The Oxford Handbook of the Second Sophistic
Page 73
Gellius, in turn, keeps distance from the useless accumulation of knowledge: he criticizes other writers of miscellanistic works because they test their readers’ patience, offering very little that is actually useful or pleasurable.34 Gellius’s own motto is Heraclitus’s saying “polymathy does not teach sense.” As he explains, his Attic Nights is the fruit of selective reading and excerpting, with a dual aim: to encourage some readers to develop a desire for liberal erudition (meaning: erudition that befits a man of social and moral distinction),35 as well as to urge them to contemplation of the “useful arts” (NA pref. 12); and, for those readers too busy to pursue study of any sort, to furnish a handbook of sorts, which will help them exhibit adequate knowledge of words or things in their daily interactions (NA pref. 12). Gellius’s rejection of polymathy results from his pedagogical objective, which is to invite Roman readers traditionally averse to the excessive theoretical pursuits of the Greeks into the world of knowledge.36 Gellius’s conception of what constitutes useful learning is very specific, however: it includes only elements of theoretical erudition falling within the sphere of philosophy or science, paired with a more practical sort of knowledge of language or key facts. Gellius himself, in his selective habits of excerption, emerges as a model of a balanced engagement with the world of learning for his Roman readers.37
Aelian might well have been one of the authors in Gellius’s black list, had he been his predecessor or contemporary: a Roman who chose to write in Greek, Aelian is self-consciously devoted to theoretical pursuits, and, as a result of this stance, embraces polymathy. As he stresses in the preface to the Characteristics of Animals:
And to know in depth the characteristics particular to each [sc. animal], and how the investigation of animals has attracted no less interest than that of man, requires an educated mind, which possesses a great deal of learning.
According to this, command of a great deal of information on the numerous characteristics of a vast number of animals, together with knowledge of previous scholarship dedicated to the topic, are the prerequisites for the success of Aelian’s project, whose goal is to prove that animals are not wholly devoid of reason or intelligence, and that their study is no less valuable than that of humans. In other words, Aelian yokes polymathy to the fulfilment of a clearly defined research goal, which, as Smith argues, aims to take a position on a broader philosophical debate on whether animals possessed reason or not.38 Later on, in his epilogue, the author further remarks that his love of learning, and his desire to enhance his personal knowledge by expending intense intellectual labor on the investigation of animals have been key motives behind the compilation of his zoological miscellany. Unlike Gellius, Aelian has not attempted to set limits to the amount of scientific information contained within his work: “I have not omitted what I have learned, nor been lazy,” he assures his readers. His theoretical interests in fact set him apart from other men (meaning especially Romans?), whose main aim in life is to gain money and social distinctions. Instead, Aelian seeks to emulate men like wise poets, scientists dedicated to the investigation of nature, and historians of the past. These three categories signal the triple literary allegiance of the Characteristics of Animals, emblematic of its effort to excel in variegated style as well as in breadth of content.39
Last but not least, Athenaeus’s Deipnosophistae valorizes polymathy as an indispensable attribute of true scholarship: the work memorializes great erudite men of the past because they exhibited mastery in their field of knowledge, as well as deep familiarity with the intellectual legacy of their predecessors. Understood in such terms, polymathy is a quality of epic stature, attached to men of great learning like a Homeric epithet. The adjective πολυμαθής, usually in its superlative πολυμαθέστατος (“most learned”), is reserved for men such as the Mauretanian historian-king Juba, the epic parodist Archestratus of Gela, the Hellenistic scholar-poet Nicander of Colophon, the Stoic philosopher Chrysippus, and, above all, the philosopher Aristotle, citations from whose works are frequently introduced with the formula “the most learned Aristotle” (ὁ πολυμαθέστατος Ἀριστοτέλης).40 The men who take part in Larensis’s dinner party are themselves praised as polymaths (1 epit. 1c–f), both in the sense that they excel in their own field, and because, as we have already seen, they are able to revive the past by citing quotations from an incredible variety of sources and genres (poetic and prose) from memory, to suit the conversation topic at hand.
The different statements the works articulate on the nature and value of polymathy are intrinsic to their cultural agenda: the knowledge that miscellanies so meticulously gather was intended to have a social impact, rather than simply be enjoyed or appreciated for its own sake. This is apparent from Gellius’s concern to save his readers from the embarrassment caused by ignorance at social situations. Symposia were perhaps the most important occasions on which readers of miscellanies would have had the opportunity to share and communicate the factual knowledge they had acquired from them. But knowing facts was not enough: symposia were places where character and social behavior were intensely scrutinized, so ultimately what would have played a far more important role in asserting readers’ belonging in the social world of true pepaideumenoi was the broader examples of cultured life miscellanies offered. It is therefore no accident that Plutarch, Athenaeus, and, in part, also Gellius, use the symposium as a literary device for communicating knowledge.41
28.4 PAIDEIA, THE WORLD AND IDENTITY
Broadly speaking, most of the material contained within miscellanies falls under the following main categories: the natural world and the place of humans in it, ethnography and the comparison of cultures, gender and social class, morality, the public role of the individual. Virtually every piece of information falling under these general rubrics can yield the opportunity to explore wider systems of prejudices, beliefs, and values that surrounded concepts, objects, practices, phenomena and natural beings (plants, animals, humans). Precisely because of this, miscellanies can be approached as media for accessing the cultural imagination of the intellectual communities that created and used them.42 So far, our discussion of variety and polymathy has allowed us to connect miscellanies’ form and content with central issues in Second Sophistic culture: memory, the social value of paideia, the performance of knowledge. In this section I wish to discuss further the ways in which they allowed imperial readers to reflect on their place in the wider world, as humans, men or women, old or young, members of certain cultural or political communities, citizens, professionals, or intellectuals. In other words, I wish to understand what sort of contribution miscellanistic texts might have made to the exploration of identity, taking into account the broader significance of this issue and in the Greco-Roman imperial context.43 Below I discuss some comparative examples that help illustrate what I mean, on a topic that is quite popular in Second Sophistic miscellanies, namely, the consumption of wine.
Let us begin with a typically scientific investigation of the practice of wine drinking, from Plutarch’s Table Talk. Chapter 3.3 of this work compares the constitutions of old men and women in terms of their respective responses to wine drinking. The answer argues that, despite being avid drinkers, women get drunk far less easily than older men, for several reasons: their excessively moist body, which causes the wine to be diluted; their greedy manner of drinking, which causes a great quantity of wine to be expelled from their body before it is properly absorbed; the many passages in their body (the result of the biological function of menstruation), which cause fluids to drain quickly (650A–C). In all these respects women are fundamentally different from men, especially old men, whose bodies are extremely dry.
Next, Gellius (10.23) and Athenaeus (10.440e–f) explore Roman culture’s regulations concerning women’s drinking. As both authors mention, according to Roman custom women were not only not allowed to drink wine (except wine made from raisins), they also had to prove their sobriety by kissing their husbands and male rela
tives. The sources of this information, and the respective contexts in which it is found, are completely different, however: Gellius attributes it to writers of Rome’s old customs, one of whom was Marcius Porcius Cato, with the aim of demonstrating that Roman women of the past “lived an abstemious life” (NA 10.23.1). This point is further demonstrated by citing Cato on the punishments that were inflicted by law: drunkenness in women was punished as severely as adultery, for which husbands had the right to kill their own wives without a trial (10.23.3–5). Athenaeus, in turn, derives the information from the Greek historian Polybius, who emphasizes that Roman women’s uncontrollable drinking habits justified the imposition of an elaborate detection mechanism. Significantly, Athenaeus cites an additional (Greek) explanation for the custom, which takes it back to a certain episode in Heracles’s adventures (441a–b), and moreover places it in the middle of a longer section on examples of men, women, and communities who became notorious for their love of wine (433b–443c). Immediately after discussing Roman practice, the text cites passages from various works which illustrate “what Greek women are like when they get drunk.” (441bff.).
Lastly, chapters 2.37–38 of Aelian’s Historical Miscellany offer a comparative examination of different communities’ regulations concerning the consumption of wine: the legislation of Zaleucus in Epizephyrian Locri (a Greek city in southern Italy), probably the earliest legal system in the Greek world, decreed that drinkers of unmixed wine were punishable by death, unless they were following doctors’ orders. Next, we learn that in cities like Massalia and Miletus, women were only allowed to drink water, Miletus in fact forming an exception from the rest of Ionia. “Why should I not mention,” Aelian concludes, “Roman custom as well? How would I not be justly reproached as unreasonable, if I recorded the customs of Locri, Massalia, and Miletus, but left aside those of my own country?.” In Rome then, Aelian goes on, women, slaves and noble men up to the age of thirty-five were not allowed to drink wine.
In all these texts, the exploration of wine drinking as a cultural practice prompts reflection on a broader cluster of interconnected issues, which embrace gender, social class, cultural differences, the problem of nature versus culture, morality and self-control, and the social scrutiny of private life and behavior. In each text, the discussion is framed in such a way that the material is presented from a different standpoint, and the role of the narrative voice is crucial in this respect. It is notable, for example, that the scientific investigation found in Plutarch does not treat wine drinking by women as a problem per se, despite the well-known fact that women were discouraged from participating in symposia. One explanation for this may be that the speaker in this particular dialogue, Mestrius Florus, was more tolerant of the habit, as a Roman.44 Another may be that the moral dimension of the issue is put to the side, for the sake of foregrounding its scientific aspect. The persuasiveness of the scientific explanation may actually be enhanced by the fact that it is offered by a Roman, because it shows that scientific discourse can function as a kind of cross-cultural conceptual currency. The gender bias is evident all the same, with the analysis presenting women as the biological “other” of men (stressing their biological and anatomical differences), and imputing an uncontrollable manner of drinking to all of them collectively.
Within the Attic Nights, by contrast, the narrator “Gellius” makes no secret of his cultural bias: his aim is not simply to prove the claim, made by early Roman writers, that Roman women of the past lived a life of self-control, it is also to show that Roman custom and legislation acted wisely in ensuring this remained the case: this is apparent from the way the chapter connects the laws governing wine drinking by women with the laws punishing adultery committed by women. In Athenaeus, on the other hand, the work’s complex narrative texture entails that the voice of Democritus, the character who speaks in this section of book 10, fuses into the voice of the source that he cites, Polybius. In fact, Democritus appears simply to juxtapose testimonies from different authors, offering no interpretation of his own. Yet the contrast between the tight control exercised on Roman women for their drinking, and the uncontrollable drinking of Greek women emerges clearly enough from the material itself, and the comment in 441b, “what Greek women are like when they get drunk” (given by the narrator) reinforces that impression, thus revealing an implicit pro-Roman bias.45
In Aelian, finally, the narrator assumes a dual perspective, both Greek and Roman: on the one hand, he acts like as a Greek historian who delves into Greek local history and, on the other, as a Roman who seeks to compare the practices of his own culture with those of the Greeks. Moreover, Aelian’s imperial perspective is especially noticeable in the geographical movement of his text, from the western (Locri and Marseilles) and eastern fringes (Miletus), to the imperial center (Rome). Importantly, Aelian’s ambivalent cultural self-positioning46 aligns him with Second Sophistic men like Favorinus, another Latin speaker who chose to write miscellanies (as well as other works) in Greek.47 This fact places miscellanies at a particular privileged position in literary history, as works which fully embody the cross-cultural dynamic of Greco-Roman imperial society.
These examples illustrate just how complex are the narrative surface and cultural outlook of Second Sophistic miscellanies. Beyond the examples we have just examined, the technique of alternating different topics within the same work would have had the effect of constantly pushing readers to shift perspectives, alternately identifying with (or, conversely, distancing themselves from) different approaches and attitudes to a huge variety of issues. We may thus speak of a certain kind of intellectual pluralism as the sort of epistemological outlook that directly emanates from the variety of miscellanies’ contents and their generic fluidity.48 This feature may in part also stem from the fact that the miscellanies’ intended imperial readership was probably itself very diverse. The audiences they addressed must have been as heterogeneous in their cultural and social outlook as Plutarch, Gellius, Favorinus, Aelian, and Pamphila themselves, and may have included women, as well as men. Those readers’ own class, gender, education and cultural or ethnic background, and self-positioning against the realities of the Greco-Roman imperial world would have had the final say in how they would interpret different aspects of miscellanies’ contents.
28.5 CONCLUSION: THE MISCELLANIES’ INTELLECTUAL LEGACY
In comparison with other forms of Second Sophistic writing, such as the novels, biographical texts, or declamatory writings, miscellanies may seem far less exciting, not least because they appear to contemporary readers as hopelessly fragmented, pedantic, repetitive, or intellectually shallow. I hope I have shown that, contrary to such an impression, miscellanies are in fact a genre of Second Sophistic writing that is perfectly suited to its rich intellectual landscape. I have argued that we can gain a better understanding of miscellanies as a genre, if we focus closely on three key aspects: their commitment to the aesthetic of variety, the different models of polymathy that they advocate, and the different ways in which they prompt their readers to explore identity. Scholarship is thankfully already turning to this direction, with a number of important studies of individual texts having been published in recent years
FURTHER READING
Our understanding of the full range and characteristics of Greco-Roman antiquity’s compilatory and miscellanistic literature is very uneven, but Bartol 2005, and König and Whitmarsh 2007, offer excellent starting-points towards a contextual study. König 2007; Morgan 2007a, 257–273; 2007b; 2011; and Oikonomopoulou 2013a explore different aspects of the structure of such works. Plutarch’s Table Talk is by far the most comprehensively studied Second Sophistic miscellany, with Teodorsson’s commentary, 1989–1996, greatly facilitating its detailed investigation. Klotz and Oikonomopoulou 2011, and König 2012 examine the Table Talk’s literary background, sympotic philosophy, and relationship to Plutarch’s wider oeuvre. Montes Cala, Sánchez Ortiz de Landalluce, and Gallé Cejudo 1999; and Ribeiro Ferreira, Leão, Tröster, and Bara
ta Dias 2009 additionally furnish some useful essays on the text’s sympotic themes. Holford-Strevens 2003 is an indispensable introduction to Aulus Gellius’s Attic Nights. Further, Henry 1994, Vessey 1994, and Holford-Strevens and Vardi 2004 address key questions concerning its intellectual content and pedigree. Lastly, Keulen 2009 and Heusch 2011 examine its satirical portraits of intellectuals and links with Roman memory culture, respectively. Jacob 2013 is now the best introduction to the rich literary and intellectual fabric of Athenaeus’s Deipnosophistae, while the Italian commentary of Canfora 2001, and the wide-ranging volume of essays edited by Braund and Wilkins 2000 allow a more focused investigation of the work. Further, Zecchini 1989 and Lenfant 2007 discuss specifically its treatment of historical sources. Aelian’s miscellanies are very understudied by comparison, but the recent new critical edition of the Characteristics of Animals by García Valdés, Llera Fueyo, and Rodríguez-Noriega Guillén 2009, paired with Smith 2014, are bound to make a positive impact on its understanding. On Aelian’s Historical Miscellany, Wilson 1997, and Lukinovich and Morand 2004 offer useful introductions. The fragments of Favorinus’s miscellanies can be consulted in Barigazzi 1966 and Amato 2010. Lastly, our knowledge of Pamphila’s miscellany relies exclusively on the indirect tradition: the main sources are Photius, Diogenes Laertius, and Aulus Gellius, and the fragments can be consulted in Müller (FHG 3.520).