12.2 THE CIVIC THEATER AND OTHER LOCA OF SOPHISTIC RHETORIC
More commonly, the rhetors of the eastern provinces took up their station in a range of custom-built locations for the performance of rhetorical texts. These settings varied in audience and purpose. The largest and most public space for rhetorical display was the theater, the hub of civic identity, where oratorical performances were now among the most frequent activities (Hanfmann 1975, 53), delivered to large crowds who constituted the whole community of a city and sometimes even a province or region. Standing on the stage platform, backed by the authority of an engaged columnar façade of two or more stories, the orator could gain more attention than anywhere else. In the theater at Alexandria, Dio Cocceianus, “the golden-mouthed,” reprimanded the Alexandrians for the “deceitfulness” of declaiming in the theater (Or. 32; Winter 2002, 40–50). At Smyrna it was in the theater that an “Egyptian fellow [ἀνθρωπίσκου] burst on the scene” to great popular acclaim and Aelius Aristides’s chagrin; yet subsequently, after giving a rival performance himself in the civic council chamber (bouleuterion), Aristides took pleasure in sharing the report that there had been only seventeen people to hear the Egyptian in the Odeum (Or. 51.30–34). Audience numbers mattered. At festivals the crowds were vastest, and the stakes were highest. The Scythian Anacharsis is told of “the great multitude of people gathering to look at such festivals, theaters filling up with tens of thousands, the competitors praised, and the winner regarded as equal to the gods” (Lucian, Anach. 10).
In the 160s Apuleius addressed an enormous gathering in the theater at Carthage:1
You have come in such great numbers to hear, that I should rather congratulate Carthage on having so many friends of learning than make excuses for being a philosopher and for not refusing to speak. For the size of the gathering suits the scale of the city, and the place of the gathering has been chosen for its size. (Apul. Flor. 18, ed. Helm, 33–34)
Theaters were the ultimate test of an orator’s rhetoric. These huge cavea constructions offered sensational acoustics, which were sometimes enhanced by devices like those described by Vitruvius (De Arch. 5.5): at Aezani in upland Phrygia, twelve pairs of rectangular compartments between the upper and lower tiers of the theater may have contained sounding vessels of terracotta (Plommer 1983, 137–138); at Scythopolis-Nysa in the Syrian Decapolis and Caesarea in Syria Palestine similar mechanisms, perhaps using bronze vessels, benefited not only theater performances but the public orator’s voice (Plommer 1983, 133–137, 138–139). The stage buildings, too, could be constructed so as to allow the performers’ voices to travel more clearly to their audiences. In the theatre at Aspendus a wooden roof built out from the inner wall of the stage building with a backward slope provided a sounding board (Dodge 1999, 222).
If the grandeur of the theater architecture and the cavernousness of its space seemed too overwhelming or intimidating for an orator, he might take refuge in a virtual space, signaled by the columnar architecture of the stage building (cf. Vitr. 5.6) and developed for his audience through his rhetorical skills. In that oration in the theater at Carthage, Apuleius pointed first to its dizzying furnishings—marble pavements, proscaenium beams, columns of the stage building, high roofed spaces, glowing coffers, and encircling seats in the cavea (Apul. Flor. 18, ed. Helm, 33–34)—before appealing to the audience to avert their gaze from those enticing features and focus instead on his own oration. His rhetoric conveyed them to a different architectural setting, inventing its own fictive spaces to transport them to the senate house or library of Carthage, just as a playwright conveyed his audience to a dramatic scene, suggested by the otherworldliness of the stage architecture; and the balance of his own verbal phrases paralleled the balanced structure and contrasting materials of the real stage building.
The theater was only the largest of many different locations where orators could declaim. Less overawing were the many smaller auditoria for city councils, assemblies, or public performances of poetry and epideictic oratory. Many sophists, like Heraclides of Lycia (Philostr. VS 2.26, 614), declaimed in law courts (dikasteria) and received high fees for their trouble. Others spoke in theater-like city council buildings (bouleuteria). Aristides’s celebrated oration on the occasion of the dedication of the Temple of Hadrian at Cyzicus was delivered not in the sanctuary, but in the city bouleuterion from where the temple was not directly visible. Yet he used the distance to create a virtual architectural environment in his rhetoric, bringing the temple to his listeners. Singled out by ancient and modern writers alike as a model of sophistic ekphrasis (Menander Rhetor 345.20–21, in Russell and Wilson 1981, 30–31; Boulanger 1923, 344), the speech visualized the tripartite structure of the building and unfolded to the audience “the greatest work ever seen by man” (Aristid. Or. 27.1). Not intimidated by the scale of his subject, Aristides took comfort in the way that architecture provided an easy subject to describe in words, while at the same time he rose to the challenge of doing so in a manner that was not commonplace but distinctive and effective: “As for beauties of public buildings and the overall construction and size of the city, no one is so resourceless in words that he cannot praise them nor so competent in speaking that he can easily make a show” (Or. 27.13).
In the West the equivalent of the bouleuterion was the room for the civic assembly (curia). At Carthage, where Apuleius spoke in the 160s (Flor. 4.18.85), this was probably a small room at the end of the basilica (Gros 1985, 151n86); at Oea the basilica was “the site of the auditorium” (Apul. Apol. 73.2). These western assembly rooms usually took the form of a rectangular space lined by benches (Balty 1991, 33–81). But some western curia buildings adopted the semi-circular cavea of eastern cities, as most dramatically at Augst (Augusta Raurica) in modern Switzerland, where the speakers addressed a civic assembly perched high above the Violenried plain (Balty 1991, 271–275).
In the Greek world purpose-built, roofed theater-like settings for oral performances went back to the Odeum of Pericles in Athens, built around 440 BCE, which seems to have been used primarily for musical contests at the Panathenaea, for dramatic performances at the City Dionysia, especially the Proagon (Csapo and Slater 1994, 109–110), and as a lawcourt (Ar. Vesp. 1109; Dem. 59 (In Neaeram) 52, 54). But by the third century BCE the building is called a mouseion or philosophical school, where, among others, Chrysippus is reported to have lectured (Diog. Laert. 7.183–185; Robkin 1976, 66–67); a fragment attributed to the comic writer Alexis projects this back to the sophists of the fourth century BCE, “babbling nonsense at the Lyceum, Academy, and gates of the Odeum” (Kassel–Austin, PCG 2, fr. 25. 1–3), but this is most likely a forgery written a century later (Arnott 1996, 819–823). Yet the forest of columns that supported the roof would undoubtedly have severely compromised the visual and acoustic experience of the spectators (Izenour 1992, 32). The construction, however, in 16–14 BCE of the new Odeum of Agrippa (Agrippeion), with its broad timber-truss roof, provided the Athenians with a much more commodious space for oral performances. Decorated entirely in marble, it developed Hellenistic spaces such as the Bouleuterion at Miletus by producing an auditorium space without any internal supports, in the manner of smaller Italian examples such as the covered theater at Pompeii; the roof span of some 25 meters created an impressive acoustic space for speakers (Baldassarri 1998, 130–133). Here in the second century CE, the Cilician Philagrus, a pupil of Herodes Atticus, performed improvised recitals, although Herodes’s other students were less impressed by the content, claiming that they were in fact taken from his own hackneyed declamations (Philostr. VS 2.8, 579). Philagrus also declaimed in the probably more modest council chamber of the Technitai of Dionysus, “near the Cerameicus Gates not far from the Knights’ Grounds” (Philostr. VS 2.8, 580; Csapo and Slater 1994, 255–258).
The demand for such covered spaces for rhetorical performance increased. At Rome a large odeum was constructed under Domitian in the Campus Martius, to the design of the architect Apollodorus of Damascus
(Dio 69.4.2), which was decorated with column shafts of Euboean cipollino and Corinthian capitals, and which continued to be admired three centuries later for its vast size, with a cavea about 100 m in diameter (Virgili 1996); in the fifth century it was listed among the seven wonders of Rome (Polemius Silvius, in Valentini and Zucchetti 1940–1953, 1:310). As if to reassert the cultural preeminence of Athens, the millionaire sophist Herodes Atticus paid for the construction of an even larger odeum around 140 CE in memory of his wife Regilla. Modern acousticians have argued that, like other roofed theaters in antiquity, the Odeum was less well suited for the human voice than for musical performances (Vassilantonopoulos and Mourjopoulos 2009); but this overlooks that it was designed to respond specifically to the needs of orators, with its innovative and expensive ceiling of cedar wood (Paus. 7.20.6; Philostr. VS 2.1, 551), a material chosen not just for its exoticism and expense, but for its acoustic properties. As modern theory confirms, cedar wood is a natural sound absorber which only enhances the sound of the human voice, rendering it into a crisp and clear sound. Today, the vast Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels in Los Angeles, designed by José Rafael Moneo and opened in 2002, and at 195,000 square feet the third-largest cathedral in the world, has an 85-foot-high ceiling of cedar wood to absorb the services crisply for its vast congregations (Bradley, Ryherd and Ronsse 2016, 304). In the same way, in sixteenth-century Venice, the Franciscan friar Francesco Zorzi claimed in his Memoriale of 1533 that flat wooden coffered ceilings were preferable for listening to sermons (Howard and Moretti 2009, 55), an assertion which accords with more recent acoustic analysis. However, such analysis also finds that even more effective than the material in absorbing sounds are the human spectators: the larger the audience, the better the acoustics as the audience absorbs the sound best (Davis and Kaye 1932, 142–143; Watson 1930, 33); this is also noticed in a study of the acoustics of ancient auditoria (Canac 1967, 82).
Herodes’s Odeum is still substantially preserved on the south slope of the Acropolis, but now lacks its iconic ceiling, and, although roof tiles are recorded as having been stamped with their destination θέατρον Ἡρώδουκαὶ Ῥηγίλλης, it remains disputed whether the enclosed space was roofed entirely (Meinel 1980, 110) or only partially, with cantilevered beams over the rear of the auditorium and a sloping roof over the stage platform where orators and other artists performed (Izenour 1992, 137–140, fig 2.13). The building would have seated up to 5000 spectators for epideictic performances, as well as musical shows, creating an audience comparable in numbers to civic theaters. Herodes was, of course, a thunderous speaker himself, and when he spoke at other venues, he relished the huge audiences that such buildings offered. An inscribed statue base, reused in the Byzantine aqueduct but which perhaps originally came from the sanctuary of Artemis, has encouraged the hypothesis that he was invited, at the instigation of the leading Ephesian citizen M. Claudius P. Vedius Antoninus Sabinus, whose portrait was found in the 1990s at Herodes’s Peloponnesian villa at Loukou (Smith 1998, 82; Szewczyk 2015), to give an oration at Ephesus, possibly in his role as corrector of the cities of Asia in 134 CE (Keil 1953, 12–13; see Barresi 2007, 148n73). At that date he must have delivered the oration in the city’s theater, then recently enlarged with a third level of orders behind the stage, and, as he stood in this architectural space, he persuaded the emperor Hadrian to donate funds for the aqueduct of Alexandria Troas. The sophists’ oratory was frequently harnessed to efforts by cities to seek imperial funding for their local projects. In the same way Polemon had very recently convinced the emperor Hadrian to finance architectural developments in Smyrna (Philostr. VS 1.25, 533), and the oratory of Aristides would later persuade Marcus Aurelius to rebuild Smyrna after the earthquake of 177 CE (Or. 19; Philostr. VS 2.9, 582).
Some fifteen years after Herodes’s oration, Vedius’s son, the senator M. Cl. P. Vedius Antoninus Sabinianus, prytanis, grammateus, gymnasiarch, and panegyriarch at Ephesus, who has been called “some kind of Ephesian Herodes” (Smith 1998, 81), enlarged the Domitianic or Trajanic bouleuterion behind the Stoa Basileios on the city’s State Agora to create a vast new theater-like structure for rhetorical performances both in and outside meetings of the city council. A statue erected in the orchestra in Vedius’s honor by a group calling itself “the teachers in the Museum” (hoi peri to Mouseion paideutai) (IvE 2065) seems to attest to their use of this space for educational purposes and to Vedius as being the patron of such groups (Steskal 2001, 187). Although a local aristocrat and not himself a sophist, Vedius seems to have identified with sophistic culture, as emerges from his own self-presentation: his likely portrait from the East Baths exhibits the studied facial expression of an intellectual (Dillon 1996; Smith 1998, 82). In this vast new Roman-style setting, mounted on a substructure of mortared rubble, orators addressed not only the Ephesian bouleutai, but, every few years, the provincial assemblies of the Ionian cities. The exceptional appearance here of a double-scotia, composite or “Ionic” base follows the stylistic taste of Rome, where it occurs in some Augustan examples and especially in the Flavian period (Strong and Ward-Perkins 1962, 5–12; Iara 2015, 37–40). Its use in the Bouleuterion of Vedius, instead of the Attic-Ionic form more commonly used in the province, has not been explained (Bier 2011, 65–66). Yet its adoption in the second century CE as an iconic image of Ionian historical culture, as in the restored Temple of Artemis at Sardis, where an inscription draws attention to these formal elements, suggests that it could have been intended as a visual reflection of the Ionian idea of oratory practiced at Ephesus (Philostr. VS 2.18, 598). The “baroque” character of the architectural ornament in the dynamic, syncopated design of jutting aedicules in two levels of the new scaenae frons behind the speakers—projecting the statuary more visibly toward the audience than in the previous, flatter arrangement—and the disposition of exotic material elements, including shafts of red Egyptian granite (Bier 2011, 51, 57–64), would have been well suited to this florid and ostentatious Gorgianic style (Kennedy 1994, 231; Kim, chapter 4 of this volume, on second-century Asianism).
12.3 THE SOPHIST AS BUILDER: GYMNASIA AS SOPHISTIC SPACE
As these examples illustrate, a remarkable feature of the world of the Second Sophistic in the eastern empire was that the exponents of spoken rhetorical performance were also frequently those who financed the venues in which they took place. Herodes Atticus had access to exceptional wealth through his marriage to the Roman Annia Regilla, descendant of the prodigious Annii family, and when Flavius Damianus married the daughter of Vedius Antoninus Sabinianus, Vedia Phaedrina, who inherited Vedius’s substantial estate, he acquired considerable spending power. But other sophists acquired substantial fortunes from their work which gave them the opportunity to finance extraordinary building projects. The sophist and legal advocate Nicetes of Smyrna is credited not only with restoring the art of oratory, but also with building a grand approach road between the inner city of Smyrna and the city gate leading to Ephesus. The sheer physical scale of this project was said to have brought his actions to the level of his words (Philostr. VS 1.19, 511) and, apparently, to have matched the grand style of his oral delivery (megalophonia, Philostr. VS 1.21, 518). If that is so, this term may suggest that Nicetes’s architectural work was a portico roofed by a barrel vault, which created loud echoes for the orator’s voice. Nicetes’s wealth no doubt accrued from his successful legal advocacy. If so, he was not the only sophist to amass a huge personal fortune. Others accumulated prodigious earnings from their lectures or declamations. Nicetes’s pupil Scopelian adjusted his fee according to the means of his clients, which suggests that for the richer ones he charged a pretty sum; meanwhile, Lollianus of Ephesus charged “handsome fees” (misthous gennaious), though he was sometimes known to remit them altogether (Philostr. VS 1.21, 518; 1.23, 527).
With their diverse building projects, the sophists had a dual and bicultural focus: on the one hand, they set out to satisfy the needs of the crowds according to the fashions of
the Imperial period; on the other hand, they respected Greek cultural traditions, not only in the objects of benefaction—gymnasia, stoas, and nymphaea (Philostr. VS 2.26, 613)—but also in their cultivation of virtues in the qualities of philotimia, bringing honour and lasting esteem to the donor, and eunoia, which they showed by offering utility to the inhabitants (Barresi 2007, 141). The projects of the highly rich Herodes Atticus were exceptional. In addition to his odeum, he paid for the reconstruction in white marble of the Panathenaic Stadium at Athens (Philostr. VS 2.1, 549–551); a new aqueduct for Alexandria Troas (VS 2.1, 548), which supplied a new bath building at that city; a stadium and odeum at Athens (VS 2.1, 551); and the notorious nymphaeum at Olympia, inscribed in the name of his wife, Regilla (Bol 1984; Settis 1968, 25). Following Trajan’s example at Rome and the contemporaneous Library of Celsus at Ephesus, libraries were also an object of patronage. C. Flavius Antesthianus Memnon constructed the library at Cremna with ten statues (Horsley 1987), and other examples were built at Nysa (Ídil 1999, 440-1; Hiesel and Strocka 2006) and Sagalassus (Devijver 1993; Waelkens and Poblome 2011).
The Oxford Handbook of the Second Sophistic Page 30