The Oxford Handbook of the Second Sophistic

by Daniel S. Richter

  On Kingship

  They say that when the aulós-player Timotheus gave his first recital before Alexander the king, he showed great skill and musicality in adapting his aulós playing to the king’s character (trópos), selecting a composition (aulēma) that was neither effeminate (malakós) nor slow nor of the kind that would induce listlessness or relaxation, but rather, I should think, that thrilling strain that bears the name Athena. And, they say as well that Alexander leaped immediately for his arms like one possessed (éntheos), so roused was he by the tones (mélos) of the music and the rhythm of the aulós. The cause of this was not so much the power of the music as the thought (diánoia) of the king, which was high-strung and passionate. For Sardanapalus would never have been roused from his chamber nor from the company of his women by Timotheus or any other of the later players—not even by Marsyas himself or by Olympus. It seems that even if Athena herself—were such a thing possible—had performed her own strain, Sardanapalus would never have laid hand to arms, but would much more likely have gotten up and danced, or shrunk back entirely. To such a wretched state had power and overindulgence reduced him.12

  Dio constructs the opening of his oration as a mise en abyme: Timotheus the aulētēs, playing before Alexander, serves as a double for Dio the rhētōr performing before Trajan. Under the aegis of Athena, moreover, the tutelary deity of Athens, Dio commences with a rhetorical maneuver that stands out as quintessentially Greek, both at the level of form and at the level of content:13 on the one hand (μέν), the martial impulses of the restless Alexander, conqueror and Hellenizer of the East, and, on the other (δὲ), the wanton listlessness of the Assyrian king Sardanapalus, who serves here as a synecdoche for the effeminacy that Hellenes projected onto “barbarian” Asiatic rulers.14 Despite the anachronism of Dio’s comparison (Sardanapalus died roughly 300 years before the birth of Alexander), the súnkrisis—a well-worn Sophistical device15—serves here an exclusionary anthropological agenda which not only distinguishes Greeks from barbarians, but simultaneously hierarchizes the Hellenic over the Asiatic, one of the principal binary oppositions, predicated on the inside/outside operants of metaphor (le dedans et/est× le dehors),16 that structured classical Greek thought. Significantly, Dio’s claims for the superiority of the Hellenic over the Asiatic prove isomorphic with the purity of his Greek, which remains unsullied by foreign words, rare glōssai, or conceits drawn from postclassical Greek compositions.

  “No other ancient people,” Edith Hall observes of the Greeks in general, “privileged language to such an extent in defining its own ethnicity.”17 Corrado Bologna makes this point with more dialectical precision: “È ancora il linguaggio che separa il Greco e il Barbaro, prima di qualsiasi qualità e categoria.”18 The term pa-pa-ro already shows up in Linear B as an onomatopoetic reduplication that refers to “someone not from Pylos,” that is, a foreigner, cognate with Sanskrit barbara- (बर्बर “stammer”), which served in the post-Vedic period as a designation for non-Āryan peoples.19 Similarly in Greek, the adjective bárbaros, when employed as a substantive, came to refer to an alien, that is to a non-Greek speaker, while the noun barbarismós became a common term for a grammatical mistake. From the Mycenaean era on, then, through the Roman Empire, the ability to speak Greek divided the world—at least as far as Hellenes were concerned—into two broad categories of people.20 In Plato’s Politikós, the Xénos (“Foreigner”) points up the nominalism inherent in this classification, as well as the logical fallacy that underpins anthropological distinctions of this type:

  In undertaking to divide the human race into two parts, one should make the division in the way that most people in this country do: they separate the Hellenic race from all the rest as one, and to all the other races, which are countless in number and have no relation in blood or language to one another, they give the single name “barbarian.” Then because of this single name, they think it is a single species. (262c–d)

  Euripides’s Iphigenia had already articulated the hierarchy implicit in this popular, if spurious, division at Aulis: “It is right [eikós] for Greeks to rule barbarians, but not vice versa, for the latter is a slave [doûlon], while the former are free men [eleutheroí < IE *h1leudh-ero, “belonging to the tribe”; cf. OHG liut, “people”].”21 Citing this very passage of Euripides, moreover, Aristotle argued that barbarians are “slaves by nature” (phúsei),22 and further stresses in the Politics that “barbarians are more servile than Hellenes, and Asiatics than Europeans.”

  Despite this notional divide, classical Greek never constituted a unified or homogeneous field of expression. Rather, with the collapse of the Mycenaean world, and the civic isolation that ensued, Hellenes came to speak a wide variety of different dialects scattered throughout Ionia, the Helladic peninsula, the Aegean islands, and Magna Graecia, some mutually intelligible, others not.23 Thus, a Corinthian trader of the fifth century BCE may well have found a sentence in Cretan difficult to understand: ἄνπανσιν ἔμɛ̄ν ὄπο̄ κά τιλ λɛ̃ι (“Adoption may take place whence one will”) (GDI 4991 9.33–34).24 Elean posed other challenges: αἰ δὲ βενέοι ἐν τἰαροῖ, βοΐ κα θο̄άδοι καὶ κοθάρσι τελείαι(“If he commits fornication in the sacred precinct, one shall make him expiate it by the sacrifice of an ox and complete purification”) (GDI 1156). For Dio, however, only Attic, as written in the fifth and fourth centuries BCE, captured the essence of “Hellenicity” (τὸ Ἑλληνικόν),25 insofar as—in his as well as many other Romans’ minds—the language of Thucydides, Plato, and Demosthenes constituted the acme of both Greek diction and Greek thought. Aelius Aristides—who characterized Attic not only as “unadulterated, pure, and inoffensive,” but also as “a linguistic model for the whole of the Hellenic world”26—makes this point explicitly in his Panathēnaïkós:

  All the cities and all the races of mankind incline towards you [viz., Athens] and your form of life, and your speech [phōnē], for through you the whole inhabited world has come to share a single tongue. Lacedaemonians and all other Greeks would be ashamed to speak in their ancestral manner even among themselves in front of others. In fact, one might say that all other dialects—whether barbarian or Greek—were like mere childish lisping when compared with yours. Only this dialect is right for all national festivals, all assemblies and council chambers. It is adequate for all times and places and equally suitable for them all.27

  On this account, Dio, Aristides, and others of their fellow sophists not only strove for Attic purity in their orations: their writings concomitantly eschewed Imperial koinaí in ways that had both cultural and class implications.28 Thus, Dio’s Atticism—elevated to the classical norm—concomitantly served to reinforce the chauvinism implicit in his comparison of Alexander with Sardanapalus, insofar as it revived the Greek of those who had decisively repulsed the Īrānians at Marathon in the fifth century BCE, as well as the language of the League of Corinth,29 which supported the Macedonian conquest of the Haxāmanišiyan empire in the fourth. In Dio’s oration On Kingship, then, the signifier (Attic) dovetails neatly with the signified (“Alexander”), such that both constitute metonyms for the triumph of Hellenic over Asiatic culture.

  Accordingly, Dio’s oration does not so much voice classical Attic in an unmediated way. Rather, at all moments he speaks self-consciously, as if entre guillemets (in quotes), staging before Trajan what Mikhail Bakhtin refers to as the “representation of the image of a language” (predstavlenie obraza yazyke),30 in this case the simulacrum of an idiom that had disappeared four centuries before. In fact, similar attempts to represent the image of diverse languages and dialects had long informed significant portions of classical Greek literature.31 In Aristophanes, for example, Old Persian,32 as well as non-Attic dialects (e.g., Boeotian, Megarian, Laconian),33 became subjects of representation on the Athenian stage—a comic gag that Alexandrian writers, in turn, promoted to what Roman Jakobson termed the literary “dominant.”34 Thus, in the thirteenth of his Iamboi,
Callimachus explicitly calls attention to his practice of writing intermittently in “Ionic and Doric and a mixture of both,”35 when—ostensibly, at least—he had never set foot in Ionia: “Fair Muses and Apollo, to whom I make libation . . . not having mingled with the Ionians, . . . nor having come to Ephesus” (fr. 203.14 Pfeiffer). Although linguistically, metrically, and thematically, the Iamboi revive the conventions of old Ionic verse,36Callimachus makes no claims for the authenticity of his speech: the poet self-identifies as a stranger to the language that he uses.37 Similarly, Theocritus foregrounds the Doric dialect in which he writes by introducing into Idyll 15 a boor who, amid the crowds of Alexandria, complains at having to suffer two Syracusan women prattling away in Doric (ἐκκναισεῦντι πλατειάσδοισαι ἅπαντα).38 One of the women sassily responds: “We talk in the Peloponnesian manner (Πελοποννασιστὶ λαλεῦμες).39 Dorians are permitted, I suppose, to speak in Doric (δωρίσδεν)” (87–93). What Aristophanes, Callimachus, and Theocritus all stress, then, is the materiality of language, which they represent as anything but homogeneous or immediately transparent. Far from neutral or fossilized, moreover, these disparate images of archaic speech vied agonistically with one another in Alexandrian letters insofar as each inevitably conveyed a different viewpoint on the world.40 Old Ionic, for example, traduces its targets with considerably more perlocutionary punch—hence the emblematic suicide of Archilochus’s Neoboulē41—than does the more genial parody of Doric mime.42

  Theocritus also composed verses in Aeolic,43 which means that between them, the major Alexandrian writers represented in their work the dialects of all three of the main branches into which Hesiod and Herodotus divided the Hellenic peoples:44 Doric, Ionic, and Aeolic—a clear precedent for the Imperial sophists’ revival of classical Attic. Whatever their affinities, however, linguistic archaism at Alexandria and the Atticism of the Second Sophistic ultimately served opposing ends. The Alexandrians participated in a literary program whose aims were to interpellate Greek readers who had relocated to Alexandria from all parts of the Hellenic world—hence, Markus Asper views Ptolemaic poetry as the latest phase of the always as yet uncompleted project of Panhellenism.45 Nita Krevans, however, reminds us that whatever sense of inclusion Callimachus, Theocritus, or Apollonius of Rhodes may have fostered in their work, their apparent “Panhellenism” in fact always remained a “Polyhellenism”46—that is, not an attempt to amalgamate Greek residents in Alexandria, but rather an effort to keep historical origins (aítia) linguistically distinct, where any sense of inclusiveness came shot through with an awareness of the dislocation that attended immigration to Alexandria from “Greece.”47 As such, Krevans suggests, Ptolemaic poetry constituted a neurotic reflex that compensated for personal, historical, and geographic loss, and which concomitantly—in the various representations of Doric, Ionic, and Aeolic that it purveyed—allowed readers to “concretize” the fact of Hellenic difference.

  By contrast, the image of classical Attic that Dio and other orators of the Second Sophistic sought to portray as the only dialect “adequate for all times and places” constitutes a dialectical negation of Alexandrian poetic practice.48 In place of polyglossia (mnogojazycie), we find a largely homogenizing idiom that extols the glories of the past not in the mode of historical loss or geographical displacement but, as if these achievements were still present, in a sustained metalepsis that effectively writes Rome and the contemporary realities of Greek life under Roman rule out of the picture.49 Ultimately, then, the unexpressed subtext of Second Sophistic oratory always turns out to be Greek subjection to Roman rule.50 This, in turn, makes it possible to see that the works of Dio, Aelius Aristides, Longinus, and Lucian—the four authors of the period that Luciano Canfora singles out51—give expression to a different form of collective anxiety, in this case a compensation for the disempowerment of an always already phantasmatic “Greece,” whose agent of castration returns precisely at the site of the repressed.52 Thus, when Dio pits Alexander against Sardanapalus, the stakes of the súnkrisis involve not only the relative merits of Greeks over barbarians: to introduce the subject of kingship, the oration begins with Alexander, the one Hellenic monarch whose power and demesne not only rivaled the imperium of Rome, but actually managed to exceed it.53 Moreover, Alexander successfully demolished the Haxāmanišiyan Empire, while Roman legions, from the time of the Republic on, perennially failed to subdue Īrān beyond the Zagros Mountains, whether under Parθavan or Sāsānid rule.54 What on the level of manifest content appears to be a belated insistence on the superiority of Greeks over barbarians, then, functioned latently as a súnkrisis between Greece and Rome, which accrued to the historical and cultural prestige of the Hellenic world.

  27.2

  The Alexander Romance—both in its Greek recensions (α–ε),55 as well as in its Armenian, Syriac, Latin, Arabic, Coptic, Īrānian, and Geʿez refashionings—constitutes, in turn, a dialectical negation of Dio’s and his fellow sophists’ political agenda and Atticizing worldview. Polemically, recension α of the Romance—our oldest extant witness to the novel, composed at the height of the Second Sophistic—opens not by conjuring up the Greece of Plato or Demosthenes. Instead, the story takes its bearings coevally from Egypt of the fourth century BCE, that is, not only outside of the Hellenic world per se, but—significantly enough—precisely in that land which, according to Herodotus at least, “had established for itself manners and customs [ēthea kai nómoi] diametrically opposed [émpalin] to those of the [Greeks]” (2.35). Accordingly, instead of lauding the philosophical achievements of classical Athens, the Alexander Romance opens by commending the wisdom (sophía) of the Egyptians, in particular the expertise in magic that Nectanebo, the last indigenous pharaoh of the Two Lands,56 personally possessed.57 From the outset, then, the Romance not only contests the sophists’ claims for the superiority of Greeks over barbarians—and here, Egyptians in particular. The promotion of magic ( ḥkȝw) to a science indispensable to both the order ( mȝꜤ.t) and protection ( sȝ) of the world58—tenets central to Egyptian political theology from the Old Kingdom through the Byzantine era59—flies directly in the face of Greek views of mageía as a foreign, specious, and illicit set of practices, without connection to the pursuit of knowledge or to the practice of religion.60 On the one hand, then, Ḥeka ()—that is, Magic personified—explains in the Coffin Texts: “I am the one whom the Sole Lord made before two things had come into this world. I am the offspring of the one who gave birth to totality, for I am the protection of that which the Sole Lord commanded.”61 On the other, Robert Parker, summarizing the mainstream Greek position, notes: “magic differs from religion as weeds differ from flowers.”62 In opposition, then, to the culturally monologizing aspirations of the Second Sophistic, the Alexander Romance presents its readers from the outset with a dialogic text, specifically designed to evoke differing responses from different communities of readers. Whereas for ethnic Greeks Egyptian magic represented just the sort of superstition in which they would expect bárbaroi to be engaged, for ethnic Egyptians, Nectanebo—in his capacity as king ( nsw)—unsurprisingly possessed cognizance and facility with ḥkȝw as part and parcel of his office and as the mainstay of his power.63 The conflict remains irresolvable to the extent that for Greeks the Egyptians appeared uncultivated and deluded, while Egyptians viewed Greeks as sacrilegious and naïve.64

  Following this presentation of Egyptian sophía, recension β of the Romance—a later derivative of α (ca. 300–550 CE)—provides the most compact account of the events that set the novel’s plot in motion, affairs that ultimately occasion Alexander’s birth.

  The Life of Alexander of Macedon and His Deeds

  Some explōratorēs [scouts]—this is what the Romans call them, among the Greeks, however, they are known as katáskopoi [spies]—presented themselves to Nectanebo and announced that a great cloud of enemies, a host of innumerable soldiers was advancing upon Egypt. The commander of Nectanebo’s army approached him a
nd said, “Live, O King! Put aside now all your ways of peace and be ready to array your troops for war. For a great cloud of foreigners (bárbaroi) threatens us both by land and sea. It is not just one people (éthnos) that marches against us, but myriads of peoples: Indians, Nokemians, Oxydrakes, Iberians, Kaukhones, Aelapes, Bosporans, Bastranians, Aksanians, Chalybes, and all the other great peoples of the East. Defer all other things and look to yourself.” When the general had spoken, king Nectanebo laughed and said to him: “You speak both well and appropriately, guarding the watch that has been entrusted to you. However, you have also spoken cravenly and not like a soldier. Force lies not in numbers (ókhlos), but rather war resides in zeal. . . . Repair then with the soldiers that have been entrusted to you and guard the battle array under your command. For with a single word, I shall cover over the numberless throng of foreigners with the sea.” (1.3)65

  As opposed to the historical and cultural foreshortening that characterized the Second Sophistic (“Greece is the world”66), the Alexander Romance conspicuously assumes as its horizon the multiethnic compass of the Imperial East. Hence, although composed primarily in Greek,67 the first sentence of this passage takes as its grammatical subject the Latin exploratores, which the narrator immediately glosses with the Greek katáskopoi. Not only does this anachronism acknowledge from the outset that we are dealing here hierarchically with Greek written under Roman rule.68 At the same time, the parenthesis foregrounds the linguistic diversity that informed not only daily life in Roman Egypt, but also that of most societies across North Africa and throughout the Roman and Sāsānian Near East.69 In Egypt alone, from the Late Period through the Byzantine era (664 BCE–641 CE), the languages of administration alone included: Aramaic, Demotic, Greek, Middle Egyptian, Latin, and Coptic. This means that scribes and readers had not only to negotiate a considerable variety of diverse vernaculars, but also an equal number of different scripts that not only jostled, but competed with each another, both within official archives—for example, the documents that Egyptian temples maintained in the “House of Life” ( Pr-Ꜥnḫ)70—as well as on a single ostracon or papyrus. This resulted in complex grammatological configurations for which the Demotic Magical Papyrus of London and Leiden supplies an emblematic image (Figure 27.1). Here Greek, Demotic, Coptic, and hieroglyphic script all find their appointed place within the spell ( rȝ, literally “utterance”), as well as on the page, such that no language assumes absolute priority over any of the others. Each remains identifiably distinct, yet all are requisite performatively for the charm to take effect.71