The Oxford Handbook of the Second Sophistic

by Daniel S. Richter

  POLITICAL COSMOPOLITANISM

  Although Epictetus’s student Marcus Aurelius never self-identifies as a Stoic, the Meditations reveal a strong Stoic cosmopolitan outlook (Asmis 1989). But if Epictetus’s ethics seem very grounded in the ethical world of the day-to-day, Marcus’s perspective, perhaps inevitably, is more global. When Marcus speaks of the cosmic city, the kinship of gods and humans, and the nature of the universe, he does so in consistently ambiguous terms that leave the reader wondering whether he is formulating an abstract cosmopolitanism or a model for enlightened citizenship in the world of the Roman Empire. Certainly, the two aims are not incompatible, and perhaps this is precisely the point. Consider, for example, a passage in the Meditations in which Marcus engages in a sort of object lesson—a reasoning animal using reason to establish his own nature:

  If our cognitive ability is common to us all, then our reason [logos], on account of which we are reasoning beings [logikoi] is also common to us all; if this is true, then that reason which instructs us in what we must do and what we must not do is also common to us all; if this is true, then law [nomos] is common to us all; if this is true, we are fellow citizens [politai]; if this is true, we participate in some sort of polity; if this is true, the cosmos is like a polis, for of what other thing could someone say that the entire human race participates in a common polity? And thence, from this same common polis, we get our cognitive, reasoning, and legal abilities. From where else? (MA 4.4)

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

  Like its philosophical forms, this “political” cosmopolitanism also has its roots in the late classical period. In particular, Isocratean panhellenism provided a rich conceptual vocabulary for early imperial intellectuals who would imagine the Roman Empire as an entirely unified and homogenous space (Richter 2011, 100–111). In 380 BCE, six years after the King’s Peace and two years before the establishment of the second Athenian League, Isocrates, the éminence grise of Athenian political life, delivered his Panegyricus, a speech ten years in the crafting. Isocrates hoped to rally the Greeks—in particular, the Athenians and the Spartans—behind Philip II of Macedon in a panhellenic war against Persia: “I have come to offer council concerning the war against the barbarians and concord amongst ourselves.”18 In this speech, Isocrates mingled arguments for the absolute superiority of Athens among the Greek poleis with calls for Greek unity. Isocrates spoke of Athens’s past service to the rest of the Greeks and various inventions and dwelled extensively on the special character of Athenian autochthony.

  Since we are autochthonous, we are able to address our city with the very same names with which we address those of our own oikos. It is fitting that we alone of all the Greeks call our city nurse, father and mother.19

  And having offered this praise of the purity of the Athenian genos, in a justly famous and much-discussed passage, Isocrates then proceeds to articulate his vision of a unified Hellas. As we shall see, the terms in which Isocrates elaborates this ecumenical vision of Hellas will become central to early imperial cosmopolitan imaginings of the unity of the Roman world. Isocrates declared,

  By so great a distance has our city surpassed all men in both thought and speech that her students have become teachers of others and our city has brought it about that the name of Greeks no longer indicates a kin group [genos] but rather a manner of thinking [dianoia]. We ought now properly call those men Greeks who have a share in our education [paideia] than in some common nature [phusis]. (Isoc. Panegyr 50)

  It is often suggested that this passage marks a shift away from an ethnic conception of Greekness and toward the sorts of “post-ethnic” constructions of identity that will come to flourish in the world that Alexander will create (e.g., Isaac 2004, 113–114; Jones 1999, 135; Saïd 2001). There is a good deal of truth in this, but Isocrates’s opposition of genos and paideia here is considerably more complex than a simple shift in the relative importance of ethnic and cultural factors in the construction of identity. In particular, any reading of the elevation of cultural criteria in this passage must account for Isocrates’s praise of the purity of the autochthonous Athenian genos earlier in the oration. The solution to this seeming problem—which several authors of the Second Sophistic seem to have understood, lies in an appreciation of the ways in which Isocrates has formulated more than one mode of defining identity in the Panegyricus. While Greekness may be understood as a cultural category defined by the possession of paideia and dianoia, the special quality of Athenianness seems to lie apart. Indeed, in chapter 50, Isocrates never mentions Athenianness—except to suggest that “Greekness” consists of the possession of Athenian paideia as well as Greek (not Athenian) descent. In other words, Isocrates allows for the simultaneous existence of both ethnic (Athenian) and cultural (Greek) modes of defining communal identity. While an Athenian could legitimately identify as a Greek, it is not certain that Isocrates would have allowed the reverse to be true in a general sense.

  Half a millennium later, the Mysian orator Aelius Aristides reformulated Isocrates’s terms in an effort to describe the unity of the oikoumenê of his own day. Like Isocrates, Aristides will articulate more than one mode of defining identity in these two speeches and will make use of both ethnic and cultural models of community. I want to think here about two orations that Aristides seems to have delivered in 155 CE: the Panathenaicus, whose performance context was Athens, and the Roman Oration, which Aristides probably delivered in the court of Antoninus Pius (Behr 1981, 373; Swain 1996, 275). These are, as we shall see, very different texts—the Panathenaicus is a more traditional city encomium while the Roman Oration seems to inaugurate the genre of the encomium of empire. The Panathenaicus insists upon the purity of Athenian blood while the Roman Oration displays a much more playful and metaphorical approach to the language of kinship. What is interesting is that in spite of these differences, both texts seek to describe the cosmopolitan unity of the Roman oikoumenê in terms that balance the claims of ethnicity and culture in strikingly similar ways.

  THE PANATHENAICUS

  In language that closely echoes classical formulations of Athenian autochthony, Aristides declares that the genos of the Athenians, “arose from the pockets of the earth” (25); that, “it is given to you [Athenians] alone to boast of pure nobility of birth and citizenship (26–27). And in a passage that recalls Hierocles’s series of concentric circles but to opposite ends, Aristides deploys the image of a shield to describe the ways in which geography has guaranteed the absolutely unmixed and unadulterated character of the city:

  Alone she [Athens] has purely taken up the face of the Greeks and is the most ethnically distinct from the barbarians; for as removed as it is in the nature of the place, so far does it stand apart in the customs of its men. As if to the bearing of a shield all things Greek tend to this central land from every extreme and the encircling Greeks—some from the sea, others from the land—surround this land all on all sides as if it were the common hearth of the race. (13)

  Aristides’s insistence on t
he ethnic purity of the Athenians in this passage recalls not just Isocrates but a raft of late classical articulations of Athenian exceptionalism. Compare the Funeral Oration that Socrates attributes to Aspasia in Plato’s Menexenus, in which Aspasia claimed that to praise of the land of Attica is to praise the nobility of birth of her children the Athenians themselves. Aspasia locates the source of this Athenian exceptionalism in the autochthonous relationship that the first Athenians had with the soil; only the Athenians can call the earth mother—all other peoples live on the land as the foster-children of a stepmother.20

  It must be said that this very special praise of the city seems somewhat out of place in the world of the “culture Greeks” of the Second Sophistic. Indeed, pace Herodes Atticus, this ethnically pure center could boast very few native sons among the ranks of the celebrity sophists. And even though Aristides will engage in some special pleading for his native Ionia in another oration (On the Aegean Sea), the ethnic logic of the Panathenaicus seems stunted. That said, we must remember that in an important sense, Aristides was contending with a problem similar to the one that Isocrates had faced half a millennium before: how to accommodate the exceptional otherness of Athens in the context of an oration whose central conceit is the cause of Greek unity? For Isocrates, however, the problem was simpler because the world was larger: his ecumenical Hellenism needed to extend only as far as the Hellespont: as Julius Jüthner argued almost a century ago, Isocrates’s Greeks were those who possessed both Greek genos and Athenian paideia (Jüthner 1923). After all, the point of the oration was war with the barbarians. Aristides’s world, by contrast, was smaller and populated by Greek, Roman, and barbarian sophists from every corner of the Roman oikoumenê, and the vision of Greekness that Aristides articulated needed to be appropriately flexible.

  For Aristides, it is precisely the purity of the Athenian center that authorizes the diversity of the periphery; as it had for Isocrates, the genius of Athenian paideia flows up from the land to the Athenians and thence outward to the “Greeks”—but for Aristides, this paideia had longer and more diverse roads to travel. The question is, how to articulate the cosmopolitan unity of this cultural field in the traditional terms that Aristides had chosen? At least part of the answer lay in an act of rehabilitation of the status of Aspasia’s foster-children. In the Theaetetus, Aspasia casts the foster-parentage of the land as a mark of inferiority; those who dwell in their land as foster-children have no real connection to it. Aristides, however, rearranges the metaphor. In the first sentence of the oration he declares,

  There is an ancient custom among the Greeks, and I think among most of the barbarians as well, of rendering all of the gratitude one can to one’s foster-parents [tropheis]. And it would be difficult to find someone who would consider any to be foster-parents before yourselves, men of Athens—I mean someone who, indeed, considers himself to belong in some way to the Hellenes [δοκῶνγεδήπωςεἰς Ἕλληναςτελεῖν]. At least, that is how it appears to me. (Panath 1)

  As Plato’s Aspasia remarked, it is not the land underneath Thebes or Sparta that is the foster mother here but Athens herself. In contrast to Aspasia’s use of the image, for Aristides, Athens can be both mother to her own autochthonous children and foster mother to the entire oikoumenê, both Greek and barbarian. It is a striking cosmopolitan vision—one that simultaneously accommodates the claims of both ethnicity (for some) and culture (for all). Also striking is the rather odd periphrasis that Aristides uses to describe those “Greeks” who would identify themselves as the foster children of Athens: δοκῶνγεδήπωςεἰς Ἕλληναςτελεῖν. The particle δή, particularly when following verbs of cognition as here (δοκῶν), often denotes irony (Denniston 1934, 229–230, 244–246). In other words, the Greekness of at least some of Athens’s foster children is not entirely unproblematic. There are those of the periphery, Aristides seems to be saying, whose claims upon the center ought to be accepted with a certain amount of knowing complicity in a fiction. But complicity in an ethnic fiction—and biologically speaking, fictive kinship is precisely the point of foster parentage—does not deny the reality of the Greekness of these “culture Greeks”—a point that Aristides makes more explicit toward the end of the oration in the context of a passage about the universality of the Athenian dialect in the Roman Empire,

  You [Athenians] alone of men, have raised a bloodless trophy not over Boeotians or Lacedaimonians or Corinthians either but over all those of the same phulon; I say this, not as one might name Hellenes contrasting them with barbarians but with the common family of mankind.21

  This “bloodless” trophy, Aristides continues, celebrates the fact that “all the cities and all the ethnic groups of mankind have inclined toward you and your way of life and your language” (Panath. 225). It’s tempting to read “bloodless” as an intentional pun here. The trophy is “bloodless” insofar as it commemorates a cultural, rather than an ethnic unity—the various ethnic groups still exist as distinct entities but the cosmopolitan whole that they form fulfills the Aristotelian requirement that the whole be composed of parts that share some essential quality that makes them truly part of the whole. In the Panathenaicus, this quality is explicitly cultural rather than ethnic.

  In the Roman Oration, when Aristides came to articulate a cosmopolitan vision of the Roman world in the city of Rome itself, he used the language of ethnicity and culture in a very different way. The category of Romanness, as Aristides must have known well, had a long history of explicitly nonethnic and universalizing inclusivity; Livy’s Romulus had instructed his companions to persuade prospective in-laws of neighboring tribes that “men should not be reluctant to mix their blood and lineages with men”22—an episode Claudius referenced when attempting to shame the native Italian senate into accepting provincials from Gaul into their number, “so that men, not just one at a time, but as countries and peoples might grow strong under our name.”23 And so in the Roman Oration, it is perhaps unsurprising that there is no talk of an ethnically pure center. In fact, the manifest diversity of the imperial center (the city of Rome) models the integrated diversity of the empire itself. One can view the empire in microcosm by walking through the city of Rome, “the factory common to the whole earth . . . the cargoes from India and Arabia Felix” (12), the city is the place at which all the inhabitants of the oikoumenê, “assemble as at a common meeting place” (60) (see Edwards and Woolf 2003). This is not to say that Aristides abandons the vocabulary of ethnicity in this text; quite the opposite in fact—Aristides consistently returns to notions of kinship in his praise of the Roman Empire—but he does so in terms that are far more playful and metaphorical than praise of Athens would have allowed. While the Panathenaicus described a world in which a single ethnically pure polis lay at the center of a culturally unified world, the Roman Oration constructs a human space in which all participate equally in a common ethnic group. The central conceit of the Roman Oration is the idea that under Rome, the oikoumenê has become a single polis and that this polis in turn is so perfectly integrated that it functions as an oikos (28, 36). As we have seen, for Marcus Aurelius and the Stoics since Zeno, the cosmos is a polis; Aristides has enclosed the community into a still smaller space. Aristides has not attempted to collapse the rings, as Hierocles had. Rather, he asks his audience to imagine that the outermost ring—that of the oikoumenê—is organized according to the principles of the innermost circle—the oikos. Elsewhere in the oration, Aristides claims that the Romans have brought it about that the Romans have offered citizenship and kinship to all men of nobility throughout the entire oikoumenê. In a famous passage of the Republic which Aristides might well have known, Socrates explained the logic behind this conceit: the polis, Socrates argued in the fifth book, would function most harmoniously if its citizens considered themselves to be members of a single family—an idea that led Socrates to advocate the dissolution of the nuclear family and the communal possession of women. Aristides will adopt the metaphor
if not the radical social agenda.

  When Aristides articulates the metaphor more fully in the Roman Oration, he returns to the passage of the Panegyricus in which Isocrates had attempted to redefine the name “Hellene.” Aristides wrote,

  you [Romans] have brought it about that the name “Roman” refers not to a city, but to a sort of common ethnic group [genos]—and this ethnic group is not one among many, but a compensation for all other ethnic groups. For you do not divide the ethnic groups [genê] into Greek and barbarian . . . rather you have divided the ethnic groups into Romans and non-Romans. To such a degree have you expanded the name of your city.24

  Aristides’s reworking of the Isocratean passage is a brilliant synthesis of Greek ethnic particularism and Roman universalism: Isocrates claimed that the name Hellene no longer refers to a genos; Aristides, by contrast, has declared that the entire human race, under Rome, is properly considered a single genos. The distinction of Roman and non-Roman is precisely nonethnic but is rather a matter of citizenship that is, in theory, open to all. Aristides’s repeated use of the language of kinship in the Roman Oration is intended, it seems, to remind his listeners that the meaning of these sorts of terms and the obligations which they engender have been irrevocably altered by the fact that the boundaries of the Roman Empire and the edges of the oikoumenê are coterminous. Aristides declares, “conditions no longer differ from island to mainland, but all, as one continuous country and one people heed quietly” (Or. 30). The space of the oikoumenê is, moreover, as homogenous as a single polis: “the Red Sea and the cataracts of the Nile and Lake Maeotis, which formerly were said to lie on the boundaries of the earth are like the courtyard walls of your city” (28)—a fact that enables the Romans to administer the oikoumenê as if it were a single polis (36).