Aelius Aristides between Greece, Rome, and the Gods (Columbia Studies in the Classical Tradition)

INTRODUCTION

wv.

lIARRrs

Aelius Aristides' Embassy Speech to Achilles (Oration XVI) seems at first reading a ham-fisted piece of work. It takes the form of a speech aimed at assuaging the wrath of Achilles with Agamemnon, like the speeches that Homer gives to Odysseus, Phoenix and Ajax in Iliad IX. I But unlike the clever speeches of Odysseus and Phoenix, it would have been much more likely to inflame Achilles than win him over: 'you seem to hate your fellow-countrymen', says the fictitious orator, 'and fear battle too' (sect. 6). Aristides, however, was not attempting to put himself in the place of a Bronze-Age prince or an archaic poet-though he was attempting as so often to live in the past and to take his audience there with him-, but to demonstrate with maximum cleverness the lack of logic, from his own point of view; in Achilles' behaviour; and in this aim he more or less succeeded. The subtle understanding of furious anger that was demonstrated by Aristides' contemporary Galen was not the sophist's forte, but it was not his interest either. The Embassy Speech to Achilles can serve rather well as an introduction to some of the investigations that are carried forward in this book. In the first place, it shows Aristides in his literary context. The speech displays of course an intimate knowledge of Homer-and no overt interest in anything that had been written since Homer's time about the wrath of Achilles or about anger more generally (between the lines, however, one can see that Aristides, though he avoids anachronism, was familiar with the cliches about moderate anger that were part of the Greek and Roman cultural patrimony). So what was Aristides' relationship to archaic and classical Greek literature? Not simple, for while it is obvious that knowledge of the poetry of that era was a cultural marker, in fact the cultural marker, of an educated Greek, there

I As to how Aristides came to be writing on such a theme, see Kindstrand 1973, 215---216. According to Behr 1968, 95, the 'substance' of this declamation is 'the importance of fame', but that is an eccentric judgement.

2

W.V. HARRIS

was emulation involved ('modesty', as Raffaella Cribiore observes later in this volume, 'was not an attribute of Aristides'), and individual taste too. The studies grouped in the first part of the book are concerned above all with the sophist's intimate mental connection with the literary and mythical traditions of the Greeks. What does the pattern of Aristides' citation of the archaic poets mean, and what in particular does it mean that he so generously cites Pindar (Ewen Bowie's culminating question)? How, in flattering the Athenians, is he to deal with the truthloving and unavoidable Thucydides, who was willing to show them at their worst (Estelle Oudot's theme)? Were the great classical myths still important, still viable, in the world of the Second Sophistic, and how could they be adapted for contemporary use (the questions answered here by Suzanne Said)? In this context too we can place Glen Bowersock's discussion of Aristides' detestation of the pantomimes, those solo performers who brought much of the repertoire of the classical theatre before the Antonine public. Another striking feature of the Embassy Speech to Achilles, especially if you come to it fresh from Homer, is its repeated reference to the Trojan War as a conflict between the Greeks and the 'barbarians': 'if you must be permanently angry, I would say that it should be with the barbarians, our natural enemies' (sect. 4) (the latter trope reappears in sect. 26). 2 In the Iliad Odysseus and Phoenix speak of the harm that Achilles has done the Achaeans by his withdrawal, but Homer never of course calls the Trojans barbarians;" Aristides applies the term to them seven times in a few pages and concludes his speech on this note. That will seem banal. But there is more: it will have been a sleepy Greek listener or reader who never for a moment thought that Aristides might be alluding to the Romans in the guise of their Trojan 'ancestors', especially since, as Laurent Pernot points out in detail in his contribution to this book, both Aristides and his public were accustomed to the practice of 'figured speech'. At all events, Aristides' thoughts and feelings about Rome and its empire were more complex than used to be realized when 70 Rome (Or.

2 The 'barbarians' had been the 'natural enemies' of the Greeks, at least for many, since Pi. Rep. V.47oc, if not earlier. 3 The Carians are barbarophonoi in ii.867. This difference between Homer and Aristides has often been noticed: see for instance Boulanger 1923, 274.

INTRODUCTION

3

XXVI) was taken at face value. The third part of this volume-the papers by Pernot, Francesca Fontanella and Carlo Franco-accordingly considers the political aspects of his writings. 300 years after the annexation of provincia Asia the Greeks were still not wholly reconciled to their subordinate though privileged role." Plutarch had warned a young man elected to office in a Greek city that for crossing their Roman rulers, 'many' had suffered 'that terrible chastiser, the axe that cuts the neck' (Praecepta rei gerendae 17 = Mor. 813£). Who could be at ease in such a situation? But Greek attitudes gradually changed: every individual had his point of view; but Celsus Polemaeanus represents one stage, Plutarch another, Aristides yet another, Lucian and Cassius Dio still others. There are two other important elements in Aristides' identity (and here I leave behind the Embassy Speech to Achilles), apart of course from his main identity as an orator and a sophist.' These two elements, closely connected with each other, are his religiosity and his status as an invalid." We have mainly concentrated both of these topics in the second part of the book, holding that with Aristides the personal is to some extent prior to the political. We have called this whole collection Aelius Aristides between Greece, Rome, and the Gods in part because the clearest element in Aristides' personality is his religiosity, and an important part of his preferred identity consisted of his devotion to Asclepius. Pernot, in the footsteps of Bowersock, reminds us how Aristides used this identity as a means of squirming out of office-holding, but no reader of the Sacred Tales could doubt that the devotion was real as well as convenient. It suited both Aristides' narcissistic personality'JtExa), presumably a reference either to frr. 172-181 West or to frr. 185-187 West. In the first Tarsian oration, Oration 33, Dio picks out Archilochus as a paradigm of an outspoken critic, the role that he himself is adopting towards the people of Tarsus. He shows knowledge of the secondary tradition about Archilochus' poetic gifts and his death (33.12), comparing and contrasting him with the praisepoet Homer. A little later, at 33.17, he cites the first two lines of four tetrameters, fro 114 West, on the better type of general, O't'Qa't'T]y6£, then paraphrases lines 3 and 4 in a way that suggests he had a text slightly different from that cited by Galen. Finally he invokes Archilochus again near the end of the speech (33.61). 12 [Dio] 37.47 quotes a line of Sappho, fro 147 Voigt, which may indeed be the reference of Aristides Or. 28.51 (see above), but this speech is generally agreed to be by Favorinus, not by Dio. 13 Dio is indeed our only source for the full text of this fragment, which may be a complete poem. 14 For citation of this poem in imperial Greek sources see frr. 196-204 Davies, and for its highlighting on Tabulae Iliacae, Horsfall 1979.

EWENBOWIE

Oration 60, Nessus or Deianeira, opens with a report of criticism of Archilochus for having his Deianeira deliver an almost epic narrative (Qa'ljJw60uouv) of her wooing by Achelous at the very point at which she is the victim of sexual assault by Nessus (fr. 286 West). Dio seems to know this poem and discussions of it, and his remarks are a valuable clue to its identification as one of Archilochus' now well-documented narrative elegies. 15 Dio Oration 74, On Mistrust, also seems to know fro 173 West, though I suspect that his relation of it to Archilochus' prospective marriage to a member of Lycambes' family arises from his familiarity with the secondary tradition and not from a careful reading of the poem.

Maximus

of Tyre

Maximus has an especially large number of citations of Anacreon and Sappho, concentrated in and prompted by his four Dialexeis on Eros (18-21 Trapp). Some 15 fragments of Sappho are cited in one paragraph of Dialexis 18, viz. 18.9, and these are Maximus' only citations of Sappho. The same paragraph has four of Maximus' citations of Anacreon. Anacreon is also mentioned in Maximus' list at Dialexis 37.5 of poets whose poetry either calmed or excited their audiencesPindar, Tyrtaeus, Telesilla, Alcaeus and Anacreon. He has no citation of Alcaeus, and neither citation nor even mention of Aleman and Ibycus, or of the elegists Callinus, Mimnermus and Theognis. Solon is mentioned several times, but not for his poetry. The one citation of Stesichorus, opening Dialexis 21.1, OUX E01;' E't1)!!O£ Myo£, ascribed by Maximus to the poet of Himera, 6 'I!!EQuto£ 'toLTJ'tT]£, in words that assign it to his Palinode, may well be taken from Plato Phaedrus 243a. The Palinode is, of course, the only poem of Stesichorus of which Aristides shows knowledge. Simonides also gets only one citation, the phrase XUAE:1tOV Eo{}A6v E!!!!EVaL, i.e. fro 542.13 Page, at Dialexis 30.1, where Maximus ascribes it to an old song, XaLa :n:UAUWV ~o!!u: this too may well come from Plato, in this case from Protagoras 339c. There is no mention of Bacchylides, but as with Aristides, albeit to a much lesser extent, there is some use of Pindar: perhaps the reference to Etna in Pythian 1.20 at Dialexis 5.4 and Dialexis 41.1; perhaps Pythian 3.1ff. for Chiron at

15

See Bowie

2001.

ARISTIDES AND EARLY GREEK LYRIC, ELEGIAC AND IAMBIC POETRY

IS

Dialexis 28.1. But there is only one verbatim citation, that of fro 213 Snell-Maehler, as the introductory text of Dialexis 12, the subject of which is whether it is right to commit injustice against somebody who has done so to onesel£ In this case Maximus seems very likely to have used a text of Pindar, since the earlier quotation which may have drawn the passage to his attention, by Plato in Republic 36Sb, constitutes only two of the four lines cited by Maximus. Like any author, of course, Maximus can come up with surprises: in his case the surprise is the citation of the first two lines of Ariphron's Paean to Hygieia, PMG fro 813 Page, described as an uQXaLov {lolla and not attributed nominatim to Ariphron."

Philostratus

if Athens' Apollonius

In his Apollonius Philostratus' chief poetic intertext is Homer, and there are also several citations of or allusions to Attic tragedy, especially to Euripides. Again lyric and elegiac poetry is rare. Archilochus figures twice: a reference to his 'shield' elegy, fro S West, at 2.7.2, and to his elegy addressed to Pericles on the occasion of the death of friends at sea, fro 13 West, at 7.26.2: in both cases the poet is named. Sappho's poetry is mentioned at 1.30, but nothing is quoted, nor is there any verbatim allusion. Pindar is twice cited: at 7.12.4, Pythian 1.10-13 is paraphrased (the lyre charms Ares), and at 6.26.2 Philo stratus refers to a poem mentioning a i'laLIlOlv that watches over the source of the Nile (fr. 282 Snell-Maehler), Again, as with Archilochus, Pindar is named each time. The same locus, 6.26.2, has the only certain mention of Stesichorus, predictably of his Palinode, referred to by precisely this title: Stesichorus himself is called simply uV~Q 'IIlEQaLo£.17 The final lyric intertext of the Apollonius, as in the case of Maximus, is a surprise: at 3.17.2, Sophocles' Paean to Asclepius (PMG fro 737a Page)."

16 For the resurrection of Ariphron's Paean in the second century A.D. see Bowie 2006, 85--86. 17 4.II.S may also derive from the Palinode. 18 For a fuller discussion of the citations in Philostratus' Apollonius see Bowie forthcoming (a); for discussion of Sophocles' Paean in the second century A.D. see Bowie 2006, 84-85'

16

EWENBOWIE

Aristides After these comparisons the thinness of the harvest from Aristides looks less surprising. Moreover it seems that one category of his compositions, I-tEAE'taL, is one in which citation of the poets was unusual. Aristides of course makes extensive use of the Iliad for his Embassy to Achilles (Oration 16), but understandably he does not cite any of Book g-Book 9 had not been composed at the dramatic date of Oration 16! Or. 8.18 and Or. 11.65 refer to Tyrtaeus as a poet sent by Athens to help Sparta, but none of his poetry is quoted. Appeals to Athenians never cite Solon; those to Thebes never cite Pindar. I take this to be a feature of the genre, and think that this view is supported by the absence of poetic quotation in Polemo's two surviving I-tEAE't'aL. Where, then, does Aristides quote early poetry, and what is the basis of his choices? The speeches in which quotation abounds are Orations 2, 3, 28 and 45. 19 Oration 28 is a special case to which I shall return. Orations 2 and 3 are attacking Plato and philosophers in defense of rhetoric, and it might be suggested that Aristides' habit of citation is something he has caught from philosophical writing. Oration 45, to Sarapis, may be Aristides' earliest extant work, perhaps from April 142 A.D. 20 Here too a special explanation can be offered. In this Oration Aristides is setting out his case that prose has as strong a claim as poetry to be used for hymns to the gods: as has been well argued by Vassilaki, Aristides tackles this task first by citing poetry, and prominently Pindar's poetry, in order to criticize it, and then moves on to use allusion to the poets to achieve mimesis of poetry" In each case, however, we see the phenomenon that stands out in Aristides' citation of early poetry; his preference for citing Pindar. Often Pindar is the only early poet to be cited. Only twice are there speeches where another poet is cited and Pindar is not: in Or. 18.4, the monody for Smyrna, Aristides names Sappho and seems to paraphrase her (see

19 Perhaps Oration 20 should be added, but the presence of three Pindaric citations is hardly enough. 20 For the date of Oration 45 see Behr 1981,419. Behr's notes there (op. cit., 420-422), show how much citation from Homer is also to be found in this speech (and, at Or. 45.18, an allusion to Ariphron PMC fro 813 Page; cf above on Maximus of Tyre). Our other candidate for Aristides' earliest surviving work is The Rlwdian Oration 25, for whose Aristidean authorship see]ones 1990. For an analysis of Aristides' procedures in Oration 45 see Russell 1990, 201-209; Pernot 1993a, II, 642-645; Vassilaki 2005. 21 Vassilaki 2005, unfortunately unaware of Russell 1990.

ARISTIDES AND EARLY GREEK LYRIC, ELEGIAC AND IAMBIC POETRY

17

above); the speech's only other poetic allusion is to Odyssey 6.231, which follows closely in Or. 18.4 and is not signalled. In the very short Oration to Heracles, at 40.6, Aristides' phrase 'tOUi; vouou; 'tOLi; O:ltAOLi; oUY'KEQavvui; mqy allude to the expression in Solon fro 36.15 West, 0J-t0ii ~LTjV re 'Kat bL'KTjV ;uvaQJ-tooai;, a line that it is clear from Or. 28.138 that he knew; but that there is an allusion here is far from certain. The big question, then, is 'Why Pindar?' It is a question to which there can be no certain answer." The citations attest Aristides' good knowledge and admiration not only for the epinicia but for several works of Pindar in other genres too. And within the epinicia he shows no knowledge of the Nemeans. To me the most persuasive explanation is that Aristides responded to Pindar's praise of the importance of outstanding natural capacities, which Aristides was convinced that he himself had, and of the importance of sustained effort in realizing these capacities, something Aristides was also more than ready to apply. Such praise could also be found in Bacchylides and, doubtless, already in epinicia of Simonides that we have lost: but no ancient critic questioned Pindar's poetic superiority. Dio in his second Kingship Oration picked out his AaJ-t:ltQo'tTj'ta 'tiii; cpuOEWi; (2.33), and his supremacy was affirmed unhesitatingly by Longinus' On the Sublime: 'tL M; EV JlEAEm JlUMOV av Elvm BUXXUAihT]~ EAOLO Tl mV()uQo~, XUL EV 'tQUyq>()L~ ~IOlV 0 Xtoc Tl vi] dLa ~o(POXAfj~; EJtEL()i] ol JlEV (i()LCX:7t'tOl'tOL xaL EV 't

The authorship of this work, once doubted, has now been generally vindicated as authentically Lucianic, and the essay may well have been known to Libanius in writing his reply to Aristides. We have no way of telling whether it was known to Aristides himself and served as some kind of irritant, but Lucian's opinion was as positive as it was well informed. For the relation of pantomime to rhetoric, the essay provides precious testimony. In general, there were no competitions (aywvE£) for pantomimes although the dancers performed a repertoire of tragic themes, and they were sometimes known as 'tQayuwL. But, says Lucian, there was one exception to the lack of thymelic crowns for them. In Italy there were competitions for dancers." We may surmise that this happened at the Sebasta in hellenophone Naples, and perhaps also at the Capitolia in Rome or the Eusebeia in Puteoli. The conjunction of the word tragic with a pantomime is reinforced by Lucian's observation that tragedy and tragic dance were almost indistinguishable: at U:JtOi}EOEL£ zorvcl a!J. I-tTJQq> 'to qJ'ul-tu EXELVO EyEVE'tO, u"A"A' T]O'tTJV Ul-tqJO'tEQW xu'fruQw 'toL\; a:n:umv, Or. XLVII.68).53 The disappearance of the tumor dramatically demonstrates Asclepius's ability to return the body 'to its former state' (El\; 'to uQxuLov, Or. XLVII.67) and to make everything the same as it once was (O'Uvi)YUYEV :n:av'ta el\; 'tau'tov, Or. XLVII.68; cf Or. IL.47). Throughout Aristides' writings, erasure turns out to be closely related to a concept of regeneration that seems to deny the passage of time so central to the archive and narration more generally. Health is an absence of scars, forgetting, a washing away. I close by briefly looking at Aristides' commitment to endless regeneration in light of both the incompatibility between the mark or sign and the body and the ways in which Aristides controls and circumscribes the public representation of his embodied experience. Lethe and katharsis The concept of being remade in the wake of illness runs as an undercurrent throughout the Hieroi Logoi. Aristides, we have seen, often casts the causes of his suffering as foreign elements that have breached the boundaries of the body. Although the elimination of a materia peccans played a key role in medical concepts of disease from the fifth century BeE onwards, the representation of disease as something foreign was counterbalanced by the belief that disease was a process by which constituent elements within the body grew dangerously powerful. 54 Indeed, the idea that disease developed inside an individual body could be used to buttress the 'care of the self' as an ethical imperative." Moreover, 53 See Pernot 2002, 375 for a reading of the tumor episode consistent with the one I offer here. 54 The classic account of 'ontological' versus 'physiological' concepts of disease is Temkin 1963. See also Niebyl 1969, 2-II for the overlap of these concepts in Greek explanations of disease. For the medical idea of katharsis in the classical period, see von Staden 2007. 55 See, for example, Galen's arguments against Erasistratus's concept of causality

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the ethics of self-care eschews the idea of perfect unity: bodies naturally comprise opposed elements whose interaction must always be managed. Aristides, as we have seen, resists attempts to locate his symptoms within secular frameworks of interpretation. He thus implicitly rejects the premise that his suffering is the outcome of practices over which he might be held accountable." His strategy works in tandem with his representation of disease as invasive and hidden and the corresponding emphasis on cathartic expulsion and rebirth. Indeed, in his evacuation of the inner body, Aristides was often willing to go to extremes that expressly contradicted basic therapeutic principles of secular medicine, such as considering the strength of the patient when undertaking therapy'" When the noted physician and sophist Satyrus-a teacher of Galen's-hears how many purges of blood Aristides has had, he orders him to stop immediately, lest he overwhelm and destroy his body (Or. IL.8; c£ Or. XLVII.73; Or. XLVIII.3435).58 Aristides responds that he is not master (%UQLO~) of his own blood and that he will continue to obey the god's directives.59 Aristides' ability to survive the body's journey to the precipice of a void indicates his privileged relationship to Asclepius. Indeed, it is because he can endure the diseased body's destruction that he is granted holistic renewal, an idea that bears some similarity to contemporary ideas of martyrdom and resurrection in early Christianity, with the notable difference that Aristides wants life after death in this life.60 The myth of Asclepius, after in On Antecedent Causes XY.I87-196 (142,3-146,5 Hankinson) and Nutton 1983, 6-16 on resistance to 'ontological' concepts of disease on ethical grounds in the Greco-Roman period. 56 Asclepius does, as we have seen, command him to avoid certain foods or activities, so that the central imperative of medicine, 'watch out'! (lpUAa!;ov), remains in effect, as at Or. XLVII.7!. The difference is that no dietetics handbook or physician can provide the information Aristides needs: the threats to his health are unpredictable and changeable. 57 On the importance in imperial-age medicine of establishing the patient's strength before letting blood, see Niebyl 1969, 68-76 (and pp. 26-38 on the origins of the concept in fifth and fourth-century BCE medicine). 58 Both Aristides and Satyrus accept the effectiveness of venesection but they take different views of it. In medicine, bloodletting helps eliminate excess, rather than aiding in the expulsion of a foreign body (Niebyl 1969). Yet Aristides seems to think of bloodletting precisely in terms of expelling something foreign (e.g. Or. XLVII.28). 59 C£ Or. XLVII.4. 60 Perkins (1992, 254, 262-266; 1995, 180-181, 18g-192) draws the comparison between the martyr and Aristides; see also Dodds 1965, 42. In both cases, similarities arise from a shared cultural context rather than any direct claims of influence. C£ Shaw 1996, 300 ('the discourse in which Aristides is engaged .. .is distinctively his own, and is

AELIUS ARISTIDES' ILLEGIBLE BODY

7

10

all, made clear the dangers involved when philanthropic gods pursue more radical forms of resurrection." In An Address Regarding Asclepius, Aristides casts renewal precisely in the metaphorical terms of primeval creation. a.AM Kat ItEAT] 'tou oWlta'tO~ ahu'i>vtaL 'tLVE~, Kat c'ivbQE~ Myoo Kat Y'uvaLKE~, :n:QOVOL t}Eq>, &JJ.. a :n:OAAOUI; 'tE xat :n:av'tOba:n:oul; ~LolJl; ~E~L(J)XO't(J)V xat 'tilv vooov xma roiito Elvm AlJOL'tEAfj VOl-tL~OV't(J)V,

Or. XXIII.I6=T402; c£ Or. XLVIII.59).

located in a realm of ideas and rhetoric separate from that of the Christian ideologues'). Shaw dates the dissemination of Christian interpretations of the endurance-pain (and torture)-virtue nexus in the elite Roman world to the first century CE (op. cit. 291296). Thus while it is true that Aristides' stance incorporates motifs from the cult of Asc1epius, we can also assume his exposure to contemporary concepts of, and debates about, suffering and healing, given his elite education, his travel, and the cosmopolitanism of the Antonine Age. 61 In most versions, Asc1epius is struck dead by Zeus's thunderbolt for raising the dead (T66-8S; TrOS-IIS). Notably, it is Sarapis who appears to Aristides in a dream about the afterlife (Or. IL.48).

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The logic of regeneration shows up in dramatic ways in the Hieroi Logoi. In addition to continual purgation and innumerable enemas and bloodlettings, Aristides boasts of being operated on more than any other suppliant in the history of the Pergamene temple of Asclepius." These literal acts of cutting and reassembling vividly express the process that Aristides imagines takes place in less violent treatments. In the third book, N eritus, one of his foster fathers, dreams that the god tells him it is necessary to remove Aristides' bones and put in tendons, since the existing ones have failed (Or. IL.IS). Seeing Neritus's alarm at the prospect of such a surgical operation, the god gives a less shocking command: no need, after all, to knock the bones out directly and cut out the tendons at present; rather what Aristides requires is a change (&AAOLWOL~) of the existing tendons, a great and strange 'correction' (E:ltav6Q{}wOL~).63 To achieve this Aristides need only adopt the use of unsalted olive oil. What is particularly striking in the N eritus dream is the idea that starting over involves, in the first formulation, not the replacement of bones and tendons with new bones and tendons, but the replacement of hard (i.e. OXATlQ6~) bones with pliant tendons, as though the bones themselves were impediments to Aristides' reinvention (an idea that recalls the etymologies of Asclepius's name that we saw above). Despite the strong emphasis that Aristides appears to place on the foreign origins of disease, then, his belief in regeneration in fact exaggerates secular medicine's concept of a body complicit in the production of suffering. That is to say: it is not simply the invasive element that must be eliminated, but the damaged body itsel£ Purging the body's strangeness thus lays the groundwork for what is both a homecoming and a form of rebirth.

or re YUQ VEW)tOQOL EV 'tou'tlp OV'tE~ ~AL)t[U~ )tUL :n:UV'tE~ ol :n:EQL 'tOY i}EOV i}EQU:n:ElJ'tUL UWL 1I~:n:o'tE ~T]lIEvu :n:w 'toov :n:uV'tWV OlJVELIlEVUL 'tocruii'tu 't~T]i}EV'tU, :n:A~V yE 'IcrxuQwvo~, dVUL II' EV 'tOi:~ :n:uQullo!;6'tu'tOv 'to y' E)tELVOlJ, aMU )tUL oo~ U:n:EQf3uAAELV 'to )tui}' ~~a~ UVElJ 'toov UAAWV :n:uQuM!;wv... ('For the temple wardens, having reached such an age in that place, and all of those who served the god and held appointments in the temple agreed that they had never known anyone who had been cut up so many times, except for Ischuron, whose case was the most unbelievable, but that our case went beyond even this one, to say nothing of the other unbelievable things', Or. XLVIII.47). 63 In the last two orations, we find similar instances where what must be changed is the mind (Or. L.S2) or 'the dead part of the soul' ('to 'tEi}vT])tO~ 't'i'j~ 1jJlJxfj~, Or. LII.2). In both cases, change brings divine communion. 62

)tUL

'tU!;EL~ EXOV'tE~ w~oA6yolJV

aelius aristides’ illegible body

109

I have argued Aristides sees the lived body as resistant to both interpretation and the act of creating memory. The body is rather written into stories that are first staged in dreams then recorded in the archive. By interpreting these stories, Aristides is able to act on the body in such a way as to restore it to a primeval state of harmony in which the dissonance between an opaque interior harboring something foreign, on the one hand, and the person who suffers and seeks the meaning of that suffering, on the other, is eliminated, at least temporarily. The body is repeatedly released from death because, although it is recovered from obscurity through stories, it is never captured by any one story. At the same time, the slipperiness of the living body creates the need for a fixed text to memorialize the work of Asclepius. Even the casual reader of the Hieroi Logoi, however, cannot help but notice that that text does not always feel stable and fixed. It is often jumpy, elliptical, and defiant of chronology.64 Its disorder stages the breakdown in Aristides’ understanding of what has happened, the moments when he is unsure how to match representation to reality; its lacunae recall the breaks in the archive. The tenuous grasp that Aristides has on his lived experiences in the Hieroi Logoi confirms the body’s irrepressible strangeness that wells up in the gap between the dream and waking life, between the oneiric performance and the text. At other moments, however, what escapes narration is precisely the glowing plenitude of well-being that rewards successful therapeutic action. This plenitude cannot be captured by the negative figure of the tabula rasa. For the feeling of being restored to wholeness that Aristides describes after events such as the dedication of the surrogate-ring to Telesphorus have a positive charge.65 Such feelings are associated most strongly with ‘the divine baths’ that Aristides narrates, and indeed

Castelli 1999, 198–202. See Or. XLVIII.28: τ8 δ" μετ τοτο *ξεστιν εOκKζειν @πως διεκε!με&α, κα0 -πο!αν τιν Yρμον!αν πKλιν TμAς Tρμσατο - &ες (‘After this it is impossible to imagine our condition, and into what kind of harmony the god again brought us’). As D. Gourevitch has observed, the word Xγ!εια is found only once, at Or. L.69 (1984, 49). What Aristides gains following the successful implementation of dream therapies is described as αστ,νη (Or. XLVIII.35; Or. IL.13; Or. LI.38, 90). ‘Physiquement’, Gourevitch writes, ‘ce bien-être obtenu grâce à la faveur divine, est un état bizarre, qui n’est pas particulièrement voluptueux, mais caractérisé par un sentiment de chaleur intérieure parfaite, et d’éloignement par rapport au monde extérieur’ (op. cit., 48); see also Brown 1978, 43; Miller 1994, 203–204. A kind of relaxation or sense of presence may also attend moments of inspired oratorical performance (e.g. Or. LI.39). 64 65

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with all his encounters with sacred water.66 Like other events that exchange the damaged past for a unified and all-consuming present, such as the healing of the tumor or tasting the water from Asclepius’s sacred well, the baths are synonymous with lêthê: ‘So let us turn to the divine baths, from which we digressed. Let the pains, the diseases, the threats, be forgotten’ (νν δ4 @&εν ξ βημεν τρεπ,με&α πρ8ς τ λουτρ τ &εα· Pδναι δ4 κα0 νσοι κα0 κ!νδυνοι πKντες ρρντων, Or. XLVIII.71).67 In bathing, the body is restored to the conscious, first-person subject as a singular entity suffused with warmth and oblivious of all that is strange or painful. One famous passage in particular goes to some lengths in its attempt to describe the phenomenology of starting over: κα0 τ π8 τοτου τ!ς #ν νδε!ξασ&αι δυνη&ε!η; :παν γ ρ τ8 λοιπ8ν τ7ς Tμ ρας κα0 τ7ς νυκτ8ς τ8 εOς ε%ν"ν διεσωσKμην τ"ν π0 τF. λουτρF. σχ σιν, κα0 οNτε τι ξηροτ ρου οNτε Xγροτ ρου το σ,ματος Moσ&μην, ο% τ7ς & ρμης ν7κεν ο%δ ν, ο% προσεγ νετο, ο%δ’ α` τοιοτον T & ρμη _ν, οLον ν τFω κα0 π’ ν&ρωπ!νης μηχαν7ς XπKρξειεν, λλK τις _ν λ α διηνεκς, δναμιν φ ρουσα $σην δι παντ8ς το σ,ματς τε κα0 το χρνου.68 παραπλησ!ως δ4 κα0 τ τ7ς γν,μης εBχεν. οNτε γ ρ οLον Tδον" περιφαν"ς _ν οNτε κατ ν&ρωπ!νην ε%φροσνην *φησ&α #ν εBναι α%τ, λλ _ν τις ρρητος ε%&υμ!α, πKντα δετερα το παρντος καιρο τι&εμ νη, Sστε ο%δ -ρ.ν τ λλα δκουν -ρAν· ο[τω πAς _ν πρ8ς τF. &εF.. (Or. XLVIII.

22–23)

And who would be able to relate what came after this? For the entire rest of the day and the night until it was time for bed I preserved the state following the bath, and I sensed no part of my body to be hotter or colder, nor did any of the heat dissipate, nor was any added, but the warmth was not of that kind that one could obtain by human means; it was a kind of continuous heat, producing the same effect throughout the entire body and during the whole time. And it was the same with my mind. For it was no obvious pleasure, nor would you say that it was in the manner of human joy, but it was an inexplicable wellbeing that made everything second to the present moment, with the result that I seemed to see other things without even really seeing them. In this way I was entirely with the god.

66 The role of water in the cult of Asclepius (and in other healing cults in the GrecoRoman world) has long been recognized. For an overview of the different uses of water in the Hieroi Logoi, see Boudon 1994, 159–163. 67 See Or. XXXIX.2, where Aristides compares the water in the sacred well to ‘Homer’s lotus’. 68 Following χρνου, MSS. Keil prints χρωτς following Haury’s emendation.

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At such moments, the body becomes familiar without the mediation of the dreams, which are premised on self-estrangement in waking life. The outside world falls away, leaving only the divine embrace and a sense of inner unity.69 It is this experience of self-sameness—no part of the body, for example, is warmer or colder than the others— that is shattered not only by the disease, but also by dreaming and writing, practices that, as we have seen, are premised on self-splitting. In focusing Aristides’ attention wholly on the present, the baths stand outside of memory. To the extent that the baths stand outside of time, they are in a strong sense extra- or anti-textual: private and eternally present. Nevertheless, Aristides wants to narrate the baths and other such moments within the Hieroi Logoi. The fact that he does so reminds us that ‘the body’ of which I have been speaking is always an effect of the Hieroi Logoi, however much body and text are uncoupled within that work. When Aristides writes about his fully embodied communion with the god, he treads a narrow path between opening that relationship up to public interpretation and protecting the inimitable intimacy that leaves no place to the watcher, and between timelessness and commemoration.70 Following one outdoors bath, Aristides writes that ‘the comfort and relaxation that followed this were perfectly easy for a god to comprehend, but for a person, not at all easy to imagine or demonstrate in language’ (T δ4 π0 τοτFω κουφτης κα0 ναψυχ" &εF. μ4ν κα0 μKλα αδ!α γν.ναι, ν&ρ,πFω δ4 D νF. λαβεν D νδε!ξασ&αι λγFω ο% πKνυ Kδιον, Or. XLVIII.49). The Hieroi Logoi are a testimonial to experiences that Aristides insists will always lie outside the public domain, experiences that nevertheless could not be celebrated as indications of divine favor without Aristides’ willingness to speak and write about them. Aristides’ difficulty in sharing the comfort gained through the bath restages the singular nature of his original experience. Several compan-

69

See also Or. XLVIII.53; Or. LI.55. On the tension between the public and the private, see Miller 1994, 184–204. This tension can be sensed even more strongly against the backdrop of Albert Henrichs’ recent analysis (2003) of hieroi logoi, which were defined, Henrichs argues, by their commitment to the esoteric while also gaining fame, e.g. in the travelogues of Herodotus or Pausanius, as closed books. Aristides’ Hieroi Logoi, named through—what else?—a dream (Or. XLVIII.9), are cited by Henrichs as an exception to the rule (230 n. 71; 240 n. 115), although on closer inspection they appear to be consistent with Henrichs’ account of hieroi logoi. 70

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ions, for example, once tried to imitate his fulfillment of the divine prescription only to find that their bodies could not tolerate the extreme conditions that it required (Or. XLVIII.76).71 As on other occasions where Aristides insists that only he is capable of understanding what the god says and fulfilling his commands, that capacity is confirmed through the failure of others. On the other hand, Aristides’ troubles as a narrator cue the impossibility of setting into time an experience that is defined by its resistance to narrative arcs that posit beginnings and endings.72 Of course, these experiences are not, in fact, unspeakable, despite Aristides’ use of this literary topos. Indeed, Aristides addresses the crowd following his bath at Or. XLVIII.82 with a speech inspired by Asclepius. Still, experiences of inner unity lie outside the logic of interpretation that governs the experience of the body in its opacity, where opacity ensures there is always something hidden to be (potentially) known and explained via a boundless divine text. Moments of communion with the divine participate, rather, in an ongoing cycle by which Aristides has his stories purged and washed from him as a condition of the renewal of life. Even Aristides, however, cannot remain with the god forever. However much time seems to stand still within his states of joy, pleasure ends, pain encroaches, and the body is again taken up as an object of interpretation and narration: story follows upon story. Thus, the body is Odyssean not only in its toils and its subterfuge, but in its refusal to stay at home in Penelope’s embrace: no sooner has it become familiar than it is attracted into foreign territory once again, like Tennyson’s Ulysses, for whom ‘the deep / moans round with many voices’, beckoning him back to the open sea with its waves, its strangeness. Unlike Odysseus, 71 Although barefoot runs and wintry baths were part of the usual repertoire of Asclepian cures, as Marcus Aurelius indicates (Ad se ipsum V.8=T407) and Aristides himself acknowledges (Or. XLVIII.55). 72 Aristides elsewhere uses the experience of drinking the sacred water to capture a sense of speech that would happen ‘all at once’: τ!ς ο`ν δ" γ νοιτ’ #ν ρχ, D Sσπερ Tν!κ’ #ν π’ α%το π!νωμεν, προσ& ντες τος χε!λεσι τ"ν κλικα ο%κ τι φ!σταμεν, λλ’ &ρον εOσεχεKμε&α, ο[τως κα0 - λγος &ρα πKν&’ 5ξει λεγμενα; (‘What, then, should be the beginning (of our speech), or, just as when we drink from the well, raising the cup to the lips we never stop again, but pour in the liquid all at once, so too should our speech everything all at once’? Or. XXXIX.4=T804). That the sentiment is a topos does not keep it from participating in a set of motifs central to Aristides’ œuvre. Water, he goes on to say in the same speech, is untouched by time (χρνος γον α%το ο%χ :πτεται, ibid. 9).

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however, this epic hero travels without a scar: the past belongs wholly to the god and the archive. By displacing writing from the lived self, Aristides manages to keep his distance from his stories and, hence, to survive them.73

73

I am very grateful to Heinrich von Staden, whose critical eye and intellectual generosity have seen this project through from beginning to end. I would also like to thank Paul Demont, who supervised my mémoire L’écriture dans les Discours sacrés d’Aelius Aristide, as well as to the members of my D.E.A. jury, Alain Billaut and Danielle Gourevitch; Hakima Ben-Azzouz and Marie-Pierre Harder provided invaluable editorial assistance in Paris. Thank you to William Harris for inviting me to take part in the conference at the Center for the Ancient Mediterranean at Columbia and for continuing to involve me in the world of Aristides, to Brent Shaw, and to Glen Bowersock, whose comments on the written version of this article greatly improved it. I acknowledge two Joseph E. Croft ’73 Summer Travel Fellowships from Princeton University and a Mellon Fellowship for Assistant Professors, which allowed me to complete this work under ideal conditions at the Institute for Advanced Study.

chapter six PROPER PLEASURES: BATHING AND ORATORY IN AELIUS ARISTIDES’ HIEROS LOGOS I AND ORATION 33*

Janet Downie Aelius Aristides begins the first of his Hieroi Logoi with what purports to be a diary of illness and therapy. Aristides suffers from digestive problems, and he sets out to offer a serial account of his condition: ‘But now’, he proclaims, ‘I want to reveal to you how it was with my abdomen. And I will give an account of everything day by day’.1 From the outset, descriptions of his night visions dominate the account, and as a consequence scholars have read Aristides’ so-called Diary (HL I.7– 60)—and sometimes the Hieroi Logoi as a whole—in the Asclepiadic tradition of prescriptive dreams and votive offerings.2 He writes, however, not from the sanctuary of Asclepius at Pergamum—his most famous haunt—but from his ancestral estates in Mysia, in early 166 CE, some two decades after the original illness that led him to his divine protector.3 And while the text is remarkable for the way it vividly reproduces

* I would like to thank William Harris for the opportunity to present this paper at the Symposium and for his assistance in the revision and editorial process. I am grateful also to Brooke Holmes and Ewen Bowie for their help, and to Christopher Faraone, Elizabeth Asmis, Shadi Bartsch and Ja´s Elsner for feedback on earlier versions. The text is substantially that of the paper as presented.

νν δ4 )ς *σχεν τ8 το Zτρου δηλ.σαι πρ8ς XμAς βολομαιk λογιομαι δ4 5καστα πρ8ς Tμ ραν (HL I.4). The Diary closes at HL I.60: τοσατα μ4ν τ περ0 το Zτρου (‘So 1

much, then, for the situation concerning my abdomen’). 2 E.g. Edelstein and Edelstein 1945; Festugière 1954; Dodds 1965; Perkins 1995. 3 Behr 1968, 97–98, dates the Diary 4 January – 15 February CE 166, based on references in Aristides’ dreams to events of the Parthian War (HL I.36) and to the presence of the emperor in the East (HL I.33; for imperial activities and movements see Birley 1966). Cf. Boulanger 1923, 483. The date of the composition of HL I is a separate question. Behr 1994, 1155–1163, argues that the Hieroi Logoi were written in 171. A persuasive case for the later date of 175 is made by Weiss 1998, 38 and nn. 55 and 56; cf. Bowersock 1969, 79–80. Conjectures as to the date of composition are based upon readings of two key passages—I.59 and II.9—but it is possible too that HL I and

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the uncertainties of dream language, the first Logos is, I believe, a deliberately public account with a rhetorical aim.4 Aristides is as much concerned with developing a professional self-portrait as with offering an account of divine medical care. In this paper I examine the rhetoric of Aristides’ self-presentation in a narrative episode from the first Logos. Aristides’ dream account at HL I.19–21 includes a declaration of his oratorical vocation that scholars have taken as key to understanding the passage. But previous readings have not offered an adequate account of what Aristides achieves by reporting this assertion in the context of a dream concerned with the sensual pleasures of bathing. I suggest we can appreciate the rhetorical point of this juxtaposition by considering its place within the broader narrative of bathing in HL I, and by reading the episode alongside moments of very similar polemic in Aristides’ Or. 33, ‘To Those who Criticize him because he does not Declaim’. In both Or. 33 and HL I Aristides draws on the precedent of Socratic self-portraiture as a way of presenting professional claims. At the same time, a comparison of the two texts also reveals what is distinctive about the Hieroi Logoi and its narrative of physical experience. Midway through the Diary of the first Logos, Aristides describes a dream in which he sees himself in conversation with an athlete, a youth in training at one of Smyrna’s gymnasia.5 The subject of their conversation is bathing—a pursuit which Aristides’ interlocutor takes to be an uncomplicated, self-evident pleasure. Adopting a Socratic pose, Aristides questions the youth’s assumptions (HL I.19–20):

HL II were written at different times. Dorandi 2005 suggests that HL I is the work not of Aristides at all, but of a later interpolator. However, his argument—based on the heterogeneity of this portion of the text and on its narrative confusion—is difficult to accept. For reasons I explain more fully in my dissertation on Aristides’ Hieroi Logoi, I take HL I to be genuine. 4 On Aristides’ realistic portrayal of the syntax of dream language see Gigli 1977, 219–220; Del Corno 1978, 1610, 1616–1618; Castelli 1999. Nicosia 1988, 181–182, suggests that the Diary of the first Logos has undergone little ‘secondary elaboration’ by comparison with dream narratives of the other Logoi. Cf. Dorandi 2005. Contrast Quet 1993, 220, who maintains that the Diary of 166 was ‘choisi et peut-être conçu pour être publié’ by Aristides himself. On Aristides self-consciousness about the compositional status of his text, and on his references to the ‘apograph’ see Pearcy 1988. 5 The setting of this dream in Smyrna is secured by a reference to the ‘Ephesian Gates’ at HL I.20. Cf. Cadoux 1938, 181. For gymnasia in Smyrna see Aristides Or. 17.11; 18.6. On baths as an outstanding feature of the Smyrnaean landscape, see Aristides Or. 17.11, 47.18–21, 29.30, 23.20. Cf. Yegül 1992, 306.

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α`&ις δ4 δκουν πρ8ς α%τF. τF. ΑσκληπιF. νεαν!σκον τιν τ.ν γυμναστικ.ν *τι γ νειον περ0 βαλανε!ων διαλ γεσ&αι, τ μεγKλα δ" παινοντα κα0 τοιατας τιν ς τ ς πολασεις το β!ου τι& μενον. δε!ξας ο`ν α%τF. τ"ν &Kλατταν oρμην εO κα0 ντα&α μεινον λοεσ&αι, D ν μικρF.. ‘ν μικρF.’, *φη. μετ δ4 τοτο λ!μνην τιν *δειξα κα0 oρμην εO κα0 ν λ!μνMη τοσατMη κρεττον, D ν μικρF.. συνεχ,ρει κντα&α @τι αJρετ,τερον τ8 ν μικρF.. ‘ο%κ ρα, *φην, πανταχο τ γε μεζον αJρετ,τερον, λλ’ *στιν τις κα0 μικρο χKρις’. κα0 :μα νενησα πρ8ς μαυτ8ν )ς κα0 πιδεικνυμ νFω που καλ8ν εOπεν @τι τ.ν μ4ν λλων ν&ρ,πων αJ Tδονα0 κινδυνεουσιν X.ν τινων εBναι Tδονα!, T δ4 μ" κα&αρ.ς ρα ν&ρ,που ε$η, @στις σνειμ! τε κα0 χα!ρω λγοις.

And again, I dreamed that by the statue of Asclepius himself a young man—one of the athletes, still unbearded—was lecturing about bathing establishments. He was praising large ones and considered such things the pleasures of life. So indicating to him the sea, I asked if it was better to bathe even in there, or in a small place. ‘In a small place’, he said. And after this I pointed to a harbor and asked whether it was better in a harbor of that size, or in a small place. He agreed that in that case too it was preferable [to bathe] in a small place. ‘Then it’s not’, I said, ‘a general rule that the greater is preferable, but there is also some charm in the small’. And at the same time I thought to myself that also if one were declaiming somewhere it would be well to say that the pleasures of other men risk being the pleasures of swine, but my pleasure is purely that of a man, since I keep company with—and rejoice in— words (logoi).

The dream contains a miniature elenchos on the subject of the size of bathing sites, by which Aristides exposes the absurdity of the young man’s assumption that life’s physical pleasures should be enjoyed on a large scale. Then, at the conclusion of this exchange, still inside the dream,6 Aristides gives an oratorical cap to the conversation in his own mind: ‘What are the pleasures of the bath house’, he reflects, ‘compared to the pure intellectual joys of one who dedicates himself to rhetoric?’ I will come back—at the end of this paper—to what ensues. For in fact, while he strongly censures bathing as ‘the pleasures of swine’, Aristides ends up making the surprising decision to indulge in the very activity he has repudiated (I.20–21). But to begin we should examine the associative logic of the dream itself. How does Aristides’ total rejection of bathing relate to the Socratic-style exchange that precedes it?

6

Implied by the phrase κα0 :μα νενησα.

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Scholars have noticed Aristides’ highly self-conscious expression, here, of his intellectual allegiances.7 However, the two studies that take some time to interpret the passage have concluded that the episode at HL I.19–21 is ultimately symbolic—either of literary aesthetics or of suppressed sexual desire; and neither offers an adequate account of Aristides’ deliberate conjunction of bathing and oratory. Charles Weiss reads the passage as an allegory of literary style, and dismissing the ‘long fast leap’ Aristides makes between the dream’s two parts, he focuses his attention on the logical conclusion of the elenchos—that there is a certain charm in the small.8 Weiss relates this to a literary aesthetic of smallness in Callimachaean terms, and suggests that it alludes to the plain style of the Hieroi Logoi themselves.9 Besides the fact that it is difficult to take the sprawling narrative of the HL as a study in literary miniaturization,10 there remains the issue that in his rhetorical comment on the dream elenchos, Aristides does not draw distinctions between different kinds of speaking or writing; rather, he contrasts the so-called ‘pleasures of swine’ with oratorical culture in its widest sense: logoi. Weiss’s reading does not address why Aristides represents the very broad categories of bathing and rhetoric as moral opposites. Michenaud and Dierkens, on the other hand, make Aristides’ opposition between bathing and oratory crucial. They read the dream encounter with the young athlete as representing a homosexual solicitation through which erotic energy is sublimated in intellectual pursuits.11 However, their overtly psychoanalytic approach misses the ironic humor at work here and precludes any recognition of Aristides’ deliberate construction of an ethical dichotomy between bathing and declamation. 7 Weiss 1998, Michenaud and Dierkens 1972. Keil 1898, ad loc. cross-references this passage with Or. 33.29–31; cf. Behr 1981, ad loc. 8 Weiss 1998, 50. 9 Weiss 1998, 49–52 takes the dream as ‘a symbol for the [stylistic] program’ of the Hieroi Logoi. He suggests that the Hieroi Logoi were composed as an essay in the ‘plain style’ as part of a bid for a position on the imperial staff (perhaps as tutor to the young Commodus) when Marcus Aurelius visited Smyrna in 176 during a political-diplomatic tour after Avidius Cassius’ uprising in the East. 10 When Aristides uses water metaphors to talk about oratory and writing, immensity and incommensurability—not an aesthetic of smallness—are the pervasive themes (e.g. HL I.1). On the rarity of references to Hellenistic authors in Aristides’ writings and those of his contemporaries—and the few exceptions—see Bowie 1989, 211–212. 11 Michenaud and Dierkens 1972, 88, take this dream as corroborating their hypothesis that Aristides’ oratorical activities are compensation for fear of real social engagement.

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To understand Aristides’ deliberate combination of bathing and oratory in this passage, I suggest we should consider two contexts for the dream: first, the therapeutic motif of alousia (‘abstention from baths’) that structures the dream narrative of HL I; second, the rhetoric of Or. 33, where Aristides characterizes bathing as a luxurious activity in order to highlight the ethical value of oratory. Dating to approximately the same time as HL I, Oration 33 presents the physical concerns of epidemic illness and of luxurious living as a testing ground for intellectual commitments. The thematic parallels help to show what is at stake in HL I, where Aristides makes the care and cultivation of his body part of a strategy for self-presentation.

Alousia From its first entry, the Diary of Aristides’ digestive complaints is framed by the god’s prescription for restoring balance in his body: alousia, ‘abstention from baths’.12 This therapy makes sound medical sense in the ancient context.13 For, since abdominal disorder was understood to result from an excess of moist humors, a ‘drying’ regimen was considered the appropriate corrective in some cases. But Aristides’ Diary does not, on the whole, record simple abstention from bathing. Instead he presents a long series of dreams that require interpretation and seem, in a number of cases, to suggest that he ought to bathe. The first of these dreams immediately follows Asclepius’ command of alousia (HL I.7):

12 ΔωδεκKτMη δ4 το μην8ς λουσ!αν προστKττει - &ε8ς (I.6): ‘And on the twelfth of the month the god prescribes abstention from baths’. Aristides uses the word alousia sixteen times in the Hieroi Logoi, all citations but one occurring in the first Logos. The only ancient author whose record approaches this is Galen (fifteen occurrences over his entire corpus). There are, of course, other ways to describe the action of refraining from bathing in Greek. In the Hippocratic context, for example, Villard 1994, 43 n. 9, finds the following verbal locutions: λουτρ.ν ε$ργεσ&αι/απ χεσ&αι, λουτεν, μ" λοειν. Alousia, then, is concise shorthand for the prescription. 13 Villard 1994, 52. Villard’s lexical analysis of Hippocratic texts shows that louesthai can indicate many different external therapeutic activities involving water, only some of which involved immersion bathing. In the Hippocratic treatise The Art 5, bathing and abstention from bathing (alousia) appear in a list of polar opposites that guide medical treatment—including eating much and fasting, exercise and rest, sleep and wakefulness and so on. In the Hippocratic Corpus, see especially: Regimen 2.57, Affections 53, Regimen in Acute Diseases 18. Bathing was believed by the Hippocratic writer of Places in Man 43

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janet downie After this there came a dream that contained some notion of bathing— not, however, without some doubt (though I did seem to be actually defiled [molunthenai] in some way), but it seemed nevertheless a good idea to bathe, especially because if in fact I had suffered this [defilement], water was necessary. Straightaway, then, I spent some rather unpleasant time in the bathhouse. And when I got out, all [my body] seemed full and my breathing was like an asthmatic’s so that, to begin with, I immediately stopped taking nourishment. After this there was corruption (diaphthora) from night onwards, and it went on to such an extent that it scarcely let up a little before noon.

Aristides describes himself as hesitating between the ‘notion’ (ennoia) that a dream of defilement signals the need for a bath, and a ‘doubt’ (huponoia)—since bathing would presumably be contraindicated by his digestive problems and by Asclepius’ previous instructions.14 The term molunthenai is rare in the medical context; here, in the context of dream interpretation and in conjunction with diaphthora it acquires, rather, a moral resonance.15 Although Aristides is not explicit about the details of his vision, we might imagine an excrement dream of the sort that Artemidorus and Galen both describe. Galen, attending primarily to how dreams index the state of the body, says that when a dreamer sees himself standing in excrement or mud it means either that his humors are in a bad state or that his bowels are full.16 According to Artemiand by Galen to help people obtain nourishment from food; thus, its opposite, alousia, was a logical concomitant of fasting. 14 This passage gives an example of the frequently complex syntax of the HL, by which Aristides attempts to render dream logic in language: narrative and interpretation quickly merge. 15 The medical uses of μολνω are limited: in his treatise on the composition of medicaments, Galen uses the verb to talk about colors that stain; in the Hippocratic corpus, the related μωλνω describes swellings that suppurate. Basically, μολνω refers to physical defilement, but this sense is easily extended metaphorically or symbolically to the moral sphere. Plato speaks of the person who is ‘defiled’ like a wild pig by his ignorance (Rep. 535e); Artemidorus investigates the significance for the dreamer’s social life of various dreams of ‘defilement’ (ii.26). Cf. LSJ (s.v.) for attestations of both the physical and extended (or metaphorical) senses. While diaphthora can refer to ‘corruption’ of a physical sort (see LSJ I.5, Aretaeus, CA ‘stomachic disorder’), in Aristides’ corpus its moral overtones (cf. LSJ I.3 ‘moral corruption’) are marked: see Or. 34.27 and Or. 29.29. Cf. Or. 33.30: φ&ορ (discussed below, and by Avotins 1982). In his treatise On Diagnosis from Dreams (VI.832–835K) Galen cautions that a doctor can err by interpreting in medical terms a vision whose significance pertains to a non-medical aspect of the patient’s life. 16 VI.835K: ‘For, those who dream that they spend time in dung or mud—either they have bad and malodorous and putrid humors inside, or an abundance of retained excrement in their digestive system’.

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dorus, however, whose interest in the interpretation of dreams covers the whole range of symbolic meanings, a dream involving excrement (animal or human) may portend sickness, particularly if the excrement stains,17 but as a symbol of impurity it may also pertain to a variety of issues relating to the dreamer’s social life.18 Although the Diary is oriented around physical concerns, Aristides responds to this dream as if it marks impurity: he takes a bath. Seizing upon water as a conceptual link between the social and medical realms19 he finds little success, as the bath leads to physical discomfort, rather than to successful regulation of the moist humors. Aristides’ account of his dream of defilement points towards a persistent area of ambiguity in the first Logos. As we have seen, bathing and abstention from baths might be explained in either medical or social terms. Just so, in spite of the explicitly medical framework of HL I, many of Aristides’ dream accounts seem concerned less with physical therapeutics than with social and professional situations.20 Several dream episodes accommodate both issues in the same narrative space.21 So, while Aristides’ preoccupation with bathing seems at first to belong to his therapeutic concern with alousia, it is also part of Aristides’ social world: a number of narrative vignettes in the Diary feature conventional bathing in purpose-built bathhouses. I suggest that he highlights this feature of contemporary health and recreation deliberately, in order to make an ethical point about oratory. Medical and dietetic writings of the Imperial period partly reflect the great popularity of public and private bathing facilities.22 Physicians like Galen offer nuanced and complex advice on precisely how to calibrate 17

Artemidorus ii.26: ‘…[excrement] indicates despondency and harm, and—when it stains—illness’. 18 Artemidorus ii.26 surveys a range of possibilities. 19 On Aristides’ eclectic approach to dream interpretation see Behr 1968, 171– 195, and Nicosia 1988. Such lack of systematization and consistency in the actual deployment of dream theory was probably common (Harris 2003). 20 Oratory is part of what Aristides refers to as the ‘secondary business’ (πKρεργον) of his dreams (I.16). For a sense of the ethical value with which Aristides invests oratory, particularly in the ‘Platonic Orations’, see Milazzo 2002; cf. Sohlberg 1972. 21 Other dreams that combine oratory with bathing: I.22, I.34, I.35. Dreams in which bathing is linked with a social scenario: I.18, I.27, I.50. 22 Fagan 1999 suggests that the increased interest in bathing as therapy in the Roman period was spurred by Asclepiades of Bithynia, who relied heavily on baths in medical treatment. On the rudimentary state of bathing facilities in earlier periods, as implied by the discussion of bathing in the Hippocratic Regimen in Acute Diseases 65–68 see Villard 1994, 43.

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bathing procedures to each health situation;23 Celsus also recognizes the wide dietetic and therapeutic possibilities of different kinds of bathing.24 It seems that bathing was such an important part of social life that there were perhaps few health conditions for which it was decisively proscribed. While Asclepius’ prescription to Aristides of alousia fits the logic of humoral medicine, then, it remains somewhat surprising from a social perspective. Aristides’ abstention from bathing would appear to be partly a principled, ascetic position—a possibility that his own writings, and those of his contemporaries, support. Artemidorus, for example, describing a progression from the primitive practices of the hardy ancients to more decadent Roman habits, identifies contemporary bathing with luxury:25 … But now [too] some people will not eat before they have washed, and others even bathe after they have eaten. And then, they take a bath when they are about to have dinner. And now the balaneion is nothing other than the road to luxurious living.

A similar apprehension about the link between bathing and luxury seems to underlie Plutarch’s cautious advice on lifestyle and regimen in his ‘On Keeping Well’: the bath is better avoided if you are in good health, he says. And while there may be a place for warm bathing in recovering from an illness, he emphasizes this is not to be overdone (131B–D; cf. 127E–F). The association of bathing with luxury made it a useful tool for rhetorical denunciations of contemporary mores, as we see in Philostratus’ Life of the first century sage Apollonius of Tyana. The model Apollonius makes philosophy his way of life, and his rejection of warm baths is the hallmark of an abstemious regimen of self-care: he disparages public bathhouses as ‘men’s senility’ (1.16.4).26 Similar principles are attributed, in this text, to the Cynic lecturer Demetrius, who waged a campaign against the excesses of the Emperor Nero partly by declaiming against bathing on the premises of the new imperial See Galen’s De sanitate tuenda III, with Boudon 1994. Fagan 2006, 201–202. 25 i.64: ‘Our distant ancestors did not consider [dreams about] bathing a bad [omen]. For they were not familiar with bathing establishments (balaneia), since they bathed in [tubs] known as asaminthoi. But later generations, by the time balaneia were in existence, considered it a bad [omen in a dream] both to bathe and to see a bathing establishment, even if one did not bathe. And they thought that the balaneion indicated disturbance (tarache)—on account of the tumult that arises there—and harm (blabe)—on account of the sweat exuded—and even mental anguish and fear because the skin and the appearance of the body are altered in the balaneion’. 26 Cf. Philostratus, VA 7.31, and Marcus Aurelius 8.24. 23 24

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gymnasium in Rome: bathers, he said, are effeminate men who defile themselves with extravagance.27 In brief, Aristides’ preoccupation with bathing in the first Logos belongs within a whole contemporary culture of the bathhouse. Conventional bathing in elaborate public and private facilities was a social institution of the imperial era that could be made to bear ethical weight. Aristides himself uses bathing as part of an ethical polemic in his Oration 33, ‘To Those who Criticize him because he does not Declaim’, and we shall see that this polemical text sheds light on the dream conversation at HL I.19–20, in which Aristides contrasts the athlete’s interest in bathing with his own intellectual pursuits. Professional Apologetics in Oration 33 On the basis of references to the Antonine plague, Or. 33 has been dated to around 166, which would make it roughly contemporary with the period covered by the Diary of HL I.28 In this Oration Aristides defends himself against accusations that he has been less than fully engaged in his role as a public speaker.29 Defining and defending his practice of rhetoric, Aristides argues, to the contrary, that his deep commitment to oratory as a socially constructive force is clear from the fact that he continued to declaim in Smyrna, even when the plague was at its height in 165.30 Inscribing his speech consciously in a Greek tradi-

Philostratus, VA 4.42. The core of Or. 33 is an apologia, perhaps intended for an audience of Aristides’ students in Smyrna (Avotins 1982). The addition of a prologue makes it an epistolary propemptikon, ostensibly for a friend of Aristides’ who is about to set out on a journey (on the possible recipient see Behr 1968, 102). The dating of Or. 33 is not secure (Behr 1968, 102 n. 22c), but references to the Antonine plague at 33.6 and arguably at Or. 33.30–31 (Avotins 1982) indicate a date after 165. Behr 1968, 102 suggests it was written before Aristides’ return to Smyrna in 167; contrast Boulanger 1923, 162, who dates Or. 33 anywhere between 165 and 178. 29 Some scholars have taken this piece to be a response to renewed attacks on Aristides’ claims to liturgical immunity (Mensching 1965; for the story of Aristides’ several attempts to contest public duties assigned to him, see Bowersock 1969, 36– 41). It is not clear that Aristides had such a specific situation in mind (see Behr 1994, 1168 n. 124 for a critique of Mensching’s hypothesis). Even if, as Behr argues, Aristides’ issues of immunity were over by 153, Aristides is nevertheless frequently concerned with defining and defending oratory as a profession, and especially his own practice of it. 30 Or. 33.6: ‘In fact, I have spoken to you about these things before, too, when the plague was at its height and the god ordered me to come forward. And what I am about to say is informed by the same intention—that you should know I did not think it 27 28

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tion that has Socrates as its source,31 Aristides calls his oration both an ‘apologia’ and ‘a well-intentioned censure’,32 and he borrows from the opening paragraphs of Plato’s Apology the first word of the defense portion of Or. 33: skiamachein, ‘shadowboxing’.33 Reprising Socrates’ assertion that his appearance before the jury is not primarily a consequence of the immediate charges against him, but rather reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of his way of life, Aristides constructs a fictional court scenario, in which he is compelled to defend his professional conduct against unspecified accusers.34 His defense is an ethical one: like Socrates he bases his self-portrait on claims that he has always been concerned primarily to foster the highest human faculties of intellect and spirit. In the apologetic context of Or. 33, then, when Aristides invokes the contrast between the pleasures of the bathhouse and the intellectual discipline of oratory, he makes a point about his own ethical persona. Conventional bathing is introduced as a sign of the degenerate luxury that is the opposite of all Aristides claims to stand for. Refuting the charge of failing to make public appearances, Aristides turns the tables on his accusers: they are the ones who are at fault for preferring baths to more dignified pursuits (Or. 33.25): Instead of going to listen to declamations, most of you spend your time (diatribete) around the bathing pools, and then you are amazed if you miss some of the speakers. But, it seems to me, you don’t want to tell yourselves the truth: that it’s not possible for people who love jewelry or who are attached to bathing, or who honor what they should not, to understand the serious pursuits (diatribas) of oratory.

Underscoring the contrast by his word choice, Aristides insists that wasting time (diatribete) at the baths is the opposite of responsible intelright to sit idle in those most precarious times. It’s other people who make declamation (logoi) a matter of small concern’. 31 Aristides’ deep familiarity with Plato’s Apology of Socrates is clear especially in his Platonic Orations (Or. 2 and 3; Milazzo 2002). Gigante 1990 briefly discusses Socrates as a model for Aristides in the Hieroi Logoi. Early on, Isocrates appropriated the Socratic apologia tradition for rhetoric (Ober 2004). On Aristides’ use of Isocrates see Hubbell 1913. 32 Or. 33. 34: ‘What I have said, then, is an apologia, if you will—or a well-intentioned censure (πιτ!μησις π’ ε%νο!ας)’. 33 Or. 33.3: ‘Shadow-boxing, I realize, is what is called for, somehow. For those to whom I should address what I have to say are not present’. Cf. Plato Ap. 18d. 34 He draws attention to the courtroom fiction: ‘I speak, then, as if these men were present and I were addressing them’ (Or. 33.5).

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lectual endeavors (diatribas). An immoderate dependence on bathing is as pathological, he suggests, as a passionate desire for jewelry. By way of contrast, Aristides sketches the responsible attitude toward bathing in a passage that makes reference to Homer. Although he was born the son of the Mysian river Meles—so the legend goes—Homer did not spend his life swimming idly about, the sophists say, but renounced such activities for greater pursuits (Or. 33.29): … Homer himself was not satisfied to dwell on his father’s banks and to swim along with the fishes who were his brothers (as their story goes), but rather lived a life so rough (auchmeron) that clearly he was generally satisfied with access to basic necessities. And baths that were improvised and, in fact, for the purpose of helping ailing bodies, as Plato says—those he accepted, but he permitted no further luxury.

Homer appears here as an ascetic model for the true orator:35 his ‘rough’ or ‘squalid’ way of life is, literally, ‘dry’ (auchmeron)—so Aristides once again links the parching effects of a regime of alousia with the ethical virtue of rejecting luxury. The legendary poet is said by his modern admirers to have accepted only baths that were medically necessary36—and even these were to be ‘improvised’, not taken in the kind of well-appointed kolymbethrai that Artemidorus refers to. Aristides’ portrait of Homer makes him representative of an old-fashioned austerity diametrically opposed to the sumptuous ease of Imperial-era balaneia that seduce Aristides’ degenerate contemporaries. Because of its associations with luxury, bathing appears as oratory’s opposite at the climax of Or. 33, when Aristides considers ethical behavior in light of the ultimate stock-taking—death. Aristides closes Or. 33 by encouraging his audience to derive their satisfactions from the best part of life—oratory of course. His image of the opposite, undesirable ethical choice now combines bathing with a reference to ‘swinish pleasures’ and recalls HL I (Or. 33.31): Take pleasure in the finest things of life as long as possible. So that if we are of the portion who are saved, we will be saved among the finest pursuits—study and oratory—and we will not be wallowing in our accommodation to the swinish temperament night after night and day after day. But if we are not [of the portion who are saved], the gain will be everything that each person pursued up to that point. Or, by the gods, is there some profit in bathing while one is alive ([an activity] that surely 35 Part of Aristides’ point is that contemporary orators themselves circulate these stories about their ‘ancestor’ Homer, but fail to live up to the model they claim. 36 Plato, Lg. 761c–d.

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janet downie awaits the deceased), but when it comes to oratory (from which one is necessarily debarred after death) it’s a thoroughly distasteful idea to take pleasure in this during life, both by speaking oneself and by attending when someone else is speaking?37

This statement of priorities—favoring the practice of oratory—is essentially the same as the one Aristides makes to himself ‘as if he were declaiming’ at the end of his dream conversation with the young athlete in the first Logos. Here, he reverses the expected distribution of pleasure and profit: intellectual activities are pleasurable, while bathing is a profitless pursuit that Aristides associates with ritual treatment of the dead body.38 In the context of a heightened awareness of mortality related to the crisis of the Antonine plague,39 Aristides urges his audience to avoid the kind of social degradation that so often accompanies epidemic illness and to make the finest human preoccupations their most urgent concern, whether they should live or die.40 By pointing to the fact that one can be bathed after death but cannot participate in the oratorical community after death, Aristides draws a clear distinction between activities that are purely physical and those higher ones that are mental or spiritual as well. The description of bathers as swine, rolling about in the mud, evokes a common image of the unregenerate mortal condition used by Plato in several contexts—notably in the Phaedrus—to describe the life lived without philosophy.41 Bathing, as Aristides’ opponents pursue it, is the inverse of intellectual elevation and spiritual purification. It is the pre-occupation of a non-initiate.42 37

My thanks to David Traill for suggestions on the translation of this passage. Compare the end of Plato’s Phaedo where, as he reflects on the dignity and immortality of the soul, Socrates takes a final bath as an anticipatory funeral rite. On allegorical interpretations of Socrates’ final moments in this dialogue see Crooks 1998. 39 Or. 33.30–31, with discussion by Avotins 1982. 40 Avotins 1982 argues that σ,ζειν in this passage implies physical survival of epidemic illness. He also reads φ&ορK at 33.30 as a reference to destruction caused by the Antonine plague. Avotins points out that Aristides echoes Thucydides here—specifically the passage in which he describes the effects of the epidemic on Athenian morals (Th. 2.53; Avotins 1982, 4). Thus φ&ορK also alludes, presumably, to the moral degeneration traditionally associated with plague (on this traditional aspect of plague writing, see Duncan-Jones 1996). Cf. HL II.38–39 and Weiss’s discussion of Thucydidean echoes (Weiss 1998, 69–71). 41 Plato, Phdr. 257a; cf. 275e, where written speeches, famously subordinated in this dialogue to face-to-face dialectic are described as ‘rolling about’ (κυλινδεται) indiscriminately even among those unable to understand or appreciate them; cf. Phd. 81d, 82e: ν πKσMη μα&!>α κυλινδουμ νην; Tht. 172c; Plt. 309a. For the association of mud with the uninitiated in Aristides see Or. 22.10; cf. Phd. 69c, R. 363d, Aristophanes, Ra. 145. 42 The connection between washing and purification was deeply embedded in Greek 38

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Socratic Posturing In Or. 33 we see Aristides using bathing and oratory as polarized ethical terms and drawing on a Socratic tradition of polemical self-portraiture in the context of epidemic crisis. The issues in HL I.19–20 are, I suggest, similar. The Hieroi Logoi, however, are explicitly concerned with Aristides’ own health, and so he faces the challenge of explaining how his therapeutic and physical activities reflect on the professional vocation he values most. We have seen that Aristides does not take Asclepius’ original command to refrain from bathing (HL I.6) as the starting point for a simple narrative of ascetic self-restraint. In fact, after his conversation with the young athlete at I.19–20, and after his round rejection of bathing as a swinish pleasure, Aristides’ dream goes on to describe (and prescribe—we are led to believe) a decidedly pleasurable warm bath (HL I.20–21): δκει δ’ ο`ν τατα λ γειν - νεαν!σκος περ0 το βαλανε!ου το πρ8ς τας πλαις τας εOς GΕφεσον φεροσαις, κα0 τ λος *δοξ μοι χρ7ναι ποπειρα&7ναι—πτε γ ρ δ" κα0 λλοτε &αρσ7σαι, εO μ" νν;—ο[τω δ" συν& σ&αι εOς Sραν 5κτην )ς τηνικατα σφαλ στατον nν κινεσ&αι… πορευμε&K τε, κα0 )ς oνσαμεν, πιστ ς τM7 δεξαμενM7 το ψυχρο πειρ,μην το [δατος, κα! μοι *δοξεν παρ’ λπ!δας ο% μKλα ψυχρ8ν εBναι, κυανον δ4 κα0 Tδ? Oδεν. κγc, “καλ,” *φην, οLα δ" γνωρ!ζων τ8 το [δατος γα&ν. )ς δ4 παρ7λ&ον ε$σω, πKλιν εiρον 5τερον ν &ερμοτ ρFω ο$κFω νειμ νον μAλλον. κα0 :μα γιγνμην τε ν τF. &ερμF. κα0 πεδυμην. λουσKμην κα0 μKλ’ Tδ ως.

At any rate, the young man seemed to say these things concerning the bathing establishment that was near the gates leading to Ephesus, thought—not least in the context of the cult of Asclepius, where water appears to have figured prominently (Parker 1983, 212–213). From early on, however, a distinction could be made between purification of the mind and purification of the body as, for example, in the inscription that is said (by Porphyry and by Clement of Alexandria) to have greeted visitors to the fourth century temple at Epidaurus: ‘purity (hagneia) is to think holy thoughts’ (Edelstein and Edelstein 1945, T.318; cf. 336). The distinction is a prominent trope in leges sacrae from the Imperial period, including a first-century CE lex sacra from Lindos (Sokolowski 1962, no. 108) that specifies one should enter the y λλ νFω κα&αρν); cf. temple ‘clean not through washing, but in mind’ (ο% λουτροι the verse-oracle of Sarapis (Merkelbach 1995, 85): ‘Enter with pure hands, and with a mind and tongue that are true, clean not through washing, but in mind’ (Yγν ς χερας *χων κα0 νον κα0 γλ.τταν λη&7 | ε$σι&ι, μ" λοετρος, λλ νωι κα&αρς). For broader discussion of this distinction and its implications, see Chaniotis 1997, especially 163–166. The metaphorical framework of religious initiation, to which Aristides briefly alludes here, when he describes rival orators defiling their vocation, plays an important role also in the polemical Orations 34 and 28.113–114.

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janet downie and in the end it seemed to me that I should give them a try—for when else indeed would I be so bold if not now? Thus, I decided upon the sixth hour as being the safest time to move about… We started out, and when we arrived, stopping at the cold pool I tried the water. And contrary to what I expected it seemed to me not to be very cold, but dark and pleasant to look upon. And I said, ‘Good!’ as if to acknowledge the excellence of the water. When I went in, I found in turn another in the warmer chamber that was milder. And at once I entered the warm chamber and began undressing. And I bathed with much pleasure.

In an ironic reversal, Aristides decides to bathe and asserts his ethical independence from the categories of intellectual and physical activity he has so polemically set out. He decides to ‘test out’ the dream’s apparent prescription in spite of his intellectual reservations, and the result is positive: a very pleasant experience in the bathhouse.43 In this episode, then, Aristides has begun the work of defining the physical practice of bathing in his own terms, setting aside its associations with luxurious indulgence so that he can appropriate it for his own purposes of self-portraiture. With the narrative of this transgressive bath at I.21 Aristides takes a crucial step beyond the basic dichotomy of bathing and oratory that played an important role in Or. 33. By claiming independence from the ethical schema set out in the preceding dream narrative, he prepares the way for the catalogue of extreme and paradoxical baths that will be crucial to the quasi-heroic healing narrative of the second Logos.44 For, once Aristides has defined his separation from conventional bathing through the narrative of alousia in the first Logos, he can incorporate this concept of abstention from bathing into a paradoxical physical regimen that combines outdoor plunges into wintery rivers, harbors and wells with taxing regimes of purging and fasting and with extraordinary intellectual discipline.45 For all of this he claims Socratic precedent

43 In his decision to ‘test out’ what the dream message suggests Aristides again follows a Socratic model: at the end of his life Socrates resorted to trial and error in the matter of the god’s command to compose poetry (Phd. 60e–61c: ποπειρ,μενος τ! λ γοι). On Aristides’ response to the dream Michenaud and Dierkens 1972, 88 comment: ‘Ayant affirmé publiquement son éloignement de tout plaisir sensuel dans le bain, il se permet l’après-midi un bain chaud et agréable, chose absolument exceptionelle dans les Discours Sacrés’. 44 HL II.24, II.45. 45 Episodes of extraordinary ‘bathing’ are described at HL II.19–23, II.46–55, II.71– 80.

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when he summarizes, at the end of his Diary, the kind of life he led during this period of illness (HL I.59): But beyond all the fasting at this time, and the even earlier [fasts], and the ones that I endured later that winter, I passed my days in an almost irrational manner: writing and speaking and examining what I had written. And I stretched it out usually into the middle of the night at least, and then on each occasion pursued my customary routines the next day, taking a correspondingly [minimal amount of] food. And when abstention from food followed upon vomiting this was what was encouraging: diligence and serious occupation about these [pursuits]. So that whenever I think of Socrates coming from the symposium to pass his day in the Lyceum, I think it no less fitting for me to give thanks for strength and endurance in these things to the god.

Aristides makes arch reference here to the Socrates of Plato’s Symposium: the Socrates who could drink copiously without getting drunk and share a bed with Alcibiades without compromising his principles—all in the same spirit with which he endured the physical rigors of battle at Potidaea, went barefoot, or regularly stood stock still, unaffected by inclement weather and deep in meditative thought.46 Already we have seen Aristides taking on the role of the philosopher in his conversation with the young athlete earlier in HL I, and alluding to the Socratic figure of Plato’s Apology in the ethical justification of his intellectual pursuits in Oration 33. Now, near the end of the first Logos we see Socrates invoked as the hero whose ethical seriousness is so solid it passes every physical test—whether of excessive strain or excessive luxury.47 Through the dream narrative of HL I.19–21 specifically, Aristides wants to suggest that, like Socrates, he moves beyond conventional moral categories.48 In this paper I have argued that at HL I.19–21 Aristides’ narrative has a deliberate rhetorical aim that can be understood, first, in the context of the broader theme of bathing and alousia in HL I and, second, with reference to Aristides’ professional polemic in Or. 33. The first Logos and Or. 33 both give moral weight to the motifs of bathing and abstention from baths, and in both texts Aristides alludes to Socrates as 46 Socrates will not be affected, whether he drinks little or much: Plato, Symp. 176c; cf. Krell 1972. 47 Symp. 174a (Aristodemus meets him—unusually—straight from the bath). 48 See McLean 2007, 65, on Socrates’ ‘peculiar bodily habits’ as a challenge to physiognomic approaches to ethical assessment.

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a model. In Or. 33, Aristides’ vocation as an orator—and specifically his professional engagement during the epidemic crisis of the 160s CE—is linked to a Socratic concern for the soul. In the Hieroi Logoi, Aristides has Socrates’ example in mind again, but in HL I he uses it to claim a certain kind of liberty in his physical pursuits. He articulates an ethic of alousia and bathing that will ultimately serve the larger apologetic project of the Hieroi Logoi, in which his intellectual vocation and physical experience are linked.

chapter seven THE BODY IN THE LANDSCAPE: ARISTIDES’ CORPUS IN LIGHT OF THE SACRED TALES

Alexia Petsalis-Diomidis In the late summer of 166 A.D., Aristides delivered a speech in the city of Cyzicus at a festival to celebrate the restoration of the temple of Hadrian, which had been damaged in an earthquake in 161. The speech itself survives in the corpus of Aristides’ writings as Oration 27, Panegyric in Cyzicus. We also have an account of this episode in Aristides’ Sacred Tales, a work written about four years later in 170/171 on the subject of the favours that he had received from the god Asklepios (Or. 51.11–17). I begin this essay with a detailed reading of these two accounts, focusing primarily on the treatment of the themes of travel and landscape, and how these are intertwined with the concepts of the body and the divine. Travel and the body are often explored separately, but when viewed in combination offer fruitful insights into Aristides’ outlook on himself and the world. I then go on to explore these themes more broadly in Aristides’ work, and I argue that they are significant throughout the corpus. This example of the use of the Sacred Tales to illuminate aspects of Aristides’ corpus finally opens the broader question of the relationship of the Sacred Tales to the rest of the orations. This question is significant not just for a nuanced understanding of the Sacred Tales itself, but also for the corpus as a whole. It will be suggested that viewing Aristides’ corpus in the light of the Sacred Tales reveals the author’s profoundly religious outlook. In the first four chapters of the Panegyric in Cyzicus, Aristides introduces the themes of the divine, his body and his oratory. The divine is established as central in Aristides’ statement that he is speaking at the command of the god Asklepios (Or. 27.2). His longstanding and ongoing relationship with the god is suggested further by mention of other instances in the past in which he has received help from the god in difficult circumstances (2). The theme of his body arises in the reference to

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his physical weakness as a potential impediment to making the speech; this weakness is said to be overcome on Asklepios’ orders (2). Aristides self-consciously draws attention to the activity of his speechmaking in the statement that he is extemporising—something which he was notoriously unwilling or unable to do—and he repeats this statement at the end of the speech (3, 46). This introduction is important, and sets the tone for the entire speech. It presents the orator’s motivation in delivering this oration, his overcoming of his physical difficulties, and the actual content of his speech as emanating from Asklepios. In this way the speech itself, its public delivery at Cyzicus, and subsequent readings enact (and re-enact) the divine / human relationship. Aristides then proceeds to a geographical ekphrasis (Or. 27.5–15). The divine element is first established in the landscape by a reference to the foundation of Cyzicus by Apollo (5). The structure of the description of Cyzicus mirrors the process of movement and travel in that it starts with a passage on the situation of the city (its broad geographical context), continues with a more focused section on the city and culminates with a specific description of the temple of Hadrian seen from up close. The process of describing, and indeed of mapping, is never neutral. But in this case, perhaps more than others, the description imposes a particular and one might say even peculiar geographical hierarchy on the landscape. Aristides first locates Cyzicus within a seascape: it is said to be located between the Euxine and the Hellespont, ‘being a kind of link between the two seas, or rather between every sea upon which men sail’ (σνδεσμς τις ο`σα τ7ς &αλKττης \κατ ρας, μAλλον δ4 YπKσης gν ν&ρωποι πλ ουσι, 6).1 It is also said to be located in the midst of three seas, Lake Maeotis (the sea of Azov), the Hellespont and the Propontis (8). It is an epicentre of travel for sailors (6). The centrality of its location both geographically and in terms of the movement of people is further emphasised by the statement that it is ‘located in the midst of the sea, it brings all mankind together, escorting some from the inner to the outer sea, and others from without to within, as if it were a kind of navel stone at the point between Gadira and the Phasis’ (τ7ς γ ρ &αλKττης ν μ σFω κειμ νη συνKγει πKντας ν&ρ,πους εOς τα%τν, τος τε π8 τ7ς ε$σω πρ8ς τ"ν *ξω παραπ μπουσα κα0 το?ς *ξω&εν πρ8ς τ ε$σω, Sσπερ τις Pμφαλ8ς το μεταξ? τπου Γαδε!ρων κα0 ΦKσιδος), the traditional termini of ancient geography (7). Moving on from the seascape,

1

Translations are by C.A. Behr.

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Cyzicus is then situated within the landscape (9–10). Centrality is here replaced by the concept of a perfect mixture of geographical features including mountains, plains and rivers. This first section is like a broad cinematic panning shot, an aerial view of the geographical context of the city. The camera then zooms in to focus on Cyzicus proper (11–12). Aristides plays with the idea of Cyzicus simultaneously being an island, a peninsula and a continent. This not only opens up the question of its geographical status, but also introduces the idea of transformational viewing. The causeways linking Cyzicus to the mainland are referred to as ‘legs’, σκ λη (11). This choice of word is interesting. It was used in the sense of walls, and in particular for the long walls between the city of Athens and Piraeus, by writers such as Strabo and Plutarch.2 This Attic association may have made it particularly appropriate in the eyes of Aristides. But its primary meaning of ‘legs’ should not be ignored. It implies viewing the landscape in the form of the human body and the close linking of the two. Aristides then refers briefly to the beauty of the public buildings (13), but does not describe them. Instead he presents his religious vision of the city ‘as the work of one of the gods’ (τ.ν κρειττνων τινς στι πο!ημα) and ‘sacred to all the gods’ (*οικε γKρ τις YπKντων εBναι τ.ν &ε.ν JερK): Sσπερ γ ρ κατ κλρους :πασι &εος ξMηρημ νη πAσα δ" μεμ ρισται, κα0 α%τ"ν οJ νε> διειλφασιν Sσπερ Yμιλλωμ νων τ.ν &ε.ν πρ8ς λλλους Xπ4ρ σωτηρ!ας τ7ς πλεως. &υσ!αι δ4 κα0 πομπα0 κα0 πρσοδοι κα0 &εραπεαι &ε.ν μετ τ.ν κα&εστηκτων &εσμ.ν … (Or. 27.14).

For as if it had been set aside and allotted among all the gods, it has now been all parceled out, and the temples have divided it up, as if the gods were competing against one another on behalf of the safety of the city. There are sacrifices, parades, processions, and divine services under established codes…

The land of Cyzicus is envisioned as physically made up of the sum of its sanctuaries, and simultaneously vivified by religious processions and rituals. Just as the topography of Cyzicus is effectively rearranged by the manner of Aristides’ description, so the citizens of Cyzicus are said to mould the landscape by exporting marble from the quarry at Prokonnesos to adorn other cities (15), and more significantly by the construction of the enormous and beautiful temple of Hadrian (17). The use of 2

E.g. Strabo 9.1.15; Plutarch Kimon 13.

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marble from Prokonnesos for the construction of this temple is envisaged in terms of the transferral of most of the island of Prokonnesos to Cyzicus. Not only is Prokonnesos reduced in this way, but the outline of the land is radically altered by the new temple: πρτερον μ4ν γ ρ τ.ν νσων τας κορυφας τεκμα!ροντο οJ πλ οντες, Κζικος qδε, Προκννησος α[τη, τ.ν λλων gν $δοι τις· νν δ4 - νεcς ντ0 τ.ν Pρ.ν ρκε, κα0 μνοις Xμν ο%δ4ν δε λαμπτρων ο%δ4 πυρσ.ν ο%δ4 πργων πρ8ς το?ς κατα!ροντας, λλ’ - νεcς πληρ.ν :παν τ8 -ρ,μενον τν τε πλιν κα0 τ"ν μεγαλοψυχ!αν τ.ν χντων α%τ"ν -μο δηλο, κα0 τοσοτος sν καλλ!ων στ0ν D με!ζων (Or. 27.17).

Formerly sailors used to judge their position by the peaks of the islands, ‘Here is Cyzicus’, ‘This is Prokonnesos’, and whatever other island one beheld. But now the temple is equal to the mountains, and you alone have no need for beacons, signal fires, and towers for those putting into port. But the temple fills every vista, and at the same time reveals the city and the magnanimity of its inhabitants. And although it is so great, its beauty exceeds its size.

The human intervention in the landscape of Cyzicus is here experienced through the process of travel, specifically through sailing. The section on the temple proper is not a systematic description of the kind Pausanias gives in his Description of Greece, much less so of the kind found in modern guidebooks. Instead it conveys the size, beauty and awesome nature of the building through a series of metaphors that transform the temple: φα!ης #ν τ.ν μ4ν λ!&ων 5καστον ντ0 νεc το παντ8ς εBναι, τ8ν δ4 νεcν ντ0 το παντ8ς περιβλου, τ8ν δ’ α` περ!βολον το νεc πλεως ποχρ.ντα γ!γνεσ&αι. εO δ4 βολει τ τ7ς αστ,νης κα0 τρυφ7ς, ντ0 γ ρ τ.ν οOκι.ν τ.ν τριωρφων κα0 τ.ν τριρων πKρεστιν -ρAν νεcν τ8ν μ γιστον, τ.ν μ4ν λλων πολλαπλασ!ονα, α%τ8ν δ4 τριπλον τM7 φσει. τ μ4ν γ ρ α%το κατKγεις στι & α, τ δ’ XπερF.ος, μ ση δ4 T νενομισμ νη. δρμοι δ4 Xπ8 γ7ν τε κα0 κρεμαστο0 δι’ α%το δικοντες κκλFω, Sσπερ ο%κ ν προσ&κης μ ρει, λλ’ ξεπ!τηδες εBναι δρμοι πεποιημ νοι (Or. 27.19–20).

You would say that each of the stones was meant to be the whole temple, and the temple the whole precinct, and again that the temple’s precinct was big enough to be a city. If you wish to consider the comfort and luxury which it provides, it is possible to view this very great temple like three-storied houses or like three-decked ships, many times greater than other temples, and itself of a threefold nature. For part of the spectacle is subterranean, part on an upper storey, and part in between in the usual position. There are walks which traverse it all about, underground and hanging, as it were made not as an additional adornment, but actually to be walks.

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This series of comparisons has the effect of playing with the relative dimensions of the temple in the mind of the audience, effectively suggesting a series of magnifications to the effect that that each stone is the size of the entire temple, the temple the size of the precinct, and the precinct as large as a whole city. The height of the temple and its occupation of the air, the surface of the earth and underground is conveyed by offering the audience the vision of the temple transformed into ‘three-storied houses’ or ‘three-decked ships’, and the emphasis on the activity of viewing the building is suggested by the use of the term & α ‘spectacle’. The passage is revelatory in its description of the underground area of the temple which, according to the archaeological evidence, was neither visible nor accessible.3 Finally Aristides chooses to highlight the walkways that traverse the temple and are actually in use, and in this way suggests the experience of sacred space through physical movement. A large portion of the speech is then devoted to praise of the ruling emperors Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus, dwelling in particular on the concord between the two rulers (22–39). In this respect Aristides’ speech mirrors the temple, as both oration and building celebrate the figure of the emperor. Finally the speech seems to come full circle in its return to the theme of the city of Cyzicus in a series of comparisons between the concord of the emperors and the concord of the universe and of cities (35, 41), between good order in a man’s life and in a city (41), and the appellation of all cities as ‘sisters’ δελφα! (44). In these parallels Aristides employs the analogy of city and person, not unlike the earlier vision of the landscape as the human body (11). I turn now to the Sacred Tales, to consider Aristides’ account of delivering this oration in Cyzicus (Or. 51.11–17). The story opens with a chronological reference that locates the episode within the timeframe of the Sacred Tales narrative (‘after a little under a year and a month’); there is also a reference to the festival at Cyzicus called the ‘Sacred Month of the Temple’. There follows a description of Aristides’ physical condition, his troubled sleep and inability to digest anything (11). In this state he receives a revelatory dream in which the doctor Porphyrio praises him to the citizens of Cyzicus and encourages them to gather and listen to him speaking—an echo of the Homeric episode in which Athena persuades the Phaeacians to assemble and listen to Odysseus— 3 On the archaeological evidence of the temple see Schulz and Winter (1990) and Price (1984), 251–252, catalogue entry.

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and then Aristides finds himself in a theatre (12).4 This dream prompts him to depart immediately for Cyzicus. We are told a number of details relating to the journey: there is mention of the order to the servants to pack, the time of departure, the mode of transport (riding in a carriage), the leisurely pace of the journey. Aristides then describes his arrival at some warm springs, but being forced to continue his journey with a few attendants because it was so crowded that he could find no shelter (13). Aristides then arrives at a village, and we are given the precise distance traversed (40 stades). He decides to proceed, riding on into the night, but is forced to stop by a lake because his servants are exhausted. Again precise distances are given: the night stop was 120 stades from Cyzicus, and he had already completed 320 stades (14). Aristides offers a detailed description of the furniture in the room in which he spends the night and comments on its cleanliness; he is equally concerned to give an account of his bodily state: he is thirsty and dusty, and spends most of the night sitting on the couch in his travelling clothes. He then relates in a tone of triumph that at daybreak he got up on his own and finished the journey (15). Both the details of the journey and of Aristides’ physical state are presented as significant indicators of divine charis in the light of the initial revelatory dream. Aristides’ insistence on these details, including minutiae relating to his body such as the state of his travel clothes, indicate the profoundly physical way in which this journey was experienced. The initial statement about his poor health also overshadows the narrative: his ability to endure such a tiring journey despite his inability to sleep and eat is also implied to be the result of divine favour. But it is not only through his body that Aristides receives divine favour on this journey: his oratory is also encompassed. And here we come to climax of the story, the passage about composing and delivering Oration 27: κα! μοι παραμ&ιον _ν της πορε!ας τ8 τF. λγFω προσ χειν, ]ν *δει τος Κυζικηνος πιδεξαι κατ τ"ν το νυπν!ου φμην· Sστε κα0 ποι&η ο[τω παρ τ"ν -δ8ν τ εXρισκμενα αOε0 ναλαμβKνοντι. τ"ν μ4ν ο`ν σπουδ"ν τ"ν συμβAσαν περ0 τ8ν λγον ο% μνον Tν!κα δε!κνυτο ν τF. βουλευτηρ!Fω, λλ κα0 [στερον ν τM7 πανηγρει, εOδεεν #ν οJ παραγενμενοι κα0 οJ τοτων κοσαντες, μο0 δ’ ο%χ qδιον ν τος τοιοτοις διατρ!βειν (Or.

51.16).

4

See Odyssey VIII.1–25.

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And my consolation for the journey was in giving my attention to the speech which I had to present to the Cyzicenes in accordance with the prophecy of the dream, so that I even composed it in this way, always recalling the ideas which I had conceived during the trip. Those who were present, and those who heard about it from these, would know the enthusiasm which was shown toward my speech, not only when it was presented in the Council Chamber, but also at the festival. But it is not so pleasant for me to linger over such things.

The threads are here interwoven very tightly. Aristides was undertaking the journey to Cyzicus on account of a revelatory dream; his consolation during the arduous journey was to turn his mind to the speech; the actual speech was later composed by recalling ideas he had conceived during the journey; and it was a great success, delivered not once but twice. The divine, his body and his oratory are intimately connected. The story concludes with an account of the return journey to his estate at Laneion. The god’s command for him to set off is experienced as a refrain praising the water at his estate. He notes that his return journey was similar to the journey to Cyzicus: in both cases he left on the same day he received the divine command, at about the same time, and both journeys were uninterrupted. We are given the specific time of arrival at an outlying farm on his estate, a mention of the fact that he had not eaten, the total distance travelled (400 stades) and that he arrived the next day at Laneion (17). He concludes the story with the statement ‘And thus took place my first journey to Cyzicus and my stay there’ (κα0 τ μ4ν τ7ς προτ ρας εOς Κζικον ξδου κα0 διατριβ7ς ο[τως *σχεν, 18). Aristides’ decision to include the rather uneventful return journey and not end on the note of oratorical triumph in Cyzicus is interesting. Fundamentally it can be explained by the fact that the return journey no less than the journey to Cyzicus was ordered by the god and its successful accomplishment is ascribed to him. This journey also, then, is one of the many divine favours bestowed by Asklepios, for which Aristides is giving thanks through the composition of the Sacred Tales. But it also reflects the importance of the journey as a round trip, there and back. The Cyzicus episode is presented as a sacred journey, undertaken at the command of the god, and the Sacred Tales as a whole can be read as a series of such sacred journeys. As a literary retrospective narrative of these events, the Sacred Tales can with justice be called a pilgrimage text. The fact that Christian and Islamic models of pilgrimage differ from Graeco-Roman ones, for example, in the emphasis on one major journey to a sacred centre

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and on the penitential dimension, should not prevent us from identifying it as such.5 Oration 27 is a public speech, delivered at a civic festival and subsequently published; the Sacred Tales may have reached a smaller number of people—there is no indication that it was delivered to a mass audience—but there is evidence to suggest that it was published, and in this sense it is also a public text. It is self-conscious and polished and by no means private musings, as has sometimes been thought. It is, however, concerned with matters very personal to Aristides: divine epiphanies and communications vouchsafed him, the internal processes of his body, the processes of composition of his speeches. In the account of the journey to Cyzicus we have the inside story, literally, a narrative relating to the interior of Aristides’ body (his digestion and sleep) and the internal processes of his mind (including the interpretation of revelatory dreams, his intentions during the journey, the subject of his thoughts, and later the process of composition of the speech). My initial decision to focus on the themes of travel, landscape and the body in the Panegyric were partly inspired by the prominence of these themes in the account in the Sacred Tales; effectively I have used the latter as a guide, indeed a commentary, to illuminate the Panegyric. What clearly emerges in both texts is Aristides’ preoccupation with landscape and travel through it; his interlinking of landscape and body; and his conception of the divine as the driving force in his life. But two questions immediately arise: to what extent are these themes of landscape, travel and the body important in the rest of Aristides’ writings? And more fundamentally, how typical is this sort of interpenetration between the Sacred Tales and other orations in the corpus, and where does it lead us? Is Cyzicus a special case? The answer to the latter question, I would argue, is a resounding no. The themes of landscape, travel and the body are prominent throughout Aristides’ corpus, and I now set out the evidence for this, focusing first on the Sacred Tales and then on other orations. The Sacred Tales opens with a comparison between Aristides’ sufferings (cast as the achievements of Asklepios) and the toils of the archetypal traveller Odysseus.6 The text as a whole is teeming with references to location— where Aristides was at different points of the stories—and to his jour5 See Rutherford 1999; Elsner and Rutherford, eds. 2005; and Petsalis-Diomidis, Forthcoming. 6 Or. 47.1. On this comparison see B. Holmes’s paper in this volume.

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neys.7 Fundamental to the purpose of these stories is the presentation of Aristides’ relationship with Asklepios. The god constantly communicates with Aristides, ordering him to stay put or to travel somewhere; the usual result is the alleviation of physical suffering contrary to expectation and a sense of union with the divine. In one instance Asklepios orders Aristides to go from Pergamon to his old nurse Philoumene, and by this means the woman is saved from death.8 The account of the journey to Cyzicus is typical in its inclusion of details, such as the state of the weather, the route and stop-offs on the way. It is also representative in its interlinking of the themes of the body and oratory with the divinely inspired journey. Travel in the Sacred Tales is generally presented as being particularly difficult and dangerous for the sick Aristides, but paradoxically it is undertaken for physical healing: many stories in the Sacred Tales refer to the fact that although Aristides was unable even to get up from his bed, he went on to travel great distances with the help of the god and to experience an amazing sense of well-being.9 As far as oratory is concerned, his illness is repeatedly said to prevent him from making speeches and from travelling to cities in order to deliver them, but conversely some of the journeys inspire him to compose,10 and Asklepios’ communications more broadly are seen to benefit his oratory. In the Sacred Tales journeys are not only undertaken for the purpose of bodily healing; they are also experienced, often painfully, through the medium of the body. Simultaneously Aristides’ body is often described as a landscape, a space in which channels of breathing and eating become blocked,11 channels flow,12 and tempests occur (τρικυμ!αι).13 In the story of the tumour (Or. 47.61–68), the lanJourneys in the Sacred Tales include: Or. 47.65 (sailing across the harbour at Smyrna), 78 (journey from Pergamon to see his old nurse Philoumene); Or. 48.7 (journey from Smyrna to Pergamon), 11–18 (abortive journey to Chios), 60–70 (journey to Rome and back); Or. 49.1–6 (journey to Aliani), 7–14 (journey from the temple of Zeus Asklepios to Lebedos), 20 (ordered to go and worship the statue of Zeus at the hearth of his foster fathers); Or. 50.1–12 (journey to the Aesepus), 31–37 (journey to Rome and return via Delos and Miletos), 42–55 (second journey to Cyzicus), 83 and 103 (summoned to Pergamon); Or. 51.1–10 (journey ‘to the land of Zeus’), 11–18 (first journey to Cyzicus), 18–37 (journeys to Pergamon, Smyrna and Ephesos); Or. 52.1 (journey to Epidauros). 8 Or. 47.78. 9 E.g. Or. 48.19–23; Or. 51.1–3, 49. 10 E.g. Or. 50.3–4. 11 E.g. Or. 47.69; Or. 48.6, 56–57, 62, 64; Or. 49.1–6, 11, 16–19, 21; Or. 50.17, 22, 38. 12 E.g. Or. 48.56. 13 E.g. Or. 47.3. Cf. Or. 42.7. 7

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guage of gardening and irrigation is used: Asklepios orders Aristides to foster the growth, and says that ‘the source of this discharge was located above, and these gardeners did not know where they ought to turn the channels’ (εBναι γ ρ το α) in order to improve his oratory (Or. 50.27 and 29). At various points in the Sacred Tales Aristides discusses in detail how the god effected this improvement, including exhortations not to abandon oratory (Or. 50.14), suggestions of particular topics of composition (Or. 50.39), exercises of ‘unseen preparation’ (Or. 50.26), oneiric introductions to the great authors of the past (Or. 50.59), actual prompting with specific phrases in dreams (Or. 50.25–27 and 39–41), and divine inspiration during delivery (Or. 50.22). In the orations themselves there are countless references to divine commands to take up the challenge of certain topics, pleas for divine aid, and references to direct divine inspiration on the way.52 But whereas these are brief and may appear conventional, the narrative of the Sacred Tales reveals in depth the intimate processes of composition underlying the other orations, and how these relate to Aristides’ body and the divine. Where does this discussion lead us? I suggest that it offers us the model of using the Sacred Tales as a guide to reading Aristides’ corpus not only in a specific way, as I hope to have demonstrated in relation to Oration 27, Panegyric in Cyzicus and in relation to the theme of travel and landscape, but also in a fundamental way, as a key interpretative text that reveals Aristides’ essential outlook. A reading of the Sacred Tales prompts us to take very seriously the statement in Oration 23, Concerning Concord that the area of Pergamon where the sanctuary of Asklepios was situated was ‘the most honoured of all and ever in my mind’ (τ8 δ’ 51 52

Or. 20.2; Or. 21.2; Or. 24.1; Or. 32.1; Or. 33, passim, e.g. 4; Or. 46.1. E.g. Or. 22.1; Or. 26.1; Or. 28.21 and 105; Or. 30.14; Or. 36.124.

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YπKντων τιμι,τατον κα0 δι  πKσης ε0 μνμης μο0, Or. 23.14), and the

passage in Oration 46, The Isthmian Oration: Regarding Poseidon ‘when I am mindful of the divine everywhere and when most of my lectures, more or less, are concerned with this’ (μ4 πανταχο το &ε!ου μεμνημ νον, κα0 σχεδ8ν τ7ς πλε!στης μοι διατριβ7ς τ.ν λγων περ0 τατα οNσης, Or. 46.3). Aristides’ deeply religious outlook can then be recognised throughout his corpus as the prism through which everything is viewed and indeed transformed, most importantly the landscape, his own body and his oratory.

chapter eight ARISTIDES AND PLUTARCH ON SELF-PRAISE

Dana Fields This paper concerns the two longest and most elaborate discussions of self-praise that survive from Greco-Roman antiquity, Plutarch’s On Inoffensive Self-Praise and Aristides’ On an Incidental Remark.1 I propose to read these texts in a way that sets each author’s treatment of the topic against the social and political contexts that these same texts depict, while taking into account their differences in aim and genre. The focus of each work is on the arguments for or against self-praise (and in Plutarch’s case helpful how-to tips). At the same time, it is crucial not to overlook the fact that all of the advice, the complaints, and the selfjustifications expressed by these texts take shape against the political and cultural background of the high Roman Empire. By comparing two figures who position themselves in such strikingly different ways in relation to the agonistic elite display culture of this period, we can tease out elements of the complex relationship between epideictic rhetoric, self-promotion, and political involvement.2 1 Περ0 το \αυτ8ν παινεν νεπιφ&νως and Or. 28, Περ0 το παραφ& γματος. See Rutherford 1995, 199–201 for other sources on periautologia and self-praise more broadly, plus Dio Chrysostom Or. 57 (a defense of Nestor’s boasting, which serves as a preemptive deflection in case the same charge might be brought against Dio himself, and in the course of which Dio manages to assimilate himself to Nestor—a strategy that rivals Aristides’ for self-aggrandizement), and Alexander of Cotiaeum’s ‘On the Difference between Praise and Encomium’ found at Rhetores Graeci 3.2–4 (ed. Spengel). The texts that discuss this issue are predominantly Greek, with the exceptions of Tacitus Agricola 1 and Quintilian Institutio Oratoria 11.1.16, where brief mentions appear. See also Gibson 2003, esp. 245–248, for discussion of Pliny’s use of mitigating strategies in self-praise and the place of self-praise in Roman culture more generally. 2 I use the terms ‘political’ and ‘politics’ (as they apply to the actions of an individual) in the narrow sense, here and throughout this essay, to refer to direct involvement in civic or provincial institutions and the fulfillment of civic or provincial responsibilities. This includes holding office, performing public benefaction (voluntary or otherwise), and serving as an ambassador to other cities, the emperor, or one of the emperor’s representatives. More generally, it also means taking an active part in ensuring the well-being (however tendentiously defined) of the city in its internal affairs and in its relations with other cities and the imperial authorities.

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Plutarch’s On Inoffensive Self-Praise is an instructional treatise probably written during the first decades of the second century CE.3 Plutarch sets out reasons why self-praise is off-putting to others, situations where it is acceptable, and ways to use it without offending (or avoid using it altogether). Aristides’ On an Incidental Remark is by contrast defensive and polemical rather than didactic. The situation that prompted the work can be gleaned from the text as follows: during his period of ‘incubation’ at the temple of Asclepius in the mid 140’s CE, Aristides apparently committed a faux pas while presenting a speech in honor of Athena. He inserted into his written remarks some extemporaneous praise of the speech he was currently giving, allegedly provoking the censure of an unnamed critic, who in turn convinced a friend of the rhetor to criticize him privately. On an Incidental Remark represents Aristides’ public response to this criticism, in which he defends his comment by giving reasons for and examples of justified self-praise.

Self-Praise in the High Empire It has been commonly observed that self-praise, or periautologia (literally: talking about oneself), is a concern that appears frequently in texts of the Roman imperial period, though, as has also been demonstrated, interest in this topic originates earlier.4 My primary question in this paper is what use Plutarch and Aristides in particular make of this theme and what this tells us about how each author envisioned the role of the prominent man in relation to his society, but I would also like

3

If the addressee Herculanus is in fact C. Julius Eurycles Herculanus L. Vibullius Pius, descendant of Spartan dynasts who received their local rule and their citizenship from Octavian, friend to Hadrian, and first senator from Sparta (under Trajan). Herculanus was known also for his patronage locally in Sparta and to various other Greek cities on a scale comparable to the benefactions of Herodes Atticus. See Halfmann 1979, no. 29; Cartledge and Spawforth 2002, 110–111. On the dating of Plutarch’s works, see Jones 1966. 4 See Pernot 1998, though it does not necessarily follow that self-praise is not an especial concern in the Roman period. See also Most 1989, arguing that throughout Greek literature talking about oneself to strangers must take the form of a ‘tale of woe’, which he regards as the least problematic mode of self-disclosure in such a situation. As one might expect, self-aggrandizement and other issues related to aristocratic competition are also prominent in honorific inscriptions; see e.g. from third century Oenoanda SEG XLIV 1182 (B), LIII 1689 (on which see Dickey 2003).

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to raise the question of what this preoccupation with praising oneself means more broadly during this era. Diverse interpretations have appeared over the course of the last century regarding the amount of attention that the problem of self-praise receives during the high Roman Empire. These range from Mikhail Bakhtin’s perception of a widespread alienation of the individual from his society, which leaves the individual unsure as to how much selfassertion is allowed (1981, 132–135),5 to Ian Rutherford’s view that the issue is merely a matter of rhetorical decorum, an interpretation that cuts loose the problematics of self-praise from their historical moorings (1995, 193–204).6 In my opinion, the prevalence of the concern with selfpraise shows the individual (qua individual) making sense of his place in relation to society. After all, such a pervasive concern with how to talk about oneself suggests not individuals alienated from society, but just the opposite: an elite culture in which people are intensely engaged with others, even to the point where this engagement verges on blood sport (as we will see in the course of this paper). Rutherford is right to say that ‘most of periautologia tradition in rhetoric is the working out of a problem of decorum created by a conflict between the social pressure to assert oneself in public and the social criticism of excessive assertiveness’ (ibid., 201). However, the agonistic pressure to self-promote and the opposing forces of social unification that aim to prevent any man from becoming too conspicuous must be examined with reference to the particular historical contexts that give meaning to these forces. For Plutarch and Aristides, this fundamental tension was shaped to a large degree by the political and social environment of the imperial Greek cities.7 Epigraphic sources reveal copi-

5

It is not unreasonable to suspect that this interpretation was colored by Bakhtin’s own experiences under Stalin, including a six-year exile to Kazakhstan. Cf. his contemporary E.R. Dodds’s view of the second to third centuries as an ‘age of anxiety’ in Dodds 1965 (and Swain’s historicization of that claim: 1996, 106–108). 6 Rutherford is followed for the most part by Pernot, who locates the problem of periautologia in the tension between its usefulness and its ‘dénonciation unanime’, (1998, at 117). 7 For surveys of local politics in the Greek East, see Jones 1940, 170–191; Sartre 1991, esp. 126–133; Millar 2006 [1993]; Salmeri 2000, 69–76; Ma 2000, 117–122. For a study of the robust political culture of Asia Minor in the High Empire (from which we have the preponderance of our epigraphic material), see Mitchell 1993, 198–217; and for an examination of the role of local officials as represented in inscriptions detailing civic offices in the province of Asia, see Dmitriev 2005, esp. 140–188 (though see also the reservations of Burell 2005; Habicht 2005).

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ous internal political activity in the Greek East, but the limited autonomy of these cities reduced their scope of action in external affairs. Furthermore, there was at least some degree of direct oversight by Roman magistrates, except among the few ‘free’ cities.8 Some of the greatest threats to the stability of the Greek cities were internal rifts, caused by aristocratic infighting, class conflict, or other factionalism, as shown in the writings of Dio Chrysostom, Plutarch, and Aristides, as well as epigraphic and numismatic evidence.9 As a result, the potential for Roman intervention always loomed, which provided elite orators with a trope to use (opportunistically or not) in their attempts at controlling the urban masses. At the same time as we recognize the influence of the socio-political environment in which Plutarch and Aristides wrote, we should also acknowledge that the contrasts between their texts arise in part from the cultural role in which each of the authors generally chose to present himself—Plutarch as instructive philosopher and Aristides as rhetor (or ‘sophist’, much as Aristides might dispute that label).10 The role to which each author lays claim plays a large part in determining his approach to the long-standing problem of negotiation between the extremes of self-glorification and restraint in a highly competitive society. Greek elite culture always had an agonistic bent, but during this period the emphasis becomes more narrowly focused on the sphere of oratorical performance as such. I argue that Plutarch’s and Aristides’ respective self-positioning in relation to this epideictic culture helps elucidate the complicated interrelation of literary and political activity in the Roman era. The political dimension of self-praise is illustrated by the way these authors’ treatments of the topic tap into a larger tension between behavior that is advantageous locally and behavior that is advantageous 8 See Millar 2004a [1988], 203; id. 2004b [1981], 328 on the elusive definition of the ‘free city’. 9 For Aristides and Plutarch, see below; for Dio, see e.g. Or. 32, 34, 39, 46. Sheppard 1984–1986, 241–248, provides an overview. 10 In framing this essay, I take Plutarch and Aristides to be representative to a significant degree of the cultural roles they adopt, but I do not mean to suggest that they are identical to their roles. There are of course limits to how typical we can take them to be, and I acknowledge that each was an idiosyncratic intellectual in his own right. Furthermore, the roles themselves are malleable (i.e. each man takes an active part in shaping the meaning of his role) and generally a matter of self-presentation: in spite of the common contraposition of rhetoric and philosophy (traceable back to Plato), Plutarch produced some sophistic works, while Aristides displays in his writings a very thorough knowledge of Plato’s arguments (rather than just his style).

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in a broader imperial context. Plutarch’s writings convey the message that within the polis the time for fierce competition and its accompanying self-promotion has passed (though self-praise always had to be handled with care, as his examples from orators of the classical period illustrate).11 By contrast, Aristides represents what later became for elite Greeks the dominant mode of public life, in which ambition aimed at the imperial center took priority over local participation and benefaction.12 In further support of this point we can note, for example, Aristides’ pride in having given speeches before emperors and his resistance to taking up local office.13 By comparing these two authors we can attain a better perspective on the tension inherent in the very issue of self-praise and on the range of approaches to it that were available to prominent Greeks of the High Empire.

Plutarch: the Value of Harmony When reading Plutarch’s On Inoffensive Self-Praise against Aristides’ work on the same theme, one aspect of Plutarch’s piece that becomes particularly striking is its orientation toward the external viewpoint. This should not be too surprising in and of itself—it is practically a cliché at this point to say that the Greeks inhabited a culture carefully attuned to judgment in the eyes of others14—but it is Aristides’ lack of interest in discussing why self-praise creates problems and what effect it has on its listeners that makes the attention to these issues so noticeable in Plutarch. For more on Plutarch’s relation to his political context, see Aalders 1982; Swain 1996, 135–186; Stadter and Van der Stockt (eds.) 2002; de Blois et al. (eds.) 2004, esp. the contributions of Stadter, de Blois, Beck, and Cook. For the philosophical background of Plutarch’s political prescriptions, see the papers of Hershbell, Secall, and Trapp (ibid.). 12 See Swain 1997, 5–9. On evasion of local offices (and their accompanying liturgies), see Jones 1940, 184–190. 13 Pride in having given speeches to emperors: Or. 42.14; in his connection with the emperors more generally: Or. 19.1. See also Philostratus, Vitae Sophistarum 582–583, and Behr 1968, 111, 142–144. Resistance to office: Or. 50.71–108; cf. Pernot, pp. 176–179 in this volume, for a reading of Aristides’ evasion of office as prioritizing Asclepius over all else, including the imperial authority. 14 Cf. Dodds’s importation of the concept ‘shame culture’ from anthropology (1951, 28–63). Note also Swain’s insistence that the interest in the ‘self ’ during the Roman Empire does not include a conception of an isolated individual, but a self that exists in relation to others and is maintained with others’ judgments in mind (1996, 128). 11

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These other-oriented strategies are apparent in the ethical terms Plutarch uses to describe self-praise: he calls it offensive (παχ& ς, 539a), unpleasant (τ"ν ηδ!αν, 539b), emphasizes its role in inciting both hatred and envy, and proclaims ‘we are appropriately disgusted at it’ (εOκτως δυσχερα!νομεν, 539c).15 He draws an even stronger connection between how one presents oneself and how others react when he scolds that ‘praise of oneself is most painful/distressing to others’ (λυπηρτατον, 539d). The man who promotes himself in this way is also taken to exhibit shamelessness and a selfish, unjust character. One reason for this judgment is the fact that the auto-encomiast forces his listener into a choice between two undesirable reactions: to stay quiet and seem envious, or to join in the praise and act as a flatterer (539d).16 It is almost as if the braggart is his own flatterer, inflating himself just as inappropriately as a flatterer does for others, and with equal shamelessness. Throughout this list of criticisms, it is precisely the selfcenteredness of the auto-encomiast, that is, his lack of attention to others’ reactions, that comes under attack. In trying to elucidate why self-praise is such a problem at the close of the work, Plutarch maintains his focus on others’ reactions. In reference to manipulative types who deliberately provoke someone into glorifying himself, Plutarch states: Εν :πασιν ο`ν τοτοις ε%λαβητ ον )ς *νι μKλιστα, μτε συνεκπ!πτοντα τος πα!νοις μτε τας ρωτσεσιν \αυτ8ν προϊ μενον. ντελεστKτη δ4 τοτων ε%λKβεια κα0 φυλακ" τ8 προσ χειν \τ ροις \αυτο?ς παινοσι κα0 μνημονεειν, )ς ηδ4ς τ8 πρAγμα κα0 λυπηρ8ν :πασι κα0 λγος λλος ο%δε0ς ο[τως παχ&"ς ο%δ4 βαρς. ο%δ4 γ ρ *χοντες εOπεν @ τι πKσχομεν λλο κακ8ν Xπ8 τ.ν αXτο?ς παινοντων Sσπερ φσει βαρυνμενοι τ8 πρAγμα κα0 φεγοντες παλλαγ7ναι κα0 ναπνεσαι σπεδομεν. (547c–d)

In all these circumstances one cannot be too cautious, neither allowing oneself to be drawn out by the compliments nor led on by the questions. The best means of caution and guarding against this is to pay attention to others praising themselves and to remember that the matter was distasteful and painful to all and that no other speech is so annoying or offensive. For though we cannot say that we have suffered any ill other than having to listen to the self-praise, it is as if by nature that we are

15 The Greek text of Plutarch’s On Inoffensive Self-Praise is Pohlenz and Sieveking 1972; the text of Political Precepts is Hubert and Pohlenz 1957. 16 The speaker demonstrates he is unworthy of praise by boasting; therefore any praise of him must be flattery.

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oppressed at the matter and try to escape it, and we are eager to be set free and to breathe again.17

As an explanation for the offensiveness of self-praise, this passage stresses the inexplicability of the irritation that the act causes. The words used to convey the offense itself emphasize its weighty quality: it is ‘heavy’ (παχ&ς), ‘burdensome’ (βαρς), and ‘oppressive’ (βαρυνμενοι), suggesting a quasi-physical dimension to the effects of self-praise. Yet Plutarch is only able to account for the unbearable heaviness of auto-encomium by attributing it to ‘human nature’ (φσις). In using images of physicality to understand the effects of self-praise, Plutarch occludes the evasiveness of his recourse to the mysterious and unquestionable ‘way things are’. However, as he continues, it becomes apparent that this so-called ‘natural’ reaction is a cover for the resentment caused by others’ flaunting of their social or material advantages, as illustrated by the example of a resentful parasite (547d). Plutarch’s avoidance of making this revelation explicit is as telling (if not more so) than if he had said it outright: if the wealthy and prominent can keep quiet about their privilege, he implies, the society as a whole will be more stable, and those advantages will not come under threat. Here, as elsewhere, Plutarch reveals that he is concerned with the reactions of less privileged ‘others’ as well as those of the reader’s aristocratic fellows.18 The preceding passage highlights not just the effects of self-praise but also the vigilance over oneself necessary for avoiding the error.19 Plutarch follows with a tip for achieving that aim:

17

All translations are my own. See below, n. 25. 19 The language used to prescribe this vigilance also appears in Plutarch’s How to Tell a Flatterer from a Friend, another text highly concerned with negotiating the tensions inherent in elite (and would-be elite) interaction and with keeping watch over oneself and others (ε%λKβεια and related forms in this connection: 49a, 58a, 70e, 71b; φυλακ and related forms: 50e, 56f, 57a, 61d, 66e, 68d, 71d, 72d). See Whitmarsh 2006, passim, but esp. 102. The emphasis on both self-mastery and the monitoring of others in this period has been widely recognized. This is especially so in the wake of Foucault’s influential analysis (1986, 39–95), which takes this preoccupation as indicating the relocation of ethical self-definition among elites to a more internallyoriented plane (which he describes as an intensification and valorization of the relations ‘of oneself to oneself ’). However, Foucault’s explanation of the phenomenon in terms of the individual’s declining political efficacy has been seriously questioned in light of evidence that the political environment of the Greek cities continued to foster robust 18

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dana fields #ν μνημονεωμεν, @τι τος Oδ!οις πα!νοις λλτριος 5πεται ψγος ε0 κα0 γ!νεται τ λος δοξ!α τ7ς κενοδοξ!ας τατης… φεξμε&α το λ γειν περ0 αXτ.ν, #ν μ τι μεγKλα μ λλωμεν hφελεν \αυτο?ς D το?ς κοοντας.

(547e–f) If we remember that censure of others always follows from praise of oneself and that the end of this empty self-glorification is the opposite of glory… we will avoid speaking about ourselves unless we intend some great advantage to ourselves or our listeners.

This ambiguous expression, ‘λλτριος… ψγος’, manages to suggest both criticism from others who are annoyed at having to listen to selfpraise and the implicit criticism of others that praising oneself entails in a context where competition is perceived as zero-sum. Both readings illustrate Plutarch’s great sensitivity to the volatile nature of agonistic elite culture.20 In the course of this conclusion, Plutarch moves from discussing annoyance at others’ self-praise to strategies for avoiding the act oneself, but despite this switch he maintains the first person plural. This ‘we’, while didactic in tone, is also slippery in its identification, migrating throughout this work between the producers of self-promotion and their audience, and thus creating a double perspective.21 The implication is that one must be able to imagine one’s actions from an external point of view to determine the correct (i.e. the least offensive) behavior. It is indeed crucial to Plutarch’s aims and to the kind of advice he is giving that the desirable action is the one least annoying to others. The last sentence of the text (as quoted above) reinforces (and complicates) one more fundamental and recurrent theme: self-praise is justified if it has some end that promotes the collective good.22 But this ending also throws into question the assumptions of the entire work by raising the possibility that self-interest is also a justifiable reason—if one local involvement. See e.g. Swain 1999, 89, demonstrating that the proper regulation of the self and of private life was viewed in the high empire as a prerequisite for the management of public life. 20 See also 540a–b, 546c, 546f–547a, as well as Sympotic Questions 2.1, 630c–d on annoying self-praise. 21 Cf. Plutarch’s use of a similar tactic in How to Tell a Flatterer from a Friend. The tricks of shifting focalization in both these works illustrate the importance of keeping watch over others as training for monitoring oneself. 22 See also 539e–f, 544d. Plutarch’s language here echoes that of Plato in his discussions of the exceptional ‘noble lie’ (π’ hφελ!>α τ7ς πλεως, Republic 389b; π’ hφελ!>α τ.ν ρχομ νων, 459d; see also 414b–415d). Both authors share the aim of political expediency.

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manages to self-promote without causing a negative reaction. At this point we must note that Plutarch’s suggestions in On Inoffensive Self-Praise are generally aimed at the man taking an active part in local politics. A generous reader might grant Plutarch that the true statesman’s interests are always in some sense the public interest; and, in fact, at the opening of the Political Precepts, Plutarch himself urges that a man should never go into public life to glorify himself but rather to serve his community with its best interests as his aim (798c–799a). However, this ending also points to the fact that tension still remains between the value of selfpraise to an individual and the social forces that discourage it. Plutarch’s Political Precepts can also be used to throw further light on why the issue of self-praise is so relevant to Greek politics under the Roman Empire. The advice in On Inoffensive Self-Praise is geared overall toward maintaining social harmony and diminishing envy (phthonos) at a local level.23 The title itself in Greek is Περ0 το \αυτ8ν παινεν νεπιφ&νως: On praising oneself without engendering the odium that accompanies too-eminent success.24 Terms such as μμελς (literally: harmonious in the musical sense) come up fairly frequently and are set in opposition to the unattractive quality of self-love and the undesirable envy of others (542b, 544b). Furthermore, Plutarch explicitly states that harmony should be an aim both in interaction with one’s equals and in one’s relationship with the masses (hoi polloi).25 By comparing Plutarch’s presentation of harmony in the Political Precepts to that in On Inoffensive Self-Praise, we can see that for Plutarch the value of social harmony lies in its necessity for maintaining local stability.26 He illustrates this when he cautions that ambition (φιλοτιμ!α) 23

Cf. Plutarch’s interest in harmony on an extremely local scale, i.e. among fellowdiners, in Sympotic Questions, esp. 1.2, 615c–619a; 1.4, 620a–622b; 7.6, 709d. In expressing his concern not only about aristocratic phthonos but also about mitigating strategies for dealing with that envy, Plutarch echoes Pindaric themes, illustrating a parallel between the social function of his text and that of Pindar’s apotropaic treatment of (human) phthonos; for an analysis of Pindar’s strategies for counteracting envy, see Kurke 1991, 195–218. 24 On this definition of phthonos, see Konstan 2003. 25 Envy and resentment of hoi polloi specifically: 542c, 544d; envy explicitly among elites: 540b, 546c, 546f–547a. Envy among elites is mainly discussed as the cause of self-praise, which would in turn exacerbate the problem, while the masses’ envy is prompted by the self-praise of a public speaker. 26 Expressed as homonoia: 824b–e; and in a musical metaphor: 809e. See Sheppard 1984–1986 on the importance of homonoia as an ideal in the works of Plutarch and in this period more generally, as attested by literary, epigraphic, and numismatic evidence; Swain 1999 on Plutarch’s depictions of the interrelation of domestic/interpersonal

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and contentiousness (φιλονεικ!α) destroy a state,27 and urges local leaders not to involve Rome in order to assert themselves over their rivals— this tactic results in more subjection to the Romans than is necessary and weakens the authority of local governments (814e–815a).28 As in On Inoffensive Self-Praise, Plutarch once again shows his concern over the dangers of class conflict: he warns that faction in the sense of quarrels between the elites and (as he puts it) their ‘inferiors’ can destabilize a city, and cites the current ‘weak state of Greek affairs’ as a reason to be especially careful in maintaining internal concord (homonoia).29 Seen against this background, it becomes clear that the importance of not offending with self-praise during this period is so much more than a strategic way to make friends and influence people. Exercising discretion in talking about oneself is crucial to maintaining the limited independence that Greek cities enjoyed, at the same time as it helps safeguard the advantages of the wealthy and prominent.

Aristides: Self-Promotion in the Service of Truth Moving now to Aristides’ On an Incidental Remark, we find a very different emphasis from that of Plutarch. Aristides’ work devotes far more space than Plutarch’s to providing justifications for self-praise and shows almost no interest in the reactions of the listener. This emphasis, and more specifically the kinds of justification Aristides produces, suggest a view of self-praise that focuses more on the qualities of the man speaking and less on his social context. Aristides repeatedly insists that it is his own talent as an orator, along with the inspiration and favor of the gods, that enables him to make comments in praise of himself. The idea that self-praise is justified by the nature of the man speaking is a theme that pervades the text, but Aristides sets it out most succinctly in this formulation: ‘I believe it is a homonoia and the smooth running of a city; Cook 2004 on the way Plutarch’s preferred rhetorical exempla in the Political Precepts also emphasize harmony. 27 809c, 815a–b, 819e–820a, 824f–825f. Plutarch also notes that this ambition and contentiousness are equally destructive to a statesman’s career: 811d–e, 816c–d. (N.B. that Hubert and Pohlenz prefer φιλονικ!α at 811d, 815a.) 28 This advice is supported by episodes from the history of the Roman conquest of mainland Greece as depicted in Plutarch’s Life of Flamininus 12.9–10. 29 815a–819d, 823e–824e. Cf. Aristides on ceasing from faction, rather than from aristocratic rivalry, to avoid Roman intervention (Or. 24.22).

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trait of an intelligent and moderate man to know his worth, and of the just man to pay himself and others their due, and of a brave man to speak the truth unafraid’ (φρον!μου μ4ν γ ρ, οBμαι, κα0 σ,φρονος γν.ναι τ"ν ξ!αν, δικα!ου δ4 τ πρ ποντα κα0 αXτF. κα0 \τ ροις ποδοναι, νδρε!ου δ4 μ" φοβη&7ναι τλη&4ς εOπεν, 145).30 The assumption that underlies the first part of this statement is one that recurs often in this speech: self-knowledge is reliable.31 Here we can compare the attitude of Plutarch, who warns in On Inoffensive Self-Praise and elsewhere that self-love makes self-knowledge extremely difficult to attain.32 Clearly this sense of caution is not shared by Aristides, who proclaims, ‘I understand oratory better than the critic and those like him and am more capable of judging what deserves praise than a member of the audience’ (κα! μοι παρ!ει περ0 τοτων μεινον σο κα0 τ.ν σο0 προσομο!ων π!στασ&αι, σκοτοδινι>A δ" πAς ντα&α κροατ"ς κα0 ο%κ *χει τ!ς γ νηται, 120). As this statement suggests, self-knowledge for Aristides is closely tied to an understanding of the art of oratory. Early on in the speech, he presents the matter this way: if the critic thinks Aristides is a better judge than himself of what is suitable to say in a historical declamation in the person of a famous ancient orator, how can he think that he is a better judge than Aristides when it comes to what is suitable for Aristides to say about himself ? While, as Aristides says, he has to guess at the character of figures like Demosthenes, he thinks he knows his own character clearly (6–7).33 Besides the belief that one can be clear-sighted about oneself, the statement quoted above (145) relies on two other suspicious assumptions. The clause at the center of the sentence suggests that speaking well of oneself is equivalent to speaking well of someone else, which implicitly locates the value of speech in its truth-content and thereby denies the importance of its role in social interaction.34 In connection with this, the belief underlying the final phrase is that speaking the truth is valuable in itself, no matter what effect it has.

See also 11, 150–151. See also 4–5, 14, 118. 32 On Inoffensive Self-Praise 546b; How to Tell a Flatterer from a Friend 48e–49a; On Tranquility of Mind 471d–e. 33 The οBμαι in ‘τ8 δ’ μαυτο σαφ.ς, οBμαι, π!σταμαι’ is likely sarcastic. 34 Cf. Plutarch on the limited circumstances (καιρς κα0 πρKχις) that might allow this approach: On Inoffensive Self-Praise 539e. 30 31

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These assumptions are part of a tendency throughout this speech to reframe the issue of self-praise as a matter of frankness, parrhêsia.35 Aristides accuses his critic of disallowing candor entirely if he prevents Aristides from praising himself (at least without showing that the self-praise is untrue) (47). This argument, like many of those that Aristides makes about himself in this speech, is based on the fundamental premise that assertions should fit what they refer to (in this case, the quality of Aristides’ oratory) rather than the social context in which they take place. As Aristides says: ο[τω το!νυν κα0 τ.ν ν&ρ,πων @σοι &εοφιλες κα0 τ.ν -μοφλων προ χουσιν, ο%κ αOσχνονται τλη&7 λ γοντες, λλ’ Tγονται το?ς λτας Xπ8 πορ!ας πολλ ψευδομ νους κα0 κατ τ"ν τ7ς χρε!ας αOτ!αν ποι7σαι τοNνομα τοτο ] σ? φεγεις, τ8ν λαζνα, Fp πAσαν τ"ν ναντ!αν *ρχεται δπου&εν - τλη&7 λ γων. (49)36

All men dear to the gods and excelling their fellows are not ashamed to speak the truth, but they believe that beggars tell many lies out of poverty and because of their need have made up this name which you shun, ‘braggart’. This ‘braggart’ is entirely opposite to the direction the truth-speaker proceeds.

With this ‘fanciful etymology’,37 the ‘god-cherished’ truth-speaker is set up as the opposite of the λαζ,ν, the braggart, who is implicitly an impostor because he praises himself dishonestly.38 Aristides even goes so far as to claim that his speech (or any true statement) cannot be blameworthy on the very basis that it is true when he reminds his audience that insult is not illegal, only slander. By the same logic, he continues, ‘if someone praises himself, he would not justly be blamed, so long as he does not tell lies’ (ο[τως ο%δ’ #ν περ0 \αυτο τις ε%φημM7, δικα!ως #ν *χοι μ μψιν, 5ως πεστιν τ8 τ ψευδ7 λ γειν, 50). Another ploy Aristides uses to shed a more positive light on his behavior is the depiction of his self-praise as having philanthropic motives (a tactic which is in line with Plutarch’s advice). In one instance For more references to parrhêsia, see 53, 85, 88. Cf. 11. 37 Behr 1981, 384 n. 72. The pun relies on similarities between λτης (beggar/wanderer) and λαζ,ν (braggart) and builds off a much older pun on λη&ς (truth) and λτης, which is first attested at Od. 14.118–127. Cf. Plutarch On Exile 607c–d; Dio Chrysostom 1.9, 7.1, 13.9–11. Cf. also Strabo 1.2.23, which connects the λαζ,ν with πλKνη (wandering)! On Homer, see Goldhill 1991, 38; Segal 1994, 179–183. On Dio, see Whitmarsh 2001, 162. 38 On the history of the term λαζ,ν, see MacDowell 1990. 35 36

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he even proposes that he is duty-bound to point out what is good about his speech since otherwise the crowd simply would not be capable of noticing all of its fine elements, much less judging which of its qualities are most deserving of praise. Therefore the act of self-praise is characteristic of a man who is ‘completely forthright and generous’ (κα&αρ.ς Yπλον κα0 φιλKν&ρωπον, 119).39 This formulation once again depends on Aristides’ superior understanding of the oratorical art. In a metaphor that oozes condescension, he compares his naïve audience, in their ignorance at how to judge his speeches, to soldiers in a battle line who have been surrounded and are thrown into confusion (120). In other words, his speeches are so good that they practically attack the listener with a barrage of excellent techniques! Only with Aristides’ help can the audience survive this onslaught by learning the true value of his oratorical skill.

Aristides: Divine Sanction In addition to the admirable qualities of frankness and benevolence that Aristides claims for himself, another factor that is crucial to justifying his self-praise is his self-presentation (in this speech and elsewhere) as both a favorite of particular gods and the recipient of divine help. According to Aristides, help from the gods is part of what makes a man great,40 and (as we have seen) a great man must be honest and open about his greatness. Honesty therefore includes attributing this excellence to the gods that made it possible; in Aristides’ case these are Asclepius, Athena, and even the Muses. Aristides’ argument rests in part on the notion that his self-praise is indirectly praise of these divinities and that barring him from remarking on the greatness they have allowed him to attain is in some sense to disallow praise of the gods themselves. Aristides’ comments about his connection to the gods range from the general, as when, for example, he groups himself among those dear to

See also 103, 105, 147. Precedents for divine inspiration of oratory include: Plato as skeptical of oratorical inspiration, Phaedrus 234d–e, 245a; Ion 534c; Aristotle on the ‘enthusiastic’ style, in connection with ‘what is fitting’ (τ8 πρ πον), Rhetoric 1408a36–b20. See also Cicero De Oratore 2.193–194; Seneca Major Suasoriae 3.6; Quintilian on Plato as divinely inspired, Institutio Oratoria 12.10.24. 39 40

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the gods,41 to the very personal, as at the end of the speech when he refers to Asclepius as his patron or protector (προστKτης) and his only guide (παιδαγωγς, 156).42 This image of Asclepius as a teacher and patron is one that appears frequently in the Hieroi Logoi. Aristides relates how, through the medium of a dream, the god encouraged and even commanded him not to give up his oratorical training while he was convalescing in the temple at Pergamum (Or. 50.14–15). He also tells of how his oratorical powers increased, not only because of the god’s encouragement of his practice, but also due to the god’s more specific instruction in that training: for example, Asclepius tells Aristides which ancient authors he should study, and Aristides says that from then on those authors were like comrades to him, with Asclepius as their common patron (κα! μοι πKντες οiτοι μετ’ κε!νην τ"ν Tμ ραν \ταροι σχεδ8ν φKνησαν, το &εο προξενσαντος, Or. 50.24).43 Oratorical assistance from the gods often takes the form of a dream in Aristides’ writings. Early on in his speech on the ‘incidental remark’, Aristides explicitly compares his oratorical inspiration to the poets’ relationship to the Muses. Like Hesiod, Aristides presents himself as visited by the goddess in a dream—Athena herself in this case, to aid him in composing the speech in her honor—and he insists that in praising himself he acknowledged the goddess’ inspiration (20–21).44 Likewise, Aristides attributes his own speeches to Asclepius in the Hieroi Logoi (Or. 48.82),45 and refers in that work to dreams in which he found himself speaking ‘better than I was accustomed to and saying things I had never thought’ (πολλ δ’ α%τ8ς λ γειν δκουν κρε!ττω τ7ς συνη&ε!ας κα0 e ο%δεπ,ποτε νε&υμ&ην, Or. 50.25). These dreams not only provide a connection to the god, but also assimilate Aristides’ source of inspiration to that of great literary figures of the past, bolstering his image as rival to the ancients. Aristides further emphasizes the importance of these dreams to his self-fashioning as a great rhetor when he states that he later incorporated these exalted dream orations into waking

See above p. 158. See also Asclepius’ dream message at 116, identical to one that appears at Or. 50.52. 43 Here as elsewhere, Asclepius sets himself up as an equal to the great ancient writers; on other occasions he recalls dreams that tell him he even excels them. For the god as guide, see also Or. 50.8. 44 See also 53, 75, 94, 102. 45 See also Or. 42.12. 41 42

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speeches and calls the dreams ‘the most valuable part of my training’ (κα0 μ"ν τ γε πλεστον κα0 πλε!στου ξιον τ7ς σκσεως T τ.ν νυπν!ων _ν *φοδος κα0 -μιλ!α, Or. 50.25). A more extreme version of assistance from the gods takes the form of divine possession during the course of an oratorical performance.46 By this tactic, Aristides absolves himself of responsibility for the offense he caused, since, as he claims, the god is truly in control. Aristides describes this experience as a series of quasi-physical sensations, heightening the suggestion of the god’s presence: the light of god comes over the speaker; it possesses his soul like a drink from the springs of Apollo, and it fills him with intensity and warmth and cheer (114). He compares those possessed to priests of Cybele (109) and Bacchants (114), both famous for their transgressive manner of worship. He also claims that inspired speech, once set in motion, is like an automaton, like an object moving by the force of its own inertia (111–112). And it is not the speeches of Aristides’ alone that are heaven-sent. ‘This is the one font of oratory’, he says, ‘the truly holy and divine fire from the hearth of Zeus’ and the speaker is figured as an initiate (λγων δ’ α[τη πηγ" μ!α, τ8 )ς λη&.ς Jερ8ν κα0 &εον πρ τ8 κ Δις στ!ας, 110).47 The upshot of this collection of mixed metaphors is the generalized connection between oratory and divine possession, which has a number of implications. For one thing, it defines the true rhetor by his communion with the god, implying that all others are shams. It also simultaneously censures anyone who criticizes Aristides’ remark for defaming the mystical art of oratory as a whole.48 To stress even more emphatically the importance of the god in sanctioning self-promotion, Aristides goes so far as to use divine involvement to trump the other arguments he himself is making. Aristides informs his audience that even if there were no precedents for selfpraise, divine possession would be enough to justify it, stating: Sστ’ εO κα0 μηδ να μηδ’ φ’ \ν8ς ε$δους ε$χομεν εOπεν π’ α%τF. τι φρονσαντα, μηδ’ _ν ναγκαον τ.ν λγων τ8 τοιοτον πK&ημα, TμAς δ’ εOς τατην - &ε8ς νν _γεν, ο%κ #ν τ πρεσβεα δ που συμφορ ν ποιομε&α. σ? δ’ αOτι>A τ8 σμβολον α%το το α κα0 σωφροσνMη), seems to me to constitute an irrefutable argument in favour of your valour as well as the most glorious subject for my oration (sect. 41).

What this σοφ!α and σωφροσνη consist of is made clear in section 51, where the Greeks are recognized as being superior to all other peoples in wisdom, and the Romans in ‘knowing how to rule’: I wanted to show precisely that before you the art of ruling did not even exist. If it had existed, it would have been among the Greeks, who certainly distinguished themselves above all other peoples in every form of wisdom. In fact this art is a discovery of your own, which has been extended in the meanwhile to all other peoples (sect. 51). 12 Cf. Oliver 1953, 924, who hypothesizes that Polybius and Aristides used a common source, perhaps Anaximenes of Lampsacus, in giving their judgements on the Athenians. But see Fontanella 2007, 114–117.

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In this case too Aristides’ judgement recalls Polybius Book VI in some ways: the latter of course linked the success of Roman expansion to the superiority of Rome’s form of government over the constitutions of the Greek cities. But since Polybius’ comparison does not concern methods of ruling subject peoples, we can fairly confidently say that Aristides is now making use of the Roman point of view,13 which had previously been set out by Cicero (Tusc.Disp. 1.1–5)14 and then rendered canonical by Vergil (Aen. 6. 847–853): excudent alii spirantia mollius aera credo equidem, uiuos ducent de marmore uultus, orabunt causas melius, caelique meatus describent radio et surgentia sidera dicent: tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento hae tibi erunt artes, pacique imponere morem, parcere subiectis et debellare superbos.

The same judgement recurs in a passage of To Rome in which Aristides firmly ties the vastness and power of the Roman Empire to Roman superiority in the art of governing, in such a way as to make Roman expansion unproblematic, indeed an essential precondition for the realization of ‘good government’: What had eluded practically everyone before was reserved for you alone to discover and perfect. And that is not at all surprising, for just as in other spheres the skills come to the fore when the material is there, so when a great empire of surpassing power arose, skill too accumulated and entered into its composition, and each was reinforced by the other. Because of the empire’s size, experience necessarily accrued, while, because of your knowledge how to rule, the empire flourished and increased justly and reasonably (sect. 58).

In this last half-sentence one can, I think, hear an echo of the theories elaborated by Panaetius in the mid-second century B.C. in his work Περ0 το κα&κοντος and taken up by Cicero in De Officiis.15 Even one who denies, like Ferrary, the Panaetian origin of the justification of Roman imperialism in Book III of Cicero’s De Republica,16 has to admit that Panaetius apparently taught the Romans in Περ0 το κα&κοντος Cf. Desideri 2003. Where the author, while recognizing Greek primacy in science and literature, claims superiority for the Romans with respect to social and political institutions and the art of war. 15 Gabba 1979. 16 Cic. Rep. 3.37–39, on which see Ferrary 1988, 363–374. 13 14

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that power is only legitimate and durable if exercised with justice, that is to say in the interest of the subjects, and that greatness and glory are only genuine if they are founded on justice and subordinated to reason.17 Aristides clearly thought that Panaetius’ lesson had been thoroughly absorbed by the Romans (De off. 1.13: ‘nemini parere animus bene informatus a natura velit nisi … utilitatis causa iuste et legitime imperanti’), and that their empire had grown ‘justly and reasonably’. Rome’s ‘imperial vocation’, which distinguishes it from all other peoples, is explained in sections 68 and 91 of To Rome by means of the well-known theory of the ‘natural’ rule of the ‘better’: It is not safe to rule without power. The best alternative [to ruling] is to be governed by one’s betters, but you have by now shown that this is in fact the best situation (sect. 68). For you alone are rulers according to nature, so to speak… Since you were free right from the start and had immediately become rulers, you equipped yourselves with all that was helpful for this position, and you invented a constitution such as no one ever had before, and you prescribed for all men rules and fixed arrangements (sect. 91).

The idea that there exist by nature some men fit to rule over other men who are destined to obey, and that this unequal relationship is in the interest of both parties, is certainly traceable to the Politics of Aristotle,18 however one wants to understand the Aristotelian concept of a law of nature.19 At Rome this theory was taken up by Cicero in Laelius’ speech in Book III of De republica, in reply to the criticisms of those who, like the philosopher Carneades in 155 B.C., had condemned Roman expansionism in the name of iustitia. Laelius, in his reply to Furius Philus (who is made the spokesman of Carneades’ complaint), defends the legitimacy of the Roman Empire on the basis of the premise that

Ferrary 401–424, esp. 424. Arist, Pol. 1252a–1255a, where we find the famous demonstration that slavery is according to nature. 19 Cf. Fassò 2001 [1966–1970], 72–75. In particular, for a parallel to the whole of section 91 (Xμες ρχοντες … κατ φσιν. οJ μ4ν γ ρ λλοι οJ πρ8 Xμ.ν δυναστεσαντες δεσπται κα0 δολοι λλλων ν τF. μ ρει γιγνμενοι … ξ ρχ7ς 'ντες λε&εροι κα0 οLον π0 τ8 ρχειν ε%&?ς γενμενοι), see, for example, Arist. Pol. 1252a: … ρχον δ4 φσει κα0 ρχμενον δι τ"ν σωτηρ!αν. τ8 μ4ν γ ρ δυνKμενον τM7 διανο!>α προορAν ρχον φσει κα0 δεσπζον φσει, τ8 δ4 δυνKμενον [τατα] τF. σ,ματι πονεν ρχμενον κα0 φσει δολον· δι8 δεσπτMη κα0 δολFω τα%τ8 συμφ ρει; 1254a: κα0 ε%&?ς κ γενετ7ς *νια δι στηκε τ μ4ν π0 τ8 ρχεσ&αι τ δ’ π0 τ8 ρχειν; 1255a: @τι μ4ν το!νυν εOσ0 φσει τιν4ς οJ μ4ν λε&εροι οJ δ4 δολοι. 17 18

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nature dictates that power should be exercised by the best people, in this case the Romans, justly and in defence of the interests of the weaker: ‘An non cernimus optimo cuique dominatum ab ipsa natura cum summa utilitate infirmorum datum?’ (Cic. De rep. 3.37). Later on, Dionysius of Halicarnassus was to exhort his readers not to grieve over the fact that they had to submit to the power of Rome, on the grounds that this had come into being in a just and proper way and was like a natural law that time cannot destroy. The law is that those who are superior will always rule over those who are inferior: μτε χ&εσ&αι τM7 XποτKξει κατ τ8 εOκ8ς γενομ νMη (φσεως γ ρ δ" νμος :πασι κοινς, ]ν ο%δε0ς καταλσει χρνος, ρχειν ε0 τ.ν Tττνων το?ς κρε!ττονας) (Dion. Hal. Ant.Rom. 1.5.2). Modern scholars, while almost unanimously recognizing the Aristotelian origin of this theory, divide into those who affirm and those who deny the mediation of Panaetius and/or Posidonius in adapting it to the Roman Empire.20 Since Augustan times this formulation had become ‘canonical’,21 so it is difficult to identify the source from which it reached To Rome. But when Aristides in section 91 writes κατ φσιν, it is possible to recognize a more specific reference to the theory of a law of nature (a reference that is explicit earlier, in section 20), that is to say to a theory that found its most complete ancient expression in Stoicism: we find this theory mentioned in two fragments of Posidonius22 from which I think that it is reasonable to deduce that he used exactly this kind of argument to justify Roman imperialism.23 The possible echo of Panaetius traceable in sect. 58 and those of Posidonius in sects. 68 and 91 could therefore allow us to identify a Middle Stoic influence on Aristides which probably came to him through Dionysius.24 We should remember in any case that the arguments of Aristides in sects. 58 and 91 and of Dion. Hal. 1.5.2 had clear-cut precedents in Cicero, who certainly knew and made use of the works of both Panaetius and Posidonius.25 20 In favour: Capelle 1932, 98–104, Walbank 1965, 13–15, Garbarino 1973, I, 37–43, Pohlenz 1948–1949, I, 206, Gabba 1990, 211, Gabba 1996, 172. Against: Strasburger 1965, 44–45 and n. 50, Gruen 1984, I, 351–352, Kidd 1988, 297, Ferrary 1988, 363–381. 21 Gabba 1996, 172. 22 Poseidonios F 147 and F 448 Theiler, with the latter’s comm. (vol. II, p. 385). 23 Capelle 1932, 98–101, Walbank 1965, 14–15, Gabba 1996, 172. 24 Cf. Fontanella 2007, 118 and 143–146. 25 This idea of Rome’s vocation to rule other peoples persists in Cicero’s last works. See Phil. 6.19: ‘Populum Romanum servire fas non est, quem di immortales omnibus gentibus imperare voluerunt … Aliae nationes servitutem pati possunt, populi Romani est propria libertas’.

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The passage in which Aristides interprets Roman constitutional arrangements as a ‘mixed constitution’26 shows once again how he reworked a tradition that went back to classical Greece but had subsequently been elaborated and transformed in both the Hellenistic and Roman worlds. However your political system is not like any other but is a mixture of all of them (κρAσις Yπασ.ν τ.ν πολιτει.ν), without the disadvantages of any of them; hence it is precisely this system of government that has turned out to be successful. If you consider the power of the people and how easily they obtain everything they desire and ask for, you will think that it is a democracy, apart from the single fact that it avoids the mistakes that the people make. If you look at the Senate deliberating and exercising power, you will conclude that it is a perfect aristocracy. But when you look at the overseer and chairman of all this, thanks to whom the people are able to obtain what they desire and the few are able to govern and wield power, you will see the man who possesses the most perfect monarchy, free from the evils of tyranny and above the prestige of a mere king (sect. 90).

The model of the ‘mixed constitution’ was present in the Greek political debate from the fourth century BC, as we can see from both Plato and Aristotle.27 It was taken up by Peripatetic and Stoic thought in the third century out of ‘a desire to define the relationship between the βασιλες, the ruling class of the cities and the mass of the people within the new Hellenistic πλις’.28 The first person to have applied this schema to Rome (and therefore not just to any πλις but to an imperial power) had been Polybius, who had asked himself the question ‘how and with what form of government (π.ς κα0 τ!νι γ νει πολιτε!ας) the Romans had in only fifty-three years conquered and subjugated almost the whole inhabited world’ (6.2.3; cf. 1.1 and 64). Polybius had identified

26

It is to be observed that in the Panathenaikos too (1.383–388) Aristides applies the scheme of the mixed constitution, though in a diachronic fashion, to the transition at Athens from monarchy to aristocracy and finally to democracy, remarking at the same time how in each of these phases the three elements were to a certain extent combined. In fact the description of a city’s political system and in particular praise for its mixed constitution were considered obligatory themes in panegyrics on cities (Menander Rhetor 1.3, sects. 359–360 Russell and Wilson; Pernot 1993a, I, 211), though that does not mean that in Aristides’ case the theme lacked ideological content (either in To Rome or in the Panathenaikos). 27 Plato (Laws 712d) interprets the Spartan political system in this fashion, while Aristotle (Pol. 1273b) applies it to Solonian Athens. 28 Carsana 1990, 15.

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the monarchic element in the Roman system in the consuls, the aristocratic element in the Senate and the democratic element in the popular assemblies: a system of reciprocal checks between these three elements was able to maintain them in equilibrium in such a way as to make this form of government stable and not liable to decay like ‘pure’ systems of government (cf. Polyb. 6.11–18). Undoubtedly Aristides’ identification of the aristocratic element with the Senate looks like a rhetorical anachronism that owes much to the classical model of the mixed constitution and to Polybius,29 and the reference to the text of Polybius is undeniable (see especially 6.11.12).30 But let us remember that Cicero too, in De republica (1.69, 2.57), had made a ‘mixed and moderate constitution’ the basis of his ideal state—though it was a constitution based on the interaction of three principles (potestas, auctoritas, libertas) present in a single united ruling class, and not, as in Polybius, on the equilibrium of three juxtaposed powers (consuls, Senate and people).31 Aristides, in speaking of a κρAσις Yπασ.ν τ.ν πολιτει.ν, seems almost closer to a Ciceronian view (though his reference to Polybius is beyond doubt), not least because To Rome makes it obvious that the Polybian principle of reciprocal control and equilibrium ‘has been replaced by a hierarchical system’,32 which is a unified system because it is headed by the emperor, the person ‘thanks to whom the people are able to obtain what they desire and the few are able to govern and wield power’. The passages of To Rome examined so far show that Aristides, though he never cites Polybius explicitly, knew and used the Greek historian’s work; but also that he had made his own the essential arguments that had been worked up in both the Latin and Greek worlds in defence of the Roman Empire. The appropriation of these themes in To Rome can be understood as a response to the doubts raised by Polybius in

29

But at the end of the passage Aristides mentions not the Senate but the ‘few’: the use of the term Pλ!γοι, though it may rather oddly evoke one of the ‘degenerate’ regime forms, oligarchy, nonetheless makes it possible to interpret the aristocratic element in the Aristidean mixed constitution in a wider sense, by identifying it with the governing class of the whole empire, already defined in sect. 59 of To Rome as the χαρι στερν τε κα0 γενναιτερον κα0 δυνατ,τερον element. 30 ‘La citazione ‘sintattica’ del testo […] sta forse ad indicare […] una continuità di rapporti tra Roma e gli esponenti delle classi dirigenti del mondo greco; un filo che lega Polibio, storico greco vissuto all’epoca degli Scipioni, ad Elio Aristide, originario della Misia nell’età degli Antonini’: Carsana 1990, 74–75. 31 Cf. Ferrary 1984. 32 Carsana 1990, 78.

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the so-called second introduction to his history; but Aristides’ answer to Polybius seems even more explicit in the sections of To Rome that immediately follow the comparison with the hegemonies of the Greek city-states (sects. 58–70). Here, first of all, he identifies in the diffusion of Roman citizenship the characteristic ‘that more than any other deserves to be noticed and admired, because there is nothing like it in the world’ (sect. 59). Being great, you have created a great city, but you have not given yourself airs about this and you have made it wonderful not by excluding people from it, but rather you have sought out a population worthy of it. You have made ‘Roman’ the name not of a single city but of a whole nation, and not just of a single nation but of a nation that is a match for all the others together. For you no longer divide the nations into Greeks and barbarians, and indeed you have demonstrated the absurdity of that distinction—for your city by itself is more populous than the whole tribe of the Greeks. You have instead divided humankind into Romans and non-Romans, so far have you extended the name of the capital city (sect. 63).

Hence No envy (φ&ονς) enters into your empire: you in fact were the first people to rise above jealousy, having made all things generally available and having conceded to all who are capable of it the chance of taking their turn in command as well as being commanded. Not even those who are excluded from positions of power nurture resentment (μσος). Given that there is a single system of government shared by all, as if this were a single city-state, it is natural that those who hold office treat people not as foreigners but as fellow-citizens, and under your government even the mass of the population feels safe from those who hold power among them… For your rage and vengeance (Pργ τε κα0 τιμωρ!α) immediately catch up with them if they dare to upset the established order. Thus it is natural that the present state of affairs pleases and suits (κα0 ρ σκει κα0 συμφ ρει) both the poor and the rich and no other way of life any longer exists. There has emerged a single harmonious system of government (μ!α Yρμον!α πολιτε!ας) that includes all … (sects. 65–66).

These sections obviously balance sections 44–46, where Aristides emphasizes the hatred that the various hegemonic Greek city-states aroused against themselves.33 The terms employed by Aristides to describe disaffection towards the rulers (φ&ονς and μσος) are used by

33 One recalls that not being capable of extending their citizenship to other peoples is given as the reason for the ruin of the Greeks by Dionysius of Halicarnassus (2.17.2)

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Polybius (6.7.8) to refer to the disaffection that arises when the ruling power ceases to pay attention to the interests of its subjects and thinks only of its own profits, which leads to the degeneration of monarchy into tyranny, which in turn leads to attempts to overthrow it: ‘thus they provoked envy (φ&ονς) and hostility, then hatred (μσος) and violent anger (Pργ), until monarchy gave way to tyranny’. There is no such disaffection towards the Romans, according to Aristides. While rage, Pργ, refers in Polybius to the rage of the subjects towards tendentially tyrannical power, and in Aristides too targets those who abuse their power, it is not in the latter writer expressed by the subjects but by the central Roman power itself, which directs it towards those who ‘dare to overturn the established order’.34 So great is the convenience of the Roman Empire for the subject peoples that they all stay close to you, and no more think of parting from you than ship-passengers think of parting from their helmsman. Just as bats in caves cling to each other and to the rock, so all of them are attached to you and fearfully take care that no one falls down from the clinging mass: they are more likely to fear being abandoned by you than to think of abandoning you themselves (sect. 68).

Finally, thanks to the Romans, peace reigns throughout the oikoumene: Peoples no longer struggle for empire and supremacy (ρχ7ς τε κα0 πρωτε!ων), because of which all previous wars have been engaged. Some people, like quietly running water, live voluntarily in peace, pleased to have put an end to troubles and misadventures, and aware of the fact that they had fought to no purpose against shadows. Others do not even know that once they had an empire—they have forgotten the fact: just as

and also by Claudius (at least in the account that Tacitus provides of his famous speech on the extension of the ius honorum to the notables of Gallia Comata: Ann. 11.24.4). 34 The end of sect. 66 of To Rome (κα0 γ γονε μ!α Yρμον!α πολιτε!ας :παντας συγκεκλεικυα) is verbally reminiscent of Polyb. 6.18.1, where, à propos of the mutual relationships that exist between the various elements in the Roman political system (consuls, Senate, people), the historian speaks of Yρμον!α: τοιατης δ’ οNσης τ7ς \κKστου τ.ν μερ.ν δυνKμεως εOς τ8 κα0 βλKπτειν κα0 συνεργεν λλλοις, πρ8ς πKσας συμβα!νει τ ς περιστKσεις δεντως *χειν τ"ν Yρμογ"ν α%τ.ν, Sστε μ" οLν τ’ εBναι τατης εXρεν με!νω πολιτε!ας σστασιν: cf. Volpe 2001, 308. A final ‘Polybian citation’ is perhaps detectable in sect. 103 of To Rome: ‘once you arrived… laws appeared, and people began to put trust in the altars of the gods’ (&ε.ν βωμο0 π!στιν *λαβον)’. Here Aristides may have had in mind Polyb. 6.56, where δεισιδαιμον!α towards the gods and the π!στις afforded to oaths are recognized as strong points in Roman society: so Oliver 1953, 948, and R. Klein in his edition, 118 n. 138.

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in Er the Pamphylian’s myth, or at least Plato’s, the city-states that were already on their own funerary pyre as a result of their mutual rivalries and struggles came back to life in a moment as soon as they all accepted your hegemony. They cannot say how they reached this state, and they can do nothing but marvel at it. They feel like a man who was dreaming a moment ago and suddenly wakes up to find himself immersed in a new reality (sect. 69).

Just this eulogy of peace, contrasted with the lives lived by the various peoples before the advent of Rome, allows us to understand better another aspect of Aristides’ response to Polybius’ problem about the Roman Empire. It is obvious that when he refers to those peoples that had fought ‘for empire and supremacy’ Aristides intends to refer in the first place to the ones whose histories he has sketched in the opening sections of his encomium, that is the Persians, Macedonians and Greeks.35 But the Romans too were well aware (as can be seen in the pages of Cicero) that they too, from at least the time of the Second Punic War, had fought wars de imperio.36 How the Romans of that time saw their wars is a matter of some controversy. Cicero later on took a moralistic stand, asserting (probably in the footsteps of Panaetius)37 that ‘wars are only to be undertaken in order to assure peace without injustice’ (De off. 1.35). Cicero seems not to have been able to make up his own mind about what constituted iustae causae for war.38 In To Rome, however, all this problematic is absent: what matters is the present, a world hegemony in which, theoretically at least, peace reigns (sects. 69–71). How this situation had been arrived at, one cannot (as Aristides remarks) say, or one would prefer not to, and hence the wars de imperio only seem to concern the past of other peoples and not that of the Romans. To everyone, and above all to the Greeks, the Romans brought peace.39 Demosthenes too (On the Crown 18.66) describes Athens as ε0 περ0 πρωτε!ων κα0 τιμ7ς κα0 δξης γωνιζομ νην, and sees Philip as initiating war Xπ4ρ ρχ7ς κα0 δυναστε!ας. 35

See for instance Cic. De off. 1.38, with Brunt 1978, 159–191. Cf. Gabba 1990, 194. 38 Cf. Harris 1979, 165–175, Brunt 1978, 177, Ferrary 1988, 410–415. 39 The idea that the Romans have brought peace to peoples who have shown themselves to be incapable of attaining and preserving it by themselves is already to be found in the letter of Cicero to his brother in which he observes, with regard to the province Asia, that ‘nullam ab se neque belli externi neque domesticarum discordiarum calamitatem afuturam fuisse, si hoc imperio non teneretur’ (Ad Q. fr. 1.1.34). Tacitus likewise makes Petilius Cerialis say in his speech to the Treviri and the Lingones that 36 37

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Aristides, having sketched in the preceding sections the unsuccessful history of the Greek hegemonies, thus demonstrates how Rome’s rise to power was in a sense a fulfillment of the objectives that the Greeks themselves had pursued but had not succeeded in achieving. ‘It fell to the political dominion of the Romans to bring about that consortium of cities united by a shared consensus to master city—the only possible way of unifying the Greek world’.40 Aristides’ attention is centred on a present in which Greece enjoys the fruits of Roman rule and on a past that could be said to have fully justified that rule. There is complete silence on the other hand about what stood chronologically between the two periods in question—Rome’s conquest of the Greek world, during which Rome combined acts such as the proclamation of the freedom of Greece by Flamininus in 196 with acts of brutal imperialism such as the destruction of Corinth in 146. The silence in which Aristides covered the history of the Hellenistic period is of course to be connected with the archaizing and classicizing elements in the style, citations and often in the subject matter of the authors of the Second Sophistic.41 But another consideration will have played an even bigger role—that it was better not to bring up now a period that was one of the most problematic, from an ‘ethical’ point of view, in the history of Rome. Polybius reserved judgement on that period, at least in public, but extended his history to the last of the Macedonian Wars and to the Achaean War, that is to say to the time when ‘the common misfortune of all Greece had its beginning and its end’ (3.5.6). Aristides prefers not to speak about these events. The reader may wonder whether this silence about Rome’s methods of conquests indicates not so much approval of Roman hegemony however it was achieved but rather, as Pernot argues elsewhere in this volume, tacit resignation in the face of a power that it seemed no longer possible to question. ‘terram vestram ceterorumque Gallorum ingressi sunt duces imperatoresque Romani nulla cupidine, sed maioribus vestris invocantibus quos discordiae usque ad exitium fatigabant’ (Hist. 4.74.2). 40 Desideri 2002, 149. 41 Cf. Bowie 1970. Though this tendency definitely has the effect of reminding the hearer of the glorious literary-historical past of Hellas, the interpretation of this allusion as an intentional challenge to Roman rule should not be generalized. In fact, ‘by recreating the situations of the past the contrast between the immense prosperity and the distressing dependence of the contemporary Greek world was dulled’ (Bowie 1970, 41), and ‘since Greek identity could not be grounded in the real political world, it had to assert itself in the cultural domain and so as loudly as possible’ (Swain 1996, 89).

chapter eleven AELIUS ARISTIDES AND RHODES: CONCORD AND CONSOLATION

Carlo Franco

Introduction The prosperous civic life of the Greek East under Roman rule may be seen as the most complete development of Greek civilization in antiquity. In this context the so-called Second Sophistic played a crucial role, and its cultural, social and political dimensions continue to attract the attention of contemporary scholars.1 Beyond its literary interest, the rich and brilliant virtuoso prose of the Greek sophists, together with the evidence of coins, inscriptions, and archaeology, provides historians with invaluable material for the study of civic life. The connections between higher education and social power, rhetoric and politics, central and local power, rulers and subjects, are becoming more and more evident. On the surface, the subjects approached by the orators were escapist (although perhaps no more escapist than a conference of classical scholars today), but on many occasions the sophists’ speeches were closely connected to the time and place of their delivery, thereby opening the door to historical analysis. In this context, Aelius Aristides rightly ranks among the most interesting and intriguing personalities: apart from the fascinating Sacred Tales and the solemn Encomium To Rome, other writings of his appear worthy of careful study. Having examined the Smyrnean Orations elsewhere, I will focus in this paper on two speeches about the ancient city of Rhodes that are included in the Aristidean corpus.2 They are good case studies for examining the impact of natural disasters on the Greek

Anderson 1989; id. 1993; Whitmarsh 2005. These texts ‘can only be understood when read in conjunction with other speeches in praise of cities’ (Bowersock 1969, 16). 1 2

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cities in the Roman Empire, as well as the social tensions that these disasters revealed. The size and beauty of those poleis were sometimes darkened and challenged by serious crises. But it was precisely in such emergencies that the educated discourse of the orators played a pivotal role. Leaving aside the momentous problem of the sophists’ political efficacy, we may claim that their speeches met above all the emotional needs of the cities: lamenting the disaster and preaching moral values, the orators tried to restore mutual confidence and concord, thereby preserving the deepest values of ancient civic life.3

The Rhodiakos In modern critical editions of Aristides’ works, the sequence of the two Rhodian speeches reverses their chronology: Oration 24, To the Rhodians on Concord, was apparently delivered more or less five years after Oration 25, the Rhodiakos. In order to examine those texts from a historical point-of-view, it is expedient to observe their proper chronological order by considering the Rhodiakos first.4 Oration 25 was delivered in Rhodes some time after a tremendous earthquake, which razed the city in 142 AD. It is at once a commemoration of the ruined city, a memorial of the catastrophe, and an exhortation to the survivors.5 After an exordium, which laments the total loss of Rhodes’ former greatness and beauty (Or. 25.1–10), there is a heartfelt exhortation to endure the disaster (11–16). The earthquake and its effects are vividly described in the central section of the speech (17–33), which goes on to reassess the importance of Rhodes and the duty of endurance (34–49). The oration then turns to a consolation, with an empathetic narration of the most ancient traditions of Rhodes and a forecast of the reconstruction (50–56). After a series of historical examples (57–68), it ends with the appropriate peroration (69). In his 1898 edition of Aristides’ works, Bruno Keil asserted, primarily on stylistic grounds, that the speech was not written by Aristides.

Leopold 1986, 818. The speech has been often disregarded because of its similarity with Oration 23: according to Reardon, ‘Il n’y a aucunement lieu d’analyser le discours Aux Rhodiens’ (1971, 134). The Rhodiakos is not considered at all, following Boulanger 1923, 126 n. 14. 5 Chronology: Behr 1981, 371; Guidoboni 1994, 235–236. Local context: Papachristodoulou 1994, 143 f. 3 4

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Keil’s judgment, accepted until recently,6 has heavily conditioned the critical evaluation of the text: the speech has generally been considered a spurious and tasteless piece, deprived of literary, not to say historical, value.7 It may be useful to remember that, before Keil, important scholars like Dindorf and Schmid judged the Rhodiakos perfectly appropriate to the style of Aristides.8 Recent studies have reconsidered the question and shown that Keil’s condemnation was too hasty and probably wrong. The bulk of the evidence adduced against an attribution of the text to Aristides was discussed and rejected by Jones.9 Upon careful scrutiny, no element of content and language was seen to conflict explicitly with the authorship of Aristides.10 Nor do small factual discrepancies with other Aristidean works support the attribution to a different author.11 Consistency was not the mark of the genre. It was the special occasion, the kairos, that dictated the choice of material to the orator, even in historical narratives: ad tempus orator retractat sententiam, as was wisely observed.12 If we were to adopt consistency as a criterion

Anderson 2007, 341–342. Keil 1898, 72, 91. As unauthentic, the Rhodiakos receives only a short mention in Boulanger (1923, 374 n. 1). General introduction: Behr 1981, 371 (with analysis of the structure); Cortés Copete 1997, 175–178. For a different hypothesis, namely that the extant Rhodiakos is spurious and that the original Rhodian speech was delivered in Egypt and subsequently lost, see Behr 1968, 16 and n. 48. 8 Aristides’ style was perfectly consistent with the Atticist mode. According to the careful analysis in Schmid 1889, vol. II, the Rhodiakos shows no remarkable difference from the other texts of the Aristidean corpus (Jones 1990). Norden (1909, 420–421) found the Smyrnean Monody and the Eleusinian speech divergent from the ‘normal’ Aristidean style. 9 Jones 1990. The highly mannered use of topoi is studied by Pernot 1993a, II, index s.v.; Cortés 1995; Cortés Copete 1995, 29 ff. 10 Much was made of the allocution to the daimones (Or. 25.33). This seems allowed by Men. Rhet 2.435.9–11: see Puiggali 1985, quoting in a note not only Or. 25.33, but also Or. 37.25, Or. 42, and Or. 46.32. 11 According to the author of the Rhodiakos, the members of the democratic group that recaptured Athens in 403 BC were seventy in number (Or. 25.64, as in Plut. Glor. Ath. 345D; see Xen. Hell. 2.4.2, Diod. 14.32), whereas Aristides (Or. 1.254) says that they were ‘little more than fifty’ (sixty, according to Paus. 1.29.3). The contradiction is of slight import and should not be used as a proof against the Aristidean authorship of the Rhodiakos. A rhetor was not bound to consistency in the evocation of ancient deeds. On the treatment of the events of 404/3 BC by the authors of the Second Sophistic: Oudot 2003. 12 In the Smyrnean Orations Aristides gives three different accounts of the origins of that city, choosing between several traditions according to the circumstances and the different aims of his speeches: Franco 2005, 425 ff. 6 7

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for judging a speech’s authenticity, the study of these texts would face a mountain of contradictions.13 The strongest argument against the authenticity of Oration 25 is based on a debatable argumentum e silentio: in the speech To the Rhodians, On Concord, Aristides does not refer to any prior declamation given on the island, despite the fact that he refers to his actions on behalf of the city, as well as to some prior visit paid to Rhodes (Or. 24.3, 53, 56). Moreover, he says that he is addressing the Rhodians tên prôtên. The meaning of these words has been much discussed: should we understand ‘for the first time’, as the more common usage suggests, or ‘for the present’? Whichever interpretation is chosen, the expression seems compatible with the attribution of the Rhodiakos to Aristides. But if this is the case, why did he fail to quote his previous speech about the earthquake? Here, too, various answers, which have underlined the difference between oral performance and written texts and between public and private declamations, have been given. There may be a more compelling explanation. When he was in Egypt, Aristides met the Rhodian ambassadors who were seeking help after the disaster (Or. 24.3). Five years later, in the same way, Rhodian delegates again came to meet him, presumably in Pergamum this time, and requested help for their city in the name of prior relations: the meeting in Egypt, but not the form of the aid given, is duly recalled. The oration On Concord is remarkably reticent about many themes, so the silence about Aristides’ previous involvement with Rhodes may be not so relevant and should be considered in a wider context. The speech is fully oriented towards the present situation of Rhodes; the earthquake is briefly alluded to only at the beginning and at the end of the text, as though it had been forgotten and completely obliterated by the rapid renaissance of the city. I will discuss at greater length later what the real motive for these choices may have been. The same attitude appears in the Aristides’ Panegyricus to Cyzicus, where the very reason for the reconstruction of the temple, viz. an earthquake, receives no mention at all. This attitude may explain the omission in the Concord oration: Rhodes faced a new crisis, that is, stasis, and needed encouragement. So it might have seemed inappropriate to recall the earlier disaster. 13 In Or. 33.29, for example, Aristides criticizes the ‘cursed’ sophists because they ‘persuade you that even Homer’s greatest quality was that he was the son of the Meles’, which is precisely one of the greatest sources of civic pride prized by Aristides in the Smyrnean Orations (Or. 17.14 ff.; Or. 21.8).

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In addition to relevant similarities to the oration On Concord, which might eventually outnumber the alleged discrepancies, the Rhodiakos shares many themes, like the beauty or sea power of Rhodes, as well as several stylistic echoes, with other works. All of these similarities led a specialist like Keil to express the bizarre hypothesis that Aristides himself imitated the Rhodiakos (allegedly the work of a different author) in his Smyrnean orations. It is high time to abandon such a theory, since neither the analysis of content, nor that of style, provides irrefutable evidence against the authenticity of the Rhodiakos.14 Indeed, the debate on its disputed authorship is showing signs of reaching a generally accepted conclusion. The diction of the Rhodiakos is compatible with Aristidean authorship, and authorship of the Rhodiakos is also consistent with Aristides’ biography. In the description of the earthquake, the author of the speech compares the rumble of the collapsing buildings with the noise produced by the Egyptian cataracts (Or. 25.25): this may be a fresh memory, for, in fact, when he went to Egypt, Aristides saw the cataracts, a customary detour for tourists on the Nile.15 Thus, the Rhodiakos could plausibly have been delivered during the journey back from Alexandria to Asia.16 To sum up, I will assume that the speech was written by Aristides. But in order to avoid bias in the analysis of the text, I will for the time being maintain a neutral designation and speak of ‘the author of the Rhodiakos’. The first theme worth consideration in the text is the description of Rhodes, which obviously refers to the days before its destruction. At the beginning of the speech, the orator recalls the ‘many great harbours’, the ‘many handsome docks’, the triremes and the bronze beaks ‘along with many other glorious spoils of war’, the temples and the statues, the bronzes and the paintings, the Acropolis ‘full of fields and groves’, and above all ‘the circuit of the walls and the height and beauty of the interspersed towers’. Up until the day of the earthquake, he says, the ancient renown of Rhodes had remained largely intact: although the glory of past sea battles was irremediably lost, ‘all the rest of the city was preserved purely pure’.17 All this material follows the familiar 14 Linguistic and philological analysis does not always definitively confirm or reject the debated authorship of ancient texts: see as a case-study the ‘Tacitean fragment’ created and discussed by Syme 1991b. 15 Arist. Or. 36 passim; Philostr. VAp 6.26. 16 Cortés 1995, 207. 17 Or. 25.1–8. All translations of Aristides are from Behr 1981.

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pattern of the laudes urbium and reveals a high level of rhetorical artistry: its function is to prepare us for the subsequent reversal of destiny and the total destruction of all the city’s treasures, statues and monuments. Although largely conditioned by rhetoric, the description is not a mere literary essay. The task of an orator in front of a civic community was to choose relevant aspects of the local reality and to reshape them, creating an idealized image of the city, not a false one.18 Thus it is possible to compare aspects of the speech with the actual city, so far as it is known from literary and archaeological evidence. Let us first consider the naval structures. At the beginning of the Imperial Age, the glory of ancient Rhodian sea power was still considered among the greatest and best-preserved sources of Rhodian pride.19 The time of its thalassocracy, however, was over. After the great battles of the Hellenistic age, the Rhodian navy had been marginalized by the increasing, and eventually prevailing, role of Rome. During the last century of the Republic, the Rhodians were still fighting against the pirates and collaborating with Caesar.20 But after heavy depredations at the time of the siege by Cassius in 43 BC, the size and strength of the Rhodian navy had been reduced to insignificance. Only commercial exchange and the local patrolling of the islands still under Rhodian rule continued.21 So the author’s reference to triremes, ‘some ready for sailing, others in dry dock, as it were in storage, but if one wished to launch and sail any of them, it was possible’ (Or. 25.4), seems an elegant way to describe the present state of the Rhodian navy: the docks and the huge triremes are preserved, but not all of them are actually in use. The author of the Rhodiakos is fully aware of this situation, since he praises this state of affairs as unique to Rhodes among the Greek cities: ‘only when one was with you, did he see precisely, not only hear, what the city was’ (2). Thus, the orator can transform the remains of the sea power into a justification for eulogy: for Rhodes has ‘sensibly

18 This attitude allows us to undertake a historical analysis of these speeches, as in the case of Dio’s speeches for Tarsus or Nicomedia, or Aristides’ for Smyrna: Classen 1980; Bouffartigue 1996. 19 Strabo 14.2.5 reports that the ‘roadsteads had been hidden and forbidden to the people for a long time’, in order to preserve its secrets, as in the Venetian Arsenal: Gabrielsen 1997, 37 ff. 20 Pirates: Flor. 1.41.8; Caes. BC 3.102.7; Cic. Fam. 12.4.3. Alexandria: BAl 1.1, 11.1–3, 13.5, 14.1, 15, 25.3–6, App. Civ. 2.89. 21 But see Cic. Fam. 12.15.2 (Lentulus): Rhodiosque navis complures instructas et paratas in aqua. Rhodes and commercial routes in the Imperial Age: Rougé 1966, 132 f.

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given up its empire’, without losing any of its structures or its name (8) and without diminishing the greatness of its ancestors.22 Archaeological excavations have revealed significant traces of the dockyards beneath later Roman structures;23 it is tempting to suppose that they were abandoned after the earthquake. Surely, no one could possibly have forecast at the time of the speech that the Rhodian navy would recover something of its former glory when in the third century AD the seas became less safe. A decree possibly dating to the beginning of the third century AD honours an Ailios Alexander, who patrolled the area of the Rhodian Chersonese and ‘provided safety and security for sailors, seizing and handing over for punishment the piratical band active at sea’.24 The memories of this great past provided the Rhodians with considerable moral strength. As a witness to the fierce character of the citizens in the face of extremely serious situations, the author of the Rhodiakos quotes an old local saying: Καιρ8ς δ4 νν ε$περ ποτ4, { νδρες =Ρδιοι, σ.σαι μ4ν XμAς α%το?ς κ τ.ν περιεστηκτων, βοη&7σαι δ4 τF. γ νει τ7ς νσου, στ7ναι δ4 πρ8ς τ"ν τχην λαμπρ.ς, ν&υμη& ντας Xμ.ν τ8ν το πολ!του κυβερντου λγον, ]ς *φη χειμαζομ νης α%τF. τ7ς νεcς κα0 καταδσεσ&αι προσδοκ.ν τοτο δ" τ8 &ρυλομενον, λλ’ { Ποτειδ ν, $σ&ι @τι Pρ& ν τ ν ναν καταδσωk (25.13).

Now is the time, O men of Rhodes, to save yourselves from these circumstances, to aid the race of the island, and to stand gloriously against fortune, keeping in mind the words of your fellow citizen, the helmsman, who, when his ship was tempest tossed and he expected that she would sink, made that famous remark: ‘Know well, Poseidon, that I will lose my ship on an even keel’.

Recourse to examples of ‘vulgarized philosophy’ was common enough in sophistic rhetoric, and especially in consolatory texts. The Rhodiakos also reveals a rich display of traditional wisdom, very apt for a popular assembly. Needless to say, the sailor’s phrase, which is widely attested in the classical writers, was particularly fitting for a Rhodian public.25 See also Dio Or. 31.103–104. Cante 1986–1987, 181 n. 10: ‘bacini di carenaggio, capannoni dei neoria, piani di alaggio’. 24 AE 1948, 201 = BullEp 1946–1947, 156; see De Souza 1999, 218–219. The brave man was also limênarchês. 25 Pernot 1993a, II, 603. Other occurrences of the saying were collected first by Haupt 1876, 319. A preliminary list ranks: Teles 62.2 Hense [= Stob. 34.991 Wachsmuth-Hense]; Enn. 508 Skutsch [dum clavum rectum teneam, navemque gubernem = Cic. QF 1.2.13]; Sen. Ep. 85.33 [‘Neptune, numquam hanc navem nisi rectam’]; Ep. 8.4 [aut saltem rectis, 22 23

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As a complement to the memories of past sea power, the author mentions the monuments which had borne witness, at least until the day of the earthquake, to Rhodes’ ancient strength: ‘bronze beaks’ and ‘many other glorious spoils of war’, some ‘taken from the Etruscans’ pirate fleet, some from the campaigns of Alexander, others from wherever each had been brought into the city’ (4). As is typical in the culture of the Second Sophistic, the memory of the past is limited to the Age of Alexander, and the approach is largely generic and selective. Rhodes had fought against the pirates already in the fourth century BC, before the Age of Alexander, and had won power and glory, but the author of the Rhodiakos does not mention this phase of Rhodian history.26 Actually the spoils exposed in Rhodes were not all the result of military operations, nor was the Rhodian attitude towards piracy unambiguous, since Rhodes had taken part, as has been recently argued, in a system of raids in the eastern Mediterranean.27 Other events in the local history enjoyed even greater renown. Of the sieges, for example, the author says, ‘and of old you showed to visitors the engines of war made from the shorn hair of your women, and it was a wonderful thing’ (κα0 πKλαι μ4ν τ κ τ.ν γυναικ.ν τ.ν ποκειραμ νων μηχανματα δε!κνυτε τος πιδημοσι κα0 &αυμαστ8ν _ν, Or. 25.32). Apparently female hair was commonly used for torsion

catapults in the Hellenistic and Roman epochs: Heron asserts that such hair is long, strong, and elastic—particularly suitable for military engines. After the great earthquake of 227 BC, King Seleucus II gave the Rhodians, among many other gifts, a large amount of hair. And a few years later, in 220 BC, the favor was returned by the Rhodians, who allegedly sent several tons of (female?) hair to Sinope as help against the attack by Mithridates.28 In the tradition of war stratagems, the use of female hair during sieges was seen as a sign of dramatic emergency and of a shortage of resources.29 Thus the machine is quoted as a brilliant aut semel ruere]; Prov. 1.4.5; Cons. Marc. 5.5; 6.3 [At ille vel in naufragio laudandus, quem obruit mare clavum tenentem et obnixum]; Quint. 2.17.24; Isid. Orig. 19.2. (both quoting Ennius); Plin. Epist. 9.26.4; Max. Tyr. Decl. 40.5e. 26 Diod. 20. 81.2–3; Strabo 14.2.5. See Gabrielsen 1997, 108 f.; Wiemer 2002, 117 ff. 27 Gabrielsen 1997, 176 n. 134; id. 2001. 28 Heron Belopoiika 30; Plb. 5.89.9; 4.56.3. The chronology is somewhere blurred: Walbank 1957–1979, I, pp. 511–512; 621 ad loc. In general see Marsden 1969, 87 ff. (and 75 n. 7: no evidence for women’s hair in Plb. 4.56.3). 29 Garlan 1974, 220, n. 3. See in general Vitr. 10.11.2: ad ballistas capillo maxime muliebri, vel nervo funes, and anecdotes about different cities, e.g. Strabo 17.3.15; Frontin. 1.7.3; Flor. 1.31.10; 2.15.10 (Carthage); Caes. BC 3.9.3 (Salona); Polyaen. 8.67 (Thasos); SHA

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symbol of heroic endurance that encompasses the whole civic body, from the soldiers to the women, and thus becomes an inspiring image for the Rhodians resisting the present catastrophe. The war engines dated presumably to the siege by Demetrius, more or less four centuries before, but all details are omitted in the speech: the orator uses the anecdote solely as a source of exhortation for the survivors. Some have suspected a play on words involving the shorn women in the past and Rhodes’ present condition, which is like that of a mourning lady.30 The opposition is between the past and the present: before the earthquake the Rhodians took pride in showing the war machines that had preserved their city; now the city itself appears destroyed. Nevertheless, there was chance in the misfortune, since ο% γ ρ πολ μFω ληφ&εσα Xμ.ν T πλις ο$χεται ο%δ’ νδρ.ν χε!ρων φανεσα, ο%δ’ *στησεν π’ α%τ7ς τρπαιον ο%δε0ς, ο%δ’ π8 τ.ν Xμετ ρων να&ημKτων τ παρ’ αXτF. τις Jερ κοσμσει, Sσπερ Xμες τος *ξω&εν λαφροις τ"ν Xμετ ραν α%τ.ν πλιν κατεκοσμσατε (Or. 25.59).

…your city did not perish captured in war, nor was it seen to be conquered by other men, nor did anyone triumph over it, nor will anyone adorn their temples with your offerings, as you have adorned your city with foreign spoils.

Thus, paradoxically, the orator may confidently judge the destruction of the city by earthquakes a reason to praise Rhodes, since the city ‘perished with a record of total invincibility’ (62), a claim that is surely false, but aptly conceals the defeat inflicted by Cassius. After praising the spoils and the memories of the past, the orator turns to Rhodes’ artistic ornamentation: τεμ νη δ4 &ε.ν κα0 Jερ κα0 γKλματα τοσατα μ4ν τ8 πλ7&ος, τηλικατα δ4 τ8 μ γε&ος, τοιατα δ4 τ8 κKλλος, Sστ’ ξια εBναι τ.ν λλων *ργων χαριστρια, κα0 )ς μ" εBναι διακρναι τ! τις α%τ.ν μAλλον &αυμKσειεν (Or.

25.5).31

There could be seen the precincts of the gods, temples and statues, of such number, size and beauty, that they were worthy thank offerings from all the rest of the world, and that it was impossible to decide which of them one would admire more. Maxim. 33.3 (Aquileia); Lact. Div.Inst. 1.20.27; Serv. ad Aen. 1.720; Veget. 4.9 (Rome, Gallic siege). The mention of Rhodes and Massilia in Frontin. 1.7.4 was apparently interpolated. 30 Dindorf 1829, I.809 n. 4, ad loc. Towers as the city’s hair: Eur. Hec. 910 f.; Troad. 784. 31 Apparently no mention of the Deigma: Plb. 5.88.8; Diod. 19.45.4.

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The praise of Rhodes’ artistic treasures was typical. Some celebrated paintings by Protogenes were said to have been spared by Demetrius and were later recorded by Strabo.32 Pliny the Elder, relying on the authority of Mucianus, stated that there were thousands of signa in Rhodes,33 although the famous oration by Dio Chrysostom informs the reader that, in his time, the Rhodians engaged in the dubious practice of recycling old statues for new honorands.34 The practise, albeit common elsewhere, was criticized by Dio.35 The author of the Rhodiakos, to be sure, does not mention this deplorable habit, but states that any one of the monuments that could be seen on the island ‘was a sufficient source of pride for another city’ (5).36 The speech then turns to the city walls, ‘a wonder […] which could not satiate the eye’ (7). This sort of praise also was very common in ancient descriptions of cities.37 According to Strabo, the Rhodian enceinte was among the most noteworthy structures of the island, and Dio Chrystostom assures us that the Rhodians took great care and spent a large amount of money in order to keep their walls wellmaintained (although they were reluctant to pay for new statues!). Pausanias ranked the Rhodian walls among the best fortifications he had seen: since his journeys are dated to the middle of the second century AD, this could mean that he saw them after their reconstruction.38 But an orator was not supposed to give technical or realistic details; rather, his task was to select relevant elements and convert them into perfect

Demetrius: Gell. 15.31.1; Strabo 14.2.5. NH 34.7.36. See also NH 33.12.55; 34.7.34, 63; 35.10, 69, 71, 93 for more information on Rhodian artistic treasures. 34 On the image of Rhodes in Dio Or. 31: Jones 1978, 26 ff. See Plb. 31.4.4 for the dedication of a Colossus to the Roman people in the precinct of Athena (Lindia?). Post-Hellenistic Rhodian statuary has not been the subject of intensive research: see Gualandi 1976, 18. Late Hellenistic casting-houses for large bronzes are studied in Kanzia and Zimmer 1998. Some monuments appear to have been restored after earthquakes: Papachristodoulou 1989, 186 n. 29b (dated to the first century AD for palaeographic reasons). 35 Recycling of statues at Athens: Paus. 1.18.3; Mycenae: Paus. 2.17.3, where criticism of the practice appears implicit in the text. As a sign of economic shortage: Sartre 1991, 138. 36 The same topos appears in Plin. 34.7.41–42 in reference to the Colossus and other large statues: sed ubicumque singuli fuissent, nobilitaturi locum. In the Rhodiakos, mention of the Colossus occurs at Or. 25.53. 37 Franco 2005, 391 ff. 38 Strabo 14.2.5; Dio Or. 31.125,146; Paus. 4.31.5, with Moggi and Osanna 2003, 493 (ad 8.43). 32 33

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forms of the topos. The Rhodiakos describes the towers, which could be seen from a distance when sailing to or from Rhodes and served as a sort of lighthouse.39 Enceintes had no real importance in a world completely pacified by Rome, but the Rhodian walls had a long history. They had played a role in a huge flood at the end of the fourth century BC, and later in the great siege by Demetrius Poliorcetes.40 Following those events, according to historical tradition and to the archaeological evidence, they had been restored after the earthquake in 227 BC (this phase is probably the one alluded to by Philo) and again after the Mithridatic wars.41 But such wars and troubles had no place in the eirenic discourse of the orators. Praise belongs to a peaceful city, where walls are no longer used and buildings fill the areas close to the enceinte (Or. 25.7), a situation exactly contrary to what ancient military engineers recommended for defence in the case of a siege.42 In comparison with other elements of the speech, the description of the city itself is rather hasty. The author takes note of the Acropolis, whose terraces have been identified in modern excavations,43 and the general appearance of the city, marked by the regularity of its buildings: ‘Nothing higher than anything else, but the construction ample and equal, so that it would seem to belong not to a city, but to a single house’ (ο%δ4ν 5τερον \τ ρου Xπερ χον, λλ διαρκ7 κα0 $σην τ"ν κατασκευ"ν ο`σαν, )ς γ νοιτ’ #ν ο% πλεως, λλ μιAς οOκ!ας, 6). The shape of the city was especially praised in antiquity, not only because of its regular grid but also because of its theatre-like structure, which Rhodes, among other cities, shared with Halikarnassos, although the resemblance between the city’s shape and a theatre belonged more to the city’s ideal image than to its real layout.44 In his description of the

39 On the topos see by contrast Arist. Or. 27.17 (after the building of the great temple, only Cyzicus does not need a lighthouse). 40 Flood in 316 BC: Diod. 19.45. On Demetrius’ siege see now Pimouget Pédarros 2003. 41 Diod. 20.100; Philo Byz. Bel. 84 f., 85; App. Mithr. 94; Kontis 1963; Konstantinopoulos 1967; Winter 1992, Philemonos-Tsopotou 1999. See the historical analysis in Pimouget Pédarros 2004. 42 See the prescriptions of Philo Byz. Bel. 80. This was actually attested by the archaeological excavations. 43 Kontis 1952, esp. 551 f.; Konstantinopoulos 1973, esp. 129–134. 44 Theatroeidês: Diod. 19.45.3, 20.83.2; Vitr. 2.8.11; Arist. Or. 25.6. Modern research in Kontis 1952; id. 1953; id. 1954; id. 1958; Wycherley 1976; Papachristodoulou 1994, id. 1996; Caliò and Interdonato 2005, esp. 91 ff. about Rhodes.

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city, the author considers only the elements pertaining to Hellenic culture (like the Rhodian fondness for paideia),45 but he does not record any ‘Roman’ element: this is hardly surprising, when we consider the attitude of intellectuals in the Second Sophistic. Thus, no mention is made of the many statues decreed (or reused) to honour Roman citizens, nor is there any mention of the imperial cult.46 The author is silent, too, about the gladiators, although this may reflect the actual situation: Louis Robert years ago remarked upon the peculiar absence of gladiatorial documents in Rhodes.47 In the Rhodiakos by Dio Chrysostom, the consistent preference for Hellenic practices is strongly contrasted with the excessive acceptance of Roman customs in Athens. Dio quotes a law from Rhodes that ‘forbade the executioner to enter the city’ (31.122).48 The author of the Rhodiakos may refer to the same law when he writes, ‘it was not even in keeping with your religion to pass a death sentence within the walls’. The allusion to the Rhodian law is debatable, however, since the orator is making a rather different point about the perverse impact of the earthquake, which transformed ‘the city which could not be entered by murderers’ into a ‘common grave for the inhabitants’ (Or. 25.28). It is easy to see that any orator appointed to praise Rhodes could walk a well-trodden path, a path amply supplied with literary and historical models; it would be even better if the author, as is the case here, was familiar with the place and the local traditions. The outlines for a eulogy of Rhodes were already established in Hellenistic times, as Polybius’ digression on the great earthquake of Rhodes in 228/7 BC makes clear.49 Relying on local sources, the historian lists in great detail the gifts received by the city from several kings, dynasts and cities after the disaster. He sings the praises of Rhodian freedom, opportunity, and conduct, following the classical scheme described by the rhetorical treatises (thesis, physis, epitêdeumata).50 In Polybius’ epoch, Rhodes was at the peak of its international power: the historian’s statements, or those of his sources, were the basis 45 Oratory and culture: Arist. Or. 25.67 (and Or. 24.6). Rhodian citizens praised for paideia: Blinkenberg 1941, 2.449 and 2.465 D (second century AD). Decay of Rhodian rhetoric in the Imperial Age: Puech 2002, 367–369. 46 Statues of emperors and Romans: Dio Or. 31.107–108, 115. 47 Robert 1940, 248. 48 Dio Or. 31.122, with Swain 2000, 44. 49 Plb. 5.89–90, with Walbank 1957–1979, I, 16–22; Holleaux 1968 [1923]. 50 On Polybius’ sources see now Lenfant 2005.

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for all subsequent praise.51 The tone of Strabo’s Rhodian section is similar to that of Polybius. Here again, contemporary elements and second-hand information are mixed together: =Η δ4 τ.ν =Ροδ!ων πλις κεται μ4ν π0 το \ω&ινο κρωτηρ!ου, λιμ σι δ4 κα0 -δος κα0 τε!χεσι κα0 τM7 λλMη κατασκευM7 τοσοτον διαφ ρει τ.ν λλων Sστ’ ο%κ *χομεν εOπεν \τ ραν λλ’ ο%δ4 πKρισον, μ τ! γε κρε!ττω τατης τ7ς πλεως (14.2.5).52

The city of the Rhodians lies on the eastern promontory of Rhodes and it is so far superior to all others in harbours and roads and walls and improvements in general, that I am unable to speak of any other city as equal to it, or even as almost equal to it, much less superior to it (trans. H.L. Jones).

Strabo praises above all the eunomia, the politeia, the care for naval affairs, and the city’s faithful conduct towards Rome, all of which resulted in Rhodes being granted the status of autonomy and receiving the large number of votive offerings that adorned the city. Especially celebrated are the provisions granted by the local government to the poor: the redistribution of wealth is considered an ‘ancestral custom’ (patrion ethos). The description of the city, stylized rather than based on autopsy, is nevertheless not remote from reality: some elements, such as the ‘Hippodamian’ plan or the harbours, have been confirmed by modern archaeological research.53 A brief historical outline also provides some useful hints. The Dorian origins of Rhodes are discussed in reference to Homer: here Strabo’s fondness for the poet joins with local tradition.54 The image of Rhodes put forth by later authors followed the same pattern. The loyal attitude displayed by the city during Mithridates’ siege won it wide celebrity and esteem.55 In the second century AD, Aulus Gellius quotes at length from Cato’s speech Pro Rhodiensibus, writing that ‘the city of the Rhodians is renowned because of the location

51 The local historians are likely to have played an important role in the formation of this literary image of Rhodes, but their works are irremediably lost to us: Wiemer 2001. 52 See Pédech 1971. 53 Harbours: Kontis 1953, esp. 279 n. 2. 54 The other poetic authority incorporated into the praise of Rhodes was Pindar. As we know from a scholion to the seventh Olympian, the text of the Ode was carved in golden letters in the temple of Athena Lindia: Gorgon, FGrH 515 F18. 55 App. Mithr. 24 ff.; Liv. perioch. 78; Vell. 2.18.3; Flor. 1.40.8. See Campanile 1996, 150 f.

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of the island, the beauty of its monuments, their skill in sailing the sea, and their naval victories’ (6.3.1), and repeats this praise in the context of an anecdote about Demetrius’ siege of the island (15.31.1). Apollonius of Tyana’s short visit to the island is also of interest: according to Philostratus, the holy man debated with Damis in the vicinity of the Colossus, engaged a talented flautist in conversation about his art, and rebuked both a rich and ignorant young man and an overweight boy fond of food. The island appears here in all its wellbeing and prosperity, although apparently Apollonius did not pay homage, not even from a critical perspective, to the beauty of Rhodes, as he did, for example, in Smyrna.56 The brilliant ekphrasis of Rhodes from the beginning of the Amores ascribed to Lucian is also worth attention. After his departure from Tarsus and his visit to the decayed cities of Lycia, on the way to Cnidus, the narrator arrives in Rhodes (6–10), where he admires the Temple of Dionysus, the porch, and the paintings; he does not see any sign of decline or crisis, nor does he mention the earthquake.57 The Amores are commonly believed to be a later composition.58 The authorship of Lucian has been denied because the text does not allude to the earthquake of 142 AD, among other reasons. But this silence does not imply a terminus ante quem. In Xenophon’s Ephesian Histories, which are dated toward the middle of the second century AD, there is a nice description of Rhodes that includes the crowded festivals of the Sun, the votive offerings, and the altar of the gods, without making any reference to the earthquake:59 the peculiar ‘atemporality’ of these texts, which show no interest in historical change, conditions the selection of local details. The earthquake of 142 AD suddenly destroyed this magical world: ‘The beauty of the harbours has gone, the fairest of crowns has fallen, the temples are barren of statues, and the altars, the streets and theatres are empty of men’ (Or. 25.9). The orator turns the description into the lamentation, exploiting the same classical topoi of the laus urbis, such as the origins of the city, but from a different point of view: if, according 56 VAp 5.21–23 and 4.7 for Smyrna. For the flautist’s name Kanos see SEG XXI 854b; Suet. Galba 12; Plut. Mor. 785B. See also the rebukes by the cithara-player Stratonicus in Plut. Mor. 525B. 57 The omission of the earthquake has been considered, perhaps erroneously, a relevant proof against Lucianic authorship. Aristides, too, in the speech On Concord, evokes the incomparable beauty of Rhodes without a hint of the recent disaster. 58 Jones 1984; Degani 1991, esp. 19. 59 Xen. Eph. 5.10–13.

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to the myth, Rhodes had emerged from the sea, now ‘the city has sunk beneath the earth and has gone from mankind’ (29). And if Zeus had ‘poured wealth’ and ‘rained down gold’ on the island, as Homer and Pindar had once sung, now ‘the god of fortune’ has poured on Rhodes very different gifts (30). The orator’s efforts are directly primarily to restraining the grief of the survivors and delivering a persuasive exhortation to them: their sufferings do not admit of any consolation, nonetheless, ‘they must be endured’ (34). He must prove that so terrible a catastrophe is bearable and that the Rhodians, because of their glorious past, must be confident that the city will flourish again. The skill in arguing in many different ways about a single subject was a sophistic heritage: the author of the Rhodiakos had only to follow the scheme of reversal. For as far as sophistic rhetoric is concerned, just as destiny transforms happiness into desperation, so misfortune will assuredly be transformed into a renewal of prosperity. Take Rhodes’ past, for example. When the Rhodians created the new city of Rhodes by unifying Lindos, Cameiros and Ialysos at the end of the fifth century BC, they did not choose an existing schema, but created a totally new one.60 Thus the reconstruction of the city after the earthquake ‘is much easier […] than the original foundation was’, because what is needed is ‘only to make a Rhodes from Rhodes, a new city from the old one’ (52–53). The argument about the monuments in the city, like the walls, is different. The earthquake has destroyed them, but their loss is bearable because, according to the old saying, ‘Not houses fairly roofed, nor the well-worked stones of walls, nor avenues and docks are the city, but men who are able to handle whatever circumstances confront them’ (ο%κ οOκ!αι καλ.ς στεγασμ ναι ο%δ4 λ!&οι τειχ.ν ε` δεδομημ νοι ο%δ4 στενωπο! τε κα0 νε,ρια T πλις, λλ’ νδρες χρ7σ&αι τος ε0 παροσι δυνKμενοι, 64). Thus, ‘even if your walls fell ten times, the dignity of the city will not fall, so long as one Rhodian is left’.61 All of the local traditions could be used by the orator to promote endurance and confidence—except, it would appear, the tradition of a negative omen that had oppressed the city from its very foundation.62 All the ancient sources are collected in Moggi 1976, 213–243. See also Or. 25.42. On the topos, which comes from Alcaeus fr. 112L–P and Thuc. 7.77.7, see Pernot 1993a, I, 195 ff. 62 Not considered in Blinkenberg 1913, who focuses above all on Homer and ancient legends. 60 61

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The author asserts that the earthquake has already fulfilled the oracle, so that one can hope that the reconstruction of the city may rest upon ‘more fortunate and better omens’ (69). The reference would have been perfectly plain to the audience, but it is less evident for us. One must turn to Pausanias. Speaking about Sikyon, he attributes the final decline of the city to an earthquake that ‘damaged also the Carian and Lycian towns, and shook above all the island of Rhodes, so that it was believed that the ancient prediction of the Sybil to Rhodes was accomplished’ (2.7.1). It is difficult to define the period alluded to by Pausanias, since the passage seems to be vague in its chronology. Elsewhere, Pausanias records the same earthquake, adding that it occurred under Antoninus.63 Thus, even if the identity of the events is not assured, one may assume that the oracle alluded to by Pausanias is the same as that mentioned in the Rhodiakos. The content of the prophecy is preserved, as it seems, in the so-called Oracula Sibyllina, among several others concerning earthquakes. The tone is obscure and allusive, and thus does not allow irrefutable identification, but the passage provides good elements for the analysis of the Rhodiakos. }Ω =Ρδε δειλα!η σ· σ4 γ ρ πρ,την, σ4 δακρσω·/ *σσMη δ4 πρ,τη πλεων, πρ,τη δ’ πολ σσMη,/ νδρ.ν μ4ν χρη, βιτου δ τε πKμπαν *δευκς*

(Orac. Syb. 7.1–3).

O poor Rhodes! I will mourn you as first. Thou shall be first among the cities, but also first in ruin, deprived of your men, totally *deprived* of life.

And again: κα0 σ, =Ρδος, πουλ?ν μ4ν δολωτος χρνον *σσMη,/ Tμερ!η &υγKτηρ, πουλ?ς δ τοι 'λβος 'πισ&εν/ *σσεται, ν πντFω δ’ 5ξεις κρKτος *ξοχον λλων (Orac. Syb. 3.444–448).64

And you, Rhodes, for a long time shall be free from slavery, O noble daughter, and great prosperity shall be upon you, and on the sea you shall reign over other peoples.

Similar oracles could refer to any big earthquake from 227 BC onwards, including the serious one of 142 AD. The Sibylline prophecies are a reminder of the symbolic and religious dimension of earthquakes in antiquity. Apart from the gods, however, there was also the political Paus. 2.7.1; 8.43.4. Orac. Syb. 4.101 = 8.160 may refer to the earthquake recorded in Paus. 2.7.1: see Geffcken 1902, ad loc. 63 64

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dimension of the event, such as the request for help and the problems of reconstruction. This was the task for the ambassadors, and required careful study: it is hardly surprising that natural catastrophes became a common subject in imperial and late antique literature. This subject was studied in the schools of rhetoric and appeared in the works of men of letters and historians.65 More than a century ago, Rudolf Herzog proposed the label of genos seismikon for this specific genre of speeches about earthquakes and suggested locating its origin in Rhodes.66 This kind of rhetoric was particularly linked to the life of the ancient city, and orators focused their attention especially on the cities. The collapse of buildings, the destruction of urban beauty, and the death of men and women struck the general imagination much more than the destiny of the rural areas did.67 This explains why in the Rhodiakos, after a sympathetic description of the earthquake, small islands around Rhodes receive only a short and dismissive mention: to the dismay of the cultivated, a great and beautiful city was in ruins, while unimportant places like Carpathus and Casus remained intact (Or. 25.31).68 But let us come to the earthquake itself. The author of the Rhodiakos was not in Rhodes when the disaster occurred. Thus the speech does not reflect any personal experience of the events, and the high dramatic style, the impressive list of ruins and casualties, and the heavy rhetorical expression are the substitutes for autopsy; this is the normal case in antiquity, with the possible exception of the letter of Pliny the Younger about the eruption of the Mount Vesuvius. At ‘that wretched noon hour’ says the orator, - δ4 qλιος τελευταα δ" ττε π λαμπε τ"ν \αυτο πλιν, κα0 παρ7ν ξα!φνης πKντα -μο τ δεινK. Xπανεχ,ρει μ4ν T &Kλαττα κα0 πAν ψιλοτο τ.ν λιμ νων τ8 ντ8ς, νερριπτοντο δ4 οOκ!αι κα0 μνματα νερργνυντο, πργοι δ4 πργοις ν πιπτον κα0 νε,σοικοι τριρεσι κα0 νεFc βωμος κα0 να&ματα γKλμασι κα0 νδρες νδρKσι, κα0 πργοι λιμ σι, κα0 πKντα λλλοις (Or. 25.20).

65 In the Progymnasmata by Aelius Theon, the seismos is listed among the themes for ekphraseis (118.18 Patillon-Bolognesi). 66 Herzog 1899, 141 ff. 67 Guidoboni 1994; Traina 1985, and now Williams 2006. Contempt for outlying areas: Arist. Or. 19.7–8. 68 This may explain also some inaccuracies about the administrative status of the islands in relationship to Rhodes: Fraser and Bean 1954, esp. 138 n. 1; Papachristodoulou 1989, 43 ff., Carusi 2003, esp. 219 ff.

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carlo franco The sun for the last time shone upon his city. And suddenly every terror was at hand at once. The sea drew back, and all the interior of the harbours was laid bare, and the houses were thrown upwards, and the tombs broken open, and the towers collapsed upon the harbours, and the storage sheds upon the triremes, and the temples upon the altars, and the offerings upon the statues, and men upon men, and everything upon one another.

The destiny of the population is a plurima mortis imago: κα0 οJ μ4ν τ ς \αυτ.ν φεγοντες οOκ!ας ν τας \τ ρων π,λλυντο, οJ δ’ ν τας \αυτ.ν Xπ’ κπλξεως μ νοντες, οJ δ4 κ& οντες γκαταλαμβανμενοι, οJ δ4 πολειφ& ντες Tμι&ν7τες, ο%κ *χοντες ξαναδναι ο%δ4 αXτο?ς α συνεναι, that is, ‘to meet privately’ (probably in his or in his student’s residence), which contrasts with Libanius’ expression ξω συνεναι, ‘to meet students at school’ (Ep. 1038.1). Aristides considered his declamations models for instruction and occasionally met some young men to correct their rhetorical imperfections. His involvement with teaching was probably not very significant and did not leave a profound mark on him. The nineteenth -century Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi, who studied Aristides in his youth, reported an amusing adespoton epigram which may have referred to a namesake of the renowned rhetor: ‘Hail to you seven pupils of the rhetor Aristides, four walls and three benches!’58 This epigram in any case may have been realistic if it alluded to Aristides having a school. Two other orations are usually taken to show that Aristides had some involvement with teaching. In 147 he wrote Or. 30, the Birthday Speech to Apellas, who, the scholion explains, was his pupil.59 Very little, however, 54

This usage is compatible with Libanius’ terminology. Watts 2006, 31. 56 See, e.g., Philostratus, VS 483.25 with the meaning ‘friend’, and Aristides, Sacred Tales 1.23 and 4.23, besides 5.29. 57 Philostratus, however, may have believed they were students. 58 See App.Anth. 5.31; Prolegomena to the Panathenaic Oration Dindorf 1829, 741; Cugnoni 1878, 54; Tommasi Moreschini 2004, 11–12 and 269. 59 On this scholion, see Behr 1981, 390 n. 2. 55

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indicates that this boy was indeed his student. In the phrase ‘We, your relations, kinsmen, teachers, companions, and all of your dear family’, the word ‘teacher’ does not necessarily refer to the orator. The speech is a conventional and artificial presentation of the city’s and the family’s glory and of the accomplishments of the young man. When he composed it, Aristides had just emerged from a nearly two-year period of incubation in the temple of Asclepius, so that his acquaintance with Apellas must have been quite recent. Years later, in 161, he wrote Or. 31, The Funeral Oration for Eteoneus, a young man who apparently studied with him. Aristides seems to have been more involved in this youth’s upbringing. And yet one perceives that some remarks may be out of place. A vain Aristides seems to be in competition with his student, as when he says that Eteoneus was so devoted to him that he never even conceived of being at his level (Or. 31.7–8). In a speech concerned with the study of rhetoric, the boy’s silence—sometimes considered a positive quality in antiquity60— nevertheless occupies too much space in the background of the effusiveness of his teacher.61 The insistence on Eteoneus’ handsomeness (four remarks in such a small compass) also sounds a bit excessive.62 When the orator says that in studying and declaiming Eteoneus used gestures that would be appropriate in a painting, one cannot agree more: the silent Eteoneus belongs in a painting (Or. 31.8). Aristides, the masterful orator, appears at the end in a grand, emotional consolation that Libanius, if he knew the passage, cannot have failed to appreciate, as when Eteoneus is compared to ‘a poet who has ended his play while people still desire to see him and hear him’.63 If we now return to the question I posed at the beginning, many of the reasons why Aristides appealed so strongly to Libanius, and implicitly to other rhetors in the fourth century, are already clear. In the fourth century, when rhetoric was not as effective as before and rhetors had lost some of their power, it was comforting to remember an age when ‘rhetoric flashed like lightning’.64 Aristides was a shining protagonist of that age, and applying his rhetorical rules reinforced the illusion that one could revive it. For Libanius, moreover, rhetoric and Cf. Or. 2. 384–385. On silence, Or. 31. 8 and 10. 62 On this boy’s beauty, Or. 31.4, 11, 12, and 15. 63 The ¯ethopoiia of the deus ex machina pronouncing words of consolation is quite moving. 64 See Libanius, Or. 2.43. 60 61

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the worship of the gods were connected not only because, as he told the emperor Julian, ‘rhetoric moved you towards reverence for the gods’, but also because Aristides’ conception of oratory inspired by ‘a sacred and divine fire’ stirred him.65 Aristides powerfully roused the emotions, and his authoritative tone and confidence in his own ability strongly attracted a sophist who doubted he could make a comparable impact. So what was Libanius reading under Aristides’ portrait? So many are the words of his predecessor that may have appealed to him, but we know with certainty that he identified with Aristides declaring his love for rhetoric in Or. 33.19–20: Alone of all the Greeks whom we know, we did not engage in oratory for wealth, fame, honor, marriage, power, or any acquisition… But since we were its true lovers, we were fittingly honored by oratory… For me oratory means everything, signifies everything, for I have made it children, parents, work, relaxation and all else.

Libanius was under the same spell.

65 See Libanius, Or. 13.1; Aristides, Or. 28.110, and, e.g., the myth of Prometheus in 2.396–399. Cf. Swain 2004, 372–373.

chapter fourteen AELIUS ARISTIDES’ RECEPTION AT BYZANTIUM: THE CASE OF ARETHAS

Luana Quattrocelli Non posso sapere se lo sono o no. Voglio dire che lo sciamano è un messo celeste: fa da intermediario tra Dio e gli uomini. Perché la malattia non è altro che un’offesa all’ordine cosmico. Dio abbandona l’uomo, si allontana da lui… e allora interviene la malattia— Sándor Márai, La sorella

In addition to providing much interesting material for the history of religion and rhetoric, the Sacred Tales of Aelius Aristides offer a starting point for understanding the success of the author among his contemporaries.1 In these six orations, while talking about his oratorical performances, Aristides refers more than once to his universal reputation (Or. 47.50; Or. 50.8, 19, 26), to the delirious enthusiasm of the crowds (Or. 50.20, 48, 101; Or. 51.16, 29, 32–33), to insistent requests from friends and acquaintances to write and deliver speeches (Or. 47.2, 64; Or. 48.1–2; Or. 50.17, 24, 95; Or. 51.30), and to the high esteem that bestowed on by the emperors (Or. 47.23, 36–38, 41, 46–49; Or. 50.75–76, 92). All of these remarks, however, would appear to contradict the need that Aristides felt to write an entire oration, To Those Who Criticize Him Because He Does Not Declaim (Πρ8ς το?ς αOτιωμ νους @τι μ" μελετF,η), in order to complain bitterly about the scant interest in attending his performances that people showed. One may wonder if Aristides’ long absences from the rhetorical scene were really due to the poor condition of his health and to the orders given by Asclepius, or if, instead, all of these reasons were only excuses designed to hide the reality of fickle success. Besides, it should not be forgotten that a panoramic view of

1 I would like to thank Professor William Harris for giving me the opportunity to present this paper before such an important audience.

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Greek rhetoric in those years would have included the works of great professionals of the calibre of Polemon, Herodes Atticus, and Apollonius Tyanensis. Although Aristides made a great display of his success, he often worried about the judgement of posterity. In a dream, he replies to a doctor who is insisting that he recite something: ‘Because, by Zeus, it is more important for me to revise some things which I have written. For I must also converse with posterity’ (Or. 51.52).2 He writes elsewhere: ‘After the inscription, I became much more eager, and it seemed in every way to be fitting to keep on with oratory, as our name would live even among future men, since the god happened to have called our speeches “everlasting” ’ (Or. 50.47). Posterity has indeed paid Aristides all the honours of which he dreamt while he was alive. Among the late Imperial Age rhetoricians, Aelius Aristides is the only author whose oeuvre has been handed down nearly complete: fifty-two orations (only the beginning of Or. 53 is preserved).3 The survival of Aristides’ corpus was due to the great admiration that rhetoricians in later centuries had for him, as well as to the high position reserved for him in schools and in scriptoria. If in the third century Apsines, Longinus, and Menander Rhetor already considered Aristides to be a classical author and quoted him as a model for style and composition, in the fourth century Aristides was often studied and imitated in lieu of the classical authors themselves. Libanius (314– 393 AD) shows himself a true devotee of Aristides, imitating him just as Aristides had once imitated Demosthenes. And Himerius (300/10– 380/90 AD), a representative of the Asiatic style, which was very different from Libanius’s Atticism, does not neglect to acknowledge Aristides as one of his masters, especially in the Panathenaicus. As Libanius’s pupils, even two church fathers of this period, Basil and John Chrysostomus, took Aristides as a model, as did all the Christian authors whose rhetorical style was deeply influenced by the Second Sophistic. Even a fourth-century papyrus,4 containing a rhetorician’s funeral oration, celebrates Aristides as Smyrna’s second son after Homer.

2 All translations of the Sacred Tales are by C.A. Behr; the text used is Keil 1898. Translations of the scholia are my own, with the assistance of David Ratzan. 3 F. Robert is preparing an edition of the fragments and the lost works of Aelius Aristides as part of the ‘Aristides Programme’, which will result in an edition of the complete works under the direction of L. Pernot (CUF, Les Belles Lettres). 4 Berliner Klassikertexte V, 1, 1907, 82–83. See Schubart 1918, 143–144.

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In the following century Synesius, who had no love for the sophists, accorded Aristides the same fame. The fame achieved in these centuries, sealed by Eunapius (who calls him ‘divine’), allowed Aristides and his orations to acquire first-class authority with lexicographers, the authors of rhetorical manuals, commentators, and erudite schools from the sixth century through the Byzantine period. At the end of the thirteenth century, Maximus Planudes was still making scribes copy a specimen of Aristides’ orations in his scriptorium for his library,5 and Theodorus Metochites wrote an essay On Demosthenes and Aristides.6 But even though Aristides escaped unharmed from the hostile attacks of Christian authors like Romanus Melodus, who had no scruples about mocking pagan authors like Homer, Plato and Demosthenes in his Hymns, he could not avoid the scorn of one tenth-century commentator, who attacked his personality as it emerges in the pages of the most autobiographical of his orations, namely the Sacred Tales. I am referring to the scathing notes written in the margins of the sheets of the manuscript Laurentianus 60, 3, (A) to the Sacred Tales, as a personal commentary on Aristides’ religious experiences. The commentary includes a series of notes, never published,7 which, lying outside the exegetical-grammatical typology of medieval comments, represent a genuine attack by a Byzantine author on a pagan one. Manuscript A, which is divided into two parts, Laurentianus 60, 3 and Parisinus graecus 2951, is the well-known manuscript of the Aristidean tradition that belonged to Arethas, the famous archbishop of Caesarea who read and commented on a number of pagan authors. The manuscript was prepared around 920 AD for Arethas by John Calligraphus,8 undoubtedly after Arethas had become archbishop of Caesarea in Cappadocia.9 Arethas himself (see fig. 1) added the titles, the capital letters, and the paragraph signs. He also wrote scholia in his neat majuscule,10 modifying the Sopater scholia and supplementing 5

See Quattrocelli (forthcoming). See Pernot 2006, 100–115. 7 Except for two cases that were edited by Dindorf in the scholiastic corpus (1829, III, 343–344). A complete edition of these notes will become an integral part of the Sacred Tales edition being prepared by L. Pernot and L. Quattrocelli for Les Belles Lettres. 8 See Keil 1898, vii; Behr–Lenz 1976–1980, xxvii n. 79; Lemerle 1971, 220 n. 52; Pernot 1981, 183. 9 Cf. Behr–Lenz, xxvii, n. 80. 10 Maass (1884, 764) speaks about the semiunciales solemnes used by Arethas for the scholia: ‘Ecce Arethas, quippe qui praeter solemnes scholiorum semiunciales non in sacris tantum verum etiam in profanis utitur uncialibus’. 6

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Fig. 1

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Fig. 2

them with additions to which he occasionally attached his monogram ΑΡΕΘ.11 These scholia cover Orations I–IV and some passages of μελ ται. In addition, one can read small notes to Orations XVII–LIII. That the reproachful notes in the margin to the Sacred Tales were also written by Arethas is proven above all by the handwriting, which faithfully imitates the unmistakable majuscule of Caesarea’s archbishop.12 The most characteristic letters are easily recognizable (see fig. 2): – alpha: with the rounded part that slips into the line space to distinguish itself from delta. – delta: in majuscule form. – epsilon: crescent-shaped. – kappa: more frequently in the majuscule form than in the minuscule one. – mu: sometimes enriched by an ornament. – nu: which alternates between the minuscule form and the majuscule one, sometimes inclined on the right. – the compendium for κα!. 11 12

On the personal notes added by Arethas, see Lenz 1964a, 58, 71–72, 84. Maass (1884, 758) was already certain of Arethas’s authorship of the notes.

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Arethas’s matrix is evident even in the arrangement of the note text as an inverted pyramid or in the shape of a funnel, closed with a little leaf or a small wavy line. Once the handwriting has been securely identified as Arethas’s, it is difficult to doubt that the ideas expressed are also his own, rather than copied from notes in other manuscripts. That the notes were copied is highly unlikely for two reasons: first, no copyist would have ever transcribed such extensive comments into his own copy, even if he had read them in the antigraph; second, and most importantly, there is a large repertoire of attacks in the same tone that Arethas addresses to other classical authors, enough to make Wilson speak of ‘the characteristic style’ of Arethas’s notes on other authors (1983, 212). Therefore, even the unedited notes to Manuscript A should be included among the other short polemical and scornful comments with which Arethas glossed the texts preserved in the manuscripts he owned. It is true that, like Photius, the philologist of Patras belongs to the period of the Byzantine culture commonly referred to as the ‘Renaissance’, which followed the Iconoclastic period. It is also true that, like Photius, Arethas made a career in the church, eventually becoming the archbishop in Cappadocia. However, if Photius provides an example of the tolerance shown towards the pagan literature of the past by the men occupying the highest offices of the church, this is not the case with Arethas. Those who deal with the Platonic textual tradition know the codex Clarkianus 39 very well: it contains twenty-four Platonic dialogues, that is, all of them except the Timaeus, the Republic, and the Laws. It was commissioned from John Calligraphus by Arethas while he was still deacon in November, 895 AD. In this manuscript, too, Arethas writes scholia in his own hand, and he adds strictly personal evaluations to them from time to time. Here is the passage from the Apology in which Socrates defends himself against the charge of atheism: εO δ’ α` οJ δα!μονες &ε.ν παδ ς εOσιν ν&οι τιν4ς D κ νυμφ.ν D *κ τινων λλων pν δ" κα0 λ γονται, τ!ς #ν ν&ρ,πων &ε.ν μ4ν παδας Tγοτο εBναι, &εο?ς δ4 μ; -μο!ως γ ρ #ν τοπον ε$η Sσπερ #ν ε$ τις jππων μ4ν παδας Tγοτο D κα0 'νων, το?ς Tμινους, jππους δ4 κα0 'νους μ" Tγοτο εBναι (Pl.

Apol. 27d–e).

If on the other hand these supernatural beings are bastard children of the gods by nymphs or other mothers, as they are reputed to be, who in the world would believe in the children of gods and not in the

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gods themselves? It would be as ridiculous as to believe in the young of horses or donkeys and not in horses and donkeys themselves. (trans. H. Tredennick).

Arethas glosses the text in this way: ‘you do well, Socrates, to compare the Athenians’ gods to donkeys and horses’. Obviously, Socrates has not done this, but the note gives us a glimpse of Arethas’s lack of philosophical subtlety and familiarizes us with one of his characteristic habits, namely that of conversing with his authors in a confidential and intentionally irreverent tone. For the scholiast from Patras, the text that he is reading is not just a monument of the past: the ancient author comes to life in front of him, provoking his likes and dislikes depending on his mood at that moment. A sort of dialogue opens up between the reader and the author. Arethas addresses the author directly, both to blame him and to express pleasure when he finds that he is in agreement with him.13 Socrates is again the target of Arethas’s sharp tongue in the Charmides. Our Christian reader comments on the description of the philosopher, who is struck by Charmides’ beauty in the Athenian palaestra, and thus gains the opportunity to reflect at length on σωφροσνη,14 in this way: ‘be cursed, Plato, for so cunningly corrupting simple souls’.15 At a later point, he goes to the heart of the philosophical discussion to defend Charmides and to attack Socrates once again:16 Socrates, you are deceiving the noble Charmides with your speeches and confusing him with sophistry. Because even if he has not shown adequate temperance (σωφροσνη), he was not in conflict with the truth. It is at least a part of temperance to act in a quiet and orderly way; for by quiet I mean non-violent, but you take it as the equivalent of lazy, and of course you spoil the reasoning.17

Since Arethas has no scruples about being so irreverent towards Socrates’ auctoritas, we should not be surprised that he behaves similarly, See Bidez 1934, 396. Pl. Chrm. 155d. 15 Arethas lashes out against Lucian for a pederastic issue (Sch. in Luciani Amores 54): μο0 μ4ν ο[τω παιδεραστεν γ νοιτο κτλ.], describing him as πKρατος: μγις ποτ , μιαρ4 κα0 πKρατε, τ8 σαυτο ξεπας. ξ,λης κα0 προ,λης γ νοιο. (‘With much hesitation you admitted this about yourself, you damned scoundrel! May you be utterly destroyed!’). A previous passage in the same work (Amores 35) had irritated Arethas’s sensitivity about the issue of male homosexuality: the Byzantine reader calls Lucian μιαρολγος, an adjective not found in the classical vocabulary. 16 Pl. Chrm.159a–c. 17 On this passage, see Lemerle 1971, 213–214; Wilson 1983, 206. 13 14

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if not more irreverently, towards another late-imperial author, namely Lucian. Lucian had already been the target of insulting epithets from the first Christian authors: in the ancient and medieval scholia to Lucian, the editor Rabe has registered no less than thirty-nine contemptuous terms used against him.18 Arethas readily adds his voice to the chorus of reprobation directed against Lucian, who nevertheless lived on among the favourite authors of Byzantine readers. Leafing through the comments on Lucian’s works, one realizes that of thirtynine spiteful allocutions, as many as fourteen can be read in the notes written by Arethas’s hand in the margins of the codex Harleianus 5694 (tenth century—E), and another thirty such epithets can be found in the three manuscripts (Vindob. gr. 123, eleventh century—B; Coisl. gr. 345, tenth century – C; Pal. gr. 73, thirteenth century—R), in which Rabe has identified scholia that can be ascribed to Arethas. Generally, Lucian is blamed for his jokes about Greek religion and philosophy, for his hyperbolic attacks against individuals, and for his presumed pederasty. In the dialogue Hermotimus, or Concerning the Sects (=Ερμτιμος D περ0 ΑJρ σεων) Lycinus, that is to say Lucian, is explaining to Hermotimus why no philosophical school can guide man in the quest for truth: ΛΥΚ. κατ τα%τ το!νυν :παντες μ4ν οJ φιλοσοφοντες τ"ν ε%δαιμον!αν ζητοσιν -πον τ! στιν, κα0 λ γουσιν λλος λλο τι α%τ"ν εBναι, - μ4ν Tδονν, - δ4 τ8 καλν, - δ4 @σα 5τερK φασι περ0 α%τ7ς. εOκ8ς μ4ν ο`ν κα0 τοτων 5ν τι εBναι τ8 εNδαιμον, ο%κ πεικ8ς δ4 κα0 λλο τι παρ’ α%τ πKντα. κα0 ο!καμεν Tμες νKπαλιν D χρ7ν, πρ0ν τ"ν ρχ"ν εXρεν, πε!γεσ&αι πρ8ς τ8 τ λος. *δει δ4 μοι πρτερον φανερ8ν γεν σ&αι @τι *γνωσται τλη&4ς κα0 πKντως *χει τις α%τ8 εOδcς τ.ν φιλοσοφοντων. εBτα μετ τοτο τ8 \ξ7ς #ν _ν ζητ7σαι, Fp πειστ ον στ!ν. ΕΡΜ. Sστε, { Λυκνε, τοτο φς, @τι ο%δ’ #ν δι πKσης φιλοσοφ!ας χωρσωμεν, ο%δ4 ττε πKντως 5ξομεν τλη&4ς εXρεν. (66)

LUC: In the same way, all philosophers are investigating the nature of Happiness; they get different answers, one Pleasure, another Goodness, and so through the list. It is probable that Happiness is one of these; but it is also not improbable that it is something else altogether. We seem to have reversed the proper procedure, and hurried on to the end before we had found the beginning. I suppose we ought first to have ascertained that the truth has actually been discovered, and that some philosopher or other has it, and only then to have gone on to the next question, which of them is to be believed. 18

They are listed in Rabe 1906, 336. See also Baldwin 1980–1981.

aelius aristides’ reception at byzantium

287

HERM: So that, even if we go all through all philosophy, we shall have no certainty of finding the truth even then; that is what you say (trans. H W. and F.G. Fowler).

At this point, that is, at Hermotimus’s τλη&4ς εXρεν, the Christian orthodoxy in Arethas objects:19 jνα κα0 ε[ρMη, τ!ς sν εXρσει, βδελυρ,τατε, ν&ρωπος Wν; κα0 τ!ς τοτFω πιστεσει, τ7ς ν&ρ,που φσεως κατ σ4 ο%δ’ @λως χοσης τ8 κεκριμ νον κα0 διKπταιστον;

To discover it (sc. the truth), who, oh despicable person, will find it while he is still alive, since he is a man? Who, instead, will believe in this, since human nature, according to you, does not have the capacity for judgement and for not making errors?

Arethas uses the adjective βδελυρ,τατος, which Lucian often used against his rival in Pseudologistes, or the Mistaken Critic (Ψευδολογιστ"ς D Περ0 τ7ς ΑποφρKδος).20 If the convicia against Lucian reveal both the failure on Arethas’s part to acknowledge the pagan author’s irony and his habit of excessively literal interpretation,21 the mood is different in the notes written in the margin of the Sacred Tales in the Laurentianus 60, 3, whose content, in my view, confirms their attribution to Arethas. In the first note on the left margin of f. 36v, we read: λλ τ! τατης *δει τ7ς τοσατης κα0 νηντου πραγματε!ας, Αριστε!δη; κα0 τ7ς τοσατης το χρνου τριβ7ς; κα0 τ7ς φασματ,δους Pνειρ,ξεως; εO δναμις Xπ7ν τF. &εF. σου ΑσκληπιF., ξKντη σε νσου κα&ιστAν κα0 ν βραχει>A καιρο