Partly because it is the age of vividly drawn biographies, the high empire appears to us a period of profoundly compelling individuals. I will summon up just two. Polemon, a sophist from a noble family in second century Laodicea and once a student of Dio Chrysostom, gained fame as a physiognomist and as a teacher. Trajan, Hadrian, and Antoninus considered Polemon a friend; he taught Herodes Atticus, the first Greek to be named Consul. His biographer Philostratus recounts that his success was partly due to his careful attention to his appearance and expression of emotion: he employed actors’ methods, and even in death dramatically reaffirmed his commitment to rhetoric in his last words: ‘Give me a body and I will declaim!’ (Philostratus, Lives 544). In a famous pair of speeches, Polemon adopted the characters of two fathers who had each lost a son at Marathon, a virtuoso performance that displayed his perfect facility with the Attic Greek spoken seven centuries earlier and his ability to bring that era passionately alive. Polemon spoke in many ancient voices: Xenophon, pathetically wishing to die with Socrates, Darius and Xerxes, stunned at the news of the Persians’ defeat, and Demosthenes, after the victory of Philip II over the Greeks at Chaeronea.
A contemporary of Polemon, Marcus, came from an ancient Byzantine family, served as an ambassador to Hadrian, and played a key role in mediating a serious dispute between Athens and Megara (Philostratus, Lives 529-530). He imitated the fourth century Attic orator Isaeus, to great acclaim, but cultivated a rather coarse, ‘rough and ready’ appearance, apparently designed to match his talent at extemporization. When, on a visit to Polemon’s school, Polemon publicly insulted him, Marcus famously redeemed himself by giving a grand extempore rebuttal. His best-known speech, however, was a polished affair describing a high point in the history of the Peloponnesian war, the Athenian victory at Sphacteria (recorded at Thuc. 5.34). Assuming the character of a Spartan elder, Marcus advised in the strongest terms against allowing soldiers who had thrown away their arms to re-enter the city (Lives 528).
In scenes like these from Philostratus’ Lives of the Sophists, composed in the late second century AD, the typical ‘Greek’ orator may hail from Asia Minor, Gaul, or Egypt, delivering epideictic orations in Greek to a mixed audience of Latin and Greek speakers. Much has changed in the four centuries since the teaching of rhetoric was banned in Rome, and Cato warned his son to beware of things Greek: what has emerged may be called a Greco-Gallo-Hispano-Africo-Roman culture united, in its upper echelons, by the common experience of rhetorical training. Philostratus called the period the ‘Second Sophistic,’ after the first, which he located in the philosophical activity in Athens in the fifth and fourth centuries (Lives481).
In the earlier era, a sophist is a rhetorician who takes pay for his teaching; in other words, a man like Gorgias. Most of the stars of Philostratus’ Second Sophistic, born into wealthy families, played prominent roles in local politics and gained fame through speaking, though not necessarily in that order.43 They were defined by their primary activity, epideictic speechmaking, a practice they transformed into an agonistic competition that entertained as much as it advertised and transmitted cultural literacy. Sophistic rhetoric is best understood by the limit it set for itself: no diction that does not appear in approved Attic authors. The research of Aristophanes of Byzantium and his colleagues was being put to new use. These men used public spaces in cities throughout the empire (especially in the Greek-speaking east) to re-create and re-enact classical Athens in the content of their speeches and their own comportment. The Sophistic thought-world was all at once eclectic (this is the age of the great encyclopaedic collections of Aulus Gellius and Athenaeus), in love with the trivial (the sophist-philosopher Dio Chrysostom devotes an encomium to a full head of hair, which the fifth century AD Synesius rebutted in an oration ‘In Praise of Baldness’), and intently devoted to re-creating the cultural tastes of the Attic past. The sophists themselves cultivated a small library of literary quotes, artfully deployed, from Homer, the nine lyric poets, Herodotus, Thucydides, Euripides, Plato, Xenophon, Demosthenes, Aeschines, and the New Comedians. Writers returned repeatedly to selected textual topoi - Lucian and Athenaeus to Plato’s Symposium, Fronto to the Phaedrus, while Aelius Aristides dreamt of Plato and Demosthenes (Oration 50.57). They replaced the double -ss - of the Ionic koine (common dialect) with the Attic - tt-, and revived the optative mood, the dual case, and - mi verbs (sometimes overcompensating). Historians in this period pursued events beyond the death of Alexander the Great only when they were concerned specifically to write about Rome - a choice shared by sophists and teachers of rhetoric in their declamations.44 With these tools of diction and theme, the sophist not only presented his audience with a set of ideals, political, social, cultural, aesthetic, but also he re-enacted them through his carefully cultivated image of manliness, courage, and refinement, functioning as a living physical transmitter of classical Greek ethics and cultural history. Yet he moved comfortably in a Roman setting, an embodiment of elite educational culture - the ideal Greco-Roman man.
Due in part to heightened awareness of the modern imperial experience, and the contestatory aspect of cultural formation within the context of empire, modern scholarship on the Second Sophistic tends to interpret it as an attempt to compensate for a glorious Greek history now centuries in the past, overshadowed by the power of Rome and its legions. By this view, the Greek sophists’ exclusivist form of language, restrictive literary canon, and limited view of history were part of a broader project of Greek cultural self-definition: ‘It is less and less easy to accept the view that a harmonious cultural equilibrium was ever reached between Greek and Roman cultures whether in the Rome of Augustus or the Athens of Hadrian’.45 That the quest to define and lay claim to ‘pure Greekness’ partly drives the Atticism and archaism of Greek rhetorical culture in the Roman empire seems obvious. At the same time, as we have seen, Atticism is a movement with roots in first century Rome. If Latin-speaking Roman elites did not join in speaking Atticized Greek or delivering Sophistic orations, then Roman rhetorical education and treatise-writing bore a strong resemblance to their Greek counterparts. One Roman historian recently observed that Rome’s longevity as an imperial power rests partly in its gradual extension of government by consensus formation to all its subjects. To the Romans, the maintenance of imperial society depended on shared communicative practices: documents, inscriptions, and coins.46 The classicizing movement of which Atticism was a part was a major instrument in the spreading and inculcating of imperial communicative practices, the common keystone of logical argumentation and stylistic taste.
As a discourse in close contact, even competition, with philosophy, especially in the way its curriculum combines the training of mind and body, rhetoric also plays a role in evolving attitudes toward the self and notions of the good life. In the third volume of his History of Sexuality, Foucault argued that imperial writings concerned with the epimeleia heautou, or ‘the care of the self’, represented an epistemic shift in the traditional ethics of self-mastery that originated in the fourth century BC. Working with the sciences or pseudo-sciences of physiognomy, dream analysis, and medical treatises, and in philosophical essays and memoirs, Foucault traces a shift that he describes as the intensification of the ‘relation of the self by which one constituted oneself as the subject of one’s acts’, resulting in the transformation of life into the ‘artful practice of life’.47 Habitual self-examination, moderation of the passions, and attention to external appearance were all ways by which the educated Greek or Roman man sought to live the good life, in accordance with social convention and the precepts of philosophical schools, especially Stoicism. Rhetorical training played a major role in enabling educated men in the imperial period to monitor their words and bodily actions: just as it taught the modulation of pleasing phrases and the arrangement of compelling arguments, its exercises set the body in order, with the proper mixture of manly uprightness and civil grace.
This holds in a general sense for Greek rhetoric at Rome. After the consolidation of power by Augustus and the military dictators who followed him, rhetoric (like its coeval and constant influence, Stoicism) persisted in presenting the world as a knowable, ordered system. It became, in that sense, a partner of empire, a key to the stability of imperial government. I conclude with Aldo Schiavone’s recent observation that ‘modernity is infinity that has become history - or the infinite productivity of human labor and intelligence... It is also the unlimited growth of needs, desires, and individualities, with dissatisfaction as its justification and battle standard’.48 If the sign of modernity is dissatisfaction with limits, one sign of Rome is the desire to impose limits on a world that defies them, and not only through armed resistance. Greek rhetoric at, in, and through imperial Rome offered a universal language of limits. The literary creativity it inspired and the ethical stylistics it helped to shape must be left to another surveyor.
World History
