Sophia and the Art — and Science — of Networking

Sensitive Content

This is to let students know that some of the reading for 28-Feb will deal with issues of racial, gender-based, and other bias, and with sexual violence. Some may find that upsetting. I therefore encourage students to share their feelings via journal entries, by emailing me — however they see fit. See more under "Sensitive Content" on the course Syllabus.

Quiz Response Prompt, Aim of Assignment

• Sophia and the Art — and Science — of Networking. Brightspace "quiz" (or better, journal entry).

The purpose of this assignment is:

• To get us thinking about how competitive emotion mediated relationships, how it was a factor in creating connections and disconnects between people and things. For instance,
  • If I envy my rivals, what relationships does that create between myself, those rivals, and the prizes we desire?
  • How in my day-to-day life do I navigate the potential threat posed by my encounters with others? How can I know whether to connect with them or to steer clear?
• To shift focus toward sub-elite actors and concerns
  • Polemon very much was a member of the elite, and Alciphron likely was; both will have viewed those non-elite realms through elite lenses. Still, this is a start.
• To explore competition in relation to issues of race, gender, sexuality, and class
• To explore what it meant to be Greek under Rome

That's a lot to ponder and will require discussion in class; we may not get to all of it. So let me pose a more free-form sort of journal prompt:

Text Access

Polemon Physiognomy

Hoyland, Robert. 2007. "A New Edition and Translation of the Leiden Polemon." In Seeing the Face, Seeing the Soul: Polemon’s Physiognomy from Classical Antiquity to Medieval Islam, edited by Simon Swain and G. R. Boys-Stones, 329-463. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.

To make access easier, I've uploaded a PDF to Brightspace. Or you can use the online book.

In any case, I'm asking that you read only the English translation of the Arabic text (Polemon's Greek does not survive, but translations into other languages do), and only the following topics/page ranges:

1. Opening. (p. 341-343)
2. The man from Cyrene. (p. 351)
3. The man of Lydia. (pp. 355-359)
4. The man from Corinth. (pp. 361-365)
5. The man with crab eyes. (p. 365)
6. Radiant eyes., The emperor Hadrian. The man from the island that is in Phoenicia. (pp. 369-371)
7. Natural eunuchs, Favorinus. (pp. 377-379)
8. Physiognomy of limbs. (start, p. 381)
9. Similarity of humans to animals. (p. 385)
10. Similarity of humans to animals. (cont'd, p. 391)
11. Masculinity, femininity. (p. 393)
12. On nationalities. (pp. 423-427)
13. On those whose appearances deceive. (pp. 437-439)
14. On the sign of the person soon to be afflicted by sudden misfortune. On detecting immanent wife abduction. On a man lying about a boat sinking. (pp. 457-461)

Alciphron's Letters

Benner, Allen Rogers, and F. H. Fobes. 1949. The Letters of Alciphron, Aelian, and Philostratus, Loeb Classical Library; 383. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Again, I'm asking that you read only the English translation of the following letters:

Book 1. Letters of Fishermen. Letters

• 5
• 15
• 17-19

Book 2. Letters of Farmers. Letters

• 27
• 35 (letter writer and addressee are women)

Book 3. Letters of Parasites (for parasites, see below). Letters

• 8 (from a parasite, to a parasite, about a parasite)
• 26 (What's the dramatic situation?)

Book 4. Letters of Courtesans (likewise, see below). Letters

• 7 (from a sex worker to a client)
• Frag. 5 (from, to, and about sex workers)

Introduction to Texts

Polemon and Physiognomy

As you'll recall from your reading of Philostratus' Lives of the Sophists, Polemon of Laodicea (90-146 CE) was a distinguished orator, teacher of rhetoric, and all around bigwig from the age of the second sophistic. Among other things, he wrote what was a much admired and highly influential Physiognomy. Polemon's Greek does not survive, but translations and paraphrases in Greek, Syriac, Arabic, and Latin do. What we're reading is from a translation into Arabic, and dating perhaps to the 9th or 10th cent. CE.

(The Arabic-speaking world played a key role in preserving ancient Greek knowledge. Greek philosophy, science, and medicine were important to medieval Arab scholars, who translated many of those texts into Arabic. See more at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.)

The Oxford English Dictionary defines physiognomy as "[t]he study of the features of the face, or of the form of the body generally, as being supposedly indicative of character; the art of judging character from such study." Polemon would likely tell us that it is the art and science of reading the soul through the body's signs. Polemon was not the first to write on physiognomy. The philosopher Aristotle (384-322 BCE) discussed it; certain treatises on the topic, not all of them preserved, predated Polemon's.

Polemon, like others, very much presents physiognomy as epistēmē, knowledge systematized according to rational principles. Yet it is no easy task to view ancient physiognomy as anything but pseudo-science, what with its reliance on gendered and ethnic — even racist — stereotypes. Still, a thoughtful approach to the topic does not have to be uncritically sympathetic. Nor can we achieve a rounded understanding of any discipline unless we try to view it from within its own intellectual horizons. Viewing physiognomy from within those horizons, we see how it relies on rhetorical proof: enthymemes, analogy, etc. It appeals, in Maria Sassi’s phrase, “[to] collective patterns of thought and personal intuitions” (The Science of Man in Ancient Greece, 81).

Of interest to us is the very idea that such a science would be useful to know. Who, though, would have needed to know it? What was its "value added"? How did this knowledge "arm" one, and for what kinds of battles? How does Polemon's treatise view its intended audience in relation to persons understood as "other"?

Alciphron's Letters

I start by pointing out a puzzle. Alciphron's Letters include a series of three between a pair of fishermen (book 1 numbers 17-19). Once upon a time, one of them lost a net, which the other finds years later, rotting on a beach. Finders, keepers, shouldn't the net be his? Just to be sure, the finder writes a letter to the net's former owner. How does the owner respond? With bile and vitriol. Thus the finder, driven by envy’s evil eye, by a "hunger for other people’s stuff," by "insatiable lust," asks for "unjust favors," or so the owner claims — why? Why all this combative talk about envy and lust, and for what, a rotting net? What has the finder done to trigger this outburst? What might that suggest about competitive emotion?

We'll talk about that in class. Here, I would stress that these are fictitious letters, mini-dramas, like literary TikTok videos or Tweets telling made-up stories. As for the author, one Alciphron, not much is known about him. We are told that he was a rhētōr, a teacher-practitioner of rhetoric, and one who cultivated the use of Attic Greek dialect. That, along with evidence internal to the letters themselves, tends to suggest a date of 200 CE or later, and aligns our author with others likewise given to nostalgic evocation of the Greece That Was. This is, in other words, very much like other writing from the period of the second sophistic. As such, it features not just drama but one of the chief concerns of Imperial-era rhetoric: ēthopoiia, "characterization," the art of bringing characters and their quirks alive through speech and action.

The dramatic setting is, ostensibly, fourth-century BCE Attica, give or take (Attica is the territory surrounding Athens). This is, however, an Attica of the imagination, a world pieced together from literary antecedents, with a heavy debt to comic drama; a world peopled by fishermen, farmers, parasites, and courtesans, whose erudition and verbal panache can, at times, seem out of step with their work lives, even to the point that they themselves resemble sophists. Indeed, the author's fondness for learned allusion and citation matters in the letters. Yet it also matters that the collection, despite the literary games it plays, shows empathy for the trials and tribulations of its déclassé characters.

We're especially interested in the ways that these characters interact with one another and with others, how they compete and how they network. How does emotion figure into their networking?

As for the collection itself, it is divided into books organized by profession:

• Book One, letters of fishermen. Note how difficult and precarious their lives are
• Book Two, letters of farmers. Their lives seem more stable, though still precarious
• Book Three, letters of parasites. Theirs is the most precarious life-style of all, but what is a parasite? A parasite (Greek parasitos, "one who takes food alongside") is a professional sponger, someone who makes his living from getting invited to dinners of the wealthy, and putting up with the abuse to which he is subjected. We don't know much about the real lives of parasites, but they're prominent in fiction and comedy
• Book Four, letters of courtesans. "Courtesan" translates Greek hetaira, a sex worker who contracts long-term relationships with men who pay them large fees. Sex was not the only thing involved; hetairai also provided learned conversation and held fancy soirées. It was important to create the appearance of an enduring, affective relationship with clients. For that reason, hetairai could be compared to sophists

Emotion in Alciphron Letters 1.18

This letter, brief though it is, is dense with content important for our course. Briefly, the three letters 1.17-19 show us one fisherman, the finder of a net rotting on a beach, staking his claim to the net in a letter to the net's (former) owner. The owner, in turn, responds angrily, refusing to acknowledge the finder's claim. The finder then gives up, though not without restating his earlier position on who should have the thing.

What stands out for the net owner's letter (1.18) is the state of mind, the emotions, that he attributes to the net finder. Those include, notably, the first emotion mentioned, namely, envy, which the letter writer connects to the evil eye:

"Ill-natured and envious is the eye of your neighbour, says the proverb."

The Greek word that he uses for "envious" is baskanos, which is related to the noun baskania, a synonym for phthonos, "envy." But baskania is also Greek for the "evil eye." For the "Sociality, Emotion, agōn" assignment, we'll talk more about the evil eye and its connection to envy. For now, I'd like to focus on envy and other emotion in the net owner's letter.

The first thing that stands out is the notion, conveyed in the quoted proverb, that neighbors commonly envy, indeed, that envy is all around us and needs to be guarded against. In ancient Greek literary sources, that notion seems to be a common refrain. Here I quote my 2021 article:

"It matters for us that phthonos was viewed as fundamentally antisocial, a bane to friendships, households, even cities. Yet there was as well something banal about it. In several of our sources, it is normal for envy (phthonos, baskania) to target neighbors, siblings, and friends." (page 352)

Which is not to say that envy actually was commonplace, something that we cannot ever hope to prove. Rather, what matters is that it was common, or at least, hardly unusual, to make such statements. We can call the practice "envy-attribution," which Edith Eidinow classifies as a "sense-making device," a way to explain "otherwise inexplicable events within communities" (2015, page 244).

What, then, does envy explain, whether in this letter or anywhere that it's alleged to exist? That's not, however, the only emotion that the net owner attributes to the net finder; we have as well "insatiate desires" and "itching for other people's property," factors, along with envy, driving "you to request unfair favours." Which forces us to ask, What rhetorical work do all those emotions do in the net owner's letter? Indeed, why all this fuss over a rotting and seemingly useless net?