The Oxford Handbook of the Second Sophistic

by Daniel S. Richter

  In telling the tale of Licinianus, Pliny’s primary concern is to reflect on the vagaries of fortune under the emperor Domitian and, it would seem, to offer at least a partial rehabilitation of his victim’s reputation. But the language Pliny uses is highly informative, with regard to both Licinianus’s activities and his assessment of them. To be an orator is to use eloquence to real-world ends, to have an impact on the fate of others. To be a rhetor or, as Licinianus is also called, a professor is to fall short as a Roman and perhaps as a man. The Greek dress, the Sicilian location, the bilious and self-pitying tone of the remarks attributed to Licinianus together differentiate him from his former Roman self and mark him as, in effect, a Latin sophist. Indeed, like the Greek sophists familiar from Philostratus, Licinianus gives an informal preface (Latin praefatio, Ep. 4.11.2, 4.11.14, corresponding to Greek prolalia) to his declamatory performance, a practice Pliny elsewhere derides (Sherwin-White 1985, 115–116). And although Pliny transmits only a few phrases, they smack of sophistic self-consideration (“What sort of game are you playing, Fortune, making professors out of senators—and senators out of professors?”) while also alluding to the (contravened) expectation of performance in Greek: “for after he had composed himself and examined his garb, he intoned ‘in Latin shall I declaim’ ” (“Latine, inquit, declamaturus sum”; Ep. 4.11.3). To Pliny the performance is distressing, even pitiable (“tristia et miseranda”), just what you would expect of someone who sullied his studies with sexual crimes (“qui haec ipsa studia incesti scelere macularit”; Ep. 4.11.4), but the implication seems to be that Licinianus’s behavior would be demeaning even if it were not the outcome of a charge of inchastity.

  The tone Pliny adopts with regard to Licinianus is representative of the Roman elite’s take on rhetorical exercise and the men who profess it more generally: it’s good and useful, but only if directed toward practical ends. Even if the language is Latin, there’s something vaguely Hellenic about the practice, and only a Greek, or failed Roman, would indulge in it exclusively. Yet behind the pity and disdain lies the realization that Latin speakers had long practiced declamation and other types of competitive verbal performance. The anomaly in Licinianus’s case is not that he declaims in Latin, but that he does so while dressed like a Greek and that for him declamation marks a step down from real oratory rather than a preparation for a practical career. Latin declaimers are well known from Seneca the Elder’s memoirs of the rhetoric schools of the early principate, where they perform alongside a handful of speakers of Greek; public contests in oratorical display were held by Caligula at Lyons; the emperor Claudius was a competent declaimer as a youth (Suet. Claud. 4.6); Nero was awarded the crown in Latin oratory and poetry in the face of stiff competition from other eminent men (Suet. Ner. 12.3); oratorical contests in both Latin and Greek seem to have formed part of the cycle of Domitianic festivals as well; Vespasian acknowledged the importance of rhetorical training by establishing chairs of Greek and Latin eloquence (Suet. Vesp. 18.1); and a collection of Latin school declamations, possibly dating to the second century CE, has survived the great triage of textual history (Shackleton Bailey 2006; Winterbottom 1984). Most of this information would have been familiar to Pliny’s audience, as would the stern critique of other-wordly declamation by the Latin rhetorician Quintilian and, quite possibly, the satirization of the practice in Petronius’s Satyricon.

  Pliny’s attitude toward Licinianus is thus shaped by a cultural discourse that regards public display of verbal fluency as admirable, but only to a point. A similar anxiety about self-serving exhibitionism is also manifest in Pliny’s remarks on the circulation and recitation of his own speeches. Pliny is proud of his work as a practical orator, mentioning especially his achievements in the centumviral courts (Ep. 4.16.1–2, 6.33) and in trials before the senate (Ep. 5.20, 7.6), but evinces a certain reticence when it comes to recitation and publication. For example, he leaves it up to Saturninus to decide whether the speech he gave at the dedication of the municipal library in Como is worthy of further distribution (Ep. 1.18). Similarly, he agrees to give a recitation of one of his speeches (“oratio”; Ep. 2.19.1) as a favor to his addressee Cerealis, but only if Cerealis first reviews it. Pliny discusses the conflicting expectations of audiences at a trial or a recitation, but he convinces himself of the validity of the latter occasion provided the audience is limited to the “highly erudite” (“eruditissimum quemque”; Ep. 2.19.9). Presumably their judgment will not be swayed by the charm (“dulcia”; 2.19.6) and aural pleasure (“sonantia”; 2.19.6) that in Pliny’s view appeal to the ignorant (“imperiti”; 2.19.8). In other letters, we learn that recitation (before a select group of friends) is an aid not to legal understanding but to the literary quality of the work in question, since those in attendance will be expected to offer corrections and suggestions for improvement (5.13, 7.17). As Pliny succinctly puts it, “I want praise not when I am reciting but when I am being read” (“Nec vero ego dum recito laudari, sed dum legor cupio”; Ep. 7.17.7). In his view, the primary aim of recitation is to produce an edifying text rather than a pleasurable embodied performance (cf. Gurd 2012, 105–126).

  Yet such performance is precisely what Pliny ascribes to the visiting Greek sophist Isaeus in a detailed description contained in Letter 2.3 (see also Philostr. VS 1.20; Juv. 3.74). Isaeus receives a more positive assessment than Licinianus, but then Isaeus is never more (or less) than a virtuoso performer. Pliny in effect recounts the various stages of the display speech—proem, invitation to others to pose a challenge, narrative, enthymeme, and so on—expressing special admiration for Isaeus’s memory and volubility. But the story is not without bite: Isaeus can afford to be sweet, genuine, and straightforward (“dulcis . . . sincerus . . . simplex”; Ep. 2.3.1, 2.3.5) because he deals with unreality (“ficta causa”; 2.3.6). In contrast, says Pliny, those of us who work in the forum and engage in real-life disputes inevitably acquire a streak of malice (“Nos enim, qui in foro verisque litibus terimur, multum malitiae quamvis nolimus addiscimus”; Ep. 2.3.5). Ultimately, Isaeus’s display oratory is wholesome entertainment, a useful occupation for a genial senior citizen or a young man in training—and a curiosity piquant enough to entice Pliny’s correspondent back to Rome, or so Pliny hopes. Pliny makes no mention of Isaeus’s role as tutor of the future emperor Hadrian (on which Oliver 1949; Smith 1997), yet it is hard not to read his cautious praise of Isaeus as an attempt to balance a variety of political, social, and cultural concerns.

  Pliny’s studied reluctance to play the sophist puts him in a bind when he is called upon to deliver and then repeat a panegyric, or formal speech of praise, in honor of the emperor Trajan. The original speech fulfilled Pliny’s political duty as consul and thus required no apology. But the three-day recitation, to discerning friends, of an amplified version elicits an elaborate justification: they insisted, not me (Ep. 3.18.4), the learned audience was most approving of the most serious sections (no pleasure-seekers they!: Ep. 3.18.8), and besides there is precedent, not among today’s Greeks, but among the idealized ancients, such as Aeschines and Demosthenes (Ep. 2.3; 4.5). It is as if Pliny is embarrassed by the very artificiality of the setting for his encore performance—the same artificiality that made possible some of the great achievements of Greek Second Sophistic, such as Dio Chrysostom’s orations on kingship.

  Perhaps the strongest evidence of Pliny’s desire to contain and redirect the force of sophistic display is the very form of his letters. Unlike Cicero’s, which for the most part provide a transcription of daily events, comings and goings, even mood swings; or Seneca’s, which illustrate and impart a Stoic-inflected moral pedagogy, Pliny’s read like a display of the writer’s broad knowledge and wide range of cultivated interests. Even the pretense that Pliny’s letters are a response to queries from multiple correspondents echoes the sophistic practice of responding extempore to any topic proposed by the audience. The difference is that through the barrier of written correspondence or invitation-only recitation from a s
cript, Pliny avoids making his physical presence the focus of attention, nor does he suffer the humiliation (for an elite Roman) of appearing to be at the beck and call of others. Cultural capital mattered for a Roman as it did for a Greek, but the case of Pliny suggests that it needed to be exhibited through different means.

  PERFORMING ERUDITION

  If Pliny supplies a Latin response to the challenge of sophistic oratory or declamation, the miscellanist Aulus Gellius exemplifies Roman awareness of and reaction to Greek sophistic claims to erudition. A significant aspect of the sophistic movement was purification of language—in effect the creation of a stylized classical idiom that differentiated the intellectual elite from the common folk (Swain 1996). Thanks in part to their careful study of earlier texts, Greek sophists came to be known as experts on all sorts of antiquarian matters. The renowned Gallo-Greek intellectual Favorinus composed a Miscellaneous History that “crossed the boundaries between philosophy, natural history, geography, mathematics, ethnography, and so forth” (Whitmarsh 2001, 115). Aelian, although Italian-born, boasted of having relied entirely on Greek sources in compiling his treatise On the Characteristics of Animals (Sandy 1997, 75). According to Philostratus (VS 565), Herodes Atticus, the sophist turned consul, wrote “handbooks and epitomes containing in small compass the plucked flowers of classical learning” (Sandy 1997, 73). Other works of the sort are ascribed to Pamphila of Epidauros and Pamphilus of Alexandria (both first century CE). So commonplace were miscellanies that Gellius could poke fun at their authors’ search for novel titles in the proem to his own compilation, named after the nights in Attica it (allegedly) recalled.

  Yet despite Gellius’s modest claim to use excerpting and note-taking as an honorable pastime to fill long winter nights, it’s clear that recondite knowledge, both his own and others’, carried social force, at least in his view. Indeed, Gellius seems as much concerned with displaying the proper attitude toward erudition as he does with getting his facts straight (Keulen 2009; Rust 2009). In the preface to Attic Nights he expresses the hope that he will save his busy readers from making errors of language that are disgraceful and boorish (“turpis, agrestis”: Gell. NA praef. 12), but throughout the twenty volumes of anecdotes that follow, those terms of disapprobation are as likely to apply to actions as to words. Already in book 1 we watch Herodes Atticus silence a prattling young pseudo-Stoic with a brief citation from a book of Epictetus. Although the young philosopher considered others clumsy and boorish (“rudis, agrestis”; NA 1.2.4), it is clear by the end of the episode that he has really only named his own failings. Later in the same book (1.10) Favorinus is shown chiding a young man who uses excessively archaic and recherché language in everyday conversation, while in yet another chapter (1.15) Gellius mobilizes his own set of citations against volubility (the standard vice of contemporary Greeks according to Romans: see Petrochilos 1974), quoting authors from Homer and Hesiod to Sallust and Cicero.

  Of Gellius’s numerous interlocutors, Favorinus receives the most attention, almost all of it favorable, at least at first glance. Repeatedly he is shown not just to have extraordinary control of the canons of Greek and Latin literature (e.g., NA 20.1) but also to know how to pose questions or present citations that will allow his challengers to defeat themselves. For Gellius, he is Favorinus noster (NA 3.3.6; 5.11), ours, as if there is a theirs against whom Gellius and Favorinus are to be positioned. But whether the connection between the two men is personal, ideological, or social in basis, it is not primarily linguistic, for while Gellius composes exclusively in Latin, Favorinus—as far as we can tell from other sources—wrote and declaimed in Greek.

  Indeed, the ease with which Gellius incorporates Favorinus into Latin-speaking contexts is striking, perhaps part of an attempt to rehabilitate the author and teacher who had suffered exile from Rome under the emperor Hadrian (Keulen 2009: 98–104). Favorinus is shown accompanying Gellius (or vice versa) in Athens (1.2), Ostia (18.1), Antium (17.10), and Rome (14.1, 16.3), including the Palatine (4.1, 20.1), the library in Trajan’s forum (13.25), and the Temple of Carmentis (18.7). Favorinus’s cultural and political crossover potential may also explain Gellius’s repeated insistence that his learning, as opposed to that of his challengers, serves useful ends for human life. In contrast to the image of Favorinus presented by the Greek sources, Gellius depicts him as specifically avoiding ostentation (e.g., 4.1.19). Gellius’s Favorinus, like Gellius himself, sticks to locales favored by Roman gentlemen—indeed a striking feature of the “Attic” Nights is that the bulk of the anecdotes in which location is specified take place in and around Rome (Johnson 2010, 101–102), in contrast to the moveable feast characteristic of a work like Plutarch’s Sympotic Questions (see König 2007). Favorinus’s role as a traveling showman is virtually written out of Gellius’s record, and his immense erudition is shown as applied in socially constructive ways. The one instance in which Gellius translates a lengthy Greek dissertation by Favorinus involves a defense of maternal breast-feeding (NA 12.1), a medical or scientific topic appropriate for the “richness and abundance” of Favorinus’s Greek (at NA 16.3.2, Favorinus, although in Rome, switches to Greek to converse with doctors). Even when Favorinus stoops to embarrassing topics, such as the praise of quartan fever, it’s to sharpen his wits or practice verbal agility or gain experience in overcoming difficulties (NA 17.12.1–2), and in any event the outcome seems to have been a series of sententiae consigned to books rather than a long-winded declamation. When Favorinus issues a guideline against monopolizing conversation at a convivium (2.22), Gellius immediately puts it into action by contradicting Favorinus on the topic at hand, even as he admires the elegance and affability (elegantia, comitas) of his presentation. As Gellius explains in another context, the point of learned inquiry is not to create material for declamation but to acquire knowledge (7.8.4).

  Despite his seeming domestication in Attic Nights, the Gellian Favorinus is not quite up to tangling with the most powerful Latin-writing intellectual of the Antonine era, namely the consul Fronto, tutor and (on his telling) lifelong friend of Marcus Aurelius. The historical Fronto, it should be noted, had many of the hallmarks of Greek sophists, yet like his Roman predecessor Pliny, evinced reluctance to flaunt his talents (on Fronto in relationship to Greek sophistic, see Swain 2004). He is and was known primarily as a teacher. He achieved great wealth and political prominence, again on his telling, thanks to his eloquence and intellectual cultivation. He wrote laudes or encomia on seemingly trivial or unexpected topics, such as smoke, dust, and negligence (Laudes Fumi et Pulveris, Laudes Neglegentiae: Hauler and van den Hout 1988, 215 and 203 respectively), as well as on the emperors Hadrian and Antoninus Pius (M. Caes. 2.4; Eumenius, Panegyrici Latini 8 (V) 14). In his letters, he tells Marcus that an orator must always seek to please the populus, in contrast to predecessors like Seneca, and especially Pliny, who express discomfort with too direct an appeal to the common listener. Elsewhere he defends rhetoric, or rather the eloquence it produces, against the pretentious attacks of some philosophers (Ad M. Antoninum de Eloquentia liber and De Orationibus liber: Hauler and van den Hout 1988, 135–142, 153–160). He voices no objection when Marcus writes enthusiastically of the Greek encomiasts he has been listening to in Naples (M. Caes. 2.11), a demurral that contrasts with Antonius Iulianus’s critique of a young Roman student, also in Naples, who rather too enthusiastically adopts the style and manner of a Greek declaimer (Gell. NA 9.15).

  Yet in other respects Fronto shies away from the exhibitionist and quarrelsome tendencies of the sophists. When Marcus wants to talk about the sophist Polemon (the archrival of Favorinus), Fronto deflects the query into a discussion of his own remarks on a different Polemon, the earlier philosopher, in a speech before the Senate (“pro Polemone rhetore . . . philosophum reddidi, peratticum”; M. Caes. 2.2.5). Fronto is proud of his learning, even admits to taking some of his ideas from Horace, but it is learning put to an immediate practical end in senatorial debate. Elsewhere, Fronto asks his son-in-law
to compare his speech on behalf of the Bithynians with Cicero’s defense of Sulla: although little is known of the context of Fronto’s speech, his remarks suggest that it deals with a genuine legal controversy (Ad Am. 1.14.2, 1.15.1; Champlin 1980, 67–68). More generally, much of Fronto’s correspondence reads like an updated version of Isocrates’s (and perhaps other Greek writers’) advice to princes. For Fronto, as for Pliny, publicity for one’s erudition is achieved at second hand—through the circulation of writings, the testimony of important friends, and a reputation for hosting events in which others compete for attention (Johnson 2010, 138–148). Only in the senate or courtroom does one put oneself on display, and even then as a means to an external end.

  The restraint that Fronto communicates through his letters to Marcus and others becomes a theme of his appearances in Aulus Gellius’s Attic Nights, where he is treated with the ancient equivalent of kid gloves. In one episode, Favorinus approaches Fronto, Gellius in tow, and starts a discussion about the paucity of color words in Latin versus Greek (NA 2.26). Fronto gently corrects Favorinus, while acknowledging that Greek in general is more verbose than Latin. Fronto’s little speech manages to cite Vergil, Pacuvius, Ennius, and Nigidius, all in short compass, and Favorinus is suitably impressed, indeed he gushes over (“exosculatus”; NA 2.26.20) Fronto’s knowledge and choice manner of speaking, before trumping his citations with another from Ennius. But Fronto, unlike other interlocutors in Gellius, doesn’t take the bait, and the episode ends as a genteel standoff.