The Oxford Handbook of the Second Sophistic

by Daniel S. Richter

  Such a multifarious corpus raises problems of structure for any attempt at an overview. My approach here will be to discuss first the biographical works (The Lives of the Sophists and Life of Apollonius of Tyana) and then the works primarily concerned with myth and its representation in art and literature (Heroicus and Imagines). Many other arrangements are possible, and as always when reading Philostratus, where one emerges from the interpretive labyrinth has much to do with the chosen point of entry.14

  18.1 LIVES OF THE SOPHISTS AND THE LIFE OF APOLLONIUS OF TYANA

  The two broadly biographical works in the Philostratean corpus take ostensibly very different subject matter: sophists, especially those of the movement which Philostratus himself named the Second Sophistic (VS 481), and the Pythagorean holy man and philosopher Apollonius of Tyana. There is, in fact, substantial overlap between these two works in the geographical centers (Athens, Asia Minor), and in some similarities of incident and character.15 Apollonius himself is mentioned in the Lives of the Sophists (488 and 570) and in the Life itself receives more than a little sophistic characterization. He is a Theios Sophistes, indeed, who despite his expressed disdain for sophists engages in many of the same forms of self-representation as them.16 Both of these texts are concerned with the construction of ideals: Apollonius, as Hellenic ideal, absorbs into himself much that could be considered Greek, and the Lives of the Sophists defines the intellectual and cultural movement to which Philostratus himself belonged.

  18.1.1 Lives of the Sophists

  The Lives of the Sophists is the principal historical document for the cultural movement which Philostratus himself called “the Second Sophistic” (deuterê sophistikê). As is generally, and rightly, noted in discussions of this text, the meaning which Philostratus gives to the phrase is not the same as the sense in which it is generally employed in recent scholarship.17 As a volume like the present one indicates, the term “Second Sophistic” has become a broad one, denoting the literature of the second and third centuries, a literature which was intensely concerned with the maintenance, interpretation, and transformation of its cultural inheritance.18 There is nothing wrong with using the term in this broad sense, as a shorthand reference for this particular Zeitgeist, but for Philostratus, the Second Sophistic is coupled and contrasted with the “ancient” or “more ancient” sophistic which was, he says, concerned with philosophy (VS 481). He insists that his Second Sophistic is also ancient, having been initiated by Aeschines (390 to ca. 314 BCE), and hence not a “New Sophistic”; it is, he says, concerned with representing character (VS 481) rather than with philosophy. What emerges in the Lives that follow is an ideal of the sophist as eloquent, Atticizing,19 egotistical and jealously competitive in claiming status, quick with witticisms and adept at improvised declamation.20

  Already in the proem to the Lives, Philostratus names declamation-in-character as the defining trait of his Second Sophistic, by contrast with the philosophical nature of the first. This leads him to establish a class of philosophers who were called sophists because of their eloquence, a group which he discusses prior to the sophists proper (484–510). Within this group of philosopher-sophists, however, come his two founding figures: Aeschines and Gorgias. Both are praised for their abilities as improvisers; Gorgias is named as the founder of sophistry in general, while Aeschines appears as the founder specifically of the Second Sophistic (VS 481). Philostratus’s desire to give his sophistic a respectable, classical origin is clear. It does, however, produce a gap of 350 years, which he populates only with some extremely shadowy, and by his own admission less than stellar figures (511).

  The “lives” which constitute the bulk of the work are not conventional biographies, either to a modern or to an ancient understanding.21 They vary widely in length, from just a few lines to the longest one, that of Herodes Atticus, which runs to approximately seventeen Teubner pages. These generally brief accounts concentrate in particular on the sophists as performers, and on the contests of wit between rivals. Insofar as the accuracy of Philostratus’s reports can be checked, he is generally correct in his facts.22

  More contentious, however, are the selection of sophists, the assessment of their ability and standing, and the arrangement of the work. The centrality of Herodes Atticus has long been remarked,23 and as Eshleman has argued,24 this is in part a matter of Philostratus’s own sophistic self-presentation, playing up the centrality of the intellectual lineage to which he himself belonged. Philostratus also tells us at the outset that the work’s dedicatee, Gordian,25 had a familial connection with Herodes, so his centrality in the Lives becomes in addition a piece of flattery by association. There are, undoubtedly, major omissions from the Lives: Lucian is often mentioned in modern discussions, though his absence might well be accounted for by a relatively low profile as a sophist on Philostratus’s definition. More strikingly, perhaps, undoubtedly prominent sophists and even entire groups are clearly omitted or given relatively little space.26 Despite its pretense of casualness, this is not a haphazardly constructed text, but one which presents an image of the sophistic that is knowingly partial in every sense. As Eshleman has observed, the “circle of sophists” is defined by Philostratus almost entirely in terms of his own intellectual ancestry and affiliations. The right to stand within that circle is, however, treated as self-evident, and the apparent challenges to inclusion reinforce its supposedly self-evidential nature. The Lives of the Sophists works to reinforce both the definition of the movement and the authoritative position of the narrator.27

  This text, like the others in the corpus, demonstrates an acute interest in how one interprets. In its descriptions of sophistic style, evaluations of performance, and occasional quotations of declamations, the narrating voice provides a model for the interpretation of sophists which readers are implicitly asked to follow. The frequent comments that the sophists of the Lives make on the performances of others demonstrate the importance of such critical activity in the broader repertoire of sophistic activity. Goldhill has noted the importance of anecdotal form in this text, allowing as it does for easy memorizing and repeating of sophistic snippets to demonstrate one’s status as pepaideumenos.28 The text offers not only the conceptual and lexical apparatus for pinning down rhetorical excellence or failure, but also a set of readily extractable observations on all of the past sophists who matter: almost always those with some relationship to Herodes Atticus and so to Philostratus himself.

  18.1.2 Life of Apollonius of Tyana

  The Life of Apollonius of Tyana is a sprawling work, part biography (or hagiography), part travel story, part novel. At eight books in length, it is the longest surviving ancient biography. Though its protagonist, a Pythagorean philosopher of the first century, certainly did exist, the pre-Philostratean traditions concerning him are tenuous and difficult.29 Whatever the character of the historical Apollonius may have been, the figure who emerges from Philostratus’s narrative is a devotee of Pythagoras from his youth, a traveler in search of wisdom who visits the ends of the earth (India, Spain, Ethiopia), an adviser of emperors and corrector of religion and custom. Philostratus’s Apollonius is certainly ascetic, but he is at the same time a socially acceptable holy man.30 Pythagoreanism appears in this text in reduced form: there is little mention of music or mathematics, but a great deal of emphasis is placed on Apollonius’s vegetarianism and abstinence from wine and sex, and on belief in metempsychosis.31 In this, we can see the popular tendency to regard philosophy predominantly as ethics, and as centered in, or even consisting of, the philosophical bios.

  One of the most appealing aspects of this extraordinary text is the narrative of Apollonius’s travels. It remains possible that the historical Apollonius did, in fact, travel to India, but it is unlikely that this journey bore much resemblance to the account of Philostratus:32 Apollonius, rather, is made to follow in the footsteps of Alexander the Great and Dionysus and to outdo both. The journey narrative, drawing on the repertoire of Indian travels established in the Alexander
historians and Megasthenes, presents a symbolic geography, concerned not with factual accuracy but with establishing the nature of Apollonius himself.33

  The notion of India as a source of wisdom was hardly a new one,34 but in a text which has so wholehearted an investment in Hellenism as this one, the superiority of the wisdom of the Brahmans to that of the Greeks should give readers pause. On the one hand, this elevated portrait of Brahmanic wisdom creates an external authority to validate the eminently Greek wisdom of Apollonius and Pythagoras. Moreover, the teachings of the Brahmans as reported in the Life are themselves based firmly in Greek thought, and are treated as having a common origin with Pythagoreanism.35 In this light, as Swain observes, “Philostratus sent [Apollonius] to India to be told how important true Greek culture was.”36 And yet, the very notion of an alien wisdom which can sit in judgment of the best of Greek thought, even if that alien wisdom is imagined in terms of Greek popular philosophy, must raise the possibility that Hellenic wisdom is not, after all, the last word. If the journey to the Brahmans is a means of establishing Hellenic authority, it is one which bears the possibility of its own reversal.

  One of the most discussed issues regarding the Life of Apollonius, especially, though not exclusively, in the older scholarship, has been its relationship to Christianity.37 Though the text never mentions the new religion or Christ, the similarities between Apollonius and Jesus are not difficult to observe: an annunciation to the expectant mother shortly before the birth (V A 1.4), similar miracles (for instance, raising a woman from the dead: 4.45), a trial before a representative of Roman power (book 8). So the question remains: should the text be regarded as a response to Christianity? It is impossible to know Philostratus’s “intentions” in this as in anything else. That said, it is very likely that Philostratus did know something about Christianity, given its increasing prominence generally, and also the known interest of some of the Severan dynasty in the new religion.38 It is usual in this connection to cite the examples of Julia Mammaea and the personal shrine of Severus Alexander, which is said to have contained images of Apollonius of Tyana and Orpheus beside Christ (Historia Augusta, Life of Alexander Severus 29.2). It is quite probable that a rising Christianity is one of the societal pressures in response to which Philostratus builds his Apollonius as paragon of Hellenism. If this is polemic, however, it chooses to construct a counter-example rather than to attack directly. Whatever Philostratus’s unknowable intentions may have been, the Life of Apollonius certainly has been taken throughout its reception as a pagan response to Christianity, and Apollonius as the pagan answer to Christ. The first extant Christian critique of the text is Eusebius’s Contra Hieroclem,39 which responds to the persecutor Hierocles’s claim that Apollonius was superior to Jesus. This essay, which has generally accompanied modern editions of Philostratus’s text, stands at the beginning of a long tradition of such polemical comparisons.40

  Related to the question of the text’s religious implications is that of its positioning as ostensibly factual or as overt fiction. This is, of course, not simply a question of whether it is truthful; about a great deal it plainly is not. The Life of Apollonius has generated profound uncertainty as to how seriously it should be taken: is it merely a vast sophistic game or an earnest pagan hagiography? One possible indicator of overt fiction has been identified in the text’s opening: the story of an account of Apollonius’s life, written by his disciple Damis, on which the narrator of the Life of Apollonius claims to base his narrative, has been considered “a conscious evocation of a novelistic tone and setting.”41 If this is the case, then the text is marked from the beginning as an essentially novelistic one, and the efforts which it makes to establish a historiographic pose are merely part of the fiction. It remains possible, however, that there was a pseudepigraph under the name of Damis given to Philostratus. Pythagoreanism was, after all, hugely productive of pseudepigraphic literature.42 Certainty on these points is impossible, but there is quite enough later in the text to make readers feel that they are reading a work which is essentially playful and fabulous: the levitating Brahmans and wonders of India, the extraordinary prominence of Apollonius in the public life of his time, and the miracles of Apollonius themselves are all enough to make this conclusion difficult to escape. Yet a fiction, even a fabulous one, can have serious cultural purposes.43

  The highly rhetorical and richly allusive style in which the Life is composed may appear a further impediment to seeing it as “serious.” Yet such a dichotomy of rhetoric and religious seriousness is a false one. Readers raised on the Gospels may expect a more restrained style for the narrative of a “divine man,” but even if Philostratus is writing (in part) as a response to Christianity in general and the Gospels in particular, it does not mean that he had them in mind as any sort of stylistic norm for a “serious” religious text. There is no reason, in other words, to see the sophistic as necessarily contradicting or undermining the religious content. Formal rhetoric is in any case so pervasive an influence on all forms of literature in this period, that identifying elements of a text as “rhetorical” means little regarding its “seriousness.”

  Nonetheless, the narrative appears to set its readers the challenge of grappling to establish its tone. There has been an important turn in recent scholarship on Philostratus to see in his works, especially the Life of Apollonius and Heroicus, elements which render them ironic. Schirren, in particular, sees the Life as a metabiographical fiction, which can be read by a naïve reader as a straightforward biography but which to the knowing reader offers a double image of “the superman and his partial deconstruction as well.”44 Somewhat similarly, Gyselinck and Demoen read the Life as simultaneously “a sophistic pièce de résistance” and “a literary monument . . . in honour of Apollonius,”45 though they do not take the text’s intertextual and ironic elements as undermining its seriousness to the same degree. Whitmarsh argues convincingly that both the Heroicus and Life grapple with issues of believability.46 In this respect these two texts are closely related as meditations on the difficulties of religion, rather than ironic dismissals of it.

  The playful and fabulous elements of the Life of Apollonius have invited comparisons between this work and the texts which are now described as ancient novels. There are, indeed, clear similarities between the Life and the novel: the theme of travel and some of the geography in which the narrative takes place, the generic playfulness and “sophistic” style, and the digressions on curiosities of natural science and other wonders. The Life differs markedly from the novels, however, in its rejection of the erotic.47 Where desire plays any part in the text, it is a negative one, as a force to be resisted by the heroically celibate Apollonius. In order to represent Apollonius’s celibacy as heroic, the Life presents his victories over supernatural sexual predators (the Lamia [4.25], a pederastic demon in India [3.28]), and contrasts his own self-control (sôphrosynê) with the self-mutilation of eunuchs (1.33–36). The story of Hippolytus is also replayed in two separate incidents which concern secondary characters and contribute to an ideal of heroic celibacy (6.3; 7.42). All this is far from the eventual union of a happy couple in the canonical novels, despite their much-tested chastity prior to that union, and brings the Life of Apollonius closer to the ascetic ideals of hagiography.

  The idealizing of Apollonius takes place in part through some artful arrangement of his actions relative to those of eminent predecessors. Pythagoras is a point of reference throughout, the memory of Odysseus is frequently evoked, and Apollonius’s resistance to Domitian is said to go beyond the resistance of other philosophers to other tyrants.48 It is easy to mock this type of rhetorical comparison (synkrisis), but these echoes of the past are in general deployed with care to produce some subtle resonances. Apollonius becomes much more than just a first-century holy man; he is rather a kind of walking embodiment of the Hellenic tradition. Beyond this, he is also made into a human, or superhuman, ideal; great emphasis falls on the notion of the ideal human being as the ideal inter
preter. Here too, a view of Greece as the culture of insight and intelligence, able to make sense of the rest of the world, even if not able to dominate it politically or militarily, is important.

  A number of scenes throughout the Life show Apollonius the exegete in action, interpreting works of art, dreams, and omens. A recurring structure here is the interpretive dialogue, in which an interlocutor (often Damis) offers an interpretation, only to be corrected by Apollonius.49 In this hermeneutic interest, the Life of Apollonius has a great deal of common ground with the Imagines. It also shares with that text some overt theorizing concerning the nature of interpretation. In the Indian city of Taxila, Damis and Apollonius, stand before some bronze relief sculptures and discuss the nature of mimêsis (2.22). Much later, Apollonius defends the Greek cult of images against the Naked Sages (Gymnosophists) of Ethiopia, and proposes phantasia as a faculty beyond mimêsis, which is able to approach the gods without suffering astonishment (ekplêxis), and to represent them for human beings (6.19).50 Theorizing about and representing interpretation are central to the depiction of Apollonius as Hellenic ideal. These same scenes, moreover, act as cues to readers in their reception of the text itself.