The Oxford Handbook of the Second Sophistic

by Daniel S. Richter

  What of Dio’s use of Greek? In the Severan Period, Atticism was in its heyday: extant authors include Galen, Aelian, Athenaeus, Diogenes Laertius, and Philostratus himself, who showed a range of styles and attitudes toward Greekness much like that of the Antonine sophists, from purist and exclusive (e.g., Diogenes) to appreciative of Rome’s support of Greek cultural supremacy (e.g., Philostratus).58 Dio, too, was an Atticist whose imitation of Thucydides was well known in antiquity (Photius notes that Thucydides’s influence was most notable in Dio’s speeches).59 But does mere Atticism make Dio a “Greek”? Scholars have tended to fall on one side or other of the fence depending on how they define Greekness and Romanness, and depending on what side of his personality—the statesman or the literary man—they believe means “more” to Dio.60 On the one hand, he is someone who is writing a monumental work in Greek. On the other hand, he shows little special interest in Greece or Greekness, despite a few mentions of his hometown of Nicaea.

  Other aspects of Dio’s relationship to paideia seem to reflect a cultural hybridism. Inasmuch as Dio’s history is a “Greek-language example of a specifically Roman genre, the senatorial annalistic history,”61 we might conclude that the truest way of viewing the act of paideia it represents is as “senatorial” rather than “Greek” or “Roman.” There are, however, some references to paideia that speak more directly to the relationship between Greek and Roman culture. For example, Dio says that he uses the word chrysous for the Roman coin aureus because the Atticists he follows do this too.62 As both a concession to a Greek audience (he is doing what Atticists do) and an acknowledgment that the audience will be expecting a Roman term, Dio seems to put Greek and Latin on equal footing. Also revealing is Dio’s emphasis on the paideia of emperors, most notably that of Hadrian and Marcus Aurelius. Dio notes in particular that the emperors’ paideia entailed immersion in both Greek and Latin literature (specifically in Marcus’s case, philosophy and rhetoric).63 Those looking for a “Greek” Dio may emphasize his mention of Greek here: the emperor reads not only Latin but also Greek; those looking for a “Roman” Dio may point out that Greek is not privileged here over Latin, as we might expect from a “Hellenocentric” author. But there may be another way altogether of reading this: not as an affirmation or dilution of some assumed Greekness on the part of Dio, but as a redefinition of excellent education as something that would describe Dio himself: as bilingual.64 Dio shows the kind of self-reflexivity about paideia that befits a man writing a monumental history of Rome under the emperors from its beginnings all the way up to the recent past, which required fluency in both Greek and Latin sources. In this sense, Dio—as a born-Greek writing in Greek about Roman things—fits nicely on the other side of a coin from Aelian, who was a Latin writing fluently in Greek about Greek things.65

  30.2.4 Herodian

  Herodian’s History of the Empire is a novel piece of writing in two senses—it is a seemingly new form of history written in Greek that deals with a set period of the very recent past, and it has been called novelistic.66 It is organized more or less as a series of imperial biographies starting with Marcus Aurelius—characterized, as in Dio, as the template of the ideal ruler against whose image his successors will fail—and ending with the ascension to the throne of the thirteen-year-old Gordian III. There is a sense of increasing hopelessness as each figure rises and quickly falls. The creation of a new sort of history dealing only with the recent past and present suggests that historiography has acquired a new sense of urgency. Paideia has perhaps an even more obvious role in Herodian, whose writing style is heavily rhetorical, than in Dio.67 While Herodian does not refer to Marcus Aurelius’s bilingualism, he mentions that his love of literature surpassed that of any Roman or Greek (History of the Empire 1.2.3); his description of Marcus’s character includes a nice piece of self-reflexive commentary on the trickle-down effect of good rulers onto the people: “He was the only emperor who gave proof of his philosophy by his dignified, sober manner rather than by words and a knowledge of doctrine. The product of the age of Marcus was a large number of scholars, since subjects always model their lives on the ideals of their ruler” (History of the Empire 1.2.4). The idea that good rulers lead by example is a rhetorical commonplace in antiquity (see, for example, Isoc. Panath. 138; Plin. Pan. 45.6), but the idea that an intellectual ruler automatically creates intellectuals through his example is Herodian’s unique twist. And yet paideia has its limits in this world. Herodian uses it, for example, to distinguish between Elagabalus and his brother Alexander: the former took part in barbarian religious ritual while the latter studied diligently. That paideia was not enough to ensure Alexander’s military success, that Marcus’s efforts to give Commodus a world-class education were not enough to curb his incipient violence, suggests that, in the new unstable world that Herodian depicts, paideia is a main attribute of the best rulers but cannot itself guarantee good rule, as men like Plutarch and Dio Chrysostom had hoped was the case for their own world.

  CONCLUSION

  Inasmuch as Antonine and Severan historiography identifies itself as something other than rhetoric and (often) deals with Rome and even contemporary Rome, it seems to lie outside what Second Sophistic scholarship tends to see as the mainstream of Hellenocentric rhetorical discourse. But like other contemporary texts written in Greek, this historiography tends to acknowledge the prevalence of rhetoric, shows a drive toward innovation and monumentality, is significantly Atticist, and has an interest in paideia. These commonalities suggest a need for definition of Second Sophistic that encompasses not only the discourse of appropriation (that is, the continual redefinition of culture as “Greek”) but also the truly hybrid nature of Greek writings that deal with Rome. Arrian’s idealized portrait of Alexander does not come from the past but is a response to Roman imitatio Alexandri; Arrian’s writings reflecting Roman life are, conversely, flush with Xenophontan reference but display little “sophistic” flourish. Appian mixes koinê and Attic Greek with Latinisms, and writes of the rise of Roman power from an Alexandrian point of view and for an Alexandrian audience; his view of Roman triumphalism is similar to that found in both Pliny and Aelius Aristides—the latter with whom Appian shares an appreciation for Alexandria and a comfort in being a subject-observer of Rome’s power. Cassius Dio and Herodian write Roman histories which take the contemporary reader up to events that happened in their lifetimes: their subject matter and closeness to the material may seem to trump any notion that they are “Greek.” But their very acts of writing in Greek—in the case of Dio, monumentally; in the case of Herodian, innovatively—and their interest in the paideia of emperors align them with other writers associated with the Second Sophistic. Unlike those who wrote in the more purist literary genres, however, for whom Attic perfection was sufficient, Dio and Herodian needed a high level of bilingualism to be authorities on the Roman world in which they lived.

  FURTHER READING

  There are not many overall treatments of Second Sophistic Greek historiography, although for the Severan period Sidebottom 2007 is very useful. Kemezis 2014 ties the historians Cassius Dio and Appian together with Philostratus as writers who in different ways saw the reign of Marcus Aurelius as a golden age. Arrian’s most important modern critic is Brian Bosworth, astute on matters of both history and rhetoric; among his many contributions are his two-volume Historical Commentary on Arrian’s History of Alexander (Bosworth 1980, 1995, which deal with books 1–5; a third volume dealing with books 6–7 is eagerly anticipated); and Bosworth 1988 and 1993. See also Brunt 1976–1983, with commentary and notes, and Stadter 1980. The study of Appian has until recently been dominated by the work of the late Italian scholar Emilio Gabba, whose main interest was Appian’s historical value for understanding Roman history, especially the civil wars; his bibliography is too large to encapsulate here, but commentaries on aspects of Appian’s civil wars appeared as early as 1956 (Appiano e la storia delle guerre civili) and as late as 2001 (Appianus: La storia romana: Libri 13–17:
Le guerre civili). More recent analyses of Appian’s work as literature include Bucher 2000, Goldmann 1988, Gowing 1992 and Welch (ed.) 2015. Millar 1964 continues to be the best starting point for Cassius Dio; for historiographical approaches see Ameling 1997 and Lange and Madsen (eds.) 2016; for studies of the triumviral and Augustan periods see Gowing 1992 and Manuwald 1978 respectively, and the commentaries of Reinhold 1988 and Rich 1990. Commentaries on other books include Edmundson 1992 (Books 56–63), Murison 1999 (Books 64–67) and Swan 2004 (Books 55–56. Geza Alföldy wrote a number of articles on Herodian, such as 1971a and 1971b; see also Sidebottom 1998 and Zimmerman 1999.

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