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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2016
In chapter 2, we saw that performance was an essential component of sophistry: if we consider only the disembodied words of the declamation on the page, we shall not understand the power of sophistry’s grip on the Greco-Roman elites of the early empire. In this chapter, I want to turn to the texts that survive, exploring the strategies that we might adopt to unpack the words on the page. It is important, though, not to lose sight of the context, for a highly specific reason. These texts do not envisage themselves as containing some inner core of truth, like a sacred book; they are designed, rather, to have their meanings debated in public space. Sophistry is a profoundly relativizing medium: every assertion is always made in full awareness of the possibility of counterassertion in this competitive forum. As a result, it is impossible to approach the surviving texts simply as documents of their authors’ views. What we need instead is a sense of how they would have been received in society, of the rich range of possibilities for interpreting them. As we shall discover in the course of this chapter, sophistic texts demand a lively and engaged audience, capable of operating on several levels simultaneously.
1 Ahl (1984); see also Bartsch (1994); Whitmarsh (1998).
2 Numerous works on skhēmata survive, by among others Alexander Numenius and ps-Herodian: see RG 3.9-188, and Hansen (1998), 25; also e.g. ps-Longinus On the Sublime 17–29. On concealment in rhetorical theory, see Cronje (1993). The classic discussion of figures is Volkmann (1885), 456–505.
3 The phenomenon of figured themes is theorized in detail by ps- Dionysius, , Art of Rhetoric in his section ‘on the use of figures’ (peri eskhématismenõn), pp. 295–358 URGoogle Scholar.
4 The subject of The Adulterer Revealed is obscure.
5 On this passage, see also Millar (1977), 3–12; Papalas (1978); Ahi (1984), 201–2; Anderson (1986), 2–3; Flinterman (1995), 39; Tobin (1997), 1–2.
6 See Kennell (1997) for the background, and the possible links with an Athenian decree published by Marcus Aurelius.
7 The episode is indeed a novelistic topos: for grieving defendants attempting suicide through self-conviction, see Chariton, Chaereas and Callirhoe 1.5.4; Achilles Tatius, Leucippe and Clitophon 2.34.6; 7.7. Deliberate ‘self-denunciations’ (prosangeliai) were also a genre of sophistic declamation: see Russell (1983), 35–6.
8 For the evidence for sophists’ interactions with emperors, see Bowersock (1969), 43–58; see also Jones (1971), index s.v. ‘embassies’ (esp. 43–4, 115).
9 See Lewis (1981) for the range of ambassadorial appointments.
10 Jones (1978), 107–8.
11 Marcus co-ruled with Lucius Verus (CE 161–9) and Commodus (177-80).
12 For Menander Rhetor, see Russell and Wilson (1981). Heath (2004) appeared too late to take into account in this book.
13 Jones (1972), (1981) (genuine, addressed to Antoninus Pius); Stertz (1979) (rhetorical exercise, 3rd-4th centuries); de Blois (1986) (3rd-century, addressed to Philip the Arab); Librale (1994) (early 2nd-century, addressed to Trajan); Körner (2002) (3rd-century, addressed to Philip the Arab).
14 On these, see esp. Moles (1990); Swain (1996), 192–7; Whitmarsh (2001), 183–216. The grouping of the four speeches on kingship probably goes back at least to Synesius in the fifth century CE (Whitmarsh (2001), 326).
15 On the encomiastic aspects, see esp. Jones (1978), 115–23.
16 There is an abundant ancient tradition on philosophical advice to kings, beginning particularly with Aristotle (see frags 646–7 Rose). For discussion, with further bibliography, see Whitmarsh (2001), 181–3.
17 See Moles (1978).
18 Whitmarsh (2001), 325–7 argues for the latter (and see also now Bowie (2002a), 51); Moles (forthcoming) for the former.
19 These are broadly the positions of, respectively, Moles ((1990), (forthcoming)) and Whitmarsh (2001), 183–216.
20 In Bowersock (1969), for example, Dio and Plutarch are said to have ‘flourished just on the eve of the Second Sophistic; and although they were not part of it, their lives adumbrated many of its most pronounced characteristics’ (112).
21 Whitmarsh (2001), 204–5.
22 Höistad (1948), 313–20; Desideri (1978), 283, 287–97.
23 Moles (1990), 313; Whitmarsh (2001), 211.
24 Whitmarsh (2001), 196–7.
25 It might be said that the Kingship Orations 2 and 4 are entirely parabolic (along with Oration 5, the supposed alternative ending of 4). See also Orations 7.1-80; 16.10; 17.13-18; 20.19-23; 21.4, 6; 43.4-6; 57; 58; 60.9-10; 62; 66.6; and Said (2000), 171–4; Whitmarsh (2004d).
26 For the general point, see Goldhill (1994).
27 Anderson (1994), 156–70; (2000).
28 On the True Histories, see esp. Fusillo (1988); Rütten (1997); Georgiadou and Larmour (1998); Möllendorff (2000). On Lucian’s narratives generally, see Whitmarsh (2004e).
29 The prologue speeches are Dionysus, Heracles, Electrum, Dipsades, Zeuxis, Herodotus, Harmonides, Scythian: for bibliography, see ch. 2, n. 45. Parabolic narratives are also found in On the Hall 1, You are a Prometheus in Words 5, and The Dream.
30 The speculation that this is a prologue to book II of the True Stories is based around this allegorical reference to picking up where one left off. But the True Stories was composed for reading, not performance (as the prologue makes clear: see 1.1, 1.4). See further Anderson (1976), 262–4.
31 Nesselrath (1990), 139.
32 See esp. Martindale (1993).
33 Bowie (1974), 170–3; Russell (1983), 106–28; Anderson (1993), 103–19. Kohl (1915) lists all known themes for historical declamations. The most detailed discussion of the topic in modern scholarship is Swain (1996), 92–6; at p. 95, he calculates the relative frequency of historically-based declamations in the contexts of public performance and exercises.
34 Bowie (1974), 170–2; Russell (1983), 117–19; Swain (1996), 95–6.
35 See further Jones (1971), 113–14.
36 Cf. Dio Chrysostom, Orations 7.66, 7.93, 47.9, 49.6, 50.6 (‘satrap’ at 66.12 and 77/8.28, and at Lucian, Nigrinus 20, may also refer to Roman governors); Philostratus, VS 524. For the Greek terms used of Roman government, see Mason (1974).
37 Swain (1996), 96 calculates that 36% of the identifiable ‘historical’ declamations in Philostratus have Demosthenic themes.
38 i.e. 5 out of the 10 recorded at VS 538, 542–3. Aelius Aristides was also fond of Demosthenes: cf. fragments 7, 48, 63 Behr.
39 He is also implicitly linked with Demosthenes at VS 539: Herodes is hailed as ‘the equal of Demosthenes’, to which he replies ‘I wish I were the equal of the Phrygian [i.e. Polemo]’.
40 Habicht (1969), 75 (no. 33) OSG, 399 (no. 210). Phrynichus snipes at Polemo’s use of Greek on the inscription (Eclogue 396 Fischer).
41 Cf. e.g. Philostratus, VS 490 (Dio appears to Favorinus). Comparable, though different, are Lucian’s two works entitled The Dream: in the one, paideia appears to the speaker, encouraging him to find fame abroad; the other is a dream-dialogue between a certain Micyllus and his cock, who turns out to be the reincarnation of Pythagoras. For explicit identifications between 2nd-century authors and classical predecessors (e.g. Arrian as ‘the new Xenophon’), see Fein (1994), 120–1; Schmitz (1997), 46–7; 226–7; Whitmarsh (2001), 27.
42 See Rutherford (1998) for the approbation of Hermogenes and others.
43 Alexandrian themes recur in the second and fourth orations of Dio Chrysostom (as well as in his lost work On the Virtues of Alexander: Suda s.v. ‘Dio son of Pasicrates’), in Plutarch’s two speeches On the Fortune or Virtue of Alexander (see main text) and Life of Alexander, and in Arrian’s Anabasis of Alexander. Lucian’s Alexander or the False Prophet is plausibly an inversion of encomiastic portrayals of Alexander (see further pp. 77–8). At the outset, Lucian compares his work to Arrian’s life of Tillorobus (or Tilloborus, 2), an otherwise unknown text; Arrian was, of course, most famous for his biography of Alexander (see above ch. 1, ‘Education, elitism, and Hellenism’).
44 This ambivalence could already be seen in 4th-century Athens: Isocrates, for example, was strongly supportive of Philip II. See e.g. Whitmarsh (2004a), 162 on the different perceptions of the Macedonians.
45 Often, but wilfully, attributed to his youth by scholars reluctant to see the mature Plutarch besmirched by sophistry. See e.g. Jones (1971), 67. On the connection between the two Alexander speeches, see Schröder (1991).
46 Whitmarsh (2002) on Plutarch’s Life; Fears (1974) on the Roman Stoic tradition, embodied in Lucan and Seneca.
47 Humbert (1991).
48 For Isocrates and the civilizing mission of Greek paideia, see esp. Usher (1993).
49 Cf. Polybius 1.63.9; Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Roman Antiquities 1.4.2 (though this passage is surely an imitation of the Polybius passage); Bowersock (1965), 108–10.
50 Hamilton (1969), xxiii-xxxiii; Jones (1971), 68; Swain (1989); (1996), 160.
51 e.g. 324d (‘Fortune saved the city ...’); 326a (‘Fortune’s kindness’). See esp. Swain (1989).
52 The sentence is finished by the phrase ‘as though for a trial’, which seems corrupt.
53 Cf. Livy 9.18.6-7 for this pastime of the ‘most trivial of the Greeks’, usually taken to be Timagenes and/or Metrodorus (Bowersock (1965), 109–10; Breitenbach (1969), 156–7; Sordi (1982), 797; disputed by Fears (1974), 129 n. 99). Polybius, perhaps reacting to early versions of such debates, pronounces Roman military success superior to Macedonian (1.2.4-8).
54 On the use of Homeric material in the period, see Kindstrand (1973). On mytho logical themes, see generally Anderson (1993), 47–53.
55 Anderson (2000), 152–4; Said (2000), 174–86; Jouan (2002). In his Progymnasmata (or ‘practice pieces’)? Hermogenes mentions topics such as a comparison between Heracles and Odysseus, Andromache’s words to Hector, Achilles’ words to Deidameia, and Achilles’ lament over Patroclus (RG 2.15-16).
56 Russell (1983), 21–39, at 38.
57 Barthes (1972); Beard (1993).
58 Russell (1983), 21–39.
59 Kennell (1997), 351. For the contemporary relevance of tyrannicide themes, see also Russell (1983), 32–3.
60 For Philostratus, the Second Sophistic definitively involves characterizations of ‘the poor and the rich, excellent men and tyrants’ (VS 481); Lucian too characterizes his sophistic past in terms of ‘the accusation of tyrants and the praise of excellent men’ (Double Accusation 32). Sophistic themes based around tyrants are collected and discussed by Russell (1983), 32–3, and esp. Kennell (1997), 351–6.
61 Russell (1983), 31.