Yet during the first century ad a Greek elite began to withdraw themselves from koine and to advocate a return to Attic, the language of fifth - and fourth-century Athens. The impetus was a revived pride in being Greek. These intellectuals were happy to call themselves sophists (see earlier, p. 270). One of their members, Phi-lostratus (c. ad 170-250), entitled his survey of second-century ad Greek culture Lives of the Sophists, and coined the term ‘the Second Sophistic’ to designate the era. The movement set itself the task of purging Greek of Latin words that had crept into koine but this was not an anti-Roman movement. Many of the sophists were Roman citizens and were well aware that ultimately their survival as an elite depended on Roman power. They formed the meeting point between the formidable literary and philosophical heritage of the Greeks and the wealthy Roman elite who admired this heritage and were happy to patronize it.
The movement was also a reassertion of elite identity against the growing number of provincials who were learning Greek for the first time. The search was for pai-deia, the Greek term for the educated man’s way of being in terms of a shared education, attitudes, and mannered relationships with others. The fourth-century
Orator Libanius talked of the young man with paideia as one ‘who has installed Demosthenes in his soul [in other words, mastered classical rhetoric] . . . He will think it is his duty to make the cities happy; he will rejoice when the executioner’s sword lies idle; he will make the citadels beautiful with buildings; and he will remain throughout as servant of the Muses.’ In short he will be a sophisticated if somewhat elitist patrician.
An intriguing example of one who leapfrogged from a Semitic background straight into the sophistic movement is Lucian. Lucian was born in Samosata in Syria about 120 ad and describes himself as a ‘barbarian, ‘wearing a kaftan in the Assyrian style’ as he puts it in another context, and so outside Greek culture. Somehow he managed to learn rhetoric in the approved Attic manner and even travelled west where he was well received in Gaul and reported that he became rich there. Lucian was endlessly inventive. He could hardly make any statement without turning it on its head a sentence or two later. The great sixteenth-century scholar Erasmus, renowned for his satires on Catholicism, loved him. ‘He shows amazing artistry and finesse in his wide-ranging criticism, turning up his nose at the whole world, rubbing the salt of his wit into every pore and always ready with a nasty crack on any topic that crosses his path.’ Yet Erasmus also appreciated an underlying seriousness in Lucian’s writings—he could ‘mix gravity with his nonsense and nonsense with his gravity’. Simon Goldhill, in an excellent essay on Lucian in his Who Needs Greek? (Cambridge, 2002), notes that he was as likely to be found in a prostitute’s bedroom as on the fringe of the emperor’s court.
Lucian was sensitive to his ‘Assyrian’ background and how much it needed to be subsumed. Achieving paideia was not merely a matter of absorbing the great classical texts. If one was a philosopher there was a correct way of walking, with a masculine gait and an appropriate air of seriousness. Lucian recalls his acute embarrassment when he used the wrong word of greeting when visiting a patron. Some of the onlookers assumed he must be drunk but, in fact, his social gaffe came from ignorance. Further embarrassment came when a ‘philosopher, presumably Lucian himself, attended his first Roman dinner party, ate the dishes in the wrong order, and did not know the correct way of replying to a toast. In an imagined text in which a Scythian visiting Athens discusses philosophy with Solon, Lucian tells how the Scythian sweats in the heat, while true Greeks, who have trained in the gymnasia, are so fit they remain cool. ‘Becoming a Greek’ was challenging for the outsider.
With the Greek elite distancing themselves from the speakers of koine through the use of Attic, new boundaries have to be negotiated between the two ‘languages’. To those born in the elite the distinction between acceptable Attic speech and koine was easily understood but to an outsider such as Lucian it was not and so he is able to offer an original perspective on the issues that arise. In Attic ‘tt’ is often used in place of the koine ‘ss’ and Lucian presents an imagined law case where sigma (‘s’) protests that tau (‘t’) has trespassed on her territory. In another text he ridicules a speaker who has become so obsessed with using Attic that his arcane language and stilted expressions have made him incomprehensible. A doctor has to be called to
Make him vomit up his lists of words. Somehow, Lucian suggests, one had to learn to speak Attic Greek naturally and without display. However inadequate Lucian felt in his own time, in later centuries his own Greek became a model for students.
Paideia demands serious intellectual study and Lucian mocks those who collect hundreds of texts, and who may even have read some of them, but who are unable to analyse them critically. He could hardly have criticized Plutarch (ad 46-120) in this respect. Plutarch was a wealthy native of the city of Chaeronaea in Boeotia and he spent most of his life there and at Delphi where he was a priest. However, he studied in Athens and also lectured in Rome. He appears to have been completely at ease with the new balance of power, accepting Rome as the ruler of Greece, while insisting that Greece remained the more sophisticated of the two cultures. In his Political Precepts he advises his fellow members of the elite to acquiesce in the dominance of Rome (and deliberately cultivate patrons in the capital itself) while never abasing themselves before their rulers. He knew the Roman mentality well enough to know that self-abasement would only encourage contempt.
In his Lives, which have been drawn on earlier in this book, Plutarch compares celebrated Romans with selected Greek equivalents (the orator Demosthenes is compared to Cicero, for instance, and Nicias, who led the ill-fated Sicilian expedition, with Crassus, who suffered a similar disaster in Persia). Plutarch did not consider that the Romans had become properly educated (in other words absorbed Greek culture) until the third century Bc and it was only from then that he could give them respect. Many of his Greek heroes, Pericles, Alcibiades, Lysander, are, understandably, from the earlier classical period while he covers many of the famous Romans of the republic. His real interest is in the characters of individuals, and the moral attributes of each of his subjects matter more to him than whether they were Greek or Roman. In short his sympathies range beyond the confines of his native Greek culture. Plutarch is, of course, writing several centuries after the lives of many of his subjects, but his style is so immediate and his creation of atmosphere so haunting that his evocations of past lives are convincing. His eye for detail is exact and he is adept at creating the drama of a death scene, the murder of Cicero or the suicide of Cato of Utica or Antony and Cleopatra.
One of the most celebrated of Plutarch’s works is his Table Talk. Here an erudite group of Greeks and Romans, Plutarch among them, recline at a symposium and discuss a series of intellectual issues. They are more than simply philosophers: at least one had been a consul, another the governor of Achaia, and the dedicatee of Table Talk, Sossius Senecio, is an intimate of the emperor Trajan. The discussions are unhurried and open-ended and they show off the atmosphere of the Second Sophistic as much as the paideia of the participants. The subjects are a wonderful mix: ‘Why the middle of wine, the top of oil, and the bottom of honey is best, ‘Why women are hardly, old men easily, foxed, ‘Which was the first, the bird or the egg?, ‘What God is worshipped by the Jews, and, intriguingly, ‘Why women do not eat the middle part of lettuce’. One suspects that Plutarch selected and shaped the discussions so as to show off his own breadth of interests.
One of the absorbing features of Table Talk is the versatility of the debate: scientific explanations for natural phenomena mingle with mythical ones, the literature of the past can be quoted and pleasure taken in the absurdity of some of the questions. Medicine, music, and mathematics are among the themes. The genre is known as a ‘miscellany’, a mixture of themes with different backdrops that could be reshuffled so as to be read in any order. Pliny’s Natural History is another example of this genre and it became especially popular in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. (See F. Klotz and K. Oikonomopoulou (eds.), The Philosopher’s Banquet: Plutarch’s Table Talk in the Intellectual Culture of the Roman Empire, Oxford, 2011, for a fuller discussion, especially, on the subject of ‘miscellanies’, the essay by Teresa Morgan.)
Once the seeker of paideia had made an intensive study of the classical authors, Sophocles, Thucydides, Xenophon, and Plato among them, he would progress to the mastering of rhetoric. The fourth-century Athenian orators Demosthenes and Isocrates (see earlier, pp. 294-5, 312) were the inspirations here. While there were far fewer opportunities for debate in the second century than in classical Athens, there were still many occasions when public speaking was valued. Crucial was the need to represent one’s city before others, either to the emperor, the provincial governor, or in disputes with neighbours. Any dignitary arriving at a city had to be welcomed with appropriate oratory. Formal speeches were to be made at funerals and weddings and in honour of the gods and the city when games were held. Yet perhaps the greatest incentive was to achieve status among one’s peers by mastering the correct language, effective forms of presenting an argument, and the invention of fresh ways of expounding a traditional theme. It was common, for instance, to show off one’s knowledge of the history of classical Athens but the trick was to present the narrative in an original way.
One can explore the use of public oratory in the orations of Dio of Prusa, a city in the province in Bithynia. Dio, also known as Dio Chrysostom, ‘the GoldenMouthed’, c. AD 40-120, grew up in a wealthy family and had the finest of Greek educations. Like many ambitious provincials he made for Rome but was among those banished from the city and banned from his native Prusa during the increasingly despotic rule of Domitian. For some years he ‘dropped out’ and, with ‘the appearance and dress of a vagabond’ as he put it, wandered around the empire gaining respect for his wisdom.
In the more tolerant reigns of Nerva and Trajan, Dio came back to prominence. Trajan in particular admired him and Dio delivered a series of orations on kingship, at least two of which were delivered personally before the emperor. While Dio accepts that monarchy is the best form of government, he recognizes that it can degenerate into tyranny (as he knew only too well) and that provincial governors can behave badly. The urbane Trajan would hardly have been offended by this but it seems too that Dio was playing to a Greek audience who were always sensitive to the abuse of Roman power. Dio’s ideal, imbued with Stoicism, is of a natural harmony overseen by Zeus as father of the gods and men. One of his speeches was made before Pheidias’ statue of Zeus at Olympia.
However, Dio’s hopes of harmony proved wishful thinking. When he returned to his native Prusa he found tensions both between and within the cities of Asia Minor. He concluded that the Stoic cycle (see earlier, p. 352) had entered a period of decline. As a philosopher Dio took it upon himself to offer advice to others. One of his orations is to the citizens of Tarsus, the capital of the province of Cilicia (and the birthplace of the apostle Paul). Tarsus had fallen out with all its neighbours while internally it was riven with class conflict. The city also had a reputation for making unnecessary complaints to Rome about its governors. Dio is sharply critical of the Tarsian elite for looking only after themselves. They do not allow the poor, in this case a union (collegium) of linen workers, to share in the franchise. While they have a right to criticize governors if they really have behaved badly, there is no point, he tells them, in getting a reputation for being litigious. Nor will their Roman overlords be impressed with their petty disputes with their neighbours, even ‘over an ass’s shadow’ as Dio puts it. Dio is equally frank with the cities of Nicaea and Nico-media, in his own province of Bithynia, who were squabbling over precedence. Dio has been accorded citizenship of both cities (this was a common practice, citizenship was often awarded to honour a famous orator or poet, anyone who had helped the city, or in the hope of gaining benefactions from the wealthy) and this gave him the right to address their citizens. ‘What’s in a title?’ is his response. These disputes are, he went on, nothing compared to the great issues over which the cities of classical Greece differed and, again, if the best is to be got out of Roman rule, the cities need to be united and so act as an effective restraint on unscrupulous governors.
It is not surprising that Dio was so widely thought of. Here, a hundred years after his death, is the encomium of Philostratus:
In speaking Dio had a peculiar resonance of his own, which enhanced the oratory of Demosthenes and Plato just as the bridge [of a stringed instrument] enhances the tone of musical instruments; and it was combined with a serious and direct simplicity of expression. . . Though he very often rebuked licentious cities, he did not show himself acrimonious or ungracious, but like one who restrains an unruly horse with the bridle rather than the whip. (Lives of the Sophists.)
It is a model which might still be followed today among online debaters.
World History
