The Oxford Handbook of the Second Sophistic

by Daniel S. Richter

  I don’t see that there is anything I should be ashamed of on this account—any more than Cyrus the Great since in his mixed lineage he was half-Mede and half-Persian. For one must look not to where each man was born but how he conducts himself; one must consider not in which region but according to which reason he has determined to live his life.15 (Apol. 24)

  The language of the claim is strikingly similar to those passages in which Lucian draws attention to the Syrianness of a speaker only to then declare that ethnicity is meaningless—only character matters. And also like Lucian, Apuleius further in the passage cited above, deploys the figure of Anacharsis as the ideal type of the cultured barbarian. Indeed, Apuleius’s fellow north African Fronto, the teacher of Marcus Aurelius, also found in Anacharsis a means of expressing his own ideas about the claims that he himself has made upon Greek culture. In a letter written in Greek to Domitia Lucilla, Marcus’s mother, Fronto asks that, “if any word in the letter is obsolete or barbaric, or unauthorized or insufficiently Attic, look not at this, but at the essential idea [dianoia] of the word” (Ep. Graec. 1 = Naber p. 239). And in words strikingly similar to those of Lucian in the Scythian and those of Apuleius in the Apology, Fronto ends the letter by comparing his own daring foray into Attic speech with the Hellenic travels of Anacharsis:

  I compare myself to Anacharsis not, by Zeus, with respect to his wisdom but with respect to the fact that we are both alike barbarians. For he was a Scythian of the nomadic Scythians and I am a Libyan of the nomadic Libyans.

  Apuleius and Fronto, as Stephen Harrison and Amy Richlin have argued elsewhere in this volume (chapters 22 and 8, respectively), are Latin authors very much attuned to the concerns and predilections of the Greek authors of the Second Sophistic. It is, then, unsurprising that we would find tropes of self-fashioning in their work that we also find in an author such as Lucian. What interests me here is the fact that the “ethnic outsider” appears to have been such a trope in the world of the Second Sophistic—a world that privileged and policed the centrality of Attic diction—that so often valued the ethnic and cultural purity of Athens that Aelius Aristides so memorably invoked in the Panathenaicus in a passage indebted to hymns to Athenian autochthony that we find in the various Funeral Orations of the fifth and fourth centuries BCE.

  I suggest that this seeming disconnect is not as paradoxical or counterintuitive as it might seem. For Lucian and several of his contemporaries, the status of “self-professed outsider”—and there is no better available ancient Greek metaphor for the outside than barbarism—offered the multilingual and multiethnic intelligentsia of the Second Sophistic a means of deflecting a very Roman discourse about Greek decline in the present versus Greek greatness in the past. In other words, by advertising—indeed, insisting upon—their non-Greek origins, intellectuals such as Fronto, Apuleius, Favorinus, and Lucian were simultaneously dodging the label of “Graeculi”—little Greeks.

  BIBLIOGRAPHIC ESSAY

  Lucian’s fortunes have improved since the late nineteenth century. For Rudolf Helm (1906), Lucian was a pale plagiarist of Menippus of Gadara—a thesis effectively demolished by McCarthy 1934 (cf. Bompaire 1958). For much of the twentieth century, Lucian was valued primarily as a source for early imperial social, cultural, and religious attitudes (e.g., Baldwin 1973; Betz, 1961; Caster 1937; Jones 1986). Studies more sympathetic to Lucian’s literary worth include Anderson 1976; Billault 1991; Branham 1981; Hall 1981; and Ní Mheallaigh 2014; for analysis of Lucian’s language, see Deferrari 1916. An overview of the reception of Lucian’s work in Europe from the Byzantine period may be found in Robinson 1979; Marsh 1998 focuses on the Italian Renaissance, while Baumbach 2002 traces Lucian’s fortunes in Germany from the Renaissance to the nineteenth century. For an account of the biographical tradition, see Richter 2005, with bibliography. MacLeod’s OCTs (1972–1987) are to be used with caution; Bompaire’s Budé (1993–2008) editions are more reliable. There are, as well, good editions of individual texts, e.g., Avenarius 1956; Georgiadou and Larmour 1998; and Lightfoot 2003. The present chapter does not address Lucian’s attitudes toward fiction, since two excellent studies (Kim 2010 and Ní Mheallaigh 2014) have so recently appeared.

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Anderson, G. 1976. Lucian: Theme and Variation in the Second Sophistic. Leiden.

  Anderson, G. 1994. Sage, Saint and Sophist: Holy Men and Their Associates in the Early Roman Empire. London and New York.

  Avenarius, G. 1956. Lukians Schrift zur Geschichtschreibung. Meisenheim.

  Baldwin, B. 1973 Studies in Lucian. Toronto.

  Bartley A., ed. 2009. A Lucian for Our Times. Newcastle.

  Baumbach, M. 2002. Lukian in Deutschland: Eine forschungs- und rezeptionsgeschichtliche Analyse vom Humanismus bis zur Gegenwart. Munich.

  Betz, H. D. 1961. Lukian von Samosata und das neue Testament. Berlin.

  Bhabha, H. 1994. “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse.” In The Location of Culture, 85–92. London.

  Billault, A., ed. 1991. Lucien de Samosate. Lyon.

  Bompaire, J. 1958. Lucien écrivain: Imitation et création. Paris.

  Bourdieu, P. 1991. “The Production and Reproduction of Legitimate Language.” In Language and Symbolic Power, edited by J. B. Thompson, translated by C. Raymond and M. Adamson, 43–65. Cambridge, MA.

  Branham, 1989. B. Unruly Eloquence: Lucian and the Comedy of Traditions. Cambridge.

  Caster, M. 1937. Lucien et la pensée religeuse de son temps. Paris.

  Deferrari, R. J. 1916. Lucian’s Atticism: The Morphology of the Verb. Princeton, NJ.

  Elsner, J. 2001. “‘Describing Self in the Language of the Other’: Pseudo (?) Lucian at the Temple of Hierapolis.” In Being Greek Under Rome: Cultural Identity, the Second Sophistic and the Development of Empire, edited by S. Goldhill, 125–153. Cambridge.

  Fredrickson, G. 2002. Racism: A Short Introduction. Princeton, NJ.

  Georgiadou, A., and D. Larmour. 1998. Lucian’s Science Fiction Novel True Histories: interpretation and Commentary. Leiden.

  Goldhill, S. 2002. “Becoming Greek with Lucian.” In Who Needs Greek? Contests in the Cultural History of Hellenism, 60–107. Cambridge.

  Hall, J. M. 1981. Lucian’s Satire. New York.

  Hartog, F. 1988. The Mirror of Herodotus: The Representation of the Other in the Writing of History. Translated by J. Lloyd. Berkeley.

  Hall, J. M. 2002. Hellenicity: Between Ethnicity and Culture. Chicago.

  Helm, R. 1906. Lukian und Menipp. Leipzig.

  Hollinger, D., ed. 2006. The Humanities and the Dynamics of Inclusion since World War II. Baltimore.

  Isaac, B. H. 2004. The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity. Princeton.

  Jones, C. P. 1972. “Two Enemies of Lucian.” GRBS 13: 475–487.

  Jones, C. P. 1986. Culture and Society in Lucian. Cambridge, MA.

  Jüthner, J. 1923. Hellenen und Barbaren: Aus der Geschichte des Nationalbewussteins. Leipzig.

  Keulen, W. 2014. “Fronto and Apuleius: Two African Careers in the Roman Empire.” In Apuleius and Africa, edited by B. T. Lee, E. Finkelpearl, and L. Graverini, 129–153. London.

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

  Kindstrand, F. 1981. Anacharsis: The Legend And The Apophthegmata: Uppsala.

  Konig, J. P. 2006. “The Cynic and Christian Lives of Lucian’s Peregrinus.” In The Limits of Biography, edited by B.Mcging and J. Mossman, 227–254. Swansea.

  Lightfoot, J. L., ed. 2003. Lucian, “On the Syrian Goddess.” Oxford.

  Marsh, D. 1998. Lucian and the Latins: Humor and Humanism in the Early Renaissance. Ann Arbor, MI.

  McLeod, M. D. 1967. Lucian. Volume VIII. Cambridge, MA.

  McCarthy, B. 1934. “Lucian and Menippus.” YClS 4: 3–58.

  Mestre, F., and P. Gómez, eds. 2010. Lucian of Samosata: Greek Writer and Roman Citizen. Barcelona.

  Ní Mheallaigh, K. 2014. Reading Fiction with Lucian: Fakes, Freaks
, and Hyperreality. Cambridge.

  Norden, E. 1898. Die antike Kuntsprosa vom VI. Jahrhundert v. Christus bis in die Zeit der Renaissance. 2 vols. Leipzig.

  Oliver, J. H. 1980. “The Actuality of Lucian’s Assembly of the Gods,” AJP. 101:304–13.

  Richter, D. S. 2005. “Lives and Afterlives of Lucian of Samosata.” Arion 13: 75–100.

  Richter, D. S. 2011a. Cosmopolis: Imagining Community in Late Classical Athens and the Early Roman Empire. Oxford.

  Richter, D. S. 2011b “How Not to Translate: Lucian’s Games with the Name(s) of the Syrian Goddess.” In Complicating the History of Western Translation: The Ancient Mediterranean in Perspective, edited by S. McElduff and E. Sciarrino, 131–145. Manchester.

  Robinson, C. 1979. Lucian and his Influence in Europe. London and Chapel Hill, NC.

  Romm, J. 1990. “Wax, Stone, and Promethean Clay: Lucian as Plastic Artist,” Classical Antiquity 9:74–98.

  Said, S. 2001. “The Discourse of Identity in Greek Rhetoric from Isocrates To Aelius Aristides.” In Ancient Perceptions of Greek Ethnicity, edited by I. Malkin, 275–99. Cambridge.

  Swain, S. 1996. Hellenism and Empire: Language, Classicism, and Power in the Greek World,AD50–250. Oxford.

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

  CHAPTER 22

  APULEIUS

  STEPHEN J. HARRISON

  INTRODUCTION

  THE remarkably versatile output of Apuleius (ca. 125 to after 164 CE) shows multiple links with the literary culture of the Second Sophistic (see, e.g., Harrison 2000, Sandy 1997, Tatum 1979); though he could not match the major Greek sophists in their international fame and imperial contacts, he seems to have operated as a Latin-speaking sophist in his home province of Roman North Africa. Based in at least the 160s CE in Carthage, one of the great cities of the High Roman Empire, he took pupils and delivered speeches and declamations, thus pursuing an evidently sophistic career, as well as producing the Latin novel Metamorphoses or Golden Ass, thus participating in one of the key literary genres of sophistic culture (see chapters 25, 26, 27 in this volume). This chapter will consider his life and output from this perspective, and give brief accounts of his two most important works (the Apologia and Metamorphoses), drawing on and adding to my detailed earlier arguments (Harrison 2000); I will say more on the less-known and more sophistic Apologia than the famous novel (for more of my own approach to the latter, see Harrison 2013).

  BIOGRAPHY AND LITERARY CAREER

  Apuleius was born in the 120s CE at Madauros, now M’daurouch in Algeria, an inland city then in the Roman province of Africa Proconsularis, and a place of strongly Latin culture, though Punic was clearly the local vernacular. He was fundamentally Roman in cultural identity and in effect a native speaker and writer of Latin: it is crucially important for a true appreciation of Apuleius to realize that he belongs not to an African subculture but to the mainstream of Latin culture and literature, with his much-vaunted fluency in Greek acquired as it would be by a well-educated Roman. This is the obvious but fundamental difference separating Apuleius and other Roman literary figures with sophistic interests from the contemporary Greek figures of the Second Sophistic, who otherwise appear to match Apuleius in their interests in rhetorical and philosophical performance. Apuleius was contemporary not only with the Latin writer Aulus Gellius, whom he may have known in Athens, but also with the Greek writers Galen, Lucian, and Aelius Aristides (see chapters 24, 21, and 17 in this volume).

  His family background was prosperous. He tells us that his father achieved the duumvirate, the “miniconsulate” which was the highest magistracy of a Roman colonia and that he himself had held the same rank at Madauros by 158/9 (Apol. 24.9). Apuleius and his brother were left substantial wealth by their father when he died some time before 158/9 (Apol. 24.9), while Augustine, not a friendly witness, states that Apuleius was of high rank in his own country (Ep. 138.19). This wealth enabled him to study at a high level: élite literary education was then as throughout antiquity the preserve of the prosperous, and Apuleius’ background was similar to those of other literary figures of the period in this respect. Madauros itself was a center of teaching by Augustine’s time more than two centuries later (he learnt literature and rhetoric there: Conf. 2.5), but Apuleius implies that his own studies began at Carthage, the provincial capital and proconsular seat, where he acquired his basic education in letters, grammar and rhetoric (Flor. 18.15, 20.3); he also claims that his first instruction in Platonic philosophy occurred there (Flor. 18.15), though here as elsewhere in his statements about Carthage in the Florida it needs to be recalled that they are made to a Carthaginian audience to whom such claims would naturally be pleasing.

  Subsequent study took him to Athens, where he claims with characteristic self-promotion to have imbibed poetry, geometry, music, dialectic, and general philosophy (Flor. 20.4). These subjects, and Apuleius’s self-description (Apol. 10.6) and later reputation as a “Platonic philosopher,” show that he plainly studied in the Platonist tradition (cf. Flor. 15.26). He tells us in the Apologia (23) of his “distant travels and long studies” undertaken before 158/9 CE. This is partly boastful self-presentation as a globe-trotting intellectual in the manner of the great Greek sophists of the time, but apart from his studies in Athens, he seems to have spent time in Rome (Flor. 17.4), and was on the way to Alexandria at the beginning of the events which led to the Apologia (Apol. 72); thus he clearly knew some of the major intellectual centers of the Second Sophistic at first hand. Apuleius seems to have been a Latin speaker competent in Greek, but was probably unable to compete effectively with the great Greek sophists of his time on their own territory; he appears to have had direct knowledge of sophistic activity, but not to have joined the sophistic circus of the Greek East, settling instead for the life of a public lecturer and declaimer in Latin in North Africa.

  In the Apologia of 158/9 (for this work and its context see further below) he appears in his thirties as a fully-fledged public performer, declaiming at Oea, the modern Tripoli in Libya (Apol. 55, 73), and producing in the Apologia itself what has been justly seen as a masterpiece of the Second Sophistic. Other evidence for Apuleius’s rhetorical activities derives from the Florida, an extant collection of twenty-one extracts from his speeches and two complete short orations; some were clearly originally delivered at Carthage and can be dated to the 160s (Flor. 9, 15, 16, 17, 18). The extracts provide useful models of particular rhetorical techniques (extended simile or metaphor: Flor. 1, 11, 13, 20, 23) and basic exercises or progymnasmata (celebrity anecdote with pithy punchline [chreia]: Flor.2, 14, 18, 20; panegyric—Florida 7, 9, 15, 19, 22; formal description [ekphrasis]: Flor. 6, 12, 15). There are also broader links of subject matter between the extracts. Florida 3 and 4 both begin from famous musicians, 6 and 7 concern India and Alexander who first reached it, 12 and 13 talk of birds, 16 and 17 are both praise of great men at Carthage, and there are a large number of extracts about famous philosophers (2, 14, 15, 18, 22). It seems likely that these extracts are selected by a post-Apuleian editor as thematic and technical models for the rhetorical instruction of later generations, but they give a good idea of Apuleian rhetoric, especially the complete Florida 9 and 16.

  The De deo Socratis discusses the topic, popular in Middle Platonism (e.g., in Plutarch’s dialogue De genio Socratis, Mor. 575a–598f), of the daimonion of Socrates, the personal divine voice or guardian spirit recorded in the works of Plato and Xenophon as giving Socrates advice on crucial occasions. This (like the Florida) is likely to have been delivered to a Carthaginian audience in the 160s; it is a popular philosophical lecture of the kind widespread in the Greek Second Sophistic, adapted for a Latin-speaking audience. Similar lively rhetorical treatments of philosophical commonplaces, presented in the first person rather than dialogue form and embellished with poetical quotations, are to be found in the works of Dio Chrysostom and Plutarch; especially close are the two Dialexeis (8 and 9) of Apuleius�
�s younger contemporary Maximus of Tyre on the same subject, which are very likely written after Apuleius’s lecture but may draw on a lost common source.

  It thus seems that after the triumph of the Apologia, the publication of which could not have harmed his career, Apuleius was primarily based in Carthage, which as a cosmopolitan provincial capital relatively close to Rome served as a good showcase for his talents. He may have retained some kind of connection with his native town; the famous inscription found at Madauros recording the setting up of a statue to a “Platonic philosopher” (Inscriptions latines d’Afrique 2115) is very likely to honor Apuleius, given that the title was applied to him by himself and others.

  Scholars have disagreed about the dating of the Metamorphoses or Golden Ass, the novel which is Apuleius’s most celebrated and widely read work (see further below). Some regard this exuberant fiction as a youthful production, aimed at a Roman readership with whom Apuleius had greater contact in the earlier part of his career, while others see its consummate style and dense literary texture as belonging to the mature period of his life (e.g., Harrison 2000, 9–10; Walsh 1970, 248–251). Objective dating criteria are hard to find; but a number of considerations suggest with some probability that the Metamorphoses belongs at least after the Apologia of 158/9. First, the Metamorphoses, which contains stories of magic and much obscenity, was apparently not known to Apuleius’s accusers in his trial on charges of sorcery: there is no hint at all of it in the Apologia. Second, the Metamorphoses seems to display allusions to Apuleius’s own career in the period of the Apologia. Like Apuleius, Lucius in Metamorphoses3 faces a trial on trumped-up charges in which he defends himself with brilliant rhetoric (Met. 3.4–7), and after which, like Apuleius at Carthage and probably at Madauros, he is rewarded by the honor of a statue (Met. 3.11). Like the marriage of Apuleius and Pudentilla, that of Cupid and Psyche in the Metamorphoses is impugned by opponents for its secretive location in a country villa (Met. 6.9). Third, Apuleius’s own list of the various literary genres he has attempted in Florida 9.27–28, dated to 162/3, does not include prose fiction, though it mentions a wide range of works (see below). Fourth, there may be some reason to date the Metamorphoses after the publication of the Sacred Tales of Aelius Aristides, which dates from the 170s CE (see Harrison 2000–2001). It is thus reasonable to argue that the Metamorphoses was probably written after the Apologia, perhaps at a late date in Apuleius’s career.