Gaming Greekness: Cultural Agonism among Christians and Jews in the Roman Empire 9781463241247

Citation preview

Gaming Greekness

Cultural Agonism among Christians and Jews in the Roman Empire

Allan T. Georgia

gp 2020

Gorgias Studies in Early Christianity and Patristics 76

Series Editorial Board Carly Daniel-Hughes Jeanne-Nicole Mellon Saint-Lauren Adam Serfass Ilaria Ramelli Helen Rhee

Gorgias Studies in Early Christianity and Patristics is designed to advance our understanding of various aspects of early Christianity. The scope of the series is broad, with volumes addressing the historical, cultural, literary, theological and philosophical contexts of the early Church. The series, reflecting the most current scholarship, is essential to advanced students and scholars of early Christianity. Gorgias welcomes proposals from senior scholars as well as younger scholars whose dissertations have made an important contribution to the field of early Christianity.

Gorgias Press LLC, 954 River Road, Piscataway, NJ, 08854, USA www.gorgiaspress.com Copyright © 2020 by Gorgias Press LLC

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise without the prior written permission of Gorgias Press LLC. ‫ܝ‬

1

2020

ISBN 978-1-4632-4123-0

ISSN 1935-6870

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A Cataloging-in-Publication Record is available at the Library of Congress. Printed in the United States of America

For Clare

TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements.......................................................................... ix Chapter One. Gaming the System: Cultural Competition and the Stakes of “Greekness” in the Early Roman Empire .................... 1 I. Introduction: Isocrates’ Gambit and the Performance of Greekness in the Early Roman Empire ......................... 2 Isocrates’ Gambit .............................................................. 2 II. The Value of Paideia: Modeling the Production of Culture in the “Second Sophistic” .................................... 6 III. Competition and the Production of Culture ................... 14 Paideia as Cultural Capital in the Roman Social World ...................................................................... 16 Paideia in the Roman Social World ............................... 20 Paideia as Open-Source Culture ..................................... 24 IV. Empire and Culture: Sophistic Greekness as a Strategy for Coping with Roman Power ...................................... 29 Greece and Rome ............................................................ 32 Greece contra Rome.........................................................36 V. A Limit Case: Tertullian’s De Pallio and the Boundaries of Greekness ........................................................... 43 VI. Overview ......................................................................... 51 Chapter Two. “In and Out of the Game”: Favorinus, Lucian and The Strategic Possibilities of Competing for Greekness ........... 57 I. Introduction .................................................................... 57 II. Competition, Ambition, and the Prize of Belonging in Favorinus’s Corinthian Oration...................................... 60 Agonistic Imagery: Corinth as Prize and Contestant in Favorinus’s Corinthian Oration ....................................................................65 v

vi

GAMING GREEKNESS

III. Lucian of Samosata and the Possibilities of a Plastic Paideia............................................................................. 73 “Do Not be Incredulous; Dreams Work Wonders!”: Lucian’s Dream and the Competition of Paideia........................................... 75 “Laugh at all the speakers!”: Rigors and Realities in the Teacher of Rhetoric ......................... 85 “It would be unkind to turn my own weapon against me!”: Agonistic Self-Creation and Lucian’s Invention in the Double Accused ............. 94 III. Agonism and Invention: The Possibilities of Paideia.... 103 Chapter Three. Paul’s Understudy: Recasting Paul as a 2nd Century Cultural Competitor ...................................................... 107 I. A Second Paul................................................................ 107 II. The Evolution of ἀγῶνες in the Pauline Tradition.......... 113 Competitive Imagery and Paul’s SelfCharacterization in 1 Corinthians 9:24-27 ............... 115 Beyond the Metaphor: Agonism and Intellectual Life in the Ancient World.................... 118 Venues of Competition in the Pastoral Epistles .............. 121 III. Paul and the Critique of Magic and Popular Cult Practices in the Acts of the Apostles and the Pastoral Epistles........................................................................... 129 Critique of Cult Practices and the Exposure of Charlatans in the 1st – 3rd Centuries. ..................... 130 Narrating Paul’s Critique of Magic and Popular Cult Practices in Acts 19 ......................................... 134 Characterizing Paul’s Adversaries in the Pastoral Epistles................................................................... 143 IV. Fugitive Acts: Paul as a Civic Virtuoso in Acts 21-22 ...... 149 Discourses of Exile and Belonging in the Roman World ........................................................ 151 Paul as a Civic Virtuoso in the Acts 21-22 ........................158 V. Conclusion .................................................................... 165 Chapter Four. Piety and Paideia: Jews Dying like Greeks in front of Romans in 4 Maccabees .................................................... 169 I. Introduction .................................................................. 169

TABLE OF CONTENTS

vii

Remembering and Re-Membering: The Exordium of 4 Maccabees ................................................................... 172 Demonstrating Martyrs ................................................. 177 Paideia and Piety ........................................................... 180 III. “Sovereign Over the Emotions”: Eleazar’s Double Ἐπιδεῖξις and Paideutic Manliness .................................. 182 Prosopopoiia and Eleazar’s Rhetorical Ἐπιδεῖξις ............ 184 Eleazar’s Agonistic Ἐπιδεῖξις ........................................... 189 IV. Tyrannical Passions: Roman Values, Greek Virtues, and the Discourse of Kingship in 4 Maccabees .............. 194 The Roman “Audience” of 4 Maccabees ....................... 198 Antiochus, the Tyrannized Despot .............................. 204 V. Rational Competition ................................................... 212 Chapter Five. The Parting of the Ways had Greek Road Signs: Posture, Deportment and the Philosophical Marketplace in the Frame Narrative of Justin Martyr’s Dialogue with Trypho ................................................................................... 217 I. Introduction .................................................................. 217 II. Urban Outfits: City, Space, and Style ........................... 223 City and Space within the Roman Civic Frame ............. 223 Cloaks, and What’s Beneath Them................................ 228 III. Agonizing over the Details: Posture, Pose and Demeanor........................................................................... 234 The Content and Context of Justin’s Homeric Greeting................................................................. 235 A Duel of Smiles ............................................................ 237 Deportment as Competition .........................................242 IV. What Came Before: Justin’s Career and The Philosophical Marketplace of the Ancient City ...................... 245 Justin as an Urban Philosopher in the Roman World ................................................................... 246 Justin and “True” Philosophy ....................................... 254 V. From Competition to Cooperation ............................... 259 Chapter Six. The Monster at the End of [T]his Book: Hybridity as Theological Strategy and Cultural Critique in Tatian’s Against the Greeks ................................................................. 261 I. Introduction ..................................................................262 II.

viii

GAMING GREEKNESS

“Difference Made Flesh”: Hybridity and Monstrosity in Tatian ....................................................................... 267 A Contradiction in Terms: Tatian the (Pseudo-) Sophist.................................................................. 267 Hybrid Selves, Bodies, and Speakers among the Sophists ................................................................. 273 Hybridity, Monstrosity, and the Competition for Greekness ........................................................ 276 III. Mixture and Monstrosity: Tatian’s Account of Greekness .............................................................................. 280 Babel Revisited: Greeks and Greekness......................... 280 The Greeks as a Barbarian Saw Them: Rome’s Cultural Colony ....................................................289 IV. The Unity and Concord of God ................................... 294 Conclusion .................................................................................... 299 II.

Bibliography .................................................................................. 305 Ancient Texts and Translations ............................................. 305 Secondary Texts ..................................................................... 320 Indices ............................................................................................ 345

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS When I was still in grade school, the reason for doing well and working hard was always the next year. “They won’t put up with this once you get to 3rd grade,” I was told in 2nd. “This won’t fly once you get to middle school,” my 5th grade teachers warned. The constant deferring of an academic reckoning was a useful tool for keeping the future ever in the present. But bringing this project to a conclusion as the summit of a 20 year endeavor of studying Christianity and Judaism in the ancient world (as well as successfully completing the 3rd grade), now is as good a time as any to momentarily look back, instead of forward, and thank those who helped me get here. I arrived at Fordham University to study with Larry Welborn, and I have never made a better academic decision than to pursue his tutelage. After spending time in his classroom at the Methodist Theological School in Ohio, I gravitated to his wisdom and insight about Christianity in the ancient world. Since our very first meeting, he has been a true mentor whose support and advice has pushed me to continue asking questions, no matter how ambitious they might be. His deep bibliographic knowledge is reflected in the margins of my notes and on my bookshelves. Completing this project under his supervision has made it immeasurably better than it would have been without his insight, but perhaps more importantly, being his student at Fordham has helped define my scholarly identity. While Larry was what drew me to Fordham, I had no idea that good fortune would also bring me under the direction of Benjamin Dunning. Ben has had a singular effect on my education as I have worked closely with him as an assistant of various kinds. The mark he has made on this project appears on absolutely every page. He has made me a better writer, a better historian, and a better thinker. But ix

x

GAMING GREEKNESS

more than that he has served as a model of scholarship and service to the field that I can only hope to emulate. He has engaged my work in ways that go far beyond the call of professorial duty and has pushed me to be thoughtful, more self-critical, and an altogether better person. I am indebted to Larry and Ben for the extraordinary impact they’ve both made on my life, both in and out of the academy. I hope I can repay them by being as giving of myself to my students as they have been generous to me. Two other scholarly mentors have served as accomplices in this project, and their influence on this project and me has been substantial. Michael Peppard and I arrived at Fordham in the same year, and he immediately became a resource for navigating the unfamiliar terrain of PhD work and an exciting interlocutor about the religious landscape of antiquity. His understanding advice and generosity— over coffee, dinner, in his office and home—helped get me through my first years in New York and helped me develop the range of tools I would need to mature as a scholar. Without his advice, pragmatism, and availability as a resource for questions large and small, I’m not sure I would have made it this far. Stephen Ahearne-Kroll, who now serves in the department of Near Eastern Studies at the University of Minnesota, has been a mentor and friend for nearly 10 years, and despite being at distance, he has remained a supportive advisor throughout my work at Fordham. I would never have been prepared for my work at Fordham or had the resources to begin on this project if it were not for Steve’s guidance. From answering the incessantly curious emails of a young divinity student, to coming in on his off days to read 4 Maccabees with me (the fruit of which appears in this project), to looking over job letters and chapter drafts, he has demonstrated for me how important and impactful a life of scholarship can be. I have also been fortunate to engage other thoughtful scholars while at Fordham University whose wisdom and advice is reflected throughout these pages. Christiana Zenner helped me think through some crucial questions about negotiating an interdisciplinary methodology at an early stage in this project. Robert Penella invited me into the circle of classicists in the New York area and introduced me to Lucian of Samosata. David Konstan fostered some of my early questions and opened up the world of imperial Greek literature to

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

xi

me. Karina Hogan helped me understand how Judaism could become an important interlocutor alongside early Christian and imperial Greek voices. Maureen Tilley, whose passing has touched the conclusion of this project, helped me work out how I might begin it. And Patrick Hornbeck, Kathryn Reklis and Sarit Kattan Gribetz helped me keep my head about me as I began to negotiate the wider academic world alongside this project. David Eastman and Susan Gunasti served as welcoming representatives from the guild of religious scholars and opened their doors to me while I negotiated a new life working in Ohio while completing this project. My path also crossed with scholars from around the country who have also helped me think through aspects of this study. Claudia Setzer was very generous with her time while this project was still in its earliest stages. Her advice helped me to clarify some of the central issues I was raising, and her encouragement helped me to raise even more difficult ones. Judith Perkins similarly entertained my frantic explanations about this project and offered wisdom that brought calm and focus to what was a cloud of ideas. Jeremy Hultin offered valuable suggestions for further research at a crucial point, and David Wilhite patiently responded to my critical engagement with his work in order to help see where our ideas overlapped. After being transfixed by her groundbreaking monograph on Christians and Sophists, Kendra Eshleman thoughtfully read a shortened draft of my chapter on Justin Martyr and offered critical feedback that sharpened my reading in every way. In addition to the extraordinary support of my mentors, I have also relied on—indeed, could not have survived without—the extraordinary friends I’ve made at Fordham University. John Penniman has been the truest kind of intellectual companion—a word whose emphasis on shared nutriment is particularly appropriate to our road together these past years. In the various proverbial foxholes we have shared, he has lent his experience and counsel, much more than I could ever hope to repay, though I certainly hope to try. Brendan and Clarey McInerny have become like family in the last six years, and the long evenings and longer train rides I have been fortunate to spend in Brendan's company have served as occasions for some of the most significant conversations I’ve ever had. John and Casey Garza have become an extended family without whom I

xii

GAMING GREEKNESS

would surely be lost. John has been a model of the most authentic kind of friendship, and his generosity and intellectual courage will never cease to be a marvel to me. Lindsey Mercer is one of the best and most challenging friends one could hope to conclude a PhD program with, and sharing her company through coursework, comps, and dissertating was like standing next to a sign that always pointed in the direction of “things that really matter.” Most of all I have to thank Lindsey because, when I asked her advice about which of several possible dissertation areas I should pursue, she confidently advised that I should “do the hard one.” I’m glad that I took her advice. Of course, many other friends and companions have served as company and support throughout this project. Daniel Peterson and Steve Case, friends since our time together studying in Oxford, have acted as sounding boards without whom I would have little to say. Dan’s interest in everything and steadfast belief in the importance of intellectual curiosity compelled me to always delve into even the murkiest of questions. Steve, whose intellectual commitment and integrity frankly dazzles me, has always reminded me how bright and limitless the mind can be, and why its dimensions should encourage us to be fearless inquirers. Despite their very different kinds of absence, Justin Lipscomb and Ray Khono both asked questions and provided philosophical perspectives on the world that will never cease resonating with me. Without Patrick Burns, who served as a generous guide in all things Roman and Latinate, this project (especially the Latin bits) would be much poorer. Andy Ballard, Emily Cain, Ashely Purpura, and Jon Stanfill made my courses at Fordham much brighter and more interesting. Jared Secord became a friend in one of those unexpected but invaluable surprises, and his expansive knowledge on all things Greek in the Roman Empire helped guide my thinking since many of the chapters here were barely drafts. My time in the company of Jeremy Scott has always helped me keep my feet on the ground and brought contemporary concerns into my analysis of the past. Robert Burns has never let me forget that asking big questions need not always result in simple, uncomplicated answers and that logic will never pierce the soul the way that art can. Without Julia Nielsen the German language would be an even bigger mystery to me than it (admittedly) remains to be. And Nick Keiger’s

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

xiii

recurring friendship and simple passion for the study of ancient things reminds me why I got into this in the first place. Long before I arrived at Fordham I was gifted with a group of treasured professors and mentors without whom I would never have been able to complete this study. Diane Lobody was the best advisor I could have hoped to have at the Methodist Theological School in Ohio. Her nurturing support led me through years of searching and helped me end up where I belonged. John Kampen and Lee Johnson impacted my thinking on the New Testament and the cultural contexts of early Christianity in monumental ways. Tim Van Meter was instrumental in helping me develop a trust in my own critical instincts, to say nothing of giving me a chance to travel to (and get back from) India—an experience that still shapes how I understand culture and identity. Roger Watts has been a confidant and a figure of true pastoral support throughout the life that was lived in-between these pages. Arlan Birkey introduced me to the study of the New Testament, and remained an agent of encouragement and support throughout a difficult and sometimes frustrating undergraduate experience. And Jeffri Bantz instilled in me an instinct to marvel and wonder that, I would wager, is the greatest gift I’ve ever received. I have also benefited greatly from the eyes and instincts of my friends and family to help me communicate ideas with an eye to audiences that are less specialized. While every fault and error in what follows are my own, this project would have been nowhere near as comprehensible as it is without my mom, Carole Georgia, who has read more of my writing than anyone, and always encourages me to write more. She has always been my conversation partner, listening to material far beyond her immediate interests. She has also modeled for me how important it is to never give up, and why there is never a better time to redouble one’s efforts than the present. My mom leads the list of dedicated proofreaders who have helped me, but following after her, Daniel Peterson offered me the wisdom of an English teacher, and Annie Sterken lent me her instincts as a voracious and astute reader. I have to thank my brother, Kirk, for his humor and company, and my sister, Laura, for her kindness and gentle spirit, as well as Alejandro Krause, a brother of sorts and one of my oldest friends, for showing me that a passion for knowledge and the dedication to ask questions and explore new ideas is always its own reward.

xiv

GAMING GREEKNESS

But most of all, this project exists as it does because of Clare Georgia. Our relationship and this project began at about the same time, and that has made all the difference for what it (and I) has become. She has been a vision of grace and a constant encouragement throughout these past years and ensured that this project could exist at all. No matter our distance, and despite the various tempests that raged behind the scenes of this project, she has been an unfailing compass, and a constant orientation forward and to the future. For all of that, and a thousand unnamed reasons more, this project is dedicated to her. Cleveland, Ohio. April 2020

CHAPTER ONE. GAMING THE SYSTEM: CULTURAL COMPETITION AND THE STAKES OF “GREEKNESS” IN THE EARLY ROMAN EMPIRE “In the modern search for the meaning of Christian identity, no issue is more persistent than the question of Hellenization. The accusation that one’s theological opponents have sacrificed the content of the faith to a Greek understanding of reality has long been a standard weapon in the arsenal of Christian polemics.”

—Jaroslav Pelikan1 “All in the game, yo.”

— Omar Little, in The Wire2 “De-Judaization and Hellenism: The Ambiguities of Christian Identities,” pp. 89-124 in The Dynamic in Christian Thought, Joseph Papin, ed. (Villanova, PA: Villanova University Press, 1970), 89. 2 I quote here at the outset of this study from David Simon’s television series, The Wire, which aired on HBO from 2002-2008. Following a suggestion made by Claudia Setzer, I want to make the influence of The Wire on this project explicit, for at least two reasons. First, because I employ the language of competition so prominently in this chapter and throughout this study, sometimes in an economic sense, I run the risk of implying an optimistically capitalistic model of economic exchange, wherein competition is always good and markets are always rational. Since this is not the way that I understand competition, referencing The Wire allows me to allude to a different valence for the language I employ here, one that is much more 1

1

2

I.

GAMING GREEKNESS

INTRODUCTION: ISOCRATES’ GAMBIT AND THE PERFORMANCE OF GREEKNESS IN THE EARLY ROMAN EMPIRE

Isocrates’ Gambit

In late October, 2000, the coastal town of Nea Michaniona, south of Thessaloniki, was preparing to celebrate the patriotic Ochi (‘Οχι) festival, which honors Greece’s military resolve during World War II.3 Commemorating the initiation of hostilities between Greece and Italy (as well as Albania, an Italian protectorate in 1940), this day celebrates Greek patriotism and resilience. “Ochi!” (“No!”), which signifies Greece’s unwillingness to acquiesce to Italy, even serves as a motto for several regiments of the Greek army. During the festival, local citizens parade through the streets, celebrating the Greek nation and honoring those who exemplify the nobility of Greece. One such honor is granted to the best student in the local school who is asked to carry the Greek flag during the parade. However, in the town of Nea Michaniona in 2000, the best student was Odhise Qenaj (rendered Odysseus Cenai by some Greek newspapers), an Albanian national whose parents had emigrated to Greece when he was young. dubious about the inevitably positive effects of markets, both economic and social—but still encapsulated in “the game.” Second, and more importantly, The Wire has served as a model for my own thinking about the contentious cultural landscape of the 1-3rd centuries CE, and especially the way that cultural performance is a function of complex games, social strategies, and valuations which are always wrought in the experiences and struggles of individual players. The Wire—perhaps uniquely among American literature in the past half-century—depicts an integrally complex world which is both created collectively by its subjects and is the dictator of those subjects’ lives. Those readers familiar with The Wire will, I hope, detect its influence on the present study. 3 More specifically, it celebrates the rejection of an ultimatum leveled by Benito Mussolini, to be enforced by Italy and its military ally, Albania. The actual exchange occurred between the Greek fascist leader Ioannis Metaxas and the Italian ambassador Emanuel Grazzi. For the context of this within the larger scope of modern Greek history, see Richard Clogg, A Concise History of Modern Greece (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 98-142; esp. 115-119.

CHAPTER ONE. GAMING THE SYSTEM

3

Once this news was made public, the outcry among the citizens of Nea Michaniona was vicious and immediate. Qenaj experienced such vitriol from his fellow students and their parents about the idea that an Albanian would represent Greece in celebration of Greek resistance against Italian and Albanian forces in World War II, that he voluntarily withdrew himself from the parade altogether—not simply in 2000, but also in 2003 when he was, again, the best student from his village.4 This relatively minor event prompted a national discussion about what it means to be Greek in a modern, global democracy. But it also posed inescapable questions about what it means to be Greek in a trans-historical, and distinctly cultural sense. Rodanthi Tzanelli, who has studied this episode thoroughly, concludes that it represented, “an internal negotiation of the contours of Greek identity and of its place in the European political order.”5 The profundity of this question was highlighted when thenPresident of Greece Konstantinos Stephanopoulos took the side of the Albanian-born student by reminding Qenaj’s critics and fellow citizens that, “Hellenes are the ones who participate in Greek culture.”6 In doing so, Stephanopoulos echoed the ancient Athenian orator Isocrates, who wrote to his fellow Athenians in the Panegyricus: Our city [of Athens] has so far outpaced other peoples in thought and in speech that Athens’s students have become the teachers of everyone else (οἱ ταύτης μαθηταὶ τῶν ἄλλων διδάσκαλοι γεγόνασι). It has made the name of the Hellenes no longer imply a race (γένους) but an understanding (διανοίας); “Hellene” now names those who share in our culture rather 4 On this entire episode, see ΤΑ ΝΕΑ (Athens) Jan. 11, 2000; Oct. 22, 2003. Also HR-Net News Agency (31 October 2000), http://www.hri.org/ news/greek/ana/2000/00-10-31.ana.html#09 (consulted 13 June 2014). Much of this is summarized in Rodanthi Tzanelli, “‘Not My Flag!’ Citizenship and Nationhood in the Margins of Europe (Greece, October 2000/2003),” Ethnic and Racial Studies 29, no. 1 (2006), 27-49. 5 Tzanelli, “‘Not my Flag,’” 30. 6 ΤΑ ΝΕΑ (Athens), Oct. 22, 2003; Stephanopoulos’ Minister of Culture, Petros Efthymiou repeated this same phrase afterwards (ΕΛΕΥΘΕΡΟΤΥΠΙΑ [Athens], Oct. 22, 2003).

4

GAMING GREEKNESS than in a common background (μᾶλλον Ἕλληνας καλεῖσθαι τοὺς τῆς παιδεύσεως τῆς ἡμετέρας ἢ τοὺς τῆς κοινῆς φύσεως μετέχοντας).7

In the Panegyricus—a text that was written to foster concord between Athens and Sparta—paideia defines what it is to be Greek.8 It is this kind of paideia, which describes both the material that makes up Greek learning as well as cultivated Greekness in practice, that Stephanopoulos appealed to in his defense of Qenaj’s proven Greekness. In a classical frame, paideia signified both the heritage of Greece and the cultivated, civilized manners, dispositions, and tastes that learning from Greece could offer. In Isocrates’ usage, it became a kind of cultural shibboleth that qualified one to be a participant in the newly conceived Greece—or rather, the myriad iterations of Greekness that developed after Isocrates. Paideia was, in short, a valuable form of cultural capital in the ancient world that preserved continuity between the idealized Greek past and constructions of Greekness even (as we see in the case of Odhise Qenaj) into the 21st century.9 It is unlikely that Isocrates had in mind such a stark revolution in what it meant to be Greek; he wrote the Panegyricus in response to the shifting political realities that characterized Greece in the late 4th century, BCE.10 The need for Greek city-states like Athens to forge

7 Isocrates, Panegy. 50. 8 Unlike other Greek texts cited throughout, I follow the majority of scholars in transliterating the word paideia (and its associated forms). However, it is crucial that this term be parsed closely; Arthur Nock importantly warned that “Greek words are protean, and to transliterate them is liable to involve what Whitehead is quoted as calling ‘the fallacy of misplaced concreteness’” (“Gnosticism,” Harvard Theological Review 57, no.4 [1964], 261.) 9 Timothy Whitmarsh explains that this notion of continuity was an essential aspect of what made paideia so valuable. He argues that the concern for cultivating paideia allowed Greek culture to thrive by reconstructing cultural links that were either absent or unknown. (Greek Literature and the Roman Empire, [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001]), 8-9. 10 Salient to this historical context is the fact that Isocrates’ rhetoric in the Panegyricus was composed in direct competition with Demosthenes, and part of a rhetorical milieu that also included the voices of Lysias and Gorgi-

CHAPTER ONE. GAMING THE SYSTEM

5

alliances with strong military partners prompted a new way of talking about what it was to be Greek.11 The cities that dotted the landscape were reimagined by elites, like Isocrates, as a Pan-Hellenic community, with Athens at the helm.12 As such, Isocrates’ rhetorical strategy was wrapped up in the project of unifying Greece in the face of Persian political and military power. But in practice, Isocrates’s words had a substantially different effect. The salient notion in his speech—that to be Greek is to share in Greek culture, and that it is Greece’s (or, Athens’s) unique task to educate the world—amounted to a rhetorical gambit, like placing a pawn in danger in one’s first move in a chess match to compel an opponent into a certain position.13 This “first move” of what was an open strategy initiated a seas. Isocrates’ strategy here is necessarily competitive because he is not the only voice appealing to his Athenian compatriots. 11 Often, this involved a double construction that construed the (usually idealized) Greek and the “barbarian” jointly. This was especially the case where Macedonian power was concerned, and the “political melee” waged by Demosthenes and Isocrates in the fourth century. That this formative discourse about Greekness was framed in competitive terms indicates what was at stake when claiming the cultural belonging made possible by the Isocratean model. See Jonathan Hall, “Contested Ethnicities: Perceptions of Macedonia within Evolving Definitions of Greek Identity,” in Irad Malkin, ed., Ancient Perceptions of Greek Ethnicity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 159-186. See also Niall Livingstone, “The Voice of Isocrates and the Dissemination of Cultural Power,” in Yin Lee Too and Niall Livingstone, eds., Pedagogy and Power: Rhetorics of Classical Learning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 12 Suzanna Saïd discusses how this aspect of Isocrates’s text and its afterlife functioned as an instigator of sophistic conceptions of Greekness (“Rewriting the Athenian Past from Isocrates to Aelius Aristides,” in David Konstan and Suzanne Saïd, eds., Greeks on Greekness: Viewing the Greek Past under the Roman Empire [Cambridge: Cambridge Philological Society, 2006], 47-60). 13 I use the term “gambit” here in its technical sense as a description of an initial move in a certain strategy in which one adopts an intentionally vulnerable position in order to force one’s opponent into a subsequent move. Isocrates fills the role of a convenient figurehead, but his own approach to Greekness was subtler than this one passage bears out, just as this culture-as-identity logic appears outside Isocrates. What I want to emphasize is the nature of the strategy at issue here. A gambit is a strategic move—usually an opening or first

6

GAMING GREEKNESS

ries of cultural moves that were played out by countless players who collectively competed over what could comprise Greekness in the following centuries. At no point has this cultural formulation of Greek identity eluded controversy. And yet, in both the ancient and modern worlds, Isocrates’ formulation of what it means to be Greek in the Panegyricus has served as a kind of mission statement for those who conceived of Greekness as a function of how well one spoke, the style in which one dressed, and the words one used (as well as the words one did not). In short, Isocrates represents the identification of Greekness as a performed, cultural attribute of people.14

II.

T HE VALUE OF P AIDEIA: MODELING THE PRODUCTION OF CULTURE IN THE “SECOND SOPHISTIC”

Isocrates’s formulation of a Greek cultural identity was forged in the shadow of powerful imperial forces, and it turned out to be prescient strategy for coping with the advent of Roman power over the Greek mainland and Asia Minor, beginning in the middle of the second century BCE. With the advent of the Roman Principate at the turn position—that entails some risk that is calculated to gain an advantage. The risk I suggest we can see in the Panegyricus is forsaking the traditional ethnic, nationalistic, and tribal definitions of identity. The compensating advantage he hopes to gain by putting imitative cultural phenomena in their place is allowing a more unified constituency of people to share in a corporate sense of belonging as “Greeks.” Isocrates clearly does not represent a programmatic opening up of Greekness to people of all kinds—he is not the authorizer of this cultural location of Greek identity. Rather, Isocrates represents a useful example of an initial position for the cultural explanation of being Greek. The specific formulation Isocrates presents makes this move with respect to being Greek clearly align with the logic and risks of a gambit. Thus, while Isocrates does not represent a single point of origin for a cultural definition of Greekness, the explicitness of Isocrates’ formulation in the Panegyricus helps clarify what was at stake when “‘Hellene’ now names those who share in our culture rather than in a common background.” 14 The way that this recasting of Greekness enabled a more efficient (and we may assume more widespread) mode of transmission is discussed in the introduction to Irad Malkin, ed., Ancient Perceptions of Greek Ethnicity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 11.

CHAPTER ONE. GAMING THE SYSTEM

7

of the epoch, a broadly influential iteration of the Isocratean paradigm was grandly realized in the so-called Second Sophistic15—the renaissance of Greek literature and oratory among elite Roman subjects from roughly the late 1st through the 3rd centuries CE.16 The precise boundaries and characteristics of the Second Sophistic continue to be negotiated by scholars. But the term has been widely adopted as a shorthand descriptor for the explosion of a Greek-language literature that was self-referential, reflective of an elite cultural location, and fully aware of the effects of Empire.17 As a result, the Second 15 Philostratus’ coinage of the term Second Sophistic (δεύτερος σοφιστικός) in his Lives of the Sophists locates this expression within a historical framework. In Simon Swain’s estimation, Philostratus’ coinage reflects a particularly useful moment in ancient reflection on a perceived literary movement. Philostratus is writing at the tail end of the period in question, as it is traditionally construed (ca. 250s CE). He thus presents his own retrospective account of a rhetorical renaissance as a kind of rival with the First Sophistic (πρώτος σοφιστικός) otherwise associated with the career of Protagoras and his disciples in classical Athens. See Simon Swain, Hellenism and Empire, 113. Cf. Glen Bowersock, Greek Sophists and the Roman Empire (Oxford: Clarendon, 1969), 1-16. More recently, this typology has been extended to include a “Third Sophistic”—first introduced by Laurent Pernot in order to name the rhetorical revival of the 4th–5th centuries CE as represented in in Libanius, Themistius, and the emperor Julian I, as well as Christian voices including John Chrysostom and Theodore of Mopsuestia (La Rhétorique de l’éloge dans le Monde Gréco-Romain [Paris: Institut d’Etudes Augstiniennes, 1993], 14). 16 In referring to the “so-called Second Sophistic,” I attempt to gesture to the criticism of this nomenclature that has emerged in various quarters. Perhaps most indicative of this scholarly shift are the recent remarks of Tim Whitmarsh, who applauds those scholars of early Christianity who have subtly revolutionized how the literature of the imperial world—Roman, “pagan,” Christian, Jewish, and otherwise—is read (Beyond the Second Sophistic, 3). These are important remarks, and they contribute to a continued scholarly conversation about the literary judgments that lay behind “The Second Sophistic.” Even so, following recent studies, I have employed the phraseology of “the Second Sophistic” interchangeably with more generic descriptors (e.g. “the sophistic movement”, “sophistic culture”). 17 The ongoing negotiation of the meaning of “the Second Sophistic” has preoccupied scholarship throughout the last half-century. As Whitmarsh so lucidly explains, as late as the 1960’s the German classicist Von Gronigen

8

GAMING GREEKNESS

considered the period of Imperial Greek literature to be a group of overlooked and ignored texts that, for the most part, deserve to be ignored by modern readers. Glen Bowersock echoed his sentiments in his monograph on Sophists in the Roman Empire (Whitmarsh, Greek Literature and the Roman Empire, 41-42). Where the period has been received as a treasury of at least interesting literature, it has been in the guise of mercurial fantasy as it survived in the Greek novels and in Lucian’s corpus, typified by the publication in the 1950’s of Jaques Bompaire’s Lucian Écrivan (Paris: E. de. Boccard, 1958). In the last 20 years a critical reappraisal of this period come about, influenced by Foucauldian discourse analysis, Bourdieu’s theory of practice, and postcolonial theories about the mediation of power. While not including more focused analyses that are dedicated to individual figures or specific literary forms, the following studies represent some of the most influential monographs that have appeared since 1995. These focus on the literary, artistic, and intellectual culture that informs the Second Sophistic, as well as those studies on ancient Christianity and Judaism that have contributed most to this conversation: Maud Gleason, Making Men: Sophists and Self-Presentation at Ancient Rome (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995); Thomas Schmitz, Bildung und Macht: Zur sozialen und politischen Funktion der zweiten Sophistik in her griechischen Welt der Kaiserzeit (München: Beck, 1997); Simon Swain, Hellenism and Empire: Language, Classicism and Power in the Greek World, AD 50-250 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); Martin Korenjak, Redner und Publikum: ihre Interaktion in der sophistischen Rhetorik der Kaiserzeit (Munich: C.H. Beck, 2000); Tim Whitmarsh, Greek Literature and the Roman Empire: The Politics of Imitation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); Bruce Winter, Paul and Philo among the Sophists: Alexandrian and Corinthian Responses to a Julio-Claudian Movement, 2nd rev. ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Tim Whitmarsh, The Second Sophisitic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Simon Goldhill, ed., Being Greek under Rome: Cultural Identity, the Second Sophistic and the Development of Empire, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Judith Perkins, Roman Imperial Identities in the Early Christian Era (Oxford: Routledge, 2009); Laura Nasrallah, Christian Responses to Roman Art and Architecture: The Second-Century Church Amid the Spaces of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Thomas Schmitz and Pascale Fleury, eds., Regards sur la Seconde Sophistique et son époque (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011); Thomas Schmitz and Nicolas Wiater, eds., The Struggle for Identity: Greeks and their Past in the First Century BCE, (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2011); Anthony Spawforth, Greece and the Augustan Cultural Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Kendra Eshleman, The Social World of Intellectuals in the Roman

CHAPTER ONE. GAMING THE SYSTEM

9

Sophistic has come to have at least two valences of meaning that have occasionally clouded what this term describes. On the one hand, it can describe a discrete movement—largely restricted to products of highly refined rhetorical, grammatical, and literary tastes—developed by the elite subjects of Rome who lived in prominent cities in the Greek East. On the other, it has been expanded to describe a broad array of intellectual movements that existed among the majority Greek-speaking communities under Roman power that aspired to literary sophistication. These two uses are frequently intertwined, and their resonance with one another points to an underlying connection between what was happening among a relatively small group of sophistic intellectuals and the innovative intellectual movements in the broader Greek-speaking world. Even so, the Second Sophistic classically describes those elite voices that flourished in the 2nd century CE, whose unstated task was to negotiate a way for Greek culture to exist alongside the Roman Imperial order—a life based on a vision of Greekness that was culturally consigned and located in elite circles of intellectual influence.18 This focus on elite voices is reflected in the scholarship that developed around the Second Sophistic in the last 20 years. In his Hellenism and Empire, Simon Swain introduced an approach that accounted for the political realities of the Greek world as a substantial problem for the development of identity. Swain considered not simply a series of rhetorical approaches, but a whole discursive system at play behind the construal of “what it was to be a Greek” under Rome. As a result, he introduced insights that had been missing from the overall picture, including the rise of linguistic Atticism and

Empire: Sophists, Philosophers and Christians (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 18 Suzanne Saïd, “The Discourse of Identity in Greek Rhetoric from Isocrates to Aristides,” in Irad Malkin, ed., Ancient Perceptions of Greek Ethnicity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 291. See also Saïd’s similar discussion in, “The Rewriting of the Athenian Past: From Isocrates to Aelius Aristides,” in Suzanne Saïd and David Konstan, eds., Greeks on Greekness: Viewing the Greek Past under the Roman Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 47-60.

10

GAMING GREEKNESS

an idealization of semantic style as a means to locate Greek history and heritage within language.19 In this way, Swain acknowledged the role of the historicized past—evident in progymnasmatic exercises as well as the bourgeoning Greek novelistic form, among more celebrated sophistic authors—as an idealized space in which Greek identity could be formulated on its own terms, apart from Roman influence. Perhaps more importantly, he notes the counterintuitive way in which Romans, as much as ethnically construed Greeks, were invested in the cultural formulation of Greekness. At one level, then, the Second Sophistic was a kind of marketing campaign on the part of elite subjects primarily aimed at Rome and Romans in order to cultivate an appreciation for the cultural dimensions of Greekness. However, as we have seen with other strategies in non zero-sum scenarios, the dynamics of competition occurred polyvalently among various players. Elite Romans were not the only audience for sophistic styles of self-representation. Greekness enjoyed prominence among diverse constituencies that were not invested in the concerns of a small number of elite sophists. This introduced an intractable chicken-and-egg problem into the bourgeoning sophistic milieu: what comes first, the Greek or Greekness? Do the things of Greece define who the Greeks are, or do those who claim to be Greek define what the things of Greece are? These questions—how Greek cultural identity was constructed, who was empowered to decide the boundaries of sophistic Greekness, and who the promotion of Greekness served—have been at the center of the resurgent scholarship on the Second Sophistic. Tim Whitmarsh represents a broad consensus of this scholarship when he argues that “authors do not write because they are Greek; they are Greek because they write.”20 In other words, Greekness was not a stable means of 19 Regarding this last point, Swain elaborates on E.L. Bowie’s landmark essay, “The Greeks and their Past in the Second Sophistic” (Studies in Ancient Society, M.I. Finley ed. [London: Routledge and K. Paul, 1974], 166209). 20 Tim Whitmarsh, Greek Literature and the Roman Empire, 2. Emphasis original. Whitmarsh expands his remark and continues, “Literature is an ever incomplete, ever unstable process of self-making. Practically all the

CHAPTER ONE. GAMING THE SYSTEM

11

self-identity for those who participated in the Second Sophistic because it was the non-optional, completely normative expectation of (effectively) all cosmopolitan elites. This did not stop figures in this period from claiming Greekness or identifying as Greeks, especially in the historical homelands of Greek cities. Whitmarsh’s insight is that, for a vast swath of the cultured population of the Roman Empire, Greekness was common, if contested, property. However, if this is so, the “chicken-and-egg” dilemma is only re-inscribed on a wider scale.21 To write in Greek— along with vocalizing, thinking and conversing in the Greek language—was at least in part to play on the field of Greekness upon which all elite identities in the Roman Empire were built. When presented in these terms, the Second Sophistic does not provide a fixed definition for a certain specific group, but rather signifies the high Greek texts that survive from this period were written by Roman citizens, men whose identity was... radically fissured” (Greek Literature and the Roman Empire, 2, emphasis original.). Whitmarsh’s point about literature is apt to say the least. However, in this study his categorization of “practically all the Greek texts that survive from this period” implicitly excludes many kinds of literature that are cast in Greek linguistic and cultural terms, but which are products of subelite communities or individuals. (Cf. the similar discussion in Simon Swain’s earlier study, Hellenism and Empire, 29-30.) Whitmarsh addresses this lacuna in more recent work. 21 The “chicken-and-egg” problem, also called the “bootstrap dilemma,” has a long and distinguished provenance. Beyond the discussion of Aristotle (at least as ascribed by DL, 5.1 and Plutarch Mor. 635E ff.), Macrobius remarked, “You jest about what you suppose to be a triviality, in asking whether the hen came first from an egg or the egg from a hen, but the point should be regarded as one of importance, one worthy of discussion, and careful discussion at that” (Sat. 7.16). However, the problem has become a durable one that describes the recursive way in which producers and products are mutually constitutive of one another. This is especially clear in Samuel Butler’s reformulation of the dilemma, that “a hen is only an egg’s way of making another egg.” In the late 20th century, appeal to this dilemma was widely used by meme-theorists who sought to reconceive how cultural phenomena were understood—not only as a product of cultural agents, but also as a medium in which those agents existed. On this notion, see James Gleick, The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood (New York: Pantheon Books, 2011), 287-309.

12

GAMING GREEKNESS

cultural valuation placed on the heritage of Greek language, learning, philosophical vocabulary, etc.—what we can helpfully term paideia. To put pen to page in the Greek language in antiquity (or voice to public audience, in its urban rhetorical context) was, at some level, to put on Greekness. On the other end of the social spectrum, the applicability of “the Second Sophistic” to Roman-era Christian and Jewish literature remains a contentious question.22 Historians of early Christianity and Judaism have long appealed to the sophistic literary renaissance as a useful historical parallel, but it has always been a tenuous one. Laura Nasrallah remarks that, “like the term postmodernism, the term Second Sophistic has no clear definition; like postmodern writers, writers of the Second Sophistic took part in a culture war with common themes variously treated by warring sides.”23 More critically, Ian Henderson has proposed a postcolonial analysis of the “Second Sophistic” as a category in order to argue that this movement should not come to signify “a vague zeitgeist of late Roman Hellenism.” Henderson resists the elitist dimension of this term, and draws attention to the “other levels and kinds of public speech [that] will have been more or less consciously and selectively related to the work of the outstanding sophistic professionals.”24 These criticisms reflect the conundrum introduced by the Second Sophistic as a historical Most influential is the lengthy discussion of the Second Sophistic as a rhetorical context for the work of Tertullian in Timothy Barnes’s landmark study (Tertullian: A Historical and Literary Study (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971; though, note Arnaldo Momigliano’s critiques of the sophistic dimension of Barnes’s study in his review in Journal of Roman Studies [66 (1976), 273-276]). I do also wish to note that, with a few notable exceptions, the context of the sophistic movement has not been brought into conversation with Jewish literature to the degree it has been with Christian literature. 23 Laura Nasrallah, Christian Responses to Roman Art and Architecture, 29-30. 24 Ian Henderson, “The Second Sophistic and Non-Elite Speakers,” in Thomas Schmidt and Pascale Fleury, eds., Perceptions of the Second Sophistic and Its Times—Regards sur la Seconde Sophistique et son époque (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011), 23. On this basis, Henderson suggests that understanding the texts, audiences, and performances of “sub- and counter-sophistic rhetorics,” exemplified by early Christian literature, can help clarify how the Second Sophistic is conceived. 22

CHAPTER ONE. GAMING THE SYSTEM

13

descriptor. There is a need to describe the ways in which early Christian and Jewish communities engaged with the sophistic movement at large, but at the same time to capture the fact that the relationship between elite sophists and early Christian and Jewish religious communities was multi-dimensional and dynamic. The restriction of many studies of the Second Sophistic to the elite, highly educated voices of the imperial East has, at times, explicitly precluded the literature of Christian and Jewish communities in the Roman world.25 Despite the objections of earlier scholars, these two literatures bear importantly on one another, even if their precise relationship is difficult to pin down. Kendra Eshleman argues, “Christian intellectuals were closer in background and habitus to Second Sophistic pepaideumenoi than either would have liked to admit.”26 Tim Whitmarsh echoes this assessment, explaining the need to re-conceptualize this period and its literature as “postclassical.”27 Whitmarsh employs this term in order to undermine what is supposed to “count as Greek literature” and to refocus attention on texts that “offer the best opportunities for confronting the larger questions of historical change, linear versus plural traditions, and cultural conflict.”28 This line of argument has exposed the insufficiency of historiographical models of the post-classical world that do not acknowledge the interdependent and highly dynamic relationships that structured the sophistic movement. Whatever “the Second Sophistic” may signify—especially if it can serve as a venue for explaining how Jews and Christians engaged with elite intellectu-

25 Simon Swain, in a discussion of the rise of linguistic Atticism and the concern for purity and the maintenance of an idealized Greek past, distinguishes between the obsession over linguistic Atticism that characterized the Second Sophistic and the “much ‘lower’ form of Greek” that can been seen in early Christian texts and Egyptian papyri (Hellenism and Empire, 30). By contrast, Kendra Eshleman references recent studies on early Christianity that engage with the Second Sophistic (The Social World of Intellectuals in the Roman Empire, 14-15; esp. n.41). 26 Eshleman, The Social World of Intellectuals in the Roman Empire, 14. 27 Whitmarsh, Beyond the Second Sophistic, 2. 28 Whitmarsh, Beyond the Second Sophistic, 2.

14

GAMING GREEKNESS

al culture in the Roman Imperial world—it requires an auxiliary vocabulary to situate it within an immensely complex social world.

III. COMPETITION AND THE PRODUCTION OF CULTURE The fraught social and political dimensions that factored into the sophistic movement as a part of elite cultures around Greek language and literature in the early Roman Empire help explain why “Hellenism” may be a problematic descriptor of the complex ways that Jews and early Christians engaged with Greek intellectual culture in the early Roman Empire. At the same time, it demonstrates why “the Second Sophistic” also fails to capture the complex stakes of the postclassical world, even as it also identifies a historical milieu that bears importantly on the foundations of these religious traditions. In this period sophists, philosophers, religious entrepreneurs and other varieties of intellectuals began to speak in the same language. While the voices of sophists and other elite intellectuals are often presumed to be the inheritors of that Greek tradition, no expression of Greekness existed in the abstract. Each performance of what it was to be Greek entailed a claim about what it meant to be Greek and what the appropriation of Greekness meant in a globalized, Roman Empire. This was as much the case with Philo of Alexandria as it was with Herodes Atticus, as it was with Clement of Alexandria. Greekness existed as a cultural resource that could be used by the ignorant or the refined, but could never be entirely possessed or contained. Greekness was, instead, a constantly shifting object of contest among elites and would-be intellectual luminaries within the Roman world who engaged in all kinds of agonistic postures and strategies in order to lay claim to paideia and its attendant resources. Thus I suggest that to be Greek in the Roman world was a function of ambitious cultural performances that were premised on the notion that if one (often quite literally) walked like a Greek and talked like a Greek, one was a Greek. Competition provides a dynamic way to discuss how diverse communities engaged with, performed and adopted Greekness in order to stake a claim on an important cultural field in the early Roman Empire. The dynamics of this competition are often difficult to pin down because they were constantly shifting through processes of agonistic exchange as ancient subjects molded and shaped the paideutic

CHAPTER ONE. GAMING THE SYSTEM

15

arena they inhabited. The “Second Sophistic,” the “sophistic milieu/movement,” and the “post-classical world” are all terms that are designed to define an intellectual arena that was defined by its dynamc mechanisms of continual exchange. But this field was also a concrete part of ancient discourses around belonging and self-identity, in which the task of vying for social legitimacy became essential to one’s comportment and intellectual persona. For this reason, the embodied habitus of vying, imperial-era pepaideumenoi provide the clearest view of the nebulous and abstract dynamics of productive, competitive exchange that existed in Roman society in this period. In light of this model of cultural relations in the early Roman world, Christian and Jewish competition for Greek cultural legitimacy in the 1-3rd centuries CE can be conceived in terms of a non zerosum competition. The texts and personalities we find in this diverse literature are involved in cultural strategies that seek access to legitimacy and space on the field of Greekness. This field of cultural competition was similar to the kind of economic and biological competition that fosters dynamic exchange, competitive fitness, and creative evolution. To make use of a biological metaphor, we can conceptualize the social world of the early Roman Empire as a diverse and dynamic cultural ecosystem in which Christians and Jews were fledgling species that contended to achieve space for themselves and find equilibrium with each other, and the system as a whole.29 Historians are sometimes forced to rely on fixed backgrounds in order to consider a historical subject in the foreground. Hellenism has proved to be an expansive and very flat backdrop for the study of early Judaism and

I use the analog “species” for Christians and Jews as loosely as possible. The benefit of the analogy to an ecosystem is its ability to model a kind of mutual constituency between an environment and its members. However, the complicated element for this model is time. The relationship between the system and its subjects develops over time, but any single “moment” also entails both the definite past and the potential future. The system as a whole, then, is a function of the (very many) subjects’ dynamic interaction. An ecosystem models non zero-sum competition by being, in a very literal sense, greater than the sum of its parts—that is, the way the parts interact actually produces something greater than they would if left in isolation.

29

16

GAMING GREEKNESS

Christianity. In short, there is need for an approach that can mutually perceive the forest and the trees. Paideia as Cultural Capital in the Roman Social World

Competition has long been a part of scholarly conversations about the Second Sophistic. In his foundational study of the movement, Glen Bowersock discusses Favorinus and Polemo’s jousting and notes how “it is in the friction of historical personalities that matters of interest are to be found... Demonstrations staged for this teacher or that by crowds of partisan students make a bit more brilliant the picture of local affairs under the high Empire.”30 Whitmarsh sees an even greater scope for the debates and contests about paideia: Paideia was not a single, doctrinally coherent system, but the locus for a series of competitions and debates concerning the proper way in which life should be lived. One of the primary differences between modern “literature” and the texts [from the Second Sophistic] lies in the generic multiplicity of the latter: they include philosophy, rhetoric, history, satire, and biography. All of these genres were subject to internal dissensions and rivalries: rhetoricians argued about style, historians and biographers argued about subject matter, and philosophers were the most argumentative of the lot... In addition, philosophers were competing for paideutic primacy with rhetoricians, sophists, and many occupants of grey areas between the various manifestations of philosophy and sophistry.31

Glen Bowersock, Greek Sophists in the Roman Empire, 89. Eshleman concurs with Bowersock on this point, and especially on the way that locality figured into competitive frameworks. She helpfully adds, “Geographic dispersion and competition among local schools could give rise to diverse paradigms of what it meant to be a sophist or a philosopher” (Eshleman, The Social World of Intellectuals in the Roman Empire, 33-34). She goes on to explain: “we glimpse this in the popularity in one city of orators and styles of oratory despised by audiences in another, in rivalries between local teachers of contrasting character, or in the tendency of students to shop around until they found a teacher of their liking” pointing to Philostratus, VS 580, 598 and 536 for examples. 31 Whitmarsh, Greek Literature and the Roman Empire, 5-6. 30

CHAPTER ONE. GAMING THE SYSTEM

17

Whitmarsh’s characterization accepts Bowersock’s premise, but explodes it both in scope and in significance. His image of paideia is a dynamic one full of ambiguity and overlap, in which Greek cultural legitimacy is at the center of an Empire-wide tug-of-war, with intellectuals of all stripes pulling from every side.32 This model of intellectual rivalry describes how complex these cultural realities were and demonstrates the way in which paideia was endowed with value by Roman subjects in the early centuries of the Principate. What paideia is and how it functioned in the Second Sophistic has been well established; however the question of what the “series of competitions and debates” about paideia meant in the Roman world warrants further description. If the Isocratean model of Greekness imbued paideia with a cultural value that was prized in the Roman world, a question emerges: what are the effects and ramifications of competing for paideia within the Roman social arena on the value of Greekness and on those who traded in it? The possession and performance of Greek paideia was the singular way in which one could compete for Greekness in the Roman Empire; indeed, paideia was the stuff out of which Greekness was made. Those who enjoyed the greatest social legitimacy from their intellectual station were the pepaideumenoi—literally “those who have been educated” in Greekness.33 However, focusing on cultural 32 Cf. Tim Whitmarsh, The

Second Sophistic, 13. Education in the ancient world, especially among Greek-speakers in the imperial East, has been the subject of very thorough scholarship in the last half century. The two foundational studies in ancient education and paideutic culture are those of Werner Jaeger, Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture, Gilbert Hight, trans., 3 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1945), and Henri I. Marrou’s study Histoire de l’éducation dans l’Antiquité (Paris: Le Seuil, 1948). Among the most important studies that have contributed broadly to the study of the Second Sophistic are Kevin Robb, Literacy and Paideia in Ancient Greece (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). Teresa Morgan, Literate Education in the Hellenistic and Roman Worlds (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Konrad Vössing, Schule und Bildung im Nordafrika der Römischen Kaiserzeit (Bruxelles: Latomus, 1997); Yun Lee Too, ed., Education in Greek and Roman Antiquity (Leiden: Brill, 2001); Rafaella Cribiore, Gymnastics of The Mind: Greek Education in Roman and Hellenistic Egypt (Princeton: Princeton 33

18

GAMING GREEKNESS

subjects can obscure the mutually constitutive relationship between those who were competing and the things for which they competed. To be a pepaideumenos was to exhibit a kind of Greekness with a certain virtuosity, but it was also to have the ability to reshape what Greekness could mean. This ability to be possessed and re-valued through its exchange defines how paideia served as a valuable form of cultural capital in the Roman world.34

University Press, 2005) and The School of Libanius in Late Antique Antioch (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007); W.A. Johnson, Readers and Reading Culture in the High Roman Empire: A Study of Elite Communities (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010); Rafaella Cribiore, Libanius the Sophist: Rhetoric, Reality, and Religion in the Fourth Century, Cornell Studies in Classical Philology (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013). There has also been a resurgence of study into early Christian education, especially in the late ancient world. See, notably, Bruce Winter, Paul and Philo Among the Sophists: Alexandrian and Corinthian Responses to a Julio-Claudian Movement, 2nd ed., (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2001); Edward Watts, City and School in Late Antique Athens and Alexandria (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006); Catherine Chin, Grammar and Christianity in the Late Roman Empire (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007); Susanna Elm, Sons of Hellenism, Fathers of the Church: Emperor Julian, Gregory of Nazianzus, and the Vision of Rome (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012). 34 Here, and throughout this section, I borrow from Pierre Bourdieu’s model of cultural capital: “Capital, which, in its objectified or embodied forms, takes time to accumulate and which, as a potential capacity to produce profits and to reproduce itself in identical or expanded form, contains a tendency to persist in its being, is a force inscribed in the objectivity of things so that everything is not equally possible or impossible” (“The Three Forms of Capital,” in J.G. Richardson, ed., Handbook for Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education [Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1986], 241–258). Additionally, throughout this chapter I refer to the “exchange value” of paideia. This language is intended to explain the means by which paideia is endowed with its value as capital by being traded, reproduced, or shared in the way Bourdieu suggests. In other words, analogous to more materially valuable forms of capital, the value of paideia is a function of its dynamic movement throughout the social networks that prized it as cultural capital. I trace Bourdieu’s discussion explicitly in footnotes.

CHAPTER ONE. GAMING THE SYSTEM

19

To claim and possess paideia in the Imperial world entailed that one adopt the habitus of a competitor—to become an ἀγωνιστής.35 The elite contexts in which sophists competed was mutually structured by an archaizing impulse to relive the Athenian past and to ambitiously pursue Roman favor in the present.36 Thus, competing for Greekness entailed the mutual claim that one had legitimately inherited paideia while also acquiring it through supreme individual effort.37 To aspire to win acclaim as a pepaideumenos, then, does not describe a consistent set of authorized norms and expressions. Instead, it defines a shifting cultural quantity that was wrapped up in, and constantly produced by, the agonistic structures of Imperial Again, Bourdieu: “Most of the properties of cultural capital can be deduced from the fact that, in its fundamental state, it is linked to the body and presupposes embodiment. The accumulation of cultural capital in the embodied state, i.e., in the form of what is called culture, cultivation, Bildung, presupposes a process of embodiment, incorporation, which insofar as it implies a labor of inculcation and assimilation, costs time, time which must be invested personally by the investor. Like the acquisition of a muscular physique or a suntan, it cannot be done at second hand” (“The Forms of Capital,” 48). I note that Bourdieu’s metaphors of the marketplace and of bodily maintenance resonate with how sophists described their own efforts to lay claim to Greekness qua capital. 36 Here I pass over a commonplace of research on the Second Sophistic: the role of an archaizing instinct among sophistic authors as a means to negotiate an understanding of Greekness that was distinct from Rome. These dynamics have been so well explicated and so universally adopted by other scholars that I presume them to be fundamental to the period. See, E.L. Bowie, “The Greeks and their Past in the Second Sophistic,”; Graham Anderson, “The pepaideumenos in Action: Sophists and their Outlook in the Early Empire,” ANRW 2, 34, 2. (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1989: 79-208); Simon Swain, Hellenism and Empire, esp. esp. 43-100; Tim Whitmarsh, Greek Literature and the Roman Empire, esp. 41-89; 133-178. These issues will resurface in chapter 7 in which Tatian’s engagement with linguistic Atticism represents the first Christian voice to engage the topic. 37 Bourdieu argues that cultural capital in its embodied state “manages to combine the prestige of innate property with the merits of acquisition” (“The Forms of Capital,” 49). This characterization aptly conveys the way in which paideia functioned as a site of agonistic struggle among the agents of the Second Sophistic, who competed over it both as a legitimate inheritance and as an individually-cultivated personal possession. 35

20

GAMING GREEKNESS

Roman society as those who aspired to Greekness embodied them. This competitive framework was endemic to the Isocratean formulation of Greekness, which made the possession and exhibition of paideia—in its constantly shifting value and subtly changing forms—the common basis for what made someone Greek. An individual navigating the social realities that underlay the exchange of paideia might variously endeavor to appropriate Greek cultural resources, adapt the expressive capacities of Greek literary and rhetorical forms and present himself as Greek. But to do so entailed a cultural performance that was by its very nature strategic. These forms of cultural deployment and performance were comprised of a whole series of strategically consigned attitudes, manners, postures, and locutions that characterized what can be termed an agonistic relationship to paideia. As a result, exhibiting Greekness and competing for Greekness were, at one level, one and the same. Paideia in the Roman Social World

The social universe in which these agonistic performances of Greekness took place was a dynamic one, and it was never abstracted from the broader Imperial world.38 Frequently, the competitive dynamics that defined Greekness in this period were not a hidden dimension of cultural exchange. They were, rather, an explicit part of social and political life throughout the Eastern Mediterranean.39 Agonistic conNo one has clarified this context more fully than Thomas Schmitz, who argues that elite society was founded on a series of competitive interrelationships among individuals, families, and cities. Schmitz argues that φιλοτιμία and φιλοπρωτία are linguistic signifiers for the pursuit of cultural legitimacy by the educated elite (Thomas Schmitz, Bildung und Macht: Zur sozialen und politischen Funktion der zweiten Sophistik in der griechischen Welt der Kaiserzeit, 97-99). The use of φιλόπρωτία—especially in view of the lexical valence of πρῶτος—demonstrates the way implicit and explicit forms of competition were conceptualized together. The term signifies political rank, social preeminence as well as the prize for which athletes and other competitors contend (see LSJ, “πρότερος and πρῶτος”, A.III; B.I.4; B.II.1). 39 Schmitz’s formative work illuminates the competitive mechanisms of this period. But it also imposes a blind spot with respect to those sub-elites who 38

CHAPTER ONE. GAMING THE SYSTEM

21

frontations were often structured on a zero-sum logic that presumed a static in-group and out-group dynamic (or discussed as if they were).40 As a result, paideutic discourses played a role in broader contests for status among all manner of citizens and subjects in the Roman world.41 It is also a concretely locatable aspect of how competition for this kind of notoriety touched on many levels of Roman society.42 However, as we have seen, competition does not always did not vie for the same social location and civic notoriety as did those Schmitz discusses. Judith Perkins has addressed this issue with respect to Schmitz in explaining the trajectory of her own account: “I am less interested in the subtle interactions and competitions of the elites evidenced in the texts of the period and more in the divisions that the texts created between the elite and the non-elite” (Roman Imperial Identities in the Early Christian Era [London: Routledge, 2009], 20). 40 Graham Anderson explains, “The social prestige of paideia is often undisguised: a society polarizing into honestiores and humiliores was able to polarize into πεπαιδευμένοι and ἀπαίδευτοι, into educated and ignoramuses” (“Sophists and their Outlook in the Early Empire,” ANRW II.33.1: 80-208, 105). Whitmarsh explicitly links this ambition to the way that paideia was defined and deployed among the elite: “In the highly competitive world of elite ambition (or philotimia), differences between factions in paideutic methods and ideals mapped out the struggles within the elite for prestige and status” (Whitmarsh, Greek Literature and the Roman Empire, 6). Cf. Eshleman, The Social World of Greek Intellectuals, esp. 21-66; 125-148. 41 For further discussion, see Peter Garnsey, Social Status and Legal Privilege in the Roman Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), as well as “Aspects of the Decline of Urban Aristocracy in the Empire,” ANRW II.1 (1974): 229-252. 42 Schmitz explains that this ambition was essential to individual sophists, as well as to those cities who vied with one another for prominence and the favorable attention of an increasingly philhellenic Rome (Schmitz, Bildung und Macht, 99-101). That this ambition often took the form of agonistic displays of education and learning (Schmitz employs the term “Schulagonen”) is indicative of the way that the sophistic movement was especially preoccupied with intellectual capital. The civic elite expressed the desire for honor by promoting their exceptional character and paideutic legitimacy. Schmitz amasses a series of inscriptional examples that demonstrate how overt this kind of ambition could be; in one representative example he cites an inscription from Thyateira which commends Tiberius Claudius Menogenes Caecilianus as a “a man who’s demeanor with respect to all culture

22

GAMING GREEKNESS

admit such neatly delineated outcomes, and the black-and-white logic of sophistic ambition masks a complex series of mechanisms that facilitated social mobility and cultural innovation. The relevance that paideia came to have for broader forms of social competition in the Roman world, more than any other factor, catalyzed the entire Isocratean enterprise in this period. This meant that creating distinction and difference among intellectuals and their audiences was just as crucial as cultivating a taste for Greekness among Roman society. Maud Gleason describes the efforts of ambitious sophists as “a very narrow form of competition where [sophists] strained to set themselves apart from the very men whose approbation they sought.”43 This competition for Greekness was “narrow” both in the sense that distinguishing oneself among the elite of any field entails very subtle kinds of differentiation, and in the sense that very few “professional” sophists comprise the field Gleason describes. But the spread and significance of these kinds of competition—repeated constantly by numerous subjects—was broader than the narrow sophistic occasions upon which Gleason focuses. This “macro-competition” constituted the field upon which philosophers, pepaideumenoi, the socially elevated and ambitious, and indeed any intellectual community involved in the production of literary culture in a Greek milieu met one another. Whitmarsh captures one of the broad stages upon which this performance of Greekness took place: “For the members of the provincial elites, Greekness was a stake in an Empire-wide aristocratic competition for status.”44 Thomas Schmitz has argued that the embodied agonism that operated within the realm of sophistic self-presentation resulted in part from the social games that defined how elites manifested their desire to compete with their peers and vie for supremacy.45 In his and virtue accounted him among the elite of Asia” (ἄνδρα ἤθους ἕνεκα καὶ παιδείας καὶ ἀρετῆς τε | πάσης ἐν τοῖς πρώτοις τῆς Ἀσίας καταριθμού|μενον (IG Rom. 4.1226 = TAM 5.933; Bildung und Macht, 102). 43 Maud Gleason, Making Men, 162. 44 Tim Whitmarsh, “Greece is the World,” 273. 45 Schmitz remarks, “Finden wir bei diesen Wettspielen eine Reihe wichtiger Momente der griechischen Gesellschaft der Kaiserzeit dargestellt: Die kultu-

CHAPTER ONE. GAMING THE SYSTEM

23

reading, sophistic styles of agonism constituted a posture that was modeled on broader aspects of social competition in the Roman Empire. Plutarch’s corpus is an especially fecund resource for tracking the various forms this distinctly civic and elite competition takes. In one instance Plutarch laments the “greed (πλεονεξία) and contentiousness (φιλονεικία) of the foremost citizens” with a view to the way that vying administrators appeal to the emperor on even small matters, thereby undermining imperial authority. 46 In another context, he castigates the citizens of provincial cities who wish for greater civic prominence and patrician eminence.47 Plutarch enjoyed an especially wide vantage on the workings of social ambition within the intellectual communities of the Greek-speaking East. He frequently depicts a social world that is image-obsessed, insecure, and contentious for greater notoriety and fame. Schmitz helpfully traces out other concrete instances in which this kind of competition took place. He further sets up a crucial distinction between explicit competition, exemplified by civic contests and festivals (including athletic and rhetorical competitions), and implicit competition, best seen in the competitive relationship that attended all sophistic performances in which audiences compared and judged performers against classical Greek rhetorical luminaries.48

relle Elite präsentierte in den Agonen ihre philotimia, den Wunsch, sich mit ihresgleichen zu messen und den ersten Rang einzunehmen” (Bildung und Macht, 112.) However, the “narrow form of competition” intimated by Gleason becomes, in Schmitz’s presentation, an even more elite affair that made social status and education largely equivalent. 46 Plutarch, Mor. 814F-815A. 47 Plutarch, Mor. 470 C. 48 Schmitz, Bildung und Macht, 110-127. This competition with classical antecedents mirrored the innately agonistic dynamics of sophistic culture— vying with others also extended to historical personages with whom one vied for notoriety and cultural significance. When Lucian’s huckster teacher of rhetoric advises his student to belittle rivals he suggests comparing them to classical authorities: “‘How is Demosthenes next to me?’ or ‘It’s like I am contending with one of the ancients (παλαιῶν ὁ ἀγών’)!’ and that kind of thing” (Rhet. Praec., 21). Schmitz’s account of these agonistic contexts crucially expands how the act of competing as a sophist applied to all kinds of

24

GAMING GREEKNESS

This kind of competition amounted to a kind of agonistic play that became a hallmark of the lightly competitive intellectual soirees that appear in Plutarch’s Symposium, Lucian’s The Eunuch and Athanaeus’ Sophists at Dinner, among other sophistic literature. 49 Paideia, in its imitable and tradable malleability, proved to serve two purposes: it fit into existing structures of social ambition, but it also preserved its hallmark cultural status as a uniquely potent mechanism for the work of philosophers, sophists and other intellectuals. It was suitable to deep philosophical speculation as well as for playful literary fancy—in short, it was not only valuable as a type of cultural capital, it was also durable and resilient as a form of social currency. Paideia as Open-Source Culture

The fact that paideia was based on an act of imitation also made it accessible in a way uncharacteristic of other social resources like civic patronage or Roman citizenship.50 This “open source” dimension of paideia is a direct result of the influence of how the Isocratean paradigm was received and the wide adoption of paideutic forms of selfperformance. Cf. Galen, CMG 5.8.1, where even the practice of medicine functioned as a contest among one’s audience of peers and patients. 49 The language of play is, of course, highly suggestive and attaches to the way that competitions often take the form of games, and games often model competition. However, this language also resonates with the notion of play employed by Derrida to describe the way human agents reveal and respond to the necessary fictions that center the structures that organize the world, which “permits the play of [the structure’s] elements inside the total form” (“Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” in Writing and Difference, Alan Bass, trans. [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978], 278ff.) This kind of play is not irrelevant to the sophistic enterprise of refashioning the sympotic literature that Schmitz identifies here. 50 I have passed over the formative role of imitation in ancient education of all kinds, and especially its role in the rhetorical milieu of the Second Sophistic, where emulating famous sophists of old was the summum bonum of all aspirant sophists. Whitmarsh and Stephen Halliwell masterfully address this issue in depth in their respective studies (Greek Literature and the Roman Empire, 41-130; The Aesthetics of Mimesis: Ancient Texts & Modern Problems [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002]).

CHAPTER ONE. GAMING THE SYSTEM

25

expression in the Roman Empire. As a result, it became an indispensible resource for those who negotiated the Greek intellectual past and the Roman social and political present. For example, in the Parallel Lives, Plutarch frequently designates his Roman as well as his Greek subjects to be exemplars of the cultivation of paideia, thereby making Greekness a basis for judging even the traits of historical figures from Roman history. In his Life of Numa, Plutarch compares the archaic patrician Numa’s character with that of the legendary Spartan statesman Lycurgus, and decides that it is the Roman who was “the Greeker lawgiver (ἑλληνικώτερον... νομοθέτην)” of the two.51 Considered as a subsequent move developed along the strategic lines of Isocrates’ initial gambit, the openness and availability of Greekness (as well as the resulting competition that openness fomented) functioned to increase the value of paideia as a social and cultural resource in the Roman Empire. In the process, Plutarch portrays a Roman luminary to “out-Greek” his ostensibly Greek historical parallel. Isocrates’ gambit provided a first move in an expansive competition both for the legitimate possession of Greekness and over the meaning and significance of being Greek. Competing for culture and contributing to the high valuation of paideia constituted a strategy of its own—proposed by no single individual, but contributed to by everyone who continued the Isocratean project—to perpetuate the significance of Greek heritage.52 Plutarch, Comp. Lyc.-Nom. 1.10. Plutarch’s language here is especially illuminating in light of Plutarch’s larger biographical project; Hans Dieter Betz explains, “As Plutarch designs them, the βίοι of eminent Greeks and Romans set forth as examples what is both commendable and reprehensible. The arena of history becomes the life context in which the truth of these values is tested by real experiences by both the persons portrayed and the readers” (“Credibility and Credulity in Plutarch’s Life of Numa,” in David Aune and Robin Darling Young, eds., Reading Religions in the Ancient World: Essays Presented to Robert MacQueen Grant on his 90th Birthday [Leiden: Brill, 2007], 47). Cf. Whitmarsh, Greek Literature and the Roman Empire, 118; and Robert Lamberton, Plutarch (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), 60-145. 52 Whitmarsh, discussing this passage, concludes that “Romans can be described as ‘Greeker’ than Greeks in Plutarch’s system demonstrates the 51

26

GAMING GREEKNESS

On the other hand, while Greekness was accessible, it still came at a premium. Not all those who pursued paideia had equal resources to claim it. The value of Greek culture was in part established by the collective competition for paideia in a civic arena that was populated by eclectically educated aspirants, not all of whom successfully won renown. The social purchase of paideia among those who could not manage to entirely get their hands on it was just as crucial for how it was endowed with value. This becomes especially clear in those rare instances in which the experiences of sub-elite aspirants for Greekness survive. The plight of a certain Neilus from Alexandria, whose circumstances are preserved in a fragmentary papyrus from Oxyrhynchus, provides a helpful illustration. Neilus writes to his father about his inability to find a rhetorical instructor who will give him a discounted rate while he searches for an educational bargain in a city that is bereft of sophists.53 The value of paideia as capital was predicated upon its openness to being exchanged, but it is a mistake to suppose that this was largely a matter of elite pepaideumenoi currying imperial favor by educating Romans. The existence of a discount market in which stingy fathers could try to find a deal on a sophist to educate their sons had a pronounced effect on the value of Greekness as well as its social purchase among those who sought to elevate their station in the Roman Empire. On the other hand, paideia’s open exchange in the Roman Empire created a kind of marketplace that resulted from the opening provided by the Isocratean model of Greekness. It is this marketplace that initiates the mutually–constitutive relationship between those who were most successfully Greek and the most successful versions of Greekness. And yet, this reciprocal relationship also gives rise to an unavoidable tension that defined the scope and influence of this marketplace by defining the limits for the competitive, self(broadly Isocratean) presence in these writings of a ‘universalist’ equation of Hellenism with civilization” (Whitmarsh, Greek Literature and the Roman Empire, 118). 53 P.Oxy. XVIII 2190. On this text, see the helpful exposition in Bruce Winter, Paul and Philo among the Sophists, 256-260. Cf. Eshleman, The Social World of Intellectuals, 35.

CHAPTER ONE. GAMING THE SYSTEM

27

aggregating efforts of intellectual entrepreneurs in the Roman world. Who could and who could not trade in this marketplace was integral to the process of bouning the endeavor of presenting oneself in the guise of paideutic Greekness. Kendra Eshleman has contributed deep insights into these issues and suggests that a literal sense of membership, curated and defined by the approving members of various intellectual groups, was the defining characteristic of who got to be a sophist. In contrast to the idea that “consumers” might recommend or acclaim the skills of sophists, she explains: More congenial to producers of paideia were methods of discernment that left the evaluation of quality and the (ideally literal) separation of the worthy from the unworthy in the hands of experts like themselves. Like recommendations, these approaches to community self-policing exploit personal interactions to draw (and justify) distinctions among those who hold themselves out as legitimate purveyors of paideia, but within sharply restricted horizons whose very limitations contribute to defining the boundaries of the group. Unlike consumer recommendations, this method is available only to those who have already staked out a position as an insider. This approach implicitly subordinates the various markers of identity cited by nonexperts to a single standard: legitimate sophists and philosophers are those whose self-presentation as such is accepted by other legitimate insiders. The rhetorical strength of this conception lies in its affirmation of the community’s exclusive right to define itself—a proposition that in turn tacitly asserts the self-evident prior existence of the very community called into being by the act of definition.54

This model of sophistic relationships illuminates the role that competition played in the value of Greek paideia in a number of ways. First, it presents a defined center made up of undisputed “legitimate purveyors of paideia” surrounded by an implicitly ambitious

Kendra Eshleman, The Social World of Intellectuals in the Roman Empire, 38.

54

28

GAMING GREEKNESS

group of outsiders. Second, it defines paideia as both an ostensibly objective qualification for legitimacy as well as a subjectively construed product of “expert consensus.” Finally, it lucidly underlines the recursive dimension of cultural definition (i.e., the insiders are inside because they are experts; the experts are expert because they are insiders; they are insiders... and so on, and so on). The social “logic” behind Eshleman’s insights attaches to the competitive dimensions of sophistic discourse and performance as a whole—to compete was to attempt to position oneself in an authoritative position.55 These competitions over paideia were local as well as Empire-wide; they existed in very concrete terms—as in the case of two individual sophists vying for rhetorical prestige—but they also structured the subtle ways that intellectual groups of various stripes engaged with one another. ****** The implications of paideia’s cultural significance as an object of competition across broad social and political contexts are profound. Among them, it means within the agonistic framework of the Roman Imperial world that, for example, Aelius Aristides’ summative sophistry in the Panathenaen oration and the tangentially Greek, sartorial argument of Tertullian in his praise of the Greek tunic in De Pallio are both part of the same cultural economy. Paideia’s cultural value incentivized the non zero-sum competition that underlined the continual reproduction of Greekness, catalyzed new forms of self-expression, and exploited Greekness in the production of new

Eshleman does not avoid other voices and communities in her extraordinary study. Indeed, she delineates the sophistic universe in the way that she does in order to draw corollaries to early Christian and philosophical literatures that develop similar strictures around the idea of “membership.” My project intends to develop upon Eshleman’s thesis by using competition as a way to describe and account for the blurriness that frequently occurred at the places where some of these communities met.

55

CHAPTER ONE. GAMING THE SYSTEM

29

discourses that were highly valued within the Roman Empire.56 The social and intellectual field that resulted from the mutual competition for paideia was comprised of players who always adopted strategically conceived positions and agonistic postures. And yet, these contentious social interactions did not amount to a game of cultural capture-the-flag. Instead, they describe the polyvalent and generative relationships that collectively produced the social dynamics that resulted from and contributed to the high valuation of Greek paideia. In the hands of Roman authorities, social elites, would-be philosophers, as well as early Christian and Jewish intellectuals, the desire for social legitimacy necessitated the possession and cultivation of paideia.

IV. EMPIRE AND CULTURE: SOPHISTIC GREEKNESS AS A STRATEGY FOR COPING WITH ROMAN POWER In Suetonius’s Life of Nero, the emperor’s love of all things Greek introduces an illuminating dimension to the way Roman political authority and cultural expressions of Greekness existed in the early Principate. In this account, Nero is obsessed with Greek performances of all kinds as well as the agonistic festivals held in Eastern cities. His infatuation goes so far that he inaugurated the “Neronia,” a Roman imitation of Greek games, including competitions in mu-

56 Bourdieu similarly suggest that competition is the mechanism by which capital is reproduced. He explains at length: “Thus the capital, in the sense of the means of appropriating the product of accumulated labor in the objectified state which is held by a given agent, depends for its real efficacy on the form of the distribution of the means of appropriating the accumulated and objectively available resources; and the relationship of appropriation between an agent and the resources objectively available, and hence the profits they produce, is mediated by the relationship of (objective and/or subjective) competition between himself and the other possessors of capital competing for the same goods, in which scarcity—and through it, social value—is generated. The structure of the field, i.e., the unequal distribution of capital, is the source of the specific effects of capital, i.e., the appropriation of profits and the power to impose the laws of the functioning of the field most favorable to capital and its reproduction” (“The Forms of Capital,” 49).

30

GAMING GREEKNESS

sic, gymnastics and horsemanship to be held every five years.57 Nero acted as both the sponsor of games as well as a competitor,58 but Suetonius’s account always places Nero’s imperial authority alongside his efforts as a judge and a competitor for these cultural performances. The overlapping of Nero’s imperial authority and his cultural aspirations eventually led him to grant favors to those who praised his musical gifts, and to forego Rome and its environs in order to compete in the (Roman) province of Achaia itself.59 Frequently, his authority was manifested by his ability to grant Roman citizenship to competitors and judges who engaged in games that celebrated Greek culture. To a group of young Greek dancers who had won the prize of a festival Nero judged, he “presented certificates of Roman citizenship to each one (diplomata civitatis Romanae singulis optulit) when their show finished.”60 Most remarkable of all is Suetonius’s account of Nero’s incompetent efforts as a charioteer in the Isthmian games at Corinth: during the race, the emperor lost his balance and fell out of the car and was unable to finish. When the Corinthian judges dutifully awarded him the prize for the race, Nero conferred freedom to the entire province and to the judges he awarded citizenship as well as substantial cash gifts.61 In Suetonius’s telling, Nero’s appetite for Greekness is such that he exchanges Roman citizenship (and cash) for the status offered by winning the games, trading the authority of Empire for the approval of cultured, Greek-speaking subjects. Rarely does the exchange of the material trappings of Roman power for acclaim as a champion of Greekness occur so crassly as in this passage. Suetonius’s account should be read with the critical, 57 Suet. Ner. 12. Here, as we shall see elsewhere, athletics and sport were part of the competitive contexts of Greekness in the Roman Empire and they clearly were part of the sense of paideia as it existed beyond the specifically delineated intellectual sense granted to it by sophists and philosophers. 58 Nero’s role is described in detail, which I suggest that it accords with the Greek term ἀγωνοθεντῆς discussed below with respect to Favorinus’s Corinthian Oration. 59 Suet. Ner. 22. 60 Suet. Ner. 12. 61 Suet. Ner. 24.

CHAPTER ONE. GAMING THE SYSTEM

31

historical judgment that attaches to all Roman historiography. But Nero’s philhellenic excesses here demonstrate the fraught relationship that existed between Roman political power and Greek cultural domination within the structures and institutions of the cities of the Eastern Mediterranean in the 1st—3rd centuries, CE. This relationship imbued sophistic styles of self-presentation with a political dimension that is not necessarily innate to the stakes of cultural expressions made by sophists, philosophers, athletes, purveyors of civic euergetistic projects or other Greek civic elites. To speak and carry oneself in the guise of Greek culture in the post-classical world was to negotiate a strategically complex political landscape in which citizens of historically Greek cities, Roman authorities of all stripes, and adventurous sub-elites from the margins of the Empire all competed for the stuff of Greece. The relationship between these diverse competitors was always complex, but in important ways, it served as a means by which all kinds of Roman subjects—from Favorinus and Dio Chrysostom to Tertullian and Tatian—could negotiate Roman authority: sometimes to use Rome to serve their agonistic ends, and sometimes to resist the coercions of Empire. The idea that the effete community of sophists was involved in a project of colonial resistance runs contrary to the traditional characterization of the Second Sophistic. Scholars who have pinpointed this dynamic within imperial Greek literature have frequently depicted the sophistic movement’s negotiation of Roman power as part of a strategy to preserve a self-determining agency for those who made up the Greek civic ruling class.62 Even so, the political significance of what sophists were doing in the Roman Empire has scarcely escaped notice. “Hellenism” as it has traditionally been construed, especially among historians of Judaism and Christianity, names a cultural program that was either neutral to, or in some measure collusive with, Roman power. In contrast to this model, the competitive stakes that characterized intellectual networks throughout the This dynamic has become so commonplace that it is now a basic premise of scholarship on the period. However, it was first introduced by Ewan Bowie in his formative essay, “Greeks and their Past in the Second Sophistic,” Past and Present 46 (1970), 3-41.

62

32

GAMING GREEKNESS

Imperial period attach especially to those Roman subjects who engaged with Greekness in order to develop strategies of selfpresentation that responded to the compulsive aspects of Empire. In this way, paideia was not simply the colonized property of Rome, nor a complicit aspect of a supposed “Greco-Roman” civilization. It held value as kind of cultural capital within the Roman social order. Because of that, it could serve as a mechanism of exchange for those who sought to cope with the domineering aspects of Imperial power. Sometimes this exchange occurred quite literally as in the account of Nero’s treatment of the Isthmian judges, but it also operated in more subtle ways through the adoption of Greek garb and rhetorical forms as well as appealing to prevailing discourses of sophistic learning. Indeed, the capacity of claims on Greekness to function beyond the scope of Roman control, but within Roman society, is part of what compelled Imperial subjects and communities to cultivate paideia. The resulting social value of paideia was ambivalent in the extreme: it was imbued with a profound attachment to Roman philhellenism, but any individual or community that endeavored (and succeeded) to possess it could do so. Paideia was most often in the purview of Romans and their elite provincial counterparts—capital of all kinds tends to aggregate around other forms of power. And yet, when it collected in the hands of those on the margins of Roman society, it could be a powerful vehicle for resisting imperial power. Greece and Rome

Roman power was a substantial force on the cultural field upon which paideia was exchanged, but the ambiguous relationship between (ostensibly cultural) Greece and (imperially dominant) Rome introduced ways in which the pursuit of Greekness could provide resources for Roman subjects to respond to and even critique imperial power. Rome’s relationship to Greek culture was extraordinarily complex, but the tendency to depict Rome as the possessor of Greece even as Greece was Rome’s unwitting captor demonstrates the fraught nature of the power differential between the two. In addition, it suggests that Greekness offered resources for resisting imperial influence in a way that was unlike any other cultural modality within the sphere of Roman influence. In the early 2nd century BCE, Rome began to take possession of Greek cities throughout the Eastern Mediterranean; neither

CHAPTER ONE. GAMING THE SYSTEM

33

the Eastern landscape nor the Romans who ventured there were left unchanged by the encounter. Indeed, the question of Roman “appropriation” of Greekness is arguably the fulcrum on which the description of Greekness among early Christians and Jews hinges. The way that Greek culture functioned within the Roman social order bears importantly on the way that other communities engaged the heritage of Greece. The subject status of those who performed Greekness underneath Roman political authority, paideia’s value as capital among the socially elite as well as its efficacy as a way to resist the domination of Roman power all contributed to the agonistic dimensions of Greekness in the 1-3rd centuries CE. Despite all of this, the entwining of Rome and Greece as social and cultural concepts is built into the language and intellectual framework of antiquity, no matter how complex that entwining was in practice. Arnaldo Momigliano presents what might be termed the “standard model” for this synthetic collaboration as one of coterminous appropriation and repudiation on the part of the Romans: While fighting against Carthage, the Romans learnt Greek and absorbed Greek customs and knowledge at increasing speed. There was no corresponding increase in the Greek interest in Rome...Why the Romans threw themselves into the difficult business of absorbing the culture of one foreign nation just when they were involved in exhausting wars with another foreign nation [i.e., Carthage], remains one of those puzzles which characterize nations in their most inscrutable and decisive hours... The assimilation of Greek language, manners and beliefs is indistinguishable from the creation of a national literature which, with all the imitation of alien models, was immediately original, self-assured and aggressive.63

Momigliano identifies Rome’s relationship to Greece to be one that was effectively spontaneous and resulting from Rome’s possession of Greece as well as Roman imitation of Greece’s cultural herit-

Alien Wisdom: The Limits of Hellenization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 16-17.

63

34

GAMING GREEKNESS

age. It was also aggressive and one-directional, at least at the outset. This relationship would clearly have been evident to Greek-speaking citizens of Eastern cities who found themselves newly under Roman rule.64 It was always negotiated in complex terms, and usually with an ambidexterity on the part of Romans who gathered what of Greece they could, but always with an anxiety about the products and ramifications of their cultural appropriation.65 According to Greg Woolf, “Roman responses to Hellenism consisted of a complex and partly incoherent mixture of adoption, adaptation, imitation, rejection, and prohibition.”66 The ambiguity Woolf identifies was not entirely unrecognized by Roman elites themselves, who were often aware of Rome’s subject status with respect to Greek culture. Starting in the first century BCE, there is a prominent strand within Roman literature that suggests that Rome was as much subject to Greece’s cultural sway as Greece was subject to Roman political authority. Roman awareness of this ambiguity has become a commonplace of scholarship on the period, especially as exemplified in two now-famous literary examBy contrast, Roland Syme suggests, “The contact with the alien civilization of Greece originally roused the Romans to become conscious of their own individual character as a people. While they took over and assimilated all that the Hellenes could give, they shaped their history, their traditions and their concept of what was Roman in deliberate opposition to what was Greek” (The Roman Revolution [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1939], 440). 65 Whitmarsh also identifies this dynamic and brings it under the umbrella of “Hellenization” (Greek Literature and the Roman Empire, 10). 66 “Becoming Roman, staying Greek: Culture, Identity, and the Civilizing Process in the Roman East,” in Papers of the Cambridge Philological Society 40 (1994): 120. This reality is perhaps best demonstrated in the figure identified by Tertullian in De Pal.: Cato, the conservative patrician, was a frequent reviler of all things Greek, seeing the infection of Greek learning as the ruin of Rome, even as he was habited in the garb and demeanor of a staid Greek philosopher. (On Cato’s reviling of Greece/Greeks, see Plutarch’s Cat. 23.1-3 and Pliny Nat. Hist. 7.113, 29.13-14, noted above. See also, Erich Gruen, The Hellenistic World and the Coming of Rome [Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1986], 260-266, and Alan Astin, Cato the Censor [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978], 169-174). 64

CHAPTER ONE. GAMING THE SYSTEM

35

ples. The first is Horace’s famous remark: “Greece, which was captured, has captured its feral victor and introduced its arts in rustic Latium” (Graecia capta ferum uictorem cep it et artis intuit agresti Latio).67 Horace’s reflection on Rome’s captive devotion to “the arts” of Greece illuminates a dynamic that was deeply felt among the imperial elite, especially as programmatic cultural appropriation became a prominent part of the city of Rome itself.68 Horace’s remark (along with the tradition it echoes) introduces, again, the recursive dynamic that accompanies other competitive motifs: Rome is (supposedly) the triumphant victor who has taken possession of Greece and its cultural heritage. But even as that happens, Rome is captivated by all things Greek and invests deeply in the traditions of Greece. Perhaps even more influence was the model of cooperative synthesis presented by Vergil in the Aeneid. In this more abstract account, Aeschines describes the complimentary roles that each tradi-

67 Horace,

Ep. 2.1.156-157. Cf. Cicero, Brut. 254; Liv. 34.4.3. (Cf. C. O. Brink, Horace on Poetry, vol. 3: Epistles book II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 200-201. The context of this remark further illustrates the scope of the Second Sophistic’s classicizing and historicizing impulses. Horace argues that Rome cannot become locked in a traditionalist’s obsession with the past. In the reading of Karl Galinsky, Horace argues that, “the Roman populace... is so inured to looking backward and extolling tradition that it lacks any understanding of the creative innovation that makes a tradition possible in the first place” (Augustan Culture: An Interpretive Introduction [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996], 126.) This motif has also been studied extensively with respect to the material remains of classical Greek antiquity by Susan Alcock, Graecia Capta: The Landscapes of Roman Greece (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 68 Karl Galinsky points out that Horace’s remark reflects more than literary borrowing, and notes that the artistic and specifically architectural projects of the late-republican and early Augustan period. He points to Tacitus’ account of Marcellus’ conquest of Syracuse in 211 BCE (Annals, 3.72.1), Caecilius Metellus’ employing of Hemodorus of Salamis in 146 BCE to build the first marble temple in Rome (the temple of Jupiter Stator) along with the temple of Juno Regina. This last case, along with the equestrian portico, was rebuilt by Augustus as the Portius Octaviae, a forerunner of Augustus’ forum (Augustan Culture, 333-334).

36

GAMING GREEKNESS

tion will come to play after the advent of the Roman Imperium to Aeneas while in Hades: To be sure, others will hammer out breathing bronzes More gracefully coax from marble living faces, Better argue cases, and with their compasses Chart the heavens and predict the rising stars. But you, Roman, remember: rule with your power. These are your arts—to impose law and peace, To treat the defeated mercifully, and eviscerate the proud.69

In Vergil’s presentation, Rome’s political acumen is its “art.” But this skill is patterned after the craft of Greek artisans—the “others” whose identities have been elided in order to showcase the summative aptitude of Romans to shape the people of the world into pacified and deflated subjects. As with Horace, the mimicry of Greek artistry is doubled in Vergil whose poetic rendering relies on the imitation of Greek epical predecessors. Roman power may be personified in a “feral victor,” but the victory itself is expressed in Greek terms. The relationship between Greek superiority in the arts, rhetoric and literature on the one hand and Roman political genius on the other are depicted as a complementary one. Greece will effectively fulfill the role of “culture” while Rome will present itself as the political state in which the “arts” of Greece can thrive. This is the cooperative civilization-building implied by the “Greco-Roman synthesis”—it amounts to a cooperative détente that resolves two spheres of competition: military and political domination is ceded in the face of a near-universal cultural influence. Greece contra Rome

This “synthesis” of civilizations does not represent the only way that Greeks responded to Roman rule. The literary models of Horace and Vergil, Aen. 6.847-853. Roland Syme remarks on the implicit contest between Greece and Rome in his influential interpretation in this text, noting that “the Romans could not compete with Greece for primacy in science, arts and letters—they cheerfully resigned the contest. The Roman arts were war and government” (The Roman Revolution, 441).

69

CHAPTER ONE. GAMING THE SYSTEM

37

Vergil present Greece as part of the Roman political order, but they represent an abstract understanding that was common to certain very elite Roman voices. The tendency to see Rome and Greece as part of a single cultural synthesis can help generalize certain effects of the confrontation between Greek culture and Roman society. However, “the Greco-Roman synthesis” also obscures the dynamics at issue among individual Greek subjects of Rome whose lives and careers were defined by ambition, civic allegiance, and strategies of selfpresentation on a cultural field defined by competition. An alternative account of the relationship between Rome and its Greek subjects suggests that Roman power was never amenable to its Greek subjects. Instead, it amounted to a takeover to be endured and resisted only while coping with Rome’s occupation. Thomas Habinek has argued that “for the Romans, Greek culture, like the Greek population and Greek material wealth, was a colonial resource to be exploited and expropriated; to the extent that Greek culture was admired, it was as much for its potential to augment Roman power as for any immanent qualities or characteristics.”70 The idea that Rome saw Greece as a possession and its resources as colonialized property undermines the notion of a broadly-conceived “Greco-Roman synthesis.”71 If Greece was a possession of Rome, how did it come to receive 70 Thomas Habinek, The Politics of Latin Literature: Writing, Identity and Empire in Ancient Rome (Princeton, NJ: Princeton, 1998), 34. Whitmarsh notes that paideia was also a fraught part of Roman aristocratic society, where Romans could not affirm the value of paideia apart from its subjugation as a possession of Rome itself. He explains, “Between Romans, Greek paideia must always appear the object of socio-economic exploitation, not (solely) of veneration: it only has value (in both the mercantile and the aesthetic senses) when it is taken over from its native context and resited in Rome’s agonistic market of elite ambitio” (Greek Literature and the Roman Empire, 14.) Insofar as it constituted a central part of ancient education, however, it always existed in an ambiguous frame as both the basis of civilization and as the possession of Rome. 71 The voices of Roman appropriation are direct and explicitly imperial; Remarking on the language of Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations, Whitmarsh notes: “to ‘take over’ or ‘appropriate’ (accipere; also accepimus and recepti at 1.3) appears to be a euphemistic reference to the processes of conquest whereby Greek material becomes Roman property: as ever, Rome’s status

38

GAMING GREEKNESS

top billing as a partner in civilization building? How did Greece win the distinction of being both the mutual conqueror of Rome and a fellow, if subjected, artisan of the world? Rome’s possession of Greece highlights a tension within the still widely used categorization of a “Greco-Roman” synthesis. We must consider the notion that the frequent collusion of “Greece” and “Rome”—especially by historians of early Christianity and Judaism—undermines the reality of Roman power over the provinces of the Greek East. Moreover, this classification undermines the strategic aspect of intellectual culture in the early Empire that sought to make Greekness amenable to Roman appropriation whole-cloth.72 Indeed, one reading of the “Greco-Roman synthesis” would present the amalgamation of Greece with Rome as a remarkably successful strategy on the part of “Greece” to cope with Roman power. Moreover, postcolonial perspectives in the study of the New Testament and early Christian literature suggest critical pathways to model the relationship between Rome and even its most elite Greek subjects.73 The as imperial conqueror is not far in the background” (Greek Literature and the Roman Empire, 12). 72 Scholars of Christian and Jewish literature have also highlighted the way that presentations of the intellectual landscape of the imperial world have focused on elite voices to the exclusion of others. See especially, Laura Nasrallah, Christian Responses to Roman Art and Architecture, 29-30; Ian Henderson, “The Second Sophistic and Non-Elite Speakers.” Judith Perkins presents this problem in contemporary scholarship as the result of an overly successful strategy of social insinuation by Christians and quips, “Indeed, ‘Christians’ were so successful in their project to suppress their multiple identities that even today their social identity as inhabitants of the Roman Empire is underplayed” (Roman Imperial Identities in the Early Christian Era, 3.) This scholarship has had an immense influence on the present project. 73 Postcolonial readings of early Christian literature, which have frequently focused on the imperial context of Roman rule, have contributed a crucial lens for understanding the wider political contexts in which early Christian literature was penned. Representative monographs that focus on the context of the Roman Empire include Paul and Empire: Religion and Power in Roman Imperial Society, Richard Horsley, ed. (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 1997); Warren Carter, Matthew and Empire; Initial Explora-

CHAPTER ONE. GAMING THE SYSTEM

39

ambivalence with which Greece was initially received by late republican figures like Cicero and Cato evolved into an acknowledgement of Rome’s dependence on Greece as a cultural compass along with a careful, caretaker’s attitude toward the maintenance of Greek cities. When the sophistic movement had come into its own, the civic landscape of the East functioned as a kind of cultural time machine that actualized Greek antiquity and established a rooted connection to a past that was shared by all of those who competed for Greekness—even Romans. Thus, in his Letters, Pliny the Younger advises a friend who is to serve the Empire in Achaia: Understand that you are sent to the province of Achaia—that true, genuine Greece in which manly comportment, learning, and even agriculture are believed to have been first invented (illam veram et meram Graeciam, in qua primum humanitas litterae, etiam fruges inventae esse creduntur). You are sent to govern the affairs of free cities—of those who are consummately men and free (id est ad homines maxime homines, ad liberos maxime liberos)... Keep close your respect for their antiquity, prodigious accomplishments, and even their legends. Dock nothing from anyone’s dignity, liberty or display. Keep this before your eyes: that this is the land from which our justice system was exported, and whose laws were given [to Rome], not as a result of victory, but through a solicitous desire; that it is Athens that you go, and Lacedaemon you rule; that it would be cruel, savage, and barbarous to take away the shadow and residual name of liberty that remains there (quibus reliquam et residuum libertatis nomen eripere durum ferum barbarum est.).74

tions (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 2001); Richard A. Horsley, Jesus and Empire: The Kingdom of God and the New World Disorder (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2003); Neil Elliott, The Arrogance of Nations: Reading Romans in the Shadow of Empire (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2008); Joseph A. Marchal, The Politics of Heaven: Women, Gender, and Empire in the Study of Paul (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2008). Many more articles and essays also have contributed to this issue. 74 Pliny, Ep. 8.24.

40

GAMING GREEKNESS

Here is a different relationship between Rome and Greece than we see in Vergil or Horace. Pliny’s approach is still premised on the idea of Rome’s colonial power over the cities of Greece, but he advises his friend to use a delicate hand out of deep reverence. Pliny’s veneration of Greece and anxiety about Roman savagery represents one of the outcomes of Isocrates’ cultural scheme: by making Greekness agonistically available, even the hegemony of the Roman elite was subject to the terms of the competition for legitimacy. In this way, Rome’s philhellenic posture—which was established and reshaped with particular fervor throughout the Antonine period—upped the stakes of what it meant to be a cultural Greek. To be Greek, in the Isocratean sense, was to claim a kind of legitimacy that had a concrete social payoff. But, as the Roman political order became increasingly enthralled by all things Greek, this legitimacy developed a political significance that necessarily affected how paideia was valued. An alternative rendering of the relationship between Roman power and paideia—one which stands diametrically opposed to Suetonius’s account of Nero—is voiced in one of the chreia from Lucian’s Life of Demonax. There the titular philosopher crosses paths with one of the newly favored urban elites that frequently appear in the pages of sophistic authors. In Lucian’s telling, Demonax takes advantage of his interchange in order to make explicit the way that Greek cultural belonging was distinguished from the mechanisms of Roman political identity: “Now a certain Polybius, quite an uncultured and unlettered person, said, ‘The emperor has honored me with Roman citizenship!’ Demonax replied, ‘Better had he made you a Greek than a Roman’“ (Πολυβίου δέ τινος, κομιδῇ ἀπαιδεύτου ἀνθρώπου καὶ σολοίκου, εἰπόντος, Ὁ βασιλεύς με τῇ Ῥωμαίων πολιτείᾳ τετίμηκεν: εἴθε σε, ἔφη, Ἕλληνα μᾶλλον ἢ Ῥωμαῖον πεποιήκει).75 Lucian’s construction of Demonax portrays a thoroughly practical philosopher who, nonetheless, esteems the notion of legitimacy among Greek intellectuals to be of the highest importance.76 Demonax’s 75 Lucian, Demon. 40. 76 This kind of legitimacy plays a central role in the way that Eshleman describes belonging in her study. Cf. The Social World of Intellectuals in the Roman Empire, 20; 35; 174-175.

CHAPTER ONE. GAMING THE SYSTEM

41

frankness is modeled on the figure of Diogenes and other Cynics who were increasingly venerated among Greek sophists and philosophers. Demonax emulates Diogenes’s parrhesiastic demeanor, and in this case Diogenes’ fabled confrontation with the archetypal monarch Alexander serves as a model for Demonax’s confrontation with the importance of civic Romanness. Demonax makes a clear separation between the way that one becomes Roman and the way one may become Greek: Romanness may be granted by edict—indeed this is the premise of Suetonius’s account of Nero. But Greekness is the hard-won result of study and dedication. Of course, there is an intentional slippage here that serves to underline the difference between Greekness and Romanness. Polybius has been honored with Roman citizenship (ῥωμαίων πολιτεία), but his lack of culture and learning cannot be remediated by fiat. By implication, Greekness must be cultivated and achieved.77 It is, in short, something beyond even the power of Rome to grant. These competing depictions of the relationship between Rome and Greece suggest that a complex, interrelated set of relationships existed between Greece and Rome after the Roman expansion into the East. These relations became even more Gordian as the Greek elite came to play a more prominent role in the philhellenic hay day of the Principate from the late 1st through early 3rd centuries CE. And yet this complexity was not only the cause of the cultural agonism that defined the sophistic landscape, but was an outcome premised on the strategic potential of the Isocratean paradigm. The concept of “Greece” as something that was defined by a classical, largely Athenian, heritage became meaningful to the Roman elite. Thus, Rome competitively selected those parts of Greek heritage that would come to be valuable. Indeed, it was Rome that effectively defined “Greece” as a contiguous Citizenship in the Greek-speaking East was still a reality, but it was organized at the level of cities, which could corporately functioned essentially as geographically imbued pepaideumenoi. Simon Swain points to Lucian’s Lover of Lies where he remarks on the importance of “public and official lies” that necessarily allowed cities to appear grander (Hellenism and Empire, 73). See also Thomas Schmitz discussion of elite belonging and citizenship in Bildung und Macht, 97-135.

77

42

GAMING GREEKNESS

political reality by amalgamating this selected heritage together into a single cultural group.78 At the same time, the implications of Isocrates’ gambit meant that those cities that were filled with the material remains of that classical past were strategically blessed to capitalize on their association with Greekness. The cities of Achaia and coastal Asia Minor were still subject to Roman power, but their location and remains were invested with value that elite Romans prized. The societies built by provincial Romans supplied many competitors for Greekness, but their allegiances were always split, and their participation was always ambiguous. The political power that these particular aspiring pepaideumenoi wielded was substantial, as is certainly the case with Pliny’s correspondent. Upon entering the prominent cities of Greece and Asia Minor, a Roman so empowered would have brought an outsized competitive fitness characterized by wealth, education, and social prestige that was matched by Roman tendencies to collect all things Greek. However, the Roman elite always contended with a risk of undermining their Romanness by being too openly philhellenic.79 Even as Greekness became naturalized within the social order of powerful Romans, these imperial elites invested heavily in the project of Greekness. Their cultural prestige Cf. Simon Swain, Hellenism and Empire, 8-13. He goes on to focus on the distinction between Asian style rhetoric and the Attic form as something which was largely developed by Roman tastes and expectations based in the Greek grammar schools of Rome (Hellenism and Empire, 22-24). He explains that “the antithesis of ‘Asian’ and ‘Attic’ does indeed reflect a stylistic debate that was Roman, not Greek, in origin” (Hellenism and Empire, 24). Cf. Anthony Spawforth, Greece and the Augustan Cultural Revolution, 252-255. 79 This risk was especially pronounced in the immediately post-republican world, and among those conservative Roman writers, like Suetonius and Tacitus, who found an overly eager interest in the stuff of Greece to be evidence of a compromised Roman or of a tyrannical emperor. See, for instance, the case of the emperor Tiberius as discussed in Steven Rutledge, “Tiberius’ Philhellenism,” CW 101 (2008), 453-67. Eshleman considers this issue within her consumerist model of Greek paideia and remarks that “special anxieties may have attached to Roman ‘consumers,’ where producerpatron interactions activated a complex polarity that figured Greeks as teachers and possessors of paideia, Romans as conquerors and students” (The Social World of Intellectuals in the Roman Empire, 81-82). 78

CHAPTER ONE. GAMING THE SYSTEM

43

afforded them opportunities to affect outcomes and provide cultural patronage that indelibly stained the fabric of the cultural arena and profoundly affected the exchange rate of Greek paideia. As a result of this influence, Roman ambivalence about its own cultural authority was mapped onto the cultural marketplace of the Greek-speaking East. In effect, Roman investment in the cultural heritage of Greece provided an especially powerful incentive for imperial subjects to compete for the legitimacy—social, political and cultural—that Greekness offered.80

V.

A LIMIT CASE: T ERTULLIAN’S DE P ALLIO AND THE BOUNDARIES OF GREEKNESS

These methodological approaches do not solve the problems that culture, as a subject of study, introduces. But the kind of problem culture represents is crucially different when considered with this kind of competitive interaction in mind. In the monolithic terms implied by “Hellenism,” culture is defined by a kind of fundamental coherence that, while not precisely nameable, is presumed to be innate to human society. Culture, in this view, is inevitable, and necessarily reflects characteristic (and, implicitly, universal) forms and categories. Considered as a function of non zero-sum competition, however, culture is no longer definable in a strictly delineated way— 80 Perhaps the best explication of this dynamic is Gregory Woolf’s study of Pliny, Ep. 4.22, where Pliny discusses Roman attempts to suppress a Greek style festival in Vienne in Southern Gaul (“Playing Games with Greeks: One Roman on Greekness” in David Konstan and Suzanne Saïd, eds., Greeks on Greekness: Viewing the Greek Past under the Roman Empire, [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006]). Woolf sees Pliny as exemplary of the predicament in which philhellenic Romans negotiated the force of Greekness and the risk of associating with Eastern decadence. He remarks, “Pliny’s letters display and presume a familiarity with many tropes of Greekness. Greece was the origin of civilization but also the source of decadence. The true Roman intellectual flourished utraque lingua, but Pliny’s own Grecisms remain highly marked. Cultural anxiety and excitement about Greek culture in Rome must have retained some power: otherwise there would have been little point in evoking it” (178).

44

GAMING GREEKNESS

such competitition entailed a constant fluidity at odds with set, cultural categories. We can talk about culture as something that characterized the expression and experience of a certain text or is reflected in the self-identifying rhetoric of a certain author, but we do not then have to think of something that is primarily psychological or ontologically transformative. Instead, the changeability, adaptability, and resourcefulness of strategic players can inform historical conclusions that are drawn about an individual text. But those conclusions do not have to fit into an over-arching theory about the “culture” in which the text was written. Focusing on competition as a site of cultural confrontation provides the best opportunity to pinpoint the generative heat where culture is produced. The payoff of this approach begins to become clear in considering how Greek culture functions in a text that is at the very boundaries of its influence: Tertullian’s De Pallio, an oration written by the North African, Christian apologist about the clothing choices made by cosmopolitan Africans. In it, Tertullian engages in what appears to be a trifling discussion, complaining about the difficulties of clothing and discussing the virtues of simple dress by means of extravagant metaphors and extraordinary imagery. Tertullian presents his case with absolute seriousness by adopting the most sophisticated rhetorical tropes and language throughout his oration. If one was to survey Tertullian’s eclectic corpus, De Pallio would seem to be an outlier—a demonstration of Tertullian’s rhetorical prowess by praising the humble pallium, a Greek-style cloak, often worn by certain philosophers and other paragons of practical simplicity, but also widely worn in the empire.81 De Pallio initially seems to bear only There has been some debate about whether or not the pallium Tertullian discusses is the cloak favored by Greek-style philosophers throughout the Roman period, but there is little doubt that it is an originally Greek cloak. (Cf. 3.7, where Tertullian most explicitly identifies it as a traditionally Greek, although now widely worn, garment.) T. Corey Brennan’s discussion of the fundamental Greekness of the pallium is instructive: “For Romans in general the distinction pallium/toga had long been basic. Romans viewed the pallium as a distinctive characteristic of Greeks. One need think only of the ancient classification of dramatic productions (fabulae) into palliate (“in Greek dress,” such as those of Plautus and Terence) and togatae 81

CHAPTER ONE. GAMING THE SYSTEM

45

tangentially on the study of early Christianity; with the exception of a few biblical references, the majority of the piece says little that directly relates to early Christianity. However, in the final sentence, Tertullian orients De Pallio’s entire argument toward a defense of Christians by explaining that a Christian man will bring great honor to the pallium by becoming its ideal wearer.82 Tertullian develops his praise of the pallium by contrasting it with the Roman toga: he laments about how no one undresses more quickly than when taking off a toga, and he rails against the oppressive, constricting nature of shoes, “that special torture of the toga.” This is more than a simple comment about comfortable clothing. There is a roiling animosity against the toga underlying Tertullian’s exposition, suggesting that the toga is being discussed as more than simply a piece of uncomfortable clothing.83 More generally, T. Corey Brennan remarks that despite the seeming inconsequence of the oration, a close look at De Pallio “reveals a stratum of deep serious(“in Roman dress”). Toga wearers, of course, thought their mode of dress superior” (“Tertullian’s De Pallio and Roman Dress in North Africa,” in Roman Dress and the Fabrics of Roman Culture (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), 262.) On the broad popularity of the pallium as a signifier of one’s intellectual status, see the discussion in Paul Zanker, The Mask of Socrates: The Image of the Intellectual in Antiquity (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1996), 268-277, along with Mary Houston’s classic study, Ancient Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Costume, 2nd edition (London: Adam & Charles Black, 1947), 96-99. 82 Vincent Hunink in his commentary on De Pallio argues that there is marginal relevance in this text to “a debate on religion.” Instead, Hunink suggests that Tertullian is primarily offering an entertaining speech, by which “he may have wished to underscore his status and position as a learned sophist and a man of great culture and hidden wisdom” (De Pallio, 23). I agree with Brennan who suggests that this sophistic display is not at odds with Tertullian’s ultimate purpose as a Christian appeal. 83 Walter Pohl remarks that “innovation in dress often expresses more fundamental changes in society, and usually goes along with actual or intended social advancement of new groups” (“Telling the Difference: Signs of Ethnic Identity,” in Strategies of Distinction: The Construction of the Ethnic Communities, 300-800, Walter Pohl and Helmut Reimitz, eds. [Leiden: Brill, 1998], 49).

46

GAMING GREEKNESS

ness.”84 Tertullian is navigating cultures, ethnicities, and the imposing influence of Rome by appealing to a modest and mundane symbol.85 This text showcases the significance of style, self-presentation, and cultural performance in the Roman world. At the outset of De Pallio, Tertullian appeals to his fellow Carthaginians to think twice about how quickly they have adopted the Roman toga.86 As Tertullian begins, he paints a sunny picture of domestic tranquility that has granted the Carthaginian elite the leisure to censure clothing and cast aspersion on the modest Greek pallium.87 However, Tertullian reminds his audience that Rome looms like a colossal shadow that covers the world—and Carthage’s own 84 “Tertullian’s De

Pallio and Roman Dress in North Africa,” 260. Brennan goes on to highlight Tertullian’s broader purpose in De Pallio to persuade the Carthaginians to change their affect and style. 85 The mundanity of Tertullian’s subject is remarkable, and the question of what kind of rhetorical genre De Pallio represents might shed light on why a cloak was an appropriate rhetorical subject. Hunink explains that there is no consensus whatever on the basic aims or genre of De Pallio (De Pallio. 21-23). He does suggest (in agreement with Barnes) that the style of the piece may reflect an intentional imitation of Apuleius’ Florida (De Pallio, 16-17). When Barnes discusses Apuleius’ work, he remarks that it includes a panegyric on a parrot and on the island of Samos. It seems possible that one way to construe De Pallio is as a species of adoxographic rhetoric, of the type discussed by Arthur Pease in his essay, “Things Without Honor” (Classical Philology 21, no. 1 [1926], 27-42). 86 The De Pallio is perhaps the most mysterious of Tertullian’s extant corpus in terms of how to fit the treatise into the chronology of his life. On this point, see Paul McKechnie, “Tertullian’s De Pallio and life in Roman Carthage,” Prudentia 24, no. 2 (1992), 44-66. 87 De Pall. 1.1. I use here the edition of Vincent Hunink. Hunink’s is the most recent edition of the text, and includes a learned translation and an exhaustive commentary. Hunink’s Latin text follows the Dutch critical edition of Aloïs Gerlo (Tertullianus, De Pallio, kritische uitgave met vertaling en commentaar, deel 1: inleiding, tekst en vertaling; deel 2: commentaar [Wetteren: De Meester, 1940]). This text, according to Timothy Barnes (following Eduard Norden), presents “insuperable linguistic difficulties” (Tertullian, 229.) Following other recent studies, I have adapted Vincent Hunink’s translation. All other translations in this study are my own, unless noted, as I do here.

CHAPTER ONE. GAMING THE SYSTEM

47

noble heritage. But it was not always so. Tertullian describes the pallium as a kind of anti-toga that does not convey a single cultural identity, but as a garment that taps into a universalized cultural framework. However, he does not explicitly account for why the pallium is now so ubiquitous—he suggests that its original Greekness gave way to a universal availability. Tertullian remarks that “the pallium is, to be sure, more Greek. But as far as the word is concerned, it belongs to Latin by now. With the word the dress was introduced” (etsi Graecum magis, sed lingua iam penes Latium est. Cum uoce uestis intrauit.)88 Tertullian firms up his point by illustrating the durability of this Greek tunic in a story about the devoutly Roman (and Greek-hating) senator Cato.89 (This would be Cato the Elder.) Cato demonstrates the universal significance of the pallium when he “who had sentenced the Greeks to be removed from town, but who as an old man had become instructed in their letters and language, this same Cato used to bare his shoulder at the time of his administration of justice, and so favored the Greeks no less by wearing his pallium (haud minus palliate habitu Graecis fauit.).”90 Tertullian extends his sartorial analogy on the assumption that the Greekness of the pallium has allowed it to be worn by people from all nations. As he continues, the conflict between the ornately Roman toga and the free, self-designating, philosophically enlightened pallium comes to the fore to speak on its own behalf.91 The pallium speaks with Cynic braggadocio and revels in its consummate 88 De

Pall. 3.7.2. He refers to Cato the Elder, whose disgust with Greek culture and efforts to expel all Greeks from Rome are recounted in Plutarch’s Life of Cato the Elder (esp. 22-23). Plutarch reminds his readers that Cato’s feelings were not successful, since “time has certainly shown the emptiness of this ill-boding speech of his, for while the city was at the zenith of its empire, she made every form of Greek learning and culture her own (πρὸς Ἑλληνικὰ μαθήματα καὶ παιδείαν ἅπασαν ἔσχεν οἰκείως [23.3]). 90 De Pall. 3.7.3. 91 Barnes remarks that, in the opening of De Pallio, “One might be listening to Apuleius as he begins to pay an extravagant compliment to the citizens of the African metropolis. In fact, it is Tertullian in the guise of a Cynic” (Tertullian, 229). 89

48

GAMING GREEKNESS

freedom. It—mind you, this is supposed to be as if a T-shirt began talking—explains its own liberty by remarking: I owe nothing to the forum, nothing to the Campus Martius, nothing to the Senate-house. I do not watch for a magistrate’s function, do not occupy any platform for speakers, do not attend to the governor’s office; I do not smell the gutters, nor adore the bar in court, nor wear out benches, nor disturb proceedings, nor bark pleas; I do not act as a judge, a soldier, or a king: I have withdrawn from public life. My only activity concerns myself; I do not have any care, except for this: to have no care. A better life can be enjoyed in seclusion than out in the open.92

The pallium is not a flatterer, and takes pride in its durable roughness.93 Moreover, the pallium is an indefatigable rhetorician who speaks loudly through its morally imposing presence. The garment quips, “just by showing up I make vices feel embarrassed. Who does not suffer in witnessing his rival? Whose eyes can withstand a person whom his mind could not? It is a great benefit of the pallium, when just the thought of it makes bad morals blush at least.”94 The pallium remarks that it is fit to adorn “every liberality of endeavor” (omnis liberalitas studiorum), and lists all manner of pallium wearers, from grammarians and sophists to astronomers and augurs.95 Perhaps these are lower than the equine Romans, but they are not below toga-clad gladiators. Thus the maxim of upwardly mobile Carthaginians should be reversed: it should not be “from pallium to toga,” but “from toga to pallium!”96 At this, the pallium’s voice falls silent — though its words would have resonated by its presence around Tertullian, who doubtless wore 92 De

Pall. 5.4.2-3. Pall. 5.5.3-6.4. 94 De Pall. 6.1.3. 95 De Pall. 6.2.1. Carly Daniel-Hughes has surveyed the way in which Tertullian engages Roman discourses of masculinity by appealing to the manliness of the pallium, which stood in contradistinction to Roman opinions of Greek effeminacy (The Salvation of the Flesh in Tertullian of Carthage: Dressing for the Resurrection [New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011], 46-47). 96 De Pall. 6.2.3. 93 De

CHAPTER ONE. GAMING THE SYSTEM

49

one as he spoke.97 Tertullian’s final words do not address his audience, but the pallium that he dons, and it is here in this final moment that he reveals his true intentions in praising the universally-worn pallium. He says to the garment, “Rejoice, pallium, and exult! A better philosophy has deigned you worthy, from the moment that it is the Christian whom you started to dress (Melior iam te philosophia dignata est ex quo Christianum uestire coepisti).”98 The pallium exists to save the people of Africa from the onslaught of Roman domination, but it is Christians who will save the pallium and its integrity from the Carthaginian obsession with Roman fashions. Tertullian’s oration demonstrates how influential Greek ideas were as well as the importance that symbolism of dress and the cultural significance of one’s appearance allowed public notables like Tertullian to negotiate the complex social realities of Roman North Africa. But most interestingly, Tertullian’s De Pallio serves as a limit case that helps to clarify a series of questions about the complex cultural relations wrapped up in engaging with Greek culture in the specific context of the Empire-wide revival of Greek culture and learning in the late first through third centuries CE. Scholars suggest that this revival helped elite Roman subjects (including many Roman citizens, both from Italy and abroad) secure an identity discrete from Roman influence.99 More specifically, the strangeness of Tertullian’s strategic use of this Greek garment in a piece of Latin rhetoric directed to elite Carthaginians demonstrates the way in which Greekness itself could function as a resource for early Christians and Jews. If the final lines of Tertullian’s oration suggest that he intended to present the Chris-

97 Paul McKechnie makes the claim that “the speaker is actually in front of a crowd of Romans and Carthaginians in Carthage, and he’s wearing a pallium” (“Tertullian’s De Pallio and Life in Roman Carthage,” Prudentia 24, no.2 (1992), 55). Cf. discussion in Brennan, “Tertullian’s De Pallio,” 259. 98 De Pall. 6.2.4 99 “Greekness” as I use it here is largely a development of the sophistic movement and is really only coherent as a designation of a kind of cultural legitimacy within the sophistic milieu as it functioned as part of the Roman Empire. This will be discussed in depth below, so I omit any discussion of it here.

50

GAMING GREEKNESS

tian message as one that could be adopted by all people, it is interesting that he chooses a paradigmatically Greek philosophical garment to do so. Tertullian’s otherwise non-Greek persona is what makes his appeal to a de facto symbol of Greek intellectual life illuminating to the question about how and why Christians and Jews in the Roman Empire engaged with Greekness. The De Pallio forces readers to acknowledge a subtle historical difference between Tertullian’s intellectual aspirations as a rhetor and educated man and the specific recourse he had to a piece of Greek cultural ephemera. To call Tertullian a sophist is not especially controversial. 100 But to call him Greek in almost any sense is patently ridiculous—he was born and died in Carthage, all of his extant writings were written in Latin (his Greek writings do not survive), he was vocally antagonistic to Greek cultural influence on the Christian faith and he has long been memorialized as the “father of Latin Christianity.” However, De Pallio exhibits how the influence of Greek intellectual culture was a result of a something peculiar about how Greekness functioned in the Roman Imperial world that can reshape not only how we understand Tertullian, but also in how we describe the cultural stakes of Greekness for Christians and Jews across the Empire. In this extraordinary piece of oratory, Tertullian showcases the fuzzy boundaries and strategies of self-presentation that resulted when Christians and Jews— themselves beginning to occupy an increasingly public place in the Roman Empire—presented their newly conceived faiths in a world that revered and revolved around the stuff of ancient Greece. If we consider De Pallio as a strategic appeal to a valuable cultural commodity, his oration illuminates both his intentions and the significance of the pallium as well. In this perspective, the pallium becomes a piece of cultural capital that Tertullian strategically invests into his social position by appealing to its virtues and aligning them 100 See Timothy Barnes, Tertullian: A Historical and Literary Study [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971 and Robert Sider, Ancient Rhetoric and the Art of Tertullian [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971. The remarkable coincidence of these scholars who were working independently drawing similar conclusions about Tertullian has served to introduce a broad consensus about the sophistic dimension of his life and education.

CHAPTER ONE. GAMING THE SYSTEM

51

with his idealized Christian man—a figure who could find an audience among both his African listeners and Romans—all of whom, by virtue of their shared understanding of what this cloak means. We can see elements of what Tertullian’s strategy is designed to achieve when he makes the pallium and his ideal Christian man singularly suited to one another. But we can also see the unexpected results of Tertullian’s gambit. This ideal Christian man concedes to the gendered values of imperial Romanness in order to portray the tunic and its Christian wearer as consummately free by tapping into the source material of Rome’s own ideals: Greek philosophy. In doing so, Tertullian seems to succeed in setting the tunic and his Christian man in an appealing frame. But he cannot entirely control the outcome of his strategy, and thus Tertullian sanctifies the pallium (and its associated cultural resonances) even as he ennobles the Christian. This small text evidences a much larger cultural confrontation—one that takes place on a Greek cultural field which is also structured by other constraints of social and political power. These constraints include Roman discourses of manliness and gendered virtuosity, the intellectual evolution of a popularized philosophical movement, and subjects of Rome whose unique African heritage colors their past and their present. By conceiving of the rhetorical strategy in De Pallio as a competitive confrontation in which Tertullian vies to win legitimacy for the Christian faithful, we can begin to see how the act of competing for legitimacy produces and re-produces a new kind of religious culture that is much more than the sum of its initial competitive parts.

VI. OVERVIEW This book argues that the Christian and “Hellenistic Jewish” communities thrived in the early Empire because they were cunning cultural strategists who successfully navigated the complex relationship between Roman imperial power and the culturally-dominant forms of Greekness that thrived in the late 1st through early 3rd centuries CE. It takes as its premise that the cultural milieu of these centuries was roiling with competition around Greek paideia and considers how this offered an extraordinary opportunity for Christian and Jewish intellectuals to gain cultural ground in a world with stark dimensions of political and social power. The first part of this study lays out the

52

GAMING GREEKNESS

various contexts that bear on reading early Christian and Jewish literature in the early Roman Empire in terms of cultural competition. In the present chapter, I discuss the rise of the sophistic movement, the renaissance of Greek rhetoric and philosophy which flourished in the late 1st to 3rd centuries CE as a particular moment in the cultural history of Greekness in the Mediterranean world. It discusses how paideia came to be so highly valued among elites in the early Empire by considering how the networks of social elites in Rome’s Easternexpanding Empire had made it the dominant cultural currency of the Imperial world. As a result, Greekness became a fecund site for selfexpression and intellectual creativity that provided opportunities where socially persuasive accounts of oneself or of one’s beliefs could be mounted. Because of its role as the educational and cultural litmus for Roman officials in Greek cities, the demonstration of one’s paideia was one of only a few places in which Roman subjects could negotiate the constraints of the Imperium on ground that was not entirely under Rome’s control. Greekness proved to be a cultural venue in which Roman subjects could make themselves, though always within the bounds of the language and culture of historic Greece. In order to understand how competition over culture could serve such dynamic purposes, I elaborate on how we should understand competition, by drawing on theorists and methods of inquiry common in other fields, but not frequently part of historiographical conversations. Specifically, I focus on what are called “non zero-sum” games as a way to understand how competition does not necessarily result in a discreet winner and loser, as in those forms of competition that characterizes certain kinds of games, economic marketplaces and biological ecosystems. Understanding competition in this complex and sometimes counter-intuitive way provides a dynamic language for describing how Greekness and its paideutically-oriented subjects were mutually constitutive of one another. It captures the way that Greekness defined the field upon which its subjects operated even as those subjects are what comprised the field’s very existence and could not exist without them. In this framework, paideia is the common denominator defining the object that cultural competitors sought to claim as well as the thing that made its possessors culturally credible

CHAPTER ONE. GAMING THE SYSTEM

53

and the thing of value that competitors could exchange for social legitimacy. In chapter two, I illustrate the open possibilities for the selfmaking offered by those who competed for Greekness by turning to two historical exemplars who demonstrate the creative strategies available to those who performed Greekness: Favorinus of Arelate (ca. 80–160 CE) and Lucian of Samosata (ca. 125-180 CE). These two, self-ascribed sophists exhibit extraordinary creativity in deploying their paideutically-cultivated selves within view of the Roman social world. But they also demonstrate how the kind of self-invention that one could manage by competing for Greekness meant that there were possibilities available to Christian and Jewish subjects who were finding their own cultural strategies and performances. The vastly different ways in which these authors engage with Greekness helps to make the point that paideia was redolent with possibilities for selfinvention. In one of his only surviving orations, Favorinus reaches outward to find the boundaries of ambition available to a sophist by making an unprecedented claim that his efforts have transformed him into a Greek, despite his Latinate heritage and Gallic background. By contrast, Lucian, whose vast corpus admits a much more detailed analysis, sought not simply to possess paideia, but to mold it into something that could express the convictions of his own boundless imagination. In doing so, each figure demonstrates how portraying one’s possession of Greek paideia served as a potent way to define one’s place in the intellectual and social economies of the Roman Empire. The second part of this study comprises readings of a series of texts that Jewish and Christian communities produced in the early Roman Empire that exemplify how these communities competed for Greekness. The voices behind these texts each competed for social legitimacy by situating themselves and the communities they represented on the field of cultural Greekness—they expressed ideas in Greek language, employed Greek cultural references and ideas, and frequently rely on Greek moral and philosophical values. These do not represent a programmatic attempt on the parts of Christian and Jewish communities to co-opt Greek forms of self-expression. Instead, each of these texts demonstrates one strategic approach (or

54

GAMING GREEKNESS

several related approaches) among many by which these communities could negotiating the competitive landscape of Greekness. Chapter three focuses on the figure of Paul as he was depicted by the second generation of New Testament writers who adopted the voice of the apostle, but deployed it in the landscapes and language that characterized the Sophistic milieu. The Acts of the Apostles and the Pastoral Epistles demonstrate a series of competitive strategies for securing Paul’s intellectual legacy. Ranges of textual motifs—including metaphors drawn from agonistic festivals and the games, intellectual criticism of popular cult practices and magic, and discourses around the experience of exile—all appear in this literature. Reading across this literature as part of a decentralized effort to reconceive the apostle Paul in a changing cultural world, these texts depict Paul to be conversant with prominent strands of Greek culture. In short, they present him as a famous, educated and worldly Christian intellectual. Chapter four considers a text that would not ordinarily be read alongside early Christian literature, but which fits importantly into the sophistic milieu. 4 Maccabees expresses what at first appears to be a contradictory devotion to an emphatically Jewish, torahfocused piety that is expressed through the philosophical and rhetorical modes that characterized Greek, sophistic self-expression. The paradigmatically Jewish martyrs—along with the argument and form of the text itself—meet the reader of 4 Maccabees in forms that are explicitly Greek. More than that, the text’s form reflects the exhibition of Greekness in ways that were especially valued by philhellenic Romans. This chapter makes the case that the author of this text is aware of the stakes of using Greek rhetorical and philosophical culture to make one’s own religious way of life coherent and attractive to elite, Roman audiences; the author exploits that fact to present Judaism as something that is consonant with Roman ideas about culture and manliness. Chapters five and six consider two figures who were part of an evolving negotiation among Christian and Jewish communities about how each related to one another within the complex urban centers of the Eastern Roman Empire: Justin Martyr, his dialoguepartner Trypho, and his student Tatian. Justin’s dialogue with Trypho has long been regarded as a nexus for the emerging separa-

CHAPTER ONE. GAMING THE SYSTEM

55

tion between Christian and Jewish communities in the 2nd century, CE. Justin uses the conceit of his dialogue with Trypho in order to develop a Christology that stands in contradistinction to Trypho’s Judaism. However, the entire dialogue—and thus its resulting construction of Christianity and Judaism—takes place on a Greek stage within an urban center in the eastern Mediterranean. In the frame narrative that sets up the ensuing dialogue, not only is the philosophical forum of the dialogue established as the basis for Justin’s discussion, but the manners and interpersonal dimensions that defined sophistic self-making and ambitious intellectual competition define their resulting dialogue. Through gesture, citation, and word choice, Justin and Trypho’s dialogue is situated as part of the competitive, sophistic milieu in which paideia was the basis of exchange. Whatever Justin constructs, and to whatever degree Trypho’s constructed persona reflects an authentic Jewish expression, their confrontation is built upon—indeed, it is incoherent without—a cultural foundation that was explicitly Greek. Justin’s student Tatian demonstrates an altogether different cultural strategy—indeed he exhibits a radically different perspective than his contemporary apologists. In chapter six, Tatian’s vituperative takedown of prevailing Greek culture provides an ideal final case study of an early Christian voice competing for cultural legitimacy. Tatian—like no other contemporary figure other than Lucian— makes explicit the constructed nature of Greekness and the cultural mechanisms that produced it. Where many of the other texts considered in this study develop strategies that only passively describe the Greek intellectual world, Tatian offers a descriptive and critical survey of sophistic culture. He engages many issues and motifs that other Christian writers ignore. Tatian’s perspective on the competitive contours of early Roman society is more like those of elite Greek intellectuals. His argument against the influence and high regard for Greek culture demonstrates the wider scope of influence that Christians began to claim for themselves at the advent of the 3rd century CE. Any inquiry into the development of Christianity and Judaism in the late antique world must concern itself with the dynamic relationship between Greek cultural heritage and Roman political and social realities. The purpose of this study, however, is to capture

56

GAMING GREEKNESS

something that is ultimately more abstract and subtle. The account offered here resists traditional dichotomies in which Christian and Jewish subjects in the foreground are studied against a relatively static Greco-Roman background. Instead, this study attempts to make a complex and inescapably recursive case that Christians and Jews in the Roman Empire contributed to making the world in which they lived, and that the world, in turn, helped to make them. This study offers a vocabulary for describing the mutually informing confrontations among Jewish and Christian communities among their contemporaries in the Roman Empire and the fields on which they took place. It offers a dynamic way of talking about how Christian and Jewish communities were, at least in part, produced by the competitive dynamics that resulted when they presented themselves on the field of cultural Greekness.

CHAPTER TWO. “IN AND OUT OF THE GAME”: FAVORINUS, LUCIAN AND THE STRATEGIC POSSIBILITIES OF COMPETING FOR GREEKNESS Apart from the pulling and hauling stands what I am, Stands amused, complacent, compassionating, idle, unitary, Looks down, is erect, or bends an arm on an impalpable certain rest, Looking with side-curved head curious what will come next, Both in and out of the game and watching and wondering at it.

–Walt Whitman, Song of Myself 41

I.

INTRODUCTION

Competing for culture is not a phenomenon that can be pinned down in a single text, nor can it be demonstrated in a discrete series of historical examples. The real-life postures and demeanors adopted by aspiring pepaideumenoi were attended by complex, contextualized performances. Every individual competitor and every occasion of competition had its own shape and texture. And every instance of Leaves of Grass (Walt Whitman, Poetry and Prose [New York: Penguin, 1982]). Whitman’s introspective voice and reflexive inquisition of selfhood has accompanied my thinking throughout this project

1

57

58

GAMING GREEKNESS

contact between a competitor and the subject of his or her competition was wrapped up in reconceiving and deploying the resources of Greek heritage. It always involved an act of remembering and reiterating a milieu that existed primarily as a result of the competition that produced it—there was a continuous, recursive relationship between the cultural agents who competed and the culture itself that they claimed for themselves. In a very real sense the field of competition and the competitors upon it produced one another. However, the dynamics that allowed this mutual production to take place are complex and spread across all kinds of literary, material, discursive and interpersonal dimensions of antiquity. In lieu of comprehending the complex whole, the dynamics at play are best captured in the embodied, competitive strategies of the subjects who struggled to lay claim to Greekness—and especially at those catalyzing points of contact between cultural subjects and their arenas of contention. Attempting to trace and understanding the dynamic moves and competitive strategies taken by a player is always a function of getting a sense of the game itself. This is typical of many forms of competition where rules can be relatively straight forward or even simple—the “feel” for the game and its strategic possibilities can only be understood after observing it, usually over and over again. For example, if an observer knew only the basic rules of chess, knowing that a knight is allowed to move in an L-shape on a chessboard does not necessarily convey anything strategic about the game. However, this aspect of the piece’s moves means that a knight is much more powerful during the early parts of a chess game when many pieces are on the board, and much weaker on an open board with fewer pieces. But even if it is only learned instinctually, after that same observer has watched (or played) 1,000 chess games—when he or she really knows the game—this aspect of the game’s strategies will become clear. In a similar way, capturing the way that paideia actually functioned in the competitive strategies and moves of individual players in the sophistic movement is a function of observing the game. Before examining Jewish and Christian texts that exhibit strategically creative approaches to engaging paideia, it is helpful to get a sense of the strategic possibilities latent in competitions for Greekness. And in order to see how these approaches could function as part of the central world of competitors, it is helpful to consider how

CHAPTER TWO. “IN AND OUT OF THE GAME”

59

Imperial Greek litterateurs could be creative and strategically inventive in ways similar to those who existed more at the margins of elite intellectual culture. In particular, it is helpful to find examples of literary invention that push the boundaries of what was deemed to be normative for pepaideumenoi. Such limiting cases for how much Greekness could be stretched and reshaped can provide a precedent for the creative deployment of paideia that is evident in the literature of even more distant communities. The liminal spaces between the Hellenic center and the “barbarian” periphery left room for many who simply could not achieve the full education it required to become a pepaideumenos. But as we shall see, it also provided a venue for those whose claims on Greekness were undermined by biographical complexity or even biological aberration. This chapter provides a basis for seeing in the competitive context of Greekness in the Roman Imperial world the possibility of self-invention and of cultural improvisation that made other forms of being Greek available to those Christian and Jewish intellectuals who claimed it for themselves. These were cultural outsiders whose literacy and ambition did not necessarily put them within the realm of pepaideumenoi. Their efforts to participate in the competitive economy of Greekness are tentative and experimental. There was no established paradigm for would-be Christian or Jewish pepaideumenoi to follow, or a set of prescriptions about how to bring the content of their message into coherence with paideutic forms of expression. Indeed, for these figures, to compete for paideia was to shape it in ways that others never had. The pliability of paideia contributed to its value. And while a great majority of Greek speaking intellectuals would try to shape themselves to the models of Greekness offered by past luminaries, some competitors employed paideia in creative ways and for unexpected ends. The careers and literary production of two very particular paideutic players, Favorinus of Arelate and Lucian of Samosata, offer insights into the cultural game they were playing and lend a feel for the stakes that players faced while demonstrating what strategic possibilities were available to those enterprising players whose field of vision could imagine possibilities beyond the game itself.

60

II.

GAMING GREEKNESS

COMPETITION, AMBITION, AND THE PRIZE OF BELONGING IN FAVORINUS’S CORINTHIAN ORATION

No ancient source represents the high valuation of paideia and its exchange for social legitimacy by a sophistic competitor better than the Corinthian Oration of Favorinus of Arelate.2 This text provides one of the most ambitious examples of how Greek-speaking intellectuals could endeavor to wrest Greekness from the idealized past and incarnate its paideutic substance in the Imperial present. Competition establishes the foundation for Favorinus’s efforts in more than one sense. As a piece of essentially juridical rhetoric, this text is premised on the agonistic efforts of Favorinus to persuade his audience. But, in another register, Favorinus defends his cultural credibility and situates the individual and civic dimensions of his career within the Roman Empire. Favorinus wishes to win over his audience even as he seeks to win acclaim as a Hellenic exemplar. This text uses a rich store of competitive imagery and language that frequently alludes to the deeper dimensions of Favorinus’s strategic approach. The Corinthian Oration has also become a literary touchstone for studies of the sophistic movement, primarily because of the explicit way in which Favorinus uses his rhetorical prowess to make an explicit claim on Greekness. Favorinus’s rhetoric in this text has become paradigmatic for the capacity for elite self-fashioning in the Roman imperial world. One passage in particular has come to define the kind of performative, sophistic self-designation so characteristic of the sophistic milieu. During an impassioned appeal voiced by his own statue on his behalf, Favorinus’s claims legitimacy as a Roman who is Greek: Well, if someone who is… a Roman—not a pleb but one of the equestrians—one who has affected, not only the language, but also the thought and deportment and garb of the Greeks (οὐδὲ τὴν φωνὴν μόνον ἀλλὰ καὶ τὴν γνώμην καὶ τὴν δίαιταν καὶ τὸ σχῆμα τῶν Ἑλλήνων ἐζηλωκώς), and done so with such mastery and conspicuousness as no one has achieved—no Roman before 2 The text of Favorinus’s oration is preserved in the corpus of Dio Chrysostom as Ad Corinthianus (Oration 37).

CHAPTER TWO. “IN AND OUT OF THE GAME”

61

him, nor any of the Greeks of his own time. For while the most noble Greeks are taken with Roman concerns, he attends to the concerns of Greeks and on account of these he is abandoning his belongings and his political standing and everything he has, in order to achieve one thing, forsaking all else: to seem and also to be Greek (ἵν̓ αὐτῷ περιῇ ἓν ἀντὶ πάντων Ἕλληνι δοκεῖν τε καὶ εἶναι).3

“Being” and “seeming” Greek, in Favorinus’s words, define the stakes of the competition that he has entered, and for which he has spent so much of himself.4 This text demonstrates that cultivating paideia could be used to win legitimacy for intellectuals in the Roman world. In the process of staking his claim on Greekness, Favorinus makes aspects of sophistic self-making explicit that ordinarily lay firmly below the surface of other texts.5 Favorinus’ role as both the speaker and the subject of his rhetorical performance of Greekness demonstrates why competing for paideia was so compelling. The other side of Favorinus’ performance is reflected in the contexts in which these cultural contests took place. These constituted the stage upon which Favorinus could voice his claim. Indeed, cultural agonism is woven into the Corinthian Oration through reference, genre, metaphor and vocabulary. These constitute an agonis3 Favorinus, Cor.

25. Whitmarsh’s analysis of this aspect of Favorinus’s oration makes a convincing case that Favorinus is not placing identity in contrast to appearance, but rather specifies two different ways in which one is Greek, i.e., seeming Greek and also being Greek, with identity being a more interior form of the latter (Greek Literature and the Roman Empire, 120). 5 Maud Gleason captures the significance of the passage: “For Favorinus… the transformation he embodies is in itself his accomplishment. Born in Gaul, a freak of nature, he has become an international celebrity in the Roman Empire as a virtuoso exponent of Greek culture. Implicit in the vision of Greek culture that he represents is the assumption that selftransformation is possible through rhetorical training, that diligent practice in the art of improvisation in a very traditional medium will result in the alteration of one’s habitus. Favorinus is himself both his medium and his message.” (Maud Gleason, Making Men, 17) 4

62

GAMING GREEKNESS

tic framework that provides a shape for Favorinus’s performance even as his skillful rhetorical improvisations demonstrate the central role that his self-forming agonism played in establishing one’s Greekness in the imperial Roman world. Favorinus delivered this oration in response to the indignity of having his statue removed from the city of Corinth, which he had won nearly ten years before. After “sharing a part of my eloquence” (τῶν λόγων μετέδωκα), Favorinus regards himself to have been a friend of the people of the city.6 And yet, Favorinus has suffered the apparent indignity of having his reputation effectively exiled from the city of Corinth when the statue is dismantled. Remarkably, Favorinus begins by giving an account of his friendship with the city before he pins himself as a rival of sorts against the city and its own aspirations for honor and notoriety. Thus Favorinus demonstrates the way in which the combative social framework of the Roman world was attended by a stasis that was characterized by friendship and concord. It is this equilibrium that the removal of Favorinus’s statue has upset, initiating a whole series of nested confrontations that he elaborates in his speech. Having taken Corinth’s most noble citizens to task, Favorinus pits himself against the entire cast of sophistic characters in the Eastern Roman world, but he crucially submits his performative selfrepresentation to the people of Corinth. The cultured citizens are intended to serve as judges (the contest they referee is not made explicit) who should know a brilliant sophist when they see one. More broadly still, Favorinus links his experience as a cultural entrepreneur with that of the post-Roman occupied city of Corinth and analogizes his own aspiration for fame with Corinth’s aspirations for notability within the Roman world. In this way, Favorinus uses his own sophistic affectations and the grandeur of Corinth itself to make a case for how Greekness is achieved. He thus highlights the crucial role that the stylistics of manner, dress, and deportment played in the sophistic movement in order to introduce the incentive for striving to claim the value offered by paideia. He also distinguishes between a 6 Favorinus, Cor.

1.

CHAPTER TWO. “IN AND OUT OF THE GAME”

63

put-on, “seeming” Greekness and a legitimate, earned, and real Greekness. Favorinus argues that this is not the result of a mystical transformation or an imputed identity that is attached to his ethnicity or citizenship. Rather, being Greek is won by those figures who comport themselves in a way that accords with the cultural ideals of Greekness. Favorinus signals the scope and dimensions of his agonistic claims by carefully delineating who he deems to be his rhetorical and civic peers in the Corinthian Oration. At the outset, the guiding question for Favorinus is, “Who deserves a statue?” Again, friendship and honor are set close together: “For you accorded me this honor, not as to one of the many who each year put in at Cenchreae as traders or pilgrims or envoys or passing travellers, but as to a cherished friend, who at last, after long absence, puts in an appearance.”7 It is the intimacy of affection that warrants Favorinus’ commemoration; the loss of friendship and the attendant honors become the premise of Favorinus (and his statue’s) subsequent defense. Favorinus begins by making a case for how much he deserves a statute—bypassing the issue of friendship entirely—by posing a consummately agonistic question: who has he outdone by having the city Corinth build him a statue?8 He begins to answer by situating himself within the auspicious company of other maligned philosophers who suffered similar indignities. He chastises the Corinthians’ unjust procedure in order to liken himself to these past notables: “For if the reason is slander (διαβολῆς), even Socrates might be judged to be a corrupter of youth and a destroyer of all the beliefs of men, starting with the gods. For whom have these

7 Favorinus, Cor.

8. Favorinus’s rhetorical strategy concretizes Schmitz’s insight that this entire period was characterized by competitive comparisons with figures from the classical, and even mythic, past (Schmitz, Bildung und Macht, 110-127). See especially the comparison to Arion in Cor. 3-4 (Cf. Herodotus, Hist. 1.23-24; Aelian preserves what is claimed to be the dedication on the statue [Nat. an. 12.45]. Lucian similarly has Poseidon converse with the dolphin who bore Arion [Dial. mort. 8]).

8

64

GAMING GREEKNESS

men—who really slander everyone—not slandered? Have they not slandered Socrates, Pythagoras, Plato?9 Favorinus further addresses the issue of his worthiness by stressing the importance of honor (τιμή), which becomes Favorinus’s chief concern in his defense of his statue. Favorinus uses the language of honor to tap into the discourses of sophistic ambition that were paradigmatic for all kinds of cultural competitors seeking Greek cultural legitimacy. Even apart from the central role that honor played as the standard of measurement for Roman society, Favorinus makes his fixation on honor clear.10 Honor characterizes the Sibyl that joins in song with Myth and History to bless the foundation of the Isthmian games, as well as the prizes that could be won there.11 It is because of the high stakes that honor represents that Favorinus criticizes in Corinth’s changeable opinions when they so quickly rescind their prizes and awards; “Is it not an entirely demented form of government that erects annual statues, like seasonal crops?” (οὐ κομιδῇ τετυφωμένης πολιτείας ἀνδριάντες ἐπέτειοι, ὥσπερ οἱ καρποί), Favorinus laments.12 Honor is given its most prominent place as Favorinus continues. He deliberately misquotes the Odyssey when he laments the estrangement that he feels from Corinth since his statue has been removed. Favorinus remarks: “But honor flutters aloft and flies away, like a dream” (τιμὴ δ̓ ἠΰτ̓ ὄνειρος ἀποπταμένη πεπότηται.)13 Quoting from Odysseus’s vision of his mother in book 11, Favorinus replaces the word “soul” (ψυχή) with the word “honor” (τιμή). Through this textual slippage, he intentionally rephrases the significance of his 9 Favorinus, Cor.

33. Indeed, this text is not the only one in which Favorinus appeals to the life of Socrates in order to cope with the indignity of losing a statue. Philostratus reports that another statue of Favorinus at Athens was torn down. Philostratus reports that Favorinus was not angered and instead observed: “Socrates himself would have been better off if he had been deprived a bronze statue by the Athenians instead of made to drink hemlock” (Philostratus, VS 490. ὤνητ᾽ἂν.. καἰ Σωκράτης εἰκόνα χλακῆν ὑπ᾽ Ἀθηναίων ἀφαιρεθεὶς μᾶλλον ἢ πιὼν κώνειον). 10 Favorinus, Cor. 8. 11 Favorinus, Cor. 13. 12 Favorinus, Cor. 30. 13 Favorinus, Cor. 9; Cf. Homer, Od. 11.222.

CHAPTER TWO. “IN AND OUT OF THE GAME”

65

statue and reconceives the incentive for his sophistic ambition from something innate and internal to something that is public and performative. If honor is to stand in for one’s soul, then who one is and claims to be is something that is received through merit—and thus subject to contest. The implications of this misquote are significant. If Isocrates’ modeling of Greekness is not founded on innate phenomena, then one’s essence is subject to those aesthetic and stylistic judgments that attach to the kind of honor upon which Favorinus is fixated. Honor—materially instantiated by his statue, but no less avatar-like in its abstract state—has a weight and a tangibility for Favorinus and other sophists that is only coherent within the myriad contexts in which Roman subjects competed for Greekness. Agonistic Imagery: Corinth as Prize and Contestant in Favorinus’s Corinthian Oration

These larger contexts of agonism—cultural and otherwise—were part of the atmosphere in which Favorinus existed. However, not every aspect of those kinds of relationships is made explicit in his oration. The juridical context of his appeal introduces the socially competitive premise in the oration and the essentially forensic defense that Favorinus’s statue makes on behalf of Favorinus (in a prosopopoiia not unlike the one in Tertullian’s De Pallio) underlines the oration’s contentious appeal. However, the competitive matrix that structured ancient social relationships appears throughout the oration by means of allusion and imagery around cultural contests. Favorinus underlines the significance of his own agonistic posture in more explicit ways throughout the Corinthian Oration, and never more remarkably than by referencing the contests that provided the mythical foundations of the city of Corinth itself. Indeed, Favorinus subtly portrays Corinth as a civic “player amongst players” and a strikingly ambitious subject in its own right within the Eastern cities that rivaled one another for the favor and affection of Rome by fighting for cultural prestige. Favorinus explains that Corinth was the object of a mythic competition among the gods at its foundation. It was as a result of this contest (and their ultimate cooperative sharing of the city) that the agonistic games themselves—the elemental contest of archaic Greek society—were first established at Corinth. The two gods Po-

66

GAMING GREEKNESS

seidon and Helius “vied with one another” (τοὺς δύο θεούς...ἐρίσαι) for possession of the city. Favorinus explains, “And after the two had striven, they entrusted the decision over their contest to a third god who was their elder (ἐρίσαντε δὲ καὶ τὴν δίαιταν ἐπιτρέψαντε τρίτῳ θεῷ πρεσβυτέρῳ)...they both have held this city and district ever since, surely no slight or obscure sign of its superiority over all other cities.”14 Corinth’s role as the prize for which the gods contend is presented as the paradigm for the Isthmian games at Corinth.15 Favorinus gives a distinguished account of their founding, suggesting that Corinth is in fact the absolute mythical foundation for all kinds of subsequent games.16 In other words, Corinth, in Favorinus’s account, also acts as an agonistic player that competes for Greekness in precisely the same way that pepaideumenoi vied for honor.17 Favorinus praises the city as primary among those of Greece—”the promenade of Hellas!” (ἐν τῷ περιπάτῳ τῆς Ἑλλάδος)18—and flatters the city as the “place where Gods put on the games,” (ὅπου δὲ θεοὶ ἀγωνοθετοῦσιν).19 Favorinus, Cor. 11-12. The third party judge is reminiscent of the role of the ἀγωνοθέτης that Favorinus introduces later, and which is discussed below. 15 This was a point of contention in the imperial period. Jason König explains, “The Isthmian festival may have been one context where the paradoxes of Corinthian Hellenism were most conspicuously on show. SemiRoman Corinth was in some ways an odd setting for the third-oldest Panhellenic festival” (Athletics and Literature in the Roman Empire [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005], 190). 16 Favorinus, Cor. 14. These games are said to be the “first games” (ἀγῶνα πρῶτον) established by the gods, and the “prize-winners and victors” (ἀθλοφόρους τε λεχθῆναι καὶ νικηφόρους) of this first contest include Orpheus, Castor, Phaeton, Theseus and Daedelus, among many others. 17 This is a central point made by Schmitz (Bildung und Macht, 99-100). It is illustrated with particular clarity by Dio Chrysostom who in his oration at his hometown of Prusa, where he discusses the ambitions of cities in which “the well-born and exceedingly Greek (εὐγενεῖς μὲν ἀνθρώπους καὶ σφόδρα Ἓλληνας)” lived (Or 47, 12-13). I note here that, as we saw with Plutarch above, Dio Chrysostom also conceived of Greekness in terms of comparative degrees. 18 Favorinus, Cor. 7. 19 Favorinus, Cor. 15. 14

CHAPTER TWO. “IN AND OUT OF THE GAME”

67

This last characterization is particularly interesting for the way that Favorinus develops this imagery in the larger exposition. Favorinus employs here the technical term ἀγωνοθέτης, the titular “judge” or “exhibitor of the games.” In the various historical contexts of its use, this word frequently described a role fulfilled by the ambitious and prestige-seeking individuals who put on games for the benefit of the populi of their cities.20 This sense of the term appears frequently in the literary accounts and inscriptions that celebrate the benefactions of these luminaries.21 However, the imagery of the ἀγωνοθέτης became tied to various descriptive analogies that linked the leadership of the games with other kinds of agonism, serving to make the paradigm of the “game-maker” more broadly relevant.22 Favorinus’s Jason König provides a definition: “The offices gymnasiarch and agonothete—head of the gymnasion and festival president, respectively—were among the most prestigious public duties to which wealthy men and women could aspire” (Athletics and Literature in the Roman Empire, 27-28). Cf. the discussion of James R. Harrison, “Paul and the Agônotheitai at Corinth: Engaging the Civic Values of Antiquity,” in James R. Harrison and L. L. Welborn, eds., The First Urban Churches 2: Roman Corinth (Atlanta: SBL Press, 2016), 271–325. Harrison’s study was unfortunately unavailable before this study was completed. 21 Prominent inscriptions that feature these roles are I. Eph. 621, I.Priene 112-114, IG VII 540; Cf. Michael Wörrle, Stadt und Fest in kaiserzeitlichen Kleinasien. Studien zu einer agonistischen Stiftung aus Oinoanda (C.H. Beck: Munich, 1988), 151-164, and H.W. Pleket, “Olympic Benefactors,” ZPE 20 (1976), 1-18. These civic contexts are discussed thoroughly by König, Athletics and Literature in the Roman Empire, 68; P. Schmitt-Pantel, La cité au banquet. Histoire des repas publics dans les cités grecques (Rome: École Française de Rome, 1992), 323-4, 367-371; Paul Veyne, Bread and Circuses: Historical Sociology and Political Pluralism, B. Pearce, trans. (London: 1990), 147; and by Onno van Nijf, “Local Heroes: Athletics, Festivals, and Elite Self-Fashioning in the Roman East,” in Simon Goldhill, ed., Being Greek under Rome: Cultural Identity, the Second Sophistic and the Development of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 312ff. 22 These usages frequently occur in Jewish and Early Christian literature. See especially Philo’s usage of the term in De Somn. 1.130 and De Mig. Abrah. 27 as well as that of Clement of Alexandria in Strom. 7.3.20, Protrep. 10.96.3, Salv. 3.6. See also the extraordinary characterization of Eros as an ἀγωνοθέτης in Heliodorus’ Ethiop. 4.1. 20

68

GAMING GREEKNESS

usage here undoubtedly is informed by these contexts, but the sophist introduces some novel conceptions of the “game-maker” in order to make his point about the kinds of games in which Corinth is a player. In this, Favorinus is remarkably aware of the various levels at which the games of social ambition and cultural agonism were played in an imperial milieu. One of the ways Favorinus manifests this awareness is by parsing the role of the ἀγωνοθέτης as a subtle, if loaded, analog for Roman leadership, and by extension the nested agonisms that Roman social and civic life entailed. Favorinus begins by defending himself against the accusation that his time at Rome had made him soft and licentious—a claim he deems ridiculous, since everyone knows that Greece is where one finds license and indulgence. He introduces a competitive metaphor that depends on the propriety of competitors in the face of scrupulous judges. During the statue’s defense of Favorinus’s character, it seeks to answer the charge that Favorinus has become censured for immodesty during his time at Rome. The statue insists that this is ridiculous in the extreme—that one who lived a decent life in the midst of Greece’s “greater license and leniency” (ἐν πλείονι ἀδείᾳ καὶ συγγνώμῃ) would never change his manner of life “in the presence of the Emperor himself and the laws” (παῤ αὐτὸν τὸν ἄρχοντα καὶ τοὺς νόμους).23 The statue suggests an analogy: “This amounts to the same as saying of an athlete that, though fastidious when he is on his own, violates the rules in front of the master of the games in the stadium!” (ἀλλὰ τοῦτό γε παραπλήσιόν ἐστιν, ὥσπερ ἂν εἴ τις τὸν ἀθλητὴν φαίη καθ̓ αὑτὸν μὲν εὐτακτεῖν, ἐν δὲ τῷ σταδίῳ καὶ παρὰ τὸν ἀγωνοθέτην πλημμελεῖν.)24 The directness of this comparison is sharpened in the next passage where Favorinus again appeals to the ἀγωνοθέτης in a probable reference to the then reigning emperor.25 That the Emperor/Rome constitutes an ἀγωνοθέτης is suggestive 23 We may note that this delineation of Greece as licentious and dangerous, while Rome is the centerpiece of lawfulness and an orderly society accords with the renditions of this relationship by Vergil in the Aeneid. 24 Favorinus, Cor. 34. Cf. Philostratus, VS 489. 25 Perhaps Hadrian, per the editor’s note on Favorinus, Cor. 34 (Crosby, LCL, 34).

CHAPTER TWO. “IN AND OUT OF THE GAME”

69

of a whole range of competitive contexts that attended the politically fraught landscapes of the Roman world: what kind of “stadium” is Rome? What are the rules of the games that are held there? In what way does the Emperor judge these games, and what are the ramifications for those who break the rules? Agonistic imagery saturates the literature of the Roman imperial world, and in this passage Favorinus locates the nexus of that competition in Rome, under the watchful eye of the Emperor himself. One of the effects of Favorinus’s depiction of Corinth is to codify a sense in which “Greece” was a kind of pseudo-nation among “Greeks” within the Roman Empire, entailing a collective unity that make his claims coherent.26 Favorinus praises Corinth’s founders as those who were, “first among all of Greece in cultivating justice” (ὧν... πάντων Ἑλλήνων μάλιστα δὴ δικαιοσύνην ἐπήσκησαν).27 Cities are said to compete among others on the basis of their Greekness—occupying a singular field, but contributing to a shared cultural-cum-national entity called “Greece.” Favorinus exploits this pseudo-nationality in order to explain how Corinth has outstripped all of its Greek rivals. He explains that Corinth stood up in defense of the “common rights of Hellas”— contributing 400 soldiers at Themopylae, above Sparta’s 300—and showing that they were not “mere lovers of honor, but lovers of Hellas, of justice, and of freedom, and haters of oppression and of tyranny” (διέδειξαν οὐ φιλοκάλως ὄντες, ἀλλ̓ ἁπλῶς φιλέλληνες καὶ φιλοδίκαιοι καὶ φιλελεύθεροι καὶ μισοπόνηροι καὶ μισοτύραννοι).28 Throughout, Favorinus phrases Corinth’s virtues in terms of a unified “Greece” that is characterized by “Greek virtues.” This is underlined in his quote of Simonides’ aged epitaph for Corinth’s long-dead soldiers: “we saved our sacred Greece” (ἱερὰν Ἑλλάδ̓ ἱδρυσάμεθα).29 Favorinus’s On this problem, see Frank Walbank, “The Problem of Greek Nationality,” Phoenix 5 (1951), 41-60. 27 Favorinus, Cor. 16. 28 Favorinus, Cor. 17-18. Even here, the usage of φιλέλληνες—a frequent designation of elite Romans in the second century—winks at the Romanness of the Corinthians and further cements the way that Favorinus’s performance of Greekness is always conscious of a Roman audience. 29 Favorinus, Cor. 18. 26

70

GAMING GREEKNESS

slippage between “Corinth” and “Greece” underlies an ambiguous association that was always in tension. After spending such effort to defend Corinth’s bona fide Greekness, Favorinus turns the tables and reminds Corinth that it is a Roman creation—a colonized specter of an authentically Greek Corinth long ago wiped away by Mummius’s legions. Corinth, in fact, has been made Greek just as much as Favorinus has.30 Corinth’s Greekness is, apparently, as much an Isocratean construction as any foreign-born sophist or philosopher. This contrived status is central to Favorinus’s argument that his statue be returned to the city. 31 The legitimacy of Corinth’s claim on Greek culture in this oration is uncertain, and the need for Corinth to mime Greek cities is indicative of its self-made status. But this also points to the way that Corinth, as a corporate entity, was involved in the strategic thinking that accompanied vying for Greekness. Favorinus highlights the ways in which Corinth was both a competitor and the subject of competition and as a result he seeks to tie his own success at cultivating Greekness with that of Corinth. His oration demonstrates how cultural ecosystems in which this competition takes place are always greater than the sum of their constitutive parts. And herein a crucial aspect of non zerosum interaction is made clear: the efforts of competitors—when winning is not an either/or proposition—can lead to cooperative outcomes. This is precisely what we find in Favorinus’ Corinthian Oration. The ambitiousness that characterized Roman social life fomented an environment of contest and confrontation. And yet, precisely because that competitiveness operated at the level of vying cities as well as at the level of combating sophists, Favorinus’s best rhe30 Favorinus,

Cor. 26. Whitmarsh explains, “It is this paradoxical status of Corinth as a mimetic city that Favorinus exploits. The personified statue reminds its addressees that although their city lays claim to a deeply rooted Hellenism, it depends for its Hellenic credentials upon the ‘invention’ of antique traditions. In a striking phrase, he refers to Corinth as the ‘prow and poop of Greece’ (§36): it is both the beginning and the end, the earliest and the latest. Corinth is both a traditionally Greek and a mimetic city. It is appropriate, he implies, that a self-made man should have a statue in a self-made city” (Greek Literature and the Roman Empire, 120).

31

CHAPTER TWO. “IN AND OUT OF THE GAME”

71

torical strategy is not to beat them, but join them by demonstrating to his listeners that dishonoring him in turn dishonors Corinth. ***** In the Corinthian Oration, Favorinus demonstrates a range of creative strategies for self-presentation that were enabled by the agonistic discourses that surrounded Greek culture in the Roman Empire. He is a competitor who exploited the strategic opportunities that his status afforded him in order to claim Greekness for himself. But he does even more when he alludes to the way in which the entire Roman world was a kind of game. Favorinus highlights the way in which competitive performers could claim Greekness, to varying degrees and for various purposes. Favorinus thus helps to establish both the boundaries and the scope of claims on a paideutic habitus, using the resources of sophistic self-expression in a way that was exceptional among his contemporaries and successors.32 Of course, Fa32 All scholars have not seen Favorinus’s influence in the same way. Suzanne Saïd has argued that Favorinus’s project in the Corinthian Oration is exceptional among authors of the Second Sophistic. She argues: “There is still a huge difference between the Hellenized Roman Favorinus and the Greeks, whether Dionysius [of Halicarnassus], Plutarch, Dio, Apollonius of Tyana, or Philostratus. Given the prominence of descent in the definition of Greek identity, Greek writers can only acknowledge that Hellenicity can be lost or regained. Favorinus, because of ‘the centrality of mores and culture in Roman self-definition,’ is the only one to accept the idea that one can become thoroughly Greek, even if he does not belong to a formerly Greek people” (The Discourse of Identity in Greek Rhetoric from Isocrates to Aristides,” 275-299). Ilaria Romeo has similarly argued that this period was marked by a battle over definitions of Greeknss, and that, especially within the Panhellenion of the Emperor Hadrian, there was a conscientious disagreement among those who sought to define Greekness by birth and race against those who defined it in terms of paideia—Favorinus most notably among them (“The Panhellenion and Ethnic Identity in Hadrianic Greece,” Classical Philology 97 [2002], 21-37). Saïd’s critique is premised on the notion that elite, “traditionally” Greek voices are the ones that dictate the terms of Greekness. But I would argue that the importance of Rome in this debate goes beyond the question of which elite Greeks got to define Greekness.

72

GAMING GREEKNESS

vorinus was aware of his role as a subject within a larger competition that he had entered. His performance stakes a claim on Greek culture even as he uses the agonistic dimensions of sophistic performance to make his claim coherent. On the other side of the cultural continuum, the Corinthian Oration illuminates how sophistic modes of self-expression had the capacity to support invention and adaptation in ways that bear importantly on the Jewish and Christian literature considered in this study. Favorinus exemplifies how competing for Greekness did not entail a rigidly defined process for qualifying as a Greek. It was, instead, a constantly changing process of personal invention and public performance. By means of his out of the ordinary rhetorical strategy, Favorinus puts together a creative, sui generis, and uncontrovertibly Isocratean claim to his own position as a light of imperial Greek culture. In doing so, he did not follow a set paradigm, nor does his oration demonstrate that the purpose of sophistic styles of selfpresentation was to “make Greeks.” If Favorinus had not performed this oration, perhaps no other sophist would have made so bold a public claim or made use of Greekness in this way. This text provides a context for how the intellectual entrepreneurs in the early Roman Empire were not limited in what they could use Greekness to try to accomplish—Greekness could serve as a resource for transformation in whatever way an ambitious intellectual could convince others that it did. This power of Greekness to exist as a fixed cultural reality while also serving as a malleable medium in which one could forge other kinds of self-expression proved to be a potent incentive for cultivating paideia.

Saïd’s critique contains a profound implication—that the Isocratean paradigm was reconceived in the 1st–3rd centuries CE in conscientious response to the influence of Rome.

CHAPTER TWO. “IN AND OUT OF THE GAME”

73

III. LUCIAN OF SAMOSATA AND THE POSSIBILITIES OF A PLASTIC P AIDEIA Lucian of Samosata, the 2nd century sophist and satirist, presents the agonistic landscape of the early Roman Empire with uncommon depth and detail. Lucian was extraordinarily productive, leaving at least 70 works that survive into the modern world.33 Moreover, his extant corpus contains perhaps the most critically incisive perspective on the sophistic movement and the experience of Roman hegemony. Lucian is also hilarious—one of very few ancient authors whose wit and sharpened tongue can pierce through the edited pages of modern critical editions.34 This humor underlies—indeed, is inseparable from—a profound literary genius. The sophistication with which Lucian approaches his subjects captures the scope and textures of sophistic culture in a way that would never survive without his writing.35 In a period in which culture was performed by sophists and intellectuals who competed for legitimacy as Greeks, Lucian is singularly aware of his agonistically conceived self-renditions and he is willing to laugh at himself for them.36 To be sure, Lucian is a virtuosic sophist who strives vigorously to claim and defend his paideutic refinement and intellectual reputation. But even where Lucian is at his most intensely competitive, the intricateness of his rhetorical de33 This number comes from A.M. Harmon’s remarks in the introduction to the Loeb edition of Lucian’s works. No better scholarly accounting of Lucian’s corpus, its dating and the evidence that can be deduced about Lucian’s life from ancient sources is available than Jennifer Hall’s discussion in Lucian’s Satire, 1-63. 34 Sometimes this humor is off-color and Lucian frequently employs double-entendres that remain vague in translation. See, for example, Harmon’s translation in the Loeb rendering of Demon. 17, where Lucian’s innuendo does not quite survive in English. 35 In the judgment of Bracht Branham, “the cultural and intellectual significance of [Lucian’s] work is invariably the by-product of a wry and nimble sense of humor that seems to resist seeing anything in precisely the accepted fashion. There is no serious Lucian who merely uses humor incidentally or who simply happens to amuse an audience in addition to doing something serious” (Unruly Eloquence: Lucian and the Comedy of Traditions [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989], 8). 36 Cf. Whitmarsh, Greek Literature and the Roman Empire, 248.

74

GAMING GREEKNESS

signs and his self-referential willingness to stand apart from himself remains a dominant dimension in his work. Lucian is thus a competitor for Greekness, but he is also a kind of commentator who describes and interprets the competitive landscape of intellectual culture in the Roman East. 37 He is also—helpful for this story—one of few non-Christian figures from the 2nd century CE who mentions both Jesus and describes early Christian communities explicitly. 38 That Lucian is uniquely suited to interpret his own world is a matter of his extraordinary background, which is so different than that of many of his fellow pepaideumenoi, and tantalizingly similar to some of his Christian and Jewish contemporaries. No single figure in the early Empire could possibly capture the scope of how Greek culture was reproduced and made real within this enormous field, but he is the closest there is among ancient intellectuals to a theorist of Greekness. He embodies the prevailing cultural values of his social milieu while also communicating a deeply critical sense of what is at stake in the various constructions and performances wrapped up in “being Greek” in the Roman world.39 Likewise, Lucian’s career encapsulates the cultural stakes of competing for Greekness because he is both an insider and an outsider of the sophistic paradigm—his 37 It is also remarkable that Lucian has been subject to consideration by historians of early Christianity in the past half-century. The bibliography for Lucian is long and has been well annotated in studies of the Second Sophsitic. For literature before 1970, see the bibliographies in Jennifer Hall, Lucian’s Satire, 607-618. For those since 1970, see Simon Swain, Hellenism and Empire, esp. 298-329; Tim Whitmarsh, Greek Literature and the Roman Empire, esp. 247-294. Though note that Hans Dieter Betz contributed both an article and a monograph to the study of Lucian within the context of early Christianity. See “Lukian von Samosata und das Christentum,” Novum Testamentum 3 (1959), 226-237, and Lukian und das Neue Testament. Religionsgeschichte und Paränetische Parallelen (Berlin: Akademie), 1961. Betz’ monograph—the only study of its kind—has not been translated into English. 38 Cf. Perg. 11-13. 39 On the subject of “being Greek,” see Simon Goldhill’s remarks in the introduction to his edited volume Being Greek under Rome: Cultural Identity, the Second Sophistic, and the Development of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

CHAPTER TWO. “IN AND OUT OF THE GAME”

75

literary sophistication and Attic chops outstrip all of his Christian and Jewish contemporaries, but as we shall see, he is not included within elite group of sophistic luminaries, like Aelius Aristides or Plutarch. His career demonstrates how competing for Greekness required one to adopt its modes of expression and comportment, but it also provides a model of how a field of Greek cultural competitors enabled one to recast and reimagine Greekness and its cultural significance. Lucian’s competitive self-presentation on the field of sophistic Greekness comes into particular focus in three semiautobiographical texts that Lucian composed to highlight competitive contexts of the 2nd century CE. In The Dream, The Teacher of Rhetoric, and The Double-Accused, Lucian develops a broadly cohesive account of his own experience of Greek paideia and his efforts to claim it.40 These texts illuminate how Greek culture was an object of competition in the Roman world. But at the same time, Lucian’s depiction of himself and the world around him demonstrates how one talented sophist could mold and shape paideia in order to fit the Greek-dominated culture in which he moved to his frame and to suit his purposes. “Do Not be Incredulous; Dreams Work Wonders!”: Lucian’s Dream and the Competition of Paideia

Isocrates’ “gambit” formulated a definition of Greekness that emanated from paideia. That paideia came to have an attributive significance—something that could be defining, as in the case of a pepaideumenos—meant that the social and cultural value that attached to Greekness became a primary object of ambitious competitors throughout the early Empire. Thus, as we have seen, paideia was transformative for those like Favorinus who were able to claim that he had become Greek.41 But this arrangement of competing cultural While I continue to use the standard abbreviations of the Latin titles from the Lucianic corpus, I use the English translations of his titles in text. 41 Cf. Whitmarsh, Greek Literature and the Roman Empire, 119. Whitmarsh engages Favorinus’ Corinthian Oration alongside Lucian’s Dream, which is discussed here. While I rely on aspects of his analysis—as well as that of Maud Gleason, who also focuses on Favorinus and Lucian—my reading of 40

76

GAMING GREEKNESS

subject and competed over cultural object could also be written in reverse. Just as ambitious individuals could gain social legitimacy by competing for cultural capital. Incentivizing talented people to pursue and vie for Greekness was crucial for how paideia maintained its high valuation as cultural capital. While many competed for Greek cultural legitimacy, the way that the inter-subjective rivalry among elites in turn helped produce and advance Isocratean-style Greekness is harder to make clear. But, across a number of texts, Lucian does just that. Lucian highlights the mutually constitutive relationship between paideia’s social importance and the fierce competition to possess it in a way that outstrips any other ancient literary voice. In The Dream, or Lucian’s Career, Lucian employs an outlandish literary staging in order to make this subtle dynamic explicit. Lucian elucidates the way that competition enabled the production of culture in two ways. First, he identifies the way that vying elites who sought to cultivate paideia did so in a conscientious effort to outdo their fellow intellectual competitors. Second, he makes explicit the way that Greek culture itself was in competition with other means of social advancement and significance for the attention of these very intellectuals. Lucian manages to do this by personifying paideia as a figure with whom he talks and dialogues. The inventiveness of literary satire allowed Lucian to encounter even broad cultural phenomena like paideia in a face-to-face scenario. In The Dream, Lucian parodies the motif of Herakles choice between Pleasure and Virtue by narrating a dream in which he is visited by the specters of Rhetoric and Sculp-

both authors seeks to illuminate the way that these sophistic voices (along with others) produced a cultural system in which Christians and Jews could develop their own strategies of self-presentation by competing for Greek cultural resources. Favorinus demonstrates how the competitive context of his speech and the tropes and metaphors that color it allow him to claim Greekness. Lucian, in his more playful engagement with the agonistic terms of sophistic culture, clarifies the way that competing for Greekness was also a chance to reimagine it.

CHAPTER TWO. “IN AND OUT OF THE GAME”

77

ture.42 It is, if not autobiographical, the work of Lucian that resonates most authentically with his life and the development of his rhetorical career. In the narrative, Lucian has just left grammar school, and his father is considering pragmatic questions: “which of the trades was best, easiest to learn, appropriate for a free man— which required supplies that were readily available, and paid a living wage.”43 After some discussion, Lucian is sent to learn sculpting because he had shown aptitude molding figures out of wax that had been scraped from his writing tablet.44 After an early misstep as an apprentice to his sculptor-uncle, Lucian is beaten with a stick, and his uncle sends him home in tears to be comforted by his mother.45 This premise is pregnant with social realism: the practical choices faced by his father, the opportunism of Lucian’s uncle, and the simple intimacy of his mother’s comfort all fill out a provincial image of Syrian family life. Night comes and Lucian falls asleep in tears, but it is in the subsequent vision that Lucian’s fate is played out, far away from hearth and home. Even in this brief set up, it is clear that Lucian is, in many ways, an exceptional case among cultural competitors in the 2nd century CE. Most Roman subjects in Eastern Syria (even those who were free subjects, if not citizens) would not have had the success that Lucian enjoyed. The Dream depicts Lucian’s starting point as an unexceptional hayseed trying to make his way in the world. The text alludes to his future accomplishments—indeed, it is premised on his inevitable success. But what happens in between is left murky. As a result, Cf. Xenophon, Mem. 2.1.21–34. Perhaps the most prominent telling of the myth that would have been known in the circles in which Lucian traveled is in Dio Chrysostom’s First Kingship Oration (Or. 1.48ff.) 43 Somn. 1. 44 The broad semantic range of εἰκών enables Lucian to toy around with the concept of “semblance,” ironically portrayed in the scene of the future rhetorician using the wax in his writing tablet to form life-like images. The word εἰκών can refer to a simple image or likeness, as well as a sculpted statue, but is also rendered as “semblance, phantom” (Cf. Lucian’s Dial mort. 16.1, as well as Euripides’ Herc. Fuer. 1002.) Lucian undeniably exploits this semantic depth to great effect in this piece. 45 Somn. 6. 42

78

GAMING GREEKNESS

within the competitive economy of Imperial-era society, Lucian represents a commodity whose talent makes him distinctly valuable as a resource for promulgating the sophistic virtuosity that was essential to the career that he sought.46 Like a corporation that seeks to expand its share of an economic market, or a flower attracting bees in order to spread its genome-laden pollen, those cultures that can successfully spread and evolve do so by attracting those who will propogate their influence.47 In short, while Lucian certainly competes for paideia, paideia must also compete for Lucian. In The Dream, that is precisely what the personified figure of Paideia does. In The Dream, Lucian presents Paideia’s efforts to win Lucian’s attention in unambiguous terms: Two women, taking me by the hands, were trying to drag me toward themselves very forcefully and with all their might (μάλα βιαίως καὶ καρτερῶς); in fact, they nearly pulled me to pieces in their rivalry (πρὸς ἀλλήλας φιλοτιμούμεναι). Now one of them would get the better of it and almost have me altogether, and now I would be in the hands of the other. They shouted at each other, too, one of them saying, “He is mine and you want to get him!” The other said, “It is no good your claiming what belongs to someone else!”48 The integral value of talented and connected people has become a hallmark of social network theory. Malcolm Gladwell has popularly characterized these individuals as “mavens”—information brokers who connect their various constituencies with the broader world (The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference [New York: Little Brown, 2000], 69). Lucian’s value with respect to Greekness is his capacity to connect others to it. 47 This notion of cultural diffusion and the need for Hellas to rely on the talented cultural entrepreneurs to spread its influence is surprisingly explicit, even at the earliest stages of Greek literature. In the Odyssey, Tiresias instructs Odysseus to carry an oar with him to cities throughout the world until he comes upon a race (γένος) who does not know the sea at all, and demonstrates this by telling him that he carries a winnowing fan. There he must plant the oar and offer sacrifices to Poseidon (Od. 23.247-299). Odysseus, much like Lucian, is to become a far-flung evangelist of Greece and Greek religious culture. 48 Somn. 6. 46

CHAPTER TWO. “IN AND OUT OF THE GAME”

79

The two women are personifications of Sculpture and Paideia, and they quite literally fight over Lucian. Their competition with one another to win Lucian’s lifetime commitment veritably defines the stakes of cultural competition. Moreover, this allegorical dream allows Lucian to name the connection between the social striving that fueled the ambition of elite pepaideumenoi and the competition that structured Greek culture. Indeed, Lucian makes the ambition of sophists and other intellectuals the basis for Paideia and Sculpture’s conflict when they are said to be “striving with one another” (πρὸς ἀλλήλας φιλοτιμούμεναι).49 Lucian makes this confrontation tactile: each woman grasps Lucian “very forcefully and with all her might” (μάλα βιαίως καὶ καρτερῶς).50 Lucian’s role as an object of competition is explicit as each woman pulls him in both directions like a rag doll. The art of sculpture and the sophistication of paideutic learning are likened to bratty children fighting over a toy. Lucian explains that the vision of these two dueling arts was “so vivid that no part of reality was missing. Everything was so clearly manifest that, after all this time (ἔτι γοῦν καὶ μετὰ τοσοῦτον χρόνον), the figures that I saw and the words that I heard still dwell in my eyes and ears.”51 Lucian entangles the events of his dream with his own memory in order to convey how this dream affected his life—indeed, the vividness of the vision still dwells (παραμένει) in his mind as he 49 Somn. 6. Cf. Schmitz’s discussion of φιλοτιμία and its role in the competition that characterized elite sophists in the previous chapter. 50 Both are very broad terms, but each has specific agonistic valences. Aristotle refers to τὴν βίαιον τροφὴν—the “hard diet” of athletes who are in training (Pol. 8 [1338b]). κρατερός appears often in the context of battle, with Polybius describing the Carthaginan and Roman battle for Sicily in as “an intense contest” (ἀγῶνος δὲ συστάντος καρτεροῦ [Hist. 1.27.11]). Especially relevant for this study is the appearance of the same adverbial form in 4 Macc. 15:31, where the mother of the seven sons—who is described in v.29 as “vindicator of the law and champion of religion, who carried away the prize of the contest in your heart!”—is compared to the ark of Noah “stoutly enduring the waves” (καρτερῶς ὑπήνεγκε τοὺς κλύδωνας). 51 Somn. 5. To make this change explicit, he appeals to Homer and quotes from Il. 2.56, where Zeus sends a ghostly vision to Agamemnon on Thetis’ request.

80

GAMING GREEKNESS

tells it.52 Lucian emphasizes the temporal dimensions that make the vision so real to him “still after all this time” (ἔτι γοῦν καὶ μετὰ τοσοῦτον χρόνον).53 The indwelling of memory serves an important function in The Dream, not least because of the way that Lucian exploits it in order to characterize the enchanting Paideia (Παιδεῖα) and the forgettable Sculpture. Lucian includes an almost physiognomic description of Sculpture (Ἑρμογλυφικὴ), who is “like a workman, masculine, with messy hair, hands full of callouses, clothing tucked up, and a heavy layer of marble-dust” (ἦν δὲ ἡ μὲν ἐργατικὴ καὶ ἀνδρικὴ καὶ αὐχμηρὰ τὴν κόμην, τὼ χεῖρε τύλων ἀνάπλεως, διεζωσμένη τὴν ἐσθῆτα τιτάνου καταγέμουσα).54 She gives an unremarkable speech that Lucian dismisses by again noting how forgettable it was: “Sculpture said all this—and even more—with a lot of stammering and barbarisms, speaking very quickly and attempting to persuade me. But I cannot remember anymore—most of what she said escapes my memory at this point.”55 Lucian’s forgetfulness is not accidental. He intimates that clumsy presentation and poor speech is liable to make one’s words forgotten, and consequently one who seeks to be remembered must never neglect the niceties of appearance and presentation. The effect of this telling is to refocus what was etched most deeply on Lucian’s mind: not the dusty workwoman, but the stunning figure of Paideia.56 52 Somn. 5.

The translation cannot fully capture the precise significance Lucian places on time in this narrative. Tοσοῦτον signifies quantity, but it also emphasizes its demonstrative sense indicating particularity, as in “so much time of this sort.” If we take this syntax as a deliberate effort on Lucian’s part to express how this dream has had its effect on his life, Lucian incorporates a dynamic temporality in employing this particular demonstrative (rather than the blunter τοσόσδε, for instance.) This pronoun explicitly references a preceding event rather than something that follows it, which in the context of Lucian’s account refers to the time of Lucian’s own life after this profound dream—this dream literally haunts Lucian. 54 Somn. 6. 55 Somn. 8. 56 I take Paideia here to represent cultural Greekness and not rhetoric in a restrictive sense for a number of reasons. First, the issue of memory emphasized here to distinguish both figures suggests that this Paideia is on a dif53

CHAPTER TWO. “IN AND OUT OF THE GAME”

81

Paideia’s appeal to Lucian is remarkable for the way she works to convince Lucian to grant her his loyalty. She dissuades him from becoming a sculptor by arguing that it will not pay off in ways that satisfy Lucian’s ambition. She goes on to name exactly what Lucian wanted most out of his career: not to labor exhaustively, but to be paid well, and to use his mind. More than that, however, he wished to be “an envied figure in public” (τοῖς πολίταις ζηλωτός) and widely notorious—lauded by friends, noted by citizens, and feared by enemies.57 This last notion is a sticking point for Lucian, and it recurs throughout the texts we examine here. She later promises him international notoriety and fame: “If you ever travel abroad, even on foreign soil you will not be unknown or inconspicuous (οὐδ᾽ ἐπὶ τῆς ἀλλοδαπῆς ἀγνὼς οὐδ᾽ ἀφανὴς ἔσῃ), for I will attach to you such marks of identification that everyone who sees you will nudge his neighbor and point you out with his finger, saying, ‘There he is’“!58 She also lays out the paideutic incentives like an enticing job-offer for a promising new hire: Lucian will have “the truly flawless jewels of the soul” (ὁ τῆς ψυχῆς ἀκήρατος ὡς ἀληθῶς κόσμος)—virtues as well as “the love of all that is beautiful and ardor toward what is most sublime” (τῷ τῶν καλῶν ἔρωτι, τῇ πρὸς τὰ σεμνότατα ὁρμῇ).59 More than that, Paideia offers to Lucian the prophetic mastery to know all that has passed and all that will come to be: “I shall in no great amount of time teach you everything that there is, whether the things of gods or of humans” (καὶ ὅλως ἅπαντα ὁπόσα ἐστί, τά τε θεῖα τὰ τ᾽ ἀνθρώπινα, οὐκ εἰς μακρὰν σε διδάξομαι).60 She will even grant him the ultimate form of fame: immortality. She says, “For though you yourself deferent order of significance that Sculpture. Second, the characterization of Paideia here is not restricted to spoken rhetoric, but is rather expansively conceived of as a divine character, as indicated by the chariot-ride and reference to Triptolemus in Somn. 15. Finally, Lucian addresses “Rhetoric” more explicitly in The Double Accused, and that characterization is much different than Paideia as it is depicted here. 57 Somn. 9. This last notion is a sticking point for Lucian, and it recurs throughout the texts examined here. 58 Somn. 11. 59 Somn. 10. 60 Somn. 10.

82

GAMING GREEKNESS

part from life, you will never cease associating with men of education (τοῖς πεπαιδευμένοις) and conversing with men of eminence (τοῖς ἀρίστοις).”61 Lucian does not pass up this opportunity and to the great indignation of Sculpture he decisively expresses his intention to go with Paideia. In response to Lucian’s “correct judgment” in their dispute, Paideia offers Lucian a ride across the heavens so that he can view the world he would have missed should he have chosen poorly. There is a theistic conceit when Lucian enters the heavenly chariot and ascends above the earth. Lucian allegorizes his rhetorical career, describing himself to be a “sower of seeds” (ἀποσπείρων) who spreads his own speeches62—and in the process paideia itself—across the earth from the chariot, like Triptolemus.63 Lucian continues, “I cannot recall now what it was I sowed (oὐκέτι μέντοι μέμνημαι, ὅ τι τὸ σπειρόμενον ἐκεῖνο ἦν); only that men, looking up from below, applauded, and all those above whom I passed in my flight sped me on 61 Somn. 12.

This language is reminiscent of the characterization the philosophers at the Aeropagus use for Paul in Acts 17.18, where Paul is mocked as a σπερμολόγος—literally an ornithological image of “picking up seeds” but which BDAG renders as “scrapmonger, scavenger.” That Lucian would put the conceptual opposite of what was a scoffing insult as a characterization of Paul suggests that the concept of “sowing” was not an insignificant one for encapsulating public success. These two opposing images accord with the honestiores and humiliores paradigm discussed in the last chapter. The dignity of being the one who sows the seeds is matched by the ignominy of being one who scrupulously gathers them up. Of course, the positive images of the gathering of birds and the care to collect crumbs so characteristic of the early gospel traditions (cf. Matt 6.26; Mark 7.28 and parallel) do not reflect the cutthroat ethos of sophistic self-aggrandizement. 63 Triptolemus is described in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter (153); however his popularity as a figure of mythic seed-scattering is primarily the result of iconography dating from the 6th century BCE (See Susan Matheson, “The Mission of Triptolemus and the Politics of Athens,” GRBS 20 [1982], 345-372). This motif and the mythology surrounding Triptolemus is vast, and the imagery of a chariot ride within a dream appears so often in ancient literature that its appearance here is almost an intentional cliché—and one that Lucian will continue to reference. Cf. Dio Chrysostom’s engagement with this and other kinds of chariot imagery in Or. 36.40. 62

CHAPTER TWO. “IN AND OUT OF THE GAME”

83

my way with words of praise.”64 Again, memory factors importantly in the underlying purpose of Lucian’s account. That he cannot remember what he sowed, but can recall the responses from those on the ground does a great to highlight the role that cultural performance held in winning the social legitimacy offered by Greekness. Here, the mutual construal of cultural Greekness and cultural Greeks collapse within the deeds of a single figure: Lucian will sow the world with paideia, growing crops of Greek cultural connoisseurs, and in so doing present himself to the world as Paideia’s very own. The Dream provides an important baseline for understanding how Lucian competed for Greek cultural legitimacy. Here he illuminates the way that laying claim to Greekness entailed reciprocal forms of competition: Lucian competes for Greekness even as Greekness (personified by Paideia) competes for the commitments of talented and powerful constituents. Lucian presents his own experience and background as a cultural entrepreneur in explicit terms, and takes care to narrate how this amounts to a very literal kind of exchange of his intellectual potential for cultural capital and its benefits. In The Dream, Lucian is the son of a freeman and is educated into his teens with a view toward a career as a tradesperson.65 Paideia regards him as “the beggarly son of a nobody” (ὁ... πένης ὁ τοῦ δεῖνος) who is trapped in the outskirts of the Roman Empire. Before Paideia gets ahold of him, he is unknown—a bumpkin. What paideia promises Lucian is a life of purpose and fame, and it is this that entices Lucian to become a pepaideumenos. “They say that some men become immortal; I shall bring this to pass for you,” Paideia promises him.66 She insists that Lucian will join the company of Demosthenes, Aeschines, and Socrates.67 There is an implicit tit-for-tat arrangement

64 Somn. 15. 65 Somn. 1-3. 66 Somn. 12.

Lucian self-identifies as an Assyrian, making Lucian and Tatian the only two 2nd century intellectual figures who so identify themselves (Syr. 11). (On the authenticity of Lucian’s authorship of On the Syrian Goddess, see Simon Swain, Hellenism and Empire, 304-7; C.P. Jones, Culture and Society 67

84

GAMING GREEKNESS

underlying the literary persona Lucian portrays here, but inevitably this status quo is premised on a mutually beneficial arrangement. In view of the larger scope of Lucian’s literary self-creation, the Dream provides a crucial point of orientation for his subsequent responses to paideia and sophistic culture. Lucian seeks to cultivate his rhetorical skill and persona in order to achieve a concrete and reasonable end: the notoriety and fame that could be won by claiming and performing paideia. All of the subsequent moves that Lucian makes evolve from this premise. An equally important conclusion that can be drawn from Lucian’s Dream is that the efforts of competitive sophists and other intellectuals created an incentive to cooperatively promote Greekness in ways that benefitted the field as a whole. This relationship is difficult to pin down, but it is an important part of how non zero-sum competition functions. Sophists and other intellectuals competed with one another at one level, but at another level they needed to cooperate with one another in order to make Greekness socially valuable. While Lucian is one of very few ancient writers to make this dynamic explicit, it functions among other ambitious intellectuals in the 1st– 3rd centuries CE. Lucian’s depiction of this dynamic in The Dream helps to clarify its importance elsewhere. Favorinus’ enterprising strategy and his concern to present his own self-making by linking it to the checkered past of Corinth becomes more profound when Favorinus and Corinth are viewed as agents that both showcased and promoted Greek culture. Corinth—like Lucian in The Dream—had been an object of competition. Likewise, Corinth’s ambition to become an ever more prominent city entailed that it be constantly aware of its appearance and character, evidenced by the careful way the city pruned its garden of honorific statues. So, Lucian’s strategically crafted personal history in The Dream participates in this mutual and cooperative act of producing culture. In the process he illuminates one of the more shadowy realities entailed by the Isocratean project: the value of Greekness and the market for its exchange was in Lucian, 41; Nasrallah, Christian Responses to Roman Art and Architecture [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010], 60-61).

CHAPTER TWO. “IN AND OUT OF THE GAME”

85

predicated upon a cooperative effort among all competitors to collectively promote the importance of Greekness as a cultural resource.68 “Laugh at all the speakers!”: Rigors and Realities in the Teacher of Rhetoric

The pursuit of Greekness by all kinds of intellectuals in the Roman world functioned like a cultural gold-strike: it put Greekness at a premium, leading to an even stronger incentive to cultivate paideia. Consequently, paideia’s high valuation created an equally powerful incentive to counterfeit the performance of Greekness.69 Counterfeiting Greekness was especially at issue in the Roman Imperial world because the entire sophistic enterprise was founded on processes of imitation—imitation of rhetorical and grammatical exemplars and the imitation of sophistic luminaries and their styles of selfpresentation. Lucian’s The Teacher of Rhetoric presents this new state of affairs by describing the ways in which the cultural marketplace of the Roman Imperial world could also trade on bogus forms of paideia.70 In this text, Lucian’s satirical takedown of aspiring, but In the context of Lucian and Favorinus, this is not a difficult case to make. This issue will become crucial in later chapters where early Christian and Jewish critiques of Greekness—most notably those of the early Christian apologist Tatian and 4 Maccabees—will seem to run against the promotion of Greek paideia. However, as I will argue later, even these criticisms depend upon—and in subtle, sub-textual ways promote—Greekness as a resource for self-presentation. 69 It is not accidental that the sham rhetorical instructor that appears in Lucian’s Teacher of Rhetoric and Herodes Atticus—an individual of extraordinary wealth and social prominence in the second century—are both linked to the title “king of oratory.” (Lucian, Rhet. Praec. 11-12; Philostratus, VS 90.28; 101.13-14. Cf. C.P. Snow, Culture and Society in Lucian, 106-107.) Lucian’s kingship language also includes a nod to Roman emperors and their parading triumphs, as he promises that the teacher of rhetoric will make one “king of the rhetorical stage who effortlessly drives the four-horse chariot of eloquence” (βασιλεὺς ἐν τοῖς λόγοις ἀπονητὶ... τὰ τέθριππα ἐλαύνων τοὺ λόγου [Rhet. Praec. 11]), in the manner of victorious, triumphing generals. 70 This text is arguably our best single source for understanding how nonelites engaged with sophistic learning, and will therefore provide an important point of reference for how the largely non-elite literature of early 68

86

GAMING GREEKNESS

lazy, would-be rhetors makes explicit the connection between the arenas of sophistic culture and the aspirations of non-elites for social legitimacy. Thus, The Teacher of Rhetoric sheds light on an otherwise unseen dimension of the way cultural currency was exchanged among Roman subjects—the ambition for social prominence among rival elites and the pursuit of social legitimacy by the unlearned are, in this text, brought into direct conversation with one another. Lucian begins his account of the easy path to rhetorical expertise by engaging a younger, would-be student: “You ask, my boy, how you might become an orator (ὅπως ἂν ῥήτωρ γένοιο), and seem to bear the sublime and glorious name ‘sophist’ (πάντιμον ὄνομα σοφιστὴς εἶναι δόξαις).”71 Lucian starts by explicitly naming the performative mechanisms and ambitious logic that characterized sophistic culture by making a specific juxtaposition between two kinds of people: the ῥήτωρ and σοφιστὴς. He then employs a verbal maneuver that is similar to that of Favorinus in the Corinthian Oration: Lucian implies that the student can become (γένοιο) a rhetor, but can only seem to bear (εἶναι δόξαις) the name of a sophist.72 After this initial reference, the word “sophist” never again appears in this text. In its place, seeming—a task that requires continual maintenance and attention—is the goal of the ambitious student. This process of becoming an ersatz sophist is likened to wearing a dazzling garment of armor that makes the student “impervious to defeat and completely un-ignorable” (ὡς ἄμαχον εἶναι καὶ ἀνυπόστατον).73 Unlike Lucian’s implicit confidence in his own talents showcased in The Dream, here Christians and Jews discussed in the remainder of this study can be understood to engage with sophistic culture as fellow competitors. 71 Rhet. Praec. 1. 72 Rafaella Cribiore highlights this dynamic and remarks that Lucian “seems to suggest that a young man had a chance to become a ῥήτωρ with the limited education offered by the flamboyant teacher but could acquire only the reputation of being a real σοφιστὴς. It is significant that the word σοφιστὴς does not reappear in the rest of the dialogue; in describing both the forensic oratory and the public, oratorical displays of the teacher of the easy road, Lucian always employs ῥήτωρ, which occurs twelve times” (“Lucian, Libanius, and the Short Road to Rhetoric,” GRBS 47 (2007): 71-86). 73 Rhet. Praec. 1.

CHAPTER TWO. “IN AND OUT OF THE GAME”

87

the competitive dimensions of rhetorical performance are roadblocks that the rhetorical teacher will help the student bypass. However, this desire to circumvent the innately competitive terms of pursuing rhetorical fame does not blunt the student’s ambition for notoriety. He seeks to be “a wonder to all, an eagerly-desired treat for the ears of the Greeks.”74 “Certainly, the object of your quest is not trivial,” responds Lucian, but it is a pursuit that ordinarily requires great effort and toilsome work.75 But Lucian suggests that students who seek to coast into the upper echelons of Greek intellectual culture need not trouble themselves with the agonies of rhetorical training. There is another way to the summit of rhetoric by which the teacher will guide his students: I shall not lead you by a rough road, or a steep and sweaty one, so that you will turn back halfway out of exhaustion. In that case I should be no better than those other guides who use the ordinary route—long, steep, toilsome, and, as a rule, hopeless. No, my advice has this to commend it, that ascending in the manner of a leisurely stroll through flowery fields and perfect shade in great comfort and luxury, by a sloping bridle-path that is very short as well as very pleasant, you will gain the summit without sweating for it, you will bag your game without any effort... and you with a wreath upon your head, will be fortunate beyond compare.76

In order to take this road, Lucian provides a referral to a teacher who is learned in the arts of sham rhetoric. Lucian thus defers from the task of speaking for the teacher himself, because it would be “laughable” (γελοῖον) for him to take the words out of the mouth of a speaker so accomplished at seeming to be a sophist. At this point in the text, the sham teacher takes over by addressing the student: “you have come of your own accord in the wake of rumor because you hear everybody speak of my achievements with astonishment, praise, 74 Rhet.

Praec. 1. Praec. 2. 76 Rhet. Praec. 3. My translation has been informed by Raffaela Cribiore’s in “Lucian, Libanius, and the Short Road to Rhetoric,” 75 Rhet.

88

GAMING GREEKNESS

admiration, and self-abasement.”77 The teacher insists that the essence of what one should do to become a celebrated rhetor is to copy his every move.78 There is no reason to delay, even if the student does not know how to write, for “orators are beyond all that” (τι παρὰ ταῦτα ὁ ῥήτωρ)!79 In the place of rigorous preparation for the journey to rhetorical sophistication, one should instead bring “ignorance, first of all; secondly recklessness as well as effrontery and shamelessness.”80 The example presented by the sham teacher is tied to forms of self-presentation that were decidedly feminine. Lucian effectively develops an ecphratic political cartoon in The Teacher of Rhetoric, depicting the charlatan teacher as an “effeminate dandy,” in the words of Jennifer Hall.81 However, this stereotyped and lavish effeminacy is not merely a matter of appearance, but of voice, subject, and even grammar.82 Lucian explains that when the aspiring student

77 Rhet.

Praec. 13. Rhet. Praec. 14. There is a very subtle humor at work here that taps into the mimetic nature of sophistic culture and education. However, the exemplars which they imitated were of the most ancient and lauded sort; to be a sophist was to master the voices of those literary figures that characterized the idealized past. So, for a teacher to instruct his students to imitate his own voice categorically excludes him from rhetorical credibility of a legitimate kind. 79 Rhet. Praec. 14. 80 Rhet. Praec. 15. 81 Jennifer Hall, Lucian’s Satire, 252. 82 This effeminacy, which elite Romans associated with Greece and Easternness generally, was linked to sexual promiscuity and a proclivity to surround oneself with women. Note, for instance, that one of the “contradictions” supposed to characterize Favorinus’ life included that he had been prosecuted for infidelity despite being widely reviled as a eunuch (Philostratus, VS 489; Cf. Gleason, Making Men, especially 3-20; 55-81; and 131-168, as well as Whitmarsh, Greek Literature and the Roman Empire, 109-116). This dynamic is made explicit in Rhet. Preac. 22-23 where the teacher explains that the hopeful rhetor should especially develop popularity among the “chattering women.” In fact, the sham teacher’s final words of advice insinuates that students should not be afraid to use oral sex in order to develop a loyal following among women: “let your mouth be open for everything 78

CHAPTER TWO. “IN AND OUT OF THE GAME”

89

turns down the easy road he will find a great number of people, “And among them a sumptuously clever and handsome gentleman with a mincing gait, a thin neck, a girlish eye, and a melifluous voice, having the air of perfume, who teases his head with the tip of his finger, and carefully dresses his hair—thinning now, but curly and blueblack.”83 The teacher’s embellished and insubstantial rhetorical advice matches his attire. He insists that a rhetor’s outfit must receive “special attention, particularly to the graceful set of your cloak.”84 One’s speech should be similarly arrayed with ornaments of sophistication, so the teacher recommends to “pick out around fifteen (or anyhow not more than twenty) Attic words—learn them by heart, and have them ready at the tip of your tongue.”85 The teacher forbids the student to consult classical exemplars like Isocrates, Demosthenes, and Plato. He should instead concentrate on recent works— especially the schoolroom declamations that were then in fashion— so that one may have a ready supply of things to rip-off.86 The scope of competition within ancient rhetorical culture was not limited to the pepaideumenoi who were performing orations. These showcases of paideia were embedded in competitive public encounters in which the audience played an important role.87 Luciequally; let your tongue serve you not only in your speeches, but in any other way it can” (Rhet. Praec. 23). 83 Rhet. Praec. 11. 84 Rhet. Praec. 16. 85 Rhet. Praec. 16. 86 Rhet. Praec. 17. 87 Kendra Eshleman illuminates the way that rhetorical audiences functioned in the Roman imperial world: “The audience was an active partner in performance, sometimes collaborating, often in competition with the speaker. The line between performer and spectator is also blurred by the fact that audiences typically did not comprise idiotai in the strongest sense but largely other members of the urban elite, often with similar education and ambitions. Our sources’ configuration of audiences as amateur outsiders with neither the disciplinary acumen nor the effective ability to pass judgment on intellectuals is thus tendentious on every count, a maneuver in the agonistic back-and-forth between speaker and hearers, rather than a description of reality” (Kendra Eshleman, The Social World of Intellectuals in the Roman Empire, 76-77).

90

GAMING GREEKNESS

an’s teacher insists that a rhetor must cultivate a healthy cadre of parasitic groupies who can help him compete, not only with one’s rivals in rhetoric, but also with the audience itself. Lucian’s teacher seems to be aware of this blurry relationship when he advises that a rhetor should seed his audience and play his part as a rivalrous observer: “Let your friends spring to their feet constantly and pay you for their dinners by lending you a hand whenever they perceive that you are about to fall down and giving you a chance to find what to say next in the intervals afforded by their applause.”88 The teacher’s concern about the jealousy of one’s rhetorical peers and the humiliation of rivals extends to the comportment of the rhetor when he is a member of the audience: “I almost forgot the things that are most important and necessary for maintaining your reputation! Laugh at all the speakers. If anyone makes a fine speech, let it appear that he is parading something that belongs to someone else and is not his own. And if he is mildly criticized, let everything that he says be objectionable.”89 Lucian’s quack teacher is a caricature of a range of traits and performative fads that were common among sophistic circles throughout the second century. The sharpness of Lucian’s satire and its exaggeration of otherwise subtle aspects of rhetorical comportment serve to clarify the specific dimensions with which performance, veiled reference, and imitation conspired to form a social network of rivalrous would-be intellectuals and cultural elites. This network was comprised of competitive nodes and agonistic vectors at which these figures could claim and defend their legitimacy as Greeks.90 88 Rhet.

Praec. 21. Praec. 22. 90 This phenomenon is no less significant in the modern world than it was in the ancient one. I argue that contemporary hip hop culture makes for a stunning parallel to the sophistic movement, both in terms of the way that identity is always the product of a highly self-aware performance and the arena on which it is able to thrive. Success among artists has often been characterized by the need to not only be liked by the right people, but also hated and even ridiculed by those whose anxiety about one’s emerging prominence (expressed via insults and deprications) grant status and standing in the larger community. Cf. a similar dynamic in Philostratus’s account 89 Rhet.

CHAPTER TWO. “IN AND OUT OF THE GAME”

91

A question that arises in light of Lucian’s satirical account here—and one that bears importantly on the Christian and Jewish intellectual culture emerging in this period—is, did such teachers and students really exist?91 That is, did a less rigorous form of rhetorical training really emerge in the 2nd century? Rafaella Cribiore argues that the prevailing anxiety of belletristic Greek speakers about the rise of sham orators and rhetorical teachers indicates that there may have been an “abbreviated system of rhetorical instruction” available in the late first and second century. 92 Cribiore claims that this text demonstrates how the stylistics inherent to a career as a public orator had become a memetic standby in the Imperial era that could be borrowed, adopted, and co-opted by other public intellectuals. She explains that Lucian’s satirical account in The Teacher of Rhetoric illustrates how untrained rhetors like these would have “compensated for their lack of mastery of traditional techniques by strategies of various kinds, which included flamboyant dress, elaborate gesturing, modu-

of Favorinus and Polemo’s quarrel, where he explains, “for those who called Favorinus a sophist precisely the fact that he had quarreled with a sophist was proof enough, for the contention which I have mentioned is usually directed against rivals in the same art” (τοῖς μὲν οὖν σοφιστὴν τὸν Φαβωρῖνον καλοῦσιν ἀπέχρη ἐς ἀπόδειξιν καὶ αὐτὸ τὸ διενεχθῆναι ἀυτὸν σοφιστῇ, τὸ γὰρ φιλότιμον, οὗ ἐμνήσθην, ἐπὶ τοὺς ἀντιτέχνους φοιτᾷ [VS 491]). See also Jason König, “Competitiveness and anti-competitiveness in Philostratus’ Lives of the Sophists,” Competition in the Ancient World, Nick Fisher and Hans van Wees, eds. (Swansea: Classical Press of Wales, 2011), 279-300. 91 The identity of the “teacher” in Lucian’s text has been subject to speculation since at least the early 19th century, with the sophist Pollux (described in Philostratus, VS 593) seen to be most likely. On this point, see Graham Anderson, Lucian: Theme and Variation in the Second Sophistic (Leiden: Brill, 1976), 67-71. 92 Rafaella Cribiore, “Lucian, Libanius, and the Short Road to Rhetoric,” 71. Cribiore develops the suggestion made by Malcolm Heath (both in Hermogenes on Issues: Strategies of Argument in Later Greek Rhetoric [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995], as well as Menander: A Rhetor in Context [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004]) that the second through fifth centuries experienced a structural shift in the curriculum of the rhetorical schools.

92

GAMING GREEKNESS

lation of voice, and keen understanding of their audience’s expectations.”93 If paideia constituted a valuable form of capital in the ancient world, the shift that Lucian’s teacher is analogous to obliterating the gold standard. Counterfeiting rhetorical aptitude had a profound effect on what constituted rhetorical speech and recast who could speak with a paideutic voice in the increasingly globalized Roman world.94 On the one hand, the cultural purchase of Greekness itself would have been magnified throughout Roman culture. But at the same time, a shift away from a closed system of membership among sophistic circles would have served to emphasize the most superficial and stylized elements of Greek culture—it would have inflated its value as capital. This whole issue as satirized by Lucian suggests that the question of how non-Greeks were initiated into Greek culture in the early Empire was not a black-and-white issue of whether or not an author had completed the full cycle of elite rhetorical training. To comport oneself as a Greek, especially through the performative contexts of rhetorical discourse, entailed a responsive stylistics that would have involved more than imitating only rhetorical forms— becoming a Greek rhetor, even one from the school of Lucian’s Teacher, involved a larger cultural performance, every element of which was styled on competitive stage. Lucian brings the Teacher of Rhetoric to a close by addressing the same theme that closed The Dream. The satirical, Lucian-esque narrator advises the student: “If you are persuaded by what you have 93 Cribiore, “Short Road to Rhetoric,” 83. 94 As one of many examples, Fergus Millar points to the rise in legalrhetorical education in Beirut, and Syria more widely, in what seems to have been a veritable stream of Syrian-Greek rhetorical and cultural “human capital flight” (i.e., brain drain) to Rome and its burgeoning knowledge economy (“The Roman Colonies of the Near East. A Study of Cultural Relations,” in Heikki Solin and Mika Kajava eds., Roman Eastern Policy and Other Studies [Helsinki: Societas Scientiarum Fennica, 1990], 7–58, esp. 23). Ancient voices are not silent on this subject; Juvenal laments to Umbiricus that the “Syrian Orontes has long since flowed into the Tiber” (iam pridem Syrus in Tiberim defluxit Orontes) and brought with it its language, morals, and other cultural miscellany (Sat. 3.62-65).

CHAPTER TWO. “IN AND OUT OF THE GAME”

93

heard, you may consider that even now you are where in the beginning you wished to be... Consequently, Plato’s famous phrase about driving full-tilt in a winged car can be applied by you to yourself with a better grace than by Plato to Zeus.”95 Along with the recurrence of the chariot motif, the yearning for fame that is shared in each text indicates a deeper symbolic resonance for the chariot. Lucian’s recycling of this image in the Teacher of Rhetoric is part of how he begins to distance himself from the youthful idealism reflected in The Dream. Claiming Greekness, no matter how rigorous one’s sophistic training might have been, always entailed an agonistic performance that depended on the regard of the wider community. Lucian, as he presents himself within The Teacher of Rhetoric is ambivalent about the same fame that so motivates the boy whom Paideia visits in The Dream. At the close of The Teacher of Rhetoric, Lucian effectively cedes his own hard-won cultural ground and the ambitiousness that motivated the young boy who chose to pursue paideia: As for me—since I am a callow, illegitimate child—I will get out of the road for you, and cease engaging Rhetoric, seeing that I have nothing to contribute to her like you all. Indeed, I have stopped already; so get the herald to proclaim a victory by forfeit and marvel! But remember this one thing: while you appear swifter, you did not outpace us by your speed but because you took the road that was easy and downhill.96

Lucian began his own experience of Greek culture in The Dream with a ride in a winged chariot with Paideia, surveying the world that he would have missed had he not chosen to go with her. In these final words in the Teacher of Rhetoric, a resigned Lucian concedes defeat as a slew of lightly-trained rhetoricians crowd into the heavenly vehicle, making a clown car of Paideia’s chariot.97

Rhae. Praec. 26. Here I part with the conclusion of C.P. Snow, Culture and Society in Lucian, 106. 96 Rhet. Praec. 26. 97 We may also note here, as a useful point of transition, Lucian’s selfconscious awareness of his illegitimacy (“ἀγεννὴς γὰρ καὶ δειλός εἰμι,” he 95

94

GAMING GREEKNESS

“It would be unkind to turn my own weapon against me!”: Agonistic Self-Creation and Lucian’s Invention in the Double Accused

It is difficult to judge how much historical truth lies behind Lucian’s satire and whether or not teachers of the sort described by Lucian opened schools or gathered students. However, we can be sure that the closing years of the first century CE saw the appearance of a wider range of literary voices on the field of Greekness. These figures competed for space and access to the resources of Greek culture as deliberately as any dyed in the wool sophist. In The Teacher of Rhetoric, Lucian renders how the Isocratean paradigm served to define both a largely elite mode of belonging as well as other kinds of cultural expression. This last point is important because it will bear importantly on the final Lucianic text considered here, the Double Accused. As Lucian demonstrates, Greekness could serve as a means of self-expression and not only as an end in itself. Some of these (often fervent) competitors—including many Christians and Jews—simply had other things on their mind, other things to learn and teach, and other purposes for Greek philosophical thinking and rhetorical performance than the cultivation of paideia for the sake of paideia.98 These figures still competed for Greekness, and they were legitimately Greek to the degree that they were successful in their agonistic performance. But their cultural position was finally the result of a series of strategic moves, the motivations of which were not necessarily tied to those of ambitious elites. Lucian’s presentation of non-elite competitors in The Teacher of Rhetoric demonstrates that paideia— says). This focus on his foreignness and non-Greekness is a central concern of The Double Accused discussed in the next section. 98 Kendra Eshleman suggests that early Christians were disinterested in the issues Lucian raises. She explains, “The specialized world of public ex tempore declamation was not on the horizon of Christian teachers, who rarely performed in public except in the limited context of martyrdom and in the fantasy world of the apocryphal Acts” (Social World of Intellectuals in the Roman Empire, 14). That Christians in the 2nd and early 3rd centuries were never giving ex tempore declamations is nearly certain, but the claim that they rarely performed in public (or are depicted to perform in public) is debatable depending on what constituted “performance” and “in public.”

CHAPTER TWO. “IN AND OUT OF THE GAME”

95

valued so highly that it became a kind of cultural reserve currency throughout the Roman world—began to be exchanged and cashed out by some intellectuals whose interests did not serve the maintenance and cultivation of Greek culture for its own sake. The jaded Lucian that speaks in his own defense at the conclusion of the Teacher of Rhetoric may be one of his more effective dramatic masks, but here we find a figure who is less interested in meeting elite expectations and more interested in cutting his own pathway. Far from withdrawing from Greek intellectual culture, Lucian seems to have used his own criticism of the social world of rhetoricians as a springboard for a fundamental shift in his own literary point of view. There is a definite trajectory within Lucian’s writing that draws him from refined sophist and skilled rhetor to an increasingly inventive and, ultimately, iconoclastic voice in the later years of his career. 99 The Double Accused is Lucian’s longest and most sustained defense of the new form of dialogue that occupies the majority of his corpus. In it, Lucian presents himself as a convert from the strictures of rhetoric to the pursuit of philosophy.100 And yet, even in The “career trajectory” I present here is largely a contrivance based on the internal logic of these three “semi-autobiographical” pieces. While some of Lucian’s extant literature can be dated and located in defined ways, the movement from his more classically sophistic texts (including The Hall, as well as his only extant declamation, The Tyrannicide) and his later seriocomic dialogues is defined by Lucian’s own characterization of this shift as a conversion. Cf. Graham Anderson, Lucian, 177-181; Jennifer Hall, Lucian’s Satire, 1-6. I do note the critical remark of the editor of the entry on Lucian in the Oxford Classical Dictionary that, “Lucian’s work is difficult both to categorize and to assign to any sort of literary ‘development’” (“Lucian,” Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Web.) Thus, the “development” I present here is artificial—though only as artificial and constructed as the various “Lucians” that we find in these texts. 100 The conversion to philosophy was a common motif in the Second Sophistic— perhaps best represented by Polemo (D.L. 4.1). who was converted to philosophy after attending a lecture in order to cause a disturbance. Lucian makes this tradition explicit by referencing a whole series of prominent philosophical figures who were notable for converting to philosophy (Bis Acc. 13, 16). Cf. the classic study by Arthur Darby Nock, Conversion: The Old and the New in Religion from Alexander the Great to Augustine 99

96

GAMING GREEKNESS

this conversion Lucian becomes a serial combiner of genres who transgresses all of the conventions of literature, including those governing satire. These crimes are made explicit in the Double Accused, where Hermes and Justice have gathered in Athens in order to give Zeus a break from the complaints that have piled up. Zeus’ court has an overstuffed docket, and many cases have been deferred for too long, including a bunch of stale lawsuits brought against “certain persons by the sciences and the arts (ταῖς ἐπιστήμαις καὶ τέχναις).”101 Among the suits raised, Drunkenness has a case against the Academy, The Stoa wishes to sue Pleasure, and Painting has accused Pyrrho with breach of contract. 102 They come to two cases brought against a single defendant—a Syrian orator. “Who is this man? His name is not recorded,” Justice inquires. But Hermes insists that nothing prevents the case from being considered anonymously (though his identity is clear to the reader.) As the courtroom is populated, it is again an agof Hippo (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1933), 164-192 (on the sophistic period); 177 (on Polemo). 101 Bis. Acc. 3. Lucian’s tendency to characterize the abstract elements of culture that so often factor into the realm of “identity” is a prominent mechanism by which he theorizes Greekness. As in the Dream, Lucian presents abstract pursuits here as a concrete part of Greek culture. Through the allegorizing of satire, Lucian indicates the substantial role that these kinds of categories played in Greek cultural discourse. For a similar portrayal, see Philosophical Lives for Sale, where Lucian tweaks the Menippean trope of selling a philosopher by narrating the sale of philosophical principles of living. On Lucian’s relationship to Menippus’ satirical inventions, see Joel Relihan, Ancient Menippean Satire (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993). 102 Bis. Acc. 14. The role of the cases that make up these intervening sections is not simply as prologue or filler. They lend to the satire occasions for characteristically Lucianic humor. For instance, after a substantial passage in which Stoa speaks against Pleasure, the sage philosopher concludes with the Polonian remark, “that is all I have to say, for I am not at all fond of long speeches” (20). The subsequent testimony by Epicurus, along with Stoa’s interminable questions—including the lament that “I would have won the case if I had put a question to Epicurus in the form of the Third Indemonstrable”—read like a farce that would not be out of place in a Monty Python sketch.

CHAPTER TWO. “IN AND OUT OF THE GAME”

97

onistic atmosphere that pervades. In this case it is not the physical rigors of athletes or the sparring competition among rival suitors, but the contentiousness of the courtroom that makes the agonistic stakes of the Syrian’s cultural performance explicit. The Syrian’s first accuser is, ostensibly, his common-law wife. This characterization is in line with a motif that has occurred throughout The Dream and The Teacher of Rhetoric: that of Paideia, or Oratory, as a lady being wooed, though in this text, the relationship has spoiled. In The Dream, the issue at hand is Paideia’s possession of Lucian as her companion. In The Teacher of Rhetoric both roads lead to “Lady Rhetoric,” and the aspiring students seek to be “her lover (ὁ ἐραστὴς), approaching, desiring, of course, to get upon the summit with all speed (τάχιστα γενέσθαι ἐπὶ τῆς ἄκρας) in order to marry her when you get there, and to possess all that she has— the wealth, the fame, the compliments (τὸν πλοῦτον τὴν δόξαν τοὺς ἐπαίνους); for by law everything accrues to the husband.”103 In the Double Accused, the Syrian’s wife is the jilted party. Her indictment of the Syrian’s origins and his treatment of her reads like an arraignment of the Isocratean paradigm—a post hoc, xenophobic criticism of the arrangement that allowed “barbarians” to adopt the guise of Greekness. Oratory gives voice to the intransigent frustration that 103 Rhet. Praec. 7. The legal context of this piece perhaps indicates that Lucian practiced law or presented before courts at some point early in his career. C.P. Jones remarks that, “though Lucian uses the word ‘rhetoric’ to describe his early career, the word could also designate the profession of forensic oratory, and he also seems to have practiced in the courts” (Culture and Society in Lucian, 12). Maud Gleason suggests that this relationship was innate to the task of rhetoric, pointing to Aelius Aristides’ claims that an orator’s audience is like a group of desperate lovers who haunt his door. When they are disappointed they are like wives who blame their shortcomings on their husbands (Aelius Aristides, Or. 33.16, 24. Cf. Maud Gleason, Making Men, 126). The suggestive implications of would-be lovers congregating at the doors of their houses seems to have been relatively common among the sophistic set. Note that the adversaries of Chaereas for Callirhoe’s affections in Chariton’s Chaereas and Callirhoe foment discord among the new couple by showing evidence of affectionate lovers congregating at their door while Chaereas is at his father’s house, including perfumes, garlands, wine, and half-burned torches (Chaer. 1.4-6).

98

GAMING GREEKNESS

resulted when those who made up the elite center of the sophistic world could not control Greekness as it was refashioned and molded in the hands of inventive cultural competitors. The testimony offered by Oratory begins with an account of the Syrian’s ignoble and barbaric origins. She begins: “When this man was just a boy, gentlemen of the jury, still speaking with a foreign accent and I might almost say bedecked with an Assyrian-style caftan, I found him while he was wandering around Ionia, not knowing what he should do with himself; so I picked him up and I educated (ἐπαίδευσα) him.”104 Oratory exploits the negative characterizations that undermine his claim on Greek cultural legitimacy, which Lucian seems to be most self-conscious about in The Dream: wearing the proper clothes and speaking with a proper accent. Lucian’s despondency at the conclusion of The Teacher of Rhetoric is reversed here in Oratory’s lamentation over the end of their honeymoon period, when the Syrian was an attentive and careful partner who had earned her generous dowry. Within this allegorical motif, Lucian’s abandonment of rhetoric is figured here in terms of the disappointed lamentation of a wife who feels she has wasted her good years on a shiftless youth: Since it seemed to me that he was a good student and watched me intently—for he was whipped (ὑπέπτησσε) in those days, waiting on me and with eyes for no one but me—I turned my back on everyone else who sought my hand, although they were rich and good-looking and nobly born. I pledged myself to this ingrate—a young nobody of a migrant worker (πένητι καὶ ἀφανεῖ), gifting him no small dowry of many marvelous speeches.105

Decoded from its satirical context, Lucian is singing his own praises as a uniquely skilled rhetor who outstripped all of his fellow pepaideumenoi. However, Lucian is also aware that the legitimacy 104 Bis

Acc. 27. Bis Acc. 27. I have translated some of the passages from the Double Accused more interpretively to capture the melodrama that I read in Lucian’s tone and the ethnic aspersions that Oratory’s words are meant to convey. 105

CHAPTER TWO. “IN AND OUT OF THE GAME”

99

that he has won never entirely erases his background—a point reinforced by the anonymous appellation, “the Syrian.” Oratory and the Syrian disagree about why they got together in the first place. According to Oratory, theirs is a kind of green card marriage. Oratory explains how marrying her allowed the Syrian to overcome his shabby past. She explains, “after we were married, I got him irregularly registered among my own clansmen and made him a citizen, so that those who had failed to win my hand in marriage choked with envy.”106 In their union, all of the Syrian’s ambitions were realized: his peers and rivals were consumed with the jealousy of spurned suitors. However, the irregularity of the Syrian’s citizenship—and the deliberateness with which Lucian uses the descriptor—defines their marriage and the way that Lucian imagines Oratory can affect the status of an ambitious Syrian. The word choice in this passage colors the kind of legitimacy that Lucian achieved through his “marriage” to Oratory; even that distinction does not win him total legitimacy as a Greek. Oratory reports that Lucian was “irregularly registered” (παρενέγραψα) as a citizen.107 The more usual word ἐγγράφω is used with a technical sense of to “enter in the public register, esp. of one’s deme or phratria.”108 Its semantic force has to do with inscription or engraving, so the term conveys a sense of permanence and importance. The inclusion of the prefix παρα- shifts the regularity of the term and gives it a sense of interpolation—of a seditious and illicit inclusion. This use is attested by Aeschines to refer to illegitimate political permissions granted to a certain πολιτής;109 here Lucian uses the same basic relationship to portray the irregularity of his already politically impotent “Greekness.” The analogy of an unequal marriage allows Lucian to reflect on his own experience as a competitor for Greekness. Oratory’s frustration with the Syrian captures the self-contradicting dismay that comes with being abandoned by one whom she still loves. She is angry that she has been used, but at the 106 Bis.

Acc. 27.

107 Cf. παρεγγράφω and ἐγγράφω in LSJ. 108 See LSJ II.1. For an example of a more normative usage, see Aristotle, Pol. 1275A. 109 In Ctesiph. 3.74.

100

GAMING GREEKNESS

same time she wishes the Syrian would return to her so that things could go back to the way they were. The Syrian’s other accuser is his new beloved (τὸν ἐρώμενον), Dialogue. Dialogue’s complaint is less involved than that of Oratory, but it does parallel many of her frustrations. This Syrian, according to Dialogue, has undermined his exalted position among the philosophers. Dialogue laments that he has “broken my wings (τὰ πτερὰ συντρίψας), putting me on the same level as the masses.”110 Dialogue’s signal position is demonstrated, again, with reference to a chariot carrying its occupants through the heavens.111 This foreigner has unmasked Dialogue’s proper, tragic face and linked him with “Jest and Lampoon and Cynicism and Eupolis and Aristophanes—horrible men for mocking everything sacred and deriding what is right.”112 Worse than these, “he even dug up Menippus—one of those ancient dogs with, it seems, quite the loud bark and sharp bite—and set him on me! Truly he’s a frightening hound whose bite is a surprise, the much more so when he is grinning as he clamps down.”113 Dialogue laments that the Syrian has manipulated him into a newfangled and mixed form of literary composition: the so-called serio-comic (σπουδογέλοιος) dialogue. It is only the imagery of a monster that truly conveys what Lucian has done to noble Dialogue:114 He took away from me the temperate, tragic mask that I had, and put another upon me that is comic, satyr-like, and a little laughable... What is most monstrous (ἀτοπώτατον) of all, I have been turned into a surprising blend, for I am neither on foot, nor on horseback, neither prose nor poetry, but seem to my

110 Bis.

Acc. 33.

111 Here Lucian references Plato, Phaed.

246 E; 247 B. Acc. 33. 113 Bis. Acc. 33. 114 The motif of the monster, which Lucian uses to great effect here and throughout his corpus, will be considered in depth in a later discussion of Tatian’s Against the Greeks. 112 Bis.

CHAPTER TWO. “IN AND OUT OF THE GAME”

101

hearers a strange, composite phenomenon (δίκην σύνθετόν τι καὶ ξένον φάσμα), like a Centaur.”115

The Syrian, who had made his claim on Greekness by means of a disingenuous union with rhetoric, also has no particular qualms about refashioning Dialogue into something more to his liking. The Syrian responds to each accuser in turn. He provides an account of his own decisions as well as the contexts in which he built relationships with Oratory and Dialogue. There is an explicit competition between the Syrian and his accusers, but there is also a deeper tension between the literary forms and the (explicitly barbarian) Syrian. This is signaled most clearly in the final request made by Oratory, before the Syrian has a chance to respond. She closes by saying: “But I beg you, if the Syrian wishes to make his defense in my style of speaking, do not permit that, for it would be unkind to turn my own weapon against me; let him mount a defense in the style of his beloved Dialogue, if he can.”116 In this unreasonable request, the terms of the Syrian’s claim on paideia are named: despite the appropriateness of the Syrian’s learning Oratory when she first met him, she now resents that he has mastered her form. And as the defendant makes clear, the fact that he has learned Dialogue does not mean the Syrian can be prevented from engaging Oratory. Behind this judicial allegory lies the profound claim that motivates Lucian’s text—that an inventive intellectual was not compelled to abide by sophistic expectations. The strictures that were assumed to govern the center of elite Greek literary culture are shown to be malleable, breakable, and reusable. What is most remarkable about his response to each of his accusers is that the Syrian does not dispute the most damning parts of their testimony. The xenophobia that underlies their frustrations with their uncontrollable suitor prompts the Syrian to laugh off their assumptions about how their relationship is supposed to work. He responds to Oratory’s accusation that he was an ungrateful suitor by saying, Oratory “gave me an education, traveled with me and had me 115 Bis. 116 Bis.

Acc. 33. Acc. 29.

102

GAMING GREEKNESS

enfranchised as a Greek (εἰς τοὺς Ἕλληνας ἐνέγραψεν)—for this, at least, I am grateful to her for marrying me.”117 The Syrian’s complaint, which spoiled his affections for Oratory, is precisely the one that lays behind Lucian’s satire in The Teacher of Rhetoric. Oratory has become, as it were, open for business, and the Syrian effectively resorts to slut-shaming Oratory. The Syrian expresses this state of affairs with consigned regret and continues the marital analogy: he preferred not to bring an action of divorce against her on the grounds of her unfaithfulness. He has moved in with Dialogue in order to preserve her honor.118 By means of this narrative of promiscuity and betrayal, Lucian describes a very real cultural transformation in which he is both a distanced observer and an active participant. The gambit initiated by Isocrates resulted in unanticipated strategic moves and outcomes, some of which were exploited by an enterprising and ambitious Syrian intellectual developed. The social prominence and popular significance of Greekness among a wide range of competitors came at the cost of clear definitions and the kind of mimetic authenticity prized by elites. In short, Lucian concluded that Greekness was out of control. This reality emerges at the close of the Syrian’s final retort, this time in response to dour Dialogue. The Syrian is surprised by Dialogue’s complaints and quickly gets to the real issue that frustrates him: Dialogue is vain about his wings and his heavenly philosophical visage, and cannot cope with the world as it is. As far as his other complaints, the Syrian responds, “He cannot say that I, who seems to be a barbarian (βάρβαρος αὐτὸς εἶναι δοκῶν), have stripped him of his Greek garment, and replaced it with apparel such as my own—that would have been another matter; stealing his customary clothing would indeed be a crime.”119 The Syrian references Oratory’s biting, 117 Bis. Acc. 30. Note the Syrian’s disputatious shift in language by using ἐνέγραψεν. 118 Bis. Acc. 30. This motif is reminiscent of the birth narrative in the Gospel of Matthew, where a man’s similar concern to maintain the honor of his betrothed who seems to have been unfaithful prompts him “to put her away quietly” (λάθρᾳ ἀπολῦσαι αὐτήν [1:19]). 119 Bis. Acc. 34.

CHAPTER TWO. “IN AND OUT OF THE GAME”

103

passive aggressive insults about his native dress and barbarous speech in his final words against Dialogue: he cannot be blamed for inventing Dialogue. He has only taken it for what he had always been, even if philosophers and intellectuals would strive to forget his comedic past.

III. AGONISM AND INVENTION: T HE POSSIBILITIES OF P AIDEIA Favorinus’ Corinthian Oration displays the way that Roman subjects could compete according to the rules of sophistic culture to claim Greekness for themselves. As he presents himself in his oration, Favorinus is a popular sophist who aspired to nothing more fervently than to be indisputably Greek. And it never seems to occur to Favorinus that this task is beyond him or inappropriate to his efforts. He regards himself to be like a literary prophet, as one who was fated to communicate the essence and cultural value of Greekness. Favorinus’ statue claims about him: Indeed it seems that he has been equipped by the gods for this precise purpose—for the Greeks, so that those from the land of Hellas may have an example before them to show that to be taught does not defer to birth when it comes to reputation; for Romans, lest those who vie with one another for honor do not overlook the role of being cultured in gaining honor; for Celts, so that no one among the barbarians may give up on the goal of attaining the culture of Greece when he looks upon this man.120

Favorinus’s entire career is depicted to serve as a kind of cultural object lesson about Greekness. As an exemplar of what might be developed by a single sophistic voice upon the terms represented by Isocrates’ gambit, Favorinus and Greek paideia are in perfect, symbiotic cooperation. In his own estimation, Favorinus’ destiny is inextricably linked to the fate of Greekness, thereby making him an impeccable cultural ambassador. To be successful, he must perfect his perFavorinus, Cor. 27. The themes introduced in this passage are clearly reminiscent of Lucian’s chariot ride through the heavens with Paideia in The Dream.

120

104

GAMING GREEKNESS

formance of Greekness, both so as to be a viable competitor and for Greekness to retain its cultural prestige. In this way, Favorinus perpetuates and relies on the explicit agonistic aspects of the sophistic milieu as a whole. By contrast, what Lucian accomplishes, especially in the Double Accused, is to wrest self-fashioning away from the strictures of Greekness as it was imagined by those who occupied the cultural (and social) high ground. Lucian acknowledges his debt to the practices of sophists, and he does not preclude himself from enjoying the payoffs of his paideutic efforts, but neither does he limit his expression of himself, or his literary instincts, to the expectations of what a sophistic Greek should be. Lucian blurs the boundaries of sophistic Greekness in order to create something new, following his own instincts and purposes throughout. More than any other figure of the Greek-speaking world during the Roman Empire, Lucian demonstrates the ways in which the pursuit of Greekness within the constraints of cultural competition could constitute an opportunity for producing culture in new ways. He began by playing the game of Greekness on the board and with the pieces he has been given, but ultimately he throws away the box top and fashions his own rules. In this way, Lucian embodies the non zero-sum logic that characterized the wider intellectual landscape of the early Imperial world—that the competition for Greekness does not result in those who have won Greek culture and those who have lost it. He demonstrates the way in which Greekness itself was a subject of play. This notion is made literal in one of the most prescient accounts in the reflexive texts considered here. Early in Lucian’s Dream, his father decides to send him to apprentice with his uncle because Lucian is deemed to have a natural gift for sculpture. Lucian explains: He made this judgment from my playing around with wax (ταῖς ἐκ τοῦ κηροῦ παιδιαῖς); whenever my teachers dismissed me I would scrape together the wax from my tablets and mold cattle or horses or even people—lifelike, my father thought. I used to get tracings from my teachers on account of them, but at that time they brought me praise for my cleverness, and good hopes

CHAPTER TWO. “IN AND OUT OF THE GAME”

105

were entertained of me, on the ground that I would soon learn the trade, to judge from that modeling (ἀπ᾽ ἐκείνης γε τῆς πλαστικῆς).121

The mundane humor implied by the scene of a young Lucian as a bored underachiever, whose genius is frustrated by the rote learning of the classroom seals the image of Lucian as a dreamer. This image of Lucian scraping wax from the slate-frame meant for practicing his writing in order to quite literally play around with and mold into creative shapes the “page” upon which a student was to write grammatical exercises is pregnant with allusions about Lucian’s fate as a literary innovator.122 This fate is not realized in The Dream, but it is inevitable even as he steps into Paideia’s heavenly chariot. Lucian chose to pursue paideia, but ultimate he could not entirely forego the plastic arts when he embarked on a literary career. Thus, Lucian did not compete only with those who imitated the forms and figures of Greek literature. He also vies with the cultural materials themselves, seeing what shapes they could be stretched into, and scraping the very substance of Greek culture together in order to create something that had a new form, dimension and grandeur. Favorinus and Lucian are representatives of Roman subjects who saw the terms of Isocrates’ gambit and the sophistic movement as an opportunity to recast themselves by trading on the value of paideia and exploiting the legitimacy offered by Greek culture. In doing so, they provide a pattern for the forms that Greekness could take and how it could serve the needs of others who would exploit its value by reshaping it to their needs. If Favorinus demonstrates the efforts that ambitious intellectuals would expend to find their way into the circle of Greek intellectuals, Lucian broadens what cultural agonism could signify to its greatest dimensions, and he exploits the competitive structures that characterized Greekness in the Roman 121 Bis

Acc. 2. This frame is the δέλτος or cera that was used in the instruction of students. Cf. Rafaella Cribiore, The Gymnastics of the Mind: Greek Education in Hellenistic and Roman Egypt (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 43-44.

122

106

GAMING GREEKNESS

World. He does this not so that he could mold himself into its shape, but so that it could convey his own vision and unique experience. He is a competitor who deliberately misrecognizes the rules of the game, and thereby makes the game into something else: he is like Louis Armstrong, stepping out in front of the nascent New Orleans jazz world in order to play around with the nature of rhythm and time; like Ned Cuthbert, stealing a base in baseball for the first time, just to see if he could; like Gustav Eiffel, seeing how far wrought iron could be bent skyward. Lucian was a well-seasoned competitor on a field saturated with cultural performers, whose self-ascribed Greekness was hard-won. Lucian, “looking with side-curved head curious what will come next,” did not invent a single new way to engage with Greek culture. Rather, he demonstrated how one could compete for what it could be and what it meant—“Both in and out of the game and watching and wondering at it.”

CHAPTER THREE. PAUL’S UNDERSTUDY: RECASTING PAUL AS A 2ND CENTURY CULTURAL COMPETITOR “To write in Greek necessarily involved breaking into a closed, centripetal tradition from outside… It involved a painstaking process of education and imitation of cultural paradigms, but also (crucially) a transformation and reconfiguration of these paradigms into something new. It also involved the construction of a literary persona, the negotiation for oneself of a place in the tradition and the justification of innovation. To write in the Greek tradition necessitated… an agonistic self-positioning against that tradition.”

– Tim Whitmarsh1

I.

A SECOND PAUL

Paul’s apostolic persona plays a central role in the letters collected under his name in a way that is completely unparalleled in New Testament and other century Christian literature in the first two centuries.2 This persona was forged first by Paul, along with his adver“Greece is the World,” in Simon Goldhill, ed., Being Greek Under Rome: Cultural Identity, the Second Sophistic and the Development of Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 304. 2 The “persona” of Paul has, of course, been a central part of Pauline scholarship throughout the 20th century. See Eduard Schwartz, Charakterkoepfe aus Antiken Literatur (Leipzig: Teubner, 1910), esp. 107-136; Albert Barnett, Paul Becomes a Literary Influence (Chicago: University of Chicago 1

107

108

GAMING GREEKNESS

saries, in his own lifetime. But when pseudonymous writers began to codify and expand this persona an amalgam emerged. This “second” Paul was neither entirely historical nor exclusively a literary creation. This Paul was the product of early Christians recasting the historical apostle—as they understood him—through a literary lens onto the social and cultural contexts of the 2nd century. 3 The opportunity to recast the figure of Paul allowed early Christian communities the opportunity to present Paul to the world and respond to issues that were internal to the burgeoning Christian communities.4 This version of Paul—who appears in the Acts of the Apostles and the Pastoral Epistles within the New Testament—is not simply a counterfeit Press, 1941); Andreas Lindemann, Paulus im ältesten Chrstentum, (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1979); Dennis R. MacDoland, The Legend and the Apostle: The Battle for Paul in Story and Canon (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1983); J. Christiaan Beker, Heirs of Paul: Paul’s Legacy in the New Testament and in the Church Today (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1991); Daniel Marguerat, “Paul après Paul: une histoire de reception,” NTS 54 (2008): 317-37; Richard Pervo, The Making of Paul: Constructions of the Apostle in Early Christianity (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2010), esp. 1-22, along with many other articles and volumes of collected essays; Benjamin White, Remembering Paul: Ancient and Modern Contests over the Image of the Apostle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). 3 The terminology for this “second” Paul can be unwieldy at times, because each version of Paul—in Acts or the Pastorals (or in the Acts of Paul or 3 Corinthians, for that matter)—has a unique personality. I will thus use particular terminology for Paul (“the Pastor,” “the Paul of Acts,” and the like) as well as more general characterizations for this Paul (“deutero-Paul,” etc.). In using various terms interchangeably, I hope to hold in tension the individual version of Paul portrayed by a single author (i.e., the Paul of Acts as against the Paul of the Pastorals) with the aggregate figure who emerges out of the proto-orthodox tradition and the canonical text. This tension is constitutive of the outcome of Paul’s legacy as it emerges from the competitive contexts of the 1-3rd centuries. 4 This mutually inward and outward focus is especially evident in the case of Acts, where it has been conceived of as an apologetical text. Loveday Alexander’s discussion of this dimension of Acts develops an account of the apologetic scenarios that dot the Acts narrative, and the various audiences each addresses (“The Acts of the Apostles as an Apologetic Text,” in Mark Edwards et al, eds., Apologetics in the Roman Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 15-44.

CHAPTER THREE. PAUL’S UNDERSTUDY

109

of the apostle’s voice.5 This rendering of Paul emerged from the friction of early Christian communities that competed for legitimacy in the early Empire. The opportunity to re-characterize the apostle also allowed early Christian writers to strategically negotiate the sophistic movement by presenting this most metropolitan of apostles as a naturalized part of the competitive landscape in which his letters and their contents were being copied and debated.6 The Paul who is presented in Acts and the Pastoral Epistles is both a competitor and an object of competition. The character of Paul in this literature is made to compete with other cultural agents—philosophers, adversarial teachers, magicians, mobs and Roman military commanders, among them. At the same time, the authors of this literature compete with one another (and with many others) over Paul’s legacy and what it could mean in the contentious universe of Christianities that were emerging in the early 2nd century. Paul also serves as an avatar of the nascent Christian movement writI introduce here the concept of “counterfeiting” to explicitly acknowledge the way that pseudepigraphy was long discussed as a kind of forgery of the apostolic voice. Cf. the formative response to this point of view by Kurt Aland, “The Problem of Anonymity and Pseudonymity in Christian Literature of the First Two Centuries,” JTS 12, no.1 (1961), 39-49). For those studies that bear on the so-called “third generation” of Pauline literature, see the discussion in Lewis Donelson, Pseudepigraphy and Ethical Argument in the Pastoral Epistles (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1986), esp. 7-66; Mark Harding, Tradition and Rhetoric in the Pastoral Epistles (New York: Peter Lang, 1998); Benjamin White, “Reclaiming Paul? Reconfiguration as Reclamation in 3 Corinthians,” JECS 17, no. 4 (2009), 497-523 (esp. n.67); Pervo, Making Paul, 63-118; Benjamin White, Remembering Paul, 1-13; Bart Ehrman, Forgery and Counterforgery: The Use of Literary Deceit in Early Christian Polemics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 239-281, 367406. 6 I have intentionally focused on canonical texts in an attempt to illuminate the way that this recasting of Paul bore influentially on the theological traditions that emanate from the New Testament text. Of course, various other non-canonical literary examples—most notably 1 Clement, the Acts of Paul, and 3 Corinthians, and even the Letters of Paul and Seneca—would also provide useful insights about the influence of Paul’s relationship to the Greek intellectual milieu as it evolved in the centuries following the Sophistic movement. 5

110

GAMING GREEKNESS

large, and the recasting of Paul in this and related literature represents a central way in which this movement, despite all of its internal variability, competed for the attention of the wider Greek and Roman world. This pseudepigraphic recasting of Paul demonstrates how some early Christians were “breaking into a tradition” in precisely the way that Whitmarsh introduces in the above epigram.7 In order to do so, this literary rendition of Paul engages in the “agonistic self-positioning” of the apostle—and by extension the message he was deemed to preach and the communities that he had cultivated— against the Greek intellectual tradition, which was, as we have seen, a fecund ground for new modes of performative self-expression. This chapter focuses on the competing and competed-over figure of Paul that appears in the New Testament literature from the city of Ephesus and its environs in the early 2nd century—Acts and the Pastoral Epistles.8 It is this literature that most influentially contributes to the reconceived, “second” Paul. 9 If the narrative construc7 Cf. Pervo’s discussion of the codification of the Pauline corpus in Making Paul, 23-62. 8 The importance of Western Asia Minor, and particularly Ephesus, as the locus in which this Pauline literature was being composed lends an additional point of coherence between the underlying project of recasting Paul in the Acts narrative and that of the Pastoral Epistles. On this context, see Vernon Robbins, “The Social Location of the Implied Author of LukeActs,” in Jerome Neyrey, ed., The Social World of Luke-Acts: Models for Interpretation (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1991); Paul Trebilco, The Early Christians in Ephesus from Paul to Ignatius (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2004); as well as the thorough discussion in Richard Pervo, Acts: A Commentary, (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2009), 5-7. 9 This chapter proceeds on the basis of certain well-established presumptions about the historical proximity between the Acts of the Apostles and the Pastoral Epistles. Here I follow the work of Richard Pervo in The Making of Paul, Acts, Dating Acts: Between the Evangelists and the Apologists (Santa Rosa, CA: Polebridge, 2006), and “Acts in the Suburbs of the Apologists,” in Thomas E. Philips, ed., Contemporary Studies in Acts (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2009), 29-49, Loveday Alexander in Acts in its Ancient Literary Context, and Margaret MacDonald, The Pauline Churches: A Socio-Historical Study of Institutionalization in the Pauline and Deutero-Pauline Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). While the focus of his study is only adjacent to my own, I have bene-

CHAPTER THREE. PAUL’S UNDERSTUDY

111

tions in these texts are plausible in their verisimilitude, it is in part because the vividness of Paul’s persona was an integral part of the early Christian thought world. This persona is an amalgam of Paul’s rhetoric about himself as it is communicated within the undisputed letters, but it is reinforced by early pseudepigraphers who were unwittingly involved in a broadly coherent process of developing what would become “the Pauline voice.”10 The competition among these authors is emblematic of the productive, non zero-sum culturebuilding-through-contention that we have seen in other literature. The mutual vying over Paul’s legacy by authors who shared a desire to broaden Paul’s significance and perceived influence in the imperial world results in points of overlap in how Paul is characterized in this literature.11 Moreover, even though Acts and the Pastoral Epistles represent distinct genre types, they both depend on a coherent story about Paul and his career. Acts depicts Paul through a fullyconceived narrative, but the Pastoral Epistles equally “create a plausible narrative world” through implicit elaboration of the situations

fitted from the argument of Benjamin White in “Reclaiming Paul?” These presumptions are neatly summarized by Richard Pervo, who links all of these issues in his account of the date of the Acts of the Apostles: “Acts was written c. 115 by an anonymous author whose perspective was that of Ephesus or its general environs. This date is close to the end of the second generation of Deutero-Pauline activity, the era of the Apostolic Father sand the Pastoral Epistles, when the focus was on the protection of established communities from external and internal threats” (Richard Pervo, Acts, 5). See also the supportive (albeit speculative) remarks of Loveday Alexander in “The Acts of the Apostles as an Apologetic Text,” 205ff, wherein she also cites the discussion of P.S. Alexander, “‘Parting of the Ways’ from the Perspective of Rabbinic Judaism,” in James D.G. Dunn, ed., Jews and Christians: The Parting of the Ways A.D. 70 to 135 (Tübingen: Siebeck-Mohr, 1992), 1-25. 10 Cf. Dennis MacDonald’s account of the vying between the Acts of Paul and the Pastoral Letters in The Legend and the Apostle: The Battle for Paul in Story and Canon [Philadelphia: Westminster, 1983]). 11 For example, note Paul’s “testament” in Acts 20.17-38 as it accords with the similar testament in 2 Tim 4.6-8. Cf. Richard Pervo, The Making of Paul, 87-89.

112

GAMING GREEKNESS

and events in which Paul comports himself.12 We are left with contemporaneous traditions that each endeavored to recast Paul— including the circumstances of his career, the recipients of his correspondence, and indeed, an entire social ecosystem of situations and circumstances—within a fabricated narrative framework that was situated among contemporary concerns of 2nd century authors.13 The authors of Acts and the Pastorals make a case for the broader legitimacy of the Christian communities by casting Paul— standing in for their literal and figurative founders in this literature—as a virtuosic, 2nd century intellectual who competes on its behalf. It is in this way that these texts can be said to constitute competitive moves in the sophistic games of the imperial world. This chapter will take account of this dynamic within Acts and the Pastoral Epistles by considering how an elaborated version of Paul was recast as an influential intellectual force within the 2nd century with respect to an intentionally eclectic group of motifs: athletic and agonistic metaphors for the moral and philosophical life, the critique of magic and popular cult practices, and the discourses around exile and belonging. This is not to suggest that these texts participated in a cooperative literary effort to foist a Greek persona onto Paul. Indeed, the Paul who emerges from this literature is the inventive creation of pious, preoccupied communities of readers that sought selfunderstanding in literature written in Paul’s memory. Rather, this Pervo, The Making of Paul, 89. Pervo is careful to include the fact that this plausibility resonates with the authorship of fiction and notes, “Much of the power of the work comes from the fictitious atmosphere, which, as indicated, resembles that of Acts.” For the “hard case” that the Pastoral Epistles constitute a narrative whole, see Richard Pervo, “Romancing an Oft-Neglected Stone: The Pastoral Epistles and the Epistolary Novel,” Journal of Higher Criticism 1 (1994), 25-47. More recently, some scholars have begun to question the literary unity of the Pastoral Epistles, including Michael Prior, Paul the Letter-Writer and the Second Letter to Timothy (Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1989), esp. 61-90; Jerome Murphy-O’Connor, “2 Timothy Contrasted with 1 Timothy and Titus,” Revue Biblique 98 (1991), 403-18; James Aageson, Paul, the Pastoral Epistles, and the Early Church (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 2008), esp. 57-89. 13 Pervo, The Making of Paul, 94-95. 12

CHAPTER THREE. PAUL’S UNDERSTUDY

113

chapter aims to cast a wide net in order to capture broader, shared aspects of these contemporaneous traditions about Paul that collaboratively engage with the competitive landscape of a 2nd century world populated by ambitious sophists, philosophers and intellectuals. Whitmarsh’s remark above can be read as a kind of dictum that these cultural luminaries followed: to write in Greek necessarily involved breaking in. Paul had, of course, always written in Greek; but part of the purpose of writing Pauline pseudepigraphy was to position Paul within and against the Greek intellectual Zeitgeist that flourished in the early Empire. The deutero-Paul of Acts and the Pastoral Epistles is not a “Greek” in a sense that would be acknowledged by a more celebrated orator. But he is a figure whose social significance and notoriety comes from exploiting the discourses, motifs, and metaphors that underlay the sophistic movement and contributed to what “Greekness” meant in the Imperial world.

II.

T HE EVOLUTION OF ἀγῶνες IN THE PAULINE TRADITION

It has long been noted that Paul’s rhetoric was influenced by the imagery of the Greek civic games. According to his letters, Paul is a runner (τρέχειν, 1 Cor 9:26; Gal 2:2, 5:7; Rom 9:16; Phil 2:16), a desperate boxer (πυκτεύειν, 1 Cor 9:26), and an enslaver of his body (εγκρατεύεσθαι, 1 Cor 9:27). At various times, Paul is striving to win a crown (στέφανος, 1 Cor 9:25) and the prize of the games (βραβεῖον, Phil 3:14), doing so as a fellow-athlete alongside Eudoia, Syntyche and Clement, from the church at Philippi (συναθλεῖν, Phil 4:3).14 Selfcharacterizations like these pepper Paul’s letters in what amounts to a broad engagement with the discursive dimensions of bodily agonism in the Roman Imperial world. Paul quite often reaches for the imagery, but also employs the underlying “logic” of the games in order to communicate his message. Paul’s use of these ideas and motifs 14 These images have been expansively treated in Victor Pfitzner, Paul and the AGON Motif: Traditional Athletic Imagery in the Pauline Literature (Leiden: Brill, 1967). Pfitzner offers a comprehensive list of agonistic imagery in Paul’s letters, though he views Colossians as authentically Pauline (The Agon Motif, 76-77).

114

GAMING GREEKNESS

occur with enough frequency in the letters to be a significant part of his rhetorical toolbox, yet infrequently enough that they appear to be only an incidental part of his thought world. While the exploits of boxers and runners were useful fodder for intellectuals such as Paul to illustrate other kinds of efforts, metaphors drawn from civic contests and the games also represent a particularly fecund site for making more subtle forms of cultural competition explicit. The Pastoral Epistles capitalize on the wide use of competitive imagery among imperial period philosophers and sophists. They build on it in creative ways in order to vivify Paul’s claims to apostleship. The development of these motifs throughout the Pauline literature—from Paul’s self-description in the authentic letters to the more expanded form Paul’s description receives in the Pastoral Epistles—shows how centrally competition figured in the minds of early Christian intellectuals. These letters develop this imagery through the characterization of an exhausted and sagacious Paul who seeks to communicate what apostleship should mean to those who follow him. This transformation of agonistic imagery as a generic metaphor for Paul’s efforts in the authentic letters into a multifaceted trope that conveys the specific faithfulness embodied by Paul’s life and apostolic career, demonstrating how early Christian imaginations contributed to the production of the persona of this “second” Paul. Moreover, the contrived intimacy offered by this ostensibly personal correspondence to Timothy enabled the pseudepigraphical author(s) to re-characterize Pauline language and ideas in order to shift how Paul’s message fit into the landscape of the Imperial Greek East.15 Thus, agonistic imagery serves as a particularly illuminating example of the way in which pseudepigraphers could borrow from pre-existing aspects of Paul’s persona even as they reshaped 15 This intimacy is a function of the letter style, and it appears in other morally imbued correspondence, most notably in the hortatory letters in pseudo-Socrates’ Epistles, the Cynic Epistles and Seneca’s Moral Epistles. Cf. Benjamin Fiore, The Function of Personal Example in the Socratic and Pastoral Epistles (Rome: Biblical Institute Press, 1986), esp. 79-100 as well as Stanley Stowers, Letter Writing in the Greco-Roman World (Philadelphia: Westminster/John Knox, 1986), esp. 36-40; 94-107.

CHAPTER THREE. PAUL’S UNDERSTUDY

115

it with reference to the discourses, codes, and performative contexts that made up the competitive landscape of Greekness in the early Roman Empire. Competitive Imagery and Paul’s Self-Characterization in 1 Corinthians 9:24-27

Athletic and competitive motifs appear most vividly in Paul’s letters when he is describing himself and his apostleship. The fullest continuous occasion in which Paul develops an agonistic metaphor is also the one that most closely ties the image of the striving athlete to Paul’s own apostleship: 1 Cor 9:24-27. It is not accidental that this agonistic metaphor comes when Paul is writing to the church at Corinth. As we have already seen, the city seems to have been a nexus for competitive rhetoric—Favorinus and the Emperor Nero both compete there.16 The city’s association with the long-held Isthmian games made it a particularly loaded context in which to draw on the efforts of athletes and the outcomes of competitive contests. In 1 Cor 9.2427, Paul writes: Do you not know that all of those who run in the stadium (ἐν σταδίῳ τρέχοντες) compete, but only one receives the prize (βραβεῖον)? All of you run, therefore, so that you may lay hold of it. Everyone who competes (ἀγωνιζόμενος) disciplines herself in all things—but they do so in order to seize a perishable crown (φθαρτὸν στέφανον), but we an unperishable crown. Therefore, I myself do not run in secret nor do I merely shadow-box (ἀέρα δέρων), but I rough up (ὑπωπιάζω) my body and make it my

Jerome Murphy–O’Connor suggests that Paul would have been resident in Corinth during the Isthmian games, remarking, “Paul could not have been unaware of the Isthmian games, and was probably in Corinth when they took place; they were celebrated in the spring of AD 49 and 51” (St. Paul’s Corinth: Texts and Archaeology [Collegeville: Glazier/Liturgical Press, 1995], 16). On the influence of agonistic festivals and the games at Corinth, see Betsey Robinson, “‘Good Luck’ from Corinth: A Mosaic of Allegory, Athletics, and City Identity” AJA 116 no. 1, [2012], 105-132) and Oscar Broneer, “The Apostle Paul and the Isthmian Games.” Biblical Archaeologist 25, no. 1 (1962), 2-31.

16

116

GAMING GREEKNESS slave (δουλαγωγῶ), lest I should become disqualified after preaching it to others.

Here, Paul ingeniously takes advantage of Corinth’s prominence as an agonistic center in order to exploit the prevailing significance of agonism to draw out a metaphor for his own efforts within a competitive context—one in which Paul and his followers struggled with adversaries as well as with one another. 17 Paul, of course, did not invent this metaphor; he stepped into a long tradition among moral philosophers to liken the training of the body to the training of the soul. Agonistic metaphors appear fully formed in Aristotle, who employs them prominently, for example, in the Nicomachean Ethics: “And just as at the Olympic games the wreaths of victory are not bestowed upon the handsomest and strongest persons present, but on those who compete (οἱ ἀγωνιζόμενοι)--since it is among these that the winners are found—so it is those who act rightly who win the prizes and good things of life.”18 Competing in the games implied a series of external adversaries; but as a metaphor for moral life, such competition implied facing off with oneself.19 From this point of view, the competitive fitness of athletes or soldiers was an inferior, bodily version of a nobler struggle that takes place in the soul. Authors who used agonistic imagery frequently made this relationship explicit, making wisdom

For the interface between philosophical usages of agonistic imagery and early Christianity see, Wayne Meeks, The Origins of Christian Morality: The First Two Centuries (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 130ff, as well as Cavan Concannon, “Not for an olive wreath, but our lives”: Gladiators, Athletes, and Early Christian Bodies,” JBL 133 (2014), 193-214. 18 Aristotle, Nic. Eth. 1.8 (1099a). 19 Foucault elucidates this dynamic when he remarks, “This combative relationship with adversaries was also an agonistic relationship with oneself. The battle to be fought, the victory to be won, the defeat that one risked suffering—these were processes and events that took place between oneself and oneself. The adversaries the individual had to combat were not just within him or close by; the were part of him” (The History of Sexuality, vol. 2, Robert Hurley, trans. [New York: Vintage Books, 1990], 67). 17

CHAPTER THREE. PAUL’S UNDERSTUDY

117

superior to “the strength of men and horses,”20 and the fight against pleasure more terrible and more dangerous than the vicious bouts of boxers.21 Consequently, these philosophers saw the cultivation of human freedom to be the greatest prize that all good citizens can pursue, rather than crowns made of pine, olive or parsley.22 The use of this imagery to describe the moral struggle with the self helped to transform the whole matrix of human relationships with oneself and the social order, turning agonistic imagery into a vocabulary for describing the rigors and discipline of the inner self. It made living a disciplined and virtuous life a veritable Olympiad of the soul.23 While Paul’s use of agonistic imagery is clearly informed by this literature, he developed an improvised strategy that reconceived athletic imagery in order to serve his own rhetorical purposes. This approach also gave him an opportunity to resist dominant moral discourses in which this imagery figured prominently. Like a true cultural competitor, Paul appropriated and reconceived what the imagery from the games could convey in order to express his message and how he understood his own apostleship.24 In this way, the agoXenophanes, Fragment 2=Athanaeus Deipn. 10.413ff. Cf. J.H. Lesher, ed. Xenophanes of Colophon: Fragments: a Text and Translation with a Commentary (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992), 12-14. Lesher follows the text of Greek Elegy and Iambus, vol. 2 (Edmunds, LCL). 21 Dio Chrysostom, Virt (Or. 8), 8.20. 22 Lucian, Anachar. 15. The relevance of this passage in Lucian’s dialogue about athletic competition has been elucidated by K.J. Frantz, “The Function of Paul’s Athletic Imagery in 1 Corinthians 9:24-27,” M.A.T.S. thesis, McCormick Theological Seminary (1988) and Roman Garrison, The Graeco-Roman Context of Early Christian Literature, (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1997), 97ff. 23 Epictetus, 3.22.51 (Ὀλύμπια μέλλεις ἀπογράφεσθαι, ἄνθρωπε, οὐχί τινά ποτε ἀγῶνα ψυχρὸν καὶ ταλαίπωρον). 24 Dale Martin has made the case that in 1 Corinthians 9, Paul deliberately contravenes the social model that accorded moral authority to wise, philosophically minded men (Slavery as Salvation: The Metaphor of Slavery in Pauline Christianity [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990], 50-85). Victor Pfitzner develops a similar account of Paul’s use of the agonistic motif, arguing that the apostle “uses the picture to illustrate the humility and indignity to which the apostles, as the servants of God, are subjected,” in con20

118

GAMING GREEKNESS

nistic motifs that occur in 1 Cor 9:24-27 serve as a capstone for Paul’s self-presentation, not simply as a victorious competitor but as a struggling figure of self-denial—a valence much more in accord with Jesus’ agony than with those of philosophically inclined σοφοῖ.25 Beyond the Metaphor: Agonism and Intellectual Life in the Ancient World

Paul was not the only figure in the early Empire who contradicted the dominant view that agonistic competition served as an inferior illustration of the more legitimate efforts of the mind and soul. Athletic imagery and metaphors drawn from the competitive games existed within the intellectual scope of Greek literature in ways that go beyond moralistic illustration. The cultural background in which Paul engaged these motifs included views of athleticism that were complex and multifaceted. For example, as early as Aristophanes’ Clouds, education in athletic skills was prized for the importance of bodily rigor. The play portrays such training to be more valuable than the intellectual proclivities of “those babbling in the agora with course and rude jests, just like those who now drag people to court concerning some matter—the hair-splitting, frivolous, and brazenlyfraudulent litigants.”26 This early construction of athleticism against the life of intellectuals—which takes place during the first agon of the play, between Aristophanes’s characters, “Right Idea” and “Wrong Idea”—entertains little of the conservative paternalism that is associ-

trast to moral philosophers who seek to use agonistic imagery to glorify sagely and wise philosophers (Pfitzner, Paul and the Agon Motif, 189). I see Paul doing with agonistic imagery what Martin suggests that he does with “benevolent patriarchal” discourses, writ large, and my argument here develops from Martin’s premises. 25 See the discussion by Pfitzner’s appendix “The Ἀγωνία of Jesus in Gethsemane, Lk. 22:44” (Paul and the Agon Motif, 130-133). 26 Aristophanes, Nub. 1003-1004. οὐ στωμύλλων κατὰ τὴν ἀγορὰν τριβολεκτράπελ᾽ οἷάπερ οἱ νῦν, οὐδ᾽ ἑλκόμενος περὶ πραγματίου γλισχραντιλογεξεπιτρίπτου. I quote here from a portion of a rich passage in which Aristophanes clearly sets the physiognomic and gendered aspects of athleticism against those of the intellectually-inclined.

CHAPTER THREE. PAUL’S UNDERSTUDY

119

ated with later Roman-era philosophers.27 In the Athenian world, as in the Roman one, referencing the games or the arena did not necessarily entail subjugating explicit forms of competition to the efforts of intellectuals. We see yet another paradigm for associating athletic and intellectual efforts in a 3rd century CE inscription from Aphrodisias. This civic inscription deviates from the mainstream usages of agonism as a metaphor by putting athleticism and virtue together as natural complements of one another.28 It celebrates a young athlete named Aurelius Achilles who was singled out precisely because the mixture of his moral and athletic accomplishments reflects well on the city. The inscription reports: He has undertaken the training of the body, and is the most distinguished of men in athletics, and the most impressive of men for his life and for his character, so that in him all types of virtue are mixed, both those of the soul and of the body. The city has honored him many times in contests in the past, which he has adorned by fighting magnificently, and with all possible manliness, and especially in the contests of the Olympics.29

The model of athletic virtue in this inscription could not be more opposed to the paradigm used by philosophers. When DiogeCf. the classic study by Milton W. Humphreys, “The Agon of the Old Comedy,” The AJP 8.2 (1887), 179-206. More recently, see Michael Fontaine and Adele C. Scafuro, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Greek and Roman Comedy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), esp. 33-50. 28 This text was first published by Louis Robert, “Inscriptions Grecques d’Asie Mineure,” in W.H. Calder and J. Keil, eds., Anatolian Studies Presented to William Buckler, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 227248. 29 I have adapted the translation of Jason König, Athletics and Literature in the Roman Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 127130. As this inscription continues, it explains that the town was able to persuade the athlete to compete in the παγκράτιον, that his victory was one of the most remarkable ever, and that his renown should be spread widely in his homeland. Singling out the παγκράτιον as a particularly horrible contest can be seen as early as the Xenophanes fragment discussed earlier, where it is “that fearful sport” (τὸ δεινὸν ἄεθλον). 27

120

GAMING GREEKNESS

nes Laertius discusses the manner of life of Diogenes, the Cynic noted how the body and the soul both required attention and practice, leading to a zero-sum economy of human efforts: time spent training the body was time that could be more profitably spent training the soul.30 In diametric opposition to that model, the Aphrodisias inscription insists that these two kinds of efforts are not opposed to one another—they are capable of being “mixed” (κεκρᾶσθαι). A further dimension of the use of agonistic imagery in the Roman world can be detected here: this inscription regards the achievements of Aurelius to be representative of the city from which he hails, and thus serves to support the city in its own competition for civic prominence among other cities of the Eastern Empire. This inscription serves as a kind of public receipt on the part of the city that vouches for the contribution Aurelius made to Aphrodisias by winning athletic acclaim and embodying the city’s virtues. The text that presents perhaps the closest equivalence between physical effort and intellectual competition occurs in a famous chreia about the sophist Polemo. Philostratus reports that “on seeing a gladiator dripping with sweat out of sheer terror of the life-anddeath struggle (δεδιότα τὸν ὑπὲρ τῆς ψυχῆς ἀγῶνα) before him, Polemo remarked, ‘You are in as great an agony as if you were going to declaim (ἀγωνιᾷς, ὡς μελετᾶν μέλλων).’“31 Polemo’s quippy remark relies on a humorous reversal of expectations: the gladiator’s immediate and very real anxiety is placed second to the nervousness of a sophist preparing to give a showy oration. The material, physical struggle—the “dripping with sweat out of sheer terror”—was a real, and perhaps primary, part of any agonistic imagery. In Polemo’s rendition of the motif, the association of athletic and intellectual efforts comes full circle: instead of making the physical efforts of athletes a pale image of the real struggle within the souls of philosophers, the sophist supplants even the soon-to-be-killed gladiator as the primary exemplar of physical suffering.

30 Diogenes Laertius, Vit. 31 Philostratus, VS 1.25.

6.2.70.

CHAPTER THREE. PAUL’S UNDERSTUDY

121

These alternative approaches to bodily agonism demonstrate the ways that other intellectuals could resist prevailing discourses that opposed the efforts of the body to the efforts of the mind. Paul’s expansive metaphors for his apostleship and the efforts of believers in 1 Cor 9:24-27 similarly develops its own unique take on how his apostolic work constitutes an agonistic act. However, there is a more fundamental use for athletic imagery that explains why it was so frequently employed across the spectrum of voices discussed above: agonistic imagery made the implicit dynamics of cultural competition explicit. Whether in the mouth of Paul, in the inscription at Aphrodisias, or in the jocular wisecrack of a peacocking sophist, imagery drawn from physical forms of competition captured the competitive environments in which Greek intellectuals functioned. Metaphors like those employed by Paul brought a tactile dimension to an otherwise disembodied, social dynamic. The sweat of the gladiator could communicate the unseen anxiety of perpetually competing sophists and philosophers. Venues of Competition in the Pastoral Epistles

Since metaphors that drew on competitive motifs were so useful in describing the cultural dynamics of 2nd century intellectuals, the embellishment of the metaphorical referent was a powerful way to express new paradigms for competing agents. Recasting Paul in the Pastoral Epistles entailed expanding the depth and scope of the agonistic imagery that appears in the authentic letters.32 Agonistic imagery fills the mouth of the Pastor—the specific rendering of Paul in these letters who is characterized by a more didactic rhetorical tone and an intimate persona that cuts against the rhetorical demeanor of Paul of 1 Corinthians and elsewhere.33 His words frequently make 32 Pfitzner sees the expansion of the scope of this imagery to be evidence of an authentic Pauline kernel in the Pastoral letters (Paul and the AGON Motif, 165). 33 The paternal and familial language of the Pastoral letters, especially in its Roman social context, has been well established. See David Verner, The Household of God: The Social World of the Pastoral Epistles (Chico, CA: Scholars, 1983), and Mary R. D’Angelo, “Εὐσέβεια: Roman Imperial Family

122

GAMING GREEKNESS

the agonistic context of his ministry and of his exhortations part of the essence of the Pauline persona developed in the Pastoral Epistles.34 In 1 Tim 4:7b-10, for instance, the Pastor deliberately sets his message among those philosophical voices that saw moral and intellectual training to be superior to that of the body: “Train yourself in piety (εὐσέβειαν), for, while the exercise of the body is of some benefit, piety (εὐσέβεια) is valuable in every way, holding promise for both the present life and the life to come.” The dual-purpose of [training in] godliness—serving both “the present life and the life to come”—provides a means by which Timothy can be victorious in the arenas to which Paul directs him. However, Paul’s pseudepigrapher is not content simply to imitate the imagery of moral philosophers—competitive fitness is an essential part of the apostolic task throughout these letters. The arena in which the Pastor games for social legitimacy is full of opposition and surrounded by spectators, constituting a veritable stage for the stylistic performance of the apostolic voice for which he has deemed Timothy suited. Beginning in 4:13, the apostle directs Timothy: “Until I arrive, give attention to the public reading of scripture, to exhorting, to teaching... Attend to these things; acquaint yourself to them so your progress may be manifest to everyone. Be intent upon yourself and your teaching; continue in these things, for in doing this you will save both yourself and your hearers.” Timothy’s task, then, is to explicitly engage in the competitive performance that occupied sophists, philosophers and other intellectuals in the 2nd century—”so that your progress may be manifest to everyone.” The “piety” that the Pastor advises Timothy to continue in allows him to “toil and struggle” (κωπιῶμεν καὶ ἀγωνιζόμεθα, 4:10) both on behalf of his own faith and in service to his hearers whose allegiance he seeks Values and the Sexual Politics of 4 Maccabees and the Pastorals,” BI 11, no.2 (2003), 139-165. 34 Pervo suggests that this reflects a martyrological dimension to the agonistic imagery in 2 Timothy (as well as Ephesians and Acts): “The parallel [of 2 Tim 4.6-8] with Acts is Paul’s ‘testiment’ in 20:17-38 (note also 20:34). Both Acts and 2 Timothy portray, as does 1 Clement 5, Paul as a triumphant hero of the faith” (The Making of Paul, 89).

CHAPTER THREE. PAUL’S UNDERSTUDY

123

to win. The Pastor’s model of apostleship entails negotiating the competitive intellectual economy that was oriented toward the cultivation of Greekness. It is the presence of this context throughout the Pastoral Epistles that shifts the underlying sense of the most broadly conceived set of agonistic metaphors in the Pauline literature: 2 Tim 2:4-6. In this relatively brief passage, the competitive dynamics that underpin the entire pseudpigraphical project explode Paul’s original agonistic imagery—especially the imagery seen in 1 Corinthians— into an array of competitive types: military, athletic and economic. The range of competitive imagery in this chapter conveys the complex mechanisms of cultural negotiation in the sophistic milieu and brings them into a text that is preoccupied with competition over Paul’s notoriety within the Greek-speaking world. The setup for this metaphorical exposition begins in 2 Tim 2:3, where the Pastor exhorts Timothy to “share in suffering like a good soldier of Christ Jesus.” The Pastor draws up the following set of intricate, linked competitive models that together are meant to provide a model of a striving apostle:35 No one serving in the army gets wrapped up (ἐμπλέκεται) in the matters of everyday life, so that he may please the enlisting officer (στρατολογήσαντι). And if one should compete in an athletic context (ἀθλῇ τις), no one is crowned (στεφανοῦνται) unless he competes professionally (ἐὰν μὴ νομίμως). The farmer who toils (κοπιῶντα) ought to have the first fruits of the crops (δεῖ πρῶτον τῶν καρπῶν μεταλαμβάνειν).36

This text transmutes Paul’s strategy to defend his apostleship in 1 Cor 9 into a stylized performance that furthers the pseudepigrapher’s agenda vis-à-vis Paul’s ecclesial and social importance. We may note remarkable shifts here from Paul’s own agonistic metaphors in 35 Note that Robert Seesengood has argued that the broad mixture of athlet-

ic and military imagery, along with Paul’s reference to his imprisonment, is meant to be “an oblique but unmistakable reference to the figure of the gladiator” (Competing Identities: The Athlete and the Gladiator in Early Christian Literature [London: Bloomsbury/T&T Clark, 2007], 52). 36 2 Tim 2:4-6.

124

GAMING GREEKNESS

that chapter: the competitors are exclusively in the third person (rather than a mixture of first and third person) and they describe widely differing kinds of competition, each of which is linked to a career that would dominate the competitor’s life. By writing in the voice of Paul and building on a premise that the apostle first articulated, the author of this text places this imagery within a larger vantage of competition appropriate to the ambitious social world of the 2nd century. The first metaphor in 2 Tim 2:4 draws on the details of military conscription. The military is an obvious subject for competitive imagery, but it is remarkable that the Pastor has declined to describe issues of strategy or the real conflicts and battles that Roman armies fought. Instead, it is the bureaucratic dimension of enlistment in the Roman army that the Pastor describes. In the process, he sheds light on a likely way the audience of this text may have interfaced with the Roman army: a recruiting officer. In the process, the dedication of military service and the tasks of soldiery are set in contradistinction to the “matters of everyday life.” The logic of this metaphor is unusual in focusing on the role of the commanding officer. The sense of the comparison is that enlisting officers are pleased when they find recruits without familial or social attachments. The specific role of the “enlisting officer” (στρατολογήσαντι) may be crucial here—the term is a technical one, and frequently used by Imperial-era authors when discussing the task of raising an army. 37 There are alternative terms for a commanding officer, so there is reason to suspect that it is the officer’s task to “enlist” or “register” that is in view in this particular metaphor. If one is to please an enlisting officer, a lack of entanglements or other kinds of allegiance conveys that one is serious and See Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Ant. Rom. 11.24 and Josephus, AJ 5.1.28 for representative examples of this usage. Hugh Mason aligns this term with the Latin dilectum facere/dilectus (Greek Terms for Roman Institutions, [Toronto: Hakkert, 1974], 87). He cites IG Rom. 3.763 (Phaselis Lyciae, 1447), StR 2.1090 adn. 2 and IGRom. 3.824 (Thracia, II). On delectus as a military term for a levy or recruiting, see Caes. B.G. 6, 1; LS identifies delectum habere, as a standing phrase for recruiting, citing Caes. B.C. 1.2, 1.6; Cic. Phil. 5.12; Sall. C. 36.3; Liv. 2.28; Tac. Ann. 13, 35. 37

CHAPTER THREE. PAUL’S UNDERSTUDY

125

committed to serving in the army. Within the fabricated scenario of the text, Timothy is a model for the dutiful and unattached recruit, and Paul serves as the skeptical στρατολογῶν who scrutinizes wouldbe apostles and judges their fitness for service. The focus on the notion of official enlistment and registration is elaborated when Paul next turns to an athletic metaphor to describe the terms upon which one is able to win a crown at the games. The function of the term νομιμῶς in 2 Tim 2:5 is crucial for conveying the competitive circumstances in which the pseudepigrapher seeks to situate Paul, as well as the way in which this text shifts the sense of Paul’s use of athletic metaphors. The traditional interpretation of this adverb is captured by the NRSV: “no one is crowned without competing according to the rules.” In this rendering, νομιμῶς describes the act of competing lawfully—a sense very close to Paul’s use of the lexical field around νόμος. Yet the adverbial form of this word is remarkable, appearing only here in the New Testament.38 Thus the infrequent appearance of this form of the term in related literature strongly suggests a resonance with the intellectual discourses of the early Empire, when the term was more broadly used. Remarkably, this is the also the period in which the term seems to have developed a more specialized usage among sophistically inclined authors. According to LSJ, the sophist and medical theorist Galen uses the word νομιμῶς to describe an athlete or a πεπαιδεύμενος 38 Jerome Quinn neatly summarizes the uniqueness of the term in the New Testament: “The adverbial nomimôs occurs…in 2 Tim 2:5 of an athlete competing according to the rules, but not otherwise in the N[ew] T[estament] or Ap[ostolic] F[athers]. In the LXX this term appears only on the lips of the aged Eleazar in 4 Macc 6:18 as he rejects the advice of those who are urging him to simulate violating the Torah by citing his having lived for the truth onto an advanced age and having rightly (nomimôs) kept a good reputation (doxan) for this” (The First and Second Letters to Timothy: A New Translation with Notes and Commentary (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000), 84). I note that the spurious Epistle 10 of Ignatius and the Sibylline Oracles also include various uses of this term. On this passage see also Dibelius and Conzelmann, The Pastoral Epistles, 106-108; Philip Towner, The Letters to Timothy and Titus (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2006), 494.

126

GAMING GREEKNESS

as a professional39—that is, as an officially registered competitor in the games or a legitimate member of the body of sophists. This is a technical usage, and one that seems to have been particularly favored by those like Galen, who were so often concerned with legitimacy and the delineation of intellectual status. 40 This dimension of the adverb’s meaning, considered in the context of this passage, does not run contrary to the more usual rendering of “according to the rules,” but it does specify that the rules in question are not a code of sportsmanship among the athletes (there must have been some garland-bearers who cheated, after all). Rather, the rules here have to do with those who compete as a professional member of the field. Νομιμῶς emphasizes a distinction about who gets to be part of the competitive field, as well as how those competitors ought to act. There is, however, an even more important dimension to this usage for the Pastoral Epistles, which have long been seen as part of a movement that sought to professionalize early Christian leadership, as against the model of Paul’s work, which was subsidized by the apostle’s own efforts.41 If this was part of the purpose of these letters, LSJ, “νομιμῶς” (http://www.tlg.uci.edu/lsj). This entry reads: “οἱ ν. ἀθλοῦντες, πεπαιδευμένοι, professional athletes, physicians,” citing Galen, Alim. Fac. 6.488 (ἅπερ οἱ νομίμως ἀθλοῦντες ἐσθίουσι μόνα), Hipp. End. 17(1).26 (τοὺς νομίμως πεπαιδευμένους). The construction that Galen uses is slightly different than what appears here, with νομιμῶς falling between the article and participle. Even so, this does not undermine the valence of this term as a signifier for a professional career. 40 Galen also frequently employed metaphors drawn from athletic competition to describe the kind of competition in which he himself was engaged— this is most clear in Opt. Med. 1. See also, Simon Swain, Hellenism and Empire, 357-399; Jason König, Athleticism and Literature in the Roman Empire, 254-300; and Jason König, “Conventions of prefatory self-presentation in Galen’s On the Order of My Own Books,” in Christopher Gill, et al, eds., Galen and the World of Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 35-58. Kendra Eshleman uses Galen as an illuminating example of how legitimacy was achieved among ancient intellectuals through networks of relationship and influence (The Social World of Intellectuals in the Roman Empire, 37; she cites Libr. ord. 1). 41 Towner (The Letters to Timothy and Titus, 493). He points to I. Howard Marshall, The Pastoral Epistles (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1999), 729; Luke 39

CHAPTER THREE. PAUL’S UNDERSTUDY

127

then the use of νομιμῶς in this passage allows the author to shift the meaning of a longstanding competitive metaphor in order to bolster the establishment of codified leadership roles among the churches of Asia. Here again, the shift in the relationship between the efforts of the body and the efforts of the mind factors into how these agonistic metaphors function. As Paul (and Aristotle) use this imagery, many compete, but only one can win—that is, the stakes of competition are high, so “all of you run, therefore, so that you may lay hold of [the prize]” (1 Cor 9:24). By contrast, this passage uses the image of the games not in a generic or idealized sense, but in a sense that specifically derives from the competitive civic and social worlds of the early Roman Empire, so that the only ones who are eligible to win are those who are properly credentialed—professionals.42 The final image the Pastor introduces is, arguably, the most abstract representation of competition, but also the most illuminating. This final impression hardly seems competitive at first glance and can only be construed to be agonistic because of the associated images in 2 Tim 2:4-6 and with reference to the non zero-sum forms of competition discussed in chapter 1. The Pastor turns from the figures of the soldier and the athlete to consider a farmer who is entitled to the first fruits of the harvest. The phrasing is not even precisely metaphorical since it breaks out of the hypothetical context imposed by the conditional constructions that occur in the previous verses. Instead, this example is apodictic: “The farmer who toils ought to have the first fruits of the crops.” The agonistic dimension of this descriptor relies on the economics of scarcity in suggesting that the toiling (κοπιῶντα) Timothy Johnson, Letters to Paul’s Delegates: 1 Timothy, 2 Timothy, Titus (Valley Forge, PA: Trinity Press International, 1996), 63; Gordon Fee, 1 and 2 Timothy, Titus (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1988), 242; J.N.D. Kelly, A Commentary on the Pastoral Epistles (London: A. & C. Black, 1963), 175. 42 Pervo illuminates the movement for professionalization among the clergy: “The ministry is acquiring [in the Pastoral Epistles] the status of what we would call a ‘profession.’ This is one reason for the disappointingly minimal qualifications for these offices: they conform to those of other professions. The church has become an institution. Stability is to be achieved not by appeal to a cosmic church or to the grace of baptism, but through structure” (The Making of Paul, 94).

128

GAMING GREEKNESS

farmer is due a return for his labor—not simply a judicious share, but the “first fruits” (πρῶτον τῶν καρπῶν). The farmer frequently serves as a virtuous exemplar for moral philosophers in the 1st and 2nd centuries,43 but the inclusion of this figure within 2 Tim 2:4-6 embellishes and clarifies the significance of the toiling worker of the earth—a prominently Pauline image.44 Even so, the shift in context from explicit competitors to the rustic image of the (perhaps tenant) farmer seems to be an intentional rupture of the agonistic images that precede it. The reader is left with a figure that alludes to the realia of ancient economic life, and the sense of expectation that one’s work would be value and rewarded. But it is, nonetheless, a competitive image, even if only implicitly so. Where the preceding illustrations focused on individual competitors and their efforts to participate in zero-sum scenarios (armies and athletes may win or lose), here the question is not one of winning or losing, but of dispersing a shared outcome. A farmer, who is responsible for the labor that goes into a harvest, is not the only beneficiary of it, but he or she should be the first beneficiary. ***** Dibelius and Conzelmann comment on 2 Tim 2:4-6 saying that, while all of these images commonly appear in philosophical diatribe, “it is not explicitly stated how these metaphors are to be applied; the reader is left to find out for himself.”45 Perhaps there is not a single use for these images, and they have certainly not been exhaustively catalogued here. What these disparate images certainly do convey, however, is the diverse kinds of capital each metaphorical competitor Examples of this are widespread, but they appear throughout the collections of Malherbe (Moral Exhortation), Long and Sedley (The Hellenistic Philosophers, 2 vols., [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987]). See also the remark of Dibelius and Conzelmann, The Pastoral Epistles, 107. 44 Cf. 1 Cor 3:5-9. Cf. L.L. Welborn, Paul, the Fool of Christ: A Study of 1 Corinthians 1-4 in the Comic-Philosophical Tradition (London: T&T Clark, 2005), 234-238. 45 The Pastoral Epistles, 108. 43

CHAPTER THREE. PAUL’S UNDERSTUDY

129

could lay claim to: the social and political capital represented by the favor of an “enlisting officer” (στρατολογήσαντι), the cultural capital gained through the notoriety and fame won by an athlete competing in the games, and the material capital enjoyed by a dedicated farmer. Where Paul reached for an illustration from contemporary parlance to serve his own purposes, his pseudepigrapher codifies competitiveness itself as part of what it means to inherit the mantle of apostleship. Moreover, the focus on types of lives as well as the outcomes that each aims to achieve suggests that the pseudepigrapher sought to place apostleship (along with the other forms of church leadership elucidated in these letters) among the panoply of competitive types that populated the cities of Asia Minor in the 2nd century. The way that Paul touches on agonistic imagery in 1 Cor 9:24-27 introduces the task of the apostle as a kind of competitor. By expanding upon this premise, the author(s) of 1 and 2 Tim make competing for cultural legitimacy an explicit part of leading and organizing churches in the 2nd century.

III. PAUL AND THE CRITIQUE OF MAGIC AND POPULAR CULT PRACTICES IN THE ACTS OF THE APOSTLES AND THE PASTORAL E PISTLES The kinds of intellectual competition that took place in the sophistic quarters of the early imperial world frequently appear to be “ingroup” affairs—sophists contending with other sophists in front of elite audiences. However, while this kind of ambitious sophistic confrontation provides a useful paradigm for the cultural games played by 2nd century intellectuals, it does not convey the diverse contexts in which this kind of competition could occur. Just as frequently, intellectuals of various stripes turned their attentions to outsiders, especially those who represented foreign or unfamiliar forms of knowledge. In one example, pragmatically minded philosophers and sophists began to criticize both traditional cults and the magical practices that were popular throughout the increasingly globalized Roman world. Rooted in the classically Cynic distinction between nature and custom, the critique of figures who operated in temples and profited from popular cultic rites as well as explaining the work of magicians became a common theme throughout the postclassical period. It found a ready-made home in the broadly Cynic-Stoic,

130

GAMING GREEKNESS

popular philosophy that colored the public discourse of cities throughout the Greek East.46 While this line of critique was not a prominent part of Paul’s own letters, they came to be part of the intellectual landscape against which the pseudepigraphers placed the apostle. In this literature, Paul is portrayed as a figure who helps expose charlatans, undermines civic worship across the Eastern Mediterranean, and ridicules his opponents by comparing them to sham magicians. Critique of Cult Practices and the Exposure of Charlatans in the 1st – 3rd Centuries.

The philosophical foundations for criticizing temple and cult practices were laid in the years leading up to the second century BCE, when Stoic and Epicurean philosophy reached what Harold Attridge terms their “classical form.”47 Even in this early period, the critique of beliefs about the gods and popular magic emerged from the competitive landscape in which philosophers debated and argued about the viability of an authentic agnosticism.48 Philosophical criticisms of cult practices, then, were rooted in the argumentative debates that colored intellectual circles throughout the last centuries BCE. As this subject continued to be discussed during the turn of the epoch, the critique of magic became part of cultural negotiation about the role that licit and illicit cult practices would play in the economy of Roman imperial power. At times this negotiation took the form of offiHere I draw on the general model of Cynic philosophy as it influenced the Roman Imperial era presented by Margarethe Billerbeck in “The Ideal Cynic from Epictetus to Julian” (in R. Bracht Branham and Marie-Odile Goulet-Cazé, eds., The Cynics: The Cynic Movement in Antiquity and Its Legacy [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996], 205-221). 47 Harold Attridge, “The Philosophical Critique of Religion under the Early Empire,” ANRW 2.16.1 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1978) 45-78. See also, the related study of Stephen Benko, “Pagan Criticism of Christianity during the First Two Centuries,” ANRW 2.23.2 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1980), 1055-1118. 48 Evidence of this dispute is principally extant in the Epicurean literature and later critics of Epicurean ideas. See the collection of texts on agnosticism in A.A. Long and D.N. Sedley, The Hellenistic Philosophers, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 57-65; 139-149. 46

CHAPTER THREE. PAUL’S UNDERSTUDY

131

cial pronouncements and policies, as in the account of Augustus cleansing of the Roman temple complex of “all the copies of Greek and Latin prophetic verse then current, burning more than 2,000 copies of the work of either anonymous or little-known authors.”49 More frequently, this negotiation took place in a prolonged and public intellectual dialogue in which various voices were involved in advocating for or railing against the use of certain kinds of magic or the suitability of certain kinds of cultus.50 That Greek philosophical resources were brought to bear on temple and cult practices demonstrates that the competition for Greekness was not restricted to the stages of celebrated sophists. Indeed, as we shall see, attacking certain cult figures in certain ways was a potent way in which to present oneself and one’s own perspective as a legitimate part of the Greek cultural enterprise. In the early years of the Empire, however, a more radical and confrontational approach to popular temple and cult practices developed among some Cynically aligned philosophers whose instincts to undercut the claims of magicians and rebuke the instincts of even the earnestly pious became a defining trait. This rationalistic mode of critique was an offshoot of sophistic and philosophical styles of competition, and these critiques naturally emerged where sophistic voices and popular philosophical personalities met. The philosopher Suetonius, Aug. 31 (translation adapted from Robert Graves, The Twelve Caesars, rev. ed. [New York: Penguin, 2007]). Augustus’s burning of these manuscripts occurred after he received the title of Pontifex Maximus. Cf. the discussion of Acts 19:17-19 below. 50 Here I lean on an immense body of secondary scholarship on worship and magic in the Roman world that cannot be annotated here. But see David Aune, “Magic in Early Christianity,” ANRW 2.23.2 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1980), 1507-57, Francis Thee, Julius Africanus and the Early Christian View of Magic (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1984), Hans-Josef Klauck, Magic and Paganism in Early Christianity: The World of the Acts of the Apostles (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2000), the carefully selected bibliographies that accompany the subject-sections of The Religious Context of Early Christianity: A Guide to Graeco-Roman Religions (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003), and Dale Martin, Inventing Superstition: From the Hippocratics to the Christians (Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 2004). 49

132

GAMING GREEKNESS

Demonax illustrates the general form that this pragmatic approach took. In a chreia from Lucian’s account of his life, Demonax confronts a magician and then a pursuer of magic: When someone said that he was a sorcerer and to have spells so powerful that he could beguile anyone to give to him whatsoever he wished by them, Demonax said, “Do not be amazed—for I belong to the same guild, and if you wish, come along to woman who deals in bread and see me with a small charm persuade her at once to serve me bread,” intimating that a coin has equal efficacy as a spell.”51

Here, the ethos is rationalistic—a coin becomes a magical token by a snarky philosopher in order to put the claims of a popular magician into a stark relief. Demonax was not alone in criticizing what he deemed to be the unnecessary interdictions of popular magical practices or the chicanery of those claiming to accomplish magical ends. Oenomaus of Gadara’s fragmentary text, The Exposure of Charlatans, was explicitly aimed at exposing magicians of all stripes. Attridge neatly summarizes what remains of this text: “[it] combines outbursts of moral indignation, invective, biting sarcasm and parody in an assault on oracular practice.”52 What is clear from the extant fragments of Oenomaus is that he adopted a multiform approach in developing his criticism of oracles.53 All the while, the underpinning of Oenomaus’ ridiculing and sarcastic account of oracular shrines and their purveyors is in line with the thinking of Demonax and oth-

Dem. 23, 25. Demonax also makes light of temple worship and service to the gods in Dem. 27. 52 Attridge, “Philosophical Critique of Religion,” 56. That this text survives in large part in the works of Clement of Alexandria, Origen, and Eusebius (primarily in the Praeparatio Evangelica) points to the close relationship between this line of critique and later Christian thinkers. Cf. F.W.A. Mullach, Fragmenta Philosophorum Graecorum, vol. II (Paris: Didot, 1867). In addition to the bibliography appended to Attridge’s essay, see Jürgen Hammerstaedt, “Der Kyniker Oenomaus von Gadara,” ANRW 2.34, 36 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1990), 2835-2860. 53 Cf. Attridge, “Philosophical Critique of Religion,” 57-58. 51

CHAPTER THREE. PAUL’S UNDERSTUDY

133

er philosophical pragmatists: “Keep your head up; bear up under hardship; keep things in proper perspective.”54 We have no more expansive example of the confrontation between an intellectual critic and the rise of a popular cult than Lucian of Samosata’s Alexander, the False Prophet.55 In it, Lucian tells the story of Alexander “the impostor of Abonoteichus,” who established an oracle and introduced the worship of the god Glycon in that city. Alexander was an innovator of a prophetic cult that achieved a wide and speedy popularity in the Eastern Empire. Lucian describes a Alexander as a handsome, magnetic, quick-witted, and enthusiastic religious entrepreneur, but also as one who used his talents for the worst possible ends.56 His exposé includes a description of the mundane tricks that Alexander performed. Lucian’s exposure of the new cult is brought to its climax when he describes the foundations of Alexander’s temple.57 Lucian interweaves stories about how the false prophet came to be adored with explanations of the crafty—but non-mysterious—means by which he duped the people of Abonoteichus. The people of the city are perfect sycophants who are enraptured by the revelation of the birth of the god: “the whole people followed, everyone seized by fervor and crazed with expectations” (ὁ δὲ λεὼς ἅπας ἠκολούθει, πάντες ἔνθεοι καὶ μεμηνότες ὑπὸ τῶν ἐλπίδων).

54 “Philosophical Critique of Religion,” 58. 55 For more expansive and systematic treatments of Lucian’s treatment of Alexander, Peregrinus, and religion, see Marcel Caster, Lucien et la pensée religieuse de son temps (Paris: Bude, 1937); Hans Dieter Betz, Lukian von Samosata und das Neue Testament. Religionsgeschichtliche und paräenetische Parallelen (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1961), esp. 23-182; Peter Pilhofer, et al, eds. Lukian. Der Tod des Peregrinos. Ein Sharlatan auf dem Scheiterhaufen (Darmstadt: WBG, 2005) Barbara Szlagor, Verflochtene Bilder. Lukians Porträts zeitgenössischer “göttlicher Männer” und seine literarische Selbstprojektion in Alexander, De Morte Peregrini, Demonax und Nigrinus, (Trier: Wissenschaft Verlag Trier, 2005), and Inger Neeltje Irene Kuin, “Playful Piety: Religion, Humor, and Audience in Lucian of Samosata,” (Ph.D. diss., New York University, 2015). 56 Alex. 4. 57 Alex. 13ff.

134

GAMING GREEKNESS

Lucian is a true demythologizer in this text, acting like a debunker of magicians who explains where the rabbit is hidden in the hat. The purpose of Lucian’s text is to present before his readers the mechanisms by which popular opinion could be exploited in order to gain an unearned notoriety. Exposing fraudulent cult leaders in order to undermine their social sway is deemed to be its own reward in this literature. But there is also an undercurrent of philanthropic concern in these accounts—each of these philosophers are keenly aware of the financial stakes that motivated pretenders to divine insight to exploit the uneducated hoi polloi. And the enduring influence of this literature suggests that it continued to gain audiences that sought to determine truthfulness among competing claims about the gods.58 Thus, the confrontation between popular cult practices and philosophy was a natural place for early Christians to make a strategic stand. Portraying Paul to work on the side of pragmatic, philosophical exposers suited the strategies of pseudepigraphers who wished to present Paul as an influential public figure in the Eastern Empire. Borrowing the tenor of these intellectual debates in order to establish a narrative context for Paul’s later career in Acts and the Pastoral letters demonstrates one of the more explicit ways in which early Christians laid claim on Greek intellectual credibility. Amidst the highly volatile landscape of 2nd century Greek cities, simply placing Paul in a position of influence among the prominent players in the Eastern Empire was to make a case for the apostle’s legitimacy as a Greek cultural entity. Narrating Paul’s Critique of Magic and Popular Cult Practices in There are prominent examples of this kind of critique leveled at early Christian communities beginning in the 2nd century CE—most notably in the philosopher Celsus’ largely-lost True Account (rebutted at length by Origen)—and became more common as Christian voices became more prominent and public. It bears noting that Lucian’s Alex. is addressed to ὦ φίλτατε Κέλσε, whom Origen (Cont. Cels. 1.8; 1.68) and the scholiast on Lucian explains is the Celsus who wrote the True Account. Cf. Lucian, LCL, vol. 3, 174-175; Henry Chadwick, Origen: Contra Celsum (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953), xxiv-xxvi. 58

CHAPTER THREE. PAUL’S UNDERSTUDY

135

Acts 19

Apart from the account of Paul’s engagement with the philosophers in Athens, the account of Paul’s tenure in Ephesus in Acts 19 provides the most elaborate account of Paul’s comportment in a prominent Greek city of the Eastern Empire. This narrative is redolent of a lived-in, populous urban environment in which all kinds of intellectual and philosophical negotiation occurred.59 Pervo singles out Acts for its remarkable narrative realism in describing the city scene here: Opposition to Paul derives from undesirable elements: magicians, Jews, itinerant exorcists. His supporters include the very foremost men of the province (v.31). One can scarcely deny that in Acts 19 Luke has pulled out all the stops to describe the peak of Paul’s mission in the Aegean region. There is not another chapter in the book of Acts which can match this for color, variety, excitement, and sheer unmitigated success. Paul converts sectaries at the touch of a finger, cures disease with castoff rags, humiliates opponents who merely seek to misuse his name, convinces myriads to renounce superstition, and hobnobs with Asiarchs.60

In short, Acts 19 depicts Paul as a major player within the intellectual landscape of a major Greek city, tracing the impact that Paul’s intellectual and spiritual charisma—as well as the message about Jesus that lies behind both—makes on Ephesus. In this narrative, the apostle competes explicitly with workers of magic and with beneficiaries of traditional civic ritual practices in light of the Roman dictates of civility. The author’s portrayal of Paul taps into the thinking of intellectuals like Demonax, Oenomaus and Lucian, but the character that is portrayed here runs parallel to those figures. That is, Paul is not portrayed as an imitator of the philosophical voices that criticized magic and popular cult practices. Rather, the apostle repreC. Kavin Rowe’s provides an insight account of the magical reputation of Ephesus (World Upside Down: Reading Acts in the Greco-Roman Age [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009]). 60 Richard Pervo, Profit with Delight, 8-10. 59

136

GAMING GREEKNESS

sents his own intellectual brand in such a way that exploits the influence of rationalistic philosophers in order to make a play for the attention of Ephesus’s citizens and seeks to win their pious allegiance. Despite the comparative narrative of Acts 19, Paul does not appear in this text as an aggressive and confrontational instigator of conflict with magicians and temple figures. The narrative instead insinuates Paul into the controversies he encounters in Ephesus. Acts thus presents a narrative that traces the effects of Paul’s message even as he undermines the credibility of those who capitalize on the piety and wonder of the Ephesian citizens. Paul’s exposure of the magicians and peddlers of cultic images is a byproduct of his message. In Acts 19, the author portrays Paul as cutting his own cultural pathway, even as the apostle mimics some of the steps of 2nd century intellectuals—not by fulfilling the role of a loquacious intellectual or a grandiose wonder-worker, but by preaching a message that undermined the ordinary pieties of a prominent Greek city. Paul begins his time in Ephesus in the guise of an itinerant teacher. The intellectual environment in which Paul engages “both Jews and Greeks” are made explicit in Acts 19:8-10: He entered the synagogue and spoke freely for three months, engaging in dialogues and persuading them about the kingdom of God. Some were stubborn and intransigent and spoke evil about the way before the assembly, so he left them. Taking the disciples with him, he engaged in dialogues in the lecture hall (διαλεγόμενος ἐν τῇ σχολῇ) of Tyrannus daily. This went on for two years, so that all of those living in Asia heard the word of the lord—Jews and Greeks.

Paul’s time in Ephesus and the significance of his reputation there are the focus of Acts 19. Unlike all of his previous travel in Acts, including his long stay in Corinth, Paul’s time in Ephesus most clearly captures Paul’s increasing notoriety in the Greek-speaking world. In this city, he engages with those in the synagogue and ultimately installs himself in a prominent lecture hall in order to address the other citizens of Ephesus. “The word of the Lord” (τὸν λόγον τοῦ κυρίου) is appropriate subject matter for both the synagogue and the lecture hall of Tyrannus according to Acts. There is a fluidity of intellectual discourse in this passage that flows through sophistic and

CHAPTER THREE. PAUL’S UNDERSTUDY

137

philosophical locales as well as in the synagogue. That this is supposed to have “continued for two years” suggests a substantial investment on the part of Paul and emphasizes the social distinction he enjoyed in the city. His message was controversial to be sure, but as Acts presents it, the city of Ephesus offered Paul a serious hearing and a place to continue his work. Immediately following this account of Paul’s intellectual efforts, his miraculous character is introduced. Paul is a wonder worker who passively heals the sick and casts out evil spirits through the influence of his touch on spare pieces of fabric (19:11-12). Paul’s intellectual fame and his miraculous abilities are reminiscent of the supernatural capabilities of Apollonius of Tyana, the very paradigm of a mythologized, sophistic darling. The narrative design of Acts 19 underlines Paul’s genuine and unquestionably efficacious works by presenting them against a group of sham magicians—the sons of the Jewish high priest Sceva in Acts 19:13-16: Then some itinerant Jewish exorcists tried to use the name of the Lord Jesus over those who had evil spirits, saying, ‘I adjure you by the Jesus whom Paul proclaims.’ Seven sons of a Jewish high priest named Sceva were doing this. But the evil spirit said to them in reply, ‘Jesus I know, and Paul I know; but who are you?’ Then the man with the evil spirit leapt on them, mastered them all, and so overpowered them that they fled out of the house naked and wounded.

The distance between Paul and these sham magicians could not be more pronounced. Paul has nothing to do with the confrontation with the magicians themselves. The critique here is implicit within the narrative; Paul confronts the sons of Sceva only in the author’s comparison of the two. Strictly speaking, the showdown that does takes place is between the demon and the pretenders to Paul’s authority. It is only through the oblique reference to Paul that the apostle’s own power is demonstrated, quite ironically, through the

138

GAMING GREEKNESS

failure of these men to control a demon in the name of Jesus.61 Paul’s reputation had secured a separation between illicit magic and the work of charlatan exorcists and the names of “Paul” and “Jesus.”62 Paul thus wins his own legitimacy in absentia. As a result, the narrative’s denigration of magicians is all the more pronounced. The failure of the sons of Sceva confirms Paul’s potent reputation as a worker of miracles and an intellectual fixture in Ephesus. While Paul has nothing to do with these magicians himself, the social effect of this story is quite disruptive. Moreover, the demon-led criticism of the sons of Sceva leads to the very outcome that was hoped for by critics like Lucian and Oenomaus. After the exposure of the sons of Sceva, Acts 19:17-19 explains: When [their exposure] was known among all the Jews and Greeks who lived in Ephesus, fear fell upon all of them and the name of the Lord Jesus was exalted. Many also of those who became believers confessed and revealed their practices. A number of those practicing superstitious rites gathered their books and burned them in front of everyone. When their value was calculated, they were found to be worth fifty thousand pieces of silver.

Paul’s intellectual prowess as well as his own miraculous deeds are both vehicles for correcting the backward citizens of Ephesus. That these Ephesian figures were perhaps already members of the Christian community there adds an additional dimension to the story and clarifies the tenure that Paul enjoyed in the city.63 Indeed, Klauck notes that “it seems as if the demon remains unperturbed and emerges as the winner. But this is true only vis-a-vis the sons of Sceva: according to the demon’s own words, he would submit to Jesus and Paul” (Magic and Paganism in Early Christianity, 100). 62 While this narrative is doubtlessly part of Luke’s own composition, part of this phraseology is preserved in the Greek Magical Papyri: “ὀρκίζω σε κατὰ τοῦ θεοῦ τῶν Ἑβραίων Ἱησοῦ (PGM 4.3019-20; Betz, Greek Magical Papyri, 96). 63 The ambiguity of this question hangs on how to interpret πεπιστευκότων in Acts 19:18. Klauck suggests that this ambiguity is meant to capitalize on the longstanding association of Ephesus with magical practices, as evidenced 61

CHAPTER THREE. PAUL’S UNDERSTUDY

139

Paul’s time in Ephesus vies with the efforts of any governing Roman nobilis in terms of enriching the intellectual institutions and temple infrastructure of a prominent Eastern city: he engaged with prominent civic leaders, ran off exploitative magical entrepreneurs, and established a community comprised of “Jewish and Greek” members who had purged themselves of their enchantment with magicians, just like the emperor Augustus had done in Rome. Paul’s unmitigated success in stomping out the influence of illicit magic in Ephesus is set in contrast to his encounter with traditional Ephesian worship traditions. As with his part with the Sons of Sceva, Paul proves remarkably passive in this narrative, and he is not instrumental either in inciting the conflict or in responding to it once it occurs—he is squarely on the sidelines for the entire episode, despite being its central subject.64 As we have already seen, Paul’s effect on Ephesus is noted in economic terms, and it is the ramifications of Paul’s message on the financial prospects for crafters of silver shrines of Artemis that drives the episode. The narrator coyly introduces the controversy in 19:23: “At that time, no small political disturbance arose concerning the Way” (τάραχος οὐκ ὀλίγος περὶ τῆς ὁδοῦ). The story that develops from this point is submerged by the confluence of social upheavals that frequently surrounded intellectual provocateurs in the imperial world. This passage captures the swaggering, self-assuredness that attached to some of the major players who moved in ancient cities. The figure of Demetrius is given central billing in this passage so that he can represent the motivations and methods of civic conservatives in the Greek-speaking East:65

in Plutarch (Quaes. Conv. 7.5ff. [= Mor. 760E]; Magic and Paganism in Early Christianity, 101-102). 64 Reinhard Selinger argues that “source analysis makes it apparent that Luke did not rely on firsthand evidence for this narrative and that it is best viewed as a Lucan composition” (“Die Demetriosunruhen (Apg. 19,23— 40): Ein Fallstudie aus rechthistorischer Perspektive,” ZNW 88, no. 3-4 (1997), 242-59; cf. Pervo, Acts, 490). 65 Cf. Robert F. Stoops’ study in which the civic upheaval in this passage is contextualized within the circumstances of life in the Eastern empire (“Riot and Assembly: The Social Context of Acts 19.23-41,” JBL 108 [1989], 73-91).

140

GAMING GREEKNESS A man named Demetrius, a silversmith who made silver shrines of Artemis, brought no small business to the artisans. Gathering these together along with those doing such work, he said, “Men, you know that our wealth is from this business, and you also see and hear that not only in Ephesus but in nearly all of Asia this Paul has persuaded and drawn away a sizeable group by saying that those are not gods that are made with human hands. This is a danger not only that our trade might come to be tossed aside, but also that the great god Artemis might come to be regarded as nothing, and she will be stripped of her majesty, whom the whole of Asia and the world worships.” When they heard this they were filled with rage and cried out, saying, “Great is Ephesian Artemis!”66

The civic cult of Ephesus is not a specific target of Paul’s teaching, but is instead a casualty of Paul’s persuasive seduction of “nearly all of Asia” (σχεδὸν πάσης τῆς Ἀσίας). The cravenness of the silversmiths explicitly ties their concern about their financial prosperity to the reputation of Artemis, “whom all Asia, indeed the entire empire, worships” (ἣν ὅλη ἡ Ἀσία καὶ ἡ οἰκουμένη σέβεται).67 Here, again, Acts is closely aligned with the perspective of early apologetical writers and presents perhaps the best narrative characterization of the adversaries of early Christians who bristled at the accusation that “those are not gods that are made with human hands.”68 The characterization of the Ephesian crowd in Demetrius’s speech seems to be part of a deliberate strategy to convey the root causes of ensuing events. The response of the crowd is immediate and emotional. Whether or not they are prompted by the affront to Aphrodite or to their business is left ambiguous, but they are “filled

The focus on Artemis as a cult figure in this text is remarkable in Acts, where no other specific civic cult is given similar attention. Cf. Richard Strelan, Paul, Artemis and the Jews in Ephesus (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1996), esp. 24-82. 67 Acts 19:24-28. 68 Cf. Justin 1 Apol. 20, 53, 58; Athenagoras, Emb. 17; Theophilus Ad Auto. 1, 10, 34-35; Clement of Alexandria, Protrep. 4. 66

CHAPTER THREE. PAUL’S UNDERSTUDY

141

with rage” (πλήρεις θυμοῦ). The ensuing fracas would undoubtedly have disturbed imperial authorities: The city was full of confusion; with one accord, the people rushed to the theater, dragging Gaius and Aristarchus— Macedonians who were Paul’s fellow travelers. Paul wished to go into the crowd, but the disciples did not let him; some of the Asiarchs, who were his friends, sent a message to him not to present himself in the theater. Others meanwhile shouted something else, for the assembly was a blur, and most of them did not know why they had gathered together.69

After the city erupts, the scene shifts to the theater, where the crowd drags in Paul’s travel companions, Gaius and Aristarchus. It is only at this point in the narrative about Demetrius and his fellow artisans that Paul is involved in the action at all—and here only briefly. Similarly vague is the role of the temple to Artemis, which receives no specific elaboration in the narrative. There is every reason to believe that Artemis serves as a generic cult figure here. The temple to Artemis functions then as a placeholder for all kinds of established, civic cult practices against which Paul is presented as a critic.70 Paul’s criticism of the Ephesian cults is only an implicit part of his successful stay in the city. The people of Ephesus are actively frothed up by the greedy artisans, opening a door to broader philosophical discourses in criticism of popular cult practices. To the same degree that Paul is portrayed as an enlightened and courageous figure—he wants to confront the crowd, but is talked down by his companions and the Asiarchs who were his confidants— the crowd is depicted to be backward, reactionary, and hostile to outsiders. This is typical of Acts as well as other early Imperial accounts of civic masses who are liable to revolt. The specifically irrational nature of the mob is emphasized in 19:32: “few of [the members of the crowd]

69 Acts 19:29-32. 70 Pervo emphasizes this point, arguing that, “In Acts, Artemis is a synecdoche for civic religion, distinct from and more distinguished than independent operations like exorcism and magic” (Acts, 492).

142

GAMING GREEKNESS

knew why they were there.”71 A crowd who will riot without even knowing the reason why stands in stark contrast to the moderate rationalism that lays behind Paul’s undermining of traditional cultic worship in Ephesus. Perhaps more importantly, this scene emphasizes the stakes of popular unrest among the cities of the Empire. The unstable radicalism of Ephesus’s inhabitants places Paul in conflict with popular cult practices with Roman imperial interests. Paul’s innocence and the baselessness of the crowd’s eruption becomes clear when the “people’s secretary” (γραμματεύς τοῦ δομοῦ) begins to address the crowd in 19:35. After advising the people to withdraw before they do something that would draw the attention of the authorities, he makes clear that they have stirred up something serious: For you have brought these men here who are neither desecrators of the temple nor blasphemers against our goddess. If, then, Demetrius and the artisans with him have a case against someone, the courts are open and there are proconsuls (ἀνθύπατοί)—let them bring official charges against one another. If you seek anything further, it shall be settled in the lawful assembly (ἐν τῇ ἐννόμῳ ἐκκλησίᾳ ἐπιλυθήσεται). For we are at risk of being charged with rioting today, since there is no cause that we can give for this upheaval.” When he had said this, he dismissed the assembly.72

In the context of Acts, these final words to the unruly Ephesian crowd underline the civility of Paul and his followers throughout his tenure in the city.73 Moreover, this episode introduces a narrative conflict that rests on the civic orderliness that the Roman imperium demanded of its provincial cities; the grammateus seems to enter the scene exclusively to name the ordinary mechanisms for appealing to Roman oversight. In Acts 19, then, two sub-assemblies represent the larger Ephesian polis. On the one hand, Paul comes to rouse a peace71 This

characterization of crowds is an imperial era commonplace, showing up representatively in Plutarch (Praec. ger. re publ. 17), Dio Chrysostom (Or. 46.14) Philo (various places in Legat.) and Josephus (Bell. 7.46-62) among contemporaneous Greek language authors. 72 Acts 19:37-41. 73 Cf. similar arguments in Justin, 1 Apol. 3-7 and Athenagoras, Emb. 2-3.

CHAPTER THREE. PAUL’S UNDERSTUDY

143

ful and lawful ecclesia among those in Ephesus who followed his message. On the other hand, Demetrius riles up a vicious and unlawful ecclesia that threatens the tranquility of the city; and for that reason, it must be dismissed (ἀπέλυσεν). Paul towers over the cultural landscape of the Eastern Mediterranean in Acts 19. He installs himself at Ephesus as a public intellectual and an architect of an alternative piety for the city. In the process, the apostle disrupts the status quo of Ephesus, introducing a new intellectual technology into an archaic system of civic belief. In Acts, Paul enjoys the kind of influence that other critics of popular cult practices—philosophical and otherwise—would have hoped to have themselves. This is despite the fact that Paul is not victorious in any practical sense over his adversaries: he is not involved in confronting the sons of Sceva, he judiciously demurs from confronting Demetrius and his followers, and he immediately disappears from Ephesus after this chapter. However, the text is successful in its situating of Paul and the effect of his message within philosophical discourses about the worship of the gods that had come to define as aspect of Greek intellectual culture in the imperial world. In this chapter, Paul’s efforts are socially credible in a way that elevates all of his subsequent efforts in Acts, as well as the Pauline legacy as a whole. The effect of this narrative is to shape the social landscape around the recast Paul as much as he is shaped by it. The result is that this vivid narrative constructs a similarly reconceived urban landscape that has room for the reconceived Paul in it. In the undisputed letters, Paul’s apostolic strategy involved an identity that was highly changeable, having him “became all things to all people, that I might by all means save some” (1 Cor 9:22). Acts adopts a new strategy and finds a new use for Paul’s apostleship by surveying the landscape in which he traveled, and placing him as a consistent and weighty figure within it. Characterizing Paul’s Adversaries in the Pastoral Epistles

Paul’s characterization in Acts 19 as an agent who undermines the influence of magic and exposes popular cult practices might be explained as part of a narrative motif that is unique to the book of Acts. Within the New Testament, Paul’s only substantive occasions to engage non-Jewish religious figures (broadly speaking) appear in

144

GAMING GREEKNESS

the Acts narrative. However, when the pseudepigraphic “narrative world” around Paul is considered as a composite whole, Paul’s critical voice with respect to cult practices and magic also operates in the Pastoral letters, though in a way that is quite different than what appears in Acts. Paul’s persona is developed in both First and Second Timothy by tapping into both negative characterizations of popular pieties and also intellectual discourses that were critical of sham magicians. There is no real “confrontation” between Paul and the illicit adversaries who lay behind the Pastoral Epistles—nothing like the deliberate pitting of Paul against the sons of Sceva or Demeterius and the Ephesian silversmiths in Acts. The Pastor instead appeals to the motifs of exposing charlatans when engaging with his ecclesial opponents.74 These kinds of references amount to generic characterizations of the teaching and teachers with whom the Pastor is in competition for leadership over the churches of Asia. Precisely who these opponents are and the nature of what they taught is one of the uncertainties with which these letters leave modern readers.75 They exist in the text primarily as a negative counterpart to Paul’s persona within the Pastoral letters. As such, the ways in which these adversaries are associated with illicit popular cults or magic is solely a function of how the Pastor characterizes them. The contrary voices that appear in the Pastoral Epistles are illegitimate because they are adversaries of the Pastor, not the other way around. The social utility of associating one’s adversaries with dangeous ideologies was too enticing for Paul’s pseudepigraphers to pass up.

74 The appearance of this language around Paul’s opponents is particularly illuminating for the Pastoral Epistles. Lloyd Pietersen has argued that the Pastor explicitly rejects a miracle-working view of Paul. Pietersen argues that the Pastoral Epistles function as “a literary version of a status degradation ceremony in form,” with respect to the “thaumaturgical” Paul in Acts of the Apostles as well as the Acts of Paul (The Polemic of the Pastorals: A Sociological Examination of the Development of Pauline Christianity [London: T&T Clark, 2004], esp. 139-141). Cf. Pervo, The Making of Paul, 86 75 See the summary of issues presented by Lloyd Pietersen, The Polemic of the Pastorals, 3-23.

CHAPTER THREE. PAUL’S UNDERSTUDY

145

Even so, there is a subtle undercurrent of rationalistic skepticism about popular magic in the Pastoral Epistles that helps contextualize how the Pastor uses negative associations about magicians to characterize his adversaries. These letters are emphatic in underlining the importance of “sound teaching” (ὑγιαίνουσα διδασκαλία in 1 Tim 1:10; cf. 1 Tim 4:6) that one “follows” (παρακαλυθεῖν). This phraseology is endemic to early imperial philosophical literature where “to follow” serves as a kind of double entendre for putting oneself under a teacher, as well as following along with their lessons and insights. 76 With the introduction of correct teaching, however, comes the specter of illicit and false teaching. Here, the pseudepigrapher adopts the same “us versus them” logic that defined intellectual competition in the 2nd century. 77 The Pastor begins his instruction of Timothy in 1 Tim 1:3-4: “I urge you (παρεκάλεσά σε), just as I did on my way to Macedonia, to remain in Ephesus so that you may instruct some individuals not to instruct with another teaching, nor to devote attention to myths and interminable genealogies (μύθοις καὶ γενεαλογίαις ἀπεράντοις) that leads to hunch-mongering (ἐκζητήσεις) rather than the dispensation (οἰκονομίαν) of God that comes in faith.” As with Acts 19, Ephesus is the urban environment in which this confrontation between Pauline authority and contrary ideologies takes place. “Myths and endless genealogies” are certainly plausible fodder for speculation into the divine, though precisely what these are intended to suggest is unclear.78 What is clear is that the manner in which the

Dibelius and Conzelmann suggest that this term is especially frequent in Epictetus (see Diss. 1.7.33; 2.24.19; The Pastoral Epistles, 68), but see also Lucian, Vit. Auct. 27; Plutarch, Quaes. Conviv. 708B, as well as its frequent appearance in early Christian and Jewish literature including Justin Martyr, Dial. 30, Clement of Alexandria (Protrep. 10 and Strom. 4.7.51 are representative), Origen (Cont. Cels. 5.63 and 8.75 are indicative, but Origen’s usage of the term is expansive), as well as 4 Macc 10.1. 77 Dibelius and Conzelmann note in passing that “the author frequently uses the same weapons with which the philosophers attacked the sophists” (The Pastoral Epistles, 66). 78 Note the engagement with genealogies made by both Jewish and Greek philosophical voices in the apologists: Justin, 1 Apol. 31; Athenagoras, Emb. 76

146

GAMING GREEKNESS

Pastor derides this false teaching depends upon the logic of a broadly rationalistic criticism of mythological beliefs. This is confirmed by the additional advice intended for Timothy: “Reject utterly the blasphemous myths and old wives’ tales (τοὺς δὲ βεβήλους καὶ γραώδεις μύθους παραιτοῦ)”.79 Here, the myths are those stories told by irrational and (implicitly) uneducated women who were often made the butt of intellectuals’ derision for foolish and naive thinking.80 These characterizations of the Pastor’s opponents flourish in 2 Tim 3:1-9, where the Pastor warns Timothy of the “distressing times” that will come in the last days. To explain who these adversaries are, the Pastor describes a group of charlatan teachers who are working among the communities of Asia Minor: For there are those among them who insinuate themselves into houses and mesmerize childish girls who pile up their sins, lead astray by their multifarious desires—forever being instructed and are never able to arrive at knowledge of the truth. As Jannes and Jambres opposed Moses, so also these men of a corrupt mind and counterfeit faith stand opposed to the truth. But they will not progress far, for their foolishness shall be manifest to everyone—just as it was with those two. (2 Tim 3:6-9)

The gendered characterization of the “silly women” (γυναικάρια) whose households have been infiltrated by these teachers matches the characterization of the “old wives tales” in 1 Tim 4:7; this is consistent with the ways in which those who were duped by sham teachers were characterized throughout the period. 81 17; Ps.–Justin, Ad Grec. 2; Theophilous, Ad Auto. 3.16ff.; Tatian, Ad Grec. 34-41. 79 1 Tim 4:7. 80 Cf. Dennis MacDonald, The Legend and the Apostle, 54-77. Indeed the term γραώδης hardly appears apart from a reference to a μῦθος in any of its contemporaneous uses (based on a search of the online Thesaurus Lingua Graecae). Where it does appear, it is frequently employed by writers who use this phrasing to describe incredible ideas; see most notably Epictetus Diss. 1.7.33; Lucian Philopseud. 9; Galen De simpl. medi. 11.792; Strabo 1.2.3. 81 Cf. 1 Tim 5:3-16. Pervo explains, “Behind this misogyny stand popular prejudices about women and religion, such as the presumption that women

CHAPTER THREE. PAUL’S UNDERSTUDY

147

More remarkable is the characterization of the Pastor’s adversaries as dangerous and illicit magicians who stand against God’s anointed prophet—they are like “Jannes and Jambres [who] opposed Moses” (2 Tim 3:8).82 Jannes and Jambres are the names given to the anonymous Egyptian court magicians whom Moses and Aaron confront beginning in Exodus 7:8. Their inclusion suggests that the pseudepigrapher was well acquainted with legendary material, for Jannes and Jambres appear to have been among the most widely recognized traditional magical figures in the Roman imperial world. They appear in a stunning range of texts. 83 Beyond these references, a were hysterical creatures, especially susceptible to bizarre religious impulses, and that they, through their lack of education and experience, as well as their constitutions, were vulnerable to unscrupulous missionaries in pursuit of their virtue or their money, if not both” (The Making of Paul, 91). Margaret MacDonald treats the characterization of women as “gadabouts and busybodies” in 1 Tim and considers the context of this characterization within the Pastoral letters and the household codes of the early 2nd century (Early Christian Women and Pagan Opinion: The Power of the Hysterical Woman [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996], esp. 154-165. For a particularly lucid explication of this ancient view of women’s gullibility, see Plutarch, Mor. 145 C (=Conj. Praec.). 82 Robert Karris argues that this is part of a traditional polemic against sophists that was borrowed from Philo. However, he notes that Philo does not name the magicians identified with sophists (“The Background and Significance of the Polemic of the Pastoral Epistles,” JBL 92: 549-64). 83 There is a debatable reference to these figures in the Damascus Document (CD 5, 17b-19; note Albert Pietersma’s concerns about the Qumran evidence [“Jannes and Jambres,” ABD, v.3, 638-640.]) Less disputable is the reference to Jannes who is attached to Moses in both Pliny the Elder’s Natural History (HN 30.2.11) and Lucius Apuleius’ Apology (Apol. 2.90), along with the discussion by Numinous of Apamea (preserved by Eusebius in Praep. Ev. 9.8, and reflected in Origen, Cels. 4.51) that Jannes and Jambres were able to undo the plagues that Moses had directed against Egypt. The two figures also appear in later rabbinical and early Christian literature (see Petersen, The Polemic of the Pastorals, 131). The textual and manuscript issues are covered at length in Albert Pietersma, The Apocryphon of Jannes and Jambres the Magicians (Leiden: Brill, 1994), esp. 3-71. Pietersma’s study is the most substantial recent one of its kind. He exhaustively covers the citations of these figures in this literature that I have surveyed here (Apocryphon of Jannes and Jambres, 36-42).

148

GAMING GREEKNESS

literary tradition developed around these figures, represented best in the fragmentary Jannes and Jambres, a text that preserves a sense of the legends that had developed around them.84 Jannes and Jambres serve as ideal points of reference for the recasting Paul as a critic of popular magic. Here, the re-imagined Paul proves to be an able competitor with internal adversaries from the churches of Asia Minor by employing a strategy that both alienates his nameless opponents and magnifies himself. By means of this brief reference, Paul’s theological and rational criticism of fantastical claims or dangerous speculation is linked to the durable figure of Moses. Moreover, the opponents of the Pastor are cast as charlatans who are rooted in the narrative of the Torah, but they fit into a widely known part of the philosophicallyenlightened landscape of the Greek East. ***** Both Acts and the Pastoral Epistles seek to revivify the apostle’s career in the Mediterranean landscape of the 2nd century. Presenting Paul in circumstances in which he engages with rogue magicians, temple-associated artisans, and anonymous opponents patterned on the Torah is an obvious way to make the apostle’s presence among prominent public institutions throughout the Greek-speaking world seem real. What is less obvious is the way that these characterizations of Paul constitute a kind of competition for Greekness. After all, Paul is nowhere depicted as taking up the mantle of civic leadership or pursuing the euergetistic accomplishments of elites. Aligning Paul with the philosophical critique of magic and popular cult practices constitutes a competition for Greek cultural legitimacy only when we consider the implicit associations that this version of Paul invites. By presenting Paul in this way, his intellectual peers become Apollonius of Tyana, Oenomaus of Gadara, and even the pious Roman emperors themselves. Of course, Paul is also at odds with each of these figures, but the incremental work of making Paul and his mes84 See the introduction and translation of Pietersma and Lutz in OTP, v.2, 427-442.

CHAPTER THREE. PAUL’S UNDERSTUDY

149

sage coherent within sophistic Greek intellectual spheres depends on the comparison itself. Through the subtle association of Paul with critics of magic and popular cults, these authors work to make the figure of Paul an influential player on an important stage in the 2nd century, Eastern Mediterranean. There is also an inertial effect to this kind of competition for cultural legitimacy that bears on the apostle’s legacy. Characterizing Paul as a participant in influential civic affairs in the 2nd century also entailed bringing unexpected and unintentional aspects of the Greek cultural milieu into the Pauline literary tradition. There is a mutual influence in depicting Paul in these Greek intellectual terms—it makes the reception and development of the apostle’s persona that much more explicitly “Greek.” This aspect of how Paul was characterized became integral to establishing Paul’s legacy throughout the centuries that followed. In the process of codifying a canon around Paul, the Paul of Acts 19 and the Pastoral letters functioned not as a subsequent part of the Pauline tradition, but rather as an integral element within a single apostolic career. This process of writers recasting Paul in light of 2nd century intellectual concerns demonstrates how the act of competing for cultural resources always results in unanticipated outcomes. The resulting, amalgamated “Paul” who was read and understood from the late 2nd century until the advent of modern critical methodologies unintentionally smuggled Greek philosophical concerns about popular worship practices into the Christian tradition--of which Paul’s legacy was a central part. Even in the subdued imitation of Greek philosophical motifs in Acts and the Pastoral Epistles, we can see the etiology of cultural change: if literary imitation can serve as a mechanism for copying a figure into a different time and place, the Paul who emerges from Acts and the Pastoral Epistles is a “Greek-er” apostle who is more naturalized to the intellectual landscape of the 2nd century than the one who entered.

IV. FUGITIVE ACTS: PAUL AS A CIVIC VIRTUOSO IN ACTS 21-22 The Acts of the Apostles contains virtually no exposition about Paul’s background and previous life—he emerges on the scene seemingly from out of nowhere in Acts 9:1. After his nefarious introduction, standing over the martyred Stephen, he quickly joins the ongo-

150

GAMING GREEKNESS

ing efforts of the apostles in the Eastern Mediterranean, even as he prepares to push the message about Jesus “to the ends of the earth.” Within the narrative economy of Acts, then, there is only a vague sense of where Paul hails from: the reader can deduce that he is from the city of Tarsus in Eastern Asia Minor, but also that he was educated in Jerusalem, and (somehow) was born a Roman citizen. This range of civic, ethnic, and political allegiances is implausible to say the least. And yet the author seems immune to the biographical difficulties that these claims about Paul’s background pose. I argue that this lack of concern about clarifying Paul’s background is part of a strategy on the part of the author of the Acts of the Apostles to recast Paul within the Greek intellectual milieu of the 2nd century. Much like the elaboration of agonistic imagery in the Pastoral Epistles and the engagement with philosophical critiques of popular cultic practices in Acts and 2 Timothy, I argue that Paul’s ability to negotiate the diverse social and political contexts in Acts is part of a deliberate design to resituate Paul in a 2nd century context. In this reading, Paul is portrayed to be a faux-Socratic “citizen of the world,” whose virtuosic ability to belong comes to a head in Acts 2122.85 In these chapters, Paul’s implausible ability to locate himself natively within three distinct civic arenas belonging—as a native son of Jerusalem, a sophistically-inclined Greek, and a citizen of Rome— taps into discourses of belonging and an empire-wide anxiety about who was equipped to negotiate the globalizing realities of the Ro85 Here, again, I rely on Kendra Eshleman’s conception of social belonging in The Social World of Intellectuals in the Roman World, esp. 1-66. My reading of Paul’s skill at belonging derives from Pierre Bourdieu’s description of the virtuoso who, “with a perfect command of his ‘art of living’ can play on all the resources inherent in the ambiguities and uncertainties of behavior and situation in order to produce the actions appropriate to each case, to do that of which people will say ‘There was nothing else to be done’, and do it the right way” (Pierre Bourdieu and Jean Claude Passeron, Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture, Loïc Wacquant, trans., 1st edition [London: Sage Publications, 1977], 8). Paul’s belonging in Acts 21-22 presents a scenario that requires that the apostle, “play on all the resources inherent in the ambiguities and uncertainties of behavior and situation in order to produce the actions appropriate to each case.”

CHAPTER THREE. PAUL’S UNDERSTUDY

151

man Imperium. These discourses were especially prominent in the literature about exile that emerged from philosophers and early novelists who were responding to dilemmas around civic and social identity in the early Empire. Acts exploits the opportunity provided by these discourses around exile to recast Paul—and by extension the entire Christian kerygma for which Paul is an avatar—as one who could legitimately speak in every language, walk through every city, and consort with all people.86 Discourses of Exile and Belonging in the Roman World

In the Roman Empire, the experience of exile was manifest as often in literary fiction and epic poetry as it was in the real experiences of historical subjects. For example, exilic motifs pervade the Greek novels that begin to appear in the late first and second centuries, CE. This literature used exile as a literary conceit that allowed elite, Greek-speaking subjects to reflect upon their subjugation to Roman authority. Exile was therefore a loaded phenomenon in the Roman world, imbued with symbolic meaning as well as real implications for Roman subjects. As a result, the experience of exile became a fruitful subject for philosophical reflection in the Imperial world. And a substantial body of philosophical literature written throughout the first and second centuries was devoted to conceiving of exile as a means by which one might cultivate true philosophical freedom. Tim Whitmarsh argues that this literature served as a medium through which cultural identity could be explored. Exile was thus not a calamity, but an opportunity, so much so that “exile becomes a positive accreditation of philosophical success.”87 These discursive innovations of what it meant to be a subject of “the enormous worldempire of the Roman Principate” created a conceptual opening for existence apart from Rome.88 Exile proved to be a fruitful way of 86 Cf. 1 Cor 9:16ff.

Tim Whitmarsh, “‘Greece is the World: Exile and Identity in the Second Sophistic”, in Simon Goldhill, ed., Being Greek under Rome: Cultural Identity, The Second Sophistic, and the Development of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 271. 88 Whitmarsh, “Greece is the World,” 271. 87

152

GAMING GREEKNESS

engaging questions about social belonging for Greek-styled intellectuals who, by the de facto centering of the world on Rome, found themselves on the periphery of an Empire that was not theirs.89 Whitmarsh goes on to elaborate that “discussions of exile constitute a nodal point where Greek cultural self-representation meets Roman power.”90 The exigencies of how Roman authorities responded to Greek intellectuals—Vespasian and Domitian’s exile of philosophers from Italy is a frequent example—provided an occasion for a group of intellectuals to develop new resources for self-presentation and new ways to construe belonging.91 These discussions of exile contributed to a contentious literature comprised of philosophical voices—including Musonius Rufus, Plutarch, Dio Chrysostom, and Favorinus—as well as the Greek novel Callirhoe. Sophistic and philosophical forms of self-expression in response to exile became valuable tools for Roman subjects attempting to navigate their own cultural allegiances in the Imperial world.92 The “calamity” of exile is effectively transformed in this literature into what might be called a negotiated process of metamorphosis—being cast out into the global expanse of Roman influence

89 I borrow the emphasis on the centering effects of Roman Imperial power and the decentering efforts of Greek-speaking subjects from Laura Nasrallah, Christian Responses to Roman Art and Architecture: The Second Century Amid the Spaces of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 51-84. 90 Whitmarsh, “Greece is the World,” 284. 91 Vespasian’s exile of the philosophers is attested in Dio Cassius 66.13.2; Domitian’s seems to have been much more widely known and appears in Suetonius’ Life of Domitian 10.5; Tacitus Agricola 2.1-2; Pliny Epistles 3.11.23; Philostratus, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, 7.11. However, see the contextualizing discussion in Erich Gruen, Studies in Greek Culture and Roman Policy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 173-179. 92 See the study of Heinz-Günther Nesselrath (“Later Greek Voices on the Predicament of Exile: From Teles to Plutarch and Favorinus”) and Paolo Desideri (“Dio’s Exile: Politics, Philosophy, Literature”) on the motifs of exile in the early Roman period, in Jan Felix Gaertner, ed., Writing Exile: The Discourse of Displacement in Greco-Roman Antiquity and Beyond (Leiden: Brill, 2007).

CHAPTER THREE. PAUL’S UNDERSTUDY

153

compelled exiles and other fugitive travelers of the world to become self-reliant—comfortable belonging in all kinds of locales. The consistent premise of the philosophical reflections on exile is that the circumstances that face an exile constitute an education in understanding that no places, countries or nations are better than others, and that whoever understands this can belong anywhere. The effect of this line of argument is subtly revolutionary, severing the idea that one’s origin and social station is determinative of where one belongs. Musonius Rufus introduces this line of argument:93 “Why should anyone who was not devoid of understanding be oppressed by exile? It does not in any way deprive us of water, earth, air, or the sun and the other planets, or indeed, even of the society of men, for everywhere and in every way there is opportunity for association with them.”94 In Musonius’s estimation, a true philosopher understands that only natural requirements constrain life—the hierarchy of needs is physical, but otherwise arbitrary. In the social realm, no real philosopher could be alienated from other people for any sensible reason—and people are basically everywhere. His approach became typical of later accounts of exile: a broadly Stoic emphasis on the natural order, the need for philosophical enlightenment to truly understand the situation of exile for what it is, and a conception of society and interpersonal relationships as interchangeable universals. Musonius’s approach provides a useful context for coping with the subjugating effects of empire. In his thinking, a philosophically minded exile should see the imposition of Roman authority as a gift in disguise that demonstrates how a life of contentment cannot be undone by the difficulties of a life lived in the shadow of Rome. When Plutarch picks up this argumentative thread, he emphasizes that the experience of exile has many upsides—”it is ourselves” who turn it into a personal cataclysm. Plutarch argues, moreover, that exile has no effect on those who have the constancy of mind to realThe text of Musonius Rufus, “That Exile is not an Evil,” appears in the version of Rufus’ works which appear under the title, “Musonius Rufus ‘The Roman Socrates,’“ Yale Classical Studies 10 (1947), 1-153. As the Greek text contains no chapter apparatus, I cite Lutz’s page numbers. 94 Lutz, “Musonius Rufus,” 69. 93

154

GAMING GREEKNESS

ize that it is no tragedy to live in another land. He insists that a philosopher has the capacity to determine his or her own life: “the wise among us, by drawing from the good and pouring it upon the bad, make their lives more pleasant and potable; whereas in the multitude, as in filters, the worst remains and adheres as the better flows away and vanishes.”95 Even so, the ability to cope with exile is not simply a matter of positive thinking. Exile presents an occasion for philosophers to manifest the truly subversive claim made by this literature: origin and birth have nothing to do with identity, and belonging is entirely in the hands of individuals. Consequently, the very idea of a “native land” from which one may be exiled is a fiction—a human being is a universal entity that exists contentedly in many locales. Plutarch makes this explicit: “Such is your present removal from what you take to be your native land. For by nature there is no such thing as a native land, any more than there is by nature a house or farm or forge or surgery... but in each case the thing becomes so, or rather is so named and called, with reference to the occupant and user.”96 In terms of Plutarch’s pragmatic, popular Stoicism, home is simply where the occupant is. The sophist Favorinus in his own discussion of exile concurs with Plutarch by focusing on the chicken-and-egg problem that lies beneath everyone’s true origins.97 Favorinus observes: “If you were to trace your own stock and that of your entire fatherland back to the ancients, you would find that they were either colonists from another land...or that they had settled from elsewhere.”98 He goes on to make a vociferous case for the possibility of belonging anywhere, claiming that one’s citizenship and one’s homeland can be designated by a self-possessed person in a way that birth and circumstance cannot. In true sophistic fashion, Favorinus puts

Moral. 600 D (=De Exilio). Translation adapted from de Lacy and Einarson, LCL (1959). 96 Moral. 600 E-F. 97 I follow here the text and translation of Favorinus’s On Exile offered by Tim Whitmarsh appended to Greek Literature and the Roman Empire. 98 Favorinus, On Exile, 10.1-3. 95

CHAPTER THREE. PAUL’S UNDERSTUDY

155

himself in the spotlight in order to explain how he would comport himself as an exile: If some of the locals will consider me a foreigner and a strange, well, I shall treat them as my fellow citizens, and this land as my fatherland, both in what I say and in what I do. The god, who has repatriated me wherever and in whichever way he has chosen, is a mightier founder of cities, much mightier than... anyone else who gave his name to a tiny part of the world by circumscribing it with walls. I consider a benevolent man much closer, in both the political and private senses, than someone who exalts in the name of a clan, phratry and family but proves himself a stranger with his actions: for it is not laws, nor the metic tax, that make men foreigners.99

Here Favorinus introduces a Socratic paradigm into the experience of exile: a philosopher is not an Athenian or a Roman, but a “cosmian” (κόσμιος)—a citizen of the world.100 The philosopher’s account of exile provided a compelling basis for how to belong despite the dislocation imposed by the Roman Empire. However, it exists as a theorized belonging in a largely hypothetical framework—even among those authors who possibly coped with exile themselves, these texts never treat it in the pragmatic and localized ways that would have affected real people. Thus, when Musonius refers to the “society of fellow human beings” which is available everywhere, he conveniently avoids all of the inevitable cultural specifics that would confront the embodied philosophical mind: how does one cope among people who do not speak your language? How should one develop an appetite for unfamiliar food and drink? How does clothing affect the way one is understood by people who find you strange and alien? Each of these questions is central to what it means to “belong.” This literature that taught how to be content as an exile was not actually supposed to prepare one to cope with life in a foreign place; it was a kind of resistance literature that produced 99 Favorinius,

On Exile, 14.1. The Socratic motif also appears in Plutarch (Mor. 601 A) and Musonius Rufus (Lutz, “Musonius Rufus,” 69).

100

156

GAMING GREEKNESS

a disposition that was imbued with a philosophically located selfidentity.101 The increasingly popular Greek prose narratives that began to appear in the 1st and 2nd centuries CE introduced a tactile, if historically distant, sense of the lived realities that faced exiled people. These stories were able to depict the circumstances of exile in more subtle ways, making the necessity of belonging part of the literary conflict. This is nowhere more pronounced than in Chariton’s novel Callirhoe, where the titular heroine becomes an exilic player who undergoes a transformation of belonging when she is brought into a foreign land.102 Chariton narrates the dilemma for the exiled Callirhoe in concrete terminology in which language and the landscape of the story help establish how far she is from home. The text depicts Callirhoe’s feelings as she is preparing to travel with her second husband Dionysius into Persia: As far as Syria and Cilicia, then, Callirhoe found her journey to be manageable: she heard Greek spoken; she could see the sea that led to Syracuse. But when she reached the Euphrates, the threshold of the King’s great empire, beyond which stretches a

The importance of philosophical self-identity is obvious in one instance within the exilic literature where a subject of exile narrates his own experience, which appears in Dio Chrysostom’s On Exile 10-13. He explains that, “after exhorting myself in this way neither to fear or be ashamed of my action, and putting on humble attire and otherwise chastening myself, I proceeded to roam everywhere. And the men whom I met, on catching sight of me, would sometimes call me a tramp and sometimes a beggar, though some did call me a philosopher.” 102 I intentionally refer to Chariton’s novel as Callirhoe in order to emphasize the role of the female protagonist in this text, and in deference to Chariton’s own self-title of the work (cf. 8.8.16). Even so, I will abbreviate the text below as Chaer., in line with SBL style. I follow the Greek text of George Goold (LCL 481), and have benefitted from Goold’s translation as well as the edition of B.P. Reardon (in Collected Ancient Greek Novels, B.P Reardon, ed., 2nd ed. [Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008], 17-124) in making my own translation. 101

CHAPTER THREE. PAUL’S UNDERSTUDY

157

vast continent—then longing for her home and family welled up in her, and she despaired of ever returning again.103

The Euphrates, here, is a boundary that initiates the most extreme experience of exile: behind Callirhoe is the ocean, Greece, and Syracuse, and ahead is Persia and a world that is different in every possible respect. The text focuses on the gravity of the location by pausing with Callirhoe as “she stood on the river bank.”104 Her lament gives full voice to her despair in a way that the philosophical voices in the exilic literature never entertain. She screams against Fortune’s gleeful persecuting of a lonely woman (μιᾶς γυναικὸς προσφιλονεικοῦσα πολέμῳ),105 exclaiming, “for you no longer keep me exiled in Ionia—the land there that you gave me was admittedly foreign, but it was Greek. And I could take great comfort there of living by the sea. Now you are hurling me from my familiar world—I am separated from my own country by the entire world.”106 Callirhoe’s native country is effectively lost to her—she is now an exile of Fortune.107 “Bactra and Susa are from now on, and my tomb,” she exclaims.108 It is at this point, however, the Callirhoe where her circumstances as an exile compel her to steel herself and ingratiate herself to the new land where she now must live. She decides how to belong in the land she must now call home. Because this is a romance, and because it is Callirhoe who is speaking, her beauty and regal aspect is the key to her being received by her new countrypeople. Callirhoe addresses the river, saying, “Only once, Euphrates, will I cross you!”109 The text goes on to narrate her departure with Dionysius and his retinue, as well as the instantaneous success 103 Chaer. 5.1.3 104 Chaer. 5.1.3 105 Chaer. 5.1.4 106 Chaer. 5.1.5

Chaer. 5.1.6. Again, Callirhoe’s distance is conceived of geographically— she is an islander, the daughter of a famous sea captain and now she is distant from any sea. “What ship from Sicily shall I now hope to dock here?” she asks. 108 Chaer. 5.1.7 109 Chaer. 5.1.7 107

158

GAMING GREEKNESS

Callirhoe had being accepted by the unfamiliar people with whom she now lived: With these words she kissed the ground and, boarding the ferry, crossed the river… One community escorted them to the next, and each governor put them into the care of his neighbor. Her beauty won over everyone. The barbarians were encouraged too by the presumption that this woman would acquire great power, so they all eagerly offered gifts or tried in some way to secure her goodwill for the future.110

This narrative emphasizes the role that belonging played in coping with a globalized world—Callirhoe is defined both by the loss (and ultimate return, by the end of the novel) of her home, as well as her ability to cope with the catastrophe of her captivity. What the philosophers saw as an intellectual ideal becomes, in this narrative about Callirhoe, part of living in a land that was not her home. Her courage in the face of a “barbarian” landscape so far from the sea is one of the defining motifs in Chariton’s narrative. Paul as a Civic Virtuoso in the Acts 21-22

Much like Chariton’s novel, the themes of exile permeate the Acts of the Apostles, often in unexpected ways. Paul visits and appeals for friendship in unfamiliar cities, he is denounced by crowds, shipwrecked, and must defend himself in front of Imperial and provincial authorities. Paul’s identity as a wandering and transient figure was part of Paul’s rhetoric in the authentic letters, and it is clear that Paul cultivated an apostolic persona defined by travel and wandering.111 These motifs are only expanded and made more descriptive in 110 Chaer. 5.1.8

Timothy Luckritz Marquis has made a compelling case that wandering was an integral part of Paul’s rhetorical strategy in 1 Corinthians 1-9 in Transient Apostle: Paul, Travel, and the Rhetoric of Empire. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013. He makes the case that Paul evokes “traveling gods and their proclaimers, epic heroes, foreign moralists, famous exiles, and sages contemplating death as a final journey” in order to assuage the Corinthian community’s anxieties about his transient wandering (24).

111

CHAPTER THREE. PAUL’S UNDERSTUDY

159

the globally-conscious and epical Acts narrative—the New Testament text that (perhaps with the exception of the Book of Revelation) is most conscious of Roman power. The exilic themes in the book of Acts differ from the literature considered up to this point in at least one crucial way: Paul is not cast out of his homeland. He is compelled to traverse the world by the message that he was called to preach; Fortune drives Callirhoe and unnamed authorities lay behind the philosopher’s exile, but it is the Holy Spirit that exiles Paul in Acts. It is part of the Holy Spirit’s movement in the world that Paul traverses the Roman world as a φύγας. In Acts 21-22, Paul’s exilic situation comes to a head when he arrives at Jerusalem with an offering from the churches of Asia, only to be captured by Roman authorities after a crowd menaces Paul at the Jerusalem temple. These chapters depict Paul (and by extension his message) as one whose ability to belong transgress the premises of the exilic literature and dismisses the confounding effect that Roman authority had on its elite subjects. 112 Where Musonius Rufus and his followers resisted the compulsion of Roman power by arguing that being an exile liberates one to belong anywhere, Acts depicts circumstances in which Paul could and in fact did belong everywhere. His speech and his message could thus be presented to any audience, and indeed was appropriate to every venue. The narrative circumstances in Acts 21-22 compel Paul to put his civic virtuosity into practice so that he could—like a nimble sophist—face a series of antagonistic audiences to which he must ingratiate himself. In these chapters, the apostle addresses a range of audiences that no ordinary rhetor could imagine confronting, and the range of dispositions he meets are the like that few public speakers could hope to survive.113 The presentation of Paul in these chapters 112 Nasrallah has argued that the early Christian movement, and Paul’s career in particular, is presented in Acts to be an analog of the Roman cultural program in Greece and Asia Minor (Christian Responses to Roman Art and Architecture, 87-118). 113 As this narrative continues, it provides Paul with ample opportunity to speak—a full quarter of the Acts narrative is spent on Paul’s custody and trails when he is in the hands of Roman officials. On the contours of the

160

GAMING GREEKNESS

taps into the exilic discourses discussed above, but it creatively plays with these motifs in order to cast the apostle as the master of his geographical and cultural circumstances. He does not appear in these chapters as a universal “citizen of the world” who is not troubled no matter where he ends up. Instead, Paul achieves a multiform citizenship by comporting himself as a civic virtuoso who can pass himself off concurrently as a faithful Jew, a cultivated Greek, and a native Roman citizen. The globalizing outlook of Acts presupposes that Paul’s Christian message is to be shared with the world, and therefore Paul is made to be, as it were, a perfect exile who is able to belong anywhere—a citizen of the world, to be sure, but also one who can belong among all kinds of people. The question of Paul’s identity is posed early in Acts 21. Much like the narrative in Acts 19, Paul’s presence and message threatens the legitimacy of a city-defining temple.114 The Jerusalem temple has a unique significance within Acts, and Paul presents himself there to placate James and foster goodwill of the Jewish community in Jerusalem. Indeed, the Jewish temple is re-inscribed as an authoritative symbol in Acts 21 for the first time since the conclusion of Stephen’s speech and his martyrdom under Paul’s approving guise in Acts 9:1. The text explicitly notes his appearance and his dutiful attendance at the temple, including his shorn head, his public acts of purification and his offering of a sacrifice.115 Despite the fact that Paul is pressed to do so by zealous Jews in Jerusalem who claim that Paul has taught gentiles to abandon the law of Moses, Paul does not argue about

trial narratives in Acts, see Harry Tajra, The Trial of St. Paul: A Juridical Exegesis of the Second Half of the Acts of the Apostles (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1994). 114 See Tannehill, Narrative Unity, 2: 242; Cunningham, Tribulations, 266. 115 Acts 21:26. Pervo notes that “the historical waters are very murky” with respect to the specifics of Paul’s cultic activity here. Also uncertain is the degree to which it would square with Paul’s established concern for consistency in legal observances with respect to the gospel (cf. Galatians 2: 7-10). However, the text clearly depicts Paul to be sincere in his observance by the ironic scenario of his capture. As Pervo further explains, “Paul will be arrested because of his loyalty and observance” (Acts, 546).

CHAPTER THREE. PAUL’S UNDERSTUDY

161

going along with the rites of purification. He is a good and faithful Jew.116 However, the text does not leave Paul alone in his pious Jewishness. The complexity of Paul’s identities come into play beginning in 21:27-28, when Paul is first seized by Jews who accuse Paul of preaching against the Jews, the Jewish law, and the temple, and defiling the temple by bringing Greeks into it. When the “tribune of the cohort” (τῷ χιλιάρχῳ τῆς σπείρης) responds to the mounting unrest, Paul confronts him: Just as Paul was about to be brought into the barracks, he said to the tribune, ‘May I say something to you?’ The tribune replied, ‘Do you know Greek? Then you are not the Egyptian who recently stirred up a revolt and led the four thousand assassins out into the wilderness?’ Paul replied, ‘I am a Jew, from Tarsus in Cilicia, a citizen of an important city; I beg you, let me speak to the people.’ When he had given him permission, Paul stood on the steps and motioned to the people for silence; and when there was a great hush, he addressed them in the Hebrew language.117

Language and rhetoric intertwine in this passage in order for Paul to introduce the first dimension of his civic virtuosity. Paul is pinned between an irate Jewish crowd and a Greek-speaking Roman tribune, and he proves himself apt to speak to both parties. The apostle has both the credentials and the capacity to appear as a native of Jerusalem and a legitimate Greek citizen. Paul’s circumstances in this narrative are exceptional—the number of Jews in the historical diaspora who could have fulfilled a vow at the Jerusalem temple, addressed a Roman military commander in Greek, and then addressed an irate mob in a Semitic language may have actually been zero. And yet, in this text, Paul’s ambiguous belonging is a given, and it be116 Pervo suggests that the temple, in this passage, clinches the irony of Paul’s situation: “His very presence in that holy place engaged in worship would have served as prima facie evidence against the charges, since the last thing expected of an international enemy of Torah and temple would have been what Paul was doing” (Acts, 550). 117 Acts 21:37-40.

162

GAMING GREEKNESS

comes a boon to his apostolic task. The Acts narrative began with Peter speaking to myriad people from across the whole ancient world who miraculously heard Peter’s message in their own language.118 Twenty chapters later, it is Paul who is addressing Greek-speaking Romans and crowds of Jews, but it is his experience as an exile that allows him to exist natively among Greeks and Jews.119 Paul’s claim to Greekness begins in an assertion about his birth—he proudly proclaims that he is “from Tarsus in Cilicia, and a citizen of that renowned metropolis.”120 But his Jewish bona fides are tied to his subsequent address to the crowd. There is a question as to whether the language in which Paul addresses the crowd is Hebrew or Aramaic. 121 Aramaic was the lingua franca of Syria and its environs, and Pervo notes that the word “Hebrew” (Ἑβραῖος) is frequently used in the New Testament when Aramaic is the language actually cited.122 However, some scholars have argued that the mention of Hebrew is precise and intentional, here and elsewhere in Acts (notably in 1:19).123 This issue is not resolvable based on what is in the text—there are no transliterated phrases or words that clue the reader into which language is meant. If we take the majority text at face value that Ἑβραΐδι signifies the Hebrew language, Acts’ presentation of Paul becomes even more emphatic about his Jewishness. As a speaker 118 Acts 2:5-12. 119 Cf. Pervo, Acts, 550.

Acts 21:39. In this, Paul echoes Dio Chrysostom who called Tarsus the greatest among the cities of Cilicia, and the friend of the Second Caesar (Or. 34; Second Tarsic 7). 121 The long history of this debate, which orbits the question of “Greek” versus “Jewish” communities in the nascent church at Jerusalem touched on in chapter 1, has been thoroughly elucidated by Edmon Gallagher in Hebrew Scripture in Patristic Biblical Theory: Canon, Language, Text (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 123-131. 122 Pervo, Acts, 549. He also notes the variant readings in P74 and A, which render the phrase in v.40 τῇ ιδίᾳ διαλέκτῳ. 123 On this see, John C. Poirier, “The Narrative Role of Semitic Languages in the Book of Acts” FilolNT 16 (2003), 107-116; “The Linguistic Situation in Jewish Palestine in Late Antiquity,” JGRChJ 4 (2007), 55–134; as well as Gallagher, Hebrew Scripture in Patristic Biblical Theory, 124-125 (who builds on Poirier). 120

CHAPTER THREE. PAUL’S UNDERSTUDY

163

of Hebrew, he would have the additional credibility of Torah specialization and a conversance with the emerging rabbinical circles.124 Perhaps more importantly, this would also make Paul a rhetorical innovator in this passage—one who brings Greek genres of oratory together with Hebrew vernacular in order to address a crowd in Jerusalem. If this is the best reading of Acts, Paul appears here as an unmatched intellectual—perhaps one of the most broadly educated individuals in the Roman Empire.125 For the author of Acts to place Paul in a context in which he—a (quite literal) hayseed of the Mediterranean diaspora—returns to Judea speaking in the language of the emerging rabbis at the Jerusalem temple is to make a hard case for the apostle’s Jewishness. And yet, because this case is modeled on Paul’s comportment in the competitive world of 2nd century intellectuals, it adheres to a distinctly Isocratean logic—one in which Jewishness is demonstrated by Paul’s performance of Jewishness through his Hebrew fluency and the content of his speech.126 Throughout Paul’s Semitic-language address, he does much to confirm his belonging among diverse classes of people. However, the temple mob reasserts Paul’s status as an exile by pronouncing the terms of his dismissal: “Up to this point they listened to him, but then they shouted, ‘Away with such a fellow from the earth! For he should not be allowed to live.’“127 It is at this point that the tribune 124 I am indebted to Jeremy Hultin for focusing my attention on this textual issue and suggesting the importance of Hebrew as a language that granted Paul a specific credibility around the Torah. 125 The influence of and/or employment of Greek rhetorical forms and genres of public speaking in languages other than Greek and Latin (where a developed pedagogical system among elites in Latin was deeply rooted) is, in my mind, a crucial area of further study. As we shall see in the discussion of 4 Macc later in this study, this is not the only text that puts polished Greek words in the mouths of speakers who are supposed to be speaking in Hebrew. When and if these forms of rhetorical performance bore on spoken Aramaic, Hebrew, Syriac or Coptic (among other languages) is an important question to consider in the aftermath of the sophistic movement. 126 Contrast the ritual, tribal and sectarian claims made by Paul himself about his Jewish bona fides in Philippians 3:5-6. 127 Acts 22:22.

164

GAMING GREEKNESS

takes Paul into custody and orders that he be questioned and flogged. Paul—the faithful Jew, and well-born Greek—then introduces yet another dimension to his belonging in the prism of imperial society. Paul begins by asking another polite question: “But when they had tied him up with thongs, Paul said to the centurion who was standing by, ‘Is it legal for you to flog a Roman citizen who is not condemned?’“128 It is not accidental that the flourish of the mob’s aggression in front of the temple provides the occasion for the subject of Roman legitimacy to enter again into the text. Just as in Acts 19, Roman control of Jerusalem is founded upon the orderliness of the city. Before Paul is sent up the ladder to higher authorities, the text continues: “When the centurion heard that [Paul was a Roman citizen], he went to the tribune and said to him, ‘What are you about to do? This man is a Roman citizen.’ The tribune came and asked Paul, ‘Tell me, are you a Roman citizen?’ And he said, ‘Yes.’“129 There is a crafted, narrative absurdity to this situation. These are the same soldiers and the same tribune who learned of Paul’s Greekness and his origins in Tarsus, and now they learn that he is also a Roman—and more than that, he was born so. The extraordinary circumstances of Paul’s citizenship are made clear by the tribune’s response: “The tribune answered, ‘It cost me a large sum of money to get my citizenship.’ Paul said, ‘But I was born a citizen.’“130 The value of Paul’s Romanness appears in the tribune’s explicit acknowledgement of the monetary cost that the tribune had paid, but it is also made clear in the force that Paul’s statement has to his Roman captors: “Immediately those who were about to examine him drew back from him; and the tribune also was afraid, for he realized that Paul was a Roman citizen and that he had bound him.”131 There is an intriguing reversal here where the terror of being subjected to Roman justice reflects back on the tribune and centurion. The implication is that Paul, and his message, need not fear—for both belong in the Empire.

128 Acts 22:25. 129 Acts 22:26-27. 130 Acts 22:28. 131 Acts 22:29.

CHAPTER THREE. PAUL’S UNDERSTUDY

165

***** It has become a truism among scholars of the early Roman world to accept that the identities of Roman subjects were nearly always multi-faceted, ambiguous, and overlapping. Roman authority had a profound effect on the way that national and ethnic belonging could be understood. In a literary text like the Acts of the Apostles we see these dynamics at play in an arena of Greek intellectual discourse that is premised on the ability to establish the circumstances in which those identities are crystalized. Paul seems to belong everywhere in this text, and more than that he seems to hail from everywhere. These are epical traits that Paul embodies, and the supreme virtuosity of his comportment among the diverse audiences and circumstances of Acts 21-22 puts him in the company of an exceptionally elite group of literary figures. Paul’s association with Greekness is thus almost a default part of Acts’ characterization of the apostle, for it is only Greek culture that had permeated the contours of the Roman landscape in a way that could provide a model for the almost inconceivable scope of his global mission. Paul is necessarily a Greek cultural virtuoso in this text because the resources of Greekness were the only ones suited to aiding an apostle who would lecture in Ephesus, talk down a mob in Jerusalem, engage with Roman military leaders and, beyond Acts 22, entreat Roman governors, Herodian client kings, and even the emperor of Rome himself. If philosophers had defined the usefulness of an exile’s self-identity, and if Callirhoe demonstrates how to pull off an exile’s insinuation into a new social landscape, then Paul in Acts somehow perfects the ability to belong everywhere he finds himself, even as he constantly hails from elsewhere.

V.

CONCLUSION

In her study of 1 Corinthians and the interpretive tradition that developed around Paul’s epistles, Margaret Mitchell cautions against trying to find method in Paul’s competitive madness. She remarks, “The agonistic apostle was the inaugurator of an early Christian exegetical tradition that would embody and explicitly claim him as its exemplar for the agônes lying ahead… his example, because it was rooted in tactical needs in shifting exigencies rather than in an abstract linguistic or interpretive theory, would always (and expedi-

166

GAMING GREEKNESS

tiously) defy complete systematization.”132 This identification of Paul as an ἀγῶνης—and moreover an ἀγῶνης who responded tactically to the local circumstances of his apostolic mission—helpfully roots Pauline rhetoric in specific, strategic concerns that affected particular ecclesial communities. But while Mitchell turns to the meaning of Paul’s particular strategies as they are interpreted by later readers of Paul, it is fruitful to pause at this intermediate layer in the Pauline tradition when Paul’s tactician sense was redeployed by nameless early Christian intellectuals who did not precisely interpret Paul so much as reintroduce his strategic visage into a new and complex cultural situation. The Pastoral recasting of Paul, along with the narratively conceived Paul in Acts, develop the competitive sharpness of his letters and expands it to fill a greater space than the more localized audience to which the “historical” Paul appealed. This second Paul speaks at once to Timothy as well as to an entire early Christian constituency that, as we shall see, continued to be competed over by teachers and would-be authorities of various stripes. In the process, the pseudepigraphers and literary voices that stand behind the Pastoral Epistles and the Acts of the Apostles relocate Paul within the contentious intellectual arenas of the 2nd century, depicting Paul to be an intellectual player on the field of cultural Greekness. The Paul who appears in Acts and the Pastoral Epistles is also instructive in another sense. These renditions of Paul are not the result of personal habitus or a cultivated cultural personality that derived from an education in elite, sophistic-style Greekness. The characterizations of Paul and his words in these texts are, instead, the result of strategic decisions made by later followers of the Pauline tradition that were just as tactical and local as those of Paul himself. The ways in which Paul is portrayed to compete for Greekness in these texts demonstrates how variable and subtle this kind of competition could be. The Pastor does not take aim at philosophers, but appropriates agonistic motifs that animated their own competition with one another. The Paul in Acts and in the Pastorals sets himself 132 Paul, the Corinthians and the Birth of Christian Hermeneutics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 11-12.

CHAPTER THREE. PAUL’S UNDERSTUDY

167

against popular cults and magic, thus implicitly aligning himself with rationalistic philosophers and Roman authorities who were wary of the insincere manipulation of cities by charlatans and opportunists. And the Paul who returns to Jerusalem in Acts does so in a way that answers questions that philosophers did not necessarily think to ask—how does one’s self-sufficiency cope with the pragmatic realities of being a “citizen of the world”? All of these characterizations constitute ways of competing for Greekness because in the imperial Roman world, Greekness served as a gateway for legitimacy— political, social, cultural, and also intellectual. The competition at issue in these renderings of Paul is part of a long-term strategy—an incremental, associative, collaborative and emphatically non zerosum maneuver by which Paul was transformed into a global entity who spoke in the parlance of philosophers, stood against traditional temple authorities and skillfully traversed the span of the Roman Empire, consorting with kings and procurators all the while. That Paul does so in these texts is the result of a competitive claim on Greekness that lies behind the diverse portrayals of the apostle in these texts. Greekness and its social value in the Roman Empire is what brings these disparate characterizations of Paul together and grants the resulting figure and his message social prestige and legitimacy. In this way, Paul’s characterization in this literature models the kinds of cultural competition that will also be evident in the remaining texts considered in this study—often subtle strategies that were frequently developed with an eye on one’s audiences, and always concerned with the legitimacy granted by claiming Greekness.

CHAPTER FOUR. PIETY AND PAIDEIA: JEWS DYING LIKE GREEKS IN FRONT OF ROMANS IN 4 MACCABEES

“Alla fin del gioco tanto va nel sacco il Re quanto la pedina.” – Italian Proverb

I.

INTRODUCTION

4 Maccabees is an outlier among Jewish texts from the imperial period. A full quarter of its vocabulary is absent from the rest of the Septuagint, and it shares only a tenth of its words with the apocryphal and pseudepigraphic corpus with which it is linked in the manuscript tradition.1 The vocabulary it does use resonates with the rhetorical contexts of pepaideumenoi and other Greek-speaking intellectuals from the Eastern Mediterranean. It is also singular among other texts associated with the Biblical tradition. While it is regarded as deutero-canonical among certain Eastern Orthodox traditions, for centuries Josephus was its presumed author.2 4 Maccabees recounts 1 Jan W. van Henten, The Maccabean Martyrs as Saviours of the Jewish People: A Study of 2 and 4 Maccabees (Leiden: Brill, 1997), 58-59. For an overview of the manuscript tradition, see Van Henten Maccabean Martyrs 58-59, fn.3, and David deSilva, 4 Maccabees: Introduction and Commentary on the Greek Text in Codex Sinaiticus (Leiden: Brill, 2006.) 2 Eusebius, Hist. Eccl. 3.10.6. Cf. Philostorgius Hist. Eccl. 1.1; Jerome Vir Ill. 13; Suda 2.655.4-6. See also, Hans Josef-Klauck, “Hellenistische Rhetorik im Disaporajudentum: Das Exordium des Vierten Makkabäerbuchs (4 Makk

169

170

GAMING GREEKNESS

the narrative of the “Maccabean martyrs”, but never engages the Maccabees themselves or the subsequent struggle for Jewish independence from Seleucid control of Judea. Moreover, despite its sophistication as a piece of Greek-language, Jewish literature, it adopts a posture of intense religious exclusivity.3 True to its outlier status, there is little certainty about the context and date of its writing, and debates over its author and date fill the critical literature.4 The text 1.1-12),” NTS 35 (1989), 451-465. “4 Maccabees” is not the only name given to the text; Eusebius gives it the title “On the Supremacy of Reason” when he attributes it to Josephus (Περί αὐτοκράτορος λογισμοῦ (History of the Church 3.10.6.) See David deSilva, 4 Maccabees, 14, and Hugh Anderson, “4 Maccabees (First Century AD): A New Translation and Introduction,” in OTP (vol. 2), James H. Charlesworth, ed., (New Haven, CT: Yale, 1985): 53164.) Josephus’s authorship is not taken seriously by modern commentators. 3 See especially David deSilva, 4 Maccabees, (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1998), 11-32, as well as John M.G. Barclay, Jews in the Mediterranean Diaspora: From Alexander to Trajan, 323 BCE – 117 CE. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 369-80. 4 Claims about 4 Maccabees’ date, author, and genre are almost entirely speculative, and are largely based in characterizations of the text. While scholars have posed dates ranging from late 1st century BCE to the mid 2nd century CE, there has been no uniform consensus. Speculation about the date and background of the author has tended to attach to questions about its genre. In brief, Hans-Josef Klauk (4 Makkabäerbuch, [Gütersloh: Mohn, 1989], 659) suggests that it is best classified as an epideictic speech, but David deSilva (4 Maccabees, 76-126) gives compelling evidence that it contains elements of encomiastic and protreptic elements as well. At one time prevailing opinion agreed with Elias Bickerman (“The Date of Fourth Maccabees”, in Studies in Jewish and Christian History, 2 vols., rev. ed. [Leiden: Brill, 1976], 1.275-81) that 4 Maccabees could be best dated between 18-54 CE, including Moses Hadas (The Third and Fourth Books of Maccabees, [New York: Harper & Row, 1953], 95-96), Stanley Stowers (“4 Maccabess,” Harper Collins Biblical Commentary, James Mays, ed., [New York: Harper Collins, 2000], 844-855), and Hugh Anderson (“4 Maccabees (First Century AD): A New Translation and Introduction”), and, more recently, David deSilva (4 Maccabees, 18). However, J. Willem Van Henten (“Datierung und Herknuft des Vierten Makkabäerbuches,” in Tradition and Reinterpretation in Jewish and Early Christian Literature: Essays in Honor of Jürgen C.H. Lebram, J. van Henten, et al, eds. [Leiden: Brill, Brill, 1986], 137-145) resuscitated an argument to locate 4 Maccabees in the literary

CHAPTER FOUR. PIETY AND PAIDEIA

171

makes no claim regarding its authorship, but its author’s persona is nonetheless a conspicuous part of 4 Maccabees as a whole.5 4 Maccabees deploys competitive strategies that respond to the ambitious cultural environment of the Imperial East in order to win legitimacy for its underlying claim that the Jewish law is a valid teacher of courage (ἀνδρεία) and personal temperance (φρονῆσις). It thus sits at an unusual cultural intersection where strict Torah observance and Greek rhetorical culture meet in an explicit way. The text negotiates its precarious position and manages its divergent constituencies by using the intellectual resources of Greekness in order to reframe the Jewish heritage around the Maccabean martyrs. The author of this text carefully retells the stories about these martyrs in order to capitalize on the ambitious environment that surrounded cultivating Greek virtues and the role of these virtues in Roman conceptions of manliness and self-control. 4 Maccabees engages with the discourses around martyrdom in order to position these storied, Jewish martyrs within a framework that showcased their disciplined

context of the Second Sophistic, suggested first by Andre Dupont-Sommer (Le Quartrème Livre des Machabées: Introduction, traduction et notes [Paris: Librarie Ancienne Honoré Champion, 1939], 75-81) and Urs Breitenstein [Beobachtungen zu Sprache, Stil und Gedankengut des Vierten Makkabäerbuchs [Basel/Stuttgart: Schwabe, 1978], 173-175). He suggests a date in the early 2nd century CE. John Barclay (Jews in the Mediterranean Diaspora) poses a date a little earlier (just before the 2nd century CE) while Douglas Campbell (The Rhetoric of Righteousness in Romans 3:21-26 [Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1992], 221-228) poses one no earlier than 135 CE. While I will attempt to allow the uncertainties about dating 4 Maccabees to remain, I will speculatively suggest that, conceding to these cultural considerations and read against the larger history of Christian and Jewish communities during the Principate, this text is most coherent in the cultural landscape of the early to mid-2nd century CE. 5 The issue of 4 Maccabees’ authorship is debated throughout the secondary literature. I will speculatively refer to an author primarily to highlight the strategic arrangement of the text. However, it needs to be clearly noted that it is only the remarkable nature of this text and its rhetorical strategy (and not any substantial evidence within the text) that prompts these speculations.

172

GAMING GREEKNESS

courage and put them in comparison to an avatar of non-Roman excess: an immoderate and tyrannical Eastern king.6 4 Maccabees adopts a two-pronged approach to placing Torah observance in a paideutic cultural frame. It taps into the competitiveness that was latent in the genre of rhetorical demonstration (ἐπιδεῖξις), while also addressing Roman anxieties about kingship in order to situate Jewish piety as a legitimate part of the intellectual landscape of the Eastern Empire. 4 Maccabees’ development in this context necessarily entailed appealing to Greek styles of manly comportment and the imperial-political biases of Romans, especially in those places where the text seeks to produce a new claim for the validity of the Jewish law. Rather than consigning the account of the Maccabean martyrs to a distant, pre-Roman past—or even to the historical circumstances of Seleucid influence over the levant—the text reframes the story with an eye to sophistic modes of discourse and Roman values. In doing so, 4 Maccabees expresses a Jewish piety that is, at the same time, a self-conscious expression of cultural Greekness, a zealous defense of the Jewish law and its strictures, and a strategic appeal to Roman ears for the legitimacy of Jews in the imperial order.

II.

REMEMBERING AND RE-MEMBERING: T HE EXORDIUM OF 4 MACCABEES

What makes 4 Maccabees unique among the other examples of paideutically-inclined Jewish and Christian literature is its organization around a martyr narrative. Paideia was at home among military victors and the celebrated feats of ambitious athletes, but it is clear that the tradition represented by 4 Maccabees saw a similar victory in the story of Eleazar, the seven brothers and their mother. Stories of martyrdom are innately compelling because the stakes facing the subjects are of the most extreme kind.7 The telling of these stories is 6 Cf. Daniel Boyarin, Dying

for God: Martyrdom and the Making of Christianity and Judaism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), esp. 93ff. 7 Scholarship on martyrdom in early Christianity has been particularly diverse and multifaceted, illustrating the complexity and cultural importance of these kinds of narrative in the ancient world. W.H.C. Frend’s seminal

CHAPTER FOUR. PIETY AND PAIDEIA

173

therefore imbued with a power that exists in few other literatures, and this power disseminates into cultural memory as these stories are told, and retold. Elizabeth Castelli has suggested that the development of martyrdom narratives was attended by “practices of collective memory.”8 According to Castelli, early Christians engaged and work in English (Martyrdom and Persecution in the Early Church: A Study of a Conflict from the Maccabees to Donatus [Oxford: Blackwell, 1965]), Glen Bowersock, Martyrdom and Rome (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) and Daniel Boyarin, Dying for God: Martyrdom and the Making of Christianity and Judaism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999) have suggested some of the most important lines of inquiry in the study of ancient martyrdom. Castelli’s, Martyrdom and Memory has similarly served to premise many subsequent studies of martyrdom and its literature (Martyrdom and Memory: Early Christian Culture Making [New York: Columbia University Press, 2004]). Others have focused on gender, bodily experience, and the role of martyrdom in early Christian ecclesial culture, including Robert Daly, Christian Sacrifice: The JudeoChristian Background before Origen (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1978); Frederick Klawiter, “The Role of Martyrdom and Persecution in Developing the Priestly Authority of Women in Early Christianity: A Case Study of Montanism,” Church History 49 (1990): 251– 62; Judith Perkins, The Suffering Self: Pain and Narrative Representation in the Early Christian Era (New York: Routledge, 1995); Judith Lieu, Image and Reality: The Jews in the World of the Christians in the Second Century (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1996); Robin Young, “Martyrdom as Exaltation,” in Late Ancient Christianity, Virginia Burrus, ed., (Minneapolis, Minn.: Fortress Press, 2005): 70–92, 293–94; Stephanie Cobb, Dying to Be Men: Gender and Language in Early Christian Martyr Texts (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008); Ramsey MacMullen, The Second Church: Popular Christianity A.D. 200–400. (Atlanta, Ga.: Society of Biblical Literature, 2009). Most recently, Candida Moss’ study of the importance of the imitation of Christ’s suffering in pre-Constantinian martyrologies (The Other Christs: Imitating Jesus in Ancient Christian Ideologies of Martyrdom, [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010]) has drawn attention to the theological orientation of these narratives, while her critical appraisal of the history and historiography of martyrdom (Ancient Christian Martyrdom: Diverse Practices, Theologies, and Traditions, [New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012]) has introduced a new appraisal of the role of variegated, discursively-construed martyrdom in early Christianity. 8 Castelli, Martyrdom and Memory, 4.

174

GAMING GREEKNESS

developed in a “memory work” that served to produce culture—a culture constituted by a “collective memory of the religious suffering of others.”9 Her analysis of early Christian martyr stories illustrates the generative, identity-making function of remembering that “did not simply preserve the story of persecution and martyrdom but, in fact, created it.”10 The question of whether Jews also participated in the culturemaking of early martyrologies alongside Christians is remarkably controversial. Christian literature dominates the genre of martyrdom, and narratives about Jewish or “pagan” martyrs have at been sidelined for being much earlier, much later, or simply different.11 9 Castelli, Martyrdom

and Memory, 4. Castelli, Martyrdom and Memory, 25. Emphasis original. The question of whether Jews also participated in the culture-making of early martyrologies alongside Christians is remarkably controversial. Christian literature dominates the genre of martyrdom, and narratives about Jewish or “pagan” martyrs have at been sidelined for being much earlier, much later, or simply entirely different. W.H.C Frend in his lengthy study on martyrdom claims that Christianity derived its martyrological tradition from Judaism, but that early Christianity “prolongs and supersedes” the Jewish tradition” (W.H.C. Frend, Martyrdom and Persecution, 133-154.) On the other hand, Glen Bowersock presents a bold thesis, claiming that martyr narratives, while fostered in the broad context of the Roman world, are a singularly Christian phenomenon. He delineates martyrdom as a phenomenon of voluntary death and claims, “there is no reason to think that anyone displayed anything comparable to martyrdom before the Christians” (Martrydom and Rome [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995], 1-5.) This trajectory of scholarship from Frend to Bowersock to Boyarin bears importantly on 4 Maccabees because of its exceptional situation as a Jewish martyrdom account that is, nonetheless, situated in the imperial world. By and large, scholarship on martyrdom literature more generally does not incorporate 4 Maccabees into its analysis; Frend, Bowersock, and Boyarin engage with it prominently, and each in different ways. 11 W.H.C Frend in his lengthy study on martyrdom claims that Christianity derived its martyrological tradition from Judaism, but that early Christianity “prolongs and supersedes” the Jewish tradition” (W.H.C. Frend, Martyrdom and Persecution, 133-154.) On the other hand, Glen Bowersock presents a bold thesis, claiming that martyr narratives, while fostered in the broad context of the Roman world, are a singularly Christian phenomenon. He delineates martyrdom as a phenomenon of voluntary death and claims, 10

CHAPTER FOUR. PIETY AND PAIDEIA

175

Daniel Boyarin denies the implication that Judaism and Christianity represent two separate entities and insists that it is meaningless to speak of one (as opposed to the other) as the origin point for the practice of martyrology.12 Instead, Boyarin conceptualizes the development of the discourse of martyrdom as, “part and parcel of the process of the making of Judaism and Christianity as distinct entities.”13 In place of a segregated approach to Christian and Jewish martyr narratives, Boyarin posits that the “literary form” of martyrdom is at the center of a developing discourse in late antiquity (i.e., after the advent of imperial Rome.) Boyarin remarks that there have always been deaths under oppression, but that the “interpretation and reinterpretation of these deaths as martyrdom is a specific discourse.”14 The discourse of martyrdom is recursive; thematic exchanges constantly moved among various Jewish and Christian communities in antiquity. Boyarin describes that: “there is no reason to think that anyone displayed anything comparable to martyrdom before the Christians” (Martrydom and Rome [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995], 1-5.) 12 Boyarin, Dying for God, 93. 13 Boyarin, Dying for God, 93. This argument is developed fully in his study, Border Lines: The Partition of Judeo-Christianity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006). This trajectory of scholarship from Frend to Bowersock to Boyarin bears importantly on 4 Maccabees because of its exceptional situation as a Jewish martyrdom account that is, nonetheless, situated in the imperial world. By and large, scholarship on martyrdom literature more generally does not incorporate 4 Maccabees into its analysis; Frend, Bowersock, and Boyarin engage with it prominently. Boyarin takes Frend’s study as a paradigmatic example of a “thoroughgoing supercessionist theology” that affects his historiographic conclusions, leading him to misidentify the emergence of Rabbinical Judaism as “late-Judaism,” presume on the historical reliability of late-sources for earlier events (though not necessarily when dealing with classical Greek or Roman sources,) and to overestimate evidence for Jews and pagans uniting against Christians (Dying for God, 127-30.) Boyarin consistently employs a fuzzy-logic in considering the definitions of cultures in the ancient world, but his focus tends to be on how those boundaries are imagined for so-termed Jews and Christians, but he is largely content to leave the “Graeco-Roman” world as a vaguely universal backdrop. 14 Boyarin, Dying for God, 116.

176

GAMING GREEKNESS This allows for a complicated, nuanced, historical account of how Jewish, Greek, and Roman cultural elements became creatively combined into late antique martyrology. We must think of circulating and recirculating motifs, themes, and religious ideas in the making of martyrdom, a recirculation that allows for no simple litany of origins and influence.15

Moreover, as Boyarin depicts it, this new discourse was not a cultural backdrop common to both Christian and Jews negotiating their nascent faiths in antiquity. Rather, the narratives helped produce a “moment of identification” for the hearer, and thus served the “production of a ‘cult of martyrs’ as a fundamental constituent in the making of the ‘new’ religions of Christianity and rabbinic Judaism.”16 Even so, Boyarin’s portrayal still presupposes a background of “cultural elements” that are available to early Christian and Jewish martyr narrators. The “Graeco-Roman” context recurs as a contributor to the makeup of the discourse, but it does not factor prominently in how Boyarin narrates the formation of the “new” religions toward which he is pointing. He evokes this larger context when he calls into question the model of historical relations presented by Glen Bowersock.17 Boyarin suggests that there is more than the construal of Jewish and Christian borders at stake when he remarks, “by posing the issue in the way that he does, Bowersock is re-inscribing a phenomenological boundary between Jews and Christians, a sort of pure Christianity, pure Judaism, and indeed pure GrecoRomanness.”18 Thus, the discussion that follows here emerges in light of Boyarin’s critique: how should we understand the way Greek and Roman culture contributed to the development of the discourse of martyrdom, and to 4 Maccabees in particular, without reinscribing the boundary that has separated Christianity and Judaism?

15 Boyarin, Dying

for God, 118. for God, 109. 17 Cf. Bowersock, Martyrdom and Rome, 1-23. 18 Boyarin, Dying for God, 96. 16 Boyarin, Dying

CHAPTER FOUR. PIETY AND PAIDEIA

177

Demonstrating Martyrs

The mechanisms for cultivating paideia and imbuing Greekness with value as cultural capital help explain how 4 Maccabees endows the narrative of the martyrs with its discursive power. The narrative of the martyrs is told through the peculiar refraction of paideia as it was valued within the urban landscape of the Roman-occupied Eastern Mediterranean. The highly rhetorical form of the text makes its engagement with Greek intellectual culture especially obvious. It is at play from the very outset in the text’s classical exordium (Gk. προοίμιον; Lt. principium, pro(h)oemium). This overture links holiness, philosophy, and rhetoric explicitly from the outset: “I am about to present (ἐπιδείκνυσθαι) an argument that is most philosophical: that pious reason is sovereign over the emotions. I would rightly advise (συμβουλεύσαιμι) you in order that you may attend earnestly to philosophy.”19 For anyone producing a formal piece of rhetoric, much depended on the success of this initial oratorical volley. Cicero advised that the purpose of an exordium is to introduce the substance of the discourse, attract the attention of listeners and obtain their goodwill for the ensuing discourse.20 Especially when presenting a philosophical subject, the exordium had to engage with the speaker, the subject, and the audience, while at the same time presenting the subject without embellishment and concrete details. This forced the orator to walk a narrow line between presenting new material to an audience and making strategic use of their audience’s knowledge to lay out his presentation. 21 4 Maccabees adopts a daring 4 Macc. 1:1. Texts from 4 Maccabees have been translated by me, unless otherwise noted. I have consulted the versions of 4 Maccabees in the NRSV and the NETS and adopted their felicitous renderings when appropriate. 20 Cicero explains that the exordium should confer “benivolum, attentum, [et] docilem” on one’s listeners (De Inv. 1.20). This is echoed in Quintilian Inst. 4.1.5. Cf. Calboli Montefusco, “Exordium,” Brill’s New Pauly. Brill Online, 2013, and Francis Donnelly, “A Function of the Classical Exordium”, Classical Weekly 5 (1911-1912), 204-207. 21 The dictum against embellishment seems to have been a predominantly Roman opinion, stressed in Cicero, De Ora. 124 and Quintilian, Inst. 4.1.55. Klauck points to Aristotle Rhet. 3.14, and remarks that the exordium was short by necessity, and was forged to avoid bold metaphors and agents of 19

178

GAMING GREEKNESS

approach, in this respect by composing its exordium to appeal both to philosophically-attuned listeners and to pious Jews.22 By holding together both strands as mutually constitutive of one another, the argument for one depended on the success of the other.23 The dual focus is signaled in the exordium from the outset. Piety is put center-stage in relief against the broadly Stoic virtues that comprise its vocabulary. Yet, philosophy is granted equal footing as an additional rhetorical thesis that the rhetor will develop. These terms are given scope when the argument goes on to claim that it is essential for all those who seek knowledge (ἀναγκαῖος εἰς ἐπιστήμην παντὶ), especially because it will entail praise of the highest virtue: mindfulness (φρόνησις.)24 At this point in the exordium, the rhetor is careful to put his philosophical allegiances in the foreground and opts to present his discourse as a philosophically rigorous resource for those who “seek knowledge.”25 4 Maccabees mixes its rhetorical pathos carefully, and in this way differed from the concluding peroratio, “where the floodgates of emotional arousal may be opened wide” (“wo alle Schleusen der Affekterregung weit geöffnet werden dürfen” [“Hellenistische Rhetorik im Diasporajudentum,” 456.) 22 Barclay points out that 4 Macc. 13:22 assumes the acquisition of both Greek παιδεία and training in the Jewish law, speculating that “our author appears to have suspected that educated Jews would find their Jewish loyalties difficult to maintain” (Jews in the Mediterranean Diaspora, 380.) 23 de Silva notes that, “the distinctive note of 4 Maccabees’ statement of the thesis is, of course, the addition of the adjective ‘devout’ or ‘pious’ (eusebês) to the faculty of ‘reason’ (logismos)… The author chooses logismos ‘reasoning’ (already used by Stoics in direct opposition to thumos, ‘passion’), rather than the philosophically loaded term logos (‘the divine mind’). The epithet ‘devout’ qualifies the sort of ‘reasoning’ that masters the passions and makes possible a virtuous, noble, praiseworthy life. While the point is not developed here, the use of this adjective allowed the author over the course of the discourse to link ‘Torah-observance’ and ‘living virtuously’ closely together” (4 Maccabees, 54). 24 4 Macc. 1.2. “λέγω δὴ φρονήσεως.” 25 Scholars have debated what rhetorical genre best characterizes 4 Maccabees. While the text clearly draws from epideictic motifs, it does not fit the epideictic label precisely, and evidencing elements of other classical forms: those of deliberative (συμβουλεύσις), epideictic (ἐπιδείξις), and judicial (ἀμφισβήτησις) rhetoric (Aristotle, Ars Rhet. 2.18.2 [1391b]).

CHAPTER FOUR. PIETY AND PAIDEIA

179

types from the very beginning, so that the author will demonstrate (ἐπιδείκνυσθαι) his argument while simultaneously advising (συμβουλεύσαιμι) his listeners. Strict rhetorical theorists would have found this kind of mixture indelicate, and it may have been seen as evidence of an inexpert hand. However, this amalgamation of forms serves a rhetorical purpose. This epideictic presentation introduces the dynamic of piety, and the deliberative appeal stresses the text’s philosophical commitment. By mixing two rhetorical forms, 4 Maccabees portrays a generative, philosophically-attuned piety as the basis for an ἐπιδεῖξις—giving further indication that these crossed rhetorical modes correspond to the author’s double commitment to Torah-piety and philosophy.26 4 Maccabees is a rhetoricallyorganized discourse, but in resisting the strictures of rhetorical forms and mixing of motifs it is able to strategically innovate new modes of expressing a Torah-centered piety. The text goes further by presenting its narrative subjects making their own epideictic presentation, thereby adding a further rhetorical dimension. For example, the author adopts a typical declamatory trope supporting one’s proposition based on the character of one’s subjects: “but I may prove (ἀποδείξαιμι) this best from the noble courage (ἀνδραγαθίας) of those who died on behalf of virtue – Eleazar, the seven brothers, and their mother.”27 However, the subject accomplishing the declamation shifts from the author to that of the martyrs: “For all these despising suffering till death displayed in Klauck posits that the epideictic element – and specifically a praiseepideictic (ἐπαίνος in 5:2, 10) – is dominant throughout, but that no specific genre designation describes 4 Maccabees completely; even his appraisal only accounts for aspects or parts of the total work. Klauck notes, “in allen weiteren Fällen geht die Anwendung bestimmter Gattungstermini auf 4 Macc nicht glatt auf, sie erreicht immer nur bestimmte Aspekte oder Teile des Ganzen” (“Hellenistische Rhetorik im Diasporajudentum,” 457). He goes on to claim that the best generic category to attach to this text is that of the epitaph speech (Grabrede.) Epidecitic, by the imperial period, was seen as primarily a means to express praise or blame, though Aristotle had signified this in his own description of epideictic (Ars Rhet. 1.9.28-29 [1367a-b].) This was more strictly codified in late antiquity (cf. Men. Rhet., 331.) 27 4 Macc. 1:8. 26

180

GAMING GREEKNESS

themselves (ἐπεδείξαντο) that reason has full command of the emotions (τῶν παθῶν).”28 The middle voice of ἐπεδείξαντο indicates that the martyrs themselves will embody in themselves the demonstration that 4 Maccabees has introduced in the exordium. The author sets up a double demonstration: that of the author’s own rhetorical prowess and that of the agonistic demonstration of the martyrs, who are portrayed as reasoned masters of the emotions, and exemplars of the highest virtues of courage and temperance. 29 Paideia and Piety

In its exordium, 4 Maccabees initiates an ingenious rhetorical strategy that serves to magnify the force of the argument developed in the text by drawing on the most potent non-Greek elements available to a sophisticated Jewish rhetor—the piety of faithful Jews. How an author was able to draw from both of these cultural strands is a question that bears deeply on how to understand the varieties of Judaism and Christianity that emerged in the early imperial world. The text of 4 Maccabees clearly taps into this model of rhetorical sophistication, however the anonymity of its author makes it difficult to speculate on his educational background, and so conclusions about the author can only be drawn from the text’s stylistic components.30 For all of the uncertainty about the situation of 4 Maccabees’ composition, it relies on a particularly undissembled expression of Greekness, exhibiting genres drawn from school-room rhetoric, drawing on an admixture of philosophy and rhetoric, and resonating 28 4 Macc. 1:9.

The convergence of the rhetorical demonstration and the narrative demonstration is made explicit in 4 Macc 3:19: “The present occasion now invites us to a demonstration (ἀπόδειξιν) of self-controlling reason.” The ἀποδεῖξις is both the λόγος delivered by the author as well as its narrative subject. 30 I follow the scholarship on 4 Maccabees in referring to this anonymous author as a man. The stylistics associated with Greek sophistic culture and certainly the role of cultivating Greekness considered here were conceptualized in exclusively masculine terms, which certainly would have been presumed of the author of this text. However, this does not make the designation any less speculative. 29

CHAPTER FOUR. PIETY AND PAIDEIA

181

with the widespread use by non-Greeks of Greek cultural resources to situate their respective heritages.31 However, there are dimensions of the text that do not accord with Greek rhetorical sophistication. 4 Maccabees does not imitate the highest order of rhetorical style evidenced elsewhere by more storied orators, nor does the text always use the rhetorical forms it adopts in sophisticated ways. Similarly, it does not evidence the hyper-sensitivity of imitating Attic grammar and classical modes of expression that appears in other 2nd century authors and manuals of style. Even so, the author claims rhetorical authority for himself, and aspires to a sophisticated intellectual and linguistic exposition that clearly is informed by rhetorical education. 4 Maccabees and its author are part of the imperial Greek world, but the simple fact of this text’s appeal to Greek cultural resources does not comprise its competitive posture. The strategies of opposition in this text are those that it engages through the employ31 The author

has a high degree of facility with the language, and the style of 4 Maccabees employs stylistic conventions that are unparalleled in any canonical or deutero-canonical texts of the New Testament or the Septuagint (deSilva, 4 Maccabees, 12-13). Breitenstein points to the use of the optative, compound vocabulary, and complex constructions as distinctive stylistic components (Beobachtungen zu Sprache, Stil und Gedankengut des Vierten Makkabäerbuchs, 177-178). Moreover, as deSilva stresses, the text strongly indicates that its author underwent the rhetorical training that is characterized by the progymnasmatic exercises used in ancient rhetorical schools, and even uses these to categorize the work itself (de Silva, 4 Maccabees, 13). Van Henten goes so far as to argue that the rhetorical training evidenced by 4 Maccabees suggests that the author was educated in the ephebate (Van Henten, “Datierung und Herkunft,” 146). David deSilva considers this claim and suggests that it is more likely that the author’s Greek skills could have derived from Jewish masters, though as a conclusion about Jewish involvement in Greek education it simply defers the question (4 Maccabees, 13). Remarkably no scholarship has attempted to argue that the author of this text could have been a Greek-trained convert to Judaism. In any case, however the Greek educational model was given to the author of 4 Maccabees, it would necessarily have entailed an awareness of pagan sources. Theresa Morgan helpfully notes that, “education is always education for something… It stands in intriguing relation to literary culture because the largest single component of its literate side was the reading of Greek or Latin authors” (Literate Education, 4).

182

GAMING GREEKNESS

ment of these formal rhetorical modes. They are evident in how this text uses its paideutic sophistication to re-tell the story of the Maccabean martyrs. 4 Maccabees participates in the competitive environment of paideia not by simply being Greek, but by exploiting the resources of imperial Greek culture to portray the legitimacy of the “pious reason” of Jews. Van Henten suggests that the purpose of the exordium is capturing this relationship between paideia and piety: In the exordium of 4 Maccabees (1:1-12) the proposition concerning the autonomy of devout reason and the subject of martyrdom are closely related. How should we interpret this connection? 4 Macc. 3:19 offers us a clue: ‘this moment now invites us to a narrative demonstration of temperate reason.’ The author indicates in this way that he is moving on to the next part of his discourse: the demonstration of his thesis by the telling of a history. The martyr stories form the basis of this narrative.32

As the anonymous author makes clear, this text will also draw on its own historical exemplars in order to make its case for the efficacy of Jewish piety as a philosophical mode of life. But to do so by reference to a group of faithful Jewish heroes who were killed at the hands of a tyrannical Greek king (and historical enemy of Rome) required more than an imitation of Greek sources. It entailed a reshaping of Greek modes of expression into another discourse altogether: one that was not precisely Greek, but also not entirely nonGreek, either.

III. “SOVEREIGN OVER THE EMOTIONS”: ELEAZAR ’S DOUBLE Ἐπιδεῖξις AND PAIDEUTIC MANLINESS The scheme of the martyr narratives in 4 Maccabees draws from elements of philosophical demonstration as well as rhetorical encomium to present Jewish piety as a valid and reasonable mode of life. The strategic composition of the text, especially in the depiction of Eleazar as a model of martyrdom, enables how 4 Maccabees to make a competitive claim for the legitimacy of Jewish piety by drawing on 32 Van Henten, Maccabean

Martyrs, 69-70.

CHAPTER FOUR. PIETY AND PAIDEIA

183

the Greek cultural resources available in this koine intellectual culture.33 In the narrative, Eleazar faces off against the Greek king Antiochus as his philosophical, rhetorical, and religious competitor.34 In order to restage this martyrological tradition in these terms, the author’s philosophical ἐπιδεῖξις must be fashioned into a narrative demonstration wherein Eleazar defends and embodies the author’s claim about pious reasoning.35 To achieve this, Eleazar enacts a double- ἐπιδεῖξις in his engagement with Antiochus. He presents a rhetorical demonstration that his fidelity to the law is rational (λογίσμος), while the veracity of his argument is demonstrated through his courageous fortitude during his torture and martyrdom for the sake of the law. 4 Maccabees characterizes Eleazar in this way in order to link Jewish piety with the philosophical virtues of imperial Greek culture that fostered courage, freedom, and frankness of speech. However, to do so, the elderly Eleazar must demonstrate Greek manliness (ἀνδρεία), which, when refracted through the explicitly Jewish and 33 The depictions of the other martyrs have been the subject of numerous critical studies, including including Hans-Josef Klauck, “Brotherly Love in Plutarch and 4 Maccabees” in Greeks, Romans, and Christians: Essays in Honor of Abraham J. Malherbe [D.L. Balch, et al., eds.; Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 1990], 144-156, Stephen Moore and Janice Capel Anderson “Taking it Like a Man: Masculinity in 4 Maccabees” JBL 117.2 (1998): 249-273, and Mary Rose D’Angelo, Ἐυσεβεία: Roman Imperial Family Values and the Sexual Politics of 4 Maccabees and the Pastorals,” BI 11, no. 2 (2003): 139-164). Notably, Eleazar has merited much less specific attention. 34 Antiochus is a central figure throughout the Eleazar narrative in chs. 5-6, however his role in the narrative will be discussed at length in the following section. 35 Judith Butler has pointed to the formative power of language and the way in which speakers are never entirely in control of their own speech. Her insights bear helpfully on understanding how 4 Maccabees appropriates, but is also construed by, Jewish cultural history. In Butler’s terminology, the text can “restage” the narrative of the martyrs, but cannot avoid being limited by and dictated in the terms of language that is not entirely in its author’s control. Butler’s insights helpfully reminds us that, while 4 Maccabees will claim a grandiose self-sovereignty for its narrative subjects, the context of its writing, the cultural and social situation of the author, and the milieu of its audience all dominate and restrict the means of its expression. (Excitable Speech [New York: Routledge, 1997], esp. 1-26.)

184

GAMING GREEKNESS

Christian discourses of martyrdom, meant exemplifying rationality in argument and courage in death. Prosopopoiia and Eleazar’s Rhetorical Ἐπιδεῖξις

Using a historical figure in a rhetorical ἐπιδεῖξις was a literary commonplace in the ancient world. Demonstrative arguments were often put in the mouths of narrative subjects through speeches-incharacter (Gk. προσωποποιία), a rhetorical motif whereby the speaker adopts the voice and circumstances of a narrative figure to personify the character of the speaker.36 This motif was widely used in imperial Greek literature, and was utilized diversely in Jewish literature.37 The appearance in 4 Maccabees of a speech-in-character, which was a central component of the progymnasmatic exercises that comprised Greek rhetorical education, lends a sense of schoolroom Greek παιδεία to the narrative.38 However, there is another dimension to this portrayal of Eleazar’s speech. Successful speeches-in-character required the speaker to portray the subject in plausible and authentic terms. An author or rhetor might be able to subtly embellish the particulars of an imagined speaker’s discourse, but it would have to reflect authentically with how the speaker was understood. Quintilian writes of the form that:

On the use of speech-in-character see, George Kennedy, A New History of Classical Rhetoric (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), esp. 201-208, Heinrich Lausberg Handbook of Literary Rhetoric: A Handbook for Literary Study, David Orten and Dean Anderson, eds. (Leiden: Brill, 1998), 367-369. On the relevance of this form for the study of Biblical texts, see George Kennedy New Testament Interpretation through Rhetorical Criticism (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1984) as well as Stanley Stowers, A Re-Reading of Romans: Justice, Jews, and Gentiles (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), 16-21. 37 Cf. Sirach 24, where the narrator portrays Wisdom as a speaker exclaiming her own majesty. 38 This is corroborated by the somewhat abortive use of ekphratic description of the Maccabean memorial grave in 4 Macc. 17:7-10. The grave is not ekphratically described, but the phrase “paint the history of your piety” (ζωγραφῆσαι τὴν τῆς εὐσεβείας σου ἱστορίαν) signals that the intent of the passage is ekphratic. See discussion below. 36

CHAPTER FOUR. PIETY AND PAIDEIA

185

Impersonations, or προσωποποιία... These both vary and animate a speech to a remarkable degree. We use them to display the inner thoughts of our opponents as though they were talking to themselves (but they are credible only if we imagine them saying what it is not absurd for them to have thought!), to introduce conversations between ourselves and others, or of others among themselves, in a credible manner, and to provide appropriate characters for words of advice, reproach, complaint, praise, or pity. We are even allowed in this form of speech to bring down the gods from heaven or raise the dead; cities and nations even acquire a voice.39

A speech-in-character forced an orator to present a plausible and reasonable account of the character in question, but it also provided a unique opportunity to call into speech anyone an orator wished. Eleazar’s age and circumstance make him an ironic character to “raise from the dead.” And yet, 4 Maccabees reincarnates Eleazar with all of his years attached so that he can become the mouth-piece and the bodily instantiation of the author’s ἐπιδεῖξις. This is a skillful rhetorical ploy on the part of the author, and the result is a narrative Inst. 9.2.30-31, LCL 127, Russell (trans.) 4 Maccabees entails a further, historical dimension that makes its employment of prosopopoiia somewhere in between this rhetorical version, and that of histories that, ostensibly, retained the historical dignity and personified the figures in question in a plausible and faithful way. However, this entailed its own deliberate work of revision, making the task of the author one of historical re-collector, who’s task not only had recourse to the restaging that Judith Butler describes, but indeed entailed it as a matter of literary form. Formative in this tradition is the famous exposition on the speeches recorded by Thucydides, where these necessarily reconstructed speeches are nonetheless presumed to be authentic, such that the process of re-expressing them is crucial for their veracity (Pelop. 1.22). Incidentally, this formative passage also showcases the competitive dimension of all such rhetoric, historical or otherwise. Thucydides is not writing a history for a rhetorical contest, but he nonetheless engages in a rhetorical agonism that aims at becoming an “everlasting possession” – a prize for which all prominent historians, both Greek and Roman, aimed. 39

186

GAMING GREEKNESS

that juxtaposes Eleazar’s torture and death with the logic of his (narratively situated) argument, so that the effect of the author’s ἐπιδεῖξις is multiplied. The text, taking its cue from 2 Maccabees, does not shy away from Eleazar’s age and infirmity. Instead, it makes much of how implausible it is for the elderly martyr to represent Jewish manliness. 2 Maccabees 6:18-31 makes Eleazar’s age a touchstone of the narrative, telling how he was compelled to consume swine flesh in order to publicly perform his apostasy as “one of the chief scribes (τις τῶν πρωτευόντων γραμματέων), a man now advanced in age” (6:18). His age endears him to everyone, and even his persecutors urge him to bring food of his own so he can merely pretend to eat the offensive meat, and “so that by making this agreement with them (πράξας) he might be saved from death, and receive clemency (φιλανθρωπίας) because of his old friendship with them” (6:22). Eleazar’s pious commitment is similarly characterized in terms of his age. After “making a witty argument (λογισμὸν ἀστεῖον), worthy of his years and the dignity of his old age, and the gray hairs that he had reached with distinction and his excellent life even from childhood,” he tells his adversaries to send him to Hades (6:23). In 2 Maccabees, Eleazar’s subsequent speech explains that his faithfulness preserves the dignity of his age, and presents an example of faithfulness to successive generations, lest “many of the young might supposed that Eleazar in his ninetieth year had adopted foreign customs (ἀλλοφυλισμὸν).”40 The elderly Eleazar is brave for the sake of the young, and he explains “so now, by exchanging this life 2 Macc. 6:24. The term ἀλλοφυλισμὸν and its cognates are prominent in the Maccabean corpus (cf. 2 Maccabees 4:13 and 4 Maccabees 18:5) as well as the fragmentary corpus of Epicurus, who opposes it to the term to ὁμόφυλος in a discussion of how one ought to best “meet the fear of external foes.” (Rat. Sent. 39 = DL 10.139-154; see also the discussion of Epicurean social ethics in The Hellenistic Philosophies, A.A. Long and D.N. Sedley, eds. 2 vols. [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987], 125-139.) The philosophical context of 2 and 4 Maccabees has long been associated with Stoic thinking, but this lexical echo in a fragmentary corpus suggests that there may be a more complex philosophical dynamic in the Maccabean tradition. See also deSilva’s measured discussion who sees 4 Maccabees emerging from a philosophical koine (4 Maccabees, 51-52). 40

CHAPTER FOUR. PIETY AND PAIDEIA

187

like a man (ἀνδρείως), I will act worthy of my age (γήρως ἄξιος), bequeathing to young men a noble example for happily dying in a zealous and noble way (εἰς τὸ προθύμως καὶ γενναίως) for the revered and holy laws.”41 2 Maccabees does not present Eleazar’s piety as enabling his bravery – in fact his bravery is always expended for the sake of his piety. The significance of Jewish practices are presumed as normative for Jews even as, in the opinion of his adversaries, “the words he had had uttered were senseless (ἀπόνοιαν).”42 2 Maccabees goes on to narrate Eleazar’s torture briefly, but Eleazar’s death again signifies his own faithfulness to God as he exclaims under torture, “in my soul I happily suffer these things because I fear Him.”43 By contrast, 4 Maccabees expands Eleazar’s role as a moral exemplar, but more importantly it fashions an entirely new rhetorical situation for him. By drawing on imperial Greek literary motifs to portray Eleazar’s speech, the text presents a parrhesiastic confrontation between a philosopher and a king. As the instigator of the confrontation with Antiochus, much of the rhetorical burden falls on Eleazar to defend the validity of the Jewish law. Moreover, he has an oratorical opponent who is absent from 2 Maccabees.44 In a crucial shift in the setup of this encounter, Eleazar’s speech is presented against another speechin-character, that of Antiochus himself. 4 Maccabees paints the sce41 2 Macc. 6:27-28. 42 2 Macc. 6:29. 43 2 Macc. 6:30. 44 In 2 Macc. 6:18-31, Eleazar’s death is separated, at least conceptually, from the narrative of the seven sons and their mother in 7:1-42, and while the sacrifice that Eleazar refuses to consume was “commanded by the king” (6:21), the king is not portrayed to be in attendance at his death. In contrast, Antiochus is present when the seven sons and their mother are tortured, and is the instigator of their deaths. Here he is portrayed as an interlocutor with the youngest brother, but he is not given a speaking part, and it is merely described that he “ not only exhorted (τὴν παράκλησιν) [the youngest brother] in argument, but promised with oaths that he would make him rich and enviable (πλουτιεῖν καὶ μακαριστὸν) if he would turn from the laws of his ancestors, and that he would take him for his friend and entrust him with public affairs (φίλον ἕξειν καὶ χρείας ἐμπιστεύσειν; 2 Macc. 7:24).” When his appeal is unsuccessful, he entreats the boy’s mother to advise him to consume the sacrificial meat (2 Macc. 7:25-26).

188

GAMING GREEKNESS

ne, with Antiochus “sitting in state with his counselors on a certain high place, and with his armed soldiers standing around him” (5:1).45 After Eleazar is brought before him, it is Antiochus who attempts to reason with him. Eleazar’s speech begins when he deferentially asks to have a word (λόγον ᾔτησεν). However, in a consummately rhetorical move, Eleazar does not mean to respond to Antiochus’s appeal. Rather, “when he had received permission to speak, he began to address the people (δημηγορεῖν.).”46 Δημηγορέω can pejoratively refer to pandering popular speeches, but most fundamentally it signifies a speech to the gathered assembly. Eleazar functionally transforms the proceeding into something like a synagogue meeting.47 The focus on Antiochus’ tyranny colors Eleazar’s entire speech. He insists that the divine law governs lives and that there is no “violent compulsion” (ἀνάγκη βιαιοτέραν) that can supplant it. 48 Eleazar insists that transgressing the law in any respect is not a small thing. This is because the law teaches “self control (σωφροσύνην), so that we master all pleasures and desires, and it also trains us in courage (ἀνδρείαν), so that we endure any suffering willingly; it instructs us in justice (δικαιοσύνην παιδεύει), so that in all our dealings we act impartially, and it teaches us piety (εὐσέβειαν), so that we worship the only living God in a way befitting his majesty (μεγαλοπρεπῶς).”49 Since it is such a powerful teacher, it is “tyrannical (τυραννικὸν) not only to compel us to transgress the law, but also to eat.”50 Eleazar’s speech presents the law as a philosophical teacher that instructs its adherents in a life of moderation, courage, justice and piety, but moreover it serves to portray Antiochus’ hostility as an immoderate, tyrannical impulse – contrary

45 4 Macc. 5:1. 46 4 Macc. 5:15. 47 It is possible to imagine that this is a synagogue in the literal sense, and is intended to resonate with the possible synagogue setting for which 4 Maccabees was first composed. See, deSilva, 4 Maccabees, 22-23. 48 4 Macc. 5:16. 49 4 Macc. 23-24. 50 4 Macc. 5:27.

CHAPTER FOUR. PIETY AND PAIDEIA

189

to (and implicitly threatened by) the virtues that the Jewish law teaches. Breaking into direct address, Eleazar affirms his devotion in uncompromising terms: “I shall not be false to you, O instructive law (παιδευτὰ νόμε), neither shall I transgress you, O friend self-control! I shall not dishonor you, philosophical Principle! nor shall I reject your honorable priesthood and knowledge of the law.”51 Eleazar’s address conflates the law and philosophical reason, as well as faithfulness and self-control. In Eleazar’s terminology, to speak of one is to speak of the other. These virtues crystallize the author’s purpose in addressing Antiochus: “for you may tyrannize the ungodly, but you shall not dominate (δεσπόσεις) my pious reason, either by words or through actions.”52 Eleazar is clear that it is the paideutic training of the Jewish law that allows him to master his passions, and here he introduces the doubled dimension of his ἐπιδεῖξις: neither the rhetorical words nor the catalyzing deeds of Antiochus will “dominate” his pious reason. Eleazar’s Agonistic Ἐπιδεῖξις

Eleazar is not restricted to speech in order to make his case. In the subsequent narrative the real efficacy of the speech-in-character comes to the fore. Eleazar is able not only to demonstrate the premise of his argument through epideictic speech, but also to performatively embody the supremacy of pious reason over the emotions. Eleazar, quite dramatically, puts his money where his (rhetorical) mouth is. This double–ἐπιδεῖξις on the part of Eleazar establishes his manly Greek bona fides by presenting him as a competitive—even athletic—embodiment of ἀνδρεία on top of his parrhesiastic demonstration of freedom in his confrontation with Antiochus.53 The fluidity 51 4 Macc. 5:34-5. 52 4 Macc. 5:38. 53 Following the work of Robin Darling Young (“The ‘Woman with the Soul of Abraham’: Traditions About the Mother of the Maccabean Martyrs,” in “Women Like This”: New Perspectives on Jewish Women in the Greco-Roman World, Amy-Jill Levine, ed. [Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1991], 67-82) and Brent D. Shaw (“Body/Power/Identity: Passions of the Mar-

190

GAMING GREEKNESS

of performing paideia in both rhetorical and bodily registers became crucial for how Christians and Jews penned and presented the narratives of these performative deaths. According to Castelli, this performative element becomes part of cultivating Greekness for narrators of martyr stories who make competitive claims for legitimacy: As if engaged in a late ancient version of a competitive marketing plan, Christian writers recognized the appeal of the spectacular and sought to lay claim to it in asserting that Christians had athletes, heroic gladiators, and daring spectacles of all sorts to compete with the more quotidian offerings found in urban amphitheaters and on stages.54

Eleazar’s engagement with Antiochus sets up a contest that pits their respective pieties, philosophies and notions of what constitutes mastery against one another on the field of cultural Greekness. When Antiochus begins his own deliberative speech, it is in direct proximity to the act of torture that will test Eleazar’s “pious reason.” Antiochus remarks, “Before I begin to torture you (βασάνων), O venerable man, I would advise these things to you (συμβουλεύσαιμ’ ἄν σοι ταῦτα), so that in the eating of pork you might save yourself.”55 The semantic range of βασάνος is key to this passage. It is germane to two contexts: the extortion of evidence from slaves, which required the tyrs,” JECS 4 [1996], 269-312.) Moore and Anderson call attention to the centrality of manliness in the ideology of 4 Maccabees, and indicate how the text “both subverts and supports the ancient hegemonic construction of masculinity (“Taking It Like a Man.”) 54 Castelli, 117. The spectacular dynamic of martyr narratives is echoed by Brent Shaw: “[4 Maccabees appeals] to existing ideological norms of positive social valuation, especially to ideals of the body derived from contexts of its conscious control and visual deployment—above all, that of the quintessential public display of personal worth through the body: the athletic contest or agôn. By recounting in lurid detail the horrible tortures inflicted on the bodies of Eleazar, and the seven young men, and finally, their mother, the author of Fourth Maccabees places their confrontation with political tyranny within the framework of an athletic contest. He always presumes an audience of onlookers, and assumes that the spectators will be hostile” (“Body/Power/Identity,” 278.) 55 4 Macc. 5:5.

CHAPTER FOUR. PIETY AND PAIDEIA

191

use of torture to be reliable,56 and in describing genuineness among elites in the Roman East, and specifically described a trial of strength that evidenced philosophical virtue. It was especially used to describe those who maintained themselves under the pressure of tyrants. 57 The context of Eleazar’s torture, then, becomes an agonistic trial, and his body becomes the raw material—the sculpted clay itself, or better, the letters, words, and phrases—that make up the demonstration of Jewish piety. As the martyrdom of Eleazar is narrated, the author comments that Eleazar has not only responded to Antiochus, but in fact he “refutes his rhetoric” (ἀντιρρητορεύω) him.58 Similarly, his fortitude refutes the entire scope of Antiochus’ argument and confirms the truthfulness of his own rhetorical demonstration. Each of the physical defeats Eleazar’s body suffers correlates with interior victories. After being stripped of his clothes, Eleazar remains clothed with the “decorousness of his piety” (τῇ περὶ εὐσέβειαν εὐσχημοσύνῆ).59 His torture is as though in a dream, leaving him to turn his eyes toward heaven. His body was unable to stand, but his reason was “straight and unbending” (ὀρθόν καἰ ἀκλινῆ).60 The author presents this picture to forge a simile: “just as a noble athlete (γενναῖος ἀθλητὴς), the old man prevailed over the torturers (ἐνίκα … τοὺς βασανίζοντας) while he was beaten.”61 As Eleazar’s manly athleticism is put on display, he is even victorious over his torturers, who marvel at his noble

56 LSJ III.1. 57 LSJ I-II. Thus, Philostratus begins his discussion of Apollonius of Tyana’s confrontation with the emperor Domitian by noting that, “the conduct of philosophers under despotism is the truest touchstone of their character, and I am in favor of inquiring in what way one man displays more courage than another” (Ap.Tyan. 7.1; Οἶδα καὶ τὰς τυραννίδας, ὡς ἔστιν ἀρίστη βάσανος ἀνδρῶν φιλοσοφούντων, καὶ ξυγχωρῶ σκοπεῖν, ὅ τι ἕκαστος ἑτέρου ἧττον ἢ μᾶλλον ἀνὴρ ἔδοξεν.) 58 4 Macc. 6:1. 59 4 Macc. 6:2. 60 4 Macc. 6:7. 61 4 Macc. 6:10.

192

GAMING GREEKNESS

spirit when they see his face sweating and his violent heaving (ἱδρῶν γέ τοι τὸ πρόσωπον καὶ ἐπασθμαίνων σφοδρῶς.)62 Eleazar presents himself through speech and through action as a Hellenic victor, achieving the nobility and courage exemplified in Greek heritage and prized by Roman elites. In chapter six, the two dimensions of Eleazar’s demonstration intermingle, so that his rational argument and his bodily performance become interdependent. He proclaims, “it will be shameful (αίσχρὸν) if we shall live a little while and become scornfully laughed at for cowardice, and we should be disdained (καταφρονησῶμεν) by the tyrant as unmanly (ἄνανδροι), if we would not contend until death for our divine law.”63 By dying courageously for the sake of the divine law, Eleazar escapes the shame of his death. In avoiding this shame, the legitimacy of Jewish “moral philosophy” is demonstrated. And because this courage was a basis for competition for social legitimacy, his achievement has a notable impact on the role of Jewish piety in Roman society. Eleazar thus affirms predominantly Roman social mores that will make the legitimacy he wins appropriate to the Greekspeaking Eleazar’s embodied holiness, whose form in life and death was that of superior reason. The author concludes the narrative with a reaffirmation of the epideictic force of this narrative: “I have shown (ἐπιδείκνυμι) reason to be master not only of suffering (ἀλγηδόνων), but also to master pleasure and not to give way to them.”64 At this point in the text, the narrative falls away entirely, and the first level rhetorical presentation of the author is reintroduced. The encomium of Eleazar that follows represents a rhetorical flourish as well as a setup for the martyr narratives that follow. The auNote that ἐπασθμαίνω does not necessarily associate with physical labor, and has an intriguing lexical range, and a tendency to show up in scenes of contention. Philostratus the Younger’s describes the image of the infant Heracles contending with the serpents. Observing the child are Tiresias, who is “divinely inspired and breathing out prophecies” (ἔνθεος καὶ μαντικὸν ἐπασθμαίνων), and the goddess Night who puts a light upon herself so that the contest of the child does not go un-witnessed (ὡς μὴ ἀμάρτυρος τοῦ παιδὸς ὁ ἆθλος γένηται [Imag. 4.5]) 63 4 Macc. 6:20-1. 64 4 Macc. 6:35. 62

CHAPTER FOUR. PIETY AND PAIDEIA

193

thor points to this in his later encomium of the mother of the seven sons who, on seeing Eleazar’s torture tells her sons, “O sons, the test (ἀγών) is noble upon which you were called for a testimony of the nation (ὑπὲρ τῆς διαμαρτυρία τοῦ ἔθνους) to fight zealously on behalf of the ancestral law. For it would be shameful: this old man enduring suffering through piety (εὐσέβειαν), but you young men fearing torture.”65 The encomium of Eleazar adopts similar imagery, opting for direct address yet again: “O old man more mighty than torture (βασάνων) … and great king of the emotions Eleazar!”66 Eleazar’s capacity to overcome his emotions comes from his pie67 ty. However the rhetoric of the author’s description centers on manliness through self-mastery in the frail old man. The author proclaims, “Indeed most wondrous, an old man, the firmness of his body already having loosened, his flesh having been made flabby, and his sinews having been enfeebled, he became young in spirit through reason, and with the reason of Isaac he rendered the manyheaded rack ineffective.”68 Eleazar patterns the subsequent narrative with his double-demonstration, and his embodiment of “pious reason” serves to demonstrate the primary argument of the author that “pious reason is sovereign over the emotions.” By restaging the narrative of the Maccabean martyrs, first depicted in 2 Maccabees, the text situates Eleazar as an exemplar of moral virtue who can stand among exceptional Greek philosophers and moralists. As a result, the author of 4 Maccabees stakes a claim for the legitimacy of the Jewish law in terms of Greek cultural expectations.

65 4 Macc. 16:16-7.

4 Macc. 7:10. Eleazar’s description here as “king” is intentionally ironic, and taps into ideologies of kingship that were very much at issue in the imperial period as discussed below. 67 4 Macc. 7:22. 68 4 Macc. 7:13-14. 66

194

GAMING GREEKNESS

IV. T YRANNICAL PASSIONS: ROMAN VALUES, GREEK VIRTUES, AND THE DISCOURSE OF KINGSHIP IN 4 MACCABEES Rome in the imperial period had a kingship dilemma. Republican convictions, especially as they developed a public, propagandistic importance during the 3rd-1st century BCE (and more central still after the assassination of Julius Caesar in 44 BCE), relied on an explicit hostility to kings and kingship. This anxiety rippled across Roman political and social spheres, both as a reason for Rome’s disparagement of its adversaries as well as a reflexive characterization that distinguished Romans as rightful masters of the world because of an innate gift for mastery.69 Vergil had already presented a Roman “right to govern” in the Aeneid; The notion that rule and mastery constituted the arts of Rome signifies the way that the Principate portrayed Roman hegemony—as a responsibility imposed because of a singular aptitude. Roman subjects in the East came to accept this “art to govern,” and they expected Rome to act as the police of kingly power, even as it increasingly adopted a monarchical model of governance. We see this dynamic hilariously exploited at the dawn of Augustan rule in a satire of Horace in which a Roman named Rupilius Rex disputes at court with a Greek named Persius, “when the praetor Brutus ruled opulent Asia” (Bruto praetore tenente ditem Asiam.)70 Persius is a hybrida, perhaps the child of a Roman father and a nonRoman mother, and perhaps of a slave, who is newly wealthy in the city of Clazomenae.71 Characteristically, their rhetorical contest is likened to the struggle of warriors and boxers, and is compared to the 69 Cf. the discussion in chapter 2.

Horace, Sat.1.7. Notably, the nearby city of Teos gives the fullest evidence of the experience of Hellenistic kingship, Roman control, and the subsequent rise of the Imperial cult, exhibiting the adoption of the cult early on in the reign of Augustus Caesar, who was Horace’s contemporary. (Cf., Simon Price, Rituals and Power: The Roman Imperial Cult in Asia Minor [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984], 1-40; 259.) This geographical locale makes for an intriguing place to stage this confrontation regarding Roman expressions of kingship. 70 71

CHAPTER FOUR. PIETY AND PAIDEIA

195

battle of Achilles and Hector. Horace describes them entering the bout: “Rupilius and Persius fight equally (par pugnat)—Bacchius and Bithus were not better matched. They charged into court with vehemence, both a terrific spectacle.”72 In court, Persius plays the Greek sophist perfectly, flattering Brutus in his appeal. Horace describes that, “like a tempestuous flood his words rushed down, spoken with remarkable ease” (ruebat flumen ut hibernum, fertur quo rara securis.) Rupilius is incensed at this and voices salty insults “like a hard-scrabble grape-gatherer” (durus vindemiator et invictus.) This final volley allows for Persius to make a clinching move that capitalizes on Roman kingship anxieties, and Brutus’ reputation as a tyrantkiller: The Greek, Persius, after being sprayed with Italian vinegar, Exclaimed: “Brutus! By the great gods to you I pray, you who plot to destroy kings, why not slay this REX (qui reges consueris tollere, cur non hunc Regem iugulas)? I swear, this what you Romans do (operum hoc, mihi crede, tuorum est)!” Horace’s Satires represent part of a poetic project that capitalizes on the ambiguitas that featured prominently in Augustan literature, whereby “a suggestive latitude within the framework of a clear overall concept” characterized much Augustan literature, from the Res Gestae to the Aeneid.73 Horace portrays not only the ironic scene of a courtroom where an appeal is made to Brutus on his qualifications as a king-killer, but they are made the jesting subject of a Greek’s rebuke of his Roman opponent. The anxiety felt by Romans about the power the empire and the response that Rome’s culturally Greek subjects was an issue that resonated deeply enough for Horace to express it in satire. Romans were established haters of kings and Bacchius and Bithus are an obscure reference. The Scholiast comments that they were two galdiators who were invincible, except for when they were finally matched against one another, at which both were defeated. (Cf. C. Smart and Theodore A. Buckley, eds., The Works of Horace, [New York. Harper & Brothers. 1863.]) 73 Galinsky imagines that Horace has employed this sense to imbue his poems with a “multireferentiality” that allowed speech to conscientiously operate in multiple dimensions, as we surely see it functioning in this satire (Karl Galinsky, Augustan Culture: An Interpretive Introduction [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996], 258). 72

196

GAMING GREEKNESS

kingship, but the amassing of political and geographical power and its centralization within an imperial office brought forth a conceptual disjuncture. If Vergil insists, perhaps idealistically, that ruling and mastery are the arts of Roman culture, Horace wonders, perhaps sardonically, whether it is Rome’s job is simply to exterminate kings. However, contrary to the assessment of some scholars, this hostility to and anxiety about kings was not a native element of Roman culture. Rather, it was the concrete product of the expanding influence that Roman power held over the ancient world, and it was forged as a mechanism for distinction and differentiation that set Roman auctoritas apart from the hegemony of Hellenistic kings and other Eastern overlords. Andrew Erskine rephrases how the sense of Roman aptitude for ruling was mediated through the experience and expression of kingship in the Hellenistic East.74 Erskine acknowledges the traditional account of Roman hatred of the nomen regis, explained in Cicero’s Republic: Rome’s last king was Tarquinius Superbus who, because of his tyranny, was overthrown and exiled. In this telling, Rome became innately hostile to kings from the infancy of the republic and “forever after Romans hated the very idea of kings.”75 Yet, contrary to this usual telling, Erskine suggests that Roman feelings about kingship resulted from engagement with the Greek world and specifically through the republican Roman political and military encounter with Hellenisitic kings in the 2nd century BCE. He suggests that the historical appraisal of pre-republican Roman kings is diverse, with Roman kings being remembered as proud founders as well as domineering tyrants. Moreover, Erskine suggests that preRepublican history is mediated through Greek historiographic traditions, so that the portrayals of kingship in Roman imperial literature adopt a boom/bust model of good kings being followed by bad

“Hellenistic Monarchy and Roman Political Invective,” CQ 41.1 (1991), 106-120. 75 Tim J. Cornell in Cambridge Ancient History, 2nd ed. F.W. Walbank, et al, eds. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). Cited in Erskine, “Hellenistic Monarchy”, 106. 74

CHAPTER FOUR. PIETY AND PAIDEIA

197

kings.76 The result was that, from the 2nd century BCE, Roman imperial progress relied on the ideology of Hellenistic kingship to portray Roman potestas and auctoritas as distinct and opposed aptitudes that clashed with monarchs in the Greek-speaking East. Civic rituals like the Roman triumph ensured that these aspects of kingship were not only imagined as part of an external propagandistic program in the East, but were affirmed through the performative display of Roman power within the precincts of the city itself. The effect of this for Roman self-understanding was to make kingship and the use of the term rex and regnum a loaded category – one that was employed primarily in Roman political invective to characterize an opponent as greedy, tyrannical, and a threat to Roman libertas.77 Erskine concludes: The kings of the Hellenistic world were fundamental in forming the conception of kingship held by Romans in the late RepubSee, for example, Polybius, Hist. 6.3-10; Dio Cassius, Hist. 52. This resonates with other portrayals of ancient kingship, notably those of Judah and Israel described in the biblical Kings and Chronicles. This aspect of ancient historiographical presentations of kingship and its resonances in the Hebrew Bible does not seem to be well studied. Though, Cf. Lester Grabbe, ed. Good Kings and Bad Kings: The Kingdom of Judah in the Seventh Century BCE (London: T&T Clark, 2005). 77 Erskine considers the evolution of the term rex and notes specifically how its categorization as an aspect of leadership and headship in generally neutral terms (for instance in the religious sphere, where phrases like the rex sacrorum and Jupiter Rex imply no tyrannical hostility) becomes endowed with a sense of luxury and an immoderate desire for both power and wealth that was characteristic of effeminiate, Eastern kings (“Hellenistic Monarchy and Roman Political Invective,” 111-115). Giving further evidence for the Greek source of this portrayal of immoderately tyrannical kings, Erskine continues to note that Latin must borrow the Greek τύραννος to find vocabulary to express the negative element of kingship. Moore and Anderson acknowledge that the term “master” itself is “synonymous with masculinity in most of the Greek and Latin texts that survive from antiquity. Such mastery could be directed outward as domination of others or inward as domination of oneself. Master of other was frequently justified on the basis of the master’s superior masculine reason and self control” (“Taking it Like a Man,” 272). 76

198

GAMING GREEKNESS lic. Indeed they even affected Roman perceptions of their own kings… For the Romans of the late Republic, kings were the epitome of wealth, power, and prosperity, but they were also the holders of absolute power and the enemies of a free constitutional state.78

Greece and Greekness serves both sides of the equation, and the portrayal of kingship factors into Roman self-definition and public display. Roman rule was not only modeled on the philosophical ideals of Greek antecedents, but was also modeled against the consumptive, immoderate tyranny of Hellenistic monarchs. The Roman “Audience” of 4 Maccabees

In a series of studies, Mary Rose D’Angelo has called attention to the Roman imperial context that situates 4 Maccabes, as well as other 2nd century texts including the Pastorals, Luke-Acts, and Hermas. In an attempt to pay close attention to the ways in which Roman social and cultural norms were felt by early Christians and Jews, she considers how virtues and specifically the understanding of the family were given new significance after the reign of Augustus.79 D’Angelo suggests that familial, conservative virtues of Rome became a kind of imperial currency that was codified by Roman propaganda and reified by Greek-speaking Roman subjects. These subjects sought to legitimate their standing by affirming this kind of Roman selfregard, while also showcasing how (ancient) Greek thinking sup78 Erskine, “Hellenistic Monarchy,” 120.

D’Angelo (“Roman Imperial Family Values,” 141-147) claims that Augustan marriage laws (including the Lex Iulia de maritandis ordinibus, Lex Iulia de adulteriis coercendis, both c. 18 BCE; Lex Papia Poppaea 9 CE) were the impetus to this shift. Contrary to historical accounts that see these as inter-Roman social phenomena that are irrelevant to non-Romans, D’Angelo insists that these were crucial for asserting the legitimacy of Imperial rule. She notes that, “the more frequently the emperors found it necessary to revise of reassert these laws, the clearer it was that the sinful Romans needed an emperor to save them from themselves.” [Cf. Andrew WallaceHaddrill, “The Golden Age and Sin in Augustan Ideology,” Past and Present 95 (1982), 19-36.]

79

CHAPTER FOUR. PIETY AND PAIDEIA

199

ported the claim. The implication of D’Angelo’s reading is that Rome and its Greek subjects engaged in a kind of intellectual negotiation, where the coherence of Roman policies and propaganda were made dependent on Greek appropriation of their content. The resulting interdependence made Greek literature itself a subtle but potent agent for political maneuvering and a locus for the engagement of Rome’s subjects with the empire. This had concrete implications for how Rome presented itself to the world. In the Res Gestae, an account is made of a shield awarded to Augustus “because of courage, clemency, justice, and piety.”80 This claim both depends upon and re-construes the Greek philosophical tradition of the virtues by adopting its form and traditional number, but also by including pietas in place of φρονήσις/ temperentia.81 According to D’Angelo, this is an intentional shift to accord with the conservative, familial policies reflected in the marriage laws, and intended to cement Augustus’ politico-familial role as the pater patriae, a title which he had assumed in 2 BCE as the “pinnacle” of his authority.82 Remarkably, this shift is reflected in how those in the Greek East experienced Roman power during the Principate. The Greek rendition of the Res Gestae employs the word εὐσεβεῖα to render pietas.83 Dionysius of Halicarnassus, some 20 years after the Res Gestae, adapts the same list to explain why Romans were chosen by Fortune as the masters of the world empire: “No city, Greek or barbarian (οὔτε Ἑλλὰς οὔτε βάρβαρος), bore men either more pious or 80 virtutis, clementiaeque et iustitiae, et pietatis causa (Res Gestae, 34; Alison Cooley, ed., Res Gestae Divi Augusti: Text, Translation, and Commentary, [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.]) 81 Cicero had given temperentia central significance, especially for Romans who wielded state power. Borrowing precisely from the koine Stoic traditions that influences 4 Maccabees, Cicero remarks (De Inv. 2.164.) that temperentia is “reason’s firm and moderate domination over desire and over lax inclinations of the mind.” (Temperantia est rationis in libidinem atque in alios non rectos impetus animi firma et moderata dominatio.) 82 D’Angelo, “Roman Imperial Family Values,” 142. Cf. Zanker, Power of Images in the Age of Augustus (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan, 1990), 96; Galinsky, Augustan Culture, 86-88. 83 Res Gestae, 98-99.

200

GAMING GREEKNESS

more just, using greater moderation (σωφροσύνῃ πλείονι) all their life or better contestants in matters of war (οὐδέ γε τὰ πολέμια κρείττους ἀγωνιστὰς).”84 Here Dionysius is employing Greek rhetorical style and its antiquarian appeal to affirm that “Rome” was the de facto ruler of the world because of its moral superiority.85 On D’Angelo’s reading, 4 Maccabees is crafted in the shadow of Augustus Caesar and depicts a holiness that is modeled imperial familial values, exploiting the importance placed by the Imperium on piety (εὐσεβὴς) in order to indicate how faithfulness to the Jewish law accorded with Roman values. She identifies 4 Maccabees’ appeal to εὐσεβὴς λογισμός with the cardinal virtue φρόνησις, itself the source of the subsequent virtues. This notion of εὐσεβεῖα, as a modifying moral value, prompts D’Angelo to link 4 Maccabees’s rhetoric to these Roman familial virtues. D’Angelo goes further to point out that this use is consistent with Philo’s apologetic use of familial piety in the Legatio ad Gaium, where Philo’s appeal for Roman clemency adopts the familial language instituted by Augustus. She insists that, in the case of the mother and the seven sons, piety “takes on a Roman cast, for it is expressed in their family relationship, their loyalty and love for each other and for their mother and hers for them.”86 4 Maccabees is not unique among imperial Greek rhetorical texts to use a historical narrative about a Greek king with a Roman audience in mind. Under the reign of Trajan, Dio of Prusa composed a series of orations on the subject of kingship. Adopting the role of the wise philosopher, Dio crafted a number of speeches that addressed the kingly power that was wielded by the Roman αὐτοκράτωρ.87 Dio addresses Trajan’s leadership in a subtly brilliant Dionysius of Halicarnassuss, Rom. Ant. 1.5.3. Translation from D’Angelo, “Roman Imperial Family Values,” 143. 85 However, as D’Angelo notes that Dionysius is careful to include σωφροσύνη (instead of the Greek Res Gestae’s ἐπιείκεια) – perhaps indicating that discipline of mind is a trait Dionysius is subtly suggesting for Romans, and Roman princeps in particular, should foster in themselves (“Roman Imperial Family Values,” 143). 86 D’Angelo, “Roman Imperial Family Values,” 150. 87 Whether these were delivered in front of Trajan himself is disputed, but the mere fact that such a celebrated sophist composed these kingship ora84

CHAPTER FOUR. PIETY AND PAIDEIA

201

way in the fourth Kingship Oration by appealing to Roman authority while also modeling the parrhesiastic power that attended Greek philosophical commitments. Rather than addressing his critique of monarchical authority to the Roman emperor directly, he develops a parallel with the story of Alexander the Great meeting with the cynic Diogenes. This story was widely related in the imperial period as an example of the subversive power of Greek philosophy over the tyrannical power of Alexander and other conquerors.88 In this account, Dio highlights how Diogenes is emptied of everything except for his intellect in the depiction of his meeting with Alexander: For all men without exception are naturally delighted when they see wisdom (φρόνησιν) honored by the greatest power and might; hence they not only relate the facts in such cases but add extravagant embellishments of their own; nay more, they strip their wise men of all else, such as wealth, honors, and the power of the body (χρήματα καὶ τιμὰς καὶ τὴν τοῦ σώματος δύναμιν), so that the high regard in which they are held may appear to be due to their intelligence (τὴν ξύνεσιν) alone.89

tions suggest that Greek-speaking subjects of Rome had a powerful mechanism in place for commenting on Roman imperial rule through a discourse on kingship. See the discussion in Whitmarsh, Greek Literature and the Roman Empire, 325-7, as well as a series of studies by John Moles, largely summarized in “The Kingship Orations of Dio Chrysostom,” Papers of the Leeds Latin Seminar 6 (1990), 297-375. 88 Perhaps the most characteristic version of the account is that told by Diogenes Laertius (DL 6.2.38): “When Diogenes was sunning himself in the Craneum, Alexander came and stood over him and said, ‘Ask of me for whatever you want.’ To which he replied, ‘Stand out of my light’” (ἐν τῷ Κρανείῳ ἡλιουμένῳ αὐτῷ Ἀλέξανδρος ἐπιστάς φησιν, “αἴτησόν με ὃ θέλεις.” καὶ ὅς, “ἀποσκότησόν μου,” φησί.) Diogenes Laertius accounts goes so far as to explicitly link the power of the cynic with that of Alexander, implicitly linking Diogenes’ mastery over himself with the military and political mastery of Alexander over nations. He has Alexander quip: “had I not been Alexander, I should have liked to be Diogenes.” (εἴπερ Ἀλέξανδρος μὴ ἐγεγόνειν, ἠθέλησα ἂν Διογένης γενέσθαι. Translation adapted.) 89 Dio Chrysostom, Or. 4.2. Translation adapted.

202

GAMING GREEKNESS

Ironically, the (sophistic) embellishments that Dio points to that ornament Diogenes are the absence of all kinds of power, including the power of the body (τὴν τοῦ σώματος δύναμιν). In ways that resonate with the figure of Eleazar in 4 Maccabees, Dio uses this prevalent characterization of a wise sage to juxtapose Alexander’s youthful ambition against Diogenes’ self-possession and self-mastery. Diogenes takes pains to convey to Alexander that true kingship is not a function of competition among others with royal ambitions, but rather is a contest with oneself. Alexander (cum Trajan) has emerged victorious in his battles with the Persian king Darius (perhaps, cum Domitian), but to his consternation, this does not qualify him for the kind of kingship Diogenes describes.90 Alexander does not follow Diogenes’ logic, even as Diogenes insists that Alexander’s most fearsome enemy is an ambitious Macedonian who has designs on Alexander’s throne. Alexander demands to know who will undermine his kingly ambitions, even as Diogenes mocks the ignorance

90 We should note that Heracles becomes a nexus for the kind of kingly nobility that Diogenes describes. Dio has Diogenes explaining that to be a true king – indeed to be a true son of Zeus—one must be educated in that “divine education” that results in those who are “manly of soul (ἀνδρείους), having been educated (πεπαιδευμένους) after the pattern of the great Heracles” (Or. 4.31). Heracles became an iconic figure among elite members of imperial society, both as an exemplar of self-reliance and an avatar of paideutic Greekness, which colors how manly courage was understood in this literature. Most notably, the iconic popularity of Heracles can be seen in a bust of Commodus excavated on the Esquiline in Rome and now at the Musei Capitolini (see discussion in Laura Nasrallah, Christian Responses to Roman Art and Architecture: The Second Century Church Amid the Spaces of Empire [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.], 180-183.) The figure of Heracles also echoes in the 2nd century figure of Sostranus (the socalled “Hercules of Herodes”) about whom Lucian wrote a now-lost work. Sostranus was understood to be a homegrown exemplar of Greekness, who spoke a pure Boetian dialect of Greek, lived in rural simplicity, and personified Greek virtues (Cf. Lucian, Dem. 1; Philostratus, VS 2.1.7. See also discussion in The Cynics: The Cynic Movement in Antiquity and Its Legacy, Robert Bracht Branham, Marie-Odile Goulet-Cazé, eds. [Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1996], 408.)

CHAPTER FOUR. PIETY AND PAIDEIA

203

of the supposed dominating ruler of the world. Finally, Diogenes explains: I have been trying to tell you for a long time, but you do not hear that you are yourself your own bitterest foe (πολεμιώτατος,) and adversary as long as you are bad and foolish. And this is the man of whom you are more ignorant than of any other person. For no foolish and evil man knows himself; else Apollo would not have given as the first commandment, ‘Know thyself!’ regarding it as the most difficult thing for every man.91

Dio crafts the exchange between Diogenes and Alexander as a metaphor of Roman ambition and Greek philosophical reflection, and in so doing he speaks for the superior arts of Greek philosophical culture to instruct and educate the imperium of Rome in how to rule well. Dio implicitly claims that Roman aspirations to sovereignty must be earned precisely through the dimension of human selfmastery on which Roman propaganda had always been based – if Trajan would be αὐτοκράτωρ, he must embody the virtues of kingship. At the same time, this Greek discourse about kingship introduces a formative paradigm into the atmosphere of first and second century imperial culture: a sagacious, self-determining man of wisdom parrhesiastically confronting a brash, immoderately ambitious Greek king.92 It is this ideology that 4 Maccabees taps into in order to reshape the character of Eleazar, rephrasing the encounter from that of the pious old man in 2 Maccabees who is put to death by Seleucid toadies to the pious, reasoning sage who faces off with the tyrannical Antiochus. In 4 Maccabees, Eleazar’s ἐπιδεῖξις (as well as the subsequent martyrdom accounts) is set against Antiochus’ tyranny, which represents all that Rome hated about kings. Thus the text’s appeal to Roman values is brought into an even deeper dimension even as it also demonstrates its Greek bona fides.

91 Dio Chrysostom, Or. 4.56-57.

For another literary example of this motif, see book eight of Philostratus’ Vit.Ap. where Apollonius confronts Domitian in his court.

92

204

GAMING GREEKNESS

Antiochus, the Tyrannized Despot

Antiochus personifies worldly power, royalty, and dominion in 4 Maccabees, and yet as a character in the narrative of chapters 5-17, he primarily represents a foil against which the nobility of Eleazar, the seven sons, and their mother is measured. His kingship is that of the unchallenged Hellenistic monarch that both imperial Romans and their Jewish subjects shared as a historical character-type. Antiochus becomes the common denominator that allows Roman anxieties about kingship and Jewish claims about the philosophical validity of the law to be conceptually resolved. He is “the bitter tyrant of the Greeks”93 and represents the “tyranny exercised against our nation” whom the martyrs can “conquer (νικήσαντες) by their endurance so that, through them, our homeland was purified (καθαρισθῆναι τὴν πατρίδα).”94 The narrative interplay with Antiochus that surrounds the speeches of Eleazar, the sons, and their mother accomplishes a reversal of roles: the Jewish victims become masters of their emotions, while the tyrant Antiochus is tyrannized by his own immoderate passions. In this way, the martyrs’ victory over Antiochus’ tyranny is accomplished not only as a “win” for Jewish piety, but specifically in a way that accords with Roman anxieties about kingship. The victories of the Maccabean martyrs make them allies of Rome, whose reverence for moderation and self-control was tied to a hatred for the gluttonousness of tyranny. However, the notion of kingship in 4 Maccabees is not restricted to the negative portrayal of Antiochus. The author sets up another model of kingly desire before beginning the martyrdom narrative by an analogy with David, drawn from 2 Samuel 23 and 1 Chronicles 11:15-19. In those accounts, David is pursuing the Philistines when he comes upon a garrison which is occupying the city of Bethlehem. 2 Samuel 23:15 reads, “David said longingly (‫) ַו ִיְּתאַ ֶוּה ָד ִוד ַויּ ֹאַמר‬, ‘O that someone would give me water to drink from the well of Bethlehem that is by the gate!’”95 Three of David’s soldiers break through the 93 4 Macc. 18:20. 94 4 Macc. 1:11.

95 NRSV trans. 2 Chronicles 11:15 uses the same word for David’s thirst, ‫אוה‬. The term bares deeply on kingship in the Hebrew Bible, where the phrase

CHAPTER FOUR. PIETY AND PAIDEIA

205

Philistine camp to draw water from the well, but David refuses to drink. Instead he “poured it out to the Lord” (‫אָתם ַליה ָוה‬ ֹ ‫) ַו ַיֵּסְּך‬, regarding the water as the very blood of the men who risked their lives to retrieve it. Within 2 Samuel, the text has a pious, even cultic significance, showcasing David’s faithfulness. 4 Maccabees clearly represents this, but the nature of the king’s thirst is remarkable apart from this. The author subtly paints David in faintly martyrological colors, noting that he is “sweating and very weary” (ἱδρῶν καὶ σφόδρα κεκμηκώς) and is very thirsty. The urge for water from Bethlehem is not a general desire, but rather “a certain irrational desire (ἀλόγιστος ἐπιθυμία) for the water in the enemy’s territory tormented and inflamed him, undid and consumed him (ὕδατος ἐπιτείνουσα συνέφρυγε καὶ λύουσα κατέφλεγεν).”96 The soldiers who endeavor to retrieve water from the behind the Philistines’ lines do so because they are in awe of/ashamed of (καταιδέομαι) David’s bitter complaining. 97 When the soldiers return with the water, David still refuses to drink water that he considers equivalent to blood. But the text is careful to note that he is still “burning with thirst” (ὁ δὲ καίπερ τῷ δίψει διαπυρούμενος) and that he pours out the water only by “opposing reason to desire” (ἀντιθεὶς τῇ ἐπιθυμίᾳ τὸν λογισμὸν). In this way, David – a king whose authority could even demand that water be brought from across enemy lines – exemplifies rational self-control, pious fear of the law and faithfulness to its mandates.98 4 Maccabees

“you shall reign over all that your soul desires” (‫ )וָּמַלְכָתּ ְבּכֹל ֲאֶשׁר־ְתּאַ ֶוּה ַנְפֶשָׁך‬is a prophetic formulation attached to both David (2 Samuel 3:21) and Solomon (1 Kings 11:37). 96 4 Macc. 3:11. 97 There is no way to resolve the ambiguity of καταιδέομαι within this passage, which perhaps is necessary for understanding how the irrational desires of a king elicit both rebuking disbelief and fear for one’s safety as his subject. 98 The ability to retrieve water even from extraordinary distances seems to have been a touchstone of monarchical kingship in antiquity, and perhaps is an indicator of the excesses of monarchs in the imperial period. Plutarch ironically notes that, “we scoff (καταγελῶμεν) at the Persian kings, if in truth, by drinking no water but that of the Choaspes, they turn the rest of

206

GAMING GREEKNESS

employs this kingly narrative to set up the claim that the martyrdom accounts will demonstrate: “for the temperate mind can conquer the needs of the passions and quench the flames of frenzied desires. It can overpower bodily agonies (τὰς τῶν σωμάτων ἀλγηδόνας) even when they are extreme and by the nobility of reason spurn all domination by the passions (τὰς τῶν παθῶν ἐπικρατείας).”99 After this interlude, Antiochus is the representative of kingship in the remaining narrative. Where Antiochus is absent from the account of Eleazar’s death in 2 Maccabees, he plays a central role beginning with the martyrdom narrative, advising the elderly Eleazar to save himself. Antiochus begins by appealing to Eleazar and remarking that he respects his age and “grey hairs.”100 Here it is Antiochus who, in his deliberative speech, advises Eleazar by appealing to philosophy, tying it implicitly to Eleazar’s elderly years: Although you’ve had [gray hairs] for so long a time, it does not seem to me that you are a philosopher when you observe the religion of the Jews (φιλοσοφεῖν τῇ Ιουδαίων χρώμενος θρησκείᾳ). When nature has granted it to us, why should you abhor eating the excellent flesh of this animal? It is senseless not to enjoy delicious things that are not shameful, and wrong to reject the gifts of nature. It seems to me that you will do something even more senseless if, by holding a groundless opinion concerning the truth, you continue to despise me to your own hurt (εἰ

the inhabited world for themselves into a waterless waste (ἄνυδρον αὑτοῖς τὴν ἄλλην ποιοῦσιν οἰκουμένην; De Exil. 6 LCL [1959])”. 99 4 Macc. 3:17-18. 100 Πολιά is an ambiguous signifier of both agedness and venerable wisdom. In Heliodorus’ Ethiopian Story, the grey hairs of Kalasiris are referred to in depicting him as a wise, albeit crafty and manipulating, instigator in the life of Theagenes, who mourns his death. (On his characterization, see John J. Winkler, “The Mendacity of Kalasiris and the Narrative Strategy of Heliodorus’ Aithiopika,” in Later Greek Literature (YCS 27), [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982], 93-158.) This sense is not new to Jewish literature in 4 Maccabees; Wisdom 4:9 employs this term to signify the proximity of wisdom and “gray hair”: “but understanding is grey hair (πολιὰ) for anyone, and a blameless life is ripe old age.”

CHAPTER FOUR. PIETY AND PAIDEIA

207

κενοδοξῶν περὶ τὸ ἀληθὲς ἔτι κἀμοῦ καταφρονήσεις ἐπὶ τῇ ἰδίᾳ τιμωρίᾳ).101

The venue for Antiochus’ appeal is a philosophical one, and his phrasing invites a competition for philosophical legitimacy. Eleazar does not seem to be a philosopher for despising the things that nature has granted. Antiochus is, implicitly, placed on the side of the hedonic consumption of “delicious things that are not shameful to eat” (καλλίστην τὴν τοῦδε τοῦ ζῴου σαρκοφαγίαν βδελύττῃ). The criterion Antiochus introduces for philosophical legitimacy is what is beneficial, though his use of the term is remarkable. The question of whether or not something was expedient or beneficial (συμφέρον) was a very common way of phrasing questions of utility, and it appears frequently in the Cynic-Stoic koine of the imperial period. Paul uses the term to cite and refute the libertarian inclinations of a member of the Corinthian church. He links the use of the term to the notion of refusal to be mastered by desire. Thus Paul writes, “ ‘all things are lawful for me,’ but not all things are beneficial (συμφέρει). ‘All things are lawful for me,’ but I will not be dominated by anything.”102 Marcus Aurelius employs the term in a more philosophical vein, attaching it to the sufficiency of nature: “what nature brings to each is beneficial (συμφέρει) to each, and it benefits (συμφέρει) precisely when nature brings it.”103 The notion of beneficence is ambiguous, and that ambiguity is exploited by 4 Maccabees to trouble the logic of Antiochus in much 101 4 Macc. 5:7b-10.

Johannes Weiss, in his commentary on 1 Corinthians notes that the term (in the sense used in 12:7), is a technical term of Stoic popular philosophy (Der Erste Korintherbrief [Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1910], 158-9), however, Mitchell notes that the term was broadly used in ethical and philosophical contexts, remarking that, “on the basis of the term’s widespread use in deliberative rhetoric one must conclude that it was not exclusively a Stoic catchword. συμφέρω was a term in wide currency” (Paul and the Rhetoric of Reconciliation: An Exegetical Investigation of the Language and Composition of 1 Corinthians [Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1991], 33-34.) 103 Med. 10.20. 102

208

GAMING GREEKNESS

the same way that Horace exploits the multi-referentiality of kingship. The appeal to “what is beneficial” begs the question of what good is at issue, and here Antiochus and Eleazar are in sincere disagreement. For Antiochus, the preservation of his life ought to be Eleazar’s greatest good, and he insists that God will forgive Eleazar for doing anything he has been compelled to do.104 Antiochus sets up the terms that fuel Eleazar’s doubled-demonstration, in both his verbal and his bodily demonstration: Will you not wake from your foolish philosophy, dispel your reasoning, adopt a mind appropriate to your years, philosophize according to the truth of what is beneficial (συμφέροντος), and have compassion (φιλάνθρωπον; cf. 2 Macc. 6:22) on your old age by honoring my humane advice? For consider this: if there is some power watching over this religion of yours, it will excuse you from any transgression that arises out of compulsion.105

The text makes the antagonistic element of Antiochus’ discourse explicit. When Eleazar begins his responsive ἐπιδεῖξις after Antiochus’ speech, the text includes a subtle comment: “after the tyrant stirred up (ἐποτρύνοντος) this way for the unlawful eating of flesh.”106 The technical term συμβουλεύω has been replaced with the derogatory ἐποτρύνω, matched by the use of τυραννός, which is not only generally derogatory, but in a Roman context, it signals an immoderate greed for power. ἐποτρύνω is most prominently used in Greek literature by Homer, who routinely uses the term to refer to the urging on of soldiers in combat, or of inciting oneself to accomplish something, though Plutarch also uses the term in Roman military settings.107 In this setting it heightens the sense of combative confrontation, but it is also suggestive of the insurrectionist, confrontational spirit of hardened soldiers in defending their homeland, as indeed 4 Macca104 This becomes the sticking point in Eleazar’s response and becomes the focus of Eleazar’s own deliberative appeal to the “children of Abraham” in 6:17-23. 105 4 Macc. 5:11-13. 106 4 Macc. 5:14. 107 Cf. Homer Il. 20.171, 373; Plutarch Crass. 23; Aem. Paul. 33.

CHAPTER FOUR. PIETY AND PAIDEIA

209

bees intends to portray the martyrs. 108 Antiochus’s speech is portrayed as a cowardly call for self-preservation, which incites Eleazar to his confrontation with Antiochus. Antiochus’ tyranny is the touchstone of all subsequent engagements with the martyrs. Their taunts as they face death highlight his immoderate, bloodthirsty, petulant character. Eleazar’s death establishes Antiochus’ viciousness, which is exploited by the seven sons and their mother. Following the encomiastic interlude that reflects upon Eleazar’s death in chapter 7, Antiochus calls for more Jews to be compelled to eat: For when the tyrant was patently defeated (ἐνικήθη) in his first attempt, being unable to compel an aged man to eat defiling foods, then in exceedingly violent passion, he gave orders to bring others from the captives of the Hebrews, and if they ate defiling food, to set them free when they had eaten, but if they refused, to torture them still more cruelly (πικρότερον βασανίζειν).109

Antiochus’ frustration comes from being “patently defeated” (ἐνικήθη περιφανῶς), but it manifests as “an exceedingly violent passion” (σφόδρα περιπαθῶς). This characterization is not dignified, but is rather represents an urge that comes from sub-rational desires.110 See Van Henten, Maccabean Martyrs, 125-269. Suggestive of this usage of ἐποτρύνω is its use by Herodotus where the deposed Spartan king Demaratos, who had fallen into the service of the Persians, is pressed by the king Xerxes to explain whether the Greeks will resist him. Demaratos is anxious about displeasing him with his answer and thus inciting his wrath, but he explains that he would not fight the Greeks unless incited to (ἐποτρύνω) by great cause or circumstance. In a remarkable parallel of the themes at issue in 4 Maccabees, Demaratos goes on to explain that the Greeks are consummately free and would resist any monarch who meant to rule them, but “they are not free in everything. For the law is set over them as a master (ἔπεστι γάρ σφι δεσπότης νόμος), which they fear more even than your people fear you” (Histories 7.104). 109 4 Macc. 8:2. 110 Plutarch, in his Ad Col. uses the term περιπαθῶς to characterize how, unlike Archimedes who exclaimed “I have found it!” when he discovered a means to measure the gold in king Heiro’s crown, “we [have] never yet 108

210

GAMING GREEKNESS

Even as the martyrs exhibit their courage by their refusal to eat, Antiochus is gluttonous in his desire to torment and dominate his Jewish subjects. Not surprisingly, the characterization of Antiochus as the “bloodthirsty, murderous and utterly abominable” (ὁ αἱμοβόρος καὶ φονώδης καὶ παμμιαρώτατος) tyrant is exploited in the narrative of the other martyrs.111 The narrative continues, “when [the others] had heard the inducements and saw the terrible devices, not only were they not fearful, but they also countered the tyrant with their own philosophy and by their good sense overthrew his tyranny (ἀντεφιλοσόφησαν τῷ τυράννῳ καὶ διὰ τῆς εὐλογιστίας τὴν τυραννίδα αὐτοῦ κατέλυσαν).”112 The second-eldest brother turns the tables on Antiochus: Do you not think, tyrant most savage of all (πάντων ὠμότατε τύραννε), that you are being tortured more than I, as you see the arrogant reasoning of your tyranny defeated by our endurance for the sake of piety? I relieve my pain with the joys that come from virtue, but you suffer torture from the threats that hang over impiety. You will not escape, most abominable tyrant, the judgments of divine wrath.113

The “tyrant most savage of all” is again linked to food. The word ὠμός, here in the superlative, refers to the savagery of consuming raw, uncooked food.114 The juxtaposition between the insatiable heard of a glutton that exclaimed with such passion (περιπαθῶς), ‘I have eaten.’” To Plutarch’s mind, “we abominate those that make mention of their great meals with too passionate an exclamation (ἐμπαθέστερον), as men obsessed (ὑπερασμενίζοντας) with insignificant and unworthy delights.” 111 4 Macc. 10:17. 112 4 Macc. 8:15. 113 4 Macc. 9:30. 114 Cf. Homer Od. 18:87, where the consumers of the raw food are dogs. More suggestively, Sophocles also employs the term where the chorus characterizes Antigone as “savage” in the same way that her father, Oedipus, was: “she appears to be the savage child born of a savage father, and does not know to concede to hurtful things” (δηλοῖ τὸ γέννημ᾽ ὠμὸν ἐξ ὠμοῦ πατρὸς τῆς παιδός. εἴκειν δ᾽ οὐκ ἐπίσταται κακοῖς. Ant.)

CHAPTER FOUR. PIETY AND PAIDEIA

211

tyranny of Antiochus, the brutality of the torture and death of the martyrs, and their joy at being able to endure suffering leads to an almost comedic dynamic as the narrative description continues. The third youngest brother, in his final tortured moments, mocks the tyrant by thanking him for his beneficence and magnanimity. After describing the excurtiating state of his the brother’s torute, the text explains, “In this condition, gasping for breath and suffocating in body, he said, “Tyrant, you grant us splendid favors against your will, according us the opportunity to show (ἐπιδείξασθαι) our enduring loyalty to the law through yet more noble sufferings (γενναιοτέρων πόνων).”115 Kingship, a theme that is introduced in the interlude story about David and continued through the account of Antiochus’ tyranny, is central to the success of 4 Maccabees. It provides an occasion for Jewish heritage and piety to engage with Greek philosophical resources that were integral in structuring Roman imperial culture. As a social reality in the stylized world presented in 4 Maccabees, kingship is presented as a foil for the dangers and excesses of irrational, undirected power. As a venue for the demonstration of personal character, kingship represents a superlative capacity of human beings as an ideal for Roman emperors to adopt. The text punctuates this dynamic in a totalizing appraisal of the seven brothers. The author exclaims, “O powers of reason, more royal than kings and freer than the free (ὦ βασιλέως λογισμοὶ βασιλικώτεροι καὶ ἐλευθέρων ἐλευθερώτεροι)! O sacred and harmonious unanimity of the seven brothers in defense of piety!”116 Like the use of εὐσεβεῖα to nod toward a prevailing discourse of Roman imperial culture, 4 Maccabees employs kingship to ally Jewish religious ideology and Roman social and political ideals by phasing their shared virtues in the language of Greekness.

115 4 Macc. 11:9b-12. 116 4 Macc. 14:2-3.

212

V.

GAMING GREEKNESS

RATIONAL COMPETITION

Competition is the dominant metaphor for the martyr’s struggle in 4 Maccabees. Indeed, the text relies on an explicit competitive dimension of its subjects’ martyrdom to present the case that εὐσεβεῖς λογίσμος is the master (αὐτοδέσποτος) of the emotions. Athletic and military metaphors pervade the narrative and structure the development of the figures, so that Eleazar, the seven sons, and their mother are construed as subjects of Antiochus’ tyrannical authority, but simultaneously as victors over Antiochus in a competition for virtue.117 Eleazar’s martyrdom—in its juxtaposition with his rhetorical ἐπιδεῖξις —serves an even further demonstrative dimension. The argumentative claims of Eleazar are embodied in his own self-mastery even as his rhetoric has mastered Antiochus’ faulty reasoning. The seven brothers are all presented as “noble athletes”, and the mother is eulogized with the exclamation, “winner of the prize of the contest of the heart (τοῦ διὰ σπλάγχνων ἀγῶνος ἀθλοφόρε).” The virtues that the martyrs achieve are the trophies of a contest (τὰ τῆς ἀρετῆς ἆθλα).118 It is a “contest befitting sanctity in which (ὦ ἱεροπρεποῦς ἀγῶνος,), for the sake of piety, so many of my brothers have been summoned to a gymnasium of sufferings, a contest in which we have not been defeated (ἐφ’ ὃν διὰ τὴν εὐσέβειαν εἰς γυμνασίαν πόνων ἀδελφοὶ τοσοῦτοι κληθέντες οὐκ ἐνικήθημεν)!”119 Similarly, the mother of the seven sons, who spurred them on to the “noble contest” of their martyrdom, is remembered as the “mother of the nation, vindicator of the law, champion of piety, prizewinner in the contest that took place in your heart (ἔκδικε τοῦ νόμου καὶ ὑπερασπίστρια τῆς εὐσεβείας καὶ τοῦ διὰ σπλάγχνων ἀγῶνος ἀθλοφόρε), more noble than males in perseverance, more manly than men in endurance!”120 The central importance of agonistic imagery and competitive motifs is showcased most dramatically in the text’s closing, where the author references the tomb of the martyrs. The author breaks into the encomium of the mother and brings the first person rhetorical 117 Cf. Moore and Anderson, “Taking it Like a Man,” 273. 118 4 Macc. 9:8. 119 4 Macc. 11:20. 120 4 Macc. 15:29-30.

CHAPTER FOUR. PIETY AND PAIDEIA

213

voice into the discourse; the author does not provide an ekphrasis so much as an account of the emotional response that the un-described image would evoke: “If it were possible for us to paint the story of your piety as on some surface, would not onlookers shudder when they saw the mother of the seven children enduring, for the sake of piety, diverse tortures even unto death?”121 Having verbally referenced the tomb that commemorates the martyrs, the author continues by giving an appraisal of the martyrs’ struggle that brings together their piety, their competition for the sake of the Law, and the tyranny of Antiochus: Truly the contest carried on by them was divine (ἀγὼν θεῖος), for then virtue, testing them for their perseverance, offered rewards (ἠθλοθέτει). Victory (τὸ νῖκος) meant incorruptibility in longlasting life. Eleazar contended first (προηγωνίζετο); the mother of seven boys entered the fray, and the brothers contended (ἠγωνίζοντο). The tyrant was the antagonist; the world and human society looked on (ὁ τύραννος ἀντηγωνίζετο· ὁ δὲ κόσμος καὶ ὁ τῶν ἀνθρώπων βίος ἐθεώρε). Godliness won the victory and crowned its own athletes (ἀθλητὰς στεφανοῦσα). Who did not marvel at the athletes contending (τοὺς τῆς θείας νομοθεσίας ἀθλητάς) for the divine law code? Who were not astonished?122

What is most remarkable here is the explicit re-introduction of the rhetorical dimension, which compels the reader to realize that there is another competitive dimension at play in 4 Maccabees. So 121 4 Macc. 17:7-10. 122 4 Macc. 17:11-16. A number of scholars have suggested that this element of the text suggests an occasion for its performance. J.H.C. Lebram suggests that the second part of 4 Maccabees is an epitaphios logos – a funeral speech for the praise of those who died (“Die literarische Form des vierten Makkabäerbuches,” VC 28 [1975], 81-96.) Jan van Henten has compared the epitaph here with extant Jewish and Christian epitaphic inscriptions to suggest both the authenticity of the text included in 4 Maccabees and to speculate on where this text originated – albeit inconclusively. (“A Jewish Epitaph in a Literary Text: 4 Macc 17.8-10,” in Studies in Early Jewish Epigraphy, Jan W. van Henten and Pieter W. van der Horst, eds. [Leiden: Brill, 1994], 44-69.) Cf. deSilva, 4 Maccabees, 25.

214

GAMING GREEKNESS

little can be said with certainty about the writer of this text, but its aspiration to represent a sophisticated, literary Greek voice is evidence of its ambition in another, more abstract arena of competition. Ekphrasis was a species of rhetoric that, when mastered, indicated significant rhetorical skill. The ability to perform speech that was capable of visually depicting an unseen image or object through the artful use of language vied with the fine arts for being able to imitate and represent the physical world. Moreover, ekphratic speeches were a frequent occasion for competition among orators, who were judged regarding who was better able to depict images in rhetorical speech.123 The ekphrasis of the tomb in 4 Maccabees would not have fared well against imperial Greek orators – it is brief and lacks the expansive description characteristic of the genre. However, it effectively draws on the emotions of the observers and uses the epitaph itself to convey its gravitas and significance. More significant, however, is the attempt and what that attempt suggests. The entirety of 4 Maccabees represents a cultural struggle for legitimacy. It is protective of Jewish piety and adherence to the law, but taking into account its rhetorical dimension, its appeal to philosophical reasoning, and the significance of its Roman-conscious depiction of piety and kingship, the text is singularly concerned with positioning Jewish piety within the marketplace of paideia. The legitimacy of Greek cultural expression and the capital of Greekness in the imperial period was a cultural commodity that 4 Maccabees attempts to gain for Jews under Roman rule. The corpus of Lucian is most representative of this phenomenon, and from whom we have some of the best ekphratic speeches. On the competition between visual and verbal representation, see the account in The Dream, or the Cock where Lucian is visited by Sculpture and Rhetoric personified, who both attempt to persuade him to pursue their respective arts. On the competitive dimension of ekphrasis, see the ekphratic speeches in The Hall, which presents two different rhetoricians’ speeches describing a beautiful hall, and which deliberately pits the rhetoricians against one another in the task of better depicting the building in words. Similarly, Lucian presents the competitive context of the Olympic festival to explain the rhetorical prowess of Herodotus in the Herodotus, or Aetion.

123

CHAPTER FOUR. PIETY AND PAIDEIA

215

What is perhaps most significant about 4 Maccabees’ cultural strategy is that 4 Maccabees represents one of the last expressions of so-called Hellenistic Judaism. Few other Jewish texts in Greek postdate its composition; by the late 2nd century, even tannaitic Rabbinical culture is winding down, and early Christian figures like Clement of Alexandria, Irenaeus and Valentinus increasingly dominate the landscape of non-pagan, Greek learning in the empire. Indeed, without its inclusion in important textual manuscripts like Codex Sinaiticus, and without Eusebius’ claim that Josephus wrote the text, it is difficult to imagine that this text would have survived into the modern world. 4 Maccabees represents an ingenious and courageously creative attempt to situate a devoted Jewish legal piety in Greek cultural terms, and it undoubtedly influenced the reception of Greek culture in the Christian world more broadly, thereby ensuring its survival and continued relevance. As a historical “moment,” 4 Maccabees’ agonistic play on the field of Greek culture also says something about how Greek culture functioned as a resource for the negotiation of self-identity in a world dominated by Rome. The attempt to imitate Greeks and perform in front of Roman spectators was not unique to 4 Maccabees – these were the rules of the game that all kinds of Greek-speaking, imperial subjects were playing.

CHAPTER FIVE. THE PARTING OF THE WAYS HAD GREEK ROAD SIGNS: POSTURE, DEPORTMENT AND THE PHILOSOPHICAL MARKETPLACE IN THE FRAME NARRATIVE OF JUSTIN MARTYR’S DIALOGUE WITH TRYPHO1 “Deportment matters. It is a shorthand that encodes, and replicates, the complex realities of social structure, in a magnificent economy of voice and gesture.”

—Maud Gleason2 “A smile is the chosen vehicle of all ambiguities.”

—Herman Melville, from Pierre; Or, The Ambiguities 3

I.

INTRODUCTION

Justin and Trypho’s chance meeting in a Greek port city is one of the more cinematic moments in second century Christian literature. 4

1 I would like to thank Kendra Eshleman for her thorough engagement with this chapter and her helpful insights into my argument and the complex sources that underlie it. 2 Making Men, xxiv. 3 New York: Harper and Brothers (1852), 112.

217

218

GAMING GREEKNESS

The account of their dialogue amidst the colonnades of an unnamed city, along with Justin and Trypho’s philosophically toned meetcute, immediately lends a façade of Greek philosophical manners to the dialogue. The narrative of their meeting, which makes up Dialogue 1–9, has left many readers with the sense that it is a separable literary unit—like a piece of stage scenery that is easily removed from the theologically dense dialogue.5 Where it has been most valuable for historians is in the information it offers about Justin’s biography and the role of philosophy in the process of his conversion.6 These insights into Justin’s intellectual context, along with the theological content of the subsequent Dialogue, has left Justin’s text to be regarded primarily as a confrontation between nascent Christianity and a figment of late, Greek-speaking Judaism in the person of

4 I follow the Greek text of Miroslav Marcovich, Justini Martyris Dialogus Cum Tryphone (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1997). All translations are my own, though I have benefitted from Marcovich’s notes as well as the translation of Thomas Falls (St. Justin Martyr: Dialogue with Trypho, Thomas Halton, rev. ed. [Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2003]). 5 There has long been speculation that the kernel elements of Justin and Trypho’s debate predate the frame narrative of chapters 1-9. Cf. Manfred Hoffmann, Der Dialog bei den christlichen Schriftstellern der ersten vier Jahrhunderte (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1966); See also Niels Hyldahl, Philosophie und Christentum: Eine interpretation der Einleitung zum Dialog Justins (Kopenhagen: Munksgaard, 1966), J. C. M. van Winden, An Early Christian Philosopher: Justin Martyr’s Dialogue with Trypho, Chapters One to Nine. (Leiden: Brill, 1971), and Judith Lieu, Image and Reality: The Jews in the World of the Christians in the Second Century (London: T&T Clark/Continuum, 1996), 103-104. These readings have also tended to see Trypho as a straw-man figure who is there to service Justin’s theological argument. 6 See Edwin R. Goodenough, The Theology of Justin Martyr: An Investigation into the Conceptions of Early Christian Literature and its Hellenistic and Judaistic Influences, (Amsterdam: Philo, 1968), 57-77; 87-100. Also, see Leslie W. Barnard, Justin Martyr: His Life and Thought (London: Cambridge University Press, 1967), van Winden, Early Christian Philosopher, and Mark J. Edwards, “Justin’s Logos and the Word of God,” JECS 3 (1995), 261–80.

CHAPTER FIVE. THE PARTING OF THE WAYS

219

Trypho.7 The plausibility of this reading is aided by the comparatively equal footing enjoyed by Justin and Trypho in the frame narrative as against the rest of the Dialogue.8 While the majority of Justin’s text The presentation of Judaism in this text is a crucial historical question in light of the dearth of 2nd century Jewish literature written in Greek. See Adolf von Harnack, Judentum und Judenchristentum in Justins Dialog mit Trypho, (Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs, 1913), Paul Donahue, Jewish-Christian Controversy in the Second Century: A Study in the Dialogue of Justin Martyr, (Ph.D. Diss. Yale University, 1973), Demetrios Trakatellis, “Justin Martyr’s Trypho,” HTR 79 (1986), 289-297, Tessa Rajak, “Talking at Trypho: Christian Apologetic as Anti-Judaism in Justin’s Dialogue with Trypho the Jew,” in Mark Edwards et al, eds., Apologetics in the Roman Empire: Pagans, Jews, and Christians (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), Timothy Horner, Listening to Trypho: Justin Martyr’s Dialogue reconsidered (Leuven: Peeters, 2001), Dawid Rokeah, Justin Martyr and the Jews, (Leiden: Brill, 2002), Oskar Skarsaune, In the Shadow of the Temple: Jewish Influences on Early Christianity, (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 2002). 8 How to understand the figure of Trypho is, perhaps, the most controversial issue in the Dialogue as a whole, with various camps adopting certain readings of Justin’s interlocutor. Tessa Rajak takes the Dialogue to be an uncompromising species of anti-Jewish rhetoric, and notes in particular how the stylized frame narrative jars with Justin “hurling a fully-formed charge of deicide at Trypho… and his people, the Jews” (“Talking at Trypho,” 59.) She imagines Justin’s project in the Dialogue to be an extension of his apologetic efforts, and sees the polemical tone of the text to be a zero-sum strategy that is “intrinsic to defending one’s side in apologetic literature” (“Talking at Trypho,” 61.) Those who take a more pessimistic view of Justin’s characterization of Trypho and of the historical realism of his portrayal include Edwin R. Goodenough (Theology of Justin Martyr), Martin Goodman, (Mission and Conversion: Proselytising in the Religious History of the Roman Empire [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994]), as well as Amos Hulen (“‘The Dialogues with the Jews’ as Sources for Early Jewish Argument Against Christianity,” JBL 51 [1932], 58-70), Jon Nilson (“To Whom is Justin’s Dialogue with Trypho Addressed?” TS 38 [1977], 538-546), George F. Moore (“Christian Writers on Judaism,” HTR 14 [1921], 197-254), Claudia Setzer (Jewish Responses to Early Christianity [Minneapolis: Fortress, 1994]), Miriam Taylor (Anti-Judaism and Early Christian Identity [Leiden: Brill, 1995]), and Paul Donahue (Jewish Christian Controversy in the Second Century). Lieu, Image and Reality and Daniel Boyarin (Borderlines: The Partition of Judeo-Christianity [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004]) represent a more middle of the road appraisal 7

220

GAMING GREEKNESS

was characterized by von Harnack as a “monologue interrupted by brief interjections,” the frame narrative places Justin and Trypho on a more level field.9 Not incidentally, the space that Justin and Trypho occupy in Dialogue 1–9 is rooted in sophistic Greek styles of self-presentation. Indeed, their confrontation maps directly onto the agonistic postures that characterized intellectual rivalries throughout the early Empire. While Justin spends much of the Dialogue speaking at Trypho about the prophetic dimensions derived from the Septuagint and expounding his own expression of a logos theology about the person of Jesus, the two figures meet one another most equally when they are discussing their Greek philosophical backgrounds. And yet, reading Justin’s Dialogue as a negotiation of religious boundaries has allowed the philosophical and sophistic elements that fill the frame narrative largely to fall out of view of the broader text.10 that attempts to consider how Trypho is portrayed in the Dialogue and understand him (and his exchange with Justin) as a plausibly realistic—if not necessarily historical—2nd century Jew in the diaspora. Timothy Horner exemplifies the most historically optimistic reader of Trypho, seeing him as a dynamic, historical figure who is earnestly represented in the pages of the Dialogue. Horner argues that “lifting Trypho out of the text reveals a consistent figure who does not appear to be based on any Jewish stereotype or Christian invention. He is neither Justin’s puppet nor is he blindly obdurate. This examination reveals an individual voice with its own sensibility, style, and agenda. It is a voice that defies fiction. His personality is unique, consistent, and idiosyncratic” (Listening to Trypho, 12). Other scholars who affirm the historical realism of Justin’s account and portrayal of Trypho include Henry Chadwick (“Justin Martyr’s Defense of Christianity” BJRL 47 [1965], 275-297), Marcel Simon (Verus Israel: A Study of the Relations between Christians and Jews in the Roman Empire [135-425 CE], H. McKeating, trans. [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986]), and Trakatellis, “Justin Martyr’s Trypho.” 9 “Ein von kurzen Einwürfen durchsetzter Monolog.” Judentum und Judenchristentum, 54. 10 Of course, many of these studies, including Boyarin’s expansive study, are tackling complex literary traditions, so the falling away of these issues is, perhaps, inevitable. Recent scholarly literature also re-engages the question of Greek cultural and Roman civic context on Justin’s career and corpus, represented by Judith Lieu, Image and Reality, 140-148 Laura Nasrallah, Christian Responses to Roman Art and Architecture: The Second Century

CHAPTER FIVE. THE PARTING OF THE WAYS

221

These studies have rightly focused on the underlying “purpose” of Justin’s text as a foundational moment in early Christian and Jewish disputes over the meaning of the Hebrew Biblical tradition.11 The most persuasive reading is Daniel Boyarin’s argument that Justin’s Dialogue accomplishes a “double construction of Jews and heretics” in order to produce a self-identity for Christians.12 This reading is steeped in the language of religious competition, and for clear reasons it has paid close attention to the substance of Justin’s argument rather than the brief narrative that surrounds it. According to Boyarin, rather than attempting to win over Trypho to his belief in logos, Justin’s motivation is to deny Trypho—and by extension nascent Judaism—access to logos as a theological resource.13 In this account, the text serves to set up a discussion in order to quash the theological dimensionality of Judaism, as Justin imagines it in the person of Trypho. Boyarin’s account of the logos motif bears strong resemblance to paideia as a kind of cultural capital to which sophists and other intellectuals sought to limit access.14 But as we have seen, the kind of cultural competition underlying both of these cultural commodities results in outcomes that could not necessarily be predicted by an author’s initial purposes. And so, despite Boyarin’s convincing interpretation about what Justin seeks to accomplish with respect to Church amid the Spaces of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), esp. 71-76. Horner’s study also thoroughly engages the question at various points. Cf. Eshleman, The Social World of Intellectuals in the Roman Empire, 54-56. 11 These questions are compounded by the exceptional use of the dialogical form as a literary conceit on the part of Justin—either as a faithful recording of a real-life encounter, or as a strategic decision on the part of Justin to craft a Jewish interlocutor for some apologetic end. This approach has been supported by the argument that the kernel elements of Justin and Trypho’s debate predate the frame narrative of chapters 1-9, which was added at a later stage of the text’s development. See also the introductory remarks in Hydahl, Philosophie und Christentum; van Winden, An Early Christian Philosopher; and Lieu, Image and Reality, 103-104. 12 Boyarin, Borderlines, 39. 13 Boyarin, Borderlines, 39-40. 14 Cf. Eshleman, The Social World of Intellectuals in the Roman Empire, 149-176 (esp. 169ff.)

222

GAMING GREEKNESS

constructing Judaism, Justin Martyr’s ultimate purpose may not be the only dimension in this text that bears on 2nd century disputes about how the proto-orthodox Christianity Justin represents (as well as the Hellenic Judaism represented by Trypho) fit into the postclassical world. Even if Justin has in mind the distinguishing of his own faith by constructing others, he cannot necessarily help producing other kinds of cultural definition at the same time. In lieu of the effect that the Dialogue had on early Christian constructions of Judaism, this chapter considers the role that the frame narrative plays in setting up Justin and Trypho’s engagement. In the initial sections of the frame narrative, subtle elements of Justin and Trypho’s interaction tap into the expansive cultural ecosystem of 2nd century intellectuals. Justin endows facial gestures, turns of phrase, and even the choice of garment with strategic purpose in setting up his confrontation with Trypho. Justin’s subsequent narration of his career and his experience searching for a teacher as a philosophical novice similarly taps into broader descriptions of the philosophical schools that occupied the cities of the imperial Greekspeaking East. Justin’s Dialogue demonstrates how Christian and Jewish authors throughout the 1st–3rd centuries developed complex strategies in order to claim aspects of Greek culture that suited their needs while not fully embracing paideia in all of its dimensions. Since Justin makes his engagement with the Greek intellectual culture of the 2nd century so clear, the question that naturally emerges is, what difference does the frame narrative make? If Justin delineates what it is to be a Christian through the elaboration of a intricately argued logos theology derived from the Hebrew Bible, what else is produced when Justin and Trypho’s encounter is portrayed as an agonistic encounter of two vying, would-be pepaideumenoi? I argue that the frame narrative of the Dialogue strategically locates the encounter between Justin and Trypho on the field of cultural Greekness, thus representing their ensuing discussion as a sophisticated excursus on an important intellectual subject. In presenting himself and Trypho as philosophers, Justin situates their dialogue within the paideutic marketplace of sophists, philosophers and other intellectuals. The frame narrative, then, restages the formative confrontation between Justin and Trypho in explicitly sophistic terms, allowing the agonistic discourses around Greekness to provide the backdrop for

CHAPTER FIVE. THE PARTING OF THE WAYS

223

their Dialogue. This text is a watershed in the production of a distinct Christian culture in the 2nd century, but the context of Justin and Trypho’s meeting relies on the discourses, codes, and performances that constitute Greekness in the early Roman Empire.

II.

URBAN OUTFITS: CITY, SPACE, AND STYLE

Justin situates his most substantive theological exposition on the significance of Jesus in the form of a dialogue with Trypho, an unfamiliar, Greek-speaking Jewish interlocutor. Following the literary form, Justin introduces the characters, their setting, and the basis for their dialogical conflict before jumping into the substance of his argument. Justin uses the opportunity to set up the competitive terms of their confrontation. In just the first few lines, he insinuates his encounter with Trypho into sophistic Greek culture through suggestion and allusion. Justin’s premise in the Dialogue is that he and Trypho meet as philosophically enlightened Greeks in dispute over a serious question. He develops this by strategically crafting the frame narrative so that the setting of their meeting, the substance of Trypho’s salutary volley, and Justin’s response are loaded with sophistic signifiers and imbued with philosophical style. Justin sets a stage that is intellectually aligned and redolent of the agonistic dimensions of sophistic styles of self-expression. City and Space within the Roman Civic Frame

Justin’s sparse description of his surroundings implies a panoramic locale for his meeting with Trypho. The initial sentence of the dialogue is loaded with an almost formulaic imperial Greek urbanity: “While walking (περιπατοῦντί) along the colonnades (ξυστοῦ) of the gymnasium early one morning, a man, accompanied by some friends, came up to me and said, ‘good morning philosopher! (Φιλόσοφε, χαῖρε)’”15 The reader gets the barest sense of where they are: it is morning when Trypho meets Justin while walking about a port city. They are not described to be beside the sea at the outset, but there is a sense of salt in the air, of a busy urban space, of com15 Dial.

1; Cf. Municius Felix, Oct. 2.

224

GAMING GREEKNESS

ings and goings. Justin carefully situates his encounter with Trypho in a stylized urban context, but he avoids mentioning a precise location. What he does describe is a setting that would not be out of place in a Platonic dialogue or at a sophistic performance. Moreover, what is described of their surroundings implies a competitive confrontation: the ξυστός under which they walk was a covered colonnade that served athletes who were exercising out of season.16 The usage of περιπατοῦντί (and συμπεριεπάτει a little later on) adds yet another philosophical dimension to Justin and Trypho’s meeting: the term generically signifies walking, but it is associated with the work of doing philosophy in Plato’s academy, ultimately serving as a title for the followers of Aristotle.17 The fact of the city plays a crucial role in framing the Dialogue as a confrontation that takes place in the urban, intellectualized setting in which sophists and philosophers typically met one another. Moreover, it contextualizes the ξυστός under which they walk and makes the philosophical context of their ensuing conversation concrete. However, we get only a bare sense of why these figures are there, and precisely where this city is. Trypho has fled from Jerusalem and the Bar Kochba revolt, though he is proud to say that he has arrived from Greece proper (and Corinth specifically).18 Against this More generally, it signified athletic encoutners. Cf. Hyldahl, Philosophie und Christentum, 92. See also, LSJ I.2; II.1, respectively, as well as the description in Pausanius, Graec. Descr. 6.23.1. Vitruvius De Arch. 6.7.5 seems to be the source for the identification, who remarks that it was a place, “in qua athletae per hiberna tempora execrentur.” 17 van Winden suggests that “one should not think of a terminus technicus. In other words, Justin does not picture himself as giving a lecture on a morning walk, like Aristotle” (An Early Christian Philosopher, 25). He suggests instead that Justin may simply have been inclined to take a morning walk. However, Justin will address his experience with the Peripatetic school in 2.3, and it is unlikely that he would have depicted his meeting Trypho in this way without being aware of this sense. Rajak also suggests that with the opening word, περιπατοῦντι, an entire philosophical modus vivendi is introduced into the text (“Talking at Trypho,” 59). 18 Dial. 1.3. Lieu suggests that the specificity the oblique reference to the Bar Kochba revolt obliquely is too historically real to presume that this detail is a literary convenience (Image and Reality, 104). We cannot be certain about 16

CHAPTER FIVE. THE PARTING OF THE WAYS

225

background, the anonymity of this city is thunderous in this initial section—why would Justin not name the city, or if not that, provide a likely one?19 A possible answer comes in reading the rest of the frame narrative; the anonymity of this space serves to underline the role of urbanness as a generic cultural signifier. By eliding the specific associations of any individual city, Justin allows “city-ness” to exist in the foreground. This is remarkable in light of Justin’s larger corpus. In the Apologies, he engages with the real civic locals of Rome and the Eastern Mediterranean in explicit terms.20 By contrast in the Dialogue, Justin gives his readers a city, as it were, in the abstract. By employing a different genre and appealing to a new audience, Justin maps the world in a peculiar way. In doing so, he attempts to distinguish Christianity as an entity removed from and superior to Judaism; the figure of Trypho, who explains that he has fled from Jerusalem (now the Roman Aelia Capitolina) in the aftermath of the Bar Kochba revolt, aids in making this claim more real in its 2nd century Justin’s reason for being in this city, and which city they are in is nowhere named or even hinted at. Eusebius first linked the Dialogue with Ephesus (HE 6.18.6). This notion was accepted early on by Theodor Zahn (“Studien zu Justinus Martyr”, ZKG 8 (1885-1886), 1-84). Lieu remarks, “there is… little reason to deny that Justin engaged in such a debate with many a Jew… or that Ephesus would provide a convincing location for such an encounter” (Image and Reality, 104). I note that Rajak, who sees Justin’s Dialogue as a historically concrete instance of anti-Semitic trends in early Christianity, presumes Ephesus is the definite historical location for the text (“Talking at Trypho,” 59; following Goodenough, Theology of Justin Martyr, 90-91). 19 The lack of certainty has, at times, led scholars into frustrated speculation. Hyldahl is so intent upon giving the Dialogue a specific location that he interpretively renders καὶ τῇ Κορίνθῳ as “und zwar hier in Korinth,” (Cf. van Winden, 28-29). 20 Laura Nasrallah insightfully attends to how Justin depicts space in his corpus from the premise that “knowledge, space, and imperial power are intertwined” for Roman subjects (Christian Responses to Roman Art and Architecture, 52). According to Nasrallah, Justin both participates in and resists the centering of the world on Rome in his own “mental (and discursive) map.” In the Apologies, Justin is like a Hellenic ambassador who speaks, “the common language of Greek, of privileged philosophy, and of Roman subject-hood” (Christian Responses to Roman Art and Architecture, 71).

226

GAMING GREEKNESS

context. Trypho is a man without a home, who has settled in Corinth, at the philosophical periphery of Greece.21 Justin, on the other hand, is the “consummate universal Greek, a philosophical everyman,” in the apt phrase of Laura Nasrallah.22 He—like the Christians for whom he speaks and whose ranks he seeks to enlarge—need not hail from anywhere at all.23 In at least one sense, Justin’s everyperson status would have been more notably at issue if he were in a specific location, or rather, if he were removed from a specific location. The Vitrurvian model of the universal traveler is patterned as an Odyssean castaway, who carries his identity with him no matter where he goes.24 However, Justin does not locate himself in an epical nostos, nor does he fix the Dialogue’s location in a specific Greek context. Instead, he places his meeting with Trypho outside of an identifiable historical place and locates their debate in a kind of idealistic Greek limbo that has all of the set pieces of an ideal Greek city, but none of the imperial confines, no historical origin, and none of the Roman-touched elements that characterized so many cities in the Greek-speaking East.25 When Justin responds to Trypho’s initial hailing, Jerusalem is in the background, as is Trypho’s flight to Greece. But in the Dialogue these 21 Nasrallah depicts Corinth’s peripheral status both in terms of its historical rivalry with Athens, and the history of its razing by Rome in the second century, BCE (Christian Responses to Roman Art and Architecture, 74.) 22 Nasrallah, Christian Responses to Roman Art and Architecture, 74. 23 At least, he need not hail from anywhere in the Dialogue. Denise KimberBuell argues that this de-emphasis on physical location is exploited by Justin, who invites all of the gentile nations into a non-geographical “new Israel” (Why this New Race? Ethnic Reasoning in Early Christianity [New York: Columbia University Press, 2005], 98-115). Cf. Dial. 119-125. 24 Nasrallah elucidates this dimension of Justin’s characterization in the Dialogue at length (Christian Responses to Roman Art and Architecture, 54. Cf. Vitruvius, De Arch. 6.preface-1.11). 25 This is in contradistinction to the civic orations of prominent rhetors in the 1st and 2nd centuries, CE. For example, Dio of Prusa’s civic orations (especially the Tarsic orations [Ors. 34–35] and the Alexandrian oration [Or. 32]), Favorinus’ Corinthian Oration as well as Aelius Aristides’ Panathenaic Oration all tap into the specific contexts of cities in the content of the oration.

CHAPTER FIVE. THE PARTING OF THE WAYS

227

places fall out of time and historical space and into the sophistic fantasy of Greek urbanity that is made up of columns and benches, seaside meandering, and philosophical debate. This urban non-place is not simply a figment of Justin’s literary imagination. In another sense—one that bore deeply upon Roman subjects—this whimsical, unnamed city was a concrete and wellpopulated destination for elite, imperial Greek intellectuals. This idealized, historical (but not historically specific), and emblematically Greek city was the frequent literary shelter of Greek elites whose civic independence had long been lost to the Roman imperium.26 Simon Swain describes how schoolroom declamations composed during the imperial period were frequently set in an idealized, but generic, Greek city that culled primarily from the Athenian world of Demosthenes. These orations were staged in a city that was, in Swain’s account, “blandly historical,” but also thoroughly Greek, with a democratic assembly and a city council to serve as the orator’s audience.27 The Hellenic fantasy of the sophists and the novelists was material to the extent that it was a shared place where Greekness could be fully imagined apart from Rome.28 But the city-spaces in which various kinds of Greek intellectual fantasy took place—philosophical dialogues, imagined declamations, and the idealized settings of Greek prose fiction—was a shared construct that allowed Greek subjects to conceptualize the intellectual freedom to which they were so dedicated. The specific role of the Greek city as a backdrop of sophistic culture under imperial Rome has been a focus of scholarship for the last quarter decade. Cf. Ewan Bowie (“The Greeks and their Past in the Second Sophistic,” in Studies in Ancient Society, M.I. Finley ed., [London: Routledge and K. Paul, 1974]), Simon Swain (Hellenism and Empire: Language, Classicism and Power in the Greek World, AD 50-250 [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998]), and Sandra Schwartz (“Rome in the Greek Novel? Images and Ideas of Empire in Chariton’s Persia,” Arethusa 36.3 [2003]: 375-94). 27 Swain, Hellenism and Empire, 93. 28 The novels more frequently are set in specific locales, but the historical distance between their authors and their fictional subjects leaves the civic locales in the novels generic placeholders rather than vivid and detailed locations in the pre-Roman landscape. 26

228

GAMING GREEKNESS

Justin’s Dialogue employs a similarly idealized landscape to set his meeting with Trypho. In the Apologies, Justin addresses Rome and Romanness outright as he appeals to the Emperor as well as his sons who are φιλοσόφος and ἐραστης παιδείας. 29 Here in the Dialogue, however, the word “Rome” does not even appear.30 Nasrallah argues that the anonymity of this city is part of Justin’s effort to present himself as a philosophical player, but we can also see it as part of a strategy to situate the entire ensuing dialogue on the competitive field of Greekness. Justin designs the setting of the Dialogue in order to subtly endow his engagement with Trypho with philosophical legitimacy and grant his encounter a dialogical ambiance.31 Cloaks, and What’s Beneath Them

When Trypho meets Justin, he explains his reason for greeting Justin in 1.2. His Socratic teacher Corinthus had taught him: I would not think ill of nor pass up anyone wrapped in this garment (σχῆμα), but to engage courteously with every such one and to engage with them in conversation, in case some good should come from the discussion—either for him or me. It is a good that bears on both of us if either one should be benefitted. And so I am grateful when I see someone in this garment and readily (ἀσμένως) apply myself to him. Accordingly it is a pleas-

See also, 1 Apol. 1.1, 26.2, 56.2, as well as 2 Apol. 1.1. (as well as the note in Justin, Philosopher and Martyr: Apologies, Dennis Minns and Paul Parvis, eds. [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009], 34-41). 30 Nasrallah, Christian Responses to Roman Art and Architecture, 75. 31 Judith Perkins suggests that Greek cultural identity, urbanity, the rise of Roman citizenship in the Greek-speaking East, as well as Roman distinctions between the humiliores/honestiores all comprised a culturally-diffuse movement organized around Greek cities, which she terms “cosmopolitanism.” Perkins’s re-situating where this kind of elite self-fashioning was taking place helpfully illuminates the formative role that conceptions of place had for individuals in this period (Roman Imperial Identities in the Early Christian Era [New York: Routledge, 2009], esp. 17-44). 29

CHAPTER FIVE. THE PARTING OF THE WAYS

229

ure now to speak to you. Those who follow together with me also hope to hear some useful (χρηστὸν) thing from you.32

As Trypho relates (or, humbly brags about) his philosophical background, it is the cloak alone that invites the ensuing debate. The very act of recognition initiates a confrontation over what the cloak signifies.33 Immediately, the careful and subtle word choice in the Dialogue comes into view. To “deal kindly” (φιλοφρονεῖσθα) puts a very friendly (and notably Platonic) face forward, but also one which underlines the competitive dynamic at play in Justin’s Dialogue.34 The agonistic aspects of their encounter is reinforced a few lines later with Trypho’s explanation that “I gladly apply myself “ (ἀσμένως αὐτῷ προσέρχομαι) to a philosophical teacher. Such were the implicitly competitive relationships among philosophical teachers and their solicitous students—philosophy, in the 2nd century CE, was a bull market. Even the semantic valence of the word Trypho uses colors their encounter with competition and philosophical rivalry. In this context, the usage is likely that of submitting to instruction, but προσέρχομαι can also have the sense of attacking, surrendering, or capitulating.35 32 Dial.

1.2. van Winden notes, “If one starts from the premise that Justin is giving a literary fiction, it must be argued that he deliberately presented himself wearing the philosopher’s cloak, which immediately called forth the greeting, ‘Hello, philosopher.’ If one assumes an historical character of the work, Justin’s actual wearing of the cloak was the occasion for a dialogue on philosophy” (An Early Christian Philosopher, 23). 34 Among his frequent use of the term, Plato uses it to describe the ideal demeanor of athletes and competitors during games and festivals in Laws 765a. (Cf. Lucian, Timon. 48.) 35 Very generally, the paideutic sense of the term is frequent in the 2nd–3rd centuries CE (cf. Philostratus Vit. Ap. 3.18; Diodorus Siculus, BH 1.95), while the more literal sense of “attack” and “surrender” pervades in classical sources (cf. Xenophon, Cyr. 6.2.16; Thucydides 3.59). The new edition of Falls’ translation of the Dialogue renders this as, “I gladly accost him.” This is an intriguing compromise of meanings, but it resorts to splitting the semantic difference. A better approach may be to accept the polysemy here, and see Trypho’s phrasing as typical of a competitive philosophical enthusiast. The philosophical culture in which Trypho and Justin meet is character33

230

GAMING GREEKNESS

Trypho’s engagement with Justin’s cloak indicates precisely how important self-designation, style, and deportment were among paideutic competitors.36 What is remarkable is that Trypho initially presumes Justin’s philosophical bone fides solely on the basis of his cloak. The philosopher’s cloak—the τρίβων—was a common enough sight in an ancient city. However, its significance among contentious philosophers and their students is not easy to parse. Despite its ubiquity, the precise significance of the cloak is often ambiguous, serving as both a signal of philosophical seriousness as well as the hastily donned garb of a sophistic poseur. It had an emblematic status among Cynic philosophers who used it to imitate Diogenes’s selfsufficiency—”the first, say some, to fold his cloak (τρίβωνα) because he was obliged to sleep in it as well, and he carried a wallet to hold his victuals, and he used any place for any purpose, for breakfasting, sleeping, or conversing (διαλεγόμενος).”37 In the Imperial period, imitating philosophers’s garb was frequently severed from the Cynic ideal, and as often as not wearing the cloak served as an identifier of ized by debate, contention, and quarrel. In any case, apart from the substance of their ultimate discussion, this reading of the cloak can be understood to imply a script of philosophical disagreement that rehearses, frames, and works to render explicit differences. 36 Rajak describes this aspect of their encounter the “gambit of philosophy” and notes that, “the Jew is attracted by Justin’s garb, and thus Trypho is temporarily constructed as ‘one of us’” (“Talking at Trypho,” 64). Of course, the “us” that Justin introduces is not truly his. As Lyman notes, Justin is a mimetic subject as much as any other Roman imperial subject was, and involved by critique and dependence (“Politics of Passing: Justin Martyr’s Conversion as a Problem of ‘Hellenization,’” in Kenneth Mills and Anthony Grafton, eds., Conversion in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages [Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2003], 38). In this case, I would suggest that the ability to ultimately critique Trypho’s Judaism entails that he build up cultural capital through his miming of Greek philosophical culture in depicting himself and his Jewish interlocutor. 37 Diogenes Laertius 6.22-23 (LCL 185, Hicks, ed.) Diogenes’s role in the cloak’s meaning is complicit in its ambivalence as a philosophical signifier: the famous Cynic did not care for fame and recoiled from those who desired it, thereby becoming a potent symbol of philosophical austerity that, nonetheless, bestowed notariety on the wearer.

CHAPTER FIVE. THE PARTING OF THE WAYS

231

sham-philosophers and a symbol for insincere philosophical commitments.38 Thus, the cloak existed as an ambiguous philosophical symbol—while some philosophers did appeal to it as a kind of selfstyled intellectual expression, just as many resisted the insincerety of the cloak as a fraudulent claim on philosophical legitimacy. Justin himself seems to have been particularly attuned to this dynamic when he addresses the role of self-styling among often contradicting public intellectuals in the first Apology. He remarks: For indeed, some assume the name and guise (ὄνομα καὶ σχῆμα) of philosophers who behave in no way worthy of their profession (τῆς ὑποσχέσεως). And you know that those aged ones who contradicted one another in their thought and teaching (δοξάσαντες καὶ δογματίσαντες) are nevertheless jointly referred to by the one name, ‘philosophers’.39

Justin’s contemporary Epictetus similarly laments about the implicit association of philosophers with their cloaks in a discourse titled “To those who Hastily Put on the Garments of the Philosophers.”40 Epictetus conceptualizes philosophy as a τέχνη embodied by philosophers who are formed by paideia—not something that can be manufactured through one’s appearance. He gives voice to what appears to have been a widely shared opinion about a kind of hypoEven in the laudatory example of Antisthenes, the cloak is a site for humorous double-entendre: Diogenes Laertius relates that, “once, Antisthenes turned his cloak (τοῦ τρίβωνος) so that the open gap became visible; Socrates saw this and said, ‘I can see your love of fame (φιλοδοξίαν) peeking through your cloak’” (6.1.5-8). On this chreia, cf. Aelian, Var. Hist. 9.35. 39 1 Apol. 4.8. Since the role of appearance in the appraisal of paideia appeared so concretely in Lucian’s Dream, I note that Justin offers his own account of Hercules’s meeting with Virtue and Vice, the fable the provides a model for Lucian. In Justin’s telling, Vice is seductively dressed and ornamented while Virtue is shabbily dressed but promises inner beauty (2 Apol. 9). 40 Πρὸς τοὺς ταχέως ἐπὶ τὸ σχῆμα τῶν φιλοσόφων ἐπιπηδῶντας (Epictetus, Diss. 4.8 Oldfeather, ed.) Τὸ σχῆμα is an ambiguous term, and I render it “garments” here to convey the sense of outward appearance that occupies Epictetus throughout the majority of the text (Oldfeather prefers the more generic “guise.”) However, the usage of this expansive term is suggestive of how diffuse philosophical comportment was, especially in ancient cities. 38

232

GAMING GREEKNESS

critical philosophical teacher who behaved immoderately while donning the cloak and beard—like a Chaucerian friar whose syphalitic boils belie his chastity. Epictetus cannot believe that such teachers are regarded as philosophers at all.41 Epictetus continues by explaining that any who have aspirations to philosophy are able to immediately adopt the trappings of a philosopher: “Such a man has grown out hair, puts on the rough cloak (τρίβωνα), lays his shoulder bare, and contends (μάχεται) with everyone he meets; and if he sees anyone in a thick, warm cloak (ἐν φαινόλῃ=Lat. paenula), argues (μάχεται) with him too.”42 Epictetus’s discussion demonstrates the range of stereotypes that could attach to popular philosophers in ancient cities, undermining true philosophical commitment which intellectual poseurs believed lay beneath the philosophical cloak. Material aspects of philosophical culture like a cloak or a beard allowed one to make a public claim on certain manifestations of paideia, but these wearable manifestations of philosophical deportment were also separable from the person who wore them. They could support one’s claims to philosophical legitimacy, but they could just as easily undermine one’s credibility as an authentic part of the intellectual scene. Epictetus’s treatise gives evidence for the way that emphasis on material expressions of philosophical legitimacy posed a problem in delineating learned philosophers from philosophical pretenders. This distinction is made with particular deliberateness in the Attic Nights, where Aulus Gellius narrates a story that clinches the tension about philosophical dress that Epictetus explicitly addresses and Justin implicitly describes. Gellius tells the story of Herodes Atticus being met by a bearded Cynic philosopher in a τρίβων. Herodes was an exconsul who was “renowned for his charm and Grecian eloquence (Graeca facundia)” according to Gellius. The act of begging introduces a crucial dynamic into the account that pits philosophical substance against Cynic styles of self-presentation. Herodes is presented by Gellius as a consummate Greek, even as his wealth and station

41 Cf. Epict. Diss. 42 Diss.

4.8.34.

4.8.6.

CHAPTER FIVE. THE PARTING OF THE WAYS

233

distinguish him as a Roman of supreme consequence.43 Meanwhile, the beggar’s request and presentation is more characteristically Cynic, but their economic disparity highlights the opportunism of the beggar’s philosophical commitments. When Herodes asks him who he is, the beggar responds, “I am a philosopher! I am amazed that you ask about something you can see with your own eyes!” Herodes bitingly retorts, “I see a beard and a cloak (barbam et pallium), but I still do not see a philosopher.”44 By emphasizing the role of sight and appearance in the confrontation between the magisterial Herodes and this nameless beggar, Gellius’s story clinches the high stakes that came with intellectual self-styling in the 2nd century. Justin, like Epictetus and Herodes Atticus, cannot presume that being called out for wearing a philosopher’s cloak is an unambiguous inquiry. The material appearance of all kinds of intellectuals in the Roman world reflected a messy and contentious culture in which style and deportment were an important factor. Attending to the underlying dimensions of Trypho’s seemingly casual opening remark colors Trypho as an ambitious intellectual competitor. It also initiates the Dialogue with an implicit, agonistic question: what makes a philosopher legitimate? In the imperial period, the traditional Cynic cloak existed as both a powerful representation of intellectual independence and an indication of a pretentious, would-be philosopher. As such, the symbolic meaning of the cloak posed rather than answered a whole series of claims and questions about the philosophical chops of its wearer. By calling Justin out based exclusively on his cloak, Trypho sets the competitive terms for their encounter.

Herodes Atticus was one of the wealthiest Roman citizens in the Eastern Empire under the Antonines, and his legacy is still extant in the ruins of cities from the Greek mainland, especially Athens. He is most thoroughly attested in Philostratus (esp. VS 545-566) and Aelius Gellius, though he appears here and there throughout second century writers. For an overview of his social impact, see the discussion in M. I. Finley, The Ancient Economy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), 100ff. 44 Aelius Gellius, Noc. Att. 9.2. 43

234

GAMING GREEKNESS

III. AGONIZING OVER THE DETAILS: POSTURE, POSE AND DEMEANOR Along with carefully setting the urban stage on which Justin and Trypho meet and establishing their wardrobe, the frame narrative also conveys the subtle manners and postures adopted by the two competitors as they begin their dialogue. In the first chapter of the Dialogue, Justin and Trypho exchange a series of facial gestures and other postures that reveal their true significance only when seen as part of competitive intellectual culture in the Roman Empire. Justin and Trypho are both depicted exploiting Greek cultural resources by drawing on the philosophical landscape of Greek cities, the sartorial customs of Greek philosophers, and the urbane vocabulary that befitted elite, sophistic intellectuals. These stylized gestures amount to a kind of preliminary competition that presages what is to come in the Dialogue. Thus, the first moves Trypho and Justin each make adopt the form of sub-verbal gestures and bodily deportment that reflect the performed modes of Greekness that only rarely survive in literature from the sophistic movement. Trypho and Justin’s gestures to one another appear innocuous at first glance, however there is much going on beneath the surface of their expressions. In part because of their subtlety, the initial salutations in 1.1-1.6 give the clearest picture of the role that the stylistics of sophistic Greekness played among early Christians and Jews. If what Justin accomplishes in this text is to construct theologically discreet identities, his and Trypho’s posturing exchange defines the explicitly agonistic context in which that production takes place—one in which Justin’s act of construction was not an isolated phenomenon, but part of a larger economy of competitive intellectual and cultural positioning. In this way, this aspect of the frame narrative provides a unique mechanism for seeing how the cultural stakes of Greekness bear on Justin’s text, as well as how texts like Justin’s Dialogue contribute to the high valuation of paideia in the 1st–3rd centuries, CE. Tracing this aspect of the frame narrative entails attending to the most inconspicuous and passing elements of Justin’s account. The context of Justin’s literary allusions, the narration of his and Trypho’s poses and facial gestures, and the lexical significance of Justin’s word choices are all redolent with the peculiar stylistics of self-

CHAPTER FIVE. THE PARTING OF THE WAYS

235

presentation that defined the competitive cultivation of paideia and claims on Greekness in the Roman world. The Content and Context of Justin’s Homeric Greeting

Justin’s response to Trypho’s greeting makes the adversarial stakes of their confrontation more explicit. It also allows Justin (and Trypho, by implication) to show off his paideutic chops. Justin’s combative retort and the presentation of his own Greek literary sophistication takes the form of a Homeric salutation. He responds to Trypho’s inquiry about his cloak with, “who among mortal men are you, my fine fellow” (τίς δὲ σύ ἐσσι, φέριστε βροτῶν;)?45 Given the traditional dating of the Dialogue, this may be one of—if not the—earliest explicit citation of Homer in a Christian text.46 This kind of citation would not impress many sophistic elites—as Favorinus’s citation of the Odyssey in the Corinthian Oration bears out, a master sophist might go further and subtly rephrase a Homeric quotation rather than simply show off that he had read the epics. But it is possible that Justin’s choice of citation was a deliberate attempt to define the kind of competition into which he and Trypho had entered. The reference behind Justin’s greeting is to the confrontation of Glaucon and Diomedes.47 In the passage, the two heroes meet as combatants, but as they engage one another, their conversation leads them to realize a shared lineage, and they proceed to exchange armor so that, “all present may know how we claim to be intimate guests of one another from the time of our fathers.”48 Il. 6.123, which reads τίς δὲ σύ ἐσσι, φέριστε, καταθητῶν ἀνθρώπων; Cf. Il. 15.247, 24.387, and the note in Marcovitch, Justini Martyris Dialogus Cum Tryphone, 69. 46 Justin’s quotation also allows him to vocalize the Doric spelling of ἐιμί. In a period where archaizing impulses among Greek-speakers were a sign of authentic Greekness, Homer grants Justin an occasion to showcase some school-room Greek, where students were often taught passages from Homer as a model of Greek literary culture. As a response to Trypho’s philosophical questioning, it reads as a volley that intends to presage Justin’s legitimacy as a Greek cultural sophisticate. 47 Il. 6.230ff. 48 Il. 6.230-31. 45

236

GAMING GREEKNESS

“Intimate guests of one another” presents an intriguing picture of respectful—if adversarial—combatants. The relevance of this passage for the encounter that Justin narrates in the Dialogue is deepened even further in Diomedes’s and Glaucon’s newly forged friendship; their fighting ceases, but the role of duplicity in competition is quickly re-established between them.49 After the two heroes dismount from their chariots and greet one another as friends, the text notes that Zeus “stole the wits” (φρένας ἐξέλετο) from Glaucon, and for that reason he traded with Diomedes his much more valuable armor—”of gold for bronze! For that worth of nine oxen that of a hundred!” Glaucon being duped by Diomedes under the auspices of friendship demonstrates the fraught relationship between competition and cooperation. This unusual scene demonstrates the non zerosum dynamics at play in confrontations where the prize is heroism and ἀνδρεία (and not, in more zero-sum terms, possession of the city of Troy). Both Glaucon and Diomedes emerge from the encounter as honorable men of their cities, but Diomedes seizes the upper hand by taking advantage of Glaucon. Just like the agonistic stakes of pursuing Greekness in the Roman Empire, the competition for heroic status in the imagined, epical past always entailed ambivalent strategies in which one worked both for one’s own good but promoted shared values. The primary sense of Justin’s Homeric citation is relatively mundane at the level of vying, ambitious sophists—quoting the Iliad was a mainstay of being a cultured Greek in the Roman world.50 It barely needs mentioning that overtures of friendship that mask an underlying duplicitous stratagem is part of the fabric of the Homeric epics. 50 Homer seems to have been a favorite subject for grammatical (mid-level) education throughout the late ancient world. Cribiore’s study of Egyptian epigraphic evidence suggests that, at least in the late Roman period, this kind of Homeric learning demonstrated an erudite, though still middling, educational background (Gymnastics of the Mind: Greek Education in Hellenistic and Roman Egypt [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001], 15-44; 185-219; esp. 40ff). Kendra Eshleman notes that this kind of Homeric quipping is typical of the playful intellectual soirees of Plutarch and other elite, 2nd century intellectuals (The Social World of Intellectuals in the Roman Empire, 21ff.) 49

CHAPTER FIVE. THE PARTING OF THE WAYS

237

But the specific literary context of what would otherwise be a passing citation meant to show off one’s sophistic credentials cuts very close to Justin’s purposes in the Dialogue. We cannot know whether Justin intended to smuggle the entire encounter of Diomedes and Glaucon into his greeting to Trypho. And yet, the resonance between the two texts is present to anyone who looks behind the Homeric curtain. This shadow encounter between two archaic heroes illustrates the unbounded nature of Justin’s citation and the role that competition plays in even the most passing encounters in the postclassical world. Whether or not Justin intended to make the connection between his confrontation with Trypho and the one between Homeric heroes explicit, the context of his citation reminds his readers that even friendly relations can comprise a kind of competitive game. A Duel of Smiles

Beyond the loaded reference in Justin’s initial greeting, he also carefully narrates the gestures and facial expressions that went along with his and Trypho’s encounter. Beginning with Justin’s first Homeric citation, the two self-acclaimed philosophers engage in an exceedingly subtle duel of smiles that operates at precisely the level of manners and deportment that constituted the personal stylistics of this period.51 And the terminology Justin uses in the frame narrative and the contexts of their meaning in Greek literary sources reveals how these narrative details are not inconsequential descriptors. They are, instead, a conduit for the modes of agonistic exchange that form the basis for how Justin and Trypho engage with one another through51 This aspect of their exchange has largely escaped the view of scholars, who have tended to mine the initial chapters of Justin’s Dialogue for its indications about Justin’s education and philosophical allegiances. Van Winden’s study on the introductory chapters makes no comment on the smile of Justin or the responsive smile of Trypho, except to note the parallel usage of ὑπομειδιάω in 1.6 and 8.3. Hyldahl has addressed the characterization of Trypho’s smile (Philosophie und Christentum, 101). Trakatellis considers the usage of the term ἀστεῖον in the parallels Hyldahl cites, however his discussion is largely concerned with the issue of the resonances of Platonic dialogues in Justin’s text—specifically the use of ὑπομειδιάω in Tim. 21c and Phaed. 86d (“Trypho,” 290.)

238

GAMING GREEKNESS

out the Dialogue. The appearance of these gestures in the frame narrative indicates that the stylistics of sophistic culture is ever present in Justin’s construction of his own nascent Christianity as well as of Trypho’s Judaism. The expressions that Justin and Trypho make to one another are appended to their postured conversation. They constitute agonistic displays that establish the basis for their competition—like two prancing rams who show off the thickness of their horns to one another.52 After Justin greets Trypho with his Homeric quotation, he includes a passing narrative comment: “I asked with a smile” (οὕτως προσπαίζων αὐτῷ ἔλεγον.) This sly smile is ambiguously appended to Justin’s remark. The term προσπαίζων is broad enough to entail a few valences, each of which places Justin in a condescending position above Trypho. One possibility is that Justin’s smile may not be good-natured—it may not even be a smile at all. Προσπαίζων can describe a smile that covers up something that is unsaid. It can be a playful smirk or jest, but it also signifies a mocking, a condescending sneer, or even an audible guffaw.53 It is a subtle narrative cue by which Justin portrays himself condescending to Trypho, either playfully or maliciously. Within the narrative, Justin’s Homeric quip and this smile reads as a retort to Trypho’s self-positioning comment about Justin’s cloak and namedropping his Socratic mentor. Προσπαίζων figures prominently in Greek rhetorical and philosophical literature. When Dio Chrysostom narrates the life of Diogenes, he compares those who abused Diogenes to the suitors who mock the disguised, beggarly Odysseus with insulting sneers (προσπαίζειν).54 Of course, these displays are effectively incoherent without a detailed understanding of the terms of a particular competitive field. Agonistic displays and their ritualized exchanges are characteristic of all kinds of competitive scenarios, from the posturing war games that are used to nonthreateningly display a nations allegiances and military power to the agonistic presentations of animals who have evolved to compete with one another without resorting to physical confrontation. (Cf. R. Axelrod, The Evolution of Cooperation [New York: Basic Books, 1984], 88-105 and J. Case, Competition: The Birth of a New Science [New York: Hill and Wang, 2007], 115129.) 53 Cf. LSJ I.1-3. 54 Or. 9.9. 52

CHAPTER FIVE. THE PARTING OF THE WAYS

239

Another possibility is that this term signifies a jocular, knowing grin that a teacher might make when responding to troubling students and inferiors.55 Plato in his dialogue has Menexenus accusing Socrates: “Socrates, you are always insulting (προσπαίζεις) the rhetoricians!”56 In this reading, Justin depicts himself in a kind of Socratic frame that parallels (and perhaps usurps) the teacher that Trypho mentions. An even further resonance is preserved in Jewish wisdom literature, where the term is associated with moral judgments that foster understanding. Sirach 8:4 is representative: “do not mock (μὴ πρόσπαιζε) the uneducated (ἀπαιδεύτῳ), lest your ancestors should be dishonored.” There is a clear resonance here; Justin and Trypho both present themselves as seekers and possessors of wisdom and they lob accusations of apaideutos at one another in various ways throughout the Dialogue. Characteristic of the ambiguity of a smile, it is likely that each of these senses is in some part conveyed by this term: Justin’s first gesture toward Trypho is an ambiguous signifier of his own competitive posture as a superior, a Socratic-style teacher, and a sage figure of wisdom. Justin’s is not the only loaded smile to appear between the two intellectual combatants in the frame narrative. After Justin and Trypho feel out one another’s philosophical background, Trypho inquires into Justin’s opinions outright: “explain to us: how do you understand these things, what is your opinion concerning God, and what is your philosophy?”57 Trypho asks this “with a subdued smile” (ὃς ἀστεῖον ὑπομειδιάσας). There is a shift in terminology here; Trakatellis sees this new description of Trypho’s smile as of his high-class manners, and helpfully points out the difference in tone between Lucian’s brief account in Zeux. 1, with its account of Lucian’s being accosted by students in the street after a lecture, also provides a useful context for Trypho’s encounter with Justin, and the general culture of urban schools. 56 Menex. 235c. This aspect of Socratic comportment is also demonstrated throughout the Platonic corpus (cf. Phaedr. 262d, Euthd. 283b). This Socratic playfulness is imitated with particular self-awarenss in Plutarch’s sympotic literature (Cf. Plut., QC 740b, 635f, 621a). I am indebted to Kendra Eshleman for this insight and for pointing me to these textual examples. 57 Dial. 1.6. 55

240

GAMING GREEKNESS

Trypho’s smile (ὑπομειδιάω) and the laughter of his companions (ἀνεγέλασαν) later in the text.58 This usage certainly conveys an effete, cultured way of comporting oneself. However, these manners also operate as a form of interpersonal competition. ὑπομειδιάω is frequently used in Greek literature from the imperial era, but rarely appears before the advent of the sophistic movement. It appears throughout the pages of sophists, satirizers, and novelists. 59 In some usages, it signals the insincere affirmation that accompanies a lie, or specifies a winking smile that is used when one does not mean what he or she is saying. We see this sense most explicitly in Lucian’s Teacher of Rhetoric. When the Teacher addresses how one should comport oneself among other speakers to keep from being found out as an uneducated imposter, Lucian’s mock-teacher commands his student: “as a rule, smile faintly (ὑπομειδία), and make it obvious that you are not pleased with what is being said. There are a wealth of opportunities for those who want to quibble (τοῖς συκοφαντικοῖς) if they have captious ears.”60 The term is also associated with devious manipulation. In his Against Flaccus, Philo of Alexandria describes the Roman governor, Flaccus as a two-faced scoundrel who manipulates the reputation of Egypt’s Jews in the sight of the Emperor. In Philo’s account, the Alexandrian Jewish community gives Flaccus a decree to send to the Gaius Caesar in Rome that confirms their fealty and explains that they had ritually honored the Emperor as far as their laws were allowed. Philo explains, “While [Flaccus] read the decree, he gestured in approval of each point; he smiled and was delighted (ὑπομειδιῶν καὶ γεγανωμένος)—or so he affected his pleasure.”61 As Philo contin-

58 Trakatellis, “Trypho,” 291. Cf. Dial.

8.3. Cf. representative examples in Plutarch, Dion. 20; Heliodorus, Aeth. 7.10; Alciphron 3.3. 60 Rhet. Prae. 22. Cf. discussion of this text in Chapter 3. 61 Ad Flac. 98. Text from “ΦΙΛΩΝΟΣ ΕΙΣ ΦΛΑΚΚΟΝ,” S. Reiter, ed., in Philonis Alexandrini Opera quae Supersunt, vol. VI, L. Cohn and P. Wendland, eds. (Berlin: Reimer, 1915). I have also benefited from the translation and commentary of Pieter van der Hoorst, Philo’s Flaccus: The First Pogrom (Atlanta: SBL Press, 2003). 59

CHAPTER FIVE. THE PARTING OF THE WAYS

241

ues his narrative, he explains that Flaccus held onto the decree, keeping it from the Emperor Gaius. Philo goes on to describe the governor’s response primarily in terms of his manners. Flaccus’ demeanor is two-faced, and his smile is meant to convey a façade that intends to mislead and deal falsely. This resonates with the depiction Lucian makes of the sham-rhetorician whose smile masks not hostility, but rhetorical incompetence. The smile Flaccus employs is unquestionably sinister—a definitive example of the two-faced way in which the deportment of an elite Roman governor can mask vicious intentions. This level of hostility does not seem to lie behind Justin’s adversary, but Flaccus’s example demonstrates how smiles can mean a great deal more than they seem. The confrontation between Justin and Trypho is made explicit as the frame narrative continues, but it begins as an implicit part of the postures and gestures of this initial agonistic volley—one smile to another. The strategic elements of deportment define the initial terms of Justin and Trypho’s encounter, but it is unsurprising that Trypho’s smile appears again in the frame narrative to clinch the posture of not only Trypho, but also his companions.62 In 8.3, the condescension that is implicit in Trypho’s earlier smile is made explicit: after Trypho makes the same subdued, antagonistic smirk in response to Justin’s account of his conversation, his companions laugh at Justin in derision. This is an impasse in the Dialogue, and as Justin begins to reply to their ungenerous response, it is not entirely clear that their conversation can continue. When Trypho is finally able to convince him to sit down and explain himself at length, Justin’s subsequent discussion—which makes up the rest of the Dialogue—is pre-loaded with Trypho’s disposition toward Justin as it is established in the frame narrative, and especially in this final moment before Justin begins his dialogue. They are courteous and civil competitors who treat one another with a contentious respect that facilitates their argument. They smile at one another, but always through their teeth. Judith Lieu notes that Trypho never takes part in the much more obvious, mocking laughter of his companions, and suggests that this is intended to distinguish Trypho as Justin’s definitive adversary in the debate (Image and Reality, 111). 62

242

GAMING GREEKNESS

Deportment as Competition

The smiles that Justin and Trypho exchange are concrete instances of how deportment functioned within the competitive economy of Greekness in the Roman Imperial world. But deportment also works in ways that are vanishingly subdued, and it can be difficult to excavate this dimension of the manifestation of Greekness from textual sources. In the case of the Dialogue’s frame narrative, Justin and Trypho’s gesturing to one another implies a whole array of manners that are not narrated precisely, but exist in the periphery of their encounter. The inclusion of the descriptive ἀστεῖος with Trypho’s initial smile at Justin in Dialogue 1.6 provides a good example of how otherwise unseen aspects of sophistic deportment can occasionally emerge from below the textual waterline. The term is a veritable conduit of sophistic Greekness, implying all of the urbane, cultural trappings that attended the cultivation of paideia. The civilized manners conveyed by this word tap into the well-established distinction between the rustic and the civic typologies of Greekness— paideia could be appropriate to both, but Justin and Trypho compete in a way that is unmistakably urban.63 It brings with it a sense of politeness, manners, and outward elegance in appearance or wittiness in thought—it is the perfect correlate for one striding through the anonymous (but unambiguously Greek) city that Justin and Trypho inhabit in the Dialogue.64 And the “politeness” implied here describes a kind of idealized Greek civility that embodies the virtues of cultivated manliness.65 ἀστεῖος is used at times to compliment otherwise ambiguous figures. In the conclusion of the Phaedo, Socrates uses this word to compliment the slave who brings the command to Cf. Whitmarsh, Greek Literature and the Roman Empire, 100-09, and Harry Sidebottom, “Philostratus and the Symbolic Roles of the Sophist and Philosopher,” in Ewan Bowie and Jaś Elsner, eds., Philostratus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 69-99. 64 The wide usage of this term to explain a kind of cultural legitimacy is corroborated by its usage in 2 Maccabees 6:23, where Eleazar’s response to his torturers’ invitation to pretend to eat pork prompts him to present a λογισμὸν ἀστεῖον. 65 Cf. LSJ II.1, and especially the usage in Isocrates, Ad Nic. (2.34). Cf. Gleason, Making Men, xxvi-xxix. 63

CHAPTER FIVE. THE PARTING OF THE WAYS

243

Socrates that he must drink his poison. When the slave praises Socrates and runs away in tears, the philosopher employs the word and says, “How charming the man is!”66 In the LXX, the word is associated with physical, male beauty. In Exodus 2:2, Moses, as an infant being whisked into the Nile, is “handsome” or, perhaps better, is a natural fit among urbane Egyptians.67 The appearance of ἀστεῖος in the frame narrative adds a remarkable dimension to the importance that even discreet forms of deportment held among contenders for sophistic legitimacy. But from a broader vantage, the appearance of this term alludes to an unspoken medium of competitive exchange that exists below the contentladen level of dialogue that takes up the majority of Justin’s text and is scarcely captured in this brief narrative moment. The inclusion of details like this in describing Justin and Trypho’s demeanors situates the ensuing dialogue in an interpersonal context that had been modeled by an array of Greek cultural exemplars. The frame narrative is the place in the fuller Dialogue where the nature and style of Justin and Trypho’s confrontation is made explicit; it defines the cultural field on which Justin portrays his meeting with Trypho, and thus serves as the premise of the substance of the Dialogue. If “the medium is the message,” Justin demonstrates that the message behind his and Trypho’s exchange is founded in their personal styles of deportment as well as in the substance of their conversation.68 Judith Lieu, in her discussion of Justin’s Dialogue, reminds her readers that the competitive dynamic between Justin and Trypho is primary—their conversation is founded in conflict. She points to the 66 Phaed.

116 C. In a remarkable transmission error in Judges 3:17, the LXX misreads the Hebrew ‫“( ָבּ ִ֖ריא‬fat”) and makes the obese king Eglon of Moab “an exceedingly handsome man” (LXX: ἀνὴρ ἀστεῖος σφόδρα. MT: ‫) ְוֶﬠ ְגלוֹן ִאישׁ ָבּ ִריא ְמאֹד‬. 68 Marshall McLuhan’s dictum became a mainstay of thinking about media in the 20th century, in which a renewed focus on technologies of communication came to be part of the messages that were communicated by them (Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man [Boston: MIT Press, 1964], 7-21). Analogously, Sophistic forms of expression can be seen as a kind of rhetorical and intellectual technology that was wrapped up in the production of meaning in the postclassical world. 67

244

GAMING GREEKNESS

companions of Trypho, who share in Trypho’s final smile, as representatives of the “hidden” audience who “represent the market for which both Jews and Christians were in competition, and, in the time-honored way of all propaganda, Justin is establishing both his ‘product’s’ superiority in every respect and the obsolescence of his competitor’s alternative.”69 This kind of religious competition for constituents is certainly at issue in the Dialogue. However there is an underlying significance to their stylistic confrontation that alludes to another economy of competition that is at stake in this text.70 Beyond the narrow audience of possible converts who listen intently to Justin’s message, there is a broader audience of cultural elites that sits beyond the view of this text and who would judge this encounter by different rules if they were ever to read it. While Justin and Trypho might vie for the attention of the narrow constituency of Jewish and Christian listeners, both of them cooperatively aspire to win social and intellectual legitimacy in the broader Greek-speaking world. This effort is already at play for both figures when a cloaked, smirking Justin is approached by a sometime-Platonist, Jewish Trypho. These new designations for religious self-identity could not have been created in a vacuum. They required a shared field, and a common cultural language to coherently locate the new relations that Justin seeks to establish among them. In the 2nd century context of Western Asia Minor under the early Roman Empire, it was a definitively Greek field and an explicitly sophistic set of relations that allowed Justin to make his construction of “Jews and heretics” coherent. The Christian and Jewish identities that Justin produces are not created from scratch—they are, in part, won by staking a claim on the

69 Lieu, Image

and Reality, 107. Lieu captures the overlapping nature of the competitive stakes at issue here. She emphasizes the role of competition between Justin and Trypho’s competition with one another for prospective converts is central to their dispute. She notes that, “in the implicit, if not explicit, missionary situation of existence in the Graeco-Roman city, where Judaism and Christianity from an apparently common base were adopting different strategies towards the approach of potential sympathizers, legitimacy was as important for those outsiders as for those within” (Lieu, Image and Reality, 136). 70

CHAPTER FIVE. THE PARTING OF THE WAYS

245

Greek cultural field that was open for their use and laden with resources to support their foothold.

IV. WHAT CAME BEFORE: JUSTIN’S CAREER AND T HE PHILOSOPHICAL MARKETPLACE OF THE ANCIENT CITY While locale, dress and deportment provide a fecund (if subtle) context for the Dialogue, there is another dimension to Justin and Trypho’s encounter that is made explicit in the frame narrative: Justin, Trypho and his friends present themselves as participants in the urban philosophical culture in the first and second centuries CE. This intellectual backdrop—populated with competing schools, ambitious students and zealous teachers—exuded the climate of cultural agonism that defined the sophistic movement.71 After Trypho’s final The scholarship on this precise dimension of 2nd century intellectual culture tends to overlap with studies on popular philosophy, especially Cynicism. Cf. Donald Dudley, The History of Cynicism (London: Metheun, 1937), esp. 143-202; Christopher P. Jones, The Roman world of Dio Chrysostom (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978); J.H. Oliver, “Marcus Aurelius and the Philosophical Schools at Athens,” AJP 102 (1981), 213225; Margarethe Billerbeck, “La reception du cynisme à Rome,” AC 51(1982), 151-173; C.E. Manning, “School Philosophy and Popular Philosophy in the Roman Empire” ANRW II.36.7 (1994), 4995-5026; John Moles, “Cynic Cosmopolitanism,” in R. Bracht Branham and Marie-Odile GouletCazé, eds., The Cynics: The Cynic Movement in Late Antiquity and its Legacy, (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1996): 105-120; Robert Lamberton, “The Schools of Philosophy of the Roman Empire: The Evidence of the Biographies” in Too, ed., Education in Greek and Roman Antitquity, 433-485. For a discussion of this culture in the milieu of early Christianity see Klaus Doring, Exemplum Socratis. Studien zur Sokratesnachwirkung in der kynisch-stoischen Popularphilosophie der frühen Kaiserzeit und im frühen Christentum (Weisbaden: Steiner, 1979) and Thomas Schmeller, Schulen im Neuen Testament?: zur Stellung des Urchristentums in der Bildungswelt seiner Zeit (Freibourg: Herders, 2001.) On material context for these figures, see R.R.R. Smith, “Late Roman Philosopher Portraits from Aphrodisias,” JRS 80 (1990), 127-155; C. Wölfel, “Porträts griechischer Dichter, Redner und Denker in römischen Villen,” in K. Stemmer, ed., Standorte. Kontext und Funktion antiker Skulptur.Ausstellungskatalog Abgußsammlung Berlin (Berlin: Freunde und Fördererder Abguss–Sammlung

71

246

GAMING GREEKNESS

smile (ὑπομειδιάσας) he makes this context explicit in his response to Justin: I commend all you say, and I admire your eager passion concerning the things of God, but it would be better for you to pursue the wisdom of Plato or some other philosopher, and in this way foster constancy, continency, and moderation (καρτερίαν καὶ ἐγκράτειαν καὶ σωφροσύνην), rather than be ensnared by false teachings, and follow men of no worth.72

Philosophical schools were widely considered the official locus of philosophy, and Trypho’s language of “Plato or some other philosopher” indicates both the cultural capital that traditional schools held and why Justin’s upstart “philosophy” was deemed suspect and marginal. However, in the second century CE, an almost Chaucerian characterization of chicanery and hypocrisy had encumbered these schools. Justin’s account of his philosophical career is thus not only a way of describing his new belief as both the summit of the course of philosophical exploration and something qualitatively different than the pursuit but it also taps into an emerging cultural trope: the wellmeaning seeker who is exhausted in his earnest search for truth by being tossed from school to school. Having choreographed a confrontation of gestures that tapped into sophistic instincts of deportment and self-fashioning, Justin narrates his educational career in order to explain how his new faith is a legitimate participant in the competitive intellectual marketplace, but also above the contentious mob of philosophical schools and their teachers. Justin as an Urban Philosopher in the Roman World

According to the stories that were preserved about Justin’s career, philosophical controversy and intrigue follow Justin throughout his life. Most notably, Eusebius describes Justin’s martyrdom to be the result of a plot by Crescens, a public intellectual and adversary whom Antiker Plastik, 1995), 441-445; Paul Zanker, The Mask of Socrates: The Image of the Intellectual in Antiquity, Alan Shapiro, trans. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), esp. 181ff. 72 Dial. 8.3.

CHAPTER FIVE. THE PARTING OF THE WAYS

247

Justin takes to task in his second Apology.73 This Roman figure is defined by Eusebius as one “who endeavored in life and behavior to live up to the name of Cynic which he bore,” in contrast to Justin who was “in truth the greatest philosopher” (ὁ ταῖς ἀληθείαις φιλοσοφώτατος).74 However, the only expansive account of Justin’s philosophical background and education comes in the frame narrative of the Dialogue. He begins by discussing the corrupt state of philosophical learning and his own course through the philosophical schools, arguing that the rise of many philosophical schools that are at odds with one another is proof that no philosophical point of view is correct. 75 Justin explains: Philosophy is indeed one’s greatest possession (κτῆμα), and is supremely honored by God, to whom it alone leads us and to whom it unites us. They are truly holy who have applied their minds to philosophy. But what philosophy is and for what good it was sent down (κατεπέμφθη) to humanity has escaped the notice of most. For otherwise, there would not be Platonists, or

73 2

Apol. 3; 9. HE 6.16.1. Early Christian communities may have fit into the culture of philosophical schools naturally—the kinship language that had defined the followers of Jesus for so long was being adopted by philosophical schools in the 2nd century. Cf. Apuleius’s use of platonica familia and cynica familia (Apol. 64.3; 22.7). 75 Van Winden remarks that, “evidently Justin imagines the evolution of philosophy as having gone the same way [as Christianity.] The different philosophical systems are like heresies; they do not represent the one true philosophy. Their adherents are Platonists, Pythagoreans, etc., not philosophers” (Early Christian Philosopher, 45). Remarkably, Justin uses the same fact to justify why those called “Christian” are similarly divided in 1 Apol. 7.2-7.4. However, Minns and Parvis note that 7.2 is a corrupted text, with various emendations suggested (Justin, Philosopher and Martyr, 94-95). Regardless of that difficulty, it is clear that Justin means to appeal to Roman authorities to deal fairly with any who are called Christian, “so that a person who is found guilty might be punished as a wrongdoer (ἄδικος), rather than as a Christian (ὡς Χριστιανός).” 74

248

GAMING GREEKNESS Stoics, or Peripatetics, or Theoretics, or Pythagoreans, since this kind of knowledge is singular (μιᾶς οὔσης ταύτης ἐπιστήμης). 76

Justin’s appraisal of the origins of philosophy sets up an intriguing background for his own experience of the Greek philosophical marketplace. He describes philosophy as a singularly consistent kernel of human understanding. However, this is not the philosophy that had become associated with the schools and sects that populated the Greek urban landscape. Justin’s concern with deportment and the external markers of intellectual legitimacy emerges here as part of a wider critique of philosophy as a whole. In his account, philosophical deportment had an ambivalent relationship to a pure philosophy that was out of reach of the schools. Justin argues that the divisions of the schools indicate how the nature and purpose of philosophy has been completely obscured. Those who “first turned to philosophy” (τοῖς πρώτοις ἁψαμένοις αὐτῆς) were “illustrious men” (ἐνδόξοις γενομένοις), but those who followed after them were only enamored of the virtues of these extraordinary figures, and gave no attention to the “investigation of truth” (ἐξετάσαντας ἀληθείας) which drove them. These subsequent figures considered their own teaching to be synonymous with philosophical wisdom, and gave rise to the “diversified” (πολύκρανος) situation of many philosophical schools.77 In a brief stroke, Justin dismisses the entirety of extant philosophical teaching while maintaining the intellectual legitimacy of “philosophy” as such. At the same 76 Dial.

2.1. πολύκρανος—”many-headed”—is a sparsely cited term before Justin’s use of it, occurring first as a mythic descriptor of a “many-headed serpent” in Euripides’ Ba. 1017. Nearly contemporaneous with Justin, it also appears in Sib. Or. 3.176, where the oracle describes the “cyclic course” of time and the succession of worldly kingdoms. In a section that is loaded with the critique of empire, Rome is described as “white and many headed… It will rule over much land, and will shake many, and will thereafter cause fear to all kings… They will also oppress mortals. But those men will have a great fall when they launch on a course of unjust haughtiness.” (John Collins, trans., in OTP I, 366, esp. note w.) See also the imitative use of this term in Ps.-Justin Martyr, Or. Ad Gent. 39 A.

77

CHAPTER FIVE. THE PARTING OF THE WAYS

249

time, he invests “philosophy”—or at least, the idealized root of the first philosophers—with the highest theological significance as the only means to approach God. Justin cuts a tangled knot in his approach to imperial-era philosophical culture; Philosophy is true, but truth for Justin is always indivisible.78 Justin’s strategy in his account of pursuing philosophy is to position himself as both a good faith public intellectual as well as a critic of popular philosophy and the system of schools that built up around it in the late 1st–3rd centuries CE. Unsurprisingly, Lucian provides a panoramic context for the urban philosophical environment that Justin engages in the Dialogue, and lends to it his usual satirical edge. Indeed, Lucian frequently touches on the intellectual contexts that underlay the systems of education in the Roman East. For example, in Philosophical Lives for Sale, Lucian depicts a very literal “philosophical marketplace” in which schools of philosophy are auctioned off to a waiting crowd.79 In this satirical account, Hermes appears in the guise of a huckster auctioneer who is peddling philosophical ways of life on behalf of Zeus.80 As Lucian presents it, Hyldahl suggests that this argument for an originally unified philosophical point of view derives from Posidonius’ Protrepticus and sees an echo of these πρῶτοι in Seneca’s primi mortalium and recentes a diis (Ep. 90.4; 90.44; Philosophie und Christentum, 114ff.) On this reading, Cf. van Winden, Early Christian Philosopher, 43-44; as well as the comments in I. Kidd (trans.), Posidonius: Volume III The Translation of the Fragments [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999], 73). 79 This text recasts a trope introduced in a now-lost antecedent piece by Menippus of Gadara, which presented Diogenes the Cynic being sold at a slave market. Diogenes Laertius 6.29-30 is our lengthiest explanation about this text by Menippus. See the expansive discussion in Joel Relihan, Ancient Menippean Satire (Baltimore: John’s Hopkins University Press, 1993). 80 In one example of the satirical bent of this piece, Lucian portrays the sale of Cynicism. When it is won, the buyer cannot make sense of how he might buy someone who is free and asks, “are you not afraid he may have the law on you for kidnapping or even summon you to the Areopagus?” Hermes responds that, “he doesn’t mind being sold, for he thinks that he is free no matter what.” It is worth noting that this is a philosophical marketplace— not a slave market that has philosophers for sale, as in the case of Menippus’ portrayal of the figure of Diogenes being sold. Harmon remarks that the 78

250

GAMING GREEKNESS

the philosophical schools that filled the cities of the imperial East made up a literal market, and their consumers are buyers who are interested in them as wares.81 Lucian thus mocks both philosophers

manuscript tradition has confused this issue in describing who precisely is being sold (LCL 54, 448). He writes that, “Although Lucian makes it perfectly plain that he is not selling specific philosophers, some, if not all, the manuscripts and all the editors ascribe the words of the different types to definite individuals.” Harmon points to Lucian’s later The Dead Come to Life, or the Fisherman, which is portrayed to have been written in response to the insult of Philosophical Lives for Sale. This text, which resonates with elements of Justin’s own critiques, has Lucian being attacked by revivified philosophers to whom he defends himself by saying that he criticized those who claimed to be following their philosophical ways of life, not the philosophers themselves. Menippus’s depiction of Diogenes being sold as a slave was crafted to exploit the irony of enslaving the irrepressibly free Cynic, so that to purchase Diogenes for his expertise was to submit to him as a master in the craft of ruling oneself. After Diogenes is sold to a certain Xeniades, he remarks, “you must obey me [in everything], although I am a slave (δεῖν πείθεσθαι αὐτῷ, εἰ καὶ δοῦλος εἴη); for if a physician or a steersman were in slavery, he would be obeyed” (DL 6.30). 81 Lucian parallels some of the specifics found in Justin’s appraisal, suggesting that some of these were commonly held about certain philosophical schools. Where Justin describes his Peripatetic teacher to be concerned primarily with money, Lucian here describes Hermes selling the Peripatetic life at a higher price and remarking, “for he himself appears to have a bit of money, so you can’t be too quick about buying him.” Similarly, in Lucian, Eun. 3, the question of chairs of philosophy endowed by the emperor arises in Athens after one of the holders died. Lycinus (standing in for Lucian, as in Hermot. Discussed below) explains how philosophers nearly came to blows with one another over who will receive the chair, despite how this conflicts with their philosophical commitments to intellectual reward. Pamphilius, Lycinus’ interlocutor, explains that “it is the doctrine of the Peripatetics, not to despise wealth vehemently but to think it a third ‘supreme good.’” The Eunuch provides a unique insight into competition among philosophical sects in a direction not discussed in Justin’s Dialogue—vying for imperial favor. The chairs of philosophy were first established at Athens by the Emperor Marcus Aurelius, as attested by Lucian and in Philostratus, VS 566-67. Cf. James Oliver, “Marcus Aurelius and the Philosophical Schools at Athens,” 213-225, as well as Arthur Urbano, The Philosophical Life: Biography and the Crafting of Intellectual Identity in

CHAPTER FIVE. THE PARTING OF THE WAYS

251

as well as buyers in order to make a satirical point about the degradation of philosophical interest and the mercenary nature of philosophical teachers. But Lucian’s most sustained engagement with urban philosophical culture and the schools that were at its center takes place in his satirical-comic dialogue, Hermotimus. This text—the lengthiest Lucian ever composed—takes aim at the hypocritical culture of urban philosophers who took advantage of well-meaning students and parallels many of the issues that appear in Justin’s account of his philosophical training. Lucian’s account begins in a way analogous to Justin’s Dialogue, with Lycinus (a nom de guerre for Lucian in the dialogues) meeting his friend Hermotimus who hurriedly walks past. Lycinus assumes that he is on his way to his teacher, because “you [Hermotimus] were twitching your lips and muttering quietly, waving your hand around like you were composing a speech to yourself, setting up one of your crooked propositions or meditating on some sophistical question.”82 Hermotimus’ teacher is domineering and impatient: he cancels lectures, physically accosts students who do not pay, and strings students along with unending courses of study. Lycinus cannot fathom what motivates Hermotimus to continue with his teacher after so much effort has left him only “just barely peeping (νῦν ἄρχομαι παρακύπτειν) at the way” to happiness through philosophy.83 Throughout this text, Lucian employs numerous metaphors for the study of philosophy, all of which are agonistic in some sense. These metaphors—including rhetorical speech, sophistical questioning, medical learning, a devoted, wakeful watch, a prize to be won, a sweat-inducing task and a long journey—imply not only extreme effort, but rely on comparative and implicitly competitive fields of mastery. Finally, Lycinus poses a question that acknowledges the summative efforts of pursuing philosophy: “have you not sweated and traveled (ἵδρωταί...καὶ ὡδοιπόρηται) enough, Hermotimus?”84 Late Antiquity (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2013), esp. 32-80. 82 Hermot. 1. 83 Hermot. 1-2. 84 Hermot. 2.

252

GAMING GREEKNESS

This question, posed by Lucian’s pragmatic intellectual, could easily follow on Justin’s account of his own pursuit of philosophy. He describes the pursuit of wisdom in superlative terms, but at the same time Justin insists that philosophical legitimacy is not a fixed quantity. It is the only means by which one is led to God and true philosophers are holy men. But this is not to say that all those who call themselves philosophers are holy. To explain this, and to set up his own experience with the schools, Justin proposes an etiology for how the diverse schools developed in which the teaching of learned sages is diluted through successive generations, like a game of telephone.85 In doing so, Justin exploits the current state of philosophical education in the early Roman Empire in order to strategically situate himself as both an intellectual innovator and the heir to a tradition that was besmirched by greedy, self-interested philosophers. Justin continues his account by putting his argument into the context of his own experience. He narrates his course through the various schools, and explains the particular reasons why he became disenchanted with each of them. In doing so, he taps into the competitive culture and popular characterizations of the various schools in an expanded narrative that navigates a young Justin through a cityscape of philosophical peddlers. He begins by placing himself “under the instruction of a certain Stoic” (ἐπέδωκα ἐμαυτὸν Στωϊκῷ τινι), though he abandons him when he learns nothing new about God from him. After that, he attaches himself to a Peripatetic instructor, but Justin relates that after a brief time together, “he demanded that we come to an agreement on my tuition fee (μισθὸν), lest our association (συνουσία) be unprofitable to him. For this reason I left him, for I did not consider him a real philosopher (μηδὲ φιλόσοφον οἰηθεὶς ὅλως).”86 Next, Justin approaches a Pythagorean because “my spirit still swelled to hear the 85 Dial. 2.2. Lycinus discusses the nature of philosophy with Hermotimus in similar terms and introduces a line of questioning that is echoed later in Justin’s Dialogue. After asking Hermotimus to clarify how many schools of philosophy there are, Lycinus inquires how he came to the conclusion that Stoicism was the proper philosophy in an effort to undermine the notion that the Stoic school (or in fact any single school) outstripped the others. 86 Dial. 2.3.

CHAPTER FIVE. THE PARTING OF THE WAYS

253

particular and excellent meaning of philosophy.”87 However, when the philosopher inquires about Justin’s aptitude in music, astronomy, and geometry, he insists that Justin can hardly comprehend what facilitates happiness without being oriented to studies that “draw the mind (ψυχὴν) away from the objects of the sense and make it suitable (χρησίμην) for the things of the mind (τοῖς νοητοῖς).”88 Justin is disheartened when he confronts the impractical expectations of the Pythagorean school—he remarks, “when I foresaw the time that I would have to spend on those studies (μαθήματα), I could not make up my mind to wait so long”89 When Justin continues, he is “at my wit’s end” (ἐν ἀμηχανίᾳ δέ μου ὄντος)—but in his own estimation, he left the best for last.90 The final school of philosophy that he seeks out is the Platonic school “whose reputation was great.”91 Justin narrates this experience as the apex of his philosophical experience. He tells Trypho: Thus it happened that I spent as much time as possible in the company (συνδιέτριβον) of a sage man (συνετῷ ἀνδρὶ) who was highly esteemed by the Platonists and who had recently taken up residence in our city. Under him I forged ahead in philosophy and I improved each day. The understanding of incorporeal things (τῶν ἀσωμάτων) vehemently siezed me and the theory of ideas (τῶν ἰδεῶν) lent wings to my mind.92

Within the framework of a philosophical narrative, this plateau of Platonic learning may have served as a logical end. Platonism, in Justin’s rendering, was an alluring way of life that had been reinvigorated in “our city” (τῇ ἡμετέρᾳ πόλει) by a recently arrived teacher. 93 87 Dial.

2.4-5. 2.4. 89 Dial. 2.5. 90 Dial. 2.6. 91 Given the way that Justin makes the monetary exploitation of philosophical teachers explicit, he employs language that elicits poverty and helplessness in using ἐν ἀμηχανίᾳ. 92 Dial. 2.6. 93 The inclusion of this detail, along with Trypho’s travel, demonstrates an important dimension of urban intellectual culture—the sophist and philos88 Dial.

254

GAMING GREEKNESS

However, Justin crafts this depiction in a way that allows him to introduce a surprising reversal, explaining how he began to exhibit the premature wisdom of the poseur philosopher. He continues by explaining that, “in a short time I imagined myself to be wise (σοφὸς). I was so stupid that I expected to gaze upon God in no time, for this is the purpose of Plato’s philosophy”94 Justin and “True” Philosophy

The conclusion of Justin’s course of philosophical learning only begins in 3.1, when Justin shifts from a narrative about his career to the introduction of the dialogical motif—in this case, not between himself and Trypho, but with a “a dignified old man, who was not shabbily (οὐκ εὐκαταφρόνητος) arrayed,” who convinces him to believe in Jesus.95 In this exchange, Justin also re-inscribes the ambiguous relationship he has with the philosophical schools as a whole. At one level, Justin’s meeting with this old man contravenes his previous philosophical efforts, serving as a kind of conversion out of philosophy. And yet, the new way of thinking that Justin adopts is never entirely severed from the trappings of philosophy and its pattern as an intellectual movement in the Roman world. When the old man asks what Justin is doing, Justin is at his most pretentious; he explains that he takes delight in solitary walks by the sea, which “are most opher who toured the empire teaching and performing orations. See, Silvio Montiglio, Wandering in Ancient Greek Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); Tim Whitmarsh, “‘Greece Is the Word’: Exile and Identity in the Second Sophistic,” in Simon Goldhill, ed., Being Greek under Rome: Cultural Identity, the Second Sophistic and the Development of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 269–305. For an overview of this motif in an early Christian context, see Timothy Luckritz Marquis, Transient Apostle: Paul, Travel, and the Rhetoric of Empire (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), esp. 22-46. 94 Dial. 2.6. Hyldahl identifies the usage of ᾕρει as well as the imagery of ἀνεπτέρου from Plato, Phaed. 246c, though Markovich points also to Tatian, Orat. 20.2 and Clement, Strom. 7.40.1. 95 On the figure of the old man, see Oscar Skarsaune, “The Conversion of Justin Martyr,” ST 30 (1976), 53-73, and A. Hofer, “The Old Man as Christ in Justin’s Dialogue with Trypho,” VC 57.1 (2003), 1-21.

CHAPTER FIVE. THE PARTING OF THE WAYS

255

suitable for philology (φιλολογία τε ἀνυτικώτατά ἐστι).”96 The old man is pleased to pop Justin’s bubble with a barbed retort. He asks, “Are you, then, a lover of words (φιλόλογος), rather than a lover of deeds and of truth? Do you not strive to be a practical man (πρακτικὸς) rather than a sophist (σοφιστής)?”97 Here, again, the issue of deportment enters again into the frame narrative—in this case, in the form of Justin’s speech and the intellectual manners that the old man criticizes.98 Justin’s encounter with the old man demonstrates how deportment was an inescapable part of 2nd century intellectual culture, even when it was subject to derision. The critique of deportment is even more pronounced in literature that focuses explicitly on the philosophical schools: when Hermotimus’s friend Lycinus inquires of him why he fell in with the Stoics, Hermotimus describes how the Stoics walked, how they were dressed, and how manly their appearance was. When Lycinus hears this, he is aghast and exclaims, “this litmus test of yours based on appearances is for statues!” (ἀνδριάντων ταύτην ἐξέτασιν λέγεις τὴν ἀπὸ τῶν σχημάτων).99 The old man Justin meets clearly sides with Lycinus—even down to stressing the importance of being a “practical man” (πρακτικὸς).100 But this line of criticism stands in tension with the way Justin carries himself throughout the frame narrative, as well as the way he (and Lycinus) present their own pragmatic philosophies as alternatives to the philosophical schools. The narrative pattern of philosophical enlightenment that is brought about by a sage older teacher is an established part of philo96 Dial.

3.2. 3.3. 98 φιλόλογος would become a mainstay of Christian thinkers who accused their non-Christian adversaries of being obsessed with the love of words for their own sake. The connotation of the term suggests the arrogance of Justin’s philosophical self-regard. Among later Christian writers, the term becomes an epithet for non-Christian philosophers. Cf. Gregory of Nazianzus, First Invective Against Julian (Or. 4.115). 99 Hermot. 18-19. 100 Dial. 3.3. Cf. Hermot. 66ff. The pragmatism reflected in Hermot. is that which appears in Lucian’s account of the life of Demonax, discussed in chapter 3 and 4. 97 Dial.

256

GAMING GREEKNESS

sophical culture throughout the Imperial period. Polemo is “converted” from an immoderate life of gluttony and anger by Xenocrates, and Zeno of Citium follows the spontaneous advice of a bookseller and follows Crates.101 Hermotimus also experiences a moment of decision once he has been convinced by Lycnius’s argument. Like Justin, Hermotimus comes to an ambivalent conclusion about his philosophical pursuits; he does not renounce philosophy per se, but he does “make a change of appearance,” casting off his preoccupation with philosophical discipline in order to pursue a more pragmatic way of life: You are right [Lycinus]. I am going...to make a change of appearance (μεταβαλοίμην... τὸ σχῆμα) as well. You will shortly see me with no dense, rough beard (πώγωνα...λάσιον καὶ βαθὺν). I shall not chastise my way of life (δίαιταν)—all shall be relaxed (ἄνετα) and free (ἐλεύθερα)... If in the future I encounter a philosopher while I am walking on the road, even by chance, I will get out of his way and avoid him entirely as if avoiding a pack of rabid dogs.102

Similarly, Justin is convinced by the old man’s argument and comes to understand philosophy in a way that stands opposed to the prevailing intellectual culture. The old man asks Justin how philosophers can speculate correctly about God if they have no knowledge of him.103 When Justin insists on the value of traditional philosophy by noting that it has come to understand that God is the unbegotten cause of all things, the old man gives a terse retort that introduces a different line of credible, intellectual authorities: “It is of no matter

These accounts are both conveyed in Diogenes Laertius (4.16 and 7.2-3, respectively). This topic has received considered study by Kendra Eshleman in “Affection and Affiliation: Social Networks and Conversion to Philosophy,” CJ 103.2 (2007-2008), 129-140. 102 Hermot. 86. Not insignificantly, Hermotimus treats Lycinus as if he is a divine savior who has saved Hermotimus from a catastrophe. 103 Dial. 3.1-7. 101

CHAPTER FIVE. THE PARTING OF THE WAYS

257

to me Plato or Pythagoras or anyone else held these opinions. This is the truth and you should learn it accordingly.”104 This admonishment strikes Justin deeply, and though he never sees the old man again, he narrates the experience as the old man’s argument takes hold within him: “at once, a fire was kindled in my mind, and a love for the prophets those who are friends of Christ took root in me. As I weighed his words in myself (διαλογιζόμενός τε πρὸς ἐμαυτὸν), I found that his teaching (λόγους) was the only sure and useful philosophy.”105 Justin’s conversion is ostensibly a kind of conversion out of this philosophical culture, but Justin links his new life with his philosophical aspirations. Christianity is the summit of his learning, and it was only reachable through the conversion that his encounter with the old man enabled. He summarizes his account in order to answer Trypho’s initial question, making his claim on philosophy explicit: “Thus, because of these things, I am now a philosopher (φιλόσοφος ἐγώ). Moreover, I would wish that everyone would be of the same temper as I, lest they should fall away (ἀφίστασθαι) from the Savior’s words.”106 Justin’s presents himself in a way that co-opts philosophy as an intellectual enterprise away from the school culture that he criticizes, transforming it into his own vehicle for communicating his faith. Despite his criticism of philosophical culture, at no point does Justin attempt to dismember the forms and dimensions of philosophy as it was widely practiced—instead, Justin models his own intellectual self-definition in explicitly philosophical terms. Indeed, the dialogical form in particular provides a continuous thread through Justin’s intellectual experience in the Dialogue: it is the premise of Trypho’s own philosophical background, foundational to the Platonic philosophical tradition at which Justin Dial. 6.1. The introduction of another basis for intellectual authority factors prominently in the remaining sections of the Dialogue. This dynamic is crucial to distinguishing early Christian intellectuals from sophists and other Greek-speaking elites. Given the argument of this chapter, I have not focused on this issue; Eshleman addresses this issue carefully in The Social World of Intellectuals in the Roman Empire, esp. 67-124. 105 Dial. 8.1. 106 Dial. 8.2. 104

258

GAMING GREEKNESS

concludes his time in the schools, it patterns his encounter with the old man, and it is an internal part of his own process of coming to faith in Jesus.107 Of course, this dialogical mode of interchange persists throughout Justin’s confrontation with Trypho. Despite the alternate forms of intellectual authority that Justin will introduce, the philosophical thread remains ever in the background of Justin’s literary strategy. In the process, Justin walks a narrow line so that he exists both as a cognizant member of the philosophical mainstream and as an interloping outsider whose newly conceived teaching contravenes the culture that drives the intellectual marketplace in the 2nd century, CE. ****** Justin narrates his career in the context of an urban philosophical milieu that participated in the broadly competitive intellectual context that defined the 2nd century CE. It made up a contentious environment in which teachers and students vied with one another for space and position in the intellectual networks of Greek-speaking cities in the Roman East. Justin’s response to this state of affairs demonstrates and deep ambivalence in his strategy of expressing his nascent Christian point of view. On the one hand, Justin insists that philosophical learning is in contradiction with their premises, and that the agonistic culture that had accreted around it was an unsustainable defect. However, Justin does not cast off the mantle of philosophy entirely—he continues to wear its garb, adopts its intellectual structure and forms of expression, and he explains his own understanding of Jesus as the true philosophy. The framing narrative, with its deeply wrought, philosophical urbanity and its philosophically enrobed and well-credentialed dialogue partners, sets up the imitation of a Greek philosophical dialogue. But it is a dialogue that will have a purpose and a direction unlike any that went before it as Justin presents a self-expressed account of his new faith within a philo107 Note “As

in Dial. 8.1.

I weighed his words in myself” (διαλογιζόμενός τε πρὸς ἐμαυτὸν)

CHAPTER FIVE. THE PARTING OF THE WAYS

259

sophical paradigm. Justin’s account thus illuminates a complex dynamic within early Christian and Jewish negotiation of sophistic culture: having access to the cultural prestige of philosophical inquiry was always predicated upon engaging with the external trappings that characterized intellectual culture and the philosophical marketplace that perpetuated it.

V.

FROM COMPETITION TO COOPERATION

The majority of the frame narrative and the substance of Justin’s prolegomena takes place in chapters 1-9 of the Dialogue. However, there is a closing narrative tag that can easily escape view when attending to the narrative. In this concluding chapter, Justin explains how he and Trypho conclude their dialogue and part ways: After stopping for a certain time, Trypho said, “You see that we did not engage with you on these issues out of devotion to a certain persona (ἐπιτηδεύσεως). I confess that I had a great deal of pleasure in our conversation (συνουσίᾳ), and I think these with me are similarly disposed (διατεθεῖσθαι). For we have discovered more than we supposed and beyond what we could expect. If we did this more frequently, examining the Biblical texts (λόγους) themselves, we would be benefitted (ὠφεληθεῖμεν) even more. But, since you say you are about to embark on your voyage and expect to leave any day now, do not hesitate to remember us as friends (ὡς φίλων) after you depart.108

As the narrative continues, Justin explains his desire to converse further, but he wishes Trypho well and encourages him and his companions to see the truth for which Justin has argued. They depart on friendly terms, but the ending is unmistakably open-ended— a remarkable conclusion given the tenor of their discussion and the contentious frame narrative that precedes it. For Trypho and Justin’s encounter to conclude on the basis of friendship stands against the sense of the text as well as many scholars who see a hostile, supercessionistic theology in Justin’s engagement with Trypho. I do not 108 Dial.

142.

260

GAMING GREEKNESS

think that the domineering and denigrating aspect of Justin’s argument in the Dialogue falls away in this final narrative passage, but this textual coda does introduce an unmistakably cooperative dynamic into the text. On the one hand, this could simply be a decorous way to conclude the Dialogue. But it is also possible that this unresolved ending was an intentional decision on the part of the author to demonstrate an important dimension of cultural competition among Christians and Jews in the Roman world. Indeed, the language about friendship with which Trypho closes might reveal a crucial insight about how the non zero-sum competition that structured the sophistic landscape operated among intellectual entrepreneurs like Justin and Trypho. Fundamental to the complex, dynamic forms of competition discussed in the first chapter is the fact that competitive agents may, at times, cooperate with one another for mutual advantage, even though they may contend and battle with one another in other arenas. Justin and Trypho had an essentially shared cultural position that lent itself to strategic cooperation—how to preserve and express their abiding faith commitments in light of Roman domination. The cooperative dimension of Justin and Trypho’s confrontation is not restricted to this final passage. When Trypho first speaks to Justin early in the frame narrative, his initial invitation to dialogue is premised on their mutual benefit. Trypho’s remark that “it is a good that bears on both of us if either one should be benefitted” (ἀμφοτέροις δὲ ἀγαθόν ἐστι, κἂν θάτερος ᾖ ὠφελημένος) provides a terrific, brief definition for the “greater than the sum of its parts” dynamic that characterizes non zero-sum forms of competition. In whatever way Justin and Trypho “parted ways” by means of their discussion, they shared a fundamentally similar cultural and social position. Thus, while Justin does much to discredit Trypho throughout the Dialogue, the makeup of their discussion as it is situated in the frame narrative presents them both as legitimate players on the cultural field of Greekness. Indeed, Justin’s decision to express his nascent Christian selfidentity in the form of the Dialogue ensures that he and Trypho both emerge as well-studied philosophers. And what is more, Justin’s narrative strategy presents the subject of their discussion as a legitimate part of the intellectual world of the early Roman Empire.

CHAPTER SIX. THE MONSTER AT THE END OF [T]HIS BOOK: HYBRIDITY AS THEOLOGICAL STRATEGY AND CULTURAL CRITIQUE IN TATIAN’S AGAINST THE GREEKS1 “The monster is difference made flesh.”

—Jeffrey Cohen2 “Oh, I am so scared of monsters!!!”

—Grover, the Monster3 A version of this chapter appears in the Journal of Early Christian Studies 26.2 (Summer): 191-219. 2 Jeffrey Cohen, “Monster Culture (Seven Theses),” 7. 3 Jon Stone, The Monster at the End of this Book, Mike Smollin, illus. (New York: Random House, 1971). I include this quote as a gloss on the title of this chapter. I conscientiously reference this piece of juvenilia because of how it phrases monstrosity as something both fearsome and familiar, and in light of the unique way in which it plays with the idea of Otherness, which is so crucial to the theoretical underpinning of monstrosity as I engage it in this chapter. As most who grew up in or have parented in the age of Sesame Street, in this children’s story, Grover spends the book afraid of reaching its conclusion because he knows that a monster lurks there. After making various attempts to stop the books pages from turning, Grover comes to the end only to find himself to be the monster who was there all along—a not insignificant parallel of the strategy I argue Tatian is employing in Against the Greeks by presenting himself as a cultural monster who seeks to bring 1

261

262

I.

GAMING GREEKNESS

INTRODUCTION

Tatian was a monster. He was a frightening, foreign and malformed entity who threatened the civilizing forces who opposed him. Beyond being a literary and theological outlier, Tatian alienated himself from his contemporaries, and he occupied his outsider position in a way that was entirely at ease with his amalgamated appearance.4 However, Tatian’s monstrousness is not an explicit part of his literary persona—unlike his contemporary Lucian, he neither announces nor names the hybrid nature of his voice and work.5 Rather, Tatian’s his Greek interlocutors to realize that they, too, have been hybrid monsters all along. 4 Cf. Nasrallah’s succinct assessment: “Nobody likes Tatian” (Christian Responses to Roman Art and Architecture [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010], 65). Nasrallah addresses Tatian alongside Justin Martyr and Lucian of Samosata in a lengthy chapter organized around how these figures each mapped the Roman world in their own literature. Her sharp analysis of Tatian illuminates many of the topics considered here in an admirably brief space. While I hope to present some of this material in different ways and with different emphases, her influence on the argument of this chapter should be evident. On the generally hostile reception of Tatian and his corpus by early Christian communities, see Naomi Koltun-Fromm, “Re-Imagining Tatian: The Damaging Effects of Polemical Rhetoric,” JECS 16 (2008), 1-30 and Matthew Crawford, “The Problemata of Tatian: Recovering the Fragments of a Second-Century Christian Intellectual,” JTS (forthcoming). 5 I rely on the concept of monstrosity in describing Tatian because of the singular way in which he situates himself as a conscientious outsider within the sophistic landscape. The image of the monster, which has its roots in continental theories of alterity, has become a fecund resource for describing otherness and its attendant fearsomeness. More specifically, it signifies what Jeffrey Cohen describes as a “refusal to participate in the classificatory ‘order of things.’“ Cohen identifies monsters as “disturbing hybrids whose externally coherent bodies resist attempts to include them in any systematic structuration. And so the monster is dangerous, a form suspended between forms that threatens to smash distinctions” (“Monster Culture,” in Jeffrey Cohen, ed., Monster Theory: Reading Culture [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996], 6). The use of monsters and monstrosity has been influential in a wide array of subject areas, as evidenced by Judith Halberstam, Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995); Timothy Beal, Religion and its

CHAPTER SIX. THE MONSTER AT THE END

263

monstrousness arises from his ambiguous rhetorical demeanor and the deliberate cultural alterity he claims for himself while in the guise of a familiar (and adept) sophist.6 By portraying himself as an amalgam that was both πεπαιδεύμενος and βάρβαρος, Tatian embodies a cultural argument against the prominence of Greek culture while also perpetuating its high valuation. And yet, this is not an accident, but part of a subtle strategy to reveal the arbitrary basis for the acclaim enjoyed by sophistic Greekness. Because his argument is delivered from the mouth of a hybrid cultural subject, Tatian strengthens his case by mirroring the way that Greekness was performed, thereby demonstrating how insubstantial the claims of sophists could be. This mirroring—because it comes from the monstrous figure of Tatian, whose vituperative rhetoric serves as fang and claw— explicitly undermines the imitation that was foundational to the so-

Monsters (London: Routledge, 2001); Margrit Shildrick, Embodying the Monster: Encounters with the Vulnerable Self (London: Sage, 2002); Richard Kearney, Strangers, Gods and Monsters (London: Routledge, 2003); David Gilmore, Monsters: Evil Beings, Mythical Beasts and All Manner of Imaginary Terrors (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003); Slavoj Žižek, John Milbank, and Creston Davis, The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic? (Boston: MIT Press, 2009); Alexa Wright, Monstrosity: The Human Monster in Visual Culture (London: I.B. Taurus, 2013). 6 That being said, Tatian does keep company with monsters if we count his inclusion of the Cyclopes (Κύκλωπες) in the list of barbarian cultures who educated the Greeks (ἐδίδαξεν here, but cf. παιδείαν in 1.1). It is unusual that these beings are included among other ethnoi and it is unclear precisely which mythic referent Tatian has in mind for the Cyclopes (though their association with bronze work strongly suggests the helpers of Hephaestus). Tatian would also doubtlessly have in mind the character of Polyphemus (Homer, Od. 9.105-564), whose monstrousness was defined by his one-eyed appearance, his consuming of raw meat and especially his cannibalism (cf. the entries on “Cyclopes” by Lutz Käppel and Richard Seaford in the New Pauly and OCD, respectively). Tatian’s consideration of these figures among the others whom he names indicates that he considers “barbarian” to be an expansively inclusive term, in contrast to the rigid exclusions that characterize who can be deemed “Greek.”

264

GAMING GREEKNESS

phistic paradigm by personifying the negative sense of μίμησις, so that Tatian becomes a mimic, a parody.7 If Isocrates’s gambit provides a convenient conceptual point of reference for how Greekness came to be so highly valued in the competitive ecosystem of the Imperial East, Tatian’s account in Against the Greeks can be seen as a retort. In it, he makes the undercurrent of cultural negotiation and the encoded postures and suggestive imitation that lay below the surface of sophistic-era literature absolutely explicit by attacking the entire sophistic program. Indeed, this text can be defined by its refusal to misrecognize the stakes that allowed sophistic Greekness to enjoy its privileged position as the cultural currency of Imperial social elites.8 Tatian manages this by naming 7 As I will explain later, I want to link the similarly ambivalent and dangerous figure of what Homi Bhabha has named the “colonial mimic” to the concept of the monster, putting Tatian’s monstrosity into a specifically colonial frame. Hybridity, mimicry and ambiguity are significant concepts in postcolonial accounts of colonized subjects, and for which the concept of “monstrosity” serves as a useful anchor. Especially as Tatian’s monstrosity in this chapter will be described as a function of his cultural ambiguity, it can be correlated with the danger posed by colonial mimicry. As Bhabha’s oft-cited essay explains, “The menace of mimicry is its double vision which in disclosing the ambivalence of colonial discourse also disrupts its authority. And it is a double vision that is a result of what I’ve described as the partial representation/recognition of the colonial object” (The Location of Culture [London: Routledge, 1994], 88). The aspect of Tatian that is “unnatural” is thus part of what makes him dangerous to those Greeks and Romans who were invested in the cultural prominence of sophistic Greekness. Thus, in the case of Tatian, to be a monster and a colonized subject (in more than one sense) constitute two sides of the same cultural coin. 8 I use “misrecognition” in its technical, Bourdieuian sense. This “form of forgetting” names the mechanism that enabled paideia to be valued and allowed the cultural field of Greekness to exist as a product of Roman Imperial power. Misrecognition in this sense describes that familiarized awareness of the world as it has been constructed, which one “inhabits like a garment” because one “feels at home in the world, because the world is also in him, in the form of the habitus” (Pascalian Meditations, Richard Nice, trans. [Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000], 142-3). And so, in this account, sophistic forms of Greekness and their attendant habitus were potent in the early Roman world only because sophists, Roman elites and other aspirant

CHAPTER SIX. THE MONSTER AT THE END

265

and exposing the values that were implicit in Isocrates’s formulation of a Greek cultural identity. Isocrates’s account of Greekness reinstituted the exclusionary, in-group logic of a Hellene/barbarian binary by introducing the premise that paideia was unified, bounded, and self-originate, and for those reasons could be learned. The purity and curated historicism of the sophistic paradigm was crucial for its success in the Roman world. Greek-speakers from various backgrounds during and before the Sophistic movement were aware of a murkier, intercultural past, but the (re-)fashioned Greekness that was embodied and exchanged throughout the Eastern Roman Empire was deemed to be comprised of a single, continuous and Athenian edifice.9 To argue against this cultural illusion, Tatian concedes to the ethnicity-defining mechanisms that underlay the civilization-making dimensions of paideia. He places himself, and the contrary philosophy he espouses, among the outsiders. As Laura Nasrallah explains his strategy, “Tatian begins his To the Greeks by ossifying the categories of Greek and barbarian, and then immediately questions the same in order to show the impure genealogy of Greek language itintellectuals collectively misrecognized the constructed nature of Greekness. That is, social and cultural elites collectively operated as if the value of Greekness was innate to it when in fact its value was produced by the collective regard for Greekness shared by these subjects. It is this constructed-ness that, I argue, Tatian refuses to participate in and which he seeks to unveil in his text. In the process he demonstrates precisely how deeply wrought the cultural stakes of paideia were in the early Empire. 9 Indeed, this cultural definition for “Greekness” was metonymic for an exclusively Attic form of language and literature that conveniently ignored the voices of the diverse past. This is evident in Isocrates’s own language in the Panegyricus where Athens is to educate the world, with the result that it will become Greek. I emphasize the Atticizing aspects of the sophistic movement here where I have not elsewhere because Tatian is the only figure who engages with this issue to any substantial degree. But, as scholarship on the sophistic movement has consistently revealed, Greekness and Atticism were frequently synonymous in the early Imperial world. Of course, the penchant of imperial era intellectuals for excluding all but Athenian voices from their account of Greekness is a crucial part of Tatian’s own critique.

266

GAMING GREEKNESS

self.”10 Where other Christian and Jewish cultural competitors sought to claim space for themselves on the field of Greekness by playing by the rules of the game, Tatian is remarkable in that he attacks the game itself. Indeed this text crystalizes the issues faced by Christian and Jewish communities throughout the period by naming them explicitly and making the game of culture itself a concrete part of his discourse. Tatian’s strategy is daring, but it is obvious why he would pursue it nonetheless. Unlike Justin, whose coded Greek dress and expressions obliquely belies his cultural location, Tatian aims at Greekness straight on by exposing an unsuspected vulnerability: the assumed purity of paideia.11 Tatian plays into the illusio of his interlocutors only to the degree that it allowed him to personify a cultural monstrousness that could upend the notion of Greek cultural purity and expose the power differential between “historical” (i.e., Attic) Greece and the circumstances of the “men of Greece” (ἄνδρες Ἕλληνες) who had become the subjects of the Roman Empire.12 He understands Isocrates’s gambit in a profound way and controvenes it by demonstrating in himself the mixed-up messiness of cultural performance which sophists and intellectuals fought so hard to exclude. Tatian is the monster that peers back at sophistic Greekness in an attempt to expose its adulterated impurity. And in the background of his critique is a theological vision—more an illusive dream than a fleshed out “philosophy,” as he calls it—one that promises a unified world in which cultural belonging melts away in the face of a divinely united society comprised of all kinds of “others.” Tatian’s Against the Greeks takes aim at the sophistic status quo by developing a com10 Christian

Responses to Roman Art and Architecture, 67. Responses to Roman Art and Architecture, 67ff. 12 Here, again, Bourdieu clarifies the mechanisms at play when he describes the illusio as “the fact of being caught up in and by the game... the fact of attributing importance to a social game... to admit that the game is worth playing and that the stakes created in and through the fact of playing are worth pursuing; it is to recognize the game and recognize its stakes” (Practical Reason: On the Theory of Action [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998], 76-7). This illusio is precisely that which those who refuse to engage in misrecognition resist. 11 Cf. Nasrallah, Christian

CHAPTER SIX. THE MONSTER AT THE END

267

pelling argument for the mutual influence of barbarian and Greek culture made by a Roman subject who embodied both sides of the cultural coin. Tatian presents himself as monstrous hybrid in order to embody a mixed cultural belonging that would unseat the illusions upon which the value of paideia depended, demonstrate the arbitrariness of Greek cultural prestige, and demonstrate to his sophistic adversaries that they, too, were the monstrous products of a messy and intermingled global empire.

II.

“DIFFERENCE MADE FLESH”: H YBRIDITY AND MONSTROSITY IN TATIAN

Despite the sharpness of his rhetoric, the figure and personality of Tatian looms even larger than his speech in Against the Greeks. Indeed, if we take Tatian’s monstrosity seriously, it becomes clear that it is the persona behind the rhetoric—comprised of the speaker’s cultural circumstances, choices, and self-ascriptions—that drives the force of his argument. The “men of Greece” and the “assembly of barbarians” make up much of his argumentative content, but it is the hybrid figure of Tatian who travels among those disparate groups that clinches his efforts to unseat the prestige enjoyed by pepaideumenoi. By presenting himself as an adept sophist who is, nonetheless, a barbarian, he situates his philosophy beyond the boundaries of Greek intellectual culture. In a world where hybridity and monstrosity were closely intertwined, Tatian leveraged his doubled cultural belonging in order to subvert sophistic forms of imitation and disrupt imperial power. A Contradiction in Terms: Tatian the (Pseudo-) Sophist

Tatian lays out his intellectual allegiances throughout Against the Greeks, but he makes his choice of belonging and the sequence of his learning absolutely clear when he closes his address.13 He identifies himself, “I—Tatian, a philosopher after the manner of the barbarians, born in the land of the Assyrians, having been educated (παιδευθεὶς) first in your learning and secondly in what I now profess to preach 13 Cf. Ad

Graec. 26.2-27.1, 29.1ff., 35.1-35.2.

268

GAMING GREEKNESS

(κηρύττειν ἐπαγγέλλομαι)—have put all of this together for you, men of Greece.”14 We have seen Lucian toy with the idea of cultural identity and barbarian origins, but it is a pliable distinction that Lucian considers in a literary frame that is always at least one level removed from the world. By contrast, Tatian not only plays into the Hellene/barbarian binary, but he presents himself as both a “native” barbarian and a barbarian philosopher who chose to turn away from Greek education. Throughout this text, he aligns himself with barbarians and speaks on their behalf. He recalls the celebration of the Scythian Anacharsis as a model for respecting barbarian ideas,15 aligns the values of the Christian community he represents with those of devoted philosophers,16 defends against what seem to have been widely held prejudices,17 and seeks to dissect the Greek/barbarian distinction in an explicit defense of himself and his fellow barbarians.18 14 Ad Graec. 42.1. That Tatian uses the archaic “Assyria,” as against the Roman-era nomenclature of “Syria,” is an unsubtle way to assert how much older the cities of the Eastern Mediterranean were than Rome. This accords with the historicizing efforts of nearly all intellectuals in the early Roman Empire, in which antiquity was regarded as innately authoritative. Cf. Ewan Bowie, “Greeks and their Past in the Second Sophistic,” in M.I. Finley ed., Studies in Ancient Society (London: Routledge and K. Paul, 1974), 166-209. Note that this usage is paralleled in Lucian’s self-ascription as “Assyrian” in De Dea Syr. For a textured reading of the term and its relationship to ideologies of Western Mediterranean subjects throughout late antiquity, see Richard Frye, “Assyria and Syria: Synonyms,” JNES 51, no. 4 (1992), 281285. 15 Ad Graec. 12.1. 16 Ad Graec. 19.4. This remark follows directly after a comment that points out the corrupt nature of many philosophers who pursue learning for wealth—a frequent basis for insulting unserious intellectuals with avaricious intentions in the early Empire. The fraught relationship between patrons and sophists is a recurring theme in the literature (see the discussion in Eshleman, The Social World of Intellectuals in the Roman Empire, 77-88, as well as Winrich Löhr, “Theft of the Greeks: Christian Self Definition in the Age of the Schools,” Revue d’Histoire Ecclésiastique 95, no. 3 (2000), 403426 [esp. 411ff.]) 17 Ad Graec. 21.1. 18 This theme recurs throughout the text, but Ad Graec. 27.1 provides an explicit description of the arbitrariness of the distinction.

CHAPTER SIX. THE MONSTER AT THE END

269

Even so, Tatian develops a complex account of his cultural belonging throughout Against the Greeks. He asserts his barbarian status, but just as definitively he aligns himself with his Hellenic adversaries, albeit in less explicit ways and with a different sense about why that matters. The divergence between Tatian’s account of Greekness and the status of his audience is the basis for how Tatian presents himself throughout the Against the Greeks. In their most idealistic iteration, sophists were embodied artifacts of Attic linguistic and intellectual purity who were adored for bringing the illustrious Greek past into the Roman present. The “Greeks” that appear in Tatian’s text are a clamorous group of self-contradicting sycophants who enjoy cultural power only by toadying to the Romans who had subjugated them. In between these two warring presentations lies the figure of Tatian. In arguing against the unity of paideia and the prestige that sophists had accumulated for themselves, he positions himself as a legitimate participant in those arcane grammatical and stylistic disputes that occupied literary elites and provided the basis for excluding others from claiming Greekness for themselves. This two-fold dimension of Tatian’s literary persona is the centerpiece of his rhetorical strategy. By embodying the cultural difference produced by the discourses of barbarianism while also performing an intellectual Greekness that was ornamented by sophistic styles of self-presentation, Tatian embodies cultural mixture and hybridity while arguing that Greek culture is as mixed-up and multiform as he is. In short, Tatian offers himself as an exemplary cultural troll. Like Tertullian standing as a pallium-clad model for his audience, or a self-referential Lucianic dialogue that instantiates the hybrid literary form for which it advocates, Tatian seeks to be his own best argument: a personified contradiction-in-terms who stands against the most hubristic dimensions of Isocratean Greekness. Throughout Against the Greeks, Tatian works to hold his paradoxical belonging in tension. He presents himself as a learned agent who was well acquainted with the sophistic performance (“having been educated [παιδευθεὶς] first in your learning,” he claims). And while his barbarian status distances him from Greek learning, it does not compel him to unlearn the grammatical habits of an ambitious, Greek-speaking intellectual in the Eastern Empire. Throughout the text, Tatian’s sophistic instincts peek through in his word choice,

270

GAMING GREEKNESS

grammatical syntax, and Atticized spelling.19 These were the rhetorical embellishments that most frequently characterized sophistry in its derogatory sense.20 A brief survey of Tatian’s predilection for inkhorn terms and his Atticizing tendencies clearly demonstrates that, despite his recurring criticisms of grammarians, he was attempting to appear to his readers as a well educated and skillful rhetor. Consider, for example, Tatian’s quotation of Aristophanes, which introduces Attic verbiage and even an explicitly Athenian intellectual context into the center of Tatian’s critique of Greek language: “Small grapes and small talk (ἐπιφυλλίδες καὶ στωμύλματα), conservatories for swallows (χελιδόνων μουσεῖα), the mutilation (λωβηταὶ) of art,” he The most thorough study of Tatian’s Greek usage and Attic tendencies is that of Aime Puech, Reserches sur Le Discours aux Grecs de Tatien (Paris: Alcan, 1903). Puech surveys in detail the usage, syntax and meter of Tatian’s rhetoric, though even he suggests that the work requires more attention than he gives it (see esp. 18-36). That being said, Puech’s reading of Tatian still very much accords with scholarly assumptions that have since been subject to critical scrutiny, including that Tatian is hostile to “paganism” and all literary or intellectual culture; according to Puech, the rhetorical sophistication that remains in Against the Greeks, “c’est bien plutôt un legs du passé une survivance inévitable de sa vie païenne et de son éducation sophistique” (36). In light of Puech’s research, it should be noted that Tatian is not the only postclassical figure to be guilty of linguistic hypocrisy in his opinions and usage—Lucian and Galen both evidence an indecisive regard for Atticism’s cultural significance and its use in their respective corpuses (Cf. Simon Swain, Hellenism and Empire: Language, Classicism, and Power in the Greek World AD 50-250 [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996], 6061). 20 Rival intellectuals frequently decried these performative phenomena (even as they all, also, incorporated them into their own work.) Tatian makes this an important part of his decision to forgo the learning of Greeks and to pursue the wisdom of barbarian (i.e., Tatian and his fellow believers’) teaching. (Cf. Ad Graec. 29.2, also discussed below.) Simon Swain has provided an expansive discussion of linguistic purism and its relationship to the political realities of Greek cities under Rome (Hellenism and Empire, 17-64). For an additional parallel, note Lucian’s sham rhetorical teacher, cited in chapter 3, who explains that would-be rhetorical performers should “pick out around fifteen (or anyhow not more than twenty) Attic words— learn them by heart, and have them ready at the tip of your tongue” (Rhet. Praec. 16). 19

CHAPTER SIX. THE MONSTER AT THE END

271

writes.21 Tatian quotes Aristophanes before he adds his own Attictinged comment, “the devotees (ἐφιἐμενοι) of this shout (λαρυγγιῶσί) and squawk like crows.”22 By quoting an Attic comedic dramatist, and specifically that drama that was remembered for its satire of Athenian intellectuals is not accidental. It also allows Tatian to demonstrate the shifting basis for linguistic valuations—the term χελιδών was frequently used in description of the sound made when speaking barbarian languages, so its appearance here to describe the arcane language of Atticizers creates a double-edged critique. 23 In his citations and his linguistic choices, Tatian shows off in precisely the manner that a sophist would. He also evidences an Atticizing habit in the form of his inconsistent spelling; The use of a double-tau in place of the koine double-sigma had become an almost clichéd way for lowbrow sophists to appear to be Attic in their speech by the 2nd century, CE.24 Tatian oscillates between the two, but he prefers the Attic style double-tau. Of course, Tatian’s spelling and word choice are eclectic— there is no pinning down his rhetorical style in a definitive way, and his rhetorical education does not appear to be as complete as his celebrated contemporaries. But as Whitmarsh argues with respect to the role of speech and claims of cultural identity throughout the period, to use Greek language is to claim Greekness in some sense. The sense of Greekness with which Tatian associates himself is more conscientiously sophistic and Atticizing than any of his Jewish or Christian contemporaries. Tatian’s language and word choice are not the only ways in which he demonstrates his sophistic affiliations. His attitude and rhetorical personality also align much more closely with ambitious sophists than they do with other representatives of Christian com21 Aristophanes, Fr.

92-3. Graec. 1.3. 23 At least since Aeschylus, Ag. 1050. Cf. LSJ, “χελιδών,” I.1. 24 This was so much the case that Lucian wrote a satire in which Sigma takes Tau to the court of the Vowels for stealing its primacy (Jud. Voc.). Puech speculates that Tatian may have known this text (Reserches sur Le Discours aux Grecs de Tatien, 24-25; Cf. discussion of Ad. Graec. 26.3-4 below). 22 Ad.

272

GAMING GREEKNESS

munities. In the ever-combative framework of Greek-speaking intellectual culture in the Roman Empire, nothing was more demonstrative of a sophist’s ambition than the denigration of other would-be sophists by classifying their speech as incoherent.25 It is therefore all the more remarkable that Tatian does not miss the chance to explain that he was “very distinguished” in paideutic forms of expression while demonstrating his facility in paideia through his own rhetoric.26 Somehow, the dissonance of these two dimensions of Tatian’s argument—his derision of sophistic performances and his insistence that he is a skilled sophist—is meant to resolve naturally within his self-cultivated monstrosity. Tatian’s monstrous hybridity reverses the cultural stakes of sophistic Greekness. Atticizing sophists sought to exclude those who did not speak in the rarified dialect of intellectual Athens. Tatian, by displaying his Attic skills and sophistic persona while also speaking as a self-described barbarian, embodies the variegation that was latent in Greek culture all along.27 Tatian’s hybridity thus serves as the basis for an alternate cultural theory that contradicts the premises of paideia’s high valuation. In this way, Tatian demonstrates himself to have understood the stakes of sophistic Greekness and its importance as much as any of his contemporaries—and perhaps with a singular perspective granted by his self-positioning as a frightening kind of 25 Cf. Ad

Graec. 3.3, 17.1, and 35.1. Graec. 1.3. 27 I have used “personify” and “embody” here relatively interchangeably, but Tatian’s hybridity is a function of his rhetorical character that is only present for us in the words that survive from Tatian’s poorly preserved corpus. To the degree to which we can imagine Tatian delivering this speech, it is definitively “embodied.” But there are no details about his dress, demeanor or physical presence that would doubtless have been essential to any real bodily manifestation. And where others, such as Tertullian, Lucian and Justin, make reference to these bodily signifiers, Tatian does not do so; thus his physical presence as a person within the civic context of the Greek East unfortunately falls from view. His monstrosity, as we can see it, is a function of his engagement with a series of abstract, intellectual issues, but we cannot assume that this did not extend (for example) into his mannerisms, his dress, and his posture. 26 Ad

CHAPTER SIX. THE MONSTER AT THE END

273

post-pepaideumenos. Tatian’s larger discussion, his argument about the realities of Greek culture and his presentation of the sophistic elites’s position within the Roman political economy are all informed by his underlying cultural ambiguity. And thus Tatian, the rhetorical subject, emerges from this text as an amalgamated creation that is knit from disparate and opposed cultural parts into a hybrid whole. Hybrid Selves, Bodies, and Speakers among the Sophists

Tatian’s monstrousness is a function of this hybridity. Within the confines of imperial Greek culture, the mixed way in which Tatian revels in his barbarian status even as he unmistakably comports himself as a trained sophist constitutes a fearsome and malformed cultural entity. However, this dimension of his rhetorical persona is revealed progressively throughout Against the Greeks. As noted above, his most explicit self-identification as a barbarian comes in the very closing lines of the text. That Tatian conscientiously presents himself to be a product of such disparate cultural backgrounds suggests that his hybridized monstrosity is a part of an intentional stylistic strategy. He fosters a culturally encoded persona that responds to the rigidity of sophistic paradigms by dissembling and recombining them. Tatian is a monster because he embodies within himself the difference upon which the Isocratean paradigm was premised. Tatian is not the only participant in the sophistic movement who toyed with what paideia could signify—Lucian was distinguished by his uniquely playful approach to Greekness.28 Lucian also 28 Lucian and Tatian parallel one another in more ways than is common for two ancient authors: the dates of their careers are nearly identical, they both hail from the far Eastern reaches of the empire, both describe themselves with the archaic geographic signifier of Ἀσσύριος (as opposed to the term Σύριος, usually preferred by Romans), both claim to have been educated in sophistic contexts, and they even share a number of specific references that suggest they operated within a shared intellectual network. Both authors also appeal to the figure of Anacharsis to make sense of barbarianism within a Greek frame (Cf. Tatian, Ad Graec. 12.5; Lucian, Anach.), and both specifically reference disputes among philosophers regarding the awarding of imperial chairs in Greek cities (Cf. Tatian, Ad Graec. 19.1; Lucian, Eun. 3).

274

GAMING GREEKNESS

parallels Tatian in touching upon his own hybridity, though Lucian sheds light on his own amalgamated status means with a typically sharp literary sensibility. Lucian frequently introduces images to illustrate his hybrid cultural and literary persona, but the most sustained meditation on this theme occurs in a short piece entitled, To One Who Said, “You’re A Prometheus in Words.29 In it, Lucian demurs from the compliment about his originality, and explains that explains that his work is graceful (χάριεν), but it is also shameful (αἰσχυνοίμην), and a malformed thing (ἄμορφον). He explains that he is worthy of Prometheus’s punishment for, “combin[ing] with foreign elements (τὰ μετὰ τοῦ ξένου πεπονθότα) things that are much more malformed (πολὺ ἀμορφότερα).”30 Lucian illustrates his premise with a tale about the king Ptolemy who sought to show off some novel hybrids: “a black Bactrian camel, and a man of two colors— half jet-black and half dazzlingly white, the colors equally divided.”31 Lucian raises this example to show how something novel and unusual is not necessarily worthy of winning acclaim, but in the process he illuminates the psychological response to hybrid creatures as they existed in his world—the viewers were frightened by the camel, but “as for the man, most of them laughed (ἐγέλων), but some were disgusted (ἐμυσάττοντο) as at a monster (τέρατι).”32 Lucian demon-

Cf. the image of Lucian as an adulterous lover of Lady Rhetoric and Comedy in Bis Acc., discussed in chapter 3. 30 Prometh. 4. 31 Prometh. 4. Needless to say, the explicitly racial implications of this passage are also significant (especially given the crowd’s response), though they go beyond the scope of this study. 32 Prometh. 4. The valence of τέρας here is clearly in the concrete sense of a monstrous birth or a “monster” more generally, as opposed to the more loaded concept of a marvel or a portent, given the response of Ptolemy’s audience. The term is used to describe a range of monsters, all of which are hybrid figures of some kind (the head of the Gorgon, Cerebus, Typhus, the Sphinx—even Caesar, whose two-faced motives compel Cicero to reach for the Greek word in his account of him in Att. 8.9.4). 29

CHAPTER SIX. THE MONSTER AT THE END

275

strates how a hybrid bodily form and monstrosity were innately connected in Lucian’s social world.33 When Lucian conceives of himself to be akin to a monstrous Titan who creates hybrid creatures, it is not solely a playful idea. It derives from the experience of a Roman subject who was clearly very aware of his own hybrid station, and who was, for that reason, all the more aware of how potent the othering logic was that could produce monsters. But what Lucian most illuminates in this short piece is the way that hybrid monstrosity was regarded in terms of mixture. He describes how his work is a camel, with dialogue and comedy both losing their beauty through their blending (μῖξις). The synthesis of two things can be beautiful, he admits, but it also leads to ugly, malformed creations. He explains, “the synthesis of two fine things can be a freak (ἀλλόκοτον)—the hippocentaur is an obvious example: you would not call this creature charming, rather a monstrosity (ὑβριστότατον).”34 Lucian guffaws at the compliment he has received about his combining two literary forms—”I’m afraid that the beauty of each has been lost in the blending (μῖξις).”35 Nonetheless, Lucian dared to adopt the role of the monstrous Titan by creating a hybrid creature of his own—”mixing female with male” (τὸ θῆλυ τῷ ἄρρενι ἐγκαταμίξας), as he calls it.36 Lucian stands by his creation, and ac33 In his account of the philosophical dispute that arose after a vacancy of a philosophical chair, Lucian describes the incensed response against the candidacy of the sexually ambiguous Bagoas (a character who stands in for the sophist Favorinus). Bagoas’s opponent makes the case that the sophist should not be considered for the chair because as a eunuch he is neither man nor woman “but something composite, hybrid and monstrous, alien to human nature” (τι σύνθετον καἰ μικτὸν καὶ τερατῶδες, ἔξω τῆς ἀνθρωπείας φύσεως). The judges of his candidacy concur by noting that he was a stranger case than a priest who had been castrated, because he used to be a man. Bagoas is “an ambiguous (ἀμφίβολον) creature, more like a crow, which cannot be reckoned (ἐναριθμοῖντο) with either a dove or a raven” (Eun. 8). 34 Prometh. 5. This metaphor recurs in Lucian’s corpus, for example, in the prolalia Zeux. 3-7, where the painter Zeuxis’s depiction of a centaur mother provides the basis for a vivid ekphrasis. 35 Prometh. 5. 36 Prometh. 7.

276

GAMING GREEKNESS

cepts his Promethean role. Like Tatian, he is at ease with the hybridity that characterizes his work, and by extension, himself. Hybridity, Monstrosity, and the Competition for Greekness

Even as recent scholarship on the sophistic movement has highlighted its implicit counter-Romanness, Laura Nasrallah has persuasively situated the 2nd century Christian apologists collectively within the Roman dominated landscape of a colonized Eastern Mediterranean. She explains: Treatment of the apologists has often devolved to the question of whether Christians successfully adopt the philosophical language of Hellenism—that is, whether they take their Christian essence and properly cloak it in terms more attractive to elites of any stripe. Instead of trying to find the Christian essence of... [the apologists], we should look at Christians as multilingual subjects under a widespread, complex, and far-reaching colonial rule.37

From this point of view, Tatian’s monstrous rhetorical persona and his hybrid cultural status contribute to a strategy of resistance. His performance is conscientious of what sophists sought to achieve for themselves with respect to Rome, but also wary of the hegemonic ambitions of Greek cultural agents. Tatian presents his argument against paideia’s high cultural valuation precisely in terms of these layered relations of power. Like the figures in Lucian’s account, Tatian’s mixed-up hybridity is neither accidental nor generic—it is terrifying and fearsome. In Againt the Greeks, he is a monster who intends to threaten and put off his audience by his very existence. Tatian collapses the cultural distinctions that fueled sophistic efforts to cultivate Greekness. To his intellectual peers who had sought to embody a cultural ideal that was based on the exclusion of foreign elements, he is “difference made flesh,” an incarnation of Greek paideia along with its barbaric correlative. Tatian’s monstrosity is all the more terrifying because it is manifested by one who participates in the mimetic mechanisms of sophistic self-making—that is, one who presents his Greekness by imi37 Christian

Responses to Roman Art and Architecture, 166.

CHAPTER SIX. THE MONSTER AT THE END

277

tating the guise and circumstances of a sophist. Homi Bhabha has defined the threatening dimensions of what he terms the “colonial mimic” as it operates among subjects of colonizing powers. Bhabha’s account reads like a blueprint for why Tatian’s rhetorical strategy would have been effective against the cooperating colonizing forces of Roman political domination and Greek cultural purism: Hybridity is the sign of the productivity of colonial power, its shifting forces and fixities; it is the name of the strategic reversal of the process of domination through disavowal (that is, the production of discriminatory identities that secure the ‘pure’ and original identity of authority). Hybridity is the revaluation of the assumption of colonial identity through the repetition of discriminatory identity effects. It displays the necessary deformation and displacement of all sites of discrimination and domination. It unsettles the mimetic or narcissistic demands of colonial power but reimplicates its identifications in strategies of subversion that turn the gaze of the discriminated back upon the eye of power. For the colonial hybrid is the articulation of the ambivalent space where the rite of power is enacted on the site of desire, making its objects at once disciplinary and disseminatory.38

Bhabha’s account of the mirroring relationship between colonialized subjects and their colonizers illuminates how mimesis engenders hybridity as a way to contravene the “‘pure’ and original identity of authority.” Tatian, as a subject of a colonizing power that was obsessed with the imitation of classical sources, uses his own hybrditiy in order to turn the gaze of his fellow subjects back upon the powerful cultural agents that controlled them. Paideutic μιμῆσις was the mechanism of exchange that produced the value of paideia as cultural capital; in Tatian’s hands, μιμῆσις still operates, but in the act of imitation he performs an adulterated Greekness that is tinged with barbarian ideas and philosophies. Tatian’s strategy thus serves as a coup for another kind of cultural production that is possible in part because of the very colonizing forces that Greek paideia sought 38 The

Location of Culture, 112.

278

GAMING GREEKNESS

to circumvent. His efforts draw attention to a proudly realized “barbarianism” that is no less aware of or informed by Greek cultural learning than were the elite selves that sought to exclude them. Revealing the unspoken premises of sophistic culture also entailed naming the competitiveness that perpetuated it. But because Tatian’s rhetorical performance includes the “othering” dimensions of his self-claimed barbarianism, he can name both sides of the competitive equation. He instantiates in his own self-sustained duality the cultural hubris of Greek elites and the defensive experience of those they excluded as barbarians. Unsurprisingly, then, Tatian is the voice among early Christian intellectuals who most clearly conveys the cultural agonism that had come to characterize the sophistic movement and the performance of Greekness in the Roman Empire. He identifies the competitive moves of his interlocutors in a confrontational tone that could only come from a hybrid subject: Why am I accused when I say the things on my mind? And why do you make haste to dismantle everything I think? For have you all in no way been born in the same manner as us, having occupied the same provinces of this empire? How are you so certain (τί φάσκετε) that wisdom (σοφίαν) is yours alone—when you do not have another sun nor an intervention of the stars, nor a distinguished birth or death that sets you apart from other men for anything special (ἐξαίρετον)? The grammarians are the root of your foolishness and the ones who split up wisdom cut you all off from true wisdom (τῆς κατὰ ἀλήθειαν σοφίας)... with inflated reputations, but humbled by misfortunes, you abuse figures of speech. You lead public triumphs (πομπεύετε), but you conceal words in secret places.39

All of the assumptions wrapped up in the Isocratean cultural program are explicitly negated in Tatian’s resetting of social values: all people are equal, cultural superiority is arbitrary, wisdom is avail-

39 Ad

Graec. 26.2-3.

CHAPTER SIX. THE MONSTER AT THE END

279

able to all.40 The role of choice—made by an intellectual equal—is what allows Tatian’s hybridity to function as monstrosity. Tatian is not only a Greek-speaking barbarian with sophistic chops, but he chooses to abandon the pursuit of Greekness, cultivating his barbarian learning in a manner not unlike a sophist perfecting paideia. Few other figures had made such inroads into the elite cultural program of pepaideumenoi and subsequently decided to take leave of “Roman arrogance (μεγαλαυχίᾳ) and Athenian cold-cleverness (ψυχρολογίᾳ).”41 Tatian is a cultural subject unlike any who confronted the forces that had worked to invest sophistic Greekness with value: a pepaideumenos who opted to walk away from what paideia had to offer. He not only demonstrates the latent potency of hybridity as a form of resisting colonial power, but he also gives a master class in how to deploy it to deliberate effect. In this, the value of Tatian’s contribution becomes clear: Against the Greeks offers a cultural critique that is aimed at remediating a constricting intellectual environment that had little room for the voices of others. In some of the ensuing topoi that appear in his critique, he rephrases and reconceives the assumed status of Greekness by exposing its polyglot and amalgamated dimensions. Tatian, whose hybridity served as a monstrous visage within the economy of cultural Greekness, demonstrates how mixed up paideia truly was.

40 I see here a contextual echo of Paul’s rhetoric in 1 Cor 1:20-26—a kind of grandiose expansion of Paul’s “fool of Christ” motif into an Empire-wide appeal to the paradigmatically unintelligible—the βαρβαροῖ. The effect of this is that Tatian abstracts the contextually specific message of Paul to the Corinthian community that serves as a kind of conceptual referent for Tatian’s cultural critique here. This Pauline affect is bolstered by Tatian’s other explicit engagement with Pauline themes (eg. the body metaphor in Ad Graec. 12.1ff, the explicit reference to Col. 1:15 in Ad Graec. 5.1ff.). On the influence of Paul on Tatian, see Emily Hunt, Christianity in the 2nd Century: The Case of Tatian (London: Routledge, 2003), 52ff. 41 Ad Graec. 35.1.

280

GAMING GREEKNESS

III. MIXTURE AND MONSTROSITY: TATIAN’S ACCOUNT OF GREEKNESS The implications of Tatian’s colonized status are present in his rhetorical strategy and persona, but they are also ingrained within the various contexts in which he presents himself. It is in this way that his performance serves to mirror and parody the moves and circumstances of his audience—his playing the monster reflects back the hybrid form of his audience to them. Thus, the motifs of mixture, adulteration and overlap allow Tatian to fashion his monstrous persona into an operating theory for culture. He frequently returns to these motifs through the text as he presents his own account of Greekness and its operation in the early Roman Empire. In this reading, his invective transforms from a protective defense of himself and his philosophy into a corrective depiction of the Roman world and the role of Greekness as a cultural field within it. He operates within the sphere of sophistic cultural performance, but refuses to perpetuate the illusio which made the sophistic paradigm possible. In trying to communicate this vision, Tatian’s own colonized experience becomes a mirror reflecting an image that contravenes the dominant account of paideia’s prestigious role in Roman society. The assumed purity of paideia and real mixture of Greekness that guides his invective forward as Tatian theorizes the cultural relations he observes. To illustrate it, he highlights the arbitrariness of sophistic opinions about Greek dialects and resituates the supposed triumphs of Greek culture in order to dismiss the obsession with cultural purity that so many intellectuals believed had won Greeks a place alongside—and not beneath—Roman power. Babel Revisited: Greeks and Greekness

The first dimension of Tatian’s cultural theory is a recurring criticism of the widespread obsession with linguistic purity and the Atticizing trends that were synonymous with the sophistic movement.42 42 The substance of Tatian’s critique addresses the intellectualized

aspects of Greek culture in an uncommon way, which has received considered attention in recent scholarship. Most notably among these are Robert Grant, Greek Apologists of the Second Century (Philadelphia: Westminster Press,

CHAPTER SIX. THE MONSTER AT THE END

281

Apropos of his rhetorical venue, he addresses as many public aspects of Greek cultural prestige as he is able, so much so that his critique provides a veritable eyewitness survey of the various species of urbanized intellecual culture that defined the 2nd century. 43 Tatian’s efforts to answer claims about the unadulterated nature of Greek (i.e., Attic) language in his argument is absolutely singular among his intellectual peers; no other Christian figure from the 2nd century demonstrates such conversance with the linguistic obsessions of sophists. Robert Grant draws a parallel between Tatian’s presentation of Greece and Aelius Aristides’s famed Panathenaic oration, in which the latter extolled the singular quality of Athens and its cultural heritage for civilizing the world. Aristides’s oration in celebration of Athens reads like a public subscription of the sophistic program into the Isocratean paradigm.44 But the celebrated sophist’s emphasis on purity is perhaps the most notable point of overlap between his conception of 1988); John E. Fojtik, “Tatian the Barbarian: Language, Education and Identity in the Oratio Ad Graecos,” in Jörg Ulrich, et al. eds., Continuity and Discontinuity in Early Christian Apologetics (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2009); Dimitrios Karadimas, Tatian’s Oratio ad Graecos: Rhetoric and Philosophy/Theology (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiskell, 2000); Winrich Löhr, “The Theft of the Greeks”; Michael McGehee, “Why Tatian never ‘Apologized’ to the Greeks”; elements of Laura Nasrallah’s study cited throughout this chapter first appeared in “Mapping the World. Justin, Tatian, Lucian and the Second Sophistic,” HTR 98 (2005), 283-314. 43 Grant links this dimension of Tatian’s rhetorical text to the forms of “leave-taking” that are specified by rhetorical theorists, such as Menander Rhetor (Greek Apologists of the Second Century, 116). The larger question of the rhetorical form of Tatian’s speech is a live issue. Grant suggests that this is the diametric opposite of a civic encomium—a λόγος ψόγος (Greek Apologists of the Second Century, 116). However, Michael McGehee draws out the productive dimension of Tatian’s argument as a case specifically for his listeners to pursue the “barbarian philosophy” he espouses in a more traditional λόγος προτρέπτικος (“Why Tatian Never ‘Apologized’ To the Greeks,” JECS 1.2 [1993], 143-158). Given the theory of mixture that, I argue, Tatian develops here, there is no reason to suppose that he did not also mix rhetorical forms or motifs, like Lucian was so famous for doing. 44 Aristides determined himself to have inherited his oratorical commitment from Isocrates, whom he self-consciously imitates throughout his corpus (Cf. Simon Swain, Hellenism and Empire, 255).

282

GAMING GREEKNESS

Attic speech and Tatian’s vituprative account of the entire Greek cultural program. Aristides’s Panathenaic Oration is the most explicit continuation of Isocrates’s project and he situates Athens in the geographical heart of Hellenic lands not only to express its prominence, but also to distance it from all foreign influences. He writes: “[Athens] alone has entirely taken over the glory of the Greek people, and is to the greatest degree distinct from the barbarians (τοῖς βαρβάροις ἐστὶν ἐπὶ πλεῖστον ἀλλόφυλος). For to the extent that it is separated by the nature of its geography, it is also removed from the barbarians in the customs of its men (τοσοῦτον καὶ τοῖς ἤθεσι τῶν ἀνδρῶν ἀφέστηκεν).”45 Athens, which “had been assigned by nature as an opponent and enemy of the barbarian race (ἀντίπαλος τούτῳ τῷ γένει καὶ πολεμία),”46 is the heart of the Greekness that Aristides seeks to embody and proclaim. And it is because of this that Attic speech and Attic habits are the sine qua non of sophistic Greekness—not because they are necessarily more constitutive of what it means to be “Hellene,” but because of their purity. Aristides continues by explaining that because of its geographical separation and its hostility to outsiders, “[Athens] has always provided its people with unadulterated, pure, and uncorrupted customs, and it also introduced, as a model for all Greek speech (παράδειγμα πάσης τῆς Ἑλληνικῆς ὁμιλίας φωνὴν), a dialect which is unmixed, pure, and pleasant (εἰλικρινῆ δὲ καὶ καθαρὰν καὶ ἄλυπον).”47 Aristides’s emphasis on purity and his claim that Greek cultural prestige emanated from Athens suggests what kind of hubris characterized the audience that Tatian addresses—these are “the Greeks” whom Tatian has in mind. And the ideology of a prestigious Greek45 Aelius

Aristides, Panathen. 14. I follow the text and translation of Charles A. Behr, P. Aelius Aristides: The Complete Works, 2 Vols. (Leiden: Brill, 1986), as well as the Greek text of F.W. Lenz and C. Behr, eds., P. Aelii Aristidis Opera Quae Exstant Omnia (Leiden: Brill, 1976-1980). I adapt Behr’s admirably precise translation here. 46 Aelius Aristides, Panethen. 15. 47 Aelius Aristides, Panathen. 15; Cf. Robert Grant, Greek Apologists of the Second Century, 116.

CHAPTER SIX. THE MONSTER AT THE END

283

ness that was rooted in the presumed purity of Athens and Athenian culture does not escape Tatian’s notice. Indeed, it is the ideological focus on purity that makes Tatian’s monstrous persona rhetorically meaningful—just the fact that he engages with grammatical arguments that were the special purview of pepaideumenoi would have constituted a terrifying violation. In parallel to his own monstrous self-presentation, he points out the ways that the entire Greek cultural program was defined by overlap, influence, and a mixed up inheritance that was in no way as pure as Aristides suggested. As Laura Nasrallah neatly summarizes his argument, “Tatian shows that Greekness itself is a fiction, a miscegenation.”48 It is this concept of mixture and amalgamation that Tatian embodies and which he reflects back onto the Greeks he addresses. In order to pull off this rhetorical reversal, Tatian presents an alternate account of Greek culture as a derivative and divided amalgam. He litanizes the educational contributions of a whole series of barbarian cultures and the arts that they perfected long before Greece. Tatian produces a kind of ethnogony that provides an outside-in model of cultural influence. Where sophists frequently accused would-be Greek intellectuals of only grasping morsels of Attic words and ideas, Tatian gives an account of the seemingly limitless nature of the barbarian civilizations that had been picked over by Greek intellectuals. 49 He goes even further, aiming at the crux of sophistic efforts to cultivate paideutic selves by overturning the mimetic foundations of Greek purity, locating their actual models among barbarian peoples: “Cease from calling imitations discoveries!” Tatian says to his Greek audience. 50 The presumed fixity within the Isocratean model derived from the perpetual imitation of paideia as a self-sufficient and independent cultural reality that flowed from its 48 Nasrallah, Christian

Responses to Roman Art and Architecture, 67. Beyond the accounts we have already seen, see the use of σπερμολόγος and related terms in the philosophers’ dismissal of the figure of Paul in Acts 17:18—a text that also concedes to a similar dichotomy between Athenians and Others in its own efforts to respond to the world that Greekness had made (Cf. Ἀθηναῖοι/οἱ ἐπιδημοῦντες ξένοι in 17:21). 50 Ad Graec. 1.1. 49

284

GAMING GREEKNESS

Athenian source. Tatian models culture in a different way: imitation is still the constitutive mechanism, but his version of μιμῆσις is not merely reflective. It commingles with various sources drawn from diverse ethnic and cultural backgrounds—in short, it acknowledges the impossibility of restricting the scope of cultural influence to a small, curated window of approved exemplars. Tatian’s model suggests that the very notion of a pure cultural inheritance, especially one maintained across centuries, is a fiction that is maintained by linguistic window dressing and the toadying self-affirmation of ingroup elites: “Accordingly, slough off this nonsense and cease citing elegant phrases in your defense—you who praise yourself because your advocates are from your own house,” he remarks.51 Tatian also undermines the cooperative relationship between Greek-speaking elites and the imperium. He presents these Greek subjects of Rome not as culturally enlightened harbingers of civilization, but as divisive rabble-rousers who divided and segmented the people. Tatian reverses the usual associations of Greeks with order and barbarians with disorder from the very first sentence. He demands of his audience, “Do not, in complete disharmony (φιλέχθρως), dispose with barbarians (βαρβάρους), you Greek men, nor begrudge (φθονήσητε) their teachings. For which of your own practices (ἐπιτήδευμα) did you not acquire from the assembly (σύστασιν) of barbarians.”52 Tatian’s initial phraseology, μὴ πάνυ φιλέχθρως, is not frequently used before this text, but its lexical sense is tied to enmity, as well as elements that refuse to mix cooperatively.53 The motifs of harmony and concord as they are introduced here serve as a backdrop for the social and civic utility of sophistic Greekness in the Roman period. The Imperium’s desire for concord was a singular urban virtue among provincial elites, and there are a plethora of sophistic texts that demonstrate how Greekness fosters

51 Ad

Graec. 1.2. Graec. 1.1. 53 As a descriptor of elements and matter, see Ps.–Galen, De Humer. Lib. 19.486.15 and Hephaestion, Apostele. 104.15; 180.2. 52 Ad

CHAPTER SIX. THE MONSTER AT THE END

285

civility among Roman subjects.54 So, when Tatian develops his own account of concord and civility, it comes with a reversal of the sophistic model that rephrases entirely the role of Greekness within the Roman Empire. To threaten concord was to imperil the stasis that allowed the Roman Empire to function, and Tatian adopts the typical rhetorical posture of an Empire-appealing sophist on behalf of his own people from the very outset of his address. He embraces the importance of concord in the cities, but he argues that it is the “Greeks” who threaten the peace of the Empire.55 His strategy thus entails imitating a sophistic rhetorical trope in order to argue that those same speechifying sophists he references are agents of disharmony.56 This is an extraordinary argument for someone like Tatian 54 Even more, Tatian sees the Greek approach to civic life to be inescapably misguided, where just as there are many different Greek dialects, there is a similar multiplicity of city constitutions that are inconsistent with one another (Ad Graec. 28.1). 55 Here we see a rhetorical account that, thematically, parallels what occurs in the narrative about the Ephesian silversmiths in Acts 19, discussed in chapter 4. 56 Speeches of concord (περὶ ὁμόνοιος) fill the corpuses of the most celebrated orators throughout the 2nd century and represent the most politically efficacious medium by which sophists affected civic life. (Cf. the notable appraisal of this virtue in Xen. Mem. 4.4.16.) Tatian’s other terminology is strongly associated with the elusiveness of concord, highlighting the tendency of cities to continue in hostility and disunity throughout; only the term σύστασιν correlates with harmony, and it is associated with the βαρβαροῖ. This form of address “on concord” had a clear influence on literature from Christian and Jewish communities in the Roman world, evident in motifs and vocabulary in 1 Cor., Philo’s Leg. Ad Gai., 4 Macc, parts of the corpus of Ignatius of Antioch, and 1 Clem. On the form in the context of these communities, see Werner Jaeger, Early Christianity and Greek Paideia (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1961), esp. 12-26; W.C. van Unnik, “‘Tiefer Friede’ (1. Klemens 2,2),” VC 24 (1970), 261-79; L.L. Welborn, Politics and Rhetoric in the Corinthian Epistles (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1997); Margaret Mitchell, Paul and the Rhetoric of Reconciliation: An Exegetical Investigation of the Language and Composition of 1 Corinthians (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1991); John-Paul Lotz, Ignatius and Concord: The Background and Use of Concord in the Letters of Ignatius of Antioch (New York: Peter Lang, 2007).

286

GAMING GREEKNESS

to make: he capitalizes on the agonistic dimensions of the Greek cultural field—an agonism that was fundamentally structured by the ambitiousness and social stratification imposed by the Empire—and suggests that that very competitiveness foments a lack of concord and is hostile to the harmony that was the basis for any enduring peace within the Empire.57 He thus turns the very climate of what made the empire function into a threat to its peace, serving not so much to deride the efforts of Greeks, but to demonstrate the underlying incoherence of this imperial culture as a whole. Tatian continues developing his account of the mixtures and adulterations of Greek culture by pointing to the multiform parts that make up its own internal disputes. Where Isocrates and Aristides made cases for the prominence of the Attic dialect, Tatian reminds Greeks of their inherent division and calls into question the arbitrariness of their judgment. He writes: Right now among you alone (μόνοις ὑμῖν) it has turned out that among your society you do not speak in the same language. For the speech of the Dorians is not the same as those from Attica, and Aeolians do not speak like the Ionians. Where there is such argument (στάσεως) among those who should not disagree (οὔσης τοσαύτης παρ’ οἷς οὐκ ἐχρῆν), I am at a loss whom I should call Greek (ἀπορῶ τίνα με δεῖ καλεῖν Ἕλληνα).58

By undermining the unity of paideia, the question of who is a “Greek” according to Tatian is plainly not a function of who speaks a certain language or shares in a certain culture. He puts forth his own model of culture and makes the quietly revolutionary case that cultures and languages are manifestly not unified things—that they are 57 Examples of these appeals to civic harmony can be found throughout the corpuses of 1st–3rd century rhetors and sophists, especially in formal discussions and examples in Plutarch, Praec. Ger. Rei Pub.; Dio Chrysostom’s speeches on concord (Ors. 38-41); Aelius Aristides, Or. 24; Apollonius of Tyana to the people of Smyrna (in Philostratus, VA 4.8-9); Iamblichus, Conc. 58 Ad Graec. 1.2-1.3. It is crucial here that Tatian makes his shift explicit, from considering Greeks and barbarians as Roman subjects to considering the internal division “μόνοις ὑμῖν.”

CHAPTER SIX. THE MONSTER AT THE END

287

composite entities that accrete through influence, overlap and the gradual co-mingling of peoples. It is not enough, however, for Tatian to call to memory the fact that linguistic Atticism emerged from a variety of other forms of Hellenic speech. He thus turns again to the role of outside influence and points to the adulteration of Greek culture within the Roman Empire. He remarks, “And what is most out of place (ἀτοπώτατον), you have honored foreign expressions (μὴ συγγενεῖς... ἑρμηνείας), and when you use barbarian words you have mixed [them into] (συμφύρδην) your dialect.”59 Tatian’s geographical logic is in the forefront of his language here—the Greeks demonstrate their own out of placeness (ἀτοπώτατον; lit. “most without place”) in their cultural borrowing.60 Just as important is the explicitness of the concept of mixture in his critique of Greek linguistic purity. Συμφύρδην, apart from being another inkhorn term that demonstrates Tatian’s grammatical virtuosity, presents a highly evocative image. Among preByzantine authors, the term συμφύρδην is used only here and in Nicander of Colophon’s 2nd century BCE poem on venomous animals; its lexical valence implies commingling, confusion, and especially the danger that comes from mixing catalyzing substances.61 In upending the unity of (Attic) Greekness and introducing the fact that Greek culture in fact had been infiltrated with a dangerous and catalyzing adulterants, Tatian presents a complex model for cultural production. As Tatian continues his attack on Greek learning as a multiform inheritance that had plenty of barbarian insights mixed in, he demonstrates with remarkable clarity how cultural competition functioned in the social landscape of the 2nd century. Tatian names the competitive mechanisms that operated to perpetuate paideia’s high valuation. Where many Greek belletrists would use their gram59 Ad

Graec. 1.3. Laura Nasrallah makes a persuasive case for the significance of geographical mapping in Tatian’s argument, focusing on this term as a way that he tries to upend the ordinary ways in which the world has been delineated (Christian Responses to Roman Art and Architecture, 67). 61 According to a TLG search; Cf. LSJ, “ συμφύρδην.” 60

288

GAMING GREEKNESS

matical chops to show off their education, Tatian uses his forum to accuse these same competing intellectuals of making grammatical difference part of their contentiousness: For why, sir (ἄνθρωπε), do you equip (ἐξαρτύεις) the letters of the alphabet for war? Why do you, like a pugilist (ἐν πυγμῇ), bash their sounds together by stuttering (ψελλισμόν) Attic when you should just speak in a more natural way (φυσικώτερον)? For if you speak in Attic (Ἀττικίζεις) without being Athenian, explain to me why you do not speak in Doric. How does one seem to you to be more barbaric (βαρβαρικώτερον,), and the other more enlightening for instruction? If you subscribe to their education (παιδείας), why fight (διαμάχῃ) with me when I adopt the opinions of teachings (δόξας αἱρουμένῳ δογμάτων) that I wish?62

These are questions that would leave most Greek-speaking elites nonplussed. Non-Athenians speaking in an Attic tongue (and importing the entire intellectual significance of Athens) was the veritable foundation of the revived significance of Greekness that defined this period. But Tatian’s questions stand, all the same. Cultural taste is arbitrary, and a poor basis for the kind of conflict that snide grammarians engendered, he suggests. Tatian does not restrict himself to the elite voices as a selfaggrandizing sophist might. He also calls attention to the clamoring mass of ambitious would-be intellectuals who play the game of culture rather than concerning themselves with questions of real substance. Thus he explodes at his rivalrous audience: For who would not rather decline to entertain the nonsense and crazy talk (γλωσσομανίαν) like this and turn toward an earnest (σπουδαῖον) search for truth? And so do not let the noiseloving—and not wisdom-loving—(φιλοψόφων καὶ οὐ φιλοσόφων) mob carry you away. These teach things that stand in opposi62 Ad Graec. 26.3-4. Puech suggests that this particular image is Tatian’s attempt to criticize the prevalence of the Attic-tinged double-tau (-ττ-) in place of more koine spellings. If this is correct, it does not stop Tatian from using this spelling throughout the text.

CHAPTER SIX. THE MONSTER AT THE END

289

tion to one another, and each one promulgates whatever occurs to them. There are many causes of offense among them, for one hates the other and they hold opposing opinions (ἀντιδοξοῦσι), adopting superior positions out of arrogance.63

Tatian takes this criticism a step further by doubling-down on the inverse power dynamic that drives the convoluted and selfcontradicting opinions of sophistic intellectuals. He refuses to participate in the Empire-wide misrecognition that assuaged the greatest anxieties of sophistic Greek culture—instead, he reveals what is truly at stake in the culture of competition he abhors. The shifting judgments of sophists, Tatian explains, is a paltry basis for assessing the value of ideas: “For you set up rhetoric on the basis of injustice and sophistry (συκοφαντίᾳ), selling (πιπράσκοντες) the self-determination (αὐτεξούσιον) of your ideas for a fee, often presenting something to be right one moment and no good the next.”64 Contrary to Tatian’s tone and rhetorical posture, this reveal is not simply a vindictive attack. By exposing the real mechanisms behind the celebration of Greekness, he makes room for a different account of the cultural field of the Roman Empire. The Greeks as a Barbarian Saw Them: Rome’s Cultural Colony

In Tatian’s version, barbarians are not the cultural remainders of the Isocratean paradigm. They are, instead, intentional opters–out who saw through the pretense that purchased paideia’s prestige within the Roman Empire and claimed their own dignity and value within other intellectual economies—even ones that were assumed to have been co-opted by agents of sophistic Greekness. But just as Tatian’s monstrosity is supposed to enlighten his audience to their own hybridity, his depiction of the empire and his role in it is intended as a corrective to how these elite Greeks saw themselves—not as Roman subjects, but as their equals and even their teachers. So, when Tatian describes his own colonized status, he also seeks to demonstrate the 63 Ad 64 Ad

Graec. 3.3-4. Graec. 1.3.

290

GAMING GREEKNESS

colonized situation of his Greek interlocutors. Throughout this text, he never misses an opportunity to remind the “Greeks” that they, too, are multilingual subjects “under a widespread, complex, and farreaching colonial rule.” This approach serves Tatian’s rhetorical efforts to confront his interlocutors, but it also adds a dimension to his theoretically sophisticated criticism of how culture is produced—not by an impeccable inheritance or the imitation of luminous precedcessors, but through confrontation, negotiation and mixture. The colonial dimension of Tatian’s invective is implicit in how he characterizes himself as a hybrid subject. But it is also present in how he presents the Roman imperium as it relates to Greekness, writ large.65 Tatian, however, presents his experience as a subject of empire as a visible part of his rhetorical persona, and he brings his own observation of Rome’s relationship to Greece into his speech against Greekness. In order to make his claim about Greece’s subject status explicit, he draws on the imagery and effect of the Empire’s greatest tool for mixing up cultures—the Roman triumph. He taps into the recursive imagery of the captor and the captive used to such effect by Horace in his subtle jab to Roman imperial philhellenism. But where Horace reminds his Roman audience that Rome—the ostensible captor of the cities of Greece—had become captivated by Greek art, literature, and philosophy, Tatian re-inscribes the motifs of mixture and adulteration by drawing out the contaminating effects of being either the captor or the captive. The Roman triumph performed cultural amalgamation in a ritual form that was uniquely public, and it had a profound effect on Tatian does not obscure the political stakes of the early empire. He presupposes his and his audience’s subject status and names Rome explicitly as the dictators of the social order in which Tatian and his Greek interlocutors—even those “Greeks” who were also Romans—vied with one another. Tatian argues that, in fact, his philosophy is in the superior paideutic position: Greeks should “learn from us [barbarians]” (παρ’ ἡμῶν... ἐκπαιδεύεσθε) how to cultivate self-control and the despising of death (Ad Graec. 19.1). This appears to have been a common strategy among second century Roman subjects—like the author of 4 Macc., Tatian appeals to those virtues most prized by Roman viri in positioning his teaching as an independent (but parallel) paideutic resource. 65

CHAPTER SIX. THE MONSTER AT THE END

291

the imagination of all imperial subjects.66 There is an endemic messiness to hegemony, in which the conqueror and the conquered become profound intimates, and it was on full display in the triumphal ritual that lies behind Tatian’s language. 67 The performance of a triumph seemed to be a grandiose display of imperial power—the captive regent and all of the material riches of a defeated kingdom were displayed for all of Rome to see. But it was also a summative moment of cultural exchange in which foreign elements were incorporated into the empire and naturalized. It was the copulative act of empire.68 Thus the triumphal imagery Tatian includes in his text does not only reminds his Greek listeners of their subject status—it also re-inscribes the unavoidable way that culture is always the mixed-together product of discourses of power. Tatian’s most explicit reference to the triumph appears alongside the criticism of Greek claims to purity that occurs throughout his text. After accusing the Greeks of borrowing and learning from barbarian wisdom, he emphasizes the plundering aspect of Greek cultural hegemony by admonishing them: “Stop leading alien words (λόγους ἀλλοτρίους) in a triumphal procession (θριαμβεύοντες) and ornamenting yourselves with feathers that are not your own (οὐκ

Imagery surrounding the triumph was a common part of all kinds of imperial era literature, including early Christian sources. Among early Christian literature, imagery from the triumph appears possibly as early as the Gospel of Mark (Cf. Allan Georgia, “Translating the Triumph: Reading Mark’s Crucifixion Narrative Against a Roman Ritual of Power,” JSNT 36, no. 1 [2013], 17-38). For examples of triumphal language and imagery in later Christian literature, see Acta Paul. 26; Lugd. Et Vien. 1 (=Eusebius, Hist. Eccl. 5.1); Melito, Pasch. 102; Clement of Alexandria, Protrep. 12; Paed. 2.8. 67 This messiness is captured by Mary Beard in The Roman Triumph (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Harvard, 2007), esp. 18-36; 107-142. 68 In just one of myriad examples, Suetonius reports that Romans joked to one another that the Gauls whom Caesar had led in triumph were led into the senate house as well (Suetonius, Div. Jul. 80). Cf. The Roman Triumph, 139-142. See also Ida Östenberg, Staging the World: Spoils, Captives, and Representations in the Roman Triumphal Procession (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 66

292

GAMING GREEKNESS

ἰδίοις... πτεροῖς), just like a jackdaw.69 If each city should take back its own phraseology (λέξιν) from you, sophistic quibbles (σοφίσματα) would be impossible.”70 In this explicit reference to the triumphal procession (θριαμβεύοντες), it is the Greeks who are in the position of victory, and by extension, a position of adulteration.71 Tatian emphasizes the ornamentation and performance that were part of any triumphal celebration, putting the Greeks uncharacteristically in the role of the cultural plunderers who gathered up ethnic signifiers as if they were their own. Tatian turns the tables on the victimized cultural lights of Greece, turning them into the plunderers of foreign lands to ennoble their own civilization. In any other context, Tatian’s rhetoric would serve to draw attention to a disempowered subject who was trying to shame a powerful constituency into using self-restraint. But Tatian does not leave the other side of the triumphal coin out of his account. In a moment of real monstrosity, he uses the triumphal motif to rub the noses of sophistic Greeks in their subordination to Roman rule. And he clinches this critique by means of his superior education in paideia. He starts by making a subtle allusion to his intellectual integrity. Unlike the prevailing tendency to cite sources and authorities, Tatian claims that he traveled to see things with his own eyes.72 He explains: These things I present were not learned second-hand; after visiting many lands and practicing your knowledge as a sophist On the jackdaw, cf. LSJ, “κολοίος,” and the similar use of this imagery in Lucian, Apol. 4. 70 Ad Graec. 26.1. Grant notices the recursive imitation going on in this passage, noting of Tatian’s various references to Greek literature, “All these are borrowed plumes themselves; because of his training in grammar and rhetoric, Tatian knows how to use them, and ironically does so” (“Studies in the Apologists,” HTR 51, no.3 [1958], 123-134). 71 See also Tatian’s reference to Greeks in control of a triumph in Ad Graec. 26.3 (δημοσίᾳ μὲν γὰρ πομπεύετε). This becomes a biting slap in the face by appearing directly after he mentions the “humbling misfortunes” of Greeks—doubtlessly a reference to the conquering of Greek cities by Rome. 72 Again, even in his most critical moments, Tatian’s intellectual habits are those of an ambitious and contentious sophist who sought to win acclaim on traditional grounds of legitimacy pursued by pepaideumenoi. 69

CHAPTER SIX. THE MONSTER AT THE END

293

(σοφιστεύσας), I came upon many instances of your skills and ideas (τέχναις καὶ ἐπινοίαις). Finally, I spent time in the city of the Romans and examined closely (καταμαθών) the varieties of statues that they captured and brought home (ἀνακομισθείσας) with them from you.73

Tatian exploits his self-claimed sophistic expertise to play out the less genteel account of the role of Greek τέχναι in the Roman Imperium.74 In this version, Tatian gains what understanding he can, but he completes his education only by visiting Rome, where the stuff of Greekness was carried away in triumph by conquering Roman generals. Tatian’s account clinches the captive, subjugated cultural realities that had motivated the very sophistic enterprise that he abandoned. In an unintentional irony, this is one of his most empathetic moments with respect to his sophistic peers: he knows as well as anyone how decimated the civic landscape of historic Greece had been after the arrival of Rome. But he will not permit his rhetorical adversaries to find solace in the segregating efforts of pepaideumenoi who sought to preserve a purified Greekness, isolated from the realities of Roman power. The triumph and its capacity to facilitate the diffusion of cultural phenomena throughout the imperial ecosystem serves as a definitive mechanism for Tatian’s theory of cultural overlap and mixture. The messiness of power and the adulterating effects of control and persuasion are central to the alternate account he gives. Tatian’s alternative account demonstrates how centrally his own experience of the imperium factored into his self-presentation—as both a traveling sophist and as the “barbarian” that he claims to be. Tatian’s monstrous hybridity derives from his position as a colonial subject, but it also explains his omni-directional invective—against Greeks, against Rome, against sophists and philosophers. It is because Tatian perceives himself to be the subject of both Greek cultural hegemony

73 Ad

Graec. 35.1. Tatian’s word choices here parallels elements in Vergil’s description of Greek and Roman “arts” in Aen. 6.847-853. 74

294

GAMING GREEKNESS

and Roman imperial power that he can understand and name the relationship between them.

IV. T HE UNITY AND CONCORD OF GOD Tatian leaves quite a mess in his wake, at least with respect to those durable cultural categories to which he set his rhetorical ire. If one takes his account seriously, “the Greeks” are a particularly noisey and duplicitous group of imperial subjects who manufactured a (false) cultural pedigree and who engender hostility among other ethnoi. Thus it is no surprise that Tatian does not take pains to offer an alternative version that fleshes out his point of view. Against the Greeks is a self-conscious invective that is, effectively, all critique. He does not concern himself with a developed explication of his philosophy or how it provides an alternative to the cultural status quo. And yet, there are momentary insights into what lays behind Tatian’s contrarian cultural theory—that is, what the “philosophy” which he claims to teach would offer in place of Roman power and Greek intellectual domination. Indeed, glimpses of Tatian’s vission appear in his allusions to a deeper agent of unity and a concord that is founded in a creation and an eschaton that is organized around a singular, unifying God.75 Tatian’s God appears throughout Against the Greeks, but he provides no developed account of precisely what he understands that God to be. It is a self-sufficient creator, in contrast to the myths that Greeks espouse.76 He evidences a developed, if vague, logos Christology that accords broadly with what Justin describes in the Dialogue with Trypho.77 “By the will of his singleness (ἀπλότητος), Logos lept forth,” he says.78 Here, though, Tatian is at pains to describe the un75 In light of the importance of unity and concord as virtues attached to Jewish and Christian communities within the early Empire, there is good reason to see Tatian’s language and imagery around a divine unity as a development upon the ideas of others. Note, for instance, this concept in Ignatius, Phld. 9:1, and the explication of the passage in John-Paul Lotz, Ignatius and Concord, 173-177. 76 Ad Graec. 4.2-3. 77 Ad Graec. 5.1-3. 78 Ad Graec. 5.1. Here I give the suggestively literal rendering of Grant (“Studies in the Apologists,” 126).

CHAPTER SIX. THE MONSTER AT THE END

295

diminishing distinction between logos and theos, borrowing Justin’s fire analogy, and extending it with his own (quintessentially sophistic) grammatical analogy: “He came into being after the fashion of parsing (μερισμόν), not of elision (ἀποκοπήν). For what has been cut off has been separated from its primary source (πρώτου), but that which has been parsed out takes on a distinct function (οἰκονομίας τὴν διαίρεσιν), not admiting poverty (οὐκ ἐνδεᾶ... εἴληπται) to that from which it had been made.”79 Similarly, Tatian sees “God the ruler” as the unifier of bodies, even when they are destroyed and mixed up. He muses, “And if I should be destroyed in rivers and oceans or torn to pieces by wild animals, I am still stored up in the treasuries of the wealthy lord... when he wishes, God the ruler will restore to its origin the substance only visible to him”80 Even where there is separation and division in the created order, God is the agent by which they remain “organized and orderly” (κοσμημένον καὶ εὔτακτον).81 Tatian continues by developing the premise of God’s unifying purposes in order to tweak Paul’s body analogy. He acknowledges the gradation of importance in its parts as integral to the balance of the whole: “For just as the composition (σύστασις) of the body comes from one blueprint (αἴτιον), the cause of its existence is integral to it—and it follows that, while these things are so, there are differences of regard (διαφοραί... δόξης) for the things in it.”82 By contast with Greeks who “practice the ‘rule of the many’ rather than of one” (τἠν “πολυκοιρανίην” μᾶλλον ἤπερ τὴν μοναρχίαν

79 Ad Graec. 5.2; Cf. Justin, Dial. 61 and 128. See also the discussion in Grant, “Studies in the Apologists,” 126. 80 Ad Graec. 6.2. Indeed, death’s finality is also a shared, unifying aspect of God’s work of bringing the world to a close (Cf. 11.1). 81 Ad Graec. 12.1. 82 Ad Graec. 12.2-3. Cf. the incisive study of Kathy Gaca, who provides a remarkable study of Tatian’s “encratite idea[s]” across Against the Greeks and the other fragments of Tatian that remain in “Driving Aphrodite from the World: Tatian’s Encratite Principles of Sexual Renunciation,” JTS NS, 53, part 1 (2002), 28-52.

296

GAMING GREEKNESS

ἐξησκήσατε) and worship a similar plurality of demons,83 Tatian and his fellow believers “search now to discover what we have lost that we once had, and to link the soul to the holy spirit and concern ourselves with the union (συζυγίαν) of God.”84 Tatian is never entirely able to hold onto this thread, and he does not provide a systematic treatment of what “the union ordained by God” exactly entails. But it is remarkable that Tatian would contrast his account of the messy and adulterated Greek cultural program with a God who dictates concord and unity. This unity is aspirational, and it is clear that Tatian’s strong eschatological leanings are crucial to the ultimate return to simplicity that he envisions.85 But it is present nonetheless as the negative pole to which his criticism of Greekness is linked. Tatian’s hybrid guise is appropriate for descending into the mire of worldly cultural concerns, because he hopes in a conclusion wrought by God in which all hybridity and difference—bodily, ethnic, linguistic, and otherwise—will be brought together into a single, resolved unity. The monster who presents himself in Against the Greeks is imbued with a ferocious purpose, and he develops a critique of the preAd Graec. 14.1. Cf. Philo, Opif. 25.171, “God is one, on account of those who introduce the polytheistic opinion, feeling no shame when they transfer the worst of political systems, rule by the mob, from earth to heaven” (David Runia, trans. [Leiden: Brill, 2001], 92). 84 Ad Graec. 15.1. Again, Tatian relies on grammatical phrasing by employing the term συζυγίαν—a union or yoking of animals, but also a conjunction and a conjugation or declension of words in formal grammar (LSJ, “συζυγία,” III.1-2). 85 Scholarly treatments of Tatian’s eschatological model in Against the Greeks have been wrapped up with questions about his theological influences and where he fits within the spectrum of 2nd century Christian theologies. While this scholarship is thoughtful and engaging, I do not adopt any of these approaches here—I prefer to consider Tatian’s theological position as one of the many mysteries with which his patchy corpus leaves modern readers. However, see the thoughtful remarks of Emily Hunt, Christianity in the Second Century: The Case of Tatian, 49 & 72; as well as Gerald Hawthorne, “Tatian and his Discourse to the Greeks,” HTR 57 (1964), 161-188; Robert Grant, “Tatian (Oratio 30) and the Gnostics,” JTS (NS) 15 (1964), 65-69; Greek Apologists of the Second Century, 132. 83

CHAPTER SIX. THE MONSTER AT THE END

297

vailing opinions about paideia and Greekness with his entire being. In lieu of his claims about God and his beliefs about the ultimate fate of the world, it is easy to see why this risky strategy seemed worth the estrangement he ultimately endured. But Tatian was evidently a reviled figure in his own time, and he was denounced by centuries of Christian luminaries after his death. This was a rude recompense for someone who took on a task that eluded his peers and many of those who followed him. His lived experience clarifies what was at stake for Christians and Jews who sought to find a place for themselves in the cultural arena that had been established by elite Greek subjects of the Empire—elites who would continue to exert influence even onto those very Christian voices who later denounced the Assyrian apologist. And so Tatian emerges at the conclusion of his text every bit the monster he has been throughout. But as the engine of culture continued forward through the end of the 2nd century and into the ascendant centuries of Christian intellectual dominance, Tatian was singular among his Christian peers in his willingness to pause, point to the engine itself and say something about how it worked. His legacy is a passing vision to a version of Christian communities that did not pursue legitimacy by appealing to existing cultural values, but rather sought to turn over the tables of the cultural marketplace and establish something else, something other.

CONCLUSION There is a peculiar fossil at the Houston Museum of Natural Science in which two prehistoric fish are captured as one is in the process of consuming the other. It is an arresting vision to see in ossified stone: an ecological vignette captured by mud and chance. It carries into the present something much more than the specimens it preserves—it captures the dynamic struggle of life itself. It is all the more remarkable because it is a fossil, a word that defines a stationary and static sample of something from the distant past. But when viewing this unusual artifact, the kinetic vivacity of the prehistoric world comes to the fore. One can almost see the movement of these two creatures and feel their competing efforts for survival. This artifact captures the deficit with which historians frequently imagine the past. The existence of these stony forms imply whole populations, life cycles and ecosystems that fall out of view when peering at prepared specimens in still-aired museums. Of course, we cannot supply what we cannot see or observe; the frustrating lacunae that fill ancient evidence is one of the defining aspects of historical, as well as prehistorical, inquiry. But these fish still serve as a remonstrance and a challenge to observers of the past that they not fall into the easy habits of the historical reader, in which every piece of material evidence defaults into a kind of frozen portrait to be observed and described. They remind historians that the past, even if it cannot be retrieved, was always in motion and never in still life. Not long after I began to conceive this project, I was visiting the Union Square Greenmarket on a Saturday morning in early Spring. Amidst the flourishing greenery of the space and the hectic bustle of market-goers, I was browsing over a bed of salad greens when I saw bundles of dandelions being sold for $3.00 a piece. Anyone who has 299

300

GAMING GREEKNESS

spent any time out of doors in Spring could not help but be incensed at the idea that someone would charge what probably was $15.00 a pound for weeds that irrepressibly sprung out of the ground every March. I had to joke with the farmer selling them, and I asked where he bought his dandelion seed from; his knowing grin indicated that he understood how crazy it seemed to sell what could easily be gathered for free. He said, “I’m doing anything I can to capitalize off the kale craze.” The Union Square greenmarket is one of very few places where $15 dandelion greens might find a few willing buyers, but I had to marvel at the scope of what was at play to produce this otherwise inexplicable value. Somewhere “in the culture” a series of influential voices had dictated that kale should be beloved, and as demand grew, somehow for this particular year, the dandelions that had emerged every Spring since time immemorial somehow won a price for which eons of evolutionary biology had not prepared it, but which its competitive evolution nonetheless made possible. Many centuries before my market experience in Union Square, but after the ebb of Greek literary production and the dissembling of Roman control in the Eastern Mediterranean in the later 3rd and early 4th centuries, the stakes of Greekness had changed irrevocably. Christian intellectuals, who were only emerging into the public sphere in the end of the 2nd century, had come to dominate the social landscape at the dawn of the 4th century. But the marks of Greekness upon the bourgeoning Christian movement were indelible, and while its value and significance had shifted, it was part of a heritage that no Christian intellectual could entirely ignore. This is perhaps nowhere clearer than in Basil the Great’s instructions in “To Young Men, On How They Might Profit from Pagan Literature (ἐξ ἑλλήνικων... λόγων).” This treatise demonstrates how much the cultural ground had shifted by the 4th century—ἑλληνικοῖ had come to signify the explicitly non-Christian, but Hesiod still held sway as an authority whose name could still be dropped.1 The issue of competi1 Note the expansive discussion on the evolution of “Hellene” into a deroga-

tory term beginning in the 4th century and into the early Byzantine period in Anthony Kaldellis, Hellenism in Byzantium: The Transformation of Greek Identity and the Reception of the Classical Tradition (Cambridge:

CONCLUSION

301

tion and ambition, especially in a speech to young men, still rests just barely below the surface of Basil’s advice. In developing an account of why studying Greek literature might be of some benefit, he remarks: “So we also must consider that a contest, the greatest of all contests, lies before us, for which we must do all things, and, in preparation for it, must strive to the best of our power, and must associate with poets and writers of prose and orators and with all men from whom there is any prospect of benefit with reference to the care of our soul.”2 Some things change; other things stay the same. The cultural embeddedness of Greekness was still alive and well, as Basil’s language choice and casual reference to Hesiod makes clear. In the 4th century, however, paideia had undergone a revised valuation in which its worth was now contingent upon a program of learning that facilitated a different kind of self-making. The new cultural state of affairs demonstrated by Basil’s advice showcases the ever-evolving and never predictable outcomes of competitive fields like that of Greekness in the Roman Empire. Basil’s appraisal does not represent a “win” for Christianity and a “loss” for Greek culture—indeed, the very subject of the text indicates how intermingled and unbounded those two categories remained. The newly gained prominence enjoyed by Christians in the 4th century and beyond was in part “produced” by the very same complex cultural dynamics that helped “produce” the Christian and Jewish communities in the early Empire. These entangled dimensions of human societies do not constitute a universal historical principle nor do they serve as an interpretive skeleton key for how historical subjects operated in the Roman world. They are, instead, a reminder that peoples and cultures cannot be easily unknotted, and that real cultures and real social networks never suffer the idling, isolated approach to their subjects that scrutinizing eyes so often crave. The upshot of focusing on the competitive interchanges and responsive Cambridge University Press, 2007), 121-131. Kaldellis’s treatment covers some of the same ground in this study, though it develops from a different series of questions and with a different historical trajectory in mind. See also his subsequent discussion of Hellenism (131-143). 2 Basil, To Young Men 2.7. (Deferrari and McGuire, trans.)

302

GAMING GREEKNESS

strategies of the texts considered in this study comes in realizing that there is no neatly traceable historical evolution. From this point of view, the historiographical project of portraying ancient cultures should be more like the frenetic movement of an action artist than the deliberate precision of a painter of still lives. Competition allows us to momentarily consider the way that all cultural production is the result of forces that are not motivated by rational subjects. It gives us a language in which we can describe the strategies employed by any individual competitor in a way that is conscientious of his or her immediate concerns but also aware that the impact of any strategy may reverberate far beyond what could have been predicted when it was conceived. The profusions of dandelions and the spread of cultures, especially religious cultures, are not unrelated. It is not accidental that the spread of Jewish communities across the Greek-speaking cities of the Eastern Mediterranean was likened to seed being spread (διασπορά), or that the figure of Paul addressing philosophers in Athens would be ostracized as a trend-purveying “seek-picker” (σπερμολόγος). The resonance of these concepts is a not accidental. The ecosystem in which the weedy, yellow flower flourishes is akin to the cultural landscape in which people have the spread and effect of seeds, which is not unlike the literal New York City market in which that flower was sold. Similar motions, similar dictates of accident and opportunity, and the efforts of the subjects who inhabit them govern each of these phenomena—a flower stretches toward the sunlight, an ἐκκλεσία endeavors to speak its message, a farmer tries to make a buck. The dynamics of competition constitute the cultural inertia that early Christian and Jewish voices negotiated in the Roman world and affected the development of what would become “Christianity” and “Judaism.” They make up the constraints and opportunities out of which the nascent, public faces of Christians and Jews emerged in the late 1st and 2nd century. The texts we have and the evidence we can analyze is an ossified fragment of a much more dynamic world; the task of historians of Christian and Jewish communities in the ancient world should include imagining the vibrant and shifting dimensions that lay behind them. It is difficult to put the dynamic and fluid interchanges that characterize the ancient world into historically descriptive language.

CONCLUSION

303

This project is an attempt to capture the complex and dynamic confrontations that characterize early Christian and Jewish literature of the early Roman Empire, and in doing so illustrate some new questions to ask of this well-worn material. In order to uncover the dynamic background of this well-reviewed history, the readings offered here focus on the places in which competing cultural subjects met. Competition is the operative lens for this study because it offers a vocabulary that can describe the spaces contesting subjects occupied, along with the context of their confrontation and struggle. By considering how Jewish and Christian communities competed in the early Roman world, we can see how these subjects concurrently helped create and were (at least in part) produced by their social and cultural world. Within the shared fields of human activity, competition is never a linear function. It is always multifaceted and polyvalent, far too complex to map in its entirety. So this project focuses on one part of the ancient Mediterranean landscape that loomed over Christians and Jews, one which has frequently been modeled as a static part of the early centuries, CE: the influence of Greek culture in the early Roman Empire. The role of Greek culture and the cultivation of “Greekness” among Roman subjects functioned within a sphere of elite and ambitious competitors, but it also became the common cultural currency of the Roman Empire: it was traded by Roman colonizers of the Greek-speaking East, valued by elites from historically Greek cities, deployed by intellectuals of all stripes, and competed over by all who sought to win legitimacy for themselves in the Roman World.

BIBLIOGRAPHY ANCIENT T EXTS AND TRANSLATIONS 4 Maccbaees

Anderson, Hugh. 4 Maccabees (First Century AD): A New Translation and Introduction. In OTP (2 Vols.), James H. Charlesworth, ed., 2: 531-64. New Haven, CT: Yale, 1985. deSilva, David. 4 Maccabees: Introduction and Commentary on the Greek Text in Codex Sinaiticus. Leiden: Brill, 2006. Dupont-Sommer, Andre. Le Quartrème Livre des Machabées: Introduction, Traduction et Notes. Paris: Librarie Ancienne Honoré Champion, 1939. Aelian

Natural History. Ed. Nigel G. Wilson. Aelian: Historical Miscellanies. LCL 486. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997. Aelius Aristides

Panathenaic Oration. In P. Aelii Aristidis: Opera Quae Exstant Omnia. Charles Behr and F.W. Lenz, eds. Brill: Leiden, 19761980. Behr, Charles. P. Aelius Aristides: The Complete Works. 2 Vols. Leiden: Brill, 1981-1986. Aelius Gellius

Attic Nights. Ed. J.C. Rolfe. Aelius Gellius: Attic Nights. 3 Vols. LCL 195, 200, 212. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1927. 305

306

GAMING GREEKNESS

Aeschines

In Ctesiphontem. Eds. G. de Budé and V. Martin. Eschine. Discours. Vol.2. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1928. Aeschylus

Agamemnon. Ed. Alan H. Sommerstein. Oresteia: Agamemnon. Libation-Bearers. Eumenides. LCL 146. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009. Alciphron

Epistles. Ed. M.A. Schepers. Alciphronis Rhetoris Epistularum Libri IV. Leipzig: Teubner, 1905. (Via TLG) Apostolic Fathers.

Ehrman, Bart, ed. Apostolic Fathers. 2 Vols. LCL 24-25. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003. Holmes, Michael W. The Apostolic Fathers: Greek Texts and English Translations. 3rd Ed. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2007. Lake, Kirsopp, ed. Apostolic Fathers. 2 Vols. LCL 24-25. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1912-1913. Apuleius

The Apology. Eds. H.E. Butler and A.S. Owen. Apulei Apologia sive Pro Se de Magia Liber. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1914. Hunink, Vincent. Apuleius of Madauros: Pro Se de Magia. Amsterdam: J.C. Gieben, 1997. Aristophanes

Clouds. Ed. Jeffrey Henderson. Aristophanes: Clouds, Wasps, Peace. LCL 488. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998. Frogs. Ed. Jeffrey Henderson. Aristophanes: Frogs, Assemblymen, Wealth. LCL 180. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002. Aristotle

Politics. Ed. H. Rackham. Aristotle: Politics. LCL 264. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1932.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

307

Nicomachean Ethics. Ed. H. Rackham. Aristotle: Nicomachean Ethics. LCL 73. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1926. Art of Rhetoric. Ed. J.H. Freese. Aristotle: Art of Rhetoric. LCL 193. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1926. Athenaeus

Deipnosophists. Ed. S. Douglas Olson. Athenaeus: The Learned Banqueters. 8 Vols. LCL 204, 208, 224, 235, 274, 327, 345, 519. Camrbidge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007-2012. Athenagoras

Embassy. Ed. Miroslav Marcovich. Legatio pro Christianis. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1990. Bardy, Gustav, ed. Supplique au sujet des Chrétiens. SC 3. Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1943. Crehan, Joseph Hugh, ed. Athenagoras: Embassy for the Christians and The Resurrection of the Dead. ACW. New York: Newman Press, 1955. Schoedel, William R, ed.. Legatio and De Resurrectione. Oxford: Clarendon, 1972. Basil of Caesarea

Address to Young Men. Ed. Roy J. Deferrari. Basil: Letters. 4 Vols. LCL 190, 215, 243, 270. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1926-1934. Bible (Hebrew Bible/Greek New Testament)

Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia. Eds. K. Elliger and W. Rudolph. 4th ed. Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 1997. Novum Testamentum Graece. Eds. Eberhard Nestle et al. 27th ed. Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 2007. Caesar

Civil Wars. Ed. A.G. Peskett. Caesar: The Civil Wars. LCL 39. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1914. Gallic Wars. Ed. H.J. Edwards. Caesar: The Gallic Wars. LCL 72. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1917.

308

GAMING GREEKNESS

Cicero

Brutus. Eds. G.L. Hendrickson and H.M. Hubbell. Cicero: Brutus, Orator. LCL 342. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1939. De Inventione. Ed. H.M. Hubbell. Cicero: On Invention, The Best Kind of Orator. Topics. LCL 386. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1949. De Oratione. Eds. E.W. Sutton and H. Rackham. Cicero: On the Orator. 2 Vols. LCL 348-349. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1942. Letters to Atticus. Ed. D.R. Shackleton Bailey. Cicero: Letters to Atticus. 4 Vols. LCL 7, 8, 97, 491. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. Tusculan Disputations. Ed. E. King. Cicero: Tusculan Disputations. LCL 141. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1927. Chariton

Chaereas and Callirhoe. Ed. B.P. Reardon. In Collected Ancient Greek Novels, B.P Reardon, ed., 2nd ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008. Goold, G.P., ed. Chariton: Callirhoe. LCL 481. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995. Clement of Alexandria

Stromata. John Ferguson. Clement of Alexandria: Stromateis (Books One to Three). FOC 85. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1991. Protrepticus and Quis Dives Salvatur. Ed. G. W. Butterworth. Clement of Alexandria: Exhortation to the Greeks, The Rich Man’s Salvation, To the Newly Baptized. LCL 92. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1919. Kleist, James, ed. Clement of Rome and Ignatius of Antioch. ACW 1. New York: Paulist Press, 1946. Cynic Epistles

Malherbe, Abraham, ed. The Cynic Epistles: A Study Edition. Missoula, MO: Scholars Press, 1977.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

309

Dead Sea Scrolls

Damascus Document. In Dead Sea Scrolls: Study Edition. Florentino García Martínez and Eibert J.C. Tigchelaar, eds. 2 Vols. Leiden: Brill, 1997-1998. Dio Chrysostom

Orations. Eds. J.W. Cohoon, et al. Dio Chrysostom: Orations. 5 Vols. LCL 257, 339, 358, 376, 385. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1932–1951. Dio Cassius

Roman History. Ed. Earnest Cary and Herbert B. Foster. Dio Cassius; Roman History. 9 Vols. LCL 32, 37, 53, 66, 82, 83, 175, 176, 177. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1914-1927. Diodorus Siculus

Bibliotheca Historica. Ed. C.H. Oldfather, et al. Diodorus Siculus; The Library of History. 11 Vols. LCL 279, 303, 340, 375, 384, 399, 389, 422, 377, 390, 409, 423. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1933-1967. Diogenes Laertius

Lives of Eminent Philosophers. Ed. R. Hicks. Diogenes Laertius: Lives of Eminent Philosophers. 2 Vols. LCL 184,185. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1925. Dionysius of Halicarnassus

Roman Antiquities. Ed. Earnest Cary. Dionysius of Halicarnassus: Roman Antiquities. 7 Vols. LCL 319, 347, 357, 364, 372, 378, 388. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1937-1950. Epictetus

Dissertationes. Ed. W.A. Oldfather. Epictetus: Discourses, Fragments, The Enchiridion. LCL 131, 218. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1925-1928.

310

GAMING GREEKNESS

Epicurus

Ratae Sententiae. (=Diogenes Laertius 10.139-154.) The Hellenistic Philosophers. AA. Long and D.N. Sedley, eds. 2 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Von der Muehll, P., ed. Epicuri Epistulae Tres et Ratae Sententiae a Laertio Diogene Servatae. Leipzig: Teubner, 1922. Eunapius

Lives of the Philosophers. Ed. Wilmer C. Wright. Philostratus: Lives of the Sophists and Eunapius; Lives of the Philosophers. LCL 134. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1921. Euripdes

Bacchae. Ed. E.R. Dodds. Euripides’ Bacchae. 2nd ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960. Arrowsmith, William, ed. “The Bacchae.” In Euripides V. David Grene and Richard Lattimore, eds. The Complete Greek Tragedies. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959. Herakles. Ed. David Kovacs. Euripides: Suppliant Women, Electra, Heracles. LCL 9. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998. Arrowsmith, William, ed. “Herakles.” In Euripides II. David Grene and Richard Lattimore, eds. The Complete Greek Tragedies. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956. Eusebius

Ecclesiastical History. Ed. Kirsopp Lake and J.E. L. Oulton. Eusebius: The Ecclesiastical History. 2 Vols. LCL 153, 265. 1926-1932. Favorinus

On Exile. In Tim Whitmarsh, Greek Literature and the Roman Empire. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Barigazzi, Adelmo, ed. Favorino di Arelate: Opere. Florence: le Monnier, 1966. Corinthian Oration. In Orations. Eds. J.W. Cohoon, et al. Dio Chrysostom: Orations. 5 Vols. LCL 257, 339, 358, 376, 385. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1932–1951.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

311

Galen

Singer, Peter N., ed. Galen: Selected Works. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. De simplicium medicamentorum. Ed. C.G. Kühn. Claudii Galeni Opera Omnia. Vol. 11:379-892–12:1-377. Leipzig: Knobloch, 1826. (Via TLG). De Alimentorum Facultatibus. Ed. Mark Grant. Galen on Food and Diet. London: Routledge, 2000. ______. Ed. C.G. Kühn. Claudii Galeni Opera Omnia. Vol. 6.453748. Leipzig: Knobloch, 1826. (Via TLG). ______. G. Helmreich. De Alimentorum Facultatibus. CMG 5.4.2. Leipzig: Teubner, 1923. In Hippocratis Epidemiarum. Ed. E. Wenkebach. Galeni in Hippocratis Epidemiarum Librum i Commentaria III. CMG 5.10.1. Leipzig: Teubner, 1934. Ps.–Galen

De Humoribus Liber. Ed. C.G. Kühn. Claudii Galeni Opera Omnia. Vol. 19.485-496. Leipzig: Knobloch, 1830. (Via TLG). Greek Magical Papyri

Betz, Hans Dieter. Greek Magical Papyri in Translation, Including the Demotic Spells. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Gregory Nanzianzen

Adversus Julianorum Imperatorem I. MPG 35. 532-664. Paris: Migne, 1885. Hephaestion

Apostelesmatica. Ed. D. Pingree. Hephaestionis Thebani Apotelesmaticorum Libri Tres. 2 Vols. Leipzig: Teubner, 1973-1974 (Via TLG). Heliodorus

An Ethiopian Tale. Morgan, J.R., ed. “Heliodorus: An Ethiopian Story.” In In Collected Ancient Greek Novels, B.P Reardon, ed., 2nd ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008.

312

GAMING GREEKNESS

Rattenbury, R.M. and T.W. Lumb, eds. Les Ethiopiques (Théagène et Chariclée). 3 Vols. Paris: Budé, 1935-1943. Herodotus

Histories. Ed. A. D. Godley. Herodotus: The Persian Wars. 4 Vols. LCL 117-120. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 19201925. Homer

Iliad and Odyssey. Eds. David B. Monro and Thomas W. Allen. Homeri Opera. 5 Vols. OCT. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1920-1922. Horace

C. Smart and Theodore A. Buckley, eds., The Works of Horace. New York. Harper & Brothers. 1863. Epistulae. C. O. Brink, Horace on Poetry, Vol. 3: Epistles Book II. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982. Satires. Ed. H. Rushton Fairclough. Horace. Satires. Epistles. The Art of Poetry. LCL 194. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1926. Isocrates

Panegyricus. Ed. George Norlin. Isocrates: Volume 1. LCL 209. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1928. Ad Nicocles. Ed. George Norlin. Isocrates: Volume 1. LCL 209. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1928. Jannes and Jambres

Jannes and Jambres. Ed. A. Pietersma and R.T. Lutz. OTP 2.427242. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983. Albert Pietersma, ed. The Apocryphon of Jannes and Jambres the Magicians. Leiden: Brill, 1994. Jerome

De Viri Illustri. Ed. Thomas P. Halton. Saint Jerome: On Illustrious Men. FOC. Washington, DC: Catholic University Press of America, 1999.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

313

______. Ed. Carl Albrecht Bernoulli. Hieronymus und Gennadius: De Viris Inlustribus. Freiburg/Leipzig: J.C.B. Mohr, 1895. John Chrysostom

Homilies on the Acts of the Apostles. MPG 60. 13-385. Paris: Migne, 1862. Josephus

Flavius Josephus: Translation and Commentary. Steve Mason, gen. ed. 10 vols. Leiden: Brill, 1999-2013. Antiquities of the Jews. Ed. H. St. J. Thackeray, et al. Josephus: Jewish Antiquities. 9 Vols. LCL 242, 490, 281, 326, 365, 489, 410, 433, 456. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1930–1965. Wars of the Jews. Ed. H. St. J. Thackeray. Josephus: Jewish War. 3 vols. LCL 203, 210, 487. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1927-1928. Justin Martyr

Marcovich, Miroslav, ed. Justini Martyris Dialogus Cum Tryphone (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1997 Falls, Thomas. St. Justin Martyr: Dialogue with Trypho. Thomas Halton, rev. ed. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2003 Minns, Dennis and Paul Parvis, eds. Justin, Philosopher and Martyr: Apologies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Ps.–Justin Martyr

Orat. Ad. Graec. Ed. J.C.T. Otto, Corpus Apologetarum Christianorum Saeculi Secundi. Vol. 3. 3rd ed. Jena: Mauke, 1879. (Via TLG) Juvenal

Satires. Ed. Susanna Morton Braund. Juvenal and Persius. LCL 91. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004.

314

GAMING GREEKNESS

Livy

Histories. Ed. B.O. Forster, et al. Livy: History of Rome. 14 Vols. LCL 114, 133, 172, 191, 233, 355, 367, 381, 295, 313, 332, 396, 404. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1919–1935. Lucian of Samosata

Macleod, Donald, ed. Luciani Opera. 4 Vols. OCT. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972-1987. Harmon, A.M., et al, eds. Lucian. 8 Vols. LCL 14, 54, 130, 162, 302, 430, 431, 432. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 19131967. Fowler, H.W. and F.G. Fowlers, eds. Lucian of Samosata. 4 Vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1905. Macrobius

Saturnalia. Ed. Robert A. Kaster. Macrobius: Saturnalia. 3 Vols. LCL 510-512. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011. Marcus Aurelius

Meditations. Ed. C.R. Haines. Marcus Aurelius. LCL 58. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1916. Melito of Sardis

Peri Pascha. Ed. Alistair Stewart-Sykes. On Pascha: With the Fragments of Melito and Other Material Related to the Quartodecimans. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladmir’s Seminary Press, 2001. Hall, Stuart George. Melito of Sardis: On Pascha and Fragments. Rev. ed. Oxford Christian Texts. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2012. Menander Rhetor

Russell, D.A. and N.G. Wilson, eds. Menander Rhetor: Text, Translation and Commentary. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981. Municius Felix

Octavius. Ed. J. Beaujeu. Minucius Felix, Octavius: Texte Établi et Traduit. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1964.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

315

______. Ed. G.W. Clarke. The Octavius of Marcus Minucius Felix. ACW. New York: Paulist Press, 1974. Musonius Rufus

Lutz, Cora, ed. “Musonius Rufus ‘The Roman Socrates,’“ YCS 10 (1947): 1-153. New Testament Apocrypha

Schneemelcher, Wilhelm. New Testament Apocrypha. 2 Vols. Rev. ed. R. McL. Wilson, trans. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2003. Oenomaus of Gadara

Mullach, F.W.A. Fragmenta Philosophorum Graecorum, Vol. 2. Paris: Didot, 1867. Origen

Henry Chadwick, ed. Origen: Contra Celsum. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953. Ovid

Tristia and Epistula Ex Ponto. Ed. A. L. Wheeler; G. P. Goold, rev. ed. Ovid: Tristia, Ex Ponto. LCL 154. 2nd ed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988. Pausanius,

Graeciae Descripto. Ed. W.H.S. Jones and R.E. Wycherley. Description of Greece. 5 Vols. LCL 93, 188, 272, 297, 298. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1918-1935 Philo of Alexandria

Colson, F.H., et al, ed. Philo. 12 Vols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1935. Migration of Abraham. Ed. René Cadiou. La Migration d’Abraham. SC 47. Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1957. On the Creation. Ed. David Runia. On the Creation of the Cosmos According to Moses: Introduction, Translation and Commentary. Leiden: Brill, 2001.

316

GAMING GREEKNESS

Ad Flaccum. “ΦΙΛΩΝΟΣ ΕΙΣ ΦΛΑΚΚΟΝ,” S. Reiter, ed., in Philonis Alexandrini Opera quae Supersunt, vol. VI, L. Cohn and P. Wendland, eds. Berlin: Reimer, 1915. van der Hoorst, Pieter, ed. Philo’s Flaccus: The First Pogrom. Atlanta: SBL Press, 2003. Philostorgius

Hist. Eccles. Ed. Philip R. Amidon. Philostorgius: Church History. Atlanta: SBL Press, 2007. _____. MPG 65.455-623. Paris: Migne, 1864. Philostratus the Elder

Lives of the Sophists. Ed. Wilmer C. Wright. Philostratus: Lives of the Sophists and Eunapius; Lives of the Philosophers. LCL 134. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1921. Life of Apollonius of Tyana. Ed. Christopher P. Jones. Life of Apollonius of Tyana. 2 Vols. LCL 16-17. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005. Philostratus the Younger

Imagines. Ed. Arthur Fairbanks. Philostratus the Elder, Imagines. Philostratus the Younger, Imagines. Callistratus, Descriptions. LCL 256. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1931. Plato

Burnet, J., et al, ed. Platonis Opera. OCT. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1922–1995. Folwer, Harold North, et al, eds. Plato. 12 Vols. LCL. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1914-1927. Pliny the Elder

Natural History. Ed. H. Rackham, et al. Pliny: Natural History. 10 Vols. LCL. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 19511962. Pliny the Younger

Epistles. Ed. Betty Radice. Pliny: Letters. 2 Vols. LCL 55, 59. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1969.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

317

Plutarch

Moralia. Ed. Frank Cole Babbit, et al. Plutarch: Moralia. 15 Vols. LCL. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1928–1969. Lives. Ed. Bernadotte Perrin. Plutarch: Parallel Lives. 11 Vols. LCL. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1914–1921. Polybius

Histories. Ed. W.R. Paton. Rev. eds. Frank W. Walbank and Christian Habicht. Polybius: The Histories. 6 Vols. LCL. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2010–2012. Posidonius

Protrepticus. Ed. I. Kidd. Posidonius: Volume III The Translation of the Fragments. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Quintilian

Institutio Oratoria. Ed. D.A. Russell. Quintilian: The Orator’s Education. LCL 124, 125, 126, 127, 494. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Res Gestae

Res Gestae. Ed. Alison Cooley. Res Gestae Divi Augusti: Text, Translation, and Commentary. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Sallust

Catilina. Ed. J.C. Rolfe. Sallust: The War with Catiline and The War with Jugurtha. John T. Ramsey, Rev. ed. LCL 116. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013. Seneca

Epistles. Ed. Richard M. Gummere. Seneca: Epistles. LCL 75-77. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1917-1925. Fantham, Elaine, ed. Seneca: Selected Letters. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.

318

GAMING GREEKNESS

Septuagint

Rahlfs, Alfred, and Robert Hanhart, eds. Septuaginta: Editio Altera. 2nd Rev. ed. New York: American Bible Society, 2006. Pietersma, Albert and Benjamin G. Wright, eds. New English Translation of the Septuagint. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Sibylline Oracles

Sibylline Oracles. Ed. John J. Collins. OTP 1.317-472. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983. Socratic Epistles

Hercher, Rudolphus, ed. Epistolographi Graeci. Amsterdam: Hakkert, 1965. (Via TLG). Strabo

Geography. Eds. Horace L. Jones and J.R.S. Sterrett. 8 Vols. LCL. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960-1970. Suda

Suda. “Suda On Line: Byzantine Lexicography.” David Whitehead, Sen. ed. http://www.stoa.org/sol/ (web: accessed February 2016). Suetonius

Lives of the Caesars. Ed. J.C. Rolfe. Suetonius. 2 Vols. LCL 31, 38. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1914. Synesius of Cyrene

______. MPG 66.1022-1050. Paris: Migne, 1864. Tacitus

Agricola. Ed. M. Hutton, et al. Tacitus: Agricola, Germania, Dialogus. Rev. ed. LCL 35. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970. Annals. Eds. Clifford H. Moore and John Jackson. Tacitus: Annals. 3 Vols. LCL. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 19311937.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

319

Tatian

Marcovich, Miroslav, ed. Tatiani Oratio ad Graecos; Theophili Antiocheni ad Autolycum. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1995. Whittaker, Molly, ed. Oratio ad Graecos and Fragments. Oxford: Clarendon, 1982. Tertullian

De Pallio. Vincent Hunink, ed. Tertullian, De Pallio: A Commentary. Amsterdam: J.C. Gieben Press, 2005. (Latin text of Aloïs Gerlo, Tertullianus, De Pallio, kritische uitgave met vertaling en commentaar. 2 Vols. Wetteren: De Meester, 1940.) De Praescriptione Haereticorum. Ed. R. F. Refoulé. Tertullien: De Praescriptione. SC 46. Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1957. Thucydides

Peloponnesian War. Ed. C.F. Smith. Thucydides. History of the Peloponnesian War. 4 Vols. LCL. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1919–1923. Jowett, Benjamin, ed. Thucydides. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1881 Theophlius of Antioch

Ad Autolycus. Ed. Robert Grant. Theophilus: Ad Autolycum. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970. Marcovich, Miroslav, ed. Tatiani Oratio ad Graecos; Theophili Antiocheni ad Autolycum. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1995. Vergil

Aeneid. Ed. Mynors, R.A.B. P. Vergili Maronis Opera. OCT. Oxford: Clarendon, 1969. Vitruvius

De Architectura. Ed. F. Krohn. Virtuvii: De Architectura. Leipzig: B.G. Teubner, 1912. Xenophon

Memorabilia. Eds. E.C. Marchant and O.J. Todd. Xenophon: Memorabilia, Oeconomicus, Symposium, Apology. Jeffrey Hender-

320

GAMING GREEKNESS

son, Rev. ed. LCL 168. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013. Cyropaedia. Ed. Walter Miller. Xenophon: Cyropaedia. LCL 51–52. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1914. Xenophanes of Colophon

Lesher, J.H., ed. Xenophanes of Colophon: Fragments. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992.

SECONDARY T EXTS Aageson, James. Paul, the Pastoral Epistles, and the Early Church. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 2008. Aland, Kurt. “The Problem of Anonymity and Pseudonymity in Christian Literature of the First Two Centuries.” JTS 12, no.1 (1961): 39-49. Alcock, Susan. Graecia Capta: The Landscapes of Roman Greece. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Alexander, Loveday. Acts in its Ancient Literary Context. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2007. ______. “The Acts of the Apostles as an Apologetic Text.” In Apologetics in the Roman Empire, Mark Edwards et al, eds., 15-44. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Alexander, P.S. “‘Parting of the Ways’ from the Perspective of Rabbinic Judaism.” In Jews and Christians: The Parting of the Ways A.D. 70 to 135, James D.G. Dunn, ed., 1-25. Tübingen: Siebeck-Mohr, 1992. Alexandropoulos, Georgios. Christians against the Ethnics. Münich: Lincom Europa, 2014. Anderson, Graham. Lucian: Theme and Variation in the Second Sophistic. Leiden: Brill, 1976. ______. “The pepaideumenos in Action: Sophists and their Outlook in the Early Empire.” ANRW 2, 34, 2 (1989): 79-208. Arnold, Matthew. Culture and Anarchy, ed. Stefan Collini. Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Astin, Alan. Cato the Censor. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

321

Attridge, Harold. “The Philosophical Critique of Religion under the Early Empire.” ANRW 2.16.1. Berlin: de Gruyter (1978): 45-78. Axelrod, Robert. The Evolution of Cooperation. Rev. ed. New York: Basic Books, 2006. Aune, David. “Magic in Early Christianity.” ANRW 2.23.2. Berlin: de Gruyter (1980): 1507-1557. Baker, J. Christiaan. Heirs of Paul: Paul’s Legacy in the New Testament and in the Church Today. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1991. Baldwin, Barry. “Lucian as Social Satirist.” CQ 11 (1961): 199-208. ______. Studies in Lucian. Toronto: Hakkert, 1973. Barclay, John M.G. Jews in the Mediterranean Disapora: From Alexander to Trajan (323 BCE - 117 CE). Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1996. ______. “Paul Among Diaspora Jews: Anomaly or Apostate.” JSNT 60 (1995): 89-120. Barnard, Leslie W. Justin Martyr: His Life and Thought. London: Cambridge University Press, 1967. Barnes, Timothy. Tertullian: A Historical and Literary Study. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971. Barnett, Albert. Paul Becomes a Literary Influence. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1941. Beal, Timothy. Religion and its Monsters. London: Routledge, 2001. Benko, Stephen. “Pagan Criticism of Christianity during the First Two Centuries.” ANRW 2.23.2. Berlin: de Gruyter (1980): 1055-1118. Berger, Peter. The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion. New York: Doubleday, 1967. Betz, Hans Dieter. “Credibility and Credulity in Plutarch’s Life of Numa.” In Reading Religions in the Ancient World: Essays Presented to Robert MacQueen Grant on his 90th Birthday, David Aune and Robin Darling Young, eds., 39-55. Leiden: Brill, 2007. ______. Lukian und das Neue Testament. Religionsgeschichte und Paränetische Parallelen. Berlin: Akademie, 1961. ______. “Lukian von Samosata und das Christentum,” NovT 3 (1959): 226-237.

322

GAMING GREEKNESS

Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994. Bichler, Reinhold. Hellenismus: Geschichte und Problematik enges Epochebefriffs. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1983. Bickerman, Elias. “The Date of Fourth Maccabees.” In Studies in Jewish and Christian History, 2 vols., rev. ed. Leiden: Brill, 1976. Billerbeck, Margarethe. “La Reception du Cynisme à Rome.” AC 51 (1982): 151-173. ______. “The Ideal Cynic from Epictetus to Julian.” In The Cynics: The Cynic Movement in Antiquity and Its Legacy, R. Bracht Branham and Marie-Odile Goulet-Cazé, eds., 205-221. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. Binmore, Ken. Game Theory: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Boin, Douglas. “Hellenistic ‘Judaism’ and the Social Origins of the ‘Pagan-Christian’ Debate,” JECS 22 (2014): 167-196. Bompaire, Jaques. Lucian Écrivan. Paris: E. de. Boccard, 1958. Bosworth, Brian. “Johann Gustav Droysen, Alexander the Great and the Creation of the Hellenistic Age” in Alexander & His Successors: Essays from the Antipodes. Pat Wheatley and Robert Hannah, eds. Claremont, CA: Regina Books, 2009. Bourdieu, Pierre. Logic of Practice. Richard Nice, trans. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992. ______. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Richard Nice, trans. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977. ______. Pascalian Meditations. Richard Nice, trans. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000. ______. Practical Reason: On the Theory of Action. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998. ______. “The Three Forms of Capital.” In Handbook for Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, J.G. Richardson, ed., 241–258. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1986. Bourdieu, Pierre and Jean Claude Passeron. Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture. Loïc Wacquant, trans. London: Sage Publications, 1977. Bourdieu, Pierre and Loïc Wacquant. An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

323

Bowersock, Glen. Greek Sophists and the Roman Empire. Oxford: Clarendon, 1969. ______. Martyrdom and Rome. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Bowie, Ewan. “The Greeks and their Past in the Second Sophistic.” In Studies in Ancient Society, M.I. Finley ed., 166-209. London: Routledge and K. Paul, 1974. Boyarin, Daniel. Borderlines: The Partition of Judeo-Christianity. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004. ______. Dying for God: Martyrdom and the Making of Christianity and Judaism. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999. ______. Socrates and the Fat Rabbis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. Brakke, David. The Gnostics: Myth, Ritual and Diversity in Early Christianity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 2010. Brams, Steven. Biblical Games: Game Theory and the Hebrew Bible. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1980. ______. Game Theory and The Humanities: Bridging Two Worlds. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011. Branham, Bracht. Unruly Eloquence: Lucian and the Comedy of Traditions. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989. Breitenstein, Urs. Beobachtungen zu Sprache, Stil und Gedankengut des Vierten Makkabäerbuchs. Basel/Stuttgart: Schwabe, 1978. Brennan, T. Corey. “Tertullian’s De Pallio and Roman Dress in North Africa.” In Roman Dress and the Fabrics of Roman Culture. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008. Broneer, Oscar. “The Apostle Paul and the Isthmian Games.” Biblical Archaeologist 25, no. 1 (1962): 2-31. Brubaker, Rogers and Frederick Cooper. “Beyond ‘Identity.’” Theory and Society 29 (2000): 1-47. Butler, Judith. Excitable Speech. New York: Routledge, 1997. Campbell, Douglas. The Rhetoric of Righteousness in Romans 3:21-26. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1992. Carter, Warren. Matthew and Empire; Initial Explorations. Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 2001. Case, James. Competition: The Birth of a New Science. New York: Hill and Wang, 2007.

324

GAMING GREEKNESS

Castelli, Elizabeth. Martyrdom and Memory: Early Christian Culture Making. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004. Caster, Marcel. Lucien et la pensée religieuse de son temps. Paris: Bude, 1937. Chadwick, Henry. “Justin Martyr’s Defense of Christianity.” BJRL 47 (1965): 275-297. Chin, Catherine. Grammar and Christianity in the Late Roman Empire. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007. Cioran, Emile. Anathemas and Admirations. Richard Howard, trans. New York: Arcade, 1987. Clogg, Richard. A Concise History of Modern Greece. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Cobb, Stephanie. Dying to Be Men: Gender and Language in Early Christian Martyr Texts. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008. Cohen, Jeffrey, ed. Monster Theory: Reading Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Cohen, Jeffrey “Monster Culture (Seven Theses).” In Monster Theory: Reading Culture. Jeffrey Cohen, ed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Cornell, Tim J. In Cambridge Ancient History, 2nd ed. F.W. Walbank, et al, eds. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Crawford, Matthew. “The Problemata of Tatian: Recovering the Fragments of a Second-Century Christian Intellectual.” JTS (forthcoming). Cribiore, Rafaella. Gymnastics of The Mind: Greek Education in Roman and Hellenistic Egypt. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005. ______. Libanius the Sophist: Rhetoric, Reality, and Religion in the Fourth Century. Cornell Studies in Classical Philology. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013. ______. “Lucian, Libanius, and the Short Road to Rhetoric,” GRBS 47 (2007): 71-86. ______. The School of Libanius in Late Antique Antioch. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007. Cunningham, Scott. Through Many Tribulations: The Theology of Persecution in Luke-Acts. London: Bloomsbury/T&T Clark, 1997.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

325

Daly, Robert. Christian Sacrifice: The Judeo-Christian Background before Origen. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1978. D’Angelo, Mary R. “Εὐσέβεια: Roman Imperial Family Values and the Sexual Politics of 4 Maccabees and the Pastorals.” BI 11, no.2 (2003): 139-165. Daniel-Hughes, Carly. The Salvation of the Flesh in Tertullian of Carthage: Dressing for the Resurrection. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Derrida, Jacques. On Grammatology. Gayatri Spivak, trans. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974. ______. Some Statements and Truisms about Neologisms, Newisms, Postisms, Parasitisms, and other small Seismisms, The States of Theory. David Carroll, ed. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989. ______. Writing and Difference. Alan Bass, trans. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978. Desideri, Paolo. “Dio’s Exile: Politics, Philosophy, Literature.” In Writing Exile: The Discourse of Displacement in Greco-Roman Antiquity and Beyond. Jan Felix Gaertner, ed. 193-208. Leiden: Brill, 2007. deSilva, David. 4 Maccabees. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1998. Dibelius, Martin and Hans Conzelmann, The Pastoral Epistles. Hermeneia. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 1972. Donahue, Paul. Jewish-Christian Controversy in the Second Century: A Study in the Dialogue of Justin Martyr. Ph.D. Diss. Yale University, 1973. Donelson, Lewis. Pseudepigraphy and Ethical Argument in the Pastoral Epistles. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1986. Donnelly, Francis. “A Function of the Classical Exordium.” Classical Weekly 5 (1911-1912): 204-207. Doran, Robert. 2 Maccabees: A Critical Commentary. Hermeneia. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2012. Doring, Klaus. Exemplum Socratis. Studien zur Sokratesnachwirkung in der kynisch-stoischen Popularphilosophie der frühen Kaiserzeit und im frühen Christentum. Weisbaden: Steiner, 1979.

326

GAMING GREEKNESS

Droyson, Johann Gustav. Geschichte des Hellenismus, 2 Vols. Hamburg: Perthes, 1836-1843. Dudley, Donald. The History of Cynicism. London: Metheun, 1937. Edwards, Mark J. “Justin’s Logos and the Word of God.” JECS 3 (1995): 261–80. Ehrensperger, Kathy. Paul at the Crossroads of Culture: Theologizing in the Space-Between. London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2013. Elliott, Neil. The Arrogance of Nations: Reading Romans in the Shadow of Empire. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2008. Elm, Susanna. Sons of Hellenism, Fathers of the Church: Emperor Julian, Gregory of Nazianzus, and the Vision of Rome. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012. Erskine, Andrew. “Hellenistic Monarchy and Roman Political Invective.” CQ 41.1 (1991): 106-120. Eshleman, Kendra. “Affection and Affiliation: Social Networks and Conversion to Philosophy.” CJ 103.2 (2007-2008): 129-140. _______. The Social World of Intellectuals in the Roman Empire: Sophists, Philosophers and Christians. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Fee, Gordon. 1 and 2 Timothy, Titus. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1988. Fiore, Benjamin. The Function of Personal Example in the Socratic and Pastoral Epistles. Rome: Biblical Institute Press, 1986. Fojtik, John E.. “Tatian the Barbarian: Language, Education and Identity in the Oratio Ad Graecos.” In Continuity and Discontinuity in Early Christian Apologetics. Jörg Ulrich, et al. eds., Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2009. Foucault, Michel. History of Sexuality: Volume 1. Robert Hurley, trans. New York: Random House, 1978. ______. The History of Sexuality: Volume 2. Robert Hurley, trans. New York: Vintage Books, 1985. ______. “Power and Strategies.” In Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977, Colin Gordon, ed. New York: Vantage, 1980. Frantz, K.J. “The Function of Paul’s Athletic Imagery in 1 Corinthians 9:24-27.” M.A.T.S. Thesis, McCormick Theological Seminary, 1988.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

327

Frend, W.H.C. Martyrdom and Persecution in the Early Church: A Study of a Conflict from the Maccabees to Donatus. Oxford: Blackwell, 1965. Frye, Richard. “Assyria and Syria: Synonyms.” JNES 51, no. 4 (1992): 281-285. Gaca, Kathy. “Driving Aphrodite from the World: Tatian’s Encratite Principles of Sexual Renunciation.” JTS (NS) 53, part 1 (2002): 28-52. Gaertner, Jan Felix, ed. Writing Exile: The Discourse of Displacement in Greco-Roman Antiquity and Beyond. Leiden: Brill, 2007. Gager, John. Moses in Greco-Roman Paganism. Nashville: Abington, 1972. Galinsky, Karl. Augustan Culture: An Interpretive Introduction. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996. Gallagher, Edmon. Hebrew Scripture in Patristic Biblical Theory: Canon, Language, Text. Leiden: Brill, 2012. Garnsey, Peter. “Aspects of the Decline of Urban Aristocracy in the Empire.” ANRW II.1 (1974): 229-252. ______. Social Status and Legal Privilege in the Roman Empire. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970. Garrison, Roman. The Graeco-Roman Context of Early Christian Literature. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1997. Georgia, Allan. “Translating the Triumph: Reading Mark’s Crucifixion Narrative Against a Roman Ritual of Power.” JSNT 36.1 (2013): 17-38. Gibbon, Edward. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. 2 vols. Philadelphia, PA: Claxton, Remsen & Haffelfinger, 1875. Gilmore, David. Monsters: Evil Beings, Mythical Beasts and All Manner of Imaginary Terrors. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003. Gladwell, Malcolm. The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference. New York: Little Brown, 2000. Gleason, Maud. Making Men: Sophists and Self-Presentation in Ancient Rome. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995. Gleick, James. The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood. New York: Pantheon Books, 2011.

328

GAMING GREEKNESS

Goldhill, Simon, ed. Being Greek under Rome: Cultural Identity, the Second Sophistic and the Development of Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. ______. Who Needs Greek?: Contests in the Cultural History of Hellenism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Goodenough, Edwin R. The Theology of Justin Martyr: An Investigation into the Conceptions of Early Christian Literature and its Hellenistic and Judaistic Influences. Amsterdam: Philo, 1968. Goodman, Martin. Mission and Conversion: Proselytising in the Religious History of the Roman Empire. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. Gouldner, Alvin. Enter Plato: Classical Greece and the Origins of Social Theory. New York: Basic Books, 1965. Grabbe, Lester ed. Good Kings and Bad Kings: The Kingdom of Judah in the Seventh Century BCE. London: T&T Clark, 2005. Grant, Robert. Greek Apologists of the Second Century. Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1988. ______. “Studies in the Apologists.” HTR 51, no.3 (1958): 123-134. ______. “Tatian (Oratio 30) and the Gnostics.” JTS (NS) 15 (1964): 65-69. Gruen, Erich. “Cultural Fictions and Cultural identity.” TAPA 123 (1993): 1-14. ______. Heritage and Hellenism: The Reinvention of Jewish Tradition. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1998. ______. Studies in Greek Culture and Roman Policy. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990. Hadas, Moses. The Third and Fourth Books of Maccabees. New York: Harper & Row, 1953. Halberstam, Judith. Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995. Hall, Jennifer. Lucian’s Satire. New York: Arno Press, 1981. Hall, Jonathan. “Contested Ethnicities: Perceptions of Macedonia within Evolving Definitions of Greek Identity.” In Ancient Perceptions of Greek Ethnicity, ed. Irad Malkin, 159-186. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001. ______. Hellenicity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

329

Habinek, Thomas. The Politics of Latin Literature: Writing, Identity and Empire in Ancient Rome. Princeton, NJ: Princeton, 1998. Halliwell, Stephen. The Aesthetics of Mimesis: Ancient Texts & Modern Problems. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002. Hammerstaedt, Jürgen. “Der Kyniker Oenomaus von Gadara.” ANRW 2.34, 36. Berlin: de Gruyter (1990): 2835-2860. Harding, Mark. Tradition and Rhetoric in the Pastoral Epistles. New York: Peter Lang, 1998. Hawthorne, Gerald. “Tatian and his Discourse to the Greeks.” HTR 57 (1964): 161-188. Heath, Malcolm. Hermogenes on Issues: Strategies of Argument in Later Greek Rhetoric. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. ______. Menander: A Rhetor in Context. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Helm, Rudolf. “Apuleius’ Apologie—ein Meisterwerk der zweiten Sophistik.” Das Altertum 1 (1955): 86-108. Henderson, Ian. “The Second Sophistic and Non-Elite Speakers.” In Perceptions of the Second Sophistic and Its Times—Regards sur la Seconde Sophistique et son époque, Thomas Schmidt and Pascale Fleury, eds., 23-35. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011. Hengel, Martin. Judaism and Hellenism: Studies in their Encounter in Palestine during the Early Hellenistic Period. John Bowden, trans. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1974. (Original edition: Judentum und Hellenismus; Studien zu ihrer Begegnung unter besonderer Berücksichtigung Palästinas bis zur Mitte des 2. Jhs. v. Chr Tübingen: Mohr, 1973.) Hijmans Jr., Benjamin L. “Apuleius orator: ‘Pro se de Magia’ and ‘Florida.’“ ANRW 2.34.2 (1994): 1708-84. Himmelmann, Nikolaus. Herrscher und Athlet. Die Bronzen Vom Quirinal. Bonn: Akademisches Kunstmuseum, 1989. Hofer, Andrew. “The Old Man as Christ in Justin’s Dialogue with Trypho,” VC 57.1 (2003): 1-21. Hoffmann, Manfred. Der Dialog bei den christlichen Schriftstellern der ersten vier Jahrhunderte. Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1966.

330

GAMING GREEKNESS

Horner, Timothy. Listening to Trypho: Justin Martyr’s Dialogue Reconsidered. Leuven: Peeters, 2001. Horsley, Richard. Jesus and Empire: The Kingdom of God and the New World Disorder. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2003. Horsely, Richard, ed. Paul and Empire: Religion and Power in Roman Imperial Society. Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 1997. Houston, Mary. Ancient Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Costume. 2nd edition. London: Adam & Charles Black, 1947. Hulen, Amos. “‘The Dialogues with the Jews’ as Sources for Early Jewish Argument Against Christianity.” JBL 51 (1932): 58-70. Humphreys, Milton W. “The Agon of the Old Comedy.” AJP 8.2 (1887): 179-206. Hunt, Emily. Christianity in the 2nd Century: The Case of Tatian. London: Routledge, 2003. Hyldahl, Niels. Philosophie und Christentum: Eine interpretation der Einleitung zum Dialog Justins. Kopenhagen: Munksgaard, 1966. Jaeger, Werner. Early Christianity and Greek Paideia. Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1961. ______. Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture. Gilbert Hight, trans. 3 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1945. Johnson, James Weldon. God’s Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse. New York: Penguin, 2008. Johnson, Luke Timothy. Letters to Paul’s Delegates: 1 Timothy, 2 Timothy, Titus. Valley Forge, PA: Trinity Press International, 1996. Johnson, William. Readers and Reading Culture in the High Roman Empire: A Study of Elite Communities. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. Jones, Christopher P. Culture and Society in Lucian. Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 1986. ______. The Roman World of Dio Chrysostom. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978. Kaldellis, Anthony. Hellenism in Byzantium: The Transformation of Greek Identity and the Reception of the Classical Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

331

Karadimas, Dimitrios. Tatian’s Oratio ad Graecos: Rhetoric and Philosophy/Theology. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiskell, 2000. Karris, Robert. “The Background and Significance of the Polemic of the Pastoral Epistles.” JBL 92 (1973): 549-64. Kearney, Richard. Strangers, Gods and Monsters. London: Routledge, 2003. Kelly, J.N.D. A Commentary on the Pastoral Epistles. London: A. & C. Black, 1963. Kennedy, George. A New History of Classical Rhetoric. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994. ______. New Testament Interpretation through Rhetorical Criticism. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1984. Kimber-Buell, Denise. Why this New Race? Ethnic Reasoning in Early Christianity. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. King, Karen. What is Gnosticism? Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2003. Klauck, Hans-Josef. 4 Makkabäerbuch. Gütersloh: Mohn, 1989. ______. “Brotherly Love in Plutarch and 4 Maccabees.” In Greeks, Romans, and Christians: Essays in Honor of Abraham J. Malherbe. D.L. Balch, et al., eds., 144-156. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 1990. ______. “Hellenistische Rhetorik im Disaporajudentum: Das Exordium des Vierten Makkabäerbuchs (4 Makk 1.1-12).” NTS 35 (1989): 451-465. ______. Magic and Paganism in Early Christianity: The World of the Acts of the Apostles. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003. ______. The Religious Context of Early Christianity: A Guide to Graeco-Roman Religions. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003. Klawiter, Frederick. “The Role of Martyrdom and Persecution in Developing the Priestly Authority of Women in Early Christianity: A Case Study of Montanism.” Church History 49 (1990): 251–62. Koltun-Fromm, Naomi. “Re-Imagining Tatian: The Damaging Effects of Polemical Rhetoric.” JECS 16 (2008): 1-30. König, Jason. Athletics and Literature in the Roman Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

332

GAMING GREEKNESS

______. “Competitiveness and anti-competitiveness in Philostratus’ Lives of the Sophists.” In Competition in the Ancient World, Nick Fisher and Hans van Wees, eds., 279-300. Swansea: Classical Press of Wales, 2011. ______. , “Conventions of prefatory self-presentation in Galen’s On the Order of My Own Books.” In Galen and the World of Knowledge, Christopher Gill, et al, eds., 35-58. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Konstan, David and Suzanne Saïd, eds. Greeks on Greekness: Viewing the Greek Past under the Roman Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Korenjak, Martin. Redner und Publikum: ihre Interaktion in der sophistischen Rhetorik der Kaiserzeit. Munich: C.H. Beck, 2000. Kuin, Inger. “Playful Piety: Religion, Humor, and Audience in Lucian of Samosata.” Ph.D. Diss. New York University, 2015. Lamberton, Robert. Plutarch. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001. ______. “The Schools of Philosophy of the Roman Empire: The Evidence of the Biographies.” In Education in Greek and Roman Antitquity, Too, ed., 433-485. Leiden: Brill, 2001. Lausberg, Heinrich. Handbook of Literary Rhetoric: A Handbook for Literary Study. David Orten and Dean Anderson, eds. Leiden: Brill, 1998. Lebram, J.H.C. “Die literarische Form des vierten Makkabäerbuches.” VC 28 (1975): 81-96. Levine, David. “What is Game Theory.” http://www.dklevine.com/ general/whatis.htm. (web: accessed January 2016). Lieu, Judith. Image and Reality: The Jews in the World of the Christians in the Second Century. London: T&T Clark/Continuum, 1996. Lindemann, Andreas. Paulus im ältesten Chrstentum. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1979. Livingstone, Niall. “The Voice of Isocrates and the Dissemination of Cultural Power.” In Pedagogy and Power: Rhetorics of Classical Learning, eds. Yin Lee Too and Niall Livingstone, 263-281. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

333

Löhr, Winrich. “Theft of the Greeks: Christian Self Definition in the Age of the Schools.” Revue d’Histoire Ecclésiastique. 95.3 (2000): 403-426. Long, A.A. and D.N. Sedley. The Hellenistic Philosophers. 2 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Lotz, John-Paul. Ignatius and Concord: The Background and Use of Concord in the Letters of Ignatius of Antioch. New York: Peter Lang, 2007. Lyman, Rebecca. “The Politics of Passing: Justin Martyr’s Conversion as a Problem of ‘Hellenization.’“ In Conversion in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, Kenneth Mills and Anthony Grafton, eds., 36-60. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2003. MacDoland, Dennis R. The Legend and the Apostle: The Battle for Paul in Story and Canon. Philadelphia: Westminster, 1983. MacDonald, Margaret. Early Christian Women and Pagan Opinion: The Power of the Hysterical Woman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. ______. The Pauline Churches: A Socio-Historical Study of Institutionalization in the Pauline and Deutero-Pauline Writings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Macleod, Matthew. “Lucianic Studies since 1930.” ANRW 2.34.2. Berline: de Gruyter (1994): 1362-1421. MacMullen, Ramsey. The Second Church: Popular Christianity A.D. 200–400. Atlanta, Ga.: Society of Biblical Literature, 2009. Malherbe, Abraham. Moral Exhortation: A Greco-Roman Sourcebook. Philadelphia: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1986. Malkin, Irad, ed. Ancient Perceptions of Greek Ethnicity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001. Manning, C.E. “School Philosophy and Popular Philosophy in the Roman Empire” ANRW II.36.7 (1994): 4995-5026. Marchal, Joseph A. The Politics of Heaven: Women, Gender, and Empire in the Study of Paul. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2008. Marguerat, Daniel. “Paul après Paul: une histoire de reception.” NTS 54 (2008): 317-37.

334

GAMING GREEKNESS

Marquis, Timothy Luckritz. Transient Apostle: Paul, Travel, and the Rhetoric of Empire. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013. Marrou, Henri I. Histoire de l’éducation dans l’Antiquité. Paris: Le Seuil, 1948. Marshall, I. Howard. The Pastoral Epistles. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1999. Martin, Dale. Inventing Superstition: From the Hippocratics to the Christians. Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 2004. ______. Slavery as Salvation: The Metaphor of Slavery in Pauline Christianity. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990. ______. The Corinthian Body. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995. Mason, Hugh. Greek Terms for Roman Institutions. Toronto: Hakkert, 1974. Matheson, Susan. “The Mission of Triptolemus and the Politics of Athens.” GRBS 20 (1982): 345-372. McGehee, Michael. “Why Tatian Never ‘Apologized’ To the Greeks.” JECS 1.2 (1993): 143-158. McKechnie, Paul. “Tertullian’s De Pallio and life in Roman Carthage.” Prudentia 242 (1992): 44-66. McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Boston: MIT Press, 1964. Meeks, Wayne. The Origins of Christian Morality: The First Two Centuries. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993. Melville, Herman. Pierre; Or, The Ambiguities. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1852. Millar, Fergus. “The Roman Colonies of the Near East. A Study of Cultural Relations.” In Roman Eastern Policy and Other Studies, Heikki Solin and Mika Kajava, eds., 7–58. Helsinki: Societas Scientiarum Fennica, 1990. Mitchell, Margaret. Paul, the Corinthians and the Birth of Christian Hermeneutics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. ______. Paul and the Rhetoric of Reconciliation: An Exegetical Investigation of the Language and Composition of 1 Corinthians. Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1991. Moles, John. “Cynic Cosmopolitanism.” In The Cynics: The Cynic Movement in Late Antiquity and its Legacy, R. Bracht Bran-

BIBLIOGRAPHY

335

ham and Marie-Odile Goulet-Cazé, eds., 105-120. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1996. ______. “The Kingship Orations of Dio Chrysostom.” Papers of the Leeds Latin Seminar 6 (1990): 297-375. Momiglanio, Arnoldo. Alien Wisdom: The Limits of Hellenization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975. ______. Review of Timothy Barnes, Tertullian: A Historical and Literary Study. JRS 66 (1976): 273-276. Montefusco, Calboli. “Exordium.” Brill’s New Pauly. Brill Online, 2013. Montiglio, Silvio. Wandering in Ancient Greek Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Moore, George F. “Christian Writers on Judaism.” HTR 14 (1921): 197-254. Moore, Stephen and Janice Capel Anderson. “Taking it Like a Man: Masculinity in 4 Maccabees.” JBL 117.2 (1998): 249-273. Morgan, Teresa. Literate Education in the Hellenistic and Roman Worlds. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Moss, Candida. Ancient Christian Martyrdom: Diverse Practices, Theologies, and Traditions. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012. ______. The Other Christs: Imitating Jesus in Ancient Christian Ideologies of Martyrdom. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Murphy-O’Connor, Jerome. “2 Timothy Contrasted with 1 Timothy and Titus.” Revue Biblique 98 (1991): 403-18. ______. St. Paul’s Corinth: Texts and Archaeology. Collegeville: Glazier/Liturgical Press, 1995. Nasar, Sylvia. A Beautiful Mind: The Life of Mathematical Genius and Nobel Laureate John Nash. New York: Touchstone, 1998. Nasrallah, Laura. Christian Responses to Roman Art and Architecture: The Second-Century Church Amid the Spaces of Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. ______. “Mapping the World: Justin, Tatian, Lucian, and the Second Sophistic,” HTR 98 (2005): 283-314. Nesselrath, Heinz-Günther. “Later Greek Voices on the Predicament of Exile: From Teles to Plutarch and Favorinus.” In Writing Ex-

336

GAMING GREEKNESS

ile: The Discourse of Displacement in Greco-Roman Antiquity and Beyond. Jan Felix Gaertner, ed. 87-108. Leiden: Brill, 2007. Nilson, Jon. “To Whom is Justin’s Dialogue with Trypho Addressed?” TS 38 (1977): 538-546 Nock, Arthur Darby. Conversion: The Old and the New in Religion from Alexander the Great to Augustine of Hippo. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1933. ______. “Gnosticism.” HTR 57 (1964): 255-279. Norden, Eduard. Die Antike Kunstprosa vom VI. Jahrhundert V. Chr. Bis in die Zeit der Renaissance. 2 vols. Leipzig: Teubner, 1898; 1909. O’Donnell, J.J. “Apuleius, Apology: Seminar Website.” Georgetown University, accessed June 2015. http://faculty.georgetown.edu/ jod/apuleius Oliver, J.H. “Marcus Aurelius and the Philosophical Schools at Athens.” AJP 102 (1981): 213-225. Östenberg, Ida. Staging the World: Spoils, Captives, and Representations in the Roman Triumphal Procession. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Pease, Arthur. “Things Without Honor.” CP 21 (1926): 27-42. Pelikan, Jaroslav. “De-Judaization and Hellenism: The Ambiguities of Christian Identities.” In The Dynamic in Christian Thought, ed. Joseph Papin, 89-124. Villanova, PA: Villanova University Press, 1970. Perkins, Judith. Roman Imperial Identities in the Early Christian Era. Oxford: Routledge, 2009. ______. The Suffering Self: Pain and Narrative Representation in the Early Christian Era. New York: Routledge, 1995. Pernot, Laurent. La Rhétorique de l’éloge dans le Monde GrécoRomain. Paris: Institut d’Etudes Augstiniennes, 1993. Pervo, Richard. Acts: A Commentary. Hermeneia. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2008. ______. “Acts in the Suburbs of the Apologists.” In Contemporary Studies in Acts, Thomas E. Philips, ed., 29-49. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2009. ______. Dating Acts: Between the Evangelists and the Apologists. Santa Rosa, CA: Polebridge, 2006.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

337

______. Profit with Delight: The Literary Genre of the Acts of the Apostles. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1987. ______. “Romancing an Oft-Neglected Stone: The Pastoral Epistles and the Epistolary Novel.” Journal of Higher Criticism 1 (1994): 25-47. ______. The Making of Paul: Constructions of the Apostle in Early Christianity. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2010. Pfitzner, Victor. Paul and the AGON Motif: Traditional Athletic Imagery in the Pauline Literature. Leiden: Brill, 1967. Pietersen, Lloyd. The Polemic of the Pastorals: A Sociological Examination of the Development of Pauline Christianity. London: T&T Clark, 2004. Pilhofer, Peter et al, eds. Lukian. Der Tod des Peregrinos. Ein Sharlatan auf dem Scheiterhaufen. Darmstadt: WBG, 2005. Pleket, H.W. “Olympic Benefactors.” ZPE 20 (1976): 1-18. Pohl, Walter. “Telling the Difference: Signs of Ethnic Identity.” In Strategies of Distinction: The Construction of the Ethnic Communities, 300-800. Walter Pohl and Helmut Reimitz, eds. Leiden: Brill, 1998. Poirier, John C. “The Linguistic Situation in Jewish Palestine in Late Antiquity,” JGRChJ 4 (2007): 55–134. ______. “The Narrative Role of Semitic Languages in the Book of Acts.” FilolNT 16 (2003): 107-116. Poundstone, William. Prisoner’s Dilemma. New York: Anchor Books, 1992. Price, Simon. Rituals and Power: The Roman Imperial Cult in Asia Minor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984. Prior, Michael. Paul the Letter-Writer and the Second Letter to Timothy. Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1989. Puech, Aime. Reserches sur Le Discours aux Grecs de Tatien. Paris: Alcan, 1903. Quinn, Jerome. The First and Second Letters to Timothy: A New Translation with Notes and Commentary. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000. Rajak, Tessa. “Talking at Trypho: Christian Apologetic as AntiJudaism in Justin’s Dialogue with Trypho the Jew.” In Apologetics in the Roman Empire: Pagans, Jews, and Christians,

338

GAMING GREEKNESS

Mark Edwards et al, eds., 59-80. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Relihan, Joel. Ancient Menippean Satire. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993. Renan, Ernst. Life of Jesus. London: Trübner & Co., 1864. Robb, Kevin. Literacy and Paideia in Ancient Greece. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. Robbins, Vernon. “The Social Location of the Implied Author of Luke-Acts.” In The Social World of Luke-Acts: Models for Interpretation, Jerome Neyrey, ed., 305-332. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1991. Robert, Louis. “Inscriptions Grecques d’Asie Mineure.” In Anatolian Studies Presented to William Buckler, W.H. Calder and J. Keil, eds., 227-248. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1939. Robinson, Betsey. “‘Good Luck’ from Corinth: A Mosaic of Allegory, Athletics, and City Identity.” AJA 116 no. 1 (2012): 105-132. Robinson, Christopher. Lucian and His Influence in Europe. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979. Rokeah, Dawid. Justin Martyr and the Jews. Leiden: Brill, 2002. Romeo, Illaria. “The Panhellenion and Ethnic Identity in Hadrianic Greece.” Classical Philology 97 (2002): 21-37. Rostovtzeff, Micheal Ivanovitch. Social and Economic History of the Roman Empire. 2nd rev. ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1957. Rowe, C. Kavin. World Upside Down: Reading Acts in the GrecoRoman Age. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Rutledge, Steven. “Tiberius’ Philhellenism.” CW 101 (2008): 453-67. Saïd, Suzanne. “Rewriting the Athenian Past from Isocrates to Aelius Aristides.” In Greeks on Greekness: Viewing the Greek Past under the Roman Empire, David Konstan and Suzanne Saïd, 47-60. Cambridge: Cambridge Philological Society, 2006. ______. “The Discourse of Identity in Greek Rhetoric from Isocrates to Aristides.” In Ancient Perceptions of Greek Ethnicity, Irad Malkin, ed., 275-299. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

339

Saltz, Jerry. “Jerry Saltz on the Met’s Incredible Boxer at Rest Sculpture.” vulture.com, June 28, 2013 (http://www.vulture.com/ 2013/06/jerry-saltz-on-the-boxer-at-the-met.html. Schmeller, Thomas. Schulen im Neuen Testament?: zur Stellung des Urchristentums in der Bildungswelt seiner Zeit. Freibourg: Herders, 2001. Schmitt-Pantel, Pauline. La cité au banquet. Histoire des repas publics dans les cités grecques. Rome: École Française de Rome, 1992. Schmitz, Thomas. Bildung und Macht: Zur sozialen und politischen Funktion der zweiten Sophistik in her griechischen Welt der Kaiserzeit. München: Beck, 1997. Schmitz, Thomas and Pascale Fleury, eds. Regards sur la Seconde Sophistique et son époque. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011. Schmitz, Thomas and Nicolas Wiater, eds. The Struggle for Identity: Greeks and their Past in the First Century BCE. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2011. Schwartz, Eduard. Charakterkoepfe aus Antiken Literatur. Leipzig: Teubner, 1910. Schwartz, Sandra. “Rome in the Greek Novel? Images and Ideas of Empire in Chariton’s Persia.” Arethusa 36.3 (2003): 375-94. Seesengood, Robert. Competing Identities: The Athlete and the Gladiator in Early Christian Literature. London: Bloomsbury/T&T Clark, 2007. Selinger, Reinhard. “Die Demetriosunruhen (Apg. 19,23—40): Ein Fallstudie aus rechthistorischer Perspektive.” ZNW 88, no. 3-4 (1997): 242-59. Setzer, Claudia. Jewish Responses to Early Christianity. Minneapolis: Fortress, 1994. Shaw, Brent D. “Body/Power/Identity: Passions of the Martyrs.” JECS 4 (1996): 269-312. Shildrick, Margrit. Embodying the Monster: Encounters with the Vulnerable Self. London: Sage, 2002. Sidebottom, Harry. “Philostratus and the Symbolic Roles of the Sophist and Philosopher.” In Philostratus, Ewan Bowie and Jaś Elsner, eds., 69-99. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.

340

GAMING GREEKNESS

Sider, Robert. Ancient Rhetoric and the Art of Tertullian [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971. Simon, Marcel. Verus Israel: A Study of the Relations between Christians and Jews in the Roman Empire (135-425 CE). H. McKeating, trans. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986. Skarsaune, Oskar. “The Conversion of Justin Martyr.” ST 30 (1976): 53-73. ______. In the Shadow of the Temple: Jewish Influences on Early Christianity. Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 2002. Smith, R.R.R. Hellenistic Sculpture. New York: Thames & Hudson, 1991. ______. “Late Roman Philosopher Portraits from Aphrodisias.” JRS 80 (1990): 127-155. Spawforth, Anthony. Greece and the Augustan Cultural Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Stansbury-O’Donnell, Mark. History of Greek Art. Chichester: John Wiley, 2015. Stark, Rodney. The Rise of Christianity: How the Obscure, Marginal Jesus Movement became the Dominant Religious Force in the Western World in a Few Centuries. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996. ______. The Triumph of Christianity: How the Jesus Movement became the World’s Largest Religious Movement. New York: Harper Collins, 2011. Stone, Jon. The Monster at the End of this Book, Mike Smollin, illus. New York: Random House, 1971. Stoops, Robert F. “Riot and Assembly: The Social Context of Acts 19.23-41.” JBL 108 (1989): 73-91. Stowers, Stanley. “4 Maccabess.” In Harper Collins Biblical Commentary, James Mays, ed., 844-855. New York: Harper Collins, 2000. ______. Letter Writing in the Greco-Roman World. Philadelphia: Westminster/John Knox, 1986. ______. A Re-Reading of Romans: Justice, Jews, and Gentiles. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994. Strelan, Richard. Paul, Artemis and the Jews in Ephesus. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1996.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

341

Swain, Simon. Hellenism and Empire: Language, Classicism and Power in the Greek World, AD 50-250. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Syme, Roland. The Roman Revolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1939. Szlagor, Barbara. Verflochtene Bilder. Lukians Porträts zeitgenössischer “göttlicher Männer” und seine literarische Selbstprojektion in Alexander, De Morte Peregrini, Demonax und Nigrinus. Trier: Wissenschaft Verlag Trier, 2005. Tajra, Harry. The Trial of St. Paul: A Juridical Exegesis of the Second Half of the Acts of the Apostles. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1994. Tannehill, Robert. The Narrative Unity of Luke-Acts: A Literary Interpretation. 2 Vols. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 1986. Taylor, Miriam. Anti-Judaism and Early Christian Identity. Leiden: Brill, 1995. Thee, Francis. Julius Africanus and the Early Christian View of Magic. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1984. Too, Yun Lee, ed. Education in Greek and Roman Antiquity. Leiden: Brill, 2001. Towner, Philip. The Letters to Timothy and Titus. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2006. Trakatellis, Demetrios. “Justin Martyr’s Trypho.” HTR 79 (1986): 289-297. Trebilco, Paul. The Early Christians in Ephesus from Paul to Ignatius. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2004. Tzanelli, Rodanthi. “‘Not My Flag!’ Citizenship and Nationhood in the Margins of Europe (Greece, October 2000/2003).” Ethnic and Racial Studies 29 (2006): 27-49. Urbano, Arthur. The Philosophical Life: Biography and the Crafting of Intellectual Identity in Late Antiquity. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2013. Vaage, Leif, ed. Religious Rivalries in the early Roman Empire and the Rise of Christianity. Waterloo, Ont.: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2006. van Nijf, Onno. “Local Heroes: Athletics, Festivals, and Elite SelfFashioning in the Roman East.” In Being Greek under Rome: Cultural Identity, the Second Sophistic and the Development of

342

GAMING GREEKNESS

Empire, Simon Goldhill, ed., 306-334. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. van Winden, J. C. M. An Early Christian Philosopher: Justin Martyr’s Dialogue with Trypho, Chapters One to Nine. Leiden: Brill, 1971. van Unnik, W.C. “‘Tiefer Friede’ (1. Klemens 2,2).” VC 24 (1970): 261-79. Verner, David. The Household of God: The Social World of the Pastoral Epistles. Chico, CA: Scholars, 1983. Veyne, Paul. Bread and Circuses: Historical Sociology and Political Pluralism. B. Pearce, trans. New York: Penguin, 1990. van Henten, Jan W. “Datierung und Herknuft des Vierten Makkabäerbuches.” In Tradition and Reinterpretation in Jewish and Early Christian Literature: Essays in Honor of Jürgen C.H. Lebram, J. van Henten, et al, eds., 137-145. Leiden: Brill, Brill, 1986. ______. “A Jewish Epitaph in a Literary Text: 4 Macc 17.8-10.” In Studies in Early Jewish Epigraphy, Jan W. van Henten and Pieter W. van der Horst, eds., 44-69. Leiden: Brill, 1994. ______. The Maccabean Martyrs as Saviours of the Jewish People: A Study of 2 and 4 Maccabees. Leiden: Brill, 1997. von Harnack, Adolf. Judentum und Judenchristentum in Justins Dialog mit Trypho. Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs, 1913 ______. What is Christianity? New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1957. Vössing, Konrad. Schule und Bildung im Nordafrika der Römischen Kaiserzeit. Bruxelles: Latomus, 1997. Walbank, Frank. “The Problem of Greek Nationality.” Phoenix 5 (1951): 41-60. Wallace-Haddrill, Andrew. “The Golden Age and Sin in Augustan Ideology.” Past and Present 95 (1982): 19-36. Watts, Edward. City and School in Late Antique Athens and Alexandria. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. Weiss, Johannes. Der Erste Korintherbrief. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1910. Welborn, L.L. Politics and Rhetoric in the Corinthian Epistles. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1997. White, Benjamin. “Reclaiming Paul? Reconfiguration as Reclamation in 3 Corinthians.” JECS 17, no. 4 (2009): 497-523.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

343

Whitmarsh, Timothy. Beyond the Second Sophistic: Adventures in Greek Postclassicism. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013. ______. “‘Greece Is the Word’: Exile and Identity in the Second Sophistic.” In Being Greek under Rome: Cultural Identity, the Second Sophistic and the Development of Empire, Simon Goldhill, ed., 269–305. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. ______. Greek Literature and the Roman Empire. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. ______. The Second Sophisitic. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Ulrich von, et al. Die Griechische und Lateinische Literatur und Sprache. In Paul Hinneberg, ed., Die Kultur der Gegenwart I.8. Berlin and Leipzig: Teubner Verlag 1905. Wilhite, David. Terutllian the African: An Anthropological Reading of Tertullian’s Context and Identities. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2007. Winchester, Simon. The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Winkler, J.J. Author and Auctor: A Narratological Reading of Apuleius’ “Golden Ass.” Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1985. ______. “The Mendacity of Kalasiris and the Narrative Strategy of Heliodorus’ Aithiopika.” In Later Greek Literature (YCS 27), 93-158. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982. Winter, Bruce. Paul and Philo among the Sophists: Alexandrian and Corinthian Responses to a Julio-Claudian Movement. 2nd rev. ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Wölfel, C. “Porträts griechischer Dichter, Redner und Denker in römischen Villen,” In Standorte. Kontext und Funktion antiker Skulptur.Ausstellungskatalog Abgußsammlung Berlin, K. Stemmer, ed., 441-445. Berlin: Freunde und Fördererder Abguss–Sammlung Antiker Plastik, 1995. Woolf, Gregory. “Becoming Roman, staying Greek: Culture, Identity, and the Civilizing Process in the Roman East.” In Papers of

344

GAMING GREEKNESS

the Cambridge Philological Society 40, 116-143. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. ______. “Playing Games with Greeks: One Roman on Greekness.” In Greeks on Greekness: Viewing the Greek Past under the Roman Empire. David Konstan and Suzanne Saïd, eds., 162-178. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Wörrle, Michael. Stadt und Fest in kaiserzeitlichen Kleinasien. Studien zu einer agonistischen Stiftung aus Oinoanda. C.H. Beck: Munich, 1988. Wright, Alexa. Monstrosity: The Human Monster in Visual Culture. London: I.B. Taurus, 2013. Wright, William J. Martin Luther’s Understanding of God’s Two Kingdoms: A Response to the Challenge of Skepticism. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2010. Young, Robert J.C. Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Culture, Theory and Race (Routledge: London and New York, 1995 Young, Robin Darling. “Martyrdom as Exaltation.” In Late Ancient Christianity, Virginia Burrus, ed., 70–92. Minneapolis, Minn.: Fortress Press, 2005. ______. “The ‘Woman with the Soul of Abraham’: Traditions About the Mother of the Maccabean Martyrs.” In “Women Like This”: New Perspectives on Jewish Women in the GrecoRoman World, Amy-Jill Levine, ed., 61-82. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1991. Zahn, Theodor. “Studien zu Justinus Martyr.” ZKG 8 (1885-1886): 184. Zanker, Paul. The Mask of Socrates: The Image of the Intellectual in Antiquity. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1996. ______. Power of Images in the Age of Augustus. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan, 1990. Žižek, Slavoj, John Milbank, and Creston Davis. The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic? Boston: MIT Press, 2009.

INDICES ANCIENT AUTHORS AND T EXTS Aelian Nat. an., 63 Var. Hist., 231

Aristides, Aelius, 8, 28, 71, 75, 97, 226, 281, 286 Panathen., 282

Aeschines, 83 In Ctesiph., 99

Aristophanes Fr., 271 Nub., 118

Aeschylus Ag., 271

Aristotle, 11, 127 Nic. Eth., 116 Pol., 79, 99 Rhet., 177, 178

Alciphron, 240 Apuleius Apol., 247

Athenaeus Deip., 24, 117

Apocrypha 2 Maccabees, 242 4 Maccabees, 54, 79, 85, 125, 145, 169-215, 285, 290 Sirach, 239 Wisdom of Solomon, 206

Athenagoras Emb., 140, 142, 145 Aurelius, Marcus Med., 207

Apostolic Fathers and New Testament Pseudepigrapha 1 Clement, 109, 122, 285 3 Corinthians, 109 Acts of Paul, 109, 291 Hermas, 198 Ignatius, 285 Ep. 10, 125 Phld., 294 Letters of Paul and Seneca, 109

Basil of Caesarea Leg. Lib. Gent., 301 Caesar, Julius B.C., 124 B.G., 124 Chariton, 97 Chaer., 97, 152, 156, 157, 158 Chrysostom, John, 7

Apuleius Apol., 147 Flor., 46

Cicero, 39 Att., 274 Brut., 35 De Inv., 177, 199

345

346

GAMING GREEKNESS De Ora., 177 Phil., 124 Tusc. Disp., 37

Clement of Alexandria, 14, 132 Paed., 291 Protrep., 67, 140, 145, 291 Salv., 67 Strom., 67, 145, 254 Cynic Epistles, 114 Dead Sea Scrolls CD, 147 Demosthenes, 4, 22, 83, 89 Dio Cassius, 152, 197 Dio Chrysostom (Dio of Prusa), 31, 60, 71, 152 Orations, 66, 77, 82, 117, 142, 156, 162, 201, 226, 238, 286 Diodorus Siculus, 229 Diogenes Laertius Vit., 11, 95, 119, 120, 186, 201, 230, 231, 250, 256 Dionysius of Halicarnassus, 71 Ant. Rom., 124, 200 Epictetus, 117, 145, 146, 231, 232 Euripedes Ba., 248 Herc. Feur., 77 Eusebius, 132, 246 H.E., 169, 247, 291 Favorinus, 16, 30, 31, 53, 57, 59, 60-72, 75, 84, 85, 86, 91, 103, 105, 115, 152 Cor., 60-72, 86, 226 Exil., 154 Galen, 125, 126 Alim. Fac., 126 CMG, 24 De Humer. Lib., 284 De Simpl. Medi., 146 Hipp. End., 126 Libr. ord., 126

Opt. Med., 126 Gellius Noc. Att., 233 Gorgias, 4 Gregory of Nazianzus Or. 4, 255 Hebrew Bible Exodus, 243 Judges, 243 2 Samuel, 204 1 Kings, 205 2 Chronicles, 204 Heliodorus Ethiop., 67, 206, 240 Hephaestion Apostele., 284 Herodes Atticus, 14 Herodotus Hist., 63, 209 Homer, 236 Il., 79, 208, 235 Od., 64, 78, 210, 263 Horace, 36, 40 Ep., 35 Sat., 194 Hymn to Demeter, 82 Iamblichus Conc., 286 Inscriptions I. Eph. 621, 67 I. Priene 112-114, 67 IG VII 540, 67 IG Rom. 3.763, 124 IG Rom. 3.824, 124 StR 2.1090, 124 Isocrates, 5-6, 7, 8, 89 Ad Nic., 242 Pan., 3-6, 265 Jerome Vir. Ill., 169

INDICES Josephus, 170 A.J., 124 Bell., 142 Julian (Emperor), 7 Justin Martyr, 54, 217-260, 262 I Apol., 140, 142, 145, 228, 231, 247 II Apol., 228, 231, 247 Dial., 145, 223-260, 295 Ps. Justin Ad Gent., 249 Ad Graec., 146 Juvenal Sat., 92 Libanius, 7 Livy, 35, 124 Lucian, 53, 57, 59, 73-106, 135, 202, 214, 249, 262, 273 Alex., 133 Anachar., 117, 273 Apol., 292 Bis Acc., 75, 81, 94-105, 274 De Dea Syr., 268 Dem., 40, 73, 132 Dial. mort., 63, 77 Dom., 95, 214 Eun., 24, 250, 273 Hermot., 250, 251, 252, 255, 256 Herod., 214 Jud. Voc., 271 Philops., 41, 146 Prometh., 274 Reviv., 250 Rhet. Praec., 23, 75, 85-95, 97, 240, 270 Somn., 75-84, 92, 93, 97, 98, 103, 214 Syr., 83 Timon., 229 Tyr., 95 Vit. Auct., 96, 145, 249 Zeux., 239 Lysias , 4 Macrobius Sat., 11

347

Melito of Sardis Pasch. , 291 Menander Rhetor, 179 Minucius Felix, 223 Musonius Rufus, 152-155, 159 New Testament Mark, 82 Matthew, 82, 102 Luke, 118, 198 Acts of the Apostles, 54, 109, 111, 112, 122, 131, 134-145, 150, 158-167, 198, 285 Romans, 113 I Corinthians, 113, 118, 121, 127, 129, 143, 151, 165, 166, 279, 285 Ephesians, 122 Philippians, 113, 163 Colossians, 113 Pastoral Epistles, 109, 112, 114, 126, 143-150, 166, 198 I Timothy, 114, 122, 129, 145, 146 II Timothy, 111, 114, 122, 123, 125, 127, 128, 129, 146, 150 Numenius of Apamea (= Eusebius, Praep. Ev. & Origen, Cels.), 147 Origen of Alexandria, 132 Cont. Cels., 134, 135, 145 Papyri P.Oxy.XVIII 2190, 26 Philostratus, 7, 71, 90 VA, 191, 203, 229, 286 VS, 16, 64, 68, 85, 88, 91, 120, 152, 202, 233, 250 Philostratus the Younger Imag., 192 Philo of Alexandria, 26, 147 Ad Flac., 240 De Mig. Abrah., 67 De. Somn., 67 Leg., 142, 200, 285 Opif., 296

348

GAMING GREEKNESS

Philostorgius Hist. Eccl., 169

Seneca Ep., 114

Plato, 64, 89, 93, 100, 107, 224, 229, 237, 239, 244, 246, 247, 253, 254, 257 Euthd., 239 Laws, 229 Menex., 239 Phaed., 100, 237, 239, 243, 254 Tim., 237

Sibylline Oracles, 125, 248

Plautus, 44

Suetonius, 40, 42 Aug., 131 Dom., 152 Jul., 291 Ner., 29, 30

Pliny the Elder Nat. Hist., 34, 147 Pliny the Younger, 42 Letters, 39, 43, 152 Plutarch, 11, 22, 66, 71, 75, 152, 154, 236 Aem. Paul., 33 Cat., 34, 47 Comp.Lyc.-Nom., 25 Crass., 23 Dion., 240 Moralia, 11, 23, 24, 139, 142, 147, 154, 205, 206, 209, 286 Ques. Conviv., 145, 239 Polemo, 16 Polybius Hist., 79, 197 Posidonius Protrep., 249 Pseudo-Socrates Ep., 114 Quintillian Inst., 177, 184, 185 Res Gestae, 195, 199, 200 Sallust C., 124

Sophocles Ant., 210 Strabo, 146 Suda, 169

Tacitus, 42 Agr., 152 Ann., 35, 124 Tatian, 31, 54, 83, 85, 100, 146, 254, 261297 Terence, 44 Tertullian, 12, 28, 31, 34, 44-51 Pal., 44 Themistius, 7 Theodore of Mopsuestia, 7 Theophilus Ad Auto., 140, 146 Thucydides Pelop., 185, 229 Vergil, 40 Aen., 35, 36, 37, 68, 195, 293 Vitruvius De Arch., 226 Xenophanes of Colon, 114, 119 Xenophon Cyr., 229 Mem., 77, 285

INDICES

349

MODERN AUTHORS AND CONTEMPORARY FIGURES Aageson, James, 112 Aland, Kurt, 109 Alcock, Susan, 35 Alexander, Loveday, 108, 110, 111 Alexander, P.S., 111 Anderson, Graham, 19, 21, 91, 95 Anderson, Hugh, 170 Anderson, Janice Capel, 183, 190, 197, 212 Attridge, Harold, 130, 131, 132, 133 Astin, Alan, 34 Aune, David, 131 Axelrod, Robert, 238 Beker, J. Christiaan, 108 Barclay, John M. G., 170, 171, 178 Barnard, Leslie W., 218 Barnes, Timothy, 12, 46, 47, 50 Barnett, Albert, 107 Beard, Mary, 291 Beal, Timothy, 262 Benko, Stephen, 130 Betz, Hans Dieter, 25, 74, 133, 138 Bhabha, Homi, 264, 277 Bickerman, Elias, 170 Billerbeck, Margarethe, 130, 245 Bompaire, Jaques, 8 Bourdieu, Pierre, 8, 18, 19, 29, 150, 264, 266 Bowersock, Glen, 7, 8, 16, 173, 174, 176 Bowie, E.L., 10, 19, 31, 227, 268 Boyarin, Daniel, 172, 173, 175, 176, 220, 221 Branham, Bracht, 73 Breitenstein, Urs, 171, 181 Brennan, T. Corey, 44, 45, 46, 49 Broneer, Oscar, 115 Buell, Denise Kimber, 226 Butler, Judith, 183 Carter, Warren, 38 Case, James, 238 Castelli, Elizabeth, 173, 174, 190 Caster, Marcel, 133 Cenaj, Odhise, 2-3 Chadwick, Henry, 134, 220 Chin, Catherine, 18 Clogg, Richard, 2 Cobb, Stephanie, 173 Cohen, Jeffrey, 261, 262 Concannon, Cavan, 116 Conzelmann, Hans, 125, 128, 145 Cornell, Tim J., 196

Crawford, Matthew, 262 Cribiore, Rafaella, 17, 86, 87, 91, 92, 105, 236 Desideri, Paolo, 153 D’Angelo, Mary Rose, 121, 183, 198, 199 Daly, Robert, 173 Daniel-Hughes, Carly, 48 Davis, Creston, 263 Derrida, Jacques, 24 deSilva, David, 169, 170, 178, 181, 186, 188, 213 Dibelius, Martin, 125, 128, 145 Donahue, Paul, 219 Donelson, Lewis, 109 Donnely, Francis, 177 Doring, Klaus, 245 Dupont-Sommer, Andre, 171 Dudley, Donald, 245 Edwards, Mark J., 218 Efthymiou, Petros, 3 Ehrman, Bart, 109 Eliot, Niel, 39 Elm, Susanna, 18 Erskine, Andrew, 196, 197, 198 Eshleman, Kendra, 8, 13, 16, 21, 26, 27, 28, 40, 42, 94, 126, 150, 217, 221, 236, 239, 256, 257 Falls, Thomas, 218 Fee, Gordon, 127 Finley, M.I., 10, 11 Fiore, Benjamin, 114 Fleury, Pascale, 8, 12 Fojtik, John E., 281 Foucault, Michel, 8, 116 Frantz, K.J., 117 Frend, W.H.C., 172, 173 Frye, Richard, 268 Gaca, Kathy, 295 Galinsky, Karl, 35, 195, 199 Gallagher, Edmon, 162 Garnsey, Peter, 21 Garrison, Roman, 117 Georgia, Allan, 291 Gerlo, Aloïs, 46 Gilmore, David, 263 Gladwell, Malcolm, 78 Gleason, Maud, 8, 22, 61, 75, 88, 97, 217, 242 Gleick, James, 11

350

GAMING GREEKNESS

Goldhill, Simon, 8, 74 Goodenough, Edwin R. , 218, 219 Goodman, Martin, 219 Grabbe, Lester, 197 Grant, Robert, 280, 282, 294, 296 Grazzi, Emanuel, 2 Gruen, Erich, 34, 152 Habinek, Thomas, 37 Hadas, Moses, 170 Halberstam, Judith, 262 Hall, Jennifer, 73, 74, 88, 95 Hall, Jonathan, 5 Halliwell, Stephen, 24 Hammerstaedt, Jürgen, 132 Harding, Mark, 109 Harrison, James, 67 Hawthorne, Gerald, 296 Heath, Malcolm, 91 Henderson, Ian, 12, 38 Hofer, A., 254 Hoffman, Manfred, 218 Horner, Timothy, 219, 220, 221 Horsley, Richard, 39 Houston, Mary, 45 Hulen, Amos, 219 Hultin, Jeremy, 163 Humphreys, Milton W., 119 Hunink, Vincent, 45, 46 Hunt, Emily, 279, 297 Hyldahl, Niels, 218, 221, 224, 237, 249, 254 Jaeger, Werner, 17, 285 Johnson, W.A., 18 Jones, C.P., 83, 97, 245 Kaldellis, Anthony, 300, 201 Käppel, Lutz, 263 Karadimas, Dimitrios, 281 Karris, Robert, 147 Kearny, Richard, 263 Kelly, J.N.D., 127 Klauck, Hans-Josef, 131, 138, 170, 177, 179, 183 Klawiter, Frederick, 173 Koltun, Fromm, Naomi, 262 König, Jason, 66, 67, 91, 119, 126 Konstan, David, 5, 8 Korenjak, Martin, 8 Kuin, Inger Neeltje Irene, 133 Lamberton, Robert, 25, 245 Lebran, J.H.C., 213 Lieu, Judith, 173, 218, 219, 220, 224, 241, 244

Lindemann, Andreas, 108 Livingstone, Niall, 5 Liddel-Scott-Jones (LSJ), 20, 90, 125, 126, 191, 224, 238, 242, 271, 287, 292, 296 Löhr, Winrich, 268, 281 Long, A. A. , 128, 130 Lotz, John-Paul, 285, 294 Lyman, Rebecca, 230 Lutz, R.T., 148 MacDonald, Dennis R., 108, 111, 146 MacDonald, Margaret, 110, 147 MacMillan, Ramsey, 173 Malherbe, Abraham, 128 Malkin, Irad, 5-6, 8 Manning, C.E., 245 Marchal, Joseph, 39 Marcovich, Miroslav, 218 Marguerat, Daniel, 108 Marquis, Timothy Luckritz, 159, 254 Marrou, Henri, 17 Marshall, I. Howard, 128 Martin, Dale, 117, 118, 131 Mason, Hugh, 124 Matheson, Susan, 82 McGeehee, Michael, 281 McLuhan, Marshall, 243 McKetchnie, Paul, 46, 49 Meeks, Wayne, 116 Melville, Herman, 217 Metaxas, Ioannis, 1 Milbank, John, 263 Millar, Fergus, 92 Mitchell, Margaret, 165, 207, 285 Moles, John, 201, 245 Momigliano, Arnaldo, 12, 33 Montefusco, Calboli, 177 Montiglio, Silvio, 254 Moore, George, F., 219 Moore, Stephen, 183, 190, 197, 212 Morgan, Teresa, 17, 181 Moss, Candida, 173 Mullach, F.W.A., 132 Murphy-O’Connor, Jerome, 112, 115 Mussolini, Benito, 2 Nasrallah, Laura, 8, 12, 38, 84, 152, 159, 202, 220, 226, 228, 262, 265, 276, 281, 283, 287 Nesselrath, Heinz-Günther, 152 Nilson, Jon, 219 Nock, Arthur, 4, 95 Norden, Eduard, 46 Oliver, J.H., 245, 250

INDICES Östenberg, Ida, 291

351 Snow, C.P., 85, 93 Spawforth, Anthony, 8, 42 Stephanopoulos, Konstantinos, 3 Stone, Jon, 261 Stoops, Robert F., 139 Stowers, Stanley, 114, 170 Strelan, Richard, 140 Swain, Simon, 7, 8, 10, 11, 19, 41, 42, 74, 83, 227, 270, 281 Syme, Roland, 34, 35 Szlagor, Barbara, 133

Passeron, Jean Claude, 150 Pease, Arthur, 46 Pelikan, Jaroslav, 1 Pepin, Joseph, 1 Perkins, Judith, 8, 21, 38, 173, 228 Pernot, Laurent, 7 Pervo, Richard, 108, 110, 111, 112, 122, 127, 135, 141, 144, 146, 147, 160, 161, 162 Pfitzner, Victor, 113, 117, 118, 121 Pietersen, Lloyd, 144, 147 Pietersma, Albert, 147, 148 Pilhofer, Peter, 133 Pleket, H.W., 67 Pohl, Walter, 45 Poirier, John C., 162 Price, Simon, 194 Prior, Michael, 112 Puech, Aime, 270, 271

Tajra, Harry, 160 Taylor, Miriam, 219 Thee, Francis, 131 Too, Yin Lee, 5 Towner, Philip, 126 Trakatellis, Demetrios, 219, 220, 237, 240 Trebilco, Paul, 110 Tzanelli, Rodanthi, 3

Quinn, Jerome, 125

Urbano, Arthur, 250

Rajak, Tessa, 219, 224, 230 Relihan, Joel, 96, 249 Richardson, J.G., 18 Robb, Kevin, 17 Robbins, Vernon, 110 Robert, Louis, 119 Robinson, Betsey, 115 Rokeah, Dawid, 219 Rowe, C. Kavin, 135 Rutledge, Steven, 42

van der Hoorst, Pieter, 240 Van Gronigen, Bernard, 7 Van Henten, Jan W., 169, 181, 182, 209, 213 van Nijf, Otto, 67 van Winden, J.C.M., 218, 221, 224, 229, 237, 249 van Unnik, W.C., 285 Verner, David, 121 Veyne, Paul, 67 von Harnack, Adolf, 219, 220 Vössing, Konrad, 17

Saïd, Suzanne, 5, 8, 71, 72 Schmeller, Thomas, 245 Schmidt, Thomas, 8, 12 Schmidt-Pantel, P., 67 Schmitz, Thomas, 8, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 41, 63, 66, 79 Schwartz, Eduard, 107 Schwartz, Sandra, 227 Seaford, Richard, 263 Sedley, David, 128, 130 Seesengood, Robert, 123 Selinger, Reinhard, 139 Setzer, Claudia, 1, 219 Shaw, Brent, 189 Shildrick, Margrit, 263 Sidebottom, Harry, 242 Sider, Robert, 50 Simon, David, 1 Simon, Marcel, 220 Skarsaune, Oskar, 219, 254 Smith, R.R.R., 245

Walbank, Frank, 69 Wallace-Haddrill, Andrew, 198 Watts, Edward, 18 Weiss, Johannes, 207 Welborn, L.L., 128, 285 White, Benjamin, 108, 109, 111 Whitman, Walt, 57 Whitmarsh, Tim, 4, 7, 8, 10, 11, 13, 16, 19, 21, 22, 24, 25, 26, 34, 37, 38, 61, 70, 73, 74, 75, 88, 107, 110, 151, 152, 154, 201, 242, 254 Wiater, Nicolas, 8 Winkler, John J., 206 Winter, Bruce, 8, 17, 26 Wölfel, C., 245 Woolf, Gregory, 34, 43 Wörrle, Michael, 67 Wright, Alexa, 263

352

GAMING GREEKNESS

Young, Robin Darling, 173, 189 Zahn, Theodor, 225

Zanker, Paul, 45, 199, 246 Žižek, Slavoj, 263

SUBJECTS Abonoteichus, 133 Abraham, 189, 208 Achaia, 30, 39, 42 Adoption, 24, 32, 34, 194 Adoxographia, 46 Adaptation, 34, 44, 72 Adversary, 97, 109, 116, 140, 143, 144, 145, 146, 148, 186, 187, 194, 203, 235, 236, 241, 246, 255, 267, 293 Aegean, 149 Agamemnon, 79 Agnosticism, 130 Agonism, 14, 19-24, 28-29, 31, 33, 37, 40, 41, 44, 50, 54, 60-63, 65, 66-69, 71-73, 76, 79, 87, 89, 90, 93-94, 97, 103, 104, 105, 107, 110, 113-129, 150, 156, 165, 166, 180, 185, 189, 191, 212, 215, 220, 222, 223, 229, 233-234, 236-238, 241, 245, 251, 258, 278, 286 Albania, 2-3 Alexander the Great, 95, 201 Allegory, 101, 115 Ambiguity, 17, 34, 138, 205, 207, 239, 264, 273 Ambition, 21-24, 37, 53, 59, 60, 6466, 68, 79, 81, 84, 86, 87, 89, 99, 202-203, 214, 272, 276, 301 Ambivalence, 39, 43, 230, 258, 264 Antigone, 210 Antiochus IV (Epiphanes), 183, 187191, 206-213 Antisthenes, 231 Aphrodisias, 119-121, 245 Apollonius of Tyana, 71, 137, 148, 191, 286 Apology, 147, 231, 247 Apostle, 54, 108-115, 117, 121-124, 125126, 129-131, 134-137, 143-146, 148-150, 158-161, 163, 165-167, 254 Appearance, 49, 61, 63, 79-80, 82, 84, 88, 94, 144-145, 145, 160, 184, 231, 233, 238, 242-243, 255-256, 262-263, 285 Appropriation, 20, 29, 33-35, 37-38, 46, 70, 77, 101, 117, 166, 183, 199

Arena, 15, 17, 25, 26, 43, 58, 86, 90, 119, 122, 150, 165, 166, 214, 297 Arion, 63 Aristarchus, 141 Artemis, 139-141 Asia (Minor), 6, 22, 42, 110, 127, 129, 136, 140, 141, 144, 146, 148, 150, 159, 194, 244 Assimilation, 19, 33-34 Assyria, 83, 98, 267, 268, 297 Athens/Attic, 3, 4-5, 7, 9, 18-19, 28, 41, 64, 82, 96 Athlete, 20, 31, 68, 79, 97, 113, 115, 116, 119, 120, 123, 125, 126, 127, 128, 129, 172, 190, 191, 212, 213, 224, 229 Atticus, 14, 85, 232, 233 Attitude, 20, 39, 271 Audience, 10, 12, 16, 22, 23, 24, 46, 49, 51, 54, 60, 69, 73, 89, 90, 92, 97, 108, 124, 129, 133, 134, 159, 165, 166, 167, 177, 183, 190, 198, 200, 225, 227, 244, 269, 274, 276, 280, 282, 283, 284, 288, 289, 290 Augustus (Caesar), 35, 131, 139, 194, 198, 199, 200 Augustan period, 35 Aurelius Achilles, 119 Bacchius, 195 Bactra, 157 Bagoas, 275 Barbarian, 5, 59, 97, 101-103, 158, 199, 263, 265, 267-273, 277-279, 281284, 287, 289, 290, 291, 293 Bar Kochba, 224-225 Bethlehem, 204-205 Beirut, 92 Beliefs, 33, 52, 63, 130, 146, 297 Bithus, 195 Bootstrap dilemma, 11 Body, 19, 113, 115, 116, 119-122, 127, 190191, 193, 201-202, 211, 279, 295 Caecilius Metellus, 35 Callirhoe, 97

INDICES Campus Martius, 48 Capital, 4, 18-19, 24, 26, 29, 32-33, 50, 76, 83, 92, 128-129, 177, 214, 221, 230, 246, 277 Captive, 209, 290-291, 293 Career, 7, 37, 59-60, 74-75, 77-78, 8182, 91, 95, 97, 103, 105, 111-112, 114, 134, 148-149, 220, 222, 246, 254, 258 Carthage, 33, 46, 48-49, 50 Castor, 66 Categories, 43-44, 96, 265, 294, 301 Cato (the Elder), 34, 39, 47 Celebrity, 61 Celsus, 134 Cenchreae, 63 Centaur, 101, 275 Centurion, 164 Chariot, 82, 93, 100, 103, 105 Chariot-ride, 81 Charlatan, 88, 130, 132, 138, 144, 146, 148, 167 Cheat, 126 Chess, 5, 58 Chreia, 120, 132, 231 Cilicia, 156 Civic contest, 23, 114 Citizenship, 24, 30, 40-41, 63, 99, 154, 160, 164, 228 Clement, 14, 67, 113, 132, 140, 145, 215, 254, 291 Cloak, 44, 46, 51, 89, 229-233, 235, 238 Commemoration, 63 Common denominator, 52, 204 Comportment, 15, 39, 75, 90, 135, 163, 165, 172, 231, 239 Concord, 4, 62, 284-286, 294, 296 Consensus, 10, 28, 46, 50 Contest, 14, 24, 36, 62, 65, 66, 70, 79, 114-115, 119, 185, 190, 192, 194, 202, 212-213, 301 Control, 32, 51-52, 98, 138, 164, 170, 183, 190, 194, 292-293, 300 Construction, 5, 40, 55, 70, 107, 118, 126, 190, 221, 234, 238, 244 Cooperation, 103, 236, 259-260 Corinth, 30, 62-66, 68-71, 84, 115-116, 136, 224, 226 Corinthus, 228 Correspondence, 112, 114 Cosmopolitan, 11, 44 Counterfeit, 85, 108, 146 Court, 96, 118, 147, 194-195, 203, 271 Courtroom, 96-97, 195 Crescens, 246

353

Criticism, 7, 54, 95, 97, 132, 138, 141, 146, 148, 255, 257, 280, 289-291, 296 Currency, 24, 52, 86, 95, 198, 207, 264, 303 Cyclopes, 263 Cynicism, 100, 245, 249 David (King), 204-205, 211 Debate, 42, 44-45, 67, 71, 162, 218, 221, 225-227, 229-230, 241 Decadence, 43 Deliberative rhetoric, 207 Demaratos, 209 Deme, 99 Demeanor, 21, 34, 41, 121, 229, 234, 241, 263, 272 Demetrius (Silversmith), 139-243 Demon, 137-138, 296 Demonax, 40-41, 132-133, 135, 255 Demonstration, 44, 52, 172, 180, 182183, 189, 191-192, 208, 211 Deportment, 60, 62, 217, 230, 232234, 237, 241-243, 245, 246, 248, 255 Despair, 157 Deutero-Canonical, 181 Deutero-Paul, 108, 113 Diogenes the Cynic, 249 Discipline, 117, 200, 256 Discourse, 5, 8, 28, 92, 96, 130, 136, 165, 172, 175-179, 182, 184, 201, 203, 208, 211, 213, 231, 264, 266 Domination, 31, 33, 36, 49, 197, 199, 206, 260, 277, 294 Domitian, 152, 191, 202, 203 Doric, 235, 288 Dream, 64, 76, 79-80, 82, 191, 266 Dress, 44-45, 47, 49, 62, 91, 103, 232, 245, 266, 272 East, 9, 13, 17, 23, 38-39, 41, 43, 74, 114, 130, 139, 148, 171, 191, 194, 196197, 199, 222, 226, 228, 249250, 258, 264, 272, 303 Economy, 28, 59, 78, 92, 120, 123, 130, 150, 217, 234, 242, 244, 273, 279 Ecosystem, 15, 52, 112, 222, 264, 293, 302 Education, 17-18, 21, 23-24, 37, 42, 50, 59, 82, 86, 88-89, 92, 101, 107, 118, 147, 153, 166, 181, 184, 202, 236-237, 247, 249, 252, 268, 271, 288, 292-293 Effeminacy, 48, 88

354

GAMING GREEKNESS

Eleazar, 125, 172, 179, 182-193, 202204, 206-209, 212-213, 242 Elite/Non-Elite, 7, 9-11, 13-14, 19-23, 26, 32-33, 35, 37-38, 40-42, 46, 49, 54-55, 59-60, 69, 71, 75, 79, 88-89, 92, 94-95, 98, 101, 129, 151, 159, 165-166, 202, 227-228, 234, 236, 241, 278-279, 288289, 297, 303 Embodiment, 19, 189, 193 Encomium, 182, 192-193, 212, 281 Entrepreneur, 62, 83, 133 Ephesus, 110, 111, 135-143, 145, 165, 225 Epicurus, 98, 186 Epistles, 54, 108-114, 121-123, 126-127, 129, 143-145, 148-150, 165-166 Eros, 67 Eudoia, 113 Eupolis, 100 Evolution, 15, 51, 113, 197, 247, 300, 302 Exchange, 1, 2, 14-15, 18, 20, 26, 30, 32, 43, 53, 55, 60, 83, 84, 203, 220, 234-235, 237, 242-243, 254, 277, 291 Exile, 54, 112, 151-160, 162-163 Ex Tempore, 94 Exorcists, 135, 137-138 Euphrates, 156-157 Fame, 23, 62, 81, 83-84, 87, 93, 97, 129, 137, 230-231 Farce, 96 Farmer, 123, 127-129, 300, 302 Fashion, 73, 89, 154, 280, 295 Festival, 2, 30, 43, 66-67, 214 Field, 11, 14-15, 22, 29, 32, 37, 51-53, 56, 58-59, 69, 74-75, 84, 94, 106, 126, 166, 190, 215, 220, 222, 228, 238, 243-245, 260, 264, 266, 280, 286, 289 Fitness, 15, 42, 116, 122, 125 Fluency, 163 Forensic, 65, 86, 97 Forgery, 109 Frankness, 41, 183 Freedom, 30, 48, 69, 117, 151, 183, 189, 227 Funeral speech, 213 Gaius, 141, 240-241 Gambit, 2, 5, 6, 25, 42, 51, 75, 102-103, 105, 230, 264, 266 Game, 1, 2, 29, 57-59, 71, 87, 104, 106, 215, 237, 252, 266, 288

Garb, 32, 34, 60, 230, 258 Gaul, 43, 61 Genealogies, 145 Genre, 46, 61, 111, 170, 172, 174, 178179, 214, 225 Gladiator, 120-121, 123 Glycon, 133 Grammar, 42, 77, 88, 181, 292, 296 Greco-Roman, 32, 36-38, 56 Greece, 2-5, 10, 31-43, 50, 52, 66, 6870, 78, 88, 103, 157, 159, 198, 224, 226, 266-268, 281, 283, 290, 292-293 Grover, 261 Gymnasium, 212, 223 Habitus, 13, 15, 19, 61, 71, 166, 264 Hadrian, 68, 71 Harmony, 284-286 Hebrew (language), 161-163, 243 Helius, 66 Hellenism, 12, 14, 15, 26, 31, 34, 43, 66, 70, 276, 301 Hephaestus, 263 Herakles, 76 Heritage, 4, 10, 12, 25, 33, 35, 41-43, 47, 51, 53, 55, 58, 171, 192, 211, 281, 300 Hermes, 96, 249-250 History, 2, 10, 16, 25, 34, 52, 84, 162, 171, 173, 182-185, 196, 226, 303 Homeland, 119, 154, 159, 204, 208 Honor, 2, 21, 45, 62-66, 69, 102-103 Humor, 73, 88, 96, 105 Hybrid, 262-263, 267, 269, 273-278, 280, 290, 296 Identity, 1, 3, 5, 6, 9-11, 27, 38, 40, 47, 49, 61, 63, 71, 90, 91, 96, 143, 151, 154, 158, 160, 226, 228, 265, 268, 271, 277 Image/Images, 17, 77, 82, 93, 105, 113, 115, 120, 127-128, 136, 192, 213214, 262, 274, 280, 287-288 Imitation, 24, 29, 33-34, 36, 46, 85, 90, 107, 149, 173, 182, 258, 263264, 267, 277, 283-284, 290, 292 Incentive, 43, 62, 65, 72, 84-85 Innovation, 22, 35, 45, 107 Interpret, 74, 138, 182 Invective, 132, 197, 280, 290, 293-294 Invention, 59, 70, 72, 94, 103, 220 Ionia, 98, 157 illusio, 266, 280 Irony, 161, 250, 293

INDICES Irrational, 141, 146, 205, 211 Isocrates/Isocratean paradigm, 2-7, 9, 24-25, 40-42, 65, 71-72, 75, 89, 94, 97, 102-103, 105, 242, 264-266, 273, 281-282, 286, 289 Isthmian Games, 30, 64, 66, 115 Italy, 2, 49, 152 Jannes and Jambres, 146-148 Jerusalem, 150, 159-165, 167, 224-226 Jesus, 74, 118, 123, 135, 137-138, 150, 220, 223, 247, 254, 258 Jewish Literature, 12, 38, 52, 145, 170, 184, 206, 219, 303 Judaism, 8, 12, 15, 31, 38, 54-55, 174176, 180-181, 215, 218-219, 221222, 225, 230, 238, 244, 302 Judea, 163, 170 Judgment, 31, 73, 82, 89, 104, 286 Juridical, 60, 65 Justice, 39, 47, 69, 96, 164, 188, 199 Kalasiris, 206 Kingship, 85, 172, 193-198, 200-206, 208, 211, 214 Lacedaemon, 39 “Lady” Rhetoric, 97, 274 Lament, 96, 157 Latin, 46-47, 49-50, 75, 124, 131, 163, 181, 197 Law, 36, 79, 97, 160-161, 171-172, 178, 183, 187-189, 192, 193, 200, 204205, 209, 211-214, 249 Legitimacy/Illegitimacy, 15, 17, 20-21, 28-29, 40, 43, 49, 51, 53, 55, 6061, 64, 70, 73, 76, 83, 86, 93, 98-99, 105, 109, 112, 122, 126, 129, 134, 138, 148-149, 160, 164, 167, 171-172, 182, 190, 192, 198, 207, 214, 228, 231-232, 235, 242244, 248, 252, 292, 297, 303 Limit, 43, 49, 104, 221 Litterateurs, 59 Loser, 52 LXX, 125, 169, 243 Maccabean Martyrs (incl. “Seven Sons and their mother), 170172, 182, 193, 204 Macedonia, 5, 145 Magic/Magicians, 54, 109, 112, 129-139, 141, 143-145, 147, 148-149, 167 Manliness, 48, 51, 54, 119, 171, 182-183, 186, 190, 193, 242

355

Manner, 21, 48, 62, 68, 85, 87, 120, 145, 185, 265, 271, 278-279 Marcellus, 35 Marcus Aurelius, 207, 250 Marriage, 99, 198-199 Martyrdom, 94, 160, 171-176, 182-184, 191, 203-204, 206, 212, 246 Mavens, 78 Medicine, 24 Mediterranean, 20, 31-32, 52, 55, 130, 143, 148-150, 163, 169, 177, 225, 268, 276, 300, 302-303 Membership, 27-28, 92 Memory, 79, 80, 83, 112, 173-174, 287 Menippus of Gadara, 249 Mimesis, 277 Mimic, 264, 277 Mind, 4, 43, 48, 79-81, 94, 118, 121, 127, 146, 153, 155, 178, 199-200, 206, 208, 210, 222, 249, 253, 257, 263, 278, 282, 301 Misogyny, 146 Misrecognition, 264, 266, 289 Mixture, 34, 119, 123-124, 179, 269, 275, 280-281, 283, 287, 290, 293 Money, 147, 164, 189, 250 Monty Python, 96 Morals, 48, 92 Moses, 146-148, 160, 243 Motifs, 35, 54-55, 112-115, 118, 121, 144, 149, 151-152, 158, 160, 166, 176, 178-179, 187, 212, 280-281, 284285, 290 Mummius, 70 Myth, 77 Narration, 222, 234 Negotiation, 3, 7, 31, 54, 107, 123, 130131, 135, 199, 215, 220, 259, 264, 290 Neilus from Alexandria, 26 Nero (Emperor), 29-32, 40-41, 115 Noah, 79 Nobility, 2, 192, 202, 204, 206 Nodes, 90 Non Zero-Sum/Zero-Sum, 10, 15, 21, 28, 43, 52, 84, 104, 111, 120, 127128, 219, 236, 260 North Africa, 49 Notoriety, 21, 23, 62, 81, 84, 87, 113, 123, 129, 134, 136 Novel, 68, 152, 156, 158, 274 Odysseus, 2, 64, 78, 238 Olympiad, 117 Oenomaus of Gadara, 132, 148 Oracles, 125, 132

356

GAMING GREEKNESS

Orontes, 92 Orator, 3, 86, 91, 96-97, 113, 177, 185, 227 Oration, 28, 44-45, 49-50, 60-62, 6566, 70, 72, 103, 120, 226, 281 Oratory, 7, 16, 50, 85-86, 97-102, 163 Orpheus, 66 Outcomes, 22, 40, 43, 70, 102, 115, 129, 149, 221, 301 Pagan, 7, 174, 181 Paradigm, 7, 24, 41, 59, 66-67, 72, 74, 82, 97, 107, 119, 129, 137, 155, 203, 259, 264-265, 273, 280-281, 289 Parrhesia, 41, 187, 189, 201 Past, 2, 4, 5, 10, 13, 15, 19, 25, 35, 39, 42, 51, 59-60, 63, 84, 88, 99, 103, 119, 172, 236, 265, 269, 299 Pastor, 108, 121-124, 127, 144-148, 166 Paul the Apostle, 107-167 “People’s Secretary,” 142 Pepaideumenos, 18, 19, 59, 75, 83, 279 Performance, 2, 14, 17, 20, 22, 24, 28, 46, 61-62, 69, 72, 83, 85, 87, 8990, 92-94, 97, 122, 123, 163, 192, 213, 224, 266, 269, 276, 278, 280, 291-292 Persuasion, 293 Persia, 156-157 Persius, 194-195 Phaeton, 66 Philippi, 113 Philistines, 204-205 Philosophy, 16, 49, 51-52, 95, 130, 134, 177-180, 192, 201, 206- 208, 210, 218, 224-225, 229-232, 239, 245258, 265-267, 280-281, 290, 294 Philosophers, 14, 16, 22, 24, 27, 29-31, 41, 44, 63, 82, 100, 103, 109, 113122, 128- 131, 134-136, 145, 151, 152, 154, 158, 165-167, 191, 193, 222, 224, 230- 232, 234, 237, 247, 249, 250-252, 255-256, 260, 268, 283, 293, 302 Physiognomic, 80 Phratria, 99 Piety, 54, 122, 136, 143, 169, 172, 178180, 182-184, 187-188, 191-193, 199-200, 204, 210-215, Platonism, 253 Play/Player, 9, 11, 24, 36, 41, 58, 6566, 68, 90, 104-106, 130, 135136, 149-150, 156, 161, 165-166, 177, 191, 213, 215, 228-229, 236, 244, 266, 288, 293, 300

Poetry, 100, 151 Polemo, 16, 91, 95, 96, 120, 256 Pollux, 91 Pontifex Maximus, 131 Popular, 102-103, 129-134, 142, 144146, 148-149, 154, 156, 167, 188, 207, 232, 245, 249, 252 Popular Cult Practices, 54, 112, 129, 135, 141-143, 148, 150 Portius Octaviae, 35 Posidonius, 249 Posture, 23, 40, 65, 170, 181, 217, 234, 239, 241, 272, 285, 289 Post-Classical, 13, 15, 31 Power, 5, 6, 8, 9, 29-33, 36-38, 40-43, 51, 72, 112, 130, 137, 152, 158, 159, 173, 177, 183, 194-202, 204, 208, 211, 225, 238, 264, 266-267, 269, 276-277, 279, 280, 289, 291, 293-294, 301 Praise, 28, 45, 83, 87, 104, 178-179, 185, 213, 284 Prestige, 19, 21, 28, 42, 65, 104, 167, 259, 267, 269, 281-282, 289 Prize, 20, 30, 60, 65-66, 79, 113, 115, 117, 127, 185, 212, 236, 251 Proconsuls, 142 Product, 11, 29, 90, 108, 196, 244, 264, 273, 291 Production, 6, 14, 22, 28, 58-59, 76, 114, 176, 223, 234, 243, 277, 287, 300, 302 Profession, 97, 127, 231 Program, 31, 159, 197, 264, 278, 279, 281-283, 296, 301 Promiscuity, 88, 102 Prose, 100, 156, 227, 301 Prosopopoiia, 65, 184-185 Proto-Orthodox, 108, 222 Presentation, 23, 36, 80, 94, 159, 162, 177, 179, 192, 219, 233, 235, 273, 281 Principate, 6, 17, 29, 41, 151, 171, 194, 199 Pseudepigraphy, 109, 113 Ptolemy, 274 Public, 3, 12, 41, 48-50, 65, 67, 72, 8182, 86, 89, 91, 94, 99, 120, 122, 130-131, 134, 143, 148, 159-160, 163, 187, 190, 194, 198, 231-232, 246, 249, 278, 281, 290, 300, 302 Pyrrho, 96 Pythagorean, 252-253 Rabbis, 163 Race, 3, 30, 71, 78, 282

INDICES Rationalism, 142 Recast, 75, 92, 105, 108, 112, 143, 150151 Reputation, 62, 73, 86, 90, 103, 125, 135-136, 138, 140, 195, 240, 253 Riot, 142 Romance, 157 Rupilius Rex, 194-195 Salamis, 35 Samos, 46 Satire, 16, 76, 90, 94, 96, 102, 194-195, 271 Sceva, 137-139, 143-144 Scholiast, 134, 195 School, 2, 77, 92, 224, 246, 252, 253, 257 Schoolroom, 89, 180, 184, 227, 235 Sculpture, 79-82, 104, 214 Second Sophistic, 6-19, 24, 31, 35, 71, 95, 171 Seeming, 45, 61, 63, 86-87, 149 Self-aggrandizement, 82 Self-expression, 28, 53-54, 71-72, 94, 110, 152, 223 Self-fashioning, 60, 67, 104, 228, 246 Self-making, 10, 55, 61, 84, 276, 301 Self-presentation, 22, 27, 31, 46, 71, 75, 76, 85, 88, 118, 126, 152, 220, 232, 269, 283, 293 Seleucid, 170, 172, 203 Semantic, 10, 77, 99, 190, 229 Semitic Language, 161 Senate-house, 48 Separation, 27, 41, 138, 282, 295 Sham, 85, 87-88, 91, 130, 137, 144, 146, 270 Sibyl, 64 Sicily, 79, 157 Sigma , 271 Simonides, 69 Smile, 217, 237-242, 244, 246 Socrates, 63, 64, 83, 231, 239, 242-243 Soul, 64-65, 81, 116-120, 187, 202, 205, 296, 301 Space, 10, 15, 94, 166, 220, 223, 225, 227, 258, 262, 266, 277, 299 Sparta, 4, 69 Speaker, 49, 61, 87, 89, 162, 177, 184 Spectator, 89 Sport, 30, 119 Stage, 55, 61, 85, 92, 122, 149, 194, 218, 221, 223, 234 Strategy, 5, 6, 25, 29, 31, 38, 51, 55, 63, 71-72, 84, 117, 123-124, 140, 143,

357 148, 150, 158, 167, 171, 180, 215, 219, 228, 249, 258, 260-261, 263, 265, 266, 269, 273, 276277, 280, 285, 290, 297, 302 Statue, 60, 62-65, 68, 70, 77, 103 Stephen (martyr), 149, 160 Stoicism, 154, 252 Student, 2-3, 23, 54-55, 86-89, 92, 98, 105, 240 Structures, 19, 24, 31, 105 Style, 6, 10, 16, 42, 43, 46, 101, 114, 156, 181, 200, 220, 223, 230, 233, 243, 271 Subjects (of Rome), 7, 9, 10, 17, 21, 30-32, 36-38, 43, 49, 51, 52, 65, 77, 86, 103, 105, 151, 152, 159, 165, 194, 195, 198, 199, 201, 204, 215, 225, 227, 264-266, 276, 277, 284-286, 289-291, 294, 297, 303 Suffering, 116, 120, 123, 173-174, 179, 188, 192-193, 211 Sweat, 120-121 Sympotic literature, 24, 239 Synagogue, 136-137, 188 Synthesis, 35-38, 275 Syntyche, 114 Syracuse, 35, 156-157 Syria, 77, 92, 156, 162, 268 Syrian, 77, 96-102 Susa, 157 Tarquinius Superbus, 196 Tau, 271 Teles, 152 Temperance, 171, 180 Temple, 35, 130-133, 136, 139, 141-142, 159-161, 163-164, 167 Temporality, 80 Theagenes, 206 Theology, 175, 220, 222, 259 Thermopylae, 69 Theseus, 66 Tiber (river), 92 Tiberius (Emperor), 42 Tiresias, 78, 192 Tit-for-tat, 83 Thetis, 79 Thyateira, 21 Tiberius C. M. Caecilianus, 21 Torah, 125, 148, 161, 163, 171-172 Trajan, 200, 202-203 Travel, 81, 136, 141, 156, 158, 253 Trypho, 54, 55, 217-226, 228-230, 233235, 237-246, 253-254, 257-260 T-Shirt, 48

358

GAMING GREEKNESS

Tribune, 161, 163-164 Triumph, 197, 290-293 Tunic, 28, 47, 51 Tyrant/Tyranny, 69, 188, 190, 192, 196, 198, 203-204, 208-211, 213 Tyrannus (Hall of), 136 Umbiricus, 92 Urban, 12, 40, 54-55, 89, 135, 143, 145, 177, 190, 223-224, 227, 234, 239, 242, 245-246, 248-249, 251, 253, 258, 284 Vectors, 90 Vespasian (Emperor), 152 Victory, 36, 39, 93, 116, 119, 172, 204, 213, 292 Virtues, 44, 50, 69, 81, 120, 171, 178, 180, 183, 189, 194, 198-200, 202203, 211-212, 242, 248, 290, 294 Virtuoso, 61, 149-150, 158, 160, 165 Vision, 9, 59, 61, 64, 77, 79-80, 106, 264, 266, 280, 297, 299

Vocabulary, 12, 14, 56, 61, 117, 169, 178, 181, 197, 234, 285, 303 Voice, 5, 12, 19, 48, 54-55, 57, 61, 76, 88-89, 92, 95, 97, 103, 109, 111, 122, 124, 144, 157, 180, 184185, 213-214, 217, 220, 231, 262, 278 Win, 19, 38, 51, 60, 61, 78, 79, 99, 113, 116, 123, 125, 127, 128, 136, 171, 204, 221, 244, 292, 301, 303 Wisdom, 45, 116, 184, 201, 203, 206, 239, 246, 248, 252, 254, 270, 278, 288, 291 Worship, 130, 131, 132, 133, 139, 142, 143, 149, 161, 188, 296 Wreath, 87, 116 Xenophobia, 101 Xerxes, 209 Zeus, 79, 93, 96, 202, 236, 249