Quiz Response Prompt
Questions:
- What connects the life of Antiphon, the one "old" sophist that I'm having you read about, with those of Philostratus' "second" sophists?
- With regard to the lives of Favorinus, Polemon, and Herodes, really, with any of our sophists, what issues of race, gender, and/or class do you see? How might that relate to sophistic? I would welcome your thoughts!
Reading Assignments, Text Access, Notes (Philostratus leaves stuff out)
What to read? Philostratus Lives of the Sophists. You are expected to read only the English translation, odd-numbered pages. Note also that I'm not assigning the whole work but only specific sections/page ranges:
- Preface and intro, pages 3-13
- Dio (DY-oh) Cocceianus of Prusa (ca. 40/50-after 110 CE), pages 17-23
- His nickname was Chrysostomus, "Golden Mouth." The Getae were barbarians in what is now Romania and Bulgaria. In 82 CE, Dio was expelled from Italy (where he worked) and Bithynia (his home) for criticizing the emperor Domitian. After wandering Greece, the Balkans, and Asia Minor as an itinerant philosopher, he was recalled by the emperor Nerva (r. 96-98). Whereas most of Philostratus' sophists are known to us mostly from what we read about them, much of what Dio wrote survives to this day.
- Favorinus of Arelate (present-day Arles, ca. 85-155 CE, "Gaul" refers to what is now France), pages 23-29
- Favorinus probably wasn't a hermaphrodite. Rather, he may have been born without testicles. The account of Favorinus and his pal, Herodes Atticus, making fun of the slave Autolecythus is extremely unattractive, indeed, racist. Sophists that they are, Favorinus and Herodes taunt Autolecythus over the latter's poor Greek. Page 27, where Philostratus relates the rivalry between Favorinus and Polemon, is important on the dangers of ambition, what our translation calls "love of glory," in the Greek, philotimia. The phrase "spirit of rivalry" translates to philotimon, which means literally "the element of ambition."
- Antiphon (AN-tee-fohn) of Rhamnus (late fifth cent. BCE), pages 41 ("Some say")-43 (middle), 45 ("A good many of his legal speeches")
- Antiphon the equipper of warships (triremes) is a different person. Antiphon of the 400 tyrants is (probably) the right Antiphon. More confusion with Antiphon dying in Sicily; that was someone else. Antiphon of Rhamnus (a suburb of Athens), our Antiphon, was put to death at Athens for the anti-democratic coup of 404 BCE. As for "selling speeches in defiance of justice," it is true that he ghost-wrote speeches for clients who had to appear in court, as did many other orators, some highly esteemed, of that time and place. It was not illegal to do so. It just wasn't something that you typically let on about.
- Scopelian of Clazomenae (active ca. 80-115 CE), pages 71-89
- It is important to note here the ways that Scopelian was being criticized, not, of course, by Philostratus, an admirer of his. ("Dithyrambic" means getting carried away to the point of not making a lot of sense.) It is also important to note how Philostratus accounts for those criticisms. "Covert allusion" is what we're refering to as "figured discourse," about which more later. References to Asia and to cities like Clazomenae, Smyrna, and to countries like Ionia, Lydia, Caria, Maeonia, Mysia, Phrygia, Cappadocia, and Aeolia, are references to places in present-day Turkey; several of them were not originally Greek-speaking. We'll call the general region "Anatolia." Hellenes and Achaeans are Greeks. Scopelian and Polemon illustrate just how important Anatolia had become, not just for sophistic culture but in the Empire generally. (Cities in ancient Anatolia also include Ephesus, Laodicea, Prusa, Aphrodisias, and Oinoanda.) This life is important for issues of gender; see the incident with the stepmother.
- Lollianus of Ephesus (2nd cent. CE), pages 99-101
- Polemon of Laodicea (90-146 CE), pages 107-137
- Polemon came from a family of immense wealth, a family numbering Black-Sea kings among its earlier members. Note Polemon's full name: Marcus Antonius Polemon. The "Marcus Antonius" bit is the Roman part of the name. It derives from the bestowal of Roman citizenship upon an ancestor by the Roman general Mark Antony (83-30 BCE). As for "Polemon," that is his Greek name. When a foreigner was made a Roman citizen, that person took the praenomen (e.g., "Marcus") and the nomen, or clan-name (e.g., "Antonius"), of the Roman sponsor; the person's original name formed the cognomen, the last name in the series of three. That Roman portion of the name was, along with Roman citizenship, passed on to descendants. We're going to see a lot of that in this course: Greeks and other provincials with Roman citizenship, and the most prominent among them climbing the ladder of Roman politics. Julia Domna and her imperial kin, descended from Syrian kings, are a conspicuous example of the phenomenon. Polemon was born in Laodicea on the Lycus, but lived in, was citizen of, and served the city of Smyrna, on the Aegean coast of Asia Minor. We have two speeches surviving by Polemon, plus a treatise on physiognomy, the art of knowing the soul from bodily signs. His rivalry with Favorinus is of great interest to us.
- Herodes of Athens ("Herodes Atticus," 101/3-177 CE), pages 139-183
- Full name, Lucius Vibullius Hipparchus Tiberius Claudius Atticus Herodes. The Greek part is "Hipparchus Atticus Herodes," the rest indicates Roman connections on both his mother's and his father's side. His father was a Roman senator and the first Greek from the Greek mainland (what we today call Greece) to become a Roman consul. The fortune that Herodes Atticus' dad "discovered" was probably wealth hidden earlier by grandpa to protect it from confiscation by the emperor. Herodes was a major sponsor of public works; as we shall see, that matters a lot for this time and place. One surviving speech is attributed to him, but authorship is doubtful. Athens was, at this point, the chief city for rhetorical and philosophical study. (Other intellectual centers included Alexandria in Egypt and Antioch in ancient Syria.) There's a lot to talk about with Herodes: his difficult relations with the emperor, with other members of the elite, with his own wife, whom he is said to have killed. Also troubling is the incident with Autolecythus.
That works out to be about 60 pages of reading, so get to it early.
Philostratus: Author Notes
Flavius Philostratus, son of Verus, came, it turns out, from a family of sophists, several named "Philostratus." If scholars are right about which Philostratus was which, our Philostratus was born ca. 170 CE into wealth and held important positions in his native city of Athens (not Lemnos). This is probably the "sophist Flavius Philostratus" (Phlabion Philostraton athēnaion sophistēn, IvO 476) whom Athens honored at Olympia by erecting a statue. A son of his and other relatives were Roman senators, a signal honor (see above).
Philostratus, as the inscription notes, was a sophist, and we're told told that around 204, he moved from Athens to Rome, where he continued to teach, just as he had previously. While in Rome, he joined the circle of intellectuals associated with Julia Domna (170–217), wife of the emperor Septimius Severus (r. 193-211). (Julia's Syrian ethnicity matters for us because it illustrates the cosmopolitan character of the Roman Empire and of Greco-Roman culture at that time.) Our Philostratus wrote, among other things, these Lives of the Sophists, the Life of Apollonius of Tyana, and other works, including, so we are told, declamations, though none of these last survive.
Lives of the Sophists
The Lives of the Sophists, which Philostratus completed perhaps in 237, and dedicated to the future emperor Gordian III, contain, as the title indicates, a number of biographies, mostly of sophists working under the Empire, but including "philosophers" whose rhetorical skill earned them a place in Philostratus' book. Philostratus includes as well the lives of ten sophists from classical times, by which I mean the fifth and fourth centuries BCE, the period of greatness for Athenian democracy and oratory — some six hundred years before Philostratus' birth. Why does he include this last group? Like so many sophists under the Empire, Philostratus wants to make a connection between the kind of thing he and others like him did and a literary tradition stretching back to the "golden age" of Greece. Further, by drawing distinctions between the "older sophistic" and the "second sophistic," he can better define the latter. But Philostratus also had to deal with the older sophistic's reputation for flimflam, a reputation that continued to haunt more recent iterations of the art.
Analysis of Text
- Pages 3-5 of the translation contain Philostratus' dedication to Gordian
- 5-13 contrast the "older" sophistic with "second sophistic"
- 13-63 cover figures whom Philostratus accounts philosophers, but whose eloquence earned them the name of sophist, notably Dio of Prusa, pages 17-29. (What else is sophist-like about Dio?)
- 63 to end concerns sophists of the Imperial age
"Older" versus "Second Sophistic"
Philostratus traces out the basic timeline, "older" to "second sophistic," as follows:
- The "ancient" sophistic was founded by Gorgias of Leontinoi (ca. 483-ca. 376 BCE)
- Unlike later sophistic, it was "philosophic"; it took as its themes (hypotheses) those of philosophy: ethics, theology, etc. But it was still rhetoric
- Apart from Gorgias, it's leading lights included
- Protagoras
- Antiphon
- Critias
- The "second" sophistic, not "new," because it also dated back to classical times (5th-4th cent. BCE), started with the Athenian orator Aeschines (ca. 390-ca. 320 BCE) after he had been exiled from Athens (after losing a major law case to his arch rival, Demosthenes) and had taken up the role of rhetoric teacher and occasional speaker
- The older sophistic handled themes "diffusely and at length," and in ways that sought to make a plausible case
- The second sophistic used character sketches (poor and rich, nobles and tyrants), drew its themes (hypotheses) from the past ("history"), and treated those themes conducive to demonstrating skill
- After Aeschines, the next notable exponent of the second sophistic was Nicetes of Smyrna (1st cent. CE). A wealthy benefactor, a teacher-practitioner of show rhetoric, honored in his city, someone who traveled far and wide in the Empire, a person whose rhetorical fame had come to the attention of the emperor himself, Nicetes for Philostratus offers a prime example of this second phase of sophistic art
Note the artificiality of that arrangement. To all intents and purposes, the first of Philostratus' "second sophists" was Nicetes. But that leaves second sophistic disconnected from the Greek golden age. Hence Philostratus' somewhat strained attempt to make Aeschines, who predates the next "second" sophist by four centuries, the first in the tradition.