The Oxford Handbook of the Second Sophistic

by Daniel S. Richter

  Taylor, D. J. 1996. Varro—De lingua latina X: A New Critical Text and English Translation with Prolegomena and Commentary. Amsterdam.

  Vainio, R. 1999. Latinitas and Barbarisms According to the Roman Grammarians: Attitudes towards Language in the Light of Grammatical Examples. Turku.

  CHAPTER 6

  COSMOPOLITANISM

  DANIEL S. RICHTER

  DEFINITIONS

  IN the Politics, Aristotle described the polis as belonging to “the class of compounds in the same way as all other things that form a single whole, but a whole composed, nonetheless, of a number of different parts (Pol. 1274b). In doing so, Aristotle created a paradox: for a compound to be considered a “whole,” its constituent parts must be at once same and different—same to the extent that they constitute a properly unified entity and yet different enough to remain parts. The question is, what are the elements that the parts must have in common to properly create a whole? In human terms, this is a social, political, and genealogical question, the answer to which must address the relative importance of various criteria according to which human communities define themselves (emic) and are defined (etic): ethnicity, class, gender, religion, language, and so on. For much of human history, biological kinship has been the central determining factor of group identity. Indeed, any human collectivity that locates its cohesion in these terms must engage in the discursive process of locating the boundaries of the descent group: the nuclear family? The extended family? The tribe? The descendants of a common eponymous ancestor? The history of cosmopolitan thought is largely a story about the ways in which those who would proclaim the unity of the human race formulate the nature and claims of kinship;1 few aspects of political and intellectual history are more implicated in the ideological commitments of one’s own time (e.g., Appiah 2005, 2006; cf. Balibar 2004; Nussbaum 1996; Singer 2002).

  The autonomous, autochthonous, and homogeneous classical polis is one of purest expressions of the idea that the political collectivity is or ought to be coterminous with the boundaries of the ethnic group (Cohen 2000; Lape 2014; Ober 1989; Rosivach 1987). The Hellenistic period, by contrast, produced a radically new set of models of political community (Nussbaum 1994). For centuries, scholars have located a revolution in human thought in the world left behind by Alexander and theorized by Zeno. But where the generation of George Grote and Johann Gustav Droysen saw the Verschmelzung of East and West as the cause of the dilution and decline of the “Greek genius” (e.g., Droysen 1877; Grote 1857), those who followed William Woodthorpe Tarn idolized “Alexander the dreamer” as the true author of the idea of the “Unity of Mankind” (Tarn 1933; see Badian’s response 1958). Tarn’s Alexander, the genius behind the marriages at Susa and the Oath at Opis, was “the pioneer of one of the supreme revolutions in the world’s outlook, the first man known to us who contemplated the brotherhood of man or the unity of mankind (Tarn 1933, 148).” For Tarn, Alexander’s policies of Greek and barbarian intermarriage, the exchange of populations between Europe and Asia, the foundation of Alexandrias from Bactria to Babylon, and the Greek education of Persian children all aimed at the realization of a cosmopolitan oikoumenê in which birth counted for nothing in the construction of (Greek) identity (e.g., Arrian, Anab. 7.4.4–5.6).

  Others have suggested that it was, in fact, Zeno of Citium who originated and elaborated the theoretical basis of the idea of the unity of the human community (Baldry 1965, 151–166; Richter 2011, 55–86). To the particularism of the classical polis, the Hellenistic Stoa offered definitions of citizenship and kinship that lay at the foundation of centuries of ancient cosmopolitan thought, culminating in the philosophical and rhetorical writings of the early Roman Empire and Pauline universalism (Engberg-Pedersen 2000; Lee 2006). I have argued elsewhere that the early Hellenistic Stoa adopted and adapted a late classical, Athenian critique of democratic birth for ethnic purposes—that the rejection of aristocratic claims for the heritability of virtue (aretê) by the fifth- and fourth-century Athenian demos provided a conceptual vocabulary for those who would challenge the specialness of birth (autochthony) itself in the third century BCE and beyond (Richter 2011, 21–54; cf. Ober 1989). The Stoa, in particular, elaborated modes of thinking about ethnicity and community in ways that were distinctly cosmopolitan (Schofield 1991; for a more abstract reading of Zeno’s cosmopolitanism, see Vogt 2008). In what follows, I want to explore how certain intellectuals of the Second Sophistic made further use of this rich vocabulary of descent in an effort to conceptualize the unity of the Roman Empire. I begin with the philosophical underpinnings of early imperial cosmopolitanism—above all in the works of the Stoics. I then turn to more properly rhetorical formulations of the unity of the human community in an effort to explain how specific performance contexts determined how certain sophists articulated a cosmopolitan worldview. Finally, I briefly sketch the ways in which certain early imperial intellectuals adopted the trope of exile to cosmopolitan ends. Overviews of ancient cosmopolitan thought can be easily found (e.g., Baldry, Richter) and so what follows here does not aim to be a comprehensive survey. I have also chosen not to focus on the engines that created an ostensibly unified Roman oikoumenê in practice, such as language, imperial administration, and pedagogy—subjects well treated elsewhere in this volume. What I offer is a set of analyses of some representative and influential formulations of cosmopolitan ideas in the Second Sophistic. As will become clear, an account of early imperial cosmopolitan thought must begin where the intellectuals of the period themselves began, in the political and philosophical writings of the late classical and Hellenistic periods.

  THE PHILOSOPHERS

  The idea that one ought to live according to nature (ζῆνκατὰ φύσιν), while not strictly limited to any single philosophical school, was most closely associated with the Stoics in antiquity and beyond.2 Indeed, Stoic conceptions of the physical nature of the universe stand at the base of all Stoic political and ethical thought and enabled the Stoa, over the course of the Hellenistic and Roman periods, to elaborate a truly revolutionary conception of the human soul. To begin with a brief sketch of Stoic physics: Chrysippus described the Cosmos as a “completed body”3 which is entirely and perfectly pervaded by the divine principle, which is variously described as pneuma, nous, theos, or Zeus.4 Because this physical divine principle (which I will call pneuma) is “totally blended” into the entirety of the cosmos, each and every physical object in the universe is essentially one.5 And because the divine is reason, the entire universe is itself rational. Alexander of Aphrodisias paraphrased Chrysippus: “God is mixed with matter and pervades the whole of it and in this way shaping it and forming it and creating the universe. . . .God is body, an intelligent and eternal pneuma.”6 That said, the Stoics did admit of a scala naturae; the pneuma might pervade all matter equally, but the ways in which it does so differ according to the internal organization of the matter itself and depends upon the matter’s capacity for movement: at the top of the scale are human beings who move “by themselves,” meaning that humans possess both the ability to move as well as the rational intelligence to decide to do so.7

  This particular understanding of the physical nature of the universe had vast implications for Stoic ideas about the nature of the human soul. In stark contrast to Aristotelian ideas about the various types of human souls (that the male soul possesses reason [logos], which in the female soul is “without authority” and which the natural slave possesses not at all),8 Stoic psychology allowed for only one type of human soul, regardless of gender or ethnicity. Indeed, the Stoics addressed the question of the rationality of the souls of women and slaves from an early date. Zeno’s student Cleanthes is said to have written a text called “Concerning the Idea that the Virtue of the Man and the Woman is the Same,” and Lactantius adduces the evidence of the Stoics when he argues,

  if wisdom is given to humankind, it is given to all without discrimination . . . because if human nature is capable of wisdom, it is fitting that craftsmen, peas
ants, and women—in short, all who bear the human form [qui humanam formam gerunt]—be taught to be wise; and it is also fitting that the people be brought together from every language, condition, sex, and age . . . the Stoics understood this to such an extent that they said that even slaves and women ought to do philosophy.9

  Musonius Rufus is said to have put the matter even more succinctly: “women as well as men have taken the same capacity for reason [logos] from the gods.”10

  It is this universalizing aspect of Stoic psychology—the idea that the human soul is always and everywhere the same regardless of the type of embodiment (Greek or barbarian, male or female)—that makes a cosmopolitan ethics and politics necessary. The theoretical basis for Stoic cosmopolitanism is the idea of oikeiôsis—the affective disposition of a human soul towards that which it feels is oikeios or “akin” to itself (Görgemanns 1983; Pembroke 1971; Pohlenz 1940; Striker 1983). All ancient accounts of oikeiôsis—including the Stoic—locate the source of this affective disposition in kinship. However, the Stoic understanding of oikeiôsis proceeds from a materialist model of the cosmos and differs radically from other ancient formulations of the idea. Indeed, if Stoic physics stands at the beginning of Stoic psychology, the peculiarly cosmopolitan Stoic understanding of oikeiôsis (as opposed to other ancient formulations) is the foundation of a distinctly cosmopolitan Stoic ethics.

  To get a sense of the peculiar character of Stoic oikeiôsis, compare the formulation of Theophrastus:

  Those from whom we have been born, I mean father and mother, we say are naturally oikeios to ourselves. And indeed, we consider oikeios to ourselves those who trace their descent back to common ancestors. (Arist. Pseudep. I.98 (Rose))

  This idea that we ought to feel a stronger affinity for those who are “closer” to ourselves is echoed in a fragment of the ostensibly Aristotelian Arius Didymus, where we read that although we feel a natural friendliness (philia) for members of our immediate and extended families, our fellow citizens, as well as for those of our own ethnos and phulon, and, indeed, for the entire human race, we naturally experience this philia more strongly for those closer to us (Görgemanns 1983; cf. Inwood 1983). By contrast, the Stoa will embrace a distinctively cosmopolitan understanding of philia-oikeiôsis which will claim, in its most stringent form, that the intensity of our obligations to others ought not to decrease with distance from the self, that the moral universe that we inhabit is populated by symmetrically placed persons.11 For some early imperial intellectuals, such as an unnamed Academic scholiast on Plato’s Theaetetus, Stoic cosmopolitan ethics rooted in oikeiôsis seemed untenable: In his attack on the Stoics, the scholiast argued that in reality,

  one has a greater appropriative relationship with one’s own fellow citizens since appropriation [oikeiôsis] increases in intensity and slackens; they [the Stoics] say that one’s own appropriative relationship to oneself is equal to that of the most distant Mysian . . . this is contrary to the datum of experience and our self-consciousness.12

  The scholiast might have had in mind Stoics such as Hierocles (second century CE) who, in spite of his acceptance of the idea that the individual is enmeshed in various sorts of familial and civic structures, nevertheless elaborated a version of oikeiôsis that tasked the wise man to reconfigure his participation in these relational matrices in ways that transcended traditional notions of social allegiance.13 Hierocles’s well-known image of the individual at the center of a series of concentric circles exhorts the sage to reimagine human relationships toward cosmopolitan ends. Each human being, Hierocles wrote, inhabits an innermost ring that “almost touches the center itself.” Immediately following the circle of self is the circle of parents, brothers, wives and children, followed by a circle of members of the extended family, followed by a circle of the kin group as a whole, a circle of demesmen and tribesmen, a circle of one’s ethnos, and then finally, in the outermost circle, the “entirety of humankind.” But having acknowledged the fact that our social universes are defined by varying degrees of distance, Hierocles tasks the wise man to “somehow draw the circles together toward the center,” and to transfer the affection that one traditionally directs toward the innermost circles toward the outermost. Hierocles allows that distance of blood will remove some affection but nevertheless insists that it is incumbent upon the wise man to acknowledge the absolute unity of the human race and to attempt to act accordingly.

  The hostile version of Stoic cosmopolitan ethics that the scholiast to Plato’s Theaetetus offers is not, it seems, entirely off the mark; Hierocles does seek to orient the attention of the individual toward the “most distant Mysian,” as the scholiast puts it, but to do so in full acknowledgment of the difficulties of this ethical position. Hierocles, then, represents in some ways what Martha Nussbaum describes as an “extreme Stoic cosmopolitanism,” which dictates that the individual ignore the special claims of kith and kin as contrary to logic and antithetical to one’s responsibilities to the unified nature of the human community. By contrast, other early imperial Stoics such as Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus advocated what Kwame Anthony Appiah would characterize as a “rooted cosmopolitanism”14 in which local affinities do not exclude global responsibilities but, in fact, enable and are enabled by them.

  This early imperial “rooted cosmopolitanism” stands in stark contrast to the radical approach to traditional ideas about kinship and citizenship that characterized the early Stoa. For example, in the Politieia, Zeno is said to have explicitly rejected ties of biological kinship in favor of the natural affinity that the virtuous have for one another:

  Those men who are not virtuous are as enemies, foes slaves, and foreigners to one another, even parents to their children, brothers to brothers, even kin to kin . . . only the virtuous are citizens, friends, kin to one another, and free.15

  Cassius the Skeptic (in Diogenes Laertius) is the overtly hostile source for this passage and indeed, Cassius emphasizes the extremity of this Stoic position by claiming that, “for the Stoics, parents are enemies [exthroi] to their children, since they are not wise.”16 As early as the Hellenistic period, these “anti-family” teachings of Zeno had come to prove an embarrassing liability for the Stoa—so much so that a certain Athenodorus, librarian at Pergamum, is said17 to have excised these “disturbing theses” from his authoritative copy of the Politeia (Goulet-Cazé, 2003; see also Vogt 2008, 20–64). Whether Zeno did, in fact, take such radical positions in his Politeia (he is also said to have advocated community of women, cannibalism, and incest) or, as Malcolm Schofield has suggested, these charges are nothing more than Skeptic calumny (Schofield 1991, 3–21), by the Roman imperial period, the cosmopolitanism of the Stoa had come to explicitly embrace the naturalness of affective local ties—the idea that affection is a good. Of the many ways of defining this shift, perhaps the most astute is Gretchen Reydams-Schils’s observation that in the imperial period, the Stoa developed a model of the self that “functions as a mediator between philosophical and traditional values” (Reydams-Schils 2005, 1). Indeed, already in the Augustan period, it seems that the general contours of a peculiarly kin-oriented Stoic cosmopolitanism had taken shape. In the third book of Cicero’s De Finibus, Cato begins his exposition of Stoic ethics with the observation that each animal is born with an “awareness of itself” (sensus sui) that drives it toward self-preservation (3.16). Cato continues to argue that it is,

  according to nature that children are loved by their parents, from which beginning we attain the effected social community of the human race . . . thus it appears that we are driven by nature herself to love those whom we have borne. From which arises that communal natural affection of human beings for human beings, with the result that it is fitting that a human being never be perceived as alien to another human given the fact that he is a human being. (De Finibus 3.62–63)

  Cato’s effort to accommodate both the claims of the immediate kin group and an ethical orientation toward the whole of humanity stands in stark contrast to Zeno’s a
lleged rejection of traditional familial and polis-centered loyalties.

  Epictetus’s cosmopolitan ethics are similarly at once local and global. On the one hand, Epictetus subscribed to a strong cosmopolitan position. Concerning the practical consequences of the idea of the kinship of gods and men, Epictetus urges his students to consider the scope of their affinities as wider than that of their immediate kin or fellow citizens. It is in this regard that Epictetus foisted upon Socrates a most-unsocratic idea. Epictetus said that to a man who might inquire after one’s origins, Socrates counseled, “never say that ‘I am an Athenian or a Corinthian,’ but that ‘I am a Cosmian’ ” (κόσμιος). In a statement that hearkens back to the cosmopolitanism of the early Stoa, Epictetus asks,

  why would you say that you were an Athenian and not from that small corner into which your bodily part was thrown at birth? Or do you clearly take the place that is more lofty and encompasses not only your own corner but your entire house and, in a word, from where the lineage of your ancestors has come down to you at this spot, whence you call yourself Athenian and Corinthian? (Diss. 1.9)

  And with a nod to Stoic materialist physics, Epictetus corrects such limited parochialism by reminding us that anyone who has carefully studied the nature of the cosmos must become aware of the “seeds” (σπέρματα) of the divine which have descended not simply from grandfather to father but, “to all things that are born and grow upon the earth and, above all, to the reasoning beings (ta logika) since according to nature, they alone are in communion with the society of the divine and are implicated in him through reason (Diss. 1.9.1–6). But as with Cato, Epictetus’s cosmian ethics do not preclude an awareness and even a celebration of the natural affection that we feel toward those who are closest to us. Epictetus does not aim, as had Hierocles, to place the individual at the center of circles of symmetrically placed others. Rather, Epictetus insisted that a human being must “eat as a human being, drink as a human being, adorn oneself, marry, have kids, participate in the life of the polis” (Diss. 3.21.5). To the man whose love for his own daughter was so great that he abandoned her during her illness lest he see her suffer, Epictetus responds, “affection for family is according to nature and good” (Diss. 1.2.17).