The Oxford Handbook of the Second Sophistic

by Daniel S. Richter

  Similarly, the Alexander Romance makes no attempt to resuscitate the Attic of Isocrates or Lysias. Rather, the text presents readers with a literary representation of koinē, the common, supraregional form of spoken Greek—based on Attic, but with many forms and syntactical constructions that educated Greeks (pepaideuménoi) condemned as “errors” (barbarismoí) which only a “dimwit” or a “rustic” might commit.72 In fact, the koinē of the Roman period was neither uniform across the empire—for example, the only attestation for the Semiticized istartēga (Attic: stratēgos [“general”]) comes from Dura Europus,73 just as the koinē of Egypt regularly displays traces of Demotic74—nor did it simply constitute a series of unruly grammatical mistakes.75 Rather, as Jeff Siegel explains:

  FIGURE 27.1 F. LL. Griffith and H. Thompson. The Demotic Magical Papyrus of London and Leiden. Volume II. London: H. Grevel & Co., 1905. Plate XXIII. A spell for lamp divination written in Demotic, Greek, and Coptic, interspersed with hieroglyphs. 3rd c. ce.

  A koine is the stabilized result of mixing of linguistic sub-systems such as regional or literary dialects. It usually serves as a lingua franca among speakers of the different contributing varieties and is characterized by a mixture of features of these varieties and most often by reduction or simplification in comparison.76

  Quite pointedly, then, the Alexander Romance eschews the Attic Kunstsprache of the sophists in favor of the lingua franca of the period with its composite of different dialectal forms and local variations. This need not imply that the redactors of the Romance lacked the type of paideía or facility with speech that Dio, for example, displays in his orations—in fact, much of the material in the novel turns out to be arcane.77 Rather, like Callimachus’s project to write his Iamboi in Ionic or Theocritus’s decision to compose pederastic poetry in the language of Sappho and Alcaeus,78 the recourse of the Alexander Romance to koinē constitutes a stylistic choice that functions as part and parcel of a centrifugal narrative that records the piecemeal construction of an always untotalized non-Hellenocentric state, whose inhabitants included Anatolians, Syro-Palestinians, Egyptians, Īrānians, Indians, Scythians, Russians, Chinese, what have you—an ethnic diversity thematized in various ways throughout the text.79 Recourse to an archaizing Attic which, as Tim Whitmarsh puts it, “is always seen here as a vehicle for cultural purity,”80 would run against the grain of the literary and ethnic pluralism that the Alexander Romance sets out to embody and portray.

  In fact, given the opening episode’s set (Einstellung) toward linguistic diversity (raznorečie), it comes as no surprise to find that several different idioms within the passage issue directly from the multicultural context of Roman Egypt, where the episode takes place.81 For one, Nectanebo’s general (Dem. mr-mšꜤ) addresses the king with the Greek imperative zēthi, “Live!,” which, although uncommon as a Greek salutation, could—within the framework of the story—mean no more than “Save yourself!” Classical Egyptian, however, regularly employed the stative of the verb Ꜥnḫ, “to live,” in reference to the king as a type of salutary honorific: “May he live!” (Ꜥnḫ.w) / “May you live!” (Ꜥnḫ.tj), which evolved in the Late Period into the epistolary salutation: jmj Ꜥnḫ=k “May you live.” Along similar lines, an oath from the Demotic Instructions of ʿOnchsheshonqy, a text that circulated in the Roman period, corresponds quite closely to the general’s address:

  Ꜥnḫ ḥr=k pȝy=y nb Ꜥȝ

  May your face live, my great lord!82 (4/2)

  By the Imperial era, significant portions of both the enchoric and the immigrant population in the Roman province of Aegyptus were bilingual, equally fluent in Demotic as well as Greek.83 Accordingly, it stands to reason, then, that this “Egyptianism,” couched within the Greek text, would be legible to speakers of Egyptian, be they of Hellenic or of Egyptian descent, further evidence—as many scholars have proposed—that Egypt was, in fact, the locus of the Nectanebo story’s composition.84

  A second construction in this passage points by another route to the Septuagint, the principal Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures, composed at least partially in Egypt.85 Nectanebo’s assertion that his magic will cover over with the sea the enemies marshaled against him (πελάγι ἐπικαλύψω) recalls the well-known passage in Exodos where the sea inversely closes over the king of Egypt as his forces pursue the Israelites to the coast of the Yam Suf:86 “The Lord [Gk. Kúrios; Heb. יהוה] said to Mōüsēs: ‘Stretch forth your hand over the sea, and let the water be turned back to its place, and let it cover the Egyptians’ (ἐπικαλυψάτω τοὺς Αἰγυπτίους) [14:26]. Mōüsēs subsequently celebrates this victory in the immediately ensuing “Song of the Sea”: “The Lord has cast the chariots of Pharaoh and his host into the sea . . . : they were swallowed up. He covered them with the sea [πόντῳ ἐκάλυψεν]: they sank to the depth like a stone” [15:4–5]. Rhetorically, within the framework of the Romance, this constitutes a metalepsis which subsumes the “miraculous” power of Yahweh under the agency of Ḥeka (“Magic”), with whose arts Nectanebo is conversant. However, just as Greek readers dismissed magic as “superstition,” this transumption likewise challenges Hebraic teaching, particularly as presented in the Septuagint itself. In Deuteronómion, for instance, Mōüsēs explicitly forbids magical practices of any kind for the Israelite people,87 and the injunction of Exodos is clear: “You shall not allow sorcerers to live” [22:17]. This difference in cultural perspective once again produces a dialogic text: for readers conversant with Egyptian traditions, the Alexander Romance associates Yahweh positively with Pharaoh, as if Nectanebo and the Lord availed themselves similarly of magic (ḥkȝw) to vanquish assailants and secure peace. However, from the point of view of the sizeable Jewish readership in Egypt, the Romance deprecatingly reduces Yahweh to a miscreant in a para-Gnosticizing gesture of Elohistic disenchantment.88

  The heteroglossia (raznorečie) that permeates the opening of the Alexander Romance proves programmatic for the novel as a whole. Self-consciously alluding to the principal languages spoken in Roman Egypt, the text likewise attempts to represent the larger discursive environment of Levantine-Mediterranean romance, consistently foregrounding the linguistic pluralism that constituted the Greco-Roman novel’s wider Sitz im Leben.89 Concomitantly, the linguistic difference that informs the prose finds its narrative correlate in the generic mixture of the passage, which draws simultaneously on Greek, Egyptian, and Hebraic material—the three main literary traditions that flourished side by side in Roman Egypt—just as it finds its thematic projection in the hordes of alien peoples—“Indians, Nokemians, Oxydrakes, Iberians, Kaukhones, Aelapes, Bosporans, Bastranians, Aksanians, Chalybes,” etc.—who threaten to overwhelm Nectanebo’s Egypt. In the sequel to this episode, moreover, Nectanebo flees to Macedon, where he wins favor with Olympias, the queen, by impersonating the Egyptian god Amun90—a bed trick through which Nectanebo becomes Alexander’s sire (genitor), even if Philip, in his capacity as king, officially presents himself as the boy’s father (pater) (1.4–14).91 Adultery here not only thematizes the various forms of linguistic, generic, and cultural commixture that make up the text of the Romance as a whole. Insofar as Alexander constituted one of the privileged topics of Second Sophistic oratory, 92 the novel explicitly presents him as a mischling—half Macedonian and half Egyptian—in a way that undermines his “Greekness” and throws into question his role as standard bearer for the Hellenization of the world. As opposed, then, to the Attic purity to which the writings of Dio and other Sophists of the period aspired, this “Macedonian” story elevates hybridity to a literary dominant, implicitly thereby flouting the cultural capital of the pepaideuménoi.93

  In his capacity, moreover, as the half-breed hero of an ethnically mixed empire, Alexander inaugurates his conquests not by elevating classical Hellenic culture, but rather by subjugating Greece, such that Hellas becomes but one among the seemingly innumerable different provinces that come to make up Alexander’s state. As the Macedonians
march against Sparta, the γ-recension of the Romance—a Byzantine redaction that still makes use of material from the third century CE—parodies the Athenian world that the Atticists imagined for themselves and never tired of portraying:

  The leaders of the cities gathered at Athens, which was their leader at the time, and twelve orators debated . . . what they should do about Alexander. After three days they had reached no conclusion on the best course of action, and were unable to reach a unanimous decision. Some were in favor of resisting Alexander, others argued the opposite. Fate was unseasonable for them . . . . When Alexander arrived, he drew up his lines against Athens and besieged them. (γ 1.27.2ff.)94

  Ironically, the Attic orators whom Dio and his cohort not only idealized but strove to imitate prove wholly ineffectual here. Unable to come to terms with Macedonia’s demand for a surrender, their indecision affords Alexander the leeway to attack Athens with “innumerable archers whose arrows blotted out the sun.” As such, the Romance presents both the orators and the city in a decidedly weak light, which expressly contradicts Aelius Aristides’s portrayal of Athens as “the bulwark [éruma] of all Hellas.”95 Following the logic of this disillusionment, moreover, Alexander proceeds to attack Rome, followed by the conquest of Rome’s historical archrival Carthage:

  Next Alexander . . . landed on Italic ground. The Roman generals sent him a crown of pearls via their general Marcus, and another with precious stones, accompanied with the message: “We too shall crown your head, Alexander, king of the Romans and of the entire earth.” They also brought him 500 pounds of gold. Alexander accepted their gift and promised he would make them great. . . . Next, Alexander crossed over to Africa. The African generals met him and begged him to stay away from their city of Carthage. But Alexander despised them for their cowardice and said: “Either become stronger yourselves, or pay tribute to those who are stronger than you.” (β 1.29)96

  In a dizzying voltige of temporal overlays, Rome not only capitulates to vassalage without so much as a skirmish: “Marcus”—the novel’s comic handle for “any Roman magistrate”—offers Alexander the diadem, which, from the hindsight of the third century CE, C. Julius Caesar had notoriously refused.97 Proleptically outdoing Caesar, then, Alexander not only assumes the crown: he concomitantly accepts lavish gifts from Rome, thereby reducing Latium to just another tributary state.

  In the fiction of the Romance, then, Greece and Rome come to share the same subsidiary status within empire, thereby obviating any reading of the text that would see Alexander’s Italic conquests as a compensatory fantasy whereby the Hellenic world—through the agency of a “Greek” Alexander—triumphs over Rome. To the contrary, Greece, Rome, and Carthage remain tributary states subsumed within Alexander’s Macedonian Empire, no more or less central than Arachosia, Egypt, or Parthyene, thereby defusing any meaningful hierarchization of one over the other. By leveling the field in this way, such that Greeks possess the same subaltern status as do Romans, on the one hand, and Persians, on the other, the Alexander Romance effectively dismantles the terms of Second Sophistical debate, envisioning instead a world in which each part—be it Greek, Roman, Punic, Iranian, Egyptian, Indic, Ethiopian, Mongolian, or Russian—contributes in its distinctiveness to the composite nature of the whole.98 As such, the Romance does not simply reverse the oppositions that shape the dominant discourse, suggesting, for example, that Alexander was not really Greek but actually Egyptian. Rather, Alexander the “Greek” turns out to be always already a “barbarian,”99 thereby collapsing the distinction between the categories altogether. In fact, according to the Romance, Alexander embodied this heterogeneity in his very person:

  Alexander’s appearance in no way bore the imprint of Philip or Olympias his mother or the one who sired him [ὁ σπείρας], but was entirely unique. He had the shape of a man, but his hair was that of a lion and his eyes were particolored [ἑτερογλαuκοúς]—the right one slanting downwards, while the left was white. His teeth were sharp as little pegs, like those of a snake, and his movements were swift and violent like a lion. (β 1.13.3)100

  Part human, mammal, reptile, and practically part wood—Alexander’s visage resembles nothing so much as the empire of difference that as the narrative ensues he comes to create at the expense of any notion of a Hellenic center.

  To implicate the reader directly in this heteronomy, moreover, the passage centers on an anacoluthon—that is, a logical discontinuity in the progression of the thought: “His eyes were particolored [heteroglaukoí]—the right one slanting downward [katōpherēs], while the left was white [leukόs].” In Greek, glaukόs refers to the glint or blue-gray color of the eye, such that hetero-glaukόs should mean that Alexander’s eyes did not quite match, each exhibiting a different shade of blue. Unexpectedly, however, the ensuing description says nothing about glaukótēs whatsoever. Instead, we learn that one of Alexander’s eyes had amblyopia, an ocular disorder that concerns the position of the pupil, while the other suffered from leukocoria, that is, it had no color at all (Figure 27.2). In effect, this repeats in the figuration of the text the logic of difference, where even what occur “naturally” as pairs turn out to be disparate in character:101

  FIGURE 27.2 Alexander’s eyes.

  Anacolutha of this sort, which typify both the rhetoric of the Romance and its narrative construction as a whole, play havoc with the neatly balanced oppositions of classical Greek rhetoric, such as the μὲν–δέ correlation with which Dio opens his first oration On Kingship. For Dio and his fellow sophists, the inhabited world (oikouménē) remained a representational space of hierarchized, but balanced antitheses, not a collective of inassimilable diversities—marvels (thaúmata) and monstrosities (térata)—such as Alexander encounters on his expedition to the East: trees that speak with human voices, birds that shoot flames through their beaks, lands of total darkness, and so forth.102 In fact, for Alexander, the worlding of the world relies upon disparity: “If we were all of like mind [homόgnōmai], the world would have remained callow [argόs]: the sea would never have been sailed, the land would never have been plowed, marriages would not have been consummated, and there would have been no making of children” (β 3.6.14). At its farthest rhetorical reaches, then, the novel ultimately rejects analogic thinking altogether. So Demosthenes, as represented in the Romance, admonishes the citizens of Athens: “Each moment [kairόs] possesses its own force [dúnamis] and makes its own demands [epitagē]” (α 2.3.5).

  The novel’s target, then, is not just Atticism per se, but more broadly the sophists’ fetishization of classical Greek culture in general. This emerges clearly from the episode that concludes book 1 of the α-recension,103 in which Ismēnias, a clever Theban (sophόs), skilled at playing the aulós, attempts to dissuade Alexander from destroying his native city. For this purpose, Ismēnias treats Alexander to an ekphrastic tour of Thebes’s mythic past set in choliambs—a complex composition that reads in part:

  Do you see these walls, built by the shepherd Zethus

  And the lyre-player Amphion?

  Cadmus built these foundations.

  This is the house of Labdacus. Here the unhappy mother

  Of Oedipus bore the murderer of his father.

  Here was the precinct of Heracles, formerly

  The house of Amphitryon . . .

  There Zeus once blasted Semele, whom he desired.

  This is the house of Tiresias, the mouthpiece of Apollo.

  From here blind Oedipus was driven out.

  Do you see that fir-tree whose branches reach to heaven?

  On that tree Pentheus, who spied on the women’s dancing,

  Was torn apart, wretched man, by his own mother.

  Do you see that furthest mountain ridge,

  Which stands out prominently above the road?

  There used to crouch the monstrous Sphinx,

  etc.104

  Rather than appease the conquering potentate, however, Ismēnias’s performance only further enflames Alexander w
ho, with the exception of the poet Pindar’s tomb, orders Thebes’s complete eradication:105 “Vilest offspring of the sons of Cadmus, vulgar offshoot of a barbarian stock [δήμιον βλάστημα βαρβάρου ῥίζης], do you think that you can deceive Alexander by telling me these sophistical and fabricated stories [σοφιστικούς καὶ πεπλασμένους μύθους]? Now I am going to destroy the city by fire . . . [and] exterminate all of you with your precious ancestors.” Accordingly, Alexander proceeds to demolish the Theban pόlis, which, in an Odyssean twist, he renames “No-City” (Ápolis).106

  Despite Ismēnias’s bid to conscript Alexander for Thebes, the Macedonian king displays neither interest in nor any nostalgia for the panoply of heroes and heroines whom the poet parades before his eyes. Rather, Alexander makes it clear that Thebans—and by synecdoche Greeks as a whole—constitute a “barbarian stock” without a culture worth preserving, a radical reversal of the Greco-Roman commonplace from the perspective of the heir to Egypt’s throne. In part to validate this Thebes-as-Greece synecdoche, the “fabricated fictions” to which his poem alludes all constitute staples of Attic tragedy, which served as the principal vehicle through which they became generally known throughout the Hellenic world.107 Each of the heroes, then, whom Ismēnias names—Amphion, Heracles, Oedipus, Pentheus, and so forth—turns out to have as much of an association with Athens as he or she does with Thebes. So Froma Zeitlin asks: