Indeed, Jewish literary culture of the Hellenistic or Second-Temple period offers an intriguing parallel to the cultural conditions of the Greek Second Sophistic (see also Gruen, chapter 41 in this volume). Like literary Greeks in the Roman Empire, literary Jews in the Greco-Macedonian period indexed their identity to canonical written works of the past, specifically the Torah. The project of translating, updating, and rewriting this body of text was in one respect crucially different—the Torah was sacred—but that fact seems to have done nothing to prevent an extraordinary interest in hybridizing biblical narrative and Greek literary form. We can now only glimpse what must have been a thrilling intellectual traffic, exemplified by fragmentary works such as the Exagoge of Ezekiel (a retelling of the Exodus story in the form of an Attic tragedy) and the hexameter epics on Biblical and Jewish themes of Philo and Theodotus.40 Jews living in Hellenistic cities were engaged in the same kind of process of cultural self-definition as Greeks would be later under the Roman Empire: they were updating narrative traditions self-consciously to fashion continuities with the past in a way that responded to the needs of the present. Thus, for example, in Ezekiel Moses’s account of the travails imposed by the Pharaonic administration on Jews suggests a continuity with the Ptolemaic present: “Right up until these times we have been ill-treated by evil men and a powerful regime” (Exagoge 5–6). There are even parallels with the Greek vogue for Attic diction. With the creation of the Septuagint, Greek-speaking Jews manufactured a language that was both new, in the sense that it was unprecedented, and ancient, in the sense that it sought to capture the antique sacrality of the Bible.41
Some have also seen parallels between the Greek Second Sophistic and the rabbinical reinvention of Hebrew and Aramaic as literary languages in the aftermath of the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE. The effect of this devastating action was to accentuate the division between Jews on the one hand and Greeks and Romans on the other. This gulf was then further widened by the Christian adoption of Greek, Latin, Coptic, and Syriac, which underlined the isolation of Jews, who turned away from Greek as a language of literary composition. A number of recent scholars of Rabbinical Judaism have argued that the process of constructing intellectual traditions in an “indigenous” language as a response to Roman imperialism—a process that ultimately yielded the Talmud—can be understood as a broader manifestation of the Second Sophistic.42
The cross-cultural wave function is visible in Egyptian culture too. Demotic Egyptian literature survives in geographically scattered papyri, not all of it published; such is the difficulty of the material that “it is not yet possible to write a linear history of Demotic and Greco-Egyptian literature.”43 Even so, it is possible to trace specific points of contact between Demotic texts and the Greek writing of the period associated with the Second Sophistic, particularly in the area of fiction: works like the Setne Khaemwas stories and the Inaros cycle—forged in the first half of the first millennium BCE, and written down from around 400 onward—are apparently shaped by interaction with Greek narrative traditions, and in turn may well be one stream that fed into the Greek romance of the imperial era.44 Stories of ingenuity and military success, set in a more glorious Egyptian past, circulated at a time when Egypt was under foreign occupation; much the same could be said not only of the Greek romances (particularly the overtly classicizing ones of Chariton and Heliodorus) but also of many historical works and rhetorical declamations composed by Greeks under the Empire.
Let me reemphasize in conclusion that my intention in this chapter has not been to argue that the Second Sophistic should never be understood in particulate terms, but to demonstrate (on the analogy with quantum physics) that it has a wave function simultaneously. The particulate model of course places greater emphasis on historical specificity, on those peculiarly elite-Greek features that are not necessarily replicated in other cultures. As I have claimed, however, the particulate model is (even on its own terms) less robust than it is often thought to be: if we interrogate the evidence more critically, we can see just how indistinct the line is that separates the Hellenistic from the imperial eras. More importantly, perhaps, we should not blind ourselves to the political implications of this way of carving the historical pie. After centuries of indoctrination into the myth of Greek exceptionalism, classicists tend to be committed to a belief that elite Hellenic literary culture has a distinctive paradigmatic value. The narrative of the decline and renaissance of Greek literary vigor has played a central role in the articulation of European and (to a lesser extent) American cultural superiority. This belief is most starkly visible in Rohde’s Der griechische Roman, the book that initiated modern interest in the Second Sophistic. For Rohde (and his many successors), the Second Sophistic was a parable of the deleterious effects on the intellectual classes of industrial mechanization (which appears in the allegory as Rome) and religion (“the east”). Like so many a philologist, Rohde looked into the mirror of classical antiquity and saw himself reflected back. The terms of the debate have of course changed substantially since Rohde, but as a historiographical construct the Second Sophistic remains firmly bolted onto a particular view of Greek literature as somehow hermetically sealed and independent of wider historical processes that governed the eastern Mediterranean over a longer period.
Indeed, the very constructs of “Greek culture” and “Greek identity” have been lent a false solidity and intellectual coherence, precisely thanks to an exclusively particulate way of perceiving the ancient world. Rather than positing Greekness as a coherent category with its own determinative power, we might instead treat ancient eastern Mediterranean culture as a broad and open field, within which semi-autonomous45 agents—such as individuals, guilds, cities, intellectual and religious communities—improvised and adapted networks of affiliation, sometimes insisting on particular forms of identification (e.g., as Greek, Jewish, Naucratite, Christian . . . ), but sometimes not. That is to say, they behaved sometimes like particles and sometimes like waves. In this sense, the Second Sophistic marks, rather than a strictly delineated period or cultural phenomenon, a pattern of self-consciously archaizing responses to imperial domination that is visible across a number of ancient societies. Consideration of the wave pattern would, in fact, help us to locate the particle more accurately, since it would allow for a crisper definition of what is distinctive about the Greek (or indeed any other) Second Sophistic.
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CHAPTER 3
WAS THERE A LATIN SECOND SOPHISTIC?
THOMAS HABINEK
DURING the period known as the Greek Second Sophistic, Latin literary and intellectual culture continued apace. Although the Latin textual record from the first and second centuries CE is dominated by genres which the Romans either claimed they had invented (satire) or had long since made their own (history, epic, drama, epistolography), Latin authors were aware of, and in many instances participated in, discourses and practices previously regarded as Greek, such as display speeches, poetry contests, certain types of panegyric oratory, and learned dispute. Engagement with contemporary Greek culture is unsurprising—after all, most elite Romans were bilingual in Greek and Latin, Roman education included study of Greek history and literature, and Roman national mythology, as transmitted in classic works by Cicero, Vergil, Ovid, and others, had long presented the Romans as inheritors and protec
tors of Greek art and thought. What is perhaps surprising, or at least in need of explanation, is the guarded attitude with which Roman authors approached the vibrant culture of contemporary Greece. There was a Latin Second Sophistic, of a sort, but during the period treated in this volume it never quite eclipsed more traditional forms of literary and cultural activity. Why this was the case, and what the similarities and disparities between Greek and Latin intellectual cultures under the early empire tell us about both, are the concerns of this chapter.
DECLAMATION AND DOWNWARD MOBILITY
The fate of one Valerius Licinianus as reported by Pliny the Younger provides useful insight into the actions and attitudes of elite Romans in the face of Greek cultural assertion. A man of praetorian rank, and, as Pliny tells it, among the most eloquent orators at Rome (“inter eloquentissimos causarum actores”; Plin. Ep. 4.11.1), Licinianus was implicated in a scandal involving the Vestal Virgin Claudia under the emperor Domitian. Although Nerva reduced Licinianus’s sentence by relegating him to Sicily, the former praetor was now a mere professor. Forced to abandon the toga of citizenship, he dressed like a Greek (“cum Graeco pallio amictus”; Ep. 4.11.3) while declaiming (declamare) in Latin. Once a senator, Licinianus had now become an exile; once an orator, now a rhetor (“ut exsul de senatore, rhetor de oratore”; Ep. 4.11.1).
The Oxford Handbook of the Second Sophistic Page 4