Lateiner, 'Second Sophistic. A Cultural Phenomenon in the Roman Empire', Bryn Mawr Classical Review 9410
URL = http://hegel.lib.ncsu.edu/stacks/serials/bmcr/bmcr-9410-lateiner-second
Graham Anderson, The Second Sophistic. A Cultural Phenomenon
in the Roman Empire. New York: Routledge, 1993. Pp. xiii,
303. ISBN 0-415-09988-9.
Reviewed by Donald Lateiner -- Ohio Wesleyan University
Graham Anderson, Reader in Classics at the University of Kent
at Canterbury, is known to students of Greek culture in the Roman
Imperial period for stimulating articles and books on Lucian
(1976), the ancient novelists (1984), and Philostratus (1986).
This book refers to Philostratus' gossipy, effusively laudatory,
and anecdotal Lives of the Sophists almost on every page,
and indeed might be read before the earlier volume, because its
scope is more general. Overlap is inevitable since the first
hundred pages of the 1986 book concern the sophists and their
"biographer," and judgments expressed there are assumed in the
book under review. The present volume in twelve chapters examines
the public activities, careers, and literary record of something
we still (wrongly [Wilamowitz] or rightly [Bowersock]) call, with
ancient precedent (Philostratus VS 481), "the second sophistic."
Anderson's first page problematizes the name and the phenomenon.
He later suggests that "there was no real break in the history of
'Sophistic' at all" (18) between Gorgias and Aeschines on the
earlier hand and Nicetes and the appropriately named Epigonus on
the other, later one, but he never squarely addresses or answers
the problems that he has rightly raised.
As the blurb says, Anderson "confirms the image of sophists as
vain, contentious and sometimes superficial." (More scholars
themselves now "blurb" their own books if BMCR's readers
indulge me in a neologistic verb. Therefore it seems fair in an
epoch of parsimonious publishing houses to quote the blurb.) The
blurb continues: "Rather than dismissing sophistic literature as
stale and irrelevant, Dr Anderson sees it as often vigorous and
witty, though not without the risk of pretentiousness and sheer
facility." (Remember the litotes). The book appears in one of the
many energetic and laudable Routledge series, this one entitled
"Graeco-Roman History and Culture." The volume bears the (by now)
seemingly trademarked, vaguely inaccurate, campy Sir Lawrence
Alma-Tadema (1836-1912) jacket illustration, this time "A Lover
of Art" in Glasgow. Roland Barthes or his fecund progeny could
make interesting hay of this major decision to merchandize books
on antiquity with the aid of retro-Victorian sensibilities (and
sometimes glossy pornography, e.g., "A Favourite Custom" of 1909,
although not here). These paintings now fetch significant prices.
The choice of artistic genre disturbingly suggests a distorting
reflection of historical reality, more suited to
deconstructionist rhetoric than Anderson's straightforward
account.
The survey is welcome, since relatively few books in English
on the range of literary and intellectual activity in the period
150-300 C.E. exist. Anderson extends his study well beyond this
date, in fact. Aside from the small Lucian industry and the
recent inflation of work on the ancient novel, one must scour the
periodicals and risk hernias with the non-periodical,
non-Festschrift, non-Encyclopaedic Aufstieg und Niedergang der
roemischen Welt in order to explore the riches that modern
scholarship on this period has uncovered or developed. In recent
decades, Louis Robert, Glen Bowersock, and C.P. Jones, inter
alios, have enriched knowledge of this era's non-literary
records. Bryan Reardon's influential Courants litteraires
grecs... (1971) set a benchmark for study of the literary
phenomena, raconteurs, stand-up casuists, and lecturers who lived
for and in a world of glitzy eloquence and "improv" theater based
on ancient books.
The introduction and first chapter place second sophistry in
some historical context. The Greeks were a sensitive, conquered
people (as the paternal consular Pliny noted in an epistle to a
praetorian senator: Ep. 8.24) living under the Roman boot (as the
candid Plutarch observed, Moral. 813e-f). The inertia of
nostalgia cannot be overestimated: Xerxes transits the Hellespont
innumerable times in innumerable genres (prolalia, progymnasmata,
melete, encomia, syncrisis, kataskeue, anaskeue, etc.), in order
to satisfy the Hellenic appetite for reliving again their own
"finest hour." The sophists, performers all, were popular because
they serviced, or kept on the respirator, the faded glories of
Hellenic identity and belief in Hellenic importance amidst a
multi-cultural congeries of an empire that had passed the
Hellenes by. They competed in public for valuable prizes (named
chairs and immunities, e.g.) and students; their egos were
fragile. Cutting-contests were popular with the educated masses
who had nothing much better to do in the absence of TV sit-coms.
On at least one occasion, Philagrus slapped a sleepy member of
the sophist's audience to wake him up (VS 578, a hilarious page
on sophistic manners, p.37 here). Herodes Atticus and Libanius
are more interesting characters than the casual reader might
realize from this book's hasty glances. Anderson claims to offer
an "outline history of Sophistic," but don't look for dates an
objection the author himself has raised against hapless Eunapius
(p.110).
Chapters 3 through 8 examine this long era's treatment of
various genres such as rhetorical exercises, historiography,
philosophy, and fiction. Anderson makes the useful point (p.81)
that similes drawn from the stage are so commonly sprinkled by
the sophists because "the theatre was an ancient institution with
a particular cultural interest, concerned with stage
performance," their own preoccupation. Controversies over
Atticism are dismissed perhaps too facilely. However unseasonable
we may think them to have been, we need to learn why the name and
cachet of Atticism meant so much to those who engaged in the
debate. The treatment of historiography (ch.5) is suggestive. The
entire book is carefully documented.
Anderson says of an average Encomium of Demosthenes that "This
historical confection is by no means an artistic success, but we
must ask why it should have been written at all" (p.117). The
question might in turn be asked about many subsequent and current
academic efforts, cui bono? Anderson describes phenomena more
often and more successfully than he analyzes them, and questions
like the one quoted are left twisting in the wind.
Anderson persuades the casual reader that the sophists bat
about the same complacent generalities for many generations and
"write convincingly... with almost no evidence whatever of expert
knowledge" about Rome, Achilles, or Xerxes (the man they loved to
hate, the Hitler of later ancient Greece). "Exuberant banality"
and "pretentious affectation" produce "a tastelessly overblown
sophistic muddle" (130-31). The topic happens to be poor Eunapius
again but it could have been neurotic Aristides or uncritical
Philostratus, or even Fronto or Plutarch whose inclusion in this
volume on Sophistic requires further argument.
Chapter 8 deals with erotic stories in the sophists, both
imitations of Platonic eroticism and situations in the novels.
Anderson identifies rhetorical set-pieces in the novels as
originating in the schools, then more or less revised for a
fictional setting. Chapter 9 deals with humor: paradoxography
such as encomia of baldness and fleas, five encomia of Thersites,
the misuse and abuse of Marathon and Alexander the not-so-Great,
Homer as polymath, and other trivia that make the television
quiz-show "Jeopardy" look like happy Mondays in the school of
Aristotle.
Chapter 10 examines sophist gods: "genuine piety or literary
reflex," he asks. (Anderson employs "reflex" throughout to mean
commonplace or accepted attitudinizing.) Jewish and Christian
performers such as Philo, Clement, and Basil flourish in their
audiences' faces many of their pagan enemies' similes,
allegories, paradoxes, and tropes, and consciously justify their
use. Gregory of Nazianzus thundered against a contorted age when
"talking nonsense has gained the reputation of culture" (p.210),
but he thunders in the same kind of "pompous wordplay" and prose
that he condemns, a symptomatic problem for an emerging
counter-culture such as Christianity.
"Only Lucian will have a clear vision of the vanity of it all,
but his is still a testimony from within" (p.233). The pregnant
observation aborts before any occasional piece of Lucian's
receives the full analysis that could prove it or make it
interesting. Too often the book stays too general, and Anderson's
final estimation condemns with faint praise when it does not
condemn with an armory of elegant vituperation. His
"self-indulgent mannerist drivel" is as good as "the ropy prattle
of rheumatic brains," when you care enough to say the very worst
about sophistic sciolism and etiolated parolists. Anderson
worries that "the cultural life of the empire is being
insidiously written off." He avers that the sophists' system "did
not in the end limit creativity" (p.242). But, on his own
evidence, something limited it. Similarly, Anderson explicitly
defends the world of the sophists as "not a curious and sterile
cultural irrelevance" (244), while warning us not to remain blind
to their flaws. His book has detailed those flaws mercilessly so
as to make even a blind man see. Au fond Anderson seems to have
wanted to like them and their produce but to have failed. The
book concludes with forty pages of references, a helpful select
bibliography, and a joke-free index.
Anderson's book collects essays rather than constructs a
coherent and significant thesis argued in detail. Although he
acknowledges the questionable utility of the term "second
sophistic," since it is hard to discover when or if the first one
ever evaporated, to judge by the literature from Alexander the
Great to the Alexanders of Abonuteichos and Aphrodisias, Anderson
uses it anyway. The label seems to mean something. His essays
then discuss useful topics but they do not explain the social,
economic, and intellectual forces that make the second sophistic
whatever it uniquely was. The problem arises from the amorphous
personnel and activities that comprise the subject-matter, not
Anderson's fault but still a hurdle that cannot be ignored. The
result is fish and fowl.
I am not sure whether we are interested in Eunapius of Sardis.
I am not sure whether we ought to be. But if we are, then the
snippets that we encounter here are not enough to form a just
judgment of his work, and most authors receive less attention
than this "sophistic" historian. Arrian receives less than two
pages despite his varied and extensive historiography. The focus
on topics, not individual authors, is reasonable, but there seems
to be not enough consideration of any work or author for the
uninitiated browser to decide whether to alter course and to read
Eunapius. On the other hand, if you are a regular reader of
Eunapius and I can name two you will not learn anything you did
not know already. Anderson calls his selection "arbitrary."
We append some quibbles for persistent readers: Anderson
affects litotes much too often (e.g., "scarcely less important,
not infrequently, not a little wit, will not have been without
its effect"). Page 228 offers four examples in twelve lines of
text. Litotes is a dangerous trope because it remains ambiguous.
In scholarly literature it suggests that the author is
him/herself uncertain where to come down on questions. Anderson
was probably infected by his affected subjects. As many as 219
endnotes are attached to chapters, mostly brief references to
ancient texts that would better appear at the bottom of the page
or in the text. In this dense forty-page forest, the editor or
designer offers no page headers referring to pages covered or
even to chapters, just the unhelpful "Notes and References." This
makes ascertaining authorities very tedious. An unfortunate
misprint has an Olynthian called an Olympian in the presence of
Prometheus (p.150). A misunderstanding of American toponymy
attributes the recently deceased Fred Householder's 1941
(Columbia University) New York dissertation on Lucian to a nearly
non-existent Columbia, Ohio. I presume that Columbus (transformed
into a literary locale of notorious note by Philip Roth) was
(wrongly) intended.
The book fills a niche in a discipline that often ignores
them.