A chapter on imperial Greek rhetoric in a volume on Roman rhetoric is essential. We take for granted the early Roman feeling of inferiority to the Greeks in the whole area of public speaking, which is reflected in Anchises’ acknowledgment that others orabunt causas melius (‘‘will plead their causes better,’’ Verg. Aen. 6.849). Other chapters in this volume examine the gradual integration of Greek Hellenistic rhetoric into the educational and political structures of republican Rome (see chapters 3, 13, 21). By the end of the second century ce rhetoric was firmly established in the life of the Roman elite; and the city itself, as the locus of political and economic power in the Mediterranean, had a role to play in the cultural developments of the time, both in the Greek and Latin languages. Philostratus, an Athenian literary grandee of the Severan age, coined the term Second Sophistic in the early third century ce to apply to the self-styled sophists of his own time and much of the two centuries previous. He presents in his Vitae Sophistarum (Lives of the Sophists) an impression of self-confident display orators in the context of revitalized Hellenism, and that picture has to be understood as a contribution to Greco-Roman culture in its own right.
Current scholarship on the Second Sophistic has tended to connect it with a variety of agendas which are cultural in the broadest sense rather than directly concerned with rhetorical performance. Yet it is that very rhetorical performance itself which for Philostratus lies at the center of the activities of sophists in the imperial period; and it was to denote them that he coined the term in the first place. There is room for some discussion about the nuance of the word ‘‘sophist’’ itself in this latter-day context: it clearly confers an air of authority (whether well or ill deserved), and implies the ability to perform extempore declamation in front of any person or persons from the emperor down to a class of pupils. It can still be argued that the word is really redundant if it can readily be replaced with ‘‘epideictic orator’’ or that the sense of ‘‘teacher’’ is the predominating emphasis (Brunt 1994: 33). There is certainly something in this, carrying as it does the accusation of ‘‘grade inflation’’ and selfpromotion for the term sophist, to say nothing of a somewhat facile link with the
Sophists of the Athenian golden age. But that gives us all the more reason to think that a sound rhetorician’s instinct rather than simple ignorance of intervening literary history would have informed Philostratus’ coinage of the term, and so Brunt cannot really remove the authenticity or convenience of‘‘Second Sophistic’’ as a late antique term. It smacks of the glibly self-promoting performer, though exceptions are not too hard to find. Modern analogies are limited and sometimes misleading, but the notion of an ‘‘academic’’ media star with a commanding presence comes close, not least in its grandiose vagueness. Current presenters of cult-status historical documentaries such as Simon Schama, David Starkie, or Michael Wood perhaps come closest to this in our own experience. But they may use scriptwriters, authentic locations, and the machinery of modern media. The ancient sophist, however, did not stand at the site of Marathon reading an autocue: he had to transport Marathon to a live classroom, theater or audience-hall: in other words, he had to be not a stand-up comedian but a stand-up scholar and cultural entertainer.
World History
