The Oxford Handbook of the Second Sophistic
Page 17
This vivid passage zooms in on three outfits that symbolize power: the cloak worn by “Pericles,” stratēgos of fifth-century Athens, the crown and carefully arranged cloak of the contemporary occupant of the stratēgion, and the shoes worn, we must assume, by the Roman proconsular agent of Caesar who sits on the “platform,” the tribunal. Modern attempts to understand what Second Sophistic literary production and, in more recent years, habitus, is “about” in terms of power, culture and relative statuses of “Greeks” and “Romans,” have relied heavily on these stark oppositions of past autonomy versus the compromised present, and the vanity of the crown of local office versus shoes and tribunal of the Roman authorities.4 Interestingly, modern interpretations have often picked up the Loeb translator’s original translation of kaltioi (a Grecized form of the Latin calcei, blandly “shoes”) as “boots of Roman soldiers.”5 One way of encapsulating Roman rule, sitting in judgment, is replaced by another, that of military force, shifting the passage further along a scale that would reach its extremity in New Testament writings, some of the grittiest depictions we have of living with an alien force of occupation.6 The passage is important for classic arguments about the Second Sophistic as a retreat into the cultural kudos of the glorious Greek past, in response to the realities of Roman political power. Even in recent accounts that emphasize the performance and writing of Greekness and the political leverage of individuals associated with the Second Sophistic, the passage is quoted as a bottom-line reality check.7
This passage of Plutarch’s Precepts of Statecraft is perhaps so peculiarly seductive because it goes one further than the Horatian tag (quoted just as frequently in similar contexts), “Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit et artes / intulit agresti Latio” (“captured Greece took captive her uncivilized victor and brought arts to uncouth Latium”; Ep. 2.1.156–157), visualizing individuals rather than these more abstract personifications of “Greece” and “Latium.” Plutarch’s portrait of the crowned contemporary stratēgos who is counseled to look to the tribunal and the shoes above his head appears in the context of an unusual, idealized and philosophical vision of living a good political life that involves turning one’s back on the value system that made the Roman imperial world go round.8 Plutarch’s stark portrayal of the realities of power that lie behind the insignia separate out and assign to different ethnic or cultural groups the dual (or more) roles which a single individual might regularly perform.
The archaic and classical Greek world had long been fascinated by the possibility (and sometimes danger) of entering or appropriating “barbarian” zones, from the attractions of habrosyne (“delicacy”), or parasols and peacocks, to the institutions and monumental language of empire itself.9 Meanwhile, Athenian imperial ideology made Greekness a possession of the Athenians and themselves the prime exemplars of it.10 For the Ptolemies, the relocation of Greek cultural capital, and its canonization in the Museum of Alexandria, was as important as securing the body of Alexander and the claim to be sole heirs that this entailed. Tax registers from the Ptolemaic period reveal the existence of “Hellenes” who held a privileged tax status and who included Jews, individuals from Egyptian families, and teachers and doctors. A single individual might perform multiple roles, using different names (e.g., Egyptian and Greek) as appropriate to the particular context.11 In the Roman imperial world, such tendencies were exaggerated by the cooption of local elites and systems of rule, by the progressive extension of the Roman citizenship as a marker of favor and prestige, and by the appropriation and transformation of Greekness into a “high” culture of empire, of Greek as one of “our” two languages, and of Atticizing as an index of extreme refinement, policed in numerous different ways by various arbiters of class and distinction.12 It is this complex, elitist world that is evoked in Philostratus’s biographies in his Lives of the Sophists, with its protagonists’ standing measured by the prizes and esteem of a single network in which old centers of learning are intertwined with international cultural capitals, famous sophists combine impeccable Athenian pedigrees with those of the Roman nobility, and public intellectuals hover between being the darlings of the court and unworldly sages.
The trope of individuals dressing up in different costumes and thereby taking on different roles is a playful expression of the multiple zones that an individual might enter. In the earlier second century BCE, when two alternative models of expansionist power, kingship and the Roman Republic, were still in competition in the Mediterranean, the madness of Antiochus IV Epiphanes (also known as Epimanes) was allegedly evident from his habit of dressing up as a Roman magistrate, canvassing for office, and sitting in judgment. When Rome alone dominated the known world, Augustus’s insistence that the Greeks and the Romans in his party at Capri should swap clothing, togas for himatia, played up the availability of alternative registers between which aspirant Romans could code-switch.13 The representation/self-representation of individuals in multiple guises that is a striking feature of funerary monuments in the Roman Empire, such as the monument of Philopappus in Athens, appearing as both Athenian archon and Roman consul, is a graphic version of conceptualizing such zones as separable entities marked by different dress.14 Elsewhere, a single individual may be represented in such a way as to occupy both zones simultaneously, as in R. R. R. Smith’s study of the seemingly nonchalant second-century portraits of local dignitaries in Asia Minor, wearing ultratraditional civic dress of the polis, their international, and specifically Roman elite status signaled by the accessories of an imperial priest, or reference to senatorial relations.15 The deliberate shock value of Plutarch’s vignette of shoes and tribunal in the Precepts of Statecraft is brought out further by the studiedly broad horizons of the rest of the work, where the statesman is encouraged to think of Roman exemplars as often as he is to think of Greek ones.16
This passage of Plutarch’s Precepts of Statecraft is not, then, a bottom-line reality check of the kind that has often been imagined. Nevertheless, some evidence, particularly relating to Roman administration, might suggest the possibility that lines were drawn more firmly in certain contexts. In the first and fourth Cyrene edicts, Augustus gives judgments on the criteria for choosing “Greek” as opposed to “Roman” juries, while in the third he upholds the continued civic obligations of “Greeks with the Roman citizenship.” In a recently published letter from Hadrian to Aphrodisias, conditions are established for trials under Roman law versus trials under local law, depending on whether a “Greek” defendant is a citizen of Aphrodisias or another city. In these contexts, “Greek” is the default category for locals who do not hold the Roman citizenship: usage in a Roman administrative context does not contribute any particular baggage, unlike for example the Roman redeployment of formerly ethnic categories such as “Latin” or “Italic” in juridical contexts.17 The more deliberate process of assigning individuals to categories, especially through drawing provincial and tax boundaries, occurs rather in more localized contexts, although even in these cases imperial authority may not necessarily override completely older and alternative identification.18 We do of course have evidence of imperial value judgments about what it is to be Greek between the late Republic and the second century CE, such as Cicero’s letter to his brother Quintus reflecting on governing the province of Asia Minor, or Trajan’s infamous remark, about Graeculi (“Greeklings love gymnasia”) in his letter to Pliny about local ambitions in Nicaea. In these contexts, we are dealing with imperial attitudes, whose connection to action and categorizations that determine conditions are more nebulous and possibly more insidious.19
While the majority of scholarly energy in recent years has been directed toward the writing and performance of Greekness in first- to third-century CE Greek literature, it may have been the case that more “real world” energies were directed toward the identification of “Romans.” Such “Romans” were a significant minority presence across the Mediterranean world, shifting from being predominantly Italian and Roman businessmen and traders in the sec
ond to first centuries BCE toward an increasing number of local holders of the Roman citizenship together with imperial authorities between the first and third centuries CE.20 Two revealing examples that illustrate this phenomenon between the later Republic and the second century CE are the mass slaughter of Romans and Italians in 88 BCE on the orders of Mithridates, and Artemidorus’s association of a dream of decapitation with becoming a Roman citizen and dreaming of Pan in Roman dress with losing a case. These are salutary reminders of the disproportionate attention we pay to the identity games of a tiny minority of Greek speakers.21
A further blind spot is our very focus on “Greekness” and “Romanness,” encouraging us to overlook other means of self-identification and claiming prestige. These include the specificities of local community identities that regularly invoke “barbarian” pasts, including the ultraloyal Aphrodisias.22 Most famously, perhaps, Philopappus’s self-representation draws heavily on the prestige of being the heir of the (defunct) kingdom of Commagene, as well as being descended from Seleucus I. The radiate crown of Commagene that adorns his portrait as Roman consul reminds us of the various “active” potential sources from which power might be drawn down, including ones that were not sponsored by Rome.23
THE LIMITS OF CULTURAL PERFORMANCE?
Current discussions of “Greekness” tend to privilege ancient evidence that comes closest to late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century emphasis on, variously, cultural rather than biological difference, the social construction of identities, and the performance of selfhood.24 It is, then, the ironic “Greekness” of Favorinus that speaks most to us, one aspect of his defiance of categorization and essentialism: “although a Gaul he went Greek, although a eunuch he was tried for adultery, although he had quarreled with a king he was still alive” (VS 489; cf. Favorinus Cor. 22–36).25 The Greek novel has recently been read not so much as a search for salvation as it was a few decades ago, but as a journey of self-discovery, an exploration of Greekness and its limits.26 The gap between ancient notions of selfhood, and our own, with its basis in a rather different understanding of individualism and autonomy, is particularly due to be revisited within the next few years.27
Late twentieth-century studies of ethnicity and cultural identity were reacting in part to earlier scholarship that understood race or national identity as historical agents and explanatory frameworks. Traditional treatments might read ancient depictions of “barbarians” as statements about empirical reality, calculate “race mixture,” or identify discrete races on the grounds of cultural behavior (such as cremation versus burial of the dead), or on biological grounds (e.g., by the shape of skulls).28 To think instead of how material culture might reveal something of the symbolic systems used to articulate identity, or what might be at stake in the depiction of other peoples in classical texts, focusing on the mechanics and significance of representation and self-representation on the part of ancient peoples themselves, was revolutionary.29
Ancient strategies of self-representation and the relative placement of selves and other peoples included genealogies that underwrote networks within and well beyond the Mediterranean world, a fascination with bodily difference and how this came about (with explanations that might variously focus on things that happened at or before conception, during pregnancy, through the agency of the environment or via human intervention), and the language of blood, which might be said to be “pure” or “tainted.” This language can remind us uncomfortably of the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century discourse of race, although it actually comes a little closer to the less self-consciously “scientific” language of blood and descent of earlier centuries. Although the overlap is never very exact, the reminiscence is not coincidental: the reception of classical and biblical language in Western education informs many modern disciplines.30
Edith Hall’s classic exposé of fifth-century Athenian representations of the barbarian in tragedy, Inventing the Barbarian, engaged with these aspects of ancient ideology, but drew a firm line between the largely cultural criteria with which her study was predominantly concerned and the anachronistic modern concept of “racism.”31 Jonathan Hall’s Ethnic Identity in Greek Antiquity and his Hellenicity emphasized the importance of genealogy and notions of ethnic descent in conceptualizing Greekness, but only for the archaic period. While concepts of Greekness were genealogically based and “aggregative” in the archaic period, constructing descent lines from an original mythological ancestor, Hellen, the process shifted in the course of the fifth century, progressively emphasizing the distinction from “barbarians” on the basis of culture as opposed to ethnic descent.32 A famous passage of Isocrates’s Panegyric (50), where concerted, Panhellenic action is urged against the Persian barbarian under Athenian leadership, is read here and elsewhere as a turning point, a new consciousness of the possibility of Greekness as an acquired characteristic. Isocrates takes the sentiment that Thucydides had put into the mouth of Pericles in the Funeral Oration, proclaiming Athens as the paideusis, the “education” of Greece (2.41.1), but tips it over, so that sharing in paideusis rather than in physis (“nature”) becomes a criterion for a Greekness that is also envisaged as a “mindset” rather than a genos (“descent group”).33
Ethnic discourses are, of course, liable to shifts and changes in emphasis, even if there is often an investment in maintaining a sense of unchanging timelessness in the articulation of group identities. But we should err on the side of imagining a whole series of different dynamic, and sometimes very heated, conversations being conducted at any one time, of which we pick up only stray threads. In the case of Isocrates’s Panegyric, the inclusive definition of Greekness is a provocation, a statement about how things should be, rather than a description of how things are. Contemporary fifth- and fourth-century Athenian idealization of blood purity and legitimacy, including restrictive citizenship laws, marks the other extreme.34
We might well expect ideologies of Greekness as an acquired characteristic, based on culture rather than descent, to have been dominant in the mobile, multiethnic worlds of the Hellenistic kingdoms and Roman Empire, but descent- and genealogy-based criteria remained very much alive, creating and underwriting multiple networks of the Mediterranean and beyond. Such criteria were the prime basis for privilege and connection sought through “kinship diplomacy.” Examples of “kinship diplomacy” that survive in epigraphic texts and that can be reconstructed from literature, with their emphasis on descent from prestigious ancestors and links with other communities through ancestral family ties, suggest the vibrancy and multiple translocal focuses of the Hellenistic and Roman worlds. “Kinship diplomacy” is rarely aimed directly at the ruling power: there are few cases in which connections of kin are asserted by poleis or koina (“leagues”) with Hellenistic kings or the Roman people, underlining the preciousness of this commodity and allaying any lingering doubts about how meaningful such claims continued to be.35 Genealogical claims were regularly invoked in the competitions for privileges increasingly controlled by kings or emperors, such as rights of asylum or place in an imperially ordained hierarchy of cities. At the same time, they were also invoked in the creation and maintenance of more traditional intercity and intercommunity networks that had little or nothing to do with the big, centralizing powers and that persisted throughout the Roman Empire. It should be emphasized that the appeals to antiquity and distinctiveness that are so characteristic of genealogical competitions and networking generally do not invoke Greekness, presumably because one could generally do better both on the distinctiveness and on the antiquity fronts by claiming pre-Greek origins.36
Perhaps precisely because Greekness per se could be so widely claimed in the Roman Empire, we find an intensification of qualifying adjectives and more precise criteria during the second century CE, including the vocabulary of “purity” with reference to language, physiognomy, and blood.37 This is one of a number of attempts to give shape to a changing world. It coexists with the cosmopolitanism of the early c
enturies CE that is ultimately just as ethnocentric as this language of exclusivism, even while it minimizes boundaries.38 Favorinus’s scorn for autochthony as a quality boasted about, when in fact the lowliest creatures, such as mice, partake in it (Cor. 27), is in all likelihood doing more than simply resurrecting fifth-century Athenian preoccupations: the contemporary debate seems to have been very much alive.39
Contemporary concern with exclusivity runs through documentation relating to membership of the Hadrianic Panhellenion, a particularly elite variety of religious league founded in 131–132 and centered on Athens and the imperial cult. It is unclear whether the initiative for the Panhellenion came from a core group of Greek cities or from Hadrian himself, but the enterprise reflects a contemporary focus on Panhellenic sentiment and the revival and “refoundation” of Athens as a cultural and international capital, including extensive benefactions on the part of the emperor himself. Surviving documentation relating to the Panhellenion reveals the importance of proofs of Greekness for communities seeking to qualify for membership. Being able to prove genealogical descent from a “core” Greek city or ethnos was all important, as it had been for centuries as a qualification for entry to Panhellenic games. The emperor’s key role in arbitrating over the criteria for membership of this flagship of Greekness, also revealed in this documentation, is an excellent example of the manner in which imperial authority could underwrite local and translocal identities, an aspect that is sometimes overlooked in our preoccupation with identity as performance.