The Oxford Handbook of the Second Sophistic

by Daniel S. Richter

  The question of what kind of genre the miscellany is, if it is a genre at all, is far from easy to answer, not least because of our own anachronistic assumptions about the nature and purpose of such works. The first to use the term “miscellany” was the Renaissance scholar Angelo Poliziano in his Miscellanea (Miscellaneorum Centuria Prima), an unsystematically ordered collection of one hundred notes on various classical texts first published in 1489. Notably, the preface of the Miscellanea self-consciously aligns with a tradition of miscellanistic writing that goes back to the Second Sophistic, by mentioning authors such as Aulus Gellius and Aelian as models for the work. For contemporary English-speaking readers, moreover, the term “miscellany” might be associated with popular, or entertainment literature, considering that the publishing landscape abounds with titles such as Schott’s Original Miscellany (together with Schott’s Food and Drink Miscellany and Schott’s Sporting Gaming and Idling Miscellany), or The Know-It-All, and includes even parodic miscellanies such as A. Parody’s (sic) Shite’s Unoriginal Miscellany.

  However, the Second Sophistic writers themselves never refer to their works by employing a term that specifically points to their conception of what we call “the miscellany” as a clearly defined genre. The literary predecessors that Aulus Gellius mentions in his preface, for example, include works entitled Meadows, Horn of Amaltheia, Muses, but also, more intriguingly, titles such as Problems, Moral Letters, and Handbooks.6 This suggests that he seeks to affiliate with a particular style of writing, characterized by thematic variety and loose organization, which can be found across different genres. Gellius refers to his own text as “commentaries,” the polished version of a body of brief annotations he made from his various readings (NA pref. 3). This, however, falls short of serving as a genre indicator. In reality, the Attic Nights selectively absorbs or synthesizes the discourse styles of many different genres (dialogue, memoir, commentary, symposium, biography and autobiography, technical handbook, encyclopaedia, scientific treatise, doxographical collection, lexicon, anthology).7 The same is true of the remaining texts in our list.8 With the protean nature of miscellanies as a given, describing their genre on the basis of formal features is impossible. Cultural approaches to genre, on the other hand, can prove much more productive in approaching this issue: these stress that “we need to look beyond the text as the locus for genre, and instead locate genres within the complex interrelations among texts, [ . . . ] audiences, and historical contexts.”9 In other words, in order to place miscellanies in the social and cultural landscape of the Second Sophistic, we need to look beyond the narrow question of their literary form, and toward an understanding of how their authors’ agendas would have interacted with reader expectations, as well as with the broader historical and cultural milieu of the Greco-Roman world of the high Empire.

  Accordingly, in what follows I discuss the aesthetic and cognitive advantages of miscellaneousness, in light of the fact that the defining feature of Second Sophistic miscellanies is their commitment to thematic variation (a feature designated with the Latin term variatio, or poikilia in Greek), and their deliberate choice to eschew a methodical style of exposition, even when the option to organize their topics systematically is clearly available to them. And, even though we cannot surmise a uniform type of readership for all types of Second Sophistic miscellany, there is no doubt that they were deeply enmeshed in the elite cultural politics of the Second Sophistic.

  28.2 VARIETY, PLEASURE, AND LEARNING

  Miscellanies are texts that can significantly enrich our understanding of Greco-Roman imperial reading culture, not only because of the attitudes to written texts and to reading that they encode, but also because the problem of how they themselves were read remains open.10 According to Goldhill, miscellanistic texts like the Table Talk or Aelian’s On the Characteristic of Animals are written in what he calls an “anecdotal form”: they are made of discrete, self-contained, and easily memorable units of knowledge, culled from many sources, which can be read in any order.11 Yet it is hard to imagine how most of these texts could have been read in a piecemeal fashion, given that the reader would have had no way of locating specific information within them: with rare exceptions, miscellanies lack tables of contents, and disperse related pieces of information, rather than unifying them under a single rubric.12 This feature stems from their self-conscious commitment to the principle that knowledge communicated to the reader in a haphazard fashion offers certain advantages over knowledge that is presented methodically. The notion is counterintuitive enough for its rationale to require justification, and the self-reflexive pronouncements the different authors offer to this end are important entryways into their work’s literary and intellectual aims.

  For starters, miscellanistic authors underscore the role pleasure plays in the reception of their texts. For Pamphila, according to Photius’s summary of her proem, “it was not difficult to divide them [sc. her topics] according to kind, but she considered mixture and variety more pleasant and graceful than [arrangement according to] one kind.”13 This statement leaves no doubt as to Pamphila’s command of her material and ultimate control over her text. Mixture and variety serve her aim to maximize the pleasure her reader will derive from her text. Similarly, Aelian, in the epilogue to the Characteristics of Animals, claims that he deliberately mixed together the diverse material he had collected, because he was seeking to make his text alluring to its readers, and sought to escape the tedium arising from monotony. His text, as he concludes, resembles a colorful meadow or wreath of flowers, both similes highlighting the fact that the work is a mosaic of heterogeneous material that crops up, as it were, or is weaved together, with no particular system. The reader is meant to derive enjoyment from the work precisely because of this feature. In addition, the similes serve as an acknowledgment of a wider tradition of writing miscellanies (they recall some of the titles for miscellanistic works that Gellius cites in his preface).14

  It is no accident that both authors attribute monotony to the orderly or systematic arrangement of topics: by doing so, they seek to carve a distinctive niche for their own works, differentiating them from technical and scientific treatises on the one hand (we can think of the orderly progression of Aristotle’s History of Animals, for example, which groups its themes together according to categories, such as internal organs, or reproduction, and proceeds overall in a methodical fashion),15 and encyclopedic compositions like Pliny the Elder’s Natural History on the other.16 Their desire to please their readers through variety certainly betrays the influence of the world of sophistic oratory: the sophists’ ability always pleasantly to surprise their audiences through the poikilia of their themes or the variegated style and rhythm of their speeches is repeatedly praised by Philostratus.17 Aelian himself, Philostratus informs us, admired Herodes Atticus because he was “the most varied among the orators” (VS 2.625).

  Entertainment however was not the sole effect envisaged for variety, but the concept was probably also yoked to an edificatory aim. A neat parallel from the preface to the fourth book of Seneca the Elder’s Judicial Declamations (Controversiae)18 elaborates on this aspect in an instructive way: the passage postulates that variety, achieved through the alternation of declaimers and the sententiae that they have used, keeps the reader more engaged than the exhaustive presentation of one declaimer at a time. This strategy aims to elicit a variety of emotional and intellectual responses: suspense, pleasure, excitement, and curiosity, conceived as the desire to know the unknown (Controv. 4. pref. 1).These are important not only for keeping the reader focused on the reading process as it takes place at a given moment in time, but also for ensuring that the text remains inviting for him in the future.

  The Judicial Declamations were expressly written as a record of declamatory case studies for the education of Seneca’s sons,19 while the link of miscellanies to the world of education is far from self-evident. Their didacticism can become more transparent, however, if we consider more closely what forms var
iety actually takes within each text. Significantly, authors of Second Sophistic miscellanies do not conceive of variety as simply a random mixture of topics, but tie it to cognitive faculties, such as memory and recollection, or anchor it in the events that mark the progression of their own life cycle. Plutarch, for example, informs his Roman addressee Sosius Senecio at the end of the preface to the second book of Table Talk, that the sympotic conversations that make up this book “have been written in a haphazard manner, not systematically but as each came to my memory” (Quaest. conv. 2, pref. 629D). Aulus Gellius, in turn, construes his text’s haphazardness as the textual imprint of his lifestyle, wholly devoted to literary-intellectual activity:

  I have employed a haphazard order of arrangement for my material, which I had previously followed in collecting it. For every time I had taken in my hands any Greek or Latin book, or had heard anything worth remembering, I used to keep notes of things just as I liked, of whatever kind, without distinguishing and without separating [sc. my topics]; and I used to put those notes away as an aid to my memory, like a kind of storehouse of letters, so that when at a given point I would need an item or word which I happened suddenly to have forgotten, and the books from which I had taken it were not at hand, I could easily find and bring it out. Now in these commentaries there is the same diversity of subject which also existed in those original notes which I had made in brief, without order or structure, from the various things I heard or read. (NA pref. 2–3)20

  Strictly speaking, the order of material within Plutarch’s Table Talk reflects the author’s pattern of recollections, functioning as the textual record of his memories of past sympotic conversations.21 Similarly, the order of material within Gellius’s Attic Nights follows that of the notes he had taken from his various readings. The sequence of subject matter within those original notes in turn correlated with Gellius’s patterns of study and reading, his social interactions, and his personal taste (which affected his criteria of selection of memorable things). The coterminousness of life and text is put forward in yet more assertive terms toward the end of the Attic Nights’ preface: “The number of books,” Gellius continues, “will advance together with the progress of life itself, however great it may be” (NA pref. 24). In fact, as Gellius adds at the end of the same section, the only kind of lifespan extension that he can plausibly envisage is intimately tied to his ability to carry on with the writing of his commentaries: “I do not wish to be given a longer lifespan,” he says, “than it allows me to retain my ability to write and take notes.”

  For both authors, then, the meandering format of the miscellany is anchored in a concrete lifestyle and thought paradigm, which idealizes continuous learning derived from various practical activities of life, as much as from bookish erudition. In this sense, the didactic value of variety lies in its ability to draw readers into the miscellanistic text’s colorful contents not (or at least not exclusively) for the sake of gaining factual knowledge, but in order to extrapolate models of life and thought from them. Further, the emphasis on the role of recollection is particularly significant, in that it affirms miscellanies’ relevance to the culturally pivotal process of preserving and codifying knowledge through memory, thus enabling its sharing and transmission.22

  A characteristic example from the tenth book of Athenaeus’s Deipnosophistae will illustrate this function of variety. As it is proclaimed, the book is a digression on Heracles’s gluttony, which breaks the continuity of the topic treated up to that point (Ath. 411a), namely, objects used for washing before and after dinner (408–411a). The rationale for the digression is offered through two poetic quotations, which open and close the book, respectively: their common topic is that poets ought to entertain their audiences through a great variety of themes, such that they resemble the variety of dishes at a feast (ποικίληεὐωχία).23 In fact, the quotations are paradigmatic for the Deipnosophistae as a whole, as the variety of sympotic conversations that the work purports to record mirrors the variety of dishes at the banquet of Larensis, the Roman fictional host.24 Book 10’s contents showcase how this is effected: the digression on Heracles’s gluttony quickly broadens out to an investigation of the gluttony of other mythical heroes, famous personalities, even entire peoples (Boeotians, Pharsalians, Thessalians) (411a–417b). Next, examples of frugality are mentioned by way of contrast (418a–421a), and lead to a condemnation of excess at banquets (421a–422d). Following on from this, the dinner phase of Larensis’s banquet is concluded, and the drinking phase (the symposium) begins: appropriately, the banqueters enquire after the vocabulary that is used to refer to the end of the feast, by citing relevant texts (422e–425f), before their attention turns to wine: they discuss its appropriate dosage and use (426d–433b), recall examples of famous drunkards (433b–443c), issue a condemnation of drunkenness (443b–445b), and explore the vocabulary that is used by various authors in order to speak about wine drinking and drunkenness (445c–f). The book finishes with a further digression, on riddles and word games played at the symposium (448b–459b).25

  The overarching link between these topics, the various stages of the banquet, is clear enough, but there are also subtler threads that connect them: association, analogy, antithesis, a movement from the particular to the general, or the reverse. All are rooted in mental processes that are triggered in the characters who participate at Larensis’s banquet, as they engage in dialogue with one another. Ultimately, they are subject to the control of the external narrator, Athenaeus, whose voice introduces and closes book 10 through the poetic quotations that praise variety.26 Above all, the ability to draw links between such diverse themes relies upon the banqueters’ profound knowledge of the literature of the past, gained through extensive reading from the archive (the library).27 Variety is thus connected with a model of feasting, wherein material and intellectual entertainment complement one another, rather than being mutually exclusive. The banqueters appear as the embodiments of this happy conjunction, as they take simultaneous pleasure in eating, drinking, and talking, and treat the symposium as an opportunity for wider reflection on the past, the correct way to live, and the uses of luxury.28 Further, as in Gellius, variety is linked to a lifestyle paradigm associated with the love of scholarship and learning. But, unlike Gellius, Athenaeus’s deipnosophists mainly engage with books, whose contents they seem to have consumed as avidly as the dishes at their host’s table. Their manner of engagement with knowledge is thus firmly rooted in the practices and legacy of the great Hellenistic scholars of the library of Alexandria.29

  28.3 MODELS OF POLYMATHY

  Second Sophistic miscellanies cover a truly impressive range of topics: across their pages historical anecdotes alternate with often lengthy quotations from longer historical works; explanations of the origins of customs, often culled from very obscure antiquarian writings, can be found side by side with knowledge extracted from scientific treatises; and accounts of miraculous natural phenomena or exotic locations can comfortably coexist with the pedantic lexical analyses of grammarians, the classifications of rhetoricians, or the theories of philosophers. Even in the case of works such as Aelian’s On the Characteristics of Animals, where the zoological theme monopolizes the text, the richness of the information that is provided is truly astonishing ranging from marvelous stories about the cleverness or extraordinary courage of animals, to descriptions of the animals’ biological functions in the style of Aristotle (whose biological writings constitute an important source). Miscellanies exude polymathy, and this fact suggests their agendas were in some way connected with the Second Sophistic ideal of the pepaideumenos. What exactly is the socio-cultural value that they attach to polymathy, however?

  In fact, miscellanies do not promote learning as an ideal in an unqualified sense, but distinguish between different types of polymathy, depending on who represents it, and what sort of engagement with knowledge it entails. In Plutarch’s Table Talk, for example, learning lies at the very heart of one’s ability to practice ph
ilosophy.30 The paternity of this attitude is attributed to the philosopher Aristotle, who allegedly argued that “polymathy provides many starting-points” (sc. for philosophical enquiry, 734D).31 Further, chapter 9.14, the very last chapter of the work, whose topic is the Muses, the patron-goddesses of knowledge, says that the Muse Polymnia “belongs to the part of the soul that enjoys learning and is dedicated to memory, which is why the Sicyonians call one of their three Muses Polymathy” (746E). In this context, polymathy is intrinsically connected not just with the love of learning, but, equally importantly, with the capacity to remember what one has learned. By contrast, when polymathy involves the sterile reproduction of knowledge in order simply to make an impression, it is rejected out of hand. The people who usually exhibit this latter type of polymathy are teachers of rhetoric or grammar, who tire their audiences with their long strings of quotations, and are the objects of mockery as a result.32 The prejudice against them is both social and intellectual, targeting on the one hand the social aspirations they fostered based on their professional credentials, and rejecting, on the other, the exclusive or esoteric nature of their expertise, which contravened miscellanies’ commitment to an ideal of knowledge that is accessible or communicable beyond the bounds of specialism.33 This ideal also underpins the Table Talk, whose dialogues underscore the role of philosophical enquiry as a way of life, and not as the exclusive domain of theoretical philosophers.