The Oxford Handbook of the Second Sophistic
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the name of the Hellenes seems to belong no longer to an ethnic group [genos] but to a way of thinking; they ought rather to be called Hellenes who have a share of our culture [paideia] than those who share in some common nature [phusis]. (Isoc. Paneg. 50)
But Isocrates elaborated a notion of cultural Greekness for a community of ethnic Greeks (Hall 2002, 209–210; Jüthner 1923, 34–36; cf. Saïd 2001); the Panegyricus’s fourth-century BCE ecumenical vision of paideia was not intended for literal consumption east of the Hellespont. For Isocrates, whose avowed purpose in the Panegyricus was “war against the barbarian and concord amongst ourselves” (Paneg. 3), they ought to be called Greeks who were Greek in terms of both ethnicity and (Athenian) paideia. Lucian, by contrast, sought to theorize Greekness in a way that explicitly celebrated the cultural legitimacy of the type of the Hellenized barbaros. In doing so, Lucian was not alone; such contemporaries and near contemporaries as Favorinus of Arelate (Or. 37.27), Apuleius of Madaura (Apologia 24), and even Marcus Aurelius’s teacher Fronto (Ep. Gr. 1.5) also explored the dialectic of ethnicity and culture in their own work (Richter 2011a, 135–176). Lucian, however, figured barbarism as an integral aspect of his own literary project.
Of central importance to Lucian is the legendary figure of Anacharsis, the Scythian sage who, according to Herodotus (4.76), so memorably demonstrated the truth of the dictum that the Scythians abhor the usage of foreign nomoi (in general, see Hartog 1988; Kindstrand 1981). The Herodotean Anacharsis, like his countryman Scyles, meets a gruesome death as a result of his transgressive practice of Greek religious rites. In the prolalia the Scythian, however, Lucian’s Anacharsis represents the ideal type of the Hellenized barbarian who successfully travels to Greece to satisfy a wholly legitimate “desire for Greek paideia” (Scythian 1).6 In this text, Anacharsis, a “foreigner and a barbarian” (xenos kai barbaros), arrives in Athens to find his fellow Scythian Toxaris (“Bowman”) already long resident in the city and so thoroughly Hellenized that his Scythianness is completely illegible, even to Anacharsis:
Anacharsis could in no way recognize [Toxaris] as a fellow-ethnic [homoethnês] for Toxaris was dressed in the Greek manner, clean shaven, without a belt, without a sword, already fluent in speech, one of those very Attic autochthonoi, so much had he been changed by time. (Scythian 3)
Toxaris introduces Anacharsis to Solon—a man who “contains all of Hellas in his own person” (5)7—and Solon in turn acquaints Anacharsis with all that is best in Hellas, effecting such a complete transformation of Anacharsis that he becomes a “true-born citizen [politês gnêsios] of Hellas” who forgets “all that he left behind in Scythia” (7). The text of the Scythian ends with a direct appeal on the speaker’s part for patronage; as Anacharsis received the cultural largesse of Solon, so the speaker of the Scythian hopes to benefit from that of a local wealthy Macedonian father and son. The speaker makes the parallel between himself and the Scythian sage explicit: “for he too was a barbarian and there is no way that you could say that we Syrians are inferior to the Scythians” (9). The transmission of Greekness in this text is complex and somewhat ambiguous. In the first place, Anacharsis, a tragic and infamously unsuccessful convert to Greek culture, seems like an odd choice with which to figure the Hellenization of a self-professed barbarian. But this is, perhaps, precisely the point. The fates of Herodotus’s Anacharsis and his countryman Scyles serve to demonstrate the truth of the dictum that, “the Scythians abhor the use of nomoi that are not their own, particularly those of the Greeks.” Lucian’s Anacharsis, however, presents the type of the latter-day Second Sophistic barbarian whose Hellenism is the direct result of his perfect and hard-won mimesis of Greekness through the acquisition of Greek paideia. He is the self-conscious embodiment of what Whitmarsh has called “new style Hellenism” (Whitmarsh 2001, 25).
For Lucian, however, this process of cultural mimesis in which the barbarian becomes a Hellene is fraught with danger, and Lucian explores the nature of “good” mimesis in several texts that feature various Syrians on trial for offences related to their cultural claims on Greekness (Bhabha 1994). We have already encountered the Syrian Parrhêsiadês in the Dead Come to Life. A similar figure appears in Lucian’s Twice Accused, a dialogue in which another author must stand trial—this time before the court of Justice herself—for his outrageous treatment of the genres of dialogue and oratory, the personifications of which have come to accuse the Syrian of neglect and hubris respectively. In the Twice Accused, however, the accused remains anonymous; the defendant is entered by Hermes “without a name” as “the Syrian” (14) and when Oratory describes how the Syrian has mistreated her, she foregrounds the Syrianness of the defendant in terms that cunningly conflate literary and ethno-cultural transgression:
When this man here was just a boy, gentleman of the jury, still a barbarian with respect to his speech and, I have to say it, still wearing a caftan in the Assyrian manner, I found him wandering around Ionia having no idea what he ought to do with himself. And I took him in hand and I gave him paideia. (Twice Accused 27)
What is more, Oratory continues, she enrolled the Syrian into her own tribe and made him a local (astos); the Syrian, however, once he became famous and successful, abandoned his patroness for Dialogue, the son of philosophy. The response of the Syrian, as so often with Lucian, consists of a brilliant deconstruction of a well-known model. The Syrian argues that Oratory herself is not the respectable matron whom Demosthenes had once married but a wanton woman who makes herself up in the manner of a prostitute (eis to hetairikon) and gives herself freely to all drunken lovers (methuontôn erastôn) who nightly knock on the door. In other words, the Syrian suggests that there are, in words that clearly recall the famous prologue of Dionysius of Halicarnassus’s Lives of the Ancient Orators, two rhetorics: Dionysius wrote that while once the ancient and respectable Attic Muse held sway, in his own day “some other [hetera tis] rhetoric” has taken her place. Dionysius likens the old rhetoric to the “lawful wife;” the new rhetoric, by contrast, is like “some whore” (hetaira tis) arrived from the death holes of Asia (Lives, preface). Again, Lucian subverts the logic of the model: while Dionysius’s metaphor describes two distinct rhetorics—the illegitimate Asian whore and the lawful Attic wife, Lucian’s Syrian speaks of a single rhetoric whose virtue has been degraded over time. There is a close parallel here with the structure of the Dead Come to Life—in both texts, the Syrian distinguishes between the purity of the ancient models and the degeneracy of their imitators of Lucian’s own day. And in both texts, it is incumbent upon the Syrian—the outsider—to expose and correct the “bad” mimesis of the “insiders” of his own day. The ethnic logic of Dionysius’s preface has been reversed: in Lucian’s rewriting of the metaphor, the “Asiatic” has come to correct the errant would-be Attic muse.
A definition of the nature of the proper mimesis of the ancients is clearly central to Lucian’s authorial project, as well as his exploration of the cultural politics of the Second Sophistic.8 What is interesting is that Lucian constructs modern literary mimesis of the ancients as an analog for the barbarian pepaideumenos’s cultural mimesis of Hellenism. Indeed, it is precisely the independence of the outsider, in Lucian’s terms, that enables the success of the literary project of good mimesis. And this is why Lucian so often casts the “Syrians” of the dialogues as generically transgressive while at the same time culturally and linguistically competent. For Lucian, good literary mimesis balances the competing claims of tradition and innovation in the same way that good cultural mimesis acknowledges both ethnicity and culture—and a good way to make this claim is to remind readers of the Syrianness of his authors in those works in which he defines the innovative nature of his literary project. For instance, at the end of the Twice Accused, the Syrian responds to Dialogue’s accusation that the Syrian’s invention of the comic dialogue has demeaned his philosophical dignity by pointing out that,
I don’t think that he could censure me to the effect that I have t
aken off his Greek cloak and dressed him in some barbarian one, even though I myself seem to be a barbarian. (33)
The Syrian, it seems, has retained the Hellenizing kit in which rhetoric first found him. But as in the Dead Come to Life, it is precisely at the point of the text in which the speaker defends his own literary project that he foregrounds his Syrianness. Compare the diatribe Against the Ignorant Book Collector, a text in which Lucian again presents his readers Syrian on Syrian cultural invective (cf. The Mistaken Critic): the Gatsby-esque wealthy target of the text who collects rare and costly editions of ancient texts in an effort to seem educated; and the speaking/writing author of the text which is itself an object lesson of a Syrian author’s ability to produce a written display of his perfect Attic Greek. By presenting both the author and the object of this invective as Syrians, Lucian is able to juxtapose for his readers two very different models of the type of the Hellenized barbarian. While the speaker is witty, urbane, and possessed of flawless linguistic competency, the book collector stumbles humiliatingly as he reads Greek texts aloud while lack of paideia has rendered him bereft of proper literary judgment (diagnôsis). While the allusive text itself demonstrates the speaker’s familiarity with the writings of the ancients, the book collector cannot discern which ancient authors wrote, “according to a proper standard” (pros ton orthon kanona) (2). The speaker boasts of his high social position and his secure status among the pepaideumenoi; the book collector cannot produce the name of a single teacher of his own.9 These differences between the two Syrians are the result of their very different understandings of the nature of cultural mimesis. For the speaker, cultural mimesis is, strictly speaking, an illegitimate project. One should not strive to imitate—to seem to be a Hellene—but rather to internalize cultural praxis to the point that one is a Hellene. Ultimately, the superior, authentic cultural transformation of the speaking Syrian enables him to produce culture (the text) rather than simply consume it. This concern with authentic Hellenism and its opposite, as we shall see, inform Lucian’s construction and definition of his own literary project, and it is to these texts that we now turn.
GREEKS AND BARBARIANS: THE LITERARY PROJECT
In 1906, Rudolf Helm published Lukian und Menipp, in which he argued that Lucian’s various claims to generic originality—in particular, his claim to have invented the comic dialogue—were intended to mask his almost complete debt to the third-century BCE Cynic philosopher and satirist Menippus of Gadara. Menippus’s satires, in which he combined prose and verse, were widely read and highly influential in antiquity (e.g., Varro’s Saturae Menippeae) and Lucian is sure to have known the work of his fellow Hellenized Syrian; Helm, however, certainly overstated the nature of this influence on Lucian and there is no reason to doubt Lucian’s claim to have invented the form of the comic dialogue.10 But Lucian consistently couches his claims to originality in terms that insist upon his faithfulness to proper ancient models. Indeed, as we have seen, this concern with proper mimesis of ancient models informs much of Lucian’s work. That said, the texts in which Lucian explicitly addresses the nature of his literary project offer his clearest formulations of his ideas about the nature of mimesis.
Again, the question is why Lucian consistently foregrounds Syrianness in texts that explore the nature of the literary project? We have already seen how in the Twice Accused the “Syrian” defends his creation of the hybrid comic dialogue by pointing out that although he himself is “considered to be a barbarian,” he has nevertheless clothed his texts in a “Hellenic” rather than a “barbarian” cloak. To have stripped dialogue of his “native costume,” the Syrian tells the jury, would have been unjust. Similarly, in the Dead Come to Life, the Syrian “barbarian” Parrhêsiadês reminds Philosophy that his barbarism is meaningless since his mind is “straight and just.” Again, in the Scythian, the speaker compares his own barbarism to that of Anacharsis in his bid for literary patronage. Nor is it without importance that the speakers of two of Lucian’s literary invectives (Against the Ignorant Book Collector and Slip of the Tongue) are self-described Syrians. It seems clear, then, that Lucian invites his readers to understand the nature of his literary project as in some sense the product of his Syrianness. I suggest that we might understand what Lucian is up to here in terms of a functional analogy: as barbarian is to Greek, so the present is to the past. In other words, as Lucian’s literary project seeks balance between innovation and proper mimesis of ancient models, the Greekness of his Syrian authors depends upon the establishment of a proper combination of outsider ethnic status and insider cultural fluency. Success—authenticity—in both endeavors is a function of a complete internalization of the essence of the model; only then does the Syrian cease simply to seem but to be Greek; just so, although Lucian’s texts might look odd, in their “thought” they are entirely traditional—pros ton orthon kanona, as the Syrian says in The Ignorant Book Collector.
Consider You Are a Prometheus in Words, Lucian’s response to a man who has called him a “Prometheus.” Lucian is at pains in this text to qualify the label of “innovator;” he would deflect the notion that his writing has no model: to the man who praises his “new manufacture [kainourgon] that imitates no exemplum [archetupon],” Lucian responds that it is not enough for him “to seem to be an innovator, unless someone should also say that there is something more ancient [arxaioteron ti] than my creation which is its ancestor [apogonon]” (3). The new, Lucian points out, always runs the risk of monstrosity—like the black camel and the half-black/half-white man that Ptolemy presented in Alexandria to the horror of the citizenry. “Newness” is nothing without “proper proportion” (euruthmon) and “beauty of form” (eumorphon) (5), and it is according to these ancient principles that Lucian claims to have created a harmony out of the forms of comedy and dialogue. Another prolalia, the Zeuxis, makes much the same point in even more explicit terms: Lucian is annoyed by the audience who praises only, “the strange conception of his work and its great newness,” while refusing to acknowledge,
its excellent vocabulary in accordance with ancient standards [ὀνομάτωνδὲ ἄρακαλῶν ἐναὐτοῖςκαὶ πρὸςτὸν ἀρχαῖονκανόνασυγκειμένων], or its penetrating thought, perceptivity, Attic grace, harmony, or the skillfulness of the whole. (2)
Lucian’s Dream, perhaps his most widely read work, is a rather complicated meditation on a young man’s acquisition of paideia. The text, which has long occupied pride of place in “biographies” of Lucian seems to be a prolalia. The question of whether the text is truly autobiographical, as most have assumed, I leave to the side. What is more interesting is the way in which Lucian again interweaves autobiography (fictive or sincere) with the characterization of his literary project. As in the Teacher of Public Speaking, the Dream describes a young man’s moment of choice but here, the youth (prosêbos) chooses not between two roads to Rhetoric but decides rather to abandon the trade that his family has chosen for him (sculpture) and to follow paideia (Romm 1990). The speaker’s family had initially rejected training in letters for him on the grounds of straightened circumstances:
Paideia seemed to most of them to require much effort [ponos], a lot of time, not a small amount of money, and high social rank, while our affairs were small and required quick support. (1)
The family resolves to apprentice the young man to his uncle, a sculptor, since he has shown an aptitude for the work; at school, he tells us, he would collect the wax from his writing tablet and mold it into shapes of animals and even images of human beings that were “indeed lifelike” (2). The boy enters his uncle’s shop, accidentally smashes a valuable piece of marble, is soundly beaten by his uncle, and runs home, where he falls asleep and has the “dream.” In this dream, like the adept in the Teacher of Public Speaking, the youth of the Dream faces an explicitly Prodicean choice presented to him by two female personifications of trades; but here the youth must choose to follow either sculpture or paideia rather than decide between
the rough or the easy roads to rhetoric.
In the Professor of Public Speaking, for instance, Lucian takes aim at those teachers of rhetoric and their students who would gain a reputation for stylistic and lexical excellence without the necessary study and emulation of the ancients. The satire takes the form of a teacher’s address to a young student who would become a sophist; what is interesting about this text is the way that Lucian essentially equates sham sophistry with bad mimesis. This text is, of course, entirely satirical and the reader is invited to mock all the advice that this sham teacher offers. The teacher, in other words, is the personification of bad mimesis—an illegitimate and perverted approach to classical models. The teacher begins, “You ask, my boy, how you might become a rhetor and how you might come to be seen as a sophist—that most august and universally admired title” (1). The teacher holds that there are two roads that lead to Rhetoric and the wealth, fame, and power that she offers her “lovers.” The rough road, as we might expect from the Prodicean model, is the path of good mimesis; here the student will find a “manly muscular man” (anêr huposklêros andrôdês) who will point out the footprints of men such as Plato and Demosthenes, “great ones indeed and even greater than the men of today [huper tous nun] but already dim and unclear through the passage of time” (9). This man, the teacher warns, will insist upon long hard work and study that will involve the “mimesis of ancient corpses” (10).