The Oxford Handbook of the Second Sophistic

by Daniel S. Richter

  In guiding his readers through an in situ gallery of monuments and natural wonders in Roman Palestine, Africanus comes much closer to the eastern dragoman than he does to a guide for Christian pilgrims to the Holy Land. This is most evident in his description of the fabulous terebinth tree. Local tradition held that the tree, reputed to be the site where Abraham entertained the three angels on their way to Sodom (Gen 18:1–10), was as old as the world itself.20 It was also the cult object of an annual festival at Hebron, attended by worshippers of all stripes, Jews, Christians, and “others.”21 Africanus’s own description says nothing about the religious makeup of the pilgrims, however. Indeed, were we to depend solely on his account of rituals performed at the site, we might reasonably conclude that ceremonies enacted at the site were pagan. Even when enveloped by the flames from offerings and hecatombs sacrificed at an altar at the base of the tree by the neighboring peoples, he writes, the tree always emerged unscathed.22 To maintain his standing as a neutral observer, he then reports a popular explanation about its origin, but without committing himself to its veracity. “It is said,” he writes, “that the tree sprouted up from a staff planted at the site by one of the angels.”23 Africanus knew the rules of paradoxography. The supernatural properties of this “wondrous [thaumasian]” tree and its links to the biblical past, not the beliefs of religious tourists visiting the site, were what mattered.

  Idealized images of a heroic past, memorialized in founding myths, artifacts, local coinage, and iconography, were a vital part of the self-representation of cities of Asia Minor and the Greek-speaking Near East in the age of the Second Sophistic. The existence of a civic-minded Christian like Africanus acting as cultural ambassador for cities and sites with their own fund of marvels from the remote past is hard to square with the standard narrative of early Christians as an embattled religious minority. But the agonistic model of conflict and ultimate triumph is only one part of the story of the early Church. For Christians with the resources and temperament, dealings with the broader culture were not always so fraught. Nowhere is the involvement of Christian elites in civic life more visible than in the Hellenistic city state of Syrian Edessa.

  CHRISTIAN COURTIERS IN ABGAR’S EDESSA

  In his Ecclesiastical History, Eusebius of Caesarea, the first author to publicize the preservation in Edessa of letters exchanged between Abgar V and Jesus, claimed that the Syriac originals were taken from the public archives at a time when “the city was ruled by a king.”24 On the assumption that Abgar the Great, one of the last two kings of pre-Roman Edessa, was also a Christian, scholars once supposed that the king had personally underwritten the fictional correspondence between Abgar V and Jesus as part of a broader program to legitimate Christianity as the state religion. But if Abgar was a Christian himself, he concealed that information from his subjects. Coins, monuments, and funerary mosaics from Abgar’s reign suggest no change in the public face of Edessene religion.25 If, then, the Jesus-Abgar correspondence did appear when Edessa was still a monarchy, the version of the legend known to Eusebius originated in a transitional pre-Christian phase in Edessa’s history, when the process of integrating Christianity into the official record and civic identity of the kingdom had already begun. Biblical relics and forged royal correspondence were part of the stock in trade.

  Christian participation in Edessene court culture also played a part in the process of integration. In a revealing eyewitness account of the inner workings of Abgar’s court, Africanus would later dwell at length on the impressive displays of expertise in archery by Edessene elites. One of them was Bar Daysan, a fellow Christian and confidant of the king. Although later generations of Christian writers remembered Bar Daysan mainly as a learned heretic, Africanus says nothing about this in his own account. What impressed him was his skill with the bow. In one performance, Bar Daysan, whom Africanus identifies here only as a “Parthian,” used arrows to recreate a likeness of a Syrian youth on a shield standing next to him. The object of another contest was to have two mismatched arrows—one tipped and the other one stripped—strike each other in mid-air. To onlookers, the collision conjured up the image of an armed soldier capturing a defenseless soldier in combat.26 Africanus identifies only one of the participants in this exercise in asymmetric warfare: Syrmos the “Scythian.” There was also a scientific experiment, designed to measure the distance an arrow would travel on a continuous day-long trajectory. When Abgar’s son Manu conducted his own test, Africanus also participated, acting as the crown prince’s overseer and guide.27

  How might a Greek or Roman reader respond to these displays by Parthian and Scythian archers? Although Greek authors admired their skill with the bow, they tended to devalue it as a barbarian form of combat.28 Lucian punctures these preconceptions in his own depiction of the fictional “Toxaris,” a Scythian who had arrived in Athens even before Anacharsis. In his On Friendship, Mnesippus, a Greek, expresses surprise when Toxaris flouts the image of the unlettered and bad-tempered Scythian skilled only in warfare and archery and shows himself to be a good friend, an able orator, and even a talented painter.29 Edessa’s Parthian and Scythian courtiers went a step farther. More than a tool of war, archery was now both a tool of science and a fine art. “As we looked on,” Africanus writes of Bar Daysan’s artistry with the bow, “we marveled that the archery was not a martial pursuit, but rather somewhat enjoyable, and a pleasurable danger.”30

  Both Africanus and Bar Daysan were amply equipped for the cosmopolitan court culture of Edessa. Africanus, described by Eusebius as an “erudite man, well known to those grounded in secular paideia,” wore his Greek learning with pride.31 Bar Daysan, a bilingual aristocrat of formidable talents, reveals none of Tatian’s animosity to anything suggestive of Greekness. To the contrary, he found in Greek learning a means of enriching Syriac literature.32 That made him an ideal representative of the cultural aspirations of Abgar’s court. The Christian heresiologist Epiphanius, while no friend of Bar Daysan, understood the nature of the attachment. Bar Daysan, he writes, was “very close with the king, collaborating with him, and partaking of his paideia [tēs autou metaschōn paideias].”33

  What bound these two men together was not a common religion, but rather a shared education and ethos.34 The same observation holds true for Africanus. It was once thought that Africanus, supposedly a Roman officer and co-religionist, was invited to Abgar’s court when he was campaigning in the East with the army of Septimius Severus.35 But Africanus says nothing about any of this, and there is little reason to suppose that religion had much to do with his role there. His duties in the Edessene court were more along the lines of the teacher and scholar for hire: tutoring the crown prince, participating in the leisure activities of the Edessene court, and helping to identify and publicize Edessa’s artifacts.

  EDESSA’S CHRISTIAN ARISTOCRATS AND ROME

  Roman colonization after the dissolution of the monarchy was ruinous for Bar Daysan, Edessa’s most renowned Christian courtier. 36 Probably remaining in Edessa up to the very end, he refused, even in the face of threats on his life, to renounce his Christianity.37 Sketchy accounts of his life after that describe a stateless aristocrat, exiled to Armenia but continuing to explore prospects for rehabilitation. Discouraged by a failed Christian mission to the local population, he is said by Moses of Chorene to have withdrawn to the fortress city of Ani. After examining and updating local archives, Bar Daysan wrote a history of the kings of Armenia, which was subsequently translated from Syriac into Greek. While the authenticity of Moses’s testimony has been questioned, his description of the undertaking is what we might expect from a displaced aristocrat, steeped in the high culture of Edessa.38

  During this period of exile, Bar Daysan also composed an ethnographic treatise on India. In addition to the expected paradoxography about a towering androgynous statue secreting blood and sweat, the surviving excerpts from the work mainly treat Indian judicial practices and the discipline and social standing of the Brahmins and “Samanae
ans,” the latter probably in reference to the Buddhists. For Greek rhetors of the Second Sophistic, the advisory role of the Brahmins was a subject of ongoing interest. Dio of Prusa describes them, along with the Druids and magi, as a privileged class of pepaideumenoi, to whose judgment even kings deferred.39 This “inverted hierarchical relationship between rulers and their sumbouloi” is also what impressed Bar Daysan about the Brahmins.40 Because of their universally recognized standing in Indian society, he writes, they are exempt from taxation and answer to no one. But kings accede to them, consulting them and the Samanaeans for advice and soliciting their intercession with the gods in times of crisis.41 It is not difficult to imagine why Dio, the rhetor and political theorist, and Bar Daysan, the champion of liberty and exiled advisor and friend of Abgar the Great, would have idealized the Brahmins’ sovereign independence and favored role in Indian society.42

  What survives from the treatise shows it to be a reasonably objective account, without a trace of Christian-inspired invective.43 Its informed neutrality probably explains why it found an appreciative readership outside Christian circles, including the Neoplatonist Porphyry. If Bar Daysan ever even identified himself as a Christian in the work, it went unnoticed even from one of the Church’s most learned adversaries. As far as Porphyry was concerned, Bar Daysan was simply a “Babylonian man,” the emblematic Eastern sage.44 He also states that Bar Daysan composed his treatise on India after interviewing an Indian delegation traveling to Rome during the reign of Caracalla’s successor, Antoninus Elagabalus. This was at a time when he was beginning to regain his footing. According to Moses of Chorene, his history of the kings of Armenia, also completed during Elagabalus’s reign, made him famous. Bar Daysan, he writes, was even “bold enough” to write a letter to the emperor.45 The encounter with the Indian delegation traveling to Rome opened up another overture to the West: to offer Rome the expertise of a “Babylonian” about a kingdom to the east of the Parthian kingdom. His former associate Africanus must have recognized in Elagabalus the same opportunity. For at the end of his reign, Africanus was also introducing himself in Rome—in this case not by interviewing a delegation traveling there, but by presiding over one himself.

  JULIUS AFRICANUS’S REINVENTION IN ROME

  Unlike Bar Daysan, Africanus has left us no stories about resistance to Roman imperial agents or about exile in a remote corner of Asia. What we hear instead are the exploits of an itinerant gentleman scholar, bibliophile, advocate, and self-promoter. In Egypt, he purchases the Sacred Book of the pharaoh Suphus, “a great treasure.”46 In libraries throughout the Mediterranean, he alerts readers to the existence of manuscripts of Homer’s Odyssey containing an extraordinary textual variant: the actual incantation that Odysseus used to summon the dead.47 He travels to Egypt to meet with Heraclas, the “very famous” Christian philosopher and future head of the catechetical school of Alexandria.48 Jesus’s own relatives, living in Galilee, also benefited from his sponsorship. Privately maintained genealogies, he writes, attest their “noble ancestry.” And he confers upon them an impressive title, the desposynoi, an obscure word meaning something like “those related to the Master.”49 His culminating achievement in advocacy was an embassy to Rome on behalf of the town of Emmaus in the year 221, the last year of the reign of Antoninus Elagabalus.50 Thanks to his efforts, Emmaus was elevated from a village to a polis.51

  During the later years of the Severan dynasty, prominent Christians benefited from a thaw in church-state relations.52 But while this may have been a precondition for Africanus’s own reinvention in Rome, his overture to Rome had little, if any, connection with the interests of the Church. During the Severan dynasty, a program to urbanize Palestine and repopulate its cities was well under way. Emmaus was in fact one of the last towns in the region to be refounded as a polis.53 Africanus’s petition to the emperor was thus an exercise in advocacy, not for Edessa’s Christian community, but rather for a provincial village seeking the standing and material benefits that other towns in the region had already received. The effort succeeded. By the fourth century, Nikopolis, formerly known as Emmaus, had become, in Eusebius’s words, a “famous city.”54 It even had its own tourist attraction: a healing fountain located on the outskirts of the city, where, according to local tradition, the post-resurrection Jesus and the disciples traveling with him had dipped their feet.55

  As with the many other self-made sophists known to Philostratus, the embassy also launched Africanus’s career in Rome.56 After Elagabalus’s death, he remained in the city, earning the patronage of his successor Alexander Severus. While Africanus’s claim to have “designed [êrchitektonêsa]” the “beautiful library of the Pantheon” was probably an exaggeration, his actions were in any case not those of a representative of the Church, but rather of a private person with specialized skills to offer the emperor.57 The same can be said of his Cesti, a compendium of technical knowledge typical of the works of encyclopedic content that proliferated in the Severan age.58 Dedicated to the emperor, the Cesti has been criticized, with reason, as an extreme example of the rhetorical excesses of the Second Sophistic. It is also a work of unashamed bravado.59 In twenty-four volumes, Africanus represents himself as the master of everything, including occult science. While letting readers know of his standing as an expert from the East, Africanus’s political loyalties are undivided. Recent Roman military failures against a renascent Persian empire, he writes, have given the nations of inner Asia cause to boast that they have attained “equality with us.”60 At least in the political sense, Africanus was now one of “us Romans.”

  AFRICANUS AND GREEK HISTORIOGRAPHY OF THE SECOND SOPHISTIC

  The final year of Elagabalus’s reign was not only a milestone in Africanus’s public career in Rome. It was also the end point of his Chronographiae, a five-book chronicle of universal history beginning with Adam. In the early Church, the scope of the undertaking was unprecedented. Although Christian writers had experimented with chronology before that time, interest in the subject was secondary to some other project, either as a weapon in the culture war against the Greeks, or as a prop for end-time speculation. It is unlikely that any Greek or Roman reader would have recognized in these forays in opposition history anything resembling the sophisticated universal chronicles of Eratosthenes or Castor of Rhodes.

  To this extent, Africanus’s own chronicle broke new ground. Alongside the Christian era from Adam, Africanus used the Olympiad era, the latter the dating system of choice among Hellenistic historians and chronographers from the time of Eratosthenes. He synchronizes kings’ lists and calendars, examines artifacts, discusses Hebrew etymologies, incorporates lists of Olympic victors, settles controversies through autopsy, and consults variant readings in biblical manuscripts. Traditional Christian motifs with a sharp polemical or ideological edge are either ground down or reshaped. While aware of the limitations of Greek chronological records, Africanus refrains from exploiting the opportunity to denounce the Greeks as a people lacking antiquity. Instead, he reframes the question as one of historical method: How is an integrated history of the world possible when Greeks records before the first Olympiad are so muddled? 61

  We can make a similar observation about Africanus’s millennialism. There is little sense in his work of an imminently approaching end-time. By his calculations, another 279 years remained before world history would run its 6000-year course. Christian readers looking for an apocalyptic interpretation of current events would find little satisfaction in his discreet handling of politically loaded biblical texts. Not long before the publication of Africanus’s chronicle, Judas, a Christian author known to us only from Eusebius, composed a chronicle in the form of a commentary on Daniel’s apocalypse of seventy weeks (Dan. 9:24–27). Its purpose was to show that the fierce persecutions besetting the Church during the reign of Septimius Severus portended the imminent coming of Antichrist.62 Africanus’s own hairsplitting treatment of the same verses is tame by comparison. Everything predicted in Daniel’s visio
n, he writes, has already been fulfilled in Christ’s ministry, death and resurrection—events unlike anything the world had ever seen, either before or after.63

  That backward-looking indifference to Africanus’s own time might seem strange for a work organized around the principles of Christian millennialism. But it is very much in line with the archaizing trends in Greek historiography in the age of the Second Sophistic. As Ewan Bowie has pointed out, universal historians of the time tended, for political reasons, to avoid contemporary history altogether.64 Africanus conforms to type. Although the genre of the universal chronicle required him to bring the narrative down to his day, he found his own way to soft-pedal contemporary history. According to Photius, his chronicle treated the period from the resurrection of Christ to his own day almost as a postscript.65 His treatment of Daniel’s apocalyptic vision suggests the reason why. At one point in the discussion, Africanus contemplates the possibility that some part of the apocalypse had yet to be fulfilled. But he then banishes the thought: the words of the prophecy, he writes, can in no way refer to contemporary events, because in the almost 200 years that had elapsed from Christ’s resurrection to his own day, “nothing extraordinary has been recorded in between.”66 With a wave of his hand, Africanus had thus effectively detached his own day from the divine plan of history. Apocalypticism, one of the most extreme manifestations of Christian estrangement from the world, has now been realigned with the archaizing conventions of Greek historiography of the Second Sophistic. No Roman reader would have found Africanus’s denatured version of it at all threatening.