This can be seen clearly in the inset parallels Dio adduces throughout the Kingships as paradigms for his own relationship with his addressee, as they demonstrate how actively Dio manipulates this imperial framework to enhance his own authority. For example, the criticisms of Alexander in Oration 4 are voiced by the philosopher Diogenes, a frequent model for Dio (as in Orr. 6, 8–10; Branham 1996, 101–103; Jouan 1993b) and one which reinforces his self-presentation elsewhere as a Cynic philosopher challenging authority. And yet, as Moles (1983 and 1990, 348–350) demonstrates, this sharp criticism is tempered by both an ironization of the Cynic framework and subtle references to Trajan’s virtues, which complicate any superficial anti-Roman conclusions and reinforce Dio’s own philosophical and rhetorical authority. Similarly, at the opening of the First Kingship, Dio compares himself to Timotheus, Alexander’s favorite musician, who modulated his performance to the king’s character so effectively that it brought the ruler running to him like one possessed (Or. 1.1–2), and wonders how he, a mere wanderer and self-taught philosopher (ἄνδρες ἀλῆταικαὶ αὐτουργοὶ τῆςσοφίας), might find a similarly appropriate subject for Trajan (1.9). By comparing himself to someone with such power over Alexander, Dio makes a claim for his own influence over the emperor (Jones 1978, 116–117) and seems to contradict his critical, distant stance elsewhere, but this comparison is self-consciously ambiguous. This characterization aligns Dio with a tradition of wandering philosophers, thus bolstering his philosophical credentials (Moles 1990, 309–311), and resists location in any Greek-Roman binary, instead insisting upon his mobility and independence as self-taught and itinerant. Rather than simply aligning himself with either a pro- or anti-Roman framework, therefore, these seemingly contradictory examples demonstrate how Dio manipulates this imperial framework, much as he did with his exile, to cast himself as an outsider and to enhance his philosophical credibility.
By contrast, Dio constructs a different kind of relationship between Greek culture and Roman power when situating himself in a more distant, less directly imperial context. In Orationes 38–50, Dio discusses matters of local politics in a number of addresses to provincial cities, most prominently his own home town of Prusa, but also various nearby Bithynian cities as well, including Nicaea and Apamea. In these speeches, Dio promotes civic harmony, defends himself against the slanders of political rivals, and discusses his involvement in local building projects to glorify the town, the political and social dynamics of which are discussed at length in Jones (1978, 95–103), Salmeri (1982, 14–45), Salmeri (2000), and Swain (1996, 225–241). Unlike in the Kingships, where Dio presents himself as a wandering philosopher immersed in Greek culture, Dio here consistently emphasizes his local origins and loyalty to the region, positioning himself more as an insider than an outsider. For example, while at various points Dio mentions his political influence, in particular his friendship with the emperor Nerva, he often frames it as a benefit for the whole city rather than a mark of personal favor (e.g., Orr. 40.15–16, 45.2–3). Indeed, Swain (1996, 232–233) suggests that Dio’s references to being criticized for his connections to corrupt officials (e.g., 43.11–12), as well as to the emperor and other Roman elites (47.22), was a consequence of Dio’s continual repositioning from imperial insider to provincial outsider. And yet, there are continuities between these positions, as Oration 42 demonstrates a similar sly self-deprecation to that at Oration 1.9, and in Oration 47.8 his description of himself as a “wanderer and idle talker” (ἀνθρώπουπλάνητοςκαὶ ἀδολέσχου) recalls his Cynic persona used elsewhere. These shifts in Dio’s self-positioning reflect the negotiations of identity particularly prominent in the Second Sophistic, where Roman and Greek affiliations are more overtly recontextualized and reconfigured for different performance contexts and audiences. Similar negotiations can be seen in the works of Lucian and Apuleius, both Second Sophistic writers who at times emphasize the foreignness of their origins (Syrian and North African, respectively), and at others their entanglement in imperial culture.4 These (re)negotiations of identity found across different performance contexts and audience perspectives, therefore, put in practice Dio’s awareness of the constructed, complex, and multifaceted nature of Second Sophistic identity positioning.
This consciousness of the mutability of imperial identity can be seen in a more playful way in Oration 21, On Beauty. Like many of Dio’s works, this title does not really encompass the full range of topics on display in the speech, as while Dio and his interlocutor do discuss the contemporary disregard for male beauty, they also cover the differences between Greek and Persian conceptions of beauty (3–6), Nero’s personal life (6–10), and Homer’s descriptions of beautiful men (16–17). Although there is no indication of a specific performance context, the speech is generally considered to be Domitianic based on the mentions of Nero, as the two are frequently paralleled in contemporary literature (for example, Juv. Satires 4.38; Plin. Pan. 53.4; see also Swain 1996, 213). Dio, however, does not stop at implicitly criticizing Domitian by casting him as worse than Nero, but goes on to sharply and explicitly condemn the whole system of imperial power, stating that whenever an emperor is needed, the richest man is chosen regardless of his other qualities for the profit of those around him (Or. 21.8). While it is possible to see this as a bitter but sincere criticism of the imperial system, possibly exacerbated by the injustice of exile (as in Jones 1978, 127–128), the discussions of Nero’s excesses which frame this statement question its sincerity. This corrupt system, Dio concludes, brought about Nero’s downfall, but even now these events are not fully understood, and although some revolted against Nero, the majority would be happy for him to be emperor forever (Or. 21.9). By emphasizing the obscurity of the matter while simultaneously clarifying it for his audience, Dio questions whether we want to interpret his criticisms of the emperor as a serious complaint against a corrupt system, or as a polemical and self-aware manipulation to enhance Dio’s own authority, as his interlocutor implicitly suggests (10). Dio’s adoption of such a critical anti-Roman position, therefore, highlights this juxtaposition of moral outrage and sophistic flippancy, and self-consciously challenges the audience to consider how seriously they want to take Dio’s stance here.
Moreover, when the interlocutor tries to move the conversation on, Dio complains that he is being looked down upon because he is discussing Nero instead of Cyrus and Alcibiades, as wise men do (Or. 21.11). By drawing a contrast between the established value of classical paradigms with the more shameful subjects of more recent history, Dio taps into the tension between past and present which underpins Second Sophistic culture, in which the use of ancient models demonstrates the speaker’s elite education and reaffirms their Hellenic self-definition. Although Dio seems to challenge this value judgment by declaring his distaste for classical writers and claiming a precedent for his use of modern examples, the fact that he bases this on the ancients’ own willingness to name contemporary figures (11) reinforces rather than undermines this attitude. Dio compares this desire for the ancient with contemporary booksellers forging cheap, new books to look old (12), which emphasizes both the potential superficiality of this position and the importance of the ability to distinguish between shallow and authentic models of antiquity, as Dio himself claims to demonstrate. This same image is also used by Lucian throughout The Ignorant Book Collector, where the title character’s inability to distinguish between forged books and genuinely ancient ones is used to illustrate the same point about the dangers of inadequate paideia. Moreover, Dio’s interlocutor complains that he has not even had an opportunity to get to the main point yet (10–13), which casts all of these preceding criticisms as mere digressions. By adopting these critical points of view on both Roman power and Greek imperial identity while framing them in such a flippant way, Dio draws attention to his different rhetorical personas and invites the audience to consider the implications of their insincerity.
Finally, these challenges to ident
ity are thoroughly interrogated in Oration 36, the Borystheniticus, through the speech’s interest in double perspectives and contradictory positioning. This name derives from the speech’s dramatic setting of Olbia, located at the fringes of empire on the Black Sea, and whose ancient pedigree as a Greek colony Dio recalls by using its more ancient name of Borysthenes. In his opening remarks, Dio explains that he happened to be in the city because he intended to travel into Scythia from there and visit the Getae (Or. 36.1), which casts this location as a stepping-stone on a journey into barbarian territory. He then goes on to discuss the city’s liminal position on the shore where two rivers meet (2–3), and contrasts the disconnect between its ancient glory and modern state of ruin, which testifies to its turbulent history of foreign conquest (4–6). By framing the speech in this way, Dio establishes the double vision evident throughout the whole speech (Porter 2001, 86; Trapp 1995, 165–166), a contradiction compounded by the Borystheniticus’s dissonance between internal and external audiences. Although the speech shows Dio talking to the Borysthenites, it is framed as a recounting of this experience to another audience, most often believed to be Dio’s fellow Prusans based on its traditional subtitle (“which he spoke in his own city”) and the comment that he undertook this travel after his exile (Or. 36.1). This speech-within-a-speech construction, discussed in Whitmarsh (2004, 459), epitomizes the Borystheniticus’s obsession with double perspectives and juxtapositions of viewpoint, particularly the multiple contradictions which can be held within a single entity.
This becomes more potent with the introduction into the narrative of the Borysthenites, whose Hellenic tendencies in their barbarian setting challenge any simplistic models of identity. Dio’s description of the Borysthenite Callistratus emphasizes both his foreign appearance on account of his barbarian trousers and Scythian clothes (Or. 36.7) and also his love of oratory, philosophy, and Homer (8–9). Indeed, the Borysthenites are so fond of Homer that even though they cannot speak Greek clearly because of their barbarian neighbors, they nonetheless all know the Iliad by heart (9), and Dio states that they demonstrated themselves to be truly Greek in their desire to hear him speak (16–17). This juxtaposition of Greek identification and barbarian appearance exposes a tension inherent in the construction of imperial Greek identity, as while the expanding borders of empire allow for such Hellenic affiliations to be adopted rather than purely ethnic this raises questions about the limits of such acculturations (see Porter 2001, 85–90). Moreover, although the majority of the Borysthenites are long-haired in accordance with Homer’s Greeks, the one who shaves is hated by his countrymen on suspicion that he does it to flatter the Romans, something which Dio describes as shameful and inappropriate (Or. 36.17). This statement can easily be read as an anti-Roman critique of perceived capitulation to Rome, but as Moles (1995, 186) points out, this is an uncomfortable moment for the supposed Prusan audience, to whom Dio has repeatedly emphasized the benefits of their friendship with Rome, as we saw above. If indeed Moles is right that the point of Dio’s comment is to insist that the essence of Greek identity must not be compromised, then this self-conscious juxtaposition of identity models surely also questions how secure this essence can ever be perceived to be. Rather than simply aligning himself within a binary opposition of Greek and Roman, therefore, Dio instead explores the fluidity and complexity of such identity negotiations, and actively interrogates their significance within the imperial world.
MYTH AND LITERATURE
Much of Dio’s corpus, however, seems disconnected from the kind of direct engagement with political and cultural concerns outlined above. This is particularly visible in the orations covering mythic and literary topics, which perhaps originated as short introductory speeches (prolaliae), as their seemingly superficial discussions of mythic narratives leave them most at risk of being dismissed as mere sophistic flippancy. Recent scholarship, such as Saïd (2000) and Gangloff (2006), however, has demonstrated the complexity and originality of Dio’s engagement with mythic topics, and it is clear that they cannot so easily be isolated from their broader cultural context. Indeed, when viewed through the lens of Dio’s rhetorical role playing, such speeches epitomize the value of the kind of reading advocated in this chapter, as they demonstrate how Dio’s inconsistencies and seeming indirectness can be used productively to situate Dio within the Second Sophistic and to reveal his own self-consciousness about his relationship with its key themes and concerns.
As discussed above, the Borysthenites’ Homeric self-identification in the Borystheniticus demonstrates the role of Homer in defining and negotiating Greek identities in the Second Sophistic, while the contrast this makes with their foreign setting challenges the limits of such self-positioning. These challenges, however, are deepened further by the “myth of the Magi,” which concludes the speech. After discussing the ideal city (Or. 36.18–23), the elderly Borysthenite Hieroson interrupts Dio and requests that he now describe the order of the heavens, which Dio agrees to do. Following some initial cosmological remarks (29–38), Dio introduces the myth itself, which he claims is a story told in the secret rites of the Magi (39) describing the four horses of Zeus’s chariot and their role in maintaining the order or disorder of the universe (39–60). Although this myth was “once taken all too eagerly as genuine ‘Zoroastrian’ or ‘Mithraic’ lore, [it] is now better understood as a deliberately colourful product of Greek thought” (Swain 1996, 198, with further references). Indeed, not only does the pseudo-Eastern myth share a number of fundamental similarities with Plato’s Phaedrus, as Michael Trapp (1990, 148–150) has shown, but this juxtaposition is self-consciously highlighted in the framing of the myth. When he interrupts Dio, Hieroson describes himself as a lover of Plato, despite the irony of barbarians admiring the most Greek of writers (26), and asks Dio to discuss cosmology in Platonic style, which Dio disingenuously refuses to do (28–29). Moreover, at the end of the myth, Dio repeatedly apologizes for the derivative quality of the myth and slyly shifts the blame for this onto the Borysthenites as the instigators of Dio’s speech (61). By superficially defamiliarizing this Platonic core with a foreign framework, as Trapp (2000, 214–219) discusses more thoroughly, Dio draws the audience’s attention to the continually blurred boundaries between the two and destabilizes their perceptions of such Greek identification. In other words, just as the Borysthenites’ earlier Homeric identifications interrogated any simplistic opposition of “Greek” and “barbarian,” this juxtaposition of Platonic and pseudo-Zoroastrian models deepens this challenge further, questioning the limits of Greek imperial identity.
In addition to Plato, Homer is a constant presence in Dio’s corpus, with Homeric epics appearing at times within philosophical and political paradigms (e.g., Orr. 2, 56, 57), at others as models for reinterpretation. For example, the Chryseis (Or. 61), which claims to uncover the nature of this marginal character from Iliad 1, ends by asking provocatively: “do you want to hear how it happened, or how it should have happened?” (18), demonstrating detailed knowledge of Homer while simultaneously threatening to supplant him (Kim 2008; Saïd 2000, 174–175). Nowhere, however, is Dio’s challenging of Homeric authority clearer than in Oration 11, the Troicus or Trojan Oration. In this speech, Dio takes the polemical position that not only was Troy never captured by the Greeks, but that Homer definitely knew the true story and deliberately concealed it, instead choosing to fabricate an implausible lie. Dio’s argument follows in a long tradition of Homeric supplements and corrections, a tradition which appears to have become especially potent in the imperial period, to judge from the presence of pseudodocumentary “true” stories of the Trojan War such as Dares Phrygius and Dictys of Crete (Ní Mheallaigh 2008). In particular, his assertion that Menelaus’s eyewitness account of the “true” story was recorded by Egyptian priests (38, 135) recalls Herodotus’s use of the same source for his own revisionist version of the Trojan War (2.118–119), later adapted by Plato in his Timaeus (21e–22b), as Saïd (2000, 176–177) and Hunter (2009,
48–51) demonstrate. Dio’s statement that he will refute Homer using his own poetry (Or. 11.11) has often been considered a reference to the Homeric interpreter Aristarchus, suggesting Dio’s awareness of and engagement with the traditions of Homeric criticism (Kim 2010, 85; Saïd 2000, 181). Dio’s arguments, however, work from rhetorical standards of plausibility (τόεἰκός), as Ritoók (1995) and Hunter (2009, 51–57) show, leading him to dismiss the story that Helen fell in love at first sight and immediately left her husband, on the grounds of being unlikely (Or. 11.54–55). Such arguments are strikingly inappropriate, since they apply standards of truth and falsehood from oratorical training to epic poetry, but this juxtaposition draws attention to these differences and questions the vested interest the audience has in Homer’s value as a literary or historical source, and thus his significance for Greek imperial culture.
The Oxford Handbook of the Second Sophistic Page 36