Being Greek under Rome: Cultural Identity, the Second Sophistic and the Development of Empire

Being Greek under Rome Cultural Identity, the Second Sophistic and the Development of Empire These especially commissi...

Author: Simon Goldhill

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Being Greek under Rome Cultural Identity, the Second Sophistic and the Development of Empire

These especially commissioned essays open up a fascinating and novel perspective on a crucial era of western culture. In the second century CE the Roman Empire dominated the Mediterranean, but Greek culture maintained its huge prestige. At the same time, Christianity and Judaism were vying for followers against the lures of such an elite cultural life. This book looks at how writers in Greek from all areas of Empire society respond to their political position, to intellectual authority, to religions and social pressures. It explores the fascinating cultural clashes from which Christianity emerged to dominate the Empire. It presents a series of brilliant insights into how the culture of Empire functions and offers a fascinating and new understanding of the long history of imperialism and cultural conflict. is Reader in Greek Literature and Culture in the University of Cambridge, and Fellow of King's College. His publications include Language, Sexuality, Narrative: the Oresteia (1984), Reading Greek Tragedy (1986), The Poet's Voice: Essays on Poetics and Greek Literature (1991) and Foucault's Virginity: Ancient Erotic Fiction and the History of Sexuality (1995). With Robin Osborne he edited Art and Text in Ancient Greek Culture (1994) and Performance Culture and Athenian Democracy (1999). SIMON GOLDHILL

Being Greek under Rome Cultural Identity, the Second Sophistic and the Development of Empire edited by

Simon Goldhill University of Cambridge

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

PUBLISHED BY THE PRESS SYNDICATE OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE

The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge, United Kingdom CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 2RU, UK 40 West 20th Street, New York NY 10011-4211, USA 10 Stamford Road, Oakleigh, vie 3166, Australia Ruiz de Alarcon 13, 28014 Madrid, Spain Dock House, The Waterfront, Cape Town 8001, South Africa http://www.cambridge.org © Cambridge University Press 2001 This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2001 Typeset in Times New Roman and New Hellenic Greek [AO] A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data

Being Greek under Rome : cultural identity, the second sophistic, and the development of empire / edited by Simon Goldhill. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0 521 66317 2 1. Rome-History-Empire, 30 BC-284 AD 2. Rome-Civilization-Greek influences. 3. Rome-Cultural policy. 4. Rome-Ethnic relations. 5. Sophists (Greek philosophy) I. Goldhill, Simon. DG78.B385 2001 937—dc21 00-064234 ISBN 0 521 66317 2 hardback Transferred to digital printing 2003

Contents

List of contributors Introduction. Setting an agenda: 'Everything is Greece to the wise'

page vii

1

SIMON GOLDHILL

I

Subjected to Empire

1

From Megalopolis to Cosmopolis: Polybius, or there and back again

29

JOHN HENDERSON

2

Mutilated messengers: body language in Josephus

50

MAUD GLEASON

3

Roman questions, Greek answers: Plutarch and the construction of identity

86

REBECCA PRESTON

II

Intellectuals on the margins

4

Describing Self in the language of the Other: Pseudo (?) Lucian at the temple of Hierapolis

123

JAS ELSNER

5

The erotic eye: visual stimulation and cultural conflict

154

SIMON GOLDHILL

6

Visions and revisions of Homer

195

FROMA I. ZEITLIN

III Topography and the performance of culture 7

'Greece is the World': exile and identity in the Second Sophistic TIM WHITMARSH

269

vi 8

Contents Local heroes: athletics, festivals and elite self-fashioning in the Roman East

306

ONNO VAN NIJF

9

The Rabbi in Aphrodite's bath: Palestinian society and Jewish identity in the High Roman Empire

335

SETH SCHWARTZ

List of works cited Index of major passages discussed General index

362 390 393

Contributors

JAS ELSNERis Reader in Greek Art and Archaeology at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. His publications include Art and the Roman Viewer (Cambridge, 1995); Imperial Rome and Christian Triumph (Oxford, 1998); and, as editor, Art and Text in Roman Culture (Cambridge, 1996). teaches at Stanford University in California. Her book Making Men: Sophists and Self-Presentation in Ancient Rome was published by Princeton University Press in 1995.

MAUD GLEASON

GOLDHiLLis Reader in Greek Literature and Culture at Cambridge University, and Fellow at King's College. His publications include Language, Sexuality, Narrative: the Oresteia (Cambridge, 1984); Reading Greek Tragedy (Cambridge, 1986); The Poet's Voice (Cambridge, 1991); Foucaulfs Virginity (Cambridge, 1995).

SIMON

is Reader in Latin Literature at Cambridge University and Fellow at King's College. His publications include Writing Down Rome (Cambridge, 1999); Fighting for Rome (Cambridge, 1998); Figuring Out Roman Nobility: Juvenal's Eighth Satire (Exeter, 1997); and, with Mary Beard, Classics: a Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 1995).

JOHN HENDERSON

is van der Leeuw Professor of Ancient History at Groningen. His publications include The Civic World of Professional Associations in the Roman East (Amsterdam, 1997).

ONNO VAN NIJF

is a Junior Research Fellow at King's College, Cambridge. Her thesis is on Greco-Roman interactions in Empire Culture.

REBECCA PRESTON

is Associate Professor of History at the Jewish Seminary of New York and in charge of the graduate at the Jewish Theological Seminary, New York. His include Josephus and Judaean Politics (1989) and his book is entitled Imperialism and Jewish Society, 200 BCE-

SETH SCHWARTZ

Theological programme publications forthcoming 640 CE.

vii

viii

Contributors

TiMWHiTMARSHisa Fellow at St John's College, Cambridge. His thesis Sumboulos: Power and Culture in the Literature of Roman Greece and his translation of Achilles Tatius will be published shortly. is Charles Ewing Professor of Greek Language and Literature at Princeton. Her books include Playing the Other (Chicago, 1996); Under the Sign of the Shield (Rome, 1982), and, with Jack Winkler Nothing to Do with Dionysus? (Princeton, 1990), and, with Jack Winkler and David Halperin, Before Sexuality (Princeton, 1990).

FROMA ZEITLIN

All the contributors worked at King's College, Cambridge at periods during the 1980s and 1990s except for Maud Gleason (whom we wish had done so), and Onno van Nijf who stayed up the road at Churchill College. This project would not have taken place without the intellectual support of that institution, and the Classics Faculty of Cambridge University.

Introduction. Setting an agenda: 'Everything is Greece to the wise5 Simon Goldhill Three pairs of snapshots, to begin with: Lucian, a Syrian from Samosata on the Euphrates, and one of the stars of this book, made a career as an orator in Rome and the Empire. His work, the Anacharsis, written in the middle of the second century CE, has a dramatic setting in Athens of the sixth century BCE, and is a dialogue between Solon, one of the founding fathers of classical democracy, and Anacharsis, a visiting Scythian sage, about athletic exercise. Anacharsis, seeing citizens roll around in the dust naked, fighting, hitting each other, 'like pigs', wonders about the point of such bizarre behaviour. Solon tries to explain the rationale of the gym to the incredulous Scythian, who points out sharply what punishment would be meted out in Scythia to anyone who thus physically abused a citizen. Naked exercise in the gymnasium was one of the key signs of Greek culture (exported throughout the Mediterranean in the wake of Alexander), along with the theatre (also mocked by Anacharsis (22)) and the symposium. Although there is a long Greek intellectual counter-tradition of questioning the value of athletics (as well as a long, fully institutionalized support for it),1 for many Roman writers it remained a distinctly suspicious and peculiarly Greek activity: not only was its association with Platonic philosophy and its amours difficult to fit into Roman ideals of manhood, but also its role as preparation for war (which Solon emphasizes) was unconvincing to the conquering Rome. Thus Plutarch records in the Roman Questions (273): For the Romans used to be particularly suspicious of rubbing down with oil, and even today believe that nothing has been so responsible for the enslavement and effeminacy (malakia) of the Greeks as their gymnasia and wrestling schools, which engender for the cities much indolence, wasting of time and pederasty and the corruption (diaphtheireiri) of the bodies of the young by regulated sleep, walking, 1

Criticism: see e.g. Eur. Autolycus fr. 382 (cited at Athenaeus 413c-f); Electra 386-9 (where Denniston suggests amusingly on the strength of Aulus Gellius (15.20) that Euripides may be expressing 'a violent reaction against [his own] early training'); Isocrates Panegyr. 1-2 and the further list of references in Branham (1989) 242 n. 25. For the general case, see Foucault (1985); Poliakoff (1987) 89-115; Branham (1989) 85-8. 1

2

Simon Goldhill

rhythmical movement and strict diets. By these practices, they have failed to notice their collapse of military training, and have become happy to be called skilful and noble wrestlers rather than fine hoplites and cavalrymen. It is certainly an effort (ergon) to escape this if you exercise naked in the open air. But those who oil themselves at home and care for their bodies commit no error. The description of Roman suspicions of rubbing down with oil, which are broadened to include all athletic activity, leads to the surprising conclusion - for a Greek, at least - that public stripping is the difficulty which private oiling and exercise in the home avoid. Cicero ('You know what I think of Greek games ...' Ad Atticum 16.5) quotes Ennius (Tusc. Disp. 4.33.70): T o bare one's body amid citizens is the origin of outrage', flagiti principium est nudare inter civis corpora. The strain of fitting Greek and

Roman ideals together is strongly marked as the ever-accommodating Plutarch allows the standard terms of Greek askesis to come under the definition of corruption, and promotes the odd social solution of locating gymnastic exercise in the private sphere of the household. Lucian indeed is only one of several later writers debating the function of the gymnasium in contemporary culture.2 Yet rather than offering any explicit contemporary polemicizing, Lucian writes as if from the sixth century BCE, and dramatizes an exchange between an Athenian culture hero and bemused foreigner. The voices are carefully layered to create a highly ironic satiric pose.3 The foreigner Lucian - from the East - writing in Greek for a cultured audience in the Roman Empire, imagines an eastern foreigner's bemused reaction to a central - but now contested Greek institution; and offers a defence of it distanced by its provenance from the mouth of an antique hero of the state - all written in a carefully articulated Attic Greek of the classical era. How, then, to understand the Greekness, the cultural value, of the gymnasium? From what position is its Greekness to be viewed? The play of insider and outsider, ancient and modern, knowingness and naivety, constructs a complex and ironic positionality for author and readers. If 'speaking to Greekness' is the cultural work projected by the dialogue, any simple or direct polemic is veiled and twisted by the dialogic fun of the satirist. Lucian - typically - establishes the dialogue most wittily within these matrices of insider/outsider, ancient/modern, knowingness/naivety. See e.g. Dio Chrysostom 28 and 29; Galen On Exercise with the Small Ball, Exhortation to the Arts; Thrasyboulos; Philostratus Gymnasticus. I have learnt from my graduate student, Jason Konig, on these texts. There are similar discussions on the institution of the symposium: see e.g. Dio Chrysostom 27; Plutarch Sympotic Questions', Lucian 17. The dialogue is marvellously placed in a tradition of humour and Cynic philosophy by Branham (1989) 81-104 - the best introduction to Lucian's comic voice. My general case here is indebted to him.

Introduction. Setting an agenda

3

Anacharsis suggests finding a shady spot for their discussion (16). After Plato's Phaedrus, it becomes a topos that philosophical discussion needs a tree-shaded spot. But this literary expectation is immediately replaced by the more mundane reason that Anacharsis finds the heat difficult with a bare head. For he has not brought his Scythian hat (pilos) from home (oikothen) because he does not want 'to be the only person among you to be a foreigner in appearance', cos HT) MOVOS ev 0|iTv £EVI£OI|JII TCO cxxrmccTi. Anacharsis wants to fit in, not to be judged a foreigner (xenos) by his appearance, dress or attitude (schema). What is it to look like an Athenian, a Greek? Anacharsis has left his iconographically charged Scythian hat behind, but is sweating and uncomfortable in the heat. His body - its schema - indeed marks him as not an Athenian, as Solon promptly points out: gymnastic exercise, he declares, is precisely what has trained Athenians to survive the sun's rays without a hat! The standard apology of athletics - that it prepares a man to withstand extremes of condition in war - even in this less exalted form of whether to wear a hat to the gym, functions to establish an 'us' and a 'them'. As they walk to the shady spot, Solon promises a (democratically) fair debate, and even offers to honour Anacharsis publicly in the Assembly if he can point out the error of their Athenian education and training: 'You may be sure that the city of Athens will not be ashamed to learn fully what is advantageous from a barbarian and foreign guest' (irapa (3ap[3dpou Kai cjevou). The addition of 'barbarian' recalls the full ideological weight of self and other so familiar from classical rhetoric, as the moral gnome seemingly rings with the openness of Athenian cultural boasting, which along with claims to be the education of Greece also rehearses the possibilities of indeed learning from the East or Egypt. (Solon by the end of the dialogue confesses to the still unpersuaded Anacharsis (39), 'we are not at all in favour of following the foreign', £r|Aouv 8e TCC £EVIKOC OU TTOCVU &£ioO|jev.) Where wisdom comes from is a question of long pedigree. Lucian, himself a barbarian and foreign guest in Athens as in Rome, thus has the sage of Athens declare the propriety of learning from barbarians and foreign guests. Anacharsis responds, however: TOUT' EKETVO fjv ocpa, 6 Eycb Trspi G|jicov T|KOUOV TGOV A0r|vaicov, cos eiV|Te eipcoves £v TOTS Aoyois, 'Now I see! That's exactly what I used to hear about you Athenians, that you do not say what you mean!', 'that you are ironical in discussion!'. How could he, a wagon-dwelling nomad (as Herodotus describes him) know about the culture of the polis? The foreign guest (writes the foreigner in his best Greek 4 ) notes that it is a sign of Athenianness not

It is not certain whether Aramaic was Lucian's first language. See Millar (1993) 454-6.

4

Simon Goldhill

to say what you mean. Especially when being open to learning from foreigners. (In a neat symmetry, the Greek proverb 'to speak like a Scythian' means to speak the blunt truth - and had Anacharsis as its model (Diogenes Laertius 1.101). Lucian himself elsewhere (Scyth. 9) takes Anacharsis as a model for his own story and foreigner's reaction to the Big City - and for the need for good patrons!5). So what is the reader to take from this foreigner's lesson? The ironist's discussion of Athenian irony seems designed to make the scene of learning the site of a ludic confusion of voices. Lucian makes a question of Greek culture - its signs, value, enactment. His Anacharsis remains unconvinced by Solon's case. His prose mobilizes a cultured, educated layering of literary reference, which knowingness frames the naivety of the outsider's questioning of what is a normative commonplace for the insider. He utilizes the voice of the outsider and the setting in the distant past not only to dramatize in an ironic way the old arguments about physical askesis, but also to comment on the contemporary tension within the valuing of Greek exercise in the Roman Empire. He slyly allows his authorial stance - his foreignness, his commitment to Greek culture - further to vein his cultural politics with a destabilizing irony. For Lucian, in the Roman Empire, speaking to Greekness is a complex business. Where wisdom comes from, and the interplay between the margins and centre of Empire are fundamental also for the second of my first pair of snapshots. Philostratus' Life of Apollonius of Tyana - a text which provides the epigraph to this introduction and to Tim Whitmarsh's chapter has Apollonius, embodiment of the sage, travel round the world dispensing wisdom and wonders, and learning himself and for the readers from the marvels of the world and, especially, from the Gymnosophists and Brahmans of the East.6 Apollonius discovers that Phraotes, the Indian king of Taxilla reads Euripides (2.32) and does Greek gymnastic exercise (2.27) (with none of Anacharsis' worries), and is surprised - as would be Indian anthropologists - to discover that the Brahmans too speak classical Greek, and that the village near the palace observes Greek religious rituals.7 The all-wise Indians do criticize standard Greek morality (3.25) 5 6

7

Tim Whitmarsh pointed out to me the importance of this passage. See in particular Eisner (1997a), Flinterman (1995) and, more generally, Bowie (1978). I have learnt especially from the forthcoming book of Tim Whitmarsh - and from his chapter in this volume. Plutarch (Mor. 328c) observes that Indians recognized Greek gods (assimilating Indian divinities to Dionysus and Heracles who visited India), and Dio Chrysostom says that the Indians know Homer through translation (53.6). Philostratus goes further than these.

Introduction. Setting an agenda

5

(as does Apollonius),8 but when a pompous Median king arrives (3.26) who attacks philosophy, Greek manhood, Greek customs, Apollonius is moved to defend Greekness and the Greeks in passionate terms. The king bursts into tears (3.32), and declares that he had been misled by Egyptians, who claimed to be the true holy men, law-givers and originators of mystic initiations. Herodotus found in Egypt a privileged origin of western culture; before the all-wise Brahmans of the East Greek culture is vindicated. Apollonius' travels, in different ways, are designed to map the claim that 'Everything is Greece to the wise man'. For my purposes here, I want to highlight two brief but telling moments from this long work. The first comes from the introduction, where Philostratus tells us that a man from Ninevah, Damis, who had travelled with Apollonius, had written his memoirs (1.3): 'a certain relative of Damis brought these previously unread documents of reminiscences to the attention of the Empress Julia. I was part of her circle - for she admired and enjoyed all types of rhetorical exercise - and she commanded me to redraft these essays .. .'.9 A tantalizing glimpse of an educated Greek circle around the Roman emperor's Greek wife sets Philostratus' tale of knowledge and power, philosophy and kingship, right at the heart of the Empire's structures of authority10 - or, at very least, claims to. When Apollonius (5.45) is depicted as encouraging Vespasian to take up the imperial throne and recalling his principled opposition to Nero, the clash of philosopher and emperor takes on a pointed significance from this frame.11 This is to be an authoritative tale for authority. The reader is encouraged to see the account of far-off travel as bringing claims of the cultural capital of Greece and other parts of the world into the circle of the empress herself. The margins and the centre are in communication and the cultural value of Greekness is integral to that communication. The second passage (4.5) is about names. At the sacrifice for the Panionia at Smyrna, Apollonius reads the decree inviting him to join the celebration. But he sees that one Lucullus has signed the decree. He was shocked to come across 'a name which was not wholly Ionian'. He sent a letter to the Council expressing his 'reproof (epiplexis) for such a 8

9

10

11

Bowie (1978) 1681-2 notes that this criticism is less evident in the letters collected under the name of Apollonius, whereas (1680) 'as presented by Philostratus, Apollonius . . . insists aggressively on the superiority of the Hellenic peoples over barbarian and delivers emphatic defences of Hellenic culture and religion'. The fictionality of Damis has been much discussed: see Bowie (1978) for excellent discussion and bibliography; also Anderson (1986); Flinterman (1995) 80-8; and Bowie (1994). On the circle of Julia Domna, see Bowersock (1969) 101-9 (who criticizes those who claim too much from this remark). For detailed discussion, see Flinterman (1995).

6

Simon Goldhill

barbarism (barbarismos)\ He also found names like Fabricius, and wrote, says Philostratus, with real force on the issue. The demand for pure Ionian - Greek - names for the Panionia certainly stands against the pattern of naming in the East where Greeks with citizenship of the Roman Empire conjoined Greek and Roman names (and where Roman names occur frequently in all forms of inscription). How would Julia Domna receive a plea for purity of nomenclature? What claim is it making for Ionian culture (over and against the barbarism of the Roman)? Philostratus' Apollonius is putting the signs of (true) Greekness on the agenda. Fascinatingly, two of the letters circulated under the name of Apollonius address the same issue. 12 In Ep. 71, Apollonius asks the Ionians why they think that their family (gene) or status as colonies constitute a sufficient reason to be called Greek (Hellenes). Rather, he declares, what makes a Greek is sOr) KOCI VO\XO\ KOCI yAcoTTcc KOCI (3ios i'5ios, 'practice and laws and language and private life', and their 'appearance (schema) and looks (eidos)\ As in the Anacharsis, schema is a central element of selfpresentation. Greekness is constituted not by ethnicity or descent, but by behavioural patterns, language and physical appearance. 13 Damis, indeed, travels with Apollonius in order that 'by education (pepaideumenos) he might stop being a barbarian . . . and become a Greek through him and consort with Greeks' (3.43). Thus, concludes the letter, in giving up the names of 'naval men and legislators' for Roman names, the Ionians will not be recognized in the Underworld by their ancestors: they will have forfeited (the sign of) their Greekness - TCC TCOV Trpoyovcov dyr| TOTS TTOCKTIV avriKpvs 'Poovaicov npoax&EiS' OUTGO y a p 6 Zi|icov 'Avdvco TCO BayaSaTou 7TpoiAovsiKias)'. On the one hand, then, Plutarch refuses to accept the chronological impossibility of the connection, and provides explicit evidence for the Pythagorean influence on Numa. Yet his failure to come to any definite conclusion turns the question back on the reader.91 The Life of Numa, therefore, does not help the reader of the Roman Questions to decide whether the contrast between Romulus' aggression and Numa's pacific philosophy is to be seen as a contrast between Roman and Greek culture. It suggests, rather, a more complex relationship. Plutarch's refusal to assert the connection between Numa and Pythagoras opens up the possibility that Roman culture, while separate from Greek culture, could also be philosophical and virtuous, in short, civilized, at least in the person of Numa.92 This possibility, however slim, undercuts any simple assertion of Greek cultural superiority. If the cultural difference between Roman and Greek can be represented negatively, as the contrast between barbarism, or otherness, and civilization, or self, then it can also be seen more positively. However, this sense of cultural difference is again undermined by the second category of Greek answering, where Plutarch uses a Greek 'parallel' to suggest or confirm an explanation.93 For example, to answer the question 'Why is it forbidden for a man to receive a gift from his wife or a wife to receive a gift from her husband?', Plutarch begins: 'Is it that, Solon 90 91

92 93

Cf. also Numa 11, 14 and 22. The situation is further complicated by the question of the origins of the Sabines. Romulus 16.1 suggests that they were Spartan colonists, but in Numa 1.3 Plutarch seems to distance himself from this idea, saying that the Sabines 'want' to be descendants of Sparta. See also QR 15, 33, 84 and 87 for possible similarities between Sparta and Rome. Cf. Boulogne (1994) 70, Pelling (1989) and Swain (1990a), for instances where Roman culture was positively valued. See Boulogne (1992) 4701-2. This type of answer is not entirely absent from Latin sources e.g. Varro ARD Cardauns frs. 151, 232, 246 and 247.

Roman questions, Greek answers

105

having promulgated a law... ?' 94 In response to the question 'Why in ancient days did they never dine out without their sons, even when these were still children?', he says: 'Did Lycurgus introduce this custom also . . . ?' 95 It is hard to see how the prescriptions of these famous Greek legislators could be seen as the ocma of a ban on marital gift-giving, or of banishing Roman boys from the dinner-table. Similarly, in QR 5, which is unusual in that the response is structured to suggest strongly that the second alternative is the right one, Plutarch answers the intriguing enquiry: 'Why is it that those who are falsely reported to have died in a foreign country, even if they return, are not admitted by the door, but mount upon the roof-tiles and let themselves down inside?' The first answer, concerning an incident after a naval battle in the First Punic War, taken from Varro, is dismissed as 'wholly fabulous (IJUOIKTIV OACOS)'. Plutarch then begins his second response: 'But consider if this be not in some way similar to Greek customs.' He then delineates Greek religious belief concerning those thought to be dead, signalling with his use of 'ydp' that this is a confirmatory proof. He includes a story about a man in this predicament who consulted the oracle at Delphi, thus linking this response closely to himself. He then sums up 'Therefore it is nothing surprising if the Romans also .. .' 96 The reader notes that 'naturally (ETTIEIKOOS)', that is, just as the Greeks do, the Romans perform all their rituals of purification out of doors. This assertion of the naturalness of Greek ritual practice also illustrates Plutarch's third, and most frequent category of Greek answering: the moralizing answer, in accordance with his own ethical and philosophical beliefs.97 For example, in QR 7, after the response concerned with SoIonic legislation, Plutarch suggests either that affection between husband and wife should not be bought by gifts, or that, since seducers try to win women over with presents, their husbands should not have to stoop to such a practice, or that, since husbands and wives should own everything in common, to receive a present from a spouse would undermine that communality. Here, Plutarch simply normalizes Roman practice, by applying his own conception of the ideal relationship between husband and wife. His repeated use of such words as 'natural', 'reasonable' or 'proper' insinuates the naturalness, reason and propriety of his own value system and conceptualization of the world.98 Plutarch's view of the world is not 94

QR 7. See also QR 65: 'As Solon (Ka0d7T6p) . . . even so (OUTCOS) did the R o m a n legislator

95

QR 33. See also QR 87. Eighteen answers use a n 'as the Greeks . . . so the R o m a n s . . . ' format. See Boulogne (1992) 4 7 0 3 - 7 . Twenty-seven answers include 'natural', 'proper' or 'reasonable' explanations. Cf. twenty four answers involving necessity, asserting the inevitability of his value system.

96 97 98

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Rebecca Preston

an arbitrary, cultural construction, but the only way of viewing the world. Indeed, Greek culture is not, therefore, cultural at all, since that would imply human agency, it is simply the natural order of things." Jacques Boulogne argues that this type of Greek answering should also be viewed as conciliatory, as a cultural synthesis. 100 Plutarch conceives of human nature as essential and universal, and the Romans and the Greeks are therefore united by their common humanity. Yet, if the Roman Questions is a synthesis, it is a rather one-sided one. Plutarch does indeed imply that civilized, Greek values and beliefs lie behind the origins of Roman institutions and practices. Yet this very application of his own ethical system reveals a lack of interest in, even a failure to acknowledge the existence of, a distinctive set of Roman values and beliefs. The Roman Questions, therefore, are a very Hellenocentric kind of synthesis. 101 Moreover, Plutarch's concern to uncover the ethical motivation behind Roman custom simultaneously highlights the strangeness of Roman culture. This becomes clear if the very different strategies, employed to answer the Greek Questions, are considered. This difference is immediately apparent if the only two questions in the two texts which contain the same piece of information are compared. Question 52, in the Roman Questions, asks: Why do they sacrifice a bitch to the goddess called Geneta Mana and pray that none of the household shall become 'good'? Is it because Geneta is a deity concerned with the generation and birth of beings that perish? Her name means some such thing as 'flux and birth' or 'flowing birth'. Therefore, just as (cbcrnsp ouv) the Greeks sacrifice a bitch to Hecate, even so (KCCI) do the Romans offer the same sacrifice to Geneta on behalf of the members of their household. But Socrates says that the Argives sacrifice a bitch to Eilioneia by reason of the ease with which the bitch gives birth. But does the import of the prayer, that none of them shall become 'good', refer not to the human members of a household, but to the dogs? For dogs should (8eT) be savage and terrifying. Or, because of the fact that the dead are gracefully called 'the good', are they in veiled language (aiviTTO|jsvoi) asking in their prayer that none of their household may die? One should not be surprised at this (ou 5ET 5E TOUTO 0auiia^6iv); Aristotle, in fact (yap), says that there is written in the treaty of the Arcadians with the Spartans: 'No one shall be made good for rendering aid to the Spartan party at Tegea'; that is, no one shall be put to death. 99

100

101

Cf. however QR 19, where Numa's choice of January to start the new year may correspond to the natural start of the year ('TTJ 4>UCTEI . . . dpx^v' and 'avdpcb-n-ois Tpoirov Tivd cpucriv'), and he believes it best ('dpiora') to begin it after the winter solstice, like the Roman calendar. (1987) 475, and (1994) 124-46, and 150-1 (his Conclusion is called 'un mediateur transculturel'). Cf. Alston's (1996) delineation of Plutarch's Hellenocentric interpretations in On Isis and Osiris.


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Here, Plutarch begins by attempting to explain the Latin etymology of a name he expected would be unfamiliar to his audience. He then implicitly identifies this Roman goddess with Hecate, using a 'parallel' Greek practice to illuminate the Roman custom. It is also possible, however, that Geneta Mana might be identified with Eilioneia, as suggested by Argive practice. This is supported by an appeal to naturalness: the ease with which dogs give birth. Plutarch's invocation of necessity elides the banality of his preference for fierce guard-dogs. He then claims that 'the good' is a euphemism for the dead, but the evidence for this is a Greek peace treaty. He provides no proof that this Greek usage can be paralleled in Latin. Rather, he anticipates the reader's surprise at such a usage, reinforcing the strangeness of Roman culture. The practices of the Romans are expected to provoke surprise. No Roman writers are quoted as the source for his explanations. Instead, the authority of the local historian, Socrates of Argos, and of Aristotle, two Greek authors, is evoked. Thus, Plutarch is using his familiar strategies of explaining Roman custom by Greek practice, of assimilating Roman religion to that of the Greeks, and of using natural, common-sense explanations, while reminding the reader of the Otherness of Roman culture. However, question 5 in the Greek Questions, is very different: Who are the 'good' among the Arcadians and the Spartans? When the Spartans had come to terms with the Tegeans, they made a treaty and set up in common a pillar by the Alpheius. On this, among other matters, was inscribed: The Messenians must be expelled from the country; it shall not be lawful to make men good.' Aristotle, then, in explaining (s^riyouiJiEvos) this, states that it means that no one shall be put to death because of assistance given to the Spartan party in Tegea. This question asks 'who?', not 'why?', and it is answered first by a description of the treaty, and then an explanation of the euphemism as explained by Aristotle. There are no alternative suggestions here, no hint of tentativeness or speculation. Rather, a particular historical query is explained simply, by recourse to a specific document. A Greek question is answered by reference to a Greek authority. No Roman author is explicitly described, in the Roman Questions, as an 'exegete' of his own culture. This answer is typical of those found in the Greek Questions, which consist of similar explanations, densely packed with 'fact', often highly abstruse, in the tradition of the learned Problemata.102 In the Greek Questions, Plutarch the pepaideumenos shows off his mastery of Greek paideia, tackling with assurance such obscure questions as 'What is it that 102

Halliday (1928) points out that the Greek Questions are our only surviving source for some of its contents. E.g. QG 16, 18, 23, 37, 48 and 53.

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the Megarians call aphabromaT, or 'Why at Sparta is a shrine of Odysseus built near the shrine of the daughters of Leucippos?' or 'What is the reason why the Eleans lead their mares outside the boundaries of their country to mate with asses?'103 Moreover, there are almost no answers of the moralizing type.104 This suggests that Plutarch did not feel it necessary to give moral reasons for Greek practice. Rather, both he and his audience might take for granted the sense and naturalness of their own culture. It is true that the Greek Questions are concerned with the religious customs of particular Greek poleis or ethne. Furthermore, questions such as 'What is the reason why the Eleans lead their mares outside the boundaries of their country to mate with asses?' might seem to emphasize differences among the Greeks.105 Indeed the Greek Questions as a whole are nearly all concerned with the specific details of the religious custom, mythical origins or political institutions of particular Greek poleis or ethne. This focus, then, appears to highlight difference, rather than similarity. For Plutarch, Greek identity is complicated.106 It consists of local, polis identity, as revealed by his concern, in the subjects of the Greek Questions, for detailed, local differences. Yet the narrow focus of the questions and the overwhelming tendency to ask 'what?' or 'who?', rather than 'why?', focuses the reader's attention not on recognizing cultural difference between the Greeks, but on finding out obscure factual details. Greek culture does not require explanation. Indeed this focus on the particularities of local cult, politics and myth also asserts a broader Greek identity, in that Plutarch takes for granted the central institutions of Greek culture. It is only Roman custom and practice which requires elucidation. The Greeks are not, however, idealized: there is, in fact, almost an emphasis on war, the difficulties involved in establishing colonies, and civil strife. In QG 17, Plutarch notes that the Corinthians fought 'in a civilized and kinsmanly way' with the Megarians, this comment implying that not all wars were conducted in this way. In contrast, in QG 21, Plutarch explains that the Cretans are accustomed to raid each others' territory. The division made between Greek civilization and Roman barbarism is thus further complicated. The Greeks too could be bellicose and expansionist; they did not necessarily live out the ideals of Greek paideia. Indeed a Roman king might more completely embody the Platonic ideal

103 104 105 106

QG 16, 48 a n d 53. F o r a n exception, see QG 34. QG52>. See Browning (1989) a n d W a l b a n k (1951), for a diachronic conspectus of the relative importance of polis versus Panhellenic identity.


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of the philosopher-king. 107 He might even be 'more Greek'. 108 This entails an uncomfortable corollary for Greek identity. If to be civilized is to be Greek, then Greek identity might not be the automatic possession of those living in the Greek-speaking East. Rather, it could be claimed by anyone who had acquired Greek paideia. Plutarch's strategy of Greek answering appropriates a Roman god as a Greek culture-hero, who civilizes the barbarous Romans - or who is himself overwhelmed by their barbarism. Greek culture is equated with civilization itself, and the Romans must learn Greek paideia. Yet Plutarch's equivocation over Numa's relationship with Pythagoras also allows for the possibility of a separate, Roman culture, more civilized and philosophical than Romulus' aggressive expansionism. Plutarch's use of Greek 'parallels', and his application of his own ethical world view elides the difference between Roman and Greek, yet it does so by asserting the naturalness of Greek culture. In the Greek Questions, by contrast, Greek culture is explained by reference to itself. Plutarch shows himself to be a true pepaideumenos, and he takes for granted the self-evident ethical good sense of his own culture. The difference between the strategies deployed to provide amcc in the Roman Questions, and those used in the Greek Questions, reinforces the opposition between Roman culture as Other and Greek culture as Self. Yet it also complicates such a division. On the one hand, Roman culture is subsumed in Plutarch's own world view, and Greek culture is promoted as the only possible culture. This strategy tends rather to deny the possibility of cultural difference. On the other hand, however, Roman culture is allowed its own identity, both negatively, in the barbarousness before Greek civilizing influences, and more positively, in the philosophical precepts of Numa. Yet the style of the answers in the Roman Questions maintains the sense of the strangeness of Roman culture. Thus, cultural difference is both denied and emphasized. Questions: past, present and the Roman Empire It is also striking that Plutarch's choice of topics in both the Roman Questions and the Greek Questions avoids explicit reference to the present. It is the case that many customs or institutions described were probably still in existence in Plutarch's time, and this is strongly suggested by his use of the present tense, or of expressions such as 'ern KOCI VUV'. 109 The 107

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See esp. Numa 2 0 . 6 - 7 . F o r discussion, see D e Blois a n d Bons (1992), a n d Buccheit (1991). Comp. Lyc-Numa 1.5. QR 21 ('and even now'). See also QR 25, 4 3 , 50, 53 a n d 96.

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flamen Dialis, for example, is the subject of a set of questions.110 There is even a reference to the emperor Domitian.111 Jacques Boulogne has argued that the Roman Questions is indeed concerned with understanding contemporary Roman society.112 Yet no specifically imperial practices or institutions are discussed and the reader is not encouraged to consider the implications of the Empire on the topics chosen. For example, in response to QR 10, about worshipping the gods with covered heads and honouring men by doing the opposite, Plutarch says: For they uncover their heads in the presence of men more powerful than they: it is not to invest these men with additional honour, but rather to avert from them the jealousy of the gods, that these men may not seem to demand the same honours as the gods, nor to tolerate or rejoice in an attention like that bestowed on the gods.

The careful distinction drawn here between man and god seems almost deliberately to bypass the imperial cult.113 Similarly, in QR 81, in a discussion of the tribunate, Plutarch claims that 'its authority and power consist in blocking the power of a magistrate and in the abrogation of excessive authority'. This description seems consciously to avoid reference to the tribunician powers held by the emperor, or to his 'excessive authority'. Elsewhere, Plutarch explains that both the Greek cities and Rome abolished kingship, because the kings became 'arrogant and oppressive', and he wonders whether the practice of wearing crescent shapes on one's shoes was instituted as a lesson in obedience to regal authority.114 Again, Plutarch studiously avoids any contemporary relevance. The reader is not encouraged to think of the present. The paucity of references to the Roman politeia might seem to reflect the irrelevance of the Republican system under the Empire, but all the references there to Roman politics concern Republican practices or institutions. Moreover, customs or institutions in Rome itself are the subject of most of the questions. Italy is mentioned only infrequently, while the topography of Rome merits a number of questions.115 This suggests that, even at the end of the first century CE, Rome can still be assimilated to a Greek polis. The Roman Empire is conspicuously absent.116 The Greek Questions are concerned with the different poleis and ethne of Greece. The majority of these places and peoples are located in the 110 111 112 113 114 115 116

QR 109-12. QR 50. (1987) 471-2 and (1992) 4698-9. Cf. QR 14, where sons, but not daughters, are said to worship their dead fathers as gods. Si? 63 and 76. Topography of Rome: e.g. QR 47, 55, 69 and 91. See Bowie (1970), for an important discussion of the avoidance of the present in Greek writers of the early imperial period.


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province of Achaea, created by the Roman authorities. Almost half of the questions and answers have at least one referent outside this unit of the Roman Empire, which, however, belong to the archaic and classical Greek world, from Troy to Tarentum, an Italian city founded by Greek colonists, rather than to the more recently Hellenized East. While this geographical spread does not conflict with the boundaries of the Roman Empire, it relies on an older conception of the Greek world. There is no mention of contemporary political realities. Rather, Plutarch concentrates on the details of city constitutions and religious practices, the origin of place names, the often mythical migrations and settlements of peoples, and on the events of Greek myth.117 QG 14, for example, concerns the penalty Odysseus paid for the slaughter of his wife's suitors, while in QG 20 the reader discovers that a saying in Priene originated from a terrible defeat by the Milesians, at the time of Bias the sage. In QG 26, Plutarch explains how the Aenianians, after a series of migrations, ended up in such a prosperous land, that they pray never to return to their original home. These are the actions of autonomous cities and peoples, from the Greek past, not from the Roman present. The pervasive use of the present tense in both the Greek Questions and the Roman Questions asserts the persistence of identity. Amcc located in the past, often the remote and mythical past, are thus linked to the present. The present can be explained in terms of the past. Furthermore, the emphasis in the Greek Questions on the origins of toponyms, or the settlements of particular places, strengthens this assumption. In QG 26, for example, Plutarch traces the fortunes of the Aenianians from their mythical expulsion by the Lapiths to their present-day prosperity. Similarly, in the Roman Questions, Plutarch comments explicitly on the persistence of identity. In QR 32, the Arcadians may have practised the human sacrifice of Argives because 'they continued to preserve (8ie((>uAaTTov) their ancient feud and enmity'. The same verb (5iac(>uAdTToucri) is used to underline the antiquity of a custom in QR 53, where the Etruscans are still called by their original name, Sardians, in memory of their distant origins in Lydia. This connection between the present and the past is, of course, typical in the aetiological tradition. It asserts a continuity between past and present, and claims to explain the present by reference to the past. Yet, in this case, Plutarch's highly selective version of the present elides the contemporary realities of Roman rule. Both Roman culture and 117

Political details: QG 1, 2, 4, 5, 8, 17, 18, 20, 29, 32, 42, 46, 47, 49, 53, 55, 57, 59; religious practice: QG 3, 6, 9, 12, 21, 23, 24, 26, 28, 31, 33, 36, 37, 39, 40, 44, 48, 58; place names: QG 15, 16, 22, 30, 41, 43, 56; migrations and settlements: QG 11, 13, 15, 16, 21, 22, 26, 35, 37, 39, 41, 51; myth: QG 14, 22, 26, 27, 28, 31, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 43, 44, 45, 46, 48, 50, 52, 56, 58.

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Greek culture are located in the past. But this very selectivity, in its omissions and elisions, also problematizes the possibility of continuity between past and present and calls into question the persistence of identity. The Roman Empire cannot be explained by Numa's calendrical changes or Odysseus' exile from Ithaca. Nor is it clear how contemporary identity can be based solely on the past. In some ways, then, Plutarch's choice of topics underlines the difference between Greek and Roman culture. The connection asserted between past and present highlights the separateness of Greek and Roman culture, and denies the possibility of cultural change over time. Thus the sense of culture as a single, unchanging entity is emphasized. However, Plutarch's failure to engage with imperial practices and institutions undermines this view of the nature of culture, in that the continuity between past and present is only asserted for preimperial Greek and Roman culture. The authority of the past to explain the present is thus called into question. Questions and cultural authority

The very existence of the Roman Questions and the Greek Questions asserts Plutarch's authority to explain Greek and Roman culture, and to evaluate the competing ama of a particular question. However, in the case of the Roman Questions, that authority is undermined by the tentativeness of the answers, as if Roman culture will elude definitive explanation. The contrast with the certainty of the Greek Questions is also revealed by Plutarch's different attitudes towards Roman and Greek authorities. Much of the material in the Roman Questions seems to have been taken from Roman sources, principally Varro. 118 Yet Plutarch does not advertise this. 119 Indeed he mentions more Greek than Latin authors by name.120 In a work about Roman culture, Plutarch prefers to support his explanations by using Greek rather than Roman authority. Moreover, his treatment of the Roman authors he does name tends to undermine their authority.121 Even where Plutarch has a choice of answers, he either prefers the Greek ones, or gives them equal status to the Roman ones. Varro is mentioned by name eight times. On three occasions his account seems to be accepted, although two of these concern only points of detail.122 In QR 90, Varro provides the source of the question, not the answer. Twice 118 119 120 121 122

See H. J. Rose (1924) ch. 1 and Valgiglio (1976). This was standard practice for ancient authors. Eleven Latin authors and nineteen Greek authors. See van der Stockt (1987). See Boulogne (1992) 4702. QR 27: Varro is the source for the answer. (Cf. Cluvius Rufus in QR 107.) QR 4 and 14: Varro is mentioned to confirm points of detail.


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Varro is cited as the source for the first of a number of alternatives, implying that his explanation should not be considered conclusive.123 On two occasions, Varro's explanation is explicitly rejected. In question 101, Plutarch says: 'What Varro and his school say is not credible (ou m0avov),' while in question 5, Varro's interpretation is described as 'quite fabulous (|ju0iKf)v oAcos)'. Plutarch goes on to provide a lengthy comparison to Greek practice, as I have already discussed. In this case, then, a Greek answer is clearly preferable. Similarly, other Latin writers are used only to provide one of a number of alternatives, or are merely the source of a detail, or the question itself.124 Livy is mentioned only once, in question 25. The topic is: 'Why do they reckon the day after the Kalends, or the Nones, or the Ides as unsuitable for leaving home or for travel?' First, Plutarch discusses the reason given by Livy and 'the majority'. However, he then exclaims: 'Or does this contain many irrationalities (TTOAACCS dAoyias)?' and provides a careful refutation. He continues by drawing an analogy between the arrangement of the Roman year and of the month, backing it up with a 'parallel' from Greek religious practice. After applying Pythagorean number theory, he wonders if a saying of Themistocles, the Athenian statesman, 'has any foundation in reason (exei Aoyov)'. Finally, he asserts that the ancient Romans never made plans at festivals, a fact backed up only by his own authority, or suggests an analogy with the present practice of lingering at temples. Here, the authority of a celebrated Roman historian is rejected in favour of Plutarch's own suggestions, a Greek philosophical theory, a 'parallel' with Greek religion, and a saying by a famous Greek statesman. Plutarch's attitude towards anonymous sources is no less equivocal. It is true that he twice asks: 'Is this also to be solved by history?', suggesting the veracity of explanations based on Roman history.125 Yet in question 106, the first alternative, explicitly called the view of the majority of Romans, is followed by another possibility. Plutarch then asks: 'Or does the matter have an explanation (Aoyov) more natural and philosophic?' This surely suggests that the reader is to prefer, or at least give equal consideration to, Greek rather than Roman answers. This is in clear contrast to the Greek Questions, where questions about Greek culture are answered with reference only to Greek authorities. 123 124

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QR 2: the first alternative of four; QR 105: the first alternative of three. As only one alternative: Antistius L a b e o (46) a n d Nigidius Figulus (21). As a source of detail: Fenestella (41) a n d G a i u s Curio (81). As a source for the question: Cicero (34 a n d Plutarch wonders at the end of his discussion whether this information is even true), C a t o the Elder (39 a n d 49) a n d Ateius C a p i t o (50). QR 43 (ancient treatment of ambassadors) a n d 54 (the mace Hum is n a m e d after a certain Macellus!).

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The sheer mass of detail and range of material deployed in both the Roman Questions and the Greek Questions impresses the reader with Plutarch's authority to pronounce on both Greek and Roman culture. In this sense, paradoxically, Plutarch therefore constructs himself as an 'insider' to both Roman and Greek culture. Indeed, in the Roman Questions, at several points, Plutarch appears to be showing off his special knowledge of Rome to his fellow Greeks.126 This is most explicit in question 103, 'Why do they call children of unknown fathers spuriiT Plutarch begins his response with the categoric statement that it is not for the reason 'the Greeks believe'. He then launches into an account of Roman praenomina and their abbreviations.127 Here, Plutarch makes clear his ability to improve his Greek readers' knowledge of Roman culture. If his exegesis, by calling on the authority of Greek practices and Greek sources, emphasizes that he is an 'outsider' to Roman culture, it also asserts special, inside knowledge. Moreover, his use of the first person plural on five occasions suggests the possibility of a unified, undifferentiated humanity. For example, the shrine of Fortune the Fowler in Rome is said to signify that 'we (rmcov) are caught by Fortune from afar and held fast by circumstances'.128 The custom of not extinguishing lamps, but letting them go out by themselves, 'teaches us' to share necessities.129 Here, difference between Greek and Roman is elided completely, as Roman practice provides a moral lesson for us all. Question 40 has been seen as an example of Plutarch's adopting a specifically Roman perspective.130 In explaining why theflamenDialis is not allowed to anoint himself outdoors, Plutarch delineates Roman suspicions of gymnasia and palaestra, as the causes of Greek 'slavery and effeminacy (liocAaKias)', and of pederasty and a failure to develop military prowess. However, Plutarch does not explicitly endorse this opinion, following it with the distancing comment: 'It is hard work, at any rate, when men strip in the open air to escape these consequences.' Moreover, in question 101, he wonders whether the bulla, the amulet worn by children, was invented to mark out free children, when naked, from the slave boys who were the objects of ancient Roman pederasty. This tends to undermine any Roman belief that pederasty was a recently-imported, Greek 126

127 128 129 130

E.g. QR 41 (providing extra information on the designs of Roman coins and the origin of some Roman nomina), 74 (listing the shrines to Fortune in Rome), 87 (explaining some incidental details of Juno's cult and informing the reader of the ancient Latin word for spear). Unfortunately, Plutarch himself is wrong on several points (Rose (1924) 211). 2*74. QR 75. See also 19, 38, and 84. See Boulogne (1994) 97, Duff (1994) 153, and Introduction to this volume, 1-2.


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habit. Plutarch, then, shows awareness of a Roman perspective, but does not accept its validity. His authority to interpret Roman culture remains intact. In the Greek Questions, Plutarch's authority to interpret Greek culture is continually reinforced by the certainty of his answers, by his erudition and by his reference to the authority of other Greek writers. In the Roman Questions, Plutarch's pervasive Greek answering and his criticism of Roman authorities asserts the authority of Greek culture to explain the Romans as well. Yet, this is undermined by the tentativeness of Plutarch's responses. Moreover, his very attempt to elucidate Roman culture locates him as an insider, while his Greek answering positions him as an outsider. Thus, Plutarch's relationship with Roman culture is revealed as highly complex. Conclusion: Romans, Greeks, identities

A comparison of the Roman Questions and the Greek Questions reveals clear differences between Plutarch's relationship with Greek and with Roman culture. Critics have argued that Plutarch should therefore be viewed as locating himself inside Greek culture and outside Roman culture.131 Further, Plutarch's reliance on Greek answering and Greek authority has been viewed as an assertion of Greek cultural superiority.132 The values of Greek paideia become universal values; Greek culture is civilization. Yet Plutarch's interest in, and knowledge of, Roman culture and history has also been ascribed a conciliatory purpose.133 The Roman Questions educate his readers about Roman customs and institutions, and the Romans are civilized, Hellenized foreigners, not barbarians. However, I feel that the Roman Questions cannot be interpreted as primarily conciliatory. Rather, I would like to conclude by examining how far the Roman Questions and the Greek Questions are typical of Plutarch's corpus, by considering how closely they reproduce the concerns of the Greek elite in the Second Sophistic and by returning to the question of the construction of identity in the Roman Empire. The differences between the Roman Questions and the Greek Questions are striking. The contrast between Roman and Greek in the Parallel Lives, however, is more nuanced.134 For example, in the preface of his Life of Theseus, Plutarch foregrounds the problems involved in writing 131 132 133 134

Barrow (1967) 6 6 - 7 0 ; Boulogne (1987) a n d (1992); a n d Duff (1994) ch. 7. Boulogne (1992) a n d (1994). Boulogne (1987) a n d (1992), a n d Swain (1990a). See e.g. B a r r o w (1967); Duff (1994); C. P. Jones (1971); Pelling (1986) a n d (1989); R u s sell (1973); Swain (1990a) a n d (1996); a n d W a r d m a n (1974).

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about both Theseus, the founder of Athens, and his pair, Romulus. He promises to attempt to purify the mythical, submitting it to reason (logos), so as to create 'a semblance of history (icr-ropiccs oyiv)'.135 His use of the word 'semblance' hardly suggests great confidence in the historical veracity of his account, and in fact Plutarch continues by asking for the reader's indulgence. This is quite different from the certainty of the Greek Questions, which treats many, similarly mythical, topics. In his Life of Numa, Plutarch criticizes Juba, the king of Mauretania and the author of an antiquarian work in Greek entitled Similarities, for 'being determined (yAix6|ji£vos)' to derive the word for the shields of the Salii from Greek.136 Yet the Roman Questions are full of such Greek answering. It seems, therefore, that the Greek Questions and the Roman Questions, perhaps because they are not literary narratives, display certain aspects of Plutarch's work in an extreme way. The Roman Questions and the Greek Questions show Plutarch to be a pepaideumenos. His immense knowledge is displayed by both works, ranging over the obscurest details of Roman history or Greek civic institutions. Plutarch represents himself as an authority competent to explain Roman and Greek culture, and to decide between competing explanations. His use of Greek authority encompasses both the canon of famous writers and individuals, for example Aristotle and Themistocles, and more obscure sources, such as the local historian Socrates of Argos, revealing the depth of his erudition. This constant appeal to the authority of the past to legitimate assertions in the present was typical of the Greek elite in the early Roman Empire.137 It seems likely that these assertions were a response both to Roman political authority and Roman appropriation of Greek cultural authority. Using Greek cultural authority to decide on questions of Roman culture is thus a neat counterpoint to Hadrian's arbitration of the Greekness of his subject cities. It is Plutarch's own ethical value system, and his mastery of his own culture, that can explain Roman culture. Greek culture is therefore assimilated to the natural order of things. Furthermore, Greek paideia must be learnt by the Romans from a series of Greek culture-heroes. Questions 22 and 32 suggest quite clearly that the Romans, before this civilizing contact, were barbarians. Romulus' bellicose expansionism can be linked to Plutarch's other representations of Rome before contact with the East.138 For example, at the beginning of his Life of Coriolanus, Plutarch argues that this 135 136 137

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Theseus 1.3. Numa 13.6. This is noted, for example, by G. A n d e r s o n (1989) a n d (1993); Bowie (1970); B r a n h a m (1989) Introduction; Rogers (1991b); a n d Swain (1996). See Duff (1994); Pelling (1989); Swain (1990a) a n d (1996).


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early Roman hero is an example of what happens when a character noble by nature lacks paideia.139 Plutarch goes on to claims that it is paideia and clearly Greek paideia, since it is a gift of the Muses - which provides the reasons necessary to control one's passions. He then continues: in those days Rome held in highest honour that part of virtue which concerns itself with warlike and military achievements (TCCS -rroAeiJiKas KCCI crrpaTiGOTiKds . . .

TTpd^eis), and evidence of this may be found in the only Latin word for virtue, which signifies really manly valour (dv8p6ias); they made valour, a specific form of virtue, stand for virtue in general.140 Bellicosity is the main characteristic of early Rome, and even a noble nature cannot really prosper without paideia. Paideia, then, was central to Plutarch's philosophical project in the Parallel Lives. His representation of the civilizing effects of Janus, Saturn and Heracles in the Roman Questions reinforces the importance of paideia, and makes it clear that civilization comes from the East. Plutarch might, therefore, seem to be typical of the 'cultural confidence' seen as a key characteristic of the Second Sophistic. 141 The continued importance and relevance of Greek paideia in the Roman world is thus asserted. However, any such confidence is problematized by the style of the answers in the Roman Questions. The reader is left to choose between alternatives; questions are answered by more questions. Roman culture is represented as eluding Plutarch's zeal for explanation; it cannot be conclusively understood. If Plutarch's Greek answering may be said to elide the differences between Greek and Roman culture, to deny the existence of any culture other than Greek paideia, then the tentativeness of this answering highlights the separateness and Otherness of Roman culture. The Romans cannot be assimilated into the Greek world view so easily. The explanatory power of Greek culture has limits. Any sense of cultural confidence is also undermined by Plutarch's focus on the past. On the one hand, his repeated explanation of the present by the past, the typical strategy of the aetiological tradition, uses the authority of the past to legitimate his interpretations. Identity and culture are thus represented as unchanging, connecting the remotest past to the contemporary world. The sense of 'Greek culture' or 'Roman culture' as real entities is reinforced. Yet, in his studied avoidance of the realities of the Roman Empire, Plutarch locates Greek and Roman culture and identity only in the past. This implies that such concepts only make sense 139 140 141

Coriolanus 1.2-4. Cf. QR 19 and 84. Swain (1996) 2. See also G. Anderson (1986); Bowie (1991); Duff (1994) ch. 7. Cf. Whitmarsh, 303, in this volume.

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if Rome is assimilated to a Greek polis, or if the cities of the East are still autonomous. Thus, the reader is struck by discontinuity, by the difference between the past and the present, as much as by the continuity. It is hard to see how 'Greek identity' or 'Roman culture', for example, as they are represented in the Greek Questions and the Roman Questions, are to function in the Roman Empire. The possibility of constructing such identities is further called into question by Plutarch's own project, in that, if the whole world were to be civilized by Greek culture, paideia would no longer be distinctively Greek. Furthermore, Plutarch's representation of identity and culture in the Greek Questions and the Roman Questions is complex, even contradictory. In the Greek Questions, there is a tension between the local differences of the poleis and ethne, and a sense of a unified Greek culture and identity. This tension is often evident in works from the Second Sophistic. Jas Eisner has shown, for example, that in his Description of Greece, the second-century Greek writer Pausanias uses the construction of religious identity as a way of transcending the realities of intra-Greek strife in the classical world.142 In the Roman Questions, it is unclear how far Roman culture is to be seen as an autonomous entity, or as a mere copy of Greek culture. If there is an authentic Roman culture, is it to be identified with barbarism, with the militarism of Romulus, or with the pacific philosophy of Numa? More general studies of Plutarch's corpus have argued that the Romans are represented neither as Greek nor as barbarian.143 It is then unclear, however, into what category exactly they might be said to fit. In the Roman Questions, the Romans seem to be Hellenized barbarians, and to be some other, separate, but civilized kind of people. It seems significant that Plutarch wrote three sets of questions, Roman, Greek and barbarian. Yet he does not make clear how the Romans are to be located in the traditional Greek-barbarian dichotomy. The very tentativeness of the answers, and the multiplying of the responses reinforce the anomalous nature of the Romans. They cannot be pinned down and explained. Moreover, Plutarch's own relationship towards Roman identity is complex, even contradictory. His reliance on Greek answers, and his failure to provide decisive responses in the Roman Questions locates Plutarch outside Roman culture. Yet the breadth and the depth of his knowledge of Rome, and his assertion of his authority to write about Roman culture for other Greeks, places him rather inside that culture. It might seem preferable, therefore, to say that Plutarch was both inside and 142 143

Eisner (1992). See also Rogers (1991b). See Browning (1989); C. P. Jones (1971); Pelling (1989); a n d Swain (1990a) a n d (1996). Cf. Russell (1979) o n the R o m a n s ' 'potentiality for barbarism' (132).


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outside Roman culture, or that he was more of an insider to Greek culture than to Roman.144 The simple opposition of inside/outside is then replaced by a more complex negotiation of position within the Roman Empire. As Simon Goldhill so neatly puts it: 'In the Roman Empire all are insiders, but some are more insiders than others.'145 Plutarch's works, then, form part of a wider debate about the nature of identity and culture in the Second Sophistic. The Roman Questions and the Greek Questions in themselves represent the complexities of that debate, by problematizing the relationship between Greek and Roman culture, the distinction between Roman, Greek and barbarian, and the possibility of using the past to create identity in the present. These are questions which Plutarch does not, and perhaps could not, answer. 144 145

See Duff (1994) for Plutarch as b o t h an insider a n d an outsider. Goldhill (1995) 354.

Part II

Intellectuals on the margins

Describing Self in the language of Other: Pseudo (?) Lucian at the temple of Hierapolis Jas Eisner

Arguably, travel writing is always an act of compromise. Usually it comprises a translation of the foreign into terms acceptable or understandable to a home community, by an author whose own identity can hardly be disentangled from the act of writing.1 The foreign is always transformed under the gaze and representations of its interpreter (framed as a specimen, perhaps, or disunited from the cultural coordinates which give it indigenous meaning, or actively misinterpreted and abused).2 Yet its entry into a home culture (even the very possibility for that entry through some form of ethnographic or relativizing discourse) may transform that home culture too - nuancing both a collective cultural identity and the more personal sense of self of the traveller.3 When such travel becomes inextricable from the problems of religion and the very powerful effects which religion exercises on subjectivity (as in the case of pilgrimage accounts), the problems and negotiations of the self may become more complex still.4 Ultimately, everything may be at

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On issues of cultural translation, there is a rich literature on the European discovery and assimilation of the New World: see esp., Greenblatt (1991), (1993); Pagden (1993); Rubies (1993). Specifically on the 'science of the Other' ('heterology'), the classic work is de Certeau (1986) esp. 67-79 and 137-49 on writing and travel with Giard (1993). On the problems of ethnography see Boon (1982); Clifford and Marcus (1986); Pratt (1992); Schwartz (1994). For accounts of the ancient geographic framework within which the De Dea Syria was written, see Jacob (1991) and Romm (1992). As a polemical position on the cultural assimilations of travel writing, this is famously the argument of Edward Said (1978). Like all polemics, the argument is too extreme. See Eisner (1994) 226-30. On the development of technologies to assimilate travel accounts in the Renaissance simultaneously a way of legislating for the framing of the Other and of reconstituting systems of knowledge in home cultures in order to accommodate the foreign - see Stagl (1990) and Rubies (1996). For a subtle account of how self-confident identities can be undermined in confronting others, see Rubies (1999). Interestingly, the literature on pilgrimage has hardly explored the effects of travel as assimilation of the Other, though see now Williams (1998) 249-96, (1999). In part this may be because the Other which is the pilgrim's goal is also (usually) the sacred underpinning of the pilgrim's sense of self. For that goal as a kind of intersubjective ideal ('communitas')

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stake in such a text; which is what makes the study of pilgrimage so rewarding.5 Antiquity hardly offers us a more remarkable and intricate investigation of these problems than the de dea Syria, an account of pilgrimage to a temple in the holy city of Hierapolis in Syria, which survives in the corpus of Lucian. Whether or not the text is actually by Lucian is a subject on which a great deal of critical ink has been spilled in the last couple of centuries.6 The debate about attribution is no arcane polemic of scholarly minutiae: at issue are all the same questions of identity that we find in the text itself, and in the very problem of travel writing as cultural translation. If the de dea Syria is by Lucian, so the story has gone, then (for it to tally with the satiric and sceptical tone of much else of Lucian's work, especially on religion)7 it must be a parody. The extreme version of the de dea Syria (hereafter referred to as DDS in this paper) as a spoof of loony rites among the mad religions of the East and at the same time as a satire on the work of Herodotus came in the Loeb translator's choice to render the text into (virtuoso but virtually unreadable) mock sixteenthcentury English.8 But this line, for all its potential literary attraction is anthropologically unsound: who are we to judge the sacred rituals of the ancient East, let alone the tone of their retelling by a voice which many have read as deeply sincere? Those who have wished to believe the apparent sincerity of the original (with its lack of obvious ironies) have tended to make it by a different and less competent hand (Pseudo-Lucian).9 Beside the difficulties of tracing irony, satiric intent and hence Lucianic authorship, lies

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- a temporary and unmediated liberation from secular divisions and hierarchies - which reverses the social norms of pilgrims' home-cultures, see Turner and Turner (1978). The Turners' fundamental anthropological analysis has been attacked on numerous grounds that it is too idealist, overly Christianizing and contradicted by empirical evidence in the field (where anthropologists have tended to find multiple voices disagreeing rather than any kind of communitas); see Eade and Sallnow (1991) 4-5, for a summary of anthropological critiques, and Williams (1995) esp. 167-8 for a more historical/literary critique. For general historical introductions to pilgrimage in antiquity, see Kotting (1950) 12-79; Coleman and Eisner (1995) 10-29; Rutherford (1995); and now Dillon (1997). For good surveys, see G. Anderson (1976a) 68-82 (effectively a defence of Lucianic authorship), Oden (1977) 4-14 with bibliography; Hall (1981) 374-81; and Swain (1996) 304-8. For a sensible riposte to the perceived need for a consistent Lucian in matters of religion, see C. P. Jones (1986) 41-3. Harmon (1925) 337-411. Compare more recently Oden (1977) 41 where the DDS is said to be 'motivated above all by [an] irrepressible desire to demonstrate the ridiculous elements in the city's cult'. Others have attempted to tone down the parody to 'pastiche' - e.g. Hall (1981) 378, following Bompaire (1958) 649; 'humour' (Jones (1986) 41) and 'a certain playfulness . . . very much in the temple's honour' (Swain (1996) 305). E.g. Caster (1937) 360-4; Betz (1961) 24-5; Turcan (1996) 133; Baslez (1994); and most recently Dirven (1997).

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the historical problem of the text's value as a documentary source on near Eastern religion. The stronger the case for satiric excess, the more worthless the text as a reliable reflection of the realien.10 Yet, if the DDS is merely an inaccurate and second-rate syncretistic compilation showing little first-hand or linguistic knowledge of Syria, this may also cast doubt on the Lucianic attribution (since Lucian was a Syrian).11 Underlying all these lines - at issue in the very question of attribution - is our own set of images of classical antiquity: was its greatest satirical essayist selfconsciously (but awfully subtly) ironic about the more extreme examples of ancient religious charisma? or was he himself a believer? or - if the text is by a believer - was its author perhaps someone other than Lucian?12 In effect, the problem of authorship exposes modernity's own identity and ancestral self-projection in relation to its privileged past. At any rate - whatever one's choice of authorship and wherever one stands in the debates about authorial consistency and historical validity the DDS is a work written in the multicultural ambience of the Roman East in the second or third centuries CE, and in the specific context of the revival of Hellenism and Greek learning during the Second Sophistic.13 It translates the strange practices and attitudes (strange, at least, to Greeks) of late-antique Syrian religion into the thought-structure and conceptual frame of Greco-Roman culture in the imperial period. The question of translation in turn raises the hoary problem of whom the text might have been intended for, of what was its implied audience. Of course, we know next to nothing about these issues, but it is certainly the case that the meanings of the DDS would have differed in relation to an educated Greek reader (at whom the text seems most directly to be aimed) by contrast with, say, a Roman or a Syrian. For both these latter kinds of possible reader, the Greek in which the text is written might well have been a second language and - however Hellenized they may have been - in some respects it is likely they would have been strongly identified with their place of origin in the West or the East (like Lucian himself, for instance).14 In any case, to all these readerships, the DDS would have sounded slightly odd since, quite apart from its choice of subject matter, its author opted - as we shall see - to write in the Ionic dialect of Greek 10

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Pace Oden (1977) 43 and 157-8, who wants the DDS to be both Lucianic satire and 'firmly based on fact'. This is the argument of Baslez (1994), who wants the DDS to be neither Lucianic nor valuable as a source. Wrapped up here but never made explicit in all these arguments are a series of assumptions about 'rationality' as a preserve of Greek culture and its western European (especially its Protestant) descendants. On this theme, see Goody (1996) 11-48. Broadly on the Second Sophistic, see G. Anderson (1993) and Swain (1996). For an account of Lucian's identity, see Swain (1996) 298-329.

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(so strongly identified with the works of Herodotus) rather than in the much more usual Attic. The text is hardly coy about the complexity its act of cultural translation inevitably generates in the authorial persona, the unnamed T, who speaks through it.15 Indeed, while conspicuously failing to name its author or narrator, the first sentences of the DDS make an elaborate point of discussing the name of the city and temple (Hierapolis) which is the text's ostensible subject as well as the fact that the name has been changed.16 The opening chapter closes with the following words: ypdco 5s 'Acrovpios kov, KOCI TCOV &Trr|y6O|jai Ta jjiev auToyir) sjjiaOov, T& 8E Trapa TCOV ipscov e8dr)v, OKOCTCC EOVTCC ejjieO TrpeapUTepa eyco ioropEco.

I write as an Assyrian, and some of the things I relate I learned first-hand, while others - the things that happened before my time - I learned from the priests. (DDS I) 17

The transparency of this authorial introduction belies a series of problems about the writer and his text, which have been fundamental to how the book has been read and received in modern times. Our self-proclaimed Assyrian writes in Greek. His project - the affirmation of a Syrian goddess, her temple and her cult - is no straightforward act of translation. It is an appropriation of one of Syria's holiest sites into a Greek context not merely into the language but also into the cultural vocabulary and associations of the Greeks - and in this sense it is a manifesto of Greek dominance over Syria.18 Yet, by proclaiming his Assyrian identity even as he writes in Greek, the author draws attention to the inconsistencies of his interpretative persona. He is not a Greek native exploring the culture of a barbarian Other - a Herodotus, for example, to cite the classic ancient model for 15

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See the brief but entirely apposite comments of Millar (1993) 245, 455; Said (1993) esp. 256-7; and Goldhill (1995) 354-5. For some interesting reflections on first-person narratives in the period, see Maeder (1991) esp. 23-32. I owe this observation to Danny Richter. It might be added that the name 'Hire . . . polls' (or 'Holy . . . city') is implicitly given two Greek etymologies - relating it to the goddess of the site ('Hera') and to the rites (TOC ipd) performed there. Yet the name - and hence the etymologies - are false (or at least pseudonymous) since 'the ancient name was different' (DDS 1). Whether or not this ancient name is meant to be the Assyrian one, clearly the whole opening passage not only raises issues of Greek and Assyrian naming, which I shall argue are fundamental to the text's thematic structure, but it also enacts through the discussion of the city's name a version of the complex withholding of names paraded by the author-narrator. I use the translation by Attridge and Oden (1976), sometimes adapted (as here). Note the interchangeability of the terms 'Syrian' and 'Assyrian' in the Greek language, see Noldeke (1871) 464 on DDS.


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this kind of account.19 On the contrary, he is one of the Other - not only an Assyrian, but himself a pilgrim to the sanctuaries of the Levant (DDS 3-9) and a devotee of the cult of the Syrian Goddess. The temple he visits, albeit described in the Greek language and in terms of a Greek culture which has very little to do with the Syrian culture of Hierapolis, is in a deep sense a guarantor of the writer's own identity as both an 'Assyrian' and a pilgrim. The very last sentence of the book proclaims that 'I too, when still a youth, performed this ceremony [of offering locks of hair and beard in the temple], and even now my locks and name are in the sanctuary' (DDS 60). Even the name, the very persona of the narrator, which is never given in the Greek text, is to be found - we discover - inscribed in the heart of the temple in Syria. That is where, he claims, his identity lies. Moreover (and still at the very opening of his narrative), our Assyrian affirms his autopsy - his authority as a guide - in terms which are hardly neutral. First, our author's Greek is not the usual Attic dialect espoused by writers of the Second Sophistic (including Lucian who satirizes the phenomenon).20 Rather, he writes in Ionic - characteristically the dialect of Herodotus himself and of some Second Sophistic imitations of Herodotus, notably Arrian's Indica, which is concerned (like the DDS) with aspects of cultural geography in the East.21 By proclaiming his sources to be autopsy, what his own eyes have seen, and the priests to whom he has spoken, he again alludes quite specifically to the claims made by Herodotus - especially in his description of Egypt, that most archetypal of Others for the Greeks.22 The de dea Syria is to be a quite self-consciously Herodotean account, in the sense that its genre, as a travel narrative of the marvellous (cf. the 'marvels', Ocouncrra, of DDS 7-8, 10) and its dialect are explicitly in the Herodotean tradition.23 To a large extent, the text's humour lies in its mock-innocent play with Herodotean patterns of narrative in what has been called a 'comic homage'.24 Yet the espousal of 19 20

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O n H e r o d o t u s a n d the Other, see especially H a r t o g (1988) a n d G o u l d (1989) 8 6 - 1 0 9 . O n Atticism, see Swain (1996) 1 7 - 6 4 with bibliography. F o r the Atticism of Lucian, see ibid. 4 5 - 9 a n d Bompaire (1994). F o r Lucian o n Atticism, see e.g. Lexiphanes 25, Rhetorum praeceptor 16-17, Iudicium vocalium passim. O n the Ionic revival in the R o m a n Empire, see Allinson (1886). F o r Ionic pastiche in Lucian, see Swain (1996) 305, n. 32. See o n priests as sources e.g. H e r o d o t u s II.3.1 a n d I I . 5 4 . 1 - 5 5 . 1 , a n d o n autopsy e.g. H e r o d o t u s 11.29.1, 11.99.1; II. 148.5. O n H e r o d o t u s ' sources, see esp. Fehling (1989) a n d (1994); o n autopsy, see A r m a y o r (1985) a n d Marincola (1987). F o r H e r o d o t e a n influence o n the DDS, see m o s t recently Said (1994), a n d M a c L e o d (1994) 1394 with extensive bibliography. O n the text's relations with H e r o d o t u s , see G . Anderson (1976a) 7 2 - 8 ; R o b e r t s o n (1979) 2 2 - 5 , 4 9 - 5 0 ; Hall (1981) 3 7 4 - 8 1 ; C. P. Jones (1986) 4 1 - 3 ; Bracht B r a n h a m (1989) 1 5 8 - 9 (whence the quote).

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Herodotus was by no means a neutral act - in the Second Sophistic itself, the Herodotean style had been attacked for the 'false speech and malice that are disguised by a smooth and soft appearance'.25 To affirm a literary ancestry in Herodotus was in this period to profess at the very least an ambiguous, if not down-right controversial, genre for a book. While the circumstances of the text - an Assyrian pilgrim (an insider) writing for Greeks (outsiders) about Syria (where his identity lies) - imply one set of problematics, its genre (as Herodotean ethnography) implies another. For - whatever the identity of the narrator - the discourse provided by his Greek model is inevitably the Hellenocentric labelling of the Other as weird and foreign through the wonder tales of the naive or fauxnaive traveller. Effectively, the DDS offers us the potential for a double persona: the home culture our author writes for is Greek, but the home culture he writes from is Syrian. He writes about Syria as if he were an insider - addressing his Greek-speaking audience as if they were outsiders; but he writes in Greek as an insider to the culture of his audience, presenting them with what is in many aspects a typical ('Herodotean') ethnography of the foreign and the marvellous. In both cultures he has an identity at stake, yet to both cultures he may seem an outsider. This already complex nexus of identity within the text is further complicated by the potential - ever present but never overly so - of the text's being satirical. We can never be quite sure when it puts 'Syria' or 'Greece' under the humorous (and deliberately distorting) light of irony; we can never be certain whether the authorial voice is reliably direct or whether it is poking fun. My aim in what follows is not to assess the veracity of the DDS or its value in reconstructing what was the genuine cult at Hierapolis.26 Rather, it will be to examine the text of the DDS as an act of cultural translation in which the confrontations of its three worlds - Syria (its religious core), Greece (its linguistic discourse) and Rome (its political frame) - combine in creative conflict to produce cultural identity. 25

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See Plutarch's essay, De malignitate Herodoti, written at the end of the first century C E . I quote from 874B, translated by A . J. Bowen (adapted). See also (from the mid-second century) Aelius Aristides, 'the Egyptian Discourse', Or 36. 4 1 - 6 3 , esp. 46: ' A l t h o u g h H e r o d o t u s has said the most glorious a n d fairest things a b o u t Egypt a n d the Nile, he is likely t o have told the t r u t h a b o u t few of t h e m . . . ' O n antiquity's d o u b t s a b o u t the credibility of H e r o d o t u s , see H a r t o g (1988) 2 9 7 - 3 0 0 . Lucian himself condemns Herodotus as a purveyor of tall stories in Verae Historiae 2.31 a n d Philopseudes 2. See also Goldhill below p . 1 6 4 - 5 . F o r this project, see e.g. Seyrig (1960); O d e n (1977); H o r i g (1979) a n d (1984); Baslez (1994); Dirven (1997) 159-70. F o r a h a n d y survey of the material a n d visual evidence, see Drijvers (1980) 7 6 - 1 2 1 a n d (1986) 355.


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The text The DDS opens with a direct statement of its main theme, the description of Hierapolis, the holy city of the Assyrian Hera (KaAeETcci 5e elpr| KOCI ECTTIV ipf| T^S "Hpris Tfis Aaovpiris, 1). Like the near contemporary Description of Greece by Pausanias, the DDS is a travel book with a strong bias towards religion, 27 in particular the description of rituals, 28 myths 29 and sacred art. 30 These interests are explicitly proclaimed in the first chapter where the author writes: Concerning this city I am going to describe whatever is in it. I will tell of the customs which they observe in connection with the rites, the festivals which they hold and the sacrifices which they perform. I will also relate whatever stories they tell about those who founded the sanctuary and about how the temple came into being. 7rspi TCCUTris cov TTJS TTOAIOS spxoiiai IpEcov OKOcra kv auTfj EOTIV speco 8E KOCI TOTCTIV is TOC i p a xpeovTai, * a i Travriyupias TOCS ayoucri Kai Oucjias TCCS 6TTIT6A6OU(TIV. speco 5e OKoaa Kai Trepi TCOV T O ipov eiT)) of its own and yet - despite or perhaps because of this - it bears the qualities (ei5ecc) of the other gods. It is the only image whose indigenous name is given. Zeus is not Zeus, but we are not told what he is; Hera is Aphrodite, Athena, Selene, Rhea, Artemis, Nemesis, the Fates as well as Hera, but we are not told what her name is in Syrian; the 'Sign' is called the 'Sign' by the Assyrians, we are told (in Greek!). One way the 'Sign' encapsulates the qualities of the other gods is that - despite the fact that they do not speak of its origins - its dedication is attributed to three 50

The Semeion has proved deeply controversial. See Oden (1977) 109-55 for a review of the arguments, and - for the idea that is might be a Roman military standard (also semeion in Greek), see Millar (1993) 247; Mettinger (1995) 110; and Swain (1996) 306.


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of the four potential founders of the temple listed earlier, Dionysus, Deucalion and Semiramis (33). More significantly, it has been suggested that the 'Sign' is an aniconic representation of the main deity of the city - that is, of the Syrian Goddess herself, who is depicted in anthropomorphic form in the same sanctuary. 51 Even if the 'Sign' were not the same deity as the goddess, the congruence within the temple of different regimes for representing the sacred is a potent act of cultural juxtaposition. The widespread 'eastern' aniconism of the Levant and Syria is placed side by side in the same adyton with more typically Greco-Roman anthropomorphism. But if the 'Sign' is in fact on some level identical with the goddess, or a symbol for her (an object without 'its own particular character' but 'bearing the qualities of the other gods', as the Greek text attempts to explain), then the effects of cultural translation on the visual level are all the more powerful. On the one hand, the text finds it impossible to come up with a Greek language adequate to describe the 'Sign's' sacred and non-Hellenic aniconism. On the other, the sanctuary only finds it possible to encompass the sanctity of its god by showing her more than once according to different (Greek and near eastern) strategies of sacred representation. At the very least, the deity is greater than any of her statues! Outside the inner chamber is an oracular statue of Apollo whose miraculous powers have been taken as a satirical expose of eastern religion, even by those who most assiduously defend the text's historical value.52 However, even before his unusual behaviour, this Apollo is odd in appearance: All others think of Apollo as young and show him in the prime of youth. Only these people display a statue of a bearded Apollo. In acting in this way they commend themselves and accuse the Greeks and anyone else who worships Apollo as a youth. They reason like this. They think it utter stupidity (aaoir| lieydAri, in their own representations and hence understanding of Apollo). 53 That power is demonstrated by a series of miraculous acts (epyoc and 0cou|jiaTa, 36) which the narrator has himself witnessed. His oracle surpasses those of the Greeks, Egyptians, Libyans and Asians because it speaks without the mediation of priests or prophets (36). Moreover: I will tell something else which he did while I was present. The priests were lifting him up and beginning to carry him, but he left them below on the ground and went off alone into the air. (DDS 37) The very Herodotean voice of autopsy abandons the discourse of Hellenic scepticism to affirm by its own witness the marvels of Syria which surpass those of the Greeks. The gods of the inner chamber strove with difficulty to accommodate themselves to the Greek language, yet shone with a universalism that was explicitly applicable not only beyond Syria and Greece, but even beyond the confines of the Roman Empire into the East. But Apollo challenges Greece directly - not just the Greek god whom his lack of imperfection surpasses, and the Greek oracles which his springing and leaping divinity (36) outshines - but also the categories of Greek representation (imagery, iconography, interpretative language on the part of the priests). With his paean to Apollo, our pilgrim-author suddenly hits a new stride. The struggle to translate Syria into Greek gives way to a celebration of Syria in its sacred and miraculous glory. At the same time, in its very celebration of a Syria which surpasses Greece, the text offers the Greek reader a non-Greek view of the Greek Apollo (who is OCTEAES - 'imperfect'). Elsewhere, for instance in the Anacharsis, Lucian exploits precisely this strategy of letting the 'Other' speak and misunderstand Greece for satiric effect. There Anacharsis, the legendary Scythian who came to Greece in search of wisdom and befriended Solon, watches and misunderstands the Greek practice of athletics (1-5). 53

For power as proof of an image's authenticity in antiquity, see further Eisner (1996) 52331, esp. 529 on this Apollo. For further ancient discussion of the Hierapolitan Apollo, see Macrobius, Saturnalia 1.17.66-70.


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The joke works to make the Greek reader both laugh at a foreigner's misconstrual and simultaneously at the eccentricity of familiar Greek customs when observed with such empirical accuracy through naive foreign eyes.54 The more the Hierapolitan Apollo's deeds render the oracular statue miraculous, the more foreign and potentially phoney (in Greek eyes) seem the doings of those who deem the Greek Apollo imperfect. We will never know if the criticism of Greek practice here is not also launched with half a laugh at the expense of Syria. Affirming Self through affirming the Other: pilgrimage to Hierapolis

Apollo's entry into the text marks the point where descriptive ethnography (the Herodotean style of affirming Self through contrast with, even implicit criticism of the Other) gives way to pilgrimage (which in this case interestingly affirms Self through celebrating the triumphant alterity of the Other). As we leave the temple's interior, the sanctuary is full of 'myriads of bronze statues' (39), of 'bulls, horses, eagles, bears and lions' who 'do not harm men but are all tame and sacred' (41), of three hundred whiterobed priests (42) as well as all kinds of holy people (male, female, castrate, all 'frenzied and deranged' (43)). We can either dismiss all this as satiric excess, the mad rituals of the crazy East, or we can follow the narrator's own hints - he makes not a single dismissive, sceptical or judgemental comment from now onwards - and witness through his eyes the marvels of his own pilgrimage's goal. The statues adorning the courtyard - Atlas, Hermes, Eileithyia (38), Helen, Hecabe, Andromache, Paris, Hector and Achilles, as well as Nereus, Procne, Philomela and Tereus, Stratonice, Alexander and Sardanapallus (40) - appear as Greece's own prized pilgrims to Hierapolis, while the statue of Semiramis (39) commemorates her eastern piety and devotion to Hera. The final section of the text (44-60) effectively gives a pilgrim's picture of the sacred action of the shrine - local traditions of sacrifice (44, 54, 578), specific rituals performed by groups and individuals (46, 48-9, 51-5, 57-8, 60), specially sacred spots (45-6), and festivals (47-51). The narrator is explicit about which rites he has not witnessed and reports from hearsay (48) and hence (implicitly) about those in which he was among the devotees (49, 50-3, 55-9, explicitly at 60). He shows a very precise interest in ritual detail, just like Pausanias. For example, the daily sacri54

On the Anacharsis, see Branham (1989) 82-104; the introduction to Bernardini (1995); and Simon Goldhill's comments in the introduction to this volume. Generally on Anacharis as traveller, see Hartog (1996) 118-27, 161-2. I am grateful to my former student Zahra Newby for discussion of Lucian's text in relation to Second Sophistic athletics.

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fice to Zeus is performed in silence, while that to Hera is accompanied by singing, flutes and rattles (44); they sacrifice bulls and cows, sheep and goats, but not swine (which are either sacred or polluted, depending on the informant, 54); they believe doves to be holy, and so a dove cannot even be touched (54). Most detailed of all is the account of ritual preparations for the pilgrimage to Hierapolis: Whenever somone is about to come to the Holy City, he shaves his head and his eyebrows. Then after sacrificing a sheep, he carves it and dines on the other parts. The fleece, however, he lays on the ground and kneels upon it, and the feet and head of the animal he puts on his own head. When he prays he asks that the present sacrifice be accepted and promises a larger one for the next time. After finishing these activities, he puts a garland on his own head and that of everyone making the same pilgrimage. Then he sets out from his own country and makes the journey, using cold water both for bathing as well as drinking, and he sleeps on the ground, for it is a sacrilege for him to touch a bed before he completes the journey and returns to his own country.55 (DDS 55) This entire portion of the text is an excellent portrait of a sacred centre in full action. Like the 'brancardiers' at Lourdes whom the shrine employs as lay-guides for pilgrims, 56 the holy city employs specified hosts (£EIVO56KOI), whom the Assyrians call instructors (KccAEovTca 6s OTTO Aaovpicov oi'Ss 5i5dcrKaAoi) and whose role is inherited within specific families, both to receive pilgrims and to explain everything to them (56). As is frequent in pilgrimage centres, the sacred activity is both general (involving large groups, e.g. 44, 49) and individual (involving personal offerings and dedications, e.g. 46, 48, 55, 57) as well as occasionally reserved for specified groups (like the galli, 50-2). 57 While this section of the narrative may read ever more like an orientalizing of the weird and the non-Greek, it builds up to a climax in the last two chapters where the narrator finally comes out and nails his own colours to the mast of Assyrian identity. At 59, we are told: All [pilgrims] are marked (crri£ovTai), some on their wrists, some on their necks. For this reason all Assyrians carry a mark (CTTiy^cnrr|(|>opEou(7i). This mark - perhaps a tattoo - is more than a sacred memento from the temple of the Syrian Goddess; it serves as a mark of identity for all As55

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Compare Pausanias 7.26.7 on Aegeira: 'Into the sanctuary of the goddess they surname Syrian, they enter on stated days, but must submit beforehand to certain customary purifications especially in the matter of diet.' Whether these were similar to those described in the DDS is perhaps less important than the fact that the worship of the Syrian goddess outside Hierapolis also required detailed ritual preliminaries. See Eade (1991). For recent ethnographic accounts focusing on group pilgrimage to Lourdes and to Palestine, see Dahlberg (1991) and Bowman (1991). On individuals charting their own paths at Walsingham, see Coleman and Eisner (1998).


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Syrians. The temple is thus placed at the heart of Assyrian self-definition, not only in sacred terms but inevitably with the ethnic, linguistic and political intimations carried by the notion of 'Assyria' as a meaningful concept within the Roman Empire. At the same time, since our author opened the whole account by stating that he is an Assyrian, he too is marked. It is at Hierapolis that the communal and individual identity of Assyrians - both as themselves and as non-Greeks, non-Romans - can be affirmed. The personal implications of 59 (when taken together with the announcement of Assyrian identity at 1) are made explicit in the final chapter. Hierapolis, we are told, shares a custom practised also by the Greeks, but only at Troezen. Virgin girls offer their hair and young men their first beards before being allowed to marry: The young men make an offering of their beards, while the young women let their sacred locks grow from birth and when they finally come to the temple, they cut them. When they have placed them in containers, some of silver and many of gold, they nail them up to the temple, and they depart after each inscribes his name. When I was still a youth, I, too, performed this ceremony and even now my locks and name are in the sanctuary. (DDS 60)

The further the ethnographic discourse of Ionic observation ventures into deepest Syria, the closer the narrative comes to affirming the author's Syrian self, until in the end - in the very last sentence - it does so. After all the Herodotean scepticism and weighing up of foreign traditions against the Greek, after all the problematics of naming and translating, the text climaxes on a sacred affirmation through pilgrimage to Hierapolis of both its author's Assyrian identity and of the temple as guarantor of all Assyrian identity, for 'all are marked'. Moreover, by explicitly closing on his own role as a pilgrim insider, the author affirms the validity of his autopsy of the details of Hierapolitan pilgrimage; his account of festivals, rituals, pilgrim hosts is all the more persuasive because, he tells us, he has done all that. The irony is that this is an archetypally Herodotean strategy for winning over one's readers! There are no half measures at Hierapolis. In the festival when castration is performed (50-1), if the 'frenzy' (r\ |jiavir|, 51) comes upon someone who 'has simply come to watch', he too (our narrator included, one presumes) may throw off his clothes, rush to the centre with a great shout and take up a sword which, I believe, has stood there for this purpose for many years. He grabs it and immediately castrates himself. Then he rushes through the city holding in his hands the parts he has cut off. He takes female clothing and women's adornment from whatever house he throws these parts into. (DDS 51)

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At the moment of the text's most ecstatic presentation of the non-Greek, it incorporates its author and all those who watch (all those who watch vicariously as they read?) as potential galli. The act of castration is central to the narrative's concern with identity, since it marks not only the most radical rejection of the norms of Greco-Roman identity, but a direct transformation in the worshipper from being a male to losing his manhood, from male dress via running nude through the city to female clothing and women's adornment. Again, the problem of reading this passage lies in whether the author is so committed a pilgrim that whatever he reports (particularly if it is hard for a sceptical reader to swallow) is to be accepted as sincere, or whether he is satirizing the excesses of Syrian religion. The genius of the strategy is that we can never be too sure - we can never safely read the text through the eyes of a Hellenocentric sceptic or an eastern believer. The devastating effect of the Ionic play with Herodotus - father of history and father of lies - is that the text's tone is poised with a breathtaking deftness on the very edge of irony and sincerity. It speaks with both voices at once. Building a sacred identity: the transformation of the subject

I am aware that this reading has so far skirted one, rather lengthy and crucial, section of the text: namely, the great myth of the temple's building and dedication {DDS 17-27). The myth relates that Stratonice, wife of an unnamed king of Assyria, was ordered to build the temple by Hera in a dream.58 After ignoring the dream and suffering serious illness, Stratonice finally vowed to erect the temple and was instantly cured. Her husband sent her with funds and an escort to the holy city to supervise the construction. In charge of the escort was Combabus, an 'exceedingly handsome youth' (19) who was also one of the king's most trusted friends. Combabus resisted the charge as long as possible, but when finally prevailed upon to lead the party, he castrated himself, put his genitals in a 58

The historical Stratonice was the daughter of Demetrius Poliorcetes, the Antigonid king of Macedon, and of Phila (both of whom were children of two of the principal lieutenants of Philip and Alexander - respectively Antigonus the One-Eyed and Antipater). She was married by her father to Seleucus I of Antioch (in the 290s BCE) and passed on by Seleucus to his son, co-regent and designated heir, Antiochus I (hence the romanticized story at DDS 17-18, as well as e.g. Plutarch, Demetrius 38 and Appian, Roman History 11 (The Syrian Wars) 59-61). See Kuhrt and Sherwin-White (1991) 71-86, esp. 83-5, and Grainger, (1997) 67-8 with further ancient sources. The choice of a mythological Stratonice as protagonist for the Combabus myth, recounted at DDS 19-27, brilliantly replays the problems of Greek versus Syrian identity. The temple's origins lie in the deeply un-Greek activities of an archetypally Hellenistic queen (although herself a Macedonian by birth) whose career followed a highly unusual (i.e. 'Eastern') pattern by Greek standards, in that she was passed on from king to crown-prince to ensure a smooth succession.


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box and entrusted his secret ('more precious than gold and worth my life to me', 20) to the king to keep. After three years building the temple in Hierapolis, what Combabus had feared finally came to pass: Stratonice fell madly in love with him and eventually flung herself upon him. Although he initially attempted to resist her, eventually Combabus 'described all his suffering and exposed his deed' (22). In response, 'when Statonice saw what she never expected, she ceased from her frenzy, but in no way did she forget her love' (22). Meanwhile, the king - having heard rumours of his wife's passion - recalled Combabus, and ordered him to be put to death. At this point Combabus revealed the contents of the box in the king's possession, and he was immediately pardoned and restored to royal favour. It is interesting that, by the end of the myth, Combabus rather than Stratonice is regarded as the temple's founder.59 Quite apart from its intrinsic interest, the myth functions as an extended and proleptic commentary on many aspects of the text. It provides an account of the building of the current temple at Hierapolis (17). It offers an aetiology for the galli and for the practice of castration at Hierapolis (more convincing than the attempt to link the temple with Attis, 15, and explicitly responsible for particular features of the galli's lifestyle and behaviour, 22, 26-7). It relates the issue of the transformation of the pilgrim's identity at Hierapolis to a mythological origin as well as to practices which the author observes elsewhere in the text. It interprets the nature of such transformation as a process of suffering (the initial selfcastration as well as the false accusations and the threat of execution Combabus endured). This suffering leads to achievement ('no one of the Assyrians any longer seemed equal to Combabus in wisdom or good fortune', 25). Strikingly, one aspect of Combabus' transformation is that even the most intimate secrets are no longer hidden from him thereafter. In the king's words: 'You will have access to us without any to announce you, nor will anyone bar you from our sight, not even when I am in bed with my wife' (25). Ultimately, worldly success gives way to sacred fulfilment - Combabus not only completes the temple and erects a bronze statue inside it (26) but he becomes the object of great love (from women, 22, 27, as well as from his dearest friends who castrate themselves in 'consolation for his suffering', 26, and from Hera who - in an alternative version - suggests 'the idea of castration to many so that he might not grieve over the loss of his manhood alone', 26). More subtly, the story comments on author, reader and narrative model alike. It has been observed that the myth parodies Herodotean tales of other lands.60 But there is more to it than that. When Combabus 59 60

On the Combabus story and connected narratives, see Benveniste (1939) and Krappe (1956). See Said (1994) 152-3. Further on the Combabus myth, see G. Anderson (1976a) 78-81.

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stands accused before the king (24), the charges (in addition to adultery) are the abuse of trust (es Trioriv OppiaavTcc) and impiety towards the goddess (es OHOV acp dv6pi cEAA6cs TTCCVTOC, 'to a wise man Greece is everywhere', 'everything' 22 - a bon mot that needs to be set against the often expressed idea (or worry) that true wisdom originally comes from the East or the barbarian other (especially India or Egypt). 23 Education, in short, (rather than blood or birth) becomes an absolutely fundamental way of articulating and discussing Greekness, and the figure of the pepaideumenos theates needs to be placed within this frame. The sites and stakes of viewing also develop, however, through Empire society. Although Philostratus and Callistratus tour the art galleries to perform their role as 'professors', and the viewing of paintings in temples or shrines begins Longus' Daphnis and Chloe and Achilles Tatius' Leucippe and Clitophon, there is throughout the Empire a culture of display (in processions, building programmes, games, personal appearances, statues) which constantly links imperial power and the spectacle.24 Both the circulation of images - statues of Antinous by Hadrian, say 25 - and the spectacle in performance - games sponsored by the elite in Rome and throughout the provinces, for example - construct a regime in and through which authority, status, positions are negotiated in the field of the visual. The emperor's spectacular self-presentation both in the performance of power in Rome, and in the circulation of images throughout the Empire, is the defining and extreme paradigm of this dynamic of display and authority. So, to take one brief but paradigmatic example, in the build up to the battle of Cremona in Tacitus (Histories III), first Antonius 20 21

22 23 24

25

See A n d e r s o n (1986) 2 4 1 - 5 7 . A l t h o u g h the old m a n is depicted with a certain amused distance, this judgement on Plato Homericus is also found in M a x i m u s of Tyre 26 (esp. 26.3); see also Or. 4 a n d 17; [Longinus] de Subl 13.3 (with Russell's note ad loc); Heracl. Alleg. 18. Philostratus Vit. Ap. 1.34. See Momiligiano (1975); Eisner (1997). See e.g. H o p k i n s (1978) esp.l97ff.; Millar (1992); Veyne (1976); H o p k i n s (1983) 1-27; C. Barton (1993); E d w a r d s (1993) a n d especially Price (1984). I have learnt from the forthcoming w o r k of Caroline V o u t o n this heterodox, even transgressive, display.

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(7), to win support, sets up throughout the country towns the images of Galba that had been thrown down in the civil war, then, as the fleet rebels, the captains tear down the images of Vitellius (12), a gesture repeated by Caecina (13), only to result in outrage from his troops, who do not wish to be associated with the implications of such an iconoclasm. Control of images is the sign and performance of power. It is within such a context that Dio Chrysostom (31) and Favorinus (ps.-Dio Chrysostom 37) earnestly debate the issues that surround the re-dedication of statues in public spaces, and Dio orates at length on the embellishment of his own city and the financial and social implications of such a policy (47; 48). The 'educated viewer' is a figure by which the interplay of (Greek) education and the culture of the spectacle is broached and negotiated. One text which puts the figure of the pepaideumenos theates at the heart of writing about the visual in the Second Sophistic is Lucian's de Domo, 'On the House'. This extraordinary text often receives brief mention in the histories of ecphrasis, but has rarely been discussed at any length.26 Typically for Lucian, it is a text which mobilizes multiple voices to dramatize a fundamental question about Greek culture and its relation to present society and past glories. It not only reflects on the beauty of a house and its decorations, but also on the problem of how a response to beauty is to be articulated in language - how rhetoric and the field of the visual interrelate in a social setting. The figure of the pepaideumenos theates is established in the opening paragraphs. As Alexander would have swum in the Cydnus, begins the author, even if he knew he would contract a fatal disease, so beautiful was the river, so too a house as beautiful as this must provoke a man to long to give speeches in it, to become a part of its beauty. 27 This turn back to the exemplum of the grand and reckless Alexander - a favourite model of the Second Sophistic28 - offers a heroic paradigm for the need to speak out, to emote, which is immediately refrained as an opposition between the TTETTaiSeuiiEvos and the I8IGOTT)S, 'the educated' and 'the ordinary' man. For a person who would leave a sight of beauty mute (KCOCJXDS) and silent (aAoyos), as if dumb (avccu8os) or struck by envy (66vos) would demonstrate a lack of sophistication - aypoiKioc - a lack of taste - carsipoKaAia and a lack of cultivation - duoucria. It would in short be a failure to recognize that (2):

26 27

28

See Bompaire (1958) 7 1 3 - 2 1 ; P a l m (1965), especially 210; Bartsch (1989) 166. Zeitlin (1990) 433 sees this as 'the analogical use of erotic desire to characterize the aesthetic sensibility of a lover of beauty'. F r o m Plutarch's Alexander to A r r i a n a n d the Alexander Romance. M a n y of the references to Alexander depend on his repeated use as a n exemplum in rhetorical training.

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oux 6 auTOS Trepi TOC OeaiaaTcc VOJJIOS iSicoTais TE Kai

There is not the same law about looking at sights for ordinary people and for educated people. In the more technical philosophical vocabulary recorded by Diogenes Laertius (VII. 51): 'some impressions ((|>avTacriai) are expert, others not. A work of art is viewed one way by an expert (TEXVITTIS) another by a nonexpert' (OCTEXVOS). The collusive distinction of Lucian depends precisely on the power to articulate a response or opinion - like a Hellenistic sophos dramatizing himself in front of a work of art. This is both a physical and an intellectual pose. For the ordinary person 'just sees and looks about and casts his eyes around and peers at the ceiling and waves his hand, and silently takes pleasure because of his fear of not being able to say anything of what's being viewed'. This image of the ordinary person's flitting eye and undirected hand gestures and fear of speech is to be contrasted with the concentration and articulacy of the man who 'looks with education (IJIETOC TTociSEias) at beauty'. For he will 'try to the best of his ability to take his time (Ev5iaTpi(3£0aA|Jcov em TT\V yuxriv KaAov, eiTa Trpos auTo

Aoyous.

For something of beauty almost flows right into the soul through the eyes, then it ornaments words like to itself and sends them forth. This language of 'flowing' into the soul, and of the formation of images in the soul which produce words, as we will see in more detail later, recalls not merely classical materialist models of sight (from Plato and Aristotle onwards) but also and more specifically contemporary Stoic theories of phantasia, where indeed visual impressions are 'productive of speech'. 30 There is, as it were, a scientific explanation, or at least a shared knowledge of the workings of nature that grounds the proprieties of knowingness. The richness of a house may prompt speech, but the mere display of wealth would be a 'barbarian sight' ((3ap(3apiiavTd£o|jai, 'an impression of Leucippe is constantly being impressed on me', he's not just uttering the well-known lover's complaint of 'I see her everywhere', but is expressing it in a term which, while certainly not requiring a full Stoic (or other systematic) epistemology, evokes a theoretical perspective on the eye's work. In a similar mixture of generalization and physiological expression, the reprobate Callisthenes is said to exemplify how words can have the same effect as that which 'wounded eyes minister to the soul': he falls in love without even seeing the woman whose praises he has heard dvairAdTTcov yap SOCUTCO TT\S TTCCISOS TO KdAAos Kcci avTa£6jji£vos Ta dopccTa, 'imaging the girl's beauty for himself and forming an impression of the unseen' - a phrase perhaps more paradoxical than its common translation 'imagining what he could not see' suggests. 35 Cleitophon's technical sounding expression prompts Cleinias' response: 'You have no idea', he argues, 'how marvellous a thing it is to look at one's beloved' - and he proceeds to offer in the typical style of this novel a ludic theoretical exposition of his generalization: 'Some lovers have to be content with a mere flashing glance [pAsmjia - which seems always to imply a special look in the eye, of pleasure, say, or of disdain 36 ] at a carefully watched over maiden, and if a lover has good luck with even such eyeing (KOCI |JiexPl TC^V omjdTcov), he thinks it is the greatest good.' So, sharing a house with Leucippe is an excellent advantage. Indeed, as a teacher of desire, he proceeds to remove his pupil's ignorance (1.9.4): OUK ol8as olov EOTIV Epco|j£vr| (3AeTro|JiEVTy |i£i£ova TCOV Epycov exEl T 1 1 V T)6OVT|V 66aAlioi y a p dAArjAois dvTavaKAcoiaevoi aTroiidTToucriv cos EV KaTOTrrpco TCOV crcoiJidTcov TOC EiScoAa- f] 8E TOU KaAAous diToppor), 5iJ CCUTCOV EIS TT\V yuxriv KccTappEoucra, EXEI Tivd |ii£iv EV diTocjTdaei. KOU oAiyov EOTI TT\S TCOV crcoiJidTcov lai^scos* Kcavf) y a p k m avTa(jias, a i s T a acoiaaTa KaTaAa|Ji(3dvEi 8 1 ' a u T o O [xr\ 8uvd|JEVos . . .

Pleasure is like a whore and a degenerate, and lusts for a lover and searches for pimps through which she will hook one. The senses are the pimps and ambassadors for her. Pleasure ensnares the senses and she easily leads on the mind. The senses carry, announce, and display what appears outside us inside, impressing the imprints of each thing and produces the corresponding affect. For like wax, it receives the impressions of the senses, by which it apprehends material substance ... The eye was the 'ambassador of love' in Achilles Tatius: here the senses in general are 'the ambassadors of pleasure' for the desiring man. In his attack on pleasure itself as a whore and degenerate, Philo manipulates the same terms that Achilles uses to anticipate and flirt with the pleasures of consummation. The senses receive phantasiai, 'impressions', like wax, they impress like a seal the imprint of objects on the soul: they 'grasp' them katalambanein - the very process of phantasia kataleptike. Philo's passionate distrust of the whore pleasure leads easily to Clement's rejection of visual stimulation, and both assimilate what are primarily Stoic accounts of perception52 to construct a philosophical and physiological base for their ethical normativity. As the Jewish and Christian apologists, writing in Greek in Egypt, attempting to reread the culture of visual display central to classical and Hellenistic societies, they adapt the normative language of philosophical schooling to negotiate a space of engagement with dominant cultural modes. The turn to theory is part of a rhetoric of self-positioning. 50 51

52

R u n i a (1993) 132. See van den H o e k (1988); O s b o r n (1987). Quod omnisprobus 15.5. see also De Post. 165; De Mutatione 212; De Vita Mos. 2.76; De Special 1.47; 2.228; 4.163. H e also uses ensphragizesthai: see e.g. de Ebr. 90. Epicurean theory h a s some similarities of vocabulary, a n d b o t h Epicurean a n d Stoic writers return t o a Platonic register repeatedly.

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Achilles Tatius himself gives an even fuller picture of the Stoicizing sexy look. By book 5 of Leucippe and Cleitophon, our hero Cleitophon thinks he has lost his heroine, beheaded by a pirate. He is being pursued by a wealthy widow who fancies him (although her husband, presumed dead, will also reappear). Cleitophon describes how at dinner she couldn't keep her eyes off him (V.I3): irdvTa 5E E(3A£TTEV k\xk. oOSev y a p f)6u TOTS epcocri TTAT^V TO epcopiEvov TT\V y a p Trdaav 6 spcos KaTaAa|3cbv, OU5E auTfj \6dpav St5cocri TTJ Tporj. r\ Sid TCOV 6|i|jidTcov EicrpEoucra TOTS orEpvois EyKaOr|Tai- EAKOUCTO 8E TOU EpcoiiEvou TO ETSCOAOV OCEI, EvaTroiiocTTETai TCO TT\S ^v/xfjs KaTOTTTpco, Kai dvaTrAaTTEi TT\V [xop<pr\v f] 6E TOU KOCAAOUS aTroppori 5i' dc|>avcov aKTivcov ETTI TT\V EpcoTiKT^v sAKO|ji£vr| Kap8iav KOTCO TT|V

She did nothing but gaze at me. To a lover, nothing is as sweet as the beloved. For desire seizes the whole soul and gives no space for eating. Pleasure from the gaze flows through the eyes into the chest and sits there. Drawing up the little image of the beloved constantly, it impresses it in the mirror of the soul, and forms a picture of the shape. The emanation of beauty through invisible rays is drawn into the desiring heart and seals down a shadow image inside it. Desire 'seizes' - katalambanein again - 'the whole soul'. Pleasure from the gaze flows - eisreousa - through the eyes into the chest and sits there. Drawing up the little image - eidolon - it 'impresses it' - enapomattei - in the mirror of the soul, and moulds its shape. The 'emanation' - aporroe - of beauty is drawn into the desiring heart and 'seals down' - enaposphragizein - the shadow image. The hero's reflection on why he likes being doted on by a beautiful woman runs through the full gamut of Stoic materialist vocabulary, as the first-person narrative knowingly plays with the lover's response to his objectification in the gaze of the woman. 53 The same phraseology of Zeno - 'impressing on and sealing down' - is conjoined with other standard terms of materialist physiology - emanation, flowing, moulding, the little image (all familar from Plato especially). Theory here becomes on the one hand part of the narrator's observing distance from the passion of the desiring woman - a neat twist on a Stoic's imperviousness to emotional disturbance. But on the other hand, and more paradoxically, it also becomes part of his flirtatious engagement with her. For his refusal to consummate his relationship leads through heavy petting, to a manage blanc and finally her pleas for wilful adultery in a prison cell. The repeated narrative joke of the narrator's highly theorized response to 53

The references to Stoic theory in these passages have been missed by commentators (and by historians of philosophy, although they give interesting evidence for the diffusion of Stoic ideas in 'non-philosophical' texts).

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erotics will reach its culminating twist when she finds the correct arguments successfully to persuade him to commit adultery, a persuasiveness he duly notes is highly philosophical... as he gives in. The first passage of Achilles Tatius used its theory of vision to reflect on the delays and relays of consummation: this second passage uses its theory to formulate and enforce the delay to consummation. The theory of the look for Achilles Tatius plays a dynamic role in the narrative of deferred bliss and blissful deferral which is the novel's erotic agenda. My two benchmark texts - with a few digressive glosses - have led to four general points with which to conclude the first part of my chapter. First, there is in the second century a considerable production of discourse about the visual specifically with regard to the culture of display and the erotic work of the eye. It is a nexus of theoretical expositions which draws eclectically on different materialist models, and which utilizes terms from the history of the theory of vision from Plato onwards (and Plato, despite his well-known distrust of visual perception is especially often recalled), but which also repeatedly reuses a highly developed and more specifically Stoic vocabulary and paradigm, not least because Stoicism is throughout the period the most evident lingua franca of the philosophical schools in which educated Greeks and Romans studied. (Even when there are four chairs of philosophy in Athens and the different schools claim different professional adherents, it is Stoic vocabulary and 'colouring' which dominate the general intellectual, philosophizing discourse, despite the apparent importance of Epicurean writings in, say, the East.) Where terms such as apomatto or the language of sealing per se may invoke a rather general sense of 'materialist theory', the combination and clustering of rarer technical vocabulary also suggests a more specific and pointed allusivity. Thus Clement and Achilles - and earlier Philo from their very different viewpoints each quote Zeno the Stoic. Jew, Greek, Christian, each in turn cite the same words from the most mainstream philosopher in their different projects. This leads to my second point. Because it is the lingua franca of theory, this model of the eye is manipulated by Christian and Jewish apologists to engage the cultured Greek in a new normative programme - but adapted by the novelist to a quite different erotic agenda. It is not merely that Clement inveighs against the threat of erotic stimulation through the visual and Achilles revels in it, but rather that each fully incorporates the theory of the eye to a narrative argument and makes it fully integral to a self-positioning, an account of the engagement of the desiring subject with the world. How you look, for both Clement and Achilles, is integral to who you are and to the narrating of that self.

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Third, it is fundamental that both Achilles and Clement in different ways are negotiating a space in and against what might be called the dominant culture of Rome and its Empire. Clement, for all that he is a centralfigurein the church hierarchy in Alexandria, speaks for a marginal and aggressive religion that is fighting for monotheistic space in polytheistic multicultural Alexandria (as well as for his Hellenized version of Christianity within the church). As Clement's proselytizing straddles the boundaries of communities, so his prose interweaves different discourses to claim a powerful speaking position. Achilles Tatius whose name appears to combine Greek and Latin forms (but about whose background there is only speculation), revels in the polyphonic possibilities of the bastard and unrecognized genre of the novel, but does not even recognize the Roman Empire, for all that he beats the bounds of the civilized world. This studious silence, I suggest, towards the politics of localism as much as the politics of empire, is typical of a certain cultural politics in Second Sophistic Greek writing - a paradigmatic reaction to the impossibility of writing Thucydidean history now.54 From an outside looking in, the theory of the eye is used to aid speculative admission to, or negotiate space against dominant discursive strategies. Fourth, the very juxtaposition of these two writers from (probably) the same city and date is a convenient sign and symptom of the clash of cultures in this period, and helps focus the question of who has control over the dominant intellectual discourse. While Greek education links elites across the Empire - at very least in the eyes of Greek writers - in such a mixed culture as the major metropolis of Alexandria, or, say, in the further outposts of Empire, the very distance (in all senses) from the centres of power at Rome allows for 'local knowledge' to have a certain autonomy (such as within the church at Alexandria), in the same way as local elites also construct a power base in social terms. It would be too simple to locate dominant discourse (or indeed power) wholly and solely in the imperial palace or in the Senate. What the juxtaposition of Clement and Achilles Tatius may show is how contests around cultural dominance take place not merely within a matrix of dominance and resistance (the imperial gaze, and the subaltern text), but with a more complex dynamic of local and central knowledge, practices of displacement and marginalization, imagined forces and unrecognized collusiveness. There are many, interlocking strategies by which the Empire writes back .. , 55 54

55

See Henderson a n d Gleason above. F o r local histories' often increasingly bizarre historical claims, see Millar (1993); a n d G r u e n (1996) for a particularly interesting early example. See the exemplary studies of Alcock (1993); Woolf (1994) a n d Millar (1993).

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IV

For the second part of this article, I want to develop these four points through some very different textual strategies and authors. I shall begin by travelling briefly round the coast of Africa from Alexandria and Clement's Hellenizing to Carthage and a Christian writing in Latin, namely, Tertullian, who raged and wrote at the very end of the second century shortly after Clement and was eventually excommunicated for his commitment to the Montanist heresy. His Christianity is forged in passionate opposition to the culture of the Roman Empire, and shows a powerful antagonism to its displays and spectacle. Tertullian is often treated as something of an embarrassment: his fierce argumentation, lumpen wit, and vile Latin - not to mention his heresy - have left him with rather an uneasy status amid the fathers of the church.56 But his treatise De Spectaculis - 'On Games', or 'On Spectacles', is a fundamental text for my project, not least for its passionate attempt to redefine the dominant ethos of bread and circuses within the Christian world of the bread of Christ's body and the athletes of chastity. Tertullian attacks the games under the general heading of idolatry, but it is pleasure as much as anything that is the perceived threat. As he says at the beginning of the piece, 'the danger of pleasure more than the danger to life turns people from Christianity'. Tertullian begins by running through the origins, names and religious elements of both gladiatorial games and stage plays, seeing in all of them both idolatry and an unholy commitment to useless and corrupt pleasure. By chapter 14, he claims he has established the charge of idolatry adequately and moves on to other criticisms. The first is the psychological disturbance that comes from being a spectator. To look at the spectacles is to lose one's cool: omne enim spectaculum sine concussione spiritus non est, 'there is no spectacle without violence to the spirit'. Pleasure requires eagerness which requires rivalry from whichflowsmadness, bile, anger - everything which is incompatible with moral discipline. For no one - not even a good man - can escape the lures of pleasure at a spectacle: 'for even if a man enjoys the spectacles in modest and upright manner, in accordance with his dignity, age or nature, still he cannot with a mind unstirred and without some unspoken disturbance of spirit'. The problem is integral not merely to spectacles, however, but to pleasure itself: Nemo ad voluptatem venit sine affectu, nemo affectum sine casibus suis patitur, 'No one has pleasure without affect; no one experiences affect without its own slippage,' its own sense of falling, 56

See e.g. Barnes (1971); Sider (1971). I have learnt in this section throughout from Piers Aitman.

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casibus suis. Indeed, that sense of the fall is integral to the effect, a stimulation to feeling that leads to pleasure. Without that effect there would indeed be no pleasure. For Tertullian, then, it is not the mechanics of the eye, so much as the stimulation to pleasure that makes the spectacular so worrying. Looking is 'mined at the centre with a fall ...' This sense of the fall from control and order is further linked to the nature of representation itself later in the treatise (23): iam vero ipsum opus personarum quaero an deo placeat, qui omnem similitudinem vetat fieri, quanto magis imaginis suae? Non amat falsum auctor veritatis; adulterium est apud ilium omne quod fingitur, 'then this business of masks, I ask if God can be pleased with it, when he forbids the likeness of anything to be made, how much more so his own image. The author of truth does not like the false: everything which is made up is adultery in his sight'. All forms of representation - and he goes on to list not merely actors and pantomimes, but even the scars of a boxer and the performance of a gladiator - by virtue of their fictive quality (fingitur) are a form of adultery in the eyes of God. God is the author of truth, and consequently the Devil is the interpellator - he who makes up and inserts false stories and words in the book of truth. The slides of emotion in being a spectator, and the performative as fictive in the spectacle, together show that, as Tertullian concludes, 'nothing to do with spectacles pleases God'. Up to this point the argument is clear enough. Both the performance and the watching itself make spectacles dangerous. Deceptive mimesis and pleasure are both lures away from the truth. As he writes in the treatise On Veiling Virgins (2.15), 'Seeing and being seen belong to the same lust.' It is a rhetoric aimed at turning the reader from the secular games to the contemplation of Christ's struggles. Accordingly, Tertullian begins to appropriate the language of the games, as he invites and hectors and cajoles the reader to celebrate a different spectacular contest: 'You want fightings and wrestling. Here they are: see impurity thrown down by chastity, perfidy slain by faith, cruelty crushed by pity, impudence shaded by modesty: such are our contests, our crowns of victory. You desire blood: you have the blood of Christ.' But the conclusion of Tertullian's treatise throws the previous twenty-nine chapters into turmoil. For he fully instantiates this idea of 'another spectacle' with a startling and bloodthirsty image of the judgement day. With a set of emotive exclamations, he imagines himself watching the torment of the magistrates who have tormented Christians, now liquefying in Hellfire, and the trembling poets who never expected to stand before Christ instead of Minos: 'And the magistrates who persecuted the name of the lord, liquefying in fiercer flames than they kindled in their rage against the Christians?!... And the poets, trembling before the judgement seat not of Rhadamanthus nor

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Minos but to their surprise of Christ?!' Indeed, he positively revels in and savours the power of his role as spectator: tune xystici contemplandi, non in gymnasiis, sect in igne iaeulati, nisi quod ne tune quidem illos velim visos, ut qui malim ad eos potius conspectum insatiabilem conferre, qui in dominum desaevierunt, Then the athletes have to be watched, tossed not in the gym but in the flames, unless I would not wish to look even then at them, in my desire rather to turn an insatiable gaze rather on those who vented their rage and mockery on the lord.' The gym is a privileged arena of the erotic gaze and of the culture of display, but now there is another show and another form of empassioned viewing. Tertullian is so thrilled with the prospect of the violent suffering of his opponents that he can't decide whether his insatiable gaze at the mockers of God would keep him from the delight of this new way of looking at athletes' physical sufferings. Not for Tertullian Augustine's careful discrimination of hating the sin and not the sinner . . . Tertullian is as wildly excited a spectator of the judgement day as his own portrayal of the baying and gambling crowd at the games. Indeed, he introduces his image with: Quae tune spectaculi latitudo! Quid admirer? Quid rideam? Ubi gaudeam, ubi exultem tot spectans reges . . . , 'What an immensity of spectacle then! What shall I gaze on in wonder? What laugh at? Where shall I rejoice, where exult, when I see so many kings ...'; and sums it all up with ut talia spectes, ut talibus exultes . . . , 'to see such sights, to feel such exultation^! The man who had attacked 'spectacultf because of the dangers of stimulating pleasure, and because of the dangers of spectating itself, here revels in and exults in his own spectating of the violent dismemberment of his enemies. He revels both in the punishment and in his ability to watch and calculate the pleasures of his insatiable gaze. Is not the stern moralist completely undermined by his own attack on the pleasures of the look? Unless it could be argued that Tertullian's extremism performs the dangers of stimulation it inveighs against, as an enacted warning to others - a highly ironic strategy difficult to find in Tertullian's writing elsewhere, and wholly at odds with his express views on acting, it must seem that Tertullian's visual politics lapses into violent self-contradiction. Perhaps the final sentences of the treatise are an attempt to salvage something from what might seem the wreckage of his self-positioning. These visions of hell are 'represented through faith in the spirit's imagining', spiritu imaginante repraesentata. They are 'things which an eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor heart felt. But they bring more joy, more pleasure than stadium or theatre,' ceterum qualia ilia sunt, quae nee oculus vidit nee amis audivit nee in cor hominis ascenderunt? Credo, circo et utraque cavea et omni stadio gratiora. The imagination or vision of hell trumps the mere physical sights of the spectacular and brings a greater joy. The

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imagination, internal viewing, here is set against the physics of the eye in an attempt to privilege the Christian's unflinching moral gaze, and acceptable pleasure. But this from the man who had said 'everything that is made up is adultery in the eyes of God'. It seems as if Tertullian's attempt to construct a philosophically loaded account of why there is an integral danger in the pleasure of looking means that his own pleasure in imagining a different looking can only appear as a paradoxical and contradictory self-positioning. Tertullian's desire to police the regime of the visual in the spectacular world of Carthage leads only to a failure to regulate his own images and imagining. Tertullian has little time for philosophy. 'What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?', he explodes, 'Away with all efforts to produce a mottled Stoic-Platonic-Dialectic Christianity.' 'Where is there any likeness between the Christian and the philosopher?'57 This violent dismissal of Greek culture could not be further from Clement's sly negotiations with cultivated Hellenism. What interests me is not so much the mess that Tertullian gets into when he does slip into philosophically led models of pleasure, nor Tertullian's obvious debt to his pagan training in rhetoric, but rather the way in which both Clement and Tertullian, these two outsiders to dominant culture, find their concerns overlapping around the erotics of the gaze, and its comprehension in models of pleasure and the body. Tertullian, for all his differences from Clement, can't finally keep his Christianity free of a mottling of the Stoic-Platonic-Dialectic. His strong sense of the conflict between himself as Christian and Roman and Greek culture none the less develops surprising nodes of implication. It is here perhaps that we find a most telling indication of the complex dialectic of conflict and appropriation in such writing against the Empire.

I want for my final text to move round the Mediterranean towards Syria, and back about fifty years, to one of the most famous and influential writers of the Second Sophistic from the middle of the second century, with whom I began this chapter, namely, Lucian. His immense popularity in the Renaissance faded through the nineteenth century, as German scholarship linked its mistrust of irony with its mistrust of 'semitic character' effectively to dismiss Lucian the Semite from the most hallowed halls of Hellenism.58 (Scholarship's racism here replays some of the issues 57 58

De Praes. 7.9-12; Apol 46.18. See especially Holzberg (1988), w h o quotes (206) e.g. Geffcken's description of Lucian as 'der ekelhafte Semit', 'disgusting Semite'.

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of power and exclusion, cultural capital and elitism, I have been discussing.) We have seen already Lucian's fragmented voice on the visual (and his engagement with cultural matters in the introduction). His writing is throughout a 'closet of masks', where every self-position is veined with a challenging irony: a philosopher who mocks philosophy, a hired writer who mocks writers who are hired, a master who mocks authority, a scourge of flatterers who writes encomia . . . The late twentieth century inevitably finds him more simpatico. The texts I shall consider now are a pair of dialogues which have often been raided by art historians, but rarely read, the Eikones and Huper Ton Eikonon, the Images and the For the Images. The first is a discussion between Lycinus - a name Lucian often uses, which is a near anagram of Lucian - and Polystratus about a beautiful woman Lycinus has seen, and how one should construct an image of such beauty. The second, For the Images, is an account by Polystratus of the woman's response to such a description of herself, and Lycinus' defence of the representation. From my description, it is clear immediately that the pair of dialogues enacts an agon, a contest around the discourse of imaging and representation which goes to the heart of the role of the visual and the discourse of description in society. Let us begin with the establishment of the scene - the opening of the dialogue. The opening speech of Lycinus and Polystratus' response set us firmly in the world of the cultivated and laddish observers about town, the pepaideumenoi within the social and literary world of a culture of display, and it is worth quoting in full (1): LYCINUS

Upon my word, Polystratus, those who saw the Gorgon must have experienced what I have just experienced, when I saw this amazingly beautiful woman. Just as it says in the myth, I was turned stiff from wonder (-rrETrriycbs UTTO TOU BauiaccTos) and almost became stone rather than human! POLYSTRATUS

Heracles! That is a remarkable spectacle (0Ecc|ja) you are talking of, and a really powerful one, if a mere woman could strike Lycinus from his senses! For you have that experience easily enough with boys, so that it would be quicker to shift Mount Sipylus than to lead you away from your beauties, and keep you from standing open-mouthed and weepy often, just like the daughter of Tantalus. But tell me, who is this petrifying Medusa and where is she from, so that we too can see her. You will not, I think, begrudge me the sight (8eccs), or be jealous, if we join you in being turned stiff (TrapETreTrnyEvai) when we see her!

Lycinus' response to the beautiful woman is immediately framed by myth, and self-consciously marked as such - 'as in the myth' - and by an elaborate and exquisite pathology, which echoes philosophical worries about the lures of emotional disturbance, without, it seems, too much

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of the worry. Indeed, Polystratus responds to his condition with a bantering humour which not only mockingly rehearses Lycinus' normal open-mouthed and weepy fixation before beautiful boys, but also works a set of mythic references into his response to the 'extraordinary spectacle'. The mountain Sipylus was the transformed Niobe, turned to stone because of her tears of grief (not tears of lust) and the second reference to Niobe as the 'daughter of Tantalus' evokes her father's famous punishment also as a model for Lycinus' permanently unsatisifed desire. So, with a third myth, the woman must be a Medusa who turns men to stone by the gaze - and there may be a shared joke about the more obviously physical signs of male arousal in the repeated term pepegosjpepegmenai, 'stiff', 'turned hard'. Lycinus retorts to this bantering by threatening Polystratus with an even worse punishment. For not only would he be struck dumb by the merest glimpse of the beautiful woman, but if she were to look at him, he would be bound and drawn to her like iron to a magnet: 'But if she were to gaze at you, what device could drag you from her? For she will tie you up and lead you where she wants, just as a magnet does to iron.' Plato's image from his Ion of the effect of the emotional poetry performance on an audience - the ironfilingsdrawn shaking towards the magnet - is here in service of an erotic servitude that marks the gaze as the privileged site of reciprocal attachment.59 To be gazed at as much as gazing is the cause here of erotic effect. Both looking and being looked at reduced the eroticized spectator to passivity (the reverse of the often postulated 'empowerment of the gaze') in the field of vision, the scene of the spectacle.60 Polystratus finally requests a stop to 'this imaginative construction of such a praeternatural beauty', and demands her name. Note again the self-conscious comment on what they are doing as the dialogue proceeds. Now it is clear from this opening that we are in the world of the pepaideumenos as observer. The careful working of mythological reference and counter reference, the elaborate bantering of erotic performance, and, 59

60

Ach. Tat. 1.17 uses the example of the magnet for erotic purposes. See Rommel (1923) for other examples of this idea, which interestingly was picked up by Christian writers, notably, Nicetas and Gregory of Nazianzus. 'Since the gaze always emerges for us within the field of vision, and since we ourselves are always being photographed by it even as we look, all binarizations of spectator and spectacle mystify the scopic relations in which we are held': thus Silverman (1994), glossing the celebrated essay of Lacan on the gaze in the Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Lacan's model recognizes a dynamic of seeing oneself being seen and of a hazard of the self in looking in a way which challenges the less complex and nuanced models of looking that trace their roots to Mulvey's influential article of 1976 (Mulvey 1989). Although the physiology, psychology and sociology of Lacan is quite different from that of Lucian, he provides a stimulating counter-text here. For relevant recent discussions of Lacan see Copjec (1994); de Bolla (1996).

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above all, the intellectualized response to a response to beauty, all betoken the self-conscious expression of the educated self. As in the Hellenistic art gallery, the act of seeing becomes a moment for the amused dissection and sophisticated articulation of self. This process will certainly be continued through the dialogue. For Lycinus confesses he does not know her name, but offers to construct a portrait of her from elements abstracted from the sculpture and paintings of the Old Masters. Although he fears with whatever politesse - that he will damage the archetype by his weakness of technique - the rhetoric of the disciplines of art is strongly marked here - he summons the artists of old to help fashion this woman, and Polystratus demands that he 'display the image' (epideixai ten eikona). Like the gods with Pandora, Lycinus will raid the various gifts of loveliness to make up the image of a woman - whose name will finally prove to be Panthea. It will be by handing over 'the images to language', TrccpOCSOVTES TOCS EIKOVCCS TCO Aoycp, that he will proceed - by giving over the visual to language. Now for the purposes of this chapter, I do not wish to rehearse the bestknown and most discussed parts of this dialogue, as Lycinus evokes particular physical details of the woman via traits of famous art works. Rather, I want to make two brief points about the narrative's progression. The first is this: there runs throughout Lycinus' turn to art history a tension between eikon and logos, between 'image' and 'text', that looks back to an extensive tradition following on from Simonides' bon mot that 'pictures are silent poems, and poems speaking pictures' - a phrase that launched a thousand variations on the relative powers of art and language. 61 By Lucian's time, rhetoric has theorized language's ability to make scenes vivid via the category of enargeia, and art history has theorized the ability of imagery to express and provoke emotion and character. This debate is amusingly evoked by Lucian when he seeks to express the woman's complexion. 'For her colour', he says (8), 'we turn to Homer, the best of painters [ypocc|>scov - or "writers"]. She is to be the colour like that Homer gave to the thighs of Menelaus when he likened (eikasas) them to ivory tinged with crimson.' Lucian twists the discussion of the relative powers of art and poetry by choosing for art's especial skill coloration - a poet, whose simile is to be reworked by Lucian's image making. What is she like? She's like Homer's likeness of Menelaus . . . (The boldness of Lucian's formulation is highlighted by, say, Achilles Tatius' more circumspect use of Homer in his description of the Egyptian ox, whose 'colour is like that for which Homer praises the horses of the Thracian [Rhesus]' (2.15.3).) The rhetorician happily appropriates the 61

See Hagstrum (1955); Lee (1967); Praz (1970); Buch (1972). Above pp. 164-7.

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power of the visual to the power and trickery of language. Imaging, here, for all its allusions to art history, is firmly and knowingly verbal. This remains a text about the power of the image. My second point is to mark the joke of the moment at which the woman gets named or recognized, which is played with in a typically witty way by Lucian. The description from art historical masterpieces reaches an end, and Polystratus, who has not yet recognized her, asks what the woman was doing, and this leads to two further tokens which prompt Polystratus' amazed declaration that he knows who the woman is. The first is that she is holding a half-finished book. For the rhetorician and educated viewer - the academic - what better turn on than a woman reading! (She is indeed an eikon given over to logos ...) The second token is an extended description of the woman's teeth] 'When she smiled she revealed her teeth: how can I tell you how white they were, how symmetrical, how well matched!' And after comparing them to a string of pearls and contrasting them to other women's misshapen equivalents he concludes in terms that recall his opening description's combination of thauma and theama, 'wonder' and 'sight' (9): 'all hers show an equal distinction, the same colour, a single size and similarly close together: in short, an incredible wonder and a sight (0aO|ia KCCI OsaiJia) transcending all human loveliness'. A standard problem in Stoic epistemology is if a person walks towards you from a distance, at what point do you know it is a person or a particular person. An idea of partial recognition and delayed identification also finds different literary models in both the Odyssey and Greek tragedy. Here, Lucian toys with the moment of identification as he makes not a scar, not a name, not a shape, but a woman's teeth the telling detail. (It is, incidentally, one part of the dialogue that never gets into the art historians' discussions ...) Polystratus now knows who she is (10): 'Hold still!... It is the emperor's mistress (cruvoucrav), you simpleton, you talk of, the woman who is so celebrated (aoi5i|jov)'. The adjective doiSijaos, 'celebrated', 'famous in song' raises an interesting question for the proprieties of public praise of a woman, which always requires careful monitoring. The mistress is indeed famous (and Polystratus has just heard her praises sung), but aoidimos, although not uncommon in encomia from the fifth century onwards, also occurs only once in Homer - applied by Helen of Troy to herself and Paris (//. 6. 358). Does Helen thus enter the picture of the fantastically beautiful Greek consort of a regal figure here in the East? If so, to what effect? At the end of the piece, Lycinus will praise her precisely because she 'is not beautiful in body alone, like Helen'. The hint of aoidimos may look forward to this appropriation of Helen's beauty to his morally valorized account.

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But her name is not simply given. Rather, Polystratus points out it is the same name as the wife of Abradatas in a novel by Xenophon - a text of nearly five hundred years earlier (10): 'She has the same name as that beautiful wife of Abradatas. You know - you have often heard Xenophon praising her as a good and beautiful woman.' 62 The protocol of not naming a woman in public is nicely observed in this shared literary sophistication. Indeed, in a neat reprise of the thrust and delay of the dialogue so far, Lycinus confesses that he feels he sees her when he reads that book, and almost hears her talking to him out of Xenophon's prose a classic expression of the topos of artistic verisimilitude: Gbcrn-ep ye opcov auTtjv SiccT£dEi|jai, OTTOTOCV KOCT' 6KeIv6 TTOU dvayiyvcocjKcov ysvcoiJiai, Kai IJiovouxi Kai OCKOUCO Aeyouoris a\Jif\s a 7TE7Toir|Tai Aeyoucia . . . , ' I feel

exactly as if I see her when I get to that point in my reading, and I can almost hear her saying what she is described as saying . . . ' So what do you see and hear through Lycinus' rhetoric, now layered with Xenophon? How has Lycinus manipulated the power of language to make a woman visible? How like Xenophon's likeness is she? Have you identified her yet? Although this game with the name marks the stance of the pepaideumenos viewer again, it also raises a new question of the politics of viewing. For what difference does it make that this paragon of beauty is the emperor's girlfriend? That she is the lover of the most powerful figure in the Roman world? It is this question that the remainder of this section will attempt to answer. Polystratus immediately points out that mere physical beauty is only a small part of Panthea's attraction once you know her properly. Her qualities of soul more than match her body's allure. Lycinus, claims Polystratus, has been 'no spectator (atheatos) of the nobleness of her soul', and when asked to display (epideixai) an eikon of her soul, Polystratus brings forth philosophers and poets to 'make apparent the invisible by language', TOC 6c8r|Aa 6|j(|>avicrai TCO Aoycp. So he is persuaded to offer a counter-image to set against Lycinus' description and he proceeds to construct an image of the perfect woman's mind - beginning with her singing voice, which he says is best summed up as 'the sort of voice that could come out of Those Teeth'. The description - which offers testimony to the difficulty of constructing straightforward encomia of women, especially the mistresses of emperors, in Greco-Roman patriarchy, in that it offers as figures exemplary of Panthea's qualities Aspasia, Sappho, Theano, Diotima and 62

The Cyropaideia is especially influential work in the Second Sophistic, see Tatum (1989). It is sometimes argued that Xenophon of Ephesus is named after Xenophon; and the opening of Arrian's Anabasis and the Cynegeticus pay special tribute to Xenophon. For the same device of giving a name by alluding to the name of a famous predecessor of the same name, see Julian Misopogon 352a.

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Nausicaa ... - and comments at length on her admirable negotiation of her position of new power, showing neither pride nor vulgarity nor forgetfulness of her former friends. This encomium prompts Lycinus to comment that the emperor is a blessed man because such a creature lives in his reign and loves him. And Polystratus concludes the dialogue by conceding that by combining the first physical description and the second moral account a true image, inspired by the Muses, has been produced. Part of the delight of this work is its formal playfulness. Although the notion of a prose dialogue of encomium may have roots in the Socratic movement of the fourth century BCE, this seems new and fresh both in the game of fictionalized participants searching for the name of the praised figure, and in the witty manipulation of the term eikon: the dialogue depends on its several senses - image, likeness, picture - in its construction of an image in words drawn out of fragments of pictures and of likenesses to figures of the past. Part of the edge of the dialogue comes from its gradual revelation that the sexy lady being praised is the emperor's Greek mistress - not his wife or his military achievements. There is a certain frisson in the circulation of a representation of a performance of this most delicate celebratory task. Both the delight and the edge are doubled by the further extraordinary formal innovation of writing a second dialogue which records the woman's response to her encomium; as well as a spirited defence of its strategies. The eikon of the woman (which had praised her voice) now gives her a voice - or at least Lucian's representation of Polystratus' account of what she said. And it will end with Polystratus promising to take Lycinus' reply back to her: he worries he will barely be able to recall its outline, and Lycinus asks him to 'play his part with care' - as the mimetic function of social role-playing finds its dominant model in the performance of the actor. Indeed, Polystratus explicitly declares that Lycinus should make his speech as if she were present, and eycb jjn|ir)crojjiai as irpos auT-qv, and 'I will imitate you to her.' Lucian's Polystratus will imitate Lucian's Lycinus, writes Lucian, in defence of images ... The dialogue represents, that is, two figures who are engaged in a play of representation - who talks for whom? - and, tellingly, the central question of the dialogue revolves around the nature of social representation in praise and flattery. For the attack Panthea makes on her encomium depends on a recognition that flattery is a dangerous and false representation, a misleading eikon, image; while Lycinus' defence is that praise depends on an imagery of exaggerated representation, but not for personal gain. In short, how do eikones, the images or representations, of powerful people circulate in society? How are they to be read and manipulated? Cui bonol Let me look at some of the relevant details of this complex game with mimesis and the image. Panthea (in Polystratus' account) immediately

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rejects flattery (TOC KOAOCKIKOC) and marks an extreme of praise as the most embarrassing form of flattery (1): 'praise is only bearable when the person being praised recognizes each thing said as appropriate to himself. What is at stake in the politics of an eikon is that it should be recognized as just like - and not inappropriately beyond - the figure described. People who enjoy flattery, she continues, are like the case of 'an ugly man on whom someone brings and puts a mask, and he prides himself on his beauty' (3). To accept extreme praise is thus like - another eikon - putting on a false mask - the world of staged deception. Above all, she rejects (continues Polystratus) the comparison with Hera and Aphrodite (with which the Eikones ended). Even to be compared with heroines is too much. Thus', comes the conclusion (10), 'while she praises the conceit and the idea of the Images, she did not recognize the likeness . . . so that she absolves you from this honouring and pays her respects to your archetypes and paradigms', Kcci socuTqv ouv TO IJIEV TrAdo-|ioc aou ETTCCIVETV KCCI TT)V imvoiav TCOV EIKOVCOV, |ir| yvcopi^Eiv TT|V 6pioiOTT|Ta

. . . COOTE dc()ir|ai croi TCCUTT|V TT\V

TijiT^v KCCI TTpoCTKuveT cjou TOC ocpxeTUTra Koci Trapa8£iy|jocToc.

Panthea's

comment both praises the writer for his inventiveness and skilful composition {plasma, 'conceit', 'fiction', 'composition' picks up ana/plattein repeatedly used in the first piece for the construction of the eikon) - and also criticizes the earlier dialogue's false praise: the earlier dialogue's claims of 'making you see the woman', its vividness, are attacked because she can't see her own likeness. 'What is to be recognized in the eikon of Panthea?' has become the question. 'What is she like?' has become a politics of representation. Not just 'how to look?', but 'how to articulate looking in an image?'. The proffering of praise has become an exchange about the proprieties of praise. Even Polystratus now joins in this criticism with a typically selfreflexive analogy about looking as he distances himself from his earlier enthusiasm for the eikones (12): TrapoarAr)(7i6v TI ETTOCSOV ol$ ETTI TCOV opcojievcov irdaxoiiev f|v IJIEV Trdvu iyyuOEV CJKOTTCO|i£V Tl KCCI UTTO TCOV 6

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