Lawrence Kim: ‘Asian’ oratory from the Hellenistic period to the Second Sophistic

What does the Second Sophistic owe to Hellenistic oratory and rhetorical discourse? Does the Second Sophistic represent something completely new, marked by a fundamental break from previous style, taste, and practice? Or should we speak of an essential continuity with what went before, despite the changes in social and political context? In the late nineteenth century, this question was posed in terms of a polarity between ‘Attic’ and ‘Asian’ styles; while Erwin Rohde saw the Second Sophistic as dominated by the flamboyant, artificial, and mannered ‘Asian’ rhetoric so prominent in the Hellenistic era, others saw Imperial orators (e.g., Dio, Aristides, and Lucian) as rejecting Hellenistic fashion and advocating a restrained and moderate ‘Attic’ style. Eduard Norden argued that in fact both sides were correct; he saw in each period an identical struggle between proponents of an ‘old’, conservative ‘Attic’ style and their ‘modern’ ‘Asian’ opponents. The validity of Norden’s thesis, which posits a fundamental continuity of both stylistic positions from the Hellenistic to the Imperial era, is, in my opinion, indisputable, despite several problems on points of detail. But the tendency in more recent Second Sophistic scholarship has been to emphasize Imperial writers’ conscious rejection of Hellenistic culture, and to highlight their conservative, classicizing attitude to content and style, as well as language (e.g., the adoption of grammatico-lexical (as opposed to stylistic) Atticism). The ‘modern’, ornate, ‘Asian’ side of Second Sophistic rhetorical style that so struck Rohde and Norden has largely been ignored, at best displaced by modern scholars onto descriptions of the extravagance, excess, and exuberance of sophistic performance.

My primary goal in this article is thus to reiterate, with refinements, the claim that Second Sophistic rhetoric should be seen as sharing key features with that of the Hellenistic period. More specifically, I demonstrate that in both periods a certain style of ‘sophistic’ Greek oratory or prose (called ‘Asian’ by its opponents in the first century BCE) can be found, which is characterized by brief, balanced clauses, ‘Gorgianic’ figures, and other embellishing effects: to the scanty Hellenistic remains of Hegesias and Heraclides Criticus we can compare the work of Imperial authors like Favorinus, Maximus of Tyre, and Achilles Tatius. Moreover, in both periods, such a style inspired hostile criticism by ‘classicizing’ writers (e.g., Dionysius; Plutarch and Lucian) who champion a ‘classical’, moderate, and restrained style in contrast to the alleged excess, affectation, and profligacy of their opponents. Despite this underlying continuity, however, there are also significant differences in the way this style is employed and discussed in each period: the predominance of Roman discussions (and the use of the term ‘Asian’) in the earlier period is not matched later, nor are there any examples in the Second Sophistic of the pompous and verbose variety of ‘Asian’ oratory criticized by the so-called Roman Atticists. Most importantly, perhaps, is that in the Imperial period we have first instance of a text celebrating, rather than denigrating, ‘sophistic’ style—Philostratus’ Lives of the Sophists.

The nature of the relationship between Hellenistic and Imperial oratory is a topic bedeviled by problems of terminology (the term ‘Asian’ is not used of contemporary oratory in the Second Sophistic; ‘Attic’ refers only to style in the late Hellenistic period, but later to style and dialect), unevenly distributed evidence (virtually no ‘Asian’ oratory from the first century BCE survives), and inconsistencies and vagueness in our main sources (Dionysius, Cicero, Philostratus). My goal in this article is to provide a clear, coherent account of the relationship, and to highlight the significant continuity in rhetorical style and discourse between the two eras.