The Oxford Handbook of the Second Sophistic

by Daniel S. Richter

  SOPHISTS

  The shabby hirelings at Lucian’s dinner parties are the guests of honor in Philostratus’s Lives. We might expect Philostratus to have endowed his heroes with sex lives resembling Plato’s as represented by contemporary biography; surprisingly, not so, although almost all Philostratus’s sophists are surrounded by crowds of adoring fanboys who come, like the suitors in a fairy tale, from far and wide. The teacher-student relationship is sometimes figured as father-son, especially for Hadrian the Phoenician, who is loved by the young “as sons love a sweet and gentle [praios] father” (VS 587), and Hippodromus, who is “the father of Greek learning” (VS 617). This relationship shows up in one startlingly erotic story about Herodes and Favorinus: Herodes considers Favorinus his “teacher and father” and writes to him asking, “When will I see you and lick your mouth?” (VS 490: pote se idô kai pote sou perileixô to stoma). Herodes here puts himself in the first person into a famous line from Aristophanes (frg. 598 KA), quoted by Dio Chrysostom (52.17), in which some eloquent person “has licked the mouth of Sophocles, smeared with honey”; this image forms part of the Second Sophistic theme of the honey-sweet lips of Sophocles, seen also in the Imagines of the younger Philostratus (Telò 2005). Perhaps Herodes’s adaptation attests to a flamboyant style belonging to the reign of Hadrian and Pius; we have seen how Fronto and Marcus insert themselves into the Phaedrus: retrosexual self-aggrandizement, in both cases.22 Considering the number of anecdotes about Sophocles paiderastês in Athenaeus, we might see Herodes here as taking a daring step into the position of the erômenos; even more daring, considering contemporary descriptions of Favorinus’s freakish body (Gleason 1995, 7). Herodes’s Romanized ways appear incidentally in a story where he “very warmly greets” Polemon by embracing him and kissing him on the mouth (VS 537). Dio was Favorinus’s teacher (VS 490); Herodes, as well as Fronto, was Marcus’s teacher; Fronto, writing to Herodes, describes himself as Herodes’s anterastês, his rival for Marcus’s love, and again as loving (êrôn) his own teacher Athenodotus, who is elsewhere his “teacher and father” (M. Caes. 2.1.3, 4.12.2 magistro et parente). But we have only Philostratus’s word for what Herodes said to Favorinus.

  The Lives, with their emphasis on male relationships and descent lines, manifest more of a butch aesthetic than do texts from before the reign of Commodus. Although Philostratus addresses women as well as boys in his Love Letters, women in the Lives are few and despised. Philostratus writes to the empress Julia Domna as his patron in his Life of Apollonius, and addresses her as a well-educated literary critic in Letter 73 of the Love Letters (Goldhill 2009b, 303–305); by the time the Lives were written, in the reign of Gordian, she was long dead, leaving Philostratus free to express a virulent misogyny.

  WHAT CAME NEXT

  A similar misogyny was already playing out in the writings of Christian apologists taking their cue from Paul and Philo (Gaca 2003). Asceticism was in the air; Justin addressed Marcus on the low morals of the old gods, but Marcus’s own Meditations would express a thoroughgoing loathing for the carnal body (Perkins 1995; Richlin 2012). Under the Severans, Clement in Alexandria and Tertullian in Carthage, both trained in rhetoric, signposted the path to sex-for-procreation-only; anonymous Tours of Hell taught nascent congregations what penalties awaited the sinner; in Judaea, rabbis surrounded by their own fanboys began a long argument about sex (Boyarin 2003; Himmelfarb 1983; Jaffee 1998; Satlow 1995). Love poetry was about to disappear from view. Yet both Clement and Tertullian complained about the sexual “deviants” and brazen women they saw daily in the streets (Clement Paedagogus 3.3, Tertullian De Pallio 4.9; Upson-Saia 2011), and, at dinner parties like Gellius’s, the choirs of young slaves still sang sweetly the songs of Anacreon and Sappho.

  FURTHER READING

  Although texts from the Second Sophistic have played a large part in overviews of the ancient sex/gender system, no study has dealt comprehensively with the question of sexuality within this cultural formation; Goldhill 1995, concise and still compelling, comes closest. The reader is left to piece together a picture mostly from special studies. Among overviews, Kathy Gaca’s The Making of Fornication (2003), which traces ideas about sexuality from classical Greek philosophy through Paul and Philo to the Christian thinkers of the 100s CE, is unmatched for its scope and intellectual rigor. Michael Satlow’s sourcebook (1995) provides a useful, wide-ranging, and clearly organized introduction to rabbinic thought on sex; Thomas Hubbard’s sourcebook (2003) includes many texts from the period related to same-sex love. On medicine and technologies of the body, see Brooten 1996 (as related to lesbians), Flemming 2000 (gynecology), and Gleason 1995 (physiognomy). Studies focused on sexual subjects include Henry 1992 and McClure 2003 (courtesans in Athenaeus), my own translation of the Marcus-Fronto letters (2006b), and Williams 2010, which covers Roman male-male sex from Plautus to Augustine, organized thematically. On the Greek novel, a hotbed of sexual issues, see esp. Goldhill 1995, Konstan 1994, Morales 2008; on smaller-scale texts, see Bowie 1990 (lyric poetry), Floridi 2007 (Strato’s epigrams), Goldhill 2009b (Philostratus’s Love Letters), and Rosenmeyer 2001 (Greek fictional letters).

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