At the other end of antiquity, we go from famine to feast, with a superabundance of rhetorical evidence. The works of Himerius (fourth century CE), Libanius (fourth), Procopius (fifth to sixth), and Choricius (early sixth) among others testify to the continuity of the tradition. Bernadette Puech’s epigraphic dossier of “orators and sophists of the imperial period” covers the first to the fifth centuries CE, and indeed a recently published prosopography of rhetors and sophists in the Roman Empire goes right up to the seventh century.11 Not only is it misleading to suggest that the rhetorical production of the period 50–250 sits apart as a discrete unit, it is actually impossible to write systematically about that period without importing late-antique evidence (notably for the school exercises known as progymnasmata, for which Libanius is such a rich source).
A more complex and prima facie attractive explanation for the focus on the period 50–250 lies in the distinctive socio-political makeup. The Second Sophistic as conventionally defined covers the period from the establishment of the principate through to the third-century crisis; and given the limited amount of extant material from the second half of the third century (which may or may not be an accident of survival), it in effect covers all the material up until Constantine and the advent of Christianity. With a little elasticity, then, the Second Sophistic can be thought of as coterminous with “non-Christian Greek cultural production of the principate.” But here, too, we are in danger of arbitrariness, for grouping artifacts purely on the basis of chronology does not necessarily make for a more inherently cogent arrangement than grouping them (say) alphabetically or in order of the relative height of their authors. To make sense of the chronological definition we would need to argue in addition that there are historical factors particular to this period that explain the form that its literature takes—and this is where the difficulties arise. Rome was a dominant force in much of the Greek-speaking world from the second century BCE onward, and many major Greek-speaking intellectuals from that period onward (among them Polybius, Posidonius, Diodorus, the epigrammatists Antipater and Crinagoras, Strabo, and Dionysius) benefited from Roman sponsorship: what then is the justification for beginning in 50 CE?12 At the other end, Christianization was hardly instantaneous: “pagan” culture continued in full health well into the sixth century, and arguably later.13
The most explicit attempt to justify 50–250 as a unit comes courtesy of Simon Swain, who, while admitting that his parameters are “only approximate,” nevertheless insists that the earlier date is a point of “significant difference” and the later one marks a “perceptible break.”14 For Swain, the crucial factor is economic independence: elite Greeks within his period were, he claims, financially independent of Romans, whereas those before “were not overly prosperous” and those after were afflicted by the general “political, military, and economic instability” that characterized the later third century as a whole. But this model raises all sorts of questions. First of all, is it really true that second-century Greek intellectuals like Plutarch and Lucian “were part of a world that did not need Rome”? Was it then just intellectual like-mindedness that drew Plutarch to superrich Romans like Philopappus and Sosius Senecio? What is Lucian’s On Salaried Posts if not evidence for the continued dependence of certain Greeks on Roman financial support? What of a text like Athenaeus’s Deipnosophists (not treated by Swain), which presents an array of Hellenized intellectuals dining with a Roman patron? Conversely, there is no firm evidence to my knowledge that the pre-50 intellectuals Strabo, Diodorus, and Dionysius (to take three names) were financially dependent on Roman support. The problem is that our understanding of the exact nature of any relationships of dependence is obscured by the (no doubt designedly) opaque language of “friendship.” What does it mean when for example Strabo cites Aelius Gallus as a “friend and a companion” (ἀνὴρφίλος ἡμῖνκαὶ ἑταῖρος, 2.5.12)? Is the nature of that friendship identical to that of Dio Chrystostom and Nerva, “a philanthropic emperor who cherished me and was my long-time friend” (αὐτοκράτοροςφιλανθρώπουκἀμὲ ἀγαπῶντοςκαὶ πάλαιφίλου, 45.2)? Or Plutarch’s with Philopappus (to whom he addresses his How to Tell a Flatterer from a Friend, which strongly implies that their own relationship teeters between the two)? There is no obvious reason to conclude that Greeks became more financially autonomous in the mid-first century CE.
What of the distinctive characteristics of the literature of the Second Sophistic? Do these offer any support for the idea of a chronologically defined period? In the midst of a general problematization of the term, Goldhill argues that “it emphasises the constant importance of rhetorical training and the rewards of rhetorical success in Empire society, and stresses the constant pull backwards to the glorious traditions of Classical Greece, the so-called first Sophistic, a return which is marked most strongly by the regular use of a highly literate classical Greek through different genres.”15 This assessment (which is not atypical) suggests that there are four interrelated elements that are thought to be constitutive of Second Sophistic culture: rhetoric, archaism, Greek identity, and literariness. None of these is, however, really distinctive. We have already dealt with rhetoric; and none of the other categories (which are rather vague) is of course exclusive to the imperial era. What did the intellectual culture of Hellenistic Alexandria represent if not an archaizing, highly literary, generically experimental reassertion of Greek identity in a multicultural, patronal context? There are disparities in the mode of expression, certainly: the early imperial era’s preference for Atticizing prose is different from the poetic “archaeology” undertaken by Callimachus, Theocritus, Apollonius, et al.16 The Second Sophistic might also be said to be less bookish and more performative (although there are problems with such a distinction).17 Such distinctions are particulate; but the reassertion of Greekness through classicizing literature, generic self-awareness, and archaic language is a wave that begins at least in the Hellenistic era, and arguably even earlier.
What is more, once we start probing then any distinction between Hellenistic and imperial in terms of verse and prose begins to look suspect. As is now relatively well understood (even if the implications are still too often ignored), poetry remained absolutely central in the imperial era, whether performed in festivals, inscribed on stone, or circulated in books.18 Conversely, the fact that the bulk of our surviving Hellenistic literature (Polybius aside) is poetic can easily—but misleadingly—feed the perception of historical rupture. Let us exemplify this briefly with a glance at one of the literary forms often taken to embody the Second Sophistic.
Erwin Rohde’s Der griechische Roman und seine Vorläufer (“The Greek novel and its precursors”) of 1876, the book that gave us the Second Sophistic in its modern form, argued that despite the appearance of exoticism the Greek romance was a genre firmly rooted in the Greek tradition.19 The reconstruction of lost Hellenistic “precursors,” Rohde believed, showed that there was no reason to posit “oriental” influence in order to explain the romance (as Pierre-Daniel Huet had done back in 1670).20 For Rohde, the important Hellenistic ingredients were love poetry and travel narratives. Other scholars following in Rohde’s footsteps proposed alternative forerunners,21 but Ben Perry’s 1967 The Ancient Romances powerfully argued the case against such biogenetic models of origination.22 For Perry and his followers, the romance is a new creation of the imperial era, and talk of Hellenistic precedents is misplaced. In this vein, one recent book has argued that Chariton’s Callirhoe, in the mid-first century CE (on this author’s dating), represents the “invention of the Greek love novel.”23
Rohde’s methodology was, to be sure, fundamentally flawed, particularly because it was vitiated by his nationalist concern to protect Greek culture from the stain of near eastern influence. (The Second Sophistic, indeed, was in his view a rear-guard defense of cultural Hellenism against the twin threats of Rome and the East.) Yet there are a number of problems with the idea that the romance emer
ged ex nihilo around 50 CE—which also happens to be the conventional start date for the Second Sophistic. Even if we leave aside the problems with dating Chariton (the only secure terminus ante quem is a second-century CE papyrus), the claim runs into immediate conceptual difficulties as soon as we start trying to identify what it is that Chariton is supposed to have invented. As has often been said, there was no single word for the romance as genre in antiquity. It is fairly clear that a cohesive sense of genre developed over time, so that we can be sure that the latest of the romance writers—Achilles Tatius, Longus, and Heliodorus—manipulate conventions and tease the reader’s generic expectations.24 Yet Chariton could not have invented the genre as it appeared from the vantage of later antiquity, for obvious reasons. What he was doing was (presumably) weaving together a generically experimental blend of romantic historiography, new comedy, and existing prose romance.
What models did Chariton have to hand? To answer this question we need, in a sense, to return to Rohde, and rediscover the world of nineteenth-century source criticism. Those who wish to see the novel as a new invention of the Second Sophistic must satisfy themselves that what Chariton was creating was wholly innovative, rather than a creative intervention in a complex intertextual web. Our evidence is not, in fact, so tenuous that this issue cannot be addressed. It seems to me that we know of four possible sources for pre-Chariton romance. The first is mime. It seems highly likely that at least some of the erotic plots that we know of through novels were also circulated far and wide in mimes and pantomimes;25 and it seems probable that the well-known reference to what seems to be a literary work called Callirhoe at Persius 1.134 refers to a theatrical version of the story. The second source is Xenophon of Ephesus’s Anthia and Habrocomes: there is not a shred of meaningful evidence to support the general consensus that it postdates Chariton’s novel.26 The third is the Greco-Jewish Joseph and Aseneth, a romance between the biblical patriarch and his Egyptian bride, which may well be Hellenistic, and to which we shall return. This displays a number of erotic motifs that have often been thought characteristic of the later romances: Aseneth’s initial preference for virginity, the purity and beauty of the young couple, their immediate falling in love on sight, the disastrous effects on the girl’s wellbeing, and so forth.27
Finally, there is Ctesias’s love-across-the-battlelines story of the Saka (Scythian) Zarinaea and the Mede Stryangaeus. Ctesias’s original text, the Persica (composed near the end of the fifth century BCE) does not survive, and Diodorus Siculus (our main source for Ctesias) omits this story. The romance, however, is known thanks to a mention in Demetrius’s On Style (probably second century BCE), and a brief papyrus fragment that partly overlaps with a quotation in Demetrius.28 Whether the romance was present already in Ctesias29 or not does not matter for our purposes: the important point is that it was read in Hellenistic times and was apparently influential on Chariton. For it has long been recognized that even the fragmentary papyrus has novelistic motifs in it: it refers, notably, to persecution by eros and to threatened suicide, in the context of a rhetorically persuasive love letter.30 Yet in the more recent editions of Ctesias by Lenfant and Stronk31 an additional version of the story has been included, and the implications of this for scholarship on the ancient novel have not yet been fully processed. The passage is a fragment of the Augustan historian Nicolaus of Damascus preserved in a Byzantine compilation called On Virtues and Vices, created on the orders of the emperor Constantinus Porphyrogenitus. It is worth quoting in full, so as to illustrate the density of novelistic reference:
After the killing of Marmareus, Stryangaeus was possessed for a long time with silent love for Zarinaea. She felt the same for him. When he approached the city of Rhoxanake where the Saka had their palace, Zarinaea approached him and on seeing him greeted him with great joy, kissing him in the full view of all. She mounted onto his chariot, and they arrived at the palace deep in discussion. Zarinaea also received the army that followed him with great honor. Next Stryangaeus retired to his quarters, secretly bewailing his desire for Zarinaea. Being unable to bear it (ou karterōn) he confided in the most trusted of the eunuchs in his retinue. This eunuch urged him to take heart, and advised him to cast off his timidity (atolmian) and speak to Zarinaea. Stryangaeus was persuaded, and leaped to his feet to go and visit her. She received him warmly. He prevaricated repeatedly, groaning and blushing; but he told her all the same how he was burning with intense love, provoked by his desire for her. She, however, refused him with great gentleness, saying that the situation was disgraceful and damaging for her—and in fact much more disgraceful and damaging for him, since he had as his wife Rhoetaea daughter of Astibaras (whom she had heard to be much more beautiful than herself and many other women). He must, therefore, (she said) be a man in the face not only of the enemy but also of this kind of situation, when something attacks the soul. He must not suffer long-term grief (if Rhoetaea should find out) for the sake of short-term satisfaction of the kind that concubines can offer. If he relinquished this request, she said, he could ask anything: she would deny him nothing. Upon hearing these words, he fell silent for a long time; then he bade her farewell and departed. He was now in a greater state of despair, and he lamented to his eunuch. Finally, he wrote a message on a piece of parchment, and extracted an oath from the eunuch to the effect that he would give the parchment to Zarinaea, without any forewarning, only after he had done away with himself. The letter read: “Stryangaeus writes to Zarinaea as follows: I was the one who saved you, and was responsible for your present good fortune. But you have killed me and robbed me of everything. If you have acted justly, may you reap all the benefits, and be blessed forever; if however you have acted unjustly, may you experience the suffering I did; for it was you who advised me to become such as I am now.” On writing this he placed the letter under his pillow, and, destined for Hades, manfully demanded his sword. But the eunuch . . .” [passage breaks off]32
The novelistic motifs in this passage are unmistakable: the focus on the debilitating effects of passion, the mutual passion, the emotional vulnerability and hesitation particularly of the male, the sense of despair (athumia), the recourse to a confidant who offers constructive advice, the accusation of unmanliness, the parallelism between war and love as spheres for the performance of masculinity, the accusatory letter, the threatened suicide (which may actually be achieved here). Now, Nicolaus’s version of the story is clearly based on Ctesias’s, without being identical to it. By chance, the one substantial papyrus fragment of Ctesias that survives contains the letter, which in the original version begins “I was the one who saved you, and you were saved by me; but I have been destroyed by you”—an opening that is also quoted by Demetrius On Style 213, where it is directly attributed to Ctesias.33 The papyrus letter then elaborates on the reproach leveled at Zarinaea, then turns to a meditation on the god Eros. Whether the papyrus is in fact verbatim Ctesias or another different version of the story does not matter greatly here.34 The point is rather that Ctesias and his Hellenistic imitators already supplied many of the erotic motifs, displayed within a rhetorical frame (a letter), that an incautious reader of Chariton would otherwise assume to have originated with him. Our knowledge of Hellenistic “romantic” historiography in the Ctesian vein is woefully deficient; it is, however, I submit, highly likely that if we had more of the latter then Chariton would look much less like an innovator, and this supposed gulf between Hellenistic literature and the Second Sophistic (as conventionally understood) would close to the point of invisibility. In other words, the Greek novel too should be seen as a postclassical wave pattern rather than as securely demarcated by the temporal parameters 50–250.
Let us return now to Joseph and Aseneth, the romance between the biblical Joseph and his Egyptian wife. The dating of this text is extremely problematic: estimates have varied from the second century BCE right through to the fifth century CE; and scholars are still undecided as to whether it is fundamentally a Jewish or a Christian text.3
5 This is not the place to intervene in this complex and irresoluble debate. In fact, given that we know that at least two different versions (which scholars imaginatively call the “long version” and the “short version”) existed in antiquity, it is probably better to consider Joseph and Aseneth, alongside the Alexander Romance and the Life of Aesop, as a “textual wave”: rather than treating it as a particle-like work with a single, definite point of origin, it is rather a cross-temporal and cross-cultural pattern, constituted not by its identity at any particular point in time and space but by the sum of those identities.36
Hellenistic near-eastern cultures, indeed, provide an excellent opportunity to test the wave function of the Second Sophistic. If the Greeks’ archaism, intellectual brio, and concern with the rooting of identity in the period 50–250 CE is to be seen as the response of an ancient, literate culture to foreign occupation, then we might expect to detect the same kinds of patterns in Egyptian and Jewish literature of the Ptolemaic period. Martin Braun, indeed, argued that the origins of the Greek romances of the imperial era (if we can again use them as Second Sophistic barometers) lay in the responses of near eastern subjects to Greco-Macedonian domination.37 Braun argued that both Egyptians and Jews began to focus on great figures of the past (the legendary Egyptian warrior-pharaoh Sesonchosis; the Israelite patriarchs of the Bible), as a means of engendering resistance to the dominant political order of the present. He also argued that the focus on sexual integrity and the management of erotic urges, such a dominant theme in the imperial romances, originates in biblical rewritings in Hellenistic Jewish Aggadah: the Testaments of Joseph and Reuben (which in fact many scholars now date to the imperial era) and particularly Josephus, whose amplification of the Potiphar’s Wife story includes a number of nonbiblical motifs (such as falling in love at a festival and love-sickness) that look “novelistic.”38 When we add Joseph and Aseneth (which Braun did not consider) into this mix, then the interrelationship between Jewish and Greek begins to look even more suggestive. Another shared element, again not noted by Braun (but of great importance to any colonial-imperial reading), is the emphasis on the human body as a site of resistance to tyrannical violence, particularly rape and torture. This is a theme of the latter part of Joseph and Aseneth (23–29), where the Pharaoh’s son, smitten by jealousy, kidnaps Aseneth. The Pharaoh is, no doubt, to be read as a biblical analog of the Ptolemaic rulers of present-day (for the text’s earliest readers) Egypt. Analogously, 3 and 4 Maccabees, which are set in the Hellenistic age, depict Ptolemaic violence against virtuous Jews. Structurally speaking, these narratives perform the same function as the scenes in the imperial Greek romances that show virtuous protagonists resisting threats of rape and torture.39
The Oxford Handbook of the Second Sophistic Page 3
