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.