Given Lucian’s penchant for rhetorical trickery, it would seem unwise to take his prescriptions for history writing as “straight” advice. Nevertheless, in the prefaces of three of our histories we see the same combination of the (traditional) idea that good history must be truthful with an acknowledgment of the near inevitability of rhetoric in historiography.21 For Arrian and Dio, in fact, truth and rhetoric can coexist harmoniously: when Arrian chooses between Ptolemy and Aristobolus as a source for a particular event, it is because that author’s account “seems more trustworthy and also more worthy of being told” (τὰ πιστότερα . . . φαινόμενακαὶ ἅμα ἀξιαφηγητοτερα); Cass. Dio, Preface 1.2, cautions that no one should be “suspicious of the truth of my narrative because I have used a fine style [κεκαλλιεπημένοις . . . λόγοιςκέχρημαι], as far as can be permitted by the subject matter,” for he has tried to be “equally exact in both these respects, so far as possible” (ἐγὼ γὰρ ἀμφότερα, ὡςοἷόντε ἦν, ὁμοίως ἀκριβῶσαι ἐσπούδασα). The idea of a truth-telling genre actively accepting rhetoric may seem paradoxical to us, but if our writers believe, like Lucian does, that the truth is self-evident, and that the historian’s task is only to “mirror” it well through the proper handling of rhetoric, the conflict disappears. Herodian is more critical of his rivals’ use of rhetoric. He begins his history with a (highly rhetorical) condemnation of other historians who privilege style over substance (using a pointed reference to paideia, we might add), which is redolent of both Thucydides22 and Lucian and worth quoting at some length:
Most writers engaged in compiling history, whose concern has been to present a fresh record of the past, have aimed at winning themselves a permanent reputation for learning [παιδείαςκλέος ἀίδιον], since they were afraid that if they did not express themselves they would be indistinguishable from the masses. But in their narratives they have shown a contempt for the truth [τῆς . . . ἀληθείας . . . ὠλιγώρησαν] and a preoccupation with vocabulary and style [φράσεώςτεκαὶ εὐφωνίας], because they were confident that, even if they wrote in a somewhat fantastic style, they would reap the advantages of the pleasure they gave to their public, without the accuracy [τὸ ἀκριβὲς] of their research being investigated. Some authors, through the excellent quality of their style [λόγων ἀρετῇ], have made trivial events acquire a spurious importance with posterity, greater than was deserved by the truth [τῆς ἀληθείας]. They have done this either because they were bitterly opposed to tyranny or because they wanted to give flattering praise to an emperor or a city or a private individual. My policy has been not to accept any second-hand information which has not been checked and corroborated. I have collected the evidence for my work with every attention to accuracy, limiting it to what falls within the recent memory of my readers. (History of the Empire 1.1.1–3)
If the opening lines of Herodian’s history seem familiar, there is something new in his complaint that those who wish to gain “permanent reputation for learning” (παιδείαςκλέος ἀίδιον) too often rely on rhetoric. Herodian in a sense is arguing for a limitation on what his own genre should expect from itself, and this is similar to the limitation implied by Lucian in How to Write History. Lucian twice recommends Thucydides’s hope that his historical work be κτῆμα ἐςαἰεὶ (“a monument for eternity”: 5 and 42) as the ideal any historiographer should strive for, but Greenwood (2006, 128) argues that this is ultimately an act of self-glorification on Lucian’s part: “Lucian plays a subtle game, purporting to uphold Thucydides for the analytical qualities that made his History timeless, but ultimately fixating on the fame of Thucydides’s work, onto which Lucian grafts his own name.”23 Lucian’s expert exposition of historiographical precepts puts him at the top of his (rhetorical) game. For our historians, however, the rhetoric of κλέος is seemingly undermined by an anxiety of influence. Arrian challenges his audience to compare him to his predecessors: “Anyone who is surprised that with so many historians already in the field it should have occurred to me too to compose this history should express his surprise only after perusing all their works and then reading mine” (Preface 3). Appian is more modest, understating the newness of his methodology: “These things have been described by many writers, both Greek and Roman. . . . Thinking that the public would like to learn the history of the Romans in this way, I am going to write the part relating to each nation separately, omitting what happened to the others in the meantime, and taking it up in its proper place” (Roman History Preface 12–13).24 Cassius Dio backhandedly refers to earlier historians as he highlights his own mastery: “Although I have read pretty nearly everything about them that has been written by anybody, I have not included it all in my history, but only what I have seen fit to select” (Roman History Preface 1.2). Having begun his history by criticizing those who seek future fame (as seen above), his only claim for his own work is that he believes posterity will find knowledge of his subject—not, we should note, his writing itself—to be pleasant: “I believe that future generations too will derive some pleasure from the knowledge of events which are important and compressed within a brief span of time” (History of the Empire 1.1.4).
Our historians, who as we will see have quite different aims in their histories (and who are not all equally “traditional”), nevertheless show some commonality in that they all define themselves as historians and verify that their projects are concerned with truth and accuracy; 25 for at least three of them we see the explicit acknowledgment that rhetoric’s presence in their genre is somewhat inevitable. All four seem to share an understanding that t is the overuse of rhetoric, not a careful exposition of the truth, that is more likely to lead one to fame, which suggests, alongside Lucian’s rhetorical domination of the subject, something of the marginality of this genre in comparison to other types of writing that encouraged rhetorical license.26
30.2 “GREEK”/”ROMAN”
If Lucian’s How to Write History helps us contextualize our historians’ traditional truth claims within a literary culture that seems to emphasize rhetorical over historical truth,27 it also reflects the fact that our extant history is largely “about” Rome, not Greece. This is important, because Second Sophistic scholarship tends to link the proliferation of literature to the assertion of a “Greek” identity—understandably, given that elite education trafficked exclusively in classical literary models. But even further, in contrast to Lucian’s bad historians, who dealt with small and relatively insignificant pieces of contemporary Roman history, ours did not solely occupy themselves with small things: Appian and Cassius Dio’s works, for example, are world histories.28
Their evident Romanitas, however, may explain why so few scholars of the Second Sophistic have studied them. By the time Appian, Cassius Dio, and Herodian wrote, Greeks had been writing Roman historiography for centuries, and after Tacitus, Latin historiography of Rome seems to have disappeared (the only Latin historian we know of is Justin, who wrote an epitome of the Augustan Pompeius Trogus’s history of the Macedonian Empire). Indeed, by the Severan period, most prose writing is being done in Greek, the major exception being the prodigious industry of legal writing in Latin.29 But herein lies the difficulty in determining whether we should call our historians Greek or Roman (reflected in the fact, for example, that the present chapter about Arrian, Appian, Cassius Dio, and Herodian could well be called “Greek Historiography,” but it also seems natural that a 2001 book on “Roman Historiography” includes all the Greek and Roman historians of this time period, sometimes with a Greek and Latin writer treated together in one chapter).30 We can say either that Roman historiography was written in Greek because Greek was the language of literature, or that “Greeks” were interested in writing Roman history because this was part of the Greek literary tradition. The difficulty of deciding between the two is further complicated by the seemingly perfunct
ory way in which the Attic language is sometimes used in these texts, as well as the presence in them of Latinisms (and, in Appian, koinê).
Admittedly it has become rather commonplace at this point to say that we cannot choose between Greek and Roman identities for any Second Sophistic writer because so many held seats in the Senate, knew emperors personally, and so on and so forth. The problem historiography poses, I believe, is somewhat different. The reason we employ Philostratus’s term Second Sophistic to refer to something beyond Philostratus’s own intellectual lineage and circle31 or live declamation32 is because we sense a certain common attitude among Greek writers toward paideia, which is equated with Greekness, which in turn is equated with culture. That is, we see paideutic display as a form of cultural politics, a “Greek” response to Roman power: hence Simon Swain has referred to the “politics of purism”; Tim Whitmarsh, the “politics of imitation.”33 For a Plutarch, a Dio Chrysostom, or an Aristides, an ideal Rome is a Rome that supports and even emulates paideia, and that makes no attempt to dominate paideia by means of its own cultural forms. So while we may think of these writers as personally “hybrid,” what they seem to show in their writing is not hybridism so much as the continual redefinition of “culture” as something definitively Greek in contrast to Roman power—something we might call “appropriation,” to capture its active nature.
If we define imperial paideia, however, strictly as Greekness-in-differentiation-from-Roman-power, it is difficult to see who of our historians would qualify besides Arrian (and, at any rate, this would be reflected in only some of his writings). If we are to use the term Second Sophistic for all our authors—and since it is hard to justify removing any one of them altogether, we may as well—we require a more expansive definition that embraces an impurist, hybrid paideia that can be more properly referred to as Greco-Roman (or in the case of Appian, Greco-Roman-Alexandrian). Like Athenaeus’s Deipnosophistae, this Second Sophistic form strives for innovation and monumentalism, but its expertise and, in the case of Cassius Dio and Herodian, its narrative viewpoint can be Roman. It is the product of the same Atticist education as more “sophistic” writing, but it defends its mix of Greek and Latin (recall, as a contrast, the inclusion of language-mixing in Lucian’s list of negative trends in historiography). The following comments on individual authors suggest how a more inclusive, hybridizing definition of the Second Sophistic meaningfully accommodates our historians.
30.2.1 Arrian
At first glance, Arrian’s works seem to divide neatly into “Roman” and “Greek.” He wrote on subjects ranging from the historical to the philosophical to the military (the last category includes some autobiography). Ostensibly on the Roman side we have his treatise on hunting, the Cynegeticus; we also have the Periplus Euxini (The Voyage around the Black Sea) and the Tactica, both of which contain a mix of antiquarian and contemporary detail; and finally there is the Ectaxis contra Alanos, which describes Roman preparations against the Alani invasions (which Cassius Dio claimed Arrian personally helped prevent: 49.15.1). All of these reference contemporary events and Arrian’s own personal experiences.34 On the Greek side we have Arrian’s two Alexander-works—the Anabasis of Alexander and Indika, four out of eight books of the Discourses of his Stoic teacher Epictetus (word-for-word notes on the philosopher’s teachings), and a summary of Epictetus’s philosophy called the Enchridion.
On closer examination, the Greek/Roman dichotomy breaks apart. The influence of Greek classicism is easy to see in the so-called Roman works: these are works about contemporary matters written in an artificial Attic dialect influenced by classical writers. Xenophon’s influence is prominent in the Tactica, the Periplus, the Ectaxis kata Alanon, and the Cynegeticus;35 Thucydides and Herodotus are also important to these works,36 if less so than to the Anabasis). What is perhaps less obvious are the ways in which “classicizing” works can seem “Roman” (although in the case of the philosophical works one wonders if Stoicism can really be considered a “Greek” philosophy by the time of Hadrian—who we should recall was, like Arrian, a student of Epictetus). The Anabasis was until recently seen as a “mere conduit for Ptolemy,”37 and it announces its classical pedigree in various ways that go beyond borrowing one of Xenophon’s titles: its famous Second Preface (1.12) parallels the second prefaces of Herodotus (7.19–21) and Thucydides (1.12.1–5);38 Arrian declares himself Homer to Alexander’s Achilles;39 and Thucydides has especially influenced speeches like the one before the Battle of Gaugamela, and historical excurses like that at Thebes.40 Then there is the Indika, an account of Nearchus’s journey from India to the Persian Gulf on Alexander’s return to Babylon which is written more purely in Herodotus’s Ionic dialect and shares that historian’s penchant for ethnographic detail.41 But all this classical allusion notwithstanding,42 if we see Arrian as something other than a receptacle for received ideas we can entertain the possibility of Rome-consciousness even where it is not directly stated. The concept of an ideal “Greek” Alexander seems to have originated in imperial Greek literature under the influence of Roman interest.43 Regardless of when we think the Anabasis was written, Arrian would have grown up fully aware of Trajan’s self-styling as another Alexander, and it has recently been suggested that, even if the Anabasis was written under Hadrian, it would have been influenced by the contemporary discourse on Rome’s expansionist excesses.44 Mentions of Rome in the Anabasis automatically suggest comparisons between Alexander and the present-day super power; it has also been argued that Arrian’s description of the reaction against proskynesis (ritual prostration) in Alexander’s court and Alexander’s murder of Cleitus the Black comment implicitly or through analogy upon Roman ruler cult.45 Finally, the Anabasis’s form seems to combine war monograph and imperial biography, which are both originally Latin genres.
More than our other historiographers, Arrian seems to fit the typical Second Sophistic model of appropriation, especially with his Anabasis Alexandri, in which a figure popular among Romans becomes strongly Hellenized. Hybridity perhaps better describes something like the Ectaxis contra Alanos whose form is influenced by Xenophon but which, as P. A. Brunt puts it, is a “tract of no literary pretentions”46 and describes Roman military preparations in which Arrian took part.
30.2.2 Appian
The Romanitas of Appian is closer to the surface than that of Arrian. Appian’s Roman History (ca. mid-second century) is a record of the Roman rise to power organized ethnographically rather than chronologically, in contrast to earlier world historians; the work climaxes with the triumph of Augustus (represented by five civil wars books and four Egyptian ones, 13–21), then skips to Trajan.47 As the first world history since the age of Augustus, its very existence seems to make it part of the Antonine renaissance of Greek letters. Appian’s sources are a mix of Greek and Latin, and include Hieronymus of Cardia, Polybius, Asinius Pollo, Caesar, and Augustus, as well as Arrian.48 As for Atticism: Appian is known for his Thucydidean diction49 (although his interest in ethnographic organization does not seem to reflect the interest in ethnographical detail we see in Herodotus and others);50 Alain Gowing also suggests a connection to Aelius Aristides’s To Rome, for both its monarchism and admiration of Alexandria.51 Appian’s connection to Alexandria, however, goes deeper than that of Aristides (whose real loyalty, as an Attic purist, lies with Athens): he calls himself “Appian of Alexandria” at the beginning of the Roman History, and more significantly organizes his work in such a way that the taming of Egypt becomes the pinnacle of the Roman conquest of the world.52 The Alexandrian connection presumably explains too why his Attic is mixed with koinê in addition to Latinisms.53 For a sophist to identify ethnically as something other than Greek is not unknown in the Second Sophistic: Syrian Lucian is the famous case. But unlike Appian, Lucian was a strict Atticist whose references to Syrians and his own identity seem set to prove that a native Syrian could out-Atticize a Greek.54 As an Alexandrian whose subject was Rome and whose main allegiance was Alexandria, a better analog
y would be Polybius, the first universal historian of the Roman empire and an Achaean loyalist. But to the degree that Appian shows signs of Atticism and writes a monumental history with a new twist, Appian also fits into a looser definition of Second Sophistic literature.
30.2.3 Cassius Dio
There is another way in which Appian seems to be of his age:55 like other Antonine writers, he does not write about the present; what is perhaps even more significant than the time gap between his own writing and the chronological endpoint of his history is the fact that his history stops with Trajan, whose philhellenism is often seen to have encouraged the rise of the Greek classicism. Cassius Dio’s universal history of Rome (the first universal history since the time of Augustus) indicates a break from the Antonine pattern in historiography.56 The Roman History was a gargantuan undertaking of eighty volumes, about half of which we have in epitomized or nonfragmentary form. It is influenced by the (originally Latin) form of the Annales, but is not strictly annalistic; it begins with Aeneas and ends with Severus Alexander. Dio first becomes an eyewitness to history during the reign of Commodus. (He did not seem to have had much of a plan besides bringing his history as far as possible into the present.)57 Departing from the triumphalist attitude that prevailed in the Antonine period, Dio views present-day Rome as having fallen from the golden age of Marcus Aurelius’s reign (Roman History 72.36.4). Like Tacitus, Dio writes from the point of view of a senator and not as a Roman subject; he has a strong authorial presence, commenting on present institutions and on his own experiences; he uses stories such as the traumatic fall of the Republic and Augustus’s reign as obvious parallels to the present, but also explicitly addresses contemporary events and is especially vivid in describing things he witnesses at Rome first-hand. The fact that he is the only extant Greek writer of the empire to use the first-person plural pronoun in reference to Rome and senatorial viewpoint naturally encourages us to think of him as a “Roman,” not a Greek, writing about Rome.
The Oxford Handbook of the Second Sophistic Page 77