studies should be a useful reminder that (despite what is sometimes claimed) battle lines are still drawn up fiercely around the study of ancient texts.
Postclassicism is not, however, merely a matter of updating political and ethical mores. Classics as a discipline was, for sure, more than most humanities subjects forged in the white heat of imperialist, nationalist, elitist, disciplinarian, androcentric imperatives, but collective self-congratulation on “our” liberal progressiveness is lazy and too easy. Rather, what I aim to do in this book is attack some of the conventional ways of categorizing literature, all of which are to some extent rooted in nineteenth-century, postromantic ideas of classical value. Classicists’ organization of literary history has tended to be dominated by an unspoken aesthetic that places certain kinds of texts in the center and hence privileges certain kinds of narratives of “what the Greeks thought.” It is at this kind of assumption, most of all, that this book takes aim. The literary production of the ancient Greeks (and others) is understood here not in terms of an intrinsic worth that is to be adulated—for value only ever indicates what the buyer is willing to pay—but as a plural cultural system. Despite the ever-increasing sophistication of our strategies for reading individual texts, classicists in general still seem to cling to unreconstructed narratives that privilege early Greece as a site of cultural, intellectual, and indeed religious purity. This creates a historical matrix that not only overaestheticizes material from the early period (particularly the tough, manly stuff: Homer, Pindar, and Aeschylus) but also dooms later literary traditions to being comprehended in terms only of replication and emulation of prior glories. This assessment, it seems to me, works only if we ignore the majority of the surviving evidence.
Any area of classical culture can be considered from a postclassical vantage. There are, of course, brilliantly innovative readings of (for example) Sappho and Herodotus that reshape our ideas about literary history. This book, however, focuses on literary texts that are also chronologically postclassical. All are located somewhere on that slippery slope toward decadence that (so some might argue) began in the aftermath of the fourth century B.C.E. I choose this material not just because it has been understudied relative to earlier texts (true though that is) but also because it offers the best opportunities for confronting the larger questions of historical change, linear versus plural traditions, and cultural conflict.
The material I consider, moreover, will (I hope) challenge many readers’ ideas about what counts as Greek literature. Some of it was written by Egyptians or Jews. Some of it is “subliterary.” Some of it, for sure, fits a more conventional template of Greek literature, but in those cases the disruption comes in in different ways. The range is designedly diverse, cutting as it does across temporal, cultural, and generic boundaries, precisely to pose sharp questions about how and why we think of Greek literary history in the way that we do. It is not my aim, let me make clear, simply to erase all the contours and lineaments that give shape and meaning to our maps of postclassical Greek culture; rather, I wish to demonstrate (i) how these intellectual frameworks can constrict as well as enable our thinking; (ii) how much more richness and variety there is to the postclassical world than conventional accounts suggest; and (iii) a more general point of methodology, on which I wish to insist. Boundaries should be seen not as barriers, the limits of our inquiry—but as crossing points, the spaces that prompt the most interesting questions. This is the nub of postclassicism as methodology: think not of the well-wrought urn but of the working of it, its breaking, its contents, its storage, the points of juncture between it and abutting objects.
Much of my work over the past fifteen years or so has focused on Greek literature of the time of the Roman Empire, roughly 50–300 C.E., a period that is sometimes known as the Second Sophistic. I have inveighed against the inaccuracies and (more importantly) blighted history of this term on a number of occasions,2 but at the risk of trying patiences let me return to the question here, for it offers a nice illustration of the general problematics sketched above and gets us to the very heart of the postclassical project. It is not the term Second Sophistic itself that is the problem—all terminology has limitations as well as advantages—but the way that unexamined adherence to nineteenth-century categories can still blinker us now. The phrase is first found in the third-century C.E. Greek writer Philostratus, where it denotes a particular oratorical style; since its reappropriation in the late nineteenth century, however, it has been associated with a supposed Hellenic revivalism calqued on the model of postindustrial nationalism.3 Erwin Rohde’s zweite Sophistik was imagined as a reassertion of “a national Hellenic element” in the face of a double threat to identity, from both “orientals” and Rome.4 (Rohde, a friend of Friedrich Nietzsche’s, was preoccupied with questions of cultural vigor in his own era too.) More recent scholarship has, perhaps understandably, preferred to speak in anthropological terms of Greek “culture” or “cultural identity” rather than “nationality.”5 But culture too is a tricky word, and arguably even more problematic: it not only risks simply repackaging the old product (that is, committing to the same metaphysics of unbroken, linear continuity)6 but also tacitly activates the idea of a Jaegerian model of idealized aristocratic solidarity (Greek literature as “high culture”). Nationalism through the back door, in other words. The Second Sophistic has been—and remains in much current scholarship—a modern fantasy projected back on to the ancient world, an objet petit a, an impossible idealization of pure, untainted aristocratic Greek tradition.
Now, it is of course not hard to find expressions of aristocratic Hellenocentrism in the postclassical Greek world. My argument, however, is that such expressions should be seen as local and tactical rather than as absolute paradigms of the spirit of the age. The enthusiasm with which classicists have embraced Plutarch,7 for instance, should give us pause: an extraordinarily rich and varied author, to be sure, but also one who shapes (or has been taken to shape)8 a very conservative vision of Greek identity in terms of a dialogue with the classical greats, particularly the nonfictional prose authors. If we take Plutarch as paradigmatic of postclassical Greece, we miss so many dimensions of Greek writing: lateral engagement with other peoples’ cultures, poetics and imaginative literature, the continuity with Hellenistic Greek culture. Much the same could be said of Dio Chrysostom and Aelius Aristides, both of whom loom large in the standard accounts of Greek identity in the Roman Empire. I am not, of course, arguing against their value for cultural historians, merely observing that selecting a limited evidentiary range leads to oversimplified claims about “the Greeks” and “the Roman Empire.”9
This picture of seamless panhellenism is, ultimately, a scholarly fiction, resting on a circular process of exclusion of evidence to the contrary. Standard accounts of postclassical Greek literature (I include my own earlier work) have, for example, little room for Jewish10 or Christian literature (although here the tide is beginning to turn).11 They scarcely acknowledge the competitor traditions that were contemporaneously devising, reimagining, and commentating on literary canons (viz. rabbinical Hebrew12 and Christian Syriac). They present the Hellenistic era as dominated by poetry and the imperial era by prose, usually by simply failing to refer to the full range of surviving material. Nor do they accommodate much demographic range within mainstream Greek society. It is rare to find mention of paraliterary works such as the Alexander Romance or the Life of Aesop, whose strata range from Hellenistic to imperial dates, or, indeed, of the so-called Acts of the Pagan Martyrs or Secundus the Silent Philosopher, works that clearly operate at some considerable remove from the Atticizing classicism of Aristides or Philostratus. We should note too the relative marginalization of the voluminous technical literature of the later era.13 While the physiognomical works of Galen (antiquity’s most productive author, to judge by what we have) and Polemo have to an extent been brought into the fold,14 little awareness is shown of—to take but a few examples—Hero of Alexandria on mechanics, Apollonius Dyscolus the grammarian, Aristides Quintilianus on musicology, Aelian on animals,15 astrologers, or alchemists. No wonder the stereotype of imperial Greeks as flouncy, elitist orators persists, when texts that present an alternative image are not pictured. How different our conception of the period would be had Philostratus not survived.
It is clearly beyond the scope of a single volume
