The Oxford Handbook of the Second Sophistic

by Daniel S. Richter

  THE EXILES

  Oh fatherland, oh home,

  may I never be without a polis

  . . .

  Of troubles, there is none greater than

  being deprived of one’s native land.25

  The chorus of Euripides’s Medea cannot imagine a fate worse than exile. To be without a polis, to be without a patris, is to lack an essential defining feature of what makes us human—a point shared by many ancient thinkers, perhaps most famously by Aristotle whose dictum, “a human being is a polis animal,” has had long innings in ancient and modern political thought (Pol. 1253a). And yet, the trope of the wanderer whose wisdom is found at the edges of the earth (Odysseus) and the philosophical exile who apprehends truth in solitude appears early in the Greek tradition, particularly among the Cynics. In response to the man who reproached him with his exile, Diogenes responded, “but it was because of it that I became a philosopher” (Diog. Laert. 6.49). Cynic exile, however, is a negative ideal; the wise man cuts his ties with the dross of the world of men. By contrast, there existed a tradition of a more positive ideal of exile, associated particularly with certain Stoic philosophers: if the Cynic rejected the ties of the polis, the Stoic wise man aspired to become a Cosmopolitês—a citizen of the cosmic polis. We have seen that for Marcus Aurelius and other Stoic thinkers, the logical consequence of the universal kinship of the human race was a cosmos that was itself a polis—an idea that Aelius Aristides worked out in explicitly political terms in both the Panathenaicus and the Roman Oration. In this last section, I want to think about the ways in which certain early imperial intellectuals articulated the classical trope of exile as a further way of articulating a cosmopolitan worldview.

  Exilic literature largely breaks down into the two categories of lament (e.g., Ovid, Cicero) and consolation of self and others (e.g., Epictetus, Plutarch, Favorinus, Musonius Rufus)—although certain authors such as Cicero vacillate between the modes in their exilic writings (Claassen 1999; Whitmarsh 2001). The consolatory exilic literature of the early imperial period is largely a Stoic affair and proceeds naturally from Stoic cosmopolitan visions of the oikoumenê as a polis. Epictetus, for example, reminds those forced to leave their homes, families, and native cities that the philosophers teach that, “the cosmos is a single polis and essence” (Diss. 3.24.10); Epictetus returns to the social function of oikeiôsis and teaches that human beings are “naturally disposed to be of one household” (Diss. 3.24.11). Zeus, the common father of all men, rules over the human race as a single polis and so takes care of all human beings as his own “citizens” (politai) (Diss. 3.24.19). To limit the scope of one’s affections and responsibilities to one single corner of the earth is contrary to reason—“we are not rooted in the earth,” Epictetus taught (Diss. 3.24.12).26 Elsewhere, in a discourse about the things that wise men ought not to fear, Epictetus points out that since one may practice virtue everywhere, there is no place on earth where the wise man cannot be happy—a sentiment echoed by Apollonius of Tyana, who remarks to his companion Damis that the wise man must always comport himself nobly wherever he might be since, “for the wise man, Greece is everywhere” (σοφῷ ἀνδρὶ Ἑλλὰςπάντα) (V A 1.35).

  Musonius Rufus, Dio Chrysostom, Favorinus, and Plutarch all develop these sorts of tropes in their own exilic writings.27 The fact that Musonius, Dio, and (possibly) Favorinus were echte exiles and that Plutarch’s treatise seems to be addressed to one speaks to the implications for practical ethics of Stoic oikeiôsis.28 In his On Exile, a treatise that takes the form of a consolatory epistle to an unnamed exiled citizen of Sardis, Plutarch, much like the Stoics (with whom Plutarch generally had little affinity) argues from nature: Plutarch reminds his friend that a fatherland (patris) is a matter of convention rather than nature and that because the entire earth is a single fatherland, “there is no exile, foreigner or alien” (601a). In an echo of Marcus Aurelius’s formulation of a common nomos for the entire human race, Plutarch declares that since justice (Dikê) is from Zeus, it is likewise according to nature that “all human beings make use of it towards all other human beings as towards fellow citizens” (601b).29

  Plutarch’s friend Favorinus of Arelate30 wrote an ostensibly autobiographical On Exile in which he seeks to refute the opinion of the many that exile is a great evil.31 Like Plutarch, Favorinus argues that the idea of a fatherland is an illusion: “it is nothing more than the land in which my forbears settled or resided” (10.1). All men are descended from colonists, travelers, or exiles, Favorinus explains—a position particularly congenial to a man like Favorinus, whose public persona was very much that of a traveler, an ethnic outsider and acculturated insider who prided himself on his ability to adapt himself to a variety of cultural codes (Gleason 1995, 3–20; König 2001; Richter 2011, 142–143). After all, the third of the three paradoxes that Favorinus was said to use of himself was that, “although a Gaul, he acted as a Greek” (Γαλατὴς ὦν ἑλληνίζειν) (Philostr. VS 489]. Those who claim to be autochthonous are merely boasting, since only mice and “other more insignificant animals are born in the earth” (10.4). In a particularly interesting passage, Favorinus reflects on the misguided human preoccupation with divisions:

  They separate Asia, Europe, and Libya form one another with rivers; neighboring peoples with mountains; local inhabitants with city walls; fellow citizens with houses; cohabitants with doors; and even those who share the same ceiling with coffers and boxes. This is the reason for wars. (11.3)

  For Favorinus, Plutarch, Dio, Musonius, and Epictetus, exile forces the wise man to confront the natural unity of the oikoumenê and his proper place in it. The philosophical approach to exile begins with the premise that the cosmos is a unified whole and that all forms of localism are ethically suspect and logically untenable.

  CONCLUSION

  Socrates was asked where he came from. He replied, “not Athens, but the world.” He, whose imagination was fuller and more extensive, embraced the universe as his city and distributed his knowledge, his company and his affections to all mankind, unlike we who look at only what is underfoot.

  So Michel de Montaigne in The Education of Children foisted upon Socrates perhaps the most famous thing the Athenian philosopher never said, at least not in the extant dialogues of Plato. Montaigne, however, ought to be forgiven—he was, after all, following such eminent early imperial authorities as Cicero, Plutarch, and Epictetus, each of whom attributed to Socrates some version of this cosmopolitan sentiment. Nevertheless, it’s ironic that Socrates, of all classical Athenian intellectuals, should have been made to voice a view so manifestly at odds with the rather parochial attitudes that his student Plato had him espouse. In the Theaetetus, for example, Socrates informs the enthusiastically Libyan geometer Theodorus that he has no interest in the youth of Cyrene, since Socrates, “loves those men over there less than those right here (in Athens).” Plato’s Socrates is very much a citizen of Athens—not of the world—a point to which Socrates returned in the Apology, where he observed that it is the philosophical training of the “locals” (astoi) that concerns him, not the virtue of “foreigners” (xenoi), “since you locals are closer to me with respect to descent [genos].” Socrates was no traveler; death was preferable to exile.

  Socrates Cosmopolitês was the creation of a later age, one in which the Socrates of Plato and Xenophon had to compete with the mythic martyr or founder of the philosophios bios—an exemplar who, over time, was coopted by various schools and compelled to take responsibility for a host of often mutually contradictory ideas. That the early imperial Socrates emerged as a cosmopolitan figure—against the evidence of the dialogues—is unsurprising, given the myriad ways in which cosmopolitan thought influenced postclassical ideas about the nature of the oikoumenê (inhabited world) and the place of the enlightened pepaideumenos within it. I have sketched here the contours of early imperial cosmopolitan thought in the writing of several authors of the Second Sophistic and I have suggested that many of these
intellectuals looked to late classical Athens for models and a conceptual vocabulary with which to describe their own early imperial Roman world. In particular, early imperial intellectuals found in late classical Athenian discussions about the nature of the polis a potent analog with which to explore the fluidity and confusion of boundaries in their own imperial present.

  FURTHER READING

  For an overview of the major trends of cosmopolitan thought in Greek antiquity, see Baldry 1965. Richter 2011 is an account of late classical Athenian and early imperial formulations of the unity of the human community. For Stoic cosmopolitan ethics, see the very different perspectives of Schofield 1991 and Vogt 2008. Of particular historiographical interest is Badian’s 1958 critique of Tarn’s 1933 hagiographic portrait of “Alexander the Dreamer,” published one year after Tarn’s death. Dench 2005 is an excellent account of Roman formulations of the nature of the unity of the inhabited world. Appiah 2006, Balibar 2004, Nussbaum 2008, and Singer 2002 provide good introductions to contemporary debates about globalism and cosmopolitan ethics.

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Ackerman, B. 1994. “Rooted Cosmopolitanism.” Ethics 104: 516–535.

  Appiah, K. A. 2005. The Ethics of Identity. Princeton, NJ.

  Appiah, K. A. 2006. Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. New York.

  Asmis, E. 1989. “The Stoicism of Marcus Aurelius.” ANRW 2.36.3: 2228–2252.

  Badian, E. 1958. “Alexander the Great and the Unity of Mankind.” Hist. 7, no. 4: 425–444.

  Baldry, H. C. 1965. The Unity of Mankind in Greek Thought. Cambridge.

  Balibar, E. 2004. We the People of Europe: Reflections on Transnational Citizenship. Translated by J. Swenson. Princeton, NJ.

  Barigazzi, A. 1966. Favorino di Arelate, Opere: Introduzione, testo critico e commento. Florence.

  Barth. F., ed. 1969. Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organization of Cultural Difference. Oslo.

  Bastianani, G., and A. A. Long. 1992. Corpus dei papiri filosofici Greci e Latini. Florence.

  Behr, C. 1981. Aelius Aristides: The Complete Works. Leiden.

  Claassen, J.-M. 1999. Displaced Persons: The Literature of Exile from Cicero to Boethius. Madison, WI, and London.

  Cohen, E. E. 2000. The Athenian Nation. Princeton, NJ.

  Dench, E. 1995. From Barbarians to New Men: Greek, Roman, and Modern Perceptions of Peoples from the Central Apennines. Oxford.

  Dench, E. 2005. Romulus’ Asylum: Roman Identities from the Age of Alexander to the Age of Hadrian. Oxford.

  Denniston, J. D. 1934. The Greek Particles. Oxford.

  Droysen, J. G. 1877. Geschichte Alexander des Grossens. 2nd ed. Gotha.

  Edwards, C., and G. Woolf. 2003. “Cosmopolis: Rome as World City.” In Rome the Cosmopolis, edited by C. Edwards and G. Woolf, 1–20. Cambridge.

  Engberg-Pedersen, T. 2000. Paul and the Stoics. Edinburgh.

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  Gleason, M. W. 1995. Making Men: Sophists and Self-Presentation in Ancient Rome. Princeton, NJ.

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  Inwood, B. 1985. Ethics and Human Action in Early Stoicism. Oxford.

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  König, J. 2001. “Favorinus’ Corinthian Oration in its Corinthian Context.” PCPS 47: 141–171.

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  Nussbaum, M. 1996. For Love of Country? Boston.

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  CHAPTER 7

  ETHNICITY, CULTURE, AND IDENTITY

  EMMA DENCH

  ENGAGEMENT with issues of identity might not quite be the defining feature of Second Sophistic literature for modern scholars, but it has been undoubtedly one of the more appealing aspects in recent years. Three partially overlapping areas have proved to be particularly fascinating to our postmodern sensibilities. The first is Greekness: the residual allure of Greek primacy, and the trajectory of nations that underpin our discipline, were overlaid, in more recent years, by the intriguing power dynamics of colonialism.1 The second is the bold and quirky performance of selfhood that disrupts ancient expectations that language, appearance, religious allegiances, and behavior should line up neatly with homeland.2 The third is the kind of protoglobalization engendered by the Roman Empire, whether envisaged as the degree to which (at least in theory) inhabitants experienced and enacted the empire as a single world in terms of value systems and commodity exchange, as the internationalism of the elite, or as the interconnection of microworlds within broader networks.3

  In this chapter, I explore three different ways in which identities were articulated in Greek literature of the first to third centuries CE: the separation out of traits and costumes into distinct personae, including “Greek” and “Roman” figures; a contrasting insistence on “essen
tialist” criteria for membership of groups that include descent and the vocabulary of “purity”; finally, Philostratus’s “Second Sophistic” as a case study of the processes of making and writing groups. Throughout this discussion, I scrutinize our tendency to exaggerate some aspects of identity articulation and to overlook others, and I question the exceptionalism of certain traits such as a preoccupation with the past, and the performance of complex identities associated with the Second Sophistic, setting such traits within a Roman imperial context that is broader in both time (between the later Republic and the second century CE) and space (beyond the Greek-speaking world of the eastern Mediterranean).

  PERSONAE

  In a frequently cited passage of Plutarch’s Precepts of Statecraft, “Plutarch” addresses “Menemachus” as follows:

  And when entering upon any office whatsoever, you must not only call to mind those considerations of which Pericles reminded himself when he assumed the cloak of a general: “Take care, Pericles; you are ruling free men, you are ruling Greeks, Athenian citizens,” but you must also say to yourself: “You who rule are a subject, ruling a State controlled by proconsuls, the agents of Caesar; ‘these are not the spearmen of the plain,’ nor is this ancient Sardis, nor the famed Lydian power.” You should arrange your cloak more carefully and from the generals’ headquarters keep your eyes upon the platform, and not have great pride or confidence in your crown, since you see the shoes [kaltious; cf. Latin calceos] just above your head. (Prae. ger. reip. 813d–e, trans. Fowler 1936 with adaptations)