The Oxford Handbook of the Second Sophistic

by Daniel S. Richter

  It was, therefore, not just authors such as Strabo (on his connections with mythography, see Patterson 2013) and Pausanias (most recently, Hawes 2013, 175–222), whose subject matter required extensive knowledge of myth, who needed access to the mythical information that mythography organized and interpreted. Myth was incorporated into a wide variety of social interactions both private and public. It could be used merely to mark one as a pepaideumenos, a member of the educated elite, or to attempt to influence personal behavior, but it was also part of the most important deliberations, including questions of interstate relations (Patterson 2010).

  Dio Chrysostom in his Olympic oration (Or. 12.44, from 97 CE) lays out four kinds of human ideas about the divine: inborn, derived from poets, derived from legal prescriptions, and derived from works of art. To these he later adds a fifth kind, ideas derived from philosophers (12.47). In our present context, what is worth consideration here is what is excluded: prose works of mythography, which Dio must have himself used and produced in his early education and his rhetorical training. But mythography is always a silent adjunct to the poetic, philosophical, and artistic modes of acquisition, and Dio and others never mention them alongside more prestigious sources. But they were certainly there. Systematic mythographers, as we have seen, organized and categorized the myths of poetry, and we have also observed the importance of mythography to Homeric literary criticism in this era. Allegorizers such as Cornutus would have been primary conduits for the initial acquisition of a philosophical understanding of myth, with texts like Heraclitus’s Homeric Problems serving more advanced audiences (see Brisson 2004, Lamberton 1986, and Struck 2004 for treatments of ancient allegory). Mythography also intersected strongly with appreciation of the visual arts, and the two interacted paedeutically—when Achilles Tatius has Cleitophon tell the story of Procne and Philomela, he is explaining a painting, something we have “real world” examples of in the Philostratean Imagines. What becomes clear from these is that one required both sides of the equation for sense to be made: one must know both the image and the story for the image to resonate fully with its mythical importance. The story, though of course always going back ultimately to traditional myth or a prestigious literary account, could be passed on in such contexts as mythographical historiai, even where the original text is referenced.

  The suppression of the role of mythography—Dio’s silence on the matter is typical—continues today to have the effect desired by its practitioners; we admire the highbrow erudition and imagine that it must come only from firsthand acquisition and prodigious memory. But the original audience would have understood what modern scholars too often fail to appreciate, that mythography underlay the whole apparatus of myth in this period. The original auditors and readers chose to ignore willingly the possibility that orators and authors got their material from intermediary sources. It is not being suggested here that mythography was the sole vehicle of acquiring and understanding myth, or even the most important, only that it was a major part of the process at every level, and one that was consciously omitted from the self-presentation of writers and orators because it could be assumed by the audience.5 Anyone of any educational level would have encountered mythography too many times to mention and in too many contexts, and as a consequence would have had a worldview shaped by mythographical texts. It is the continuing task of scholarship on the Second Sophistic to investigate just what this realization means for our understanding of the literature, rhetoric, public self-fashioning, and private identities of the Greeks.

  FURTHER READING

  For overviews of the development of early mythography and discussion of generic considerations see Dowden 2011, Fowler 2000 and 2013, Meliadò 2015, Pellizer 1993, and Trzaskoma and Smith 2007, x–xxviii. Alganza Roldán 2006 also explores the issue of genre, while Higbie 2007 treats mythographical texts of the imperial period generally. Only a few specific works from the late Hellenistic and early imperial periods have been covered in this chapter, but investigation of the nature of many of them is of considerable interest for the study of mythographical trends in the Second Sophistic. Of particular value are the following: Stern 1996 and Hawes 2013 (Palaephatus); Lightfoot 1999 (Parthenius); Brown 2002 (Conon). Hawes 2013 and Patterson 2010 are recent examples of scholarship that assesses larger trends and the intellectual status of myth and mythography, although they are not limited to our period. They are welcome signs of the field having moved beyond viewing mythographical works as base source material. Smaller studies, such as Fletcher 2008, Delattre 2013, and many of the essays in Trzaskoma and Smith 2013, reveal the same tendency to contextualize mythography in more nuanced ways within imperial culture.

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Alganza Roldán, M. 2006. “La mitografía como género de la prosa helenística: Cuestiones previas.” Florentia Iliberritana 17: 9–37.

  Almirall i Sardà, J., and E. Calderón Dorda. 2012. Antoní Liberal: Recull de Metamorfosis. Barcelona.

  Boys-Stones, G. 2007. “Fallere Sollers: The Ethical Pedagogy of the Stoic Cornutus.” In Greek and Roman Philosophy, 100BCto 200AD, edited by R. Sharples and R. Sorabji, 77–86. London.

  Brisson, L. 2004. How Philosophers Saved Myths: Allegorical Interpretation and Classical Mythology. Chicago.

  Brown, M. 2002. The Narratives of Konon: Text, Translation and Commentary of the Diegeseis. Munich and Leipzig.

  Cameron, A. 2004. Greek Mythography in the Roman World. Oxford.

  Celoria, F. 1992. The Metamorphoses of Antoninus Liberalis. London and New York.

  Cuartero I Iborra, F. 2010–2012. Pseudo-Apollodor: Biblioteca. Barcelona.

  Delattre, C. 2010. “Le renard de Teumesse chez Antoninus Libéralis (Mét., XLI): Formes et structures d’une narration.” Rev. Ét. Grec. 123: 91–111.

  Delattre, C. 2013. “Pentaméron Mythographique: Les Grecs ont-ils Écrit leurs Mythes?” Lalies 33: 77–170.

  Dowden, K. 2011. “Telling the Mythology: From Hesiod to the Fifth Century.” In A Companion to Greek Mythology, edited by K. Dowden and N. Livingstone, 47–72. Malden, MA, and Oxford.

  Fletcher, K. 2008. “Systematic Genealogies in Apollodorus’ Bibliotheca and the Exclusion of Rome from Greek Myth.” Cl. Ant. 27: 59–91.

  Fowler, R. 2000. Early Greek Mythography. Vol. 1. Oxford.

  Fowler, R. 2013. Early Greek Mythography. Vol. 2. Oxford.

  Gibson, C. 2013. “True or False? Greek Myth and Mythography in the Progymnasmata.” In Writing Myth: Mythography in the Ancient World, edited by S. Trzaskoma and R. Smith, 289–308. Leuven.

  Hawes, G. 2013. Rationalizing Myth in Antiquity. Oxford.

  Higbie, C. 2007. “Hellenistic Mythographers.” In The Cambridge Companion to Greek Mythology, edited by R. D. Woodard, 237–254. Cambridge.

  Lamberton, R. 1986. Homer the Theologian: Neoplatonist Allegorical Reading and the Growth of the Epic Tradition. Berkeley, CA.

  Lightfoot, J. L., ed. 1999. Parthenius of Nicaea. Oxford.

  Meliadò, C. 2015. “Mythography.” In Brill’s Companion to Ancient Greek Scholarship, edited by F. Montanari, S. Matthaios, and A. Rengakos, 1:1057–1089. Leiden and Boston.

  Montanari, F. 1995. “The Mythographus Homericus.” In Greek Literary Theory after Aristotle: A Collection of Papers in Honour of D. M. Schenkeveld, edited by J. Abbenes, S. Slings, and I. Sluiter, 135–172. Amsterdam.

  Most, G. W. 1989. “Cornutus and Stoic Allegoresis: A Preliminary Report.” In ANRW 2.36.3: 2014–2065.

  Smith, R., and S. Trzaskoma. 2017. “Mythography.” In Oxford Bibliographies Online. http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780195389661/obo-9780195389661-0142.xml.

  Pàmias i Massana, J., and A. Zucker. 2013. Ératosthène de Cyrène : Catastérismes. Collection des universités de France; Série grecque, 497. Paris.

  Papathomopoulos, M. 1969. Antoninus Liberalis: Les Métamorphoses. Paris.

  Papathomopoulos, M. 2010. ΑΠΟΛΛΟΔΩΡΟΥΒΙΒΛΙΟΘΗΚΗ: Apollodori Bibliotheca post Richardum Wagnerum Reco
gnita. Athens.

  Patterson, L. 2010. Kinship Myth in Ancient Greece. Austin, TX.

  Patterson, L. 2013. “Geographers as Mythographers: The Case of Strabo.” In Writing Myth: Mythography in the Ancient World, edited by S. Trzaskoma and R. Smith, 201–221. Leuven.

  Pellizer, E. 1993. “La mitografia.” In Giuseppe Cambiano, et al., eds. Lo spazio letterario della Grecia antica, edited by G. Cambiano, L. Canfora, and D. Lanza, 1/2:283–303. Rome.

  Ramelli, I. 2003. Anneo Cornuto: Compendio di teologia greca. Milan.

  Renner, T. 1978. “A Papyrus Dictionary of Metamorphoses.” Harv. Stud. 82: 277–293.

  Russell, D. A., and D. Konstan. 2005. Heraclitus: Homeric Problems. Atlanta, GA.

  Stern, J. 1996. Περὶ Ἀπίστων: On Unbelievable Tales. Wauconda, IL.

  Stern, J. 2003. “Heraclitus the Paradoxographer: Περὶ Ἀπίστων: On Unbelievable Tales.” TAPA 133: 51–97.

  Struck, P. 2004. Birth of the Symbol. Princeton, NJ.

  Trzaskoma, S. 2013. “Citation, Organization and Authorial Presence in Ps.-Apollodorus’ Bibliotheca.” In Writing Myth: Mythography in the Ancient World, edited by S. Trzaskoma and R. Smith, 75–94. Leuven.

  Trzaskoma, S., and R. Smith. 2007. Apollodorus’ Library and Hyginus’ Fabulae: Two Handbooks of Greek Mythology. Cambridge, MA.

  Trzaskoma, S., and R. Smith, eds. 2013. Writing Myth: Mythography in the Ancient World. Leuven.

  Van Rossum-Steenbeek, M. 1998. Greek Readers’ Digests? Studies on a Selection of Subliterary Papyri. Leiden.

  Wagner, R. 1926. Mythographi Graeci. Vol. 1. Leipzig.

  CHAPTER 30

  HISTORIOGRAPHY

  SULOCHANA R. ASIRVATHAM

  HISTORY is everywhere in the Greek literature of the Roman Empire. Athenaeus and Plutarch use historical personages as exempla of particular ethical dispositions; Aelius Aristides’s declamations on historical themes are a master’s versions of those that formed the basis for elite education; Polyaenus’s Stratagems are based on legendary and historic battles from the Homeric to the Augustan periods; the novels of Chariton and Heliodorus contain many historical elements; the list goes on. These sorts of texts use historical details for rhetorical display or ethical arguments,1 but there is also a significant body of Roman-era texts written in Greek that Ewen Bowie categorized as “historical works,” which includes some extant texts as well as a number of Jacoby’s fragmentary authors.2 In his survey on Severan historiography, Harry Sidebottom extended the definition of historiography to include a very wide variety of writings,3 but here I focus on the kind of text he categorized as “mainstream,” for example, universal history (in the Severan but also the Antonine period preceding it).

  These texts pose interesting challenges to what we think of as characteristics of “Second Sophistic” literature. First, inasmuch as we identify a work as “historiography” based on its ostensible goal of telling the truth about the past, it is seemingly incompatible with a large bulk of imperial Greek writing that is more obviously inspired by declamation (the practice of making display speeches)4 and whose main goal is the virtuosic display of erudition itself. Second, inasmuch as imperial historiography is largely about Rome, it tells against stereotypes of Roman Greek literature as both Hellenocentric and preoccupied with the Greek past rather than the Roman present. Through a consideration of our four extant historians—Arrian, Appian, Cassius Dio, and Herodian—this chapter attempts to elucidate the particularly hybrid nature of historiography on these two levels: of genre (earnest “history,” but somewhat dominated by rhetoric) and of cultural politics (between Greek and Roman). The first section argues that while historiography sets itself apart from rhetoric by insisting on its own truth value, it also exhibits a new understanding of the prevalence of rhetoric in contemporary discourse. The second section argues that the combination of Greek language and Roman subject matter found in much late historiography makes the distinction between “Greek” and “Roman” even harder to justify for those authors than for others, since their linguistic habits and varying degrees of self-awareness as pepaideumenoi cannot always be seen as strictly “Greek.”5

  I have chosen these four figures because their work is significantly extant, because they signal to us their attachment to the historiographical tradition, and because they show the signs of Atticizing education we see in other writers who are associated with the Second Sophistic. (The last is important because Attic “purism,” perhaps more than anything else, encourages us to think of the Second Sophistic as a “period” in time, and yet even the “canonical” Plutarch uses a literary form of koinê.)6 Given their similarities (and, in some cases, their cross-pollination), it seems appropriate to treat these authors together. But their differences inevitably encourage more inclusivity, rather than more restrictiveness, in the Second Sophistic label (if we are going to use it at all).7

  30.1 HISTORY/RHETORIC

  Genre is notoriously difficult to discuss. The situation is somewhat less difficult when a text proclaims its attachment to a tradition: Appian, Cassius Dio, and Herodian all use Herodotus’s ἱστορία8 (“inquiry”) to describe their work; after Thucydides, Cassius Dio uses συγγράφειν (“to compose in writing”) as well, and Arrian uses συγγραφή (“written narrative”) for his Anabasis Alexandri as well as his Indika (ostensibly modeled on Xenophon and Herodotus).9 Such signals allow us at the very least to see these texts in relationship to other texts that label themselves the same way. But the question is complicated by the longstanding debate on the relationship between history and rhetoric, which has particular consequences for historiography at a time when rhetoric was the most prestigious literary activity.10 Some ancients saw historiography as a branch of rhetoric (what Momigliano called the “Isocrates-Ciceronian notion”);11 this view continued into the nineteenth century until the rise of scientific historiography.12 In the twentieth century and beyond, however, we have seen the rise and establishment of a “metahistorical” view that emphasizes the discursive nature of writing on the past and questions the distinction between historical and fictional narrative.13 It is certainly true that in Greco-Roman antiquity, those writing history would have had the same education as those sophists who wrote more overtly rhetorical works, and there was no specific instruction in the writing of history.14 More to the point, ancient historiography had always been influenced by rhetoric, something most notable in the fictional, purportedly verisimilitudinous speeches that historians from Herodotus onwards put into the mouths of their historical characters. (Thucydides’s justification of his own such practice famously led Gilbert Murray to remark that the historian “would not have liked it in Herodotus; and the practice was a fatal legacy to two thousand years of history-writing after him.”)15 If any of our later historiographers have been accused of being too rhetorical, we should think of it as an intensification rather than a grafting of rhetorical language onto some originally “pure” idiom.

  Nevertheless, conventional ideas about truthfulness in history were still in circulation in this period, although in some cases rhetoric seems to occupy a new place of privilege. The best illustration of this is Lucian’s How to Write History (ΠῶςΔεῖ ἹστορίανΣυγγράφειν)—the closest thing we have to historiographical theory in the empire. Here Lucian lambastes certain trends in contemporary historians and offers his own correctives, often using Thucydides as the model historian.16 (Thucydides was the model for Lucian’s bad historians too, along with the two other greats: Lucian complains of his pretentious targets that they are “all Thucydideses, Herodotuses, and Xenophons”). He begins, in 2.47.3–54, with a story of a plague (as Emily Greenwood 2006, 114, puts it, a “loosely constructed spoof” of Thucydides’s plague narrative)17 that had once caused the people of Abdera to start spontaneously and uncontrollably chanting Euripidean verses at the tops of their lungs; Lucian suggests that a plague, too, is responsible for the present-day rash of writing on a relatively minor incident in the 150
-year history of Parthian Wars: the 161 CE disaster in Armenia that resulted in the commander Severianus’s suicide. This horde of individuals (unnamed, except for four who may or may not be Lucian’s inventions)18 disregard facts and figures; are unable to distinguish history from encomium; unpleasantly mix Latin terminologies into their Greek; mix high and low language; believe that only philosophers should write history; write too long a preface without much body or, alternately, write no preface at all; or pretend to have been an eyewitness to events by falsifying numbers,19 all while proving they know nothing whatsoever about the geography of where they took place (Hist. conscr. 6–32). The second, “positive” or “constructive” half of Lucian’s treatise tells us what good history is (allowing it to be embodied by Thucydides): in sum, it is truth, well researched and packaged in excellent rhetoric (“arrangement and exposition” [δεῖ δὲ τᾶξαικαὶ εἰπεῖναὐτά]; “how to say” [ὅπωςεἴπωσιν] the truth): “Above all, let him bring a mind like a mirror, clear, gleaming-bright, accurately centered, displaying the shape of things just as he receives them, free from distortion, false coloring, and misrepresentation. His concern is different from that of the orators—what historians have to relate is fact and will speak for itself, for it has already happened: what is required is arrangement and exposition. So they must not look for what to say but how to say it” (Hist. conscr. 50).20