Being Greek under Rome: Cultural Identity, the Second Sophistic and the Development of Empire

Being Greek under Rome Cultural Identity, the Second Sophistic and the Development of Empire

These especially commissioned essays open up a fascinating and novel perspective on a crucial era of western culture. In the second century CE the Roman Empire dominated the Mediterranean, but Greek culture maintained its huge prestige. At the same time, Christianity and Judaism were vying for followers against the lures of such an elite cultural life. This book looks at how writers in Greek from all areas of Empire society respond to their political position, to intellectual authority, to religions and social pressures. It explores the fascinating cultural clashes from which Christianity emerged to dominate the Empire. It presents a series of brilliant insights into how the culture of Empire functions and offers a fascinating and new understanding of the long history of imperialism and cultural conflict. is Reader in Greek Literature and Culture in the University of Cambridge, and Fellow of King's College. His publications include Language, Sexuality, Narrative: the Oresteia (1984), Reading Greek Tragedy (1986), The Poet's Voice: Essays on Poetics and Greek Literature (1991) and Foucault's Virginity: Ancient Erotic Fiction and the History of Sexuality (1995). With Robin Osborne he edited Art and Text in Ancient Greek Culture (1994) and Performance Culture and Athenian Democracy (1999). SIMON GOLDHILL

Being Greek under Rome Cultural Identity, the Second Sophistic and the Development of Empire edited by

Simon Goldhill University of Cambridge

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

PUBLISHED BY THE PRESS SYNDICATE OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE

The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge, United Kingdom CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 2RU, UK 40 West 20th Street, New York NY 10011-4211, USA 10 Stamford Road, Oakleigh, vie 3166, Australia Ruiz de Alarcon 13, 28014 Madrid, Spain Dock House, The Waterfront, Cape Town 8001, South Africa http://www.cambridge.org © Cambridge University Press 2001 This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2001 Typeset in Times New Roman and New Hellenic Greek [AO] A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data

Being Greek under Rome : cultural identity, the second sophistic, and the development of empire / edited by Simon Goldhill. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0 521 66317 2 1. Rome-History-Empire, 30 BC-284 AD 2. Rome-Civilization-Greek influences. 3. Rome-Cultural policy. 4. Rome-Ethnic relations. 5. Sophists (Greek philosophy) I. Goldhill, Simon. DG78.B385 2001 937—dc21 00-064234 ISBN 0 521 66317 2 hardback Transferred to digital printing 2003

Contents

List of contributors Introduction. Setting an agenda: 'Everything is Greece to the wise'

page vii

1

SIMON GOLDHILL

I

Subjected to Empire

1

From Megalopolis to Cosmopolis: Polybius, or there and back again

29

JOHN HENDERSON

2

Mutilated messengers: body language in Josephus

50

MAUD GLEASON

3

Roman questions, Greek answers: Plutarch and the construction of identity

86

REBECCA PRESTON

II

Intellectuals on the margins

4

Describing Self in the language of the Other: Pseudo (?) Lucian at the temple of Hierapolis

123

JAS ELSNER

5

The erotic eye: visual stimulation and cultural conflict

154

SIMON GOLDHILL

6

Visions and revisions of Homer

195

FROMA I. ZEITLIN

III Topography and the performance of culture 7

'Greece is the World': exile and identity in the Second Sophistic TIM WHITMARSH

269

vi 8

Contents Local heroes: athletics, festivals and elite self-fashioning in the Roman East

306

ONNO VAN NIJF

9

The Rabbi in Aphrodite's bath: Palestinian society and Jewish identity in the High Roman Empire

335

SETH SCHWARTZ

List of works cited Index of major passages discussed General index

362 390 393

Contributors

JAS ELSNERis Reader in Greek Art and Archaeology at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. His publications include Art and the Roman Viewer (Cambridge, 1995); Imperial Rome and Christian Triumph (Oxford, 1998); and, as editor, Art and Text in Roman Culture (Cambridge, 1996). teaches at Stanford University in California. Her book Making Men: Sophists and Self-Presentation in Ancient Rome was published by Princeton University Press in 1995.

MAUD GLEASON

GOLDHiLLis Reader in Greek Literature and Culture at Cambridge University, and Fellow at King's College. His publications include Language, Sexuality, Narrative: the Oresteia (Cambridge, 1984); Reading Greek Tragedy (Cambridge, 1986); The Poet's Voice (Cambridge, 1991); Foucaulfs Virginity (Cambridge, 1995).

SIMON

is Reader in Latin Literature at Cambridge University and Fellow at King's College. His publications include Writing Down Rome (Cambridge, 1999); Fighting for Rome (Cambridge, 1998); Figuring Out Roman Nobility: Juvenal's Eighth Satire (Exeter, 1997); and, with Mary Beard, Classics: a Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 1995).

JOHN HENDERSON

is van der Leeuw Professor of Ancient History at Groningen. His publications include The Civic World of Professional Associations in the Roman East (Amsterdam, 1997).

ONNO VAN NIJF

is a Junior Research Fellow at King's College, Cambridge. Her thesis is on Greco-Roman interactions in Empire Culture.

REBECCA PRESTON

is Associate Professor of History at the Jewish Seminary of New York and in charge of the graduate at the Jewish Theological Seminary, New York. His include Josephus and Judaean Politics (1989) and his book is entitled Imperialism and Jewish Society, 200 BCE-

SETH SCHWARTZ

Theological programme publications forthcoming 640 CE.

vii

viii

Contributors

TiMWHiTMARSHisa Fellow at St John's College, Cambridge. His thesis Sumboulos: Power and Culture in the Literature of Roman Greece and his translation of Achilles Tatius will be published shortly. is Charles Ewing Professor of Greek Language and Literature at Princeton. Her books include Playing the Other (Chicago, 1996); Under the Sign of the Shield (Rome, 1982), and, with Jack Winkler Nothing to Do with Dionysus? (Princeton, 1990), and, with Jack Winkler and David Halperin, Before Sexuality (Princeton, 1990).

FROMA ZEITLIN

All the contributors worked at King's College, Cambridge at periods during the 1980s and 1990s except for Maud Gleason (whom we wish had done so), and Onno van Nijf who stayed up the road at Churchill College. This project would not have taken place without the intellectual support of that institution, and the Classics Faculty of Cambridge University.

Introduction. Setting an agenda: 'Everything is Greece to the wise5 Simon Goldhill Three pairs of snapshots, to begin with: Lucian, a Syrian from Samosata on the Euphrates, and one of the stars of this book, made a career as an orator in Rome and the Empire. His work, the Anacharsis, written in the middle of the second century CE, has a dramatic setting in Athens of the sixth century BCE, and is a dialogue between Solon, one of the founding fathers of classical democracy, and Anacharsis, a visiting Scythian sage, about athletic exercise. Anacharsis, seeing citizens roll around in the dust naked, fighting, hitting each other, 'like pigs', wonders about the point of such bizarre behaviour. Solon tries to explain the rationale of the gym to the incredulous Scythian, who points out sharply what punishment would be meted out in Scythia to anyone who thus physically abused a citizen. Naked exercise in the gymnasium was one of the key signs of Greek culture (exported throughout the Mediterranean in the wake of Alexander), along with the theatre (also mocked by Anacharsis (22)) and the symposium. Although there is a long Greek intellectual counter-tradition of questioning the value of athletics (as well as a long, fully institutionalized support for it),1 for many Roman writers it remained a distinctly suspicious and peculiarly Greek activity: not only was its association with Platonic philosophy and its amours difficult to fit into Roman ideals of manhood, but also its role as preparation for war (which Solon emphasizes) was unconvincing to the conquering Rome. Thus Plutarch records in the Roman Questions (273): For the Romans used to be particularly suspicious of rubbing down with oil, and even today believe that nothing has been so responsible for the enslavement and effeminacy (malakia) of the Greeks as their gymnasia and wrestling schools, which engender for the cities much indolence, wasting of time and pederasty and the corruption (diaphtheireiri) of the bodies of the young by regulated sleep, walking, 1

Criticism: see e.g. Eur. Autolycus fr. 382 (cited at Athenaeus 413c-f); Electra 386-9 (where Denniston suggests amusingly on the strength of Aulus Gellius (15.20) that Euripides may be expressing 'a violent reaction against [his own] early training'); Isocrates Panegyr. 1-2 and the further list of references in Branham (1989) 242 n. 25. For the general case, see Foucault (1985); Poliakoff (1987) 89-115; Branham (1989) 85-8. 1

2

Simon Goldhill

rhythmical movement and strict diets. By these practices, they have failed to notice their collapse of military training, and have become happy to be called skilful and noble wrestlers rather than fine hoplites and cavalrymen. It is certainly an effort (ergon) to escape this if you exercise naked in the open air. But those who oil themselves at home and care for their bodies commit no error. The description of Roman suspicions of rubbing down with oil, which are broadened to include all athletic activity, leads to the surprising conclusion - for a Greek, at least - that public stripping is the difficulty which private oiling and exercise in the home avoid. Cicero ('You know what I think of Greek games ...' Ad Atticum 16.5) quotes Ennius (Tusc. Disp. 4.33.70): T o bare one's body amid citizens is the origin of outrage', flagiti principium est nudare inter civis corpora. The strain of fitting Greek and

Roman ideals together is strongly marked as the ever-accommodating Plutarch allows the standard terms of Greek askesis to come under the definition of corruption, and promotes the odd social solution of locating gymnastic exercise in the private sphere of the household. Lucian indeed is only one of several later writers debating the function of the gymnasium in contemporary culture.2 Yet rather than offering any explicit contemporary polemicizing, Lucian writes as if from the sixth century BCE, and dramatizes an exchange between an Athenian culture hero and bemused foreigner. The voices are carefully layered to create a highly ironic satiric pose.3 The foreigner Lucian - from the East - writing in Greek for a cultured audience in the Roman Empire, imagines an eastern foreigner's bemused reaction to a central - but now contested Greek institution; and offers a defence of it distanced by its provenance from the mouth of an antique hero of the state - all written in a carefully articulated Attic Greek of the classical era. How, then, to understand the Greekness, the cultural value, of the gymnasium? From what position is its Greekness to be viewed? The play of insider and outsider, ancient and modern, knowingness and naivety, constructs a complex and ironic positionality for author and readers. If 'speaking to Greekness' is the cultural work projected by the dialogue, any simple or direct polemic is veiled and twisted by the dialogic fun of the satirist. Lucian - typically - establishes the dialogue most wittily within these matrices of insider/outsider, ancient/modern, knowingness/naivety. See e.g. Dio Chrysostom 28 and 29; Galen On Exercise with the Small Ball, Exhortation to the Arts; Thrasyboulos; Philostratus Gymnasticus. I have learnt from my graduate student, Jason Konig, on these texts. There are similar discussions on the institution of the symposium: see e.g. Dio Chrysostom 27; Plutarch Sympotic Questions', Lucian 17. The dialogue is marvellously placed in a tradition of humour and Cynic philosophy by Branham (1989) 81-104 - the best introduction to Lucian's comic voice. My general case here is indebted to him.

Introduction. Setting an agenda

3

Anacharsis suggests finding a shady spot for their discussion (16). After Plato's Phaedrus, it becomes a topos that philosophical discussion needs a tree-shaded spot. But this literary expectation is immediately replaced by the more mundane reason that Anacharsis finds the heat difficult with a bare head. For he has not brought his Scythian hat (pilos) from home (oikothen) because he does not want 'to be the only person among you to be a foreigner in appearance', cos HT) MOVOS ev 0|iTv £EVI£OI|JII TCO cxxrmccTi. Anacharsis wants to fit in, not to be judged a foreigner (xenos) by his appearance, dress or attitude (schema). What is it to look like an Athenian, a Greek? Anacharsis has left his iconographically charged Scythian hat behind, but is sweating and uncomfortable in the heat. His body - its schema - indeed marks him as not an Athenian, as Solon promptly points out: gymnastic exercise, he declares, is precisely what has trained Athenians to survive the sun's rays without a hat! The standard apology of athletics - that it prepares a man to withstand extremes of condition in war - even in this less exalted form of whether to wear a hat to the gym, functions to establish an 'us' and a 'them'. As they walk to the shady spot, Solon promises a (democratically) fair debate, and even offers to honour Anacharsis publicly in the Assembly if he can point out the error of their Athenian education and training: 'You may be sure that the city of Athens will not be ashamed to learn fully what is advantageous from a barbarian and foreign guest' (irapa (3ap[3dpou Kai cjevou). The addition of 'barbarian' recalls the full ideological weight of self and other so familiar from classical rhetoric, as the moral gnome seemingly rings with the openness of Athenian cultural boasting, which along with claims to be the education of Greece also rehearses the possibilities of indeed learning from the East or Egypt. (Solon by the end of the dialogue confesses to the still unpersuaded Anacharsis (39), 'we are not at all in favour of following the foreign', £r|Aouv 8e TCC £EVIKOC OU TTOCVU &£ioO|jev.) Where wisdom comes from is a question of long pedigree. Lucian, himself a barbarian and foreign guest in Athens as in Rome, thus has the sage of Athens declare the propriety of learning from barbarians and foreign guests. Anacharsis responds, however: TOUT' EKETVO fjv ocpa, 6 Eycb Trspi G|jicov T|KOUOV TGOV A0r|vaicov, cos eiV|Te eipcoves £v TOTS Aoyois, 'Now I see! That's exactly what I used to hear about you Athenians, that you do not say what you mean!', 'that you are ironical in discussion!'. How could he, a wagon-dwelling nomad (as Herodotus describes him) know about the culture of the polis? The foreign guest (writes the foreigner in his best Greek 4 ) notes that it is a sign of Athenianness not

It is not certain whether Aramaic was Lucian's first language. See Millar (1993) 454-6.

4

Simon Goldhill

to say what you mean. Especially when being open to learning from foreigners. (In a neat symmetry, the Greek proverb 'to speak like a Scythian' means to speak the blunt truth - and had Anacharsis as its model (Diogenes Laertius 1.101). Lucian himself elsewhere (Scyth. 9) takes Anacharsis as a model for his own story and foreigner's reaction to the Big City - and for the need for good patrons!5). So what is the reader to take from this foreigner's lesson? The ironist's discussion of Athenian irony seems designed to make the scene of learning the site of a ludic confusion of voices. Lucian makes a question of Greek culture - its signs, value, enactment. His Anacharsis remains unconvinced by Solon's case. His prose mobilizes a cultured, educated layering of literary reference, which knowingness frames the naivety of the outsider's questioning of what is a normative commonplace for the insider. He utilizes the voice of the outsider and the setting in the distant past not only to dramatize in an ironic way the old arguments about physical askesis, but also to comment on the contemporary tension within the valuing of Greek exercise in the Roman Empire. He slyly allows his authorial stance - his foreignness, his commitment to Greek culture - further to vein his cultural politics with a destabilizing irony. For Lucian, in the Roman Empire, speaking to Greekness is a complex business. Where wisdom comes from, and the interplay between the margins and centre of Empire are fundamental also for the second of my first pair of snapshots. Philostratus' Life of Apollonius of Tyana - a text which provides the epigraph to this introduction and to Tim Whitmarsh's chapter has Apollonius, embodiment of the sage, travel round the world dispensing wisdom and wonders, and learning himself and for the readers from the marvels of the world and, especially, from the Gymnosophists and Brahmans of the East.6 Apollonius discovers that Phraotes, the Indian king of Taxilla reads Euripides (2.32) and does Greek gymnastic exercise (2.27) (with none of Anacharsis' worries), and is surprised - as would be Indian anthropologists - to discover that the Brahmans too speak classical Greek, and that the village near the palace observes Greek religious rituals.7 The all-wise Indians do criticize standard Greek morality (3.25) 5 6

7

Tim Whitmarsh pointed out to me the importance of this passage. See in particular Eisner (1997a), Flinterman (1995) and, more generally, Bowie (1978). I have learnt especially from the forthcoming book of Tim Whitmarsh - and from his chapter in this volume. Plutarch (Mor. 328c) observes that Indians recognized Greek gods (assimilating Indian divinities to Dionysus and Heracles who visited India), and Dio Chrysostom says that the Indians know Homer through translation (53.6). Philostratus goes further than these.

Introduction. Setting an agenda

5

(as does Apollonius),8 but when a pompous Median king arrives (3.26) who attacks philosophy, Greek manhood, Greek customs, Apollonius is moved to defend Greekness and the Greeks in passionate terms. The king bursts into tears (3.32), and declares that he had been misled by Egyptians, who claimed to be the true holy men, law-givers and originators of mystic initiations. Herodotus found in Egypt a privileged origin of western culture; before the all-wise Brahmans of the East Greek culture is vindicated. Apollonius' travels, in different ways, are designed to map the claim that 'Everything is Greece to the wise man'. For my purposes here, I want to highlight two brief but telling moments from this long work. The first comes from the introduction, where Philostratus tells us that a man from Ninevah, Damis, who had travelled with Apollonius, had written his memoirs (1.3): 'a certain relative of Damis brought these previously unread documents of reminiscences to the attention of the Empress Julia. I was part of her circle - for she admired and enjoyed all types of rhetorical exercise - and she commanded me to redraft these essays .. .'.9 A tantalizing glimpse of an educated Greek circle around the Roman emperor's Greek wife sets Philostratus' tale of knowledge and power, philosophy and kingship, right at the heart of the Empire's structures of authority10 - or, at very least, claims to. When Apollonius (5.45) is depicted as encouraging Vespasian to take up the imperial throne and recalling his principled opposition to Nero, the clash of philosopher and emperor takes on a pointed significance from this frame.11 This is to be an authoritative tale for authority. The reader is encouraged to see the account of far-off travel as bringing claims of the cultural capital of Greece and other parts of the world into the circle of the empress herself. The margins and the centre are in communication and the cultural value of Greekness is integral to that communication. The second passage (4.5) is about names. At the sacrifice for the Panionia at Smyrna, Apollonius reads the decree inviting him to join the celebration. But he sees that one Lucullus has signed the decree. He was shocked to come across 'a name which was not wholly Ionian'. He sent a letter to the Council expressing his 'reproof (epiplexis) for such a 8

9

10

11

Bowie (1978) 1681-2 notes that this criticism is less evident in the letters collected under the name of Apollonius, whereas (1680) 'as presented by Philostratus, Apollonius . . . insists aggressively on the superiority of the Hellenic peoples over barbarian and delivers emphatic defences of Hellenic culture and religion'. The fictionality of Damis has been much discussed: see Bowie (1978) for excellent discussion and bibliography; also Anderson (1986); Flinterman (1995) 80-8; and Bowie (1994). On the circle of Julia Domna, see Bowersock (1969) 101-9 (who criticizes those who claim too much from this remark). For detailed discussion, see Flinterman (1995).

6

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barbarism (barbarismos)\ He also found names like Fabricius, and wrote, says Philostratus, with real force on the issue. The demand for pure Ionian - Greek - names for the Panionia certainly stands against the pattern of naming in the East where Greeks with citizenship of the Roman Empire conjoined Greek and Roman names (and where Roman names occur frequently in all forms of inscription). How would Julia Domna receive a plea for purity of nomenclature? What claim is it making for Ionian culture (over and against the barbarism of the Roman)? Philostratus' Apollonius is putting the signs of (true) Greekness on the agenda. Fascinatingly, two of the letters circulated under the name of Apollonius address the same issue. 12 In Ep. 71, Apollonius asks the Ionians why they think that their family (gene) or status as colonies constitute a sufficient reason to be called Greek (Hellenes). Rather, he declares, what makes a Greek is sOr) KOCI VO\XO\ KOCI yAcoTTcc KOCI (3ios i'5ios, 'practice and laws and language and private life', and their 'appearance (schema) and looks (eidos)\ As in the Anacharsis, schema is a central element of selfpresentation. Greekness is constituted not by ethnicity or descent, but by behavioural patterns, language and physical appearance. 13 Damis, indeed, travels with Apollonius in order that 'by education (pepaideumenos) he might stop being a barbarian . . . and become a Greek through him and consort with Greeks' (3.43). Thus, concludes the letter, in giving up the names of 'naval men and legislators' for Roman names, the Ionians will not be recognized in the Underworld by their ancestors: they will have forfeited (the sign of) their Greekness - TCC TCOV Trpoyovcov
13

14

On the status of these letters see Penella (1979) 23ff.; Bowie (1978), with bibliographies. On the letters and issues of identity see Flinterman (1995) 92. Isocrates Panegyricus 50, in an important precursor of this idea, argues that dianoia, paideusis, and koine phusis and not genos make up Greekness. Dictys Cretensis' account of the Trojan War was said to have been found in a tomb, but the device of discovering an unpublished manuscript is a topos of fiction/history perhaps more in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: see Day (1987). On Philostratus and fictionality, see Bowie (1994) for discussion and bibliography.

Introduction. Setting an agenda

7

masks in the way that so delights Lucian. None the less, the expression and defence of a true Greekness requires a complex rhetorical position and reading. Both Lucian and Philostratus see Greek culture - its establishment, value, maintenance - as a question integral to their intellectual projects, and to the social impact of their writing. Culture - both in the sense of an elite body of learning and in the sense of a way of life, a habitus - is for both an issue that demands discussion. My first pair of snapshots came from high literary culture, in a space articulated by a centre at Rome and a shifting East. My second and briefer pair of snapshots turns to the world of Asia Minor, the eastern Empire, and to a quite different sort of record. In the first century CE, Tiberius Claudius Damas put up more than one inscription in Didyma and Miletus recording his involvement in the local cult of Apollo, and, in particular, his renewal of traditional customs.15 He memorializes (Didyma 237 II) how he had accepted the privilege16 of the priestship over and above (or, possibly, instead of) a generalship: u-rrep oTponriyias Aafkbv TT}V 7rpo(|>r|T£iav. Claudius Damas, whose name, no doubt to Apollonius' chagrin, indicates his Greek provenance and Roman citizenship, is making a display of his civic munificence, of his performance in and for the community, and does so in part by his memorialization of his commitment to the past and thus his role in the perpetuation of ancestral tradition. His support of festival culture in more than one city - Greeks could be citizens of more than one polity as well as the Empire - is part of the politics of individual and civic prestige, which can spread 'beyond local culture and politics to the relation of cities and emperors',17 and involve vast expense.18 Despite the long history of civic benefaction,19 there is a 'significant change in the nature of urban priorities in the second and third centuries AD', 20 and Damas is typical in celebrating the performance of his religious role. Viewed from the norms of the classical Greek polis, however, or from the Roman cursus of military honours, the specific rejection of the generalship is striking. Both for Greek citizens of the classical era, and for the Greeks of the continuing literary tradition, military activity is integral to any definition of masculinity and citizenship: 'war is

15 16

17 18 19 20

LSAM 53 [Milet VI 1, 134]; D i d y m a 237 II; D i d y m a 268. O n Scoped, which 'became almost technical for this imperial grant' (of authorization) (Mitchell (1990) 191), see R o b e r t REA (1960) 2 9 4 - 6 ; Millar (1977) 452. Mitchell (1990) 189. See Millar (1977) for the large picture. See C o u l t o n (1987) for some figures. See G a u t h i e r (1985) for the earlier material. Mitchell (1990) 189.

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to a man what marriage is to a woman'.21 Yet Didyma had no standing army at this period, and the 'generalship' cannot have had extensive military, or perhaps even political responsibilities. For Claudius Damas, thus, typically the generalship is something publicly less valued than the restoration of cult practice. For all that Homer and Thucydides provide the script of Greek education, the models of Achilles and Pericles (not to mention Alexander) are left to rhetorical or philosophical exercise.22 So - to frame Damas with literary culture again - Plutarch writes in his Precepts of Statecraft (Mor. 805a): 'Nowdays, when civic affairs do not include military leadership, the overthrow of tyrants, the making of alliances, what opening for a distinguished and brilliant public career could a person make? There remain public trials and embassies to the Emperor ...' Indeed, where Pericles could say to himself everyday Take care! You rule free men, you rule Greeks, Athenian citizens', the modern politician must say to himself 'You rule ruled (dpx6|i£vos apxeis) over a city controlled by proconsuls, the representatives of Caesar ...': there can be no pride in a crown 'when you see a Senator's boots above your head' (813e). To see a Greek of the Empire trying to imitate or emulate the glory of past generations, declares Plutarch ringingly, is 'like watching small children try on their daddy's shoes - laughable' (814a). This does not stop Plutarch himself repeatedly using such examples, for sure, but he still concludes that it is the contemporary statesman's job to point out the weakness of Greek affairs: 'for there can be no [military] leadership or glory now' (814e-f). The Greek writers of the Empire are often characterized as having a special and longing view of the glories of the Greek past. Indeed, the look backward to the classical polis, via Alexander's triumphant conquest of the world, dominates the range of literary paradigms in this period. Yet as Plutarch's emotive prose shows, in juxtaposition to Damas' memorial, the construction of that past is also veined with a complex dynamic of attraction and rupture, affiliation and dismissal. The question of whose past is to count, and the ambivalence, redefinition and desire which inform such historicizing pictures, mark such genealogies as the site of contest as much as tradition. Plutarch's strikingly expressed dissection of contemporary civic life reveals the tensions within the political and social strategies of self-positioning through the (classical) past. In second-century Stratoniceia, also in Asia Minor on the main inland road from Halicarnassus, Sosandros, son of Diomedes, had a long in21 22

A rewrite ofVernant (1980) 23. Plutarch makes this point explicitly (Mor. 814c): 'Marathon, Eurymedon, Plataea - and all the exempla which make the people swell and highstep vainly - should be left to the schools of the sophists.' See Swain (1996) 167.

Introduction. Setting an agenda

9

scription set up which recorded the establishment and rules of a new cult practice (LSAM 69). Every day, thirty well-born boys in white robes and garlands, carrying branches, were to process to the Council Chamber where statues of Zeus Panamerios and Hekate, the main deities of the town were set up. There the boys were to sing a daily hymn to these gods 23 (KCCO' 6Kdcrrr|v fmepav ). Instructions are included for maintaining the correct number of boys, as are other regulations and restrictions. Other hymns for Hekate at different intervals are specified. Elements in such a ritual can certainly be traced in earlier practices, and the balance of innovation and conservatism is especially hard to evaluate in ancient religious behaviour. None the less, the establishment of a new, daily, civic ritual of hymn singing, in the Council Chamber, which links the moral instruction of youth with a carefully aestheticized performance, seems paradigmatic of the changing form of elite engagement in religious ritual. While building programmes offered the opportunity for major displays of benefaction and civic honour - 'local aspirations were redirected in particular to building', and Hadrian, for example, was a leading figure in sponsoring new civic construction throughout the Greek East24 - 'games and rituals offered a rival claim on funds and an alternative route to individual and civic prestige'.25 The provision of meals - at two banquets in mid-second-century Stratoniceia the priest provided from his own finances for every citizen twelve pounds of pork, beef and mutton and eight pounds of bread26; the opportunity for the performance of hierarchical roles in ritual - it is not by chance that Sosandros' chorus will sing in the Council Chamber, the centre of political authority; the opportunity for the interstate agonistic display of international competition - as in the foundation of the Demostheneia at Oenoanda;27 the connection of the elite with the highest level of Roman authority - specified in Sosandros' inscription; all make new festivals privileged sites for the exercise of civic status. The very recording of such events in full scale inscriptions is similarly performative: 'we may link this monumental display of writing to 23

24

25 26 27

See LSAM 28, where hymns are to be sung at the temple of Dionysus at Teos Ka8' r\\ikpav at the opening and closing of the doors. Sokolowski ((1955) 82 ad 28.8) argues that this m u s t m e a n every day of the festival because it would be impossible in practice to maintain. R o b e r t (1937) 3 1 - 5 argues, however, for 'service journalier d u temple' b o t h in Teos a n d Stratoniceia. T h e Asclepieion at P e r g a m o n , t h o u g h in different circumstances, certainly h a d daily ritual. T h e conspicuous expense of the foundation is, of course, p a r t of its significance. T h e rules which specify w h a t h a p p e n s when a boy of the chorus becomes a n ephebe m a y imply a long-term project. Mitchell (1990) 189; on H a d r i a n ' s buildings, for a convenient list see Magie (1950) 5 6 6 92; 6 1 4 - 2 0 . Mitchell (1990). This is most fully worked out in Worrle (1988) a n d Rogers (1991b). M a g i e (1950) 588. Well discussed by Worrle: the relevant decree is translated usefully in Mitchell (1990).

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the appearance of a visible and self-conscious elite ... which was able to muster all the legal, political, cultural and material resources necessary to make such a statement about its own power'.28 Sosandros' contribution is indicative not merely of civic pride or personal benefaction but also of the construction of a new civic tradition, the invention of a (ritual) past (to come). Within the Roman Empire, the local politics of status and intensification of cult engagement frame new constructions of achievement and memorialization. Both Ti. Claudius Damas and Sosandros erect monuments of selfpublicity which inevitably reflect changing models of the performance of citizenship. Both show a self-conscious awareness of (the construction of) tradition, and the role of ritual in the formation of civic identity. Both are paradigmatic of the expectations and range of celebrated success for Greek citizens in the eastern Empire. It was way back in free, imperialist Athens that Aeschylus, the playwright, could - emblematically - boast in his epitaph only of his military achievements against the barbarians. My final pair of snapshots returns to Rome and a different glance at the Greek sophos. Juvenal's third satire, produced in the early decades of the second century, perhaps as late as the time of Hadrian's succession, puts into the mouth of one Umbricius a virulent view of the city polluted by the music and sex of the East, and by everything Greek - though even the Greek (like Lucian) is really from Syria: the river Orontes has for a while been pouring its language, customs and music into the Tiber, like sewage (62-3). The countryman, the backbone of Rome, has been infected by foreignness (67-8): rusticus Me tuus sumit trechedipna, Quirine, et ceromaticofert niceteria collo, That yeoman of yours, Quirinus, has adopted the sarong; and bears off the palme d'or on his pommaded shoulder.' Strange, Greeky, sounds (trechedipna, cerematico, niketeria), strange dress, and the surprisingly alien oiling of the wrestler's shoulder sum up the fall from grace of the honest Roman stock. The reader, rolling Juvenal's foreign syllables around his/her mouth is also stained by these impurities of tongue ... The list of Greek things and places culminates in the celebrated attack on Greek intellectuals (73-8): ingenium velox, audacia perdita, sermo promptus et Isaeo torrentior. ede quid ilium esse putes. quemvis hominem secum attulit ad nos: grammaticus, rhetor, geometres, pictor, aliptes, augur, schoenobates, medicus, magus, omnia novit Graeculus esuriens: in caelum iusseris ibit. 28

Rogers (1991b) 23.

Introduction. Setting an agenda

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Swift wit, outrageous nerve, ready speech, More gushing than Isaeus. Tell me, then, what do you think That man is? Whatever you want - he's brought it with him to us: Teacher, rhetorician, mathematician, artist, personal trainer, Soothsayer, rope-climber, doctor, sage: he knows everything, the hungry little Greek. Give him the order, he'll go to the sky! The insider's alienated dismissal of the hungry Greek and his farrago of learning (Roman to Roman, like Cicero and his pals 29 ) chimes tellingly with ApoUonius' claims of his own wisdom, his travels, his self-promotion (not to mention Lucian's range of representations and masks - he even flies to the moon in the Vera Historia}). Umbricius, the amicus of the ego of the poem, declaims his sense of Rome through his sense of foreignness and invites the reader to come along with him - ad nos. Greek learning and Greek culture function as signs that articulate a boundary of a man's fitting into society and offers the Roman reader - through his/her recognition, his/her knowledge of the little Greek - a matrix of self-placement. 'Place' - in all its senses - and mobility structure Umbricius' discourse and putting the Greek in his place is integral to his self-expression. The insult of Graeculus is central to my final picture too. The emperor Hadrian neatly encapsulates the difficulty of the categories of Romanness and Greekness - from the imperial throne itself. Born in Spain, bearded like the Greek, renowned for his boy-lover Antinous, whose statue he circulated after his death as if he were a cult figure - even to Stratoniceia and renowned too for extensive travels in the Greek East rather than running the Empire from Rome, Hadrian is not easy to fit into the old ideals of Roman manhood 30 (which he is helping to change). 'Hadrian's own Hellenism [was] expressed in friendships and appointments, visits and constant attention to Greek cities, and above all the formation of the Panhellenion' 31 - the institutional regulation of civic Greekness. The account of his life in the Historia Augusta marks this well especially with regard to his early career. (Although the date and provenance of this text has been very widely contested, and its value as a historical source challenged, the ideological import of these anecdotes, which most scholars

29 30

31

'Graeculus': Cicero de oral. 1.11.47; 1.22.107; adfam 7.18.1. - and elsewhere. Stratoniceia was renamed Stratoniceia-Hadrianopolis, and had not only a statue of Alcinous but also a new cult - linking Greek and Roman terms and customs - of Hadrian kynegesios, Hadrian 'the hunter': see Gawantka and Zahrnt (1977). On Hadrian's travels see e.g. SHA 'Hadrian', one of the bases of Magie's account (1950) (on Stratoniceia, 616). Bowie (1978) 1683. Flinterman (1995) 44 calls it a 'legendary love of things Greek'. On the Panhellenion see Spawforth and Walker (1985) and Spawforth and Walker (1986). More nuanced, however, is Jones (1996).

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think come from early sources anyway, is still relevant.32) Hadrian, it notes in the obligatory section on education, was instilled at an early age with such a love of philosophy that he was nick-named 'Graeculus' (2): imbutusque impensius Graecis studiis ingenio eius sic ad ea declinante ut a nonnullis Graeculus diceretur, 'he was dedicated rather too eagerly to Greek learning, which is where his own intellect tended, so that he was called by some "little Greek"'. The HA is written explicitly here (as if) to Diocletian, Roman historian to Roman emperor - an attempt to control and promote an authoritative image of the past in the highly competitive and dangerous world of representing the emperor - and the author carefully calibrates how Hadrian was a little too Greek by intellect and training. Not only Juvenal's city, but also the leader of the Roman world, is dangerously impure in his Romanitas. Impensius - his desire for Greekness is wrongly expended. Indeed, Hadrian's first speech in the Senate is represented as indicating the difficulty which the reader is being encouraged to see in Hadrian's persona (3): cum imperatoris orationem in senatu agrestius pronuntians risus esset, usque ad summam peritiam et facundiam Latinis operam dedit, 'when he delivered the speech of the emperor [Trajan] in the Senate, his rather too provincial accent provoked laughter, so he worked hard to achieve maximum skill and fluency in Latin'. The Graeculus emperor has to learn Latin in order to avoid the laughter of the Romans in the Senate. (Apollonius, specifies Philostratus (1.7), spoke Greek without a trace of his (native) Cappadocian accent.) Interestingly, the threat of such laughter is recorded even by Cicero in his De Oratore, where - in quite a different context - an orator who speaks Latin badly, Crassus declares, will be thought not 'a man'.33 Hadrian is not the 'rusticus9 of Juvenal's imaginary projection, but 'agrestius9, 'rather too much of the fields', 'too non-urban'. Excessively educated (in a Greek way), insufficiently educated (in a Roman way) - Hadrian is out of kilter. The HA's careful rhetoric of judgement ('rather too', 'rather too') displays the work of finding Hadrian's place in the categories of culture. For the HA here, as for Juvenal, placing Greekness is a crucial strategy in the politics of representation. These three pairs of snapshots - from Greek high literary culture, the material world of civic memorialization, the (self-)representation of 32 33

See Syme (1971); Barnes (1978) for accounts with large bibliographies to the debate. Cic. de orat. I l l 52 [xiv]: n e m o enim u m q u a m est o r a t o r e m q u o d Latine loqueretur admiratus: si est aliter, irrident, neque e u m o r a t o r e m t a n t u m m o d o sed h o m i n e m n o n putant, ' F o r n o one ever admired a n orator because he spoke proper Latin; if it is otherwise, they laugh at him, a n d think him n o t only not an o r a t o r but n o t a h u m a n . ' See also Sextus Empiricus Against the Professors 1.176ff. O n the b a c k g r o u n d to this, see n o w A t h e r t o n (1998).

Introduction. Setting an agenda

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Romans, faced by Greekness - are designed to evoke some of the ways in which an affiliation to Greekness is a particular, varied and shared concern for the elites of the Empire. Since Herodotus (at least) the definition of Greekness (over and against the barbarian other) is a familiar aspect of Greek self-reflection. The Alexandrian community from its foundation as a Greek ruling minority in a vast polyglot metropolis, developed further strategies of self-representation and dealt with different dynamics of interaction with, say, the Egyptian population: 'Egypt' (as part of this dynamic of self and other) becomes a paradigmatic site of the imagination for Greek writers which is stratified with its history of representations. Yet for all this long and intricate history, the Roman empire radically affects the possibilities of what Greekness might imply. That is the primary subject of this book.

n As the snapshots have already outlined, the issue of Greekness is articulated across a range of writings, social practices and ideological expressions. Explicit statements about the constituent elements of Greek culture abound (from different viewpoints), as do explicit responses to Roman rule from Greeks, and to Greek achievements by Romans. Such explicit utterances, however, form only part of what is a far more complex picture - and not merely because of the difficulty of accounting for the rhetoric of such explicitness in each work (as with Juvenal), nor because of the invested power relations which make statements about power by elite writers more than usually veiled.34 Affiliations to Greekness are seen - explored, contested, projected - also through the education system which linked the elite of Empire in a proclaimed communality of paideia, a shared system of reference and expectation.35 What it means to be Greek is also implicit in claims about tradition and the past; in the study of philosophy, rhetoric and medicine; in performances of ritual; in building projects; in sport and other entertainments.36 Since Greek becomes a language of advancement and a key sign of the cultivated citizen, the Greek language transcends - and provokes debate about - ethnic origin in the determination of affiliation and status: as the orator Favorinus 34

35

36

T h e constant b u t uncontested focus on the explicit is a huge limitation of Swain (1996); the determination of a direct 'pro-' or ' a n t i - R o m a n stance' also prevents Flinterman (1995) being as nuanced as it might be. See in particular M o r g a n (1998), also Bowersock (1969), Anderson (1989), Swain (1996); and, generally, T o o a n d Livingstone (1998); o n such 'imagined communities', in general, Anderson (1991). See e.g. o n the past: Bowie (1970); on buildings: Alcock (1993); Laurence (1998); philosophy a n d rhetoric, Gleason (1995); F o u c a u l t (1986); medicine, Barton (1994); also, in general, Woolf (1994). ( E a c h with further bibliographies.)

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famously and paradoxically is said to have declared of himself: obv cEAAr|vi£eiv, 'I am a Hellenized Gaul', 'a Greek-speaking Gaul'. 37 Both Romanitas and Greekness are implicated with ideals of masculinity and femininity, the formulation of the political subject, the conceptualization of the body... All these areas - and this list is not intended to be exhaustive - are elements of the complex process of self-placement in Empire society. This vast subject is indicated by the subtitle of this volume 'Cultural Identity, the Second Sophistic, and the Development of Empire'. Both phrases 'cultural identity' and 'Second Sophistic' should raise eyebrows, even though both the Greek writing of the Roman Empire and the topic of self-presentation and self-definition are particularly hot topics in classics (and other fields) at present. 'The Second Sophistic' is conventionally used to refer to Greek writings (and the intellectual society that produced them) from the first to the third centuries CE (following - and authorized by - its use in Philostratus VS 481). It has been criticized as a term for good reasons. There is no indication among the writers themselves that they constitute a group with a shared agenda (despite Philostratus). It forces a series of very different projects and personalities into a single and distorting category. The criteria for inclusion, however, are also themselves difficult to pin down: is an interest in philosophy a necessary condition or one which excludes a writer from a sophistic group? Is the explicit title 'sophist' a sign of insult or a badge of honour? Should a medical writer or geographer be included? The dates of this so-called period are notoriously vague. Should Chariton from thefirstcentury, Heliodorus from - probably - the fourth - be included? There are some benefits to the term: it emphasizes the constant importance of rhetorical training and the rewards of rhetorical success in Empire society, and stresses the constant pull backwards to the glorious traditions of classical Greece, the so-called first Sophistic, a return which is marked most strongly by the regular use of a highly literate classical Greek through different genres.38 It is not clear to me that these benefits outweigh the criticisms. So why is the term maintained? Partly because it has a conventional recognizability which may help prospective readers towards a rough expectation of the book's contents, and partly - and more importantly - because the range of material and questions posed here will, we hope, prompt wider reflection about the problem of periodization and determination of agenda which the phrase 'Second Sophistic' provokes. Thus Polybius from the second century BCE is the subject of the first chapter, although he fits in with no standard 37 38

Favorinus receives a thorough treatment from Gleason (1995). Well discussed in Swain (1996). More generally, see Hobsbawm (1990) 51-63; 93-100; 110-20; Anderson (1991) ch. 5.

Introduction. Setting an agenda

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definition of the period of the Second Sophistic, because he provides a foundational text of how to write history under Empire, a model for the issues of narrating the loss of power, the imposition of authority, the shifts of status of individuals, the logic of accommodation and assimilation. So Plutarch in the first century CE takes him as an exemplum of the modern, Greek political figure.39 Similarly, Jewish writing of the fourth century is included, as is a range of Christian writing (even in Latin), although they are not usually brought into the category of the Second Sophistic, because the gradual transformation of the Roman Empire into a Christian Empire requires not merely the search for references to Christian or Jewish activity in Greek and Roman writers, but also the recognition that each of these texts emerges from a culture which is - in places, at times - in conflict around the fundamental ideals of citizenship, religion, engagement. Our use of the familiar term 'Second Sophistic' is a convenient starting point to explore - via its limitations - the possibilities of understanding more adequately the tensions, clashes and conservative strands of Empire society. 'Cultural identity' is a term more familiar in fields outside classics,40 but it is also a phrase replete with difficulties. Both 'culture' and 'identity' are buzz words of the contemporary academy, and (thus) suffer from competing definitions, multiple expectations and confused argumentative usage. 'Culture' has shifted in use from an implication of a privileged body of artistic materials (and a set of attitudes surrounding them), which transcends localism and links the generations of civilized humans culture as opposed to anarchy, say: 'the best that has been thought or known' (Arnold) - to an idea of a conglomeration of protocols, behavioural patterns, micro-social expectations and ideological formations 'the culture of the University'; 'the culture of cigarettes' ('Culture is ordinary' (Williams)). In its more general usage, this latter expression has affinities with Bourdieu's 'habitus' (hence 'the cultural climate', 'the culture of Britain in the 90s'): 'a field articulating the life-world of subjects ... and the structures created by human activity';41 in its more localized application, it implies frames of institutional expectation and regulation: 'the culture of the student bar'. The recognition and description of 39 40

41

See Mor. 814c-d. Though see Laurence and Berry (1998); Miles (1999). Laurence does not consider the range of the term, and brings mainly archaeological and historical evidence to bear. Gender, Greekness, rhetoric, education (for example) do not play a part in his Empire culture. Miles' volume (from the same stable as this) considers the later period of the Empire. The focus on 'identity' is different from Dougherty and Kurke's 'cultural poetics' (which deals only with archaic Greece). Gilroy (1987) 17.

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'cultures' indeed has become a dominant trope of social analysis: thus culture 'is a description of a particular way of life which expresses certain meanings and values not only in art and learning but also in institutions and ordinary behaviour. The analysis of culture, from such a definition, is the clarification of the meanings and values implicit and explicit in a particular way of life, a particular culture.'42 For the academy, the invention of cultural studies and of cultural anthropology (and more recently cultural history) has been influential in this gradual shift of sense. 'Cultural studies', in part motivated by a desire to challenge the social as well as the intellectual exclusiveness of what was now to be called 'high culture', focused initially and polemically on what it called 'popular culture', or 'mass culture'.43 The contested definition - appropriation - of the word 'culture' is a repeated and integral dynamic of this field (and is often explicitly related to the issue of 'identity': 'culture has now been institutionalized as the battleground for a discourse of identity'44). In post-war Britain (where this movement became institutionalized in a particularly important way), but also in the USA of the Depression (and later), the political thrust of this redefinition of scope is patent (and potent).45 The history of thisfieldhas been told several times, and does not need rehearsing here.46 Its direct effect on classics has been small, in part because the opportunities of studying 'working class' (slave, helot, latifundia, poor man, even female) culture are severely handicapped by the largely elite evidence which survives. Indirectly, however, its shift in focus is strongly reflected in modern classics which has readily adopted the stance of 'cultural history' - 'the study of the processes by which meaning is constituted'.47 So, to take examples from classical Athens, an interest in the micro-sociology of the symposium, the analysis of the role of the mirror, the burgeoning interest in magic, each link material artefacts, writings, imagery, to look at classical Greece not through the lens of the glory that was Greece - the cultural value of tragedy, epic, the Parthenon, the statues of Pheidias - nor through the often patronizing rubric of 'everyday life' (which in classics rarely involves a sophisticated conceptualization of the 42

43

44

45 46 47

Williams (1961) 41: who is ritually honoured as the founding father of British Cultural Studies: see e.g. Frow (1994); Turner (1990); McGuigan (1992). See e.g. Ross (1989); Schiach (1989); McGuigan (1992); Chaney (1994); Frow (1994); and more discursively Carey (1992). The '"invention" or "discovery" of popular culture' is, of course, to be dated earlier than this: see Burke (1978) who sees J. G. Herder as especially important. Chaney (1994) 85; 'culture as a complex of figurations has come to be seen as a basis for identity' id. 99. 'Questions of culture . . . quickly become anguished questions of identity', Rosaldo (1993) 18. Also from a different point of view Apple (1996). See e.g. Turner (1990); Jameson (1993); Ross (1989). See e.g. the works cited in the previous three notes, each with further bibliographies. Chartier (1988) 14.

Introduction. Setting an agenda

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normal or everyday, despite the work of de Certeau and others48); but rather with a view to investigating how rituals, objects, behavioural norms, explicit discussions, together contribute to an understanding of how Greek society conceptualized itself, its activities, its actors.49 'Cultural anthropology', a discipline which has repeatedly and selfreflexively (re)written its own history as it has progressed,50 has had a more direct influence on this development of classics. Although classics has been intimately involved with the formulation of anthropology as a discipline from its inception,51 contemporary classics has drawn extensively on the methodology of anthropology to reconsider its study of ancient society. Anthropology's recognition of the otherness of different societies has made strikingly evident the ideological underpinnings which support the ideals of 'culture' as a shared inheritance which links civilized human beings across the generations. It is now a commonplace in classics to consider Greece and Rome not simply as the origin of western culture but as societies whose cultures are (in ways to be calibrated) other, different from our own. The Greek writings of the Roman Empire have often been dismissed by critics, particularly in the heyday of nineteenth-century classics, precisely as not being part of the canon of 'culture'. In recent years, however, they have become increasingly viewed as central documents for understanding the pressures and tensions of a society in change - with the growth of Christianity, the development of Rabbinic Judaism, and the increasing claims of Greek paideia as a link between the educated of Empire from Gaul via Africa to Syria and Italy itself. The different needs of different Greek writers to articulate their position in the Empire and within a Greek intellectual tradition - and others' responses to this varied Greekness are significant elements in this heady cultural mix. The modern discussions of 'culture' find fascinating echoes here, as paideia (a buzz word of the Second Sophistic) implies both a body of privileged texts, artworks, values - a culture to be inherited and preserved as a sign of civilization and also a process of acculturation - education - which 'makes men', which informs the structures and activities of the lives of the civic elite. This book is broadly and variously informed by the methodologies involved in modern approaches to cultural study (history, anthropology), but is also particularly interested in the self-conscious, literate accounts of 48 49

50

51

See e.g. de Certeau (1985); Stewart (1980); Bourdieu (1979). On symposium, see especially Lissarrague (1987); Murray (1990); on mirrors, FrontisiDucroux and Vernant (1997); on magic Faraone and Obbink (1991); Graf (1997). Starting points: Geertz (1973); Stocking (1983); Clifford and Marcus (1986); Stocking (1987); Banks (1996). A history of textbooks of 'cultural anthropology' would be an interesting project. See Detienne (1981); Humphreys (1978).

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'culture' produced by a range of elites working to find, maintain, redefine a place within society and its traditions. Identity' is no less a contested term than 'culture'. It is a key expression in philosophical, psychoanalytic, historical and sociological discussions of the self and the subject - and is defined and used in different senses between these different disciplines: 'just now everybody wants to talk about "identity" \ 5 2 Yet for all the work on identity - its crises, its expression, its formulation - the very use of the word has been passionately challenged both in general and specific terms. At one level, 'identity' has seemed to have worrying implications because it can be taken to imply an essence for the self - the true and/or natural centre of a person. The danger of such essentialist models, as has been pointed out most tellingly by a series of feminist critics, is in part the failure to recognize the power of social construction - 'one is not born a woman, one becomes one' - in part the damagingly repressive, consequent political assumption that there is an inevitable and natural social (intellectual, physical, political) role that is required by such an essence.53 A commitment to an essentialist model is seen as being complicit with society's drive to make its own structures of power seem natural. This political argument (familiar from the work of Bhabha and others) is given also a fully articulated psychological dimension by, say, the immensely influential arguments of Judith Butler (1990), who constructs a performative model of self-formation precisely designed to challenge an essentialist model of gender and identity. At another and corollary level, the term 'identity' can be taken to imply 'singleness', 'sameness', 'unity'. The concept of the 'unity of the self, however, has come under increasing attack in the modern academy. On the one hand, particularly in the wake of Freud as read by Lacan, in literary and cultural studies as much as in technical psychoanalytic discussions, the subject has been conceptualized as split, fractured, non-unified constructed in language, crossed by desire, mirrored by the other.54 Thus 52

53

54

Mercer (1990) 4 - the epigraph to Miles (1999). See also for starting points to these areas: R o r t y (1976); Williams (1973); Smith (1991); B h a b h a (1990); Butler (1990); G a l l o p (1985); Silverman (1983). Q u o t a t i o n is from de Beauvoir (1973) 301 (glossed e.g. by C h a n t e r (1995) 47ff); good starting points in Butler (1990); Riley (1988); Ortner a n d Whitehead (1981); Fuss (1989); M a c C o r m a c k a n d Strathern (1980); Strathern (1988). Especially i m p o r t a n t has been the reception of the French-speaking Kristeva, Irigaray a n d Cixous: on this see conveniently C h a n t e r (1995) 2 1 - 4 6 , with further bibliography. A long history: some inevitably arbitrary seeming starting points: Wilden (1972), w h o calls identity 'a paradoxical concept' 25; C o w a r d a n d Ellis (1977); Silverman (1983); Dollimore (1984); Belsey (1985); G a l l o p (1985); Butler (1990). M a n y other texts could be cited: as Barthes writes (1977) 168; ' T o d a y the subject apprehends himself elsewhere'', 'I a m not contradictory, I a m dispersed' 143. L a c a n ' s version of F r e u d ' s concept of Spaltung has been central to the psychoanalytic model.

Introduction. Setting an agenda

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criticism of the term 'identity' has focused on its inability to take adequate account of this (post)Freudian topography of the conscious and subconscious mind, or of the relation of self to language.55 On the other hand, social theorists have pointed to the multiple and changing roles, positions, masks, by and in which a person acts out a life. If a person(ality) is formulated, categorized, identified in exchanges with the world, then this pattern of transactions will remain in disruptive tension with the postulation of a single, unified identity. Thus Marilyn Strathern in her fine and deeply nuanced analysis of Melanesian societies shows how 'persons appear as individuated women and men with influence and power at their disposal', but also at the same time how shifting positionalities and relationships constantly rearticulate a self in transaction - 'the multiple person produced as the object of multiple relationships'.56 The idea of singleness and sameness in 'identity' stands against such a sense of the social self. This leads - a further level - towards a virulent contemporary political debate. For identity as a term has become particularly associated with arguments about race and nationalism - and what is sometimes called 'identity polities'. On the one hand, determination of a racial or national identity has proved an important political gesture of empowerment, particularly for groups that are being threatened, repressed or in a subordinate position. That is, the definition of group boundaries, with shared values and practices has enabled resistance against dominant authorities. 'Say it loud, I'm black and I'm proud.' On the other hand, determination of a racial or national identity is an integral gesture in the dominance of racism and nationalism - and works to obscure other connections and differences between groups or individuals.57 'Culture' becomes a charged term in the pursuit of national identity too: 'Culture [Kultur] can't be acquired by education. Culture is in the blood.'58 What is more, particularly in 'identity polities', the claim of affiliation with an 'identity' can come to seem extremely close to the circulation of a stereotype: 'I write as a white, middle-class, male ...' Thus the term 'identity' has become the focus of arguments in these areas because in implying a single, essential, coextension between a person and a race or a nationality, it encapsulates the power and danger of such classification within the political arena. 55

56 57

58

Rose (1986) 90 - paradigmatically - 'The unconscious constantly reveals the "failure" of identity.' Strathern (1988) 173, 185. See e.g. Gilroy (1987); H o b s b a w m (1990); B h a b h a (1990); Smith (1991) - a n d for a test case Colley (1996); Y o u n g (1990). H a n s H a n a k , quoted in H o b s b a w m (1990) 63. A m o r e theoretical a p p r o a c h is to be found in Gellner (1964), discussed by Smith (1991).

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These brief and inevitably sketchy indications of some ways in which the terms 'identity' and 'culture' have become problematic in contemporary discourse do not wholly vitiate the choice of subtitle, though they certainly make some glossing imperative. 'Cultural identity' in this volume is to be taken to imply something more than national, racial or ethnic identification: indeed, before the nation state, and where ethnicity seems not to depend on race or religion, (self-)representation has importantly different contours. 'Cultural identity' should be taken here first to mark a set of questions about the formulation of the subject within Empire society. In what ways do Greek writers of the Empire conceptualize their engagement in society and with the Empire? In what ways does the (political, intellectual, sexual, military) self become an issue? What forms of affiliation, identification and exclusion structure self-representation? How is an idea(l) of Greekness projected and contested? 'Cultural identity', however, also implies an agenda: that answers to these questions are to be found throughout the cultural expressions of this period (and not merely in explicit statements about the Roman Empire or power or Greekness); and that the rhetoric of such self-representation is intricate, veiled and far from self-evident. It is important, too, that despite my criticisms of the term 'identity', discussions of 'cultural identity' here are concerned with historical and regional variation, as well as with links through the Empire; with education, construction and contest, rather than with an essential core; with multiple and complex affiliations and positions rather than with exclusive (or cumulative) identifications. Our aim is to see the formulations of Greekness in process. There remains a certain idealism in this agenda. On the one hand, there is a vast amount of highly complex written works and material remains from this period - far too much to be surveyed adequately in a single book or by a single person. On the other hand, these texts and materials offer an extremely partial and inadequate view of Empire culture. As I began with snapshots, so in a sense each chapter of this book offers a snapshot - of a range of questions, materials, responses. Each chapter, however, takes a paradigmatic area or problem or author and allows them to be seen in a new light. Texts that have all too often been largely mined for nuggets of information or analysed for stylistic or generic oddity are here read as cultural artefacts which perform a role for Greeks in the formation of a cultural identity. Historians and antiquarians, philosophers and satirists, religious polemicists and novelists, together provide a richly nuanced picture of Greek enagagements with self-representation and the representation of the Empire; and the chapters of this book, severally and collectively, hope to open a new view of the excitements and possibilities of this field.

Introduction. Setting an agenda

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m The book has three sections, each with three chapters in it. The first, 'Subjected to Empire', focuses on the impact of the Roman Empire and its military and cultural imperialism on Greek writing - and the implications of this interaction for Greek cultural identity. John Henderson considers the first great Greek account of Roman power, Polybius. Although Polybius writes many years before the majority of writers in this volume and has no claim to be a writer of the Second Sophistic, he also sets an agenda - a set of questions and a series of strategies - which remains central to later writers. Polybius writes the History of Rome from the perspective of a virtual hostage of the conquering Roman authorities, a history commissioned by a leading Roman family, written (and then rewritten) from a now subject Greek territory. As Henderson explores, Polybius writes the history of how the Greek world changes for ever, and his history changes the repertoire of Greek cultural strategies for ever. The glory that was Greece', after Polybius, becomes an account of a projection from a subject state. Exemplary of this new sense of self-positioning is Josephus, a Jewish writer who also writes in Greek of the Roman conquest of his own nation, and who also moves physically and figuratively between the Roman authorities and his Jewish roles: a general of the Jews, a Roman military captive, a privileged imperial client. Maud Gleason investigates how the complexities of this straddling of positions is instantiated in his history writing by looking specifically at his representation of body language, and in particular, the debasement, torture and mutilation of the body. Josephus not only depicts a contest around culturally specific and misunderstood 'semiotics of the body', but also provides telling testimony of shifting values of bodily integrity in a period in which Christianity also is developing new commitments to the flesh. Plutarch, a leading Greek intellectual and local grandee, who dealt extensively and peacefully with Roman rule, is concerned more with the war of cultures than with militarism itself. Writing from the very centre of Greek culture - a priest at Delphi, the 'centre of the universe' - in his Greek Questions and Roman Questions, he treats issues of cultural nicety and confusion. Rebecca Preston considers how this pair of treatises expresses a sense of cultural specificity and in particular the difficulties that arise when two cultures meet. How can a Greek answer the question(s) of Roman culture? Or explain Greek culture to others? Preston explores how what may appear as a symmetry reveals a more intricate set of relations. The dynamics of being an insider or outsider to culture provoke complex acts of intellectual self-positioning. Together these three papers explore how from the beginnings of Roman conquest a Greek speaking cultural identity is

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formulated in response to the military and cultural force of the Roman Empire. The second section, 'Intellectuals on the margins', is concerned with how the centre and margins of culture are expressed and explored by the intellectual elite of Greek culture. Jas Eisner discusses in detail Lucian's work de dea Syria, 'On the Syrian Goddess'. Lucian was a Syrian, who had an extremely successful career in rhetoric and letters - writing in Greek for an elite Greco-Roman audience. In the de dea Syria, however, he writes a brilliant pastiche of Herodotean Ionic Greek, and, in Herodotean style, offers an account of an eastern religious cult, except, unlike Herodotus, who narrates the East as a tourist or explorer to help define Greekness for Greeks, Lucian writes Greek as a Syrian insider, an initiate of the cult in question. Who is the outsider in the Roman Empire? How does religious syncretism or pluralism become a question for cultural identity? The tension between Lucian's ironic authorial strategies of self-authorization and claims of truth, on the one hand, and his anthropological and narratological panache, on the other, produce for the reader an unsettling sense of shifting cultural bearings. Where Plutarch could offer Greek and Roman questions as separate, if related, cultural enquiries, Lucian's 'closet of masks' plays wittily with the problems of secure cultural identification, secure self-positioning. Simon Goldhill further analyses Lucian's texts on viewing the works of culture in the course of an extended treatment of how looking itself becomes a topic of particular interest in the second century. Roman culture was a culture of spectacle. Looking at a range of Greek and Roman writing - from treatises, to novels, to dialogues - Goldhill discusses how writing in response to this culture of spectacle becomes a strategy of negotiating the systems of power in the Empire. In particular, the eroticized gaze becomes implicated in a set of philosophical, religious and political discussions. How you look helps define who you are. Body language is integral to Josephus' account of cultural practice: there is throughout the Second Sophistic an extensive theoretical discourse concerning the act of looking (at bodies and other objects), from which Christianity's particular and integral concern for the erotic or artistic gaze emerged. Froma Zeitlin continues the theme of 'visuality' and considers how a range of writers represent the figure of Homer in the process of constructing an intellectual culture of viewing. Homer, the most important of great authors of any Greek's past, remained a central factor of a Greek education (and paideia linked the elite of Empire, across local positions and rivalries). 'Being Greek' is often represented as 'knowing Homer'. Yet Homer is treated in a vast range of ways by Second Sophistic writers from scholarly investigations, to parody, to allegorization. As much as knowing Homer is a fundamental

Introduction. Setting an agenda

23

part of what it means to be Greek (for the educated, first and foremost, and for their privileged view of Greekness), so knowing how to read with, against, through and around the cultural icon of Homer is central to the literate Greek's sense of Hellenism - and its contestations and precarious or bold formations. Zeitlin considers how the figure of Homer becomes a way of Empire Greeks engaging in culture across a whole range of issues. In particular, Philostratus' Heroicus provides a central image - a witty, oblique account of an encounter between a Phoenician merchant and a once educated city man now vineyard worker who discuss the epiphanic appearence of a Homeric hero and the tales he tells. This text, which leads into discussions of cult, literary tradition, philosophical tradition and a cultural investment in the past, stands for Zeitlin as an icon of the Hellenic engagement with the possibilities of the figure of Homer. These three chapters, then, each look at the placement of the intellectual in and against his tradition, but also, and perhaps most importantly, how such writing becomes a way of engaging with the culture of Empire, and of influencing the development of that culture. The third section, 'Topography and the performance of culture', picks up

elements of both of the previous sections to investigate how Greek writing in the Second Sophistic depends on particular ideas of place, in all senses, and how cultural ideals need to be instantiated and contested in and through social performance. Following on from Eisner's account of Lucian's games with the dynamics of insider and outsider in ethnology, Tim Whitmarsh, looking at Dio Chrysostom, Musonius, Favorinus and others, discusses exile as a strategy of writing and self-representation. Whitmarsh discusses how through a range of different strategies, these writers turn the dislocation of exile into a set of re-explorations of past literary models in order to develop new models of self-representation. If Polybius and Josephus write the (military) history of Empire, and Lucian travels through the Empire as observer of cultural practices, the writers of exile make their relation to history and their relation to travel an integral element of the figure of the sophist. The Greek writing of exile changes the topography of Empire - to make the whole world 'Greece' - to the wise man. If Whitmarsh is concerned primarily with a space of Timaginaire', Onno van Nijf considers the material remains of that central institution of Greekness with which I began this introduction - athletics. He considers the inscriptional record of the eastern Empire and finds that in contrast to the intellectuals' picture of travelling sophists, received in glory in the cities of the Empire, the institutions of athletics continued to be a major cultural activity of the elites of the Empire. Athletes travelled from city to city, local athletes competed fiercely, and elite families recorded victories - or even less successful participation - with monuments and records in

24

Simon Goldhill

stone. A paideia which included, or even privileged, physical training looked back through the ideals of Greek history to a glorious past and affiliated contemporary culture to it. Despite the commentaries of contemporary intellectuals, the performance of Greek athletics linked the wealthy throughout the Greek East. Picking up on Eisner's sense of Lucian's ethnographic gaze, Goldhill's concern with spectacle, and Zeitlin's interest in cult, van Nijf shows in an exemplary way how important material culture is for the expression and comprehension of a cultural identity - and how the material record can also be in tension with the contestations of discursive practice. The final chapter finds echoes in the previous discussions of Josephus' political negotiations in Palestine, Lucian's explorations of eastern cult, the development of Christian attitudes to viewing spectacles, and education and the formation of identity through the texts and material culture of the past. Seth Schwartz offers an account of the growth of the rabbinical movement as a response to (and framed by) the conditions of second-century imperial culture in Palestine, and how the rabbis' attempts to reformulate a religion of the book in the absence of temple cult on the one hand show a self-conscious construction of a powerful religious identity in and against a context of cultural conflict and syncretism; but on the other hand also show the tensions between local claims and national (or international) socio-political influence, especially in the religious sphere in this period. The rabbi in the bath-house becomes a sign and symptom of the clashing topographies of culture. Even more than Josephus, these rabbinical writings engage in Greekness from the outside, but cannot keep their cultural ideals clear of it. They give a crucial dimension to our understanding of the power of Greek in this period. Each of these three chapters, then, looks at a central institution of Greco-Roman culture - citizenship, athletics, bathing/leisure and investigates how performance within such institutions is a central element of the formulation of a cultural identity - and of recognizing and contesting such identities. Each investigates the work of (self-)placement within a topography of culture. The three general problematics marked out by these three sections, we believe, provide an essential matrix for approaching cultural identity in this period. As I have already highlighted, there are many overlaps and links between these different projects, which are further drawn out in the chapters themselves. Other central elements are also interwoven through the sections, and should not be undervalued. Two recurrent issues in particular need explicit stress here. First, religious affiliation is a question rapidly growing in importance, and would undoubtedly dominate a book with only a slightly different time scale. As it is, in this volume Plutarch's position as a priest engaged in the exegesis of religious questions leads

Introduction. Setting an agenda

25

via Lucian's explanations of the weird religious rites of the Greek East towards the Christian polemics concerning spectacle to the rabbi's attempt to create his religious space within the culture of the Eastern empire. It should not be forgotten that it is from such a complex picture of competing extremisms and comfortable understandings that the Christianization of the Empire emerges. Our consideration of 'the cultural identity' of Greeks writing under Rome provides, we suggest, a crucial context for the emergence of that slow process of Christianization. Second, an attitude towards the past and a (Greek) history informs the expression of identity. This is most obviously at work in the intellectual's multiple redeployments of Homer or Euripides, or in the writing of history itself; but it is also integral to the construction of new military and political roles, athletic festivals, as well as the weight of attention committed to paideia. Finding the story of the (Greek) past which makes sense of and for present culture is a project that has not yet ended. These modern approaches to the question of cultural identity throw new light on this fascinating period of Greco-Roman society (in a way which has significant implications for classicists working on a very wide range of topics), and, we hope, will stimulate further debate. The ancient texts (and issues) discussed here, however, also offer examples and models of considerable sophistication and depth for those more generally interested in post-colonial writing, imperial fiction, and the difficulties of how identity is formulated, asserted, contested in a complex social and intellectual context. Those who work on the questions of cultural identity have often ignored the length and intricacy of the history of the problem. The arguments offered here draw on and contribute to what is an ongong and shared debate. It is our hazard that there is still much to be learnt about cultural identity from the writing of the Mother of Empires. It is the aim of this book to make good that claim.

Parti

Subjected to Empire

From Megalopolis to Cosmopolis: Polybius, or there and back again* John Henderson

The city that they speak of has much of what is needed to exist, whereas the city that exists on its site, exists less. So if I wished to describe Aglaura to you, sticking to what I personally saw and experienced, I should have to tell you that it is a colourless city, without character, planted there at random. But this would not be true, either: at certain hours, in certain places along the street, you see opening before you the hint of something unmistakable, rare, perhaps magnificent; yet you would like to say what it is, but everything previously said of Aglaura imprisons your words and obliges you to repeat rather than say. (Calvino (1979) 55, 'Cities and Names 1') cro(j>6v yap ev (3ouA£U|aa TQS TTOAACXS X^PaS

I

The many lives of Polybius

Polybius is known for his Histories, which mark the beginning, or on any estimate an important beginning, of the project that in one way and another would occupy the bulk of extant Greek literature - its construal of cultural identity, in Greek writings from Roman citizens. Polybius' text, whether directly or through intermediaries, substantially informed all Roman Greece's notions of the transumption of their East Mediterranean world within the orbit of the barbarian Empire from the West;2 Polybius' narrative provided a dramatic paradigm for the future fix of imperial Greek identity, as his life and writing negotiated the tensions and torsions This I got from my Greco-Roman History teacher George Forrest's tobacco-jar. Hence the title apes that 'enchanting prelude to "The Lord of the Rings"', from late 30s Oxford to Middle-Earth World War and back again, '... And what is a hobbit?' (Tolkien (1937) in (1966) blurb). Euripides Antiope 19.3f. Kambitsis, cited at Polyb. 1.35.4. A telling canon of Greek historians from Late Antiquity puts Polybius last in the top ten chronologically: he alone post-dates Alexander (Luce (1997) 105f.: FGrH 70 T34). Nachleben: RE2XA (1952) 1572-4 (K. Ziegler); e.g. for Plutarch, cf. Stadter (1965) Index 'Polybius'. 29

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John Henderson

of the founding epoch. The problematic of Roman Greece returns here always, and any account must acknowledge the Histories' persistent pertinence through the centuries to come. Taken virtual hostage near the start of a promising career by the intervention of Roman military supremacy, Polybius spent much of the rest of a long life writing for the inhabitants of the civilized world an account of what he accepted and proclaimed as its irrevocable conquest. Released from house arrest, and welcomed into the entourage of the Roman Republic's greatest family, the nexus around the Cornelii Scipiones and Aemilii Paulli, he was eventually permitted to crawl off back to Achaea. But further disasters followed at once, with the elimination of Carthage and the simultaneous sacking of the pride of his region, Corinth, accompanied by massive destruction, slaughter and enslavement, and this unorthodox 'elder statesman' Polybius both assisted the Roman campaigns and participated in the new arrangements for provincial Greece. He settled to researching and recording what he dubbed the cru[jm-AoKr), the 'entwinement together' of hitherto discrete histories into (one-World) History, in semi-captivity at Rome; and composed, continued, or at least completed the forty-book narrative (3.32.2f.: whole, five times as long as Thucydides, 4,000+ Teubner pages) in a soon shadowy but prolonged retirement back in his home region, ended (gasp) by falling off his horse at eighty-two .. . 3 Greek historian of the Roman conquest of the Greek world, Polybius' writing drastically altered the archive of Greek culture. And of Roman culture, too. Knowing Greek and knowing Greece were never going to mean the same again. His story changes the world and the words in which anything could work together, and everything come apart at the seams. Polybius translates Rome for Greek readers, shifts Rome into Greek perspectives, betrays Rome to translation, remakes Rome for Greeks, gives the new Rome terms for thinking Rome as imperial suzerain of a Hellenized world. 4 The historicality to be envisaged for the composition of Polybius' narrative therefore demands attention. The implication of Polybius within the twists and turns of a h/History that altered the sense of what he wrote as he wrote it, altered the sense of his writing it, and altered the authorial valency of his own authority, dramatizes his writing as a context-sensitive, revolutionary or repressive, process. Whatever tale 3

4

Pseudo-Lucian Macrobii 22. His dates are, however, disputed: between c. 208-131/c. 125, and c. 200-118/116, Eckstein (1992). Romans wrote their history of Rome in Greek through past Polybius' day: 39.1, Badian (1966) 6f.

From Megalopolis to Cosmopolis

31

Polybius planned and began to tell, unfolding and unforeseeable events obliged him to rethink and rewrite his perspective. Each heart attack another stroke of luck, for a historian determined set to thrill.5 While Greeks after Alexander had become adept in shuffling their many community and individual identity cards to the best advantage, the challenge to Polybius to retain or devise some basic consistency and coherence for his sense of who he was, where he spoke from and what constituency he spoke for, was especially testing. In his case, the same set of book-rolls must comprehend both the improvisational vagaries of coalition and the underlying persistent geopolitical magnetics; the Histories grip together the subjectivities stamped onto a parochial pawn by planetary power-play, in its narrative ordering and in its structural deployment. This essay will suggest how these pairs map onto each other. On one side, Cicero could decide to look back to the acme of the Roman Republic, before Caesars, before Sulla, and before Cicero, by having Scipio Aemilianus commend the precision of 'our Polybius" political analysis (On the Republic 2.14.27, cf. 4.3.3, Polybius noster hospes), and having Scipio's aide Laelius hint that Polybius' political theorizing derived from Scipio's lead (ibid. 1.21.34); and it could be right to glimpse Brutus working on an epitome of Polybius on the eve of the victory of Caesarism (Plutarch Brutus 4.4). Again, Posidonius' universalizing narrative continued Polybius, and Strabo actually wrote up The World apres Polybius,6 mobilizing Polybius' terminus of the fall of Greece to the Romans at Corinth in 146 to initiate the (Augustan, imperial) epoch achieved by the conclusive ascendancy of the Caesars at the fall of Alexandria to Octavian Caesar in 30 BCE. On the other side, Roman Greece's myth of '(free) Greece' continued to depend historically on the gathering of Greece into one subjected unit through Roman conquest, and discursively on selective and revisionary attention to history: thus the secondcentury travelogue Pausanias contrives to white out Rome between the conquest and the Hellenized emperor Hadrian from his range of vision, and to project Panhellenized vindication across each feature in the land-

5

6

'Kata-/ek-plexis' as stock-in-trade of writing (ancient) history: 'Nothing is more calculated to entertain a reader than the times a-changing and Fortune's vicissitudes' (Cicero Ad Familiares 5.12.4); pace Polybius, denigrating Phylarchus, 2.56.10, or deploring other historians' 'over-the-top treatment of shocking crunch-moments' (6 7rAEovao-|ji6s OTTEP TGOV 6KTTXT|KTIKCOV cruiiTTTcopidTcov), such as The Fall of Agathocles, 15.36, Walbank (1990) 261; KaTcrn-AriTTGo in Polybius: Davidson (1991) 19. Hence - pow! - hair-raising difficulty in apprehending Polybius' own shock-horror within the formulaic/generic frissons of his editorial voice, his narratorial persona, and his cast of characters. Marincola (1997) 239.

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and cityscape of mainland Hellas.7 Polybius had become something of a tourist attraction in the Roman province of Achaea, oozing sanctified precedent: 4

In Mantinea's temple, a man figured in relief is Polybius the son of Lycortas who will be mentioned again in what follows' (8.9.If.); his statue in Pallantium 'is not far from the temple of Kore' (8.44.5); at Tegea, 'hard by the sanctuary of Eileithyia is an altar of Earth, and a bright marble slab clings to the altar, on it Polybius the son of Lycortas, and on a second slab there is fashioned Elatus, one of the sons of Areas' (8.48.8).

Polybius' cardinal position as last-and-first in the once-forever bouleversement8 is memorialized in Pausanias by the series of notices of honorific statues distributed through Polybius' home hinterland: (Across the Alpheius to the south west of Megalopolis, on the approach to the sacred precinct at The Shrine of Our Lady, four reliefs in the portico show Fates and Zeus Fate-Leader, Hercules wrestling Apollo over the Delphic tripod, Pan with Nymphs.) On the fourth is Polybius, the son of Lycortas. And on it there is a caption: 'Greece would not have fallen in the first place if Greece had given Polybius complete obedience, and when Greece had gone astray, rescue would have come through him alone.' (8.37.If.) His home-town itself, of course, made the most of its second most famous citizen, a player on the world stage: In the agora of Megalopolis, behind the precinct dedicated to Lycaean Zeus, there is a man worked on a slab, Polybius son of Lycortas. Inscribed on it are elegiacs saying that he roamed over every land and sea, became ally of the Romans and stopped their wrath against what is Greek On the left of the image of Polybius is the City Council. (8.30.8) Even (especially) here, Polybius' fame must be negotiated with great care: This Polybius compiled a history of Rome featuring their entry into war with Carthage, together with its causation, and - not without epic perils - the eventual Roman [lacuna] to Scipio, the one dubbed Africanus for ending the war and toppling Carthage to the ground. All the matters where Rome followed Polybius' counsel brought them success; anything Rome did not listen to his advice about, they say, turned into blunders for them. All the Greek cities that were paid up members of the Achaean League secured from the Romans the godsend of getting Polybius to set up constitutions for them and establish laws. (8.30.8f.) 7

8

Eisner (1992) esp. 18f.; with the half-cocked protests of Arafat (1996) esp. 8 n. 13: Pausanias' narrative beats the bounds, circumscribes a Hellas by excursion between Athens and Delphi, posits this as Hellas, invents (this as) 'Greece'. Cf. Eisner below 129 n32. The sack of Corinth as watershed in history according to Pausanias: 7.17. If., Arafat (1996) 39, 202f.; inspired by Polybius' analysis: Musti (1996) 32; his version of Megalopolis: Jost (1973). Relief portrait of Polybius (third-century Olympian dedication): Walbank (1957) I, 'Frontispiece and Preface' ix-x.

From Megalopolis to Cosmopolis

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Pausanias carefully sketches in a paradigmatic form of heroism for this sage who left Roman statesmanship in his wake and relaunched Greek lives into their colonial future. This culture-hero models the twin aspirations of his successors - to impress a Roman 'Scipio' (a Caesar), and to win authority back home as a pay-off - that double-barrel of nothingness and solidity, muting and empowerment, relegation and fruition, which became the political regime of the imperial province. In the close echo here of his earlier caption as the 'warner-figure' statesman ignored by Greece, then its rescuer in ruin, Polybius' inaugural role as watershed is eloquently staked out. 9 He witnessed, and canonized himself as the witness to, the historical moment when the continuing 'now' diverged from the terminated 'back then, once upon a time, before Rome'. According to the uncanny posthumous excerptor's embroidery on his text, one (paradigmatic) marble statue of Polybius was awarded by the Achaeans in admiration for his rescue of Philopoemen's images, already out of Peloponnese and awaiting the Hadriatic and shipment to Rome (39.3.4-11). 10 But this is to position Polybius as a symbolic marker potentially the last of Greek leaders, instead first of the Roman Greeks. My concern, however, is to restore some sense of the drama of Polybius' long lives, as a crisis of contrary allegiances, divergent interests, disjoined personae. These amount to a taxing, even excruciating, file of combinations and mutations, and their challenge is played out across the vast terrain of his writing. How he met, ducked, fudged, and ignored their imposition is the personal history told in Polybius' imperial Histories, by turns hidden and displayed, for all and none to see. II

Bright lights, big city

'Polybius the Megalopolitan', he calls himself, as he steps out onto his own pages, remarking on the uniqueness of his name (36.12.5).1X A lost encomium by Polybius in three books had broadcast the budding fame of Philopoemen of Megalopolis, and the Histories round out the picture (10.21-4). This was 'the last of the Greeks', his bones fetched back home to rest (Paus. 8.51-2), his statues posthumously saved from Roman destruction by Polybius' influence with the generalissimo (39.3/Plutarch, Philopoemen 21). Polybius lived through the collapse of the experiment of Arcadia having a 'Big City' centre - where once the Giants had fought the gods and lost (Paus. 8.29.1): 9

10 11

Polybius does tick off the Romans for never learning their lesson from history - e.g. not to sail or travel at whatever season (1.37.10). Cf. Walbank (1972) 22. On these 'critical antics from antique critics' (Henderson (1998)): Marincola (1997) 189-91.

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The Arcadian tribes are thought to be the oldest of the Greeks ... Because of the complete ruination of the country it wouldn't be appropriate to expatiate on them: for the cities, earlier having been famous, were annihilated by constant wars, and the farmers have quit the land since those times when most of the cities were collectively settled in what's called Megalopolis. Now Megalopolis itself has gone through what the comedian said, 'Megalopolis is mega-flopolis'. (Strabo 8.8.1; cf. Paus. 8.33.1) The installation of Roman supervision scrapped the world in which such conurbation made (at least theoretical) sense. Megalopolis was to be remembered as a brave new venture of free Greeks, locked together in their own autonomous feuding: Megalopolis is the newest/youngest of cities, not just Arcadian cities but those among the Greeks, except for those whose inhabitants departed with the coming of Roman rule. The Arcadians joined together into it for the sake of strength ... Epaminondas of Thebes collected the Arcadians into the collective settlement ... These were all the cities that the Arcadians were persuaded to abandon through enthusiasm and on account of hatred of the Spartans, though they were their fatherlands: Alea, Pallantium, Eutaea, Sumateium, Asea, Peraethenses, Helisson, Oresthasium, Dipaea, Lycaea ... Tricoloni, Zoetium, Charisia, Ptolederma, Cnausum, Paroreia ... Aegys, Scirtonium, Malea, Cromi, Blenina, Leuctrum ... Lycosura, Thocnia, Trapezus, Prosenses, Acacesium, Acontium, Macaria, Dasea ... Gortys, Theisoa ... Lycaea, Aliphera ... Theisoa, Methydrium, Teuthis ... Tripolis ... Callia, Dipoena, Nonacris Of the (forty-one) cities on the list, some are totally deserted in our time, some are villages owned by the Megalopolitans... (Paus. 8.27.1-7) The upland and mountain villages had gambled, more or less against their better judgement, that an outsize collective capital would peg Sparta to stay south of Arcadia, thus throwing away the strength that lay in Arcadian dispersal, inaccessibility, lack of lootable resources. T h e Big City' was a planner's paradise, one of the grandest materializations of Hellenistic theory in action. It was built on the wager of effective juggling between power blocs. Once posit the eternal designs of Sparta on hegemony of the Peloponnese, as in their legendary period of domination (1.2.3, 'the Lacedaemonians held undisputed hegemony over the Greeks for hardly twelve years'), and the destiny of Megalopolis was likewise prorogued as the affront, obstruction, and lure for their aggression. Deliberately set athwart the main land-route to the rest of Hellas to rub in their eclipse a sitting target desperately hard to defend (seen by Polybius: 2.55.2; by some of the Achaeans, 5.93.5). The Arcadians would need both to redouble their investment in confederacy by abandoning their old localism for good, as all those villages so spectacularly did to stock the sprawling new (white elephant of a) metropolis, and to cultivate neighbours also likely to be permanently fixated on defence from Sparta (2.48.1). Where

From Megalopolis to Cosmopolis

35

Polybius' story comes in, they are already recuperating from miscalculation and destruction of (too) Bigburgh by Spartan storm troops, 'so vicious and hostile that no one would think it possible for it to be resettled' (2.55.7, cf. Paus. 8.27.16; soon rebuilt: 5.93; Liv. (P.) 38.34.7). The solution that won out was to team up with Achaea, loosely or formally, which bought into a sufficiently major share of clout in the Peloponnese to deliver a reasonablyflexibleset of options to cooperate as circumstances might dictate, with/against the other districts, Messenia,12 Elis,13 the Argolid.14 Achaea would bring in the prestige of a major historic city (Corinth), and subsumption of the Arcadian League within the homologous Achaean League provided a self-reinforcing model of mutual respect, paraded for instance in the rotation of the assembly between Megalopolis and the other chief centres of population, up by the Corinthian Gulf. If the downside was the continual likelihood of friction with Aetolia, the auld enemy of Achaea across the Gulf, then this could in turn bring its own compensation, in the form of support from Aetolia's traditional persecutor, the bordering kingdom of Macedon.15 As Megalopolis had in the first place been magicked into existence by the intervention of a rampant Thebes, in the struggle of all Hellas' (then) biggest guns, so the long arm of an Antigonid king could reach out to shoo away any fresh Spartan offensive (2.50.2, 4.80.16-82.1; 18.14.6, Liv. (P.) 28.8.6). At least one Polybius expects his readers to keep Megalopolis clearly focused in their sights: don't snigger when told how Zeno confusingly mentions at Messene 'the gate towards Tegea', when between Messene and Tegea stands Megalopolis, so no gate could be called 'the gate toward Tegea'; in reality, the name is 'the Tegean gate'. This Polybius was the one who felt he really must write to Zeno about his howlers in Laconian topography - 'Too late, alas!', came the courteous and troubled reply... (16.16-20). Yes, every last brook, bridge and barn in Arcadia looms large for this historian of his own backyard. Although Megalopolis - like Macedon itself - confutes the thinking, it would be easy to understand if Arcadians, like any other Greeks, assumed that new configurations of political muscle would not radically reconstitute local and regional borders and administrative units. The larger confederacies precisely embody as their basic principle the aim to defend 12

13

14 15

Arcadia's twin, perennial prey for Sparta - unless solid with Megalopolis (4.32-3, esp. 32.10; Pausanias 7.6.8). Hectored insufferably at 4.74, 'to jog their memories', and recover the security of their former Olympic neutrality. Like Megalopolis etc., at risk because bordering on Laconia: 5.92.9. Aetolia, little Helladists could yelp, gave up the rest of Greece to the barbarians by calling Rome in (11.5.7-9).

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forever the parochial units and the identities they subtend and assign. Political thinking on any larger scale was not necessarily an informed or enlightened chosen path, but at bottom the product of a largely defensiveminded bid not to forfeit the status quo.16 The young Polybius studied, and then participated in, the juggling between Megalopolitan Arcadia and the Achaean League, as the last giants of free Greece assumed heroic proportions in his writings - Aratus first (that classic charismatic... loser: 4.7.11-8.6; literally heroized, 8.12.7f.), then Philopoemen, and Polybius' father, Lycortas, too, on a more modest scale (2.40.2). Once the prediction was made that heartland Greeks would soon not be free to limit alignment to the 'internal' confines of Hellas, because of'gathering storm clouds' in the Carthaginian/Roman West Mediterranean, the escalation was upon them all (so Philip at the Naupactus conference: 5.104.10, cf. 9.37.10-38.1). Polybius' narrative precisely picks out the infiltration and embroilment of Rome in Greek affairs as the spin-off from alliance between Hannibal and Philip. Once Rome became a player, interplay within the network of traditional regions was destabilized, and the choices narrowed soon enough. However reluctantly, half-heartedly, unsystematically, Roman attitudes to occupation or annexation of Greek territory may have developed, Roman tolerance of resistance, coolness, or any attitude other than enthusiastic coincidence with Roman wishes, sensitivity to their preferences, obedience to their requests, was so low that political entities had to learn the benefits of submission instantly, or else court resentment, wrath, reprisal, and in no time at all suicidal military debacle, as happened first, but not last, to the Aetolians (20.9.1 If.: unable to understand ^fes, unable to calibrate freedom).17 None of this was part of Lycortas' reckoning, or of his friend and hero Philopoemen's (whose ashes were carried to rest in Megalopolis by young Polybius), intent on the salvation of their Arcadia through leadership of Achaea and consequent repression of Sparta. Used to gearing combinatory diplomacy on the Macedonian range into predominantly honorific coquetry with faraway Ptolemaic Egypt (a speciality of Polybius' family, this),18 the team clung onto the pan-Peloponnesian horizons of their 16

17

18

Achaean parochialism: Gruen (1984) II, 445f.; 'Were there Greek federal states?': Walbank (1985) 20-37 (a classic). Polybius and the (?Achaean?) discourse of (pan)Hellenic freedom: Eckstein (1990). Callicrates' doctrine that a Roman request was an order, above pre-existent obligations: Polyb. 24.8-13, Paus. 7.10.5. Polybius' 'chancellery style' officialese infiltrated by Latinizing solecisms: Tricrns ~ fides, \on\p£T\<j\x6% ~ salutatio, Dubuisson (1990) 236f. Reliability itself as generator of prestige: 22.3.6, 9.2f., 24.6.3; and part of Polybius' downfall: 29.23; cf. Walbank (1994) 37.

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admired predecessor, Aratus of Sicyon, who had brought Megalopolitan Arcadia into Achaea. Aratus had inherited a problematic whose traditional terms, Argos, Sparta, Athens, had been upset but not displaced by the spectacular world conquest of Macedon; he bequeathed a policy of flexible manoeuvring between Macedon, Aetolia, Sparta, and, finally, the new player, Rome. His memoirs were required reading for Polybius (2.40.4, cf. 43-58), who took his own starting point from where Aratus left off (1.3.2, 4.2.1), as he was groomed for the presidential role he was born into. An early photo-opportunity trip to Alexandria advertised him as his father's son (24.6.3); his career got under way with appointment as Hipparch of the Achaean League (28.6.9), and he gets to quote his own maiden speech, showcasing this Polybius the Achaean statesman-in-the-making with one historian's speech that is not palmed off on his character! (28.7.8-15). As his father's group of guerrillas-turned-diplomats persevered with dignified right to neutrality and fingers crossed, when the Romans came to smash Macedon and brought their characteristic demand of enthusiastic obedience as the minimum threshold of loyal alignment (30.6-9),19 Polybius was kidnapped, for History. The aliens good as flew him off to another planet, and made Polybius 'ours'. Ill

Reprogramming our man in Rome

Polybius' notes before his deportation to Rome - comprising the expert knowledge of an insider in the corridors of Peloponnesian politicking, 'present at some of the doings, informed by eyewitnesses to others' (4.2.2, 29.5.3) - must have been kept with a view to projects such as his panegyrical tribute to Philopoemen. The catastrophe that overwhelmed 'Macedonian' Greece and forcibly whisked Polybius out of his Achaean life became the line in history that ended an era and initiated its inscription in History (3.1.9). Now he was detained at Rome, without trial in a Kafkaesque limbo of indeterminable status and shape, he was reborn as the new Timaeus,20 whose narrative he continued as a preparatory background for his own project (1.5.1, 39.8.4), the incomparably grand and 19

20

Polybius 'On Traitors', shoring up his line in the crisis before Pydna through defence of the Achaean leap from Macedon to Rome back in 198: 18.13-15, Eckstein (1987) 146f. 'Polybius' discussion is not wholly happy': Walbank (1995) 275; ibid., 'his own policy, from the time he became involved in political life, was one of full accommodation towards Rome': Eckstein (1985). 'It seems clear that it was Timaeus who, both in his general history and in his books on Pyrrhus, was regarded as the first historian of Rome' (Walbank (1985) 276; cf. Marincola (1997) 228f., 238 on this 'lonely historian' positioning the Histories through mordant critique of his predecessor).

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definitively unsurpassable story of eternal Rome's astonishing rise to world domination 'in fifty-three years'. The world he was born into became the preparatory background within this story, as he looked back from the perspective of the final superpower's HQ, and reviewed his obsolete Achaean vista - with the unimaginable hindsight of a post-Macedonian teleology, and the unthinkable once-and-for-all reconstitution of every coordinate and axiom of Greek politics. 21 His narrative must retool the materials that embody his roots, as the Histories retell the story of the Achaean League. Polybius had been bred to idolize the philosophically grounded, theory-saturated, ? practical ? wisdom of a continuous, and continuously vindicated, strategy for maximizing the security and leverage of miniscule political entities through consensual cooperation: the oldest/ newest political identity that could be conjured out of rarefied ratiocination. The gigantism of Megalopolis itself was massive testimony to the magic that could turn wilderness into fortress, void into a people's pride. 22 Now, the story of Achaea is an explanatory prelude setting the scene for the real action to come (2.37-70): 23 willy-nilly, for all his fanfare for the 'remarkable growth and agreement in his times' (2.37.7), Polybius will preserve Aratus and Philopoemen (2.40.2) as dinosaur specimens, Greek federality a dead duck, and the lesson of his lifetime to be the incommensurability of Roman power. The Histories demonstrate that the best of Greek political thought could not cope with this. 24 Naturally, the demonstration demanded a Romanized Greek, to grapple with the conceptual monster in its lair, live alongside it until intelligent analysis could inform retrospective comprehension of what had befallen Greece. In Greek, the descriptive christening f) MeydAri TToAis always tells one and all this was Pious Intentions-ville, 'Nutopia Magna', and is just asking visitors to wonder if it doesn't have a proper name because it doesn't really exist, and is this 'big' for marketing to tourists as 'beautiful' (all mod. cons., proper sanitation, plenty of parking)? 'Big' compared with . . . hide-outs up in the Arcadian Alps? Or 'big' architecturally, because missing from history (the antithesis to unbuilt Sparta)? 25 In Latin, 'Megalopolis' was just the bus stop before Sparta. Now, Polybius had landed in the real 'Big Apple'. 21

22

23

24 25

Still in Polybius' day, he spotted, Greek fear envisaged m o r e horrific Galatian/Celtic invasions (2.35.9). The airier end of Megalopolitan self-romanticization is on show when Polybius avers t h a t music is indeed literally vital to Arcadians, w h o w o r k h a r d in t o u g h conditions, a n d so need softening u p if they are to be h u m a n (4.20-1). Written before Polybius' deportation: W a l b a n k (1985) 327 n. 15; ' a n open question': W a l b a n k (1995) 278 n. 46. 'The R o m a n constitution . . . a naturally evolved mixed constitution': H a h m (1995) 40. Polybius' hilariously pedantic reflections on which of t h e m is a big city - Megalopolis or Sparta: 9.26a.

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If Polybius was born to embody Arcado-Achaean psychomachy, he was compensated for his birthright by transplantation into the engineroom of cosmopolis. Research would wire him into the self-consciousness of Rome, where critical thinking was known to be a luxury import from the 'old world' of Greece, and so equip him with the data which he could process into the master-narrative to teach Greece the new rules. He was handed the best credentials anyone could have for his self-appointment as interpreter of Greek blindness to Greece, when, one Roman day, out of the loan of a few books, and chit-chat about them (31.23.4)... IV

Intellectual collaboration

Rome shipped in Greek culture wholesale - the thousands of books looted from Greece to the Macedonian capital were crated again, this time to oblige an empire to master their subjects' language. And, as is the way, Greek writers landed, too. The detainee, then honoured house guest and guru Polybius soon wormed his way into intimacy with those who had flattened his Macedonian worldscape - which is to say, that Rome inducted a promising satellite to proclaim to, through, and beyond the Eastern front of the Empire, that Greece had learned its lesson, for good. If Greeks would listen best to Greek, let their Greek be the Graeculus re-educated in the house of the Roman generals who bossed Roman rise from do-or-die struggle against Carthage, all the way to authoritative incorporation of Greece as far as Asia Minor beneath the Roman umbrella, and to the final extirpation of Macedon. Polybius was (onto) a winner: haud quaquam spernendus auctor, as Livy would enthuse (30.45.5, cf. 33.10.10). The Histories do more than chart the advance of Rome to world empire, they also famously investigate the political structures and cultural habitus that powered this success. Book VI presents the Roman polity as an 'impossibly' miscegenate absurdity, that should never have got off the ground; a contravention of the norms that held good for Greek statehood. It took all the resources of Greek political theory to approximate to an account of Roman exceptionality. Both Greek and Roman could warm to this equally; and Romanized Greeks would serve up such admiration for centuries to come. Whether Scipio or any other intimates of Polybius in the senatorial fraternity suggested, dictated, corrected, or lapped up, struggled with, boggled at, the analysis cannot be discerned by us, and might have been too complex for the parties themselves. The Romanization of the Greek and the Hellenization of the Roman may even have been hammered out not least in discussion of the line to be taken in Polybius' writing, not improbably over drafts of his text. The Philhellenism of Scipio Aemilianus would become legendary, and his circle of intimates

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would be immortalized as (among other things) a nirvana for talented Greeks flattered by the respect shown them in this inner ring of barbarian puissance. The fans et origo of the Scipionic legend would be none other than Polybius. For the career of Scipio would come to hijack the Histories, as Polybius found cause for drastic revision of his project. As his detention was repeatedly denied a term, and the years passed, history produced still further unimaginable convulsions which seriously threatened Polybius' fundamental conviction that his story had come to a full stop at the diacritical moment which spawned its historian. V

In the nick of time

The surviving Achaean house guests were finally dismissed - 'little old Greeks', for Cato, 'to be carried by pall-bearers in Rome or in Achaea who cares?' (35.6 = Plutarch Cato Maior 9) - they were just in time for Scipio to recall friend Polybius from a Peloponnese about to explode in a frenzy of suicidal war on the (Roman) world (38.16.7). Instead of facing the impossible plunge into the abyss, inevitably provoked by Spartan withdrawal from unwanted incorporation within the Achaean federation (3.5.6; Paus. 7.12f.),26 it worked out that Polybius could sail off honourably to take a place in history at the side of the new conqueror's moment of glory, advising him, for example, how best to take Carthage, and there to have his wrist grasped while the genius confided his foreboding that one day it would be Rome's turn to go up in smoke (38.19-21 /Plutarch Apophthegmata 5.200a). Moreover, Polybius pushed his luck and asked what he meant by mouthing a couple of Homeric lines on the doom of Troy, to be told openly that he was afraid for Rome (38.22 = Appian, Punica 132). Yes, the Histories milked the limelight for all Polybius was worth ... Scipio, then, was to write the Roman line underneath Carthage. And the turn of events would oblige Polybius to reopen the Histories, for their completion at this final realization of Roman hegemony. Supplementing the narrative destined for closure with the elimination of Macedon would require all the materials Polybius could have amassed during his years of detention, for the next twenty years would now bring his story to rest, as he wrote up his time at Rome.27 In this supplementary tailpiece, he would write his Greek Histories with the authority of an insider in the know, an honoured long-term participant-observer in the Roman think-tank. If Polybius did not know what Rome was up to now, no one could; what he didn't understand wasn't worth the attempt. 26 27

The crisis is best recounted by Derow (1989) 321f. See Henderson (forthcoming) for this orthodoxy queried.

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This remained the case - Polybius writing as spokesperson for Rome even though he would compose his account of the period from 167 to 146 in retirement back in Arcadia, where he lived on, long after the 'common misfortune of all Hellas' (3.5.6), we are told, to reach the ripe old age portended by his name: Polybius, 'Bags of Life' (the pun latent at 3.5.7). On the plus side, the narrative would pitch Polybius into a triumphantly rising encomium for Scipio,28 as tact took over from research as his chief imperative: epitaphic superlatives for Scipio's natural father Aemilius Paullus, conqueror of Macedon (31.22), ground Polybius' mock-defensive invocation of Roman readers, in a position to discredit any whoppers he might tell (31.22.8), by way of lift-off for extraordinary panegyric to introduce the boy wonder: 'Scipio's fame' (lest we forget) 'stretches far beyond Italy and Hellas' - thus neatly authorizing Polybius' narrative to the ends of the earth (31.22, 23.3: 23-30; a full report promised: 36.8.6). The very narrative that began with Hannibal's bid to crush Rome - ended climactically by the defeat of Carthage at the elder Scipio Africanus' hands, lauded at the top of Polybius' range - 'pretty well the most famous man up to his time ... coulda been king of any region in the world he chose' (10.2.2, 40.7). Presumably it was agreeable enough to find that the bufferings Polybius' life had taken was compensating him with an undeniable stake in the great events he was to cover: in his last books, world history even metamorphosed, progressively, into autobiography: just in case he annoys us, he'll mix up T this and T that with references to 'Polybius', because he knows it is so 'offensive to keep babbling about oneself, since that sort of talk is naturally uncongenial, but often comes to be unavoidable whenever the subject can't be made clear any other way'! (36.12.1-4). But this was only half Polybius' tale. The other half meant he must write, back in Greece for the duration, as the once-intimate aide of the principal Roman executive, the detailed chronicle of the deliberate, and symbolically ritualistic,29 eradication by the Romans of the entire edifice that defined the cultural identity to which he had thought, all those long years, to return. VI

The view from the burrow

The Romans did not just defeat the Achaeans, when Polybius was fortunately absent on duty with Scipio; and they did not only tear down the massive international trading centre and former imperial capital of 28

29

Yet T h e o p o m p u s is earlier reprimanded precisely for 'including the history of Greece in that of Philip - when it should have been the other way a b o u t ' (8.11.4). See Purcell (1995) esp. 137; despite e.g. Pausanias 2.1.2, 2.3.7, archaeology shows Corinth was thoroughly, b u t hardly utterly, wasted: Arafat (1996) 110. See Gleason in this volume.

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barbarian Carthage, scarcely likely to evoke Greek tears. Polybius was obliged, by his decision to celebrate Scipio's glory, and to extend his story from the exit of Macedon to that of Carthage, to record the ruination of his homeland - as the only Achaean patriot not there to witness and share in the crazy last stand his confederacy brought upon themselves (38.14.3 = Orosius 5.3.3: in Africa with Scipio as the single hopeless battle for Achaea was fought). The Romans wiped out the Biggest City of Achaea, Corinth, as the twin lesson to go with Carthage, razed simultaneously. With it went the Achaean League and other Greek ethno-federal structures, demolished by Roman commissioners (at least temporarily, and so far as Big Ideas of self-government goes - it was all over). 30 And, with his father's eyes, Polybius of Megalopolis would understand that the days of Arcadian communality were also numbered: if there would be no future threat from Sparta, 31 eternally frozen within its heartland district by Roman fiat, like all the rest of the Greek regions in existence when the Romans marched in, still there would be no greatness for the Big City, doomed to depopulation, short on credibility and purpose, and left as a monument to a Grand Plan beggared by the escalating scale and reach of 'one world' cosmocracy: 'Big Brother' Rome. The last Polybius he leaves us with is the one we met at the start, statufied across Arcadia, for hustling round the townships of the Peloponnese and prevailing on the vandalous Roman commissioners to go easy, take his advice, settle these pygmies down so they would nevermore be a nuisance, leave them their harmless icons (39.3-5). We don't know how many of his contemporaries may have been glad he was there to 'help' in this way. Would lips get bitten to be told that history would have gone differently had Polybius been spared to argue Achaea out of harikiri? 32 Was he begrudged what could seem, ultimately, his charmed life, the opulence bespoken by his name 'Polybius' - most of all when he noisily refused a free choice of the loot confiscated from the Achaean losers (39.4)? There is no future in speculating, no doubt, and we certainly won't swallow whole those notices put up for the tourists, playing in the museum-sites of Pausanias' Greece. Passage of time made it easy for an 30

31

32

Paus. 7.16.9f. 'The end of Greek freedom': D e r o w (1989) 323, cf. 38.15-19, W a l b a n k (1972) 176f. Polybius even prays that the present stability in the Peloponnese obviates the advice he has to offer, that 'if ever there's trouble a n d disturbance, the one hope I see for Messenians a n d Megalopolitans to m a n a g e to run their own territory any further is, according to E p a m i n o n d a s ' formula, to get o n the same wave-length, a n d determine to share truly with each other every decision a n d undertaking' (4.32.9f.). They must not forget the disasters inflicted on their countries by the Lacedaemonians' (4.33.11). W h e n it suited, Polybius denounced peace at all costs loud as you please: ' W h y d o all of us b o a s t . . . the w o r d ' F r e e d o m ' if nothing takes precedence over peace?' (4.31.3-8).

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excerptor to spout that Polybius' settlement of the internal politics of the various Greek city-states on behalf of the Roman quango was so winning that 'they honoured him with the greatest honours, city by city, both in his lifetime and after his decease ... Wherefore this must be reckoned as the finest of all the achievements of Polybius' (39.5.4-6). But we do have very extensive primary evidence of what Polybius in his dotage, back home, back, that is, in the ruination of Roman Achaea, himself decided to tell his world, Roman-Greek or Hellenized-Roman, as he looked back from the end of the end of history: That Polybius says at the end of his text: Having achieved this, I returned home from Rome, having gained, so to speak, a crown for the aims of my political career - favour worthy of my good will for the Romans. Wherefore I pray all the gods that for the remaining portion of life things stay in this state and on these terms, observing as I do that Fortune is good at begrudging human beings and specially flexes her muscles in any area where somebody supposes he is most blessed and a success in his life. (39.8.If.: excerpt from the epilogue)

At least those parts of the Histories which narrate from 167 through 146 represent the retrospect of Polybius' retirement; and, though much or most of the materials for the whole final extent of the Histories had been gathered by Polybius the intimate of Scipio, either at Rome or en route to and from Carthage, it is not impossible that the entire narrative, from the Aratus-Philopoemen prelude, through the main crescendo from Roman defeat of Carthage through to the elimination of Macedon, plus the supplement to tell of the elimination of Carthage, with Corinth thrown in for bad luck, was all composed, every single word of it, by Polybius the relic of history, the survivor of cataclysm, the messenger to all Greek readers to come that the Romans were not just inexorably destined to rule the world, but would crush any community, of whatever firepower, to teach whatever lesson they might decide made sense. (Compare Josephus' testimony, as discussed by Gleason in this volume.) They would be around forever, to placate. To put this more suggestively, when we read any stretch whatever among the extant portions of Polybius' narrative, we know that the aged author decided to leave what he had written, against the full knowledge of whatever he came to think, in his final incarnation, was the correct record of it and its right interpretation.33 His policy, or his predicament, may have been that he must leave what earlier Polybiuses had thought, whether or not he got it all wrong. Certainly it could break a heart to try Cf. Shimron (1979-80) 114.

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to revise and rewrite this whole lifework,34 even if its precious wholeness did urgently need saving from all the cracks that kept opening up in the edifice. It is obvious, besides, that even if Polybius did choose to pontificate {more suo) on the subject of the mortal limits to revisability, the excerpts we have for especially the later decades of his work would be very likely to deny us their preservation: editorial flourishes, in which 'early' Polybius specializes, where his text is intact (books I-V), are not their stock-in-trade. And historians have not often been in the business of disowning their earlier follies - indeed, the demand for stable consistency and coherent continuity is the basis of their authority with readers. At all events, Polybius winds up in his armchair memorializing a switchback ride of military conquest that precludes further historical transformation, and with it (if he had his way) the need to write further History. Broadcasting to Greece from the sidelines of outer Arcadia, the Histories set the future to consecrate the cultural conquest this world traveller brings home to its readers: now that the Polybiuses of Greece, 'the action men, have been released from ambition in the military and political spheres and as a result have lots of grand impulses for getting stuck in and finding out' all about planetary geopolitics (3.59.4). Each move they recount in the relentlessness of Roman imperium, their every cosmeme, marks a development in the saltatory lifeline of Polybius, another biographeme, leaving us to recreate the strain and incompatibility between the several phases and multiply revisionary retrospections they brought as their freight: the plurality of the Histories as polybiograph. Whether Roman Greeks to come hid or hid from their cultural annexation, or whether they wore or wiped this on their sleeve, they would be rewriting and revivifying the plot and plight of Polybius, across half a millennium or more. (Thus, in this volume Whitmarsh will show how the story might be transcended; Eisner how it might be palmed with other histories.) VII

The hologram

Polybius is a byword for systematic holism. His work parades teleology, economy, discipline - with unwavering seriousness, chalcenteric concentration on detail, earnest explication of values. Traditionally valued for the plain facticity of his privileged insider's vantage-point through much of his narrative, 35 Polybius famously names his project 'pragmatic' (1.2.8, 34

35

Polybius was predictably (rightly) concerned to underline the pains his w o r k cost him: 1.1.2, 3.59.7f., M a r i n c o l a (1997) 151. T h e opacity of Polybius' mediatory 'gaze' o n t o 'the landscape of R o m a n history, [no] single substantial unitary reality': Davidson (1991) 10. W i t h Polybius' cosmopolitan Greek style, contrast (e.g.) the disconcerting flamboyance of the de dea Syria: Eisner below, 1 2 3 - 5 3 .

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9.2.4), 'apodeictic' (2.37.3), 'universal' (5.33) and precisely, 'monoeidic' (9.1.2) and 'somatoeidic' (1.3.4). 36 The achieved forty-book unit of the Histories must weld together a synoptic perspective to match the blazoned 'entwinement' of universal History into 'one single telos" (1.3.4, 4.28.3). Thus he derides the digressive, unfocused armchair historian in the exile Timaeus (12.3f. and book XII passim); and reveres the unanimity which 'in his time' saw 'the whole Peloponnese fall short of being a single city only in that its inhabitants don't have a perimeter wall, whereas both in common and city by city all other aspects are identical or virtually so' (2.37.10f.). This perfectionist, one of those scholars who won't die till they have written 'The End', however long it takes, must precisely summarize in a triumphant epilogue, the perfect articulation of his work, which has traced the inexorable 'convergence of virtually the whole of the world beneath the one single rule of Romans, in all its unprecedented uniqueness'; and even so, a final book must top off the opus magnum with datechart, list of books, and index for the whole project (39.8.7f.: T-qs oAris TrpayiiccTeias the last words; echoing 1.1.5f.). But as Polybius strings out his pageant of reason embodied in controlled exegesis37 across forty volumes, through (one way or another) fifty or so years of living, 38 the Megalopolitan Arcadian Achaean Peloponnesian Hellene(s) he was, yes, first, second, and third times around, all jostle irreconcilably with the Roman Scipionite and the Roman subcommissioner. (How) Could the same Polybius so roundly convict the Carthaginians of failing to 'use their success well' in Spain, where their disrespect for their subjects cost them dear: 'they had not learned that those maintain their ascendancy who abide by the same principles by which they acquired their hegemony in the first place' (10.36.1-7, esp. 5), yet when he determined to set himself to carry the account of Rome beyond the conquest of Greece so as to include subsequent policy of the rulers, and see whether 'Roman rule is abominable or desirable' and 'praiseworthy and enviable or blameworthy' (3.4.6f.), somehow he contrived to complete his marathon assignment without providing anything

36

37

38

'Polybius o n the aim of pragmatic history-writing': Meissner (1986). Universal historiography: Alonso-Nunez (1990), with W a l b a n k ' s c o m m e n t (ibid. 198f.): '(Polybius') own concept of the genre is so limiting as to m a k e it almost impossible for anyone else to write universal history It was only n o w that the whole oiKounevri h a d become one. Polybius' claim was to have perceived this, experienced it a n d written a b o u t it, leaving n o place for anyone else. It was a claim which, as it turned out, rather backfired against h i m s e l f . . . ' Systematicity, unlike some colleagues (Theopompus?): 3 8 . 6 . 1 - 3 , cf. Boncquet (1982-3) 284, W a l b a n k (1985) 318f. ' . . . There is a g a p of a b o u t fifty years. It is o n the face of it unlikely that his views o n R o m e remained constant during the whole of this time': W a l b a n k (1985) 280 (dry but droll).

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approaching an unequivocal verdict either way? 39 Paradox as it may seem, perhaps it wasn't the same Polybius: So it is that the natures of human beings not only have a multiform property in their bodies ('monoeides'), but even more so in their souls, so that the same man has natural ability for some and not for others not just in different investments of work, but also as concerns some investments that are similar in type ('homoeides'), the same man is both most intelligent and slowest, or likewise most daredevil and most cowardly. And there is no paradox here ... (4.8.7) This prototype Romanized Greek lived through the conquest, and was caught out by its peripeteias: would provincial permanence help or oblige his 'Greco-Roman' successors to resolve the contradictions between their 'many lives'? Polybius pledges that 'history is the surest, and indeed sole, way to learn how to bear nobly the vicissitudes of Fortune' (1.1.2). He asks, and we should ask: do the Histories stagger through a continuum, or reel through supplementary revision, and collapse into self-confuting puffery? And: can reading 'entwine' the traumatic rifts in the thread of Polybius' textualized life into 'one single' continuous fabric (3.32.2) - at what cost to personal and cultural identity? 40 Fergus Millar (1987) borrows Frank Walbank's (1974) title (= (1985) 280-97) 'Between Greece and Rome' to contrast their verdicts on Polybius' verdict on Roman supervention in Greece: There is no simple or unambiguous way of stating Polybius' conclusion F. W. Walbank, the greatest modern expert on Polybius, concluded that on the whole his view was favorable. I think otherwise: that Polybius, though he expresses himself obliquely, took an increasingly distant and hostile view of Roman domination.41 39

40

41

We have Polybius' construal of Greek reactions to the annihilation of Carthage: 36.9, cf. Walbank (1985) 168-73; he does say that what happened to the Greeks was worse, since they had no good excuse (38.1.5). His tear-jerker report of Corinth sacked is cited by Strabo 8.6.23 (= Hist. 39.2; cf. Paus. 7.16.8). The debate on Polybius' verdict on Rome: Shimron (1979-80), Walbank (1972) 27f., 182 (no clear answer, cf. Luce (1997) 140f.). Did history make Polybius a turncoat quisling? No: Shimron (1979-80); he came out, from cynical detachment at Rome (books XXX-XXXIII), to strongly pro-Roman fervour after his release from detention, through the Carthaginian and Corinthian debacles (books XXXV-XXXIX), but was 'always primarily an Achaean': Walbank esp. (1985) 280-97; 'the Achaean connection' as formative: Walbank (1993) 22; 'My own personal view is that, had he been faced with the decision of what to do at the time of the Achaean War, Polybius would not have come out against Rome. But who can tell?... Perhaps . . . the modern historian would be well advised to follow the old maxim and abstain from moral judgement': Walbank (1995) 284f. 'It would appear that on Walbank's assumptions Polybius suffered from a split personality': Shimron (1979-80) 114; 'Polybius ended with confusion rather than clarity': Gruen (1984) 343-51, at 350; against the consensus that 'Das Werk des Polybios i s t . . . innerlich unfertig': Erbse (1951) 157 (the whole composition undertaken post-144). This is in nuce Frank Walbank's problematic - his lifework, and the complex product of his own negotiation of the shifts and vagaries of a radically changing and irregularly aleatory world and habitus (cf. Henderson (forthcoming)).

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In a wide-ranging positioning of the Histories, Millar himself concludes: What is important is the fact that Polybius' History really is the product of his earlier experience as a centralfigurein the self-governing Achaean League of cities which occupied a large part of the Peloponnese Polybius would have been surprised to learn that ... he himself was a Hellenistic historian. He would surely have supposed that he was simply a Greek one.42 The Polybian pronouncement which inspired those elegiacs displayed in the agora of his home-town Megalopolis points a rather different moral. 43 Here a crucial excerpt de sententiis features a terminological fuss that should strike even Polybius hacks as toppling into a crank's self-parody. Taken from the editorial introducing the last two books' final episode of disaster for Achaea in 147-145, the excerpt will come to this climax (38.4.9): In times of crisis Greeks should assist Greeks in every way, sometimes protecting them, sometimes drawing a veil over them, sometimes begging mercy from the wrath of their conquerors - as I did in the very thick of things. But the transmission of past events to posterity through recorded accounts must be bequeathed untouched by any falsehood, so that readers shall not be pleasured for the moment through the ear, but shall be set straight in the mind for no more tripping up in the same circumstances. And on this topic, let that much be my say. In Polybius' characteristic style, this vigorous finger-wagging at the future reflects upon as well as crowns the immediately preceding passage, a rhetorical flourish too long to quote, but which merits summary (38.1-3). In this book, he trumpets, the end is nigh: (That) Book XXXVIII comprises the completion of the downfall of the Greeks. Of course, he insists, aggressive as ever, 'downfall' (&Tuxioc) is, for all the horrors of history, precisely what his generation lived through - worse than even the fate of Carthage, once the thing is thought through. Incipit pugnacious paradox-mongering: at least Carthage left a final scrap of a case for their defence, and at least their total annihilation spared them a future of realizing their tragedy . . . (38.1.1-8). And, yes, readers with any decency will find Polybius' present narrative is truly more pitiful - worse than all the disasters cherished by Greek History: (i)

42 43

Athens, gloriously, but just Athens, and only temporarily, blitzed by Xerxes' Persia, and later humiliated by Sparta, but the discredit to Sparta.

Millar (1987) 17f. Pausanias 8.30.8 above: combined with echo of the important editorial at Polyb. 3.4.11, cf. Walbank (1979) 689 on 38.4.7.

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John Henderson

(ii) Sparta was pegged back by Thebes from dominance in Greece to their traditional backyard, but no disgrace attaches to that. (Disasters, yes, but 'downfall' - no way!) (iii) Mantinea was dispersed by Sparta - but that shamed Sparta. (iv) Thebes was obliterated by Alexander, but shamefully, and was soon restored. (General sympathy can aid victims of injustice; change of Fortune and regret can bring the dominant powers to repair the unjustified damage they have inflicted.) (v) Chalcis, Corinth, etc. were occupied by Macedonian garrisons - but everyone worked hard to free them, and hated and opposed their enslavers. (Q.E.D.: these were single cities on a city-scale; they were without reproach, so the word 'downfall' didn't apply for long. The victims' own folly is required to qualify for 'downfall'.) Polybius' subject wins again: the downfall of 'Peloponnesians, Boeotians, Phocians, <.. .>ians, Locrians, some inhabitants of the Ionian Gulf, plus the Macedonians'. A maximally shameful and dishonourable 'downfall', too, ending up with occupation by the Romans, in terror for all the sins committed - not the people, that is, but the ones who had been responsible for such extreme folly. Such is the provocative sermon which prompts the preacher to insist that he must write the truth for posterity (4.If., 5): There will be no call for surprise at this point if I am openly abandoning the ethos of historical narrative and fashioning an account of it that is rather declamatory and ambitious (ETriSeiKTiKcoTepocv KOU <|>iAoTi|juDTepav . . . TT\V dTrayysAiav). Yet

some will likely censure me for giving my writing a penchant for polemic, when the right thing to do was above all to draw a veil over the sins of the Greeks A writer of political history must absolutely not be accepted if he puts any priority higher than the truth. Polybius' challenge is here defined as that narrow line of historical narration between the rock of truth and the hard place of hectoring, selfaggrandizing rhetoric which is the stuff of subjugated Hellenism: he practises in this broadside the appeasement he took for his role in mediating Roman wrath against defeated Greeks, shading in a case for settlement with an eye to Roman honour rather than immediate material advantage, and a case against repression in the teeth of lasting outrage,

From Megalopolis to Cosmopolis

49

shame and eventual regret. To this end he belittles prior Greek history, and presses the downfall of his Greece as the sin that the truth of his Histories will prevent from recurrence. The logic of Polybius' rant belongs to his appropriation of the voice of irresistible Roman power, as its victim and apostle; he cries up his Peloponnese, the saga of an Achaea which he, his father, and his hero had helped inflate, to make possible a significant profile for Arcadia and security for Megalopolis. The Greece he addresses is one he hopes will be homoeostatic, hopes he has helped to reprieve and delegates his narrative to protect from itself; a particular Greece, then, whose self-recognition models the viability of a politics shorn of traditional options of selfdetermination and opportunist coalition. For Polybius' protreptic to his readers is also a multifaceted directive on how to contain Roman ascendancy, which imperial Greeks must convert to their own fixes in the future. Pre-Roman Hellas is their eternal playground for ideas, and exemplary narratives, on how to align honour with security. Teaching the glories of (lost) Greece became a master strategy for binding the exercise of super-power, applied and reworked across the eastern provinces and down the centuries of Roman rule. Polybius may seem to applaud Roman conquest; and may seem to deplore its abuse of power. The point of his revisionary writing, however, is to produce 'Greek History' as the discursive arena where such appraisals may be co-tenable (as Preston discusses below), put to work within Greek-Greek and Greek-Roman negotiations - 'sometimes protecting them, sometimes drawing a veil over them, sometimes begging mercy ...' And why, now it has happened, Should the atlas still be full of the maps of countries We shall never see again? (MacNeice (1966) 167, The closing album, V: August-September 1939)

2

Mutilated messengers: body language in Josephus1 Maud Gleason

Tourists through the ages who visit the Dead Sea have often been tempted to test its buoyancy by throwing something in. Vespasian inspected the site as a Roman general. He came, Josephus tells us, in the spirit of dispassionate enquiry (KCCO' ioropiccv),2 and made trial of the water like everyone else. But he did not throw in an object, a bottle or a brick. He tossed in living human bodies with their hands tied behind their backs bodies carefully selected for their known /^ability to swim. My goal in this paper is to use the evidence of Josephus to explore the mentality behind the choice of human bodies as buoyancy indicators in this recreational science experiment. It is really not explanation enough to invoke the notorious brutality of the Roman military, though Vespasian was in the process of subduing a rebel province at the time. Rather, what I am fishing for in these murky waters is some understanding of the semiotic context - of the ways the human body functioned as a signifier in that time and place. Josephus, as a bi-cultural first-hand observer, records a rich array of gestural evidence. His perceptions were filtered through a sensibility that was both Jewish and Romanized, and the tableaux he records (or invents) resonate to varying degrees with the stereotyped repertoire of self-expression traditional in both cultures. Separating out these two traditions is only a heuristic strategy, however, for ultimately their copresence in the narrative suggests an ongoing process of cultural accommodation. In this semiosis of the body, all too often violent, did ethnicity make a difference? Josephus does not record whether Vespasian selected Jewish 1

2

Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the Finnish Academy in Rome, at Princeton University, the University of Pennsylvania, Trinity University, and the University of California, Berkeley. The author wishes to thank the scholars present on those occasions, as well as Alessandro Barchiese, Daniel Boyarin, Simon Goldhill, Erich Gruen, Michael Nagler, Seth Schwartz, Brent Shaw, and Mahalia Way for their suggestions and comments. Josephus, Jewish War A All. Tacitus omits the details of Vespasian's experiment, merely observing that the Dead Sea floats both swimmers and non-swimmers equally well (Histories 5.6).

50

Mutilated messengers

51

non-swimmers or his own soldiers for his flotation test. In general, however, we will find that when people in Josephus use their own bodies as expressive instruments, their body language is often marked by some cultural specificity. But when people use the bodies of others to send a message, the body's appeal as a semiotic instrument seems to lie in its promise of a universal language. I should make it clear that I am using the term 'body language' in the most naive and general sense. Any use of the body to convey a message, from highly stylized gestures to one-of-a-kind improvisatory tableaux, will count as 'body language' for the purposes of this investigation.3 A philosopher begged me earnestly not to use the term 'language' at all. Perhaps, at the turn of the millennium, humanity's achievements in the realm of the logos seemed to him too precarious to be tainted by association with acts of violence. But I speak of gestures, including acts of violence, as language, because I can see no reason why some forms of communication between living beings should be privileged as more 'rational' than others. Even if 'body language' is only a metaphor, the metaphor helps our investigation because languages are systems of communication that admit of degrees of familiarity. A language - a system of words, or a gestural repertoire - can be native, incomprehensible, or imperfectly appreciated, and thus the metaphor of 'body language' prompts us to ask, of any given gesture both 'How was it meant?' and 'How was it understood?' I will begin exploring how Josephus used the body to project dominance or humility in moments of crisis. Sometimes he used his own body to articulate the expressive penitential gestures traditional among Jewish aristocrats. At other times in the narrative he dramatizes his control over the bodies of others, describing a type of violence which seems to have been widely recognized in the ancient world as part of the process of making a claim to personal power. The relish with which Josephus narrates both ways of using the body as tours de force of self-presentation makes it clear that he did not consider body language a 'natural' concomitant of strong emotion, but a system of conventional signs whose deployment was subject to conscious control. 3

Daniel Russell, drawing on the work of his late colleague Jean Hampton, suggested to me that non-verbal behaviour might profitably be analysed in terms of various forms of implicature, along the lines proposed for linguistic philosophy by H. P. Grice. I take this to mean that gesture x might 'mean' y if x is normally evidence for y ('smoke means fire'), or gesture x might be (within a given cultural system) a conventional sign for y. Gesture x might also, without being entirely conventional, suffice to make the actor's meaning clear, perhaps by using a cultural system's gestural conventions in a metaphorical way. Finally, gesture x, if used with intention counter to its conventional meaning, might convey 'metalinguistically', as it were, anything from a double entendre to an insult (see note 27 below on parodies of the adventus ritual of welcome).

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Maud Gleason

Perhaps because he was himself so versatile, Josephus was acutely aware of the way other people 'schematized' their body language to effect deception, a form of misleading semiotics discussed in the second section of this essay. Evidence that the body could be made to lie offers further proof that, in Josephus' understanding, gesture constituted a language, a system of signs subject to deliberate manipulation. The range of meanings that bodily signs could convey was conditioned by established patterns of analogical thought. The third section of this essay explores a pattern of thinking about the body and society that is particularly prominent in Josephus' writing, an analogical formation that I have termed 'the body politic'. Images of the body as synecdoche for society formed part of his mental furniture. If we hypothesize that Josephus shared with others this way of imagining society as, in some sense, a corporate entity, then metaphors of the body politic in the writings of Josephus may help us see how spectacular violence against the body conveyed political meaning to his contemporaries both in literature and in life. How are we to read the acts of violence against bodies that he describes? An ethologist perhaps would read them as stress-induced aggression. An anthropologist might read them like a cultural product. Does violence register cultural difference? Can we develop a semiotics of stylized carnage? These are some of the questions opened up by the last section of this essay, which examines what we can learn from Josephus about the role played in the negotiation of power by the spectacle of the body in pain. Sometimes this spectacle is self-dramatizing, enacted by the agent with his own body, at other times coercive, enacted by the agent upon the bodies of others. Historical setting of the Jewish War In the summer of 66 CE, unrest in the Roman province of Judaea became impossible to ignore. The priests in Jerusalem who controlled the Temple liturgy, over the strenuous objections of some of their colleagues, decided to refuse sacrificial offerings from non-Jews. 4 Thus daily offerings on behalf of the emperor and the Roman people, which had in some sense symbolized the accommodation of the Jewish ruling class to Roman government, came to an abrupt halt. Then the citizens of Jerusalem besieged 4

BJ 2.409. This refusal was spearheaded by the High Priest's son Eleazar (whose participation presumably neutralized his father's influence), but resisted by 'the chief priests and the notables'. Josephus says this incident laid the 'foundation-stone of the war', presumably more because it signalled to the Jerusalem population at large the triumph (however temporary) of insurrectionist tendencies among Temple leadership than because it alarmed the Romans or affected Roman behaviour.

Mutilated messengers

53

the city's Roman garrison. The garrison, outnumbered, agreed to surrender on condition that their lives be spared. They laid down their arms and were massacred.5 Interestingly enough, the Jews did spare the Roman commander, who staged a formal supplication (pan-Mediterranean submissive body language?), and in addition 'promised to Judaize to the point of circumcision' (a culturally specific gesture of submission).6 The governor of Syria arrived with the Twelfth Legion to restore order, but was forced to beat an ignominious retreat. At this point war appeared inevitable. With the pro-Romans in their midst thoroughly discredited, the citizens of Jerusalem met to select generals for the defence of all Judaea. Josephus says he was chosen to superintend the defence of Galilee.7 I

The body language of Josephus

If we derive our picture of the past primarily from the written word, it is difficult to appreciate the extent to which body language and gesture served as forms of communication and markers of identity in ancient Mediterranean societies.8 Identity mattered. People were more comfortable with 'others' whose categories were clear around the edges. 'Others' whose cultural identity was anomalous, who blurred categories, aroused intense suspicion because they were not different enough. Because they were difficult to isolate, they might contaminate: the Jewish proselytes living in Syrian towns, for example, were feared by Syrian gentiles as 'an equivocal element in their midst . . . that was mixed in'. 9 Josephus must have been keenly aware of identity markers and how they functioned 5

BJ 2.450-4.

6

TOOTOV y a p iKeTeucravTa KOCI \xk\p\ TrepiTO|jifjs iou8oacreiv \JTto<jyp\xzvov Sieoxocrav piovov (BJ

7

8 9

2.454). Voluntary circumcision by a foreigner as a sign of submission to Jewish dictates appears as early as Genesis 34 (compare JA 11.285); for coercive circumcision extorted as a sign of submission see Vita 113 (aristocratic refugees in 66 CE) and JA 13.319 (conquered Ituraeans in 104/3 BCE). BJ 2.562-8. Consistency was not a hallmark of Josephus' self-presentation. In the BJ he presents himself as an omni-competent general specifically chosen to conduct the war; in his autobiography his responsibility is diminished by the presence of two colleagues and their mission described thus: T o persuade the wicked to lay down their arms' (Vita 28). In any case, how did Josephus come to be chosen as a leader? Perhaps his successful expedition to Rome to ransom Jewish prisoners about five years before (Vita 13-16) had given him a 'can-do' reputation. On the significance of this visit for revealing Josephus' understanding of power in the Roman world as being based on personal relationships see Shaw (1995) 361-3. Lateiner (1995) has made a good beginning. See now Aldrete (1999). TO -nrap' eKaoTois afjupifioAov ... /jEfjiy/jevov BJ 2.463. On the suspicion attached to those whose gender was equivocal, the so-called cinaedi or androgynoi, see Gleason (1995) 62-7, 76-81. Similarly, panic about the lack of a clear boundary between Christians and Jews may have contributed to a tendency among historians ancient and modern to present a misleading picture of two distinct faiths that were separate from birth. See Boyarin (forthcoming).

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because his own identity was ambiguous. In various ways, he occupied a liminal position between cultural systems: within Judaism, he belonged by birth to a priestly family whose lineage was recorded in the public archives, but he claims to have passed through specialized religious training offered by other Jewish sects; 10 in the Roman context he had been both a Jewish general and a Roman prisoner of war, both a military captive and a privileged imperial client with special tax exemptions. 11 We shall see how his self-presentation develops a certain stereoscopic quality as he presents both sides of himself seriatim or even simultaneously. Josephus paid heightened attention in his writings to recording performative nuances of gesture because he knew from experience that self-presentation before diverse audiences requires fine-tuning of one's cultural identity-construct.12 Josephus' literary self-presentation is notable for its visuality (an aspect of Second Sophistic culture discussed by Goldhill and Zeitlin in this volume): he frequently describes his own postures and movements. Let us look first at how he describes himself using his own body to convey messages of dominance and humility to his fellow Jews during his command in Galilee. If we read between the lines of his account it becomes apparent that he established his authority only with difficulty. With few troops of his own beyond those bandits he was able to recruit as mercenaries, 13 Josephus had to tread carefully around others who aspired to power in the region. It appears, for example, that he made efforts to accommodate the profiteering aspirations of a freelance bandit chief named John of Gischala, whom he allowed to corner the market in kosher olive oil. When a detachment of Josephus' own bandits-cum-mercenaries managed to waylay the chief finance minister of the pro-Roman king Agrippa, they expected that Josephus would look the other way as they divided the spoils. 14 But it proved more difficult than they had anticipated to dispose discreetly of the minister's silver goblets and luxurious clothes. Imagine the consternation of these enterprising young men when they turned to their commander for assistance and he confiscated everything! Josephus deposited the loot with the leading citizens of Tarichaeae. 15 His soldiers 10

11 12

13 14 15

This sampling of 'the three academies', which assimilates Josephus' Jewish education to a Hellenistic model, may be a fictional construct (Cohen (1976) 106-7). Following Cohen's lead, Steve Mason disputes the commonly-held notion, based on Vita 12, that Josephus became a Pharisee: Mason (1991) esp. 339-40. On Josephus' background see also Rajak (1983) and Goodman (1987). Vita 429. For a discussion of some tendentious aspects of Josephus' self-presentation in the BJ see Cohen (1976) 91-100. Compare the versatility of Paul's self-presentation in I Corinthians 9. Vita 11-%. BJ 2.595ff. The account in Vita 126-9 minimizes the highwaymen's ties to Josephus. BJ 2.591; Vita 131.

Mutilated messengers

55

suspected that he intended to return the stolen property to its pro-Roman owner, and by the next morning, we are told, the hippodrome teemed with angry demonstrators denouncing Josephus for treason. (It is of course highly unlikely that these events happened exactly as described. Perhaps they never happened at all. What is significant for our purposes is the way Josephus chooses to describe himself. The body language he attributes to himself in his narratives is an important part of his self-presentation.) Josephus claims that he slept through all the commotion, only to awaken when the mob was on the point of setting fire to his house. Deserted by his bodyguard and almost all his friends, he prepared to face the crowd by changing his own appearance. He ripped holes in his clothing, rubbed ashes in his hair, tied his sword around his neck, and twisted his hands behind his back.16 Unfamiliar as these penitential gestures may seem to us, they were instantly understood by his Jewish opponents, who 'assumed from his demeanour' (TrpoEiAr^ecrav yap EK TOU a^rmcn-os) that he was not going to deny the charges against him. These were the same penitential gestures employed by the Jews who petitioned an imperial legate during the reign of Gaius: they scattered dust on their heads and approached with their hands held behind their backs and, according to Philo, explained that the gesture indicated deliberate vulnerability.17 Wearing black when threatened by a lawsuit was a practice attested for private individuals in Judaea, Greece, and Rome. 18 But Josephus' demeanour as he describes it here also evokes a culturally specific gestural repertoire of stylized selfabasement used by the Jewish elite. In a world where political leaders had to control crowds without the aid of tear gas or public address systems, highly visible histrionic gestures were an obvious, if risky, means of exerting personal power.19 If, as we like to say nowadays, society is constructed through symbolic discourse, pp OTTICTCO TOCS x e *P a $

Ka

*

TO

8e TT\S KeycxKr\s KOVIV, py iSiov £iq>os £7Ti6r)aas TCO TEVOVTI (BJ 2.602). In the parallel

account in his autobiography Josephus emphasizes the stylized drama of his sudden appearance: he changed into black garments, hung a sword around his neck, and took a back road to the hippodrome, where he successfully produced a pitiable spectacle by appearing suddenly and, with a histrionic gesture, throwing himself face down, weeping, on the ground: IJETEVSUS ouv neAocivav ecrOfJTa KOU TO £iq>os dTrapTT|(Td|jievos EK TOO OCUXEVOS KOCG' 6 6 6 v ETEpaV . . . TjElV CIS TOV ITTTToSpOHOV, d
18

19

Sdxpuaiv cpupcov EAEEIVOS ISo^a Tracnv (Vita 138). Philo, On the Embassy to Gaius 2 2 8 - 9 : KaTaxsdjjEvoi TTOAAI^V KOVIV KOU peoiaevoi 8aKpuois, Tas X6^PaS d|i(poTepas eis TOUTTICTGO TrspiayayovTes Tpoirov e^yKcoviCT|ji6vcov.

For documentation see Cohen (1976) 112 n. 46. Compare JA 16.287: the Arab Syllaeus dons black to elicit the sympathy of Augustus. Compare for example the suicide tableau of Germanicus when faced with mutinous troops (Tacitus, Annals 1.35). On personal power see Shaw (1993) 176-204.

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one of the most potent constitutive symbols of Palestinian Jewish society were the bodies of its priests: immaculate in lineage, marked off by education and ritual privileges, and, if without physical blemish, also marked off on ceremonial occasions by the immaculate linen of their ritual dress. 20 As a member of the priestly class Josephus knew how to control a crowd by rendering visible in his own person the social dissolution that would attend the unrestrained expression of popular wrath.

The body language that Josephus displayed at Tarichaeae resembles the gestures used in Jerusalem by persons of high social status to control an angry crowd, when 'powerful citizens, with the High Priests, rent their clothes and fell to the ground in supplication' in an attempt to stop a riot against an unpopular Roman governor.21 Soon after when that same governor was marching in wrath towards Jerusalem with two cohorts of reinforcements, we find members of the priestly class again attempting to persuade the angry crowd by heaping dust on their own heads, tearing their clothing, and baring their chests.22 This time the gestures of selfabasement were not displayed impromptu-fashion, as they had been at the earlier riot, but, like the Roman ritual of vestem mutare,23 the whole affair was deliberately staged.24 In preparation for a processional wel20

21

22

23

24

BJ 5.228-9; Vita 1. T h e identity a n d p o p u l a r following of t h e Jewish u p p e r class in this period is a m a t t e r of some scholarly dispute. H e r o d h a d purged the H a s m o n e a n court a n d replaced m a n y of its leading m e n with his o w n appointees, w h o m he enriched with land grants. Likewise, he appointed t o the high priesthood m e n from Babylon a n d Alexandria, whose families h a d n o traditional claim t o the respect of t h e populace of Jerusalem. See G o o d m a n (1987) with t h e criticisms of Brunt (1990) 5 1 7 - 3 1 . T h e priestly class itself was n o t entirely of one m i n d a b o u t h o w t o deal with t h e R o m a n s , as the rift between A n a n i a s a n d his son Eleazar shows (BJ 2.409-10). N o t e the p r o - R o m a n overtures of Eleazar's brother Simon (BJ 2.418). oi SuvocToi ovv TOIS dpxiepeOcnv TCCS icrdfJTas nEpisppq^auro KOU TTpoaTTiTTTOVTes EKaoros ESEOVTO mxucjaaOai . . . (BJ 2.316). Josephus says the crowd complied out of respect (ai8cos). These mourning gestures on the part of the High Priests would have been especially striking in view of the prohibition in the Law (Leviticus 21:10 cf. 10:6-7) against an officiating High Priest rending his garments or otherwise involving himself in matters funereal (on the identity of 'The High Priests' as either former or potential officiants see Schurer et al. (1979) II, 232-4; on the rending of garments see note 22). TOUS 6' dpxiepsiS OCUTOUS T)V ISETV Kara/jco^uou^

/JEV TTJV K£(pocAr)v KOVEI, yupivous 5E TCX

oTEpvcx TCOV iadrjTcou Siepp-qyiJEvoov (BJ 2.322). Presumably t h e tearing of ritual garments represents a n escalation of sackcloth-and-ashes w o r n by Jerusalem's leaders t o compose the crowd after a fracas with the Samaritans in the reign of Claudius (BJ 2.237; AJ 20.123). I n 66 they were confronting a crisis t h a t threatened n o t merely R o m a n retribution b u t the survival of the Jewish state. In time of national emergency the Senate might formally decide t o exchange clean togas for togae sordidae ( L i n t o t t (1968) 1 9 - 2 0 ; Heskel (1994) 141). Temple ceremonial prepared Jews of all r a n k s t o assemble as a citizen b o d y for other expressive purposes. C o m p a r e the vast protest pilgrimage t o the imperial legate in Phoenicia staged by the citizens of Jerusalem a n d its surrounding villages when t h e E m p e r o r G a i u s ordered t h e installation of his statue in t h e Temple. T h e crowd w a s divided in advance according t o age a n d gender a n d performed prostrations a n d laments in unison 'as they h a d been c o m m a n d e d ' (Philo, Embassy to Gaius 2 2 7 - 8 ) .

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57

come to greet the troops arriving from Caesaria, the priests had dressed themselves in ritual vestments and carried in procession the sacred vessels of Temple service, accompanied by a choir of Temple singers dressed in white linen and carrying their instruments. 25 Ideally, the populace should then have dressed in white and gone out with the priests to welcome the troops as the citizens of Jerusalem had done to such good effect when they welcomed Alexander the Great. 26 But on this occasion, when the populace refused to cooperate, the priests fell to their knees and formally abased themselves by soiling their hair and tearing their clothes. These high-status Jews were using culturally specific gestures of stylized selfabasement to persuade the crowd to display submissive body language to the Romans. They wanted the crowd to go out to greet the troops with what the Romans would recognize as a proper adventus.21 Josephus claims the Roman governor had in fact spelled out in advance the semiotic purport of this gesture of submission that Romans in the East had come to expect: he said it would be the only sign (IJOVOV TEK[jripiov) the Jews could give that the populace was not planning further revolution. 28 Eventually the priests' supplication was successful and the crowd agreed to cooperate, but when the Romans, by malignant prearrangement, failed to respond in kind to the welcoming gestures and acclamations of the Jews, a riot ensued in which the bodies of some of the Jewish welcomers, whose message the Romans had deliberately misconstrued, were so crushed in the melee that their identity was obliterated. 29 Evidently elite Jews understood well enough the Roman code of selfabasement, as stylized in the ritual of the adventus, to recommend it when 25

26

27

28

29

U n d e r Agrippa, the Temple's Levite musicians h a d gained the privilege of wearing linen, a n innovation of which the priestly Josephus disapproved {AJ 20.216-18). O n clothing in general see E d w a r d s (1994) 1 5 3 - 9 . AJ 1 1 . 3 2 7 - 3 1 . Alexander's visit m a y be fantasy, but Josephus' description shows how successful welcomes were supposed t o be performed. O n later forms of the adventus a n d its 'protocols of welcome' see M a c C o r m a c k (1981). Civic ceremonials celebrating the arrival of the powerful go back to the Hellenistic kings (e.g. JA 12.138), a n d became the perquisite of R o m a n governors a n d generals. R o m a n legal code urged arriving governors t o m i n d their m a n n e r s (non gravate audire) during w h a t m u s t have been frequently tedious displays of imperial loyalty a n d self-promoting civic speechmaking Digest ( U l p i a n ) 1.16.7. N o written source specifies h o w ordinary soldiers were supposed to behave during a n adventus, b u t clearly they were expected to d o something like doff their caps in response to acclamations a n d applause. T h o u g h Josep h u s is certainly n o t going to admit as m u c h here, it was certainly possible to perform the adventus ceremony with irony verging on mockery. Consider the p a g a n villagers w h o by prearrangement strewed the r o a d with thorns a n d m a l o d o r o u s fumigations to 'welcome' the new bishop of G a z a ( M a r k the D e a c o n , Life of Porphyry, Bishop of Gaza 16). BJ 2.318. A s Josephus puts it, the point of a n adventus is 'to render obedience visible': 9ocvep6v TToif^aai TO TT£10T)VIOV {BJ 2.300).

To Josephus bodies and identities were coextensive; he stresses that the victims' mangled remains could no longer be identified even by relatives: f)9avi£ovTo, KOU O06E irpos T a ^ v TIS yvcopijios TOTS iSiois KaTeAEiTTETo BJ 2.327.

58

Maud Gleason

they thought it would forestall Roman aggression, while ordinary citizens of Jerusalem understood it well enough to be enraged when the Romans failed to respond appropriately. It is worth pointing out that at least some of the 'Roman' soldiers would have been gentile recruits from the cities of Caesaria and Sebaste who were used to living at close quarters with their Jewish neighbours and who could, on occasion, devise means of insulting Jews that revealed some rudimentary knowledge of Jewish taboos. 3 0 Roman officials, in contrast, appear not to have read the Jewish code of stylized self-abasement very well, for when Queen Berenice herself appeared barefoot as a suppliant before this governor, she met with absolutely no oci8cbs, though her head was shaved to indicate that she was undergoing a religious purification. 31 And in Herod's day, when the defeated Hasmonean Antigonus threw himself at the feet of the Roman governor of Syria, this gesture produced not pity but insult: uncontrolled laughter and the nickname 'Antigone'. 32 By making a gesture of submission that may have been, in Jewish culture, a standard part of the selfdramatization repertoire available to aristocrats in moments of crisis, Antigonus had, according to Roman codes of deportment, feminized himself. To return to Josephus in his hour of need: his torn clothing and the ashes on his head evoked the image of a Jewish aristocrat beseeching the 30

31

32

See for example the incident in which a gentile sacrificed a bird outside the synagogue at Caesaria (BJ 2.289), a n d the incident in which a soldier found a copy of the T o r a h in a village, tore it u p , a n d threw it into the fire (BJ 2.229). T h e R o m a n soldier guarding the Temple colonnade during Passover w h o used the R o m a n convention of aggressive nudity to bare his backside a n d fart at the assembled worshippers (BJ 2.224) m a y or m a y not have been aware that Jews were especially sensitive to male nudity polluting holy places (see Satlow (1997) 4 2 9 - 5 4 , esp. 4 5 2 - 3 ) . O n the local origins of some ' R o m a n ' troops see Millar (1993) 356. 5 / 2 . 3 1 4 . C o m p a r e the situation of Princess D r a u p a d i in the second b o o k of the Mahabharata: dragged against her will from the seclusion of the menstrual r o o m to the council c h a m b e r of the K a r a v a s , she is stunned to discover that her a n o m a l o u s presence elicits n o respect a n d her supplications have n o force. Presumably, Berenice humbled herself by appearing bare-headed. R o m a n s m a y have been aware that veiling was a traditional c o m p o n e n t of Jewish w o m e n ' s clothing, since ' J u d a e a C a p t a ' on Flavian coinage appears veiled. A cuirassed statue of Vespasian, however, depicts a Jewish male captive wearing trousers, which Jewish m e n never wore. In this case, the trousers are just iconographic code for ' b a r b a r i a n ' (Gergel (1994) 197-9). R o m a n s m a y not have understood the religious subtleties of Jewish costume, b u t they were sensitive enough to the political potential of the H i g h Priest's vestments to try to control the conditions of their display (JA 15.405; 18.90-5). £Trey£Aa(T6v TE aKpaxcos xai 'AvTiyovr|v exdAecTEv BJ 1.353. Pontius Pilate tried to ignore the d r a m a t i c self-abasement of Jews w h o staged a five-day demonstration lying faced o w n in front of his house to protest his introduction of imperial images into Jerusalem, but he caved in when the scale of protest was expanded a n d a stadium full of Jews prostrated themselves, baring their necks to his soldiers in a public act of submissive defiance

(BJ2M\-4;JA

18.57-9).

Mutilated messengers

59

people to mollify their wrath for the public good. Other gestures dramatized his intention not to defend himself from the charge of peculation: the sword dangling uselessly from his neck, the hands held behind his back as if he were already a captive. In effect, he positioned himself before the crowd as hors de combat. Both parties (as Josephus presents them) perceived these gestures to be formulaic: the crowd concluded that 'this pityroutine' (TOC Tipos TOS EAEOV) had been performed to purchase their pardon, while Josephus confides to his readers that 'in reality this lowliness (r) TocTravcocris) was advance preparation for a stratagem'?* At this point Josephus appears to be presenting himself as a versatile trickster-survivor, a paradigm that has its roots in the Hebrew Bible. 34 Closer to Roman times, we see this paradigm in the wily rabbis whose stories are preserved in the Talmud: Rabbi Johanan ben Zakkai, for example, escaped from Jerusalem during the siege by pretending to be dead. He arranged to have himself carried out on a bier packed with malodorous materials and lived to found Yavneh. 35 Rabbi Meir, when he found his face on Rome's T e n Most Wanted' poster, disguised himself by taking refuge in a brothel and escaped to Babylonia. 36 Rabbi Yose ben Kisma, Rabbi Elazar ben Perata and Rabbi Eliezer all outwit their Roman adversaries with disguise, deceit, or double entendres and live to pray another day. 37 Drawing perhaps unconsciously - on survivor-paradigms already present in Jewish folk-tradition, Josephus relates with pride how his gestural versatility staved off a lynching. Having temporarily appeased the crowd at Tarichaeae with the body language of submission, Josephus disclaimed all intention of returning the money he confiscated. He said that actually he had been planning to use it to fortify the town. Naturally the citizens of Tarichaeae applauded this announcement, but the citizens of other towns became angrier than ever. Josephus says he escaped to his house, where he was soon besieged by an angry crowd. At this point, he says he resorted to a second ruse (dirdTri).38 Addressing the crowd from the safety of his rooftop, he 33

34 35

36 37

38

TCO 6' fjv i) TcrrTEivcocris TTpoTrapacjKEVTi (TTpcxTTiyrjijaTos (BJ 2.604). A t other points in this episode he refers to himself as using CUTTCXTT] (611) a n d 66Aos (635). Niditch (1987). Babylonian T a l m u d , Gitin 5 6 a - b . This trickster-hero appears to have m o r e to fear from the Zealots t h a n the R o m a n s , and, like Josephus, finds favour with Vespasian by predicting his rise to the purple. O n the implications of these stories for constructions of Jewish masculinity in occupied territory see Boyarin (1997) 3 0 6 - 2 9 . Babylonian T a l m u d Avoda Zara 18. See Boyarin (forthcoming) ch. 3. F o r discussion of their stories Boyarin (1998) 5 2 - 8 0 a n d the works cited in the previous two notes. McbariTTOs aird-ir) SeuTEpa XP"n Tal BJ 2.611. In the Vita he uses the w o r d OTpcnT|yr)|ja (148).

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invited them to send in a delegation to negotiate. As he tells it in the Jewish War, a group of the leaders took him up on his offer. Once they were inside, he dragged them to the inner recesses of the building and whipped them 'until their innards were laid bare'. 39 Then he describes himself flinging open the front doors like a theatrical impresario to reveal the bloodied bodies to the mob. This is the body language of dominance; its effect, he says, was stark terror: KaTcrrrAr)£is.40 Incapacitated by the shock, the spectators dropped their weapons and ran. Thus Josephus shows himself gaining mastery over all his opponents by demonstrating his ability to destroy the physical integrity of a token few. We are fortunate when Josephus tells the same tale twice, for if the same details appear in both versions of the story, they may or not be factually true, but it is safe to assume he considered them a critical component of his self-presentation.41 Josephus gives a parallel account of the Tarichaeae incident in his autobiography. Again he describes himself, when besieged in his house, as using a mutilated body to send a message to the crowd. There is only one mutilated body in this version of the story, but an intensified level of violence used to inscribe the message. Josephus claims that he invited the crowd's representative inside, tortured him with whips, and, in a macabre inversion of his own earlier ordeal (when he hung his sword around his neck and twisted his hand around his back), ordered that one of his victim's hands be cut off and hung around his neck. 42 The voltage of this spectacle's effect on the crowd is described in the same way: stark terror (EKTTATI^IS KCCI 96P0S OUTI jjETpios). In another dramatic incident Josephus claims to have subdued a rebellious town on the Sea of Galilee trickster-fashion (56Acp), with a 'Potemkin flotilla' of unmanned boats. 43 When he had kidnapped the town's leading citizens under pretext of negotiation, Josephus found himself once again face to face with a hostile crowd - at a safe distance, to be sure, since he was still on board ship. Demoralized, however, by the disappearance of their political leaders, the citizens began to shout that a certain Cleitus was the real instigator of the revolt. In this story it is as if the citizens' need to protect themselves, and Josephus' need to signal his authority through an exemplary act of violence, somehow collaborate to produce a scapegoat. Josephus ordered one of his soldiers to step forward and cut 39 40

41

42 43

eiiacrnyGoo-ev |JexPl "iravTcov ra avAayxva yu/jvcoaai (BJ. 2.612). Compounds of 7rAf)TTco used to describe the psychological effects on spectators of military violence are extremely common in Polybius also: Davidson (1991) 19 with n. 43. On the relationship of the BJ to the Vita as independent reworkings of a common hyponmnemata-type source see Cohen (1976) 83. Vita 147-8. The town in question was Tiberias (BJ 2.635-44; Vita 163-73).

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61

off Cleitus' hands. The soldier refused to go. At this point Josephus' visible loss of authority over his own men has put his authority over the barely pacified town in jeopardy. An obvious, but risky, solution would be for Josephus to leap ashore and do the job himself, thus redeeming his claim to authority by an act of personal courage. Instead, he bluffed. Shifting the focus of attention from reluctant executioner to reluctant victim, Josephus offered terms: Cleitus might keep one of his hands provided he cut the other off himself.44 Cleitus whipped out his sword and severed his left hand, 'to such a pitch of fear had he been brought by Josephus'. Josephus seems to be demonstrating a paradoxical truth about power: its most impressive manifestations can be indirect. Presumably this is the point of the story (and of the incident itself, if it actually happened): to signal that Josephus' personal authority was powerful enough to extort a mind-boggling act of self-mutilation without the direct use of force.45 In these confrontations Josephus is both devious and violent; more than a trickster-survivor, he plays the trickster-enforcer. Like the avenging Odysseus, or Brutus the Liberator, he is willing to disguise himself in the garments and postures of humility in order that he may ultimately vindicate his claim to honour with a spectacularly violent act of revenge. It would be too simple to say that violent acts of revenge are culturally marked as 'Roman' tout court. Indeed the traditional Brutus story as recounted in Livy may be read as an uneasy meditation on the role played by deceit and cleverness, as well as violence, in Roman success. Growing up under tyranny, Brutus assumes a simulated character.46 His very name ('Dimwit') is a disguise. He uses trickery to fulfil the Delphic oracle by falling flat on his face (so that he is the first 'to kiss his mother' when he returns home): a behaviour that confirms his rivals' view of his intelligence but also simultaneously confirms his cunning and worthiness to rule. Lucretia's 'manly' suicide after she is raped by his enemy propels Brutus from his 'feminized' role, and the moment of transformation is rendered concrete as he seizes the bloody knife from her lifeless body. Yet Brutus as a trickster-enforcer clearly embodies a different model of manhood than that represented by R. Yohanan ben Zakkai, whose 'last

44

45

46

In his autobiography he permits himself a phrase worthy of a declaiming sophist: y£voO (TOCUTOO SriMOCTios, 'Become your own executioner' (Vita 172). Josephus' demonstration of power makes a more durable impression on his readers than on his supposed original audience, who were back to their old tricks in a few days. At that point Josephus had a full compliment of troops and exerted his authority by more conventional means: he told them to sack the city, and then further dramatized his power by ordering his troops to give the booty back (BJ 2.645-6). In Histories I.56ff. Brutus is described thus: iuvenis longe alius ingenii quam cuius simulationen induerat.

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laugh' is the survival of Jewish tradition in Yavneh, a triumph of cultural continuity that did not require the validation of a sanguinary tableau. In Josephus' final confrontation with an angry crowd, we find his selfpresentation attempting to finesse the gap between the roles of survivor and enforcer. The siege of Jotapata is at its last gasp. Vespasian has offered Josephus a safe-conduct out of the city, which the infuriated defenders, with whom he has been hiding underground, suspect he will accept. When he tries to discourage them from mass suicide they rush in to attack. But he, calling this one by name, looking another in the eye in the commanding fashion of a general, grasping that one by the hand, shaming another with a glance of entreaty, and torn by all the variegated emotions of the critical moment, succeeded in keeping everyone's blade from his throat as he turned to face one assailant after another, like a wild beast at bay. They, in turn, still respected their general even in his moment of peril. Some of them found their right hand paralyzed, others' swords glanced off the target, and many charging forward found themselves dropping their weapons without visible cause.47 Josephus dramatizes his charismatic personal authority to his readers in terms of its power over the bodies of others. But here he does not have to actually chop off the hands of his opponents; all he has to do is look them in the eye and their hands go limp; they miss their mark or drop their weapons involuntarily. Note also his self-schematizing versatility. He tries a different approach with each opponent - becomes all things to all men. Indeed this episode may show us in miniature how the rhetoric of Josephus' self-presentation constitutes a kind of syllepsis. Like the matron in Apuleius' novel who is simultaneously a conniving adulteress and a frugal housewife, Josephus is 'perpetually deployed between divergent codes': 48 he is both a stern general and a resourceful survivor, both an enforcer and a trickster, both a Roman and a Jew. In fact, the doublets and inconsistencies in Josephus' narratives of his exploits in Galilee become easier to understand if we read the Bellum Judaicum and his autobiography as works of prose fiction, for which in this period syllepsis appears to function as a master trope, used particularly as a way 'to stage differences in cultural perspectives or world-views'. 49 The 'real Josephus' eludes us; we can never quite get him into focus as he straddles irreconcilable personae. When he can't be both simultaneously, he sometimes evokes the two sides of his double identity seriatim, creating a kind of stereoscopic effect. In the Galilee narrative, 47

48 49

BJ 3.385-6. The biography does not give a separate narrative of these events (see Vita 412). The echoes of Homer and Thucydides (7.69) are clear. Selden (1994) 49. My thanks to Fernanda Bashaw for suggesting this connection. Selden (1994) 63 n. 132.

Mutilated messengers

63

for example, it's Josephus himself who plays the masterful Roman general, whipping his legions into shape,50 while John of Gischala functions as a kind of disavowed alter ego: brigand, trickster, businessman. Josephus in his narrative does not shift personae neatly from Jewish patriot to Roman apologist at the moment of his surrender to the Romans. Prior to his surrender, for example, John of Gischala and Josephus' own mercenaries are allowed to voice their suspicions that Josephus is pro-Roman - let the reader make of these protestations what s/he will. Indeed we are never quite sure, for example, what Josephus actually intended to do with the confiscated cache of Agrippa's finance minister that caused him so much trouble. Did he confiscate the loot because he was himself, in effect, a brigand chief? Did he take it because he planned to return it to Agrippa, friend of Rome? Or did he actually plan all along to use the money to fortify Tarichaeae? His behaviour satisfies the conditions of all three theories simultaneously. The acts of physical violence with which Josephus punctuates his story of survival may endow him with an air of decisive manliness on the Roman aristocratic model, but they hardly clarify his ultimate intentions.51 In his versatile body language Josephus resembles another individual whose relationship to Roman central authority was both imitative and adversarial, the bandit Bulla Felix. Bulla was 'never seen when seen, never found when found, never caught when captured'.52 His stock-in-trade was his ability to assume any number of identities. He impersonated a government official when his men were in jail, and ordered the jailer to release them, on the grounds that he needed criminals of just that sort to throw to the lions. He diddled the centurion assigned to arrest him by approaching incognito and offering to lead him to the robbers' den. Having led the fellow into an ambush he dressed himself up like a magistrate, staged a mock criminal trial, and impudently sentenced the 50

BJ 2.577ff., where he organizes his troops along Roman lines. This has to be a. post facto fantasy, since Josephus had ample opportunity to observe the customs of the Roman military only after he surrendered. 5 * Indeed the story of Masada, recorded in no other source, may have evolved from Josephus' attempt to straddle divergent codes: at Jotapata he surrenders to the Jewish god as His prophetic mouthpiece, lectures his followers at length on the evils of suicide in the persona of a Hellenistic philosopher, disarms his mutinous men as a charismatic general, dupes them into suicide as a trickster-survivor, and surrenders to Vespasian as a friend of the Romans (BJ 3.351-92). Since in all this virtuoso role-playing, the one role he can't play is that of Cato, whose suicide made him the noblest Roman of them all, perhaps Josephus elaborates the suicide of Eleazar and his companions at Masada to make up this lack. As D. Boyarin has observed, 'Far from being a conscience-ridden return to and valorization of "his" people, the account of the honorable suicide to avoid surrender at Masada was another step in Josephus' self-Romanization and thus a further emphasis on his true andreia or manliness ...' (1997) 320. On the disturbing political implications of the way Josephus' fiction has influenced modern ideology see Zerubavel (1994) 72-100. 52 Dio Cassius, Roman History, epitome of book 77.10.

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centurion to carry a message back to his commanders, Teed your slaves lest they become bandits.' 53 These words were accompanied by a message engraved on the messenger's body - though in keeping with Bulla's aristocratic clemency and plebeian humour the message was temporary: a shaved head rather than severed hands. 54 II

Deceptive deportment

The versatility of self-presentation on which Josephus prided himself and which Bulla the bandit took to fantastical extremes served to enhance their improvisatory exercise of personal power. Such versatility was also of great adaptive value wherever people found themselves subject to the arbitrary power of others. But the more deportment was perceived by either side as something that could be schematized, the larger loomed the problem of false body language and deliberate deception. King Herod's court, wracked by the spasmodic purges of an arbitrary and paranoid ruler, was the sort of place that Josephus imagined as having a lot of 'schematizing' going on. Here, for example, is Herod's son Antipater systematically undermining the reputation of his half-brother Alexander. Stage-managing everything with an eye for detail, he devised the most artful ways for slander to reach Herod's ears while wearing himself the mask of loyal brother ... and then when an accusation against Alexander was made by others, he came forward to play his part.. , 55 Josephus' language evokes the theatre, and presupposes the kind of selfconscious impression management 56 employed by Herod's treacherous brother Pheroras as he prepared to beg a royal pardon for his misdeeds: He arranged himself so as to appear as pitiable as possible, and then, all black clothing and tears, threw himself at Herod's feet.57 53

54 55

56 57

O n the carnivalesque inversions involved in Bulla's playacting (the outlaw impersonating figures of government authority, the fugitive staging a ceremony that convicts his pursuers) c o m p a r e R o b i n H o o d , w h o 'transgresses spatial boundaries, trespassing u p o n the king's forests; he inverts social hierarchy, preying u p o n the d o m i n a n t classes; he degrades the sacred, humiliating the clergy; he replaces the fast of peasant poverty with the feast of poached deer' (Stallybrass (1989) 4 5 - 7 6 ) . A t issue, of course, is not w h a t the historical Bulla actually did, b u t the patterns of thinking revealed by the stories that people liked to tell a b o u t w h a t he did. F o r m o r e messengers with shaved beards see II Samuel 10.4, with t h a n k s to Ory Amitay. 5e TrepiecTKE|ji|Jievcos Spafjaroupycov TOCS Trpos'HpcbSriv 66ous TOCIS Sia|3oAaTs ETTOIETTO CXUTOS [xkv aSeAcpoO npoaconeiov ETTIKEIIJEVOS . . . KaireiSav &7rayyEA06ir| TI KOCT' 'AAs^dvSpou, irapEAdcbv viTEKpiveTO ... (BJ 1.471). T h e t e r m is Goffman's (1969). Koci KCCTCccrKEuacras eaurov,

cos cxv oiKTpoTotTos 9 a v e i r | , laeAaivri T£ scrGfJTi KOCI 8 a K p u o i s

TTpOCTTTlTTT8l ToTs'HpcbSoU TTOCTIV (BJ

1.506).

Mutilated messengers

65

This ensemble of clothing and gesture functioned as a kind of shorthand, as Josephus was well aware. In another version of this incident he simply says that Pheroras put on black clothing 'and all the [other] signs (crrmeTa) of incipient ruin.' 58 If an audience before Herod required carefully schematized deportment, so too would an audience before the emperor. After Herod's death various claimants to his throne appeared before Augustus. Archelaus, Herod's appointed heir, was accused by his relatives of faking grief after his father's death. On top of this they accused him of pretending to mourn his father, schematizing his appearance to present a mask of grief by day, but drinking riotously by night.59 Just as if he were on stage he pretended to weep by day, but enjoyed the pleasures of the realm by night.60 Because Josephus' source Nicolas of Damascus was actually present on this occasion, there is a possibility that we are listening to not just what Josephus thought was plausible, but to the sort of arguments actually used. The dissident members of Herod's family were clearly trying to undermine the credibility of Archelaus on many levels, including the credibility of his body language. Body language was in fact the key to Archelaus' response. He appointed Nicolas of Damascus to speak in his defence, and fell, in silence, prostrate at Caesar's feet.61 His grandfather, Antipater the elder, had the mute eloquence routine all figured out. Appearing before Julius Caesar under very similar circumstances, he did not use either Jewish or Roman clothing conventions to articulate his distress, but countered accusations of disloyalty brought by dissident relatives by letting his body speak. In response to their accusations Antipater ripped off his garment to reveal all his battle scars. As for his loyalty to Caesar, he said, he had no need of words; his body, while he was silent, shouted it aloud.62 58

59

60

61 62

JA 16.267. W h e n H e r o d himself appeared before Octavian as a chagrined ex-partisan of A n t o n y ' s , he did n o t wear black, considering it penitential costume enough t o omit his royal diadem a n d d o n a c o m m o n e r ' s robes (BJ 1.387). A R o m a n in P h e r o r a s ' situation would use n o t a funereal togapulla, b u t a toga sordida. O n squalor see Lintott (1968) 1 6 20, also Heskel (1994) 141-2. TTPO(7GOVE{SI£EV 6' cos *ai TO TTEVBOS KareipcovEuaaro TOO TraTpos, |ae0' fjjiEpav [xkv imaXT]iJC(Ti£cov TO npoo-conov EIS AUTTT|V, vuKTcop 6e |i£XPlS Kcb|jcov HEOUCTKOIJIEVOS (BJ 2.29). oocnrep eni <JKT)VT\S SaKpueiv \xkv TrpocrrroiouiJEVov TOCS f)|jiepas, ocTroAauovTa SE f)Sovfj TTJ ITTI xf|s ocpxfis o a a i VUKTES (JA 17.234). JA 17.248. n p o s TOCOTO( 6 'AvTiTraTpos diroppiyas TT|V EcrOfiTa TO TrAf|0os ETTESEIKVUEV TCOV Tpauiiorrcov, Koci iTEpi |i£v TT\S EIS Kaicrapoc Euvoias OUK E<pr| Aoyou SETV auTco* KEKpayevai y a p TO acdfja aiconcouTos (BJ 1.197). This move was made notorious by Manius Aquilius who used it to absolve himself of extortion charges in 99 BCE (Leigh (1995) 209 with n. 29).

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Maud Gleason

This shouting, silent body did indeed effect a successful cross-cultural communication, probably because the display of one's scars as testimony in self-defence was a Roman gestural convention. 63 When Caesar decided to appoint Antipater procurator of Judaea, Antipater's scars were converted into a highly visible verbal message: Caesar had his decision 'engraved on the Capitol as a sign (ormslov) of his own justice and of Antipater's deserts'. 64 The emperor, ideally, reads the body right. Josephus twice tells the story of how Augustus' physiognomic gaze penetrated straight through the schematizing pretensions of a low-class claimant to the Hasmonean throne. 65 This time the fellow was no relative of Herod's, but a muscular Jewish slave who happened to bear a striking resemblance to Herod's murdered son Alexander. With the help of an advance man he put it about that he himself was Alexander and had not been murdered after all: those sent to do the deed had merely substituted a look-alike body to impersonate his corpse! He successfully imposed this deception upon the Melians, who provided him with a royal retinue and sent him on to Rome. There (we are told) Augustus, 'who knew Alexander's features well, divined the deception based on similarity even before he saw the man' 6 6 (a testament to the emperor's powers of extra-sensory perception?). Josephus says Augustus sent an agent to bring 'Alexander' in for an audience. In one version this agent detects the imposture, in another, he too is fooled and the final unmasking of the deception is left to Augustus himself. In both versions, the pretender's body-habitus gives him away. His body is 'hardened and servile', 'worn by toil', and he lacks a certain je ne sais quoi that the real Alexander's body ought to have 'due to luxury and good breeding'. 67 (The phrase 'luxury and good breeding' shows well how nurture and nature should conspire to produce the true 63

64

65 66

67

I n Cicero De Oratore 2.124, 195 w e hear of a n advocate for the defence revealing his client's scars. Other examples of m e n citing their o w n bodies as testimony in this fashion include Niger in BJ 4.359, a n old soldier in Livy 2.23.4 (ipse testes honestarum aliquot locis pugnarum cicatrices aduerso pectore ostentabai), M a r i u s in Sallust Jugurtha 85.29; Tacitus Annals 1.18, a n d Plutarch Life of Aemelius Paulus 3 1 . 8 0 - 3 2 . 1 . T TOCS MEV ST) Tipids TOCC/TOCS KaTaap ETTEOTEAAEV iv TCO KaireTcoAicp xa9aX^vai ^ T £ O^TOO SiKoaoawns crrmeiov Kai Tffc xdvSpos laoiJiEvas dpET-ns (BJ 1.200). I n BJ 1.193 Antipater's w o u n d s are again termed Td arj/jeTa TT\S dpET-ns. 5/2.101-10; AJ 17.324-37. KaTaap 8e yivcoaKcov [dxpipcos] TOUS 'AAs^dvSpou xapaKTf|pas • •. cruvEcopa [xkv KOCI npiv iSeiv TOV dvOpcoirov TT)V T-qs 6MOI6TT|TOS aTrd"rnv (BJ 2.106). TO T6 6Aov (j&ixa. (TKA-qpoTepov TE KOCI SouAocpavss KaTanadcov evorjaev irdv TO auvTayiia (BJ 2.107); auTOUpyia TS y a p 6T£TpUTO 6 yeuSaAe£av8pos Kai i r a p d TO EKEIVCO fpaSaAdv TOV GcbiiccTos UTTO Tpwpfjs Kai yevvai6TT)Tos cruvEpxofjtevov 8id Ta Evavria TCO8E STTICJE£E|3E(3T)KEI TO acoiJia (AJ 17.333).

Mutilated messengers

67

aristocrat.) Augustus read this body right: 'Laughing, he sentenced the false Alexander to row as a galley slave on account of hisfinephysique'.68 Augustus correctly interpreted the eue^ioc of the pretender's body as a sign of servility rather than royalty and, by way of punishment, assigned him a social status to match.69 The underlying message seems to be that, even across cultural boundaries, one aristocrat should be able to know another by the body's infallible signs. We have considered so far the use of 'schematized deportment' to enhance an individual's claim to social status - the gestural repertory of social climbing, if you will. But Josephus also abounds with examples of duplicitous deportment in wartime. When he was besieged by the Romans in Jotapata, Josephus devised a stratagem for getting messages out and supplies in: he instructed his messengers to cover their backs with hairy hides and creep on all fours past the sentries 'so as to present the appearance of dogs'.70 During the siege of Jerusalem, some Jews got up an elaborately duplicitous charade that capitalized on divided Jewish sentiment for its verisimilitude. One group of men pretended that they were the anti-Roman faction and had just been expelled from the city by the other group, who lined the walls pretending to be 'the people' and promising to open the gates to the Romans. Those outside the gates 'acted the part' of trying to beg or force their way back in and 'made themselves appear' to be in a state of extreme agitation.71 Titus, Josephus claims, was not deceived, but some of his men rushed into the trap and were killed. The Jews, taunting the Romans for being taken in by the ruse, broadcast an impromptu war dance from the wall - a way of claiming victory long-distance with body language. A complex example of duplicitous deportment in wartime appears later in Book V. After they had breached the first wall around Jerusalem, the Romans brought up an enormous battering ram to pound away at the second. To buy time a Jew named Castor called out to Titus 'with a voice designed to elicit pity' and made as if to desert with five companions who

68

69

70

71

Koci 6 KocTcrap TOV jaev y£u5aAe£avSpov . . . Spaar-qpiov opcov auroupyfjaai ra> crcbfjom epeacreiv ev TOIS vauTais KonraAeysi (AJ 17.337). C o m p a r e another pretender, Simon of Perea, a royal slave w h o hoped to m a k e something of his g o o d looks a n d outstanding physical size a n d strength (BJ 2.51; AJ 17.273). A shepherd might become a pretender if he was tall a n d strong enough: (AJ 17.278-84; BJ 2.60-5). O n being a 'big m a n ' in Palestine see Shaw (1993). cos ••• 9ccvTacriav Trapexoiev KUVCOV (BJ 3.192). W a s Josephus thinking of himself as Odysseus in the Cyclops' cave when describing himself as the a u t h o r of this ruse - or even as J a c o b stealing a m a r c h on Esau? UTTEKplVOVTO . . . IK£T£UEIV . . . TQpaTTO|i£VOlS TTpOCTECOKElCraV (BJ

5.112).

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Maud Gleason

'jointly play-acted a supplication'.72 The rest of the men on the disintegrating tower pretended to resist them, shouting 'Liberty or death.' Titus, hoping to assist the would-be 'deserters', suspended the assault. Josephus imagines Castor, the Jewish ringleader, as the very embodiment of a double message: while pretending to entreat his sword-waving compatriots to accept Titus' terms, he secretly sent word to his Jewish commander that he could fool the Romans almost indefinitely.73 Titus (ever noble, but a little thick?) could only marvel at this display of synthetic courage. When at last the trick unravelled and the battering ram was brought back in to play, the defending Jews used their own bodies one last time to send a false message to the enemy. They set fire to the tower and jumped through the flames to safety in a hidden vault beneath, 'again giving the Romans the impression of courage, as if they were hurling themselves into the fire'.74 During the siege of Jerusalem, however, some Jews directed misleading body language not at the Romans, the enemy without, but at their fellow Jews. Josephus vividly describes the deceptive bodies of the Zealots those whom he and other anti-revolutionary Jews would consider the enemy within. The Zealots' appetite for plunder was insatiable; they indulged themselves freely in robbery, murder and rape. In Josephus' description, the momentum of their excess pushes gender boundaries. They guzzled their loot washed down with blood, and in their excess gave themselves up to effeminate experiences (eve0r|AuTrd0ouv). They arranged their hair, put on women's clothes, drenched themselves in perfume, and applied eyeliner to enhance their good looks. Not only did they mimic women's appearances, they mimicked women's experiences: completely uninhibited, they dreamed up unhallowed kinds of sex (dOeiiiTous EpcoTccs). They wallowed in the city as if it were a whore house and polluted the whole place with impure acts. Their looks were feminine, but their hands were murder: approaching with mincing steps they would suddenly become warriors, pull swords out from beneath their coloured finery, and impale the passers-by.75

72

KCCl Tfj fCOVfj

KCCTOlKTl£6lJlEVOS

£AET\<JOLl O^CXS TTCCpEKdAEl . . . Ol TTEVTE JIEV CCUTCp

(JUVUTTEKpi-

VOVTO TT)V iK6TT|piav (BJ 5.318, 321). 73

afja

8E TOCC/TOC TTEIJTTCOV KCCTCxcpavqs fjv Kai TOUS aTreidoOvTocs ETTI TT\V 8E£I6CV napccKccAcdv

(BJ

5.322). 74 75

TTOCAIV 86£av dv5p£/crs"'Pco|jaiois wapEaxou cos piyavTES (79&S OCUTOUS EIS TO m ) p ( 5 / 4 . 3 3 0 ) . |i£0J aiiaccTos TE TOC cruAr|0EVTa KaTETnvov KCCI |i£T5 dSEias svEdrjAunddouv TOO Kopco, KOHOCS cruv0£Ti£6iJ£voi Kai yuvaiKEias IO^TOCS dvaAa|i(3dvovTES, KOCTCCVTAOUIJEVOI 8E laupois Kai Trpos EUTipETTEiav U7Toypdq>ovTES o90aAiJous. ou [iovov SE KOCTIJIOV, dAAd Kai nadr} yuvaiKcov emIJOUVTO Kai h\ UTTEppoAfiv dcrEAyEias aOe^hou^ ETrEvoricrav epcoras' EVT)AIV8OUVTO 8' 60s •nopvEiOQ Tfj TTOAEI Kai uaCTav aKa0dpTois E|Jiiavav Epyois. yuvaiKi£6iJEVoi 8E Tas oyEis Kpovcov TaTs SE^iaTs, 0puTTTO|iEvoi TE TOIS |3a5i
vov (5/4.561-3).

Mutilated messengers

69

This passage of invective is unique in Josephus' history of the Jewish War.76 Nowhere else does he characterize political misbehaviour as gender inversion. What prompted him to describe the Zealots as crossing gender boundaries? I think we can assume that the Zealots did not actually dress in drag to deceive their victims, but practised false self-presentation in some other fashion that rendered their unsuspecting victims more vulnerable to violence.77 Josephus shares with the author of the de dea Syria the assumption that the clue to a person's 'real' identity lies in the body (see Eisner in this volume). The cross-dressing of a Gallus reveals his new identity and brings his social persona into conformity with both his subjectivity and his newly modified anatomy, while the cross-dressing of the Zealots conceals their true identity until their physical violence shows who they really are. Ingesting the wealth of their fellow-citizens precipitates a slide into self-indulgent excess that frames the Zealots - temporarily - as female. Cross-dressing and effeminate body language conceal their 'real' identity while lulling their victims into quasi-feminine passivity. But the momentum of sensual excess can precipitate gender-reversals in either direction: at any moment a Zealot may whip out his concealed weapon to penetrate his hapless victims and manifest his virility as violence. Such conquests were predicated on deceit. The Zealots pretended to be patriots. They 'decked themselves out' to appeal to the (male) citizens of Jerusalem. By ingratiating themselves with the masses instead of keeping them in their place, they subverted the web of symbols - social, religious, and political - on which traditional leaders relied to buttress their authority. In this passage, gender inversion is a trope for revolution. Josephus' informants about the Zealots' behaviour were upper-class Jews who defected from the city as the political and military situation spiralled out of their control. Years later, writing in Rome, he recreated the Jewish aristocrats' sense of displacement and victimization in the 76

77

Cross-dressing is explicitly forbidden in the L a w ( D e u t . 22.5); Josephus, in his s u m m a r y of Mosaic law adds the specification that it is particularly heinous in wartime: T a k e care, particularly in your battles, that n o w o m a n wear the garments of a m a n , n o r m a n the g a r m e n t of a w o m a n ' (AJ 4.301). Cross-dressing is n o t m u c h discussed in the Talmudic texts surveyed by Satlow (1995). Philo, as a Jew living in a Hellenistic city, claims to have seen his share of quasi-males w h o use the cosmetic arts described by Josephus (clothing, hairstyle, m a k e - u p , eyeliner, a n d perfume) to feminize themselves a n d attract other m e n (Special Laws 1.37-40; 3.37-8). However, Philo describes these practices n o t as forms of political deception practised by deviant Jews, b u t as corruptions endemic to other nations which Jewish law proscribes. Josephus could have h a d in the back of his m i n d the deception practised by Pontius Pilate as p r o c u r a t o r in Jerusalem: he ordered soldiers to 'cross-dress' as Jews a n d infiltrate a rowdy crowd of protesters. A t a prearranged signal, they drew clubs out from beneath their cloaks a n d attacked the Jews (BJ 2.176; JA 18.60-2).

70

Maud Gleason

gendered terms of Greco-Roman political invective. This type of invective fuels itself from a sort of psychological syllogism: To feel threatened is to feel victimized; to feel victimized is to feel feminized; to feel feminized is to feel that one's identity as a man is at risk; therefore one projects this threatening image of defective manhood back onto one's opponents. This description of Zealots in drag strikes us as an isolated set piece because, however intensely he may loathe the Zealots, Josephus does not consistently characterize their deviance as gender inversion. But this passage taps in to another corporeal metaphor for social dysfunction - one which does seem to have pervaded Josephus' imagination. When the Zealots 'wallowed in the city as if it were a whore house', whose body were they corrupting? When they reached out from behind their treacherous finery, whom did they impale? The body politic. HI

The body politic

For Josephus, as for many Greek and Roman writers, metaphors of the body politic are commonplace. The body figures the polity because its component parts move cooperatively under hierarchical direction. 78 In the Jewish War, for example, when the Romans move battering rams up to the walls of Jerusalem, the Jews 'become one body' and rush to the ramparts. 79 When a ruler abuses his domain, its territory is figured as body. Thus when Josephus presents a Jewish embassy to Augustus pleading for the autonomy of Judaea, they describe King Herod's enormities as offences against the body, invoking a cross-culturally potent image of the body politic: For not only had he tortured the bodies of his citizens, but he had also tortured the cities. He had maimed the cities of his own dominion, but adorned the cities of other races, and had gratified foreign peoples with Judaea's blood.80 Judaea is a body that must be rescued from Herod's would-be successors who are 'rending it limb from limb'. 81 Conversely, when Antipater stands 78

79 80

F o r a suggestive analysis of social tensions expressed via m e t a p h o r s of the b o d y politic see Bruce Lincoln's discussion of A g r i p p a ' s speech in Livy 2.32 (Lincoln (1989) 145—8). ev crcbfja yivovTca (BJ 5.279). f3EJ5acrc(viKEvai y y a p ou |i6vov Ta (JcotJiaTcx TCOV UTroTETaynevcov aAAa xai rocs TTOXEIS' TOCS |i£v y a p i5ias XeAco^-qcrdai, TCXS SE TCOV aAAoq>uAcov K8Koa|iT|K6vai Kai TO TT\S 'louSaias af/ja KExapicT0ai TOTS ECJCOOEV 5f)|jiois (BJ 2.85). Josephus' source Nicolas of D a m a s c u s was

present on this occasion to defend Herod's side. 81

TOTS concos orrapocTTOUcTiv (BJ 2.91).

Mutilated messengers

71

accused of treason before Herod and begs to be tortured ('Let the instruments of torment travel through my guts'),82 the body is being figured as territory. Sometimes the image of the body politic in Josephus takes on architectural dimensions. King Herod, as an autocrat, saw the state as an extension of his household. He made his mark on Jerusalem by building three huge towers into the old wall, and 'indulged his private feelings' by naming them after his brother, his favourite wife, and his best friend.83 In Josephus' description, these structures are anthropomorphized and therefore gendered. The tower with the most ornate rooms was named after Mariamne, on the grounds that 'King Herod considered it appropriate that the tower named after the queen should be more decorated than those named after men, just as theirs ought to be more strongly fortified than the woman's.'84 When it comes to architectural images of the body politic, we can contrast the aestheticizing sentimentality of King Herod, who made the city wall into an architectural memorial for one dead woman, with the brutally functionalist approach of the Zealots, who welcomed the death of women as useless non-combatants, and 'walled up the breach with their own bodies' when the city wall was damaged during the siege.85 And when the Romans captured the citadel, the defenders set fire to its beautiful connecting porticoes in what amounts to prophylactic surgery on the architecture of the body politic: 'Just like when a body is putrefying, they cut away the limbs that were already diseased to preempt its further spread.'86 In fact, the body politic is often figured as diseased when its component parts are in conflict. Thus, as civil disorder spreads, 'No sooner had these disturbances been put in order then, just like in a sick body, another part became inflamed.'87 If the chief component goes bad, so much the worse for the rest of the organism. As Josephus comments on the spread of 'brigandage' from Jerusalem to the rest of Judaea, 'Just as in the body, when the chief part is inflamed, all the limbs become infected too.' 88 In a monarchical context, the royal family can be figured as one great 82 83 84 85 86

87

66eu6Tco 5id TCOV eiawv arrAdyxvcov TOC o p y a v a (BJ 1.635). 5/5.162. 5/5.171. TO KaTappi906V avrneixiaavTes TOTS aco/jacri (BJ 5.346). KocOdwep OT)TTOIJEVOU (JcbfjtaTos d7T6KOTTTOv TOC 7Tpo6iAr||i|i6va |jeAr| 90dvovT£s T-pv eis TO TTpoaco vo\xi\v (BJ 6.164). Lucan's Civil War uses the same imagery in many places; Sulla, for example, cuts off the putria membra of the state (2.141). KaT6oraA|Jievcov Se KCU TOUTCOV coansp ev VCXTOUVTI aco/jom -rrdAiv rrepov iJiepos ^Aeypiaivev

(5/2.264). 88

KccdawEp 8k kv acofjan 4.406).

TOO KupicoTaTou (pAeypiaivovTOS TrdvTa TCX |iGXri auvevoasi (BJ

72

Maud Gleason

big body. King Herod is advised that his contentious kinsmen will have to learn to live with a little inflammation, 'In monarchies, just as in obese bodies, there is always some part that is swollen because of the weight, which should not be amputated, but doctored more gently.' 89 (The speaker is trying to persuade Herod not to execute his brother.) Conversely, when the royal body is literally inflamed, it becomes a site of contested meaning. There were some who said that Herod's gruesome last illness, complete with convulsions and worms in the privy parts, was a sign of God's judgement on his crimes. 90 From the point of view of the exasperated Romans, the metaphor of the body politic combines with the theme of deceptive deportment to produce an image of a Judaea that, even when quiescent, is secretly diseased. As Josephus has Titus say to the beleaguered rebels, 'Granted - you despised the indolence of Nero, and, like lesions or sprains, you remained quiet but malignant for a time until a more serious illness broke out and you were revealed [for what you were] .. .' 9 1 In this metaphor, the opponent's corporate body proves to be not a trans-cultural source of truth, but a stubbornly opaque cipher. When describing the siege of Jerusalem, Josephus encodes the disorder of the body politic in imagery of distorted bodily boundaries, cannibalism and incest. Starving refugees who have fled to the Romans unwittingly eviscerate themselves as they stuff food into their swollen bellies and burst apart like living oxymorons. 92 Those who prudently avoid exploding are forcibly eviscerated by Syrian and Arab troops (note how Josephus figures the authors of these atrocities as non-Roman) on suspicion that their intestines harbour smuggled gold. 93 Bodies turned inside out, excremental wealth - these images blur the boundary between self and non-self and constitute a very Roman meditation on distortions of personal identity in 89

90

91

92 93

iv y a p TCXTS paaiAeiais cooirep kv neyahois acbfjacnv dei TI laepos 9Aey|jaiveiv OTTO TOO |3dpous, oTigp OCTTOKOTTTEIV |jiev ou xpfivai, OepaiTEueiv Se TTpaoTEpov (BJ 1.507). O n t h e complex significance of t h e grotesque male b o d y in rabbinical literature as a symbol of b o t h fecundity a n d exploitation/corruption see Boyarin (1993) 197ff. BJ 1.656, where this interpretation of H e r o d ' s illness is presented a s t h e opinion of unn a m e d prophets. I n AJ 17.170, Josephus himself concurs with this view. Likewise, Josep h u s read the illness of a Gentile critic of Judaism as vindication: A p i o n h a d reviled t h e practice of circumcision, but then developed a genital ulcer a n d h a d t o submit t o it himself (as if this irony were n o t satisfying enough, t h e disease - o r the treatment - proved fatal anyway) (Against Apion 2.143). O n Josephus' elaborated description of H e r o d ' s death in the Antiquities see L a d o u c e u r (1981) a n d Africa (1982). Similarly, m o d e r n critics have been k n o w n t o claim t h a t F o u c a u l t ' s illness was a 'biological transcription' of the process of his intellectual decay. See Halperin (1998) 93 with n. 1. goTco youv, Konre9povf)craTe TT\S Nepcovos pa0u|iias, KOU Kccdawep pr\yiiaTa f\ aAAov xpovov KaKor)0cos r)p£|jioOvTes ev rfj /jei^ovi uoaco 8i£9avr|T£ . . . (BJ 6.337). £.7 5.549. 5/5.421,550-2.

Mutilated messengers

73

the context of civil war along the grotesque lines fleshed out by Lucan in the 60s.94 From Jewish scripture comes the idea that incestuous cannibalism signals the immanent destruction of Israel.95 When the Zealot party splits, Josephus compares the 'faction bred within a faction' to 'a wild beast maddened by the lack of external supplies that now attacks its own flesh'.96 As the siege progresses, metaphor replaces simile: the Zealots in Jerusalem are no longer compared to autophagous animals, they are figured as cannibals tout court. Their cannibalism of the body politic precludes their awareness of imminent collective starvation, 'for it was still possible to feed on the people's troubles and drink the city's lifeblood'.97 Those citizens who still had normal food became prey for the factionleaders, who 'drank each other's health in the blood of the people and divided the corpses of the wretches between them'.98 The cannibalistic dismemberment to which the body politic is subjected by the Zealots is mirrored by the literal dismemberment inflicted by Titus on its deserters who escape (a practice discussed further below). The Zealots are insensible to the suffering they have caused because in attacking the body politic they have, in a bizarre way, performed a further dismemberment on themselves. Having separated their souls from their bodies, they treated both as if they belonged to others. For no suffering could tame their souls, and no pain could touch their bodies: like dogs they continued to maul the carcass of the people . . . "

This theme of the corrupted body politic that preys upon itself achieves a grisly climax in the story, all the more telling if invented, of Mary bat Eleazar, who, pushed to starvation by the depredations of the Zealots, cooked and ate the baby that had been feeding at her breast. This episode is said to have shocked even the rebels, and serves as a sort of anticipatory justification for the burning of the Temple (the episode which, in the narrative, it immediately precedes). Josephus has the mother announce her semiotic intentions in a dramatic soliloquy: 'Come, little one: become 94 95

On Lucan see the brilliant study of Bartsch (1997). Leviticus 26.29; Deuteronomy 28.53-7, a text which describes women eating their own children during a siege (a likely source of Josephus' story of the cannibalistic 'Mary' discussed below).

96

Tocu"rr)v 6' OUK dv dpidpTOi TIS EITTCOV cnaaei cnacriv eyyeveaBai, KOCI Ka6d7T6p Oripiov Aucroficrav evSsia TCOV e£co0Ev erri ras idias fjSri accpKccs opiJicx (BJ 5.4).

97

I T I y a p irapfiv eaBieiv SK TCOV 5rmo(7icov KOCKCOV KOCI TO TT\S TTOXSCOS alfjia wiveiv (BJ 5.344).

98

avrnrpohrivou

Se dAArjAois TO al^a

TCOV 5T)IJOTCOV KCQ TCC TTTCO\ICXTO: TCOV dOAicov 8ie-

vepifrvTo (BJ 5.440). 99

Kod TCXS yvx&s \copicjavTES and TCOV UCOIJCXTCOV dii<poT£pois cos dAAoTpiois exP 0 ^ 1 " 0 - ° ^ T £ y d p Trd0os auTcov f)|aepou TT^V yuxriv OUT' dAynScov f|TTT£TO TOOCTCOIJICXTOS,oi ye KOCI vsKpov TOV SfjfJOV COOTTEp KUVES k(JTTCXpCXTTOV . . . (BJ 5 . 5 2 5 ~ 6 ) .

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Maud Gleason

nourishment for me, and for the rebels an avenging angel, and for the world become a story - the only one needed to complete the miseries of the Jews.' 100 She is making her baby into a message, yevou nOOos: at this command flesh is transmuted into fiction. When people use their bodies, or those of others, as semiotic instruments, they may do so both within and across cultural boundaries. When Jewish elders, for example, supplicated the rioting crowds of Jerusalem, they were using culturally specific forms of body language to urge the crowd to participate in an adventus, a more generalized form of submissive body language imposed by the Romans on their conquered peoples as a lingua franca. When Titus dismembered Jewish deserters, he preempted their ability to use their own bodies as culturally specific expressive instruments in order to send a 'universal' message that the Jews would understand. I hope to show that by making the assumption that imagery of the body politic was (or was thought to be) cross-culturally transparent, we gain access to an explanation for certain kinds of violence. My hypothesis is that where the body so readily figures the polity in the collective imaginary, dramatizing one's ability to control individual bodies (both one's own and those of others) was a vital part of making a claim to political power. These dramatizations produce, in literature and, I would maintain, in life, the phenomenon of 'spectacular violence'. 101 IV

Spectacular violence

The story of Mary furnishes a good example of how spectacular violence against a helpless body could be configured as a claim to dominance. When she had cooked her son, Josephus says, she ate only half of him, putting the rest aside in a covered dish. Drawn by the unholy smell, the predatory rebels arrived to demand their share. We are asked to imagine Mary, hierophant of horror, uncovering the remains with a flourish. The revelation stuns the soldiers; the sight has them rooted to the spot, shivering with dread.102 She forces them to see; she dares them to eat: 'Don't be softer than a woman or more compassionate than a mother.' Their paralysis yields to panic; one woman, unarmed, makes the rebels flee. With this spectacular display, Mary forces upon them an dvayvcopicris of 100

101 102

181, yevou \xo\ Tpocpf] KOU TOTS OTao-iaaraTs epivus KOCI TCO (3ico nOdosb \xovo% eAAeiircov TCCIS MouSaicov av|jq>opaTs (BJ 6.207).

On the interpenetration of 'literature' and 'life' as a feature of Roman culture in the Neronian age, see Coleman (1990) 44-73 and Bartsch (1994). TOUS 5' 6U06COS 9piKT| Koci TTapEKOTcccxis f|pei KOU Trapa TT^V oyiv eTreTrnyeaav BJ 6.210. O n

writing about seeing compare Goldhill in this volume.

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their own cannibalistic crimes. At the same time, by an act of violence against a body that is in effect an extension of her own, she has perversely demonstrated a degree of self-control that trumps their claims to power. One scene on the battlefield shows particularly well the importance attached to controlling one's own body by Josephus and the imperial Romans he wrote to please. During the defence of Jotapata, Vespasian was wounded in the foot by an arrow.103 The wound, hardly life-threatening, receives expanded literary treatment. We watch the semiotic power of the injured imperial foot spreading outwards in concentric circles to produce a [ieyicrrov 06pu|3ov amongst the Romans. Our focus widens as the rumour spreads from the seeping blood to the shaken witnesses close by, including at last the whole Roman army, which suspends siege operations and then converges in terror on its wounded general. Titus, however, is the first to reach his father's side - with the result that the army's confusion is compounded by the son's anguish (dycovia). No agony at all is attributed to Vespasian himself, however. Josephus has him allay both his son's fears and the army's agitation by making a spectacle of himself && a selfenclosed classical body. 'Becoming higher than his pain, and taking care to be seen by all those who were agitated on his behalf',104 Vespasian demonstrates his self-control to his soldiers and brings their focus back to the war against the Jews. Though ordinary Romans may writhe in agony when he drenches them with boiling oil,105 Josephus has lived long enough in Rome to know that one does not describe an aristocrat as feeling, but as transcending, pain. An ordinary person, however, may be presented as making himself temporarily into an aristocrat by staging a tableau vivant (more accurately, a tableau mourant)}06 In narrating these episodes Josephus intimates that the sort of aristocratic body habitus displayed by Vespasian can function as a universal language. Characters who achieve this momentary ennoblement on the battlefield, gentile or Jew, are admired by both sides. During the siege of Jotapata, for example, a certain Eleazar dropped a huge stone and broke off the end of a Roman battering ram. He leapt down into the midst of the enemy to retrieve the iron ram's head and, having become the target of the enemy's gaze (CTKOTTOS ... yevoiievos), received five arrow 103 104

105 106

5/3.236-9. TOOV yap aAyrjSovojv indvco yevoyevos KOCI Traaiv TOIS eTTTormevois 5iJ auTOV 6
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Maud Gleason

wounds on his unprotected body. 107 Ignoring these, he leapt back up on the wall 'and took his stand conspicuous to all (TrepioTrros TT&CTIV) in his bravery, then fell to the ground with the ram, writhing like a worm from his wounds'. The Hellenistic prototype for Eleazar is Alexander the Great, standing atop the wall of an Indian citadel, 'conspicuous in the splendour of his armour and the singularity of his daring', shot at from all sides, but leaping down, unaided, into the fray. 108 Like the Jewish Eleazar, an otherwise unknown Roman receives an heroic obituary for killing himself atop a burning colonnade in full view of both sides: 'Last of all, a young man named Longus added final ornament to the whole disaster, and of all the individually memorable men who perished, showed himself the noblest of all.' 109 I suspect it is Josephus' own ambivalence about suicide and survival as models of heroism that immediately provides this noblest Roman with a trickster double: 'Artorius', who, trapped on the same colonnade, 'saves himself by a rogue's trick'. 110 He lures his tent-mate forward with promise of a legacy and then jumps to safety, killing on impact the friend who broke his fall. Simon of Skythopolis, neither gentile nor Jew in the sense that he was a traitor to his people, dispatched every member of his family with his own sword when caught up in a pogrom and forestalled any gentiles from boasting over his body by standing 'conspicuous upon the corpses, raising his right hand so that no one would fail to see, and plunging his sword into his own throat'. 111 In this tableau he reenacts - with melodramatic enhancements - the death of King Saul. 112 In the biblical story Saul is already wounded, and surrounded by Philistines who have already killed his sons. His suicide is mediated by the fact that he first begs his armourbearer in vain to dispatch him, then falls on his own sword. Josephus' Simon kills his children himself and his suicide is unmediated. Here Josephus' sensibility has probably been influenced by what Barton calls 'the Roman paradigm of the redemption of honor through ferocious self107

BJ 3.229-32. Indeed the phrase yu|jva> TW crcbiiaTi suggests that we are reading a n ecphrasis of a tableau of heroic nudity, Hellenistic style (on heroic nude portraiture in R o m e see Z a n k e r (1988) 5 - 8 ) . 108 Arrian, Anabasis of Alexander 6.9.5. 109 BJ. 6.186-7. 110 -rravoupyioc Siaacb^eTai BJ. 6.188-9 ('Artorius' is surely corrupt). N o t e that b o t h the noble suicide a n d the trickster-survivor in this diptych are R o m a n s ; as the story of Brutus shows, R o m a n mythology contained b o t h paradigms, t h o u g h the trickster type was often disavowed. 11 * TTEpiomos ETTioT&s TOTS (Tcb|ia(Tiv TT|V TS Ss^t&v ava-ravas cos |ir)5eva AaOsTv BJ 2.476. Just this sort of suicidal/infanticidal bloodbath, o n a grand scale, was, according to Philo, proposed by the Jewish elders w h o petitioned G a i u s ' legate n o t to desecrate the Temple (Embassy to Gaius 2 3 3 - 5 ) . 112 I Samuel 3 1 ; I Chronicles 10.

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destruction'.113 Is Simon in some way a stand-in for Josephus: a Jew of shifting loyalties who, unlike his creator, actually achieved Catonian heroism in his demise? But even momentary ennoblement achieved by Simon eludes a Jew named Jonathan who challenged the Romans to single combat. Josephus is at pains to point out his unsuitability for the role of champion: 'he was a man of short stature and in his appearance easy to despise, undistinguished in his birth and in every other way'.114 To everyone's surprise he killed his opponent, but made such a vulgar display in his victory dance that we can almost hear an editorial 'good riddance' when the Romans shoot him down.115 Jonathan marred the elegance of his heroic tableau by jeering at the enemy. The right attitude, of course, is one of calm superiority, such as Essenes under torture are said to display to the Romans: 'they conquered their agonies with their minds' and 'smiling in their torments, treated their tormentors with irony'.116 The reader is surprised to find the infamous Sicarii displaying these very qualities when tortured by the Romans at the end of the war. 'All of them guarded their beliefs above the reach of necessity, so as to receive the torments and the fire with bodies that lacked sensation and with souls that almost

113

114

115

116

Barton (1994) 41-70, 46. Lucan's description of Vulteius' suicide cited by Barton in this connection amounts to a tableau mourant staged en masse. The element of visuality is critical: the boat is 'conspicuous', land, sea, and cliffs will provide witnesses who will watch the spectacle (spectabunt) (Civil War 4.492-5). Volteius' men wait for dawn and then dispatch themselves in plain view of the conquerors they despise (victoresque suos voltu spectare superbo 469). The suicidal martyrdoms of 2 Maccabees show that spectacular self-slaughter was not exclusively a Roman taste. 'Razis', a Jewish elder with a Persian name, in response to persecution, kills himself not once, but thrice: he falls on his sword, defenestrates, and finally eviscerates himself, scattering his entrails on the soldiers sent to arrest him (2 Maccabees 14.37-46). There is no clear evidence that Josephus had read 2 Maccabees (Schurer III.l 534), and it is also not clear whether the gory details of the Razis story are due to Jason of Cyrene or to the rhetorical flourishes of his epitomator; all we can say is that Jewish readers of Josephus may have been familiar with the Razis story or others like that that have not come down to us, and did not necessarily need Roman paradigms to appreciate suicidal heroism. dvnp TO TE crcoiia (3pc<xus KOCI TT^V oyiv eC/KaTa9p6vr|Tos, yevous & iveKa KOCI TCOV aAAcov aarmos (BJ 6.169). This incident involves a reconfiguration of the standard intercultural duel of Roman-meets-foreigner seen so often in Livy, in which the Roman is smaller but braver, while the barbarian is gigantic and boastful. Here Jonathan the Jew plays both the Roman and barbarian roles seriatim. It is no accident that Josephus describes the low-class Jonathan as experiencing actual agony: 5ivr|0eis ex TCOV &Ayr|86vcov (BJ 6.176). TOCS |J6V aAyr|86vas VIKCOVTES TOIS 9povr||iaaiv . . . laeiSicovTes Se ev TOUS 6cAyr|S6cTiv KOCI

KaT£ipcov6u6|i6voi TCOV TOCS paadvous TTpoaxpepovTcov 5/2.151, 153). Josephus makes these claims as part of a general encomium of the Essenes; we never meet any tortured Essenes in the narrative.

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welcomed pain.' 1 1 7 These mind-over-body cameos show that Josephus shared the dualistic world view of Hellenistic Jews like Philo and Paul. 1 1 8 So much for the language of self-control; it is time now to consider the control of the body from the point of view of those who staged such demonstrations with the bodies of others. The Hasmonean king Alexander provides us with an excellent example of the spectacular use of bodies in pain. During a rebellion which constituted a major challenge to his royal authority he brought 800 Jewish captives into Jerusalem and crucified them in the middle of the city. He made the crucified watch the execution of their wives and children, while he reclined publicly amongst his concubines to watch the spectacle-within-a-spectacle. The sight of the king as spectator became in itself a spectacle that produced an intense emotional reaction in the populace: the next night 8,000 more rebels got the message and fled the country. 119 We can tell that Josephus thought that the visual component of this episode was paramount because his parallel account in the Antiquitates Judaicae emphasizes both the spectatorship of the crucified and the visibility of the chief spectator. 120 In another display of spectacular violence the Idumaeans and Zealots taking over Jerusalem are said to have dramatized their dominance by demonstrating their control over the bodies of the city's aristocratic young men. 1 2 1 They arrested a large number of them, held them in jail and subjected them to torture, executed them, and threw their mutilated bodies out in heap, prohibiting public mourning and a proper burial. They sent a similar message with the bodies of the chief priests, which they also threw out naked without burial. Josephus emphasizes the dramatic visual impact of this kind of body language. 'Bodies that had lately worn the sacred garment, that had presided over cosmic ceremonies and 117

UTrepTEpocv Tffc dvdyKris TT\V auTcov yvcb|jr|v 5iE(puAa£av, cborrEp avaicrd-qrois crcbfjam Xcxipouarj JJIOVOV ouxi TTJ yvxfj TOCS pacrdvous Kai TO m / p Sex6|jevoi (BJ 7.418-19). F o r the

ideology of endurance in other texts of the first centuries CE see Shaw (1996). u s p o r ra bbinical culture as a deliberately incarnate response to this dualism see Boyarin (1993). 119

120

121

TCOV y d p AT^OEVTCOV OKTaKoaious dvaaraupcocras kv fJEcnj rfj noAei yuvaTxas TE Kai TEKVCX auTcov aTrecKpa^ev rails oyeai- Kai TOO/TOC TTIVCOV Kai cruyKaTaKEiiJievos TaTs TraAAaKitnv a
TOUS 5e Euyevels Kai vsous (BJ 4.327). The public humiliation of high-status persons, whose bodies would be by popular expectation immune from such mistreatment, was practised also by Romans against Jews in Alexandria. Avillius Flaccus, prefect of Egypt, during the period of anti-Jewish pogroms, had the entire Jewish gerousia dragged in chains to the theatre, where they were flogged with whips normally reserved for lowclass criminals from the countryside (Philo In Flaccum 74-80).

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received prostrations from every corner of the globe, were seen naked, thrown out as carrion for dogs and wild beasts.'122 In a similar spirit the rebel leader Simon executed the very man who had admitted him into Jerusalem, a high priest whose authority with the people made him a potential rival.123 Simon executed him on a charge of treason, since one of his sons had fled to the Romans. He staged things so that the priest had to watch the execution of his other sons before he died, and made sure that the whole spectacle took place in full view of the Romans, asking his victim whether those to whom he intended to desert were going to help him now. To prolong this 'message' he forbade the burial of the whole ensemble: a father butchered on the bodies of his sons.124 Simon's spectacle-within-a-spectacle was designed to send a message emphasizing his absolute control over Jerusalem to both the Romans outside the walls and the Jews within. But if Simon hoped by this demonstration to eliminate all resistance to his authority among Jews, the attempt backfired, for it persuaded some of his subordinates that they had more to fear from him than from the Romans. These men took possession of a tower in the wall and, perhaps inspired by Josephus (who at this point was walking around the walls urging people to surrender),125 they called out to the Romans to come forward, promising to open the gates and let them in. In the atmosphere of mutual suspicion generated by the siege, mere words were ineffective: having been duped before, the Romans were reluctant to take the message at face value. While the Romans hesitated, Simon preempted communications, resorting to the supposedly unambiguous and universal language of the body. Seizing the tower, he executed its occupants in full view of the Romans, mutilated their bodies, and tossed them over the wall.126 One wonders, 'Wouldn't unmutilated bodies do as well?' But Simon was not indulging in meaningless violence. To mark the body of another in the ancient world was to signal that ownership and agency rested not with the one who bore the mark but with the person who imposed it.127 By mutilating the medium Simon 122

123 124

oi Se Trpo oAiyou TT)V iepav ioOfJTa -nepiKeiiievoi KOCI Tf]s Koa|iiKf|S 0pr|crKeias npoaKuvoOfjevoi TE TOTS £K Tffc OIKO\J\X£VT\S Trapa(3dAAoucnv eis TT\V TTOAIV, |3opd KUVCOV Kaii dripicov S^AETTOVTO {BJ 4.324-5). 5 / 4 . 5 7 4 , cf. BJ 5.521. 6 |iEV ouv kv oyei (poveuOeicnv E7TE<jq>dyr| TOTS TTOCKTIV avriKpvs 'Poovaicov npoax&EiS' OUTGO y a p 6 Zi|icov 'Avdvco TCO BayaSaTou 7Tpo
125 126

eppiye TCX acoijara (BJ 5.540). 127

T* OCTTETTTS TCX

adznara {BJ 5.531). 5/5.541. TOUS dvSpas cjuAAa(3cbv kv oyei TCOV 'PcoiJiaicov dvaipEi KOU irpo TOO TEIXOUS Aoo(3ricrdiJ6vos For details see Jones (1987) 139-55.

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personalized the message; by adding as it were a signature, he marked the messenger as his own. Simon was no novice at these techniques; he had used them, when he was still a bandit chief conducting independent operations, to browbeat the Zealot leadership in Jerusalem. The Zealots had waylaid his wife in hopes of transforming Simon from an assailant into a suppliant. But Simon's response to the capture of this non-combatant was to start capturing all the non-combatants who ventured out of the city, killing some and sending others back as 'marked' messengers with their hands chopped off.128 Both the Zealots and the populace were sufficiently intimidated (the spectacle of the mutilated messengers having the anticipated effect of KaTocTrAri^is) that they caved in to Simon's threats and sent him back his wife. The sort of softening effect that the Zealots were hoping to achieve on Simon by using the body of his wife can be seen more plainly from an incident during the Hasmonean period. Ptolemy, besieged in a fort by his brother-in-law John Hyrcanus, made a practice of dragging the besieger's mother and brothers out into plain view on the battlements and beating them up whenever Hyrcanus pressed the siege too hard. 1 2 9 Though his mother implored him aloud to take no notice of her sufferings, Hyrcanus vacillated between being inspired by her fortitude under torture and unmanned by his own response to the spectacle: 'he became feminized - all emotion'. 130 Ptolemy's use of the queen made the body politic concrete. It put Hyrcanus in a double bind: making an assault on the fortress walls became tantamount to assaulting his mother's body, and dissipated his masculine resolve in a puddle of emotion, but slacking off preserved his mother (and the fort) at the expense of his manhood and military purpose. The stalemate dragged on until a religious truce created a suspension of hostilities, at which point Ptolemy executed his hostages, bodies whose semiotic services were no longer required. We see a Jewish aristocratic body serving as both object and subject in the siege of Machaerus. One of the defenders, the scion of a prominent family, 131 was seized outside the gates by a Roman soldier who singlehandedly carried him back to the Roman camp. The spectacle of this abduction produced £KTrAr|£is amongst the Jewish spectators on the wall, 132 a response which the Roman general determined to exploit. He 128 129

TTOAAOUS 6E KOCI xeipOKowqaas EiaETTEiiTTE KccTanArjgacrdai TOUS EX^povS • • • ( 5 / 4 . 5 4 2 ) . 6 y d p TTToAsiiaTos OTTOTE KOCTaTrovoTTO, TT)V TE |xr|TEpa Kod TOUS dS£A<pous OCUTOO Trpodycov E7TI TOO TEIXOUS EIS EUdUVOTTTOV rjKl^ETO (BJ

130 131 132

E6T]AUVETO KOU TOO -rraOous 6Aos fjv (BJ 1.59). BJ 7.204. 5/7.199.

1.57).

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ordered the captive stripped naked, placed 'in the spot most visible to those watching from the wall', and savagely scourged.133 Although we cannot be sure that the Roman general understood that Jews were specially sensitive about nudity in the presence of social inferiors,134 the verb aiKi^gaOai, commonly used for scourging, well conveys the injury to status that such punishment involved. The outcry that this spectacle produced among the Jews encouraged the Roman general to attempt 'an intensification of their agony'135 in hopes of brokering the surrender of the citadel. He therefore had a post set up as if in preparation for a crucifixion and gave the young captive an opportunity to plead with his fellow Jews in his own words. When John Hyrcanus' mother spoke at cross-purposes with the intimidating communication being sent via her body, the mixed message caused paralysis in her son. But here the tactic of having the young captive send the same message both as subject and as object worked like a charm: the prospect of imminent crucifixion gave weight to his words and the Jews in the citadel surrendered. The Roman general's message derived additional impact from culturally specific particulars: the social status of the captive whom he forced to deliver it, and the extent of the speaker's kinship network in the town. (Those watching from the wall would not have been much moved by the flogging of an individual without status, as we may infer from the fact that they did nothing to protect the gentile population in the terms they arranged for the surrender of the town.136) When it comes to mutilated messengers, not just anyone will do. Titus tried to use the crucifixion of a random captive to inspire the besieged Jews to surrender Jerusalem. But the shock produced among the spectators did not have the intensity he had hoped, since he chose as his 'messenger' an undistinguished individual without a prominent kinship network and he targeted as his audience a much less cohesive population.137 Such spectacles would affect the spectators' behaviour only to the extent that they felt connected to the body of the victim. Such spectacles also constituted a complex manoeuvre in the game of power relations, because

133

sis TO 9avEpcoTccTov TOTS EK Tffc TTOAEGOS &7To(3AeTroucn (BJ 7.200).

134

Satlow (1997) 438.

135

ETTlTElVai TO TTEpiaAyES (BJ 7.201).

136

BJ 7.206-9.

137

(7VVE|3r| 6J EV TCCUTT) TT) Max1!) Kai £coypr|6fjvai Tiva TCOV 'louSaicov, 6v 6 TITOS avacrTaupcoaai -rrpo TOU TEIXOUS EKEAEUCTEV, EI TI TTpos TTJV dyiv EV5OIEV oi Aonroi KaTaTrAayevrss

(BJ 5.289). Josephus' repeated insistence that it was factional divisions that destroyed Jerusalem may derive in large measure from his awareness that these divisions made impossible the sort of negotiated surrender of the corporate body that Titus was trying to produce.

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a person who forces spectators to witness what they would rather not see is forcing them to experience themselves as being under his control.138

The siege of Jerusalem as narrated by Josephus contains two episodes which bring together the theme of mutilated messengers with the theme of schematized deportment. The siege created a prolonged communication crisis, in which metaphors for power became reified. As words became suspect, opposing sides resorted to reading each other's intentions through bodies. What is more, both sides tried to control and manipulate the interpretation of the semiotic body. Deceptive bodies were displayed and decoded by one side or another in a kind of high-stakes hermeneutics, and mutilated bodies were used to send messages back and forth between the opposing sides.139 Consider in the first place the bodies of the poorer class of townsfolk, people impelled by starvation to venture outside the walls in search of food. When apprehended by the Romans they were scourged, tortured, and crucified in full view of the walls.140 Since they were being apprehended at the rate of five hundred a day, this policy created an appalling spectacle for the Jews and a lot of unpleasant work for the Romans.141 Titus hoped that this spectacle of their collective future would inspire the remaining Jews to surrender.142 The Roman soldiers he detailed to execute the gruesome task added another layer of significance to the communication by schematizing the postures of the crucified, 'out of rage and hatred they nailed up the captives in one posture or another as a form of ridicule'.143 Far from accepting the message of submission suggested by these human semaphores, the rebels in Jerusalem gave their appearance a new spin: they dragged the victims' families up to the walls, along with those who were known to favour surrender on terms, and proclaimed to this reluctant audience that the victims they saw below were deserters, not captives. 'So suffer those who flee to the Romans.' This counterinterpretation staunched the flood of desertions for a while - until the 138

139

140

141

142 143

E.g. T u r n u s hopes to m a k e Pallas' father spectator of his own son's death, while Pallas hopes in turn to force T u r n u s to watch, while dying, as Pallas strips him of his a r m s (Aeneid X I 443, 4 6 2 - 3 ) . Josephus does not record any instances of Jews mutilating R o m a n bodies, t h o u g h he does record instances of Jews using the bodies of other Jews to send a message to the R o m a n s (e.g. BJ 5.540). naoTiyouiaevoi Sr\ KOCI 7Tpo(3acjavi£6|jEvoi TOO OOCVOCTOU iracjav aiKtav avEcrraupoOvTo TOU reixous ccvriKpu (BJ 5.449). It is difficult to tell whether the R o m a n soldiers were aware of Jewish t a b o o s against exposing one's nudity in view of the Temple (for these t a b o o s see Satlow (1997)). F o r a glimpse of the civilian executioner's duties a n d equipment see the Lex libitinaria Puteolana, C o l u m n I I . 8 - 1 4 , AE 88, 1971 (with t h a n k s to J o h n Bodel). TOCX* av ivSouvai wpos TTJV oyiv (BJ 5.450). TrpooT)Aouv Se oi crrpaTicoTai Si' opypv KOCI IJTCTOS TOUS OCAOVTOCS CCAAOV aAAco axrmocn Trpos tiv (BJ 5.451).

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truth came out. Titus found it hard to believe that a city that could produce so many deserters was not ready to surrender, so he tried again. He sent some of the deserters as messengers back into the city, after ordering their hands to be chopped off 'so that they might not seem to be deserters [but captives] and be the better believed because of their misfortune'.144 Not long after this Josephus himself was a participant in a propaganda struggle to control the meaning of absent bodies. Towards the end of the siege a group of high-status Jews deserted to the Romans. Titus settled them comfortably in a village twelve miles away. When the rebel leaders in Jerusalem circulated a rumour that these deserters were no longer to be seen because the Romans had killed them, desertions stopped - until Titus ordered that those settled in the village return to Jerusalem to parade around the walls with Josephus 'to be seen by the people'. 145 In the high-stakes hermeneutics of the siege, a crucial task in the struggle for power was not just to control the movements of bodies, but to control their meanings. Where the rebels tried to make captives look like deserters, Titus tried to make deserters look like captives. What are we to make of Titus' conviction that mutilated messengers would be the better believed? We see the same conviction operating in an episode recorded by Frontinus: the besieged Roman survivors of Battle of the Teutoburgian Forest in 9 CE spent an entire night leading German captives around and around their food storehouses. Having thoroughly confused the captives about the extent of their remaining supplies, the Romans severed their hands and let them go. 146 The point of this stratagem in general was to make the mutilated captives report to their people that the Romans were well supplied; the point of the mutilation in particular was to ensure they would be believed. In situations characterized by hostility and suspicion, as well as linguistic incompatibility, we find the combatants trying to use human bodies as symbolic tokens in a crude lingua franca,147 1 4 4

145 146

147

TTOAAOUS S E KOU x£lPOKO'n"n<jai

KeAeucras T I T O S TCOV £CXAGOK6TCOV, cbs VT) SOKOTSV

OCUTOIJOAOI

KOU moreuoivTo 6ia TTJU crvijcpopccv, eicreTreiJiye . . . (BJ 5.455). H e r o d o t u s records a n incident in which the a u t h o r of a military stratagem actually mutilates himself that he m a y be the better believed (Zopyrus in Histories 3.154-7). C o m p a r e the canny self-mutilation of C o m b a b u s in Lucian De Dea Syria 20, discussed by Eisner in this volume. 6
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Deprived of agency, in both a symbolic and literal sense, by the loss of their hands, capable of speech, but forced to speak the message of another, mutilated messengers manifest the disquieting ease with which a human subject can become an object. Each one is, in a sense, a science experiment that demonstrates the fragility of personhood. Each one is also a work of propaganda, dramatizing the power of the individual at whose pleasure the boundaries of the self dissolve. These considerations are, I think, sufficient to explain the presence of mutilated messengers in Josephus' narrative. But this is not to say that he just dreamed them up as thought-experiments. Historical figures like Titus and Simon may have actually chosen to use mutilated messengers precisely because, once these individuals had been marked as the instrument of another's will, they would be perceived to lack agency. Such ex- or quasi-persons would be thought unlikely to be pursuing an agenda of their own and thus would really be 'the better believed' by suspicious opponents. If this conviction were operative, it would have been reinforced by social practices that both cultures had in common. Both Hasmonean and Roman Judaea were cultures whose sense of truth was conditioned by the practice of judicial torture. Logically, the mutilated messengers' manifest unwillingness testified to their authenticity, but symbolically, in some strange way, their mutilation actually came close to constituting their authenticity. 148 Similarly, the founder of the cult of the Syrian Goddess embodies an awful Latin pun: his severed testicles are the guarantors (testes) of his good faith; his mutilation constitutes his integrity. 149 The mutilated messengers of my title functioned as powerful symbols precisely because they operated in a culture where autonomy and social control were articulated in the language of the body. Greco-Roman aristocrats were expected to display a body free from the scars of mutilating punishment or manual work; 150 for aristocratic Jews, the stakes were even higher. Since aristocratic physical perfection encoded not only the social history of the body, but also its fitness for divine service, physically imperfect men could not assume priestly duties, 151 and a usurper might 148 149

150

151

For an exploration of related themes in later texts see Gleason (1999). See Eisner in this volume. I will never forget the shock we experienced as schoolchildren when we were taken to meet the ethnographer Colin Turnbull, whose book on the Pygmies we had read. There was an electric recognition of authenticity: he had those same tattoos! On the voluntary stigmatization that early Christian heretics, like the devotees of the Syrian Goddess, practised on their bodies, see Elm (1996). On aristocratic ambivalence about scars won in battle see Leigh (1995) 207 with n. 35: although 'the aristocrat has no alternative criteria [other than battle-scars] by which to give value to his unmarked, unworked body', the Republicans at Pharselus were notoriously unnerved by Caesar's order to wound them in the face. 5/5.238.

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be thought to have mutilated a rival's ears with his own teeth to ensure that he could never become high priest or king. 152 If we think back to the episode by the Dead Sea with which these explorations began, we can imagine Vespasian, not yet emperor, but with future greatness on his mind, staging a miraculous demonstration before an admiring circle of ambitious adjutants. 153 These men understood without explanation what it meant to control the hands of others; had they been sitting with Vespasian at lunch when a stray dog brought in a severed hand and dropped it at his feet, 154 they would have had no trouble reading this omen as a sign of future dominance. To us, it is the apparent gratuitousness of Vespasian's science experiment that makes it revealing. Mute human bodies, reduced to 'extreme dependency and weakness' by the functional loss of their hands, deprived of their culturally specific voice and used by others as a semiotic instrument, were thought at this time to speak a universal language appropriate to dramatizations of political power and formulations of scientific truth, and thus came to mind as the 'natural' signifier when the emperor and his aides were looking for a way to make the Dead Sea articulate its property of buoyancy. The semiotic body as we find it in the narratives and metaphors of the Jewish War has yielded us some clues to the general mentality of Josephus' contemporaries; it also reflects the world-view of the author, who in his own life negotiated a specific transition from a Jewish to a Roman context. Christianity, of course, was doing the same thing at about the same time, and if ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny in such matters, Josephus' personal evolution might some day give us some clues about that wider cultural evolution in which the meaning of the body played such an important role. 155 152 153

154 155

BJ 1.270. In the narrative of this incident in the AJ, Josephus omits the teeth (14.366). C o m p a r e , for its casual use of bodies to demonstrate truth, the incident in the apocryphal Acts of Peter 25 in which the Prefect of R o m e 'donates' one of his slaves to be put to d e a t h a n d (possibly) resurrected in a contest between competing magicians (discussed in Gleason (1999)). Suetonius, Life of Vespasian 5. Josephus' descriptions of the m a r t y r d o m s of Essenes a n d Sicarii cited above are particularly interesting to consider in this light, as is the final scene of the BJ itself, in which the R o m a n governor of Libya, w h o h a d h o u n d e d the Jews of his province a n d permitted accusations of treason to be b r o u g h t against Josephus himself, dies an instructively hideous d e a t h by disease complete with hallucinations of torture - a set piece that could have been penned by Lactantius himself {BJ 7.451-3).

3

Roman questions, Greek answers: Plutarch and the construction of identity Rebecca Preston

Introduction

Cultural identity In 134/5 CE, the emperor Hadrian acted as the ultimate arbiter in a dispute between Cyrene in Libya and another city, possibly Ptolemais Barca, over the latter's application to join the Panhellenion, the recently created Panhellenic league of Greek cities.1 Responding to appeals by the archon (chief official) of the Panhellenion and Cyrene itself, the emperor decided on the Greek credentials of two of his subject cities. Cyrene is described as having 'y^v°5 'Axcaov KCCI &KpEi(3cos Acopiov',2 while the second city, although 'iOocy EVE [is]', 3 cannot claim the same privileges as the echt Greek Cyrenaeans. 4 The letter was later inscribed on a stele as the first of a series of documents asserting the pre-eminence of Cyrene in its province.5 Hadrian's political supremacy was thus acknowledged and reinforced by this request from the Greek East to adjudicate in a dispute over Greek descent. In turn, the emperor asserted his claim to cultural authority, thus bolstering his political power, by choosing to act as arbiter. Hadrian's interest in cultural activities, and that of the Roman authorities in general, traditionally known as Philhellenism, can therefore be viewed as reinforcing and furthering Roman political control by appro1

2

3 4 5

Reynolds (1978) 11.2-12 (= SEG XXVIII 1566; translation Oliver (1989) no. 120). Discussed, with modifications to the text, by C. P. Jones (1996) App. I, pp. 47-53. See also Spawforth and Walker (1986) 96-101.1 would like to thank Joyce Reynolds for discussing this inscription with me. LI. 9-10: 'Achaean and perfectly Dorian ancestry' (following Jones' translation, p. 53). 'aKpei(3cos' has also been taken to mean 'strictly' (Reynolds (1978) 116) or 'specifically' (Oliver (1989) 276-7, giving a translation 'Greek and specifically Dorian ancestry'). Whatever its precise meaning, the use of this adverb asserts Hadrian's confidence in his ability to pronounce on the Greek origins of his subjects. L. 10: 'true-born' (Reynolds (1978) 116 and Jones (1996) 52-3). L.9. See Potter (1994) 117-20, for a discussion of these 'history walls' (117), on which a carefully selected series of documents was inscribed by a polis, in order to broadcast particular civic claims.

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Roman questions, Greek answers

87

priating the cultural capital of the Greek East.6 Furthermore, the letter to Cyrene suggests that the Greek past - even the apparently remote and scholarly topic of an obscure mythical genealogy - was highly relevant to contemporary power relations, both between Greek poleis and between subject and emperor.7 By inscribing this imperial proof of their mythical origins, the people of Cyrene asserted their Greek eugeneia, or nobility of birth, using the past to legitimate their Greek identity.8 The present-day position of Cyrene was clearly affected by claims about the distant past. Similarly, the Roman interest in the policing of cultural activities, for example, burning books and exiling philosophers, suggests that the Roman authorities were well aware of the political implications of a particular view of the past, or of a particular philosophical doctrine.9 Greek culture, then, and the Greek past in particular, were inextricably linked to the political life of the early Roman Empire. Recent works on the history of the Greek East in the early Roman Empire have argued that Greek culture, or paideia, is crucial to our understanding of elite constructions of their identity, of the activities of the poleis, and of the development of responses to the impact of Roman rule.10 Culture has also played a central role in modern theoretical discussions of identity. Definitions of 'ethnicity' or 'national identity', while highlighting the importance of a particular group's belief in its common descent, or in its claim to a territory, have also foregrounded the selfconscious perception by a group of having a shared culture. Identity is now seen not as an eternal given, but as something actively constructed and contested in a particular historical context, based on subjective, not objective criteria.11 The formation of identity is a process of self-definition in opposition to other identities; it relies as much on differences from others as on similarities within a group. If culture is often central to such self-definitions, then it must be highly implicated in questions of politics and power. A number of post-colonial writers about conquest and imperialism, most notably Edward Said, have argued persuasively for 'the union of power and knowledge'.12 The 'struggle for the control of 6 7

8

9

10 11

12

Alcock (1994), Gleason (1995) 22, Wallace-Hadrill (1988), and Woolf (1994). For further discussion of the uses of mythical genealogies, see Curty (1995); Strubbe (1984-6); and Weiss (1984). Cf. 1. 16 (the second document chosen by Cyrene), where Hadrian appeals for 'ava[xvr)Giv TT\S TTocAaias 0|JICOV euyeveias' ('the recollection of your ancient nobility'). For examples, see Ahl (1984); Bartsch (1994); Forbes (1936); Stertz (1983); and Toynbee (1944). E.g. G. Anderson (1989) and (1993); Bowie (1991); Gleason (1995); and Swain (1996). See B. Anderson (1991); E. Hall (1989); J. Hall (1997); S. Hall (1992); S. Jones (1997); Said (1995) Afterword; and Tomlinson (1991). Said (1994) 184. See also Cheyfitz (1991) and Said (1995).

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meaning' must be seen as central to the struggles over the distribution of power in societies. 13 Cultural authority is inevitably bound up with political authority. 14 It seems clear, in the positive and negative aspects of Roman official interest in cultural activities, for example, that culture and politics can be closely connected. Cultural products, such as works of literature, arguably must also be linked to their social and political contexts. Indeed, modern theorists often define identity as a discourse, placing the linguistic production of meaning, in particular the construction of narrative, at the heart of any study of identity. 15 Many fruitful discussions of the early imperial Greek East have pursued the connections between literature and the world. 16 Yet it is important to note that such studies are successful not because they assume some simple functional relationship between literature and politics (where a literary work is expected to contain a simple 'political' message) but because they see the connection as 'a dynamic exchange' between the complexities of text and context. 17 Critics have therefore moved away from the previous tendency to comment on whether particular texts, or particular authors from the Greek East, should be regarded as pro- or anti-Roman, as if these polarized extremes were the only possible positions. Instead, identity is viewed not as a static position, a set of unchanging attitudes, but as a complex process of construction, negotiation and contestation. Indeed, to use the singular term 'identity' is in itself misleading, since identity is necessarily complicated and multiple. 18 It is not a single, static, easily defined and apolitical entity, but a complex process of negotiating a place in the world and of engaging in the contest over political power. Plutarch and identity In this chapter, I intend to explore the complexities of constructing an identity through the close reading of two works (conventionally known as Roman Questions and Greek Questions) by Plutarch. This prolific Greek 13 14

15 16

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Cheyfitz (1991) 72. Recent studies of cultural identity in the context of Roman imperialism include the essays in Alcock (1997); Laurence and Berry (1998); and Webster and Cooper (1996); and Millar (1993) part II. In this volume, see e.g. Introduction 15-20; Gleason 52-3; Eisner 132-3; and Whitmarsh 305. E.g. J. Hall (1997); S. Hall (1992); Said (1994) and (1995); Tomlinson (1991). E.g. Branham (1989) on Lucian; Eisner (1992) and (1994) on Pausanias; Duff (1994), Pelling (1989) and Swain (1990a) and (1990b) on Plutarch; Bowie (1991), Gleason (1995) and Swain (1996) on a number of 'Second Sophistic' texts. Said (1995) 14. See S. Hall (1992); Said (1994), and (1995) esp. Afterword.

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writer, born in the 40s CE and believed to have died early in the reign of Hadrian, remained strongly attached to his birthplace, Chaeronia in Boeotia, serving as a priest for many years at the nearby oracle of Apollo in Delphi. He also travelled extensively in the eastern Roman Empire and Italy and had a wide range of contacts.19 His possession of Roman citizenship is known from a dedicatory inscription on a statue of Hadrian at Delphi.20 The details of Plutarch's life, gathered from scattered references in his works and from epigraphic and prosopographical evidence, suggest complicated and multiple identities. For example, in the inscription from Delphi, Plutarch is described as a Roman citizen, as a priest of the oracle of Apollo and as a member of the Delphic Amphictyony.21 He is thus connected with the ruling power, with the divine authority of Apollo and with an ancient Panhellenic institution. However, such biographical material should not be privileged over detailed exploration of his writings, partly because much of the information is taken from his texts, but, more importantly, because its interpretation is disputed as part of a wider debate over the nature of Greek identity in the Roman Empire.22 Plutarch's concern for identity did not exist in a vacuum. In order to understand how identity is constructed by his works, they must be placed in their author's intellectual, social and political context.23 Historians have highlighted the importance of paideia in their characterization of the intellectual and social background of early imperial Greek literature.24 Paideia can be understood as both the formal education of the elite and the wider culture shared by the Greek local elites. This common culture has been taken to include expertise in public speaking; knowledge, and therefore deployment, of a shared stock of historical paradigms and 19

20 21

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T h e standard accounts of Plutarch's life are K. Ziegler (1964), cols. 4 - 6 0 (a revised version of Ziegler (1951), cols. 639-96) a n d C. P. Jones (1971) (with the criticisms of Babut (1975) a n d Swain (1991a)). FD III, IV.4, 472 ( = CIG 1713 a n d SIG 829 A). LI. 7 - 1 0 : 'einneAriTeuovTos OCTTO AeA^cbv Mscn-piou FTAouTdpxou TOO iepkos' ('When Mestrius Plutarchus the priest was epimelete for Delphi'). Cf. the debate over the significance of Plutarch's silence a b o u t his R o m a n citizenship in his extant works, variously interpreted as revealing a reluctance to embrace R o m a n identity a n d a n assertion of the continued importance of Greekness ( B a r r o w (1967) 13; v o n Wilamowitz-Moellendorf (1995) 50; K. Ziegler (1964) col. 14), or as suggesting that R o m a n citizenship was already so c o m m o n p l a c e a m o n g the eastern elite that there was n o need to m a k e special mention of it (C. P. Jones (1971) 45). I have n o t discussed Plutarch's relationship with the so-called 'Second Sophistic', since this forms p a r t of a wider, as yet unresolved debate over the characterization of this term. See further G . A n d e r s o n (1989), (1990) a n d (1993); Bowersock (1969); Bowie (1982); Brunt (1994); Stanton (1973); a n d Swain (1991b) a n d (1996); a n d Introduction to this volume 1 4 - 1 5 . It therefore seems m o r e helpful to concentrate o n the construction of identity in his works, while placing h i m in his general historical context. In particular, G. A n d e r s o n (1993); Gleason (1995) a n d Swain (1996).

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literary texts (or at least quotations from a canon of works and authors); an ability to use a highly artificial, 'Atticizing' dialect of Greek; and a common aristocratic ethos. Wealth provided the means for the acquisition and display of paideia; paideia differentiated the elite from the uneducated and uncultured masses and was one means of legitimating elite political authority. Modern scholars often use the term 'pepaideumenoV ('those who have acquired paideia') as a synonym for the elite, indicating that paideia should be seen as crucial to elite identity. Paideia, as Maud Gleason has argued, could be said to have given the Greek elite cultural, and thence political, authority. 25 One aspect of elite paideia has been highlighted: their concentration on the Greek past in their literary texts and their cultural activities.26 Paideia provided the educated man with both a common store of paradigmatic historical figures and events and a canon of classical models for creative imitation. But this privileging of the past had political as well as cultural implications: a number of studies have recently stressed the active role played by the rewriting and reinterpretation of Greek history in making sense of, even challenging, the reality of Roman domination. 27 Indeed awareness of the difference between the 'glories' of the pre-Hellenistic, autonomous poleis and the 'backwater' status of Roman Greece, heightened by this concentration on the past, seems politically awkward rather than reconciliatory. If writing about the Greek past in itself asserts the existence of discrete, everlasting, 'natural' or essential identity, then it also complicates the idea of such an identity by focusing attention on the contrast, the discontinuities between the past and the present, as much as on the continuity. It forces both conqueror and conquered to explain this contrast. Negotiating this complex relationship between classical and Roman 25

26 27

However, while paideia was clearly central to those w h o could be termed professional pepaideumenoi, or to those members of the elite with exceptional intellectual talents, such as Plutarch, it has n o t yet been shown that it was crucial to the elite in general. It is n o t surprising that those w h o m a d e their living from paideia, as travelling sophists, should emphasize its importance, nor, that in a competitive society, those pre-eminent in literary ability should use their skill to assert its importance above other possible markers of elite identity a n d status, such as ancestry, wealth, euergetism, or connections in high places. T h e investigation of this question will, I suggest, depend on a study of the representation of elite identity in epigraphic material. While inscriptions are not, of course, simple reflections of elite concerns a n d values, the process of debate a n d approval which lay behind the inscribing of a particular text suggest that they can perhaps m o r e securely be viewed as collective, rather t h a n individual representations. F o r suggestive studies of inscriptions in the early R o m a n Empire, see M a c M u l l e n (1982); Meyer (1990); W o o l f (1996); a n d Introduction to this volume 7 - 1 0 . See Bowie's seminal article (1970). E.g. Duff (1994); Eisner (1992) a n d (1994); H a r t o g (1983); Pelling (1989); Rogers (1991b); Swain (1990a), (1990b) a n d (1996).

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Greece, between past and present identity, seems to have been an important concern of the early imperial Greek elite.28 These elite, who held political power in their poleis, were the most affected by the loss of Greek freedom and the severely curtailed possibilities for action now available to formerly sovereign cities. Moreover, their remaining local power was further diminished by the presence of Roman officials, who could be appealed to as a higher authority in local disputes, and by direct imperial intervention, often in the form of 'Philhellenic' euergetism. Constant intervention in the affairs of the Greek poleis was a fact of provincial life. The existence of a greater power inevitably sapped the local authority of the Greek elites. However, they also had the most to gain from Roman rule, both in the confirmation of their local oligarchic hegemony, and in the new opportunities available for empire-wide careers. In the Roman Empire, the Greek elite were both ruled and rulers. Elite acquisition of Roman citizenship, and then of imperial office, as well as a community of interests shared with oligarchic elites throughout the Empire, suggests, almost paradoxically, that the Greek elite were in many ways the most Romanized of the population in the East. Yet, as the most educated and culturally proficient, and in their claim to cultural authority as guardians of classical heritage, they could also be seen as the most Greek. The Greek elite, then, had to make sense both of a real loss of autonomy and of the tensions involved in pursuing local and imperial office, in being both Roman and Greek. As a pepaideumenos, Plutarch was the heir and guardian of the classical heritage and of the complicated facts of Greek history. As a local officeholder and a Roman citizen, his political authority was upheld by and implicated in the authority of Rome, and yet it was also undermined by and in conflict with Roman power. The contradictions of the position of the Greek elite in general suggest that any construction of identity by Plutarch would be difficult and complex. Plutarch's corpus provides copious evidence for his concern with identity, both in his choice of subject matter, and in his choice of form. The past, whether providing paradigms of virtue or the setting for a discussion, whether the subject of an oration or of a historical biography, is central to even the most philosophical and apparently abstruse of Plutarch's works.29 Writing about the past provides the paradigms of an 28

29

T h e most recent a n d helpful discussion of this a p p r o a c h is Duff (1994) ch. 7, b u t see also in particular Alcock (1993). P a r a d i g m s of virtue: e.g Political Precepts (esp. 798C); setting for a discussion: e.g. On the Sign of Socrates (a discussion set during the liberation of Thebes from Spartan control in 379 BCE); subject of a n oration: e.g. On the Glory of the Athenians; historical biography: e.g. Parallel Lives.

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identity, but, when, for example, individuals or actions are admired as epitomizing Greek identity, it is important to recognize that identity itself is being constructed. Pericles, or Epaminondas, or the victory at Marathon, can only embody 'Greekness' if Greek identity is in some sense a definable essence. Moreover, Plutarch's pervasive use of historical examples to illustrate arguments about the proper conduct of political life in the present, or to urge his contemporaries to virtue, simultaneously asserts the continuity between past and present, or at least the relevance of the past to the present.30 If the past were alien, radically different from the present, it could not be used as a paradigm for the present. In his employment of examples from classical Greek history, above all, Plutarch argues for a continuity of culture and identity between past and present. Furthermore, in writing such a work as On the Fortune of the Romans, an epideictic (or display) oration on the subject of whether Rome's success should be attributed to fortune or virtue, which provides a conspectus of Roman history, Plutarch admits the possibility of writing 'Roman' history. In other words, by providing this overview of the fortunes of Rome, Plutarch is asserting the desirability of describing and evaluating the world in terms of such concepts as 'Roman', 'Greek' or 'barbarian'. To write 'Roman history' is to assume that there is such an entity as 'Rome', such a thing as 'Romanness'. Not only does writing about the past construct a particular representation of identity, in the way it depicts 'Greekness' or 'Romanness', but the very act of writing asserts the existence of identity itself. The most important evidence for Plutarch's interest in identity, however, is the form of his major project, the Parallel Lives?1 These historical biographies of famous Greeks and Romans are arranged into a series of books, consisting of a brief introduction, followed by one life (usually the Greek subject), then the second life (usually the Roman subject), and, in most cases, ending in a short, formal synkrisis, or comparison, of the two Lives. The form of the Parallel Lives, in juxtaposing Greek with Roman, leads the reader to compare Greek with Roman. Moreover, as Hartmut Erbse, Christopher Pelling and Tim Duff have demonstrated, synkrisis is not confined to the formal conclusion, but pervades the Lives, and indeed the Moralia as well, and clearly had a major influence on Plutarch's choice, deployment and evaluation of material. This use of comparison can be explained by Plutarch's philosophical project, to exemplify virtue 30

31

T h e most recent account of Plutarch's theory of m o r a l progress through imitation is Duff (1994) ch. 1. See, in particular, Boulogne (1994) 5 8 - 7 1 ; Duff (1994) ch. 7; Erbse (1956); Pelling (1986); a n d Russell (1966).

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and to encourage his peers to imitate these examples, a project in itself with interesting implications for the present, in that it required Plutarch's contemporaries to imitate the virtues of, for example, Pericles or Alexander the Great. Furthermore, it is important to stress that comparison inevitably involves revealing both similarities and differences, 'ojaoioTriTa KCCI Siact>opdv.'32 In other words, Plutarch's very use of comparison implies that his construction of identity must be more complicated than the creation of one, unified, Greco-Roman identity. Explanations, therefore, which see the Parallel Lives simply as the expression of Greco-Roman unity, fail to take into account that cultural differences are as important for comparison as are cultural similarities. Plutarch's decision to compare Greek and Roman (rather than, say, Greek with Greek, or Greek with barbarian) forcefully suggests a concern with Greek and Roman identity, and with the similarities and differences between Greek and Roman culture. Questions and identity

The Roman Questions and the Greek Questions consist of a series of questions and answers about Roman and Greek culture respectively.33 Plutarch is also said to have written a third work, no longer extant, called Barbarian Questions?* It seems likely that they were written after 96 CE, and are based on research for other texts, principally the Parallel Lives.25 Their conventional titles in Greek, Arrioci or, better, Ama, 36 that is, 'Causes' or 'Reasons', link them to the aetiological tradition, which includes Hellenistic poetry, most notably the Aetia of Callimachus, numerous, mostly lost works on local Greek history, and a number of works by the late Republican Roman polymath, Varro.37 If these aetiological 32 33

34

35

36

37

On the Virtues of Women 2 4 3 B - C . T h e commentaries of H . J. R o s e (1924) a n d Halliday (1928), while useful, are primarily concerned with recovering information from lost sources used by Plutarch. Brief discussion in B a r r o w (1967) 6 6 - 7 0 ; Deremetz (1990); Duff (1994) ch. 7; H a r d i e (1992); Swain (1990a); a n d K. Ziegler (1964) cols. 2 2 2 - 5 . There are three m o d e r n studies of the Roman Questions'. Boulogne (1987), (1992) a n d (1994). T h e latter analysis, while similar in some respects to w h a t follows, ignores the Greek Questions, and does not explore the relationship between the Roman Questions a n d other works with similar subject m a t t e r or concerns. K n o w n only from the so-called ' L a m p r i a s Catalogue', a list of Plutarch's works ostensibly written by a n otherwise u n k n o w n son of his. T h e list probably originated in a library, in the third or fourth centuries. F o r a translation a n d brief discussion, see S a n d b a c h (1969). T h e bare reference to ' D o m i t i a n ' in QR 50 suggests strongly that it is was written after his assassination in 96. I will assume that b o t h texts are genuine a n d b o t h were published: K. Ziegler (1964) cols. 2 2 2 - 5 seems decisive on b o t h issues. See Halliday (1928) 13; H . J. R o s e (1924) 49; Titchener (1924) 2 4 - 5 ; K. Ziegler (1964) cols. 2 2 2 - 5 . See Boulogne (1992); Fraser (1972) passim; Miller (1982) a n d Poucet (1992).

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works have sometimes seemed dry, pedantic and abstruse, it must also be stressed that their interest in explanation and causation, and in the origins of places, peoples and customs, clearly connects such texts with central contemporary concerns. The Cyrene inscription, for example, shows that disputes about the mythical founders of cities could play a key role in political relations in the present. Similarly, Matthew Fox, in his recent book on the portrayal of the regal period in Augustan literature, has argued persuasively that, by explaining the present in terms of causes in the past, Varro's aetiological works are highly concerned with the evaluation of Rome itself, its origins and the reasons for its success.38 The pervasive tactic, in the aetiological tradition, of using reasons located in the past, often in the remote and mythical past, to explain the state of things in the present, is therefore clearly linked to the question of identity. First, by repeatedly connecting the present and the past by ocma, aetiological texts assert the persistence of identity - of places, peoples and customs - over time. Secondly, the topics discussed, for example the foundation of cities, or the legendary migrations of peoples, or the origins of a particular custom, are key elements in the construction of identity. For example, in his well-known appreciation of Varro's corpus, Cicero claimed that Varro had, for the first time, allowed the Romans to understand their own identity: 'For we felt like strangers in our own city and were wandering about like visitors, and your books led us, so to speak, back home, and enabled us at last to realize who and where we were.' 39 He compares the Romans, before Varro's work, to strangers in their own city, implying that self-conscious study and knowledge of their own culture was necessary to the creation of their identity. Such self-awareness is here seen as central to identity. Works of aetiology, far from being dull antiquarianism, were deeply implicated in the construction of identity. According to Cicero, Varro's works located both author and reader as 'inside' Roman culture. Varro was writing about his own culture and identity. He has been identified as an important source for Plutarch's Roman Questions.*0 Yet, if aetiology is concerned with the construction 38

39

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Fox (1996) Appendix. See also Veyne (1988), on the characteristic use of aetiology by the Greeks to explain and justify their conceptualization of the world. Cicero Academica I.iii.9 ('nam nos in nostra urbe peregrinantis errantisque tamquam hospites tui libri quasi domum reduxerunt, ut possemus aliquando qui et ubi essemus agsnoscere'). Translations are adapted from the Loeb. See Rose (1924) ch. 1 and Valgiglio (1976). Only fragments survive of the works Plutarch appears to have used. Editions of individual works: Antiquitates rerum divinarum Cardauns (1976); Antiquitates rerum humanarum Mirsch (1882); De vita populi romani Riposati (1972); De gente populi romani Peter (1906); Aetia Mercklin (1848). For discussion of Varro's approach to Roman history and culture, see Boyance (1955); Collart (1954); Dahlmann (1935); Fox (1996); La Penna (1976); Rawson (1985); and Tarver (1997).

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of identity, Plutarch might be expected to take up a different position towards Roman culture than that of a late Republican Italian. 41 In the rest of this paper, therefore, I wish to consider how Plutarch places himself in relation to Roman and Greek culture and identity, by performing a synkrisis of my own, in comparing the Roman Questions with the Greek Questions.*2 Questions and answers Plutarch's use of a question and answer format for the Roman Questions and the Greek Questions allies them with the Pseudo-Aristotelean Problemata.43 This work consists of a series of questions beginning '5ia TI;', 'why?', typically answered in the form of a rhetorical question: 'f\ OTI;', 'is it that?', followed by a confirmatory statement of proofs (often signalled by 'y^p', 'for'). Plutarch's readers might then have expected his two texts to follow a similar pattern. Moreover, Plutarch refers to the Roman Questions in two of his Roman Lives. In his Life of Romulus, to conclude a discussion of the customs originating from the rape of the Sabine women, he says 'I have spoken further on these matters in my Causes,'4'4 while in his Life of Camillus, he claims that the question of whether some days of the month are always ill-omened 'is discussed more carefully in Concerning Roman Causes9.45 The reader of these Lives9 then, is prompted to consult the Roman Questions, as if they contained a definitive and exhaustive examination of the topics in question. However, both the Roman Questions and the Greek Questions deviate from the pattern of the Problemata. In the Roman Questions, about twothirds of the questions have more than one possible answer. 46 The reader is thus presented with a further series of questions. For example, in 41

42

43

44

45 46

Varro's position is not simple itself: Cicero compliments Varro by suggesting that the Romans were outsiders to their own culture until Varro, who did not come from Rome itself, made them insiders. Cf. Barrow (1967) 66-70 and Duff (1994) 152-3. Alston (1996) provides a stimulating discussion of Plutarch's positioning in his On Isis and Osiris. In this volume, see in particular Henderson and Eisner. See Barrow (1967) 70; Boulogne (1992) 4683-4; Fuhrmann (1972) xiii-xxvi; and Hardie (1992)4751. K. Ziegler (1964) argues that 'ev TOIS Amois' (Romulus 15.5) should be taken as referring to all three books of Aetia (but cf. Barrow (1967) 184 n. 1). This would provide additional proof of the close connnection between the three sets of questions and answers. Camillus 19.8. Other works in this genre also offer several alternative answers to a particular question. What is distinctive about the Roman Questions, however, is the scale of the use of alternatives and the particular context in which it occurs, that is, in a work on Roman culture, in a series of three texts concerning Roman, Greek and barbarian culture.

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answer to QR 11, which asks 'Why (5icc TI) do they sacrifice to Saturn with the head uncovered?', Plutarch offers three possible explanations, all in the form of questions: Is it because (iroTEpov OTI) Aeneas instituted the custom of covering the head, and the sacrifice to Saturn dates from long before that time? Or is it that (f| OTI) they cover the head before the heavenly deities, but they consider Saturn a god whose realm is beneath the earth? Or is it that (f| OTI) no part of Truth is covered or overshadowed, and the Romans consider Saturn father of Truth?

Furthermore, the reader is often offered no help in choosing between the possible alternatives. Rather, he is left to construct amcc for Roman culture, deciding for himself the relative merits of the various suggested explanations. The reader of the Roman Lives, eager to find out more, is not provided with an explicit authorial assessment, judiciously summing up all the available information to come to the most plausible, if not the truthful, explanation.47 Instead, he is confronted only with the raw material for such an explanation.48 In contrast, just under half of the questions in the Greek Questions ask 'why?', the rest 'who?' or 'what?', and in nearly all cases only one solution is given, in a style that suggests there is no uncertainty about the truth of that explanation.49 Thus, the Greek Questions also differ from the Aristotelean Problemata, in that they often ask 'what?', a more specific and easily answered question than 'why?', and because the general avoidance of rhetorical questions in the answers implies a greater degree of certainty. This sharp contrast between the form of the questions and answers in the Greek Questions and the Roman Questions suggests a wider difference between Greek and Roman culture. It implies that there is an intrinsic difficulty in explaining Roman culture. Even when Plutarch puts forward only one possible reason for a custom in the Roman Questions, the struc47

48

49

Cf. De Lacy (1953) and Hardie (1992) for Plutarch's preference for plausibility and probability over the assertion of absolute truth. It might be objected that, in the Roman Questions, Plutarch is simply following his usual approach, in providing a variety of explanations, and that his philosophical beliefs preclude his asserting that something is definitely true (as delineated by Hardie (1992)). However, I still feel that the contrast with the Greek Questions is more significant, since it is the only work in the same genre. Plutarch's Convivial Questions, while based on the Problemata form, are made into mini sympotic dialogues. As Hardie argues, 'in the relaxation of the dinner table there are no indisputably correct answers' (4756; see also 4758-9 for discussion of how playfulness and ingenuity are privileged in this sympotic setting). Eleven (of 59) give more than one answer. Of these, four (QG 12, 42, 43 and 56) concern only alternative or additional details. Twelve answers are in the form of a rhetorical question, of which only six are left open.

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ture he has chosen insinuates that it is only to be taken as a tentative response. In these two texts, then, it seems that, while Greek culture is susceptible to Plutarch's explanation, Roman culture, on the other hand, despite his research, is still the subject of considerable uncertainty. This difference is further sharpened by the fact that the implied reader of both works is Greek.50 In the Roman Questions, the Romans are referred to as 'they' or, less commonly, as 'the Romans'. Yet Plutarch uses the first person four times, to designate his home-town Chaeronia, Boeotia, and Greece in general.51 Roman words are transliterated and translated, Roman offices and institutions are explained and historical figures are identified.52 No such concessions are made to the reader of the Greek Questions. It is a Greek reader, then, who is to infer from the pervasive device of tentative alternatives in the Roman Questions that Roman culture is different and strange. 'They', that is the Romans, are clearly hard to explain. The certainty of the Greek Questions, by comparison, strengthens the sense of a 'natural' and explicable culture, shared by writer and reader. This difference in form, then, tends to construct Greek as Self and Romans as Other. Roman questions, Greek answers The difference between the style of answers in the Greek Questions and the Roman Questions seems to suggest that Plutarch positioned himself quite differently in relation to Roman culture than he did in relation to Greek culture. The strategies which Plutarch adopted in order to construct his aiTia, the types of explanations he thought might answer his questions, are also crucial for any comparison of his approach to Roman culture and to Greek culture. What is immediately striking is the extent to which Plutarch has provided Greek answers to the Roman Questions. These Greek answers fall into three categories. The first type involves the explanation of a particular Roman custom or institution by a specific Greek cause. Most notably, Plutarch not only identifies Roman deities with Greek ones, as was commonplace, but he asserts that one of the most apparently Roman gods, 50 51

52

See Boulogne (1987), (1992) a n d (1994); a n d Duff (1994) 153. QR 16 ('in m y native t o w n Chaeronia'), 29 ('among us in Boeotia'), 40 ('in m y country') Elsewhere, the Greeks are also referred a n d 57 ('Just as we call wet-nurses thelonai...'). to in the third person. In the Greek Questions, the third person is also used, b u t to refer to the citizens of a particular city. Transliteration a n d translation: e.g. QR 13, of ' H o n o r ' ; explanation of institutions: e.g. QR 68, a short description of the Luperci a n d their activities; identification of individuals: e.g. QR 34, Decimus Brutus. (All these examples are t a k e n from the questions themselves.)

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Janus, was a Greek immigrant. 53 Furthermore, it is this Greek incomer, together with Heracles, who really was an imported god, who civilizes the Romans and provides them with the main elements of culture. The effect of Greek culture on the Romans is brought out particularly clearly in QR 22: Why do they suppose Janus to have been two-faced and so represent him in painting and sculpture? Is it because, as they relate (cos ioropoucriv), he was by birth (TCO yevsi) a Greek from Perrhaebia, and, when he had crossed to Italy and had settled among the barbarians there (cruvoiKricras TOIS OCUTOOI (3appdpois), he changed both his speech and his habits? Or is it rather because he changed and converted the people of Italy to another form of life by persuading a people which had made use of wild plants and lawless customs to till the soil and to live under organized government

Here, Plutarch makes it clear that Janus was Greek, and it is claimed that he provided the Romans with two of the key features of civilization, agriculture and civic political life. Similarly, in QR 41, Janus is said to have 'established for them an ordered government (euKocriJuav) by civilizing their life (e^rmepcbaas TOV (3iov)', while in QR 19, Numa chooses January as the first month 'since Janus was a statesman (TTOAITIKOV) and a farmer (yscopyiKov)'.54 Moreover, QR 22 suggests that the Romans were barbarians before this civilizing Greek influence. Indeed, the first response seems to imply that Janus himself was barbarized by his contact with the Italians, rather undermining his efficacy as a culture-hero. This also suggests the frightening potential for barbarism to overwhelm civilization. In QR 32, Heracles is described as having put a stop to the custom of sacrificing Greeks by throwing them off the Pons Sublicius, by teaching the Romans to substitute images. 55 Those practising this custom are referred to as 'the barbarians who lived in these parts (of Trepi TOV TOTTOV OIKOOVTES (3dp(3apoi)'.56 It is interesting, however, that in neither case does Plutarch 53

54

55

56

See Boulogne (1987), (1992) a n d (1994). Cf. Ovid Fasti 1.89-90, which asserts the distinctive R o m a n n e s s of Janus: 'quern t a m e n esse d e u m te dicam, l a n e biformis?/nam tibi p a r nullum Graecia n u m e n habet'. M a c r o b i u s Saturnalia 1.7.19 stresses the fact that J a n u s was 'indigena'. Only two other surviving sources suggest that J a n u s came to Italy from overseas: Servius ad Aen. 8.357 a n d D r a c o of Corcyra ap. Athenaeus Deipn. xv. 692F. Cf. the use of 'e^rmepoco' to refer to Heracles' civilizing mission in Greek literature e.g. Euripides Heracles 11. 80 a n d 852. Cf. Plutarch Coriolanus 1.4, Numa 3.5, 16.3, 20.3. T h e nearest parallel to Plutarch's version is in Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Roman Antiquities 1.38.3. However, in Dionysius' account, it is described as a custom of 'TOUS iraAocious', a n d barbarism in only hinted at, in his c o m m e n t that Celts, a n d other western peoples, still practise h u m a n sacrifice. See Rives (1995) for the topos of h u m a n sacrifice in antiquity. Cf. Dionysius of Halicarnassus 4 . 2 5 - 6 , where a clear distinction is d r a w n between the R o m a n s , w h o are Greeks, a n d their Italian neighbours, w h o are barbarians.

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specifically name the inhabitants of Rome as barbarians. Rather, he refers more vaguely to those living in Italy. Furthermore, the reader is also told that the practice of human sacrifice in QR 32 might in fact be Greek in origin, a custom prompted by the ancient enmity between the Argives and the Arcadians, who were said to have settled in Italy under Evander. The Arcadians, too, were in need of Heracles' civilizing influence, learning their letters from him in QR 59. On the one hand, then, this characterization of the Arcadians in Italy problematizes any simple opposition between Greek civilization and Roman barbarism. On the other hand, however, because it is Heracles who civilizes the Arcadians, the assertion that civilization came to the West from the Greek East is in fact reinforced. This strategy is, however, difficult to interpret. The claim that Roman culture, or at least some aspects of it, was really Greek was one found in Latin, as well as Greek, writers.57 Servius, for example, claims that Varro's De gente populi Romani discussed 'what [the Romans] borrowed from each people (quid a quaque transerint gente per imitationem)',58

The

mere acknowledgement of the cultural influence of Greece on Rome, then, cannot be used as proof of a particular sense of cultural identity.59 Furthermore, it is important to stress the polyvalency of cultural influence. This has been emphasized, in particular, in the debate over the interpretation of the myth of the Trojan origin of Rome. In Hellenistic Greece, this story was used both to justify enmity towards the Romans and to claim ancient ties of friendship.60 The assertion that the Romans were of Trojan origin did not dictate a single attitude towards them. Instead, the myth could be reinterpreted in a number of ways to suit contemporary political demands. It seems more fruitful, then, to consider how cultural influence is characterized by particular writers, in comparison to Plutarch. Jacques Boulogne has argued that Plutarch's Hellenization of the Romans is a conciliatory strategy on Plutarch's part, recreating the Romans as civilized, Hellenized foreigners, rather than as barbarians, thus making

57

58 59

60

See Bickerman (1952); Cornell (1975) a n d (1995); F o x (1996); G a b b a (1991); G r u e n (1993) ch. 1; M o m i g l i a n o (1984); W i s e m a n (1974) a n d (1995), for good discussions of this topic. ad Am. 7.176, Peter fr. 2 1 . Moreover, the loss of m a n y of the relevant sources, especially the works of V a r r o , m a k e s it very difficult t o c o m p a r e individual instances. Cf. W i s e m a n ' s (1983) stimulating discussion of all the surviving versions of the rape of the Sabine women. Justification of enmity: Pausanias 1.12.1, where Pyrrhus, as a descendant of Achilles, is said t o have characterized his expedition against R o m e as a rerun of the Trojan war; claims of friendship: Strabo 10.2.25, where the Acarnians are said t o have received their freedom from the R o m a n s , by arguing that they alone h a d n o t taken p a r t in the Greek attack on Troy. See, in particular, G r u e n (1993) C h . 1, a n d M o m i g l i a n o (1984).

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them palatable to his Greek readership.61 However, Plutarch's version cannot, in fact, be characterized as primarily conciliatory. This is clear if he is compared with the most extreme assertion of this theory, found in the Roman Antiquities, a history of early Rome by the Greek author, Dionysius of Halicarnassus in Asia Minor, written at the time of Augustus.62 Dionysius' thesis is that various peoples of Rome, even the so-called Aborigines, were of Greek origin. Rome is represented as the paradigmatic Greek polis, and as the greatest in a succession of empires.63 In his preface, Dionysius claims to have written his history in order to combat both Greek ignorance and anti-Roman versions of Rome's origins current in the East. Dionysius' work has therefore often been characterized as highly conciliatory, not to sayflattering.However, some critics have pointed out rather how 'Hellenocentric' Dionysius' project is, in that it isfirmlybased on the traditional Greek/barbarian polarity.64 Greek culture is identified with civilization itself. It is true that the Romans are assimilated to the Greeks, not to the barbarians, but only at the cost of denying the existence of an autonomous Roman culture altogether. The Latin language, for example, is reduced to a dialect of Greek, barbarized by later immigrants to Rome.65 For Dionysius, there is no Roman culture. Plutarch's representation of Roman culture in the Roman Questions could also be called Hellenocentric. It is Greek culture-heroes who bring civilization westwards, and Greek culture is therefore equated with civilization itself. Moreover, rather than portraying the Romans as Greek in origin, Plutarch depicts them as barbarians before their contact with the beneficent influence of Greek culture.66 The Roman Questions thus seems to correlate with recent characterizations of Plutarch's views on the relationship between Roman and Greek culture. Tim Duff, Christopher Pelling and Simon Swain have emphasized the importance of Greek paideia to Plutarch's philosophical project.67 It is only Greek paideia that can provide the reason necessary to control one's passion in the progress towards virtue. Moreover, in the Parallel Lives, Plutarch stresses that acquisition of such paideia cannot be taken for granted in the case of his 61 62 63

64 65 66

67

1987 a n d 1992. See F o x (1996) ch. 3; G a b b a (1991); H a r t o g (1991); a n d Schultze (1986). N o t e also the persistence of the Greekness of R o m e : e.g. 7 . 7 0 - 3 , R o m a n sacrificial ritual retains customs which have n o w died o u t in Greece. See F o x (1996) ch. 3 a n d Schultze (1986). See H a r t o g (1991). See, however, Camillus 2 2 . 2 - 3 , where a story current in Greece concerning the Gallic sack of R o m e describes the city as Greek, a n d the G a u l s as Hyperboreans. Plutarch dismisses the latter appellation as 'fabulous' a n d 'fictitious', b u t it is n o t clear whether the description of R o m e as Greek is m e a n t t o be similarly rejected. Duff (1994); Pelling (1989); Swain (1990a), (1990b), (1996) ch. 5, a n d (1997).

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Roman subjects, and he delineates both the negative consequences of the absence of paideia, and the primitive, bellicose, even barbaric state of Rome before contact with the East. Greekness is something the Romans must learn.68 The highest compliment a Roman may earn is to be called 'Greek', which is assimilated to meaning 'civilized'. In his Life of Marcellus, for example, Plutarch commends the Romans for having nothing barbarian (|3ap(3apiK6v) or unnatural (EK<(>UAOV) in their religious practices, but rather as behaving 'Greekly ('EAATIVIKGOS)' and 'mildly (-rrpacos)'.69 The Roman Questions could then be seen as asserting the superiority of Greek culture. This delineation of the relationship between Roman culture, Greek paideia and civilization contrasts sharply with the approach of Cicero and Varro, for example. Cicero stresses the limited nature of the Greek influence on Roman culture: artes or studia may be Greek, but virtutes and mores are Roman.70 He argues for an active role for the Romans in selecting and, crucially, improving on what they have borrowed.71 The Roman constitution is superior to that of any Greek state because of its slow evolution over time.72 Cicero alsofirmlyrejects the Greek/barbarian dichotomy for a distinction between barbarism and civilization.73 Varro's works have also been characterized as a delineation, and a celebration, of the evolution of the Roman state.74 La Penna has convincingly argued that a corrupt fragment of De vita populi Romani can be interpreted as contrasting the uncontrolled borrowing of other states, with the moderate and sensible cultural imitation practised by the Romans.75 In this text, Varro put the Romans firmly on the side of civilization, when he castigated the Carthaginians for the 'barbarian wildness (barbaram feritatemf of their conduct in the wars against Rome.76 For both Cicero and Varro, neither barbarism nor inferiority were entailed in acknowledging the Greek influence on Roman culture. 68

69

Cf. QR 93, where Plutarch asks, of the use of vultures in augury, ' O r did they learn this also (KCCI TOOTO) from Heracles?'. 3.4. See also Comp. Lyc-Numa 1.5, where, discussing their different attitudes towards the treatment of slaves, Plutarch calls N u m a ' m o r e G r e e k as a law-giver (iAAriviKcbTepov . . .

vo|jo0e-rr|v)\ 70

71 72 73

74 75 76

E.g. Tusc. I . i . 2 - 3 ; Rep. I.xviii.30, xxii.36. Cf. Sallust Jug. 8.5.32; Seneca Ep. Mor. 59.7. See Dubuisson (1981) a n d F o x (1996). E.g. Tusc. I.i.l, Rep. II.xvi.30. This topos is discussed fully by Cornell (1995) 170. Rep. I a n d II passim. See Buchheit (1991) a n d F o x (1996). Rep I.xxxvii.58, Tusc V.xxxvi.104, Orator 48.160. See F o x (1996) a n d R a w s o n (1985). Cf. however ad QF 1.1.27-8, for a fulsome acknowledgement of the debt owed by R o m e to the ' h u m a n i t a s ' of the East. F o r further discussion of the complexities of Cicero's position, see also Crawford (1978). Cornell (1995); D a h l m a n n (1935); F o x (1996); L a P e n n a (1976); a n d R a w s o n (1985). L a P e n n a (1976), o n Riposati fr. 5. Riposati fr. 98b.

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If, for Dionysius, the Romans were firmly on the Greek side of the Greek/barbarian dichotomy, in the Roman Questions, their position is more ambiguous. QR 22 and 32 suggest that they were barbarian before their contact with Greek civilization. Yet it is not clear whether the reader is to assume that they have now become Greek. Indeed, Plutarch's tentativeness in answering his Roman questions emphasizes rather the separateness, the otherness of Roman culture.77 The existence of three sets of questions - Roman, Greek and barbarian - suggests the possibility of the Romans occupying some new, third category, but that category is left vague.78 Rather, cultural difference, as much as cultural similarity, is emphasized. The importance of the Greek civilizing influence on Roman culture might appear to be strengthened by the opposition drawn between Romulus and Numa.79 This distinction between the warlike Romulus and the pious, peace-loving Numa was traditional, but Plutarch's version differs in some respects from that in other sources. Romulus is linked to an aggressive expansionism, in QR 15, where he is said to have set up no boundaries to Rome 'so that Romans might go forth, seize land, and regard all as theirs'. This expansionist instinct is implicitly criticized, as he is contrasted with Numa, who is pointedly called 'a just man (5iKcaos) and a statesman (TTOAITIKOS), who had become a philosopher'. Moreover, Plutarch claims that Numa set up Terminus as the god of the boundary to be 'overseer and guardian of friendship and peace', and that is the reason why he is not 'defiled' by blood-sacrifice. Numa's concern to avoid the pollution of bloodshed stands in mute contrast to the slaughter implied by Romulus' bellicosity.80 This bellicosity is applied to Rome in general in QR 84, where Rome is said to have had 'a military organization originally (crrpaTicoTiKTiv EV apxt) owra^iv)'. Numa, however, is represented as attempting to combat this Roman aggressiveness, in accordance with his philosophical beliefs.81 Roman expansionism and bellicosity are less negatively portrayed by other writers. Cicero, for example, says that Numa wished to reduce the bellicosity of his subjects only 'a little (paulum)\ while Livy and Virgil suggest the enervating dangers of otium, and Florus 77 78

79 80

81

Cf. Boulogne (1994) 48, 50 and 120, who stresses rather how the Romans lose their otherness in the Roman Questions. Cf. Flamininus, where the Romans are described as '6cAA6(j>uAov' (2.5) and 'dAAo^uAoi' (11.4). See Dubuisson (1982), for an interesting discussion of the uses of the Greek/ barbarian distinction in the R o m a n period. See Boulogne (1994) 51 and 92. Cf. also QR 4, where the Roman king Servius is said to have tricked a Sabine out of sacrificing a heifer, after a prophecy that the city of the man who sacrificed this particular cow was destined to rule all Italy. 2*15, 19 and 23.

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and Ovid praise the achievement of the Roman Empire, expanding to include the whole world.82 Moreover, Ovid explicitly rejects the idea that any boundary could be placed on Rome.83 Plutarch's stress on Numa's philosophy might, then, seem to imply a contrast between the virtuous effect of Greek philosophy and the bloodthirsty bellicosity that was natural to the Romans. However, this interpretation depends on whether the reader is intended to see Numa's philosophy as the consequence of the teachings of Pythagoras, or as the product of his natural, untaught virtue. This was an important site of contestation in the ancient debate over the extent of Greek influence on Roman culture.84 Latin authors tended to stress either the chronological impossibility of linking Numa and Pythagoras, or to assert that Numa's philosophy was home-grown, often Sabine, wisdom.85 Moreover, this correction of a historical detail is often explicitly framed as part of a wider construction of Roman identity. For example, in Cicero's Republic, Scipio rejects the story as 'ignorantly and absurdly fictitious', providing a clearly argued chronological proof.86 In response, another participant, Manilius, exclaims at the longevity of this false tradition, and adds: 'Yet I am not sorry that we got our culture, not from arts imported from overseas, but from our innate, native virtues.'87 In this instance, the rejection of Numa's debt to Pythagoras is used as a symbol of a wider rejection of foreign influences on Roman culture. Rather, Roman culture is characterized as the result of native, home-grown virtues. In Ovid's works, however, Numa is explicitly linked to Pythagoras.88 Yet his sphere of knowledge is described as 'rerum natura', and it is unclear whether this should be identified with Numa's political policies.89 There was not, it seems, a one single position on this question to be taken by Latin writers, 82

83 84

85

86 87

88 89

Rep. Il.xiii. 25; Livy 1.19; Aeneid 6.812-15 (cf. Numa 22.7, where, in contrast, Tullus Hostilius' criticism of N u m a ' s policy is clearly linked t o his decline a n d death, a n d Comp. Lyc-Numa 4.6, where Plutarch expresses his disappointment that N u m a ' s pacifism did n o t endure after his death); Florus Introduction, Ovid Fasti 2.683-4. Fasti 2. 684. See Buccheit (1991); F o x (1996) ch. 1 a n d Appendix; Glaser (1937); Ogilvie (1965); R a w s o n (1985); a n d Skutsch (1985). E.g. Livy 1.18.4 argues that N u m a was educated n o t 'peregrinis artibus' (by foreign studies), but 'disciplina tetrica ac tristi veterum S a b i n o r u m ' (by the stern and austere discipline of the ancient Sabines); Cicero: Tusc. IV.i.3, De Oral II. xxxvii.154; Varro: Boyance (1955) (70 ' . . . il est manifeste qu'il [i.e. Varro] fait de N u m a c o m m e une sorte de pythagoricien avant la lettre') a n d F o x (1996) A p p . N o t e , however, that the connection is also rejected by Dionysius of Halicarnassus AR 2.59. Rep. II.xv.28-9 ('imperite absurdeque fictum'). Ibid, ('ac t a m e n facile patior n o n esse nos transmarinis nee importatis artibus eruditos, sed genuinis domesticisque virtutibus'). Meta. 15.1-481, Ex Ponto 3.3.44, Fasti 3.153 (as one of two possibilities). Meta. 15.6. See F o x (1996).

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but it is clear that it could be an important issue. It is in this highly charged context, then, that Plutarch's representation of Numa must be approached. Yet, in his Life of Numa, Plutarch is curiously reluctant to reveal his own position on this question. He foregrounds the issue by discussing the debate over the relative chronologies of the Roman king and the Greek philosopher in the first chapter. But he breaks off, saying that chronology is hard to determine, and begins his account of Numa's life. In chapter 8, Plutarch draws out a number of close parallels between Numa's policies and Pythagorean doctrine.90 He then lists the evidence in favour of a relationship between the king and the philosopher. Yet again he breaks off, saying that to discuss it further would be proof of 'an adolescent love of contentiousness (}i£ipaKicb5ous ... (|>iAovsiKias)'. On the one hand, then, Plutarch refuses to accept the chronological impossibility of the connection, and provides explicit evidence for the Pythagorean influence on Numa. Yet his failure to come to any definite conclusion turns the question back on the reader.91 The Life of Numa, therefore, does not help the reader of the Roman Questions to decide whether the contrast between Romulus' aggression and Numa's pacific philosophy is to be seen as a contrast between Roman and Greek culture. It suggests, rather, a more complex relationship. Plutarch's refusal to assert the connection between Numa and Pythagoras opens up the possibility that Roman culture, while separate from Greek culture, could also be philosophical and virtuous, in short, civilized, at least in the person of Numa.92 This possibility, however slim, undercuts any simple assertion of Greek cultural superiority. If the cultural difference between Roman and Greek can be represented negatively, as the contrast between barbarism, or otherness, and civilization, or self, then it can also be seen more positively. However, this sense of cultural difference is again undermined by the second category of Greek answering, where Plutarch uses a Greek 'parallel' to suggest or confirm an explanation.93 For example, to answer the question 'Why is it forbidden for a man to receive a gift from his wife or a wife to receive a gift from her husband?', Plutarch begins: 'Is it that, Solon 90 91

92 93

Cf. also Numa 11, 14 and 22. The situation is further complicated by the question of the origins of the Sabines. Romulus 16.1 suggests that they were Spartan colonists, but in Numa 1.3 Plutarch seems to distance himself from this idea, saying that the Sabines 'want' to be descendants of Sparta. See also QR 15, 33, 84 and 87 for possible similarities between Sparta and Rome. Cf. Boulogne (1994) 70, Pelling (1989) and Swain (1990a), for instances where Roman culture was positively valued. See Boulogne (1992) 4701-2. This type of answer is not entirely absent from Latin sources e.g. Varro ARD Cardauns frs. 151, 232, 246 and 247.

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having promulgated a law... ?' 94 In response to the question 'Why in ancient days did they never dine out without their sons, even when these were still children?', he says: 'Did Lycurgus introduce this custom also . . . ?' 95 It is hard to see how the prescriptions of these famous Greek legislators could be seen as the ocma of a ban on marital gift-giving, or of banishing Roman boys from the dinner-table. Similarly, in QR 5, which is unusual in that the response is structured to suggest strongly that the second alternative is the right one, Plutarch answers the intriguing enquiry: 'Why is it that those who are falsely reported to have died in a foreign country, even if they return, are not admitted by the door, but mount upon the roof-tiles and let themselves down inside?' The first answer, concerning an incident after a naval battle in the First Punic War, taken from Varro, is dismissed as 'wholly fabulous (IJUOIKTIV OACOS)'. Plutarch then begins his second response: 'But consider if this be not in some way similar to Greek customs.' He then delineates Greek religious belief concerning those thought to be dead, signalling with his use of 'ydp' that this is a confirmatory proof. He includes a story about a man in this predicament who consulted the oracle at Delphi, thus linking this response closely to himself. He then sums up 'Therefore it is nothing surprising if the Romans also .. .' 96 The reader notes that 'naturally (ETTIEIKOOS)', that is, just as the Greeks do, the Romans perform all their rituals of purification out of doors. This assertion of the naturalness of Greek ritual practice also illustrates Plutarch's third, and most frequent category of Greek answering: the moralizing answer, in accordance with his own ethical and philosophical beliefs.97 For example, in QR 7, after the response concerned with SoIonic legislation, Plutarch suggests either that affection between husband and wife should not be bought by gifts, or that, since seducers try to win women over with presents, their husbands should not have to stoop to such a practice, or that, since husbands and wives should own everything in common, to receive a present from a spouse would undermine that communality. Here, Plutarch simply normalizes Roman practice, by applying his own conception of the ideal relationship between husband and wife. His repeated use of such words as 'natural', 'reasonable' or 'proper' insinuates the naturalness, reason and propriety of his own value system and conceptualization of the world.98 Plutarch's view of the world is not 94

QR 7. See also QR 65: 'As Solon (Ka0d7T6p) . . . even so (OUTCOS) did the R o m a n legislator

95

QR 33. See also QR 87. Eighteen answers use a n 'as the Greeks . . . so the R o m a n s . . . ' format. See Boulogne (1992) 4 7 0 3 - 7 . Twenty-seven answers include 'natural', 'proper' or 'reasonable' explanations. Cf. twenty four answers involving necessity, asserting the inevitability of his value system.

96 97 98

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an arbitrary, cultural construction, but the only way of viewing the world. Indeed, Greek culture is not, therefore, cultural at all, since that would imply human agency, it is simply the natural order of things." Jacques Boulogne argues that this type of Greek answering should also be viewed as conciliatory, as a cultural synthesis. 100 Plutarch conceives of human nature as essential and universal, and the Romans and the Greeks are therefore united by their common humanity. Yet, if the Roman Questions is a synthesis, it is a rather one-sided one. Plutarch does indeed imply that civilized, Greek values and beliefs lie behind the origins of Roman institutions and practices. Yet this very application of his own ethical system reveals a lack of interest in, even a failure to acknowledge the existence of, a distinctive set of Roman values and beliefs. The Roman Questions, therefore, are a very Hellenocentric kind of synthesis. 101 Moreover, Plutarch's concern to uncover the ethical motivation behind Roman custom simultaneously highlights the strangeness of Roman culture. This becomes clear if the very different strategies, employed to answer the Greek Questions, are considered. This difference is immediately apparent if the only two questions in the two texts which contain the same piece of information are compared. Question 52, in the Roman Questions, asks: Why do they sacrifice a bitch to the goddess called Geneta Mana and pray that none of the household shall become 'good'? Is it because Geneta is a deity concerned with the generation and birth of beings that perish? Her name means some such thing as 'flux and birth' or 'flowing birth'. Therefore, just as (cbcrnsp ouv) the Greeks sacrifice a bitch to Hecate, even so (KCCI) do the Romans offer the same sacrifice to Geneta on behalf of the members of their household. But Socrates says that the Argives sacrifice a bitch to Eilioneia by reason of the ease with which the bitch gives birth. But does the import of the prayer, that none of them shall become 'good', refer not to the human members of a household, but to the dogs? For dogs should (8eT) be savage and terrifying. Or, because of the fact that the dead are gracefully called 'the good', are they in veiled language (aiviTTO|jsvoi) asking in their prayer that none of their household may die? One should not be surprised at this (ou 5ET 5E TOUTO 0auiia^6iv); Aristotle, in fact (yap), says that there is written in the treaty of the Arcadians with the Spartans: 'No one shall be made good for rendering aid to the Spartan party at Tegea'; that is, no one shall be put to death. 99

100

101

Cf. however QR 19, where Numa's choice of January to start the new year may correspond to the natural start of the year ('TTJ 4>UCTEI . . . dpx^v' and 'avdpcb-n-ois Tpoirov Tivd cpucriv'), and he believes it best ('dpiora') to begin it after the winter solstice, like the Roman calendar. (1987) 475, and (1994) 124-46, and 150-1 (his Conclusion is called 'un mediateur transculturel'). Cf. Alston's (1996) delineation of Plutarch's Hellenocentric interpretations in On Isis and Osiris.

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Here, Plutarch begins by attempting to explain the Latin etymology of a name he expected would be unfamiliar to his audience. He then implicitly identifies this Roman goddess with Hecate, using a 'parallel' Greek practice to illuminate the Roman custom. It is also possible, however, that Geneta Mana might be identified with Eilioneia, as suggested by Argive practice. This is supported by an appeal to naturalness: the ease with which dogs give birth. Plutarch's invocation of necessity elides the banality of his preference for fierce guard-dogs. He then claims that 'the good' is a euphemism for the dead, but the evidence for this is a Greek peace treaty. He provides no proof that this Greek usage can be paralleled in Latin. Rather, he anticipates the reader's surprise at such a usage, reinforcing the strangeness of Roman culture. The practices of the Romans are expected to provoke surprise. No Roman writers are quoted as the source for his explanations. Instead, the authority of the local historian, Socrates of Argos, and of Aristotle, two Greek authors, is evoked. Thus, Plutarch is using his familiar strategies of explaining Roman custom by Greek practice, of assimilating Roman religion to that of the Greeks, and of using natural, common-sense explanations, while reminding the reader of the Otherness of Roman culture. However, question 5 in the Greek Questions, is very different: Who are the 'good' among the Arcadians and the Spartans? When the Spartans had come to terms with the Tegeans, they made a treaty and set up in common a pillar by the Alpheius. On this, among other matters, was inscribed: The Messenians must be expelled from the country; it shall not be lawful to make men good.' Aristotle, then, in explaining (s^riyouiJiEvos) this, states that it means that no one shall be put to death because of assistance given to the Spartan party in Tegea. This question asks 'who?', not 'why?', and it is answered first by a description of the treaty, and then an explanation of the euphemism as explained by Aristotle. There are no alternative suggestions here, no hint of tentativeness or speculation. Rather, a particular historical query is explained simply, by recourse to a specific document. A Greek question is answered by reference to a Greek authority. No Roman author is explicitly described, in the Roman Questions, as an 'exegete' of his own culture. This answer is typical of those found in the Greek Questions, which consist of similar explanations, densely packed with 'fact', often highly abstruse, in the tradition of the learned Problemata.102 In the Greek Questions, Plutarch the pepaideumenos shows off his mastery of Greek paideia, tackling with assurance such obscure questions as 'What is it that 102

Halliday (1928) points out that the Greek Questions are our only surviving source for some of its contents. E.g. QG 16, 18, 23, 37, 48 and 53.

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the Megarians call aphabromaT, or 'Why at Sparta is a shrine of Odysseus built near the shrine of the daughters of Leucippos?' or 'What is the reason why the Eleans lead their mares outside the boundaries of their country to mate with asses?'103 Moreover, there are almost no answers of the moralizing type.104 This suggests that Plutarch did not feel it necessary to give moral reasons for Greek practice. Rather, both he and his audience might take for granted the sense and naturalness of their own culture. It is true that the Greek Questions are concerned with the religious customs of particular Greek poleis or ethne. Furthermore, questions such as 'What is the reason why the Eleans lead their mares outside the boundaries of their country to mate with asses?' might seem to emphasize differences among the Greeks.105 Indeed the Greek Questions as a whole are nearly all concerned with the specific details of the religious custom, mythical origins or political institutions of particular Greek poleis or ethne. This focus, then, appears to highlight difference, rather than similarity. For Plutarch, Greek identity is complicated.106 It consists of local, polis identity, as revealed by his concern, in the subjects of the Greek Questions, for detailed, local differences. Yet the narrow focus of the questions and the overwhelming tendency to ask 'what?' or 'who?', rather than 'why?', focuses the reader's attention not on recognizing cultural difference between the Greeks, but on finding out obscure factual details. Greek culture does not require explanation. Indeed this focus on the particularities of local cult, politics and myth also asserts a broader Greek identity, in that Plutarch takes for granted the central institutions of Greek culture. It is only Roman custom and practice which requires elucidation. The Greeks are not, however, idealized: there is, in fact, almost an emphasis on war, the difficulties involved in establishing colonies, and civil strife. In QG 17, Plutarch notes that the Corinthians fought 'in a civilized and kinsmanly way' with the Megarians, this comment implying that not all wars were conducted in this way. In contrast, in QG 21, Plutarch explains that the Cretans are accustomed to raid each others' territory. The division made between Greek civilization and Roman barbarism is thus further complicated. The Greeks too could be bellicose and expansionist; they did not necessarily live out the ideals of Greek paideia. Indeed a Roman king might more completely embody the Platonic ideal

103 104 105 106

QG 16, 48 a n d 53. F o r a n exception, see QG 34. QG52>. See Browning (1989) a n d W a l b a n k (1951), for a diachronic conspectus of the relative importance of polis versus Panhellenic identity.

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of the philosopher-king. 107 He might even be 'more Greek'. 108 This entails an uncomfortable corollary for Greek identity. If to be civilized is to be Greek, then Greek identity might not be the automatic possession of those living in the Greek-speaking East. Rather, it could be claimed by anyone who had acquired Greek paideia. Plutarch's strategy of Greek answering appropriates a Roman god as a Greek culture-hero, who civilizes the barbarous Romans - or who is himself overwhelmed by their barbarism. Greek culture is equated with civilization itself, and the Romans must learn Greek paideia. Yet Plutarch's equivocation over Numa's relationship with Pythagoras also allows for the possibility of a separate, Roman culture, more civilized and philosophical than Romulus' aggressive expansionism. Plutarch's use of Greek 'parallels', and his application of his own ethical world view elides the difference between Roman and Greek, yet it does so by asserting the naturalness of Greek culture. In the Greek Questions, by contrast, Greek culture is explained by reference to itself. Plutarch shows himself to be a true pepaideumenos, and he takes for granted the self-evident ethical good sense of his own culture. The difference between the strategies deployed to provide amcc in the Roman Questions, and those used in the Greek Questions, reinforces the opposition between Roman culture as Other and Greek culture as Self. Yet it also complicates such a division. On the one hand, Roman culture is subsumed in Plutarch's own world view, and Greek culture is promoted as the only possible culture. This strategy tends rather to deny the possibility of cultural difference. On the other hand, however, Roman culture is allowed its own identity, both negatively, in the barbarousness before Greek civilizing influences, and more positively, in the philosophical precepts of Numa. Yet the style of the answers in the Roman Questions maintains the sense of the strangeness of Roman culture. Thus, cultural difference is both denied and emphasized. Questions: past, present and the Roman Empire It is also striking that Plutarch's choice of topics in both the Roman Questions and the Greek Questions avoids explicit reference to the present. It is the case that many customs or institutions described were probably still in existence in Plutarch's time, and this is strongly suggested by his use of the present tense, or of expressions such as 'ern KOCI VUV'. 109 The 107

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See esp. Numa 2 0 . 6 - 7 . F o r discussion, see D e Blois a n d Bons (1992), a n d Buccheit (1991). Comp. Lyc-Numa 1.5. QR 21 ('and even now'). See also QR 25, 4 3 , 50, 53 a n d 96.

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flamen Dialis, for example, is the subject of a set of questions.110 There is even a reference to the emperor Domitian.111 Jacques Boulogne has argued that the Roman Questions is indeed concerned with understanding contemporary Roman society.112 Yet no specifically imperial practices or institutions are discussed and the reader is not encouraged to consider the implications of the Empire on the topics chosen. For example, in response to QR 10, about worshipping the gods with covered heads and honouring men by doing the opposite, Plutarch says: For they uncover their heads in the presence of men more powerful than they: it is not to invest these men with additional honour, but rather to avert from them the jealousy of the gods, that these men may not seem to demand the same honours as the gods, nor to tolerate or rejoice in an attention like that bestowed on the gods.

The careful distinction drawn here between man and god seems almost deliberately to bypass the imperial cult.113 Similarly, in QR 81, in a discussion of the tribunate, Plutarch claims that 'its authority and power consist in blocking the power of a magistrate and in the abrogation of excessive authority'. This description seems consciously to avoid reference to the tribunician powers held by the emperor, or to his 'excessive authority'. Elsewhere, Plutarch explains that both the Greek cities and Rome abolished kingship, because the kings became 'arrogant and oppressive', and he wonders whether the practice of wearing crescent shapes on one's shoes was instituted as a lesson in obedience to regal authority.114 Again, Plutarch studiously avoids any contemporary relevance. The reader is not encouraged to think of the present. The paucity of references to the Roman politeia might seem to reflect the irrelevance of the Republican system under the Empire, but all the references there to Roman politics concern Republican practices or institutions. Moreover, customs or institutions in Rome itself are the subject of most of the questions. Italy is mentioned only infrequently, while the topography of Rome merits a number of questions.115 This suggests that, even at the end of the first century CE, Rome can still be assimilated to a Greek polis. The Roman Empire is conspicuously absent.116 The Greek Questions are concerned with the different poleis and ethne of Greece. The majority of these places and peoples are located in the 110 111 112 113 114 115 116

QR 109-12. QR 50. (1987) 471-2 and (1992) 4698-9. Cf. QR 14, where sons, but not daughters, are said to worship their dead fathers as gods. Si? 63 and 76. Topography of Rome: e.g. QR 47, 55, 69 and 91. See Bowie (1970), for an important discussion of the avoidance of the present in Greek writers of the early imperial period.

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province of Achaea, created by the Roman authorities. Almost half of the questions and answers have at least one referent outside this unit of the Roman Empire, which, however, belong to the archaic and classical Greek world, from Troy to Tarentum, an Italian city founded by Greek colonists, rather than to the more recently Hellenized East. While this geographical spread does not conflict with the boundaries of the Roman Empire, it relies on an older conception of the Greek world. There is no mention of contemporary political realities. Rather, Plutarch concentrates on the details of city constitutions and religious practices, the origin of place names, the often mythical migrations and settlements of peoples, and on the events of Greek myth.117 QG 14, for example, concerns the penalty Odysseus paid for the slaughter of his wife's suitors, while in QG 20 the reader discovers that a saying in Priene originated from a terrible defeat by the Milesians, at the time of Bias the sage. In QG 26, Plutarch explains how the Aenianians, after a series of migrations, ended up in such a prosperous land, that they pray never to return to their original home. These are the actions of autonomous cities and peoples, from the Greek past, not from the Roman present. The pervasive use of the present tense in both the Greek Questions and the Roman Questions asserts the persistence of identity. Amcc located in the past, often the remote and mythical past, are thus linked to the present. The present can be explained in terms of the past. Furthermore, the emphasis in the Greek Questions on the origins of toponyms, or the settlements of particular places, strengthens this assumption. In QG 26, for example, Plutarch traces the fortunes of the Aenianians from their mythical expulsion by the Lapiths to their present-day prosperity. Similarly, in the Roman Questions, Plutarch comments explicitly on the persistence of identity. In QR 32, the Arcadians may have practised the human sacrifice of Argives because 'they continued to preserve (8ie((>uAaTTov) their ancient feud and enmity'. The same verb (5iac(>uAdTToucri) is used to underline the antiquity of a custom in QR 53, where the Etruscans are still called by their original name, Sardians, in memory of their distant origins in Lydia. This connection between the present and the past is, of course, typical in the aetiological tradition. It asserts a continuity between past and present, and claims to explain the present by reference to the past. Yet, in this case, Plutarch's highly selective version of the present elides the contemporary realities of Roman rule. Both Roman culture and 117

Political details: QG 1, 2, 4, 5, 8, 17, 18, 20, 29, 32, 42, 46, 47, 49, 53, 55, 57, 59; religious practice: QG 3, 6, 9, 12, 21, 23, 24, 26, 28, 31, 33, 36, 37, 39, 40, 44, 48, 58; place names: QG 15, 16, 22, 30, 41, 43, 56; migrations and settlements: QG 11, 13, 15, 16, 21, 22, 26, 35, 37, 39, 41, 51; myth: QG 14, 22, 26, 27, 28, 31, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 43, 44, 45, 46, 48, 50, 52, 56, 58.

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Greek culture are located in the past. But this very selectivity, in its omissions and elisions, also problematizes the possibility of continuity between past and present and calls into question the persistence of identity. The Roman Empire cannot be explained by Numa's calendrical changes or Odysseus' exile from Ithaca. Nor is it clear how contemporary identity can be based solely on the past. In some ways, then, Plutarch's choice of topics underlines the difference between Greek and Roman culture. The connection asserted between past and present highlights the separateness of Greek and Roman culture, and denies the possibility of cultural change over time. Thus the sense of culture as a single, unchanging entity is emphasized. However, Plutarch's failure to engage with imperial practices and institutions undermines this view of the nature of culture, in that the continuity between past and present is only asserted for preimperial Greek and Roman culture. The authority of the past to explain the present is thus called into question. Questions and cultural authority

The very existence of the Roman Questions and the Greek Questions asserts Plutarch's authority to explain Greek and Roman culture, and to evaluate the competing ama of a particular question. However, in the case of the Roman Questions, that authority is undermined by the tentativeness of the answers, as if Roman culture will elude definitive explanation. The contrast with the certainty of the Greek Questions is also revealed by Plutarch's different attitudes towards Roman and Greek authorities. Much of the material in the Roman Questions seems to have been taken from Roman sources, principally Varro. 118 Yet Plutarch does not advertise this. 119 Indeed he mentions more Greek than Latin authors by name.120 In a work about Roman culture, Plutarch prefers to support his explanations by using Greek rather than Roman authority. Moreover, his treatment of the Roman authors he does name tends to undermine their authority.121 Even where Plutarch has a choice of answers, he either prefers the Greek ones, or gives them equal status to the Roman ones. Varro is mentioned by name eight times. On three occasions his account seems to be accepted, although two of these concern only points of detail.122 In QR 90, Varro provides the source of the question, not the answer. Twice 118 119 120 121 122

See H. J. Rose (1924) ch. 1 and Valgiglio (1976). This was standard practice for ancient authors. Eleven Latin authors and nineteen Greek authors. See van der Stockt (1987). See Boulogne (1992) 4702. QR 27: Varro is the source for the answer. (Cf. Cluvius Rufus in QR 107.) QR 4 and 14: Varro is mentioned to confirm points of detail.

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Varro is cited as the source for the first of a number of alternatives, implying that his explanation should not be considered conclusive.123 On two occasions, Varro's explanation is explicitly rejected. In question 101, Plutarch says: 'What Varro and his school say is not credible (ou m0avov),' while in question 5, Varro's interpretation is described as 'quite fabulous (|ju0iKf)v oAcos)'. Plutarch goes on to provide a lengthy comparison to Greek practice, as I have already discussed. In this case, then, a Greek answer is clearly preferable. Similarly, other Latin writers are used only to provide one of a number of alternatives, or are merely the source of a detail, or the question itself.124 Livy is mentioned only once, in question 25. The topic is: 'Why do they reckon the day after the Kalends, or the Nones, or the Ides as unsuitable for leaving home or for travel?' First, Plutarch discusses the reason given by Livy and 'the majority'. However, he then exclaims: 'Or does this contain many irrationalities (TTOAACCS dAoyias)?' and provides a careful refutation. He continues by drawing an analogy between the arrangement of the Roman year and of the month, backing it up with a 'parallel' from Greek religious practice. After applying Pythagorean number theory, he wonders if a saying of Themistocles, the Athenian statesman, 'has any foundation in reason (exei Aoyov)'. Finally, he asserts that the ancient Romans never made plans at festivals, a fact backed up only by his own authority, or suggests an analogy with the present practice of lingering at temples. Here, the authority of a celebrated Roman historian is rejected in favour of Plutarch's own suggestions, a Greek philosophical theory, a 'parallel' with Greek religion, and a saying by a famous Greek statesman. Plutarch's attitude towards anonymous sources is no less equivocal. It is true that he twice asks: 'Is this also to be solved by history?', suggesting the veracity of explanations based on Roman history.125 Yet in question 106, the first alternative, explicitly called the view of the majority of Romans, is followed by another possibility. Plutarch then asks: 'Or does the matter have an explanation (Aoyov) more natural and philosophic?' This surely suggests that the reader is to prefer, or at least give equal consideration to, Greek rather than Roman answers. This is in clear contrast to the Greek Questions, where questions about Greek culture are answered with reference only to Greek authorities. 123 124

125

QR 2: the first alternative of four; QR 105: the first alternative of three. As only one alternative: Antistius L a b e o (46) a n d Nigidius Figulus (21). As a source of detail: Fenestella (41) a n d G a i u s Curio (81). As a source for the question: Cicero (34 a n d Plutarch wonders at the end of his discussion whether this information is even true), C a t o the Elder (39 a n d 49) a n d Ateius C a p i t o (50). QR 43 (ancient treatment of ambassadors) a n d 54 (the mace Hum is n a m e d after a certain Macellus!).

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The sheer mass of detail and range of material deployed in both the Roman Questions and the Greek Questions impresses the reader with Plutarch's authority to pronounce on both Greek and Roman culture. In this sense, paradoxically, Plutarch therefore constructs himself as an 'insider' to both Roman and Greek culture. Indeed, in the Roman Questions, at several points, Plutarch appears to be showing off his special knowledge of Rome to his fellow Greeks.126 This is most explicit in question 103, 'Why do they call children of unknown fathers spuriiT Plutarch begins his response with the categoric statement that it is not for the reason 'the Greeks believe'. He then launches into an account of Roman praenomina and their abbreviations.127 Here, Plutarch makes clear his ability to improve his Greek readers' knowledge of Roman culture. If his exegesis, by calling on the authority of Greek practices and Greek sources, emphasizes that he is an 'outsider' to Roman culture, it also asserts special, inside knowledge. Moreover, his use of the first person plural on five occasions suggests the possibility of a unified, undifferentiated humanity. For example, the shrine of Fortune the Fowler in Rome is said to signify that 'we (rmcov) are caught by Fortune from afar and held fast by circumstances'.128 The custom of not extinguishing lamps, but letting them go out by themselves, 'teaches us' to share necessities.129 Here, difference between Greek and Roman is elided completely, as Roman practice provides a moral lesson for us all. Question 40 has been seen as an example of Plutarch's adopting a specifically Roman perspective.130 In explaining why theflamenDialis is not allowed to anoint himself outdoors, Plutarch delineates Roman suspicions of gymnasia and palaestra, as the causes of Greek 'slavery and effeminacy (liocAaKias)', and of pederasty and a failure to develop military prowess. However, Plutarch does not explicitly endorse this opinion, following it with the distancing comment: 'It is hard work, at any rate, when men strip in the open air to escape these consequences.' Moreover, in question 101, he wonders whether the bulla, the amulet worn by children, was invented to mark out free children, when naked, from the slave boys who were the objects of ancient Roman pederasty. This tends to undermine any Roman belief that pederasty was a recently-imported, Greek 126

127 128 129 130

E.g. QR 41 (providing extra information on the designs of Roman coins and the origin of some Roman nomina), 74 (listing the shrines to Fortune in Rome), 87 (explaining some incidental details of Juno's cult and informing the reader of the ancient Latin word for spear). Unfortunately, Plutarch himself is wrong on several points (Rose (1924) 211). 2*74. QR 75. See also 19, 38, and 84. See Boulogne (1994) 97, Duff (1994) 153, and Introduction to this volume, 1-2.

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habit. Plutarch, then, shows awareness of a Roman perspective, but does not accept its validity. His authority to interpret Roman culture remains intact. In the Greek Questions, Plutarch's authority to interpret Greek culture is continually reinforced by the certainty of his answers, by his erudition and by his reference to the authority of other Greek writers. In the Roman Questions, Plutarch's pervasive Greek answering and his criticism of Roman authorities asserts the authority of Greek culture to explain the Romans as well. Yet, this is undermined by the tentativeness of Plutarch's responses. Moreover, his very attempt to elucidate Roman culture locates him as an insider, while his Greek answering positions him as an outsider. Thus, Plutarch's relationship with Roman culture is revealed as highly complex. Conclusion: Romans, Greeks, identities

A comparison of the Roman Questions and the Greek Questions reveals clear differences between Plutarch's relationship with Greek and with Roman culture. Critics have argued that Plutarch should therefore be viewed as locating himself inside Greek culture and outside Roman culture.131 Further, Plutarch's reliance on Greek answering and Greek authority has been viewed as an assertion of Greek cultural superiority.132 The values of Greek paideia become universal values; Greek culture is civilization. Yet Plutarch's interest in, and knowledge of, Roman culture and history has also been ascribed a conciliatory purpose.133 The Roman Questions educate his readers about Roman customs and institutions, and the Romans are civilized, Hellenized foreigners, not barbarians. However, I feel that the Roman Questions cannot be interpreted as primarily conciliatory. Rather, I would like to conclude by examining how far the Roman Questions and the Greek Questions are typical of Plutarch's corpus, by considering how closely they reproduce the concerns of the Greek elite in the Second Sophistic and by returning to the question of the construction of identity in the Roman Empire. The differences between the Roman Questions and the Greek Questions are striking. The contrast between Roman and Greek in the Parallel Lives, however, is more nuanced.134 For example, in the preface of his Life of Theseus, Plutarch foregrounds the problems involved in writing 131 132 133 134

Barrow (1967) 6 6 - 7 0 ; Boulogne (1987) a n d (1992); a n d Duff (1994) ch. 7. Boulogne (1992) a n d (1994). Boulogne (1987) a n d (1992), a n d Swain (1990a). See e.g. B a r r o w (1967); Duff (1994); C. P. Jones (1971); Pelling (1986) a n d (1989); R u s sell (1973); Swain (1990a) a n d (1996); a n d W a r d m a n (1974).

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about both Theseus, the founder of Athens, and his pair, Romulus. He promises to attempt to purify the mythical, submitting it to reason (logos), so as to create 'a semblance of history (icr-ropiccs oyiv)'.135 His use of the word 'semblance' hardly suggests great confidence in the historical veracity of his account, and in fact Plutarch continues by asking for the reader's indulgence. This is quite different from the certainty of the Greek Questions, which treats many, similarly mythical, topics. In his Life of Numa, Plutarch criticizes Juba, the king of Mauretania and the author of an antiquarian work in Greek entitled Similarities, for 'being determined (yAix6|ji£vos)' to derive the word for the shields of the Salii from Greek.136 Yet the Roman Questions are full of such Greek answering. It seems, therefore, that the Greek Questions and the Roman Questions, perhaps because they are not literary narratives, display certain aspects of Plutarch's work in an extreme way. The Roman Questions and the Greek Questions show Plutarch to be a pepaideumenos. His immense knowledge is displayed by both works, ranging over the obscurest details of Roman history or Greek civic institutions. Plutarch represents himself as an authority competent to explain Roman and Greek culture, and to decide between competing explanations. His use of Greek authority encompasses both the canon of famous writers and individuals, for example Aristotle and Themistocles, and more obscure sources, such as the local historian Socrates of Argos, revealing the depth of his erudition. This constant appeal to the authority of the past to legitimate assertions in the present was typical of the Greek elite in the early Roman Empire.137 It seems likely that these assertions were a response both to Roman political authority and Roman appropriation of Greek cultural authority. Using Greek cultural authority to decide on questions of Roman culture is thus a neat counterpoint to Hadrian's arbitration of the Greekness of his subject cities. It is Plutarch's own ethical value system, and his mastery of his own culture, that can explain Roman culture. Greek culture is therefore assimilated to the natural order of things. Furthermore, Greek paideia must be learnt by the Romans from a series of Greek culture-heroes. Questions 22 and 32 suggest quite clearly that the Romans, before this civilizing contact, were barbarians. Romulus' bellicose expansionism can be linked to Plutarch's other representations of Rome before contact with the East.138 For example, at the beginning of his Life of Coriolanus, Plutarch argues that this 135 136 137

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Theseus 1.3. Numa 13.6. This is noted, for example, by G. A n d e r s o n (1989) a n d (1993); Bowie (1970); B r a n h a m (1989) Introduction; Rogers (1991b); a n d Swain (1996). See Duff (1994); Pelling (1989); Swain (1990a) a n d (1996).

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early Roman hero is an example of what happens when a character noble by nature lacks paideia.139 Plutarch goes on to claims that it is paideia and clearly Greek paideia, since it is a gift of the Muses - which provides the reasons necessary to control one's passions. He then continues: in those days Rome held in highest honour that part of virtue which concerns itself with warlike and military achievements (TCCS -rroAeiJiKas KCCI crrpaTiGOTiKds . . .

TTpd^eis), and evidence of this may be found in the only Latin word for virtue, which signifies really manly valour (dv8p6ias); they made valour, a specific form of virtue, stand for virtue in general.140 Bellicosity is the main characteristic of early Rome, and even a noble nature cannot really prosper without paideia. Paideia, then, was central to Plutarch's philosophical project in the Parallel Lives. His representation of the civilizing effects of Janus, Saturn and Heracles in the Roman Questions reinforces the importance of paideia, and makes it clear that civilization comes from the East. Plutarch might, therefore, seem to be typical of the 'cultural confidence' seen as a key characteristic of the Second Sophistic. 141 The continued importance and relevance of Greek paideia in the Roman world is thus asserted. However, any such confidence is problematized by the style of the answers in the Roman Questions. The reader is left to choose between alternatives; questions are answered by more questions. Roman culture is represented as eluding Plutarch's zeal for explanation; it cannot be conclusively understood. If Plutarch's Greek answering may be said to elide the differences between Greek and Roman culture, to deny the existence of any culture other than Greek paideia, then the tentativeness of this answering highlights the separateness and Otherness of Roman culture. The Romans cannot be assimilated into the Greek world view so easily. The explanatory power of Greek culture has limits. Any sense of cultural confidence is also undermined by Plutarch's focus on the past. On the one hand, his repeated explanation of the present by the past, the typical strategy of the aetiological tradition, uses the authority of the past to legitimate his interpretations. Identity and culture are thus represented as unchanging, connecting the remotest past to the contemporary world. The sense of 'Greek culture' or 'Roman culture' as real entities is reinforced. Yet, in his studied avoidance of the realities of the Roman Empire, Plutarch locates Greek and Roman culture and identity only in the past. This implies that such concepts only make sense 139 140 141

Coriolanus 1.2-4. Cf. QR 19 and 84. Swain (1996) 2. See also G. Anderson (1986); Bowie (1991); Duff (1994) ch. 7. Cf. Whitmarsh, 303, in this volume.

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if Rome is assimilated to a Greek polis, or if the cities of the East are still autonomous. Thus, the reader is struck by discontinuity, by the difference between the past and the present, as much as by the continuity. It is hard to see how 'Greek identity' or 'Roman culture', for example, as they are represented in the Greek Questions and the Roman Questions, are to function in the Roman Empire. The possibility of constructing such identities is further called into question by Plutarch's own project, in that, if the whole world were to be civilized by Greek culture, paideia would no longer be distinctively Greek. Furthermore, Plutarch's representation of identity and culture in the Greek Questions and the Roman Questions is complex, even contradictory. In the Greek Questions, there is a tension between the local differences of the poleis and ethne, and a sense of a unified Greek culture and identity. This tension is often evident in works from the Second Sophistic. Jas Eisner has shown, for example, that in his Description of Greece, the second-century Greek writer Pausanias uses the construction of religious identity as a way of transcending the realities of intra-Greek strife in the classical world.142 In the Roman Questions, it is unclear how far Roman culture is to be seen as an autonomous entity, or as a mere copy of Greek culture. If there is an authentic Roman culture, is it to be identified with barbarism, with the militarism of Romulus, or with the pacific philosophy of Numa? More general studies of Plutarch's corpus have argued that the Romans are represented neither as Greek nor as barbarian.143 It is then unclear, however, into what category exactly they might be said to fit. In the Roman Questions, the Romans seem to be Hellenized barbarians, and to be some other, separate, but civilized kind of people. It seems significant that Plutarch wrote three sets of questions, Roman, Greek and barbarian. Yet he does not make clear how the Romans are to be located in the traditional Greek-barbarian dichotomy. The very tentativeness of the answers, and the multiplying of the responses reinforce the anomalous nature of the Romans. They cannot be pinned down and explained. Moreover, Plutarch's own relationship towards Roman identity is complex, even contradictory. His reliance on Greek answers, and his failure to provide decisive responses in the Roman Questions locates Plutarch outside Roman culture. Yet the breadth and the depth of his knowledge of Rome, and his assertion of his authority to write about Roman culture for other Greeks, places him rather inside that culture. It might seem preferable, therefore, to say that Plutarch was both inside and 142 143

Eisner (1992). See also Rogers (1991b). See Browning (1989); C. P. Jones (1971); Pelling (1989); a n d Swain (1990a) a n d (1996). Cf. Russell (1979) o n the R o m a n s ' 'potentiality for barbarism' (132).

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outside Roman culture, or that he was more of an insider to Greek culture than to Roman.144 The simple opposition of inside/outside is then replaced by a more complex negotiation of position within the Roman Empire. As Simon Goldhill so neatly puts it: 'In the Roman Empire all are insiders, but some are more insiders than others.'145 Plutarch's works, then, form part of a wider debate about the nature of identity and culture in the Second Sophistic. The Roman Questions and the Greek Questions in themselves represent the complexities of that debate, by problematizing the relationship between Greek and Roman culture, the distinction between Roman, Greek and barbarian, and the possibility of using the past to create identity in the present. These are questions which Plutarch does not, and perhaps could not, answer. 144 145

See Duff (1994) for Plutarch as b o t h an insider a n d an outsider. Goldhill (1995) 354.

Part II

Intellectuals on the margins

Describing Self in the language of Other: Pseudo (?) Lucian at the temple of Hierapolis Jas Eisner

Arguably, travel writing is always an act of compromise. Usually it comprises a translation of the foreign into terms acceptable or understandable to a home community, by an author whose own identity can hardly be disentangled from the act of writing.1 The foreign is always transformed under the gaze and representations of its interpreter (framed as a specimen, perhaps, or disunited from the cultural coordinates which give it indigenous meaning, or actively misinterpreted and abused).2 Yet its entry into a home culture (even the very possibility for that entry through some form of ethnographic or relativizing discourse) may transform that home culture too - nuancing both a collective cultural identity and the more personal sense of self of the traveller.3 When such travel becomes inextricable from the problems of religion and the very powerful effects which religion exercises on subjectivity (as in the case of pilgrimage accounts), the problems and negotiations of the self may become more complex still.4 Ultimately, everything may be at

1

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4

On issues of cultural translation, there is a rich literature on the European discovery and assimilation of the New World: see esp., Greenblatt (1991), (1993); Pagden (1993); Rubies (1993). Specifically on the 'science of the Other' ('heterology'), the classic work is de Certeau (1986) esp. 67-79 and 137-49 on writing and travel with Giard (1993). On the problems of ethnography see Boon (1982); Clifford and Marcus (1986); Pratt (1992); Schwartz (1994). For accounts of the ancient geographic framework within which the De Dea Syria was written, see Jacob (1991) and Romm (1992). As a polemical position on the cultural assimilations of travel writing, this is famously the argument of Edward Said (1978). Like all polemics, the argument is too extreme. See Eisner (1994) 226-30. On the development of technologies to assimilate travel accounts in the Renaissance simultaneously a way of legislating for the framing of the Other and of reconstituting systems of knowledge in home cultures in order to accommodate the foreign - see Stagl (1990) and Rubies (1996). For a subtle account of how self-confident identities can be undermined in confronting others, see Rubies (1999). Interestingly, the literature on pilgrimage has hardly explored the effects of travel as assimilation of the Other, though see now Williams (1998) 249-96, (1999). In part this may be because the Other which is the pilgrim's goal is also (usually) the sacred underpinning of the pilgrim's sense of self. For that goal as a kind of intersubjective ideal ('communitas')

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stake in such a text; which is what makes the study of pilgrimage so rewarding.5 Antiquity hardly offers us a more remarkable and intricate investigation of these problems than the de dea Syria, an account of pilgrimage to a temple in the holy city of Hierapolis in Syria, which survives in the corpus of Lucian. Whether or not the text is actually by Lucian is a subject on which a great deal of critical ink has been spilled in the last couple of centuries.6 The debate about attribution is no arcane polemic of scholarly minutiae: at issue are all the same questions of identity that we find in the text itself, and in the very problem of travel writing as cultural translation. If the de dea Syria is by Lucian, so the story has gone, then (for it to tally with the satiric and sceptical tone of much else of Lucian's work, especially on religion)7 it must be a parody. The extreme version of the de dea Syria (hereafter referred to as DDS in this paper) as a spoof of loony rites among the mad religions of the East and at the same time as a satire on the work of Herodotus came in the Loeb translator's choice to render the text into (virtuoso but virtually unreadable) mock sixteenthcentury English.8 But this line, for all its potential literary attraction is anthropologically unsound: who are we to judge the sacred rituals of the ancient East, let alone the tone of their retelling by a voice which many have read as deeply sincere? Those who have wished to believe the apparent sincerity of the original (with its lack of obvious ironies) have tended to make it by a different and less competent hand (Pseudo-Lucian).9 Beside the difficulties of tracing irony, satiric intent and hence Lucianic authorship, lies

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8

9

- a temporary and unmediated liberation from secular divisions and hierarchies - which reverses the social norms of pilgrims' home-cultures, see Turner and Turner (1978). The Turners' fundamental anthropological analysis has been attacked on numerous grounds that it is too idealist, overly Christianizing and contradicted by empirical evidence in the field (where anthropologists have tended to find multiple voices disagreeing rather than any kind of communitas); see Eade and Sallnow (1991) 4-5, for a summary of anthropological critiques, and Williams (1995) esp. 167-8 for a more historical/literary critique. For general historical introductions to pilgrimage in antiquity, see Kotting (1950) 12-79; Coleman and Eisner (1995) 10-29; Rutherford (1995); and now Dillon (1997). For good surveys, see G. Anderson (1976a) 68-82 (effectively a defence of Lucianic authorship), Oden (1977) 4-14 with bibliography; Hall (1981) 374-81; and Swain (1996) 304-8. For a sensible riposte to the perceived need for a consistent Lucian in matters of religion, see C. P. Jones (1986) 41-3. Harmon (1925) 337-411. Compare more recently Oden (1977) 41 where the DDS is said to be 'motivated above all by [an] irrepressible desire to demonstrate the ridiculous elements in the city's cult'. Others have attempted to tone down the parody to 'pastiche' - e.g. Hall (1981) 378, following Bompaire (1958) 649; 'humour' (Jones (1986) 41) and 'a certain playfulness . . . very much in the temple's honour' (Swain (1996) 305). E.g. Caster (1937) 360-4; Betz (1961) 24-5; Turcan (1996) 133; Baslez (1994); and most recently Dirven (1997).

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the historical problem of the text's value as a documentary source on near Eastern religion. The stronger the case for satiric excess, the more worthless the text as a reliable reflection of the realien.10 Yet, if the DDS is merely an inaccurate and second-rate syncretistic compilation showing little first-hand or linguistic knowledge of Syria, this may also cast doubt on the Lucianic attribution (since Lucian was a Syrian).11 Underlying all these lines - at issue in the very question of attribution - is our own set of images of classical antiquity: was its greatest satirical essayist selfconsciously (but awfully subtly) ironic about the more extreme examples of ancient religious charisma? or was he himself a believer? or - if the text is by a believer - was its author perhaps someone other than Lucian?12 In effect, the problem of authorship exposes modernity's own identity and ancestral self-projection in relation to its privileged past. At any rate - whatever one's choice of authorship and wherever one stands in the debates about authorial consistency and historical validity the DDS is a work written in the multicultural ambience of the Roman East in the second or third centuries CE, and in the specific context of the revival of Hellenism and Greek learning during the Second Sophistic.13 It translates the strange practices and attitudes (strange, at least, to Greeks) of late-antique Syrian religion into the thought-structure and conceptual frame of Greco-Roman culture in the imperial period. The question of translation in turn raises the hoary problem of whom the text might have been intended for, of what was its implied audience. Of course, we know next to nothing about these issues, but it is certainly the case that the meanings of the DDS would have differed in relation to an educated Greek reader (at whom the text seems most directly to be aimed) by contrast with, say, a Roman or a Syrian. For both these latter kinds of possible reader, the Greek in which the text is written might well have been a second language and - however Hellenized they may have been - in some respects it is likely they would have been strongly identified with their place of origin in the West or the East (like Lucian himself, for instance).14 In any case, to all these readerships, the DDS would have sounded slightly odd since, quite apart from its choice of subject matter, its author opted - as we shall see - to write in the Ionic dialect of Greek 10

11

12

13 14

Pace Oden (1977) 43 and 157-8, who wants the DDS to be both Lucianic satire and 'firmly based on fact'. This is the argument of Baslez (1994), who wants the DDS to be neither Lucianic nor valuable as a source. Wrapped up here but never made explicit in all these arguments are a series of assumptions about 'rationality' as a preserve of Greek culture and its western European (especially its Protestant) descendants. On this theme, see Goody (1996) 11-48. Broadly on the Second Sophistic, see G. Anderson (1993) and Swain (1996). For an account of Lucian's identity, see Swain (1996) 298-329.

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(so strongly identified with the works of Herodotus) rather than in the much more usual Attic. The text is hardly coy about the complexity its act of cultural translation inevitably generates in the authorial persona, the unnamed T, who speaks through it.15 Indeed, while conspicuously failing to name its author or narrator, the first sentences of the DDS make an elaborate point of discussing the name of the city and temple (Hierapolis) which is the text's ostensible subject as well as the fact that the name has been changed.16 The opening chapter closes with the following words: ypd<|>co 5s 'Acrovpios kov, KOCI TCOV &Trr|y6O|jai Ta jjiev auToyir) sjjiaOov, T& 8E Trapa TCOV ipscov e8dr)v, OKOCTCC EOVTCC ejjieO TrpeapUTepa eyco ioropEco.

I write as an Assyrian, and some of the things I relate I learned first-hand, while others - the things that happened before my time - I learned from the priests. (DDS I) 17

The transparency of this authorial introduction belies a series of problems about the writer and his text, which have been fundamental to how the book has been read and received in modern times. Our self-proclaimed Assyrian writes in Greek. His project - the affirmation of a Syrian goddess, her temple and her cult - is no straightforward act of translation. It is an appropriation of one of Syria's holiest sites into a Greek context not merely into the language but also into the cultural vocabulary and associations of the Greeks - and in this sense it is a manifesto of Greek dominance over Syria.18 Yet, by proclaiming his Assyrian identity even as he writes in Greek, the author draws attention to the inconsistencies of his interpretative persona. He is not a Greek native exploring the culture of a barbarian Other - a Herodotus, for example, to cite the classic ancient model for 15

16

17 18

See the brief but entirely apposite comments of Millar (1993) 245, 455; Said (1993) esp. 256-7; and Goldhill (1995) 354-5. For some interesting reflections on first-person narratives in the period, see Maeder (1991) esp. 23-32. I owe this observation to Danny Richter. It might be added that the name 'Hire . . . polls' (or 'Holy . . . city') is implicitly given two Greek etymologies - relating it to the goddess of the site ('Hera') and to the rites (TOC ipd) performed there. Yet the name - and hence the etymologies - are false (or at least pseudonymous) since 'the ancient name was different' (DDS 1). Whether or not this ancient name is meant to be the Assyrian one, clearly the whole opening passage not only raises issues of Greek and Assyrian naming, which I shall argue are fundamental to the text's thematic structure, but it also enacts through the discussion of the city's name a version of the complex withholding of names paraded by the author-narrator. I use the translation by Attridge and Oden (1976), sometimes adapted (as here). Note the interchangeability of the terms 'Syrian' and 'Assyrian' in the Greek language, see Noldeke (1871) 464 on DDS.

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this kind of account.19 On the contrary, he is one of the Other - not only an Assyrian, but himself a pilgrim to the sanctuaries of the Levant (DDS 3-9) and a devotee of the cult of the Syrian Goddess. The temple he visits, albeit described in the Greek language and in terms of a Greek culture which has very little to do with the Syrian culture of Hierapolis, is in a deep sense a guarantor of the writer's own identity as both an 'Assyrian' and a pilgrim. The very last sentence of the book proclaims that 'I too, when still a youth, performed this ceremony [of offering locks of hair and beard in the temple], and even now my locks and name are in the sanctuary' (DDS 60). Even the name, the very persona of the narrator, which is never given in the Greek text, is to be found - we discover - inscribed in the heart of the temple in Syria. That is where, he claims, his identity lies. Moreover (and still at the very opening of his narrative), our Assyrian affirms his autopsy - his authority as a guide - in terms which are hardly neutral. First, our author's Greek is not the usual Attic dialect espoused by writers of the Second Sophistic (including Lucian who satirizes the phenomenon).20 Rather, he writes in Ionic - characteristically the dialect of Herodotus himself and of some Second Sophistic imitations of Herodotus, notably Arrian's Indica, which is concerned (like the DDS) with aspects of cultural geography in the East.21 By proclaiming his sources to be autopsy, what his own eyes have seen, and the priests to whom he has spoken, he again alludes quite specifically to the claims made by Herodotus - especially in his description of Egypt, that most archetypal of Others for the Greeks.22 The de dea Syria is to be a quite self-consciously Herodotean account, in the sense that its genre, as a travel narrative of the marvellous (cf. the 'marvels', Ocouncrra, of DDS 7-8, 10) and its dialect are explicitly in the Herodotean tradition.23 To a large extent, the text's humour lies in its mock-innocent play with Herodotean patterns of narrative in what has been called a 'comic homage'.24 Yet the espousal of 19 20

21

22

23

24

O n H e r o d o t u s a n d the Other, see especially H a r t o g (1988) a n d G o u l d (1989) 8 6 - 1 0 9 . O n Atticism, see Swain (1996) 1 7 - 6 4 with bibliography. F o r the Atticism of Lucian, see ibid. 4 5 - 9 a n d Bompaire (1994). F o r Lucian o n Atticism, see e.g. Lexiphanes 25, Rhetorum praeceptor 16-17, Iudicium vocalium passim. O n the Ionic revival in the R o m a n Empire, see Allinson (1886). F o r Ionic pastiche in Lucian, see Swain (1996) 305, n. 32. See o n priests as sources e.g. H e r o d o t u s II.3.1 a n d I I . 5 4 . 1 - 5 5 . 1 , a n d o n autopsy e.g. H e r o d o t u s 11.29.1, 11.99.1; II. 148.5. O n H e r o d o t u s ' sources, see esp. Fehling (1989) a n d (1994); o n autopsy, see A r m a y o r (1985) a n d Marincola (1987). F o r H e r o d o t e a n influence o n the DDS, see m o s t recently Said (1994), a n d M a c L e o d (1994) 1394 with extensive bibliography. O n the text's relations with H e r o d o t u s , see G . Anderson (1976a) 7 2 - 8 ; R o b e r t s o n (1979) 2 2 - 5 , 4 9 - 5 0 ; Hall (1981) 3 7 4 - 8 1 ; C. P. Jones (1986) 4 1 - 3 ; Bracht B r a n h a m (1989) 1 5 8 - 9 (whence the quote).

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Herodotus was by no means a neutral act - in the Second Sophistic itself, the Herodotean style had been attacked for the 'false speech and malice that are disguised by a smooth and soft appearance'.25 To affirm a literary ancestry in Herodotus was in this period to profess at the very least an ambiguous, if not down-right controversial, genre for a book. While the circumstances of the text - an Assyrian pilgrim (an insider) writing for Greeks (outsiders) about Syria (where his identity lies) - imply one set of problematics, its genre (as Herodotean ethnography) implies another. For - whatever the identity of the narrator - the discourse provided by his Greek model is inevitably the Hellenocentric labelling of the Other as weird and foreign through the wonder tales of the naive or fauxnaive traveller. Effectively, the DDS offers us the potential for a double persona: the home culture our author writes for is Greek, but the home culture he writes from is Syrian. He writes about Syria as if he were an insider - addressing his Greek-speaking audience as if they were outsiders; but he writes in Greek as an insider to the culture of his audience, presenting them with what is in many aspects a typical ('Herodotean') ethnography of the foreign and the marvellous. In both cultures he has an identity at stake, yet to both cultures he may seem an outsider. This already complex nexus of identity within the text is further complicated by the potential - ever present but never overly so - of the text's being satirical. We can never be quite sure when it puts 'Syria' or 'Greece' under the humorous (and deliberately distorting) light of irony; we can never be certain whether the authorial voice is reliably direct or whether it is poking fun. My aim in what follows is not to assess the veracity of the DDS or its value in reconstructing what was the genuine cult at Hierapolis.26 Rather, it will be to examine the text of the DDS as an act of cultural translation in which the confrontations of its three worlds - Syria (its religious core), Greece (its linguistic discourse) and Rome (its political frame) - combine in creative conflict to produce cultural identity. 25

26

See Plutarch's essay, De malignitate Herodoti, written at the end of the first century C E . I quote from 874B, translated by A . J. Bowen (adapted). See also (from the mid-second century) Aelius Aristides, 'the Egyptian Discourse', Or 36. 4 1 - 6 3 , esp. 46: ' A l t h o u g h H e r o d o t u s has said the most glorious a n d fairest things a b o u t Egypt a n d the Nile, he is likely t o have told the t r u t h a b o u t few of t h e m . . . ' O n antiquity's d o u b t s a b o u t the credibility of H e r o d o t u s , see H a r t o g (1988) 2 9 7 - 3 0 0 . Lucian himself condemns Herodotus as a purveyor of tall stories in Verae Historiae 2.31 a n d Philopseudes 2. See also Goldhill below p . 1 6 4 - 5 . F o r this project, see e.g. Seyrig (1960); O d e n (1977); H o r i g (1979) a n d (1984); Baslez (1994); Dirven (1997) 159-70. F o r a h a n d y survey of the material a n d visual evidence, see Drijvers (1980) 7 6 - 1 2 1 a n d (1986) 355.

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The text The DDS opens with a direct statement of its main theme, the description of Hierapolis, the holy city of the Assyrian Hera (KaAeETcci 5e elpr| KOCI ECTTIV ipf| T^S "Hpris Tfis Aaovpiris, 1). Like the near contemporary Description of Greece by Pausanias, the DDS is a travel book with a strong bias towards religion, 27 in particular the description of rituals, 28 myths 29 and sacred art. 30 These interests are explicitly proclaimed in the first chapter where the author writes: Concerning this city I am going to describe whatever is in it. I will tell of the customs which they observe in connection with the rites, the festivals which they hold and the sacrifices which they perform. I will also relate whatever stories they tell about those who founded the sanctuary and about how the temple came into being. 7rspi TCCUTris cov TTJS TTOAIOS spxoiiai IpEcov OKOcra kv auTfj EOTIV speco 8E KOCI TOTCTIV is TOC i p a xpeovTai, * a i Travriyupias TOCS ayoucri Kai Oucjias TCCS 6TTIT6A6OU(TIV. speco 5e OKoaa Kai Trepi TCOV T O ipov ei
1)

The focus is thus explicitly on 'whatever is in the city' (i.e. material culture), the 'customs' (VOIJIOI), 'rites' (ipa, Travriyupicxi, Oucrica) and 'myths' (OKOCTCC jiuOoAoyeoucri). In addition to its clearly Herodotean heritage, the DDS shares many features in common with ancient Greek pilgrimage narratives, 31 especially as exemplified by Pausanias. 32 Quite apart from its systematically religious emphasis (even more so than in Pausanias), its focus on images in the sanctuary (31-40), its interest in taboos and ritual niceties (6, 31, 54, 5 5-60), 33 and its detailing of mythical charters for ritual practice or natural phenomena (e.g. at 6, 7, 8, 13-15), 34 the text's 27 28 29 30 31 32

33 34

O n Pausanias' religious bias see H a b i c h t (1985) 1 5 1 - 9 . See further Eisner (1996). O n m y t h in G r e c o - R o m a n culture, see Veyne (1988) 9 5 - 1 0 2 specifically o n Pausanias. O n the religiousness of P a u s a n i a s ' images in the main, see Arafat (1996) 76. O n ancient pilgrimage with special reference t o Apollonius of T y a n a , see Eisner (1997a). T h a t is, if o n e accepts t h e characterization of Pausanias as a pilgrim. See Eisner (1992) esp. 2 0 - 7 . This view h a s been accepted by some - e.g. H o r n b l o w e r (1994) 5 1 , n. 130; Woolf (1994) 125; Alcock (1996) 247. It h a s been rejected (on different b u t equally Christianizing grounds) by Swain (1996) 342 n. 50 (who thinks t h a t belief is a precondition for pilgrimage) a n d Arafat (1996) 1 0 - 1 1 a n d n. 22 (who believes t h a t being interested in anything other t h a n religion disqualifies a pilgrim from being a pilgrim): in m y view, b o t h these objections arise from drastic simplifications of t h e problematic a n d p h e n o m e n o n of pilgrimage. F o r a brief comparison of Pausanias a n d DDS, see Eisner (1997b) 191-6. F o r Pausanias on taboo, see Eisner (1992) 2 1 - 5 . Compare for Pausanias, Eisner (1996) 523.

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relentless use of the first person proclaims the experiential or phenomenological nature of the journey it describes. 35 The importance of Hierapolis is established in a preamble - both an introduction to the 'ancient and great sanctuaries in Syria' (TCCSE [XSV kern TOC hv TTJ Svpir) dpxocioc KOU jjiEydAa ipd, DDS 9) and a swift voyage through them (DDS 4-9) - from which it emerges that: None are greater than the holy city, nor could any other temple be more sacred or any other region more holy. TOCJOUTCOV 6e SOVTCOV £|ioi SOKEEI ou5ev TGOV ev TT\ ipf) TTOAE laeT^ov smjEvcu ouSs vr|6s dyicoTEpos o08e X^P 1 ! dAAr| ipOT6pr|. (DDS 10)

The explicit localism (in focusing on Syria and narrowing down to Hierapolis) that the DDS shares with Pausanias' Greece (which, though described at much greater length, is largely confined to the Roman province of Achaea)36 is inevitably a geographical strategy of self-promotion. The sacred Syria of the DDS is defined against Egypt - supposedly where religion itself as well as sanctuaries and sacred tales were first conceived (DDS 2-3) - and against Greece, whose Heracles is not only different from the Heracles worshipped at Tyre, but is also younger (DDS 3). The Syrian temples of this prefatory pilgrimage, whose ultimate goal will be Hierapolis, are not only sanctuaries in the greatest cities of the Levant - Tyre, Sidon, Byblos - but also a series of direct counterpoints to the myths, rituals or iconography of Greece and Egypt. For instance, the great Phoenician temple at Sidon 'belongs to Astarte' whom some including the author - think is Selene, or to Europa (4).37 The moment the text attempts to assimilate the indigenous world of the Semitic near East in its classical Herodotean Greek, it foregrounds the difficulties of mapping foreign culture (for example, in the form of the Sidonian goddess) onto the terms, stories and encyclopaedia offered by the Greek language into which the world of Sidon is being translated. Both the author and his sources ('one of the priests' and 'other Phoenicians' who 'do not agree') find the identity of the Sidonian goddess extremely difficult to frame in Greek. This contestation of origin and identities is immediately repeated. While the Astarte/Selene/Europa temple seems to have Greek connec-

35

36 37

On Pausanias' phenomenological enactment of his journey in his writing, see Eisner (1992)11-14. On Pausanias' Greece, see the account of Alcock (1996) esp. 244. F o r the same confusion between Astarte, Europa and Selene at Sidon, this time manifested as a disagreement between textual readings in the manuscripts, see Achilles Tatius 1.1-4, with the discussion of Morales (1996) 1-14.

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tions, 'another sanctuary, not Assyrian but Egyptian, came to Phoenicia from Heliopolis' (5). In Sidon, the competition for the cultural origins of sanctuaries is divided into two temples, one connected with Greece and the other with Egypt (of which our Greek-speaking writer did not see the non-Greek sanctuary, 5). At Byblos, by contrast, it is focused on the contested myths and rituals of a single temple: that of Aphrodite. Here the conflict is not about the identity of the goddess but about the origin and hence associations of the shrine. The rites performed either celebrate Adonis (6) or the Egyptian Osiris (7). 38 These rituals - a sacrifice to Adonis and head-shaving in the manner of 'the Egyptians when Apis dies' (6) point to contradictory origins for the cult - both of which are supported by narratives of miracles (OcouiiccToc, 7-8). Our Assyrian doubts neither marvel (indeed one he has explicitly witnessed, 7) and both are described as 'divine' (Oeiri, 7 and 8). Hierapolis itself is introduced as the culmination of this swift pilgrimage through an ever more miraculous, ever more Other, sacred Levant: Even if they are like this it seems to me that none of them is greater than what is in the Holy City, nor could any other temple be more sacred or any other region more holy. (DDS 10) Hierapolis is supreme in 'expensive artefacts and ancient offerings', in 'marvels and divine images' (10). Moreover the gods are especially manifest to the inhabitants. For the statues among them sweat and move about and give oracles, and a shouting often occurs in the temple when the sanctuary is locked, and many have heard it. (10) This climax of divine activity - both an ultimate Otherness and a profound bedrock of its devotees' identities - is instantly guaranteed by the temple's influence. We are told its treasures come 'from Arabia, Phoenicia, Babylonia and still more from Cappadocia. Offerings are brought by the Cilicians and the Assyrians' (10). Here the Herodotean discourse of wonders and exotic orientalism culminates in a sanctuary that seems supremely non-Greek in its rare marvels and foreign worshippers. The preamble concludes with the virtual impossibility of assimilating or expressing either the nature of the temple or its goddess: When I enquired about the age of the temple and who they considered the goddess to be, I heard many accounts. Some of them were sacred (ipoi), some profane (e|i<()ave6s), some quite fabulous (KdpTcc nu0cb5££s). Some were barbarian and some agree with what the Greeks tell. I will tell them all, but in no way do I accept

them. (DDSU) 38

See further Millar (1993) 276.

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It is as if consensus is not only impossible but unattainable because of the conflicting identities and cultural encyclopaedias of the different discourses - Greek and barbarian, religious (ipof), rationalistic or empirical (kixtyavks) and mythic - which have defined the very self-presentation of the narrator himself from the opening of his account.39 The text's inability to find consensus in relation to the accounts it relates - 'religious', 'profane', 'mythic' - and indeed to distinguish clearly between these kinds of narratives, is a key to its complex portrayal of identity. Standing between Greek and barbarian (in the wonderfully chosen ambivalent space of the Ionic dialect - a Greek dialect specifically associated with Asia Minor and thus with eastern influence, as well as with Herodotus), the authorial voice attempts to chart an interpretative journey through multiple discourses without defining precisely which discourse should be dominant: 'I will tell them all', he says, 'but in no way do I accept them all.' It is a brilliant stroke that the strategy of writing simultaneously parodies Herodotus' attempts to tell foreign tales while judging their truthfulness and at the same time demonstrates the multiple and sometimes apparently exclusive strands of identity-formation within a multicultural and multilinguistic context. But it is also the case that the T who announces this, who proclaims Assyrian nationality at the opening and the leaving of his name (TO ouvoiJia - the text's very last word, 60) in the sanctuary at the end, never comes clean. The author neither names himself in the text,40 nor affirms in which context which aspect of his multifarious and shifting identity is to be dominant. Just as we never certainly know whether a given narrative is 'religious', 'profane' or 'mythic', so we never know whether the author's more Assyrian or Hellenic voice will speak; and so, equally, we never know, in any particular instance or within the text as a whole, if the authorial voice is straightforwardly believable or subtly satiric. The instabilities and ambivalences of the preamble (1-11), themselves all implicit in the initial claim to be an Assyrian while writing in Greek, are unpacked at greater length and detail through the text's focus on its prime theme, the sanctuary at Hierapolis. The culture of the DDS (its language, concepts, terms) affirms a Greek identity, comprising a repeated strategy of connections and parallels with all kinds of Greek lore as well as an orientalist discourse in relation to the Other. But the text's heart 39

40

The finest account of such competing discourses and their different purchases on truth in the ancient Greek world is Veyne (1988). On similar issues, but more directly in relation to religion at Rome, see now Feeney (1998). As Lucian does elsewhere, for instance in Alexander 55, in a text which sees him condemn many of the same kinds of popular religious phenomena (e.g. Alex. 15-18) which are reported with apparent piety and without blame in the DDS.

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its sacred identity in relation to the matters of religion which are its prime subject matter - belongs to a religious Assyria over which 'Greece' has very little purchase. This incorporation within a single text - indeed within a single authorial subjectivity - of multiple, logically exclusive and yet mutually constitutive identities is one final and intriguing parallel with the narrative of Pausanias. 41 One of the most interesting aspects of the text is that the shift in weight between these two conflicting identities is progressive so that the text begins on a much more Hellenocentric note than the one on which it ends. Hellenizing the Other The Hellenocentric side of the text's discourse is evident on several fronts. First, there is the authorial voice - its adoption of post-Herodotean ethnography, scepticism and empirical observation. This works particularly through the author's judgements about which stories to believe. Second there is the attempt to translate a very un-Greek set of cults and objects (a phenomenal world which is clearly Syrian) into terms comprehensible within Hellenic culture. I shall explore each of these strategies separately, before turning to the text's more religious affirmation of, indeed identity with, Syria. Authorial judgement and myths of origin The account of the sanctuary proper begins at 12 with its myths of foundation. Our author offers four, all apparently indigenous to the temple and its devotees (though who can tell the extent of their fabrication by local guides precisely as tales to satisfy foreign visitors?) and all mutually exclusive. In each case, the myth presents us with a different myth-historical figure as founder, and in the last three cases with a different deity as the true (i.e. Greek) identity of the temple's prime goddess. Hierapolis thus represents a culmination of the theme of identity as presented at Sidon (where the writer's informants could not agree on the identity of the goddess worshipped) and Byblos (where they could not agree on the identity of the founder): here they can agree on neither. While all the stories are presented as arising in the holy city, they nonetheless represent Syrian attempts to translate the cult of Hierapolis into terms accessible to Greeks. As such they will allow the Greek persona of our narrator grandly to judge between them as to what seems most On Pausanias' contestant, logically exclusive, yet mutually constitutive, signals of identity, see Eisner (1992) esp. 25-7.

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plausible. In each case the 'proof for the correctness of the myth depends upon a long established ritual tradition and/or a set of sacred objects preserved in the sanctuary. In other words, the myths of origins are generated by ritual tradition or material culture specific and local to the sanctuary,42 but (in every case) translated into terms which are meaningful to the narrator and his Greek audience because they form components of the Greco-Roman mythical encyclopaedia.43 What is interesting, in an author who claims to be Assyrian, is the constant emphasis on a Greek touchstone to verity as his means of deciding which story is false, which plausible and which true. Ultimately the story which is most in accordance with what the Greeks say (16) is the one the narrator supports. Even an Assyrian worshipper at Hierapolis is forced to become 'Greek' when writing under the constraints of Herodotean ethnography. The majority view, according to our writer, is that Deucalion founded the sanctuary. The story of Deucalion and the flood follows immediately, but is explicitly presented as an account borrowed from the Greeks (12).44 The 'Greek' myth is then given a specific local tinge: the flood water drained from the earth at a chasm on the site of Hierapolis over which Deucalion built the temple (13). Our narrator has seen this chasm and remarks on how small it is - though he cannot be sure if it has shrunk since remote antiquity. Implicitly, one takes it that he cannot quite bring himself to believe that all the flood water could have drained away from this one hole. This myth is supported by the description of a twice yearly festival in which sea water is brought to the temple and poured into the chasm in commemoration of the flood (13). This ritual is the work not only of the priests but also of 'the whole of Syria and Arabia' and of people 'from beyond the Euphrates' (13). After relating what he terms the 'traditional account' (dpxouos Aoyos) given by the locals, the narrator makes no comment on its value but simply bypasses it (having cast some implicit empirical doubts on its validity). Instead, we learn that: Others think that Semiramis the Babylonian, whose deeds in Asia are many, also founded this site and that she founded it not for Hera, but for her own mother, whose name was Derketo. (DDS 14) The reasons given for this set of attributions depend on the cultic taboos practised at Hierapolis (not eating fish, which are sacred; eating all birds 42 43 44

For parallels with Herodotus and Pausanias, see Eisner (1994). For a subtle account of the ramifications of myth in the Greco-Roman encyclopaedia, see Veyne (1998). Note though that this account differs considerably from our main Greek source, Apollodorus 1.7.2 (with J. G. Frazer's notes in his Loeb edition ad loc, 53-6).

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except the dove, which is also sacred, DDS 14) and their interpretations (Derketo had the form of a fish and Semiramis ultimately became a dove). The narrator is willing to tolerate the possible attribution of the foundation to Semiramis (who features later at DDS 33 and 39) but cannot accept Derketo on the interesting ethnographic grounds that he knows of Egyptians whose abstention from fish is not in honour of Derketo. His empirical relativism - effectively the superior knowledge of the (Herodotean) Hellenizing outsider - is the basis for his rejection of this story. The third 'sacred account, which I heard from a wise man' (15) is that the goddess is Rhea (i.e. the Greek version of the Great Mother, or Cybele) and that the sanctuary was created by Attis. 45 The basis for this is that the image of the Syrian Goddess is similar to Rhea ('lions carry her, she holds a tympanum and wears a tower on her head, just as the Lydians depict Rhea', 15) and that the galli, or eunuch priests, who form a key feature of the cult at Hierapolis (see DDS 26-7, 50-2), never castrate themselves in honour of Hera, but do so for Rhea in imitation of Attis. The joumeyings of Attis after his castration are said to have brought him to Hierapolis where he founded the temple. Our author finds the myth plausible (a/npe-irea, 15) - not only because of iconographic and ritual resemblances with the cult of Cybele, but also perhaps because the Greek version of the Great Mother, Rhea, as the mythological mother of Hera, makes a plausible candidate for the confusion or conflict between the two goddesses (though purely in the terms of Greek mythological Wissenschaft). Nonetheless, he rejects this account as 'untrue' since he has heard 'another reason for the castration which is much more believable' (15) presumably the long myth of Stratonice and Combabus given at DDS 1727. By now, the narrative's slow establishment of its writer as an authoritative interpreter with wide experience (of Greeks, Syrians, Egyptians) guarantees his superior knowledge in judging between accounts of equal plausibility. But, of course, that guarantee of authority comes at the price of a careful reflection of Herodotean practice - a kind of appreciative mockery which serves simultaneously to undermine the author's claim to ethnographic superiority. The final myth of origins - the one which the narrator likes best since its supporters agree 'in most respects with the Greeks' (16) - considers 'the goddess to be Hera and the construction to be a creation of Dionysus, son of Semele'. The mythic travels of Dionysus make a visit to Syria possible, the presence of ancient foreign offerings (exotic clothes, Indian gems and elephants' tusks) make his association with the temple plausible, and an inscription clinches the correctness of the attribution. At the gate of the 45

On the cult of the Great Mother, see briefly Turcan (1996) 28-74, with bibliography.

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site (compare DDS 28) stand two large phalli, on one of which is the inscription These phalli I, Dionysus, dedicated to Hera, my stepmother' (16). As the author affirms, 'as far as I am concerned, this is sufficient proof (16). The Dionysiac conclusion is supported by an ithyphallic dedication inside the sanctuary whose iconography resembles the phalli erected by Greeks (presumably in Greece) to honour Dionysus (16). Interestingly, this is the only interpretation for which no ritual or cultic support indigenous to the site is given. We are not told if the inscription was in Greek or in Syriac, and - if the latter - whether it was construed by our writer himself or interpreted for him. Effectively, what wins in the battle for mythic authenticity is the combination of Hellenic myth, Greek iconography and the power of the inscribed word.46 The four accounts move from the majority version, traditional to the temple, to one which is most strongly Greek in flavour. While the author never explicitly rejects the first, his treatment of the four myths shows a hierarchy of plausibility with the last one presented as true. The authorial voice throughout this passage is at its most 'Orientalist' - assuring the temple's meaning within a Hellenizing frame, and arrogantly dismissing Syrian interpretations if they are not in accordance with the hegemony of Greek ethnographic discourse. It is true that the result of this is to frame Hierapolis not as itself but as a translation accessible to and meaningful within Greek discourse; yet it is also true that this framing opens the possibility for a dialogue between 'Greece' and 'Syria' - between the two identities the narrator affirms - in which (however falsely represented) 'Syria' has the chance to 'speak to' 'Greece'. Naming the Other: transcribing Hierapolis into Greek In the temple's inner chamber (entry into which is highly restricted, but whose contents were apparently visible to those outside) stand statues of its two gods (31): One is Hera and the other is Zeus whom, however, they call by another name. Both are of gold and both are seated, but lions support Hera, while the god sits on bulls. The statue of Zeus looks like Zeus in every respect: his head, clothes, throne. Nor will you, even if you want to, liken him to anyone else. As one looks at Hera, however, she presents many different forms. On the whole she is certainly Hera, but she also has something of Athena, Aphrodite, Selene, Rhea, Artemis, Nemesis and the Fates ... 46

It is worth noting that the traveller's strategy of quoting (explicitly Greek) inscriptions and noting marvels associated with Dionysus is specifically satirized in Lucian's Verae Historiae 7. In part the target there is Herodotus 4.82 (where a footprint of Heracles is described).

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ev 5e Tcp6s EICCTOCI TOC e5ecc, f| TE "Hpr| Kai TOV CCUTOI Aia EOVTCC ETEpco ouvoiacrn KATJI^OUCTIV. a|ic()co 5e xp^crsoi TE eicii Kai ajj<|>Go ££ovTar aXha. TT\V [\kv "Hpr|v AEOVTES 4>EpouCTiv, 6 5E Taupoiaiv E^E^ETCCI. Kai SfJTa TO JJIEV TOU AIOS 6cyaA|ia ES Aia TrdvTa opf) Kai K£<|>aAr)v Kai Ei|jaTa Kai E6pr|v, Kai |aiv OU5E E0EACOV aAAcos EiKacrEis. f) 8E "Hpr| CTKOTTEOVTI <joi TTOAUEISEOC |aopf)v EK^CCVEEI- EXEI 6E TI KCCI 'A0r|vair|S Kai 'A(t>po8iTr|s

Kai ZEArivairis Kai TETIS Kai JApTE|ii5os Kai NE^CTIOS Kai MoipEcov. (DDS 3 1 - 2 )

Here the text's problematic of cultural translation - already apparent in the non-Greek Heracles at Tyre (3) and the Sidonian goddess who may have been Astarte, Selene or Europa (4) - reaches its climax. The framing discourse of Hellenic ethnography has made possible a space for the representation of Syria; but how is Syria to feature? how can Syria speak in a foreign Greek tongue? The key problem facing the cultural translator is itself articulated in the description of Zeus: 'you would not liken him to anyone else'. Yet in asking 'what is he like (EIKOCCTEIS)?', the text risks depriving him of being what he is. Hence, the Zeus of Hierapolis is presented as obviously being like Zeus in every respect, but the narrator chooses to report that he possesses another local name (which we are not told). The Hera, whose native name is carefully suppressed, turns out both to have one clear identity (out of a number of contrasting candidates, as at Sidon) and to be a conflation of several of the most important figures in the Greco-Roman canon. 47 We have already seen that she looks just like Rhea (15), and here the alternative identification of the goddess with Derketo (suggested and dismissed at 14) is ignored. 48 Clearly, the categories available in Greek mythology and the Greek language are simply insufficient to accommodate the sacred identity of an entirely different cultural world. 'Hera' is described at some length (32) with an emphasis on her attributes (sceptre, spindle, crown of rays and a tower 'with which they only adorn celestial Aphrodite') 49 and on the range of 'very costly gems' adorning her surface. While the goddess' identity encapsulates that of so many deities in the Greek pantheon, her offerings extend her power outside the Hellenic world: 47

48

49

On the identifications of the DDS's 'Zeus' and 'Hera' with the Syrian Hadad and Atargatis respectively, see Oden (1977) 47-107 (summarizing and extending a century of scholarship). Apparently the ancient identification of Atargatis and Derketo was in fact correct. See Oden (1977) 69-73. Chris Faraone points out to me that the translations of Attridge and Oden, (1976) 42 and Strong and Garstang (1913) 71 both mistranslate this passage (section 32) by giving xecrTOS as 'girdle' (following LSJ and TLG). However, Cyranides 1.10.49-69 (probably first or second century CE) explains the KEOTOS as some kind of 'strap which is painted or moulded around Aphrodite's head like a diadem'. See further on Cyranides, Fowden (1986) 87-8 and n. 57, and - on this passage - Waegeman (1987) 195-215, esp. 200.

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There are also many sardonyxes and sapphires and emeralds, which the Egyptians, Indians, Ethiopians, Medes, Armenians and Babylonians bring. (DDS 32) At the culmination of this account of a Panhellenic and panbarbarian identity is the supernatural power of the great ruby on the goddess' head and of her gaze: A great light shines from this ruby by night, and the whole temple is illumined by it as if by lamps ... There is another wondrous feature in the statue. If you stand opposite and look directly at it, it looks back at you and as you move its glance follows. If someone else looks at it from another side, it does the same things for him. (DDS 32) While the being and the accoutrements of the goddess express a power and inclusivity far beyond the parochial confines of Hierapolis, and even of Syria, the sacred gaze performs the miracle of encompassing the identities of more than one worshipper at once. This goddess can hold and follow the gazes of as many devotees as look at her. She herself generates the light by which she may be seen. Again, even as the narrator names her 'Hera' he struggles to transcend the limitations of this definition by extending her into a conflation with the other Greek gods, beyond Greece to the peoples of the East and even supernaturally to a direct confrontation with viewers' identities. Between the two statues stands another golden image, not at all like the other statues. It does not have its own particular character, but it bears the qualities of the other gods. It is called 'Sign' by the Assyrians themselves, and they have not given it any particular name, nor do they speak of its origin or form. ev liECTco 8s &ii(()OT6pcov eorr|Ke £6ccvov ocAAo xp^creov o u 5 a | i d TOICTIV OCAAOKJI §6avoi<7iv IKEAOV. T O 5e l a o p ^ v |jiev i5ir|v OUK S^BI, <|>opEEi 5e TCOV dAAcov OECOV eTSea. KCCAEETCCI 5 E OT||jiriiov Koci UTT' auTcov VWcTUpiGov, OU8E T I ouvoiaa TSiov OCUTCO EOEVTO, &AA J OU5E a u T o O Kai EI5EOS AEyouai. (DDS 3 3 )

This last image in the inner chamber is more complex still. 50 It has no form (|iopct>T)) of its own and yet - despite or perhaps because of this - it bears the qualities (ei5ecc) of the other gods. It is the only image whose indigenous name is given. Zeus is not Zeus, but we are not told what he is; Hera is Aphrodite, Athena, Selene, Rhea, Artemis, Nemesis, the Fates as well as Hera, but we are not told what her name is in Syrian; the 'Sign' is called the 'Sign' by the Assyrians, we are told (in Greek!). One way the 'Sign' encapsulates the qualities of the other gods is that - despite the fact that they do not speak of its origins - its dedication is attributed to three 50

The Semeion has proved deeply controversial. See Oden (1977) 109-55 for a review of the arguments, and - for the idea that is might be a Roman military standard (also semeion in Greek), see Millar (1993) 247; Mettinger (1995) 110; and Swain (1996) 306.

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of the four potential founders of the temple listed earlier, Dionysus, Deucalion and Semiramis (33). More significantly, it has been suggested that the 'Sign' is an aniconic representation of the main deity of the city - that is, of the Syrian Goddess herself, who is depicted in anthropomorphic form in the same sanctuary. 51 Even if the 'Sign' were not the same deity as the goddess, the congruence within the temple of different regimes for representing the sacred is a potent act of cultural juxtaposition. The widespread 'eastern' aniconism of the Levant and Syria is placed side by side in the same adyton with more typically Greco-Roman anthropomorphism. But if the 'Sign' is in fact on some level identical with the goddess, or a symbol for her (an object without 'its own particular character' but 'bearing the qualities of the other gods', as the Greek text attempts to explain), then the effects of cultural translation on the visual level are all the more powerful. On the one hand, the text finds it impossible to come up with a Greek language adequate to describe the 'Sign's' sacred and non-Hellenic aniconism. On the other, the sanctuary only finds it possible to encompass the sanctity of its god by showing her more than once according to different (Greek and near eastern) strategies of sacred representation. At the very least, the deity is greater than any of her statues! Outside the inner chamber is an oracular statue of Apollo whose miraculous powers have been taken as a satirical expose of eastern religion, even by those who most assiduously defend the text's historical value.52 However, even before his unusual behaviour, this Apollo is odd in appearance: All others think of Apollo as young and show him in the prime of youth. Only these people display a statue of a bearded Apollo. In acting in this way they commend themselves and accuse the Greeks and anyone else who worships Apollo as a youth. They reason like this. They think it utter stupidity (aao
Here, despite appearances, there is no doubt that this Apollo is identical with the real Apollo, also worshipped by the Greeks. But this is a better version than the Greek - not only a more mature one, but one who is not 'imperfect' (CCTEAES). The resonances of CKTEAES go beyond simply lack of perfection: the root verb TEAECO is a key term in Greek for the performance of ritual action from sacrifice to mystic initiations to magic. By implica51

52

See Mettinger (1995) 109-10 within a wide ranging synthesis of aniconism in the Phoenician-Punic world, and 81-115 in the context of near eastern aniconism in general, and Oden (1977) 149. See Oden (1977) 157.

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tion, the Greek Apollo is less sacred, less religiously accomplished, than the Syrian. For the first time, a text - which has (in part for reasons of its own Herodotean genre) constantly subjected Syria to Greek framing and an implicit critique by Greek discourse - turns on the Greeks and reports the East's critique of them. The proof of this Apollo's greater perfection lies in his unique power (and implicitly in the accusation that the Greeks have committed 'great unwisdom', cccro(|>ir| lieydAri, in their own representations and hence understanding of Apollo). 53 That power is demonstrated by a series of miraculous acts (epyoc and 0cou|jiaTa, 36) which the narrator has himself witnessed. His oracle surpasses those of the Greeks, Egyptians, Libyans and Asians because it speaks without the mediation of priests or prophets (36). Moreover: I will tell something else which he did while I was present. The priests were lifting him up and beginning to carry him, but he left them below on the ground and went off alone into the air. (DDS 37) The very Herodotean voice of autopsy abandons the discourse of Hellenic scepticism to affirm by its own witness the marvels of Syria which surpass those of the Greeks. The gods of the inner chamber strove with difficulty to accommodate themselves to the Greek language, yet shone with a universalism that was explicitly applicable not only beyond Syria and Greece, but even beyond the confines of the Roman Empire into the East. But Apollo challenges Greece directly - not just the Greek god whom his lack of imperfection surpasses, and the Greek oracles which his springing and leaping divinity (36) outshines - but also the categories of Greek representation (imagery, iconography, interpretative language on the part of the priests). With his paean to Apollo, our pilgrim-author suddenly hits a new stride. The struggle to translate Syria into Greek gives way to a celebration of Syria in its sacred and miraculous glory. At the same time, in its very celebration of a Syria which surpasses Greece, the text offers the Greek reader a non-Greek view of the Greek Apollo (who is OCTEAES - 'imperfect'). Elsewhere, for instance in the Anacharsis, Lucian exploits precisely this strategy of letting the 'Other' speak and misunderstand Greece for satiric effect. There Anacharsis, the legendary Scythian who came to Greece in search of wisdom and befriended Solon, watches and misunderstands the Greek practice of athletics (1-5). 53

For power as proof of an image's authenticity in antiquity, see further Eisner (1996) 52331, esp. 529 on this Apollo. For further ancient discussion of the Hierapolitan Apollo, see Macrobius, Saturnalia 1.17.66-70.

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The joke works to make the Greek reader both laugh at a foreigner's misconstrual and simultaneously at the eccentricity of familiar Greek customs when observed with such empirical accuracy through naive foreign eyes.54 The more the Hierapolitan Apollo's deeds render the oracular statue miraculous, the more foreign and potentially phoney (in Greek eyes) seem the doings of those who deem the Greek Apollo imperfect. We will never know if the criticism of Greek practice here is not also launched with half a laugh at the expense of Syria. Affirming Self through affirming the Other: pilgrimage to Hierapolis

Apollo's entry into the text marks the point where descriptive ethnography (the Herodotean style of affirming Self through contrast with, even implicit criticism of the Other) gives way to pilgrimage (which in this case interestingly affirms Self through celebrating the triumphant alterity of the Other). As we leave the temple's interior, the sanctuary is full of 'myriads of bronze statues' (39), of 'bulls, horses, eagles, bears and lions' who 'do not harm men but are all tame and sacred' (41), of three hundred whiterobed priests (42) as well as all kinds of holy people (male, female, castrate, all 'frenzied and deranged' (43)). We can either dismiss all this as satiric excess, the mad rituals of the crazy East, or we can follow the narrator's own hints - he makes not a single dismissive, sceptical or judgemental comment from now onwards - and witness through his eyes the marvels of his own pilgrimage's goal. The statues adorning the courtyard - Atlas, Hermes, Eileithyia (38), Helen, Hecabe, Andromache, Paris, Hector and Achilles, as well as Nereus, Procne, Philomela and Tereus, Stratonice, Alexander and Sardanapallus (40) - appear as Greece's own prized pilgrims to Hierapolis, while the statue of Semiramis (39) commemorates her eastern piety and devotion to Hera. The final section of the text (44-60) effectively gives a pilgrim's picture of the sacred action of the shrine - local traditions of sacrifice (44, 54, 578), specific rituals performed by groups and individuals (46, 48-9, 51-5, 57-8, 60), specially sacred spots (45-6), and festivals (47-51). The narrator is explicit about which rites he has not witnessed and reports from hearsay (48) and hence (implicitly) about those in which he was among the devotees (49, 50-3, 55-9, explicitly at 60). He shows a very precise interest in ritual detail, just like Pausanias. For example, the daily sacri54

On the Anacharsis, see Branham (1989) 82-104; the introduction to Bernardini (1995); and Simon Goldhill's comments in the introduction to this volume. Generally on Anacharis as traveller, see Hartog (1996) 118-27, 161-2. I am grateful to my former student Zahra Newby for discussion of Lucian's text in relation to Second Sophistic athletics.

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fice to Zeus is performed in silence, while that to Hera is accompanied by singing, flutes and rattles (44); they sacrifice bulls and cows, sheep and goats, but not swine (which are either sacred or polluted, depending on the informant, 54); they believe doves to be holy, and so a dove cannot even be touched (54). Most detailed of all is the account of ritual preparations for the pilgrimage to Hierapolis: Whenever somone is about to come to the Holy City, he shaves his head and his eyebrows. Then after sacrificing a sheep, he carves it and dines on the other parts. The fleece, however, he lays on the ground and kneels upon it, and the feet and head of the animal he puts on his own head. When he prays he asks that the present sacrifice be accepted and promises a larger one for the next time. After finishing these activities, he puts a garland on his own head and that of everyone making the same pilgrimage. Then he sets out from his own country and makes the journey, using cold water both for bathing as well as drinking, and he sleeps on the ground, for it is a sacrilege for him to touch a bed before he completes the journey and returns to his own country.55 (DDS 55) This entire portion of the text is an excellent portrait of a sacred centre in full action. Like the 'brancardiers' at Lourdes whom the shrine employs as lay-guides for pilgrims, 56 the holy city employs specified hosts (£EIVO56KOI), whom the Assyrians call instructors (KccAEovTca 6s OTTO Aaovpicov oi'Ss 5i5dcrKaAoi) and whose role is inherited within specific families, both to receive pilgrims and to explain everything to them (56). As is frequent in pilgrimage centres, the sacred activity is both general (involving large groups, e.g. 44, 49) and individual (involving personal offerings and dedications, e.g. 46, 48, 55, 57) as well as occasionally reserved for specified groups (like the galli, 50-2). 57 While this section of the narrative may read ever more like an orientalizing of the weird and the non-Greek, it builds up to a climax in the last two chapters where the narrator finally comes out and nails his own colours to the mast of Assyrian identity. At 59, we are told: All [pilgrims] are marked (crri£ovTai), some on their wrists, some on their necks. For this reason all Assyrians carry a mark (CTTiy^cnrr|(|>opEou(7i). This mark - perhaps a tattoo - is more than a sacred memento from the temple of the Syrian Goddess; it serves as a mark of identity for all As55

56 57

Compare Pausanias 7.26.7 on Aegeira: 'Into the sanctuary of the goddess they surname Syrian, they enter on stated days, but must submit beforehand to certain customary purifications especially in the matter of diet.' Whether these were similar to those described in the DDS is perhaps less important than the fact that the worship of the Syrian goddess outside Hierapolis also required detailed ritual preliminaries. See Eade (1991). For recent ethnographic accounts focusing on group pilgrimage to Lourdes and to Palestine, see Dahlberg (1991) and Bowman (1991). On individuals charting their own paths at Walsingham, see Coleman and Eisner (1998).

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Syrians. The temple is thus placed at the heart of Assyrian self-definition, not only in sacred terms but inevitably with the ethnic, linguistic and political intimations carried by the notion of 'Assyria' as a meaningful concept within the Roman Empire. At the same time, since our author opened the whole account by stating that he is an Assyrian, he too is marked. It is at Hierapolis that the communal and individual identity of Assyrians - both as themselves and as non-Greeks, non-Romans - can be affirmed. The personal implications of 59 (when taken together with the announcement of Assyrian identity at 1) are made explicit in the final chapter. Hierapolis, we are told, shares a custom practised also by the Greeks, but only at Troezen. Virgin girls offer their hair and young men their first beards before being allowed to marry: The young men make an offering of their beards, while the young women let their sacred locks grow from birth and when they finally come to the temple, they cut them. When they have placed them in containers, some of silver and many of gold, they nail them up to the temple, and they depart after each inscribes his name. When I was still a youth, I, too, performed this ceremony and even now my locks and name are in the sanctuary. (DDS 60)

The further the ethnographic discourse of Ionic observation ventures into deepest Syria, the closer the narrative comes to affirming the author's Syrian self, until in the end - in the very last sentence - it does so. After all the Herodotean scepticism and weighing up of foreign traditions against the Greek, after all the problematics of naming and translating, the text climaxes on a sacred affirmation through pilgrimage to Hierapolis of both its author's Assyrian identity and of the temple as guarantor of all Assyrian identity, for 'all are marked'. Moreover, by explicitly closing on his own role as a pilgrim insider, the author affirms the validity of his autopsy of the details of Hierapolitan pilgrimage; his account of festivals, rituals, pilgrim hosts is all the more persuasive because, he tells us, he has done all that. The irony is that this is an archetypally Herodotean strategy for winning over one's readers! There are no half measures at Hierapolis. In the festival when castration is performed (50-1), if the 'frenzy' (r\ |jiavir|, 51) comes upon someone who 'has simply come to watch', he too (our narrator included, one presumes) may throw off his clothes, rush to the centre with a great shout and take up a sword which, I believe, has stood there for this purpose for many years. He grabs it and immediately castrates himself. Then he rushes through the city holding in his hands the parts he has cut off. He takes female clothing and women's adornment from whatever house he throws these parts into. (DDS 51)

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At the moment of the text's most ecstatic presentation of the non-Greek, it incorporates its author and all those who watch (all those who watch vicariously as they read?) as potential galli. The act of castration is central to the narrative's concern with identity, since it marks not only the most radical rejection of the norms of Greco-Roman identity, but a direct transformation in the worshipper from being a male to losing his manhood, from male dress via running nude through the city to female clothing and women's adornment. Again, the problem of reading this passage lies in whether the author is so committed a pilgrim that whatever he reports (particularly if it is hard for a sceptical reader to swallow) is to be accepted as sincere, or whether he is satirizing the excesses of Syrian religion. The genius of the strategy is that we can never be too sure - we can never safely read the text through the eyes of a Hellenocentric sceptic or an eastern believer. The devastating effect of the Ionic play with Herodotus - father of history and father of lies - is that the text's tone is poised with a breathtaking deftness on the very edge of irony and sincerity. It speaks with both voices at once. Building a sacred identity: the transformation of the subject

I am aware that this reading has so far skirted one, rather lengthy and crucial, section of the text: namely, the great myth of the temple's building and dedication {DDS 17-27). The myth relates that Stratonice, wife of an unnamed king of Assyria, was ordered to build the temple by Hera in a dream.58 After ignoring the dream and suffering serious illness, Stratonice finally vowed to erect the temple and was instantly cured. Her husband sent her with funds and an escort to the holy city to supervise the construction. In charge of the escort was Combabus, an 'exceedingly handsome youth' (19) who was also one of the king's most trusted friends. Combabus resisted the charge as long as possible, but when finally prevailed upon to lead the party, he castrated himself, put his genitals in a 58

The historical Stratonice was the daughter of Demetrius Poliorcetes, the Antigonid king of Macedon, and of Phila (both of whom were children of two of the principal lieutenants of Philip and Alexander - respectively Antigonus the One-Eyed and Antipater). She was married by her father to Seleucus I of Antioch (in the 290s BCE) and passed on by Seleucus to his son, co-regent and designated heir, Antiochus I (hence the romanticized story at DDS 17-18, as well as e.g. Plutarch, Demetrius 38 and Appian, Roman History 11 (The Syrian Wars) 59-61). See Kuhrt and Sherwin-White (1991) 71-86, esp. 83-5, and Grainger, (1997) 67-8 with further ancient sources. The choice of a mythological Stratonice as protagonist for the Combabus myth, recounted at DDS 19-27, brilliantly replays the problems of Greek versus Syrian identity. The temple's origins lie in the deeply un-Greek activities of an archetypally Hellenistic queen (although herself a Macedonian by birth) whose career followed a highly unusual (i.e. 'Eastern') pattern by Greek standards, in that she was passed on from king to crown-prince to ensure a smooth succession.

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box and entrusted his secret ('more precious than gold and worth my life to me', 20) to the king to keep. After three years building the temple in Hierapolis, what Combabus had feared finally came to pass: Stratonice fell madly in love with him and eventually flung herself upon him. Although he initially attempted to resist her, eventually Combabus 'described all his suffering and exposed his deed' (22). In response, 'when Statonice saw what she never expected, she ceased from her frenzy, but in no way did she forget her love' (22). Meanwhile, the king - having heard rumours of his wife's passion - recalled Combabus, and ordered him to be put to death. At this point Combabus revealed the contents of the box in the king's possession, and he was immediately pardoned and restored to royal favour. It is interesting that, by the end of the myth, Combabus rather than Stratonice is regarded as the temple's founder.59 Quite apart from its intrinsic interest, the myth functions as an extended and proleptic commentary on many aspects of the text. It provides an account of the building of the current temple at Hierapolis (17). It offers an aetiology for the galli and for the practice of castration at Hierapolis (more convincing than the attempt to link the temple with Attis, 15, and explicitly responsible for particular features of the galli's lifestyle and behaviour, 22, 26-7). It relates the issue of the transformation of the pilgrim's identity at Hierapolis to a mythological origin as well as to practices which the author observes elsewhere in the text. It interprets the nature of such transformation as a process of suffering (the initial selfcastration as well as the false accusations and the threat of execution Combabus endured). This suffering leads to achievement ('no one of the Assyrians any longer seemed equal to Combabus in wisdom or good fortune', 25). Strikingly, one aspect of Combabus' transformation is that even the most intimate secrets are no longer hidden from him thereafter. In the king's words: 'You will have access to us without any to announce you, nor will anyone bar you from our sight, not even when I am in bed with my wife' (25). Ultimately, worldly success gives way to sacred fulfilment - Combabus not only completes the temple and erects a bronze statue inside it (26) but he becomes the object of great love (from women, 22, 27, as well as from his dearest friends who castrate themselves in 'consolation for his suffering', 26, and from Hera who - in an alternative version - suggests 'the idea of castration to many so that he might not grieve over the loss of his manhood alone', 26). More subtly, the story comments on author, reader and narrative model alike. It has been observed that the myth parodies Herodotean tales of other lands.60 But there is more to it than that. When Combabus 59 60

On the Combabus story and connected narratives, see Benveniste (1939) and Krappe (1956). See Said (1994) 152-3. Further on the Combabus myth, see G. Anderson (1976a) 78-81.

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stands accused before the king (24), the charges (in addition to adultery) are the abuse of trust (es Trioriv OppiaavTcc) and impiety towards the goddess (es OHOV a<7E|3eovTa). These accusations are well motivated in the narrative since they recall the specific injunctions to Combabus laid down by the king when he first sent him to Hierapolis (19) - namely the need for great trust (xpeiw neydAris TTICTTIOS) in the fulfilment of a task specifically defined as sacred and directly accountable to the king himself (spyov TE lioi E-rnTEAscrai KCCI ipa TsAeaai). But both are charges one might lay before the author: abuse of trust, if the voice of apparent sincerity turned out to be satirical; and impiety, if the text's worship of the goddesss and her sanctuary turned out to be played even partially for laughs. Like Combabus, the author has a secret hidden in a box dedicated in a special place for safekeeping. Like Combabus (whose definition as a man the contents of the box will transform), the author's secret determines his identity. In both cases, a word of the same root is used for the box (ayyrjiov, 20; ayygoc, 60) and the secret is a testimony to faithfulness - if Combabus has no genitals he cannot commit 'a man's crime' (25), and if the author's name and locks are dedicated in the temple, then his voice must surely be sincere. But unlike Combabus, who reveals his secret (he 'broke the seal [and] revealed both what was in the box and all that he himself had suffered', 25), the author never opens the container (perhaps made of silver, perhaps of gold, 60) in which his true self lies concealed. In the case of the reader, we face the dilemmas of the king and the queen. She falls in love with Combabus and is shown the absence of what would satisfy her love (22), with the result that 'she was always in his company as a consolation for unfulfilled love'. If Combabus is a figure for the temple which he built and whose galli he inspired, then the queen's plight is like ours: the more we read the text as an account of the sacred world it describes the more it is a 'consolation' for an absence. The true pilgrim would put down the consolatory text and go to the sanctuary. The king, by contrast, was wrong about adultery (though right about his wife's desire to commit the crime), just as we are wrong (and yet perhaps also right) to disbelieve a text which makes careful attempts to stretch our credulity. Unlike the king, who sees both the absence of manhood on Combabus' body and the secret in the box, we are never given proof of the author's sincerity. Like the king's suspicions about adultery, our reading of the text is always hearsay - susceptible to false accusations and a misleading plethora of alternative versions. If, like Combabus, we were to take the trip to Hierapolis (and, in the case of men, undergo the risk of ending up as galli or, in the case of women, of falling inconsolably in love with them, 22, 27), we may achieve the desired spiritual transformation which the king never attains. Specifically, after the events of the myth (but interestingly narrated before it, 17-18), when the king's son falls in love

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with Stratonice (his step-mother), his only cure is to receive the queen whom his father hands over, along with the kingdom. Most intriguing is the word used for Combabus' act of castration: &T£A6CC EcouTov ETTOIEE (20). He made himself imperfect by performing (literally 'perfecting') a 'great deed' upon himself: iJEycc Epyov dTtoTEAEcrai (20). The cause for the act is that he foresaw the result (TEAOS, 20) of the journey as escort to the queen. Here the theme of pilgrimage - both the journey to the holy city (656s, 20) and the ritual process (TEAOS, 20) - is tied, through a series of brilliant puns, to the process of self-mutilation presented as the supreme act of the sanctuary's later pilgrims. The castration is itself parallel to the king's instructions for founding the temple ('to accomplish a deed for me and to perform the rites': Epyov TE JJOI ETTiTEAEaoci Kcci ipa TEAECTOCI, 19) and to Combabus' completion of the building after his trial before the king (26), when he asks for permission to finish (EKTEAECTCCI) the temple, which is described as being in an imperfect state (&T£AEa). The acts of Combabus - both castration and temple building - are linguistically rendered as the perfection of an imperfection (20:

dcTroTsAEaai . . . CCTEAEOC ECOUTOV; 2 6 : EKTEAEO-CCI . . . CCTEAECC . . . TOV vr|6v),

but the former renders him imperfect while the latter finishes (and hence perfects) that which was imperfect. Again, Combabus' passage from making himself imperfect through to perfecting the temple reads like a rite de passage of sacred transformation. Yet, in becoming &T£Ar|s himself, Combabus is not only 'incomplete' but also 'exempt' from fear (that he will be falsely accused) or from evil consequences.61 It is this freedom which marks Combabus as specially sacred (like the galli) throughout the narrative of the myth, as well as making him the archetypal Syrian pilgrim to the sanctuary. Castration is both the worshipper's supreme offering to the goddess and the sanctuary's most splendid gift to the worshipper - for it is an act of emulating not only Combabus' original action (and hence a way of embarking on his rite de passage to perfection) but also of evoking the temple's original foundation. But, by virtue of his dxEAEia, or imperfection, Combabus is aligned to the Greek Apollo whom, we saw above, the Syrians believe to be 'imperfect' (dTEAEa, 35). Again, just as the text might at last be thought to have established a definitional discourse to distinguish 'Syria' and 'Greece' (through different kinds of gods and mythologies), it turns out to confuse them. Is the 'imperfection' of the beardless Greek Apollo meant to imply his castration? In its mythical voice - both the charter for its sacred rites and a playful rendering of the Herodotean discourse of fabulous inventions - the text's key story of castration and temple building combines the archetypes of 61

This double meaning was pointed out by Attridge and Oden (1976) 31.

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Syria and Greece (Combabus and the beardless Apollo) in a joint crreAea. But the parallel dedicatory boxes containing the narrator's (and all Assyrian men's) first beard and Combabus' genitals take the myth's reflection on &TEA6CX one stage further.62 The removal of the beard is a sign of manhood attained, while the loss of Combabus' genitals (in a youth presented as being on the edge of full manhood, ver|vir|v, DDS 19) is a sign of manhood lost. Yet while the offering of Assyrian beards may be seen to represent an appeasement of the hero who sacrificed his manhood, it is the bearded (and hence fully male) Apollo of Hierapolis who is 'perfect' by contrast with his 'youthful' (VEOV TS KCCI Trpcodr|(3r|v, DDS 35) and beardless Greek counterpart. On one reading, the Combabus story seems to imply that full perfection is only gained through castration (or that the achievement of manhood is not the final attainment of the male), but the bearded maleness of the Syrian Apollo seems to imply the opposite. Again, the text's subtle comparisons of models, Greek and Assyrian, reveal an ambivalence about how they should be interpreted. The brief, and at first sight, gratuitous reference to Troezen at the end of the text (DDS 60) raises a final and brilliant reflection on the Combabus myth.63 As was well known in Greek literary culture and religious practice (Euripides, Hipp. 1423-30; Pausanias 2.32.1), the hair-cutting cult at Troezen honoured the hero Hippolytus.64 The Combabus myth given in the DDS is a strikingly precise but different 'Syrian' version of the Hippolytus story told by Euripides, as the text implies by referring directly to Phaedra and Hippolytus at DDS 23. 65 Both heroes are pure and chaste, both are objects of seduction by an adulterous queen. But in the case of Combabus, the castrate who loves and honours Stratonice (DDS 22), the queen never repudiates the lover who fails to satisfy her and ultimately there is honour and salvation for all concerned. Hippolytus, on the other hand, repulses Phaedra - only to be himself falsely accused and subject to a terrible curse. Combabus loses only his genitals; Hippolytus is torn to pieces. This Assyrian version of the Hippolytus drama is extended in the narrative given before the Combabus myth (DDS 17-18) by the parallel of Stratonice and Phaedra (drawn explicitly at DDS 23). Both stepmothers become amorously involved with their husband's son. But while Phaedra falls for her stepson Hippolytus with disastrous results, in the DDS it is the stepson who falls in love with Stratonice. Unlike Phae62 63

64 65

I owe the following reflections to some acute comments m a d e by Bruce Lincoln. I owe m u c h of this p a r a g r a p h to the excellent observations of D a v i d D o d d . O n the general parallelism of gallus myths (such as that of Attis) to the m y t h of Hippolytus (but without discussion of C o m b a b u s ) , see F a u t h (1959). O n the cult at Troezen, see Barrett (1964) 7 - 1 0 , 3 2 - 3 ; Burkert (1979) 111-18. O n the ways the Hellenistic tradition rewrote the Hippolytus myth, with special reference to the DDS, see M e s k (1913) esp. 3 7 5 - 9 on the DDS a n d 3 8 6 - 9 4 on Euripides.

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dra (who rejects the stepson who rejected her and dies as he does), Stratonice is given by her husband, the Assyrian king, to his son, along with the kingdom. Twice, what one might call the Syrian sacrificial theme (of a loss to gain a greater gain: the loss of Combabus' genitals and the loss of the king's wife and kingdom) is made to change the mythical structure of the parallel Greek narrative. The play with the Hippolytus myth not only grounds the text's deeper learning in the classics of Greek culture, appealing to the (Greek) reader's sophisticated education, but it also works simultaneously to affirm Syria's different (better?) way of handling such mythical problems. It is as if a paradigm of Syrian sacrifice is being made to cap the heroics of Greek tragedy. Conclusions I have argued that the de dea Syria, after foregrounding the difficulties of cultural identity in its opening chapter, presents a remarkable and sustained exploration of the theme. From the relatively stronger Herodotean ethnography of its opening to the passionate assertion of Syrian religious identity at its close, the text charts a path between 'Syria' and 'Greece' which is never entirely resolved. Even in the final chapter, as the narrator records his own personal devotions at the temple, he cannot refrain from placing the lock-cutting ceremony in the context of a Greek comparison.66 Yet at the end, despite this final parting shot in the style of ethnographic comparanda, one cannot say that 'Syria' has been simply represented or appropriated by the hegemonic discourse of an orientalizing 'Greece'. Nor can one argue that 'Syria' has fully shaken free of the dominance of Greek linguistic and cultural technologies of framing. Instead, in the near eastern world of the Second Sophistic, the cultural significance of Syria and Greece are mutually codependent. Identity, at least on the level of the educated class, is inevitably a matter of cultural negotiation between these two ethnic, linguistic and religious poles. One thing the text proves is that the relative weight of self-definition, in terms of Syrian and Greek culture, is different in matters of religion (where our author firmly sides with Syria) from - say - matters of linguistic expression (where he cannot avoid being Greek). In the cultural conflict between Greece and Syria, an individual's identity lies on many levels; and the complexities of our text lie in part in the differing extent of Greekness or Syrianness asserted in the different levels of authorial subjectivity the narrative reveals. The text treads along a knife-edge line between sincerity and irony. It 66

Likewise, in the narrative of the Combabus myth - which is presented as the key Assyrian charter for the temple's founding - the author cannot resist Greek parallels for Stratonice's passion with the illicit loves of Sthenoboea and Phaedra (23).

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speaks in the Ionic tongue of the ancient Greek East, which serves to cast not only 'Greece' and 'Syria', but also the constantly emulated model of Herodotus in a gently amusing (rather than viciously satirical) light. This allows it to be both serious in its exploration of the problematics of national and linguistic identities in the Roman East, and yet humorous at the same time. The targets of the humour are not only the oddities of Syrian myth and religion (which then turn out to be strongly affirmed) and the difficulties of Greek (Herodotean) discourse in translating the cultural difference of Syria into Greek terms, but also the Greek (and potentially the Syrian, and potentially the Roman) reader's strategies for self-definition in relation to a narrative which it is impossible to know whether to believe or laugh at. That the text's conflictive and yet interdependent syncretism of 'Greek' and 'Assyrian' was at all possible, is due to the one factor the text chooses never to mention. I mean - of course - Rome. It should be stressed that the DDS is hardly the only text of the Second Sophistic to make no reference to Rome (take the novel of Achilles Tatius, for another example).67 But the absence is certainly significant. It works in two contradictory ways, simultaneously. By assuming rather than including Rome, the DDS assumes the status quo - the overriding political frame within which any Greek pilgrimage to Hierapolis is possible. Rome need not be mentioned because the power of the Pax Romana is so obvious, so utterly pervasive. At the same time, by eschewing all mention of Rome, the text implies Rome's irrelevance. Whatever the influence and the dominance of the distant imperial centre, what matters to this pilgrim and his readers - their identities, their religion, their confrontation with the gods who are so especially manifest in Hierapolis (DDS 10) - simply excludes Rome. One of the glories of the DDS's paean to local Syrian spirituality is that it simultaneously affirms the political order (by the assumptions implicit in omission) and it challenges the relevance of that order (by making identity a matter of local, peripheral, concerns). Ironically, the Pax Romana has created the very conditions for its own profound irrelevance: it has allowed a Hellenized Assyrian to find his deep Assyrian roots and to forget (if only for the brief extent of a literary pilgrimage) that Rome exists. It may be too much to say that this ability to forget the political frame of Rome, while focusing on the local sanctity of a peripheral shrine, represents an active example of what has been described as 'resistance' to the centre (resistance not only from the East but also from Greece).68 Rather, 67

68

O n this issue, see for instance Simon Goldhill's comments at the end of section III of his article in this volume. O n resistance, see especially Woolf (1994), with bibliography. Of course, there are m o ments in the DDS where resistance is explicit - especially in the description of Apollo (35-6), see Eisner (1997b) 1 9 4 - 5 .

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it provides a perfect cultural space in which resistance - whether expressed as local self-assertion, as the assumption of a non-Roman identity or simply as the text's silence about Syria's Roman masters - becomes both possible and safe (since it carries no active sign of enmity). The specific space created for local self-assertion lies above all in religion. The DDS presents the focus of identity in religion as much more than just a matter of local cult. It is pilgrimage: the wide appeal of a sacred centre far beyond the local population and even beyond those whose language the site shares - to Greeks, Egyptians, Indians, Ethiopians, Medes, Armenians, Babylonians, Phoenicians, Cappadocians, Cilicians, Arabs and Assyrians (DDS 10, 32). The very Greek language of the text becomes, on this account, an act of veneration which testifies to the cult's impact in the Hellenic world (not only upon the author but also on everyone who may read his text). The nature of the DDS as a pilgrimage narrative testifies to a construction of identity much more assertive than simply the self-defensiveness of the indigenous Syrians in the face of Greco-Roman cultural hegemony.69 The Syrian Goddess and her temple's major deities (like the oracular Apollo and the Sign) promise an alternative identity from the eclectic and cultural assimilations implicit in being 'Roman'. They offer personal transformation (the 'marking' of Assyrians, the passage from manhood to being a gallus) in a sacred world whose 'gods are especially manifest' (DDS 10) and whose appeal extends (with a certain evangelical, even missionary, gusto)70 far beyond Hierapolis into the Roman and Parthian empires. The text is itself a kind of publicity pamphlet,71 and the attempt to assert the validity of the East at this period by propelling its religious fervour throughout the imperial cultures which controlled it politically, is paralleled by numerous other evangelical and mystery cults from Mithras and Cybele to Isis, Serapis and Jesus Christ. In the context of charismatic religion in antiquity, the DDS is rather special. The text is testimony not to the diffusion of an eastern cult (like, say, those of Jupiter Dolichenus or Mithras) to the most distant regions of the Roman Empire. Rather, it attests the refocusing of identity, both local and international, on a sacred centre which is in every sense peripheral even irrelevant - within the political realities of the Roman world, but 69

70

71

Pace Swain (1996) 308 (on the DDS): 'Since the native political tradition had been abolished by Greeks, religion was all that was left to anyone who considered himself indigenous.' This is right so far as it goes, but there is more to personal identity than the polarity of politics and religion, and there is more to pilgrimage across ethnic and linguistic borders than merely the affirmation of indigenous identity. On the spread of the cult of the Syrian Goddess, see Turcan (1996) 133-43; for some general reflections on the significance of the evangelical spread of the eastern cults through the empire, see Eisner (1997b) 189-91, 195-7. A point made by Turcan (1996) 133.

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which is none the less presented as absolutely primary in its holiness. Effectively, the DDS is an act of recentring. It suggests a new centre, not for the Roman Empire as a political entity, but for what matters most to the individual within the Roman world who speaks with the T of this text (namely his identity in relation to his chosen god). As such, it is part of the process which would ultimately replace the civic and imperial cult fostered by the political centre with another oriental cult from the Empire's Semitic fringe whose imagery, practices and theology were even more antithetical to traditional religion than the goings-on at Hierapolis namely, Christianity. Indeed, the Christians would very specifically echo the strategy of the DDS by proclaiming another holy city (equally peripheral, irrelevant and distant) as the spiritual (not the political) centre of the entire Roman world: for Hierapolis, read Jerusalem. Like the Life of Apollonius of Tyana, written by Philostratus for the imperial court of Julia Domna (empress of Septimius Severus) in the early third century, the DDS is a sustained effort at heightening the importance of what - from the perspective of the centre - might be expected to appear utterly unimportant, to a level of universal significance.72 Where Philostratus elevates a long-dead sage from Asia Minor to being an exemplary and universal holy man for the whole Roman Empire, the DDS implicitly elevates a temple in remotest Syria to a level of supreme importance. Christianity, of course, would combine both strategies - making its holy man the exclusively acceptable God of the Empire and his city its sacred centre. In part, the power of this strategy - whereby the specific (a particular place with all its local eccentricities or a particular sage with his very personal hagiography) becomes of universal import - lies in the brilliant and profound alignment of supernatural power (as expressed by the account of Hierapolis) and personal identity (as demonstrated not only in the text but by it). The DDS is a narrative obsessed with the issue of identity and yet so careful to avoid naming its writer. Even if the author were identified by a scribal addition after the main text in the (lost) ancient papyri, this would of course have emphasized the writer's silence in the matter of identifying himself (while ending the entire text on the very word 'name'). The readings of the DDS, among the scholars, have largely revolved around that very problem - playing the game of 'name the author'. I am conscious that I have been coy about this game, and that I might be expected to step forward and come clean. Of course, for me to write T is very different 72

On the trend towards universalism in late Roman polytheism, see esp. Fowden (1993) 3760 and Brent (1999) 251-330. On Apollonius of Tyana in this context, see Eisner (1997a) 34-7, with bibliography.

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from the T of the DDS - in part because my name appears at the top of the piece, and in part because academic prose (however hard one might wish to put oneself in the picture) is not quite ethnographic autopsy. And here is an important point about the DDS's agenda: when I write T , I mean (at least according to the usual conventions of scholarship) a persona who is also the writer; but that need by no means be the case in this text. It fails to name not just its author but the narrator, and it fails to tell us whether these two are one and the same. Even as it takes its Greek readers into the heart of another culture and affirms its own identity in that Other (DDS 1 and 60), so it stands back from affirming that identity as a personal or familial name. Unlike the T of Herodotus, who names himself in the very first words of the first book of his Histories (in the very place where the DDS withholds its author's and narrator's names), the T within the text of the DDS can never be extracted as a particular historical and extra-textual identity. Is it that pilgrimage is meaningful because it strips the worshipper of all his contexts, all his identities (even his eyebrows and hair, DDS 55), in a direct confrontation with his god? It does the DDS a great injustice to reduce the debate to no more than attribution; but it is hard - with such a clever piece - not to believe it was written by Lucian.73 73

Afinalnote of thanks. The concerns informing this paper have been with me a long time. I suppose I should begin by thanking my parents, middle European emigres to England, who did their best (and never quite succeeded) in integrating into a world whose most habitual reflexes were always unfamiliar. My wife's family, Europeans settled in Mexico, have done their best to make me feel not entirely disorientated in frequent visits to a strange land. Three close friends have debated with me long and hard the themes of cultural translation throughout my adulthood: Joan-Pau Rubies, a Catalan living in London, whose life's-work is the historical unravelling of European confrontations with America and Asia; Thupten Jinpa, a Tibetan exiled to India, educated in Cambridge and living in Canada, a true professional in the art of cultural translation (and official translator to the Dalai Lama) who seems always at his ease whatever unfamiliar occasion may arise; and Silvia Frenk, a Mexican living in Oxford, whom I have successfully - if unintentionally - contrived to misconstrue at least once a day throughout our married life. I am particularly grateful to Jane Lightfoot (who is preparing a new edition, translation and commentary on the text) for her comments, to Helen Morales and Ian Rutherford for inviting me to give a version of this paper to the Second Sophistic seminar in Reading, to Melissa Calaresu and Peter Burke for letting me inflict it on the Cultural History Seminar in the Faculty of History at Cambridge, and to Shadi Bartsch and Rob Nelson who gave me the opportunity to try out a completed draft on a most discerning audience at the University of Chicago: on all three occasions, the various comments made have helped me think again. In Chicago, I am especially grateful to Hans Dieter Betz, David Dodd, Chris Faraone, Bruce Lincoln, Margaret Mitchell and Danny Richter. Finally, I owe a great debt to the editor and to Sue Alcock for their immensely helpful comments on an earlier version.

The erotic eye: visual stimulation and cultural conflict Simon Goldhill

sex and sex and sex and sex and look at me Mick Jagger

When an exhibition of Robert Mapplethorpe's photographs became the subject of legal challenge in Cincinnati in 1990, the prosecution of the gallery and its director had a simple, if scarcely innocent, strategy. Rather than make an intricate case, they just showed the pictures to the carefully selected jury - only three of which 'local community members' had ever been in an art gallery in their lives. 'You're going to ask, "Shouldn't we hear something more?",' declared Frank Prouty, the chief prosecutor, The pictures are the State's case.'1 The corrupt and stimulating imagery was to speak for itself. Look and you will see. The defence, however, framed the pictures with a mass of expert academic evidence - attacking the prosecution's knowing display with a display of knowledge. As with the Lady Chatterley trial,2 the paraded discourse of the academy swayed the good men and true, and the exhibition was acquitted of the charge of pornographic display. This time, the thousands of words were worth more than a picture, and the game of 'show and tell' was won by the team from the academy: 'The prosecution basically decided to show us the pictures so that we'd say that they weren't art when everybody was telling us they were.'3 The scandal, however, has remained a test-case of culture wars which Senator Jessie Helms took to the floor of the Senate itself4 - and it has become an icon and a staple of cultural studies. Catherine McKinnon - whose legal agenda in trying to outlaw pornography draws on different ideological imperatives from Helms and the Cincinnati prosecution derives the threat of pornography precisely from the look: 'the way men 1

2 3 4

The story of this case is told most insightfully by Steiner (1995) 7-59 (Prouty is quoted 32-3); and Dubin (1992) esp. 170-96. See Rolph 1961; Bowlby (1993) 25-45. A juror's comment reported in the New York Times and cited by Steiner (1995) 33. See Steiner (1995): Helms circulated the photographs to Senate members to mount a campaign to challenge 'liberal' arts' funding.

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see women defines who women can be'.5 'A sex object is defined on the basis of its looks, in terms of its visibility for sexual pleasure, such that both the looking - the quality of the gaze, including its point of view and the definition according to use become eroticized as part of sex itself.'6 The regime of the visual, and society's strategies of portrayal, become so imbricated with the structures of power and inequality that Suzanne Kappeler can follow her argument on the violence of representation to the rigorous conclusion: 'all art must go'.7 The modern heirs of Plato's linkage of the noble lie of censorship with both epistemology and power have helped make the erotic eye a hot topic. Who, these days, would simply allow that a cat can look at a king? To talk of viewing is indeed to enter afiercelycontested debate.8 My interest in this chapter is in the process of looking, and its constitution in and through cultural and epistemological models. I shall be focusing primarily on the last fifty years of the second century CE, with some framing from earlier tradition, and at least a glance into the third and fourth centuries. I am particularly interested in this period because it offers a fascinating view of cultural clash, and the writings I will consider in most detail have been chosen in part for the way that they highlight issues of cultural conflict. All the works I will be discussing come from the Roman Empire but not one of the writers is simply Roman, not one is centrally placed in the dominant political culture of Empire which remains centred on Rome and the emperor. I shall frame the chapter with a discussion of works by a Semite from Syria, who learns Greek and becomes a master rhetorician, and the slyest of satirists from the margin of Roman society. I shall be discussing a Greek novelist, said to be from Alexandria, whose novel begins in Sidon and ends with a sailing to Byzantium. He will be juxtaposed to a Christian from Alexandria, writing for an educated Greek audience in that polyglot metropolis. From further down the coast, there will be a stern African writing extremely fierce Latin. Earlier writers will include a rhetorician exiled not only from his own town of Prusa in Bithynia but also from Rome and Italy; a Jew from Alexandria; a Greek priest from Delphi. Later writers mentioned include a novelist who claims to be a Phoenician from Emesa, whose novel begins at the 5 6

7 8

MacKinnon (1992) 462. MacKinnon (1992) 463. For further bibliography and discussion, see also Itzin (1992) passim. Kappeler (1986). She is followed closely by the contributors to Richlin (1992). For a representative sample of this contemporary debate, see Kappeler (1986); Rose (1986); Pointon (1990); Itzin (1992); Nead (1992); Hunter, Saunders and Williamson (1993); Hunt (1996); Gibson and Gibson (1993); Melville and Readings (1995); Brennan and Jay (1996); Bal (1996); Bryson, Holly and Moxey (1996). In Classics, see now Kampen (1996) and Keuls (1985).

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centre of the Greek world, Delphi, but ends up in that most marginal of societies, Homer's 'end of the world', Ethiopia. Throughout this period, conventionally (though not very usefully) known as the Second Sophistic, Greek learning has immense cultural capital but has to negotiate its lack of political authority.9 Lucian, as a non-native Greek speaker, writing in Greek and making his way in the Roman world by virtue of his Greek education, never stops satirizing cultural capital, Greekness, Romanness and people trying to make their way in culture. Earlier, and from the powerful local position as a priest, Plutarch's edifice of intellectual engagement with the question of cultural difference throughout the Moralia is also a reaction to the tensions between his own social position and Roman political dominance: his Lives pair great Greek and Roman figures, and reflect on the exemplarity of characters who are for the Greeks also testimony of a lost political and military centrality. If the exile Dio Chrysostom portrays himself - with whatever fictionalizing10 - as the advisor of the most powerful men of Empire, Achilles Tatius writes a novel which tracks across the Mediterranean with no mention of any aspect of imperial rule. As Pausanias' guide to Greece creates a vision of a glorious Greece through an archaeology of myth and monument, and, paradigmatically, for all its rhetoric of objective viewing cannot 'see' (or describe) the new Roman temple on the Athenian Acropolis in front of the Parthenon,11 so Achilles' world - a post-Alexandrian world - turns a blind eye to imperial history. The Christian writers move towards the centres of power, writing for a range of audiences, from Clement engaging the educated Alexandrian to Tertullian in conflict with the Roman magistrates from the passion of the African fringe. Philostratus' Life of Apollonius ofTyana, which traces the pursuit of wisdom from the margins of the known world, proclaims itself to be written for the innermost circle of the court of the empress Julia Domna.12 In each case, we will find that the dominant intellectual discourse - produced in part by the education system - is manipulated for different purposes, and articulates a range of strategies, and explores different perspectives on the centres and margins of power. Post-colonial discourse is a bandwagon that is not always aware 9

10

11 12

The degree of this negotiation is much contested: see in particular Bowersock (1969); Bowie (1970); Bowersock (1974); Anderson (1989) who is too blithe in his conclusion of a 'comfortable and subtle accommodation' (137); Anderson (1993). See also Peretti (1946); C. P. Jones (1978) for studies of particular authors from this perspective. Sidebottom (1996) is rightly more critical of any easy acceptance of this self-representation than C. P. Jones (1978), Bowersock (1969) and Anderson (1986). See also Crawford (1978). See Eisner (1992) with bibliography. Philostratus Vit Ap. 1.3. See Anderson (1986) (with further bibliography); Eisner (1997); and the introduction to this volume, 4-7.

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of the length of its history, and this writing from the mother of empires has a sophistication and complexity that will provide a remarkable and instructive set of models for what has often been a rather simplistic contemporary take on the problems of writing the imperial margins. The discussions of how to look that I will be tracing necessarily become engaged in the dynamics of social authority and cultural display, and with questions of how the boundaries of social and cultural inclusion and exclusion are negotiated within the Empire. My question, then, in short, is what happens to looking, or writing about looking, within the intricate world of self-positioning that is Empire culture.

My main focus will be on the erotics of the gaze, but it is crucial to my argument that this erotics cannot be understood without a consideration of how it becomes embroiled in structures and discourses of education, culture, power, religion, philosophy . . . One central idea running throughout this nexus will be that of the 'cultured' or 'educated' viewer, the pepaideumenos theates. During the Hellenistic period, in particular in Alexandria with the foundation of the Museum and the Art Gallery as spaces for viewing, and with the concomitant growth of the discourses of art theory, there developed the image of the sophos as viewer, an ideal of the articulate and witty analyst of imagery, uncovering hidden meanings and displaying his - and it is, of course, normatively 'his' - sophia as a sign of an elite and cultivated response. 13 As Hellenistic poetry in general with its abstruse intellectualisms, emotional ambivalences and self-conscious literary playfulness required and presupposed a particular type of reader, so the multiform poems about looking at art aimed to produce a particular type of viewer - self-aware, oblique, brilliant. During the Second Sophistic, however, for all its privileging of an educated Greek culture, there is a gradual and subtle shift away from these high priests of the Museum. Thus, for example, although even rustic shepherds in Theocritus can refer to the extremely obscure mythological figures of Melampous and Bias, and Apollonius' Argonauts can tour the most mythologically recondite sites of the Black Sea, and Lycophron can delight in mobilizing the most rarified mythological language, it is typical of the writers of the Second Sophistic to draw on a far more restricted range of familiar and mainstream mythological and literary models: both the Philostratan and the Callistratan art galleries, for example, scarcely stray from the best13

For this development, see Goldhill (1994).

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known characters of the mythic repertoire.14 Even Pausanias, for all his recondite knowledge, does not challenge the reader with the playful uses of obscurity that so delight Hellenistic writers. Yet with the continuing spread of Greek culture and in particular with the dominance of the enkuklios paideia - the educational curriculum that so many elite males across the Empire followed - there is an immense cultural and social importance attached to the notion of paideia, to being pepaideumenos, 'educated', or 'cultured'.15 I offer the additional translation of 'cultured' because it is clear that a Greek education is central to a certain privileged model of cultivation. On the one hand, knowing Greek as a language, and knowing Greek culture from Homer onwards becomes a key sign of acceptance within a social and political elite. The well-documented commitment to and discussion of classical Attic Greek as the most valued mode of literary expression is only one, albeit important, indication of how Greekness is articulated and regulated in the complex ethnic and cultural mix of the (Eastern) Empire.16 Whether the provenance of the author is Syria, Bithynia, Africa, Greece, it is inevitably within a frame of education in Greek that cultural identity is formed. So, too, local loyalties, often seen in competition for status between different cities in the Empire, and local senses of identity,17 are played out within a shared commitment to the frame of privilege. Paideia, as several scholars have recently documented, makes the man.18 A Greek education is an education in Greekness, in becoming a Greek. On the other hand, a string of texts explore the boundaries of this idea, often by travelling to the boundaries of the Empire. So, Dio Chrysostom's Borysthenitikos {Or. 36) takes the exiled orator to a community on the borders of Pontus by the mouth of the river Hypanis, an outpost which lacks many signs of civilization (and is a byword for the end of the world in Propertius19), but which is 14

15

16

17 18

19

This is in contrast with the evident interest in abstruse linguistic points. See Anderson (1989) 126-7; Swain (1996). Most of the evidence comes from satires, especially Lucian's, about the supposed investment in grammatical and linguistic niceties. A useful synoptic account (with bibliography) of the importance of the term pepaideumenos is to be found in Anderson (1989), who writes nicely (82) 'Paideia transforms the rhetor in the Roman world into a sophist fighting Homeric battles in Platonic dialogue somewhere in the middle of Babylon.' See also Bompaire (1958) 33-156; 157-470; Reardon (1971). The standard account of Greek education Marrou (1956) is out of date; see Too and Livingstone (1998). I have learnt in particular from Morgan (1998). The best recent account (with further bibliography) is Swain (1996): his connection of this concern with politics and history is regrettably naive, however. See in particular Millar (1993). See in particular Gleason (1995); also Barton (1994). I have learnt here from Tim Whitmarsh. Prop. I.xii. 4.

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none the less completely obsessed with Homer. 20 Every man learns and reads Homer to the exclusion of all other texts, with few exceptions, especially one old man who loves Plato too - because of its similarity to Homer. 21 Dio's presentation of an exotic society whose Greekness is corrupted by constant contact with the barbarian other, and barely preserved by the embalming of Homer, becomes a way for his audience to reflect on - normatively - the criteria and limits of Greekness. So, too, Philostratus' Apollonius of Tyana travels to the East to find wisdom - only to have the gurus talk in Greek about Greek philosophy. As Philostratus puts it: cro(|>cp dv6pi cEAA6cs TTCCVTOC, 'to a wise man Greece is everywhere', 'everything' 22 - a bon mot that needs to be set against the often expressed idea (or worry) that true wisdom originally comes from the East or the barbarian other (especially India or Egypt). 23 Education, in short, (rather than blood or birth) becomes an absolutely fundamental way of articulating and discussing Greekness, and the figure of the pepaideumenos theates needs to be placed within this frame. The sites and stakes of viewing also develop, however, through Empire society. Although Philostratus and Callistratus tour the art galleries to perform their role as 'professors', and the viewing of paintings in temples or shrines begins Longus' Daphnis and Chloe and Achilles Tatius' Leucippe and Clitophon, there is throughout the Empire a culture of display (in processions, building programmes, games, personal appearances, statues) which constantly links imperial power and the spectacle.24 Both the circulation of images - statues of Antinous by Hadrian, say 25 - and the spectacle in performance - games sponsored by the elite in Rome and throughout the provinces, for example - construct a regime in and through which authority, status, positions are negotiated in the field of the visual. The emperor's spectacular self-presentation both in the performance of power in Rome, and in the circulation of images throughout the Empire, is the defining and extreme paradigm of this dynamic of display and authority. So, to take one brief but paradigmatic example, in the build up to the battle of Cremona in Tacitus (Histories III), first Antonius 20 21

22 23 24

25

See A n d e r s o n (1986) 2 4 1 - 5 7 . A l t h o u g h the old m a n is depicted with a certain amused distance, this judgement on Plato Homericus is also found in M a x i m u s of Tyre 26 (esp. 26.3); see also Or. 4 a n d 17; [Longinus] de Subl 13.3 (with Russell's note ad loc); Heracl. Alleg. 18. Philostratus Vit. Ap. 1.34. See Momiligiano (1975); Eisner (1997). See e.g. H o p k i n s (1978) esp.l97ff.; Millar (1992); Veyne (1976); H o p k i n s (1983) 1-27; C. Barton (1993); E d w a r d s (1993) a n d especially Price (1984). I have learnt from the forthcoming w o r k of Caroline V o u t o n this heterodox, even transgressive, display.

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(7), to win support, sets up throughout the country towns the images of Galba that had been thrown down in the civil war, then, as the fleet rebels, the captains tear down the images of Vitellius (12), a gesture repeated by Caecina (13), only to result in outrage from his troops, who do not wish to be associated with the implications of such an iconoclasm. Control of images is the sign and performance of power. It is within such a context that Dio Chrysostom (31) and Favorinus (ps.-Dio Chrysostom 37) earnestly debate the issues that surround the re-dedication of statues in public spaces, and Dio orates at length on the embellishment of his own city and the financial and social implications of such a policy (47; 48). The 'educated viewer' is a figure by which the interplay of (Greek) education and the culture of the spectacle is broached and negotiated. One text which puts the figure of the pepaideumenos theates at the heart of writing about the visual in the Second Sophistic is Lucian's de Domo, 'On the House'. This extraordinary text often receives brief mention in the histories of ecphrasis, but has rarely been discussed at any length.26 Typically for Lucian, it is a text which mobilizes multiple voices to dramatize a fundamental question about Greek culture and its relation to present society and past glories. It not only reflects on the beauty of a house and its decorations, but also on the problem of how a response to beauty is to be articulated in language - how rhetoric and the field of the visual interrelate in a social setting. The figure of the pepaideumenos theates is established in the opening paragraphs. As Alexander would have swum in the Cydnus, begins the author, even if he knew he would contract a fatal disease, so beautiful was the river, so too a house as beautiful as this must provoke a man to long to give speeches in it, to become a part of its beauty. 27 This turn back to the exemplum of the grand and reckless Alexander - a favourite model of the Second Sophistic28 - offers a heroic paradigm for the need to speak out, to emote, which is immediately refrained as an opposition between the TTETTaiSeuiiEvos and the I8IGOTT)S, 'the educated' and 'the ordinary' man. For a person who would leave a sight of beauty mute (KCOCJXDS) and silent (aAoyos), as if dumb (avccu8os) or struck by envy (<|>66vos) would demonstrate a lack of sophistication - aypoiKioc - a lack of taste - carsipoKaAia and a lack of cultivation - duoucria. It would in short be a failure to recognize that (2):

26 27

28

See Bompaire (1958) 7 1 3 - 2 1 ; P a l m (1965), especially 210; Bartsch (1989) 166. Zeitlin (1990) 433 sees this as 'the analogical use of erotic desire to characterize the aesthetic sensibility of a lover of beauty'. F r o m Plutarch's Alexander to A r r i a n a n d the Alexander Romance. M a n y of the references to Alexander depend on his repeated use as a n exemplum in rhetorical training.

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oux 6 auTOS Trepi TOC OeaiaaTcc VOJJIOS iSicoTais TE Kai

There is not the same law about looking at sights for ordinary people and for educated people. In the more technical philosophical vocabulary recorded by Diogenes Laertius (VII. 51): 'some impressions ((|>avTacriai) are expert, others not. A work of art is viewed one way by an expert (TEXVITTIS) another by a nonexpert' (OCTEXVOS). The collusive distinction of Lucian depends precisely on the power to articulate a response or opinion - like a Hellenistic sophos dramatizing himself in front of a work of art. This is both a physical and an intellectual pose. For the ordinary person 'just sees and looks about and casts his eyes around and peers at the ceiling and waves his hand, and silently takes pleasure because of his fear of not being able to say anything of what's being viewed'. This image of the ordinary person's flitting eye and undirected hand gestures and fear of speech is to be contrasted with the concentration and articulacy of the man who 'looks with education (IJIETOC TTociSEias) at beauty'. For he will 'try to the best of his ability to take his time (Ev5iaTpi(3£<70ai) and to reciprocate the sight with speech (Aoycp diiEiyaoOai TT\V OEOCV)' (2). The educated man takes time in the business of looking and in responding with language. As Lucian theorizes the educated gaze as the measured requital of imagery with rhetoric, the viewer's stance or pose as cultured has been set at stake and open to scrutiny and the regulation of the knowing. 29 The specific nature of Lucian's construction of the 'cultured viewer' can be appreciated by contrasting his image with a classical model. Xenophon's Symposium dramatizes the response of a group of educated men to a beautiful boy's arrival at a party (1.8ff). Everyone's eyes are drawn to him (as with the sudden appearance of light in the dark), everyone experienced some psychological reaction (ETTCCOE TI TT^V yuxr)v), and 'some became more silent, others made some sort of gestures too', oi IJEV ye <Tico7rr]T£poi EyEvovTo, oi 6E Kai kcjxmicrvi^ovTO TTCOS- The silent and vague gesturing of the fifth-century sophisticates in the face of beauty contrasts strikingly with the careful and articulate poses of Lucian's Empire figures, for whom the antique philosophers' response would look like a sign of lack of proper cultivation. Indeed the orator goes on to offer something of a materialist model for the effect of beauty on a person, and to broaden the contrast between proper looking, proper speech and mere seeing. The richness of a house, 29

For a brilliant analysis of the physical and intellectual poses of looking in the eighteenth century, see de Bolla (1989). The Greek pepaideumenos did not stand in awed silence before the sublime . . .

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he argues, stimulates a speaker, 'as if the sight were in some way a stageprompter' (4): y a p eiopeT TI 6ia TCOV 6(|>0aA|Jcov em TT\V yuxriv KaAov, eiTa Trpos auTo

Aoyous.

For something of beauty almost flows right into the soul through the eyes, then it ornaments words like to itself and sends them forth. This language of 'flowing' into the soul, and of the formation of images in the soul which produce words, as we will see in more detail later, recalls not merely classical materialist models of sight (from Plato and Aristotle onwards) but also and more specifically contemporary Stoic theories of phantasia, where indeed visual impressions are 'productive of speech'. 30 There is, as it were, a scientific explanation, or at least a shared knowledge of the workings of nature that grounds the proprieties of knowingness. The richness of a house may prompt speech, but the mere display of wealth would be a 'barbarian sight' ((3ap(3apii<6v TO OEOCIJOC). Barbarian decoration is designed to astound (sKTrArjcjaeiv) the viewer, and not to prompt praise. To silence, in envy, fear, or awe (like a tyrant). This house, claims Lucian, treading the ever fine line between praise and flattery, has nothing to do with such 'barbarian eyes, Persian hypocrisy, regal boasting'. It needs 'not a poor man to see it but a cultured spectator d£ocTou)' - the sort of man (6): OTCO [xr\ ev TT\ o y s i f] Kpicris ccAAcc T I S KOCI Aoyiapios ETrccKoAouOeT TOTS

for whom judgement is not in the looking; but a certain reasoned opinion also accompanies what is seen.

To be cultured, here, is to know how to respond to wealthy display without the symptomatics of poverty; but a tellingly different and far more ironical gloss on a rich house and a poor spectator is offered in Lucian's Saturnalia. This strange work combines a dialogue, an exchange of letters and the promulgation of a set of festival laws, in the course of commenting on the Roman festival of the Saturnalia, a festival of reversal. (The mixing of genres is the literary equivalent of the social mixing of the festival - as Bakhtin would have it.) The poor first-person speaker (who also speaks on behalf of the pepaideumenoi) complains how the poor, even at the Saturnalia, get no fair shares from the rich, and is reminded by Saturn/Kronos himself that 'you only see their gold and purple, and whenever you see them riding behind a white team, you gape and prostrate 30

See Goldhill (1994) for discussion; also Long (1971a); Sandbach (1971); Imbert (1980); Bumyeat (1983); Watson (1988); Frede (1983). Rispoli (1985) has the most useful historical overview.

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yourself. If you looked away, and paid no attention, and did not turn towards their silver carriages, and did not look at the emerald in their rings when conversing, and did not touch and wonder at the softness of their clothes, but let them be rich all on their own, know well that they would come running to you to beg you to dine with them to show you their couches and tables and cups. There is no use in possession without witnesses ...' Or as Kronos writes in his letter to the rich: 'If the poor walked about with their eyes s h u t . . . it would annoy you.' In an exchange about (a festival of) reversal, the lord of the Golden Age and of the festival of reversal points out how rich and poor are linked in a reciprocal dynamic of envious watching and status-seeking display - which would fall apart if the poor just shut their eyes. This more sardonic and disruptive construction of the politics of spectacle lets us see from a different angle the ideological collusiveness of Lucian's opposition in the de Domo between the poor man's looking and the cultured viewer. In the de Domo the poor spectator is a failure in cultural expectation; in the Saturnalia the impoverished speaker is enjoined (with whatever irony) to see how to escape the subordinating spectacle of the rich - a strategy which, typically for Lucian, also satirizes the motives of the rich and their displays in a way missing from the de Domo. The proem of the de Domo, then, establishes a hierarchical and politically loaded opposition. It contrasts the ordinary man's response the silent, the ignorant, the barbarian, the envious, the inarticulate, the dumbstruck - to the educated response - the articulate, the praising, the cultivated. The ordinary man's flighty looks and gestures are opposed to the educated man's concentrated and measured response. Beauty moves an educated man to speak and the beauty of his surroundings makes the speech itself seem beautiful. So after the orator praises the elegance and restraint of the gilded hall (which is like a modest but splendid woman with just the right amount of jewellery), he concludes that the 'beauty of the house is sufficient to move a man to speech' - and that he himself was 'attracted by its beauty as by a magic wheel or by the Sirens' and that 'even if his speech was without form before it would seem beautiful here, as if dressed in beautiful clothing'. The beautiful speech, dressed, like the house, as if it were a beautiful woman, is the sign of the cultivated viewer in (rhetorical) action. At this point in the speech, however, Lucian makes a remarkable switch of strategy. For, there is, he suddenly declares (14), 'another logos which keeps trying to interrupt, one which is OUK dyEvvfis . . . dAAd KCCI TTOCVU yevvoaos, cos r|O"i, 'not without good breeding . . . but indeed absolutely noble, as it claims'. I have translated gennaios 'noble', although it can also be used idiomatically to mean 'great', 'big', 'significant'. It is the

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adjective that Plato uses for the 'lie' which founds his Republic. The tautology of 'not ignoble but absolutely noble' draws attention to the choice of phraseology, as does the immediate qualification, 'as it claims', 'as it says', and it marks, I take it, the intellectual history of the argument to come (which does indeed have a distinguished genealogy) but also possibly may recall the specific Platonic image, which may serve to raise a question about the status of the following case. For the scene of Lucian's speech now shifts from its encomiastic epideictic opening into a law-court, as the second logos addresses us, the readers, as 'gentlemen of the jury' and speaks himself as an antidikos, an 'opponent in legal proceedings'. The case that this second logos makes is to reverse the claim of the speech so far that a beautiful house with fine images is a good place for rhetoric to be on display. Rather, the beauty of the hall distracts the audience, bedazzles a speaker, and devalues language. If the first logos has 'vision' and 'rhetoric' in beautiful harmony, the second logos sets them in antagonistic opposition. Indeed, to test one's rhetoric amid such beauties is like trying 'to display an ant on the back of an elephant or a camel' (16). He picks up the example of the beautiful woman and reframes it (15): 'beautiful jewellery distracts men's gaze from her complexion, so that viewers are too preoccupied to praise her and consider the sight of her as a side issue'. He juxtaposes the Sirens, to which the first logos had appealed, to the Gorgons: the Sirens can only delay a sailor with their voices, but the Gorgon, through the visual, turns men to stone. The peacock, which earlier had been offered as an example of the seductiveness of beauty, is now adduced as an example of 'pleasure in vision and not pleasure in voice'. Thus he concludes ringingly (19): So invincible it seems is pleasure through sight. The argument that opposes painting and the plastic arts to poetry and memorial in language goes back at least to Simonides and Pindar in the fifth century BCE, and to support his case for the threat of the visual to the rhetorical, he then calls an ancient witness - Herodotus - summoned as if in an Athenian court as 'HpoSoTov Au£ou cAAiKapvaa69ev (20), 'Herodotus, son of Lyxus, from Halicarnassus' (the expression is formed as if Halicarnassus were a deme of Athens). Herodotus, allowed by the orator to speak in Ionic, bears witness to the truth of what this logos says, ending with the famous Herodotean tag: COTOC yap xuyxavsi EOVTOC dmcrroTepa 6<(>0aA|jicov, 'For ears happen to be less trustworthy than eyes'. If Herodotus - whose status as a truth teller is scarcely assured - is wittily brought into court as a named ancient witness, the logos continues by devaluing a Homeric tag to his own advantage. 'Words' he claims 'are winged' (ETTEOC TnepoEVTa) - and fly off and die, whereas 'the pleasure of

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seen things is always present and lasting and wholly entices the spectator' (20). The immortality enshrined in the poetry of the past is but naught in the face of the permanence of visual stimulation. Any association of insubstantiality with the visual is dismissed by the amusing and dodgy arguments of this gennaios logos and his appeal to the past. Yet this very lauding of the visual with its aggressive trivialization of language's power will itself lead into a series of ecphrases. For this logos now goes on to describe at some length the paintings which decorate the hall, and by which, he claims, the gentlemen of the jury should not be ashamed to confess themselves distracted. The praise of the visual has been a lengthy foil for his own word-images to come. Indeed, the paintings' 'precise technique' (TT)S TEXVTIS TO at
Regard the difficulty of the enterprise, to represent so many images without colours, structures or space. For the imagery of words is a bare thing. Although at one level this expression rehearses the problem of representing the physical attributes of painting in words - a topos of ecphrastic writing - it also slyly utilizes terms which themselves recall the technical language applied to the orator's skills (as the language of painting and writing as ever in Greek overlap). Chromata - Latin 'Colores' - is used to indicate the style or feeling of a speech (as is the verb chromatizein). Schemata is used repeatedly of the rhetorical structure of a sentence or the strategy of an argument (and, as Anderson notes, 32 saxriiJiaTicrpiEvri AECJIS, 'figured speech', hence ironic mode, was especially valued by the sophists). Topos, most commonly in the plural, implies the rhetorical commonplace, as much as the physical place of the paintings. The final expression f) ypcc<|>f) TCOV Aoycov could mean 'the writing of words' as much as 'a picture made up of words'. Even the term eikones, 'images' as we will see later, can imply verbal imagery. There is a certain slipperiness even here in the language of (this) logos in the pursuit of the visual. 31

See Pollitt (1974).

32

Anderson (1989) 108.

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The ecphrases that follow - an elegant series of familiar subjects carefully articulated - lead to an extraordinary concluding paragraph (32): Do you not see, gentlemen of the jury, how all these things distract the listener and turn him away towards the sight, and leave the speaker stranded? The audience is instructed to see how the hearer is distracted towards the visual and leaves the speaker in the lurch. The visual acts as a psychagogia, which bars the listener from the speech of the orator - or so the orator passionately expounds. Has the enargeia of his speech allowed the reader to see (with the cultured viewer) his own distraction (as well as the beauty of the art)? There is something of a paradox in the orator's verbal instructions to see how viewing leaves speaking unheard . . . His description has not been, however, to put down his opponent, he continues, but rather 'so that you might support his struggle, and as best as possible shut your eyes and listen to what he says, and consider the difficulty of his task'. The logos which praises the visual now hopes for his audience to shut their eyes to listen to his opponent. This rather patronizing appeal on behalf of his floundering opponent, however, is itself a foil for the last encomiastic sentence of the piece. He explains why he has spoken apparently in the aid of his opponent's effort (32): For because of my love for the House, I would like anyone who speaks about it to be successful. So, in the end, both logoi offer ecphrases of the house and both speeches praise the house. Praise is doubled by coming from opponents. The agon around the visual at all points tends to the encomium of the beauty of the house. Both speeches too require and demonstrate the skills of the pepaideumenos theates. Both speeches construct cultured, measured and self-conscious rhetorical reflections on the process of looking, and on the process of talking about looking. The agon, the dramatization of logos against logos, rehearses the split between words and images, and the adequacy of words to express the visual - a constant debate and topos of ecphrastic literature. Yet the heteros logos, the second speech, is set up as a figure who interrupts, who wittily but wilfully adduces the support of or denigrates ancient authorities, who aggressively parodies the claims of the first speech - while finally offering an ecphrasis of his own. The challenge to the authority of rhetoric is itself subtly undermined - in the end, all is words here. Indeed, the tour deforce of split voices becomes also a sign of the mastery of the orator, Lucian. What is more, the house strikingly is not named, nor is any patron, nor even city or country. Critics over the years may have been too swift to assume a precise and known (but not to us) context of performance for this speech. 'We will build as with a shin-

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ing Hall, raising its portal on golden pillars', writes Pindar of his poetry of praise (01. 6.1-3); 'I have constructed a monument more lasting than bronze', boasts Horace of his poetry (Car. 3.30.1-2); organize a speech as if walking around a house, advise the experts in rhetorical Mnemotechnik. Is this house, too, a brilliant construction of Lucian's enargeia, his power to make vivid? Is the text not performing what it is discussing - the power of language not just to respond to beauty, but to bring it before the eyes of an audience? The unnamed and unsited house may not be so much the prompt to reflection on the rhetoric of visuality as the product of it. This tour de force of rhetorical display splits the orator's voice into competing logoi (who share an agenda of praise) and thus dramatizes the tensions within the discourse of the 'educated viewer' as a question of how rhetoric responds to the stimulus of beauty. The stake of 'looking' is the cultured man's standing in culture. This figure of the educated viewer along with an agonistic interplay of word and image within a strategy of praise - will be central to a further pair of Lucianic texts which will be the final example of this article. Each of the following texts, however, in different ways will engage with the question of how vision and education or training relate to the stimulated viewer, as erotics (so long a philosophical topic in Greek culture) and the gaze become the scene of a debate, to whose competing voices I now wish to turn. The self-conscious, articulate, educated viewer is the desiring subject in question.

n I want to begin with two benchmark texts that I hope will help set an agenda. My first author is Achilles Tatius, whose great novel Leucippe and Cleitophon is impossible to date with certainty, but there is a least a measure of critical consensus for the last half of the second century. His birthplace is given by later writers as Alexandria (though some have reasonably supposed that this might be an assumption based on the extended and honorific descripion of that city which opens book 5). It is a reasonable suggestion that this highly articulate, sophisticated and literary novel was written for an audience of privileged educated readers (such as existed in Alexandria and throughout the Empire). Nothing more than these tenuous presuppositions is known of Achilles Tatius. His novel contains a most wonderful bricolage of strange sights, high theory, and lovers' melting glances, in the course of a baroque narrative which travels around the Mediterranean taking in and reflecting on the spectacles of Empire. Throughout the novel, the knowing sophistication of the intellectual narrator and author explores the variety of the world with extraordinary narratological and scopophiliac panache. (Thefirst-personnarrative of the

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hero Cleitophon allows for disjunctions and plays between the knowingness of the narrator and the knowingness of the author.) From the lovers' first glances at each other to the famous scenes of the forced observation of the beloved's apparent disembowelling, the erotic narrative traces a particular engagement with the look; but the novel also contains extended passages of 'art history' with the description and interpretation of paintings, of 'tourism' with its outsiders' views of the different sites and sights of the Mediterranean, of 'paradoxography' with its ornate descriptions of natural wonders such as the crocodile, and of rhetorical display with its extended portrayal of the effect of seeing Alexandria for the first time. Together - and in ironic tension with one another - these different discourses of looking construct what can be called in Helen Morales' fine phrase a 'scopophiliac paradise'.33 Shadi Bartsch has written on the relation between the descriptions of paintings and the narrative's strategies of interpretation, and I have discussed elsewhere at length how Achilles' characteristic blend of (pseudo-)science, rhetorical formulation, and selfconscious slyness (always with his narratological twisting of readers' expectations) depends on and distorts a specific discourse of TO ETKOS - the probable, natural, likely - that is, how his text mobilizes and manipulates a reader's knowledge and his/her knowingness - his/her implication in dominant narratives of how things are.34 For the purposes of this chapter, I want to look first at one brief passage from the opening of the book which focuses on the physiology of the desiring eye. Cleitophon, the hero, who has fallen in love with Leucippe, has gone to see Cleinias, his cousin and confidante, for advice. The hero expounds his situation and explodes that he can't shut his eyes to sleep: because of desire 'Impressions of Leucippe face me all the time': TTOCVTOTE AEUKITTTTTIV (|>avTd£o|jai. Now <|>avTd£o|jai and the noun <j>avTacjia, normally translated 'impression', are central terms in Stoic (and other materialist) theories of vision - which I have discussed with regard to Hellenistic culture of art and perception in Art and Text in Ancient Greek Culture. As already mentioned above, in Hellenistic society a new caste of expert viewer - sophisticated, educated, cultivated - grew up. The viewing subject as articulate, witty, uncoverer of sedimented and learned images found its most fully developed epistemological and physiological model for viewing in Stoic theory - which unlike Platonic paradigms of mimesis, privileges viewing as a mode of access to knowledge of the world. Phantasia is the central term for the impact the external world makes on the viewing subject and produces articulate reaction. (This is one theoretical basis behind Lucian's requirement of verbal response for the educated 33

Morales (1996).

34

Bartsch (1989); Goldhill (1995a) 70-111.

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viewer.) So when Cleitophon, the hero, exclaims irdvTOTe c|>avTd£o|jai, 'an impression of Leucippe is constantly being impressed on me', he's not just uttering the well-known lover's complaint of 'I see her everywhere', but is expressing it in a term which, while certainly not requiring a full Stoic (or other systematic) epistemology, evokes a theoretical perspective on the eye's work. In a similar mixture of generalization and physiological expression, the reprobate Callisthenes is said to exemplify how words can have the same effect as that which 'wounded eyes minister to the soul': he falls in love without even seeing the woman whose praises he has heard dvairAdTTcov yap SOCUTCO TT\S TTCCISOS TO KdAAos Kcci avTa£6jji£vos Ta dopccTa, 'imaging the girl's beauty for himself and forming an impression of the unseen' - a phrase perhaps more paradoxical than its common translation 'imagining what he could not see' suggests. 35 Cleitophon's technical sounding expression prompts Cleinias' response: 'You have no idea', he argues, 'how marvellous a thing it is to look at one's beloved' - and he proceeds to offer in the typical style of this novel a ludic theoretical exposition of his generalization: 'Some lovers have to be content with a mere flashing glance [pAsmjia - which seems always to imply a special look in the eye, of pleasure, say, or of disdain 36 ] at a carefully watched over maiden, and if a lover has good luck with even such eyeing (KOCI |JiexPl TC^V omjdTcov), he thinks it is the greatest good.' So, sharing a house with Leucippe is an excellent advantage. Indeed, as a teacher of desire, he proceeds to remove his pupil's ignorance (1.9.4): OUK ol8as olov EOTIV Epco|j£vr| (3AeTro|JiEVTy |i£i£ova TCOV Epycov exEl T 1 1 V T)6OVT|V 6<(>6aAlioi y a p dAArjAois dvTavaKAcoiaevoi aTroiidTToucriv cos EV KaTOTrrpco TCOV crcoiJidTcov TOC EiScoAa- f] 8E TOU KaAAous diToppor), 5iJ CCUTCOV EIS TT\V yuxriv KccTappEoucra, EXEI Tivd |ii£iv EV diTocjTdaei. KOU oAiyov EOTI TT\S TCOV crcoiJidTcov lai^scos* Kcavf) y a p k m
You do not know what a thing it is when a lover is looked at. It has a greater pleasure than the Business. For the eyes receive each others' reflections and impress from there little images as in mirrors. Such an emanation of beauty,flowingdown through them into the soul is a kind of copulation at a distance. This is not far from the intercourse of bodies. For it is a novel kind of embrace of bodies.

If theory proposes a materialist account of vision, Achilles Tatius, with sly wit and brilliant manipulation of the possibilities of the technical language of vision and desire, rewrites the penetrating and longing gaze as a kind of copulation. Thus the pleasure of looking is greater than 35

36

F o r a n extended version of the 'seeing the absent lover' motif, but without any such technical langauge, see C h a r i t o n 6.4.5-7. See e.g. Aristophanes Plutus 1022; D e m o s t h e n e s 21.72; a n d Philostratus VS 491 of the

orator.

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ta erga, 'The Business', 'the deed'. The verbs OCVTCCVOCKAUCO - 'reflect' - and dTToiidTTco, 'impress', are technical terms from optics - I will return to &7ro|idTTco in particular later - and the vocabulary of flowing and mixing is familiar from science - the theory of 'emanation' 37 - and from Plato's highly ornate description of the desiring soul (which talks also of the 'emanation', or 'outflowing' (aporroe) 'of beauty through the eyes' (Phaedrus 251b9ff.) and which itself is paralleled in technical physiological discussions back to the fifth century). But this vocabulary is here eroticized as an oozy step on the path to sex. Indeed, looking is called 'almost a mixis\ 'intercourse', and also a auiiirAoKri, 'embrace', which is the usual term in general intellectual discourse for a sexual position. Finally, the eye is called a -npo^svos <|>iAias, 'an ambassador of love', a rather grand gobetween or pimp - as the discourse moves through its science, with a nod to ethical philosophy, towards a more familiar 'ars amatoria'. The theory of the eye here becomes part of a knowingly eroticized discourse, as Achilles Tatius playfully explores the space between the consolations of theory and the performance of erotics. A theory of perception is mobilized as part of the boys' wise talk about how to get the girl. The Hellenistic theory of the expert viewing subject as cultured and articulate commentator on the world of impressions becomes intertwined with and erotically stained by the lovers' play. Not only is looking the height of erotic stimulation, but even (the) theory itself is pretty sexy stuff. Using a theoretical exposition of the physiology of the eye as part of a sly and self-conscious erotic discourse is a strategy used to amusing effect by Heliodorus, some hundred and fifty years later in his novel, the Aethiopika. Calasiris, the tricky Egyptian priest, and prime mover of the plot, is called on to explain why the heroine, Charicleia, has an undiagnosed sickness. (We the readers know that she has seen Theagenes, the hero, parading in a spectacular procession at Delphi and fallen in love, despite her commitment to virginity.) Calasiris, who is also in the know, explains to Charicles, the father, that she may be the victim of the 'evil eye'. When Charicles laughs and expresses surprise that the sophisticated Calasiris believes in such folk theories, the priest responds with a finely nuanced scientific account (3.7.3): 'We are completely enveloped in air, which permeates our bodies by way of our eyes, nostrils, respiratory tract, and other channels, bringing with it, as it enters, various properties from outside, thus engendering in those who take it in an effect corresponding to the properties it introduces.' The poroi ('channels') of the body as a route for infection and circulation are standard in medical theory, as this materialist model of sight draws on a long tradition of 37

The best general introduction to this area is Simon (1988).

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philosophical and physiological writing. This leads to the example of plague which is passed on without bodies touching (3.7.4) to the 'conclusive proof (3.7.5): . . . the genesis of love, which originates from visually perceived objects, which, if you will excuse the metaphor, shoot arrows of passion, swifter than the wind, into the soul by way of the eyes. This is perfectly logical, because, of all our channels of perception, sight is the least static and contains the most heat, and so is more receptive of such emanations; for the spirit which animates it is akin to fire, and so is well suited to absorb the transient and unstable impressions of love.

The language of heat and desire passed through the eyes to the soul recalls not merely Plato's Phaedrus (which I have already cited and is so often a dominant presence in later Greek writing on erotics and vision) but also and more surprisingly, Plutarch. For in his Tabletalk (680cff.), he too offers an explanation of the 'evil eye' which is remarkably similar, indeed has identical phrasing in places. As Matthew Dickie has nicely analysed,38 although scholars have argued whether Heliodorus and Plutarch share a common source or whether Heliodorus is quoting Plutarch, in either case Heliodorus is utilizing a parodic, veiled, and tricky discourse of science for rhetorical and comic effect. Indeed, the layers of quotation, together with the technical language of materialist optics, as well as the standard metaphorical language of desire (marked as metaphorical by the speaker with disingenuous coyness39) signal this passage as a rhetorical tour de force, and one whose design is evident. For Calasiris is here misleading the girl's father prior to her elopement. The parodic quotation - blinding the father with science - plays with the ideas of clear sight and malice (as with the example of the erotic gaze itself), as it is uttered to be misinterpreted. Making visuality visible here is a blind, a device to stop the father seeing what is happening with his daughter, displayed for the reader's knowing pleasure. As the girl falls in love 'at first sight', the desiring eye is given a physiological account that on the one hand grounds this novel's language of art history and tourism (as the Aethiopika traces the lovers' journey to the exotic Ethiopia), and that, on the other hand, plays a role in the narrative of the novel as a lure, a distraction of the father's attention in order to aid the young lovers' elopement. The reader enjoys the trick, but as Calasiris becomes a central figure for the model of reading and interpretation in the novel (as Winkler and Morgan have shown40) the reader (also) becomes set up as the dupe of 38 39

40

Dickie (1991). The implications of oiov are brought out well by Morgan's translation, which I have used here. Winkler (1982); J. Morgan (1982); (1989).

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Heliodorus' scientific and story-telling panache. In Heliodorus, seeing is not merely theory-laden but laden with the history of theory, as the narrative's scenes of viewing, and commentary on viewing, and manipulation of the language of viewing, interrelate. As in Achilles Tatius, the scientific knowledge of how the eye works is fully integral to the ludic and collusive deceptions of erotic narrative.

in We will return to Achilles' lascivious theorizing gaze later, but first I want to look at my second benchmark, a there-or-thereabouts contemporary text, probably from the same city. This is Clement of Alexandria's Protrepticus, a homiletic text which adopts and adapts Greek philosophy via Philo's Jewish allegorizing towards a Christian normative message. Little is known of Clement's life and background, but there is little reason to doubt that he had a conventional and extensive Greek education before converting to Christianity.41 He worked and taught in Alexandria in the last quarter of the second century, where the Christian community, although not large, was beginning to become significant. The Protrepticus is ostensibly and primarily aimed at the educated Greek community of polyglot Alexandria, and it passionately argues against the muthoi and religious practice of the Greek tradition in favour of a Christianity that absorbs and redirects Greek philosophy towards a Christian belief and practice. Chapter 4 of the Protrepticus, with which I will be concerned here, is an extended critique of the practice of idol-worship, and it will lead up to an extraordinary attack on the pagan practices of looking at sexy images. Surprisingly, the obvious point that the Hebrew Bible explicitly bans idolatry is not made until the very end of his case - only after he has formulated an argument in terms that speak more closely to the dominant Greek intellectual tradition, and, indeed, Exodus 20 emerges only as a final confirmation rather than as a starting point for his argument. (This contrasts with several later treatises written within church polemics leading up to iconoclasm which take Exodus as a starting point.42) The chapter opens with a history of art which apophthegmatically makes art the source of sin: eireiS^ f}vdr|a£v f) Texvri, r|0£r|crev f) TTAOCVTI, 'When art flourished, error grew.' This leads into a dismissive account of the human construction of cults and cultic objects, which culminates in an outraged 41 42

See Chadwick (1966); Lilla (1971); Timothy (1973); Dawson (1992) 183-240; Ridings (1995). For this long history, see e.g. Belting (1994); Barasch (1992); Clerk (1915); Finney (1994).

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attack on Hadrian's deification of Antinous, whose very beauty is sullied by such treatment: 'I will recognize beauty, when you have guarded the image in purity; I will reverence beauty when it is a true archetype of the beautiful.' The technical, philosophical language of 'archetype of the beautiful' is conjoined here with a moral outrage at an image which is impure because it is designed 'to celebrate fornication': the very act of recognizing beauty itself is made subject to Clement's moral positioning. This is followed by a lengthier attack on the lifelessness of statues, their materiality. They are senseless and soulless - eyes they have but see not and yet are honoured by people. Even worms and caterpillars, he declares, the lowest of animals, who do not possess all five senses, are better than statues which are perfectly deaf and dumb, and have not a single sense. The implications of this - that statues can be stolen, destroyed and made to look like particular people - are drawn out at length (without engaging in the simple point that Lucian makes - and Dio expounds at length that no sensible person would confuse a real god and a statue43). Thus, ringingly, he concludes his attack on materiality with 'my practice is to tread on earth, not worship it. For it is not right to entrust to soulless objects the hopes of the soul'. At this point, the treatise takes a new turn, as he aims to prove that the lure or attraction of statues is an integral element which raises special problems for a Christian in pagan culture: 'we must approach the statues very closely to prove from their very appearence how error is integral. For the statues are quite clearly impressed (£vcrrro|ji6|jai
See Lucian Hyper ton eikonon (discussed below); Dio Chrysostom 12.46, where he says that 'more inexperienced viewers' (apeiroteroi theatai) take ideas of gods from statues.

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spectators was deceived', -qcjav TGOV OEOCTGOV ai oyeis f)7TaTr||jisvai OTTO

TT\S TExvris. Wrong looking is wrong living. Even if you do not desire statues, honouring them betokens the same error. Worshipping statues is but a weaker form of copulating with them. Art may be praised, he concedes, but only if it does not pass for the truth, does not aim to deceive. For what is at stake in looking is your very soul, the truth of things. How you look is part of your relation to God. Even this bare allowance of some praise for art's skill, however, will turn out to be a foil for a further damning attack on the content of art's imagery. For both painters and poets in representing the sexual transgressions and corrupt behaviour of the divinities of paganism encourage such behaviour in humans. Poetry is the theory, adultery is the practice. So, in words to warm Plato's heart, he quotes the first four lines of Homer's account of Aphrodite's adulterous relationship with Ares, and exclaims: 'Stop your singing, Homer! It teaches adultery. We have refused to lend our ears to fornication!' Because man is a 'living and moving statue' which carries in it the 'image of god', he must not be sullied by such unholy influences. (Note how the language of statues and images here is turned, via its echo of Genesis, to construct a holy materiality for man, to juxtapose to his earlier rejection of the mere materiality of cult statues.) The threat that is in poetry is integral to images too: They throw aside shame and fear, and have their homes decorated with the unnatural lusts of gods. Committed to lewdness, they have decorated their bedrooms with painted tablets, hung up like offerings, since they think licentiousness is piety. As they lie on the bed, while still in a sexual embrace, they fix their gaze on that naked Aphrodite, bound too in a sexual embrace. Accepting the image of femininity, they engrave on their rings the bird, the lover, flapping around Leda, using as a seal the representation of Zeus' licentiousness.

Men look at pictures of naked Aphrodites, bound in a sexual embrace (as she was caught by Hephaestus' nets in the act of adultery), while they are in the very embrace of the sexual act. (Thus a remarkable first-century mirror-cover - itself a significant object both for the dynamics of mimesis and for its associations with desire and decoration - represents a couple making love on a bed, and on the wall of the room there is a picture of a couple making love: the mirror with a scene mirrored by a picture creates a fine mis-en-abime of the interplay of the image and the act in sex, or the role of imaging in sexuality.44) So these images become 'archetypes of 44

From Rome's Capitoline Museum: it is nicely illustrated in Johns (1982) colour plate 35. See also Jacobelli (1995) (pi. 32) who puts it in the context of recently discovered erotic wall decorations in Pompeii. Suetonius' Life of Horace 10 complains that the poet had mirrors in his bedroom for lascivious purposes. Seneca QN 1.16 records the case of Hostius Quadra and his enlarging mirrors used for outrageous sexual pleasures.

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voluptuousness'. The archetype, the seal, the imprint - his language recalls Greek theories of perception as he attacks pagan cultures of display and practices of looking. Indeed, as the following catalogue of corrupt images reaches a climax, he declares that not merely the use of such pictures, but even looking at them is forbidden: TOUTCOV ou |i6vov T^S XP 1!0 "60 ^* TTpos 6e Kcri Tfjs oyecos KCCI TT^S aKoffc auTfjs apivriOTiav KCCTayysAAoiJev. f)Taipr|K£ OJJITV TCC COTOC, TTETropvEUKacriv oi 6<(>0aA|jioi Kai TO KCCIVOTEpov TTpo TT\S OVUTTAOKTIS a i oyeis 0|iTv

We declare that not only the use, but also the sight and the very hearing of these things is to be forgotten. Your ears have fornicated; your eyes have whored; your sight has committed adultery before you have embraced. For Clement, just as for Achilles Tatius, looking is a kind of copulation, a sexual embrace before the act of fornication, a corruption akin to adultery or prostitution. The attraction of art is a seduction towards loss of control: imaginary stimulation is the threat. So, don't look now. Beyond 'use' - either religious45 or sexual - even to look at images of naked bodies is to be dragged towards the pit. Idolatry and sexual error are linked through the error of the eye. Indeed, the conclusion of the argument significantly is that by allowing such images in society you become a mere 'spectator (theates) of virtue, but an athlete in sin'. The spectacular arena of the games becomes a charged metaphor for the failure of selfcontrol in the regime of the visual. Clement's commitment to Greek philosophy as a means of engaging with the educated of Alexandria has been frequently discussed by scholars. 46 This passage is a perfect example of how elements of Greek theorizing on sight are appropriated and adapted towards his Christian moralism for persuasive effect. I want to take one word to show in further detail precisely how such a rhetoric works. I marked &Tro|idTTco, 'impress', as a significant choice of vocabulary in my first passage of Achilles Tatius; 6vocTro|jdTTco, 'impress on' opens Clement's description of statues. Apomatto and ekmatto quite often occur in technical discussions of mimesis*1 but the rarer enapomatto is particularly marked because it is one of the central terms in Zeno the Stoic's definition of phantasia kataleptike.*8

45 46

47

48

On religious use of images see Eisner (1996). Particularly useful are Chadwick (1966) and the more detailed studies of Timothy (1973); Ridings (1995) (with further bibliography) and Lilla (1971). See e.g. the well-known discussions of Phil. VA 6. 19 and Dionysus of Halicarnassus De Im. fr. 3. So too the imagery of wax moulding for artistic construction is familiar, without any necessary Stoic implications or vocabulary, in Latin works: see e.g. Ovid Met. 10.282-6; Statius Ach. 1.332-4. On phantasia kataleptike, see the works cited in note 30 above.

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Zeno the Stoic was one of the founding fathers of Stoicism, and thus an authority for the philosophy which is the lingua franca of the Greek and Roman intellectual world of the Empire. Only fragments of Zeno now survive, and it is always hard to pin down exact wording through the doxographic tradition, but both Diogenes Laertius and Sextus Empiricus offer the following definitions ofphantasia kataleptike: piev, fjv Kprrfjpiov slvai TCOV TrpayiaaTcov <j>acri, TT\V yivo|i£vr|v a m ) KOCT' CCUTO T O UTrdpxov iva7re<j
The cognitive, which the Stoics say is the criterion of things, is that which arises from what is and is stamped and impressed exactly in accordance with what is. (Diogenes Laertius VII.46) KaTaAr)TTTiKTi 5 E EOTIV r\ OCTTO uirdpxovTOS KOCT' CXUTO T O UTrdpxov yi<jfj£vr) KOCI

evanEcrcppa-

A cognitive impression is one which arises from what is and is stamped and impressed exactly in accordance with what is. (Sextus Empiricus VII.247) ou \x\\v ccAAa KCCI ivccneaQpayujiJsvrjv

Koci iuanoijeijayijsvrju

TEXviKcos Ta i8icb|iaTa TCOV (JXDCVTCCOTCOV dua/jdrrrjTai

Tuyxdveiv, iva TrdvTa

. . . KCCI 6V Tpoirov a! 5id TCOV

SaKTuAicov a<|)payT5£S dsi TrdvTas sir' aKpi^es TOUS x a P a K T n p a S evaTTO|idTTOVTai TCO Kripco . . .

Furthermore, its being stamped and impressed, so that all its impressors' peculiarities are stamped on it in a craftsmanlike way ... just as the seals on rings always stamp their markings precisely on the wax ... (Sextus Empiricus VII.252) Phantasia kataleptike is a fundamental element in the Stoic account of perception that explains the process whereby images of the physical world enter the mind of the subject. You will note that enapomatto is conjoined with evaTro(7<|>payi£co, 'to emboss as with a signet ring' - an image which may perhaps lie behind Clement's odd choice of signet rings as a particular example of corrupting representation. 49 Clement's choice of a word particularly associated with Stoic theory is designed to bolster his purchase on an educated audience - a hook. It appropriates the privileged language of Greek education against Greek culture and its visual regime. Now Clement is not the only writer to appropriate this model of perception to a moral argument. Philo, the Jewish writer also from Alexandria, more than a century earlier, offers extensive allegorical readings of the Hebrew bible, and he was so carefully read by Clement that one scholar 49

Although the language of 'sealing' is seen as early as Aristotle (de Mem. 450a32) and remains important in Mnemotechnics, the combination with enapomatto and its place in Zeno's definition gives it new weight in this period. Clement also writes about signet rings at Paed. Ill 59.2-60.1.

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comments that Clement writes as if he had Philo 'on his desk'. 50 Philo repeatedly uses the language of Stoic impressions to explore how meaning is constructed: 'the souls of the young are impressed (evcrrroiJaTToiJievai) with the first indelible imprints (TUTTOUS) of phantasiai\ he writes in typical vein. 51 Particularly relevant, however, is the following passage from his discussion of why pleasure uses its wiles on women to snare man - part of his reading of the Adam and Eve narrative of Genesis {On the Account of the World's Creation A cording to Moses 166): oicc eTocipis KCCI liccAx&S oucra, f)8ovn yAixsToa TUXETV epa<7ToO KCCI dva£r|TeT, 8 1 ' cov TOUTOV ayKiOTpEucrEToa- liaorpoTrEuoucri 8 J CCUTTJ KCCI TOV epcovTa aicjOrjcreis. a s SeAeacracrcc paSicos UTrriydyeTo TOV VOUV, CO TCC <j>avevTa EKTOS

Eiaco

Koni^ouaai

Evac|)payi^6|iEvai,

8iayyeAAoucri

Kai

ETTISEIKVUVTOCI,

Kai T O OJJIOIOV EV£pya£6|ji£vai

TOUS

TUTTOUS

TTCC6OS' Kipco y a p

EKCCOTCOV

EOIKCOS S E ^ T C C I

TCXS 5 i d TCOV ai(70T](7ECOv <j>avTa(jias, a i s T a acoiaaTa KaTaAa|Ji(3dvEi 8 1 ' a u T o O [xr\ 8uvd|JEVos . . .

Pleasure is like a whore and a degenerate, and lusts for a lover and searches for pimps through which she will hook one. The senses are the pimps and ambassadors for her. Pleasure ensnares the senses and she easily leads on the mind. The senses carry, announce, and display what appears outside us inside, impressing the imprints of each thing and produces the corresponding affect. For like wax, it receives the impressions of the senses, by which it apprehends material substance ... The eye was the 'ambassador of love' in Achilles Tatius: here the senses in general are 'the ambassadors of pleasure' for the desiring man. In his attack on pleasure itself as a whore and degenerate, Philo manipulates the same terms that Achilles uses to anticipate and flirt with the pleasures of consummation. The senses receive phantasiai, 'impressions', like wax, they impress like a seal the imprint of objects on the soul: they 'grasp' them katalambanein - the very process of phantasia kataleptike. Philo's passionate distrust of the whore pleasure leads easily to Clement's rejection of visual stimulation, and both assimilate what are primarily Stoic accounts of perception52 to construct a philosophical and physiological base for their ethical normativity. As the Jewish and Christian apologists, writing in Greek in Egypt, attempting to reread the culture of visual display central to classical and Hellenistic societies, they adapt the normative language of philosophical schooling to negotiate a space of engagement with dominant cultural modes. The turn to theory is part of a rhetoric of self-positioning. 50 51

52

R u n i a (1993) 132. See van den H o e k (1988); O s b o r n (1987). Quod omnisprobus 15.5. see also De Post. 165; De Mutatione 212; De Vita Mos. 2.76; De Special 1.47; 2.228; 4.163. H e also uses ensphragizesthai: see e.g. de Ebr. 90. Epicurean theory h a s some similarities of vocabulary, a n d b o t h Epicurean a n d Stoic writers return t o a Platonic register repeatedly.

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Achilles Tatius himself gives an even fuller picture of the Stoicizing sexy look. By book 5 of Leucippe and Cleitophon, our hero Cleitophon thinks he has lost his heroine, beheaded by a pirate. He is being pursued by a wealthy widow who fancies him (although her husband, presumed dead, will also reappear). Cleitophon describes how at dinner she couldn't keep her eyes off him (V.I3): irdvTa 5E E(3A£TTEV k\xk. oOSev y a p f)6u TOTS epcocri TTAT^V TO epcopiEvov TT\V y a p Trdaav 6 spcos KaTaAa|3cbv, OU5E auTfj \6dpav St5cocri TTJ Tpo<|>rj. r\ Sid TCOV 6|i|jidTcov EicrpEoucra TOTS orEpvois EyKaOr|Tai- EAKOUCTO 8E TOU EpcoiiEvou TO ETSCOAOV OCEI, EvaTroiiocTTETai TCO TT\S ^v/xfjs KaTOTTTpco, Kai dvaTrAaTTEi TT\V [xop<pr\v f] 6E TOU KOCAAOUS aTroppori 5i' dc|>avcov aKTivcov ETTI TT\V EpcoTiKT^v sAKO|ji£vr| Kap8iav KOTCO TT|V

She did nothing but gaze at me. To a lover, nothing is as sweet as the beloved. For desire seizes the whole soul and gives no space for eating. Pleasure from the gaze flows through the eyes into the chest and sits there. Drawing up the little image of the beloved constantly, it impresses it in the mirror of the soul, and forms a picture of the shape. The emanation of beauty through invisible rays is drawn into the desiring heart and seals down a shadow image inside it. Desire 'seizes' - katalambanein again - 'the whole soul'. Pleasure from the gaze flows - eisreousa - through the eyes into the chest and sits there. Drawing up the little image - eidolon - it 'impresses it' - enapomattei - in the mirror of the soul, and moulds its shape. The 'emanation' - aporroe - of beauty is drawn into the desiring heart and 'seals down' - enaposphragizein - the shadow image. The hero's reflection on why he likes being doted on by a beautiful woman runs through the full gamut of Stoic materialist vocabulary, as the first-person narrative knowingly plays with the lover's response to his objectification in the gaze of the woman. 53 The same phraseology of Zeno - 'impressing on and sealing down' - is conjoined with other standard terms of materialist physiology - emanation, flowing, moulding, the little image (all familar from Plato especially). Theory here becomes on the one hand part of the narrator's observing distance from the passion of the desiring woman - a neat twist on a Stoic's imperviousness to emotional disturbance. But on the other hand, and more paradoxically, it also becomes part of his flirtatious engagement with her. For his refusal to consummate his relationship leads through heavy petting, to a manage blanc and finally her pleas for wilful adultery in a prison cell. The repeated narrative joke of the narrator's highly theorized response to 53

The references to Stoic theory in these passages have been missed by commentators (and by historians of philosophy, although they give interesting evidence for the diffusion of Stoic ideas in 'non-philosophical' texts).

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erotics will reach its culminating twist when she finds the correct arguments successfully to persuade him to commit adultery, a persuasiveness he duly notes is highly philosophical... as he gives in. The first passage of Achilles Tatius used its theory of vision to reflect on the delays and relays of consummation: this second passage uses its theory to formulate and enforce the delay to consummation. The theory of the look for Achilles Tatius plays a dynamic role in the narrative of deferred bliss and blissful deferral which is the novel's erotic agenda. My two benchmark texts - with a few digressive glosses - have led to four general points with which to conclude the first part of my chapter. First, there is in the second century a considerable production of discourse about the visual specifically with regard to the culture of display and the erotic work of the eye. It is a nexus of theoretical expositions which draws eclectically on different materialist models, and which utilizes terms from the history of the theory of vision from Plato onwards (and Plato, despite his well-known distrust of visual perception is especially often recalled), but which also repeatedly reuses a highly developed and more specifically Stoic vocabulary and paradigm, not least because Stoicism is throughout the period the most evident lingua franca of the philosophical schools in which educated Greeks and Romans studied. (Even when there are four chairs of philosophy in Athens and the different schools claim different professional adherents, it is Stoic vocabulary and 'colouring' which dominate the general intellectual, philosophizing discourse, despite the apparent importance of Epicurean writings in, say, the East.) Where terms such as apomatto or the language of sealing per se may invoke a rather general sense of 'materialist theory', the combination and clustering of rarer technical vocabulary also suggests a more specific and pointed allusivity. Thus Clement and Achilles - and earlier Philo from their very different viewpoints each quote Zeno the Stoic. Jew, Greek, Christian, each in turn cite the same words from the most mainstream philosopher in their different projects. This leads to my second point. Because it is the lingua franca of theory, this model of the eye is manipulated by Christian and Jewish apologists to engage the cultured Greek in a new normative programme - but adapted by the novelist to a quite different erotic agenda. It is not merely that Clement inveighs against the threat of erotic stimulation through the visual and Achilles revels in it, but rather that each fully incorporates the theory of the eye to a narrative argument and makes it fully integral to a self-positioning, an account of the engagement of the desiring subject with the world. How you look, for both Clement and Achilles, is integral to who you are and to the narrating of that self.

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Third, it is fundamental that both Achilles and Clement in different ways are negotiating a space in and against what might be called the dominant culture of Rome and its Empire. Clement, for all that he is a centralfigurein the church hierarchy in Alexandria, speaks for a marginal and aggressive religion that is fighting for monotheistic space in polytheistic multicultural Alexandria (as well as for his Hellenized version of Christianity within the church). As Clement's proselytizing straddles the boundaries of communities, so his prose interweaves different discourses to claim a powerful speaking position. Achilles Tatius whose name appears to combine Greek and Latin forms (but about whose background there is only speculation), revels in the polyphonic possibilities of the bastard and unrecognized genre of the novel, but does not even recognize the Roman Empire, for all that he beats the bounds of the civilized world. This studious silence, I suggest, towards the politics of localism as much as the politics of empire, is typical of a certain cultural politics in Second Sophistic Greek writing - a paradigmatic reaction to the impossibility of writing Thucydidean history now.54 From an outside looking in, the theory of the eye is used to aid speculative admission to, or negotiate space against dominant discursive strategies. Fourth, the very juxtaposition of these two writers from (probably) the same city and date is a convenient sign and symptom of the clash of cultures in this period, and helps focus the question of who has control over the dominant intellectual discourse. While Greek education links elites across the Empire - at very least in the eyes of Greek writers - in such a mixed culture as the major metropolis of Alexandria, or, say, in the further outposts of Empire, the very distance (in all senses) from the centres of power at Rome allows for 'local knowledge' to have a certain autonomy (such as within the church at Alexandria), in the same way as local elites also construct a power base in social terms. It would be too simple to locate dominant discourse (or indeed power) wholly and solely in the imperial palace or in the Senate. What the juxtaposition of Clement and Achilles Tatius may show is how contests around cultural dominance take place not merely within a matrix of dominance and resistance (the imperial gaze, and the subaltern text), but with a more complex dynamic of local and central knowledge, practices of displacement and marginalization, imagined forces and unrecognized collusiveness. There are many, interlocking strategies by which the Empire writes back .. , 55 54

55

See Henderson a n d Gleason above. F o r local histories' often increasingly bizarre historical claims, see Millar (1993); a n d G r u e n (1996) for a particularly interesting early example. See the exemplary studies of Alcock (1993); Woolf (1994) a n d Millar (1993).

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IV

For the second part of this article, I want to develop these four points through some very different textual strategies and authors. I shall begin by travelling briefly round the coast of Africa from Alexandria and Clement's Hellenizing to Carthage and a Christian writing in Latin, namely, Tertullian, who raged and wrote at the very end of the second century shortly after Clement and was eventually excommunicated for his commitment to the Montanist heresy. His Christianity is forged in passionate opposition to the culture of the Roman Empire, and shows a powerful antagonism to its displays and spectacle. Tertullian is often treated as something of an embarrassment: his fierce argumentation, lumpen wit, and vile Latin - not to mention his heresy - have left him with rather an uneasy status amid the fathers of the church.56 But his treatise De Spectaculis - 'On Games', or 'On Spectacles', is a fundamental text for my project, not least for its passionate attempt to redefine the dominant ethos of bread and circuses within the Christian world of the bread of Christ's body and the athletes of chastity. Tertullian attacks the games under the general heading of idolatry, but it is pleasure as much as anything that is the perceived threat. As he says at the beginning of the piece, 'the danger of pleasure more than the danger to life turns people from Christianity'. Tertullian begins by running through the origins, names and religious elements of both gladiatorial games and stage plays, seeing in all of them both idolatry and an unholy commitment to useless and corrupt pleasure. By chapter 14, he claims he has established the charge of idolatry adequately and moves on to other criticisms. The first is the psychological disturbance that comes from being a spectator. To look at the spectacles is to lose one's cool: omne enim spectaculum sine concussione spiritus non est, 'there is no spectacle without violence to the spirit'. Pleasure requires eagerness which requires rivalry from whichflowsmadness, bile, anger - everything which is incompatible with moral discipline. For no one - not even a good man - can escape the lures of pleasure at a spectacle: 'for even if a man enjoys the spectacles in modest and upright manner, in accordance with his dignity, age or nature, still he cannot with a mind unstirred and without some unspoken disturbance of spirit'. The problem is integral not merely to spectacles, however, but to pleasure itself: Nemo ad voluptatem venit sine affectu, nemo affectum sine casibus suis patitur, 'No one has pleasure without affect; no one experiences affect without its own slippage,' its own sense of falling, 56

See e.g. Barnes (1971); Sider (1971). I have learnt in this section throughout from Piers Aitman.

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casibus suis. Indeed, that sense of the fall is integral to the effect, a stimulation to feeling that leads to pleasure. Without that effect there would indeed be no pleasure. For Tertullian, then, it is not the mechanics of the eye, so much as the stimulation to pleasure that makes the spectacular so worrying. Looking is 'mined at the centre with a fall ...' This sense of the fall from control and order is further linked to the nature of representation itself later in the treatise (23): iam vero ipsum opus personarum quaero an deo placeat, qui omnem similitudinem vetat fieri, quanto magis imaginis suae? Non amat falsum auctor veritatis; adulterium est apud ilium omne quod fingitur, 'then this business of masks, I ask if God can be pleased with it, when he forbids the likeness of anything to be made, how much more so his own image. The author of truth does not like the false: everything which is made up is adultery in his sight'. All forms of representation - and he goes on to list not merely actors and pantomimes, but even the scars of a boxer and the performance of a gladiator - by virtue of their fictive quality (fingitur) are a form of adultery in the eyes of God. God is the author of truth, and consequently the Devil is the interpellator - he who makes up and inserts false stories and words in the book of truth. The slides of emotion in being a spectator, and the performative as fictive in the spectacle, together show that, as Tertullian concludes, 'nothing to do with spectacles pleases God'. Up to this point the argument is clear enough. Both the performance and the watching itself make spectacles dangerous. Deceptive mimesis and pleasure are both lures away from the truth. As he writes in the treatise On Veiling Virgins (2.15), 'Seeing and being seen belong to the same lust.' It is a rhetoric aimed at turning the reader from the secular games to the contemplation of Christ's struggles. Accordingly, Tertullian begins to appropriate the language of the games, as he invites and hectors and cajoles the reader to celebrate a different spectacular contest: 'You want fightings and wrestling. Here they are: see impurity thrown down by chastity, perfidy slain by faith, cruelty crushed by pity, impudence shaded by modesty: such are our contests, our crowns of victory. You desire blood: you have the blood of Christ.' But the conclusion of Tertullian's treatise throws the previous twenty-nine chapters into turmoil. For he fully instantiates this idea of 'another spectacle' with a startling and bloodthirsty image of the judgement day. With a set of emotive exclamations, he imagines himself watching the torment of the magistrates who have tormented Christians, now liquefying in Hellfire, and the trembling poets who never expected to stand before Christ instead of Minos: 'And the magistrates who persecuted the name of the lord, liquefying in fiercer flames than they kindled in their rage against the Christians?!... And the poets, trembling before the judgement seat not of Rhadamanthus nor

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Minos but to their surprise of Christ?!' Indeed, he positively revels in and savours the power of his role as spectator: tune xystici contemplandi, non in gymnasiis, sect in igne iaeulati, nisi quod ne tune quidem illos velim visos, ut qui malim ad eos potius conspectum insatiabilem conferre, qui in dominum desaevierunt, Then the athletes have to be watched, tossed not in the gym but in the flames, unless I would not wish to look even then at them, in my desire rather to turn an insatiable gaze rather on those who vented their rage and mockery on the lord.' The gym is a privileged arena of the erotic gaze and of the culture of display, but now there is another show and another form of empassioned viewing. Tertullian is so thrilled with the prospect of the violent suffering of his opponents that he can't decide whether his insatiable gaze at the mockers of God would keep him from the delight of this new way of looking at athletes' physical sufferings. Not for Tertullian Augustine's careful discrimination of hating the sin and not the sinner . . . Tertullian is as wildly excited a spectator of the judgement day as his own portrayal of the baying and gambling crowd at the games. Indeed, he introduces his image with: Quae tune spectaculi latitudo! Quid admirer? Quid rideam? Ubi gaudeam, ubi exultem tot spectans reges . . . , 'What an immensity of spectacle then! What shall I gaze on in wonder? What laugh at? Where shall I rejoice, where exult, when I see so many kings ...'; and sums it all up with ut talia spectes, ut talibus exultes . . . , 'to see such sights, to feel such exultation^! The man who had attacked 'spectacultf because of the dangers of stimulating pleasure, and because of the dangers of spectating itself, here revels in and exults in his own spectating of the violent dismemberment of his enemies. He revels both in the punishment and in his ability to watch and calculate the pleasures of his insatiable gaze. Is not the stern moralist completely undermined by his own attack on the pleasures of the look? Unless it could be argued that Tertullian's extremism performs the dangers of stimulation it inveighs against, as an enacted warning to others - a highly ironic strategy difficult to find in Tertullian's writing elsewhere, and wholly at odds with his express views on acting, it must seem that Tertullian's visual politics lapses into violent self-contradiction. Perhaps the final sentences of the treatise are an attempt to salvage something from what might seem the wreckage of his self-positioning. These visions of hell are 'represented through faith in the spirit's imagining', spiritu imaginante repraesentata. They are 'things which an eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor heart felt. But they bring more joy, more pleasure than stadium or theatre,' ceterum qualia ilia sunt, quae nee oculus vidit nee amis audivit nee in cor hominis ascenderunt? Credo, circo et utraque cavea et omni stadio gratiora. The imagination or vision of hell trumps the mere physical sights of the spectacular and brings a greater joy. The

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imagination, internal viewing, here is set against the physics of the eye in an attempt to privilege the Christian's unflinching moral gaze, and acceptable pleasure. But this from the man who had said 'everything that is made up is adultery in the eyes of God'. It seems as if Tertullian's attempt to construct a philosophically loaded account of why there is an integral danger in the pleasure of looking means that his own pleasure in imagining a different looking can only appear as a paradoxical and contradictory self-positioning. Tertullian's desire to police the regime of the visual in the spectacular world of Carthage leads only to a failure to regulate his own images and imagining. Tertullian has little time for philosophy. 'What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?', he explodes, 'Away with all efforts to produce a mottled Stoic-Platonic-Dialectic Christianity.' 'Where is there any likeness between the Christian and the philosopher?'57 This violent dismissal of Greek culture could not be further from Clement's sly negotiations with cultivated Hellenism. What interests me is not so much the mess that Tertullian gets into when he does slip into philosophically led models of pleasure, nor Tertullian's obvious debt to his pagan training in rhetoric, but rather the way in which both Clement and Tertullian, these two outsiders to dominant culture, find their concerns overlapping around the erotics of the gaze, and its comprehension in models of pleasure and the body. Tertullian, for all his differences from Clement, can't finally keep his Christianity free of a mottling of the Stoic-Platonic-Dialectic. His strong sense of the conflict between himself as Christian and Roman and Greek culture none the less develops surprising nodes of implication. It is here perhaps that we find a most telling indication of the complex dialectic of conflict and appropriation in such writing against the Empire.

I want for my final text to move round the Mediterranean towards Syria, and back about fifty years, to one of the most famous and influential writers of the Second Sophistic from the middle of the second century, with whom I began this chapter, namely, Lucian. His immense popularity in the Renaissance faded through the nineteenth century, as German scholarship linked its mistrust of irony with its mistrust of 'semitic character' effectively to dismiss Lucian the Semite from the most hallowed halls of Hellenism.58 (Scholarship's racism here replays some of the issues 57 58

De Praes. 7.9-12; Apol 46.18. See especially Holzberg (1988), w h o quotes (206) e.g. Geffcken's description of Lucian as 'der ekelhafte Semit', 'disgusting Semite'.

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of power and exclusion, cultural capital and elitism, I have been discussing.) We have seen already Lucian's fragmented voice on the visual (and his engagement with cultural matters in the introduction). His writing is throughout a 'closet of masks', where every self-position is veined with a challenging irony: a philosopher who mocks philosophy, a hired writer who mocks writers who are hired, a master who mocks authority, a scourge of flatterers who writes encomia . . . The late twentieth century inevitably finds him more simpatico. The texts I shall consider now are a pair of dialogues which have often been raided by art historians, but rarely read, the Eikones and Huper Ton Eikonon, the Images and the For the Images. The first is a discussion between Lycinus - a name Lucian often uses, which is a near anagram of Lucian - and Polystratus about a beautiful woman Lycinus has seen, and how one should construct an image of such beauty. The second, For the Images, is an account by Polystratus of the woman's response to such a description of herself, and Lycinus' defence of the representation. From my description, it is clear immediately that the pair of dialogues enacts an agon, a contest around the discourse of imaging and representation which goes to the heart of the role of the visual and the discourse of description in society. Let us begin with the establishment of the scene - the opening of the dialogue. The opening speech of Lycinus and Polystratus' response set us firmly in the world of the cultivated and laddish observers about town, the pepaideumenoi within the social and literary world of a culture of display, and it is worth quoting in full (1): LYCINUS

Upon my word, Polystratus, those who saw the Gorgon must have experienced what I have just experienced, when I saw this amazingly beautiful woman. Just as it says in the myth, I was turned stiff from wonder (-rrETrriycbs UTTO TOU BauiaccTos) and almost became stone rather than human! POLYSTRATUS

Heracles! That is a remarkable spectacle (0Ecc|ja) you are talking of, and a really powerful one, if a mere woman could strike Lycinus from his senses! For you have that experience easily enough with boys, so that it would be quicker to shift Mount Sipylus than to lead you away from your beauties, and keep you from standing open-mouthed and weepy often, just like the daughter of Tantalus. But tell me, who is this petrifying Medusa and where is she from, so that we too can see her. You will not, I think, begrudge me the sight (8eccs), or be jealous, if we join you in being turned stiff (TrapETreTrnyEvai) when we see her!

Lycinus' response to the beautiful woman is immediately framed by myth, and self-consciously marked as such - 'as in the myth' - and by an elaborate and exquisite pathology, which echoes philosophical worries about the lures of emotional disturbance, without, it seems, too much

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of the worry. Indeed, Polystratus responds to his condition with a bantering humour which not only mockingly rehearses Lycinus' normal open-mouthed and weepy fixation before beautiful boys, but also works a set of mythic references into his response to the 'extraordinary spectacle'. The mountain Sipylus was the transformed Niobe, turned to stone because of her tears of grief (not tears of lust) and the second reference to Niobe as the 'daughter of Tantalus' evokes her father's famous punishment also as a model for Lycinus' permanently unsatisifed desire. So, with a third myth, the woman must be a Medusa who turns men to stone by the gaze - and there may be a shared joke about the more obviously physical signs of male arousal in the repeated term pepegosjpepegmenai, 'stiff', 'turned hard'. Lycinus retorts to this bantering by threatening Polystratus with an even worse punishment. For not only would he be struck dumb by the merest glimpse of the beautiful woman, but if she were to look at him, he would be bound and drawn to her like iron to a magnet: 'But if she were to gaze at you, what device could drag you from her? For she will tie you up and lead you where she wants, just as a magnet does to iron.' Plato's image from his Ion of the effect of the emotional poetry performance on an audience - the ironfilingsdrawn shaking towards the magnet - is here in service of an erotic servitude that marks the gaze as the privileged site of reciprocal attachment.59 To be gazed at as much as gazing is the cause here of erotic effect. Both looking and being looked at reduced the eroticized spectator to passivity (the reverse of the often postulated 'empowerment of the gaze') in the field of vision, the scene of the spectacle.60 Polystratus finally requests a stop to 'this imaginative construction of such a praeternatural beauty', and demands her name. Note again the self-conscious comment on what they are doing as the dialogue proceeds. Now it is clear from this opening that we are in the world of the pepaideumenos as observer. The careful working of mythological reference and counter reference, the elaborate bantering of erotic performance, and, 59

60

Ach. Tat. 1.17 uses the example of the magnet for erotic purposes. See Rommel (1923) for other examples of this idea, which interestingly was picked up by Christian writers, notably, Nicetas and Gregory of Nazianzus. 'Since the gaze always emerges for us within the field of vision, and since we ourselves are always being photographed by it even as we look, all binarizations of spectator and spectacle mystify the scopic relations in which we are held': thus Silverman (1994), glossing the celebrated essay of Lacan on the gaze in the Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Lacan's model recognizes a dynamic of seeing oneself being seen and of a hazard of the self in looking in a way which challenges the less complex and nuanced models of looking that trace their roots to Mulvey's influential article of 1976 (Mulvey 1989). Although the physiology, psychology and sociology of Lacan is quite different from that of Lucian, he provides a stimulating counter-text here. For relevant recent discussions of Lacan see Copjec (1994); de Bolla (1996).

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above all, the intellectualized response to a response to beauty, all betoken the self-conscious expression of the educated self. As in the Hellenistic art gallery, the act of seeing becomes a moment for the amused dissection and sophisticated articulation of self. This process will certainly be continued through the dialogue. For Lycinus confesses he does not know her name, but offers to construct a portrait of her from elements abstracted from the sculpture and paintings of the Old Masters. Although he fears with whatever politesse - that he will damage the archetype by his weakness of technique - the rhetoric of the disciplines of art is strongly marked here - he summons the artists of old to help fashion this woman, and Polystratus demands that he 'display the image' (epideixai ten eikona). Like the gods with Pandora, Lycinus will raid the various gifts of loveliness to make up the image of a woman - whose name will finally prove to be Panthea. It will be by handing over 'the images to language', TrccpOCSOVTES TOCS EIKOVCCS TCO Aoycp, that he will proceed - by giving over the visual to language. Now for the purposes of this chapter, I do not wish to rehearse the bestknown and most discussed parts of this dialogue, as Lycinus evokes particular physical details of the woman via traits of famous art works. Rather, I want to make two brief points about the narrative's progression. The first is this: there runs throughout Lycinus' turn to art history a tension between eikon and logos, between 'image' and 'text', that looks back to an extensive tradition following on from Simonides' bon mot that 'pictures are silent poems, and poems speaking pictures' - a phrase that launched a thousand variations on the relative powers of art and language. 61 By Lucian's time, rhetoric has theorized language's ability to make scenes vivid via the category of enargeia, and art history has theorized the ability of imagery to express and provoke emotion and character. This debate is amusingly evoked by Lucian when he seeks to express the woman's complexion. 'For her colour', he says (8), 'we turn to Homer, the best of painters [ypocc|>scov - or "writers"]. She is to be the colour like that Homer gave to the thighs of Menelaus when he likened (eikasas) them to ivory tinged with crimson.' Lucian twists the discussion of the relative powers of art and poetry by choosing for art's especial skill coloration - a poet, whose simile is to be reworked by Lucian's image making. What is she like? She's like Homer's likeness of Menelaus . . . (The boldness of Lucian's formulation is highlighted by, say, Achilles Tatius' more circumspect use of Homer in his description of the Egyptian ox, whose 'colour is like that for which Homer praises the horses of the Thracian [Rhesus]' (2.15.3).) The rhetorician happily appropriates the 61

See Hagstrum (1955); Lee (1967); Praz (1970); Buch (1972). Above pp. 164-7.

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power of the visual to the power and trickery of language. Imaging, here, for all its allusions to art history, is firmly and knowingly verbal. This remains a text about the power of the image. My second point is to mark the joke of the moment at which the woman gets named or recognized, which is played with in a typically witty way by Lucian. The description from art historical masterpieces reaches an end, and Polystratus, who has not yet recognized her, asks what the woman was doing, and this leads to two further tokens which prompt Polystratus' amazed declaration that he knows who the woman is. The first is that she is holding a half-finished book. For the rhetorician and educated viewer - the academic - what better turn on than a woman reading! (She is indeed an eikon given over to logos ...) The second token is an extended description of the woman's teeth] 'When she smiled she revealed her teeth: how can I tell you how white they were, how symmetrical, how well matched!' And after comparing them to a string of pearls and contrasting them to other women's misshapen equivalents he concludes in terms that recall his opening description's combination of thauma and theama, 'wonder' and 'sight' (9): 'all hers show an equal distinction, the same colour, a single size and similarly close together: in short, an incredible wonder and a sight (0aO|ia KCCI OsaiJia) transcending all human loveliness'. A standard problem in Stoic epistemology is if a person walks towards you from a distance, at what point do you know it is a person or a particular person. An idea of partial recognition and delayed identification also finds different literary models in both the Odyssey and Greek tragedy. Here, Lucian toys with the moment of identification as he makes not a scar, not a name, not a shape, but a woman's teeth the telling detail. (It is, incidentally, one part of the dialogue that never gets into the art historians' discussions ...) Polystratus now knows who she is (10): 'Hold still!... It is the emperor's mistress (cruvoucrav), you simpleton, you talk of, the woman who is so celebrated (aoi5i|jov)'. The adjective doiSijaos, 'celebrated', 'famous in song' raises an interesting question for the proprieties of public praise of a woman, which always requires careful monitoring. The mistress is indeed famous (and Polystratus has just heard her praises sung), but aoidimos, although not uncommon in encomia from the fifth century onwards, also occurs only once in Homer - applied by Helen of Troy to herself and Paris (//. 6. 358). Does Helen thus enter the picture of the fantastically beautiful Greek consort of a regal figure here in the East? If so, to what effect? At the end of the piece, Lycinus will praise her precisely because she 'is not beautiful in body alone, like Helen'. The hint of aoidimos may look forward to this appropriation of Helen's beauty to his morally valorized account.

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But her name is not simply given. Rather, Polystratus points out it is the same name as the wife of Abradatas in a novel by Xenophon - a text of nearly five hundred years earlier (10): 'She has the same name as that beautiful wife of Abradatas. You know - you have often heard Xenophon praising her as a good and beautiful woman.' 62 The protocol of not naming a woman in public is nicely observed in this shared literary sophistication. Indeed, in a neat reprise of the thrust and delay of the dialogue so far, Lycinus confesses that he feels he sees her when he reads that book, and almost hears her talking to him out of Xenophon's prose a classic expression of the topos of artistic verisimilitude: Gbcrn-ep ye opcov auTtjv SiccT£dEi|jai, OTTOTOCV KOCT' 6KeIv6 TTOU dvayiyvcocjKcov ysvcoiJiai, Kai IJiovouxi Kai OCKOUCO Aeyouoris a\Jif\s a 7TE7Toir|Tai Aeyoucia . . . , ' I feel

exactly as if I see her when I get to that point in my reading, and I can almost hear her saying what she is described as saying . . . ' So what do you see and hear through Lycinus' rhetoric, now layered with Xenophon? How has Lycinus manipulated the power of language to make a woman visible? How like Xenophon's likeness is she? Have you identified her yet? Although this game with the name marks the stance of the pepaideumenos viewer again, it also raises a new question of the politics of viewing. For what difference does it make that this paragon of beauty is the emperor's girlfriend? That she is the lover of the most powerful figure in the Roman world? It is this question that the remainder of this section will attempt to answer. Polystratus immediately points out that mere physical beauty is only a small part of Panthea's attraction once you know her properly. Her qualities of soul more than match her body's allure. Lycinus, claims Polystratus, has been 'no spectator (atheatos) of the nobleness of her soul', and when asked to display (epideixai) an eikon of her soul, Polystratus brings forth philosophers and poets to 'make apparent the invisible by language', TOC 6c8r|Aa 6|j(|>avicrai TCO Aoycp. So he is persuaded to offer a counter-image to set against Lycinus' description and he proceeds to construct an image of the perfect woman's mind - beginning with her singing voice, which he says is best summed up as 'the sort of voice that could come out of Those Teeth'. The description - which offers testimony to the difficulty of constructing straightforward encomia of women, especially the mistresses of emperors, in Greco-Roman patriarchy, in that it offers as figures exemplary of Panthea's qualities Aspasia, Sappho, Theano, Diotima and 62

The Cyropaideia is especially influential work in the Second Sophistic, see Tatum (1989). It is sometimes argued that Xenophon of Ephesus is named after Xenophon; and the opening of Arrian's Anabasis and the Cynegeticus pay special tribute to Xenophon. For the same device of giving a name by alluding to the name of a famous predecessor of the same name, see Julian Misopogon 352a.

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Nausicaa ... - and comments at length on her admirable negotiation of her position of new power, showing neither pride nor vulgarity nor forgetfulness of her former friends. This encomium prompts Lycinus to comment that the emperor is a blessed man because such a creature lives in his reign and loves him. And Polystratus concludes the dialogue by conceding that by combining the first physical description and the second moral account a true image, inspired by the Muses, has been produced. Part of the delight of this work is its formal playfulness. Although the notion of a prose dialogue of encomium may have roots in the Socratic movement of the fourth century BCE, this seems new and fresh both in the game of fictionalized participants searching for the name of the praised figure, and in the witty manipulation of the term eikon: the dialogue depends on its several senses - image, likeness, picture - in its construction of an image in words drawn out of fragments of pictures and of likenesses to figures of the past. Part of the edge of the dialogue comes from its gradual revelation that the sexy lady being praised is the emperor's Greek mistress - not his wife or his military achievements. There is a certain frisson in the circulation of a representation of a performance of this most delicate celebratory task. Both the delight and the edge are doubled by the further extraordinary formal innovation of writing a second dialogue which records the woman's response to her encomium; as well as a spirited defence of its strategies. The eikon of the woman (which had praised her voice) now gives her a voice - or at least Lucian's representation of Polystratus' account of what she said. And it will end with Polystratus promising to take Lycinus' reply back to her: he worries he will barely be able to recall its outline, and Lycinus asks him to 'play his part with care' - as the mimetic function of social role-playing finds its dominant model in the performance of the actor. Indeed, Polystratus explicitly declares that Lycinus should make his speech as if she were present, and eycb jjn|ir)crojjiai as irpos auT-qv, and 'I will imitate you to her.' Lucian's Polystratus will imitate Lucian's Lycinus, writes Lucian, in defence of images ... The dialogue represents, that is, two figures who are engaged in a play of representation - who talks for whom? - and, tellingly, the central question of the dialogue revolves around the nature of social representation in praise and flattery. For the attack Panthea makes on her encomium depends on a recognition that flattery is a dangerous and false representation, a misleading eikon, image; while Lycinus' defence is that praise depends on an imagery of exaggerated representation, but not for personal gain. In short, how do eikones, the images or representations, of powerful people circulate in society? How are they to be read and manipulated? Cui bonol Let me look at some of the relevant details of this complex game with mimesis and the image. Panthea (in Polystratus' account) immediately

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rejects flattery (TOC KOAOCKIKOC) and marks an extreme of praise as the most embarrassing form of flattery (1): 'praise is only bearable when the person being praised recognizes each thing said as appropriate to himself. What is at stake in the politics of an eikon is that it should be recognized as just like - and not inappropriately beyond - the figure described. People who enjoy flattery, she continues, are like the case of 'an ugly man on whom someone brings and puts a mask, and he prides himself on his beauty' (3). To accept extreme praise is thus like - another eikon - putting on a false mask - the world of staged deception. Above all, she rejects (continues Polystratus) the comparison with Hera and Aphrodite (with which the Eikones ended). Even to be compared with heroines is too much. Thus', comes the conclusion (10), 'while she praises the conceit and the idea of the Images, she did not recognize the likeness . . . so that she absolves you from this honouring and pays her respects to your archetypes and paradigms', Kcci socuTqv ouv TO IJIEV TrAdo-|ioc aou ETTCCIVETV KCCI TT)V imvoiav TCOV EIKOVCOV, |ir| yvcopi^Eiv TT|V 6pioiOTT|Ta

. . . COOTE dc()ir|ai croi TCCUTT|V TT\V

TijiT^v KCCI TTpoCTKuveT cjou TOC ocpxeTUTra Koci Trapa8£iy|jocToc.

Panthea's

comment both praises the writer for his inventiveness and skilful composition {plasma, 'conceit', 'fiction', 'composition' picks up ana/plattein repeatedly used in the first piece for the construction of the eikon) - and also criticizes the earlier dialogue's false praise: the earlier dialogue's claims of 'making you see the woman', its vividness, are attacked because she can't see her own likeness. 'What is to be recognized in the eikon of Panthea?' has become the question. 'What is she like?' has become a politics of representation. Not just 'how to look?', but 'how to articulate looking in an image?'. The proffering of praise has become an exchange about the proprieties of praise. Even Polystratus now joins in this criticism with a typically selfreflexive analogy about looking as he distances himself from his earlier enthusiasm for the eikones (12): TrapoarAr)(7i6v TI ETTOCSOV ol$ ETTI TCOV opcojievcov irdaxoiiev f|v IJIEV Trdvu iyyuOEV CJKOTTCO|i£V Tl KCCI UTTO TCOV 6<()0aA|iCbv CCUTCOV, OUSEV OCKpi^ES 5iayiyVcb(7KO|JEV, f|V SE dTTOOTavTES EK T O O (TU|i|JiETpou 5iacrrr)|JccTos i'5co[i£v, ocTravTcc <7acos KaTC«|>aiv£Tai, TCX £ U KCCI TOC [XT\

I experienced something like we experience in the realm of the visual. If we observe things from quite close up and under our very eyes, we distinguish nothing accurately; but if we stand back and look from a balanced distance, everything appears clearly, what is good and what is not so. This is not merely an analogy to the correct physical positioning before art or before other such objects of the gaze. It is also a question of how closely to read: how is the performance of praise ('what is good and

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what is not so') to be evaluated? What is the correct distance between an observer (praiser) and object (praised)? The analogy with seeing also sketches a question of social dynamics in the scene of hierarchical exchange that is encomium. Lycinus, however, begs the right of reply, and Polystratus (in lines I have already cited) agrees to hear the speech 'as if she were present' and then to take it back and imitate it to her. There are two main threads of Lycinus' apologia. The first concerns the logic of praise. Praise, he claims, depends on a representation that tends towards exalted rhetoric rather than exactitude. It is better praise to say of a dog not that it is bigger than a cat but that it is like a lion in strength (19). Thus, 'do not wonder', he concludes (19), 'that when I wish to make comparisons (eikasai) which an encomiast must, I use somewhat higher examples, since this is what the type of speech dictates'. But this defence is immediately turned to a more ironic and witty self-placement (and reader implication) as he deals with the issue of false praise or flattery (20): 'You mention flattery and that you hate flattery. I praise you for that.' Is that praise flattery? Can the distinction between praise and flattery be maintained? He goes on to assert that praise only exaggerates what is present while flattery lies for selfish reasons, and that since Panthea is beautiful, a comparison with the goddesses is acceptable (22): ou TTOCVU EK TTOAAOU 5iacrrrmaTos TO ToAiirma, 'the venture is not completely beyond the pale' (ek pollou diastematos). Polystratus had claimed that reading or rereading praise required looking from a 'balanced distance' {ek tou summetrou diastematos). Now Lycinus claims that his comparison is acceptable precisely because it is not excessive in its 'distance'. The interplay of social propriety and proper looking has become a contested question of 'distance' between the language of praise and the reception of praise. This leads to his second and more specific defence about comparisons with the divine. He did not, he carefully points out, liken her to goddesses, but to statues - and no one would confuse such man-made objects with the 'true images of the gods which I suppose to be unapproachable by human imitation' (23). But even if he had (the classic sophistic reductio), then a series of poets, led by, in particular, Homer, preceded him. For they constantly talk about 'god-like Odysseus' and use similes from the divine. Similarly, Dio Chrysostom (12) when he imagines Pheidias defending his practice of imaging the gods, constructs an elaborate defence by reference to Homer's comparisons. It is Homer, the cornerstone of Greek paideia, who must be rejected, along with the philosophers, the capstone of Greek paideia, if saying man is in god's image is to be banned from the discourse of cultured exchange. Lycinus' defence is precisely that he has observed

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the proprieties of educated discourse. Proper looking and proper talking are linked through proper eikones - the proper formulation and circulation of images of the self. Yet, typically for Lucian, the dialogue avoids any simple closure. Lycinus says he has 'put the play {to drama) in Polystratus' hands' and 'when they announce the votes of the judges, I will be there in person to see what the outcome (telos) of the agon will be'. A self-reflexive comment, for sure, on the dialogue as a mimesis, and on its ending here as it closes; but by turning his encomium into a scene of an agon, and by withholding finally an answer to the distinction between praise and flattery, and whether it will be accepted by Panthea, Lucian engages the reader in the business of recognizing the complexity of the social positioning of giving and receiving praise. Representation involves self-positioning in the power games of emperors, mistresses and clients. The question of mimesis in an eikon has become the question of self-representation in the world of role-playing that surrounds the court. The discussion of viewing the beautiful woman and what she is like - precisely - has turned to the politics of what is to be said and how it is to be said to promote a cause. In short, how can a cat say he looks at a king's mistress? Lucian, the Syrian who has learnt such urbane Greek, and who writes thus repeatedly about role-playing and the dangers of mimesis and praise, gives us, then, a telling insight into how the regime of the visual becomes fully imbricated in the politics of language and power. The question of mimesis links what you look like to how you represent yourself to how you engage in the pursuit of power - and how images of power circulate in society. 'What did it look like for a Roman emperor to have a Greek mistress?' - Lucian dramatizes the cultural conflicts of that question as an unresolved agon about the proprieties of social exchange. VI The analysis of the second-century texts I have focused on could well be extended, as could the rollcall of significant writers for this project, and its chronological scope. My aim has been to trace a particular line of argument about the connection between erotic viewing, culture and power, through a selection of paradigmatic works, in a period of particular interest. But enough has been shown, I hope, of how writing about the 'stimulated eye' engages a range of Second Sophistic writers in the personal politics of the Empire - and how exploring the twists and turns of this writing about seeing gives a particular and telling perspective on the cultural conflicts of this period - and on modern cultural theory's

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construction of the gaze, so often formulated without taking the history of visuality seriously.63 In Roman culture, spectacular display is a central dynamic of the performance and politics of power. The Greek or African or Syrian intellectual outsider - whether ironically assimilating like Lucian or violently opposed like Tertullian - engages in this politics of visuality through their writing. This is, in Jane Gallop's terminology,64 writing through the visual. Whether sidling up to the emperor's mistress, or screaming defiance at the Roman magistrate, or writing a novel without Rome, or composing Christian apologetics for Greeks in a Roman province, an engagement with the visual becomes also an engagement with the politics of dominance and the politics of culture. In the Second Sophistic, the construction of the subject in the regime of the visual is a central dynamic in the construction of cultural identity. 63 64

Exemplary however are Summers (1987) and Crary (1990), (1994). Gallop (1988).

Visions and revisions of Homer Froma I. Zeitlin

Prologue It is not by chance that I begin this essay with an image of Homer from the Hellenistic period as a essential prologue to what will follow in examining his role and that of his epics in the period of the Second Sophistic. For in this chapter, I will be attempting to do two things in order to understand the remarkable cultural authority of Homer that, starting with Alexandria and the example of the notoriously philhomeric Alexander, expands so broadly over the territories of the known world under the Empire. First and primarily, I want to investigate how Homer fits into a visual culture, by which I do not mean simply any pictures of Homer or of his epics. Rather, I shall be trying to discover how a complex interlocking set of ideas about visual experience and public representation find a surprising but essential focus in Homer - or, more precisely, in the idea of Homer and his heroes. To this end, I will be using three central notions: first, theatricality - the articulation of the visual through the model of the theatre ('the place for looking'), and through the social performances of 'spectatorship', 'acting', and 'imitation'; second, the visual arts - how the construction of images and the scene of viewing constitute a specific intellectual and cultural arena; and, thirdly, what I call 'close encounters', by which I mean both the fashion for tourism to hallowed sites (in this case, focused on Troy), and, even more, particular visionary experiences of a Homeric kind, moments in which second-century intellectuals depict an uncanny sighting of a grand figure of the past, whether at the site of Troy itself or in more fabulistic contexts. This nexus of problems around the visual leads directly also to my second major concern: how such ideas can only be properly understood historically, through the layering of past models and inherited constructions. The newness of the numerous and often conflicting approaches in this second- and third-century (re)vision of Homer is also a bricolage of old fragments, reassorted into a seemingly infinite variety of patterns and 195

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allusions to suit every sort of purpose and attitude, and adapted to different modes of self-display on the part of the speaker. Seeing how these ideas interrelate in the sophisticated and self-reflexive writing of the Second Sophistic will demonstrate just how complex an engagement with Homer is enshrined in these texts, and how difficult it is to comprehend adequately the role of Homer in the construction of Greek cultural identity in the Second Sophistic, whether that 'identity' is defined in ethnic terms or in the more inclusive sense of a paideia that marks its bearers, whoever they may be, as Hellenes. Moreover, beyond his presence at every level of education, starting with the fundamentals of literacy, he is the only figure, in fact, who exceeds the boundaries of a specifically Hellenic identity to attain universal status, even that of quasi-divinity, whose priority in time and prestigious renown are available either for appropriation or refutation by non-Greeks, bent on establishing their own place in the history of civilization. My strategy in the following sections will be to explore these ideas through detailed readings of only a handful of texts - though they will be more than enough to demonstrate the fascinating cultural work of this visioning and revisioning of the bard. After a more general introduction to set the stage (taking 'theatricality' for the most part as a persistent undercurrent in what follows), I shall first be focusing on Dio Chrysostom's Olympic Oration (12) and Lucian's twin discourses {Imagines and Pro Imaginibus) with respect to the visual arts (painting and sculpture). I will then pair his Verae Historiae and Philostratus' Life of Apollonius ofTyana against the background of Roman representations of uncanny visual encounters with Homer, for whom Troy and the bard are essential elements in the construction of their own revisionist history. I will conclude more generally with a look at Philostratus' Heroicus and somefinalobservations. In the interests of integrating such a disparate and extensive amount of material, I will be alluding in advance, when appropriate, to these specific works. Alexander will also thread his way throughout my explorations. Given his notorious passion for Homer, his commanding influence in the dissemination and enhancement of visual culture (as defined above), and his prominence in Second Sophistic texts, he can serve as a unifying point of departure and return. I resort too to suggestive epigrams and other quotations as headings to signpost certain themes in what might seem, at first glance, to be circuitous routes. Finally, many other texts and contexts will be points of call, in what will turn out to be an Odyssean journey around Empire culture, in pursuit of a figure who, claimed by so many cities as their own, remains both absolutely central and yet oddly unlocatable.

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We still listen to the lament of Andromache; we still see Troy laid in ruins from her foundations and the battle toil of Ajax, and Hector bound to the chariot and dragged under the battlements of the town all through the verses (mousan) of Maeonides, the bard whom not one country honours as his own, but all the regions of both continents. Alpheios of Mitylene (AP 9.97) [post-Augustan]

A Hellenistic marble votive relief, signed by a sculptor, Archelaos of Priene, is a remarkable visual witness to the expansion and consolidation of Homer's prestige in the post-classical era (Fig. 1). Found in Italy, but quite certainly from Alexandria, and currently in the British Museum (BM 2191), the piece is dated from the late third to the middle of the second century BCE, and the occasion for its dedication was probably the victory of an unknown poet.1 The relief is roughly divided into three major zones. At the top is a reclining Zeus, with sceptre and eagle, on a mountain peak; the goddess Mnemosyne is at his right, almost at his level. Below these divinities in the same zone are their offspring, the nine Muses, who are shown in a variety of poses, each with her own attribute. One of them accompanies Apollo, who occupies the middle register. Dressed in poet's garb, with kithara and book roll in hand, he seems to be standing in an alcove or shrine, which to judge from the omphalos at his feet, is no doubt Delphi. To the far right and just above the god is the figure, it is presumed, of the unnamed poet, who stands alone on a pedestal, a tripod behind him and a book roll in his hand. In the third and lowest zone, we see a curtained sanctuary where Homer is shown, with sceptre and book roll, seated in majesty on a throne before an altar, surrounded by a number of figures, whose names are inscribed below. Flanked by two small kneeling figures, named Iliad and Odyssey, and with two tiny mice nibbling at his footstool (to signify the Batrachomyomachia), the poet is receiving the sacrifice of a bull in his honour, which is being prepared at the altar at the centre by a small boy, Mythos, and an older girl, Historia. Behind her three other figures approach with hands outstretched in a ritual gesture. The first is Poetry (Poiesis), bearing two torches, followed The most useful discussions of this relief are those of Pinkwart (1965a, 1965b); Webster (1964) 145-7; Pollitt (1986) 15-16; Onians (1979) 103-6; Stewart (1990) 217-18; Brink (1952) 549-52; and most recently, Zanker (1995) 159-62, with up-to-date bibliography. Given limitations of space by comparison to the vastness of the subject, bibliographical references, here and throughout the text, have necessarily been kept to a minimum.

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Fig. 1 Votive relief of a poet in honour of Homer, by the sculptor Archelaos of Priene. c. 150 BCE London, British Museum, 2191.

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by Tragedy and Comedy in appropriate costume. Bringing up the rear is another group offigures,who also pay homage - a small boy named Physis (Nature) glances back at four female figures: Arete (Excellence), Mneme (Mindfulness), Pistis (Trustworthiness), and Sophia (Wisdom). On the other side, standing behind Homer and crowning him is a couple, labelled respectively, Chronos (Time) and Oikoumene (Inhabited World). From their diadems, we infer they are royal sovereigns, whose faces are thought to be cryptoportraits of Ptolemy Philopator and his consort, Arsinoe III, who were known to have set up a temple in honour of Homer.2 Several unusual features deserve mention. First is the hybrid composition of the relief: a mythical landscape depicting the divine sources of poetic inspiration joins with the iconography of a typical votive offering, which enacts the performance of a ritual in honour of a divinity or hero. Second is the high degree of allegory in the lowest register, which relies on the matching of figure to name in the numerous inscriptions. The result is a document that combines word and image to represent an intellectual world, where the personifications of abstract literary qualities are organized into a hierarchy of value and meaning, under the patronage of both gods and rulers. Homer's poetry is served by both Myth and History. The other literary genres, in chronological order, acknowledge their dependence upon the bard, whose authority in turn is founded on the range of moral and intellectual qualities embodied in his poems. A third point of interest lies in the figures of the sovereigns. Their royal character is clear, but by the roles they assume (and the inscriptions they bear), they too enter into the abstract conceptual scheme as both participants in and guarantors of its general message. Time (Chronos) and the Inhabited World (Oikoumene), we may note, are both political and intellectual emblems. The rulers declare their own imperium in time and space, while endorsing the universality and ubiquity of Homer's poetry as an everlasting possession for all. Crowns, sceptres, and book rolls are repeated elements in the composition. The patron royal couple, themselves crowned, crown the bard in turn. But Homer himself bears a sceptre, not unlike the one held by the ultimate sovereign, Zeus, who looks down upon the entire proceedings from his topmost perch. The book roll, however, hallmark of poetic inspiration and literate production, provides the strongest thematic focus; it links together Apollo, one of the Muses, the anonymous poet in his niche, the Ptolemaic king, and finally, Homer himself. Standing on a pedestal, just above Apollo, the poet, we might note, might already be a statue. The 2

Ptolemy Philopator reigned from 220-205 BCE, but the date of the relief may be considerably later, depending on considerations of letter forms and the arrangement of the Muses.

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image might be a replica of the one erected in honour of the victor in a poetic contest. More broadly, perhaps, if Homer is a living god below, the new poet has himself already become a monument. Standing aside from the hierarchical rank as an internal spectator of this miniature world, his spatial vantage point suggests not only the sources of his inspiration but perhaps his own claims to preeminence in the poetic competitions of his time.3 The bookish environment, as has often been noted, suggests the intellectual milieu of Hellenistic Alexandria. J. J. Pollitt observes how the work of art 'combines courtly taste, the politics of royal patronage, and learned didacticism'. Andrew Stewart goes a step further to propose that the 'bicameral structure' of the relief 'actually replicates the institutional fabric of Alexandrian academe itself, with the mythic design of the upper part reflecting the Mouseion and below, the Library (founded by Ptolemy I), depicting its activities of Homeric scholarship and its broader work of collecting and evaluating classical texts.4 To this complex we may add a third foundation, the Homereion, mentioned above, which may even have been the model for the sacred shrine to the epic poet that is shown on the relief. This Homereion, as Aelian (VH 13.22), later describes it, was a temple endowed by its founder, Ptolemy Philopator, with another striking visual tableau. 'Homer was seated in the centre and in a circle around him the ruler arranged figures of all the cities that claimed Homer as their own.' The number of these cities is not given, nor are their names, but among them were most likely Chios, Smyrna, Ios and Argos, all of which are known to have initiated cults of Homer, some attested at least from the fourth century BCE.5 Given the date of its foundation, Alexandria could hardly enter into this competition. Ancient scholarship, however, proposes all sorts of origins for Homer, including other Greek cities, such as Athens, and there are still more exotic claims, both serious and in jest, that Homer was a Chaldean, Syrian, Babylonian, Roman and even an Egyptian.6 But the city could point to Homeric inspiration in its own story of origins that was utterly in keeping with the epic ardour of its founder and sub3

4 5 6

Webster (1964) 146 suggests that the upper register might even refer to the subject itself of the poet's performance, that he 'sang of Zeus, the Muses and Apollo as the inspiration of Homer, who became ubiquitous and immortal, the source of all future poetry and educator of men'. If so, the combination of word and image would take on even greater significance. Pollitt (1986) 16; Stewart (1990) 218. Raddatz (1913) cols. 2190-9. All translations are cited from the Loeb editions, unless otherwise noted. For the most recent and detailed discussion, see Heath (1998).

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sequently served his successors as a source of their own legitimacy. For, as the story goes, Alexander had a nocturnal vision, in which an old man with white hair (presumably Homer) appeared and recited some lines from the Odyssey concerning the island of Pharos {Od. 4.354-5). The king read his dream as an indication of the site for the city that was to bear his name, declaring that 'Homer was not only admirable in other ways, but also a very wise architect' (Plut. Alex. 26.3-5), and he was perhaps imitated by the same Ptolemy, who, if we correctly interpret an epigram on the theme, erected the Homereion in response to a dream of his own.7 In the many ancient sources on the life and career of Alexander, one consistent theme is Alexander's passionate attachment to Homer, from boyhood on, especially with regard to Achilles whom he seems to have consciously chosen as his heroic paradigm and from whom he claimed descent on his mother's side. One of his tutors, Lysimachus, 'was esteemed, not for his refinement, but because he called himself Phoenix, Alexander Achilles, and Philip Peleus' (Plut. Alex. 5.8). A copy of the Iliad, as is often recounted from the earliest sources, accompanied Alexander in his campaigns, as a vademecum of military strategy, and was kept under his pillow, together with his dagger, later to be deposited in the famous chest taken from the Persian king, Darius.8 On numerous occasions, at the site of Troy and elsewhere, he imitates Achilles in gesture, costume and deeds, to the extent that he comes close to virtual reenactments of Iliadic scenes, as though he saw himself as a latter-day Achilles, whose exploits, excellence and fame (kleos) he yearned to rival - and surpass.9 Several anecdotes, in particular, recounted by his later biographers of the Empire, attest to this desire for kleos. He refuses the offer by a native of Troy to view the purported lyre of Paris (whose name, Alexandros, he shared), preferring instead that of Achilles, because this was the instrument 'to which the hero used to sing the glorious deeds of brave men' (Plut. Alex. 15.4). At the tomb of Achilles, according to Arrian, Alexander declares 'the hero blessed for having Homer to proclaim his fame to posterity', a remark quoted to justify Arrian's own declared mission as the bard of Alexander's exploits. 'No other single man performed such remarkable deeds', says Arrian, 'whether in number or magnitude, among either Greeks or barbarians. That, I declare, is why I myself have embarked on 7 8

9

Webster (1964) 144, Epigram 105b most easily available in Page (1942). Plut. Alex. 668D 8.2; Mor. 327f-328a; Pliny HN 7.29.108. Alexander adopted models of other heroes and divinities, but no other, it is believed, exercised the same personal appeal as the role of Achilles. On Alexander and Achilles, I have found the following most useful: Ameling (1988); A. Cohen (1995); A. Stewart (1993), especially, 78-85; Edmunds (1971); and Lane Fox (1973) 59-62. Arr. Anab. 1.12.1; Diod. 17.17e; Plut. Alex 15.7.

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this history, not judging myself unworthy to make Alexander's deeds known to men' (Arr. Anab. 1.12). Alexander, along with the city he founded, provides the indispensable prologue to any consideration of the role of Homer as the touchstone of Hellenic affiliation (and self-identification) in the Hellenistic period and beyond. For Greeks of the Empire, looking back under Roman rule to their cultural heritage, Alexander himself became a favourite topic for sophists, historians and fabulators, and in the significant preoccupation of this era with its classical past, his exploits mark a chronological endpoint with reference to global political power. While details of his mercurial character and striking career are treated from a number of aspects, ranging from biography to imaginary dialogues, from romance to satire,10 he has by now firmly evolved into the very champion of Greek paideia, with Homer as its undisputed heart and core. To him goes the credit for extending Greek civilization to the known borders of the world he conquered, the Oikoumene, as proudly represented in the figure of Ptolemy Philopator's consort, whose portrait adorns the Archelaos relief examined above. And where Alexander went, Homer followed too. Despite the commonplace assertion we often find comparing Homer to scripture, the fact is that Greek culture never developed the notion of a sacred book, whose authority would rely on its status as divine revelation and on its textual claims to unvarying truth. Still, it seems fair to say that if there is one figure who might be said to dominate the field of Greek values and identity, it is Homer and the legacy of his epics. Alexandrian critics strove to fix Homeric texts in canonical form and ushered in the era of learned commentaries. But this philological and exegetical activity is only one, albeit essential, component of a traffic in Homer that lasted until the end of antiquity. Like the numerous cities, who were said to have claimed the poet after his death, each for a different reason, poets, philosophers, allegorists, novelists, historians, satirists and fabulists were intent on appropriating Homer for their own designs. In this industry of the imagination, Homer was available for a whole spectrum of strategies that ran the gamut from transcendent truths, veiled as allegories for mystic initiates, to wicked parodies and mischievous challenges to his authority. Between these extremes of sacralization and denigration, veneration and satire, the single guiding thread is the irreducible significance of Homer for the assertion of Hellenic affiliation, however that slippery term might be defined. In the cultural economy of the Empire, Homer circulated as a kind of common coinage, an acknowledged criterion of self-recognition 10

For the continuing fascination with Alexander in the Second Sophistic and beyond, along with the relevant sources, see G. Anderson (1976b) 171-2, (1986) 182, 193-4, (1989) 145.

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for all those, even non-Greeks, who included themselves in 'a proclaimed communality of paideia, a shared system of reference and expectation'. 11 Dio Chrysostom's visit to Borysthenes by the Black Sea nicely epitomizes this contention. For when reporting a visit to an isolated and sadly reduced Greek community on the margins of the civilized world, he observes that while they can hardly be said to hellenizein, their one link to their origins is the insistence by a local that almost all the inhabitants know Homer by heart (Or. 36.9.30)!12

n I believe that many barbarians who are still more ignorant than those men of India have heard the name of Homer, if nothing more, though they have no clear notion what it signifies, whether animal or vegetable or something else still. (Dio Chrysostom Or 53.8) But when Alexander was civilizing Asia, Homer was common reading, and the children of the Persians, the Susianians, and the Gedrosians learned to chant the tragedies of Sophocles and Euripides. (Plut. De Vit. Alex. 328e) While the seeds of the investment in Homer as the envoy of Hellenic values and exemplar of Greek wisdom can be detected earlier, it is obviously in the face of a vastly expanded and diverse population that the ideological weight of Homeric prestige can exert its pervasive influence. The endless debates, scholarly, poetic and political, about the birthplace of Homer, alluded to above in the sculptural group of the Homereion (and the subject of numerous epigrams) betoken efforts to retrieve genuine information about the past or to accrue merit for rival cities. But they can easily be transmuted into a claim that he belongs everywhere and to everyone: 'the bard whom not one country honours as its own, but all the regions of both continents' (quoted in the epigram at the head of the first section of this essay). For Antipater of Sidon (first century BCE), Homer is the 'herald of the heroes' valour, spokesman of the blessed ones, 11

12

Goldhill, this volume, Introduction, and for Homer especially, see Morgan (1998) 76-7. Isocrates, in the fourth century BCE, offers a preview of what was to become the watchword of later antiquity when he praises Athens, claiming that 'her pupils have become teachers of the rest of the world; and she has brought it about that the title "Hellenes" applied no longer to a race but to a dianoia (intelligence, habit of mind)' (Paneg. 50). For testimonia, early and late, see Verdenius (1970) and North (1952). Knowing Homer by heart is already a theme in late-fourth century BCE, beginning with Xenophon, Symp. 3.5. Dio Chrysostom (Or. 4.39) claims that Alexander too had memorized the whole Iliad and a large part of the Odyssey. More sober evidence suggests a far more limited close knowledge of Homeric texts. On Borysthenes, see also Goldhill (above 158-9) and Whitmarsh (below 288-94).

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a second sun to the life of the Greeks, the light of the Muses', but by the epigram's end, he is also called 'the unaging voice (stoma) of the whole world (/cosmos)' (AP 7.6). We hear some quite remarkable claims of Homer's far-flung reputation during the Second Sophistic, tales, for example, of barbarians who know little or nothing about Hellenic culture, but recognize Homer's name (Dio. Chrys. Or. 53.6; cf. 47.5). It may be a matter of some dispute, serious or otherwise, whether Indians had translated the poet's works into their own tongue, but it is worth pointing out that Homer is the only Greek author mentioned by name in the entire Talmud.13 Homer is a significant figure as well in what might be called the 'culture wars' between competing ethnic groups, each with its own history and each claiming cultural superiority on the basis of greater antiquity. Beginning in the Hellenistic period, Greek intellectuals point to Homer (along with Musaeus and Orpheus) as proof of their entitlement to archetypal wisdom as founders of civilization and masters of paideia. Charges of plagiarism fly back and forth in these disputes, which continue under the Empire, most often by Christian apologists, who as the latest on the scene, have an even greater stake in the outcome.14 The same uncertainty about Homer's biographical data, coupled with the immortality of his fame, can also be deployed to claim his superhuman status. While the epithet, theios (godly) in good Homeric fashion is applied to Homer himself already in the classical period, as, for example, in Aristophanes' Frogs (1034) and elsewhere, the poet is elevated in later times to veritable divinity, as he is indeed on the Archelaos relief. The apotheosis of rulers, introduced in the Hellenistic period, no doubt underlies such hyperbole, but the motive as well is one way of divinizing the glorious past and of asserting dominance in cultural values. Accordingly, Homer is called a child of Heaven, descended from Zeus, or sent down by the Muses.15 One anonymous poet is more circumspect: 'If Homer be a god, let him be honoured as one of the gods; but if again he be not a god, let him be believed to be a god' (AP 16.301). Although Homer may in certain philosophical circles be granted divinity through extensive resort to allegory, or, more accurately, given the status of hierophant (Stoic), prophet (Pythagorean), philosopher (Epicurean), or theologian (Neoplatonist),16 for schoolchildren, who began their education with the study of Homer, the lesson is not in doubt. They are taught from the start to 13 14

15

16

See Lieberman (1950) 105-14. See, for example, Droge (1989); Pepin (1959); Momigliano (1975); and F. M. Young (1997). A variant is that the poems were not composed by him but by a god, Zeus or Apollo or one of the Muses. See, e.g., AP. 16.293, 294, 295, 296. Cumont (1942) 4-8; Lamberton (1986) 22.

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write theos oud' anthropos Homeros (Homer is not a human being but a god), and Homer remains throughout the rest of the Greco-Roman world as the undisputed touchstone of excellence. He is claimed at various times to be the source of all technical, poetic and experiential knowledge, ranging from housekeeping, warfare, statesmanship, medicine, geography and science to literature, philosophy, religion, rhetoric, psychology, ethics and all the arts.17 These ideas (and others) were inculcated at greater or lesser degree from the first learning of letters to the higher stages of instruction, up through advanced training in the rhetorical schools.18 This all too brief introduction scarcely touches the surface of the vast and variegated fabric of Hellenistic and Greco-Roman antiquity through which Homeric references are interwoven, in virtually every guise and under innumerable circumstances. Even Felix Buffiere, whose magisterial work, Les mythes d'Homere, is the most wide-ranging compendium of sources, is compelled to admit that he too can never hope to tell the whole story. There are numerous studies of individual authors or texts, such as Lucian, Maximus of Tyre, Aelius Aristides, Dio Chrysostom, and epigrams of the Greek Anthology, which attempt to collect, categorize, and characterize the many allusions to Homer, along with more general studies of Hellenism in the later Greek world.19 My aim, however, is far more limited. It is one that seeks to situate the poet and his work in the context of the expanding visual culture that is the hallmark of the postclassical era. Homer, I will argue, as verbal artist, authority on the gods, and repository of traditional themes and images, has a special, although obviously not exclusive, place in such a scheme, which includes not just the arts themselves but also other modes of 'seeing' in a range of encounters with the past. If I approached Homer at the beginning of this essay through the visual properties of the Archelaos relief, its home in the city of Alexandria, and the figure of Alexander himself, I did so, first, to set the stage for the new diversified and diffuse world in which the epic poet, now an exportable commodity beyond the earlier confines of Greek territory, becomes the persistent model and reliable point of reference for Hellenic culture, along with Alexander himself. As Graham Anderson remarks with regard to the Second Sophistic, 'like Homer, Alexander presented a cultural canvas

17

18

19

On Homer's comprehensiveness, see, for example, Plat. Ion 531c-d, Dio Chrys. Or 12.68, [Plut.] De Vit. Et Poes. Horn. 63 and 74 ff., Quint. Inst. 10.46-51, Max.Tyr. Or. 26.1. On Homer's importance in the educational system of both Greece and Rome, see the still valuable work of Marrou (1956) and also Hamdi-Ibrahim (1976-7), Cribiore (1996), and Morgan (1998). Buffiere (1973); Kindstrand (1973); Bouquiaux-Simon (1968); and Skiadas (1965).

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which could be applied in any situation; an assured place in periegesis and romantic archaeology'.20 The grandiose Aelius Aristides (second century CE) could claim that in a dream he saw at Pergamum a joint monument for himself and Alexander: 'I rejoiced and reckoned that we both had reached the top of our professions, he in military, and I in oratorical power (Hier. Log. 448-9). At the same time, he aspired even higher, as an epigram on a portrait of him declares: 'Aristides put an end to the ancient quarrel that the cities of Ionia had about Homer's parentage. For they all say, "it was Smyrna who gave birth to divine Homer, even she who bore likewise the rhetor Aristeides"' (AP 16.320). In the current frame of inquiry, however, Alexander is even more significant in his remarkable preoccupation with revisiting, reviving, and above all, revisioning a glorious past through his own personal taste and innovations. He serves, in fact, as a preview of (and model for) what is to follow in his particular interest in the resources of what I have called visual culture. Alexander's exploits as a replay in his mind of his beloved Homeric heroes marks him as the herald of Greek paideia itself, the first, pepaideumenos, one might say, the prototype of the cultivated man, whose learning, taste and refinement were so highly prized in the period of the Second Sophistic, not least as exemplified in the sophists themselves. Plutarch characterizes him as philologos and philanagnostes by nature, who not only was devoted to Homer, philhomeros, as Strabo had put it (Geog. 13.127), but, when in the field deep in Asia, requested a number of books by other authors to be sent to him (Plut. Alex. 8.2). The fashioning of his own image in various heroic and divine moulds shows him a consummate performer, even impersonator, not just of Achilles, but notably, also of Heracles and Dionysus and various others.21 His motives were, no doubt, largely political and reflected his charismatic ambitions, but the biographical tradition suggests again and again how deeply he had internalized the texts he so loved, a point elaborated in his later biographers of the imperial period, when Plutarch, for example, declares that at Troy, he could engage his visual imagination to 'form a mental picture for himself of the heroic deeds which had once taken place there (anatupoumenos tas heroikas praxeis; Plut. Mor. 33Id).22 Moreover, he was the 20 21

22

A n d e r s o n (1989) 145. A t various times, he also dressed as an Egyptian p h a r a o h , a Persian king, (in imitation of Darius), a n d is said to have d o n n e d a n u m b e r of different costumes at dinner parties. In addition to Heracles a n d a Persian potentate, reports include Artemis, H e r m e s a n d A m m o n . F o r the relevant texts, see Stewart (1993) 3 5 0 - 7 . Anatupoo, to describe or represent, a n d in the middle voice, to form a n mental picture, is a term n o t in use before the literature of the Empire. Its coinage is closely tied to the growing interest in the faculties of the imagination (phantasia) a n d reflects the age-old notion t o o that the m i n d is ' s t a m p e d ' or 'inscribed' like a n artefact.

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first, it seems, to preside over the manufacture of his image in the visual arts. He is alleged to have issued an edict forbidding anyone else but the painter Apelles and the sculptor Lysippus to fashion his portraits, with the addition of a gem cutter Pyrgoteles in later tradition.23 In his lifetime and thereafter he is the figure who inspired a multitude of other art works. Many of these would be unknown to us, were it not for the detailed observations of Pliny and Plutarch, along with others, probably invented by their authors, for whom descriptions of works of art, whether real or fictitious, constituted compelling evidence of their rhetorical virtuosity. While images of Alexander assume a number of poses and are equipped with various symbols of power, he himself seemed to have cultivated a resemblance to Achillean iconography through his blond hair, aquiline nose, leonine stance, and beardless countenance.24 It seems entirely fitting, therefore, that so many centuries later in Philostratus' account of the life of Apollonius of Tyana, the site for the sage's famous discussion of painting and phantasia should be conducted in full view of a remarkable work of art in a temple in India, dedicated long ago by Porus, Alexander's Indian associate, in honour of their joint exploits. It is just as fitting that the work's combination of metalwork and painting should evoke the comparison to the 'work of Hephaestus upon the shield of Achilles, as revealed in Homer', yet at the same time be described as executed in a 'respectable style of art resembling that of Zeuxis or Polygnotus and Euphranor, who delighted in light and shade and infused life into their designs, as well as a sense of depth and relief (Phil. VA 2.20, 22).

in The surgeon Apollonides dreamed that he was playing scenes drawn from Homer and wounded many people ... Actors of such scenes no doubt wound and cause blood to flow, but they certainly do not wish to kill. The same goes for the surgeon. (Artemidorus, Oneirokritika 4.2.244-6) For convenience's sake, what I have been calling visual culture might be classified into three major categories. Each has a part to play in the growing desire to see, to make visible, either as spectators or performers, and thereby in some way to repossess - even reactualize - in a new age the heritage of a long-vanished past. The first consists of role-playing and a heightened sense of theatre, whether manifested in actual dramatic 23 24

Cic. Ep. adfam. 5.12.7, Hor. Ep. 2.1.232-44, Plin. HN 7.125; 35.85; 37.8, Plut. Alex. 4.1, Apul. Flor. 1. Ameling (1988) 670.

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performances, elaborate processions, tableaux vivants, skenographic effects, or, for example, through the later histrionics of sophists before enthusiastic audiences.25 To this category we might also add a staple of rhetorical training called prosopopoeia, a kind of impersonation or creative mimetism, which involved the composition of imaginary speeches or scenes in keeping with the presumed character of long-vanished figures of both history and myth.26 Next are the visual arts themselves, including painting, sculpture, mosaics, gems, decorative reliefs, architecture, etc. as well as descriptions (or ecphraseis) of such artefacts. My third rubric involves some form of 'direct encounter with the past', sacred or not, whether through dreams, fictitious journeys to the world beyond, actual visits to historical sites (e.g. Troy), or other 'sightings' of mythical figures (e.g. Achilles or Odysseus).27 These categories are not, to be sure, entirely exclusive of one another. In particular, one noteworthy hallmark of Hellenistic style that persists throughout the rest of antiquity, is what J. J. Pollitt calls the 'theatrical mentality', a cultural pattern of framing experience that is manifested not just in material culture, such as in styles of architecture, portraiture, sculptural groups and house decoration, but also in the frequent literary metaphors that may be used to heighten emotion, animate the reader's experience, or even view life itself as a drama.28 The taste for arrangements of personified figures in art, such as we saw on the Archelaos relief, is evident, for example, in the sculptural group in the Homereion, which, we may recall, depicted Homer surrounded by images representing the cities who claimed him. This type of dramatic mise-en-scene recurs in a similar iconographical scheme, this time in the Serapeion at Memphis, in which a dozen over life-size portrait statues formed a semi-circle around Homer, this time representing poets and intellectuals of different eras, 25

26

27

28

Branham (1989) 3, puts the matter succinctly: 'The sophist's act as described by Philostratus [in the VS], would involve reminiscence, by impersonation or evocative description, of legendary figures, places, or events and acutely conscious of itself as theatre, complete with dramatic entrances, flamboyant dress, interpretive gesturing, careful modulation of voice, and a shrewd sense of audience's expectation.' An important subset of prosopopeia is called eidolopoiia, which consists in a dramatic personification either of abstract notions or of characters who are absent, far away, or dead. See the discussion in Manieri (1998) 82-4. Anderson (1989) 138-9 recognizes the significance of such rhetorical progymnasmata that use theatrical evocation framed in highly visual imagery, calling 'the technique a kind of verbal necromancy', along with rhetorical apostrophes to the dead, as though they were in one's very presence. In fact, the entire rhetorical education 'tended to foster a mimetic faculty' of this kind. See too Onians (1980) 15. One might also include the numerous epigrams that directly address great figures of the past in myth as in history (sometimes also through their statues or commemorative monuments). Pollitt (1986) 4-7. On the 'drama of life', see Kolakis (1960).

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possibly along with members of the ruling family.29 One feature of the breathtaking decor of the festival pavilion of Ptolemy goes still further in the direction of an imagined cast of characters on stage. As reported by Athenaeus {Deipn. 196a), who is quoting an earlier source verbatim, we learn that in addition to a hundred marble statues by the best artists, the pavilion included recesses, where 'figures, who represented characters from tragic, comic and satyric drama, were arranged to face one another as if in a drinking party', and, if this were not enough to suggest the illusion of an actual symposium, 'the draped garments on them were real'. The pavilion was built at the time of the famous Ptolemaic procession in honour of Dionysus (276 BCE), also known to us from Athenaeus {Deipn. 197c). Combining 'elements of an Egyptian harvest festival, a Greek theatrical festival and a political parade'30 the spectacle, among other dazzling features, far too numerous to mention, brought on live actors as personified figures in fully symbolic costume (morning and evening stars, the seasons, the year) along with floats representing mythological tableaux and functioning automata, including, we might add, not one, but two gold statues of Alexander in the sculptural company of his royal successors, as though signifying political continuity and legitimate succession. Several other innovations, which specifically focus on Homer, involve extravagant visual experiments. One example is the ship of Hieron II of Syracuse (c. 265-215 BCE), later given as a gift to one of the Ptolemies, which among other lavish decorations on the furniture, ceilings and doors, boasted a mosaic floor 'in which the whole story of the Iliad was represented in marvellous fashion' (Ath. Deipn. 207cn°.). A second novelty consisted of the so-called 'Homeric bowls', whose Alexandrian originals, probably in silver (dated after 200 BCE), depicted scenes in relief illustrating episodes from Homer and other poems of the epic cycle (along with scenes from drama, mainly Euripides). Unlike Attic vase painting, which selected certain epic scenes and figures for representation, sometimes with identifying inscriptions, the surviving bowls for the first time offer distinct illustrations of sequential scenes from epic texts, often accompanied by relevant quotations. It is likely that they belonged to a much larger set or sets, which aimed to provide its users with an erudite 29

30

D a t i n g from the later second or early first century B C E , the m o n u m e n t in M e m p h i s was renovated in later antiquity a n d is thought to have included the figures of Pindar, Demetrius of Phaleron, Orpheus, Hesiod, Protagoras, Thales, Heracleitus, a n d Plato, as well as members of the ruling Ptolemaic family. T h e Serapeion in Alexandria might also have contained a similar g r o u p a n d we k n o w one early Hellenistic painting at least that depicted a similar subject. See further Z a n k e r (1995) 172 and bibliography. Pollitt (1983) 36.

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compendium or a convenient aide-memoire at symposia 'produced for the edification and pleasure of the Ptolemaic court'.31 Both cases suggest a new demand (and need) for a comprehensiveness, either in a synoptic overview, in the case of the mosaic, or through continuous narrative. Whether or not we accept Kurt Weitzmann's theory that the inspiration for the bowls derived from illustrated papyrus rolls,32 perhaps now coming into vogue, the combination of word and image, as John Onians suggests, points to the 'growing use of the representational arts as a means of communication equivalent to the spoken or written word'.33 Finally, there is the introduction of Homer (probably by Demetrius of Phaleron) into the theatre at Alexandria through performers called Homeristai. Unlike earlier rhapsodic performers, whose mimetic virtuosity we know, for example from Plato's Ion, these dramatic presenters, dressed in appropriate costumes and equipped with the essential props, brought Homeric scenes vividly to life on stage before enthusiastic audiences. These performances continued under the Empire to increasing popularity.34 More generally, the activity of spectatorship itself is thematized, again with an increase in focus, detail and expansiveness of style. Theocritus' Idyll 15, which turns on two women's visit in Alexandria to the pageant and ceremonies in honour of Adonis, and Herodas' Mime 6, reporting two women's visit to a sanctuary of Asclepius (probably in Cos) which contained a collection of statuary, paintings and other votive objects, are elegant vignettes that record the viewers' reactions to the objects meticulously described. While there are precedents in earlier dramatic literature (satyr play, tragedy and probably mime) and like them, these Hellenistic spectators are presented as naive viewers on a day's outing, the differences are striking, not just in tonality, but in their status as independent pieces, whose major point is a little genre scene, characteristic of the newer kinds of literature.35 31

32 33 34

35

H a u s m a n n (1959) 19-22. See also Webster (1964) 1 4 7 - 5 3 ; Pollitt (1986) 2 0 1 - 2 , with further bibliography. W e k n o w these bowls t h r o u g h M e g a r i a n replicas in terracotta, found in Boeotia. Of the sixty surviving specimens, half come from H o m e r a n d the epic cycle. T h e famous Iliac Tablets of R o m a n provenance (probably first century C E ) also represented in miniature a n u m b e r of scenes from the Trojan cycles inscribed with extensive quotations. See esp. Sadurska (1964); Horsfall (1979); a n d Rouveret (1989) 3 5 4 - 6 9 . Incidentally, these small tablets were found at Bovillae outside R o m e , the same place in which the Archelaos relief was discovered. W e i t z m a n n (1947). Onians (1979) 106. Attested in Petronius (Sat. 59), Athenaeus (Deipn. 14.262b), Artemidorus (Onir. 4.2), a n d Achilles Tatius (3.20.4), along with papyrological references from the second a n d third centuries C E . See H u s s o n (1993) a n d N a g y (1996) 159-82. F o r the Attic stage, see Zeitlin (1994) 138-96; on these Hellenistic examples, see Goldhill (1994) 2 1 6 - 2 3 .

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By the time of the Second Sophistic, when under the influence of the rhetorical schools, ecphrasis becomes a highly developed exercise and the contest between word and image is a prized occasion for verbal pyrotechnics, the emphasis shifts in the opposite direction to the pepaideumenos, who uses descriptions of works of art as a means of both instruction and display, as, for example, in Philostratus' Imagines, in which the framing device is precisely the sophist in the role of expert tutor to a group of naive youths in a gallery of paintings. Now the cultivated man is expected to give proof in words of his aesthetic appreciation and skill in the interpretation of visual codes. Along with evidence of his knowledge of the mythological repertory and classics of the literary canon, his aim is to engender in his audience an emotional and cognitive response similar to his own. Lucian's de Domo, supposedly delivered as a speech in the magnificent house he is describing, is a prime case in point. In its artful and subtle arguments as well as in its description of the house ('the greatness of its size, the splendour of its beauty, the brilliance of its illuminations, the lustre of its gilding, and the exuberance of its pictures'), this piece is a virtual prooftext of the passion for viewing and the passion for ecphrasis that so grips the writers of the imperial age. Yet if the sophist, whose stock in trade is eloquence, proudly separates himself and those like him from the hoi polloi, who cannot, like him and others like him, respond to the paintings by commenting on 'the exactness of their technique and the combination of antiquarian interest in their objects' (21), Lucian does not limit aesthetic admiration to the cultural elite alone. Indeed, the great common denominator of Greco-Roman culture was precisely the availability of spectacle and every sort of visual ostentation for the delectation (and enlightenment) of an entire public as a shared code of communication across economic, linguistic and regional boundaries. The rampant visual culture of Hellenistic and later antiquity served a number of general purposes, at whatever social level the spectator might be. It advertised the power of the rulers, enhanced the status of the elite, lent heightened visual energy to religious cult, memorialized the dead, or sustained in new and often composite forms the heritage of the past through the circulation and accumulation of themes and images (increasingly reduced to a standard repertoire).36 In this culture, both the museum and library now have their place as hallowed repositories of cultural treasures and images. The Elder Pliny gives an important description of the latter:

36

See, for example, the copious material in Chevallier (1991) and for a recent and sophisticated treatment, see Eisner (1999).

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We should not pass over a recent invention, in that likenesses made, if not of gold or silver, yet at all events of bronze are set up in the libraries in honour of those whose immortal spirits speak (loquuntur) to us in the same places. Furthermore, those whose portraits we don't have are represented by the imagination (finguntur) and a sense of regret engenders features that have not come down to us by tradition, as occurs in the case of Homer. Thus, in my personal opinion, there is no greater proof of felicity than this that all people always want to know what a human being looked like. Pliny attributes the origins of this practice at Rome to Asinius Polio, 'who first by founding a library made works of genius the property of the public (in the 30s BCE), although the likely pioneers, he supposes, were the kings of Alexandria and Pergamum, who each strove to outdo the other in founding libraries (HN 35.2.9-11). There is much of interest in this passage. But for our purposes I will focus on a few crucial details. First, the library is not conceived so much as a place for reading books (which, of course, it was), but rather a privileged location where one might commune with 'the immortal spirits' of their authors, who speak to us. Even taking account of the fact that the act of reading was normally conducted viva voce, there is a notable leap between envoicing the words of others and the claim that these others can actually speak. Second is the fabrication of their images, motivated by the desire to see their features, despite the fact that their faces can only be represented through the imaginative skill of the artist. Homer, we might note, is the only poet mentioned by name. He is the most famous, to be sure, but because he is also the furthest removed in time, no one could presume that a true likeness of him might have been transmitted to posterity. 37 Hence he can serve as the best (and most familiar) example. In this instance these two ideas are intertwined. The voiced words of dead authors which we can hear and the tangible representations of their faces which we can see might suggest an uncanny meeting between the present and the past, an encounter that brings the dead back to life, as it were, in our very presence. At the same time, it is acknowledged that these visages can only appear before us as sculptured objects fashioned by the power of the imagination, phantasia (or visio), we might say, rather than as copies of a model in the spirit of mimesis (or imitatio). Only in this way can we come to know these hallowed figures of bygone days, since portraits display more than outward characteristics, but when properly executed, can give us a glimpse of the entire person. Portraiture is, of course, one of the major developments of the Hellenistic period, which placed a high priority on individual likeness as well 37

On the various portrait types of Homer, their diffusion, and popularity, see Zanker (1995) s.v. Homer.

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as on forms of self-representation, in addition to the promotion of ideal (and composite) types. I spoke earlier of Alexander's careful management of his various images, which was to have a profound effect on future styles and tastes, and the trend in portraiture develops to an even greater extent in a number of interesting ways. The science of physiognomies under the Empire also supports the significance of 'reading faces' for the information about inner character and vital essence, an aim already adumbrated in Xenophon's fourth-century account of Socrates' encounter with a painter, sculptor, and armourer. Socrates leads the sculptor to acknowledge that his art ought not just be an exercise in creating a superficial resemblance, but must portray inner emotion as well, and even more, he must represent in his figures 'the activities of the soul' (Xen. Mem. 3.10.8). It was the task of the rhetorician to convey in words the description of persons, verbal portraits, if you will, and it is a noteworthy fact that in the age of the Second Sophistic, the vogue for elaborate depiction of every kind seems to increase in sheer length and extent of detail.38 The younger Philostratus (third century CE) in his prooimion to his collection of imaginary ecphrases which are inspired by his grandfather's example, insists that the 'true master of the art of painting must have a good knowledge of human nature, he must be able to discern the signs of men's character even when they are silent, and what is revealed in the state of the cheeks and the expression of the eyes and the character of his eyebrows ... and whatever has to do with the mind. If proficient in these matters he will grasp every trait and his hand will successfully interpret the individual story of each person ... and will paint in each case the appropriate traits'. And he continues more generally (with Gorgias obviously in mind): 'And the deception (apate) inherent in the artist's work is pleasurable and involves no reproach; for to confront objects which do not exist as though they existed and to be influenced by them, to believe that they do exist, is not this, since no harm can come of it, a suitable and blameless means of beguilement (psychagogia; Phil. Iun. Imag. 391k). Description of bygone figures is also an important element in the Heroicus of the elder Philostratus (probably of the early third century CE and probably the same man to whom his grandson refers). It is a dialogue between a Phoenician merchant and a local vinegrower, who has a curiously close relationship with the hero Protesilaus, the first to die at Troy 38

Onians (1980) and further in (1999) 256-77, argues ingeniously that the increasing fondness for description is in direct contrast to a decreasing naturalism in art, a tendency he attributes to the rhetorical education that trained the mimetic faculty of the imagination and insisted on more and more elaboration in the encomiastic genres. His examples, however, are too selective and the links he proposes between rhetoric, perception, and the actual production of art are too abstract to be convincing.

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at the moment when the Greeks disembarked on the shore. Protesilaus appears to this fellow in the Thracian Chersonese on a regular basis as companion and guide, instructing him in the fine points of farming, medicine, moral precepts and much else beside, including intimate knowledge of the other Homeric heroes and the whole saga of Troy, both before and after. The Phoenician stranger wants the vinegrower to show them to him and describe exactly how they looked (e.g. Her. 10.1; 10.5; 33.38). To oblige him, the vinegrower reels off descriptions of a long list of heroes, both Greek and Trojan, including details of their hair, ears, eyes, shape and size of body, style of clothing and armour, etc., as well as anecdotes and other information about them. The portrait of Protesilaus is a fine example of this style: I suppose he is about twenty years old. A light down grows on his chin (as suits the age at which he went to Troy) and he smells sweeter than myrtle in the fall. He puts on his face a bright expression, because he loves a cheerful disposition, when things are serious he looks alert and intense, but if I find him relaxed, his eyes are amazingly charming and friendly. His hair is blond and of moderate length; it seems to overhang his forehead rather than cover it. His nose is angular, just like a statue's. His voice carries farther than trumpets, although his mouth is small. He looks handsome nude, for he is well proportioned and graceful, like the statues one sees at race-courses ... and just as the statue, he wears a soldier's mantle as they do in Thessaly; it is purple, the colour of the gods ... (10.1-4)

While this text seems to instantiate the later aesthetic theory of the younger Philostratus in his Imagines, once again there is an important distinction between these two examples. The Heroicus purports to give an account of actual face-to-face encounters with a hero from the world beyond (Protesilaus), who serves as an impeccable authority for the authenticity of his descriptions. The ghosts of the past, in this rendering, are thought to return in material form and hover about the scenes of their former heroic existence, now endowed with the oracular prescience and power granted to those of the elite who have departed this life. In this fictitious work, we may note that the author's efforts to give an accurate picture of these figures often, as here, rely on comparison with statues, which he knows his interlocutor has seen. In this sense, therefore, the visual image has as much to do with the formation of mental pictures as the fact that statues' claims to verisimilitude are based on the degree to which they are convincing imitations of real models. Nevertheless, figurative art is here primarily a point of reference to enhance the sense of a vivid reality, whereas the younger Philostratus stresses the inventive skill of the artist, his praiseworthy apate, 'to confront objects which do not exist as though they existed ... and to believe that they do exist' - a skill

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which places him on the same par as the best poets and most successful rhetoricians. Even if both texts are products of consummate verbal practitioners and both satisfy the desire of sophisticated auditors - both external and internal addressees - to see with their own eyes what they can only hear, the two are by no means commensurate. The Imagines of the younger Philostratus (and even more, those of his grandfather) are ecphrastic specimens of paintings, whose vividness of description may tease us with the uncanny possibility that the spectator might indeed cross the boundary between the imaginary and the real, to enter into the space of the painting, and conversely, to animate the immobile figures there into active and lively presences. The operative principle here is the power of aesthetic representation and the sources of that power through the growing development of (and theorizing about) the faculty of the imagination (phantasia), or perhaps more accurately, what J. J. Pollitt defines as 'intuitive insight'.39 This faculty is shared by artist and spectator alike, and it is one that insists on a growing parity, not just between words and images, but between the wisdom of the poet and the same quality now attributed to the producer of images.40 The premises of the Heroicus, however, bring us to another aspect, especially prominent in later antiquity, which Robin Lane Fox felicitously calls 'close encounters', by which individuals can experience proximity, even intimacy, with figures from the bygone past or with the gods themselves, not infrequently through association with their statues.41 These encounters, which can even be termed 'epiphanies' are shared by all strata of society, the humble and the lofty. They may take place in dreams or daytime reveries; they can occur at particular sites where those figures formerly walked or where their cults or tombs are located and their statues may be credited with supernatural activity. The religious aspect of these 'sightings' as visually intense forms of communication is augmented by beliefs, current in this age, in daimones, intermediate between gods and mortals, and combining both popular ideas and philosophical speculations. These immortal beings maintain influence over human affairs, and can either intercede for mortals or punish them

39

40

41

Pollitt (1974) 53: 'The word implies not simply fabricating something in the mind but actually "seeing" something that is not perceptible to the senses.' On the new concept of the artist's sophia in the first and second centuries CE, see Rispoli (1985) and Maffei (1991). On phantasia, more generally, in addition to the above named sources, I have found most useful Watson (1988) and (1994); and Manieri (1998), all of which provide ample bibliography. Lane Fox (1986) 102-67. On the important distinction between aesthetic and religious considerations of images, even though these may at times overlap, see Eisner (1996).

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for moral infractions, and often as not, show their anger for neglect of their cults. The entire Heroicus is set in such an atmosphere from beginning to end, starting with the Phoenician sailor's account of the reason for his presence in the Thracian Chersonese and ending with the vinegrower's detailed description of Achilles redivivus on the island of Leuke in the Black Sea. The Phoenician was motivated by a dream, in which he was 'reading the verses of Homer where he recites the catalogue of the Achaeans, and I started to invite the Achaeans to come on board the ship as if it were big enough for them all ... I interpreted it as referring to a long and slow voyage. For to those who are anxious about something, dreams of the dead imply failure.' He therefore made land in order to get a sign about the dream. The vinegrower was the first person he met, and he realizes the meaning of his vision as portending something quite different, since, as he concludes, 'cataloguing them onto the ship and collecting their stories before embarking amount to the same thing' (6.3-6). The vinegrower can congratulate him on this fortuitous happenstance: 'For just as Odysseus, when he was distraught far from his ship, met Hermes or one of his wise pupils, and shared his profound wisdom (for we must imagine the "moly" as this), so Protesilaus through my agency, will fill you with knowledge, and make you happier and wise - for great knowledge is a great thing' (6.1). So vivid are the vinegrower's reports that the Phoenician can eventually even exclaim, 'I feel as if I were one of the army which has sailed for Troy, so possessed am I by the demigods we were discussing' (23.2). We will later return to a closer examination of this remarkable text. Not every traveller to a famous site in antiquity in quest of viewing relics, listening to the stories of the local exegetes, or communing in some other way with the past, could hope to get the same kind of 'reliable' information as does the Phoenician merchant, even if second hand. Even less usual is the vinegrower's privileged access to such knowledge through his intimate association with Protesilaus. But if the Heroicus is the most extended treatise we possess, it is by no means the only example in the literature of the Empire of the desire to gain more 'authentic' knowledge through some kind of pseudo-necromantic consultation that suggests, fictitiously or otherwise, not just the continuing existence and vitality of those figures from the past, but the possibility of direct communication with them in the here and now, in a spirit of piety or inquiry. The journey is often the means, the most extreme form of which is a species of visit to the world beyond, whether to the Underworld or the Isles of the Blessed. The latter motif, of course, is already established in the Odyssey, not once but twice (books 11 and 24), and Antipater of Sidon can give voice to a painting of Nicias, depicting the Underworld, which is made to declare:

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'I am painted here an ever living city of the dead, the tomb of every age. It was Homer who explored the house of Hades, and I am copied from him as my first original' (archetypon; AP 9.792). Socrates himself looks forward to meeting Orpheus, Musaeus, Hesiod, and Homer in the Underworld after death. He will be able to compare his own fortunes with such heroes as Palamedes or Telamonian Ajax and any others, who, like him, met their death through an unfair trial. He will also continue in characteristic fashion the same activity as here in Athens, in 'examining and searching people's minds, to find out who is really wise among them, and who only thinks he is' (PI. Ap. 41a). The Pythagoreans seemed to have established the idea of a literary court, 'a paradise of intellectuals' with their master in first place and Homer in second, and the sophists exploited the topos, as we shall see, in varied ways.42 A more typical option, however, is a journey to some long hallowed site of ancient mythological or historical note, a practice of long standing, but which under the Empire almost takes the form of a pilgrimage. Chief among these sites is Troy, which is 'especially evocative', as Graham Anderson observes, 'as supplying the first Greek victory in Asia'.43 Visits there are often loaded with political implications for Greeks as well as for Romans, each in their own way, to appropriate and refashion the legacy of the Trojan War as it passed from Homer into a many-layered history, a topic I will later explore. In reviewing the three elements I earlier suggested the major components of visual culture as comprising theatricality, the visual arts, and 'close encounters'. Given that theatricality, in the sense of role playing and impersonation, on the one hand, and spectacle performance along with a heightened sense of framed reality, on the other, is an integral feature in sophistic literature, I will not therefore not treat the topic on its own, but will incorporate relevant observations, where appropriate. I propose therefore first to look more closely at Homer's relations to the visual arts themselves and then turn to a fuller discussion of what I have called 'close encounters' in the light of its more complex implications for Hellenic identity. By way of transition (and preview), I invoke an interesting variant of a felicitous use of a particular site and the possibilities for restaging there a scene from the past as exemplified in Dio Chrysostom's twelfth oration, which concerns the great cult statue of Zeus made by the classical sculptor, Pheidias. The speech was supposedly delivered at 42

43

For the Pythagoreans, see Cumont (1942) 315, and cf. Lucian, Pseudom. 33. For a discussion of the theme of encounters in the Underworld or its equivalent in sophistic literature, see Bompaire (1958) 365-78. Anderson (1989) 141.

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Olympia itself in the very presence of the statue on the occasion of a Panhellenic festival (probably in 101 or 105 CE). The rhetor profits from the locale to bring Pheidias back in person before his audience in a fine example of prosopopeia to defend his artistic rationale in his own words, claiming its model was Homer's own verses in the first book of the Iliad {Or. 12.62), and leading to the eventual imaginary envoicing of the great statue itself at the end. IV [On a painting of Odysseus] Ever is the sea unkind to son of Laertes; the flood hath bathed the picture and washed off thefigurefrom the wood. What did it gain thereby? For in Homer's verses the image of him is painted on imperishable pages. (Anonymous (AP 16.125)) There is the tradition also that Homer was blind: but it is his painting not his poetry that we see; what district, what shore, what spot in Greece, what aspect or form of combat, what marshalling of battle, what tugging at the oar, what movements of men, of animals has he not depicted so vividly that he has made us see, as we read, the things which he himself did not see? (Cic. Tusc. 5.39.114)

Previously I argued that Homer, as verbal artist, authority of the gods, and repository of traditional themes and images, occupies a singular place in the visual culture of later antiquity, and nowhere more so than in the aesthetic debates of the time that are concerned with such issues as the relations between art and nature, representation and identity, mimetism and original creativity, as between word and image. Histories of artistic development were already in place by the end of the Hellenistic period, transmitted to us mainly by Pliny the Elder. The canon of the greatest artists, particularly in sculpture and painting, was firmly established, and the exercise of critical judgement with regard to aesthetic taste was a valuable skill to be nurtured. Rhetoric drew upon the technical vocabulary of art in a metaphorical transfer to the arts of oratory (e.g. Quint. Inst. 12.10), and the resort to enargeia, the effect of 'making hearers into listeners' was a particularly prized tool of persuasion in virtually every genre. The artist wasfinallyelevated from a mere artisan to compete with poets and other intellectuals in wisdom and prestige of accomplishment. Plato's injunction against the lure of the mimetic arts (as against poetry) was still a matter for concern in some circles, including sophists, but particularly among the Neoplatonists, who strove to reconcile his views with their validation of vision and visionary experience, even as they and others did with regard to his critique of Homer. The evaluation of the eye as a

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significant means of perception had already been addressed by Epicureans, Stoics and Peripatetics, with different results, along with advances in the science of optics. A number of these strands are drawn together in the increasing concern with phantasia, as already mentioned, which shifted attention from the mimetic faculty and technical excellence in the production of images to the valorization of a kind of interior vision, which was capable of forming a picture in the mind through a combination of subjective intuition and intelligent contemplation, one that was meant to induce the same experience in listeners and viewers alike. This is not the place to elaborate on these matters, which have been treated in detail by many others. I wish merely to point out that the authors of the Second Sophistic, so concerned with their own verbal artistry and performative style, continually draw upon the resources of visual representation, in both theoretical and practical ways. Beyond aesthetic criteria, the contest between word and image, the prestige of ecphrastic description, and the inculcation of subjective response to visual stimuli raise significant questions about the workings of memory, knowledge, visualization and language.44 The cultural patterns engendered by the sheer profusion of statuary and painting in the public domain, particularly of the gods, are tested in this multicultural world of competing visions of the divine, with regard to the representational validity of anthropomorphic renderings of what lies beyond normal perception. This happens, for example, in Apollonius of Tyana's confrontation with Thespesion, the appropriately named Egyptian, who prefers 'symbols of profound inner meaning' in his own culture to Greek norms of representation and asks mockingly whether 'your artists, like Pheidias and Praxiteles, leaped up to heaven and took a copy of the forms of the gods, and reproduced them by their art?' (VA 6A9).45 This is an old point of contestation, going back as far as the archaic era with Xenophanes. But the problem of portraying the gods in a heightened atmosphere of both spiritual and aesthetic debate now heats up in popular and learned circles, and the gravity of its subject leads to the most impassioned considerations, not only of divinity, but of the general merits of the visual and verbal arts. This is a time, after all, when it is a commonplace of dream interpretation that 'to dream of statues of the gods is the same as dreaming of them' (Artemid. Oneir. 2.39), and conversely, when anecdotes about erotic passions for statues enjoy popular currency, particularly when it comes to Praxiteles' Aphrodite of Cnidos, notably in 44 45

See Maffei (1991) 592-93, and in general, Goldhill, in this volume. Cf. an epigram of Philip (probably second century CE) on Pheidias, this time in an encomiastic spirit: 'Either the god came from heaven to earth to show you his image, or you did go to see the god' (AP 16.81-5).

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Lucian's Erotes. This is the time too when the most famous classical sculptures of the past are not only found in copies everywhere, but are also 'quoted', as it were, as though their mere mention could stimulate the listener's visual imagination to recreate in memory a concept of the whole. Alternatively, reduced to standard archetypes, they could simply be invoked in virtually any context for their metaphorical value. Collections of art, in both public and private domains, would have encouraged the tendency to promote such canons of reference. Lucian's Imagines reels off a whole list of the best-known works for his composite portrait in praise of a beautiful woman, along with the masterpieces of the bestknown painters, which the other speaker can be counted on to have seen in his travels. Nevertheless, any other, even less touristed, spectator could conjure up the same images. And in his Philopseudes, the courtyard of a private house is adorned with statues, probably copies of Myron, Polycleitus, Critias, and Demetrius {Philops. 18), which are familiar enough to be recognized by any cultivated passerby. Again I call Aelius Aristeides to witness, in his claim that when he lay near death, Athena herself appeared in all her astounding beauty, just as Pheidias had sculpted her, breathing a scent from her aegis, which looked like wax. She assures him that the Odyssey is no mere muthos and that he, Aristeides, is Odysseus and Telemachus, which is why she will come to his aid (Hier. Log. 2.41). Both verbal and visual memory coalesce in the dream, whereby this latter-day Odysseus recognizes the goddess through her most renowned representation and identifies her words through his intimate knowledge of the poet's verses. If there is any single consensus in ancient sources as to the highest achievement in the visual arts, it would be the example of Pheidias' great chryselephantine statue of Zeus at Olympia, to which I have already several times referred. Countless testimonies survive, from both Greek and Roman authors, most often praising its supreme artistry in representing even incarnating - the supreme deity, and expressing the awe, both spiritual and aesthetic, which it inspired in its spectators.46 It became, quite simply, the standard topos of comparison for any other work deemed inimitable (schol. Od. 11.613). Menander Rhetor (late third or early fourth centuries CE), in suggesting rules for describing a statue in a sanctuary, urges a comparison with Zeus at Olympia and Athena on the acropolis at Athens. 'And then add', he advises: 'What Pheidias, what Daedalus fashioned such an image? Perhaps this statue fell from heaven' (445.15-19). Two major themes can be traced throughout our sources, from Cicero 46

See the testimonia in Overbeck (1868) nos. 692-743. See also Rouveret (1989) 405-11, with bibliography.

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to Plotinus, to account for the achievement of Pheidias' masterpiece. The first attributes the artist's inspiration to his own superior inner vision or phantasia, as exemplified in Apollonius of Tyana's subsequent reply to Thespesion's mockery of Greek ideas of divinity, cited above. 47 The second, however, like Dio Chrysostom's Olympian Oration, draws upon a tradition that Pheidias derived his model from Homer's famous description of Zeus in Iliad 1 (528-30) and translated the poet's vision into tangible form. 48 Dio's oration is by far the longest and most intriguing exposition, which deserves fuller exploration than can be undertaken here. 49 Its value in our context is its detailed discussion of the relations between art and poetry, specifically Homer, 'who was the first to show the Hellenes many beautiful images of all the gods, and especially of the greatest among them' (73). Pheidias contrasts the freedom of words to depict space, time, movement, and the entire range of emotions with the limitations of the artist, who 'must work out a design (schema) for himself that shows each subject in a single posture, one that admits of no movement, and is unalterable', compelled to remain fixed in a single locale. 'Yet that design', he continues, 'is so perfected that it will comprise within itself the whole of the god's nature and power' (70). The artist's task is more difficult, he argues. 'The poet when moved by one single conception and one single impulse of his soul can pour forth an immense volume of verses . . . before the vision (phantasma) and the conception (epinoia) he had grasped can leave him and flow away,' while the 'sculptor must keep the very same image (eikon) in his soul continuously until he finishes the work, which often takes many years' (70). Moreover, while a poet can 'excite and deceive the ear by filling it with mimemata under the spell of metre and sound', there is no such subterfuge for a work of art, since spectators are more demanding and 'require greater enargeia to be convinced', given that 'the eye agrees exactly with what it sees' (71). Although Homer's genius, his 'godlike wisdom', is praised to the skies, Dio through his imagined Pheidias does not unequivocally bring off the poet as the victor in this contest, as most critics seem to think. Rather, by various clever shifts in the argument, like the one just cited previously (and cf. 63), the restrictions faced by the artist also may turn into superior merits. Yes, the sculptor must work with intractable and durable substances (marble and metal), a laborious obstacle in itself, but as to its 47

48 49

E.g. Cic. Or. 9-10; Livy 14.27-8; Quint. Inst. 12.10.7-9; Sen. Contr. 10.5.8; Plotinus Em. 5.8.1; AP 16.81-5. In addition to Dio Chrys. Or. 12, see Polyb. 30.10.6, Strabo 8.3.30, Plut. Aem. Paul. 28. See, for example, the discussions of Leclerc (1917) 194-229; Fazzo (1977) 21-58; Watson (1988) 71-95; and the commentary of Russell (1992).

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mundane nature as unfitting to represent the gods, Pheidias can point to the artisan god himself and his prestige to enhance the sculptor's vocation. 'Indeed, not even Hephaestus did Homer represent as showing his skill in other materials, but while he furnished a god as the craftsman for the making of the shield, he did not succeed infindingany different sort of material for it.' It is but a short step to the notion that the sculptor is the mortal counterpart of the 'first and most perfect artificer', Zeus himself, the demiourgos, 'who fashioned the entire universe' (82).50 The setting at Olympia during a Panhellenic festival also promotes the artist's accomplishment as an essential contribution to Hellenic pride and sense of collective identity. In making the definitive image of the god, which has eclipsed all predecessors, Pheidias is apostrophized as the one who by 'the power of his art first conquered and united Hellas' (53). The tribunal he is to face ideally should not just consist of the 'judges directing the contests here in honour of the god' but 'a general court of all the Peloponnesians and of the Boeotians, too, and Ionians and of other Hellenes, wherever they are to be found in Asia as well as in Europe' (49). Moreover, for all Homer's versatility in representing the many facets of Zeus's power, in both positive and destructive aspects, it is Pheidias, limited as he is to a single image, who has chosen to show a more purified form of divinity. His god is one 'who is peaceful and altogether gentle, such as befits the guardian of a faction-free and concordant Hellas'. He is 'a mild and majestic deity in pleasing guise, the giver of our material and our physical life and of all our blessings, the common Father and Saviour and Guardian of mankind', that is, 'as far as it was possible for a mortal man to frame in his mind (dianoia) and to represent {mimeisthai) the divine and inimitable nature' (74). The implication is that Pheidias has grasped the true nature of the godhead in Zeus's powerful pose, while Homer, for all his dazzling reproduction of sights and sounds, trails behind the sculptor's truer, more stable, vision. Dio can only concur in this conclusion, which emphasizes contemporary ideas about divinity current in his own day, and he caps his approval with his final highest accolade: 'Indeed, the god seems to us to have such an expression, altogether benevolent and solicitous, that I at least can almost imagine that he is speaking to us' (85). The words Zeus is made to 'speak', however, acknowledges for the first time the gap between the lofty achievement of the past, as embodied in Pheidias and his magnificent statue, and the sadly diminished political situation of Hellenes today under Roman rule (85). For while Zeus is imagined as praising the assembled multitude for 50

Here Pheidias quotes Pindar (fr. 57 Snell-Maehler), who calls Zeus aristotechna. It is not difficult to recognize in this passage echoes from Plato's Timaeus and the concept of the creator god as demiourgos, which was current also among the Stoics.

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their fine and generous administration of the sacrifices and contests 'of physical condition, strength and speed', as well as their general adherence to keeping the customs they have inherited', he shows alarm for the people's decrepit condition, comparing them to a former king, Laertes, whose days of youth and power are over, fittingly in Homer's exact verses: 'Yourself untended seem, and wretched age with mean attire and squalor is your lot' (Od. 24.249-50).51 The poet, it seems, gets the last word. Throughout Pheidias' defence of his art, he takes the occasion to praise Homer's poetry, which by definition is 'an extravagant thing and in every respect resourceful and a law unto itself (64). He expounds on his linguistic versatility in coining neologisms, and his many sonic effects which imitate all sounds in nature and recreate the din of battle as well as the visual signs of Zeus's celestial role as dispenser of storms as of rainbows. The sculptor could not reproduce the effect of thunder in 'a soundless image' or a lightning flash in the use of earth-bound metal (79), but, as we have seen, his own conception of Zeus seems to embody a loftier, more idealistic, vision of the god. And while he refers to himself and to Homer as demiourgoi (craftsmen) in good Homeric fashion and grants Homer the credit (or for his critics, the blame) for giving the Greeks their images of the gods in human form, Pheidias falls short finally of granting the poet precedence in the pictorial arts. This theme, however, is one we find on more than one occasion in our sources of this period. One in particular, the so-called Life of Homer (attributed to Plutarch, but assuredly not by him), deserves to be quoted in full in this regard (and cf. too Max. Tyr. Or. 26.5). It is the final coda to the author's exhaustive compendium of the poet's virtues (217): If one were to say that Homer was a teacher of painting as well, this would be no exaggeration, for as one of the sages said, 'Poetry is painting which speaks and painting is silent poetry.' Who before, or who better than Homer displayed for the mind's eye (phantasiai ton noematori) gods, men, places, and various deeds (praxeis poikilas), or ornamented them with the euphony of verse. He sculpted (aneplase) in the medium of language all kinds of beasts and in particular the most powerful: lions, boars, leopards - and by describing (hupograpsas) their forms and dispositions and drawing on human matters for comparison, he demonstrated the special properties of each. He dared also to give the gods human shapes {morphas anthropon eikasai). Hephaestus, making the shield of Achilles and sculpting in gold the earth, the heavens, the sea, even the mass of the sun and the beauty of the moon, the swarm of stars that crowns the universe, cities of various sorts and fortunes - what practitioner of arts (demiourgos) of this sort can you find more skilled (technikoteros) than he?

51

Some commentators are concerned, however, about the abruptness of this finale and the sudden switch in tone. See Moles (1995) 181-4.

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For Dio's Pheidias, Hephaestus' fabrication of Achilles' shield was invoked to defend the sculptor's need to resort to earthly materials in the manufacture of his own divine image. Likewise, as we have seen, Philostratus' Apollonius of Tyana mentions it in reference to the wondrous votive masterpiece, dedicated by Porus in India. The Stoics translated the artefact into a grandiose allegory of cosmic creation itself, with each element given symbolic value,52 while Lucian mischievously reverses direction from allegory to the opposite extreme of hyperreality, when he suggests in the Icaromenippus (16) that a bird's eye view of the world will reveal a physical topography, 'whose physical features were just like what Homer says was on the shield'. But despite its assignment in the rhetorical handbooks under the rubric of ecphrasis to the category of mere hoplopoiia (making of weapons), the shield served as a regular, even proverbial, reference to express the summit of artistry, and is granted its own detailed description in one of the Imagines of the younger Philostratus (10). In ps.-Plutarch's account, however, Hephaestus' manufacture of the shield is transferred to the poet himself as proof that the product of his phantasia entitles him to the highest credentials of excellence in the visual arts themselves. The same compliment is offered by Lucian perhaps some sixty years later, in the first of his two matching dialogues, Imagines and Pro Imaginibus, when he names Homer as 'the best of all painters (ariston ton grapheon), even in the presence of Euphranor and Apelles' (Imag. 8).53 Dio's Pheidias had acknowledged the primacy of Homer as the basis for the exaltation of his own art in the inspired monumental statue of the 'father of gods and men'. Lucian too summons Homer in the service of an artistic enterprise, but one of an altogether different kind. The great sculptors and painters of the past, along with the poets, notably Homer, are enlisted to provide elements of a composite model in order to render a portrait (eikon) in words, and this time, that of a mortal and a woman, and an erotic one at that. Pheidias' need to justify the adequacy of his sculpted masterpiece is reversed in Lucian, for whom the hallowed works of great artists provide the standards of versimilitude. Art and nature change places here. This is a tendency we note elsewhere for this shift in attitude, as for example, in Philostratus' Eikones (1.1), in which he suggests that nature herself is an artist. But for Lucian, the reversal of the equation goes hand in hand with the conviction, so strongly held in the Second Sophistic, that the mimetic endeavour is based on emulation of past models, whether 52 53

See Buffiere (1973) 155-68. O n these dialogues, see R o m m (1990) a n d Maffei (1994), and, especially Goldhill in this volume.

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in text or in art. The differences between these sophistic works are striking on a number of other accounts, not least in the solemnity of Dio Chrysostom's undertaking, encased in a dense philosophical discourse, and Lucian's elegant tour deforce of brilliant charm and wit. Yet, both works are specimens of panegyric rhetoric; both are concerned with the relations between image and text, and each, at one level or another, calls into question the very foundation of anthropomorphic representations of divinity in a neat counterpoint to one another. For if Dio's oration addresses the conundrum of gods imagined in human form, Lucian's work does the opposite; it questions the propriety of describing mortal beauty in terms of the divine - not without a touch of parody and sly humour. Homer initially is not the major topic of interest in the first of the two dialogues. Lycinus has caught sight of an unknown ravishing woman, so ravishing in fact that his powers of description fail him. His own techne is insufficient to render a likeness of the original, the archetypon. But in response to the plea by his friend, Polystratus, who thinks that with a sketch of her figure (eidos), he might recognize her, Lycinus agrees, providing he can call in some of the famous artists of old so they might model (anaplaseian) the woman for him (3). And to counter his friend's perfectly reasonable surprise, since these artists are long dead, Lycinus turns instead to their most famous works of sculpture, which upon questioning, Polystratus agrees he has seen. Lycinus' idea is to blend the best features of each to produce a single eikon, a portrait statue, by means of his eloquence, which can adapt (metakosmein), combine {suntithenai) and fit together (harmozein) as harmoniously as he can, without losing the composite effect (to summiges) and the variety (to poikilon; 5). Lycinus, in short, will be a sculptor in words, and he proceeds to invoke Praxiteles' Aphrodite of Cnidos for the head - hair, brows, forehead, eyes (not her nude body, for modesty's sake), Alcamenes' Aphrodite of the Gardens for aspects of the face as well as the hands and fingers, while he will borrow the nose from Pheidias' Lemnian Athena and the same sculptor's Amazon will supply the lips, and neck. Finally, Calamis' Sosandra in Athens will adorn her with modesty (aidos), contribute what must have been a well-known smile, and provide the figure's drapery (6). All that is lacking is colour to give the full dimensions of life, and this the painters can supply. Polygnotus, Euphranor, Apelles, and Aetion are called in to divide up the task, and here too the touches they add are all borrowed from their most famous works: the colour of the hair, the lips, the flush of cheeks, the delicate folds of clothing, and the body. Now Homer is invoked, 'the best of painters', for the complexion ('like that he gave to the thighs of Menelaus when he likened them to ivory tinged with crimson', // 4.141ff.), the eyes, and finally, 'Homer shall make her

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"laughter-loving" and "white-armed" and "rosy-fingered."' In a word, concludes Lycinus, 'Homer will liken her to golden Aphrodite, far more fittingly than he did the daughter of Briseus' (//. 19.282) (7). Now that sculptors, painters and poets have all collaborated on the portrait, the only problem that remains - the most difficult to resolve - is the imitation of charts, that lively quality of enticing charm and glamorous appeal, associated with the Charites and Erotes, one which in Greek thought pertains to human beings and works of art alike. Lycinus has now reached his voyeuristic limits, but along with a few further clues (the book she was reading, the entourage which accompanied her, and the description of her fabulous teeth!), Polystratus finally recognizes her as none other than the Greek mistress of the emperor Lucius Verus (9-10), and, as a fine pepaideumene in her own right, a fitting subject for these two enraptured sophists. Her name? It is Panthea. But rather than uttering it directly, the name is posed as an etymological and literary riddle. Like her, it is called 'pretty and charming', but more helpfully, we are told that she has the same name as a character in Xenophon's Cyropaideia, 'the most beautiful woman in Asia', whose tragic devotion to her husband, Abradatas, furnishes a continuing romantic motif in the biography of the Persian king.54 Like the traits bestowed upon the new Panthea by earlier models, her name too is borrowed from a classical antecedent. These clues spur instant recognition from a cultivated man of letters, whose graphic verbal powers have animated his portrait of the present Panthea. Her predecessor is almost as vivid to Lycinus as the woman he has just seen in theflesh:'It makes me feel as if I saw her when I reach that place in my reading; I can almost hear her say what she is described as saying, and see how she armed her husband and what she was like when she sent him off to battle' (10). It is now Polystratus' turn. His knowledge of the woman extends beyond his friend's momentary glimpse of her, which had limited him to a verbal reproduction of her body (soma) and figure (morphe). A true encomium must praise not just physical qualities but also those of the soul. Only in the perfect combination of the two can true beauty be said to exist (11), and these aspects the new Panthea has in abundance: virtue, self control, goodness, kindliness, among others. His task will be all the more difficult, for 'it is not the same thing to praise what is manifest to all and to reveal in word what is invisible' (12). This is a recurrent theme in discussions of representational art. First, what constitutes beauty? And second, to what extent can a figure, sculpted or painted, embody those 54

Panthea's story unfolds over several books (Cyrop. 4.6.11; 5.1.2-18; 6.1.33-51; 6.4.2-11; 4.3.2-16).

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interior traits of personality, emotions, states of mind, as well as evidence of virtues or defects? At stake is the larger definition of verisimilitude and its projection, its illusion of lifelikeness, which would guarantee the authentic resemblance of a copy to the model. These are some of the questions about mimesis that Socrates long ago posed in Xenophon's Memorabilia, when he paid visits to a painter, Parrhasius, and a sculptor of athletes, and interrogates them on their technical procedures of imitation. This is the text I cited above, as our earliest testimony to the increasing demand in the Hellenistic period for greater emotion and psychological depth in the successful depictions of their subjects {Mem. 3.10). This text I suspect, in fact, is screened behind this entire dialogue, adding yet another layer of erudition and an opportunity for subtle allusion. The obvious paradigm for Lycinus' choice of creating an image of ideal beauty from the individual parts of different females goes back to the often repeated story of Zeuxis at Croton and his painting of Helen, in which he had the well-born girls of the city parade in front of him and he chose the best parts of each for a composite portrait.55 Parrhasius, in his encounter with Socrates, however, acknowledges the same principle: 'To copy types of beauty (eide kala), it is so difficult to find a perfect model that he [Parrhasius] combines (sunagogo) the most beautiful details of several, and thus contrives to make the whole figure (soma) look beautiful' (Mem. 3.10.2).56 Well and good. The same anecdote is credited to two different painters, who are contemporary with one another. But, can it be merely a coincidence that the next Socratic encounter related by Xenophon equally fits Lucian's context, and like the previous example of Parrhasius, is a reverse mirror image? This incident concerns a beautiful courtesan in Athens, also appropriately named as Theodote, and Socrates, like Polystratus, hears that 'words failed him to describe her beauty', and artists visited her to paint her portrait. Socrates' response is the opposite of Lycinus'. He insists on going to see her in person, for if praise is indeed warranted, 'what beggars description can't be very well be learned by hearsay'. This he does, and what does hefind?She is posing before a painter! (Mem. 3.11). In the stories attributed to Parrhasius (and Zeuxis), art copies from nature to make its hybrid of an idealized form, while in Lucian, it is the contrary. And if Lycinus begins like Socrates, in his insistence that beauty cannot be described but must be seen in person, Xenophon's reference to the painter of Theodote, resonates in the invocations of sculptors, painters and poets, appeal to whom, it turns out, constitute more than sufficient praise. 55 56

Cic. De Invent. 2.1.2.; PI. HN 35.64; cf 66; Dion. H a l . De Vet Script. Cens. 1. Cf. Plato Resp. 472de; also M a x . T y r . Or. 17.3.

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Polystratus too claims that he will follow his friend's earlier procedure in depicting the virtues of Panthea, which will fully animate her, starting with her voice. 'If you ever hear her sing', he says, 'not only will you have learned by [visual] experience, through being turned into stone, what the Gorgons can do, but you will know also what the effect of the Sirens were like' (13-14). Polystratus' procedure too will draw upon a composite of anterior examples, 'so the several virtues of her soul shall be portrayed each by itself in a single picture that is a true copy of the model (archetypon mimemeney (15). While he claims at the start that he will also resort to sculptors and painters, in truth, he only retains the technical vocabulary and turns instead to both mythical and historical forebears to fully saturate the image. 'For all that poets have set forth with the embellishment of metre or orators with the might of eloquence, all that historians have related or philosophers recommended shall give beauty to our picture, not simply to the extent of tinting its surface, but staining it all deeply with indelible colours until it will take no more' (16). A familiar cast of characters then process before us, drawn especially from Homer: the Muses, Theano, wife of Antenor, Arete and her daughter, Nausicaa, Penelope - all of whom exemplify the womanly qualities Panthea is said to possess - with the addition of the lady's homonym, adds Polystratus, who deserves to be included in the list (16, 19). And in the summary of the praise for still other virtues, including judicious and modest use of her power as the emperor's mistress, Lycinus can only concur: 'It is not in body alone, like Helen, that she is fair, but the soul that she harbours therein is still more fair and lovely' (22). Even more, the Roman emperor is fortunate to have such a woman in his time - a woman about whom one can quote with propriety the saying of Homer, that 'she vies with golden Aphrodite in beauty and equals Athena herself in accomplishments' (//. 9.389-90). Among mortal women there is none to compare with her (22), 'neither in stature nor mould', as Homer says, 'nor in mind nor in deeds'(//. 1.115). But of chief concern in this reckoning is Panthea's status as a pepaideumene, inasmuch as 'paideia must stand at the head of all that it is fair, and particularly all that is acquired by study'. In truth, 'there is no ancient model for this painting (archetypon ... tes graphes)\ Polystratus must admit, 'for tradition tells us of nothing similar in point of culture among those of olden times' (16). And indeed, evidence of her paideia heads the list, leading on from the citation of all the Muses to the models (paradeigmata) of intellectually accomplished women, known for their wisdom and understanding: Aspasia (shrewness in statescraft, quick-wittedness, and penetration), Theano, wife of Pythagoras (high-mindedness), Sappho (attractive way of life) and finally, Socrates' Diotima in the Symposium, who 'shall be copied not only in those qualities for which Socrates com-

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mended her, but in her general intelligence (sunesis) and power to give counsel' (sumboulia, 17-18). Given Panthea's high status as mistress of a Roman emperor, it is no wonder that Aspasia, Pericles' mistress, should head the roster, and her political astuteness as well as intelligence be featured in first place. But another compelling reason for the choice of Aspasia is Panthea's own pedigree, emphasized from the very beginning. We learn that she is a native of Ionia (Smyrna), a homeland she shares not only with Aspasia (of Miletus) but also with Homer himself. And like Aspasia, she is entitled to Atticizing virtues as well: 'As to the precision of her language, and its pure Ionic quality, as to the fact that she has a ready tongue and conversation and is full of Attic wit - nothing to wonder at. It is an inherited trait in her and ancestral... since she partakes of Athenian blood through the settlement they planted [in Smyrna].' But most important is the fact 'that a countrywoman (politis) of Homer likes poetry and holds much converse with it' (15). In the second dialogue, which is framed to counter Panthea's reported critique of her portrait on the grounds of excessive flattery, especially in its hybristic comparison of her to the gods, Homer is finally summoned as the supreme witness for the defence. Her purported speech (as appropriated by Polystratus) is itself evidence, not just of her modesty, previously praised, but of the wit and learning she displays, just like any expert pepaideumenos. She has much of value to tell us about the habits of portrait painters to improve their subjects, often with ludicrous misrepresentations. But her crucial point is the charge of impiety. 'It would be considered a sacrilege and a sin on her own part if she allowed herself to be said to resemble Cnidian Aphrodite and the Lady in the Gardens', which 'sets a woman above the very stars, even to the point of likening her to the goddesses' (9). So while she in turn can praise Lycinus' skill in modelling {plasma) and the mental design of portraits (epinoian ton eikonon) and can pay homage to his originals {archetypd) and models {paradeigmata), she insists on proportion in size (10), another point that emphasizes her Greek sensibility.57 Polystratus can only agree, now that he has had a chance to stand back and look from a distance, as one does with a work of art, to assess its merits as a whole (12) and reassess the very basis of comparison on which the entire enterprise has relied. 57

In thefirstdialogue, the justification for the magnitude of Panthea's now colossal portrait by contrast to the small canvas (pinakion) of the original [Socrates' Diotima] is that 'the Athenian state of those days and the Roman Empire of today are not equal, nor near it' (Imag. 18). In the second dialogue (Pro Imag.% Panthea implicitly rebukes this extravagance. She refers to the well-known anecdote about Alexander, who refused an architect's proposal to carve Mt Athos into a giant portrait of the king and commends him for his greatness of spirit (9), and subsequently invokes the old edict of the Hellanodikai at the Olympic games, which forbade victorious athletes to erect greater than life-size statues (11).

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If Dio's Pheidias needed to justify himself against the charge of his anthropomorphic rendering of the gods in his art, Lycinus, in defence of his encomiastic practice, casts into high relief the techniques of verbal rhetoric. It puts the seal on the metaliterary atmosphere of the entire piece, in its continuing use of the vocabulary of sculptors and painters as metaphors for the sophist's own creative work. Now the trope is continued in the analysis of the poet's art of composition, as founded by Homer. At stake is the larger epistemological question of likeness and difference in the use of simile and metaphor, along with general issues of mimesis and representation. The word, eikon, takes on its full range of meanings: portrait, image, statue, likeness, and finally, simile. T h e eulogist must use simile and comparison (eikon, homoiotes)\ he declares, and in order to succeed, one must praise something that surpasses it - with good sense and discretion (19). The argument takes three turns. The first one addresses the notion of confusion in identity between a statue and its original model, between art and reality. Lycinus confesses that he did not compare the woman to a goddess, but only with masterpieces of good craftsmen (the technitai and demiourgoi), made out of stone or bronze or ivory. Since statues are made by human agency, how could it be impious to compare these objects to human beings themselves? Panthea had supposed the reverse. 'Perhaps you have assumed that what Pheidias fashioned is Athena, and that what Praxiteles made in Cnidos is heavenly Aphrodite?' These are mere facsimiles, for 'it would be unworthy to hold such beliefs about the gods, whose real images {aletheis eikonas) I assume to be unattainable by human mimesis' (23). The second argument resorts to the precedents set by poets of old, which furnished his own models. Like Dio's Pheidias, who refers his own conception of Zeus to the words of Homer, Lycinus too can point to the same illustrious forebear, and with even better cause. His earlier defence of encomiastic procedure was already studded with references to Homer. Now Homer emerges into full-throated expression, with appeal to Panthea's own pedigree: There have been many good poets ahead of me, and above all your fellow-citizen Homer (polites) whom I shall now call up (anabibasomai) to plead for me, or else he himself will be convicted along with me.' And Lycinus continues, I shall therefore ask him, or better, ask you in his stead, since you know by heart and it is greatly to your credit - all the most charming of the verses he composed, what you think of him when he says of Briseis, the captive, that as she mourned for Patroclus, she resembled golden Aphrodite [//. 19.286] ... When he says that sort of thing, do you loathe him andflingaway the book, or do you permit him to enjoy full freedom in his praise ... even if for a foreign woman? (24)

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In the string of examples that follow, which invoke the Homeric epithets, theioeides, theioeikelos, among other citations, which apply to male heroes as well as to lovely women, Lycinus also draws attention to the reverse kind of rhetoric, namely, that 'Homer did not hesitate to derive praise for goddesses from things of lower degrees ("ox eyes," "violet brow")'. And he concludes: 'As for "rosy fingered," who that has even the slightest acquaintance with Homer's poetry does not know it?' (26). Comparisons of gods and mortals are reduced to a mQizfagon deparler, a convention of poetry, even as statues are the work of mere artisans, however gifted these craftsmen may be. His reasoning never resolves the weighty problem of why the gods should be represented in human form in the first place, and if they are, what relation does the representation bear to its archetypal essence, the very two issues confronted by Pheidias in his own defence. Yet in both cases, appeals to Homer legitimate the respective arts of each. Lycinus' last argument, however, is perhaps the most intriguing, as it is in a sense the most empirical, drawing its conclusions from observation in real life. If 'as far as personal appearance (morphe) is concerned, it signifies comparatively little if one is said to be like a god,' it matters even less with regard to nomenclature. 'How many there are who have copied the very names of the gods, calling themselves Dionysius, Hephaestion, Zeno, Poseidonius, Hermes!' (27). Let us now recall, however, the fact Lucian never mentions the name of Panthea. He refers to it only through allusion to her homonym in Xenophon. But in view of the master conceit that has equated Panthea to goddesses - the point most vigorously disputed by the woman in question - Lucian seems to have deliberately resisted (or even negated) another time-hallowed convention. This is the belief in the correspondence between names and things, and especially the idea of nomenomen with respect to persons. Panthea, 'all goddess', might have furnished an ideal opportunity for Lycinus to invoke this concinnity, both in creating her portrait and in his subsequent defence of his grounds of comparison. Should not a Panthea, after all, be 'like to the gods'? Instead, he prefers to demystify the meanings of names in the service of his rhetoric, in a clear-eyed recognition of the contrived nature of his own craft and the artificial conventions of encomium. The suppression of Panthea's name is just the opposite of another closely related one - Pandora - whose implied presence might lie just beneath the surface of Lucian's text. In Hesiod, Pandora is likewise a moulded figure, fabricated by the master artisan, Hephaestus, whose outward appearance makes her 'like to the gods'. She too is a hybrid composite, with all her separate qualities, inner as well as outer, bestowed upon her by the appropriate gods, in accordance with their own functions and attributes. The name she rightly earns thereby, the one to whom 'the

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gods have given all gifts', puts the definitive seal on her identity. Here, however Lucian is the artisan, and the gods give gifts, as it were, through borrowed images and figures of speech, in order to construct the portrait of a woman, and in the process, create a new hybrid experiment, in the rhetorical service now not of blame, as for Hesiod but of its counterpart, praise. As typical in the contest between word and image, however art may be magnified, ultimately it is rhetoric that wins (or seems to win). Thus, the appropriation of the semantics of artistic manufacture by its verbal complement, redounds, as here, to the inventiveness of the clever, self-reflexive speaker, who happily substitutes models of the past for present reality. But, in truth, there is more parity between the two domains in contemporary practice than might be first assumed. Sonia Maffei observes that 'the praise of Panthea not only restores traces of lost classical Greek art', but assumes a larger 'documentary role in assessing the forms and values of the reception of art in the imperial period'.58 More than the significance of the particular details referring to statues of the fourth and fifth centuries BCE, she continues, are 'the formative elements and methods themselves of the creation of this literary portrait', since 'the idea of mixing different masterpieces in single figures reveal a surprising affinity with the aesthetic practice and artistic tendencies which are dominant in the imperial period'. The eclectic method, known already from late Hellenistic art in a Roman context, mixes different styles and periods. Even more concretely, the technique corresponds to aspects of imperial classicizing art, whereby, in addition to the widespread industry of copyists, masterpieces of the past are also reworked. 'Extracted from the world of values that had determined their origins, formal solutions and Greek statuary types come to be combined synchronically and recomposed in a completely new interpretative system, one that looks for models on the basis of excellence in particular characteristics.' Furthermore, in the Hadrian-Antonine period, such art 'presupposes an audience that examines sculpture part by part, one that treats in isolation the single formal detail, that enjoys contrasts independently of the general composition', not unlike Lucian's own practice in these dialogues. What happens is that 'where the knowledgeable use of quotation emerges as a dominant aesthetic principle, it assumes the value of a formal original language', one that translates 'classical forms into a silent and universal linguistic code'. These are not merely recondite 'quotations', meant only for the cultivated elite, but legible in large part too by a broader viewing public as a system of 'metaphorical commonplaces', with both aesthetic and ethical value. 'The ancient observer knew how to associate precise meanings to each type of statuary, reconstructing beyond images, a precise and clear mes58

This and the quotes and paraphrases which follow are a composite blend, drawn from Maffei's discussion (1986) and (1994) xlvi-lv. See also Goldhill, above.

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sage', whether in the 'expression of private values and self-representation' or in state-sponsored art. Comparisons with the gods are particularly prominent in funerary art, for example. They are shared by 'images and inscriptions, statues and epigrams', but the practice is more widespread, as Maffei shows. Hence, to conclude, if Lucian in the second dialogue justifies his general use of similes on the authority of Homer, he easily assimilates the poet to the aesthetic taste of his day. Was not Homer equally eclectic, as in the case of Agamemnon, whom Homer describes as having the head and eyes of Zeus, the waist of Zeus, and chest of Poseidon (//. 2.478-9), thus also 'dismembering him (diairon kata meltf claims Lycinus, 'with respect to the eikones of the gods?' (25). This is why, finally, at the end of the first dialogue, words will take precedence for the sophist, whose aim is nothing short of epic in its claims to divine inspiration: 'If you are willing, let us put our portraits together, the statue you modelled of her body and the picture I painted of her soul; let us blend them all into one, put it down in a book, and give it to all mankind to admire, not only to those now alive, but to those that shall live hereafter. It would at least prove more enduring than the works of Apelles, Parrhasius, Polygnotus, and far more pleasing to the lady herself than anything of that kind inasmuch as it is not made of wood and wax and colours but portrayed with intelligence (epinoia) from the Muses' (Imag. 23).

Strangers, the ash of ages has devoured me, holy Ilion, the famous city once renowned for my towered walls, but in Homer, I still exist, defended by brazen gates. The spears of the destroying Achaeans shall not again furrow me, but I shall abide on the lips of Hellenes everywhere. (Evenus of Ascalon, AP 9.62) Hector of Ares' blood, if you hear beneath the earth, hail! And give respite to your sighs for your native land. Ilion, the famous city, is inhabited, containing men inferior to you, but still lovers of Ares, while the Myrmidons have perished. Stand by his side and tell Achilles that all Thessaly is subject to the sons of Aeneas. (Hadrian (or Tiberius), AP 9.387)59

Lucian's Polystratus readily acknowledges that he has seen the great masterpieces of sculpture which his friend, Lycinus, invokes for his verbal portrait of Panthea. He had seen them first hand, presumably in the 59

Probably a Greek translation of a Latin epigram by Germanicus: PLM, 4.109 Baehrens. Page (1981) 559-60, however, argues that Tiberius was the author of the Greek epigram.

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course of his travels, like so many other tourists during the Greco-Roman period, who journeyed long distances around the Mediterranean, in quest of viewing famous cities, temples, tombs, monuments, works of art, and other relics of the past - from geographers to emperors, from merchants to wandering sophists and far more ordinary folk. Like Plutarch's Cleombrotus, who is described as philotheamon and philomathes (de Def. Orac. 410a-b), these other travellers, motivated by the desire to see and to learn, could satisfy their passion for both sights and information by direct observation, and armed with guidebooks or in the company of local exegetes, they could follow the mythological and historical vestiges of antiquity, which were everywhere. An indefatigable (and credulous) sightseer could even catch a glimpse of such relics of the heroic age such as Leda's egg, Helen's goblet (said to be the exact size and shape of her breast), Agamemnon's sceptre, Odysseus' cloak and armour, Penelope's web, and the petrified ship of the Phaeacians, all scattered far and wide in different sites, on Greek territory and even among the barbarians. As Aelius Aristeides says, 'everywhere talk ran on the bygone: any nook must be the remains of a battle trophy, a monument, spring, the chamber of Helen or Harmonia or Leda'.60 Above all, the pages of books they had read and the stories they had heard could come alive in the authenticating presence of material realities to revive powerful images and scenes in the viewer's imagination. Cicero's friend, Atticus, declares: Tor we are in some strange way affected by the very places that carry the imprints {vestigia) of those whom we love or admire. My beloved Athens delights me not so much by stunning monuments or exquisite works of antiquity found there, but rather by recalling to my mind great men - where they each used to live, to sit, and carry on discussions; why I even enjoy gazing on their tombs' (de Leg. 2.2.4). A friend in another dialogue, set in Athens (of 79 BCE) only needed a glimpse of the town of Colonus to picture Sophocles in person before him, and he goes on: 'Indeed, my memory took me further back; for I had a vision of Oedipus advancing towards this very spot and asking in those most tender verses? 'What place is this?' - a mere fantasy, no doubt, yet still it affected me strongly' (de Fin. 5.2.3). One of the others, Pomponius, chimes in with his favourite, the Gardens of Epicurus and adds, 'I could not forget Epicurus, even if I wanted; the members of our group not only have pictures of him, but even have his likeness on their drinking-cups and rings.'61 In short, it is concluded, 'so great a power of suggestion 60 61

Friedlander (1908) 373, 375. In the banter that follows his words, we hear that this fellow 'has so taken root in Athens that he is almost an Atticus' (as indeed he was known later on).

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{admonitio) resides in places that it is no wonder the art of memory is based on it' (5.2.2). This group of friends, engaged in philosophical discourse while studying at Athens, naturally think of their pertinent models, Plato, Epicurus, Carneades, Pythagoras, along with the great orators of old, and exhort their youngest comrade not to indulge in mere antiquarian curiosity, but 'to resolve to imitate your heroes as well as to know about them' (5.2.6). These Philhellenic Romans have no difficulty in appropriating Greek culture for themselves ('my Athens'). The experiences they describe likewise demonstrate a sensibility that we will meet elsewhere, phrased as a kind of mystical communion with great spirits, halfway between dream reverie and epiphany, augmented by recollections of portraits and images already stored in memory. Alexander would have appreciated the last bit of advice about imitation of heroes, as we may recall, in his own visit to Troy several centuries before, when he acted the part of Achilles, his model and rival, going so far as to donate his armour to the temple of Athena at Troy in exchange for ancient weapons stored there, which included the reputed shield of Achilles (Arr. Anab. 1.11; cf. 6.93). There, in the words of Plutarch, as also mentioned above, 'he stood there at Troy 'forming a mental image for himself (anatupoumenos) the heroic deeds which had once taken place' (Plut. Mor. 33Id) - a favourite word among Greek imperial authors, who had no difficulty in assimilating Alexander's fantasies to their own cultural milieu. He was preceded in his visit by Xerxes some 150 years earlier and his own performance at Troy on the eve of his expedition against Persia was certainly not happenstance. But he inaugurated in turn a tradition among later Roman rulers, who also aspired to heroic greatness and, under the Empire, to domination of the world, and so came to Troy out of mixed motives of both piety and propaganda.62 From our perspective, these sources are useful for assessing briefly the difference between Greek and Roman outlooks in a Homeric context. Both had a distinct stake in Troy - the Greeks, of course, through the memory of their victorious conquest of the city and the epic poetry of Homer it inspired, and the Romans, through their adoption of Troy as the site of their origins, but also in their admiration for Homer, equally the foundation of education in that bilingual society, augmented only later in Quintilian's time by the addition of the now Roman 'classic' authors, such as Virgil and Cicero. The Philhellenic propensities of the imperial age, fostered from Nero to Hadrian and beyond, also insured the broad 62

For a full list, see Vermeule (1995) and see too, C. P. Jones (1999) 95-9.

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circulation of Greek paideia and its resources of mythology and literature, in both public and private domains.63 Above all, Homer was the undisputed model for Romans' desire to record their history in epic. Aside from Virgil, of course, the Roman sense of belatedness is expressed in two poetic otherworldly experiences, the one at the very beginnings of Latin literature in the dream of Ennius, the first epic poet, and the second, an account of a descent into the underworld by Silius Italicus, writing his epic under the reign of Vespasian on the subject of the second Punic War, a poem modelled as well on his Roman predecessors. A third, Lucan, in his Pharsalia, stages his confrontation with Homer at the site of Troy itself, but the ravaged landscape it describes and the spirits of the Trojan dead which still inhabit the ruins give the scene a strange, unworldly atmosphere. Despite its fragmentary state, the proem of Ennius' Annales, it seems certain, contained the account of a dream in which Homer tells the poet that his soul has actually transmigrated into the body of Ennius by a form of metempsychosis, not unlike that of Ennius' own mentor, Pythagoras, who had claimed that in an earlier life he himself was a minor Homeric hero, Euphorbus.64 While dreams figure in accounts of poets' initiations more generally, from Hesiod on,65 the remarkable aspect of Ennius' vision in a Roman context is the bold idea of a direct transmission, from Greek to Latin, through the physical mechanism of an actual rebirth in another's body. A highly poetic conceit, perhaps, to authorize Ennius' ambitions and the new culture, taking its first steps to legitimacy. Nevertheless, the dream encounter with Homer goes beyond other pictorial and poetic depictions of dependency upon earlier, more prestigious, ancestors, to suggest a Homer redivivus, both in the presence of the bard's dream image itself and in the message of reincarnation it conveys. In this spirit, it is not difficult to account for the epithet, alter Homerus, ascribed to him by later Roman authors (Lucilius, fr. 1189 Marx; Hor. Ep. 2.1.50). Silius' approach to Homer takes a different and more typical turn from inspiriting, we might say, to inspiration. In the lengthy description 63

64

65

A n y discussion of relations between G r e e k a n d a Hellenized R o m a n culture can only be vastly oversimplified in this discussion, especially since m a n y of o u r best sources for the Greek ideas pursued here are R o m a n (e.g., Cicero, Pliny a n d Quintilian). O n a few of the ambiguities, see A n d e r s o n ' s discussion of problems of perspective in this period (1990), esp. 9 9 - 1 1 0 . Ennius' account m a y have a Hellenistic precedent. A n epigram of Antipater (AP 7.75), claimed that H o m e r ' s soul h a d passed into Stesichorus' breast. But whether this Antipater is the Sidonian (second century B C E ) or Thessalonian (age of Augustus) is not clear. Still, even if the p o e m is Hellenistic, it is m o r e t h a n likely that he a n d Ennius drew on another, earlier, Hellenistic source. See Brink (1952) 5 5 7 - 6 0 a n d Webster (1964) 2 7 5 - 6 . E.g., Callimachus, H e r o d a s , H o r a c e , a n d Lucian. See too Brink (1952) 559 n. 4 3 , a n d Webster (1964) 276.

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of the Underworld (a composite of the major poetic sources, including his own additions) his herb Scipio eventually meets Alexander and shortly thereafter, Homer. Alexander, once he is identified by the Sibyl, is queried for practical military advice: 'Since your undisputed fame eclipses that of all other commanders, and my heart isfiredwith the same thirst for glory, tell me the path by which you rose to your proud eminence and topmost pinnacle of achievement' {Pun. 13.762-75). The figure of Homer, however, he does not even recognize at all. 'Say who this is, for his sacred brow shines with light beyond compare, and many souls follow him and escort him with cries of wonder and delight. What a countenance is his. Were he not in the darkness of Hades, I would have said confidently that he was a god.' The Sibyl agrees: 'He deserved to seem divine. A great genius (numen) dwelt in his mighty breast. His poetry embraced earth and sea, sky and nether world; he rivalled the Muses in song and Apollo in glory. All this region also, before he ever saw it, he revealed to mortals; and he raised the fame of your Troy to heaven.' Scipio in reply wishes the poet could sing of Roman deeds for all the world to hear, 'for how much deeper an impression the same deeds would make on posterity, if Homer testified to them'. He envies Achilles (the very first heroic ghost he meets afterward, followed by Hector) that 'he had such a poet to display him to the world' and thereby increase his valour even more (Pun. 13.779-97). These themes are all quite deeply conventional and in context serve as the transition to the rank of heroes to follow. Yet, although Silius imparts a highly Roman flavour to his imitation of Homer's Underworld (shadowed, of course, by Virgil's version) and he speaks of Homer as celebrating Trojan glory, the chronological frame of an epic about the Punic wars allows him to represent a more unmediated connection between Homer's poetry and his own, as between Achilles and his own hero, Scipio, of the Aeneadae (1.1), who by his exploits is a worthy successor to the heroes at Troy. Above all, the combination of Alexander, Homer, and Achilles demonstrates the strength of this triad in Roman minds, particularly for those in power, who were eager to match - and surpass - Greek victories of their past and their ensuing fame.66 Strabo in his account of Julius Caesar's visit to Troy in 49 BCE is even more explicit on this point. Caesar, described as philalexandros, visits the site, emulating the 'example of Alexander, who had come to Troy, himself 66

Scipio, Hannibal and Alexander reappear together in several other sources in a contest for the title of best general. Cf. Livy 35.14, Appian 11.20, Plut. Flam. 21.3, Pyrrh. 8.2, and Lucian's satire, D. Mort. 25. In the last, Hannibal, having now learned Greek in the Underworld, claims physis as the basis of his excellence, since as a barbarian and apaideutos, he was unable to declaim {rhapsodon) Homer like Alexander (385). See also Anderson (1993) 194.

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a lover of Homer {philhomeros)\ If Alexander claimed descent from Achilles, Caesar has an ever better claim, first as a Roman, because the Romans believed Aeneas to have been their original founder, and secondly, because he belonged to the Julian clan, which traced its descent to one of the descendants of Aeneas (13.27). In Lucan's account of the same visit (9.961-99), Caesar too is a mirator famae, emulous of ancient glory, who 'visited the sands of Sigeum and the stream of Simois, famous for Ajax's grave, and the dead who owe so much to the poet's verses' (9.961). But what Lucan's narrative now emphasizes are the visual aspects of the ruined landscape, the city that was now only a 'famous name' (memorabile nomen), and it paints a melancholy picture of desolation - dry river beds and overgrown remains - where 'worn out roots clutch the temples of the gods and the citadel is covered with thorn bushes' (9.966-9). Caesar revisits too the sites in the countryside haunted by Trojan myths: the judgement of Paris, the lament of Oenone, the cave of Anchises, the abduction of Ganymede. There is no stone without a name' (nullum est sine nomine saxum, 973), he wistfully concludes. And now 'having satisfied his eyes with venerable antiquity' (inplevit visus veneranda vetustas, 987), Caesar makes offerings at an altar. He invokes the 'spirits of the dead, who inhabit the ruins of Troy and the household gods of his ancestor Aeneas, who now dwell safe in Lavinium and Alba, where still shines the fire of Troy on their altars', vowing to rebuild the walls so a 'Roman Troy (Romana Pergama) might rise', and in return prays that prosperity attend him to the end (990-9). The stark topography of buried landmarks and barren terrain, where 'the very ruins have been destroyed' and a patch of weeds trodden by an unwary foot might conceal the remains of Hector (9.969, 976-97) resembles a kind of land of the dead in its own right, but as 'Roman Troy' it can be revived and brought back to life.67 But in the interval between this last scene of Caesar's prayer and his earlier circuit around the city, the poet intervenes with thoughts of the poetic vocation itself as the guarantee of lasting memory and renown. Like Scipio in Silius Italicus' Punica, Caesar too needs his bard, as Troy has had its Homer, whose task it was 'to snatch all things from destruction and give immortality to mortal men'. Caesar should not envy those of sacred fame, Lucan continues, 'for if it is permissible for the Latin 67

In fact, there was a well-attested 'tomb of Hector' at the site. While Alexander had intended to restore the ancient city and initiated the precedent, followed by Roman rulers thereafter, of exempting the city from taxation, the serious rebuilding programme at Troy only began in earnest with Caesar, some time after 48 BCE. Additionally, 'by about 200 BCE, the archaeology of Homeric Troy was a fully developed subject, and Polemon of Ilion had written a description of the city'. Vermeule (1995) 469, and see his useful discussion of the vicissitudes of Troy, Neon Ilion, and later, Novum Ilium.

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Muses to promise anything, then, as long as the fame of Smyrna's bard [Homer] endures, posterity shall read my verse and your deeds' (980-6). A curious and somewhat enigmatic statement from a brash young poet, equally a mirator famae. It effaces Latin epic before Lucan (surely, Virgil), and implies in addition that the future of his own poetry is irrevocably linked to the perpetuity of Homeric eminence, despite his emphasis throughout on the Roman side of Troy. One last significant episode remains to be mentioned, an occasion to be recorded not for its solemnity and patriotic fervour, but rather for its infamy and the preposterous behaviour of its actor, the emperor Caracalla. History here is stranger than fiction in its reductio ad absurdum of the kinship between Rome and Troy, with its even more bizarre coda in the appearance of Caracalla's own impostor a few years after his death, imitating Caracalla's imitation of Alexander and Achilles. This first episode is all the more germane too because it not only falls within the period of the Second Sophistic, but Caracalla, and even more, his mother Julia Domna, had a close connection with Philostratus, who, as we shall see, returns to Troy several times in his work, briefly in the Life of Apollonius of Tyana and at length in the Heroicus. Some critics, in fact, have suggested that the latter was written to celebrate the emperor's visit to Troy, or at least, may have motivated the sophist's interest in the topic.68 Caracalla, it seems, conceived a passion for Alexander. 'Once he arrived in Thrace on his journeys', the historian Herodian, declares, 'he suddenly became Alexander and commemorated him afresh in all sorts of ways; for instance, orders were given for pictures and statues to be set up in every city, and he filled Rome as well on the Capitoline and in other temples, images designed to emphasize his links with Alexander' (4.7.8). In some places, Herodian continues, 'we saw some ludicrous pictures portraying a single body surmounted by a head whose circumference was split into two half faces, one of Alexander and one of Caracalla'. The emperor even dressed the part. 'He used to go out, wearing Macedonian dress' and to complete the charade, he formed a brigade which he called the Macedonian phalanx, whose commanders were compelled 'to adopt the names of Alexander's generals' (cf. Dio 77.7-8 (380-1)). Shortly afterward, he went on to Troy, visiting the shrines, decorating the tomb of Achilles with offerings, and there he 'imitated Achilles' - or more accurately, he imitated Alexander imitating Achilles. When Alexander's beloved companion, Hephaistion died (not in Troy, however, but in Ectabana), his immoderate grief and the grand funeral he prepared recalled

Lane Fox (1986) 148 offers cogent arguments against this view.

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Achilles' reaction over his Patroclus (cf. Arr. Anab. 14.1).69 But Caracalla goes one better, with all the sinister implications of what Kathleen Coleman has called Roman 'fateful charades'. 'In his hunt for someone to be Patroclus', we are told, 'one of his favourite freedmen, his chief personal secretary, died at Troy (some say he was poisoned so he could have a funeral like Patroclus, or perhaps he died of a disease)'. Caracalla leaped at the opportunity to prepare a lavish funeral, complete with sacrifices and libations of every sort. Yet of his mimetic zeal, Herodian scornfully records that he made himself an 'object of derision' by cutting a lock of his hair to cast into the fire (like Achilles and later Alexander). Only he was completely bald - 'so he cut off what bit of hair he had' (Herod. 4.7.8-8.5). But the story is not finished. After leaving Troy, he eventually sets off for Alexandria. The excuse was 'a longing to see the city founded in honour of Alexander' as well as to worship Serapis there, but while he made elaborate obeisance to Alexander's tomb, his intention was to massacre the Alexandrians, known for their well-known malicious wit, who this time lampooned him and his family and 'jeered at him for imitating Alexander and Achilles, who were very strong, tall men, while he himself was only a little fellow' (Herod. 8.6-9.3). It is also possible, as a papyrus document suggests, that the provocation was the mob's destruction of statues of Alexander, probably being made ready for Caracalla's visit.70 In any case, these and other murderous excesses, not surprisingly, were shortly to bring him to an untimely - and just as undignified - end.71 Caracalla's obsession combines a number of themes which we have been following in the context of visual culture under the Empire - but in the negative: theatricality in costume and action - at an extreme limit of impersonation, the manipulation of images, including the bizarre novelty 69

70

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On Hephaistion's death and the supposed rites of his funeral, see too Aelian, Var. Hist. 7.8, who is even more explicit on Alexander's identification with Achilles on this occasion. A papyrus, known as the Ada Heraclitii, dated to 215, may well be related to the events in Alexandria and if so, the provocation was the destruction by a mob of statues of Alexander, probably being made ready for Caracalla's visit. See Millar (1964) 157. He was stabbed, with his pants down, when compelled to make an impromptu road stop (Herod. 4.13.4-5). Dio Cassius, who loathed Caracalla, described him as a composite of barbarian, non-Greek traits: he had 'the levity, cowardice, and rashness of a Gaul, the roughness and ferocity of an African, and the cunning of a Syrian' (Dio 77.6.1a; 379-80). The 'coda' which I earlier mentioned concerns the bizarre case of a pseudo-Alexander, recorded by Dio (79.18.1-3). This figure mysteriously appeared in 221, as a kind of daimon and followed the same route through Moesia and Thrace as that earlier travelled by Caracalla in his Alexander costume. Just before disappearing, he is said to have made 'a hollow wooden horse' which he buried in a sepulchre. As Millar (1964) 214-17 puts it, he was really a 'pseudo-pseudo Alexander'.

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of a bi-faced hybrid, and the recorded public reaction that grasped the absurdity of his masquerade, whether in exposing the physical differences between model and copy, or in an actual attack on the very icons of the hero so dear to the emperor. But in assessing all these Roman encounters - poetic in reference to Homer's example, theatrical in reference to the emulous activities of Roman rulers, and visual in the scenes in the Underworld or in Troy itself - the political implications indicate the desire to broadcast a power that could boast of having both appropriated and superseded their Greek predecessors. The references to Homer all occur in the context of a striving for renown and everlasting fame along with emulation of the bard, for poet and hero alike. The site of Troy itself furthers the creative enterprise of fabricating a Roman historical memory in the account of its origins, one that turns defeat into eventual triumph and destruction into renewal. These ideological aspects do not, of course, exclude the numerous other uses made by Latin literature and culture of Homer and the saga of Troy and its heroes, a subject which would repay detailed and individual study. But for the period in question, the sophists' industry in Homeric imaginings is, by contrast, both vast and multitudinous in its approach to a topic and a figure with which they are intimately familiar and whose heritage they unhesitatingly take for granted. A favourite theme and the source of endless quotations, paraphrases and comparisons, as well as of distortions and mischievous rewriting, Homer can veer easily between the sacred and secular, the satiric and sober, but he is never ignored. For this reason I want to pair two quite different kinds of 'close encounters' or epiphanic experiences, Lucian's meeting with Homer on the Isles of the Blessed in his imaginary travel narrative, the Verae Historiae, and Philostratus' Apollonius of Tyana, who in the course of his extensive journeys pays a visit to Troy, where he insists on raising the ghost of Achilles for a private conversation. Atfirstglance, the differences between a wicked parodist and a would-be holy man might inhibit such a comparison, especially since the first openly avows his entire story as a fabrication and the other purports to be a pious biography. However, both Philostratus and Lucian are sophists, whose practice, as has often been observed, consists in variations on a repertory of themes, not unlike an 'art of the fugue', with seemingly endless opportunities for skilful improvisation, mimetic sophistication, and rhetorical ingenuity.72 Both texts are accounts of journeys with a philosophical cast, Lucian's narrator in a paradoxical search for truth through lies, and Apollonius in a quest for enlightenment, both a receiver and dispenser of wisdom. Each text, in its 72

Bompaire (1958); Anderson (1976b).

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own way, shares elements with the genre of romance, so popular in this period; both recount marvellous experiences, albeit to a different degree and intention, and each has a strong taste for the exotic and unfamiliar. Above all, these two travellers, it turns out, are both philomatheis; they are in search of knowledge, like countless visitors before them to actual shrines and historical or mythic sites. In the case of Homeric epic, they want it not from exegetes or guidebooks, but from those who, it is hoped, can resolve, once and for all, the innumerable controversies that swirled about the poet, from textual inconsistencies to items of factual interest, including the much vexed question of Homer's name and identity. The questions they will pose are not wholly dissimilar, reflecting the influence of Alexandrian philology and learned exegeses, as well as popular beliefs and sophistic themes, but the contrasts are, of course, equally instructive. Treating each in turn, we will then turn back to the Heroicus for a last brief look, to conclude with the reported 'sightings' of Achilles himself on the island of Leuke in the Black Sea, a kind of Isle of the Blessed in its own right within the scope of any passing sailor. VI Poetic phantasiai through enargeia are waking dreams (egregoroton enupnia). (Plut. Amat. 749b)

Lucian's Verae Historiae is a sendup of virtually every genre.73 Poetry, history and philosophy are the prime targets, but paradoxography, romance, scientific speculation, and travel literature (periegeses) all come in for their share of the satirist's wit and parodic skill. But Homer, and particularly the Odyssey, provide the dominant frame as well as the prime source of the narrator's self-identification. His objections, as he makes clear in the prologue, are the blatant lies they fabricate and pass off as truth: miracles and fables, imaginary journeys, and all sorts of nonsense, a charge from which philosophers are hardly exempt. And who is the guide and teacher (archegos kai didaskalos) of all this mendacity? Why Homer's Odysseus, of course, and particularly in the narration of his fabulous wanderings before the Phaeacians. Lest Lucian too be excluded from the freedom of mythmaking (muthologein eleuetherias), 'and having nothing true to tell, not having had any adventures of significance', he says brazenly, 'I took to lying'. The difference, he explains, is that he is an honest liar, who 'by his own admission is not telling a word of truth'. And he 73

On this work, see now the useful edition of Georgiadou and Larmour (1998) and the study of Riitten (1997).

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caps this avowal with a warning to his audience: 'Be it understood, then, that I am writing about things which I have neither seen nor had to do with nor learned from others - which in fact, do not exist at all and in the nature of things, cannot exist. Therefore my readers should on no account believe in them' (VH 1.4). Yet for all the exotic fantasy, in truth, Lucian never leaves the Greek world at all, but only reviews it through a perspective that paradoxically debunks myth in the service of myth. Homeric echoes resonate throughout the first part of the narrative, in the traveller's visit to the moon and later in the belly of the whale, along with numerous allusions to other authors. But the centrepiece of the work and the one that most concerns us is the visit to the Isles of the Blessed, the dream of every sightseer and ethnographer (2.5-29). There he finds Homer himself, with Odysseus beside him, along with a host of other figures. These include demigods and heroes, particularly of the Trojan war (with the exception of Locrian Ajax), barbarians (both Cyruses, the Scythian Anacharsis, the Thracian Zalmoxis, and Numa the Italian), Greeks (Lycurgus of Sparta, Phocion and Tellus of Athens), along with the Seven Sages (except for the tyrant Periander). Other figures of myth are also there: Hyacinthus of Sparta, Narcissus of Thespiae, Hylas and other comely youths (in company with Socrates). Finally come the other philosophers, among whom only Epicurus, Aristippus, Diogenes the Cynic, and finally, Pythagoras are present. Lucian, as the arbiter of admission, can exclude others on the basis of their doctrines. Thus, Plato is not there; he is off in his imaginary city whose constitution and laws he had written. Chrysippus cannot enter until he undergoes therapy once again to cure his madness; the Stoics were 'still climbing the hill of virtue', and the Academicians 'wanted to come but ... were still debating as to whether even such an island existed', and even those who started out were too slow, 'being constitutionally unable to arrive at anything, and so turned back half-way' (2.18). Socrates certainly fulfils the promise he made in Plato's Apology (previously quoted) to continue the same habits in the world below as in life, and nearly gets expelled by Rhadamanthus for his irritating irony that spoils everyone's pleasure (2.17). The assembled company, however, along with many others, whatever their profession, 'render especial honours to Achilles and to Theseus' (2.19) - a nice sophistic nod to both Homeric epic and Athenian myth, the sophists' twin points of reference.74 Lucian's depiction of the Isles of the Blessed owes a great deal to a number of sources, chief among which is the Odyssey. There are obvious parallels with Odysseus' own descent into the Underworld, but to Homer 74

The historians, Herodotus and Ktesias, we later learn are on the Isle of the Wicked.

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too is due the idea of the Elysian Fields (a close parallel) to which Menelaus will be consigned after death in view of his status as Zeus' son-in-law (Od. 4), and the landscape itself resembles Alcinous' gardens on Phaeacia, as does the way of life that includes feasting, athletic games, and performances of poetry and song. But in addition to possible oriental influences, this paradise also introduces later ideas about ethical merit as a criterion for admission (the others being relegated to the Isle of the Wicked) and no doubt includes Lucian's own probable innovations, particularly in the matter of philosophers, who here as elsewhere are often the chief butts of his satire. At the same time, the general congerie reflects the thought world of the Second Sophistic as if in microcosm, with its favourite roster of names, its ecumenical inclusion of the now-hallowed barbarian sages, and the jostling together of figures from myth and history, drawn from different ages and vocations, all keeping happy company together. Lucian in general seems to favour an idea of easy communication, which allows mortals to connect to the world of the gods or the world of the dead, the latter, for example, in his brief vignettes, the Dialogues of the Dead, but also in other dialogues such as Charon and Menippus. More than progymnasmata, those rhetorical exercises, which encourage students to enter into the personae or prosopa of important historical or mythical characters through speech or dialogue, in encounters with the world beyond suggest a more intimate and more immediate kind of contact with the past. Those who inhabit it are acknowledged as belonging to another dimension of existence, but the desire to breach the boundary between the dead and the living exerts a powerful hold on the imagination - a desire fulfilled by the fortunate few who can travel to these other regions, behold the spirits of the departed with their own eyes, converse with them, and, ultimately, be able to assure themselves that these heroes are as they always were. There are other motives as well in more traditional manifestations: to gain knowledge, undergo a kind of initiatory rebirth in returning to the land of the living, and give proof of one's heroic prowess. But from Homer to Aristophanes, from Plato's Myth of Er to Lucian's fantasies, these encounters, whether serious or comic, reframe time into space and reconstitute memory into a visible reality of presence, even when the idea itself is mocked, as here in Lucian, along with the foibles of the venerated figures of old. The materialism of Lucian's exacting ethnographic detail acknowledges the paradox of the fantasy: the inhabitants 'have no bodies, but are intangible andfleshless(anapheis kai asarkoi) and display only form and figure (morphen kai ideari), but incorporeal as they may be, they live and move and think and talk ... naked souls in the semblance of their bodies' (2.12). The past lives on in this twilight state of being and non-

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being, in a reduction to essence of form and character that nevertheless is illuminated through vivid detail and the renewed activity of its actors. Homer is represented in the scenes on the island in four different ways: first, his physical presence in Elysion and his songs that are sung by choice at the never-ending symposium (Tor the most part they sing the epics of Homer, who is there himself and shares the revelry, lying at the table in the place above Odysseus,' 15); second, Lucian's own personal conversations with the poet in which he asks Homer everything he ever wanted to know; third, the repetition of Iliadic activity in funeral games, named the Thanatousia, in which the heroes, some old, some new, participate, with Achilles (and Theseus) as judges, along with a replay of the Certamen between Homer and Hesiod (won again by Hesiod, although 'Homer was really far the best man'). Finally, there are a series of sequels, as it were, to the Iliad, with new challenges in the form of a battle between the heroes and rebels from the land of the Wicked, in which Achilles (and Socrates, as at Delion) were the ones who most distinguished themselves. To celebrate this achievement, Homer writes a new epic, 'and as I was leaving he gave me the book to take to the people at home, although it was later lost along with everything else from the voyage'. The first line, however, is preserved: This time sing me, Muse, of the shades of the heroes in battle' (a nice combination of Iliad and Odyssey) (2.23-4). Subsequently, Helen is abducted yet again - by one of Lucian's own crewsmen (an event that results in his premature banishment from the Island) - but this time, the Homeric heroes give chase by sea and restore her to Menelaus, with no aftereffects, except for the miscreant who is appropriately punished (2.257). No new Trojan War is in the offing, even if Helen remains the same wayward wife as before - even if Stesichorus had been admitted to the Isles of the Blessed - since 'by that time Helen had forgiven him' (2.15). In departure from the island, however, the Homeric allusions tilt back to the Odyssean side that had already framed the entire narrative. Lucian now turns fully into an Odysseus, and Rhadamanthus, who presides over Elysion, gives him a parodic version of Tiresias' prophecy (2.27-8). From this point on, Lucian begins to play Odysseus in earnest, yet with a new and ironic twist. He goes to the Isle of the Wicked and sees the great sinners (as in Odyssey 11), continues on to the Isle of Dreams, with its gates of horn and ivory (Od. 9), and much else besides, which he describes, 'since no one else has written about it, and Homer, the only one to mention it at all, was not quite accurate in what he said' (2.32). And now as a true stand-in for his alter ego, he makes his way to the island of Calypso, where he finds the nymph's cave 'which was as Homer described it, where she was working wool'. And why? Odysseus himself

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had secretly given him a letter for the nymph which recounts the events that followed his leaving of her island (shipwreck, the land of Phaeacians, the situation he found at Ithaca, and his killing of the suitors). He adds that he was subsequently killed by Telegonus, his son by Circe, but now on the Isle of the Blessed, he regrets his previous departure. 'I am sorry to have given up my life with you and the immortality you offered me. Therefore if I get a chance, I shall run away and come to you' (2.36). Lucian cannot go as far as to arrange for this reunion, but in one stroke he has overturned the very ideological basis of the epic, its investment in marital fidelity and embrace of mortality as the human condition in favour of the all too human desire to live forever.75 Before leaving Lucian's tale, let us turn back briefly to his conversations with Homer (2.20), not just to hear what a sophist might ask of a bard, but as a connecting link to Apollonius of Tyana's similar interview with the ghost of Achilles at Troy. A reader who would look for metaphysical or even poetic depth in Lucian's questions will go away disappointed. For what does Lucian want to know? The answers to the questions that comprised the stock in trade of grammarians and Alexandrian textual critics, but which also became commonplace themes among authors of epigrams and in the popular imagination. Thefirstis the question of his birthplace, one we encountered earlier in this essay. Homer knows well that Chios, Smyrna and Colophon were among the chief contenders, but no, 'I am a Babylonian,' he says, and among my fellow-countrymen my name was not Homer but Tigranes. A close neighbour, it now seems, to Lucian's own place of origin in Syria,76 Homer continues with how he got the name he goes by, resorting to a familiar etymology, homeros or hostage, since he was once hostage to the Greeks. Secondly, was he the author of the bracketed lines obelized by the recensions of the Alexandrian library? Indeed, all the lines are his own. So much for Zenodotus and Aristarchus, says Lucian, who now considers them guilty of the highest psuchrologia (pedantry), and in one stroke wipes out Homeric textual criticism. Well, what about the beginning of the Iliad? Why did you begin with the wrath of Achilles, another matter for concern among the exegetes? Homer's answer is simple. It just came into his head that way. Hardly a boost for inspiration from the Muses. Next comes the familiar inquiry as to which poem came first. Did he write the Odyssey 75

76

O n e might think of Achilles' regret in H o m e r ' s U n d e r w o r l d - that he would rather be a hired servant in the world above t h a n a king in the world below. This is the subject t o o of one of Lucian's Dialogues of the Dead (26) in which Achilles defends his desire before Antilochus. E a c h m a k e s H o m e r in his own image, it seems. T h e cock in Lucian's dialogue of the same n a m e (17) claims H o m e r was originally a camel!!

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before the Iliad, as most people say (in contrast to ps.-Longinus who says the opposite). The answer is brief and in the negative. For an epic poet, Homer seems to be a man of few words. Lucian need not pose the last question. He can see for himself that Homer is not blind (20). This was not the end of his inquiries, which he says he posed on other occasions, and each time he was greeted by Homer with the same cordiality. Moreover, Lucian's easy familiarity with Homer does not stop here, for not only does Homer entrust him with the new epic he had written, but on Lucian's departure, the poet consents to compose a couplet to carve up on a memorial stone, and in good Homeric hexameter and diction, this elegant graffito reads: One Lucian who is altogether dear to the blessed gods Beheld what is here and went back again to his native land. (29)

Without the bard to attest to the reality of an unreal journey, who would otherwise believe his eyewitness report? And what greater ambition could be realized than to be immortalized among the immortals in the inscription of this would-be hero's name and deeds? The scene at Troy occupies a very small segment of the vast and sprawling biography of Philostratus' Life of Apollonius of Tyana, whose narrative recounts the eventful life and far-reaching travels of the Neopythagorean philosopher, charismatic sage, religious reformer and prophet, adviser to emperors, and supposed miracle-worker, who had lived a century earlier. His journeys take him as far as India, beyond the furthest limits of Alexander's conquests, to Ethiopia, Spain, Asia Minor, and also to Rome, in addition to extensive tours of Greece and the Mediterranean. There is no need here to enter into the controversies concerning the identity of the author (which Philostratus?) and the credibility of the work (fact, fiction, or a mixture of the two). 77 What seems certain, however, as the text relates (VA 1.3), is that the work was commissioned by the Julia Domna, mentioned earlier, the Syrian-born wife of Septimius Severus and mother of his successor, Caracalla, although she did not live to see its completion. Without going into detail, I can only agree with Graham Anderson's assessment that the work 'is one of the most extraordinary products of ancient literature' in the sheer scope of its ambition, its sophistic virtuosity, and its wide-ranging purview over the Greco-Roman world (and beyond). Like Lucian's Historiae Verae, the work is filled with exotic 77

For the most recent discussions, see Francis (1998); Flinterman (1995); and Eisner (1997a), all with bibliography. My own view is that whatever sources about Apollonius were available to Philostratus, he has cast his own work in a recognizably sophist form, with techniques often borrowed from romance and other genres of the period.

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paradoxographical descriptions of every sort, so dear to the sophist polymath tradition, and like Lucian's fantasy, the VA is also filled with marvellous sights and deeds in the course of many travels. But the differences, of course, are far more striking. Lucian's favourite butts of satire are philosophers, in the Verae Historiae and elsewhere, and his pages are filled with charlatan would-be seers, while Philostratus' Apollonius is represented as exemplifying the highest standards of virtue in the purity of his life, his ascetic practices, religious zeal, and devotion to wisdom. Above all, is the evidence of his supernatural powers, especially in the matters of a clairvoyance and close communion with the gods. These are the gifts Apollonius was promised when he chose Pythagoras as his guide: if he becomes pure, he will gain the faculty of foreknowledge, and his eyes will be so filled with light, as he is told, that he 'shall distinguish a god, and recognize a hero, and detect and put to shame the shadowy phantasmata which disguise themselves in the form of men' (6.11; cf.1.1). Apollonius will be a seer in the true sense of the word. Not a mere magician as his detractors claimed, but one who, like the premier Homeric heroes in their respective epics, is privileged to behold both gods and ghosts face-to-face and grasp their true identities. Philostratus' portrait of the sage, as has been observed, is also a prime illustration of Greek self-identity at work in the promotion of a Philhellenism in its many aspects, among which are paideia, philosophical wisdom, devotion to learning, love of freedom, and defence of ethical values. Along with his public interventions in the affairs of cities, his role as adviser to emperors, and the discourses he delivers to large audiences, these qualities are ones he shares with any good sophist, along with eloquence in speech and an ear attuned to good Attic Greek. His pious attention to cults and religious ideas and practices may find some parallels in the literature of the period, including, of course, Pausanias and Plutarch. But in keeping with the vocation he has embraced, he is not only deeply engaged in discussions of the soul, the nature of the gods, the afterlife and moral conduct. He takes an active role in the restoration of Greek shrines or the correction of ritual procedures, especially of divination and sacrifice, and he visits all the major sacred sites, with an eye to upholding the old customs and traditions. If Lucian declares that his desire to travel was based on his intellectual curiosity and desire for adventure (VH 1.5), Apollonius initially embarks on his journeys to learn of the wisdom and cultic practices of others, especially at the more ancient sites of religious enlightenment, first among the Brahman sages in India, whose seat lies beyond the limits of Alexander's conquests, and subsequently, with the Egyptian gymnosophists in Ethiopia. The Brahman sages were the original source of Pythagoras' wisdom, who transmitted it to the Egyptians

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from whom it passed to the Greek philosopher (VA 6.11, 8.7.12). As James Francis observes, 'by returning to these sources independently, Apollonius outdoes Pythagoras and is established as an independent authority, while remaining in the tradition of Greek wisdom'.78 The visit to Troy takes place at a strategic moment in the fourth book, once he has returned to Ionia after his long sojourn among the Indian sages and before he sets out for Hellas proper. This is not pure happenstance. The episode can (and should) be viewed as a return now to the sources of Greek cultural identity that mark a significant turning point in his career. This mission is all the more urgent in view of the Indians' censure of Homer and his heroes, which he had just recently faced. The stopover at Troy, as we shall see, affords Apollonius the opportunity to summon his own image of Achilles into existence, one which both resembles and supports Apollonius' own unique sense of self - his special powers, his religious vocation, his Hellenic sympathies and values - while yet allowing him to acknowledge his debt to Indian wisdom and, at the same time, preserve the Homeric hero's fundamental epic character. In the previous book, the Indian seer, Iarchas, had cast aspersions on Homeric heroes in the context of a discussion on metempsychosis (a belief he shares with Apollonius). Apollonius had asked, 'Since Pythagoras declared himself to be Euphorbus, so were you yourself, before you entered your present body, one of the Trojans or the Achaeans or someone else?' Iarchas waxes indignant: Those Achaean sailors were the ruin of Troy, and your talking so much about it is the ruin of you Greeks. For you imagine that the campaigners against Troy were the only heroes there were, and you forget other heroes both more numerous and more divine, whom your own country and that of the Egyptians and that of the Indians have produced.' To prove his point, he asks Apollonius whom he regards as the most remarkable of those heroes. Apollonius does not hesitate: it is Achilles, 'for he and no other is celebrated by Homer as excelling all the Achaeans in personal beauty and size, and in mighty deeds' (3.19). But Iarchas is ready with a counterexample, a virtuous Indian king of old, named Ganges, son of the river of that name, also known for those same qualities as Achilles - and more. The comparisons are instructive. Achilles destroyed cities in the course of the Trojan expedition, he points out, the other founded them, and in greater number. One was cruel and merciless in his reaction to the theft of a woman by a king, while Ganges was magnanimous in even more difficult personal circumstances, keeping his oath of alliance with another king, even though that king had carried off his own wife. He liberated his country from Scythian invaders; but 78

Francis (1995) 106.

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Achilles enslaved a city, and that 'on behalf of a woman [Helen] who probably was never carried off, even against her will'. And in what I suspect to be an implicit contrast to Achilles' battle with the river Scamander, this Indian king, 'when his own father inundated India, himself turned the flood into the Red Sea, and effected a reconciliation between his father and the land' (3.20).79 Iarchas, it turns out, is a reincarnation of that very Ganges. He had already hinted at this fact: 'I would have you compare my own ancestor (progonon), or rather my ancestral body (to progonon soma), for that was the light in which Pythagoras regarded Euphorbus' (19). But a more curious case is still to follow. The Indian sage points out a gifted but unruly boy, who, as it happens was none other than the Homeric hero, Palamedes, in a previous life. Despite his natural aptitudes and other admirable traits (the proof of his identity is that he knows how to write although he has never learned his letters), he has 'refused to embrace philosophy and has no love for learning', although he has been sent to Iarchas in the hopes he might change his ways. And why? 'He found his bitterest enemies in Odysseus and Homer; for the one laid an ambush against him of people by whom he was stoned to death, although innocent; while the other denied him any place in his epic, while bestowing renown on lesser people.' This is why the boy now rejects philosophy and bemoans his ill fortune, since his wisdom proved no use to him. A man of surpassing wisdom, killed by his own kind, and, to compound the offence, Homer inflicts the ultimate ignominy in denying him the kleos that others, not as worthy as he, have won through the poet's verses (22). Both issues, the matter of Achilles' outsize anger and Palamedes' absence from Homeric epic (along with his unjust trial) were issues of some interest to sophistic rhetoric. But already in fifth-century Athens, Palamedes had come into special prominence. All three tragic poets composed drama about him and Gorgias' epideictic speech in his defence is still extant. Palamedes, credited with all sorts of technical and intellectual inventions, including writing, is indeed an appropriate figure for that age of ferment and discovery, and the question of his trial also coheres with the pressing questions of law and justice, so essential to the development of drama in the polis.80 For the new sophists, Palamedes can be invoked, in a favourite ploy, to supplement (or correct) Homer's account of the 79

80

Ganges, like the good king in the Odyssey, guarantees the fertility of the land and its purity. The Ethiopian inhabitants, who had treacherously killed him, were stricken with plague and infertility. Driven out of the land by Ganges' ghost, they were finally compelled to purify the earth with the blood of the murderers. His story was told in the Kypria. For a convenient survey of the story and its variants, see Gantz (1993) 603-8.

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Trojan War, with the palm going to Philostratus' Heroicus, where the claim is even advanced that Odysseus' ghost traded first-hand knowledge with Homer in exchange for the suppression of Palamedes in his epics. But more to the point, the sophists see themselves in him. Palamedes represents the avatar of wisdom, even philosophy, and as such, they could readily identify with him. They admired his polymathic feats and themselves aspired to a reputation, like his, for sophia. He is one of the heroes, we may recall,whom Socrates hoped to meet in the Underworld, along with Orpheus, Musaeus, Hesiod and Homer (PL Ap. 41a). At any rate, he seems to have been a favourite of Philostratus, both here and far more extensively in the Heroicus. Let us turn back now to Apollonius and the scene of Troy. In viewing the sights there, like many tourists before him, 'his mind was stored with all the traditions of the past (archaiologia)\ and so he went to visit the tombs of the Achaeans, where in keeping with his own ascetic principles, he made 'bloodless and pure sacrifices'. Only then does he determine to spend the night alone on Achilles' mound, despite the entreaties of his companions, who insist that 'Achilles was still dreadful to look upon, as the local inhabitants say.' Only Trojans might have something to fear from the one, 'whose shield and his plumes waved so terribly, as they say', but not a Greek. 'I have nothing in common with Ilium,' Apollonius replies, and moreover, he is ready with examples of the hero's affability. 'I know Achilles well and he thoroughly delights in company (homilia) and conversation,' such as with Nestor, Phoenix, and even with Priam, as soon as he heard him speak, although the Trojan king had been his bitterest enemy. As for me', declares Apollonius, 'I shall talk to him more pleasantly than his former companions' (4.11). His confidence in his fellow Greek is not misplaced, as we hear when some days later he relates the entire episode to his companions on board ship (4.16-17). As night came on, he summoned the hero for a conversation, 'not by a digging a ditch like Odysseus, nor by tempting souls with the blood of sheep, but I offered up the prayer which Indians say they use in approaching their heroes: "O Achilles, most of mankind declare that you are dead, but I cannot agree with them, nor can Pythagoras, my spiritual ancestor (sophias progonos). If then we hold the truth, show to us your own form (eidos); for you would profit not a little by showing yourself to my eyes, if you should be able to use them to attest your existence." ' The invocation succeeds in eliciting the desired epiphany. 'The earth shook slightly and a youth emerged five cubits high wearing a cloak of Thessalian fashion; but in appearance he was by no means the braggart figure (alazon), which some imagine Achilles to have been. Though stern to look upon (demos), he never lost his bright look; and seems to me that

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his beauty has never received its meed of praise, even though Homer dwelt at length upon it; for it was really beyond the power of words, and it is easier for the singer to ruin his fame in this respect than to praise him as he deserved.' In true epiphanic fashion, the hero, once having emerged, grew in size, more than double his previous height, and his beauty increased to the same degree as well. Like Apollonius, he has long hair, which in this case, he explains he has kept inviolate (asulon) out of respect for the river to which he had dedicated a lock for oracular consultation. We note several telling details right from the start: his beauty of appearance far outweighs his fearsome look and his first words concern his piety and trust in divination. What follows next only confirms the initial impression. 'I am pleased to have met you', Achilles says, 'since I have long wanted a man like yourself.' The reason is his concern that the Thessalians 'for a long time past have failed to present their offerings at my tomb, and I do not yet wish to show my wrath (menis) against them'. If that should happen, 'they would perish more utterly than did the Hellenes on this spot'. The menace of wrath and violence is still there, but his first resort will be 'gentle advice' (sumboulia epieikes), 'to warn them not to violate ancient customs (hubrizein ... es ta nornima), nor to prove themselves worse men than the Trojans here. Although they were robbed of so many of their heroes by myself, yet they sacrifice publicly to me ... and with suppliant branch in hand, ask for a truce from my hostility.' But this request, however deserving, Achilles refuses to grant. Greek and Trojan still remain on opposite sides. His famous menis abides intact as evidence of his core identity, and he goes so far as to insist that if Troy were to be rebuilt or regain its old prosperity, it would only meet the same fate again.81 If the Thessalians, however, do not redress his grievance at their neglect of his cult, they will be treated the same way, and only Apollonius as his envoy will 'save them from ruin'. Thus, while Achilles ever remains the proud egotist, concerned for his own time, even after death, the task he enjoins fits precisely with Apollonius' own more general mission in the restoration of cults and in support of ancestral custom. Likewise, Achilles' implacable resentment of the Trojans here is not based on his loss of life at their hands, as we might expect, but because they committed the moral offence of a perjured oath against him. In this romanticized version, which had by now gained popularity, Achilles is not killed by Paris and Apollo in battle at the Scaean In 4.12, we further learn that Achilles had bidden Apollonius to get rid of one of his companions, Antisthenes of Paros, and not to 'initiate him in your wisdom', since he is of Trojan ancestry, on the grounds that 'he is too much of a descendant of Priam, and the praise of Hector is never out of his mouth'.

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gates as predicted in the Iliad (22.359), but through a treacherous ambush, when he was lured unarmed to the temple of Apollo with the promise of Polyxena as his bride. And in a further revision, as we shall shortly hear in Achilles' reply to Apollonius' query, it was not the Greeks who sacrificed Polyxena to their lasting shame, but rather, she killed herself over his tomb out of her love for him. In a few brief lines, therefore, Achilles proves himself a man after Apollonius' own heart. In hearkening to the seer's summons, he has validated both Apollonius' unorthodox means of producing an epiphany and his distinctive Pythagorean belief in the continued existence of the dead. He has demonstrated too that he shares the seer's moral values, reserving his anger for oathbreakers and for those who abandon the ritual practices of old. But there is more to come. It is now Apollonius' turn. Achilles already anticipates his desire to ask him about the Trojan War and accordingly, grants him five questions. In the Verae Historiae, Lucian's inquiries centred about the poet himself, his name and birthplace, the authenticity of his verses, the order of epic composition, and poetic technique questions quite in keeping with the narrator's scholastic bent. Here the issue is one of truth or falsehood: did something really happen as the poet had said? Who should know better than one who was 'really' there? But these questions also subtly sustain the same ideology as delineated above. Several queries are ontological in nature; they are facts that postdate Achilles' death, the answers to which assume the continuing sentience of the hero: was he really buried at Troy and did the Muses sing the dirge over him; was Polyxena slaughtered by the Achaeans over his tomb; and 'did Greece ever produce at any one time so many and such distinguished heroes as Homer says were gathered at Troy'. The other two queries are equally suggestive, this time on ethical grounds. To the age-old question, 'did Helen really come to Troy or was it Homer who took pleasure in inventing the story', the reply performs a double function. 'We were deceived for a long time', Achilles says, 'sending envoys and fighting battles in her behalf, in the belief she was at Ilion, although she was really living in Egypt in the house of Proteus.' So far, it is easy to recognize this alternate ploy, as old as Herodotus, Stesichorus and Euripides. But, as Achilles goes on, he introduces a new twist. Eventually the Achaeans realized the truth, 'yet we continued to fight to win Troy itself, so as not to disgrace ourselves by retreat'. The Trojans knew the truth but deceived the Greeks; the Greeks came to the same knowledge on their own, but persevered in order to safeguard their heroic honour. In representing the situation in this way, Helen too remains pure and, at the same time, Achilles has also absolved the Achaeans from Iarchas' scorn (shared by many Greeks, as we know, since Herodotus) that they fought a war only

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for the sake of a wanton woman. The fifth and last question, however, leads us directly back to the scene among the Indian seers, and serves as a fitting climax to the interview with the 'best of the Achaeans'. 'Why was it that Homer knew nothing about Palamedes, or if he knew him, then kept him out of your story?' 'Palamedes came to Troy, as surely as Troy itself existed,' is the reply. But 'since this wisest and most warlike hero fell in obedience to Odysseus' whim, Homer does not introduce him into his poems, lest he should have to record the shame (oneidos) of Odysseus in his song'. This abbreviated version sidesteps a forthright indictment of Odysseus' treachery against Palamedes, as the Heroicus will do at length. But Achilles is not one here to malign Greeks for the same kind of deception levelled against the Trojans (twice over). Instead, he shows his own mettle in his grief over Palamedes, raising up a lament over him 'as over one who was the greatest and most beautiful of men, the youngest and the most warlike, who surpassed all others in sophrosune and had often consorted with the Muses'. Even more painful is the knowledge that Palamedes' cult too is neglected, and he enjoins upon Apollonius a second mission: to care for that hero's tomb and restore the image of him 'that has been so contemptuously cast aside'. In Achilles' eyes, Palamedes has all the heroic qualities of beauty and valour, in addition to his moral temperance and cultivated eloquence. But the grounds of his appeal to Apollonius are even closer to the mark, since as he says, 'you sages have a tender regard for one another' (sophois pros sophous epitedeid). Apollonius and Palamedes are kin, bound together by their mutual esteem for sophia, and if Achilles does not include himself in this category, he nevertheless proves to cherish its value. At the same time, if Palamedes was maltreated in life and denied his kleos (and vindication after the death) - a state of affairs which led the Indian boy to reject philosophy altogether Achilles' concern for his friend insures that his memory will be resurrected in cult and he grants Apollonius yet another occasion to fulfil his selfappointed role as custodian of ritual practice. Indeed, Apollonius carries out both missions. Somewhat later he finds an occasion to meet with the Thessalians and in Achilles' name turn them from their neglectful ways (4.23), just as he has been doing everywhere he now stops in Greece. But the search for Palamedes comes first, and what happens more than confirms the personal meaning of the hero to Apollonius, well beyond his other, more typical, acts of restitution (4.13). Directly after leaving Troy, he and his companions seek out the place on the Aeolian coast, near Lesbos, according to Achilles' instructions, and disembarking Apollonius said: 'Let us give respect, men of Hellas, to so good a man to whom we owe all wisdom. For we shall prove ourselves better men than the Achaeans, if we pay tribute to the excellence (arete) of

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one whom they unjustly slew.' They find the tomb and unearth the buried statue, bearing the inscription, 'to the divine Palamedes', and raise up an unusually large shrine on the site. Praying to the hero, Apollonius begs him 'to forget his anger (menis) against the Achaeans and grant that men multiply in numbers and in sophirf. Such is Palamedes' legacy, not just improved welfare for his worshippers, as the more customary reward for piety, but the very faculty of sophia itself. The seer's last words take us even further: 'O Palamedes, author of all eloquence {logos), author of the Muses, author of myself (di hon ego).' Apollonius remains throughout his life a disciple of Pythagoras, the ancestor of his wisdom (sophias progonos), but the epic Palamedes, a figure who belongs to traditional myth, is in a sense his true alter ego, the avatar of himself. In sum, the visionary experience granted to Apollonius in his face-toface conversation with Achilles and the nature of their reciprocal interchange fully confirms the seer's character and an ideal of heroic conduct. The introduction of Palamedes goes further, not just to promote an intimacy of identification with the past in the sympathy between an individual and a hero (or god). It also suggests the potential nature of such encounters to provide the occasion at which one may see oneself in the other. As Robin Lane Fox so acutely observes, such incidents come close 'to our psychological notion that the "other" may in fact be a projection of the feelings and emotions of the observer',82 one that depends on the immediacy of visual contact, however it is procured.

vn When Alaric and the whole army came to the city, he saw the tutelary goddess Athena walking about the wall, looking just like her statue, armed and ready to resist attack, while leading their forces he saw the hero Achilles, just as Homer described him at Troy when in his wrath he fought to avenge the death of Patroclus. (Zosimus, Historia Nova 5.6)

In the dialogue, Heroicus, which I earlier discussed as a prime example of 'close encounters' (ascribed either to the same Philostratus as the author of the VA or a close relative), the intimacy between the local vinegrower and the hero Protesilaus does not depend on the same self-reflexive impulse that aligns the ghostly figure of Achilles with the sage Apollonius, despite some of the parallels in detail and outlook between the two works. Protesilaus is rather the spiritual guide, practical advisor, and the authoritative medium through whose eyes the vinegrower (and through the vinegrower, the Phoenician merchant, and through them, we too) are 82

Lane Fox (1986) 162.

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permitted to 'see' the vast throng of heroes, both Greeks and Trojans, who cluster around the territory of Troy, in the form of eidola (spirits) and sometimes too in their images (agalmata), heroes who are described in their physical appearance down to the last detail. We hear too the stories about them, their past and present activities, their natures and deeds, which Protesilaus, an avid reader of Homer, often knows better than the bard. Nothing in ancient literature approaches the kind of regular and affectionate communion, the sunousia, between the vinegrower and his daimonic hero, who frequents this part of the countryside. In Homeric epic, gods may appear to mortals on occasion in times of necessity and then only to the especially privileged, like Athena to Achilles in the Iliad and to Odysseus in the Odyssey. Hippolytus in Euripides' play may consort with Artemis as her favourite, but while he may hear her voice, he cannot see her face to face. Others, whom we have noted, like Aelius Aristides, may enjoy repeated visions in dreams, and the nature of Socrates' daimonion is a popular theme among writers under the Empire. But the Heroicus makes the condition of election a form of moral instruction combined with mystic revelation, which is imparted to the vinegrower (a former pepaideumenos of sorts when he lived in the city) through the counsel of Protesilaus himself, who has persuaded him to adopt a better mode of life. The lifestyle Protesilaus advocates, for all its Neopythagorean aspects, harks back to older ideas about a golden age in its simple and peaceful existence, close to the land in a society 'more suited to heroes than to men' (2.1), where the virtues of friendship and hospitality are observed, money is rarely used, and wisdom or sophia may be pursued.83 The vinegrower in turn will initiate the Phoenician merchant into the secrets of wisdom, as well as entrance him with his vivid storytelling, so that at the end he can declare that this local informant must be 'dear to the gods' (like Apollonius and the traveller Lucian), since 'it is obvious that your knowledge of these divine stories is the work of the same gods who have made you Protesilaus' friend and companion' (58). The pastoral setting itself of the encounter between the vinegrower and the Phoenician stranger resonates with a blend of classical echoes, as befits a work of this period composed for a highly literate audience. We may recall the Odyssey itself in the meeting of Eumaios with the disguised Odysseus and their exchange of stories (book 14), not without a touch 83

I am indebted to Mantero (1966), especially for her analysis of the atmosphere and philosophico-religious aspects of the dialogue, 48-74, but also for its many other contributions. Anderson (1986) is unduly sceptical of almost anything but sophistic elements. Jeffrey Rusten has kindly allowed me to quote his unpublished translation of the dialogue.

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of irony, given the general vilification of Odysseus in this dialogue to Palamedes' advantage.84 Hesiod's influence, however, is even stronger, not only in the praise of agricultural labour but in the situation of the vinegrower himself, who had been cheated of his land by unscrupulous folk and only through Protesilaus' intervention was he able to recover the single field that will now at least suffice for his humbler needs. We might even refer his suspicion of merchants and seafaring to Hesiod's similar distaste. Above all, it is Hesiod to whom is owed the concept of a golden age and its aftermath in the idea of surviving daimones who wander over the surface of the earth (epichthonioi) as guardians of justice, spirits, who are here transmuted into the omnipresent figures of Homeric heroes in their former haunts. Certain Dionysiac elements, so popular in rural cults under the Empire, might also be adduced to account for the occupation of the vinegrower.85 Finally, the locus amoenus and its beautiful landscape to which the speakers repair provoke recollection of Plato's Phaedrus one of the most ubiquitous (and overworked) topoi in later literature - as the proper scene in which to discuss philosophy and the nature of divinity itself.86 The rustic atmosphere, is one, however, that attracted sophistic attention, as for example, in Dio Chrysostom's Euboicus or in Longus' Daphnis and Chloe, a choice which gave ample scope to the rhetorical love of description as to moralizing contrasts between an unspoiled nature and the rush and tumble of urban life. More generally, it is difficult to fix the exact tone of the dialogue. In its syncretistic blend of piety, local traditions, mysticism, romance, and rationality, the piece incorporates many motifs of sophistic literature, including and especially extensive discussions of Homer's own authority in the matter of his origins, his knowledge, and the details of his poems. Protesilaus, the first Greek to meet his death on the shores of Troy, might not at first glance win credence as a likely eyewitness of subsequent events. But reassured as the Phoenician stranger might be by the news of his double resurrection (once for love of Laodamia and again through some unnamed mystical process), we cannot altogether efface the suspicion that, for all his piety, Protesilaus is a skilful sophist at work, as revealed in his erudition, antiquarian lore, rhetorical description, and deft manipulation of Homeric traditions, for praise and for blame. On the other hand, there is nothing ambiguous about the hero Palamedes, the sophist's favourite, who, as in The Life of Apollonius of Tyana, is given top billing. He is not only praised to the skies for his 84 85 86

On this setting and the Odyssey, see Anderson (1986) 250. Mantero (1966) 58-9. On the Phaedrus in second-century literature, see Moles (1990).

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inventive skills and superior wisdom, along with a disdain for riches and honour that is compatible with the professed ideology of the piece. But his wrongful death by the machinations of Odysseus is elevated to the entirely novel reason for the wrath (menis) that rules both epics, of Achilles in the Iliad and Poseidon in the Odyssey. In his grief and anger, Achilles even 'composed a song for the lyre on Palamedes, and sang of him as of heroes of old, and prayed that he would visit him in a dream offering wine from the bowl where Hermes drinks to send dreams'. Even now, Protesilaus weeps when he speaks of Palamedes to the vinegrower, and the hero is said 'to appear in person to all those who loved strength and wisdom as one worthy of song and admiration' (33.36-7). The reason, we learn, for Homer's suppression of his story in this version was not just a decision to protect Odysseus from disgrace (the motif in the Life). Rather, in a neat reminiscence of Odysseus' own consultation with the dead in the epic Nekyia, Homer conjured up the soul of Odysseus on Ithaca, who in return for sharing with the poet his truthful recall of events at Troy ('souls never lie when at a pit filled with blood') demanded a full expurgation of his rival and enemy from the roster of heroes. 'Homer knew the truth but changed much of it to suit the subject he had chosen' (43.12-17), it is said. In that same spirit, the bard invented the race of Cyclopes, imagined the Laestrygonians, and made the daimon Circe and other gods fall in love with Odysseus, even though he was clearly too old for sex, and anyway he was too short, 'with a snub nose and a calculating look' that is unattractive in lovers. Protesilaus himself certainly doesn't believe any of those stories, although he has never actually heard any of them, least of all the one about the Sirens, he says, since 'he put wax in his ears and decided not to listen, not because it was not enjoyable and entertaining, but because it was an incredible series of fictions.' (24.33; 34.3-6). For lovers of truth, Odysseus' fabulous adventures and trickster character make him a convenient scapegoat, not just here but elsewhere in a long tradition of ambivalence about his merits, while the introduction of Palamedes allows for the 'upgrading' of Homer in the sophist manner, by supplementing his poems with more acceptable philosophical and intellectual values. Although both Protesilaus and Palamedes are the two most important figures in the Heroicus, the only ones who often converse with ordinary mortals, the text reaches its climax with Achilles, who, in keeping with his mystique, is given the longest treatment by far of any other hero at Troy (45-57). Starting from the beginning with the marriage of Peleus and Thetis, we hear about Achilles' birth and childhood, his education under Chiron, followed by the expedition to Scyros, and as for all the heroes, his face and figure are described in detail. The narrative turns then to his

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career at Troy and the circumstances of his death and funeral, to conclude with his cults. One is located in the Troad and the other on Leuke (the White Island), which lies in the Euxine Sea at the mouth of the Ister (Danube), not far from Olbia. While there is occasional grumbling about the prestige of this hero who is the most 'godlike of the Greek army', he stands out from the rest by 'his physical grace, size, and the brilliance of his armour', and is recognizable from the fact that 'a windstorm swirls around him to accompany his spirit (eidolon)9, although 'he too, like the other heroes, visits and holds conversations with a few people' (22.1). While none of his traditional fierceness has abated (he is compared to a lion and in Ilion he hunts wild animals), his character is enhanced by the company he keeps and the sympathies he shares with the nobler heroes. Among these are Ajax and Antilochus, but Palamedes, as earlier mentioned, is singled out. It was his close friendship with Achilles, let us recall, that had prompted the substitution of his unfortunate fate as the reason for Achilles' withdrawal from battle in place of his quarrel with Agamemnon over the captive girl, Chryseis. Protesilaus, who vaunts in turn his own unsung aristeia in the battle against the Mysians and their king Telephus (a mimetic prelude to the Trojan War), is represented as a younger doublet of Achilles (23.330),87 and it is he who visits Achilles himself in his sanctuary on the White Island and reports back the details to the vinegrower. It is a further mark of distinction that Achilles exists in two dimensions, one on land, the other at sea. He is visible as the spirit of a dead hero who can be worshipped at his tomb in Troy, but he is also to be seen as an immortal deity, who resides in another, quite distant, locale, where he may be sighted by passing ships (cf. (52.10)).88 The entire dialogue is a fitting climax to our extended study of visual culture and the Homeric tradition. The cult at Troy returns us to the figure of Alexander the Great, who, it may be recalled, initiated his emulation of Achilles at the hero's tomb. Here too, his name is invoked as the cause of the Thessalians' renewed interest (now lapsed) in performing the odd (and probably invented) rites in honour of Achilles at Troy in return for his sparing of their land during his conquest of Greece (52.16-18). Like Alexander's desire for the lyre of Achilles (rather than that of Paris, his namesake), Achilles too, as we will learn, still sings the klea andron (and more) in his island home. The special aspect, however, of the 'sight87 88

Anderson (1986) 244, 247. This distinction is made in the hymn supposedly sung by the Thessalians to Achilles at Troy in praise of Thetis: 'what his mortal nature had of him lies in Troy; but what the boy took from your race lives in Pontus' (52.10).

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ings' of heroes in both Troy and on the White Island is the strength of popular tradition that gives access, not just to the elite, but to ordinary folk, either those who live in the vicinity of Troy, or as in the case of Leuke, any sailor who happens by. But while Philostratus may have fabricated (or exaggerated) the ghostly apparitions of so many heroes over the plain of Ilion, the tradition about the White Island is known to us from far earlier sources and is supported by archaeological and epigraphical evidence.89 True, given the frame of the work, the land-bound vinegrower must depend on Protesilaus and his authoritative eyewitness account of Leuke (as he does too for the heroes at Troy just across the sea). But the maritime aspects of Achilles (probably connected to Thetis) that in Roman times give him the title of Pontarches (Lord of the Sea), put his person within casual range of passing ships, whose men may hear his voice or catch a glimpse of him, and on a few unusual occasions enjoy a closer, if transitory, contact with him. In this role, Achilles is not separated from this world like those who dwell on the Isles of the Blessed, a mythical place, which can only be visited in the imagination by such fantasists as Lucian. Achilles exists still, as he always was (in his arms, at games and on the race course) in a location that from the sixth century BCE on can be mapped on the geography of the region (perhaps due to colonies established by Miletus there), and anyone, Greek or barbarian, may experience the reality of his still awesome epiphany. As the story goes in the Aethiopis, Thetis snatched her son from the funeral pyre and translated him to the White Island to make him immortal. Attested by poets in the archaic and classical periods, the island of Leuke is subsequently mentioned by travellers and geographers (e.g., Paus. 3.19.11, Strabo, 7.16-17, Arrian, Peripl. 21-2) as well as by other sophists, Dio Chrysostom {Or. 36.25) and Maximus of Tyre {Or. 9.7). The island had some strange features, reported in several sources, such as the large numbers of white birds, who were said to serve Achilles by keeping his temple clean with the wind and moisture from their wings. More than one account concurs with Philostratus' claim that the island 'may be visited by sailors as a welcome haven for their ships, but neither sailors nor dwellers in the region, Greek or barbarian, may ever build a house there. If they anchor and sacrifice there, they must board their ships at sunset and leave the land for the night; if the wind is favourable, they sail away' (54.9-11). Achilles is not alone on the island, although his companions may differ from one version to another. Maximus of Tyre tells of a man who 89

On the cult of Achilles on Leuke, see Rohde (1925) 565-7; Hommel (1980); and esp. Hedreen (1991), with bibliography and reports of new archaeological finds.

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inadvertently fell asleep on the island and was entertained by Achilles: 'Patroclus was there to serve the wine, Achilles played the lyre, and Thetis and a host of other daimones were present too.' In other accounts, the two Ajaxes are also present. Philostratus, like several other sources, pairs him with Helen (the 'best of the Achaeans' with the 'most beautiful of women'), and adds the charming detail that 'even though poets tell us that love come from the eyes, the source of their love was rather what they heard - they began to love each other before they met, she being in Egypt and he in Troy'. The reason given here, in fact, for the ban on spending the night on the island is that this is the time 'when Achilles and Helen drink and sing together, of their love for each, of Homer's verses about Troy, and of Homer himself (54.12). In his earlier description of Achilles' upbringing, Protesilaus mentioned his musical education, which Chiron undertook to offset his pupil's tendency to excessive emotion (thumos). The subjects of his songs then were drawn from myths appropriate to his age: 'the youths of long ago, like Hyacinthus, Narcissus, or anything about Adonis, and also a new one on Hyllas', and he so excelled that he aspired to a poetic career. 'But the goddess Calliope appeared to him in a dream and said, "I am giving you enough of music and poetry to make banquets sweet and drive away your troubles; but I and Athena want you to be a warrior, a terror amidst the terrors of battle. Later there will be a poet whom I shall command to sing your praises"' (45.6-7). Now on the White Island, 'he can exercise those poetic talents which Calliope gave him and which he still enjoys and practices even more now that his fighting is over'. To prove his point, Protesilaus even sang to the vinegrower a recent song composed by Achilles, a song for himself and for Homer, who guaranteed immortality to him, his fellow heroes, and to Troy itself (54.12-55.4). This delightful specimen of sophistic invention, which imagines that now the hero celebrates the bard who was destined to celebrate him, expands upon one of the common manifestations of Achilles' presence, which can take a number of forms, including hearing, direct vision, and apparitions in dreams. Maximus of Tyre reports that 'sailors have often seen a young man with tawny hair, clad in golden armour, exercising there. Others have not seen him, but have heard him singing. Yet others have both seen and heard him' (Or. 9.7). Arrian, in his account, claims that 'Achilles appears in dreams to those who land on the island, as also to those who are sailing not far from shore, and indicates to them the place on the island where it is preferable to land, and where to cast anchor. Others say that Achilles appeared to them, even when they were in a state of wakefulness, on the summit of the mast or at the edge of the topsail, like the Dioscouroi' (Peripl. 23.1). Philostratus, after emphasizing

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the quality of the voice, its divine clarity that carries far over the sea, also refers to the 'claims of those who have anchored there to have heard the hoofbeats of horses, the clash of armour, and the shouts of war', as well as reporting Achilles' maritime advice to sailors (56.1-4). The sophist adds further details about life on the island, particularly the lurid story of the Trojan girl, whom Achilles commanded a merchant to bring to him, only to tear her apart in a final revenge on Hector and his entire race, and the harrowing tale of an invasion of bloodthirsty Amazons, which Achilles repulsed and whose ships were subsequently destroyed by a storm (56.6-57.17). While these further incidents may have some basis in local tradition, I suspect that these anti-romantic stories are included here to dispel any idea of Achilles' former loves now that he is wedded to Helen - his Trojan bride, Polyxena, and Penthesileia, the Amazon queen, of whom he was enamoured at Troy. But if Philostratus feels free to embroider sailors' yarns in good sophist style, he also portrays an Achilles, both beneficent and vengeful, who retains the passion and vigour of his former existence, and ready, as in the Life of Apollonius ofTyana, to punish his errant Thessalians, if they do not revive his cult. The more sober Arrian, who reports such hard facts as the many kinds of offerings at the shrine and the numerous inscriptions in both Latin and Greek, has no Protesilaus to guarantee his information, which he has garnered instead from those who were there themselves or heard from others. Nevertheless, he finds the stories credible: Tor my part', he declares, 'I believe that Achilles is the hero par excellence, if I judge the matter by his nobility and beauty, the strength of his soul, the life he left so young, the poetry of Homer about him, and the love and friendship he proved to the point itself of choosing to follow in death the one he loved (tois paidikoisy (Peripl. 23.4).90 In this general assessment, Arrian gives succinct expression to Achilles' emblematic role as the embodiment of heroic virtues, and through him to Homer's poetry, which in the Heroicus translates a yearning for a revival of that vanished Hellenism into the revival of cults, in addition to the resurrection of heroes, in spirit as in deed, whose imagined visual appearance remains forever fixed in the bloom of youth and eternal vitality. Throughout this essay I have attempted to link the ubiquity of visual culture in its various manifestations throughout the post-classical world to 90

The emphasis on Achilles' love for Patroclus may discretely allude to Hadrian's similar attachment to Antinous, who had died in 130 CE, and to whom Hadrian was establishing a cult at the moment of Arrian's composition of this text. See the discussion in Silberman (1995) 62, with bibliography.

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the significant position of Homer as an endlessly recurrent motif in literary texts, cultural artefacts, theatrical and other spectacles, as well as in reported experiences of dreams, visions and other encounters with figures of the past. All of these at one level or another are unified by the high emphasis (and premium) placed on an immediacy of viewing, whether in person or through another's mediation, and all refer to the poet's authority, seriously or otherwise, as a mode of negotiating the boundaries between a fascination with the past, bordering on archaism, so characteristic of the age, and the contemporary demands of a changing society. What I have called visions and revisions is predicated on the conviction that whatever the style of viewing, real or imaginary, the eyes, as no other faculty, give life and credence to vivid recollections of the past and the preoccupations of a shared cultural inheritance. This is a distinctive feature of Hellenic civilization, from the start, and it only seems to increase in scope and magnitude as the centuries progress, along with its counterpart, the insistence on the deceptive and illusory nature of sense experience, which under the Neoplatonists, for example, is none the less demonstrated through the transference of vision to the inner eye. It must be said, however, that each of the two terms I have paired visual culture and Homeric epic - exceed any point of intersection between them. The repertory of themes in the literature and art of this period is, of course, by no means limited to Homer, but includes other poets, philosophers, historians, andfiguresof history and myth. At the same time, what I earlier called 'the traffic in Homer' manifests itself in a host of other activities and contexts, with different degrees of invocation, tonality, and variation of use. Nevertheless, the intersection to which I have referred allows for a broadening of perspective, which, especially through Homer, can embrace both upper and lower strata of society, educated and untutored, in ritual, political, rhetorical and aesthetic contexts. These will elicit a range of responses from viewers to that 'indefinable theme of "Hellenism" which was itself a shorthand for a cluster of concepts, nostalgia, ancient culture, and pagan religion, that together encompassed their traditional world view'.91 Hellenic identity, by this time, is a diffuse and also indeterminate concept, one made all the more difficult tofixwith any certainty through the texts we have examined, written in Greek for a Greek audience and free to elaborate on known facts with what are most likely invented details. Apollonius' report of seeing 'embroidered tapestries in Babylon, whose subjects are taken from Hellenic stories, Andromedas being represented

Eisner (1999) 107, although he is referring to mythology more generally.

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and Amymones, and Orpheus seen everywhere' is a good case in point (Phil. VA 1.25). Is his good fortune in finding Indians and Egyptians who speak perfect Greek in far off lands a sign that Hellenization has indeed penetrated so far into the margins of the known world or is it rather a sophist's own embroidering of the facts?92 Let us take another example, Dio Chrysostom's discourse to the inhabitants of Borysthenes on the Black Sea {Or. 36), to which I earlier referred, where the people, surrounded by barbarians and in the vicinity of an island they identify as the special abode of Achilles, are reduced to an existence marked by the continual need for self-defence and by an almost exclusive reliance on Homer, which they claim to know by heart. Aside from the improbable portrait of this town, whatever the accurate details of its topography,93 the inhabitants' attachment to Homer is figured here as a kind of primitivism, an Iliadic dependence on archaic warrior values which marks the deficit of the values of a well-ordered polis. Dio's initial aim therefore is to expand their Hellenic awareness through reference to Plato. But his exposition turns into an elaborate cosmic myth of the Persian Magi (composed of Stoic ideas and Platonic imagery), which nevertheless features the Greek gods of the pantheon, now in the name of Zoroaster. Do these two specimens of sophistic rhetoric display a typically Greek myopia that views the world through their own eyes or are these exemplary instances of a widespread syncretism and a hybrid combination of barbarian wisdom and Greek philosophy?94 Even more to the point, in Philostratus' Heroicus, the Phoenician merchant's close familarity with and curiosity about Homer is never explained, including the fact of a dream of Homeric heroes that sent him on shore at the Thracian Chersonese in search of its interpretation. His garb is Ionian, because, as he explains to the vinegrower, this is the way Phoenicians dress, due to 'the Sybaritic habits of Ionia which have influenced every bit of Phoenicia' (1.1). This luxurious costume, it should be added, is in direct contrast to the vinegrower's rustic leather cloak, which he adopted when he understood Protesilaus' injunction 'to change his clothes' as meaning he must change his way of life (4.8-9). The Phoenician merchant may be a convenient foil to the landed vinegrower and may provide an appropriate motivation for the closing section of the dialogue concerning Achilles' maritime role on Leuke as a helper to sailors. But 92 93 94

See the remarks of Follet (1991) on the different aspects of Hellenism in Philostratus. On the mix of possibly realistic details and fanciful exaggeration, see C. P. Jones (1978) 62-3. On different interpretations of this oration, see Swain (1996) 83-5, and Moles (1995). For the best reading, however, see Porter (2001).

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Ionian dress alone is hardly sufficient to account for this comfortably Hellenized merchant, who is ripe for conversion to Protesilaus' wisdom and can never sate his cravings to hear more and more of the vinegrower's stories about Homer, even to the point of postponing his own voyage. Phoenicians, as it happens, however, are recurrent features in the literature of the age.95 They turn up, for example, in virtually every Greek novel; they bear Greek names, always speak Greek, and they sometimes even display a reasonable command of paideia. One of them, a mere merchant, even competes in the Pythian games and wins, having trained in his native land (Heliodorus, Aethiopiaca 4.16.6). Achilles Tatius's romance opens in Sidon and Cleitophon, the protagonist of the work is a Greek who comes from Tyre, and it is casually mentioned that the general there by the name of Charmides has a Tyrian father.96 The authorial persona of Heliodorus' novel is also a Phoenician, a Hellenized nonGreek, but this time from Emesa, a still more eastern city. Even earlier, Dictys of Crete in writing his revisionist fiction of the Trojan War (probably belonging to the Neronian period) claimed the work was originally written in Phoenician and translated into Greek (and thence into Latin), and many other examples could be adduced. We know from historical evidence that by this time the Phoenicians were thoroughly Hellenized and no longer even spoke their own language. The image of Europa and the bull, for example, described in the painting at the beginning of Achilles Tatius appears on Phoenician coins in the second century BCE and again in imperial times. Nevertheless, Phoenicia remains a strange and barbarian land, associated with exoticism and luxury. As always, from Homer's time on, the Phoenicians are represented as pursuing maritime activities, but in an individual way, just as they did in the Odyssey, not in the more organized forms of commerce they practised under the Empire. They retain too the negative qualities attributed to them from Homer: deceptiveness, indulgence in piracy and abduction, with the further addition of barbarous rites (as depicted in the fragments of Lollianos' Phoinikiaka). In short, their image partakes both of a current reality and of the literary cliches that attend them ever since Homer. What is more, as Briquel-Chatonnet observes, the Phoenicians are 'close enough for a Greek reader to identify with them (as is not the case of those from Egypt or India) and sufficiently exotic to give the impression of a displacement 95 96

In what follows, I draw essentially upon some of the information and observations in the essay of Briquel-Chatonnet (1995). Briquel-Chatonnet (1995), for all the value of her research, does not distinguish between Phoenicians and Greeks living in Phoenicia.

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elsewhere'.97 This is because, conversely, Phoenicians identify with Hellenism while retaining their own identity. While it may be true that by the second century, the word 'Hellene' could mean anyone schooled in Hellenic culture as well as an ethnic Greek, (e.g. Phil. VS 2.5.571), we should still insist on the crucial difference between 'identification with' and 'identity'. The Phoenician merchant in the Heroicus is still asked to account for his Ionian dress, and it would be difficult to imagine any subject other than Homeric epic that could elicit the same degree of rapt absorption, as it does from this traveller, who will return home from foreign parts wiser than before, his ears and eyes filled with the klea andron. For Homer, I will insist, both exemplifies Greek culture in its most fundamental manifestation and at the same time stands apart from (and above) it as an almost universal commodity, to be disseminated among Greeks and non-Greeks alike.98 97

98

Briquel-Chatonnet (1995) 194. Interestingly, Winter (1995) in a remarkable essay on the representation of the Phoenicians in Homer comes to similar conclusions as to their mediate position in the epic. They are both distinctly 'other' but in their associated traits and practices they are also structurally akin in part to the Phaeacians, Odysseus himself, and even the Trojans. Grateful thanks are owed to Sean Corner and Elizabeth Greene for their invaluable assistance, to Daniel Mendelsohn for helpful commentary, and to Ewen Bowie, Jas Eisner, and Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood for their insightful critiques, but above all, to Simon Goldhill, for his patience and so much else.

Part III

Topography and the performance of culture

'Greece is the World5: exile and identity in the Second Sophistic Tim Whitmarsh

. . . you do not realise that everything is Greece to a wise man . . . Philostratus, VA 1.35 . . . if I narrate the course of my exile, men will say, not that I am lamenting, but far rather that I am boasting. Dio Chrysostom, Oration 45.2

I The motif of exile has been used throughout history to express cultural problems and to explore identity politics: from Exodus to Exil et le royaume and beyond, the notion of expatriation has been exploited to interrogate relationships between human beings and society. Indeed, writers over the last century have pursued this theme with unprecedented vigour: in modernism and postmodernism, the alienation and solitude of the individual is frequently articulated through the topology of exile (one thinks of the literary significance of the expatriation of Joyce, Eliot, Pound, Yeats and Becket).1 Modernist exile, especially under the influence of Sartrian notions of alienation, is now, as Bruce Robbins wittily puts it, 'at home in the academy'.2 Exile is also frequently cited as a metaphor for 'the postmodern condition': in an introduction to a recent collection entitled Literature and Exile, David Bevan claims that exile stands for all forms of estrangement: 'exile, viscerally, is otherness'.3 Exile has become one of the fundamental tropes for recent writers on culture and identity. 1

2 3

On modernism and exile, see Brennan (1990) 60-4; (with some reservations) Martin (1992). Robbins (1983) 72. Bevan (1990) 3. Understandably, several critics, particularly those who themselves have undergone exile or emigration, have reacted against generalizations of exile (Goldman (1995) 127-8). In particular, Edward Said and Homi Bhabha have railed against the association of exile with modernity and post-modernity by pointing to the suffering undergone by those who have genuinely experienced it (Said (1984) 54-5; Bhabha (1990) 292 = id. (1994): 140-1). 269

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This chapter will seek not to unify such diverse representations, to present a 'phenomenology of exile', but to demonstrate that in antiquity too, in the period we know as the 'Second Sophistic',4 there was considerable interest in exploring and expressing issues of cultural identity through the language of exile. Whatever claims have been made to the effect that exile represents the 'human condition' (and these claims, in a certain form at any rate, go back to antiquity),5 this chapter will proceed from the premise that issues of identity are necessarily negotiated within specific historical and cultural parameters. In the present project, I focus exclusively upon three philosophical and/or sophistic6 tracts on the subject of exile, written in Greek, within one hundred years of each other, under the Roman Empire: Musonius Rufus' That exile is not an evil, Dio Chrysostom's thirteenth oration, On Exile (together with related texts) and Favorinus' On Exile.1 A full study of the use of exile to explore identity politics under the Roman Empire would have to take in not only the other texts in Greek from this period (Plutarch's essay On exile, Epictetus' scattered comments on exile and Philiscus' speech in Cassius Dio8), but also the better known Roman writers on exile, Seneca, Ovid and (from the Republic) Cicero.9 Musonius, Dio and Favorinus, however, can profitably be analysed together:10 not only do they share preoccupations and vocabulary (some scholars have considered this common 4

5

6

7

8

9

10

Not a helpful term, to my mind (Whitmarsh (1998a) 18-24; id. (1998b) 192-3 n. 3), but at times inevitable for the sake of clarity and consistency with other scholars. See Goldhill above 14-15. For the idea of the human or the soul as an 'exile' from the divine, see Emped. fr. B 115.13 D-K; Plut. De ex. 17 = Mor. 607c-e; Plotin. 1.6.8; Aug. Civ. Dei 1 praef; 18.51; 19 passim. On the figurative role of exile in Augustine's work, see Ferguson (1992); on the mediaeval development of the idea, see Ladner (1967). These terms are labile and manipulable, and the problems of applying them in this (even more than any other) period are legion: see Stanton (1973). I consider each of the writers in question as eclectic, drawing upon both 'philosophical' subject matter and 'rhetorical' techniques of display and characterization. Musonius is cited by fragment, page and line number from the edition of Hense (Leipzig, 1905); Dio from the edition of de Bude (Leipzig, 1916); Favorinus from the edition of Barigazzi (Florence, 1966). The translation of Musonius is modified from that of Lutz 1947 and that of Dio from the Loeb edition of Cohoon (Cambridge MA., 1939); translations of Favorinus are my own. Plutarch's On exile is to be found at Mor. 599a-607f; I exclude it from consideration not only because of its more metaphysical concerns, but also because Plutarch does not represent himself as an exile (such self-representation, as will become clear, is central to the texts I do discuss). For Epictetus' comments on exile, see Arr. Diss. Epict. 1.1.26-7; 1.11.33; 1.29.6; 3.3.17; 3.22.22; 3.24.29; 4.1.60; 4.1.172; 4.5.29; 4.7.14; 4.7.18; 4.11.23; Epict. fr.21 Schenkl = Stob. Flor. 3.7.16; Epict. Ench. 21; 32.3. For Philiscus' speech see Cassius Dio 38.18-29, with Claassen (1996a). The bibliography on exile in the Roman writers is immense. I have found especially useful Williams (1994); Edwards (1996) 110-12; Claassen (1996b). They are discussed as a group by Grasmuck (1978) 141-3.

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ground an index of lack of original thought11 ), but also each shows awareness of his predecessors' work - hardly surprising, given that Dio was taught by Musonius and Favorinus by Dio. 12 These three writers reveal, through their differences as well as their shared concerns, the multiple possibilities inherent in the discourse of exile for the exploration of identity politics and cultural self-positioning. As is now widely understood, the Greek literature of the early principate sites itself linguistically, stylistically and thematically within and against the literary tradition of democratic Athens.13 This chapter argues that this process of self-definition against the classical past extends from literary fashioning to political revisionism; that the writers under examination strategically reorientate the language of cultural self-definition which was current in that earlier period, reconfiguring (sometimes explicitly) the relationship between self and polis in terms more appropriate to the enormous world-empire of the Roman principate. In the classical period, Aristotle could write that 'a human is an animal which belongs in a polis (politikon zoion),' and to be 'without a polis (apolis) is to be either greater or lesser than a human' (Ar. Pol. 1253al-4). Social identity, for Aristotle as for all Greeks of the period, was created and articulated through the polis, and to lose that was to lose one's self. Exile from the polis was, thus, a form of social death, and the horrors of exile are iterated time and again.14 In the later writings which form the subject of this chapter, however, exile becomes a positive accreditation of philosophical success (as can be seen from the citation from Dio Chrysostom at the head of this chapter15). How do we interpret this shift in attitudes to exile from abhorrence to celebration? It is dangerous to assume too quickly that this discursive transformation represents a direct, knock-on response 11

12

13 14 15

Grasmuck (1978) 142 ('... die imrner wiederkehrenden Topoi . . . ' ) ; Doblhofer (1987) 41 ('... einem Arsenal von Trostgriinden ...'); Claassen (1996a) 30-1. Musonius is said to have taught Dio at Fronto p. 135.3-4 van den Hout, and the philosopher praised at Dio 31.122 is usually considered to be Musonius: see von Arnim (1898) 216; Lutz (1947) 17 n. 60; Jones (1978) 12. The report that Dio wrote an essay Against (?) Musonius (pros Mousonion, attested at Synes. Dio 37b) might be taken to contradict this, but, as Moles puts it with admirable tact, 'it is not unusual for pupils to quarrel with teachers' ((1978): 82). Moreover, it is not clear to me that pros necessarily means 'against', and not 'in reply to' (LSJ s.v. -rrpos C4). Dio is said to have taught Favorinus at Philostr. VS 490. Favorinus was clearly aware of Plutarch, too (Fav. fr. 28 Barigazzi; Suda s.v. Oocfkopivos). See esp. Reardon (1971); Bowie (1974); Swain (1996) 43-100. For the sources, see Doblhofer (1987) 21-40. See also Luc. Peregr. 18, where the false philosopher Peregrinus finds his expulsion from Rome (for his persistent nuisance) a source of fame (kleinori) and reputation as 'a philosopher exiled for his free speech (parrhesiari) and excessive freedom (eleutherian)\ which assimilates him to 'Musonius, Dio, Epictetus and anyone else who found himself in such a predicament'.

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to changes, between the classical and the Roman periods, in the sociocultural role of the polis in defining Greek identity.16 Indeed, some of these ideas concerning the tolerability of exile were already current in embryonic form in the late classical period: the Cynics Diogenes, Crates and Stilpo discussed deracination from the polis, and were highly influential upon the exilic writers of the principate.17 What interests me here, though, is not so much the genealogy of the ideas in question as the selfpositioning of Musonius, Dio and Favorinus against the background of the intellectual and ideological climate of their times, and their perceived and articulated relationship with earlier Greek tradition. From this perspective, it matters little that some of the ideas expressed have their roots in classical and Hellenistic philosophy: what counts is the attempt to articulate a new cultural positionality by rewriting the past. It is not necessarily any particular theoretical innovation, but a new intensification and stylization of the discourse of exile which marks these texts' historical site in the Greek culture in the early principate. The Roman Empire created radically new modalities of identity, specifically by allowing the provincial elites access to Roman citizenship18 (each of the writers discussed here was a powerful Roman citizen19). The provincial elite, thus, were affiliated to far-ranging networks of Romans, as well as to their fellow-citizens in their native poleis. To label the local identity 'Greek' and the wider identity 'Roman', though, would be to oversimplify: in the eastern Empire at any rate, and to a certain extent in the West too, Attic Greek (as opposed to the demotic Greek spoken by the masses) was the lingua franca of the educated elites, the common cultural store which bound them together and excluded the lower class.20 There were thus two fundamental criteria which could define 'Greekness', and they were not always complementary: on the one hand, 'the Greeks' were, as they had been in the past, the inhabitants of the old poleis and their colonial offshoots;21 on the other, 'the Greeks' were an elite group 16 17

18 19

20 21

Foucault's remarks on the need for caution in this respect ((1986) 81-4) are well made. For records of Cynic discussions of exile and the polis, see Diog. Laert. 6.21; 49 on Diogenes; Diog. Laert. 6.93 on Crates. Stilpo's views are preserved, although no doubt in mediated form, in Teles fr. 3 Hense = Stob. Flor. 3.40.8. For analysis of the Quellen of the exilic writers, see Giesecke (1891). See esp. Millar (1977) 477-90. See Whitmarsh (1998b) 196 for sources on the rise of the eastern elites within the structures of Roman power. Musonius and Favorinus belonged to the equestrian order (Tac. Ann. 3.81.1; (Dio Chr.) Or. 37.25), while the wealthy Dio inherited Roman citizenship from one of his parents (Whitmarsh (1998b) 199). See most fully Swain (1996) 17-100; Horrocks (1997) 79-88. I.e. those who could lay claim to a genealogical descent from the 'original' tribes (see Hall (1997) esp. 34-66 on the importance of this notion for Greek ethnicity). For more discussion of the relationship between paideia and genos (descent) as arbiters of identity in the period, see Bowie (1991).

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from a range of cities which covered the entire eastern Empire, united solely by their ability to write or speak in Attic, the archaizing dialect which had originally been used in the fifth and fourth centuries BCE. 'Hellenizing' (hellenizein) in this latter sense, quite clearly, implied a fundamentally different relationship with the polis of one's birth. For the members of the provincial elites, 'Greekness' was a stake in an empirewide aristocratic competition for status. It is thus crucial to remember that, whatever might have been the case in earlier Greece, the notion of 'Greekness' was not by now coterminous with ethnicity: it was a socially constructed style, one strand in a skein of valorized concepts (civilization, intelligence, manliness22) which could not be disentangled meaningfully. The relationship between these two modalities of Greek identity is the subject of this chapter. Any relationship between past and present, however, is inevitably complex.23 The texts discussed here do not simply reject the classical world and its polis-based ideology: the very allusive process which accords centrality to the literature of Athens also expresses a perceived continuity with the past. We should not imagine the writers on exile under the principate to be simply abnegating the polis as a locus of cultural definition: rather, they create and explore a tension between polis and cosmos, between the traditional parochiality of Greek identity and its new role as the integrative language of the eastern Roman Empire. This Janus-like duality is absolutely fundamental to the culture of what is known as the 'Second Sophistic': the glorious epoque of democratic Athens is both familiar and alien, and self-definition in the present involves both the appropriation and the transcendence of the paradigms of the past. This chapter argues that the writers on exile under the principate exemplify in important and interesting ways precisely this tension between older, polis-based identities and the newer modalities created by Roman citizenship. It is crucial to note that 'cultural identity' was not, in this case (if it ever is), a homogeneous substrate essence underlying and motivating all cultural production by Greeks in the period. Greek 'identity', as we have already seen, was not 'identical' in all cases. What 'being Greek' meant was under constant redefinition according to the requirements and strategies of individual agents.24 Identity was thus not reflected by, but constructed through language (and, perhaps to a lesser extent, other cultural forms such as art and architecture). The extant literature of the period was in its day the fundamental vehicle of self-definition for the urban elites of the eastern Empire. 22 23 24

O n manliness a n d identity, see Gleason (1995). See also Preston, p p . 9 0 - 1 above. F o r a brief s u m m a r y of the theoretical issues involved, see Laurence (1998) 9 5 - 6 .

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Concomitant with the centrality to Greek elite self-definition of literary language came a certain self-consciousness about the manipulation of the paradigmatic texts of the classical world. Greek literary theory and practice of the early principate focused heavily upon the notion of mimesis, of 'imitation' of selected models drawn from canonical works.25 The effectiveness of this process was not, however, confined to aesthetics: the ethical subject, we are told by several writers, fashions his or her (but usually his) personal comportment through continual reference to the 'virtues' (aretai) of illustrious forebears.26 The ransacking of the literature of the past to provide models for the present was a much-theorized process in antiquity, and with theory came an ironic knowingness. A series of questions recur in the texts: what is it to mould identity consciously? How 'real' is it, and how 'fictive'? Is the relationship between past and present obvious and self-evident, or is it constructed and narrativized? To what extent is the presentation of the self a performance?27 I am not, then, seeking an answer to a question such as 'what was it like to be Greek in the Second Sophistic'? The present essay aims, rather, to explore some of the various manipulations of Greek identity through the individuated forms of self-display and self-expression that proliferated on the epideictic stage in the early Empire. 'Cultural identity', in the sense employed here, is a rhetorical self-positioning: it is a mode of relationship with, and public presentation of, the self. To write of a relationship with the self raises a set of questions which have received a significant amount of attention in recent scholarship.28 I shall not address here such questions as whether or not there was a concept of the individual person in antiquity.29 Closer to my concerns here is Foucault's interest in 'the care of the self (cura sui, or in Greek epimeleia heautou) 'wherein the relations of oneself to oneself were intensified and valorized'.30 Musonius, Dio and Favorinus all engage with the Hellenistic tradition of consolation.31 Hel-

25 26

27

28 29

30 31

Bompaire (1958); R e a r d o n (1971); Flashar (1978); Russell (1979); Hidber (1996) 5 6 - 7 5 . See esp. D i o d . Sic. 1.1.4; D i o n . H a l . Ep. Gn. Pomp. 3.18; Plut. Aem. Paul, proem 1-3. See further Hidber (1996) 6 1 - 3 . I take this formulation from Goffman (1969). F o r m o r e on 'performance' theory in cont e m p o r a r y anthropology, see Schieffelin (1985); id. (1998); Schechner (1988); id. (1993); a n d for a critique of such approaches, see G o o d y (1997) 9 9 - 1 5 2 . F o r a full bibliography o n the topic, see E d w a r d s (1997). F o r a recent discussion of this question, with further bibliography, see L o n g (1991). R a t h e r less useful from this perspective is Engberg-Pedersen (1990). F o u c a u l t (1986) 4 3 . M u s o n i u s (fr. 9 p . 41.5 Hense: irapeiJiuOTjaaTo) a n d F a v o r i n u s (De ex. 2 . 1 - 2 : -rra[p]riyopiav; 2.14: irapapiuOiav) present their essays specifically as consolations. D i o 13.2 a m o u n t s to a 'self-consolation'. F o r the genre of the consolation, see esp. Kassell (1958); Ochs (1993) is less useful for the present purposes.

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lenistic philosophy was largely, as Martha Nussbaum has stressed,32 therapeutic in orientation, and exilic consolation correspondingly seeks to 'cure' exiles of their 'sickness'.33 These texts can thus be viewed as a continuation of an earlier tradition of private introspection and self-help. The distinction between public and private, however, is notoriously difficult to define, and it is equally possible to view these consolations as (public) dramatizations of the therapeutic process, packaged 'presentations' of exilic identity. The possibilities for staging the 'self are multiple in the case of exile. Greek literary history had a long tradition of exiled writers, from the early lyric poets Alcman, Archilocus and Sappho, through Thucydides to Diogenes the Cynic.34 Such well-known exempla clearly contribute to the prestige of an exilic self-fashioning, and it has been well understood in recent years how Ovid (and others too) manipulated this exemplary tradition.35 The significance of exile, however, gained new urgency for philosophers in the early Empire: Vespasian and Domitian both banished all philosophers from Rome,36 and exile became in a sense the hallmark of a free-speaking philosopher.37 Each of the three writers discussed here claims to have experienced exile personally at the hands of an emperor (although ancient commentators and modern scholars have at times disputed the veracity of various details38). The language of exile thus also implies a polemical engagement with Roman power, and the vaunted transcendence of humiliation and suffering imposed by exile advertises the philosopher's superiority to imperial dominion.39 Discussions of exile constitute a nodal point where Greek cultural self-representation meets Roman power. This chapter, then, seeks to understand exile as a strategy of self-representation, and as a means of constructing and exploring the relationship between Greek identity (complex, elusive and in a sense fictive as it is) and the socio-political landscape of the Roman Empire. 32 33 34

35

36

37

38

39

See esp. N u s s b a u m (1994). O n the 'nosography' of exile, see Doblhofer (1987) 6 6 - 7 2 . O n this tradition, see Doblhofer (1987) 2 1 - 4 9 ; A n d r e a n d Baslez (1993) 2 8 3 - 9 7 . Sappho's exile is n o t discussed by either: it is recorded o n the so-called Chronicon Parium (IG 12.5, 444.XXXVI). N o t that Ovid necessarily invented his exile (as argued by F i t t o n Brown (1985)), but that he manipulates the literary topology of exile with the utmost self-consciousness (see Williams (1994)). F o r Vespasian's banishment of philosophers, see Cass. D i o 66.13.2; for D o m i t i a n ' s , see Suet. Dom. 10.5; T a c . Agr. 2 . 1 - 2 ; Plin. Ep. 3.11.2-3; Philostr. VA 7.11. See esp. Luc. Peregr. 18. O n D i o ' s manipulation of the prestige attached to exile, see Moles (1978) 9 6 - 1 0 0 ; o n F a v o r i n u s ' similar manipulations, see Gleason (1995) 1 4 7 - 8 . See, o n D i o , Moles (1978); o n Favorinus, Swain (1989); Gleason (1995) 145-6. F o r Philostratus' denial that D i o was exiled, see VS 488. O n R o m a n strategies of corporeal humiliation a n d degradation, see Gleason in this volume.

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n Musonius Rufus was a Roman citizen of the equestrian order, originally from Etruria (Tuscany) in Italy. Despite this solid Italian background, the words which are transmitted by Stobaeus under his name are in Greek.40 He followed Rubellius Plautus after the latter's exile in 62 CE, we are told by the historians, thus implicating himself in the Pisonian conspiracy against Nero and earning himself his own exile to the desolate Aegean island of Gyara.41 Cassius Dio (as abbreviated by the Byzantine scholar Xiphilinus) suggests, surprisingly, that Musonius was then excluded from Vespasian's blanket banishment of all philosophers from Rome (Cass. Dio 66.13.2). It is not clear precisely why, or whether this information is accurate; at any rate, Musonius was clearly well known for having been exiled at least once.42 If the Greek writers on exile in general are usually considered to be unimaginative, then Musonius Rufus in particular is usually deemed to have derived his content directly from Teles and Stilpo, with only the slightest innovations in form.43 It is clear that several of Musonius' arguments do draw upon a traditional repertoire, and indeed at times his language closely shadows that of Teles.44 Yet, as we shall see, an excessive fixation upon the Quellen of Musonius' writings has blinded scholars to the specifically Musonian features of the text, and thus to the vitality of the text within its own cultural context. Specifically, those who seek to play down Musonius' innovations have failed to consider the dramatic and rhetorical framing of the text: what kind of voice is Musonius constructing here? How is he positioning himself in relation to Rome and Greece in the middle of the first century CE? There is, however, a major qualification which should be made prior to the undertaking of such a project. On one theory, Musonius himself did not write the texts which we have preserved: evidence suggests that a certain shadowy Lucius may have played Xenophon/Plato to the great 40

41

42 43

44

Compare the example of Aelian, who, Philostratus tells us, composed perfect Attic Greek without having ever left Italy - indeed, without having ever even set foot on a boat (VS 624-5)! For the details, see Lutz (1947) 14. On the miseries of Gyara, see Courtney (1980) ad Juv. Sat. 1.73. He is cited as a famous exile at Luc. Peregr. 18. Giesecke (1891) 25 ('[ajtque pro certo quidem did potest, ea quae Stilponi tribuimus in usum suum corniersisse Musonius . . . ' ) ; van Geytenbeek (1963) 151 ('[a]s usual, Musonius' argument is not original, but it is attractive and clear'); Doblhofer (1987) 41. For further discussion, see van Geytenbeek (1963) 142-51. See van Geytenbeek (1963) 147-8 on the arguments; Giesecke (1891) 25-6 on the verbal reminiscences.

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man's Socrates. 45 It might be suggested, on this basis, that any attempt to access the 'voice' of Musonius is misguided, mediated as the writings are. Yet there are two reasons to persist. Firstly, as with Epictetus, Musonius' neglect to write his own words is no doubt part of a specific cultivation of a Socratic persona (and evidence from elsewhere suggests that Musonius was, and hence wanted to be perceived as, the 'Roman Socrates' 46 ). Secondly, I am not in search of Musonius' 'voice' in the sense of his own deeply held convictions: my aim here is to investigate the relationship between the words on the page and the social persona of Musonius. To this extent, it matters little whether we have the 'real' Musonius or not. In fact, these concerns with 'real' and 'constructed' voices lead us into issues which are rather more germane to this project. As I take it, Musonius the social actor is (necessarily) composite, a figure, albeit an individuated figure, modelled on other figures from the repertoire of Greek culture. To be an exiled philosopher, as noted above, is to a certain extent to play a role which has already been scripted. What interests me is Musonius' adoption of an exilic persona, borrowed synthetically from the cultural repertoire. I want to consider first how Musonius refashions the political language of democratic Athens. The clearest example of this process comes with his stress upon the importance of freedom (eleutheria) and free speech (parrhesia) (48.1-50.3). 47 'Freedom', as is well known, was a common cry amongst republican dissenters of the first century, prior to Trajan's appropriation of the language for his own propaganda. 48 Musonius' celebration of the 'free speech' of the exile contributes to his own selfrepresentation as a free-speaking philosopher banished by an intolerant tyrant, thus developing the sense that exile reflects more on Nero than on the philosopher. Yet there is a more subtle articulation at work here: Musonius specifically presents his own definition of parrhesia as a reorientation of the classical definition. Using the rhetorical technique known as anaskeue (quotation and refutation), 49 he cites Euripides' famous comment that it is a slave's lot to lack freedom of speech (Phoen. 391-2), and addresses Euripides in order to disagree: But, by Zeus, you [i.e. Musonius' interlocutor] insist, Euripides says that exiles lose their freedom (eleutheria) when they are deprived of freedom of speech (parrhesia). For he represents Jocasta asking Polyneices, her son, what misfortunes an exile has to bear. He answers, 45 46 47

48 49

Van Geytenbeek (1963) ch. 1 passim, esp. 9-12. See Lutz (1947) 3-4. Teles also mentions loss of parrhesia in passing as one loss to which the exile is held to be subject (fr3 15.16). Wirszubski (1950) 167-71; Wistrand (1979) 95-6. Cf. Aphthonius, Progymnasmata 5.

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'One greatest of all, that he does not have freedom of speech (parrhesia)' She replies, 'You name the condition of a slave, not to be able to say what one thinks.' But I should say in rejoinder: 'You are right, Euripides, when you say that it is the condition of a slave not to say what one thinks - when one ought to speak, at any rate, for it is not always, nor everywhere, nor before everyone that we should say what we think. But one point, it seems to me, you have not made well, namely that exiles do not have freedom of speech (parrhesia) (if to you freedom of speech (parrhesia) means not suppressing whatever one happens to think). For it is not exiles who shrink from saying what they think, but men afraid lest from speaking pain or death or punishment or some other such thing befall them. Fear is the cause of this, and not, by Zeus, exile! For to many people, nay to most, even though dwelling safely in their native city, fear of what seem to them dire consequences of free speech is present. However, one who is manly (ho andreios), in exile no less than at home, is dauntless in the face of all such fears; for that reason also he has the courage to say what he thinks no less50 when he happens to be in exile than when not.' (Fr. 9 48.1-12; 48.15-49.2)

In addressing and confronting one of the central authors of classical Athens, Musonius is drawing explicit attention to the process of selfdefinition through rereading the past. We can see here clearly that rewriting the literary past also involves repositioning the social and political parameters of identity. The word parrhesia was coined in Athens in the fifth century, where it referred to the right to speak in the democratic assembly, one of the centrally enshrined and definitive features of participatory democracy51 (it is with a certain disruptive irony that Euripides places his words in the mouths of Polyneices and Jocasta, a would-be tyrant and a queen). Musonius' response to Euripides, however, redefines parrhesia as a moral imperative to speak what one thinks when one should speak.52 This ethical focus orientates the discussion away from civic rights to philosophical duty, and the (predominantly Stoic) issue of whether and how a philosopher should engage in politics.53 Whereas Euripides presupposes a context wherein the right to free speech defines the citizen body exclusively, Musonius presupposes an alienated relationship between self and state, where the individual can only display his manhood (note ho andreios, 'one who is manly') by resisting the edicts imposed upon him. The individual's identity is no longer articulated through collective enfranchisement, but through the agonistic process of 50

51

52 53

I have adopted Gesner's emendation T)TTOV, recorded in Hense's apparatus, for M S (followed by Hense a n d Lutz) laaAAov, which gives the wrong sense. Lutz' translation of this passage ('equally at h o m e or in exile') fudges the issue. Peterson (1929) 2 8 3 - 5 ; Scarpat (1964) 2 9 - 4 5 ; M o m i g l i a n o (1971) 5 1 5 - 2 3 ; id. (1973-4): 259; K o n s t a n (1996) 9. Plutarch m a k e s a similar point at De ex. 16 = Mor. 606a. See esp. Cic. De off.; M u s . Ruf. fr. 8; Plut. Dephil max. cumprinc. diss.

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ethical self-presentation. Propriety of action follows specifically not from the subordination of one's desires to those of the masses, but from fearless constancy to oneself, which at times sets one at odds with society. It is important to note that exile is not simply the juridically defined state of Musonius, but also a literary trope establishing Musonius as an exceptional figure, isolated from norms and conventions. 54 In a literal sense, the emperor banished him from Rome for practising philosophy; at a deeper level, Musonius' decision to philosophize had already condemned him to a kind of exile from society. At an earlier point in the text, Musonius indicates that the philosopher identifies with not the polis, but the cosmos: Why should anyone who is not devoid of understanding (anoetos) be oppressed by exile? It does not deprive us of water, earth, air, or the sun and the other planets, or indeed, even of the society of men, for everywhere and in every way (hapantakhou ... kaipantei) there is opportunity for association with them. What if we are kept from a certain part of the earth (merous tinos tes ges) and from association with certain men, what is so dreadful about that? Why, when we were at home, we did not enjoy the whole earth (hapasei tei gei), nor did we have contact with all men. (Fr. 9 41.10-13) This passage draws heavily upon Stoic and Cynic ideas of what scholars call cosmopolitanism, 55 the belief that a philosopher is a citizen of the universe. The crucial opposition for Musonius is between 'part' (merous) and 'whole' (hapasei tei gei): one 'devoid of understanding' (anoetos, literally 'without mind') may feel bound to the part, but the wise (including, by strong implication, Musonius) grasp the importance of the entirety (what the Stoic sources refer to as to pan ('everything') and to holon ('the whole') 56 ). This polarity thus expresses Musonius' exceptional wisdom: whereas most people view the world from a local, partial perspective, Musonius embraces the cosmos.51 Once again, exile - understood here as a relocation from the local to the general, from the specific to the universal - is presented figuratively as a means of constructing philosophical authority. Space and geography serve a powerfully metaphorical role in the articulation of identity. 54

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The dominant model for this 'isolationist' view of philosophical ethics is Socrates, whose role as a paradigm for Musonius will be discussed in greater detail below. E.g. D i o Chr. 4.13; Diog. Oen. fr. 30; Arr. Diss. Epict. 2.10.3. O n cosmopolitanism, see amongst older scholars Baldry (1965) and Stanton (1968), and more recently esp. Schofield (1991) 57-92; Moles (1996). See Rutherford (1989) 239-40 n. 40 for further bibliography. to pan: SVF 3.260.5; to holon: SVF2A61.S. O n the distinction between the two, see LS 44A. Epictetus makes a similar point to Musonius (Arr. Diss. Epict. 3.22.22). F o r analogous 'cosmic' representations of philosophical wisdom, see e.g. Lucr. DRN 1.72-4; Philostr. VA 3.34-5.

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In the following words, Musonius attributes cosmopolitan doctrine to two classical writers, Socrates and Euripides. 'Is not the universe {cosmos) the common fatherland (paths) of all men, as Socrates held?' (42.1-2). 'Euripides too agrees with this when he says, "As all the heavens are open to the eagle's flight / so all the earth is for a noble man his fatherland (patris)"' (42.10-13).58 At the same time as he distances himself from democratic conceptions of political identity, Musonius also seeks to ground his doctrine in the prestigious literature of the classical period. This is a striking move, given that Musonius' is an eminently Stoic vision of the universe: the 'reasonable' man (epieikes), he tells us, should consider himself a 'citizen (polites) of the city (polis) of Zeus' (42.9), and the polis of Zeus (a phrase which recurs in Marcus Aurelius59) is glossed in familiar Stoic terminology as a sustema ('community'/'compound') of men and gods.60 Having earlier explicitly distanced himself from the democratic conception of parrhesia, Musonius here goes out of his way to attribute Stoic cosmological ideas to classical writers. Democratic Athens provides both the negative exemplum against which the modern view of the world is offset and the source of the prestige in which it must be grounded. The early principate's complex, ambivalent relationship with the literary-philosophical past is clearly visible here. I want to turn now to consider in greater detail Musonius' relationship to the classical past, and in particular his use of classical paradigms to construct his own philosophical persona. Once again, we shall discover that exile plays a crucial metaphorical role within the economy of the essay. Before discussing Musonius, however, it will be profitable to have assessed briefly the metaphorical role of travel in the narrativization of philosophical enlightenment in other contexts: this will allow us to see more clearly the backdrop against which Musonius styles himself. A number of the myths current in early Greek culture centre around the theme of the travel of a young man to a far-off or marginal place, and his return home in a state of maturity (Jason, Telemachus, Orestes).61 In the 58 59 60

61

Eur. fr. 1047 N 2 . M a r c . Aur. Med 4.23. See esp. SVF 2. p . 168.11-14: 'Chrysippus says that the cosmos is a sustema of heaven a n d earth a n d the natures therein, or the sustema of gods a n d m e n a n d the things which are b o r n of them. T h e use of political terminology to describe the cosmic sustema is widespread: for example, the A u g u s t a n Stoic Arius D i d y m u s writes 'the cosmos is a kind of city c o m p o u n d e d of (sunestosa, cognate with sustema) m e n a n d gods, where the gods have c o m m a n d a n d h u m a n s are arrayed beneath t h e m ' (SVF 2. p . 169.26-8). O n the Stoic conception of the cosmic polis, see the excellent account in Schofield (1991) esp. ch. 3. O n Jason, see Segal (1986) 5 6 - 6 0 ; M o r e a u (1994) 117-42; on Orestes, see Zeitlin (1978) 160-74; o n Telemachus, see M o r e a u (1992a). F o r a m o r e detailed discussion of the role of space in the narrativization of transition t o adulthood, with bibliography, see Whitm a r s h (1999).

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classical period, it appears that young men on the point of initiation to adulthood were ritually secluded from the polis, and sent to its margins to be peripoloi ('border-guards').62 This association between transition and marginal spaces alsofiguresphilosophical enlightenment in the narratives of lives of wise men: the subject travels abroad in a state of ignorance and returns in a state of wisdom. The notion that travel generates wisdom is latent as early as Homer's initial characterization of Odysseus as the man 'who wandered much ... and saw the cities and attitude of many men' (Horn. Od 1.1-3). In the post-Homeric tradition, Odysseus is frequently represented as a man of inquiry, a historian or philosopher avant la lettre.63 Following this tradition, Herodotus makes Croesus remark on Solon's fame 'on account of your wisdom and travelling (planes)9 (1.30.2), and comments similarly on the Scythian sage Anacharsis (4.76.1). Stories of travelling philosophers subsequently abound,64 employing this narrative model of central and peripheral space to articulate initiation into philosophical wisdom. Another, related narrative trope sees men become philosophers in exile.65 In the context of a discussion of exile, Cicero lists sixteen philosophers who lived their life abroad (Xenocrates, Crantor, Arcesilas, Lacydes, Aristotle, Theophrastus, Zeno, Cleanthes, Chrysippus, Antipater, Carneades, Clitomachus, Philo, Antiochus, Panaetius, Posidonius: Tusc. Disp. 5.108). The philosopher who is most identified with exile, however, is Diogenes the Cynic, who, as Musonius himself points out, 'turned from a layman (idiotou) to a philosopher when he had been exiled' (43.17; cf. Diog. Laert. 6.21), instead of 'sitting' in his home-town of Sinope. Musonius uses the example of Diogenes to articulate an exemplary contrast between the city's sedentary 'softness and luxury' (malakias kai truphes, 44.2-3), leading to 'disease' (nosematon, 44.4; noson, 44.7; noseleuomenos, 44.8-9), and the askesis ('training,' 43.18-44.1) forced upon the exile, which leads to manliness (andrikoteron, 44.3-4; cf. andrizesthai, 45.2), bodily vigour and health (44.12). Exile is presented as a form of philosophical initiation, a transition to mature manhood. Musonius' account of Diogenes' 'conversion' during exile provides a clear narrative model for his own autobiography (although Musonius would no doubt claim to have been a philosopher before his exile). Indeed, at one point, in a breath-taking display of self-dramatization, he explicitly arrogates to himself the same paradigmatic status as that of Diogenes. 62 63 64 65

Vidal-Naquet (1986a) 106-28; Vidal-Naquet (1986b). Marincola (1996); o n his paradigmatic status for the Stoics, see Stanford (1954) 118-27. See in general A n d r e a n d Baslez (1993) 2 9 3 - 8 . A n d r e a n d Baslez (1993) 2 9 3 - 7 .

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In order to back up his assertion (discussed earlier) that exiles have parrhesia, Musonius offers two examples of such manliness, Diogenes and himself (49.3-50.3). The first story tells of Diogenes' imperious behaviour when he came up for auction at the slave-market: he commanded Xeniades the Corinthian to buy him.66 This exemplum is said to illustrate his 'freedom of speech' {parrhesia, 49.5-6) and his 'freedom' (eleutheria, 49.7-8), thus confusing the categories of free and slave: the slave is freer than his master (a fine, Cynic paradox). The second example is that of Musonius himself: But why should I employ examples of long ago (palaia)! Are you not aware that I am an exile? Well then, have I been deprived of freedom of speech (parrhesia)! Have I been bereft of the power (exousian) to say what I think? Have you or anyone else ever seen me cringing before anyone just because I am an exile? (49.913)

Musonius' presentation of his own exile as an example to be imitated links him back with hoipalaioi, the men of old, self-consciously constructing a persona for the speaker within and (to an extent, as we shall see) against the classical tradition. This strategy informs the essay as a whole, as I see it: the use of himself as an exemplum of fortitude is only the clearest example of Musonius' redeployment of the paradigms of the past for the purposes of self-authorization in the present. In this case, the analogy between Diogenes and Musonius, between canonical past and the present, does have a specific point to it. Like Diogenes, Musonius (according to his own account) inverts conventional power relations: exousia, here translated 'power', is regularly used in the sense of 'political authority'.67 This deliberately paradoxical sense that exile, which is conventionally viewed as a submission to the power and authority of the emperor, in fact stimulates the (internal, personal) power of the philosopher is implicit throughout the essay. Inverting a well-known pun,68 Musonius tells us that exile 'strengthens' (errhosen, 44.3) its victims: rhome ('strength') is thus generated not by Rhome (Rome), but distance from it. Once again, the philosopher's exceptional status is constructed through a literary trope of segregation and distance, and expressed as a form of power which cannot be accessed through conventional civic hierarchies. The crucial difference between the spatial model which undergirds Musonius' narrativization of his own life and that found in the majority of the philosophical lives discussed earlier lies in Musonius' failure to 66

67 68

This story is also found at Diog. Laert. 6.30, a n d was apparently m a d e famous by E u b u l u s in his Sale of Diogenes: see H o i s t a d (1948) 1 1 9 - 2 5 . LSJ s.v. i^ouaia II. See Plut. Rom. 1.1; Ael. Ar. Ad Rom. 8; Erskine (1995).

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place any particular importance upon the return from his marginal travels. Like Diogenes, Musonius sees travel abroad not as a period of enforced seclusion prior to reaggregation into the community, but a pronounced and irreparable break with the parochial concerns of his home community. Wherever he is, he remains (metaphorically) an exile from the mundane socio-political concerns of Rome. Moreover, there is even a marked contrast between Diogenes and Musonius, in the sense that the former travels from the marginal space of Sinope to Athens, the cultural centre of the world, whereas Musonius passes from the centre of his world to a desolate island in the Aegean. His peripheral geographical position, that is to say his status as an exile on Gyara,figuresboth his lack of interest in the petty comforts of civilization and, a more positive aspect, his adoption of a more cosmic perspective. Musonius' construction of an authoritative philosophical persona depends crucially upon the metaphorical role in his autobiography of his spatial location, which (like other elements in the essay) needs to be read against the literary-philosophical tradition. The most important figure for the construction of Musonius' own persona, though, is always Socrates, mentioned at the beginning of That exile is not an evil (42.2), and elsewhere in the remains (10.8; 40.7-8; 54.12; 70.14; 102.9).69 Socrates' contempt for the punishments inflicted by the Athenian people is the paradigm which undergirds most ancient discussions of Musonius' reactions to his exile and mistreatment by Nero. At times this is explicit. Philostratus, for example, records an anecdote concerning Musonius' imprisonment by Nero (Philostr. VA 4.46). Apollonius secretly asks Musonius if he might help him, and the reply comes by letter: 'Socrates the Athenian, because he refused to be released by his own friends, went before the tribunal and was put to death. Farewell.' In other cases, such as in That exile is not an evil, the relationship with Socrates is more subtle, and involves contrast as well as comparison. Structurally, the essay, like all the fragments preserved by Stobaeus, resembles an extract from Xenophon's Memorabilia of Socrates. Like that text, it presents itself as if it were an eyewitness' account of Musonius' teachings, rather than (as is sometimes the case with Plato) maintaining the fiction that this is the master speaking sua uoce. Moreover, the text begins with Musonius' response to another's words or actions ('When a certain exile began to lament because he had been exiled, he consoled (paremuthesato) him somewhat in this manner' 41.4); this recalls closely Xenophon's standard means of beginning a Socratic conversation.70 The 69

70

On the importance of Socrates as an exemplum of fortitude elsewhere in the period, see Moles (1978) 98. An example, chosen pretty much at random: at Mem. 2.5.1-2, Xenophon writes 'I once heard him exhort {protrepein) a listener ...'

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Socratic parallels draw an analogy between the two occasions of unjust punishment: Nero's imprisonment of Musonius on Gyara is assimilated to the Athenians' imprisonment of Socrates. As in the accounts of Socrates' trial, punishment becomes implicitly an index of the punisher's intolerance, not of the sufferer's culpability. Musonius suggests as much in his closing lines (51.11-16), where he echoes the celebrated Socratic notion that it is better to suffer wrong than to do it (PL Cri. 49c; Gorg. 474b; Xen. Mem. 4.8.9-10; Ap. 26; cf. Thuc. 3.47.5), and specifically claims that in his case ('... which is what happened to me ...') he has suffered rather than perpetrated injustice. Thus his exile indicates Nero's, rather than his own, culpability (a point echoed by Favorinus, On exile 23.1). Yet there is a crucial difference between Socrates, whose devotion to his polis leads him to die rather than fleeing from Athens,71 and Musonius, whose philosophy is practised in exile. In Plato's works, exile is unceasingly presented with horror.72 Socrates has only left Athens briefly, to go on military campaign {Cri. 53a): he travels intellectually, not physically {Tht. 173e). For the 'Roman Socrates', however, matters are very different. 'The city' - now Rome, not Athens - no longer guarantees free speech; indeed, as we have seen, speech is much freer for the exile than for one who remains within striking range of the emperor. Once again, Musonius can be seen to be trying on and adapting masks offered by the classical world. His construction of an exilic persona involves the selfconscious manipulation and appropriation of literary tradition. It is important to stress Musonius' deliberate and careful construction of a Greek identity for himself. By assimilating himself to the paradigmatic philosophers of the Greek past, the Etruscan-Roman eques is also appropriating a definitively Greek mode of behaviour (even though Roman models are available to him: contrast, for example, Seneca's eminently Latin approach to the exilic consolation in his address To Helvia, his mother13). The extraordinary fact of Musonius' adoption of the Greek language, and of Greek styles of behaviour, is rarely sufficiently acknowledged,74 and adds greater depth of resonance to Musonius' complex selfpositioning. By Hellenizing in this manner, he constructs a schematic opposition between Greek and Roman in terms of philosophical liberation and oppressive power. Musonius' exile to the Greek Aegean, within the symbolic economy of his autobiography, represents a movement away from the false and domineering world of Rome into the veridical 71 72 73 74

F o r this interpretation of the Crito, see Colson (1989) 4 0 - 8 . Doblhofer (1987) 39. O n the specifically R o m a n ideas at w o r k in the Ad Heluiam, see E d w a r d s (1996) 1 1 0 - 1 1 . See however Goldhill (1995a) 133.

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world of Greek philosophy. The crucial point, however, is that this selfrepresentation as a Greek philosopher is precisely a representation, the artificial construct of a Roman noble. Musonius, then, manipulates the language and rhetoric of exile to provide himself with a mask, a role, a position; and for his readers, it provides a readily assimilable framework within which to understand his actions in relation to the emperor. At the same time, this (constructed, appropriated) identity is neither secure (in the sense that the mask of Socrates could neverfitan Etruscan eques exactly), nor taken over uncritically. This section has sought to expose some of the operations of this process of identity-construction, especially those which relate to geographical space and culture.

in While the literary form of Musonius' thoughts is (to an extent) traditional for philosophy, modelled on Xenophon's Memorabilia, the writings of his pupil Dio from the Bithynian town of Prusa (now Bursa in northern Turkey) combine philosophical doctrine with sophisticated rhetorical techniques.75 In later antiquity, his eloquence earned him the surname by which he is now conventionally known, Chrysostom ('golden mouth'). For his biographer Philostratus, Dio is one of those who 'philosophize under the guise of sophistry' {Lives of the sophists 479; cf. 492). Concomitant with this oratorical artistry comes a self-consciously sophistic manipulation of his own biography, to the extent that many historically-minded scholars have thrown up their arms in exasperation at Dio's slipperiness.76 He claims to have befriended the Flavian emperors (Dio Chr. 7.66), and is elsewhere reckoned to have advised Vespasian on kingship (Philostratus, Life of Apollonius 5.27-38); this has been disputed.77 He claims to have 'found' philosophy whilst experiencing exile under Domitian (Dio Chr. 13.4); this too has been disputed.78 The first four orations in our collection purport to have been delivered before Trajan; this too has been disputed.79 75

76 77 78 79

D i o has been m u c h better served by m o d e r n scholarship t h a n either Musonius or F a v o r inus. F o r general treatments of the m a n a n d his works, see especially von A r n i m (1898); Jones (1978); Moles (1978); Desideri (1978); Russell (1992) 3 - 7 . O n the question of fiction in D i o ' s representation of his travels, see J o u a n (1993). Sidebottom (1996). Moles (1978). W a t e r s (1974) 237, w h o asserts that '[t]he " d r a m a t i c f r a m e w o r k " of the [Kingship] orations is . . . totally fictitious; they may, in substance, have been orally delivered, b u t the presence of the emperor need not be anything but a convenient device'. Swain (1996) 194 is wary.

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The facts of Dio's biography are not of primary interest here. This section will focus instead upon the narrative importance of his exile by Domitian to his self-constructed persona, always bearing in mind that his pose as an opponent of Domitian complements his pose as an advisor of Trajan, the emperor under whom most of Dio's orations were written80 (Domitian's successor but one, who presented himself as the antithesis of the former81). To do so is to follow those scholars who have argued that Dio is manipulating the facts in his orations to present himself in the best possible light; rather than considering this evidence of his 'wholly disingenuous' stance, or his 'fraud',82 however, the question considered here is what might be the point of his role-playing within the subtle literary economy of his self-presentation. Dio's exile is narrated in the thirteenth oration, On Exile. Like Musonius, Dio represents his exile as fundamental to his philosophical authority, even attributing his initiation directly to the experience. It is worth quoting the passage in full, as I wish to consider it in some detail: When it fell to my lot to be exiled on account of my reputed friendship with a man of good character and very closely connected with those who at that time were Fortune's favourites and indeed high officials, a man who lost his life on account of the very things which made him seem fortunate to many men, and indeed to practically everyone, I mean his connection by blood with these officials; the charge being brought against me that I was that man's friend and adviser - for just as among Scythians it is the practice to bury cupbearers and cooks and concubines with their kings, so it is the custom of tyrants to throw in several others for no reason whatever with those who are being executed by them - so, at the time when my exile was decreed, I began to consider whether this matter of exile was really a grievous thing and a misfortune, as it is in the view of the majority, or whether such experiences merely furnish another instance of what happens in connection with the divinations of the women in the sacred places. For they pick up a chance clod of earth or a stone, and try to see in it the answer to their enquiry. And, so the story goes, some find the clod light, while others find theirs so heavy that they are not able to move it easily. 'May not exile after all', I thought, 'and poverty, yes, and old age too and sickness, appear heavy to some and grievous, but to others light and easy? For in the first case perhaps the god lightens the weight according to the importance of the matter in question, and in the second case, I imagine, to suit the strength and the willpower of the afflicted one.' (Dio Chr. 13.1-3)

80

81 82

There is some disagreement a b o u t the dating of D i o ' s speeches (see e.g. Jones (1978) 1 3 1 4; Brancacci (1980); Moles (1983); Swain (1996) 4 2 8 - 9 ) . By c o m m o n consensus, all the speeches discussed below, with the possible exceptions of 6 a n d 80, are post-Domitianic. W h i t m a r s h (1998b) 2 0 1 - 2 for the sources a n d brief discussion. T h e quotations are from Moles (1978) 96; 100. They are objected t o o n different grounds by Russell (1992) 5.

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The tone is genial and digressive, and his first words are carefully constructed so as to suggest that his audience have stumbled onto an unscripted conversation (rather like Callimachus' mimetic hymns, or, perhaps more pertinently, a Platonic dialogue such as the Symposium or the Theaetetus). There is no prologue or introduction: we are immediately pitched into a temporal clause, lasting for (in Greek) ninety-seven words before we reach the main verb. This first sentence is set up so that the information which is revealed in this digressive temporal clause might appear tangential to the main concerns of the oration. Yet nothing is arbitrary here: the sentence reveals that Dio has been a friend, indeed a sumboulos ('counsellor', a marked word with Isocratean and Demosthenic overtones83), of powerful Romans; and, at the same time, an enemy of the turannos, the tyrant Domitian (and the opponent of tyrants is another Demosthenic self-representation84). This information, framed as incidental, is in fact integral to Dio's narrativization of his own life.85 Dio, we learn, has an oblique relationship with Roman power: he is both integrated into its networks of friendship and alienated by the emperor's displeasure. This ambivalence towards Rome is, as we shall see, fundamental to Dio's construction of his identity. The narrative technique of presenting crucial information as if it were stumbled upon points towards a theme central to the content of the oration. Dio's exilic consolation is not the result of philosophical dialectic there is no expert instruction here - but follows 'naturally' from his circumstances. This is an ironically 'naive' presentation of what is actually a topos of philosophical writing: the answer to the question 'where does philosophy come from?'86 This affectation is developed, as Dio presents the Socratic denial of mass opinion (13.7; cf. e.g. PI. Crit. Ale) as though it were the most obvious thing in the world. This is homespun philosophy. Musonius' consolation is addressed to another (41.4-5; although he does admit to exhorting himself at 51.4-5); Dio, by way of contrast, discovers his own consolation. Furthermore, the model for such self-consolation is not a philosophical paradigm, but an analogy with a folk-tale (signalled by 'so the story goes', 13.2). Next, the ethical commonplace that it is one's character, not the punishment, which determines one's response to exile 83

84

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See R a w s o n (1989) o n sumbouloi under the empire. See further T o o (1995) 128-9; 1 4 9 50; 2 0 6 - 7 o n Isocrates' use of the term, a n d Yunis (1996) 2 7 2 - 3 (with further references) o n that of Demosthenes. F o r Demosthenes' self-representation as a (personal) enemy of tyrants, see H a r d i n g (1987) 26. F o r his enmity with D o m i t i a n , see Orr. 3.12-13; 4 5 . 1 ; on his self-projection as a counsellor, see R a w s o n (1989) 2 3 3 - 5 ; Sidebottom (1996); W h i t m a r s h (1998b) 2 0 1 - 3 . PI. Tht. 155d; Ar. Rhet. 1371a; Met. 982b; Arr. Diss. Epict. 2.11.

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(cf. Mus. Ruf. 50.15-51.4) is arrived at by means of an inference from popular wisdom. After improvising this perfectly respectable piece of Stoic exile theory, Dio then continues to explain how he became a philosopher: he recalled the paradigms of Odysseus and Orestes, wailing for their native lands, but nevertheless took solace from an idiosyncratic interpretation of Apollo's advice to Croesus, that he should feel no shame to go into exile when a mule becomes king of Lydia (13.4-8; cf. Hdt. 1.55). In a famous passage, Dio then claims to have visited Delphi himself, and that the god replied to him with a strange (literally 'out of place', atopon, a word which recurs frequently in Dio's works87) oracle: he should undertake his exile eagerly, as a fine and fortuitous thing, until he should come to the end of the earth (to hustaton ... tes ges, 13.9). After a brief self-comparison with Odysseus, the wanderer par excellence, Dio tells us that he took up scruffy clothes, steeled himself, and 'began to wander everywhere' (elomen pantakhou, 13.10). Of those who met him, some called him 'wanderer' (aleten), some 'beggar', and some 'philosopher' (13.11). The idea that Dio is a wanderer (aletes; elomen is cognate) is emphasized here, and recurs significantly elsewhere (as we shall see). Unlike the majority of philosophers, who proclaim their statuses like Olympic heralds, Dio became a philosopher against his will. By chance (tukhon), he began to acquire this reputation, and people began to consult him on ethical matters: he was forced to cogitate on philosophical issues (13.12-13). The element of randomness in Dio's story, however, is (deliberately) ironic.88 If it was by chance that Dio became a philosopher, it can hardly have been by chance that his account of the process reproduces the patterns of Socrates' enlightenment in the Apology, the older philosopher, too, claimed Delphic validation for his role (PL Apol 20e-21a).89 This 'randomness' is carefully scripted: no less than Musonius, Dio is presenting his biography in conspicuously Socratic terms. John Moles has argued forcefully that this Socratic mask is intended to fool his audience into believing a 'fraud', that Dio only became a philosopher in exile;90 this, 87

88

89 90

Koolmeister and Tallmeister (1981) list seventy-three uses, an average of almost one per oration. Compare the equally ironic 1.9, where Dio describes himself as a 'self-taught in wisdom' (ocuToupyoi Tfjs cro<j)ias), alluding, perhaps, to the process of self-discovery described in the thirteenth oration. The irony springs from the fact that the phrase, which appears to advertise the speaker's naivety, is itself a borrowing from Xenophon's Memorabilia (1.5, as noted by Moles (1990) 309; the idea, however, goes back to Homer's Phemius, who is ocuToSiSocKTos (Od. 23.347; cf. also Pind. Ol 2.86-7)). Dio the autodidact is, as he expects his audience to be, well aware of the instructive precedents for autodidacticism. The connection was first spotted by Moles (1978) 99. Note also Xen. Apol 14. See Moles (1978) 98 on Dio's Socratic mask.

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however, is a somewhat too literal-minded approach (fraudsters rarely advertise their techniques as prominently as Dio does). Rather, Dio is carefully constructing an playful interaction between the randomness and naivety which he implies with such regularity and the didactic authority of the ancients texts which so evidently structure his accounts. It is not just prestige that Dio has absorbed from the philosopher famous for his 'irony' (eironeia).91

Indeed, if we have still not appreciated that Dio is manipulating personae in the thirteenth oration, he proceeds to make it explicit: in chapter 14, the speech turns towards Socrates himself. Dio, we are told, used to direct himself and others towards 'a certain ancient account' spoken by Socrates, that he 'never stopped saying' (recalling PL Apol 29d: 'I will not stop philosophizing'). 'I did not pretend that this was my account,' Dio tells us (13.15),92 before promising to reproduce it as closely as possible, 'for it is not likely that ancient (palaious) accounts have lost their power through dispersal, like drugs' (13.15).93 Qui parlel For all that he acknowledges his sources, Dio cannot promise to have got the words exactly right. This strategy raises similar issues to those famously adumbrated by Thucydides (1.22), and also raised by various Platonic speakers (e.g. Phaed. 58d; Symp. 172a): if one only presents the gist of what was spoken, then who is to be accredited with authorship? Such questions underlie Dio's coy self-positioning: how much of his philosophical identity is self-taught, natural, the product of chance? How much is conscious, sophisticated, rhetorical imitation? The contemporary imitator deliberately intermingles his persona with that of his prestigious forebear while laying ironic claim to innocence. Dio then launches into a version of the argument of the Clitophon, a dialogue now reckoned to be pseudo-Platonic but the Platonic authorship of which was apparently not doubted in antiquity. He begins by addressing his audience with a striking quotation, which also recaps the theme of wandering: 'where are you going ...?' (poi pheresthe ... 13.16 = ps.-PL Clit 406b). The concerns of the following passage are not germane to the present argument, and I shall forego further discussion. What is important, however, is the self-consciousness with which Dio changes between his own voice and that of Socrates (which, moreover, is always already scripted by Plato). Dio alludes to this process explicitly when he switches back into his own voice, and tells of his travels to Rome: he decided to 91 92

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F o r Socrates' irony (eipcoveia), see PL Symp. 216e; Resp. 337a; Ar. Eth. Nic. 1127b. Even this denial of deceit is a rhetorical topos. O n the c o m m o n oratorical phrase 'the story is n o t mine, b u t . . . ' (OUK EIJOS 6 piOOos, dAAd . . . ) see Grosslein (1998) 55. T h e contrast between living words a n d drugs (<J)dp|jiaKa) recalls PL Phaedr. 270b; 274e; 275a.

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'imitate' (mimoumenos) Socrates' words when he visited Rome, and chastized the citizens there for their serious want of good education (paideias, 13.29; cf. 13.31). The whole speech, thus, serves as a self-constructed aetiology for Dio's reputation as a brave and outspoken purveyor of Greek ideals in the face of Roman authority. The Musonian pose, the self-dramatization as a Greek philosopher opposing Roman power, is arrived at via a mixture of apparent accident and delightful sophistical ingenuity. Dio's exilic self-representation, thus, switches between an ironic naivety, presenting his initiation into philosophical identity as the natural consequence of a series of random accidents, and an extremely arch, knowing manipulation of literary topoi. Whereas Musonius' response to the tradition of exile as a source of philosophical prestige is to seek to inscribe himself into this tradition as another, albeit modern, paradigm of philosophical virtue, Dio (writing in the generation after Musonius, as his pupil) appears much more self-conscious about the over-determined, even hackneyed nature of the topos of the exiled philosopher, and about the need for reinvention and reinvigoration. The master-pupil relationship between Musonius and Dio has been translated into a contest of the symbolic terrain of literary tropes and allusions, where the pupil is uncomfortably aware of the master's possession of an authoritative identity; he seeks thus to turn his posterity to his own advantage, at once displacing his master's authority by exposing its cliches and claiming it for himself by reconfiguring it and renewing it as a figure of authorial selfrepresentation.94 Dio's literary-rhetorical-philosophical persona is formed of what Harold Bloom calls 'the psychology of belatedness'.95 This self-conscious relationship to the topology of wandering and exile is not confined, in Dio's oeuvre, to the thirteenth oration: such themes play a powerful metaphorical role throughout his works.96 The sixth oration, for example, contrasts positively the 'free' wandering of Diogenes with the anxious, unsettled flitting of the Persian king, implicitly assimilating Dio to Diogenes and Domitian to the king.97 The eightieth oration also links 'freedom' to errancy (80.1-3). Here, Dio explicitly represents himself as separated from the community by his wandering: he 'stands apart from everyone' (80.1), ignoring the spaces conventionally viewed as 94

95 96 97

This antagonistic master-pupil relationship is speculative, but the report (hard to interpret as it is) that Dio composed a tract Against (or 'in reply to"!) Musonius (see n. 12) may invite such speculations. Bloom (1975) 35. My formulation in this paragraph owes much to Bloom's work, both there and in Bloom (1997) (first edition 1973). See Trapp (1995) on Dio's allegorical uses of spatial imagery. Hoistad (1948) 213-20; Desideri (1978) 283; 287-97.

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definitive of civilization (councils, theatres and moots, 80.2), even 'holding an assembly on his own' (80.2)! The use of the language and imagery of wandering and travel play a two-fold role in Dio's self-representation. Firstly, they serve to ironize the presentation of his wisdom. Are we to expect truth or error from an errant? The punning play between truth (aletheia) and the wanderer (aletes) goes back to the Odyssey (14.122-7), 98 but is developed in a specific way by Dio. Let us consider briefly the first oration, On Kingship (purportedly addressed to Trajan). Here, Dio describes himself as 'a wandering (aletai, plural for singular) man' (1.9), and goes on to tell an allegorical tale concerning wandering and paths. He 'happened (etukhori) to be wandering (alomenos) in exile' (1.50), when he 'fell upon' {epetugkhanon, 1.52) a road, whereupon he 'lost his way and began to roam (eplandmerif (1.52). He then met with an old woman who prophesied that 'there would not be much more time for my wandering {ales), and misery - "neither for you, nor for humanity"' (1.55)." So far, the strategy is familiar from the thirteenth oration: the theme of digressive wandering (aletai, alomenos, eplanomen, ales) and chance (etukhon, epetugkhanon), like the passage in the thirteenth oration discussed above (with which it shares vocabulary), barely masks an artfully constructed (and protreptically directed) narrative. The following words, however, underline with masterfully bathetic irony the deeply embedded association in Greek culture between spatial wandering and errors of judgement: You will meet at some point with a powerful man, the ruler over most of the world: do not hesitate to tell him this story - even if some despise you as a chatterbox and a rambler (planetos). (1.56) At this point, Dio narrates in the present a time in the past foretelling the present encounter (which may or may not be a fictional dramatization of the meeting between Trajan and Dio). At this crucial point, the wandering philosopher chooses to suggest that some will see him as a planes a 'rambler' (literally a wanderer over the earth, but used metaphorically here): Dio thus wittily forestalls the objection that his speech about wandering has itself begun to wander. The self-representation as an exilic wanderer serves the purpose of underlaying the necessary pomposity of moral protreptics with a course of playful, self-denigration. This ironic 98 99

Segal (1994) 179-83; Goldhill (1991) 38. As Moles (1990) 321 points out, Dio here makes his own wandering allegorical of the wider 'wandering' of the human race under Domitian; but it is not as clear as Moles suggests that humanity has now, under Trajan, ceased to 'wander' (nor that Dio has: recall that even in the present speech the speaker describes himself as a 'wanderer', 1.9). Moreover, I do not see why Moles interprets Dio as admitting to a 'moral error' here.

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self-effacement also pervades Dio's assessment of his own literary style: at several points in his orations, he chastises himself for 'wandering in his speech'.100 Such pronouncements should not, of course, simply be dismissed as confessions of garrulity: we have already seen too much of Dio's irony and self-consciousness for that. Dio's self-presentation as a wanderer, however, also serves as a source of cultural authority, constructing for him a positive identity as a wise man (and this is my second point).101 As was noted in the previous section, there is a close connection in the Greek tradition between wandering and philosophical initiation. In the nineteenth oration, Dio refers to his friends as 'considering that I have a certain advantage over most men because of my wandering {alenf (19.1). In the third oration, another speech On Kingship, Dio claims that it will be obvious that he is not aiming to flatter his addressee, since he has formerly given a 'touchstone {basanos) of my freedom (eleutherias)' (3.12). The reference is to his exile under Domitian. The metaphor of the touchstone pre-empts the later comparison of the flatterer to the debaser of coinage (3.18), picking up the familiar metaphor which applies the language of coinage to 'genuine' and 'counterfeit' friends.102 It also, however, implies an initiation into philosophical identity: the basanos is not only a proof which the reader may apply to Dio, but also an ordeal which he has undergone in order to prove that there is nothing counterfeit about his philosophical free speech.103 Dio's exile is, according to his own account of his life, a rite de passage which authorizes his assumption of the role of genuine philosopher. These two polar aspects of the wanderer, the digressive 'wanderer in speech' and the culturally authorized man of experience, are reconciled in the figure of Odysseus. We saw in the previous section that Homer's wandering hero is an important model for travelling philosophers and historians, the prototype of the man of inquiry;104 he is also, of course, the man of lies and disguise, the original sophist.105 Odysseus is a crucial 100

101 102

103 104 105

A t 7.1, D i o tells us that his tale will be set during his exile, but forewarns us of his polulogia ('verbosity'), a n d t h a t the speech will be aletikon ('wandering'); a similar point is m a d e at 7.127 (see Moles (1995) 179). See also 12.16, planomenos en tois logois ('wandering in m y words'; planomenous en tois logois at 4.37, however, is used of the sophists from w h o m D i o wishes to distance himself). F o r m o r e on D i o ' s self-representation as garrulous see Moles (1983) 254 n. 17. Moles (1978) 9 6 - 1 0 0 . E.g. Theogn. 116-17; Athen. Deipn. 6 9 4 d - e ; Eur. Med. 5 1 6 - 1 9 ; Here. fur. 659; Hipp. 9 2 5 - 3 1 ; Hyper, fr. 229. O n the various meanings of basanos, see duBois (1991) 9 - 3 3 . C o m p a r a b l e usages of basanos at Philostr. VA 4.37; 7.1. Above, p. 281. Sophismata are attributed to Odysseus at Soph. Phil. 14; Eur. Hec. 238. Antisthenes' version of the debate over the a r m s of Achilles, moreover, clearly casts Odysseus in the role of glib sophist (frr. 2 - 3 G i a n n a n t o n i ; cf. Ov. Met. 13.1-381).

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literary model for Dio's self-presentation:106 we have already seen how, in Dio's homespun self-consolation on the occasion of his exile, he reminds himself of Teiresias' advice to the hero in the Underworld (13.10). In Philostratus' account of Dio's life, the exiled philosopher, on hearing the news of Domitian's death, leaps up naked onto an altar and begins a moral oration on tyranny with the Homeric line 'Then Odysseus of the many wiles stripped himself of his rags.'107 Assuming the authoritative position of moral expert, Dio strips off his clothes to indicate that the time for disguise and deceit has gone ... but simultaneously alludes explicitly to his own literary role-playing! Odysseus' importance to Dio as a model lies in his ambivalence, as both the founder in the Greek tradition of enquiring knowledge and the master of canny self-dramatization. We have seen, then, that exile and wandering play crucial figurative roles in Dio's literary self-fashioning, in both the construction and the ironization of his claims to cultural authority, as well as in the subtle negotiation of his relationship to his master Musonius. In conclusion, I want to note one fundamental difference between Musonius' and Dio's exilic self-representations: Dio's narration of his exile is always premised upon the idea that he returned from exile to assume an influential position within the Roman hierarchy (even if, as we might suspect, Dio's claims to have counselled Trajan are another fiction, it is the fiction itself which counts for more for the present purposes). The majority of Dio's extant orations are post-Domitianic, which is to say, composed subsequent to his recall from exile.108 At times, the narrative of return is explicit (esp. 45.2),109 but more often it is merely implied by the disjunction between the 'present' time of speaking and the 'past' time of narration (as in the case of the narrative of the first oration, On Kingship, discussed above). The narrative of Dio's opposition to Domitian is inextricably imbricated with his later relationship (or, at least, projected relationship) with Trajan. The account of this fluctuating and ambivalent relationship with Roman power encapsulates nicely the duality of his cultural position as a Roman citizen and a Greek philosopher.110 Dio is not just an eccentric wandering philosopher, but also an important political agent; or, from the other perspective, he is not just a toady to the imperial household, but also din 106 107 108 109

110

F o r a full list of passages a n d discussion, see Moles (1978) 97. Philostr. K S 4 8 8 ; Horn. Od 22.1. See further W h i t m a r s h (1998b) 2 0 6 - 7 . Above, n. 80. A t 36.1, on the other h a n d , 'after m y exile' (|i£Ta TT\V 4>uyf)v) refers to the decree of the exile (for this meaning, see LSJ s.v. <J>uyr| II. 1 fin.) a n d n o t the period of the exile. T h e a r g u m e n t of Russell (1992) ad loc. that these words are a n intrusion, incidentally, is unpersuasive: removing the phrase m a k e s the whole clause vapid ('I h a p p e n e d to be in Borysthenes for the summer, since I h a d sailed there at that time . . . ' ) . F o r m o r e o n D i o ' s perspectives on R o m e , see Moles (1995); Swain (1996) 1 8 7 - 2 4 1 .

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idealist of courage, discrimination and integrity. Like Musonius,111 but in a much more extreme fashion, Dio presents himself as both integral and marginal to the structures of Roman power. We can moreover, estimate the reasons for his projected ambivalence towards Rome. Assuming that Dio's self-dramatization is intended for audiences in the Greek world, we might conclude that it serves the valuable political functions of justifying his mediation between Greek and Roman and of defusing the potential dangers involved in integrating two cultural ideals, that of the Greek ethical idealist and that of the Roman political agent, in one man. In this instance, we can see how the literary tropes of exile might have played a crucial role in the Realpolitik of the Empire. IV Favorinus of Arelate (modern Aries) was one of the most prominent figures in the Greco-Roman literary culture of the second century. He features prominently in the Attic Nights of Aulus Gellius, who repeatedly calls him 'philosophus' (1.3.27; 1.10.1; 3.19.1; 8.2.14, etc.), and displays a deep respect for the variety and depth of his learning, as well as the elegance and concision of his speech. Much of his work clearly dealt with philosophical issues, although Favorinus seems to have privileged eclecticism over doctrinal consistency.112 The appellation 'philosopher', though, is too restrictive: Favorinus' most celebrated work was his Miscellaneous History,113 of which many fragments survive excerpted elsewhere, and his prodigious polymathy was invariably disseminated through a highly rhetorical prose style. Indeed, Philostratus, who treats him at length in his Lives of the Sophists (489-92), includes him (along with Dio Chrysostom) amongst those who 'philosophize in the guise of sophistry' (479; 492). Despite his evidently sophisticated knowledge of the Greek language,114 he is at times pilloried by the Atticist Phrynicus for his 'barbaric' solecisms.115 This is no doubt partly Phrynicus' snobbishness at the Gaul's 'barbarian' provenance,116 but it also reflects accurately Favorinus' exploratory, 'outlandish' diction, which does indeed set him at odds with his archaizing contemporaries.117 111 112 113 114

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116 117

See above, pp. 284-5. On Favorinus' philosophical eclecticism, see Holford-Strevens (1997) 203-7. FIT. 35-90 Barigazzi; see also Mensching (1963). See Aul. Gell. NA 1.15.17; 2.5.1; 5.11.8-14; 12.1.24; 14.1 passim etc. on his superlative knowledge of Greek. Phryn. Eel. 218 Fischer; Swain (1996) 45. Galen also attacks Favorinus' choice of words (Swain (1996) 61 for references and discussion). Phrynicus' severity is well characterized by Swain (1996) 53-5. For a list of the linguistic experiments in Favorinus' extant works, see Barigazzi (1966) 58-62.

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Favorinus is no slavish imitator of the past: his approach is, rather, characterized by innovation and experiment. His fondness for anomaly and surprise is not confined to his literary stylization, but extends also into his representation of his life. This is exemplified by the story, preserved by Philostratus and recently discussed by Maud Gleason,118 of his 'three paradoxes': that he quarrelled with the emperor but 'suffered nothing', that he was a eunuch convicted of adultery (he seems to have suffered from an incomplete sexation119), and that he was a Gaul who Hellenized (Lives of the Sophists 489). Favorinus' entire oeuvre displays this love of 'paradoxes', of striking (and, of course, arcanely erudite) oddities which present challenges to received opinion (doxa). The interest of Favorinus for the present project, lies precisely in his self-conscious self-representation as exotic and innovative, and the articulation of that self-representation through the discourse of exile. In order to exemplify both his hyper-modernity and his self-consciousness about the process of self-fashioning, I shall consider briefly a well-known passage from the Corinthian oration.120 This oration is one of two speeches preserved in the manuscripts of Dio Chrysostom (no. 37; On fortune is no. 64) which are attributed with some certainty to Favorinus. In it, Favorinus upbraids the Corinthians for removing the statue commemorating him. In part of the speech (22-36), he assumes the voice of the statue as it argues that it should remain in place. This striking prosopopoeia creates an emphasis upon the artificiality of the conceit, as Favorinus' 'voice' is filtered through a mimetic creation. This is doubly striking because of the emphasis which Favorinus gives to the very processes whereby he has fabricated his identity: the statue speaks of Favorinus as, although a Roman equestrian, 'having emulated (ezelokos) not only the voice but also the mind-set, life-style and style (skhemd) of the Greeks' (25). Emulation (zelosis) is a literary-critical term, referring to artistic creation by means of imitation of canonical models:121 Favorinus is perfectly selfconscious about the artificial, mimetic aspects of his self-fashioning. As a result, the statue tells us, he is pre-eminent in one quality, in 'seeming (dokeiri) and being Greek' (25). Does 'and' divide or unite the two concepts? Can one 'be' a Greek by 'seeming' one, i.e. by exterior semiotics? Or does 'seeming' imply 'but not actually being'? Presently, Favorinus 118 119

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Gleason (1995) 6. He is repeatedly attacked on the grounds that he is a 'eunuch': see Gleason (1995) 46-7; 132-5. It is interesting, in view of Favorinus' preoccupation with cultural hybridity (see below), to observe that Lucian's dialogue The Eunuch (probably a satire on Favorinus: see Gleason (1995) 135) describes the eunuch in question as 'something composite (suntheton), hybrid (mikton), and monstrous (teratodes), alien to human nature' (Eun. 6). In what follows, I owe much to the brief but insightful comments of Gleason (1995) 1617. On the MS tradition of this speech, see Amato (1995) 4-39. Russell (1979) 9-10.

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seems to answer the question, commenting that he has displayed to the Greeks 'how education is no different from birth in respect of appearance {to dokeiny (27). The notion that 'Greekness' could be defined by education and not by birth originates in Isocrates' programme of Hellenizing imperialism (Panegyr. 50).122 Favorinus, though, seems to be going further, exploring the role of imitation and representation in social performance. After all, the message encoded in the 'example' (paradeigma) of Favorinus should be learned, the statue tells us, by all peoples (27); and not least the Corinthians themselves, since he, like they, 'though Roman has thoroughly Hellenized' (26). The reference here is to Mummius' sack of Corinth, and the city's subsequent refoundation as a Roman colony. The statue reminds its addressees that although their city has an ancient name, it too depends for its Hellenic credentials on a performative selfpresentation. The Corinthian oration shows an extraordinary self-awareness about the multiple ways in which Greek identity can be constructed by reference to the past. These themes, as we shall see, are central to the speech On exile, to which I now turn.123 The speech survives on a single, lacunose papyrus acquired in dubious circumstances by Pope Pius XI in 1930.124 It is securely attributed to Favorinus, since Stobaeus quotes excerpts under his authorship. If Favorinus truly was exiled to Chios (the location is stated at 16.3), Hadrian is the most obvious emperor to have ordered the exile (Aulus Gellius presents the philosopher as on good terms with Antoninus Pius: see esp. Attic Nights 20.1.1-3). This would mean that the date of composition of the speech was some time between 130 and 138.125 There is, however, no external evidence to corroborate the implication in this speech that Favorinus suffered exile unless we interpret his first paradox, that he quarrelled with the emperor and 'suffered nothing' (Philostratus, Lives of the Sophists 489) to mean that his quarrel with the emperor resulted in nothing more serious than exile (a somewhat forced interpretation).126 The historical veracity of the phenomenon, however, is 122

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124 125 126

O n Isocrates' imperialist agenda here, see U s h e r (1993) 1 4 0 - 5 . A t Philostr. VA 3.43, D a m i s expresses the h o p e t h a t education at Apollonius' h a n d s will m a k e turn him from a Greek into a b a r b a r i a n . . . b u t this partisan perspective would n o t necessarily have been shared by all contemporaries. T h e title On exile (periphuges) is a guess: the beginning a n d the end of the papyrus have been lost. T h e n a m e is given to it by editors o n the grounds of the n u m b e r of otherwise attested Favorinian titles containing peri ('on . . . ' ) (Barigazzi (1966) 349). I cite the text from Barigazzi's edition, using his chapter a n d p a r a g r a p h divisions (which m a k e for less unwieldy references) rather t h a n the usual column a n d line n u m b e r s of the papyrus. O n F a v o r i n u s ' exile, see n o w Bowie (1997) a n d below n.126. See Barigazzi (1966) 347. Barigazzi (1966) 349. See Gleason (1995) 1 4 7 - 8 . Swain (1989) also discusses the 'historicity' of F a v o r i n u s ' exile, although he reaches n o firm conclusions either way.

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not of primary interest here: the 'exile' of Favorinus, like the exiles of Musonius and Dio, was overdetermined by, and its representation carefully structured around, literary antecedents and canonical paradigms. The focus here, as above, will be upon the fabrication of an exilic persona and its implications for the self-positioning, specifically the cultural selfpositioning, of the subject. The interrelation between literary models and life is a central theme of On exile. In one of the earliest legible passages (2.2), Favorinus writes of the benefits to practical life of paradigms from the past. The essay, he writes, is intended to a 'possession (ktema) for someone else as well [sc. as himself]' who finds himself exiled and incapable of coping. The Thucydidean echo (recalling the historian's famous assertion that his work is a 'possession (ktema) for all time,' 1.22.4) underscores Favorinus' claim that the speech, like Thucydides' Histories (which provide 'utility' in the place of pleasure: 1.22.4), will have a practical and beneficial effect. How will this work? By showing us, Favorinus writes, which examples not to 'imitate' (mimeisthai) because they show 'unmanly' and 'manic' behaviour, and which ones to 'marvel at'. This is no essay in cultural archaeology: the literary past and the lived present are intended to interact profitably. The question of which paradigms are the right ones occupies Favorinus throughout On exile.127 Later, he writes of the 'many even more ancient (palaitera) paradigms (paradeigmata)9 of friendship in the face of adversity, from amongst which he has selected the case of Adrastus (18.1); and talk of paradigms recurs elsewhere (23.2; 25.2 bis). In an important passage, the author considers his schooling against such troubles as exile comports: '... partly by learning about deeds and words of yore (palaion) which lead one towards virtue, and partly by coexistence (sunousiai) with men of our age who are worthy of record ...' (5.2). The opposition between past (palai) and present implies prima facie two different worlds, one of literature which can be accessed only through learning, and the other the world of 'being' and reality (the word sunousia, 'coexistence,' is cognate with the verb 'to be'). 128 Yet both are equally weighted in terms of their utility: the literature of the past, just as much as moral instruction in the present, provides a crucial resource for remedying the soul. Moreover, the link between theory and practice is not just unidirectional: as the passage just cited shows, 'men of our age' too can attain paradigmatic status. Practice can itself create new paradigms: near the beginning of the 127 128

The importance of paradigms to On exile is noted by Gleason (1995) 148-58. This notion of two separate worlds is evoked and then collapsed by Plutarch at Aem. Paul. 1.2 Lindskog-Ziegler, where the author writes of 'spending time with' (sundiaitesei) and 'living with' (sumbiosei) the subjects of his texts. Plutarch here plays with a rich pun on the dual meaning of bios, 'life' (lived reality) and Life (a literary text). On this passage, see Duff (1999).

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papyrus, he writes that the man who 'aims at virtue' can not only counsel with 'theory (logoi),' but also teach others with 'his own paradigm (paradeigmatiy (2.1). Like Musonius, Favorinus considers that proper action in the present can help one achieve paradigmatic status, that is to say, it can lead one across the divide separating literature from life, and into the culturally endorsed realm of literary tradition. Indeed, as has been stressed, Favorinus approaches the past as though it were not hallowed and untouchable, but a dynamic repertoire of paradigms capable of, indeed requiring, revitalization in the present. The past and the present are not separated by the glass of a museum-case. Not for Favorinus the excision of all mentions of the Roman present from his works: we have seen in the extract from Corinthian oration cited above that he is willing, even in a thoroughly Hellenic context, to style himself a Roman, and in On exile too he is perfectly willing to use not only Latin literature as a source but even Roman examples of excellence. At several points, Favorinus recalls Seneca's exilic consolation, Ad Heluiam matrem.129 At one point, he even recalls the example of Aeneas' flight from Troy (26.4), which may well be a reference (the earliest in extant Greek) to Virgil's Aeneid (2.705-44). Finally, his 'paradigms' include Musonius (2.1; 23.1), the general Mucius (1; 22.4),130 and at greatest length, Horatius (22.4). This deployment of Roman paradigms is not arbitrary: it reinforces his claim to have absorbed the lessons which can be taught in 'both Greek and barbarian lands' (5.2).131 In Aulus Gellius' (Latin) Attic Nights, Favorinus is presented as prodigiously skilled in the exegesis of both Roman and Greek culture: 'You are indeed the one man within my memory who is most familiar (peritissimus) both with Greek and with Roman lore,' as Caecilius tells him (20.1.20). Although he displays a preference for Greek (13.25.4; 14.1 passim; 17.10 passim), and his sense of the superiority of that tongue is reflected by Gellius himself (12.1.24), the point is to represent him as a syncretist of Greek and Latin. In the speech On exile, likewise, the overwhelmingly Greek perspective is offset by a familiarity with Roman culture, a familiarity which is absent - or, rather, palpably suppressed (since both were Roman citizens of rank) - in Musonius and in Dio. Favorinus' relationship with his literary past is much more intense, but also much more contestatory than those of either Musonius or Dio. The level of quotation, reference and allusion in On exile is, as has been 129 130 131

See (briefly) Barigazzi (1966) 368-9. I see no reason to assume, with Barigazzi, that Favorinus has not read Seneca directly. The reference to Mucius Scaevola seems somewhat obscure: see Barigazzi (1966) 205-6. This phrase also recalls Dio Chr. 1.52.

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stressed by commentators, high. 132 This, however, is not simply a matter of style, nor does it simply reflect the archaism of the later period. Favorinus is engaging actively with his sources, at times slipping quotations into his own sentences, at times drawing support from the authority of the classics, but at times also vigorously disputing the sententiae. His disputatious procedure is in evidence most clearly in the lengthy disputes with the Polyneices of Euripides' Phoenissae (7.1-3) and Hesiod (26.3-5). Musonius' anaskeue of a passage from the Phoenissae was discussed above, but Favorinus discusses his (different) passage more systematically and in greater detail. The literature and paradigms of the past are not simply to be mimicked: they require careful and active filtering, since one needs to learn also what not to imitate (2.2). Favorinus' approach to life, then, is defiantly eclectic. His approach should be styled, perhaps, not as imitation but as appropriation and transfiguration. This perception of the present as a transfiguration of the past is also troped through the theme of exile, to which I now turn. Exile is read by Favorinus as an enforced relocation from homeland, which represents ancestral values and the past, to another place, which represents the new. Favorinus' consolation is thus directed primarily against those who cling uncritically to their homelands; and this 'consolation' serves the veiled function of figuring a more general critique of nostalgia, of the overprivileging of the canonical past to the detriment of the present. Let us consider first of all his exploration of the notion of the patris (fatherland): And I too love my fatherland (patris); my love is second to no one's, and I should never have left it willingly. On reflection, however, I discover that it is nothing other than the place in which my forebears settled or resided. That a fatherland (patris) is not the country in which we ourselves were born is clear from the following: many people, though born in one place, regard another land as their fatherland (patris). If our fatherland (patris) is this, the territory to which our ancestors have become accustomed, why by the same token should we not also love the country in which we currently reside? After all, the land in which one dwells is much closer than that in which one's ancestors dwelled, and my future descendants will have the same reason (or even more just cause) to make my enforced dwelling-place their fatherland (patris). (De ex. 10.1-2) 132

See e.g. Lesky (1957-8) 755 (where De ex. is 'eine Vorstellung von Favorins ktinstlicher, hier mit Zitatentiberladener, Schreibweise'). Homer is cited fourteen times (4.5; 8.1; 8.3; 13.2; 13.3; 15.2 bis; 16.4; 21.1; 21.2; 21.3 bis; 25.2; 26.5), Euripides twelve times (3.2 bis; 7.1; 7.2; 17.1; 17.2; 18.2 bis; 18.3; 20.1 bis; 20.3), Sophocles four times (11.1; 13.2; 16.4; 19.5), Pindar perhaps three times (5.3 - attributed to Pindar, but apparently a solely Bacchylidean line; 7.2; 25.2), Menander twice (14.2; 25.3), and Aeschylus (11.4), Chilo (18.2) and Hesiod (26.5) once each. In addition, lines of unknown origin are cited at 8.3, 11.1 and 13.1. References to writers by name occur at 4.4 (Homer), 5.3 (Pindar), 7.2 (Euripides and Pindar), 8.2 (Simonides), 9.1 (Plato and Homer), 10.2 (Alcaeus), 13.2 (Sophocles), 19.5 (Sophocles), 25.3 (Homer) and 26.3-5 (Hesiod).

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The first point I wish to make about this passage concerns its relationship to Favorinus' literary identity as a Roman Gaul writing Greek. In questioning the link between the individual's cultural origin and his or her subsequent identity, he is in effect legitimizing his own literary project. Writing in Greek, for Favorinus, is always in a sense the action of an exile. Like Musonius and Dio, then, Favorinus accords an important figurative role to exile in the articulation of literary identity. Yet this is not merely a literary game: it also interacts in important ways with ideological issues which were coming to the fore at the time. Greek cultural identity, as was noted earlier, was traditionally constructed and legitimated by reference to genealogy, either to the provenance of an individual (Dio of Prusa) or, by analogy, the 'descent' of a tribe from a founding father.133 In 131/2 CE, Hadrian established an institution known as the Panhellenion, centred upon Athens, which would regulate which poleis were to be known as Greek and which not, by reference to genealogy.134 Many cities in Asia Minor, traced their descent - often fictitiously - to cities on the mainland, in order to gain admittance to the Panhellenion.135 Can it be a coincidence that Hadrian's attempt to privilege genealogy as the determinant of culture is (roughly: the speech cannot be dated with certainty) contemporary with Favorinus' interrogation of the validity of genealogy as a criterion of identity (in a speech in which he claims to have been exiled, apparently by the emperor)? Elsewhere, Favorinus elaborates on this point. Various poleis trace their lineages back, but 'if you narrate history (arkhaiologeis) back to the very earliest time (to palaitaton), you will find that all are foreigners and exiles' (10.3). The traditional substantiation of identity by recourse to common birth is exploded. This idea is entirely new in the Greek tradition, and may demonstrate something of the range of Favorinus' cultural experience: Aeneas, the mythical founder of Rome, was of course an exile, and, as Seneca points out in his own treatise on exile, this makes Rome a city of exiles.136 One further point: Favorinus emphasizes here the importance of language (logos) in the construction of cultural identity through ancient narratives (arkhaiologia). Narrative is fundamental to identity. Later, Favorinus advances a similar argument in relation not this time to civic but to personal genealogy. Supplementing the words of Euripides' Jocasta to Eteocles concerning the pernicious nature of ambi133 134 135

136

Above, p . 272n21. O n the Panhellenion generally, Spawforth a n d W a l k e r (1985); eid (1986); Jones (1996). Spawforth a n d W a l k e r (1985) 8 1 - 2 ; Curty (1995) 254. Curty provides a n edition of all inscriptions claiming ouyyeveia with m a i n l a n d cities, a n u m b e r of which are imperial. Sen. Ad. Helv. matr. 6 - 7 . T h e notion t h a t R o m e is a 'city of exiles' recurs elsewhere in imperial Latin literature: see E d w a r d s (1996) 1 1 0 - 3 3 .

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tion (philotimia: see Phoenissae 531-5), 137 he extends the discussion to the worthlessness of genealogy: 'Do you not know that if you trace back all those ancient (palaias) noble ancestries (eugeneias), you will trace them back to Promethean mud or the stones of Deucalion?' (20.5). The primary point here is that all humans have a common, primaeval origin; but there is also a suggestion that the search for origins can only ever reveal mythical narrative (hence the references to Prometheus and Deucalion). Genealogies are fundamentally storied. Let us turn now to Favorinus' challenge to the myth of cultural origins par excellence, autochthony. For democratic Athens, autochthony provided an 'official narcissism', 138 a mythical legitimation of the exclusivity of Athenian political identity: Hephaestus was said to have pursued Athena, who resisted his advances; his semen dribbled down her leg and fell on the ground, causing it to give birth to Erectheus, the first Athenian. (As we have seen, identity is often legitimated by mythic narrative.) This idea of the biological relationship between the Athenians and the soil of Attica was advanced with a particular intensity after Pericles' reform of the citizenship laws in 451/0 BCE, which made it necessary for an Athenian citizen to have both parents of Athenian origin (a measure clearly designed to protect the supposed purity of Athenian blood from contamination by non-autochthonous 'outsiders'). 139 Favorinus makes great sport of this notion: If some small number of people think that they are autochthonous (autokhthones), and give themselves airs for this reason, then these truly are empty boasts: I grant you, mice and other more insignificant animals are born in the earth, but it is right for humans to be born from no other source than a human. What is more, if these people affiliate themselves more closely to the earth than all others for this reason - well, one should not deal with one's own portion (mews) of the earth alone, but inhabit the whole earth (pasan ten gen), as it is the same mother and nourisher of all. (De ex. 10.4) Favorinus reverses the implications of birth from the soil by assimilating autochthons to mice. Furthermore, in a neat twist, the notion of cosmopolitanism (so central to Musonius' essay, as we saw) is introduced here: if one wishes to associate oneself with the earth, one should do so not with the part (mews) but with the whole (pasan ten gen). The language of part and whole recalls very strongly that used by Musonius in his 137 138 139

Favorinus is wrong to assert that Jocasta is addressing Polyneices. Dio Chrysostom also cites Jocasta's lines with approval (17.8). Loraux (1993) 37. On the mythical narratives of autochthony, see Rosivach (1987); Parker (1987) 193-5; on their symbolic and ideological values, see Loraux (1993) 3-71. See, on these issues, Davies (1977).

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essay (fr. 9 41.10-13). 140 The central reason for citing this passage here, though, is to show how once again Favorinus is interrogating the ideological structures of his literary predecessors. In contesting the definitive significance of autochthony for identity, On exile inverts the topology and ideology of a famous body of precedents in the genre of epideictic oratory, the Athenian funeral speeches.141 Let us contrast, for the sake of example, what Demosthenes says about autochthony in his funeral speech: For it is possible for each of them [i.e. the dead citizens] to trace his ancestry not only to their fathers (patera), and those of his remote ancestors, man by man, but also to the entire fatherland (patris), which they have in common, from which they are agreed to be autochthonous (autokhthones). For alone (monoi) of all men, these inhabited the fatherland (patris) from which they were born, and passed it on to those born from them, so that one might justly consider those interlopers who enter cities and are called citizens of them to be similar to suppositious children, while considering our citizens the children of the fatherland (patris) by legitimate birth. (Dem. 60.4) Demosthenes' strategy here depends upon an elision of the distinction between father (pater) and fatherland (patris): the myth of autochthony allows him to present citizens as bound by a genetic ancestral relationship to the soil of the fatherland itself, and interlopers as bastards. Favorinus' response (if not specifically to this passage then to the ideology it encapsulates), which we have already seen, is to expose with brusque satire the ludicrously illogical consequences of assimilating patris and pater. of course human beings are not born from the soil. Favorinus' rejection of autochthony as a myth of identity, moreover, accompanies an overhaul of the entire democratic ideology of citizenship. Where Demosthenes substantiates citizen identity by reference to a biological connection with the patris, Favorinus argues that the patris is merely a name given to the place to which one has become accustomed, settled there by chance; 142 where Demosthenes specifically rejects the claims to citizen identity of interlopers, Favorinus considers all inhabitants of a place to have been interlopers at one point; and where Demosthenes focuses upon the exclusive, distinctive qualities possessed by one group alone (monoi), Favorinus' scope deliberately encompasses different cultures. The rewriting of the political ideology of classical Athens, which we have identified throughout as a feature of the writers on exile of the early principate, can be seen 140 141 142

Above, p . 279. T h e classic account of ideology in the funeral oration is L o r a u x (1986). T h e Greek tukhe m e a n s b o t h 'chance' a n d 'fate'. Favorinus refers to it at 8.1; 12.1; 21.1; at other times, he writes o f ' t h e god' (2.3 tris; 5.3; 13.4; 14.1; 21.1; 21.2; 21.3; 22.1 bis; 22.3).

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at its clearest here. What is more, this very process of appropriating and recreating the literary and ideological structures of the past itself underlines the point Favorinus makes here, that the past does not determine the present, that the present writes the past, that one's identity is created in the here and now. 'Favorinus is himself both his medium and his message', as Gleason has pointed out in a slightly different context. 143 Exile thus serves as a trope through which Favorinus, like Musonius and Dio, fashions his identity. An outsider, a latecomer, an exotic paradox, the Gallic Roman presents himself as a literary refugee in a terrain littered with native traditions. He is not content, however, with his marginal position; or, rather, the notion of cultural centrality is for Favorinus irrectifiably bankrupt. What is it to 'belong'? What is it to be 'indigenous'? These concepts, we are told, rest upon a deluded narrative fiction with no solidity. For Favorinus, literary and social identity is and was ever a state of exile, a fact carefully and strategically concealed by the ludicrous state mythology of exclusivist systems such as that of democratic Athens. Although his self-representation is that of an exiled interloper, then, Favorinus ultimately makes himself a generalizable emblem of all literary and social identity. To 'Hellenize,' to 'be Greek', is to seem Greek: all identities are fictions narrated and performed in the present. It is important, however, not to interpret Favorinus simply as dissipating structures of identity, as claiming that 'anything goes'. As much as he challenges received definitions, he also constructs new ones. His claims to 'be Greek' are premised upon his prodigious paideia {Cor. (= ps.-Dio) 27), a signal (as we saw in the introduction to this chapter) of high elite status. 'Greekness' is still to be an exclusivist system, but now differently orientated in terms of the requirements of a vast network of Hellenizing elites throughout the empire. Favorinus' project is one not of 'multiculturalism' (in the idealized modern sense), but of reorientation of the means to the prestigious symbolic capital associated with Hellenism, and, ultimately, of self-authorization and self-empowerment.

This chapter has sought to show how the trope of exile was used to construct identity in the Greek literature of the early principate. As we have seen, the essays discussed here should not be considered simply as trite repetitions of Hellenistic philosophical donnees: rather, they need to be read in the context both of the so-called 'Second Sophistic' (with its reinvention of the literature and values of classical Athens) and of the 143

Gleason (1995) 17.

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strategies of self-presentation of the authors in question. Both these contexts are interrelated: as we have seen, the process of negotiating a relationship with the Athenian past was the central means, for these authors, of constructing literary identity and cultural authority. Exile, especially in the light of the expulsions of philosophers by Vespasian and Domitian, inevitably implied an antagonism towards imperial power and movement away from Rome (as well as all that Rome represented: oppression, luxury, excess) into a world of introspection, ascesis, philosophical self-discovery and autotherapy through meditation upon the paradigms of the past. Yet this was not simply a case of crossing the barrier between Roman power and Greek philosophy, between oppressive control and self-control, between present and past: the language of exile, as we have seen, encouraged a continual interweaving of the two, so that the Greek philosophical tradition was renewed and revitalized as an active, dynamic system for self-presentation in the here and now. Exile was presented not as an enforced seclusion from the 'reality' of the Roman present but as an intense (if stylized) engagement with highly topical issues of power and identity. Exile, then, implied a combative relationship to Roman power. What also emerges from these texts, however, is the sense that exile simultaneously figures an alienation from Greek culture. As much as Rome represents the space moved away from, Greece is an alien territory where (in the case of Musonius and Favorinus) one resides as an interloper. In terms of the construction of literary identity through the language of exile, this is highly significant: it implies that the writers in question saw themselves as outsiders and late-comers to Greek language and culture. This observation provides a crucial corrective to the dominant view of Greek literature under the principate, that it displayed a self-satisfied confidence in its possession of its cultural heritage: what we have seen, on the contrary, is that its engagement with the past was much more ambivalent and problematic. To write in Greek necessarily involved breaking into a closed, centripetal tradition from outside (and the problem was redoubled in the case of an Etruscan, a Prusan and a Gaul). It involved a painstaking process of education and imitation of cultural paradigms, but also (crucially) a transformation and reconfiguration of these paradigms into something new. It also involved the construction of a literary persona, the negotiation for oneself of a place in the tradition and the justification of innovation. To write in the Greek tradition necessitated, for the 'strong' writer,144 an agonistic self-positioning against that tradition. The language of exile expressed the writer's alienation from the tradition and 144

I refer here to Bloom's theory of 'strong' poets (see esp. Bloom (1975) 63-80).

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values of the classical world; it also underlined his manly strength, as he struggled with the adversity of his condition of belatedness. I offer two general conclusions on the theme of 'cultural identity'. Firstly, 'cultural identity' is not to be confused with 'ethnicity'. Even to say without qualification that Musonius, Dio and Favorinus 'were Greeks' is to over-simplify: they used the Greek language and presented themselves as Greek, granted, but they were also each of them both Romans and provincial natives from outside of mainland Greece. Their adoption of a Greek style was a careful and deliberate move, and in no sense (at least for Musonius and Favorinus) the sole or obvious course. (Which is not, of course, to imply that it was simply a matter of the capricious or arbitrary choice of Greek from a range of equally rated cultural systems: as we have seen, the values attached to Hellenism were specific.) Their behaviour is thus not to be explained through a model of colonization, as though they were 'Greeks' resenting 'Roman' invasion: on the contrary, each of the three writers apparently moved with comparable ease in 'Roman' (i.e. political) contexts. Greek cultural identity, at least in the highly energized world of elite literary production, was manipulated strategically in order to serve the interests of the speaker or writer. Each literary articulation of Greekness, then, needs to be interpreted in context, in the light of the aims and ambitions of the actor in question, and not simply taken for granted as an expression of ethnic unrest. Secondly (a related point), cultural identity as manifested in literature is inseparable from literary strategy. This is not to suggest that it serves a purely aesthetic purpose (if, that is, aesthetics ever exist in any 'pure' state): literary self-presentation, in Roman Greece, was a crucial aspect of the competitive structure of elite society.145 Nor do I mean that studies of cultural identity (in the broader sense) should be subordinated to literary studies. My point is, rather, that we should not expect these sophisticated, highly self-conscious texts simple to 'reflect' an ontologically anterior 'identity'. Identity, in these texts, is constructed and explored within the literary work itself, and needs to be understood in the context of its dense and sometimes complex processes. 145

E.g. Bowie (1982); Gleason (1995) esp. 159-68; Swain (1996) 63-4.

8

Local heroes: athletics, festivals and elite self-fashioning in the Roman East* Onno van Nijf

Introduction

A rather unremarkable statue base was set up some time under the reign of Gordian III in the entrance-passage of the agora of the Lycian city of Oinoanda.l (a) (on mouldings:) (statue) of Poplios Sthenios Fronto, son of Likinnianos, by gift. (b) (on the shaft) When Ioulios Loukios Peilios Euarestos was the agonothete of the fifth panegyris [... ] Euaresteia which he himself founded with his own money, Poplios Sthenios Fronto, citizen of Oinoanda, son of Poplios Sthenios Likinnianos having been crowned in the men's pankration; open to all Lycians. (c) (epigram) First my Fatherland crowned me for the boys' wrestling and honoured me with a glorious statue in bronze; later, having carried off for my fatherland the men's pankration ...

The honorand was a member of a prominent local family, who had excelled as a heavy athlete all his life, and the base must have carried a statue of Fronto as a victorious athlete. It is obvious from this text that athletic victory was a crucial aspect in Fronto's self-image. But texts such as these suggest that there was more at stake than simple personal pride in athletic excellence: Fronto presents both his athletic victory, and the commemoration of this victory as his gifts to his fatherland. Success in an agonistic festival apparently had a social importance that went well beyond the interest of the individuals concerned. * This article is an extended version of a paper that I gave to the Cambridge Philological Society in March 1999. A shorter version was published in the PCPhS. I would like to thank Simon Goldhill for the invitation to publish here a revised version. I would also like to thank Paul Cartledge, Christopher Kelly, Harry Pleket and Sofia Voutsaki, Jason Konig as well as an anonymous reader for their comments on various versions of this paper. The research for this paper has been made possible by a fellowship of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. 1 SEG xliv, 1165. The translations of the agonistic inscriptions from Oinoanda (with the exception of those referring to the Demostheneia) are those of N. Milner in Hall and Milner (1994).

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In this paper I want to address the issue of the social importance of athletic success in the Roman East. After a short discussion of the development of the agonistic festival in the Greek world under Roman rule, I shall focus my discussion on a few cities in south-west Asia Minor whose festive culture is well documented through a rich epigraphic record. We shall be looking at the festivals from the perspective of the organizers of these spectacles: the local benefactors, who use the festivals to make a statement about their own status in society, about the Greek character of the community in which they lived, and about their loyalty to the Roman system. In the second part we shall be considering the festivals from the perspective of the competitors. It will be argued that athletic performance was a crucial element in the self-presentation of the local elites. Finally we shall see what role there was for the audiences to play in these events. Greek festivals Agonistic festivals, that is festivals with athletic or artistic competitions, had been a central element of Greek culture since the earliest of recorded times. Their pedigree was impeccable. The oldest Greek literature contains vivid descriptions of athletic contests in the framework of funeral games, athletic victory in Panhellenic contests informed some of the finest poetry, and we should not forget that the entire corpus of Greek drama originated in an agonistic context. As Cartledge wrote: 'Festivals were perhaps the single most important feature of classical Greek religion in its public aspect.'2 All over the Greek world city officials organized remarkably similar festivals in honour of their gods with processions, sacrifices, banquets and above all, contests. The most famous of these were of course the Panhellenic festivals at Olympia, Delphi, Isthmia and Nemea.3 It is sometimes thought that over time these games gradually lost their appeal, and that they had almost petered out when a Christian emperor delivered the final blow in 393 CE. But this image of slow decline is wrong. A recently discovered bronze plaque from Olympia listing athletic victors as late as 385 CE suggests a continuing popularity right up to the very end of the fourth century.4 Some things did change, however, and a study of the place of origin of the Olympic victors yields some interesting results (Fig. 1 and Fig. 2).5 It is striking that known victors from the 2 3 4 5

Cartledge (1985) 98. See for a handy and up-to-date survey Decker (1995) 39-59; see also Finley and Pleket (1976). Ebert (1997). The maps are taken from Harris (1964). They do not include recent additions to the list of known Olympionikai, but these confirm the trends visible here. Lists of Olympic victors can be found in: Moretti (1957); Moretti (1970); Moretti (1992). See, for a more detailed study Farrington (1997).

Fig. 1 The origins of Olympic Victors 600 BCE-300 BCE.

Fig. 2 The origins of Olympic Victors 300 BCE-400 CE.

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Hellenistic and Roman periods are found increasingly in the eastern provinces. This pattern illustrates two trends. In the first place, given the fact that our knowledge is to a large extent based on epigraphic evidence, these maps show that epigraphic commemoration of Olympic victory became increasingly important in the eastern part of the Greek world. I shall return to this observation later.6 Secondly, they clearly show how the boundaries of Greekness were shifting. The Panhellenic games had by definition been open only to people of Greek descent, but the boundary between Greek and non-Greek was not exactly impermeable. For example, the kings of Macedon had been allowed to compete from the fifth century BCE onwards, but other non-royal Macedonians were made to wait until Philip and Alexander had drastically re-mapped the Greek world. In the Hellenistic and Roman periods, increasingly large concentric circles were drawn to include Hellenized Anatolians, Syrians, Egyptians and even Romans.7 The permission given to the latter to participate in the Isthmian Games of 228 BCE effectively declared them to be Greek.8 Greek identity was apparently something that could be acquired not just through language or learning but also (and perhaps more easily) through athletic training in the gymnasion. The enthusiasm for traditional Greek agonistic festivals in the Roman period is also evident elsewhere. Alongside these four major international festivals, there had always been numerous local festivals and competitions of varying standing. Some cities organized hieroi stephanitai agones (sacred crown games) of their own, and the number of these increased over time. More numerous, however, were the themides, agones themateitai, or prize games, most of which offered money or other valuable prizes.9 It would seem, however, that apart from the prize money, there was no substantial difference between these festivals and the more prestigious games. We find the same athletes and artists competing in the same disciplines, according to the same rules. All festivals shared in a kind of homogeneous common Greek festival structure, which appears to have changed very little over the centuries. Literary, archaeological, and above all epigraphical evidence suggests that by the Roman period this traditional Greek festival was popular as never before. In the entire Greek world, but above all in Roman Asia Minor, old festivals were revived or reorganized, and new ones were founded in large numbers. Louis Robert describes this phe6

7 8 9

What these maps do not show, of course, is that the majority of the victors came from the East. Commemoration was a function in part of the rise and fall of epigraphic habits, as is noted by Farrington (1997). Finley and Pleket (1976) 90ff. Rigsby (1996) 26. Cf. Plb. 2.12.8. The distinction is explained in Robert (1982); Pleket (1975); and Spawforth (1989).

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nomenon as an 'agonistic explosion'.10 There was hardly a town without at least one or two agonistic festivals on its calendar to boast about. Festive life in the East developed its own dynamics. Small festivals, for locals only, were 'upgraded': disciplines were added, and prizes increased, to attract competitors from further afield.11 The more successful festivals attracted the top performers of their time: (professional) athletes and artists from all over the Greek world, who could command a hefty appearance fee (just as modern tennis-stars do). There was strong competition between festivals, and the organizers vied with each other to attract the best performers, or the largest crowds. They competed by offering larger cash prizes, or by adorning their festivals with resounding titles. Many cities longed for festivals with the more prestigious stephanitic (or crowned) status, and they declared their festival Isolympic, or Isopythian (that is 'equal to the Olympic or Pythian games'). This need not mean more than that they copied the programme of the games at Olympia or Delphi in detail.12 It has been suggested, however, that local festival organizers were ready to fork out large sums of money to have the right to organize their own version of the Olympic games: the late writer Malalas records that the people of Antioch paid the Eleians for the right to organize Olympic games in Syria.13 If true, the Salt Lake City Olympic Committee can claim to stand in a long tradition! Only, there was at that time no scandal: no member of the Eleian Olympic committee was asked to resign. Cities sent out envoys to the entire oikoumene - that is, the entire Greek world - inviting everybody to their games. Formal observers (theoroi) received seats of honour in the theatres and stadia, and special envoys were sent to share in the sacrifices (synthytai).14' In the Roman period, when the emperor became the obvious arbiter of all things Greek, granting of stephanitic status was in his gift (such festivals were technically known as a dorea of the emperor).15 Cities aiming to outdo each other accumulated imperial games. The city of Tarsus organized Hadriania Olympia, Kommodeia Olympia (later renamed the Severeia Olympia, which under Caracalla were known as the Severeia Antoneia Olympia), as well as Augustia Aktia.16 10 11 12 13 14

15 16

Robert (1982) 38. See below for the 'upgrading', and the addition of prizes to the festivals in Oinoanda. Robert (1978) for Olympic Games in Ephesus, and other local imitations. Pleket (1978) 15-18. Roueche (1993) 182-9, nos. 58-64 discusses a number of texts that record the celebration by various cities of a grant to Aphrodisias of a stephanitic festival in which they appeared as 'joint sacrificers'. There were reserved seats in the stadium for envoys of the cities of Mastaura and Antiocheia: 87, no. 45.4 and 96, no. 45.34. Mitchell (1990) 224. Ziegler (1985) 32.

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Cities were rightly proud of such festivals. Even if each festival took up no more than a few days a year, together they must have made a tremendous and lasting impact on the city and its institutions, on built-up space, and on the very rhythm of urban life. Large sums of money were invested in order to build proper facilities (stadia, theatres, gymnasia), while political time was dedicated to proposals for setting up new foundations, special magistrates appointed to oversee the events, and coinage issued to commemorate and advertise new contests.17 The ritual calendar had to be adapted to accommodate new or expanded celebrations. And of course, hundreds if not thousands of inscriptions were set up in public spaces in permanent commemoration of victors, festival organizers, and other benefactors, or to mark the successful completion of yet another contest. The agonistic festival was a defining characteristic of Greek civic life under Roman rule.18 Festive euergetism When we talk about festivals in the Roman period, we must remember that most of them were not financed from public funds, i.e. from taxpayers' money. As with most amenities of public life, the costs were met from private purses: they were paid for by elite benefactors, like Caius Iulius Demosthenes and L. Pilius Euarestos who were active in the Lycian city of Oinoanda, and many, many others. 19 To these men festivals were on a par with the other acts of euergetism, such as the construction of buildings, or contributions to the food supply. Demosthenes sums it all up in the inscription that commemorates his festival:20 ... When Claudius Capito Rubrianus was high priest of the emperors, on 24 Artemeisios [25 July], I, C. Iulius Demosthenes, son of Apollonios, of the Fabian tribe, prytanis and secretary of the council of the Oinoandians, as I have loved my dearest home land since my earliest youth, and have not only maintained, but surpassed the generosity of my ancestors towards it in the annual subsidies which I made to ensure fair prices in the market and in providing a boundless supply of [ ] to the magistrates, and as I have constructed a food market with three stoas facing it, two with one and one with two stories, and have spent more than 15,000 denarii on this and the purchase of the houses which were removed to make way for this building, and as I wish to leave behind for my home-land, in like manner with these buildings, a permanent capital fund, publicly promise (the foundation 17

18 19

20

Worrle (1988) o n the impact of the Demostheneia in Oinoanda. F o r coinage see H a r l (1987) 64ff.; Ziegler (1985); a n d Mitchell (1990) 223. Mitchell (1990) 217. T h e classic account of euergetism is Veyne (1976); cf. A n d r e a u , Schmitt a n d Schnapp (1978); Garnsey (1991). SEG xxviii, 1462, 11. 6 - 1 2 . T h e text w a s published with extensive c o m m e n t s in Worrle (1988). T h e English translations used here are those of Mitchell (1990).

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of) a thymelic [a theatrical] festival to be called the Demostheneia, which will be celebrated after three-year intervals just as the other penteteric festivals are celebrated ...

Festivals were apparently deemed to be as essential to the citizens as the provision of their daily bread.21 But euergetism was no charity: its motivation was not pure altruism but love of honour (philotimia). Providing spectacles was a competitive business, which put the spotlight clearly on the benefactor, as is evident from the following fourth-century description:22 The theatre isfillingup, and all the people are sitting aloft presenting a splendid sight and composed of numberless faces ... You can see neither tiles nor stones but all is men's bodies and faces. Then as the benefactor who has brought them together enters in the sight of all, they stand up and as from a single mouth cry out. All with one voice call him protector and ruler of the city that they share in common, and stretch out their hands in salutation ... they liken him to the greatest of rivers ... they call him Nile of gifts ... and say that he is in lavish gifts what the Ocean is among waters ... What next? The great man bows to the crowd and in this way shows his regard for them. Then he sits down amid the congratulations of his admiring peers, each of whom prays that he himself may attain the same eminence.

Our Lycian benefactors were fuelled by the same spirit: L. Pilius Euarestos concludes the inscription that commemorates his setting up of another festival with the words:23 Many have put up prizes for cities after they were dead, but, in his own lifetime, no mortal man. I alone dared do this, and it rejoices my heart to delight in brazen images. So, abating your criticism, all those who have dread Envy, look upon my statue with emulous eyes!

And emulous eyes there were: it has been suggested that the remarkable series of Oinoandian contests each represented a stage in a process of euergetic one-up-manship, each benefactor trying to outdo his predecessors by making more lavish arrangements.24 However, self-promotion was not the only factor. When such benefactors paid for public festivals, when they revived old festivals, or in21

22 23 24

Cf. SEG xliv, 1186 for M . Aurelius A r t e m o n w h o like Demosthenes h a d m a d e contributions to the food supply of the city, a n d h a d funded a festival. J o h n Chrysostom De inani gloria 4 - 5 (quoted from Brown (1992) 83). SEG xliv, 1182. See Hall a n d Milner (1994) for the suggestion. Euarestos m a y have tried to o u t d o Demosthenes by offering m o n e y for commemorative statues; his decision to ' u p g r a d e ' his own festival (see below) m a y have been triggered by the foundation of the Artemeia by M . Aurelios A r t e m o n a n d his wife Polykleia, w h o m a d e a point of inviting athletes from the 'ancestral city' Termessos (SEG xliv, 1186 a n d 1187). T h e family of Demosthenes finally responded to the challenges to their supremacy by also offering to fund the setting u p of statues for athletic victors (SEG xliv, 1183, 1184).

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vented new ones, they were not trying simply to please the crowds with free entertainment. These festivals were used to make serious political statements about the kind of community in which they, the benefactors, thought they lived, or would wish to live. Among the issues that such festivals addressed were the importance of being Greek in a contemporary world, the realities of Roman power, and the principles underlying the social hierarchy. Greek culture and identity

The first issue we may want to discuss is the importance of Greek culture and identity. What was the point of all these Greek-style festivals? I take as my starting point the foundation of Demosthenes which offers a detailed blueprint of how such festivals were run.25 ... On the Augustus day of Artemeisios [1 July], a competition for trumpeters and heralds, in which the victors will be given a prize of 50 denarii; then, after the meetings of the Council and the Assembly on the 5th, a competition for writers of encomia in prose, in which the victors will be given 75 denarii; the 6th day to be left clear because of the market which takes place then; the 7th, a competition for poets, in which the victors will be given 75 denarii; the 8th and 9th, a competition for playing the shawm with a chorus (chorauleia), the first prize winner will be given 125 denarii, and the second 75 denarii; the 10th and 11th, a competition for comic actors, the first prize winner will be given 200 and the second 100 denarii; the 12th, a sacrifice for ancestral Apollo; the 13th and 14th, a competition for tragic actors, the first prize winner will be given 250, and the second prize winner 125 denarii; the 15th the second sacrifice for ancestral Apollo; and the 16th and 17th, a competition for kitharodoi [singers accompanied with the lyre], who shall receive as first prize 300 denarii and as second prize 150 denarii; the 18th an open competition for all, for which will be given a first prize of 150 denarii, and a second of 100 denarii, and a third prize of 50 denarii; and 25 denarii will also be given to the person who provides the scenery; the 19th, 20th and 21st, hired performances among which will be mime artists, acts and displays, for which prizes are not provided; and the other acts which are for the benefit of the city are hired for these days, for which 600 denarii will be paid; the 22nd, gymnastic competitions for citizens, on which 150 denarii will be spent...

Demosthenes makes a maximal use of familiar Greek categories: for all the events, for the order in which they were performed, and for their relative importance in his scheme of things (expressed by the value of the prizes) we can find parallels in other Greek cities of the Hellenistic and Roman period.26 Demosthenes does not present this experience as something new, or so it would seem at least. Other festival competitions in 25

SEG xxviii, 1462,11. 37-46.

26

Worrle (1988) 227-58; cf. Jones (1990).

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Oinoanda were cast in a similar traditional mould. Apart from the Demostheneia we know of five other festivals, most of which were athletic. 27 Statue bases in honour of the victors give us the names of wrestlers, pankratiasts, and boxers, all familiar figures of Greek athletics. A third-century festival that was funded by a Lucius Pilius Euarestos is of particular interest here, as it seems to take a dual approach: initially set up as an athletic contest, it was later upgraded so as to include artistic competitions as well. 28 The reason may be obvious: the donor is described as grammatikos: he was the local orator, who taught (Greek) literature to the young men of the city, possibly in the colonnades of the gymnasion. An inscription in the agora allowed him to present himself as the guardian of Greek culture, which he defined in artistic as well as in athletic terms: Agonothete for life, I have put up prizes for the strong in the famous stadia of athletic Heracles. But one who has earned his living from the Muses ought to have provided gifts for his own Muses; therefore having celebrated myself this fifth themis, I have put up prizes welcome to the Muses for artistic performances and, obedient to the holy command of Phoebus, son of Leto, I have adorned strong Alcides with the Muse. And I pray the immortals that my children, my city and my country will always celebrate these festivals, unharmed. Your wife's famous brother wrote this, Fronto, having trained his mind in composition. It is significant that his 'famous brother-in-law, Fronto' who seems to have composed part of the inscription, was himself a prominent wrestler who prided himself here on his literary skills as well. 29 Sport and literature are more or less equivalent and combinable signs of true paideia, Greek culture. At first sight it looks as though the inhabitants of Oinoanda, and no doubt of countless other cities, were presented by such men with solid Greek heritage stuff; that they were offered an image of themselves, of their own community as standing in a long unchanging Greek tradition. But matters were more complicated than that. Oinoanda itself had a history that went no further back than the third century BCE, when it had been founded as a colony of Termessos. 30 More generally, the Greek character of Lycia was not unproblematic. 31 The Lycians had long lived 27

28 29

30 31

Hall a n d Milner (1994) conveniently collects all the evidence for agonistic life in O i n o a n d a . T h e texts are reproduced in SEG xliv, 1165-1201. Hall a n d Milner (1994) 8-30. See, SEG xliv, 1165 for F r o n t o ' s victory. Strictly speaking there are two possibilities: Either OpovTcov is a nominative, in which case he is the a u t h o r of at least p a r t of the inscription, or it is a vocative, in which case the inscription is addressed to F r o n t o , whose statue was standing alongside that of his brother-in-law. Milner discusses b o t h options, but prefers to read F r o n t o as a nominative. Bean (1978) 170. Bean (1978) 19-31 a n d F a r r i n g t o n (1995) 120-32 have brief historical surveys.

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at the fringes of the Greek world, but until the fourth century BCE they had not been part of it. They had sided with the Persians in the 480s (as they had done with the Trojans in an earlier conflict between Asians and Greeks), and they werefinallydrawn into the Greek world by Alexander.32 For much of the Hellenistic period the Ptolemies were their formal overlords, but the Lycians maintained a high degree of independence, although their cities developed Greek-style political institutions. The arrival of the Romans in the second century BCE had brought them freedom (in 167); the Lycian koinon became in this period their most important political body. They were formally incorporated as a province in the Roman Empire, in combination with already provincialized Pamphylia, by Claudius, but even then the koinon continued to function. They had set up inscriptions in their own language until the third century, and they retained a distinctive funerary culture until well into the Roman period. In material terms Greek-style public building had come only with Roman rule. It was only under the Roman emperors, and with their active support, that Lycians were inventing themselves as full-blown Greek communities. Seen in this light, agonistic festivals were an invented tradition that really flourished as part and parcel of this political-cultural package. So, Demosthenes' curiously old-fashioned programme was perhaps more of a novelty than it might have seemed.33 To pursue this point a little further: it remains to be seen how popular this brand of games was with the Oinoandians themselves. It is perhaps a sobering thought that there are no records in Oinoanda of any local victors in the artistic contests set up by Demosthenes. None of Euarestos' pupils seems to have been able to lay his hands on an artistic prize. The only seeming exceptions are consolation decrees set up for young boys who had showed enormous literary promise, but who unfortunately had died before they had been able to win anything.34 Such documents are, of course, revealing of the self-image of the local elite, but they may mask a considerable degree of cultural inadequacy! This phenomenon was not limited to Oinoanda: the festival of the Meleagreia in Balboura, which was explicitly modelled on the cultural programme of the Demostheneia, did not yield any local cultural champions either.35 The only local victors that we know of are boys and men who had won in the purely athletic competitions - mainly wrestling - that were appended to these cultural festivals. More than 130 years after 32 33

34 35

Bean (1978) 24. Jones (1990) emphasizes t h a t the purely cultural contest was a rarity not only in O i n o a n d a , but m o r e widely in the R o m a n East. SEG xliv, 1191 a n d 1198. F o r a discussion of the p h e n o m e n o n , see Pleket (1994). Milner (1991).

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Demosthenes set up his festival, one of his descendants decided to yield to the inevitable by making funds available also for prizes and statues in the athletics competitions that were open only to the citizens.36 Unless we assume either that victory in the artistic competitions was not valued enough by the local elites to warrant commemoration, or that it is a matter of chance that no artistic inscription has survived, we must conclude that local victories in these contests were scarce. The artistic competitions were probably dominated by travelling professional artists (technitai), who did not bother to record their victories in these rather modest local affairs.37 It would seem, therefore, that just as the famous philosophical inscription of Diogenes appears to have failed to turn one single Oinoandian towards a more Epicurean lifestyle, the civilizing offensive of Demosthenes and his peers similarly failed to generate much artistic activity among the locals. To them Greek culture apparently equalled Greek-style wrestling. It is important to adopt a proper perspective here. Wrestling was a highly respectable, and symbolically powerful aspect of ancient cultures. Its cultural significance may have been particularly high in these areas of Anatolia, where wrestling had been an important ritual activity long before the arrival of Greeks and Romans.38 It should not surprise us that a process of acculturation took shape through a selective borrowing of cultural traits, particularly of those that harmonize most with earlier practices. Greek athletics were apparently adapted to suit the needs and potential of the locals. Appropriation and adaptation of a past for purposes of the present are of course common features of invented traditions all over the world. The ideals behind cultural Hellenism were not politically innocent: these festivals were not just the antiquarian fads of schoolmasters. All over the eastern provinces, Hellenism was a major ideological force in the hands of local elites, used to provide a common identity to dominant groups in widely divergent cities and provinces.39 Demosthenes, Euarestos and others may well have expected that their attempts to present themselves as the servants of the Muses, as the protagonists of a Greek cultural revival, justified and legitimized their economic and political hold over their community. Paideia, athletics included, was without a doubt a crucial element of the self-image of the urban elites in the Roman East, even in 36 37

38 39

SEG xliv 1183, 1184. They are discussed by Forbes (1955); Pleket (1973); R o u e c h e (1993). See Stefanis (1988) for a prosopography. See e.g. Poliakoff (1987); for A n a t o l i a n predecessors, Carter (1988) a n d Puhvel (1988). T h e importance of paideia is well explained in Brown (1992) esp. ch. 2 'Paideia a n d power'. See also Preston, Goldhill, W h i t m a r s h above.

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areas where the local population was not fully ethnically Greek. 40 Mastery of Greek culture might even have been of greater significance where the elites themselves were heavily implicated in the Roman administration, or especially when their own claim to Greekness was tenuous. Demosthenes was a member of the equites and he had served the Roman administration as procurator in Sicily, before settling down in his hometown Oinoanda. 41 It should perhaps also be noted that the Pilii, the family of Euarestos, were the descendants of Roman traders - or perhaps of one of their freedmen.42 The Greek festivals of the Roman Empire and their organizers were clearly implicated in the wider political developments of the time. Greek festivals in a Roman context It is worthwhile pursuing this Roman connection a little further. It is important to note that Demosthenes' festival 'was framed by its references to Roman power'. 43 Care was taken to enlist the support of the 'most cultured of emperors' (lioucriKcbTaTos |3occriAeus in the words of Athenaeus). 44 Demosthenes was on his own account a personal acquaintance of Hadrian, 45 and the dossier opens with a letter from the emperor warmly recommending Demosthenes' project to the Oinoandians. ... The emperor Caesar Trajan Hadrian Augustus, son of the god Trajan Parthicus and grandson of the god Nerva Germanicus, Pontifex Maximus, with tribunician power for the 8th time, consul for the 3rd time, greets the magistrates, council and people of the Termessians of Oinoanda. I praise Iulius Demosthenes for the patriotic zeal he has shown to you, and I confirm the musical competition which he has promised to you. He himself will contribute the cost from his own treasuries.. . 46 Who could resist a request like this? Once you begin to look for them, you will find imperial fingerprints all over the Demostheneia. The emperor and his cult pervaded every aspect of the foundation and the panegyris. The festival was supposed to start on the 'Augustus day', that is the first day of the month (1. 14), the agonothete wears a crown with the image of the emperor (1. 55), imperial sacrifices were performed (11. 57-8), and ten sebastophoroi 'dressed in white with crowns of wild celery' carried images of the emperor in the procession (11. 62-3). It has been suggested, therefore, that the festival was especially designed to please Hadrian, whose 40 43 45 46

41 42 Brown (1992) 37. Worrle (1988) 55-69. Hall and Milner (1994) 26. 44 Jones (1990) 487. Athenaeus 3.115B. SEG xxviii, 1462, 11. 103-4 TOTS ZepaoroTs efiri TOTS K]OCAAICTTOIS Eyvcoaiievos. SEG xxviii, 1462,11. 1-3.

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cultural tastes were well known, and whose presence in the region may have prompted this remarkable display of loyalty.47 Not all emperors may have been as enthusiastic as Hadrian - of whom Aelius Aristeides said that he had turned the whole empire into one gigantic festival procession - but they all were pleased to see these festivals as welcome expressions of loyalty. Local benefactors were ready to comply.48 Most emperors at least allowed the cultivation of an image of themselves as the protectors of traditional Greek culture. Throughout the Roman East we can witness how Greek festivals were closely linked with emperors, and in particular with the imperial cult. A good example is the festival of the Aktia, which Augustus instituted in 27 BCE at Nikopolis to celebrate his victory over Antony and Cleopatra.49 The emperor declared that they were to have equal prestige with the traditional Panhellenic games, and they were duly added to the circuit or periodos. He also founded similar games in Naples, the Sebasta in 2 CE. Tiberius and Germanicus registered their interest in the Olympic Games by taking part, and - not surprisingly - they won.50 Nero did the same, but the sources represent this as a public relations debacle.51 Domitian set up a festival in Rome itself, the Capitolian Games (86 CE) which also acquired Panhellenic status.52 Later emperors also promoted Greek athletic festivals in Italy and in the provinces in various ways. Roman observers may have seen this as a deplorable new departure, but from a Greek perspective it was the logical outcome of a development that had already started under the Hellenistic kings. At a more modest - local - level, traditional festivals also recognized the inevitability of Roman power; titles such as Augusteia and Sebasteia or other imperial titles were added to ancient names, and others were newly founded to honour specific emperors.53 We may note that the festivals organized by Demosthenes' successors in Oinoanda all honoured Roman emperors through the addition of (temporary) imperial epithets,54 and we know that he himself also organized a league-festival in honour of that most unlikely recipient of imperial cult, Vespasian.55 47 48

49 50 51 52 53 54 55

Jones (1990) 487-8. Mitchell (1990) 219. Hadrian's successor may have been a little less keen on promoting festivals: his famous letter to the Ephesians commends a benefactor for offering the city buildings instead. The Ephesians had wanted the festival (IK 15 1493). Demosthenes could not be faulted on this: he also had paid for buildings, as we saw above. Hertz (1988). IvO, 220 (Tiberius) and 221 (Germanicus). Cf. Alcock (1994). Cf. Caldelli (1993). Mitchell (1990) has a convenient survey of emperors and festivals in Roman Asia Minor. Hall and Milner (1994) 29-30. SEGxliv, 1185.

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It should perhaps be noted here that Lycia was not unique in this respect: even in mainland Greece agonistic festivals were often the product of the imperial system. The rich agonistic life of Roman Sparta was mainly a creation of the imperial period, with at least two festivals, the Kaisareia and the Olympia Kommodeia explicitly set up in honour of Roman emperors.56 Nor should we forget that the Athenian ritual calendar was fully reorganized under Hadrian, who not only introduced new games such as the Panhellenia, the Hadriania, the Olympia, and the Antinoeia in Eleusis, but also restored the Panathenaic Games to something of their former splendour.57 Even the Athenians sometimes had to be told how to be Greek. Everywhere Greek agonistic festivals were used to accommodate the realities of Roman power, and to negotiate the relations between the local communities and the centre in Rome. Throughout the East the Roman imperial cult was probably the most important vehicle for the establishment of Greek agonistic festivals,58 but even festivals that were not formally in honour of the emperors were suffused with references to Rome. It is relevant to note that this development had been prefigured in the Republican period. The oldest Greek-style festival in Lycia (in Xanthos in 188 BCE) was called the Romaia, the Roman Games, thus raising the question of what it was that Lycians thought that they were doing: were they Hellenizing or Romanizing when they staged Greek-style contests?59 Whatever else these festivals did, they certainly complicated any easy distinction between what was Greek and what was Roman. Athletic performance

So far I have looked at these festivals from the vantage point of the organizers and the imperial centre, but I should also like to investigate what these festivals meant to the competitors. Who were the athletes? and what was the place of athletics in civic life? This is a complex story, and I cannot go into detail here, but some points need to be made. Modern histories of Greek athletics tend to repeat the old-fashioned prejudice that Greek athletics of the Roman period was increasingly a professional affair, with all the moral problems that came with that. Professionalism in sport - so it is said - had driven out the true amateurs, and replaced them with uncultured musclemen. 56 57 58 59

Cartledge a n d Spawforth (1989) ch. 13. Follet (1976) 3 1 7 - 5 0 , Spawforth a n d W a l k e r (1985) 9 0 - 1 , a n d Jones (1996). Mitchell (1990) 219. R o b e r t (1978).

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Lofty ideals, and love of the sport had been replaced with greed and vulgarity.60 As a result - so it is said - the Greco-Roman elites had withdrawn from the games and the gymnasia. As the author of a recent study on Greco-Roman masculinity puts it:61 Perhaps physical strength once had been the definitive criterion of masculine excellence on the semi-legendary playing fields of Ilion and Latium, but by Hellenistic and Roman times the sedentary elite of the ancient city had turned away from warfare and gymnastics as definitive agonistic activities, firmly redrawing the defining lines of competitive space so as to exclude those without wealth, education or leisure.

In the following pages I wish to argue that this view is mistaken and that the gymnasion was still a locus for making men. Athletic success was no less a prerequisite for elite status and for claiming a Greek identity than were rhetorical or literary skills. Athletic performance at festivals, and epigraphic commemoration of such performances were crucial sources of symbolic capital, that served to support the social dominance of the bouleutic classes throughout the Roman East. The social background of athletes

It can easily be established that Greco-Roman elites were never absent from the running tracks and wrestling pits of the ancient world.62 Athletics started off as a pastime for Homeric aristocrats, and as late as the sixth century CE, we still find scions of elite families who participated in athletic contests, and had this proudly commemorated on their epitaphs.63 In the period that concerns us here also, athletes of elite status were a common occurrence. To stick with Roman Lycia: we know of a number of athletes who achieved athletic distinction abroad. M. Aurelios Toalis who was a citizen of Arykanda and of Olympos was a victor in the boys' pankration at the second celebration of the Euaresteia.64 He had also achieved suc60

61

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Gardiner (1930); Harris (1964); Harris (1972). This whole debate is bound u p with nineteenth-century prejudices about professionalism in sport, and an idealization of the classical Greek past. Cf. Young (1988). The excellent new account of Greek sport by Golden does not fall into this trap, but unfortunately does not concern itself with later Greek history (Golden (1998)). Gleason (1995) 159. Gleason's oversight of the importance of athletics for the construction of male elite identity is regrettable, especially as her analysis of rhetorical practice in the context of an intensely agonistic elite culture is convincing. A proper discussion of masculinity ideals should take the culture of the body as seriously as that of the mind. Pleket (1973); Pleket (1974); Pleket (1975); Pleket (1992). SEG xxxvii, 1485 is an epitaph from Gaza, dated to 12 April 569 CE. It was set up for a seventeen year old athlete, who was styled a 'friend of the bouW of which he appeared to have been a member himself. 1171.

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cesses in Pythian, Actian, and Olympian Games, even though these may have been local versions, rather than the 'real thing'. The fact that he was able to tour at least regional festivals suggests that he was relatively welloff. Elite status is further suggested by the fact that he already had double citizenship at an age that he could still compete in the boys' category. We are on safer grounds with a near contemporary of his, L. Septimius Flavianus Flavillianus, whose career it is worth discussing in some detail. He is known from five inscriptions in Oinoanda that record his remarkable progress. The first text that mentions him is a honorific inscription of about 212 CE set up by the proud patris, when he had won the boys' wrestling in the Meleagreia.65 Lucius Septimius Flavianus Flavillianus, paradoxos (brilliant victor), having been crowned in the boys' wrestling, when Aurelius Kroisos, son of Simonides, son of Kroisos, son of Tlepolemos was agonothete of the thirteenth panegyris of the Meleagreia - the fatherland honoured propitiously. In the 230s he appears to have won the men's wrestling and pankration in the same contest. The two inscriptions commemorating this achievement style him as a hieroneikes (a victor in a crown contest) which shows that in the meantime he had embarked on an international athletic career as well. One inscription even lists his victories at Athens, Argos, Ephesos, and even at the Sebasta in Neapolis. 66 Finally, an inscription from 231-2 shows him again victorious in pankration in the games organized by Euarestos. The inscription lists some of his other victories, and as a mark of status informs the reader that he had citizenship in no fewer than three Lycian cities.67 To achieve such distinction, Flavillianos must have lived the life of a top sports star, dedicating time, money and effort to his considerable talents, of which he was clearly proud. He was, however, also a member of the aristocratic family of the Licinnii: well-known purveyors of Roman administrators and imperial priests. His father Flavius Diogenes, was a Lyciarch - an official in the Lycian koinon - a position that was reserved only for the wealthiest and most respectable notables in the League. It is telling that his family was not in the least embarrassed by his athletic exploits: his aunt Licinnia Flavilla lists him proudly in the genealogical inscription that she had engraved on her tomb as an advertisement of her family's status and pedigree: Flavius Diogenes, the Lyciarch ... had from his second wife ... a son Flavillianos, who trained as a pankratiast and who was crowned victor in sacred contests.68 65 68

66 67 SEG xliv, 1194. S£Gxliv, 1195, and 1196. SEG xliv, 1169. IGR III, 500 (V). Cf. Hall and Milner (1994) 15, and Hall, Milner and Coulton (1996) 122-3.

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Flavillianos' triple citizenship reflected his background as much as it did his athletic success; people like him were dominating the international athletic scene.69 Yet, this distinguished aristocrat would happily have collected the cash prizes that were on offer at the games, or received the opsonion (pension) that some cities offered to successful performers.70 But he would probably not have described himself as a 'professional': his sport was not an 'epitedeuma\ There was a fine line between receiving money as a prize for an athletic achievement, and receiving money as a wage. It should be acknowledged, though, that the elite athletes never did fully monopolize the field on this level. The existence of large prizes in the form of cash and valuables would have made it possible in principle for athletes from lesser backgrounds to make a living from their sport. Many famous athletes of the Roman era may have followed this route, even though it is impossible to quantify this phenomenon.71 One problem is that after their retirement, successful athletes would be in the position to settle as members of the bouleutic class in their home-towns, or in any community that would welcome them. The epigraphic self-presentation of these socially mobile athletes is virtually indistinguishable from that of their aristocratic colleagues, whose lifestyle and ideology they were ready to copy: athletes were apparently not 'sufficiently reflective or articulate to criticize the aristocratic ethos, or to substitute something different'.72 Even if the aristocratic athletes did not fully monopolize the field, it is clear at least that their ideology was all pervasive.73 The ideological domination of the elite athlete was equally strong at local levels. I opened this paper with the inscription of the pankratiast Fronto. He was, as we saw, a member of a prominent family, and his brother-in-law was the benefactor Euarestos who had funded the games that were named after him. His qualities as an athlete, as well as his qualities as a poet, may have distinguished him from his compatriots, but they may not have sufficed for an international career as a professional performer. Many of Fronto's fellow aristocrats in Oinoanda and beyond seem to have placed high value on their athletic achievements, as is clear from an ever growing body of epigraphic texts. Cities such as Oinoanda were keen to immortalize the athletic successes of their sons, by statues and inscriptions. Victory in a foreign contest, 69

70 71 72 73

F o r the parallel case of the Milesian periodoneikes a n d councillor Thelymitres, see Giinther (1986). Pliny Ep. Tra. 118-19. Pleket (1974); Pleket (1975). Cf. Brunt (1973). Cf. the remarks of Robert: 'L'Ideal des athletes, c'est la gloire de la couronne. O n parle avec mepris des athletes 'professionels' de l'epoque imperiale. II faut reconnaitre qu'ils ont a d o p t e l'ideal des ' a m a t e u r s ' et des citoyens grecs', R o b e r t (1968) 288.

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especially in prestigious ones such as the Olympic Games, was highly prized,74 but victory in a local contest was also reason for celebration. Hundreds of victory inscriptions were set up, often at prestigious, and symbolically important locations in the city: in the agora, in the gymnasion, alongside major roads. In Oinoanda, victors were commemorated alongside major benefactors and top magistrates in the agora and in the 'Esplanade' (the old agora), where the inscription of Diogenes the Epicurean was found, and in many other prominent locations as well.75 If we turn our attention to neighbouring Termessos, it becomes obvious to what extent the image of athletic victory could dominate an urban landscape. There were several spaces in this Pisidian city that were used for the public display of inscriptions: the agora, stoas around the agora, the odeionlbouleuterion, the main temple, the two gymnasia and a colonnaded avenue just north of the city centre. At all these places we find agonistic inscriptions, mainly honorific monuments for successful athletes. There was no escape: wherever you went in Termessos, you were confronted with the powerful image of the victorious youth.76 The situation in Termessos may have been exceptional, but the large number of agonistic inscriptions throughout Asia Minor suggests that athletic victory was one of the most powerful and widespread images around. Now, because we know the names of hundreds of successful athletes and performers, it can easily be demonstrated that the glittering prizes for artistic and athletic achievement - or at least public commemoration of such successes - tended to go to those best fitted to receive them: the members of the leading families of the cities. Known local victors can routinely be linked to the prominent land-owning families (the same ones who provided also the magistrates and benefactors of the cities).77 The epigraphic record of Termessos illustrates the trend: the rich display of agonistic inscriptions served primarily to honour members of a few elite families.7 8 One reason for this state of affairs is perhaps that the essential training in athletics, just as that in literature and music, was closely bound up with 74

75 76

77 78

T h e commemorative inscriptions often emphasized any victories in the traditional P a n hellenic contests by mentioning these first. A boxer from Miletus stated that he h a d been 'OAupiTTioveiKris rTsicraTos - i.e. that he h a d w o n in the original Olympic G a m e s , n o t in some local imitation! (/. Milet II, 500). Hall a n d Milner (1994) with m a p s o n p p . 10, 12, 14, a n d 16. T h e inscriptions can be found in TAM III. 1, nos. 141-213. There is a m a p o n p . 365. Appendix I gives precise information of the location of individual inscriptions. I discuss the organization of the epigraphic display in Termessos in: van Nijf (forthcoming). M a n y examples can be found in Pleket (1974); Pleket (1975). Cf. TAM III. 1, nos. 141-213 for the agonistic inscriptions. Appendix V: ' S t e m m a t a G e n t i u m ' lists the most prominent families.

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the culture of the gymnasion, and this remained at all times the realm of a self-selecting crowd.79 To be sure, gymnasion education was not limited to the bouleutic classes - we know of urban craftsmen and traders who registered an interest - but it will not have extended much beyond a broad middle class. Any long term commitment to the gymnasion, and to the agonistic culture in the city, however, must have been an option open only to the happy few. Despite occasional subsidies or individual sponsorships for talented youngsters from outside the elite, who will have moved on to the international athletic scene, most local athletes must have come from well-to-do families, who could afford to spend the time and money needed for a lasting athletic career.80 But this aristocratic dominance of the athletic field is also an effect of the patterns of epigraphic commemoration, as the situation in Termessos makes clear. The commemoration of athletic succes took two basic forms. In the first place we know a few lists of victors that were inscribed on the walls of public buildings such as a stoa on the agora, or the odeion.81 These lists recorded - probably once a year - all the victors of contests that were held inside the gymnasion under the supervision of the paidonomoi or ephebarchs. The victors are all boys or ephebes. The other - much more numerous - category consists of individual honorific inscriptions commemorating victory in one of the many prize or crown games that were held in the city, but not within the framework of the gymnasion82 They were found on the bases of statues that were set up along the public roads of the city. The victors are adult men as well as boys and ephebes. It is striking that there is hardly any overlap between the two categories of victors, and it looks as though social class is a determinant factor. The individual honorific statues seem to have gone by and large to the members of the Termessian elite, but the gymnasion lists record also the names of less prominent victors. This pattern may be explained as a result of the socially more exclusive nature of the Termessian contests, many of which were founded and funded by elite benefactors, who may have been able to keep the 'riff-raff' at bay. The most likely explanation, however is that the elites jealously guarded the right to obtain private commemoration on public locations, as a marker of social status.83 The enduring impression left by such monuments would have 79 80

81 82 83

Cartledge and Spawforth (1989) 188-9. Kleijwegt (1991) 75-88. PZenon 59060 for a case of sponsorship in Hellenistic Egypt. See also IK 16, 2005 with Robert (1937) 28-32 for a case from Ephesus. TAMlll.X, 199-213. TAMIIU, 141-98. I have discussed the issue of elite control of honorific space in van Nijf (1997) 23-8; 7 3 128 and in van Nijf (forthcoming).

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been of the omnipresence in the urban landscape of a few familiar names combined with an idealized representation of the individual honorands as young victors.84 This function of athletic statues is playfully addressed by Dio Chrysostom in his description of the athlete Iatrokles:85 He was exercising so brilliantly and in so spirited a way that he seemed more like a man in actual contest. Then, when he stopped exercising and the crowd began to draw away, we studied him more closely. He was just like one of the most carefully wrought statues, and also he had a colour like well blended bronze.

Iatrokles apparently was so good an athlete, that his exercises were as watchable as the actual contest. Moreover, his body had already reached the perfection of a statue, which was the ultimate reward for his achievements. That social strategies were behind patterns of epigraphic display is confirmed by what we know about the commemoration of athletic victory in neighbouring Balboura. A recent study by Milner discusses the honorific inscriptions that celebrated athletic victory in the Melagreia.86 Most of the inscriptions for the victors of this contest run like this: In the first agonotheteship for life of Thoantianos, son of Thoantianos, son of Meleagros, son of Kastor, the festival celebrated now also for the 4th time from the gift of Meleagros son of Kastor, his grandfather: Mousaios (son of Mousaios, son of Mousaios, son of Troilos, son of Mousaios, son of Polydeukes) alias Kalandion, a man of first rank in the city, kinsman of League officials of the Nation, his father a League Official, having won the men's wrestling.87

The inscription celebrates the victor as well as the organizer of the games. There is a lot of attention given to the (prominent) families of the two men, who bask in the reflected glory. But accidents did happen. One victor mentions only an ethnic, where others listed their entire pedigree: was this because he had no pedigree worth mentioning?88 Such an outcome was embarrassing, and may have been avoided where possible. A small number of inscriptions honour joint winners of the wrestling contests: it is interesting to note that in nearly all these cases, one of the joint winners is well connected, and clearly identifiable as a member of the elite, whereas the other one seems much less distinguished (short or no pedigree, no officials to boast about and so on).89 It is just conceivable that the (elite) judges in these wrestling matches would step in and declare a draw, at the moment when a less well-connected wrestler was about to win. No doubt such a decision was justified - against a popular outcry? 84 87 89

85 86 Mattusch (1997) 41. Dio Chrysostom Or. xxviii.3. Milner (1991). 88 SEG xli, 1345. Milner (1991) 39, no. 11 (= CIG 4380h), cf. SEG xli, 1353. Milner (1991) 34, no. 7 (= CIG 4380g), cf. SEG xli, 1349. SEG xli, 1352.

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with reference to historic precedent: had Achilles not likewise intervened in the wrestling contest between Odysseus and Aias? 'You have both won', they may have said, 'take equal prizes and withdraw'. 90 The image of athletic victory is turned into pure ideology, when we find honorific inscriptions set up for athletes who had competed honourably, but who somehow had not managed to win anything. Valerius Hermaios is an example from Oinoanda. He had taken part 'with distinction' in the boys' wrestling in 207 CE. He had not won, but his father was the agonothete, so he got a statue anyway. 91 There were apparently people who did not need to win to acquire an honorific statue: to them athletic success came as a class attribute, a birthright even. 92 What was at stake, then, in the epigraphic representation of athletic victory was not just the celebration of individual success, but its social localization in the hands of a few elite families. Athletics is an important aspect of elite self-fashioning. Inscriptions seem to present athletic success as something of a birthright, a class attribute among others like wealth, or benevolence, or indeed other aspects of paideia. Victors are praised for being priests and wrestlers, for being benefactors and pankratiasts, for being the scions of prominent families and boxers. Yet, judging by numbers, athletics was their favourite attribute. The social importance of athletic victory It would be possible to explain the ideological importance of athletics against the background of the intensely competitive nature of GrecoRoman society. The same spirit that fuelled the contests for status between the euergetai who put up the spectacles might have inspired their sons to compete in the contests of which the festivals consisted. The domination of the athletic field by the elite as a whole helped them to maintain social distance between themselves and the rest of the population. But athletic contests provided also a stylized and structured context in which individual aristocrats could compete with their peers for status in a socially acceptable manner. This agonistic spirit does not, however, fully explain the preference for traditional Greek athletics as the main focus of male competitiveness in Oinoanda and beyond, for there were realistic alternatives. It has been convincingly demonstrated that the practice of rhetoric easily turned into

90

91 92

Iliad X X I I I 736: VIKT) 5'aii(|>OTepoi(jiv. aeOAia 6' icr*

SEGxXw, 1191; another example: SEGxli, 1351. Robert (1960) 356-8 for more examples.

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a contest for status, and other aspects of Greek paideia were just as intensely agonistic.93 However, as we saw above, the young Oinoandians seem to have been less interested (or successful) in the artistic and literary contests that their fathers set up, than in wrestling, pankration or boxing.94 Had they so wished, some could have derived comfort from the words of their compatriot Diogenes the Epicurean, that were inscribed on the walls of a stoa on the Esplanade, where the gymnasion was also located, and where many of the statues celebrating athletic victory were found:95 The sum of happiness consists in our physical condition (6id06cris) of which we are master. Military service is dangerous and one is subordinate to others. Rhetoric is full of agitation and nervousness as to whether one can convince. Why then do we pursue an occupation like this, which is under the control of others?

The Oinoandians were not alone in this preference: throughout the Roman East thousands of monuments testify to the importance of athletic victory in the epigraphic self-fashioning of the local elites. I would like to suggest that there are two elements that may account for this preference. In the first place it may be claimed that athletics draws attention to the importance of the body in expressing cultural and social ideals. In good Greek tradition good citizenship was an ideal that was not only a matter of actions, gestures or even a mentality (patriotism) but also of physical comportment: succesful citizens have successful bodies. This had for centuries been the central element of Greek civic education in the gymnasion. Specialist teachers, hired by the city or paid for by benefactors, instructed the youth in the range of athletic, artistic and intellectual activities that were essential to the self-image of the local elites, as cultivated as well as cultural Greeks. Although the ephebes had to learn their Homer, of course, much of their time must have been dedicated to preparing for and performing in the athletic contests that were such a common feature of gymnasion life.96 Among these we find so-called judgement contests such as euexia (comportment), eutaxia (discipline), euandreia (manliness) and philoponia (endurance), which make explicit the ideals behind the gymnasion education.97 Literary representations of the askesis-culture of the gymnasion, as for example Dio Chrysostom's 93 94 95 96 97

Gleason (1995) for rhetorical competition. Cf. SEG xliv, 1179, which mentions Aurelius Ammianos, who was a descendant of Demosthenes, but he chose to compete in wrestling. Smith (1992) 294 fr. 112. Gauthier and Hatzopoulos (1993) 95ff. Crowther (1985); Crowther (1991). The subjective element inherent in such judgement contests made it relatively easy to secure that the prizes were received by victors of the 'right' social background.

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discourses on the boxer Melankomas, or Lucian's Anacharsis make a similar point: athletic training produces citizens who embody civic ideals. Insofar as members of the Termessian elite were concerned to present themselves as ideal citizens, they must have found athletic victory an indispensable attribute. The second aspect that may have played a part in the popularity of athletics is the fact that it was such an unmistakable marker of Greek culture. It is clear that athletic competition had been central to the Greeks' understanding of themselves. Participants in the most famous international contests were by definition Hellenes, and their sporting success was subject to the gaze of Hellenodikai. The importance of athletics for the collective self-identification of the Greeks was also explicit in the proud title apioros 'EAATJVGOV that was the reward for the victor of the hoplite race at the Eleutheria in Plataea, a festival that had been instituted to celebrate the Greek victory over the Persians. In the Roman period this title was still coveted by athletes from all over the oikoumene as is evident from a long honorific inscription for a Milesian athlete, who claimed to be the first and only athlete from Asia to achieve this honour. 98 Literary works such as Lucian's Anacharsis, which purports to be a dialogue between the sixth-century Athenian, Solon and a Scythian visitor, confirm that traditional Greek athletics were still felt to have a contemporary significance. Just as the organization of Greek style festivals helped the city of Oinoanda to view itself as a Greek community, so participation in the athletic contests offered young members of the local elite an opportunity to stake out their claim to Greek identity. Although literary paideia was also on offer, many may have felt it easier to achieve social status, Greek identity and manhood through the training of their bodies, than through the arduous route of literary education. The role of the audience So far, I have demonstrated that agonistic festivals were a major ingredient of Greek culture under Roman rule. I have argued that festivals were heavily implicated in the symbolic structures that upheld Roman rule, and I have suggested that they served the class interests of an elite which was eager to establish its Greek credentials. One might then justifiably ask what role there was in all this for the common man, the ordinary citizen

98

Philostratos. Tlepl Fufjv. 8. Cf. Milet 9.369 apicrrov TCOV C EAATJVGOV TrpcoTov [Kai] JJIOVOV TCOV diro T-qs 'Aaias.

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of Oinoanda and other cities of the Roman East? What did such festivals do for them? Popular entertainment In the first place, we should not underestimate the excitement and fun that was the result of three weeks of spectacles, processions and sacrifices. Much enjoyment would also be found on the tax-free festival market that was appended to the main celebration, where the Oinoandians might have bought the odd luxury import, and where they might have eaten some special delicacies." Literary descriptions offer us some glimpses of the motley crowd that was attracted by such festivals: we hear of fortune tellers and jugglers; of peddlers and show-people; and of visiting dignitaries, and mobile brothels that toured the festivals of Roman Asia Minor. 100 It is possible that the general public also enjoyed the displays of athletic and cultural excellence that Demosthenes had planned, but the inscription drops some hints as to what constituted real popular entertainment. Towards the end of the festival (on days 19 to 21) Demosthenes provides for: hired performances among which will be mime artists, acts and displays ... and other acts which are for the benefit of the city.101 If these entertainments featured performers such as the Carthaginian ischyropaiktes, (strong man), of whom we know from Delphi, or the kinaidologos (reciter of obscene songs) whose tombstone was found in Apollonia, or some other type of juggler or entertainer, we might conclude that a rift sometimes existed between the tastes of the masses, and those of the happy few around Demosthenes. 102 But it is significant that he made this concession to popular taste. Moreover this was a practice common enough to lead some moralists to issue a stern warning to would-be politicians and benefactors, that they ran the risk of 'enslaving' themselves to the masses by putting on these displays. 103

99

100

101 102

103

The panegyris is discussed by Worrle (1988) 209-15. For a general discussion see de Ligt (1993); de Ligt and de Neeve (1988). For the special foodstuffs consumed at festivals, cf. van Nijf (1998) 332-3. Festival description in Dio Chrysostom Or. viii.9 (Isthmia); xxvii, 5; xxxv.14-16 (Kelaina) and lxxvii-lxviii.4 (for the moble brothels). See van Nijf (1997) 139-46. SEG xxxviii, 1462,11. 4 4 - 5 . The kinaidologos in Cabanes (1997) no. 226; the others are mentioned in Robert (1928) 422-5. Quet (1981) on Dio Chrysostom and Plutarch.

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Civic rituals More significantly perhaps, Demosthenes, like many other benefactors made arrangements also for money-distributions and sacrificial banquets which to the recipients may well have represented the piece de resistance of the whole show. 104 Food is a powerful symbolic medium, and recent studies of public banquets in ancient Greece have demonstrated how these civic rituals were used to express, among many other things, ideas about the identity of the civic communities and about the essential values which govern their social relationships. It is often assumed that civic euergetism of the Roman period was undifferentiated, and that its benefits were showered upon the cities as a whole, 105 but it is becoming increasingly clear that civic benefactions often displayed a tremendous concern with the corporate order of society. This was particularly so in the case of civic banquets and public distributions of food or money, which were well suited for expressing status differentials, as has been amply demonstrated in the case of the sportulae in the towns of Roman Italy. 106 I have argued elsewhere that benefactors in the Roman East also adopted this practice. 107 It is important, therefore, to consider how Demosthenes organized his banquets and distributions. Early on in the inscription Demosthenes arranges for dianomai (hand-outs) to sub-sections of Oinoandian society: ... anything else that is remaining from the prizes of competitors who by chance do not appear, will be given as a judges' fee to the members of the boule and to the sitometroumenoi, since the bouleutai should serve as judges and sitometroumenoi who are not members of the boule should be picked by lot until a total of 500 is reached, so that each receives three denarii; and the remaining 300 denarii and anything left over from the prizes shall be divided between the citizens who are not among the sitometroumenoi and the freedmen and the country dwellers (paroikoi) .. ,108

Other benefactors in Oinoanda envisaged a similar line-up for their handouts, thereby giving a monetary expression to social hierarchy. 109 104

See Schmitt-Pantel (1992) for a n excellent study of the role of public banquets a n d distributions in G r e e k society. 105 v e v n e (1976); for a critique of this position, see Rogers (1991a) esp. 97, a n d m y discussion in van Nijf (1997) 156-88. 106 D u n c a n - J o n e s (1982) 138-44; cf. van Nijf (1997) 152-6. 107 I discuss the cases of A b a of Histria a n d E p a m i n o n d a s of Akraiphia a n d several others in v a n Nijf (1997) 149-88. los woj-rie (1988) SEG xxxviii 11. 25ff. T h e sitometroumenoi (grain recipients) were a privileged g r o u p of citizens in several Lycian cities. They a p p e a r most often as a separate category in hand-outs of m o n e y or grain. See Worrle (1988) 123-34. 109 SEG xliv, 1187: M a r c i a Aurelia Polykleia directs her dianomai to the '500' (10 denarii each), to the demotai (2 denarii each), to the perpetual sebastophoroi, the sebastophoroi for the day and the mastigophoroi (1 denarius per day).

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Moreover, there are other instances in the Demostheneia where an image of the social order in Oinoanda was presented. Demosthenes gave instructions for a civic procession, consisting of the main magistrates and officials of the city (most of whom belonged to the same social class as Demosthenes himself): ... The following will process through the theatre and will sacrifice together during the days of the festival, according to the way the agonothete gives written instructions for each communal sacrifice: The agonothete himself, one bull; the civic priest of the emperors and the priestess of the emperors, one bull; the priest of Zeus, one bull; the 3 panegyriarchs, one bull; the secretary of the council and the 5 prytaneis, 2 bulls; the 2 agoranomoi of the city, one bull; the 2 gymnasiarchs, one bull; the 4 treasurers, one bull; the 2 paraphylakes, one bull; the ephebarch, one bull; the paidonomos, one bull; the supervisor of public buildings, one bull; of the villages with their associated farmsteads, one bull [here follows a list of names of villages on the territory of Oinoanda .. .] 1 1 0 The procession produces a kind of image of society. It is not a perfect image, but at best an approximation: it exaggerates the importance of some groups, and neglects others. 111 Civic rituals like these do not list every social category, only those that are deemed worthy to express social values. They thus provide an idealized representation of society which corresponds structurally rather than formally to the 'social reality'. Such ritual occasions are not only a model of society, they are also set up as a model for society. The details of the idealized image are dictated by the interests of the members of the ruling elite. They set themselves apart from the others and define, through ritual, the relationships among the groups that made up society. These distributions, banquets and processions are, to use Robert Darnton's phrase, a way in which people 'put their world in order'. 112 Demosthenes' view of the local hierarchy may not have been the only one available. His colleagues may have wanted to fill in the details rather differently. Indeed such a ritual order may have been used to gloss over deeper divisions in society. The image projected by Demosthenes may have been contested by some of his compatriots. Guy Rogers has argued that the inscription shows signs of protracted negotiations in the background, exactly centring on issues such as ritual representation. Indeed no society exists in which there are not conflicting ideas of how the world 110

S£Gxxxviii, 1462,11. 67-74. *1 This type of analysis of ritual has been very fruitful in the case of early modern Europe: classic examples are Muir (1981), and Darnton (1984); see also Muir (1997). These methods were successfully applied to the ancient world by Rogers (1991b) and Price (1984) esp. ch. 5. I have myself used the concept of civic rituals in the context of ritual representation of professional associations in van Nijf (1997). 112 Darnton (1984). 1

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should be ordered. 'Political rituals tend to camouflage such tensions, especially by representing more political harmony than might actually exist.' 113 At any rate, Demosthenes himself clearly reckoned with the possibility that the festival would occasion ritual violence. The agonothete had to appoint a 'police force' of twenty |iaoriyo<|>6poi (whip carriers) dressed in white clothing without underwear, also carrying shields and whips, who will be in charge of good order in the theatre (iv TOTS OsdTpois £UKo<j|iia).

We may also point to the two dyeAdpxai who were to be chosen from boys of the noblest families (euyevecnraToi TTOCISES) in order to supervise the activities of another potential source of trouble: young children. With these precautions in place, the scene was set for an orderly display of civic unity. The fact that Demosthenes and his colleagues were able to persuade the population to act out their versions of the local hierarchy in huge massparticipation rituals, and could have the detailed arrangements for these set in stone, suggests that they were able to impose their own sense of order on their fellow Oinoandians. Through the ritual they persuaded their fellow citizens, their Roman overlords, and no doubt themselves, that they had succeeded in their mission to keep the population under control, to maintain a 'quietissimus populus* } 1 A r The cumulative effect of the many festivals that the Lycian benefactors organized was to establish these benefactors, and the members of their families, not only as the guardians of Greek culture, but also as a separate, superior stratum in society. Festive euergetism thus helped to legitimize an increasingly oligarchic political system, that was securely locked into an all-embracing imperial system. It can be seen that the preservation - or invention - of such traditional elements of Greek culture as artistic and athletic festivals, was not simply a matter of love of sport, of dry antiquarianism, or even of a romantic harking back to a Greek past: these games were used to project an image of a well-ordered society to the outside world by presenting a local hierarchy with the members of proRoman elites firmly in control. The emperor must have loved it. Conclusion To sum it all up then: there have been three related arguments running through my paper. (I) I have used mainly epigraphic evidence to show the vital impor113 114

Muir (1997) 230. Brown (1992) 79.

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tance of traditional Greek festivals for civic life in the Greek East. I have focused on a few cities, but thousands of agonistic inscriptions, honouring athletes and performers, commemorating benefactors and thanking emperors, not to mention the archaeological remains of gymnasia, stadia, and theatres, testify to the popularity of festivals throughout the Greek East. From the vantage point of the ordinary provincial, Greek civic culture under Roman rule was a markedly festive culture. (II) I have also argued that the Greek festive culture of the Roman period was appropriated to serve the needs both of the local elites, and of the central authorities in Rome. It mobilized the resources of a glorious Greek past enabling urban elites to display their social superiority in several ways. But at the same time it was clearly focused on Rome and the emperor, who ultimately underwrote the hierarchical world view of which it was an expression. Festivals were in many important respects an invented tradition that effectively blurred the boundaries between Greek and Roman. (III) Finally, I have made a case for athletics as an alternative passport to Greek identity. There can be no doubt that a small and hyper-literate elite continued to define Greek paideia exclusively in terms of access to a formal literary and rhetorical culture, and they may well have been the dominant voice. I suspect, however, that many people - members of local elites as well as upwardly mobile individuals - would have found athletic competition a more attractive way of staking out a claim to Greek identity and social status. Agonistic festivals, then, were used to promote interpretations of the past that were highly coloured by contemporary political events; they set out the rules for a social hierarchy, and located these firmly within an imperial context. The main beneficiaries of these rituals were of course the members of the elite classes: the councillors, and their families who funded the festivals. Their social importance was underlined by the hierarchical set-up of the processions and sacrificial banquets, and they often had the front seats in the stadia, from where they could watch their sons as the intended star-performers of the shows. Agonistic festivals were not least an occasion for the local elites to put their world in order. Greek festivals had always had 'political' functions, but it would seem that with the passing of time these became more important. Greek athletic festivals of the Roman period made clear what a city was about, what everybody's place was, and what principles were underlying the social order. Games and festivals were serious play.

9

The Rabbi in Aphrodite's bath: Palestinian society and Jewish identity in the High Roman Empire Seth Schwartz

I

Jews in Palestine in the second and third centuries

There is something reassuring in contemplating Herodian Jerusalem, the environment which formed Josephus, the author of the Jewish Antiquities. Here was a city whose public spaces featured the best that Italian and imperial Greek architecture had to offer, and whose elites gloried in their friendships with local dynasts and Roman grandees and decorated their houses with mosaics and frescoes very much like those of precisely contemporaneous Pompeii.1 But in other respects, Jerusalem was radically different from Greco-Roman cities. For Jerusalem was not merely the chief city of Judaea, but the metropolis of the Jewish ethnos. Its fixed population was small, but the scale of the most conspicuous of its public buildings, the temple precinct dedicated to the God of Israel, was massive - only the temple precincts of Ephesus and Pergamon could compete. Its public space was also transgressive in being largely devoid of statuary. Neither gods nor emperors were anywhere to be seen. The houses of the elites were likewise devoid of figurative decoration. The items borrowed from the repertoire of Greco-Roman urban culture had been pressed into service to display not only Jerusalem's participation in that culture, but also its essential remoteness from it - an ambiguity which mutatis mutandis characterized also the most important literary artefacts of first-century Judaism, the writings of the Jerusalemite priest Josephus.2 This pleasing congruence of material and literary culture disappears in the second and third centuries. Following two failed revolts against Rome, Judaea was de-judaized. Jerusalem itself was refounded as Aelia Capitolina, with a shrine to Jupiter Capitolinus built on the site of Herod's 1

2

For a survey of the archaeology of Jerusalem, see New Encyclopaedia of Archaeological Excavations in the Holy Land (= NEAEHL), s.v. The houses of well-to-do Jerusalemites in the first century were decorated with frescoes closely resembling those of the so-called 'first style' of Pompeii, and with mosaic pavements featuring geometric designs, also like those of Pompeii. The Jerusalem houses, though, were devoid of representations of animals and humans. See Avigad (1980) pis. 97, 100, 103-9. This is more or less the thesis of Rajak (1983) 11-64. 335

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temple serving as a back-handed acknowledgement of the majesty of the defeated God of Heaven, who had formerly occupied the site. The devastated villages were slowly resettled by pagans. The demographic centre of gravity of Jewish Palestine shifted north, to Galilee - a once pagan district which had been judaized by an expansionist Judaean monarch at the end of the second century BCE.3 The Galilaeans had only sporadically participated in the first revolt, and apparently skipped the second altogether. As a result, their district escaped serious damage.4 The culture of Galilee which we may discern in the second and third centuries is one of sharp discontinuities. Galilee had two distinct regions.5 Lower Galilee consisted of the low hills between the Meron Massif to the north and the Jezreel Valley to the south, and included the bowl-like valley of the Sea of Galilee. The region had in addition to the standard farming communities two cities, Tiberias and Sepphoris, founded in the early first century CE. It also had several large villages, which like so many large Syrian villages of the High and Later Empire, seemed to be aspiring to some of the institutional density and cultural glamour of the cities.6 Upper Galilee consisted of the high hills north of Lower Galilee - an unurbanized area, but neither poor nor unpopulous, necessarily. Galilee as a whole benefited from the integration of Palestine into the Roman Empire following the two revolts and the annexation of the province. The main base of one of the legions stationed in Palestine, VI Ferrata, was in Legio-Capercotna, just south of Galilee, with detachments scattered around the country - a source of intimidation to be sure, but also of coined silver. New roads were likewise built to ease the movement of the troops and enable collection of tolls; but they also eased communication within Galilee, especially Lower Galilee, and between Galilee and the cities of the Mediterranean coast and desert fringe.7 In the second and third centuries, Tiberias and Sepphoris emerged as entirely conventional cities of the Roman East, despite the fact that nearly all, or all, of their inhabitants were in some sense Jewish. And yet the literature known to have been written in these cities, the Mishnah and Tosefta in the third century, the Palestinian Talmud in the fourth, has little in common with the standard literary products of the High Imperial East. These works were produced collectively by the rabbis, that remnant of the scribal and judicial sub-elites of first-century Judaea 3

4 5 6 7

See most recently Horsley (1996) 25-8. Horsley underestimates the extent of the transformation. For a summary account of the revolts and their aftermaths see Schurer (1973) 484-557. For a survey, see Goodman (1983) 17-24. See Goodman (1983) 27-31; Millar (1993) 250ff. et passim. See Isaac (1992) 104-18.

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who strove in the centuries after the Bar Kokhba revolt and the Roman annexation of Palestine to restore their institutional authority as interpreters and executors of the laws of the Torah.8 The Mishnah is the first post-biblical compilation of such laws, arranged topically, in contrast to the apparently haphazard organization of the legal sections of the Pentateuch. Mishnaic law is often quite distinct from that of the Pentateuch - a fact that the Mishnah itself never justifies, despite apparently regarding its own laws as being in some sense a component of the Torah. The Tosefta supplements and offers a rudimentary commentary on the Mishnah, and the Palestinian Talmud is a discursive commentary on the Mishnah and Tosefta. It is especially concerned to specify the scriptural basis of earlier rabbinic legislation, and resolve or at least explain the legal disputes between the rabbis, the reporting of which is one of the most remarkable characteristics of the rabbinic literature as a whole.9 Such a summary may seem to make the distinctiveness of the Jewish literary production of the High Empire, of which rabbinic literature is all that is extant, self-evident. Where after all is the rhetoric, philosophy, historiography, fiction, biography, poetry which poured out of Greek cities elsewhere in the Roman Empire at the same period, and had indeed not been neglected by earlier Jewish writers? In fact, not only does rabbinic literature fail to resemble imperial Greek literature, but it bears only occasional explicit indications even of hostility to its environment, of the sort which fuelled the writing produced by such unhappy imperial subjects as the authors of various Egyptian apocalypses, the so-called Acts of the Pagan Martyrs and, for that matter, Christian writers like Tertullian. The world which the rabbinic inhabitants of the Greco-Roman cities of Palestine constructed in their writing was self-enclosed, archaic and rustic.10 (In this respect at least, rabbinic literature may bear comparison with some Greek writing of the second and third centuries, with the difference that the archaizing imperial Greek culture was partly validated and co-opted by the Roman state.11) We must obviously not assume that the rabbinic literature provides a perfectly faithful reflection of the attitudes and social roles of the rabbinic circles who produced them, any more than Plutarch the Roman knight is easily discerned behind On the E at Delphi.12 In the case of rabbinic literature, its ostensible status as the work of a collectivity obscures still further its relation to its producers. Notwithstanding the peculiarity of the 8 9 10 11 12

See Cohen (1987) 214-31. Introductions to rabbinic literature: Strack and Stemberger (1982); Safrai (1987). See Neusner (1985). See Eisner (1992). See Jones (1971); Swain (1996) 135-86.

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collective rabbinic literature, some rabbis may have been in their social lives in most respects 'normal' well-to-do citizens of their Greco-Roman cities. Nevertheless, to the extent that the rabbis constituted a group, and their literature can be viewed as a series of (partial) expressions of the group's ideology, it seems clear that the roles the rabbis played in their society are not precisely comparable to those played by such contemporary urban types as sophists, iurisprudentes, philosophers or 'holy men'. The rabbis apparently thought that they derived the authority they aspired to from their expertise as interpreters of the Torah, and furthermore regarded the Torah as the repository of everything of value. The role they strove to acquire was thus undifferentiated, incorporating a variety of roles filled elsewhere by advocates, judges, sophistic and philosophical moralizers, priests, and other mediators of divine power.13 All this needs to be stated emphatically, because since the 1940s much of the best rabbinic scholarship has been dedicated to the task of normalizing the ancient rabbis, of arguing, that is, that the rabbis participated in meaningful ways in the common culture of the Greco-Roman city, and that this participation is reflected in their literature. This tendency was initiated by the talmudist Saul Lieberman who, in his Greek in Jewish Palestine (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary, 1942), painted a lively, pointilistic portrait of a Roman provincial urban society, mainly on the basis of Palestinian rabbinic literature. This book and its companion Hellenism in Jewish Palestine, published in 1950, argue by suggestive accretion of detail; indeed, in formal terms, both books are collections of exegetical essays, in which Lieberman sought to use what he thought he knew about urban life in the eastern Roman Empire to interpret difficult talmudic texts. But neither his followers nor his critics missed his implicit point: Lieberman's rabbis were, for all their distinctiveness, recognizably part of the Greco-Roman world in which they lived.14 It seems obvious enough in retrospect that the desire of Lieberman and his followers to view the ancient rabbis as participants in the general urban culture of their day was merely a particular manifestation of modern Jews' striving to acculturate themselves in the new world which was emerging following the great demographic dislocations and upheavals of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Almost every academic Jewish scholar from the beginning of the Wissenschaft des Judentums, around 1820, until very nearly our own time had personally experienced dislocation, geographical, social, or both, usually from some form of traditional Jewish 13 14

See now the comprehensive treatment by Hezser (1997). See, e.g. Smith (1958); Smith (1968); Goldin (1988); Fischel (1977); Fischel (1973); Cohen (1981); Visotzky (1995).

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society to the modern liberal nation-state, and underwent as a result an intellectual and religious crisis to which their scholarship was the usually unacknowledged response.15 Saul Lieberman himself not only conformed to the normal pattern, but also taught for four decades at an institution whose mandate was to train rabbis who were to be religiously traditionalistic but also unassailably modern Americans. It may seem paradoxical that Talmudic philology served there as a significant instrument of modernization, but this was in fact the case. In these circumstances, the appeal of integrated, 'Hellenized', ancient rabbis is readily understandable. Conversely, the shift in emphasis back to the distinctiveness of the ancient rabbis, which is now starting to crystallize and in which this paper participates, not without a certain ambivalence, can be viewed as the next chapter of the same story - as an aspect of a wider attempt by Jews who now take their acculturation for granted to salvage for themselves some meaningful shards of Jewish particularity.16 It may not be superfluous to mention that I teach at the same school as Lieberman did. All this said, there is no question that the old normalizing assumption has proved a powerful hermeneutical tool - that it has made sense of many hitherto obscure talmudic passages and has shed light on enigmatic rabbinic practices and institutions: the rabbis were influenced by their environment. What it has failed to explain, though, is the peculiarity of the rabbinic movement and its literature as a whole. We must be careful not to overlook what Lieberman, if not always his followers, was inclined to take for granted. The rabbis were not normal elites or sub-elites of the eastern part of the Roman Empire. They were unique in deriving their self-understanding from the Torah. Admittedly, their wisdom may sometimes have had a Stoic or Cynical tinge, their legislation may have owed something (though not much) to Roman civil law, and their miracles (or miracle stories) resembled those performed by (or told about) such figures as Apollonius of Tyana. But as far as the Rabbis themselves were concerned, the source of all wisdom, law and power to subvert nature was the Torah alone. In this way they closely resembled their Jewish predecessors in the Second Temple period and their rabbinic colleagues in Babylonia 15

16

In Jerusalem, which emerged as an important centre of Judaic scholarship in the 1930s, there was another common type: the son - always the son - of the assimilated western European Jewish haute bourgeoisie who embraced Jewish scholarship, and Zionism, as a protest against his background. Here the emblematic figure is Gershom (Gerhard) Scholem: see his memoir, Scholem (1988). The Jerusalem classicists Victor Tcherikover, Moshe (Max) Schwabe and Yohanan (Johannes) Lewy all came from similar backgrounds. See, for example Levinson (1996), who argues from a single case (therefore suggestively rather than convincingly) that 'the rabbis' were familiar with but appropriated the conventions of the novel.

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(not to mention Christian bishops), but were at odds with their nonrabbinic contemporaries and counterparts in the cities of the Roman East. The writing they produced was correspondingly eccentric. We must not exaggerate, though: the normalizing scholarship has shown convincingly that the rabbis were not entirely self-enclosed, despite the archaizing rhetoric of their literature. We must furthermore not make the mistake of viewing rabbinic literature as an expression of a kind of unselfconscious ur-Jewish authenticity. The rabbis' traditionalistic selfunderstanding was laboriously constructed and required zealous maintenance, at the cost of full integration into the urban life of Syria-Palestine. At the same time the rabbis resisted monastic withdrawal, an option taken by some of their sectarian Jewish forebears and Christian contemporaries. In fact, they depended on the cities: their influence, such as it was, was precisely coextensive with that of Palestinian urban culture. The world of the rabbis was that of the Galilean and neighbouring cities - Tyre, Akko, Caesarea, Scythopolis, Gadara and Bostra, in addition to Tiberias and Sepphoris, and Lydda in northwestern Judaea - and of the big Lower Galilean villages, with their aspiring urban Hellenism. The rabbis gravitated to the cities because their conviction that they constituted the true leadership of Israel made them not sectarian but expansionist. In the cities they had access to networks of trade, communications, patronage and political power. They paid little attention to, and were little noticed in, non-urban, non-Hellenized areas like Upper Galilee and Golan. The disjunction between the rabbis and their urban environment is all the more striking when we recognize that the normalcy of the cities, even those of Jewish Palestine proper, extended to religion: the public life of Tiberias, Sepphoris and Lydda, not to mention Caesarea and the rest, as revealed by physical remains, coinage, inscriptions, statements in the writing of the church fathers and even, surprisingly, in the Palestinian Talmud itself, was essentially pagan. In what sense, then, were the inhabitants of these cities Jewish? And how did the rabbis who, as self-proclaimed embodiments of Torah had to take very seriously indeed the pentateuchal horror of everything associated with paganism, cope with life in the cities? In the absence of literature, the first question is very difficult to answer. Most of the inhabitants of the cities may have been Jewish only in that they had a sense of a common past, a mild feeling of separation from their neighbours which the latter, who had shared memories of their own, may have conspired to maintain. Many may have lived lives characterized by profound eclecticism: for them, the disintegrated shards of Judaism survived as a non-exclusive option in a religious system which was basically pagan. An apt metaphor for such eclecticism are the alleged miqva'ot, or ritual baths, discovered among the Dionysiac mosaics and imported

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bronze statuettes of the gods in the recent excavations at Sepphoris (and they are only a metaphor, since they could equally well be secular bathtubs).17 In other words, many of the Jews of High imperial Lower Galilee may have felt themselves to be Jewish in precisely the same, very attenuated, way that some of their coastal neighbours considered themselves Phoenician,18 with the difference that among the Jews, the traditional exclusivism, in the form of the Judaism of the rabbis, survived, if only as a weak and marginal cultural option. Most of the evidence on which I base this account has long been known, but no one to my knowledge has ever before expressed matters quite so starkly. Let me, therefore, very briefly discuss some of the evidence and its implications before proceeding to my second question, concerning rabbinic strategies of accommodation to urban life, which will be the main topic of this paper. Pagan cities?

Like hundreds of other cities of the Roman East, the three Jewish cities of Palestine (Tiberias, Sepphoris, and Lydda) all minted bronze coins down to the middle of the third century.19 The coinage of Tiberias began early in the reign of Trajan and from the start featured standard pagan types on the reverse, with a special emphasis on Hygieia and Asclepius, a presumable reference to the medicinal hot springs in the city's southern suburbs, but also featuring Zeus seated in a temple and other familiar images. In the earliest coinage there are a few 'Jewish' reverse types, imitated from Hasmonean and Herodian coinage, but these disappeared under Trajan or Hadrian. Sepphoris' Trajanic coinage, by contrast, is entirely 'Jewish' in its reverse types, but under Antoninus Pius these types were abandoned in favour of pagan types, among which images of the Capitoline Triad are especially prominent. Concurrently, and probably not coincidentally, the city changed its name to Diocaesarea. Lydda was elevated to city status only in the wake of the civil war between Severus and Niger, as a result of which it received the right to call itself Diospolis, and to mint coins, which were pagan from the start.20 Tiberias is said by Epiphanius (Panarion 30.12), writing in the 370s, to have had a large temple of deified Hadrian, of all gods, and this is some17

18 19

20

T h e excavations are not yet fully published; surveys m a y be found in Meyers, Netzer a n d Meyers (1992); a n d Weiss a n d Netzer (1994). See Millar (1993) 2 6 4 - 9 5 . T h e basic corpus is Rosenberger (1972-7); some discussion a n d additional material in Meshorer (1985); for updating see Kindler a n d Stein (1987). See Isaac (1992) 3 5 9 - 6 1 .

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times assumed identical with the temple of Zeus depicted on the city coins.21 Since the city has been inhabited without interruption since its foundation, in 19 CE, no serious archaeological investigation is possible, but some second and third century funerary inscriptions which have turned up confirm the impression of the city's absolute normalcy.22 Rather more surprisingly, the Palestinian Talmud too describes Tiberias' public spaces as dominated by images of gods and emperors, and by pagan shrines. One of the most striking cases is from the Palestinian Talmud, tractate Avodah Zarah, chapter 3, halakhah 1, folio 42c (cf. B. M.Q. 25b): When R. Nahum bar Simai died, they covered the eikonia with mats. 23 They said, 'Just as he did not look upon them in life, so let him not look upon them in death' . . . And why was he called Nahum of the Holy of Holies? Because he never looked at the image on a coin in his life . . . When R. Aha died, the star (Venus) was visible at noon. When R. Hanan died, the statues (andartayd) bent over. When R. Yohanan died, the eikonia bent over - they said it was because no eikonion was as beautiful as he. When R. Hanina of Berat (Bet?) Hauran died, the Sea of Tiberias split... When R. Hoshaya died, the Kalon of Tiberias fell.24 When R. Isaac b. Elyashib died, seventy lintels belonging to landlords in Galilee were uprooted - they said that they had stood by his merit. When R. Samuel b. Rav Isaac died, the cedars of the Land of Israel were uprooted . . . When R. Yasa bar Halfuta died, the gutters of Laodicea ran with blood - they said it was because he had given his life for circumcision (?). When R. Abbahu died, the columns of Caesarea wept. The Cutheans (Samaritans) said, 'Rather, they were sweating' . . . A member of the patriarchal household died and the burial cave collapsed and endangered lives. 25 R. Yosi came and eulogized him, 'Happy the man who left the world in peace!' When R. Yosi died, 26 the Castellum of Tiberias fell and the Patriarch's men rejoiced. R. Ze'ira said to them, 'The two events are dissimilar: there, lives were endangered, here not; there no idolatry was uprooted, here it was.' 21 22 23

24

25

26

See Jones (1971) 278; Meshorer (1985) 3 4 - 5 ; G o o d m a n (1983) 46. T h e m a i n collection is a H e b r e w publication: Schwabe (1949). I leave eikonia untranslated; the T a l m u d clearly intends different things by the words eikonion, tzalma, andarta, a n d so on, but it is n o t clear what. Here the reference seems to be to statues or reliefs lining the street along which the funeral procession passed. F o r a full discussion of the sparse rabbinic material on N a h u m , see Florsheim (1976). Kalon in H e b r e w m e a n s 'reproach', a n d it seems overwhelmingly likely that Jastrow, s.v., was right in taking it as a cacophemistic reference to some public image of a god, or a temple. Lieberman (1931) 113-14, asserted it was simply a loan w o r d from Latin columna, a n d this assertion is taken u p as fact in Sokoloff (1990), s.v.; b u t Jastrow's suggestion (Jastrow (1950), s.v.) m a k e s m o r e sense in context. Neusner's translation (Neusner (1982) ad loc), 'palm', seems a guess; Wewers (1980) 9 1 , suggests ' p a g a n temple or whorehouse'. T h e meaning of the w o r d translated as 'collapsed' ( Q L T ) is uncertain, according to Sokoloff, but seems obvious e n o u g h from the context. Editio princeps reads ' Y a s a ' but clearly 'Yosi' is meant.

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This is, of course, a brief compilation of prodigies, given a peculiar rabbinic twist. The implicit point of most of the stories seems to be that there is in the world a precise moral economy, so that the death of a rabbi must be balanced by the disappearance of some evil. Even apart from the explicit polemical attacks on the Samaritans and the Jewish patriarchs, it would not be absurd to imagine that the collection was motivated by claims of Christians like Epiphanius that it was the Christians, not the Jews, who eradicated paganism in Palestine. For when the Talmud was redacted in the later fourth century, Tiberias and its neighbours had lost their pagan character, and many of the rabbinic accounts of Tiberias seem, like this one, concerned among other things to explain precisely how this had happened. The only really new material comes from the ongoing excavations at Sepphoris. Only a very small part of the city has as yet been excavated, and much of this excavation indicates that the part of the city beneath the acropolis was massively rebuilt in the fifth and sixth centuries under the aegis of the city's bishop. Nevertheless, some High imperial remains have been uncovered, mainly on the acropolis. These include a theatre with space for around 5,000, and at least two houses whose triclinia are paved with elaborate figurative mosaics. Only one of these has so far been published, and a very grand item it is. 27 Its central panel depicts a drinking contest between Heracles and Dionysus, and the side panels depict a variety of little Dionysiac scenes, with a seasons motif decorating the rectangular border. In terms of size and quality it is equal to the best that north African or Antiochene curial money could buy. Among the few small finds so far publicized, of special interest are several incense shovels, a small altar, some bronze statuettes of gods, and some lamps with reliefs on the disci of a couple having sex. 28 By contrast, not a single item with any 'Jewish' iconography has yet been discovered in a High imperial context. The aforementioned bathtubs may indeed be miqva'ot, as the excavators aver, but why they cannot just be bathtubs I have no idea. Conventionally, two techniques have been used to account for pagan material found in 'Jewish' contexts, dismissal and co-optation. As an example of the first, a narrative has been invented to account for the coinage, which is enshrined in Jones, Cities of the Eastern Roman Provinces (278), and was greatly elaborated by B. Isaac and I. Roll in an article published

27 28

See, in addition to the works mentioned above, T a l g a m a n d Weiss (1988). T h e altar is mentioned only in the survey in the New Encyclopaedia of Archaeological Excavations in the Holy Land, s.v. Pace Weiss a n d Netzer (1994) 22, the incense shovels can have been used only for p a g a n ritual, or for a n otherwise unattested type of Jewish ritual which ignored the D e u t e r o n o m i c prohibition of cultic worship outside Jerusalem. This latter alternative would be astonishing (though not impossible).

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in Latomus in 1979.29 According to this, Trajan and/or Hadrian, either in anticipation of or in response to the second Jewish revolt, took the city councils of Tiberias and Sepphoris out of Jewish hands and entrusted them to pagans - hence the imagery on the coins and Sepphoris' change of name. But this story, told in no ancient source, fails to explain why forty years separated the adoption of pagan imagery on the coinages of the two cities, why rabbinic literature persistently regards the bouleutai of both cities as Jewish, and why lead weights of the second century discovered there indicate that the agoranomoi had such names as Ioudas, Iesaias and Simon.30 Now it would be perfectly reasonable to suppose that Tiberias' temple of Hadrian, and Sepphoris' change of name and coin types in the 130s reflect the city-councillors' desire to distance themselves from their rebellious Judaean co-religionists. But the persistence of the pagan coinage for a century after 135, the pervasiveness of statues and shrines in the cities' public spaces down to 300 at earliest, and the case of Lydda, whose change of name to Diospolis and right to coin were unambiguously a reward to the leaders of the town for having supported Severus in the civil war of 193, demonstrate the fragility of the conventional explanation. The second approach, co-optation, has two sub-types. The more widespread is the supposition that pagan imagery found in Jewish contexts is merely decorative, devoid of any conceivable religious meaning.31 This is, for example, the explanation offered for the Dionysiac mosaic of Sepphoris by its publishers. But of course it is not merely decorative - rather it is self-evidently a celebration of abundance in which Dionysus functions as at very least a metaphor. We will see later that the rabbis eventually learned to close their eyes to the religious implications of this sort of deployment of Greek mythological imagery, but this does not mean that we should imitate them. The other type of co-optative approach is that associated with the name of E. R. Goodenough, who argued that pagan imagery was stripped of its denotative content when used by Jews and retained only what Goodenough called its 'value', that is, its emotive content, which is universal, and which Goodenough thought he could ascertain by introspection(I). The ancient Jews supplied their own 'interpretations' of the art, that is, told their own Jewish, but in Goodenough's 29 30

31

Isaac a n d Roll (1979). N o trace of this story is to be found in Isaac (1992) 3 4 7 - 6 1 . T h e evidence is collected in Stemberger (1987) 36; see also SEG 38 (1988) 1647 a n d Corpus Inscriptionum Iudaicarum 2.985, a sarcophagus decorated with Jewish symbols inscribed with the n a m e of Isidoros bouleutes. T h e most influential p r o p o n e n t of this view was M . Avi-Yonah; see, e.g., A v i - Y o n a h (1981); in the major synthetic w o r k of Hachlili (1988) 2 6 8 - 9 , A v i - Y o n a h ' s a p p r o a c h is represented as the view of 'most scholars'.

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view mystical rather than rabbinic Jewish, stories about them.32 Goodenough was surely right to argue that Palestinian art of the second through sixth centuries demonstrates that the rabbis did not control the Palestinian Jews, but I think that his art history no longer requires refutation. What all these approaches share is the assumption that the chief problem facing the interpreter is, how did the Jews as adherents of an ideological system which prohibited representations of humans, let alone of gods, defend their use of figurative art and other trappings of GrecoRoman paganism. My answer, that many Jews in the second and third centuries were adherents of no such ideological system, has been made possible among other things by a collapse of the consensual chronology of the ancient synagogue. It was once common to date a large proportion of Palestinian synagogue remains, especially the grander ruins, to the second century (on the grounds that high quality construction work was impossible later on).33 This suggested that the synagogue - presumably a place where the Jewish God alone was worshipped in ways evocative but not imitative of the Jerusalem temple cult, and his Law was read, in sum, an unquestionably Jewish institution - was the predominant institution of Roman Palestine so that as a whole the Jews must have been really Jewish in readily recognizable ways. The growing realization that no Palestinian synagogue remains can be proved to predate the fourth century has had a peculiar consequence. The second and third centuries are now denuded of all recognizably Jewish remains, a fact which makes any sort of judaizing interpretation of the pagan remains problematic, to say the least. The most plausible explanation for this conundrum is to suppose that destruction, dislocation, annexation, and Roman-sponsored prosperity had more complex and unsettling effects on the Jews than has usually been supposed. II

Rabbinic accommodation to the Greco-Roman city

Given the impossibility of saying much more than this about the mass of the Jews in second- and third-century Palestine and the abundance of evidence for the rabbis' strategies of accommodation to the cities, I will concentrate in what follows on the latter. Though all of rabbinic legislation may be thought to constitute such evidence, the rabbinic laws concerning 'idolatry' do so in the clearest possible way, given the pervasive32 33

Goodenough (1953-68); the essential evaluation of Goodenough's work is Smith (1967). For a very brief account of the old consensus, see NEAEHL, s.v.; the same article provides a detailed account of the new consensus. It is significant that in the Hebrew version of the encyclopaedia the ratio of old to new is reversed. See also Seager (1989); Urman and Flesher (1995) xvii-xxxvii; important also are Levine (1987), and Levine (1992).

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ness of representations of gods in the cities in which the rabbis lived, and what we might have expected to be the rabbis' abhorrence of such representations. As a kind of case study, I will focus on a single brief text, but one which in my view articulates in a distilled form the principles underlying the rabbis' laws of idolatry. The rabbis, I will argue, needed to develop a mechanism to allow them to live in the cities and to participate in some of the cities' public activities. This mechanism was a spectacular act of misprision, of misinterpretation, whereby the rabbis defined pagan religiosity as consisting exclusively of cultic activity, affirmed and even extended the biblical prohibitions of it, but in so doing declared the non-cultic, but still religious, aspects of urban culture acceptable. To the extent that words like 'problem', 'mechanism' and 'misprision' imply intention, I use them as metaphors. I would not care to argue that the rabbis, still less that specific rabbis, were conscious of the systemic tensions between Judaism and the life of the city, though of course they knew that the city posed many specific legal problems. Nor would I want to suggest that the act of misprision which constitutes a foundation of the laws of avodah zarah, that is, 'worship of strange gods', or what the rabbis elsewhere called 'idolatry', was intended as a way of coping with GrecoRoman culture, and was not, say, the result of conventionally rabbinic ways of thinking about legal issues in general.34 In the final analysis, intentions may be what is least knowable about another, and when that 'other' is in fact a group - consisting by definition of individuals whose motivations are complex and variable - a group, furthermore, which lived in the remote past and which we know about entirely from a small and opaque corpus of texts, any attempt to recover intentions would be a priori futile. What I would argue, though, is that the rabbis' misprision, whether they knew it or not, allowed them to live and work in the cities, the very places where they could most easily accumulate wealth, social ties, and influence. The normative status of rabbinic literature

First of all, though, something must be said of the Mishnah and related documents, which are our only artefacts of the rabbis. The Talmuds regard the Mishnah as having been redacted by the Palestinian Patriarch, Rabbi Judah I, and his entourage, and a mediaeval chronicle dates its 34

For a very detailed argument that this is usually what is behind the rabbinic laws of idolatry, directed mainly against the naive historicism of E. E. Urbach, see Hayes (1997).

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publication to around 220 CE. There is nothing in the Mishnah itself, whose editorial voice is anonymous, to confirm or refute this information, though the dating may be roughly correct: Judah and his contemporaries are the latest rabbis quoted in the Mishnah, and they do seem to have flourished around the beginning of the third century. One peculiarity of the Mishnah's publication deserves special notice: it may not have been published in writing.35 Rabbinic orality, which has been much discussed recently, should not be confused with the orality of the non-literate.36 It was, like the rusticity and archaizing of the rabbis' legal rhetoric, a self-conscious and paradoxical effect. Rabbis were necessarily literate, in most cases probably highly so. By their own account, their position depended entirely on their mastery of 'the writing' par excellence, the Bible. Furthermore, their family and civil law depended heavily on written contracts so that to the extent that rabbis expected to work as arbitrators and clerks, they obviously had to be able to read and write, in Hebrew and Aramaic, and often in Greek as well. The rabbis thus made routine use of writing, but they also fetishized it.37 Of sacred lore, only the Torah itself might be written: the rabbis' own elaborations of and arguments about the laws of the Torah they themselves considered secondary, not to be confused with 'the writing' (and so, we infer, liable to be confused with it!), and so not to be written down. (In rabbinic practice, their own law replaced that of the Torah and so transformed it precisely into a fetish - an elaborately produced parchment scroll read ceremonially in the synagogue.) Though we cannot be sure that this ritualized orality prevailed among the pre-Mishnaic rabbis of the second century, who were apparently still a diverse and unintegrated set of individuals, it was common in the third century and later. Then the Mishnah seems to have existed, and to have been studied, only orally. Rabbis taught their students with the assistance of a tanna (in Aramaic, repeater), a man who could recite the Mishnah and associated material from memory.38 The students in turn were expected to memorize what they heard, though the Talmuds state that some students wrote notes on pinakes, which might be consulted, but had no legal force. The Mishnah thus did not function as a law-code in any conventional way. In fact it would have been difficult to use as such in any case since 35 36 37 38

Lieberman (1950) 83-99. The essential work is by Martin Jaffee; see Jaffee (1992); Jaffee (1994). See Goodman (1990); Goodman (1994). Lieberman (1950) 88-91.

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it records legal disputes without indicating how they are to be resolved. Nor was the Mishnah a devotional text, as it came to be after the invention of printing, providing material for study and reflection by a pious lay public.39 Rather, the Mishnah was the raw material of rabbinic instruction - transmitted orally, with the addition of explication and glosses, by rabbis to their students. The fact that the Mishnah and related rabbinic documents were orally transmitted mainly in an instructional setting does not predetermine the question of their normative status. The main content of the rabbinic literature, after all, is law and, notwithstanding the fact that its presentation of legal disputes complicates discussion of what precisely the editors of the documents thought they were doing, all rabbinic literature takes for granted the rabbis' legal authority over the Jews. The literature also frequently reports cases - allegedly real examples of rabbis acting as judges. These cases seem to demonstrate that though different rabbis often reached opposing decisions, such decisions were always informed by the laws of the Mishnah and other contemporaneous legal material. At least the editors of the documents assumed that they were and so could be used in the interpretation of Mishnaic law. It would perhaps be unjustified to conclude from this that the actual rabbis of the third and fourth centuries, as opposed to the editors of the Talmuds starting in the late fourth century, actually regarded the Mishnah as normative. But it would be equally implausible to suppose that the editors produced the effect ex nihilo. The Mishnah survived because it was transmitted: someone in the third and fourth centuries was evidently convinced of its importance. The position of the rabbis in Jewish society

In the final analysis, the text cannot answer the question of its own normative status. We can move towards an answer only by considering the status of the text's authors and interpreters. What precisely was the extent of the rabbis' judicial authority? What role did they play in Palestinian Jewish society in the third and fourth centuries? My argument in this paper depends on a hypothesis of the rabbis' marginality. I read the Mishnah's 39

Some texts suppose that the Mishnah was the next text after the Bible in the ancient school curriculum. But while anecdotes in the Palestinian Talmud frequently mention safraya (teachers of 'the book'), metanyanaya (teachers of the Mishnah) never figure in anecdotes; they are mentioned only in stereotyped contexts like Y Yebamot 12:6: villagers petition the patriarch to appoint for them one man who will serve as 'safar, hazan, dayan, metanyan, and fulfill all our needs'. Such rural religious factotums may have been increasingly common in the course of the third century, but were still rare. In any case, the 'metanyan' never had a differentiated function.

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laws about paganism not as motivated by pastoral concerns, but as essentially inner-directed, as providing a way for the rabbis themselves to cope with a society - a Jewish society - they could not control. That the rabbis were marginal is a controversial though not uncommon position. Indeed, it would be fair to say that contemporary scholarship on the issue is split into two roughly constituted camps. One camp takes the explicit and implicit claims rabbinic literature makes about rabbinic authority in Roman Palestine more or less at face value, and often extends them. In this view, once general among Jewish scholars and now prevalent mainly in Israel, the rabbis, whether or not they enjoyed technical legal jurisdiction granted by the government, had extensive, and highly institutionalized, authority because 'the people', united in their unswerving devotion to Judaism and in their resistance to foreign rule, recognized the rabbis as the only authoritative interpreters of the Torah. The rabbis were thus not only the leading judges, but also the 'spiritual leadership' of the Jewish people. Whatever the merits of this view as a hermeneutical framework within which to set the rabbinic literature may be, it seems obviously a product of nationalist romanticism combined with sentimental religiosity. Indeed, this position has hardened over the years, and has come to be increasingly dominated by its underlying political ideology as its proponents have become less explicit or more confused about their agenda. Older scholars occasionally admitted that the rabbis' authority was not absolute or completely institutionalized. For example, Gedalyahu Allon (1901-1950), the most important and influential Zionist historian of the Talmud period' knew (because the Talmud itself said as much) that many Jews brought their legal cases not to rabbis, but to Roman courts, city councils, large landowners, and other non-rabbinic judges and arbitrators.40 H. P. Chajes (1876-1927) argued that rabbinic courts rarely existed in any formal way; rather, individual rabbis acted as arbitrators, in contravention of rabbinic legislation itself (Allon later tried to refute this theory).41 But Allon's followers have excluded such qualifications from their accounts and posited a completely institutionalized rabbinic movement whose authority, having been internalized by the Jewish masses, was entirely free of serious challenge.42 Inner-rabbinic legal disputes are therefore, fantastically, read as expressions of profound tensions affecting Jewish society as a whole, and self-evidently legendary anecdotes about 40 41 42

Allon (1977). Chajes (1899). This is the assumption underlying, for example Safrai (1995); see especially 77-8.

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rabbis are read as straight political history. To take just one example, the Palestinian Talmud reports several stories about meetings between the patriarch Rabbi Judah I and 'Antoninus' in which the emperor is represented as asking the rabbi questions about biblical exegesis and Jewish law; in one story Antoninus is said to have converted to Judaism. We might be inclined to try to understand these stories as artefacts, little nuggets of ideology, and wonder what they tell us about the rabbis' perception of themselves and others. So it is bracing, in a way, to find scholars taking them more or less at face value, assuming that such meetings really occurred, arguing in meticulous detail over which emperor the Talmud meant by 'Antoninus', and analysing the impact on Jewish and Roman politics of the intimate friendship of the two great leaders.43 The other camp has since 1970 come to prevail in the United States and Europe, in the wake of the revolution in rabbinic studies produced by the early work of the American talmudist Jacob Neusner, especially The Development of a Legend (1970), Rabbinic Traditions about the Pharisees before 70 (1975), and his massive work on the form criticism of the Mishnah summarized in Judaism: The Evidence of the Mishnah (1981). Neusner started from Goodenough's observation, mentioned above, that archaeology seems to show that the rabbis did not control Jewish life in antiquity, and complementarity from the occasional attempts by his teacher Morton Smith to read rabbinic literature with a rigorous Bultmannesque scepticism (paying careful attention to tradition-history, asking penetrating questions about the way the self-interest of the redactors influenced the extant documents, and so on), and proceeded to question every assumption conventionally made by academic talmudists and their historian collaborators about the essential accuracy, historicity and normativity of the rabbinic literature. The excesses which have come to characterize Neusner's voluminous writing since 1981, the growing dogmatism, the carelessness, the obvious implausibility of his rigid segregation of the rabbinic documents from each other and the concomitant assumption that each document is a summary statement of the ideology of a discrete social organization - a 'Judaism', in Neusner's language - his consequent embrace of tautology as the only acceptable mode of reading, the sense of embattledness produced by his polemical ferocity, none of these can obscure his accomplishments. Neusner's work has made it acceptable to read rabbinic literature as ideology, not history, and to see the rabbis' social and political position in Roman Palestine, and so the normative status of their literature, as problematic. 43

E.g. Herr (1971).

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The rabbis on idolatry44 The primary discussion of idolatry is in M. Sanhedrin 7:6: One [i.e. a Jew] who engages in idolatry [is to be stoned - a quotation of Mishnah 4] - whether he worships [the idol in its normal way], or sacrifices, or burns incense, or offers a libation, or bows, or accepts it as a god, saying, 'you are my god'. But if he hugs it, or kisses it, or cleans it, or washes around it, or washes it, or anoints it, or dresses it, or shods it, he violates a negative commandment [and so is merely liable to beflogged].If he takes a vow or swears in its name, he violates a negative commandment. If he exposes (po'er) himself to Ba'al Pe'or - this is his [normal form of] worship; if he throws a stone at Merkulis [a dolmen sacred to HermesMercury] - this is his worship.

Characteristically, the Mishnah requires action of its idolaters, especially cult-related action. The Mishnah arranges these punishable actions hierarchically. Most severe is the prohibition of what we may call firstorder worship - worshipping a god either as he is normally worshipped by his adherents, or with forms of sacrificial worship which may not in fact be customarily used for the particular god, but which are unambiguously cultic acts either because they are how the Jewish God demanded to be worshipped, according to the book of Leviticus, or because they are elements in a Mediterranean cultic koine. Everyone knows that pouring a libation is a cultic act. Finally, and most interestingly, in this category, the acclamation of a god (I take this to be explanatory of the clause it follows: we can tell if someone 'accepts' a god only if he has acclaimed him) also counts as first-order worship. Next, and less severely punished, is second-order worship, characterized not as ambivalence about a god, or as acts indicating ambivalence, but as unambiguous acts of reverence for an idol which, however, stop short of full worship,45 or their verbal equivalent - the oath, that is, a speech act which unambiguously indicates belief but does not amount to acclamation. The Mishnah's final category is the ambiguous act, which looks like an expression of disrespect but is actually afirst-ordercultic act. It is not entirely clear what punishment the Mishnah prescribes in this case: perhaps an effort is to be made to detect the intentions of the actor. It is characteristic that one 'case', that of Ba'al 44

45

See Theological Dictionary of the New Testament s.v. The Greek word is found only in Christian sources, as a katachresis for paganism, though it has a precise Jewish parallel in the Rabbinic 'avodat 'elilim (idol worship); I use it as a functional equivalent of the nonkatachrestic term Avodah Zarah. Hadas-Lebel (1979) is a full discussion of the specific pagan practices mentioned in Avodah Zarah; see also the analyses of the tractate in Blidstein (1968), and in Hayes (1997). Indeed, as far as some pagans were concerned, bathing and dressing images of gods were acts of profound devotion requiring the presence of a priest; see Clerc (1915) 33.

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Pe'or, is presumably derived entirely from a story in the book of Numbers: it has no known correlate in Syro-Palestinian religious life of the second century, while the other seems (despite the Latin name) a reference to a piece of common Palestinian folk piety:46 for the rabbis, the world of the Hebrew Bible was at least as real as the world in which they actually lived. The Mishnah's basic law of 'idolatry' is founded on two principles. The first of these is that only cultic actions (including speech) matter, and the second is that pagan worship is primarily directed at fetishes. Though both of these principles are derived from Pentateuchal law, they reflect a rather reductive reading of it. The Bible prohibits not just acts associated with the worship of strange gods in the form of idols, but also a wide range of activities associated only peripherally with pagan cult, including 'having other gods' (Exodus 20), whatever that may mean. To be sure, M Sanhedrin is primarily concerned with court procedure, not paganism, so it does not legislate about beliefs, about speech which ambiguously expresses belief in other gods, about what attitude Jews should have to the ethos and physical trappings of paganism, in sum, about how one should cope with the realities of a life in which the images of gods, places associated with gods, items offered to gods, and the people who worship them, were absolutely everywhere. Such subtler issues do, however, constitute the main concerns of M. Avodah Zarah: how, the tractate asks, to avoid any semblance of participation in or collusion with pagan cultic activity, how to treat items associated or suspected of being associated with such activity (especially images and wine), how to treat images of the gods in general, and how to cope with aspects of city life objectionable for other than religious reasons - various types of entertainments, for instance, and the building of gallows (M Avodah Zarah 1.7)? In trying to make sense of the rabbis' view of paganism, it may be best to begin with a story, in M. Avodah Zarah 3:4, which is unusual in the context of the Mishnah in that it lacks any clear legal content. In fact, it may appear in the Mishnah for no other reason than that one of its protagonists quotes Deuteronomy 13.18, which is quoted also in the previous mishnah. However, in my view, M. Avodah Zarah 3:4 also articulates the meta-legal principles which underlie rabbinic legislation on Avodah Zarah as a whole in a way which highlights their contrast with the sort of rigoristic interpretation of the Pentateuch which may have pre46

See Hadas-Lebel (1979) 403-5 for a different view. For a remarkable explanation of po'er et 'atzmo leba'alpe'or, see Sifre Numbers (ed. S. Horowitz) pisqa 131.

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vailed in some contemporary non-rabbinic circles, and had almost certainly been widespread among the Jews before 70, in pre-rabbinic times. 47 Proklos ben Philosophos48 asked Rabban Gamaliel in Akko, when they were bathing in the bath-house of Aphrodite, 'It is written in your Torah, "let nothing of the herem (roughly equivalent to 'sacer' - a status the Pentateuch ascribes to any object associated with idolatry) remain in your hand" (Deut. 13.18); why then are you bathing in the bath-house of Aphrodite?' He said, 'One may not respond [to questions about Torah] in a bath-house.' When they went out, Rabban Gamaliel said, 'I did not enter her territory; she entered mine. You do not say "the bath-house is made as an ornament for Aphrodite," but "Aphrodite is made as an ornament for the bath-house." Furthermore (davar aher), if you were given much money, you would not49 enter your temple naked, having just ejaculated, and urinating before the goddess. And yet here she is set over the drain and everyone urinates before her. It is written "their gods" [probably an allusion to Deut. 12.3: "you shall dismember the idols of their gods"] - in cases where they are treated as gods they are forbidden, when they are not they are permitted.' Proclus and his question

By the time of the compilation of the Mishnah and associated documents there were real pagan critics of the Hebrew Bible and its Jewish and Christian interpreters, Celsus and Porphyry, for example. But at least some of the learned pagans who sparsely populate the pages of rabbinic literature seem to function as safe mouthpieces for the expression of the rabbis' own concerns about their version of Judaism.50 The pagans' questions thus tend to have a coherence and rigour which the rabbinic responses - which, as products of profound systemic tensions, often combine laxity and over-determination - lack. Proclus begins by quoting a verse which, when read in its biblical context, is not precisely relevant. Deut. 13.13-19 concerns an Israelite town whose inhabitants have been seduced into the worship of strange gods. Yet, in their expansion of the biblical laws of 47

48

49

50

Kanter (1980) 175-7, misreads the story as a report of Gamaliel's halakhically objectionable behaviour as revised by a sympathizer, comparable to the complex of material in M. Berakhot 2.5-7'. But in M. Avodah Zarah Gamaliel's behaviour is precisely not objectionable in terms of rabbinic halakhah, only in terms of the sort of rigoristic reading of the Pentateuch the rabbis are trying to distance themselves from. Or in the better MSS, the unconstruable PLSLWS: see Zlotnick (1993) for an attempted construal. For the text of the tractate, see Rosenthal (1980), especially vol. II, 4 0 - 3 . MSS Cambridge, Kaufmann and Parma omit 'not' and presumably read the statement as a rhetorical question. Modern treatments of this issue, in their single-minded attention to the identification of the real identity of the interlocutors, are characterized by the most naive pseudohistoricism; on 'Antoninus and Rabbi', see above note 43; on the 'Rabbi Yosi and Matrona' stories, Ilan (1994); on Gamaliel and Proclus, Wasserstein (1980).

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idolatry, the rabbis themselves removed verse 18 from its context and understood it as a foundation for the laws of idolatry in general, with no necessary connection to the seduced Israelite city. For example, the rabbis derive from the verse the rules that an Israelite's idol must be destroyed in such a way as to make impossible any potential contact even with the fragments, and that monetary benefit derived from idolatry must likewise be destroyed without a trace. Thus, 'Proclus" use of the verse to demonstrate the impropriety of Rabban Gamaliel's behaviour, while at first glance odd, conforms to that of the rabbis elsewhere: By your standards, Proclus is made to say, this bath is herem, which means that whether or not you destroy it, you may not use it; why then are you here? This powerful question reveals several anomalies at the very core of the rabbinic treatment of paganism. How, in the first place, could the rabbis simply ignore the images which decorated both private and public spaces in the cities and larger villages? It is true that the rabbis demanded that one go to tremendous lengths to avoid even indirectly encouraging pagan worship: the tractate opens by prohibiting the conduct of business with a pagan for three days before his festival, apparently so that he should not in his joy at his success offer thanks to his god;51 one may not even walk towards a city whose inhabitants are celebrating a festival (1.5); since pagans are assumed to be constantly pouring libations, their very contact with wine is enough to render it forbidden. Yet in other circumstances, they seemed to have little objection to images. Not only is it permissible to enter places decorated with images of the gods, like public baths, and use inexpensive items decorated with unambiguously pagan symbols (3.3), but one may derive benefit from idols assumed not to have been worshipped (4.4; cf. T. Avodah Zarah 5.3-4), or which have been abandoned, slightly disfigured or, in one opinion, simply sold, by a pagan (4.5-6). Indeed a Jew may unhesitatingly enjoy a garden or bath-house which belongs to a pagan temple, as long as no expression of gratitude to the priests is required (4.3). The later rabbinic collections go further, in some cases, making explicit what the Mishnah leaves unsaid: images, even of the gods - in paintings, mosaics, the carvings on such household items as 'Delphic' tables - are expressly permitted, provided they are simply 'decoration'. How could the rabbis so blatantly ignore the tenor of the Pentateuchal laws, with their apparently unconditional opposition to images, and of general biblical thought?

51

M. Avodah Zarah 1.1, following Rashi, ad be, who was himself extrapolating from the editorial response to the opinion of R. Judah at the end of the Mishnah.

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Gamaliel's response: a doctrine of mere decoration

In their discussions of this Mishnah, the Talmuds focus on Rabban Gamaliel's refusal to answer Proclus in the bath-house. This refusal foreshadows the Mishnah's argument that the bath, with its naked, urinating patrons, is unsuitable for religious activities, like pagan sacrifice and Torah-study. The Talmudim observe that Gamaliel's very refusal to answer was a piece of Torah-study and so should have been forbidden! We will not let this characteristic paradox detain us, though, since what follows is of greater interest. What can Gamaliel have meant by saying that the goddess entered his territory, and not vice versa? Rabban Gamaliel's first response is indeed difficult to understand, but it may in fact mean no more than that bath-houses are for bathers, not worshippers, so the goddess, not the bather, is the intruder. As the Babylonian Talmud observed in its comment on this Mishnah, this sort of argument is palpably inadequate, even from the perspective of rabbinic law, let alone that of biblical prescription. But this very inadequacy explains why additional responses are given. The second and third clauses should, I believe, be taken as complementary: together they produce a kind of 'doctrine of mere decoration': the pagans themselves would say that Aphrodite in the bath is secondary, a mere ornament - indeed, they themselves do not hesitate to stand before her naked, behaviour they would not countenance in their own temples. An idol is only a god, and so subject to (our attenuated version of) the biblical prohibitions, if it is treated like one. If it is erected in a bath-house or, by extension, used to decorate tableware, or simply neglected, it is perfectly acceptable. The phrasing of R. Gamaliel's response - you pagans say, 'Aphrodite is made as an ornament for the bath', you pagans would never think of behaving in a temple as you do in the bath - indicates that the Mishnah is not simply ignoring the nature of real-life paganism in a quest for formal exegetical precision. Rather it claims to be shaping its interpretation of the biblical laws around its understanding of paganism. And for good reason. The Pentateuchal text itself does not in fact constrain the rabbis' view of paganism. On the contrary, the rabbis could, for instance, have taken the Pentateuchal exhortations about divine unity (Deut. 6.4; Ex. 20.1-5) as legal prescription and understood them to prohibit any practice which seemed to contradict it, like the non-cultic use of images; instead of reading in an exclusive way the verses prohibiting the representation of animal, human and divine creatures ('thou shalt not make an idol nor any image ... thou shalt not bow down to them nor worship

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them' (Ex. 20.3-5; Deut. 5.7-9) = don't make them or have them if they have been or will be worshipped, but otherwise, you incur no penalty), they could have read them inclusively, as their predecessors before 70, when the Jews rigorously avoided figurative art, had done. They could, in sum, have prohibited everything associated with paganism. After all, the stakes were high: Israel's God was a jealous God (Ex. 20.5; Deut. 5.9). Instead, the rabbis imagined that pagan religiosity consisted exclusively of cultic acts directed at fetishes, and interpreted the biblical prohibitions accordingly (though it must be said that some aggadic - non-legal - passages indicate a more subtle appreciation of pagan religiosity). What would a pagan have thought of the rabbis' view of his religion? Clearly the rabbis supposed that Proclus was convinced by R. Gamaliel's arguments, and no doubt few pagans would have denied the importance of figural representation and the centrality of sacrifice in their religious life. Some, furthermore, would have regarded the deity's image as its embodiment, at least under some circumstances; but others would have claimed that the individual gods were only aspects of the divine, all legitimately worshipped because, as the fourth century poet Symmachus put it, 'it is impossible that there is only one road to so great a mystery'.52 Such thoughtful pagans might have regarded the rabbis' theology of paganism as unhelpfully reductive: even homespun statuettes which would never receive a cult might be thought to contain a spark of the divine, even if only because they turned men's minds to piety.53 And even essentially decorative images, like Aphrodite in the bath-house, Dionysus on the mosaic pavement of the city-councillor's triclinium, the Capitoline triad on the city coins, all had real religious meaning, or at very least were meaningful as decoration only within a pagan religious scheme. Aphrodite may have been thought present in the bath which housed her image not in the image itself but as patron-goddess, or for the more sceptically inclined, as the allegorical personification of physical pleasure.54 Even such decorative representations underlined the omnipresence of the gods; they also underlined what seems at first glance like an essential difference between Jewish and Greco-Roman, indeed, general eastern Mediterranean, religiosity. The latter had long been characterized by a slippage between impersonal natural or social forces and personified deities, which

52

53 54

See MacMullen (1981) 59-60; Nock (1972) 40. In some aggadic passages, the rabbis evince a more nuanced grasp of pagan religiosity. See B. Avodah Zarah 54b-55a, with partial parallels in Mekhilta deRabbi Ishmael, pisqa 65 and Mekhilta deRashbi, Yitro (Ex. 20.5), with discussion in Halbertal and Margalit (1992) 2 6 - 7 . Clerc(1915)38. See the extensive discussion in Dunbabin (1978) 137-87.

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allowed people to view Fortune or Youth as gods deserving of worship, and Aphrodite and Zeus as metaphors for human social relations, while yet remaining gods, all of them readily representable. Their images, even when not meant as objects of cult, were unambiguously part of an ethos of paganism. I would add here parenthetically that apart from the issue of representation, Judaism was not as remote from its environment as we, and the rabbis before us, might like to think, for the Jews, too, had endowed natural and social forces with personality and made them not gods, perhaps, but demi-gods, or angels. I am trying, in sum, to problematize the rabbis' creation of the category of the purely decorative; this is necessary because the rabbinic category resonates all too closely with our own preconceptions. It is, for instance, perfectly obvious that the Gorgon's-heads and classicizing busts which decorate the fagades of the apartment buildings on the Manhattan avenue where I now sit have no religious meaning whatever, and it is all too easy to suppose that the comparable deployment of similar iconography in a Roman town of the third century didn't either. But on closer examination, the decoration of the buildings proves deeply meaningful. The residents of the street sense that they live in a neighbourhood with depth and resonance, but the resonances are not with classical antiquity but with the near past of baroque Rome and nineteenth-century Paris. The street does not feel as if it had been built up hastily in the 1920s on the ruins of a workers' quarter to accommodate a rising bourgeoisie. Even residents who have never visited Paris or Rome cannot miss the implications of the classicizing decorations and Berniniesque facades. The street is grand but restrained, its inhabitants substantial but unaddicted to excess. Here, the images of the gods indeed have no religious meaning, but their status as cultural signs is unmistakable. The rabbis' world was, in contrast to ours, pervaded with gods. To take for granted the 'naturalness' of the rabbis' dismissal of the significance of their commonplace material representation, as all modern scholarship has done (see works cited in note 56), is not only problematic per se, but also ignores the evidence from rabbinic literature itself, to be discussed below, that at least some rabbis recognized that decoration was never merely decorative. What motivated the rabbis' radical misinterpretation of Greco-Roman paganism? It is of course impossible to say. But we may at least note that their formalism, their taxonomists' aversion to ambiguities, their consequent creation of categories whose correspondence to social realities is loose, are all characteristic of their treatment even of issues far less freighted with consequence than paganism. If we knew nothing about the context in which the rabbis produced and compiled the laws of idolatry, it is unlikely that we would sense anything strange about them.

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By suggesting, following C. E. Hayes,55 an internalist rationale for the laws of idolatry, I am rejecting the sort of naive historicizing contextualization which has dominated modern interpretation. For example, E. E. Urbach, in a celebrated article, argued that the rabbis' leniency about certain categories of images was intended to ease the lot of the economically challenged Jews by permitting them to deal in slightly damaged idols.56 Not only is this implausible (how much demand was there for slightly damaged idols?), and apologetic (since it is intended to demonstrate that the rabbis of the Mishnah were more enlightened than their contemporary Tertullian), but it also makes what I consider the error of regarding rabbinic legislation as unproblematically binding on all the Jews. But rabbinic legislation was Utopian - in that it was directed at a nation which no longer existed, and whose former members had no reason to recognize the laws' authority over them; it was also innerdirected. Its primary context was the rabbinic study-house, increasingly institutionalized in the course of the third century. Hayes' argument that we take seriously the inner dynamics of rabbinic law is convincing. That said, there is evidence from rabbinic literature itself that at least some of the rabbis were uncomfortable with the implications of their formalism; they were not unaware that their own views represented an attempt to mediate between the absolute aniconism and rejection of paganism demanded by a rigoristic reading of the Pentateuch (and of standard pre-Destruction Jewish practice) and the pervasive presence of images of the gods in their own world. Some rabbis are supposed to have sensed that even halakhically innocent images are problematic and to have avoided possessing or even looking at them. We have already encountered the Palestinian Talmud's admiration for R. Nahum bar Simai - Nahum of the Holy of Holies - who never looked at an image in his life, not even if it was only stamped on a coin.57 The Palestinian Talmud also reports a series of stories concerning rabbis who were reluctant to pass before public statuary (Y. Avodah Zarah 3:13, 43b). The stories all conclude with the rabbis' giving in at the urging of Rabbi Yohanan (but, quite literally, closing their eyes to the images as they 55 56 57

Hayes (1997). Urbach (1959). For discussion of additional examples, see Hayes (1997) 2-24; see also Stern (1996). A minority opinion, whose precise meaning is obscure, not mentioned in the Mishnah, attributed in two sources to R. Judah (second century CE), prohibits looking at dioqna'ot, or eikoniot (Sifra, Kedoshim parashah 1, section 10; Y. Avodah Zarah 3:1, 42b; T. Shab-

bat 17(18).l, where it is quoted anonymously), but this had no impact on general rabbinic halakhah; R. Nahum's refusal to look at eikoniot, whatever precisely they are, is presented as supererogatory. R. Nahum himself was for the rabbis a shadowy, almost legendary,figure:see Florsheim (1976).

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passed), but they still may reveal that the Mishnah's formalism does not tell the whole story. We may, however, wonder whether these stories were not retrospective creations of the later fourth century, when the Talmud was compiled, idealized projections made by rabbis who no longer knew what it was like to live in a pagan city. The same may be true of the story of R. Yohanan's instruction to one Ben Drusai to destroy the presumably wholly unproblematic statues in the Tiberian bath-house (YAZ 4:4) - the same R. Yohanan who is reported elsewhere to have permitted to the Jews of Bostra a spring whose waters were used in the local cult of Aphrodite (Y. Sheviit 8:11, 38b-c), and to have also permitted Jews to pass through the shade of a sacred grove which had encroached on public land (B. Avodah Zarah 48b) on the grounds that what is public cannot be prohibited - a rule whose legal rationale is unclear.58 Whether or not the rabbis were aware that their legislation was accommodative is in the final analysis impossible to determine. What seems clear is that it functioned as accommodation. I am suggesting here that though the rabbinic laws of idolatry may have as their primary context the rabbinic study-house, and so may have been motivated by the internal dynamics of rabbinic law, they may also be seen as part of a larger social process. Having moved to the cities, and having decided to set about acquiring the authority which they believed the Torah had granted them, the rabbis could not have maintained the purely rigoristic approach to idolatry which they presumably had inherited from their pre-Destruction Pharisaic and priestly predecessors. At most, the persistence of individual extremists in or near rabbinic circles - or at least the rabbinic recounting of stories about such men, and about the miraculous destruction of public statuary - kept pure aniconism and separatism alive as ideals, by definition generally unattainable. But the universalization of such attitudes among the rabbis of the second and third centuries would have re58

See Blidstein (1976). I have not followed his interpretation of Y. Sheviit 8:11, 38b-c: 'R. Shimon b. Lakish was in Bostra and saw them sprinkling a certain Aphrodite (mezalpin lehada Aphrodite)', he said to them, "Is it not forbidden?". He went and asked R. Yohanan, who told him in the name of R. Shimon b. Yehozadak, "that which belongs to the public cannot be forbidden.'" Blidstein followed Lieberman (1950) 132-3, who read mezalpin behada Aphrodite, 'were bathing in that (bath-house? of) Aphrodite'. But in this case it is puzzling that neither R. Shimon b. Lakish nor R. Yohanan is made to quote the Mishnah. (The same objection rules out what would be syntactically the simplest interpretation that R. Shimon saw Jews sprinkling water on an idol, declared it forbidden but was overruled by R. Yohanan. Sprinkling water on an idol is explicitly forbidden by M. Sanhedrin, see above.) Furthermore, mezalpin without the reflexive pronoun ('al garmehon) does not mean 'bathe' but 'sprinkle'. The interpretation given in the commentary attributed to R. Elijah b. Solomon, the gaon of Vilna, is preferable: R. Shimon b. Lakish saw the Bostrans sprinkling water drawn from a spring on a statue of Aphrodite and wished to forbid the spring to the Jews of Bostra - drawing an analogy from the Mishnah's prohibition of a barrel of wine from which a libation has been offered.

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duced them to existence in complete isolation from the rest of Palestinian Jewish society. Their modified rigorism, with its uncompromising rejection of anything remotely connected to pagan cult,59 but acceptance of most non-cultic manifestations of Greco-Roman pagan culture, permitted them to live and function in the cities. Conclusion: Jewish society under the High Empire

The rabbis were nevertheless marginal. I would argue that in the wake of the destruction of the temple and the end of the semi-autonomous Jewish polity in 70, the failure of the Bar Kokhba revolt in 135, the annexation of Jewish Palestine and the subsequent urbanization and prosperity, Judaism shattered and Jewish society disintegrated. In practice, Palestinians of Jewish background in the second through fourth centuries had two core ideologies to chose from (to use a series of crude but heuristically serviceable metaphors). The most influential, authoritative and, it must be emphasized, even religiously compelling, was the ideology of the GrecoRoman city, culturally Hellenic, religiously pagan, non-particularistic, rendered prestigious by its association with the peace, power and prosperity of the High Empire, and probably reconcilable, if only with difficulty, with retention of a variety of other, mildly discredited, ethnic identities. A citizen of Caesarea might be a proud Roman citizen, too, but also a Jew, or a Samaritan, or a Christian, or a Syrian, in addition to thinking of himself as being in some sense Greek. If he took his municipal responsibilities seriously, though, his Jewishness or Christianity would necessarily have been attentuated, for the public life of the city was pagan to the core. What Palestinian Jews had, though, which most other co-opted nations lacked, was the sense, which some of them had partly internalized, that life ought to be lived differently, a sense embodied in the rabbis, who preserved a profoundly altered but still recognizable version of Judaism. The rabbis were not authorized by the state and had little glamour after the revolts. Nevertheless, to the extent that some probably very small number of Jews had internalized Judaism in a fairly comprehensive way, and many others may have retained a looser attachment to it, the Rabbis 59

Even this was to some extent modified by, or in tension with, another Rabbinic principle - darkei shalom, 'the ways of peace' - which requires Jews to treat pagans far better than the letter of the law would lead one to expect. Thus, in towns with mixed population Jews are required to support the pagan poor, care for their sick, comfort their mourners, and so on. R. Ammi (early fourth century) is said to have almost permitted some Jews of Gadara (or, 'weavers': garda'e or gadra'ei) to attend a pagan's (wedding? religious?) celebration, but to have been dissuaded by a colleague, R. Ba (Y. Avodah Zarah 1.3 = Y. Gittin 5.9, 47c).

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did have a few followers and probably slightly larger numbers of occasional supporters. This loose periphery of supporters is likely to have consisted of people who in most respects lived normatively Greco-Roman lives and whose Jewishness was strictly compartmentalized. We should, in fact, view the population of Jewish Palestine as situated along an ideological continuum. At one extreme are people who, though of Jewish origin and probably in some sense ethnicity (they must have known that they were living in 'Jewish' towns, even if only because their 'Greek' neighbours sometimes reminded them), were to all intents and purposes standard Greco-Roman pagans. At the other are hard core representatives of Judaism, mainly the rabbis. Most Jews were caught in between, though the two poles were unequal in their attraction. Most Jews seem to have lived mainly as pagans and looked primarily to the Roman state and the city-councils as their legal authorities and cultural ideal, but even they may still have retained some sense of being not quite fully Greek ((un)like their insistent neighbours in Scythopolis, who adopted for their city the suggestively overdetermined title 'Nysa, also called Scythopolis, the Holy and Inviolate, One of the Hellenic Cities of Koile Syria');60 others may have been eclectic, living in some respects as pagans and in others as Jews, occasionally supporting and consulting rabbinic figures for some purposes, perhaps by the third century helping in the construction of synagogues, but most often politely ignoring them; or they may have been people whose primary identity was Jewish, and like the rabbis themselves may often have regarded their accommodations with the dominant culture with unease. For there was a systemic tension at the core of rabbinic ideology. The rabbis were radically countercultural, in that their norms and ideals were at variance with those of the urban Roman East. For them, the ideal society was one which lived according to Pentateuchal prescriptions, of which they claimed to be the most authoritative interpreters. At the same time, they regarded other Jews not as beyond the pale, but simply as sinners who could be redeemed. In sum, they were expansionist and needed to work their way into the social, political, economic and cultural network formed by the cities. I have argued that an important manifestation of this tension is the rabbinic laws of Avodah Zarah. Though the formalism of these laws, their rigorous restriction of prohibited 'idolatry' to cultic acts, is of a piece with the general rabbinic legislative style, it may also be helpfully viewed as an aspect of rabbinic accommodation to urban life, for if the rabbis had retained the pre-rabbinic aversion to images, they would have reduced themselves to sectarian irrelevance. 60

For this title see Foerster and Tsafrir (1986-7).

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Index of major passages discussed

Achilles Tatius Leucippe and Cleitophon 1.9: 169-70 2.15: 187 5.13: 178-9 ApoUonius of Tyana Ep

71:6

Ep 72: 6 Arrian Anab. 1.12: 201-2 Cicero ad An. 16.5:2 Tusc Disp 4.33.70: 2 5.39.114:218 deRep 2.14.17: 31
390

Diogenes Laertius 1.101:4 7.247: 176 Favorinus de ex 2: 297 5:297 10: 299-301; Heliodorus Aethiopica 3.7.5:171 4.16.6:265. Herodian 4.13: 240 4.17: 240 Historia Augusta Hadr

2-3: 11-12. John Chrysostom de Inani Gloria 4-5: 313 Josephus Bell. Jud. 1.57: 80 1.97: 78 1.197: 65-6 1.471: 64 1.506: 64-5 2.16: 56 2.29: 65 2.85: 70-1 2.322: 56 2.454: 53 2.602: 55 2.604: 59 3.239: 75 3.385-6: 62-3 4.406: 71 4.477: 50-1 4.561-3: 68-9

Index of major passages discussed 5.4: 73 5.525-6: 73 5.318: 68 5.344: 73 5.440: 73 5.451: 82 6.186-7: 76 6.207: 73-4 7.418-9: 77-8 Ant. Jud 13.380: 78 17.234: 65 Juvenal 3.62-3: 10 67-8: 10 73-8: 10-11 Lucian Anach. 16: 2 22: 1 39:2 dedea Syria 1: 126, 129 10: 130, 131 11: 131-2 14: 134-5 17-27: 144-9 31-2: 136-8 33: 138 35: 139 37: 140 51: 143-4 55: 142 59: 142-3 60: 143 de Domo 2: 160-1 4: 162 6: 162 14: 163 19: 164 21: 165 32: 166 Icaromen 16: 224 delmag. 1: 185-7,224 8: 187, 225 9-10: 188-9, 226 16: 228 24: 230-1 pro Imagin. 10: 191 12: 191 20: 192 22: 192

Saturnalia 162-3 Scyth 9: 4 Ver Hist 1.4:243 1.5: 248 2.12: 244-5 2.17-19:243 2.23-4: 245 2.29: 247 2.36: 246 Musonius fr 9: 277-85 Pausanias 8.9.1: 32 8.9.44-8: 32 8.27.1: 34 8.29.1: 33-4 8.30.8: 32 8.37.1: 32 Philo In Flacc. 74-80: 78 de Leg ad Gaium 227'-8: 56 228-9: 55 233-5:76 de gen. Mundi 166: 177 Philostratus Vit. Ap. 1.3: 5 1.7: 12 2.20: 207 2.25: 4 2.27: 4 2.32: 4 3.19:249 3.32: 5 3.43: 6 4.5: 5 4.16-7:251-2 6.11:248 6.19:219 Vit. Soph 481: 14 Her. 2: 256 10: 214 24: 258 43: 258 45: 261 54: 260, 261 58: 256 Plutarch Prae.Ger. Re 805a: 8

391

392

Index of major passages discussed

Plutarch (cont.) 813-14: 8 Quaes Gr 5: 107-8 17:108 21: 108-9 26: 111 Quaest Rom 5: 105 7: 105 10: 110 11:96 15:102 19: 98 22: 98 32:98-9, 111 40: 1-2 41:98 52: 99, 106-7 53:111 84: 102 Vitae: Alexander 201, 202, 206 Brutus 31 Coriolanus 116-17 Numa 104, 116 Theseus 116 [VitHom] 217, 223-4. Polybius 2.37.10:45

4.1-5:48 4.8.7: 46 38.4.9: 47 39.8.1:43 SEG xxviii 1462: 312-13, 314-15, 318, 330 xxxviii 1462: 331, 332 xli 1345: 326 xliv 1182: 313 1194:322; Sextus Empiricus 7.247: 176 7.252: 176 Talmud Avoda Zara 3: 342-3, 352-3 18:59 Gitin 56a-b: 59 Sanhedrin 7, 351-2 Tertullian de Spectaculis 14: 181-2 23: 182 30: 182-3 de Virg. Vel. 2.15: 182; Xenophon Symp 1.8: 161

General index

Achilles 8, 201-2, 208, 237, 239-40, 245, 246, 249-55, 258-9, 327 Achilles Tatius 150, 156, 159, 167-70, 175, 178-9, 187, 265 Aelian 200 Aelius Aristides 205, 206, 234, 319 Aethiopis 260 Alexander the Great 8, 31, 57, 78, 93, 160, 196, 201-2, 205-6, 209, 213, 235, 237, 239-40 Allon, G. 349-50 Anacharsis 1-4, 140-1, 243, 281, 329 Anderson, G. 205-6, 217, 247 Antigonus 58 Antipater 203-4 Aphrodite 173-4, 225, 229, 230, 353-7 Apollo 139-40, 147, 197, 252-3, 288 ApolloniusofTyana 4-7, 152, 156, 159, 219, 239, 241, 246, 247-55, 339 Apuleius 62 Archelaos 197-203 Aristophanes 204, 244 Aristotle 271 Arnold, M. 15 Arrian 127, 201-2, 235, 240, 261-2 Artemidorus 207, 219 Athenaeus 209 athletics 1-4, 140-1, 183, 306-34 Augustus 66-7 Aulus Gellius 294, 296, 298 Bakhtin, M. 162 Bartsch, S. 168 Bevan, D. 269 Bloom, H. 290 Boulogne, J. 99-100, 106, 110 Bourdieu, P. 15 Briquel-Chatonnet, F. 265-6

Brutus 61-2 Buffiere, F. 205 Bulla Felix, bandit 63-4 Butler, J. 18 Caesar 237-8 Callimachus 93, 287 Caracalla 239-41 Cassius Dio 270, 275 castration 144-9 Celsus 353 Chajes, H. 349 Chariton 14 Christianity 15, 25, 85, 152, 172-5, 179-80, 181-4, 204, 337, 340, 343, 353 Cicero 2, 11, 12, 31, 94, 101, 102, 103, 220, 234-5, 270, 281 citizenship 7, 10, 89, 91-3, 272-3, 293-4 Clement of Alexandria 172-5, 179 Combabus 144-9 cultural anthropology 17 cultural studies 16 Damas, Tiberius Claudius 7 Damis 5 Darnton, R. 332 Demosthenes 287, 302-3 Demosthenes of Oenoanda 312-16, 318— 19,330-3 Dickie, M. 171 Dio Cassius 240 Dio Chrysostom 4n7, 23, 156, 157-8, 160, 192, 196, 203, 205, 212-13, 221-2, 230, 257, 260, 264, 269, 270, 271, 274, 285-94, 297, 298, 326, 328 Diogenes, Cynic 281-2, 283 Diogenes, Epicurean 328 Diogenes Laertius 161, 176 393

394

General index

Dionysius of Halicarnassus 100,102 Duff, T. 92, 100 ecphrasis 161-7, 208 education, see paideia Egypt, Egyptians 13, 36, 127, 131, 170, 177, 200, 209, 248-9 Emperor, Roman 5, 8, 11-12, 188, 228-9, 285, 318-20, 333, 350; see also Augustus, Julia Domna, Hadrian, Titus, Vespasian Ennius 236 Erbse, H. 92 Euripides 4, 148, 254, 256, 277-8, 280, 299, 300-1 Favorinus 13-14, 23, 160, 270, 284, 294303, 305 Florus 102-3 Foucault, M. 274 Fox, M. 94 Francis, J. 249 Frontinus 83, 274 Fronto, the athlete 306, 323 Galilee 336, 340-1 Gallop, J. 194 Gamaliel 353-7 Games 181-4; see also athletics Gleason, M. 295, 303, 321 Goldhill, S. 119 Goodenough, E. 344-5, 350 Hadrian 9, 10, 11-12, 31, 86, 89, 116, 159, 173, 232, 296, 300, 319-20, 341, 344 Heliodorus 14, 170-2, 265 Helen 188, 227, 234, 253, 261 Hellenistic culture 157,195-203 Herod 65-6, 70-2 Herodas 210 Herodian 239-40 Herodotus 3, 5, 13, 126, 127-8, 129, 132, 140, 143, 164, 254, 281 Hesiod 231-2, 236, 257, 299 Hippolytus 148-9, 256 Homer 8, 22, 23, 156, 159, 174, 187-8, 192, 195-266, 281 Horace 167,236 Iarchas 249-51

identity, use as term 18-19, 91-3, 108, 142-4, 196, 263-4, 272-3 Isocrates 28 Janus 98-9 Josephus 21, 22, 24, 50-85, 335 Julia Domna 5, 6, 152, 156, 239, 247 Juvenal 10-11,12 Kappeler, S. 155 Lane Fox, R. 215, 255 Language, discussion of 12, 107, 114, 1268, 132, 139, 229, 272-3, 294, 305 LaPenna, A. 101 Lieberman, S. 338-9 Livy 39, 102, 113 Lollianus 265 Longinus 247 Longus 159,257 Lucan 238-9 Lucian 1-4, 10, 11, 22, 24, 123-53, 160-7, 184-93, 196, 205, 210, 220, 224-33, 241-7, 248, 253, 260, 329 Anacharsis 1-4 dedea Syria 123-53 de Domo 160-7 de imaginibus 184-93, 224-33 Maccabees 11 McKinnon, C. 154-5 Maffei, S. 232 Mapplethorpe, R. 154-5 Mary, child-eater 73-5 Maximus of Tyre 205, 260-1 Melagreia 316-17, 322 Menander Rhetor 220 Millar, F. 46-7 Milner, N. 326 Mishnah, see Talmud Moles, J. 288-9 Morales, H. 168 Musonius 23, 270, 271, 274, 276-85, 290, 294, 297, 298, 304, 305 names 5-6, 107, 114, 132, 136-41, 143 Neusner, J. 350 Numa 102-4, 118,243 Nussbaum, M. 275

395

General index Oenoanda 312-16, 318-19, 327-8, 330-3 Olympia 222, 307-12, 319 Onians, J. 210 Ovid 103, 270, 275 Paideia 13, 17-18, 22-3, 24, 87-8, 89-92, 100-1, 107-8, 115-17, 157-9, 180, 192, 206-7, 228-9, 248, 315, 317-18 Palamedes 253-5 Pausanias 31-3, 42, 118, 129, 133, 148, 156, 248 Pelling, C. 92, 100 Pericles 8, 92, 93, 301 Phantasia 162, 168-70, 176-9, 206, 207, 212, 220-4, 242 Pheidias 220-4, 230, 231 Philo 55, 118, 176-7, 179 Philopoemen 33, 38, 43 Philostratus 4-7, 152, 157-8, 159, 196, 211, 213-18, 239, 241, 247-55, 25566, 269, 285, 294, 296 Heroicus 213-15, 255-66 Vit. Ap. 4-7, 157-8, 247-55 Philostratus, the younger 213, 214, 224 Pindar

164

Plato 3, 142, 164, 168, 171, 174, 179, 184, 186, 210, 217, 218, 235, 243, 244, 251, 257,264,276,287,288-91 Pliny 207, 211-12, 218 Plutarch 1, 4n7, 8, 15, 21, 40, 86-119, 156, 171, 201, 206, 207, 234, 235, 242, 248, 270 337 Greek and Roman Questions 1, 86-119 Pollitt, J. 200, 208, 215 Polybius 14-15, 2i, 29-49 Porphyry 353 Posidonius 31 Proclus 353-4 Pythagoras 103-4, 204, 228, 235, 236, 243, 248, 250 Quintillian 235 ritual, civic 9, 56-7, 105, 141-2, 147, 30634 Robbins, B. 269 Robert, L. 310-11 Rogers, G. 323-33

Romulus 102, 116, 118 Said, E. 87-8 Scipio 32, 33, 39-40, 41, 42, 43, 103, 237, 238 Second-Sophistic, as term 14-15, 270 self-presentation 3, 6, 10, 20, 53-70 Seneca 270, 284, 298, 300 < s j gn ' 136-8 silicus 236-7 Simonides 164, 187 Smith, M. 350 Socrates, see Plato, Xenophon Sosandros 9 statues 9, 98, 136-41, 173-5, 197-203, 207, 210, 220-4, 232-3, 353-7 Stewart, A. 200 strabo 31, 206, 237-8, 260 Strathern M 19 Stratoniceia 8-10 S wain, S. 100 Tadtug

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Wallbank, F. 46 Weitzmann, K. 210 Williams, R. 15 Xenophanes 219 Xenophon 161, 189, 213, 227, 231, 276, 283-4, 285 zealots 68-70, 73, 80 Zeno 175-6, 178 Zeus, statues of 9, 136-41, 197-203, 220-4 Zosimus 255