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Introduction

Beyond the Second Sophistic and into the Postclassical

This book represents a series of experiments in alternative ways of thinking about ancient Greek literature, which I shall identify by the term (to which I lay no exclusive claim) postclassicism.¹ With this neologism I mean, principally, to mark an aspiration to rethink classicist categories inherited from the nineteenth century. It is not intended to proclaim any sharp rupture with existing theories and practices within the discipline, for clearly there are many theoretically informed approaches (literary and cultural theory, feminism, reception, Marxism, postcolonialism, queer theory . . .) that share in that labor of reconstructing the humanities legacy, but it seems to me that finding a progressive label that is specific to classical literary studies should be a useful reminder that (despite what is sometimes claimed) battle lines are still drawn up fiercely around the study of ancient texts.

Postclassicism is not, however, merely a matter of updating political and ethical mores. Classics as a discipline was, for sure, more than most humanities subjects forged in the white heat of imperialist, nationalist, elitist, disciplinarian, androcentric imperatives, but collective self-congratulation on “our” liberal progressiveness is lazy and too easy. Rather, what I aim to do in this book is attack some of the conventional ways of categorizing literature, all of which are to some extent rooted in nineteenth-century, postromantic ideas of classical value. Classicists’ organization of literary history has tended to be dominated by an unspoken aesthetic that places certain kinds of texts in the center and hence privileges certain kinds of narratives of “what the Greeks thought.” It is at this kind of assumption, most of all, that this book takes aim. The literary production of the ancient Greeks (and others) is understood here not in terms of an intrinsic worth that is to be adulated—for value only ever indicates what the buyer is willing to pay—but as a plural cultural system. Despite the ever-increasing sophistication of our strategies for reading individual texts, classicists in general still seem to cling to unreconstructed narratives that privilege early Greece as a site of cultural, intellectual, and indeed religious purity. This creates a historical matrix that not only overaestheticizes material from the early period (particularly the tough, manly stuff: Homer, Pindar, and Aeschylus) but also dooms later literary traditions to being comprehended in terms only of replication and emulation of prior glories. This assessment, it seems to me, works only if we ignore the majority of the surviving evidence.

Any area of classical culture can be considered from a postclassical vantage. There are, of course, brilliantly innovative readings of (for example) Sappho and Herodotus that reshape our ideas about literary history. This book, however, focuses on literary texts that are also chronologically postclassical. All are located somewhere on that slippery slope toward decadence that (so some might argue) began in the aftermath of the fourth century B.C.E. I choose this material not just because it has been understudied relative to earlier texts (true though that is) but also because it offers the best opportunities for confronting the larger questions of historical change, linear versus plural traditions, and cultural conflict.

The material I consider, moreover, will (I hope) challenge many readers’ ideas about what counts as Greek literature. Some of it was written by Egyptians or Jews. Some of it is “subliterary.” Some of it, for sure, fits a more conventional template of Greek literature, but in those cases the disruption comes in in different ways. The range is designedly diverse, cutting as it does across temporal, cultural, and generic boundaries, precisely to pose sharp questions about how and why we think of Greek literary history in the way that we do. It is not my aim, let me make clear, simply to erase all the contours and lineaments that give shape and meaning to our maps of postclassical Greek culture; rather, I wish to demonstrate (i) how these intellectual frameworks can constrict as well as enable our thinking; (ii) how much more richness and variety there is to the postclassical world than conventional accounts suggest; and (iii) a more general point of methodology, on which I wish to insist. Boundaries should be seen not as barriers, the limits of our inquiry—but as crossing points, the spaces that prompt the most interesting questions. This is the nub of postclassicism as methodology: think not of the well-wrought urn but of the working of it, its breaking, its contents, its storage, the points of juncture between it and abutting objects.

Much of my work over the past fifteen years or so has focused on Greek literature of the time of the Roman Empire, roughly 50–300 C.E., a period that is sometimes known as the Second Sophistic. I have inveighed against the inaccuracies and (more importantly) blighted history of this term on a number of occasions,² but at the risk of trying patiences let me return to the question here, for it offers a nice illustration of the general problematics sketched above and gets us to the very heart of the postclassical project. It is not the term Second Sophistic itself that is the problem—all terminology has limitations as well as advantages—but the way that unexamined adherence to nineteenth-century categories can still blinker us now. The phrase is first found in the third-century C.E. Greek writer Philostratus, where it denotes a particular oratorical style; since its reappropriation in the late nineteenth century, however, it has been associated with a supposed Hellenic revivalism calqued on the model of postindustrial nationalism.³ Erwin Rohde’s zweite Sophistik was imagined as a reassertion of “a national Hellenic element” in the face of a double threat to identity, from both “orientals” and Rome.⁴ (Rohde, a friend of Friedrich Nietzsche’s, was preoccupied with questions of cultural vigor in his own era too.) More recent scholarship has, perhaps understandably, preferred to speak in anthropological terms of Greek “culture” or “cultural identity” rather than “nationality.”⁵ But culture too is a tricky word, and arguably even more problematic: it not only risks simply repackaging the old product (that is, committing to the same metaphysics of unbroken, linear continuity)⁶ but also tacitly activates the idea of a Jaegerian model of idealized aristocratic solidarity (Greek literature as “high culture”). Nationalism through the back door, in other words. The Second Sophistic has been—and remains in much current scholarship—a modern fantasy projected back on to the ancient world, an objet petit a, an impossible idealization of pure, untainted aristocratic Greek tradition.

Now, it is of course not hard to find expressions of aristocratic Hellenocentrism in the postclassical Greek world. My argument, however, is that such expressions should be seen as local and tactical rather than as absolute paradigms of the spirit of the age. The enthusiasm with which classicists have embraced Plutarch,⁷ for instance, should give us pause: an extraordinarily rich and varied author, to be sure, but also one who shapes (or has been taken to shape)⁸ a very conservative vision of Greek identity in terms of a dialogue with the classical greats, particularly the nonfictional prose authors. If we take Plutarch as paradigmatic of postclassical Greece, we miss so many dimensions of Greek writing: lateral engagement with other peoples’ cultures, poetics and imaginative literature, the continuity with Hellenistic Greek culture. Much the same could be said of Dio Chrysostom and Aelius Aristides, both of whom loom large in the standard accounts of Greek identity in the Roman Empire. I am not, of course, arguing against their value for cultural historians, merely observing that selecting a limited evidentiary range leads to oversimplified claims about “the Greeks” and “the Roman Empire.”⁹

This picture of seamless panhellenism is, ultimately, a scholarly fiction, resting on a circular process of exclusion of evidence to the contrary. Standard accounts of postclassical Greek literature (I include my own earlier work) have, for example, little room for Jewish¹⁰ or Christian literature (although here the tide is beginning to turn).¹¹ They scarcely acknowledge the competitor traditions that were contemporaneously devising, reimagining, and commentating on literary canons (viz. rabbinical Hebrew¹² and Christian Syriac). They present the Hellenistic era as dominated by poetry and the imperial era by prose, usually by simply failing to refer to the full range of surviving material. Nor do they accommodate much demographic range within mainstream Greek society. It is rare to find mention of paraliterary works such as the Alexander Romance or the Life of Aesop, whose strata range from Hellenistic to imperial dates, or, indeed, of the so-called Acts of the Pagan Martyrs or Secundus the Silent Philosopher, works that clearly operate at some considerable remove from the Atticizing classicism of Aristides or Philostratus. We should note too the relative marginalization of the voluminous technical literature of the later era.¹³ While the physiognomical works of Galen (antiquity’s most productive author, to judge by what we have) and Polemo have to an extent been brought into the fold,¹⁴ little awareness is shown of—to take but a few examples—Hero of Alexandria on mechanics, Apollonius Dyscolus the grammarian, Aristides Quintilianus on musicology, Aelian on animals,¹⁵ astrologers, or alchemists. No wonder the stereotype of imperial Greeks as flouncy, elitist orators persists, when texts that present an alternative image are not pictured. How different our conception of the period would be had Philostratus not survived.

It is clearly beyond the scope of a single volume to survey the full range of postclassical literary production, and this in any case is not my aim here.¹⁶ That being said, there is certainly a primary intention to expand the range of material that scholars of the Hellenistic and early imperial periods have traditionally covered. Part 1 treats Greek fiction proposing that the span extends well beyond the “Greek novel” (or “romance”) as conventionally understood—that is, the works of Chariton, Achilles Tatius, and so forth. These, I argue in chapter 2, represent a very limited window onto the world of ancient fictional production, and indeed they play by very different rules than those of the generality of “novelistic” literature. My wider narrative of prose fiction begins early in the Hellenistic era, with Euhemerus (sometime after 300 B.C.E.), and gives a central berth to a series of texts too often relegated to “the fringe”:¹⁷ the Alexander Romance, the pseudo-Lucianic Ass, Philostratus’s Heroicus, and even the literary-critical writings of Dionysius of Halicarnassus. Part 2 attempts to remedy the general neglect of poetics in the scholarship of the early imperial period (a neglect that is certainly prompted by certain ancient sources themselves, which diagnose the imperial era as a prosaic one: see chapter 12). There are signs here and there that the corner is being turned,¹⁸ albeit slowly, but even so the emphasis is too often placed on subordinating poetics to a supposed context where rhetorical prose dominates, rather than reading the material on its own terms, as poetry. My chapters on the early imperial epigrammatists (chapter 9), Mesomedes (chapter 10), and Lucian’s paratragedies (chapter 11) seek to show how these cunning poems resonate against both the rich tradition of classical poetics and contemporary culture. Part 3 marks the end of the book’s adventures, in Hellenistic Judaism: Ezekiel’s tragic retelling of the Exodus story (chapter 13) and the various attempts to integrate the biblical and the Homeric traditions (chapter 14). This material is unusually rich and sophisticated, and with its concern to root a distinct identity politics in the revivifying and transforming of an ancient literary culture it can be said to preempt many of the concerns of the Greek Sophists of the early Roman Empire.

As will be clear, this book does more than simply expand the canon. My aim is to do away entirely with the idea of the culturally central, the paradigmatic, to dispense with hierarchies of cultural value. The Jewish epic poets Theodotus and Philo may be fragmentary, for example, and may not have spawned an entire tradition of Jewish epic poetics (although perhaps they did? We have lost so much Jewish literature of the era), but to me they are potentially as significant in cultural terms as Vergil. I say potentially because thinking more pluralistically involves a hypothetical rewiring of literary history: let us bracket the subsequent reception that made Vergil (in T.S. Eliot’s famous phrase) “the classic of all Europe” and Philo and Theodotus footnotes in literary history; let us recall instead that when each of these poets wrote, the future was entirely up for grabs. Philo and Theodotus did not know that Jerusalem would be sacked in 70 C.E. and that Judaism would as a result turn its back on the Greco-Roman tradition: for all they knew, they were composing poems that might change the world. This kind of utopian (or, better, uchronic) intellectual experiment with literary history seeks not only to unsettle our deeply embedded metanarratives of classical “value” but also to restore some of the local vitality, urgency, and conflict that is endemic to all literary production.

Issues of centrality and marginality cluster particularly around fiction and the novel, which is why part 1 focuses on this area. The issue here is not just the familiar one that the Greeks themselves apparently set little store by fictional production; it is, more pertinently, that there is a hierarchy of sorts among the novels themselves. The five “romances” of Chariton, Xenophon, Achilles, Longus, and Heliodorus seem to work together as a unit and hence as a bullyboy gang excluding all those that do not fit. Scholars, however, have been too easily magnetized by the imperial romances’ apparent generic coherence, so that we tend to read other prose fictions in terms primarily of their deviation from the romance paradigm (see chapters 1–2). The imperial romances do indeed work as a genre, but I propose that this sense of shared form coalesced only partially, gradually, and in a sense retrospectively: thus the first-century Callirhoe became a “romance” as we understand the term (that is, a participant in the genre) only as a result of the later formation of a tradition. We need a much more plural model of what Greek fiction is and was, a model that includes works such as the pseudo-Lucianic Ass, the Alexander Romance, and Philostratus’s Heroicus.

The book’s second major theme, already adverted to above, is that poetry gives us a very different point of entry into the world of the Greeks under the Roman Empire. Perhaps surprisingly, much of the poetry is written “from below”: whereas prose authors tend to project their relationship with empire in terms of parity—a projection that feeds the nineteenth-century preoccupation with noble Greeks preserving their cultural traditions—poets mobilize a stock of topoi, drawn from patronal poets such as Pindar, Bacchylides, and Theocritus, that emphasize a difference of status. Poets do not necessarily give us a truer picture of Greeks’ feelings about Rome: these we will never know. But they do capture a different facet of that relationship, where the hierarchy and exploitation are much more visible.

The third thematic locus is Hellenistic Judaism. Literary classicists have in general neglected material that is not perceived to be echt Greek; the lionization of Lucian, the Hellenized Syrian of the second century C.E., is the exception (but Lucian plays almost entirely by “classical” rules, apart, perhaps, for in On the Syrian Goddess). The reasons for this are in many ways understandable. We have lost entire cultural traditions: Greco-Phoenician culture is in effect represented only by Philo of Byblos, who is himself excerpted in Eusebius; likewise Greco-Mesopotamian literature, where Berossus survives (again) primarily in Eusebius’s paraphrase. Demotic Egyptian texts do survive (usually in fragments), and there were clearly numerous points of cultural contact between Egyptian and Hellenistic Greek culture, but the material is difficult to work with, given how much primary editorial work remains to be done.¹⁹ With Second Temple Jewish literature, however, we have (thanks to late-antique Christians, who treated biblical matter with predictable reverence) a rich, albeit incomplete, body of literature: it presents classicists with a wonderful opportunity to test the ways in which sophisticated Greek speakers deployed the traditional Greek forms of tragedy and epic as vehicles for non-Greek narrative traditions. These texts, indeed, seem to preempt much of the ingenious play with issues of identity, self-fashioning, and cultural bivalence that scholars have detected in the Second Sophistic. It may be a provocation, but it is no exaggeration to speak of a “Jewish Sophistic” already in the second and first centuries B.C.E.

There are other threads running through this book: the figure of metalepsis, the (dis)appearances of authors, the intersection between literary production and literary criticism, and my unflagging preoccupation with the power of the human imagination to transform. These are best left to emerge organically, in the reading. This book was, as I have said, conceived in an adventurous spirit; there are many alternative tracks and trails for “off-roaders.” With that same desire for openness and accessibility, I have kept the endnoting relatively light and used Greek letters only where they have seemed impossible to avoid (and only in endnotes). I hope the writing is accessible to nonspecialists.

1. I have benefited from rich and ongoing discussions with Brooke Holmes and Constanze Güthenke of Princeton University, and from contributors to the “Postclassicisms” seminar at Oxford in the autumn of 2012.

2. See especially Whitmarsh 2001, 42–45; 2005a, 4–10.

3. Philostr., VS 481, 507; see, e.g., Rohde 1876, which is in part a polemic against the hypothesis of Eastern influence on the development of the Greek novel. On the nationalist, and arguably anti-Semitic, context of Rohde’s work, see Whitmarsh 2011b.

4. Rohde 1914, 310–23, at 319.

5. So Swain 1996, Whitmarsh 2001, and Goldhill 2001b.

6. See the pertinent critique of McCoskey 2012, 93.

7. Witness the success of the International Plutarch Society, its multiple publications, and its journal, Ploutarchos. Let me stress that reflection on the phenomenon does not imply any criticism of this fine institution or its wonderful members!

8. As ever, such generalizations risk oversimplifying. There is much more that could be said about Plutarch’s multifaceted relationship with non-Greek cultures, particularly Roman. His (surely ironic) claim to know minimal Latin (Demosthenes 2, carefully unpacked by Zadorojnyi 2006) has been given far too much prominence, at the expense of such extraordinarily hybridized texts as On the Fortune of the Romans and the Roman Questions. Strobach 1997 opens up these questions interestingly.

9. A case in point is Veyne 2005, 195–310, magisterial but largely unencumbered by awareness of the voluminous scholarship on the complexity of Greek identity, and hence prone to unsustainable generalization (e.g., p. 238: “The Greeks are tacitly considered, in the Roman Empire, as foreigners. The Greeks equally considered themselves superior, which is why their identity remained irreducible”).

10. Goldhill 2001b is an exception, containing an excellent essay by Maud Gleason on Josephus.

11. König 2009 is exemplary in this regard; see also, from the side of Christian studies, especially Lieu 2004, Nasrallah 2010 (with 28–30 specifically on this issue), and now Perkins 2010 and Eshleman 2012.

12. Linked to the Second Sophistic by, e.g., Jaffee 2001, 128–40, with further bibliography at 202 n. 9, 203 nn. 24–25.

13. König and Whitmarsh 2007 represents an attempt to bridge this particular gap.

14. Galen receives a chapter in Bowersock 1969; see further Gill, Whitmarsh, and Wilkins 2009. Gleason 1995, 55–81, situates Polemo’s Physiognomics within rhetorical agonistics; for a fuller discussion of this question see Swain 2007.

15. A deficit that Steven Smith will correct in an eagerly anticipated study.

16. For an excellent survey of Hellenistic literature that adopts a more pluralistic perspective see Cuypers and Clauss 2010; the forthcoming Cambridge History of Later Greek Literature, edited by Robert Shorrock, promises to be a milestone.

17. The phrase used and explored in Karla 2009.

18. See especially Baumbach and Bär 2007, on Quintus of Smyrna and the Second Sophistic.

19. Whitmarsh and Thomson, forthcoming, covers much of this Hellenistic intercultural material.