“TO THINE OWN SELF BE TRUE”
So far, we have seen a number of factors which seem to suggest that the sophists were indeed professionals. We will now return one last time to our anecdote to gain a more nuanced view. Let us look at the reason for which Megistias was willing to exchange garments with Hippodromus and to listen to his declamation: “when he observed the keenness of his glance and saw that he seemed sane and sober, he changed clothes with him.” In fact, this small detail is the peg on which Philostratus hangs his entire anecdote, which he claims he heard from Megistias himself: “Though he was somewhat rustic in appearance, yet an extraordinary nobility shone out of his eyes, and his glance was at once keen and good-natured. Megistias of Smyrna also says that he noticed this characteristic of his, and he was considered second to none as a physiognomist.”
Physiognomy was a subject with which several sophists were fascinated; we still have some meager fragments of a treatise by Polemon on this “science.”35 It is reputed to detect the true nature of a person, no matter how much she or he tries to conceal it; a number of anecdotes relate that some famous physiognomist was able to see through the veils of pretense that people put on to hide the unsavory traits of their character. Philostratus occasionally takes some care to describe the look of his sophists:36 Marcus of Byzantium was, like Hippodromus, somewhat “rustic” (agroikoteros; VS 1.24, 529), yet “the expression of his brows and the gravity of his countenance proclaimed Marcus a sophist. . . . This was evident from the steady gaze of his eyes.”
Such passages show that for Philostratus and for his readers, sophistry was a curious mixture of ingredients which we moderns would consider contradictory. On the one hand, as we have seen, he emphasizes that it demanded rigorous preparation and hard work. He has a somewhat ambivalent attitude toward laborious studies:37 while he admires natural abilities and does not believe that they can be replaced by training and instruction, he reserves his highest praise for sophists (like Scopelian or Herodes Atticus) who provided an outward image of effortlessness, yet spent their nights studying.38 Hippodromus receives praise for his wide reading and good memory, and it is his rhetorical training that enables him to emerge victorious from his encounter with Megistias.
On the other hand, this sophistic training is regarded as a natural character trait which is visible in a person’s countenance; it is something which cannot be acquired, but is an inborn talent. Take the case of Agathion:39 when this somewhat mysterious, superhuman figure meets Herodes Atticus, the sophist is struck by the purity of his language and asks him: “ ‘How were you educated, and by whom? For you do not seem to be an uneducated man.’ ‘The interior of Attica educated me,’ Agathion replied, ‘a good school for a man who wishes to be able to converse’ ” (VS 2.1, 553). Philostratus seems to suggest that Agathion received no formal education, but is a survivor, as it were, from the classical age; he is a sophist’s dream come true: his pure Attic is a natural gift, not the result of hard work. The entire cultural elite aspired to this ideal, as we can see in numerous inscriptions, where concepts such as “education” (paideia) are combined with words denoting the character (êthos) or overall excellence (aretê) of a person:40 being a pepaideumenos is more than simply having received an education, it underlines the natural superiority of every member of the social and political elite.
This conception of sophistry as a mark of your entire personality is what separates it most from our modern notion of “profession.” As we have seen, there was some kind of separation between the sophist as an individual and his public role. Nevertheless, each and every performance showed who you really were: it was not primarily about what you had learned and read, but about your general superiority. Hippodromus’s declamation simply confirms what his physiognomy had already indicated: his “extraordinary nobility” (amêchanon eugeneian; the Greek expression directly refers to the “genetic” dimension of this power). This is also expressed when the audience at Smyrna pays him the highest compliment that any sophist could aspire to: he is deemed “worthy of being enrolled among men of former days” (hoios en tois pro autou graphesthai). One of the most important aspects of sophistic performances was the effort to embody the great heroic figures of the classical Greek past, to imitate their language as closely as possible, to become one of them. When Herodes Atticus is called “one of the Ten,”41 he has reached the highest pinnacle that a sophist could hope for, and Hippodromus is here “counted among the classics.” Being a sophist connected imperial Greeks with what they considered their most valuable and important heritage, the classical past.42 Hence, sophists were much more than simple professionals: they were representatives of what an entire culture found important about itself.
FURTHER READING
Korenjak 2000 and Whitmarsh 2005, 23–40 provide lively and informative descriptions of the sophists as public performers and their interactions with audiences. Schmitz 1999 and Connolly 2001 explore some of the implications of sophistic performances. Schmitz 1997 is a book-length study of the function of sophistic rhetoric in imperial Greek society. Eshleman 2012 analyzes the ways in which sophists defined their professional in-groups. Gleason 1995 is an excellent study of the role of physiognomy in sophistic self-fashioning.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Anderson, G. 1986. Philostratus: Biography and Belles Lettres in the Third CenturyA.D. London.
Anderson, G. 1993. The Second Sophistic: A Cultural Phenomenon in the Roman Empire. London and New York.
Avotins, I. 1975. “The Holders of the Chairs of Rhetoric at Athens.” Harv. Stud. 79: 313–24.
Bowie, E. L. 1970. “Greeks and Their Past in the Second Sophistic.” P&P 46: 3–41. Revised reprint in Studies in Ancient Society, edited by M. I. Finley, 166–209. London and Boston, 1974.
Bowie, E. L., and J. Elsner, eds. 2009. Philostratus. Cambridge.
Castelli, C. 2001. “Le fatiche del sofista: Note sul lessico dell’attività letteraria nelle ‘Vitae Sophistarum’ di Filostrato.” Rend. Ist. Lomb. 135: 247–259.
Connolly, J. 2001. “Reclaiming the Theatrical in the Second Sophistic.” Helios 28: 75–96.
Cribiore, R. 2007. “Lucian, Libanius, and the Short Road to Rhetoric.” GRBS 47: 71–86.
Eshleman, K. 2012. The Social World of Intellectuals in the Roman Empire: Sophists, Philosophers, and Christians. Cambridge.
Fisher, N., and H. van Wees, eds. 2011. Competition in the Ancient World. Swansea.
Gleason, M. W. 1995. Making Men: Sophists and Self-Presentation in Ancient Rome. Princeton, NJ.
Jones, C. P. 2002. “Philostratus and the Gordiani.” Mediterraneo Antico 5: 759–767.
Kasulke, C. T. 2005. Fronto, Marc Aurel und kein Konflikt zwischen Rhetorik und Philosophie im 2. Jh. n. Chr. Beiträge zur Altertumskunde 218. Munich.
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.
Korenjak, M. 2000. Publikum und Redner: Ihre Interaktion in der sophistischen Rhetorik der Kaiserzeit. Zetemata 104. Munich.
Lauwers, J. 2014. “Systems of Sophistry and Philosophy: The Case of the Second Sophistic.” Harv. Stud. 107: 331–363.
Naechster, M. 1908. De Pollucis et Phrynichi controversiis. Unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Leipzig.
Puech, B. 2002. Orateurs et sophistes grecs dans les inscriptions d’époque impériale. Paris.
Roskam, G., M. De Pourcq, and L. Van der Stockt, eds. 2012. The Lash of Ambition: Plutarch, Imperial Greek Literature and the Dynamics of “Philotimia.” Collection d’Études Classiques 25. Namur.
Rothe, S. 1989. Kommentar zu ausgewählten Sophistenviten des Philostratos. Sammlung Groos 38. Heidelberg.
Russell, D. A. 1983. Greek Declamation. Cambridge.
Schmitz, T. A. 1997. Bildung und Macht: Zur sozialen und politischen Funktion der zweiten Sophistik in der griechischen Welt der Kaiserzeit. Zetemata 97. Munich.
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p; Schmitz, T. A. 1999. “Performing History in the Second Sophistic.” In Geschichtsschreibung und politischer Wandel im 3. Jh. n. Chr., edited by M. Zimmermann, 71–92. Historia Einzelschriften 127. Stuttgart.
Schmitz, T. A. 2009. “Narrator and Audience in Philostratus’ Lives of the Sophists.” In Philostratus, edited by E. L. Bowie and J. Elsner, 49–68. Cambridge.
Schmitz, T. A. 2013. “Plutarch and the Second Sophistic.” In A Companion to Plutarch, edited by M. Beck, 32–42. Oxford.
Sidebottom, H. 2009. “Philostratus and the Symbolical Roles of the Sophist and Philosopher.” In Philostratus, edited by E. L. Bowie and J. Elsner, 69–99. Cambridge.
Swain, S. 1996. Hellenism and Empire: Language, Classicism, and Power in the Greek World,AD50–250. Oxford.
Van Hoof, L. 2010. Plutarch’s Practical Ethics: The Social Dynamics of Philosophy. Oxford.
Veyne, P. 1990. Bread and Circuses: Historical Sociology and Political Pluralism. London. First French edition Paris 1976.
Whitmarsh, T. 2005. The Second Sophistic. Oxford.
Wright, W. C. 1921. Philostratus, Lives of the Sophists; Eunapius, Lives of the Philosophers and Sophists. London and Cambridge, MA.
Zuiderhoek, A. 2009. The Politics of Munificence in the Roman Empire: Citizens, Elites, and Benefactors in Asia Minor. Cambridge.
Zweimüller, S. 2008. Lukian, “Rhetorum praeceptor”: Einleitung, Text und Kommentar. Hypomnemata 176. Göttingen.
CHAPTER 12
PERFORMANCE SPACE
EDMUND THOMAS
12.1 SOPHISTIC PERFORMANCE AND ITS SETTING
ONE day in the reign of Antoninus Pius, the rhetorical teacher Favorinus waited in Trajan’s Forum in Rome to meet the consul of the day. As a group of devotees, including the young Aulus Gellius, gathered around him, Favorinus used the time to improvise a display of literary learning, which took its starting point from the decoration of the building. Pointing to the inscription beneath the gilded statues of horses and standards that adorned the roof of the colonnade, he embarked on a learned explanation of the phrase ex manubiis (Gell. NA 13.25; Gleason 1995, 138–9). One might have thought that Favorinus would have shown more awareness of the visual or spatial aspects of this complex, which, still very recent in construction, continued to be regarded as sensational a generation later (Paus. 5.12.6); and indeed he may have done so, but we are dependent for our knowledge of this episode on the selective memory of the hyper-philologist Gellius, who took little interest in architectural details and with other monumental complexes in Rome also preferred to dwell on the semantics of inscribed text than on the surrounding buildings (Gell, NA 10.1.6–9; Holford-Strevens 2003, 325). For Favorinus’s companions, a spatial turn around the porticoes of this grandiose new complex was a valued opportunity to learn from this celebrated intellectual. For the sophist himself, it gave him a chance to step out of the classroom and exercise his talents in an architectural setting. Extemporizing was an essential part of the sophistic repertoire, allowing the rhetor space, literally, to expand on questions posed by the architecture of the city. But the urban environment did not only offer rich material for reflection and improvisation, it also provided a constructive physical environment in which to speak. The first-century orator Scopelian regarded his native city Smyrna as “a grove in which he could practice his melodious voice and thought it best worth his while to let it echo there” (Philostr. VS 1.21, 516). The teachers of the Second Sophistic were not just aware of their architectural surroundings; they positively fed off them.
There was, in fact, a very real equivalence between architecture and rhetoric. The two arts were analogous, each directed toward achieving utility as well as pleasure (Thomas 2014, 37–38, and passim). Their methods, too, could be similar, winning over audience or spectators by theatrical effects. The brilliant oral style of orators like Lollianus of Ephesus, with its “flashes of brilliance like lightning” (Philostr. VS 1.23, 527), was commended in similar terms (lamprotes) as the contemporary architecture of sophists (Thomas 2007, 219). Even where the subject matter of epideictic oratory was not explicitly architectural, speeches reflected the orator’s immediate experience of the setting. Unlike a text read in the schoolroom, a rhetorical address had to adjust to the built surroundings. The acoustics of a venue determined the tone of the speaker’s delivery and the success of his speech. He either stood out in the location and was remembered, or proved unworthy of the architectural grandeur, like Peregrinus at the Nymphaeum of Herodes Atticus at Olympia, who was almost stoned to death for his criticism of the expensive structure filled with marble statuary of the donor’s and emperor’s families (Bol 1984) as an effeminate waste (Lucian, De mort. Peregr. 19). It was in order to fit most effectively within their environment that speakers cultivated their outward appearance, in order to make spectacular entrances into the public settings where they performed. Orators studied the proper posture and the correct manner of walking, made appropriate bodily gestures, and wore clothes, which, like the architectural decoration, were beautiful without being distracting or ostentatious (Gleason 1995, 155). Hadrian the Phoenician would arrive at his lectures in Rome in a carriage with silver bridles (Philostr. VS 2.10, 587). His destination, the emperor Hadrian’s Athenaeum (Philostr. VS 2.10, 589), was no ordinary lecture room. Excavations between 2006 and 2010 have shown that it consisted of three adjacent auditoria, each paved in grey Egyptian granodiorite and Numidian yellow marble, with walls in colored marbles including Phrygian pavonazzetto and Africano from Teos in Asia Minor (Egidi 2010, 107–121). There was a sense of mutual expectation between the ostentatious style of sophistic performance and its glamorous and impressive settings.
There was no more consummate rhetorical performer than the sophist Antonius Polemon. Herodes Atticus recalled his mannerisms in a letter to the Roman Consul M. Vettulenus Civica Barbarus (Alföldy 1977, 328):
He would come forward to declaim with a serene expression and full of confidence, and he always arrived in a litter, because his joints were already diseased. When a theme was proposed, he did not rehearse it in public, but would withdraw from the crowd for a short time. His utterance was clear and incisive, and there was a fine ringing sound in the tones of his voice. According to Herodes, he used to rise to such a pitch of excitement that he would jump up from his chair when he came to the most striking conclusions in his argument, and whenever he rounded off a period he would utter the final clause with a smile, as if to show that he could deliver it without effort, and at certain places in the argument he would stamp the ground just like the horse in Homer. (Philostr. VS 1.25, 537)
As André Boulanger has discussed, his declamations and delivery consisted of “a rolling fire of wordplays” and other verbal effects:
There is plenty of overkill, and considerable bad taste, but also a good deal of passion and enthusiasm. . . . If his schoolroom declamations hardly justify the reputation of the rhetor of Smyrna, it should be remembered that he owed his immense success above all to the public glamour of his eloquence. It was “the prodigy himself” [le monstre lui-même] that one needed to hear, his fervent delivery, his passionate impersonations. These declamations, edited and corrected for reading, as in particular the systematic exclusion of hiatuses shows, are for us like the librettos of cantatas whose music has been lost. (Boulanger 1923, 93–94; adapted from translation by Gleason 1995, 27)
Yet it would be even more appropriate to compare these works to operas, since their impact derived not just from the words and music, but from the rhetor’s theatrical use of the spatial settings in which they took place.
Polemon’s most famous oration, and “perhaps the symbolic event for the Second Sophistic” (Anderson 1986, 105), was a prose hymn delivered, at the invitation, or bidding (Philostratus uses the word ἐκέλευσε), of the emperor Hadrian, at the inaugural sacrificial ceremony of the Temple of Olympian Zeus in Athens in 131 or 132 CE (Weber 1907, 268–275; Benjamin 1963; Halfmann 1986, 208). Speaking at the open-air sacrifice in the temple pre
cinct, he was inspired by the religiousness of the occasion, and, as he declared in the prelude of his oration, spoke “not without divine impulse” (Philostr. VS 1.25, 533). Religious sanctuaries, the high-point of cities’ architecture and esteem, had by now become the locus for theatrical performances (Gödde 2015) and correspondingly offered the most compelling space for orators to demonstrate their virtuosity. By the third century CE it was common for rhetors to conduct classes inside temples. Philostratus recalls of the performer Hippodromus of Thessaly that “when he saw a temple with attendants sitting near it, and slaves in waiting carrying loads of books in satchels, he understood that someone of importance was holding his school inside.” Once inside, he would take his seat on the lecturer’s chair (τοῦ θρόνου), intermittently jumping up from it for rhetorical effect (VS 2.28, 618–19). Polemon stood outside, addressing presumably the large crowd that could fill the gigantic precinct. Reputedly fixing his own gaze on his inner thoughts, he was nonetheless himself an object of spectacle: he stood on the stylobate (ἀπὸ τῆςκρηπῖδος) of this vast dipteral temple, with three rows of columns at the front and rear (a feature of the legendary Archaic sanctuaries at Ephesus and Samos), so that its overhanging ornamental cornices of the Corinthian order overshadowed him as he spoke (Hellmann 1992, 242–243; Willers 1990, 26–67). The variety of points of visual interest in this prestigious subject of his speech offered both potentially distracting fascination for the audience and convenient loca for the orator, from the supposed relics of the temple’s mythical foundation by Deucalion, the hackneyed starting point of many an oration (Lucian, Rhetorum Praeceptor 20), to the new statues of the living emperor (Paus. 1.18.6–8). It was no wonder that Philostratus described that final dedication by Hadrian as a “great contest of time” (χρόνουμέγαἀγώνισμα: VS 1.25, 533), a formulation so rhetorical that it may even have been drawn directly from Polemon’s own words. For such ceremonial occasions, architecture and rhetoric came together in a harmonious synergy which could not be compromised. The unfinished state of the propylon on the north side of the precinct seems to indicate the haste in completing the work in time for this portentous event (Willers 1990, 38).
The Oxford Handbook of the Second Sophistic Page 29