Fleury, P. 2011. “L’orateur oracle: Une image sophistique.” In Regards sur la Seconde Sophistique et son époque: Actes de colloque, edited by T. Schmidt and P. Fleury, 65–75. Phoenix Supplementary Series. Toronto.
Fleury, P. 2012. “Letters of Marcus Aurelius.” In The Blackwell Companion to Marcus Aurelius, edited by M. van Ackeren, 62–76. Oxford and Malden, MA.
Garcea, A., and V. Lomanto. 2004. “Gellius and Fronto on Loanwords and Literary Models: Their Evaluation of Laberius.” In The Worlds of Aulus Gellius, edited by L. Holford-Strevens and A. Vardi, 41–64. Oxford.
Graverini, L., and W. Keulen. 2009. “Roman Fiction and Its Audience: Seriocomic Assertions of Authority.” In Readers and Writers in the Ancient Novel, edited by M. Paschalis, S. Panayotakis, and G. Schmeling, 197–217. Ancient Narrative Supplement 12. Gröningen.
Haines, C., ed. and trans. 1919–1920. Correspondence. 2 vols. Cambridge.
Harrison, S. J. 2000. Apuleius: A Latin Sophist. Oxford.
Holford-Strevens, L. 2003. Aulus Gellius: An Antonine Scholar and His Achievement. Rev. ed. Oxford.
Johnson, W. A. 2012. Readers and Reading Culture in the High Roman Empire: A Study of Elite Communities. Oxford and New York.
Kemezis, A. 2010. “Lucian, Fronto, and the Absence of Contemporary Historiography under the Antonines.” AJPhil. 131: 285–325.
Keulen, W. 2009. Gellius the Satirist: Roman Cultural Authority in “Attic Nights”. Mnemosyne Supplement 297. Leiden and Boston.
Lana, I. 1966. “Simplicitas, philostorghia e curiositas nella letteratura latina delle II sec. d. C.” Cultura e Scuola 18: 90–97.
L’Huillier, M.-C. 2002. “Fronton et ses amis: L’orateur dans la cité.” In Antiquité et citoyenneté, edited by S. Ratti, 293–306. Besançon.
Martin, J.-P. 2003. “Fronton magister imperatorum.” In Vrbs aeterna: Actas y colaboraciones del coloquio internacional “Roma entre la literatura y la historia”: Homenaje a la profesora Carmen Castillo, edited by A. del Real, 65–81. Pampelune.
Marache, R. 1952. La critique littéraire de langue latine. Rennes.
Mathieu, N. 1994. “Les Aufidii de Pisaurum et la mémoire de Cornelius Fronto.” In Mélanges R. Chevallier, edited by C. M. Ternes, 1:301–312. Luxembourg.
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CHAPTER 17
AELIUS ARISTIDES
ESTELLE OUDOT
PRESENTING Aelius Aristides in a work on the Second Sophistic means presenting a sophist who vigorously rejected the term, and who called himself a rhêtôr.1 But despite himself, a sophist is what he was, if only with regard to his declamations (meletai), this being the first of the formal criteria by which Philostratus, in his Lives of the Sophists 1. 481,2 differentiated the Second (deutera) Sophistic from the original movement. He also delivered orations in political forums and ceremonies, gave lectures, took part in meetings and made informal presentations (laliai). In many ways, he corresponded to the typical portrait that was multiplied by the fifty or so personalities in Philostratus’s Lives. But in his rejection of this denomination, he was asserting a singularity that could not be reduced to a manifestation of overweening pride. We clearly perceive the tension that traverses a personality who was both emblematic of a cultural, literary, and social phenomenon, and idiosyncratic—a man who lived in symbiosis with a God, was wary of certain rhetorical practices, refused to take on the civic responsibilities that would normally have been incumbent on a person of his milieu, often preferring reclusion to society, and yet was occupied with promoting language and rhetoric among his contemporaries, and defined himself as the incarnation of the ideal orator in his century.
AN EMBLEMATIC FIGURE OF THE SECOND SOPHISTIC
If one follows, in a summary way, the defining criteria of the Second Sophistic—a period, a privileged geographical area and the manifestation of paideia—Aristides was objectively a writer-orator who typified this social and cultural movement.
Historically, Aristides’s life coincided with the Pax Romana and the Antonine era, which favored the travels and activities of orators and their cultivated audience. The activities of Greek-speaking intellectuals won the favor of philhellene emperors such as Hadrian and Marcus Aurelius. Aristides would profit much from living in an age of such stability and prosperity. He was born in 117 AD, the year in which Hadrian came to power, and he lived until at least 180.3 His adult life coincided with the reign of Antoninus Pius, and in particular Marcus Aurelius, who, apart from being an emperor, was a scholar and philosopher who chose to write in Greek. Aristides and Marcus Aurelius shared two teachers, Herodes Atticus and Alexander of Cotiaeum, and they had an epistolary relationship. The major part of Aristides’s life was also spent in the cradle of the Second Sophistic. He was a native of Hadrianoutherai, in Mysia, a city recently founded by Hadrian. But he had close ties with Smyrna, “the hearth of the continent” (Or. 17.13)4 in terms of education and culture, of which he became an eminent citizen, and which he praised in high-flown terms (Or. 17 and Or. 18–20).5 He also had ties with Pergamum, which was a center of culture and religious debate,6 and where he made visits to the sanctuary of Asclepius over many years. Finally, his education and activities spanned the pedagogical and professional gamut of the Second Sophistic. He came from a wealthy family, and was a Roman citizen (on the base of a statue there are the tria nomina, �
�όπλιοςΑἴλιος Ἀριστείδης, along with the epithet Θεώδορος).7 He received a thorough rhetorical and literary education. In Smyrna he studied with Alexander of Cotiaeum,8 and he attended lectures by Polemon of Laodicea. In Pergamum, he frequented Aristocles, and in Athens, Herodes Atticus. Through his studies, he acquired an uncommon knowledge of the classical authors: Plato; the poets Homer, Simonides, and Pindar; the historians; and the orators Isocrates and Demosthenes. He acquired a precise knowledge of Greek history, and was a distinguished practitioner of the Attic dialect.9 At an early age, his mentors assured him that he could look forward to a literary career of the first rank (prôteuein, Or. 33.17). In order to complete his studies, and to develop his activity as an orator and teacher, he undertook a number of journeys. In 141, he set out for Egypt, where he spent two years. He honed his talent in the places he visited: Cos, Knidos, Rhodes, and Alexandria. He also began teaching, notably in Cyzicus, and subsequently visited Rome, Athens, and other cities, where he made speeches. He argued in favor of concord, so as to limit the rivalries between Smyrna, Ephesus, and Pergamum for the attribution of honors, and advocated the resolution of internal strife, notably in Rhodes (Or. 23 and Or. 24). He attended ceremonies during which he delivered, among others, the Panathenaikos, hymns in honor of divinities, a discourse on Apellas’s birthday (Or. 30), and funeral orations for his student Eteoneus and his master Alexander (Or. 31 and Or. 32).10 In this way he built up a considerable body of work. Some of his orations were given in public, some were meant only to be read. But all, it would seem, were intended for publication; which no doubt required one or more rewritings.11
Though being without question a cultured individual (pepaideumenos), with links to the domains of knowledge and power, practicing epideictic and deliberative eloquence as a counselor, declaimer, and formal speaker, Aristides was also, as Philostratus said, an idiosyncratic member of his intellectual milieu.
Throughout his career he was stricken with bouts of illness,12 though in fact his physical and mental states were the mainspring of his creativity. During his first visit to Rome (between late 143 and some time in 144), which he hoped would bring him professional success, he became seriously indisposed (Or. 48.60–70). And from then on he oscillated between periods of good health, during which he traveled around Asia Minor, delivering orations and lectures, and periods of treatment, often at the Asclepieion, for pathologies both acute and chronic.
The unexpected benefits produced by Aristides’s physical condition were a result of the personal relationship he established with the god Asclepius, in whom he found not just a doctor capable of assuaging his maladies (Or. 48.5–7; 50.32–37), but also a mentor in rhetoric. He quotes Pardalas, “the greatest expert of the Greeks of our time in the science of oratory,” as saying that “he believed that I had become ill through some divine good fortune, so that by my association with the god, I might make this improvement” (Or. 50.27).
From then on, Aristides regarded his activity as a divine mission. And with oratory having received the divine seal of approval, he saw it as the discipline that dominated, ordered, and educated the world.13
Another of Aristides’s distinguishing features was his ambiguous relationship with fame and power. Though he claimed to value only the judgment of his peers (Or. 34.38–47), he clearly courted the approval of both the public and the Roman authorities. He ended a hymn to Athena, for example, with the hope that he would win “honor from both our emperors,” and also be “best in wisdom and oratory” (Or. 37.29).14
Acclaim was not lacking, indeed. Aristides spoke of it himself, both in passing (Or. 42.14) and in detail,15 painting a self-portrait of a rhetor lauded for his eloquence and the masterful nature of his performances. This image, though suspect in its complacency, was in fact corroborated by the award of several honors (Or. 51.56),16 besides his personal relationships with emperors. The oration he delivered before Marcus Aurelius and Commodus in Smyrna in 176 won him their official recognition, and this encouraged him to write to them, on his own initiative, a letter that has remained famous, asking for their help in the reconstruction of the city after its destruction by an earthquake in 178.17 But he had to put up some stern resistance in order to avoid taking on the civic functions that would normally have been accepted by a person in his position: eirenarch in Adriani, prytan in Smyrna, tax collector, priest of Asclepius. This suggests that, although he had a number of students, including Eteoneus in Cyzicus, Damian of Ephesus, and Apellas, he did not hold a teaching position (see Or. 50.87) of the kind that would automatically have exempted him from such “liturgies.”18
Another of Aristides’s distinguishing traits was his avoidance of what Philostratus considered to be the touchstone of oratorical prowess, namely improvisation on a theme suggested by a member of the audience. But in Philostratus’s view, which he set out at some length, this was a deliberate choice, not a weakness. During the aforementioned imperial visit to Smyrna, Aristides postponed his address to the emperors for a day because, as he stated, he was “one of those who do not vomit their speeches but polish them.”19 And when he gave his address, he did so with “an admirable impetuosity of speech.”20 That being said, Philostratus was persuaded that in private he worked assiduously on his improvising skills.21 At any rate, in order to absolve Aristides for what, in the end, he evidently could not but see as a shortcoming, Philostratus depicted him as an orator of great erudition (eupaideusia)22 who was also the most skilled (technikos) of the sophists, and who worked to eliminate excess and triviality (kouphologia). In his text on Aristides, Philostratus plays up the value of technical and formal talent, while playing down the kind of bravura display that is commented on approvingly elsewhere in the Lives of the Sophists.
And in fact Aristides’s broad-ranging work included metadiscursive reflection and comments on rhetoric itself. While remaining to some extent within the framework of classical oratory, he adapted its forms to his own purposes, and reflected on its object, the logos.
His is the largest extant body of work by an orator of the Second Sophistic, comprising fifty complete orations, two that are incomplete (Or. 52, the sixth Sacred Tale, and Or. 53, A Panegyric on the Water in Pergamum) and one that is considered apocryphal23 (Or. 35, Regarding the Emperor).24
A BRIDGE BETWEEN THE TWO SOPHISTICS
Aristides was among those who bore out Philostratus’s view that the Sophistic of the Roman era was indeed “second” (deutera), rather than “new” (nea). And in formal terms, the classical Greek heritage was apparent in many of his orations, with their pure Atticism and their exemplification of rhetorical genres. But in a world where political messages were no longer delivered at the same times or places as before, he favored epideictic rhetoric. A prime example of this is the Panathenaikos, a long eulogy to Athens with a title that echoes an oration by Isocrates, to whose Panegyricus it also looks for inspiration, while part of its topos and its periodization of history come from classical funeral orations.25 Other works, such as the orations on Pergamum, Ephesus, Smyrna (Or. 23), and Rhodes (Or. 24), fall into the category of deliberative rhetoric. Nor is the forensic mode absent, given that the “Platonic discourses” (Or. 2–4) present themselves as defenses of oratory.
But Aristides goes further still in his work on literature. He reproduces the traits of the classical age by donning the personas of ancient orators. On one occasion, for example, “I immediately accepted the omen of Demosthenes speaking again” (Or. 50.18).26 He gives a voice to real or imagined orators, translocating the enunciative situation to the classical era in such a way as to enter into the Peloponnesian war in medias res,27 or to grapple with the complexity of relations between Greek cities during the fourth century BC.28 Beyond the appearance of an academic exercise, this is a novel form of mimesis. But it also involves a genuinely creative process that modern critics have tended to overlook.
RHETORIC AND LITERARY INNOVATION
This creative process resulted from conscious work
on the part of Aristides. He reworked and modified the precepts and topoi laid down by the theoreticians. His eulogy of Rome, for example, is totally silent about the history of the city and the empire. The hymns to the gods claim the right to use prose, not poetry. The Sacred Tales represent a personalization of the hieros logos. These are among the indications that Aristides was acutely conscious of genres, and that he wanted to work on rhetoric with a view to literary innovation. Such an approach to rhetoric was infused with the importance he ascribed to the function, and the power, of the logos in the human world, and the vocation of the orator. His work derives its underlying coherence from the logos, and it can only benefit from being read in that light. What was unusual was not so much his vision (one may recall Isocrates’s eulogy of the gift of speech) as the strength of his identification with it. “For me, oratory means everything, signifies everything. For I have made it children, parents. . . . This is my play, this is my work. In this I rejoice, this I admire, its doors I haunt” (Or. 33.20).
ORATORY AS A MISSION, AND THE SACRED TALES AS ITS MANIFESTO
According to Aristides, it was at an early age that he formed the conviction of having been chosen by Asclepius, and of being given unique protection by the god. This resulted in an experience that was both intellectual and therapeutic; which is what he relates in the Sacred Tales, whose themes are clinical and medical (with a combination of psychological and affective components), and also rhetorical, building up, little by little, a picture of an orator mandated by a god to assume the mantle of his art.
The Sacred Tales have no parallel in ancient literature. They take the form of a narration29 that evokes the visions and dreams in which Asclepius regularly appeared to Aristides over a total of almost twenty years (143–155, then 165–171). Only a god could cure his maladies (Or. 47.57): acute conditions such as septicemia and tumors, or chronic respiratory and digestive problems.30 And the different remedies he describes—some conventional, others of the nature of paradoxical therapy—did make a significant contribution to the medical lore of the time.
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