Plutarch (or at least Plutarch through the mouthpiece of Zeuxippos) not only denigrates the techniques of the athletic trainer; he also, again like Galen, constructs an alternative model of training for good health, based on dietetic traditions, rather than rejecting physical exercise outright. However, the remarkable thing about Plutarch’s version is the fact that it is presented—much more explicitly so than is the case for Galen—as a set of principles particularly well suited to pepaideumenoi (“those who have been educated”) like himself. That point is made most clearly in paragraph 16 (130a–31b).41 Here Plutarch announces first that he is moving on to the subject of “exercises [gymnasia] suitable for scholars [philologoi]” (130a). He then suggests that it is hardly necessary to do so, given that people of this sort already practice one of the most valuable exercises of all, that is the use of their voices:
For it is amazing what kind of exercise [gymnasion] is daily use of the voice in speaking aloud, not only for health but also for strength, not the strength of wrestlers which makes the external parts of the body fleshy and thick like a building, but instead the kind of strength that produces ingrained vigour and real energy in the most vital and most important parts of the body. (130a–b)
In that passage we see not only another rejection of professional training, in this case on the grounds that it produces only an illusion of strength rather than real strength of the kind that is useful for everyday life (again, that is a criticism echoed by Galen),42 but also, more remarkably, the claim that the best strength-giving exercise—speaking—is one perfectly suited to the lifestyle of the learned.43 That point is extended in what follows:
For that reason neither a journey by sea nor a stay in an inn should be used as an excuse for silence, not even if everyone mocks you. For surely it is not disgraceful to take exercise, in a place where it is not disgraceful to eat. More disgraceful is to be afraid and shy in front of sailors and mule-drivers and innkeepers, who direct their mockery not at the man who plays ball or shadow-boxes but at the man who speaks, if in the process of exercising he teaches and enquires and learns and uses his memory. . . . For a man who exercises through singing or speaking, every place provides for him a gymnasion with enough room, whether he is standing up or lying down.
For the learned man, it seems, the gymnasium is everywhere. On Precepts of Healthcare, in summary, is an ingenious attempt to make the athletic and the literary compatible with each other, even as it rejects the value of the bulk of day-to-day athletic training.
FURTHER READING
Until relatively recently, scholarship on the Second Sophistic has paid little attention to the expansion of interest in athletic festivals and athletic training in this period: Gleason 1995 and Schmitz 1999 are good examples of important studies of elite self-definition which have little to say on the matter, concentrating primarily on rhetorical training. A series of articles by van Nijf (1999, 2001, 2003, 2004, and 2007, among others) stresses the elitist character of athletics in imperial culture. Van Nijf 2004 in particular covers similar ground to this chapter in examining the links between athletics and paideia, although his main aim is to demonstrate the greater popularity of athletics by comparison with literary paideia, rather than the compatibility between the two, as I have tended to do here. König 2005 examines the ways in which the Greek and Latin authors of the Roman Empire responded to the athletic culture which was so important to their contemporaries, with comparisons between literary and epigraphical representations of athletic activity. Newby 2005 covers the athletic art of the Roman Empire; on the whole she too stresses the way in which athletic art allowed its owners and viewers in both the Greek east and the Roman west to associate themselves with traditional high-status skills linked with the classical past. All of those works deal at length with the festivals of the Roman Empire and with commemoration of victorious athletes, as do many of the recent introductory works on sport in the ancient world: e.g., Kyle 2007, esp. 300–338 and Potter 2011, esp. 225–320. Lying behind the assumptions outlined above about the elitist character of imperial athletics is a set of earlier debates about the links between athletes and social status: e.g., see Young 1985 and Fisher 1998 for accounts which stress the openness of athletic training and athletic competition to young men from below the upper levels of society; Pleket 1975 and Pritchard 2003 for the opposite view (of these two, only Pleket focuses at any length on the imperial period). On gymnasium education and especially the ephebeia, much of the most important evidence comes from the Hellenistic period: e.g., see Delorme 1960, Kah and Scholz 2004, and Gauthier 2010. For the ephebeia in the Roman period, see Kennell 2010; and on the Athenian ephebeia specifically, see Newby 2005, 168–201; also Graindor 1931, 85–97, and 1934, 98–102. For Galen’s writings on athletics, see König 2005, 254–300; and for translation of his Thrasyboulos and Protrepticus, see Singer 1997. For Philostratus’s Gymnasticus, and its relation with Galen’s work, see König 2005, 301–344, and König 2009b; also Jüthner 1909, esp. 3–131, for a long and still very useful introduction to the work’s relationship with earlier writing on athletic topics, including a useful survey of earlier writing on dietetics; and for translation of the Gymnasticus, see Rusten and König 2014 in the Loeb Classical Library series. For Plutarch’s Precepts of Healthcare (not discussed in König 2005), see Van Hoof 2010, 211–254; and translation in volume 2 of Plutarch’s Moralia in the Loeb Classical Library series.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Borg, B. E., ed. 2004. Paideia: The World of the Second Sophistic. Berlin and New York.
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Ewald, B. V. 2004. “Men, Muscle, and Myth: Attic Sarcophagi in the Cultural Context of the Second Sophistic.” In Paideia: The World of the Second Sophistic, edited by B. E. Borg, 229–275. Berlin.
Fisher, N. 1998 “Gymnasia and the Democratic Values of Leisure.” In Kosmos: Essays in Order, Conflict and Community in Classical Athens, edited by P. Cartledge, P. Millett, and S. von Reden, 84–108. Cambridge. Reprinted in Greek Athletics, edited by J. König, 66–86. Edinburgh, 2010.
Forbes, C.A. (1945). “Expanded Uses of the Greek Gymnasium”. CPh 40: 32–42.
Gauthier, P. 1995 “Notes sur le rôle du gymnase dans les cités hellénistiques.” In Stadtbild und Bürgerbild im Hellenismus, edited by M. Wörrle, and P. Zanker, 1–11. Munich.
Gauthier, P. 2010 “Notes on the Role of the Gymnasion in the Hellenistic City.” Translation of Gauthier 1995, in Greek Athletics, edited by J. König, 87–101. Edinburgh.
Gleason, M. W. 1995 Making Men: Sophists and Self-Presentation in Ancient Rome. Princeton, NJ.
Graindor, P. 1931. Athènes de Tibère à Trajan. Cairo.
Graindor, P. 1934. Athènes sous Hadrien. Cairo.
Hall, A. and Milner, N. (1994) “Education and Athletics. Documents illustrating the festivals of Oenoanda,” in Studies in the History and Topography of Lycia and Pisidia (In Memoriam A.S. Hall), edited by D. French, 7–47. London.
Jüthner, J., ed. 1909. Philostratos über Gymnastik. Leipzig.
Kah, D., and P. Scholz, eds. 2004. Das hellenistische Gymnasion. Berlin.
Kennell, N. 2010. “The Greek Ephebate in the Roman Period.” In Sport in the Cultures of the Ancient World: New Perspectives, edited by Z. Papakonstantinou, 175–194. London.
König, J. 2005. Athletics and Literature in the Roman Empire. Cambridge.
König, J. 2007. “Greek Athletics in the Severan Period: Literary Views.” In Severan Culture, edited by J. Elsner, S. Harrison, and S. Swain, 135–145. Cambridge.
König, J. 2009a. Greek Literature in the Roman Empire. London.
König, J. 2009b. “Training Athletes and Explaining the Past in Philostratus’ Gymnasticus.” In Philostratus, edited by J. Elsner and E. Bowie, 251–283. Cambridge.
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König, J. 2011. “Competitiveness and Anti-competitiveness in Philostratus’
Lives of the Sophists.” In Competition in the Ancient World, edited by N. Fisher and H. van Wees, 279–300. Swansea.
König, J. 2014. “Images of Elite Community in Philostratus: Re-reading the Preface to the Lives of the Sophists.” In Roman Rule in Greek and Latin Writing: Double Vision, edited by J. Madsen and R. Rees, 246–270. Leiden.
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Kyle, D.G. 2007. Sport and Spectacle in the Ancient World. Malden, MA.
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CHAPTER 11
PROFESSIONALS OF PAIDEIA?
The Sophists as Performers
THOMAS A. SCHMITZ
WHILE the last decades have greatly advanced our understanding of the Second Sophistic, we still have to acknowledge that the precise meaning and ancient usage of the term “sophist” remain somewhat elusive. There was no formal degree which gave graduates the right to carry this title; there was no guild in which sophists had to enroll; no official body appointed aspirants to the rank of sophist. The epigraphic record reveals that there were many individuals who were proud to call themselves “sophists,” but most of them are unknown to us from other sources, so we cannot even guess how they went about being sophists.1 Hence, when we explore the sophists as professionals, we must keep in mind that we are looking at the tip of an iceberg—we can only study sophists about whose “professional” behavior we have some kind of information. Nevertheless, the questions of whether the sophists were professionals and to what degree it makes sense to consider the Second Sophistic a profession is an excellent way to gain insight into the nuts and bolts of this cultural movement.
The most important source for our knowledge about the Second Sophistic is Philostratus’s Lives of the Sophists, written in the third century CE and dedicated to Gordian.2 Its lively narrative and colorful anecdotes provide unmatched insights into the professional and private lives of the great sophists. However, we have to be wary of the fact that Philostratus does not intend to write an accurate history of the movement; instead, he aims to entertain and sometimes bedazzle his readers.3 One of his striking anecdotes (VS 2.27, 618) about one of the sophistic superstars will provide the starting point for our exploration of the sophists as professionals.4 Hippodromus of Larissa held one of the chairs of rhetoric in Athens during the early years of the third century.5 However, as Philostratus tells us, he abandoned this position after just four years to manage his estates, which had begun to deteriorate in his absence. But even after retiring from his teaching position, he still attended public festivals and declaimed, and he always kept up his reading of classical authors and his rhetorical training.
Hippodromus’s semi-retirement occasioned an encounter with another sophist, which reveals the mechanisms of sophistic performances: he arrives in Smyrna, one of the most important centers of the Second Sophistic in Asia Minor. As a true pepaideumenos, he is eager to meet the local sophists and learn from them. As he walks through the town, he sees pedagogues and slaves with books in front of a temple and concludes (rightly) that this must be the place where some well-known sophist teaches. He enters, greets the sophist Megistias,6 and quietly takes a seat in the audience. Megistias at first thinks that he must be the father of one his students, and asks him why he has come. Hippodromus replies: “Let us exchange garments.”
He was in fact wearing a traveling-cloak, while Megistias wore a gown suitable for public speaking. “And what do you mean by that?” asked Megistias. “I wish,” he replied, “to give you a display of declamation.” Now Megistias really thought that he was mad in making this announcement and that his wits were wandering. But when he observed the keenness of his glance and saw that he seemed sane and sober, he changed clothes with him. When he asked him to suggest a theme, Megistias proposed “The magician who wished to die because he was unable to kill another magician, an adulterer.” And when he took his seat on the lecturer’s chair, and after a moment’s pause sprang to his feet, the theory that he was mad occurred still more forcibly to Megistias, and he thought that these signs of proficiency were mere delirium. But when he had begun to argue the theme and had come to the words: “But myself at least I can kill,” Megistias could not contain himself for admiration, but ran to him and implored to be told who he was. “I am,” said he, “Hippodromus the Thessalian, and I have come to practice my art on you in order that I may learn from one man so proficient as you are the Ionian manner of declaiming. But observe me through the whole
of the argument.” Toward the end of the speech a rush was made by all lovers of learning in Smyrna to the door of Megistias, for the tidings had soon spread abroad that Hippodromus was visiting their city. Thereupon he took up his theme afresh, but gave a wholly different force to the ideas that he had already expressed. And when later on he made his appearance before the public of Smyrna, they thought him truly marvelous, and worthy of being enrolled among men of former days.
DRESS FOR SUCCESS: PROFESSIONAL ATTIRE REQUIRED
The first detail of this anecdote that I wish to emphasize is Hippodromus’s change of dress: he does not wish to declaim in his traveling cloak, but wants to wear Megistias’s gown, which is more suitable for a sophist. This can be interpreted as an outward sign of the separation of professional persona from private individual: sophists did not wear a uniform, but some sort of festive dress was expected from a sophistic performer.7 Philostratus mentions the sumptuosity that some sophists displayed: Hadrian of Tyre “wore very expensive clothes, bedecked himself with precious gems, and used to go down to his lectures in a carriage with silver-mounted bridles” (VS 2.10, 587); when Alexander “Clay-Plato” performed in Athens for the first time, “a low buzz of approval went round as a tribute to his perfect elegance” (VS 2.5, 572). To some observers, the sophist’s attire might appear foppish and pretentious, as Lucian’s description of the transparent tunic and effeminate shoes of the charlatan sophist makes clear.8 For this sophistic dress code, we might compare the tuxedo or gown that a modern soloist in a concert of classical music is expected to wear: it emphasizes that the performance represents a special cultural space and that the performer transcends his usual private self. In the case of the sophist, it may also have helped his role playing: in their formal recitations, sophists usually embodied historical figures (such as Demosthenes or Themistocles), speaking in their name, adopting their classical Attic language and style, which was far removed from the spoken Greek of their own time. Wearing particularly elegant garments that were unlike their everyday clothing emphasized that they were stepping out of their usual environment.
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