Such, and not nobler, in the realms above,
My wonder dictates is the dome of Jove. [Od. 4.74]
Whereas Socrates or Diogenes would instead have said:
What vain, vexatious, useless things I’ve seen,
And good for nothing but to move one’s spleen.
You fool, what are you saying? When you ought to have stripped your wife of her purple and gaudy attire, so that she might cease to live luxuriously and run mad after strangers and their fashions, instead of this, do you adorn and beautify your house, so that it may appear like a theatre or a stage to all comers? (trans. W. W. Goodwin, 1874, adapted)
Many rhetors, like Proclus of Naucratis, Philostratus’s own teacher (Philostr. VS 2.21, 603–4), who shared his substantial private library with his own students, rehearsed their declamations in their own houses, but this did not mean that the architectural setting was more modest than public spaces. Polemon’s house was reputed to be the finest in Smyrna (Philostr. VS 534; Gleason 1995, 26). The covered porticoes of ancient houses would have offered a suitable space not just to converse or contemplate, but to practice oratory, inspired by thematically appropriate decoration. Herodes Atticus’s father is reputed to have “instructed that all the herms of ancient orators that were in the colonnades [dromoi] of [Herodes’s] house should be pelted with stones, because they had ruined his son” (Philostr. VS 1.21, 521). This may refer to Herodes’s villas in Greece or in the Triopion outside Rome. If the Younger Pliny’s villas seem more suited for quiet reading than public recitations (Pliny, Ep. 2.17.7), the two theaters at Hadrian’s Villa at Tivoli, on a grander level—the South Theater with twelve rows of seats in Greek marble and an Imperial loggia, and the smaller so-called ‘Greek Theater’ (Sear 2006, 46)—must have served rhetorical performances as well as plays and poetry.
In the light of what we know of the great set-piece speeches by Polemon and Aristides, there is no reason to believe that sophistic rhetoric was confined to purpose-built interior spaces. Just as many theaters demanded open-air delivery, other external venues could also offer potential for epideictic oratory. Public space offered opportunities as much as religious precincts. Aristides’s great Rome oration must have been delivered in one of the great public spaces of the capital. While the auditoria of Hadrian’s Athenaeum would have offered a suitable theater for such an oration, perhaps nowhere would have been more appropriate for that extravagant set-piece than the recently completed and consecrated Temple of Venus and Rome, the Templum Urbis, whose festival on April 21, 143 Aristides undoubtedly attended.3 The showpiece court erected by the benefactress Plancia Magna in front of the Hellenistic city gate at Perge in Pamphylia invited orators to exalt the city and dwell on its founding legends. Among the statues of local mythological heroes arranged in the lower-story niches of the horseshoe-shaped court were images of the seers Calchas and Mopsus, whose legendary poetic contest presented a model for Second Sophistic orators. The Panhellenic associations of the whole group with their links to the tale of the Argonauts would have formed an easy visual reference point for local speakers seeking evidence of a link to Hadrian’s Panhellenion or a counterweight to arguments that this Pamphylian community did not belong to the genos Hellenikon (Scheer 1993, 201).
By late antiquity the imperial fora where we began this chapter had become the venue not just for learned conversations, but for public recitals. Around 380 CE, a space known as the schola Traiani, very likely the curved exedra of Trajan’s Forum, appears to have been used by the Syrian rhetor Hierius and his brother Dracontius to revise declamations. Some fifteen years later, the Christian rhetor Severus Sanctus Endelechius used the Forum of Augustus as a schoolroom in which his pupil Sallustius rehearsed a critical reading of the ninth book of Apuleius’s Metamorphoses (Marrou 1932). If this seems a more formalized version of the improvisations of the second century, it very probably continues that tradition and may hint that Favorinus’s excursus was not untypical of the earlier period. It witnesses the very real nexus between architecture and rhetoric and how the intellectual endeavours of the Second Sophistic were constantly played out in formal architectural space.
FURTHER READING
For more detail on the architectural aspects of the theaters and odea discussed here, see Izenour 1992 and Dodge 1999; and, for the gymnasia of Rome, Greece, and Asia Minor, see Nielsen 1990 and Yegül 1992. Newby 2005 surveys athletic decoration in gymnasia in the context of the Second Sophistic. An analysis of the odeum at Cos is offered by Chlepa 1999, but the fullest and most enlightening discussions of such buildings are the studies by Steskal and La Torre 2008 of Vedius’s Gymnasium and Bier 2011 of the Bouleuterion at Ephesus. Lucian’s text is discussed in more detail in the context of monumental architecture of the Antonine period by Thomas 2007, and Newby 2002 provides an excellent close discussion of the relations between this text and sophistic performance. The essays collected in Borg 2004, Cordovana and Galli 2007, and Elsner 2002 provide good explorations of the relations between verbal and visual culture in the Second Sophistic. For a consideration of the deeper relations between architecture and rhetoric in particular, see Thomas 2014.
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