Not every community that sought membership was equally qualified, as we see from a fascinating, fragmentary letter of Hadrian to Cyrene adjudicating the relative statuses of Cyrene and another city in Cyrenaica (probably Ptolemais-Barca) within the Panhellenion. While both cities retained their membership, Hadrian apparently upheld differentiated voting rights within the organization. Cyrene was granted more votes on the grounds of her demonstrable descent from the recognized genealogy of Hellen, while the citizens of the other city were granted lesser rights on the grounds of being “authentic Greeks” who nevertheless lacked the ability to prove tighter criteria of descent.40 The surviving evidence for membership of the Panhellenion, in its geographical narrowness, reinforces this sense of competing contemporary notions of the criteria for Greekness.41
We can certainly see correspondence between the restrictive criteria for membership of the Panhellenion, with its basis in eugeneia, nobility of descent, and some of the discussions associated by Philostratus with members of the group he calls the “Second Sophistic,” involving the language of purity, including the notion of pure blood. Nevertheless, we should also think of the Panhellenion within a much broader context of ways of imagining groups in more restrictive terms based on descent, race and blood that extend far beyond the Greek polis. These more restrictive ways of configuring groups were superimposed on a broadly shared worldview that privileged genealogy as a means of explaining who everyone was. Networks formed by wandering gods and heroes crisscrossed the known world in antiquity.42 While the broad tendency was to write peoples in rather than out, thinking genealogically could be to express with some subtlety the relative place of different peoples in the world. Ancestral encounters that ran along a spectrum of returns to former kingdoms; couplings of heroes and mortals, including local princesses; and mere visits suggest the rich landscape of a “middle ground” and fused local mythologies together with more international ones.43 The language of heredity was both persistent and flexible in antiquity. By the fourth century BCE, the Greek noun genos could be extended to refer to a group whose members shared a profession or outlook, like philosophers, while in Roman society the high social value of continuing the traditions of ancestors was franchised out well beyond the immediate family, a “virtual heredity” that operated both on the individual level, through adoption or patronage, and on the level of the state, through the telling and display of exemplary individuals.44
We might usefully compare early imperial debates around the Roman citizenship with debates about exclusive and inclusive notions of Greekness around the Panhellenion. The retelling of myths such as Romulus’s asylum and the rape of the Sabine women projected the origins of a citizenship that had been vastly expanded in recent years back to Rome’s very beginnings, and social and ethnic plurality back to Romulus’s opening up of an asylum for newcomers, and cunning ruse to obtain wives for the Romans by snatching them from neighboring peoples. But the versions we have hint at anxieties and tensions around this very plurality and the potential ignobility of origins. In some versions, the tension hangs in the air, contributing potentially both to Rome’s future strength and her future weakness. In others, the details are sanitized, for example by excluding slaves from the asylum, or minimizing any hint of ethnic “mixing” in these early days. The myth of the asylum engages with the myth of Athenian autochthony, inviting comparisons as well as contrasts with the earthborn, indigenous Athenians.45 Emperors were praised for exercising caution in extending the citizenship, such as by paying attention to criteria such as the ability to speak Latin, and pilloried for broad and inappropriate extensions to “barbarians.”46 During the reign of Hadrian, Suetonius wrote of Augustus’s intentions in tightening up the conditions under which former slaves and foreigners were admitted to the Roman citizenship, to “keep the Roman people pure and unsullied by any mixing in of foreign and servile blood” (Aug. 40.3). The extension of the Roman citizenship strained to absurd extremes the ancient ideal of the community of citizens as a unit of being and belonging, which is perhaps precisely why we see so much insistence on Romanness expressed by Latin, togas, blood, and descent.47 In this context, it is perhaps less surprising that early Christians should have depicted themselves as “a new race,” the most obvious means available of writing a radical estrangement from customs, rituals, and allegiances that ought to line up with fatherland.48
THE SECOND SOPHISTIC: SOCIAL NETWORK?
Modern discussions of Second Sophistic identity tend to glide between at least three partially overlapping focuses of enquiry. The first is Philostratus’s own notion of the Second Sophistic, a group of individuals named in his Lives and fleshed out in his biographies. The second is broader socio-historical analysis of the correspondence between traits manifested in Philostratus’s account and the external record in a reasonably strict sense, including individuals self-identifying or referred to as sophists, intellectuals brokering relationships between local communities and the imperial court, a high premium placed on paideia as an exclusive quality of which sophists are exemplars, and participation in festivals and games that fostered literary and athletic competition. The final one is more narrowly literary, and involves identifying common traits identified with Second Sophistic writings in authors (and genres of literature) not included in Philostratus’s list.
Recent discussions of identity have tended to concentrate on the second and third focuses of enquiry, both of which raise questions about the exceptionalism of traits that have been associated with “Second Sophistic” writing or habitus, or indeed with the Greek-speaking world of the first to third centuries CE more generally. Leaving aside the “special relationship” with Greek that is indicated by linguistic appropriation and sponsorship, it is clear, for example, that writing complex selves is a phenomenon that runs through the Jewish Greek works of Philo and Josephus, Latin letter-writing and the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, not to speak of Augustine’s Confessions.49 While Greek culture and Greek pasts had a particular value within the Roman Empire, many other communities (especially those of the Near East and Italy, and even, to some extent, those of northern and western Europe) were able to capitalize on the distinctiveness and antiquity of their origins and pre-Roman histories, and many of these distinctive identities were evoked in similar ways in the international cultures of empire.50
The third focus of enquiry has the distinct advantage of engaging directly with the ancient processes of adjudicating on the membership of groups. Philostratus’s delineation of the “Second Sophistic” engages extensively both with traditional and contemporary ethnic and cultural discourses, but creates a group that consistently challenges norms about being and belonging. Thus, the group is characterized by debate rather than by consensus on whether or not one can become Greek, or the value and desirability of “pure” Attic. Representing the poles of the argument are freakish personifications; Favorinus, the hermaphrodite Gaul at one extreme, and “tall as a Celt” Agathion, who can detect the stench of impurity of milk milked by a woman, at the other extreme, the living paragon of the “pure” Atticism of the interior of Attica (VS 552–554). If the group cannot be classified by ethnic descent, it cannot be classified by domicile either, or by audience, or even by language. The group is studiedly international in terms of both origins and domicile, including Aelian, another master of the purest Atticism, “a Roman” who had never left Italy (VS 624). The best reach unexpectedly broad audiences, beyond fanatics of the Greek language, or even those who understand Greek (VS 491–492, 589). Philostratus’s group sets the agenda rather than following one, even and especially when it comes to crunch points like looking like a sophist or speaking “correctly.” Marcus of Byzantium appears to some, including Polemon, to be too “rustic” to be a sophist, and has a Doric accent, but is a master of the art of extemporizing (VS 529), while Philagrus, the most distinguished pupil of Herodes Atticus, lets slip a foreign word in anger but, when this is queried, claims it as his own neologism (VS 578–579). In terms
of imperial dynamics, they do not always know their place, confronting and quarreling with emperors, or not needing conventional patronage (e.g., VS 534–535, 582–583, 610, 614).
Philostratus is nevertheless determined to show that his “Second Sophistic” is a group, its membership controlled both through internal and authorial arbitration and by the big question about the value of kinship, the most conventional and traditional ancient language of identity, that runs through the work.51 The work is framed by questions about the value of genealogy from the beginning: Philostratus’s addressee, Gordian, is linked to Herodes Atticus, the central figure of the Lives, both by technê (“skill”/“training”) and by genos (“kin”) (VS 479–480). It is in fact unclear whether this Gordian was literally a relative of Herodes rather just than his pupil. This uncertainty is suggestive in the light of Philostratus’s tendency in the Lives to elide actual with virtual descent, as he weaves his web around Herodes Atticus at the center, reaching down all the way to “Philostratus.”52 It is at the programmatic beginning of the work too that Philostratus criticizes the principle of including everyone’s father rather than just illustrious ones, and without ascertaining the man’s “own virtues and vices, or what he got right and what he got wrong, either by fortune or by judgment” (VS 480), a wonderful compression of major ancient debates about how to account for success. Genealogical thinking perhaps also accounts for the puzzling beginning of the Second Sophistic, with its stray, fourth-century BCE founder, Aeschines, and its looping back to the “ancient” Sophistic of Gorgias, like several founding fathers punctuating the genealogy of a people or city with their “watershed” contributions.
When Philostratus highlights real descent, we can expect that this is doing work, as in the case of his emphasis on Herodes’s real family ancestry, and particularly his impeccable connection with old and new world powers, with the Aeacids, Miltiades and Cimon, and Roman “double consuls” (VS 546–547): for all the language of “virtual ancestry,” it was still hard to conceive of a central figure without a real ancestry. In the case of others, however, the value of real ancestry is questionable, as in the case of Polemon, whose actual descendants are all unworthy of the name, with the sole exception of his great-grandson Hermocrates (VS 544, cf. 609).53 At the same time, teacher-pupil relationships form branches of a virtual family tree, and these are invariably mentioned, sometimes explicitly as kinds of reproduction and heredity. Thus, for example, Herodes regards Favorinus as both a father and a teacher (VS 490), and also acknowledges Polemon as a father (VS 537), perhaps signaling in part his joint heredity, combining the shape-shifting, “culture Greek” qualities of Favorinus with the ultraconservative old school “purity” of Polemon. Herodes’s students in turn are chips off the old block or, in exact imagery, “slices” of their teacher, an apparent allusion to something that Aeschylus was supposed to have said about being a “slice” of Homer, reception and reproduction rolled into one (VS 574, with Civiletti 2012 ad loc.).
Drawing the boundaries of a group is in general extraordinarily complicated, and typically differs according to perspective and context, while the authority of different agents to police membership will vary.54 Modern attempts to reconstruct on more “objective grounds” the boundaries of a group are fraught with difficulty, as we can see from the variety of modern arguments about the ease or complexity of distinguishing between sophists and philosophers.55 Careful prosopographical reconstruction of biographies and networks from a variety of evidence is better at answering questions about who is included than about who is excluded.56 In terms of judging whether or not someone was a sophist, we might think of the different processes, agencies, and levels of stability involved in being judged to look like a sophist or a philosopher,57 being endorsed by other sophists (raising the immediate question of which other sophists),58 and being offered the chair of rhetoric in Athens or Rome, or granted tax breaks by the Roman emperor.
Philostratus’s view of who is “in” the specific sophistic circle of his Second Sophistic and who is “out” of it is deeply idiosyncratic, cutting across very different ideological positions, and counting individuals “in” or “out” in ways that contradict their own self-identification or the estimations of others.59 At the most immediate level, this suggests both the multiplicity and the inherent instability of intellectual groupings, not unlike the plurality of contemporary notions of Christianity and Judaism that is implied by the insistent line-drawing that we observe in contemporary writings.60 This also complicates notions of implied audience and might encourage us to imagine the possibility of audiences or fan bases for different authors or performers and different genres configured in numerous different ways.61 We might also want to zoom out from the boundary policing of contemporaries and observe the bigger picture that is suggested by all this energy: the proliferation in the Roman imperial period of means of self-identifying that are not based primarily on the realities of fatherland, family descent, or place of residence, but on profession (sometimes in a double sense of occupation and declaration of who one “really” is).
FURTHER READING
For aspects of “Greekness” in general, excellent places to start include: Hall 1989, 1997 and 2002; Malkin 2001; and Saïd 1991. For identity as a prime focus of enquiry into Greek literature and society of the first to the third centuries CE, see, e.g., Gleason 1995; Goldhill 2002; Swain 2007; Whitmarsh 2010, 2011; Woolf 1994. The focus of Eshleman 2012, on the formation of groups, is a very stimulating new approach to the Second Sophistic. For identity dynamics in the Roman Empire more generally, see e.g., Buell 2005, Dench 2005, Wallace-Hadrill 2008; Johnston 2017.
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The Oxford Handbook of the Second Sophistic Page 18
