ed. 1996. Pausanias Historien. Fondation Hardt Entretiens sur l’Antiquité Classique 41. Geneva. Bischoff, E. 1938. “Perieget.” In Realencyclopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft. 19: 725–​742.

368   Literature and Culture Boeckh, A. 1874, Gesammelte kleine Schriften. Leipzig. Bowie, E. L. 1996. “Past and Present in Pausanias.” In Pausanias Historien, edited by J. Bingen, 207–​230. Fondation Hardt Entretiens sur l’Antiquité Classique 41. Geneva. Bowie, E. L. 2001. “Inspiration and Aspiration: Date, Genre, and Readership.” In Pausanias: Travel and Memory in Roman Greece, edited by S. E. Alcock, J. F. Cherry, and J. Elsner, 21–​32. Oxford. Casevitz, M., J. Auberger, A. Jacquemin, M. Jost, Y. Lafond, et al., eds. 1992–​2005. Pausanias: Description de la Grèce. 6 vols. Paris. Casson, L. 1974. Travel in the Ancient World. London. Dickey, M. 1997. “Philostratus and Pindar’s Eighth Paean.” BASP 34: 11–​20. Diller, A. 1955. “The Authors Named Pausanias.” TAPA 86: 268–​279. Diller, A. 1956. “Pausanias in the Middle Ages.” TAPA 87: 84–​97. Diller, A. 1957. “The Manuscripts of Pausanias.” TAPA 88: 169–​188. Elsner, J. 1992. “Pausanias: A Greek Pilgrim in the Roman World.” P&P 135: 3–​29. Elsner, J. 2010. “Picturesque and Sublime: Impacts of Pausanias in Late-​Eighteenth-​and Early-​ Nineteenth-​Century Britain.” Classical Receptions Journal 2: 219–​253. Foccardi, D. 1987. “Religious Silence and Reticence in Pausanias.” In The Regions of Silence. Studies in the Difficulty of Communicating, edited by M. Ciani, 67–​113. Amsterdam. Frateantonio, C. 2009. Religion und Städtekonkurrenz: Zum politischen und kulturellen Kontext von Pausanias’ Periegese. Berlin. Frazer, J. 1898. Pausanias’s Description of Greece. 6 vols. London. Galli, M. 2005. “Pilgrimage as Elite Habitus: Educated Pilgrims in Sacred Landscape during the Second Sophistic.” In Pilgrimage in Graeco-​Roman and Early Christian Antiquity: Seeing the Gods, edited by J. Elsner and I. Rutherford, 253–​290. Oxford. Gruen, E.S. 1976. “The Origin of the Achaean War.” JHS 96: 46-​69. Habicht, C. 1998. Pausanias’ Guide to Ancient Greece. 2nd ed. Berkeley, CA. Hanell, K. 1938. “Phaidryntes.” RE 19: 1559–​1560. Harloe, K. 2010. “Pausanias as Historian in Wincklemann’s History.” Classical Receptions Journal 2: 174–​196. Hutton, W. 2005. Describing Greece: Landscape and Literature in the “Periegesis” of Pausanias. Cambridge. Hutton, W. 2010. “Pausanias and the Mysteries of Hellas.” TAPA 140: 423–​459. Jost, M. 2006. “Unité et diversité: La Grèce de Pausanias.” Rev. Ét. Grec. 119: 568–​587. Juul, L. O. 2010. Oracular Tales in Pausanias. Odense. Knoepfler, D., and M. Piérart. 2001. Éditer, traduire, commenter Pausanias en l’an 2000. Actes du Colloque de Neuchâtel et de Fribourg, 18–​22 September 1998. Geneva. Lightfoot, J. L., ed. 2003. Lucian, “On the Syrian Goddess”. Oxford. Musti, D., L. Beschi, M. Torelli, G. Maddoli, M. Moggi, et al., eds. 1982–​2003. Pausania: Guida della Grecia. 8 vols. Milan. Pirenne-​Delforge, V. 2008. Retour à la source: Pausanias et la religion grecque. Liège. Porter, J.  I. 2001. “Ideals and Ruins:  Pausanias, Longinus, and the Second Sophistic.” In Pausanias: Travel and Memory in Roman Greece, edited by S. E. Alcock, J. F. Cherry, and J. Elsner, 63–​92. Oxford. Pretzler, M. 2005. “Pausanias and the Oral Tradition.” CQ 55: 235–​249. Pretzler, M. 2007. Pausanias: Travel Writing in Ancint Greece. London. Regenbogen, O. 1956. “Pausanias.” RE Supplement 8: 1008–​1097. Rocha-​Pereira, M.-​H. 1989–​1990. Pausaniae Graeciae Descriptio. 3 vols. 2nd ed. Leipzig.

Pausanias   369 Rutherford, I. 2001. “Tourism and the Sacred:  Pausanias and the Traditions of Greek Pilgrimage.” In Pausanias: Travel and Memory in Roman Greece, edited by S. E. Alcock, J. F. Cherry, and J. Elsner, 40–​52. Oxford. Snodgrass, A. 2001. “Pausanias and the Chest of Kypselos.” In Pausanias: Travel and Memory in Roman Greece, edited by S. E. Alcock, J. F. Cherry, and J. Elsner, 127–​153. Oxford. Snodgrass, A. 2003. “Another Early Reader of Pausanias?” JHS 123: 187–​189. Strid, O. 1976. Über Sprache und Stil des Peregeten Pausanias. Uppsala. Swain, S. 1996. Hellenism and Empire: Language, Classicism, and Power in the Greek World, ad 50–​250. Oxford. Veyne, P. 1988. Did the Greeks Believe in their Myths? An Essay on the Constitutive Imagination. Translated by P. Wissing. Chicago. Whitmarsh, T. 2001. Greek Literature and the Roman Empire: The Politics of Imitation. Oxford. Zizza, C. 2006. Le iscrizioni nella Periegesi di Pausania. Commento ai testi epigrafici. Pisa.

Chapter 24

Gale n Susan P. Mattern

24.1  Galen and Greek Identity Life.  Like other Greeks of his and previous eras, Galen identified closely with his city, the great city of Pergamum. No matter that he lived in Rome for decades; the Roman province of Asia was still “our” (sc. “my”) land. Pergamum was at that time renowned not only for its spectacular public architecture and sculpture, and for its library (which had rivaled that of Alexandria until the century previously, when Antony, notoriously, donated its 200,000 scrolls to the Egyptian collection), but also for Asclepius, god of medicine, whose temple precinct underwent massive renovation in Galen’s youth and was heavily patronized by the great sophist Aelius Aristides. Galen was born at Pergamum in September, around the equinox, in 129 ce, and received his early education there. Beginning in his late teens, after his father’s death, he left to study medicine at Smyrna and other cities around the eastern Mediterranean, finally spending four or more years at Alexandria, the most prestigious center of medical education ever since the legendary Herophilus and, probably, Erasistratus had performed human dissections and vivisections there. He returned to Pergamum in 157, where for four years he held the position of physician to the gladiators, under the supervision of the city’s chief priest (archiereus). In 161, he departed for Rome, where he lived for five years before returning to Pergamum at the outbreak of the cataclysm he calls the “Great Plague.” But the emperors Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus recalled him, and he spent the winter of 168–​169 treating plague victims among the army gathered at Aquileia (near the Slovenian border today), before returning to Italy. He lived and practiced for the rest of his life mostly in the city of Rome, though he also owned property in Campania. A fire that broke out near the Temple of Peace in 192 destroyed some of his original works, his recipe collections, and much of his private collection of manuscripts. By the time he died, probably in 216 or 217 at the age of eighty-​seven, he had authored about 370 treatises, of which about 125 survive in some form.

372   Literature and Culture City and Country. Galen came from a professional family. His father, Nicon, and also his grandfather were architects. His great-​grandfather was a geometer. But Galen’s family also owned land, and in middle age Galen’s father retired to his estate in the country, where he died; Galen inherited his property. His class identity as a landowner who did not need to work for money was important to him throughout his life. His values were, however, among other qualities, profoundly urban. Galen did not, like some Roman authors or like his own father, who performed rudimentary biological experiments on crop seeds (De alim. facult. 1.37, 6.552–​553K), style himself an expert on agriculture or romanticize life in the countryside. While he prided himself on his ability to talk to peasants and treat their illnesses even in the difficult and limited environment of the countryside, and on his knowledge of dialect and local dietary traditions among peasants, Galen identifies with the urban half of an urban-​rural divide in which the countryside is an alien place. It is characterized by poverty, isolation, and lack of the resources and amenities of civilized life; the peasant’s life is one of sickle-​wounds, snakebite, famine, and daily hard work, analog and also opposite to the urban resident’s program of exercise in the gymnasium. The Gymnasium.  This latter—​gymnastic exercise, what Galen calls gymnasia—​he considered an essential part of a healthy lifestyle. That is, his vision of the medically correct life is that of an urban male of the leisured class or, to a lesser extent, the male slaves in such a household. His treatise On Matters of Health instructs readers on the optimal way of life over the lifespan, from infancy to old age. Beginning at age fourteen, exercise in the gymnasium is a critical part of the hypothetical male subject’s routine, discussed at great length. Galen and other Greeks perceived wrestling as the gymnastic exercise par excellence. He describes patients injured while wrestling, and one severe wrestling injury (an acromio-​clavicular joint displacement) he incurred himself at age thirty-​four (In Hipp. Artic. comment. 1.61, 18a.401–​404K). One of his lengthiest and most literary case histories is set partly in a “gymnasium,” possibly the Baths of Trajan or another of Rome’s great bathing complexes (De meth. med. 10.3, 10.671–​678K). Galen calls the Baths of Trajan the “gymnasium of Trajan,” as he and other sources also called Nero’s baths the “gymnasium of Nero,” not unreasonably interpreting Roman imperial baths, with their palaestras, libraries, lecture-​halls, gardens, and lavish decoration, as the equivalent of the Hellenic world’s most important civic and cultural institution.1 The gymnasium was the locus of the physical and intellectual education of upper-​class male adolescents and of the controlled violence that (mostly) replaced military service in the Hellenistic period and was fundamental to the idea of masculinity for that class. Galen’s Normative Patient.  Unlike the Roman bathing complexes with which Galen and other Greeks equated them, Greek gymnasia, of course, did not allow women and Galen’s ideal of gymnastic training did not apply to women, who play a marginal role in On Matters of Health and in his work generally. Galen’s normative or ideal patient reflects the Hellenic, urban, masculine, intellectual, and aristocratic values of the Second Sophistic. Case histories in which Galen portrays the character of his patient in some detail, and passages describing the ideal human temperament (or “mixture” of

Galen   373 humors and their qualities of hot, cold, wet, and dry) are especially revealing on this point. The type of patient Galen describes most often, relates to best, and seems to consider normative (the standard from which all others deviate), is a neaniskos, a male in the prime of life, of hot and dry temperament. Galen applies the word neaniskos to men between their early twenties and age forty or so; the hot, dry temperament is typical of this life stage, and is also the most masculine temperament, contrasting with the relatively cold, wet temperament of women. A youth of this type may be especially susceptible to the emotions of anger and “distress,” lupe, a concept Galen links to intellectual activity (phrontizein and related words). He exercises in the gymnasium and Galen may use the adjective “gymnastic” to describe him. There is clearly a class element to this characterization. Gymnastic exercise as a way of life was available only to urban patients and only to the leisured class or, to a lesser extent, their slaves. Galen’s On Matters of Health includes advice to the slaves of rich men and other urban residents too busy to implement his full program of gymnastic exercise (6.5, 6.405K). Peasants, living in the countryside, have no access to the gymnasium at all; and Galen sometimes discusses the distinction or equivalence between gymnastic exercise (gymnasia) and “work” (erga). In one passage he describes doing agricultural labor as a form of exercise while detained in the countryside, perhaps at his estate in Campania: “we were forced to split wood for the sake of exercise [ἕνεκα τοῦ γυμνάζεσθαι], and to throw barley into a mortar and crush and grind it, which every day people in the countryside were doing as work” (ἔργα, De san. tuenda 2.8, 6.133–​134K). Peasants are a marginal—​not normative—​category of human, along with women, children, eunuchs, and overdeveloped athletes. Urban slaves, on the other hand, may be difficult to distinguish medically from their masters. Some of Galen’s patients are highly educated intellectuals like himself— ​pepaideumenoi—​and these patients are most likely to be named in his stories (though Galen names few of his patients). They include Diodorus, a grammarian; Pausanias, a sophist; Eudemus, a philosopher, the subject of Galen’s longest case history and one of the patients to whom he refers most often; and Antipater, a physician. These patients tend to be men of mature age and obvious social prominence; and it is this class that includes the great rhetors, the “sophists,” of the Second Sophistic. Pausanias, whom Galen cured of nerve damage in one of his most famous stories, rates a paragraph in Philostratus’s Lives of the Sophists (VS 13). It is to this group that Galen clearly thinks he belongs.

24.2 Paideia “Sophists.”  On the one hand, Galen’s polemics against the people he calls “sophists” are vociferous and renowned. “Sophists” are arrogant, shameless purveyors of empty bombast and semantic quibbling, ignorant of facts and disdainful of experience, observation, and truth (von Staden 1997a, 34–​35). On the other hand, this

374   Literature and Culture should not be misinterpreted: Galen uses the word “sophists” very loosely, invoking its ancient pejorative sense and often applying it to his professional rivals; such “polemics against the ‘sophistry’ of rival ‘sophists’ ” (von Staden 1995, 50) were quite normal among the orators themselves. Galen could speak of individual “sophists,” such as Pausanias of Caesarea or Aelius Aristides, in neutral terms and without rancor, for example when they are his patients.2 The audience of intellectuals in his friend Boethus’s entourage includes two “sophists” (Hadrian of Tyre and Demetrius of Alexandria; De praecogn. 5, 14.628K), and Galen clearly valued the approval of this type of elite, educated person. The Liberal Arts.  Galen’s intellectual values were similar to those of the sophists, and typical of his time. He praised the arts (the technai) that he calls “rational” or “noble” (logikai, semai, kalai), among which he positioned medicine; other technai he places in this category include geometry, mathematics, astronomy, music, and philosophy, and also rhetoric, all of which he thought fundamental to the education of physicians or of any cultured person. He claims for Hippocrates an expertise in geometry, rhetoric, music, and astronomy; and excoriates the detested Thessalus, founder of the reductionist Methodist sect, as lacking education in these same disciplines, and as degrading medicine to the status of shoemaking or weaving.3 Here as always Galen reflects the profoundly elitist attitudes of his culture more generally; while medicine, geometry, and shoemaking are all technai, and for some purposes can be compared, the “noble” or “liberal” technai occupy a much higher plane. Medicine was not, in Galen’s view, a banausic craft to be learned by crude apprenticeship, though this is, in fact, how it was probably taught to most people calling themselves iatroi, many of whom, in Rome, were former slaves. Galen’s Early Education.  The medicine that Galen advocated followed the social model of learning of other elite disciplines, including rhetoric, and was available only to a very narrow aristocracy. In his effort to establish his credentials as a pepaideumenos and as an exemplary practitioner of his techne, Galen offers a fair amount of information about his own education. His father, Nicon the architect, whom he revered, home-​schooled Galen through his early teens in geometry, mathematics, arithmetic—​the disciplines of his profession—​and also in Greek, for his father’s command of the language was impeccable.4 At the age of fourteen, Nicon handed over his son to a handpicked contingent of philosophers for his further education, one from each of the major sects (Stoic, Platonist, Peripatetic, and Epicurean). Nicon himself, Galen tells us, was responsible for his early decision, followed faithfully, never to proclaim adherence to a particular sect. Galen transmits the names of his teachers’ teachers (some of whom, though not perhaps the teachers themselves, were very illustrious), thus laying claim to the intellectual pedigree that was an indispensable element of paideia.5 Galen continued to study philosophy and claimed an identity as a philosopher for the rest of his life, arguing that the best physician is also a philosopher (the title of one of his treatises, in which Hippocrates serves as a model of the ideal) and boasting of his reputation in that discipline. Galen published many philosophical works, including a treatise in fifteen books on logical

Galen   375 proof, now lost; commentaries on works of Plato and Aristotle; and treatises on ethics, some of which survive. He wrote a treatise On the Doctrines of Hippocrates and Plato, demonstrating the harmony of their views against those of other, later traditions with which Galen disagreed, notably Stoicism. He claimed renown as a philosopher as well as a physician among his contemporaries (Praecog. 2, 14.608K), and this may be correct (Nutton 1984). Galen would probably have continued along this path, but when he was sixteen, Nicon had a series of dreams in which a god—​no doubt Asclepius, Pergamum’s most illustrious deity, though Galen does not say this—​convinced him to change course: “exhorted by distinct dreams, he had me study medicine together with philosophy;” that is, from that point forward, Galen would study both.6 Although Galen wrote very little—​almost nothing that survives—​from the years before his migration to Rome, he mentions a number of his medical teachers by name, and also the names of their teachers, and of the intellectual traditions in which they stood. His teachers represented all of the schools or “sects” that Galen would later identify as important (these are discussed in more detail below), except for the Methodists, for whom he would proclaim disdain all his life. One of Galen’s earliest teachers, still at Pergamum, was Aeschrion, an Empiricist (De simpl. medicament. temp. 11.1.34, 12.356–​357K). Galen also mentions a Hippocratic teacher, a Pneumatist teacher, and the most important of his Pergamene teachers, Satyrus, student of Quintus, who did not count as an Empiricist but leaned that way. That is, Galen had several teachers at once, and his medical education, like his philosophical education, was eclectic from the beginning. The Sects.  Galen often identifies medical schools or traditions by their founding figures; thus the “Erasistrateans,” followers of the early third-​century physician Erasistratus, or “Asclepiadeans,” followers of Asclepiades of Bithynia, whose ideas were very influential on the later Methodist school. Some, in particular the Empiricists and the Methodists, departed radically from previously accepted principles and were named after their methods. Pneumatists too were called after the role of pneuma in their doctrine; this sect accepted Stoic theories of physics. Galen disdained to affiliate himself with any of the named sects or with the name of a founder figure, not even Hippocrates (De libr. propr. 1, 19.13K), but was proud of his training in all the major sects (De loc. affect. 3.3, 8.143–​144K). In discussing the sects or haereseis of medicine Galen tends to identify three major competing traditions—​the Empiricists, the Rationalists or Dogmatists (this a sort of catchall term for everyone not an Empiricist), and the Methodists. Empiricists traced their tradition to Philinus of Cos, a student of the famous anatomist Herophilus at Alexandria. They rejected every form of medical knowledge except experience (peira). Methods were rigorously defined and could include the experience of other physicians, as recorded in books or transmitted orally (historia). Most forms of deductive reasoning were banned, including speculation about the causes of disease or about the interior of the body generally, and anatomy was also banned.

376   Literature and Culture Methodists based their ideas of physiology on Democritus’s atomist theory of physics; bodies, as they argued, are composed of atoms and pores, and all diseases were disorders of either compaction, or flux, or a combination. This sect was founded by a shadowy figure of the first century bce named Themison, but more popularly associated with Thessalus of Tralles, who lived under Emperor Nero and had a tomb on the Appian Way. Medical schools, then, were deeply implicated with philosophical traditions of epistemology, physics, logic, and so forth, while on the other hand many philosophical traditions (especially Stoicism) postulated theories about the body. For Stoics as well as for Aristotelians, for example, the rational soul or seat of intelligence was located in the heart, a position against which Galen crusaded all his life, insisting on the brain as the seat of reason. Aristotle virtually founded the practice of dissection and the discipline of comparative anatomy in Greek culture, and Peripatetics of Galen’s own time (among them Boethus, discussed below) seem to retained an enthusiastic interest in anatomy. Medicine as Galen knew and defined it was an intellectual tradition comparable to philosophy and not easily separable from it. Galen and the  Sects.  Despite Galen’s passionate commitment to anatomy, which he began to learn from Satyrus and perhaps others in Pergamum, he retained much sympathy for Empiricist methods throughout his life. The opposite was true of his attitude toward Methodism, and Galen seems never to have had a Methodist teacher. The Methodist sect was very prominent in Galen’s time and may have been the dominant tradition; certainly Galen devoted his whole life to a battle against it, and many of the doctors he mentions as rivals in his stories are Methodists. Galen presents Methodism as a reductionist sect that rejected anatomy and claimed that the art of medicine could be taught in six months, although the Methodist Soranus refers to anatomical discoveries in his surviving work on gynecology.7 Galen did not invent the tripartite division of medicine into Empiricists, Methodists, and Dogmatists, which is also attested in Celsus (Proem. 10, 57), but he is its main surviving exponent. Nevertheless, although he often describes the intellectual history of medicine using this scheme, Galen’s own works show that it is an oversimplification. Within each sect, and especially the eclectic Dogmatist sect, were competing traditions; the term “Dogmatist” was itself not particularly meaningful except in contrast to Empiricism; and Galen often identifies rivals not by their adherence to one of these three traditional sects, or to more minor traditions such as Pneumatism, but by their descent from an intellectual forbear such as Asclepiades. While he disdained to apply any such label to himself, his own intellectual pedigree, and especially his relationship to the physician he calls Quintus, was fundamental to his education and professional identity. Teachers and Followers: Quintus.  Quintus is known only from Galen’s writings. He practiced in Rome, where he apparently dominated the medical scene in the reign of Hadrian. Quintus seems to have been a native Pergamene, and may have been Galen’s inspiration as well as his intellectual grandfather. Although Quintus died before Galen began to study medicine, Galen sought out as many of Quintus’s students as he could,

Galen   377 sparing no effort or expense to learn at their feet, and traveling around the eastern Mediterranean to find them. This quest eventually brought him to Alexandria, in pursuit of Numisianus, one of Quintus’s most famous students, who probably died before Galen could meet him, and who was the teacher of Pelops, Galen’s teacher at Smyrna in the years immediately after he left Pergamum. Galen did not study with all of Quintus’s students: at least two of his bitter rivals were pupils of Quintus from whom he never learned. These were Lycus, whom he never met, but whose comprehensive work on anatomy was a major challenge to Galen’s On the Usefulness of the Parts when he finally finished it around 175 ce (De libr. propr. 2, 19.20–​23K), and Antigenes, one of his rivals in the case of Eudemus, a spectacular success early in Galen’s career at Rome (De praecogn. 3, 14.613K). Neither Quintus, nor Pelops, nor Numisianus left much in the way of surviving works for Galen to study—​their works were kept secret and eventually destroyed, and Quintus in particular never wrote much to begin with.8 Galen learned a tradition that was transmitted person to person, and orally. Like rhetoric for the sophists, medical training relied not only on mastery of what was, by Galen’s time, a massive corpus of texts, mostly lost today, but also on close personal interaction with a prestigious teacher (or, in Galen’s case, a number of teachers) and on practice; for Galen and his fellow students observed their teachers treating patients and worked closely with them. Consultations and debates about specific cases or theoretical problems were normal. Galen on  Language. Galen shared the sophists’ profound interest in language. He claimed expertise in Attic usage and in Greek usage generally, and authored many works on language, now mostly lost. One of his most significant losses in the fire that consumed the region of the Temple of Peace in 192, including Galen’s supposedly fireproof storeroom there, was his dictionary of words in the Attic comic writers; his dictionary of Attic prose writers survived the fire (though it is lost today), and ran to an astonishing 48 books. He rewrote parts of the dictionary that perished, publishing several works (now lost) on usage in certain Athenian comic writers; he particularly admired the comic poets for their command of idiomatic usage. Galen’s views on language were complex. He assumes an audience that was most familiar with the Atticism common among the elite of his day (and he seems to have perceived the Greek normally spoken and written by the cosmopolitan class of educated people like himself as a form of Attic). But his thoughts on the best methods of scientific expression are not easy to characterize and certainly not identical with Atticizing purity, an aesthetic he despised. He idealized the contemporary usage of the “Greeks of Asia,” which he also considered closest to the usage of Hippocrates; and recommended ordinary usage in general, in contrast to erudition for its own sake or the generation of special, technical vocabularies. In his pharmacological treatises, synonyms and local usage are especially important for identifying materia medica, and he often discusses local words and words in other languages, including Latin (Manetti 2009). Galen and “the Ancients.”  Galen’s intellectual stance reflects the high prestige of the classical period in Second Sophistic culture. Galen attached importance to mastery of

378   Literature and Culture a massive tradition in medicine, philosophy, and other subjects, and engages at length and in depth with sources from the archaic period through his own time. His stance generally privileged older over newer authorities. Galen refers often to the palaioi or archaioi, and prefers the readings of the earliest Hellenistic commentators on Hippocrates, at least in those works that he intended for an outside readership. Beyond this, two authors of the classical period—​Plato and Hippocrates—​played a central role in Galen’s self-​fashioning, and his treatise On the Opinions of Hippocrates and Plato sought to demonstrate agreement between these two greatest authorities. Galen considered Hippocrates the founder of medical science, and mastery of Hippocrates among the cornerstones of professional competence. By his time there was a long tradition of commentary and exegesis on the works that circulated under Hippocrates’s name, tracing back at least as far as Herophilus. Galen names eight previous commentators on Epidemics III alone (von Staden 2009, 148–​149). He had learned Hippocratic interpretation from his earliest teachers, Satyrus and Pelops, though he considered Quintus and his students in general only mediocre authorities on this subject. Galen published commentaries on a large number of Hippocratic books and hoped to comment on all the works he considered genuine before he died (De ord. libr. propr. 3, 19.57K); this exegesis was a lifelong task running to dozens of ancient volumes, in most of which he sought to display his mastery not only of the Hippocratic texts themselves but of all previous commentary on them. It was one of his criticisms of the Methodists that they treated Hippocrates like any other authority, subject to criticism and attack; whereas for other medical traditions, including the Empiricists, Hippocrates was a foundational figure to be interpreted and interrogated but not rejected on any point. Galen and Lycus:  Intellectual Rivalry.  It is important to note that Galen represented himself as master of the complete tradition of medicine, not only of Hippocrates or the privileged class of Hellenistic sources (the palaioi), nor, as he repeatedly insists, of the traditions of a single school, even if he often cites contemporary or recent sources mainly to target them for criticism. This is illustrated, for example, in an episode from around the year 175, after the publication of Galen’s masterpiece On the Usefulness of the Parts in seventeen books, which coincided with the arrival in Rome of a new, comprehensive work on anatomy in nineteen books by Lycus of Macedon, a student of Quintus whom Galen had never met and who had recently died. Galen insists that it was his deliberate choice not to study with Lycus, of whom he had a low opinion (De anat. admin. 4.10, 2.469–​470K; 14.1, 232 Simon), and may be defensive on this point; Lycus’ anatomy was well-​received in Rome and something like factional rivalry seems to have sprung up over the two new anatomical works. Galen claims that better-​educated doctors, as well as Aristotelian philosophers, supported On the Usefulness of the Parts, which has a profound teleological subtext, but “certain slanderers motivated by jealousy” started the rumor that it described anatomical structures that could not be found on dissection. Galen’s friends pressured him to stage a public demonstration, which he at first refused to do, but his enemies mocked him every day at the Temple of Peace until,

Galen   379 in exasperation, he finally relented, offering what must surely have been one of the most spectacular demonstrations of his career, over several days. The method he proposed required gathering all the volumes of all previous works on anatomy (“the books of all the anatomists”), which included those of Lycus and no doubt of Marinus, Quintus’s teacher and author of the most comprehensive work on anatomy (in twenty books) before those of Lycus and Galen, as well as all Hellenistic works on the subject, and must have run to dozens or hundreds of ancient volumes. Anyone present in the audience, he offered, might propose (proballein) a part for dissection, and he would prove that his ideas were correct against the errors of his predecessors. That is, he would locate the relevant passages among the mountain of texts before him, which collection must in itself have been an astonishing display of erudition, and would then compare their descriptions and his own to the evidence of dissection, on whatever animal carcasses he had prepared for the occasion (he does not say what animals he used). Someone chose the chest; and Galen was going to begin with the most ancient authorities, but his audience insisted he confine his discussion to the work of Lycus. Galen proceeded to demolish Lycus’s work in a series of demonstrations which he later published as the lost treatise On Lycus’s Ignorance of Anatomy.9

24.3  Performance and Competition Anatomical Demonstrations. The last story illustrates that Galen was very much a public figure and part of the culture of competition and performance so typical of the Second Sophistic and its era. His anatomical demonstrations in particular, in which he dissected or vivisected animals before an audience while lecturing on the structures he exposed, shared many of the features of sophistic performances; and he even uses the same vocabulary, calling them epideixeis, inviting problemata from the audience, and so forth. These dissections and vivisections were an important part of public life. For example, Galen won his position as physician to the gladiators of Pergamum in a public contest in which he disemboweled a live monkey—​perhaps a Barbary macaque or a baboon—​and challenged his competitors to replace the intestines (De opt. med. cogn. 9, 105 Iskandar). Although overtly educational, these displays were also a form of entertainment; the vivisections in particular, with their violence, blood, and demonstration of mastery over animals, recall other forms of public entertainment popular throughout the Roman Empire. Dissection and vivisection were highly specialized skills that, as Galen emphasized many times, had to be practiced and taught exhaustively “in private” before they could be performed publicly—​that is, Galen trained constantly with his circle, partly so that he could perform flawlessly in public. He is merciless in mocking other anatomists who make mistakes in their public performances, for example the Erasistratean who, challenged before a crowd to demonstrate his school’s thesis that the arteries contain air

380   Literature and Culture rather than blood, proves incapable of exposing an animal’s aorta without killing it (De anat. admin. 7.16, 2.641–​643K). Anatomical demonstrations required substantial organization and might be performed in large venues, although Galen does not specifically describe this. One of his best-​known demonstrations, a series of vivisections illustrating the mechanisms of the voice, may have taken place in the house of his aristocratic friend Boethus, who sponsored them. Another episode Galen describes must also have been prearranged, as it involved textual props; “once when speaking publicly on the works of ancient physicians . . . the discussion of Erasistratus’s On the Bringing up of Blood was proposed to me, and a stylus [grapheion] was stuck in it, in the customary manner.” Like the practice of soliciting topics from the audience, this was a method of “randomly” choosing a topic for improvised speech, a problema (and Galen uses the passive participle problethentos, “proposed”). Debating in Public.  But Galen also describes a less formal level of public engagement; intellectuals might lecture or debate before small crowds around the Temple of Peace, the Baths of Trajan, or the bookseller’s district (the vicus Sandaliarius, what Galen calls the Sandaliarion), and Galen seems to have done this frequently, debating topics in medicine, philosophy, language, health, and probably other things. The terminology of the pulse was a particularly contentious issue; a debate on this topic at the Temple of Peace might involve eight participants and end in a fight (De puls. diff. 1.1, 8.494–​495K). Audiences were very active, laughing, heckling, and interrupting, so that no public speech was a “lecture” in the modern sense of the word; challenges from the audience were an expected part of the show, and Galen was good at humiliating others in this way. The atmosphere could be raucous and even violent. Public performances of this type were obviously high-​risk, or depended on that perception for their entertainment value: the speaker did not strictly control the agenda, but was expected to improvise and meet impromptu challenges. The stakes could be raised even higher by issuing formal challenges and generating publicity ahead of a confrontation, as Galen’s rivals did in the prodrome to his showdown on the works of Lycus. Galen sometimes set debate topics for his rivals in advance, another way in which his performances could resemble those of the great rhetors: “I . . . allowed the followers of Asclepiades and Epicurus to seek out how, if they themselves stood in the place of the shaper of animals, they would have bestowed nerves on the aforementioned muscles. For I am accustomed to do this sometimes, and to concede to them not just days, but as many months as they wish for reflection” (De usu part. 7.14, 3.571K). In another episode, Galen milked publicity by dragging out the aftermath: when a rival rushed off from a debate in triumph without giving Galen the opportunity to demolish his argument, Galen composed his refutation in a book, overnight, and gave it to what he describes as the rival’s “chorus”; “and he was never afterwards so persuasive to them” (De purg. med. fac. 3, 11.332K). The Crowd:  Friends and Enemies.  Galen uses the word “chorus” in the episode just described and elsewhere to refer disparagingly to a rival’s circle of supporters. The role

Galen   381 of the crowd in every aspect of his professional life is very prominent, whether they are the audience or participants in “public” debates or “private” demonstrations for students and invited guests, or the “friends” and “companions” who form a part of these audiences, follow him on visits to patients, and solicit and publish his written works (Galen’s rivals would no doubt call these his “chorus”). Galen draws no sharp distinction between his “friends” or “companions” and his students, nor between his amateur admirers (some of whom were prominent intellectuals or members of the Roman senate) and his preprofessional students of medicine. He seems deliberately to blur these categories, emphasizing the social nature of his relationship with the people who learned medicine from him. At the same time, it is obvious that the competition for their esteem—​for reputation and for followers—​was very intense, as it was for the great rhetors. Further, the competitive features of Galen’s public debates and formal demonstrations locate him in the context of the Second Sophistic’s rhetorical displays and of agonistic culture more generally, in an era when athletic and cultural contests flourished and defined Hellenic urban life. Therapy as  Competition.  Cures of patients could also be competitive, and many of Galen’s case histories have obvious or subtle agonistic elements. Some feature a “cattle call” in which a patron invites many physicians to consult on a difficult case in his household, and from which Galen emerges victorious, like a runner in a race in which everyone has an even start. Or, Galen may compete head to head with another physician or with a cohesive group of them (often labeled “Methodists,” “Erasistrateans,” and so forth), as in a sport like wrestling that matched two combatants. A large audience of the patient’s friends, relatives, servants, and other physicians is often specified or implied. Galen also brought his own “friends” or students to the scene; sometimes the addressee of the treatise in which he tells the story is among these, and Galen may invoke him as a witness to the events. Galen also brought his own slaves, whose presence must usually be inferred from subtle hints. The spectators’ astonishment at Galen’s achievements, which validates his victory, may be an important part of the story. The patient’s “friends” in particular may take an active role in the story, interrogating or challenging the physician, caring for the patient and advocating for him. In addition or as an alternative, the patriarchal head of household may play the role of judge awarding a prize to Galen, as in the famous case of Boethus’s wife, in which Galen’s consular friend gave him 400 gold coins after the successful cure. Challenges, predictions, claims and counterclaims, skepticism, mocking laughter, and other features that raise the stakes in the contest are common in Galen’s agonistic case histories. Also prominent in many of these stories are verbal debate and display, in which Galen defeats rivals in argument or persuades an audience of the correctness of his views. The atmosphere in these stories is overwhelmingly masculine, although they take place in houses, and usually in the more private parts of houses (sleeping chambers, baths). Galen virtually never mentions women (or children) in his stories about cures, unless they are the patients; he does not mention interacting with his patients’ wives or

382   Literature and Culture female friends or relatives. Occasionally midwives play a minor role in the story, but not as competitors. The sickroom in Galen’s stories is a crowded, competitive, masculine social scene. Galen treated plenty of women, children, and slaves in his practice; but their role in his stories of victory is minimal. In reality, it is likely that Galen often co-​operated and collaborated with the other physicians on a case, and a few stories, read carefully, confirm this. But when recounting the events later as case histories, he emphasizes agonistic themes and his triumphs over rivals.

24.4  Galen and Roman Imperial Power It was a critical feature of the Second Sophistic that it defined the ethnic identity of a Greek elite class in a period when the entire Greek world was subject to the Roman Empire. The Hellenic or Hellenized urban aristocracy not only functioned as the ruling class of the eastern Mediterranean cities; it was the intermediary between that population and an imperial power that dominated its subjects largely by means of social networks and ties of reciprocity. But although the Greek aristocracy was a critical part of the Roman imperial project, it also sought to distinguish itself from, and portray itself as superior to, Roman power and Roman culture. This ambivalence is very obvious in Galen’s work. As with the sophists, the prestige of Greek culture—​and in this case medicine in particular—​among the Roman aristocracy was the foundation of his influence with that group and his power over it. Roman Connections.  It is likely that Galen was a Roman citizen, as this was true of most of Pergamum’s elite families by his time. We do not, however, know what his Roman names were, because (unlike Quintus, for example), he never used them. He was possibly an Aelius or a Julius, if either Aelius Nicon or Julius Nicodemus/​Nicon, both architects whose names survive on inscriptions from Pergamum, was his father. On the other hand, the gentile name Claudius is attested in Renaissance editions of Galen’s works from Italy, and in the fifteenth-​century Greek Vlatadon manuscript codex from Thessaloniki; many Pergamenes bore that name, and it is possible or likely that the attribution is correct (Alexandru 2011). Even at Pergamum, Galen’s social network included early ties to Rome. Quintus, his intellectual grandfather, was a Roman citizen and practiced in Rome; Galen’s own teacher, Satyrus, probably studied in Rome with Quintus. When Galen knew him, he was living at Pergamum with L. Cuspius Pactumeius Rufinus, a Pergamene and Roman senator who was also a friend of Aelius Aristides, and is mentioned several times in the fourth book of Sacred Tales (Or. 50). Rufinus was funding the new temple of Zeus Asclepius then under construction at Pergamum (De anat. admin. 1.2, 2.224–​225K). This temple was a smaller reproduction of the era’s most modern design, Hadrian’s rebuilt Pantheon at Rome. A new temple of Zeus and Trajan, whose ruins today crown

Galen   383 Pergamum’s ancient acropolis, was also being built at the same time. Hadrian himself visited Pergamum a few years before Galen’s birth, in 123; this visit was probably the inspiration for the massive reconstruction of the precinct of Asclepius, of which the new temple was a part. Galen was neither the first nor the only member of his circle to move to Rome. Teuthras, a Pergamene and fellow student of Galen’s, seems already to have been there when Galen arrived, and supported him in one of his early controversies, over the treatment of a woman with suppressed menstruation. The Peripatetic philosopher Alexander of Aphrodisias, with whom Galen shared the teacher Herminos and who became a lifelong rival and enemy, may also have preceded Galen to Rome if he is identical with the Alexander of Damascus Galen mentions in On Prognosis (5, 14.627K) and On Anatomical Procedures (1.1, 217–​218K). Galen especially benefited from his connection with Eudemus, a Pergamene, Peripatetic philosopher, and friend of his father’s. Eudemus was also Galen’s teacher, possibly one of his original teachers of philosophy at Pergamum. Epigenes, a friend of Eudemus and the addressee of Galen’s treatise On Prognosis, may also have been a fellow Pergamene. Galen and the Senatorial Aristocracy.  Eudemus was Galen’s most important patient in his first year at Rome. At sixty-​two he was suffering from what Galen eventually diagnosed as a combination of three quartan fevers, probably (in modern terms) malaria. Galen’s cure involved multiple confrontations with two of Rome’s most well-​known physicians and brought him a great deal of publicity among the Roman senatorial class, with which Eudemus was well connected. In particular, Eudemus was among the intellectual entourage of Flavius Boethus, a senator of consular rank originally from Ptolemais in Syria Palestina. Boethus was an enthusiast of Peripatetic philosophy and of anatomical dissections, and commissioned from Galen a series of demonstrations—​vivisections—​ on the voice. Galen dedicated a large number of anatomical treatises to Boethus, including his masterpiece On the Usefulness of the Parts, of which only one book was finished when Boethus left Rome, probably in 165 or 166, to govern his native province. Boethus never returned, but Galen sent him the remaining sixteen books of the treatise before he died. Galen and the Emperor.  Besides Boethus, Galen mentions many other Roman senators whom he cured, or whose friends he cured, or to whom he dedicated treatises and with whom he had social relationships (and these categories overlapped). He wrote an entire autobiographical treatise, the extant On Prognosis, about his rise to prominence in Rome, culminating with his appointment as physician to the emperor’s son, Commodus, and his cure of the emperor Marcus Aurelius himself. (It is important to note that this treatise is the only one among Galen’s works in which social climbing is its main theme.) The cure of Marcus happened probably in 176, when the emperor visited Rome on a break from his German campaigns. Galen successfully treated him for a stomach problem that had stumped his regular physicians; and he records the exact words of Marcus’s enthusiastic praise on this occasion (De praecogn. 11, 14.659–​660K). The central position of the emperor in the narrative of his

384   Literature and Culture professional success links Galen to other prominent figures of the Second Sophistic, such as Aelius Aristides. Like other Greek intellectuals of his era, then, Galen was part of the Roman imperial project. He was on the emperor’s payroll probably from 168 or 169, after he was recalled from Pergamum and allowed to remain in Italy as physician to Commodus. Galen writes that he took a break from public life at this time and from Rome, following Commodus and his entourage around Italy (De praecogn. 9, 14.650K), and seems to have developed a friendship with Commodus’s chief caregiver, Peitholaus, the imperial chamberlain. He was to remain on call at all times in case Commodus’s main caregivers needed him (De libr. propr. 2, 19.19K), and was in fact consulted on at least one occasion (De praecogn. 12, 14.661–​665K). When the physician who normally prepared Marcus’s daily dose of theriac died, Galen was appointed to that job. He seems to have continued to serve under all subsequent emperors at least through the reign of Severus and Caracalla (though Commodus did not use theriac; Antid. 1.13, 14.65–​66); On Theriac to Piso, which may or may not be genuine, is blatantly flattering of the latter emperors.10 Galen’s attitude toward Roman power is, however, ambivalent. Although he boasts of his cure of Marcus, he deliberately avoided joining the ranks of the latter’s inner circle of “companions.” In 169 he resisted (with some ingenuity) Marcus’s demand that he accompany his projected campaign against German tribes (De libr. propr. 2, 19.18–​19K), and Galen never achieved the honors bestowed by Claudius, for example, on his physician C. Sterilius Xenophon. It was only reluctantly and under duress, as he claimed, that Galen served the emperor at all: he fled Rome in 166 because he wished to avoid being drafted into the emperor’s service (De praecog. 9, 14.648K), and later complained about “the time wasted in the imperial court, which I not only did not want, but even when fate was dragging me forcefully toward it, I resisted not once or twice, but many times” (De indolentia 49). The first chapter of On Prognosis is a diatribe against the moral and intellectual degeneracy of the capital city and its ruthless social atmosphere, a theme he picks up again later in the treatise, contrasting Rome with Pergamum on these points.11 Thus, like the orators and novelists who preferred to expound on topics from Classical or Hellenistic history, Galen in some ways avoided engagement with Roman culture. He did not use his Roman name. Although he is interested in Latin words, he does not cite Latin authors. His Rome is, in the anecdotes to which it forms a shadowy background, indistinguishable from a Greek city. In its tense and awkward combination of aloofness and superiority with dependency and even servility, Galen’s attitude is typical of the cultural environment of the Greek Second Sophistic.

Further Reading The catalog of Galen’s works published by Fichtner (2004) is fundamental to Galenic studies (and is the source of the abbreviations used in this chapter and for the number of attested works of Galen). The best general introduction to Galen’s ideas and influence is Temkin 1973;

Galen   385 a handbook on Galen’s work is now available in Hankinson 2008. The collection of essays in Gill, Whitmarsh, and Wilkins 2009 is also an excellent introduction to many of the themes discussed in this chapter. Several scholarly biographies of Galen are now available: Boudon-​Millot 2013; Mattern 2013; and Schlange-​Schöningen 2003. Editions, with translations and commentary, of Galen’s autobiographical treatises On Prognosis, On My Own Books, and On the Order of My Own Books are available in Boudon-​Millot 2007 and Nutton 1979; English translations of the last two treatises may be found in Singer 1997. This last, however, was published before the discovery of a second and more complete manuscript of On My Own Books, and it is important to use Boudon-​Millot’s numbering of the chapters. Some autobiographical information (such as the profession of Galen’s grandfather) also comes from the newly discovered treatise Avoiding Distress, now available in Boudon-​Millot and Jouanna 2010; an English translation is included in Singer 2013. Jones’s study of Galen’s travels (2012) adds many details not addressed in other biographies. On Pergamum and its history, see Halfmann 2004 (= 2001), Koester 1998, Radt 1999, and recently Evans 2012. For more detailed discussion of Galen’s values, identity, and portrayal of patients, including his views on peasants and women, see Mattern 2008a, especially c­ hapters 2 and 4, and Mattern 2008b. On medicine, paideia, and the culture of the Second Sophistic, see Bowersock 1969, chap. 5; Ieraci Bio 1981; Mattern 2008a, chap. 1; Swain 1996, chap. 11; von Staden 1995 and 1997; and Boudon’s editions of Galen’s Art of Medicine and Exhortation to Study the Art of Medicine (2000). For social-​historical studies of medical personnel and their position in Roman society, see Korpela 1987; Kudlien 1986; Nutton 2004, chap. 17. On Galen and philosophy, a huge body of work exists. The articles in Barnes and Jouanna 2003 and the chapters by R. J. Hankinson in Hankinson 2008 are a good introduction. A translation of Galen’s most important treatises on ethical themes, including the newly discovered Avoiding Distress, is now available in Singer 2013. That the Best Physician is also a Philosopher is available in an edition with French translation and commentary by Boudon-​Millot 2007, and an English translation is included in Singer 1997. An edition and English translation of On the Opinions of Hippocrates and Plato is available in de Lacy 1980–​1984. On Galen’s medical education, besides the biographies cited above, see also Grmek and Gourevitch 1994. On the medical sects, the best introductory discussion is von Staden 1982. Published collections of the fragments of the Methodists (Tecusan 2004)  and Empiricists (Deichgräber 1965) are available. On language, see especially Manetti 2009; also Hankinson 1994; Morison 2008; Swain 1996, 56–​62; and von Staden 1997a, 51–​53. On Galen’s library of texts, much new material was obtained with the discovery of On Avoiding Distress; see Nutton 2009. On the fire of 192, Nutton 2009 and Mattern 2013, chap. 8. On Galen as author and editor, see Hanson 1998; Johnson 2010, chap. 5; and von Staden 1997b. On Galen’s use of Hellenistic medical writers and Hippocrates, von Staden 1997a, 50–​53, 1997b, and 2009; also Smith 1979, chap. 2; and Lloyd 1993. On Galen’s anatomical demonstrations, see Debru 1996; Gleason 2009; Mattern 2013, chap. 5; and von Staden 1995. On Galen’s public presence and social relationships, Mattern 2008a, chap. 1. On the agonistic features of his case histories, ibid., chap. 3.

386   Literature and Culture On Galen, the Roman aristocracy, and Roman imperial power, see the classic essay of Bowersock 1969, and also Mattern 1999; Mattern 2013, chap 6; and Swain 1996, chap. 11. On Galen’s name and Roman citizenship, Alexandru 2011. On the Pergamene elite, see White 1998. An English translation, with extensive commentary, of On Prognosis is available in Nutton 1979.

Bibliography Alexandru, S. 2011. “Newly Discovered Witnesses Asserting Galen’s Affiliation to the gens Claudia.” ASNP ser. 5, 3: 385–​433, 600–​611. Barnes, J., and J. Jouanna, eds. 2003. Galien et la philosophie. Geneva. Boudon, V. 2000. Galien. Vol. 2, Exhortation à l’étude de la médecine; Art medical. Paris. Boudon-​Millot, V. 2007. Galien. Vol. 1, Introduction générale; Sur l’ordre de ses propres livres; Sur ses propres livres; Que l’excellent médecin est aussi philosophe. Paris. Boudon-​Millot, V. 2013. Galien de Pergame: Médecin et philosophe. Paris. Boudon-​Millot, V. 2016. Galien. vol. 6, Thériaque à Pison. Paris. Boudon-​Millot, V., and J. Jouanna. 2010. Galien. Vol. 4, Ne pas se chagriner. Paris. Bowersock, G. W. 1969. Greek Sophists in the Roman Empire. Oxford. Debru, A. 1996. “Les demonstrations médicales à Rome au temps de Galien.” In Ancient Medicine in its Socio-​Cultural Context, edited by Ph. J. van der Eijk, H. F. J. Horstmanshoff, and P. H. Schrijvers, 1:69–​81. Amsterdam. Deichgräber, K. 1965. Die griechische Empirikerschule: Sammlung der Fragmente und Darstellung der Lehre. Berlin. de Lacy, P., ed. and trans. 1978–​1984, 2nd ed. 2005. Galen: On the Doctrines of Hippocrates and Plato. Corpus Medicorum Graecorum 5.4.1.2. 3 vols. Berlin. Evans, R. 2012. A History of Pergamum: Beyond Hellenistic Kingship. London. Fichtner, G. 2004. Corpus Galenicum:  Verzeichnis der galenischen und pseudogalenischen Schriften. Tübingen. http://​cmg.bbaw.de/​online-​publications/​Galen-​Bibliographie_​2016_​ 12.pdf. Gill, C., T. Whitmarsh, and J. Wilkins, eds. 2009. Galen and the World of Knowledge. Cambridge. Gleason, M. W. 2009. “Shock and Awe:  The Performance Dimension of Galen’s Anatomy Demonstrations.” In Galen and the World of Knowledge, edited by C. Gill, T. Whitmarsh, and J. Wilkins, 85–​114. Cambridge. Grmek, M., and D. Gourevitch. 1994. “Aux sources de la doctrine médicale de Galien: L’enseignement de Marinus, Quintus, et Numisianus.” ANRW 2.37.2: 1491–​1528. Halfmann, H. 2001. Städtebau und Bauherren im römischen Kleinasien: Ein Vergleich zwischen Pergamon und Ephesos. Beihefte der Istanbuler Mitteilungen 43. Tübingen. Halfmann, H. 2004. Éphèse et Pergame: Urbanisme et commanditaires en Asie mineure romaine. Translated by I. Voss. Bordeaux. Hankinson, R. J. 1991. Galen, On the Therapeutic Method: Books I and II. Oxford. Hankinson, R. J. 1994. “Usage and Abusage:  Galen on Language.” In Language, edited by S. Everson, 166–​187. Cambridge Companions to Ancient Thought 3. Cambridge. Hankinson, R. J., ed. 2008. The Cambridge Companion to Galen. Cambridge. Hanson, A. E. 1998. “Galen:  Author and Critic.” In Editing Texts/​Texte edieren, edited by G. W. Most, 22–​53. Göttingen. Ieraci Bio, A. M. 1981. “Sulla concezione del medico pepaideuménos in Galeno e nel tardoantico.” In Galeno: Obra, pensamiento e influencia, edited by J. A. López Férez, 133–​152. Madrid.

Galen   387 Johnson, W. A. 2010. Readers and Reading Culture in the High Roman Empire: A Study of Elite Communities. Oxford and New York. Johnston, I., and G. H. R. Horsley. 2011. Galen: Method of Medicine. 3 vols. Cambridge, MA. Jones, C. P. 2012. “Galen’s Travels.” Chiron 42: 399–​419. Koester, H., ed. 1998. Pergamon:  Citadel of the Gods. Harvard Theological Studies 46. Harrisburg, PA. Korpela, J. 1987. Das Medizinalpersonal im antiken Rom: Eine sozialgeschichtliche Untersuchung. Annales Academiae Scientiarum Fennicae, Dissertationes Humanarum Litterarum 45. Helsinki. Kudlien, F. 1986. Die Stellung des Arztes in der römischen Gesellschaft. Stuttgart. Leigh, R. 2015. On Theriac to Piso, Attributed to Galen: A Critical Edition with Translation and Commentary. Leiden. Lloyd, G. E. R. 1993. “Galen on Hellenistics and Hippocrates: Contemporary Battles and Past Authorities.” In Galen und das hellenistische Erbe, edited by J. Kollesch and D. Nickel, 125–​ 144. Stuttgart. Manetti, D. 2009. “Galen and Hippocratic Medicine: Language and Practice.” In Galen and the World of Knowledge, edited by C. Gill, T. Whitmarsh, and J. Wilkins, 157–​174. Cambridge. Mattern, S. P. 1999. “Physicians and the Roman Imperial Aristocracy:  The Patronage of Therapeutics.” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 73: 1–​18. Mattern, S. P. 2008a. Galen and the Rhetoric of Healing. Baltimore, MD. Mattern, S. P. 2008b. “Galen’s Ideal Patient.” In Asklepios: Studies on Ancient Medicine, edited by L. Cilliers, 116–​130. Acta Classica Supplementum 2. Bloemfontain. Mattern, S. P. 2013. The Prince of Medicine: Galen in the Roman Empire. Oxford and New York. Morison, B. 2008. “Language.” In The Cambridge Companion to Galen, edited by R. J. Hankinson, 116–​156. Cambridge. Nutton, V. 1979. Galen: On Prognosis. CMG 5.8.1. Berlin. Nutton, V. 1984. “Galen in the Eyes of His Contemporaries.” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 58: 315–​324. Reprinted in From Democedes to Harvey:  Studies in the History of Medicine. London, 1988. Nutton, V. 1997. “Galen on Theriac:  Problems of Authenticity.” In Galen on Pharmacology: Philosophy, History, and Medicine (Studies in Ancient Medicine 16), edited by A. Debru, 133–​152. Leiden. Nutton, V. 2004. Ancient Medicine. London. Nutton, V. 2009. “Galen’s Library.” In Galen and the World of Knowledge, edited by C. Gill, T. Whitmarsh, and J. Wilkins, 19–​34. Cambridge. Radt, W. 1999. Pergamon: Geschichte und Bauten einer antiken Metropole. Darmstadt. Richardson, L. 1992. A New Topographical Dictionary of Ancient Rome. Baltimore, MD. Schlange-​Schöningen, H. 2003. Die römische Gesellschaft bei Galen:  Biographie und Sozialgeschichte. Untersuchungen zur antiken Literatur und Geschichte 65. Berlin. Schöne, H. 1917. “τὸ τοῦ Τραιανοῦ γυμνάσιον bei Galenos.” Hermes 52: 105–​111. Singer, P. N., ed. 1997. Galen: Selected Works. Oxford. Singer, P. N., ed. 2013. Galen: Psychological Writings. New York. Smith, W. D. 1979. The Hippocratic Tradition. Ithaca, NY. Strohmeier, G. 2007. “La longévité de Galien et les deux places de son tombeau.” In La science médicale antique: Nouveaux regards, edited by V. Boudon-​Millot, A. Guardasole, and C. Magdelaine, 393–​403. Paris. Swain, S. 1996. Hellenism and Empire: Language, Classicism, and Power in the Greek World, ad 50–​150. Oxford.

388   Literature and Culture Tecusan, M. 2004. The Fragments of the Methodists. Leiden. Temkin, O. 1973. Galenism: The Rise and Decline of a Medical Philosophy. Ithaca, NY. von Staden, H. 1982. “Haeresis and Heresy: The Case of the haireseis iatrikai.” In Jewish and Christian Self-​Definition. Vol. 3, Self-​Definition in the Greek and Roman World, edited by B. F. Meyer and E. P. Sanders, 76–​100, 199–​206. London. von Staden, H. 1995. “Anatomy as Rhetoric: Galen on Dissection and Persuasion.” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 50: 47–​66. von Staden, H. 1997a. “Galen and the ‘Second Sophistic.’” In Aristotle and After, edited by R. Sorabji, 33–​54. BICS Supplement 68. London. von Staden, H. 1997b. “Gattung und Gedächtnis: Galen über Wahrheit und Lehrdichtung.” In Gattungen wissenschaftlicher Literatur in der Antike, edited by W. Kullmann, J. Althoff, and M. Asper, 65–​96. Tübingen. von Staden, H. 2009. “Staging the Past, Staging Oneself:  Galen on Hellenistic Exegetical Traditions.” In Galen and the World of Knowledge, edited by C. Gill, T. Whitmarsh, and J. Wilkins, 132–​156. Cambridge. White, L. M. 1998. “Counting the Costs of Nobility: The Social Economy of Roman Pergamon.” In Pergamon: Citadel of the Gods, edited by H. Koester, 331–​365. Harvard Theological Studies 46. Harrisburg, PA.

Chapter 25

Chariton and X e noph on of Ephesu s J. R. Morgan

Scholars used to be in the habit of dividing the five extant Greek novels into two groups. One the one hand, the novels of Longus, Achilles Tatius, and Heliodorus were perceived as texts of literary stature and ambition; on the other, those of Chariton of Aphrodisias (Callirhoe) and Xenophon of Ephesus (Ephesiaka or Ephesian Story) were regarded as simpler and more primitive love stories, aimed at a less intellectually endowed public.1 This was more than a simple judgement of literary quality: the labels “sophistic” and “presophistic” inscribed both a perceived connection, or lack of one, with the agendas of the Second Sophistic, including literary skill, and an assumption that literary sophistication develops chronologically and can be used as a tool in dating these notoriously free-​floating narratives. More recent work has insisted both on the continuity of the genre and on the individuality of each of the novelists, complicating and multiplying the possible groupings within the set. It does neither Chariton nor Xenophon justice to think of them as barely competent near-​identical twins, or to imagine that they were somehow immune from the intellectual, social and political currents that shaped the work of the other novelists. Chariton is a writer of palpable intelligence and skill, acutely sensitive to some of the big issues driving the Second Sophistic. Xenophon is a more problematic case, but the problems his novel raises are nonetheless of extraordinary interest. The primary concern of this chapter will not be with the literary quality and techniques of the two novels, but with their engagement with their cultural and political environment, and how that environment informs them, particularly in their concern, manifested in different ways, with Greek elite identity. Dating is a crucial issue. A clear terminus ante quem for Chariton is provided by a papyrus fragment from the mid-​second century.2 The case for a first-​century date has recently been argued forcefully by Tilg 2010, but the evidence, including an alleged absence of Atticism3 and a supposed reference to Chariton’s heroine Callirhoe in the first satire of Persius,4 is far from conclusive. On the other hand, there are strong grounds for connecting the novel’s third main character, a dignitary of Miletus named Dionysius,

390   Literature and Culture with the important sophist Dionysius of Miletus, active in the reign of Hadrian, and the subject of one of Philostratus’s Lives of the Sophists;5 he is also mentioned by Cassius Dio, and attested epigraphically. Chariton’s Dionysius is introduced as a man of exceptional paideia (Callirhoe 1.12.6) and described as pepaideumenos on several occasions; he is thus centrally characterized by one of the key terms of sophistic culture. Philostratus (VS 524) tells us that the historical Dionysius was appointed “satrap” by Hadrian; his use of this word is partly due to squeamishness about using Latin official terms, but it echoes the status in the novel of Dionysius, who is a friend of the Persian king and serves as his general. At the very least, it implies a parallel between the Persian and Roman empires which Chariton also appears to be playing on. When the action reaches Babylon, Dionysius accuses a rival of trying to steal his wife and makes a speech characterized by its restraint and simplicity;6 this corresponds to Philostratus’s judgments on the rhetoric of the historical Dionysius. Philostratus also mentions a work he refers to as “Araspas the lover of Panthea,” which must be a declamation spoken in the persona of a character in Xenophon’s Cyropedia. Although Philostratus denies Dionysius’s authorship of this work and says it was attributed to him maliciously, the attribution, particularly if false, suggests a publicly perceived connection between him and oriental erotic narratives. Whether the character of Dionysius in Chariton’s novel reflects that perception or gave rise to it is impossible to tell. The argument of Bowie 2002 that Chariton could only have invented his fictional Dionysius before the lifetime of his historical namesake, and that Dionysius the sophist therefore constitutes a terminus ante quem for the composition of the novel, rests on the unnecessary assumption that it would have been offensive to depict an important public figure as a man in love. However, Philostratus contests the attribution of the oration to Dionysius purely because of its deficient technique, with no hint that its erotic subject matter was problematic to sophist or public. Chariton’s portrait, in fact, is a sympathetic one of an honorable man who emerges with credit and with his reputation intact. The letter which Callirhoe addresses to Dionysius at the end of the novel (Callirhoe 8.4.5), addressing him as her “benefactor” (euergetês) and urging him to remember (mnêmoneue) his Callirhoe, looks very like a dedication of the novel, which shares its heroine’s name, to the author’s patron. Philostratus seems to allude to this fictional letter in one of his own fictional letters, addressed to a Chariton who is clearly an author: You think that the Greeks will remember [memnêsesthai] your words when you are dead. But those who are nothing while they exist, what will they be when they exist not?7

Like English, Greek can use the present tense to report what an author says in his text, even after his death, and the allusion indicates that Philostratus is not only addressing the novelist Chariton but also understood the letter in exactly the metaliterary way I  have suggested. Ironically, his assertion that Chariton would be forgotten after his death in fact confirms that the novel was remembered and read in sophistic circles. The reference to Chariton as “nothing” may be a derogatory reference to his social status

Chariton and Xenophon of Ephesus    391 (he introduces himself as clerk to a rhetor) or to the literary merit of his novel; but it is tempting to see in it support for the (now generally abandoned) hypothesis that “Chariton of Aphrodisias” (“Charming of Lovesville”) might be a pseudonym, too appropriate for a romantic novelist to be true. These considerations not only suggest, contrary to current orthodoxy, a dating for the novel early in the second century but also associate it by personal connection with the sophistic mainstream. It is therefore no surprise that Callirhoe embodies a number of concerns central to contemporary sophism. First is its recourse to the past. The sophistic practice of inventing speeches that might have been given at crucial junctures of Greek history was a device to recapture a historically defined Greek identity, in general limited to a classical world before the conquests of Alexander (and certainly before the advent of Rome). Philostratus records (VS 522) that in a famous speech, Dionysius of Miletus played the role of Demosthenes denouncing himself in the Athenian boulê after Chaeronea, and mentions another speech in which he impersonated Arcadians defending themselves on a charge of being mercenaries, probably set in the fourth century bce. The exercise was not merely about imitating the language and techniques of the Attic orators, but required both speaker and audience imaginatively to leave their own time and place to become classical Athenians. Chariton’s novel is set in the aftermath of the Athenian defeat in Sicily in 413 bce. The heroine is Hermocrates’s daughter, and her identity is repeatedly defined by reference to his victory.8 However, although the story is thus anchored to the classical past, the setting is not consistently maintained. The historical Hermocrates died in 407 bce, before the end of the Peloponnesian War. In the novel he is still alive at the end of the story. The Peloponnesian War ought therefore to be ongoing throughout the time-​frame of the novel, but there is no sign of it. Athens is at peace and open to traders from Sicily. Asia Minor, including Miletus, is under Persian control, which was not the case before 387 bce. The Persian king is called Artaxerxes, probably intended to be identified with Artaxerxes Memnon, who acceded in 404 bce, but whose reign did not coincide with the lifetime of the historical Hermocrates. In the seventh book, the romantic story is caught up in an Egyptian rebellion against Persia, which seems to amalgamate details from several historical events, including the capture of Tyre by Alexander.9 Although Chariton introduces himself as the narrator of the novel in a short prologue,10 he describes the institutions of the Persian Empire in the present tense, as if they were still in existence. In other words, the novelist has constructed a fictitious narratorial persona more or less contemporary with the events he narrates, who addresses a similarly constructed narratee.11 The exercise of projecting oneself and one’s audience empathetically into an ideologically validated past is essentially the same in speech and narrative fiction, and the classical period of the novel’s setting coincides exactly with that of the sophistic orations. It was perfectly permissible in sophistic speeches to add fictitious detail to strengthen the argument: narrow fidelity to the historical record was not a cardinal virtue. Similarly, Chariton, while producing a “historical” novel, has not adhered slavishly to the historical record. Indeed the deviations from historical truth

392   Literature and Culture should be read as intentional markers of the narrative’s creation of a counterfactual history, where the Peloponnesian War has been replaced by the travails of romantic love. It has been suggested that the “historical” nature of the earliest Greek novels is the result of a genetic connection with Hellenistic historiography, with its interests in emotion and spectacle, but it makes more sense to see the novel as engaged in the same imaginative adaptation of the past as the sophists.12 Chariton’s past is ideologically constructed. The geographical structure of the novel marginalizes Athens in favor of Greek cities of the west and east, Syracuse and Miletus.13 Although the Sicilian Expedition provided opportunities for rhetorical reconstruction, Syracuse is not part of the normal declamatory repertoire. There may be a sophistic agenda here. The demotion of Athens is of a piece with Chariton’s disavowal of doctrinaire Atticism; the rhetor Dionysius appears, from analysis of the clausulae of the fragments of his orations to have been a moderate Asianist. It may also be a marker of the novels’ sense of doing something generically new that they either turn their backs on Athens or depict it unfavorably, though intertextually aligning themselves with the Athenian literary tradition. If Chariton shares the sophistic disposition to use the past as a way to define what it means to be Greek, he is equally concerned to do so geographically and culturally. From Herodotus onward, it was a trope of Greek thought to define Greekness by constructing a series of antithetical “others.” Like many of the novels, Callirhoe presents a Hellenocentric plot, moving from a Hellenic center to a barbarian periphery and back again.14 Its principal polarity is the canonical one between the Greek west and the Persian east, which carries the usual barbarian markers of an absolute king, servile eunuchs, scheming satraps, and sensual women. Callirhoe’s story takes her from her true love and first marriage to Chaereas in Syracuse, which is depicted as a fully functional democracy, to a reluctant but expedient second marriage to Dionysius in Miletus, and thence to Babylon, where the Persian king hears a legal dispute between Dionysius and the satrap Mithridates, whom he accuses of trying to steal his wife. Miletus is nominally under Persian governance, Dionysius is described as a friend of the Great King, and there is no sign of functioning civic institutions, though the Persian presence seems not very oppressive and limited to attending ceremonial occasions. It would be neat if Chariton had a world-​scheme shading from democratic Syracuse in the west to Persian despotism in the east, with Miletus occupying an intermediate position, culturally and politically as well as geographically. It does not work quite so simply, however. The lack of political activity in Miletus is simply due to the exigencies of this section of the plot, which is set in the private space of Dionysius’s country property. No negative markers of luxury and effeminacy are attached to Ionia. Chaereas admittedly makes a point of recruiting only Dorians into his mercenary force to fight the king (7.3.8), but his comments are focalized and expedient, and do not entail any authorial dialectic of Dorian superiority over Ionians. Dionysius is no less proficient and successful than Chaereas in the military arena, and his repeatedly stressed culture (paideia) is in no sense a symptom of Ionian softness. Although devoted to the memory of his first wife, and guiltily infatuated with

Chariton and Xenophon of Ephesus    393 Callirhoe, he is no habitual philanderer, and wrestles virtuously with emotions which he thinks unworthy of him. Greece is conceived as a cultural unity, despite the occlusion of Athens at its geographical center. The sea between Syracuse and Miletus connects rather than separates them: for Chaereas it is the means by which he can follow Callirhoe, and for her the means by which she can imagine rescue or return. The real division is between Greece and Persia, with the frontier specifically at the crossing of the Euphrates (Callirhoe 5.1.3), which also marks the structural division between the two halves of the novel, stressed by a second preface and résumé of the story-​so-​far at the beginning of book 5. Up to that point in her journey up-​country, Callirhoe had heard Greek being spoken and could see the sea that connected her to Syracuse. Beyond the Euphrates she can see only an endless stretch of land inhabited by barbarians. To her the river represents “the starting-​point of the greater part of the king’s land” (from which the Greek-​speaking cities of the coast and their hinterland are differentiated). Narrative time stands still while Callirhoe utters a passionate lament on the bank of the river. Crossing it is a symbolic moment of severance from home and family, from which she is separated by the entire cosmos (5.1.6). The river crossing appears to erase her true identity and constitutes a virtual death. Chariton’s Babylon possesses many of the traditional appurtenances of the Greek construct of Persia, but the polarity it represents is in some respects a surprising one. The case between Dionysius and Mithridates is held in a formal court of law, in which the king is advised by a council of his “friends” (5.4.5). This is a very constrained autocracy, with no sign of the arbitrary exercise of power, cruelty, and sexual perversion that will characterize Heliodorus’s representation of the Persian satrap’s palace. Inevitably, the king falls in love with Callirhoe, but he is inhibited by fear of public opinion and shame before his own wife from taking advantage of his position of absolute power in order to impose his will on her (6.1), and he even resists the temptations offered by his eunuch confidant (6.3). Even when the eunuch convinces him that, as Callirhoe has no husband, no approach to her can be considered as adultery, the king still insists that she must not be subject to compulsion and everything must be conducted in secrecy. It is the eunuch who offers the most radical antithesis to true Greekness. Having been brought up in a great tyranny, he considers nothing impossible for the king and himself (6.5.10), and confronted by Callirhoe’s free spirit resorts to threats of violence against Chaereas and herself. Chariton gives us Persian servility but not the tyranny. The antithesis presented here by the oriental “other” is a very mild one, essentially restricted to sexual ethics and dealing in degrees of conformity to convention and respect. The narrative distances the king from the worst excesses of autocratic monarchy and unloads them on to the eunuch, who pressures Callirhoe in ways not sanctioned by the king himself. Although the fictional setting in the late fifth and early fourth centuries bce superficially retains the bipolarity of the classical worldview, it lacks the profound significance that once it had. For Chariton and his readers, the greatest anxieties are not the threats posed by an ideologically charged enemy, but concerns about behavior within a broadly agreed spectrum of values. The stereotypical “other” is thus

394   Literature and Culture reconfigured to meet the needs of the unipolar world of the empire, characterized by its cultural homogeneity and apparently permanent peace and security. The novel’s concern with civilized behavior crystallizes around its interest in paideia, a central concept of the sophistic mentality, and the crucial differentiator between elite and nonelite. The investment of large resources of time and money in nonpractical education, so as to master archaic but culturally endorsed linguistic modes and to deploy the whole intertextual arsenal of the classical canon, was a signifier of wealth and status so powerful that the education itself came to be seen as the necessary qualification for membership of the elite. More overtly, education was held to improve a person as a human being, so that to be a pepaideumenos meant to be a person of refinement, taste, and general decency. Chariton attaches greater emphasis to paideia than any other extant novelist, and though he never specifies exactly what it consists of, it is clearly an elite aspiration, recognized as such by both the narrator and the characters.15 Paideia is associated most closely and frequently with Dionysius, and signifies both his social status and his sense of propriety. On his first appearance, he is described by his steward as surpassing all Ionians in wealth, birth, and paideia (1.12.6), a bundle of qualities that encapsulates his elite status completely. This view is echoed verbatim by the narrator (2.1.5), except that wealth and birth are combined under the heading of social status (axiôma). As Dionysius wrestles with his feelings for Callirhoe, the narrator calls on his status as pepaideumenos and an aspirant to virtue (aretê) to explain his scruples (2.4.1), and more graphically to characterize his battle not to drown in a sea of passion (3.2.6). When Dionysius has to tell Callirhoe of Chaereas’s reappearance at Babylon, he is able to do so with tact and sensitivity because he is pepaideumenos and intelligent (phronimos; 5.5.1). This combination recurs when he learns that he has lost Callirhoe forever, and is enabled to control the display of his emotions by reason of his intelligence (phronêsis) and paideia (8.5.10). These passages are formally in narrator-​text, but the word pepaideumenos is dialogic; that is, the narrator is, as it were, quoting Dionysius’s self-​definition. Callirhoe herself is quick to sense that paideia is central to Dionysius’s conception of himself when she flatters his humanity (philanthrôpia) and paideia as the qualities that would lead him to return her to her family (2.5.11). In these passages, paideia denotes not so much the process of education as the civilized refinement and culturally correct behavior that result from it. In one passage, however, the educational aspect of paideia is foregrounded. Dionysius’s fears before the trial are exacerbated by his understanding of the inconstant nature of Eros, which, as a pepaideumenos, he has derived from his knowledge of poetry, sculpture, and mythology (4.7.6). To the Second Sophistic mentality, the two senses of the word are not distinct. The pepaideumenos configures the knowledge and skills acquired through elite education as internalized values, display of which confirms his moral and social superiority. Paideia, in other words, is the mechanism which enables social status and moral worth to be elided. Chariton’s portrait of Dionysius exposes this hidden ideology with great perception, and suggests that he was an acute observer of the sophistic elite. The particular virtue which Dionysius derives from paideia is mastery of his passions. He demonstrates this both in his behavior toward Callirhoe, against whom he

Chariton and Xenophon of Ephesus    395 refuses to use compulsion, and, less successfully, in his self-​projection to his peers and his household, from whom he tries to hide his infatuation, considering it adolescent in itself and, when focused on a woman whom he believes to be a bought slave, unworthy of his social position (2.4.1). In a remarkable scene, Chariton stages this inner conflict as one between passion and reason, figured through metaphors of storms at sea and military assault. It is, of course, a struggle which Dionysius cannot win, and in trying to fight it at all he is setting himself in opposition to one of the novel’s basic generic assumptions, that love is paramount. The protagonist Chaereas is differentiated from Dionysius precisely in his failure to control his emotions: he sets the plot in motion by kicking his wife in a fit of jealousy, and repeatedly gives way to suicidal despair, from which he is always saved by his faithful friend, Polycharmus. Only once, toward the end of the novel, is Chaereas granted paideia, in a situation where it marks his cultural superiority to the Egyptian leader of the rebellion from Persia (7.2.5). Chaereas is not literally uneducated, but he has not internalized the values of his education in the way that a true pepaideumenos like Dionysius can. This is partly a matter of years and maturity, but also of innate temperament; even at the end of the novel Callirhoe avoids arousing his innate jealousy (emphytos zêlotypia, 8.4.4). Even Callirhoe is allowed more paideia than her male counterpart: first, when she uses her paideia and intelligence to control her anger toward the Persian eunuch (6.5.8), and second, when she sensitively consoles the Persian queen after her capture (7.6.5). The fact that Dionysius loses the battle against his passions does not mean that his paideia is structurally devalued. In fact, the novel, especially in its portrayal of Dionysius, inscribes and explores the moment of transition in the conception of the self in the early empire charted by Foucault (1984) and Konstan (1994), when classical paradigms of gender relationships, rooted in disparity and male self-​control, gave way to the idea that reciprocal passionate love could form the foundation of personally satisfying and lasting marriage. Chariton in effect dramatizes the transition in the confrontation of his two main male characters, but he avoids taking sides. Although Chaereas is to some extent rehabilitated by his military successes, through which he can assert a conventional masculinity, he remains the most problematic and unendorsed of the genre’s heroes: the novel’s happy ending is disturbed by suggestions that Callirhoe’s life is not about to relapse into uneventful happiness. Dionysius, on the other hand, although he plays the generic role of the unwanted rival, possesses the virtues that the hero so conspicuously lacks, and is allowed a sympathetic inner life unparalleled in any other extant novel. As a study of alternative amatory paradigms, Callirhoe remains acutely and sensitively poised, reflecting the cultural tensions of the moment of its composition, despite its setting in a period several hundred years earlier. That dramatic setting enforces a classical geography, and excuses the absence of the central fact of the imperial period: the power of Rome. If Chariton was truly a native of Aphrodisias, he came from a city with particularly close links with Rome, among whose sculptures appear to be representations of scenes from the Aeneid.16 When she returns to Syracuse with Chaereas at the end of the novel, Callirhoe leaves her son (whom Dionysius believes to be his child but who in fact is Chaereas’s) in Miletus with

396   Literature and Culture Dionysius, with a request to send him to Sicily when he grows up (8.4.6). Just as the story of a beautiful woman with two husbands casts Callirhoe as a second Helen,17 so the idea of the son of a woman who is closely associated with, and indeed mistaken for, Aphrodite, suggests a parallel with Aeneas, son of Venus, and his journey from Asia to Italy to become the founder of the Roman race. However, it is very difficult to substantiate an explicitly pro-​Roman reading of the novel. Rather the concerns of the Greek elite in the Roman Empire and their accommodations, to mutual advantage, with the governing power are reflected in the novel in the relations between the Greek cities of Asia and Persia. This is not to suggest anything as crude as that we should read Chariton’s Persia as Rome-​in-​disguise, with the potentially anti-​Roman agenda that implies, though we have seen that the historical Dionysius held a position under Hadrian which Philostratus could describe as satrap. It is rather that Chariton takes for granted, and is interested in exploring, a world where Greek identity must be negotiated and maintained in the absence of full political autonomy. The historical inaccuracies of his mise en scène can be partly explained as the imposition of contemporary circumstances on the historical record. For instance, we have a late fifth-​century Greece where there is no war and in which easy communications exist. The provincial authorities of the governing power work in association with the local aristocracies. Just as Greek cities regularly referred disputes and complaints to the emperor in Rome, and sent sophists as part of the delegation, so in the novel Dionysius’s accusation that the satrap Mithridates has tried to seduce his wife is referred to the Great King. At the hearing, the king is accompanied by friends and freedmen, and some unspecified “fellow judges” (5.4.8); the opposing sides are allowed to present their arguments, and despite Mithridates’s dramatic production of Chaereas, whom both Callirhoe and Dionysius had believed dead, due judicial processes are observed.18 All this reflects the kind of legal procedure with which Chariton (who introduces himself as a lawyer’s clerk) and his audience would have been familiar; we might even speculate that there is a respectful reflection of the dealings of the real Dionysius of Miletus with the Roman court. The relative mildness of Chariton’s Persia speaks to the Greek experience of Roman rule in the first centuries ce better than would an attempt to recreate the despotic theocracy of the historical Persia of the classical period. The location of the novel’s Greek center in the Italian west and the resultant marginalization of democratic Athens are perhaps a further reflection of the Greek elite’s accommodation with the realities of Roman rule. There is nothing as simple as a pro-​or anti-​Roman agenda being played out: the point is that the fiction can dramatize the aspirations and fears of its Greek elite readership without committing itself to a contemporary setting. Chariton’s novel is, to understate the case, a very competent piece of work, with a complex but coherently constructed plot, well-​developed and consistent characterization, a clear and elegant prose style (based on that of the Athenian Xenophon), and a densely intertextual literary texture. The Ephesiaka (Ephesian Story) of Xenophon of Ephesus bears certain similarities of plot: its aristocratic and beautiful protagonists, Anthia and Habrocomes, fall in love and are married near the beginning of the novel, only to be separated as a result of a pirate attack and to undergo a series of brushes

Chariton and Xenophon of Ephesus    397 with death, encounters with lustful love-​rivals (of both sexes), and extensive and aimless travel, before being reunited and living happily ever after in a passionate marriage in their Greek city. However, it leaves a very different impression: the plot is a hectic succession of loosely connected episodes rather than anything intricate and unified; many of the episodes are short, almost in note-​form, and are abandoned before being developed; the invention stretches credibility to breaking point; characterization is rudimentary, and actions, particularly journeys, are often arbitrary and unmotivated, staged as a series of near misses before hero and heroine are eventually reunited; and the prose style is formulaic and unrefined, rarely going beyond the barest statement of what happened. In a word, it is unsophisticated, less clearly connected with the sophistic movement. There are three broad ways in which these qualities can be explained and the novel interpreted. The first is to see it as an epitomized version of a more satisfactory original. Our text of the novel is in five books, but the Suda’s entry for Xenophon of Ephesus mentions ten. Given the Suda’s unreliability and the frequency with which numerals are corrupted in the transmission of texts, this is not compelling evidence for abridgement. However, the oddities, unevennesses, ellipses, and missed opportunities for elaboration in the narrative are more worrying. The attempt by Bürger (1892) to identify places where epitomization occurred has been vigorously attacked, notably by Hägg (1966), but the criticisms, if accepted, demonstrate only that Bürger’s precision in individual cases was misplaced: they do not disprove the epitome theory in principle. The second and third approaches both assume that the text is, more or less, in its intended form. On the one hand, it may be that we are dealing with a subliterary text, composed for an implicitly less literate and sophisticated audience, one more interested in rapid and sensational incident than in subtler literary effects.19 A variant of this idea is that the novel was composed orally and written down only later, or that, if composed in writing, it remains close to oral roots.20 This would take the novel outside the sophistic ambit, but several considerations tell against the idea. Although our text lacks verbal allusion, it is in structural dialogue with the Odyssey. An embroidered canopy on the protagonists’ marriage bed (Ephesiaka 1.8.2–​3) figures the story of Aphrodite and Ares as narrated by Demodocus, while the night after their reunion (5.14) is dominated by reciprocal storytelling, on the model of Odysseus’s reunion with Penelope, so framing the story in two nights of love, which act as markers of a progression from a purely sexual passion gratification to a mutual interaction at a non-​physical level.21 This scheme further suggests an awareness of the Platonic hierarchy of kinds of Eros, and there are Platonic hints throughout the story. Xenophon of Ephesus is one of several Xenophons noticed in the Suda who appear to be novelists. It is a reasonable assumption that they were using pseudonyms to align themselves with Xenophon of Athens, whose Cyropedia might be seen as the prototypical novel. In fact, the names of the protagonists of our novel, Anthia and Habrocomes, are an unmistakable calque on those of the erotic subplot of the Cyropedia, Panthea and Abradatas.22 These factors suggest that author and intended readership both possessed a higher level of literary intelligence than is obvious in the surviving text. Furthermore, we do have a few papyrus fragments of “subliterary”

398   Literature and Culture fiction, but they do not look much like the Ephesiaka, featuring scenes of explicit sex, sensational violence, and the supernatural, rather than anything so clearly akin to the other “ideal” romances. Finally, the Ephesiaka sits neatly in the romantic tradition. Although the priority is difficult to determine, there are similarities between this novel and Callirhoe close enough to suggest that one author was imitating the other.23 And significantly Heliodorus, the most literary of all the novelists, clearly alludes to the Ephesiaka on several occasions, which would be unlikely if the novel truly were without any cultural pretension. On the other hand, it may be that the Ephesiaka is the work of a sophisticated author, writing with deliberate simplicity (apheleia) for artistic effect.24 The problem is to understand exactly what that effect might be. Simplicity and sweetness of prose style were certainly valued by ancient rhetoricians, but Xenophon’s prose is simply lacking in any style. In any case, absence of stylistic pretension does not entail shoddiness of plot construction, and it is hard to see how a reader’s pleasure and excitement could be increased by the failure to develop interesting situations that characterizes so many of Xenophon’s episodes. At the same time, there is nothing in the text to suggest a parody of subliterary writing designed to offer superior amusement to a highly literate readership. A comparison with Longus’s Daphnis and Chloe is illuminating: there, artistic simplicity is part of a complex system of signification quite different from what we have in Xenophon. Although the view is unfashionable and the question far from closed, it seems to me that the best explanation for the sheer oddness of this text is still that we do not have it as it was meant to be. With this proviso, and its implication that much of the sophisticated detail has been lost, it is nonetheless clear that Xenophon shared Chariton’s concern with elite identity, although he handled it in a very different way. Like Chariton’s, his protagonists come from the highest echelons of Greek polis-​society, suffer a series of displacements which enable them to discover who they truly are, and eventually return to a stable marriage in the Greek center where they began. Whereas Chariton makes some play with the child of Chaereas and Callirhoe, whom Dionysius will eventually send back to Syracuse, so ensuring the propagation of the elite family, at the end of Xenophon’s novel the happy future into which the protagonists retire consists solely of the pleasure of being with one another, with no reference to children. However, their love is from the start a matter of civic interest, implying a similar anxiety about the continuity and stability of elite society lurking behind the erotic themes. The absence of children is connected with temporal setting. Chariton in effect supplies a pedigree connecting the elite with the historical past so heavily validated by sophistic culture, but Xenophon does not exploit the past to stage his story or connect it to his readers. Rome is not named, but the official figures encountered by the protagonists reflect the realities of the Roman Empire.25 Perilaus (Xenophon’s version of Dionysius perhaps) is introduced as “the man in charge of the peace in Cilicia” (2.13.3), and later is said to “have been appointed to rule the peace in Cilicia” (3.9.5). These phrases are rightly understood as literary periphrases for the office of eirenarch, which is first attested epigraphically for the year 116–​117, but may have existed considerably

Chariton and Xenophon of Ephesus    399 earlier than that date; attestations continue to the fifth century. The powers of the eirenarch varied from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, but Perliaus’s activities in the novel—​ essentially leading police operations against criminal gangs from a base in Tarsus—​are not seriously out of keeping with what we find for instance in martyrologies. Similarly, Habrocomes appears before an anonymous “archon of Egypt” (4.2.1). This term is frequently used of Roman governors, and the responsibilities of this man, who acts as judge in capital cases and commands troops within his province, again reflect Roman realities. These details suggest a vaguely contemporary setting, but since they concern long-​term institutions they do not help to date the composition or setting of the novel precisely. A passing reference (3.12.2) to “shepherds” (poimenes) operating as bandits in the Nile Delta seems to be connected with the Boukoloi, whose uprising in 171 attracted some attention and is reflected in Achilles Tatius. As with Chariton, there is no compelling evidence for an early dating: my belief is that the original version of the novel appeared in the mid-​second century, well within the world of the Second Sophistic. Again unlike Chariton, Xenophon is not in the business of defining Greekness against a barbarian “other.” Although his plot is Hellenocentric in that its heroes begin from and return to a major Greek city, in this case Ephesus, its geography does not deal in sustained ethnic polarities. The heroes’ travels are extensive and varied, but do not take them beyond the boundaries of the Greco-​Roman world into barbarian territory. Within those limits they do encounter individuals who are described as “barbarian.” The most exotic of these is a colorless Indian ruler called Psammis, who purchases Anthia from pirates in Alexandria, but is soon killed and robbed of her near Coptus. Apart from the fact that he is superstitious—​a quality the narrator says is characteristic of “barbarians” (3.11.4) but which is primarily a narratorial device to motivate his refraining from raping the heroine whom he believes to be a priestess of Isis—Psammis is not characterized at all. Otherwise, the most prominent “barbarian” is Manto, the daughter of the Tyrian pirate-​chief Apsyrtus, who has captured Habrocomes and Anthia.26 She desires Habrocomes, threatens violence if he does not comply, falsely accuses him to her father of attempted rape, and, after her marriage to a Syrian from Antioch, sends Anthia off to be the wife of a goatherd, who is later ordered to kill her. A little barbarian coloring is useful here to emphasize and condemn Manto’s uncontrolled sexuality and cruelty, but she lives and operates within the Hellenic world.27 Her doublet, the spectacularly evil Cyno—​who within a single chapter (3.12) conceives a foul desire for Habrocomes, wears down his chaste resolve and kills her aged husband to clear the path to her bed for him, and then, when he cannot bring himself to sleep with a murderess, falsely accuses him of the crime—​is not characterized as “barbarian,” despite living in Egypt (but this whole episode looks to be the victim of the epitomator). Ultimately what matters in Xenophon’s world is not the difference between Greek and non-​Greek, but that between elite and non-​elite status. The protagonists come from the highest levels of Ephesian society, and Habrocomes at least is characterized by a vague but class-​defining paideia (1.1.2), which encompasses the arts (mousikê poikilê), and training (gymnasmata) in hunting, horsemanship, and sword-​fighting. In one episode, Chariton explores the nightmare of total loss of social status, when Chaereas and

400   Literature and Culture Polycharmus are enslaved and work in a chain gang, but Xenophon exposes his heroes again and again to threats of enslavement and the consequent loss of control over their own bodies. Their travels, in short, take them not to alien lands but beyond the margins of respectable society, and the resolution of the plot involves not only return home but reemergence from the underclass. The pattern begins when they are captured by a pair of pirates, Corymbus and Euxinus, who fall in love with them and so pose the first threat to the integrity of their bodies and their relationship. The threat is averted only when the pirate-​leader, Apsyrtus, claims them as his own slaves. Habrocomes is enslaved for a second time when the ship he is traveling in is wrecked off the Nile Delta, he is captured by the “shepherds,” and sold to an elderly soldier called Araxus (3.12). He is subjected to a series of unwanted sexual attentions from social inferiors who temporarily have control of him: the homosexual pirate Corymbus, Apsyrtus’s barbarian daughter Manto, and Araxus’s hideous wife Cyno. He is twice imprisoned (on charges of attempted rape and murder, following accusations by Manto and Cyno). In Sicily he lives with a subsistence-​level fisherman, Aegialeus (who keeps his wife’s body in the house), and ends up taking a job as a labourer in the stone quarries of Nuceria (5.8.1–​3). Anthia’s tale of social degradation is even more horrifying. After being enslaved to Apsyrtus, she is gifted to Manto as a wedding present, and sent away by her jealous mistress to be the wife of an extra-​societal goatherd, who later sells her to Cilician merchants. When they are shipwrecked she is captured by a gang of bandits led by Hippothous, but rescued by the eirenarch Perilaus, who, inevitably, falls in love with her. She tries to kill herself to escape marriage, is buried and revives in the tomb, which is looted by robbers who sell her to a slave dealer in Alexandria (3.9.1ff.). This is where she is bought by Psammis, only to be captured again by Hippothous: when she kills one of his men who tries to rape her, she is shut up in a trench with big dogs, but preserved by another amorous brigand. Eventually, she falls into the hands of a relation of the governor of Egypt, Polyidus, whose jealous wife cuts off her hair and ships her to Tarentum in Italy to be sold to a brothel keeper. She is there at the same time that Habrocomes is quarrying stone: both have sunk as low in society as it is possible to sink, from the relative security and dignity of domestic service to the most demeaning manual labor and sex work. Like Habrocomes, she is assailed by unwelcome lovers, often powerful men, whose position gives them power over her:  the pirate Euxinus, the eirenarch Perilaus, the Indian princeling Psammis, the bandits Anchialus and Amphinomus, the commander Polyidus, and finally the clients in the Tarentine brothel (whom she deters by feigning epilepsy). Only the humble goatherd treats her with respect. For both the protagonists then, the breathless plot is a walk on the wild side of the world of the Second Sophistic, a nightmarish rehearsal of what it might mean to lose social status and everything that goes with it: comfort, leisure, culture, and, most importantly, physical and moral security and control of one’s own person. In an extreme form, the story inscribes the real anxieties of the Greek elite in the imperial period, and defines their identity by a set of social antitheses. In that sense, Xenophon is playing closer to the

Chariton and Xenophon of Ephesus    401 edge than Chariton, whose negotiation of identity remains bookish and rooted in a past that can be regained through literary activity. Like Chariton’s, this novel has an important third character, who embodies the central theme. This is the robber Hippothous, who twice captures Anthia without recognizing her and, still without recognizing her, falls in love with her and buys her from the brothel keeper, and also befriends Habrocomes as he searches for Anthia in Cilicia. He acts as a girder to connect the novel’s two narrative strands, and eventually is instrumental in reuniting the two protagonists. At one point (3.2), he tells Habrocomes his life story, revealing that he too is by origin a member of the social elite, from the city of Perinthus, who took to banditry after killing a love rival and then losing his boyfriend in a shipwreck; the homosexuality (something completely absent from Chariton’s world) passes almost without comment, but is probably not, at this stage, the same as classical Athenian pederasty, since Hippothous and his beloved were of the same age and so did not arouse suspicion.28 After serving in the ranks of a bandit gang, Hippothous’s social quality showed, and he graduated to running his own bandit gang, operating successively in Cilicia, Cappadocia, Syria, Phoenicia, and Egypt. When his band is destroyed by Polyidus, he escapes to Sicily. Here he is able to regain respectability by marrying, reluctantly, a wealthy widow, who promptly dies, leaving him the wherewithal to live in comfort with an aristocratic youth named Cleisthenes. This looks more like the classical model of older erastês and younger erômenos, but at the end of the novel the relationship mutates by adoption into one of father and son, so that Hippothous also is able to ensure elite familial continuity. His story hovers around the margins of society, and dramatizes the anxieties of how life might be lived outside the elite. Both of these novels, then, speak to the Second Sophistic concern with elite identity, but pose the question in different ways. In effect Chariton asks, “What does it mean to be Greek?,” and Xenophon, “What does it mean to be a member of the elite?” Both explore the question by constructing antitheses for their protagonists. But their different strategies derive from diametrically different attitudes toward the defining fact of the imperial period. Chariton’s anxiety over Greek identity was given its edge by the power of Rome, which called Greekness into question and prompted a flight to a world from which Rome was excluded, though present in its absence. Xenophon, on the other hand, seems to take the Roman settlement for granted, although Rome is never mentioned by name, and to be more concerned with how elite life can continue under it.

Further Reading Translations of these two novels can be found in Reardon 1989 (Chariton by B. P. Reardon and Xenophon by Graham Anderson), and Trzaskoma 2010. For basic information about them, the essays in Schmeling 1996 (by B. P. Reardon and Bernhard Kytzler) are still valuable. For the issues of identity on which this chapter concentrates, Whitmarsh 2011 is full of provocative insights, and Jones 2012 is particularly valuable on the role of paideia in the novels. For general literary assessment, the relevant sections of Hägg 1983 and Holzberg 1995 are standard introductions, and important essays on Chariton by Reardon

402   Literature and Culture and Hägg are reprinted in Swain 1999. Tilg 2010 concentrates on Chariton’s position in the development of the genre, and contains a wealth of background material, particularly on dating and possible relationships with Rome. For Chariton’s connection with history, Hunter 1994 is fundamental; Smith 2007 is tendentious and provocative. Xenophon is less well served bibliographically. Schmeling 1980 provides a basic introduction, and O’Sullivan 1995, in arguing the case for oral composition, offers many insights into Xenophon’s literary techniques.

Bibliography Bowie, E. L. 2002. “The Chronology of the Earlier Greek Novels since B. E. Perry: Revisions and Precisions.” Ancient Narrative 2: 47–​63. Bürger, K. 1892. “Zu Xenophon von Ephesos.” Hermes 27: 36–​67. Capra, A. 2009. “The (Un)happy Romance of Curleo and Liliet: Xenophon of Ephesus, the Cyropedia and the Birth of the Anti-​tragic Novel.” Ancient Narrative 9: 29–​50. Crawford, D. S. 1955. Papyri Michaelidae. Aberdeen. De Temmerman, K. 2014. Crafting Characters: Heroes and Heroines in the Ancient Greek Novel. Oxford. Doulamis, K. 2007. “Stoic Echoes and Style in Xenophon of Ephesus.” In Philosophical Presences in the Ancient Novel, edited by J. R. Morgan and M. Jones, 151–​176. Groningen. Doulamis, K. 2011. “Forensic Oratory and Rhetorical Theory in Chariton Book 5.” In Echoing Narratives:  Studies of Intertextuality in Greek and Roman Prose Fiction, edited by K. Doulamis, 21–​48. Ancient Narrative Supplementum 13. Groningen. Foucault, M. 1984. Le Souci de Soi. Paris. Hägg, T. 1966. “Die Ephesiaka des Xenophon Ephesios:  Original oder Epitome?” C&M 27: 118–​161. Translated as “The Ephesiaca of Xenophon Ephesius:  Original or Epitome?” in Hägg, Parthenope:  Selected Studies in Ancient Greek Fiction (1969–​2004), edited by L.  B. Mortensen and T. Eide, 159–​198, Copenhagen, 2004. Hägg, T. 1983. The Novel in Antiquity. Berkeley, CA. Hägg, T. 1987. “Callirhoe and Parthenope:  The Beginnings of the Historical Novel.” Cl. Ant. 6:  184–​204. Reprinted in Oxford Readings in the Greek Novel, edited by S.  Swain, 137–​160, Oxford, 1999; and in Hägg, Parthenope: Selected Studies in Ancient Greek Fiction (1969–​2004), edited by L. B. Mortensen and T. Eide, 73–​98, Copenhagen, 2004. Hägg, T. 2004. Parthenope: Selected Studies in Ancient Greek Fiction (1969–​2004). Edited by L. B. Mortensen and T. Eide. Copenhagen. Hansen, W., ed. 1998. Anthology of Ancient Greek Popular Literature. Bloomington, IN. Hernández Lara, C. 1990. “Rhetorical aspects of Chariton of Aphrodisias.” Giornale Italiano di Filologia 42: 267–​274. Holzberg, N. 1995. The Ancient Novel: An Introduction. London and New York. Hunter, R. 1994. “History and Historicity in the Romance of Chariton.” ANRW 2.34.2: 1055–​1086. Jones, C. P. 1992. “La personnalité de Chariton.” In Le monde du roman grec, edited by M.-​F. Baslez, P. Hoffmann, and M. Trédé, 161–​167. Paris. Jones, M. 2012. Playing the Man: Performing Masculinities in the Ancient Greek Novel. Oxford. Konstan, D. 1994. Sexual Symmetry:  Love in the Ancient Novel and Related Genres. Princeton, NJ.

Chariton and Xenophon of Ephesus    403 Morgan, J.  R. 2004. “Chariton.” In Narrators, Narratees, and Narratives in Ancient Greek Literature, edited by I. J. F. De Jong, R. Nünlist, and A. Bowie, 479–​487. Leiden. Morgan, J.  R. 2007. “Travel in the Greek Novels:  Function and Interpretation.” In Travel, Geography and Culture in Ancient Greece, Egypt and the Near East, edited by C. Adams and J. Roy, 139–​160. Oxford. Morgan, J. R. 2008. “Intertextuality: 1, The Greek Novel.” In The Cambridge Companion to the Greek and Roman Novel, edited by T. Whitmarsh, 218–​227. Cambridge. O’Sullivan, J. N. 1995. Xenophon of Ephesus: His Compositional Technique and the Birth of the Novel. Berlin and New York. Papanikolaou, A. D. 1973. Chariton-​Studien: Untersuchungen zur Sprache und Chronologie der griechischen Romane. Göttingen. Perry, B.  E. 1967. The Ancient Romances:  A  Literary-​Historical Account of Their Origins. Berkeley, CA, and London. Reardon, B. P., ed. 1989. Collected Ancient Greek Novels. Berkeley, CA. Reardon, B. P. 1996. “Chariton.” In The Novel in the Ancient World, edited by G. Schmeling, 309–​335. Leiden. Rife, J. L. 2002. “Officials of the Roman Provinces in Xenophon’s Ephesiaca.” Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 138: 93–​108. Ruiz-​Montero, C. 1991. “Aspects of the Vocabulary of Chariton of Aphrodisias.” CQ 41: 484–​489. Schmeling, G. 1980. Xenophon of Ephesus. Boston. Schmeling, G., ed. 1996. The Novel in the Ancient World. Leiden. Schwartz, S. 2003. “Rome in the Greek Novel? Images and Ideas of Empire in Chariton’s Persia.” Arethusa 36: 375–​394. Smith, S. D. 2007. Greek Identity and the Athenian Past in Chariton: The Romance of Empire. Groningen. Swain, S., ed. 1999. Oxford Readings in the Greek Novel. Oxford. Tagliabue, A. 2013. “The Ephesiaca as a Bildungsroman.” Ancient Narrative 10: 17–​46. Tilg, S. 2010. Chariton of Aphrodisias and the Invention of the Greek Love Novel. Oxford. Trzaskoma, S. 2010. Two Novels from Ancient Greece. Callirhoe and Ephesian Story. Indianapolis, IN, and Cambridge. Whitmarsh, T. 2011. Narrative and Identity in the Ancient Greek Novel: Returning Romance. Cambridge.

Chapter 26

L ongu s a nd Achilles Tat iu s Froma Zeitlin

Very little is known about the authors, Longus and Achilles Tatius, whose prose fiction is the subject of this chapter; and what we think we know is not even very reliable either. Epigraphical sources suggest a provenance of Lesbos for the name Longus, although his native knowledge of that Greek island, the setting of his Daphnis and Chloe (D&C), is open to some dispute.1 Even more disconcerting, Longus (Loggos) may not even be a proper name, but a misreading (or misspelling) of logos (story) in the manuscripts. With Achilles Tatius, we may seem to be on firmer ground, given the biographical entry in the Suda (despite certain confusions about his name). Yet even in this instance, his Alexandrian origins may derive merely from his elaborate ekphrasis of that city in book 5 of Leucippe and Cleitophon (L&C).2 When it comes to chronology, however, even in the absence of hard evidence, we may feel more somewhat more confident in attributing both authors to the period of the so-​called Second Sophistic, dated to somewhere (probably late) in the second century ce, when Greek Hellenism under Rome (with its emphasis on paideia and an awareness of its own belatedness in respect of its classical inheritance) was at its height.3 Along with the later Aithiopika of Heliodorus (third to fourth centuries ce) these three novels, by reason of their sophisticated literary techniques, stylistic complexity, debts to the rhetorical schools, erudite uses of myths, aesthetic connoisseurship, and self-​conscious artistry differ from those of their more straightforward predecessors (Chariton and Xenophon of Ephesus), which are thought to belong either to the late Hellenistic period or that of the early empire.4 Nevertheless, for all these distinctions, the five extant romances share variations on conventional plots that depict a young (elite) couple who fall in love but undergo a number of vicissitudes and delays, until the novel reaches its expected conclusion, that is, the happy ending in the accomplishment (or as in the case of Chariton and Xenophon, the renewal) of a marriage that is sanctioned by family and society, with the gods’ approval. While the identity of the genre itself is barely acknowledged in ancient sources, and concomitantly, we have only a few clues to the composition of its

406   Literature and Culture readership (which might even have included women as well as men), the stylistics of Longus and Achilles Tatius (and Heliodorus) were surely meant for a highly educated audience, which could appreciate the literary and aesthetic merits of these erotic works and whose readers could apply their own interpretive skills to intertextual games of multiple allusions, undercurrents of irony, and clever manipulations of familiar topoi for pleasure as for profit. This said, however, the pairing of D&C and L&C for this chapter might seem like a mating of strange bedfellows. After all, Longus’s tale (often dubbed a pastoral romance, but with a turn to New Comedy in the last episodes) is a small-​scale miniature consisting of four books, set entirely in an idyllic landscape (a locus amoenus) on the island of Lesbos, where the young lovers enjoy a condition of unimaginable innocence and what adventures they have are limited to their own surroundings. Exposed at birth, the two youngsters of unknown parentage, adopted by rustic folk, grow up in the countryside, where, with a disarmingly faux simplicity, they learn to be shepherds and goatherds, make garlands, play panpipes, join in the vintage, catch birds, and romp on the mountains and seashore, according to the seasons. They fall in love as they begin to mature, but distressed by their mysterious symptoms, they do not know at first that it is love (Eros) that ails them, and once informed by an older shepherd (Philetas), they are still ignorant of how to achieve the physical satisfaction of their desire. The fourth and last book, with the arrival of the city folk and the master of the domain, Dionysophanes, turns to the genre of New Comedy, with its obligatory recognition scenes that culminate in a final legitimation of the protagonists’ identity as offspring of well-​born parents, a move that in this socially conscious world of elites is essential to complete (and validate) the happy ending. Achilles Tatius’s Leucippe and Cleitophon, by contrast, is a sprawling tale of maximum complexity that covers the length of eight books. It involves a wide-​ranging geography, features a number of paradoxographical excurses along with sophistic debates and heavy emotional outpourings, and, in general, encompasses a much broader range of experience. Aside from leading the well-​born lovers through the requisite journeys, shipwrecks, disasters, and separations that take place all around the Mediterranean (to include Byzantium, Tyre, Alexandria, and Ephesus), the text parades its scientific and philosophical learning at every opportunity (e.g., aetiologies of wine and the color purple, love life of plants and animals, habits of the phoenix, the river Nile). Its narrative, replete with numerous sententiae, along with its complex, even baroque, plot and multiple characters, suggests a knowing outlook on life, not without a cynical (and to some, a parodistic) touch on more than one occasion.5 Longus focuses throughout on a single couple, Daphnis and Chloe, with subsidiary would-​be rustic suitors for Chloe in the first and last books (Dorkon, Lampis), who may leave an essential imprint on the plot, but are soon enough dispatched. Daphnis too is subject to unwanted sexual advances, this time by Gnathon, the urban pederast, who in the last book accompanies the master, Dionyophanes and his son Astylos, to this country estate. But his short-​lived scheme to take Daphnis back to the city for his own debauched pleasures is the very crisis that speedily precipitates the final dénouement. Achilles Tatius, by contrast, delights in erotic complications with a network of crisscrossing amorous

Longus and Achilles Tatius    407 figures, either on the brink of matrimony or already married: Leucippe and Cleitophon, the impetuous lovers, are the center of interest, of course, but their lives intersect with two other major pairs (Calligone and Callisthenes; Melite and Thersandros) in several triangular combinations that immensely complicate the plot.6 Yet a preliminary comparison of the two romances is an object lesson, as it were, in the flexibility of the genre itself, that is, the creative possibilities of using novelistic tropes and thematic conventions to produce entirely different results, while reinforcing (if, at times, challenging) the ideological underpinnings of the ideal romance. Hence before venturing further, let us look at them, as one critic has said, in counterpoint.7

Parallels and Inversions Longus and Achilles Tatius, each in his own way, performs a remarkable experiment that transforms a romantic story into a sort of test site for approaching theoretical questions about perception and cognition through the focalizing lens of eros, whose desiring eye and all-​consuming passion serve as chief stimuli for acquiring knowledge about the world, in both its physical and emotional aspects. Structurally speaking, both works begin with the accidental viewing of an erotic painting as a framing device (the picture in the sacred grove in Longus, that of Zeus’s abduction of Europa in Achilles Tatius). The primary narrator in both is a tourist, who happens upon it (a hunter from the city in Lesbos for Longus; an unknown stranger who meets Cleitophon in Sidon as they both gaze at the picture). In each case, the erotic subject they see is the cue that sets the entire narrative in motion (Longus: a historia Erôtos, as the narrator says; Achilles Tatius: the figure of Eros depicted in the painting of Europa). The lure of the visual, in fact, pervades both works in which extended ekphrastic discourse is a recurrent narrative trope. Although Achilles offers ekphrases of four paintings (to Longus’s one), in keeping with the scopophiliac tendencies of the narrator,8 each author favors descriptions of gardens, with all their erotic symbolic potential, not once but twice in their respective texts (Longus in strategically placed accounts in books 2 and 4 [the garden of Philetas, the paradeisos of Dionysophanes]; Achilles in the first book in a trompe l’œil effect that slides from the painting to a grove to an actual garden as the scene of seduction in book 1).9 Each is preoccupied with the origins and nature of Eros, both heterosexual and homosexual; both adduce Platonic ideas in one form or another, especially from the Phaedrus and the Symposium,10 and both feature two appearances of an erotic teacher, a praeceptor amoris, one male, one female, who provides indoctrination into the mechanics and metaphysics of sexual pleasure (the pastoral figure of Philetas in book 2 and the city woman, Lycaenion, in book 3 for Longus; Cleinias, Cleitophon’s friend cousin in book 1, and Melite, the Ephesian widow, in book 5, for Achilles).11 At the same time, both texts tease the reader to different degrees with the possibility of higher aspirations in quasi-​serious allusions to carnal love as a spiritual

408   Literature and Culture mystic initiation under the guidance of the gods (Longus:  Eros, then Dionysus; Achilles: Aphrodite and Eros).12 Broadly speaking, each charts its plot as an éducation sentimentale of sorts for male and female alike, with the requisite amorous rivals, acts of sexual aggression, erotic temptations, and near tragic outcomes, although the couple’s maturation through time and experience is obviously treated in quite different ways. Longus’s tale follows a straightforward narrative account from birth to marriage, in tune with the changing of the seasons, and the progress of their activities treats Eros itself as a spontaneous and organic process.13 In Achilles Tatius, the main characters, already on the threshold of adulthood, fumble their way through a number of vicissitudes, starting with their impulsive elopement after a failed seduction, followed by shipwreck and abductions that lead to subsequent violent separations and a series of ordeals, before earning the approval of their union at the end. Both works, of course, end in the predictable success of a reciprocal love that is sanctioned by family and society through legitimate matrimony, with a (genre-​specific) rejection of any pederastic alternative along the way (Longus: Gnathon; Achilles: Cleinias, Menelaus). Above all, however, in striking contrast to the earlier romances, marriage is the endpoint of the novel, not its beginning, a situation which suggests a more evolutionary model of love’s requirements.14 Central to this chronological shift is a new emphasis on virginity. In both novels the willing acquiescence of the girl threatens to sabotage the requisite demand for premarital chastity: Chloe by reason of her innocent desire to alleviate the erotic symptoms that torment her; Leucippe, persuaded to acquiesce through Cleitophon’s seductive advances. Hence, the maintenance of the genre’s (and society’s) inflexible rules against a premature sexual union of the couple constitutes the narrative suspense that energizes the plot until its conclusion in successful consummation. This is, in fact, the single feature that most distinguishes these sophistic texts from their predecessors, in which the protagonists are already wedded to one another before the “adventure time” of the romance begins, and their plots consist, not in the maintenance of physical chastity itself, but in the constancy of their commitment to one another throughout all the trials of separation, jealous rivals, threats of death, and other dangerous encounters.15 A first result of this change, while perhaps an indication of a changing emphasis on the symbolic value of virginity itself in the religious mix of later antiquity, is the notion that sexual initiation can be attained only as the result of transformative experiences in the development of the protagonists’ identities that includes a return to socially prescribed gendered roles. A second result may be just the opposite (or its corollary)—​the titillation of teasing foreplay that is sustained throughout the divagations of the plot, for characters and readers alike. That is, both sophistic narratives continually work the double game of deflecting and also refracting sexual tensions into other forms of activity, descriptions, similes, and so on, that serve to eroticize the entire environment (panta erotica, as Longus’s narrator describes the painting he sees). The continual postponement of physical satisfaction gives rise to a text that prolongs the excitement through a variety of means that may often serve as distractions but more often are themselves

Longus and Achilles Tatius    409 drawn into the very erotic trap they are meant to evade, and we become aware of hidden analogies and metaphors, of actions and attitudes, that they are meant to repress (e.g., wolves, pirates, trampling of grapes, panpipes, or bird catching for Longus; e.g., bandits, daggers, hippopotami, urban mazes, for Achilles). Nevertheless, if the girl must remain in a virgin state, the hero, albeit for different reasons, has sex with another (more mature) woman with noteworthy results for the plot. For Longus, Lycaenion, the city woman, teaches the ignorant Daphnis the actual mechanics of sex (beyond Philetas’s earlier prescriptions in book 2), but warns him about the difference between maidens and women, lest he run off and try his new-​found knowledge on Chloe. In the case of L&C, a wealthy widow, Melite, pursues Cleitophon with all the rhetorical skills at her disposal. She does achieve an eventual (if short-​lived and untimely) success, despite the fact of their previously unconsummated “marriage” that took place in Alexandria after Leucippe was presumed dead, having been captured and apparently decapitated at sea by pirates (the second Scheintod) in book 5. Most pertinent of all, perhaps, although “the sweet odor of vaguely illicit pleasure hangs about” all the extant romance texts,16 both Longus and Achilles Tatius have been specifically accused of “dirty talk.” The often quoted remarks of Erwin Rohde about Longus are a bitter complaint: One may grant validity to the treatment of the love of this youthful herdsman pair as something hardly more than a sweet sensual youthful herdsman pair as something hardly more than a sweet sensual desire. But the way in which the author whips up this desire and through lascivious experiment keeps on bringing it to point just short of gratification—​this betrays a revolting, hypocritical sophistication and makes us most unpleasantly aware that all the naïveté of this idyllist is only an artificial concoction, and that he himself is in fact nothing more than a sophist.17

As for Achilles Tatius, as long ago as the ninth century ce, the bishop Photius (Bibl. 87), for all his admiration of the style, diction, and inventiveness of the love episodes, declared that all these excellences were vitiated by the fact that it was extremely obscene (hyperaischron) and impure (akatharton). It takes sôphrosynê to resist sophist temptation, as we learn from the narrator in Longus, who at the end of his proem, prays for self-​control in the writing of his erotic tale, or in the case of Achilles Tatius, we might heed the advice of a Byzantine epigrammatist (Anth. Pal. 9.203), who urges readers, who desire to sôphronein, to look to the ending of the narrative in Achilles Tatius rather than revel in its so-​called (sexy) “marginal sights” along the way. In addition to the opening frames of these narratives, there are parallels too when it comes to the endings, beyond their happy outcomes. Each dénouement revolves around the resolution of a stubborn mystery: for Longus, the issue is the most familiar and the most profound—​the identity of the two foundlings who were exposed as infants in the countryside that now makes them eligible for marriage; for Achilles Tatius, the stakes seem smaller, but not in the light of the obsessions of the first-​person narrator—​the

410   Literature and Culture explanation of the second and most puzzling Scheintod he witnessed with his own eyes in book 5, which accounts for all the misadventures in the rest of the plot. Moreover, in both works, there is an emphasis on theater and theatricality, in keeping with the spectatorial interests of the period, and in both, this aspect is adumbrated in the first part but fully developed in the second. Daphnis performs his musical and herdsman’s skills for the city folk in the fourth and last book in counterpoint to the rustic spontaneous celebration of mimetic narrative, song, and dance after the vintage in book 2 (Pan and Syrinx), while in L&C, the latter half, more allusively (after the ploy of the actor’s trick of a fake sword in book 3) offers disguise, costume, and histrionics in the law court and in the temple in Ephesus, with references to both dramatic genres.18 Certain recurrent motifs are also common to both:  in addition to horticultural descriptions, there is the prominence of the rapturous first kiss in the economy of the text, and the device of strategically placed dreams that influence (and shape) the course of the plot with predictive, sometimes prescriptive, authority—​even as in AT, where their meaning may be far from clear. With few exceptions, the dreams are all god-​sent, no matter the identity of the dreamer: Eros again and again in Longus along with an epiphanic vision of Pan; Aphrodite and Artemis (twice) in AT. Even more conspicuous is the role of myth and the frequent recourse to storytelling: In the first instance, Cleitophon declares to the unnamed interlocutor at the beginning of the narrative that his erotic travails are more akin to muthoi than logoi (1.2),19 while Pan in D&C proclaims that he intends to make a muthos out of Chloe (2.27). The ambiguity of the term suggests a hesitation between fiction (invented) and myth (a traditional story), between a creative self-​consciousness and a justified appeal to an established repertory of tales.20 This is a topic that requires further discussion. I point out merely in this brief survey the numerous embedded myths that are related in the course of these narratives that quite often have an exegetical function and give evidence of the authors’ paideia. In the case of Longus, the figure of Pan features in the first three myths (Pitys, Syrinx, Echo), with Chloe taking the last place as the probable mythos, as mentioned above, while the temple of Dionysus, located in the sumptuous garden park, in book 4 is adorned with other, quite different myths of that god that gesture to another nonpastoral sphere of influence (and import) altogether. An inventory of myths in Achilles Tatius would need to be far more extensive. They are sometimes quite brief, often aetiological, and at times represented in pictorial form. As the most relevant, I single out, in addition to the painting of Europa and the bull (book 1), the diptych of Andromeda and Prometheus (book 3) and the picture of Procne, Philomela, and Tereus (book 5), while the stories of two other mythical figures (Syrinx, Rhodopis) are the basis for the chastity tests that both Leucippe and Melite are required to undergo (book 8). The myth of Pan and Syrinx, we may note, is common to both texts, although with entirely different implications (and a different placement in the narrative). Even so, while Pan in his myths is the sexually aggressive deity, he is also in the context of epiphany (Longus) or ritual (Achilles) protective of a maiden’s integrity.

Longus and Achilles Tatius    411 Above all, let me stress the playful humor of both works that is the cue to recognizing their value as programmatic texts about the nature of eros as about the epistemological and ontological bases of perception and self-​identity. True, the comic aspects of Longus depend on the gap between the sophisticated urban narrator and the unschooled naïveté of the young pair, whose path to understanding is nevertheless thick with referential density to earlier literary works and generic conventions, which they express but cannot possibly know. In the case of Achilles Tatius, items such as mistaken identity, farcical confusions, juridical parody, and pompous sophistic discourse have led some critics to characterize the work as a species of comic realism.21 Yet, comedy and philosophy (however ironically the latter is treated in Achilles) are not mismatched consorts. Whether in Aristophanes’s Thesmophoriazusae or Euripides’s Helen, we see the same mixture of serious and comic, where ventures into dangerous terrain can be protected through cuddling up to both parodistic and profound tonalities and where mimesis meets up with playful and flirtatious elements that mask more serious levels of intellectual inquiry. Finally, each work may be said to play with the very conventions of the novel itself, each depending for its effects on a prior acquaintance with the rules of the genre. The pastoral simplicity of Longus transposes the usual series of romance adventures into a small compass, ruled by an opposition between town and country rather than the more typical one between home and abroad, and exploits the innocence of its characters to probe an entire inheritance of Greek ideas about eros in a cunning pastiche of literary and philosophical allusions (e.g., Sappho, Theocritus, Homer, Plato). Achilles Tatius, at the opposite end of the spectrum, for all his deployment of the usual topoi (travel, kidnapping by pirates, enslavement, imprisonment, storm, shipwreck, court trial, attempted seduction by powerful rivals) skews the expected symmetry of the couple by the use of a first-​person (often unreliable) narrator, who veers between sophistic erudition and naïve self-​deception. He is at first a seducer rather than a lover, with a penchant for voyeurism and a taste for graphic images that join with his larger shortcomings as a more typical romance “hero.” The novel revels in devious subplots, exploits such narrative devices as the Scheintod (which is used not once, but three times), questions the very meaning of parthenia (maidenhood) in applying the term to both sexes, and subjects such paramount ideas as paideia and philosophia to cheerful subversion. Parody and pastiche are charges often leveled against this “slippery and subtle work,”22 along with its mischievous sendup, at times, of the expected moral values that are promoted in the rest of the genre, made more complicated by the need to read between the lines of Cleitophon’s self-​representation and thereby to gauge the levels of narrative identity (and sincerity). Unlike the case of Longus, whose novel is generally admired (pace Rohde) as a masterful achievement “that manages to be both detached and sympathetic, ironic and sincere, sophisticated and religiose,”23 critical consensus is difficult to achieve in Achilles Tatius, which is said to “hover between an emotional overload and hypersophisticated knowingness,”24 and breaks every sort of taboo in its graphic erotic descriptions, whether of sensual pleasure or sexual violence. Above all, however,

412   Literature and Culture are the substantial differences in their erotic programs as the route to final satisfaction and enlightenment.

Erotic Programs Longus Daphnis and Chloe is unique in the entire corpus for the explicit way in which it foregrounds the value of Eros as an all-​encompassing guide to life, not just for the characters but for all readers alike. The narrator in the proem promises that the story he is about to tell “will heal the [love]sick and comfort the sufferer [in love], remind the one who has loved and teach in advance the one who has not.” The reason is that “no one has ever escaped Eros or ever shall, as long as beauty exists and eyes can see.” The book, as a verbal transcription of an artwork, answers to the narrator’s own desire to respond to the painting (antigrapsai) in words25 and to disseminate its message as a “delightful possession for all mankind,” even as he dedicates his work to the local divinities: Eros, the Nymphs, and Pan. From the start, Longus intertwines the erotic and aesthetic as he does with the relations between nature and artifice. Because the work makes erotic education into the most elementary and essential of lessons, it suggests the utterly “natural” experience of Eros as a founding paradigm, but one supported everywhere with reference to previous texts and attitudes to create a “hallucinatory echo text” of all the erotic literature that has proceeded it. Children naturally imitate what they see and feel though what they imitate is expressed through a mimetic rehearsal of an entire tradition, but recreated as though for the first time. As the narrator-​lover imitates the painting, and the narrative in turn works its mimetic effects upon its readers, so in their way the children learn about Eros through a mimesis that extends throughout their entire world in their relations to nature, animals, gods, parents, elders, and themselves.26 Another set of apparent antitheses is the one between physis (nature) and technê (knowhow). Philetas, emblem of pastoral wisdom, can instruct the ignorant young pair about the power of Eros, leaving them with the final advice to lie together naked, but it takes the city-​woman, Lycaenion, to instruct an eager Daphnis on the mechanics of sex, a lesson that on their wedding night he teaches Chloe in turn. This emphasis on paideia as a necessary supplement to the instinct of nature inscribes human sexuality in the social sphere and regulates the stages and conditions under which it may be properly accomplished. In so doing, Eros, the Nymphs, and Pan conspire to expand the erotic paradigm itself from its literal sense of sexual desire and its consummation to represent a broader vision of the world in which both art and nature have a place in both local and universal terms.27 Poised between the suggestion of an archetypal myth and a purposeful literary creation, Longus’s singular accomplishment stands alone in the history of Greek literature, however its merits may be judged.

Longus and Achilles Tatius    413

Achilles Tatius In Longus, it is the young couple’s innocent ignorance about sexuality that sustains the forward thrust of the narrative and justifies the novel’s educational program of life and learning that revolves around Eros, to be fulfilled, all in due time. While Daphnis in the last book is obliged to vouch for the virginal status of Chloe to ensure her marriageability, once his identity as the son of Dionysophanes, the lord of the estate, is revealed, the matter is quickly resolved in a brief private conversation with his newly found father. The opposite holds true for Achilles Tatius in every respect. His characters know all about the “facts of life,” we might say, from the start, and it is their preliminary violation of the social (and romance) protocols in a failed assignation that determines what happens thereafter in the price that each must pay for their willful sexual desires. To this extent, therefore, we might speak of an erotic education of sorts, one that consists of one ordeal after another as a penance until they achieve redemption and the couple is reunited at the end. Three dreams, one by Leucippe’s mother (book 2)  and those of Leucippe and Cleitophon (book 4) augur the events to come. The mother’s dream that “a bandit with a naked sword seized her daughter, dragged her away, threw her down on her back, and sliced her in two all the way up from her belly, making his first insertion at her private parts” (2.23.3) sets the stage for all that follows—​the interrupted tryst of the lovers at home, which prompts their hasty escape from Tyre, then a journey by sea, shipwreck, and capture by bandits in Egypt. What the mother thought was a metaphor of her daughter’s defloration turned out to be quite literally true in the “sacrifice” she undergoes at the bandits’ hands (the first Scheintod). But the scare tactics of the dream to enforce the rule of an intact body until the lovers’ dangerous erotic impulses can be channeled into the social institution of marriage are not. The breach of the rules, once sinisterly exposed in the mother’s terrible vision, ensures that the novel will subsequently exploit to the fullest the other side of sexuality, in assaults upon the body, the site of desire—​ sacrifice, abduction, physical violence, bondage, attempted rape, images of mutilation, slavery, and death (or at least apparent death), but now under the sign of resistance. When after Leucippe’s “resurrection” in the first Scheintod, engineered through a clever trick, Cleitophon again had urged her to yield herself to him, she now demurs: “it is not themis,” for Artemis had appeared to her, enjoining her to remain a virgin “until I adorn you as a bride, and none other than Cleitophon shall wed you” (4.1.3–​4). What could be more explicit than this divine injunction with its promised reward? On the other hand, Cleitophon’s dream is more ambiguous, although at first it seems to parallel hers: “I saw before me Aphrodite’s temple and the goddess’s cult image within it, but the doors were shut. Instead a woman appeared looking just like the statue, saying “At present you cannot enter the temple, but if you wait for a short time, I will not only open it to you but make you a priest of the goddess” (4.1.5–​8). What this will mean in fact is that after Leucippe’s second Scheintod (on a ship off the coast of Alexandria), the look-​alike

414   Literature and Culture Aphrodite will be none other than the figure of the Ephesian widow, Melite, who wields a sophist’s persuasion to seduce him in direct counterpoint to (or retaliation for) his previous efforts with Leucippe. Cleitophon will later suffer severely for adultery at her husband Thersandros’s hands for his marriage to Melite, when the latter unexpectedly returns alive from a shipwreck to Ephesus, where, as previously mentioned, all the characters in question are now located. Beaten, imprisoned, brought to trial, fed a false story of yet another murder of Leucippe, this time by Melite, no less, and wounded by grief and remorse, he accuses himself of her death and is determined to die. Made ready for the rack, the fire, and the lash, and sentenced to execution, the male protagonist too is ready to pay the price on his body, if initially at first for opposite reasons, that Leucippe, now the slave of Thersandros, had paid on hers.28 This initial violation of the conventions, therefore, constitutes the very motor of the plot, accounting for the assaults upon and subsequent passionate defense of the body’s integrity on the part of Leucippe, and the initial counterexperience of Cleitophon with Melite that tests (and challenges) the hero’s masculine virtue (even identity) as well as that of the heroine. At the end, Cleitophon can claim to Leucippe’s father in the last book (with some disingenuousness, it must be admitted): “Leucippe and I have acted like sage philosophers, Father, while we have been away from home. . . . Eros was pursuing us, and we fled as lover and beloved, but in our exile we were like brother and sister. If one can speak of such a thing as male virginity [andros parthenia, 8.5.7], this is my relationship to Leucippe up to now.” Even so, the chastity test in the grotto of Pan, that follows, to which I earlier alluded, proclaims the need for a public validation of her virtue, with the entire populace of Ephesus as witness, to put the matter to rest, once and for all. To drive home the import of virginal honor with even greater force is the coda to the novel that resolves the story of another couple, that of Calligone (Cleitophon’s half-​sister) and Callisthenes, that began in book 2. The latter, a young elite wastrel, had abducted the girl on the occasion of her wedding (to Cleitophon),29 thinking she was Leucippe (having fallen in love with her only through repute of her beauty). Now in book 8 we hear of Callisthenes’s remarkable transformation (thaumastê metabolê) from an impetuous youth into the perfect gentleman, the brave warrior, and the ideal suitor, who put aside lust to fall in love with Calligone, and maintained all the necessary protocols (including the heartfelt appeal to her father) to win his bride, whose chastity he had zealously guarded. John Morgan comments that Cleitophon and Callisthenes are narrative doublets (as are the two girls in question) but insists that the latter’s serious conversion only redounds to Cleitophon’s discredit in respect to paideia and self-​knowledge.30 Nevertheless, the emphasis on Calligone’s chastity (against apparently all odds) once again reinforces the basic message, and the ending of the novel that results in a double wedding (one in Byzantium, one in Tyre) brings the two stories together in the properly achieved nuptials of two virgin brides. In conclusion, it is difficult, even impossible, to assess the socio-​cultural reasons for this shift from marital constancy in the earlier novels to an emphasis on the intact physical body that, from a literary point of view, transforms the narrative pulse of the story into one of delay and deferral, with increased (and more explicit) erotic content. At the same

Longus and Achilles Tatius    415 time, I have already pointed out that these two romances, divergent as they are, demonstrate, each in its own way, their skill in confronting the normative topoi of their predecessors through humor, irony, and “clever refashioning of traditional themes,”31 with a self-​conscious awareness of their works as fiction. Various theories have been offered to account for the rise of the novel in general, whether a new focus on the role of private emotions and selfhood, or the product of a supposed reorganization of sexual protocols in the imperial period. This change not only foregrounds the erotic at the expense of all other concerns, for male as for female, but emphasizes the reciprocal basis of the marriage bond.32 As Whitmarsh observes, “the emergence of romance is even more difficult to relate to particular historical changes, because it was, it appears, composed outside of civic institutions.”33 Nevertheless, some have claimed that the marriage of elites formed the basis of civic stability, or was itself a symbolic celebration of the social order and its presiding deities—​its veil of power.34 Hence the focus on an initiatory scenario that sees legitimate wedlock as the only desired outcome in the socialization of the young.35. Conversely, the genre, in its elaboration of “adventure time,” has been termed a form of escapist literature that enlivened the predictable rhythms of humdrum life.36 The trials and tribulations suffered by the protagonists in a world beset with uncertainty away from home may be exciting, but also indicative of what has been called an “age of anxiety” in which “identity politics” are held up to disquieting confusion.37 In the end, it must be said, “cultural forms like literature do not straightforwardly reflect a pre-​existing reality. . . . Rather they offer a framework for perceiving it,” and must, in the broadest sense, answer to the tastes of their readers on intellectual and aesthetic grounds.38 In the period of the Second Sophistic, the genre has evolved to include both the more playful and the more serious aspects of life, without ever really questioning in the end the prescribed roles for masculine and feminine identities or compromising the need to tame erotic desire in the service of social respectability. Leucippe’s ardent defense of her person in maintaining her chastity against all odds when confronted with the lustful Thersandros gives her the right to speak with a newfound eloquence (6.21–​22). It attests to the larger role granted to women on a par or even at a higher level than men that no other genre granted them. But Leucippe’s choice of Artemis over Aphrodite obeys the rules of male hegemonic authority, as she learned the hard way, and which the course of the entire novel shows she cannot gainsay. Chloe, on the other hand, begins to diminish in stature the more that Daphnis grows into manhood, with all its attendant responsibilities (as well as his newfound knowledge about sex). While the projection into the future of their life together just before they are wed in the last book promises to restore the symmetry of their partnership in all their pastoral activities, it is no accident that her previous ascendancy over him gives way to his mastery of the skills of life, whether as musician, storyteller, or gardener, which in the presence of the city folk earns him the anagnorisis of his parentage well before hers. On their wedding night, Daphnis is the teacher, following Lycaenion’s lessons, and “for the first time Chloe learned that what had happened on the edge of the woods was nothing but shepherds’ games” (4.40.3). This brief discussion of the two sophistic novels cannot, by necessity, begin to encompass the richness of their literary textures nor the subtleties of their narrative art that have

416   Literature and Culture gained critical admiration over the last several decades. While the novel was formerly relegated to the margins of Greek literature and its products often scorned as unworthy heirs to the classical tradition, today’s climate of opinion has undergone a quite drastic shift in the assessment of the value of these works as cultural artifacts. Aided by theoretical considerations in a number of domains (e.g., feminism, narratology, postcolonialism, etc.), by a rediscovery of imperial Greek literature as a whole in a new emphasis on the diffusion of Hellenic identity and Hellenization itself, and by a widespread interest in gender identity, both masculine and feminine, along with constructions of the body and investigations of emotion, the novel has garnered a substantial (and increasing) bibliography, which in particular has shed much-​needed illumination on both Longus and Achilles Tatius.39

Further Reading These suggestions are for Anglophone readers. Translations of both Longus and Achilles Tatius in Reardon 2008 and their respective Loeb editions (Longus:  Henderson 2009; Achilles Tatius:  Gaselee 1969). For Longus, see also Morgan 2004 (with introduction and commentary). For Achilles Tatius, see Whitmarsh 2001, with introduction by Helen Morales. For comparison of the two works, Alvares 2006 and notably, Whitmarsh 2011, 69–​ 107. Individual critical studies: Longus: on major themes such as religion, art, education, mimesis, pastoral, and intertextuality, see variously, Chalk 1960, Gillespie 2012, Hunter 1983 and 1996, Montiglio 2012, Nimis 2001, Pandiri 1985, and Zeitlin 1990. For Achilles Tatius: on major themes such as character, parody, ekphrasis, rhetoric, narrative, myths, landscape, psychology, and intertextuality, see Ballengee 2005, Brethes 2012, Chew 2000, Goldhill 1995, Martin 2002, Nimis 1998, Reardon 1994, Webb 2006, Whitmarsh 2003, and Zeitlin 2012. Morales’s 2004 in-​depth study (the first of its kind) is essential reading. Finally, see Bartsch’s 1989 pathbreaking book on the role of description in Achilles Tatius, which, together with Morales, albeit in different ways, probes the unusual features of this visually inflected text. The study of the ancient novel has profited from an enormous increase in bibliography over these last years, often with multiple contributors to edited volumes. Whitmarsh 2011 is a good place to start, but see also Panayotakis, Zimmerman, and Keulen 2003, Schmeling (1996) 2003, Swain 1999, and Tatum 1994, and Zeitlin 2016, along with supplements to the publication Ancient Narrative on specific themes.

Bibliography Alvares, J. 2006. “Reading Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe and Achilles Tatius’ Leucippe and Clitophon in Counterpoint.” In Authors, Authority, and Interpreters in the Ancient Novel: Essays in Honor of Gareth L. Schmeling, edited by S. Byrne, E. Cueva, and J. Alvares, 1–​33. Ancient Narrative Supplement 5. Groningen. Ballengee, J. R. 2005. “Below the Belt: Looking into the Matter of Adventure-​Time.” In The Bakhtin Circle and Ancient Narrative, edited by B. Branham, 130–​163. Ancient Narrartive Supplement 3. Groningen.

Longus and Achilles Tatius    417 Bartsch, S. 1989. Decoding the Ancient Novel:  The Reader and the Role of Description in Heliodorus and Achilles Tatius. Princeton, NJ. Bierl, A. 2009. “Der griechische Roman—​ein Mythos? Gedanken zur mythischen Dimension von Longos’ Daphnis und Chloe.” In Antike Mythen:  Medien, Transformationen und Konstruktionen, edited by U. Dill and C. Walde, 709–​739. Berlin. Bouffartigue, J. 2001. “Un triangle symbolique. Eros, Aphrodite et Artémis dans le roman de Leucippé et Clitophon.” In OPORA la belle saison de l'hellénisme. Edited by A. Billaut, 125–​38. Paris Bowie, E., and S. Harrison. 1993. “The Romance of the Novel.” JRS 83: 159–​178. Brethes, R. 2007. De l’idéalisme au réalisme: Une étude du comique dans le roman grec. Cardo 6. Salerno. Brethes, R. 2012. “How to Be a Man: Towards a Sexual Definition of the Self in Achilles Tatius’ Novel Leucippe and Clitophon.” In Narrating Desire: Eros, Sex, and Gender in the Ancient World, edited by M. P. F. Pinheiro, M. B. Skinner, and F. I. Zeitlin, 154–​181. Berlin. Briand, M. 2006. “Formes et fonctions fictionnelles de la ‘muthologia’: Énonciations en catalogue et résumés dans les romans grecs anciens.” Kernos 19: 161–​175. Chew, K. 2000. “Achilles Tatius and Parody.” CJ 96: 57–​70. Chalk, H. H. O. 1960. “Eros and the Lesbian Pastorals of Longus.” JHS 80: 32–​51. Effe, B. 1982. “Longos:  Zur Funktionsgeschichte der Bukolik in der römischen Kaiserzeit.” Hermes 110: 65–​84. Effe, B. 1999. “Longus: Towards a History of Bucolic and Its Function in the Roman Empire.” In Oxford Readings in the Greek Novel, edited by S. Swain, 189–​209. Oxford. Foucault, M. 1988. The History of Sexuality. Vol. 3, The Care of the Self. Translated by R. Hurley. New York. Gaselee, S., trans. 1969. Achilles Tatius: Leucippe and Clitophon. Rev. ed. Cambridge, MA. Gillespie, C. 2012. “Creating Chloe: The Aesthetics of Education in Daphnis and Chloe.” In Aesthetic Value in Classical Antiquity, edited by I. Sluiter and R. Rosen, 421–​446. Leiden. Goldhill, S. 1995. Foucault’s Virginity:  Ancient Erotic Fiction and the History of Sexuality. Cambridge. Henderson, J., trans. 2009. Longus, Daphnis and Chloe:  Xenophon of Ephesus, Anthia and Habrocomes. Cambridge, MA. Hunter, R. 1983. A Study of Daphnis and Chloe. Cambridge. Hunter, R. 1996. “Longus, Daphnis and Chloe.” In The Novel in the Ancient World, edited by G. Schmeling, 361–​386. Leiden. Hunter, R. 1997. “Longus and Plato.” In Der antike Roman und seine mittelalterliche Rezeption, edited by M. Picone and B. Zimmermann, 15–​28. Basel. Johnson, W. A., and H. N. Parker, eds. 2009. Ancient Literacies: The Culture of Reading in Greece and Rome. Oxford. Konstan, D. 1994. Sexual Symmetry:  Love in the Ancient Novel and Related Genres. Princeton, NJ. Lalanne, S. 2006. Une éducation grecque: Rites de passage et construction des genres dans le roman grec ancien. Paris. Martin, R. P. 2002. “A Good Place to Talk:  Discourse and Topos in Achilles Tatius and Philostratus.” In Space in the Ancient Novel, edited by M. Paschalis and S. A. Frangoulidis, 143–​160. Ancient Narrative Supplement 1. Groningen. Merkelbach, R. 1988. Die Hirten des Dionysos: Die Dionysos-​Mysterien der römischen Kaiserzeit und der bukolische Roman des Longus. Stuttgart.

418   Literature and Culture Montiglio, S. 2012. “The (Cultural) Harmony of Nature: Music, Love, and Order in Daphnis and Chloe.” TAPA 142: 133–​156. Morales, H. 2004. Vision and Narrative in Achilles Tatius’ “Leucippe and Clitophon”. Cambridge. Morgan, J. R. 1996. “Erotika mathemata:  Greek Romance as Sentimental Education.” In Education in Greek Fiction, edited by A. Sommerstein and C. Atherton, 163–​189. Bari. Morgan, J. R. 2004. Longus, Daphnis and Chloe. Oxford. Nimis, S. 1998. “Memory and Description in the Ancient Novel.” Arethusa 31: 99–​122. Nimis, S. 2001. “Cycles and Sequence in Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe.” In Speaking Volumes: Orality and Literacy in the Greek and Roman World, edited by J. Watson, 185–​198. Mnemosyne Supplement 218. Leiden. Núñez, L. 2008. “Mythes enchâssés dans un roman grec:  Achille Tatius entre erudition et divertissement.” Pallas 78: 319–​334. Panayotakis, S., M. Zimmerman, and W. Keulen, eds. 2003. The Ancient Novel and Beyond. Leiden. Pandiri, T. A. 1985. “Daphnis and Chloe: The Art of Pastoral Play.” Ramus 14: 116–​141. Pecere, O., and A. Stramaglia, eds. 1996. La letteratura di consumo nel mondo greco-​latino. Cassino. Perkins, J. 1995. The Suffering Self: Pain and Narrative Representation in the Early Christian Era. London. Pinheiro, M. P. F., M. B. Skinner, and F. I. Zeitlin, eds. 2012. Narrating Desire: Eros, Sex, and Gender in the Ancient World. Berlin. Plepelits, K. 1980. Achilleus Tatios, Leukippe und Kleitophon. Stuttgart. Reardon, B. P. 1994. “Achilles Tatius and Ego-​Narrative.” In Greek Fiction: The Ancient Novel in Context, edited by J. R. Morgan and R. Stoneman, 80–​96. London. Reprinted in Oxford Readings in the Greek Novel, edited by S. Swain, 243–​258. Oxford, 1999. Reardon, B. P., ed. 2008. Collected Ancient Greek Novels. 2nd ed. Introduction by J. R. Morgan. Berkeley, CA. Rohde, E. 1914. Der griechische Roman und seine Vorlaüfer. 3rd ed. Leipzig. Segal, C. P. 1984. “The Trials at the End of Achilles Tatius’ Clitophon and Leucippe: Doublets and Complementaries.” Stud. Ital. 3rd ser. 2: 83–​91. Schmeling, G., ed. (1996) 2003. The Novel in the Ancient World. Leiden. Swain, S. 1996. Hellenism and Empire: Language, Classicism, and Power in the Greek World, ad 50–​250. Oxford. Swain, S., ed. 1999. Oxford Readings in the Greek Novel. Oxford. Tatum, J. 1994. The Search for the Ancient Novel. Baltimore, MD. Trapp, M. 1990. “Plato’s Phaedrus in Second-​Century Greek Literature.” In Antonine Literature, edited by D. A. Russell, 141–​173. Oxford. Webb. R. 2006. “Rhetoric and the Novel: Sex, Lies and Sophistic.” In A Companion to Greek Rhetoric, edited by I. Worthingon, 526–​541. Oxford. Whitmarsh, T., trans. 2001. Achilles Tatius:  Leucippe and Cleitophon. With introduction by H. Morales. Oxford. Whitmarsh, T. 2003. “Reading for Pleasure: Narrative, Irony and Erotics in Achilles Tatius.” In The Ancient Novel and Beyond, edited by S. Panayotakis, M. Zimmerman, and W. Keulen, 191–​205. Leiden. Whitmarsh, T., ed. 2008. The Cambridge Companion to the Greek and Roman Novel. Cambridge. Whitmarsh, T. 2011. Narrative and Identity in the Ancient Greek Novel: Returning Romance. Cambridge.

Longus and Achilles Tatius    419 Zeitlin, F. I. 1990. “The Poetics of Eros: Nature, Art, and Imitation in Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe,” In Before Sexuality: The Construction of Erotic Experience in the Ancient Greek World, edited by D. Halperin, J. J. Winkler, and F. I. Zeitlin, 417–​464. Princeton, NJ. Zeitlin, F. I. 2008. “Religion.” In The Cambridge Companion to the Greek and Roman Novel, edited by T. Whitmarsh, 91–​108. Cambridge. Zeitlin, F. I. 2012. “Gendered Ambiguities, Hybrid Formations, and the Imaginary of the Body in Achilles Tatius.” In Narrating Desire: Eros, Sex, and Gender in the Ancient World, edited by M. P. F. Pinheiro, M. B. Skinner, and F. I. Zeitlin, 113–​134. Berlin. Zeitlin, F. I. 2016. “Romancing the Classics: The Hellenic Standard and its Vicissitudes under the Empire. Ancient Narrative 13: 37–​65.

Chapter 27

The Anti-soph i st i c  Nov e l Daniel L. Selden

Few aspects of Greek literary culture from the mid-​first to the mid-​fourth century ce did not in some measure fall under the influence of the Second Sophistic, and the “ancient novel” is no exception.1 “[N]‌o city,” Graham Anderson observes, “at any period in the Empire would have been too insignificant to receive a visit from some sophistically colored figure,”2 and we can extend this formulation to literary works as well. Whatever place romance occupied within the hierarchy of literary genres under Imperial rule, their relation to the Second Sophistic constitutes one important index to their meaning, whether they availed themselves of Sophistic literary devices or pointedly refused them. Ancient Mediterranean romance—​to judge by its surviving fragments—​flourished from the fourth century bce through the seventh century ce,3 bookended roughly, at one end, by the Macedonian foundation of Alexandria in 331 bce and, at the other, by ʿAmrū ibn al-​ʿĀṣ’s capture of the city in 641 ce, under the directives of the Rāshidūn Ḫalīfah ʿUmar ibn al-​Ḫattāb. Attested in a wide variety of Mediterranean and Levantine languages—​including Imperial Aramaic, Greek, Late Middle Egyptian, Demotic, Latin, Hebrew, Coptic, Syriac, Armenian, Georgian, Samaritan, Pārsīg, Arabic, and Geʿez—​ only three of the surviving Greek novels show any significant affinity with the oratorical display culture of the Second Sophistic that Philostratus describes in his Lives of the Sophists: Achilles Tatius’s Leucippe and Clitophon, Longus’s Daphnis and Chloe, and Heliodorus’s Aethiopica4—​that is, somewhat under 1 percent of the extant novelistic corpus, a figure that hardly argues for the centrality of the Second Sophistic to the life of the Levantine-​Mediterranean romance as a whole. Were it not for the popularity that these three works enjoy today, so exiguous a corpus would hardly merit mention, though how and why certain Greek novels should have availed themselves of Second Sophistic literary devices (priëm),5 while the majority resisted or ignored them is a complex matter, albeit, from the viewpoint of the constellation of the genre, one of both historical and interpretive importance. Other chapters in this volume deal with novels attracted into the orbit of the Second Sophistic.6 This chapter, therefore, will focus on contemporary romances that gravitated elsewhere or mounted resistance.

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27.1  A comparison (súnkrisis) between the opening of Dio of Prusa’s first oration On Kingship and the inaugural episode of the Alexander Romance, antiquity’s most successful novel,7 makes clear the difference in character between what amount to competing representations of the life of Alexander the Great.8 Alexander appears as one of the favored topoi of the period: Philostratus cites Dio as exemplary of the Imperial sophist,9 and hence his orations provide a benchmark against which to measure both the commonalities of the romances and their deviations.10 Ostensibly delivered before the emperor Trajan,11 Dio’s speech opens by comparing (sunkrίnein) the Macedonian monarch Alexander III with the Assyrian king Sardanapalus. On Kingship

They say that when the aulós-​player Timotheus gave his first recital before Alexander the king, he showed great skill and musicality in adapting his aulós playing to the king’s character (trópos), selecting a composition (aulēma) that was neither effeminate (malakós) nor slow nor of the kind that would induce listlessness or relaxation, but rather, I should think, that thrilling strain that bears the name Athena. And, they say as well that Alexander leaped immediately for his arms like one possessed (éntheos), so roused was he by the tones (mélos) of the music and the rhythm of the aulós. The cause of this was not so much the power of the music as the thought (diánoia) of the king, which was high-​strung and passionate. For Sardanapalus would never have been roused from his chamber nor from the company of his women by Timotheus or any other of the later players—​ not even by Marsyas himself or by Olympus. It seems that even if Athena herself—​ were such a thing possible—​had performed her own strain, Sardanapalus would never have laid hand to arms, but would much more likely have gotten up and danced, or shrunk back entirely. To such a wretched state had power and overindulgence reduced him.12 Dio constructs the opening of his oration as a mise en abyme: Timotheus the aulētēs, playing before Alexander, serves as a double for Dio the rhētōr performing before Trajan. Under the aegis of Athena, moreover, the tutelary deity of Athens, Dio commences with a rhetorical maneuver that stands out as quintessentially Greek, both at the level of form and at the level of content:13 on the one hand (μέν), the martial impulses of the restless Alexander, conqueror and Hellenizer of the East, and, on the other (δὲ), the wanton listlessness of the Assyrian king Sardanapalus, who serves here as a synecdoche for the effeminacy that Hellenes projected onto “barbarian” Asiatic rulers.14 Despite the anachronism of Dio’s comparison (Sardanapalus died roughly 300 years before the birth of Alexander), the súnkrisis—​a well-​worn Sophistical device15—​serves here an exclusionary anthropological agenda which not only distinguishes Greeks from barbarians,

The Anti-sophistic Novel   423 but simultaneously hierarchizes the Hellenic over the Asiatic, one of the principal binary oppositions, predicated on the inside/​outside operants of metaphor (le dedans et/​est le dehors),16 that structured classical Greek thought. Significantly, Dio’s claims for the superiority of the Hellenic over the Asiatic prove isomorphic with the purity of his Greek, which remains unsullied by foreign words, rare glōssai, or conceits drawn from postclassical Greek compositions. “No other ancient people,” Edith Hall observes of the Greeks in general, “privileged language to such an extent in defining its own ethnicity.”17 Corrado Bologna makes this point with more dialectical precision: “È ancora il linguaggio che separa il Greco e il Barbaro, prima di qualsiasi qualità e categoria.”18 The term pa-​pa-​ro already shows up in Linear B as an onomatopoetic reduplication that refers to “someone not from Pylos,” that is, a foreigner, cognate with Sanskrit barbara-​(बर्बर “stammer”), which served in the post-​Vedic period as a designation for non-​Āryan peoples.19 Similarly in Greek, the adjective bárbaros, when employed as a substantive, came to refer to an alien, that is to a non-​Greek speaker, while the noun barbarismós became a common term for a grammatical mistake. From the Mycenaean era on, then, through the Roman Empire, the ability to speak Greek divided the world—​at least as far as Hellenes were concerned—​ into tw o b road categories of people.20 In Pl ato’s Politikós, t he Xénos (“Foreigner”) points up the nominalism inherent in this classification, as well as the logical fallacy that underpins anthropological distinctions of this type:

×

In undertaking to divide the human race into two parts, one should make the division in the way that most people in this country do: they separate the Hellenic race from all the rest as one, and to all the other races, which are countless in number and have no relation in blood or language to one another, they give the single name “barbarian.” Then because of this single name, they think it is a single species. (262c–​d)

Euripides’s Iphigenia had already articulated the hierarchy implicit in this popular, if spurious, division at Aulis: “It is right [eikós] for Greeks to rule barbarians, but not vice versa, for the latter is a slave [doûlon], while the former are free men [eleutheroí < IE *h1leudh-​ero, “belonging to the tribe”; cf. OHG liut, “people”].”21 Citing this very passage of Euripides, moreover, Aristotle argued that barbarians are “slaves by nature” (phúsei),22 and further stresses in the Politics that “barbarians are more servile than Hellenes, and Asiatics than Europeans.” Despite this notional divide, classical Greek never constituted a unified or homogeneous field of expression. Rather, with the collapse of the Mycenaean world, and the civic isolation that ensued, Hellenes came to speak a wide variety of different dialects scattered throughout Ionia, the Helladic peninsula, the Aegean islands, and Magna Graecia, some mutually intelligible, others not.23 Thus, a Corinthian trader of the fifth century bce may well have found a sentence in Cretan difficult to understand: ἄνπανσιν ἔμɛ̄ν ὄπο̄ κά τιλ λɛ̃ι (“Adoption may take place whence one will”) (GDI 4991 9.33–​34).24 Elean posed other challenges: αἰ δὲ βενέοι ἐν τἰαροῖ, βοΐ κα θο̄άδοι καὶ κοθάρσι τελείαι

424   Literature and Culture (“If he commits fornication in the sacred precinct, one shall make him expiate it by the sacrifice of an ox and complete purification”) (GDI 1156). For Dio, however, only Attic, as written in the fifth and fourth centuries bce, captured the essence of “Hellenicity” (τὸ Ἑλληνικόν),25 insofar as—​in his as well as many other Romans’ minds—​the language of Thucydides, Plato, and Demosthenes constituted the acme of both Greek diction and Greek thought. Aelius Aristides—​who characterized Attic not only as “unadulterated, pure, and inoffensive,” but also as “a linguistic model for the whole of the Hellenic world”26—​makes this point explicitly in his Panathēnaïkós: All the cities and all the races of mankind incline towards you [viz., Athens] and your form of life, and your speech [phōnē], for through you the whole inhabited world has come to share a single tongue. Lacedaemonians and all other Greeks would be ashamed to speak in their ancestral manner even among themselves in front of others. In fact, one might say that all other dialects—​whether barbarian or Greek—​were like mere childish lisping when compared with yours. Only this dialect is right for all national festivals, all assemblies and council chambers. It is adequate for all times and places and equally suitable for them all.27

On this account, Dio, Aristides, and others of their fellow sophists not only strove for Attic purity in their orations: their writings concomitantly eschewed Imperial koinaí in ways that had both cultural and class implications.28 Thus, Dio’s Atticism—​elevated to the classical norm—​concomitantly served to reinforce the chauvinism implicit in his comparison of Alexander with Sardanapalus, insofar as it revived the Greek of those who had decisively repulsed the Īrānians at Marathon in the fifth century bce, as well as the language of the League of Corinth,29 which supported the Macedonian conquest of the Haxāmanišiyan empire in the fourth. In Dio’s oration On Kingship, then, the signifier (Attic) dovetails neatly with the signified (“Alexander”), such that both constitute metonyms for the triumph of Hellenic over Asiatic culture. Accordingly, Dio’s oration does not so much voice classical Attic in an unmediated way. Rather, at all moments he speaks self-​consciously, as if entre guillemets (in quotes), staging before Trajan what Mikhail Bakhtin refers to as the “representation of the image of a language” (predstavlenie obraza yazyke),30 in this case the simulacrum of an idiom that had disappeared four centuries before. In fact, similar attempts to represent the image of diverse languages and dialects had long informed significant portions of classical Greek literature.31 In Aristophanes, for example, Old Persian,32 as well as non-​Attic dialects (e.g., Boeotian, Megarian, Laconian),33 became subjects of representation on the Athenian stage—​a comic gag that Alexandrian writers, in turn, promoted to what Roman Jakobson termed the literary “dominant.”34 Thus, in the thirteenth of his Iamboi, Callimachus explicitly calls attention to his practice of writing intermittently in “Ionic and Doric and a mixture of both,”35 when—​ostensibly, at least—​he had never set foot in Ionia: “Fair Muses and Apollo, to whom I make libation . . . not having mingled with the Ionians, . . . nor having come to Ephesus” (fr. 203.14 Pfeiffer). Although linguistically, metrically, and thematically, the Iamboi revive the conventions of old Ionic verse,36

The Anti-sophistic Novel   425 Callimachus makes no claims for the authenticity of his speech: the poet self-​identifies as a stranger to the language that he uses.37 Similarly, Theocritus foregrounds the Doric dialect in which he writes by introducing into Idyll 15 a boor who, amid the crowds of Alexandria, complains at having to suffer two Syracusan women prattling away in Doric (ἐκκναισεῦντι πλατειάσδοισαι ἅπαντα).38 One of the women sassily responds: “We talk in the Peloponnesian manner (Πελοποννασιστὶ λαλεῦμες).39 Dorians are permitted, I suppose, to speak in Doric (δωρίσδεν)” (87–​93). What Aristophanes, Callimachus, and Theocritus all stress, then, is the materiality of language, which they represent as anything but homogeneous or immediately transparent. Far from neutral or fossilized, moreover, these disparate images of archaic speech vied agonistically with one another in Alexandrian letters insofar as each inevitably conveyed a different viewpoint on the world.40 Old Ionic, for example, traduces its targets with considerably more perlocutionary punch—​hence the emblematic suicide of Archilochus’s Neoboulē41—​than does the more genial parody of Doric mime.42 Theocritus also composed verses in Aeolic,43 which means that between them, the major Alexandrian writers represented in their work the dialects of all three of the main branches into which Hesiod and Herodotus divided the Hellenic peoples:44 Doric, Ionic, and Aeolic—​a clear precedent for the Imperial sophists’ revival of classical Attic. Whatever their affinities, however, linguistic archaism at Alexandria and the Atticism of the Second Sophistic ultimately served opposing ends. The Alexandrians participated in a literary program whose aims were to interpellate Greek readers who had relocated to Alexandria from all parts of the Hellenic world—​hence, Markus Asper views Ptolemaic poetry as the latest phase of the always as yet uncompleted project of Panhellenism.45 Nita Krevans, however, reminds us that whatever sense of inclusion Callimachus, Theocritus, or Apollonius of Rhodes may have fostered in their work, their apparent “Panhellenism” in fact always remained a “Polyhellenism”46—​that is, not an attempt to amalgamate Greek residents in Alexandria, but rather an effort to keep historical origins (aítia) linguistically distinct, where any sense of inclusiveness came shot through with an awareness of the dislocation that attended immigration to Alexandria from “Greece.”47 As such, Krevans suggests, Ptolemaic poetry constituted a neurotic reflex that compensated for personal, historical, and geographic loss, and which concomitantly—​in the various representations of Doric, Ionic, and Aeolic that it purveyed—​allowed readers to “concretize” the fact of Hellenic difference. By contrast, the image of classical Attic that Dio and other orators of the Second Sophistic sought to portray as the only dialect “adequate for all times and places” constitutes a dialectical negation of Alexandrian poetic practice.48 In place of polyglossia (mnogojazycie), we find a largely homogenizing idiom that extols the glories of the past not in the mode of historical loss or geographical displacement but, as if these achievements were still present, in a sustained metalepsis that effectively writes Rome and the contemporary realities of Greek life under Roman rule out of the picture.49 Ultimately, then, the unexpressed subtext of Second Sophistic oratory always turns out to be Greek subjection to Roman rule.50 This, in turn, makes it possible to see that the works of Dio, Aelius Aristides, Longinus, and Lucian—​the four authors of

426   Literature and Culture the period that Luciano Canfora singles out51—​give expression to a different form of collective anxiety, in this case a compensation for the disempowerment of an always already phantasmatic “Greece,” whose agent of castration returns precisely at the site of the repressed.52 Thus, when Dio pits Alexander against Sardanapalus, the stakes of the súnkrisis involve not only the relative merits of Greeks over barbarians: to introduce the subject of kingship, the oration begins with Alexander, the one Hellenic monarch whose power and demesne not only rivaled the imperium of Rome, but actually managed to exceed it.53 Moreover, Alexander successfully demolished the Haxāmanišiyan Empire, while Roman legions, from the time of the Republic on, perennially failed to subdue Īrān beyond the Zagros Mountains, whether under Parθavan or Sāsānid rule.54 What on the level of manifest content appears to be a belated insistence on the superiority of Greeks over barbarians, then, functioned latently as a súnkrisis between Greece and Rome, which accrued to the historical and cultural prestige of the Hellenic world.

27.2  The Alexander Romance—​both in its Greek recensions (α–​ε),55 as well as in its Armenian, Syriac, Latin, Arabic, Coptic, Īrānian, and Geʿez refashionings—​constitutes, in turn, a dialectical negation of Dio’s and his fellow sophists’ political agenda and Atticizing worldview. Polemically, recension α of the Romance—​our oldest extant witness to the novel, composed at the height of the Second Sophistic—​opens not by conjuring up the Greece of Plato or Demosthenes. Instead, the story takes its bearings coevally from Egypt of the fourth century bce, that is, not only outside of the Hellenic world per se, but—​significantly enough—​precisely in that land which, according to Herodotus at least, “had established for itself manners and customs [ēthea kai nómoi] diametrically opposed [émpalin] to those of the [Greeks]” (2.35). Accordingly, instead of lauding the philosophical achievements of classical Athens, the Alexander Romance opens by commending the wisdom (sophía) of the Egyptians, in particular the expertise in magic that Nectanebo, the last indigenous pharaoh of the Two Lands,56 personally possessed.57 From the outset, then, the Romance not only contests the sophists’ claims for the superiority of Greeks over barbarians—​and here, Egyptians in particular. The promotion of magic ( ḥkȝw) to a science indispensable to both the order ( mȝꜤ.t) and protection ( sȝ) of the world58—​tenets central to Egyptian political theology from the Old Kingdom through the Byzantine era59—​flies directly in the face of Greek views of mageía as a foreign, specious, and illicit set of practices, without connection to the pursuit of knowledge or to the practice of religion.60 On the one hand, then, Ḥeka ( )—​that is, Magic personified—​explains in the Coffin Texts: “I am the one whom the Sole Lord made before two things had come into this world. I am the offspring of the one who gave birth to totality, for I am the protection of that which the Sole Lord

The Anti-sophistic Novel   427 commanded.”61 On the other, Robert Parker, summarizing the mainstream Greek position, notes: “magic differs from religion as weeds differ from flowers.”62 In opposition, then, to the culturally monologizing aspirations of the Second Sophistic, the Alexander Romance presents its readers from the outset with a dialogic text, specifically designed to evoke differing responses from different communities of readers. Whereas for ethnic Greeks Egyptian magic represented just the sort of superstition in which they would expect bárbaroi to be engaged, for ethnic Egyptians, Nectanebo—​in his capacity as king ( nsw)—​unsurprisingly possessed cognizance and facility with ḥkȝw as part and parcel of his office and as the mainstay of his power.63 The conflict remains irresolvable to the extent that for Greeks the Egyptians appeared uncultivated and deluded, while Egyptians viewed Greeks as sacrilegious and naïve.64 Following this presentation of Egyptian sophía, recension β of the Romance—​a later derivative of α (ca. 300–​550 ce)—​provides the most compact account of the events that set the novel’s plot in motion, affairs that ultimately occasion Alexander’s birth. The Life of Alexander of Macedon and His Deeds

Some explōratorēs [scouts]—​this is what the Romans call them, among the Greeks, however, they are known as katáskopoi [spies]—​presented themselves to Nectanebo and announced that a great cloud of enemies, a host of innumerable soldiers was advancing upon Egypt. The commander of Nectanebo’s army approached him and said, “Live, O King! Put aside now all your ways of peace and be ready to array your troops for war. For a great cloud of foreigners (bárbaroi) threatens us both by land and sea. It is not just one people (éthnos) that marches against us, but myriads of peoples: Indians, Nokemians, Oxydrakes, Iberians, Kaukhones, Aelapes, Bosporans, Bastranians, Aksanians, Chalybes, and all the other great peoples of the East. Defer all other things and look to yourself.” When the general had spoken, king Nectanebo laughed and said to him: “You speak both well and appropriately, guarding the watch that has been entrusted to you. However, you have also spoken cravenly and not like a soldier. Force lies not in numbers (ókhlos), but rather war resides in zeal. . . . Repair then with the soldiers that have been entrusted to you and guard the battle array under your command. For with a single word, I shall cover over the numberless throng of foreigners with the sea.” (1.3)65 As opposed to the historical and cultural foreshortening that characterized the Second Sophistic (“Greece is the world”66), the Alexander Romance conspicuously assumes as its horizon the multiethnic compass of the Imperial East. Hence, although composed primarily in Greek,67 the first sentence of this passage takes as its grammatical subject the Latin exploratores, which the narrator immediately glosses with the Greek katáskopoi. Not only does this anachronism acknowledge from the outset that we are dealing here hierarchically with Greek written under Roman rule.68 At the same time, the parenthesis foregrounds the linguistic diversity that informed not only daily life in Roman Egypt, but also that of most societies across North Africa

428   Literature and Culture and throughout the Roman and Sāsānian Near East.69 In Egypt alone, from the Late Period through the Byzantine era (664 bce–​641 ce), the languages of administration alone included: Aramaic, Demotic, Greek, Middle Egyptian, Latin, and Coptic. This means that scribes and readers had not only to negotiate a considerable variety of diverse vernaculars, but also an equal number of different scripts that not only jostled, but competed with each another, both within official archives—​for example, the documents that Egyptian temples maintained in the “House of Life” ( Pr-​Ꜥnḫ)70—​as well as on a single ostracon or papyrus. This resulted in complex grammatological configurations for which the Demotic Magical Papyrus of London and Leiden supplies an emblematic image (Figure 27.1). Here Greek, Demotic, Coptic, and hieroglyphic script all find their appointed place within the spell ( rȝ, literally “utterance”), as well as on the page, such that no language assumes absolute priority over any of the others. Each remains identifiably distinct, yet all are requisite performatively for the charm to take effect.71 Similarly, the Alexander Romance makes no attempt to resuscitate the Attic of Isocrates or Lysias. Rather, the text presents readers with a literary representation of koinē, the common, supraregional form of spoken Greek—​based on Attic, but with many forms and syntactical constructions that educated Greeks (pepaideuménoi) condemned as “errors” (barbarismoí) which only a “dimwit” or a “rustic” might commit.72 In fact, the koinē of the Roman period was neither uniform across the empire—​for example, the only attestation for the Semiticized istartēga (Attic: stratēgos [“general”])

Figure  27.1  F. LL. Griffith and H. Thompson. The Demotic Magical Papyrus of London and Leiden. Volume II. London: H. Grevel & Co., 1905. Plate XXIII. A spell for lamp divination written in Demotic, Greek, and Coptic, interspersed with hieroglyphs. 3rd c. ce.

The Anti-sophistic Novel   429 comes from Dura Europus,73 just as the koinē of Egypt regularly displays traces of Demotic74—​nor did it simply constitute a series of unruly grammatical mistakes.75 Rather, as Jeff Siegel explains: A koine is the stabilized result of mixing of linguistic sub-​systems such as regional or literary dialects. It usually serves as a lingua franca among speakers of the different contributing varieties and is characterized by a mixture of features of these varieties and most often by reduction or simplification in comparison.76

Quite pointedly, then, the Alexander Romance eschews the Attic Kunstsprache of the sophists in favor of the lingua franca of the period with its composite of different dialectal forms and local variations. This need not imply that the redactors of the Romance lacked the type of paideía or facility with speech that Dio, for example, displays in his orations—​in fact, much of the material in the novel turns out to be arcane.77 Rather, like Callimachus’s project to write his Iamboi in Ionic or Theocritus’s decision to compose pederastic poetry in the language of Sappho and Alcaeus,78 the recourse of the Alexander Romance to koinē constitutes a stylistic choice that functions as part and parcel of a centrifugal narrative that records the piecemeal construction of an always untotalized non-​Hellenocentric state, whose inhabitants included Anatolians, Syro-​Palestinians, Egyptians, Īrānians, Indians, Scythians, Russians, Chinese, what have you—​an ethnic diversity thematized in various ways throughout the text.79 Recourse to an archaizing Attic which, as Tim Whitmarsh puts it, “is always seen here as a vehicle for cultural purity,”80 would run against the grain of the literary and ethnic pluralism that the Alexander Romance sets out to embody and portray. In fact, given the opening episode’s set (Einstellung) toward linguistic diversity (raznorečie), it comes as no surprise to find that several different idioms within the passage issue directly from the multicultural context of Roman Egypt, where the episode takes place.81 For one, Nectanebo’s general  (Dem. mr-​mšꜤ) addresses the king with the Greek imperative zēthi, “Live!,” which, although uncommon as a Greek salutation, could—​within the framework of the story—​mean no more than “Save yourself!” Classical Egyptian, however, regularly employed the stative of the verb Ꜥnḫ, “to live,” in reference to the king as a type of salutary honorific:  “May he live!” (Ꜥnḫ.w) /​“May you live!” (Ꜥnḫ.tj), which evolved in the Late Period into the epistolary salutation: jmj Ꜥnḫ=k “May you live.” Along similar lines, an oath from the Demotic Instructions of ʿOnchsheshonqy, a text that circulated in the Roman period, corresponds quite closely to the general’s address:

Ꜥnḫ ḥr=k pȝy=y nb Ꜥȝ May your face live, my great lord!82 (4/​2)

430   Literature and Culture By the Imperial era, significant portions of both the enchoric and the immigrant population in the Roman province of Aegyptus were bilingual, equally fluent in Demotic as well as Greek.83 Accordingly, it stands to reason, then, that this “Egyptianism,” couched within the Greek text, would be legible to speakers of Egyptian, be they of Hellenic or of Egyptian descent, further evidence—​as many scholars have proposed—​that Egypt was, in fact, the locus of the Nectanebo story’s composition.84 A second construction in this passage points by another route to the Septuagint, the princip al Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptu res, composed at least partially in Egypt.85 Nectanebo’s assertion that his magic will cover over with the sea the enemies marshaled against him (πελάγι ἐπικαλύψω) recalls the well-​known passage in Exodos where the sea inversely closes over the king of Egypt as his forces pursue the Israelites to the coast of the Yam Suf:86 “The Lord [Gk. Kúrios; Heb. ‫ ]יהוה‬said to Mōüsēs: ‘Stretch forth your hand over the sea, and let the water be turned back to its place, and let it cover the Egyptians’ (ἐπικαλυψάτω τοὺς Αἰγυπτίους) [14:26]. Mōüsēs subsequently celebrates this victory in the immediately ensuing “Song of the Sea”: “The Lord has cast the chariots of Pharaoh and his host into the sea . . . : they were swallowed up. He covered them with the sea [πόντῳ ἐκάλυψεν]: they sank to the depth like a stone” [15:4–5]. Rhetorically, within the framework of the Romance, this constitutes a metalepsis which subsumes the “miraculous” power of Yahweh under the agency of Ḥeka (“Magic”), with whose arts Nectanebo is conversant. However, just as Greek readers dismissed magic as “superstition,” this transumption likewise challenges Hebraic teaching, particularly as presented in the Septuagint itself. In Deuteronómion, for instance, Mōüsēs explicitly forbids magical practices of any kind for the Israelite people,87 and the injunction of Exodos is clear: “You shall not allow sorcerers to live” [22:17]. This difference in cultural perspective once again p rod uces a dialogic text: for reade rs conv ersa nt with Egyptian traditions, the Alexander Romance associates Yahweh positively with Pharaoh, as if Nectanebo and the Lord av ail ed themselves similarly of magi c (ḥkȝw) to vanquish assailants and secure peace. However, from the point of view of the sizeable Jewish readership in Egypt, the Romance deprecatingly reduces Yahweh to a miscreant in a para-​Gnosticizing gesture of Elohistic disenchantment.88 The heteroglossia (raznorečie) that permeates the opening of the Alexander Romance proves programmatic for the novel as a whole. Self-​consciously alluding to the principal languages spoken in Roman Egypt, the text likewise attempts to represent the larger discursive environment of Levantine-​Mediterranean romance, consistently foregrounding the linguistic pluralism that constituted the Greco-​Roman novel’s wider Sitz im Leben.89 Concomitantly, the linguistic difference that informs the prose finds its narrative correlate in the generic mixture of the passage, which draws simultaneously on Greek, Egyptian, and Hebraic material—​the three main literary traditions that flourished side by side in Roman Egypt—​just as it finds its thematic projection in the hordes of alien peoples—​“Indians, Nokemians, Oxydrakes, Iberians, Kaukhones, Aelapes, Bosporans, Bastranians, Aksanians, Chalybes,” etc.—​who threaten to overwhelm Nectanebo’s Egypt. In the sequel to this episode, moreover, Nectanebo flees to Macedon, where he wins favor with Olympias, the queen, by impersonating the

The Anti-sophistic Novel   431 Egyptian god Amun90—​a bed trick through which Nectanebo becomes Alexander’s sire (genitor), even if Philip, in his capacity as king, officially presents himself as the boy’s father (pater) (1.4–​14).91 Adultery here not only thematizes the various forms of linguistic, generic, and cultural commixture that make up the text of the Romance as a whole. Insofar as Alexander constituted one of the privileged topics of Second Sophistic oratory, 92 the novel explicitly presents him as a mischling—​half Macedonian and half Egyptian—​in a way that undermines his “Greekness” and throws into question his role as standard bearer for the Hellenization of the world. As opposed, then, to the Attic purity to which the writings of Dio and other Sophists of the period aspired, this “Macedonian” story elevates hybridity to a literary dominant, implicitly thereby flouting the cultural capital of the pepaideuménoi.93 In his capacity, moreover, as the half-​breed hero of an ethnically mixed empire, Alexander inaugurates his conquests not by elevating classical Hellenic culture, but rather by subjugating Greece, such that Hellas becomes but one among the seemingly innumerable different provinces that come to make up Alexander’s state. As the Macedonians march against Sparta, the γ-​recension of the Romance—​a Byzantine redaction that still makes use of material from the third century ce—​parodies the Athenian world that the Atticists imagined for themselves and never tired of portraying: The leaders of the cities gathered at Athens, which was their leader at the time, and twelve orators debated . . . what they should do about Alexander. After three days they had reached no conclusion on the best course of action, and were unable to reach a unanimous decision. Some were in favor of resisting Alexander, others argued the opposite. Fate was unseasonable for them . . .  . When Alexander arrived, he drew up his lines against Athens and besieged them. (γ 1.27.2ff.)94

Ironically, the Attic orators whom Dio and his cohort not only idealized but strove to imitate prove wholly ineffectual here. Unable to come to terms with Macedonia’s demand for a surrender, their indecision affords Alexander the leeway to attack Athens with “innumerable archers whose arrows blotted out the sun.” As such, the Romance presents both the orators and the city in a decidedly weak light, which expressly contradicts Aelius Aristides’s portrayal of Athens as “the bulwark [éruma] of all Hellas.”95 Following the logic of this disillusionment, moreover, Alexander proceeds to attack Rome, followed by the conquest of Rome’s historical archrival Carthage: Next Alexander . . . landed on Italic ground. The Roman generals sent him a crown of pearls via their general Marcus, and another with precious stones, accompanied with the message: “We too shall crown your head, Alexander, king of the Romans and of the entire earth.” They also brought him 500 pounds of gold. Alexander accepted their gift and promised he would make them great. . . . Next, Alexander crossed over to Africa. The African generals met him and begged him to stay away from their city of Carthage. But Alexander despised them for their cowardice and said: “Either become stronger yourselves, or pay tribute to those who are stronger than you.” (β 1.29)96

432   Literature and Culture In a dizzying voltige of temporal overlays, Rome not only capitulates to vassalage without so much as a skirmish: “Marcus”—​the novel’s comic handle for “any Roman magistrate”—​offers Alexander the diadem, which, from the hindsight of the third century ce, C.  Julius Caesar had notoriously refused.97 Proleptically outdoing Caesar, then, Alexander not only assumes the crown:  he concomitantly accepts lavish gifts from Rome, thereby reducing Latium to just another tributary state. In the fiction of the Romance, then, Greece and Rome come to share the same subsidiary status within empire, thereby obviating any reading of the text that would see Alexander’s Italic conquests as a compensatory fantasy whereby the Hellenic world—​ through the agency of a “Greek” Alexander—​triumphs over Rome. To the contrary, Greece, Rome, and Carthage remain tributary states subsumed within Alexander’s Macedonian Empire, no more or less central than Arachosia, Egypt, or Parthyene, thereby defusing any meaningful hierarchization of one over the other. By leveling the field in this way, such that Greeks possess the same subaltern status as do Romans, on the one hand, and Persians, on the other, the Alexander Romance effectively dismantles the terms of Second Sophistical debate, envisioning instead a world in which each part—​be it Greek, Roman, Punic, Iranian, Egyptian, Indic, Ethiopian, Mongolian, or Russian—​contributes in its distinctiveness to the composite nature of the whole.98 As such, the Romance does not simply reverse the oppositions that shape the dominant discourse, suggesting, for example, that Alexander was not really Greek but actually Egyptian. Rather, Alexander the “Greek” turns out to be always already a “barbarian,”99 thereby collapsing the distinction between the categories altogether. In fact, according to the Romance, Alexander embodied this heterogeneity in his very person: Alexander’s appearance in no way bore the imprint of Philip or Olympias his mother or the one who sired him [ὁ σπείρας], but was entirely unique. He had the shape of a man, but his hair was that of a lion and his eyes were particolored [ἑτερογλαuκοúς]—​the right one slanting downwards, while the left was white. His teeth were sharp as little pegs, like those of a snake, and his movements were swift and violent like a lion. (β 1.13.3)100

Part human, mammal, reptile, and practically part wood—​Alexander’s visage resembles nothing so much as the empire of difference that as the narrative ensues he comes to create at the expense of any notion of a Hellenic center. To implicate the reader directly in this heteronomy, moreover, the passage centers on an anacoluthon—​that is, a logical discontinuity in the progression of the thought: “His eyes were particolored [heteroglaukoí]—​the right one slanting downward [katōpherēs], while the left was white [leukόs].” In Greek, glaukόs refers to the glint or blue-​gray color of the eye, such that hetero-​glaukόs should mean that Alexander’s eyes did not quite match, each exhibiting a different shade of blue. Unexpectedly, however, the ensuing description says nothing about glaukótēs whatsoever. Instead, we learn that one of Alexander’s eyes had amblyopia, an ocular disorder that concerns the position of the pupil, while the other suffered from leukocoria, that is, it had no color at all (Figure 27.2). In effect, this repeats in the figuration of the text the logic of difference, where even what occur “naturally” as pairs turn out to be disparate in character:101

The Anti-sophistic Novel   433

Figure 27.2  Alexander’s eyes.

Anacolutha of this sort, which typify both the rhetoric of the Romance and its narrative construction as a whole, play havoc with the neatly balanced oppositions of classical Greek rhetoric, such as the μὲν–​δέ correlation with which Dio opens his first oration On Kingship. For Dio and his fellow sophists, the inhabited world (oikouménē) remained a representational space of hierarchized, but balanced antitheses, not a collective of inassimilable diversities—​ marvels (thaúmata) and monstrosities (térata)—​such as Alexander encounters on his expedition to the East: trees that speak with human voices, birds that shoot flames through their beaks, lands of total darkness, and so forth.102 In fact, for Alexander, the worlding of the world relies upon disparity: “If we were all of like mind [homόgnōmai], the world would have remained callow [argόs]: the sea would never have been sailed, the land would never have been plowed, marriages would not have been consummated, and there would have been no making of children” (β 3.6.14). At its farthest rhetorical reaches, then, the novel ultimately rejects analogic thinking altogether. So Demosthenes, as represented in the Romance, admonishes the citizens of Athens: “Each moment [kairόs] possesses its own force [dúnamis] and makes its own demands [epitagē]” (α 2.3.5). The novel’s target, then, is not just Atticism per se, but more broadly the sophists’ fetishization of classical Greek culture in general. This emerges clearly from the episode that concludes book 1 of the α-​recension,103 in which Ismēnias, a clever Theban (sophόs), skilled at playing the aulós, attempts to dissuade Alexander from destroying his native city. For this purpose, Ismēnias treats Alexander to an ekphrastic tour of Thebes’s mythic past set in choliambs—​a complex composition that reads in part: Do you see these walls, built by the shepherd Zethus And the lyre-​player Amphion? Cadmus built these foundations. This is the house of Labdacus. Here the unhappy mother Of Oedipus bore the murderer of his father. Here was the precinct of Heracles, formerly The house of Amphitryon . . . There Zeus once blasted Semele, whom he desired.

434   Literature and Culture This is the house of Tiresias, the mouthpiece of Apollo. From here blind Oedipus was driven out. Do you see that fir-​tree whose branches reach to heaven? On that tree Pentheus, who spied on the women’s dancing, Was torn apart, wretched man, by his own mother. Do you see that furthest mountain ridge, Which stands out prominently above the road? There used to crouch the monstrous Sphinx, etc.104

Rather than appease the conquering potentate, however, Ismēnias’s performance only further enflames Alexander who, with the exception of the poet Pindar’s tomb, orders Thebes’s complete eradication:105 “Vilest offspring of the sons of Cadmus, vulgar offshoot of a barbarian stock [δήμιον βλάστημα βαρβάρου ῥίζης], do you think that you can deceive Alexander by telling me these sophistical and fabricated stories [σοφιστικούς καὶ πεπλασμένους μύθους]? Now I  am going to destroy the city by fire . . . [and] exterminate all of you with your precious ancestors.” Accordingly, Alexander proceeds to demolish the Theban pόlis, which, in an Odyssean twist, he renames “No-​City” (Ápolis).106 Despite Ismēnias’s bid to conscript Alexander for Thebes, the Macedonian king displays neither interest in nor any nostalgia for the panoply of heroes and heroines whom the poet parades before his eyes. Rather, Alexander makes it clear that Thebans—​and by synecdoche Greeks as a whole—​constitute a “barbarian stock” without a culture worth preserving, a radical reversal of the Greco-​Roman commonplace from the perspective of the heir to Egypt’s throne. In part to validate this Thebes-​as-​Greece synecdoche, the “fabricated fictions” to which his poem alludes all constitute staples of Attic t­ragedy, which served as the principal vehicle through which they became generally known throughout the Hellenic world.107 Each of the heroes, then, whom Ismēnias names—​ Amphion, Heracles, Oedipus, Pentheus, and so forth—​turns out to have as much of an association with Athens as he or she does with Thebes. So Froma Zeitlin asks: What, then does Thebes as a topos represent for Athens on the dramatic stage in the theater of Dionysos? . . . I propose that [it] functions in the theater as an anti-​Athens, an other place. If we say that theater in general functions as an “other scene” where the city puts itself and its values into question by projecting itself upon the stage to confront the present with the past through its ancient myths, then Thebes . . . is the “other scene” of the “other scene” that is the theater itself, . . . [where] Athens acts out questions crucial to the polis, the self, the family, and society, . . . displaced upon a city that is imagined as the mirror opposite of Athens.108

To put this another way, Thebes in Ismēnias’s account—​the Thebes of Attic tragedy—​ possesses no identity of its own: entirely tropological (“other”), it serves as lieu commun that allowed Athenian playwrights of the fifth century bce to represent issues that affected Athens,109 but which did not necessarily coincide with those that troubled

The Anti-sophistic Novel   435 Thebes.110 Metonymically, then, Alexander’s destruction of “Thebes” functions as a displaced blow struck against classical Greek culture as a whole—​hence the recourse to choliambs which from Hipponax through Callimachus, Catullus, and Martial retained their association with invective and abuse.111 Not for nothing, then, the Romance calls Ismēnias sophόs and his art of storytelling sophistikόs, for these are the very terms which, at the time of the novel’s composition, Flavius Philostratus, among others, used to describe the itinerant Greek rhētores of the Roman Empire.112 Ultimately, then, Ismēnias serves as a caricature of the Second Sophistic orator who looks back to Thebes-​as-​Athens’s “finest hour” in order to deliver feigned speeches and compose fictional tales (peplasménoi mûthoi) concerning long-​settled historical crises or legendary events. With its historical belatedness and far-​fetched Attic diction,113 Ismēnias’s speech looks like nothing so much as a Socratic meletē, for which the audience proposed the topic: “What did Ismēnias [a generic name for ‘any Theban’] say to Alexander in order to persuade him to spare Thebes?”114 Or, to put the matter somewhat more pointedly, the deliberation turns pyrrhically upon the question: “Should Alexander destroy the cultural capital of Athens?,” a self-​deconstructing proposition that cuts the entire project of the Second Sophistic to the quick.

27.3  Mikhail Bakhtin argued that the European novel assumed as its vocation to question, discomfit, and ultimately to neutralize the various hegemonic uses to which literary language has been put.115 Accordingly, Imperial Greek prose—​which Bakhtin assigns to “the prehistory of novelistic discourse”116—​passes through three dialectically disposed moments of negation. In the first instance, the Atticizing imperative of the Second Sophistic develops in response to the hegemony of Latin as the official language of the Roman occupation.117 At the same time, however, the sophists did not simply favor classical Attic in their work: they actively policed Greek oratorical diction to the point that Atticism itself effectively became another form of hegemonic discourse.118 It is precisely here, then, that the antisophistic novel makes its point of critical intervention, by insisting on the social diversity of speech types (raznorečie) that make up the literary landscape.119 Thus, the history of Imperial Greek prose consists largely of the dialectical interplay between these competing centripetal and centrifugal linguistic forces. As Bakhtin observes: Unitary language constitutes . . . an expression of the centripetal forces of language. A unitary language is not something given [dan], but is always in essence posited [zadan]—​and at every moment of its linguistic life it is opposed to the realities of heteroglossia. . . . At any moment of its evolution, language is stratified not only into linguistic dialects in the strict sense of the word, . . . but also into languages that

436   Literature and Culture are socio-​ideological: languages of social groups, “professional” and “generic” languages, languages of generations and so forth. From this point of view, literary language itself is only one of these heteroglot languages—​and in its turn is also stratified into languages (generic, period-​bound and others).120

Alongside the Alexander Romance, which persistently foregrounds this pluralism in its diction, its generic make-​up, and its plot (fabula), other novels contemporary with the α-​recension deploy alternate modes of resistance to the Second Sophistic. In fact, the pseudobiographical Life of Sekoûndos, dated to the second century ce, carries the critique of the Second Sophistic one step further by explicitly inverting the sophists’ main professional claims—​in particular the premise that oratorical mastery leads to power.121 Hence, instead of actively pursuing a Greek education (paideía) and cultivating purity of diction, Sekoûndos “practiced silence [σιωπὴν ἤσκησεν] up until his death.”122 His scruple here concerns the perlocutionary force that speech acts inevitably entail:123 “Recognizing that it was on account of his own tongue [διὰ τῆς αὐτοῦ γλώττης] that his mother’s death had come about, he resolved that he would never speak thereafter” (70). Sekoûndos’s reticence thus marks the limit of what Paolo Valesio calls the “rhetoric of anti-​rhetoric,” in which “the type of discourse that is explicitly contrary to rhetoric and tries to detach itself from its mechanism [turns out to be] completely under the sway of rhetoric that . . . is actually more sophisticated and devious than the rhetoric from which it pretends to shy away.”124 In this case, Sekoûndos’s abnegation of all speech turns his life into one extended aposiōpēsis,125 a metarhetorical gesture that figures dialogically within the context of a still largely oral culture where not only paideia and prestige, but also the very prospect of subject formation depended upon oratorical display.126 Ironically, Sekoûndos’s silence so aggrandizes his reputation that when Hadrian visits Athens,127 the emperor summons him to an audience in which, true to his convictions, the philosopher refuses to utter anything at all, even under pain of execution. The two, therefore, agree to communicate in writing: Hadrian poses the questions and the philosopher writes back (antigráphein). Sekoûndos, however, prefaces their correspondence with a written prooímion which, instead of eulogizing the emperor according to the protocols of the basílikos lόgos,128 pointedly deflates the imperial maiestas of the future Divus Hadrianus: “You are a human being [ánthrōpos], like the rest of us, subject to every kind of happenstance [páthos]—​dust of corporeal decay. The life of irrational beasts [áloga] is such as this” (76). Moreover, instead of praising Hadrian for the lasting monuments that he had erected throughout the empire,129 Sekoûndos stresses the ephemera of life, admonishing the emperor with the well-​worn platitude: “Today passes us by, and what tomorrow brings we do not know.”130 He then proceeds to answer the twenty largely fatuous questions that Hadrian proposes: “What is a farmer?” “What is a boat?” “What is the day?” Rather than expatiate upon these topics with either philosophical precision or rhetorical finesse, Sekoûndos concatenates a series of two-​word phrases (qualifier + noun) which, taken together, neither cohere into a mimesis of oration nor present a philosophic argument in the way that his answers are made to do in the Armenian and Arabic reworkings of the text. 131

The Anti-sophistic Novel   437 What Is Poverty?

A hated good [misoúmenon agathón], a mother of health [hugeías mētēr], an impediment to pleasures [hēdonōn empodismós], a pastime free of care, a possession difficult to cast off, a master of conceits, an inventor of wisdom, an ­ungrudging occupation, an essence free from intrusion, a trade free of duty, an unapproved gain, a possession on which no one informs, invisible good fortune, good fortune free of care. (88) This hodgepodge of bipartite phrases, closer in spirit to Near Eastern wisdom literature than to philosophical discourse in the Hellenic tradition,132 not only repeats and contradicts itself—​Sekoûndos describes penury both as an object of hatred (mísēma) and as an unexpected boon (eutúkhēma). The couplings regularly juxtapose classical Attic with Imperial koinē (e.g., dus­­apόs­pas­ton ktēma), including a disproportionate number of neologisms not attested elsewhere in the extant literary corpus (askόpeutos, azēmíōtos, apsēphistos).133 Accordingly, Sekoûndos turns the norms and the ideals of the Second Sophistic inside out. Not only does he make himself into a living sign (sēma), admonishing rhetoricians that they can never predict, much less control, the perlocutionary effects of their own speech acts.134 His performance of silence rather than Attic oration turns out to be as effective in gaining access to the emperor as the cultivated disquisitions of Herodes Atticus or Favorinus. Overall, his jottings to Hadrian, which push to an extreme the paratactic style generally typical of koinē, suggest that the emperor proves just as eager to hear the sun vacuously described as a “sky-​traveler” as he is to listen to Polemon of Laodicea’s proposal that he allow Smyrna to erect a second imperial temple in his honor. Across the horizons of the second and third centuries ce, however, the Story of Aseneth (Ἱστορία Ἀσενέθ) arguably constitutes the romance that most aggressively contests the goals and priorities of the Second Sophistic, insofar as it repudiates Athenocentrism altogether. Instead, the novel, written in koinē, narrates the marriage between the daughter of Pentephrēs, high priest of the Egyptian temple at Heliopolis ( Jwnw; Grk. Ὄν), and the Israelite patriarch Iosēph, a former convict who had risen to become Pharaoh’s chief advisor and vizier of the Two Lands. 135 Although originally, it seems, a Hellenistic composition, multiple recensions of the novel circulated under Roman rule,136 comprising a network of loosely related texts in which no two witnesses turn out to be the same. 137 While the emplotment (sjužet) of each redaction varies, the story (fabula) focuses consistently on intermarriage as a trope for cross-​c ultural connectivity where, in the intrigue of the tale, the convergence of Greek, Egyptian, and Hebraic literary, religious, and political traditions—​more forthrightly than in the Alexander Romance—​u ltimately supersedes ethnic apartheid, thereby effectively undoing both the Greek cultural logic of binary oppositions and the Second Sophistic ideology of Hellenic purity. In the first scene of the romance, Iosēph refuses to eat with Pentephrēs and his wife due to Israelite dietary restrictions, retrojected back from Leuítikon and Deuteronόmion onto the Patriarchal period, 138 while Aseneth, generally

438   Literature and Culture presumptuous and misandristic, in particular, remains shut up alone in her private tower. Once, however, she catches sight of Iosēph’s beauty and perfection, Aseneth repents and—​following a divinely appointed conversion from idolatry to the god of Iosēph (metánoia)—​Pharaoh marries the pair, effectively promoting Iosēph to what would have traditionally been the office of Iripat ( ).139 Shortly thereafter—​and here the romance closes—​“Pharaoh died and bequeathed his crown (diádēma) to Iosēph, who ruled as king (ebasíleusen) in Egypt for forty-​eight years. After this, Iosēph handed the crown over to Pharaoh’s younger son,140 who was still breast-​feeding at the time of Pharaoh’s death. And Iosēph was as a father to his son in the land of Egypt all the days of his life.” Filling out a leerstelle in the book of Genesis, which only mentions Joseph’s marriage to Aseneth in passing,141 the narrative expansions of the romance not only relate in Greek the union between a Hebrew and an Egyptian—​however difficult to realize the novel’s redactions show such cross-​cultural conjunctions to be. Iosēph’s regency in Egypt and care for the crown prince simultaneously portray a utopian world where—​ through the medium of koinē Greek—​interethnic dependency and mutual cooperation ultimately prevail. I Esdras, a deuterocanonical book that circulated as part of the Septuagint, composed roughly at the same time as Aseneth,142 provides a backdrop against which the radical nature of the novel becomes clear. In going up from Babylon to rebuild Jerusalem, Esdras—​“a man of genius in the law of Mōüsēs” (8.3)—​gathers the remnants of the Babylonian captivity and enjoins the former Israelites to shun intermarriage with non-​Jews: Esdras arose and said to [the people]: “You have transgressed the law [ēnomēsate] in marrying foreign wives [gunaixìn allogenési], to increase the sins of Israel. But now give glory to the God of our fathers; do his will and separate yourselves from the peoples of the land [χωρίσθητε ἀπὸ τῶν ἐθνῶν τῆς γῆς], and from the alien women.” Then the whole multitude cried out in a loud voice, “Just as you have spoken, so we shall do.” (9.7–​10)

Max Weber, in his study Das antike Jundentum, traces the historical byways that led Jews of the Second Temple period to (re)define themselves as a “pariah people,” that is, “a distinctive hereditary social group lacking autonomous political organization and characterized by prohibitions against commensality and intermarriage.”143 Thus, while Esdras insists on policing the line that separates Jews from other peoples, autonomous but powerless under Īrānian—​and by extension Macedonian and Roman—​rule, the Story of Aseneth imagines a wholly different set of social possibilities. As such, the novel constitutes a radical break not only with the strictures of Second Temple Judaism, but also with the world of Dio and Herodes Atticus. Instead, the romance—​whose power one too easily defuses by sequestering it from the Greco-​Roman tradition as part of “Jewish literature between the Bible and the Mishnah”144—​envisions a field of cultural production where relational modes of thought prevail over what Ernst Cassirer called “substantialist thinking,”145 which tends to privilege individuals

The Anti-sophistic Novel   439 over structural positioning. In “Expecting the Barbarians” (1904), Constantine Cavafy famously described this cultural precipice as follows: Και τώρα τι θα γένουμε χωρίς βαρβάρους. Οι άνθρωποι αυτοί ήσαν μιά κάποια λύσις. And now what shall become of us without barbarians? Those people were a kind of solution.146

In the context of the Second Sophistic, where privilege turned on the double valorization of héllēnes over bárbaroi and pepaideuménoi over apaídeutoi—​measured by the acme of an idealized Attic past—​the Story of Aseneth portrays a world in which these oppositions and such criteria fail to do justice to the historical and ethnic complexities of East Mediterranean societies and cultures. Thus, in Cavafy’s katharevousa, the poem’s final word, lúsis, can mean either “solution” or “dissolution,” as if to suggest that, for Greeks, however productive “barbarians” at one time may have proved “good to think with”147 investment in this opposition concomitantly led to the undoing of classical Greek thought.148 It is not the least of the antisophistic novels’ provocations that it proves impossible to say anything about their origins: whether the compositors—​ we cannot yet speak here of an “author”149—​were Greek, Roman, Hebrew, Egyptian, Armenian, or Syriac, all we know is that they succeeded in articulating an intuition of the world (Weltanschauung) as it inheres within the image of Greek—​not as fossilized in some ideal past, but—​as it continued to grow and develop under Roman rule. With the birth of koinē fiction, Second Sophistic discourse disappears.

Further Reading Anderson, G. 1984. Ancient Fiction: The Novel in the Graeco-​Roman World. London. Braun, M. 1938. History and Romance in Greco-​Oriental Literature. Oxford. Hägg, T. 1991. The Novel in Antiquity. Rev. ed. Berkeley, CA. Hanson, W. ed. 1998. Anthology of Ancient Greek Popular Literature. Bloomington, IN. Holzberg. N. 1995. The Ancient Novel: An Introduction. London and New York. Merkelbach, R. 1962. Roman und Mysterium in der Antike. Munich. Morgan, J. R., and R. Stoneman, Greek Fiction. New York. Reardon, B. P. 1991. The Form of Greek Romance. Princeton, NJ. Reardon, B. P., ed. 2008. Collected Ancient Greek Novels. 2nd ed. Berkeley, CA. Rohde, E. 1914. Der griechische Roman und seine Vorläufer. 3rd ed. Leipzig. Schmeling, G., ed. The Novel in the Ancient World. Rev. ed. Leiden. Stoneman, R. 2007–​. Il Romanzo di Alessandro. 3 vols. Milan. Swain, S., ed. 1999. Oxford Readings in the Greek Novel. Oxford. Takahashi, H. 2014. “Syriac as a Vehicle for Transmission of Knowledge across Borders of Empires.” Horizons 5: 29–​52. Tatum, J., ed. 1994. The Search for the Ancient Novel. Baltimore, MD. Whitmarsh, T., ed. 2008. The Cambridge Companion to the Greek and Roman Novel. Cambridge. Whitmarsh, T. 2011. Narrative and Identity in the Ancient Greek Novel: Returning Romance. Cambridge.

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442   Literature and Culture Gains, R. N. 1974. “Doing by Saying: Toward a Theory of Perlocution.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 65: 207–​217. Georgakopoulou, A., and M. Silk, eds. 2009. Standard Languages and Language Standards: Greek, Past an Present. Farnham. Gleason, M.  W. 1995. Making Men:  Sophists and Self-​ Presentation in Ancient Rome. Princeton, NJ. Goldhill, S. 2008. “Genre.” In The Cambridge Companion to the Greek and Roman Novel, edited by T. Whitmarsh, 185–​200. Cambridge. Goudriaan, K. 1988. Ethnicity in Ptolemaic Egypt. Amsterdam. Gow, A. S. F. 1952. Theocritus. 2nd ed. 2 vols. Cambridge. Graham, D. 2013. Rome and Parthia. North Charleston, SC. Gruen, E. S. 1996. Studies in Greek Culture and Roman Policy. Berkeley, CA. Hall, E. 1989. Inventing the Barbarian: Greek Self-​Definition through Tragedy. Oxford. Hall, J. M. 2005. Hellenicity: Between Ethnicity and Culture. Chicago. Hansen, D. U., ed. 1998. Die attizistische Lexicon des Moeris: Quellenkritische Untersuchung und Edition. SGLG 9. Berlin and New York. Hawkins, S. 2012. Studies in the Language of Hipponax. Bremmen. Hawkins, T. 2008. “Out-​ Foxing the Wolf-​ Walker:  Lycambes as Performative Rival to Archilochus.” Cl. Ant. 27: 93–​114. Heide, M. 2014. Secundus Taciturnus: Die arabsichen, athiopischen, und syrischen Textzeuge. Wiesbaden. Hoffmeier, J. K. 1999. Israel in Egypt: The Evidence for the Authenticity of the Exodus Tradition. Oxford. Horrocks, G. C. 2014. Greek: A History of the Language and Its Speakers. 2nd ed. Malden, MA. Hunter, R. 1996a. “Mime and Mimesis:  Theocritus, Idyll 15.” In Theocritus, edited by M. A. Harder, R. F. Regtuit, and G. C. Wakker, 149–​196. Groningen. Hunter, R. 1996b. Theocritus and the Archeology of Greek Poetry. Cambridge. Hunter, R. 1997. “(B)ionic Man: Callimachus’ Iambic Programme.” PCPS 43: 39–​51. Iser, W. 1976. Der Akt des Lesens. Munich. Jakobson, R. 1987. Language in Literature. Cambridge, MA. Jasnow, R. 1997. “The Greek Alexander Romance and Demotic Egyptian Literature.” JNES 56: 95–​103. Jobes, K. H., and M. Silva. 2000. Invitation to the Septuagint. Grand Rapids, MI. Jones, C. P. 1978. The Roman World of Dio Chrysostom. Cambridge, MA. Johnson, J. H. 1992. Life in a Multi-​Cultural Society:  Egypt from Cambyses to Constantine. Chicago. Johnson, J. H. 2000. Thus Wrote ʿOnchsheshonqy. Chicago. Jouanno, C. 2002. Naissance et métamorphoses du Roman d’Alexandre: Domaine grec. Paris. Karenga, M. 2004. Maat: The Moral Ideal in Ancient Egypt. New York. Kerkhecker, A. 1999. Callimachus’ Book of “Iambi”. Oxford. Kraemer, D. C. 2008. Jewish Eating and Identity through the Ages. New York. Kraemer, R. S. 1998. When Aseneth Met Joseph. New York. Krevans, N. 2011. “Callimachus’ Philology.” In Brill’s Companion to Callimachus, edited by B. Acosta-​Hughes, L. Lehnus, and S. Stephens, 118–​133. Leiden. Lambert, W. G. 1960. Babylonian Wisdom Literature. Oxford. Lausberg, H. 1998. Handbook of Literary Rhetoric: A Foundation for Literary Study. Translated by M. Bliss, A. Jansen, and D. E. Orton. Edited by D. E. Orton and R. D. Anderson. Leiden.

The Anti-sophistic Novel   443 Layton, B. 1987. The Gnostic Scriptures. New York. Lefebvre, H. 1974. La production de l’espace. Paris. Lévi-​Strauss, C. 1962. Le totémisme aujourd’hui. Paris. Lightfoot, J. L., ed. 2003. Lucian, “On the Syrian Goddess”. Oxford. López Martínez, M. P. 1998. Fragmentos papiráceos de novela griega. Alicante. Mason, J. 1994. “Rhetoric and the Perlocutionary Field.” Rhetoric and Philosophy 27: 410–​414. McDonald, M., and M. Walton, eds. 2007. The Cambridge Companion to Greek and Roman Theatre. Cambridge. McGready, A. G. 1968. “Egyptian Words in the Greek Vocabulary.” Glotta 46: 247–​254. Merkelbach, R. 1977. Die Quellen der griechischen Alexanderroman. 2nd ed. Revised by J. Trumpf. Munich. Meshtrie, R. 1994. “Koines.” In The Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, edited by R. Asher, 4:1864–​1867. Oxford. Meyer, M., and P. Mirecki, eds. 1995. Ancient Magic and Ritual Power. Leiden. Moles, J. L. 1990. “The Kingship Orations of Dio Chrysostom.” Leeds International Latin Seminar 6: 297–​375. Monier-​Williams, M., ed. 2011. A Sanskrit-​English Dictionary. Delhi. Nagy, G. 1983. “Sēma and Noēsis: Some Illustrations.” Arethusa 16: 35–​55. Nickelsburg, G. W.  E. 1981. Jewish Literature between the Bible and the Mishnah. Philadelphia, PA. Papaconstantinou, A., ed. 2010. The Multilingual Experience in Egypt, from the Ptolemies to the ʿAbbāsids. Farnham. Papademetriou, J.-​T. A. 1978. “Notes on the Vocabulary of Secundus Taciturnus.” Glotta 56: 73–​87. Parker, R. 2005. Polytheism and Society at Athens. Oxford. Parsons, P. 2011. “Callimachus and his Koinai.” In Brill’s Companion to Callimachus, edited by B. Acosta-​Hughes, L. Lehnus, and S. Stephens, 134–​152. Leiden. Pernot, L. 1997. Éloges grecs de Rome: Discours traduits et commentés. Paris. Perry, B. E. 1964. Secundus the Silent Philosopher. Ithaca, NY. Philonenko, M. 1968. Joseph et Aséneth. Leiden. Redford, D., ed. 2002. The Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Egypt. 3 vols. Oxford. Renberg, G. H., and F. Naether. 2010. “‘I Celebrated a Fine Day:  An Overlooked Egyptian Phrase in a Bilingual Letter Preserving a Dream Narrative.” ZPE 174: 49–​7 1. Riggs, C. 2012. The Oxford Handbook of Roman Egypt. Oxford. Ritner, R. 1997. The Mechanics of Egyptian Magical Practice. Chicago. Robertson, A. T. 1934. Grammar of the Greek New Testament in Light of Historical Research. 4th ed. Antioch, TN. Rochette, B. 1997. Le latin dans le monde grec: Recherches sur la diffusion de la langue et de lettres latines dans les provinces hellénophones de l’empire romain. Brussels. Romeo, I. 2002. “The Panhellenion and Ethnic Identity in Hadrianic Greece.” CPhil. 97: 21–​40. Rotstein, A. 2010. The Idea of Iambos. Oxford. Rutherford, I. 1997. “Kalisiris and Setne Khamwas: A Greek Novel and Some Egyptian Models.” ZPE 117: 203–​209. Salmeri, G. 2000. “Dio, Rome, and the Civic Life of Asia Minor.” In Dio Chrysostom: Politics, Letters, and Philosophy, edited by S. Swain, 53–​92. Oxford. Schmitt, R. 1977. Einführung in die griechischen Dialekte. Darmstadt.

444   Literature and Culture Schmitz, T. A. 1997. Bildung und Macht:  Zur sozialen und politischen Funktion der zweiten Sophistik in der griechischen Welt der Kaiserzeit. Zetemata 97. Munich. Segal, A. F. 2002. Two Powers in Heaven:  Early Rabbinic Reports about Christianity and Gnosticism. Boston and Leiden. Selden, D. 1994. “Genre of Genre.” In The Search for the Ancient Novel, edited by J. Tatum, 39–​64. Baltimore, MD. Selden, D. 1998. “Alibis.” CA 17: 290–​420. Selden, D. 2010a. “Guardians of Chaos.” Journal of Coptic Studies 13: 117–​155. Selden, D. 2010b. “Text Networks.” Ancient Narrative 8: 1–​23. Selden, D. 2012. “Mapping the Alexander Romance.” In The Alexander Romance in Persia and the East, edited by R. Stoneman, K. Erickson, and I. Netton, 19–​59. Groningen. Selden, D. 2014a. “Apuleius and Afroasiatic Poetics.” in Apuleius and Africa, edited by B. T. Lee, E. Finkelpearl, and L. Graverini, 205–​284. New York and London. Selden, D. 2014b. “Targum:  Translation in Hellenistic and Roman Imperial Prose Fiction.” Ramus 43, no. 2: 173–​217. Shklovskii, V. 1983. “Iskusstvo kak priëm.” In O teorii prozy, 9–​25. Moscow. Shpet, G. 1927. Vnutrennyaya forma slova. Moscow: Akademiya khudozh nauk. Siegel, J. 1985. “Koines and Koineization.” Language in Society 14: 357–​378. Simon-​Shoshan, M. 2007. “The Task of the Translators: The Rabbis, the Septuagint, and the Cultural Politics of Translation.” Prooftexts 27: 1–​39. Simpson, W. K., eds. 2003. The Literature of Ancient Egypt: An Anthology of Stories, Instructions, Stelae, Autobiographies, and Poetry. 3rd ed. New Haven, CT. Stephens, S. A. 2003. Seeing Double: Intercultural Poetics in Ptolemaic Alexandria. Berkeley, CA. Stoneman, R. 1991. The Greek Alexander Romance. London. Stoneman, R. 2007. Il Romanzo di Alessandro. Vol. 1. Milan. Stoneman, R. 2008. Alexander the Great: A Life in Legend. New Haven, CT. Strobel, C. 2009. “The Lexica of the Second Sophistic: Safeguarding Atticism.” In Standard Languages and Language Standards:  Greek, Past and Present, edited by Georgakopoulou A.and Silk M, 93–​109 Farnham. Swain, S. 1996. Hellenism and Empire: Language, Classicism, and Power in the Greek World, ad 50–​250. Oxford. Swain, S., ed. 2000. Dio Chrysostom: Politics, Letters, and Philosophy. Oxford. Thalmann, W. G. 2011. Apollonius of Rhodes and the Spaces of Hellenism. Oxford. Thiel, H. van. 1974. Leben und Taten Alexanders von Makedonien: Der griechische Alexanderroman nach der Handschrift L. Darmstadt. Thissen, H. J. 1984. Die Lehre des Anchscheschonqi. Bonn. Torallas Tovar, S. 2010. “Linguistic Identity in Graeco-​Roman Egypt.” In The Multilingual Experience in Egypt, from the Ptolemies to the ʿAbbāsids, edited by A. Papaconstantinou, 17–​46. Farnham. Valesio, P. 1980. Novantiqua: Rhetorics as a Contemporary Theory. Bloomington, IN. Vasunia, P. 2001. The Gift of the Nile: Hellenizing Egypt from Aeschylus to Alexander. Berkeley, CA. Vlassopoulos, K. 2013. Greeks and Barbarians. Cambridge. Ward, W. A. 1982. Index of Egyptian Administrative and Religious Titles of the Middle Kingdom. Syracuse, NY. Weber, M. 1956. Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. 4th ed. Edited by J. Winckelmann. Tübingen. West, M. 1967. “A Note on Theocritus’ Aeolic Poems.” CQ NS 17: 82–​84.

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Chapter 28

Miscell a ni e s Katerina Oikonomopoulou

28.1  Second Sophistic Miscellanies: The Problem of Genre Perhaps no other type of Second Sophistic writing yields more fruitful ground for appreciating the dynamics of literary experimentation in this period than the miscellany. Although miscellanies were not a Second Sophistic invention (significantly, their origins probably go back to the sophists of the fifth century bce),1 the era provided the ideal socio-​cultural conditions for these sorts of texts to flourish and become firmly entrenched in the literary landscape. Not accidentally, miscellanies feature in the literary output of two sophists mentioned by Philostratus’s Lives of the Sophists, namely Favorinus of Arelate (late second century ce), who wrote Memoirs and a Miscellaneous History,2 and Claudius Aelian (late second to early third century ce), who produced the zoological miscellany On the Characteristics of Animals and a Historical Miscellany.3 They also represent an important segment of Plutarch’s oeuvre: the Chaeronean philosopher (mid-​first to early second centuries ce) produced miscellanistic collections in question-​and-​answer format, among the best-​known of which is his sympotic miscellany known as the Table Talk;4 a philosophical miscellany, entitled Stromateis, was also attributed to him in antiquity.5 Further, miscellanies were bequeathed to us from members of important intellectual circles of second-​century ce Rome, namely Aulus Gellius and Athenaeus of Naucratis, who wrote the Attic Nights and the Deipnosophistae, respectively. There must have been a veritable boom in the writing of such works during the first and second centuries ce, judging by the number and variety of titles for miscellanistic works in Greek and Latin, to which Aulus Gellius traces back the literary ancestry of his own composition (NA pref. 6–​10). We even have the name of a woman writer of a miscellany, Pamphila. We do not know much about her, except that she lived in Nero’s time, and was married for thirteen years to a man who was probably quite eminent. As Pamphila herself claims, the rich experiences and knowledge

448   Literature and Culture that she gained on her husband’s side were distilled into a miscellanistic work, cited under the title of Miscellaneous Historical Commentaries, or more simply as (Historical) Commentaries. The question of what kind of genre the miscellany is, if it is a genre at all, is far from easy to answer, not least because of our own anachronistic assumptions about the nature and purpose of such works. The first to use the term “miscellany” was the Renaissance scholar Angelo Poliziano in his Miscellanea (Miscellaneorum Centuria Prima), an unsystematically ordered collection of one hundred notes on various classical texts first published in 1489. Notably, the preface of the Miscellanea self-​consciously aligns with a tradition of miscellanistic writing that goes back to the Second Sophistic, by mentioning authors such as Aulus Gellius and Aelian as models for the work. For contemporary English-​speaking readers, moreover, the term “miscellany” might be associated with popular, or entertainment literature, considering that the publishing landscape abounds with titles such as Schott’s Original Miscellany (together with Schott’s Food and Drink Miscellany and Schott’s Sporting Gaming and Idling Miscellany), or The Know-​It-​All, and includes even parodic miscellanies such as A. Parody’s (sic) Shite’s Unoriginal Miscellany. However, the Second Sophistic writers themselves never refer to their works by employing a term that specifically points to their conception of what we call “the miscellany” as a clearly defined genre. The literary predecessors that Aulus Gellius mentions in his preface, for example, include works entitled Meadows, Horn of Amaltheia, Muses, but also, more intriguingly, titles such as Problems, Moral Letters, and Handbooks.6 This suggests that he seeks to affiliate with a particular style of writing, characterized by thematic variety and loose organization, which can be found across different genres. Gellius refers to his own text as “commentaries,” the polished version of a body of brief annotations he made from his various readings (NA pref. 3). This, however, falls short of serving as a genre indicator. In reality, the Attic Nights selectively absorbs or synthesizes the discourse styles of many different genres (dialogue, memoir, commentary, symposium, biography and autobiography, technical handbook, encyclopaedia, scientific treatise, doxographical collection, lexicon, anthology).7 The same is true of the remaining texts in our list.8 With the protean nature of miscellanies as a given, describing their genre on the basis of formal features is impossible. Cultural approaches to genre, on the other hand, can prove much more productive in approaching this issue: these stress that “we need to look beyond the text as the locus for genre, and instead locate genres within the complex interrelations among texts, [ . . . ] audiences, and historical contexts.”9 In other words, in order to place miscellanies in the social and cultural landscape of the Second Sophistic, we need to look beyond the narrow question of their literary form, and toward an understanding of how their authors’ agendas would have interacted with reader expectations, as well as with the broader historical and cultural milieu of the Greco-​Roman world of the high Empire. Accordingly, in what follows I  discuss the aesthetic and cognitive advantages of miscellaneousness, in light of the fact that the defining feature of Second Sophistic miscellanies is their commitment to thematic variation (a feature designated with the Latin term variatio, or poikilia in Greek), and their deliberate choice to eschew a

Miscellanies   449 methodical style of exposition, even when the option to organize their topics systematically is clearly available to them. And, even though we cannot surmise a uniform type of readership for all types of Second Sophistic miscellany, there is no doubt that they were deeply enmeshed in the elite cultural politics of the Second Sophistic.

28.2  Variety, Pleasure, and Learning Miscellanies are texts that can significantly enrich our understanding of Greco-​Roman imperial reading culture, not only because of the attitudes to written texts and to reading that they encode, but also because the problem of how they themselves were read remains open.10 According to Goldhill, miscellanistic texts like the Table Talk or Aelian’s On the Characteristic of Animals are written in what he calls an “anecdotal form”: they are made of discrete, self-​contained, and easily memorable units of knowledge, culled from many sources, which can be read in any order.11 Yet it is hard to imagine how most of these texts could have been read in a piecemeal fashion, given that the reader would have had no way of locating specific information within them: with rare exceptions, miscellanies lack tables of contents, and disperse related pieces of information, rather than unifying them under a single rubric.12 This feature stems from their self-​ conscious commitment to the principle that knowledge communicated to the reader in a haphazard fashion offers certain advantages over knowledge that is presented methodically. The notion is counterintuitive enough for its rationale to require justification, and the self-​reflexive pronouncements the different authors offer to this end are important entryways into their work’s literary and intellectual aims. For starters, miscellanistic authors underscore the role pleasure plays in the reception of their texts. For Pamphila, according to Photius’s summary of her proem, “it was not difficult to divide them [sc. her topics] according to kind, but she considered mixture and variety more pleasant and graceful than [arrangement according to] one kind.”13 This statement leaves no doubt as to Pamphila’s command of her material and ultimate control over her text. Mixture and variety serve her aim to maximize the pleasure her reader will derive from her text. Similarly, Aelian, in the epilogue to the Characteristics of Animals, claims that he deliberately mixed together the diverse material he had collected, because he was seeking to make his text alluring to its readers, and sought to escape the tedium arising from monotony. His text, as he concludes, resembles a colorful meadow or wreath of flowers, both similes highlighting the fact that the work is a mosaic of heterogeneous material that crops up, as it were, or is weaved together, with no particular system. The reader is meant to derive enjoyment from the work precisely because of this feature. In addition, the similes serve as an acknowledgment of a wider tradition of writing miscellanies (they recall some of the titles for miscellanistic works that Gellius cites in his preface).14 It is no accident that both authors attribute monotony to the orderly or systematic arrangement of topics: by doing so, they seek to carve a distinctive niche for their own

450   Literature and Culture works, differentiating them from technical and scientific treatises on the one hand (we can think of the orderly progression of Aristotle’s History of Animals, for example, which groups its themes together according to categories, such as internal organs, or reproduction, and proceeds overall in a methodical fashion),15 and encyclopedic compositions like Pliny the Elder’s Natural History on the other.16 Their desire to please their readers through variety certainly betrays the influence of the world of sophistic oratory: the sophists’ ability always pleasantly to surprise their audiences through the poikilia of their themes or the variegated style and rhythm of their speeches is repeatedly praised by Philostratus.17 Aelian himself, Philostratus informs us, admired Herodes Atticus because he was “the most varied among the orators” (VS 2.625). Entertainment however was not the sole effect envisaged for variety, but the concept was probably also yoked to an edificatory aim. A neat parallel from the preface to the fourth book of Seneca the Elder’s Judicial Declamations (Controversiae)18 elaborates on this aspect in an instructive way: the passage postulates that variety, achieved through the alternation of declaimers and the sententiae that they have used, keeps the reader more engaged than the exhaustive presentation of one declaimer at a time. This strategy aims to elicit a variety of emotional and intellectual responses:  suspense, pleasure, excitement, and curiosity, conceived as the desire to know the unknown (Controv. 4. pref. 1).These are important not only for keeping the reader focused on the reading process as it takes place at a given moment in time, but also for ensuring that the text remains inviting for him in the future. The Judicial Declamations were expressly written as a record of declamatory case studies for the education of Seneca’s sons,19 while the link of miscellanies to the world of education is far from self-​evident. Their didacticism can become more transparent, however, if we consider more closely what forms variety actually takes within each text. Significantly, authors of Second Sophistic miscellanies do not conceive of variety as simply a random mixture of topics, but tie it to cognitive faculties, such as memory and recollection, or anchor it in the events that mark the progression of their own life cycle. Plutarch, for example, informs his Roman addressee Sosius Senecio at the end of the preface to the second book of Table Talk, that the sympotic conversations that make up this book “have been written in a haphazard manner, not systematically but as each came to my memory” (Quaest. conv. 2, pref. 629D). Aulus Gellius, in turn, construes his text’s haphazardness as the textual imprint of his lifestyle, wholly devoted to literary-​ intellectual activity: I have employed a haphazard order of arrangement for my material, which I had previously followed in collecting it. For every time I had taken in my hands any Greek or Latin book, or had heard anything worth remembering, I used to keep notes of things just as I liked, of whatever kind, without distinguishing and without separating [sc. my topics]; and I used to put those notes away as an aid to my memory, like a kind of storehouse of letters, so that when at a given point I would need an item or word which I happened suddenly to have forgotten, and the books from which I had taken it were not at hand, I could easily find and bring it out. Now

Miscellanies   451 in these commentaries there is the same diversity of subject which also existed in those original notes which I had made in brief, without order or structure, from the various things I heard or read. (NA pref. 2–​3)20

Strictly speaking, the order of material within Plutarch’s Table Talk reflects the author’s pattern of recollections, functioning as the textual record of his memories of past sympotic conversations.21 Similarly, the order of material within Gellius’s Attic Nights follows that of the notes he had taken from his various readings. The sequence of subject matter within those original notes in turn correlated with Gellius’s patterns of study and reading, his social interactions, and his personal taste (which affected his criteria of selection of memorable things). The coterminousness of life and text is put forward in yet more assertive terms toward the end of the Attic Nights’ preface: “The number of books,” Gellius continues, “will advance together with the progress of life itself, however great it may be” (NA pref. 24). In fact, as Gellius adds at the end of the same section, the only kind of lifespan extension that he can plausibly envisage is intimately tied to his ability to carry on with the writing of his commentaries: “I do not wish to be given a longer lifespan,” he says, “than it allows me to retain my ability to write and take notes.” For both authors, then, the meandering format of the miscellany is anchored in a concrete lifestyle and thought paradigm, which idealizes continuous learning derived from various practical activities of life, as much as from bookish erudition. In this sense, the didactic value of variety lies in its ability to draw readers into the miscellanistic text’s colorful contents not (or at least not exclusively) for the sake of gaining factual knowledge, but in order to extrapolate models of life and thought from them. Further, the emphasis on the role of recollection is particularly significant, in that it affirms miscellanies’ relevance to the culturally pivotal process of preserving and codifying knowledge through memory, thus enabling its sharing and transmission.22 A characteristic example from the tenth book of Athenaeus’s Deipnosophistae will illustrate this function of variety. As it is proclaimed, the book is a digression on Heracles’s gluttony, which breaks the continuity of the topic treated up to that point (Ath. 411a), namely, objects used for washing before and after dinner (408–​411a). The rationale for the digression is offered through two poetic quotations, which open and close the book, respectively: their common topic is that poets ought to entertain their audiences through a great variety of themes, such that they resemble the variety of dishes at a feast (ποικίλη εὐωχία).23 In fact, the quotations are paradigmatic for the Deipnosophistae as a whole, as the variety of sympotic conversations that the work purports to record mirrors the variety of dishes at the banquet of Larensis, the Roman fictional host.24 Book 10’s contents showcase how this is effected: the digression on Heracles’s gluttony quickly broadens out to an investigation of the gluttony of other mythical heroes, famous personalities, even entire peoples (Boeotians, Pharsalians, Thessalians) (411a–​ 417b). Next, examples of frugality are mentioned by way of contrast (418a–​421a), and lead to a condemnation of excess at banquets (421a–​422d). Following on from this, the dinner phase of Larensis’s banquet is concluded, and the drinking phase (the symposium) begins: appropriately, the banqueters enquire after the vocabulary that is used to refer

452   Literature and Culture to the end of the feast, by citing relevant texts (422e–​425f), before their attention turns to wine: they discuss its appropriate dosage and use (426d–​433b), recall examples of famous drunkards (433b–​443c), issue a condemnation of drunkenness (443b–​445b), and explore the vocabulary that is used by various authors in order to speak about wine drinking and drunkenness (445c–​f ). The book finishes with a further digression, on riddles and word games played at the symposium (448b–​459b).25 The overarching link between these topics, the various stages of the banquet, is clear enough, but there are also subtler threads that connect them:  association, analogy, antithesis, a movement from the particular to the general, or the reverse. All are rooted in mental processes that are triggered in the characters who participate at Larensis’s banquet, as they engage in dialogue with one another. Ultimately, they are subject to the control of the external narrator, Athenaeus, whose voice introduces and closes book 10 through the poetic quotations that praise variety.26 Above all, the ability to draw links between such diverse themes relies upon the banqueters’ profound knowledge of the literature of the past, gained through extensive reading from the archive (the library).27 Variety is thus connected with a model of feasting, wherein material and intellectual entertainment complement one another, rather than being mutually exclusive. The banqueters appear as the embodiments of this happy conjunction, as they take simultaneous pleasure in eating, drinking, and talking, and treat the symposium as an opportunity for wider reflection on the past, the correct way to live, and the uses of luxury.28 Further, as in Gellius, variety is linked to a lifestyle paradigm associated with the love of scholarship and learning. But, unlike Gellius, Athenaeus’s deipnosophists mainly engage with books, whose contents they seem to have consumed as avidly as the dishes at their host’s table. Their manner of engagement with knowledge is thus firmly rooted in the practices and legacy of the great Hellenistic scholars of the library of Alexandria.29

28.3  Models of Polymathy Second Sophistic miscellanies cover a truly impressive range of topics: across their pages historical anecdotes alternate with often lengthy quotations from longer historical works; explanations of the origins of customs, often culled from very obscure antiquarian writings, can be found side by side with knowledge extracted from scientific treatises; and accounts of miraculous natural phenomena or exotic locations can comfortably coexist with the pedantic lexical analyses of grammarians, the classifications of rhetoricians, or the theories of philosophers. Even in the case of works such as Aelian’s On the Characteristics of Animals, where the zoological theme monopolizes the text, the richness of the information that is provided is truly astonishing ranging from marvelous stories about the cleverness or extraordinary courage of animals, to descriptions of the animals’ biological functions in the style of Aristotle (whose biological writings constitute an important source). Miscellanies exude polymathy, and

Miscellanies   453 this fact suggests their agendas were in some way connected with the Second Sophistic ideal of the pepaideumenos. What exactly is the socio-​cultural value that they attach to polymathy, however? In fact, miscellanies do not promote learning as an ideal in an unqualified sense, but distinguish between different types of polymathy, depending on who represents it, and what sort of engagement with knowledge it entails. In Plutarch’s Table Talk, for example, learning lies at the very heart of one’s ability to practice philosophy.30 The paternity of this attitude is attributed to the philosopher Aristotle, who allegedly argued that “polymathy provides many starting-​points” (sc. for philosophical enquiry, 734D).31 Further, ­chapter 9.14, the very last chapter of the work, whose topic is the Muses, the patron-​goddesses of knowledge, says that the Muse Polymnia “belongs to the part of the soul that enjoys learning and is dedicated to memory, which is why the Sicyonians call one of their three Muses Polymathy” (746E). In this context, polymathy is intrinsically connected not just with the love of learning, but, equally importantly, with the capacity to remember what one has learned. By contrast, when polymathy involves the sterile reproduction of knowledge in order simply to make an impression, it is rejected out of hand. The people who usually exhibit this latter type of polymathy are teachers of rhetoric or grammar, who tire their audiences with their long strings of quotations, and are the objects of mockery as a result.32 The prejudice against them is both social and intellectual, targeting on the one hand the social aspirations they fostered based on their professional credentials, and rejecting, on the other, the exclusive or esoteric nature of their expertise, which contravened miscellanies’ commitment to an ideal of knowledge that is accessible or communicable beyond the bounds of specialism.33 This ideal also underpins the Table Talk, whose dialogues underscore the role of philosophical enquiry as a way of life, and not as the exclusive domain of theoretical philosophers. Gellius, in turn, keeps distance from the useless accumulation of knowledge: he criticizes other writers of miscellanistic works because they test their readers’ patience, offering very little that is actually useful or pleasurable.34 Gellius’s own motto is Heraclitus’s saying “polymathy does not teach sense.” As he explains, his Attic Nights is the fruit of selective reading and excerpting, with a dual aim: to encourage some readers to develop a desire for liberal erudition (meaning: erudition that befits a man of social and moral distinction),35 as well as to urge them to contemplation of the “useful arts” (NA pref. 12); and, for those readers too busy to pursue study of any sort, to furnish a handbook of sorts, which will help them exhibit adequate knowledge of words or things in their daily interactions (NA pref. 12). Gellius’s rejection of polymathy results from his pedagogical objective, which is to invite Roman readers traditionally averse to the excessive theoretical pursuits of the Greeks into the world of knowledge.36 Gellius’s conception of what constitutes useful learning is very specific, however: it includes only elements of theoretical erudition falling within the sphere of philosophy or science, paired with a more practical sort of knowledge of language or key facts. Gellius himself, in his selective habits of excerption, emerges as a model of a balanced engagement with the world of learning for his Roman readers.37

454   Literature and Culture Aelian might well have been one of the authors in Gellius’s black list, had he been his predecessor or contemporary: a Roman who chose to write in Greek, Aelian is self-​ consciously devoted to theoretical pursuits, and, as a result of this stance, embraces polymathy. As he stresses in the preface to the Characteristics of Animals: And to know in depth the characteristics particular to each [sc. animal], and how the investigation of animals has attracted no less interest than that of man, requires an educated mind, which possesses a great deal of learning.

According to this, command of a great deal of information on the numerous characteristics of a vast number of animals, together with knowledge of previous scholarship dedicated to the topic, are the prerequisites for the success of Aelian’s project, whose goal is to prove that animals are not wholly devoid of reason or intelligence, and that their study is no less valuable than that of humans. In other words, Aelian yokes polymathy to the fulfilment of a clearly defined research goal, which, as Smith argues, aims to take a position on a broader philosophical debate on whether animals possessed reason or not.38 Later on, in his epilogue, the author further remarks that his love of learning, and his desire to enhance his personal knowledge by expending intense intellectual labor on the investigation of animals have been key motives behind the compilation of his zoological miscellany. Unlike Gellius, Aelian has not attempted to set limits to the amount of scientific information contained within his work: “I have not omitted what I have learned, nor been lazy,” he assures his readers. His theoretical interests in fact set him apart from other men (meaning especially Romans?), whose main aim in life is to gain money and social distinctions. Instead, Aelian seeks to emulate men like wise poets, scientists dedicated to the investigation of nature, and historians of the past. These three categories signal the triple literary allegiance of the Characteristics of Animals, emblematic of its effort to excel in variegated style as well as in breadth of content.39 Last but not least, Athenaeus’s Deipnosophistae valorizes polymathy as an indispensable attribute of true scholarship: the work memorializes great erudite men of the past because they exhibited mastery in their field of knowledge, as well as deep familiarity with the intellectual legacy of their predecessors. Understood in such terms, polymathy is a quality of epic stature, attached to men of great learning like a Homeric epithet. The adjective πολυμαθής, usually in its superlative πολυμαθέστατος (“most learned”), is reserved for men such as the Mauretanian historian-​king Juba, the epic parodist Archestratus of Gela, the Hellenistic scholar-​poet Nicander of Colophon, the Stoic philosopher Chrysippus, and, above all, the philosopher Aristotle, citations from whose works are frequently introduced with the formula “the most learned Aristotle” (ὁ πολυμαθέστατος Ἀριστοτέλης).40 The men who take part in Larensis’s dinner party are themselves praised as polymaths (1 epit. 1c–​f ), both in the sense that they excel in their own field, and because, as we have already seen, they are able to revive the past by citing quotations from an incredible variety of sources and genres (poetic and prose) from memory, to suit the conversation topic at hand.

Miscellanies   455 The different statements the works articulate on the nature and value of polymathy are intrinsic to their cultural agenda: the knowledge that miscellanies so meticulously gather was intended to have a social impact, rather than simply be enjoyed or appreciated for its own sake. This is apparent from Gellius’s concern to save his readers from the embarrassment caused by ignorance at social situations. Symposia were perhaps the most important occasions on which readers of miscellanies would have had the opportunity to share and communicate the factual knowledge they had acquired from them. But knowing facts was not enough: symposia were places where character and social behavior were intensely scrutinized, so ultimately what would have played a far more important role in asserting readers’ belonging in the social world of true pepaideumenoi was the broader examples of cultured life miscellanies offered. It is therefore no accident that Plutarch, Athenaeus, and, in part, also Gellius, use the symposium as a literary device for communicating knowledge.41

28.4  Paideia, the World and Identity Broadly speaking, most of the material contained within miscellanies falls under the following main categories: the natural world and the place of humans in it, ethnography and the comparison of cultures, gender and social class, morality, the public role of the individual. Virtually every piece of information falling under these general rubrics can yield the opportunity to explore wider systems of prejudices, beliefs, and values that surrounded concepts, objects, practices, phenomena and natural beings (plants, animals, humans). Precisely because of this, miscellanies can be approached as media for accessing the cultural imagination of the intellectual communities that created and used them.42 So far, our discussion of variety and polymathy has allowed us to connect miscellanies’ form and content with central issues in Second Sophistic culture: memory, the social value of paideia, the performance of knowledge. In this section I wish to discuss further the ways in which they allowed imperial readers to reflect on their place in the wider world, as humans, men or women, old or young, members of certain cultural or political communities, citizens, professionals, or intellectuals. In other words, I wish to understand what sort of contribution miscellanistic texts might have made to the exploration of identity, taking into account the broader significance of this issue and in the Greco-​Roman imperial context.43 Below I discuss some comparative examples that help illustrate what I mean, on a topic that is quite popular in Second Sophistic miscellanies, namely, the consumption of wine. Let us begin with a typically scientific investigation of the practice of wine drinking, from Plutarch’s Table Talk. Chapter 3.3 of this work compares the constitutions of old men and women in terms of their respective responses to wine drinking. The answer argues that, despite being avid drinkers, women get drunk far less easily than older men, for several reasons: their excessively moist body, which causes the wine to be diluted; their greedy manner of drinking, which causes a great quantity of wine to be expelled

456   Literature and Culture from their body before it is properly absorbed; the many passages in their body (the result of the biological function of menstruation), which cause fluids to drain quickly (650A–​C). In all these respects women are fundamentally different from men, especially old men, whose bodies are extremely dry. Next, Gellius (10.23) and Athenaeus (10.440e–​f ) explore Roman culture’s regulations concerning women’s drinking. As both authors mention, according to Roman custom women were not only not allowed to drink wine (except wine made from raisins), they also had to prove their sobriety by kissing their husbands and male relatives. The sources of this information, and the respective contexts in which it is found, are completely different, however: Gellius attributes it to writers of Rome’s old customs, one of whom was Marcius Porcius Cato, with the aim of demonstrating that Roman women of the past “lived an abstemious life” (NA 10.23.1). This point is further demonstrated by citing Cato on the punishments that were inflicted by law: drunkenness in women was punished as severely as adultery, for which husbands had the right to kill their own wives without a trial (10.23.3–​5). Athenaeus, in turn, derives the information from the Greek historian Polybius, who emphasizes that Roman women’s uncontrollable drinking habits justified the imposition of an elaborate detection mechanism. Significantly, Athenaeus cites an additional (Greek) explanation for the custom, which takes it back to a certain episode in Heracles’s adventures (441a–​b), and moreover places it in the middle of a longer section on examples of men, women, and communities who became notorious for their love of wine (433b–​443c). Immediately after discussing Roman practice, the text cites passages from various works which illustrate “what Greek women are like when they get drunk.” (441bff.). Lastly, c­ hapters 2.37–​38 of Aelian’s Historical Miscellany offer a comparative examination of different communities’ regulations concerning the consumption of wine: the legislation of Zaleucus in Epizephyrian Locri (a Greek city in southern Italy), probably the earliest legal system in the Greek world, decreed that drinkers of unmixed wine were punishable by death, unless they were following doctors’ orders. Next, we learn that in cities like Massalia and Miletus, women were only allowed to drink water, Miletus in fact forming an exception from the rest of Ionia. “Why should I not mention,” Aelian concludes, “Roman custom as well? How would I not be justly reproached as unreasonable, if I recorded the customs of Locri, Massalia, and Miletus, but left aside those of my own country?.” In Rome then, Aelian goes on, women, slaves and noble men up to the age of thirty-​five were not allowed to drink wine. In all these texts, the exploration of wine drinking as a cultural practice prompts reflection on a broader cluster of interconnected issues, which embrace gender, social class, cultural differences, the problem of nature versus culture, morality and self-​ control, and the social scrutiny of private life and behavior. In each text, the discussion is framed in such a way that the material is presented from a different standpoint, and the role of the narrative voice is crucial in this respect. It is notable, for example, that the scientific investigation found in Plutarch does not treat wine drinking by women as a problem per se, despite the well-​known fact that women were discouraged from participating in symposia. One explanation for this may be that the speaker in this

Miscellanies   457 particular dialogue, Mestrius Florus, was more tolerant of the habit, as a Roman.44 Another may be that the moral dimension of the issue is put to the side, for the sake of foregrounding its scientific aspect. The persuasiveness of the scientific explanation may actually be enhanced by the fact that it is offered by a Roman, because it shows that scientific discourse can function as a kind of cross-​cultural conceptual currency. The gender bias is evident all the same, with the analysis presenting women as the biological “other” of men (stressing their biological and anatomical differences), and imputing an uncontrollable manner of drinking to all of them collectively. Within the Attic Nights, by contrast, the narrator “Gellius” makes no secret of his cultural bias: his aim is not simply to prove the claim, made by early Roman writers, that Roman women of the past lived a life of self-​control, it is also to show that Roman custom and legislation acted wisely in ensuring this remained the case: this is apparent from the way the chapter connects the laws governing wine drinking by women with the laws punishing adultery committed by women. In Athenaeus, on the other hand, the work’s complex narrative texture entails that the voice of Democritus, the character who speaks in this section of book 10, fuses into the voice of the source that he cites, Polybius. In fact, Democritus appears simply to juxtapose testimonies from different authors, offering no interpretation of his own. Yet the contrast between the tight control exercised on Roman women for their drinking, and the uncontrollable drinking of Greek women emerges clearly enough from the material itself, and the comment in 441b, “what Greek women are like when they get drunk” (given by the narrator) reinforces that impression, thus revealing an implicit pro-​Roman bias.45 In Aelian, finally, the narrator assumes a dual perspective, both Greek and Roman: on the one hand, he acts like as a Greek historian who delves into Greek local history and, on the other, as a Roman who seeks to compare the practices of his own culture with those of the Greeks. Moreover, Aelian’s imperial perspective is especially noticeable in the geographical movement of his text, from the western (Locri and Marseilles) and eastern fringes (Miletus), to the imperial center (Rome). Importantly, Aelian’s ambivalent cultural self-​positioning46 aligns him with Second Sophistic men like Favorinus, another Latin speaker who chose to write miscellanies (as well as other works) in Greek.47 This fact places miscellanies at a particular privileged position in literary history, as works which fully embody the cross-​cultural dynamic of Greco-​Roman imperial society. These examples illustrate just how complex are the narrative surface and cultural outlook of Second Sophistic miscellanies. Beyond the examples we have just examined, the technique of alternating different topics within the same work would have had the effect of constantly pushing readers to shift perspectives, alternately identifying with (or, conversely, distancing themselves from) different approaches and attitudes to a huge variety of issues. We may thus speak of a certain kind of intellectual pluralism as the sort of epistemological outlook that directly emanates from the variety of miscellanies’ contents and their generic fluidity.48 This feature may in part also stem from the fact that the miscellanies’ intended imperial readership was probably itself very diverse. The audiences they addressed must have been as heterogeneous in their cultural and

458   Literature and Culture social outlook as Plutarch, Gellius, Favorinus, Aelian, and Pamphila themselves, and may have included women, as well as men. Those readers’ own class, gender, education and cultural or ethnic background, and self-​positioning against the realities of the Greco-​Roman imperial world would have had the final say in how they would interpret different aspects of miscellanies’ contents.

28.5  Conclusion: The Miscellanies’ Intellectual Legacy In comparison with other forms of Second Sophistic writing, such as the novels, biographical texts, or declamatory writings, miscellanies may seem far less exciting, not least because they appear to contemporary readers as hopelessly fragmented, pedantic, repetitive, or intellectually shallow. I hope I have shown that, contrary to such an impression, miscellanies are in fact a genre of Second Sophistic writing that is perfectly suited to its rich intellectual landscape. I have argued that we can gain a better understanding of miscellanies as a genre, if we focus closely on three key aspects: their commitment to the aesthetic of variety, the different models of polymathy that they advocate, and the different ways in which they prompt their readers to explore identity. Scholarship is thankfully already turning to this direction, with a number of important studies of individual texts having been published in recent years

Further Reading Our understanding of the full range and characteristics of Greco-​Roman antiquity’s compilatory and miscellanistic literature is very uneven, but Bartol 2005, and König and Whitmarsh 2007, offer excellent starting-​points towards a contextual study. König 2007; Morgan 2007a, 257–​273; 2007b; 2011; and Oikonomopoulou 2013a explore different aspects of the structure of such works. Plutarch’s Table Talk is by far the most comprehensively studied Second Sophistic miscellany, with Teodorsson’s commentary, 1989–​ 1996, greatly facilitating its detailed investigation. Klotz and Oikonomopoulou 2011, and König 2012 examine the Table Talk’s literary background, sympotic philosophy, and relationship to Plutarch’s wider oeuvre. Montes Cala, Sánchez Ortiz de Landalluce, and Gallé Cejudo 1999; and Ribeiro Ferreira, Leão, Tröster, and Barata Dias 2009 additionally furnish some useful essays on the text’s sympotic themes. Holford-​Strevens 2003 is an indispensable introduction to Aulus Gellius’s Attic Nights. Further, Henry 1994, Vessey 1994, and Holford-​Strevens and Vardi 2004 address key questions concerning its intellectual content and pedigree. Lastly, Keulen 2009 and Heusch 2011 examine its satirical portraits of intellectuals and links with Roman memory culture, respectively. Jacob 2013 is now the best introduction to the rich literary and intellectual fabric of Athenaeus’s Deipnosophistae, while the Italian commentary of Canfora 2001, and the wide-​ranging volume of essays edited by Braund and Wilkins 2000 allow a more focused

Miscellanies   459 investigation of the work. Further, Zecchini 1989 and Lenfant 2007 discuss specifically its treatment of historical sources. Aelian’s miscellanies are very understudied by comparison, but the recent new critical edition of the Characteristics of Animals by García Valdés, Llera Fueyo, and Rodríguez-​Noriega Guillén 2009, paired with Smith 2014, are bound to make a positive impact on its understanding. On Aelian’s Historical Miscellany, Wilson 1997, and Lukinovich and Morand 2004 offer useful introductions. The fragments of Favorinus’s miscellanies can be consulted in Barigazzi 1966 and Amato 2010. Lastly, our knowledge of Pamphila’s miscellany relies exclusively on the indirect tradition: the main sources are Photius, Diogenes Laertius, and Aulus Gellius, and the fragments can be consulted in Müller (FHG 3.520).

Bibliography Amato, E. 2010. Favorinos d’Arles, Œuvres III: Fragments. Paris Barigazzi, A. 1966. Favorino di Arelate, Opere: Introduzione, testo critico e commento. Florence. Bartol, K. 2005. “Per Una Morfologia della Poikilografia Antica.” Eos 102: 210–​223. Beall, S. 2004. “Gellian Humanism Revisited.” In The Worlds of Aulus Gellius, edited by L. Holford-​Strevens and A. Vardi, 206–​222. Oxford. Braund, D., and J. Wilkins, eds. 2000. Athenaeus and His World: Reading Greek Culture in the Roman Empire. Exeter. Canfora, L. 2001. I Deipnosofisti. I Dotti a Banchetto. 4 vols. Rome. Clement, P. A., and H.  B. Hoffleit, eds. and trans. 1969. Plutarch:  Moralia, Volume VIII. Cambridge, MA, and London. Doody, A. 2010. Pliny’s Encyclopedia: The Reception of the Natural History. Cambridge. Edwards, C., and G. Woolf. 2003. “Cosmopolis: Rome as World City.” In Rome the Cosmopolis, edited by C. Edwards and G. Woolf, 1–​20. Cambridge. Eshleman, K. 2013. “‘Then Our Symposium Becomes a Grammar School’: Grammarians in Plutarch’s Table Talk.” Syllecta Classica 24: 145–​171. Fairweather, J. 1981. Seneca the Elder. Cambridge. Frazier, F. 2000. “Les visages de la rhétorique contemporaine sous le regard de Plutarque.” In Rhetorical Theory and Praxis in Plutarch, edited by L. Van der Stockt, 183–​202. Leuven García Valdés, M., L. A. Llera Fueyo, and L. Rodríguez-​Noriega Guillén, eds. 2009. Claudius Aelianus: De Natura Animalium. Berlin. Goldhill, S. 2009. “The Anecdote:  Exploring the Boundaries between Oral and Literate Performance in the Second Sophistic.” In Ancient Literacies: The Culture of Reading in Greece and Rome, edited by W. A. Johnson and H. N. Parker, 96–​113. Oxford. Harrison, G. W.  M. 2000. “Problems with the Genre of Problems:  Plutarch’s Literary Innovations.” CPhil. 95, no. 2: 193–​199. Henry, M. M. 1994. “On the Aims and Purposes of Aulus Gellius.” ANRW 2.34.2: 1918–​1941. Heusch, C. 2011. Die Macht der ‘Memoria’. Die ‘Noctes Atticae’ des Aulus Gellius im Licht der Erinnerungskultur des 2. Jahrhunderts n. Chr. Berlin. Holford-​Strevens, L. 2003. Aulus Gellius: An Antonine Scholar and His Achievement. Rev. ed. Oxford. Horster, M. 2008. “Some Notes on Grammarians in Plutarch.” In The Unity of Plutarch’s Work: “Moralia” Themes in the “Lives,” Features of the “Lives” in the “Moralia”, edited by A. G. Nikolaidis, 611–​624. Millennium Studien 19. Berlin and New York.

460   Literature and Culture Jacob, C. 2000. “Athenaeus the Librarian.” In Athenaeus and His World: Reading Greek Culture in the Roman Empire, edited by D. Braund and J. Wilkins, 85–​110. Exeter. Jacob, C. 2001. “Ateneo, o il Dedalo delle Parole.” In I Deipnosofisti: I Dotti a Banchetto, edited by L. Canfora, 1: xi–​cxvi. Rome. Jacob, C. 2013. The Web of Athenaeus. Translated by A. Papaconstantinou. Center for Hellenic Studies Series 61. Washington, DC. Johnson, W. A. 2009. “Constructing Elite Reading Communities in the High Empire.” In Ancient Literacies: The Culture of Reading in Greece and Rome, edited by W. A. Johnson and H. N. Parker, 320–​330. Oxford. Johnson, W. A. 2010. Readers and Reading Culture in the High Roman Empire: A Study of Elite Communities. Oxford and New York. Keulen, W. 2004. “Gellius, Apuleius, and Satire on the Intellectual.” In The Worlds of Aulus Gellius, edited by L. Holford-​Strevens and A. Vardi, 223–​245. Oxford. Keulen, W. 2009. Gellius the Satirist: Roman Cultural Authority in “Attic Nights”. Mnemosyne Supplement 297. Leiden and Boston. Klotz, F., and K. Oikonomopoulou, eds., 2011. The Philosopher’s Banquet: Plutarch’s “Table Talk” in the Intellectual Culture of the Roman Empire. Oxford. König, J. 2007. “Fragmentation and Coherence in Plutarch’s Sympotic Questions.” In Ordering Knowledge in the Roman Empire, edited by J. König and T. Whitmarsh, 43–​68. Cambridge. König, J. 2011. “Self-​ Promotion and Self-​ Effacement in Plutarch’s Table Talk.” In The Philosopher’s Banquet: Plutarch’s “Table Talk” in the Intellectual Culture of the Roman Empire, edited by F. Klotz and K. Oikonomopoulou, 179–​203. Oxford. König, J. 2012. Saints and Symposiasts: The Literature of Food and the Symposium in Greco-​ Roman and Early Christian Culture. Cambridge. König, J., and T. Whitmarsh, eds. 2007. Ordering Knowledge in the Roman Empire. Cambridge. König, J., and G. Woolf. 2013. “Encyclopaedism in the Roman Empire.” In Encyclopaedism from Antiquity to the Renaissance, edited by J. König and G. Woolf, 23–​63. Cambridge. Lenfant, D., ed., 2007. Athénée et les Fragments d’Historiens: Actes du Colloque de Strasbourg (16–​18 Juin 2005). Paris. Lennox, J. 2010. “Bios and Explanatory Unity in Aristotle’s Biology.” In Definition in Greek Philosophy, edited by D. Charles, 329–​355. Oxford. Lukinovich, A. 1990. “The Play of Reflections between Literary Form and the Sympotic Theme in the Deipnosophistae of Athenaeus.” In Sympotica: A Symposium on the Symposion, edited by O. Murray, 263–​271. Oxford. Lukinovich, A., and A.-​F. Morand 2004. Élien: Histoire Variée. Paris. Louis, P. 1964. Aristote: Histoire des Animaux. Vol. 1. Paris. Maisonneuve, C. 2007. “Les Deipnosophistes d’Athénée: Repéres dans une structure complexe.” In Athénée et les Fragments d’Historiens: Actes du Colloque de Strasbourg (16–​18 Juin 2005), edited by D. Lenfant, 387–​412. Paris. Meier, C. 2004. “On the Connection between Epistemology and Encyclopaedic Ordo in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period.” In Schooling and Society:  The Ordering and Reordering of Knowledge in the Western Middle Ages, edited by A. A. MacDonald and M. W. Twomey, 93–​114. Groningen Studies in Cultural Change 6. Leuven. Minar, E. L., Jr., F. H. Sandbach, and W. C. Helmbold, eds. and trans. 1961. Plutarch: Moralia, Volume IX. Cambridge, MA, and London. Mittell, J. 2001. “A Cultural Approach to Television Genre Theory.” Cinema Journal 40, no. 3: 3–​24.

Miscellanies   461 Montes Cala, J. G., M. Sánchez Ortiz de Landalluce, and R. J. Gallé Cejudo, eds. 1999. Plutarco, Dioniso y el Vino: Actas del VI Simposio Español sobre Plutarco, Cádiz, 14–​16 de Mayo de 1998. Madrid. Morgan, K. A. 2004. Myth and Philosophy from the Presocratics to Plato. Cambridge. Morgan, T. 2004. “Educational Values.” In The Worlds of Aulus Gellius, edited by L. Holford-​ Strevens and A. Vardi, 187–​205. Oxford. Morgan, T. 2007a. Popular Morality in the Early Roman Empire. Cambridge. Morgan, T. 2007b. “Reading Moral Miscellanies.” SCI 26: 135–​153. Morgan, T. 2011. “The Miscellany and Plutarch.” In The Philosopher’s Banquet:  Plutarch’s “Table Talk” in the Intellectual Culture of the Roman Empire, edited by F. Klotz and K. Oikonomopoulou, 49–​76. Oxford. Murphy, T. 2004. Pliny the Elder’s Natural History: The Empire in the Encyclopedia. Oxford. Oikonomopoulou, K. 2011. “Peripatetic Knowledge in Plutarch’s Table Talk.” In The Philosopher’s Banquet: Plutarch’s “Table Talk” in the Intellectual Culture of the Roman Empire, edited by F. Klotz and K. Oikonomopoulou, 105–​130. Oxford. Oikonomopoulou, K. 2013a. “Plutarch’s Corpus of Quaestiones in the Tradition of Imperial Greek Encyclopaedism.” In Encyclopaedism from Antiquity to the Renaissance, edited by J. König and G. Woolf, 129–​153. Cambridge. Oikonomopoulou, K. 2013b. “Ethnography and Authorial Voice in Athenaeus’ Deipnosophistae.” In Ancient Ethnography:  New Approaches, edited by Ε. Almagor and J. Skinner, 179–​199. London and New York. Olson, S. D. 2006–​2012. Athenaeus:  The Learned Banqueters. 8 vols. Cambridge, MA, and London. Ribeiro Ferreira, J., D. Leão, M. Tröster, and P. Barata Dias, eds. 2009. Symposion and Philanthropia in Plutarch. Coimbra. Richter, D. S. 2011. Cosmopolis: Imagining Community in Late Classical Athens and the Early Roman Empire. Oxford. Rodríguez-​Noriega Guillén, L. 2000. “Are the Fifteen Books of the Deipnosophistae an Excerpt?” In Athenaeus and His World: Reading Greek Culture in the Roman Empire, edited by D. Braund and J. Wilkins, 244–​255. Exeter. Rolfe, J. C., ed. and trans. 1927. The Attic Nights of Aulus Gellius. 3 vols. Cambridge, MA, and London. Romeri, L. 2000. “The λογόδειπνον:  Athenaeus between Banquet and Anti-​Banquet.” In Athenaeus and His World: Reading Greek Culture in the Roman Empire, edited by D. Braund and J. Wilkins, 256–​271. Exeter. Romeri, L. 2002. Philosophes Entre Mots et Mets. Plutarque, Lucien et Athénée Autour de la Table de Platon. Grenoble. Sandbach, F. H. 1969. Plutarch:  Moralia, Volume XV (Fragments). Cambridge, MA, and London. Smith, S. D. 2014. Man and Animal in Severan Rome: The Literary Imagination of Claudius Aelianus. Cambridge. Teodorsson, S.-​T. 1989–​1996. A Commentary on Plutarch’s “Table Talks”. 3 vols. Göteborg. Thompson, D. 2000. “Athenaeus in his Egyptian Context.” In Athenaeus and His World Reading Greek Culture in the Roman Empire, edited by D. Braund and J. Wilkins, 77–​84. Exeter. Too, Y. L. 2000. “The Walking Library: The Performance of Cultural Memories.” In Athenaeus and His World:  Reading Greek Culture in the Roman Empire, edited by D. Braund and J. Wilkins, 111–​123. Exeter.

462   Literature and Culture Vardi, A. 2001. “Gellius against the Professors.” ZPE 137: 41–​54. Vardi, A. 2004. “Genre, Conventions, and Cultural Programme in Gellius’ Noctes Atticae.” In The Worlds of Aulus Gellius, edited by L. Holford-​Strevens and A. Vardi, 159–​186. Oxford. Vessey, M. 1994. “Aulus Gellius and the Cult of the Past.” ANRW 2.34.2: 1863–​1917. Wilkins J. 2000. “Dialogue and Comedy: The Structure of the Deipnosophistae.” In Athenaeus and His World. Reading Greek Culture in the Roman Empire, edited by D. Braund and J. Wilkins, 23–​37. Exeter. Wilson, N. G. 1997. Aelian: Historical Miscellany. Cambridge, MA, and London. Zecchini, G. 1989. La Cultura Storica di Ateneo. Milan.

Chapter 29

M y tho gra ph y Stephen M. Trzaskoma

Mythography, that is, scholarly and semischolarly writing from antiquity that sought either to systematize and harmonize varying traditional accounts or to interpret the myths, came into existence as a separate genre in the fifth or fourth century bce, but its appeal and place in the intellectual ecosystem endured strongly into later periods. Its importance for the study of Greek imperial literature and the Second Sophistic has not been thoroughly explored in the scholarship but is nonetheless a matter of some inherent interest, both because a large proportion of our extant mythographical texts come from this period and because mythography underlies a great deal of the widespread deployment of myth in the oratory and literature of the Roman period. It should be stated in advance that this influence can usually be traced only indirectly due to the loss of the vast bulk of ancient mythography, but a strong circumstantial case can be constructed for mythography’s role in contemporary education as well as in oratory and literary composition. This chapter will consist of an overview of some representative surviving mythographical texts from the period and then in briefer compass suggest some of the ways in which mythography was part of a system by which knowledge of myth was first acquired by writers and speakers and then utilized in communicating with audiences similarly equipped. In some ways mythography seems to stand outside of the Second Sophistic. Many works that we would place in the category would under most circumstances be classified as decidedly unliterary productions, and their subliterary nature means that it is difficult to see many of the overt features that characterize so many other texts from the period (Atticism, ornate rhetoric, etc.). On the other hand, their preservation of arcane knowledge and their archaizing interests made them valuable adjuncts in the creation of the distinctive works of the period, and their very variety shows some of the same tendencies, as well as some of the same tensions, to be found in the more ambitious and sophisticated literary productions—​as, for instance, the pull between tradition and innovation, localism and universalism, and Hellenic and Roman identities.

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29.1 The Texts Without doubt our most important mythographical text1 from antiquity is the Bibliotheca (that is, Library, its title an indication of its claim to completeness of coverage) of Pseudo-​Apollodorus, so called to distinguish him from the earlier mythographer Apollodorus of Athens, whose works are lost.2 The Bibliotheca, which likely dates from the period 50–​150 ce, is an attempt organized along genealogical, temporal, and geographical lines to encapsulate a large amount of the myth from the primeval reign of Uranus and Gaea to the death of Odysseus after the Trojan War. The final sections, from the middle of the narrative of Theseus to the end, unfortunately survive only in two Byzantine epitomes. Within a spare but data-​rich matrix, the author sometimes elaborates important stories in greater but never great detail. Typical of the framework is the following section: Herse and Hermes had Cephalus. Eos fell in love with him, abducted him, and slept with him in Syria. She had Tithonus, who had a son, Phaethon. He in turn had Astynous, who had Sandocus, who went from Syria to Cilicia, founded the city of Celenderis, married Pharnace daughter of Megassares, king of the Hyrians, and had Cinyras. Cinyras founded Paphos in Cyprus, where he had gone with a group of people. There he married Metharme, the daughter of Pygmalion, king of the Cyprians, and had Oxyporus and Adonis, and, in addition, the daughters Orsedice, Laogora, and Braesia. These girls slept with strangers because of Aphrodite’s wrath and died in Egypt. (3.181–​182)

This is immediately followed, however, by a section, approximately twice as long, that concentrates on Adonis alone, includes two alternate genealogies for him, describes his death at the tusk of a boar, and narrates the familiar story of his mother’s incestuous impregnation, her metamorphosis, and Aphrodite’s and Persephone’s love for him. The narrative scope of the Bibliotheca in this manner continually shifts its level of magnification and contains both rapid genealogical sweeps across many generations and larger set pieces, some of them very large indeed, such as, for instance, the sections on the Calydonian Boar Hunt, Jason and the Argonauts, and Heracles and his Labors. This last section, which spans most of the second book (2.61–​160), is exemplary in its utility, representing the best single, coherent presentation of the “facts” of the myths of Heracles that we know of from the ancient world (Diodorus Siculus is the only rival). With the story told in scattered fashion across multiple epics, tragedies, and other accounts, we are lucky to have the Bibliotheca’s version. Ancient readers would likewise have found it of tremendous use and generally would have had a very difficult time indeed without mythographical summaries of this sort. One cannot learn the story of Oedipus simply from reading Sophocles’s Oedipus Tyrannus; one can from the mythographers. Although the Bibliotheca is assuredly derivative and its style very plain, the tendency to view it as merely a simplistic repository of the “facts” of myth compiled in an

Mythography   465 uncritical fashion, prevalent up until recently, has begun to be challenged. We might note, for instance, the insistent avoidance of myths connected with Rome and think of the implications of this for constructing a Hellenic identity through myth (Fletcher 2008)  or the narrator’s conscious claim to authority in matters of organization and selection (Trzaskoma 2013). It is difficult to assess with complete certainty such matters because no other example of synoptic mythography of comparable scope is preserved,3 but what other mythography we possess in fragmentary or epitomized form does not give the impression that such a universal mythography was a particularly common pursuit. Despite his uniqueness in this, Pseudo-​Apollodorus is in other ways very much like the other authors practicing one main branch of mythography, namely the systematic. He aims to select, organize, and present the myths, not interpret them. This drive to systematize the confusion of traditional narrative is an old one, but it flourished especially during the Second Sophistic, as is well attested in the papyri and in fragmentary works. Antoninus Liberalis (late first or second century ce) produced a collection of forty-​one tales of metamorphosis without any sort of interpretation along philosophical or rationalistic lines (text and translations in Papathomopoulos 1969 and Almirall i Sardà and Calderón Dorda 2012; English translation with introduction in Celoria 1992; cf. Delattre 2010 for a more ambitious reading of one of the tale’s composition and consumption). What binds the collection together is merely the presence of metamorphosis in all of the stories, and this way of organizing a portion of the confusing mass of both local and Panhellenic tales along thematic lines was quite common. First, we may compare the remains of another such collection preserved partially on a late second-​or early third-​century ce papyrus (PMich. 1447; published in Renner 1978 and reedited by Van Rossum-​Steenbeek 1998), which not only shares the same theme as Antoninus’ work, but which goes the additional step of organizing the individual items, more briefly treated than in Antoninus, into an alphabetic dictionary. To give some sense of the nature and scope, two of the surviving adjacent entries are: Arethusa:  the daughter of Hyperus, after sleeping with Poseidon by the strait of Euboea, was changed by Hera [into a spring] in [Chalcis], according to Hesiod. Aethyiae: the daughters of Haliacmon son of Haliartus, seven in number, while mourning for Ino, were transformed by Hera into [birds] . . . they are called “crow-​ haters” by Aeschylus.

Sometimes even simpler in form are the lists of mythological information we find in numerous papyri (helpfully collected by Van Rossum-​Steenbeek 1998). One from the first or second century ce (POxy. 4306) preserves fragmentarily no fewer than eight lists: who first sacrificed to which gods, who first built temples to which gods, origins of some divine epithets, metamorphoses, sons of gods and mortal women, inventors, the foundations of games, and murderers tried on the Areopagus. We have many good parallels for this sort of list in some preserved Greek texts and in Hyginus, who has several, such as “Those nursed on animals’ milk,” “Those who died from boar attacks,” and

466   Literature and Culture “Wives who killed their husbands.” This last can serve as a good example of the type (trans. Smith): Clytaemnestra daughter of Tyndareus and Leda daughter of Thestius: Agamemnon son of Atreus. Helen, the daughter of Jupiter and Leda: Deiphobus son of Priam. Agave: Lycotherses in Illyria, so that she could give his kingdom to her father, Cadmus. Deianira daughter of Oenes: Hercules, the son of Jupiter and Alcmena, at Nessus’ prompting. Iliona daughter of Priam: Polymnestor, the king of the Thracians. Semiramis: King Ninus in Babylonia. (Fab. 240)

All of these systematic works and lists could be organized around such narrative themes, but also around geography, the particular deities or heroes involved, or any other connection. Star myths (catasterisms) had long been a popular choice and continued to be so in our period, when several collections were circulating in both Greek and Latin. One Greek example survives in epitomized form, the Catasterisms of Ps.-​Eratosthenes (the relationship to the original Hellenistic manual of Eratosthenes is a complex one), which presents mythical and astronomical information in a relatively compact guide to the sky (see Pàmias i Massana and Zucker 2013 for texts, French translations, and up-​to-​ date discussion of the Greek materials connected to Eratosthenes, especially lvi–​lxi for mythographical connections). The first third of the account of Orion, for instance, runs: Hesiod says that he was the son of Euryale, daughter of Minos, and Poseidon, and that the ability was granted to him to walk on the waves as if on land. He came to Chios and got drunk and raped Merope, daughter of Oenopion. When Oenopion found out and could not bear the violation, he blinded him and ejected him from the land. He wandered to Lemnos as a beggar and became associated with Hephaestus, who out of pity gave him his own servant Cedalion to guide him on the road. Orion put him on his shoulders and carried him while he indicated the way to go (32).

This sort of summary is essentially indistinguishable from other systematic mythography; only the connection to astronomy and the addition of “astrothetic” information at the end of each entry mark the difference (in this case the entry has appended: “Orion has three faint stars on his head, one bright one on each shoulder . . .”). There were, of course, many choices about a theme or subject that could be made in organizing a mythographical work. To take another example, a miscellaneous collection of summaries (historiai) of about 250 myths was circulating during our period, first as an independent work (the so-​called Mythographus Homericus) and then cannibalized and worked as needed into early commentaries and scholia (for overview and discussion, see Montanari 1995 and Van Rossum-​Steenbeek 1998, 85–​118). The common connection between the different entries was that they were the myths mentioned but usually not elaborated upon in Homeric epic.

Mythography   467 Systematic mythography, then, was primarily concerned with presenting information, either the barest of facts or stories summarized at greater or lesser length. The principle of organization varied. As we have seen, it could be thematic, geographic, genealogical, and so forth. And, finally, the manner and scope of presentation ranged from the long continuous narrative of Pseudo-​Apollodorus to long but discontinuous historiai to dictionaries with reasonably full entries to the simplest of lists. Despite the differences, however, the activity of all of these mythographical writers remains at heart the same, the attempt to inform and bring order to the chaos of myth. The texts that survive in manuscripts and on papyri, as well as the citations and quotations of lost mythographers in scholia and commentaries, show us the meager remnants of what must have once been a massive amount of material in wide circulation throughout the Mediterranean world during the Second Sophistic. Of a very different sort are the works of interpretive mythography that were produced and circulated in the period. These almost never retell the myths in any substantial detail or present traditional information for its own sake. Rather, their primary focus is always the interpretation of myth, particularly through rationalistic, euhemeristic and allegorical explanations, an activity which is certainly earlier in origin, and for which we have a surviving early mythographical exemplum in the Peri Apiston of Palaephatus (a rationalizer, probably late fourth century bce), but which seems to have gained new life and a new popularity in the imperial period. Cornutus (mid-​first century ce) and the slightly later Heraclitus the Allegorist and Heraclitus the Paradoxographer (both perhaps from the late first or second century ce)4 can serve as our representative texts here. Cornutus’s Stoic handbook, Theologiae graecae compendium, is miscellaneous in its scope, that is to say, no common thematic thread runs through the topics discussed aside from the fact that it is all mythical (for overview and text, see Ramelli 2003 and also Most 1989). What unifies the treatment is the insistent presence of etymological and allegorical interpretation and a clear ethical orientation (Boys-​Stones 2007). This is typical of Stoic allegory, and Cornutus makes no claim to originality—​ he is merely packaging the material for, as he makes clear, an audience of beginners (the addressee of his preface is a paidion), concentrating on physical and moral notions, such as: Athena is said to have been born from Zeus’ head, perhaps because the ancients understood that the governing part of our soul is there (just as others later on believed too), or perhaps because the head is the highest portion of the human body, just as in the cosmos the highest portion is aether, where its governing part and the very substance of thought are located. (20)

and Eros is a child because lovers’ judgment is imperfect and easily deceived, and he is winged because either he makes them have flighty thoughts or because he is always

468   Literature and Culture flying suddenly into their thinking like a bird, and he is armed with a bow because those who are captured by him experience something identical to a physical blow from the sight of beautiful people although they are not near or touching them, only viewing them from a distance. (47)

Heraclitus the Allegorist (see the introduction and translation of Russell and Konstan 2005) uses similar techniques in his Homeric Problems, but as the title indicates, this is not a miscellaneous collection at all but a treatise designed to defend the myths in Homer against the ancient charge that they were morally corrupt. Heraclitus again and again shows that the externals of the stories hide worthwhile ideas that can be unlocked by those who know the proper techniques. Despite a similarity of method to Cornutus (he gives a very similar account, for instance, of the allegorical function of Athena quoted above), his is a more ambitious work and likely addressed to more advanced audiences—​and clearly those who were interested in Homer and in the debates about his value and place in the literary canon. Since the work is arranged in the order of the Homeric poems, it could presumably also have been read alongside them, although the work stands on its own because Heraclitus frequently cites the relevant verses. Philosophically more eclectic than Cornutus, Heraclitus shows a greater interest in exploring the value and nature of allegory in general and so is of interest for examining ancient literary criticism and composition theory. The other Heraclitus, probably writing in the first or second century ce, is labeled a “paradoxographer,” but since the wonders he treats are all mythical, this is something of a misnomer. He is really a rationalizing mythographer who also indulges an interest in allegory as he treats a miscellaneous set of myths, mostly likely for an audience of students—​more indication that writers of the period were being trained to think mythographically (Stern 2003; Hawes 2013, 99–​102 for detailed connections to rhetorical exercises). The text as we have it is almost certainly a very abbreviated epitome, and so the interpretations here are more abrupt. His rationalizations are thus sometimes a bit unclear, but his method is the standard one known since Palaephatus and is mostly a form of banalization. Thus: About Perseus it is told that Hermes gave him winged sandals, for Hermes invented training for running and Perseus was famous for that. At any rate, those who saw him, amazed at his speed, said that he had put wings on his feet; in the same way we regularly say, “he flew,” about those who run quickly.

What is important to note is that these three authors, taken together, show a range of interests, organizational principles, styles, and audiences, even as they are engaged in what is fundamentally the same activity. Their survival and the survival of contemporary texts of a similar nature (the Pseudo-​Plutarchan Life of Homer, for instance) show how widespread the phenomenon was and how deep the interest among readers.

Mythography   469

29.2  The Contexts We seem prima facie to be a long way from the heart of the Second Sophistic when dealing with mythographical texts. Mythography and its division into systematic and interpretive approaches, its organization along several main lines (universal, thematic, geographic, author-​centered, etc.), and the primary research that mined archaic and classical poets, early historians, and local legends are all products of earlier times. What is distinctive about our period, however, is the rapid and wide diffusion and multiplication of mythographical sources and information. The long, scholarly mythographical works of the Hellenistic age were epitomized into more digestible sources, worked through for the raw materials to construct lists, catalogs, and digests, and broken apart into small historiai and factoids to be incorporated into commentaries and marginal scholia. Such a process did not occur because myth had lost its importance after the Hellenistic period, but because myth’s role in imperial paideia at all levels was so great that it was natural for it to become available in more compact and easily digestible forms. The second-​century bce scholar Apollodorus of Athens had written influential works of mythography based on substantial research, including a detailed treatment of divine myth, On the Gods, in twenty-​four books and a commentary on the Iliadic catalog of ships that filled another twelve books. Contrast his imperial descendant, Pseudo-​ Apollodorus, who sought to contain essentially the whole of the major mythic tradition in only a few books. It is not that later mythographers are worse mythographers or lazier ones; they were fulfilling a different function, no longer writing just for each other as scholars, as the earlier ones had, but for much wider audiences. In doing so, they were producing easily accessible information to satisfy the imperial fascination with the distant past and particularly with mythical stories. The ancient myths were remote, but knowledge of them paradoxically became not only a highly desirable mark of the educated elite but a way to connect to and refashion Hellenic (and Roman) identity. There has been no large-​scale attempt to synthesize the overall role of mythography during the period in question (but see Cameron 2004, 217–​249 and compare the insightful discussion of Delattre 2013), so we can merely sketch here some of the ways in which it was integrated with education, oratory, and literary writing. Myths could entertain, provide moral exempla both positive and negative, connect Greeks to their origins, and help to explain the contours of the present, and so it was of obvious interest in any case. But from the initial stages of grammatical education, which often began with the memorization and writing of lists of mythological names, all the way through to the end of rhetorical training, myth was incorporated to a greater degree than is often realized, and mythography was present at every stage (Gibson 2013; cf. Hawes 2013, 99–​102). As students moved past memorizing, consuming, and interpreting mythological material, they began using it actively in crafting narratives and orations. They not only would have benefited from the organizational work of mythography, they would also have been to a large degree practicing it—​that is, selecting and organizing it (by

470   Literature and Culture choosing suitable narratives) and narrating it, but also using it as the starting point for interpretation, either implicitly through comparison or explicitly. We must imagine, then, a world in which all of our authors were far more familiar with mythography than modern scholars are and felt themselves part of a mythographical web. It is not that mythography replaced other sources of mythological knowledge (though in some cases, it did—​the epic cycle, for instance, was not being widely read in the Second Sophistic), but it complemented them and helped to form a view of the material. The usual reaction to mythological material in the literature of the Second Sophistic is to imagine literary antecedents, but we must allow that not every mythological allusion is actually an allusion to a text of impeccable archaic or classical pedigree. When Achilles Tatius, for instance, in his novel Leucippe and Cleitophon has Clinias urge his boyfriend to reject an arranged marriage, he employs myth in the attempt: “If you were an uncultured layman, you would be unfamiliar with the tragic actions of women, but as it is, you could recount for the rest of us how many stories women have filled the stage with. Eriphyle’s necklace. Philomela’s meal. Stheneboea’s slander. Aerope’s theft. Procne’s murder. When Agamemnon longs for Chryseis’s beauty, he causes a plague for the Greeks. When Achilles longs for Briseis’s beauty, he brings grief for himself. When Candaules has a beautiful wife, the wife murders Candaules. The torch-​fire of Helen’s wedding kindled another fire to burn Troy. The marriage of chaste Penelope—​how many suitors did that kill? Phaedra killed Hippolytus because she loved him, but Clytemnestra killed Agamemnon because she didn’t. O women, capable of every cruelty! When they love, they kill. When they don’t love, they kill. Agamemnon was bound to be murdered! Handsome Agamemnon, whose beauty was heavenly, ‘in his eyes and head like unto thunder-​loving Zeus.’ And, O Zeus, his wife cut that head off!” (1.8.4–​7)

The most natural assumption is that mythographical lists and catalogs lie behind this, not that Achilles Tatius had to rummage through his memories of Attic tragedy at length to piece together a list ab novo. In making this point it is perhaps helpful to think of it from the other way round: did Achilles Tatius really have to read Sophocles’s Tereus to reference “Philomela’s meal” and “Procne’s murder,” and would his audience have needed firsthand knowledge of that play to understand the references? More likely, any knowledge would have come from a mythographical summary (hypothesis) of the play, collections of which were in wide circulation. In fact, we have found just such a hypothesis for a Tereus on papyrus (POxy. 3013, second or third century ce). He need not even have had specific recourse to a summary of the play for such an offhanded reference, especially in the context of a list of this sort. He had probably copied out or memorized such a short catalog when he was nine years old, and if that had no doubt faded by the time he wrote, the imprint was still there and lists were easy to find. Compare Hyginus’s Fab. 240, “Wives who killed their husbands,” which was mentioned above, for something of the type. But even the larger and more detailed retelling of the story of Procne and Philomela (Ach. Tat. 5.5) need not depend on anything more than a good mythographical historia. We do not have to look far for other

Mythography   471 suspiciously mythographical concatenations. Not long after Clinias’ catalog, we get the famous debate over male-​centered and female-​centered love (2.35–​38). Achilles Tatius has his novel’s characters use myths once more to make a point. Cleitophon, advocating for love of women, at one point argues: “And yet,” I replied, “the beauty of women seems more heavenly insofar as it does not decay quickly. Agelessness is next to godliness. What changes through decay in imitation of mortal nature is not heavenly but common. Fine, Zeus fell for a Phrygian boy [i.e., Ganymede]. He brought the Phrygian boy up to the heavens. But the beauty of women brought Zeus himself down from heaven! For a woman Zeus once mooed; for a woman he once played a Satyr; and he turned himself into gold for another woman. Fine, Ganymede can pour the wine, but Hebe gets to drink it with the gods, so the woman has the boy as her servant. I also feel bad for him when I think about his abduction. This bird—​this carnivorous bird—​dives down at him, and once he’s snatched up, he’s as defenseless as a man ruled by a tyrant. The spectacle is absolutely degrading, a young man hanging from talons. Semele, by contrast, was brought up to the heavens not by a carnivorous bird but by fire. Don’t be surprised that someone goes up to heaven via fire. That’s how Heracles got there. And if you’re going to laugh at Danae’s ark, you’d better not forget Perseus. You know the only gift good enough for Alcmena? Zeus stole three whole days for her.”

There can be no doubt that Achilles Tatius was thoroughly familiar with a wide range of mythical narratives in their original poetic contexts, but “Zeus . . . once mooed . . . played a Satyr . . . turned himself into gold” looks more like the product of a mythographical impulse (and perhaps a handy mythographical guide that contained just such a list). For comparison’s sake, PMil. Vogl. 3.126, a papyrus of the late second or early third century ce, preserves a list of Zeus’s affairs with mortal women, and Hyginus also had one (Fab. 226, though we have only the title, “Mortal Women Who Slept with Jupiter,” not the list). What we ought to pay attention to is the world that Achilles Tatius draws, one of young, international (two of the men in the debate are Hellenized Tyrians, the other a Greek from Egypt or a Hellenized Egyptian) elite males displaying erudition, debating each other about contemporary issues with the use of mythical exempla, and distinguishing themselves from uncultured laymen. This is a friendly and informal fictional debate, but it reveals much that is not in its broad outlines fiction. At least some members of the audience of the novel were real-​life cultural counterparts to its characters, as can be clearly seen from an offhand remark that Cleitophon makes to the reader in 3.15.6 when he is paralyzed by the sight of what he believes to be his lover’s murder: “Perhaps the myth of Niobe was not false but she too, suffering something similar at the destruction of her children, gave the appearance from her motionlessness of having become stone.” The explanation of mythical paralysis as lack of motion from amazement or shock would have been familiar to anyone with even a cursory exposure to interpretive mythography (cf. Palaephatus 31, Conon 40, Heraclitus Paradoxographus 1) and the comparison is not unique in the period (cf. the opening of Lucian’s Imagines). Moreover, we have a surviving if different rationalizing account of the very figure of Niobe (in Palaephatus 8).

472   Literature and Culture Examples such as this show us that Achilles Tatius, his narrating characters and at least some of his readers were fluent in the discourse of mythography. It was, therefore, not just authors such as Strabo (on his connections with mythography, see Patterson 2013) and Pausanias (most recently, Hawes 2013, 175–​222), whose subject matter required extensive knowledge of myth, who needed access to the mythical information that mythography organized and interpreted. Myth was incorporated into a wide variety of social interactions both private and public. It could be used merely to mark one as a pepaideumenos, a member of the educated elite, or to attempt to influence personal behavior, but it was also part of the most important deliberations, including questions of interstate relations (Patterson 2010). Dio Chrysostom in his Olympic oration (Or. 12.44, from 97 ce) lays out four kinds of human ideas about the divine: inborn, derived from poets, derived from legal prescriptions, and derived from works of art. To these he later adds a fifth kind, ideas derived from philosophers (12.47). In our present context, what is worth consideration here is what is excluded: prose works of mythography, which Dio must have himself used and produced in his early education and his rhetorical training. But mythography is always a silent adjunct to the poetic, philosophical, and artistic modes of acquisition, and Dio and others never mention them alongside more prestigious sources. But they were certainly there. Systematic mythographers, as we have seen, organized and categorized the myths of poetry, and we have also observed the importance of mythography to Homeric literary criticism in this era. Allegorizers such as Cornutus would have been primary conduits for the initial acquisition of a philosophical understanding of myth, with texts like Heraclitus’s Homeric Problems serving more advanced audiences (see Brisson 2004, Lamberton 1986, and Struck 2004 for treatments of ancient allegory). Mythography also intersected strongly with appreciation of the visual arts, and the two interacted paedeutically—​when Achilles Tatius has Cleitophon tell the story of Procne and Philomela, he is explaining a painting, something we have “real world” examples of in the Philostratean Imagines. What becomes clear from these is that one required both sides of the equation for sense to be made: one must know both the image and the story for the image to resonate fully with its mythical importance. The story, though of course always going back ultimately to traditional myth or a prestigious literary account, could be passed on in such contexts as mythographical historiai, even where the original text is referenced. The suppression of the role of mythography—​Dio’s silence on the matter is typical—​ continues today to have the effect desired by its practitioners; we admire the highbrow erudition and imagine that it must come only from firsthand acquisition and prodigious memory. But the original audience would have understood what modern scholars too often fail to appreciate, that mythography underlay the whole apparatus of myth in this period. The original auditors and readers chose to ignore willingly the possibility that orators and authors got their material from intermediary sources. It is not being suggested here that mythography was the sole vehicle of acquiring and understanding myth, or even the most important, only that it was a major part of the process at every

Mythography   473 level, and one that was consciously omitted from the self-​presentation of writers and orators because it could be assumed by the audience.5 Anyone of any educational level would have encountered mythography too many times to mention and in too many contexts, and as a consequence would have had a worldview shaped by mythographical texts. It is the continuing task of scholarship on the Second Sophistic to investigate just what this realization means for our understanding of the literature, rhetoric, public self-​ fashioning, and private identities of the Greeks.

Further Reading For overviews of the development of early mythography and discussion of generic considerations see Dowden 2011, Fowler 2000 and 2013, Meliadò 2015, Pellizer 1993, and Trzaskoma and Smith 2007, x–​xxviii. Alganza Roldán 2006 also explores the issue of genre, while Higbie 2007 treats mythographical texts of the imperial period generally. Only a few specific works from the late Hellenistic and early imperial periods have been covered in this chapter, but investigation of the nature of many of them is of considerable interest for the study of mythographical trends in the Second Sophistic. Of particular value are the following: Stern 1996 and Hawes 2013 (Palaephatus); Lightfoot 1999 (Parthenius); Brown 2002 (Conon). Hawes 2013 and Patterson 2010 are recent examples of scholarship that assesses larger trends and the intellectual status of myth and mythography, although they are not limited to our period. They are welcome signs of the field having moved beyond viewing mythographical works as base source material. Smaller studies, such as Fletcher 2008, Delattre 2013, and many of the essays in Trzaskoma and Smith 2013, reveal the same tendency to contextualize mythography in more nuanced ways within imperial culture.

Bibliography Alganza Roldán, M. 2006. “La mitografía como género de la prosa helenística: Cuestiones previas.” Florentia Iliberritana 17: 9–​37. Almirall i Sardà, J., and E. Calderón Dorda. 2012. Antoní Liberal:  Recull de Metamorfosis. Barcelona. Boys-​Stones, G. 2007. “Fallere Sollers: The Ethical Pedagogy of the Stoic Cornutus.” In Greek and Roman Philosophy, 100 bc to 200 ad, edited by R. Sharples and R. Sorabji, 77–​86. London. Brisson, L. 2004. How Philosophers Saved Myths:  Allegorical Interpretation and Classical Mythology. Chicago. Brown, M. 2002. The Narratives of Konon: Text, Translation and Commentary of the Diegeseis. Munich and Leipzig. Cameron, A. 2004. Greek Mythography in the Roman World. Oxford. Celoria, F. 1992. The Metamorphoses of Antoninus Liberalis. London and New York. Cuartero I Iborra, F. 2010–​2012. Pseudo-​Apollodor: Biblioteca. Barcelona. Delattre, C. 2010. “Le renard de Teumesse chez Antoninus Libéralis (Mét., XLI): Formes et structures d’une narration.” Rev. Ét. Grec. 123: 91–​111.

474   Literature and Culture Delattre, C. 2013. “Pentaméron Mythographique: Les Grecs ont-​ils Écrit leurs Mythes?” Lalies 33: 77–​170. Dowden, K. 2011. “Telling the Mythology: From Hesiod to the Fifth Century.” In A Companion to Greek Mythology, edited by K. Dowden and N. Livingstone, 47–​72. Malden, MA, and Oxford. Fletcher, K. 2008. “Systematic Genealogies in Apollodorus’ Bibliotheca and the Exclusion of Rome from Greek Myth.” Cl. Ant. 27: 59–​91. Fowler, R. 2000. Early Greek Mythography. Vol. 1. Oxford. Fowler, R. 2013. Early Greek Mythography. Vol. 2. Oxford. Gibson, C. 2013. “True or False? Greek Myth and Mythography in the Progymnasmata.” In Writing Myth: Mythography in the Ancient World, edited by S. Trzaskoma and R. Smith, 289–​308. Leuven. Hawes, G. 2013. Rationalizing Myth in Antiquity. Oxford. Higbie, C. 2007. “Hellenistic Mythographers.” In The Cambridge Companion to Greek Mythology, edited by R. D. Woodard, 237–​254. Cambridge. Lamberton, R. 1986. Homer the Theologian: Neoplatonist Allegorical Reading and the Growth of the Epic Tradition. Berkeley, CA. Lightfoot, J. L., ed. 1999. Parthenius of Nicaea. Oxford. Meliadò, C. 2015. “Mythography.” In Brill’s Companion to Ancient Greek Scholarship, edited by F. Montanari, S. Matthaios, and A. Rengakos, 1:1057–​1089. Leiden and Boston. Montanari, F. 1995. “The Mythographus Homericus.” In Greek Literary Theory after Aristotle:  A  Collection of Papers in Honour of D.  M. Schenkeveld, edited by J. Abbenes, S. Slings, and I. Sluiter, 135–​172. Amsterdam. Most, G.  W. 1989. “Cornutus and Stoic Allegoresis:  A  Preliminary Report.” In ANRW 2.36.3: 2014–​2065. Smith, R., and S. Trzaskoma. 2017. “Mythography.” In Oxford Bibliographies Online. http://​www. oxfordbibliographies.com/​view/​document/​obo-​9780195389661/​obo-​9780195389661-​0142.xml. Pàmias i Massana, J., and A. Zucker. 2013. Ératosthène de Cyrène : Catastérismes. Collection des universités de France; Série grecque, 497. Paris. Papathomopoulos, M. 1969. Antoninus Liberalis: Les Métamorphoses. Paris. Papathomopoulos, M. 2010. ΑΠΟΛΛΟΔΩΡΟΥ ΒΙΒΛΙΟΘΗΚΗ:  Apollodori Bibliotheca post Richardum Wagnerum Recognita. Athens. Patterson, L. 2010. Kinship Myth in Ancient Greece. Austin, TX. Patterson, L. 2013. “Geographers as Mythographers:  The Case of Strabo.” In Writing Myth: Mythography in the Ancient World, edited by S. Trzaskoma and R. Smith, 201–​221. Leuven. Pellizer, E. 1993. “La mitografia.” In Giuseppe Cambiano, et al., eds. Lo spazio letterario della Grecia antica, edited by G. Cambiano, L. Canfora, and D. Lanza, 1/​2:283–​303. Rome. Ramelli, I. 2003. Anneo Cornuto: Compendio di teologia greca. Milan. Renner, T. 1978. “A Papyrus Dictionary of Metamorphoses.” Harv. Stud. 82: 277–​293. Russell, D. A., and D. Konstan. 2005. Heraclitus: Homeric Problems. Atlanta, GA. Stern, J. 1996. Περὶ Ἀπίστων: On Unbelievable Tales. Wauconda, IL. Stern, J. 2003. “Heraclitus the Paradoxographer: Περὶ Ἀπίστων: On Unbelievable Tales.” TAPA 133: 51–​97. Struck, P. 2004. Birth of the Symbol. Princeton, NJ. Trzaskoma, S. 2013. “Citation, Organization and Authorial Presence in Ps.-​Apollodorus’ Bibliotheca.” In Writing Myth: Mythography in the Ancient World, edited by S. Trzaskoma and R. Smith, 75–​94. Leuven.

Mythography   475 Trzaskoma, S., and R. Smith. 2007. Apollodorus’ Library and Hyginus’ Fabulae: Two Handbooks of Greek Mythology. Cambridge, MA. Trzaskoma, S., and R. Smith, eds. 2013. Writing Myth:  Mythography in the Ancient World. Leuven. Van Rossum-​Steenbeek, M. 1998. Greek Readers’ Digests? Studies on a Selection of Subliterary Papyri. Leiden. Wagner, R. 1926. Mythographi Graeci. Vol. 1. Leipzig.

Chapter 30

Historio g ra ph y Sulochana R. Asirvatham

History is everywhere in the Greek literature of the Roman Empire. Athenaeus and Plutarch use historical personages as exempla of particular ethical dispositions; Aelius Aristides’s declamations on historical themes are a master’s versions of those that formed the basis for elite education; Polyaenus’s Stratagems are based on legendary and historic battles from the Homeric to the Augustan periods; the novels of Chariton and Heliodorus contain many historical elements; the list goes on. These sorts of texts use historical details for rhetorical display or ethical arguments,1 but there is also a significant body of Roman-​era texts written in Greek that Ewen Bowie categorized as “historical works,” which includes some extant texts as well as a number of Jacoby’s fragmentary authors.2 In his survey on Severan historiography, Harry Sidebottom extended the definition of historiography to include a very wide variety of writings,3 but here I focus on the kind of text he categorized as “mainstream,” for example, universal history (in the Severan but also the Antonine period preceding it). These texts pose interesting challenges to what we think of as characteristics of “Second Sophistic” literature. First, inasmuch as we identify a work as “historiography” based on its ostensible goal of telling the truth about the past, it is seemingly incompatible with a large bulk of imperial Greek writing that is more obviously inspired by declamation (the practice of making display speeches)4 and whose main goal is the virtuosic display of erudition itself. Second, inasmuch as imperial historiography is largely about Rome, it tells against stereotypes of Roman Greek literature as both Hellenocentric and preoccupied with the Greek past rather than the Roman present. Through a consideration of our four extant historians—​Arrian, Appian, Cassius Dio, and Herodian—​this chapter attempts to elucidate the particularly hybrid nature of historiography on these two levels: of genre (earnest “history,” but somewhat dominated by rhetoric) and of cultural politics (between Greek and Roman). The first section argues that while historiography sets itself apart from rhetoric by insisting on its own truth value, it also exhibits a new understanding of the prevalence of rhetoric in contemporary discourse. The second section argues that the combination of Greek language and Roman subject matter found in much late historiography makes the distinction between

478   Literature and Culture “Greek” and “Roman” even harder to justify for those authors than for others, since their linguistic habits and varying degrees of self-​awareness as pepaideumenoi cannot always be seen as strictly “Greek.”5 I have chosen these four figures because their work is significantly extant, because they signal to us their attachment to the historiographical tradition, and because they show the signs of Atticizing education we see in other writers who are associated with the Second Sophistic. (The last is important because Attic “purism,” perhaps more than anything else, encourages us to think of the Second Sophistic as a “period” in time, and yet even the “canonical” Plutarch uses a literary form of koinê.)6 Given their similarities (and, in some cases, their cross-​pollination), it seems appropriate to treat these authors together. But their differences inevitably encourage more inclusivity, rather than more restrictiveness, in the Second Sophistic label (if we are going to use it at all).7

30.1  History/​R hetoric Genre is notoriously difficult to discuss. The situation is somewhat less difficult when a text proclaims its attachment to a tradition: Appian, Cassius Dio, and Herodian all use Herodotus’s ἱστορία8 (“inquiry”) to describe their work; after Thucydides, Cassius Dio uses συγγράφειν (“to compose in writing”) as well, and Arrian uses συγγραφή (“written narrative”) for his Anabasis Alexandri as well as his Indika (ostensibly modeled on Xenophon and Herodotus).9 Such signals allow us at the very least to see these texts in relationship to other texts that label themselves the same way. But the question is complicated by the longstanding debate on the relationship between history and rhetoric, which has particular consequences for historiography at a time when rhetoric was the most prestigious literary activity.10 Some ancients saw historiography as a branch of rhetoric (what Momigliano called the “Isocrates-​Ciceronian notion”);11 this view continued into the nineteenth century until the rise of scientific historiography.12 In the twentieth century and beyond, however, we have seen the rise and establishment of a “metahistorical” view that emphasizes the discursive nature of writing on the past and questions the distinction between historical and fictional narrative.13 It is certainly true that in Greco-​Roman antiquity, those writing history would have had the same education as those sophists who wrote more overtly rhetorical works, and there was no specific instruction in the writing of history.14 More to the point, ancient historiography had always been influenced by rhetoric, something most notable in the fictional, purportedly verisimilitudinous speeches that historians from Herodotus onwards put into the mouths of their historical characters. (Thucydides’s justification of his own such practice famously led Gilbert Murray to remark that the historian “would not have liked it in Herodotus; and the practice was a fatal legacy to two thousand years of history-​ writing after him.”)15 If any of our later historiographers have been accused of being too rhetorical, we should think of it as an intensification rather than a grafting of rhetorical language onto some originally “pure” idiom.

Historiography   479 Nevertheless, conventional ideas about truthfulness in history were still in circulation in this period, although in some cases rhetoric seems to occupy a new place of privilege. The best illustration of this is Lucian’s How to Write History (Πῶς Δεῖ Ἱστορίαν Συγγράφειν)—​the closest thing we have to historiographical theory in the empire. Here Lucian lambastes certain trends in contemporary historians and offers his own correctives, often using Thucydides as the model historian.16 (Thucydides was the model for Lucian’s bad historians too, along with the two other greats: Lucian complains of his pretentious targets that they are “all Thucydideses, Herodotuses, and Xenophons”). He begins, in 2.47.3–​54, with a story of a plague (as Emily Greenwood 2006, 114, puts it, a “loosely constructed spoof ” of Thucydides’s plague narrative)17 that had once caused the people of Abdera to start spontaneously and uncontrollably chanting Euripidean verses at the tops of their lungs; Lucian suggests that a plague, too, is responsible for the present-​day rash of writing on a relatively minor incident in the 150-​year history of Parthian Wars: the 161 ce disaster in Armenia that resulted in the commander Severianus’s suicide. This horde of individuals (unnamed, except for four who may or may not be Lucian’s inventions)18 disregard facts and figures; are unable to distinguish history from encomium; unpleasantly mix Latin terminologies into their Greek; mix high and low language; believe that only philosophers should write history; write too long a preface without much body or, alternately, write no preface at all; or pretend to have been an eyewitness to events by falsifying numbers,19 all while proving they know nothing whatsoever about the geography of where they took place (Hist. conscr. 6–​32). The second, “positive” or “constructive” half of Lucian’s treatise tells us what good history is (allowing it to be embodied by Thucydides): in sum, it is truth, well researched and packaged in excellent rhetoric (“arrangement and exposition” [δεῖ δὲ τᾶξαι καὶ εἰπεῖν αὐτά]; “how to say” [ὅπως εἴπωσιν] the truth): “Above all, let him bring a mind like a mirror, clear, gleaming-​bright, accurately centered, displaying the shape of things just as he receives them, free from distortion, false coloring, and misrepresentation. His concern is different from that of the orators—​what historians have to relate is fact and will speak for itself, for it has already happened: what is required is arrangement and exposition. So they must not look for what to say but how to say it” (Hist. conscr. 50).20 Given Lucian’s penchant for rhetorical trickery, it would seem unwise to take his prescriptions for history writing as “straight” advice. Nevertheless, in the prefaces of three of our histories we see the same combination of the (traditional) idea that good history must be truthful with an acknowledgment of the near inevitability of rhetoric in historiography.21 For Arrian and Dio, in fact, truth and rhetoric can coexist harmoniously: when Arrian chooses between Ptolemy and Aristobolus as a source for a particular event, it is because that author’s account “seems more trustworthy and also more worthy of being told” (τὰ πιστότερα . . . φαινόμενα καὶ ἅμα ἀξιαφηγητοτερα); Cass. Dio, Preface 1.2, cautions that no one should be “suspicious of the truth of my narrative because I have used a fine style [κεκαλλιεπημένοις . . . λόγοις κέχρημαι], as far as can be permitted by the subject matter,” for he has tried to be “equally exact in both these respects, so far as possible” (ἐγὼ γὰρ ἀμφότερα, ὡς οἷόν τε ἦν, ὁμοίως ἀκριβῶσαι ἐσπούδασα). The idea of a truth-​telling genre actively accepting rhetoric may seem

480   Literature and Culture paradoxical to us, but if our writers believe, like Lucian does, that the truth is self-​ evident, and that the historian’s task is only to “mirror” it well through the proper handling of rhetoric, the conflict disappears. Herodian is more critical of his rivals’ use of rhetoric. He begins his history with a (highly rhetorical) condemnation of other historians who privilege style over substance (using a pointed reference to paideia, we might add), which is redolent of both Thucydides22 and Lucian and worth quoting at some length: Most writers engaged in compiling history, whose concern has been to present a fresh record of the past, have aimed at winning themselves a permanent reputation for learning [παιδείας κλέος ἀίδιον], since they were afraid that if they did not express themselves they would be indistinguishable from the masses. But in their narratives they have shown a contempt for the truth [τῆς . . . ἀληθείας . . . ὠλιγώρη σαν] and a preoccupation with vocabulary and style [φράσεώς τε καὶ εὐφωνίας], because they were confident that, even if they wrote in a somewhat fantastic style, they would reap the advantages of the pleasure they gave to their public, without the accuracy [τὸ ἀκριβὲς] of their research being investigated. Some authors, through the excellent quality of their style [λόγων ἀρετῇ], have made trivial events acquire a spurious importance with posterity, greater than was deserved by the truth [τῆς ἀληθείας]. They have done this either because they were bitterly opposed to tyranny or because they wanted to give flattering praise to an emperor or a city or a private individual. My policy has been not to accept any second-​hand information which has not been checked and corroborated. I have collected the evidence for my work with every attention to accuracy, limiting it to what falls within the recent memory of my readers. (History of the Empire 1.1.1–​3)

If the opening lines of Herodian’s history seem familiar, there is something new in his complaint that those who wish to gain “permanent reputation for learning” (παιδείας κλέος ἀίδιον) too often rely on rhetoric. Herodian in a sense is arguing for a limitation on what his own genre should expect from itself, and this is similar to the limitation implied by Lucian in How to Write History. Lucian twice recommends Thucydides’s hope that his historical work be κτῆμα ἐς αἰεὶ (“a monument for eternity”: 5 and 42) as the ideal any historiographer should strive for, but Greenwood (2006, 128) argues that this is ultimately an act of self-​glorification on Lucian’s part: “Lucian plays a subtle game, purporting to uphold Thucydides for the analytical qualities that made his History timeless, but ultimately fixating on the fame of Thucydides’s work, onto which Lucian grafts his own name.”23 Lucian’s expert exposition of historiographical precepts puts him at the top of his (rhetorical) game. For our historians, however, the rhetoric of κλέος is seemingly undermined by an anxiety of influence. Arrian challenges his audience to compare him to his predecessors: “Anyone who is surprised that with so many historians already in the field it should have occurred to me too to compose this history should express his surprise only after perusing all their works and then reading mine” (Preface 3). Appian is more modest, understating the newness of his methodology:  “These things have been described by many writers, both Greek and Roman.  .  .  .  Thinking

Historiography   481 that the public would like to learn the history of the Romans in this way, I am going to write the part relating to each nation separately, omitting what happened to the others in the meantime, and taking it up in its proper place” (Roman History Preface 12–​13).24 Cassius Dio backhandedly refers to earlier historians as he highlights his own mastery: “Although I have read pretty nearly everything about them that has been written by anybody, I have not included it all in my history, but only what I have seen fit to select” (Roman History Preface 1.2). Having begun his history by criticizing those who seek future fame (as seen above), his only claim for his own work is that he believes posterity will find knowledge of his subject—​not, we should note, his writing itself—​to be pleasant: “I believe that future generations too will derive some pleasure from the knowledge of events which are important and compressed within a brief span of time” (History of the Empire 1.1.4). Our historians, who as we will see have quite different aims in their histories (and who are not all equally “traditional”), nevertheless show some commonality in that they all define themselves as historians and verify that their projects are concerned with truth and accuracy; 25 for at least three of them we see the explicit acknowledgment that rhetoric’s presence in their genre is somewhat inevitable. All four seem to share an understanding that t is the overuse of rhetoric, not a careful exposition of the truth, that is more likely to lead one to fame, which suggests, alongside Lucian’s rhetorical domination of the subject, something of the marginality of this genre in comparison to other types of writing that encouraged rhetorical license.26

30.2  “Greek”/​” Roman” If Lucian’s How to Write History helps us contextualize our historians’ traditional truth claims within a literary culture that seems to emphasize rhetorical over historical truth,27 it also reflects the fact that our extant history is largely “about” Rome, not Greece. This is important, because Second Sophistic scholarship tends to link the proliferation of literature to the assertion of a “Greek” identity—​understandably, given that elite education trafficked exclusively in classical literary models. But even further, in contrast to Lucian’s bad historians, who dealt with small and relatively insignificant pieces of contemporary Roman history, ours did not solely occupy themselves with small things: Appian and Cassius Dio’s works, for example, are world histories.28 Their evident Romanitas, however, may explain why so few scholars of the Second Sophistic have studied them. By the time Appian, Cassius Dio, and Herodian wrote, Greeks had been writing Roman historiography for centuries, and after Tacitus, Latin historiography of Rome seems to have disappeared (the only Latin historian we know of is Justin, who wrote an epitome of the Augustan Pompeius Trogus’s history of the Macedonian Empire). Indeed, by the Severan period, most prose writing is being done in Greek, the major exception being the prodigious industry of legal writing in Latin.29 But herein lies the difficulty in determining whether we should call our historians Greek

482   Literature and Culture or Roman (reflected in the fact, for example, that the present chapter about Arrian, Appian, Cassius Dio, and Herodian could well be called “Greek Historiography,” but it also seems natural that a 2001 book on “Roman Historiography” includes all the Greek and Roman historians of this time period, sometimes with a Greek and Latin writer treated together in one chapter).30 We can say either that Roman historiography was written in Greek because Greek was the language of literature, or that “Greeks” were interested in writing Roman history because this was part of the Greek literary tradition. The difficulty of deciding between the two is further complicated by the seemingly perfunctory way in which the Attic language is sometimes used in these texts, as well as the presence in them of Latinisms (and, in Appian, koinê). Admittedly it has become rather commonplace at this point to say that we cannot choose between Greek and Roman identities for any Second Sophistic writer because so many held seats in the Senate, knew emperors personally, and so on and so forth. The problem historiography poses, I believe, is somewhat different. The reason we employ Philostratus’s term Second Sophistic to refer to something beyond Philostratus’s own intellectual lineage and circle31 or live declamation32 is because we sense a certain common attitude among Greek writers toward paideia, which is equated with Greekness, which in turn is equated with culture. That is, we see paideutic display as a form of cultural politics, a “Greek” response to Roman power: hence Simon Swain has referred to the “politics of purism”; Tim Whitmarsh, the “politics of imitation.”33 For a Plutarch, a Dio Chrysostom, or an Aristides, an ideal Rome is a Rome that supports and even emulates paideia, and that makes no attempt to dominate paideia by means of its own cultural forms. So while we may think of these writers as personally “hybrid,” what they seem to show in their writing is not hybridism so much as the continual redefinition of “culture” as something definitively Greek in contrast to Roman power—​something we might call “appropriation,” to capture its active nature. If we define imperial paideia, however, strictly as Greekness-​in-​differentiation-​ from-​Roman-​power, it is difficult to see who of our historians would qualify besides Arrian (and, at any rate, this would be reflected in only some of his writings). If we are to use the term Second Sophistic for all our authors—​and since it is hard to justify removing any one of them altogether, we may as well—​we require a more expansive definition that embraces an impurist, hybrid paideia that can be more properly referred to as Greco-​Roman (or in the case of Appian, Greco-​Roman-​Alexandrian). Like Athenaeus’s Deipnosophistae, this Second Sophistic form strives for innovation and monumentalism, but its expertise and, in the case of Cassius Dio and Herodian, its narrative viewpoint can be Roman. It is the product of the same Atticist education as more “sophistic” writing, but it defends its mix of Greek and Latin (recall, as a contrast, the inclusion of language-​mixing in Lucian’s list of negative trends in historiography). The following comments on individual authors suggest how a more inclusive, hybridizing definition of the Second Sophistic meaningfully accommodates our historians.

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30.2.1 Arrian At first glance, Arrian’s works seem to divide neatly into “Roman” and “Greek.” He wrote on subjects ranging from the historical to the philosophical to the military (the last category includes some autobiography). Ostensibly on the Roman side we have his treatise on hunting, the Cynegeticus; we also have the Periplus Euxini (The Voyage around the Black Sea) and the Tactica, both of which contain a mix of antiquarian and contemporary detail; and finally there is the Ectaxis contra Alanos, which describes Roman preparations against the Alani invasions (which Cassius Dio claimed Arrian personally helped prevent: 49.15.1). All of these reference contemporary events and Arrian’s own personal experiences.34 On the Greek side we have Arrian’s two Alexander-​works—​the Anabasis of Alexander and Indika, four out of eight books of the Discourses of his Stoic teacher Epictetus (word-​for-​word notes on the philosopher’s teachings), and a summary of Epictetus’s philosophy called the Enchridion. On closer examination, the Greek/​Roman dichotomy breaks apart. The influence of Greek classicism is easy to see in the so-​called Roman works: these are works about contemporary matters written in an artificial Attic dialect influenced by classical writers. Xenophon’s influence is prominent in the Tactica, the Periplus, the Ectaxis kata Alanon, and the Cynegeticus;35 Thucydides and Herodotus are also important to these works,36 if less so than to the Anabasis). What is perhaps less obvious are the ways in which “classicizing” works can seem “Roman” (although in the case of the philosophical works one wonders if Stoicism can really be considered a “Greek” philosophy by the time of Hadrian—​who we should recall was, like Arrian, a student of Epictetus). The Anabasis was until recently seen as a “mere conduit for Ptolemy,”37 and it announces its classical pedigree in various ways that go beyond borrowing one of Xenophon’s titles: its famous Second Preface (1.12) parallels the second prefaces of Herodotus (7.19–​21) and Thucydides (1.12.1–​5);38 Arrian declares himself Homer to Alexander’s Achilles;39 and Thucydides has especially influenced speeches like the one before the Battle of Gaugamela, and historical excurses like that at Thebes.40 Then there is the Indika, an account of Nearchus’s journey from India to the Persian Gulf on Alexander’s return to Babylon which is written more purely in Herodotus’s Ionic dialect and shares that historian’s penchant for ethnographic detail.41 But all this classical allusion notwithstanding,42 if we see Arrian as something other than a receptacle for received ideas we can entertain the possibility of Rome-​consciousness even where it is not directly stated. The concept of an ideal “Greek” Alexander seems to have originated in imperial Greek literature under the influence of Roman interest.43 Regardless of when we think the Anabasis was written, Arrian would have grown up fully aware of Trajan’s self-​styling as another Alexander, and it has recently been suggested that, even if the Anabasis was written under Hadrian, it would have been influenced by the contemporary discourse on Rome’s expansionist excesses.44 Mentions of Rome in the Anabasis automatically

484   Literature and Culture suggest comparisons between Alexander and the present-​day super power; it has also been argued that Arrian’s description of the reaction against proskynesis (ritual prostration) in Alexander’s court and Alexander’s murder of Cleitus the Black comment implicitly or through analogy upon Roman ruler cult.45 Finally, the Anabasis’s form seems to combine war monograph and imperial biography, which are both originally Latin genres. More than our other historiographers, Arrian seems to fit the typical Second Sophistic model of appropriation, especially with his Anabasis Alexandri, in which a figure popular among Romans becomes strongly Hellenized. Hybridity perhaps better describes something like the Ectaxis contra Alanos whose form is influenced by Xenophon but which, as P. A. Brunt puts it, is a “tract of no literary pretentions”46 and describes Roman military preparations in which Arrian took part.

30.2.2 Appian The Romanitas of Appian is closer to the surface than that of Arrian. Appian’s Roman History (ca. mid-​second century) is a record of the Roman rise to power organized ethnographically rather than chronologically, in contrast to earlier world historians; the work climaxes with the triumph of Augustus (represented by five civil wars books and four Egyptian ones, 13–​21), then skips to Trajan.47 As the first world history since the age of Augustus, its very existence seems to make it part of the Antonine renaissance of Greek letters. Appian’s sources are a mix of Greek and Latin, and include Hieronymus of Cardia, Polybius, Asinius Pollo, Caesar, and Augustus, as well as Arrian.48 As for Atticism: Appian is known for his Thucydidean diction49 (although his interest in ethnographic organization does not seem to reflect the interest in ethnographical detail we see in Herodotus and others);50 Alain Gowing also suggests a connection to Aelius Aristides’s To Rome, for both its monarchism and admiration of Alexandria.51 Appian’s connection to Alexandria, however, goes deeper than that of Aristides (whose real loyalty, as an Attic purist, lies with Athens): he calls himself “Appian of Alexandria” at the beginning of the Roman History, and more significantly organizes his work in such a way that the taming of Egypt becomes the pinnacle of the Roman conquest of the world.52 The Alexandrian connection presumably explains too why his Attic is mixed with koinê in addition to Latinisms.53 For a sophist to identify ethnically as something other than Greek is not unknown in the Second Sophistic: Syrian Lucian is the famous case. But unlike Appian, Lucian was a strict Atticist whose references to Syrians and his own identity seem set to prove that a native Syrian could out-​Atticize a Greek.54 As an Alexandrian whose subject was Rome and whose main allegiance was Alexandria, a better analogy would be Polybius, the first universal historian of the Roman empire and an Achaean loyalist. But to the degree that Appian shows signs of Atticism and writes a monumental history with a new twist, Appian also fits into a looser definition of Second Sophistic literature.

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30.2.3 Cassius Dio There is another way in which Appian seems to be of his age:55 like other Antonine writers, he does not write about the present; what is perhaps even more significant than the time gap between his own writing and the chronological endpoint of his history is the fact that his history stops with Trajan, whose philhellenism is often seen to have encouraged the rise of the Greek classicism. Cassius Dio’s universal history of Rome (the first universal history since the time of Augustus) indicates a break from the Antonine pattern in historiography.56 The Roman History was a gargantuan undertaking of eighty volumes, about half of which we have in epitomized or nonfragmentary form. It is influenced by the (originally Latin) form of the Annales, but is not strictly annalistic; it begins with Aeneas and ends with Severus Alexander. Dio first becomes an eyewitness to history during the reign of Commodus. (He did not seem to have had much of a plan besides bringing his history as far as possible into the present.)57 Departing from the triumphalist attitude that prevailed in the Antonine period, Dio views present-​day Rome as having fallen from the golden age of Marcus Aurelius’s reign (Roman History 72.36.4). Like Tacitus, Dio writes from the point of view of a senator and not as a Roman subject; he has a strong authorial presence, commenting on present institutions and on his own experiences; he uses stories such as the traumatic fall of the Republic and Augustus’s reign as obvious parallels to the present, but also explicitly addresses contemporary events and is especially vivid in describing things he witnesses at Rome first-​hand. The fact that he is the only extant Greek writer of the empire to use the first-​person plural pronoun in reference to Rome and senatorial viewpoint naturally encourages us to think of him as a “Roman,” not a Greek, writing about Rome. What of Dio’s use of Greek? In the Severan Period, Atticism was in its heyday: extant authors include Galen, Aelian, Athenaeus, Diogenes Laertius, and Philostratus himself, who showed a range of styles and attitudes toward Greekness much like that of the Antonine sophists, from purist and exclusive (e.g., Diogenes) to appreciative of Rome’s support of Greek cultural supremacy (e.g., Philostratus).58 Dio, too, was an Atticist whose imitation of Thucydides was well known in antiquity (Photius notes that Thucydides’s influence was most notable in Dio’s speeches).59 But does mere Atticism make Dio a “Greek”? Scholars have tended to fall on one side or other of the fence depending on how they define Greekness and Romanness, and depending on what side of his personality—​the statesman or the literary man—​they believe means “more” to Dio.60 On the one hand, he is someone who is writing a monumental work in Greek. On the other hand, he shows little special interest in Greece or Greekness, despite a few mentions of his hometown of Nicaea. Other aspects of Dio’s relationship to paideia seem to reflect a cultural hybridism. Inasmuch as Dio’s history is a “Greek-​language example of a specifically Roman genre, the senatorial annalistic history,”61 we might conclude that the truest way of viewing the act of paideia it represents is as “senatorial” rather than “Greek” or “Roman.” There are, however, some references to paideia that speak more directly to the relationship between

486   Literature and Culture Greek and Roman culture. For example, Dio says that he uses the word chrysous for the Roman coin aureus because the Atticists he follows do this too.62 As both a concession to a Greek audience (he is doing what Atticists do) and an acknowledgment that the audience will be expecting a Roman term, Dio seems to put Greek and Latin on equal footing. Also revealing is Dio’s emphasis on the paideia of emperors, most notably that of Hadrian and Marcus Aurelius. Dio notes in particular that the emperors’ paideia entailed immersion in both Greek and Latin literature (specifically in Marcus’s case, philosophy and rhetoric).63 Those looking for a “Greek” Dio may emphasize his mention of Greek here: the emperor reads not only Latin but also Greek; those looking for a “Roman” Dio may point out that Greek is not privileged here over Latin, as we might expect from a “Hellenocentric” author. But there may be another way altogether of reading this: not as an affirmation or dilution of some assumed Greekness on the part of Dio, but as a redefinition of excellent education as something that would describe Dio himself: as bilingual.64 Dio shows the kind of self-​reflexivity about paideia that befits a man writing a monumental history of Rome under the emperors from its beginnings all the way up to the recent past, which required fluency in both Greek and Latin sources. In this sense, Dio—​as a born-​Greek writing in Greek about Roman things—​fits nicely on the other side of a coin from Aelian, who was a Latin writing fluently in Greek about Greek things.65

30.2.4 Herodian Herodian’s History of the Empire is a novel piece of writing in two senses—​it is a seemingly new form of history written in Greek that deals with a set period of the very recent past, and it has been called novelistic.66 It is organized more or less as a series of imperial biographies starting with Marcus Aurelius—​characterized, as in Dio, as the template of the ideal ruler against whose image his successors will fail—​and ending with the ascension to the throne of the thirteen-​year-​old Gordian III. There is a sense of increasing hopelessness as each figure rises and quickly falls. The creation of a new sort of history dealing only with the recent past and present suggests that historiography has acquired a new sense of urgency. Paideia has perhaps an even more obvious role in Herodian, whose writing style is heavily rhetorical, than in Dio.67 While Herodian does not refer to Marcus Aurelius’s bilingualism, he mentions that his love of literature surpassed that of any Roman or Greek (History of the Empire 1.2.3); his description of Marcus’s character includes a nice piece of self-​reflexive commentary on the trickle-​down effect of good rulers onto the people: “He was the only emperor who gave proof of his philosophy by his dignified, sober manner rather than by words and a knowledge of doctrine. The product of the age of Marcus was a large number of scholars, since subjects always model their lives on the ideals of their ruler” (History of the Empire 1.2.4). The idea that good rulers lead by example is a rhetorical commonplace in antiquity (see, for example, Isoc. Panath. 138; Plin. Pan. 45.6), but the idea that an intellectual ruler automatically creates intellectuals through his example is Herodian’s unique twist. And yet paideia has its limits in this world. Herodian uses it, for example,

Historiography   487 to distinguish between Elagabalus and his brother Alexander: the former took part in barbarian religious ritual while the latter studied diligently. That paideia was not enough to ensure Alexander’s military success, that Marcus’s efforts to give Commodus a world-​ class education were not enough to curb his incipient violence, suggests that, in the new unstable world that Herodian depicts, paideia is a main attribute of the best rulers but cannot itself guarantee good rule, as men like Plutarch and Dio Chrysostom had hoped was the case for their own world.

Conclusion Inasmuch as Antonine and Severan historiography identifies itself as something other than rhetoric and (often) deals with Rome and even contemporary Rome, it seems to lie outside what Second Sophistic scholarship tends to see as the mainstream of Hellenocentric rhetorical discourse. But like other contemporary texts written in Greek, this historiography tends to acknowledge the prevalence of rhetoric, shows a drive toward innovation and monumentality, is significantly Atticist, and has an interest in paideia. These commonalities suggest a need for definition of Second Sophistic that encompasses not only the discourse of appropriation (that is, the continual redefinition of culture as “Greek”) but also the truly hybrid nature of Greek writings that deal with Rome. Arrian’s idealized portrait of Alexander does not come from the past but is a response to Roman imitatio Alexandri; Arrian’s writings reflecting Roman life are, conversely, flush with Xenophontan reference but display little “sophistic” flourish. Appian mixes koinê and Attic Greek with Latinisms, and writes of the rise of Roman power from an Alexandrian point of view and for an Alexandrian audience; his view of Roman triumphalism is similar to that found in both Pliny and Aelius Aristides—​the latter with whom Appian shares an appreciation for Alexandria and a comfort in being a subject-​observer of Rome’s power. Cassius Dio and Herodian write Roman histories which take the contemporary reader up to events that happened in their lifetimes: their subject matter and closeness to the material may seem to trump any notion that they are “Greek.” But their very acts of writing in Greek—​in the case of Dio, monumentally; in the case of Herodian, innovatively—​and their interest in the paideia of emperors align them with other writers associated with the Second Sophistic. Unlike those who wrote in the more purist literary genres, however, for whom Attic perfection was sufficient, Dio and Herodian needed a high level of bilingualism to be authorities on the Roman world in which they lived.

Further Reading There are not many overall treatments of Second Sophistic Greek historiography, although for the Severan period Sidebottom 2007 is very useful. Kemezis 2014 ties the historians Cassius Dio and Appian together with Philostratus as writers who in different ways saw the

488   Literature and Culture reign of Marcus Aurelius as a golden age. Arrian’s most important modern critic is Brian Bosworth, astute on matters of both history and rhetoric; among his many contributions are his two-​volume Historical Commentary on Arrian’s History of Alexander (Bosworth 1980, 1995, which deal with books 1–​5; a third volume dealing with books 6–​7 is eagerly anticipated); and Bosworth 1988 and 1993. See also Brunt 1976–​1983, with commentary and notes, and Stadter 1980. The study of Appian has until recently been dominated by the work of the late Italian scholar Emilio Gabba, whose main interest was Appian’s historical value for understanding Roman history, especially the civil wars; his bibliography is too large to encapsulate here, but commentaries on aspects of Appian’s civil wars appeared as early as 1956 (Appiano e la storia delle guerre civili) and as late as 2001 (Appianus: La storia romana: Libri 13–​17: Le guerre civili). More recent analyses of Appian’s work as literature include Bucher 2000, Goldmann 1988, Gowing 1992 and Welch (ed.) 2015. Millar 1964 continues to be the best starting point for Cassius Dio; for historiographical approaches see Ameling 1997 and Lange and Madsen (eds.) 2016; for studies of the triumviral and Augustan periods see Gowing 1992 and Manuwald 1978 respectively, and the commentaries of Reinhold 1988 and Rich 1990. Commentaries on other books include Edmundson 1992 (Books 56–​63), Murison 1999 (Books 64–​67) and Swan 2004 (Books 55–​56. Geza Alföldy wrote a number of articles on Herodian, such as 1971a and 1971b; see also Sidebottom 1998 and Zimmerman 1999.

Bibliography Alföldy, G. 1971a. “Zeitgeschichte und Krisenempfindung bei Herodian.” Hermes 99: 429–​449. Alföldy, G. 1971b. “Herodians Person.” Anc. Soc. 2: 204–​233. Ameling, W. 1997. “Griechische Intellektuelle und das Imperium Romanum:  Das Beispiel Cassius Dio.” ANRW 2.34.3: 2472–​2496. Andrade, N. J. 2013. Syrian Identity in the Greco-​Roman World. Cambridge. Asirvatham, S. R. 2005. “Classicism and Romanitas in Plutarch’s De Alexandri Fortuna Aut Virtute.” AJPhil. 126: 107–​125. Asirvatham, S. R. 2008. “His Son’s Father? Philip II in the Second Sophistic.” In Philip II and Alexander the Great: Father and Son, Lives and Afterlives, edited by E. Carney and D. Ogden, 193–​204. New York and Oxford. Borg, B. E. 2004. “Glamorous Intellectuals: Portraits of Pepaideumenoi in the Second and Third Centuries ad.” In Paideia: The World of the Second Sophistic, edited by B. E. Borg, 157–​178. Berlin and New York. Bosworth, A. B. 1980. A Historical Commentary on Arrian’s History of Alexander. Vol. 1, Commentary on Books I–​III. Oxford. Bosworth, A. B. 1988. From Arrian to Alexander. Oxford. Bosworth, A. B. 1993. “Arrian and Rome: The Minor Works.” ANRW 2.34.1: 226–​275. Bosworth, A. B. 1995. A Historical Commentary on Arrian’s History of Alexander. Vol. 2, Commentary on Books IV–​V. Oxford. Bowersock, G. W. 1975. “Herodian and Elagabalus.” In Studies in the Greek Historians, edited by D. Kagan, 229–​236. Cambridge. Bowden, H. 2013. “On Kissing and Making Up:  Court Protocol and Historiography in Alexander the Great’s ‘Experiment with Proskynesis.’” BICS 56, no. 2: 55–​77.

Historiography   489 Bowie, E. L. 1974. “Greeks and Their Past in the Second Sophistic.” In Studies in Ancient Society, edited by M. I. Finley, 166–​209. London and Boston. Revised reprint from P&P 46 (1970): 3–​41. Brodersen, K. 1988. “Appian und Arrian.” Klio 70: 461–​467. Brunt, P. A. 1976. Arrian: Anabasis of Alexander, Books 1–​4. Cambridge, MA. Brunt, P. A. 1983. Arrian: Anabasis of Alexander, Books 5–​7; Indica. Cambridge, MA. Bubenik, V. 2007, “The Rise of Koine.” In A History of Ancient Greek: From the Beginnings to Late Antiquity, edited by A.-​F. Christidis, 342–​345. Cambridge. Bucher, G. 2000. “The Origins, Program, and Composition of Appian’s Roman History.” TAPA 130: 411–​458. Carlsen, J. 2014. “Greek History in a Roman Context:  Arrian’s Anabasis of Alexander.” In Roman Rule in Greek and Latin Writing: Double Vision, edited by J. Madsen and R. Rees, 210–​223. Leiden. Doran, R., ed. 2013. Philosophy of History after Hayden White. London. Edmundson, J. C. Dio: The Julio-​Claudians, Selections from Books 58–​63 of the Roman History of Cassius Dio. London. Eshleman, K. 2008. “Defining the Circle of Sophists: Philostratus and the Construction of the Second Sophistic.” CPhil. 103: 395–​413. Gabba, E. 1959. Appiano e la storia delle guerre civili. Florence. Gabba, E. 2001. Appianus, La storia romana, Libri 13–​17: Le guerre civili. With D. Magnino. Turin. Gleason, M. 2001. “Mutilated Messengers: Body Language in Josephus.” In Being Greek under Rome:  Cultural Identity, the Second Sophistic and the Development of Empire, edited by S. Goldhill, 50–​85. Cambridge. Goldmann, B. 1988. Einheitlichkeit und Eigenstdndigkeit der Historia Romana des Appian. Hildesheim. Gowing, A. 1992. The Triumviral Narratives of Appian and Cassius Dio. Ann Arbor, MI. Greenwood, E. 2006. Thucydides and the Shaping of History. London. Grundmann, H. R. 1885. Quid in elocutione Arriani Herodoto. Berliner Studien für classische Philologie und Archaeologie 2.2. Dresden. Habinek, T. 2005. Ancient Rhetoric and Oratory. Oxford and Malden, MA. Hering, J. 1935. Lateinisches bei Appian. Unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Leipzig. Iglesias-​Zoido, J.-​C. “Thucydides in the School Rhetoric of the Imperial Period.” GRBS 52: 393–​420. Kemezis, A. 2010. “Lucian, Fronto, and the Absence of Contemporary Historiography under the Antonines.” AJPhil. 131: 285–​325. Kemezis, A. 2014. Greek Narratives of the Roman Empire under the Severans:  Cassius Dio, Philostratus and Herodian. Cambridge. Kim, L. 2010. Homer between History and Fiction in Imperial Greek Literature. Cambridge. Kolb, F. 1972. Literarische Beziehungen zwischen Cassius Dio, Herodian und der Historia Augusta. Bonn. Kyhnitzsch, E. 1894. De contionibus, quas Cassius Dio historiae suae intexuit, cum Thucydideis comparatis. Unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Leipzig. Lange. C. H. and J. M. Madsen (eds.) 2016. Cassius Dio: Greek Intellectual and Roman Politician. Leiden. Laird, A. 2009. “The Rhetoric of Roman Historiography.” In The Cambridge Companion to the Roman Historians, edited by A. Feldherr, 197–​213. Cambridge.

490   Literature and Culture Leon-​Ruíz, D. W. 2010. Arrian, Alexander, and the Limits of the Second Sophistic. Unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Virginia, Charlottesville. Litsch, E. 1893. De Cassio Dione imitatore Thucydidis. Unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Freiburg. Manuwald, B. Cassius Dio und Augustus. Weisbaden. Mason, S. 2005. “Of Audience and Meaning:  Reading Josephus’ Bellum Iudaicum in the Context of a Flavian Audience.” In Josephus and Jewish History in Flavian Rome and Beyond, edited by J. Sievers and G. Lembi, 71–​100. Leiden. Mehl, A. 2001. Römische Geschichtsschreibung. Stuttgart. Translated by H. F. Mueller as Roman Historiography. Chichester and Malden, MA, 2011. Millar, F. 1964. A Study in Cassius Dio. Oxford. Momigliano, A. 1978. “Greek Historiography.” History and Theory 17:1–​28. Müller, S. 2014. “Arrian and Visual Arts.” Journal of Ancient Civilizations 29: 87–​101. Murison, C. L. Rebellion and Reconstruction, Galba to Domitian: An Historical Commentary on Cassius Dio's Roman History Books 64–​67 (A.D. 68–​96). Atlanta. Murray, G. 1897. A History of Ancient Greek Literature. Oxford. Norden, E. 1898. Die antike Kunstprosa vom VI. Jahrhundert v.  Christus bis in die Zeit der Renaissance. 2 vols. Leipzig. Palm, J. 1959. Rom, Römertum und Imperium in der griechischen Literatur der Kaiserzeit. Lund. Pitcher, L. V. 2011. “Two Textual Emendations in Appian (Hann. 10.43; B CIV. 1.6.24).” CQ 61: 758–​760. Price, J. J. 2015. “Thucydidean stasis and the Roman Empire in Appian’s Interpretation of History.” In Appian’s Roman History:  Empire and Civil War, edited by K. Welch, 45–​63. Swansea. Redondo, J. 2000. “The Greek Literary Language of the Hebrew Historian Josephus.” Hermes 128: 420–​434. Reinhold, M. From Republic to Principate: An Historical Commentary on Cassiud Dio’s Roman History Books 49–​52. Atlanta. Reuss, F. 1899. “Arrian und Appian.” Rh. Mus. 54: 446–​465. Rich, J. W. Cassius Dio: The Augustan Settlement (Roman History 53–​55.9). Warminster. Richter, D. S. 2011. Cosmopolis: Imagining Community in Late Classical Athens and the Early Roman Empire. Oxford. Russell, D. A. 1983. Greek Declamation. Cambridge. Rubincam. C. R. 1979. “Qualification of Numerals in Thucydides.” AJAH 4: 77–​95. Rubincam. C. R. 1991. “Casualty Figures in the Battle Descriptions of Thucydides.” TAPA 121: 181–​98. Rubincam. C. R. 2003. “Numbers in Greek Poetry and Historiography: Quantifying Fehling.” CQ 53.2: 448–​63. Schmitz, T. A. 2011. “The Second Sophistic.” In The Oxford Handbook of Social Relations in the Roman World, edited by M. Peachin, 304–​316. Oxford and New York. Sidebottom, H. 1998. “Herodian’s Historical Methods and Understanding of History.” ANRW II.34.4: 2775–​2836. Sidebottom, H. 2007. “Severan Historiography:  Evidence, Patterns, and Arguments.” In Severan Culture, edited by S. Swain, S. Harrison, and J. Elsner, 52–​82. Cambridge. Spencer, D. 2009. “Roman Alexanders:  Epistemology and Identity.” In Alexander the Great:  A  New History, edited by W. Heckel and L. Tritle, 251–​ 274. Chichester and Malden, MA.

Historiography   491 Stadter, P. 1980. Arrian of Nicomedia. Chapel Hill, NC. Stadter, P. 1981. “Arrian’s Extended Preface.” ICS 6: 157–​171. Stein, F. J. 1957. Dexippus et Herodianus rerum scriptore quatenus Thucydidem secuti sint. Bonn. Strebel, H. G. 1935. Wertung und Wirkung des Thukydideischen Geschichtswerkes in der griechisch-​romischen Literatur:  Eine literargeschichtliche Studie nebst einem Exkurs über Appian als Nachahmer des Thukydides. Speyer am Rhein. Swain, S. 1996. Hellenism and Empire: Language, Classicism, and Power in the Greek World, ad 50–​250. Oxford. Swan, P. M. 2004. The Augustan Succession: An Historical Commentary on Cassius Dio's Roman History, Books 55–​56 (9 B.C.–​A.D. 14). Oxford. Tonnet, H. 1988. Recherches sur Arrien: Sa personnalité et ses écrits atticistes. 2 vols. Amsterdam. Tucker, A. 2004. Our Knowledge of the Past: A Philosophy of Historiography. Cambridge. von Möllendorff, P. 2001. “Frigid Enthusiasts: Lucian on Writing History.” PCPS 47: 117–​140. Welch, K., ed. 2015. Appian's Roman History: empire and civil war. Roman culture in an age of civil war. Swansea. Whitmarsh, T. 2001. Greek Literature and the Roman Empire: The Politics of Imitation. Oxford. Whitmarsh, T. 2007. “Prose Literature and the Severan Dynasty.” In Severan Culture, edited by S. Swain, S. Harrison, and J. Elsner, 29–​51. Cambridge. Woodman, A. J. 1988. Rhetoric in Classical Historiography. London. Woolf, G. 2011. Tales of the Barbarians: Ethnography and Empire in the Roman West. Chichester and Malden, MA. Zimmerman, M. 1999. “Enkomion und Historiographie: Entwicklungslinien der kaiserzeitlichen Geschichtschreibung vom 1. bis zum frühen 3. Jh. n. Chr.” In Geschichtsschreibung und politischer Wandel im 3. Jh. n.Chr., edited by M. Zimmermann, 17–​56. Stuttgart.

Chapter 31

P oets and P oet ry Manuel Baumbach

31.1  Poetry in the Second Sophistic Although most literary remains from the period of the Second Sophistic are prose texts, authors continued to produce and consume Greek poetry at a high level. Apart from the extant works, we find fragments of poetry written in almost all previously established poetic genres (see Heitsch 1963) and numerous references to poets whose works are completely lost. Furthermore, poetic inscriptions, including epigrams, as well as performances of hymns, drama, epic, fable, encomia, and various forms of lyrical poetry point to the continuing presence of poetry in public contexts. Many representatives of the educated elite (pepaideumenoi) frequently quote or refer to poetry in order to illustrate their exceptional education (paideia), and a number of sophists were themselves poets (see Philost. VS 518 on Scopelian; Bowie 1989 and König 2009, 99), which suggests that poetry played an important role in the Greek literary culture of the Second Sophistic. Poetry remained an essential part of the school curriculum and was at the core of Greek paideia (see Cribiore 2001, 194–​204 and 226–​230). The fact that educated Greeks from all parts of the Roman Empire shared more or less the same knowledge of the Greek literary tradition regardless of their different cultural backgrounds was a function of the uniform Greek educational system and was based upon literary canons, which had been established for many genres (Hägg 2010; Most 1990). By way of creative reception of the poetic tradition and in order to demonstrate their specific learnedness within the elite, pepaideumenoi frequently put the authority of canonical texts to the test, as can be seen, for instance, in the corrections and criticism of Homer in sophistic speeches and prose narrations like Dio’s Troikos, Philostratus’s Heroicus, or Lucian’s Verae Historiae 1.1 (see Kim 2010). They quote noncanonical authors and constantly extend their field of reference by alluding to Hellenistic or even contemporary poetry, a phenomenon that can be frequently observed in Athenaeus’s Deipnosophistae (early third century ce). In any case, the reference to Greek poetry in public speech and written prose from encomia to novels (cf. Chariton) was part of a code

494   Literature and Culture used by the elite as a means of displaying their own paideia, both within and outside the inner circle of educated Greeks. Second, Greek poetry was an important source and means of displaying expert knowledge of the Greek past and history, which provided the foundation for a new cultural identity of the Greeks under Roman rule (see Bowie 1974; Goldhill 2001). In this regard, not only the two Homeric epics but also Greek tragedies and lyrical texts on mythological and historical deeds of the past could be regarded as a shared cultural heritage of the glorious Greek past, which was preserved in poetic texts as literary lieux de mémoire. Third, poetry was regarded as an essential element of rhetoric. The representatives of Greek education, the sophists, did not only discuss and propagate the high value of Greek poetry by including countless quotations and allusions to poetry in their speeches (Anderson 1993, 69–​85; North 1952); in the context of language, style, and rhetorical techniques they regarded the three classical genres of poetry (drama, epos, and lyric) as “father, mother, and breath” of the sophists (see Philostr. VS 620: μητέρα σοφιστῶν τὴν τραγῳδίαν . . . πατέρα Ὅμηρον . . . Ἀρχίλοχον πνεῦμα). A fourth aspect is the “setting in life” (Sitz im Leben) of many poetic genres, which shows that poetry was not only written for educated readers but could also address a wider audience. The tradition of the symposium continued and the epigraphical record points to a number of poetic contests, religious festivals, and other public performances of poetry in the Greek-​speaking world. Whereas traditional hymns, Homeric epic (see Gangloff 2010), and classical tragedies were performed at religious (local and Panhellenic) festivals, we know of a number of poetic contests, which included both recitals of the poetic tradition and the presentation of new poetry (see Easterling and Miles 1999). Contemporary political or military success could be memorialized in encomia or epic, and new scientific findings celebrated in the established form of didactic epos. We find wandering poets who performed on different stages similar to traveling sophists, and original poetic production was necessitated by the ongoing need for inscribed grave, dedicatory, and memorial epigrams (see Merkelbach and Stauber 1998–​ 2002 for the Greek East). Although it remains difficult to distinguish specific poetic tendencies or generic developments in the period because of the scantiness of the material, poetry in the Second Sophistic seems to adhere to established generic traditions; metrical rules were strictly kept and only a few innovations can be observed. A fifth aspect concerns patronage. There is evidence that some poets belonged to the imperial court, where—​in the tradition of Hellenistic court societies (see Herman 1997 and Weber 1993)—​the production and presentation of literature was strongly linked with propaganda and the individual praise of the emperor. The poet Mesomedes, for instance, composed encomia for Hadrian, whose imperial cult was celebrated in hymns by Aelius Paion, another poet of the emperor’s inner circle (see Fein 1994, 115–​126). As in Hellenistic times, the relation between poetry and court is Janus-​faced: while the poets enhanced the reputation of the emperor by spreading and memorializing his glorious deeds, the authority of the court in turn supported the poet’s fame and helped to spread and establish his poetry in society.

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31.2 Epic In the Second Sophistic, the production of hexameter poetry continues (see Carvounis and Hunter 2008; Heitsch 1963, 51–​152; Miguélez Cavero 2008, 3–​105). A great number of fragments of various hexameter poems is preserved: the longest comprises 343 hexameters of the so-​called visio Dorothei, a Christian narration (late third or fourth century ce) about a doorkeeper of heaven, who claims to be the son of Quintus (Bremmer 1993; Kessels and van der Horst 1987). Furthermore, we know of many lost epics, such as Scopelian’s Gigantias (early third century ce); Pisander of Laranda’s Ἡρωϊκαὶ θεογαμίαι (third century ce); and Nestor of Laranda’s Lipogrammatic Iliad (third century ce), which was a free adaptation of the Homeric Iliad avoiding the usage of one particular letter in each of the twenty-​four books (the first book did not use alpha, the second avoided beta, etc.). Some fragments of the Bassarica (an epic on Dionysus’s Indian campaign) and the Gigantias of a poet called Dionysius, who is probably not identical with Dionysius Periegeta but belongs to the first century ce, have been preserved (PLond. Lit. 40; see Benaissa 2013). Although Scopelian is the only example that Philostratus mentions of a sophist who composed epic poetry (VS 518; see Anderson 1993, 70), it cannot be ruled out that there were other sophists who not only used the epic tradition as a crucial part of their rhetorical repertoire but were epic poets themselves (see Bär 2009, 17). Due to the importance of the Homeric epics for shaping Greek identity and their exceptional status at all levels of education (see Dio Chrys. Or. 18.8), there were numerous imitations and adaptations of the Iliad and the Odyssey in content, style, and meter (see Bowie 1990, 66–​ 80; Kindstrand 1973; Zeitlin 2001). However, as only two mythological and three didactic epics have survived from the period of the Second Sophistic, it is difficult to pinpoint specific generic developments. Furthermore, the exact dating of these epics is still a matter of dispute and a relative chronology is hard to define as linguistic, stylistic, and metrical criteria often prove to be circular. The several examples of Second Sophistic epic poetry share two key features. First is the reception of Latin poetry, especially Vergil and Ovid. This kind of translingual intertextuality cannot be found in any other poetic genre nor in prose texts of this period, where Latin texts seemed to be widely ignored—​be it for programmatic or practical reasons, that is to distance themselves from Roman culture or because all relevant models and texts of reference were found in the Greek tradition. It is disputable, however, whether similarities in structure, narration, and content derive from a direct reception of Latin literature or whether they were the result of an independent usage of a Greek literary tradition which is no longer extant. Second, Second Sophistic epic is in close dialogue with Hellenistic poetry in terms of language and style as well as content. We find the Alexandrine technique of imitatio cum variatione as a kind of ars allusiva (see Bär 2009, 61–​69, for Quintus’s Posthomerica). In terms of versification, Second Sophistic epic is characterized by a close imitation of the Homeric model with only moderate alternations in rhythm (see West 1982, 177–​179).

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31.2.1 Mythological Epic: Quintus and Triphiodorus The two extant mythological epics, Quintus of Smyrna’s Posthomerica and Triphiodorus’s Haliosis Troias most likely date to the third century ce. Their relative chronology remains a matter of scholarly debate, although it seems likely that Quintus’s epic came first. The fact that both deal with themes of the epic cycle has led to the assumption that this kind of epic (re)production was boosted by the contemporary loss of the epic cycle (Davies 1989, 6–​8). However, John Philoponus’s remark that the cycle was no longer available at the time of Pisander of Laranda (i.e., third century ce; cf. EGF test. 2, p. 14.16–​21) neither implies that the epic cycle completely disappeared at all places at the same period of time nor helps explain the production of the two epics of Quintus and Triphiodorus. As the poems of the Epic cycle were not as highly regarded as the Homeric epics, ambitious poets might have been inspired to write more refined versions of the events (see Bär 2009, 69–​91 on Quintus; Minguélez-​Cavero 2013, 52–​56 on Triphiodorus). In any case, the reception of both epics flourished in Late Antiquity and Byzantine times, when the epic cycle was definitively lost and the two epics filled the gap between the extant Iliad and Odyssey. As regards later epic tradition, both epics were known to and used by Nonnus in his Dionysiaca (see Shorrok 2007) The Posthomerica (Τὰ μεθ᾿ Ὅμηρον /​ Τὰ μετὰ τὸν Ὅμηρον, “The events after Homer”) probably dates back to the third century ce (see James and Lee 2000, 4–​9; and Baumbach and Bär 2007, 1–​8, with a discussion of the relation between the Posthomerica and the visio Dorothei). Little is known about its author; the name Κόιντος is attested in Byzantine texts and scholia on Homer; his origin from Smyrna is taken from the poetological remarks in the Binnenproömium (12.308–​13), where the author, fashioning himself as a Hesiodic initiate to poetry, claims to originate from Smyrna (for further poetological reflections, see Bär 2007). The poem starts in medias res purporting to continue the narration of the Iliad. It tells the events after the death of Hector, covering the two aristeia of Penthesileia and Memnon, the death of Achilleus, the contest over his armour, Odysseus’s trick with the wooden horse, and some nostoi of Greek heroes. Thus, the Posthomerica cover the content found in the cyclic epics Aethiopis, Little Iliad, Sack of Troy, and Nostoi. Compared to the epic cycle tradition, however, “new” material seems to be included: the episode of Oenone and Paris, which is first attested in the literary tradition in the fifth century bce (Hellanicus FGrH 4 F 29), might be inspired by a Hellenistic epyllion, and a number of dissimilarities to the cyclic epics (so far as their content is known to us), such as the unique narration of Neoptolemus’s arrival (see James 2004, 301) or the torture of Sinon (12.353–​394), can be observed. Thus, the Posthomerica seem to be competing with the tradition of the epic cycle and in doing so, they show a great affinity to some of the main characteristics of Second Sophistic literary tradition (see Baumbach and Bär 2007, 8–​15). There is emphasis on rhetoric (cf. especially the rhetorical contest between Odysseus and Ajas about Achilleus’s armor in book 5), and we find frequent usage of simile and ekphrasis (see 5.6–​101), which are used as a code for the educated readership.

Poets and Poetry   497 Furthermore, traces of stoic philosophy (Maciver 2007) and intertextual references to Hellenistic poetry underline the claim for learned poetry. Further characteristics of the Posthomerica include its usage of didactic poetry, especially Oppian’s Halieutica (see James and Lee 2000, 6; Kneebone 2007; Ozbek 2007), the changes of the role of the gods, who are less involved in the action than in Homer, the dominance of fate, and the possible reception of Latin poetry, especially Vergil (see Gärtner 2005). Triphiodorus’s Capture of Troy (Ἰλίου ἅλωσις) also dates to the third century ce (cf. POxy. 2946; Dubielzig 1996, 7–​11; Miguélez-​Cavero 2013, 4–​6). The poet, whose name suggests an upper Egyptian background (see Dubielzig 1996, 2–​4; and Suda s.v. = T 111 Adler) is said to have composed a number of other epics which are all lost: an epic about the events at Marathon (Μαραθωνιακά), which might have been either a historical epos about the battle of Marathon or a version of Theseus’s fight against the Marathonian bull, which could have been influenced by Callimachus’s Hecale (Dubielzig 1996, 11–​12); a mythological poem Story of Hippodamia; a Lipogrammatic Odyssey that might have been inspired by Nestor of Laranda’s Lipogrammatic Iliad; and a Paraphrase of Homer’s Comparisons, which was most probably written in prose (Dubielzig 1996, 14–​15). The Capture of Troy is a short epos of 691 verses and might be regarded as a generic synthesis between the long epic in Homeric tradition and the epic subgenre of epyllion (D’Ippolito 1976, 15–​26). In terms of epic tradition, it cannot be ruled out that Triphiodorus tried to challenge both Homer and Quintus by writing a short epos in Homeric style (Tomasso 2012). The poem opens with a short invocation to Calliope in Homeric tradition and covers the final days of the Trojan war starting with the Helenus’s predictions (vv. 43–​50) and the construction of the wooden horse (vv. 57–​107), followed by the events known from the two cyclic epics Little Iliad and Sack of Troy. As in Quintus, however, it is unclear to what extent Triphiodorus modeled his epos on the epic cycle. Similarities and possible influences have been discussed especially with regard to Lesches’s Little Iliad (see Gerlaud 1982). Although Homer was the principal model of the text (Orsini 1974) and Triphiodorus does not follow the Alexandrean tendency to correct Homer (Dubielzig 1996, 16–​17), we find a number of linguistic innovations (see Miguélez-​Cavero 2013, 44–​46).

31.2.2 Didactic Epic: Oppian of Apamea, Oppian of Cilicia, and Dionysius of Alexandria Didactic poetry was popular in the Second Sophistic, both in its formal and practical types. With regard to the extant works, the poems by the two Oppians are written in the tradition of the “formal” type of didactic poetry, which puts the focus on the art of poetry, whereas Dionysius of Alexandria’s Periegesis (ca. 130 ce) can be numbered among the “practical” type, which concentrates on the content (see Effe 1977 on these categories). All three poems have rather long proems (see Brioso 1996) with biographical information and contain dedications to rulers, which points to a political interest

498   Literature and Culture in didactic poetry and patronage. This is especially evident in the case of Marcellus of Side (second century ce), whose grave inscription (Anth. Pal. 7.158) gives insight into the poet’s support by the emperors Hadrian and Antonius Pius, who installed copies of his didactic poetry in public libraries. In terms of language and meter, Second Sophistic didactic poetry is greatly influenced by Hellenistic poetry. The existence of a strong biographical tradition for the three extant poems (see Mair 1928, xiii–​xxiii; and Hamblenne 1968 for the Oppians) points to their popularity and broad reception. Oppian of Cilicia’s Halieutica (ca. 178 ce; ed. Fajen 1999) is dedicated to Marcus Aurelius and his son Commodus. It describes the habits and nature of fish (books 1–​2) and the ways to catch them (books 3–​5). With regard to content the poem relies upon prose treatises by Aristotle (Richmond 1973) and Leonidas of Byzantium; the influence of the Halieutica of Ovid and other Latin literature (Keydell 1937) is a matter of dispute. What is particularly noteworthy is its anthropomorphic approach. The world of the animals is paralleled to the world of human beings by ascribing human emotions and actions (love, jealousy, hunting) to the sea creatures. This effect is supported by the frequent usage of similes (Bartley 2003). There are traces of Stoic philosophy especially in the philosophical digressions, but there is no systematic approach to Stoicism. Stylistically, the Halieutica show more Homeric features than didactic poems of the Hellenistic period (James 1970, 257–​266). The poem, which has been transmitted in fifty-​ eight copies (Fajen 1999), was very popular in imperial times: it had influenced the epic technique of Quintus and Nonnos, its content was spread by a prose paraphrasis from a fifth-​century ce manuscript (the ascription to Eutecnius is speculative; see Gualandri 1968), and the existence of scholia proves that it entered the school curriculum. Oppian of Apamea’s Cynegetica (On Hunting) was written in the early third century ce. The poem is dedicated to the emperor Caracalla. Four books are extant and a fifth book might have been lost. Like the Halieutica, an anonymous paraphrasis is preserved (Tüselmann 1900) and the large number of manuscripts as well as scholia suggest a widespread reception. The poem belongs to the formal type of didactic poetry in that it uses prose treatises of Aristotle, Xenophon, and Arrian and is enriched with many fantastic and mythical digressions (see Bartley 2003; Englhofer 1995). The Cynegetica not only imitate the Halieutica in style, structure, and language, but also show a similar tendency to anthropomorphic similes. In terms of meter we find many inconsistencies (Schmitt 1969, 25–​33). The proem is modeled upon the tradition of the Homeric Hymns and Callimachus’s Aitia (Costanza 1991); the high level of learnedness and intertextuality—​together with the abundant rhetorical features (Schmitt 1969, 14–​24)—​ makes the poem attractive for a Second Sophistic readership. Dionysius of Alexandria’s Oikoumenes Periegesis is a geographical poem in 1187 hexameters and was probably written in the 130s ce (Ilyushechkina 2010). It contains a description of the ocean and the three continents of Africa, Asia, and Europe. Thematically modeled upon the tradition of periplus-​literature, the poem works in different poetic traditions from the Homeric Catalog of Ships to the Hellenistic poetry of Callimachus and Apollonius of Rhodes (Lightfoot 2014, 6–​13). With its many intertextual references and geopoetic aspects, the Oikoumenes Periegesis fulfils

Poets and Poetry   499 the criteria of formal didactic poetry. The poem was broadly received in antiquity: it was part of the school curriculum, commentated on by Eustathius and translated into Latin by Avianus and Priscianus. The journey has a hymnic ending which stresses the Callimachean tradition (see Bowie 1990, 72)  and makes the reader reflect upon its generic status. Apart from the extant poems, three fragments of the monumental Iatrica (On Medicine; forty-​two books) of Marcellus of Side (second century ce) are transmitted, and we have a prose paraphrasis of a poem Ornithiaka or Ixeutika (On Birds; see Garzya 1957), which is ascribed to Dionysius of Alexandria in the vita Chisiana (see Colonna 1957); another Ixeutika by Oppian (either 2 or 5 books) is lost.

31.3 Melic Poetry Although only few examples of melic poetry, that is monodic and choral songs composed for musical performances in the tradition of archaic Greek lyric, have been transmitted from the period of the Second Sophistic, continuous production and widespread recitation of almost all established subgenres of melic poetry in private, sympotic, and public contexts is attested (see Bowie 1990, 83–​90; Heitsch 1963, 1:23–​50). Three places of presentation were especially relevant for viva voce performance: (1) Melic poetry was frequently used for the self-​presentation of the emperor and his circle at the royal court. Tiberius is said to have composed Greek poetry (see Sueton. Tib. 70: “fecit et Graeca poemata imitatus . . . Parthenium”) and Hadrian wrote numerous poetic works (see Cassius Dio 69.3.1; SHA Hadr. 14.8–​9, 25.10), including epigrams, epicedia, encomia, and mocking poems (see Fein 1994, 47–​60). Court poets were employed in order to enhance the emperor’s reputation, to encode and reinforce the ethical values of the court, and to recall glorious deeds of the past. At Hadrian’s court, for instance, Aelius Paion, “a melic poet and rhapsode of the divine ruler Hadrian” (μελοποιὸς καì ῥαφῳδὸς θεοῦ Ἁδριανοῦ, IK 11 Ephesus 22 Z 3f.), composed lyrical poetry (see Robert 1980,17), and the Cretan poet and citharode Mesomedes (second century ce), a former slave and freedman of Hadrian (see Whitmarsh 2004 on the poetics of patronage), is the author of a number of shorter poems in various lyric meters (see West 1982, 172–​173) from different genres (see Heitsch 1963, 24–​32): encomia on the emperor, hymns, love poetry, and epigrams (Anth. Pal. 14.63: On the Sphinx, and Anth. Plan. 16.323: On the Invention of Glass). Marcellus of Side was engaged by Herodes Atticus to write a poem for his dead wife, Regilla, which was inscribed on her cenotaph (IG 14.1389). The poem is a mixture of hymn, sepulchral epitaph, and epigram, and might have been orally performed (see Davies and Pomeroy 2012, 14). (2) Melic poetry in its monodic forms is performed primarily in sympotic contexts. The most prominent extant example of sympotic poetry—​especially of the

500   Literature and Culture skolia (“drinking songs”), with topics like wine, love, and song—​in the Second Sophistic are the Carmina Anacreontea, a collection of sixty short poems in creative reception of Anacreon`s poetry, preserved in the Anthologia Palatina (cod. Paris. Suppl. gr. 384, siglum P). Although the exact dating of the poems, composed between the first century bce and the sixth century ce, is problematic, most poems of the first half of the collection probably date back to early imperial period (Baumbach and Dümmler 2014, 3–​4; Rosenmeyer 1992, 115–​145; West 1993, xvi–​xviii). With its programmatic call for mimesis (see Most 2014), the collection tries to engage its recipients in the process of constantly reenacting Anacreon and thus hints at both the ongoing attraction of archaic Greek lyric and the playful ways of its creative reception in the Second Sophistic. Likewise, the lost “lyrical songs” (λυρικοὶ νόμοι) of the sophist Hippodromus of Larissa (second to third centuries ce) seem to have been modeled upon archaic or classical tradition (Philostrat, VS 620). (3) Melic poetry was frequently presented at festivals, where specific public or religious demands and traditions guaranteed a continuing production of traditional melic subgenres like hymns, threnoi, encomia, epicedia, or epinicia. In the imperial period, the popularity of festivals, whose number had increased from Archaic to Hellenistic times (Chaniotis 1995, 162–​163), was high, and in many cities throughout the Roman Empire old festivals were reorganized and enriched by musical and poetic contests, as can be seen from honorific decrees (see Spawforth 1989 and van Nijf 2001, 307–​312). Depending on the importance of the festival, the presentation of poetry could be highly prestigious; therefore these occasions attracted single wandering poets (see Hunter and Rutherford 2009, 8–​9), as well as artists, who were organized in specific associations (see Aneziri 2009, 227–​ 229). Specific traditions of melic poetry can be traced back to local cults of poets, like the cult of Archilochus in Paros, which were still celebrated in the period of the Second Sophistic (see Clay 2004); the art of poetic mimesis of older melic traditions is frequently attested in inscriptions on the winner of the musical contest, such as the victory of Aurelios Hierocles at the Great Didymeia “in the style of Timotheus” (τιμοθεαστής, IDidyma 181; also see Prauscello 2009). Performances of dithyrambs by technitai of Dionysus are likely to have taken place in the traditional choral form, as well as the citharodic (see Bélis 1995). Similarly, the paean to Asclepius by Diophantus of Sphettus (IG 2:4514, 167/​8 ce) and an inscribed hymn to Antinous, written in apokrota and paroemiacs, could have been sung by a choir or by the citharode alone (see Bowie 1990, 84–​85). For examples of epithalamia and encomia from the second and third centuries ce, see Miguélez Cavero 2008, 43–​45 (encomia) and 39–​40 (epithalamia). Hymns were the most popular form of melic poetry. Many cities had their own choruses of “hymn-​singers” (ὑμνήσαντες) who performed at religious festivals (see Furley and Bremer 2001, 1:24–​25; Pickard-​Cambridge 1968, 279–​321). Private hymns, especially magical hymns, are also attested (see Preisendanz 1973–​1974, 2:237ff.). The collection

Poets and Poetry   501 of the eighty-​seven hexametrical Orphic Hymns (second to fourth centuries ce) were composed for a local community in Asia Minor. The short anapaestic fragment of a Gnostic Naassene-​hymn on the fate of the soul in the world (second century ce), which is quoted by Hippolytus in his Refutation of All Heresies (5.7.2–​9), was probably used liturgically. Similarly, the Odes of Solomon (early second century ce) show hymnic characteristics and were most likely composed for liturgical use. Hymns or hymnic prayers are frequently attested for the early Christian societies (Deichgräber 1967; Lattke 1991). In a letter to the emperor Trajan (Ep. 10.96.7) Pliny refers to Christians who praise Jesus Christ in a choral song “as if he were a god” and hymns on Christ are preserved in Paul’s epistle to the Philippians and in Clement of Alexandria’s Paidagogós (ca. 190 ce).

31.4 Epigram The tradition of literary and inscribed epigrams continued in the Second Sophistic. Inscribed epigrams, which can be found in all parts of the Greek-​speaking world (see Merkelbach and Stauber 1998–​2002), fulfilled an important cultural function in preserving both the private memory of the individual (grave, dedicatory, and honorific epigrams) and the collective memory of a group or city. They are mostly anonymous, often formulaic, and sometimes written in dialect. A number of epigrams have been preserved in form of graffiti, that is spontaneous (poetic) creations, which are mostly scratched by the poet him-​or herself. A good example is the Memnon-​colossus near Thebes in Egypt, where 107 Greek and Latin graffiti have been inscribed since 20 bce (Bernand and Bernand 1960). Among them we find four epigrams of the aristocratic Julia Balbilla, who accompanied Hadrian on his visit in Egypt in 130 ce. The epigrams commemorate the visits of the statue, honor Hadrian and his wife, and are gifts of the poet to the hero Memnon (Bowie 1990, 61–​63). Literary epigram belonged to the standard repertoire of established poets and is often characterized by allusiveness. Our most important source, the Anthologia Palatina, contains verses from all established subgenres and incorporates epigram-​ books from Hellenistic and early imperial times like the Garland of Philip (first century ce; see Cameron 1993, 33–​43). We also find the collection of homoerotic epigrams (Musa paidike) of Strato of Sardis (first to second centuries ce) in the twelfth book of the Anthologia Palatina (see Höschele 2010, 230–​271) and thirty-​seven epigrams on heterosexual love of Rufinus, who dates to either the second or fourth century ce (Page 1978), in the fifth book. As a new epigrammatic subgenre (Nisbet 2003), the satirical or scoptic epigram, which was mainly inspired by New Comedy in its focus on character types and professions, flourished at the hands of Lucillius and Nicarchus (both first century ce), followed by Ammianus, Pollianus, Diogenianus, and Lucianus (all second century ce; for the dating of Cerealius, see Schulte 2009, 43–​45). This new epigrammatic subgenre is characterized by a variety of forms, from short poems containing simple jokes to longer epigrams with anecdotes and dramatized action (see

502   Literature and Culture Schatzmann 2012, 30–​32 on Nicarchus). The popularity of this new form can be seen from the fact that even emperors like Trajan (Anth. Pal. 11.418) and Hadrian (Anth. Pal. 9.139) composed scoptic epigrams.

31.5 Drama Although no drama has been preserved from the period of Second Sophistic and only the names of five comic poets and a few verses of two tragedies (a Medea by Pompeius Macer, TGF 1.180, and an untitled tragedy by Serapion, TGF 1.185—​both first century ce) are transmitted, a considerable number of new tragedies and comedies must have been composed, at least through the second century ce (see Heldmann 2000, 185–​188). Dramatic festivals, which had spread over the whole Greek-​speaking world in the Hellenistic period (see Kotlińska-​Toma 2015, 264–​288), continued (Fugmann 1988) and technitai-​associations are well attested, which organized these festivals. Dramatic performances by traveling citharodes like Themison of Miletus (second century ce; see Heldmann 2000, 200–​203), in which choral song probably did not play an important role (cf. Dion of Prusa 19.5), are mentioned by Philostratus (VS 534, 541, 616) and Suetonius (Ner. 21), and the composition of dramas, especially tragedies, is attested for many well-​educated Greeks and Romans. Pliny claims to have composed a Greek tragedy at the age of fourteen (Ep. 7.4.2), and Tacitus talks about the composition of tragedies as a common activity (Dial. 3.3–​4). Sophists are commonly attested as authors of tragedies. According to the Suda, the sophist Philostratus wrote forty-​three tragedies and fourteen comedies, all lost. Likewise the sophist Isagoras (second century ce) was a composer of tragedies (also see the list of tragedians in Thorburn 2005, 599ff.), and Scopelian is said to have devoted himself to all kinds of poetry, especially to tragedy (see Philostr. VS 518). The composition of dramas by the sophists and the educated elite was primarily used for practicing style in close reception of the classical tradition, and it is in this context that Nicagoras calls tragedy “the mother of sophists” (Philostr. VS 620). The presentation of their works probably took place at symposia (see SHA Hadr. 26.4) or within private circles. A very popular dramatic form in the period of Second Sophistic was the mime; as the adaptation of Euripides’s Iphigenia in Tauris from the second century ce (POxy. 413) shows, these mimes were often composed in creative reception of classical drama and used different meters.

31.6 Fable Although the genre of fable in its poetic form can be traced back to Hesiod and Archilochus, the first fable books occur in early imperial period. Phaedrus (first century

Poets and Poetry   503 ce) wrote five books of Fabulae Aesopiae in Latin iambic senarii, and the Greek poet Babrius (second century ce) put some 200 fables of the Corpus Aesopicum into choriambic meter in the Hellenistic tradition (Perry 1965, xlvii–​lxxiii). In his versification, which he himself refers to as “Aesopic Mythiambics” (μυθίαμβοι Αἰσώπειοι, prolog. 2.7–​ 8), Babrius often extends the narration of the plot and inserts dialogue in order to work out the psychological aspects. His fables were extremely successful and widely read at schools.

Further Reading Poetry was not in focus when scholarly interest in the Second Sophistic manifested itself, and the first good overviews on the topic were presented by Bowie (1990 and 1991). Bowie’s work provides short introductions to exemplary works from epic to epigram and gives general insight into the literary innovations of the poetry of that period. Ever since, scholarly focus has been on hexametrical poetry (see Carvounis and Hunter 2008), and especially Quintus of Smyrna’s Posthomerica has seen a number of new approaches taking into account the backdrop of the Second Sophistic (Baumbach and Bär 2007). For a concise analysis of the composition and history of the Greek epigrams preserved in the Anthologia Palatina, see Cameron 1993; the rise and popularity of scoptic epigram is profoundly discussed by Nisbet 2003. For the scanty transmission of drama, see Heldmann 2000. A good insight into the Sitz im Leben of Greek poetry, which had been performed by festivals in Roman East, is given by van Nijf 2001.

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504   Literature and Culture Bernand, A., and É. Bernand. 1960. Les inscriptions grecques et latines du Colosse de Memnon. Paris. Bowie, E. L. 1974. “Greeks and Their Past in the Second Sophistic.” In Studies in Ancient Society, edited by M. I. Finley, 166–​209. London and Boston. Revised reprint from P&P 46 (1970): 3–​41. Bowie, E. L. 1989. “Greek Sophists and Greek Poetry in the Second Sophistic.” ANRW 2.33.1: 209–​258. Bowie, E. L. 1990. “Greek Poetry in the Antonine Age.” In Antonine Literature, edited by D. A. Russell, 53–​90. Oxford. Bremmer, J.  N. 1993. “The Vision of Dorotheus.” In Early Christian Poetry:  A  Collection of Essays, edited by J. den Boeft and A. Hilhorst, 253–​261. Leiden. Brioso, M. 1996. “Los proemios en la épica griega de época imperial.” In Las letras griegas bajo el imperio, edited by M. Brioso and F. J. González Ponce, 55–​134. Zaragoza. Cameron, A. 1993. The Greek Anthology from Meleager to Planudes. Oxford. Carvounis, K., and R. Hunter, eds. 2008. “Signs of Life? Studies in Later Greek Poetry.” Special issue, Ramus 37. Chaniotis, A. 1995. “Sich selbst feiern? Städtische Feste des Hellenismus im Spannungsfeld von Religion und Politik.” In Stadtbild und Bürgerbild im Hellenismus, edited by M. Wörrle and P. Zanker, 147–​172. Munich. Clay, D. 2004. Archilochos Heros: The Cult of Poets in the Greek Polis. Cambridge, MA, and London. Colonna, A. 1957. Dionysii Periegetae Vita Chisiana. Rome. Costanza, S. 1991. “Motivi callimachei nel proemio dei Cynegetica di Oppiano d'Apamea”, In Studi di Filologia Classica in onore di Giusto Monaco. I Letteratura greca, 479–​489. Palermo. Cribiore, R. 2001. Gymnastics of the Mind: Greek Education in Hellenistic and Roman Egypt. Princeton, NJ. Davies, M. 1989. The Epic Cycle. Bristol. Davies, M., and S. B. Pomeroy. 2012. “Marcellus of Side’s Epitaph on Regilla (IG XIV 1389).” Prometheus 38: 3–​34. Deichgräber, R. 1967. Gotteshymnus und Christushymnus in der frühen Christenheit: Untersuchungen zu Form, Sprache und Stil der frühchristlichen Hymnen. Göttingen. D’Ippolito, G. 1976. Trifiodoro e Virgilio:  Il proemio della “Presa di Ilio” e l’esordio del libro secondo dell “Eneide”. Palermo. Dubielzig, U. 1996. Τριφιοδώρου Ἰλίου ἅλωσις. Triphiodor: Die Einnahme Ilions. Ausgabe mit Einführung, Übersetzung und kritisch-​exegetischen Noten. Tübingen. Easterling, P. E., and R. Miles. 1999. “Dramatic Identities:  Tragedy in Late Antiquity.” In Constructing Identities in Late Antiquity, edited by R. Miles, 95–​111. London. Effe, B. 1977. Dichtung und Lehre:  Untersuchungen zur Typologie des antiken Lehrgedichts. Munich. Englhofer, Claudia M. 1995. “Götter und Mythen bei Oppianos von Apameia.” GB, 21:157–​173 Fajen, F. 1999. Oppianus. Halieutica. Einführung, Text, Übersetzung in deutscher Sprache. Ausführliche Kataloge der Meeresfauna. Stuttgart and Leipzig. Fein, S. 1994. Die Beziehungen der Kaiser Trajan und Hadrian zu den Litterati. Stuttgart and Leipzig. Fugmann, J. 1988. Römisches Theater in der Provinz: Eine Einführung in das Theaterwesen im Imperium Romanum. Aalen. Furley, W. D., and J. M. Bremer. 2001. Greek Hymns. 2 vols. Tübingen.

Poets and Poetry   505 Gärtner, U. 2005. Quintus Smyrnaeus und die “Aeneis”:  Zur Nachwirkung Vergils in der griechischen Literatur der Kaiserzeit. Munich. Gangloff, A. 2010. “Rhapsodes et poètes épiques à l’époque impériale.” Rev. Ét. Grec. 123: 51–​70. Garzya, A. 1957. “Paraphrasis Dionysii poematis de aucupio.” Byzantion 25–​27: 195–​240. Gerlaud, B., ed. 1982. Triphiodore: La prise d’Ilion. Paris. Goldhill, S., ed. 2001. Being Greek under Rome: Cultural Identity, the Second Sophistic and the Development of Empire. Cambridge. Gualandri, I. 1968. Incerti auctoris in Oppiani Halieutica paraphrasis, Milano and Varese. Hägg, T. 2010. “Canon Formation in Greek Literary Culture.” In Canon and Canonicity. The Formation and Use of Scripture, edited by E. Thomassen, 109–​128. Copenhagen. Hamblenne, P. 1968. “La légende d’Oppien.” L’antiquité classique 37: 589–​619. Heitsch, E. 1963. Die griechischen Dichterfragmente der römischen Kaiserzeit. 2 vols. Göttingen. Heldmann, G. 2000. “Die griechische und lateinische Tragödie und Komödie in der Kaiserzeit.” WJA 24: 185–​205. Herman, G. 1997. “The Court Society of the Hellenistic Age.” In Hellenistic Constructs: Essays in Culture, History, and Historiography, edited by P. Cartledge, P. Garnsey, and E. S. Gruen, 199–​224. Berkeley, CA. Höschele, R. 2010. Die blütenlesende Muse: Poetik und Textualität antiker Epigrammsammlungen. Tübingen. Hunter, R., and I. Rutherford, eds. 2009. Wandering Poets in Ancient Greek Culture: Travel, Locality and Pan-​Hellenism. Cambridge. Ilyushechkina, E. 2010. Studien zu Dionysios von Alexandria, Amsterdam James, A.  W. 1970. Studies in the Language of Oppian of Cilicia:  An Analysis of the New Formations in the Halieutica. Amsterdam. James, A. W. 2004. Quintus of Smyrna: The Trojan Epic: Posthomerica. Baltimore and London. James, A. W., and K.  H. Lee. 2000. A Commentary on Quintus of Smyrna, Posthomerica V. Leiden and Boston. Kessels, A. H. M., and P. W. van der Horst. 1987. “The Vision of Dorotheus (Pap. Bodmer 29). Edited with Introduction, Translation and Notes.” Vig. Chr. 41: 313–​359. Keydell, R. 1937. “Oppians Gedicht von der Fischerei und Aelians Tiergeschichte.” Hermes 72: 480–​510. Kim, L. 2010. Homer between History and Fiction in Imperial Greek Literature. Cambridge. Kindstrand, J. F. 1973. Homer in der Zweiten Sophistik: Studien zu der Homerlektüre und dem Homerbild bei Dion von Prusa. Uppsala. Kneebone, E. 2007. “Fish in Battle? Quintus of Smyrna and the Halieutica of Oppian.” In Quintus Smyrnaeus: Transforming Homer in Second Sophistic Epic, edited by M. Baumbach and S. Bär, 285–​305. Berlin and New York. König, J. 2009. Greek Literature in the Roman Empire. London. Kotlińska-​Toma, A. 2015. Hellenistic Tragedy: Texts, Translations and a Critical Survey. London and New York. Lattke, M. 1991. Hymnus: Materialien zu einer Geschichte der antiken Hymnologie. Fribourg. Lightfoot, J. L. 2014. Dionysius Periegetes: Description of the Known World, Oxford. Maciver, C. 2007. “Returning to the Mountain of Arete:  Reading Ecphrasis, Constructing Ethics in Quintus Smyrnaeus’ Posthomerica.” In Quintus Smyrnaeus:  Transforming Homer in Second Sophistic Epic, edited by M. Baumbach and S. Bär, 259–​284. Berlin and New York. Mair, A. W. 1928. Oppian, Colluthus, Tryphiodorus. London and New York.

506   Literature and Culture Merkelbach, R., and J. Stauber, eds. 1998–​2002. Steinepigramme aus dem griechischen Osten. 4 vols. Munich. Miguélez Cavero, L. 2008. Poems in Context: Greek Poetry in the Egyptian Thebaid 200–​600 ad. Berlin and New York. Miguélez-​Cavero, L. 2013. Triphiodorus, “The Sack of Troy”: A General Study and a Commentary. Berlin and Boston. Most, G. W. 1990. “Canon Fathers: Literacy, Mortality, Power.” Arion 1: 35–​60. Most, G. W. 2014. “Τὸν Ἀνακρέοντα μιμοῦ: Imitation and Enactment in the Anacreontics.” In Imitate Anacreon! Mimesis, Poiesis and the Poetic Inspiration in the Carmina Anacreontea, edited by M. Baumbach and N. Dümmler, 145–​159. Berlin and Boston. Nisbet, G. 2003. Greek Epigram in the Roman Empire. Oxford. North, H. 1952. “The Use of Poetry in the Training of the Ancient Orator.” Traditio 8: 1–​33. Orsini, P. 1974. “Tryphiodore et la μίμησις.” Pallas 21: 3–​12. Ozbek, L. 2007. “Ripresa della tradizione e innovazione compositiva:  la medicina nei Posthomerica di Quinto Smirneo.” In Quintus Smyrnaeus: Transforming Homer in Second Sophistic Epic, edited by M. Baumbach and S. Bär, 159–​183. Berlin and New York. Page, D. 1978. The Epigrams of Rufinus:  Edited with an Introduction and Commentary. Cambridge. Perry, B. E. 1965. Babrius and Phaedrus. London. Pickard-​Cambridge, A. 1968. The Dramatic Festivals of Athens. 2nd ed. Oxford. Prauscello, L. 2009. “Wandering Poetry, ‘Travelling’ Music: Timotheus’ Muse and Some Case-​ Studies of Shifting Cultural Identities.” In Wandering Poets in Ancient Greek Culture: Travel, Locality and Pan-​Hellenism, edited by R. Hunter and I. Rutherford, 168–​194. Cambridge. Preisendanz, K. 1973–​1974. Papyri Graecae Magicae: Die griechischen Zauberpapyri. 2 vols. 2nd ed. Stuttgart. Richmond, J. 1973. Chapters on Greek Fish-​Lore. Wiesbaden. Robert, L. 1980. “Deux poètes grecs à l’époque impériale.” In Στήλη: Τόμος εἰς μνήμην Νικολάοθ Κοντολέοντος, 1–​20. Athens. Rosenmeyer, P. A. 1992. The Poetics of Imitation:  Anacreon and the Anacreontic Tradition. Cambridge. Schatzmann, A. 2012. Nikarchos II: Epigrammata. Einleitung, Texte, Kommentar. Göttingen. Schmitt, W. 1969. Kommentar zum ersten Buch von Pseudo-​Oppians Kynegetika. Unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Münster. Schulte, H. 2009. Griechische Epigramme der Kaiserzeit. Handschriftlich überliefert. Teil I: Epigramme mit Autorangabe. Text, Übersetzung, Kommentar. Trier. Shorrok, R. 2007. “Nonnus, Quintus and the Sack of Troy.” In Quintus Smyrnaeus: Transforming Homer in Second Sophistic Epic, edited by M. Baumbach and S. Bär, 379–​391. Berlin and New York. Spawforth, A. J. S. 1989. “Agonistic Festivals in Roman Greece.” In The Greek Renaissance in the Roman Empire: Papers from the Tenth British Museum Classical Colloquium, edited by S. Walker and A. Cameron, 193–​197. London. Thorburn, J. E. 2005. The Facts on File: Companion to Classical Drama. New York. Tomasso, V. 2012. “The Fast and the Furious: Triphiodorus’ Reception of Homer in the Capture of Troy.” In Brill’s Companion to Greek and Latin Epyllion and Its Reception, edited by M. Baumbach and S. Bär, 371–​409. Leiden and Boston. Tüselmann, O. 1900. Die Paraphrase des Euteknios zu Oppians Kynegetika, Berlin.

Poets and Poetry   507 van Nijf, O. 2001. “Local Heroes: Athletics, Festivals and Elite Self-​Fashioning in the Roman East.” In Being Greek under Rome: Cultural Identity, the Second Sophistic and the Development of Empire, edited by S. Goldhill, 306–​334. Cambridge. Weber, G. 1993. Dichtung und höfische Gesellschaft: Die Rezeption von Zeitgeschichte am Hof der ersten drei Ptolemäer. Stuttgart. West, M. L. 1982. Greek Metre, Oxford. West, M. L., ed. 1993. Carmina Anacreontea. 2nd ed. Stuttgart and Leipzig. Whitmarsh, T. 2004. “The Cretan Lyre Paradox:  Mesomedes, Hadrian and the Poetics of Patronage.” In Paideia: The World of the Second Sophistic, edited by B. E. Borg, 377–​402. Berlin and New York. Zeitlin, F.  I. 2001. “Visions and Revisions of Homer.” In Being Greek under Rome:  Cultural Identity, the Second Sophistic and the Development of Empire, edited by S. Goldhill, 195–​266. Cambridge.

Chapter 32

Epistol o g ra ph y Owen Hodkinson

Introduction: Epistolography in the Second Sophistic Epistolography was among the most popular genres in the imperial period:1 the vast quantity of epistolary texts transmitted to us testifies to this.2 It also numbers examples by a Philostratus (probably Flavius) and Aelian, subject of a life in Philostratus’s Lives of the Sophists (VS). These, and the following extract from a short treatise by Philostratus of Lemnos—​namechecking some of the central figures of VS and Life of Apollonius (VA) and discussing one of the key features of its literary style in Atticism—​ can leave us in no doubt that letters were important business in the Second Sophistic: Those who, next to the ancients, seem to me to have used the epistolary style of discourse best are, of the philosophers [Apollonius] of Tyana and Dio  .  .  .  of the Emperors the divine Marcus . . .  3 of the rhetoricians Herodes the Athenian was the best at writing letters although he does, through excessive Atticism and loquacity, frequently depart from the appropriate epistolary style. For the epistolary style must in appearance be more Attic than everyday speech, but more ordinary than Atticism. Philostratus of Lemnos De Epistulis (2.257–​258 Kayser)

Despite all this, imperial Greek epistolography is severely underresearched compared to many of its contemporary genres and severely undervalued relative to its contemporary importance.4 This brief chapter can barely scratch the surface of such a huge and varied genre: I aim only to survey its subgenres and their common features. First, some general observations on Greek letters in the empire and their connections with the sophistic movement. The vast majority are written (usually by an unknown author) as if from someone else, from historical or literary figures to fictional comic and

510   Literature and Culture pastoral types. Thus they bear connections with the rhetorical exercises and sophistic staples prosopopoiia and ethopoiia; but though they have often been neglected as such, many are accomplished pieces of literature employing these techniques (just as orations and other genres of the period frequently did), not actual exercises themselves. Though some collections of such pseudonymous letters are just that—​collections of compositions of various authors and periods—​several are rather letter books composed by a single author, with discernable structure and design, including commonly a lengthier and stylistically more adventurous climactic epistle, as Holzberg observed.5 Many letter books are essentially fictionalized “autobiographical” narratives, and some contain enough coherent narrative to have been labeled “epistolary novels.”6 Letters are almost exclusively prose, and in some cases, especially when epistolarity is not so essential to the content, the letter can be seen as a useful form in which an author can compose a prose miniature,7 another staple of Second Sophistic literature. As with other contemporary prose forms, they sometimes “prosify” traditionally verse forms (elegy, epigram, pastoral, comedy). During the first few centuries ce Greek literary letters multiplied exponentially, and with the increased quantity came great generic variety and experimentation; due to the essentially “blank” template for the form (apart from opening and closing greetings) it lends itself extremely well to combining and cross-​fertilizing with other genres.8 The themes, styles, and favorite intertexts of a great many Imperial Greek letters have much in common with contemporary novels and other fictional works such as Lucian’s oeuvre, as well as contemporary orations and lives. From early on, letters seem to have circulated alongside other works by the same author (where these existed), but also in collections only of letters, including perhaps anthologies by multiple authors:9 they were thus not only read for interest in their supposed authors, but also valued as examples of their genre.

Greek and Latin Letters of the Empire The imperial Greek epistolary tradition surveyed in this chapter displays far more continuity and contiguity with classical and Hellenistic Greek epistolography than it does with most Latin epistolography.10 The famous Latin epistolographers either composed poetic epistles (Horace, Ovid), which thus belong as much if not more to other genres and literary conventions as to those of prose epistolography, or else published (or had published on their behalf) “real” correspondence in their own voices, which are therefore quite unlike the largely pseudonymous and fictional Greek epistolary collections.11 The conventions and tropes of the Greek literary epistolographic tradition were certainly known to and incorporated into literary Latin epistolography, but whether the inverse was true in general is impossible to say with certainty. Pliny’s and Ovid’s attention to the arrangement of collections of letters and composition within a book structure pre-​date many of the Second Sophistic epistolographers who would have appreciated these features, and might have been influenced by them if they read

Epistolography   511 them. Ovid’s Heroides—​a book of literary letters in which the author writes in the personae of a succession of figures from myth and creates a fictional correspondence—​is the most similar earlier extant text in either language to Aelian’s and Alciphron’s books, and it is tempting here to see possible connections.12 Pliny’s ten books of Epistles, “real” but at the same time “artificial” in their arrangement and no doubt edited for publication,13 bear resemblance to many of the pseudonymous Greek letter books supposed to be from real historical figures, especially those whose arrangement and intratextuality show that they were composed as books (e.g., biographical epistolary novels such as Chion and Themistocles or the letters attributed to Euripides), rather than assembled as collections from a range of spurious and possibly genuine letters of various date and provenance attributed to an author (e.g., the collection of thirteen letters attributed to Plato).14 But whether or not imperial Greek authors commonly read Latin authors writing in the same genre, they rarely refer to them explicitly or allude to them in obvious enough ways for the allusion to be indisputable, so influence in such cases cannot be asserted other than speculatively,15 especially when so little is known about most of the authors of Greek epistolography with whom we are concerned (Alciphron is just a name to us; the authors of the pseudonymous epistolary compositions are, necessarily, not even that).

Aelian and Alciphron We begin with letter books by Claudius Aelianus and Alciphron; these are far from the most typical epistolary compositions of the empire, but are certainly typical sophistic pieces, and also among the most accessible.16 Aelian also has an entry in Philostratus’s VS (624–​625) which labels him a “sophist,” while Alciphron, about whom nothing is known, composed a very similar text. Aelian’s work consists of twenty Rustic Letters between imaginary farmers and their fellow rustics (wives, lovers, friends, and enemies); much can be learned about the sophistic nature and the game of the whole miniature book (and indeed about Alciphron’s similar text) by the self-​conscious metaliterary comment concluding its final letter: If these written words addressed to you are too clever for the country to supply, do not marvel, for we are not Libyan nor Lydian, but Athenian farmers. (Ael. Ep. 20 fin)17

Alciphron’s text comprises four books:  Letters of Fishermen, Rustics, Parasites, Courtesans. It is almost certain that one imitated the other, but the chronology of Alciphron and thus the priority cannot be determined; there are also important connections between both texts and Longus and Lucian.18 Much of what can be said of one text applies to the other (although Alciphron book 4 is rather different), thus they are treated here in common. With Aelian, of course, we have other extant works to contextualize

512   Literature and Culture and compare with the Epistles; two recent studies move away from a trend to dismiss the Epistles as trivial or juvenalia19 and instead note correspondences with Aelian’s moral and literary program elsewhere.20 Both epistolographers imitate fictional characters in the manner of sophistic exercises (meletai, specifically ethopoiiai).21 Thomas Schmitz’s important article shows the many ways in which Alciphron partakes of typical Second Sophistic literary traits, but also demonstrates that his letters are far more than simple exercises—​rather, their extreme self-​consciousness about the rhetorical techniques they employ and those same, typically sophistic, traits mean that they “explore and destabilize the status of sophistic writing, thus providing a metacommentary on sophistic declamations.”22 Alciphron and Aelian are both also highly self-​conscious and metafictional in their use of the epistolary form, and experiment with the limits and particular opportunities of the genre, as several recent studies have shown.23 Their play with combining different genres and intertexts to create a novel subgenre of epistolary narrative fiction, and the metaliterary awareness of this act, are also typical of the striving for novelty of much Second Sophistic literature.24 Both texts frequently hark back to an earlier time, especially the world of classical and Hellenistic Attica, through their linguistic Atticism and through their settings and intertextual borrowings (especially from New Comedy but also from pastoral).25 Their evocation of “ordinary” character types such as those found in Greek comedy and in pastoral poetry bears similarities to the Greek novel, as does their setting in an earlier (but sometimes indeterminately so) period of Greek history.26 The adaptation of comic scenes and characters is sometimes quite extensive (Ael. Ep. 13–​16 take their premise and characters from Menander’s Dyscolus—​adapting it however to the epistolary medium27). Alciphron’s fourth book provides a fictional correspondence between Menander and his courtesan-​mistress Glycera (4.18–​19); I have argued that Menander is here an authorial figure for Alciphron, who thus self-​consciously refers to one of his major hypotexts in the climactic and lengthiest letters of his work.28 This fourth book of Alciphron is different in that the characters (the letter writers) are not purely fictional, but fictionalized versions of historical figures (courtesans and their alleged lovers) from classical to early Hellenistic Athens. This kind of historical setting is typical of imperial Greek literature and also characteristic of other pseudonymous letters; Schmitz aptly likens their appeal to that of modern historical novels.29 The basis for the “historical” content of book 4 is a preexisting tradition of anecdotes about historical courtesans, for which contemporary readers evidently had a taste: there is much similarity with Athenaeus’s book 13,30 while Lucian’s Dialogues of Courtesans combines the interest in the courtesan with the freer character-​creation of Alciphron’s other books and of Aelian. Alciphron 4 adapts the “source” material to the epistolary form quite markedly: as Rosenmeyer notes, the self-​conscious use of epistolary markers is far more frequent than in books 1–​3.31 This may be precisely because of the difference in content and greater reliance on preexisting material, leading the author to mark the material as his own by a very clear change of genre.

Epistolography   513

Philostratus’ Epistles and the Epistles of Apollonius The importance of epistolography to the Second Sophistic, defined by Flavius Philostratus, is further shown by two sets of letters related to the Philostratean corpus.32 The seventy-​three Epistles attributed to a Philostratus are now usually agreed to be the work of Flavius Philostratus himself.33 The letters attributed to Apollonius of Tyana, though many may well be genuine and certainly predate Philostratus, include some quoted (or perhaps “quoted”) in Philostratus’s fictionalizing biography of Apollonius; these and perhaps others may be later pseudonymous letters, possibly by Philostratus himself.34 The Dialexis on letters by Philostratus of Lemnos quoted above labels Apollonius a model epistolographer, and is mentioned approvingly by Flavius Philostratus (VS 628), showing the latter’s interest in epistolary composition. The references to and use of letters of (Pseudo-​)Apollonius by both Philostrati shows that there was a collection of Apollonian letters circulating and being read before and during the Second Sophistic, as Jones notes;35 these earlier letters, probably including some genuine, were very likely embellished and added to at various later periods, and the extant letters (114) are very varied in length, addressee, and theme. Fourteen of them (Ep. 42a–​h, 77a–​f ) are quoted in V A, the others transmitted in a complex manuscript tradition or (Ep. 78–​100) via Stobaeus’s fifth-​century anthology of moral reflections.36 Philostratus says that Apollonius wrote to “kings [including Roman Emperors], sophists, philosophers, Eleans, Delphians, Indians, and Egyptians, on the subject of gods, about customs, morals, and laws, setting upright whatever had been overturned among such people” (V A 1.2.3). Many are extremely short pieces of advice, admonishment, or moral apophthegms of only a single short sentence. The letters included in V A are similar in their functions to embedded letters in other historiographical or biographical narratives, but given the marked fictionalizing tendency of V A the likelihood that letters have been significantly adapted or invented by Philostratus to serve the purposes of the containing narrative is high.37 Philostratus’s own letters fall into two groups:  Erotic Epistles, fifty-​five prose love poems addressed to anonymous women and boys; and eighteen other letters to friends or other historical figures. The latter are far from being straightforward records of Philostratus’s real correspondence, however; some are highly self-​conscious literary works, of a piece with the rest of the corpus. Of particular interest for the (perhaps) historical context of Philostratus and his sophistic is Epistle 73 to Julia Domna, wife of the emperor Septimius Severus, and supposedly the patron of a circle of sophists and writers including Philostratus.38 If, however, the Plutarch referred to in the letter as if alive is the long-​dead author of that name, as it appears, then we are dealing with a metaliterary game in keeping with other Philostratean works which discuss literary and rhetorical models.39 Other addressees include Antoninus (72; probably the emperor Caracalla), Chariton (66; possibly the novelist), and Epictetus (42, 65, 69; possibly a

514   Literature and Culture rival sophist). In the range of addressees and tone, some of the nonerotic letters, especially the very short ones (e.g., 65–​66), are very similar to and likely influenced by the letters of Apollonius. The Erotic Epistles are a collection of prose epigrams or elegies to pederastic and heterosexual beloveds;40 often the same theme is repeated in several letters but treated in a different—​sometimes opposing—​manner, which makes the book an example of the sophist’s art of arguing both sides of a case, and gives great internal variety and interconnections between individual letters.41 For instance several letters treat the common erotic topos of artificial vs. natural beauty (including boys “prolonging their youth” by shaving or not) and the related question in pederasty of the beloved’s ideal stage of maturity (Ep. 13–​15, 22, 27, 40, 58).42 Many letters concern accompanying gifts, including several times roses, both to boys and women (Ep. 2, 4, 46, 54). Among the standard erotic motifs and Plato-​influenced emphasis on eyes and the gaze in connection with eros,43 many letters have what Benner and Fobes labeled a “strange, brooding spirit” and several “grotesqueries,”44 including foot fetishism (Ep. 18, 36–​37) and a sort of masochism (5, 23, 47) which could be connected with the (Roman) elegiac idea of servitium amoris.45 Philostratus in this book as elsewhere does not simply keep to expected themes and forms of expression, embarking on sometimes unusually dark elegiac reveries, including very specialized tastes and therefore in literary terms recherché themes.

Pseudonymous Letter Collections Far the most frequent type of Greek letter from all periods is the letter attributed to a historical figure but evidently composed later, either as a school exercise in ethopoiia and prosopopoiia, as a more developed literary text employing those techniques, or as a way of authenticating fictional biographical information about a public figure—​and thus an opportunity to “discover” the private lives of figures whose published works lacked biographical information (e.g., the letters attributed to Plato or Euripides, or the correspondence between Paul of Tarsus and Seneca).46 Such collections usually accumulated letters by various authors composed over several centuries, naturally grouped together by editors in the manuscripts from which we receive them. Many such collections cannot thus be read as a compositional unit, or indeed as the product of a particular period (and indeed it is usually very hard to date such texts with any more accuracy than a range of several centuries). Some collections which probably (in large part or entirely) date from around the Second Sophistic include those attributed to Aeschines,47 Chion of Heraclea,48 Crates of Thebes,49 Euripides,50 Phalaris,51 the Socratics,52 and Themistocles.53 The biographical impulse to epistolography noted above is very evident in many of these collections, as is moralizing or other philosophical advice (cf. the letters of Apollonius) in those attributed to philosophers.

Epistolography   515 These letters often engage with earlier examples in the genre, especially those attributed to Plato,54 and naturally with the Demosthenic Epistles in the case of Aeschines;55 as well as with other, nonepistolary biographical traditions.56 Many such texts essentially continue in the same literary-​epistolary tradition begun with the collections of letters by or attributed to Plato, Epicurus, Demosthenes, and Isocrates which are known to be circulating already by the late classical to early Hellenistic periods.57 Where the genre shows significant development in the Second Sophistic is in the arrival of the epistolary novel, discussed in the next section.

Epistolary Novels and Short Stories in Epistolary Form Rather than a steady accretion of letters attributed to a historical figure over time, written by different authors with various aims and degrees of skill in composing convincing pseudonymous letters, an epistolary novel or Briefroman would normally be taken to have a single author and to have been composed as a unit, and thus should more correctly be termed a book than a “collection.”58 Nothing in antiquity is quite so coherent an epistolary novel as modern examples of the genre, apart from the letters attributed to the tyrannicide Chion of Heraclea (and no ancient epistolary novel comes close in length either to the extant ancient novels or to modern epistolary novels); the other strongest contender is the book of letters attributed to Themistocles.59 The first study to explore the applicability of the term Briefroman to ancient texts in any detail was Holzberg’s short edited volume,60 although this includes many pseudonymous letter collections under that heading which have no such narrative unity or coherence. Because of their association with other pseudonymous letters, these narratives have not gained the recognition they deserve for their creation of another new genre roughly contemporary with the Greek novel:61 a hybrid between literary letters (and their usual autobiographical slant) and novelistic, historiographical, and other extended narratives (which themselves often include embedded letters). Neither novel was translated in Reardon’s Collected Ancient Greek Novels,62 which extended in other directions quite far to the “fringes” of the novel genre, though a recent translation of Greek novels now includes Chion.63 With their generic invention and innovation, at the same time as their use of ethopoiia and rhetorical arguments aimed at defending the political-​philosophical stances of the central characters, these novels are in several ways typical sophistic texts. Another way in which they fit the Zeitgeist is in their highly self-​conscious natures: both are full of metafictional comment on their genre and narrative, including on the status of the “letters” which comprise the narrative as both self-​authenticating “documents” and as fictive compositions.64 This is in part because of the epistolary genre’s particular

516   Literature and Culture capacity for literary self-​consciousness and metafiction, which is exploited a great deal in fictional letters of the Second Sophistic.65 In addition to epistolary novels there are at least two short stories in epistolary form which as far as we know do not belong to a connected narrative (whether epistolary or more conventional): a miniature comic-​erotic novella transmitted as [Aeschines] Ep. 10 (but having nothing to do with the other “Aeschinean” letters), and a romantic ghost story partially preserved in Phlegon of Tralles’s Book of Marvels (1). Both could perhaps be connected with the elusive “Milesian Tales” genre of titillating or salacious stories,66 and thus with the ancient novel genre. Recent studies of each have demonstrated that the epistolary genre is not a random choice but an important feature of the authors’ narrative techique and responsible for stylistic and other choices they made.67 In addition, there being no “short story” genre as such in antiquity, the epistolary form is a convenient prose narrative medium of the appropriate length for these stories; the form’s variety for literary miniatures of all kinds thus sees in these two texts development in a further direction. Both epistolary novellas may have further connections with the longer ancient novel genre: in both the theme is romantic or erotic, and the characters are ordinary people not figures of myth; thus, and in other respects, they are generically aligned with the comic narrative of the novel (indeed [Aeschines] labels his story a comedy, §9). In addition, [Aeschines]’s female protagonist is named Callirhoe, like that of Chariton’s novel, which might well be a deliberate reference and thus a metafictional “label” showing the reader this story’s generic affiliation with the Greek novel genre.68 In the case of Phlegon, the evident and self-​consciously highlighted importance of the epistolary form as an authentication device for the narrative is reminiscent of this use of letters in the novelistic texts of Dictys Cretensis and Darius Phrygius (see “Embedded Letters,” below), as well as the “self-​authenticating” narratives of epistolary novels. Moreover, by a curious coincidence (if it is one), there is a similar reference to the novelist Chariton through the character name Charito in Phlegon’s ghost-​story, which also makes a metafictional statement about the genre of the story and its relation to the Greek novel genre.69

Embedded Letters A final category in which the epistolary genre is especially important in the Second Sophistic is the use of embedded letters within longer narratives, which increases greatly in amount and in variety from their long-​established use as quoted documents in historiography. Mimicking this historiographical usage (in this as in several respects), many ancient novelistic texts contain some “quoted” letters between their characters, which contribute to their wider alignment with the historiographical genre, and specifically pretend to “authenticate” the fictional narratives since they contain this “documentary evidence”; several studies of the ancient novel have focused on the various

Epistolography   517 ways they use embedded letters.70 The Alexander Romance in its various recensions always contains quoted correspondence between Alexander and his family, advisors, and rivals, some of it also circulating independently in pseudonymous letter collections; earlier versions of the Alexander Romance may have influenced the Second Sophistic novelistic texts, as well as Philostratus’s V A, in this respect.71 Even in historiographical and biographical texts, the use of quoted letters becomes more extensive over time (e.g., in Josephus or Diogenes Laertius),72 but in fictional or fictionalizing texts there is room for more varied manipulation of the combined epistolary and narrative forms, as in Philostratus’s V A. In the case of novels’ narrators “quoting” letters from their characters, it is clear that the letters are written to form part of the surrounding narrative and have no independent existence or circulation; therefore the narrative techniques used to connect embedding and embedded text can be more complex and sophisticated than in historiographical texts or the Alexander Romance. Similar to the novels is the inclusion in Lucian’s Verae Historiae of a letter from Odysseus to Calypso (Ver. hist. 2.35–​36).73 In some of these cases the inclusion of letters serves—​just like quoted direct speech in epic or indeed the novels themselves—​simply as variation from the usual narrative perspective and focalization of the surrounding text, that is, to give the reader for a time direct access to the words and thoughts of one of the characters. Unlike speech, though, their presence (since relatively uncommon within these narratives) stands out; and in the ideal romances, they are expedients for situations in which the protagonists are separated from each other, thus facilitating crucial communications at these equally crucial points in the plot. At the same time, and also unlike verbal communication, their physical presence as objects within the plot means that characters can interact with their messages in an extra (letter-​specific) set of ways—​losing and discovering them, intercepting them, forging them. These plot devices using letters are already present from the earliest Greek epic and tragedy,74 and in historiography,75 but the everyday and highly frequent nature of letters by the time of the novel means that they can plausibly be embedded more frequently in the later texts and thus give the authors wider scope for variations on the embedded letter device. The letters in the Trojan War fictions of Dictys of Crete and Dares of Phrygia are different in that they preface and authenticate the following narratives as part of an elaborate artifice: letters report the discovery of an ancient text telling the long-​lost true version of events in the Trojan War, which is appended to the letter. A similar case in its use of epistolarity is the novel of Antonius Diogenes, which, however, survives only in summary.76 Such cases of course rely on the use of the letter form as documentary evidence by historiographers, and crucial to this authenticating use is the reader’s implicit trust that the historiographical narrator does in fact have access to the physical object which is the quoted letter, and is thus able to report verbatim (rather than from memory, less reliably). When transferred to the authentication of fictional texts such as these, one of the particular functions of the epistolary genre is again employed in combination with a fictional narrative form, and again exploits the letter’s status as physical object, to create a further innovative effect.

518   Literature and Culture

Conclusions As has been shown in this brief survey, the epistolary form in Second Sophistic literature saw very wide and extremely varied use, its flexibility making it among the most popular literary forms. This is in part a development upon and use of a vast and ever-​increasing corpus of pseudonymous and (less so) authentic letters from the classical and especially Hellenistic periods onward; but it is upon this foundation that the generic variations and combinations within epistolary literature, and experimentation and broadening of the traditional limits and functions of the letter form, could be built. This experimentation with and development of a prose (often narrative, usually miniature) genre is characteristic of the Second Sophistic, as is the use by some authors (notably Aelian, Alciphron, and Philostratus) of a prose form to adapt and recast poetic forms. In other respects too, much of the epistolary literature of the Second Sophistic reflects the zeitgeist: in terms of connections with contemporary forms such as the novel, for instance, or of rhetorical techniques such as ethopoiia and prosopopoiia which sophists in other genres, too, made into literary genres. But perhaps the most notable way in which many Second Sophistic letters are of their time is the obsession in many cases with a pre-​Roman, very often classical Athenian, past; many epistolary texts center on the historical figures of past eras (indeed for pseudonymous letters the bringing to life of such figures “in their own voice” through prosopopoiia is the primary conceit), and they usually also imitate the past period’s written forms by employing Atticism of language and imitating the style of great authors. Thus in many respects, across the spectrum of texts composed in this form in this period, epistolary literature provides one of the most representative cross-​sections of the concerns and trends of Second Sophistic literature.

Further Reading Editions and translations: Many letters are unavailable in accessible modern editions; for these cases Hercher 1873 must serve for now. Aelian, Alciphron, and Philostratus are collected in the Loeb of Benner and Fobes 1949, while Jones’s Loeb 2006 now covers Apollonius of Tyana; Penella 1979a offers a commentary. Düring 1951 provides edition and commentary on Chion; Doenges 1981 on Themistocles. Full translations of both these epistolary novels and selections from across the range of second sophistic epistolographers, with introductory essays on each subgenre, are found in Rosenmeyer’s 2006 anthology, an excellent starting point for the genre. Costa’s 2001 anthology (edition, translation, and disappointingly spare commentary) makes further texts accessible, and Trapp’s 2003 ranges widely across Greek and Latin epistolography but adds a few more Second Sophistic examples. Phlegon is translated with commentary in Hansen 1996. Text and (Italian) commentary on [Aeschines] 10 in Mignona 2000. Secondary literature: The only place to begin is Rosenmeyer’s (2001) excellent monograph on the whole field of Greek literary letters, with separate chapters on epistolary novels, embedded letters, Aelian, Alciphron, Philostratus, and pseudonymous letter collections; see also

Epistolography   519 in general Jenkins 2006, Muir 2008, 177–​210, and now Ceccarelli 2013 on Greek epistolary literature before the Second Sophistic, and for a bibliographical survey, Rosenmeyer forthcoming. These should be supplemented by edited volumes by Hodkinson, Rosenmeyer, and Bracke (2013), including an Introduction which surveys some of the important issues in scholarship on Greek epistolary literature, and contains chapters on (among others) Phlegon, [Aeschines] 10, Apollonius of Tyana, [Euripides], Lucian, and Achilles Tatius; by Vox (2013b), which contains contributions (mostly in Italian and Spanish) on Alciphron (8), Aelian (2), and Philostratus (1); by Biraud and Zucker (forthcoming), on Alciphron; and by Nadjo and Gavoille (2000, 2002, 2004). Further accessible modern studies of these texts are rare; here are listed some of the most recent, together with some important older contributions, all of which should be consulted for further bibliography. Aelian: Hodkinson 2013b, Smith 2014. Alciphron: Anderson 1997; Fögen 2007; Hodkinson 2012; König 2007; 2012, 251–​265; Schmitz 2004. Philostratus: Anderson 1986, 274–​277; Goldhill 2009; Penella 1979a; Schmitz 2017; Walker 1992. Chion: Penwill 2010. Themistocles: Penwill 1978, Hodkinson 2007b. Multiple authors: Holzberg 1994a, Trapp 2006, Hodkinson 2007a, 2014, Morrison 2013.

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520   Literature and Culture Ceccarelli, P. 2013. Ancient Greek Letter Writing: A Cultural History (600 bc–​150 bc). Oxford. Costa, C. D. N., ed. 2001. Greek Fictional Letters. Oxford. Doenges, N. A. 1981. The Letters of Themistocles. New York. Drago, A. T. 2007. Aristeneto: Lettere d’amore. Lecce. Drago, A. T. 2013a. “Api infedeli e fiori avvizziti (Ael. Ep. 5).” In Lettere, mimesi, retorica: Studi di epistolografia letteraria greca di età imperiale e tardo-​antica, edited by O. Vox, 311–​325. Lecce. Drago, A. T. 2013b. “Su alcuni (presunti) casi di imitazione letteraria: le epistole di Eliano e di Alcifrone.” In Lettere, mimesi, retorica: Studi di epistolografia letteraria greca di età imperiale e tardo-​antica, edited by O. Vox, 71–​86. Lecce. Drago, A.  T. 2014. “Menandro nell’epistolografia greca di età imperiale.” In Menandro e l’evoluzione della commedia greca (Atti del convegno internazionale di studi in memoria di Adelmo Barigazzi), edited by A. Casanova, 259–​276. Florence. Drago, A. T. forthcoming. “‘Laus vitae rusticae’:  conventionality, imitation, Variation in the Letters of Alciphron.” In The Letters of Alciphron:  A  Unified Literary Work?, edited by M. Biraud and A. Zucker, 169–​177. Leiden. Düring, I. 1951. Chion of Heraclea: A Novel in Letters. Göteborg. Fögen, T. 2007. “Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes:  Zur Charakterzeichnung in den Hetärenbriefen Alkiphrons.” Würzburger Jahrbücher für die Altertumswissenschaft 31: 181–​205. Funke, M. 2012. “Female Sexuality in Longus and Alciphron.” In Narrating Desire: Eros, Sex, and Gender in the Ancient Novel, edited by M. P. F. Pinheiro, M. B. Skinner, and F. I. Zeitlin, 181–​196. Berlin. Funke, M. 2016. “The Menandrian World of Alciphron’s Letters.” In Athenian Comedy in the Roman Empire, edited by C. W. Marshall and T. Hawkins, 223–​238. London. Gallé Cejudo, R. 2013. “Obsesión, fetichismo y masoquismo en las “Epístolas eróticas” de Filóstrato o la atomización del ejercicio preparatorio de retórica.” In Lettere, mimesi, retorica:  Studi di epistolografia letteraria greca di età imperiale e tardo-​antica, edited by O. Vox, 327–​374. Lecce. Gallé Cejudo, R. forthcoming. “Different forms of generic tension between Epistolary precepts and progymnasmatic rhetoric in the Letters of Alciphron.” In The Letters Of Alciphron: A Unified Literary Work?, edited by M. Biraud and A. Zucker, 131–​146. Leiden. Gera, D. L. 2013. “Letters in Xenophon.” In Epistolary Narratives in Ancient Greek Literature, edited by O. D. Hodkinson, P. A. Rosenmeyer, and E. Bracke, 85–​103. Leiden. Gibson, R. K. 2012. “On the Nature of Ancient Letter Collections.” JRS 102: 56–​78. Gibson, R. K. 2013. “Letters into Autobiography: The Generic Mobility of the Ancient Letter Collection.” In Generic Interfaces in Latin Literature, edited by T.  D. Papanghelis, S.  J. Harrison, and S. Frangoulidis, 387–​416. Berlin. Gibson, R. K., and R. Morello, eds. 2012. Reading the Letters of Pliny the Younger. Cambridge. Goldhill, S. 2009. “Constructing Identity in Philostratus’ Love Letters.” In Philostratus, edited by E. L. Bowie and J. Elsner, 287–​305. Cambridge. Goldstein, J., ed. 1968. The Letters of Demosthenes. New York. Gordon, P. 2013. “Epistolary Epicureans.” In Epistolary Narratives in Ancient Greek Literature, edited by O. D. Hodkinson, P. A. Rosenmeyer, and E. Bracke, 133–​151. Leiden. Gösswein, H.-​U., ed. 1975. Die Briefe des Euripides. Meisenheim am Glan. Hanink, J. 2010. “The Life of the Author in the Letters of ‘Euripides.’” GRBS 50: 537–​564. Hansen, W. 1996. Phlegon of Tralles’ Book of Marvels. Exeter. Harrison, S. J. 1998. “The Milesian Tales and the Roman Novel.” GCN 8:61–​73.

Epistolography   521 Hercher, R., ed. 1873. Epistolographi Graeci. Paris. Hodkinson, O. D. 2007a. “Better than Speech: Some Advantages of the Letter in the Second Sophistic.” In Ancient Letters: Classical and Late Antique Epistolography, edited by R. Morello and A. D. Morrison, 283–​300. Oxford. Hodkinson, O.  D. 2007b. “‘Novels in the Greek Letter’:  Inversions of the Written-​Oral Hierarchy in the Briefroman ‘Themistocles.’” In Seeing Tongues, Hearing Scripts: Orality and Representation in the Ancient Novel, edited by V. Rimell, 257–​278. Groningen. Hodkinson, O. D. 2011. Authority and Tradition in Philostratus’ “Heroikos”. Lecce. Hodkinson, O. D. 2012. “Attic Idylls: Hierarchies of Herdsmen and Social Status in Alciphron and Longus.” JHS 132: 41–​53. Hodkinson, O. D. 2013a. “Aelian’s Rustic Epistles in the Context of his Corpus: A Reassessment of Aelian’s Literary Programme and Qualities.” In Lettere, mimesi, retorica: Studi di epistolografia letteraria greca di età imperiale e tardo-​antica, edited by O. Vox, 257–​310. Lecce. Hodkinson, O. D. 2013b. “Epistolarity and Narrative in Ps.-​Aeschines Epistle 10.” In Epistolary Narratives in Ancient Greek Literature, edited by O. D. Hodkinson, P. A. Rosenmeyer, and E. Bracke, 323–​345. Leiden. Hodkinson, O. D. 2014. “Epistolography.” In A Companion to Greek and Roman Sexualities, edited by T. K. Hubbard, 463–​478. New York. Hodkinson, O. D. 2017. “Lucius Flavius Philostratus.” In Oxford Bibliographies in Classics, edited by D. L. Clayman. New York. http://​oxfordbibliographies.com/​view/​document/​obo-​ 9780195389661/​obo-​9780195389661-​0252.xml Hodkinson, O. D. forthcoming. “Typecast? Speaking names in Alciphron.” In The Letters Of Alciphron: A Unified Literary Work? Edited by M. Biraud and A. Zucker, 147-​167. Leiden. Hodkinson, O.  D., and P.  A. Rosenmeyer. 2013. “Introduction.” In Epistolary Narratives in Ancient Greek Literature, edited by O. D. Hodkinson, P. A. Rosenmeyer, and E. Bracke, 1–​36. Leiden. Hodkinson, O.  D., P.  A. Rosenmeyer, and E. Bracke, eds. 2013. Epistolary Narratives in Ancient Greek Literature. Leiden. Holzberg, N., ed. 1994a. Der griechische Briefroman: Gattungstypologie und Textanalyse. Tübingen. Holzberg, N. 1994b. “Der griechische Briefroman: Versuch einer Gattungstypologie.” In Der griechische Briefroman:  Gattungstypologie und Textanalyse, edited by N. Holzberg, 1–​52. Tübingen. Höschele, R. 2014. “Greek Comedy, the Novel, and Epistolography.” In The Oxford Handbook to Ancient Comedy, edited by M. Fontaine and A. C. Scafuro, 735–​752. Oxford. Hubbard, T. K. 2011. “Virgil, Longus, and the Pipes of Pan.” In Brill’s Companion to Greek and Latin Pastoral, edited by M. Fantuzzi and T. D. Papanghelis, 499–​514. Leiden. Hunter, R. 1983. A Study of Daphnis and Chloe. Cambridge. Jenkins, T.  E. 2006. Intercepted Letters:  Epistolarity and Narrative in Greek and Roman Literature. Lanham, MD. Jones, C. P., ed. and trans. 2006. Philostratus: Apollonius of Tyana: Letters of Apollonius, [etc.]. Cambridge, MA. Kalospyros, N. A.  E. forthcoming. “Atticisms vs. style:  towards a new critical edition of Alciphron’s Letters.” In The Letters Of Alciphron:  A  Unified Literary Work?, edited by M. Biraud and A. Zucker, 31–​37. Leiden. Kasprzyk, D. 2013. “Letters in Philostratus’ Life of Apollonius of Tyana.” In Epistolary Narratives in Ancient Greek Literature, edited by O. D. Hodkinson, P. A. Rosenmeyer, and E. Bracke, 263–​289. Leiden.

522   Literature and Culture Kennedy, D. F. 1984. “The Epistolary Mode and the First of Ovid’s Heroides.” CQ 34: 413–​422. Köhler, L. 1928. Die briefe des Sokrates und der sokratiker. Leipzig. König, J. 2007. “Alciphron’s Epistolarity.” In Ancient Letters:  Classical and Late Antique Epistolography, edited by R. Morello and A. D. Morrison, 257–​282. Oxford. König, J. 2012. Saints and Symposiasts: The Literature of Food and the Symposium in Greco-​ Roman and Early Christian Culture. Cambridge. Konstan, D. 2011. “Alciphron and the Invention of Pornography.” In Sociable Man: Essays in Greek Social Behaviour in Honor of Nick Fisher, edited by S. D. Lambert, 323–​335. Swansea. Konstan, D., and P. Mitsis. 1990. “Chion of Heraclea: A Philosophical Novel in Letters.” In The Poetics of Therapy: Hellenistic Ethics in its Rhetorical and Literary Context, edited by M. C. Nussbaum, 257–​279. Edmonton. Kurfess, A. 1965. “The Apocryphal Correspondence between Seneca and Paul.” In New Testament Apocrypha, edited by W. Schneelmelcher, 2:133–​141. London. Létoublon, F. 2003. “La lettre dans le roman grec ou les liaisons dangereuses.” In The Ancient Novel and Beyond, edited by S. Panayotakis, M. Zimmerman, and W. Keulen, 271–​288. Leiden. Lindheim, S. H. 2003. Mail and Female: Epistolary Narrative and Desire in Ovid’s Heroides. Madison, WI. Malherbe, A. J. 1988. Ancient Epistolary Theorists. Atlanta, GA. Malosse, P.-​L. 2005. “Éthopée et fiction épistolaire.” In ‘ΗΘΟΠΟΙΙΑ: La représentation de caractères à l’époque impériale et tardive, edited by E. Amato and J. Schamp, 61–​78. Salerno. Marchesi, I. 2008. The Art of Pliny’s Letters: A Poetics of Allusion in the Private Correspondence. Cambridge. Marquis, E. forthcoming. “On the structure of Alciphron’s Letters.” In The Letters of Alciphron: A Unified Literary Work?, edited by M. Biraud and A. Zucker, 9–​18. Leiden. Marshall, C. W. 2016. “Aelian and Comedy: Four Studies.” In Athenian Comedy in the Roman Empire, edited by C. W. Marshall and T. Hawkins, 197–​222. London. McClure, L. K. 2003. Courtesans at Table: Gender and Greek Literary Culture in Athenaeus. New York. Merkle, S. 1994. “Telling the True Story of the Trojan War: The Eyewitness Account of Dictys of Crete.” In The Search for the Ancient Novel, edited by J. Tatum, 183–​196. Baltimore, MD. Merkle, S. 1996. “The Truth and Nothing but the Truth: Dictys and Dares.” In The Novel in the Ancient World, edited by G. Schmeling, 563–​580. Leiden. Mignona, E. 2000. “Calliroe e lo Scamandro: Ps.-​Eschine (epist. 10).” In Ἔρως: Antiche trame greche d’amore, edited by A. Stramaglia, 85–​96. Bari. Miles, G. 2004. “Music and Immortality: The Afterlife of Achilles in Philostratus’ Heroicus.” Ancient Narrative 4: 66–​78. Morales, H., ed. 2011. Greek Fiction: Callirhoe, Daphnis and Chloe, Letters of Chion. London. Morello, R., and A. D. Morrison, eds. 2007. Ancient Letters:  Classical and Late Antique Epistolography. Oxford. Morgan, J.  R. 1985. “Lucian’s True Histories and the Wonders beyond Thule of Antonius Diogenes.” CQ 35: 475–​490. Morgan, J.  R. 2009. “Readers writing Readers, and Writers Reading Writers:  Reflections of Antonius Diogenes.” In Readers and Writers in the Greek Novel, edited by M. Paschalis, S. Panayotakis, and G. Schmeling, 127–​141. Ancient Narrative Supplement 12. Gröningen. Morgan, J. R. 2013. “Love from beyond the Grave: The Epistolary Ghost-​Story in Phlegon of Tralles.” In Epistolary Narratives in Ancient Greek Literature, edited by O. D. Hodkinson, P. A. Rosenmeyer, and E. Bracke, 293–​321. Leiden.

Epistolography   523 Morrison, A. D. 2013. “Authorship and Authority in Greek Fictional Letters: Fictional Letters and Historical ‘Authors.’” In The Author’s Voice in Classical and Late Antiquity, edited by A. Marmodoro and J. Hill, 287–​312. Oxford. Morrison, A.  D. 2014. “Pamela and Plato:  Ancient and Modern Epistolary Narrative.” In Defining Greek Narrative, edited by D. Cairns and R. Scodel, 298–​313. Edinburgh. Morrison, A. D. forthcoming. “Order and disorder in the Letters of Alciphron.” In The Letters of Alciphron: A Unified Literary Work?, edited by M. Biraud and A. Zucker, 19–​30. Leiden. Muir, J. 2008. Life and Letters in the Ancient Greek World. London. Nadjo, L., and E. Gavoille, eds. 2000. Epistulae antiquae: Actes du 1er Colloque “Le genre épistolaire antique et ses prolongements”. Louvain. Nadjo, L., and E. Gavoille, eds. 2002. Epistulae antiquae II: Actes du 1er Colloque “Le genre épistolaire antique et ses prolongements européens”. Louvain. Nadjo, L., and E. Gavoille, eds. 2004. Epistulae antiquae III: Actes du 1er Colloque “Le genre épistolaire antique et ses prolongements européens”. Louvain. Ní Mheallaigh, K. 2008. “Pseudo-​Documentarism and the Limits of Ancient Fiction.” AJPhil. 129: 403–​431. Ní Mheallaigh, K. 2012. “The ‘Phoenician Letters’ of Dictys of Crete and Dionysius Scytobrachion.” Cambridge Classical Journal 58: 181–​193. Norden, E. 1898. Die antike Kunstprosa vom VI. Jahrhundert v.  Christus bis in die Zeit der Renaissance. 2 vols. Leipzig. Olson, R. S. 2010. Tragedy, Authority, and Trickery: The Poetics of Embedded Letters in Josephus. Cambridge, MA. Olson, R. S. 2013. “Letters in the War between Rome and Judaea.” In Epistolary Narratives in Ancient Greek Literature, edited by O. D. Hodkinson, P. A. Rosenmeyer, and E. Bracke, 349–​ 370. Leiden. Penella, R. 1979a. The Letters of Apollonius of Tyana. Leiden. Penella, R. 1979b. “Philostratus’ Letter to Julia Domna.” Hermes 107: 161–​168. Penwill, J. L. 1978. “The Letters of Themistocles: An Epistolary Novel?” Antichthon 12: 83–​103. Penwill, J. L. 2010. “Evolution of an Assassin: The Letters of Chion of Heraclea.” Ramus 39: 24–​52. Poltera, O. 2013. “The Letters of Euripides.” In Epistolary Narratives in Ancient Greek Literature, edited by O. D. Hodkinson, P. A. Rosenmeyer, and E. Bracke, 153–​165. Leiden. Reardon, B. P., ed. 1989. Collected Ancient Greek Novels. Berkeley, CA. Repath, I. 2013. “Yours truly? Letters in Achiles Tatius.” In Epistolary Narratives in Ancient Greek Literature, edited by O. D. Hodkinson, P. A. Rosenmeyer, and E. Bracke, 237–​262. Leiden. Rimell, V., ed. 2007. Seeing Tongues, Hearing Scripts: Orality and Representation in the Ancient Novel. Groningen. Robiano, P. 2007. “La voix et la main: La lettre intime dans Chéréas et Callirhoé.” In Seeing Tongues, Hearing Scripts:  Orality and Representation in the Ancient Novel, edited by V. Rimell, 201–​222. Groningen. Rochette, B. 1997. Le latin dans le monde grec: Recherches sur la diffusion de la langue et de lettres latines dans les provinces hellénophones de l’empire romain. Brussels. Rösch, Y. forthcoming. “Close encounters with the hetaira—​reading Alciphron’s book 4.” In The Letters Of Alciphron: A Unified Literary Work?, edited by M. Biraud and A. Zucker, 179–​190. Leiden. Rosenmeyer, P. A. 1994. “The Epistolary Novel.” In Greek Fiction: The Greek Novel in Context, edited by J. R. Morgan and R. Stoneman, 146–​165. London.

524   Literature and Culture Rosenmeyer, P. A. 1996. “Love Letters in Callimachus, Ovid, and Aristaenetus, or, The Sad Fate of a Mail-​Order Bride.” MD 36: 9–​31. Rosenmeyer, P. A. 1997. “Ovid’s Heroides and Tristia: Voices from Exile.” Ramus 26: 29–​56. Rosenmeyer, P. A. 2001. Ancient Epistolary Fictions: The Letter in Greek Literature. Cambridge. Rosenmeyer, P. A. 2006. Ancient Greek Literary Letters: Selections in Translation. London. Rosenmeyer, P. A. forthcoming. “Greek letters.” Oxford Bibliographies in Classics, edited by D. L. Clayman. New York. Russell, D.  A. 1988. “The Ass in the Lion’s Skin:  Thoughts on the Letters of Phalaris.” JHS 180: 94–​106. Schmid, W. 1887–​1897. Der Atticismus in seinen Hauptvertretern von Dionysius von Halikarnass bis auf den zweiten Philostratus. 5 vols. Stuttgart. Schmitz, T. A. 2004. “Alciphron’s Letters as a Sophistic Text.” In Paideia: The World of the Second Sophistic, edited by B. E. Borg, 87–​104. Berlin. Schmitz, T. A. 2017. “The Rhetoric of Desire in Philostratus’ Letters.” Arethusa 50: 257–​282. Smith, S. D. 2014. Man and Animal in Severan Rome: The Literary Imagination of Claudius Aelianus. Cambridge. Smith, W. D. 1990. Hippocrates: Pseudepigraphic Writings. Leiden. Spentzou, E. 2003. Readers and Writers in Ovid’s Heroides. Oxford. Thyresson, I. 1964. “Quatre lettres de Claude Élien inspirées par le Dyskolos de Ménandre.” Eranos 62: 7–​35. Trapp, M. 2003. Greek and Latin Letters: An Anthology with Translation. Cambridge. Trapp, M. 2006. “Biography in Letters; Biography and Letters.” In The Limits of Ancient Biography, edited by J. Mossman and B. McGing, 335–​350. Swansea. Ureña Bracero, J. 2013. “El rétor tras el personaje en ‘Las cartas de pescadores y campesinos’ de Alcifrón.” In Lettere, mimesi, retorica: Studi di epistolografia letteraria greca di età imperiale e tardo-​antica, edited by O. Vox, 179–​202. Lecce. Vox, O., ed. 2013a. Lettere, mimesi, retorica: Studi di epistolografia letteraria greca di età imperiale e tardo-​antica. Lecce. Vox, O. 2013b. “Paideia ed esercizi retorici in Alcifrone.” In Lettere, mimesi, retorica: Studi di epistolografia letteraria greca di età imperiale e tardo-​antica, edited by O. Vox, 203–​250. Lecce. Vox, O. forthcoming. “Women’s voices: four or five women’s letters by Alciphron.” In The Letters Of Alciphron: A Unified Literary Work?, edited by M. Biraud and A. Zucker, 99–​109. Leiden. Walker, A. 1992. “Eros and the eye in the Love-​letters of Philostratus.” PCPS 38: 132–​148. Whitmarsh, T. 2005. The Second Sophistic. Oxford. Whitmarsh, T. 2013a. “Addressing Power: Fictional Letters between Alexander and Darius.” In Beyond the Second Sophistic: Adventures in Greek Postclassicism, 86–​100. Oxford. Whitmarsh, T. 2013b. “Addressing Power: Fictional Letters between Alexander and Darius.” In Epistolary Narratives in Ancient Greek Literature, edited by O.  D. Hodkinson, P.  A. Rosenmeyer, and E. Bracke, 169–​186. Leiden.

Pa rt  V I

P H I L O S OP H Y A N D P H I L O S OP H E R S

chapter 33

The Stoi c s Gretchen Reydams-​S chils

Tacitus reports that the Roman Stoic Musonius Rufus (before 30 to ca. 100 ce), who was strongly committed to philosophy (studium philosophiae aemulatus), tried to talk an army of soldiers into peace, only to be met with boredom, ridicule, and even aggression (Hist. 3.81). Musonius Rufus mingled with the troops (permixtus manipulis) and admonished them (monere) in an exposition about the benefits of peace and the risks of war. If he had not given up his attempt at “untimely wisdom” (intempestiva sapientia), listening to the advice of the more temperate and yielding to threats by others, he would have been attacked and trampled under foot. That this kind of anecdote could constitute a stock theme is proven by a similar story about Dio Chrysostom (40 ce to ca. 120 ce) in Philostratus (VS 1.23.1; 488 Olearius). Unlike Musonius Rufus, however, Dio was successful. Even after his alleged “conversion” to philosophy, his formidable rhetorical training apparently served him well. According to Philostratus, Dio presented himself as a sage, a sophos, and adopted the role of Odysseus. His persuasiveness (πειθώ) was such that he cast a spell (καταθέλξαι), like Circe in the Odyssey (10.213),1 even on men who did not understand Greek well. All we hear about Musonius Rufus from Tacitus is that he was a Stoic and devoted to philosophy; Philostratus, however, carefully stages Dio’s intervention and self-​ presentation. (This may also point to a difference in perspective between Tacitus and Philostratus as authors.) Musonius Rufus mingles with the troops, holds forth (disserens), and comes across as inept, to put it mildly. Dio in a histrionic gesture tears off his rags, climbs naked onto an altar to deliver his speech, captures his audience by a startling opening line in which he assumes the role of Odysseus (see also his Or. 13, 33), and comes across as a masterful manipulator of crowds, a sorcerer of some sort. But it is also the case that Musonius wants his audience to reflect about the advantages of peace in comparison with war, whereas Dio merely convinces the soldiers that it would be better to go along with the Romans (ἀμείνω φρονεῖν τὰ δοκοῦντα Ῥωμαίοις πράττοντας). Musonius, in other words, wants his listeners to reach a deeper level of understanding, whereas Dio wants to win the day. In this contrast one can capture almost all of the main features that make up the later Stoics’ conscious attempt to set themselves apart from

528   Philosophy and Philosophers common cultural expectations and social success as measured by traditional standards and embraced by figures such as Dio. The contrast is all the more interesting because Musonius Rufus taught both Epictetus and Dio. (Even though there may have been a polemic between Dio and Musonius Rufus [Synesius Dio 1], Lucian mentions Dio in one breath with Musonius Rufus and Epictetus [De mort. Peregr. 18].) In spite of the fact that they share some similar strategies, the modes of self-​presentation adopted by later Stoics such as Seneca (4 bce/​1 ce–​65 ce), Musonius Rufus, Epictetus (ca. 50–​125 ce), and Marcus Aurelius2 (121–​180 ce) are so markedly different from the ones that are predominant in the Second Sophistic3 that we can legitimately infer an intense cultural polemic about what it meant to be a philosopher in this era.4 The recorded anecdotes about philosophers are very informative because they give us an invaluable glimpse of how such actors were perceived and are meant to reflect these actors’ values, in the broadest sense of the term. In keeping with the above anecdote, Musonius is also on record as having stated that the proper response to a philosophical lecture is reverent silence, not applause, because of the weightiness of the issues at stake—​namely, the good life and the sorry state in which we all find ourselves (Gell. NA 5.1). (Epictetus for his part explicitly makes fun of public speakers like Dio who want to command the attention of as large an audience as possible; Diss. 3.23.19–​21.) Ultimately all human beings, including those who claim to be teachers of philosophy, are judged by how they act and not by what they say or claim to know. And what a Stoic would expect from his audience is indeed a tall order: that they revise their entire scale of values, consider virtue the optimal functioning of reason and thus the sole good, and act accordingly. One could be stunned into silence by less. To underscore how far the Stoic ideal is removed from ordinary practice, Musonius Rufus recommends shepherding and farming as the best occupation for a philosopher (11 Hense and Lutz). Away from the bustle and corruption of big cities, pupils would share in this way of life, use leisure hours for instruction, and see their teacher leading the good life, not just lecturing about it. Nothing would be more effective in getting the message across than this active modeling of virtue. Musonius appropriates here a common pastoral theme in the Roman tradition, which goes back at least as far as Cato the Elder, about the benefits of a frugal life in the countryside led by the gentleman farmer. Musonius’s pupil Epictetus, for his part, ran a school in Epirus, far away from the centers of political and cultural activity, and he does not shy away from shock therapy to jolt his pupils out of their misguided assumptions. He recommends three types of exercises, which appear also to have had a major influence on Marcus Aurelius. The first concerns correct reasoning, so that we do not commit any fallacies in our thinking and fall prey to erroneous judgments; the second disciplines our desire, so that it is in keeping with the divine providential reason that governs the entire world; and the third is meant to regulate our impulses and actions, so that we do what is right and proper in terms of our social obligations too.5 But as much as Epictetus took advantage of his pupils’ temporary absence of social attachments to shake them in their complacency and complained, for instance, about the hold that mothers would still have on their sons even from far away (Diss. 3.24.22),

The Stoics   529 it also clear from his extant writings that he intended them eventually to return to their initial social contexts and to apply what they had learned and interiorized to their everyday activities. Epictetus enjoins: A builder does not step forward and say: “Listen to me give a speech about building,” but takes on a contract for a house, completes it and thus demonstrates that he has the skill. You too should act in this manner: eat like a human being, drink like one, take care of your appearance, marry, beget children, fulfill your political duties. Endure abuse: bear with an unreasonable brother, bear with a father, a son, a neighbor, a travel-​companion. Show us these things, so that we may see whether you have truly learned something from the philosophers. (Diss. 3.21.4–​6, trans. Oldfather; cf. also Sen. Ep. 108.35–​end)

Or as Musonius Rufus puts it, “philosophy is nothing else than to search out by reason what is right and proper, and by deeds to put it into practice” (14–​end Lutz and Hense; cf. also 4, on philosophy as the art of becoming a good human being). A number of Epictetus’s discourses are devoted precisely to the necessity and challenges of making the transition from his school back to the social circles from which his pupils originally came.6 And as he astutely points out, it is quite a bit easier to hold on to the tenets of philosophy in a school setting, in which one is surrounded by like-​minded people and has a teacher at hand, than in the midst of everyday life: “in theory there is nothing which holds us back from following what we are taught, but in the affairs of life there are many things which draw us away” (Diss. 1.26.3, trans. Oldfather). Thus Stoics like Musonius and Epictetus expected their pupils both to adopt the high standards of Stoic principles and to continue assuming their social roles and responsibilities. Again, no easy feat. Given the fragmentary nature of our evidence for the Early Stoa, it is hard to tell to which extent this later Stoic emphasis on social responsibility entails a transformation of earlier doctrine. The assumption that the later Stoic writings merely present some kind of watered-​down version in popular moralizing of an originally highly innovative and sophisticated system of thought is no longer tenable: it is clear that the later Stoics still knew their Chrysippus, to name but him (see below), and consciously chose a different mode of philosophical discourse (Reydams-​Schils 2010; Sellars 2009). Moreover, the assumption that posits Panaetius and Poseidonius as catalysts for a number of alleged concessions to Roman culture is open for revision as well. For the Early Stoa we already find attested (1) deliberations on whether and under which circumstances the sage should participate in public life (and marry; Reydams-​Schils 2005, 84–​86), and (2) a strong connection between the theoretical and the practical life, both as subsumed under the “life of reason,” bios logikos (Diog. Laert. 7.130). For Chrysippus specifically we have evidence, for instance, of reservations about (1) the life of pleasure provided by a more permanent attachment to a philosophical school (Plut. De Stoic. repug. 1033c), and (2) theoretical quibbles of logic (directed primarily against Academic and Megarian “abuses” of dialectic; Bénatouïl 2006, 79–​91 and 136–​139). It is therefore safer to assume

530   Philosophy and Philosophers that the distinctive features of later Stoic thinking are a matter of emphasis, and in some cases of elaborations of earlier Stoic views, and do not reflect a radical break in the tradition. Plutarch (ca. 40–​120 ce) makes for an ideal foil to the later Stoic attitude. As recent scholarship, and especially the work of Van Hoof (2010), has pointed out, Plutarch may have been closer than commonly assumed to the Second Sophistic in his works on practical philosophy, such as On Feeling Good, On Exile, On Talkativeness, and On Curiosity, to the extent that in these contexts he is very much concerned about his own social ­capital, in the traditional sense. In his works of this type, at least, Plutarch, so Van Hoof argues, manages the sensitivities of his upper-​class audience. He meets them very much on their own ground and uses their traditional value judgments and their sense of pride to coax them toward better attitudes. Moreover, in doing this, Plutarch is also intent on increasing his own social capital with this elite, using his accounts to create a justification for his interest in philosophy and to present himself as the best counselor for his audience. For instance, when he critiques busybodies or idle curiosity, he also forestalls criticisms that potentially could come his way. Could he himself, as a prolific writer, not be accused of burying himself in abstruse and irrelevant matters and of meddling with other people’s lives (Van Hoof 205–​210)? But his interests are truly relevant for the good life, and he, as one of their equals, is the best counselor his elite audience could hope for. By contrast, Musonius Rufus and Epictetus appear hardly to care for such social capital at all, a point to which we will return below, and this may be one the main reasons why they did not leave anything in writing themselves. With Epictetus, we can detect an occasional advertisement for his school, as when he gives visitors who are merely passing through a glimpse of what they could learn if they were willing to spend more time with him (Diss. 2.14.10, 20.34–​35), but his restraint in not presenting himself as a role model is remarkable.7 This holding back is one of the main reasons why he transfers the image of the ideal sage to a Cynic, not a Stoic. The Cynic would be the scout of the god, and of all human beings comes closest to being godlike. (Seneca takes a similar approach by weaving in praise for the Cynic Demetrius in his On Benefits 7.1.) Epictetus does not call himself a philosopher, but a trainer, παιδευτής (Diss. 2.19.29–​34). As I have argued elsewhere (Reydams-​Schils 2011) the later Stoics want their pupils and audience to focus on the message, the truth of Stoic teaching, which ultimately needs to be interiorized, not to become permanently attached to individual teachers nor to mistake a knack at expounding the intricacies of Chrysippus’s views, for instance, for the only goal that matters: a fundamental transformation of the manner in which they lead their lives. Striking parallels to Epictetus’s self-​representation can be found in Seneca’s philosophical writings, though Seneca is, strictly speaking, not a teacher running a school, whereas Epictetus is. But Seneca does give advice to others, in the first instance to the addressees of his works, but in a broader sense to his entire readership. Like Musonius Rufus, who as a man in exile himself advises another who is struggling with the same plight (9 Lutz and Hense; see also below), Seneca’s writings start from his own existential struggles, and in describing a trajectory of progress for his addressees, he

The Stoics   531 simultaneously addresses himself and maps his own progress. That he includes his own authorial voice among those striving toward the Stoic ideal helps us understand better the shape of the limited biographical material in Seneca’s writings: rather than include information and details that would have been unique to his own life, he focuses only on those difficulties that pose a threat to the philosophical life and situations that can be shared by others. Thus he talks about the challenges of exile (Helv.), ill health (as in Ep. 78 and 104), excessive sorrow (as in Ep. 63.14), and disappointments in a political career (QNat. 3 preface), but always in terms that can be shared with his interlocutors as experiences all too common to the human condition. In Letter 52, for instance, he ranks himself among those who are not quick learners but need to work hard at making progress, and with the assistance of others (7, durum ac laboriosum ingenium). One of the striking features of Seneca’s Letters is that he dwells very little on his social position and former success (one exception in a negative sense occurs in Letter 73, in which he stages a request to the emperor to grant him otium and release him from his public responsibilities). To name but a few counterexamples to Seneca’s and Epictetus’s modesty, Cicero, even in his most pessimistic moments, never stops dwelling on his achievements, whereas Plutarch in On Curiosity (522D–E) talks about himself giving a seminar in Rome. In Dio’s extant writings, again in contrast to Seneca’s, the autobiographical material plays a much more prominent role in underscoring his cultural capital: he rose to the challenges of his wanderings and exile and, like the Cynic Diogenes (Or. 6) and even Homer (Or. 53.9), coped heroically, almost literally in a Herculean manner, with hardship8; he returned to favor and claims to have gained access to the emperor Trajan, which allowed him to capitalize on the prestige of being an emperor’s associate (as in Or. 3.2; 44.6, 12; 45.2–​3; 47.22); and his speeches delivered in his native Bithynia and home town of Prusa show a man who holds a privileged, if not uncontested, position (as in Or. 38, 40, 43, 44, 46). Last but not least, in the anecdote about his address to soldiers, Philostratus claims that Dio presented himself not merely as a philosopher but as a sage, a sophos. It may seem that in at least one of the extant expositions of Musonius Rufus, the one mentioned above on exile (9), he, too, uses the first person voice to draw a comparison between himself and Diogenes the Cynic, presenting himself as a role model. After first mentioning how Diogenes coped, Musonius claims that he himself is displaying the very same fortitude. But the setting of the exposition matters and gives quite a ­different feel to the exchange from that in Dio’s speeches: the account presents Musonius as speaking from one man in exile to another, in a one-​on-​one conversation (even though witnesses must have been present to record the address). Thus the account reads like both a consolation and encouragement of his interlocutor and a reminder to himself (and others) of the reasons why exile is not to be lamented: Οἷς δὲ λογισμοῖς χρῶμαι πρὸς ἐμαυτόν, ὥστε μὴ ἄχθεσθαι τῇ φυγῇ, τούτους καὶ πρὸς σὲ εἴποιμι ἄν. The reflections which I employ for my own benefit so as not to be aggravated by exile, I would like to share with you too.

532   Philosophy and Philosophers He, Musonius Rufus, knows what he is talking about because he has firsthand experience with exile, and if he, like Diogenes, can rise above such a challenge, so can his interlocutor and his audience. The immediate purpose of this manner of presenting oneself as a model is to establish a connection with the interlocutor not in order to meet the other on his own terms, as Plutarch did in his treatises on practical ethics, but to encourage him to strive for an ideal that is possible, even if difficult, to attain. Enhancing one’s own status, on the other hand, is not a primary concern. If it is true that later Stoics such as Musonius Rufus and Epictetus consciously resist the traditional mechanisms of acquiring status, one could argue that this Stoic teacher’s discretion is merely analogous to the (in)famous Socratic irony and his disavowal of knowledge. After all, the end of Plato’s Phaedrus shows us a Socrates praying on his own behalf as well, as if he needs help, for inner beauty, for an exterior that harmonizes with his inner self, for the ability to recognize that the sage is rich, and for only so much material wealth as would be compatible with temperance. (The line about only the wise man being rich in particular would be picked up by the Stoics as one of their notorious paradoxes; SVF 3.593–​603.) And in the Phaedo (91b–​c) Socrates urges his interlocutors Simmias and Cebes to “care little for Socrates but much more for the truth” (trans. Gallop). Yet if we view such claims in the broader context of Plato’s works, it is clear that Plato at least has no qualms presenting Socrates as supremely sovereign and in control, notably in the Symposium, Phaedo, and the Apology. Plato and Xenophon stage their version of Socrates to a much greater extent than Arrian does with his Epictetus. An important corollary to the low profile that both Epictetus and Seneca adopt for themselves is their recommendation that philosophers practice discretion. Epictetus has stripped his Socrates and Cynics of all quirky features, and in the case of the latter, of all potentially shocking behavior. Epictetus’s Cynic has been cleaned up considerably; no urinating or masturbating in public for his role model. (For this reason, too, we should be careful with using Epictetus’s portrait to complement our information about ancient Cynicism.9) And Epictetus also endorses the more common topos of being very critical of those who merely look and play the part of being a philosopher by relying on props, as well of those who neglect their physical appearance altogether.10 He rails against effeminate looks and wants his pupils to be clean, manly (with beard), and healthy. Epictetus even goes so far as to concede that a threat to cut off his beard could be enough reason for a philosopher to commit suicide (Diss. 1.2.29), probably also because, as Musonius too points out, a beard is a sign bestowed by nature to distinguish men from women (21 Lutz and Hense; on this topic, cf. also Dio as in Or. 33.63–​64; 35). According to Philostratus, Domitian did have Apollonius of Tyana’s beard and hair shorn off in order to humiliate him (V A 7.34). But even if it is the case for Epictetus that the true Cynic will be impressive in his simple radiance (Diss. 3.22), it would be a mistake for one merely to adopt this image without being able to rise to the considerable challenges of what it means to be an envoy and scout of the gods. The literature of the period abounds with reflections on the “looks” of a philosopher.11 (An amusing and less often discussed example occurs in a pseudo-​letter of Crates to his

The Stoics   533 lover Hipparchia, 33 Malherbe, who has given birth to their son. Because of his mother’s healthy and rugged lifestyle, her son in turn is very strong, and it would not be long before he would be a child version of the Cynic, a puppy born of “Dog” parents, complete with staff, cloak, and wallet.) In comparison with Epictetus, Dio is much more ambivalent. While he, too, adopts the topos of railing against false philosophers, he pays considerable attention to his own mode of dress and self-​presentation. Through visible cultural markings, Dio claims, a philosopher distinguishes himself from all others (as in Or. 70.7; 72; 47.25). He calls himself a mere self-​taught wanderer and “laborer” in philosophy (1.9), yet the use of the first person in his orations allows him to brag and align himself with Heracles in his simplicity of speech and life (Or. 1, haplôs legein/​bioun), with Socrates as someone who speaks the truth and avoids flattery (3.26–​28), with Homer as having bravely born a life of wandering (see above), or with Diogenes as enjoying leisure and thus having time to advise a ruler (4.3). In spite of the almost requisite claims of humility about how someone like Dio pales in comparison with the first generations of philosophers (as in Or. 12.5–​8, 72.16), it did not escape the notice of astute readers such as Arethas, a pupil of Photius, that in reality Dio aligns himself systematically with this august company (T7 Lamar Crosby). Rather than divert attention from himself, as Epictetus does in his expositions, Dio enhances his own status through his references to the great men of old. In contrast to Dio and more in keeping with Epictetus, Seneca, too, prefers discretion. One does not flaunt one’s philosophical allegiance in being an agent provocateur; no repulsive dress, unkempt hair, messy beard, and conspicuous rejection of luxury by wallowing in squalor (Ep. 5.2–​3). In a famous passage about a festival, for instance, he recommends that one not hold oneself aloof but take part without letting oneself go (Ep. 18.4). According to Stoics such as Seneca and Epictetus, we continue to do the same things, but not in the same manner. Epictetus presents Socrates as such a pinnacle of discretion that even when asked to take others to philosophers, Socrates happily complied without drawing any attention to himself (Diss. 3.23.20–​23; 4.8). There are passages in Plato that also point in this direction: in the Protagoras, for instance, Socrates complies with providing an overly eager young admirer access to the “great” sophist (310e), and in the Theaetetus he claims that he matches those who do not have an aptitude for philosophy with sophists instead of taking them on himself (151b). Yet the tonality of these scenes is quite different from Epictetus’s point. Plato’s account hinges on the distinction between the sophists and the “true” philosopher Socrates is supposed to be, whereas in Epictetus’s perspective, Socrates hides his very identity as a philosopher. Epictetus also explicitly justifies the value of philosophical discretion (Diss. 4.8.17–​ 20). Such an attitude makes one focus on doing the right thing for one’s own sake and as a tribute to god, not in order to impress onlookers. Furthermore, if one makes mistakes, one undermines only one’s own reputation, not philosophy’s, and does not lead the general public even further astray. Epictetus here clearly has in mind the widespread lampooning of philosophers as hypocrites who themselves are not able to practice what they preach and the damage this does to philosophy.12 Seneca not only addresses this topic at

534   Philosophy and Philosophers some length, he even indirectly defends himself against such a charge (Vit. Beat. 17ff.), which, as we know, was historically leveled against him because of his great wealth and close association with Nero.13 Epictetus puts his defense of discretion into the mouth of his contemporary, the less-​ known Stoic Euphrates.14 But his portrait of Euphrates stands in marked contrast to that by Pliny the Younger (Ep. 1.10.5–​7), who very much focuses on Euphrates’s outer appearance and rhetorical skill. Pliny describes Euphrates as a tall and comely man, with long hair and a beard—​one of the physical hallmarks of a philosopher, as we have seen already—​and his style of speech as luxuriant and seductive, the epitome of rhetorical elegance. Euphrates, Pliny claims, affects his listeners as much by his appearance and discourse as he does by the integrity of his life. One cannot help but notice that Euphrates in Pliny’s rendering is radically different in appearance and speech from Epictetus, as the latter comes across in Arrian’s records: a “little old man” (Diss. 2.6.23) with a lame leg and a caustic wit rather than a mellifluous tongue. If Pliny is right, instead of hiding his identity as a philosopher, as Epictetus claims he did, Euphrates, like Dio, seems to have presented himself as a living billboard. And even Epictetus acknowledges the attraction that Euphrates exerted through his rhetorical skill (Diss. 3.15.8; Ench. 29.4) in converting people to philosophy, although he does question the effectiveness of a speech to bring about such a tremendous outcome. It is not the historical accuracy of the descriptions that is the issue here, but the conscious presentations. Pliny’s portrait is much more in line with broader cultural expectations of a philosopher’s behavior, which could be quite colorful, and verges onto the sensational. Even before the Second Sophistic reached its peak in the early second century, Dio, as we have seen, already embodies this mode of self-​representation.15 Culminating in Philostratus’s over-​the-​top portrait of Apollonius of Tyana, whom Euphrates for his part had attacked and criticized severely, this mode increasingly depicts larger-​than-​life figures, as also in Lucian’s satirical staging of the Cynic Peregrinus, who “performed” even his own death by leaping into a pyre. Euphrates’s rebuttal of Apollonius in front of Vespasian as rendered by Philostratus (5.37) is worth quoting in this context. If Euphrates relied more on public status than Epictetus did, Apollonius of Tyana, in turn, apparently pushed his status claims too far even for Euphrates: the emperor should “favor and embrace the kind [of philosophy] that is in accordance with nature, but avoid the kind that claims to be inspired [by (the) god(s), θεοκλυτεῖν]. For by misrepresenting the gods, such people [i.e., ones like Apollonius] prompt us to many foolish schemes” (trans. Jones). Traces of this criticism, with its concomitant rejection of magic, can also be found in Marcus Aurelius’s writings (1.6, 16, 17).16 In his Lives of the Philosophers and Sophists, Eunapius has captured well the notion of philosophers as divine men (as in 454 Wright). Could a philosopher in the imperial era go too far in claiming authority for himself? The challenge must have been especially poignant for public speakers such as Dio. In several of his orations, we find lengthy prooimia in which he establishes his credentials with his audience and tries to secure its goodwill. That this could be difficult we also learn from him when he dwells on the reasons why people generally dislike philosophers

The Stoics   535 who look down upon and berate others (Or. 72). In one instance in the extant writings, this discourse of self-​justification takes up as much as half of the exposition (Or. 33), which focuses on a critique of “snorting” as a comic vehicle for addressing weightier issues. Let us take a closer look at one such preface, from an address to the people of Alexandria (Or. 32) delivered to a big crowd in the great theatre, whom he needs to convince to pay attention to a serious speech. Entertainment, he claims (7), will never be in short supply, but speeches such as the one he himself has to offer for their benefit are much more rare. Next, in order to strengthen his credentials, he tries to get potential rivals out of the way: philosophers who do not speak in public at all or confine themselves to their lecture rooms (see also 20), Cynics who because of their modus operandi end up increasing the insolence of their audience, or speakers who focus merely on display and their own reputation. Perhaps there have been a few who have sparingly uttered frank statements, he goes on, but to find a man who is noble, brave, and disinterested enough to address them in this manner, as Dio himself is doing, is all too rare and precious, a gift of the good fortune of a very lucky city. He is not taking on this task, he claims, of his own volition, but by divine appointment, a point on which he dwells greatly in an elaboration of the importance of divine Providence. Where Epictetus took great pains to warn any would-​be Cynic of the immensity of the task, which could be undertaken only by someone appointed by god as a scout and special emissary (3.22, see esp. 2–​8, 23–​25, 46–​47, 53), Dio here has no qualms arrogating that status to himself. The remainder of the preface is devoted to the challenges of addressing a large crowd and coaxing it into being good listeners. By Dio’s standards, Musonius Rufus, Epictetus, and Seneca would all be liable to the charge of hiding away from public encounters. Although Musonius Rufus has some public appearances to his name, based on the extant evidence, he mostly taught in a more intimate setting, like Epictetus. And though Seneca’s writings were destined for a wider audience, they are framed as exchanges with individuals, not with a larger audience at public gatherings. This, again, I would argue, points to a conscious decision in a cultural polemic about how philosophical discourse should best be conducted, a decision that ran counter to the mode adopted by Dio, Euphrates, and others. When one views Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations from this angle, one could argue that Musonius Rufus’s and Epictetus’s stance reached its logical conclusion with this work: the writings are so far from intended to impress and garner status for their author that they were probably meant for personal use or to be read by a very small circle of people. The Meditations, written in Greek, show traces of a ruler who is aware of the importance of his public role and his responsibilities, but they were also, in all likelihood, the only way for Marcus Aurelius to get some distance from this role and to overcome its considerable social constraints (cf. 6.30). We can discern in Dio’s positioning of himself vis-​a-​vis Trajan how even the category of associates or friends of an emperor was governed by heavy protocol. In these writings, Marcus Aurelius attempts to move beyond such social scripts and strives to exemplify the ideal of making philosophical teachings his own and integrating them into everything he does.

536   Philosophy and Philosophers Stoics of the Roman imperial era such as Seneca, Musonius Rufus, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius drew from the same cultural stock as did more public actors such as Dio and other members of the Second Sophistic, but they put this tradition to a radically different use; they attempted to walk a fine line between challenging common assumptions and practices and maintaining one’s responsibility and role in socio-​political contexts. Because of this latter concern, they were not quite the kind of closet agents against whom Dio directed his scorn (see also Or. 47.2–​3, for a more positive view of the Stoics’ quandary). For their part, they consciously eschewed certain modes of acquiring social status and success, whereas Dio did, after all, take on a role in public life and try to convey certain messages that ran counter to a business-​as-​usual approach, and he may very well have needed an established reputation to accomplish this task. The trade-​off and cultural dilemma could not be clearer than in the two anecdotes about Musonius Rufus and Dio each addressing armies.

Further Reading Of the works included in the bibliography to this chapter, Inwood 2005 is a good introduction to the thought of Seneca, as is Van Geytenbeek 1963 to Musonius Rufus, Long 2002 to Epictetus, and Hadot 1998 and Van Ackeren 2012 to Marcus Aurelius. Ramelli 2008 provides the most complete and up-​to-​date bibliography, and Reydams-​Schils 2005 focuses on the topic of social ethics. Hahn 1989 and Whitmarsh 2001 constitute the best background reading for the issues discussed in this chapter.

Bibliography Bénatouïl, T. 2006. Faire usage: La pratique du stoïcisme. Paris. Bénatouïl, T. 2009. Les Stoïciens III: Musonius, Épictète, Marc Aurèle. Figures du Savoir 45. Paris. Billerbeck, M. 1978. Epiktet “Vom Kynismus,” herausgegeben und übersetzt mit einem Kommentar. Philosophia Antiqua 34. Leiden. Bonhöffer, A. 1890. Epictet und die Stoa. Stuttgart. Bonhöffer, A. 1894. Die Ethik des Stoikers Epictet. Stuttgart. Colardeau, T. 2004. Étude sur Epictète. La Versanne. Originally published in 1903. Frede, M. 1997. “Euphrates of Tyre.” In Aristotle and After, edited by R. Sorabji, 1–​11. London. Hadot, P. 1993. “Une clé des Pensées de Marc Aurèle:  Les trois topoi philosophiques selon Épictète.” In Exercises spirituels et philosophie antique, 135–​172. 3rd ed. Paris. Hadot, P. 1998. The Inner Citadel: The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. Cambridge, MA, and London. Hahn, J. 1989. Der Philosoph und die Gesellschaft: Selbstverständnis, öffentliches Auftreten und populäre Erwartungen in der hohen Kaiserzeit. Stuttgart. Inwood, B. 2005. Reading Seneca: Stoic Philosophy at Rome. Oxford. Long, A. A. 2002. Epictetus: A Stoic and Socratic Guide to Life. Oxford. Nesselrath, H.-​G., ed. 2009. Dion von Prusa: Der Philosoph und sein Bild. Sapere 13. Tübingen. Ramelli, I. 2008. Stoici Romani. Milan. Reydams-​Schils, G. 2005. The Roman Stoics: Self, Responsibility, and Affection. Chicago.

The Stoics   537 Reydams-​Schils, G. 2010. “Philosophy and Education in Stoicism of the Roman Imperial Era.” Oxford Review of Education 36: 561–​574. Reydams-​Schils, G. 2011. “Authority and Agency in Stoicism.” GRBS 51: 296–​322. Rutherford, R. B. 1989. The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius: A Study. Oxford. Schofield, M. 2007. “Epictetus on Cynicism.” In The Philosophy of Epictetus, edited by T. Scaltas and A. Mason, 71–​86. Oxford and New York. Sellars, J. 2009. The Art of Living: The Stoics on the Nature and Function of Philosophy. 2nd ed. London. Trapp, M. 2007. Philosophy in the Roman Empire: Ethics, Politics and Society. Aldershot. Van Ackeren, M., ed. 2012. A Companion to Marcus Aurelius. Chichester and Malden, MA. Van Geytenbeek, A. C. 1963. Musonius Rufus and Greek Diatribe. Assen. Van Hoof, L. 2010. Plutarch’s Practical Ethics: The Social Dynamics of Philosophy. Oxford. Whitmarsh, T. 2001. Greek Literature and the Roman Empire: The Politics of Imitation. Oxford. Zanker, P. 1995. The Mask of Socrates: The Image of the Intellectual in Antiquity. Berkeley, CA.

chapter 34

Epicu reani sm Writ L a rg e Diogenes of Oenoanda Pamela Gordon

If it were not for two men by the name of Diogenes, our conception of Epicureanism during the Roman Empire would be shaped almost exclusively by a venomous anti-​ Epicurean tradition. As a school that identified pleasure as the telos (the fulfillment, or goal of life), Epicureanism was an easy target for hostile observers who may not have understood that philosophy itself was a cardinal Epicurean pleasure. (Epicurus expressed less enthusiasm for food and sex.) Ridicule of the Epicurean theory of pleasure had begun during Epicurus’s lifetime in the late fourth and early third centuries bce, and gained momentum during the late Roman Republic. But anti-​Epicurean discourse took on new life during the empire, when the school was vigorously reviled by a range of authors from the first centuries, including Aelian, Cleomedes the Stoic, Epictetus, Plutarch, and Seneca. In this tradition, the Garden of Epicurus (as the school was sometimes called) was portrayed as a school of vice, its men unmanly and its women an aberration. Among Roman detractors, Epicureanism was too Greek, and among Greeks it was not Greek enough. The Greek orator and self-​styled Stoic philosopher Dio Chrysostom, for example, likened the Epicureans to Asiatic followers of Isis and Cybele. Meditating on human awareness of the divine in his Olympic Discourse (97 ce), he describes the allegedly obtuse Epicureans as worshipping an evil female daemon, “a lavish luxury [τρυφή] and ease [ῥᾳθυμία] and uncontrolled wantonness [ὕβριs], whom they call Pleasure [ἡδονή]—​truly a womanish divinity—​and whom they honor and worship with some kind of tinkling cymbals or pipes played in the dark” (trans. Russell 1992). Dio’s description of the supposedly Asiatic-​like Epicureans is especially pointed given its delivery at Olympia (a quintessentially Greek cultic center). Dio Chrysostom does not mention that eunuchs were traditionally among the worshippers of Cybele but the connection

540   Philosophy and Philosophers is latent in his description of the musical instruments, which were associated with the Galli, her castrated priests. The first-​century ce Roman Stoic writer Seneca had made the association explicit: I shall not say, as most of our own (Stoics) do, that the sect of Epicurus is a priestess of vices, but I do say this: it has a bad reputation, it is notorious. “But that is unfair,” someone might protest. Who could know this without having been admitted inside? Its very façade provides opportunity for gossip and inspires wicked expectation. It is like a man in a gown (stola): your chastity remains, your virility is unimpaired, your body has not submitted sexually, but in your hand is a tympanum. (Vit. Beat. 13)

The tambourine-​like tympanum was a frequent attribute of Cybele. Elsewhere Seneca writes similar critiques, though in his Epistles he frequently praises Epicurus. In the second century ce, the Stoic Epictetus drew an explicit connection between the notional castration of the Epicurean male and his own hostile view of Epicurean philosophy. The context is Epictetus’s critique of Epicurus’s denial that there is a “natural community between people.” Epicurus had taught that people seek friendship for their own security and happiness, not because of innate human inclinations. For Epictetus, the very fact that Epicurus wrote late into the night so that others might benefit from his philosophy represents a contradiction. Epictetus writes: It is not possible for a person to destroy human inclinations totally, and even those who mutilate themselves are not able to mutilate men’s natural affections. Thus even Epicurus chopped off everything that has to do with being a man, everything to do with being the master of a household, with being a citizen, with being a friend, but did not chop off human affections. (Discourses 2.20.20)

The Stoic Cleomedes, author of the Caelestia (likely of the second century ce), departed from the routine derision by attributing even Epicurus’s miscalculation of the size of the sun to a compromised masculinity (Caelestia, 58 and 168). For Cleomedes, good science requires a particularly Stoic construction of manliness (as embodied in the Stoic hero Heracles). Less scurrilous ridicule of Epicureanism appears in Athenaeus’s late second-​ century ce Learned Banqueters, a work that cites approximately 1,250 Greek poets, philosophers, and playwrights, all within the literary framework of a days-​long dinner table conversation. To Athenaeus we owe the preservation of quotations from otherwise lost New Comedy plays that feature Epicureans who are overly devoted to the pleasures of the flesh (Gordon 2012). Comic portrayals of Epicureans appear too in Alciphron and Lucian, though the latter also invents more sympathetic Epicurean caricatures, as in Alexander the False Prophet.

Epicureanism Writ Large: Diogenes of Oenoanda    541

Diogenes Laertius Despite the reigning anti-​ Epicurean discourse, Diogenes Laertius and Diogenes of Oenoanda granted Epicureanism an exalted position, the former at the pinnacle of the ancient Greek philosophical tradition, the latter on a massive public monument in a largely Greek-​styled city in Asia Minor. To begin with the later author: Diogenes Laertius’s Lives and Opinions of the Eminent Philosophers (perhaps of the third century ce) is a ten-​book compendium of the biographies and doctrines of the Greek philosophers that culminates in an Epicurean-​friendly Life of Epicurus. Like so many authors of his era, Diogenes Laertius valorizes Greek culture, which had produced “not only philosophy but the human race itself ” (Diog. Laert. 1.3). The tenth book of his work is tremendously important to the history of Epicureanism. Embedded in it are the only completely intact texts of Epicurus: the Letter to Herodotus, the Letter to Menoeceus, and the Letter to Pythocles (the last of which may be pseudepigraphic). Diogenes asserts that the three epistles together summarize Epicurus’s “entire philosophy” (Diog. Laert. 10.28–​29). But because most of our sources on Epicureanism belong to the late Roman Republic or the Roman Empire, and because early Epicurean texts have survived only in fragments, it is difficult to gage whether Laertius’s selection of texts is representative of Epicurus’s extensive oeuvre. The style of the papyrus fragments of Epicurus’s On Nature is quite different, and the letters preserved by Diogenes may be more reflective of post-​Hellenistic interests than is readily apparent. Diogenes Laertius treats all of the major Greek thinkers and philosophical schools, but expresses a particular admiration for Epicurus and Plato. Although he does not identify himself as an Epicurean, Laertius is so well disposed toward the Garden that he offers a fourth text not only as the conclusion to the biography of Epicurus, but as the culmination of his entire work on all of Greek philosophy. These are the Epicurean Kuriai Doxai or Principal Doctrines, forty sayings that were formulated by Epicurus or culled from other Epicurean texts. Much of Diogenes Laertius’s survey of Epicureanism takes the form of a eulogistic defense of Epicurus that leads him to mention a broad array of authors who disparage the Garden. In his estimation, these enemies of Epicurus are all “out of their minds” (Diog. Laert. 10.9). Also catalogued in Laertius’s survey are the names of many Epicurean philosophers, students, and official scholarchs, but he seems never to have heard of Diogenes of Oenoanda. Nor does any other ancient author mention this second Diogenes, but the form and context of Diogenes of Oenoanda’s Epicurean inscription make him an extraordinary author.

Diogenes of Oenoanda Diogenes of Oenoanda is known only from a monumental inscription in Oenoanda, a small inland city in the mountains of Lycia (now in Turkey, near the modern village of

542   Philosophy and Philosophers Incealiler). The early Epicureans had recommended withdrawal from public life, an attitude epitomized in their adage “Live Unnoticed.” But Diogenes’s limestone inscription is an invitation to Epicureanism that was publically displayed on the walls of a stoa—​the choice of building perhaps an architectural pun on Stoicism, the most vociferous philosophical rival to Epicureanism. More than a handbook on Epicureanism, Diogenes’s inscription includes epitomes on physics and ethics, a defense of old age, collections of letters (some by Diogenes, others perhaps by Epicurus himself), a will, and—​running in one long line in especially large letters—​a new version of the Epicurean Principal Doctrines. Inscribed mostly in narrow columns that recall the arrangement of text on a papyrus roll, much of the inscription was composed for this epigraphical context only. As Diogenes explains: “I wished to use this stoa to advertise publicly the [medicines] that bring salvation” (fr. 3). The known fragments (nearly 300, as counted in 2012) contain well over 6,000 words. The original inscription may have consisted of over 25,000 words, which suggests that the original text was the longest known inscription from the ancient Greek and Roman world (Smith 1993, 83). Reconstruction of the original layout of the inscription is controversial, but is aided by the fact that the fragments can be sorted according to distinct letter sizes and column lengths. Although the inscription was dismantled in antiquity and many of the stones were dispersed and used for other purposes, it seems likely that a full excavation would unearth many more fragments. Meanwhile, the known fragments (except those that have been lost since their discovery in the nineteenth century) remain on site and have been recorded in drawings, photographs, 3D images, and squeezes (a type of paper cast). For a variety of reasons, including the style of the lettering, Smith dates Diogenes’s inscription to around the 120s ce, though Clay paces it slightly later (Clay 1989; Smith 1993, 35–​48). As Smith maintains, the resemblance of the lettering of Diogenes’s inscription to another, securely dated inscription is striking. This other major inscription in Oenoanda concerns a benefaction by C. Julius Demosthenes, whose inscription includes a letter from the emperor Hadrian dated August 29, 124 ce, and other documents from the same era (Smith 1993, 40–​43 and Wörrle 1988, 19–​43). Despite his medium, Diogenes seems uninclined to conserve space. Projecting a distinct personal voice even as he imitates Epicurus, Diogenes describes his purpose thus: “I wanted, before being overtaken by death, to compose a [fine] anthem [to celebrate the] fullness [of pleasure] and so to help now those who are well-​constituted. Well, if only one person or two or three or four or five or six or any larger number you choose, reader, provided that it is not very large, were in a bad predicament, I should address them individually and do all in my power to give them the best advice.” After a gap he continues: “So, to reiterate what I was saying, observing that these people are in this predicament, I bewailed their behaviour and wept over the wasting of their lives, and I considered it to be the responsibilty of a good man to help, to the utmost of one’s ability, those who are well-​constituted” (fr. 3 and 2; new reconstruction by Smith 2003, 65). Many of the fragments reveal Diogenes’s biography:  a winter spent in Rhodes,

Epicureanism Writ Large: Diogenes of Oenoanda    543 conversations with other Epicureans, travels to Athens, and stomach or heart problems that were treated with a diet of curdled milk. Much of the work on Diogenes of Oenoanda treats the text as an orthodox handbook that can be used to reconstruct otherwise lost Epicurean doctrine, or, conversely, focuses on reconstructions that rely on texts of Epicurus. Throughout the long history of the school, the Epicureans revered the Epicurean founders (exclusively Epicurus in the case of Lucretius, but four figures cited as “the men” in the case of Philodemus), and strove to be faithful to Epicurus. Nevertheless, Epicurean philosophers and scholars frequently focused on new expositions and defenses of the philosophy rather than on the production of methodical commentaries on early texts. Thus the school’s texts were “not simply a static body of documents to be restored, but a sinuous, evolving entity” (Snyder 2000, 53). Despite Epicurean conservatism, both content and form place Diogenes firmly in this Epicurean tradition, and equally firmly in an imperial Greek context. Diogenes, however, is often considered in isolation. As one scholar has written about the need for interdisciplinary work, “Quite apart from the hope that it would produce a rounded, contextualized, and generally illuminating account of Diogenes, his times, and his Epicureanism, its absence has contributed to the marginalization of Diogenes to the fringes of ancient philosophy and other interested disciplines” (Warren 2000, 148). Many aspects of Diogenes’s inscription deserve further exploration. First, there is its monumentality (Warren 2000). According to Smith, the inscription once covered 260 square meters, the topmost line of its seven courses rising almost 4 meters or around 13 feet above floor level (Smith 1998, 125 and 1993, 92–​93). Possibly 80 meters in length, it has been compared to the Column of Trajan (erected 106–​113 ce): “In both cases, the reader is impressed, almost bludgeoned with a ‘rhetoric of stone’ that conveys a magnificent weight and monumentality” (Snyder 2000, 62). Diogenes asks readers not to read selectively, in the manner of passers-​by (fr. 30), but reading was likely difficult despite the fact that the letters were progressively larger as one looked upwards. While the subject matter is unique, the form fits well with the imperial enthusiasm for epigraphy and the “highly textualized culture” of the Greek world in first centuries of the empire (Whitmarsh 2005, 23). Related to its monumentality is its location in the urban center of Oenoanda, apparently alongside a large “esplanade” that may have been the agora in Diogenes’s era (Smith 1993, 54–​56). Roskam (2007, 143) has argued that Epicurean pleasure was Diogenes’s goal in broadcasting Epicurus’s teachings, and yet the monument’s public situation represents a departure from Epicurean quietism. Directed outward rather than to his own Epicurean circle, Diogenes’s inscription is cosmopolitan in both content and form (see Richter, “Cosmopolitanism,” ­chapter 6 in this volume). As Diogenes writes in his epitome on Ethics, he hopes to reach “those who are called foreigners, though they are not really so.” He continues: “For, while the various segments of the earth give different people a different country, the whole compass of this world gives all people a single country, the entire earth, and a single home, the world” (fr. 30).

544   Philosophy and Philosophers Diogenes expresses concern for outsiders frequently and writes that foreign visitors are among those he aims to help (epikourein; a pun on the name of Epicurus; fr. 3). Elsewhere he announces that he is shouting out his Epicurean message “to all Greeks and non-​Greeks” (fr. 32). In contrast, according to Clement of Alexandria, Epicurus had asserted that Greeks alone are capable of philosophy (Strom. 1.15). Even Diogenes’s choice of a stoa—​which would offer shade in a public location—​may reflect his cosmopolitanism. According to Philostratus’s Lives of the Sophists, stoas—​along with temples, gymnasia, and fountains—​were among the particular amenities that served the needs of visitors to the cities of Asia Minor (VS 613). Yet despite his professed desire to reach “all Greeks and non-​Greeks,” Diogenes expresses acute xenophobia regarding Egyptians and Jews in a recently discovered fragment (see below). Another aspect of the inscription’s connection with the urban life of the Greek East is the way Diogenes characterizes his endeavor as “philanthropic” (fr. 3), thus positioning himself in competition with other, more conventional public benefactions. Epicurus had explained centuries earlier: “It is neither continuous drinking parties nor physical enjoyment of boys and women, or fish or other elements of a lavish banquet that produce a pleasant life, but sober reasoning and searching out reasons for choice and avoidance” (Letter to Menoeceus 132). Updating Epicurus’s instruction, Diogenes contrasts the Epicurean pleasure of studying philosophy with the pleasures of his contemporaries: “I declare that the [vain] fear of [death and that] of the [gods grip many] of us, [and that] joy [of real value is generated not by theatres] and [. . . and] baths [and perfumes] and ointments. [which we] have left to [the] masses, [but by natural science. . . ]” (fr. 2.III.4–​14). Although the restoration is conjectural, the words “masses” and “baths” are certain. For Bendlin, Diogenes’s disparagement of theaters and baths—​typical public benefactions—​was “truly subversive” (2011, 184). The most elaborate second-​century bath complex in Oenoanda was a benefaction that probably postdated Diogenes, but euergetism had already shaped Diogenes’s city. Displayed most likely in the near vicinity of Diogenes’s stoa was the 117-​line Hadrianic inscription that may have been carved by the same stone mason(s). This other inscription records the establishment of the Demostheneia, an elaborate weeks-​long musical and theatrical festival to take place every five years. The same stones reveal that the eponymous benefactor Demosthenes had outdone his ancestors by providing three stoas and a market. What the philanthropic Diogenes offers instead is the salve of Epicurean wisdom, which he describes through medical metaphors: the people are ill, and his inscription offers the remedies (φάρμακα, fr. 3). The inscription itself is also relevant to Diogenes’s role as public benefactor. As Warren (2000, 148) writes: “Epigraphy is clearly the medium in which civic values were projected at this time, and so Diogenes uses this very medium on a gargantuan scale to launch his counter-​attack.” Although the inscription does not undermine what we know of the original teachings of Epicurus, Diogenes offers distinctive expansions of Epicurean doctrine and demonstrates the elasticity of Epicurean teachings. A key example of the latter is Diogenes’s version of the Principal Doctrines. Much of the text is recognizable, despite departures from Diogenes Laertius’s text that suggest they had been simplified for memorizing and

Epicureanism Writ Large: Diogenes of Oenoanda    545 recitation (Clay 1990). Yet eight of Diogenes’s Principal Doctrines are unique, but are nonetheless granted authenticity by their inclusion in the same continuous, single-​line band that Clay 1990, 2535 describes as “Epicurus’s underwriting” of Diogenes’s Ethics. Another corresponds to one of the Sententiae Vaticanae, a version that is longer than, but similar to Diogenes Laertius’s collection. Thus, Diogenes Laertius and Diogenes of Oenoanda present us with two versions of the Principal Doctrines, both of which may well resemble only roughly a collection directly formulated by Epicurus or his immediate disciples. The likelihood that Diogenes himself was not the innovator is suggested by the fact that he includes his own collection of maxims elsewhere, in multiline columns. There Diogenes’s authorship is indicated by the apparent epilogue to these maxims, which reminds readers that he “turned so many letters to stone” for their sake (fr. 116). Perhaps the strongest indication of Diogenes’s stance on cultural phenomena in the first centuries of the Roman Empire is his critique of oracular prophecy. Epicureans of all eras denied that the gods intervene in human affairs (for good or for ill), and Diogenes Laertius records that Epicurus rejected all types of divination (Diog. Laert. 10.135). Yet the extant works of Epicurus contain no criticism of oracular prophecy in particular, as would be in keeping with the decrease in the importance of Delphi and other oracular centers during the Hellenistic era, (as was later remarked by Cicero in Div. 2.117). But in the Greek East of the first centuries of the empire there was a sharp rise in the interest in oracles, a phenomenon that may be regarded as part of a broader “rhetoric of tradition” and a “successful export of Greek culture” to Asia Minor (Bendlin 2011, 220 and 221). As a faithful Epicurean, Diogenes puts traditional Epicurean theology into service, writing his own critique of a contemporary development. Similarly, Lucretius takes Epicurus’s general teachings about the gods as his starting point when he censures Roman augury (e.g., Lucr. 6.83–​89). Recent discoveries strongly suggest that there was an oracle to Apollo in Oenoanda (Milner 2000), but Diogenes takes a longer view. Like the second-​century Cynic Oenomaus of Gadara, Diogenes uses a Herodotean locus classicus to argue against the belief in oracular prophecy. Regarding the famous story of Croesus’s Delphic consultation about Cyrus’s empire (Hdt. 1.53), Diogenes asks: “Why does he (Apollo) give oracles to any who want them against those who have committed no sin, either big or small, against him? For this is incompatible with the majesty of a god.” “Moreover,” Diogenes continues, in this traditional and erroneous account, “Apollo also takes bribes”: because of his desire to procure oracular responses, Croesus dedicated large quantities of gold to Delphi (New Fragment [henceforth NF] 143). Also in connection with traditional oracles recorded by Herodotus, Diogenes writes in a fragment that was probably adjacent: “what great misfortunes some people have experienced on account of this ambiguity and intricate obliqueness of oracles” (fr. 23). Warren (2000, 148) describes Diogenes’s critique of oracular prophecy as a response in kind to the “epigraphical genre” of inscribed oracular utterances, contemporary examples of which are found in Oenoanda (Milner 2000). One of the most valuable texts in the inscription is a series of fragments that has been named the Letter to Mother (fr. 125–​126, and possibly fr. 127). In this letter a

546   Philosophy and Philosophers student of philosophy apparently assures his mother that her dreams about him are meaningless: despite the dire situation that the dreams suggest, her son is learning to be “as joyful as the gods” (an Epicurean ideal). The writer explains that dream images can be sensed not by physical touch, but only by the mind. Although the text is fragmentary, it is evidently in accord with a well-​known Epicurean explanation that dreams—​rather than being sent by the gods—​are merely streams of fine simulacra that flow from the actual object or person, entering the mind of the dreamer along with any distortions that conditions induce (Diogenes of Oenoanda fr. 9 and 10; Lucr. 4.26–​44, 4.722–​822, and 4.962–​1036; Epicurus Ep. Hdt. 51). As Diogenes writes elsewhere, dreamers may misinterpret what they experience, “for the means of testing the opinion are asleep at the time” (fr. 9). Having offered his scientific explanation, the philosophy student urges his mother: “But in heaven’s name, do not be so generous with the contributions which you are constantly sending us, for I do not want you to go without anything so that I may have more than enough” (fr. 126). Although the Letter to Mother has been included in editions of Epicurus, some scholars read it as a letter from Diogenes to his own mother, and others suspect that it is fictional (see Smith 1993, 555–​558; on fictional letters in the Second Sophistic, see ­chapters 32 [“Epistolography”] and 43 [“Christian Apocrypha”] in this volume). Signs of its being a later composition include: it paraphrases Epicurus’s Principal Doctrines, resembles other pseudepigraphic letters attributed to philosophers, and overturns widespread clichés about the Epicureans (Fletcher 2012 and Gordon 1996, 66–​93). This last element is particularly telling. The first generation of the Garden had included women who were bona fide students of philosophy, but hostile observers labeled the women as hetaerae and portrayed their inclusion as an emblem of Epicurean licentiousness (Gordon 2012, 72–​108). This letter, however, validates the notion that a woman could be the recipient of Epicurean wisdom. A third fragment even predicts: “you will turn away from the speeches of the rhetoricians, in order that you may hear something of our tenets” (fr. 127). Judging it unlikely that a woman would be entreated to leave rhetoric in favor of philosophy, some scholars would attribute this last fragment to a letter to a male recipient (see Smith 1993, 559–​560). But fragment 127 appears less incongruous if we consider the Letter to Mother as a composition not of the late fourth century bce, when a woman who studied philosophy would be labeled a hetaera, but of an era when women were more active in public life and when Diogenes Laertius urged his female reader to master Epicurus completely (Diog. Laert. 10.28–​29). Thus the Letter to Mother achieves several ends: it offers a portrait of a young Epicurus who is a model of filial piety, serves as a medium for an Epicurean theory of the mechanics of dreams, and challenges a hostile stereotype of women in the Garden. The tendency of Diogenes’s non-​Epicurean contemporaries to regard dreams as “a preferred medium of divine communication” (Bendlin 2011, 181), may also indicate a specifically second-​century context. Among Diogenes’s unique contributions to Epicurean theology is his commentary on ancient portrayals of divinities. In contrast with the vengeful gods of many ancient cultures (including Greek and Roman), the gods as conceived by Epicurus are contented, “blessed” beings who never harm people (Principal Doctrines 1). Whether he

Epicureanism Writ Large: Diogenes of Oenoanda    547 took his assertion from an earlier text or was offering an original elaboration, Diogenes illustrates the concept in a unique way by critiquing traditional iconography. Instead of depicting gods armed with a bow (as was traditional for, e.g., Apollo, Artemis, and Heracles) or guarded by wild beasts (traditional for Cybele), Diogenes asserts:  “we ought to make statues of the gods genial and smiling, so that we may smile back at them rather than be afraid of them” (fr. 19). It may be that Diogenes’s assertion is a particularly Epicurean response to Christian and Jewish rejection of “graven images” comparable to Dio Chrysostom’s “exalted interpretation” of Phidias’s cult statue of Zeus (Clay 2000, 89–​91). Elsewhere Diogenes corrects the common misapprehension that the Epicureans were atheists, asserting that such views were held by other philosophers, notably Pythagoras. In accord with his disapproval of the notion that the gods communicate with human beings by means of oracles and dreams, Diogenes deplores the prevalence of superstition (ψευδοδοξία) among his contemporaries “who suffer from a common disease, as in a plague . . . and their number is increasing (for in mutual emulation they catch the disease from one another, like sheep)” (fr. 3). Here Diogenes does not enumerate the superstitions of this growing number of victims. But a recently discovered fragment identifies two peoples as the most superstitious, or, literally, “the most fearful of divine power” (δεισιδαιμονέστατοι). In accordance with the Epicurean view that fear of the gods is a human failing that brings no societal good, Diogenes writes: “A clear indication of the complete inability of the gods to prevent wrongdoings is provided by the nations of the Jews and Egyptians, who, while being the most superstitious of all peoples, are the vilest of all peoples” (NF 126). Various explanations for this unexpectedly hostile commentary on Judaism have been offered. Diogenes may be expressing Hellenic aversion to circumcision, or may be influenced here by traditional lore about Jews and Christians such as their alleged cannibalism (Smith 1998, 140–​142). In Rome both Egyptians and Jews were sometimes regarded as practitioners of unwelcome alien cults (Gruen 2002, 30–​33; 52–​53), and Diogenes’s focus on Jews and Egyptians may be “an Epicurean counter to the Stoic, and then Middle Platonist, tendency to regard precisely these two nations as exemplifying the claim that barbarian philosophies contained elements of the true religion of primal times” (Gordon and Reynolds 2003, 289). It is also possible—​ depending upon its date—​that this passage is inspired in part by the widespread and violent Jewish revolt of 115–​118 or possibly of the second great revolt in Palestine in 132–​ 135 ce (Smith 1998, 142). A more general context would be the vigorous Jewish critiques of Epicureanism such as those found in Philo (20 bce–​50 ce) and Josephus (37 to ca. 100 ce), which are epitomized by the Hebrew transliteration of Epicurus’s name as a term for heretic. Writing all or most of the inscription toward the end of his life, Diogenes includes a defense of old age that apparently stretched across much of the highest level of the inscription and is thus far represented by fifty-​three fragments (Smith 2004, 39). In it he expresses exasperation with young men’s erroneous views of the elderly and quotes Agamemnon’s words to Nestor in the Iliad (2.53) as proof that old men are good speakers (fr. 138 and 142). A new fragment whose physical attributes match the Old Age treatise

548   Philosophy and Philosophers (NF 136), mentions “an elaborate house with fretted and gold-​spangled ceilings” as something to be avoided, recommending instead simple clothing and food, particularly cabbage (elsewhere Diogenes commends chick peas). Here Diogenes takes part in an Epicurean tradition of improvising on Epicurus’s teaching that “it is better to recline on a straw mattress and have no worries than to have a golden couch and luxurious table” (Usener fr. 207; cf. Letter to Menoeceus 131–​132 and Lucr. 2.20–​36). Thinking beyond his own life—​and expressing an idea found in no other Epicurean sources—​Diogenes hoped for an Epicurean Golden Age when people would have no slaves, but would study philosophy and farm together (NF 21). Despite evident earthquake damage and the predations of the Oenoandans that obscured Diogenes’s Golden Age message for centuries, we can hope for an excavation that will reveal yet more of Diogenes’s benefaction, elucidating even more clearly the state of Epicureanism in the second century ce.

Further Reading The most up-​to-​date book-​length editions of Diogenes of Oenoanda are published by Smith (1993 and 2003). Since 2004, newly discovered or redeciphered fragments have been published nearly annually and are now reprinted in Hammerstaedt and Smith 2014, which begins with NF 136. All of these editions include commentary and English translation. Note also the catalog of publications of new fragments on the Oenoanda project’s website, under the auspices of the Deutsche Archäologische Institut (DAI) http://​www.dainst.org/​ de. Fragments cited in this chapter follow Smith’s or Hammerstaedt and Smith’s numeration, and all translations are by Smith 1993 or Hammerstaedt and Smith 2014, unless otherwise noted. Smith (1993, 599–​615) offers a concordance of the various numeration systems. Earlier editions and translations of Diogenes of Oenoanda include the publication of the first discoveries in the nineteenth century (Hebedey and Kalinka 1897), as well as Chilton 1971, and Casanova 1984. The production of print editions of Diogenes of Oenoanda is problematic not only because the fragments present us with a complicated and lacuna-​ridden puzzle, but also because the printed page cannot reproduce the layout of the inscription or capture its full impact as experienced by readers in antiquity. On various reconstructions of the layout see Erler 2009, figs. 1 and 2. On other major inscriptions in and near Oenoanda, see Kokkinia 2000, Rogers 1991, and Wörrle 1988. Considerations of the second-​century context of the inscription include:  Bendlin 2011 on dreams, oracular prophecy, and the subversive nature of Diogenes’s endeavor; Clay 1989 on Diogenes’s community and intellectual background; Clay 2000 on theology; Fletcher 2012 and Gordon 1996 on the Letter to Mother; Roskam 2007 on Diogenes’s response to euergetic practices; Scholz 2003 on Diogenes’s community; Snyder 2000 on the production of Epicurean texts; and Warren 2000 on the monumentality of the inscription. Innovations in Epicureanism in general are explored in Fish and Sanders 2011 and Holmes and Shearin 2012. The most recent critical editions of Diogenes Laertius are Marcovich 1999–​2002 and Dorandi 2013. For recent reevaluations of Diogenes Laertius, see Gigante 1992; Goulet-​Cazé 1999; Meier 1992 and 2007; and Warren 2007. Gigante examines Diogenes Laertius’s connections with Epicureanism. Warren suggests that Diogenes Laertius does not express “any personal philosophical allegiance” (2007, 138).

Epicureanism Writ Large: Diogenes of Oenoanda    549 Recent handbooks on Epicureanism include Warren 2009. Erler 2009, Erler and Bees 2000, and Ferguson 1990 treat Epicureanism in the Roman Empire. Maso 1999 treats Seneca’s many affirmative citations of Epicurean philosophy. Hershbell 1992 and Boulogne 2003 examine Plutarch’s critique of Epicureanism. On Epictetus and Stoics in general, see ­chapter 33 in this volume; on Cleomedes, see Bowen and Todd 2004. On anti-​Epicurean discourse in antiquity, see Gordon 2012.

Bibliography Bendlin, A. 2011. “On the Uses and Disadvantages of Divination: Oracles and Their Literary Representations in the Time of the Second Sophistic.” In The Religious History of the Roman Empire: Pagans, Jews, and Christians, edited by J. A. North and S. R. F. Price, 175–​250. Oxford and New York. Boulogne, J. 2003. Plutarque dans le miroir d’Épicure: Analyse d’une critique systématique de l’épicurisme. Villeneuve d’Ascq. Bowen, C., and R. B. Todd. 2004. Cleomedes’ Lectures on Astronomy:  A  Translation of The Heavens. Berkeley, CA. Casanova, A. 1984. “I frammenti di Diogene” d’Enoanda. Florence. Chilton, W. 1971. Diogenes of Oenoanda: The Fragments. London. Clay, D. 1989. “A Lost Epicurean Community.” BICS 30: 313–​335. Reprinted in Paradosis and Survival:  Three Chapters in the History of Epicurean Philosophy, 232–​256. Ann Arbor, MI, 1998. Clay, D. 1990. “The Philosophical Inscription of Diogenes of Oenoanda:  New Discoveries, 1969–​1983.” ANRW 2.36.4: 2446–​2559. Clay, D. 1998. Paradosis and Survival: Three Chapters in the History of Epicurean Philosophy. Ann Arbor, MI. Clay, D. 2000. “Diogenes and His Gods.” In Epikureismus in der späten Republik und der Kaiserzeit, edited by Michael Erler, 76–​92. Stuttgart. Dorandi, T. 2013. Diogenes Laertius: “Lives of Eminent Philosophers”. Cambridge. Erler, M. 2009. “Epicureanism in the Roman Empire.” In The Cambridge Companion to Epicurianism, edited by J. Warren, 46–​64. Cambridge. Erler, M., and R. Bees, eds. 2000. Epikureismus in der späten Republik und der Kaiserzeit. Bonn. Ferguson, J. 1990. “Epicureanism under the Roman Empire.” ANRW 2.36: 2257–​2327. Fish, J., and K. R. Sanders, eds. 2011. Epicurus and the Epicurean Tradition. Cambridge. Fletcher, R. 2012. “Epicurus’s Mistresses: Pleasure, Authority, and Gender in the Reception of the Kuriai Doxai in the Second Sophistic.” In Dynamic Reading: Studies in the Reception of Epicureanism, edited by B. Holmes and W. H. Shearin, 2–​88. New York. Gigante, M. 1992. “Das zehnte Buch des Diogenes Laertios: Epikur und der Epikureismus.” ANRW 2.36.6: 4302–​4307. Gordon, P. 1996. Epicurus in Lycia: The Second-​Century World of Diogenes of Oenoanda. Ann Arbor, MI. Gordon, P. 2012. The Invention and Gendering of Epicurus. Ann Arbor, MI. Gordon, R., and J. Reynolds. 2003. “Roman Inscriptions, 1995–​2000.” JRS 93: 212–​294. Goulet-​Cazé, M.-​O. 1999. Vies et doctrines des philosophes illustres. Paris. Gruen, E. S. 2002. Diaspora: Jews amidst Greeks and Romans. Cambridge, MA.

550   Philosophy and Philosophers Hammerstaedt, J., and M. F. Smith. 2014. The Epicurean Inscription of Diogenes of Oinoanda: Ten Years of New Discoveries and Research. Bonn. Heberdey, R., and E. Kalinka. 1897. “Die philosophische Inschrift von Oinoanda.” BCH 21: 346–​443. Hershbell, J. P. 1992. “Plutarch and Epicureanism.” ANRW 2.36.5: 3353–​3383. Holmes, B., and W. H. Shearin, eds. 2012. Dynamic Reading:  Studies in the Reception of Epicureanism. Oxford. Kokkinia, C. 2000. Die Opramoas-​Inschrift von Rhodiapolis: Euergetismus und soziale Elite in Lykien. Bonn. Marcovich, M. 1999–​2002. Diogenis Laertii Vitae philosophorum. 3 vols. Stuttgart. Maso, S. 1999. Lo Sguardo della Verità: Cinque Studi su Seneca. Padua. Mejer, J. 1992. “Diogenes Laertius and the Transmission of Greek Philosophy.” ANRW 2.36.5: 3556–​3602. Mejer, J. 2007. “Biography and Doxography:  Four Crucial Questions Raised by Diogenes Laertius.” In Die griechische Biographie in hellenistischer Zeit. Akten des internationalen Kongresses vom 26.–​29. Juli 2006 in Würzburg, edited by M. Erler and S. Schorn, 431–​442. Berlin. Milner, N. P. 2000. “Notes and Inscriptions on the Cult of Apollo at Oinoanda.” Anatolian Studies 50: 139–​149. Rogers, G. M. 1991. “Demosthenes of Oenoanda and Models of Euergetism.” JRS 81: 91–​100. Roskam, G. 2007. Live Unnoticed = (ΛΑΘΕ ΒΙΩΣΑΣ) λάθε βιώσας: On the Vicissitudes of an Epicurean Doctrine. Leiden and Boston. Russell, D. A., ed. 1992. Dio Chrysostom: Orations VII, XII, XXXVI. Cambridge. Scholz, P. 2003. “Ein römischer Epikureer in der Provinz: Der Adressatenkreis der Inschrift des Diogenes von Oinoanda—​Bemerkungen zur Verbreitung von Literalität und Bildung im kaiserlichen Kleinasien.” In Philosophie und Lebenswelt in der Antike, edited by K. Piepenbrink, 208–​228. Darmstadt. Smith, M. F., ed. and trans. 1993. Diogenes of Oinoanda: The Epicurean Inscription. La scuola di Epicuro Supplemento 1. Naples. Smith, M. F. 1998. “Excavations at Oinoanda 1997: The New Epicurean Texts.” Anatolian Studies 48: 125–​170. Smith, M. F. 2003. Supplement to Diogenes of Oinoanda: The Epicurean Inscription. La scuola di Epicuro Supplemento 3. Naples. Smith, M. F. 2004. “In Praise of the Simple Life: A New Fragment of Diogenes of Oinoanda.” Anatolian Studies, 54:35–​46 Snyder, H. G. 2000. Teachers and Texts in the Ancient World. New York. Usener, H. 1887. Epicurea. Leipzig. Warren, J. 2000. “Diogenes Epikourios: Keep Taking the Tablets.” JHS 120: 144–​148. Warren, J. 2007. “Diogenes Laertius, Biographer of Philosophy.” In Ordering Knowledge in the Roman Empire, edited by J. König and T. Whitmarsh, 133–​149. Cambridge. Warren, J., ed. 2009. The Cambridge Companion to Epicureanism. Cambridge. Whitmarsh, T. 2005. The Second Sophistic. Oxford. Wörrle, M. 1988. Stadt und Fest im kaiserzeitlichen Kleinasien: Studien zu einer agonistischen Stiftung aus Oinoanda. Vestigia 39. Munich.

chapter 35

Skep tic i sm Richard Bett

Modern scholarship recognizes two philosophical traditions in the ancient Greco-​ Roman world as skeptical:  the Academy, in a certain period of its history, and Pyrrhonism. While only the Pyrrhonists used the term skeptikos, “inquirer,” to refer to themselves, it was already perceived in antiquity—​particularly, as we shall see, in the period covered by this volume—​that Pyrrhonism and the phase of the Academy that we now call skeptical had much in common with one another. Central to both traditions is a practice of inducing suspension of judgment through a presentation of opposing arguments on the same subject. The skeptical Academy began with Arcesilaus (316/​315–​241/​240 bce), the fifth head of the Academy after Plato, and extended to Philo of Larissa in the early first century bce. But Philo’s skepticism was of a highly mitigated kind, allowing the holding of opinions, even if only tentative and admittedly fallible ones—​in contrast to the rigorous suspension of judgment promoted earlier:1 and Philo’s pupil, and subsequently Academic rival, Antiochus of Ascalon seems to have abandoned skepticism entirely, taking this to be truer to Plato’s original legacy.2 These two effectively mark the end of the Academy as an institution. But the enfeebling and eventual rejection of skepticism that they represent led to a reaction by Aenesidemus of Cnossos, who appears to have belonged for a time to the Academy himself. Setting himself against the Academy, and especially the Academy of his own day, Aenesidemus founded a new rigorously skeptical movement claiming inspiration from Pyrrho of Elis (ca. 360–​270 bce).3 Pyrrho’s own views are hard to reconstruct, and he does not seem to have founded any lasting tradition of thought; but Aenesidemus clearly read him as eschewing all doctrines, and hence as a suitable figurehead for his own new outlook. This new Pyrrhonist movement lasted at least until the second century ce; although we have no indication that it was ever a formal school, we know the names of several of its adherents, and we also have extensive surviving writings from one of these, Sextus Empiricus. Thus, in the period covered by this volume, we have one living skeptical tradition, the Pyrrhonists; the skeptical tradition from the Academy, and indeed the Academy itself, has been dead, at least as a formal institution, for some time. It is therefore somewhat

552   Philosophy and Philosophers surprising to find that several people in the second century ce seem to have treated the thought of the Academy, and especially the skeptical Academy, as a live option. Epictetus twice engages in polemic against Academics who claim to subvert our knowledge of even the most basic facts about the world around us (Discourses 1.5, 2.20–​1-​5); and Galen devotes a whole work (De Optima Doctrina, On the Best Method of Teaching) to polemic against skeptical Academic ideas. In Galen’s case the target is explicit; Favorinus is the holder of the Academic position being criticized. And that Epictetus also had Favorinus in mind seems clear from the fact that, as Galen tells us (Opt. Doctr. 1, p.  92, 12–​14 Barigazzi), Favorinus wrote a work Against Epictetus, featuring a dialogue between Epictetus and a slave of Plutarch. In the same passage Galen also tells us that Favorinus wrote another work called Plutarch, or the Academic Disposition. The prominence of Plutarch in this context is no accident; besides being Favorinus’s teacher, Plutarch shows clear interest in the skeptical Academy (despite also being strongly attracted to some of the more doctrinal sides of Plato), and sometimes makes use of arguments of Academic character in his own polemics against the Stoics and the Epicureans. Both Favorinus and Plutarch are featured elsewhere in this volume; and in recent years there have been other good, concise treatments of Favorinus’s credentials as an Academic skeptic (see Further Reading, below). I will therefore confine myself to a few remarks about the extent of the connection between Favorinus’s embrace of the Academic label and his broader rhetorical activity. The rest of the chapter will then concentrate on the Pyrrhonist side of things—​though, as we shall see, Favorinus has some involvement with this side as well. Simon Swain has plausibly said of Favorinus that “Academic scepticism suited his philosophical pretensions and his rhetorical instincts as someone who might wish to argue on both sides of the question to demonstrate his skills in constructing and demolishing an argument”;4 and such a combination of philosophy and rhetoric would surely not be unexpected in a leading figure of the Second Sophistic. But a strong aspect of showmanship and performance was characteristic of the skeptical Academy from the start. Neither Arcesilaus nor Carneades (214–​129/​8 bce), the other great head of the school in its skeptical phase, wrote anything; both depended entirely on the spoken word, and both were renowned for their use of it. Diogenes Laertius tells us that Arcesilaus “was the first to argue on both sides, and the first to alter the discourse handed down by Plato, making it more contentious [eristikôteron] through question and answer” (4.28). And Cicero tells us that Arcesilaus would invite members of his audience to state their opinions, and that he would then argue against them (Fin. 2.2., cf. De or. 3.80). The details of these reports do not entirely agree, but I doubt there was any rigid formula; the main point is that Arcesilaus worked by means of extemporaneous speaking in public, and that the result, no matter what materials his audience presented him with, would be a set of opposing arguments on the same subject. As for Carneades, he was famous for have given two speeches on successive days, while on an embassy to Rome in 155 bce: the first was in favor of justice, the second against it (Lactantius, Div. inst. 5.14.3–​5, summarizing a now lost portion of Cicero’s Republic). Again, there is a philosophical purpose in addition to a rhetorical display; Carneades wants to bring

Skepticism   553 about a situation in which equally powerful opposing arguments produce suspension of judgment—​in this case, about the value of justice. But the display is clearly an important element in that enterprise. So if Favorinus did marry his philosophical and rhetorical interests in the way that Swain suggests, this would be quite consonant with the Academic tradition he claims to represent, in addition to belonging well within the sphere of his sophistic activities in general. If Favorinus’s engagement with Academic skepticism was nothing but a rhetorical pose, the verdict would of course be different. But the fact that Galen thought him a philosopher worth refuting, and the fact that he wrote the books referred to in Galen’s essay, suggest otherwise. Yet perhaps a still better indication of Favorinus’s commitment to philosophy is, paradoxically, his interest in the other skeptical tradition, Pyrrhonism. We are told that Favorinus also composed a work in ten books called Pyrrhonian Modes (Purrôneioi Tropoi, Aulus Gellius 11.5.5); the Modes are sets of standardized forms of Pyrrhonian argument, which occupy an important role in Sextus Empiricus’s account of Pyrrhonism and are discussed or mentioned by several other authors. Gellius’s information has been suspected, but on no good grounds.5 Assuming it is correct, Favorinus must have paid very close attention to the Modes and written about them in great detail; Diogenes Laertius also tells us that Favorinus presented one of the sets of Modes in a different order from his own (9.87), which tends to support this. It is hard to imagine a rhetorical function for this work; rather, we seem to have evidence of sustained philosophical engagement on Favorinus’s part, quite independent of his public persona as a sophist. The depth of interest in Pyrrhonism suggested by this work has also been regarded as problematic seeing that Favorinus identified himself as an Academic; given the history sketched at the beginning, the two traditions were generally seen as distinct and even rival forms of skepticism. But we know that, in this period and in the circles to which Favorinus belonged, there was discussion of the extent of resemblance between the two. Plutarch wrote a work called On the Difference between Pyrrhonists and Academics (Lamprias catalog 64). The title does not, I think, allow us to infer that he saw the difference as significant; for all we know, the work could have been designed to show how small the difference was. But even if Plutarch did think there was an important difference between them, it is by no means clear that Favorinus agreed. Aulus Gellius, in the same chapter as he tells us of Favorinus’s work on the Modes, briefly addresses the question. He says that the two traditions have a great deal in common, but that “they have been thought” (existimati sunt, 11.5.8) to differ particularly in that the Academics assert the definite conclusion that nothing can be known, whereas the Pyrrhonists avoid even that conclusion. Since Favorinus features prominently in Gellius’s work as both a character and a source, and Gellius does not otherwise show an extensive knowledge of the history of skepticism, it can hardly be doubted that Favorinus is the source of this material. Whether the supposed difference between the two schools is one that Favorinus accepted, or one that he simply reported, but rejected himself, is impossible to say for sure. Galen, in his critique of Favorinus, speaks of the Academics and Pyrrhonists as if they are interchangeable (Opt. Doctr.

554   Philosophy and Philosophers 2, p. 94, 16–​17; 3, p. 102, 3–​4 Barigazzi); but he does not discuss whether Favorinus himself saw a significant difference between the two. And since his main goal is to convict Favorinus of self-​contradiction, it is difficult to get from him a clear or consistent picture of what Favorinus’s conception of Academic skepticism was. Certainly Gellius’s report about what the Academics “have been thought” to maintain echoes claims about the Academics that can be found in Cicero (e.g., Acad. 1.45, 2.29) and Sextus (e.g., Pyr. 1.3, 1.226); and Sextus takes this as a major divide between Academic and Pyrrhonist thinking. So either way, Favorinus would be correctly representing a prominent strand of thought about the difference between the two. Either way, though, he would also be acknowledging important areas of overlap—​enough, perhaps, to explain his considerable interest in Pyrrhonism. On balance, however, I am inclined to think that a self-​professed Academic who also wrote extensively about Pyrrhonism is more likely to have viewed the two outlooks as amounting to essentially the same—​in other words, that he merely reported, but did not endorse, the alleged difference noted by Gellius. In this case he will have conceived of Pyrrhonism as furnishing new resources for his own Academic position. Favorinus’s philosophizing, then, can be seen as to some extent part and parcel of the rhetorical activity for which he was celebrated in his own day, but to some extent separate from it. This makes him a complex figure; but at least he is recognizably connected with the intellectual and cultural trends with which this volume is mainly concerned. With the Pyrrhonists, and particularly Sextus Empiricus, matters are very different. In what follows I develop this theme in particular; in the course of doing so, I aim also to put on display some central features of the Pyrrhonist philosophy. For one thing, we get absolutely no sense of the Pyrrhonists as public figures or well-​ known individuals. Recent studies of the Second Sophistic6 have emphasized the self-​ promotion or self-​fashioning characteristic of the sophists of the second century ce; they devoted considerable energy to creating particular identities and projecting these in public. While one would not, of course, necessarily expect the same motivations from philosophers, the contrast with Favorinus—​who clearly did cultivate a certain public persona, but who also clearly qualifies as a philosopher—​is nonetheless striking. While Pyrrhonism in general is known, as we saw, to Plutarch, Galen, and Aulus Gellius, we never get any portraits of individual Pyrrhonists. Diogenes Laertius, in his lives of Pyrrho and Pyrrho’s disciple Timon, names a number of adherents of the later Pyrrhonist movement besides Aenesidemus and Sextus Empiricus, and occasionally cites some of them for particular points (9.70, 88, 106, 116). Several of these names appear only as part of a “succession” of Pyrrhonist philosophers, and as such are dubious; doxographers (that is, summarizers of philosophical doctrines) in later antiquity loved to construct these teacher-​pupil lineages of particular schools, often on little or no evidence. But in any case, we are never told anything about any of these characters except their names and, sometimes, their cities of origin, a title of a book they wrote, or who they allegedly taught or were taught by. We do not even get any colorful anecdotes about their habits, of the sort that fill Diogenes’s pages (including his pages on Pyrrho and Timon themselves). And no other ancient author makes up for this deficiency. So

Skepticism   555 it is difficult to suppose that any of them made, or were attempting to make, much of an impression on their contemporaries. And the same is true even of Sextus Empiricus himself. Diogenes mentions him just once, along with a pupil of his, Saturninus (9.116), who to Diogenes’s knowledge (and no other author contradicts this) seems to be the last member of the Pyrrhonist movement. Diogenes refers to Sextus’s works as “very fine” (kallista). Aside from this, Sextus appears to have gone virtually unnoticed in his own time (whenever exactly that was—​ more on this later). The pseudo-​Galenic Introduction or the Doctor mentions him as an Empiricist doctor (14.683K), a point confirmed by Diogenes as well as by the title Empiricus; but here too there is no elaboration. And, what is perhaps still more surprising, Sextus’s own voluminous surviving works tell us absolutely nothing else about him as a person. He refers to himself occasionally as a medical practitioner; otherwise he does not talk about himself at all, except as an adherent of Pyrrhonism. This is about as far as one can imagine from the typically sophistic project of constructing and promoting an identity. He is clearly interested in somehow promoting Pyrrhonism—​ although who he takes his readership to be is itself an interesting question, which the writings themselves do little to resolve.7 And in the course of this exercise, a certain authorial personality emerges from his writings—​including, at times, a desire to show off his argumentative prowess. What he is emphatically not interested in showing off is an image of himself as an individual. One possible explanation for the Pyrrhonists’ apparently self-​effacing attitude is philosophical. Unlike the Academics, the Pyrrhonists took suspension of judgment to have an important practical effect: ataraxia, tranquility. Sextus announces this most clearly in a one-​sentence summary of Pyrrhonist skepticism near the beginning of his best-​known work, Outlines of Pyrrhonism: “The skeptical ability is one that produces oppositions among things that appear and things that are thought in any way whatsoever, one from which, because of the equal strength in the opposing objects and accounts, we come first to suspension of judgement, and after that to tranquility” (Pyr. 1.8). Unfortunately, his explanations of why suspension of judgment has this result are not entirely consistent. On the one hand, he tells us that the skeptic starts as someone who is looking for tranquility by discovering the truth. The search for the truth is then frustrated by the fact that he keeps on encountering equally powerful opposing positions on any question, leading to suspension of judgment. But he finds, paradoxically, that this suspension of judgment itself produces the tranquility that he was seeking in the first place. Here it sounds as if the reason for the tranquility is that one has given up on a fruitless search; one yearned to know the real nature of things, one’s lack of knowledge was a source of constant anxiety, and the abandonment of the attempt means that one is no longer troubled (e.g., Pyr. 1.12, 26, 28–​29). But whenever Sextus explicitly addresses the question why suspension of judgment yields tranquility, he focuses on beliefs specifically about good and bad. And here the idea is that if one believes that certain things are really, or by nature, good or bad, one will think it tremendously important to have the good things and avoid the bad; hence one will be in a state of turmoil, obsessively seeking the good and warding off the bad. By contrast,

556   Philosophy and Philosophers someone who, because of suspension of judgment, no longer thinks of anything as good or bad in the real nature of things will simply care a great deal less about what happens; obsession and turmoil are thereby replaced by tranquility (e.g., Pyr. 1.27–​28, 30; 3.235–​238; Math. 11.110–​167). It is not clear how these two stories are supposed to be related to one another. Sextus clearly thinks they combine into a single coherent position, since at one point he treats them both together, in alternating fashion, with no suggestion of any discrepancy between the two (Pyr. 1.26–​30). One might well wish that he had said more about this topic. However this may be, ataraxia is the skeptic’s telos or goal (Pyr. 1.25)—​or rather, ataraxia about matters of opinion (that is, about topics one’s attitude to which can be affected by philosophical discussion), coupled with metriopatheia, moderate feeling, about matters over which we have no such control (such as hunger, pain, etc.). And this, as I said, may help to explain why the Pyrrhonists do not seem to have been interested in cultivating a public image. If your overriding aim is to be tranquil, you will want to do as little as possible to cause trouble for yourself; in that case, putting yourself in the public spotlight might well be something you will choose to avoid. Politics is perhaps an extreme case; someone who values tranquility above all else is unlikely to care for political office. But the same could easily be true of any activity that exposed you to public judgment and, potentially, public ridicule or shaming—​such as the Second Sophistic’s public displays of oratory; this kind of thing would just not fit with your plan of life. It is no accident that the Epicureans, who also had ataraxia as their goal—​ to be achieved, however, by a very different mechanism—​also cultivated, at least at first, a very private and sheltered lifestyle; lathe biôsas, “live hidden,” was a well-​known saying of Epicurus, criticized by Plutarch (Whether “Live Hidden” is Well Said; Mor. 1128a–​1130e). The picture is admittedly more complicated in the Roman period, and the view of Epicureans as allergic to politics can certainly be overstated8 (although Lucretius, too, seems to have “lived hidden”). The decision of the Epicurean Diogenes of Oenoanda (second century ce) to erect a massive stone inscription, containing his own Epicurean writings as well as some of Epicurus’s own, also suggests a certain desire for public recognition, even if only posthumously (it was constructed late in his life, according to his own words).9 But there is no denying that the ideal of ataraxia is at least a strong deterrent to self-​promotion and to putting oneself in any public line of fire; and here the Pyrrhonists seem to have been more uncompromising than the Epicureans. Another factor may be that if one does not think that anything is in reality good or bad, one is likely to lack enthusiasm for difficult political causes; one needs to think certain things are really important if one is to exert oneself on their behalf. The skeptics’ suspension of judgment on this matter (which the Epicureans do not share) is a further motivation toward quietism. Returning now to Sextus: he has so successfully exemplified the maxim “live hidden” that virtually nothing is known about him beyond what I have already mentioned. He is generally placed in the second century ce, but the evidence is hardly decisive. The latest definitely datable person referred to in his works (who is mentioned in the past tense) is the emperor Tiberius (Pyr. 1.84), so Sextus cannot have been writing earlier

Skepticism   557 than the middle of the first century ce. Beyond this, the evidence, such as it is, depends on connections with other individuals, such as Diogenes Laertius, whose dates are themselves very far from certain. Clear indications as to his place of birth, or where he lived and worked in his maturity, are equally elusive. It is hard to disagree with the conclusion of one of the very few comprehensive attempts to sift the evidence concerning Sextus’s life: “It is necessary to suspend judgement on Sextus’ life in almost every detail.”10 And so the prospects for relating Sextus with any precision to his time and place are not good. But there is yet a further reason for this. Whatever his exact time and place, Sextus seems strikingly cut off from broader intellectual developments of his own day. For although, as just mentioned, the middle of the first century ce is the earliest one could possibly place him, the philosophers he writes about are those of the Hellenistic period and earlier. He refers to several philosophers active in the early first century bce—​ Aenesidemus, the Academics Philo and Antiochus, and the Stoic Posidonius—​but no one clearly later than that. The philosophical opponents on whom he concentrates the most are the Stoics, but he has no inkling of Roman Stoicism; Stoicism, for him, is primarily the school in its prime in Athens under Chrysippus, and only occasionally are later refinements mentioned (e.g., Math. 7.253ff.). He also has no idea of Platonism or Aristotelianism as live forms of philosophy in his own time (as they were, whenever exactly that was); he mentions a few Platonists from the pre-​skeptical phase of the Academy (Speusippus, Xenocrates, Polemon) and a few Aristotelians from the Hellenistic period (Theophrastus, Strato, Critolaus), but no one post-​Hellenistic. Nor does he have any idea of writers in roughly his own time (as Plutarch and Favorinus may very well have been) who undertook what they presented as a revival of the thinking of the skeptical Academy. From Sextus’s perspective it looks as if the clock stops in philosophy—​with the exception of the Pyrrhonist movement itself—​at around 75 bce.11 This peculiar isolation from his own place and time simply compounds the difficulty of saying anything informative that might relate Sextus to the culture in which he lived. What we can do, however, is look at a specific instance of this isolation that is relevant to one of the main concerns of this volume. To put this in context, a word is needed about Sextus’s surviving works. His best-​known work, as already mentioned, is Outlines of Pyrrhonism, which consists of a general introduction to the Pyrrhonist outlook (book 1), plus a critical examination of theories in the standard three areas of philosophy in the Hellenistic period—​logic, physics, and ethics (books 2 and 3). Then there is another, partially surviving work doing the same things at much greater length; the general portion of this work is lost, and the surviving portions consist of two books Against the Logicians, two Against the Physicists, and one Against the Ethicists. We also have a third work of Sextus in six books, each directed against some specialized field of inquiry. The second of these six books is Against the Rhetoricians, and this is the one on which I will focus. Now, one might expect that a book with this title would be concerned with forms of rhetoric prominent in the author’s own day; and, whenever exactly Sextus lived, if this had been his concern, the rhetorical activities characteristic of the Second Sophistic would surely have occupied much of his attention. In fact, however, we see nothing of the kind.

558   Philosophy and Philosophers Against the Rhetoricians begins with a reference to rhetoric as primarily exercised in political and judicial contexts (ep’agoras kai bêmatôn, Math. 2.1). There follow brief discussions of definitions of rhetoric offered by Plato (2–​5), his student Xenocrates and the Stoics (6–​7), and Aristotle (8–​9). Most of the remainder of the book is then devoted to arguments for two connected conclusions: rhetoric is not a genuine technê or expertise, and rhetoric does not exist. The connection between the two points is that if there were genuinely to be such a thing as rhetoric, it would have to qualify as a technê; hence Sextus freely switches between the two conclusions, treating them as interchangeable. As in much of Sextus’s surviving work, the arguments vary in quality and persuasiveness, but they are mostly organized around several themes: rhetoric is not a technê because it has no clear use (20–​47); it does not exist because it has no clear subject matter (48–​59); and it does not exist, or is not a technê (both are stated almost simultaneously, 60) because it has no clear telos or end—​nothing can be clearly specified as “what it is for” (60–​87). Throughout the discussion the assumption persists that rhetoric is typically employed to influence assemblies or juries. This is broadened in the final section (89–​112), where the three parts of rhetoric distinguished by Aristotle—​judicial, deliberative (i.e., political), and focused on praise (“encomiastic”)12—​are each introduced, and there follow brief arguments for the impossibility of each. The book concludes with an objection to all three parts that appeals to arguments elsewhere in Sextus’s oeuvre against the possibility of demonstration—​something that rhetoric surely depends on (106–​112). What is striking about this entire book is the complete absence of any contemporary context. Nothing in Sextus’s descriptions of how rhetoric operates would not be at home in the classical period, and his opening reference to Plato’s Gorgias (2) positively encourages one to think of the fifth and fourth centuries bce. He mentions the Peripatetic Critolaus (12, 20, also 61, where “his friend Aristo” is also mentioned—​ not the Peripatetic Aristo of Ceos, but an obscure peripatetic of that name identified by Quintilian as Critolaus’ pupil; see Inst. Or. 2.15.19–​20), as well as Clitomachus and Charmadas, both Academics of the late second century bce (20); we also hear of the second-​century bce rhetorical theorists Hermagoras and Athenaeus (62)—​juxtaposed, however, with Plato, Xenocrates, and Isocrates (61–​62). But these are the latest datable figures referred to; Sextus’s consistent practice of not mentioning any philosopher later than the early first century bce is precisely paralleled by his references to writers on rhetoric. As for practicing orators, the named examples are Demosthenes (40), his contemporary Demades (16), Aeschines (40), and Corax, the supposed originator of systematic oratory (96–​99) in the fifth century bce. The subjects of incidental anecdotes are also distinctly archaic: Lycurgus (21), Tissaphernes (22), Plato the Old Comedian (35), and the Areopagus “in ancient times” (to palaion, 77). The point is clear enough: Sextus shows no sign of having any awareness of a flourishing rhetorical culture in his own day. Now, it may be said that one characteristic of the Second Sophistic itself is a tendency not to focus on contemporary authors, and to regard the Greek literary universe as something from an earlier period13. But the leading figures of the Second Sophistic were certainly aware of each others’ existence, and wrote in response to what their contemporaries wrote; even if they focused on the Greek past,

Skepticism   559 in doing so they were engaged in a highly sophisticated form of rivalry with one another. Sextus, by contrast, seems to have no idea that the Second Sophistic even exists. Recall, too, that the title of his book is Against the Rhetoricians. He is not himself engaged in a rhetorical exercise (as he himself conceives it, at any rate); rather, his goal is to undermine rhetoric. For someone with this purpose, entirely ignoring its contemporary practitioners would seem a perverse strategy; his readers, whether sympathetic or not, could reasonably object that he is missing the target, or at least one target. As we saw, most of Sextus’s book has to do with judicial and deliberative oratory; yet the oratory of the Second Sophistic was not delivered before political assemblies or law courts. Of course, opportunities also still existed in the period of the Second Sophistic for rhetorical skill to be exercised in political and judicial settings, and Philostratus’s Lives of the Sophists contains frequent references to these; but Sextus shows no apparent knowledge of contemporary manifestations of political or judicial oratory, either. As for epideictic oratory, the category that, of Aristotle’s three, seems to have the most overlap with the activities of the Second Sophistic, Sextus gives it very short shrift, merely arguing that a genuine understanding of whom to praise or blame, and on what grounds, would require knowledge (about the inner dispositions of the people concerned, or about the real nature of good and bad) that no one can be expected to have (101–​105). One suspects that the leading Second Sophistic practitioners, renowned for extemporaneous speaking on themes (whether of praise or blame or anything else) proposed to them by the audience, and skilled at tailoring their speeches to the particularities of the audience and the moment, would simply have laughed at this.14 The fact that someone as practiced in argument as Sextus should have left himself so exposed to such criticisms suggests, again, that his complete lack of reference to the rhetoric of his own day is not a matter of policy, but a matter of ignorance. As we have seen, his treatment of rhetoric is just one example of a general phenomenon in Sextus’s writing. Now, the one apparent exception to this phenomenon of Sextus being in a profound sense unconnected with his own time is the section of the first book of Outlines of Pyrrhonism in which he explains why skepticism—​by which he means Pyrrhonism—​is not the same as various other philosophies that have been taken to be equivalent or importantly similar to it (1.210–​241). Clearly these claims of equivalence or resemblance cannot have been made until Pyrrhonism existed as a distinct philosophical tradition capable of being compared with other preexisting philosophies; and so here we do seem to have a case of Sextus engaging with critics or commentators of his own day. The first of the claimed similarities is between skepticism and the philosophy of Heraclitus (1.210–​212), and this Sextus attributes to the founder of the later Pyrrhonist tradition, Aenesidemus; somewhat surprisingly, he argues strongly against the suggestion, calling it absurd (atopon, 212).15 Otherwise we are simply told that a certain philosophy “is said” (legetai, 1.213) or “is thought” (dokei, 1.217) to be similar to or the same as Pyrrhonism, or that “some people” (tines, 1.215, 220, 236) say so. Presumably the proponents of these claims are distinct from Aenesidemus, and Sextus certainly makes it sound as if they are contemporaries whose views he is anxious to refute, thereby asserting the autonomy of Pyrrhonism. The last case—​Pyrrhonism’s

560   Philosophy and Philosophers relation to medical Empiricism (1.236–​241)—​sounds like an internal dispute; as we saw, Sextus himself is identified as an Empiricist, and he is not the only Pyrrhonist of whom this is true.16 But in the other cases, we really have no idea who Sextus is arguing against.17 In fact, given his tendency to dwell in the past, we cannot even be sure that they are his contemporaries; they could belong to any period between his own and that of Aenesidemus, who first put Pyrrhonism on the map. So it is not even obvious that this is indeed an exception to his usual silence about everything subsequent to the early first century bce. But even if it is, this is of very little use, since he gives us no clue as to who these unnamed tines are. The school that Sextus spends the most time on in this section is the Academy—​ including both Plato himself and what I have been calling the skeptical Academy (1.220–​ 235). Now, as we saw, Favorinus seems to have had a project of bringing Academic and Pyrrhonist skepticism into alignment; if so, Sextus, who sees the Academics (with the partial exception of Arcesilaus) as very different from the Pyrrhonists, would have had a very different attitude from Favorinus. Given this conflict of opinion, Leofranc Holford-​ Strevens has made the ingenious suggestion that the unnamed source of the view Sextus opposes—​namely, that the Academic and the Pyrrhonist philosophies are the same—​ is Favorinus himself.18 He is properly tentative about this, and I too must admit that I cannot show he is wrong. However, if Sextus’s target was Favorinus, one might have expected him to acknowledge the revival of Academic skepticism that Favorinus himself represents; indeed, emphasizing Favorinus’s self-​styled role as an Academic, and showing how different Pyrrhonism is from this, might well have been an effective form of refutation. Yet, as we have seen, for Sextus the Academy appears to end, as the history of philosophy in general (except for Pyrrhonism) appears to end, in the early first century bce; Sextus never mentions Favorinus any more than he mentions other philosophers beyond that date. And so I am inclined to doubt that Sextus is responding directly to Favorinus, even though I certainly cannot propose any definite alternative. Be that as it may, the general verdict is clear: Sextus Empiricus, and the Pyrrhonist movement in general, appear to have led an extremely secluded existence. While Pyrrhonism was in the period covered by this volume, it seems to have been, in a very real sense, not of it. I have tried to say a little to explain this phenomenon; but ultimately, given that it reveals itself to us by means of a profound lack of information, one cannot do much more than note it with interest. Sextus Empiricus had an important influence on the direction taken by philosophy in the early modern period; and many contemporary philosophers still take him very seriously. But his standing in the ancient world would not have given us any reason to expect this.

Further Reading A good general survey of ancient skepticism is Thorsrud 2009. Bett 2010, a collection of essays, is more comprehensive but still accessible. Both contain extensive bibliographies of both primary and secondary materials, organized by topics. On the difference between the

Skepticism   561 Academics and the Pyrrhonists, see in particular Striker 2010. On the demise of the skeptical Academy and the rise of Pyrrhonism with Aesnesidemus, see the works cited in notes 1, 2, and 3. Favorinus’s philosophical side is well treated in Holford-​Strevens 1997; see also Ioppolo 1993 and (for a very concise discussion) Lévy 2010, 96–​98. Good recent work on the Pyrrhonism of Sextus Empiricus includes Perin 2010 and the essays in Machuca 2011a; see also the ancient portion of Machuca 2011b—​and the rest of this volume for some indication of Sextus’s wide-​ ranging influence in modern philosophy. On the Pyrrhonian Modes see Annas and Barnes 1985, Barnes 1990, Woodruff 2010.

Bibliography Allen, J. 2010. “Pyrrhonism and Medicine.” In The Cambridge Companion to Ancient Scepticism, edited by R. Bett, 232–​248. Cambridge. Anderson, G. 1993. The Second Sophistic:  A  Cultural Phenomenon in the Roman Empire. London and New York. Annas, J., and J. Barnes, eds. 1985. The Modes of Scepticism:  Ancient Texts and Modern Interpretations. Cambridge. Annas, J., and J. Barnes, eds. (1994) 2000. Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Scepticism. Cambridge. Barnes, J. 1990. The Toils of Scepticism. Cambridge. Bett, R. 2000. Pyrrho, His Antecedents, and His Legacy. Oxford. Bett, R., ed. 2010. The Cambridge Companion to Ancient Scepticism. Cambridge. Bett, R. 2013. “The Pyrrhonist’s Dilemma:  What to Write if You Have Nothing to Say.” In Argument und literarische Form in antiker Philosophie:  Akten des 3.  Kongresses der Gesellschaft für antike Philosophie, edited by M. Erler and J. E. Hessler, 389–​410. Berlin and Boston. Brittain, C. 2001. Philo of Larissa: The Last of the Academic Sceptics. Oxford. Fish, J. 2011. “Not All Politicians are Sisyphus: What Roman Epicureans Were Taught about Politics.” In Epicurus and the Epicurean Tradition, edited by J. Fish and K. R. Sanders, 72–​104. Cambridge. Floridi, L. 2002. Sextus Empiricus: The Transmission and Recovery of Pyrrhonism. New York. Hankinson, R.  J. 2010. “Aenesidemus and the Rebirth of Pyrrhonism.” In The Cambridge Companion to Ancient Scepticism, edited by R. Bett, 105–​229. Cambridge. Holford-​Strevens, L. 1997. “Favorinus: The Man of Paradoxes.” In Philosophia Togata II: Plato and Aristotle at Rome, edited by J. Barnes and M. Griffin, 188–​217. Oxford. House, D. K. 1980. “The Life of Sextus Empiricus.” CQ 30: 227–​238. Ioppolo, A. M. 1993. “The Academic Position of Favorinus of Arelate.” Phronesis 38: 183–​213. Lévy, C. 2010. “The Sceptical Academy: Decline and Afterlife.” In The Cambridge Companion to Ancient Scepticism, edited by R. Bett, 81–​104. Cambridge. Machuca, D., ed. 2011a. New Essays on Ancient Pyrrrhonism. Leiden and Boston. Machuca, D., ed. 2011b. Pyrrhonism in Ancient, Modern, and Contemporary Philosophy. Dordrecht, Heidelberg, London, and New York. Perin, C. 2010. The Demands of Reason:  An Essay on Pyrrhonian Scepticism. Oxford and New York. Polito, R. 2004. The Sceptical Road:  Aesnesidemus’ Appropriation of Heraclitus. Leiden and Boston.

562   Philosophy and Philosophers Schofield, M. 2007. “Aenesidemus:  Pyrrhonist and ‘Heraclitean.’” In Pyrrhonists, Patricians, Platonizers:  Hellenistic Philosophy in the Period, 155–​86 bc, edited by A.  M. Ioppolo and D. Sedley, 271–​338. Naples. Sedley, D. 2003. “Philodemus and the Decentralisation of Philosophy.” Cronache ercolanesi 33: 31–​41. Sedley, D., ed. 2012. The Philosophy of Antiochus. Cambridge. Smith, M. F., ed. and trans. 1993. Diogenes of Oinoanda: The Epicurean Inscription. La scuola di Epicuro Supplemento 1. Naples. Striker, G. 2010. “Academics versus Pyrrhonists, Reconsidered.” In The Cambridge Companion to Ancient Scepticism, edited by R. Bett, 195–​207. Cambridge. Swain, S. 1997. “Plutarch, Plato, Athens, and Rome.” In Philosophia Togata II: Plato and Aristotle at Rome, edited by J. Barnes and M. Griffin, 165–​187. Oxford. Thorsrud, H. 2009. Ancient Scepticism. Berkeley, CA. Whitmarsh, T. 2005. The Second Sophistic. Oxford. Woodruff, P. 2010. “The Pyrrhonian Modes.” In The Cambridge Companion to Ancient Scepticism, edited by R. Bett, 208–​231. Cambridge.

chapter 36

Pl atoni sm Ryan C. Fowler

The extensive literary output spanning the time period of the Second Sophistic is rife with direct references to Plato and also quotations from and allusions to his dialogues. In terms of the number of references and the variety of contexts in which these references occur, Plato himself or his dialogues or ideas remains second only to Homer during the first and second centuries ce.1 In texts written during this period we see that Plato’s work inspired methodological approaches, as, for example, Galen’s and Maximus of Tyre’s “methods of division.”2 His ideas and his literary style were sources of both ideological engagement and imitation: he inspired Lucian to utilize the dialogue form and Aelius Aristides to defend a type of rhetoric against Plato’s attacks.3 Allusions to Plato and the dialogues comprised a philosophical mantle one could don at will, as in the case of Dio and Fronto.4 Plato’s vocabulary and syntax were linguistic touchstones in Lucian, guides for proper Attic Greek style for Hermogenes, and given as evidence of proper grammar by first-​and second-​century ce lexicographers and rhetoricians.5 And Plato’s metaphysics was a source of expression and argumentation for Christian authors from the second century on.6 Evidence for academic and scholastic Platonism during the first and second centuries ce, however, is, in comparison, slim. In general, we have evidence of informal teaching (as opposed to a formal Academy, which only existed up until perhaps the first century bce7) by instructors who lectured on Plato and Platonic themes in various places around the empire.8 However, our knowledge of the literary activities of these teachers and other authors is fragmentary, often consisting of no more than the title of a work.

The Start of Platonism Around the turn of the second and first centuries bce, we start to see a shift toward the instruction and interpretation of a positive dogmatic philosophy of Plato, away from the types of Academic skepticism that had been prevalent from the time of the

564   Philosophy and Philosophers third-​century scholarch Arcesilaus (even if there would still be some authors who continue to discuss skeptical approaches during the Second Sophistic; see ­chapter 35 in this volume). As we will see, the general variation of emphases and approaches that were all contained under the umbrella of the “Academy” continued into the Platonism of the Second Sophistic; this variance changes significantly only with Plotinus in the third century ce. As a result of this shift toward dogmatism and regardless of its cause, the story of Platonism during the Second Sophistic, as well as what we come to understand as Platonism itself, begins with Plutarch in the first century ce. In a number of ways, he connects these earlier authors, including the various Academics, to the authors of the second century ce, when the term “Platonic” (Πλατωνικός) itself would only really begin to be used.9 As Plutarch was a Platonist, his work reflects a desire to clarify Plato’s philosophy, understood by him to contain positive teachings. At the same time, reflecting the type of so-​called eclecticism (although a misleading term) we see throughout the history of the Academy, he is influenced by other quarters, including Academic skepticism and Stoicism. For Plutarch, Plato’s philosophy contains both an aporetic and a doctrinal element, and he argues against the distinction that Antiochus seems to have suggested between Socratic (or aporetic) dialogues and Platonic (or doctrinal) dialogues (Cic., Acad. post. 1.15–​17). According to Plutarch, the aporetic element in Plato reflects a way of searching for the truth without prejudices, which, in effect, amounts to a dialectical inquiry. This dialectical method in which one might argue both sides of a discussion, however, does not for him deny either the possibility of reaching firm conclusions or even the possibility of achieving knowledge. Plato had reached such conclusions, which Plutarch works to identify and clarify as his doctrines; at the same time, Plato allowed for ongoing inquiry, which can be seen in the dialogue form itself. In this way, then, Plutarch is able to advocate a theory of knowledge that integrates both the suspension of judgment—​ the initial rejection of dogmatism—​and, at the same time, a defense of the possibility of acquiring true knowledge. Plutarch was known by later Platonists to have upheld a literal approach to interpreting Plato. In De Iside et Osiride (370f) he differentiates the Plato who “obscures and veils his opinion” from the older Plato who asserted things not in circumlocution or symbolically, but “in ordinary words” (κυρίοις ὀνόμασιν). An important example of this type of reading is found in his literal interpretation of the Timaeus, which holds that the world had a temporal beginning.10 As he himself tells us (On the Generation of the Soul in the Timaeus 1013e), Plutarch argues against the interpretation of a number of Platonists of his time who refuse to understand creation in terms of an actual generation. But if the universe is actually ungenerated, he contends, that would be the end of Plato’s contention that the soul, being senior to the body (cf. Ti. 34c), initiates all change and motion (On the Generation of the Soul in the Timaeus 1012e and 1013d–​f; cf. Phdr. 245c, Leg. 896a–​c, 892a–​c), is installed in her position as chief (cf. On the Generation of the Soul in the Timaeus 1016c) and, as he tells us Plato himself writes, as

Platonism   565 “primary agent” (πρωτουργόν; a reminiscence of πρωτουργοὶ κινήσεις from Leg. 897a). This literal interpretation of the Timaeus also aims to understand how, as Plutarch says (On the Generation of the Soul in the Timaeus 1016a), the soul in Plato is said to be both uncreated (cf. Phdr. 245c–​246a) and created (cf. Ti. 34b–​35a), and, as he says (1014d–​e), how the soul is said to be a mixed entity composed of indivisible being (i.e., intellect) and divisible being (i.e., the nonrational precosmic soul; cf. Ti. 35a and 53a8–​b4; On the Generation of the Soul in the Timaeus 1024a). Plutarch’s literal interpretation of the Timaeus was a target for debate among later Platonists: it was adopted by Atticus, but was resisted by most others, including Taurus and, later, Porphyry and Proclus. Nevertheless, Plutarch’s view that the world soul is created, in the sense that it partakes of reason and intelligence imparted to it by the demiurge, is found in Alcinous (Handbook 169.33–​42) and, it is thought, also in Numenius (fr. 45; cf. Dillon 1993, 127). But regardless of subsequent evaluations of his interpretations, Plutarch’s importance lies at least in part in, first, directing the attention of later Platonists and Christians to the Timaeus in order to understand Plato (regarding both his cosmology and his theology), and, second, treating Plato’s work as comprising a coherent system of philosophy that warranted further articulation. Just before he begins his interpretation of the temporal creation of the world that we have been discussing, Plutarch describes his approach to Plato when he says that he will set down what he thinks about these matters, “confirming and vindicating as far as may be by probability what is unusual and paradoxical” about his account; he will then “apply the interpretation and the demonstration to the texts [of Plato], at the same time bringing them into accord with one another” (De Animae 1014a). The focus here is not bringing into accordance Plutarch’s demonstration of his interpretation, but rather the reconciliation of apparently incompatible passages of Plato (cf. On the Generation of the Soul in the Timaeus 1016a and e). His proofs of such reconciliations are themselves demonstrations (cf. ἀπόδειξις, 1015f).

Platonic Teaching Regarding the teaching of Platonism during the Second Sophistic, we have evidence of independent teachers not associated with any particular formal Platonic Academy (as before), if perhaps sometimes thought to be associated with an Academy.11 The first solid date we have for the instruction of Plato in the first century ce is from Plutarch, who tells us (De E 385e) that he attended lectures of Ammonius in Athens in 66 or 67 ce (when Nero was in Greece), not, it seems, at a formal school.12 In Quaestiones convivales, Plutarch records a conversation at Ammonius’s house in Athens after a demonstration that included “successful teachers,” “men of letters,” and “some of his circle of friends” (736a); and he describes Ammonius as a personal teacher (καθηγητής).13

566   Philosophy and Philosophers After Plutarch’s time, we have a few anecdotes about the Platonic classroom of Calvenus Taurus (fl. 145 ce) left by the philosophical journalist Aulus Gellius (ca. 125 to after 180 ce). Taurus was, Gellius tells us, “a man celebrated in my time for his Platonic teaching” (vir memoria nostra in disciplina Platonica celebratus; NA 7.10). He taught in a lecture-​hall or school (in diatriba; NA 1.26) and had disciples or followers (sectatores) who traveled with him (NA 18.10). Taurus is reported as well to have been the teacher “for the doctrines of Plato” of the politician and prominent sophist Herodes Atticus (Philostr. VS 564). Apuleius (born ca. 125) is best known for the Golden Ass or Metamorphoses (see ­chapter 22 in this volume). The philosophical works we have by him are: On Plato and His Doctrines (On Plato); perhaps a Latin translation of On the Cosmos of the Pseudo-​ Aristotelean On the Universe (περί Κόσμου); and possibly On Interpretation, a Latin work on logic that may, however, be the third book of On Plato. 14 The Asclepius, a Latin translation of a Hermetic treatise, is also sometimes attributed to him. Other works, like the Florida, On the God of Socrates, and his Apology, read more like speeches with Platonic references. So, we might ask: given the various types of genre he worked in, was he a Platonist in the vein of Albinus or Alcinous? Was Platonism a mantle he took on for the sake of authority and status, which seems to be the case with a figure like Maximus of Tyre? On the one hand, Apuleius, qua transmitter, translator, and representative of Platonic ideas in and after the second century, was a Platonist, who had an interest in questions and interpretations of Plato and Platonic questions, perhaps with varying degrees of success. (In particular, we might take his relatively confusing attempt to harmonize the Platonic vices and virtues and the Aristotelean idea of the mean at On Plato 2.4: e.g., how might we understand “propriety” and “cowardice” to be the two relative means between “courage” and “fear”?). Further, there are numerous similarities between On Plato and Alcinous’s Handbook, which may point to his being earnestly engaged with Platonism at the time; at the same time, however, this might provide further support for his being a philosophical translator. On the other hand, Apuleius, qua sophist, clearly drops Platonic references in a way that might cause us to think of him a Platonic rhetor. For example, in his Apology (64), he writes, rather poetically, that “in its zeal to reach the heights of wisdom, the Platonic school has explored regions higher than heaven itself and has stood triumphant on the outer circumference of our universe.” It is in Plato where his addressee previously read of “the place above the heavens . . . on heaven’s back” (τὸν ὑπερουράνιον τόπον . . . οὐρανοῦ νῶτον), which are two small quotations from Phaedrus 247b and c. Yet in his On the God of Socrates, in particular, he engages with true-​blue Platonic issues (i.e., the daimones), but with strong rhetorical flair, along the lines of the orators and writers we find working with the more literary style of the Second Sophistic (here especially invoking the important connection with the classical past). Emphasizing this interest in rhetoric, we might note Apuleius’s discussion of it in his On Plato (­chapters 2.8–​2.9), which interrupts what would be a more common turn to politics just after a discussion of ethics, for example, as in Alcinous’s Handbook (though Apuleius does eventually end with a discussion of political structures). Perhaps some support for his Platonic

Platonism   567 authority is found in Augustine’s engagement with the work of “the Platonist Apuleius” in his City of God (9.3, 6, 7, 8, 13, 16) who represents “the opinion of the Platonists” (9.6). With an author like Apuleius, who wore a number of literary hats, it seems that treating him at least as a creative Platonist is not without warrant.15 As further evidence of the teaching of Plato during this time period, the medical writer Galen (129–​216/​217; see c­ hapter 24 in this volume), who as we will see below was himself interested in Plato’s dialogues, writes that he took lectures at fourteen years old in Pergamum from “citizen philosophers” (φιλόσοφοι πολῖται):  primarily from a Stoic, a student of a certain Philopator, as well as, for a short time, from a Platonist (Πλατωνικός), a student of Gaius. The reason for the short time, it seems, is that this student of Gaius was himself busy with political affairs.16 Some time in the early 150s, Galen also attended lectures of the Platonist Albinus in Smyrna.17 If it is the same Albinus of the Introduction to Plato, then we might be able to gather some sense of his approach to teaching Plato from that work, where Albinus writes that “the instructional type [of dialogue] is appropriate for the teaching, practice, and demonstration of the truth” (chap. 3).18 Further, based on the evidence we have, Albinus himself seems to have attended lectures by Gaius.19 Perhaps one last indication of Platonist teaching during the Second Sophistic might be gleaned from Apuleius’s On Plato, where there is, interestingly, an emphasis on the moral teaching of the young: the teachers of boys should “imbue them with habits and manners toward virtue . . . so that their students may learn to rule and be ruled with justice as their teacher” (2.3).

Platonic Texts Of the work written by Platonists during the Second Sophistic, we have some in the form of complete texts, some are fragmentary, and some we know only by title or reputation. The texts can be divided generally into expository works, handbooks and summaries, polemical works, and commentaries, with the understanding that elements of one can be found in another, and that in some basic sense all of these texts attempt to expose something (e.g., the falseness of another school’s position). As we will see, a number of authors wrote (or are reported to have written) more than one type of work.

Platonic Expository Works We have the most evidence for expository works that seek to explain some Platonic problem or expand on a particular topic but that are not attached to a particular dialogue nor attack a specific target. Two works we have in which Plutarch interprets Platonic themes or questions are his Platonic Questions and On the Daemon of Socrates (on which see c­ hapter 19 in this

568   Philosophy and Philosophers volume), but more relevant here are the titles of a number of his lost works. Some of these include (the numbers correspond to the Lamprias catalog): On the Fifth Substance (no. 44), On the World’s Having Come into Beginning According to Plato (no. 66), Where are the Forms? (no. 67), How Matter Participates in the Forms: It Constitutes the Primary Bodies (no.  68), What Is Understanding? (no.  146), That Understanding Is Impossible (no. 146), On Matter (no. 185), Whether He Who Reserves Judgment on Everything Is Involved in Action (no. 210) (which may defend an Academic stance), and What Is the Telos According to Plato? (no. 221). In addition, in true Platonic form (if not always containing Platonic material), he also wrote dialogues: some dramatic, such as On Control of Anger and The Dinner of the Seven Wise Men, and some narrated, such as On the Delays of Divine Vengeance, the three “Delphic dialogues,” and Table Talk. Theon (fl. 100 ce) has been connected with a statue set up by “the priest Theon, for his father, Theon the Platonic philosopher” that has been dated to the reign of Hadrian (117–​138 ce). He left us one reference work: his surviving On Mathematics Useful for the Understanding of Plato is an introductory survey of Greek mathematics. It makes no claim to originality, quoting swaths of text by Adrastus of Aphrodisias on mathematics and harmonics, and Thrasyllus on harmonics and astronomy (as well as a short summary of a work by the mysterious Dercyllides). We also have a report in Arabic of a work on the correct order of reading of the dialogues, in which he accepts Thrasyllus’s arrangement: this reflects an interest during the Second Sophistic in establishing a reading order for Plato’s dialogues (we will see it again when we discuss Albinus’s Introduction, below). Favorinus of Arelate (ca. 85–​155 ce; ­chapter 15 in this volume) wrote a ten-​book Pyrrhonean Tropes, and as a result is sometimes associated with that school; he might be best thought of, however, as a moderate Academic skeptic.20 Philostratus (VS 1.8) describes him as a sophist and philosopher; Gellius (20.1) also calls him a philosopher, one who uses the “arguments of the Academy” (disputationes Academicae); and Lucian (Eunuch 7) allusively refers to him “an Academic eunuch.” In his On the Best Teaching against Favorinus, Galen describes Favorinus’s position as similar to certain Academicians (that is, by arguing for and against a certain position), and groups him in with the “Newer” Academy (νεώτεροι, 1.40K). According to Gellius, in fact, Favorinus thought of himself as a follower of the Academy;21 this use of an “Academy” could again simply be similar to that of Plutarch, above. Indeed, Favorinus and Plutarch knew one another: Plutarch quotes Favorinus in his Roman Questions, made him a character in his Table Talk, and wrote him a letter on friendship (in fact, he was the dedicatee of Plutarch’s On the Principle of Cold); in turn, Favorinus gave his work On the Academic Disposition the alternative title Plutarch. Last, Favorinus’s Memorabilia is said to include discussions of Socrates (Diog. Laert. 2.5.19, 23, 38, 40), and he is also reported to have written an Alcibiades.22 The physician Galen mentioned above wrote a nine-​book On the Doctrines of Plato and Hippocrates, in part an expository work on Platonic tripartite psychology alongside a polemic against the Stoic monist alternative. This work also reflects Galen’s synthesis of this Platonic view with his physiology of brain, heart, and liver. Textual justification for these bodily locations of the parts of the soul are taken primarily from passages from Plato’s Timaeus, as well as passages from the Republic book 4 (5.336.16–​358.22), as well

Platonism   569 as a few passages from the Sophist (e.g., 5.302.18–​19 and 312.11–​12).23 As with Maximus of Tyre and the Latin writer Apuleius, there has been much discussion about whether Galen should be considered a Platonist.24 Numenius (fl. 175) is another important figure in the history of the Platonism of this time, but unfortunately we have only fragments.25 His main work on philosophy seems to be a six-​book On the Good, which, based on the extant fragments, is an inquiry into the nature of the First Principle—​Being, or The Good—​in dialogue form.26 He seems to have been inspired by Plato’s accounts of the Form of the Good in Republic book 6 (508e–​ 509b), as well as the argument concerning the goodness of god in the Timaeus (29e–​ 30b).27 We have a mention in Origen (C. Cels. 5.57) of a work in at least two books On the Indestructibility of the Soul. We know nearly nothing, unfortunately, about what the content might be of Numenius’s treatise On Plato’s Secret Doctrines (Euseb. Praep. evang. 13.4.4, fr. 23). In the sole surviving fragment (fr. 23), Numenius discusses Plato’s use of the character Euthyphro in the Euthyphro as a representative of Athenian popular religion. As quoted in a number of sources,28 Numenius (“the Pythagorean”) is known for the statement, “For what is Plato, but Moses speaking Attic Greek?” (τί γάρ ἐστι Πλάτων ἢ Μωυσῆς ἀττικίζων;). Regarding his status as a Pythagorean, we might consider the opinions of Origen in Against Celsus, who refers to “Numenius the Pythagorean” as “a surpassingly excellent expounder of Plato” (πολλῷ κρεῖττον διηγησάμενον Πλάτωνα), and who held a foremost place as a teacher of the doctrines of Pythagoras. In addition, he writes, Numenius quotes from the writings of Moses and the prophets in many of his works, and applies to the passages in question a likely allegorical meaning, as in his work Epops, and in those titled Numbers and Place. The combination of Plato and Pythagoras should not give us great pause. Numenius accepted both Pythagoras and Plato as the two authorities one should follow in philosophy; that said, however, Plato had been a Pythagorean, before his doctrines had been marred by his successors.29 Numenius seemed to regard Plato’s authority as slightly subordinate to that of Pythagoras, whom he considered to be the source of all true philosophy, including that of Plato.30 We might consider four final authors here. The first, Taurus, according to the tenth-​ century Suda, wrote a work On Corporeals and Incorporeals, about which we have no further information (see below, however, for evidence of his polemics and commentaries). Second, we might recall Albinus’s editing an Outlines of Platonic Doctrines from the Classes of Gaius, which might be an example of a commentary “from the voice” of a teacher, a type of work that may come down by the name of a lecturer or pupil. And, like Taurus, there also seems to be reference in a Syriac text of a work by Albinus called On the Incorporeal.31 Finally, we have an extract in Eusebius (Praep. evang. 13.17) of a work On the Soul by Severus, who is conjectured to have lived in the second century ce, and is one of the authors read in Plotinus’s circle. He is said to think that soul is “not a third thing put together from two elements contrary to one another, but simple and by its very nature impassible and immaterial.” This formulation is taken as being in opposition to the dualism of Plutarch and Atticus, and shows a strong Stoicizing that is closer to the Chrysippan doctrine of the unity of the soul.32

570   Philosophy and Philosophers

Platonic Handbooks and Summaries The division between topical expository works and Platonic summaries or aggregates is perhaps a false one (a summary or handbook most certainly might expand on an idea in a new way, as arguably in the case of Alcinous, below), but I take the difference as one of intent (an Introduction is different from a work on the problem of creation in the Timaeus). A short tract by Albinus (fl. ca. 150 ce) entitled Introduction to Plato’s Dialogues (εἰσαγωγὴ εἰς τοὺς Πλάτωνος διαλόγους) has survived. The original title of his work was also considered to be Prologos, and it has been suggested to have originally formed a section (or the initial section) of notes taken at the lectures of Gaius. In it, after explaining the definition and nature of the dialogue (which he compares with tragedy and history), Albinus divides the dialogues of Plato first into instructional and investigative types (i.e., the “highest” or “most general types”), both of which he further subdivides into seven categories: physical, logical, political, ethical, tentative, obstetrical, probative, and refutative. He gives the first tetralogy of Thrasyllus (i.e., Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, and Phaedo, explaining each by their subjects), and writes that that series is based on dramatic concerns but is not helpful for those who want to discover what is in accordance with wisdom (chap. 4). As a suggested order of reading for the ideal student, whom he defines, he advises: Alcibiades (as obstetrical), Phaedo (as ethical), Republic (as political), and Timaeus (physical), and explains the educational purpose of each. Later, in ­chapter 6, he suggests a more general five-​part series, perhaps for the nonideal student, which includes the more general categories: a “purgative” dialogue, to cast out false beliefs; one that is “obstetrical,” to bring to light our natural concepts; an instructional dialogue, to receive the appropriate doctrines; one that is logical, so that these doctrines do not escape and so that we learn the method by which true things are demonstrated and false things are refuted; and finally one that is probative and refutative, so we might not be deceived by sophists. In ­chapter 5 (and reinforced in ­chapter 6) we are told about the necessity to “have knowledge of divine matters, so that one who has acquired virtue can become assimilated to them” and, as a result, “see the divine with complete clarity,” a common goal within the Platonism during this time, found in Plutarch (De sera 550d), Alcinous (28.1), and Apuleius (On Plato 2.23). We should reemphasize that Albinus ends his short work with a common Platonic as well as a Second Sophistic concern: the value probative and refutative types of dialogues have to show us how to listen to the sophists and how and by what means to address those who make false and misleading arguments (chap. 6). Alcinous (second century ce) is the author of work called The Handbook of Platonism (Ἐπιτομὴ τῶν Πλάτωνος δογμάτων, referred to as the Didaskalikos), another of the few fully surviving works from this period. We know nothing about the author. What is important about this work is the effort he makes to put together an introductory doctrinal handbook on Platonism from relatively disparate materials. The book contains thirty-​six chapters which propose to cover topics ranging from theoretical (given

Platonism   571 as theology, physics, mathematics), practical (ethics, economics, politics), and logical (division, definition, introduction, and syllogistic), though the actual ordering and depth of the topics covered is slightly different. In general, there are numerous parallels with other relatively recent Platonists (e.g., Philo and Plutarch), but, importantly, the author reflects the type of inclusion of formulae from Peripatetics and Stoics that were part of the Platonist project. Regarding the interpretations given, modern scholars have pointed out a very similar passage from the first-​century bce Stoic author Arius Didymus (in Stobaeus), as well as some general similarities with Apuleius’s On Plato, which make it tempting to imagine a common source or sources.33 At the same time, there are moments in the work that register whether Alcinous agrees or disagrees with the way of reading Plato that he is recording, which goes beyond straightforward source transcription.34 Moreover, there are moments in the work in which familiarity with Plato seems to be assumed; at these moments, a general or neophyte reader is less likely the target audience than an instructor.35 The Platonism we find in the Didaskalikos looks very familiar to that which we find during the Second Sophistic. In ­chapter 9, Alcinous discusses the Platonic Forms as ideas in the mind of God; in c­ hapter 10, like Albinus and others, he discusses the influential goal for a Platonist (and early Christians): likeness to or assimilation with God. Relatedly, a further important distinction in Alcinous’s work is the division between a first and second god, and which of these this assimilation refers to: “By ‘God’ is obviously meant the god in the heavens [τῷ ἐπουρανίῳ], not, by Zeus, the God above the heavens [τῷ . . . ὑπερουρανίῳ], who does not possess virtue, but is superior to it” (28.3). Alcinous ends his work (36.1) with a statement that gives us an idea of his desire to provide an introduction to guide someone toward Plato, as well as the limits of his account: This much is sufficient for an introduction [εἰσαγωγή] to Plato’s doctrine-​building [δογματοποιΐα]. Perhaps some of it has been stated in an organized fashion, other parts as they came up and out of order; nevertheless, as a result from what has been stated they might become able to examine and discover subsequently the rest of his doctrines, too.36

It is worth noting that Tarrant (2010, 99) argues that Alcinous adds his own material of an interpretive nature (to what had been designed as a handbook of Platonic doctrines), and so his work should be looked at more as an updated handbook that is responding to issues and ideas of his time.

Platonic Polemics During the Second Sophistic, both intra-​and interpolemical works often take to task other philosophical schools. (For some of these texts, “polemical” might be too strong a word, and we might consider them inter-​and intrascholastic.)

572   Philosophy and Philosophers Several of Plutarch’s works are baldly polemic, most often against the Stoics and Epicureans. The central argument in Plutarch’s criticisms is that both Stoics and Epicureans contradict common notions (see, e.g., Comm. not. 1073c–​1074f) and force facts about things into agreement with their tenets, instead of the other way around (Quomodo quis sentiat 75f–​76a). A list of scholastic polemics by Plutarch would include the lost works: On the Difference between the Pyrrhonians and the Academics (no. 64) and the notable On the Unity of the Academy since Plato, in which he seems to hold that the skeptical Academy should be included in the long history of Platonism. Plutarch, then, shows an interest in distinguishing the Academic position from the generally more absolute Pyrrhonic skepticism, as well as expressing his opposition to Antiochus’s view (and, we will see, that of Numenius) that there were two Academies, an Old and a New, while Philo of Larissa had maintained that there had been only one. We have fragments of Numenius’s treatise on the points of divergence between the Academicians and Plato (On the Defection of the Academics from Plato, perhaps ca. 160–​ 190 ce) preserved in the Preparation for the Gospel of Eusebius (14.5). (There are other sources for the fragments, e.g., Proclus’s commentary on the Timaeus.) Here Numenius criticizes the departure of the skeptical Academics from what he considers to be Plato’s doctrine, namely, the doctrine of first principles of reality that he finds expressed in the Second Letter attributed to Plato (fr. 24.51–​56). Therefore, what marks the failure of the Academy for Numenius is the disagreement of the Academic skeptics with Plato’s allegedly dogmatic philosophy. There is as well a plea in that work by Numenius for a purification of Plato’s philosophy from alien elements, Aristotelian and Stoic included, to allow him to be a Pythagorean (Numenius fr. 24–​28),37 quite against the position held by Antiochus. Beyond his having an interest in the history of Platonism, then, it is thought that Numenius’s reaction against a skeptical interpretation of Plato was a reaction to contemporary attempts to revive a form of Academic skepticism, such as those by the anonymous commentary on the Theaetetus (discussed below), Plutarch, and Favorinus.38 Regarding the polemical work of Taurus, Gellius tells us of a book “against the Stoics” (NA 12.5) in which Taurus sets out their differences from the Academy (perhaps similar to Numenius’s idea of purification), as well as emphasizes the Stoics’ internal contradictions; it may be that a source for his work was Plutarch’s On the Self-​Contradictions of the Stoics. The Suda mentions a work of Taurus on the differences between Aristotle and Plato, perhaps again a topic akin to what we saw above in the case of Numenius. Atticus (second half of second century ce), called “a distinguished man among the Platonic philosophers” (διαφανὴς ἀνὴρ τῶν Πλατωνικῶν φιλοσόφων), is reported to have written (again from Eusebius: Praep. evang. 1.15) a polemical tract against the Peripatetics. In that work he refutes those who profess to support the doctrines of Plato with those of Aristotle. But while for Atticus “the Peripatetic will be seen to be quite far from teaching any of the doctrines of Plato” (11.15), Aristocles, a representative Peripatetic, is perhaps more sympathetic, writing that “if any man ever yet taught a genuine and complete system of philosophy, it was Plato” (11.11). We also have report

Platonism   573 in Simplicius of a work in which Atticus attacks Aristotle’s Categories, about which not much more than that is known.39 Though it should be clear by now that there was great interest in the question of whether Stoicism (and Peripatetism) should be included in the Platonism of the time, we should remember that that worry did not prevent great borrowing of terminology, if not also therefore some ideas, from both of those schools. Last, perhaps, in the realm of polemical works, we hear about The True Word (Λόγος Ἀληθής), a lost treatise in which Celsus argued against many principal arguments of the early Christians. What we know of the work exists in the extensive quotations from it found in Origen’s Against Celsus (C. Cels.), written perhaps seventy years later. We might tentatively add this work in this section, since, as Origen himself puts it, he plans to put questions to certain Greeks, “in particular Celsus, who either holds or not the sentiments of Plato, and at any rate quotes them” (C. Cels. 1.32). That said, Origen also tells us that Celsus might be thought of as an Epicurean (C. Cels. 1.8) (perhaps in Platonic clothing?). In the work, it seems Celsus attacked Christianity in three ways: by refuting its philosophical claims (e.g., 1.3, 2.12, 3.57), by marking it as a phenomenon associated with the uneducated and lower classes (3.57 and 58, 4.36), and by cautioning his audience that it was a danger to the Roman Empire (7.17); however, as with any polemic, we should approach with care the attribution of specific views to Celsus. It is perhaps noteworthy that we find in Origen a different evaluation between Platonists: “we express our approval of Numenius, rather than of Celsus and other Greeks, because he was willing to investigate our histories from a desire to acquire knowledge” (4.51); the reason he gives is that in his On the Good, Numenius quotes from the writings of Moses and the prophets (4.51).

Platonic Commentaries Finally, there are a number of commentaries from the Second Sophistic that are meant to provide exegesis for a particular Platonic dialogue. While we have many reported titles, we have only one (anonymous) less fragmentary commentary from the period, and even that might be dated earlier than the Second Sophistic. The closest Plutarch gets to a commentary is his work on the Timaeus (On the Generation of Soul in the Timaeus), a partial commentary on Timaeus 35a1–​36b5. While Plutarch looks only at a short passage of Plato’s long work, this work is important for our understanding of Plutarch, since it is not an exaggeration to say that Plutarch’s interpretation of the Timaeus shapes his entire philosophy. In the work, he discusses some of the interpretations of his predecessors, in particular two groups who followed Xenocrates and Crantor. His first few lines, before he quotes the Timaeus passage itself, show his intent to provide a unified collection of the various statements he has frequently made about that dialogue concerning what he believes to be the opinion held by Plato regarding the soul. In addition, he adds, a separate treatise ought to be devoted to that account, “as it is both difficult to deal with otherwise and in need of vindication because of its opposition to most of the Platonists” (1012b). His overall interpretation, then, is

574   Philosophy and Philosophers in need of aggregation, and requires explanation not only because of its density but because of its relative unorthodoxy. Below we will see the result in subsequent commentary work of Plutarch’s redirecting Platonists’ attention toward the Timaeus. After Plutarch, we have records of a number of commentaries on some of Plato’s dialogues. Theon, primarily known for his work on mathematics in Plato (discussed above), also alludes in that work, in a discussion of the myth or Er, to his own commentary on the Republic; this is the only evidence we have for it. Like Theon, Numenius also wrote a commentary on the Myth of Er (as reported by Proclus), which is perhaps connected to Porphyry’s citation of Numenius’s exegesis on the Cave of the Nymphs in his work of the same name.40 And as for Atticus’s commentaries, we also have evidence from Proclus for commentaries on the Timaeus and the Phaedrus.41 Porphyry, in his Life of Plotinus (14), writes that “commentaries” (ὑπομνήματα) of Gaius were read in Plotinus’s seminar. It is worth quoting the whole section of that text, to give an idea of the company Gaius’s work kept: In the meetings of the school he used to have the commentaries read, perhaps of Severus, perhaps of Cronius or Numenius or Gaius or Atticus, and among the Peripatetics of Aspasius, Alexander, Adrastus, and others that were available.

That said, if these commentaries are actually the outlined classroom notes made by Albinus (mentioned above), then it may be that we have no evidence of any writings of Gaius. Galen tells us that he wrote synopses of eight Platonic dialogues (all lost), including one on the Timaeus. He also wrote a single commentary, also on the Timaeus, some of which survives in fragmentary form.42 As would make sense given his interests, the fragments we have show an emphasis on physiological, rather than metaphysical topics. Galen also actively worked on Aristotle: he mentions as well a (lost) commentary on the Categories. And, in this vein, we might also recall his numerous commentaries on Hippocratic works, all as part of a general increase in commentary work during the Second Sophistic. Evidence of commentaries of Taurus include reference to the first book of a commentary on the Gorgias (NA 7.14), and to the first book of a commentary on the Timaeus (John Philoponus De aeternitate mundi p. 520, 4 Rabe). Dillon (1977, 240) also includes Iamblichus’s reference in his On the Soul of Taurus’s views on the descent of souls into bodies, and suggests that this may be referring to the Timaeus commentary or to a work on the soul. A commentary on Plato’s Republic, attributed to a certain Taurus of Sidon, has also been argued to be by this Taurus.43 The case of Severus is interesting, if only because we have evidence from Proclus (In Ti. 1.204, 17) for a commentary by him on the Timaeus. We are told that he was an object of attack by the Peripatetics (In Ti. 3.212, 8) and that he, like Plutarch, proposed that the world had a beginning in time. We are also told that he introduces a qualification from Plato’s Statesman (280b) in order to argue that the cosmos has two cycles, one in which it is at present turning, and so is created and had a beginning, and a cycle which is opposite

Platonism   575 to it, and in the absolute sense eternal (In Ti. 1.289, 7). Besides showing a greater Stoic influence, there does not seem to be another clear example of this use of the Statesman in this way by a Platonist during the Second Sophistic.44 We end this section with the anonymous commentary on the Theaetetus, which has been dated anywhere between the first century bce45 and the second century ce.46 This fragmentary commentary is found on a Berlin papyrus datable from 150 ce. What survives starts at the end of the preface in that dialogue to 153d–​e, with another section from 157 to 158. The work is significant, since it is the only extant commentary of the kind we only otherwise hear about. A straightforward exegesis of the text with some notes on grammar, the text does not itself seem to take a strongly skeptical position, but engages with skeptical readings of Plato, and with the controversy between the Old and New Academy. At a lemma for Theaetetus 150c4–​7 (where Socrates is discussing his intellectual midwifery, and as a result does not offer any answers of his own), the author tells us that some think that Plato was an Academic, as not having doctrines. Not only is that not the case, but in fact “even other Academics, with very few exceptions, have doctrines”; in fact, “the Academy is unified by the fact that even those hold the most important doctrines in common with Plato.” The fact that Plato held doctrines, and declared them with conviction, then, can be understood from Plato himself.47 In the fragments we have of the commentary, there are moments of excursus or criticism of the Stoics, Epicureans, and, as we saw, the Skeptics. Tantalizingly, the author also mentions his own commentaries on the Phaedo (section 48), Symposium (70), and, perhaps, the Timaeus (35).

Platonism after the Second Sophistic The interests and scholarship of those working on Platonism during the Second Sophistic live on in two ways: in the philosophy of Plotinus (and those who follow him), and in the philosophy of later Christians. We started in the Platonic classroom above, and Platonism in the Second Sophistic might be thought of as ending there as well with, perhaps symbolically, both Plotinus and, it seems, the Christian theologian Origen attending lectures of the influential Ammonius Saccus (fl. third century ce). We hear that Ammonius taught Plotinus for eleven years, from 232 to 243 (as well as, perhaps, the Christian theologian Origen48). In Porphyry’s Life of Plotinus (3), we are told that Ammonius’s students (Erennius, Origen, and Plotinus) had made an agreement not to disclose any of his doctrines which he had revealed to them in his lectures. Plotinus kept the agreement, and, though he held conferences with people who came to him, maintained silence about the doctrines of Ammonius. We are told that, like his teacher,49 Plotinus for a long time continued to write nothing, but began to base his lectures on his studies with Ammonius. But, we are told, Plotinus “did not just speak straight out of these books but took a distinctive personal line in his consideration, and brought the mind of Ammonius’s to bear on the investigation in hand” (14). Leaving Ammonius’s classroom, Plotinus would in turn teach; and with Plotinus, a new phase in

576   Philosophy and Philosophers the organization and understanding of Plato begins. Plotinus emerged out of the relative chaos of the Platonism during the Second Sophistic, and would significantly shape the understanding of Platonic philosophy. On the Christian side of the equation, Plato would have an impact on the thought of a number of authors, notably in Methodius of Olympus’ Symposium, a dialogue between ten women extolling the virtues of chastity, which is replete with Platonic quotations and allusions. The work of these Platonists also has impact on the thought of Augustine (354–​430 ce), who praises Plato as having perfected philosophy by combining the active study of Socrates and the contemplative study of Pythagoras (De civ. D. 8.4). In his discussion of demonology in that book, the Platonici he names are: Apuleius, Plotinus, Porphyry, and Iamblichus. In his Confessions, he tells us that he took on the habit of the (New) Academics (academici) for some time (Conf. 5.14.25), before finally coming upon the Platonizing influence of Ambrose and “some books of the Neoplatonists translated from Greek into Latin” (7.9.13). There has been great speculation what these books might have been. These allowed him, as he says (7.10.16), to overcome his common-​ sense materialism and they provided him a metaphysical framework that differentiated between the sensory world of becoming (which is neither completely existent nor completely nonexistent, 7.11.17) and nonphysical being (what abides unchangingly). In his Retractiones, however, written near the end of his life, he regrets the concessions he had made to the Platonists in his early writings (1.1). In some important and similar ways, both Platonism and Christianity were gaining their respective footing during the Second Sophistic.50 Both had multiple competing views regarding what exactly they should be, and for both there were a number of widely competing directions regarding where they should go. Each, in fact, attacked the other for this very diversity of views, according to Origen (e.g., C. Cels. 3.10); and, later, Eusebius (Praep. evang. 1.7–​8) invites us, not casually but leisurely and with careful consideration, to observe the mutual disagreement of the philosophers whom he quotes.51 During the Second Sophistic, we effectively see the start and end of (pre-​Plotinian) Platonism. There is very little that might unify these Platonists and their work, save, perhaps, a desire to go back to and elucidate Plato’s true philosophy. Generally speaking, bce invention had given way to ce elucidation, even if that understanding requires the incorporation of terminology and even concepts from other sources. In the end, the work these Platonists did on metaphysics and theology, as well as how we might behave in the world, was all in the name of clarifying Plato’s philosophy, whatever the actors understood the specifics to be.

Further Reading Due to the generally scattered nature of this source material, general surveys are a good place to start. Dillon 1977 (revised in 1996 with a new Afterword) is still essential; a more recent overview of the time period is found in Boys-​Stones 2001. For shorter overviews there is Tarrant 2010, which focuses on Platonism, and perhaps Fowler 2010, which focuses slightly more on

Platonism   577 the rhetorical use of Plato during the Second Sophistic, both in the two-​volume Gerson 2010; there is in that volume a helpful overview by Elizabeth Digeser (“The Late Roman Empire from the Antonines to Constantine”), as well as relevant entries on Numenius of Apamea by Mark Edwards, Galen by R. J. Hankinson, Philo of Alexandria by David Winston, and Origen by Emanuela Prinzivalli (for the next time period, there is a series of entries in section III: “Plotinus and the New Platonism”). For Alcinous, there is Dillon’s 1993 translation of the Handbook. For an edition of the anonymous commentary on the Theaetetus, see Bastianini and Sedley 1995. Volume 2 of Sharples and Sorabji 2007 has numerous relevant contributions on Platonists and Academics. More recent for Galen is Singer 2014. On Apuleius’s Platonism, there is Fletcher 2014. Finally, Fowler 2016 provides new translations of both Albinus’s Introduction and Apuleius’s On Plato.

Bibliography Algra, K., J. Barnes, J. Mansfeld, and M. Schofield, eds. 1999. The Cambridge History of Hellenistic Philosophy. Cambridge. Allen, J. 1994. “Academic Probabilism and Stoic Epistemology.” CQ 44: 85–​113. Anderson, G. 1993. The Second Sophistic:  A  Cultural Phenomenon in the Roman Empire. London and New York. Bastianini, G., and D. N. Sedley. 1995. “Commentarium in Platonis ‘Theaetetum.’” Corpus dei papiri filosofici greci e latini. Pt. 3, Commentari, 227–​562. Florence. Behr, C. A. 1981–​1986. P. Aelius Aristides: The Complete Works 2 vols. Leiden. Beutler, R. 1940. “Numenius.” In Real-​Encyclopaedie der klassischen Altertumswissenschaft, edited by A. Pauly, G. Wissowa, and W. Kroll, 664–​678. Stuttgart. Bonazzi, M. 2007. “Eudorus of Alexandria and Early Imperial Platonism.” In Greek and Roman Philosophy, 100 bc–​200 ad, edited by R. W. Sharples and R. Sorabji, 365–​377. London. Bonazzi, M., and C. Helmig, eds. 2007. Platonic Stoicism—​Stoic Platonism:  The Dialogue between Platonism and Stoicism in Antiquity. Leuven. Bowersock, G. W. 2002. “Philosophy in the Second Sophistic.” In Philosophy and Power in the Graeco-​Roman World, edited by G. Clark and T. Rajak, 157–​170. Oxford. Boys-​Stones, G. R. 2001. Post-​Hellenistic Philosophy: A Study of Its Development from the Stoics to Origen. Oxford. Boys-​Stones, G. R. 2005. “Alcinous, Didaskalikos 4: In Defence of Dogmatism.” In L’eredità platonica: Studi sul platonismo da Arcesilao a Proclo, edited by M. Bonazzi and V. Celluprica, 203–​234. Naples. Brakke, D. 2010. The Gnostics: Myth, Ritual, and Diversity in Early Christianity. Cambridge, MA/​London. Brenk, F. E. “Plutarch’s Middle-​Platonic God: About to Enter (or Remake) the Academy.” In Gott und die Götter bei Plutarch. Götterbilder—​Gottesbilder—​Weltbilder: Religionsgeschichtliche Versuche und Vorarbeiten, 54, edited by R. Hirsch-​Luipold, 27–​50. Berlin. Brittain, C. 2001. Philo of Larissa: The Last of the Academic Sceptics. Oxford. Cameron, A. 2014. Dialoguing in Late Antiquity. Hellenic Studies Series 65. Washington, DC, and Cambridge, MA. Chiaradonna, R. 2009. “Galen and Middle Platonism.” In Galen and the World of Knowledge: Greek Culture in the Roman World, edited by C. Gill, T. Whitmarsh, and J. Wilkins, 243–​260. Cambridge.

578   Philosophy and Philosophers Cleary, J. J., ed. 1999. Traditions of Platonism: Essays in Honour of John Dillon. Aldershot. de Lacy, P. 1974. “Plato and the Intellectual Life of the Second Century ad.” In Approaches to the Second Sophistic: Papers Presented at the 105th Annual Meeting of the American Philological Association, edited by G. W. Bowersock, 4–​10. University Park, PA. de Lacy, P., ed. and trans. 1978–​1984, 2nd ed. 2005. Galen: On the Doctrines of Hippocrates and Plato. Corpus Medicorum Graecorum 5.4.1.2. 3 vols. Berlin. Dickey, E. 2007. Ancient Greek Scholarship: A Guide to Finding, Reading, and Understanding Scholia, Commentaries, Lexica and Grammatical Treatises, from their Beginnings to the Byzantine Period. Oxford. Digeser, E. 2010. “The late Roman Empire from the Antonines to Constantine.” In The Cambridge History of Philosophy in Late Antiquity, edited by L. P. Gerson, 13–​24. Cambridge. Dillon, J. 1977. The Middle Platonists: 80 b.c. to a.d. 220. Ithaca, NY, and London. Dillon, J. 1988. “‘Orthodoxy’ and ‘Eclecticism’. Middle-​Platonists and Neo-​Pythagoreans.” In The Question of Eclecticism: Studies in Later Greek Philosophy, edited by J. Dillon and A. Long, 103–​125. Berkeley, CA. Dillon, J., trans. 1993. Alcinous: The Handbook of Platonism. Oxford. Dillon, J. 2003. The Heirs of Plato: A Study of the Old Academy (347–​274 bc). Oxford. Dillon, J. 2008. “Pedantry and Pedestrianism? Some Reflections on the Middle Platonic Commentary Tradition.” In Reading Plato in Antiquity, edited by H. Tarrant and D. Baltzly, 19–​31. London. Domini, P.-​L. 1986. “Plutarco, Ammonio e l’Accademia.” In Miscellanea Plutarchea: Atti del I convegno di studi su Plutarco, edited by F. E. Brenk and I. Gallo, 97–​110. Ferrara. Donini, P. 1986a. “Lo scetticismo academico:  Aristotele e l’unita della tradizione platonica second Plutarco.” In Storiografia e dossografia nella filosofia antica, edited by G. Cambiano, 203–​226. Turin. Donini, P. 1986b. “Plutarco, Ammonio e l’Academia.” In Miscellanea Plutarchea: Atti del I convegno di studi su Plutarco, edited by F. E. Brenk and I. Gallo, 97–​110. Ferrara. Edwards, M. 2010. “Numenius of Apamea.” In The Cambridge History of Philosophy in Late Antiquity, edited by L. P. Gerson, 115–​125. Cambridge. Finamore, J. F. 2006. “Apuleius on the Platonic Gods.” In Reading Plato in Antiquity, edited by H. Tarrant and D. Baltzly, 33–​48. London. Finamore, J. F. 2007. “The Platonic Tripartite Soul and the Platonism of Galen’s on the Doctrines of Hippocrates and Plato.” In Metaphysical Patterns in Platonism:  Ancient, Medieval, Rennaissance and Modern Times, edited by J. F. Finamore and R. M. Berchman, 1–​16. New Orleans, LA. Fletcher, R. 2014. Apuleius’ Platonism: The Impersonation of Philosophy. Cambridge. Fowler, R. C. 2010. “The Second Sophistic.” In The Cambridge History of Philosophy in Late Antiquity, edited by L. P. Gerson, 100–​114. Cambridge. Fowler, R. C. 2016. Imperial Plato: Albinus, Maximus, Apuleius. Las Vegas. Fowler, R. C. Forthcoming. “Variations of Receptions of Plato during the Second Sophistic.” In The Brill Companion to the Reception of Plato in Antiquity, edited by H. Tarrant and F. Renaud. Leiden. Gerson, L. P. 2005. Aristotle and Other Platonists. Ithaca, NY. Gerson, L. P., ed. 2010. The Cambridge History of Philosophy in Late Antiquity. 2 vols. Cambridge. Gerson, L. P. 2013. From Plato to Platonism. Ithaca, NY. Glucker, J. 1978. Antiochus and the Late Academy. Göttingen.

Platonism   579 Göransson, T. 1995. Albinus, Alcinous, Arius Didymus. Göteborg. Hankinson, R. J., ed. 2008. The Cambridge Companion to Galen. Cambridge. Hankinson, R. J. 2010. “Galen.” In The Cambridge History of Philosophy in Late Antiquity, edited by L. P. Gerson, 210–​232. Cambridge. Harkins, P. W., trans. 1963. Galen on the Passions and Errors of the Soul. Columbus, OH. Holford-​Strevens, L. 2003. Aulus Gellius: An Antonine Scholar and His Achievement. Rev. ed. Oxford. Jones, C. P. 1966. “The Teacher of Plutarch.” Harv. Stud. 71: 205–​213. Karamanolis, G. 2006. Plato and Aristotle in Agreement? Platonists on Aristotle from Antiochus to Porphyry. Oxford. Kraus, P., and R. Walzer. 1951. Galeni Compendium Timaei Platonis. London. Kritikos, A. 2007. “Platonism in Origen.” In Greek and Roman Philosophy, 100 bc–​200 ad, edited by R. W. Sharples and R. Sorabji, 403–​417. London. Mansfeld, J. 1983. “Intuitionism and Formalism: Zeno’s Definition of Geometry in a Fragment of L. Calvenus Taurus.” Phronesis 28: 59–​74. Mansfeld, J. 1994. Prolegomena: Questions to Be Settled before the Study of an Author or a Text. Leiden. Mansfeld, J. 1997. “Notes on the Didascalicus.” In Studies in Plato and the Platonic Tradition: Essays Presented to John Whittaker, edited by M. Joyal, 245–​259. Aldershot. Marquadt, J., Mueller I., and G. Helmreich, eds. 1884–​1893. Galeni Scripta Minora. 3 vols. Leipzig. Mattern, S. P. 2008. Galen and the Rhetoric of Healing. Baltimore, MD. Mitchell, M. M., and F. M. Young, eds. 2006. The Cambridge History of Christianity. Vol. 1, Origins to Constantine. Cambridge. Moreschini, C. 2017. Review of Stover 2016. BMCR. Cf. http://​bmcr.brynmawr.edu/​2017/​ 2017-​03-​31.html. Opsomer, H. J. 1998. In Search of the Truth: Academic Tendencies in Middle Platonism. Brussels. Opsomer, H. J. 2005. “Plutarch’s Platonism Revisited.” In L’eredità platonica: Studi sul platonismo da Arcesilao a Proclo, edited by M. Bonazzi and V. Celluprica, 161–​200. Naples. Opsomer, H. J. 2009. “M. Annius Ammonius: a Philosophical Profile.” In The Origins of the Platonic System: Platonisms of the Early Empire and their Philosophical Contexts, edited by M. Bonazzi and J. Opsomer, 123–​186. Collection d’Études Classiques 23. Leuven. Prinzivalli, E. 2010. “Origen.” In The Cambridge History of Philosophy in Late Antiquity, edited by L. P. Gerson, 283–​298. Cambridge. Ramelli, I. 2009. “Origen, Patristic Philosophy and Christian Platonism:  rethinking the Christanization of Hellenism.” Vig. Chr. 63: 217–​263. Runia, D. T. 1995. “Why Does Clement of Alexandria Call Philo ‘The Pythagorean’?” Vig. Chr. 49: 1–​22. Schröder, H. 1934. Galeni in Platonis Timaeum commentarii fragmenta. Leipzig. Sedley, D. 1997. “Plato’s Auctoritas and the Rebirth of the Commentary Tradition.’ In Philosophia Togata II: Plato and Aristotle at Rome, edited by J. Barnes and M. T. Griffin, 110–​29. Oxford. Sharples, R. W., and R. Sorabji, eds. 2007. Greek and Roman Philosophy, 100 bc–​200 ad. 2 vols. BICS Supplement 94. London. Singer, P.  N. 2014. “Galen and the Philosophers:  Philosophical Engagement, Shadowy Contemporaries, Aristotelian Engagement.” In Philosophical Themes in Galen, edited by P. Adamson, R. E. Hansberger, and J. Wilberding, 7–​38. BICS Supplement 114. London.

580   Philosophy and Philosophers Smith. A. W. 2012. “Origen (2).” In The Oxford Classical Dictionary, edited by S. Hornblower and A. Spawforth, 1048. 4th ed. Oxford. Stover, J. A. 2016. A New Work by Apuleius: The Lost Third Book of the ‘De Platone’. Oxford and New York. Swain, S., and M. Edwards. 2004. Approaching Late Antiquity: The Transformation from Early to Late Empire. New York. Tarrant, H. 1983. “The Date of the Anonymous In Theaetetum.” CQ 33:161–​187. Tarrant, H. 1985. Scepticism or Platonism? The Philosophy of the Fourth Academy. Cambridge. Tarrant, H. 1993. Thrasyllan Platonism. Ithaca, NY. Tarrant, H. 2000. Plato’s First Interpreters. London. Tarrant, H. 2007. “Platonist Educators in a Growing Market: Gaius, Albinus, Taurus, Alcinous.” In Greek and Roman Philosophy 100 bc–​200 ad, edited by R. W. Sharples and R. Sorabji, 449–​465. London. Tarrant, H. 2010. “Platonism before Plotinus.” In The Cambridge History of Philosophy in Late Antiquity, edited by L. P. Gerson, 1:63–​99. Cambridge. Trapp, M. 1990. “Plato’s Phaedrus in Second-​Century Greek Literature.” In Antonine Literature, edited by D. A. Russell, 141–​173. Oxford. van den Hout, M. P. J., ed. 1954. M. Cornelii Frontonis epistulae. Leiden. von Staden, H. 1997. “Galen and the ‘Second Sophistic.’” In Aristotle and After, edited by R. Sorabji, 33–​54. BICS Supplement 68. London. Whittaker, J. 1987. “Platonic Philosophy in the Early Centuries of the Empire.” ANRW 2.36.1: 81–​123. Winston, D. 2010. “Philo of Alexandria.” In The Cambridge History of Philosophy in Late Antiquity, edited by L. P. Gerson, 1:235–​257. Cambridge. Wooten, C. 1987. Hermogenes' On Types of Style. Chapel Hill, NC.

chapter 37

The Aristot e l ia n Traditi on Han Baltussen

Peripatetics in the Roman Empire shared with most literary movements of the time that they looked back to the writings of the classical past. But they did this, not so much to find stylistic examples (as literary pundits would), but to retrace and understand their intellectual forebears, whose thoughts and philosophical system they aimed to engage with, communicate, and live by. The evidence, while fragmentary, allows us to establish that teachers cultivated a scholarly approach to reading and authority, engendering an increasingly bookish culture of intertextual communication. These features and the idea that philosophy and scholarship could go hand in hand would define the specific nature of the Peripatetic tradition under the early empire. With the exception of one major figure, we know surprisingly little about the Peripatetics in the first and second centuries ce.1 Alexander of Aphrodisias, appointed teacher and champion of Aristotelianism in Athens around 200 ce, seems to have eclipsed many of his immediate predecessors and contemporaries. He became especially famous for his commentaries on Aristotle’s esoteric writings.2 About twenty prominent Peripatetics can be identified between the early first century bce and the time of Alexander, yet for only three do we have extant works, all commentaries dating from the second century ce; for other Peripatetics we have fragments of their work or nothing at all.3 One work by a contemporary of Alexander, Aspasius, also survives almost complete, a commentary on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. In the Aristotelian tradition under the empire the commentary played a crucial role, while it developed into a complex analytical tool for clarifying the works of Aristotle. It illustrates what the study of philosophy entailed at a time when the political and social landscape had changed dramatically and philosophical engagement with political and social problems had diminished. The precise reasons for the dominant position of Alexander are impossible to unravel, but two points may help us to understand better this state of affairs: Alexander’s quality of exegesis is indeed impressive due to its breadth and his eye for detail—​which is why later commentators regarded him as “the commentator par excellence.”4 They even

582   Philosophy and Philosophers referred to him as “the commentator,”5 while using his work to further their understanding of the founder of the Peripatos. In addition, other philosophical schools had more emphatically put their stamp on the popular imagination due to primary interests that engaged more closely with the moral concerns of the wider population. Since the Hellenistic period, ethics had become the core business of philosophy, and it would seem that the immediate successors of Aristotle were “betting on the wrong horse” (physics), a perception which lingered for much of antiquity and after.6

37.1  Peripatetic Presence in the Late Republic and Early Empire Our knowledge of the Peripatos in the early empire is determined by its decline in the late Republic, as is suggested by a striking gap in our evidence between 225 (Lyco) and 155 bce (Critolaus) as well as the absence of any writings down to the first century bce. The philosophical schools of the Hellenistic era—​Platonists, Peripatetics, Stoics, and Epicureans—​all had their followers among Romans. Although early contact with Greeks in south Italy had resulted in an interest in, and admiration for, Greek cultural achievements among the Roman elite families (we can think of the philhellene Scipio Africanus in the late third century), first contact with Greek philosophers in Rome famously occurred when an embassy from Athens came to Rome in 155 bce (Cic. De or. 2.155), impressing some Romans and annoying others, in particular traditional aristocrats such as Cato the Elder (Plut. Cat. Mai. 22.4–​23.4). This event was followed, somewhere between 86 and 82 bce, by the transport of Aristotle’s library to Rome by Sulla after he had captured Athens (84 bce). By this time, knowledge of Peripatetic philosophy had become patchy. In Hellenistic times, anthologies and collections of philosophical views were created, summarizing ideas for didactic and practical reasons; another form, the compendium, not only summarized but also restructured and reorganized knowledge. In other words, selection, compression, and canonization occurred.7 Nicolaus of Damascus (first century bce) wrote a wide-​ranging compendium which survives in Syriac, summarizing the natural philosophy and metaphysics of Aristotle.8 Such works, together with contemporary responses (whether hostile or sympathetic), inform us about the interest in philosophy and how summaries could replace the original works. The revival in the first century bce, then, seems linked to the recovery of esoteric works which had been unavailable or neglected, and followed early efforts by Lucretius (105–​65 bce) and Cicero (106–​44 bce) to familiarize the Romans with Greek philosophy. But Greek philosophers also intensified their work on the newly imported “treasures,” a substantive collection of Aristotle’s writings. Many Greek intellectuals had moved to Rome already under the late Republic.9 The crucial step forward seems to have been an “edition” of Aristotle’s esoteric works in a thematic arrangement by Andronicus

The Aristotelian Tradition    583 of Rhodes (middle to second half of the first century bce)—​in some accounts the eleventh successor to Aristotle as head of the Peripatos.10 Whether or not he produced the first “edition” of Aristotle’s works, his efforts did set a new agenda for reading the corpus, and may have led to its status as a fixed “canon.”11 As a result, the renewed study of Plato’s and Aristotle’s ideas in the early first century led to the emergence of a more scholarly exegesis. Now the (Alexandrian) techniques of editing and assessing manuscripts seemed to combine with philosophical analysis of the arguments and ideas presented in the texts.12 Philosophers would make good use of, and build on, the accumulated knowledge and arguments to engage in debate. Roman-​era emphasis on the commentary flows from the fact that upon his death Aristotle’s esoteric writings were not a fully edited corpus, but a multitude of research and lecture notes which had an implicit coherence, but no explicit systematized narrative. His immediate successors, who were his students and collaborators, were familiar with his ideas and did not require elaborate help to come to grips with the conceptual complexity of the treatises. Subsequent generations of Peripatetics had to work harder at understanding his writings. Andronicus’s textual exegesis and criticism seem to arise from considering a number of specific criteria to assist new readers, in particular the question of coherence and authenticity (Ammonius On Arist. De interpr. 5.24–​26.4): persuasiveness of the arguments, elegant exposition of the doctrine, and similarities with other esoteric writings (pragmateiai). These three points, useful as they may seem, may not be originally his.13 However this may be, the later tradition shows how such questions could become part of the reading practices to establish the text and determine if works were genuine.14 Andronicus is also reported to have written an exegesis to the Categories, as did his student Boethus (Philoponus, in Cat. 5.18–​19; according to Simplicius it was a “word-​by-​ word exegesis,” in Cat. 30.2). These explanatory notes would be taken up by philosophical exegetes in later centuries, as we know from Simplicius (on Boethus, see in Cat. 1.18, 13.15–​17). Such early exegetical works were often concerned with parts of a treatise in response to problematic passages, terms, and concepts (such as the ἀπορίαι, “puzzles,” by Lucius and Nicostratus; see Simpl. in Cat. 1.19–​20). This form of exegesis with a narrow focus on short passages may seem isolated and devoid of wider purpose. But the continuous commentary was not far behind: between Andronicus and Aspasius (early second century ce), a shift occurred from partial exegesis to writing explanatory comments on complete works. The pedagogical context explains much about the nature of the philosophical commentary and must be kept in mind when assessing its predominance in the school’s annals. This brief account of the genesis of ancient “commentary” shows that it is quite different from its modern scholarly counterpart. Comments were made from a particular viewpoint and arose from classroom activity. Significantly, the formal scholarly commentary was coming of age in the second century ce.15 Aristotelian commentary is best represented for this era by the works of Aspasius the Peripatetic (first half of second century ce), Adrastus of Aphrodisias (first half of second century ce), and Alexander (late second to early third century ce).16

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37.2  Peripatetics in the Second Sophistic: Aspasius, Adrastus, Alexander For our purposes, an important distinction should be made in the Roman era between committed Peripatetics (e.g., Adrastus, Aspasius, and Alexander of Aphrodisias, to name the prominent figures) and more eclectic thinkers, who keenly adopted some aspects of Aristotle’s thought, but rejected others. The first group would be self-​ declared adherents of Aristotelian ideas, who broadly agree with the Aristotelian outlook. (They will defend him, but may still criticize him on specific points; see below, section 37.2.1, “Aspasius.”) Members of the second group could belong to a range of domains outside philosophy—​no doubt the result of the increasing eclecticism and thematic convergence among schools of thought, in particular in ethics.17 One example of eclecticism is the historian Strabo, who studied with the Peripatetics Xenarchus (Geogr. 14.5.4) and Boethus of Sidon (Geogr. 16.2.24); yet his views seem to align more with the Stoics. Another is the famous physician Galen (129–​ca. 216/​17ce; see below section 37.3, “An Aristotelianizing Author in the Second Sophistic”), who adopted a select set of scientific and epistemological ideas from Aristotle, but considered many of his empirical views ill-​informed or plain wrong.18 He also offers tantalizing details on Peripatetic thinkers in Rome around 160–​180 ce, referring to one by the name of Eudemus (not to be confused with the second-​generation Peripatetic from Rhodes), who played the role of patron and introduced Galen to the court of the emperor (Marcus Aurelius), and another named Flavius Boethus, an important aristocrat with a keen interest in Aristotle.19 It is against this background of accumulative research activity surrounding the Aristotelian works and the increasingly scholarly nature of philosophical activity that we need to see three Peripatetics in the early empire.

37.2.1 Aspasius Aspasius (ca. 80–​150 ce) remains a somewhat elusive figure. We know that he lived and worked in the first half of second century ce and his commentaries on Aristotle are the earliest surviving examples. He wrote commentaries on the Nicomachean Ethics, Metaphysics, Physics, De sensu, De caelo, the Categories, and On Interpretation.20 The evidence for these works suggests that they were extensive and detailed, often a line-​by-​ line interpretation. In some instances, our knowledge of their existence depends on one passage only, but the evidence for these seven works is reasonably firm.21 His interest in Aristotle’s ethics fits the imperial context, where the debate focused on moral perfection and the means to reach this goal, and signals the shift away from the school’s early focus on physics. His work was known to and used by Galen, Alexander, Boethius, and

The Aristotelian Tradition    585 Simplicius. As Barnes notes, the few points considered by some to undercut his allegiance to the Peripatetic school are not conclusive.22 In his surviving commentary on ethics books 1, 2, 4, 7, 8 (dated to ca. 131 ce), Aspasius discusses standard questions regarding fate, choice, and the virtues. For instance, he claims that each human being is the “source and cause of the things he does” (Commentary to Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics 74.10–​15 Heylbut). Virtue and vice both depend on us (Comm. to Nic. Eth. 76.11–​16), but Aspasius denies that they admit of degrees, claiming that “the perfect virtue consists of all virtues, both the practical and the theoretical” (Comm. to Nic. Eth. 8.25–​26).23 Aspasius also comments on the love between parents and children (Comm. to Nic. Eth. 177.31–​33) and shows awareness that children should love their parents more than parents their children, because the object of love is of more value. When he adds, “this does not happen,” he sounds a critical note, aware that this may contradict comments elsewhere, yet stops short of pressing Aristotle any further.24 The master should not be exposed on every detail.

37.2.2 Adrastus of Aphrodisias Adrastus (ca. 80–​150 ce) came from Aphrodisias, a thriving city in Caria (now southwest Turkey) and a center of philosophical activity. The prosperity of the city was partly due to imperial privileges.25 Adrastus’s broad engagement with Aristotle’s works is clear even from the limited evidence of short references and his one surviving work on ethics (e.g., Porph. Plot. 14.13). We know of works on the arrangement and titles of Aristotle’s works, thanks to the meticulous reports in the introductions to the sixth-​century commentaries by Simplicius on Aristotle’s Categories (in Cat. 16.2–​3, 18.16) and Physics (in Phys. 4.11–​15, 6.4–​9). The view held by Aristotle’s immediate successor Theophrastus—​ that the Physics fell into two parts and that books 1–​5 were about principles of nature (Simpl. in Ph. 923.7–​8; cf. 1358.8–​10)—​is also attributed to Adrastus (in Phys. 6.4–​10). Galen used Adrastus’s treatise on the Categories, on which he wrote a commentary himself (Libr. Propr. 19.43.1 K.). A century later, Porphyry quotes his commentary on the Timaeus (Commentary on Ptolemy’s Harmonics 96.1–​6). And there are works on music and harmonics26 and on the style and history of Theophrastus’s work On Dispositions.27 Such as it is, this evidence indicates that Adrastus was a philosopher with scholarly interests, concerned with questions of arrangement and structure of Aristotle’s works—​ a feature that fits the concerns of his time as well as the Peripatetic mold.

37.2.3 Alexander of Aphrodisias Like Adrastus, Alexander came from Aphrodisias. His teachers were Aristotle of Mytilene, Herminus, and Sosigenes.28 Until recently we had no precise dates for Alexander’s working life, since his dedication of On Fate to emperors Septimius Severus and Caracalla allowed only an estimate between 198 and 211 ce (the death of Septimius

586   Philosophy and Philosophers Severus).29 Our knowledge was supplemented in 2004 by epigraphic evidence from Aphrodisias with publication of a honorary inscription dedicated to his father (also a philosopher) which confirms his status as diadochos and provides his full name, which he shares with his father: Titus Aurelius Alexandros.30 Arguably the commentator par excellence, at least in the Aristotelian tradition, Alexander became the model for the running commentary on Aristotle’s esoteric writings for several centuries. His appointment to the chair of Peripatetic philosophy in Athens was significant—​one of several chairs set up by emperor Marcus Aurelius (Philostr. VS 2.2 [566]). Given the quantity of his surviving commentaries and treatises, his ideas and the formal features of his work, praised by later commentators, can only be briefly outlined here.31 His decision to comment almost line by line by choosing lemmata (short passages) had its precedent in Aspasius (and Boethus). Though clearly an Aristotelian, his attitude to Aristotle remains critical, while aiming to reach a coherent interpretation where possible. Alexander’s works are probably the best example for how philosophy was now an exercise in textual interpretation, and no doubt became influential because they “were detailed, sensible discussions of the text and not overly partisan or obsequious in their interpretation.”32 They were used in the third century by Plotinus (Porph. Plot. 14.13–​14) and continued to attract the attention of Aristotelian and Platonist commentators alike. But Alexander also wrote his own philosophical works, some in the form of prose treatise, while others are problem-​oriented (called problêmata in Greek or quaestiones in Latin). Thus his influence was pervasive as an Aristotelian thinker and commentator.33 Surviving works in Greek, Syriac, and Arabic range from commentaries on Aristotle’s metaphysics, physics, works on the senses, meteorology, providence, logic, and Coming-​ to-​be and Passing-​Away.34 Alexander is an Aristotelian defending Aristotle’s worldview, but some of his elaborations and clarifications fall under the broader description of “creative and expansive interpretation.”35 His attempt to show Aristotle as presenting a coherent and comprehensive system sometimes leads to interpretations which elaborate on what is in Aristotle or even go beyond it. Like commentators before him, his interpretation is based on the text, but he may offer a “creative interpretation,” stretching its meaning and surmising what Aristotle “intended” to write. He also diverges from Aristotle in subtle ways, most famously in his views on the soul, determinism, universals, and intellect. Since these represent his views on the source of life, the order of the universe, and how we can acquire knowledge of these, they concern topics of great interest to the contemporary philosophical debate. A few examples of his discussion of Aristotle’s ideas will illustrate these aspects of his approach. His treatment of the works on nature has been characterized as having naturalistic tendencies, in that he takes the un-​Aristotelian position that “universals do not exist apart from particulars.”36 That is, he distinguishes between intelligible forms embodied in matter and those that are not. He agrees with Aristotle that “the soul is the first actuality of a body which is natural and complex [organikon]” (Alex. De anima 16.10f. = Sharples 2010a, text 24H), but adds elsewhere that the soul is “not a certain mixture of bodies, that is an arrangement [harmonia], but the power that is supervening on a

The Aristotelian Tradition    587 certain sort of mixture” (24.21 = Sharples 2010a, text 24Ac). As is clear, the debate was focused on the question what Aristotle’s soul was made of, and whether it consisted of elements, or supervened on them. There is, however, some suspicion that Aristotle’s definition was not well known and therefore misunderstood.37 The last point is closely connected to his theory on intellect, considered his most influential. Over the course of two accounts which are not completely in harmony (his own De anima 80–​92 and De intellectu mantissa 2), he argues with Aristotle that our intellect receives the forms of its objects without the matter; the result is that intellect and objects become identical with regard to the form (Alex. De anima 84.22–​24). Alexander diverges from Aristotle in a way that is presented as extending (rather than contradicting) his ideas. For instance, when he comes to talk about the active and passive intellect (Arist. De an. 3.5), he identifies active intellect with pure form (i.e., “not embodied in matter”), but he fails to clarify how the active intellect operates as a cause. However this may be, the position seems to imply that Alexander does not believe in a personal survival of a part of the individual soul.38 Alexander’s critical studies include a polemic against contemporary schools, in particular the Stoics. He appears to have focused more on the school’s founders (the “Old Stoa”), not contemporary Stoics. But in De fato, for instance, his peculiar concern is with the general thesis of determinism more than the specific Stoic discussion within their philosophical position:39 That deliberating is in vain if everything comes to be of necessity can easily be realized by those who know the use of deliberating. It is agreed by everyone that man has the advantage from nature over other living creatures, that he does not follow appearances in the same way as them, but has reason from her as a judge of the appearances that impinge on him concerning certain things as deserving to be chosen. (De fato 2.178.15–​28).40

In this passage, Alexander evaluates the assumption of a deterministic universe (“if everything comes to be of necessity”) and how it might influence our behavior. He argues that human beings can use reason to deliberate about the appearances, which might induce them to make a choice. He thus distances himself from full determinism, even if this argument incorporates the Stoic notion of assent into the account of Aristotelian deliberation.41 But Alexander also directs criticism at others, for example, against Galen, in a work preserved in Arabic entitled “Refutation against Galen’s Attack on Aristotle’s Doctrine that Everything that Moves Is Set in Motion by a Mover,” a work that concerns the old chestnut of souls as self-​movers.42 Alexander’s influence as a writer is most felt as commentator, starting with Plotinus (203–​275 ce) who read the commentaries while studying Aristotle with his students (Porph. Plot. 14.4), reaching up to the Platonist commentators of the fifth and sixth centuries (esp. Ammonius and Simplicius).43 His commentaries helped to interpret the works of Aristotle, but also functioned as a template for the running commentary.

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37.3  An Aristotelianizing Author in the Second Sophistic In contrast to the poorly attested reactions to Aristotle’s ideas in the Hellenistic period, other intellectuals outside the circle of self-​declared Peripatetics can be seen to engage actively with his ideas during the Second Sophistic. One important example is the prolific philosopher-​physician Galen, who was also heavily influenced by the approaches to knowledge and literary production of this time. It is no coincidence that Galen was also a writer of commentaries (see ­chapter 24 in this volume). His interest in Aristotle illustrates the eclectic attitude of the era regarding philosophy. “Eclecticism” should not, however, be taken as a negative label, but as a term which describes Galen’s sensible selectiveness and “penchant for systematic synthesis.”44 Plato and Aristotle were major influences on Galen. In his youth, Galen had sampled all major philosophical schools in his own city: this was customary for the well-​educated class (his father was an architect, as was his grandfather45). This gave him a broad education and made him aware of the different schools and a range of arguments in the main branches of philosophy (epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, logic). The experience strongly influenced his view of the medical profession.46 Aristotle famously declared that the philosopher has to have knowledge of medical matters and a physician should also be a philosopher (Sens. 436a19–​22; Resp. 480b26–​30). Galen’s concern with education and pedagogy is clear from the way in which he echoes certain views of Aristotle (and Plato). Galen often noted the characteristics he expected students to have: “he [who wants to study medicine and philosophy] has to be quick-​witted, have a good memory and be hardworking” (De Ord. Libr. prop. 19.59.2). In another passage (in a work preserved only in Arabic entitled On How to Recognize the Best Doctor), Galen sums up what kind of student will become a good doctor, emphasizing that a student with the right instruction “will be able to describe the doctrines of each of these [i.e., the Ancients].” The perfect student can also add “those of their successors, outlining the differences and agreements,” and add “his own judgment on their differences, justifying correct doctrines and exposing those that are erroneous.” Galen insists that this requires training in demonstrative science.47 These requirements express the importance of education at the time and are very familiar from discussions of knowledge acquisition in Plato (e.g., Resp. 485–​6; Tht. 143) and Aristotle (Eth. Nic. 6.9; An. post. 1.33).48 More specifically, this view (partly) echoes an often overlooked remark made by Aristotle in the last book of the Nicomachean Ethics.49 Here Aristotle states in passing: We do not see men becoming expert physicians from a study of medical handbooks [ek tôn suggrammatôn]. Yet medical writers attempt to describe not only general courses of treatment, but also methods of cure and modes of treatment for particular sorts of patients, classified according to their various habits of body; and

The Aristotelian Tradition    589 their treatises appear to be of value for men who have had practical experience [tois empeirois], though they are useless for the novice [tois anepistêmosi]. (Eth. Nic. 10.9, 1181b21ff. Loeb)

Aristotle clearly expresses the same view about the limited value of books in relation to practical knowledge as Galen did—​especially relevant because it concerns the art of medicine.50 Both authors imply that learning from books alone is rather ineffective because it is like learning to swim on dry land: the knowledge will have no referent in one’s understanding of the actions and things described; that is, a gap will remain between theory and practice, between knowing and applying. Aristotle’s point is of course more limited in that he emphasizes the aspect of the general versus the particular (he just spoke of legislation, arguing that a mere collection of laws written down still does not amount to knowledge of justice or a just society). Galen never tired of stating that his understanding of medicine was of a higher level, because he knew philosophy and was trained in logic (in his view most of his medical colleagues were not). He admired Aristotle mostly for his logical doctrine and scientific methodology and seems to have aimed to live up to Aristotle’s injunction: to be a physician-​philosopher.

37.4  Concluding Remarks During the so-​called Second Sophistic, philosophy was as much backward-​looking as most other branches of literary production. But it also incorporated several new trends which had arisen out of the consolidation of its intellectual heritage in written form. And these trends, mostly characterized by close textual study of the writings of the early founders, their successors, and students, contributed to forging new ways forward. The text-​based method of philosophizing necessitated philosophical as well as scholarly skills to acquire a full understanding of the base text and its interpretations accumulated over time. The focus was on recapturing the founder’s ideas from the books that became more widely available and for a new audience in Rome. The scholarly nature of the exegetical method grew initially out of an attempt to clarify the text of the difficult Aristotelian writings, and out of the pedagogical context, where teachers discussed the original writings with their students. Rather than diminish it, commentary was there to enrich philosophy. A well-​educated doctor like Galen saw the benefit of Aristotelian ideas for his own medical science. A scholarly approach implicitly appealed to the authority of the master (and his successors) and would try to reveal the true nature of his thought by way of sophisticated exegesis. Those who identified with Aristotelian thought could be self-​declared, or perceived as, Peripatetics, but it is clear that they would still be free to engage critically with the writings of their master.51 Like many earlier Peripatetics (Theophrastus, Eudemus, Xenarchus, Boethus), Alexander is seen to disagree with Aristotle on important issues—​a fact which does not jeopardize

590   Philosophy and Philosophers their allegiance. (It does complicate how we are to understand that notion, and with it, the coherence of a “school” built on a narrowly defined corpus of texts.) This attitude to the founder’s writings implicitly acknowledged that his work was not an unambiguously revealed truth, but an interpretation of the world which itself allowed for different interpretations. As a result, the philosophical commentary became the mainstay of philosophical activity, as the intellectual workspace for interpreting and developing ideas. Alexander of Aphrodisias was the highlight of this type of learned interpretation for the Aristotelian tradition up to 200 ce. His appointment to the Peripatetic chair placed him among the elite of his times, as a man of letters linked to power—​which is especially clear from the dedication to Septimius Severus and Caracalla of his work On Fate (1.164.3–​15).52 He was probably the last significant Peripatetic thinker writing philosophical commentary, but his intellectual authority lived on beyond the classroom, influencing Platonist, Arabic, and Christian philosophers in their reading of Aristotle.53

Further Reading The ancient evidence on the Peripatetics for the period 200 bce–​200 ce is limited, uneven and of a rather technical nature, which is why a synthetic account of the Aristotelians in relation to the Second Sophistic remains difficult (see Baltussen 2016). For discussion of some Aristotelians of this period, see Moraux 1973, 1984, and Gottschalk 1987. Important primary material of the period is now conveniently translated in Sharples 2010a (for discussion, see also Sharples and Sorabji 2007). Useful comments on Peripatetic views on ethics in Trapp 2007 (esp. 30–​36, 76–​7 8, 144–​1 47, with further literature). For Alexander of Aphrodisias, Sharples’s books and translations are fundamental; for a convenient set of important short passages in translation see also Sorabji 2004. The most useful (and only) book on Aspasius is the collection of essays edited by Alberti and Sharples 1999. Translations of parts of his Commentary on Aristotle’s Ethics by Konstan 2006, 2010. Good general treatments of Galen and his relation to Aristotle as well as the Second Sophistic are Swain 1996, chap. 11; von Staden 1997; and Van der Eijk 2009.

appendix Peripatetics 100 bce to 250 ce The chronological list is based on Sharples in Sharples and Sorabji 2007, 503–​504 and Sharples 2010a, with additions by myself (*) and from Schorn 2003. I have included those Peripatetics who are given that label in the sources. Andronicus of Rhodes (first century bce): called “the Peripatetic” by Galen (e.g., Quod animi mores 4.782 K). Boethus of Sidon: student of Andronicus; wrote comments on the Categories (Simpl. in Cat. 1.18; 13.15–​17; 30.2; Philoponus, in Cat. 5.18–​19).

The Aristotelian Tradition    591 Staseas of Naples: called “a Peripatetic” by Cicero (De orat. 1.104) (see Moraux 1973, 217; Schorn 2003, 43). Xenarchus of Seleucia:  teacher of Strabo (64 bce to 24 ce); fragments preserved in later Platonists (collected and clarified by Falcon 2012). Kratippus of Pergamum:  according to Cicero (Tim. 1), “easily the best among Peripatetics I have heard” (Schorn 2003, 43). (Areus) Didymus: court philosopher of Emperor Augustus(?); second half of first century bce (if he is the same as Arius/​Areus Didymus, he may be a Stoic; see Sharples 2010a, 21–​22). Nicolaus of Damascus (second half of first century bce): court philosopher of Herod the Great (FGrH 90F135 Jacoby); wrote a Study of Aristotle’s Metaphysics (noted in some MSS at end of Theophr. Metaph. 12a4–​b4) (see Sharples 2010a, 15–​16). Adrastus of Aphrodisias (first half of second century ce): perhaps the same person as Adrastus of Philippi mentioned by Stephanus of Byzantium (FGrH 7, 1999, 51). Alexander of Aegae (mid-​first century ce): Peripatetic philosopher at the court of Nero (Suda s.v. = A 1128). Aristotle of Mytilene: perhaps teacher of Alexander (Galen, On Habits 11.4–​12 Müller = fr. 1.Z Sharples). Aspasius the Peripatetic (first half of second century ce): “among the exegetes of Aristotle” (Simpl. in Phys. 131.14); wrote commentaries on ethics, metaphysics, physics, physiology, the heavens, logic (Categories, On Interpr.). One of his students taught Galen ca. 144 ce (see On the Affections of the Soul 8; Barnes 1999, 1–​3). Mentioned twenty-​eight times in the commentaries on Aristotle by the Platonist Simplicius (ca. 480–​540 ce) [source: TLG-​E at http://​ stephanus.tlg.uci.edu.au/​]. Sosigenes (ca. 120–​180/​190 ce): teacher of Alexander of Aphrodisias. Herminus (ca. 120–​180/​190 ce): teacher of Alexander of Aphrodisias. Ptolemy (third quarter of second century ce). *Aristocles of Pergamum (150–​180 ce): “though from boyhood to early manhood he had devoted himself to the teachings of the Peripatetic school, he went over entirely to the sophists” (Philostr. VS 2.2 [566]). *Anon. (late second century ce) wrote a Commentary on Nicomachean Ethics 2–​5. Eudemus (late second century ce): teacher of Flavius Boethus; mentioned by Galen (De praenotione 14.612.12) as a Peripatetic in Rome. Alexander of Damascus (late second century ce): teacher of Flavius Boethus; mentioned by Galen (De anat. admin. 2.218 K.); confused with Alexander of Aphrodisias by Galen himself (Sharples 1987, 1179 with n21). Flavius Boethus (late second century ce): mentioned by Galen (e.g., De anatom. administr. 2.215.5 K) as an important Roman aristocrat with great interest in Aristotle (De praenotione 14.626.1 K; 627.1 K). See also Johnson 2010, 78–​79. *Claudius Severus (late second century ce): teacher of Marcus Aurelius (Med. 1.14) Aristotle of Mytilene (mid to late second century ce [died between 165 and 180 ce]): teacher of Alexander of Aphrodisias. Alexander of Aphrodisias (late second to early third century ce): referred to as “the commentator”; appointed to chair (thronos) of Peripatetic philosophy at Athens between 198 and 211 ce, Alexander is the dominant commentator in this era; many of his works were used by subsequent philosophical commentators at least until Simplicius (ca. 480–​540 ce).

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Bibliography Alberti, A. and R. W. Sharples, eds. 1999. Aspasius:  The Earliest Extant Commentary on Aristotle’s Ethics. Berlin. Baltussen, H. 2007. “From Polemic to Exegesis: The Ancient Philosophical Commentary.” In “Genres in Philosophy.” Special issue, Poetics Today, edited by J. Lavery, 28: 247–​281. Baltussen, H. 2008. Philosophy and Exegesis in Simplicius: The Methodology of a Commentator. London. Baltussen, H. 2013. “The Peripatetics after Aristotle.” In The Routledge Companion to Ancient Philosophy, edited by J. Warren and F. Sheffield, 511–​525. New York and Abingdon. Baltussen, H. 2016. The Peripatetics: Aristotle’s Heirs, 322 bce–​200 ce. London. Barker, A. 1984. Greek Musical Writings. Cambridge. Barnes, J., S. Bozien, K. Flannery, and K. Ierodiakonou, trans. 1991. Alexander of Aphrodisias: On Aristotle Prior Analytics 1.1–​7. London. Barnes, J. 1997. “Roman Aristotle.” In Philosophia Togata II: Plato and Aristotle at Rome, edited by J. Barnes and M. Griffin, 1–​69. Oxford. Barnes, J. 1999. “Introduction to Aspasius.” In Aspasius: The Earliest Extant Commentary on Aristotle’s Ethics, edited by A. Alberti, and R. W. Sharples, 1–​50. Berlin. Boudon-​Millot, V. 2007a. Galien. Vol. 1, Introduction générale; Sur l’ordre de ses propres livres; Sur ses propres livres; Que l’excellent médecin est aussi philosophe. Paris. Boudon-​Millot, V. 2007b. “Un traité perdu de Galien miraculeusement retrouvé, le Sur l’inutilité de se chagriner: Texte grec et traduction française.” In La science médicale antique: Nouveaux regards, edited by V. Boudon-​Millot, A. Guardasole, and C. Magdelaine, 72–​123. Paris. Bowie, E. L. 1982. “The Importance of Sophists.” YClS 27: 29–​59. Chaniotis, A. 2004. “New Inscriptions from Aphrodisias (1995–​2001).” AJArch. 108: 377–​416. Dickey, E. 2007. Ancient Greek Scholarship: A Guide to Finding, Reading, and Understanding Scholia, Commentaries, Lexica and Grammatical Treatises, from their Beginnings to the Byzantine Period. Oxford. Drossaart Lulofs, H.  J. 1969. Nicolaus Damascenus on the Philosophy of Aristotle. 2nd ed. Leiden. Düring, I. 1957. Aristotle in the Ancient Biographical Tradition. Gothenburg. Falcon, A. 2012. Aristotelianism in the First Century bc: Xenarchus of Seleucia. Oxford. Falcon, A. 2013. “Andronicus of Rhodes.” In Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by E. N. Zalta. http://​plato.stanford.edu/​entries/​aristotle-​commentators/​supplement.html. Fazzo, S. 2012. “The Metaphysics from Aristotle to Alexander of Aphrodisias.” In Ancient Philosophy in Memory of R. W. Sharples, edited by P. Adamson, 51–​68. BICS 55, no. 1. London. Frede, D. 2013. “Alexander of Aphrodisias.” In Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by E. N. Zalta. http://​plato.stanford.edu/​archives/​spr2013/​entries/​alexander-​aphrodisias/​. Fortenbaugh, W. W. 2011. Theophrastus of Eresus: Commentary Volume 6.1. Sources on Ethics. Leiden. Gottschalk, H. B. 1987. “Aristotelian Philosophy in the Roman World.” ANRW 2.36.2: 1079–​174. Hankinson, R. J. 1992. “Galen’s Philosophical Eclecticism.” ANRW 2.36.5: 3505–​3522. Hebert, L. 2009. “Pagans and Christians in Late Antique Aphrodisias.” In Conversion to Christianity from Late Antiquity to the Modern Age: Considering the Process in Europe, Asia, and the Americas, edited by C. B. Kendall, O. Nicholson, W. D. Phillips, and M. Ragnow, 85–​113. Washington.

The Aristotelian Tradition    593 Ierodiakonou, K. 1999. “Aspasius on Perfect and Imperfect Virtues.” In Aspasius: The Earliest Extant Commentary on Aristotle’s Ethics, edited by A. Alberti and R. W. Sharples, 142–​161. Berlin. Jaeger, W. 1948. Aristoteles: Grundlegung einer Geschichte seiner Entwicklung. Oxford. Jaeger, W. 1957. “Aristotle’s Use of Medicine as a Model of Method in his Ethics.” JHS 77: 54–​61. Johnson, W. A. 2010. Readers and Reading Culture in the High Roman Empire: A Study of Elite Communities. Oxford and New York. Konstan, D., trans. 2001. Aspasius: On Aristotle’s “Nicomachean Ethics” 8–​9. Ithaca, NY, and London. Konstan, D., trans. 2006. Aspasius: On Aristotle’s “Nicomachean Ethics” 1–​4, 7–​8. Ithaca, NY, and London. Mansfeld, J. 1994. Prolegomena: Questions to Be Settled before the Study of an Author or a Text. Leiden. Mattern, S. 2013. The Prince of Medicine: Galen in the Roman Empire. Oxford. Moraux, P. 1973. Der Aristotelismus bei den Griechen von Andronikos bis Alexander von Aphrodisias. Vol. 1, Die Renaissance des Aristotelismus im I. Jh. v. Chr. Berlin. Moraux, P. 1984. Der Aristotelismus bei den Griechen von Andronikos bis Alexander von Aphrodisias. Vol. 2, Der Aristotelismus im I. und II. Jh. n. Chr. Berlin. Niehoff, M. R. 2011. Jewish Exegesis and Homeric Scholarship in Alexandria. Cambridge. Nutton, V. 1973. “The Chronology of Galen’s Early Career.” CQ 23: 158–​171. Reynolds, L. D., and N. G. Wilson. 1991. Scribes and Scholars: A Guide to the Transmission of Greek and Latin Literature. 3rd ed. Oxford. Schorn, S. 2003. “Wer wurde in der Antike als Peripatetiker bezeichnet?” WJA NS, 27: 39–​69. Sharples, R.  W. 1987. “Alexander of Aphrodisias:  Scholasticism and Innovation.” ANRW 2.36.2: 1176–​1243. Sharples, R.  W. 1990. “The School of Alexander?” In Aristotle Transformed:  The Ancient Commentators and Their Influence, edited by R. Sorabji, 83–​111. Ithaca, NY. Sharples, R. W. 2005. “Implications of the New Alexander of Aphrodisias Inscription.” BICS 48: 47–​56. Sharples, R. W. 2010a. Peripatetic Philosophy 200 bc–​ce 200: An Introduction and Collection of Sources in Translation. Cambridge. Sharples, R. W. 2010b. “Peripatetics.” In The Cambridge History of Philosophy in Late Antiquity, edited by L. P. Gerson, 1:140–​160. Cambridge. Sharples, R. W., and R. R. K. Sorabji, eds. 2007. Greek and Roman Philosophy 100 bc–​200 ce. BICS Supplement 94. London. Sorabji, R. R. K. 2004. The Philosophy of the Commentators, 200–​600 ce: A Sourcebook. 3 vols. London. Swain, S. 1996. Hellenism and Empire: Language, Classicism, and Power in the Greek World, ad 50–​250. Oxford. Trapp, M. 2007. Philosophy in the Roman Empire: Ethics, Politics and Society. Aldershot. Van der Eijk, P., ed. 2001. Diocles of Carystus: A Collection of the Fragments with Translation and Commentary. 2 vols. Leiden. Van der Eijk, P. 2009. “‘Aristotle! What a Thing for You to Say!’ Galen’s Engagement with Aristotle and Aristotelians.” In Galen and the World of Knowledge, edited by C. Gill, T. Whitmarsh, and J. Wilkins, 261–​281. Cambridge. von Staden, H. 1997. “Galen and the ‘Second Sophistic.’” In Aristotle and After, edited by R. Sorabji, 33–​54. BICS Supplement 68. London.

594   Philosophy and Philosophers Wehrli, F. ed. 1967–​1969. Die Schule des Aristoteles: Texte und Kommentar. 2nd ed. 12 vols. Basel. First published 1944–​1959. Wehrli, F. 1994. “Der Peripatos bis zum Beginn der römischen Kaiserzeit.” In Die Philosophie der Antike, edited by J. Flashar, 3:459–​599. 2nd ed. Basel. Whitmarsh, T. 2005. The Second Sophistic. Oxford.

Pa rt  V I I

R E L IG ION A N D R E L IG IOU S L I T E R AT U R E

chapter 38

Cult Marietta Horster

From the Hellenistic period onward, there was an increase in the importance of festivals, rituals, public performances and office-​holding in the context of more or less public cults and of private cult associations. This seems to be a clear trend, though it was interrupted from time to time by the effects of war. Several Roman emperors then fostered this tendency during the imperial period. Augustus supported the renewal of temple building and helped to restore the property of sanctuaries (e.g., Res Gestae 24; IK Ephesos 18b, 3501; IK Kyme 17). New festivals and new cults were inaugurated in Rome, Italy, and the provinces, and the ruler cult with its sacrifices, processions, and festivals gave a new structure to the religious calendar of many cities in the empire. However, Roman dominance had further consequences for the cultic life of Greek cities, for example the priesthood of the imperial cult, which became one of the most important positions in the larger cities, or the priesthood of the provincial council, which was reserved for the wealthiest citizens who could afford to pay for the costly festival in honor of the emperor and Roma. The Julio-​Claudian emperors and the Flavians continued the pattern set by Augustus: sacred property was protected, religious rituals were observed, there was continuity in cult, and individual or municipal privileges in the context of cult and religion were recognized. In the second century, emperors like Hadrian and Marcus Aurelius financed building projects in the eastern provinces, of which the temple of Zeus at Athens is one of the most spectacular. Completely new construction of a sanctuary with a major temple is rare in the mid-​and later second century and is not associated with any particular source of funding (e.g., imperial, public, or private). The monumental and visual presence of the divine world is one facet of ancient religious life, while ritual and cult, staging and performing the numinous, are another. Dio of Prusa even goes so far to claim that in his lifetime, the late first century ce, sacrifices and festivals were the most important means by which Greek cities competed and won fame (Dio Chr. Or. 21.102). The number, length, and splendor of “religious” festivals and processions seem to increase again in the second part of the second century, as do reports about the generosity and extent of gifts of money and food.1 Herodes Atticus’s lavish expenditure in Athens (Philostr. VS 549) is one such example. At the Panathenaia,

598    Religion and Religious Literature Atticus paid for the sacrifice of a hundred oxen to the goddess Athena and entertained the Athenians with the sacrificial feast. At the city-​Dionysia, he arranged a splendid wine event for citizens and foreigners in the Ceramicus. In addition, the international Panhellenic contests at major sanctuaries, above all at Olympia and Delphi, were among the most important occasions for sophists to appear in public and gain recognition. The “Olympic speech” was a standard part of rhetorical education, and other genres of speech were also favored at the various artistic competitions that were staged in the context of (religious) festivals.2 All this is known not only from building inscriptions, inscribed honors recording benefactions, and decrees and letters set up in stone, but also from many literary texts. Pausanias’s praise of the Greek religious zenith of archaic and classical times contrasts with his rather saturnine account of the contemporary scene in the mid-​second century, with its abandoned sites, neglected cult tradition, and collapsed temple roofs in the very heart of Greece.3 However, Pausanias’s description of Greece as a land with divine presence manifest in the remains of the past, with his interest in cult, myths, and traditions, is in itself a counterbalance to his own picture of contemporary Greece, as are texts by other authors who put cult and religious movements at the heart of their writings. Christian authors, and especially those in the tradition of apologetic writings, have their first peak in this period and the first heroic accounts of individual Christian martyrs, too, were published at this time. The present chapter will not address such texts or the changes and spread of Christian cult organization; likewise, it must leave out accounts of the struggle of the Jews with the Roman authorities and the drastic consequences for their cult after the Bar Kochba Revolt was crushed in 136 ce. However, it should be noted that some scholars have seen parallels between Christian narrative traditions and sophistic texts, both those that play with ideas of thaumaturgy and those that show parallels between the plots of Jesus’s or the Apostles’ lives and those of pagan heroes like Apollonius in Philostratus.4 Furthermore, in addition to sophistic literary representations of the importance of rituals, religious offices, and cult traditions, “real-​life” sophists were involved in cult organizations and held priesthoods of the imperial cult and of more or less important deities. The more down-​to-​earth topics, such as the imperial measures concerning cult and religion, and individual sophists’ involvement in cults, will be treated at the start of this chapter, whereas the more “sophistic” (or literary) question of the role of cults in the sophists’ texts and the role played by the sophists in the cultic and religious life of the cities of the eastern provinces will be treated at the end.

38.1  Imperial Measures Concerning Cult in the Eastern Provinces Only a few imperial measures that concern cult and religion were of general importance and valid for the empire as a whole, or at least for one or more provinces. One measure

Cult   599 (though of little relevance in the context of cults) is, however, significant for the general perception of the period: it was probably Antoninus Pius who introduced a ritual for the newly wed.5 Ob insigniam eorum concordiam—​in order to express their harmony and concord—​every young couple had to sacrifice on a specific altar erected in honor of the imperial couple, at least in Rome and Ostia, and perhaps in all cities of the empire (Rémy 2005, 131). The visual, ritual, and verbal expression of the unity and harmony of a couple (dextrarum iunctio), or of a city, group of people, province, or region, or of the Roman Empire as a whole, were the main keywords of the Antonine period.6 The cult of Antinous, Hadrian’s beloved young friend, was another new feature in the sacred landscape of more than one region or province, but while it was widespread it often was not long-​lived. The cult veneration had the character of a hero cult. Antinous was the “ideal” ephebe and was sometimes adapted to other heroes (like Androclos or Adonis) or divinities (like Osiris or Apollo).7 Hadrian’s role in the “encouragement” of this cult is far from clear. The many known imperial benefactions and regulations concern in most cases only a single city, sanctuary, or cult, one individual priest, or the priesthood of one deity in one city. Among these cases, building activity is the most prominent topic, at least in the material that has been transmitted by inscriptions, biographies, or other literary traditions. Most of these reports concern Hadrian. M. Boatwright has listed the temples, shrines, and sanctuaries that Hadrian built, rebuilt, or supported with financial or material resources; about a third of all his benefactions concern building work.8 Only a few cases were entirely new constructions: in Athens the temple of (Hera and) Zeus Panhellenios (Paus. 1.18.9), and in the newly inaugurated colonia Aelia Capitolina of Jerusalem the temple of Jupiter Capitolinus (Cass. Dio 69.12.1 and others). Hadrian rebuilt the archaic temple of Apollo in Phocian Abai (Paus. 10.35.4), the extraurban sanctuary of Poseidon Hippios at Arcadian Mantineia (Paus. 8.10.2), and the shrine of Pythian Apollo in Megara, which he turned from a building of brick into one of white marble (Paus. 1.42.5). Pausanias relates that in Abai and Mantineia the older structures were preserved, a mark of the emperor’s respect for cult traditions and for the mythological and historical past of the sites. Hadrian completed the Olympieum in Athens (Paus. 1.18.9, cf. Willers 1990), and in Asia Minor and the Aegean islands he supported several construction projects connected with sanctuaries: the sanctuary of Zeus in Cyzicus,9 perhaps a (cult?) building in Metropolis (IK Ephesos 3433, cf. Mitchell 1987, 358), and in Teos the temple of Dionysus.10 This last is one of the few sanctuaries connected with the administration of the association of Dionysian technites, the important professional organization of artists who performed at many of the sacred festivals and were an indispensable guarantee of a certain standard of entertainment. But Hadrian did more: he formally took over responsibility for the oracular sanctuary of Apollo Claros for one year (Sherk 1991, 241) and, as prophetes in Didyma, for the temple of Apollo there (Boatwright 2000, 69–​70). When he stayed in Pergamum, he may have helped finance the decoration of the Asclepieum in that city.11 If we can trust the Byzantine author Georgios Kedrenos, Trajan paid for the expensive temple door (púle) of the Artemisium of Ephesus (Kedr. 1.595) and Antoninus Pius added to the

600    Religion and Religious Literature funding of the temple of Artemis in Termessus (SEG 41.1255).12 Pausanias noted a costly and extravagant votive offering by Hadrian for the temple of Hera in Achaean Argos—​a peacock, sacred to Hera, made of gold and gemstones—​but it should be noted that such gifts are not a phenomenon typical only of the second-​century sophistic era, as Nero had dedicated a golden crown and a purple robe to Hera nearly a century earlier (Paus. 2.17.6). The renovation of hero shrines and tombs was another similar measure that promoted a city’s cultural and religious renown, appearance, and standing.13 For some, not only building activities but also imperial visits like those of Hadrian, or that of Caracalla to the Achilleum, may have made hero shrines a more attractive subject in contemporary literature, as seen in Philostratus’s Heroicus or in Philostratus’s Life of Apollonius, in which he makes Apollonius consecrate a new cult for Palamedes.14 The imperial cult was extended by all emperors from Augustus onward, most often in the form of permissions, grants and titles: Ephesus received a second “Neokoros” title (and temple) from Hadrian after an intervention by the priest of the imperial cult (and probable sophist) Ti. Claudius Piso Diophantes (IK Ephesos 428), while in Smyrna the sophist M. Antonius Polemon was able to convince Hadrian to grant the city a Neokoros temple and contribute to the building expenses (Philostr. VS 532, 539–​540; after Polemon’s death, his written speech was performed by another orator before the emperor).15 Coins and inscriptions show that Hadrian awarded Neokoros status to the cities of Tarsus and Cyzicus too. In the late second and third centuries, the title seems to have been widespread and it is attested in, for example, Magnesia, Philadelphia, and Tralleis, but it is unclear whether any privileges were connected with this now common grant. Another impulse for the imperial cult was given by the Panhellenion established by Hadrian (cf. Pirenne-​Delforge 2008, 156–​171). As well as building activities, votives, donations, and new organizational forms like the Panhellenes, there were measures that perhaps got less publicity but nonetheless had lasting consequences. For example, Hadrian regulated conflicts over sacred land and its income for the city of Aezani and the sanctuary of Zeus (CIL 3.355 = Smallwood 2.454); in Ephesus, the goddess Artemis received the right to accept legacies and estates (IK Ephesos 274), privileges for which the city thanked its “founder” and “savior” Hadrian, even though he was not the first emperor to grant privileges to Artemis, as we know that at least Augustus and Claudius did so. These and other cult privileges, as well as permissions to hold festivals, seem to have been confirmed again, either at times when substantial changes were made (perhaps only those concerning property rights and additional costs?) or when a new emperor was on the throne. A dossier of letters with appeals and the emperors’ responses is preserved in Delphi concerning the sanctuary, sacred funds, and festivals, especially the Pythian Games (cf. Millar 1977, 450–​451). Such decisions of the emperors involved embassies and, in some of the inscribed evidence and a few of Philostratus’s short notes on the lives of the sophists, we are told the names and status of these ambassadors. A more personal interest in a specific cult seems to lie behind another kind of involvement in cult: for some of the emperors who were initiated into the Eleusinian Mysteries (e.g., Augustus, Hadrian, Marcus Aurelius) we know of cases concerning the Eleusinian priests that were heard and decided by the emperor.16

Cult   601 In structure, the imperial measures of the second century are not different from the support that early first-​century emperors had given to the cities and sanctuaries of the eastern provinces (cf. Spawforth 2012, 233–​270). However, it is the sheer quantity of Hadrian’s benefactions that seem to have set or confirmed a trend. His example may have prompted more and similar benefactions by members of the municipal and provincial elites, and he himself may have been influenced by the magnificent style of living and lavish expenditure enjoyed by some Greek and Asian households of members of the wealthy Greek intellectual elite like Herodes Atticus (Galli 2002). Hadrian’s travels made personal contacts even more important, and access to the emperor was easier to obtain. The emperor’s open ear for excellent speeches and erudite talk encouraged people to dare such an approach in order to gain privileges for an individual or—​via (rhetorically excellent) ambassadors—​for a city and its sanctuaries or for a province (cf. Millar 1977, chaps. 7–​8). A precondition of all this was knowledge of the art of erudite conversation and, most of all, the art of oratory.

38.2  Priesthoods and the Support of Cult Affairs and Festivals It would be misleading to highlight the priestly offices of sophists, orators, and philosophers in the Greek world without at least hinting at their other activities as benefactors in various fields, sometimes as magistrates or ambassadors of their hometown or province. As ambassadors they might have the prominent duty of enhancing the status of a city by winning permission for a second temple of the imperial cult (neokoria), such as M. Antonius Polemon obtained from Hadrian for Smyrna together with other cult-​relevant awards like a sacred contest, theologoi, hymnodoi, and so on.17 A rich man, Polemon took over the office of strategos and was responsible for minting coins that made reference to Antinous, which is probably a hint of a short-​lived cult that Polemon installed in Smyrna after the death of Hadrian’s beloved.18 Polemon belonged to the highest socio-​economic strata of his province, as did the high priests of Asia, who were also acclaimed sophists:19 Ti. Claudius Polemon of Kibyra (IGRom. 4.883; 907 and more), perhaps related to the just-​mentioned famous Polemon, was another such high priest of the imperial cult, as was his contemporary Sellius Sulla in the second century (IGRom. 4.1643). Literary accounts of such offices are rather rare: aside from Scopelian of Clazomenae (VS 515), Philostratus mentions in his biographies only Euodianus of Smyrna, a descendant of a family with many high priests of Asia (VS 596), and Heraclides the Lycian, who became high priest of Lycia (VS 612). The widespread engagement of sophists in the imperial cult was part of their social and political life and civic engagement (Bowersock 1973, 182). The existence of the imperial cult in the provinces added not only more festive days and festivals, new priesthoods, new sanctuaries and altars, but also a change in the kind of entertainment offered. Roman elements are added to the

602    Religion and Religious Literature Greek ones, especially venationes and gladiatorial games; as the term “entertainment” may suggest, these elements were usually not regarded as part of the traditional Greek cult-​oriented festival and they were therefore criticized in Greek intellectual circles, and not only by the sophists; this did not hinder the rich sophists named above from taking over these costly duties in the context of the imperial cult and so demonstrating their influence and special relationship with the highest authorities of the empire. Some of them held provincial high priesthoods and also a city’s priesthood of the imperial cult, but others held only municipal priesthoods, such as M. Flavius Antonius Lysimachus and the very rich Claudius Aurelius Zelos, both in second-​century Aphrodisias (MAMA 8.501; SEG 26.1219), the rhetors Hermaphilus in Tomis, and Hermocrates (see above) and Nicomedes (IvPergamon 3. 31) in Pergamum. However, only a few attestations of sophists holding cult offices concern specific nonimperial priesthoods, for example, in the first century Timocrates, priest of the goddess Roma in Cilician Antioch,20 Mestrius Plutarchus, priest of Apollo in Delphi (Plut. Mor. 700; CID 4.150), and L. Flavius Philostratus, priest of Hephaestus in Lemnos (IG 12.8.27, cf. Puech 2002, 282f.). In second-​or third-​century Athens, the sophist Apollonius was hierophant of the Eleusinian goddesses at Athens (IG II².3811); Licinnius Firmus was priest of Zeus Polieus (IG II².3563.29–​30 with Anth. Plan. 322); Sospis, a pupil of Chrestos of Byzantium, was priest of the Altar (of the goddesses Demeter and Kore) in Eleusis (VS 591); and Apollonius of Athens was hierophant in Eleusis (VS 600). Some of the second-​century “kings of eloquence,” such as Herodes Atticus, who had once borne this title and had been agonothetes of the Panathenaia (cf. Puech 2002, 392–​393), or the third-​century historian and orator P. Herennius Dexippus, who had likewise been involved in financing the festival, the equipment of the ship and the clothing of the goddess (IG II².3198), were imitated in their cultic duties and title even by late antique sophists (IG II².3818). In Philostratus’s account, the wealth and social standing of the sophists is an important topic and he often praises them if they had presided over festivals with great distinction and lavish expenditure,21 for example, Rufus of Perinthus, who presided over the Panhellenic festivals at Athens with remarkable distinction (VS 597). Not only Athens, but also other centers of eloquence profited from a similar commitment to that of Polemon, who presided over the Olympic Games inaugurated by Hadrian in Athens and took part in the procession on the sacred ship that was brought to the agora of Smyrna (VS 530, 541). Noteworthy also is Hippodromus the Thessalian of Larissa (VS 616), who twice presided over the Pythian Games with more expenses and glamor than ever and with an extraordinary sense of fairness as umpire. In addition, Hippodromus’s high reputation is manifest in his chair of rhetoric at Athens and the speech he held on the last day of the Olympic festival on the occasion of the final sacrifices (VS 617–​618). The impression one gets is that the rhetors were heavily involved in the religious life of the cities where they were citizens or in which they taught and lived. On the other hand, the many exemptions and privileges sought and received (see above and Laes and Stubbe 2014, 82–​83) made any duty fulfilled for a city, its deities, or citizens seem, in contrast, an act of benevolence.

Cult   603

38.3  “Restitutions” of Cult Traditions From the late third century bce, individual and collective identities began to be defined with reference to the archaic and classical eras and their intellectual and cultural achievements, and to the long genealogies of wealthy citizens. There were several waves of restoring neglected traditional cults (or at least what was thought to be traditional at a given time). This was widespread under Augustus and during the imperial period.22 The use of local religious and mythographic traditions as arguments was reinforced by the growing role of embassies, oratory, and sophistic performance for competitive public display, and by the pursuit of individual recognition and common or communal privileges (Bowie 1970, 2007). Kata ta patria (according to old tradition) was an easy and telling argument. There are extant several literary and inscribed references to “reforms” and “restitutions” of cult and rituals in the imperial period, though their connection to sophists like Herodes Atticus is not always clear and the character of a “restitution” of an old tradition may be questioned in many such cases. We can observe that the recourse to ancient traditions at times created a completely new interpretation, as in the case of Herodes Atticus’s technical innovation of creating a mechanical means of transporting the Panathenaic vessel (Philostr. VS 550), or his gift of fashionable, pure white clothes for the Eleusinian procession, replacing the traditionally black garments of the ephebes, which made them lose their traditional context, obviously already no longer understood;23 or Tib. Claudius Nicomedes (ca. 180/​192 ce), who received an honorific decree of the Ephesian gerousia because of his engagement on behalf of the famous cult of Ephesian Artemis. Nicomedes initiated a “revival” of the Lysimachean tradition of mysteries and sacrifices in the cult of Artemis (IK Ephesos 26.l.2–​4) and added gifts of money, which the gerousiasts were to receive in the context of the feasts and banquets (l.11–​12). Distributions of food and money for participants at feasts and banquets had become fashionable during the second century ce and often underscored the socio-​ economic differences in society through the differing amounts of money that specific groups and individuals were to receive. The character of the cults was obviously changed by these innovations, just as the sacred landscape of Ephesus in 104 ce was changed by the newly organized procession in honor of Artemis, paid for by C. Vibius Salutaris (IK Ephesos 27). This procession, featuring a great number of imperial portraits, set a new focus on the Ephesian youth (Rogers 1991). Hymnody “as a form of spiritual sacrifice” (Chaniotis 2003, 187) was another important aspect which did exist before the imperial period but which in that period received a more prominent place in the hierarchy of rituals and in the esteem of the wealthy and well educated.24 Epigrams and poetry presented as hymns in sanctuaries underlined the exclusiveness of both the author and the reader who understood the texts. All this attests to the antiquarian interests of the educated elites, of course, but above all these phenomena form one of many links from the contemporary Roman reality to an idealized past, an element that helped to strengthen and assert local

604    Religion and Religious Literature identity and importance within the empire (e.g., Lafond 2005). Mythical origins and heroes, historical events and victories, protection by the gods, cult origins, and specific local cult features thus become the ingredients for a convincing speech, such as Dio Chrysostom’s Olympian speech (Or. 12; cf. Swain 1996, 197–​206) or Aelius Aristides’s Isthmian spech in honor of Poseidon (Or. 46). This traditional, conservative aspect of the (intellectual) elite might be combined with contemporary popular taste, through an increase in the number of sacrificial animals and hence in the extent of the sacrificial banquet, or the distribution of money, the addition of animal shows and hunting and perhaps even a gladiatorial contest. Staging more and longer festivals, especially if they were intraregional or even Panhellenic events, provided a chance of receiving imperial permission for fairs with tax exemption (see De Ligt 1993, 253–​255). The city, too, profited from the stimulation of the local economy. In addition, those of the elites who preferred the Greek tradition—​with contests of musicians, of tragedy and comedy performances, poetry contests, and battles of words, but also with “Greek” athletic contests and weapon-​dance performances—​had also more occasions to celebrate, and occasional “Roman” contests demonstrated their closeness and familiarity with Rome and the imperial house. It goes without saying that for the followers of Pythagoras these “Roman” festival traditions were inadequate, even repellent; for many Pythagoreans even most of the “Greek” traditions were too entertaining, and also not spiritual and ascetic enough. Laughter, excitement, and a full stomach, especially if filled with meat, were far removed from the “right” religious attitude.25 Criticism concerning the entertaining aspects of the festivals in honor of gods and deities was widespread and not restricted to the followers of Middle and Neoplatonism and Neopythagoreanism. This elitist philosophical and purist pseudo-​Greek attitude is partly a new, sophistic way to express a deep personal religiosity, which is often combined with adoration of one universal highest divinity.26

38.4  The Subject of Cult in Literature Many texts of the late first to early third centuries deal in a learned manner with subjects of mythology and religion, discuss with a more or less philosophical approach divine qualities, the supernatural and superstition, mystery, and orphism, or integrate descriptions of cults and (real or “fictive”) ritual into literary texts and speeches. A great many of these texts are discussed in this volume.27 In this section the focus will be on the specific interest in cult. In the late first and early second century stands the enormous oeuvre of the erudite Plutarch. He had been one of the two main male priests of Apollo in Delphi (from the mid-​80s?), which may explain his two dialogues concerned with Delphi. Apart from the many notes and short remarks on cult and religion in the Table Talk and other texts, five treatises by Plutarch are concerned with the topic of religion in the widest

Cult   605 sense: On Superstition, Isis and Osiris, The E at Delphi, The Oracles at Delphi No Longer Given in Verse, and The Obsolescence of Oracles.28 The respective topics are treated as learned disputes in which the literary authorities, their sayings, and interpretations are discussed. Thus, in Isis and Osiris, the Egyptian priests’ clothing and their purity and dietary rules (Plut. Mor. 352e–​353f) are treated following the evidence of Hesiod, Herodotus, Hecataeus, Eudoxus, Aristagoras, and other authors, before Plutarch widens the topic to food in Egypt, priests and kings in Pharaonic Egypt, the Egyptian gods and their names, the etymology of Egyptian names, and the myth of Isis and Osiris and its variants. The other texts named above have a similar general structure—​learned discussions of a number of subjects that are more or less loosely connected with the topic in the title.29 Compared to the prevalence of intertextual references and the art of citation, and to topics of mythology and (more) philosophical subjects, the treatment of religion in general, and especially the systematic treatment of single cults and rituals, seems to be of less interest to Plutarch. Dio of Prusa at the end of the first century seems to present the standard treatment of how to deal with gods and oracles in public speeches on standard occasions.30 The text genre demands a conservative religious attitude, that is, accepting that the working of the gods is real and the oracles give good advice (e.g., Dio Chrys. Or. 13.9; cf. Desideri 2000). Speeches by later sophists held at public festivals may have presented a similar conservative attitude.31 The orators and their speeches are, however, less “banal” than one might assume and Dion turns out to be a “moralist,” with heavy criticism of many phenomena, attitudes, and conduct related to cult and religion in his time.32 Aelius Aristides presents more than one religious attitude in his work: there is the conservative pseudoarchaic one with descriptions of myths, cults, and rituals to honor and praise the powerful gods in his prose hymns to Athena, Dionysus, Zeus, Sarapis, Poseidon, Heracles, and so on (Arist. Or. 37–​46); but he also introduces a mystical and very personal aspect in his devotion to Asclepius in his Hieroi Logoi.33 It is obvious that the “genre” of text determines the possible range of interpretations and the acceptable attitudes presented toward cult and religion. Not orations but short conversations are Plutarch’s main format for the topic. In the Obsolescence of Oracles the lightweight and short answer to the question why so many oracles no longer operate in imperial Greece is demography: fewer people proportionally need fewer oracles. However, Plutarch’s theme of the function of oracles is of relevance for other authors of the second century. The cynic Oinamaos of Gadara wrote About the Exposure of Cheats, in which he denies the possibility of prediction and the value of oracles (Hammerstaedt 1990), and the two “biographies” of Apollonius of Tyana (by Philostratus) and Alexander of Abonuteichos (by Lucian) are filled with allusions to the ongoing discussion about the value and efficacy of prophecy and oracles.34 The valuation of and search for spiritual experience (dreams, prophecies, oracles, with orphism, mysticism, with Neopythagoreanism and Middle and Neoplatonism) are one important intellectual trend at that time; another one is skepticism, with satirical overtones especially in criticizing everything connected to superstition, mysticism, and belief in miracles.35 However, it is not the “critical” philosophical treatises,

606    Religion and Religious Literature but the elegantly styled digressions and anecdotes that give us details of what may have been the ritual and cult practice in sanctuaries with oracles of that time. Such room for details in the description of cult practice and religious background is found in the Greek novel, a strong literary format in the second and early third centuries. There is no Greek novel without religion, rituals, cult, priests, temples, and so on (Zeitlin 2008). However, there seems to be no standard set of divine interventions or use of the religious setting. The novel’s main subject, love and passion, with the necessary obstacles which the lovers who are the heroes of the works must survive so they can finally come together, is interwoven with miraculous salvations and interventions by deities. The setting in a sanctuary, initiation or other mystery rituals, or cult events like processions are often the background for surprising turning points: in Xenophon’s Ephesiaka (1.2), the Artemis festival in Ephesus, with its many bystanders, provides a lively background for the moment when Anthia meets her Habrocomes; in Achilles Tatius, the two lovers Leucippe and Cleitophon are rescued, after a short but decisive intermezzo in the Artemisium, because a sacred embassy from Byzantium arrives in Ephesus (7.12.2–​4); and in Heliodorus, most of the male and female protagonists are priests or pretend to be priests, and, further, Theagenes and Charicleia fall in love at the ceremony of a torch ritual (3.1–​6).36 It is not divine intervention but human-​organized cult events to honor the gods that are the important elements of a turning point in the novels of the second and early third centuries. In addition, exotic settings add to the already charged atmosphere. In such a context, non-​Greek gods, the staging of their cult, and the “otherness” of their priests and cult personnel are given some importance. Thus Isis is introduced into the Greek literary world with Xenophon of Ephesus and Apuleius: she flavors a novel with period atmosphere, but is no indicator of a groundbreaking change in the religious structure in the cities and the religious behavior of their elites.37 Mystery cults and exclusiveness go together, but this exclusiveness is defined by the group of the initiates and not necessarily by social status and literary education. It seems as if certain mystery cults, inter alia that of Melikertes-​Palaimon, are of more “intellectual” standing.38

38.5  Religious Trends? There are changes in the use and description of the religious setting that can be traced in the language and atmosphere of the various literary works of the Second Sophistic, from novels to orations to short or long treatises. Some have called this a new “ethics of conjugality” of the Antonine period, referring not only to human social relations but also the relation between gods, heroes, and humans.39 Philostratus’s Heroicus is a good example of this emotional and social interaction between humans and a hero: divine epiphany and the real presence of the gods are part of the world created by literature and oratory.40 Aelius Aristides often describes his relation to Asclepius in terms of a personal

Cult   607 relationship: he has conversations with him and he feels his presence and understands his messages both while awake and in dreams. Epiphany, therefore, is “real” not only in the Heroicus.41 Especially Aristides’s Hieroi Logoi and Philostratus’s Lives of the Sophists and Life of Apollonius reveal the importance of sanctuaries and so of the cult context as a setting for intellectual life in the late first to the early third centuries (Galli 2001, 2002), whereas in Pausanias and Plutarch the educated reader learns that sanctuaries, as the most important monumental reference points of the past, can be read and understood only with the help of antiquarian knowledge and paideia.42 Sanctuaries are guarantors of historical and cultural continuity, but so are the names of deities and heroes, or local myths and histories, which may explain the specific forms of commemoration in festivals, processions, sacrifices, or the special requirements for the priests and priestesses (Alcock 1993, passim; Bowie 2013). In the mind of Apollonius and his intellectual friends the panegyris, the festival at Olympia, is not just a matter of financing and imperial permissions: it is also composed of buildings and rituals together with wisdom and antiquarian knowledge (Philostr. V A 8.18). If education is the most important way to get to the core of the cults and the essence of Greek religion and culture, then only the elite (Alcock 1993, 210–​212)—​ or, I would rather say, the philosophers and sophists—​can engage in that field; the literary narrative of a biography or novel may even match the religious process with an intellectual journey (Platt 2009, 133, on the Life of Apollonius of Tyana). Apollonius, the inspired and true philosopher, therefore has knowledge superior to that of any priest on matters concerning cult and religion (Miles 2006). Beyond that intellectual setting, cult and religion gained more attention during the second century, as can be seen in the reemergence of local cults on Greek civic coinage (Horster 2013, 247), and in the pervasiveness of the so-​called confession inscriptions of the late first to early third centuries, which attest a deeply rooted religiousness in Phrygia, Lydia, and Mysia.43 This is no “intellectual” phenomenon, though the confession texts often refer to abstract deities; the context referenced is “morality”; the subtext is the personal interactions between the divine world and one individual; and many of the texts attest a kind of mono-​or megatheism, with one supreme god or a very unique deity (Chaniotis 2010). These inscriptions illustrate that the pagan monotheistic aspect of Greek religion in the imperial period is not only based on the monotheism “commonplace in mainstream Greek philosophy since the Classical period” (Mitchell and van Nuffelen 2010, 3), but is also part of some rural religious traditions of the eastern Roman Empire.44

Further Reading Anderson 1993 and Whitmarsh 2005 provide excellent introductions to the Second Sophistic and the many aspects of cult, religious settings and attitudes both in the “real” and in the narrated and literary worlds created by the intellectuals of the Second Sophistic. The prosopographical aspect is treated by Puech 2002, while the literary aspects on single authors’

608    Religion and Religious Literature attitudes toward religion are discussed by Brenk 1987 for Plutarch, Pirenne-​Delforge 2008 for Pausanias, Platt 2009 and Rutherford 2009 for Philostratus. A fresh view on common and diverging (not only religious) attitudes of sophists, philosophers and Christians is exposed by Eshleman 2012.

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chapter 39

Pil grimag e Ian C. Rutherford

39.1  In the Second Sophistic religious travel was widespread, facilitated and no doubt encouraged by increased ease of mobility within a pacified Roman Empire.1 People traveled to established religious centers to take part in festivals, to consult oracles, to undergo incubation in a healing sanctuary, or to be initiated into cults. Alternatively, in some cases the motivation may just have been to see and marvel at places of cultural significance, what we would call “tourism.” Most of our evidence for it comes from areas where we happen to have relatively rich epigraphy—​Greece, Anatolia, and Egypt—​but it must have happened in other parts as well. Often it seems to take place within a defined political or geographical area, such as Anatolia or Egypt, but sometimes the scope is broader, in the case of the sanctuary of Syrian Goddess at Hierapolis-​Bambyke (see below, section 39.7). Religious travel to and from the areas outside the empire is not well attested, with the exception of the sanctuary of Isis at Philai on the southern border of Egypt and the Dodecaschoenus (see section 39.7). A question arises to what extent the modern term “pilgrimage” is applicable to all or any of these forms of religious travel. Some scholars, following a pattern of usage in anthropology and the history of religion, seem to be comfortable with using the term in application to Greco-​Roman paganism, while others prefer to reserve it for the context of Christianity or Islam.2 Certainly, monotheistic pilgrimage shows some distinctive features; for example, the journey itself seems more ritualized, imagined as a process that takes the pilgrim outside normal life and culminates (at least in some cases) in a perceived transformation. On the other hand, traces of some of the same things can perhaps be found in polytheism as well, for example in Thessalos’s visionary experience of Asclepius in Thebes (see below, section 39.4). My own preference is to use “pilgrimage” in a very general sense, covering pretty well any journey of unusual length undertaken (to a sanctuary or any other place) for the sake of participating in a religious activity. There seems little risk of harm in using the term, as long as we keep in mind that this is a broad category comprising many types which may be more or less closely related.

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39.2  In the classical and Hellenistic Greek world, the four major focuses of religious travel had been healing, initiation into mystery cult, oracles, and festivals (Dillon 1997). All four of these continue in the Roman period. Oracles flourish like never before, none more conspicuously than that of Apollo at Claros, which drew delegates from cities all over Asia Minor and to some extent the Aegean; one factor in the growth of its popularity may have been the plague that afflicted the region in this period (Jones 2005). Many Anatolian cities sent regular delegations there, which were often accompanied by choirs of children (Busine 2005; Ferrary 2005; Lane-​Fox 1986, 171–180), and verse oracles survive from Claros which recommend that enquirers set up filial cults of Apollo Clarios in their cities, an effective way of promulgating the cult (Merkelbach and Stauber 1996). Didyma and Delphi are also active into the third century ce (for Didyma: Fontenrose 1988). A newer form of oracle was that of the snake god Glycon, located at Abonoteichos in Paphlagonia, and satirized by Lucian in Alexander or the False Prophet.3 According to Lucian, the oracle began by attracting locals (Alex. 15), but news spread to Bithynia, Galatia, Thrace (Alex. 18), then the broader world (Alex. 24), including eventually Italy and Rome, where the superstitious P. Mummius Sisenna Rutilianus was taken in by it (Alex. 30).4 Initiation rites for pilgrims continued to be provided by Eleusis and Samothrace; Eleusis remained popular right through to the third century ce, to judge from the fact that five Roman emperors were initiated there: Augustus, Hadrian (apparently before he became emperor; later Antinous was also initiated), L.  Verus, Marcus Aurelius together with Commodus Caesar, and Galienus (see Clinton 1989; Halfmann 1986, 116–​117). Ordinary people must been initiated as well; it was considered extraordinary that Apollonius of Tyana was initially turned away on the ground that he was an imposter (Philostr. V A 4.18; cf. 5.19). The cult of the Kabeiroi on Samothrace was popular with Rome because the island was regarded as the origin of the Penates and Romans are recorded as having regularly been initiated there until the end of the second century ce (Cole 1989, 1584–​1585), among them several provincial governors of Macedonia (for an example, Dimitrova 2008, no. 104), though no emperors, as far as we know. Forms of initiation are also attested elsewhere, for example in the context of the oracle at Claros. Apuleius says in his Apologia (55) that he participated in many initiations in Greece. Another important context for pilgrimage was that of healing cults. The sanctuary of Asclepius at Epidauros continued to be popular (see in particular the detailed epigraphic record of the pilgrim Apellas of Mylasa [IG 4.2.1.126])5, but it was eclipsed by the sanatorium of Zeus-​Asclepius at Pergamum, where visitors and long-​term residents were drawn mostly from Asia Minor.6 The physician Galen worked there for a while, but its most famous patient was for two years (145–​147 ce) the rhetor Aelius Aristides, who chronicled his tenure (kathedra), as well as the surrounding years of his life, in the aretalogical autobiography the Sacred Tales.7 He spent his time there communing with the god via incubation, receiving treatment and on a variety of other religious and cultural activities with his fellow pilgrims (sumphoitetai). Another Asclepieum very important

Pilgrimage   615 in the Roman period was the one at Aigeai in Cilicia, apparently still a thriving center when it was closed down by Constantine in 331 ce.8 Many others are known.9 There were also major healing sanctuaries in Egypt, such as the Sarapeum in Alexandria and the temple of Imhotep-​Asclepius at Deir el-​Bahari near Thebes (see Łajtar 2006). Aelius Aristides’s autobiography also gives us a great deal of information about smaller healing pilgrimages he makes, both during the kathedra, when he started from Pergamum, and after it, most of them motivated by dream communications from Asclepius. He traveled to Elaia south of Pergamum, to the River Meles at Smyrna (2.48.80), to the River Caicus (48.48), and to Chios, an abortive trip, as it turned out (48.11ff.). He traveled twice to the River Aisepos in North Mysia, first in 143 ad, when his illness started, and again seven years later via a temple of Asclepius at Poimanenos. On another occasion his destination was a place referred to in a dream as “the Land of Zeus,” which he initially interpreted as Pergamum, but which proved in the end to be a small temple of Olympian Zeus near his estate. From all of this, one gets a sense of the rich religious topography of the region, and the possibilities for religious travel within it (see Rutherford 1999).

39.3  Another major focus for pilgrimage was festivals. The great festivals at the major Greek sanctuaries were still being held:  Aulus Gellius describes the Pythian festival as the “meeting of almost all Greece” (NA 12.5.1); Aelius Aristides gives a vivid account of the Isthmian festival; and recent epigraphic discoveries from Olympia have confirmed that the Olympic Games was still flourishing into the fourth century ce.10 Smaller festivals also continued; for example, Polemon the physiognomist reports that he made one of his diagnoses at the festival of Artemis at Perge in Pamphylia where, according to the Arabic translation, “people would visit on pilgrimage from the ends of the land” (R. Hoyland ap. Swain 2007, 457).11 The cult of Ephesian Artemis was said by an imperial writer to be the most widely disseminated Greek cult, and there must have been an intense tradition of pilgrimage there, especially from Western Asia Minor, though in this case the evidence is mostly indirect, in the form of cult statues in the distinctive style of the goddess, iconography on coins or amulets.12 New festivals established in Italy in the early Roman period were also a draw, particularly the Italica Romaea Sebasta Isolympia in Naples and the Capitolia in Rome established by Domitian; there was an Aktia festival at Nicopolis in Acarnania at the site of the Battle of Actium (see Newby 2005, 27). One might have expected that these festivals would have attracted visitors from all over the empire, rather as the Athenians or Ptolemies used festivals to regulate their empires, but the evidence for this is very limited: for example, the city of Barca in Libya sent a delegation to the Captiolia under Antoninus Pius in 156 ce and was reprimanded by the emperor for trying to upstage its neighbor Cyrene (Rutherford 2013, 272–​273).13 Possibly the Roman Empire was just too extended to support the emergence of a pan-​imperial festival network.

616    Religion and Religious Literature Many new athletic and musical festivals were established by cities in Asia Minor, some on a major scale, and endowed by the emperor (see Mitchell 1993, 217–​25; Robert 1982), some much smaller, such as the Demostheneia at Oenoanda in Lycia, named after a local citizen C. Iulius Demosthenes who endowed it (Wörrle 1988). The first enactment of a newly endowed festival is likely to have been particularly well attended; thus, a record of new festival at Aphrodisias established in the mid-​third century ce lists delegates from neighboring cities who have engaged in “joint sacrifice” (sunthusia), a common term in this period (Roueché 1993, 182–​187). For a city, the award of the status of neokoros could also be the occasion for a celebration which justified the presence of delegates from abroad; thus Ephesus received delegations from a number of cities when it was awarded its third neocorate in 211 ce, among them one from Carthage, which Louis Robert suggested was reciprocating one sent by Ephesus to witness the inauguration of the Carthaginian Pythia festival (Robert 1978, 468n41). In traditional Greek festival culture a major dynamic had been the celebration of Panhellenic identity via common sacrifices and participation in athletic competitions. Panhellenic identity remains important in the Second Sophistic, although somewhat transformed:  one focus was the Eleutheria festival at Plataea, where delegates from Athens and Sparta still commemorated the defeat of the Persians six centuries before.14 Another was institution of the Panhellenion in Athens, established by Hadrian in 131–​ 132 ce and linked to the imperial cult; member states (we are not sure how many there were) sent delegates to make sacrifices and to take part in a common council (see Jones 1996; Romeo 2005). They wore crowns dedicated with the bust of the emperor (Riccardi 2007). To be a member, a city had to have a proven Greek pedigree, and there seem to have been two different degrees of Greekness (Jones 1996, 53). Journeys to sanctuaries are also a theme in the Greek romance, sometimes providing a context where the lovers meet, usually set in an idealized past. Achilles Tatius’s Leucippe and Cleitophon is structured round a series of festivals attended by sacred delegations held in Byzantium, Tyre, and Ephesus. A particularly clear example of that is Heliodorus’s Aithiopika, where the heroine, Charicleia, is a temple official at Delphi, and the hero, Theagenes, is leading an elaborate theoria from Hypata, the capital of Ainis in Thessaly (see Rutherford 2013, 349–​354). The purpose of the theoria is to honor the hero Neoptolemus, son of Achilles, to whose family Theagenes himself belongs. The culmination of the theoria is a moment of erotic gaze between the hero and heroine. Theagenes subsequently elopes with Charicleia, and the out-​of-​control behavior of his comrades causes the Delphians to ban Hypate from sending a theoria again. However, there is reason to think that in the third century ce Hypate actually was involved in the administration of the Delphic sanctuary (see Weir 2004).

39.4  In the literature of the Second Sophistic, a common pattern is that of the educated elite (pepaideumenoi) visiting sacred places and discussing the history and

Pilgrimage   617 significance of what they find (Galli 2006). Obvious examples are Plutarch’s Delphic Dialogues and Pausanias’s Periegesis. (Although the best evidence for this is from the Second Sophistic, it is difficult to say for sure whether this is entirely new, since we know so little about Hellenistic literature that precedes it.) Some might see the activity presupposed by these works as a form of secular intellectual tourism, not far removed from that implied by the lists of the “Seven Wonders of the World” that circulate in this period; it is telling that the lists include two of the most important Greek religious sites: Phidias’s statue of Zeus at Olympia and the Artemision at Ephesus (see Brodersen 1992).15 On the other hand, Pausanias does not just describe what he sees, but presents the Greek landscape through the lens of traditional polytheistic religion. For example, he makes a special trip to see the cult statue of Demeter Melaine at Mt. Elaious near Phigalia in Arcadia, although it proved to have disappeared (8.42.21); in describing the altars at Olympia, he presents them in liturgical order, not the order in which they stand (5.14.4, 10). In some he cases he claims that dreams that tell him what he can and cannot reveal (about Eleusis: 1.38.7; and about Messene: 4.33.4–​5). He witnesses a festival to Demeter on Mt. Pron near Hermione, but reports that only the cult insiders are allowed to see the image (2.35.11) (see Elsner 1992; Rutherford 2001). A pattern related to this is that of the elite explorer who travels to foreign lands for the sake of “inquiry” (historia) in matters of history, geography, or religion. The chief characters in Plutarch’s De defectu oraculorum are of this type, including Cleombrotus of Sparta, who had “made many excursions in Egypt and about the land of the Cave-​ dwellers, and had sailed beyond the Persian Gulf; his journeyings were not for business, but he was fond of seeing things and of acquiring knowledge; . . . he was getting together a history to serve as a basis for a philosophy that had as its end aim theology, as he himself named it.” (De def. or. 410a–​b). Similarly, the preface to a work on herbs (probably dating from the first or second centuries ce) relates how Thessalus of Tralles visited Egypt, first to Alexandria, were he studied the work of Nechepso, and then Thebes, where he experienced a vision of Asclepius.16 Now when he had shut me in the room and commanded me to sit opposite the throne upon which the god was about to sit, he led me through the god’s secret names and he shut the door as he left. (24) Once I sat down, I was being released from body and soul by the incredible nature of the spectacle. For neither the facial features of Asklepios nor the beauty of the surrounding decoration can be expressed clearly in human speech. Then, reaching out his right hand, Asklepios began to say: (25) “Oh blessed Thessalos, attaining honour in the presence of the god. As time passes, when your successes become known, men will worship you as a god. Ask freely, then, about what you want and I will readily grant you everything.”

A step beyond the religious explorer is the wandering wise man, such as Apollonius of Tyana, whom Philostratus in his Life represents as traveling widely, and visiting many sacred places in Anatolia, mainland Greece, and elsewhere, and sometimes participating in local religious rituals. Jaś Elsner (1997a has argued that pilgrimage is one of the models that Philostratus draws on in composing his life, representing him as both

618    Religion and Religious Literature engaged in pilgrimage, for example in his account of Apollonius’s journey up the Nile (end of book 5) In several places they took boats across the river in order to visit every sight on it; for there was not a city, temple or sacred site in Egypt that they passed without discussion. For at each they either learned or taught some sacred story, and any ship on which Apollonius embarked resembled the sacred ship of a religious embassy.

The ship is like the ship used by sacred embassies (the theoris) because Apollonius is engaged in theoria, a complex word that covers sacred missions to sanctuaries, philosophical contemplation, and exploration of the sort Solon engaged in. Similarly, Apollonius actually seems to become himself an object of pilgrimage, as in the Asclepieum in Aigeai (V A 1.8) where the people of Cilicia are said to flock to see him, or in Olympia, where more people came to see him than to any Olympic festival (V A 8.15).

39.5  Some of the journeys of Roman emperors also had a religious dimension.17 Just before he became emperor in 70 ce, Vespasian visited the Serapeum at Alexandria, where he saw a vision which he took as an omen of his future rule,18 and at about the same time went to consult the oracle of Mt. Carmel in Judaea where he received another favorable prophecy;19 thus, Sarapis and Baal could be presented as providing public support for the future emperor just as Alexander the Great has received endorsement from Zeus Ammon when he visited the Siwa Oasis. Caracalla is said to have cultivated Apollo, Asclepius, and Sarapis because of physical and mental illness (Cass. Dio 78.15; Rowan 2013, 162), and to have visited several healing sanctuaries: one of Apollo Grannus (perhaps at Phoebiana in western Raetia), that of Zeus-​Asclepius at Pergamum,20 another Asclepieum at Aigeai in Cilicia (Haymann 2010), and the Serapeum at Alexandria (see Cass. Dio 78.22). Septimius Severus is said to have enjoyed taking part in the worship of Sarapis in Alexandria (Aelius Spartianus 17.4).21 The sacred mountain of Mons Kasios in northern Syria22 drew Trajan (113 ce), Hadrian (129 ce), and Julian (363 ce). The mountain was believed to be the home of the deity Baal Saphon, in Greek interpretatio “Zeus Kasios,” whose cult had spread to various places in the Mediterranean; Nero sacrificed to him on Corcyra before coming to Greece (Suet. Ner. 22).23 Several members of the Julio-​Claudian family are known to have visited Troy, not so much in emulation of Alexander the Great as because of their family connections with the city. Later emperors were not as keen; Hadrian when he passed through the area is not said to have visited Troy, though he made special trip to pay his respects to the tomb of Telamonian Ajax at Rhoitaeum (Philostr. Her.8.1). The exception is Caracalla, who is said not only to have visited Troy but to have staged a lavish funeral for his freedman Festus in imitation of Achilles’s actions in the Iliad.24 Caracalla’s visit may

Pilgrimage   619 have inspired Flavius Philostratus who in his Heroicus (55) narrates the long history of sacred delegations sent by Thessaly to honor the tomb of Achilles; Philostratus says that this practice went back to the heroic age, and had several times fallen into neglect and then revived over the centuries (see Rutherford 2009; 2013, 347–​348).

39.6  Pilgrimage and tourism to and within Egypt in this period is widely attested in the form of graffiti, particularly ones recording the “adoration” or proskunema of the visitor, sometimes transmitted on behalf of others (see Geraci 1971; in general Rutherford 2012; Foertmeyer 1989). In another common form of graffito the writer says that he “remembered” such and such a person. Sometimes the inscriptions contain complete poems commemorating the visit or praising the deity. One such poem from the temple of Mandoulis at Kalabsha in Nubia, by a certain Sansnos, actually advocates pilgrimage: “Sansnos son of Pseno . . . wrote: revere the divine, sacrifice to all the gods, visit each sanctuary making an act of adoration” (Bernand 1969, no. 165) The fullest dossiers come from Upper Egypt: the Memnonion at Abydos, for some time a center for the cult of Sarapis, but later an oracle of Bes; the sanctuary of Imhotep-​ Asclepius at Deir-​al-​Bahari in Thebes, a healing-​pilgrimage center for the region; the temple of Khnum on the island of Elephantine, where a yearly festival seems to have marked the beginning of the inundation of the Nile (see Maehler in Jaritz 1980); and the temple of Isis at the nearby island of Philai, which was traditionally the southernmost point of Egypt (during the Roman period Egyptian territory extended south along the so-​called Dodecaschoenus). A good example from Philai is an inscription on the South Pylon of the temple of Isis which records the pilgrimage there of three Alexandrians in 191 ce: Serenus, Felix, and Apollonius the painter.25 Similar patterns must have existed in the north of Egypt, though evidence has not survived. During the third century ce, Philai also received sacred delegations from the kingdom of Meroe. It is now believed that the first temple on Philae was built when Egypt was ruled by Ethiopian pharaohs in the 25th Dynasty (early seventh century bce), and it was probably under Ethiopian control again in the third century bce. The tradition of pilgrimage from Ethiopia could be ancient as well; a poem written on the pylon of the temple in the first century bce to first century ce refers to the sight of Ethiopian ships bearing temples (see Bumbaugh 2011; Dijkstra 2008, 132–​137; Rutherford 1998; the poem is Bernand and Bernand 1969, no. 158). Philai is thus a rare example of a sanctuary where pilgrims from different ethnic groups seem to have mixed. In other cases, we may prefer to talk about tourism. A good example is the singing statue of Memnon (originally one of the two colossal statues of Amenhotep III), which seems to have become a major draw for visitors in the late first century bce when it started to emit a characteristic noise around sunrise. This and the statue next to it are covered with inscriptions, many of them dating from the time of Hadrian, including

620    Religion and Religious Literature poems by Julia Balbilla commemorating Hadrian’s own visit in 130 ce.26 The hundreds of visitors who left graffiti in the royal tombs (suringes) in the Valley of the Kings should probably be classed as tourists as well (though cf. Hunt 1984, 405–​406).

39.7  Similar things may have been going on in the East. Lucian says that the sanctuary of the Syrian Goddess at Hierapolis-​Bambyke on the Euphrates attracted dedications from Arabia, Phoenicia, Babylon, Cappadocia, Cilicia, and Assyria (De dea Syria 10).27 He says that pilgrims would shave their heads and eyebrows, sacrifice a sheep, all of which they would then eat, except for the fleece, which he would kneel on, and the feet and head which he would put on his own head; he would also wear a garland, and put garlands on the heads of his fellow pilgrims (De dea Syria 55; see Lightfoot 2005). For the cult of Zeus Heliopolitanus at Baalbek, there seems to be indirect evidence of pilgrimage from the region in the form of medallions which may have been taken home by returning pilgrims.28 Jewish pilgrimage to Jerusalem, which had flourished at the time of Herod the Great, probably disappeared for the most part with the destruction of the Second Temple, though it is possible that some forms still survived (see Grossmark 2012, 92; Wilken 1992, 105–​108). Christian pilgrimage to the Holy Land is usually supposed to begin in the fourth century ce, specifically with the visit by Constantine’s mother Helena in 312 ce (in the course of which the True Cross was allegedly discovered), which, since her son was the emperor, resembles an imperial journey (Holum 1990). The famous early pilgrims are dated after that: the Bordeaux Pilgrim in 333 ce; Egeria, and Paula, recorded in a letter of Jerome (both late fourth century).29 Before then, it is questionable to what extent early Christians were interested in particular locations. At the same time, there are indications of visits by Christians as early as the second half of the second century ce, coinciding with the great resurgence of Greco-​Roman paganism at that time.30 A bishop of Sardis called Melito, cited by Eusebius (Hist. eccl. 4.26.14; Bitton-​Ashkelony 2005, 27), claimed to have visited “the East and the place where these things were preached and done”; and Alexander, a bishop in Cappadocia, also travelled to Jerusalem according to Eusebius (Hist. eccl. 6.11.2) for the purpose of prayer and “enquiry (historia) of the places,” a term which suggests the world of elite paideia (a connection made by Hunt 1984).

Further Reading There best general study of pilgrimage in the Second Sophistic is Petsalis-​Diomidis 2010. For pilgrimage to the oracle at Claros, see Busine 2005 and Lane Fox 1986, ­chapter 5. For pilgrimage by the educated elite see Galli 2005. Several articles by Jaś Elsner cover fundamental aspects: 1992, 1997a, and 1997b. For pilgrimage within Egypt, see Rutherford 2012. For pilgrimage in the Greek Romance, see Rutherford 2013, 349–354.

Pilgrimage   621

Bibliography Belayche, N. 1987. “Les pèlerinages dans le monde romain antique.” In Histoire des pèlerinages non chrétiens: Entre magique et sacré: Le chemin des dieux, edited by J. Chelini and H. Branthomme, 136–​150. Paris. Bendlin, A. 2011. “On the Uses and Disadvantages of Divination: Oracles and Their Literary Representation in the Time of the Second Sophistic.” In The Religious History of the Roman Empire: Pagans, Jews, and Christians, edited by J. A. North and S. R. F. Price, 175–​250. Oxford and New York. Bernand, É. 1969. Inscriptions métriques de l’Égypte gréco-​romane: Recherches sur la poésie épigrammatique des grecs et Égypte. Paris. Bernand, A., and É. Bernand. 1969. Les inscriptions grecques et latines de Philae. Paris. Bitton-​Ashkelony, B. 2005. Encountering the Sacred: The Debate on Christian Pilgrimage in Late Antiquity. Berkeley, CA. Bowersock, G. W. 1984. “The Miracle of Memnon.” BASP 21: 21–​33. Brodersen, K. 1992. Reiseführer zu den Sieben Weltwundern: Philon von Byzanz und andere antike texte. Frankfurt am Main. Bumbaugh, S. 2011. “Meroitic Worship of Isis at Philae.” In Egypt in its African Context:  Proceedings of the Conference Held at the Manchester Museum, University of Manchester, 2–​4 October 2009, edited by K. Exell, 66–​69. Oxford. Busine, A. 2005. Paroles d’Apollon: pratiques et traditions oraculaires dans l’Antiquité tardive (IIe–​VIe siècle). Leiden and Boston Clinton, K. 1989. “The Eleusinian Mysteries: Roman Initiates and Benefactors, Second Century B.C. to A.D. 267.” ANRW 2.18.2: 1498–​1539 Chaniotis, A. 2002. “Old Wine in a New Skin: Tradition and Innovation in the Cult Foundation of Alexander of Abonouteichos.” In Tradition and Innovation in the Ancient World, edited by E. Dabrowa, 67–​85. Electrum 6. Krakow. Cole, S. G. 1989. “The Mysteries of Samothrace during the Roman Period.” ANRW 2.18.2: 1564–​1598. Dijkstra, J. H. F. 2008. Philae and the End of Ancient Egyptian Religion: A Regional Study of Religious Transformation (298–​642 ce). Leuven. Dillon, M. P. J. 1997. Pilgrims and Pilgrimage in Ancient Greece. London. Dimitrova, N. M. 2008. Theōroi and Initiates in Samothrace: the Epigraphical Evidence. Hesperia Supplement 37. Princeton, NJ. Downie, J. 2013. At the Limits of Art: A Literary Study of Aelius Aristides’ “Hieroi Logoi”. Oxford. Ebert, J. 1997. “Zur neuen Bronzeplatte mit Siegerinschriften aus Olympia: (Inv.1148).” Nikephoros, 10:217–​233 (= id. Agonismata. Kleine philologische Schriften zur Literatur, Geschichte, und Kultur der Antike, ed. M. Hillgruber et al. Stuttgart: 317–​335 Edelstein, E. J., and L. Edelstein. 1945. Asclepius:  A  Collection and Interpretation of the Testimonies. Baltimore, MD. Elsner, J. 1992. “Pausanias: A Greek Pilgrim in the Roman World.” P&P 135: 3–​29. Elsner, J. 1997a. “Hagiographic Geography:  Travel and Allegory in the Life of Apollonius of Tyana.” JHS 117: 22–​37. Elsner, J. 1997b. “The Origins of the Icon: Pilgrimage, Religion and Visual Culture in the Roman East as ‘Resistance’ to the Centre.” In The Early Roman Empire in the East, edited by S. E. Alcock, 178–​199. Oxford.

622    Religion and Religious Literature Elsner, J., and I. Rutherford, eds. 2005. Pilgrimage in Graeco-​Roman and Early Christian Antiquity: Seeing the Gods. Oxford. Erskine, A. 2001. Troy between Greece and Rome: Local Tradition and Imperial Power. Oxford. Fauth, W. 1990. “Das Kasion-​Gebirge und Zeus Kasios: Die antike Tradition und ihre vorderorientalischen Grundlagen.” Ugarit-​Forschungen 22: 105–​118. Ferrary, J.-​L. 2005. “Les mémoriaux de délégations du sanctuaire oraculaire de Claros et leur chronologie.” CR Acad. Inscr. 149: 719–​776. Foertmeyer, V. A. 1989. Tourism in Graeco-​Roman Egypt. Unpublished PhD dissertation, Princeton University. Fontenrose, J. 1988. Didyma: Apollo’s Oracle, Cult and Companions. Berkeley, CA. Frank, G. 2008. “Pilgrimage.” In The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Studies, edited by S. Ashbrook Harvey and D. G. Hunter, 826–​841. Oxford. Friedrich, H.-​V., ed. 1968. Thessalos von Tralles: Griechisch und lateinish. Beiträge zur klassischen Philologie, 28. Meisenheim am Glan. Galli, M. 2005. “Pilgrimage as Elite Habitus: Educated Pilgrims in Sacred Landscape during the Second Sophistic.” In Pilgrimage in Graeco-​Roman and Early Christian Antiquity: Seeing the Gods, edited by J. Elsner and I. Rutherford, 253–​290. Oxford. Geraci, G. 1971. “Ricerche sul Proskynema.” Aegyptus 51: 3–​211. Grossmark, T. 2012. “Talmudic Itineraria and Talmudic Pilgrimage: Tracing the Genre in the Babylonian Talmud.” Mediterranean Studies 20: 88–​113. Habicht, C. 1969. Altertümer von Pergamon. Vol. 8, pt. 3, Die Inschriften des Asklepieions. Berlin. Hajjar, Y. 1977. La triade d’ Héliopolis-​Baalbek. Leiden. Halfmann, H. 1986. Itinera Principum: Geschichte und Typologie der Kaiserreisen im Römischen Reich. Wiesbaden. Harland, P. A. 2011. “Journeys in Pursuit of Divine Wisdom: Thessalos and Other Seekers.” In Travel and Religion in Antiquity, edited by P. A. Harland, 123–​140. Waterloo, ON. Haymann, F. 2010. “Caracalla in Aigeai: Ein neues Tetradrachmon und weitere numismatische Belege.” Jahrbuch für Numismatik und Geldgeschichte 60: 145–​165. Henrichs, A. 1966. “Vespasian’s Visit to Alexandria.” ZPE 3: 51–​80. Holum, K. G. 1990. “Hadrian and St. Helena:  Imperial Travel and the Origin of Christian Holy-​Land Pilgrimage.” In The Blessings of Pilgrimage, edited by R. G. Ousterhout, 66–​81. Urbana, IL. Hunt, E. D. 1982. Holy Land Pilgrimage in the Later Roman Empire, ad 312–​460. Oxford. Hunt, E. D. 1984. “Travel, Tourism, and Piety in the Roman Empire:  A  Context for the Beginning of Christian Pilgrimage.” Echos du Monde Classique 28: 391–​417. Hunt, E. D. 1999. “Were There Christian Pilgrims before Constantine?” In Pilgrimage Explored, edited by J. Stopford, 25–​40. Woodbridge. Jaritz, H. 1980. Elephantine III: Die Terrassen vor den Tempeln des Chnum und der Satet mit einer Bearbeitung der griechischen und demotiscen Inschriften von den Brüstung der Chnumtempel-​ Terrasse von H. Maehler und K.-​T. Zauzich. Mainz. Jones, C. P. 1996. “The Panhellenion.” Chiron 26: 29–​56. Jones, C. P. 2005. “Ten Dedications ‘To the Gods and Goddesses’ and the Antonine Plague.” JRA 18: 293–​301. Kaimakes, D. V. 1976. Die Kyraniden. Meisenheim am Glan. König, J. 2005. Athletics and Literature in the Roman Empire. Cambridge. Kötting, B. 1950. Peregrinatio religiosa: Wallfahrten in der Antike und das Pilgerwesen in der alten Kirche. Forschungen zur Volkskunde 33–​35. Regensberg and Münster.

Pilgrimage   623 Künzl, E., and G. Koeppel. 2002. Souvenirs und Devotionalien: Zeugnisse des geschäftlichen, religiösen und kulturellen Tourismus im antiken Römerreich. Mainz. Łajtar, A. 2006. Deir el-​Bahari in the Hellenistic and Roman Periods: A Study of an Egyptian Temple Based on Greek Sources. Warsaw. Lane Fox, R. 1986. Pagans and Christians. New York. Lightfoot, J. L., ed. 2003. Lucian, “On the Syrian Goddess”. Oxford. Lightfoot, J. L. 2005. “Pilgrims and Ethnographers:  In Search of the Syrian Goddess.” In Pilgrimage in Greco-​Roman and Early Christian Antiquity:  Seeing the Gods, edited by J. Elsner and I. Rutherford, 333–​352. Oxford. Lipinski, E. 1995. Dieux et déesses de l’univers phénicien et punique. OLA 64 = Studia Phoenicea 14. Louvain. MacKay, T. S. 1990. “The Major Sanctuaries of Pamphylia and Cilicia.” ANRW 2.18.3: 2045–​2129. MacMullen, R. 1981. Paganism in the Roman Empire. New Haven, CT. Merkelbach, R., and J. Stauber. 1996. “Die Orakel des Apollon von Klaros.” EA 27: 1–​54. Millar, F. 1977. The Emperor in the Roman World (31 bc–​ad 337). Ithaca, NY, and London. Mitchell, S. 1993. Anatolia: Land, Men, and Gods in Asia Minor. Vol. 1, The Celts and the Impact of Roman Rule. Oxford. Moyer, I. S. 2004. “Thessalos of Tralles and Cultural Exchange.” In Prayer, Magic, and the Stars in the Ancient and Late Antique World, edited by S. Noegel, J. Walker, and B. Wheeler, 39–​56. University Park, PA. Newby, Z. 2005. Greek Athletics in the Roman World: Victory and Virtue. Oxford. Oliver, J. H. 1953. The Ruling Power: A Study of the Roman Empire in the Second Century after Christ through the Roman Oration of Aelius Aristides. Philadelphia, PA. Ovadiah, A. and R. Pierri. 2015. Elijah’s Cave on Mount Carmel and its inscriptions. Oxford Petsalis-​Diomidis, A. 2010. Truly beyond Wonders: Aelius Aristides and the Cult of Asklepios. Oxford. Price, S. R. F. 2012. “Religious Mobility in the Roman Empire.” JRS 102: 1–​19. Riccardi, L. A. 2007. “The Bust-​Crown, the Panhellenion, and Eleusis: A New Portrait from the Athenian Agora.” Hesperia 76: 365–​390. Robert, L. 1978. “Documents d’Asie Mineur.” BCH 102: 395–​543. Robert, L. 1981. “Le serpent Glycon d’Abônouteichos à Athènes et Artémis d’Ephèse à Rome.” CR Acad. Inscr. 125: 513–​535. Robert, L. 1982. “Discours d’Ouverture.” Actes du VIIIe congrès international d’épigraphie grecque et latine, 1:35–​45. Athens (= Robert, Opera minora selecta 6 (Amsterdam, 1989) 6:709–​719). English translation in Greek Athletics, edited by J. König, 108–​119. Edinburgh, 2010. Romeo, I. 2002. “The Panhellenion and Ethnic Identity in Hadrianic Greece.” CPhil. 97: 21–​40. Rosenmeyer, P. A. 2008. “Greek Verse Inscriptions in Roman Egypt: Julia Balbilla’s Sapphic Voice.” Cl. Ant. 27: 334–​358. Roueché, C. 1993. Performers and Partisans at Aphrodisias in the Roman and Late Roman Periods: A Study Based on Inscriptions from the Current Excavations at Aphrodisias in Caria. London. Rowan, C. 2013. Under Divine Auspices: Divine Ideology and the Visualisation of Imperial Power in the Severan Period. Cambridge. Rutherford, I. 1998. “The Island at the Edge: Space, Language and Power in the Pilgrimage Traditions of Philai.” In Pilgrimage and Holy-​Space in Late Antique Egypt, edited by D. Frankfurter, 229–​256. Leiden.

624    Religion and Religious Literature Rutherford, I. 1999. “To the Land of Zeus: Patterns of Pilgrimage in Aelius Aristides.” Aevum Antiquum 12: 133–​148. Rutherford, I. 2001. “Tourism and the Sacred:  Pausanias and the Traditions of Greek Pilgrimage.” In Pausanias: Travel and Memory in Roman Greece, edited by S. E. Alcock, J. F. Cherry, and J. Elsner, 40–​52. Oxford. Rutherford, I. 2003. “Pilgrimage in Greco-​Roman Egypt: New Perspectives on Graffiti from the Memnonion at Abydos.” In Ancient Perspectives on Egypt, edited by R. Matthews and C. Roemer, 171–​189. London. Rutherford, I. 2009. “Black Sails to Achilles:  The Thessalian Pilgrimage in Philostratus’ Heroicus.” In Philostratus, edited by E. L. Bowie and J. Elsner, 230–​247. Cambridge. Rutherford, I. 2012. “Travel and Pilgrimage in Roman Egypt.” In The Oxford Handbook of Roman Egypt, edited by C. Riggs, 701–​7 16.Oxford. Rutherford, I. 2013. State Pilgrims and Sacred Observers:  A  Study of Theoroi and Theoria. Oxford. Spawforth, A. J. S. 2012. Greece and the Augustan Cultural Revolution. Cambridge. Swain, S., ed. 2007. Seeing the Face, Seeing the Soul: Polemon’s “Physiognomy” from Classical Antiquity to Medieval Islam. Oxford. Tardieu, M. 1990. Les paysages reliques: Routes et haltes syriennes d’Isidore à Simplicius. Louvain. Thiersch, H. 1935–​. Artemis Ephesia: Eine archäeologische Untersuchung. Berlin. Totti, M. 1985. Ausgewählte Texte der Isis-​und Sarapis-​Religion. Hildesheim. Weir, R. 2004. Roman Delphi and its Pythian Games. Oxford. Wilken, R. L. 1992. The Land Called Holy: Palestine in Christian History and Thought. New Haven, CT. Wörrle, M. 1988. Stadt und Fest im kaiserzeitlichen Kleinasien: Studien zu einer agonistischen Stiftung aus Oinoanda. Vestigia 39. Munich. Yoyotte, J., and P. Chuvin. 1988. “Le Zeus Casios de Péluse à Tivoli: Une hypothèse.” BIFAO 88: 165–​180.

chapter 40

E arly Christia ni t y a nd the Cl assical T ra di t i on Aaron P. Johnson

The Christians who are the focus of the following discussion probably would have been dismayed to see that they were limited to a section entitled “Religion and Religious Literature” in the present Handbook. It is not that they did not explore the issues of the nature of the divine and the practices appropriate to their conception of true piety—​ issues we might readily place within the category of “religion” today. Within their conceptual framework, however, they did not differentiate their religious sensibilities as an identifiable category distinct from the categories of culture, ethnicity, literature, history, and philosophy. On the contrary, Christian thinkers of the second and third centuries saw themselves as the practitioners of true philosophy who embodied the cultural ideals of an ancient nation and its literature, which stood for them as the fount of all that was best in civilization. Conversion to Christianity was often conceived as a transfer of identity from one’s previous ethnic affiliations to membership within the Hebrew ethnos, whose ancient forefathers and way of life became one’s own. Even if not all Christians “on the street” of a Mediterranean city or village articulated or lived out such an identity transference, the representation of Christian identity in such terms is a persistent feature of Christian intellectual discourses of the early centuries of Christianity (Johnson 2006; Kimber Buell 2005; Lieu 2002, 2004; Olster 1995). At the same time, elite Christian intellectuals of the second and third centuries were products of complex negotiations and resistances to ongoing imperial Hellenizing processes. It is thus something of a modern scholarly oddity that intellectuals such as Justin Martyr, Tatian, or Athenagoras are often omitted from studies of the Second Sophistic (whatever cultural and literary phenomena might be subsumed under that problematic label) and limited to treatments of the “rise” of Christianity, as though cultured men, pepaideumenoi, who self-​identified as Christians (or as adherents of Hebrew philosophy) were somehow inhabiting different discursive traditions or cultural sites of performance than those of Lucian or Aelius Aristides. While we should not underestimate the impact of the transfer of ritual (often exclusively) to a different

626    Religion and Religious Literature deity, or the adoption of a different corpus of literature as the canon of philosophical truth, or the transfer of loyalties to different imagined communities and their narratives of shared history, there remains a significant rootedness of early Christian literature within literary and performative contexts of the imperial Mediterranean (Brent 2006; Nasrallah 2010). In particular, several early Christian philosophers played the role of the eloquent rhetor advising those in power, including the emperor; they negotiated the multiple valences of the logos in their own logoi; and they participated in the same ongoing “culture wars” of imperial Hellenism that Plutarch, Lucian, and others were engaged in, and even adopted many of the same strategies.

40.1  Speaking Truth to Power In response to unsympathetic representations and unjust treatment, some Christian intellectuals are recorded as addressing their concerns to the emperor himself. Beginning with Hadrian and continuing to Marcus Aurelius, a series of apologetic works named the emperor as their addressee.1 The earliest known apologetic treatise, of which only a single fragment survives, was addressed to Hadrian by a certain Quadratus (Euseb. Hist. eccl. 4.3.1–​2). The same emperor was likewise the ostensible recipient of Aristides of Athens’s Apology (Euseb. Hist. eccl. 4.3.3), a work that was otherwise lost until the discovery in the second half of the nineteenth century of an explicitly attributed fragment of an Armenian translation sparked the identification of Syriac and Greek versions and fragments of the text. Melito of Sardis addressed an apology, of which only fragments remain, to Marcus Aurelius (Euseb. Hist. eccl. 4.13.8; 4.26.1–​ 11). Justin Martyr’s well-​known First Apology addressed itself to Antoninus Pius and his two sons, Verissimus (Marcus Aurelius) and Lucius, as well as the Senate and people of Rome. Finally, Athenagoras of Athens’s Legatio was an ambassadorial speech (logos presbeutikos) to Marcus Aurelius and his son Commodus (Grant 1988b, 101). It remains debatable whether some or any of these apologies were read to the emperors, presented personally by their authors during eastern imperial tours (Grant 1988a), or were merely “open letters” to the emperors with no concrete attempts made to provide the emperor with a copy. The possibility that the apologists had genuine ambitions of being heard by the emperor cannot be too easily dismissed: submitting petitions to the emperor was a frequent practice of imperial subjects and, after all, they could have drawn on Philo of Alexandria as a model in this, as they would in so many other areas beginning in the late second and early third centuries. On the other hand, there seems to be no clear impact on the emperors if they ever did make it so far. It may be best to take the imperial dedications in these Christian texts as at least providing an important mode of self-​ presentation on the part of their authors: with a freedom of speech deriving from their heightened philosophical sensibilities and virtues, men like Justin had the courage to speak truth to power, bravely represent the interests of their fellow-​Christians, and advise rulers in the ways of justice (cf. mutatis mutandis, Whitmarsh 2001, 186–​190).

Early Christianity and the Classical Tradition    627 Most important, then, is the posture taken in these literary works as well as the classical models on which they rested. The very adoption of the broad genre of apologia rooted itself in the Apology of Socrates, sometimes explicitly so. Purporting to be a record of the actual words spoken by the philosopher before an Athenian court in 399 bce, Socrates’s Apology (as written by Plato) contained features that would become significant for later apologies composed by Christians. In it Socrates declares his innocence against the charges (of corrupting the youth and introducing new deities), claims that his actions were more important than words (which he claims were delivered in a simple manner anyway), preached the immortality of the soul, which entailed a consequent refusal to fear death, and argued that, in spite of the accusations against him, his activities had been for the good of his community and had only been concerned with the highest human aspiration, namely truth. His calm and philosophic demeanor when facing death after the trial made his testimony (martyrion) a powerful model for Christians who died at the hands of persecutors (or at least those who wrote about their deaths).2 Socrates’s defense and death found explicit invocation and implicit imitation in the First and Second Apologies of Justin Martyr in the second century.3 Even if Justin only named his work “a petition and address” (not an apologia), the high number of allusions to Socrates’s Apology are unmistakable (Blunt 1911, passim, which is not exhaustive). Indeed, for the Christian apologist, Socrates was a Christian before Christ in his doctrine of the immortality of the soul, his adoption of cross-​imagery,4 and his belief in absolute truth. Christians were averred to be good for the state in a manner similar to Socrates’s claims for himself. Even though the political context had changed sharply from democratic Athens to imperial Rome, Christians were beneficial in their prayers for the emperor, their philosophic witness to truth, their sober and well-​ordered lifestyle, and their calling the bluff on the daemons who disguised themselves as the gods of Rome and incessantly produced deceptive imitations of truth (both in mythology and iconography). As in the case of Socrates, however, such an apologetic approach, marked as much by a critique of one’s accusers and the entire society they represented as by a defense of one’s own conduct and teachings, proved unsuccessful in garnering imperial or societal toleration. Justin, along with some of his students, faced execution for the threat that their freedom of speech and rejection of the state’s protecting gods posed to their hearers (Mart. Just. et al. Mursurillo). Athenagoras’s later embassy speech in defense of Christians, which exhibits a clear attempt to develop further Justin’s apologetic argument and clarify structurally the layout of a proper apologia, adopts and extends a technique of treating the emperors as philosophers that appeared in Justin’s First Apology. At various moments throughout his Legatio, Athenagoras complimented Marcus Aurelius and Commodus for their philosophic character. For instance, he could excuse himself from offering a detailed account of Pythagorean number symbolism, “for I  know that, as you excel all men in intelligence and in the power of your rule, in the same proportion do you surpass them all in an accurate acquaintance with all learning [paideia], cultivating as you do each several branch with more success than even those who have devoted themselves

628    Religion and Religious Literature exclusively to any one” (Legat. 6.18–​1 Geffcken; trans. Pratten).5 The consistently respectful tone of Athenagoras marks an attempt to smooth over the roughness of his apologetic predecessor in addressing the emperors. Justin had begun his earlier petition to the emperors (Antoninus Pius and his sons) and the Senate: “Reason directs those who are truly pious and philosophical to honor and love only what is true, declining to follow traditional opinions if these be worthless. . . . Do you, then, since you are called pious and philosophers, guardians of justice and lovers of learning, give good heed, and hearken to my address; and if you are indeed such, it will be manifested” (1 Apol. 2.1, 2). Even from its beginning, Justin’s treatise adopts a somewhat patronizing tone and he avoids praising them for being true philosophers, only remarking that they are said to be so. The Christian, as a true philosopher unconcerned about the opinions of the many or the preservation of the body, speaks frankly to those in highest power. “You can kill, but not hurt us” (1 Apol. 2.4; trans. Dods and Reith). Or, more strongly: “But if you also, like the foolish, prefer custom to truth, do what you have power to do. But just so much power have rulers who esteem opinion more than truth, as robbers have in a desert. And that you will not succeed is declared by the Word, than whom, after God who begat Him, we know there is no ruler more kingly and just” (1 Apol. 12.6–​7; trans. Dods and Reith). Like Socrates five centuries before, Justin’s freedom of speech and advisory stance toward his audience bore an independent confidence that approached the offensive. His critique of the injustice of Rome’s judicial apparatus, the identification of Rome’s gods as wicked daemons, and the advertisement of Christian willingness to engage in civil disobedience undeterred by threats of punishment would have scarcely been effective elements to assuage any feelings of uneasiness about Christians by his named imperial and senatorial addressees (Pagels 1985). This feature of the work cautions against the frequent assumption that Christian apologetics marked an attempt to “build bridges” between the fledgling faith and the outside world. The apologist certainly showed a knowledge and appreciation of the Greek philosophical and literary tradition—​the pages of Justin, Athenagoras, Theophilus, and others are littered with quotations from classical philosophers and poets, many in a notably positive manner—​and, indeed, their appeal to Plato, Herodotus, Homer, and the tragedians highlights the ways in which Christian intellectuals participated in the larger imperial Greek project of creating, negotiating and resignifying a classical canon (Zeegers-​Vander Vorst 1972). Yet, the simultaneous conversation with the classical past and the imperial present was an unmistakably critical one. There is not a single early Christian defense of the faithful that does not engage in a task of constructing boundaries between a Christian “us” and a non-​Christian “them,” based upon polarities of reason and folly, one true God and many false gods (or daemons), piety and impiety, purity and immorality, wisdom and ignorance, and so on. Bridges and boundaries were, however, not mutually exclusive apologetic acts. The apologists were reading the same literature and studying the same models as non-​ Christian pepaideumenoi of the second century. In important respects, then, they were speaking the language of their learned contemporaries. They spoke truth to imperial

Early Christianity and the Classical Tradition    629 power (even if the emperors never read or heard their apologies, the speech act bore the same valence) and criticized Roman Hellenized culture within the philosophical diction of that culture and by means of the deployment of products of that culture (Lyman 2003; Nasrallah 2010; Perkins 2008). Countercultures—​insofar as at least some early Christians were attempting to conceptualize Christianity as such—​are never created sui generis. In adopting the posture of an advisor to emperors and of a social critic, the Christian intellectual was performing literary acts resonant of the Cynic-​style free speech exemplified by the likes of Dio Chrysostom (Swain 1996, 192–​196; Whitmarsh 2001, 181–​246, 325–​327).

40.2  In Praise of the Logos Central to the ethos of imperial sophistic culture was the celebration of the power—​ aesthetic, psychological, intellectual, cultural—​of the spoken and written word. The classical sophistic had been heralded by the memorably ostentatious display of verbal dexterity in the Encomium of Helen by Gorgias. Even as he sought to defend Helen of all culpability in her Trojan escapade, Gorgias’s encomium of the woman became an occasion to portray and praise the power of the well-​turned word (Segal 1962). The Christians, too, made significant attempts to glorify the word; in so doing, they exhibited a divergent manifestation of the revived and revised development of sophistic culture in the second century. The Christian negotiation of the word appeared in two rather distinct, but I would argue interrelated, ways. On the one hand, they adapted key elements of contemporary philosophical currents, with a focus upon the nature of the Platonic Demiurge; on the other hand, they evinced a concern with the written words of both the classical and biblical traditions so as to transform them into integral components of their own writings. Drawing on Plato’s Timaeus, imperial-​era philosophers of a middle Platonist or Neopythagorean persuasion had begun to explore the identity of the Demiurge with a resulting division of opinion over whether the first God was the Demiurge (Plutarch, Atticus, Nicomachus) or whether one was to distinguish the highest God from a second divine Demiurge (Dillon 1996; Opsomer 2005; cf. Moreschini 1994, 5109–​5120). The precise character of this second creator was elaborated in terms of the necessity of mediating the ontological hierarchy between pure being (or even what was “beyond being”) and the material world of becoming. While Christian philosophers like Justin and Athenagoras seem to have identified the highest God (the Father) as the creator, they discovered unique ways of formulating the role of God’s Word in creation. A principal motivation lay in the presence of some of the most important biblical lines for later theological developments: the prologue of the Gospel of John had asserted that “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God . . . all things came into being through [the Word]. . . . The Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son” (John 1:1, 3, 14, NRSV).

630    Religion and Religious Literature The author of these lines was himself echoing a Hellenistic Jewish conversation with Greek philosophical discourses, exhibited most clearly in the Wisdom of Solomon and the corpus of Philo of Alexandria. Ultimately, what these texts allowed second-​century Christian philosophers to do was to connect the opening lines of Genesis, in which God had spoken (legein) the world into existence (“Let there be light,” etc.), with their belief in the divinity of Christ, so that God’s creative speech was seen as having become incarnate (“the Logos became flesh”), in a language that was resonant of a Platonic philosophical cosmology and ontological hierarchy (Droge 1989; Edwards 1995; Puech 1912, 103–​115, 158–​160, 184–​190). It was a brilliant theological move that permanently opened up a space for Christian articulations (awkward and unwanted though these may have been) in the discursive fields of imperial Platonism. One of the reasons Socrates had proved such an amenable model for early Christian apologists was not only that he had delivered an apologia in defense of his teachings and had been willing to die for them; it was also that, as a philosopher who prized the proper use of reason (logos), he exhibited the work of God’s Logos before the incarnation (but see Edwards 1995, 278–​279 for an important distinction). He recognized the superiority of a divine Mind and reason, which ordered the universe, and thus had been labeled an atheist. Christian philosophers, faced with the accusations of atheism themselves, could claim “the mind and reason [nous kai logos] of the Father is the Son of God. . . . From the beginning, God, being the eternal Mind, had the Logos in himself, being eternally rational [logikos]” (Athenagoras, Legat. 10.25–​26, 28–​29 Geffcken). Furthermore, the cosmological claim of a creation through the Logos of God allowed for conceiving an affiliation among all humans who recognized the Reason behind the rationally-​ordered universe. It was this line of thought that allowed Justin to make the bold claim that Socrates was a Christian before Christ. Justin’s argument was formulated as follows. Socrates, using reason (logos), condemned the religion of the Greeks (especially as expressed in poetry—​Homer and Hesiod were to be excluded from the ideal state). Driven by evil daemons, the Greeks retaliated by claiming that he was introducing “new divinities” and was an atheist. In this way, Socrates was just like the Christians. “For not only among the Greeks did Logos prevail to condemn these things through Socrates, but also among the barbarians were they condemned by the Logos himself, who took shape, and became man, and was called Jesus Christ” (1 Apol. 5.4; trans. Dods and Reith). Therefore, those who “live with logos are Christians, though they have been considered atheists;” among Greeks were men such as Socrates and Heraclitus, among barbarians men such as Abraham and Elias; this same Logos was born of a virgin, suffered, died, and rose (1 Apol. 46.3–​5; Droge 1989, 65–​72). If unpersuasive to modern readers (and to many ancient readers as well), such Christian explorations of the Word display a fascinating creativity and the beginnings of a pervasive intertextual movement between biblical and classical words and conceptions that would have a rich and fecund course throughout Late Antiquity. A second salient mode of working with words in carving out a textual space within imperial literary culture involved the direct quotation of others’ words. Justin’s First Apology contained a significant number of quotations from Plato and the poets

Early Christianity and the Classical Tradition    631 (Zeegers-​Vander Vorst 1972, 23–​24, 255–​256), as well as many biblical passages (especially in his survey of Christian teachings). But it is in a later work, the Dialogue with Trypho, that Justin would push quotation to new levels in a manner reminiscent of Josephus or earlier Isocrates, while at the same time exhibiting further the ways in which Plato continued to represent a model for the literary presentation of true philosophy. The opening pages of the Dialogue with Trypho possess all the indications of standing within classical philosophical channels (Edwards 1991; Hoffmann 1966, 9–​40; Rajak 1999, 59–​68; Van Winden 1971). A narrative of Justin’s philosophical and educational pursuits, first among Stoics, then Peripatetics, Pythagoreans, and Platonists, provided a literary extension of similar autobiographical claims made by Socrates in Plato’s dialogues, where an account was given of the ephemeral appeal of other philosophic approaches in such a way as to highlight their shortcomings and so show the viability of the speaker’s approach (e.g., Pl. Phd. 96a–​100a). All of this was couched within the form of a dialogue with an interlocutor who represented a distinct position (in this case, Trypho, a Jew who advised Justin to be a good Platonist, or, instead, to be a good Jew; Dial. 8). Trypho suggested that Christians could not hope to be truly pious if they ignored all the rituals and festivals practiced by true God-​fearers. As it is, they “are not in any particular separated from [other peoples], and do not alter [their] mode of living from the nations. . . . If you can defend yourself on these points . . . we would gladly hear from you” (Dial. 10; trans. Dods and Reith). Justin responded to this challenge in a lengthy argument comprising quotation from the Hebrew Scriptures with his own interpretive commentary (Dial. 11–​142). His basic position continued that of Paul in the New Testament: Christians are the “true Israel,” for they understand the Scriptures more correctly than the Jews and find in them a true account of piety and prophecies of Christ and the church. We see clearly expressed throughout the Dialogue the demarcation of Christians from Jews as distinct identities based upon a literary severing of the true (Christian) reading of Scriptures from a false (Jewish) reading of them. Justin was, in effect, performing a “parting of the ways” between them so as to create rival identities for each as distinct peoples, even distinct nations (ethnê).6 Fundamental to this construction of identity and conflict over right reading techniques was the quotation of large blocks of text from a source (in this case the Hebrew Scriptures) as witnesses for one’s defense. The New Testament authors and other early Christians had made frequent allusion to, and paraphrase or quotation of, the Hebrew Scriptures. Justin, however, distinguished himself from these earlier practices in the length of his quotations (some totaling roughly a chapter of quoted material) and in the centrality of quotation, rather than allusion or paraphrase, to the development of his argument. Indeed, his argument is a quotational one in that its very basis rests upon the quotation of texts. In this aspect, Justin not only participated in the broader book culture of the second century (Johnson 2010), but placed himself at the heart of the fledgling “testimonia” tradition (Skarsaune 1987). Testimonia texts collected passages of Scripture that were deemed useful for debate (either with Jews or with other Christian groups) so as to provide a practical reference tool for those who might not have had the

632    Religion and Religious Literature sort of command of Scripture that would allow them to quote from memory the passage that would most appropriately confirm their own claim or refute those of others. A testimonia collection would contain the quoted material with little or no commentary by the collector. Because he provided his own comments on the biblical passages, Justin’s was not simply a testimonia collection; but it certainly seems to have depended upon one (possibly one of his own making). This sort of performance of excerpting passages of ancient works for the purposes of self-​promotion and polemical display was scarcely unique to Jews and Christians (the “peoples of the book”). Scholarly excerpting was widespread in sophistic culture of the second century as the aficionados of quotation and philological banter in the pages of Aulus Gellius or Athenaeus show (Johnson 2010, 118–​136). So, too, in Justin’s Dialogue the effect of incorporating extensive blocks of quotation displayed the power that could be garnered through mastery of ancient words: the character of Trypho himself admitted amazement at Justin’s knowledge of the writings of the Jews (Dial. 56.16; cf. 50.1, 65.1) and Justin would even declare to Trypho that the Jewish writings were “not yours, but ours” (Dial. 29.2). It is rarely recognized that this sort of quotational drive was not unique to Jewish-​ Christian debate and was not limited to quotation of scriptural texts. Josephus’s Contra Apionem, in the first century, was an important exemplar (Hardwick 1989). But, citation and quotation of documents had already become a staple of judicial speeches in the classical period. Most notably, Isocrates’s Antidosis quoted the author’s own earlier writings as part of his apologia against accusations that he had corrupted the youth.7 Quoted material could amount to as much as roughly five pages of Isocrates’s text. In the amount of introductory remarks and subsequent commentary on the quotation, and in the clearer structure of the whole, it differs from the testimonia collection embedded in Justin’s Dialogue, which possesses less authorial exposition and a less closely structured plan. The basic impulse, however, is the same in each. Literary texts, not merely legal documents, were considered apt witnesses to be brought forth in a defense. Quotation confirmed the misplaced nature of the accusations of one’s opponents and affirmed the innocence of the defendant. The importance of Justin’s adoption and extension of a quotational method in imperial Christian apologetics, especially in the generation that saw the Jewish hopes of territorial integrity crushed by Hadrian in response to the Bar Kochba revolt, cannot be ignored. The decision to quote Scripture in polemic against the Jews was not a necessary one (Christians could, and did, adopt other strategies including the development of arguments about the geographical limitations of Jewish cult, the destruction of the Jewish temple and scattering of the Jews, or their ignorance and guilt in rejecting Christ). Alongside the quotation of classical authors, the quotation of biblical texts opened up a space for the exercise of interpretive skills and the consequent reflection and fertilization of the Christian imagination by the narratives and oracular utterances of the Jews’ own Scriptures. In contrast to the rejection of the Hebrew Scriptures by Marcionites or Gnostics, who saw the Hebrew writings and their God as part of the problem rather than the solution to discovering the path of salvation, Justin’s appropriation of the Scriptures fostered an ongoing concern with things Jewish among Christians. The testimonia

Early Christianity and the Classical Tradition    633 tradition and its apologetic expression in numerous literary works from Justin’s time into the Byzantine period were legitimizing and determinative of continued immersion in the Jewish texts (in spite of the frequent anti-​Jewish sentiment) and the construction of a Christian identity that required the existence and formulation of a Jewish identity (as mother, sister, or rival).

40.3  Hellenes and History Justin’s quotation of barbarian literature stands in stark contrast to the Hellenocentric dismissal of barbarian identity as uncultured, immoral, or irrational and, in particular, of the disavowal of direct quotation in favor of a Hellenizing technique of paraphrasing the stories or ideas of barbarian cultures as exemplified by Plutarch (Johnson 2013a, 226–​230; Richter 2011, 207–​235). In the treatise On Isis and Osiris, Plutarch declared that the Egyptians did not know how to tell rightly their own myths, having confused them as history in a euhemeristic framework; what was needed was a Greek paraphrase of those myths in order to elucidate the philosophical truths hidden deep within them (de Iside 20). This was an interpretive technique that allowed a Greek to speak out of both sides of his mouth: on the one hand, barbarians were allowed consideration as possessors of an ancient wisdom, but on the other hand, they were judged as incapable of understanding that wisdom and thus in need of Greek rationality. The Greeks bore the civilizing burden of helping those who could not help themselves. It was precisely this sort of Hellenocentric presumption that many Christian intellectuals diligently sought to oppose. Like at least some of their non-​Christian contemporary pepaideumenoi, such as Philo of Byblos or Lucian of Samosata, Christians engaged in ethnic polemics against the Greeks. In spite of being the products of imperial Hellenism, in the sense that they were well educated in the Greek language and its literature, they used the tools of Hellenism to criticize the Greeks (Johnson 2012). The criticisms formulated did not remain within the sphere of Greek religion, though Greek religious practices and the myths about the Greek gods came under heavy fire in nearly all of the extant apologies. Born “in the land of the Assyrians” (Ad Gr. 42, p. 43.10–​11) and educated in Athens, Tatian criticized the diversity of Greek dialects (Ad Gr. 1, p. 2.2–​ 4) and the privileged place of Atticism (Ad Gr. 27, p. 29.13) albeit in his own moderately Atticizing Greek. Though rhetorically trained, he attacked grammarians and sophists, citing Aristophanes in his castigation of their “left-​over grapes and babbling” in which they cawed like crows (Ad Gr. 1, p. 2.11, quoting Ar. Ran. 92–​93). The starting point of Greek nonsense was, for Tatian, the grammarians who appropriated words but “dialogued like a blind person with a deaf one” (Ad Gr. 26, p. 28.3, 7–​8). Though his tone is less hostile, Athenagoras would contrast the simple and authentic goodness of illiterate Christians to the clever sophistries of those who “reduce syllogisms, and clear up ambiguities, and explain etymologies . . . who teach homonyms and synonyms, and predicaments and axioms, and what is the subject and the predicate” (Legatio 11.20–​23

634    Religion and Religious Literature Geffcken; trans. Pratten). Whereas Lucian would attack fellow-​Syrians who acquired books in order to appear learned without actually being so (in his Adversus Indoctum), Tatian attacked the Greeks for collecting books while remaining empty-​headed readers “like the [leaky] jar of the Danaids” (Ad Gr. 26, p. 27.21–​22). Beyond criticisms of the cultural privilege that was deemed to accrue from the mastery of the Greek language, a more substantial contribution of these Christians to Hellenism’s culture wars was the historiographic concern to elaborate the precise chronological relations of the nations of their world (Droge 1989, 91–​96). Justin had already made asseverations to the greater antiquity of Moses in comparison to the Greeks: the Greek poets had borrowed from the Hebrew prophets (1 Apol. 44.9), and Plato had borrowed from Moses, though he had understood the latter’s teaching only imperfectly (1 Apol. 59–​60). The more peppery Tatian was sweeping in his indictment: Greeks had stolen words (Ad Gr. 26, p. 27.15–​16), stories, and ideas from various barbarian peoples. Importantly, both Tatian and his near contemporary Theophilus of Antioch were not content with merely making the claim of Greek lateness in comparison to the Hebrews as Justin had done (or likewise, as Philo of Byblos had done with respect to the Phoenicians, if his fragments are indicative of the range of his argument). They confirmed their claims with detailed chronological arguments. Taking Homer and Moses as the two starting points for each of the peoples, since the one was the oldest of Greek authors and the other was the “founder of all barbarian wisdom” (Ad Gr. 31, p.31.8), Tatian provided a summary of the various dates that had been assigned to Homer—​not by the Christians but by the Greeks themselves, so that he would not be suspected of depending upon biased sources. Rather, he would use the Greek sources (such as Theagenes, Stesimbrotus, Antimachus, Herodotus, and so on) as weapons against them (Ad Gr. 31, p.31.11–​16). The earliest that any of these sources placed Homer was eighty years after the Trojan War, though there was a good deal of divergence that gave dates as late as 400 years after the fall of Troy. Yet, even if Homer lived at the very time of the Trojan War he could scarcely approach the times of Moses, whose lifetime could be determined to synchronize with Amosis the Egyptian king and Inachus the Argive king, and was thereby proven to have lived not only before the war but before Troy was even founded (Ad Gr. 36, p.37.24–​25). His argument for the priority of Moses is hardly scientific—​it is interrupted by lengthy tirades against Greek immorality, and, of the non-​Hebrew and hence purportedly unbiased sources he cites for the date of Moses, only one seems to have mentioned Moses—​yet, it was to have immense impact on the development of world chronology. For, without the adoption of chronology as an apologetic technique it is doubtful that Julius Africanus would have drafted his chronography in the third century or even more that Eusebius would have taken up the task of compiling his massive and painstaking Chronicon in the first decade or so of the fourth century. Theophilus’s chronological argument was no less important and represented a less polemical and more coherent argument. It began with the Amosis-​Moses synchronism, then drew upon Manetho for a chronology of Egyptian kings until Sethos, whose brother was Danaus who migrated to Greece (Ad Autol. 3.20). This allowed for

Early Christianity and the Classical Tradition    635 Theophilus to connect the chronology of the Hebrews to that of the Greeks by means of the Egyptian regnal chronology. For Theophilus, the Hebrews were “our ancestors” and hence the otherwise new religious movement of Christianity was able to acquire ancient roots that antedated the Greeks by several hundred years. In distinction from Tatian, Theophilus used the polemical motivation for constructing a chronology that could “prove” the lateness of the Greeks as an opportunity to take a further step and offer his own chronology of world history beginning with Adam and continuing up to the reign of Marcus Aurelius (Ad Autol. 3.24–​28). Significantly, in their chronological contrasts between Greeks and other eastern nations, Tatian and Theophilus were affirming a rich fund of historical narratives that could become an integral part of their own identity. The persistent identification of the ancient Hebrews as the forefathers of the Christians, or of Christians as the “true Israel” as Justin had argued, marked an important step by these intellectuals beyond the schematic formulation of Aristides the Athenian in the earliest extant apology. Aristides stands most apart in his apologetic speech purportedly delivered before the emperor Hadrian himself, for his work answered no criticisms and quoted from no earlier texts. Furthermore, while it certainly made a powerful and incisive contribution to the development of Christian identity in terms of a race (genos) that “traced its genealogy from Christ,” in marked difference from the polytheistic nations (Chaldeans, Greeks and Egyptians) and the Jews (Apol. 2.2), it lacked the articulation of a properly historical vision. In apologists of the later second century, who emphasized that they were answering anti-​Christian accusations, strategies more advanced than the simplicity of Aristides’s approach were developed to draw out the contours of a Christian identity as superior to its rivals (especially Greeks and Jews). Christians were a nation of pious, wise, and truly philosophic people who were the heirs of the ancient wisdom of the Hebrews, a race that preceded the others in its antiquity and surpassed the others in knowledge of the one true God and the true worship due Him. It was the ethnic nature of such claims, which the later apologists picked up from Aristides, that forced them to begin to grapple so seriously with the historical origins of nations and their relative chronologies. It was in the construction of such an historically rooted and theologically defined identity that Christian intellectuals like Theophilus formulated universalizing claims. At once particularist and universalist, therefore—​in their adoption of ancient Hebrew holy men as their own ancestors and exclusivist cultic assertions, on the one hand, and their rationalizing Logos theology, discussed earlier, on the other—​these Christians pursued the same sort of universalizing project that Plutarch, for instance, had developed. Indeed, it was in order to topple the Hellenocentric universalism of the likes of Plutarch or Aelius Aristides that Tatian and Theophilus made their painstaking chronological labors. Part of what made the sophistic culture of the second century a time of such intellectual exhilaration and literary foment is strikingly, therefore, the chronological investigations, as well as the amassing of biblical proof-​texts and castigations of Greek and Roman impiety, injustice, or irrationality, by these Christian litterateurs. If the age of the Second Sophistic can be identified as a field on which complex ad hoc maneuvers

636    Religion and Religious Literature and struggles over ethnic identity, historiographic vision, and theological framework were performed, whether playfully or polemically, by cultured actors promoting rival claims to cultural superiority, intellectual or literary precision, and universal truth, then these Christians must receive an integral position in any appreciation of that field. The foregoing observations only gesture at a limited set of notable engagements that exhibit the simultaneous industry of creative freedom (and incessant manipulation) on the part of Christian intellectuals, while at the same time evincing the embeddedness of their literary projects within classical traditions that were shared and contested by their second-​century contemporaries.

Further Reading Valuable studies of individual Christian intellectuals are contained in Edwards et  al. 1999; Grant 1988b remains useful. Significant examinations of early Christian literature’s participation in the philosophical culture of the first centuries of our era and, in particular the development of apologetic historiographical frameworks, have been offered by Boys-​Stones 2001; Droge 1989; and Pilhofer 1990; cf. Van Nuffelen 2011. Ongoing scholarship continues to trace the varied articulations and contexts of Christian identity as both a cosmopolitan identity (Perkins 2008) and a race or nation (Johnson 2013b; Kimber Buell 2005; Lieu 2002, 2004). Brent 2006 and Nasrallah 2010 have made illuminating investigations into the performative sophistic contexts of early Christian intellectuals.

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chapter 41

J ewish Literat u re Erich S. Gruen

The Jews saw themselves as a people apart. The Bible affirmed it, and the nation’s experience seemed to confirm it. As God proclaimed in the Book of Leviticus, “You shall be holy to me, for I the Lord am holy, and I have set you apart from other peoples to be mine” (Lev. 20:26). The idea is echoed in Numbers: “There is a people that dwells apart, not reckoned among the nations” (Num. 23:9). Other biblical passages reinforce the sense of a chosen people, selected by the Lord (for both favor and punishment) and placed in a category unto themselves (e.g., Gen. 12:1–​3; Exod. 6:7, 33:16; Deut. 7:6, 10:15, 14:2). This notion of Jewish exceptionalism recurs with frequency in the Bible, most pointedly perhaps in the construct of the return from the Babylonian Exile when the maintenance of endogamy loomed as paramount to assert the identity of the nation (Ezra, 9–​10; Neh. 10:29–​31; 13:1–​3, 23–​30). The image was more than a matter of self-​perception. Greeks and Romans also characterized Jews as holding themselves aloof from other societies and keeping to their own kind. The earliest Greek writer who discussed Jews at any length, Hecataeus of Abdera, described them (in an otherwise favorable account) as somewhat xenophobic and misanthropic (Hecataeus, apud Diod. Sic. 40.3.4). That form of labeling persisted through the Hellenistic period and well into the era of the Roman Empire. One need only cite Tacitus and Juvenal for piercing comments on the subject:  Jews are fiercely hostile to gentiles and spurn the company of the uncircumcised (Tac. Hist. 5.5.1–​2, 5.8.1; Juv. 14.103–​104). Whatever the perceptions or the constructs, however, they did not match conditions on the ground. Jews dwelled in cities and nations all over the eastern Mediterranean, spilling over also to the west, particularly in Italy and North Africa. The diaspora population far outnumbered the Palestinian, and the large majority of the dispersed grew up in lands of Greek language and culture—​and Roman political dominance (Barclay 1996; Gruen 2002). Isolation was not an option. Indeed, the Hellenic world of the Roman Empire was part and parcel of the Jewish experience, no alien setting or foreign intrusion. It had been so for a long time. Jewish intellectuals showed familiarity with and engagement in the genres and forms of Greek

640    Religion and Religious Literature literature from the later third century bce. Jewish writers composed tragic drama, epic poetry, history, philosophy, and even prose fiction in Greek with some frequency (far more than we know, since we have but a fraction of it). By the time of the Second Sophistic, they were steeped in Hellenic literary traditions, many of them probably knew no language other than Greek (the Hebrew Bible had long since been translated into Greek), and they were fully comfortable with the intellectual horizons of the Hellenic Mediterranean. Did this produce strain and tension? Did working within well-​established Greek literary conventions in a world under Roman sway require compromise of Jewish principles and values that had an even longer history and a more compelling hold on the consciousness of the Jews? A revealing clue lies in the subject matter that pervades Jewish writings in Greek of every form from the beginning. Epic, tragedy, history, and prose fiction did not celebrate the exploits of Zeus, Heracles, Odysseus, or Aeneas. Their heroes were Abraham, Joseph, and Moses. The genres of classical cultures were put to use to retell in new shapes and guises the ancient tales on which Jews founded their faith. The Hellenic mode served as a means of expression rather than an adoption of ideology. That does not, however, fully resolve the issue. The pride in isolation and distinctiveness, on the one hand, and immersion in Hellenic culture, on the other, hardly made for a cozy fit. Tensions and strains must have existed as Jewish writers grappled with the amalgam of ideas and formulations at the intersection of the cultures. The literary output constituted a rich and diverse mix, and no brief survey can do it justice. Some salient examples will have to suffice.

Philo of Alexandria Philo of Alexandria stands out as the most prominent and conspicuous instance of the Jewish intelligentsia steeped in Greek learning. His output was vast, and his corpus (of which most, though not by any means all, survives) defies summary. He held a position of high esteem in the Jewish community of Alexandria in the period of the early Roman Empire, living into the reign of Claudius (Schwartz 2009, 9–​31). The diversity and variety of his writings reflect a lifetime of learning of which only a small hint can be given here (Morris 1987, 819–​870; Royse 2009, 32–​64). Philo was a devoted student and adherent of the Hebrew Bible in its Greek version (he knew little or no Hebrew), and he dedicated much of his energy to biblical exegesis. Interpretation of the Pentateuch, often elaborate allegorical interpretation, represented his principal métier and drove his mission throughout. But he brought to that task a wealth of erudition in Greek literature and, especially, Greek philosophy (Dillon 1977, 145–​183; Niehoff 2001, 137–​158; Wolfson 1948, passim). Philo’s deep engagement with Hellenic culture is no better illustrated than by his treatise Quod Omnis Probus Liber Sit (“Every good man is free”). The work tackles a

Jewish Literature   641 familiar Stoic “paradox,” the proposition that the Stoic wise man alone is free, regardless of material condition, oppressed circumstances, or even servile status. Philo follows Stoic doctrine in insisting that freedom is a quality of mind or soul, an inward certitude of virtue, unaffected by anything external. Only the sage is rich, no matter how poverty-​stricken, and only he is sovereign, no matter his fetters, brands of servitude, and enduring enslavement (Philo, Omnis Probus, 8–​10, 59–​61). Genuine eleutheria comes from scorning the claims of the passions, resisting the blandishments of wealth, reputation, and pleasure, and renouncing human frailties. The wise man is thus immune to the shifts of fortune and unaffected by avarice, jealousy, ambition, fear, or even pain (17–​25). Philo assigns due credit to the fountainhead of Stoicism, Zeno, as the peerless practitioner of true virtue, even defending his doctrines against critics and skeptics. Zeno was the preeminent advocate of living life in accord with nature (53–​56, 97, 108, 160). But Philo’s exposition went beyond Stoicism. The sources he cites and the illustrations he employs show a wide acquaintance with Hellenic history, literature, tradition, and mythology. Philo does not hesitate to appeal to Pythagorean teachings, to Plato, to other philosophers like Antisthenes, Anaxarchus, Zeno the Eleatic, and Diogenes, to Sophocles, and indeed to Homer (2, 13, 19, 28, 31, 106–​109, 121–​125, 157). He makes reference to the constitutions of Athens and Sparta, and to their lawgivers Solon and Lycurgus, he includes anecdotes about Alexander the Great, and he praises the sentiments and actions of the hero Heracles as conveyed by Euripides (47, 92–​96, 99, 101–​103, 114). And he freely employs tales from Greek history, drama, and legend to reinforce his philosophical propositions (125–​146). All of this shows Philo comfortable, quite unselfconsciously so, in the culture of the Hellenes. Yet the comfort level was incomplete. Reading between the lines shows that the cultivated philosopher did not altogether escape a sense of tension in negotiating the relationship of his ancestral tradition to the intellectual world of Hellas. Philo felt obliged to remind his readers that the lawgiver of the Jews went beyond the praise of inner virtue to celebrate love of the divine that makes the devout similar to gods among men (Philo, Omnis Probus, 43). The passage fits ill in its context, almost an afterthought or an insertion, suggesting a need to reassert foundational principles, however incongruous in the setting. And Philo goes further still to propose that Zeno himself drew on the Torah for some of his precepts (57). That proposition was not novel. Earlier Jewish thinkers too had advanced the idea that the best in Greek philosophy was prompted by the Bible—​ and none was deterred by the fact that the Greek translation was unavailable to Zeno or any of his predecessors (Gruen 1998, 246–​253). Philo cites Moses more than once for statements that supposedly anticipated the Stoics (Philo, Omnis Probus, 68–​70). He occasionally takes potshots at Greek sophists, mere wordsmiths absorbed in logic-​ chopping and petty quibbling (80, 88, 96; cf. Philo, Mos. 2.211–​212). And he identifies as the very embodiment of ascetic existence and devotion to spiritual life the Jewish sect of the Essenes. They need no philosophical justification, only the piety that stems from adherence to the laws of the fathers (Philo, Omnis Probus, 75–​88). The digression on the Essenes looks very much like an intrusion in the treatise, hardly a smooth transition.

642    Religion and Religious Literature Although (or perhaps because) this work is as thoroughly Hellenic as any item in Philo’s large corpus, the author felt obliged to reassure readers, even at the cost of consistency, that his commitment to Jewish teachings remained unshaken. The motif that Jewish learning lies behind the Hellenic intellectual achievement appears with some frequency in Philo’s other writings. In different contexts he has Heraclitus, Socrates, Zeno, and various Greek lawgivers owe their insights to the laws of Moses (Philo, Leg. All. 1.108; Mut. 152; Q Genesis, 2.6; Somn. 2.244; Spec. Leg. 4.59–​61). In the Life of Moses, Philo goes further still, asserting that Jewish law has earned the respect of Hellenic communities everywhere and gentiles generally who, among other things, have embraced the Sabbath and the Day of Atonement as nearly universal practices (Philo, Mos. 2.17–​24, 2.44). No Greek legislator comes close to the supreme accomplishments of Moses (2.12–​14). Philo even accounts for the translation of the Hebrew Bible into Greek by a Hellenic desire to emulate the ways of the Jews (2.25–​27, 2.43). Extravagant claims of this sort leave more than a hint of the disquiet that accompanied the embrace of Hellas even for this most Hellenic of Jews. Philo devoted a whole treatise, De Congressu, to discussing the value of the various branches of educational training. He ranges over grammar, geometry, astronomy, rhetoric, dialectic, music, and the whole span of subjects that belong to the traditional curriculum of the Hellenic elite. He even provides some autobiographical notices of his own educational experience that proceeded through these forms of instruction, for all of which he expressed praise and admiration (Philo, Congr. 11–​18, 74–​76, 144). The combination of disciplines leads the mind inexorably toward its true goal, the acquisition of wisdom through philosophy (77–​80, 146–​148). Philo underscores throughout the contrast between the formation of the mental faculties and the ultimate objective, employing the analogy of Hagar and Sarah, and including a host of biblical allusions and allegories (Pearce 2007, 170–​175). But there are no theological overtones here. The work provides as thoroughly Hellenic a presentation as one could wish for the Stoic doctrine of preliminary teachings that lead to the embrace of philosophy (Alexandre 1967, passim; Mendelson 1982, passim). Yet it is not the whole story. A remarkable passage encapsulates both Philo’s firm attachment to Hellenic education and his need to go beyond it. He provides a strikingly idiosyncratic version of Moses’s own primary and secondary education. For Philo, the Hebraic founder of the faith had Egyptian teachers at the outset, followed by masters summoned from Greece to advance his intellectual training. Egyptians took him through the initial stages in arithmetic, geometry, rhythm, harmony, and astrology, and Greeks carried him to higher learning, evidently literature, rhetoric, and philosophy. Lest readers conclude, however, that Moses was fully formed by educators beyond the biblical borders, Philo adds that the young man’s inner genius allowed him swiftly to transcend his teachers, who had no more to give him—​as if he drew more on his own recollection than on anyone’s instruction (Philo, Mos. 1.21–​24). Philo’s blend of Hellenism and Judaism was less a smooth process than a tense negotiation.

Jewish Literature   643

4 Maccabees A complex interweaving of Greek philosophy and Jewish precepts appears also in a treatise that our textual tradition labels as 4 Maccabees. The genre of the work does not conform readily to a single or standard model. Its form suggests, at least on the face of it, a diatribe, expounding on a philosophic position and defending it against objections (Hadas 1953, 101–​102; Norden 1898, 303–​304, 416–​420). The opening of the treatise indicates that its topic will be the mastery of devout reason over the passions, and that motif holds, in various ways, throughout. Yet the bulk of 4 Maccabees treats, often in graphic detail, the noble resistance and the cruel fate of Jewish martyrs in the persecutions that led to the Maccabean rebellion. This might recall the genre of the encomium, a eulogy of praiseworthy persons, often in the form of a funeral oration (Lebram 1974, 81–​96; deSilva 1998, 26–​28, 46–​49, 76–​97; Van Henten 1997, 60–​67). It carries echoes of lofty rhetoric, the epideictic speech, performative oratory that stemmed from Classical Greece and enjoyed a vogue in the era of the Second Sophistic. 4 Maccabees appears to be something of a hybrid, a rare combination of the diatribe and the encomium, or, more likely, an entity of its own, not a conscious mixture of genres and not easily subject to classification. Whatever label one applies, however, Hellenic features predominate. The peculiar work not only defies categorization but baffles inquiry into author, provenance, and date. There is little point in probing beyond its anonymity which leads nowhere. And the author’s location could be anywhere in the Jewish diaspora. Asia Minor or Antioch is a favored guess because of the “Asianism” of the author’s style (Anderson 1985, 534–​535; Barclay 1996, 370; deSilva 1998, 18–​21; Hadas 1953, 110–​113; Klauck 1989, 666–​667; Norden 1898, 1:416–​420; Van Henten 1997, 78–​81). But “Asianism” is largely a pejorative term flung about by critics who prefer a more direct “Attic” style, and has little to do with geography (Van Henten 1997, 59–​60). A rough date, on the other hand, is slightly more accessible. Language and vocabulary, as well as historical arguments, have induced most scholars to place it anywhere between the mid-​first and mid-​ second centuries ce (Anderson 1985, 533–​534; Barclay 1996, 449; Breitenstein 1978, 75; Collins 2000, 203–​204; deSilva 1998, 14–​18; Dupont-​Sommer 1939; Van Henten 1997, 73–​78). Similarities with philosophical treatises and with rhetorical pieces of the Second Sophistic, in any case, place the work snugly within that cultural context. Much ink has spilled over the question of whether the author owes more to Plato or to the Stoics (Anderson 1985, 537–​539; Breitenstein 1978, 132–​133; Collins 2000, 205–​206; Hadas 1953, 115–​118; Klauck 1989, 665–​666; Renehan 1972, 224–​232). None of the arguments has compelling force. The issue of reason’s control over the emotions, with which the text opens, was a standard Stoic topic, as is the claim that reason is mind choosing with right judgment the life of wisdom, and wisdom, in turn, being the knowledge of things divine and human and their causes (4 Macc. 1.1–​3, 1.15–​16). But the Stoics had no monopoly on such precepts. 4 Maccabees’s insistence on the four cardinal

644    Religion and Religious Literature virtues, good sense, justice, courage, and self-​control, can be traced back to Plato and Aristotle, and numerous thinkers who followed, including Philo (4 Macc. 18; cf. Philo, Leg. All. 1.71–​72). The author need not and should not be pinned down. Some have plausibly dubbed him an eclectic, though one might as easily see him as the purveyor of philosophic clichés (Barclay 1996, 370–​372). The work, on any reckoning, resonates with Hellenic philosophy. The encounter between Antiochus, the Hellenistic monarch who was determined to bend Jews to Greek ways, and Eleazer, the elderly Jewish sage of priestly stock and deep legal training, turns into a philosophic dialogue (Van Henten 1997, 275–​278). Antiochus indeed challenges Eleazer by asserting that he cannot be a true philosopher if he adheres to the observances of the Jews, and he brands his beliefs as “foolish philosophy.” Eleazer responds in kind, affirming that it is precisely his philosophy that teaches self-​restraint, justice, and courage, the traditional Hellenic virtues, but adds to them the requirement of piety, thus best to worship the sole god in properly magnificent fashion (4 Macc. 5.1–​38). The philosophic character of the piece predominates. The author proceeds to detail the tortures and death inflicted by the tyrannical monarch not only upon the aged Eleazer but upon a steadfast and devout mother and her seven stalwart sons, horror scenes that occupy most of the treatise. But the horror serves a larger purpose. These actions, for the author, represent exemplary instances of the exercise of philosophic principle in the face of autocracy and injustice (deSilva 1998, 65–​74). The text indeed repeats these points, almost to excess, as recurrent themes that bind together the story and remind readers of its meaning. After Eleazer’s noble death, the author declares that it represented the triumph of devout reason over the passions (4 Macc. 6.31–​35). Only a man of wisdom and courage, like Eleazer, can be lord of his emotions (4 Macc. 8.23). The author delivers the same verdict upon the seven brave sons who defied the king and went proudly to their deaths. They showed that reason is sovereign over the passions, and that right reasoning can overcome suffering (4 Macc. 13.1–​5). Reasoning powers, so declares the author, are more kingly than kings and freer than free men (4 Macc. 14.2). Even the superiority of the martyrs’ convictions over royal power and persecution is described in terms of a Greek athletic contest, with competitors contending for prizes and the winners metaphorically crowned as spiritual victors (4 Macc. 17.11–​16). In all this the Hellenic element prevails, readily recognizable, even stereotypical, for any reader conversant with Greek philosophy and rhetoric in the age of the Second Sophistic. Indeed, the treatise refrains from theology, and it alludes only vaguely to any precepts or practices that could be identified as Jewish. The term “Judaism” appears just once in the text, and “Hebrews” also just once, apart from references to Hebrew as a language spoken by characters in the story. The author does state that Antiochus sought to have the people renounce their “Judaism” and take up a “Greek form of life,” and he refers to an epitaph that praises the martyrs for resisting the tyrant who had resolved to destroy the polity of “the Hebrews” (4 Macc. 4.26, 8.7–​8, 17.9–​10). But the treatise shows little interest in pitting Hellenism against Judaism. 4 Maccabees does not depict an ideological war. The focus is on philosophical principles that are thoroughly Greek, rather than on matters of religion.

Jewish Literature   645 Yet the author engaged in no pretense or disguise. His heritage stands out unequivocally. The story dwelled on the Maccabean martyrs, not on abstract theory. We may not be able to identify precise Greek texts on which the author drew for his philosophic ideas. But we do know that he employed the tale of the origins of the Maccabean rebellion as found in 2 Maccabees, although he rewrote it for his own purposes, giving little space to the historical background recounted by 2 Maccabees, while dwelling at length upon and significantly expanding the narrative of the martyrdoms. And, although he avoided depicting a clash of cultures or religions, he injected a feature that left no doubt about the special piety of his people. The “reason” (λογισμὸς) to which the text repeatedly refers is frequently accompanied by the adjective εὐσεβὴς (e.g., 4 Macc. 1.1, 6.31, 7.16, 8.1, 13.1, 16.1, 18.2). Thus, “devout reason,” a coinage of the author, is the driving force of the treatise. And reference to piety, εὐσεβεία, occurs throughout as prime motif and motivation for the actions of the characters (e.g., 5.38, 6.22, 7.3–​4, 12.11, 13.7–​8, 15.1–​3). Although the particulars of the author’s religion are not spelled out, the fundamental principle, that adherence to the Law, that is, Mosaic law, inspires the steadfastness of its believers, dominates the work (e.g., 1.17, 2.5–​6, 3.20, 5.16–​36, 6.18–​21, 7.7, 9.1–​4, 11.27, 15.8–​10). Further, the author appeals regularly to the exemplars of his nation’s past, the figures of the Bible, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, David, Daniel, and others (2.2–​3, 2.17–​19, 3.6–​16, 7.19, 13.9, 13.17, 15.28, 16.3, 16.20–​22, 18.10–​19). Most notably, the text describes Eleazer as “philosopher of the divine life” and as advocate of “divine philosophy” (7.7, 7.9). The wise and courageous man who masters his own passions is the philosopher who lives in accord with the rule of philosophy—​and has trust in God. Control of the passions comes through reverence for God (7.21–​23). The author, in effect, equates true philosophy with the faith of his fathers. 4 Maccabees holds enduring interest as a document of Jewish intellectual engagement with the cultural world of the Greeks. How best to characterize that engagement poses a challenging task. The aim has been described as “wrapping its (Jewish) message in attractive philosophic garb” (Barclay 1996, 379). That formulation may not have it quite right. The philosophic garb is the author’s own. His familiarity with currents of philosophy and rhetoric swirling in the world of the Second Sophistic suggests a writer thoroughly at home in that world, not one who needed to borrow its accouterments for an artificial construct. He conceived his work as a “most philosophical one” (4 Macc. 1.1). Its lessons would be conveyed in the form and style in which he had been trained through the Hellenic paideia of his diaspora community. 4 Maccabees was no mere façade, nor was it a piece of apologetic literature designed to justify the ways of Jews to Gentiles. The mode of expression was deeply ingrained. But so also was the religious conviction that underlay it. The blend of the two may not always have been easy. Stoic logismos was transformed into a “devout logismos.” The exercise of reason became equivalent to obedience to the Law. The four cardinal virtues were appropriated, but Jewish piety held center stage. Laudatory rhetoric celebrated heroic deeds, but the praise went to murdered martyrs rather than military heroes. Ultimate authority—​and triumph—​rested not with tyrants and despots but with the God-​given Law.

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Pseudo-​P hocylides A very different text in a very different genre speaks to a very similar issue: the expression of Jewish precepts in the language, culture, and modalities of Hellenism. The Greek gnomic poet Phocylides dates to the sixth century bce, in the archaic age of Hellenic literature. His reputation in subsequent generations was high and impressive. Yet only a few fragments of his writings survive, an unfortunate, probably quite a significant, loss. What we do have, however, is a poem of 230 lines in dactylic hexameters attributed to Phocylides but composed probably half a millennium or more later. And this set of verses was written by a Jew. No firm date can be fixed. The text contains a number of words unattested prior to the first century bce. And parallels with Stoic writings of the early imperial era, like those of Musonius Rufus and Seneca, offer a clue that might put it in the first century ce (Derron 1986, lxi–​lxvi; van der Horst 1978, 81–​83). Further precision eludes us. But the poem likely falls somewhere in the era inhabited by Philo and the author of 4 Maccabees. And it serves further to illustrate Jewish adaptation to the wider world of the Second Sophistic. The work raises a number of fascinating questions. If one digs below the surface, certain tell-​tale signs identify it unmistakably as a Jewish composition. Yet there are few signs of Judaism that could be detected by the most determined researcher, and even fewer by any contemporary. The author appears to have covered his tracks. To what purpose? Why produce a work in a palpably Greek mode, ascribe it to a well-​known Greek poet, but use it to convey Jewish thinking? Was this an elaborate disguise or a charade? Whom was the author seeking to fool, and why? Did the poem represent an effort to bring Jewish ideas to the attention of a wider Greco-​Roman world? Or did the reverse hold, a demonstration that the ways of that world impinged productively upon Jewish consciousness? The work conventionally carries the designation of The Sentences of Pseudo-​ Phocylides. That label alludes to the form, a series of sententiae or statements, set in verse, delivering moral maxims or aphorisms, a genre known in Greek as gnomai. Gnomic poetry, brief and pithy sayings for the edification or education of the readership, had its origin in archaic Greece, with Hesiod, Theognis—​and Phocylides. The reputation of the last in antiquity made him a logical figure to whom to attach the work that we possess (van der Horst 1978, 60–​63). There is little doubt, however, that the author is a Jew. Parallels in Septuagint pronouncements can readily be found. Although many are generic and not exclusively tied to Jewish precepts, others have a specificity that is hard to dismiss. So, for example, the opening lines of the text, admonishing readers to refrain from adultery, murder, theft, falsehoods, or covetousness of others’ property, while honoring God and parents, plainly paraphrase parts of the Decalogue (Ps.-​Phoc. 3–​8; Exod. 20:12–​14). In similar fashion, the author’s stress on concern for the poor and the laborer, on charity to the needy, and on philanthropy by the fortunate echoes biblical

Jewish Literature   647 pronouncements (Ps.-​Phoc. 10, 19, 22–​29; Deut. 24:14–​15; Isa. 58:7; Prov. 3:27–​28). So also does the noble injunction to hold strangers as equal to citizens (Ps.-​Phoc. 39–​41; Exod. 23:9; Lev. 19:34, 24:22). More tellingly still, the author’s reference to the physical resurrection of the dead, a concept quite foreign to Greco-​Roman thought, has a direct predecessor in the Book of Daniel (Ps.-​Phoc. 103–​104; Dan. 12:22–​23). Scholars have rightly pointed to many other parallels (Thomas 1992, 161–​179; van der Horst 1978, 65; Wilson 2005, 17–​19). The connection can be reinforced. Overlappings exist between Pseudo-​Phocylides’s remarks on sexual behavior, condemnation of homosexuality, marriage practices, and attitudes toward the elderly and the poor, on the one hand, and those expressed by Philo and Josephus in their summaries of Jewish law on the other (Joseph. Ap. 2.190–​ 219; Philo Hyp. 7.1–​9; Wilson 2005, 19–​22). The correspondence can occur even in the smallest detail, as in the case of the prohibition against taking the mother bird from her nest (Ps.-​Phoc. 84–​85; Philo Hyp. 7.9; Jos. Ap. 2.213). Whether or not all three drew on the same source, the Jewish inspiration for the pronouncements is undeniable. The form itself of the work, the staccato-​like delivery of maxims and lessons for behavior, readily recalls the Book of Proverbs, as well as the second-​century bce Jewish writer of ethical and practical counsel Ben Sira. The whole tradition of Jewish Wisdom literature lies in the background. In addition to Proverbs and Ben Sira, Kohelet deserves mention, and the Wisdom of Solomon also contains comparable adages and aphorisms in a text that may be approximately contemporary with Pseudo-​Phocylides. God himself gains repeated mention. He is the one god, wise and powerful, judge of the wicked, scourge of the perjurer, provider of prosperity, the bestower of reason, whose spirit and image are granted to mortals, and who is to be honored first above all (Ps.-​Phoc. 8, 11, 17, 29, 54, 106, 128). All that said, however, the poem hardly wears its Judaism on its sleeve. The name of Israel appears nowhere in the text, and the distinguishing characteristics of Jews that were most familiar to pagans, such as circumcision, dietary laws, observance of the Sabbath, and prohibition of idolatry, go altogether without mention. It causes little surprise that the ascription to Phocylides himself went unquestioned not only in antiquity but until the late sixteenth century. The piece plainly had close affinities with the Greek gnomological tradition. Precedents exist in Hesiod’s Works and Days, in Theognis, Isocrates, Menander, and elsewhere in Greek literature. The authors provided ethical and practical advice, with didactic objectives, in some instances perhaps deliberately designed for pedagogical purposes. Gnomic poetry enjoyed a vogue in the Hellenistic period, employed most notably by the Cynics, embraced also by other philosophers, and used by a range of other authors. Gnomic sayings generated wide enough interest even to prompt collections and anthologies, a veritable industry of gnomologia (Derron 1986, vii–​xxxi; Thomas 1992, 287–​313; Wilson 1994, 18–​33). Philosophic, especially Stoic, teachings can be found among the Sentences of Pseudo-​Phocylides. The praise of moderation, self-​restraint, resistance to pride, anger, or excess of any sort take prominence in the treatise (Ps.-​Phoc. 36, 53, 57, 59–​64, 76, 118, 122).

648    Religion and Religious Literature The Sentences fall within a well-​established Greek tradition of supplying wise counsel for the instruction of its constituencies. Resonance occurs in a text conveniently reflective of the Second Sophistic. Dio Chrysostom’s third oration on monarchy, directed probably to the emperor Trajan, expounds on the qualities and principles desirable in a ruler and offers generous advice on how that ruler should comport himself. The counsel provided by Dio includes embrace of the familiar virtues of courage, self-​restraint, and justice, only taken to a higher level since the king must serve as a model for his subjects. A shepherd to his flock, the monarch takes full responsibility for their welfare and security, exercising sound judgment, scorning flattery and false glorification, preferring duty to self-​indulgence, adhering to law, and following the guidance of the divine (Dio Chrys. Or. 3, passim). In that company, pagan readers would have found the Sentences of Pseudo-​Phocylides a recognizable parallel. The Jewish roots of the text would have been difficult to detect. How then should one understand the aims of the Sentences? Did Pseudo-​Phocylides address himself to a gentile readership, suppressing his Jewishness, presenting his principles as entirely consistent with pagan philosophical and ethical teachings, and thus seeking to secure a welcome place for Jews within the larger Greco-​Roman society? Or was his audience a Jewish one, the intellectual elite who enjoyed a Greek paideia but needed assurance that they could participate in the broader culture because the precepts of the Torah were consonant with Hellenic tenets? Or did he have an intermediate segment in mind, the “god-​fearers,” that category of gentiles who were sympathetic to and shared many practices and beliefs of the Jews, without seeking full conversion? Or did the text express a form of universalizing Judaism, symbolized by the donning of a gentile mask? (Cf. Barclay 1996, 343–​346; Collins 2000, 173–​174; Derron 1986, xxxviii–​ li; Thomas 1992, 231–​235, 352–​361; van der Horst 1978, 70–​76; 1988, 3–​30). None of the suggestions has compelling force. If the author endeavored to win Jewish acceptance by gentile society because of the correspondence of their doctrines or concepts, why present them in strictly Greek guise and attribute them to a celebrated Greek writer? There would be little point in covering up his Jewishness if he wished to exhibit its consonance with Hellenism. An appeal to fellow-​Jews makes more sense if he hoped to reassure them that they could fully embrace Greco-​Roman culture without deviating from their own traditions. Yet the message would seem to be over-​subtle and too indistinct for readers to catch the meaning when Torah teachings take on pagan trappings, Jewish practices are nowhere in sight, and the author of the tract has the persona of an ancient Greek gnomic poet. As for the “god-​fearers,” we have only the haziest sense of their mind-​set, we know little or nothing of their aspirations, and we have no reason to believe that they took any interest in this form of literature. A resort to their membership as either authors or audience is a mere stab in the dark. A different approach might be salutary. Pseudo-​Phocylides need not have been on a mission at all. The composition of a gnomic poem places him as part of a literary tradition. By the age of the Second Sophistic, Jewish intellectuals had long since been participants in a shared culture, without needing to calculate a balance of Hellenism and Judaism or consciously brewing a cultural blend. The Jewish author worked within

Jewish Literature   649 the known genre of the didactic poem, possessing a deep familiarity with both Jewish Wisdom literature and Hellenic gnomic poetry. The mix may well have been ingrained for generations in the circles of the Jewish intelligentsia. It did not require a deliberate scheme to win over gentiles or comfort Jews. The Sentences of Pseudo-​Phocylides embodies the unselfconsciousness of Jewish participation in Greco-​Roman intellectual culture. Why then the application of a pseudonym, and recourse to a renowned writer dating to many centuries earlier? Was it camouflage or deception? One might consider instead a simpler answer: the name was chosen because it exemplified a master of the genre. The real author perhaps indulged in a bit of whimsy.

Joseph and Aseneth Yet another genre serves as illuminating instance of Jewish interaction with Greek literature in the age of the Roman Empire. The “novel” had its heyday in that era, a literary type difficult to define, somewhat easier to illustrate. Labels and categories are inevitably artificial, requiring repeated exceptions, modification, and reformulation. The ancients themselves had no word for “novel,” a disconcerting fact that needs to be borne in mind. But we do like to think that we know one when we see one. The novel, in general, takes form as a piece of prose fiction that narrates an entertaining and/​or edifying tale that can also communicate values, ideas, and guidance. In antiquity, the standard examples normally cited fall somewhere in the period of the first through the fourth centuries ce, though none can be dated with any precision. The extant Greek novels of that period are ascribed to Chariton, Xenophon of Ephesus, Achilles Tatius, Longus, and Heliodorus (see ­chapters 25–​27 in this volume). Two celebrated Latin novels, by Petronius and Apuleius, much influenced by Greek models, serve also as prime exemplars of the category (for Apuleius, see ­chapter 22). It held favor over an extensive stretch of time and not only possessed appeal in the realm of “popular culture,” often transmitted orally, but also possessed subtleties and complexities, while assuming knowledge of earlier literature and intellectual traditions that could appeal to more sophisticated audiences. Ancients may not have had a name for the genre. But certain common features among these works (even if those features are occasionally parodied) do suggest a pattern that readers came to expect and found welcome: the separation of lovers, their adventures or misadventures, whether kidnapping, shipwrecks, or the amorous designs of third parties, and eventual reuniting with a happy ending. The repeated motifs, themes, and narrative techniques give a unity to the genre, without inhibiting the great variety and diversity in which they were expressed (Anderson 1984; Goldhill 2008, 185–​200; Hägg 1983; Reardon 1991; Whitmarsh 2008, 1–​14). One Jewish “romance” falls recognizably within the umbrella of these prose narratives. It evidently partook of their popularity in the age of the Roman Empire.

650    Religion and Religious Literature Joseph and Aseneth shares a number of features with the other novels. Among them, alas, is deep uncertainty as to its provenance and date. The story takes place in ancient Egypt, unsurprisingly so, since Joseph is a principal figure, but that need not be a clue to its place of composition. And the work has been situated anywhere from the Ptolemaic period to Late Antiquity, although most scholars put it in the first or second century ce (Chesnutt 1995, 80–​85; Collins 2000, 104–​110; Humphrey 2000, 28–​37; Kraemer 1998, 225–​244). In any case, it belongs in the company of the extant Greek and Latin novels, whether as imitation or model. They thrived in a common intellectual atmosphere. The narrative of Joseph and Aseneth can receive only the briefest summary here. It has but a small basis in Scripture. Genesis reports that the patriarch Joseph took as wife a certain Aseneth, daughter of an Egyptian priest by whom she bore two children (Gen. 41:45, 41:50–​52, 46:20). The novel employs that short notice as launching pad for a full-​ scale fantasy. It divides into two quite different parts. The first takes the form of an erotic tale in which Joseph meets and rejects the beautiful teenager Aseneth until she abandons her idolatrous ways through a mystical revelation, thus paving the way for a marriage between them sanctioned by the Pharaoh himself (Jos. As. 1–​21). The second consists of an adventure story in which the embittered son of Pharaoh endeavors to murder Joseph and carry off Aseneth, sparking a split among Joseph’s brothers and a fierce battle in which Aseneth emerges victorious with the assistance of some of Joseph’s brothers while magnanimously sparing the others. The narrative concludes with Pharaoh’s appointment of Joseph to rule the land of Egypt (22–​29). Affinities exist with certain Greek or Roman novels. A plot set in the distant past, the virginal status of the lovers, their separation and then uniting, and the attempted kidnapping of the heroine by a rival lover all strike familiar chords. So also does Aseneth’s dramatic conversion to the faith of Joseph and his fathers through a mysterious vision, which bears comparison to mystical tales and sacred epiphanies, as in Apuleius’s Metamorphoses (Jos. As. 14–​18; Kee 1983, 394–​413). The author was surely familiar with the motifs and devices that occur in pagan romances (Chesnutt 1995, 85–​93; Humphrey 2000, 38–​46; Pervo 1991, 145–​160; Standhartinger 1995, 20–​26; West 1974, 70–​81; Wills 1995, 16–​28, 170–​184). But parallels do not provide the full picture. Joseph and Aseneth has its own characteristics and peculiarities that set it apart from the mainstream. The erotic features central to most of the novels play a subordinate role in this one. Separation of the lovers was a voluntary rather than an involuntary one, a dramatic tension between the priggish Joseph and the haughty Aseneth (Jos. As. 2–​9). And the fantasy, imaginative and inventive though it be, did employ a known setting, that of the biblical narrative of the patriarch in Egypt. The Jewish author, moreover, had other novelistic texts as forerunners, Jewish texts quite independent of the Greco-​Roman tradition, the tales of Judith, Esther, and Tobit, which also combined marriage narratives with adventure stories (Pervo 1976, 171–​181). Both Hebraic and Hellenic strands intertwined in this remarkable text. It would be misleading to isolate them—​or indeed to imagine that the author consciously combined them. The work reflects a mixed milieu.

Jewish Literature   651 As with the other authors and writings discussed here, a subtle tension swirls below the surface in Joseph and Aseneth. Joseph’s insistence upon the purity of the faith and the pollution of idolatry, Aseneth’s abject debasement and violent break with her past to achieve absolution, and the favor of God supporting the faithful against their idolatrous opponents all seem to suggest a stark dichotomy between the forces of good and evil, and a sharp distancing of Jew from gentile (Barclay 1996, 204–​216; Collins 2000, 231–​232). The relationship, however, is more nuanced and complex. The fact that the wedding of Joseph and Aseneth takes place under the auspices of Pharaoh, who had not himself become a convert, holds central symbolic significance. The enemies of the faithful were forgiven, harmony and reconciliation followed, and the gentile ruler of Egypt placed his kingdom in the power of the immigrant from Israel. Indeed, it is noteworthy that no mention of “Jew” or “gentile” occurs anywhere in the text. Aseneth’s transformation amounted essentially to abandonment of idolatry. This is no simple tale of cultural clash. Distinctions between the people hold at one level in the novel, but they are overcome at another. Joseph and Aseneth exemplifies the duality stressed throughout this chapter. The Jewish author perpetuated a literary tradition that stemmed from his forefathers, while at the same time he bought into (or perhaps helped to shape) a Hellenic literary tradition that reached its apogee in the empire of the Romans.

Further Reading This subject has not been treated as such in previous publications. General surveys of Jewish literature in Greek in the Hellenistic and Roman periods do place some of the works discussed here in a broader context. One might mention in particular the valuable studies of Barclay (1996), Collins (2000, and Schürer (1987). The individual authors or works addressed in this chapter have received fuller attention on their own terms. For the interested reader, one can recommend the classic work of Wolfson (1948) on Philo, together with the quite instructive collection of essays by Kamesar (2009). The edition of 4 Maccabees by Hadas (1953) remains a most serviceable introduction to that text. Van der Horst’s edition of Pseudo-​Phocylides (1978) is the essential starting point for the study of that author. And, amidst the numerous treatments of Joseph and Aseneth, the brief book by Humphrey (2000) supplies a sober and intelligent guide to the main issues and controversies in that fascinating text.

Bibliography Alexandre, M. 1967. De Congressu Eruditionis Gratia. Paris. Anderson, G. 1984. Ancient Fiction: The Novel in the Graeco-​Roman World. London. Anderson, H. 1985. “4 Maccabees.’ In The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, edited by J.  H. Charlesworth, 2:531–​573. Garden City, NY. Barclay, J. 1996. Jews in the Mediterranean Diaspora: From Alexander to Trajan (323 bce–​117 ce). Edinburgh.

652    Religion and Religious Literature Breitenstein, U. 1978. Beobachtungen zu Sprache, Stil und Gedankengut des vierten Makkabäerbuches. 2nd ed. Basel. Chesnutt, R. 1995. From Death to Life: Conversion in Joseph and Aseneth. Sheffield. Collins, J. J. 2000. Between Athens and Jerusalem: Jewish Identity in the Hellenistic Diaspora. 2nd ed. Grand Rapids, MI. Derron, P. 1986. Pseudo-​Phocylide: Sentences. Paris. deSilva, D. 1998. 4 Maccabees. Sheffield. Dillon, J. 1977. The Middle Platonists: 80 b.c. to a.d. 220. Ithaca, NY, and London. Dupont-​Sommer, A. 1939. Le Quatrième Livre des Machabées. Paris. Goldhill, S. 2008. “Genre.” In The Cambridge Companion to the Greek and Roman Novel, edited by T. Whitmarsh, 185–​200. Cambridge. Gruen, E. S. 1998. Heritage and Hellenism: The Reinvention of Jewish Tradition. Berkeley, CA. Gruen, E. S. 2002. Diaspora: Jews amidst Greeks and Romans. Cambridge, MA. Hadas, M. 1953. The Third and Fourth Books of Maccabees. New York. Hägg, T. 1983. The Novel in Antiquity. Berkeley, CA. Humphrey, E. M. 2000. Joseph and Aseneth. Sheffield. Kamesar, A., ed. 2009. The Cambridge Companion to Philo. Cambridge. Kee, H. C. 1983.” The Socio-​Cultural Setting of Joseph and Aseneth.” New Testament Studies 229: 394–​413. Klauck, H.-​J. 1989. “4. Makkabäerbuch.” Jüdische Schriften aus hellenistisch-​römischer Zeit 3: 645–​763. Kraemer, R. S. 1998. When Aseneth Met Joseph. New York. Lebram, J. C. H. 1974. “Die literarische Form des vierten Makkabäerbuches.” Vig. Chr. 28: 81–​96. Mendelson, A. 1982. Secular Education in Philo of Alexandria. Cincinnati, OH. Morris, J. 1987. “The Jewish Philosopher Philo.” In The History of the Jewish People in the Age of Jesus Christ, edited by E. Schürer, revised edition by G. Vermes, F. Millar, and M. Goodman, 3.2:809–​889. Edinburgh. Niehoff, M. R. 2001. Philo on Jewish Identity and Culture. Tübingen. Norden, E. 1898. Die antike Kunstprosa vom VI. Jahrhundert v.  Christus bis in die Zeit der Renaissance. 2 vols. Leipzig. Pearce, S. 2007. The Land and the Body. Tübingen. Pervo, R. 1976. “Joseph and Asenath and the Greek Novel.” SBL Seminar Papers: 171–​181. Pervo, R. 1991. “Aseneth and her Sisters: Women in Jewish Narrative and in the Greek Novels.” In Women Like This: New Perspectives on Jewish Women in the Greco-​Roman World, edited by A. J. Levine, 145–​160. Atlanta, GA. Reardon, B. P. 1991. The Form of Greek Romance. Princeton, NJ. Renehan, R. 1972. “The Greek Philosophic Background of Fourth Maccabees.” Rh. Mus. 115: 223–​238. Royse, J. 2009. “The Works of Philo.” In The Cambridge Companion to Philo, edited by A. Kamesar, 32–​64. Cambridge. Schürer, E., ed. 1987. The History of the Jewish People in the Age of Jesus Christ. Revised edition by G. Vermes, F. Millar, and M. Goodman. Edinburgh. Schwartz, D. 2009. “Philo, His Family, and His Times.” In The Cambridge Companion to Philo, edited by A. Kamesar, 9–​31. Cambridge. Standhartinger, A. 1995. Das Frauenbild im Judentum der hellenistischen Zeit:  Ein Beitrag anhand von “Joseph und Aseneth”. Leiden. Thomas, J. 1992. Der jüdische Phokylides. Göttingen.

Jewish Literature   653 van der Horst, P. W. 1978. The Sentences of Pseudo-​Phocylides. Leiden. Van Henten, J. W. 1997. The Maccabean Martyrs as Saviours of the Jewish People: A Study of 2 and 4 Maccabees. Leiden. West, S. 1974. “Joseph and Asenath: A Neglected Greek Romance.” CQ 24: 70–​81. Whitmarsh, T. 2008. “Introduction.” In The Cambridge Companion to the Greek and Roman Novel, edited by T. Whitmarsh, 1–​14. Cambridge. Wills, L. M. 1995. The Jewish Novel in the Ancient World. Ithaca, NY. Wilson, W. 1994. The Mysteries of Righteousness. Tübingen. Wilson, W. 2005. The Sentences of Pseudo-​Phocylides. Berlin. Wolfson, H. A. 1948. Philo: Foundations of Religious Philosophy in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. 2 vols. Cambridge, MA.

chapter 42

The Creat i on of Christian E l i t e Culture in Roma n Syria and the Nea r E ast William Adler

As it did elsewhere, Christianity in Syria produced its own brand of disaffected culture warriors, most notably the anti-​Greek polemicist and rhetor Tatian (ca. 120–​173). Anyone who assumes, however, that Syrian Christians of the late second and third centuries were tout court self-​marginalizing outsiders would be at a loss to explain the existence of Bar Daysan (154–​222) and his contemporary Julius Africanus (ca. 160–​240), two Christian aristocrats serving in the court of Abgar VIII the Great (died 212). Traditional Christian categories (apologist, theologian, biblical commentator) do scant justice to authors of such wide-​ranging interests. Because they moved with evident ease in non-​ Christian society, “Christian” was not always the first or the most distinctive thing observers and associates saw in them. Bar Daysan, Africanus, and even Tatian, after a fashion, are as much creations of elite Hellenistic culture as they are representatives of the Church. The ensuing discussion explores these exemplars of eastern Christianity in the context of four themes familiar to students of the Second Sophistic: (1) attitudes toward Greek paideia; (2) relics and the creation of civic identities; (3) Hellenistic court culture; and (4) the encounter of Greek-​ speaking eastern elites with Rome.

Syrian Christians and Greek Paideia While Hellenism elsewhere in the Near East produced no explosions comparable to the Maccabean uprising, by the second century of the common era Syrian writers began

656    Religion and Religious Literature to express anxiety either about assimilation and loss of native identity or estrangement from the culture in which they were educated.1 For the rhetor and satirist Lucian of Samosata, the encounter with Greek culture made a fruitful topic for social commentary on the liminal existence of outsiders straddling two worlds. Tatian’s own reaction was more virulent. The author of a searing indictment of the “Greeks,” Tatian represents himself as a seeker after truth, whose intellectual restlessness finally brought him to Rome. It was there that he finally soured on Greek learning altogether (35.1). In his view, the whole concept of “Greekness,” an agglomeration of gleanings from other peoples, is devoid of content: “I am at a loss,” he writes, “as to whom to call a Greek” (1.3). Tatian’s rejection of Greek culture is, at least rhetorically, categorical and decidedly nativist. Born “in the land of the Assyrians” (42), he renounces Greek culture in favor of what he calls the “barbarian philosophy.” And if the Greeks are serious in their search for a universal polity able to integrate the various peoples of the world into a single oikoumenê, they might consider doing the same. Given the irreconcilable differences in prevailing national customs, the cosmopolitan ideals of Hellenism can come to fruition only in a philosophy that is for Tatian the most ancient and most pure (28.1). Tatian’s abandonment of the culture in which he says he was first instructed may not have been entirely high-​minded. Beneath his scorn for the “arrogance of the Romans and the cold cleverness of the Athenians” (35.1), the “mumbling” of Atticizing Greek, and the sophists “who sell their freedom for pay” (1.3) lie the bitterness and disappointments of an aspiring but unsuccessful rhetor in Rome.2 The Oratio is itself drenched in the very system of education that Tatian now claims to disown. Although Tatian might praise the sources of his barbarian philosophy for simplicity and lack of artifice, his own language, style of argumentation, the well-​worn topoi, and the gratuitous displays of erudition (much of it available from handbooks) betray the marks of the trained rhetor.3 We should thus not see in the Oratio an example of Christian participation in the revival of a distinctively “Syrian” paideia.4 But even if “barbarism” is here only a rhetorical construction, Tatian’s framing of the categories is revealing. “Greeks” are not the Greek nation, but rather “you learned people [pepaideumenoi]” (25.3). Similarly, barbarism, at least as it applies to Christianity, is an alternative paideia, more original than its Greek counterpart and defined by its negation of everything distinctive of it.5

Christian Elites and the Creation of Civic Identities in the Roman Near East Among the many advantages that for Tatian gave his barbarian philosophy the edge over the Greeks was its superior antiquity (31.1). By Tatian’s time, this was an old and somewhat hackneyed theme. From the time of their first encounters, representatives of Egypt

The Creation of Christian Elite Culture    657 and the civilizations of the Near East often charged the Greeks, nouveaux arrivés, with borrowing from them everything they knew. The Jews had their own culture heroes, especially the lawgiver Moses, the source from which the most illustrious legislators of the Greeks purportedly derived their own legal code.6 Tatian found in the same argument a way to take down the Greeks a peg or two. He never calls himself a Christian, aligning himself instead with the school of Moses, the “author of all barbarian wisdom” (31.1) and the foundation of all the doctrines of Greek philosophers and sophists—​even if, in adulterating his teachings, they were no longer mindful of their debt. Like Josephus before him, Tatian makes his case empirically, through a rather circuitous chronological excursus meant to demonstrate that Moses pre-​dated Homer, the historians, and all the “ancient heroes, wars, and demons” of the Greeks (40.1). But in the world of the Second Sophistic, an age absorbed with relics and antiquities, visible symbols proved to be a more compelling way to forge links to the distant past.7 And local experts, so expertly caricatured in (Pseudo-​)Lucian’s De Dea Syria, were more than happy to indulge the cultural appetites and preconceptions of Greek and Roman readers. How educated Christians from the Roman Near East contributed to this project of fashioning civic identities in an age in which Hellenism was the dominant idiom of communication is a story yet to be told. In Asia Minor and the Near East, the best attested examples of this exercise in cultural translation are the various cities claiming possession of monuments dating back to the reign of the semimythical Assyrian queen Semiramis.8 It is telling that the tradition about her accomplishments owes its origins to a Greek history, the Persica of Ctesias of Cnidus (fifth century bce). Dissenting opinions notwithstanding, Ctesias’s claim that Assyria was the oldest kingdom of Asia, and Ninus and Semiramis its earliest rulers of record, was soon absorbed into the vulgate tradition of Hellenistic universal historiography.9 The cachet of the term “Assyrian” may thus explain why educated Syrians preferred to be called “Assyrian” instead of the arguably more disparaging term “Syrian.”10 And the willingness of cities of Asia and the Near East to oblige a fiction propounded by a historian characterized by Pierre Briant as a precursor to Western orientalism illustrates the extent to which the construction of civic identity through founding myths presupposed Hellenocentric perceptions of the East.11 Biblical relics, especially those with crossover appeal, had their own contribution to make to this exercise in identity formation. Because the various tales about flood heroes that proliferated in the Near East were easy to assimilate to Greek counterparts, artifacts surviving from Noah’s ark were best suited for this kind of exploitation.12 The various locations competing for possession of its remains are a sure sign of its own international standing. Travelers to Armenia took home souvenirs from the ark for use as amulets.13 In Adiabene, relics were shown, Josephus writes, to “those curious to see them.”14 In Apamaea of Phrygia, a city founded not far from Celaenae, one of the alleged sites of the ark, coins minted in the city from the late second century bore the likeness of Noah and his wife, together with the word “Noah.”15 Probably the most sensational discovery of the early third century was in the northwestern Syrian kingdom of Edessa. This

658    Religion and Religious Literature was the correspondence purportedly exchanged between Jesus and king Abgar V (9–​46 ce), housed in Edessa’s public archive. Jesus’s letter, the only document asserting authorship from Jesus himself, helped put the city and its archive on the map. By the early fifth century, Edessa and her archive had become a mandatory destination for Christian pilgrims.16 Like the self-​identified “Assyrian” who escorts his readers through the temples, ruins, and wonders of Hierapolis in De Dea Syria, native Christian experts were prepared to act as informants and go-​betweens. One of them was the well-​traveled polymath Julius Africanus. In his universal chronicle, Africanus, a Palestinian by birth, referees a controversy about the location of the ark. While aware that Celaenae claimed possession of its remains, he rules in favor of Ararat in Parthia, adjudicating the matter in the expected way, through autopsy.17 At the Dead Sea, on the other hand, he plays the part of the faux-​naïf, viewing, as if for the first time, the amazing things he witnessed there and adding in some local lore about the reasons for the sterility of its water and the barrenness of the surrounding region.18 One other location known by Africanus to possess biblical relics was the western Mesopotamian city state of Edessa. Jacob’s shepherd’s tent, he writes, was preserved there until it was destroyed by a thunderbolt during the reign of the emperor Antoninus.19 If, as seems likely, Africanus, a visitor to Edessa, had firsthand knowledge of its existence, his discovery would be one of the earliest Christian contributions to antiquarian research in Edessa. In guiding his readers through an in situ gallery of monuments and natural wonders in Roman Palestine, Africanus comes much closer to the eastern dragoman than he does to a guide for Christian pilgrims to the Holy Land. This is most evident in his description of the fabulous terebinth tree. Local tradition held that the tree, reputed to be the site where Abraham entertained the three angels on their way to Sodom (Gen 18:1–​10), was as old as the world itself.20 It was also the cult object of an annual festival at Hebron, attended by worshippers of all stripes, Jews, Christians, and “others.”21 Africanus’s own description says nothing about the religious makeup of the pilgrims, however. Indeed, were we to depend solely on his account of rituals performed at the site, we might reasonably conclude that ceremonies enacted at the site were pagan. Even when enveloped by the flames from offerings and hecatombs sacrificed at an altar at the base of the tree by the neighboring peoples, he writes, the tree always emerged unscathed.22 To maintain his standing as a neutral observer, he then reports a popular explanation about its origin, but without committing himself to its veracity. “It is said,” he writes, “that the tree sprouted up from a staff planted at the site by one of the angels.”23 Africanus knew the rules of paradoxography. The supernatural properties of this “wondrous [thaumasian]” tree and its links to the biblical past, not the beliefs of religious tourists visiting the site, were what mattered. Idealized images of a heroic past, memorialized in founding myths, artifacts, local coinage, and iconography, were a vital part of the self-​representation of cities of Asia Minor and the Greek-​speaking Near East in the age of the Second Sophistic. The existence of a civic-​minded Christian like Africanus acting as cultural ambassador for cities and sites with their own fund of marvels from the remote past is hard to square with the

The Creation of Christian Elite Culture    659 standard narrative of early Christians as an embattled religious minority. But the agonistic model of conflict and ultimate triumph is only one part of the story of the early Church. For Christians with the resources and temperament, dealings with the broader culture were not always so fraught. Nowhere is the involvement of Christian elites in civic life more visible than in the Hellenistic city state of Syrian Edessa.

Christian Courtiers in Abgar’s Edessa In his Ecclesiastical History, Eusebius of Caesarea, the first author to publicize the preservation in Edessa of letters exchanged between Abgar V and Jesus, claimed that the Syriac originals were taken from the public archives at a time when “the city was ruled by a king.”24 On the assumption that Abgar the Great, one of the last two kings of pre-​ Roman Edessa, was also a Christian, scholars once supposed that the king had personally underwritten the fictional correspondence between Abgar V and Jesus as part of a broader program to legitimate Christianity as the state religion. But if Abgar was a Christian himself, he concealed that information from his subjects. Coins, monuments, and funerary mosaics from Abgar’s reign suggest no change in the public face of Edessene religion.25 If, then, the Jesus-​Abgar correspondence did appear when Edessa was still a monarchy, the version of the legend known to Eusebius originated in a transitional pre-​Christian phase in Edessa’s history, when the process of integrating Christianity into the official record and civic identity of the kingdom had already begun. Biblical relics and forged royal correspondence were part of the stock in trade. Christian participation in Edessene court culture also played a part in the process of integration. In a revealing eyewitness account of the inner workings of Abgar’s court, Africanus would later dwell at length on the impressive displays of expertise in archery by Edessene elites. One of them was Bar Daysan, a fellow Christian and confidant of the king. Although later generations of Christian writers remembered Bar Daysan mainly as a learned heretic, Africanus says nothing about this in his own account. What impressed him was his skill with the bow. In one performance, Bar Daysan, whom Africanus identifies here only as a “Parthian,” used arrows to recreate a likeness of a Syrian youth on a shield standing next to him. The object of another contest was to have two mismatched arrows—​one tipped and the other one stripped—​strike each other in mid-​air. To onlookers, the collision conjured up the image of an armed soldier capturing a defenseless soldier in combat.26 Africanus identifies only one of the participants in this exercise in asymmetric warfare: Syrmos the “Scythian.” There was also a scientific experiment, designed to measure the distance an arrow would travel on a continuous day-​long trajectory. When Abgar’s son Manu conducted his own test, Africanus also participated, acting as the crown prince’s overseer and guide.27 How might a Greek or Roman reader respond to these displays by Parthian and Scythian archers? Although Greek authors admired their skill with the bow, they tended to devalue it as a barbarian form of combat.28 Lucian punctures these preconceptions

660    Religion and Religious Literature in his own depiction of the fictional “Toxaris,” a Scythian who had arrived in Athens even before Anacharsis. In his On Friendship, Mnesippus, a Greek, expresses surprise when Toxaris flouts the image of the unlettered and bad-​tempered Scythian skilled only in warfare and archery and shows himself to be a good friend, an able orator, and even a talented painter.29 Edessa’s Parthian and Scythian courtiers went a step farther. More than a tool of war, archery was now both a tool of science and a fine art. “As we looked on,” Africanus writes of Bar Daysan’s artistry with the bow, “we marveled that the archery was not a martial pursuit, but rather somewhat enjoyable, and a pleasurable danger.”30 Both Africanus and Bar Daysan were amply equipped for the cosmopolitan court culture of Edessa. Africanus, described by Eusebius as an “erudite man, well known to those grounded in secular paideia,” wore his Greek learning with pride.31 Bar Daysan, a bilingual aristocrat of formidable talents, reveals none of Tatian’s animosity to anything suggestive of Greekness. To the contrary, he found in Greek learning a means of enriching Syriac literature.32 That made him an ideal representative of the cultural aspirations of Abgar’s court. The Christian heresiologist Epiphanius, while no friend of Bar Daysan, understood the nature of the attachment. Bar Daysan, he writes, was “very close with the king, collaborating with him, and partaking of his paideia [tēs autou metaschōn paideias].”33 What bound these two men together was not a common religion, but rather a shared education and ethos.34 The same observation holds true for Africanus. It was once thought that Africanus, supposedly a Roman officer and co-​religionist, was invited to Abgar’s court when he was campaigning in the East with the army of Septimius Severus.35 But Africanus says nothing about any of this, and there is little reason to suppose that religion had much to do with his role there. His duties in the Edessene court were more along the lines of the teacher and scholar for hire: tutoring the crown prince, participating in the leisure activities of the Edessene court, and helping to identify and publicize Edessa’s artifacts.

Edessa’s Christian Aristocrats and Rome Roman colonization after the dissolution of the monarchy was ruinous for Bar Daysan, Edessa’s most renowned Christian courtier. 36 Probably remaining in Edessa up to the very end, he refused, even in the face of threats on his life, to renounce his Christianity.37 Sketchy accounts of his life after that describe a stateless aristocrat, exiled to Armenia but continuing to explore prospects for rehabilitation. Discouraged by a failed Christian mission to the local population, he is said by Moses of Chorene to have withdrawn to the fortress city of Ani. After examining and updating local archives, Bar Daysan wrote a history of the kings of Armenia, which was subsequently translated from Syriac into

The Creation of Christian Elite Culture    661 Greek. While the authenticity of Moses’s testimony has been questioned, his description of the undertaking is what we might expect from a displaced aristocrat, steeped in the high culture of Edessa.38 During this period of exile, Bar Daysan also composed an ethnographic treatise on India. In addition to the expected paradoxography about a towering androgynous statue secreting blood and sweat, the surviving excerpts from the work mainly treat Indian judicial practices and the discipline and social standing of the Brahmins and “Samanaeans,” the latter probably in reference to the Buddhists. For Greek rhetors of the Second Sophistic, the advisory role of the Brahmins was a subject of ongoing interest. Dio of Prusa describes them, along with the Druids and magi, as a privileged class of pepaideumenoi, to whose judgment even kings deferred.39 This “inverted hierarchical relationship between rulers and their sumbouloi” is also what impressed Bar Daysan about the Brahmins.40 Because of their universally recognized standing in Indian society, he writes, they are exempt from taxation and answer to no one. But kings accede to them, consulting them and the Samanaeans for advice and soliciting their intercession with the gods in times of crisis.41 It is not difficult to imagine why Dio, the rhetor and political theorist, and Bar Daysan, the champion of liberty and exiled advisor and friend of Abgar the Great, would have idealized the Brahmins’ sovereign independence and favored role in Indian society.42 What survives from the treatise shows it to be a reasonably objective account, without a trace of Christian-​inspired invective.43 Its informed neutrality probably explains why it found an appreciative readership outside Christian circles, including the Neoplatonist Porphyry. If Bar Daysan ever even identified himself as a Christian in the work, it went unnoticed even from one of the Church’s most learned adversaries. As far as Porphyry was concerned, Bar Daysan was simply a “Babylonian man,” the emblematic Eastern sage.44 He also states that Bar Daysan composed his treatise on India after interviewing an Indian delegation traveling to Rome during the reign of Caracalla’s successor, Antoninus Elagabalus. This was at a time when he was beginning to regain his footing. According to Moses of Chorene, his history of the kings of Armenia, also completed during Elagabalus’s reign, made him famous. Bar Daysan, he writes, was even “bold enough” to write a letter to the emperor.45 The encounter with the Indian delegation traveling to Rome opened up another overture to the West: to offer Rome the expertise of a “Babylonian” about a kingdom to the east of the Parthian kingdom. His former associate Africanus must have recognized in Elagabalus the same opportunity. For at the end of his reign, Africanus was also introducing himself in Rome—​in this case not by interviewing a delegation traveling there, but by presiding over one himself.

Julius Africanus’s Reinvention in Rome Unlike Bar Daysan, Africanus has left us no stories about resistance to Roman imperial agents or about exile in a remote corner of Asia. What we hear instead are the exploits

662    Religion and Religious Literature of an itinerant gentleman scholar, bibliophile, advocate, and self-​promoter. In Egypt, he purchases the Sacred Book of the pharaoh Suphus, “a great treasure.”46 In libraries throughout the Mediterranean, he alerts readers to the existence of manuscripts of Homer’s Odyssey containing an extraordinary textual variant:  the actual incantation that Odysseus used to summon the dead.47 He travels to Egypt to meet with Heraclas, the “very famous” Christian philosopher and future head of the catechetical school of Alexandria.48 Jesus’s own relatives, living in Galilee, also benefited from his sponsorship. Privately maintained genealogies, he writes, attest their “noble ancestry.” And he confers upon them an impressive title, the desposynoi, an obscure word meaning something like “those related to the Master.”49 His culminating achievement in advocacy was an embassy to Rome on behalf of the town of Emmaus in the year 221, the last year of the reign of Antoninus Elagabalus.50 Thanks to his efforts, Emmaus was elevated from a village to a polis.51 During the later years of the Severan dynasty, prominent Christians benefited from a thaw in church-​state relations.52 But while this may have been a precondition for Africanus’s own reinvention in Rome, his overture to Rome had little, if any, connection with the interests of the Church. During the Severan dynasty, a program to urbanize Palestine and repopulate its cities was well under way. Emmaus was in fact one of the last towns in the region to be refounded as a polis.53 Africanus’s petition to the emperor was thus an exercise in advocacy, not for Edessa’s Christian community, but rather for a provincial village seeking the standing and material benefits that other towns in the region had already received. The effort succeeded. By the fourth century, Nikopolis, formerly known as Emmaus, had become, in Eusebius’s words, a “famous city.”54 It even had its own tourist attraction: a healing fountain located on the outskirts of the city, where, according to local tradition, the post-resurrection Jesus and the disciples traveling with him had dipped their feet.55 As with the many other self-​made sophists known to Philostratus, the embassy also launched Africanus’s career in Rome.56 After Elagabalus’s death, he remained in the city, earning the patronage of his successor Alexander Severus. While Africanus’s claim to have “designed [êrchitektonêsa]” the “beautiful library of the Pantheon” was probably an exaggeration, his actions were in any case not those of a representative of the Church, but rather of a private person with specialized skills to offer the emperor.57 The same can be said of his Cesti, a compendium of technical knowledge typical of the works of encyclopedic content that proliferated in the Severan age.58 Dedicated to the emperor, the Cesti has been criticized, with reason, as an extreme example of the rhetorical excesses of the Second Sophistic. It is also a work of unashamed bravado.59 In twenty-​four volumes, Africanus represents himself as the master of everything, including occult science. While letting readers know of his standing as an expert from the East, Africanus’s political loyalties are undivided. Recent Roman military failures against a renascent Persian empire, he writes, have given the nations of inner Asia cause to boast that they have attained “equality with us.”60 At least in the political sense, Africanus was now one of “us Romans.”

The Creation of Christian Elite Culture    663

Africanus and Greek Historiography of the Second Sophistic The final year of Elagabalus’s reign was not only a milestone in Africanus’s public career in Rome. It was also the end point of his Chronographiae, a five-​book chronicle of universal history beginning with Adam. In the early Church, the scope of the undertaking was unprecedented. Although Christian writers had experimented with chronology before that time, interest in the subject was secondary to some other project, either as a weapon in the culture war against the Greeks, or as a prop for end-​time speculation. It is unlikely that any Greek or Roman reader would have recognized in these forays in opposition history anything resembling the sophisticated universal chronicles of Eratosthenes or Castor of Rhodes. To this extent, Africanus’s own chronicle broke new ground. Alongside the Christian era from Adam, Africanus used the Olympiad era, the latter the dating system of choice among Hellenistic historians and chronographers from the time of Eratosthenes. He synchronizes kings’ lists and calendars, examines artifacts, discusses Hebrew etymologies, incorporates lists of Olympic victors, settles controversies through autopsy, and consults variant readings in biblical manuscripts. Traditional Christian motifs with a sharp polemical or ideological edge are either ground down or reshaped. While aware of the limitations of Greek chronological records, Africanus refrains from exploiting the opportunity to denounce the Greeks as a people lacking antiquity. Instead, he reframes the question as one of historical method: How is an integrated history of the world possible when Greeks records before the first Olympiad are so muddled? 61 We can make a similar observation about Africanus’s millennialism. There is little sense in his work of an imminently approaching end-​time. By his calculations, another 279 years remained before world history would run its 6000-​year course. Christian readers looking for an apocalyptic interpretation of current events would find little satisfaction in his discreet handling of politically loaded biblical texts. Not long before the publication of Africanus’s chronicle, Judas, a Christian author known to us only from Eusebius, composed a chronicle in the form of a commentary on Daniel’s apocalypse of seventy weeks (Dan. 9:24–​27). Its purpose was to show that the fierce persecutions besetting the Church during the reign of Septimius Severus portended the imminent coming of Antichrist.62 Africanus’s own hairsplitting treatment of the same verses is tame by comparison. Everything predicted in Daniel’s vision, he writes, has already been fulfilled in Christ’s ministry, death and resurrection—​events unlike anything the world had ever seen, either before or after.63 That backward-​looking indifference to Africanus’s own time might seem strange for a work organized around the principles of Christian millennialism. But it is very much in line with the archaizing trends in Greek historiography in the age of the Second Sophistic. As Ewan Bowie has pointed out, universal historians of the time tended, for political reasons, to avoid contemporary history altogether.64 Africanus conforms to

664    Religion and Religious Literature type. Although the genre of the universal chronicle required him to bring the narrative down to his day, he found his own way to soft-​pedal contemporary history. According to Photius, his chronicle treated the period from the resurrection of Christ to his own day almost as a postscript.65 His treatment of Daniel’s apocalyptic vision suggests the reason why. At one point in the discussion, Africanus contemplates the possibility that some part of the apocalypse had yet to be fulfilled. But he then banishes the thought: the words of the prophecy, he writes, can in no way refer to contemporary events, because in the almost 200 years that had elapsed from Christ’s resurrection to his own day, “nothing extraordinary has been recorded in between.”66 With a wave of his hand, Africanus had thus effectively detached his own day from the divine plan of history. Apocalypticism, one of the most extreme manifestations of Christian estrangement from the world, has now been realigned with the archaizing conventions of Greek historiography of the Second Sophistic. No Roman reader would have found Africanus’s denatured version of it at all threatening. Removing what Bowie calls the “defective” present from the plan of history was one way in which Africanus could deal or, better, not deal with the reality of Roman rule in the East. The other way was to embrace it, in this case by honoring Rome with a royal Eastern pedigree extending back to the times of Ninus and Semiramis. In Africanus’s euhemeristic construction of the founding of Rome, the earliest god-​ kings of Italy were not indigenous rulers, but rather members of a celebrated Assyrian dynasty, descendants of Shem who colonized and civilized Italy and the West.67 This is bold revisionist history, with a decidedly Eastern twist. Rome now boasts a respectable ancient “Semitic” ancestry, traceable to the earliest recorded kings of Assyria. It is thus probably more than by chance that the publication of Africanus’s chronicle coincided with his embassy on behalf of Emmaus. Roman colonization of the East was not domination by a foreign Western power, but rather a return to its ancestral homeland.

Edessa’s Christian Elites in Later Tradition At least initially, Christians and non-​Christians understood that there was more to Bar Daysan and Africanus than their religion. Over time, however, Christian tradition tended to collapse their identities into the more recognizable categories of “Christian and pagan,” “orthodox and heterodox.” In Eusebius’s view, Bar Daysan’s expertise in debate and his refutation of astral determinism almost compensated for his failure to fully rid himself of the “filth” of the Valentinian heresy.68 Later writers were less forgiving. Were we to depend only on Ephrem, the main thing we would know about Bar Daysan was that he was a well-​dressed and high-​born Christian heretic.69 Probably because Africanus gravitated to technical and antiquarian disciplines and had no disciples, he

The Creation of Christian Elite Culture    665 managed to escape the charge of heresy. But later generations were disturbed that a pillar of the early Church could have written a work like the Cesti. Unsettled by its embrace of “Hellenic error,” a scholiast to Eusebius’s Ecclesiastical History concluded that the work must have been written by a pagan writer of the same name and time.70 We need not resort to such desperate measures to rescue Africanus for the Church. His resourcefulness and versatility, multiple identities, and skill at reinvention are very much in keeping with the spirit of the age.

Further Reading For Syria, Hellenism, and the Roman Near East, readers should consult Millar 1987 and 1993, Butcher 2003, esp. 223–​398, Sartre 2007, esp. 274–​363, and Andrade 2013, esp. 245–​ 339.For Edessa, Segal 1970 and Ross 2001 are good starting points. There has been a recent revival of interest in Tatian’s critique of Greek paideia in the context of cultural trends of the Second Sophistic, including comparisons with Lucian; see esp. Nasrallah 2005, Nasrallah 2010, 56–​70, and Andrade 2013, 261–​287. Drijvers’s monograph 1966 on Bar Daysan contains a good summary of the ancient witnesses (including non-​Christian) to his life and work; see esp. 166–​212. See further Teixidor 1992, Denzey 2008, Ramelli 2009. On Bar Daysan’s ethnography of India, see Müller 1980, Sedlar 1980, Reed 2009, and Biffi 2011. For Africanus and the Second Sophistic, see Adler 2009, Roberto 2011, 29–​65.

Bibliography Primary Julius Africanus. Chronographiae. Edited by M. Wallraff and U. Roberto. Translated by W. Adler. Berlin, 2008. Julius Africanus. Cesti. Edited by M. Wallraff, C. Scardino, L. Mecella, and C. Guignard. Translated by W. Adler. Berlin, 2012. Egeria Itinerarium. Edited and translated by G. Rowekamp: Reisebericht. Freiburg, 1995. Ephrem. Hymns against Heresies. Edited and translated by E. Beck: Des heiligen Ephraem des Syrer Hymnen contra Haereses. Louvain, 1957. Epiphanius. Panarion. Edited by K. Holl. Leipzig, 1915–​2006. Eusebius. Onomasticon. Edited by E. Klostermann. Leipzig, 1904. Eusebius. Supplementa ad quaestiones ad Stephanum. PG 22.957–​976. Moses Khorenats’i. History of the Armenians. Translated by R. W. Thomson. Cambridge, MA, 1978. Tatian. Oratio ad Graecos. Edited and translated by Molly Whittaker. Oxford, 1982.

Secondary Adler, W. 2009. “The Cesti and Sophistic Culture in the Severan Age.” In Die Kestoi des Julius Africanus und ihre Überlieferung, edited by M. Wallraff and L. Mecella, 1–​15. Texte und Untersuchungen zur Geschichte der altchristlichen Literatur 165. Berlin. Anderson, G. 1986. Philostratus: Biography and Belles Lettres in the Third Century a.d. London.

666    Religion and Religious Literature Andrade, N. J. 2013. Syrian Identity in the Greco-​Roman World. Cambridge. Biffi, N. 2011. “Ciò che Bardesane venne a sapere sull’India.” Classica et Christiana 6: 305–​335. Bowersock, G. W. 1969. Greek Sophists in the Roman Empire. Oxford. Bowie, E. L. 1974. “The Greeks and their Past in the Second Sophistic.” In Studies in Ancient Society, edited by M. I. Finley, 166–​209. London and Boston. Revised reprint from P&P 46 (1970): 3–​41. Briant, P. 2006. From Cyrus to Alexander: A History of the Persian Empire. Winona Lake, IN. Brock, S. 1992. “Eusebius and Syriac Christianity.” In Eusebius, Christianity and Judaism, edited by H. W. Attridge and G. Hata, 212–​234. Detroit, MI. Butcher, K. 2003. Roman Syria and the Near East. Los Angeles. Caseau, B. 2004. “The Fate of Rural Temples in Late Antiquity.” In Recent Research on the Late Antique Countryside, edited by W. Bowden, L. Lavan, and C. Machado, 105–​144. Leiden. Denzey, N. 2008. “Bardaisan of Edessa.” In A Companion to Second-​Century Christian “Heretics”, edited by A. Marjanen and P. Luomanen, 159–​183. Leiden. Dihle, A. 1964. “The Conception of India in Hellenistic and Roman Literature.” PCPS 190, NS 10: 15–​23. Reprinted in Antike und Orient, edited by V. Pöschl and H. Petersmann, 89–​97. Heidelberg, 1984. Drews, R. 1965. “Assyria in Classical Universal Histories.” Historia 14: 129–​142. Drijvers, H. J. W. 1966. Bardaisan of Edessa. Assen. Drijvers, H. J. W. 1982. “A Tomb for the Life of a King: A Recently Discovered Edessene Mosaic with a Portrait of King Abgar the Great.” Le Muséon 95: 167–​189. Drijvers, H. J. W. 1994. “Apocryphal Literature in the Cultural Milieu of Osrhoëne.” In History and Religion in Late Antique Syria, edited by H. J. W. Drijvers, 231–​247. Aldershot. Flinterman, J.-​J. 1995. Power, “Paideia” and Pythagoreanism: Greek Identity, Conceptions of the Relationship between Philosophers and Monarchs and Political Ideas in Philostratus’ “Life of Apollonius”. Amsterdam. Flinterman, J.-​J. 2004. “Sophists and Emperors: A Reconnaissance of Sophistic Attitudes.” In Paideia: The World of the Second Sophistic, edited by B. E. Borg, 359–​376. Berlin. Fotjik, J. E. 2009. “Tatian the Barbarian: Language, Education and Identity in the Oratio ad Graecos.” In Continuity and Discontinuity in Early Christian Apologetics, edited by J. Ulrich and A.-​C. Jacobsen, 23–​34. Frankfurt am Main. Gelzer, H. 1967. Sextus Julius Africanus und die byzantinische Chronographie. 2 vols. New York. First published in 1898. Hammerstaedt, J. 2009. “Julius Africanus und seine Tätigkeiten im 18. Kestos (P. Oxy. 412 col. II).” In Die Kestoi des Julius Africanus und ihre Überlieferung, edited by M. Wallraff and L. Mecella, 53–​69. Berlin. Jones, A. H. M. 1971. Cities of the Eastern Roman Provinces. 2nd ed. Oxford. Jones, C. P. 2004. “Multiple Identities in the Age of the Second Sophistic.” In Paideia: The World of the Second Sophistic, edited by B. E. Borg, 13–​21. Berlin. Kofsky, A. 1998. “Mamre: A Case of a Regional Cult?” In Sharing the Sacred: Religious Contacts and Conflicts in the Holy Land, edited by A. Kofsy and G. G. Stroumsa, 19–​30. Jerusalem. Lampe, P. 2003. From Paul to Valentinus. Minneapolis, MN. Lendon, J. E. 2006. Soldiers and Ghosts:  A  History of Battle in Classical Antiquity. New Haven, CT. Millar, F. 1987. “The Problem of Hellenistic Syria.” In Hellenism and the East: The Interaction of Greek and Non-​Greek Civilizations from Syria to Central Asia after Alexander, edited by A. Kuhrt and S. Sherwin-​White, 110–​133. Berkeley, CA.

The Creation of Christian Elite Culture    667 Millar, F. 1993. The Roman Near East: 31 bc–​ad 337. Cambridge, MA. Müller, K. E. 1980. Geschichte der antiken Ethnographie und ethnologischen Theoriebildung. Wiesbaden. Nasrallah, L.S. 2005. “Tatian, Lucian, and the Second Sophistic.” Harvard Theological Review 98: 283–​314. Nasrallah, L. S. 2010. Christian Responses to Roman Art and Architecture: The Second-​Century Church amid the Spaces of Empire. Cambridge. Porter, J. I. 2001. “Ideals and Ruins:  Pausanias, Longinus, and the Second Sophistic.” In Pausanias: Travel and Memory in Roman Greece, edited by S. E. Alcock, J. F. Cherry, and J. Elsner, 63–​92. Oxford. Ramelli, I. 2000. “La Chiesa di Roma in età severiana: Cultura classica, cultura cristiana, cultura orientale.” Rivista di Storia della Chiesa in Italia 54: 13–​29. Ramelli, I. 2009. Bardaisan of Edessa: A Reassessment of the Evidence and a New Interpretation. Piscataway, NJ. Reed, A. Y. 2009. “Beyond the Land of Nod: Syriac Images of Asia and the Historiography of ‘The West.’” History of Religions 49: 48–​87. Roberto, U. 2011. Le “Chronographiae” di Sesto Giulio Africano. Soveria Mannelli. Ross, S. K. 2001. Roman Edessa: Politics and Culture on the Eastern Fringes of the Roman Empire, 114–​242 ce. London. Santos, N. 1981. “La dinastia de los Severos y los cristianos.” Euphrosyne 11: 149–​171. Sartre, M. 2007, The Middle East under Rome. Cambridge. Sedlar, J. W. 1980. India and the Greek World: A Study in the Transmission of Culture. Totowa, NJ. Segal, J. B. 1970. Edessa: The Blessed City. Oxford. Teixidor, J. 1992. Bardesane d’Edesse: La première philosophie syriaque. Paris. Trapp, M. 2007. “Philosophy, Scholarship, and the World of Learning in the Severan Period.” In Severan Culture, edited by S. Swain, S. Harrison, and J. Elsner, 470–​488. Cambridge. Trebilco, P. 2006. Jewish Communities in Asia Minor. Cambridge. Vieillefond, J.-​R. 1970. Les “Cestes” de Julius Africanus: Étude sur l’ensemble des fragments, avec édition, traduction et commentaire. Paris. Whittaker, M., ed. and trans. 1982. Tatian: Oratio ad Graecos and Fragments. Oxford. Yildirim, B. 2004. “Identities and Empire:  Local Mythology and the Self-​Representation of Aphrodisias.” In Paideia: The World of the Second Sophistic, edited by B. E. Borg, 23–​52. Berlin.

chapter 43

Christian Ap o c rypha Scott Fitzgerald Johnson

43.1 Introduction The multifarious corpus of Christian apocryphal literature authored, copied, read, and translated from around 100 to 500 ce constitutes in many ways what could be termed the “dark matter” of the Second Sophistic and Late Antiquity.1 This literature is “dark” first and foremost because it is only rarely included in surveys of the period. Classicists often know little to nothing of this rich corpus. Indeed, The Cambridge History of Classical Literature has no entry on Christian literature at all, even though the Second Sophistic is reasonably well represented.2 Likewise, collected volumes on the novel or romance in the ancient world—​such as Oxford Readings in the Greek Novel—​may sometimes have a cursory discussion of Christian apocryphal literature, but when they do the focus is almost solely on the relatively limited subset of texts called the Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles, rather than the corpus of Christian fiction as a whole.3 However, for a world like that of the Second Sophistic, and the postclassical period generally, which we have grown accustomed to seeing as complex, vibrant, multicultural, and intensely engaged with the concepts of minority identity and the past, it is remarkable that Christian apocryphal texts remain so underrepresented. Indeed, those descriptors apply to nearly every apocryphal text produced in this period. Another reason we might consider apocryphal literature to be dark matter is its sheer bulk. There are so many texts in this category that one chapter can hardly do them justice:  independent works easily number in the hundreds and many involve complex reception histories and manuscript traditions. In terms of languages, Greek and Latin are only the basic starting points; often the best version of a given text, even if originally written in Greek or Latin, survives today in Syriac, Coptic, Armenian, Georgian, Arabic, or Ethiopic. The requisite skills to do philological justice to Christian apocrypha are rarely, if ever, to be found in a single scholar. This prospect is daunting: even the authoritative, multiauthor Cambridge History of Early Christian Literature includes only one small section on apocryphal writings.4 In the present chapter, therefore, I cannot

670    Religion and Religious Literature presume to address the entire corpus, much less its textual transmission. Instead, with an eye to the common absence of such texts in surveys of late classical or “postclassical” literature, I will attempt to show that this “dark matter” resonates strongly with the fundamental principles of the Second Sophistic, especially as the period has been defined in the past decade or two.5 Moreover, I will argue that, if Christian apocrypha were to be regularly included alongside the standard authors and texts of the emergent Second Sophistic and late antique canons, then historians of ancient literature would have a much more diverse toolkit to employ in constructing their broader interpretations of the period.

43.2 Definitions To begin with the word itself, “apocrypha” comes from the Greek adjective ἀπόκρυφος (“hidden,” “secret”), and some of these works certainly pitched themselves as revealing esoteric information (e.g., Apocalypse of Paul, fourth century ce). While it is sometimes stated that “apocrypha” is a modern coinage, this is not entirely true. Today’s familiar use of the term “apocrypha” in an extended, denigrating sense, can clearly be found in the ancient world as, for instance, when the fourth-​century Apostolic Constitutions uses it to describe Old Testament writings ascribed to Israel’s patriarchs and prophets (what we call the Pseudepigrapha) as “apocryphal” works which were “enemies of the truth.”6 Nevertheless, early Christian categorizations of apocryphal writings were often more granular than this, and many writers allowed for a nuanced position between canonical and heretical. Let us consider Origen’s terminology from the middle of the third century. He does not use the term “apocrypha” per se, but he has a developed system for classifying early Christian writings. For Origen, “canonical” (ὁμολογούμενα, lit. “agreed upon”) meant authoritative and divinely inspired;7 “heretical” (ψευδῆ, lit. “forged”) meant deceptive and evil; and “disputed” (ἀμφιβαλλόμενα, lit. “doubted”) implied a recognition that some books were already subjects of debate, though he offers no precise standards of authenticity. This third category clearly included books that Tertullian (ca. 200), for instance, had already called “useful writings” (scripta instrumenta), indicating not just that they were either “in” or “out” but that they could stand somewhere in the middle, functional but not authoritative.8 Origen included in his “disputed” category some works that we would not call “apocrypha” today, such as the letter of 2 Peter and the Shepherd of Hermas (one of the so-​called “Apostolic Fathers”). At the beginning of the fourth century, Origen’s intellectual grandson Eusebius of Caesarea added to this category of “disputed books” (βίβλια ἀντιλεγόμενα) by placing in it not only 2 Peter, but also 2 and 3 John, as well as James.9 This was an expansion but also a restriction, since “disputed” now applied only to debated books within what we would recognize as a New Testament canon. In the category of “spurious” or “counterfeit” (νόθος, lit. “bastardized”)—​also described as “the inventions of heretical men”

Christian Apocrypha   671 (αἱρετικῶν ἀνδρῶν ἀναπλάσματα) which “ought to be shunned completely” (παντῇ παραιτητέον)—​Eusebius, differing from Origen, placed books from the “Apostolic Fathers” like Shepherd of Hermas, the Didache, and Barnabas, as well as books we would call “apocrypha,” such as the Acts of Paul and the Apocalypse of Peter. It is therefore important to stress at the beginning that definitions of Christian apocrypha fluctuated in antiquity, and to a great degree our modern categories are constructions, despite their dependence upon ancient language. The famous Gelasian Decree, a sixth-​century list of banned books from Rome, labels a whole host of works as spuria and, as such, reads more like a library catalog of what literate Christians actually had on their shelves, rather than a list of “lost scriptures.”10 Regardless of whether or not they were considered “scripture” by those who were defining the terms of “apocrypha,” in no respect can we say they were lost. Indeed, the opposite was true. Authoritarian statements by individual writers or councils in Late Antiquity against such texts should be interpreted as confirmation of the broad popularity of apocryphal literature—​as is suggested by the transmission history itself—​rather than as evidence of its demise as the result of suppression. Like Origen before him, Eusebius is an important witness to terminology because his language is very specific. This specificity is too often overlooked. “Disputed” for Eusebius explicitly entails a community of “church scholars” (ἐκκλησιαστικοί) arguing over the validity of these works. It is clear that such scholars were in communication throughout the early Christian period, at least from the time of Irenaeus on (ca. 180), and probably earlier than that in some quarters. In the mid-​third century Julius Africanus applied the term spurious to the book of Susannah (attached to the Greek version of Daniel in the Septuagint), saying in a letter to Origen that wordplay in the Greek shows it could not have been part of the original Hebrew Bible.11 Thus, Christian scholars were not arbitrarily accepting and rejecting works as if at random or out of reactionary spite. Instead, they took note of, for instance, the original language and provenance, and these and other qualities were argued over and mattered in disputes over attribution and date. Moreover, it goes without saying that perceived doctrinal positions—​e.g., on the person of Jesus or the ethics of abstinence—​were also standards of judgment by which various parties judged apocryphal texts according to their own interests. For Eusebius, further aspects were equally important to the categorization of Christian writing, such as a recognizable style (ὁ τῆς φράσεως χαρακτήρ) which should not differ from that of the Apostles. If Origen’s text-​critical scholarship was indicative of a legacy of Hellenistic Alexandria, as has been recently emphasized,12 then Eusebius’s attention to style could be said to conform more to a Second Sophistic training in rhetoric and the principles of mimesis. The two trends in Greek literature were closely related, of course, especially in the combination of Greek and Roman educational practice in imperial Rome among “elite communities,” but we should not assume that early Christian definitions of apocrypha were careless or somehow isolated from the larger literary world of Greece under Rome.13

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43.3 Collections It is worth noting that modern collections of translated apocrypha represent merely a sampling of the surviving texts.14 In order to gain some purchase on this large and diverse literature, anthologies will often categorize works under the two broad labels of “New Testament Apocrypha” and “Old Testament Pseudepigrapha.” While these labels offer a convenient method for separating texts dealing with New Testament figures versus texts dealing with Old Testament figures, they tend to obscure rather than elucidate the history of this varied literature.15 Thus, many Old Testament Pseudepigrapha were actually written by Christians, or, if originally written by Hellenistic Jews, were later adopted, changed, and copied by Christians. This is, after all, why they exist today, because they were copied by medieval Christian scribes.16 Modern critical work on apocrypha is usually traced back no further than to Johann Albert Fabricius’s eighteenth-​century selection (1713), but collections of these texts were already in circulation in Eusebius’s day. By the end of the fourth century, the Manichaeans had become infamous among Christians for adopting an authoritative canon of a specific set of Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles.17 New apocryphal texts continued to be written throughout Late Antiquity and into the Middle Ages and Byzantium, with identifiable patterns of genre and theme that extended back to the earliest Christian literature. It is thus significant, and often overlooked, that the collection, canonization, and anathematization of these texts, as literary and cultural processes, were occurring at the same time that new apocryphal works were being authored. Texts such as the Acts of Xanthippe and Polyxena (third to fourth centuries), the Acts of Philip (fourth to fifth centuries), the Epistle of Pseudo-​Titus (fifth century), the Acts of Barnabas (sixth century), the Gospel of Pseudo-​Matthew (eighth to ninth centuries), and numerous others testify to the continuous stream of apocryphal literature extending from the second century through Late Antiquity. In other words, it is difficult to read the processes of the collection and organization of apocrypha in antiquity—​even if only to condemn certain texts en masse—​as having anything other than an absolutely positive effect on the continued vitality of the literary forms and genres represented by the apocryphal corpus. Both the neutral and the denigrating senses of “apocrypha” presuppose the existence of canonical or agreed-​upon narratives.18 Further, as has often been noted by historians of late antique literature, the (even larger and more multifarious) corpus of Christian hagiographical literature was partly inspired by the imaginative worlds first evidenced in Christian apocrypha.19 Far from causing the ossification some scholars have tried to see, this attention paid to Christian apocrypha by late antique writers seems to have had the effect of propping up these texts. The attempts at proscription, therefore, came in response to the proliferation of this literature.20 Since 1983, the “Corpus Christianorum Series Apocryphorum” has published critical editions of apocryphal texts, of many different genres and themes. The long

Christian Apocrypha   673 gestation period of some of the editions, however, speaks to the difficulties of dealing with the manuscript traditions and reception histories. Not only are numerous early Christian languages usually involved in any edition of such texts, but the textual stemmata are often nearly impossible to establish with confidence.21 This is partly because of the translations but perhaps even more because of a literary principle repeatedly invoked by textual scholars of Christian apocrypha called “multiformity.” Multiformity is the existence of multiple surviving copies of a text that are different enough from one another to be classified as independent works, though related at the level of a shared “myth” or “story” core (e.g., Acts of Peter, second century).22 Apocryphal stories were used as “sites” for writing and rewriting, and multiple texts survive with the same titles even as their contents differ significantly. Thus, because of the prevalence of multiformity in Christian apocrypha, the corpus challenges the concept of known, individual texts and authors.23 Even for an age like the Second Sophistic in which the concept of authorship became a means of subversion and satire, Christian apocrypha vastly expand the realm of what is possible in this period with regard to authorial misdirection, diglossia, and anonymity.

43.4  Apocryphal Gospels Probably the most diverse yet compelling group of early Christian apocrypha include the word “Gospel” in their titles. In some cases these titles are merely modern conventions, but for the most part the “Gospel” title is found either in the ancient and medieval manuscripts (e.g., the Gospel of Thomas, second century) or in the testimonia of contemporary authors who read or knew about these texts (e.g., Gospel of the Ebionites, second century). In a handful of cases the word “Gospel” is found in the texts themselves in a self-​referential manner (e.g., the Gospel of Truth, early third century). In their literary form, apocryphal Gospels differ from one another, and from the canonical Gospels, much more than, say, the Gospel of John differs from the synoptic Gospels (Mark, Matthew, and Luke).24 The variety of literary expression among apocryphal Gospels is impressive, and several different and competing cosmological worldviews are assumed or argued for in the apocryphal Gospels, especially among the works today grouped together under the umbrella of “Gnosticism.”25 Many of the latter survive only in Coptic, having been unearthed in Nag Hammadi, Egypt, in 1945, and published in critical editions and translations from 1977 onward. It is usually assumed that these Coptic codices, dating from the fourth century, represent translations of earlier works originally written in Greek, though in certain cases (e.g., the Gospel of Mary, third century) the Coptic text represents a very different piece of literature from the surviving Greek fragments.26 In other cases (e.g., the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, ca. 200) the Syriac language offers a better literary Sitz im Leben for the original work.27 Clearly there were more stories in circulation about Jesus than have survived in the canonical Gospels themselves. The closing of the Gospel of John tells us as much: “But

674    Religion and Religious Literature there are also many other things which Jesus did; were every one of them to be written, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written” (John 21:25, RSV). Likewise, the opening of the Gospel of Luke refers to “many” other attempts at telling the history of Jesus’s life (Luke 1:1–​4). The immediate question, however, is how do the apocryphal Gospels that survive relate to these statements; do they include some of the very stories that John and Luke allude to? Most scholars would say probably not, or if so, only in an attenuated fashion. One clue to this is that the apocryphal Gospels almost all presuppose the existence of the canonical Gospels, though not necessarily all four.28 While “Gospel” itself as a genre designation is not a transparent term, the apocryphal Gospels (and the copyists of their manuscripts) seem to understand the term primarily as a written text, whereas the canonical Gospels seem to use the term to mean a spoken message of “good news” (εὐαγγέλιον = κήρυγμα), and in that they mimic the usage of the term in the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible made in the Hellenistic period, the Septuagint.29 By contrast, the textual meaning of “Gospel” appearing in the apocrypha parallels the way in which theologians like Irenaeus of Lyons used the term from the mid-​second century onward. If we were to include all texts known by manuscript titles, early testimonia from Irenaeus and others, or by their own use of the term “gospel” self-​referentially, then there are about forty individual surviving texts that fall under that category.30 These texts, however, differ widely from one another in content. Unlike the canonical Gospels, several of them include elaborate descriptions of their underlying cosmologies. The Gospel of Truth (early third century), attributed to the Gnostic writer Valentinus, who lived in Rome in the 140s but who taught all over the Mediterranean, is one of the most sophisticated of these texts. Likewise, the recently discovered Gospel of Judas (second to third centuries) emerged from a Gnostic sect called the Sethians. Both of these texts describe the creation of the material world as happening outside the intentions of the perfectly good creator-​god, and Jesus, for both of them, serves as a messenger and savior to lead those who recognize him (and only them) to the spiritual God from within the dark world of the material. The Sethians traced their lineage back to a secret line of knowledge extending down to them from Adam and Eve’s “other” son, Seth. A controversial Coptic text from Nag Hammadi, which also survives in Greek fragments, is the Gospel of Thomas (second century), famous for its seemingly close relationship to the synoptic Gospels via a notional sharing of a lost “sayings source,” Q (from German Quelle, “source”).31 The Gospel of Thomas has proven difficult to situate with any confidence. It comprises 114 sayings of Jesus. Of these only three overlap indubitably with the synoptic Gospels (logia 20, 64, and 65), and given the quotation of 1 Corinthians 2:9 in logion 17, these echoes from the Gospels are not terribly remarkable. More adventurously, it has been posited that the Gospel of Thomas was related to the Gospel of John in some manner—​namely, one might be responding directly to the other—​but this view has not won wide favor.32 The Gospel of Thomas does not reveal any type of Sethian or Valentinian cosmology. Instead, it is completely sapiential and aphoristic in character.

Christian Apocrypha   675 However, when the varied corpus of apocryphal Gospels is considered, the Gospel of Thomas becomes more interesting. At its outset it presents the Apostle Thomas as the bearer of secret wisdom revealed by Jesus only to him. This very image of Thomas as having a special relationship to Jesus is found in other “Thomasine” texts. For example, in the Acts of Thomas (ca. 200)—​in which Jesus commissions Thomas to evangelize India—​the Apostle is said to be the “twin” of Jesus, playing on his Greek name in the canonical Gospels, Judas Thomas Didymus (“Judas Thomas the Twin”), Didymus being a literal translation of the Aramaic Tōmā.33 Further, like the Gospel of Thomas, the so-​called Book of Thomas the Contender (second to fourth centuries) is written in a similar sapiential mode and does not include an explicit cosmology. Finally, an even more striking text attributed to Thomas is the Infancy Gospel of Thomas (third century), which takes up the very brief sketch of Jesus’s youth offered in Luke and turns it into a bizarre but captivating narrative of Jesus’s childhood angst among his playmates.34 This enfant terrible kills his schoolteacher for striking him and also two children for taunting him and he mocks his father Joseph’s discipline, all while going around and healing people who are sick or injured. The Infancy Gospel of Thomas thus seemingly represents a mixture of the early Christian images of Jesus as a compassionate sojourner among the outcasts of society and a supernatural master of all creation. As such, it signals above all the variety of expression possible in Christian literature of the period. A number of now-​lost apocryphal texts with the title Gospel are known because they were cited by early Christian writers.35 This group includes the so-​called “Jewish-​ Christian Gospels,” which generated a lot of attention in the ancient world even though no complete texts have survived.36 Most significant among these was the Gospel of the Nazareans, a text which seems to have been written quite early (early second century) and, more importantly, was originally in Aramaic and not Greek. Eusebius and Jerome knew the copy in the library at Caesarea, and Jerome claims to have translated it into Greek (“from the Syro-​Chaldaic tongue but in Hebrew characters”; i.e., perhaps Palestinian Aramaic, but not Syriac). Jerome also says it was sometimes called the “Gospel of the Apostles,” that it was “in use among the Nazarenes and Ebionites,” and that “most people” thought this was the authentic text of Matthew. He does not appear to disagree with their assessment. However, complicating the issue is the fact that a number of different Gospel texts were attributed to Jewish-​Christian groups like the Ebionites or even to the Jews themselves: these include the Gospel of the Ebionites and the Gospel According to the Hebrews. Both of these are sometimes conflated with the Gospel of the Nazareans and it can be difficult to know exactly which text or group the ancient author citing them had in mind. Eusebius’s and Jerome’s ascription of the Gospel of the Nazareans to the Apostle Matthew (and, in Jerome, to the whole company of the Apostles more generally) is interesting and demonstrates that similarities of reception and authentication were being used by widely divergent Christian communities. The habit of ascribing texts to the “patriarchs” of Christianity differed very little from the same practice that ascribed much of what we call the Pseudepigrapha to the patriarchs of the Old Testament.37

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43.5  Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles The category of Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles appears somewhat more consistent than that of Gospels but is perhaps still not consistent enough to constitute its own genre.38 As with the Gospel texts, we are dealing here with a category that partly comes from the self-​referentiality of works in the ancient world, partly from the descriptions of readers in that same world, and partly as a convenience for modern readers. The standard five Acts—​comparable in this formulation to the set of “ideal” Greek novels—​ are (in rough chronological order of authorship) the Acts of John (ca. 150–​160), the Acts of Paul (ca. 170–​180), the Acts of Peter (ca. 190–​200), the Acts of Andrew (ca. 210), and the Acts of Thomas (ca. 220–​240).39 To call these standard, however, is to project an image of inviolate texts confident in their own independence. On the contrary, it is with this category that the literary principle of multiformity in surviving exempla can be demonstrated most clearly. Furthermore, only the Acts of Thomas survives complete; the others are all fragmentary. Many other Apocryphal Acts survive that do not belong to this group: these include the fourth-​to fifth-​century Acts of John by Prochorus (a very popular text in Byzantium) and the contemporary Acts of Philip (a theologically rich defense of “encratic” or rigorously abstinent monasticism).40 As with the Apocryphal Gospels, the Apocryphal Acts continued to be written throughout Late Antiquity and consequently offer one of the most vibrant literary histories from the late ancient world. The legends recounted in the Apocryphal Acts concern primarily the careers and deaths of the named Apostles from the canonical Gospels. In this way, as noted above, they presuppose the existence and authority of those canonical Gospels, even while expanding and sometimes attempting to correct them. Many of the stories they contain have become part of the collective memory of the early church: Peter’s crucifixion upside-​down following his quo vadis? confrontation with the risen Jesus on the way out of Rome; Paul’s description as “small in size, bald-​headed, bandy-​legged, with large eyebrows, hook-​nosed, full of grace”; Paul’s baptism of a lion; Thecla on the pyre and her self-​baptism in an arena in Antioch; and John’s rebuke of the bedbugs.41 While these texts are sometimes dismissed as popular or “subliterary” writings, it is precisely their popularity as a historical phenomenon which ensured the longevity of such episodes. The Apocryphal Acts also attest a high view of Christology in the century following Jesus’s ministry: Jesus is clearly equated with God in all of these texts, even while often appearing polymorphically as his alter egos, the Apostles (the alter Christus motif).42 The martyrdoms of the Apostles are consistently the centerpieces of the Apocryphal Acts and inspired and interacted with the martyrial literature from the late second century and later.43 In their focus on the careers and deaths of individual Apostles they thus resemble much more the singular visions of the canonical Gospels than they do the multifronted canonical book of Acts.44 Nevertheless, historiographical pretentions are shared between all of these texts and are shared too with the ancient novel or romance.

Christian Apocrypha   677 Apocryphal Acts are sometimes said to have enjoyed a readership among early Christian women.45 This is applied above all to the Acts of Paul and Thecla, which occupies the middle third of the Acts of Paul, though it circulated on its own.46 Arguments about readership tend to be circular when we have only the work itself to go on.47 With Thecla, however, there might be enough material evidence in addition to the text to offer a cautious affirmation. Certainly the heroes of the Acts of Paul and Thecla are all women:  Thecla, Tryphaena, Falconilla, and a female Lion in the Antiochene arena. Moreover, Thecla’s defiant self-​baptism—​in the face of male oppression, including her abandonment by Paul—​was striking enough to ancient readers to elicit reproach by Tertullian as early as 200 ce, very shortly after the Acts of Paul were written.48 Despite such censures, Thecla became the preeminent female saint in the early Church. She was titled “protomartyr” from an early point, being thus paired with the protomartyr Stephen from Acts 7 and received a number of narrative treatments, including multiple extensions to the Acts of Paul and Thecla and a major rewriting and extension of her legend in the fifth-​century Life and Miracles of Thecla.49 Importantly, this all occurred without the slightest evidence that Thecla was ever a historical person. Her story, however, obviously made a powerful impact throughout the Mediterranean and was translated into every Christian language from an early point. It is not an exaggeration to say that, at least according to the surviving apocryphal literature, Thecla was more popular as a female patron than the Virgin Mary until the late fifth century. This is precisely when we see the Thecla literature wane and the literature related to the doctrine of the Dormition of the Virgin begin to take hold of the Christian imagination.50 The explosion of Marian apocrypha was certainly aided by the fascinating and early text now called the Protoevangelion of James (second century). This “foregospel” is most often grouped with Apocryphal Gospel texts in modern collections. However, in the earliest period this text was called the Birth of Mary, signaling perhaps that Marian devotion was not as limited as has been suggested.51 As already noted, scholars often associate the Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles with the form of the Greek novel.52 This comparison can only be made indirectly with the five “ideal” novels, since their form is much more consistent and they have survived more or less complete (Xenophon of Ephesus perhaps being an epitome).53 More similar in composition and reception history are the other novelistic works from the Second Sophistic, such as Apollonius King of Tyre, the Alexander Romance, and the Jewish novels (from earlier) like Joseph and Aseneth, Judith, Tobit, or the Greek version of Esther.54 Nevertheless, the number of shared motifs between the Apocryphal Acts and almost all of the novels from the Second Sophistic is striking: shipwrecks, brigands, slavery, brothels, travel, suicide, entombment, the reunion of long lost couples, and so on.55 In certain cases it seems that the Apocryphal Acts may even have had a direct effect on the novels of Achilles Tatius and Heliodorus.56 This is not the venue to discuss the complex relationship between Apocryphal Acts and the ancient novel, but it is worth reemphasizing that the Acts are not the only Christian texts that demonstrate an awareness of the novelistic style of writing. For instance, dreams and apparitions, common in the ancient novel, appear frequently in apocryphal

678    Religion and Religious Literature Gospels and apocalypses. Moreover, one does not have to posit the Apocryphal Acts as a necessary intermediate stage in Christian literary evolution between the New Testament and late antique hagiography. This is the case because, first, papyrological discoveries show that, for the most part, the readership of the novel continued to be strong through the Second Sophistic and Late Antiquity.57 Second, narrative fiction shows its influence in many different forms of Christian texts, not only apocryphal, including ecclesiastical history and poetry. For example, one could cite the important “Hymn of the Pearl,” a gnostic verse narrative about a Mesopotamian prince’s journey to Egypt, his imprisonment, self-​discovery, and ultimate triumph over evil.58 This text was embedded into the prose Acts of Thomas around 200 ce, though it clearly circulated independently prior to that and has parallels in the early second-​ century Odes of Solomon.59 Some of the more enigmatic Christian apocryphal texts usually associated with the genre of the novel are found in the corpus of Pseudo-​Clementine literature, namely, the Homilies (surviving in Greek) and the Recognitions (surviving in Latin).60 These two texts concern the life of Clement I of Rome and name him as their author, though they focus on the career and teachings of Peter in the East, especially his disputations with Simon Magus (disputations which also serve as the centerpiece of the Acts of Peter).61 The two branches of the literary tradition are related to one another through a common original narrative (the Grundschrift) but diverge substantially from one another in surviving versions.62 The Homilies is more spare in its revision of the narrative, whereas the Recognitions has been sanitized during its translation into Latin by Rufinus.63 The popularity of the Recognitions in the West is represented by a huge number of medieval manuscripts. Syriac epitomes of both branches survive together as part of the earliest dated manuscript in the Western world, copied, according to its colophon, in Edessa in 411 ce.64

43.6  Pseudepigrapha, Apocalyptic, and Epistolography In discussions about the pseudepigraphical nature of early Christian apocrypha it is often not sufficiently recognized that writing under the name of a founding father of the religion was extremely common among Hellenistic Jews and that Christian authors adopted the custom in the process of claiming Hellenistic Jewish literature as their own. Recently it has been fashionable to label pseudepigrapha—​and many Christian apocryphal texts are just a subset of pseudepigrapha—​as “forgeries.” In German, another option is the word Schwindelliteratur, which conveys a sense of “literary hoax” and not just writing under someone else’s name.65 Do pseudepigrapha belong to either category, “forgery” or Schwindelliteratur, or should we be speaking more of a mode of writing employed for various goals? Many scholars would argue that neither category

Christian Apocrypha   679 is satisfactory. The pseudepigraphic mode is both less conniving and more interesting than “forgery,” and yet it does not operate at the same level of the complex literary performance of Schwindelliteratur. To take an important example, many of the most important pseudepigraphic writings consist of apocalyptic visions given to the patriarchs of the Old Testament: these texts fall under the category of “testaments” and comprise a recognizable genre in Jewish and Christian literature. Christian authors saw in these texts an appealing mode of conveying authority within creative discourse. Many varied texts, including the well-​known Testament of Abraham (first to second centuries ce), the Enochic corpus (third century bce to first century ce), 3 Maccabees (first century bce) fall into this category.66 In almost every case, it is nearly impossible to separate out the original Jewish and Christian elements of these works: as they stand they are, for all intents and purposes, Christian writings preserved, copied, and translated by medieval scribes in every corner of Christendom. On the background of this corpus, however, the pseudepigraphical nature of early Christian apocrypha becomes much clearer.67 Works such as the Apocalypse of Peter (early second century), the Coptic Apocalypse of Paul from Nag Hammadi (originally second century), the Apocalypse of Paul or Visio Pauli (fourth century), and the Apocalypse of Thomas (fourth century) apply the mode of pseudepigrapha to different types of first-​person apocalyptic, thus imitating very closely the “testament” or “vision” literature just mentioned. An important, related genre is the apocryphal epistle, which like the apocryphal apocalypse is written in the first person. Often such texts suggest an emergent literary form in the Second Sophistic which came into its own in Late Antiquity and Byzantium, that of the “question-​and-​answer” (ἐρωταποκρίσεις).68 The text that is most clearly a crossover between these various genres is the popular Questions of Bartholomew (second to sixth centuries), which discusses in question-​answer format (among many other topics) the descent of Christ into Hell (the descensus Christi). Similarly, the Epistula Apostolorum (late second century) and the Book of Thomas the Contender (Nag Hammadi, second to fourth centuries) are written as dialogue texts and also take the form of letters. Given the vibrancy of the genre of the literary epistle in the Second Sophistic, it is perhaps no surprise that Christians seized upon the form and expanded it into a didactic tool. More unexpected, perhaps, is the fact that this type of container-​literature could hold a remarkable number of different episodes and themes. Like the Questions of Bartholomew, the Epistula Apostolorum shares close affinities with the Ascension of Isaiah in its discussion of the Christ’s descent into Hell: there is clearly a fundamental apocalyptic or visionary aesthetic shared between these three texts. However, departing from the apocalyptic aesthetic, the discussion of the descensus Christi in the Epistula Apostolorum occurs as merely one of a number of revelatory answers that the risen Jesus offers to the Apostles in the course of a long session of questions they put to him. Thus, in the Epistula Apostolorum the apocalyptic, epistolary, didactic, and pseudepigraphical modes are all combined together in what seems to be a very early Christian apocryphal text.

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43.7 Conclusion The narratives of the canonical Gospels and Acts from the New Testament offered enough of a window onto the infancy of Jesus, the careers and martyrdoms of the Apostles, and the End Times that Christian writers and readers were stimulated to create imaginative worlds that extended far beyond what was written in the New Testament. The dramatis personae of the canonical texts sparked a firestorm of literary activity. Moreover, expectations of the imminent return of Jesus coincided with the sufferings of Christians and Jews in various communities throughout the Mediterranean and triggered a spate of apocalyptic visions which drew directly on Jewish literary styles from the Second Temple period. In almost every case there are parallels in genre between corpora called New Testament Apocrypha and Old Testament Pseudepigrapha. Both groups include novelistic narrative, apocalyptic, aphoristic, and sapiential literature, epistolography, historiography, hymnography, and prophecy. The role of storytelling in early Christianity is key to the definition of apocrypha. Christian storytelling is never merely entertainment.69 There is always a measure of the informative, the didactic, or the moralizing in every piece of apocrypha. However, inasmuch as the combination of entertainment and didacticism was a hallmark of many types of Second Sophistic literature, Christian apocryphal stories confirm the prevailing style of the period. Recently, the genres of biography and panegyric have been highlighted as shared literary vehicles between classical and early Christian writing, particularly in the fact that classical biographical literature was shot through with didactic, moralizing, and mimetic imperatives.70 This was true of historical biography like Xenophon’s Kyropaideia as much as it was of the Neoplatonic biographies by Porphyry and Proclus.71 Philosophical biography was a common framework for both classical or pagan and Christian authors, taking expression, for example, in funeral orations and encomia on friendship.72 These modes of writing were so endemic to the high and late Roman Empire that at some point it becomes meaningless to differentiate between “classical” and “Christian” texts. Moreover, a shared goal of much Greek Christian literature from this period seems to have been the subversion of imperial hierarchy and social norms.73 In this goal the Christians were certainly reinforcing, rather than challenging, established habits in Second Sophistic literary ideology. However, despite all these similarities, it is worth acknowledging that the deluge of Christian apocrypha written during the Second Sophistic is more of an exception to prove the rule than another brick in the familiar edifice. The corpus of apocrypha “proves the rule” of the Second Sophistic in its “dark matter” qualities I spoke of in the introduction. These are, first, that apocrypha is an unknown category for most Classicists, falling as it does well outside the canon. Second, its sheer bulk is staggering, yet all the more exciting in its Mediterranean-​wide scope, in its subaltern status and engagement with imperial control, in its use of Greek as a means of competition and subversion, and, perhaps especially, in its willingness to allow neighboring languages

Christian Apocrypha   681 and cultures to form a part of its narratives. However, the “exception” part of Christian apocrypha is a big one: the corpus is, after all, Christian in terms of its religious content. While being written, disseminated, translated, and culturally absorbed all within a Roman context, Christian apocrypha represent imaginative worlds that make sense only to the Christian mind. Indeed, as I  have tried to show, Christian apocryphal texts were in no small part responsible for the creation and formation of that same Christian mind: they underpin the Christian conception of the natural and supernatural—​in terms of what an author or reader was able to imagine could actually happen in the visible world—​as well as the early Christian conception of what it meant to be an identifiable minority within a larger political system. Most of all, perhaps, Christian apocryphal narratives satisfied the early Christian love of storytelling and in that—​as a question of taste or aesthetics—​they presaged an entire literary history of hagiographical writing in every medieval Christian language.

Further Reading In English, the most commonly used anthologies for New Testament Apocrypha are Elliott 2009 (replacing James [1924] 1953) and Hennecke and Schneemelcher 1991–​1992 (largely covering the same texts). For the Old Testament Pseudepigrapha the main anthologies are Charlesworth 1983 (replacing Charles 1913); Bauckham, Davila, and Panayotov 2013 (an extension of Charlesworth 1983); and Sparks 1984. A better gauge of the size and diversity of the apocryphal corpus is the Clavis Apocryphorum Novi Testamenti (Geerard 1992), which lists all the works known up to the time of its publication, and includes papyrus, manuscript, and publication information where available. The most authoritative and complete collection of the apocryphal Gospels is now the German translation of Markschies and Schröter 2012, which represents the first part of a complete revision and expansion of Hennecke and Schneemelcher 1991–​1992. A more limited selection of apocryphal Gospels in English, with facing-​page original text (for Latin, Greek, and Coptic only), is Ehrman and Pleše 2011. Other important collections include Erbetta 1966–​1981 (Italian); Bovon, Geoltrain, and Kaestli 1997–​2005 (French); and Santos Otero 2001 (Spanish; Gospels only). Several important articles by François Bovon have been reprinted together in Bovon 1995 and 2011. Numerous collected volumes devoted to individual apocryphal texts have been published by Peeters under the editorship of Jan Bremmer. Fundamental studies of the conceptual issues surrounding apocrypha and pseudepigrapha include Davila 2005, Junod 1992, Koester 1990, Kraft 2007 and 2009, and Reed 2008 and 2009. New critical editions continue to appear in the Corpus Christianorum Series Apocryphorum (Brepols).

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682    Religion and Religious Literature Baldwin, M. C. 2005. Whose Acts of Peter? Text and Historical Context of the Actus Vercellenses. Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament 196. Tübingen. Bauckham, R., J. R. Davila, and A. Panayotov, eds. 2013. Old Testament Pseudepigrapha: More Noncanonical Scriptures. Vol. 1. Grand Rapids, MI. Becker, A. H., and A. Y. Reed, eds. 2007. The Ways that Never Parted: Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages. Minneapolis, MN. Bovon, F. 1981. Les Actes apocryphes des apôtres: Christianisme et monde païen. Publications de la Faculté de théologie de l’Université de Genève 4. Genève. Bovon, F. 1988. “The Synoptic Gospels and the Noncanonical Acts of the Apostles.” Harv. Theol. Rev. 81: 19–​36. Bovon, F. 1995. New Testament Traditions and Apocryphal Narratives. Princeton Theological Monograph Series 36. Eugene, OR. Bovon, F. 1999. “Editing the Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles.” In The Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles:  Harvard Divinity School Studies, edited by F. Bovon, A.  G. Brock, and C. R. Matthews, 2–​35. Cambridge, MA. Bovon, F. 2003a. “Canonical and Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles.” Journal of Early Christian Studies 11: 165–​194. Bovon, F. 2003b. “The Dossier on Stephen, the First Martyr.” Harv. Theol. Rev. 96: 279–​315. Bovon, F. 2011. New Testament and Christian Apocrypha. Edited by Glenn E. Snyder. Grand Rapids, MI. Bovon, F. 2012. “Beyond the Canonical and the Apocryphal Books, the Presence of a Third Category: The Books Useful for the Soul.” Harv. Theol. Rev. 105: 125–​137. Bovon, F., B. Bouvier, and F. Amsler, eds. 1999. Acta Philippi. 2 vols. Corpus Christianorum Series Apocryphorum 11–​12. Turnhout. Bovon, F., A. G. Brock, and C. R. Matthews, eds. 1999. The Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles: Harvard Divinity School Studies. Cambridge, MA. Bovon, F., P. Geoltrain, and J.-​D. Kaestli, eds. 1997–​2005. Écrits apocryphes chrétiens. 2 vols. Bibliothèque de la Pléiade 442. Paris. Bovon, F. and C. R. Matthews. 2012. The Acts of Philip: A New Translation. Waco, TX. Bowersock, G. W. 1994. Fiction as History: Nero to Julian. Sather Classical Lectures 58. Berkeley. Bowie, E. L. 2003. “The Ancient Readers of the Greek Novels.” In The Novel in the Ancient World, edited by G. L. Schmeling, 87–​106. Rev. ed. Boston. Brakke, D. 2010. The Gnostics: Myth, Ritual, and Diversity in Early Christianity. Cambridge, MA. Bremmer, J. N., ed. 1996. The Apocryphal Acts of Paul and Thecla. Kampen. Bremmer, J. N., ed. 1998. The Apocryphal Acts of Peter: Magic, Miracles, and Gnosticism. Studies on the Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles 3. Leuven. Bremmer, J. N., ed. 2001. The Apocryphal Acts of Thomas. Studies on Early Christian Apocrypha 6. Leuven. Bremmer, J. N., ed. 2010. The Pseudo-​Clementines. Studies on Early Christian Apocrypha 10. Leuven. Bremmer, J. N., and F. Bovon, eds. 2000. The Apocryphal Acts of Andrew. Studies on the Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles 5. Leuven. Bremmer, J. N., and M. Formisano, eds. 2012. Perpetua’s Passions: Multidisciplinary Approaches to the Passio Perpetuae et Felicitatis. Oxford. Cameron, A. 1991. Christianity and the Rhetoric of Empire: The Development of Christian Discourse. Sather Classical Lectures 55. Berkeley, CA.

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684    Religion and Religious Literature Frankenberg, W., ed. 1937. Die Syrischen Clementinen mit griechischem Paralleltext:  Eine Vorarbeit zu dem literargeschichtlichen Problem der Sammlung. Texte und Untersuchungen zur Geschichte der altchristlichen Literatur 48.3. Leipzig. Frey, J., and J. Schröter, eds. 2010. Jesus in apokryphen Evangelienüberlieferungen: Beiträge zu ausserkanonischen Jesusüberlieferungen aus verschiedenen Sprach-​und Kulturtraditionen. Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament 254. Tübingen. Geerard, M. 1992. Clavis Apocryphorum Novi Testamenti. Corpus Christianorum. Turnhout. Grafton, A., and M. H. Williams. 2006. Christianity and the Transformation of the Book: Origen, Eusebius, and the Library of Caesarea. Cambridge, MA. Hägg, T. 1983. The Novel in Antiquity. Berkeley, CA. Hägg, T. 2012. The Art of Biography in Antiquity. Cambridge. Hägg, T., and P. Rousseau, eds. 2000. Greek Biography and Panegyric in Late Antiquity. Transformation of the Classical Heritage 31. Berkeley, CA. Harper, Kyle. 2013. From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity. Cambridge. Hennecke, E., and W. Schneemelcher, eds. 1991–​1992. New Testament Apocrypha. Translated by R. M. Wilson. Rev. ed. 2 vols. Louisville, KY. Herren, M. W., ed. 2011. The Cosmography of Aethicus Ister:  Edition, Translation, and Commentary. Publications of the Journal of Medieval Latin 8. Turnhout. James, M. R., ed. 1953 [1926]. The Apocryphal New Testament, Being the Apocryphal Gospels, Acts, Epistles, and Apocalypses, with Other Narratives and Fragments. Oxford. Johnson, S. F., ed. 2006a. Greek Literature in Late Antiquity:  Dynamism, Didacticism, Classicism. Aldershot. Johnson, S. F. 2006b. “Late Antique Narrative Fiction:  Apocryphal Acta and the Greek Novel in the Fifth-​Century Life and Miracles of Thekla.” In Greek Literature in Late Antiquity: Dynamism, Didacticism, Classicism, edited by S. F. Johnson, 190–​207. Aldershot. Johnson, S. F. 2006c. The Life and Miracles of Thekla: A Literary Study. Hellenic Studies 13. Washington, DC, and Cambridge, MA. Johnson, S. F. 2007. “Apocrypha and the Literary Past in Late Antiquity.” In From Rome to Constantinople: Studies in Honour of Averil Cameron, edited by H. Amirav and B. ter Haar Romeny, 47–​66. Leuven. Johnson, S. F. 2008. “Reviving the Memory of the Apostles: Apocryphal Tradition and Travel Literature in Late Antiquity.” In Revival and Resurgence in Christian History, edited by K. Cooper and J. Gregory, 1–​26. Studies in Church History 44. Woodbridge. Johnson, S. F. 2010. “Apostolic Geography:  The Origins and Continuity of a Hagiographic Habit.” DOP 64: 5–​25. Johnson, S. F. 2016. Literary Territories: Cartographical Thinking in Late Antiquity. Oxford and New York. Johnson, W. A. 2000. “Toward a Sociology of Reading in Classical Antiquity.” AJPhil. 121: 593–​627. Johnson, W. A. 2010. Readers and Reading Culture in the High Roman Empire: A Study of Elite Communities. Oxford and New York. Junod, E. 1992. “‘Apocryphes du Nouveau Testament’: Une appelation erronée et une collection artificielle. Discussion de la nouvelle définition proposée par W. Schneemelcher.” Apocrypha 3: 17–​46. Junod, E., and J.-​D. Kaestli, eds. 1983. Acta Iohannis. 2 vols. Corpus Christianorum Series Apocryphorum 1–​2. Turnhout.

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686    Religion and Religious Literature Quispel, G. 1975. Tatian and the Gospel of Thomas:  Studies in the History of the Western Diatessaron. Leiden. Reed, A. Y. 2007. “‘Jewish Christianity’ after the ‘Parting of the Ways’:  Approaches to Historiography and Self-​Definition in the Pseudo-​Clementines.” In The Ways that Never Parted: Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages., edited by A. H. Becker and A. Y. Reed, 189–​231. Minneapolis, MN. Reed, A. Y. 2008. “Pseudepigraphy, Authorship, and the Reception of ‘the Bible’ in Late Antiquity.” In The Reception and Interpretation of the Bible in Late Antiquity, edited by L. DiTommaso and L. Turcescu, 467–​490. Leiden. Reed, A. Y. 2009. “The Modern Invention of ‘Old Testament Pseudepigrapha.’” JTS 60: 403–​436. Rehm, B., and G. Strecker, eds. 1992. Die Pseudoklementinen, Homilien. 3rd ed. Die griechischen christlichen Schriftsteller der ersten Jahrhunderte. Berlin. Rehm, B., and G. Strecker, eds. 1994. Die Pseudoklementinen, in Rufins Übersetzung. 2nd ed. Die griechischen christlichen Schriftsteller der ersten Jahrhunderte. Berlin. Santos Otero, A. de. 2001. Los Evangelios Apócrifos: Estudios introductorios y versión de los textos originales. Estudios y ensayos BAC, Teologia 22. Madrid. Schmeling, G., ed. 2003. The Novel in the Ancient World. Rev. ed. Leiden. Schröter, J., ed. 2013. The Apocryphal Gospels within the Context of Early Christian Theology. Bibliotheca Ephemeridum Theologicarum Lovaniensium 260. Leuven. Shoemaker, S. J. 2002. Ancient Traditions of the Virgin Mary’s Dormition and Assumption. Oxford Early Christian Studies. Oxford. Shoemaker, S. J. 2008. “Early Christian Apocryphal Literature.” In The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Studies, edited by S. A. Harvey and D. G. Hunter, 521–​548. Oxford. Shoemaker, S. J., trans. 2012. Maximus the Confessor: The Life of the Virgin. New Haven, CT. Shoemaker, Stephen J. 2016. Mary in Early Christian Faith and Devotion. New Haven. Söder, R. 1932. Die apokryphen apostelgeschichten und die romanhafte literatur der antike. Stuttgart. Sparks, H. F. D., ed. 1984. The Apocryphal Old Testament. Oxford. Speyer, W. 1971. Die literarische Fälschung im heidnischen und christlichen Altertum:  Ein Versuch ihrer Deutung. Handbuch der Altertumswissenschaft 1.2. Munich. Stoneman, R. 2008. Alexander the Great: A Life in Legend. New Haven, CT. Swain, S., ed. 1999. Oxford Readings in the Greek Novel. Oxford. Talbot, A.-​M., and S. F. Johnson. 2012. Miracle Tales from Byzantium. Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library 12. Cambridge, MA. Thomas, C. M. 2003. The Acts of Peter, Gospel Literature, and the Ancient Novel: Rewriting the Past. Oxford. Tuckett, C. M. 2005. “Forty Other Gospels.” In The Written Gospel, edited by M. Bockmeuhl and D. A. Hagner, 238–​253. Cambridge. Volgers, A., and C. Zamagni, eds. 2004. Erotapokriseis: Early Christian Question-​and-​Answer Literature in Context. Leuven. Whitby, M., ed. 1998. The Propaganda of Power:  The Role of Panegyric in Late Antiquity. Mnemosyne, Bibliotheca Classica Batava 183. Leiden. Wills, L. M. 1995. The Jewish Novel in the Ancient World. Ithaca, NY. Wills, L. M. 2002. Ancient Jewish Novels: An Anthology. Oxford. Young, F., L. Ayres, and A. Louth, eds. 2004. The Cambridge History of Early Christian Literature. Cambridge. Zwierlein, O. 2013. Petrus und Paulus in Jerusalem und Rom: Vom Neuen Testament zu den apokryphen Apostelakten. Untersuchungen zur antiken Literatur und Geschichte 109. Berlin.

Notes

Chapter 1 1. Or even to condemn: Whitmarsh 2013, 3; and cf. ­chapter 2 of this volume.

Chapter 2 1. Barad 2007, 264. 2. The dates given in the title of Swain 1996. 3. This phrase comes from Anderson 1993. 4. Bowie 1970 is entitled “The Greeks and Their Past in the Second Sophistic.” This trope has been repeated innumerable times since: see, e.g., Brent 2006, 5–​8 (“Language Games and Life in the Second Sophistic”). Variants include, e.g., “during the Second Sophistic” (Baumbach and Bär 2007, 8–​15); “from the period of the Second Sophistic” (Elsner 2007, 135). 5. I attempt to account for the “wave function” (although I do not call it that) in Whitmarsh 2013. 6. See, e.g., Schmitz 1997; Whitmarsh 2005. 7. For material culture and the Second Sophistic, see Borg 2004; also Elsner 1995, 2007, and Nasrallah 2010. 8. Swain 1991. 9. Wilamowitz-​Möllendorff 1900, 9–​14; Brunt 1994, esp. 25–​33. 10. PHib. 15. Of a similar period is PBerol. 9781. In general, on Hellenistic oratory, see Cuypers 2010, 323–​330; Kremmydas and Tempest 2013; Russell 1983, 3–​4, 16–​20; Vanderspoel 2007. 11. Puech 2002. 12. For this point see especially Schmitz and Wiater 2011. Goldhill 2001b contains a chapter (by John Henderson) on Polybius. 13. Cameron 2011; Bowersock 1990. 14. Swain 1996, 2–​3. 15. Goldhill 2001a, 14. 16. “Archaeology”: Hunter 1996. 17. Cameron 1995 has argued that scholarship has understated the performance context of Hellenistic poetry. Conversely, it would be misleading to suggest that rhetorical (or any other kind of) performance was the primary driver of imperial literary production: the major texts that survive are (for obvious reasons) book texts, even if performance remained absolutely crucial (see, e.g., Hall 2013). The crucial point is that in both the Hellenistic and Imperial periods we should be thinking of a complex blend of the textual and performed. 18. See, e.g., Bowie 1989a, 1989b, 1990; Merkelbach and Stauber 1998–​2004 (for the inscriptions); Whitmarsh 2013. 19. Rohde 1914. 20. Huet 1971. 21. Giangrande 1962; Lavagnini 1922.

688   Notes 22. 23. 24. 25.

Perry 1967. Tilg 2010. For this diachronic view of the romance as genre, see Whitmarsh 2013, 35–​48. See Luc. De Salt. 2, 54 for Metiochus and Parthenope, with Hägg and Utas 2013, 46–​52. On mimes and novels, see esp. Webb 2013. 26. A date in the second century ce is sometimes posited on the basis of the apparent reference at 2.13.3 and 3.9.5 to the office of “keeper of the peace” (eirenarch), which is first attested epigraphically under Trajan. But as Bowie 2002, 57, and others note, there is no reason to assume that the first epigraphic attestation marks the first creation of the post (in fact, that is highly unlikely). 27. On these motifs see West 1974, especially 71–​75. 28. Frr. 8a–​b Lenfant 2004, Stronk 2010. Lobel dates the papyrus to the second century ce (see POxy. 2330). 29. Giangrande 1976 argues that the papyrus cannot be Ctesias, since it is in an Atticizing dialect and we are told that Ctesias wrote in Ionic. I agree with Bigwood 1986 that this objection is not decisive, but even so there is no way of deciding the matter given our current state of evidence. 30. For the novelistic motifs here, see Holzberg 1992. 31. Lenfant 2004; Stronk 2010. 32. Fragment 8c in Stronk 2010, Lenfant 2004. 33. Ctesias’s interplay of pronouns (“it was I who . . . because of you,” etc.) seems to have been imitated by the imperial authors of romances: see Char. 4.3.10 and Ach. Tat. 5.18.4–​5. 34. See above, note 29. 35. For convenient summaries of views, see Humphrey 2000, 28–​31; Vogel 2009, 9–​15. 36. Selden 2010 speaks similarly of “text networks.” 37. Braun 1938. 38. On the complex relationship between the Joseph story and the Greek novel, see Whitmarsh 2007. 39. On the parallelism between novelistic and (Christian) martyr scenes see Chew 2003; specifically on 4 Maccabees and Achilles Tatius, see Shaw 1996. 40. Both are discussed with further bibliography in Whitmarsh 2013, 211–​247 (where I argue for a “Jewish sophistic”). Generally, on Hellenistic Jewish literary culture, see Barclay 1996; Collins 2000; Gruen 2002. 41. Rajak 2009, 125–​175, with further references. 42. E.g., Geiger 1994; Tropper 2004, 136–​156. Niehoff 2012 draws parallels between the classicizing of Homer in the Greek tradition and of the Bible in the Jewish; see esp. Furstenberg’s chapter (Furstenberg 2012) on analogies between rabbinical interpretative methods and those of Second Sophistic. 43. Dieleman and Moyer 2010, 433. 44. Rutherford 2013; Stephens 2013. 45. By “semi-​autonomous agent” I mean an individual or group whose outlook is shaped but not wholly determined by historical forces.

Chapter 4 1. ἀττικισμός is used in this sense (of Lysias’s language) in the epitome of Dion. Hal. De imit. F 31.5.1 (originally written in the late first century bce), but could very well be attributed to the epitomator rather than to Dionysius himself.

Notes   689 2. The numerous technical writings of the period are better characterized as “intermediate prose” (Rydbeck 1967: Zwischenschichtsprosa), occupying a loosely defined area “between” the spoken vernaculars and the literary, written standard. 3. Dionysius’s associate and contemporary, the rhetorician Caecilius of Caleacte, must also have been involved, judging from two of his surviving titles (Κατὰ Φρυγῶν: Against the Phrygians (i.e., Asianist orators) and Τίνι διαφέρει ὁ Ἀττικὸς ζῆλος τοῦ Ἀσιανοῦ: How the Attic style differs from the Asian). The precise nature of his involvement, however, remains unclear due to uncertainty surrounding his date and the fragmentary nature of his surviving work (see O’Sullivan 1997; Woerther 2015). 4. The important study of Wahlgren 1995 has shown that the language of Dionysius, Strabo, Philo, and Nicolaus of Damascus is collectively more “Attic” than that of Polybius and Diodorus, but not consistently so, suggesting that this shift in usage was not a conscious choice. 5. Both authors are also models of linguistic versatility: Lucian wrote two texts in Ionic (On the Syrian Goddess, On Astrology), and Arrian not only did the same (his Indica is in Ionic), but also wrote in koinê (Epictetus’s Discourses). 6. The mention, in the late fourth-​century ce biography of Aristides attributed to Sopater, of Polemon, Herodes, and Aristides as members of a “third crop” (φορά) of orators “coming from Asia” refers to geographical, not stylistic provenance (Proleg. Aristid. 1 = Lenz 1959, 111). 7. It is important to remember that the use of “Asian” in rhetorical contexts from the first century bce onward does not refer to the continent of Asia, but to the Roman province Asia, established in 133 bce and encompassing the regions of Ionia, Caria, Mysia, Phrygia, and other areas of Western Anatolia. 8. Norden 1898, 138–​147, following Cicero Brut. 326, identifies a second type of Asian style in late Hellenistic inscriptions, most notably those of Antiochus I of Commagene at Nemrud Daği, dating from the mid-​first century bce (OGI 383; IGLSyr 1.1). But while the texts feature many of the same clausulae endings found in Hegesias, the style is quite different: prolix, circumlocuitous, and composed of long sentences (Dörrie 1964; Waldis 1920). This “bombastic” variety of Asian rhetoric may have been a late Hellenistic phenomenon, but we have no other evidence for it outside of inscriptions (cf. IG 5, 2.268, from Mantinea). See Kim forthcoming for further discussion of the relation between these texts and those of the Second Sophistic.

Chapter 5 1. Concerning the period of Fronto and Gellius, Smiley 1906, 261 calls the interest in precision of speech “almost . . . the disease of the age.” 2. See Fronto, Ep. 62–​64; Holford-​Strevens 2003 and Smiley 1906, 241–​271. The scene of philological controversy as a literary set-​piece would have a great literary future, on Macrobius’s Saturnalia most directly but also in the wrangles that permeate commentaries from Macrobius’s contemporary Servius down to our own. 3. Adams 2007, 19–​20 and 28–​29, describes the complex attitudes to rusticitas of speech (some approved as evidence of antiquitas but at times disapproved or even seen as comical). 4. The strangeness of including such comments was at times noted. Balbus in Cicero’s De Natura Deorum 2.91 disapproves that Pacuvius had put in a play “what we name caelum the Greeks call aethera.”

690   Notes 5. Adams 2007, xv. 6. Certain authors are approved as having pure Latinity, most famously Terence, whom Caesar named “puri sermonis amator” (Suet. Poet. fr. 11; see Goldberg 1986, 179–​186). Terence’s ability at creating conversational scenes is being applauded here as well as his diction. On purity as an anthropological category for understanding Roman speech, see Short 2007, iv–​x and 88–​115. A more typical philological activity has been to point out failures of Latinity, see Vainio 1999. 7. Leeman 1963, 32: “Latinitas (a ‘translation’ of ἑλληνισμός) is adherence to sermo purus, free from the vitia of soloecismus, faulty grammatical construction, and barbarismus, the use of non-​Latin words.” 8. On contempt for grammarians, see Kaster 1988, 51–​60. 9. The text was published by Baehrens in 1922. 10. Taylor 1996 demonstrates that there were not in fact opposing schools of thought but different tendencies in the scholar’s toolchest. See Cavazza 1981, 106ff., and discussion and further bibliography in Holford-​Strevens 2003, 173. 11. Aulus Gellius provides a number of examples of overzealous schoolmen advocating forms against consuetudo, which in his case means the republican writers. See the important discussion of Holford-​Strevens 2003, 174–​178. 12. On this passage, see Cousin 1935, 47–​49, with bibliography. 13. Sedulius Scottus, In Eutychum 100.74, citing Boethius as his authority. Cf. Isidore of Seville, Etym. 11.1.1: “Natura dicta ab eo quod nasci aliquid faciat.” See the discussion of Morin 2001, 189–​191. 14. See Charpin 1977, 512, cited and discussed by Morin 2001, 40.

Chapter 6 1. Hall 1997; Richter 2001, 55–​86. There are several good starting points in the modern anthropological literature, esp. Barth 1969; Eriksen 1993; Fox 1967. See also Evans-​ Pritchard 1951 and Lévi-​Strauss 1949. 2. Cf. F. Nietzsche, “Beyond Good and Evil” 1.9: “You want to live according to nature? Oh, you noble Stoics, what deceit lies in these words. . . . In your pride you want to dictate your morality, your ideals to nature, incorporate them into nature, of all things you demand that nature be ‘according to the Stoics.’ ” 3. Plut. De Stoic. Repug. 1054e–​1055a (= SVF 2.550; Long and Sedley 1987–​1989, 29d). 4. See Diog. Laert. 7.135 (= SVF 2.580). 5. Chrysippus is said to have used the metaphor of a cup of wine being poured into the ocean and becoming coextensive with it (Diog. Laert. 7.551; Plut. Comm. not. 1078e). 6. Alex. Aphr. De Mixt. 225. 7. This account follows Origen’s report of what Inwood takes to be Chrysippus’s formulation. Origen, de Principiis (= SVF 2.998); cf. Inwood 1985, 21. 8. Pol. 1252a–​b. 9. Lact. Div. inst. 3.25. 10. Stob. Ecl. 2.244.10–​11. Cf. Philodemus de Pietate col. 5.8–​10. On this passage, see Schofield 1991, 43. 11. Cf. Singer 1997, 1, who has argued that “distance and nationality make no moral difference.” Cf. Singer 2002.

Notes   691 12. Anon. In Plat. Theaet. 5.18–​6.31. 13. Hierocles (apud Stobaeus 4.671.7–​673.11) = Long and Sedley 1987–​1989, 57g. For text, commentary, and facing Italian translation, see Bastianani and Long 1992, 245–​268; with Long 1996. See also Ramelli and Konstan, 2009. 14. The term was originally used in Ackerman 1994. Appiah has taken up the idea more recently (2005). 15. Diog. Laert. 7.32–​34. 16. Diog. Laert. 7.34. 17. Diog. Laert. 7.32–​34; 7.187–​189. Cf. Sextus Empiricus Pyr. 3.245–​249, M II.189–​196. 18. Isoc. Paneg. 3. 19. Isoc. Paneg. 25. 20. Menex. 237c. 21. Panath. 225. 22. Livy Ab Urbe 1.9. 23. Tac. Ann. 11.24. On the varieties of Roman formulations of identity, see Dench 1995 and 2005. 24. Aristid. Or. 63. 25. Eur. Med. 645–​653. 26. Cf. Plut. De Exil. 600e. 27. As Whitmarsh points out (2001, 270–​271), the fact that these three philosopher-​sophists make use of these ideas in remarkably similar language ought not to be surprising, given the fact that Dio was Musonius’s student and Favorinus Dio’s. 28. The evidence for the historicity of these exiles is discussed by Whitmarsh 2001 with bibliography. Plutarch’s friend seems to have been fairly wealthy and the subject of relegatio, a relatively lenient form of exile which allowed the Sardian to settle anywhere in the empire other than Sardis (cf. 604b). Plutarch recommends certain of the Aegean islands (602c–​d). 29. ᾗ χρώμεθα πάντες ἄνθρωποι φύσει πρὸς πάντας ἀνθρώπους ὥσπερ πολίτας. The repetition of the word ἄνθρωποι recalls Cato’s formulation of Stoic oikeiôsis in the De Finibus. 30. Plutarch dedicated De Primo Frigido to Favorinus. 31. This text is not very easily found. For the Greek text and an account of its relatively recent reappearance, see Barigazzi 1966. For an English translation, see Whitmarsh 2001, appendix I.

Chapter 7 1. See, in brief, Whitmarsh 2005, 6–​10. 2. Dench 2005, esp. 306, 353. 3. For proto-​globalization, see, e.g., Hingley 2005, Hitchner 2008, Witcher 2000; for the idea of empire as a single system, see the discussions of, e.g., Ando 2000, Woolf 1990; for networks and microworlds, see, e.g., Constantakopoulou 2007; Horden and Purcell 2000; Malkin 2011; Malkin, Constantakopoulou, and Panagopoulou 2009; Whitmarsh 2010. 4. For Second Sophistic as a habitus, see, e.g., Borg 2004, Schmitz 1997. 5. LSJ s.v. kaltios; the mistranslation is discussed in Jones 1971, appendix II, citing earlier scholarship, but is still widespread. 6. Sitting in judgment as iconic feature of Roman rule: Meyer 2006; Schäfer 1989; cf. Plutarch, Precepts of Statecraft 824e, 813e–​f for the particular punishments that might be expected

692   Notes for stepping out of line: exile, banishment, or humiliation by edict of the proconsul; for the Roman occupation of Judaea, see Cotton 2007. 7. Compare Bowie 1970 and Whitmarsh 2005, 12, cf. 14; cf. De Blois 2004 8. For the extreme and countercultural oddness of Plutarch’s idealized political life in this piece, see Trapp 2004. 9. Cool Root 1985, Kurke 1992, Miller 1997, Raaflaub 2009. 10. Hall 1989, chap. 4. 11. Ptolemaic cultural capital:  Erskine 1995; tax registers and dual identities:  Clarysse and Thompson 2006; Moyer 2011, 29–​32; Thompson 1997. 12. Atticism:  Kim 2010; Kim, ­ chapter  4 in this volume; Roman appropriation of Greek: Dubuisson 1981, Rochette 2010. 13. Polybius 26.1.5–​ 7  =  Athen. 5.193d; Diodorus 29.32; cf. Livy 41.20; Suet. Aug. 98; for the significance of dressing up stories such as these, see Dench 2005, 295–​296; Wallace-​Hadrill 1998. 14. Hallett 2005, 208–​217; Kleiner 1983. Cf. Gleason 2010 for Herodes Atticus’s monumentalization of his own bicultural identity and that of his family. 15. Smith 1998. 16. E.g., 798f; 800e; 804c, f; 805a, c, e–​f; 806a–​b, d–​e; 808e; 809e; 810a–​c. 17. Cyrene Edicts: Oliver 1989, 8, 10, 11; Hadrian to Aphrodisias: SEG 50.1096; cf. Jones 2010, 111; the fiscus Iudaicus is an extreme example of Roman administrative appropriation. 18. For imperial reassignments, see Ando 2010; but cf. Strabo 12.4.6, C565 for a historical perspective that reflects on the change and loss involved; cf. also Spawforth 1999 for questions about the degree of enthusiasm with which imperial initiatives, e.g., the Panhellenion, were taken up at a local level. 19. QFr. 1.1; Plin. Ep. 10.40.2; cf. Woolf 1994. 20. Hatzfeld 1919, Purcell 2005. 21. Slaughter of Romans and Italians: App. Mithr. 22; Cic. Leg. Man. 5.11, 3.7; Dio Cass. fr. 101.1; Tac. Ann. 4.14; Plin. HN 2.209; Artemidorus, Oneirocritica 1, 35, 4.72, with Bowersock 2004. 22. Yildirim 2004; cf. Jones 2004, 2010; cf. Wallace-​Hadrill 2008, chap. 3 for triangulation of identities in Hellenistic Italy. 23. Kleiner 1983, Smith 1998. 24. Despite new challenges to social constructionism, especially around gender and sexuality (cf. Davidson 2007, 163–​204, for an interesting historical perspective on the postwar period), our commitment to identity as performance shows no sign of abating as we live our lives on Facebook, Twitter, and reality TV: see, e.g., Zhao, Grasmuch, and Martin 2008. 25. For Favorinus, see, e.g., Gleason 1995; Whitmarsh 2001, 90–​130. 26. Whitmarsh 2011. 27. Cf. Späth 2005. 28. See, e.g., Harrison 2013 on George Rawlinson. 29. E.g., Hall 1989; Hartog 1980; Hodder 1982. It is interesting that these two conversations took place in parallel, with little or no cross-​fertilization. 30. Banton 1977; Dench 2005, 222–​297; cf. Krebs 2011 for shifting interpretations of Tacitus’s Germania; cf. Leonard 2005, 58 for the entangled ancient and modern discourses of structuralism. 31. Hall 1989, esp. ix and 172–​181; contrast Isaac 2004 and Eliav-​Feldon, Isaac, and Ziegler 2009 for fuzzier boundaries of race and racism. 32. Hall 1997, 2002.

Notes   693 33. For the notion of Athens as the paideusis of Greece, see Most 2006; for fifth-​to fourth-​ century Athenian ideology, see Dench 2005, 240–​245. 34. Lape 2010; Ogden 1996, chap. 1. 35. The question of the level at which such genealogical claims were believed is an extremely interesting and complex one: see Veyne 1988 for a classic discussion of questions of belief in Greek myth more generally. 36. Kinship in general:  Curty 1995, Jones 1999; kinship with Rome or Hellenistic kings: Battistoni 2010; Erskine 2001; rights of asylum: Rigsby 1996; intercity and intercommunity networks: e.g. Spawforth and Walker 1986; the potential kudos of “barbarian” origins: e.g. Spawforth 2001; Yildirim 2004; Jones 2004, 2010. 37. Swain 2007, 2009. 38. Richter 2011, chap. 3. 39. Whitmarsh 2001, 116–​121, 167–​180. 40. Reynolds 1978, 117–​121 = SEG 28.1566.8–​12, with rereading of the inscription by Jones 1996; cf. Boatwright 2000, 182; Romeo 2002, 26–​27; Spawforth 2012, 252–​255. 41. Spawforth 1999; Spawforth and Walker 1985, 1986. 42. Bickerman 1952. 43. Price 2005; Woolf 2011. 44. Genos in the fourth century: Jones 1999, 15; “virtual heredity” in Rome: Dench 2005, 114–​117, 253–​254 45. E.g., Livy 1.8.5–​7; Dion. Hal. Ant. Rom. 2.15.3–​4, with Dench 2005, 96–​117. 46. Dench 2005, 136–​143. 47. Dench 2005, 273–​279. 48. Buell 2005; cf. Eshleman 2012; we might usefully compare and contrast the kind of essentialism to which Perpetua appeals when she likens the impossibility of calling herself anything other than Christian to the impossibility of calling a vase by any other name (Passio SS. Perpetuae et Felicitatis 3.1–​2 (van Beek): identity as profession is linked here to older, philosophical discourse about the relationship between names and things (cf. Heffernan 2012, 156–​157). 49. The scope of traits that might be associated more narrowly with the first to third centuries ce self-​defining Greek world is brought out well in Goldhill 2001. 50. E.g., Dench 2005, Johnston 2017, Millar 1983, Woolf 2011. 51. Internal and authorial arbitration: Eshleman 2012, esp. 125–​139. 52. For the state of the question about “Gordian,” see Civiletti 2002 on VS 479. 53. Cf. VS 555 for Herodes laughing at his brother-​in-​law’s boasts of eugeneia (“nobility”). 54. The instability of group boundaries is a major theme of modern ethnographical studies: see, e.g., Ferguson 1999, Valentine 2007. 55. For different assessments how easy or difficult it is to distinguish philosophers from sophists, see, e.g., Bowersock 1969, 11–​15; Flinterman 2004; Sidebottom 2009. 56. See especially Bowersock 1969, a fundamental study. 57. E.g., Zanker 1995, esp. chap. 5; Borg 2004. 58. Eshleman 2012, chap. 4. 59. Eshleman 2012, 139–​148; Whitmarsh 2005, 18–​19. 60. For the plurality of Christianity and Judaism: Beard, North, and Price 1998, 236, 248, 284–​285, 304, 307–​308. 61. E.g., for questions about the targeted audience of the ancient novel, see Martzavou 2012; cf. Swain 2009 for the possibility of ideological factions; cf. Johnson 2010 for reading communities more generally.

694   Notes

Chapter 8 1. Many thanks to the editors, and to Thomas McGinn and Mario Telò for their help. For theoretical problems in writing the history of sexuality and an overview of the field as a whole, see Richlin 2013. 2. The word “retrosexuality” already exists to denote masculinity as it was before feminism; I will here be developing an alternate sense. On life in quotation marks, see Erik Gunderson on Gellius’s Attic Nights, for example on Gellius quoting Antonius Julianus: “What one wishes to say about a topic is, frequently, precisely the already-​said about the topic, or, further, the already-​said about the already-​said about the topic” (2009, 258, cf. 268). Similarly, James Davidson on Athenaeus’s dinner party as a feast of words (2000). 3. Previous discussions: Holford-​Strevens 2003, 22–​23, 66–​67, 219, 233–​234, on the circulation of such Greek and Latin poetry in this period; Vardi 2000. 4. Richlin 2006b, 69, 147. On Apuleius as the author of this poem, see Holford-​Strevens 2003, 22–​26; Courtney 1993, 395–​397; Holford-​Strevens 2003, 22–​26. 5. Space precludes discussion of astrology, dream analysis, and physiognomy, all of which concerned themselves with sexual issues; see Brooten 1996, 115–​142, 175–​187; Foucault 1986, 3–​36; Gleason 1995, 55–​81; Winkler 1990, 17–​44. On love magic, attested by contemporary texts and by less datable material evidence, see Brooten 1996, 73–​114; Winkler 1990, 71–​98. 6. On this Sulpicia (not to be confused with the Augustan elegist), see Hallett 1992; Parker 1992a; Richlin 2014, 110–​29; Stevenson 2005, 44–​48, with discussion of contemporary women writers. On women’s desire in the ancient novel, see Morales 2008. 7. On emperors’ wives in this period, see essays in Kolb 2010; Keltanen 2002. On the relation between public portrayal of these women and of Regilla, wife of Herodes Atticus, see Gleason 2010. 8. For Pantheia mourning by the tomb “of her lord” in Marcus’s Meditations (8.37), editors have read “of Verus” instead of “of her lord”; the next set of mourners sits by Hadrian’s tomb. On Xenophon in the Second Sophistic, see Goldhill 2009a, 109; on Pantheia, Vout 2007, 213–​239. 9. Jokes: 1.74, 5.75, 6.7, 6.22, 6.45, 6.91. On this law, see McGinn 1998a. 10. Plut. Mor. 140b, 144c, 144d (other women); 138f, 139c, 139e, 140c, 143d–​e, 144f (sex between husbands and wives); 139a (love charms). See Pomeroy 1999. 11. Gilhuly 2006 sees Lucian’s creation of lesbian characters in Dial. Meret. 5 as a manifestation of his own hybrid status within the Second Sophistic; cf. Morales’ discussion (2006) of the female-​female romance in Iamblichus’s Babylonian Affairs in the context of Antonine imperialism. 12. On lamppost problems, see Richlin 2014, 5. Grateful for details, I myself have generalized on the basis of material from the 100s ce (esp. at Richlin 1992, 35, 37, on Strato—​who is now suspected of belonging to the Flavian or even Neronian period, Floridi 2007, 1–​13). 13. On Fronto and Marcus, see Richlin 2006a, 2006b; Taoka 2013a, 2013b; with close attention to the language of Roman friendship, Williams 2012, 240–​258; for doubts, Laes 2009. 14. For the date of Rufinus relative to Strato, see Cameron 1982; Floridi 2007, 1–​13; Höschele 2006, 58–​61. On epigram in the time of Fronto, see Bowie 1990, 55–​56; Cameron 1993, 16, 84–​90, on the anthology of Diogenian under Pius; Holford-​Strevens 2012, 129. On Severan epigram, see Nisbet 2007. 15. The eroticism in these odd poems is disputed; see Asso 2010; Newlands 2011 ad loc.

Notes   695 16. For a full overview of pederastic epigrams in the Greek Anthology and in Martial, see Richlin 1992, 34–​44, 55–​56, 275–​276; on Strato, Floridi 2007. See Williams 2004 for an annotated text of Martial Epigrams 2. 17. On the anomalous antipederasty position of Musonius Rufus, see Williams 2010, 269–​277, and in general Goldhill 1995, 133–​143; for the putative Severan effort, see McGinn 1998b, 270–​274. 18. On stories about this law in later histories, see Grelle 1980; on exoleti, Williams 2010, 90–​93. 19. Sources at Newlands 2002, 112n85; on Earinus, see also Vout 2007, 167–​212. On Earinus and the sexual use of child slaves in Martial, Statius, and Philostratus, see Richlin 2015, 358, 363–​366. 20. For full discussion, see Gunderson 2000, 149–​186, on Lucian, especially on the Rhetoric Teacher; on Roman texts, see Gunderson 2005; Jope 2009; Walters 1998; and Williams 2010, 177–​245, with further bibliography. 21. On Sotades and kinaidologoi, see Bettini 1982; Cameron 1995, 18–​20. For the tombstone of a kinaidologos, see Van Nijf 2001, 330. 22. Many thanks to Mario Telò for elucidating this passage.

Chapter 9 1. See, in particular, Schmitz 1997; Whitmarsh 2001, 90–​130. 2. On the epigraphic evidence, see Puech 2002, and on the papyri, see Cribiore 2001 and Morgan 1998. 3. Philostratus alludes to similar practices among teachers of rhetoric: Damianus waived fees for students in financial difficulty (VS 606), but only for those who had traveled from other cities and were thus cannot have been poor by general standards. 4. Children could be taught in religious buildings, private houses (Aelius Aristides claims to have taught from his sick-​bed), even in tombs (Cribiore 2001, 23–​34; Aristid. Sacred Tales 1.64; Philostr. VS 618–​619). 5. The letter from a student to his father in POxy. 2190 (late first, early second century ce) notes the lack of good teachers in Alexandria. 6. On arithmetic, see Cribiore 2001, 180–​183. 7. Alexander of Cotiaion served as tutor to the young Marcus Aurelius (Med. 1.10). See also Philostratus VS 599–​600 on Apollonius of Naucratis and Lucian, On Salaried Posts. 8. On history, see Gibson 2004. On a third-​century teacher of geometry, see Kleijwegt 1991, 90. Girls do not seem to have attended formal schools and would have received training in grammar and rhetoric only through private tuition. They were not, however, totally cut off from the world of the schools attended by male relatives: Aelius Aristides’s funeral oration for his pupil Eteoneus depicts the boy’s mother as taking an active part in his education. On girls’ education in general, see Cribiore 2001, 83–​101, and on the evidence for educated women, see Bowie 1994. 9. The age of pupils at the different stages is difficult to determine. 10. See Cribiore 2001, 179 and 132–​137, and Morgan 1998, 39–​49. 11. On the use of poetry in rhetorical training, see Cribiore 2007, 159–​165, and Webb 2011. It is true that poetry gained greater prominence in Late Antique education but there is no need to assume that second-​century practice was dramatically different. See also, below, on Herodes Atticus’s Clepsydrion fellowship.

696   Notes 12. Sextus Empiricus Against the Grammarians, 277–​320. 13. According to Suet. Gram. et rhet. 25.4 and Quint. Inst. 1.9, Roman grammarians taught all or some of the Progymnasmata. 14. Aelius Aristides notes that Alexander of Cotiaion wrote a treatise on Aesop, suggesting that this author featured in the grammarian’s schools. 15. Theon Prog. 74.24–​75.16. 16. Theon Prog. 78.16–​21. 17. On the rhetorical uses of ekphrasis in particular, see Webb 2009. 18. Lib. Prog. 5.2 and 6.3. 19. On the date, see Theon Progymnasmata: Patillon and Bolognesi 1997, cxxxvi–​clii. 20. Theon Prog. 13. 21. Theon Prog. 72.4–​7. On Quintilian, see Bloomer 2011. 22. On the imagery of wax and impressions see Morgan 1998, 259–​260, and Chiron 2013. 23. Lucian, Somn. 2. On modeling as a metaphor for Lucian’s activity, see Romm 1990. 24. Lib. Prog. 8.4. 25. This type of use was not restricted to authors of the hyperelite: the text of the Charition mime, an example of popular theater, makes use of literary hypotexts. See Hall 2013, 119–​128. 26. It is hard to know how many years were devoted to each stage of training. Libanius speaks of boys spending only two years at his school; see Cribiore 2007, 323–​327. 27. Hermog. On Issues, 33. 28. For examples, see Heath 1995, 189–​191, 209–​211, 223–​230. 29. Ps.-​Dionysius of Halicarnassus, On Mistakes in Declamation (Dion. Hal. Rhet. 359–​374). 30. Philostr. VS 604. The term neoi is used by Theon of the students of the elementary stages of rhetorical training and by Plutarch of the young readers of poetry. See Lalanne 2006, 71, on the difficulty of assigning ages to these terms. 31. On the importance of studying with the “right” teacher, see Lucian, The Ignorant Book Collector, 3, with the analysis of Johnson 2010, 161–​163. 32. See also Bloomer 2011, 122–​124, on anxieties about pederasty in Quintilian’s discussion of education.

Chapter 10 1. For good discussion, see Pritchard 2003, e.g., 302: “physical education manifestly remained an established element of the normative and traditional paideia . . . of young Athenians throughout the classical period,” with references in n61. 2. For Plato’s views on athletic training, see among others Jüthner 1909, 37–​43; Kyle 1987, 137–​140; Meinburg 1975. 3. For overviews, with numerous examples of all the phenomena mentioned below, see Delorme 1960, 316–​336; Forbes 1945, 33–​37; Gauthier 2010, 93–​94; König 2005, 49–​51 and 65; Scholz 2004. 4. See Newby 2005, 243 (with further references, and plan at fig. 8.4, p. 237). 5. See Scholz 2004, 125–​128. 6. See Kennell 2010, 177–​178 for the point that the decline in inscriptional evidence for the ephebeia in the Roman period is not a sign of a decline in the importance of the institution itself.

Notes   697 7. IG XII.9.234 = SIG3 II 714, lines 8–​12; and see Scholz 2004, 110 for brief discussion. 8. IG II2.2119.126–​134; and see Newby 2005, 178, noting also that the inscription refers to exhortatory speeches (logoi protreptikoi) given at the beginning of the contests (the logos protreptikos delivered to athletes is one of the standard categories of speech making discussed in Ps-​Dionysius’s Ars Rhetorica [speech 7] = Russell and Wilson 1981, 377–​381); and cf. 198 for another example from IG II2.2291, where the speaker is an ephebe (who is also acting by virtue of his wealth as agonothete—​i.e., benefactor—​for the festival at which he performs). 9. For examples see, among many others, König 2005, 127–​131; van Nijf 2004, 214. 10. See Newby 2005, 230–​246 (and note also 243 for statues of the Muses in gymnasia); also Themelis 2001 for several examples from Messene. 11. See Newby 2005, 188–​192, setting that argument in the context of other ephebic celebrations of Athens’s military past. 12. See Newby 2005, 192–​200, noting other links between the ephebes and the story of Theseus in addition; cf. Themelis (2001) 124. 13. See Ewald 2004, 244–​247. 14. See König 2005 305–​315 for a survey of the social status and educational level of ancient trainers: the evidence suggests quite a wide spectrum. 15. See Newby 2005, 174; in one of her examples (Fig. 6.4, p. 176, IG II2.2208) the cosmêtês has a pile of bookrolls at his feet—​presumably a sign of his intellectual accomplishment. 16. E.g., see van Nijf 1997, 42n54 and 59n144 on I. Smyrna 246. 17. See König 2005, 313–​314. 18. See Pl. Resp. 406a. 19. See König 2005, 309–​312. 20. Cf. Galen, Thrasyboulos 43, K5.888. 21. POxy. 3.466; for translation, see Miller 2004, 32, no. 36; and Poliakoff 1986, 161–​163, with commentary at 165–​171. 22. E.g., see Rogers 1991 on ephebic involvement in the festival founded by Vibius Salutaris in Ephesus in the first century ce (I. Eph. 27). 23. See Potter 1999, 258–​283; van Nijf 2007. 24. See Hall and Milner 1994, 8–​30 (section B); also van Nijf 2004, esp.  203–​204; Newby 2005, 252. 25. Cf. Ael VH 4.9 for a story about the philosopher Plato attending the games at Olympia: even if we accept that the story is unlikely to be true, it still illustrates nicely the widespread assumption that philosophical and athletic interests could stand side by side. 26. See König 2005, 158–​204. 27. For a good example, see the opening lines of IG XIV.1102 (translated by Miller 2004, 171–​ 172, no. 213). 28. See Schmitz 1997, 63–​66 for that argument in relation to the sophists. 29. See König 2014; also Tell 2007 for the classical tradition. 30. See Philostr. VS 2.1, 550 and Pausanias 1.19.6 (with König 2009a, 84–​85); and cf. Pausanias 2.1.7–​8 for his benefactions at Isthmia; and Lucian, Peregrinus 19 for Olympia. 31. See Philostr. VS 2.1, 565–​566 for Herodes’s funeral; also 2.1, 550 for his ephebic benefactions (with further discussion by Newby 2005, 192–​200; also on honors given by the ephebeia to Herodes in return). 32. See Whitmarsh 2001, 188–​190; and on athletic metaphors for other areas of intellectual accomplishment, see König 2005, 132–​139 (on philosophical training) and 2010, 282–​283.

698   Notes 33. See König 2005, 15–​16. 34. Key passages include Xenophanes fr. 2 (IE 2.186–​187 = Miller 2004 182–​183, no. 229); Eur. Autol. fr. 282 (TGF pp. 441–​442 = Miller 2004, 183, no. 230); Isocrates, Panegyricus 1–​2; and see König 2005, 57–​58 for overview; also Galen, Protrepticus 10, K1.23–​25 for an example of an imperial author quoting classical views (in this case the Euripides fragment) in support of his own views. 35. E.g., see Gymnasticus 1–​2 and König 2007. 36. Cf. Jüthner 1909, 94–​97. 37. Cf. Van Hoof 2010, 238–​239. 38. See esp. Quaest. conv. 2.1. 39. E.g., see Thrasyboulos 46, K5.894–​896. 40. See Van Hoof 2010, 211–​213 for brief introductory discussion of the relationship between philosophy and medicine, and between Galen and Plutarch; and 214–​218 for analysis of this opening section and its implications for understanding Plutarch’s relationship with medicine. 41. See Van Hoof 2010, 232–​234 for brief discussion. 42. See esp. Protrepticus 13, K 1.32–​37; Thrasyboulos 46, K5.894. 43. Cf. von Staden 2000, esp. 359–​360 on the therapeutic uses of reading aloud in the medical writing of Celsus.

Chapter 11 1. There is an excellent collection and commentary of these inscriptions in Puech 2002. 2. There is some debate whether the dedicatee was Gordian I or Gordian III, but the chronological difference between these two is only slight; see Jones 2002. 3. On Philostratus, see Anderson 1986, Bowie and Elsner 2009. 4. On this anecdote, see Eshleman 2012, 40–​41, 125; Korenjak 2000, 140–​141; Whitmarsh 2005, 30–​32. Text and translation of Philostratus’s Lives of the Sophists are quoted from Wright 1921; occasionally, I have slightly modified his translation. 5. The exact date is difficult to determine; see the discussions of his career in Avotins 1975 and Puech 2002, 309–​310. 6. See Eshleman 2012, 132: he must have been an eminent teacher and speaker, though not much is known about him, and Philostratus does not provide a biography of him. 7. Quintilian 11.3.137–​49 gives elaborate rules about the proper dress code for a public speaker—​a clear indication that this was considered important both by performers and their audience. 8. Lucian, The Professor of Public Speaking 15. Cribiore 2007 is right to remind us that the ironical stance of this satire is more difficult to define than many critics have seen; see also Zweimüller 2008. Cf. Antoninus’s disapproval of the sophist Alexander as “the fellow who is always arranging his hair, cleaning his teeth, and polishing his nails, and always smells of perfume”; and see Gleason 1995, 74–​76. 9. Korenjak 2000, 27–​33; cf. Eshleman 2012, 25–​28. 10. Aristid. Or. 51.31–​34; cf. Dio Chrys. Or. 32.2, 20 or Lib. Or. 1.87. 11. See Korenjak 2000, 42–​46. 12. For details see Webb, ­chapter 9 in this volume.

Notes   699 13. Philostratus’s florid language and/​or our lack of familiarity with the details of everyday school life prevent us from getting a clear picture of just what is involved. Philostratus says that Megistias talked to Hippodromus διακωδωνίσας . . . τὰ μειράκια. These words have puzzled commentators; they may mean “after having dismissed his students” or “after having examined his students”; cf. Rothe 1989, 239. 14. See Rothe 1989, 23. 15. Many details remain unknown; see the discussions in Avotins 1975; Rothe 1989, 19–​27, 39–​ 40. If Puech 2002, 456–​457 is right in her interpretation of an inscription from Ephesus (I. Ephesos 1548), cities were competing for the services of famous sophists not unlike modern universities compete for academic stars. 16. See, e.g., Nicagoras’s proud declaration of being a “sophist on the chair” (epi tēs kathedras sophistēs) in IG II2.3814 and the interpretation in Puech 2002, 358–​359. 17. Cf. VS 1.21, 521: Scopelian receives the equally impressive amount of 180,000 from Herodes Atticus and his father Atticus for an extempore declamation. 18. The same negative attitude toward wage earning can be seen, e.g., in Lucian’s On Hired Academics, see Eshleman 2012, 79–​83. 19. See, e.g., VS 1.12, 514; 2.25, 608; 2.32, 625; cf. 2.23, 605. 20. The literature on the relation between philosophy and (second) sophistic is vast. Recently, Kasulke 2005, esp. 49–​187, has tried to show that there was no real opposition between these two, but his arguments fail to convince; against, see Lauwers 2014, Schmitz 2013, and Sidebottom 2009. 21. See, e.g., VS praef., 479; 1.9, 492; 1.24, 528; 2.9, 525; 2.27, 616. 22. Eshleman 2010, 125–​148 gives a very good overview; lots of valuable information can be found in Naechster 1908. 23. Russell 1983, 26n38 rightly points out that magic is common in Greek literature during the first centuries ce (Lucian and the novel), but relatively rare in declamation; however, cf. Philostr. VS 2.10, 590; Ps.-​Hermogenes, Inv. 3.10: “A magician asks for a girl’s hand in marriage. When her father refuses, she falls in love with a ghost; the magician is accused of poisoning her.” 24. As Rothe 1989, 242–​243 and Korenjak 2000, 75 think. 25. On this aspect of Philostratus’s Lives of the Sophists, see Schmitz 2009. 26. See, e.g., VS 2.5, 572: “[Alexander] made a further wonderful display of his marvellous powers in what now took place. For the sentiments that he had so brilliantly expressed before Herodes came he now recast in his presence, but with such different words and different rhythms, that those who were hearing them for the second time could not feel that he was repeating himself.” Cf. Russell 1983, 84–​86. 27. On the depiction of competition in Philostratus, see König 2011. 28. Anderson 1993, 124. 29. See Van Hoof 2010, 234–​235. 30. On competitiveness and ambition in imperial Greek culture, see Fisher and van Wees 2011; Roskam, De Pourcq, and Van der Stockt 2012. 31. On euergetism, see Veyne 1990, Zuiderhoek 2009. 32. See, e.g., I. Smyrna 2.635 for the sophist Lollianus. As Puech 2002, 333n1 points out, the hyperbolic and illogical monos kai prôtos had already been satitirized by Lucian. 33. Advice about Keeping Well 133 E; cf. Van Hoof 2010, 237–​240. 34. Eshleman 2012, 7–​10 provides a very perceptive reading of this passage. 35. On physiognomy in the Second Sophistic, see the brilliant remarks of Gleason 1995, 55–​81.

700   Notes 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42.

See Rothe 1989, 83–​4. See Castelli 2001. VS 1.21, 518 and 2.1, 565. On him, see Schmitz 1997, 190–​193; Swain 1996, 80–​83. Cf. Puech 2002, 29–​31; Schmitz 1997, 136–​146. VS 2.1, 564; what is meant is he that he is one of the canonical classical orators. See Bowie 1970, which is still relevant.

Chapter 12 1. For the date, see Harrison 2000, 123. 2. “Wer sich das prunkvolle Auftreten der Rhetoren und Sophisten des 2. und 3. Jahrhunderts n. Chr., wie es in den Lebensbeschreibungen des Philostrat geschildert ist, vergegenwärtigt und sich dazu erinnert, dass der neugefundene Vortagssaal ebenso wie die Exedra aller Wahrscheinlichkeit nach von dem berühmten ephesischen Sophisten Flavius Damianus erbaut worden ist, der wird verstehen, dass beim Bau des Auditoriums ein so prächtiger Rahmen für die Person des Vortragenden vorgesehen wurde.” 3. Oliver 1953 suggests that the speech was delivered in the Athenaeum, but writes on the assumption that this complex was on the Palatine and well before its actual location was rediscovered; cf. also Jarratt 2016, 218, who imagines a grand urban setting, but notes, with Pernot 2008, 188, that Aristides gives no hint of this architecture in his speech.

Chapter 13 1. Cf. the epigraphic material collected by Robert 1948, 29–​34, on the men who were able to plead for their province dia tên en logois aretên kai tên peri tou nomou empeirian. 2. On the two forms of declamation, cf. Russell 1983, chaps. 5 and 6. 3. Puech 2002. 4. Pernot 1993, 14n9. Cf. Amato, Roduit, and Steinrück 2006, v–​vi; Malosse and Schouler 2009, 162–​163; Quiroga 2007, 34; Van Hoof 2010, 213. 5. Cf. Pernot 2010a on Callinicus and 2010b on Philodemus, cited later.

Chapter 14 1. The philosopher mentioned at Or. 31.122 is often taken to be Musonius Rufus, but this is not conclusive. Whitmarsh 2001, 137n16 presents a balanced summary of the evidence. 2. Compare with Philostratus’s account of the “Heracles of Herodes” (called Sostratus in Lucian’s Demonax 1), who claims that he received the best education from the interior of Attica, as it preserves the purest strain of Hellenism in contrast to the more diluted versions found in Athens, which has been corrupted by the presence of barbarian foreigners (VS 552–​554). 3. A  useful parallel here is Longus’s Daphnis and Chloe, in which the naive perspectives of the rustic protagonists are contrasted with those of the more knowing audience. See Whitmarsh 2001, 101–​105, with further references.

Notes   701 4. For example, Lucian’s On the Syrian Goddess, which defamiliarizes the audience’s sense of foreign and familiar through unsettling the author’s (and their own) cultural positioning between Syrian and Greek (Elsner 2001; Goldhill 2002, 78–​82). Similarly, Apuleius describes himself as a foreign, inexperienced Latin speaker in the prologue of the Metamorphoses (1.1.5), but when addressing his North African countrymen at his trial, he claims his real crime is being educated in Latin and Greek (Apology 4.1).

Chapter 16 1. Ramírez de Verger, 1973, 115–​126, uses three topics to show the proximity between Fronto and the Second Sophistic: the use of adoxography, the affinity for fabulous stories, and archaic terminology. I would like to thank warmly K. Coghlan for his help in the translation of this paper. 2 . The letters on the trial of Herodes (Ad Marcum 3.2–​3 .6) are quite mutilated: thus, it is hard to know what was the point of contention; on the trial, cf. Fleury 2003, 86–​ 97; 2006a, 136–​139; Van den Hout 1999, 94–​97. On the consolation Fronto wrote for Herodes, Ad Marcum 2.1, cf. Fleury 2006b, 77–​8 1. 3. “Who pray prevents us from painting-​in much colour from the paint-​box of our friend Favorinus?” (Haines 1919–​1920, 1:49). All translations are those of Haines 1919–​1920; the titles of the letters are from Van den Hout 1988. Van den Hout 1999, 496 sees this Favorinus as an owner of a beauty parlour. It is more likely that Fronto speaks of the sophist, cf. Barigazzi 1966, 140; Pernot 1993, 535. 4. In another letter (Ad Marcum 2.11), Marcus Aurelius recalls his audition of Greek orators in the theater in Naples. The letter is full of innuendos, but the same negative attitude is discernible. On those judgments, cf. Fleury 2012. 5. The young Polemon had ceased intemperance and debauchery the day when, still tipsy, he stepped in the classroom of Xenocrates while the philosopher was talking about temperance. We can find the same story in Diogenes Laertius 4.16; Lucian, Bis accusatus 16; and August. Ep. 104.2. On the way Fronto uses this fable, cf. Fleury 2006a. 6. Boulanger 1968, 87–​94, after studying the two speeches that we have by Polemon, concludes that Marcus Aurelius has wandered in his judgment. Favreau Linder 2004 rightly nuances Boulanger’s conclusions by arguing that Polemon’s declamations use sobriety and passion and can therefore match Marcus Aurelius’s remarks. 7. Peratticus seems to be the translation for ὑπεραττικός. Atticism is mentioned only three times in the Frontonian corpus: once, in a marginal note to Ad Antoninum 3.2.5, and once, it comes under Marcus Aurelius’s pen, Additamentum Epistularum 7.2, the last occurrence is in a letter written by Fronto, Ad Marcum 2.3.5. If we look at occurrences of the word in contemporary literature (Lucian, Lexiphanes 25; Demon. 26; Philostr. V A 1.17), it is always seen as a negative feature of authors or philosophers; cf. Swain 1996, 82–​83. On Atticism and style, see ­chapter 4 in this volume. 8. Except for this occurrence, the word is used just one more time (De eloquentia 4.10), likewise in a letter that compares philosophy and rhetoric:  “contemni denique et nullo honore esse rhetora uideas; obseruari autem et omnibus officiis coli dialecticos” (“In a word, you could see that the rhetorician is despised and of no account, while the dialecticians are courted and treated with every respect”; Haines 1919–​1920, 2:79).

702   Notes 9. Ad Marcum 2.2.4, 4.3.3; Ad Antoninum 1.2.6, 3.8.2; cf. Cugusi 1983, 262; Portalupi 1961, 39f.; Schwierczina 1925; Zetzel 1974. It is nevertheless clear that, in the structure of Ad Marcum 2.2, the remark made in paragraph 4 on Marcus Aurelius’s ability in writing letters, where Fronto mentions relaxed and Ciceronian conversation, is the loose logical link that leads to the Ciceronian rhetor Polemon. 10. NA 2.26, 13.29, 19.8, 19.10, 19.13. On the relations of Fronto and Aulus Gellius, cf. Baldwin 1973, Pellini 1912, and more recently, Garcea and Lomanto 2004 and Sacerdoti 2003. 11. Indeed, in all the chapters where Fronto is a character, the answer to lexical problems is found in pre-​Ciceronian writers. 12. On the vindictive nature of the sophists in Philostratus, see, inter alia, Bowersock 1969, 89–​100; Whitmarsh 2005, 37–​40. On Polemon, see Ad Marcum 2.2.5 and 2.10. 13. Although we may think that some letters were written for a larger audience than the imperial family, such as the treatises in epistolary form (De eloquentia, De orationibus), the small diffusion of the letters in antiquity seems to show that the publication was not Fronto’s doing, nor that of Marcus Aurelius, and that the edition of the letters must have been posterior to the death of both correspondents. Cova 2004 has put forward the attractive hypothesis of an editor, Fronto’s descendant, who would have put the corpus together to rehabilitate the family after Victorinus’s forced suicide. This type of rehabilitation can also be seen in one more occasion, see Mathieu 1994. 14. Pflaum 1964, 547, 560: Pflaum considers that Fronto himself was the publisher of his letters and that is why he tries to demonstrate the equilibrium in the two books of the letters to friends between powerful men and men of knowledge. This conclusion is still valid if we think of an editor aiming for rehabilitation of the family. 15. According to Demougin 2001, 221, there is a clear distinction between relations and friends who shared contubernium with Fronto. On the intellectual activities that took place in this circle, cf. Johnson 2012, 141–​148. 16. The studies that analyse both cultural worlds are increasingly numerous, cf. Harrison 2000, Kemezis 2010, and Keulen 2009. 17. On Anacharsis in the authors of the second century, cf. Richter 2011, 167f. 18. Fronto, like most of the writers of his century, evolves in a bilingual world, where the knowledge of both languages, especially for a Latin speaker, is indispensable. On this topic, see Bowie 1970, 4. Russell, 1990, 14, thinks that Fronto, in this letter, associates Greek and primary education and rejects Greek for the adult orator. 19. Cf. Swain 2004. 20. Same conclusions in Claassen 2009. For a more historical study, cf. Méthy 1983.

Chapter 17 1. Behr 1994, 1163–​1177. Aristides used the term “sophist” to denigrate the “Asianists” (Against Those Who Burlesque the Mysteries [of Oratory], Or. 34) or personal rivals (e.g., Or. 33.29). But he also used it in the neutral sense of “teacher,” and in particular “public teacher” (Puech 2002, 10–​15). 2. See Pernot 2003, 128–​133. 3. Most of the biographical information about Aristides that is to be found in the present text comes from his own work (and in particular the Sacred Tales; Or. 47–​52), Philostratus, 2.9.581–​585, Sopatros’s Prolegomena (ed. F. W. Lenz, 1959), the Suda and various epigraphic

Notes   703 sources. Behr (1968, 1994) gives a version which, though detailed, is sometimes conjectural. See also Bowie 1996. 4. Behr 1981–​1986 is the source for all the quotations from Aristides’s works. 5. See also Franco 2005. 6. Nicosia 1979; Petsalis-​Diomidis 2010. 7. Puech 2002, 140–​145. 8. Vix 2010, 373–​389. 9. See, for example, Vix 2010, 314–​397, and his bibliography; and Kim, c­ hapter  4 in this volume. 10. Or. 32, taking the form of a letter to the magistrates of Cotiaeum. 11. The hymns (Or. 37–​46), among others, were written down before being presented orally, and were later reworked. In other words, they were aimed firstly at listeners, then at readers. 12. Philostr. VS 581. 13. See, for example, Or. 46, The Isthmian Oration: Regarding Poseidon. 14. Quet 1993, 213; 2001. 15. The Sacred Tales contain many references to the esteem in which he is held, e.g., Or. 48, 82; Or. 50, 48, 91, 95, 102; Or. 51, 29. 16. Puech 2002, 140–​145; Quet 1992. 17. Quet 2006. 18. He gives a detailed account of his requests to the proconsul of Asia not to serve as an eirenarch in Adriani. And the emperors apparently sent a letter to the authorities in Smyrna confirming his fiscal exemption. Each time, he won his point, and was heaped with honors and excuses (Or. 50, 72–​108). See Bowersock 1969, 36–​41; Puech 2002, 27; Sartre 1991, 144–​147. 19. Philostr. VS 583. 20. Philostr. VS 583. 21. Philostr. VS 583. 22. Philostr. VS 585. 23. Pernot 1997, 171–​183. 24. See Bowie 1996 for a classification:  the “epideictic” orations (in praise of cities:  Or. 1 [Panathenaikos], Or. 18 and 21 [Smyrna], Or. 22 [Eleusis], Or. 26 [Rome], Or. 27 [Cyzicus], Or. 46 [Corinth], and those that commemorate a funeral [Or. 31 and 32] or a birthday [Or. 30]); the “deliberative,” or “polemical,” orations, which are either political (Or. 23 and 24) or related to Aristides’s career in rhetoric (the Platonic discourses, Or. 2–​4); Or. 28, 29, 33, and 34; the Sacred Tales (Or. 47–​52); the “declamations” (Or. 5–​16); and the “hymns in prose” (Or. 37–​46). There is also an essay on the source of the Nile, Or. 36. 25. See also the funeral orations that he composed for his student Eteoneus (Or. 31) and his master Alexander (Or. 32); also Vix 2010, 113–​141. 26. See also Or. 28.6, 47.16, and 50.15. 27. Or. 5 and 6, the “Sicilian orations,” for and against sending reinforcements to Sicily; Or. 7 and 8, the “orations for peace.” 28. Or. 9 and 10, “orations on the alliance with the Thebans”; Or. 11–​15, the “Leuctran orations.” 29. See, for example, Swain 1996, 260–​274. 30. See Pernot 2002, 373–​374. 31. It is essentially in Or. 50 and 51 that Asclepius is spoken of as providing Aristides with methods for developing his rhetorical talents.

704   Notes 32. Philostr VS 581. On Asclepius’s actions in different domains, see, in particular, Or. 42. 33. Petsalis-​Diomidis 2010. 34. See, in particular, Quet 1993. 35. Pernot 2002, and in particular 371. 36. Whitmarsh 2005, 83–​85. 37. Quet 1993, 221. On the structure of the Sacred Tales, see Behr 1968, 116–​119; Gigli 1977; Pearcy 1988. 38. See, for example, Or. 51.56, where Aristides goes from a psychological assessment of middle life to an expression of his spiritual fulfilment. 39. Petsalis-​Diomidis 2010, 122–​124. Recent research has relocated the Sacred Tales within the study of religion and culture in the second century (Nicosia 1979, 1988). Anthropological approaches have also been developed recently; see chapters by Holmes, Downie, and Petsalis-​Diomidis in Harris and Holmes 2008. 40. Pernot 2002, 382–​383. 41. Or. 2 (To Plato: In Defense of Oratory) and Or. 3 (To Plato: In Defense of the Four). There is also a brief work, Or. 4 (To Capito), in which Aristides replies to the criticisms of a contemporary philosopher. See Milazzo 2002. 42. Or. 50.57, 51.57–​66, gives a significant dream in which Plato is quoted favourably (Or. 51.58), and is placed above Demosthenes and Homer (Or. 51.63). 43. Pernot 1993b, 323. 44. Flintermann 2002a. 45. Flintermann 2002b, 199–​200; Karadimas, 1996, 240. 46. Or. 2.52. 47. See Or. 3.672, for a contrasted portrait. 48. Pl. Ap. 31 c–​d. 49. See also Or. 33.19; Flintermann 2002b. 50. See Wissmann 1999. 51. Or. 2.393–​399; also Saïd 2008, 65–​67, 66 (quotation). 52. Miletti 2011. 53. Pernot 1998; Rutherford 1995, 203. 54. Quet 2001, 215. 55. Quet 2001. 56. In this passage, Aristides rejoins the spirit of the Gorgias (503a), which he also draws on for his definition of eloquence. 57. There was already a tradition of prose hymns, and Aristides did not claim to be innovating in this area (see Or. 40.1, 44.1), though it is true that references in Greek sources are rare. He himself also composed hymns in verse (Bowie 1989; Goeken 2012, 66–​69). His use of prose was thus a deliberate choice. 58. This was one of his first works, dating from 142 or 143. See Goeken 2012, 76–​77. 59. Goeken 2012, 81. 60. Pernot 2007. 61. Pernot 1997, 163–​170. 62. See the subtitles given by J.  H. Oliver to the annotated translation of these two orations: “The Ruling Power” (1953) and “The Civilizing Power” (1968). 63. Pernot 1993a, 323–​328. 64. Oudot 2006a, 2006b. 65. Swain 1996, 274–​276.

Notes   705 66. Pernot 2008. 67. See, however, Or. 51.56, where Aristides regrets that, given his poor health, he has not been able to visit as many cities as he would have liked. 68. On urban development, see also Or. 26.97. 69. Regarding the orations on Smyrna (Or. 17–​21), see Franco 2005. 70. See Jones 2008; Robert 2009. 71. Fragment 50.12, ed. Patillon-​Brisson. 72. Cribiore 2008. 73. Or. 18, 23, 24, 26, 27, and 34. 74. Robert 2009, 154–​160.

Chapter 18

1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

The fullest study of the problems of authorship and attribution remains De Lannoy 1997. As Solmsen 1940 already saw. See also Grossardt 2006, 14–​16. For some Motivparallelen, see Grossardt 2006, 21–​23. On this text: Whitmarsh 1999. There is almost no modern discussion. On the second Dialexis, see Swain 2009 and on the nature and transmission of these texts Miles 2017. 6. Bowie 2009 examines the available evidence for Philostratus’s life and career. 7. On the “circle” of Julia Domna, see the appropriately wary analysis of Whitmarsh 2007, 32–​38 with further bibliography. 8. Beschorner 1999. 9. Grossardt 2006, 14–​17; Solmsen 1940. 10. For instance, “A Protean corpus”: Elsner 2009a. 11. Billault 2000, 5. 12. Grossardt 2006; Schirren 2005. 13. For instance, Maclean and Aitken 2001; Mantero 1966. 14. Space does not permit discussion of the Letters, Gymnasticus, Dialexis, and Nero. Letters: Goldhill 2009a, and Hodkinson, ­chapter 32 in this volume. Gymnasticus: König 2005, 301–​344. Nero: Whitmarsh 1999. Dialexis: Swain 2009. 15. For example, Apollonius writes to the sophist Scopelian (1.23–​24), who also appears in the Lives of the Sophists (514–​521), and Dio Chrysostom features in both texts. Some other points of contact: Kemezis 2011, 22n54. 16. Rhetoric: Billault 1992 and 1993. Theios Sophistes is the apt title of Demoen and Praet 2009. 17. Whitmarsh 2005, 1–​10. 18. See Johnson and Richter, ­chapter 1 in this volume. 19. On Atticism, see Kim, ­chapter 4 in this volume, and Kim 2010a. 20. On the composite portrait of “the sophist” in the Lives, see Côté 2006, 23, and Anderson 1989 and 1993. 21. Côté 2006, 19, with further bibliography. 22. Swain 1991. 23. Anderson 1986, 83. 24. Eshleman 2008; Kemezis 2011 on geography. 25. On the identity of this Gordian, see Barnes 1968, and Jones 2002.

706   Notes 26. Eshleman 2008 on these omissions. Herodes as conduit for the Ionian sophists: Kemezis 2011, 8–​9. For the wider picture of Greek oratory in this period which emerges from the epigraphic evidence, see Puech 2002. 27. Eshleman 2008, 396. 28. Goldhill 2009b. 29. See Bowie 1978; Dzielska 1986; Meyer 1917; Weisser 1980 on the Arabic tradition; Penella 1979 on the Letters. 30. Francis 1995, 126–​130. 31. On Apollonius’s Pythagoreanism:  Flinterman 2009. On other aspects of this school, Burkert 1972; O’Meara 1991; Zhmud 2012. 32. Swain 1995 proves conclusively that the supposed Sanskrit evidence for Apollonius’s visit is a nineteenth-​century forgery. It was already regarded as suspect by Bhattacharya 1943, vi c–​d. 33. Elsner 1997. Further on geography, see Abraham 2014. 34. See Karttunen 1989; Parker 2008; Sedlar 1980. 35. See also Richter 2011, 199–​206; Belousov 2014. 36. Swain 1995, 254. 37. Koskenniemi 1991, 1998; Petzke 1970. 38. Edwards 2007. 39. On the probability that this text was not by Eusebius of Caesarea, see Hägg 1992. 40. Elsner 2009b. On Philostratus’s possible response to Christianity, see Swain 2009. 41. Bowie 1978, 1663. Meyer 1917 already doubted the existence of Damis. 42. Flinterman 1995, 85, for this possibility. 43. Francis 1998. 44. Schirren 2009, 177. The case is made at greater length in Schirren 2005. 45. Gyselinck and Demoen 2009, 126–​127. 46. Whitmarsh 2004a, 2004b. 47. Bowie 1994, 190–​193; Miles 2017a. 48. Van Dijk 2009. 49. For instance: V A 1.22, 2.22. See Miles 2009 and 2017b, and on the production of multiple interpretations in the Gymnasticus, König 2005, 325–​337. 50. On the interest in visuality in these dialogues, see Platt 2009. 51. On the conversion from skepticism to belief, see Kim 2010b, 201–​202; Whitmarsh 2004a, 249. On the setting and Plato’s Phaedrus: Hodkinson 2011. 52. On the relationship of the Schwindelliteratur to the Heroicus, see Grossardt 2006, 55–​74; Kim 2010b, 175–​215. 53. Also visualized at Imag. 2.2. 54. Discussed more fully in Miles 2004. 55. For instance, Mantero 1966. 56. Anderson 1986, 241–​258. 57. Grossardt 2006, 127–​130. 58. Hodkinson 2011, 58 takes a similar point of view, as does Kim 2010b. König 2005, 334 makes some related observations regarding the Gymnasticus. 59. Webb 2009, 188 observes the “several levels of time involved” in the Imagines. 60. Limitation of space prevents discussion of these second Imagines here. 61. Newby 2009.

Notes   707 62. “Rhodogoune” (2.5) is again a fine example. I discuss these aspects of the Imagines further in Miles 2017. 63. Lehmann-​Hartleben 1941. See the response of Bryson 1994. 64. Goethe 1818. On the resistance to a final structure, see Baumann 2011. 65. Billault 2000, 49. 66. Somewhat similar observations have been made regarding Heliodorus: Morgan 1994.

Chapter 20 1. On the presence of historians’ writings in grammar school curricula, see Marrou 1966, 230, and more extensively Nicolai 1992, 186–​233; regarding declamations of historical subjects in rhetoric schools, see the concise Bowie 1970, 4–​5, and more extensively Nicolai 1992, 215–​233. For an especially interesting testimony to these declamations, see Plutarch himself in the Praecepta gerendae rei publicae (Mor. 814c), about which see Desideri 2012c (= 1998a), 62ff. 2. See Desideri 1997 and 2001 (for Plutarch’s role, 174–​177). 3. On this cultural phenomenon, see Bowersock 1969. For a concise survey of authors and themes, as listed by Philostratus, see Desideri 1992a, 59–​60; and remember that it was Philostratus who defined the activity of these sophists as dedicated to developing themes “belonging to history” (VS 481). Schmitz 2014’s description of the relationships between Plutarch and the Second Sophistic is not interested in my main point, i.e., Plutarch’s and sophists’ common interest for history. 4. Here I am thinking, first, of the History of Memnon of Heraclea, regarding whose writings I refer to my older works from the previous century (Desideri 1967 and 1970–​1971), and the more recent Desideri 2007; but for a more exhaustive survey of these entire literature, see Bowie 1970, 19–​22. 5. See Bowie 1996; Habicht 1985. 6. See at least Cordovana and Galli 2007; Walker and Cameron 1989. 7. As shall be seen clearly later in this work, I do not share the idea of a sharp contrast between biography and history: I limit my argument on this subject to referring to Desideri 2012a (= 1992c), 247–​249; 2012f (= 1995), and now 2015, sect. 6d (but see the previous work by Gentili and Cerri 1983, 65–​90; Mazzarino 1983, 3, 136–​138; Pelling 1990; and more recently Schepens 2007, 341ff). 8. Duff 1999, 3–​5; regarding Late Antiquity, also see Jones 1971, 81n1. 9. Only the first pair, Epaminondas and Scipio, was lost. 10. For a general bibliography on biography, see now Desideri 2015, sect. 5. 11. For a list (from the Catalog, but also from Plutarch’s self-​references) of the individual Lives that were lost (not many, truthfully), among which the Life of a politician and captain such as the great Scipio Africanus; see Ziegler 1965, 307ff. 12. See Desideri 2015, sect. 6e (and the earlier Jones 1982, 968). Here the main reference is naturally Cornelius Nepos, on whose relations with Plutarch see Ramón Palerm 2009, 42–​46. 13. See Jones 1971, 104ff: “P. appears to have added one pair after another haphazardly . . . ; lack of plan . . . ; random accumulation of instances.” 14. On the technical and rhetorical aspects of Plutarch’s biographical writings, see Ramón Palerm 2009, 48ff.

708   Notes 15. Its theme was in fact “The Unity of Plutarch’s Work” (for the Proceedings, see Nikolaidis 2008); for the history of the composition of the two great and distinct corpora of the Byzantine era, see therein Geiger 2008. 16. See Desideri 2012h (= 2012g); I later dealt with this theme again in Desideri 2016. 17. Dario Del Corno (1983, 12) spoke of “afflatus of anguish” (see Desideri 2011, 100ff) 18. All of Plutarch’s life and works demonstrate the strength of this conviction of his: see especially Stadter 2002, 5–​6. 19. Mor. 422b (this translation of Plutarch, like all the others in this chapter, comes from the Loeb volumes). 20. Mor. 422bc (καὶ περὶ αὐτὰ τοῦ αἰῶνος ὄντος οἷον ἀπορροὴν ἐπὶ τοὺς κόσμους φέρεσθαι τὸν χρόνον). 21. Mor. 432ab 22. Mor. 432b. 23. Mor. 387b. 24. Mor. 408bc; the same idea, in terms which are just as covertly ironic, is expressed in the Praecepta rei publicae gerendae (Mor. 824c). 25. This was apparently a widespread opinion (Mor. 408d): see Desideri 2012h (= 2012g), 363ff. 26. The dating in particular of the De E has been a subject of much debate: see Stadter 2002, 12; in any case, its attribution to the age of Hadrian cannot be proven (Jones 1966, 63–​65). 27. Jones 1966, 70 (perhaps in 99 ce, year of the first consulate of his friend Sosius Senecio, whom the work addresses); 1971, 31; Stadter 2002, 6. 28. The pair Aemilius Paullus and Timoleon could be positioned at the eleventh (Nikolaidis 2005, 296), or thirteenth to fourteenth place (Jones 1966, 67)  in the series of the Parallel Lives. 29. Aem. 1. For further analysis of this proem, see Desideri 2012j (= 1989), 201–​202. 30. Mor. 84d ff.; the image of the mirror also appears in the above-​mentioned proem of Aemilius Paullus (see Desideri 2012b [= 1992b], 232). 31. Per. 2.4 (see Desideri 2012j [= 1989], 202–​203 and 2013, 24). 32. For a more in-​depth analysis of the reasons why the biographical model of historical writing emerged in the imperial age, see Desideri 2001, 176; 2015, sect. 6e; Swain 1997. 33. On the relationship between the two passages, see Giua 1985. 34. Pelling 1997b, 118ff; 2006, 258. 35. Jones 1982, 968. Bowersock 1998 supports the Plutarchan originality of the plan and attributes the writing of these Lives to the age of Domitian (see, previously, Jones 1966, 71; 1971, 27 and 72–​73); Geiger 2002, 93ff. reaffirms his preference for the age of Nerva. On these Lives, see now Georgiadou 2014. 36. Desideri 2015, 14. 37. For a stimulating approach to the Parallel Lives—​one both comprehensive and concise—​ see now Geiger 2014. 38. But we cannot rule out the joint publication of several pairs: Mewaldt 1907 (see Jones 1966, 66–​67; Nikolaidis 2005, 296ff). 39. Thes. 1.2; Cim. 2.2; Dem. 3.1; Dio 2.7. 40. For example, see Cim. 3; Rom. 1.4–​5. On Plutarchan parallelism, see still Hirzel 1912, ­chapter 7 (“Der Historiker”); and later Desideri 2012b (= 1992b); 233ff; Duff 1999, 287–​309; Pelling 2010; Tatum 2010; and in general the collected works in Humble 2010. 41. Desideri 2012d (= 1998b), 38ff; previously Jones 1971, 107ff. had observed that “the Parallel Lives do not reveal a cleavage between Greeks and Romans, but rather their unity.”

Notes   709 42. Desideri 2012d (= 1998b), 33ff. 43. Jones 1966, 67; Nikolaidis 2005, 299; Ziegler 1965, 308. 44. I maintain my position (Desideri 2012b [= 1992b], 240–​245); for a different perspective, Geiger 2014, 298; Van der Stockt 2014, 323. 45. Stadter 1965, 9–​11. See the later Jones 1982, 964 (though previously, he had claimed that “the primary purpose . . . is artistic,” and that, as in Nepos, “his aim was delectation and not demonstration,” despite admitting an ethical intention as well; Jones 1971, 105–​106); Desideri 2012a (= 1992c), 234; Tatum 2010, 4ff. 46. This difficulty has now been explored very well by Tatum 2010. 47. Pelling 2010. 48. As we know, Plutarch sometimes refers to Lives which will never actually be written. 49. For the group of Late Republic Lives in particular, see Pelling 1979; Stadter 2010 thinks that the pairs included in these six Lives actually form a larger unit, in which Plutarch may have focused on certain specific themes. 50. The problem of the work’s internal timeline has been discussed most in depth in Jones 1966 and Nikolaidis 2005; but also see Piccirilli 1977, 999–​1003. 51. Nikolaidis 2005 made a noteworthy attempt at reconstructing the order of the themed explorations connected to the order in which the individual pairs were published over time. 52. See Desideri 2012e (= 2005), 142. 53. Comp. Arist./​Cato 1.2–​3 (see Desideri 2012b (= 1992b), 236). 54. Phoc. 3.1–​3 (see Desideri 2012b (= 1992b), 235–​236). 55. I recall, for example, the beginning of the Comparison between Solon and Publicola (1.1), in which Plutarch writes of the “very particular aspect” of this comparison, consisting of the fact that the “latter figure imitated the former, and the former proved the value of the latter.” 56. Desideri 2012d (= 1998b), 35–​38. 57. On the centrality of the theme of freedom in Philopoemen (and in Flamininus), see Pelling 1997a, 137–​153; 300ff. 58. Cic. 24.6. 59. Plutarch explicity declares (Dem. 3.1–​2) that it is not his intention (nor is he able) to compare the two in terms of their oratorical skills. 60. Nic. 1.5. 61. Nietzsche 2010, 41–​42. I  discussed the connection between Plutarch and Nietzsche in Desideri 2016. 62. It is interesting to note that a great Greek contemporary intellectual, such as the orator Dio Chrysostom, who shared Plutarch’s constant use of the Greek past for argumentative purposes, displays a nearly complete ignorance of the Roman past. 63. See Desideri 2012c (= 1998a), 63–​68.

Chapter 21 1. On the reception of Lucian in general, see Baumbach 2002 and Robinson 1979. 2. LUKINOS: The Lapiths; Essays in Portraiture; Essays in Portraiture Defended; The Dance; Lexiphanes; The Eunuch; Hesiod; Hermotimus; The Ship; The Cynic. LUKIANOS: Verae Historiae; Peregrinus Proteus; The Solecist (probably inauthentic); Affairs of the Heart.

710   Notes LUKIUS: The Ass. THE SYRIAN: Dead Come to Life; Bis Accusatus; Adversus Indoctum; De Syria Dea; Mistaken Critic. 3. I use the word “Lucian” in this chapter to refer to both the author of the texts and the authorial persona within the text. 4. E.g., Dead Come to Life 19; Dionysus 5; Heracles; Zeus the Tragedian 8; Mistaken Critic 14–​29; Twice Accused 33; Ignorant Book Collector 19; Dream 8; Anacharsis 16; How to Write History 24; Dipsads; Herodotus 1; Zeuxis 12; Scythian 9; You are a Prometheus in Words 4. 5. Cf. Twice Accused 31 for a brilliant reworking of the preface of Dionysius of Halicarnassus’s Lives of the Orators. See below. 6. The Anacharsis of Lucian’s Anacharsis hews more closely to the Herodotean and Hellenistic models. 7. Cf. the remark of Apollonius of Tyana to his companion Damis about the absolute ethical behavior of the wise man whether or not he is among the Hellenes: “for the wise man, Hellas is everywhere” [VA 1.35]. 8. See the excellent analyses of both Kim 2010, 140–​174, and Ní Mheallaigh 2014, 206–​260. 9. Lucian speaks often of the importance of teachers:  for good philosophical training, see: Nigrinus, Demonax—​bad philosophical training is satirized in Runaways. For various perspectives on good and bad rhetorical training, see Teacher of Public Speaking, Lexiphanes, The Dream, The Mistaken Critic, Twice Accused. 10. See the critique of Helm in McCarthy 1934. 11. I’ve borrowed the Loeb’s evocative translation of these excessively archaic terms. 12. Jones 1986, 41, accepts Lucianic authorship but sees no satirical intent. 13. See Kim’s ­chapter 4, in this volume, about the tendency of Atticizers to distinguish their own diction from the “learned koinê” of the Hellenistic and early Imperial periods. 14. E.g., Gell NA 12.11: Philosophum nomine Peregrinum, cui postea cognomentum Proteus factum est, virum gravem atque constantem, vidimus, cum Athenis essemus, deversantem in quodam tugurio extra urbem. Cumque ad eum frequenter ventitaremus, multa hercle dicere eum utiliter et honeste audivimus. 15. non uideo quid mihi sit in ea re pudendum, haud minus quam Cyro maiori, quod genere mixto fuit Semimedus ac Semipersa. non enim ubi prognatus, sed ut moratus quisque sit spectandum, nec qua regione, sed qua ratione uitam uiuere inierit, considerandum est.

Chapter 23 1. Athenaeus: Hutton 2005, 254n49; Lucian: Lightfoot 2003, 218; Pollux: Hanell 1938, 1560; Philostratus: Dickey 1997, 11–​20; Athenagoras: Snodgrass 2003. 2. I would like to thank the editors of this volume for their many constructive suggestions for improvements to this chapter.

Chapter 24 1. On this point see Schöne 1917 and Richardson 1992, s.v. gymnasium Neronis. 2. Pausanias called a “sophist”: De anat. Admin. 3.1 (2.343K), De loc. aff. 3.14 (8.213K). Galen mentions Aristides in In Plat. Tim. comm. 33 Schröder. Note that Aristides refers to Galen’s teacher Satyrus as a “sophist of no humble birth” (Orat. 49.8).

Notes   711 3. Thessalus is attacked throughout Galen’s work but especially in the first book of On the Method of Healing. A commentary is available in Hankinson 1991 and a new translation of all of Meth. Med. in Johnston and Horsley 2011. 4. Home-​schooling:  De libr. propr. 14 (19.39–​40K); De an. aff. dign. et cur. 8 (5.41–​43K). Proper Greek: De puls. differ. 2.5 (8.587K); De ord. libr. suor. 4 (19.59K). 5. De an. aff. dign. et cur. 8.3 (5.41–​43K); De libr. propr. 14 (19.43K). 6. Nicon’s dreams:  De ord. libr. suor. 4 (19.59K); De meth. med. 9.4 (10.609K); and De praecogn. 2 (14.608K). 7. For a recent, sympathetic history of Methodism, Nutton 2004, chap. 13. Galen mentions Soranus several times, and one of his most entertaining stories recounts his own humiliation of Attalus, a student of Soranus: De meth. med. 13.15 (10.910K). 8. De anat. admin. 14.1, 230–​233 Simon; In Hipp. Nat. Hom. comment. 2.6, 15.136K. 9. For the story of the demonstration, De libr. propr. 2 (19.20–​23K); also De anat. admin. 4.10 (2.469–​70K). 10. The authenticity of Ther. Pis. is defended by Swain 1996, appendix D, and Nutton 1997, but doubted by Strohmeier 2007. Recent editors Leigh 2015, 19-​60, and Boudon-​Millot 2016, chap. 4, make thorough and convincing arguments against authenticity. 11. De praecogn. 1 (14.599–​605K), 2 (14.620–​624K); cf. De opt. med. cogn. 1 (46 Iskandar).

Chapter 25 1. Perry 1967, 108–​124, and, for example, the standard English introductions: Hägg 1983, 34, and Holzberg 1995. 2. P. Michaelidae 1 in Crawford 1955, 1–​4. 3. Papanikolaou 1973; but see now Hernández Lara 1990 and Ruiz-​Montero 1991. 4. Pers.1.134, on which see Tilg 2010, 69–​78. Persius is a notoriously opaque author, but the logic of the passage suggests to me that his Callirhoe is a slapstick comedy. 5. Philostr. VS 521–​526. The connection is made by Jones 1992; Bowie 2002 and Tilg 2010, 44–​46, are unduly skeptical. 6. 5.6.1–​10. See Doulamis 2011 for full analysis. 7. Philostr. Ep.66. 8. This is how the narrative begins:  “The Syracusan general Hermocrates, the man who defeated the Athenians, had a daughter called Callirhoe” (1.1.2, trans. Reardon) 9. On the “historical” setting see Hunter 1994; Reardon 1996, 325–​330; and on Callirhoe as historical novel, see Hägg 1987. 10. 1.1.1: “My name is Chariton, of Aphrodisias, and I am clerk to the attorney Athenagoras. I am going to tell you the story of a love affair that took place in Syracuse.” 11. On the construction of the narrator, see Morgan 2004. 12. Callirhoe is not an isolated case in this respect. The fragmentary novel known as Metiochus and Parthenope (translated in Reardon 1989, 813–​815) seems to have been engaged in a similar romantic elaboration of bare historical fact, this time based around the daughter of the tyrant Polycrates of Samos and the son of the Athenian general Miltiades. 13. Athens figures only in an episode where tomb robbers decide not to sell the heroine there because it is a city of busybodies and informers (1.11.4–​7). 14. Morgan 2007, and now, indispensably, Whitmarsh 2011, esp. 50–​58.

712   Notes 15. For full discussion of paideia in the novels as a marker of elite masculinity, see Jones 2012, 20–​91. 16. Tilg 2010, 24–​36, provides information on Aphrodisias; and 240–​297 argues for Chariton’s acquaintance with the Aeneid. 17. On this and the novel’s intertextuality in general, see Morgan 2008. 18. For the argument that the hearing reflects Roman legal practice, see Schwartz 2003. 19. So, for example, Xenophon of Ephesus is included in Hansen 1998. 20. The oralist case is argued forcefully by O’Sullivan 1995. 21. Argued at length by Tagliabue 2013. 22. See Capra 2009 for development of this idea. 23. Particularly striking are the sequences where the heroine is wrongly believed dead, buried, revives in the tomb, and is taken by tomb robbers. 24. For example, Doulamis 2007; De Temmerman 2014, 118–​123. 25. Details in Rife 2002. 26. The people of Tyre are characterized as “barbarians” who have never seen beauty such as that of the protagonists (2.2.4). 27. Achilles Tatius’s protagonist is a Greek-​speaking Tyrian. From the time of Alexander, the city could not really be described as “barbarian.” Antioch, of course, was a Seleucid foundation, and Xenophon’s description of Manto’s husband as a “Syrian from Antioch” suggests that he is using racial categories loosely. 28. The text is uncertain at this point.

Chapter 26 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

Morgan 2004, 1–​2. See, e.g., Plepelits 1980. A convenient summary of the evidence in Bowie and Harrison 1993, 160–​161 For a different view, see Morgan, ­chapter 25 of this volume. See especially Goldhill 1995. (a) Cleitophon, in love with Leucippe, is betrothed to Calligone, his half-​sister. She is mistakenly abducted by Callisthenes, thinking she is Leucippe; (b) Cleitophon, pledged to Leucippe, is “courted” by the Ephesian “widow” Melite in Alexandria and marries her after Leucippe “dies” the second and seemingly final time at sea, but does not initially consummate the union. (c) Thersandros (villain) married to Melite, but presumed dead in a shipwreck, “courts” Leucippe, now a slave on his estate, when both he and she separately reappear alive in Ephesus. 7. Alvares 2006. There are some inevitable overlaps between his essay and mine, but essentially, we go in quite different directions. 8. Morales 2004 9. See Martin 2002, and Zeitlin 1990 and 2012. 10. On the Phaedrus in second-​century literature, see Trapp 1990 and more specifically, see Hunter 1997, Martin 2002, and Morgan 2004. 11. The wily slave, Satyros, also gives timely advice to Cleitophon to further his seduction of Leucippe. 12. For Longus, see especially Chalk 1960 on Eros; also Morgan 2004, 8–​10 on both divinities. Morgan supports the idea of a higher spiritual level to the story but rightly rejects

Notes   713 Merkelbach’s 1988 insistence that D&C “is a cultic text, encoding initiation rituals of the Dionysiac religion.” For Achilles Tatius, see Segal 1984 on the differing roles of Aphrodite and Artemis, and Bouffartigue 2001 on the differences between Aphrodite and Eros in the text; for the parodistic language of the mysteries as a means of seduction, see Zeitlin 2008. 13. The couple fall in love in the spring, learn about Eros from Philetas in the autumn. Winter enforces a long separation, broken by a single reunion, but the next spring brings about Daphnis’ education in sex from the city woman, Lycaenion, followed by a second summer, and, coinciding with the vintage of the second autumn, the novel reaches its climax in the final dénouement. 14. Note that the primary coup de foudre is not shared by both partners. In both works the visual sight of beauty is the initial stimulus to erotic longing, although the genders are reversed. In Longus, it is Chloe who first feels the pangs of desire for Daphnis when she sees him as he bathes; Cleitophon, on the other hand, is the one smitten with an instant passion in Achilles Tatius at his first glimpse of Leucippe, and who then immediately sets out to woo her. 15. See Konstan 1994 on this distinction. 16. Morgan 2004, 3. 17. Rohde 1914, 549; translated from the German. 18. Notably, Euripides’s Iphigenia in Tauris at 8.1–​2 and Aristophanes at 8.9. 19. For the numerous other references to narrative as muthos in the last book of Achilles Tatius and their import, see Núñez 2008, 331n41. 20. See e.g., Briand 2006 for further discussion. 21. Brethes 2007. 22. Morgan 1996, 179. 23. Whitmarsh 2011, 97. 24. Whitmarsh 2003, 214. 25. Graphê means both “writing” and “painting.” 26. Zeitlin 1990, 435. 27. Zeitlin 1990, 435–​436. 28. Zeitlin 2012, 110. 29. It was their father who demanded this marriage. Cleitophon had already fallen in love with Leucippe and was faced with a bitter choice between his beloved and the demands of filial piety. Half-​siblings of a different mother were allowed to wed. 30. Morgan 1996, 186. 31. Whitmarsh 2011, 8. 32. Notably, Foucault 1988 and Konstan 1994. 33. Whitmarsh 2011, 11, and for a convenient discussion of the diverse opinions, see 6–​10, as well as introduction in Swain 1999, 12–​35. 34. Perkins 1995, 54. 35. See especially Lalanne 2006 and Bierl 2009. 36. See Pecere and Stramaglia 1996, who argue for a “literature of consumption” produced for people sufficiently literate to enjoy entertainment, as quoted in Johnson and Parker 2009, 355. 37. E.g., Konstan 1994, 226–​229. 38. Whitmarsh 2011, 255. 39. See most recently, Zeitlin 2016.

714   Notes

Chapter 27 1. I have discussed the problematics of the term “ancient novel” in Selden 1994; see further Goldhill 2008; Whitmarsh 2005a. Here, I  use the terms “novel” and “romance” interchangeably in the sense of роман as Mikhail Bakhtin defines it in Bakhtin 1975, 408–​446 (“Iz predistorii romannogo slova”). 2. Anderson 1993, 25. 3. See in primis López Martínez 1998. 4. Cf. Anderson 1993, 156–​170. 5. See Shklovskii 1983. 6. For a brief overview, see also Whitmarsh 2005b, 86–​89. 7. Jouanno 2002; Stoneman 2008; Selden 2010b. 8. On súnkrisis/​sunkrίnein, see Focke 1923. 9. Philostratus, VS 486–​488. 10. For a general overview, see Jones 1978. 11. See Fein 1994. 12. Cohoon and Lamar 1932–​1951, 1:2–​4. See Moles 1990. 13. See Blass, Kühner, and Gerth 1890–​1904, 2:264–​281. 14. See Hall 1989; Vlassopoulos 2013; Woolf 2011. 15. Anderson 1993, 51. 16. Derrida 1967, 1972. 17. Hall 1989, 5. Perhaps an overstatement: consider, in this period alone, Coptic, Hebrew, and Arabic. 18. Bologna 1978, 305. 19. Monier-​Williams 2011, s.v. 20. For a comprehensive overview, see Swain 1998. See also Bowie 1970; Romeo 2002; Whitmarsh 2001a. 21. Euripides, IA 1400. See Beekes 2010, 1:408; Chantraine 1968, 1:336–​337. 22. Aristotle, Pol. 1252b9. 23. For an overview, see Christidis 2007, 383–​ 518; Colvin 2007; Horrocks 2014, 7–​ 42; Schmitt 1977. 24. See Anson 2009, 10–​11. 25. See Hall 2005. 26. Aristid., Or. 1.15 (Lenz-​Behr). 27. Aristid., Or. 1.327–​328; trans. Anderson 1993, 86, condensed and modified. Cf. Whitmarsh 2004a, 144–​146. 28. For details regarding Atticism and its place in Imperial Greek culture, see Kim, ­chapter 4 in this volume. 29. See IG2 236. 30. Bakhtin 1981, 336, et passim. 31. On the accidence and syntax of Greek dialects, see Bonino 1898. 32. Ach. 100; see Willi 2004. 33. See Ach. 719–​954 (Megarian, Boeotian); Lys. 82ff. (Laconian). See Colvin 1995, 1999, 2000. 34. Jakobson 1987, 41: “The dominant may be defined as the focusing component of the work of art: it rules, determines, and transforms the remaining components. It is the dominant which guarantees the integrity of the structure.” 35. Callim. fr. 203.18 (Pfeiffer).

Notes   715 36. See Hawkins 2012. 37. Cf. Acosta-​Hughes 2002, 60–​103; Hunter 1997; Kerkhecker 1999, 250–​270; Selden 1998. 38. See Carney 2013, 100–​101. See Gow 1952, 2:290 on πλατειάσδοισαι. 39. On Hellenistic Doric, see Horrocks 2014, 87–​89. 40. Bakhtin 1986, 60–​102. 41. Carey 1986; Hawkins 2008. Cf. Anth. Pal. 7.351. 42. See Cavarzere, Aloni, and Barchiesi 2001; Hunter 1996a, 1996b, 1997; Rotstein 2010. 43. See West 1967. 44. Cf. Hes., Cat. fr. 4; Hdt. 1.6. 45. Asper 2011. 46. Krevans 2011; cf. Selden 1998. 47. On the invention of “Greece,” see Whitmarsh 2004a, 161–​176. 48. Pace Whitmarsh 2004a, 106–​158. 49. On metalepsis in classical literature, see Eisen and von Möllendorff 2013. 50. On Dio’s displaced politics, see Salmeri 2000. See also Pernot 1997. 51. Canfora 2013. 52. Freud 1915 and 1919. Cf. Billig 1999; Bloom 1980. 53. So Aelius Aristides Keil 2, 99. At its height, the Haxāmanišiyan Empire covered 3.08 million square miles. 54. See Dignas and Winter 2001; Graham 2013. 55. On the various recensions of the Alexander Romance, see Jouanno 2002; Merkelbach 1977. 56. See Manetho, fr. 74 (Waddell). 57. Cf. Pyramid Texts, Utterance 220: jw=f ḫr=t_ wr.t ḥkȝ.w. 58. See Assmann 2006. 59. See Karenga 2004 60. See Ritner 1997; cf. Meyer and Mirecki 1995, 29–​60. 61. Coffin Texts, Spell 261. Abridged. 62. Parker 2005, 122. 63. See Selden 1994. Cf. Stephens 2003. Within Egypt, it is not possible to correlate ethnicity with language use; see Goudriaan 1988. In fact, just as Hellenes accepted as Greek anyone who could speak Greek and adopted Greek customs, so too the Egyptians counted as Egyptian anyone who could speak their language and adopted Egyptian customs. 64. On classical Greek views of Egyptians, see Froidefond 1971; Vasunia 2001. 65. Stoneman 2007, 124–​126. 66. See Whitmarsh 2001a; the viewpoint goes back to the early Ptolemaic period—​see Thalmann 2011, 53–​75. 67. It is possible that the entire passage comes from a demotic Egyptian source; see Jasnow 1997. Cf. Rutherford 1997. 68. See Riggs 2012, 493–​596. 69. See, for example, Selden 2014a, 2014b. 70. Gardiner 1938. 71. See Dieleman 2005; Riggs 2012, 493–​596. 72. Whitmarsh 2005b, 43. 73. Bubenik 2007, 633. 74. See McGready 1968; Renberg and Naether 2010. 75. Christidis 2007, 618–​653. See further Abel 1927; Blass 2001; Colvin 2009; Robertson 1934. 76. Siegel 1985. See also Brixhe 1987 and 2010; Georgakopoulou and Silk 2009; Meshtrie 1994.

716   Notes 77. For example, the Egyptian doctrine of Kȝ-​mw.t=f; see Redford 2002, s.v. Kamutef; Brunner 1986. 78. See Hunter 1996a, 167–​195. 79. Cf. Selden 2010a. 80. Whitmarsh 2005b, 43. 81. See Johnson 1992. 82. Johnson 2000. Cf. Thissen 1984. 83. For a concise overview, see Torallas Tovar 2010. See also the other papers in Papaconstantinou 2010. 84. Jasnow 1997. 85. Cf. Conybeare and Stock 2001; Fernández Marcos 2009; Jobes and Silva 2000. 86. See Hoffmeier 1999, 199–​222. 87. See Bohak 2008. 88. See Layton 1987; Segal 2002. 89. Bakhtin 1986, 60–​102. 90. See Stephens 2003, 64–​73. 91. On this theme in general, see Doniger 2000. On Indo-​European notions of fatherhood vs. paternity, see Benveniste 1969, 1:205. 92. Anderson 1993, 53: “Alexander is a symbolic figure for the Sophistic.” 93. See Bourdieu 1983. 94. Stoneman 2007, 303–​307. 95. Aristid. Or. 1.9 (Lenz-​Behr). 96. Thiel 1974, 40 97. Plut. Vit. Caes. 61. 98. See Selden 2012, 31–​32. Cf. Whitmarsh 2010. 99. See Dem. Olynthiacs 3.24, which characterizes Macedonians as barbaroi. 100. Stoneman 2007, 144–​146. 101. Cf. Deleuze 1968. 102. On “representational space,” see Lefebvre 1974. 103. Text: Braccini 2004. 104. The translation of the choliambs, much condensed, follows Stoneman 1991, 81–​82. 105. For the rationale of saving Pindar, see Dio 2.33. 106. Cf. Od. book 9. 107. See McDonald and Walton 2007. 108. Zeitlin 1992, 144–​145. 109. Cf. Freud 1914. 110. See Demand 1983. 111. See Cavarzere, Aloni, and Barchiesi 2001; Rotstein 2010. 112. See, for example, Philostr. VS 488 on Dio of Prusa. 113. E.g., eklόkheuma, apokuéō, neognόs, tephrόō. 114. Anderson 1993, 55–​68. 115. See Bakhtin 1975, 447–​483 (“Ĕpos i roman”). 116. Bakhtin 1975, 408–​446 (“Iz predistorii romannogo slova”). 117. Cf. Rochette 1997. 118. See Hansen 1998; Strobel 2009. 119. See Bakhtin 1975, 72–​233 (“Slovo v romane”). 120. Bakhtin 1981, 270–​272.

Notes   717 121. See Swain 1998. 122. Perry 1964, 70. 123. Austin 1975. 124. Valesio 1980, 59–​60. 125. Demetr. Eloc. 103, 264; Plut. Quaest. Plat. 1009e; Hermog. Id. 2.7; Lausberg 1998, §887–​889. 126. See Gleason 1995. 127. On Hadrian’s relationship to the Second Sophistic, see Whitmarsh 2004b. 128. See Men. Rhet. §368–​377.30 (ed. Russell and Wilson); Lib., Oratio 59. 129. See, for example, Cass. Dio, Roman History 68.4 130. Cf. Proverbs 27:1: Μὴ καυχῶ τὰ εἰς αὔριον, οὐ γὰρ γινώσκεις τί τέξεται ἡ ἐπιοῦσα. 131. Perry 1964, 108–​160; Cf. Heide 2014. 132. Cf. Qoheleth 3:1–​9: Letter of Aristeas 187ff. Lambert 1960; Simpson 2003, 125–​243. 133. See Papademetriou 1978. 134. See Gains 1974; Mason 1994. 135. Text: Burchard 2003. 136. Philonenko 1968, 1–​52; for dating, see Kraemer 1998. 137. Selden 2010b; Selden 2014b. 138. See Kraemer 2008. 139. Ward 1982, no. 850. 140. The elder son died earlier in the course of trying to rape Aseneth. 141. Iser 1976. Genesis 41:45:  καὶ ἐκάλεσεν Φαραω τὸ ὄνομα Ιωσηφ Ψονθομφανηχ· καὶ ἔδωκεν αὐτῷ τὴν Ασεννεθ θυγατέρα Πετεφρη ἱερέως Ἡλίου πόλεως αὐτῷ γυναῖκα. 142. Fried 2011. 143. Weber 1956, 2/​2: 300. 144. Nickelsburg 1981. 145. Bourdieu 1993; Cassirer 1910. 146. Cavafy 1990, 35; translation: Dalven 1959, 19. 147. Hall 2002; Lévi-​Strauss 1962. 148. See Selden 1998. 149. Wyrick 2005.

Chapter 28 1. It might go back to the sophist Hippias, who wrote a work entitled Συναγωγή (DK 86B6), probably a kind of miscellany or anthology (also characterized as an “encyclopaedia”: see K. A. Morgan 2004, 95–​96. 2. Frs. 32–​93 Barigazzi. 3. Philostr. VS 1.489–​492 (Favorinus); 2.624–​625 (Aelian). 4. Harrison 2000; Oikonomopoulou 2013a. 5. Fr. 179 Sandbach. The work is considered spurious. 6. NA pref. 6–​10. See Holford-​Strevens 2003, 30–​47; Vardi 2004, 159–​165. 7. Vardi 2004, 179–​186. 8. Jacob 2001 and 2013, 31–​39, 95–​107; Lukinovich and Morand 2004, xxi–​xxv; Wilkins 2000.

718   Notes 9. Mittell 2001, 7. 10. On the reading culture of the high Roman Empire, see Johnson 2010. 11. Goldhill 2009. 12. Gellius’s Attic Nights is the only miscellany that includes a table of contents (see pref. 25). Cf. Doody 2010, 1–​10, 92–​131, on Pliny the Elder. 13. Phot. Bibl. Cod. 175, 119b, ll. 31–​33. 14. Smith 2014, 47–​66. 15. Lennox 2010; Louis 1964, xx–​xxxiii. 16. On Pliny’s structure, see Murphy 2004, 29–​48. On the not so clear-​cut boundaries between miscellanies and encyclopedias, see König and Woolf 2013, 52–​58. 17. VS 1.496, 528; 2.573, 590. 18. Fairweather 1981, 125–​126. 19. 1. pref. 1. 20. All translations from ancient texts in this chapter are my own, but the Loeb translations were consulted throughout. On Gellius’s preface, see Holford-​Strevens 2003, 30–​36; Vardi 2004, 165–​179. 21. On the different roles assumed by “Plutarch” (the narrator) within the Quaest. conv., see König 2011. 22. Heusch 2011, 49–​301; Jacob 2000 and 2013, 75–​83; Johnson 2010, 118–​120; König 2012, 30–​120; Oikonomopoulou 2011; Too 2000. 23. See Deip. 10.411b and 10.459c, with the notes in Olson (2006–​2012), respectively. 24. Lukinovich 1990. On the (tense) relationship between food and conversation within the work, see Romeri 2000 and 2002, 253–​290. 25. Maisonneuve 2007, 402–​403. 26. On the work’s narrative structure, see Jacob 2013, 9–​12, 27–​30; Rodríguez-​Noriega Guillén 2000. 27. Jacob 2000 and 2013, 55–​69; Too 2000. 28. Romeri 2000 and 2002, 253–​290. 29. Jacob 2000 and 2013, 71–​83; Thompson 2000. 30. Cf. Quaest. conv. 5.7, 680C–​D. 31. See Quaest. conv. 8.10, 734C–​E, and Oikonomopoulou 2011, 108–​112. 32. Cf. Quaest. conv. 5.3, 676C–​F. See Eshleman 2013; Frazier 2000; Horster 2008. 33. Vardi 2001. 34. NA pref. 11. See also 9.4, 14.6. 35. Beall 2004, 214–​215; Heusch 2011, 372–​373; Keulen 2004, 236–​239. 36. Beall 2004, 206–​215. 37. Holford-​Strevens 2003, 36–​47. 38. Smith 2014, 11–​13. 39. Smith 2014, 13–​16. 40. 3.83b (Juba); 7.324b (Archestratus of Gela); 3.126b (Nicander of Colophon); 13.565a (Chrysippus); 9.398e, 11.505c, 15.692b, 15.696a (Aristotle). 41. See, e.g., Gellius, 11.17, and also Johnson 2009 and 2010, 120–​130, on social occasions where the reading of texts takes place in Gellius. 42. Smith 2014. Cf. Murphy 2004, 6–​11. 43. On Roman imperial cosmopolitanism, see Edwards and Woolf 2003; Richter 2011, 7–​9, 135–​206. 44. König 2012, 26–​27.

Notes   719 45. See König 2012, 103–​119, and also 52–​59 (on the Bakhtinian concept of polyphony, and its applicability to the texts of Plutarch and, especially, Athenaeus). See also Oikonomopoulou 2013b. 46. Smith 2014, 67–​99. 47. See note 2 above. Also, Holford-​Strevens 2003, 98–​130 (on the role of Favorinus in the Attic Nights). 48. Cf. Meier 2004.

Chapter 29 1. Cameron 2004, 27–​32 contains a relatively full list of systematic mythographical works from the early imperial period. 2. For the text see the recent editions of Cuartero I Iborra 2010–​2012 and Papathomopoulos 2010 (the latter not, however, rendering Wagner 1926 obsolete). 3. The closest example is Hyginus, whose first-​century ce Fabulae as we currently possess them are a rather degraded and incomplete reworking of an original collection called the Genealogiae made at least two centuries later. There is no indication, however, despite his title, that Hyginus produced as complete or as coherently connected a mythical narrative as that which we find in the Bibliotheca. Though a Latin work, the Fabulae will occasionally be adduced in the following discussion as an example of “typical” mythography. 4. This is the widely accepted date for the allegorist, but it is by no means secure. 5. In the same way I would normally suppress the fact that I used Google to remind myself of the date of Dio’s Olympicus.

Chapter 30 1. This chapter does not distinguish between more “philosophical” strains of rhetoric (like Plutarch and Dio) and those of sophists like Lucian and Aristides, a distinction that may be meaningful in other contexts. My focus, as will become clear, is on texts that announce themselves as part of the historical, truth-​telling tradition as opposed to those that do not. 2. In Bowie 1974, which continues to be the main starting-​point for discussing this body of literature. 3. Sidebottom 2007. 4. Declamation was not precisely a “background” to written texts except in the sense that it would have been part of each sophists’ pedagogical training; the writings of Dio Chrysostom, Plutarch, Lucian, and Aristides, for example, seem to present a mixture of speeches that were performed and those that were not, but we cannot even be sure that any “performance” text we possess was delivered in the form in which we have received it (Russell 1983, 15). 5. I further explain my use of the word “hybrid” in section 30.2, “Greek”/​“Roman,” below. 6. What Bubenik (2007, 345) calls the final stage in the development of koinê: the “nativized.” 7. A variety of other figures who write in Greek could also fit into this broader defnition of Second Sophistic: for example, Galen, who rejects Greek while wanting to show competence in it (Swain 1996, 60), and the Flavian Josephus, whose Atticism has long been recognized (Mason 2005, 75–​76; see also Redondo 2000), and who has been included in

720   Notes Second Sophistic scholarship, e.g., Gleason 2001. Then there are native Italian writers like Aelian and the lost Asinius Quadratus (BNJ 97), who write in Attic Greek. 8. According to Aulus Gellius NA 5.18, Verrius Flaccus thought that ἱστορία in Greek referred to knowledge of current events (and thus was to be distinguished from annales), which suited Cassius Dio and Herodian at any rate. 9. ἱστορία: App. Preface 1; Cass. Dio 37.17; Herodian 1.1.3. συγγράφω and συγγραφή: Arr. Anab. Preface infra; Indika 17 (with additional references to the Alexander-​history as συγγραφή at Indika 19, 21, 23, 26 and 40); Cass. Dio Preface. Arrian’s other main model, Xenophon, uses neither ἱστορία nor συγγραφή to describe his own work. 10. Schmitz 2011, 305–​306 notes the proliferation of inscriptions and coins that celebrated men of the elite explicitly as sophistai and rhetores, and sarcophogi emphasizing their paideia, as well as Atticist lexica and rhetorical handbooks that “demonstrate the growing pressure for all members of the upper classes to acquire and display competence in linguistic classicism.” See also Borg 2004. 11. Momigliano 1978, 1. See especially Woodman 1988, 70–​116 for Cicero’s theory on historiography and its subsumption into rhetoric. This need not imply a lack of regard for truth, however: as Laird 2009, 199–​200 points out, Cicero says in De Legibus 1.5 that in history “everything is directed towards truth” (ad veritatem referantur). 12. A historiography “modeled after Newtonian physics, mechanistic, deterministic, prognostic, and deduced from the laws of human nature,” which was further claimed by “scientistic strands of Marxism . . . claiming that Marx was the Newton of historiography, who founded a deterministic prognostic science of historiography deducible from the economic laws of dialectical materialism” (Tucker 2004, 210–​211). 13. Pioneered by Hayden White in the early 1970s. For a recent assessment of White’s thought and impact see Doran 2013. 14. Ameling 1997, 2476; Momigliano 1978, 9. 15. Murray 1897, 186. 16. For Thucydides’s use in imperial rhetorical education, see Iglesias-​Zoido 2012. 17. For another interpretation of the Abdera scene, see Möllendorff 2001. 18. For discussion on the possible existence or nonexistence of each named author, see now the commentaries on Antiochianos (BNJ 207), Crepereius Calpurnianus (BNJ 208), Demetrios of Sagalassos (BNJ 209), and Kallimorphos (BNJ 210). 19. On Lucian’s parody of the “rhetoric of numbers,” see Greenwood 2006, 121–​124 with discussion of Catherine Rubincam’s fundamental work on the rhetoric of numbers in antiquity (1979; 1991; 2003). 20. Translations of Lucian, Arrian, Appian, Cassius Dio, and Herodian are modified from Loeb. 21. Appian does not connect truthfulness and rhetoric in an explicit way. In Preface 12 he creates an impression of truthfulness through labor, explaining the way he worked on different “national” stories before bringing it all together: “Being interested in it, and desiring to compare the Roman prowess carefully with that of every other nation, my history has often led me from Carthage to Spain . . . at last I have brought the parts together.” But certainly a rhetorical force is contained in the overall structure of the preface, which over the course of eight Loeb pages’ worth of Greek overwhelms the reader with a “mini-​periegesis” (Woolf 2011, 97) of the Mediterranean and the history of Rome’s conquests. 22. On Herodian and Thucydides, see Stein 1957.

Notes   721 23. This is also reflected literally in Lucian’s final image of the Pharos lighthouse, whose architect wrote his name on the base, covered it with gypsum on which the name of the reigning king was inscribed, and only later gained fame when water washed away the king’s name to reveal his own. 24. Price 2015 highlights Appian’s truth-​claim about the Roman empire: it was uniquely able to overcome the stasis that normally destroyed a state. 25. Josephus (J.A. 1 pr.) is more explicit than our Antonine and Severan authors on the importance of truth-​telling to historiography. He gives four reasons that people undertake history-​writing. Some wish to show their rhetorical skill; others wish top gratify those about whom they are writing; Josephus counts himself among the third and fourth types who are driven to write history out of concern for the facts and for the sake of bringing such facts out into the open for the purpose of public edification. (Noted by Price 2015, 45 in connection with Appian.) 26. Habinek 2005, 50, for example, stresses the “limitless possibilities of language” found in handbook treatments of rhetorical style. 27. “It is not that the rhetorician has carte blanche to lie. Rather, society grants him a licence to create. The truth he speaks is not the truth of empirical science but the truth of art. His goal is not to reflect but to create, and to create something socially significant” (Habinek 2005, 53). 28. Also, our historians’ chariness concerning their future reputations has not been wholly justified by their fates: the Byzantines, for example, saw Polybius and Herodian as their models, not Thucydides, and Arrian is still considered the most reliable of the Alexander-​historians. 29. Whitmarsh 2007, 29–​30. 30. Mehl 2001. 31. See Eshleman 2008. 32. Acknowledging that there is no stable definition or way to characterize this “movement” of the Second Sophistic, Schmitz 2011, 305 provides the following limiting definition of the Second Sophistic as “a cultural movement that gained particular prominence in the second and third centuries ad, and that was characterized by linguistic classicism, improvised declamations on historical and judicial topics, and professional performers who would often come from the highest echelons of society in the eastern half of the Roman Empire.” 33. Swain 1996, 33–​42; the subtitle of Whitmarsh’s 2001 monograph Greek Literature and Roman Empire. 34. Lost are a History of Affairs after Alexander, a History of Parthia, and a History of Bithynia. Lucian also mocks Arrian for writing a biography of the brigand Tillobarus, but this may refer to something contained in the Bithynica itself. See J. Radicke’s commentary on FGrH 1069 F 52 (Lucian, Alexander 2). 35. Bosworth 1993, 272. 36. Bosworth 1980, 35–​ 36. For Thucydides’s influence in Arrian, see Tonnet 1988; for Herodotus’s, see Grundmann 1885. 37. Bosworth 1993, 226. 38. See especially Stadter 1981. 39. For the reception of Homer in the Second Sophistic, see Kim 2010. 40. Bosworth 1980, 25.

722   Notes 41. Note that the distinction between an “Ionic” Indika and an “Attic” Anabasis, which itself shows a heavy Ionic strain, can be overplayed (see, for example, Brunt 1976, xiv). 42. This can go beyond literary references: see Müller 2014 on Arrian’s eagerness to show his knowledge of Greek visual arts in the Periplus and the Anabasis. 43. As I have argued elsewhere, e.g., in Asirvatham 2005 and 2008, 113–​114. By “Roman interest” I am referring to the imitatio Alexandri of Roman strongmen, not Latin writers, who were largely negative toward Alexander (see especially Spencer 2009). 44. Leon-​Ruíz 2012, 179. Bosworth 1980, 8–​11 argues for an early date based on Arrian’s apparent unfamiliarity in the Anabasis with, for example, Cappadocia (where he was legate in 131/​132), with which he shows familiarity elsewhere. For partial support of Bosworth’s evidence and a dating in around the 120s, as well as a general discussion of the problem of dating the Anabasis, see Leon 2012, appendix 1. Appian’s borrowings from Arrian have been used to help date the latter, but as Brodersen 1988, 461 notes, we do not need Appian for Arrian’s dating. 45. Bowden 2013; Carlsen 2014. 46. Brunt 1976, ix. 47. Bucher 2000 is excellent on the program and structure of Appian’s work. The structure appears to have been as follows: the initial preface and book 1 deal with the Roman era of the kings, after which there are twenty-​three books, each dealing with a chapter of Rome’s conquest of the known world (book 2: central Italy; book 3: Samnites; book 4: Gauls; book 5: Sicilians; book 6: Iberians; book 7: Hannibal (Second Punic War); book 8: Carthaginians, with an appendix on the Numidians; book 9: Macedonians, with an appendix on the Illyrians; book 10; Greece and Ionia; book 11: Seleucids, with an appendix on the Parthian Wars; book 12:  Mithridates; books 13–​17:  Civil Wars; books 18–​ 21: Egyptian Wars). Photius calls book 22 “the hundred years”; book 23 the Dacian book, and book 24 the Arabian book, with the implication that the last two were about Trajan. We have books 1–​5 only in fragmentary form, and 18–​24 are lost; extant are the preface, books 6–​9 (without the book 8 appendix on the Numidians; book 9 on the Macedonians is fragmentary), and books 11–​17 (without the book 11 appendix on the Parthians, which may have been unfinished). 48. Most have at any rate affirmed some degree of borrowing from Arrian (see, e.g., Brodersen 1988; Reuss, 1899). 49. Strebel 1935; see also Pitcher 2011, 759–​760. 50. Woolf 2011, 95–​98. 51. Gowing 1992, 279. 52. Bucher 2000 argues that Appian was writing for an Alexandrian audience who knew little of Roman history, which explains his penchant for treating Roman customs as foreign ones. 53. Hering 1935. Norden (1898) does not include Appian in the category of “free” Atticism alongside Arrian and Cassius Dio (1:344–​407); the alternative category is “strict” Atticism, which belongs to writers like Aristides; for the Latin/​Greek bilingualism of Appian and other sophists, see 1:363. 54. Richter 2011, 148–151. On Syrians and Rome in general, see Andrade 2013. 55. The evidence suggests that he wrote his work under Antoninus Pius (138–​161) and Marcus Aurelius (161–​180). Fronto’s letter to Antoninus Pius recommending Appian for a procuratorship provides the terminus post quem, since Appian mentions it in his preface. Appian states in book 13.38 (the first book of the Civil Wars) that Hadrian’s policy of having some

Notes   723 parts of Italy ruled by a proconsul did not last long, but he does not mention that it was reinstated by Marcus Aurelius, which means he wrote this section in 166 at the latest). See Bucher 2000, 415–​416. 56. The distinction between Antonine (avoiding contemporary history) and Severan historiography has been argued most strongly by Kemezis 2010. 57. Millar 1964, 39–​40. 58. For a survey of Severan literature, see Whitmarsh 2007. 59. Bibliotheca 71. On the influence of Thucydides on Dio, see Litsch 1893 and Kyhnitzsch 1894. 60. More Roman than Greek: Gabba 1959, 378; (more subtly) Kemezis 2014, 27–​28; Palm 1959, 81–​82. Culturally Greek, politically Roman: Millar 1964, 191; Swain 1996, 404–​405. 61. Kemezis 2014, 18. 62. Cass. Dio Roman History 55.12. 63. Cass. Dio Roman History 72.35. 64. This is not to say that these comments do not reflect the reality of the emperors’ educations; the contrast I am interested in between Cassius Dio and writers like Plutarch and Dio Chrysostom, for whom paideia is definitively Greek, and who only on the basis of its Greekness appreciate an emperor’s paideia. 65. Philostratus said that Aelian spoke Attic like a native: VS 2.31. 66. Initially by Alföldy 1971a, 430; also Kolb 1972, 161. Cf. Bowersock 1975, who describes Herodian’s treatment of Elagabalus as more sober than Dio’s. 67. On the relationship between encomium and Herodian (and others before him), see Zimmerman 1999.

Chapter 32 1. I am grateful to Aldo Tagliabue for helpful comments on a draft of this chapter. 2. See Casevitz 2002, 248: epistolography in the second century ce has become “un genre à la mode.” More specifically, Schmitz 2004, 87: “Fictional letters were one of the favorite genres of the first centuries ce; about thirty such collections have been transmitted to us.” Cf. Rosenmeyer 2006, 7, 29–​30. Hercher’s huge edition (1873) contains most Greek letters surviving by literary transmission from all of antiquity. 3. On M. Aurelius’s correspondence with Fronto, see ­chapter 16 in this volume. 4. See Hodkinson and Rosenmeyer 2013, 1–​3 on the history and reasons for this. 5. Holzberg 1994b, 51; cf. Hodkinson 2012, 51–​53 for a further example (Alciphron). 6. Holzberg 1994a; Rosenmeyer 1994; 2001, 234–​252. On letters as/​and biography, see Trapp 2006; Gibson 2012, 2013, with note 46 below; on letter collections as narratives or epistolary novels, Morrison 2014. 7. Anderson 1997. 8. See Hodkinson 2007a, 283–​288; Hodkinson and Rosenmeyer 2013, 27–​30. 9. See, e.g., Smith 1990, 35–​41 in detail on the transmission of [Hippocrates’s] Epp. through epistolary collections as well as attached to the Hippocratic corpus from at least the first century ce. 10. On the Latin (and some Greek) letters between Fronto and M. Aurelius, see ­chapter 16 in this volume. 11. For a survey of Greek and Latin epistolography on erotic themes, including some comparison between the two traditions, see now Hodkinson 2014.

724   Notes 12. On the Heroides in connection with Greek (but not Second Sophistic) epistolography, see Rosenmeyer 1996; in general, see especially Lindheim 2003; Rosenmeyer 1997; Spentzou 2003. 13. On these aspects of Pliny’s letters, see especially Marchesi 2008; Gibson and Morello 2012. 14. On “letter books” as units of composition as opposed to the usual, indiscriminately applied “collections,” see Hodkinson 2007a, 283–​288. 15. On this question in general, see Rochette 1997, arguing very plausibly for more influence of Latin on Greek authors than is usually accepted. When it comes to the late antique (fifth century ce?) fictional epistolographer Aristaenetus, scholars are more ready to see allusions to Ovid: see Drago 2007, 36–​77 and index locorum for passages of Ovid discussed in commentary. There is a slowly growing trend in scholarship on imperial Greek literature to be more willing to see Greek authors alluding to Roman ones (a very convincing case is Hubbard 2011), but this has yet to be explored in any detail in relation to Greek epistolary literature of the Second Sophistic. 16. In Benner and Fobes 1949. 17. See Hodkinson 2013a, 273–274. Cf. Alciphron 3.24.2, 2.34.1, with Schmitz 2004, 98–​101 for (somewhat less overt) self-​consciousness, including about the “surprisingly” good Attic of his lowly characters. On Aelian’s Atticism, see Schmid 1887–​1897, vol. 3. 18. Summarized by Hunter 1983, 6–​15; Anderson 1997, 2194–​2199; the most recent contribution to the debate, Drago 2013b, is more cautious on the connections between Ael. and Alciphr. 19. See Benner and Fobes 1949, 344–​345. 20. Hodkinson 2013a; Smith 2014 (still arguing for an early date, but not thereby dismissing the Epp.). 21. Anderson 1997, 2203 describes Alciphron’s Epp. as “miniature meletai”; cf. Schmitz 2004, 90–​91; Malosse 2005; see now Ureña Bracero 2013 and Vox 2013b. 22. Schmitz 2004, 90; cf. 98–​104 on their self-​consciousness. 23. Hodkinson 2007a; König 2007; Rosenmeyer 2001, 255–​321. 24. See Whitmarsh 2005, 54–​56, 87–​89. 25. See Schmitz 2004, 89–​93, 100–​102 for Atticism and the classical period; Biraud 2010, Hodkinson 2012 on pastoral; cf. Drago 2013a on pastoral in Aelian. Note here also another common tendency of the Second Sophistic employed by both Alciphron and Aelian: turning poetic genres to prose forms. Benner and Fobes’s (1949) notes on the texts of Alciphron and Aelian throughout indicate metrical clausulae which might indicate lines appropriated from New Comedy, but also are a feature of artistic prose in the Second Sophistic; cf. in general Norden 1898; Biraud 2010, 2012 for a new approach to Alciphron’s “prose poems” using stress accent instead of quantity-​based rhythms. 26. Brethes 2007; Funke 2012; Hodkinson 2012; Höschele 2014. 27. See Thyresson 1964 on the source; Hodkinson 2007a, 293–​297 on the particularly epistolary adaptation. On New Comedy in imperial Greek epistolography, see now Drago 2014, and Funke 2016, Marshall 2016. 28. Hodkinson 2012, 51–​52. The order of letters and arrangement into books is not certainly by Alciphron, but both have their logic (see Schmitz 2004, 88–​89; Hodkinson 2012, n.49); Epp. 4.18–​19 anyway stand out in length compared to the remainder. 29. See Schmitz 2004, 89. 30. See McClure’s (2003) study of Athenaeus 13, with her index, s.v. Alciphron, for extensive points of comparison between the two.

Notes   725 31. Rosenmeyer 2001, 298–​307. 32. On Philostratus’s major works, see chapter 18 in this volume. 33. E.g., Anderson 1986, 273–​277; Goldhill 2009. On Philostratus’s Atticism, see Schmid 1887–​ 1897, vol. 4. 34. See Jones 2006, 2–​7 and in more detail Penella 1979a, 23–​29. 35. 2006, 3–​4. 36. See note 34 above. 37. See Kasprzyk 2013 for a detailed study. 38. There is however little evidence for her “circle”; for the arguments cf. Bowersock 1969, 101–​109. 39. See Penella 1979b on Ep. 73; Hodkinson 2011, 110–​111 compares its strategy for validating Philostratus’s new sophistic with that of Heroicus and Vitae Sophistarum. Cf. Miles 2004 on the continued presence of figures from the past in Epp. 66, 72, 73. 40. As a collection of ornate literary miniatures, they can be compared with the same author’s Imagines. 41. See Anderson 1986, 274–​277; Rosenmeyer 2001, 322–​338; Gallé Cejudo 2013, Goldhill 2009 for general studies. 42. See Hodkinson 2014, 469–​470. 43. See Walker 1992. 44. Benner and Fobes 1949, 393; cf. Rosenmeyer 2001, 332–​333; Goldhill 2009, 295–​296; and see now Gallé Cejudo 2013. 45. See Hodkinson 2014. 46. On these impulses to epistolography in general, Hodkinson and Rosenmeyer 2013, 3–​10. On the Paul-​Seneca correspondence, probably fourth century ce, Kurfess 1965. Gibson 2012 and 2013 show that far more work is needed on the arrangement of ancient letter collections (not least in Greek), and that assumptions about biographical narrative as their main purpose are not always supported by the nonchronological order in which many evidently circulated in antiquity. 47. Reference to several discussions of this dating conveniently collected at Hodkinson 2013b, 323n1. 48. Düring 1951, 22–​24. 49. Capelle 1896, 51–​54. 50. Gösswein 1975, 29. 51. Russell 1988, 96–​97: from second century Byzantium. 52. Köhler 1928, 5: Epp. 8–​35, i.e., not those (1–​7) attributed to Socrates. 53. Penwill 1978. For letters attributed to Epicurus, not discussed here, see c­ hapter 34 in this volume, and Gordon 2013. 54. See, e.g., Poltera 2013 on Euripides and Costa’s commentary (2001) on Chion for engagement with the “Platonic” epistles in those texts; Morrison 2013 on the Platonic epistles themselves. 55. Goldstein 1968, 78; 265–​266. 56. See Hanink 2010 on Euripides. 57. See Hodkinson 2007a, 283–​288 for summary of the tradition. 58. See above, note 14. 59. Penwill 1978 argues well that this text deserves the label, although it forms two parallel narratives rather than a single one. 60. Holzberg 1994a; cf. Rosenmeyer 1994 and 2001, 234–​252, focusing on Chion; Konstan and Mitsis 1990.

726   Notes 61. See notes 47–53 above for references on epistolographers’ dates. 62. Reardon 1989. 63. Morales 2011. 64. I  discuss these aspects of Themistocles in a collection of studies of (other) ancient novels: Hodkinson 2007b. 65. See Hodkinson and Rosenmeyer 2013, 18–​20; Whitmarsh 2013a, 169–​170, 176; references at note 23 above. 66. See Harrison 1998, esp. 61–​64; Bowie forthcoming. 67. Morgan 2013 (Phlegon), especially 314–​ 319 on connections with the Greek novel; Hodkinson 2013b (Aeschines), especially 337–​344 on connections with the Greek novel. 68. As I argue at Hodkinson 2013b, 339–​340. 69. As argued in detail and very convincingly by Morgan 2013, 315–​317. 70. Létoublon 2003, Robiano 2007, Repath 2013, and Rosenmeyer 2001, 133–​168 and 1994. 71. See above on V  A. Rosenmeyer 2001, 169–​192; Whitmarsh 2013a and 2013b on the Alexander Romance’s letters. 72. On letters in Josephus, see Olson 2010 and 2013. 73. On this letter, see Bär 2013, Ní Mheallaigh 2008, and Rosenmeyer 2013, 66–​68. 74. See Bowie 2013, 71–​72; Ceccarelli 2013, 183–​264; Rosenmeyer 2001, 39–​44 and 61–​97; Rosenmeyer 2013. 75. See Bowie 2013; Gera 2013; Ceccarelli 2013, 101–​180; Rosenmeyer 2001, 45–​60. 76. See Ní Mheallaigh 2012 and especially Ní Mheallaigh 2008 on the authenticating functions of the letters in Dictys Cretensis and Antonius Diogenes; also Merkle 1994 and 1996 on Dictys and Dares, Morgan 1985 and 2009 on Antonius Diogenes. Summary of Antonius Diogenes in Reardon 1989.

Chapter 33 1. On the association between rhetoric and sorcery, see also Gorgias fr. 11.10 DK, Whitmarsh 2001, 241–​242. 2. For an introduction to Seneca’s philosophical writings, cf. Inwood 2005; to Musonius, Rufus, cf. Van Geytenbeek 1963; and to Marcus Aurelius, cf. Hadot 1998 and Van Ackeren 2012. For Epictetus, see below. 3. Hence my approach here differs from that of Whitmarsh 2001, esp. 141–​180 and chap. 4, which focuses on the similarities. 4. This chapter is partly based on an earlier publication, Reydams-​Schils 2011. 5. For a general overview of Epictetus’s teachings, see Bonhöffer 1890, 1894; Hadot 1998; Long 2002. 6. As in Epictetus Diss. 4.1.132–​143, 4.5.37, 4.12.12; cf. also 1.29.34–​35, 2.9.15–​16, 2.10.29–​30, 2.16.2, 3.3.17, 3.20.18. On this topic, cf. the excellent analysis by Colardeau 2004 (reprint of 1903), 165–​195 and Bénatouïl 2009, 134–​155. 7. As in Diss. 1.16.20, 1.2.35, 3.1.36, 3.7.1, 3.8.7; on this aspect of Epictetus, cf. Long 2002, 121–​125 and Bénatouïl 2009, especially 134–​155. 8. Or. 1.50; 61–​62; 3.13–​16; 12 (see below); 13; 19.1–​2; 45.1; 50.8. Some sources claim that Dio wore a lion skin, like Heracles; Phot. Bibl. cod. 209, followed by Sudas s.v. 9. On this topic, see Schofield 2007, 71–​86, pace Billerbeck 1978.

Notes   727 10. As in Epictetus Diss. 3.12.16, 3.14.4, 3.23, 4.8.15–​16, 4.11; cf. also Musonius Rufus 16 Lutz/​ Hense. Epicurus shared this criticism, cf. GVE 54. 11. Cf. Hahn 1989 and Zanker 1995; on Dio specifically, cf. Nesselrath 2009. 12. Cf. also Diss. 3.21.22, 24.80, 26.13; Plutarch also uses this topos, as in De prof. virt. 80e–​81d, but he focuses on the need to combat pride. 13. In the conflict with Suillius Rufus, cf. Tac. Ann. 13.42–​43, 14.52; Cass. Dio 61.10.1–​6, 62.2.1. 14. Cf. Frede 1997. 15. On the contrast between Epictetus and Dio, cf. also Long 2002, 121–​125. One could also examine more closely in this context Apuleius and Maximus of Tyre. On this topic, see Trapp 2007. 16. Cf. Rutherford 1989, 181–​188.

Chapter 35 1. The details of Philo’s philosophical development are complex and controversial; but this much would be generally agreed. See Brittain 2001, Lévy 2010. 2. The thought of Antiochus, too, is difficult to interpret beyond this very general level; for a variety of perspectives, see Sedley 2012. 3. See Hankinson 2010, Schofield 2007, and, in opposition to these on a number of points, Bett 2000, chap. 4. Again, there is general agreement on this basic description, but considerable disagreement on the specifics. 4. Swain 1997, 178–​179. 5. For details, and defense of both the text and Gellius’s credibility, see Holford-​Strevens 1997, 213n96. 6. E.g., Anderson 1993, Whitmarsh 2005. 7. I have discussed this in Bett 2013. 8. See Fish 2011 for a valuable corrective. 9. See Smith 1993; for the reference to his age, see 150, 368. 10. House 1980, 238. See also Floridi 2002, 3–​7. 11. David Sedley has argued that this is a much broader phenomenon; see Sedley 2003. He cites several other authors besides Sextus—​Diogenes Laertius, Seneca, Plutarch, Diogenes of Oenoanda, and Philodemus—​who also treat the history of philosophy as ending in the early first century bce, and he connects this with the demise of Athens as the center of philosophy, and the related dispersal of school libraries to other parts of the Greco-​ Roman world. After this, he argues, philosophy—​at least, as viewed by its practitioners at the time—​becomes largely a matter of “recovering and understanding the wisdom of the ancients” (36). While I find Sedley’s argument generally cogent, I do not think it sufficient to explain Sextus’s silence about his own time. For Pyrrhonism, as Sedley himself notes, was never an Athenian school; besides, whatever may be true of the other authors Sedley cites, Sextus clearly saw himself as a participant in an ongoing philosophy, which was a rival to other philosophies, rather than as a preserver of ancient wisdom. While the character of his summaries of the views of other schools may very well be due to the phenomenon to which Sedley draws attention—​he is drawing on sources that themselves treat those schools as not continuing to innovate beyond the early first century bce—​this does not eliminate the mystery of his apparent lack of interest in what was going on around him, philosophically speaking. Nor does it explain his similar lack of knowledge of and interest

728   Notes in the recent history of rhetoric, to which I turn in the next paragraph; for Athens did not have the same kind of monopoly on rhetorical teaching and theory, prior to the early first century, as it had on philosophy. 12. Aristotle actually speaks of this part as directed to praise or blame (Rh. 1.9). But by far the greater portion of his attention is given to the former. 13. I thank the editors for raising this point and encouraging me to reformulate my presentation in light of it. 14. The best example from Philostratus’s Lives of the Sophists is perhaps his story of Alexander “Clay Plato” and Herodes Atticus giving successive speeches to audiences including each other, and exquisitely adapting their presentations so as to impress each other (VS 572–​574). But Philostratus makes frequent reference to individual sophists’ skill at extemporaneous speaking; see, e.g., VS 519 (Scopelian), 527 (Lollianus of Ephesus), 612 (Hermocrates). 15. This is not the only place in Sextus where a connection is suggested between Aenesidemus and Heraclitus. For recent discussions of this perplexing topic, see Hankinson 2010, Polito 2004, Schofield 2007. 16. On this relations between Pyrrhonism and the medical schools, see most recently Allen 2010. 17. Annas and Barnes (1994) 2000, 54n221, say that Diogenes Laertius 9.72 ascribes to the skeptics themselves the view that skepticism and the philosophy of Democritus are similar. This is a mistake. The autous, “them,” of 9.72 has the same reference as the enioi, “some people,” of 9.71; Diogenes, like Sextus, attributes this claim of similarity to an unnamed group. 18. Holford-​Strevens 1997.

Chapter 36 1. Cf. Anderson 1993, 173; Boys-​Stones 2001, 149; de Lacy 1974; and Fowler 2010 and forthcoming; Trapp 1990. 2. Cf. Maximus 11.8. Cf. Gal. On the Doctrines of Hippocrates 9.5, where Phdr. 265c–​265e is quoted. 3. Cf. Lucian: A Literary Prometheus 5–​6; cf. also The Parasite, The Parasitic Art, and A Feast of Lapithae (and not just Lucian, of course; for the dialogue in Late Antiquity, primarily in a Christian setting in Greek, cf. e.g., Cameron 2014, 3: “Sometimes these elements derive from Platonic models, especially the Republic and the Symposium, in an exercise of imitation, or rather of intertextuality. In general, though with some exceptions, the Platonizing elements are literary/​rhetorical rather than philosophical.”) Cf. Aelius Aristides To Plato: In Defense of Oratory (Behr’s 1986 title). 4. Cf. Dio Chrys. Or. 36. Cf. Fronto:  e.g., the so-​called Erôtikos logos (Add. 8 van den Hout 1954). 5. Cf. Lucian, A Slip of the Tongue in Salutation 4.  Cf. Hermogenes, On Types of Style (Wooten’s 1987 title) 2.10, Rabe 395. First-​and second-​century lexicographers and rhetoricians, such as Diogenianus (Hesychius of Alexandria’s [fifth-​or sixth-​century ce] source), and Aelius Dionysius and Pausanius (both early second century ce); for discussion, cf. Dickey 2007, 46–​49, 88–​90, and 99. 6. For example, Clement’s Exhortation to the Greeks 6, where Plato is lauded for (sometimes) hitting on the truth.

Notes   729 7. Glucker 1978, 110–​111. 8. E.g., Plutarch’s Ammonius in Athens, Albinus in Smyrna, Ammonius Saccas in Alexandria. Later in this time period (in the 170s ce), Marcus Aurelius established four chairs of philosophy in Athens, including a Platonic chair; these were added on to Vespasian’s Greek and Latin chairs of rhetoric in Rome. 9. For the various uses of the term Πλατωνικός in the second century, cf. Glucker 1978, 206–​ 225; cf. also Gerson 2013, 4, where he notes that at Cicero ND 1.73, the interlocutor Velleius refers to a pupil of Plato as Platonicus. 10. Cf. Plut. Quaest. Plat. 1001b–​c, De Animae 1013c–​1024c; cf. Ti. 30a, 52d–​53b. 11. Dillon 1977, 60 and 232–​233. 12. Ammonius is thought not to be associated with the Platonic Academy; cf. Jones 1966, 211 and 213n35; Glucker 1978, 124–​128. 13. How to Tell a Flatterer from a Friend 70e and Table-​Talk 719f; on the term, cf. Glucker 1978, 124–​128. 14. Cf. Stover 2016 for a newly published work that is argued to be the missing third book of On Plato. Not all agree on that attribution; cf. Moreschini 2017. 15. For Apuleius’s Platonism, cf. Fletcher 2014. 16. On the Diagnosis of the Soul’s Passions (8 = V.40–​41 Kühn). I take the διά phrase as an explanation as to why the time was short with the Platonic student lecturer, not why Gaius himself, presumably a recognizable name to Galen’s audience, wasn’t the instructor; cf. the translation of Harkins 1963 for the latter interpretation. 17. On My Own Books 19.16 K. 18. In Albinus (chap.  4), the instructional dialogues are divided into:  physics (Timaeus), logic (Cratylus, Sophist, Statesman, Parmenides), politics (Republic, Critias, Minos, Laws, Epinomis, and ethics (Apology, Crito, Phaedo, Phaedrus, Symposium, Letters, Menexenus, Cleitophon, and Philebus). 19. In the Cod. Par. gr. 1962, f.146v is recorded a Notes of Gaius’ Lectures in seven books (now lost). Albinus and Gaius are sometimes paired together:  Proclus’s commentary on the Timaeus refers to the opinions of “Albinus and Gaius” (in that order), Proclus’s commentary on the Republic (2.96.10–​15) refers to the Πλατωνικοί Albinus and Gaius (in that order). 20. Cf. Ioppolo 1993. 21. AN 4.1.14 and 18; 20.21.1 and the reply to 21 by the responder who mentions isti disputationum vestrarum academici; citations from Ioppolo 1993, 183. 22. Cf. Ioppolo 1993, 192; on Favorinus, cf. also Opsomer 1998 and Holford-​Strevens 2003, 98–​130. 23. De Lacy 1978–​1984. 24. E.g., against his being thought of as a Platonist, cf. Chiaradonna 2009, 252; for the designation, cf. Finamore 2007, 15–​16. 25. In particular from Eusebius Preparation for the Gospel, Calcidius’s commentary on the Timaeus, and Origen C. Cels. There are a number of references in much later Platonists, principally Proclus in his commentaries on the Cratylus (85), Republic (2.96 and 128), and the Timaeus. 26. Dillon 1977, 363; fragments include Eusebius Preparation for the Gospel 11.10, 18, 22. 27. Cf. Eusebius, Migne, PG 11.22 (Numenius): “But Plato represented these things as true differently in different places; for in the Timaeus specifically he wrote the common inscription on the Demiurge, saying, ‘He was good’; but in the Republic he called the good the

730   Notes idea of Good, meaning that the idea of the Creator was the Good, because to us he is manifested as good by participation (μετουσίᾳ) in the First and only [Good].” 28. Cf. Clement of Alexandria, Stromata, i.  22; Eusebius, Praep, evang. 11.10; Suda, s.v. Numenius. 29. Cf. Migne, PG 9.7, 14.5; also cf. Boys-​Stones 2001, 140. 30. Cf. Migne, PG 11.10. 31. Cf. Tarrant 2007, 452. 32. Cf. Dillon 1977, 264 for translation and discussion. 33. Göransson 1995 for discussion. 34. Cf. Tarrant 2010, 80. 35. Cf. Dillon 1993, xiv, and 2010, 81. 36. Cf. 36.1. 37. Migne, PG 14.5. 38. Cf. Opsomer 1998. 39. Simplicius commentary on the Categories 30.16ff., 32.19ff.; cf. Dillon 1977, 251. 40. Proclus commentary on the Republic (2.96, 11 = fr. 35); Porphyry On the Cave of the Nymphs (10 = frr. 30–​33). 41. Timaeus: commentary on the Timaeus (1.276.31ff.; 381.26ff.; 431.14ff. etc.); Phaedrus: commentary on the Timaeus (3.247.15). 42. Cf. Galen On My Own Books (13, SM 2:122.13). For fragments of the Timaeus synopsis: Kraus and Walzer 1951; for fragments of the Timaeus commentary: Schröder 1934. 43. Cf. Mansfeld 1983. 44. Dillon 1977, 262–​264, for discussion. 45. Bastianini and Sedley 1995, 254; Tarrant 1983. 46. Opsomer 1998, 35–​36. 47. Cf. Bastianini and Sedley 1995. 48. Cf. Ramelli 2009; for the view that there were two different Origens: cf. Smith 2012. 49. Plot. 20 (quoting Longinus):  “For those that have not written, there are among the Platonists Ammonius and Origen, two teachers whose lectures I myself attended during a long period, men greatly surpassing their contemporaries in mental power; and there are the Platonic Successors at Athens, Theodotus and Eubulus.” 50. Cf. Boys-​Stones 2001, 151; regarding Platonism, cf. Dillon 2010, 99; for variations of early Christianity, cf., e.g., Brakke 2010. 51. In fact, Philo Byblius, Eusebius tells us, “on seeing the disagreement among the Greeks,” carefully composed three books bearing the title Paradoxical History. On this topic, cf. Boys-​Stones 2001, 151–​175.

Chapter 37 1. With Sharples 2010a, viii, I try to avoid the ambiguity inherent in “Aristotelian” and use “Peripatetic” as the label for self-​declared followers of Aristotle and the views they express. “Aristotelian” will be used for Aristotle’s doctrines, even if adopted by non-​Peripatetics (see also section 37.3, “An Aristotelianizing Author in the Second Sophistic,” below). 2. Of these commentaries, several survive today. See section 37.2, “Peripatetics in the Second Sophistic: Aspasius, Adrastus, Alexander,” and Sharples 1987.

Notes   731 3. Sharples in Sharples and Sorabji 2007, 2:503–​504; Falcon 2012. In the Appendix I list the names Sharples identifies—​some names added from Schorn 2003 and by myself. 4. Sharples 1987, 1179. 5. E.g., Simpl. in Phys. 707.33, 1170.13. Whether this was an honorific title (a view accepted by many) or not (Barnes, Bozien, Flannery, and Ierodiakonou 1991), it clearly was a shorthand which was well understood and thus singles him out from other commentators. 6. This broad characterization should not be generalized without qualification. For some helpful cautionary notes, see Gottschalk 1987, Sharples 2010b. 7. The best known Peripatetic compendium is the De mundo, a cosmological work, which became listed among Aristotle’s works, but is now generally considered spurious. 8. Gottschalk 1987, 1122–​1125. An edition of the first five books is in Drossaart Lulofs 1969. 9. Bowie 1982, 41–​42. 10. Ammonius, On Aristotle’s De interpr. 5.28–​29. But this tradition is regarded as suspect, because it clashes with another comment in the same source (Ammonius, In APr. 31.12–​ 13) and the exact count of scholarchs is difficult to align with our evidence, since there is a gap between no. 4 (Lyco, ca. 274–​225 bce) and no. 8 (Critolaus, ca. 155 bce, a date established by counting back from Andronicus) before Diodorus (?) and Andronicus. See Baltussen 2013. 11. Falcon, SEP 2009, referring to Porphyry’s comment in his Life of Plotinus 24. For a skeptical look at the question to what extent it was an edition, see Barnes 1997. 12. A  useful case study of Alexandrian scholarship is Niehoff 2011. See also Reynolds and Wilson 1991, 5–​31 and Dickey 2007, 43–​51. 13. Moraux 1973, 65n22 disagrees with Düring Biographical Tradition 416 that Ammonius’s text presents the criteria which Andronicus used to discuss problems of authenticity. 14. This method of discussing features of the text to establish authorship would certainly be a part of the later commentary tradition; see Mansfeld 1994. 15. Its development from occasional and sporadic comments to running commentary has not yet been fully charted, but see Baltussen 2007 for a first attempt to capture the evolution of exegesis. 16. For a fuller treatment of terminology related to exegesis, ranging from marginal annotation (paratithesthai) to clarifying notes (scholia) and commentaries (hypomnêmata) see Baltussen 2007 and Mansfeld 1994. 17. Michael Trapp has argued persuasively that the difference between Platonist and Aristotelian views in ethics became harder to determine, because the ongoing debates caused their views to converge: Trapp 2007, 76. 18. See Van der Eijk 2009, 261–​262 for a succinct summary of Galen’s criticisms of Aristotle, and 262ff. for the overlaps between the two, some of which are discussed below (section 37.3, “An Aristotelianizing Author in the Second Sophistic”). On Xenarchus, see Falcon 2012. 19. See Appendix for details. 20. Barnes (1999, 10) notes that Aspasius is mentioned some twenty-​eight times in Simplicius’s commentaries. See Barnes 1999, 1 for the question whether he was the teacher of Galen (an morb. 6.41–​42 K). 21. My guide is Barnes 1999 here, though in one case it is possible to supplement his judgment, because he did not yet have the newly found edition of Galen’s On My Own Books available (Boudon-​Millot 2007a). His comment (Barnes 1999, 8) that “the text of Galen’s work . . . is

732   Notes in a desperate state” need no longer trouble us. Boudon has confirmed the reading for the phrase “exegetical work such as those of Adrastus or of Aspasius.” 22. Barnes 1999, 5–​8. A good general account of Galen now in Mattern 2013. 23. Ierodiakonou 1999, 147–​148. The question of the unity of virtues is already found in Plato’s Protagoras. 24. Konstan 2001, 5. 25. On its economic prosperity, see Hebert 2009. 26. in Harmon. Ptol. p. 270, cf. Barker 1984, 210. 27. Fortenbaugh 2011, 237 with n.  11 and 749 (five books on History and Style in the On Dispositions of Theophrastus, see fr. 437 FHSG). 28. Aristotle: Galen περὶ ἐθῶν, Scr. Min. 2, 11.4–​5 Müller. Herminus and Sosigenes: Simplicius in Cael. 430.32–​33. See Sharples 1987, 1178. 29. Dedication: De fato 1.164.1–​3 (= Sharples 2010a, chap. 1, text Ab). 30. Inscription found in Karacasu and dated to ca. 200 ce: see Chaniotis 2004, 388–​389 and Sharples 2005. 31. What follows relies heavily on Baltussen 2008, chap. 4.2, Moraux 1984, and Sharples 1987. 32. Baltussen 2008, 114. 33. On his influence see note 53 below. On the lack of a secure chronology of his works see Sharples 1987, 1181. 34. See Sharples 2010a, 140 for literature. A full list of known works (incl. spurious and lost ones) in Sharples 1987, 1182–​1199. His lost commentary on De caelo is quoted in Simpl. in Cael. 297 ff. 35. Mansfeld 1994, 2; Whitmarsh 2005, 1. On expansive commentary justified by the claim of unclearness, see Whitmarsh 2005, 8. 36. This section draws heavily on Sharples 1987, 1199ff. 37. Sharples 2010a, 246. 38. Sharples 1987, 1206–​1209. 39. Sharples 1987, 1178, 1180 (i.e., his interest is “not primarily a historical one”). 40. Translation by Sharples 2010a, 213 (= text 23H). 41. Sharples 2010a, 230. 42. E.g., Thales on the magnet, ap. Arist. De an. 405a19, 411a7; the Pythagoreans ap. Arist. De an. 404a20–​21; Pl. Phdr. 245c–​e. Cf. Sharples 1987, 1202–​1204, 1215. 43. For his influence on Simplicius, see Baltussen 2008, chap. 4. 44. Hankinson 1992, 3508; cf. Van der Eijk 2009, 271n42. 45. See Galen, On the Futility of Grieving 58–​59 (Boudon-​Millot 2007b, 117). 46. To which he turned after his father claimed to have had a dream: see Nutton 1973. 47. De optimo medico 69.15–​23. On this passage see also Mansfeld 1994, 168. 48. For a fuller account we have to turn to a propaedeutic work, entitled To Patrophilus on the Constitution of the Medical Art 6.1.244–​245 K. See also Swain 1996, 57ff. (cf. 366–​367); Mansfeld 1994, 167. 49. It is mentioned briefly in Van der Eijk’s fragment edition of Diocles of Carystus (Van der Eijk 2001: fr. 6, 1:9 [text] and 2:11–​12 [commentary]). 50. On the importance of medicine for him as a model of method, see Jaeger 1957, 59–​60. 51. A useful discussion of the label “Peripatetic” in Schorn 2003. On criticism and allegiance, see Falcon 2012, 2–​6 (Xenarchus). 52. See above note 30.

Notes   733 53. Platonists: Plotinus (ca. 204/​5–​270 ce), Porphyry (ca. 234–​305 ce), Simplicius (480–​560 ce); Arabic thinkers:  Averroes/​Ibn Rush (1126–​1198 ce); Christian thinkers:  Thomas Aquinas (1225–​1274 ce).

Chapter 38 1. Price 1984, 101–​132 on city rivalry connected to festivals of the Imperial cult; Mitchell 1990, 190 with the second-​century examples of a festival-​competition within the Lycian cities Oinoanda and Balboura. 2. E.g., Pl. Hp. mi. 363c; Philostr. VS 493, 496, 505 for the fifth and fourth centuries bce; 607, 617 for the second century ce. Dio Chrys. Or. 12 is still extant. 3. See Pirenne-​Delforge 2008 on the function of narrative on the past, on the praxis of sacrifices, on mystery cults, etc.; Frateantonio 2009 on the political context of his attitude toward religion, the hierarchy of cults; Juul 2010 with a focus on oracular “tales”; and Porter 2001, who focuses on the selectivity of both, Pausanias and Longinus, and their “time travel through culture(s)” (63) contrasting “ideals and ruins.” 4. For an opposing view, see the arguments of Whitmarsh 2009. For parallels between Jewish, Christian, and Second Sophistic authors, see Anderson 1993, 203–​215, and Goeken 2012, 318–​334 (on Aelius Aristides). On the intellectual habitus of Christian authors, see, e.g., Eshleman 2012, 102–​114, 199–​202. 5. According to Dio Cassius (Xiphilinus) 72.31.1, the senate introduced this new ritual in honour of Marcus Aurelius and Faustina the Younger for the city of Rome; the decretum decurionum from Ostia refers to Antoninus Pius and diva Faustina (the Elder), CIL 14.5326. 6. Cf. Dio Chr. Or. 28–​41 (On Concord in civic life), cf. Jones 1978, 83–​94. 7. Cf. Vout 2007, 108–​121, and the list of written sources in Kuhlmann 2002, 197–​239. 8. Boatwright 2000, 110–​112, 127–​143; cf. Mitchell 1987. 9. Schol. Lucian Icarom. 24 and more; cf. Winter 1996, 90. 10. McCabe, Teos 76; cf. Boatwright 2000, 130–​131. 11. IvPergamon 2.364, 367–​374 with C. Habicht’s introduction to IvPergamon vol. 3, p. 10. 12. Less trustworthy are the imperial temple-​building reports for Syrian Antioch by the sixth-​ century author Malalas, cf. Horster 1997, 81–​92. 13. For Hadrian’s engagement for the tombs of Hector and Aias in Ilium, of Epaminondas in Mantineia, of Alcibiades in Melissa, Archilochus in Paros and Pompeius in Egypt, see Boatwright 2000, 140–​142. 14. Philostr. V A 4.15, cf. Gyselinck and Demoen 2006, 116; Her.: thus Rutherford 2009, but see Whitmarsh 2009. 15. Neokoros: since the mid-​first century ce, the title designated a city in one of the eastern provinces that had a provincial temple of the imperial cult; see, e.g., Burrell 2004, 17–​269, with a list of cities with one and more neokoroi-​titles. 16. Decisions by Octavian/​Augustus (in Rome): Suet. Aug. 93; cf. Dio Cass. 51.4.1; by Marcus (in Pannonia): SEG 29.127, cf. Oliver 1989, 366–​388, no. 184. 17. IGRom. 4.1431, see the commentary of G. Petzl at I. Smyrna 697, cf. also Philostr. VS 530. 18. BMC Ionia, 278, no. 339–​341; cf. Puech 2002, 399 with note 2. 19. See Bowersock 1969; Bowie 1982; Hahn 1989, 33–​53; Schmitz 1997, 39–​63. Puech 2002, 23–​35 gives a short overview of the current discussion. Three or perhaps five “sophists”

734   Notes had been members of the Roman senate, and others had been equestrian procurators or secretaries in the imperial service. Attested are the following sophists as high priests: Aurelius Annianus (IGR 4.1226, third century), Aurelius Septimius Apollonius (SEG 17.200, third century), Aurelius Athenaios of Thyateira (IGR 4.1233–​1234, second century), probably also his namesake of Ephesus (I. Ephesos 3057, second century), Ti. Claudius Frontonianus (of Melos, IG XII 3.1119, second century), L. Flavius Hermokrates (IvPergamon 3.34, early third century); Pomponius Cornelius Lollianus Hedianus (IGR 4.1424, third cent.), the father and homonymous son T. Flavii Menandri (I. Ephesos 3062, second century), Ti. Claudius Pardalas of Aizanoi (MAMA 9.18–​19), probably a valued friend of Aelius Aristides (cf. S. Mitchell at MAMA). Only few rhetors are attested as high priests of eastern provinces other than Asia, e.g., T.  Cominius Claudianus Hermaphilos, pontiarch in Moesia Superior (IGR I 632–​633, second to third centuries), and L. Iulius Vestinus, high priest of Egypt and Alexandria and director (epistates) of the Museum (IGR 1.136). 20. G. E. Bean and T. B. Mitford, Journeys in Rough Cilicia 1965, 34n36 21. Eshleman 2012, 125–​148 on the “construction” of the Second Sophistic in Philostratus’s Lives of the Sophists through the narratives of “self-​presentation and negotiation for status” (125). 22. Augustus and the early empire: e.g., the renewal of the once neglected sacrifices for Zeus Soter in Milesian Didyma, I. Didyma 199 lines 6–​7 and the renewal of the festival of Zeus Labraundos at Mylasa, I. Labraunda 54a. lines 5–​6. See Chaniotis 2003 with examples of neglected cult traditions and the revival of rituals in the second century ad. 23. IG II² 2090, Philostr. VS 550, cf. Tobin 1997, 200–​209, and Strauss 1993, 120. 24. E.g., the hymn cited as a delicacy for the listener in Hel. 3.2.4; cf. Galli 2001, 47–​48, with references. 25. Criticism concerned: gladiatorial shows as part of a festival, Dio Chr. Or. 31.121; Philostr. V A 4.22 and comedies; Ael. Arist. Or. 29.4; those who lack the power of persuasion and use gifts of money, banquets, or gladiatorial shows to please the common people, Plut. Mor. 802 D; cf. as well Mor. 821 D, 477 D, and a more general critic of the pursuits of glory, Dio Chr. Or. 66, and popularity, Dio Chr. Or. 66.8, 11 via spending on festivals, as well as Lucian Anach. 39 and Demonax 46, where the protagonists ridicule the famous Lacedaimonian cult rituals. 26. E.g., the changing monotheistic attitudes of Aelius Aristides (Sarapis, Asclepius both assimilated to Zeus); cf. Anderson 1993, 200–​215; Chaniotis 2010. See also above and Oudot, ­chapter 17 in this volume. 27. See especially section VI, ­chapters 33–​37, and VII, ­chapters 40–​43. 28. Telling are the topics in Van der Stockt, Titchener, Ingenkamp, and Jiménez 2010: single myths, dreams, demonology, wandering souls, solar eclipses, etc. But see Van Nuffelen 2011, 48–​7 1, and the structured and in-​depth discussion by Brenk 1987. On p. 255 he lists Plutarch’s works on fate (tyche), those with a “general interest in religious topics,” and those with “strong eschatological overtones.” 29. Digressions in the Moralia: the E at Delphi is presented as a learned discussion during a literary promenade in the sanctuary, the Oracles at Delphi tells stories of important persons who had asked for an oracle, the Obsolescence of oracles discusses inter alia the function of demigods (daimones). Short passages concerning aspects of the working of the cult and the duty of the priests are also integrated into other parts of Plutarch’s work, e.g., Mor.

Notes   735 437a–​b which concerns the preliminary sacrifice by the priests, and Mor. 437d and 428a–​b, about potential influences on the Pythia and her reaction. 30. Famous is Dio’s Olympic speech (Or. 12), in which Phidias’s statue of Zeus and the idea of the gods are at the core of the oration, with a philosophical and artistic treatment of theology in the context of a fictive judicial process contra Phidias. Dio’s Borysthenes speech (Or. 36) was later used by some of the church fathers because its subject could be interpreted in a nonpagan cosmological-​theological manner, cf. Nesselrath, Bäbler, Forschner, and De Jong 2003. 31. Cf., e.g., Ael. Arist. Panathenaic speech (Or. 1), in which the gods protect and mark out Athens (1.40–​48, 399–​401). On oratory see Pernot, ­chapter 13 in this volume. 32. Cf. Jones 1978, 56–​64, about the moral aspects in his Euboian and Olbian speeches, Dio Chr. Or. 7 and 36; Piérart 1998. 33. Cf. Behr 1968, 148–​161; Goeken 2012, 253–​303. 34. On Apollonius of Tyana, see Miles, ­chapter 18 in this volume. 35. The earliest such treatise in the period of the Second Sophistic seems to be Plutarch’s On Superstition, in which he follows Plato and others in his critique and censures superstition as being as dangerous as atheism; Brenk 1987, 260–​262. 36. See Billault 2012 on cult and rituals in Achilles Tatius; Morgan 2003, 446–​454 on religion and morality and sexual codes in Heliodorus; Whitmarsh 2012 on eroticism and religion in the Jewish ancient novel of Joseph and Aseneth, with many parallels to the “Greek” novel of the imperial period. 37. No esoteric meaning is encoded in the texts of the second century, as Merkelbach 1988 has claimed. Cf. Beck 2003, 131–​132; Zeitlin 2008, 95, though the idea still offers a stimulating suggestion for discussion of Apuleius’s Metamorphoses. 38. The deity Melikertes-​Palaimon and some rituals of the cult are present in Philostr. Imag. 2.16; Her. 52.3–​54.4; Ael. Arist. Hymn to Poseidon (Or. 46.40–​41), and other epigraphic and literary texts, as well as on coins; cf. Piérart 1998 with the evidence; Galli 2001, 61–​62 discusses the evidence at the sanctuary of Poseidon at Isthmia. For the philosophical interpretation of mystery cults in the imperial period, see Van Nuffelen 2011, 27–​47. 39. On these ethics of conjugality, see with further references Anderson 1993, 200–​215; Zeitlin 2008, 98–​99. 40. For the Heroicus, see Pache 2004; Rutherford 2009; for Lucian’s Peregrinus, see Jones 1986, 129. On epiphany in general, see Platt 2011, who includes art as well but has a focus on texts from the archaic to the late antique period. 41. Bowersock’s 1973, 182 devotion to “occultism” among the Antonine elites goes too far. 42. See above on Plutarch and Pausanias. For the role of paideia in the Roman empire, see Bowersock 1969; Swain 1996, 17–​42 on language consciousness and its power to create a specific Greek identity within the Roman Empire; Schmitz 1997 on paideia as social capital which allowed the literati and the educated rich to negotiate and compete about status within the hierarchies of the local, regional and imperial elites; Whitmarsh 2001, 96–​108 on paideia and social status. 43. Cf. Mitchell 1993, 191–​195; Petzl 1998, but see also Van Nuffelen’s 2011, 12–​13 warning to mix different conventions and social settings (inscriptions—​philosophical treatises) by making too wide conclusions of the confession inscriptions. 44. For the discussion of the last twenty years of changes in religious mentality, see Van Nuffelen 2011, 11–​14.

736   Notes

Chapter 39 1. As Aelius Aristides put it in On Rome (Or. 26.100–​101): “Now indeed it is possible for Hellene or non-​Hellene, with or without his property, to travel wherever he will, easily, just as if passing from fatherland to fatherland” (trans. Oliver 1953, 906). 2. Against: Price 2012, 8n36; for: Elsner 1992, Petsalis-​Diomidis 2010. 3. For Lucian’s portrait of Alexander, see Bendlin 2011, Petsalis-​Diomidis 2010, 42–66. 4. For Lucian’s criticism of pilgrimage, see also Dialogues of the Dead (10), where Menippus mocks the hero Trophonios for the procedure at the latter’s sanctuary in Lebadeia. 5.  = Edelstein and Edelstein 1945, T432. 6. Petsalis-​Diomidis 2010,167–​220. 7. See Downie 2013, Petsalis-​Diomides 2010, 122–150. 8. See Euseb. Vit. Const. 3.56 = Edelstein and Edelstein 1945, T817. 9. See the useful map of sanctuaries of Asclepius in Anatolia in Belayche 1987, 150. 10. König 2005, 29–​30; Isthmos: Aelius Aristides, Isthmian Oration (Or. 46.23, 31); Olympia: see Ebert 1997. 11. See further MacKay 1990, 2052. 12. See Elsner 1997b; Künzl and Koeppel 2002, 68–​7 1; Thiersch 1937. For the wide dissemination of the cult of Ephesian Artemis, see Pausanias: 4.31.7; I. Ephesos 24B.8–​14. 13. See Rutherford 2013, 272–273. 14. Spawforth 2012, 130–​138, 245. 15. For Phidias’s statue as a tourist destination in this period, cf. Arrian, Epictetus 1.6.23–​25, who criticizes someone who travels to Olympia to behold it, and regards it as a misfortune to die without seeing such sights. 16. Totti 1985, no.  45; see Harland 2011; text in Friedrich 1968. So too the author of the Cyranides, a compilation of magical law, claims in the preface the he read the text on a stele that he was shown at Alexandria in Babylon: see Kaimakes 1976, 16–​17 17. See Halfmann 1986, 115; Millar 1977, 28–​40. 18. Suet. Vesp. 8.7.1; Tac. Hist. 4.82; Henrichs 1966. 19. Suet. Vesp. 8.5.6; Tac. Hist. 2.78. So too Pythagoras was supposed to have visited Mt. Carmel (Iambl VP 3.14–​17). For Mt. Carmel, see Lipinski 1995, 284–​288 and now Ovadiah and Pierri 2015, who publish graffiti from "Elijah's Cave", the earlier ones dating from 2nd-​3rd centuries AD. 20. Apollo Grannus: Cass. Dio 78.15, 6; Pergamum: Herodian 4.8.3. 21. He also visited Athens “to perform sacred rites” (id.3.7). 22. Trajan: Joannes Malalas, Chronographia 11, p. 270 Dindorf; Halfmann 1986:188; Hadrian, Anth. Pal. 6.332; Hadrian: Aelius Spartianus, Vit. Hadr. 14.3; Julian: Amm. Marc. 22.14.4; Joannes Malalas, Chronographia 13, p.  327; Julian, Mis. 361d; Lib. Or. 18.69 (2:112, 14 Foerster). 23. Zeus Kasios: see Fauth 1990. 24. Hadrian: Halfmann 1986, 199; Caracalla: Cass. Dio 78.16.7, Herodian 4.8.3–​5. Halfmann 1986, 214. See in general Erskine 2001, 252–​253. 25. Bernand and Bernand 1969, 166ff., n.168; Totti 1985, no. 35. 26. On this, Bowersock 1984; on Julia Balbilla, see Rosenmeyer 2008. 27. For the authorship, see Lightfoot 2003. 28. Hajjar 1977, 1:177–​178 (n. 158–​163); for the pilgrimage more generally, 2:521.

Notes   737 29. Bordeaux Pilgrim:  Kötting 1950, 92–​93; Egeria:  Hunt 1982, 164–​166; Paula:  Hunt 1982, 171–​172. 30. Lane Fox 1986, 180: “While Christians travelled to the holy land and marveled at God’s wrath against the Jews, pagan choirs were travelling yearly to Claros to sing and to see their delegates ‘enter’ the temple tunnels.”

Chapter 40 1. For the problems of identifying these works according to a precise genre of apologia, see variously Frede, 1999, 225–​231; Young 1999, 82–​92; Parvis 2007; Fredouille 1995. I use the term here loosely to designate works sharing a similar Tendenz rather than composition according to narrow structural characteristics. 2. Benz 1951. The death of Christ would, of course, prove the most important model for martyrdom; but His refusal to give a spoken defense was rarely, if ever, followed. Cf. Origen, C. Cels. praef. 1–​3. 3. For similar influence on Athenagoras, Leg., see Rankin 2009, 161–​162. 4. Justin, 1 Apol. 60.1, 5, alluding to Pl. Tim. 36bc. There was, therefore, an elision of the person of Socrates, the person executed in an unjust trial by the Athenians, and the doctrines elicited from the dialogues of Plato. In addition to the elements raised here (the act of dying for the truth, the doctrine of the immortality of the soul), Socrates’s general use of reason (logos) would be significant in the early Christian apologetic imagination; see the discussion below in the second section of the present chapter. 5. See also Legat. 7.29–​32, 11.18–​20, 17.28–​29, 22.9–​11. 6. Justin, Dial. 11.5, 110.4, 116.3, 119.3, 123.1, 138.2, 135.6. 7. The charge and entire court case are fictitious (as Isocrates declares at Antid. 8); he is clearly adapting Socrates’s Apology (as recorded by Plato) as a literary model; see notes in the Loeb edition, passim. For more general uses of excerpting in the classical period, see Konstan 2011.

Chapter 42 1. For the Hellenization of Syria, see Millar 1987, 110–​133; Butcher 2003, 274–​289. 2. Whittaker 1982, xii. 3. Whittaker 1982, xii–​xv. 4. See Lampe 2003, 290. 5. For Tatian and Greek paideia, see Fotjik 2009; Lampe 2003, 426–​440; Nasrallah 2010, 65–​70. 6. Jos. Ag. Ap. 2.154. 7. On the importance of relics, see Porter, 2001, 67–​76. 8. See Jones 2004, 19–​20. 9. Cf. Diod. Sic. 2.4; see further Drews 1965. 10. Jones 2004, 19–​20. 11. Briant 2006, 7. On Ninus and Semiramis in the founding myths of cities of Asia Minor, see Yildirim 2004, 40–​46.

738   Notes 12. Cf. (Ps.-​?)Lucian, De Dea Syria, 12, where the narrator’s version of Deucalion has the hero and his family surviving the flood in an ark. 13. Joseph. Ant. 1.93, quoting Berossus. 14. Joseph. Ant. 20.25–​26. 15. See Trebilco 2006, 86–​95. 16. See Egeria Itinerarium; Reisebericht, 202.20–​28 [19.19], ed. Rowekamp. 17. Julius Africanus, Chronographiae, F 23, 18–​23, ed. Wallraff. 18. Chron. F26, 13–​22. 19. Chron. F29. 20. Joseph. BJ 4.533. 21. For description of the festival in his own day (fifth century), see Sozom. Hist. eccl. 2.4. For recent discussion, see Caseau 2004, 123–​126; Kofsky 1998, 19–​30. 22. Chron. F30b, 4–​11. For unknown reasons, Africanus locates the tree in Shechem, not Hebron. 23. Chron. F30a, 15–​17. 24. Euseb. Hist. eccl. 1.13.5. 25. See Drijvers 1982, 167–​189; Ross 2001, 133–​135. For further arguments against Abgar’s Christianity, see Brock 1992, 212–​234, esp. 222–​224. 26. Cesti F12, 20.35–​57, ed. Wallraff. 27. Cesti F12, 20.1–​24. 28. For the Greek devaluation of archery, see Lendon 2006, 33–​34; 47–​48; 55–​56; 96, 310. 29. Lucian, Toxaris, 8. 30. Cesti F12, 44–​45. 31. Euseb. Quaest. Steph. suppl. (Migne, PG 22.965A). 32. See Euseb. Hist. eccl. 4.30.1, who states that his students translated his numerous Syriac treatises into Greek. On the Greek education of his son Harmonius, see Sozom. Hist. eccl. 3.16.5. See further Ross 2001, 119–​123. 33. Epiph. Pan. 56.3, ed. K. Holl, 2.338.9–​11. 34. On Bar Daysan as a representative of the cultural values of Edessa, see Drijvers 1994, 237–​238. 35. Gelzer 1967, 1, 8. 36. For Edessa after the removal of Abgar, see Millar 1993, 476–​481; Ross 2001, 57–​68. 37. Epiph. Pan. 56.5. ed. Holl. 38. Moses of Chorene, History of Armenia, 66 (Tomson, 212–​213). 39. Dio of Prusa, Or. 49.7. 40. Flinterman 2004, 359; see further Flinterman 1995, 178–​181. 41. Porph. Abst. 4.17.60–​63. 42. For discussion of other similarities between Dio and Bar Daysan, see Anderson 1986, 147–​148. 43. See further Dihle 1964, 63; Drijvers 1965, 173–​176; Müller 1980, 311–​321; Reed 2009, 66–​70; Sedlar 1980, 170–​175. 44. Porph. Abst. 4.17.10 45. History of Armenia, 66 (Thomson, 212). 46. Chron. F46, 52–​54. 47. Cesti F10, 50–​53. For discussion, see Hammerstaedt 2009, 53–​69. 48. Chron. F98. 49. Africanus, Epistle to Aristides, in Euseb. Hist. eccl. 1.7.14.

Notes   739 50. Chron. T2a. 51. Cf. Millar 1993, 375–​376. 52. On Severus Alexander’s dealings with Christians, see Ramelli 2000; Santos 1981. 53. See Jones 1971, 279. 54. Euseb. Onom. 90.15–​17, ed. E. Klostermann. 55. Sozom. Hist. eccl. 5.21.6–​7. 56. On Greek sophists in Rome, see Bowersock 1969, 43–​58. 57. Cesti F10.51–​52. 58. See Trapp 2007. 59. See Vieillefond 1970, 50–​52, esp. 52; Adler 2009, 11–​15. 60. Cesti F12, 10.4–​5. 61. Chron. F34, 1–​11. On Africanus’s chronicle in the context of Hellenistic historiography, see Roberto 2011, 67–​106. 62. Euseb. Hist. eccl. 6.7.1.1–​7. 63. Chron. F93, 1–​13; 30–​103. 64. Bowie 1974, 166–​209. 65. Chron. T11, 5–​7. 66. Chron. F93, 84–​86. 67. Chron. F24. 68. Euseb. Hist. eccl. 4.30. 69. Ephrem, Hymns against heresies, 1.12.1–​2, ed. Beck. 70. Cesti T1b.

Chapter 43 1. I would like to dedicate this chapter to the memory of Professor François Bovon (1938–​ 2013), an inspiring scholar, a dear friend, and the gentlest of souls. 2. Kenney 1982–​1985. 3. Swain 1999; see also the major collection of Schmeling 2003, which includes a wealth of discussion about Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles but pays less attention to other categories of Christian fictional literature. 4. Young, Ayres, and Louth 2004, 20–​35. 5. A foundational study in this vein is Hägg 1983, which was very prescient in seeing in the Second Sophistic a wide range of related literary styles. 6. Apostolic Constitutions 6.16.3, ed. Funk. 7. Cf. 2 Timothy 3:16; 2 Peter 1:16–​21. 8. Bovon 2011, 318–​322; Bovon 2012. 9. Hist. eccl. 3.25, ed. Bandy. 10. The Gelasian Decree was not the only such list: others include the List of the Sixty Books (seventh century), and the Stichometry of Nicephorus (fourth or ninth century). For these texts and others, see Hennecke and Schneemelcher 1991, 34–​43. The phrase “lost scriptures” is the title of Ehrman 2003. 11. Euseb. Hist eccl. 6.31; Adler 2009, 4; and, generally, Neuschäfer 1987. 12. See Grafton and Williams 2006. 13. See W. A. Johnson 2000, 2010. 14. See the “Further Reading” section at the end of this chapter.

740   Notes 15. See Junod 1992; Kraft 2007; Reed 2009; and Shoemaker 2008. 16. On this point, see Bauckham, Davila, and Panayotov 2013, xxxii; and more generally, Davila 2005 and Kraft 2009. 17. Kaestli 1977. The Manichaean Psalm Book (fourth century) names individual apostolic legends as part of a canon: see Klauck 2008, 3–​4. 18. Bovon 1995, 173. 19. Cameron 1991, 89–​119; Johnson 2007. 20. Elliott 2013, 456. 21. On these difficulties and others, see Bovon 1999. 22. See Baldwin 2005 and Thomas 2003. 23. For further discussion of these basic concepts, see Lapham 2003. 24. Bovon 1988. See also Koester 1990. 25. On the debates surrounding the definition of “Gnosticism,” see now Brakke 2010. 26. On the textual criticism of the Nag Hammadi codices as related to their reception history, see Emmel 1997. 27. On apocrypha in Syriac, see Debié, Jullien, Jullien, and Desreumaux 2005. 28. See Koester 1989. 29. E.g., Mark 1:1; 1 Peter 1:25; 2 Samuel 4:10; 2 Kings 7:9. 30. Tuckett 2005. 31. There are three extant fragments of the Gospel of Thomas in Greek, all from Oxyrhynchus: POxy. 1, POxy. 654, POxy. 655. The extant Coptic text is not an exact translation of the Greek. 32. See Pagels 2003 with Most 2005, 242–​244; also the older critique of Fitzmyer 1980. See also Dunderberg 2013. 33. On the onomastics of Judas Thomas in this literature and elsewhere in Late Antiquity, see S.  F. Johnson 2016, 111–​114 (revising both Johnson 2010, 16n60 and Johnson 2008, 16n62). On the twin motif, see Stang 2016. On the Acts of Thomas, see Klijn 2003; and Bremmer 2001. 34. On infancy narratives generally, see Elliott 2006; Davis 2014. 35. See Elliott 2009, 3–​25. 36. See Klijn 1992. 37. See Elliott 1997. 38. Bovon 2003a. 39. These dates are approximate and are taken from Klauck 2008, 3. In the ninth century, Photius knows these texts as a collection entitled “Circuits of the Apostles” (αἱ περίοδοι τῶν ἀποστόλων) authored by a Leucus Charinus. The Manichaeans claimed Charinus as the author of the entirety of their apocryphal canon. See Phot. Bibl. cod. 114, ed. Henry, with a discussion at Klauck 2008, 5–​6. 40. On the Acts of John by Prochorus, see Junod and Kaestli 1983. On the Acts of Philip, see Bovon, Bouvier, and Amsler 1999; Bovon and Matthews 2012. 41. For this point, see Elliott 2013, 468. 42. See Stang 2016; Foster 2007; and Klauck 2008, 31–​32. On the theology of the Apocryphal Gospels, see Frey and Schröter 2010; and Schröter 2013. 43. See Bremmer and Formisano 2012. 44. Klauck 2008, 2. See also Bovon 2003a. 45. For an extended discussion of this topic, see Davis 2001. 46. See Bremmer 1996.

Notes   741 47. On this point with reference to the ancient novel, see Bowie 2003. 48. Johnson 2006c, 1–​14. 49. On this text see Dagron 1978; Johnson 2006c. The Miracles half has been translated in Talbot and Johnson 2012. On the parallel history of apocrypha dealing with Stephen, see Bovon 2003b. 50. See Shoemaker 2002; and now Shoemaker 2016, which attempts to place devotion to the Virgin Mary much earlier in the history of Christian literature. 51. For more on this question in relation to the rise of Thecla devotion, see Johnson 2006c, 221–​226. 52. Johnson 2006b; Pinheiro, Perkins, and Pervo 2012. 53. On these texts, see in the present volume Morgan (­chapter 25), Selden (­chapter 27), and Zeitlin (­chapter 26). 54. Apollonius King of Tyre:  Kortekaas 2004, 2007. Alexander Romance:  Stoneman 2008. Jewish Novels: Wills 1995, 2002. 55. This list is adapted from Bremmer 2001, 164, who in turn is summarizing the conclusions of Söder 1932. 56. See Bowersock 1994; Price 1997; also now Harper 2013, 121–​132, 194–​213. 57. See Bowie 2003. 58. On the “Hymn of the Pearl,” see Poirier 1981. 59. On the Odes of Solomon, see Lattke 2009. 60. Ed. Rehm and Strecker 1992 (Homilies), 1994 (Recognitions). See also Hennecke and Schneemelcher 1991–​1992, 483–​541. 61. Cf. Acts 8:9–​24. See Ferreiro 2005 and Zwierlein 2013. On the Acts of Peter, see also Bremmer 1998. 62. The Grundschrift has recently been placed through internal analysis into a northern Mesopotamian cultural milieu in the early third century: Bremmer 2010; Kelley 2006. The Clementine literature has been associated with both Justin Martyr—​a Greek Christian apologist teaching at Rome from the 140s—​and, especially, his disciple Tatian, who composed his harmony of the Gospels, the Diatessaron, around 172, after having returned from Rome to his native Syria (Perrin 2002, 30–​34). The Diatessaron seems to have a close affinity with the text of the canonical Gospels used by both the Gospel of Thomas and the Clementine Grundschrift. On this larger question of the dissemination and influence of the Diatessaron, see Petersen 1994 and Quispel 1975. 63. The Homilies was revised by an Arian editor who sought to include some basic metaphysical doctrine—​namely, the “disposition of the syzygies,” or binary opposites—​but it still retains some of the Jewish-​Christian heritage thought to underlie the Grundschrift (e.g., vegetarianism) and which is missing from the Recognitions. See Reed 2007. 64. These texts were edited and presented alongside a hypothetical retro-​translation into Greek by Frankenberg 1937. 65. The term “forgery” is favored by Ehrman 2011 and 2013. Ehrman is heavily dependent for terminology on the classic treatment of Speyer 1971, who speaks instead of Schwindelliteratur and literarische Fälschung. I consider Speyer’s treatment to be the more subtle, but, regardless, Erhman does not consider nearly the range of literature that Speyer does. A clearer example of Schwindelliteratur or literary hoax is found, for instance, in the early medieval Cosmography of Aethicus Ister, discussed at Speyer 1971, 77–​78. This text invents sources out of whole cloth in order to buttress its claim to being an authentic (theretofore lost) work of Jerome (Herren 2011).

742   Notes 66. For select anthologies of this huge corpus, see Bauckham, Davila, and Panayotov 2013; Charlesworth 1983; and Sparks 1984. 67. See also Reed 2008. 68. On question-​answer literature, see Papadoyannakis 2006, and Volgers and Zamagni 2004. On Christian dialogue literature in Late Antiquity, see now Cameron 2014. 69. Pervo 1987; Bovon 1995, 161. 70. Cameron 2006. 71. Hägg 2012, 380–​389. 72. Hägg and Rousseau 2000; Whitby 1998. 73. See Bovon 1981.

Index

Achilles Tatius, 16, 389, 399, 405–​16, 472, 649, 677, 688n39, 712n27 Leucippe and Clitophon of, 55, 119, 353, 405–​6, 413–​16, 421, 470, 606, 616 myths of, 410, 471 See also asianism; novel, the Adrastus of Aphrodisias, 574, 591. See also Aristotelians Aelian of Praeneste, 6, 28, 359–​60, 448–​50, 457–​58, 485–​86, 539, 724n25 atticism of, 44, 49–​53, 58, 60, 108, 150, 720n7, 723n65, 724n17 epistolography of, 509, 511–​12, 518 On the Characteristics of Animals of, 28, 447, 449, 452, 454 Varia Historia of, 358–​59, 447, 456, 459 See also atticism; oratory; sophists Aelius Aelianus, 193 Aelius Aristides, 5, 41, 49, 142, 233, 255–​67, 346, 352, 371, 382, 384, 431, 563 atticism of, 51, 53, 424, 484 autobiography of, 615 the civic theater and, 184, 625 education and, 140, 191, 477, 695n4, 696n14 Hellenocentric universalism of, 635 Monody to Smyrna of, 55 oratory of, 89, 147, 171, 205, 213, 311, 425, 604, 695n8 Panathenaikos of, 89–​93, 342, 424 Platonic discourses of, 261–​62 on poetry, 263–​64 polemics of, 261–​63 religion and, 605–​6, 615, 734n26 Roman Oration of, 93, 207, 736n1 Roman triumphalism of, 487

asianism of, 57, 60 cult and rituals in, 735n36 Sacred Tales of, 12, 259–​61, 348, 354, 614 as a sophist, 374 See also atticism; oratory Aelius Paion, 494, 499. See also melic poetry; poetry Aesop, 143, 340, 696n14. See also Corpus Aesopicum; fable aesthetics, 363, 405, 415, 629 anticlassical, 58–​60 apocalyptic, 679, 681 artworks and, 364 of atticism, 56, 377 of blood and violence, 282 butch, 130 of erotic works, 406, 412 Latinity and, 71, 74, 78 of miscellaneousness, 448, 458 See also asianism; atticism Alcaeus, 429. See also poetry Alciphron, 511–​12. See also epistolography; literature Alexander of Aegae, 591. See also Aristotelians Alexander of Aphrodisias, 83, 383, 574, 581, 583–​87, 590–​91. See also Aristotelians; commentary Alexander of Cotiaion, 140, 142, 150, 695n7, 696n14. See also grammar Alexander of Damascus, 383, 591. See also Aristotelians Alexander Romance, 18, 422, 426–​37, 517, 677. See also novel, the Alexander Severus, 125, 190, 278, 485, 662, 739n52

744   Index Alexander the Great, 45, 56, 222, 264, 277, 321, 391, 422, 426–​27, 431–​36, 618, 641. See also Greece allegory, 20, 228–​29, 300–​1, 472 of myth, 468, 472 Stoic, 467 See also literature; philosophy Ammianus, 49, 501. See also epigram anacoluthon, 432–​33 Anacreon, 116, 130, 500. See also poetry anatomists, 375, 379. See also medicine Anderson, Graham, 229, 421 Andronicus of Rhodes, 582–​83, 590. See also Aristotelians Anthologia Palatina, 500–​1, 503. See also epigram; poetry Antigenes, 377. See also medicine Antoninus Pius, 89, 123, 125, 128, 181, 210, 239, 250, 256, 498, 599, 615, 626, 628, 722n55, 733n5. See also Roman Empire Antonius Diogenes, 517, 726n76. See also novel, the Antonius Iulianus, 30, 116, 694n2 Antonius Polemon, 182, 233, 600–​1. See also sophists Antonius Romanus, 31. See also oratory; rhetoric Apollodorus of Athens, 464, 469. See also mythography Apollodorus of Damascus, 186, 191. See also architecture Apollonius Dyscolus, 51. See also grammar Apollonius of Athens, 54–​55, 207, 602. See also sophists Apollonius of Rhodes, 3, 15, 425, 498 Apollonius of Tyana, 32, 44, 94, 509, 513–​14, 518–​19, 532–​34, 598, 705n15, 710n7 biography of, 275–​83, 605 religion and, 607, 614, 617–​18 See also religion Appian, 8, 311, 322, 477–​78, 480–​88, 720n21, 721n24, 722n47, 722nn52–​55. See also history Apuleius of Madaura, 6, 34–​36, 116, 120–​21, 205, 224, 248, 342, 345–​55 Apologia of, 118, 123, 125, 330, 341, 345, 350–​52, 614 biography of, 345–​50

Metamorphoses of, 120, 196, 345, 352–​54, 362, 649–​50, 701n4, 735n37 oratory of, 184–​85 platonism of, 566–​7 1, 576–​77 religion and, 301, 606 See also literature; novel, the; philosophy; sophists archaism, 4, 12, 15, 18, 60, 70, 78 in Alexandrian writers, 425 in Apuleius, 248 in Aulus Gellius, 248 in Fronto, 245 in Pausanias, 362, 366 See also literary antiquarianism; Second Sophistic Archilochus, 425, 500, 502, 733n13. See also fable; poetry architecture, 156, 174, 181–​97, 265, 371–​74, 382, 588, 700n3. See also civic theater (Areus) Didymus, 84, 591. See also Aristotelians Aristides of Athens, 626. See also Christianity Aristides Quintilianus, 8. See also technical literature Aristocles of Pergamum, 44, 256, 572, 591. See also Aristotelians; oratory; sophists Aristophanes, 129, 424–​25, 633 comparison of Menander and, 48 Thesmophoriazusae of, 411 See also comedy Aristophanes of Byzantium, 45. See also Hellenistic scholarship Aristotelians, 83, 91, 303, 339, 348, 376, 378, 557, 572, 581–​91, 730n1, 731n17. See also Aristotle; philosophy Aristotle, 81, 93, 297, 303, 329, 348, 375–​76, 423, 450–​54, 498, 558–​59, 572–​74, 581–​91, 644, 728n12, 730n1, 731n7. See also Aristotelians; philosophy Aristotle of Mytilene, 585, 591. See also Aristotelians Arius Didymus, 571, 591. See also Stoics Arrian of Nicomedia, 49, 51, 53, 311, 359, 477–​80, 482–​84, 487–​88, 498, 720n9 Anabasis of, 361, 722n42, 722n44 on Epictetus, 532, 534 Indika of, 366, 689n5 Periplous of the Black Sea of, 366, 722n42

Index   745 See also Epictetus; history Artaxerxes Memnon, 391. See also Persia asceticism, 130, 277, 279, 604, 641. See also Christianity; Judaism Asclepiadeans, 375, 380. See also Asclepiades of Bithynia; medicine Asclepiades of Bithynia, 375–​76, 380. See also medicine Asclepius, 127, 257, 259–​60, 262–​63, 354, 371, 375, 382–​83, 605–​6, 613, 618 gymnasium of, 193 paean to, 500 sanctuary of, 256, 263, 614, 619 temple of, 615 vision of, 617 See also religion asianism, 53–​60, 188, 263, 365, 392, 643 atticism and, 41–​61 defining, 53–​58, 689n7 in the Second Sophistic, 58–​60 See also aesthetics; atticism; Greek Asinius Gallus, 124 Asinius Pollo, 124, 484 Asinius Quadratus, 720n7. See also atticism Aspasius, 574, 581, 583–​86, 590–​91, 731n20. See also Aristotelians Asper, Markus, 425 Athenagoras of Athens, 626–​28. See also Christianity Athenaeus of Naucratis, 6, 14, 32, 121, 125, 128, 130–​31, 359–​60, 477, 632 atticism of, 485 Deipnosophistae of, 53, 149, 358, 447, 451–​58, 482, 493, 540, 694n2 historical examples in, 477, 512 See also dinner party; sophists Athenodorus, 44. See also oratory; sophists Athens, 29, 55, 88–​92, 95, 157, 337, 360, 391–​93, 396, 431, 433–​36, 700n2 atticism and, 43, 50, 52, 431, 484 constitution of, 641 cultural empire of, 5, 264, 329, 342, 424 democratic, 627 education in, 140, 150, 346, 350, 352, 633 eulogy to, 258 Hellenistic, 512 Herodes Atticus and, 238–​42, 256

history of, 318–​20, 697n11 monuments and buildings of, 101, 183, 186, 194, 300, 597, 599 Panhellenism and, 105, 602, 616 philosophy in, 292, 295, 426, 557, 565, 581–​82, 586, 727n11, 729n8 rhetoric in, 169, 171, 173, 183, 208, 433, 602, 728n11 stadium at, 189, 239 superiority of, 88, 104, 186, 693n33 See also architecture; Greece athletes, 155–​65, 273, 373, 697n8. See also athletic trainers; gymnasium; festivals athletic trainers, 155–​65 adaptations of, 161–​64 criticisms of, 161–​64 See also athletes; gymnasium atomism, 293, 376. See also Epicureans; philosophy atticism, 41–​53, 389, 392, 424, 486, 689n4, 701n7 and classicism, 49–​51 lexica of, 44–​46 in the Second Sophistic, 43–​44, 431–​35, 478 varieties of, 51–​53 See also aesthetics; asianism; diglossia; Greek; koinê Atticus, 565, 569, 572, 573–​74, 629. See also philosophy; Platonists Augustine, 107, 346, 348, 567, 576. See also Christianity Aulus Cornelius Celsus, 376, 698n43. See also medicine Aulus Gellius, 6–​7, 28–​32, 35–​36, 240–​41, 354, 448–​49, 459 Attic Nights of, 29, 74, 115–​17, 123–​25, 130, 247–​48, 447–​57, 694n2, 718n12 Favorinus and, 29–​30, 127, 181, 233–​38, 553, 568 on festivals, 615 Fronto and, 247–​48, 354, 689n1 pederasty in, 121 philological interests of, 68–​69, 181, 632, 690n11, 720n8 philosophy in, 553–​54, 566, 568, 572 social outlook of, 458 See also dinner party; miscellanies; philosophy; sophists Avianus, 499. See also poetry

746   Index Babrius, 503. See also fable Babylon, 82, 390, 392, 394, 438, 483, 620, 639, 661 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 424, 435, 714n1, 719n45 Bar Daysan, 660–​61. See also Christianity Bologna, Corrado, 423 Bowersock, Glen, 9, 708n35, 723n66, 735n41 Bowie, Ewen, 9, 284, 359, 390, 477, 503, 663–​64, 688n26 Caecilius, 74. See also latinitas Caecilius of Caleacte, 689n3. See also rhetoric Callimachus, 3, 15, 124, 424–​25, 435, 499 Aitia of, 498 Coma Berenices of, 127 Hecale of, 497 Iamboi of, 424, 429 See also poetry Canfora, Luciano, 426, 458 Caracalla, 191, 274, 384, 498, 513, 585, 590, 600, 618, 661. See also Roman Empire Carmina Anacreontea, 500. See also Anacreon; melic poetry Carneades, 236–​37, 552–​53. See also philosophy; Skeptics Carthage, 34, 130, 345–​51, 431–​32, 616, 720n21 audience in, 346 theater at, 184–​85 Cassirer, Ernst, 438 Cassius Dio, 8, 32, 120, 311, 316, 390, 477–​78, 483–​88, 720n8, 723n64 atticism of, 722n53 calumny of, 123 as a Greek historian of Rome, 322, 481–​82 See also history; Rome Cassius the Skeptic, 85. See also philosophy; Skeptics Catullus, 70, 116, 118, 128, 435. See also Latin; poetry Cavafy, Constantine, 439 Celsus, 573. See also philosophy; Platonists Cerealius, 501. See also epigram Chariton of Aphrodisias, 18, 20, 48, 51, 61, 389–​402, 405, 513, 711n10, 712n16 Callirhoe of, 12, 15, 143, 389–​98, 398, 516, 711n12

and the Greek novel, 16, 398, 477, 516, 649, 711n9 See also novel, the; literature Christian Apocrypha, 6, 669–​81 Acts of the Apostles of the, 676–​78, 739n3 apocalyptic and, 678–​79 collections of, 672–​73 definitions in, 670–​7 1 epistolography and, 678–​79 gospels of the, 673–​75 pseudepigrapha and, 678–​79 See also Christianity Christianity, 625–​36, 655–​65, 669–​81, 739n52 court culture and, 659–​61 early, 625–​36, 741n62 elites of, 655–​65 the emperor and, 626–​29 Greek culture and, 633–​36, 655–​56 the logos and, 629–​33 Plato’s metaphysics and, 563 the rise of, 277–​78 sexuality in, 130 See also Christian Apocrypha; Judaism; religion Cicero, 25–​34, 56–​57, 74, 95, 102, 124–​25, 246, 350–​53, 531 on Asianism and Atticism, 55–​59 Brutus of, 55, 319 De Finibus of, 86 exilic literature and, 93 history and, 317, 478, 720n11 latinitas and, 68–​78 Orator of, 55 philosophy and, 552, 554, 582 Pro Cluentio of, 350 Tusculan Disputations of, 236 See also Latin; latinitas; oratory; rhetoric cinaedus, 119, 127–​29. See also sex civic theater, 184–​88, 208, 544. See also architecture; performance; rhetoric; sophists Claudius, 26, 91, 123, 242, 384, 600, 640. See also Roman Empire Clement of Alexandria, 130, 501, 544, 728n6. See also Christianity Clement of Rome, 678. See also Christianity comedy, 334, 339, 377, 411, 510, 604

Index   747 Attic, 52 Greek, 512 Greek novel and, 516 Persius and, 711n4 See also New Comedy; poetry commentary Aristotelian, 581–​90, 731n15 in Aulus Gellius, 448 biblical, 632, 663 Epicurean, 546–​47 and the Hippocratic corpus, 378 on the Iliadic catalog of ships, 469 Platonic, 569, 572–​75, 729n19, 729n25 Plutarch and the, 293 See also Aristotelians; philosophy; Platonists Commodus, 383–​84, 498. See also Marcus Aurelius Cornutus, 467–​68, 472. See also allegory; Stoics Corpus Aesopicum, 503. See also Aesop; fable cosmopolitanism, 81–​96, 105 the Panathenaicus and, 89–​93 exiles and, 93–​94 philosophy and, 83–​87 political, 87–​89 Roman imperial, 718n43 Stoic, 82 See also Athens; Greece; Panathenaicus, the; Roman Empire Crates of Mallos, 45, 73. See also rhetoric Cronius, 339, 574. See also philosophy cult, 597–​608 Imperial, 300 imperial measures and, 598–​601 in literature, 604–​6 mystery religion and, 300, 362, 604, 606, 614, 733n3, 735n38 priesthoods and, 601–​2 religious festivals and, 601–​2 religious trends and, 606–​7 restorations of the traditions of, 603–​4 See also Christianity; pilgrimage; religion cultural identity, 5–​6, 99–​110, 121, 206, 295, 341–​42 Christian, 625–​26, 636 elite, 150, 372, 389, 656–​59

Fronto’s discourse on, 249–​51 Greek, 15, 18, 20, 103–​7, 208, 226–​27, 230, 317, 321, 416, 494 Jewish, 19, 639–​51 of Lucian, 327–​28, 341 paideia and, 88–​89, 455–​58 Roman, 35, 92, 317, 345, 353 See also culture; ethnicity; religion; Second Sophistic culture, 3–​8, 12, 15, 20, 99–​110, 178 Christian, 14, 655–​65 ethnicity and, 89–​91 Greek, 41, 18, 20, 90, 103–​7, 189–​90, 208, 218, 222–​30, 317, 321, 416, 494 of gymnasium and festival, 155–​57 imperial athletic, 162, 164 Jewish, 19, 639–​51 Latin, 67–​78, 248 near-​eastern, 18 paideia and, 88–​89, 251, 256, 455–​58 religious, 597–​608, 613–​20 rhetorical, 205–​13 Roman, 35, 68, 75, 92, 150, 238, 317, 345, 353 Second Sophistic, 15, 25–​36, 41–​61, 197 Western popular, 120 See also cultural identity; literature; religion; Second Sophistic Cynics, 190, 530. See also philosophy declamation, 30, 146–​51, 206, 208–​9, 390, 482, 700n2, 721n32 asianism and, 54 atticism and, 51–​52 and downward mobility, 25–​28 in Hellenistic oratory, 13 historical themes and, 477, 707n1 Latin, 120 magic and, 699n23 Roman use of, 32, 35 school use of, 140, 142, 146–​50, 450 sophists and, 170–​78, 183–​92, 195–​96, 213, 245–​46, 255, 275–​76, 350, 719n4 See also oratory; performance; rhetoric Demetrius of Alexandria, 374. See also sophists Demetrius of Phalerum, 16–​17. See also oratory; sophists

748   Index Demetrius the Cynic, 190–​91, 236, 530. See also Cynics; philosophy Democritus, 376, 728n17. See also atomism Demosthenes, 319, 391, 426, 433. See also oratory Demotic Magical Papyrus, 428. See also Egypt Didymus. See Areus Didymus. diglossia, 46–​49, 673. See also atticism; Greek dinner party, 115–​17, 123, 125, 128, 130, 157, 176, 454, 694n2. See also Athenaeus of Naucratis; Aulus Gellius Dio Chrysostom (Dio of Prusa), 8, 28, 34, 48, 51, 94, 129, 205, 217–​30, 233, 265, 347–​49, 352, 423–​31, 438, 482, 487, 502, 527, 531, 536 biography of, 176, 217–​20 Euboicus of, 12, 119, 220–​22 festivals and, 597 Greece and Rome in, 222–​36, 709n62 myth and literature in, 226–​30 Olympic Oration of, 472, 604 On Kingship of, 422, 424, 433 as philosopher, 539, 547 politics and, 207, 213 religion and, 605, 661 on rulers, 648 Trojan Oration of, 146, 280 See also oratory; philosophy; sophists Diodorus of Sicily, 48, 51, 319. See also history Diogenes Laertius, 32, 85, 93, 121, 459, 485, 517, 552–​57, 727n11, 728n17. See also philosophy Diogenes of Oenoanda, 539–​49, 556. See also Epicureans; philosophy Diogenes the Cynic, 143, 223, 531, 533. See also Cynics; philosophy Diogenianus, 501. See also epigram Dionysius of Alexandria, 495, 497–​99 Periegesis of, 497–​99 See also epic; poetry Dionysius of Halicarnassus, 48, 50, 61, 148, 317, 331, 688n1. See also history; rhetoric Dionysius of Miletus, 149, 160, 175–​76, 390–​92, 394–​96. See also sophists Dogmatists, 375–​76. See also medicine Domitian, 126–​27, 176, 191, 279, 708n35. See also Roman Empire Douris of Samos, 361. See also history

drama, 25, 353, 493–​94, 502–​3, 641. See also poetry education, 6, 34–​35, 139–​51, 178, 394–​95, 642, 695n11 grammatical, 469 and Greek culture, 104, 188–​94, 234, 436, 493–​94 gymnastic, 155–​65, 372 history of, 7 imperial, 50, 88, 720n16 medical, 374–​76, 385 nonpractical, 394 the organization of, 140–​41 philosophical, 295, 305, 351, 375, 570, 588 rhetorical formation in, 205–​6, 469, 472, 478, 598 Roman, 25, 68, 75 and the sophists, 5 of women, 305, 695n8 See also grammar; paideia; learning Egypt, 16–​20, 101, 256, 291, 297, 300–​1, 337, 399–​401, 426–​39, 484, 501 apocryphal Gospels found in, 673 chronology and, 634–​35 cults of, 547, 605, 633 education and, 642 Greek borrowing from, 656–​57 Joseph and Aseneth a story of, 649–​51 religious travel in, 613, 615, 617–​20 See also Roman Egypt Empiricists, 375–​76, 378. See also medicine encomium, 89, 157, 213, 265, 352, 479, 494, 643, 723n67 the art of the, 57–​58, 209–​11, 629 mock, 208 the rhetoric of the, 212 See also oratory; rhetoric Ennius, 31, 70–​7 1, 129. See also Latin; literature; poetry epic, 25, 36, 70, 228, 280–​81, 353, 361, 464, 470, 493–​99, 517 on biblical and Jewish themes, 19 didactic, 497–​99 Homeric, 227, 466, 494

Index   749 Jewish, 640 mythological, 496–​97 polymathy, 454 See also Homer; poetry Epictetus, 29, 85–​87, 93–​95, 236, 483, 513, 528–​40, 549, 552. See also Arrian of Nicomedia; philosophy; Stoics Epicureans, 236, 293–​94, 301–​2, 374, 380, 575, 582 attacks on the, 292, 552, 572 Diogenes of Oenoanda and the, 539–​49, 556 and religion, 281 See also atomism; Diogenes of Oenoanda; philosophy epigram, 36, 124–​26, 193, 493–​94, 499–​503, 510, 694n14 Byzantine, 409 cult traditions and the, 603 and the dinner party, 115–​17 erotic, 120, 122, 514, 695n16 See also Martial; poetry epistolography, 509–​19, 723n2, 723n11, 724n12 Christian apocrypha and, 678–​80 embedded letters and, 516–​17 fictional, 724n15, 725n46 Greek, 510–​14, 724n27 the novel and , 515–​16 pseudonymous letter collections and, 514–​15 Roman appropriation of, 25 short stories and, 515–​16 See also Christian Apocrypha; literature Erasistrateans, 375, 379–​80. See also Erasistratus; medicine Erasistratus, 371, 375 human dissections and vivisections of, 371 On the Bringing up of Blood of, 380 See also Galen; medicine erudition. See learning ethics, 84–​87, 94, 277, 301–​5, 375, 532, 542, 557, 582, 584–​90. See also virtue ethnicity, 57, 69, 81–​83, 140, 484, 625, 636 and culture, 89, 99–​110, 327–​32, 336, 341, 458 and diversity, 327, 429, 431, 439, 619 of Greekness, 88, 109, 382 language and, 423, 715n63 persecutions and, 298, 437

prejudices of, 59 purity of, 89–​92, 342, 437 religion and, 336–​37, 633, 635 stereotypes of, 56 transcendence of, 81–​96, 150 See also cultural identity; culture Eudemus, 373, 377, 383. See also Aristotelians; Galen; philosophy Eudorus of Alexandria, 292. See also philosophy; Platonists Euripides, 3, 218, 220, 641, 698n34 Helen of, 411 Iphigenia in Tauris of, 423, 502 letters attributed to, 511, 514 Medea of, 93, 146 See also poetry; tragedy Eusebius of Caesarea, 569, 576, 620, 634, 660, 663–​64, 670–​72, 675 Contra Hieroclem of, 278 Ecclesiastical History of, 659, 665 Preparation for the Gospel of, 572, 729n25 See also Christianity Eustathius, 499. See also commentary exiles, 93–​94, 691n28 fable, 143, 205, 240, 493, 502–​3. See also Aesop; poetry Favorinus of Arelate, 6, 8, 28–​32, 50–​61, 108–​9, 129–​30, 233–​38, 245–​47, 437 exile and, 94 Greekness of, 103, 105, 127, 330, 341 Memoirs of, 447 Miscellaneous History of, 28, 447 as a Skeptic, 552–​54, 560, 568 as a sophist, 175, 181, 447, 457, 552 See also asianism; sex; Skeptics; sophists festivals, 15, 26, 107, 155–​61, 164, 169, 184, 266, 295, 734n25 dramatic, 502 musical and theatrical, 544 national, 424, 500 religious, 165, 494, 500, 597–​607, 613–​19, 631, 658, 733n1, 734n22 See also athletes; cult; Panhellenic festivals; religion

750   Index Flavius Damianus, 188, 191, 193, 700n2. See also oratory; sophists Flavius Philostratus. See Philostratus Frazer, J. G., 358, 365–​66 Fronto, 7, 30–​37, 205, 210, 235, 239–​40, 245–​51, 354, 701nn1–​7, 702nn9–​18 Correspondence of, 251 and Aulus Gellius, 689n1 and Marcus Aurelius, 116, 118, 121–​23, 129–​31, 330, 342, 349, 354 philological interests of, 68 See also oratory; rhetoric; sophists Gaius, 567, 570, 574, 729n19. See also philosophy Galen, 5, 7–​8, 32, 161–​65, 233, 237, 346, 371–​84, 614 anatomical demonstrations by, 379–​80 and “the Ancients”, 377–​78 atticism and, 43–​44, 49, 51, 485 biography of, 371–​75 the crowd and, 380–​81 debating in public by, 380 and the emperor, 383–​84 on language, 377 the liberal arts and, 374 normative patient of, 372–​73 On Anatomical Procedures of, 383 On Lycus’s Ignorance of Anatomy of, 379 On Prognosis of, 383–​84 On the Doctrines of Hippocrates and Plato of, 375, 378 On the Usefulness of the Parts of, 377–​78, 383 paideia and, 373–​79 philosophy and, 552–​54, 567–​69, 574, 584–​90, 698n40, 731n18 and Roman imperial power, 382–​84 Roman connections of, 382–​83 and the senatorial aristocracy, 383 therapy as competition in, 381–​82 women in, 119 See also medicine; philosophy geography, 28, 89, 141, 251, 277, 279, 366, 395, 406, 466, 479, 617. See also history Gleason, Maud, 127 Goldhill, Simon, 14, 124, 276, 449

Gorgias of Leontini, 8, 13, 57–​59, 108, 275–​76, 629. See also rhetoric; sophists Gowing, Alain, 484 grammar, 47, 51, 67–​78, 141–​46, 150, 156–​60, 205, 311, 346, 452–​53, 633, 642. See also education; rhetoric Greece, 11–​21, 396 Alexander and, 431 language of, 423 and Persia, 392–​93 and Rome, 222–​26, 432, 481–​82 See also cultural identity; Greek; Persia; Rome Greek, 4, 14–​15, 19, 423 cultural identity and, 18–​20, 103–​7, 208, 226–​27, 230, 317, 321, 416, 494 hellenismos and, 68, 71, 74 and Latin, 29, 247–​51, 316, 342, 346, 352, 447, 457, 482, 486–​87, 724n15 oratory, 26, 28–​29, 431, 437 poetry in, 218, 220, 411, 493–​95, 499 See also asianism; atticism; cultural identity; diglossia; Greece; koinê Greenwood, Emily, 480 gymnasium, 156–​58, 188–​94, 372. See also athletes; athletic trainers; sophists Hadrian, 32, 210, 242, 382–​83, 390, 396, 436, 486, 494, 498, 502, 626. See also Roman Empire Hadrian of Tyre, 59, 170–​7 1, 191, 233, 242, 374. See also sophists Hall, Edith, 104, 423 Harrison, Stephen, 342, 353 Heath, Malcolm, 150 Heliodorus, 16, 20, 389, 393, 398, 477, 649, 677 Aethiopica of, 405, 421, 616 religion and, 606, 735n36 the sylistics of, 406 See also novel, the; literature Heliodorus of Athens, 364. See also architecture Hellenistic scholarship, 45, 70, 452, 454, 469, 671. See also grammar; Homer Helm, Rudolf, 327, 333, 342 Heraclitus, 468. See also allegory; Homer

Index   751 Hermocrates, 391, 711n8 Hermogenes of Tarsus, 58, 147–​48. See also oratory; rhetoric Herodes Atticus, 44, 177–​78, 238–​42, 245–​46, 437–​38, 499. See also oratory; sophists Herodian, 477–​78, 486–​87, 721n28. See also history Herodotus, 366, 392, 425–​26, 478 Hesiod, 29, 425, 465–​66, 502, 605, 630, 646–​47. See also fable; poetry Herophilus, 375, 378. See also medicine Hippocrates, 374–​75, 377–​78. See also medicine Hippodromus of Larissa, 129, 169–​78, 240, 500. See also sophists Hippolytus, 501. See also Christianity Hipponax, 435. See also invective historiography, 20, 124, 278, 392, 477–​88, 634, 636, 720n12, 721n25 Africanus and Greek, 663–​64 Antonine, 487 Christian apocrypha and, 680 and epistolography, 515–​17 Greek, 663–​64 Hellenistic, 392, 657, 739n61 oratory and, 141 Pausanias and, 361 Philostratus and, 513 Plutarch and, 312, 316, 318–​22 political, 311 romantic, 16, 18 Severan, 487 See also history; literature history, 477–​81 of Athens, 318–​20, 697n11 Cicero and, 317, 478, 720n11 Plutarch and, 313–​14, 318–​21 of the Second Sophistic, 275–​76 See also geography; historiography Homer, 218, 220, 411, 493–​95 Iliad of, 142, 495 Odyssey of, 397, 662 See also epic; Hellenistic scholarship; poetry Homeric Hymns, 498. See also poetry Idomeneus of Lampsacus, 236. See also Epicureans; philosophy

intellectualism, 7, 335. See also education; learning invective, 120, 123, 205, 209, 220, 332–​33, 351–​52, 435, 661. See also literature Isocrates, 259, 262, 428. See also oratory; rhetoric Jakobson, Roman, 424 Josephus, 18, 48, 107, 517, 547, 631–​32, 647, 657, 721n25. See also history; Judaism Judaism, 19, 438, 547, 639–​51 allegory in, 300 Christianity and, 109, 693n60 Hellenism and, 642, 644, 648 Plutarch on, 297 See also Christianity; religion Julia Domna, 130, 274 Julius Africanus, 6, 634, 655–​65, 671. See also Christianity; history; polymathy Julius Caesar, 31, 76, 124, 432 Julius Pollux, 8 Justin Martyr, 626, 633, 741n62. See also Christianity Juvenal, 8, 117–​28, 220, 512, 639. See also satire koinê, 44–​52, 61, 150, 241, 292, 424, 428–​29, 437–​39, 478, 482, 484, 487, 689n5. See also Greece; Greek Krevans, Nita, 425 Latin citizenship and, 106–​7 erotic, 116, 120 Greek and, 247–​51, 316, 342, 346, 352, 447, 457, 482, 486–​87, 724n15 hegemony of, 435 letters in, 118, 510–​11 literature in, 4, 7, 122, 345, 498, 352, 495–​99, 650 origins and development of, 69–​70 rhetorical culture, 205–​13 words, 5, 127, 384, 390 See also latinitas; Latin Second Sophistic; literature; rhetoric

752   Index latinitas, 67–​78, 248, 690nn6–​7 the development of a sense of, 70–​73 theorized, 73–​78 See also Latin; Latin Second Sophistic Latinity. See latinitas Latin Second Sophistic, 4, 25–​35, 67–​78. See also Latin; Second Sophistic learning, 29–​35, 101, 155–​56, 170, 181, 234, 338, 351–​53, 406, 449–​55 Greek, 640, 642, 656, 660 Jewish, 642 life and, 413, 640 literary, 353 lovers of, 628 philosophy and, 453 See also paideia; polymathy; sophists Leonidas of Byzantium, 498 Life of Sekoûndos, 436–​37 literary antiquarianism, 52–​53, 366, 607. See also archaism; literature literary devices, 57, 411, 421. See also literature literature, 273–​524 cult and, 604–​6 of exile, 93–​94 Greek, 104, 188–​94, 218–​20, 234, 411, 436, 493–​95 Latin, 4, 7, 25, 31, 76, 122–​23, 345, 352, 495–​98 myth and, 226–​30 of pilgrimage, 362 See also allegory; comedy; culture; literary devices; miscellanies; novel, the; poetry; tragedy Livius Andronicus, 70. See also Latin; literature Longinus, 425, 730n49, 733n3. See also Pseudo-​Longinus Longus, 16, 61, 359, 389, 511, 649 and Achilles Tatius, 405–​16 cult in, 712n12 Daphnis and Chloe of, 55, 353, 398, 405, 412, 421, 700n3, 713n14 the novels of, 389 See also literature; novel, the Lucian of Samosata, 149, 205, 273, 327–​43, 425 Alexander of, 354 cultural identity in, 341–​42 the gods of, 336–​38

How to Write History of, 480 imposters and, 338–​41 the literary project of, 333–​36 On the Syrian Goddess of, 366 philosophers and, 339–​40 Syrians and non-​Syrians in, 329–​33 True Stories of, 366 See also ethnicity; literature; satire Lucianus, 501. See also epigram Lucillius, 501. See also epigram Lucius Verus, 191, 245, 371. See also Roman Empire Lycus of Macedon, 377–​80. See also medicine Lysias, 54, 56, 59, 122, 236, 250, 428, 688n1. See also Greek; oratory Marcellus of Side, 498–​99 Iatrica of, 499 Ornithiaka of, 499 See also epic; poetry Marcus Aurelius, 32, 124, 371, 383–​84, 486, 498, 626. See also Commodus; Roman Empire; Stoics Marinus, 379. See also medicine Martial, 8, 118–​19, 123, 435. See also epigram medicine, 7, 117, 119, 174, 353, 371–​84, 388, 732n50 Apuleius on, 349 Asclepius god of, 371 philosophy and, 161, 588–​89, 698n40 Plutarch on, 163 See also Galen; philosophy melic poetry, 499–​501. See also poetry Melito of Sardis, 620, 626. See also Christianity Menander, 48, 512, 647. See also comedy Menander Rhetor, 185, 209–​11, 213, 266. See also encomium; rhetoric Mesomedes, 12, 494, 499. See also poetry Methodists, 375–​76, 378. See also medicine Michael Psellos, 266. See also philosophy Middle Platonism, 300–​1, 547. See also philosophy; Platonists miscellanies, 28–​29, 34, 52, 235, 447–​59, 466–​68, 717n1. See also literature misogyny, 119, 130. See also sex; women Mithridates, 102, 392–​96. See also Persia

Index   753 Morgan, John, 414, 712n12 Musonius Rufus, 83, 93–​94, 217, 304, 340, 527–​32, 535–​36, 646, 695n17, 700n1. See also philosophy; Stoics mythography, 358, 463–​73, 603, 719n1, 719n3. See also literature mythos, 364, 410 Naevius, 70–​72. See also Latin; poetry Near Eastern wisdom literature, 437, 647–​49. See also Judaism Nectanebo, 426–​27, 429–​31. See also Egypt Neoplatonism, 213, 576, 604–​5, 661, 680. See also philosophy; Platonists Nero, 4, 12, 26, 32, 190, 224–​25, 291, 299, 376, 447, 534, 600, 618. See also Roman Empire Nerva, 14, 26, 48, 207, 218, 224. See also Roman Empire Nestor of Laranda, 495, 497. See also epic New Comedy, 221, 406, 501, 512, 540, 724n25, 724n27. See also comedy Newlands, Carole, 127 Nicarchus, 501. See also epigram Nonnos, 496, 498. See also epic; poetry Norden, Eduard, 41–​42, 57, 249, 327, 689n8, 722n53 novel, the, 41, 60, 279, 295, 305, 361–​64, 477, 516, 649, 676, 711n9 anti-​Sophistic, 5, 421–​39 Greek, 6, 15–​18, 55, 103, 120, 221, 389–​401, 405–​16 Jewish, 649–​51, 677, 688n38, 735n36 Latin, 34, 345–​55 women and the, 694n6 See also literature; religion Numenius, 565, 569, 572–​74, 577, 729n27. See also philosophy; Platonists Numisianus, 377. See also medicine Odes of Solomon, 501, 678. See also Christian Apocrypha Oppian of Apamea, 497–​99 Cynegetica of, 498 See also epic; poetry

Oppian of Cilicia, 497–​99 Halieutica of, 498 See also epic; poetry oratory, 13, 27, 33–​34, 141, 155, 195, 206–​8, 331, 360, 601 Asiatic, 56, 61 Attic, 52, 59, 437 epideictic, 3, 182, 185, 196, 210, 559, 643 Greek, 43–​44, 58, 257–​66, 361, 425,  706n26 Hellenistic, 59, 687n10 judicial, 144, 349, 559 Latin, 26, 205–​13 as a mission, 259–​61 myth and, 463, 469 panegyric, 25 practical, 205 sophistic, 4, 28, 42, 187–​88, 192, 209, 212, 431, 450, 556, 603 theatrical, 311 See also declamation; Greek; Latin; performance; rhetoric; sophists Origen of Alexandria, 569, 573, 575–​77, 670–​7 1 Against Celsus of, 573, 729n25 On First Principles of, 690n7 See also Christianity Orphic Hymns, 501. See also melic poetry Ovid, 3, 25, 93, 120, 235, 495, 724n15 Halieutica of, 498 Heroides of, 511 poetic epistles of, 510 See also Latin; poetry paideia, 6, 11, 392–​95, 399, 410–​12, 429, 436, 455–​58, 482, 735n42 poetry and, 493 professionals of, 165–​78 schools and, 139–​51 See also education; sophists Pamphila of Epidauros, 29, 447–​48, 458, 459. See also miscellanies Panathenaicus, the, 89–​93, 186, 258, 264–​67, 342. See also Athens; cosmopolitanism Panhellenic festivals, 105, 494, 598, 602–​4. See also festivals; Greece Parker, Robert, 427

754   Index Pausanias, 357–​66, 599–​600 Periegesis Hellados of, 51, 160, 194, 298, 311, 357, 598, 617 myth and, 472 pilgrimage and, 298 religion and, 598, 607 See also atticism; Greece Pausanias of Caesarea, 357, 373–​74, 710n2. See also sophists Peloponnesian War, 258, 391–​92. See also Greece Pelops, 377–​78. See also medicine performance, 26–​28, 35, 44, 60, 71, 99–​105, 129, 181–​96, 257, 493, 597 and competition, 379–​82 of cultural memory, 295 culture of, 44, 103–​7 declamatory, 26, 208, 719n4 dramatic, 502, 604 epideictic, 351 of erudition, 28–​32 of love, 123 of lyric poetry, 117 oratorical, 211, 321 paideia and, 139–​97, 455 philosophical, 346, 552 of poetry, 494, 499–​500, 687n17 rhetorical, 346, 348 sophistic, 4–​5, 82, 223–​24, 276, 335, 603 Sotadic, 128 See also learning; oratory; Second Sophistic; sophists periodicity, 3–​9. See also Second Sophistic Peripatetics. See Aristotelians Persia, 82, 88, 104, 157, 192, 297, 329, 390–​96, 432, 616, 662. See also Greece Persius, 16, 389, 711n4. See also comedy; poetry Phaedrus, 502–​3 Fabulae Aesopiae of, 503 See also fable; sophists Philagrus, 44, 108, 176, 186. See also oratory; sophists Philinus of Cos, 375. See also medicine Philo of Alexandria, 626, 630, 640–​42 koinê and, 48 religion and, 300 See also allegory; Judaism; Platonists

Philo of Byblos, 633–​3 philosophy, 83–​87, 292–​97, 374, 411, 527–​36, 539–​49, 551–​61, 563–​77, 581–​90. See also Aristotelians; Cynics; Epicureans; Middle Platonism; Neoplatonists; Platonists; Stoics Philostratus (Elder), 26, 32, 99, 106–​9, 139–​40, 150–​51, 273–​83, 357 atticism and, 44, 49, 52–​53, 485, 723n65 declamation and, 147–​48, 208, 482 Epistles of, 55, 273, 513–​14 Gymnasticus of, 161, 273 Heroicus of, 146, 273–​74, 280–​81, 283, 493, 600, 606 Imagines (first) of, 273–​74, 281–​83, 363 Life of Apollonius of Tyana of, 217, 273–​74, 277–​80, 283, 316, 534, 605–​7 Lives of the Sophists of, 28, 44, 55, 58–​59, 101, 121, 129–​30, 149, 160–​77, 192, 219, 221, 255, 273–​76, 316, 373, 390, 421–​22, 447, 495, 544 oratory and, 257–​58 periodicity and, 3, 8, 12–​13, 212 philosophy and, 237–​38, 246 See also atticism; oratory; sophists Philostratus of Lemnos (Younger), 43, 207, 274, 509, 513 on epistolary style, 274, 513 Imagines (second) of, 129, 273 See also sophists Photius, 228, 230, 409, 449, 459, 664, 722n47, 740n39 physiognomy, 105, 117, 177–​78, 281, 615, 694n5 physis, 104, 273, 412 pilgrimage, 613–​20 Christian, 658 criticism of, 736n4 literature of, 362 religion and, 260, 298 See also cult; religion Pindar, 52, 256, 434. See also poetry Pisander of Laranda, 495–​96. See also epic Plato, 49–​52, 71, 90, 95, 116–​17, 121–​25, 129, 256, 260, 265–​66, 329, 378, 411 Apology of, 13, 532 commentaries on, 375 and Demosthenes, 335, 426

Index   755 education and, 156 and Hippocrates, 378 language of, 424 letters of, 511, 514–​15 Menexenus of, 89 Phaedo of, 532 Phaedrus of, 227, 236, 250, 298, 353, 407, 532 Politicus of, 423 Protagoras of, 533 Republic of, 298 Symposium of, 236, 295, 407, 532 Theaetetus of, 84–​85, 533 Timaeus of, 228, 299 See also Middle Platonism; Neoplatonism; philosophy; Platonists; Socrates Platonists, 213, 236, 346, 374, 563–​77, 582, 629, 631, 731n17, 733n53 as commentators, 586–​87, 590 degenerate, 339 and Skeptics, 557 and Stoics, 292, 294 See also Middle Platonism; Neoplatonism; philosophy; Plato Pliny the Younger, 25–​36, 50, 118, 124–​25, 196, 487, 501–​2, 510–​11. See also epistolography; literature Plutarch of Chaeronea, 291–​305, 311–​22, 477 biography and, 315–​16 ethics and, 301–​305 history and, 313–​14, 318–​21 miscellanies of, 447 Moralia of, 291, 347, 366 Parallel Lives of the Greeks and Romans of, 291, 311–​22 philosophy and, 292–​97 religion and, 297–​301 Stromateis of, 447 Table Talk of, 447 See also philosophy; Platonists Pneumatists, 375–​76. See also medicine poetry, 493–​503 comic, 377 didactic, 498–​99 drama and, 25, 353, 493–​94, 502–​3, 641 epic, 494–​99 epigram and, 501–​502 fable and, 502–​3

geographical, 498 grammar and, 142–​43 Greek, 494, 499 Hellenistic, 498 hexameter, 495 lyric, 494, 499–​500 melic, 499–​501 patronage of, 494 in the Second Sophistic, 493–​94 See also comedy; epic; fable; Hesiod; Homer; literature; melic poetry; tragedy Polemon, 30, 245–​46. See also sophists Polemon of Ilion, 364 Polemon of Laodicea, 437. See also sophists Polemon of Smyrna, 32. See also sophists Poliziano, Angelo, 448. See also Renaissance Pollianus, 119, 501. See also epigram Pollux of Naucratis, 44. See also oratory; sophists Polybius of Megalopolis, 14–​15, 48, 51, 316, 319, 456–​57, 484, 721n28. See also historiography; history polymathy, 274, 350, 452–​55, 458. See also learning; sophists Porphyry, 565, 574–​76, 585, 661, 680, 733n53. See also commentary; Neoplatonism; philosophy; Platonists Posidonius of Apamea, 14, 557. See also polymathy; Stoics poverty, 220, 372, 437, 641 Priscianus, 120, 499. See also poetry Proclus, 565, 572, 574, 680, 729n19, 729n25. See also Neoplatonism; philosophy Proclus of Naucratis, 59, 173, 195. See also oratory; rhetoric Pseudo-​Apollodorus, 465, 467, 469 Bibliotheca of, 464 mythography of, 464–​65 See also Apollodorus of Athens; mythography Pseudo-​Longinus, 8, 58, 61, 266. See also Longinus Ptolemy, 8, 235, 591. See also technical literature Ptolemy of Naucratis, 148–​49, 207. See also oratory; rhetoric

756   Index Quintilian, 27, 33–​34, 67–​69, 72–​78, 120, 141, 145, 205, 213, 558, 698n7. See also oratory; rhetoric Quintus, 376–​78, 382. See also medicine Quintus of Smyrna, 495–​98, 503 Posthomerica of, 495–​96 See also epic; poetry Rationalists, 375. See also medicine religion, 20, 81, 366, 547, 617, 625 Aelius Aristides and, 605–​6, 615, 704n39, 734n26 Christianity as the state, 659 cult and, 300, 597–​607 Egyptian, 297, 301, 426–​31 Greek, 301, 361, 426, 569, 606–​7, 630, 633 magic and, 426–​27 mystery, 300, 362, 604, 606, 614, 733n3, 735n38 mythology and, 604–​5 Pausanias and, 366, 617 Persian, 297 Philostratus and, 274, 277–​80 pilgrimage and, 613–​20 Plutarch and, 291–​305 traditional, 274, 361 trends in, 606–​7 See also Christianity; cult; festivals; Judaism; pilgrimage Remmius Palaemon, 123. See also grammar Renaissance, 343, 382 retrosexuality, 115–​31, 694n2. See also sex; women Rhetores Graeci, 205. See also oratory; rhetoric Rhetorica ad Herennium, 73, 75. See also rhetoric rhetoric, 205–​13, 377, 477–​88 domestic space and sophistic, 194–​96 epideictic, 3, 182, 185, 196, 210, 258, 559, 643 formation in, 205–​6, 374 grammar and, 143–​46 historiography and, 141, 487 and literary innovation, 259 locations of sophistic, 184–​88 See also oratory; performance; Rhetores Graeci; Rhetorica ad Herennium; sophists

Richlin, Amy, 8, 342, 353 Rohde, Erwin, 8, 15–​16, 20, 41–​42, 59, 409 Roman Egypt, 427–​30, 484, 613, 615, 619. See also Egypt; Roman Empire Roman Empire, 19, 101, 291, 435, 500. See also Roman Egypt; Rome Rome, 196, 218, 396, 401, 431–​32 culture of, 67–​78, 238, 248 eulogy of, 259 Greece and, 190–​91, 222–​26, 382, 481–​82, 709n62 history of, 322, 481–​82 the power of, 395 rhetoric in, 208, 211 sophists in, 173, 181–​82, 186, 189, 233 See also Latin; Roman Egypt; Roman Empire Russell, D. A., 119, 220, 240, 699n23, 702n18 Sappho, 411, 429. See also poetry Sardanapalus, 422, 424, 426. See also Alexander the Great satire, 25, 72, 117–​20, 125, 128, 327, 329, 333–​40, 389, 673, 698n8. See also Juvenal; literature; Lucian of Samosata Satyrus, 378, 382. See also medicine Scopelian of Clazomenae, 59, 177, 181, 189, 209, 311, 495, 502, 601, 705n15. See also poetry; sophists Second Sophistic, 107–​9, 255–​58, 275, 389, 394, 399, 405, 421 agonistic culture of the, 381 Atticism of the, 435, 478 critique of the, 436–​37 cultural aspirations of the, 427, 432, 435 cultural politics of the, 449 elite identity and the, 401 Greek aristocracy in the, 382 Greek influence in the, 258 history of the, 275–​76 literary skill in the, 389 literature of the, 477 poetry in the, 503 rhetorical displays of the, 381 sex in the, 115–​31 and the Third Sophistic, 212

Index   757 See also Latin Second Sophistic; performance Seneca, 450, 531, 646, 727n11. See also philosophy; Stoics; tragedy Septimius Severus, 384, 585, 618 Septuagint, 19, 48, 430, 438, 646, 671, 674. See also Christianity; Judaism sex, 115–​31, 412–​13 boys and, 121–​25 cinaedi and, 127–​29 the dinner party and, 115–​17 eunuchs and, 125–​27 sophists and, 129–​30 women and, 117–​21 See also cinaedus; misogyny; retrosexuality; women Sextus Empiricus, 47, 143, 150, 551, 553–​55, 560–​61. See also philosophy; Skeptics Sidebottom, Harry, 477 Siegel, Jeff, 429 Skeptics, 236–​38, 551–​61, 563–​64, 568, 572, 575, 728n17. See also philosophy slaves, 68, 83, 123, 413, 677 Socrates, 34, 86, 95, 116, 122, 195, 235–​36, 260–​62, 294–​95, 532–​33, 575–​76 Apology of, 627 Christian apologists and, 628, 630–​31, 737n4 companions of, 340 the daimonion of, 347 discussions of, 568 See also philosophy; Plato Sopater, 148, 266, 689n6. See also rhetoric sophists, 169, 426, 433 as builders, 188–​94 the circle of, 174–​76 Galen and the, 373–​74 money and the, 172–​74 oratory of the, 431 as performers, 169–​78, 181–​84 political influence of the, 208–​9 professional attire of the, 170–​7 1 sex and the, 129–​30 See also oratory; performance; rhetoric Sophocles, 3, 641 lips of, 129–​30 Oedipus Tyrannus of, 464

Tereus of, 470 See also poetry; tragedy Sparta, 88, 90, 192, 295, 431, 616–​17, 641. See also Greece Statius, 36, 123, 126–​27. See also poetry Stoics, 374–​76, 498, 527–​36. See also philosophy Strabo of Amasia, 14, 48, 51, 61, 364, 472, 584. See also geography; history Sulpicius Apollinaris, 31, 247. See also sophists Swain, Simon, 14, 482, 552, 706n32 Tacitus, 7–​8, 120, 207, 298, 316, 481, 485, 502, 527, 639. See also Roman Empire Tatian, 633, 655, 741n62. See also Christianity technical literature, 8, 117, 349, 353, 448, 450, 689n2. See also literature Terence, 74, 690n6. See also Latin; literature Thebes, 90, 193, 434–​35, 483, 613. See also Greece Themison, 376. See also medicine Theocritus, 15, 119, 220, 411, 425, 429 Idylls of, 425 verses in Aeolic of, 425 See also poetry Theon, 143 Progymnasmata of, 144–​50 See also rhetoric Thessalus of Tralles, 374. See also medicine Thucydides, 3, 50, 52, 104, 339, 360–​61, 365, 424, 478–​80, 483–​85. See also history; oratory Tiberius, 48, 123, 499, 556. See also Roman Empire tragedy, 19, 104, 339, 434, 470, 494, 502, 517, 570, 604, 640. See also literature; poetry Trajan, 48, 382, 422, 424, 501–​2. See also Roman Empire Valesio, Paolo, 436 Varro, 68, 70, 72–​73, 76–​78, 297, 333. See also Latin; latinitas Vergil, 25, 31, 76, 123, 495–​97. See also Latin; poetry Vespasian, 26, 207, 217, 534, 618, 729n8. See also Roman Empire

758   Index virtue, 75, 82, 94–​95, 108, 157, 160, 189, 236, 261, 301–​5, 319, 394, 338 Aspasius on, 585 Christian, 576, 626 and intellectual qualities, 351 masculine, 414 paideia and, 394–​95 Philo on, 641 Platonic, 211, 566–​67, 570–​7 1 Stoic, 528 unity of, 301, 732n23 See also ethics Vitruvius, 156, 184, 191. See also architecture von Wilamowitz-​Möllendorff, Ulrich, 13, 41–​42, 266 Weber, Max, 438 Whitmarsh, Tim, 3, 7, 150, 219, 223, 226, 279, 331, 415, 429, 482 women, 68, 83, 85, 92, 125–​27, 130, 229, 392, 415, 470–​7 1 ancient novel and, 694n6 boys and, 117, 125, 130, 513–​14, 544

Christian, 677 education and, 305, 695n8 in Epicureanism, 539, 546 Galen on, 372–​73, 381–​82, 385 paideia and, 455–​58 Sabine, 106 sex lives of, 117–​21, 125 virtue of, 305, 576 See also misogyny; sex Xenophon of Athens, 49, 52, 95, 235, 347, 396–​97, 478–​79, 483, 498, 532 Anabasis of, 366 Apology of, 13 Cyropaedia of, 118, 390, 397, 680 See also atticism; history; Persia Xenophon of Ephesus, 389–​401, 405, 606, 649, 677 Anthia and Habrocomes of, 16 Ephesiaka of, 389, 396, 398, 606 See also novel, the; literature Zeitlin, Froma, 5, 434