Reading Assignment, Text Access
- Lucian The Rhetorician's Vade Mecum (complete works vol. 3, pages 218-230)
- Lucian Tyrannicide (complete works vol. 2, pages 173-183)
- This study guide, as always
Aim of Readings. Quiz Response Prompt
This assignment concerns Greek rhetoric and rhetorical culture during the period of the so-called second sophistic. I say "so-called" because the term itself is somewhat contentious. It has even been denied that the period of the second sophistic, first through third centuries CE, really saw the rise of anything new in rhetorical (or "sophistic") culture. Rohde, the first scholar since antiquity to adopt the term "second sophistic," understood it as the last, faint glimmer of ancient Greek literature in decline. More recently, scholars have treated it as something much more positive. Indeed, Anderson justifies use of the term "second sophistic" in relation to what he sees as a second flowering of Greek literary culture.
At the same time, the very term "sophist" (sophistēs) could carry both positive and pejorative meanings. As a put-down, it meant, and often still does mean, someone dealing in verbal and logical flimflam, someone out to trick you: lawyers, politicians, dodgy intellectuals. Yet under the empire, it was also used to honor rhetoricians whose services deserved special recognition and reward.
Quiz questions:
- What is a sophist? What features are distinctive to sophists, especially for the period in question, 1st-3rd cent. CE?
- What are your impressions of today's Lucian readings? Are they serious? Silly? Both? What to make of that?
Write a decent paragraph for each.
Rhetoric
More than anything else, sophists and sophistic were about rhetoric. What, then, is rhetoric? The Greek word for rhetoric is rhētorikē, short for rhētorikē tekhnē, "the art (or skill) of speaking." Socrates in Plato's Phaedrus defines it as "a universal art of enchanting the mind (tekhnē psukhagogia, "psychagogic art") by arguments (logoi). . ." (261a-b), i.e., the art of persuasion. "Aristotle," to quote the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "defines the rhetorician as someone who is always able to see what is persuasive (Topics VI.12, 149b25)," and rhetoric (or more precisely, rhetorical skill), "as the ability to see what is possibly persuasive in every given case (Rhet. I.2, 1355b26f)." Again, rhetoric as the art of persuasion, though with an emphasis on it as a developed skill. In democratic Athens, where Plato and Aristotle taught, persuasion, especially in political settings and in the courts, was what it was all about.
But already in Plato's day and earlier, particularly in the works of the "older" sophist Gorgias (483-376 BCE), we see this persuasive art linked not simply to the substance but to the style of discourse: the kinds of words we use, how they're arranged, even the sound-effects that they produce — the emotional/psychological effects to which listeners/readers were exposed. That conception of rhetoric suggests a split between substance and style, with rhetoric having more to do with style than with substance, as if rhetoric were how we dress up our thoughts.
That supposed split can, however, be deceptive. For even if we regard rhetoric as analogous to clothing styles, and substance as argument stripped of all camouflage and ornament, the "naked" word, still, rhetoric also functions as argument and possesses its own substantive dimension. The Roman politician (and Latin speaker) Cato the Censor (234-149 BCE) famously defined the orator as "a good man skilled at speech" (vir bonus dicendi peritus). And this association of skill at speech, i.e., rhetoric, with goodness, not just moral goodness but social-political-economic "goodness" (i.e., class), allows us to see rhetoric in the Greco-Roman world as its own kind of argument, a "statement" about the respectability and worth of all that the speaker says, does, and is.
That helps us see the importance of rhetoric to the Greco-Roman male elite, though women like Aufria and the empress Julia Domna could also be players in the world of words. For to be a player in that world required mastery of the art of self-presentation, which, where words were concerned, was the art of rhetoric, mastery of which required considerable time, energy, and money.
Side note. I am currently trying to find a definition, specifically, of rhetoric, produced by a Greek author of the Early or High Imperial period — the period of the second sophistic. I'm embarrassed to say that I have yet to find one. I'll keep looking, but I'm not sure that we can, in the end, expect to learn anything from such an investigation. Ultimately, we're less concerned with (philosophical) questions of what rhetoric was or is than with who did it, how they did it, and why — complicated questions. . . .
Sophist, (Second) Sophistic
Here I quote Brill's New Pauly for its definition of the term "second sophistic":
. . . often used by modern scholarship, particularly for the Greek culture (esp. literary culture) during the Roman Empire between AD 60 and AD 230 when 'Sophistic declamation' (μελέτη/melétē) became one of the most prestigious cultural activities in the Greek world. (Brill's New Pauly s.v. "Second Sophistic")
"Sophist" (sophistēs) is a term whose use dates back to the fifth century BCE and perhaps earlier. According to Herodotus, it meant a "master of one's craft, adept, expert." In describing the seven sages of Greece, it conveyed the sense of them as "wise, prudent or statesmanlike" (Liddell-Scott-Jones Lexicon) — people, in other words, who possessed sophia, a combination of outstanding excellence and skill.
Yet already in Herodotus, sophia could convey the idea of "cunning" or "trickery," and it is this ambiguity between "wisdom" and "cunning" that seems to attach itself to sophistic as a professional pursuit in the latter half of the fifth century BCE, when "sophist" meant someone who, for a fee, took on students seeking to master rhetoric and the art of argument in preparation for a life in politics and in the courts. The context for that was the rise of democracy, where skill at speaking could lead to success in the public sphere. But in the minds of many, sophistic was all about the art of verbal manipulation and bogus logic — bad things. Sophists as teachers had become controversial.
Fast forward to ca. 200 CE. By that point, democracy had largely disappeared from the Greek-speaking world, which Rome now dominated.* After years of havoc wreaked by Rome's conquest of Greece and the eastern Mediterranean (the destruction of Corinth in 146 BCE, the violent siege and sack of Athens by Sulla in 86 BCE, other disasters), oligarchy, rule by the wealthy few, reigned supreme in most Greek-speaking cities, though the term "democracy" continued to be used, sometimes even with a degree of accuracy.
* Keep in mind that the Greek-speaking world at the time included lands and cities extending from southern France to southern Italy, and from there to Greece, Egypt, the middle East, and modern-day Turkey and Syria.
By the time of the early Empire (27 BCE-117 CE), the pax romana, that is, the peace and stability brought about by Roman rule, made possible a revival of economy and culture in Greek-speaking cities. Along with that came renewed interest in Greek identity and in Greek rhetoric as an expression of that identity. Despite the reality of Roman rule, rhetoric, with its political associations, continued to flourish. It still had a place in public debates (Greek cities remained largely, not entirely, self-ruling) and in court-room pleading. To be successful in public life, you needed to know how to speak. But rhetoric under Rome found a special home in display oratory, epideictic, but a better name for it might be show oratory: you're putting on a show, and often for a live audience. Starting with Nicetes of Smyrna (1st cent. CE), we see a succession of teacher-performers, often highly successful, of just that type.
Philostratus, writing in the years following 200 CE, called these sophists "second sophists," the next stage of sophistic after the first sophistic flowering of the 400s and early 300s BCE. These "second" sophists often were men of means, movers and shakers in their respective cities. Their profession commanded great prestige; sophist was an official designation in more than one city in the Roman East, and could carry with it special privileges. For hefty fees, sophists — not all, but many — taught. The training sophists underwent and the instruction they provided was thought to confer paideia, not just "education" but the kind of learning that befitted a gentleman. Yet the label "sophist" could still stand for the same bad things — verbal flimflam — that it had centuries earlier.
The sorts of shows that these Imperial-age sophists staged might play out in a public theater and before a large audience, a mix of well-educated cognoscenti and ordinary folks. Typically, the performance started with a more informal warm-up speech (lalia, "talk"; prolalia, "pre-talk"; dialexis, "discourse," "lecture") on a variety of topics: a description of something (an ekphrasis), praise of the city in which you're speaking and of its people (your audience!), lots of different things. This would be done sitting down. Next would come the main show, a declamation, in Greek, meletē, often improvised and on an audience-suggested theme, though we should not assume that sophists wouldn't have been above having people planted in the audience to call out a theme known in advance to the declaimer. For this, the sophist might stand; we're told of one sophist who would dramatically leap to his feat when he was about to deliver his declamation.
These declamations (meletai) always involved role-play. Imagine that you are President Dwight Eisenhower (served 1953-1961). You've been impeached and are facing Congress to plead your case. (That never happened, of course.) What would you say? That's kind of what declamation was like.
In some ways, declamation was always a double performance. On the one hand, there was the dramatized speaker seeking to sway the judgment or opinions of an imaginary audience. On the other hand, there was the author-performer, whose role-playing sought to demonstrate mastery of rhetoric in all its facets, and before a real-life audience. That required a firm grip on argumentation, on language, on arrangement of material. (Don't forget that declamations were often improvised; you had to do this on the fly.) But it also involved physical deportment, dress, anything that had a bearing on self-presentation. Stand the wrong way, mispronounce a word, and you might be laughed off stage.
Declamations may have been show pieces, but they always posed as real speeches. As such, they took one of two basic forms:
- A legal speech, with the speaker as prosecutor or defendant in a case
- A deliberative, usually political, speech, with the speaker either proposing policy or attacking it
Often, the sophist would give paired speeches, taking both sides, one after the other, in an imaginary dispute. And imaginary these speeches always were, sometimes extremely so. Maybe our sophist has been asked to take on the role of the goddess Athena, urging her fellow gods to take the side of the Greeks in their war with Troy. (That would be a political speech.) Or they might impersonate a defendant in a bizarrely formulated court case, say, one involving a young man arguing that he must be put to death for cowardice in battle. Why is this dramatized speaker doing that? To draw attention to the fact that his father, who is defending his son, is sleeping with that son's wife. (I know, it's complicated, but that's the premise of a declamation by the 4th-century CE sophist Sopater.) Often, the sophist would go in for carefully-studied realism, maybe by recreating an actual speech lost to history, sort of like a "based on real events" movie, with language and argumentation recalling the actual situation from centuries earlier. Aelius Aristides (117-181 CE) was fond of that sort of thing.
Still, however realistic declamation might be, it was still what we would call fiction. D. A. Russell coined the term "Sophistopolis," that is, city of sophists, to refer to the imaginary settings for these speeches. Those settings could be, to varying degrees, fantastical or historically convincing, but they (almost?) always sought to evoke the "Greece of yesteryear," and in particular, democratic Athens of the 400s and 300s BCE. On the one hand, that seems a little nuts. In 150 CE, Greek speakers no longer spoke the Greek that Athenians did in 400 BCE, yet that's exactly the kind of Greek that sophists sought to recreate. Imagine if I assigned you to speak and write only Shakespearian English for class. So there's an element of nostalgia involved: sophists sought to reconnect audiences with a shared heritage, that of Greek culture, language, and politics during a universally acknowledged Golden Age.
But we need also to keep in mind the educational role of sophistic generally and of declamation in particular. For declamation wasn't just for superstar orators to perform. It was also the crowning stage of the rhetorical education that many elite young men undertook from maybe the age of 12 to the age of 18 or so. Sophists were, then, not just performers; most of them were also teachers, and a sophist's collection of declamations could/would serve, among other things, as examples to be studied by students of rhetoric.
- From a young age up to pre-teenhood, elite Greek-speaking boys under the Empire studied with a grammatikos, from whom they learned Attic Greek and with whom they studied lots of poetry, Homer especially. Already at this stage, students would start to study the elements of rhetoric
- From pre-teenhood to young adulthood, they studied with a rhetoric teacher, who would have them read massive amounts of prose, and especially classic orators like Demosthenes. Students would also be assigned preliminary composition exercises called progumnasmata, and, at the end of their schooling, would compose and perform declamations
- The chief term for "rhetoric teacher" was rhētōr, which also meant "speaker." If you taught rhetoric, you were a rhētōr. The principal rhētōr in a sizable city would often receive special stipends and privileges, and would be expected to represent the city on embassies. They would speak in the local assembly and would defend clients in court. If a high-ranking official, a provincial governor, maybe the emperor, came to visit, they would give the welcome speech. And they would perform in public, as described above. Those high-level rhētores were and are referred to as sophists, sophistai. But rhētōr and sophistēs were also largely interchangeable terms
There are important issues of gender and class operating here. Sophistic culture mostly excluded women and girls — mostly, but not entirely. Aufria was an orator from Asia Minor (present day Turkey). In the second century CE, she was honored by the Greek city of Delphi. According to a preserved inscription, she "demonstrated the entire range of her education (her paideia), and delivered many excellent and enjoyable speeches at the assembly of Greeks at the Pythian games" (FD III 4:79; translation adapted from Lefkowitz and Fant, Women's Life in Greece and Rome #92). If there was one such woman orator, there will have been others. Back in the days of Athenian democracy (400s-300s BCE), there was a woman teacher of rhetoric, in other words, a sophist, Aspasia (active 440s-420s BCE). Also, the empress Julia Domna was deeply interested in Greek culture and thought. We're told that she spent much time with sophists and philosophers, and it is to be expected that she was herself adept in self-expression. She was, furthermore, a patron of the sophist Philostratus of Athens. We learn that Cleopatra, queen of Egypt, was attracted to literature; Philostratus, our informant, means Greek literature (Lives of the Sophists 1.5.485; Cleopatra was impressively multi-lingual). Cleopatra (69-30 BCE) comes about a century before our period, but she needs to be taken into consideration, as do other women who, though not sophists, were prominent intellectuals (e.g., Sosipatra, earlier 300s CE; Hypatia, 400s CE).
Still, the aforementioned Philostratus, like other male writers, betrays considerable bias against women generally and female intellectuals in particular (Bowie 2018, Dialogues d'histoire ancienne, Supplement 18). Indeed, most students and practitioners of rhetoric were boys and men of means. Rhetoric was, in fact, often understood as a way to perform masculinity and elite status. Though most students of rhetoric did not go on to become rhētores or sophists, the kind of training offered by rhetoric teachers was thought to open doors to men of ambition.*
* As we saw in Lucian's Dream, not everyone undertaking the study of rhetoric came from the highest echelons of society. And although sophists sometimes taught for free or at a reduced rate, a rhetorical education was usually a major investment in terms of time, effort, and money. In terms of masculinity, the case of Favorinus, a sophist from what is now southern France, offers a fascinating and complicated example.
That brings us to a troubling topic, for we need to acknowledge that this kind of education could function as gate-keeping, that is, as a way to limit access to privileges and opportunities intended for male persons of elite status. In our class, as we reflect on how education could in the past, and still can to this day, serve to limit access to opportunity, we're reminded that we should aim to make education a gateway to opportunity.
Sophistic as agōn
There's an important question for this course:
How was sophistic as practiced in the Roman East an agōn?
What is agōn? It's competition or contest, potentially, of any sort — more here. Sophists often referred to what they did as agōn. Sometimes what they did was agōn in the fullest sense of the word. It is believed that the Greek-speaking city of Oinoanda, in modern-day Turkey, sponsored competitions in, among other things, rhetoric. We also learn of prizes for speech writers (logographoi) at the Pythian games at Delphi. (Plutarch Moralia 674e; compare the case of Aufria, above.)
And what about professional rivalries? When the professorship in rhetoric opened up in Athens in 340 CE (a bit later than our period, but no matter), there was huge competition for the position: speeches by competing candidates, machinations by stakeholders in the background. Earlier, in 176 CE, the emperor Marcus Aurelius created multiple professorships at Athens in philosophy. We're told about fierce competition for those posts, and we can imagine similar whenever a professorship in anything, including rhetoric, opened up. (Certainly, that was the case for the 4th-cent. CE sophist Libanius when he competed for chairs in rhetoric in Athens, Constantinople, and Antioch.) Two sophists who were fierce rivals were Favorinus (ca. 85-ca. 150 CE) and Polemon (ca. 90-146 CE), a rivalry resulting, we're told, in Favorinus' loss of favor with the emperor Hadrian. Let's also not forget that as teachers, sophists competed with one another for students.
Still, what sophists did as sophists when not teaching mostly wasn't what we'd call formally organized competition, with ranked prizes and all that, but solo performances. Still, they always thought of themselves as engaged in a struggle: against rival orators, against critics, against anyone who, they imagined, would stop at nothing to sabotage their careers. The corollary to that is that sophists typically felt themselves under constant surveillance, their every move watched by rivals and a public ready and willing to take them down for any misstep or slip of the tongue. Sophists of the Imperial age typically specialized in a revived form of Attic Greek speech from centuries earlier (the Greek spoken in Athens, 400s and 300s BCE). Mastery of Attic was therefore part of their toolkit, whereas misuse of Attic was something to avoid. The way one spoke, acted, dressed, etc. could, in short, build one up or tear one down in the eyes of others.
Notes on Readings
Lucian The Rhetorician's Vade Mecum
This is by Lucian of Samosata (ca. 120-ca. 190 CE), whom you'll already have read. (More here on Lucian.) The translator amusingly refers to to the piece as a vade mecum, a handbook; the title supplied by Greek manuscripts is Rhētorōn didaskalos, "Teacher of rhetoricians," which may not fully capture the point.
What, then, is the point? You'll recall that Lucian was not himself Greek; he was Syrian. Yet "Greekness" for a sophist counted for much. And what better index of acquired Greekness than mastery of Attic Greek and of rhetoric in the old Athenian mode?
Turning to the opening lines of the piece, we read there,
You ask, young man, how you may become a rhetorician, and win yourself the imposing and reverend style of Professor.
"Rhetorician" in the Greek is rhētōr, "speaker" (or "rhetoric teacher"), and "Professor" (note how that's an "imposing and reverend style"!) is sophistēs. Seemingly, this is a book on how to become a sophist, and in twelve easy lessons. Or something like that.
Surely, though, you'll pick up that this is also satire: that's not how you become a sophist. Or is it?. . .
As in the case of all satire, the dividing line between the straightforward and the tongue-in-cheek can be hard to detect, and so it is here. Obviously, learning just a few words of Attic to impress audiences won't get you the Chair in Rhetoric at Athens, but amid all the fun and exaggeration, one senses serious messages — what are they? At least one scholar has suggested that the piece may well reflect the existence of short-cut courses for would-be rhetoricians. (Cribiore in GRBS 2007.) Be that as it may, what can this "vade mecum" teach us about sophistic and associated values?
The Tyrannicide
This piece is clearly a meletē, a rhetorically elaborate declamation, or formal performance piece. It serves as an example of sophia, rhetorical skill. This example takes the form of a dicanic, or "courtroom" speech.
A "tyrannicide" is someone who kills a tyrant. This speech has the sophist taking on the persona of such a person. The imaginary situation is this. A citizen of an unnamed Greek city from the age of democracy (5th-4th cents. BCE — even later in some cities) has killed the son of the city's tyrant, what we'd call a dictator. As a consequence, the tyrant has killed himself, and democracy has returned to the city.
There seems to be a law that says that those who kill tyrants get a reward. The speaker claims that reward, but someone has come forward to argue, "Wait a minute: He hasn't killed the tyrant, he's killed his son!"
The procedure is dokimasia, a challenge to the legitimacy of another's position or claim. The dramatized speaker, speaking on his own behalf, argues (obviously) for the defense. We do not have a speech for the prosecution, though sophists would often produce speeches arguing both sides of a question.
Note resonances with the tradition. In 511 BCE, the Greek city of Athens saw the beginning of the end of tyranny when two of its citizens, Harmodius and Aristogeiton, slew not the reigning tyrant but his brother. According to tradition, that act brought down the tyranny and established democracy. But as Thucydides reminds us, the actual tyranny, which didn't end till later, only got worse as a result of that killing. In any case, H&A, who got both of themselves killed, later received heroic honors. Lucian wasn't writing about that, exactly, but readers/listeners won't have failed to be reminded of it.
Further connections with tradition. The (fictitious) law about tyranny mentioned in Lucian's text recalls a similar law, one protecting tyrant slayers, enacted at Athens in 337/6 BCE. In that year, Philip II of Macedon and his son, Alexander (of Alexander-the-Great fame), threatened a kind of tyranny over Athens and all of Greece.
Tyrants were a favorite topic of declaimers like Lucian. In many ways, the tyrants of rhetoric are similar to modern-day movie villains. In this piece, note how the tyrant's son (less so the tyrant himself) embodies a lot of ancient tyrant stereotypes: power-mad, violent, rapacious, self-centered.
Azoulay (The Tyrant-Slayers of Ancient Athens 2017 page 155) notes that this piece takes as its hypothesis (question to be debated) a variation on the familiar theme of whether a philosopher who has persuaded a tyrant to renounce power should be honored as a tyrant slayer.
Questions for you: Is this a straightforward presentation of facts? Does the speaker persuade you? Can you detect rhetorical special effects? What are they? What's the point? Do you think the rhetoric works at a stylistic or aesthetic level? (This is an English translation, so that's more an approximation stylistically-rhetorically than the actual thing. Still, probably a pretty good one.) Is this straight-forward rhetoric or tongue-in-cheek — Lucian as satirist (see above)? Given that this is an imaginary situation recalling the age of freedom for Greek cities, does the speech seem to have any resonance with the reality of Roman rule?