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.
Monthly Archives: May 2015
Casper C. de Jonge, On Imitation: from Dionysius to Dio
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.
Joy Connolly: Inscape empire: uses of classical Athens from Cicero to Aristides
As early as the fourth century BCE Greeks like Isocrates began to represent Athens as a universal model of human greatness. Being “Greek” in an Attic mode came to embody itself in a set of cultural practices (like speaking pure Greek or doing rhetoric or philosophy) theoretically accessible to all educated men, regardless of “native” ethnicity or language. This construction of Greekness created an immensely useful heuristic for the Romans who had conquered the Mediterranean world. If Athens could be claimed as the model for refined human culture on a global scale, it was Roman military might that preserved its memory and made its continued circulation possible. The habits of thought and practice advocated by classical Atticizing Hellenism promoted a universalist worldview peculiarly favorable to imperial government and its claims to provide security.
This paper explores how the habit of imperial Greeks of seeing Athens in classicized and classicizing, universalized and universalizing terms — already incipient in fifth and fourth century Attic texts — gains traction in first century BCE Roman texts, particularly in the writings of Cicero. This has implications not only for understanding the development of Greek imperial civic culture, but for grasping the forces that gradually made Roman citizenship thinkable as a universal property. After sketching recent critiques of cultural studies’ use of “identity” as a term of art, the paper turns to the emphasis on fantasy in forging ideas and practices of collective belonging in Frantz Fanon, Lauren Berlant, Homi Bhabha and others. Closely reading Cicero’s representation of his own desiring identification with Athens (especially in the prefaces to De Finibus) it examines how immersion in a cultural context coded as foreign or other transforms local regional, linguistic, or family bonds into a larger “inscape” of transcendent identification — in this case, with “classical” “Attic” culture. The paper seeks to advance our historical understanding of the adoption and transformation of Greek culture by Roman elites (whose distinctive imitative qualities Denis Feeney has recently noted) and its role as a forebear of Atticizing imperial Greeks, and to contribute to the growing literature in political thought on the history of cosmopolitan and universalist values.
Mario Baumann: Joyful voyages: Periplous and the reader’s pleasure in Diodorus’ Bibliotheke and Philostratus’ Imagines
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.