This volume is a dense, well-researched treatment of imperial Greek textual and material culture. It draws on a wide range of literary, material (especially epigraphic) and visual sources to investigate how elite Greeks in the Roman empire related to time and tradition. Whereas conventional approaches focus on the temporality of the so-called ‘Second Sophistic’ as obsessed with the (classical) past, this book makes a strong case that imperial Greek culture instead used the past primarily to address the future.
The book consists of one introductory chapter, followed by six further chapters, which are organised in three parts. Chapter 1 sets the main novelty of the book: S. sets out to explore how imperial Greek culture used the past primarily to address the future. The expression ‘Second Sophistic’, which made its first appearance in Philostratos’ Lives of the Sophists to describe a kind of oratorical performance, is here meant broadly to signify ‘classicizing patterns of literary and monumental self-representation by elite Roman citizens of Greek origin during this period with a particular focus on the second century ad’ (p. 2). Sophists were not only orators, performers and teachers, but political protagonists, ‘competitive and status driven’, whose success was measured in terms of ‘political influence’ (p. 5). Some important developments in the scholarly conception of the Second Sophistic, which are preliminary for S. to overcome the conventional emphasis on the classical Greek past as a baseboard for imperial Greeks, are then introduced (in particular A. Wallace-Hadrill's ‘cardiac’ model of Roman acculturation and T. Whitmarsh's post-classicist view of imperial Greek literature ‘as a new phase in a cultural continuum from Classical times’, p. 7). S. goes on to introduce briefly two methodological landmarks of the volume: interdisciplinarity and intermediality. Texts and monuments are introduced as two mutually engaging streams of culture: ‘Imperial Greek literature is saturated with monuments and commemorative spaces, and imperial Greek monuments discourse with the architectural matrices of Roman imperial cityscapes, Greek architectural and artistic traditions, and the spaces of Greek history and literature’ (p. 9). Last but not least, S. rightly notes that ancient societies lacked a conceptual notion of future comparable to ours: on the contrary, ‘Futurity was buttressed by the concept of monumental permanence and the canon of great literature’ (p. 12).
Part 1, ‘Glorious Past, Tense Present, Pending Future’, is about ‘how imperial Greek authors mediate the spectre of the classical canon at the moment they come to write’, in other words how they ‘negotiate the problem of being postclassical’ (p. 29). S. examines both textual (Chapter 2) and material evidence (Chapter 3) to show how the competitive and performative nature of imperial Greek society was addressed not only to the present, but also to future audiences. In Chapter 2 S. explores the strategies through which imperial Greek authors, such as Pseudo-Longinus and Dio Chrysostom, among others, try to shape their own potential canonicity in a hypothetical future. In Chapter 3 S. explores how the material world interacts with its textual counterparts: the chapter mainly focuses on Herodes Attikos (in particular the commemorative arch on his Marathonian estate), but also discusses in detail two important funerary monuments in Ephesos (the Library-heroon of Kelsos and the tomb of Dionysios of Miletos). S. shows how Greek imperial monuments and commemorative landscapes engage with classical visual and verbal traditions in order to address posterity and their own role in a hypothetical future canon. Part 2, ‘Textual Monuments and Monumental Texts’, is dedicated to the role of inscriptions in the futuring of imperial Greek culture. S. focuses in particular on the ‘boom’ of honorific inscriptions as the favoured medium used by imperial Greeks in their attempt to self-commemorate, and analyses their literary and physical engagement with inscribed monuments of different types. In Chapter 4 S. discusses examples of inscriptions incorporated into literary texts (Alexander's altars in Philostratos’ In honour of Apollonios of Tyana and the Pillars of Herakles in Lucian's True Stories); physically extant inscriptions, such as Herodes Attikos’ herms with inscribed curses; and two major examples of (again, either literary or physical) appropriation of past markers of cultural memory, such as the tomb of Alexander and that of Cyrus in Arrian's Anabasis, and the polyandrion of the Marathonomachoi by Herodes Attikos. Chapter 5 focuses on a specific type of inscribed monument, the honorific statue, and analyses the strategies with which imperial Greeks tried to come to terms with the statues’ commemorative perceived limitations. Among these strategies S. identifies, for instance, amplification through monumental statue programmes such as the colossal nymphaion at Olympia, funded by Herodes Attikos and dedicated by his wife Regilla; the creation of imaginary spaces of honour, which S. detects in the texts of Favorinus, Aristeides and Polemon; the replication of private portraits by Greek elite members such as Herodes Attikos. Part 3, ‘Controlling the Future?’, comprises two chapters. Chapter 6, which is devoted to the literary reception of Herodes Attikos in his own time, allows for a deeper comprehension of the anxieties and tensions that animate Greek elite members’ commemorative efforts: Herodes’ contradictory literary representations by other authors, especially by Philostratos, ‘enrich, destabilize, and confound Herodes’ monumental image’ (p. 247). Chapter 7 offers a kind of general conclusion: albeit brief (three pages), it usefully underlines the major point of the book, namely that Greek imperial cultural innovations are funded on ‘an artificially constructed sense of continuity between past, present, and posterity’ (p. 305). This movable temporal perspective works as a ‘Janus-like, bi-directional gaze’, having the effect that ‘someone glancing back from a hypothetical future moment might view imperial Greek as an equal notch on (or potentially even the climax of) a long, culturally inclusive timeline’ (p. 305).
This book is not only interdisciplinary, with a double focus on texts and monuments – a combination of sources that is in itself commendable –, but also develops through a truly intermedial engagement with the evidence. Different sources are analysed in their mutual engagement and influence. Important interpretative outcomes derive from this approach. For instance, S. explains with unprecedented perceptiveness Herodes’ multi-medial and multi-thematic, multi-temporal and multi-spatial engagement with the physical landscape of Roman Greece, also shedding new light on some controversial actions undertaken by Herodes: for instance, the transfer of the stele of the fallen Marathonomachoi from its original place on the battlefield to his villa in the Peloponnese (pp. 177–85) takes on a new light as part of a whole, as an ingredient of Herodes’ wide-ranging engagement with time, and space, in order to shape his own, and his family's, self-representation for future posterity. S.'s approach is far from conventional. Whereas common views on the Second Sophistic focus on its relation to the classical past, S. shows how elite Greeks in imperial times used the past to shape the future. This focus on temporality represents the great addendum of the book to the status quaestionis and the widespread scholarly focus on the triad of culture, identity and power as the driving force of elite Greek society in the Roman empire. In S.'s approach, positioning themselves into tradition was for the Greek elites a way of addressing the future and shaping their own posterity. The book is well informed and thoroughly researched; and despite the richness of details and the sophistication of the thesis developed, it is captivating and pleasant to read. Ancient evidence, both literary and material, is treated with great accuracy, several illustrations are provided, and the bibliography is vast and up to date. S.'s approach, pairing material and literary sources, on the one hand, and combining patterns of commemoration and temporality, on the other hand, definitely proves to be successful. The book achieves its aim of drawing out the tensions, preoccupations and interests (which were certainly not one-sided) of the Greek imperial elite; by doing so it offers a remarkable contribution to the understanding of their political and cultural agenda, and, ultimately, of their historical role under the Roman empire.
