The Oxford Handbook of the Second Sophistic

by Daniel S. Richter

  CONCLUSION

  Even if the education offered by schools during the period of the Second Sophistic did not differ markedly from that of the preceding or following centuries, the relationship between schools and wider society was particular. Beyond the small differences of approach or style noted by Philostratus and satirized by Lucian, the training offered by the schools was essentially uniform: only Sextus Empiricus challenged the principles on which it was based, others simply offered variations. This meant that pepaideumenoi from any area where Greek was known, from Gaul to Samosata, shared a common culture that transcended geographical and ethnic boundaries: an educated Roman like Aelian, who had never even left Italy, could be praised for his mastery of Attic and counted among Philostratus’s Sophists (VS 624–625; Whitmarsh 2001, 116–129). At the same time, it reinforced social distinctions: these educated non-Greeks were more “Hellenic” than a koinê-speaking craftsman (Paideia in Lucian’s Dream [13] intimates that the artisan does not even deserve to be considered a free man). As we have seen, the expense of education, particularly when travel was involved, made it the preserve of the few and an ostentatious sign of wealth and leisure (scholê). At the same time, schools do seem to have offered some opportunities for a tiny minority, like Lucian himself, to achieve a degree of both cultural and social mobility. At a more humble level, Aelius Aristides (Or. 32.10) claims that the grammarian Alexander of Cotiaion made a point of finding jobs for students who did not have the necessary contacts. As Tim Whitmarsh (2001, 129–130) has pointed out, the possibility of mobility was inherent in the role of education in shaping elite identity and clearly caused some degree of anxiety, as evidenced by the hostility with which outsiders could be viewed. This same anxiety may help to explain why the role of the schools is elided by Philostratus in favor of a more personal, aristocratic (and, in the case of Agathion, autochthonous) vision of the source of paideia.

  A final question is that of the function of imperial Greek education, beyond the acquisition of the trappings of elite Hellenic culture. Malcolm Heath (2004) has shown that, in the ancient context, the skills acquired through declamation could have practical applications in courtrooms and we know that Philostratus’s sophists were involved in pleading cases. The displays of professional sophists may have pushed the mechanics of rhetorical training to the point where they became performances of the performance of rhetoric (as well as of status and Hellenism), but the standard training of the schools could impart skills in analysis, close reading (in order to find the flaws in a narrative for the exercise of refutation), and exposition. Equally, if not more, importantly, the practice of debating for and against the same point, whether in confirmation and refutation, praise and blame or thesis, not only developed the ability to foresee and forestall an opponent’s arguments but also encouraged the intellectual flexibility necessary to see other points of view (Danblon 2013, 127–148; cf. Heath 2007, 16–17) as well as an acute awareness of persona, all of which could be seen as hallmarks of Second Sophistic writers such as Lucian and Philostratus himself.

  FURTHER READING

  A great deal of light has been shed on the methods used in teaching language and literature by the work of Teresa Morgan and Rafaella Cribiore. The latter’s book on Libanius’s school is particularly valuable for the detailed information it draws from Libanius’s copious writings on the running of a school and the relationships between teacher and pupil. It is impossible to know how representative Libanius’s fourth-century school was of earlier practices but it is the best-documented example. Another valuable source of information on the methods used in rhetorical training is represented by the Greek rhetorical manuals of the imperial period. Many of these are now accessible in new editions and translations. The various versions of the Progymnasmata are available in English in Kennedy 2003 and in new editions with facing translation and commentary in Patillon and Bolognesi 1997 (Theon) and Patillon 2008 (Aphthonius and Ps.-Hermogenes). Libanius’s own examples of the Progymnasmata exercises have been translated by Gibson 2008. Russell 1983 provides an accessible introduction to the complexities of declamation. Hermogenes’s treatise on status theory has been translated and elucidated by Heath 1995 and Patillon 2009. The latter’s Corpus Rhetoricum also includes texts, translations, and very detailed commentaries to several other important rhetorical treatises. The ideology behind the education dispensed in schools of the period and the sociological implications of the organization and content of elite education have also received much attention, notably in Schmitz 1997 and Swain 1996, the latter making use of the theories of Bourdieu, Whitmarsh 1998 (focusing on the figure of Dio Chrysostom) and 2001, and Connolly 2001. The organization and nature of philosophical training from the second century onward are explored in Watts 2006.

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Auger, D., C. Bréchet, M. Casevitz, S. Minon, E. Oudot, and R. Webb, trans. 2012. Ilion n’a pas été prise: Dion de Pruse, Discours “Troyen” 11. Paris.

  Bloomer, W. M. 2011. “Quintilian on the Child as a Learning Subject.” CW 105: 109–137.

  Bowie, E. L. 1994. “The Readership of Greek Novels in the Ancient World.” In The Search for the Ancient Novel, edited by J. Tatum, 435–459. Baltimore, MD.

  Chiron, P. 2013. “Imiter, modeler, trouver, créer . . . : Métaphores et conceptions de la fiction dans les Progymnasmata d’Aelius Théon.” In Théories et pratiques de la fiction à l’époque impériale, edited by C. Bréchet, A. Videau, and R. Webb, 37–47. Paris.

  Connolly, J. 2001. “The Problems of the Past in Imperial Greek Education.” In Education in Greek and Roman Antiquity, edited by Y.-L. Too, 339–372. Leiden.

  Cribiore, R. 2001. Gymnastics of the Mind: Greek Education in Hellenistic and Roman Egypt. Princeton, NJ.

  Cribiore, R. 2007. The School of Libanius in Late Antique Antioch. Princeton, NJ.

  Danblon, E. 2013. L’Homme rhétorique: Culture, raison, action. Paris.

  Eshleman, K. 2008. “Defining the Circle of Sophists: Philostratus and the Construction of the Second Sophistic.” CPhil. 103: 395–413.

  Gibson, C. 2004. “Learning Greek History in the Ancient Classroom: The Evidence of the Progymnasmata.” CPhil. 99: 103–129.

  Gibson, C. 2008. Libanius’s Progymnasmata: Model Exercises in Greek Prose Composition and Rhetoric. Atlanta, GA.

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

  Hall, E. 2013. Adventures with Iphigeneia in Tauris: A Cultural History of Euripides’ Black Sea Tragedy. Oxford.

  Harris, W. 1989. Ancient Literacy. Cambridge, MA.

  Heath, M. 1995. Hermogenes “On Issues”: Strategies of Argument in Later Greek Rhetoric. Oxford.

  Heath, M. 2004. “Practical Advocacy in Roman Egypt.” In Oratory in Action, edited by M. J. Edwards and C. Reid, 62–82. Manchester.

  Heath, M. 2007. “Teaching Rhetorical Argument Today.” In Logos: Rational Argument in Classical Rhetoric, edited by J. G. F. Powell, 105–122. BICS Supplement 96. London.

  Hock, R. F., and E. N. O’Neil. (1986) 2002. The Chreia in Ancient Rhetoric. 2 vols. Atlanta, GA.

  Johnson, W. A. 2010. Readers and Reading Culture in the High Roman Empire: A Study of Elite Communities. Oxford and New York.

  Joyal, M., I. McDougall, and J. C. Yardley. 2009. Greek and Roman Education: A Sourcebook. London and New York.

  Kennedy, G. A., trans. 2003. Progymnasmata: Greek Textbooks of Prose Composition and Rhetoric. Atlanta, GA.

  Kim, L. 2010. Homer between History and Fiction in Imperial Greek Literature. Cambridge.

  Kleijwegt, M. 1991. Ancient Youth: The Ambiguity of Youth and the Absence of Adolescence in Greco-roman Society. Amsterdam.

  Lalanne, S. 2006. Une éducation grecque: Rites de passage et construction des genres dans le roman grec ancien. Paris.

  Marrou, H.-I. 1956. A History of Education in Antiquity. Madison, WI.

  Morgan, T. 1998. Literate Education in the Hellenistic and Roman Worlds. Cambridge.

/>   Morgan, T. 2007. “Rhetoric and Education.” In A Companion to Greek Rhetoric, edited by I. Worthington, 303–319. Malden, MA, and Oxford.

  Patillon, M., ed. and trans. 2008. Corpus Rhetoricum 1. Paris.

  Patillon, M., ed. and trans. 2009. Corpus Rhetoricum 2. Paris.

  Patillon, M., and G. Bolognesi, ed. and trans. 1997. Theon, Progymnasmata. Paris.

  Penella, R. J. 2011. “The Progymnasmata in Imperial Greek Education.” CW 105: 77–90.

  Puech, B. 2002. Orateurs et sophistes grecs dans les inscriptions d’époque impériale. Paris.

  Romm, J. 1990. “Wax, Stone, and Promethean Clay: Lucian as Plastic Artist.” CA 1: 74–98.

  Russell, D. A. 1983. Greek Declamation. Cambridge.

  Schmitz, T. A. 1997. Bildung und Macht: Zur sozialen und politischen Funktion der zweiten Sophistik in der griechischen Welt der Kaiserzeit. Zetemata 97. Munich.

  Swain, S. 1996. Hellenism and Empire: Language, Classicism, and Power in the Greek World, 50–250,AD. Oxford.

  Watts, E. J. 2006. City and School in Late Antique Athens and Alexandria. Berkeley, CA.

  Webb, R. 2001. “The Progymnasmata as Practice.” In Education in Greek and Roman Antiquity, edited by Y. L. Too, 289–316. Leiden.

  Webb, R. 2006. “Fiction, Mimesis and the Performance of the Greek Past in the Second Sophistic.” In Greek on Greekness: Viewing the Greek Past under the Roman Empire, edited by D. Konstan and S. Saïd, 27–46. Cambridge.

  Webb, R. 2009. Ekphrasis, Imagination and Persuasion in Ancient Rhetorical Theory and Practice. Farnham.

  Webb, R. 2011. “Between Poetry and Rhetoric: Libanios’ Use of Poetic Themes in His Progymnasmata.” Quaderni Urbinati di Cultura Classica NS 95: 131–152.

  Whitmarsh, T. 1998. “Reading Power in Roman Greece: The Paideia of Dio Chrysostom.” In Pedagogy and Power: Rhetorics of Classical Learning, edited by Y. L. Too and N. Livingstone, 192–213. Cambridge.

  Whitmarsh, T. 2001. Greek Literature and the Roman Empire: The Politics of Imitation. Oxford.

  CHAPTER 10

  ATHLETES AND TRAINERS

  JASON KÖNIG

  THE late first to mid-third centuries CE saw not only an intensification of interest in prose writing and display oratory in the Greek east, but also renewed prominence for athletic activity. Moreover, the literary and athletic spheres had a remarkable amount of common ground, even if their relationship was also often marked by rivalry and mutual criticism. My primary aim in this chapter is to sketch out some of the most important elements of that relationship, and in the process to illustrate some of the ways in which athletic skill could in itself be presented as a form of paideia (“learning,” “education,” “erudition”), or at any rate an attribute dependent upon or linked with paideia. I look first at day-to-day training in the gymnasium, focusing particularly on the use of athletics in the education of young men of the Greek elite. I then turn to the athletic contests which flourished at festivals across the Mediterranean world and to the professional athletes who flocked to them. Finally, I look at a series of attempts by imperial Greek authors to redefine athletic training in line with their own intellectual priorities.

  For the most part there was a fairly clear distinction between those who underwent gymnasium training in educational contests (the focus of my first main section) and professional athletes who competed at a much higher level, and very lucratively, in festival contests (the focus of the second). However, I should stress that I do not mean to imply a completely solid dividing line between the two groups. Some of those undergoing a gymnasium education would have competed in the festivals of their home cities, or even, in promising cases, competed in the boys’ category at more high-profile festivals. Some of these must then have used that experience as a launch-pad for full-time careers touring around the many hundreds of athletic festivals which were spread across the Mediterranean world by the Roman period. The majority of athletic trainers were probably employed as gymnasium educators, whereas those who specialized in training adult athletes for professional competition would presumably have been in the minority. Once again, however, we should not imagine a clear dividing line: presumably many individuals would have moved from one category to the other during their careers; we also have evidence for trainers linked with the gymnasium accompanying particularly promising young athletes to festivals. Nevertheless, the cultures of gymnasium and festival were in some ways quite distinct from each other, and linked with literary and rhetorical paideia in rather different ways, hence my decision to deal with them separately here.

  GYMNASIA

  Education in the gymnasium was often taken as a sign of high social status. Young men were trained first in the junior age range, as paides (“boys”), and then in their late teens as “ephebes.” This latter institution in particular, the ephebeia, was a standard feature of civic life across the Greek-speaking world from the early Hellenistic period and on into the Roman world. Many ephebes clearly came from wealthy, well-educated families: participation in athletic training seems to have been viewed, along with basic literary and rhetorical education, as one of the accomplishments a young man required in order to take his place in the day-to-day elite life of the Greek city. That had been the case in classical Greece too, even well before the formalization of the ephebic system:1 Plato’s stress on the importance of balancing physical and intellectual education (although he is also critical of athletes and athletics in some parts of his work) draws on and reshapes attitudes which were widespread among his contemporaries.2

  Not only that, but there is also a great deal of evidence to suggest that a gymnasium education could itself include elements of rhetorical and literary training.3 Vitruvius, writing in roughly 30 BCE, makes space at least for informal displays of learning in his description of the standard architectural pattern of a palaestra: “In three of the colonnades spacious exedrae [i.e., recesses for sitting] should be set up, with seats on which philosophers and rhetoricians and others who take pleasure in studies can sit and debate their subjects” (De arch. 5.11.2) That detail is not just an idealizing nod towards the Socratic image of philosophical talk in the gymnasium, inherited from Plato’s Lysis and other dialogues. It is also supported by archaeological evidence for specific gymnasium buildings: a good example is the so-called East-Bath Gymnasium in Ephesus, which seems to have included a room with rows of seating, apparently intended as a lecture theater of some sort.4 It was also common for gymnasia to contain libraries.5 In addition, we have numerous examples of grammarians employed as gymnasium staff members (although the bulk of evidence for that comes from the Hellenistic period, because of the decline in habits of writing up records of students and staff in most cities in the Roman period).6 Many inscriptions record lectures given by learned visiting speakers. For example, a gymnasiarch (benefactor and head of the gymnasium—a yearly appointment) from the city of Erythrai in Asia Minor is praised, in an inscription dating from roughly 100 BCE, among other things for having provided “at his own expense a teacher of rhetoric and a weapons instructor, who gave classes in the gymnasium for the paides and the ephebes and for anyone else who wants to benefit from such things.”7 In addition to the common sporting components in the end-of-year ephebic contests held in the gymnasium, there are numerous examples of competitions in literary subjects. For example, in an inscription set up to record the activities of the Athenian ephebeia, dating from the late second century CE, we read the following: “These won the contests of the ephebes . . . at the festival of the Antinoeia in the town: the contest for heralds—Niketes son of Glaukos; encomium—Statios Athenogenes; poetry—Protogenes son of Apollonios; dolichos [i.e., long-distance running race]—Zosimos son of Apollonios,” and so on through a number of other athletic events.8 It is also common in epitaphs for young men who have died young to find praise of their erudition and their virtue, together with their sporting accomplishment.9

  Moreover, the artwork of Greek gymnasia in the Roman period often linked the athletic act
ivity of the present with the classical and mythical past. The resemblances to literary and rhetorical practice in the same period, with its obsessive replaying of the classical heritage, are immediately clear. Gymnasia regularly contained classicizing athletic statues (following the models made famous by Polyclitus and other classical sculptors), many of them depicting gods and heroes like Hermes and Heracles who were particularly associated with the gymnasium.10 Some gymnasia also associated themselves with specific episodes from myth and history: for example the naval contests of the Athenian ephebeia, attested for the second and third centuries CE, and the artwork associated with them, seem to have been designed to recall the glorious naval victories of Athens over the Persians at Salamis in the fifth century BCE.11 We also have evidence for the Athenian ephebeia participating in a peri alkes (“strength”) contest at Eleusis in the second century CE, where they would be divided into two teams, one representing Heracles and the other Theseus.12 Sarcophagus sculptures often included mythical stories involving groups of young men (for example Hippolytus with his hunting companions), depicted as ephebic figures, and so linking the deceased both with the mythical past and with the contemporary culture of the gymnasium.13

  The instructors and benefactors in the gymnasia of the Greek east, like their charges, could be represented as intellectual figures.14 Honorific portraits set up for the cosmêtês, the magistrate responsible for the Athenian ephebeia in a particular year, regularly use the iconographic conventions of the intellectual, with furrowed brow and himation (i.e., cloak).15 There is even some epigraphical evidence for trainers (paidotribai) holding political office in their home cities16 and using rhetorical skills in presenting requests for funding.17 Plutarch’s Quaestiones Convivales, which claim to record many decades of Plutarch’s dinner-party conversations with philosophically minded friends, includes one long account of a symposium in Athens presided over by Plutarch’s great philosophical teacher Ammonius: “While he was holding the office of strategos [i.e., ‘general’] at Athens, Ammonius attended a demonstration held in the Diogeneion [a building which seems to have been used for musical and literary activity by the Athenian ephebeia] by the ephebes who were studying literature, geometry, rhetoric, or music, and then invited to dinner those teachers who had been successful. Pretty well all of our friends were present, and many other scholarly people in addition” (9.1.1, 736d). One of the guests is an athletic trainer: “Afterwards honey cakes were brought in as a prize for the boys for dancing. My brother Lamprias was appointed as judge together with Meniskos the trainer [paidotribês], for he [i.e., Lamprias] had given a convincing performance of the pyrrhic dance and was thought to be the best of the boys in the palaestra at shadow-boxing” (9.15.1, 747a–b). Here we see a gymnasium instructor taking his place in the most elevated intellectual company, and mixing with others who are closely involved in the education of the young men of the city. Plutarch and his brother Lamprias were still young men at the date at which the dialogue is set, and it is clear that athletic training has been a part of their education, along with more obviously intellectual pursuits. The passage projects a fleeting impression of a world where gymnastic education stands in a harmonious relationship with its musical and rhetorical equivalents.