It should have become obvious by now, however, that this “Asian” style is reminiscent of an older and far more illustrious figure, the fifth-century BCE sophist Gorgias of Leontini. Norden, for instance, established close links between the “new,” “Asianic” style of the Hellenistic and imperial periods and that of Gorgias and the sophists (1898, 379–381). After all, the balancing and echoing devices characteristic of our texts—isocolon, paromoiosis, homoeoteleuton, paronomasia, etc.—were named “Gorgianic figures” by ancient critics (Noël 1999), and are on display, for example, in the opening sentence of Gorgias’s Encomium of Helen:
Κόσμοςπόλειμὲνεὐανδρία, The kosmos of a city is courage,
σώματιδὲ κάλλος, and of a body, beauty,
ψυχῆιδὲ σοφία, and of a soul, wisdom,
πράγματιδὲ ἀρετή, and of a deed, virtue,
λόγωιδὲ ἀλήθεια· and of a speech, truth;
τὰ δὲ ἐναντίατούτων ἀκοσμία. And the opposites of these is akosmia.
But if we are to call the imperial prose of, say, Achilles Tatius and Favorinus, “Asian” because of its resemblance to Hegesias’s Hellenistic “Asian” prose, should we not, for consistency’s sake, also refer to Gorgias’s older style as “Asian”? As is clear from Cicero’s reference to the third-century BCE Sicilian historian Timaeus as an “Asian” orator (Brut. 325), employing an Asian style implied nothing about one’s ethnicity or geographical origin. At any rate, Gorgias was certainly censured by ancient literary critics for the same reasons that Hegesias and “Asian” orators were. For instance, Cicero attributes identical stylistic qualities to both Hegesias and Gorgias: the “cutting up” of sentences into short rhythmic, verse-like clauses and an enthusiasm for balanced arrangement, sound effects, and poetic devices (Brut. 287, Orat. 39–40, 167, 231; cf. Dion. Hal. Comp. 4, 18; Agatharchides in Photius, Bibl. 250). The very words Dionysius uses to malign the “new” “Asian” rhetoric—vulgar, bombastic, and theatrical—are repeated in his criticisms of Gorgias and Gorgianic figures (Lys. 3; Isaeus 19; Dem. 4–6, 25; Thuc. 24). The style that inspired such disapproval was thus by no means an “invention” of the postclassical period, but had been a part of Greek rhetoric from a very early stage. It featured brief, balanced clauses, conspicuous rhythms, repetitions of sound, poetic vocabulary, ambitious metaphors, and other embellishing effects, and was considered by its critics as excessive, affected, and undisciplined. This is the style that I am calling “Asian,” employed by authors throughout antiquity—not only Gorgias, Hegesias, and certain Second Sophistic writers, but presumably also by many others whose work has been lost (the only other extant Hellenistic examples are the fragments of the third-century BCE periegete Heraclides Criticus [see Pasquali 1913, 16–17; Pfister 1951], and an encomium to Isis preserved in a first-century BCE inscription from Maroneia in Thrace [Grandjean 1975]).8
ASIAN STYLE IN THE SECOND SOPHISTIC: AN ANTICLASSICAL AESTHETIC
Prior to the imperial period, we possess only scattered examples of “Asian” prose, and critical opinion is overwhelmingly negative, condemning “Asian” stylists’ deviations from the norms of moderation, restraint, and judiciousness. Similar attitudes can be found under the empire as well: in the late first century CE, Plutarch (Alex. 3; F 186 Sandbach) and Pseudo-Longinus (3.2) each single out the style of Gorgias and Hegesias for their disapproval, and in the second, the rhetorician Hermogenes of Tarsus points to imperial sophists as well as Gorgias and his followers as the chief representatives of the ostentatious, artificial, and false virtuosity he despises (Id. 377). The critics’ ideal, conversely, is a “natural” and “temperate” style that repudiates “Asian” extravagance and hews more closely to that of “classical” authors. As I mentioned above, many imperial authors employ such a “classical” style (while others, such as Aelian, for example, adapted it for their own ends). But in the second and third centuries CE, the nature of our evidence changes. For the first time, we have a significant amount of surviving “Asian” prose, and, just as important, a critic—Philostratus—who appreciates that prose.
In his Lives of the Sophists, Philostratus explicitly links the sophists of his own time with those of the fifth and fourth centuries BCE (VS 481); he anoints Gorgias the spiritual leader of the first and Second Sophistics, and unabashedly praises his often derided prose style for its beauty, its loftiness, its paradoxical thoughts and poetic words (492; cf. his defense of Gorgias against Plutarch in Letter 73). The late fourth-century BCE orator Aeschines may have nominally been the first representative of the Second Sophistic, but it was Gorgias who “founded the art of extempore oratory” (482) and to whom Philostratus “believes the art of the sophists carries back as though he were its father” (492). In Philostratus’s eyes, moreover, the imperial sophists, particularly those of the first two generations, are worthy heirs of Gorgias (de Romilly 1975, 75–88; Norden 1898, 379–392). The style of Nicetes of Smyrna, the late first-century CE sophist with whom Philostratus begins his account of the Second Sophistic proper, distanced itself “from the ancient, political [discourse]” (τοῦ . . . ἀρχαίουκαὶ πολιτικοῦ: 511), that is, from the classical oratory of Lysias and Demosthenes; like Gorgias, Nicetes was renowned for his “idiosyncratic and paradoxical content” (511). Nicetes’s student Scopelian of Clazomenae unrepentantly sought out a “poetic” style and devoted himself to studying “the sophists, especially Gorgias of Leontini” (518; cf. influence of the first sophistic at 590 on Hadrian of Tyre and at 604 on Proclus of Naucratis).
Philostratus’s descriptions of his sophists’ style often commend “Asian” stylistic features that were traditionally disdained by rhetoricians; for instance, Philostratus explicitly rejects unnamed critics who scorned Scopelian’s style as “inflated, unrestrained and overabundant” (διθυραμβώδη . . . ἀκόλαστονκαὶ πεπαχυσμένον: 514), and calls it “inspired” instead. A few pages earlier, he had used one of those pejorative terms—διθυραμβώδης, “inflated”—in a positive sense when describing the style of Nicetes (511). An even better example concerns the “Asian” propensity for rhythmic, musical effects, which aroused special indignation (indeed, differences in prose rhythm are what distinguish Hellenistic and imperial “Asian” rhetoric from its classical counterpart: see Kim forthcoming). In the first century BCE, Cicero had derided “singing in the Asiatic manner, in a wailing voice with violent modulations” (inclinata ululantique voce more Asiatico canere: Orat. 27; cf. 57), and in the imperial period, complaints about “singing” sophists, modulating their voices and rhythms, are found in Dio (32.68), Plutarch (De aud. 41D), Lucian (Dem. 12, Pseudol. 7), and Aristides (34.47). Philostratus, however, singles out musical and vocal effects for special praise: he marvels at Favorinus’s ability to “bewitch” members of his audience who did not even understand Greek “by the tone of his voice . . . and the rhythm of his speech” (VS 491–492); the same power is also attributed to the sophist Hadrian of Tyre, whose non-Greek audience was “astounded at . . . the ease with which he could modulate his voice and his rhythms, both in prose and with his song” (589). Philostratus is thus the first writer who treats “Asian” rhetoric with respect, and even enthusiasm; many of the very features of “Asian” prose that critics had censured are now the objects of his admiration (although cf. 514, 522, 527, 528 for praise of sophists hewing to a “natural” style [κατὰ φύσιν]).
While “Asian” style had existed before, it is only in the Second Sophistic that we are able to discover the kind of evidence that allows us to appreciate its virtues—a wealth of surviving “Asian” texts and Philostratus’s positive, vivid, and influential portrait of certain “Asian” writers. This prominence is precisely what led Rohde and others in the nineteenth century to characterize Second Sophistic oratory as asianisch. For many of them, however, “Asian” was an unqualifiedly negative term (as in antiquity), signifying a corrupt, effeminate, and disgusting
rhetorical style (Norden 1898, 131–133; Rohde 1886). If we want to move away from the ethnic prejudices that have colored this term from its birth onward, it might be more fruitful to call the rhetorical style extending from Gorgias to the Second Sophistic by a more neutral name—e.g., “sophistic” style (suggested by Papanikolaou 2009 for Hellenistic oratory), or “virtuosic” (Pernot 1995, 381: “virtuosité”)—that would either emphasize its connection with the first sophistic or highlight its preoccupation with stylistic artistry and brilliance (on the modern attempt to see Asianism as an early manifestation of Mannerism, see Robling 1992).
Throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, scholars have pointed to the central role played by the classical past in the literature and culture of the Second Sophistic; in the first part of this chapter, I discussed what remains probably the best example of that centrality: linguistic Atticism, which was focused on reproducing the Attic dialect of the fifth and fourth centuries BCE. But in the second part, I have tried to highlight a style or aesthetic that is also popular in the Second Sophistic, but stands somewhat apart from the “classical” canon. A number of orators, novelists, and writers from this period may employ the classical Attic dialect, display an intimate knowledge of classical literature and history, or declaim in the persona of classical figures on topics ripped from fifth- and fourth-century BCE headlines, but they do so in a style that strikes us as very un-classical—overtly rhythmic, repetitive, musical, poetic, and employing to an extreme degree all of the rhetorical figures and devices that many of our surviving ancient critics insisted should be used only occasionally and in moderation. Of course, such writers could temper their exuberant style when necessary—for example, in narrative or expository passages—but on the whole, instead of abiding by “classical” tenets of stylistic tastefulness and restraint, they prefer to embrace artifice, theatricality, and novelty.
In fact, one can detect traces of this aesthetic stance beyond matters of prose style; one thinks of Polemon’s and Achilles Tatius’s delight in depicting paradoxical, shocking, and grotesque scenes that risk overstepping the boundaries of “good taste” (paralleled in the longest fragment of Hegesias [FGrH 142 F 5 = Dion. Hal. Comp. 18.26]), or of sophists like Hadrian, Favorinus, and Polemon, whose stylistic conceits are reflected in their flamboyant costumes, ostentatious performances, and unusual lifestyles (Connolly 2001; Gleason 1995; Whitmarsh 2005, 23–40). In fact, much of the recent surge of scholarly interest in the Second Sophistic can be attributed to a renewed appreciation of this “Asian” aesthetic; it serves as a reminder that for all of their immersion in the classical past, certain authors of the Second Sophistic were also able to resist its pull.
FURTHER READING
References to scholarship on specialized topics (such as Attic lexicography, koinê, “Asian” inscriptions, etc.) are found in the text; I concentrate here on Atticizing and Asianizing language and style. For overviews of the nineteenth-century Attic-Asian debate, see Boulanger 1923, 58–73; Desideri 1978, 524–36; Reardon 1971, 80–96; Sirago 1989, 43–56; cf. Robling 1992 on the continuity of the concepts beyond antiquity. Accounts of linguistic Atticism in general surveys of Greek literature or language are often unreliable; better are Kim 2010; Schmitz 1997, 67–96 and 110–127; Swain 1996, 17–64; Whitmarsh 2005, 41–56; cf. Anderson 1993, 86–100. On the relation of Atticism with Latin archaism in the second century CE, see Holford-Strevens 2003.
On the linguistic Atticism of individual authors, Schmid 1887–1897 covers Dio, Herodes, Polemon, and Lucian (vol. 1), Aristides (vol. 2), Aelian (vol. 3), and Philostratus (vol. 4), but does not systematically compare their language use with Hellenistic or early imperial authors. Better analysis of Herodes in Albini 1968, of Polemo in Boulanger 1923, 87–94, and of Aristides in Boulanger 1923, 395–412, and Pernot 1981, 117–146; for Lucian, see also Bompaire 1994, Chabert 1897, and Deferrari 1916; for Philostratus, de Lannoy (2003). For Second Sophistic authors not treated by Schmid, good accounts of Favorinus in Amato 2005, 192–211, and Barigazzi 1966, 29–73; of Arrian in Tonnet 1988, 299–350; and of Maximus of Tyre in Dürr 1899 and Trapp 1997, 1964–1966. Less helpful but still useful are Sexauer 1899 on Achilles Tatius, Valley 1926 on Longus, and the comments of Hutton 2005, 181–190, on Pausanias.
For earlier imperial authors, less work has been done; there is still no systematic treatment of the language of Dionysius, Strabo, Dio (Schmid’s treatment is not comprehensive), Josephus (cf. Ledouceur 1983; Redondo 2000), or Plutarch. On the last, see provisionally Weissenberger 1895 and on vocabulary, Schmid 1887–1897, 4:635–643; Pérez Molina 1994; Giangrande 1990, 1992; see also the introduction to Hunter and Russell 2011. Chariton is better served, by Ruiz-Montero 1991 and Hernández Lara 1994; Mann 1896 on Xenophon of Ephesus and Tröger 1898–1899 on Ps.-Longinus are not as helpful. For the Augustan Greek writers, Wahlgren 1995 is fundamental, but limited in scope; on Dionysius of Halicarnassus, see also Ek 1942, Lasserre 1979, and Usher 1982. Palm 1955 is an exemplary treatment of the Hellenistic koinê of Diodorus, as is de Foucault 1972 on Polybius; cf. Lightfoot 1999, 283–296 on the language of Diodorus’s contemporary Parthenius of Nicaea.
On the style of imperial Greek authors, Norden 1898 (2nd ed., 1914), 344–450, is still standard (“Asian” style at 407–450), but Pernot 1993, 333–421 (“Asian” style at 371–394), is more nuanced and better overall. For individual authors, see on Philostratus: Anderson 1986, 14–17, and 1993, 97–98; Pausanias: Hutton 2005, 190–233, and Pasquali 1913; Aristides: Boulanger 1923, 413–435, and Pernot 1981, 87–116; Favorinus: Amato 2005, 72–106; Achilles: Laplace 2007, 365–410; Longus: Hunter 1987, 84–98; Philostratus’s sophists: Boulanger 1923, 83–108.
Of the voluminous scholarship on the first-century BCEAttic-Asian controversy in Rome, see Adamietz 1992; Bowersock 1979; de Jonge 2008, 9–20; Calboli 1986, 1050–73, and 1988; Dihle 1957 and 1977; Gelzer 1979; Hendrickson 1926; Hose 1999; Kennedy 1972, 97–100; Leeman 1963, 91–111; Radermacher 1899; Spawforth 2011, 21–26 and 70–80, and Wisse 1995. For discussion specifically focused on Hellenistic Greek Asian oratory, see also Blass 1865, Norden 1898, 126–51, Papanikolaou 2009 and 2012; Wooten 1972 and 1975; on Hegesias, Calboli 1987, Donadi 2000, and Staab 2004. On the vexed topic of Greek prose rhythm, identified as an essential element of “Asian” rhetoric since the nineteenth century, the work of Norden 1898 vol. II, 909-923, Blass 1905, and others was superseded by the studies of de Groot 1919, 1921, 1926; cf. Shewring 1930 and 1931, the extremely useful overview of Skimina 1937, and the studies of Favorinus by Goggin 1951 and of Appian by Hutchinson 2015.
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