The Oxford Handbook of the Second Sophistic

by Daniel S. Richter

  The Roman world on its own had long been familiar with the laudatio funebris. The emperor and imperial family was the object of speeches delivered on birthdays and jubilees, at weddings, and so on. A frequent type of oration was the consuls’ gratiarum actio. Fronto delivered several encomia of Hadrian before the Senate, and he congratulated Antoninus Pius on the success of the war in Britain (Fronto, M. Caes. 2.4).

  The rhetorical encomium was a refined, coded instrument, which served to express approval, certainly, and often hyperbolically, but which also aimed at communicating veiled messages, at making requests, negotiating, and indeed criticizing.

  The encomium was particularly effective in setting forth models. It was called upon to reinforce public adherence to accepted and recognized standards. Gods, cities, sovereigns, leaders, institutions: it praised what everyone already respected or was thought to respect. Its function was to reaffirm and constantly to recreate the consensus on prevailing values. It established a moment of communion, during which society presented to itself the spectacle of its own unity.

  Epideictic orators enlightened the collectivity on its own feelings, provided a reasoned basis for its traditional practices, and translated its convictions into the respected language of rhetoric. In this light, they can be described as ideologues. They shaped understandings and elaborated a vision of the world. While other types of thinkers played a similar role at the same time, the uniqueness of epideictic rhetoricians consisted in considering things from the angle of the praiseworthy and the collective interest. Epideictic orators presented the shining and concordant face of the social conscience, to the detriment of any concern for strictly impartial and critical observation. The encomium was a speech removed from reality, and it owed all its richness to this remove, which allowed it to extol values. Its persuasive force derived simultaneously from its beautiful language, culture, and morality, as well as from public and ceremonial oratorical “performance.”

  Still, hidden meanings often lurked in the background. For example, concerning the welcoming speech addressed to a governor taking up office, Menander Rhetor advises thinking about what is to come, by positioning the encomium in the future (2.379–381). Beginning with praise for the new governor’s justice, the orator must avow his conviction that the magistrate will show, through his administration, that he is a better judge than Minos, Aeacus, and Rhadamanthus, that no one will be arbitrarily imprisoned, that the rights of different social classes will be respected. Moving on to courage, the speaker ought to declare that the governor will have the necessary tenacity to defend his province’s cause before the emperor. Other encomia follow in the same vein, concluding: “Is it not obvious that the governor is going to execute his office in a manner conducive to the good of his subjects?” At first glance, this blatant confidence might seem so much flattery, or even naïveté resulting from the desire to cover the encomium’s standard topics at all cost. But just consider things from the governor’s point of view. Barely arrived, in the presence of all the city’s leading lights, he listens to the local sophist describe to him the program his administration is meant to fulfill, a description which, while studded with mythological and historical references and grounded in the Platonic system of the four virtues, is no less replete with specific allusions to the province’s concrete problems. Far from naïve, this address indicates to the new governor, with a great deal of elegance, what the governed expect of him. It is a program outlined upon entry into office, a midpoint between an entreaty and a bill of particulars. The encomium conveys an implied request.

  In other rhetorical encomia of the Second Sophistic, admonitions, veiled criticisms, or frank thoughts may be surmised. In particular, when it comes to the rapport between Greeks and Romans, the Greek encomia of Rome suggest an interpretatio Graeca of the Roman domination. Written in Greek, by Greeks, in the name of Greek interests, these speeches put forth a proud and partisan reading of the reality of empire; they set down the terms of Hellenic acceptance of Roman conquest. Thus, the rhetorical encomium was a subtle instrument of communication in the sophists’ hands. Behind the parroting and hyperbole, lie discernible messages, claims, warnings, expressions of pride, self-respect, ill humor.

  13.5 FIRST SOPHISTIC, SECOND, THIRD . . . HOW MANY SOPHISTICS?

  In 1993, I used the expression “Third Sophistic,” and this term has been repeated and discussed.4 The debate it has aroused is helpful in understanding the Second Sophistic better.

  When modern scholars speak of the “Second Sophistic,” following Philostratus (VS 480–481), they mean the literary and social movement that existed in the Greek world from the end of the first century CE until the third. Philostratus offered this designation to describe his contemporary situation, as he saw it, and to relate the present to the great models of the past. He aimed to trace a parallel between classical Greece and the High Roman Empire by observing that a category of individuals with similar characteristics existed in both these historical periods: the “sophists,” those virtuosos of oratory, at once professors of rhetoric, traveling lecturers, and civic leaders. In speaking of the “Third Sophistic” or of the “Second Sophistic Encored,” apropos of the fourth century and beyond, I wanted to emphasize that the phenomenon of the Second Sophistic did not disappear at the moment where Philostratus’s Lives breaks off (that is, toward the end of the first third of the third century CE) and that some sophistic figures continued to flourish in the Christian empire, in the world of Late Antiquity, presenting the same characteristics as before and still displaying a combination of literature and politics under rhetoric’s auspices (for example, Libanius, Themistius, the Cappadocian Fathers of the Church).

  Pursuing this line of thought, one may note that sophists existed in other periods as well. Thus in the second half of the third century CE, Callinicus of Petra was a notable personage, who conversed with emperors and high government officials and involved himself in public life. The rhetoric of the encomium, in which he specialized, enabled him to convey messages with a political dimension concerning the emperor and the empire. His career, highlighted by teaching, rivalry with colleagues, and the writing of speeches and treatises on rhetoric, as well as a work of history, is a typical sophistic career. It demonstrates how, in the full “crisis” of the Roman Empire, in the void apparent between the “Second Sophistic” and the “Third Sophistic,” between the Lives of the Sophists of Philostratus and the Lives of the Philosophers and Sophists of Eunapius, there was still room for teaching and culture, for travel and exchanges, for the oral delivery and written publication of speeches, for the Greek sophists’ political and ideological influence.5

  Going back in time, toward the end of the Hellenistic Age and the beginning of the empire (between the “First Sophistic” and the “Second Sophistic,” therefore), one can see still other individuals who merit the name of “sophists.” These include the contemporary sophists to whom the third book of Philodemus’s Rhetoric alludes; the orator, statesman, and professor, Potamon of Mytilene (FGrH 147); or certain declaimers whom the Elder Seneca cites.

  So it is essential to understand the Second Sophistic within a continuum, especially in its rhetorical dimension. The Sophist is one of the cultural icons of Greco-Roman civilization, just like the Philosopher. In every period, sophists existed, in the sense, defined above, of professor of rhetoric, orator, lecturer, and civic figure. But in certain, particularly brilliant and well-documented eras, the figure of the Sophist took on special importance and prominence: so in late classical Greece, or during the High Empire. This phenomenon can be compared, mutatis mutandis, with that of Neoplatonism: Platonism and Platonists existed throughout antiquity, but the third to sixth centuries CE were a special time. Likewise, in the case of sophistic, the period of the High Empire witnessed the development of a new, or renewed, style of public figure, designated by the quite ancient name of “sophist,” but endowed with novel importance and influence and characterized by political activity, especially at the local
level, and by social success based on rhetorical teaching and oratorical ability. This evolution gave the sophists of the Second Sophistic a rhetorical and political stature all their own.

  FURTHER READING

  For an overview of rhetoric during the Second Sophistic, see Kennedy 1972; Pernot 2005, 128–201. On the linguistic, literary, historical, and religious context, see Anderson 1993 and 1994, Bowersock 1969, Swain 1996, Whitmarsh 2005. The Lives of the Sophists by Philostratus provides a colorful and detailed description that especially stresses the rhetorical aspects of the sophists’ activity (English translation in Wright 1921).

  On the teaching of rhetoric, see Kennedy 2003. Quintilian’s Education of the Orator offers the best guide for learning about rhetorical theory, not only Roman, but also Greek (English translation in Russell 2001). The treatises On Epideictic Discourses by Menander Rhetor complement Quintilian by analyzing the genre of the encomium, about which Quintilian has little to say (English translation in Russell and Wilson 1981). On the rhetoric of the encomium, see Pernot 1993, 2015; on hinting and allusions, Pernot 2008a and 2008b, 2011.

  The works of Aelius Aristides display different aspects of sophistic rhetoric: declamations, hymns, solemn orations in cities and on ceremonial occasions, discussions on the definition and worth of rhetoric, polemic against colleagues, autobiographical memoirs. The works of Dio of Prusa, among other remarkable features, provide glimpses into municipal political oratory (Bithynian Orations) and the connections between rhetoric and philosophy (On Kingship, Olympian Oration). Lucian practiced rhetoric and also satirized it, for example, in the juicy pamphlet entitled Rhetorum Praeceptor (commentary by Zweimuller 2008). For further reading on these three authors see the bibliographical chapters in this volume, respectively chapters 17, 14, and 21.

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