The Oxford Handbook of the Second Sophistic

by Daniel S. Richter

  Another feature identified as central for the Second Sophistic is paideia, a concept that served, as Morgan puts it (chapter 25), as “the crucial differentiator between elite and nonelite. The investment of large resources of time and money in nonpractical education, so as to master archaic but culturally endorsed linguistic modes and to deploy the whole intertextual arsenal of the classical canon was a signifier of wealth and status so powerful that the education itself came to be seen as the necessary qualification for membership of the elite.” Paideia was, however, not simply to be had, but to be performed. The very public agon of early imperial intellectual life, with its scrupulously policed codes of deportment and persistent evaluation of cultural competencies, was, in an important sense, a zero-sum game: one pepaideumenos’s loss of cultural capital signaled the gain of another. Thus, the period is replete with texts that show intense interest in virtuoso display of learnedness, especially as it regards language (e.g., the Latin writer Gellius and the Greek Athenaeus: Oikonomopoulou, chapter 28), myth (Trzaskoma, chapter 29; cf. Horster, chapter 38), and philosophical thought (e.g., Brenk, chapter 19), but also showcasing polymathic command of intertextuality, and specific trained rhetorical elements like ekphrasis (showing up in works as different as Apuleius and the Greek novels, Pausanias, and the Posthomerica: chapters 22, 23, 31). All this speaks to the bookish, lamplight culture that predominated even as live performance remained central in the mentalité. Philosophy, for example, has now become primarily an exercise in textual interpretation (see Baltussen, chapter 37).

  Finally, we come to the theme of self-definition and identity. Here the contributors follow recent scholarly trends in leaving to one side the well-worn discussion of the ways that Greeks could retain and promote their cultural identity within the context of Roman rule. Instead, there is interesting analysis of the hybrid and ambivalent self-positioning we find in an Aelian or Favorinus (Oikonomopoulou, chapter 28; Dench, chapter 7; cf. Asirvatham, chapter 30, on Cassius Dio), or the sorts of multiple identities, with an ability to self-reinvent, that are found in Apuleius or Julius Africanus (Harrison, chapter 22; Adler chapter 42). Jewishness is found to retain its core identity even while making informed use of the “modalities of Hellenism” (Gruen, chapter 41), and Syrian Christians are likewise found to participate in a Hellenized Roman East in ways that are textually, as well as socially, interesting and important (Adler, chapter 42). The broad spectrum of literature and culture included in this volume (see below) should allow the reader a strong sense of the vibrant, multicultural environments from which these texts emanated, and the surprisingly cosmopolitan views that form a core feature of the era (Richter, chapter 6).

  The characteristics traditionally identified with the Second Sophistic are, on close and nuanced inspection, indeed good to think with.

  1.2 PURPOSE AND SCOPE

  As will already be clear from the discussion above, our purview for the Second Sophistic is unusually broad-reaching (if, however, not as broad-reaching as it might be). Both in its scope and in its pluralism of voices the Handbook represents a somewhat new approach to the Second Sophistic, one that attempts to integrate Greek literature of the Roman period into the wider world of early imperial Greek, Latin, Jewish, and Christian cultural production, and one that keeps a sharp focus on situating these texts within their socio-cultural context.

  Scholarly interest in the literature and society of the second century has grown rapidly in the last generation, but there remains an inadequate supply of foundational instruction and instructional materials. This is the gap we hope to help fill. The student or teacher of Classics who comes to the literature of this era seldom has had a course of study that includes the likes of major figures such as Gellius, Galen, Aristides, Fronto; even Plutarch and Lucian are usually no more than a small and quickly passed over part of the graduate curriculum. Standard resources like the Cambridge History of Greek Literature (1982), Cambridge History of Latin Literature (1985), or Conte’s Latin Literature: A History (1987, trans. 1994) fall off quickly in detail of treatment for authors after Pliny and Tacitus. Symptomatic is the history of Latin Silver Age literature by J. W. Duff (1931), which ends with Suetonius and treats the second century in an appendix of under ten pages; similarly, Lesky’s History of Greek Literature (1957, 1963, trans. 1966) takes only ninety of its 900 pages for materials following the Hellenistic era. Duff and Lesky are, to be sure, now much out of date, but these two books were standard resources up through the 1980s, and bear witness to a long-held and still-influential view that “classical” Latin and Greek literature effectively ends with Pliny, Tacitus, and Plutarch. Albrecht Dihle’s Greek and Latin Literature of the Roman Empire (1989, trans. 1994) is more even in coverage, but by its nature exceedingly summary (under 100 pages for the entirety of the second century). B. Reardon’s magisterial Courants littéraires grecs des IIe et IIIe siècles après J.-C. (1971), which was never translated, is limited to Greek and strictly literary in its viewpoint, and is thereby not only out of date but also lacking much of the basic matter that today’s student will need. T. Whitmarsh’s excellent G & R survey The Second Sophistic (2005) is in many respects the best summary overview for the student who lacks grounding in the era, but at eighty-nine pages it is necessarily limited in concept and scope.

  The Handbook, then, attempts to serve a real need. For the student curious about the literary remains of the second century, and how those remains may be relevant for his or her research, there is call for a much more comprehensive and accessible overview of the principal texts from the period. The second century boasts an extremely valuable set of materials for all sorts of inquiries, many of particularly current interest (e.g., gender studies, cultural history of the body, sociology of literary culture, history of education and intellectualism, history of medicine, cultural linguistics), and yet most teachers as well as students of the Classics have only a dim idea of what these materials entail or how best to go about accessing them. Many of the authors from this period have large or very large corpora (e.g., Galen, Lucian, Plutarch, Dio Chrysostom, Aristides, Cassius Dio, Appian) and practical guidance within those corpora would be a useful tool for the student new to this era. But in addition to content and bibliographical guidance, there is a strong need for a volume that helps to situate the textual remains within the period and its society, to describe and circumscribe not simply the literary matter but the literary culture and societal context. Thus we devote considerable space at the front to various contextual essays, and we have tasked all our authors with keeping the contextual demands in mind.

  The creation of the volume has involved hard choices, and some are more strategic and practical than philosophical. Authors well treated in other handbook accounts are generally underplayed, or even omitted. It might have been, for instance, interesting to consider how Second Sophistic culture finds analogs within the work of authors like Martial and Juvenal (who do, however, get some attention in Richlin, chapter 8), or, differently, Tacitus. Despite the many hundreds of pages here, there remain authors who deserve treatment (Pseudo-Longinus and Julius Pollux are two obvious examples); the many technical treatises (Ptolemy and Aristides Quintilianus, for example) need situating within the era; an exploration of how the narratives here might intersect with the art and material culture of the age seems in order. With that said, our aim has been to offer a rich and varied exploration of social, literary, and intellectual history from the period, with emphasis on the core authors and movements usually associated with the era but with a broader range, as stated earlier. We make no claim for completeness. The Handbook is too hefty to serve as a literal vade mecum, but we hope nonetheless that it will offer helpful guidance to that fascinating cultural era known as the Second Sophistic.

  1.3 WHY A HANDBOOK TO THE SECOND SOPHISTIC?

  “To place men such as Favorinus and Aristides . . . next to Protagoras, Hippias, Gorgias and Prodicus as their heirs is near to blasphemy.” Erwin Rohde’s (1886) assessment of the sophist
s now smacks of racially tinged connoisseurship—a judgment rooted in an aesthetic conditioned to privilege the purity of the original model beside the derivative, belated copy. It is, as well, a limiting and distorting perspective, one that reduces the literary and cultural production of the early imperial period to a single manifestation and elides the diversity of early imperial intellectuals. The view of the Second Sophistic that animates this volume is more holistic and ecumenical than that of Philostratus and his successors. This Handbook assembles essays from a range of scholars whose competencies, we hope, to some extent reflect the variety of early imperial cultural production. Finally, in light of the recent surge of interest in the Second Sophistic, it is worth remembering how young the field is. In an important sense, Bowersock (1969) and Bowie (1970) inaugurated the serious study of the Second Sophistic only a generation ago and the contours of the field—our fundamental questions—are still very much contested. It is our hope that this volume of essays will enable another generation of scholars to see early imperial Greek and Latin cultural production in a way that allows for its complexity, heterogeneity, and ambiguity.

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Bowersock, G. W. 1969. Greek Sophists in the Roman Empire. Oxford.

  Bowie, E. L. 1970. “Greeks and Their Past in the Second Sophistic.” P&P 46: 3–41.

  Johnson, W. A. 2010. Readers and Reading Culture in the High Roman Empire: A Study of Elite Communities. Oxford and New York.

  Richter, D. S. 2011. Cosmopolis: Imagining Community in Late Classical Athens and the Early Roman Empire. Oxford.

  Rohde, E. 1886. “Die asianische Rhetorik und die zweite Sophistik.” Rh. Mus. 41: 170–190.

  Whitmarsh, T. 2013. Beyond the Second Sophistic: Adventures in Greek Postclassicism. Berkeley, CA.

  CHAPTER 2

  GREECE HELLENISTIC AND EARLY IMPERIAL CONTINUITIES

  TIM WHITMARSH

  ACCORDING to the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics, famously parodied by Erwin Schrödinger, subatomic matter has the properties of both waves and particles simultaneously, to the extent that its description can only ever be probabilistic; it is only the act of measurement itself that causes wave function to collapse, and hence the position and state of a given particle to become definite; “Which is not to say that human observers determine the results . . . but rather the specific nature of the material arrangement of the apparatus is responsible for the specifics of the enactment of the cut.”1

  The Second Sophistic is usually thought to operate like a historical particle: bounded more or less by the dates 50 and 250 CE (the period of the High Roman Empire),2 situated in the Greek-speaking part of the Roman Empire, and defined by certain characteristics, it appears to have all the hallmarks of a determinate “cultural phenomenon.”3 That its location is imagined as defined by fixed spatio-temporal parameters is indicated by the choice of prepositions scholars use. When we indicate that a certain text or author is “in the Second Sophistic,”4 we imply a specific set of coordinates: the Second Sophistic is imagined as a container with a defined volume, or a map with certain territories, or some other hypostatized image.

  There are clearly gains to be had from considering the Second Sophistic in a conventionally particulate way, as localized in the Greek-speaking world between 50 and 250: it allows us to consider the distinctive role played by rhetoric, Atticism, Homeric reception, and so forth in the shaping of Greek paideia. Yet it also obscures certain continuities, and thereby certain wider features of the imperial subjectivity shared between the Hellenistic and Roman worlds.5 Any apparent particle-like behavior is in fact determined by the experimental setup itself. Classicists’ lab equipment is designed to test for a limited range of phenomena: the solidity and durability of elite Greco-Roman culture, the centrality of elite literary traditions to ancient societies, the decisive impact of top-down political change. It is this restricted range of questions that produces the illusion that the Second Sophistic is in an eigenstate. In this chapter I wish to argue that the Second Sophistic also has a wave function, which reifying accounts collapse. (This analogy is of course intended to provide a refreshing model to think with, rather than to indicate exact correspondences between the fields of quantum physics and classical cultural history.)

  There are two crucial features of what I am calling this wave function. First, let us imagine a wave-form on a graph: its significance lies in the pattern as a whole rather in the individual points on the graph. From this perspective, the value of the “Second Sophistic” as a heuristic lies not in its ability to fix particular individuals, texts, or artifacts within a defined cultural context, but to trace broader relationships over time and space. It is of course conventional even in particulate accounts to acknowledge the haziness of the term and the arbitrariness of chronological limits, but this acknowledgment is typically presented as an embarrassment to be apologized for rather than as a prompt to rethink the model. Second, if we take this view, then the Second Sophistic by definition cannot be localized in any one place or one time. Many of the properties often considered to be characteristic of the Second Sophistic will thus be found in neighboring periods and cultures.

  Considering the phenomenon in these terms—as simultaneously particulate and wave-like—has the additional advantage of respecting the concertina-like properties of the very phrase “the Second Sophistic.” As has often been remarked, it can be used in a range of senses, from the highly specific (with reference to the tradition of rhetorical epideixis in persona, as described by Philostratus)6 to the general. The general, expanded definition covers all imaginative Greek literary production of the period, and sometimes material culture too.7 When understood in this latter way, its hallmarks are thought to be a preoccupation with archaism and a desire to root identity in the deep past, a concern with rhetoric and self-presentation, and a certain joy in fictive discourse. If we use this second definition, then we are already beginning to treat it as a wave, since we are grouping together cultural artifacts by general affinity rather than robust definitional criteria. It would be hard to come up with a strict list of rules of inclusion for a corpus of texts that included, say, Dio Chrysostom’s Euboicus, Chariton’s Callirhoe, Aelius Aristides’s Sacred Tales, and the hymns of Mesomedes; yet we could all no doubt agree that this fuzzy set has a kind of coherence, and captures something of the ludic, revisionist, but nonetheless self-assertive vitality of the era. Acknowledging the “wave function” of the Second Sophistic helps us to recognize its nondeterminate aspects not as challenges but as opportunities.

  The specific focus of this chapter is chronology. Why do we tend to assume the date range of approximately 50–250 CE? The short answer is simple: Philostratus. The Lives of the Sophists, which provides the only mention of the “second sophistic” (deuterê sophistikê) until the nineteenth century, was composed in the 230s, and (a few isolated earlier mentions notwithstanding) focuses on the period reaching from the reign of Nero up to his own day. That the Second Sophistic is largely centered on what we now call the second century is a coincidence, but has probably contributed to the apparent naturalization of the concept. These explanations, however, suggest that the label is all but entirely arbitrary. Philostratus was not in a position to offer a systematic overview of Greek cultural history. His interest lay in anecdotes illustrating the magnificent eccentricities of the sophists, and for these he depended primarily upon oral reports and letters,8 which were for obvious reasons recent. The distorting effect of the Philostratean fish-eye is why some scholars have argued, with Wilamowitz, that the Second Sophistic has no value as a historical category at all.9

  Wilamowitz was probably right to argue that display oratory in persona was continuously fashionable from classical times right through to late antiquity, and in this respect the early imperial period was undistinctive. Even Philostratus sees the Second Sophistic as beginning with Aeschines in the late fourth century BCE (VS 481). The way had already been pointed by such texts as Gorgias’s Palamedes, Antist
henes’s Ajax and Odysseus, and the Apologies of Plato and Xenophon. We know very little about Hellenistic oratory, but papyri suggest that sophisticated declamation in persona was indeed practiced during this period. A fragment from the time of Ptolemy Philadelphus (283–46 BCE) offers an excellent example.10 The speaker assumes the role of an Athenian statesman urging his fellow citizens to make a swift attack on an unspecified foe. It displays a clearly “sophistic” self-consciousness about role-playing, both in the Demosthenic urging of speedy reprisal and in the insistence that his audience “imitate” someone (56: the papyrus is lacunose here) and live up to their predecessors at Marathon and Salamis (106–9). Philostratus himself speaks of three Hellenistic orators: Ariobarzanes of Cilicia, Xenophron of Sicily, and Peithagoras of Cyrene (VS 511). (He speaks of them as nonentities, but that probably means nothing more than that he knew very little about them.) There is no reason, then, to put unconditional trust in Philostratus’s depiction of a sudden blossom in the early principate.