The paper explores the absence of clear ideological tension in the Greek historiography written in the early empire, using Dionysius and Plutarch as case studies. Given the subjection of Greek culture to Roman politics, it is strange how little these historians used the past as an arena for exploring national identity and the processes of colonization and subjection. I argue that a multivalent approach is necessary: readjusting expectations on the basis that ideas of nationhood became more tightly defined in the Enlightenment; considering the influence of dialogic approaches to textual representation over more authoritative ones; and reading texts with an eye to the dialogue with historian-predecessors. The paper works on Dionysius’ account of the sack of Alba Longa, and on Plutarch’s Roman Questions, to demonstrate the interpretative problems, to illustrate how ideological dilemmas could be dramatized in different types of historical writing, and to point to the usefulness of ‘dialogue’ as a concept when approaching the ideological struggle between Rome and Greece in this period.

Dio of Prusa’s eighteenth oration, the so-called letter On Training for Public Speaking, presents a reading list of Greek literature. The unknown addressee, who appears to be a powerful statesman, wishes to acquire ‘training in eloquent speaking’, for which he has not found the time in the past. Dio helpfully provides him with a short guide to those Greek poets, historians, orators and philosophers who are the most useful models for public speakers. Dio’s canon of Greek literature is traditionally interpreted as yet another representative of the standard reading lists that were used in rhetorical education. Scholars have argued that there is general agreement between Dio’s selection of Greek authors and the reading lists in Dionysius of Halicarnassus’ On Imitation, Quintilian’s Institutio oratoria (book 10) and Hermogenes’ On Types of Style. It has also been suggested that that these reading lists simply repeat the recommendations of Alexandrian scholars like Aristarchus and Aristophanes.

This paper will argue that Dio’s reading list is in fact fundamentally different from that of Dionysius. Among the authors that Dionysius prefers, Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Herodotus, and Demosthenes stand out; Dio on the other hand recommends his reader to study Menander, Euripides, Xenophon and Aeschines. The latter selection appears to correspond more closely to the Roman taste of the first century AD. Although Quintilian follows the order of Dionysius’ list rather closely, he agrees in essential points with his contemporary colleague Dio.

In explaining the differences between these reading lists, we should take at least three factors into account. Firstly, audience: Dionysius presents his treatise On Imitation to the Greek Demetrius, whereas Dio appears to write for a Roman statesman (possibly Titus or Nerva). Secondly, aesthetics: although Dionysius and Dio both claim to offer a practical guide for orators, it is obvious that Dionysius emphasizes ‘beauty’ and ‘sublimity’, whereas Dio focuses on ‘usefulness’. Thirdly, the development of Greek criticism in Rome: between the first century BC and AD, we move from the archaizing, democratic, idealizing classicism of Dionysius to the modern, imperial, pragmatic classicism of Dio.

This chapter is a comparative analysis of the periplous of the Red Sea as described in Diodorus, Bibliotheke 3.38–48 and the ecphrasis 2.17 in Philostratus’ Imagines which is arranged as a voyage with the speaker and his addressee passing through a group of islands. The chapter shows how the reader is encouraged to interact with the text in both passages, affording him pleasure by that; methodically speaking, the chapter is based on the results of the seminal study by Thomas Anz, Literatur und Lust. Glück und Unglück beim Lesen, Munich 1998.

These two passages have in common that they create a vividness and cause the reader to become imaginatively involved in the text; this is mainly due to the fact that both texts give detailed and enargetic descriptions of the regions or islands visited during the journey and that they appeal to the reader’s curiosity (cf. the numerous θαύματα pointed out by the speaker in Imagines 2.17) or his emotions (cf. the pitiful shipwreck drama described in Bibliotheke 3.40.4–8). On the other hand, though, there are significant differences as well. These differences mainly derive from both passages’ media and narrative characteristics:

(1) Different mediality
The Bibliotheke presents itself from the onset as a book written for a reading audience (cf. Bibliotheke 1.1.1 and numerous other instances where the narrator explicitly refers to his readers). The strongly emphasised “bookishness” of the Bibliotheke opens up specific ways in which the reader may derive pleasure from reading the Bibliotheke. In the periplous of book 3 e.g. the narrator often highlights the dangers encountered by the seafarers. The reader can enjoy these descriptions precisely because he is not actually accompanying any sailors but, as a reader, is in a safe position outside the recounted events. The Imagines in contrast are marked by a feigned orality: the ecphrases are stylised as impromptu speeches given by a virtuoso sophist in front of the pictures. Here, the reader is enticed to become engrossed into the descriptions, to let his imagination reign and to enjoy being carried away by the virtuoso performance of the sophist.

(2) Different narrative shaping
From a narratological point of view, the most conspicuous feature of the Bibliotheke’s periplous is its consistent focalisation, i.e. its continuous narration from the perspective of somebody sailing past the shores of the Red Sea. In Imagines 2.17, however, focalisation is much less prominent. The main narrative feature here is that the speaker “narrates away” the boundary between his verbal discourse and the picture described: he metaleptically enters the picture and positively sails through the image. Both techniques on the one hand invite the reader to let himself be involved by these descriptions; on the other hand, though, a potential for reflection and distancing is opened up in both passages—a didactic potential in the case of the Bibliotheke (learning from history), a potential to reflect on the mediality of text and image in the case of the Imagines.

These characteristics as well as the resulting impact on the reader’s pleasure have their place in the respective cultural context: it is the first century BC debate on the pleasure of reading historiography which is relevant for the Bibliotheke, while the Imagines are situated in the culture of education and performance of the Second Sophistic. This contextualisation, too, is in the focus of this chapter.

What are the political implications of universalizing projects like that of Polybius? This was one of the questions I considered in my paper at our September conference.

Polybius’ central assumption is that the rise of Roman power has resulted in a fundamental change of the very structure of the world. This new design of the world he calls the “symploke”, the weaving together of all regions of the world and their individual local histories into the new fabric of Roman power, like a net all the individual threads of which are connected and interrelated. Polybius introduces his concept of the ‘symploke’ through an image of the unity of the body. At 1.4.6-11 he says (Paton’s Loeb translation adapted):

6 We can no more hope to have a comprehensive view of this [the new, symploke structure of the world] from histories dealing with particular events than to get at once a notion of the form of the whole world, its disposition and order, by beholding, each in turn, the most famous cities, or indeed by looking at separate plans of each: a result by no means likely. 7 He indeed who believes that by studying isolated histories he can acquire a fairly comprehensive view of the whole, is, as it seems to me, much in the case of one, who, after having looked at the dissevered limbs of a body once alive and beautiful, fancies he has been as good as an eyewitness of the creature itself in its accomplished design and beauty. 8 For could anyone put the creature together on the spot, restoring its form and the comeliness of life, and then show it to the same man, I think he would quickly avow that he was formerly very far away from the truth and more like one in a dream. 9 For we can get some idea of a whole from a part, but never knowledge or exact opinion. 10 Special histories therefore contribute very little to the knowledge of the whole and conviction of its truth. 11 It is only indeed by study of the interconnection of all the particulars, their resemblances and differences, that we are enabled to achieve a general perspective, and thus derive both benefit and pleasure from history.

The association of Polybius’ concept of the unity of the world and the beauty of complete, functioning body is essential for persuading his readers of the validity of this interpretation of the world under Roman rule. We must not forget that the symploke is not an objectively verifiable description of what the world looks like, but an interpretive concept of understanding the world under Rome in a certain, distinctly positive, way that Polybius wants his reader to adopt.

The body metaphor plays a crucial role in this process, as it associates Polybius’ vision of the unified Roman world with beauty, while conceptualizing the pre-Roman state of the diversity of many autonomous Greek city states in terms of severed limbs and, hence, undesirable. The image of the unified body invests the idea of the unification of the Greek world under Rome with distinctly pleasing aesthetic properties, something to desire and appreciate.

There is no reason to suppose that this is only a cheap trick to advertise the benefits of Roman power to the reader. I think we can safely assume that Polybius did, indeed, find the idea of a unified world aesthetically pleasing and inherently preferable to a world split up into a multitude of autonomous little states. The point I want to stress here is that we do not go deep enough if we approach the question of Polybius’ attitude towards Roman imperialism on an entirely rational basis, collecting all the passages where he either says something positive or something negative about the Romans and then calculating the sum total of each. This will not get us any closer towards Polybius’ attitude towards Roman power because Roman power as an idea, a concept, is much more than concrete examples of individual Romans exerting their power in a good or a bad way. People can still like communism as a concept but reject, even condemn, the attempts to realize it in, say, the Soviet Union or the GDR. Roman power is more than the sum of its parts, and understanding Polybius’ attitude towards Roman power is more than calculating that sum.

This is where the body metaphor comes into play, because it conceptualizes the very idea of the world under Roman rule, independent of the failure of some Roman officials to use their political power as they should, and this idea – to Polybius – is beautiful. Polybius does not (at least initially) like Roman power because its concrete material or cultural advantages; Polybius likes Roman power because he the idea of an organic, body-like unity of the world appeals to him. In the image of the world under Roman rule as a body, the political and the aesthetic form an inseparable unity.

At this point it becomes clear how deeply imperialistic Polybius’ own historical project is. His aim is to translate the new unity of the world into literature, his Histories mirroring in their very structure and design the symploke (see 3.1.4-6) In the symploke, literary aesthetics and historical explanation overlap. In order to achieve this aesthetically pleasing representation of the world under Rome, Polybius is happy to sacrifice the individual and local for the sake of the greater good (29.12.3-9):

[W]hen dealing with a subject which is simple and uniform they [‘local’ historians] wish to be thought historians not because of what they accomplish, but because of the multitude of their books, and to make such an impression as I have described, they are compelled to magnify small matters, to touch up and elaborate brief statements of fact and to convert quite incidental occurrences of no moment into momentous events and actions, describing engagements and pitched battles in which the infantry losses were at times ten men or it may be a few more and the cavalry losses still fewer. 4 As for sieges, descriptions of places, and such matters, it would be hard to describe adequately how they work them up for lack of real matter. 5 But writers of universal history act in just the opposite manner. 6 I should not therefore be condemned for slurring over events, when I sometimes omit and sometimes briefly report things to which others have devoted much space and elaborate descriptions; but I should rather be credited with treating each event as it deserves. 7 For those authors, when in the course of their work they describe, for instance, the sieges of Phanotea, Coronea, and Haliartus, find it necessary to place before their readers all the devices, all the daring strokes, and in addition to this describe at length the capture of Tarentum, the sieges of Corinth, Sardis, Gaza, Bactra, and above all Carthage, adding inventions of their own; and they by no means approve of me, when I simply give a true and unvarnished account of such matters. 9 The same remarks apply to descriptions of battles, the reports of speeches, and the other parts of my history.

Compared to the greatness of unity through Roman power, who cares about what happens at Phanotea, Coronea, and Haliartus? The people who live in these places and whose friends and family members have died in these battles, one obvious answer would be. Looking at Greek inscriptions provides an excellent corrective to the all-too-tempting idea of simply adopting Polybius’ pleasant unifying point of view: local history mattered, it was written down and remembered, and it defined local identities. The ‘truth’ that Polybius is trying to sell to his readers, by contrast, is a global and, as such, deeply Roman one: accepting it is tantamount to accepting Roman power – not because everything the Romans do is good, beneficial and advantageous, but because a unified world under Roman rule is just such an appealing idea.

This entry is getting much longer than I ha planned, and I should probably stop here. I should like to add, though, that this is only one half of the story: in a move that is unique in what remains of ancient historiography, Polybius deliberately throws the unity of his own work, and with it the concept of the beauty of the world unified under Rome, over board by adding another ten books to the original design of his work. I will talk about this in my next entry.

[750-word abstract of a paper delivered in September 2013 in St Andrews. I would welcome suggestions for revision/expansion: Jason König, jpk3@st-andrews.ac.uk]

This paper argues (drawing on recent work on the politics of landscape representation in cultural geography and landscape studies) that representation of mountains plays a key role in Strabo’s exploration of the distinction between civilised and uncivilised territories within the Mediterranean world.

Some aspects of Strabo’s mountains are in line with what we find in other ancient authors, for example the cartographic use of mountains (Strabo starts nearly every account of a new region with an account of its shape, with reference to its mountains–also rivers and coastlines), and the ethnographic association between rough mountains and uncivilised peoples.

In other respects, however, Strabo is unusual, especially in the frequency with which he returns to the subject of human domestication of mountains (which is surprisingly infrequent in earlier geographical and historiographical writing). In some books–most strikingly of all in his account of Iberia in Book 1–he emphasizes repeatedly the way in which Rome has pacified brigands and brought political and military control to wild populations (cf. Geography 2.5.26: ‘the cold mountainous regions furnish by nature only a wretched existence to their inhabitants, yet even the regions of poverty and piracy become civilised as soon as they get good administrators’).

Elsewhere, by contrast, he gives a very different impression of the way in which mountains can be integrated within human civilisation in a more organic way. That theme is concentrated especially in his portrayal of Italy in Book 5, and mainland Greece in Book 8: in these sections we repeatedly encounter descriptions of cities built into hillsides, and mountains associated with economic advantage and religious knowledge (the differences between Strabo and Pausanias are often stressed, but in his books on mainland Greece Strabo is much closer to Pausanias than he is elsewhere). There are some scattered examples of the pacification-of-brigands motif, but they are usually linked (again especially for Greece) with the distant past (e.g. 9.1.4 for the killing of robbers by Theseus at the Sceironian rocks).

Strabo’s account of the hills of Rome is part of that wider narrative of the domestication of mountain landscape (although it has to my knowledge never been read in relation to that wider theme in the text as a whole). It also stands out in ancient Greco-Roman literature as an unusual example of aesthetic appreciation of mountain landscape: ‘the early Romans made but little account of the beauty of Rome, because they were occupied with other, greater and more necessary, matters; whereas the later Romans, and particularly those of today and in my time, have not fallen short in this respect either — indeed, they have filled the city with many beautiful structures…the crowns of those hills that are above the river and extend as far as its bed, which present to the eye the appearance of a stage-painting (σκηνογραφικὴν ὄψιν) — all this, I say, affords a spectacle that one can hardly draw away from’. (5.3.8). For Strabo, it seems, appreciation of the beauty of the land can follow only after it has been brought under control.

There is thus a distinction running through the work between rough mountains which been only recently and in many cases imperfectly pacified, and other regions whose mountains have been domesticated much longer ago. In practice, however, the distinction between those spheres is sometimes undermined as we read, and the final section of the paper examines Strabo’s representation of the region of Pontus in Book 12 in order to demonstrate that. The pacification-of-brigands motif recurs repeatedly in that book in references to the Roman victory over Mithridates, but the uncivilised/civilised dichotomy is not secure here. Most importantly, the depiction of Strabo’s home city of Amaseia, which is built into the rocky landscape around it, recalls the civilised cities of Italy in Book 5 (this is another much analysed passage which like the depiction of the hills of Rome has never been much discussed in relation to portrayal of hills and mountains elsewhere in the work).

The final section of the paper draws comparisons with a series of other geographical and historiographical authors (focusing especially on his late Hellenistic contemporaries and early imperial successors up to the second and early third century CE) in order to explore the possibility that Strabo’s preoccupations with this theme of human control over physical landscape may be at least partly explained by his Augustan context–although I also stress the hazards of relying on a reductive appeal to political context, given how different Strabo’s work is even from what we find in contemporary authors like Dionysius and Diodorus.

One of the things we wanted to do with this project was just to encourage people who work on the imperial Greek literature of the late first to early third centuries CE to look back a bit more often to the late Hellenistic period. I think a lot of people working on the later material don’t do that; certainly that has been the case for me until relatively recently.

It seems to that the obvious place to start in looking at the relationship between late Hellenistic and imperial Greek literature is Philostratus’ Lives of the Sophists, just because he had such a formative role in our periodisation of the ‘Second Sophistic’ as a distinct phase in literary and cultural history; and consequently also in a tendency to skate over late Hellenistic literature in recent scholarship, which I think hasn’t been a recent growth area in quite the same way as the Greek prose literature long second century CE (although there are obviously many important exceptions, in recent new work on authors like Strabo and Diodorus and Dionysius and Parthenius).

Philostratus places the foundation of contemporary sophistry in the classical period, and with Aeschines in particular, but then he skates over four whole centuries, with only the briefest mention of a few late Hellenistic Greek orators (e.g., Philostratus the Egyptian in 1.5, VS 1.5, 486, who is said to have been associated with Cleopatra, and Theomnestus of Naucratis in 1.6, 486, who may have been active in Athens in the first century BC, if he is the philosopher referred to by Plutarch in Brutus 24). Philostratus then dates the revival of the ‘second sophistic’ to the sophist Niketes of Smyrna in the reign of Nero. Some recent scholarship has seen the Augustan period as central to the formation of the epideictic rhetoric traditions which dominated so much later imperial oratory, but you wouldn’t guess it from reading Philostratus.

The key passages are as follows (using Wright’s Loeb translation):

VS 1 intro., 481: Now ancient sophistic [which Philostratus a moment before has defined as ‘philosophic rhetoric’–VS 480], even when it propounded philosophical themes, used to discuss them diffusely and at length; for it discoursed on courage, it discoursed on justice, on the heroes and gods, and how the universe has been fashioned into its present shape. But the sophistic that followed it, which we must not call “new,” for it is old, but rather “second,” sketched the types of the poor man and the rich, of princes and tyrants, and handled arguments that are concerned with definite and special themes for which history shows the way. Gorgias of Leontini founded the older type in Thessaly, and Aeschines, son of Atrometus, founded the second, after he had been exiled from political life at Athens and had taken up his abode in Caria and Rhodes; and the followers of Aeschines handled their themes with a view to elaborating the methods of their art, while the followers of Gorgias handled theirs with a view to proving their case.

VS 1.19, 511: We will pass over Ariobarzanes of Cilicia, Xenophron of Sicily, and Peithagoras of Cyrene, who showed no skill either in invention or in the expression of their ideas, though in the scarcity of first-rate sophists they were sought after by the Greeks of their day, as men seek after pulse when they are short of corn; and we will proceed to Nicetes of Smyrna. For this Nicetes found the science of oratory reduced to great straits (es stenon apeilêmmenên), and he bestowed on it approaches far more splendid even than those which he himself built for Smyrna, when he connected the city with the gate that looks to Ephesus, and by this great structure raised his deeds to the same high level as his words.

Here the revival of sophistic oratory after a long barren period is linked with the increase in public building funded by local benefactors which was such a prominent feature of civic life in the east from the late first century onwards, and so represented as part of a wider renaissance of Greek culture. (Ariobarzanes of Cilicia, Xenophron of Sicily, and Peithagoras of Cyrene are not attested elsewhere–they may be late Hellenistic–we don’t know).

How far does Philostratus’ picture look different when we juxtapose it with writing on rhetoric from the late Hellenistic period he neglects? I think the obvious place to look is Dionysius of Halicarnassus. When we look at the two of them together it is immediately clear that Philostratus is close to Dionysius in many ways, in fact it’s tempting to feel even that he knows Dionysius and imitates him deliberately (it’s hard to find specific verbal echoes, but we wouldn’t necessarily expect that: Philostratus often seems to be borrowing from source texts in quite idosyncratic and deliberately oblique ways which make the borrowing hard to prove). For one thing it is striking that Philostratus’ combination of biography with critical, stylistic assessment is very close to what we find in Dionysius’ lives of the ancient orators, even if Dionysius has a much lower proportion of biographical detail than Philostratus does. It seems to me that there is a lot of work still to be done in exploring the relationship between Philostratus’ and Dionysius’ biographical-critical procedures (Civiletti’s Italian commentary has some good starting-points for that enterprise).

Even more striking is the similarity between Philostratus’ notion of the decline of a literary movement followed by its later revival (although they also use that notion quite differently in some ways). The key extracts from Dionysius’ Preface to On the Ancient Orators are as follows (using Usher’s Loeb translation):

‘In the epoch preceding our own, the old philosophic Rhetoric was so grossly abused and maltreated that it fell into a decline. From the death of Alexander of Macedon it began to lose its spirit and gradually wither away (ekpnein kai marainesthai), and in our generation it had reached a state of almost total extinction.’

‘Whether at the instance of some god, or by the return of the old order of things in accordance with a natural cycle, or through the human urge that draws many towards the same activities: for whatever reason, the ancient, sober Rhetoric has…been restored to her former rightful place of honour…’

The relationship between Dionysius’ account of Atticist and Asianist rhetoric with what we find in Philostratus has been discussed every so often in previous scholarship, but I haven’t found much discussion of the more basic point that Philostratus’ model of decline followed by revival, which is what leads him to elide the Late Hellenistic rhetoric almost entirely, is in fact prefigured precisely within the late Hellenistic literature he so conspicuously ignores (but for passing comparison between the two passages see Whitmarsh, Greek Literature and the Roman Empire 67, n. 108). It is tempting even to feel that Philostratus’ discussion of ‘philosophical rhetoric’, which he gets out of the way right at the start of the work on the grounds that it is not his main interest (VS 1.1-17, before he turns to Aeschines and then Niketes), is a response to Dionysius’ high valuation of that concept, an attempt to contrast Dionysius’ account with his own more idiosyncratic vision of what kind of rhetoric is to be valued (see Civiletti on VS 480 for brief discussion of that possibility). All of that makes me wonder whether these two authors need to be read together rather more often than they are.

Our project was off to a great start with the planning workshop on 13 June. In preparation for the big conference in September, we were eager to discuss some key aspects of the project with our colleagues in St A. Many of them work on different texts of the period(s) we are interested in and we wanted to draw on their experience to clarify some important aspects of our project. Some of our key questions were the starting and ending point of the project; which texts to cover; and whether (and how) to integrate the Latin side. We had a great turn out and heard fascinating papers by Alex Long, Myles Lavan, Rebecca Sweetman, and Alice König, all of which were followed by stimulating discussion. We hope to develop further many of the points made then in the blog entries of the following months; in particular, we are looking forward to bringing the results of the workshop in dialogue with the papers at the conference.

We started with a brief overview of what we want to do in the project. The main focus was on where to begin and end. Periodization is always arbitrary, and as much as it appeals to think of a ‘Hellenistic period’ that is somehow distinctly different from the classical and the imperial periods, all these ‘periods’ develop from each other. Bound up with this question are ancient models of periodization which were often used as the basis for our modern ones. The idea, for example, that something new begins with the death of Alexander the Great goes back at least as far as Dionysius of Halicarnassus (Preface to On the Ancient Orators), and the whole concept of the “Second Sophistic” is based on Philostratus. Consequently, Dionysius and Philostratus were two of the authors we chose to discuss in our introduction.

‘External’ markers of periods such as the death of Alexander are, in the last instance, of little help because the Hellenistic world is so variegated and comprises so many individual ‘micro-cultures’ that differ from kingdom to kingdom and from city state to city state. Rebecca Sweetman’s talk fleshed out these general concerns by discussing archaeological evidence from Crete, Athens, Sparta and the Cyclades alongside each other. What goes for periods also holds true for the generalizing concepts of “Greek” and “Roman”: the key word here, too, is “diversity”. If we are dealing with a plethora of local identities and an equally variegated range of ways of negotiating Greek and Roman cultural and political concepts (not to mention local influences…), how does one approach a question like ours, the development of Greek cultural identity in the Hellenistic und imperial periods? In any case we will have to be wary of trying to produce a homogeneous narrative, as appealing as that might be. The Hellenistic world was, much like ours, fragmented; this does not mean that there are no common factors at play. But these shouldn’t be taken for granted and need to be identified carefully first. Scholarship that seeks to understand the cultural processes of these ‘periods’ will have to reflect, to a certain extent, the diversity and variety of the material that we are dealing with.

If we look at Greek literature, Polybius’ Histories would appear to be a good starting point for our inquiry. As far as we can tell, his work provides the first testimony to a deep impact of the Roman presence on a Greek’s outlook on and understanding of the world. Polybius conceives of the rise of Roman power as a paradigm change in world history: the way in which Roman power became the point of reference for all the individual realms and city states in the Mediterranean and ‘wove’ them together (Polybius calls this the symploke) had no precedent in history, and he is probably right. This is more than the claim, familiar from Herodotus and Thucydides and many other authors, that their subject is greater than anything that has ever happened before: the rise of the Romans in Polybius’ view resulted in a fundamentally new structure of the entire Mediterranean world. The Persian Wars, one could argue, had the potential of bringing about a similarly profound change; yet the decisive point is that they did not, but the Romans did.

One way to trace this impact of the Romans both in Greek literature and on the level of the micro-cultures, is the inclusion of inscriptions alongside literary texts. Myles Lavan discussed the letter of L. Cornelius Scipio and his brother to Herakleia in Karia from 190BCE (SIG(3rd edn.) 618; RDGE 35). The letter shows nicely how the Romans adopted the language of the negotiation of power that characterizes the communication between city states and the Hellenistic kings (see John Ma, Antiochus III and the Cities of Western Asia Minor. Oxford 1999). Hellenistic city states had developed this language as an incredibly effective tool to negotiate their own interests with the demands of the rulers. ‘Power’, as Andrew Wallace-Hadrill put it (PCPS 216 (n.s. 36), 1990, 143–81, at 147), ‘does not exist without the language in which it is conceived and presented and argued over.’ The language of the Greek inscriptions which allowed city states and rulers to negotiate their respective interest, had created an infrastructure of power, as it were, which the city states continued to use for the Romans and which the Romans fit into with remarkable ease. Tracing the development of this language of power in Greek inscriptions seems a promising way to understand the impact of Roman power on the micro-level and the level of local cultures throughout the empire; it will also help us avoid the ‘literature trap’ which privileges literary over other texts and thus creates a too narrow and undifferentiated narrative of the impact of Roman power on Greek culture.

Alex Long provided fascinating insights into another important aspect of Hellenistic and imperial culture, the development of philosophical thought. His paper on Posidonius raised many questions about how philosophical school create their own distinctive profile by engaging with the thoughts of their predecessors, representatives of other schools and the canonical figures of philosophy, in particular Plato. Strategies of traditionalization here often go hand-in-hand with the creation of distinction, as different branches of philosophical thought develop when philosophers are looking for affinity with the ideas of the great predecessors and fill in the gaps they perceive in the latters’ works, each in their own characteristic way.

This dovetails nicely with the dynamics observable in Dionysius of Halicarnassus’ classicist writings: Dionysius models his community of ‘classicists’ along the lines of the prominent philosophical schools, often drawing on aesthetic and philosophical concepts developed there; and like them, he seeks to claim the great classical philosophers Plato and Aristotle as the forebears of his particular kind of aesthetic thought.

Similar strategies of distinction can be seen in the work of Vitruvius, as Alice König demonstrated. In Vitruvius’ thought aesthetic concepts are integrated with different ideas from philosophical traditions, and the whole complex is closely tied back to political power. Vitruvius, Dionysius of Halicarnassus and the Augustan principate all converge in their interest in the conjunction of aesthetics, morals and power, be it in literary style, paintings, statues or architecture. It would be promising, we think, to follow this line of thought through imperial Greek culture and see whether and how the concept of an interrelation of morals, aesthetics and power changes over time.

Alice’s paper has taken us into the early stages of the Roman empire; this, in turn, brings us back to one of the crucial questions of Jason’s and mine introductory paper: the question of where to end. Philostratus seems an obvious choice, but in the discussion it also became clear that we might want to consider Plutarch as an alternative, because of his role as a catalyst linking Hellenistic and imperial Greek culture.

Jason demonstrated how fruitful it is to read Philostratus’ concept of periodization alongside that of Dionysius of Halicarnassus. Interestingly, as much as modern scholars like to think of Dionysius as the beginning of the Atticism that is characteristic of the ‘Long Second Century’, it would appear that it is precisely the classicism of the first century BCE that Philostratus dismisses as irrelevant. In stark contrast, he places strong emphasis on the literary development that Dionysius condemns as ‘Asianism’. But this will be the subject of our next blog post…

Monthly work-in progress blog entries will be posted to this website from June 2013 onwards.