The Oxford Handbook of the Second Sophistic

by Daniel S. Richter

  On another occasion, Favorinus showed poorer judgment: appointed to a highly expensive honor in his native province, he claimed exemption from the burden as a philosopher. This gave Hadrian the opportunity to question whether he really was one; in order to limit the damage he withdrew his plea, reporting a timely dream in which his master Dio restated the commonplace that men were born for their fatherlands as well as for themselves (Philostr. VS 1.8.2). Some have seen in this undated incident the occasion for his loss of imperial favor; more probable is Philostratus’s report that Hadrian was simply having fun. To be sure, he also claims that in consequence the citizens of Athens made haste to overthrow the statues they had erected to him in his days of glory; but on Favorinus’s own showing it was the adultery scandal that caused the Corinthians to do likewise. It would certainly be more economical to suppose the same cause for both incidents.

  In 1931, a speech preserved in a third-century papyrus was published that incorporated three known quotations from Favorinus; it is spoken in the person of an exile on Chios. In the absence of any historical or mythical personage in whose character Favorinus might be speaking, editors, most recently Amato (2005, 19–29), have taken it to be autobiographical despite a reference to the speaker’s progeny, which has to be dismissed as conventional; historians have been more doubtful (Bowie 1997, 5; Fein 1994, 244–245; Swain 1989, 156–157), though the hypothesis of a fictitious exile is also problematic (Holford-Strevens 2015, 124–126). It is no objection that Philostratus does not mention any such episode, for he refuses—and in the life of Dio says as much (VS 1.7 2)—to acknowledge any exile not imposed by formal sentence; we may well suppose that Hadrian had dealt with Favorinus as his political model Augustus had with Ovid, privately instructing him to depart for a specified location but sending him, not to the remote Tomi, but to the far from unpleasant island of Chios. Unlike Ovid, however, in the next reign Favorinus was back in the capital, where he appears to have spent the rest of his life, becoming a friend of the leading Roman orator M. Cornelius Fronto and winning the devotion of the young Aulus Gellius. Since the latter, born in the mid-120s and at least twenty-five when appointed as a judge, claims to have consulted him on an ethical scruple about a case he was hearing (NA 14.2), he must have been alive in the early 150s; we shall see that he may have lived on into the next decade, but a reference in Lucian makes it clear that he was dead by the late 170s.

  Many titles of works by Favorinus are preserved, and numerous fragments, especially from his twenty-four-book miscellany Παντοδαπὴ ἱστορία (Learning of All Kinds) and at least five books of Ἀπομνημονεύματα (Reminiscences), whose title recalls Xenophon’s stories about Socrates but which is fact is a collection of anecdotes about philosophers in general. However, the only works to survive complete are two speeches, one praising Corinth to the detriment of Athens and answering the charges that had caused his statue to be removed, the other celebrating the very fickleness in Fortune that it was customary to deplore. These two speeches were preserved through misattribution to Dio (Amato 2005, 53, 66–7), yet as Philostratus observes, Favorinus’s style is completely different; he aptly describes it as rambling but ingenious and palatable (VS 1.8.4).

  Neither in those speeches nor in that on exile (a well-worn philosophical topic) is profundity of thought in evidence; ingenuity of argument is, particularly in the speech on Fortune, an example of the paradoxical praise in which Favorinus was said by Gellius to have excelled (NA 17.12). Their language at times falls short of the pure Attic that was the ideal of the age (despite a claim made in the speech at Corinth, §26), but few orators even approached it, and certainly not Polemon. Literary quotations abound, along with historical and mythological examples; so do the Gorgianic figures and rhythmical sequences of short parallel phrases (Amato 2005, 89–93; Goggin 1951, esp. 192–201) that Gellius imitates in reproducing two discourses he claims to have heard (NA 12.1, 14.1; Holford-Strevens 2003, 108–109 and literature cited), one on a mother’s duty to breastfeed her baby, the other denouncing the fraud of astrology, both obviously translated from written texts. Although Gellius professes not to know whether the latter was meant for truth or for display, Ptolemy’s defense of astrology in his Tetrabiblos may have been in part an answer to Favorinus’s attack.

  Like other philosophers, and like the clergy of later days, Favorinus spent much of his time giving ethical advice; in his day, when not based on traditional commonplaces (which he is known to have collected) this generally had a Stoic flavor, as when Gellius represents him as quoting the great Stoic moralist Epictetus (NA 17.19.5–6); Favorinus also admired the suave Cynic Demetrius (Philostr V A 4.25), but admiration for eminent and dead adherents of those sects may have served, as in our own day praise for deceased presidents and prime ministers of the other party, as a stick to beat their contemporary successors, who on Lucian’s showing passed personal remarks about his unphilosophical appearance (Eunuchus 7, cf. Demonax 12–13). There is also much Stoic and Cynic matter in the speech on exile, as inseparable from that subject as Peripatetic matter was from displays of curious learning; even Plutarch uses Stoic arguments when they suit him, and Dio had demonstrated that selected Cynic sentiments were not incompatible with civilized discourse.

  Like any philosopher other than an Epicurean, Favorinus invokes Socrates with constant praise; he wrote about his art of love (F 24 Amato 2010)—a subject indeed in which he notoriously took great interest—and related a romantically exaggerated version of the mental abstraction recounted in the Symposium (Gell. NA 2.1); he also wrote about his trial (F 41). His statement that Socrates and his pupil Aeschines were the first teachers of rhetoric (F 67) was apparently borrowed from the Epicurean Idomeneus of Lampsacus, who meant it in a hostile spirit hardly shared by the rhetorician Favorinus; but when he remarked that the slightest textual change in Plato impaired the style, but in Lysias the sense (NA 2.5), which is hardly in the spirit of the Phaedrus, he seems to have shown a certain want of reverence paralleled in the assertion, lifted from the embittered Aristoxenus, that almost the entire Republic was to be found in Protagoras (F 60), which demonstrates at best a naïve credulity in the face of fourth-century polemic. The balance might be redressed if we knew his treatises on Plato and the Ideas.

  In natural philosophy, Favorinus had leanings toward the Peripatetic school (Plut. Quaest. conv. 8.10, 734 F); but when in Attic Nights 18.1 he umpires a debate between a Stoic and a Peripatetic on whether virtue alone is sufficient for happiness, Gellius makes him disallow one of the latter’s arguments as fallacious. However, the narrative can hardly be taken as factual, since it reenacts the debate between the two schools on that topic recorded by Cicero at Tusculan Disputations 5.120, and in view of Gellius’s own sympathies with Stoic moralism, at least if not taken too far, it cannot be shown to reflect Favorinus’s own outlook rather than the author’s.

  The original debate was overseen by Carneades, the exponent of the Academic skepticism that looked through Plato to Socrates not for dogmatic exposition but for dialectic method, the practice of arguing on both sides of any question and withholding judgment, at most allowing that one case was more probable than the other. Although the Academy had abandoned this position in the first century BCE (on which see further chapter 35 in this volume), both Plutarch and Favorinus adopted it, in contrast to the Platonists who claimed to teach what Plato taught despite their disagreements about what it was.

  Favorinus’s first link with skepticism is Plutarch’s jeu d’esprit on the principle of cold, in which the author, having settled to his own satisfaction that cold is no mere privation of heat but a quality in its own right, sets out the respective reasons of those who have identified that principle with air and with water, then submits the previously unargued case for its being earth. Favorinus is addressed in three places: the first, an opening sentence posing the question whether there is a principle of cold (945 F), is mere routine; the second, at the end of the arguments for air, declares that
the case “rests on such probabilities as these” (949 F), the third is the last sentence of the book, inviting Favorinus to compare the case for earth with the others, “and if it neither falls short in probability nor is far superior, to abandon dogmatic assertion, holding suspension of judgement more philosophical than assent” (955 A). The skeptical language and the examination of conflicting hypotheses seem well enough matched to the recipient; and if Plutarch does not seem to be wholly serious, that too is appropriate in a work addressed to a budding sophist.

  Favorinus’s arguments for skepticism provoked Galen to write the treatise On the Best Form of Education against him. It begins: “Favorinus says that the best form of education is arguing on both sides of a question,” a process that led “the older Academics” (taken to include Carneades) to suspend judgment; by contrast, “the younger ones” (for Favorinus is not alone) sometimes uphold an extreme form of skepticism, suspension of judgment that will not allow even the sun to be apprehended, and sometimes suppose their students can determine the merits of rival arguments (Peripatetic and Stoic) by mere intuition. This is a hostile report by one whose fairness is often in doubt; since we lack the treatises on which Galen is commenting, we cannot tell whether the contradictions he claims to find in them result from changes in Favorinus’s views over time or are tendentious misrepresentations of arguments offered on both sides of the question. In this treatise, as elsewhere, he lumps together Academics and Pyrrhonians; nevertheless, it is as an Academic, even if an unsound one, that he treats Favorinus, throwing in the Pyrrhonians only to establish guilt by association.

  In all, Galen reviews four of his victim’s treatises, one of them in three books, but nowhere does he discuss his most important contribution to the debate, the ten books of Pyrrhonian Discourses, in which Favorinus discussed the ten Modes or systems of argument that Pyrrhonians deployed against all other schools in order to undermine belief, slightly varying the order in which they were considered (F 30) and in all likelihood devoting one book to each Mode. The work was not only said by Gellius to have been written with the greatest subtlety and sharpness (NA 11.5.5) but described by Philostratus as the best of his philosophical writings (VS 1.8.4); even if neither Gellius nor Philostratus was a philosopher, we may infer that it commanded some respect and ought to have been noticed by Galen had it already been in circulation. It would be more plausible, indeed, to suppose that it was written after Galen’s polemic, even in part as a response; if so, the words εἴπερ ἦν in §3 of the latter work (p. 98. 10 Barigazzi 1991), “if [Favorinus] really existed [I should like to ask him],” which are clearly absurd, must be emended to εἰ παρῆν, “if he were present,” and not εἰ περιῆν, “if he were still alive.”

  Philostratus’s attention was caught by the statement that Pyrrhonians, albeit suspenders of judgement, yet had the capacity to hear lawsuits (F 31). This answers the charge that the skeptic could make no contribution to civic or human life; but it is not what we should have expected to hear from Favorinus, whose assertion that both Academics and Pyrrhonians were skeptics (Gell. NA 11.5.6) puts him firmly in the former camp, had he been intent on distinguishing Academic skeptics like himself, who could find that one case was more probable than another, from a Pyrrhonian whose motto “this is no more the case than that or than neither” (NA §4) would render him incapable of returning a verdict. It would appear that Favorinus’s approach to Pyrrhonism was sympathetic, holding that the two schools differed only in one point, whether uncertainty itself was certain, though Gellius’s statement of that difference appears to be flawed (NA §8; Holford-Strevens 1997, 214n97 and 215–216 for another possible of point of disagreement that Favorinus may have tried to smooth away).

  HERODES ATTICUS

  Among Favorinus’s closest friends was the great orator and plutocrat Herodes Atticus, to whom he left not only his books and his house in Rome but his Indian slave who amused them both with his broken Greek—and perhaps more, since in this context his name Autolekythos probably means not “Pauper” but “Wellhung” (Holford-Strevens 2003, 438). Herodes’s wealth, culture, eloquence, and munificence brought him general admiration except in his native Athens, where he was widely detested. Both opinions were amply justified.

  According to Philostratus (VS 2.1.2), Herodes’s grandfather Hipparchus had been condemned by Domitian to confiscation of his property for tyrannical conduct, as if in the tradition of the like-named tyrant assassinated in the late sixth century BCE whose name Herodes would also bear; his father Atticus had found a treasure hidden from the authorities in one of his own houses (evidently made over to him before execution of the sentences), obtained imperial permission to keep it, and consolidated his new-found riches by marrying a wealthy wife, Vibullia Alcia, like him of an Athenian family with Roman citizenship, and by becoming a successful banker.

  Herodes’s date of birth is commonly reckoned back from his consulate in 143 to 101, though Ameling 1983, 2:2 proposes 103; under the empire the consular age was more flexible than in republican times (Morris 1964, 325–332). His education laid more emphasis on the classical orators than Atticus cared for until Scopelian was engaged to teach him extemporization (Philostr. VS 1.21.7); it did not exclude Roman culture, which he studied with P. Calvisius Tullus Ruso, maternal grandfather to Marcus Aurelius, though he remained firmly Greek in outlook. Despite an unfortunate entry into public life, when he broke down in an address to the emperor Hadrian (Philostr. VS 2.1.14; probably congratulating him on behalf of the Athenian ephebes for his accession, Graindor 1930, 47), he rose quickly enough to become eponymous archon at Athens in summer 126; some nine years later he was made corrector Asiae, inspector of finances for the cities of Asia Minor, where he encountered the proconsul T. Aurelius Antoninus, soon to become the emperor Antoninus Pius; at one point there was some pushing and shoving between their respective entourages in a narrow defile, but Philostratus denied (VS 2.1.8) that the incident ended in fisticuffs.

  No less well aware than other people of his own magnificence, Herodes claimed kinship with the house of Aeacus, sought as allies by the Athenians at the time of the Persian War, with Miltiades, the victor of Marathon, and with his son Cimon, who had taken the war to Asia Minor; in due course he would name his eldest daughter Elpinice after Cimon’s half-sister despite the latter’s doubtful reputation. He was equally aware of the social expectations attaching to great wealth: over the course of his life he would erect or rebuild many splendid buildings, including the Panathenaic stadium at Athens, the theater that bears his name, and the aqueduct that after nine centuries at last relieved the thirst of spectators at the Olympic Games. In such munificence he took after his father, yet it was his father’s very munificence that brought Herodes lasting unpopularity in his native city.

  Atticus’s will contained a bequest to the Athenian demos of a hundred drachmae to each citizen every year for life; this was said to be at the behest of his freedmen, between whom and Herodes there was no love lost (Philostr. VS 2.1.4). However, they had forgotten that the descent of a Roman citizen’s property was governed by Roman law, which forbade bequests to noncitizens; nor can Atticus have attempted to circumvent the prohibition through a fideicommissum or trust, since by that time not only were fideicommissa to noncitizens legally void, but at Hadrian’s instance the Senate had ordained that the money should escheat to the fisc (Gaius, Institutes 2.285). Herodes was therefore not obliged so grievously to impair his fortune; instead he compounded with the Athenians for a single payment of 500 drachmae a head, which they soon found had been eaten away by their fathers’ and grandfathers’ debts to Atticus and Vibullia Alcia. He was never forgiven; even the Panathenaic stadium in gleaming Pentelic marble was bitterly said to deserve its name, having been paid for by all Athenians.

  The discontent and indeed disorder provoked by Herodes’s conduct was reflected in a legal case at Rome between Herodes and his enemies. The legal basis is uncertain, and scholars are not even agreed which side brought the
action; but when one of Herodes’s opponents engaged the services of Fronto, the latter’s pupil in Latin rhetoric, Marcus Caesar—Pius’s adopted son and the future Marcus Aurelius—became alarmed at the bad blood that might arise between them. He first urged Herodes not to launch a personal attack on Fronto, then requested Fronto to observe the like restraint; Fronto, not previously aware that Herodes was his grandfather’s pupil, promised to concentrate on the facts, which were grave enough: “I must speak of free men brutally beaten and robbed, one even killed; savagery and greed; I must speak of an undutiful son who paid no heed to his father’s pleas; I must denounce avarice and greed; in this case I must present Herodes as a kind of murderer.” Nevertheless, if Marcus so wished, he would pull his punches. Despite the allegations (which modern scholars are too quick to dismiss as commonplaces, as if things often said could not sometimes be true), Herodes emerged with sufficient credit to be made consul ordinarius in 143 and tutor in Greek rhetoric to Marcus; despite the speech, he and Fronto became firm friends. (What little we know of the case comes entirely from Fronto’s correspondence: Ad M. Caesarem et invicem 3.2–6, Ad M. Antoninum Imp. 3.4, Ad L. Verum Imp. 1.8, van den Hout 1988, 36–39, 102, 113; cf. van den Hout, 1999, 94–96, 278–279, who, however, does not, as Graindor and Ameling could not, know that Fronto’s consulate has been documented as July–August 142 not, as had been thought, 143.)