Three Facets of the Second Sophistic: Plutarch, Arrian and Lucian

From their diadems, we infer they are royal sovereigns, whose faces are thought to be cryptoportraits of Ptolemy Philopator and his consort, Arsinoe III, who were known to have set up a temple in honour of Homer. First is the hybrid composi- tion of the relief: Second is the high degree of allegory in the lowest register, which relies on the matching of figure to name in the numerous inscriptions.

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The result is a document that combines word and image to represent an intellectual world, where the personifications of abstract literary qualities are or- ganized into a hierarchy of value and meaning, under the patronage of both gods and rulers. Homer's poetry is served by both Myth and His- tory. The other literary genres, in chronological order, acknowledge their dependence upon the bard, whose authority in turn is founded on the range of moral and intellectual qualities embodied in his poems.

A third point of interest lies in the figures of the sovereigns. Their royal character is clear, but by the roles they assume and the inscriptions they bear , they too enter into the abstract conceptual scheme as both participants in and guarantors of its general message. Time Chronos and the Inhabited World Oikoumene , we may note, are both political and intellectual em- blems. The rulers declare their own imperium in time and space, while endorsing the universality and ubiquity of Homer's poetry as an everlast- ing possession for all.

Crowns, sceptres, and book rolls are repeated elements in the compo- sition. The patron royal couple, themselves crowned, crown the bard in turn. But Homer himself bears a sceptre, not unlike the one held by the ultimate sovereign, Zeus, who looks down upon the entire proceedings from his topmost perch. The book roll, however, hallmark of poetic in- spiration and literate production, provides the strongest thematic focus; it links together Apollo, one of the Muses, the anonymous poet in his niche, the Ptolemaic king, and finally.

Standing on a pedestal, just above Apollo, the poet, we might note, might already be a statue. Zeitlin image might be a replica of the one erected in honour of the victor in a poetic contest. More broadly, perhaps, if Homer is a living god below, the new poet has himself already become a monument. Standing aside from the hierarchical rank as an internal spectator of this miniature world, his spatial vantage point suggests not only the sources of his inspiration but perhaps his own claims to preeminence in the poetic competitions of his time.

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Pollitt observes how the work of art 'combines courtly taste, the politics of royal patronage, and learned didacticism'. Andrew Stewart goes a step further to propose that the 'bicameral structure' of the relief 'actually replicates the institutional fabric of Alexandrian academe itself, with the mythic design of the upper part reflecting the Mouseion and below, the Library founded by Ptolemy I , depicting its activities of Homeric scholarship and its broader work of collecting and evaluating classical texts. This Homereion, as Aelian VH Ancient scholarship, however, proposes all sorts of ori- gins for Homer, including other Greek cities, such as Athens, and there are still more exotic claims, both serious and in jest, that Homer was a Chaldean, Syrian, Babylonian, Roman and even an Egyptian.

All translations are cited from the Loeb editions, unless otherwise noted. Visions and revisions of Homer sequently served his successors as a source of their own legitimacy. For, as the story goes, Alexander had a nocturnal vision, in which an old man with white hair presumably Homer appeared and recited some lines from the Odyssey concerning the island of Pharos Od. The king read his dream as an indication of the site for the city that was to bear his name, declaring that 'Homer was not only admirable in other ways, but also a very wise architect' Plut.

One of his tutors, Lysimachus, 'was esteemed, not for his refinement, but because he called himself Phoenix, Alexander Achilles, and Philip Peleus' Plut. A copy of the Iliad, as is often recounted from the earliest sources, accompanied Alexander in his campaigns, as a vademecum of military strategy, and was kept under his pillow, together with his dagger, later to be deposited in the famous chest taken from the Persian king, Darius.

He refuses the offer by a native of Troy to view the purported lyre of Paris whose name, Alexandras, he shared , preferring instead that of Achilles, because this was the instrument 'to which the hero used to sing the glorious deeds of brave men' Plut. At the tomb of Achilles, according to Arrian, Alexander declares 'the hero blessed for having Homer to proclaim his fame to posterity', a remark quoted to justify Arrian's own declared mission as the bard of Alexander's exploits. That, I declare, is why I myself have embarked on 7 Webster Epigram b most easily available in Page Alexander adopted models of other heroes and divinities, but no other, it is believed, exercised the same personal appeal as the role of Achilles.

On Alexander and Achilles. I have found the following most useful: Ameling ; A. Cohen ; A. Stewart , especially, ; Edmunds ; and Lane Fox Zeitlin this history, not judging myself unworthy to make Alexander's deeds known to men' Arr. Alexander, along with the city he founded, provides the indispensable prologue to any consideration of the role of Homer as the touchstone of Hellenic affiliation and self-identification in the Hellenistic period and beyond. For Greeks of the Empire, looking back under Roman rule to their cultural heritage, Alexander himself became a favourite topic for sophists, historians and fabulators, and in the significant preoccupation of this era with its classical past, his exploits mark a chronological endpoint with reference to global political power.

While details of his mercurial character and striking career are treated from a number of aspects, ranging from biography to imaginary dialogues, from romance to satire,10 he has by now firmly evolved into the very champion of Greek paideia, with Homer as its undisputed heart and core. To him goes the credit for ex- tending Greek civilization to the known borders of the world he con- quered, the Oikoumene, as proudly represented in the figure of Ptolemy Philopator's consort, whose portrait adorns the Archelaos relief examined above.

And where Alexander went. Despite the commonplace assertion we often find comparing Homer to scripture, the fact is that Greek culture never developed the notion of a sacred book, whose authority would rely on its status as divine revelation and on its textual claims to unvarying truth. Still, it seems fair to say that if there is one figure who might be said to dominate the field of Greek values and identity, it is Homer and the legacy of his epics.

Alexandrian critics strove to fix Homeric texts in canonical form and ushered in the era of learned commentaries. But this philological and exegetical activity is only one, albeit essential, component of a traffic in Homer that lasted until the end of antiquity. Like the numerous cities, who were said to have claimed the poet after his death, each for a different reason, poets, philos- ophers, allegorists, novelists, historians, satirists and fabulists were intent on appropriating Homer for their own designs. In this industry of the imagination, Homer was available for a whole spectrum of strategies that ran the gamut from transcendent truths, veiled as allegories for mystic initiates, to wicked parodies and mischievous challenges to his authority.

Between these extremes of sacralization and denigration, veneration and satire, the single guiding thread is the irreducible significance of Homer for the assertion of Hellenic affiliation, however that slippery term might be defined. In the cultural economy of the Empire, Homer circulated as a kind of common coinage, an acknowledged criterion of self-recognition 10 For the continuing fascination with Alexander in the Second Sophistic and beyond, along with the relevant sources, see G.

Anderson b 2. Visions and revisions of Homer for all those, even non-Greeks, who included themselves in 'a proclaimed communality of paideia, a shared system of reference and expectation'. For when reporting a visit to an isolated and sadly reduced Greek community on the margins of the civilized world, he observes that while they can hardly be said to hellenizein, their one link to their origins is the insistence by a local that almost all the inhabitants know Homer by heart Or. Dio Chrysostom Or The endless debates, scholarly, poetic and political, about the birthplace of Homer, alluded to above in the sculptural group of the Homereion and the subject of numerous epigrams betoken efforts to retrieve genuine information about the past or to accrue merit for rival cities.

But they can easily be transmuted into a claim that he belongs everywhere and to everyone: For Antipater of Sidon first century BCE , Homer is the 'herald of the heroes' valour, spokesman of the blessed ones, 11 Goldhill, this volume. Introduction, and for Homer especially, see Morgan For testimonia, early and late, see Verdenius and North More sober evidence suggests a far more limited close knowledge of Homeric texts.

Zeitlin a second sun to the life of the Greeks, the light of the Muses', but by the epigram's end, he is also called 'the unaging voice stoma of the whole world kosmosf AP 7. We hear some quite remarkable claims of Homer's far-flung reputation during the Second Sophistic, tales, for ex- ample, of barbarians who know little or nothing about Hellenic culture, but recognize Homer's name Dio. It may be a matter of some dispute, serious or otherwise, whether Indians had trans- lated the poet's works into their own tongue, but it is worth pointing out that Homer is the only Greek author mentioned by name in the entire Talmud.

Beginning in the Hellenistic period, Greek intellectuals point to Homer along with Musaeus and Orpheus as proof of their entitlement to archetypal wisdom as founders of civilization and masters of paideia. Charges of plagiarism fly back and forth in these disputes, which continue under the Empire, most often by Christian apologists, who as the latest on the scene, have an even greater stake in the outcome.

While the epithet, iheios godly in good Homeric fashion is applied to Homer himself already in the classical period, as, for example, in Aristophanes' Frogs and elsewhere, the poet is elevated in later times to veritable divinity, as he is indeed on the Archelaos relief. The apotheosis of rulers, introduced in the Hellenistic period, no doubt under- lies such hyperbole, but the motive as well is one way of divinizing the glorious past and of asserting dominance in cultural values.

Accordingly, Homer is called a child of Heaven, descended from Zeus, or sent down by the Muses. Although Homer may in certain philosophical circles be granted divinity through extensive resort to allegory, or, more accurately, given the status of hierophant Stoic , prophet Pythagorean , philosopher Epicurean , or theologian Neo- platonist ,16 for schoolchildren, who began their education with the study of Homer, the lesson is not in doubt.

They are taught from the start to 13 See Lieberman Visions and revisions of Homer write theos oud' anthrdpos Homeros Homer is not a human being but a god , and Homer remains throughout the rest of the Greco-Roman world as the undisputed touchstone of excellence. He is claimed at various times to be the source of all technical, poetic and experiential knowledge, ranging from housekeeping, warfare, statesmanship, medicine, geography and science to literature, philosophy, religion, rhetoric, psychology, ethics and all the arts.

Even Felix Buffiere, whose magisterial work, Les mythes d'Homere, is the most wide-ranging compendium of sources, is compelled to admit that he too can never hope to tell the whole story. There are numerous studies of individual authors or texts, such as Lucian, Maximus of Tyre, Aelius Aristides, Dio Chrysostom, and epi- grams of the Greek Anthology, which attempt to collect, categorize, and characterize the many allusions to Homer, along with more general studies of Hellenism in the later Greek world.

It is one that seeks to situate the poet and his work in the context of the expanding visual culture that is the hallmark of the post- classical era. Homer, I will argue, as verbal artist, authority on the gods, and repository of traditional themes and images, has a special, although obviously not exclusive, place in such a scheme, which includes not just the arts themselves but also other modes of'seeing' in a range of encounters with the past. If I approached Homer at the beginning of this essay through the visual properties of the Archelaos relief, its home in the city of Alexandria, and the figure of Alexander himself, I did so, first, to set the stage for the new diversified and diffuse world in which the epic poet, now an exportable commodity beyond the earlier confines of Greek territory, becomes the persistent model and reliable point of reference for Hellenic culture, along with Alexander himself.

Ion c-d, Dio Chrys. Zeitlin which could be applied in any situation; an assured place in periegesis and romantic archaeology'. At the same time, he aspired even higher, as an epigram on a portrait of him declares: For they all say, "it was Smyrna who gave birth to divine Homer, even she who bore likewise the rhetor Aristeides"' AP In the current frame of inquiry, however, Alexander is even more sig- nificant in his remarkable preoccupation with revisiting, reviving, and above all, revisioning a glorious past through his own personal taste and innovations.

He serves, in fact, as a preview of and model for what is to follow in his particular interest in the resources of what I have called visual culture. Alexander's exploits as a replay in his mind of his beloved Homeric heroes marks him as the herald of Greek paideia itself, the first, pepaideumenos, one might say, the prototype of the cultivated man, whose learning, taste and refinement were so highly prized in the period of the Second Sophistic, not least as exemplified in the sophists themselves. Plutarch characterizes him as philologos and phikmagnostes by nature, who not only was devoted to Homer, plulhomeros, as Strabo had put it Geog.

The fashioning of his own image in various heroic and divine moulds shows him a con- summate performer, even impersonator, not just of Achilles, but notably, also of Heracles and Dionysus and various others. For the relevant texts, see Stewart Its coinage is closely tied to the growing interest in the faculties of the imagination plumtasia and reflects the age-old notion too that the mind is 'stamped' or 'inscribed' like an artefact. Visions and revisions of Homer first, it seems, to preside over the manufacture of his image in the visual arts. He is alleged to have issued an edict forbidding anyone else but the painter Apelles and the sculptor Lysippus to fashion his portraits, with the addition of a gem cutter Pyrgoteles in later tradition.

Many of these would be unknown to us, were it not for the detailed observations of Pliny and Plutarch, along with others, probably invented by their authors, for whom descriptions of works of art, whether real or fictitious, constituted compelling evidence of their rhetorical virtuosity. While images of Alexander assume a number of poses and are equipped with various symbols of power, he himself seemed to have cultivated a resemblance to Achillean iconography through his blond hair, aquiline nose, leonine stance, and beardless countenance.

It is just as fitting that the work's combination of metalwork and painting should evoke the com- parison to the 'work of Hephaestus upon the shield of Achilles, as re- vealed in Homer', yet at the same time be described as executed in a 're- spectable style of art resembling that of Zeuxis or Polygnotus and Euphranor, who delighted in light and shade and infused life into their designs, as well as a sense of depth and relief Phil. Actors of such scenes no doubt wound and cause blood to flow, but they certainly do not wish to kill.

The same goes for the surgeon. Each has a part to play in the growing desire to see, to make visible, either as spectators or performers, and thereby in some way to repossess - even reactualize - in a new age the heritage of a long-vanished past. The first consists of role-playing and a heightened sense of theatre, whether manifested in actual dramatic 23 Cic. Zeitlin performances, elaborate processions, tableaux vivants, skenographic effects, or, for example, through the later histrionics of sophists before enthusi- astic audiences.

My third rubric involves some form of 'direct encounter with the past', sacred or not, whether through dreams, fictitious journeys to the world beyond, actual visits to historical sites e. Troy , or other 'sightings' of mythical figures e. In particular, one noteworthy hallmark of Hellenistic style that persists throughout the rest of antiquity, is what J. Pollitt calls the 'theatrical mentality', a cultural pattern of framing experience that is manifested not just in material culture, such as in styles of architecture, portraiture, sculptural groups and house decoration, but also in the frequent literary metaphors that may be used to heighten emotion, animate the reader's experience, or even view life itself as a drama.

This type of dramatic mise-en-scene recurs in a similar iconographical scheme, this time in the Serapeion at Memphis, in which a dozen over life-size portrait statues formed a semi-circle around Homer, this time representing poets and intellectuals of different eras, 25 Branham 3.

See the discussion in Manieri 82 4.

Anderson recognizes the significance of such rhetorical progymnasmata that use theatrical evocation framed in highly visual imagery, calling 'the technique a kind of verbal necromancy', along with rhetorical apostrophes to the dead, as though they were in one's very presence.

In fact, the entire rhetorical education 'tended to foster a mimetic faculty' of this kind. See too Onians On the 'drama of life', see Kolakis Visions and revisions of Homer possibly along with members of the ruling family. As reported by Athenaeus Deipn. The pavilion was built at the time of the famous Ptolemaic procession in honour of Dionysus BCE , also known to us from Athenaeus Deipn. Combining 'elements of an Egyptian harvest festival, a Greek theatrical festival and a political parade'30 the spectacle, among other dazzling features, far too numerous to mention, brought on live actors as personified figures in fully symbolic costume morning and evening stars, the seasons, the year along with floats representing myth- ological tableaux and functioning automata, including, we might add, not one, but two gold statues of Alexander in the sculptural company of his royal successors, as though signifying political continuity and legitimate succession.

Several other innovations, which specifically focus on Homer, involve extravagant visual experiments. One example is the ship of Hieron II of Syracuse c. A second novelty consisted of the so-called 'Homeric bowls', whose Alexandrian originals, probably in silver dated after BCE , depicted scenes in relief illus- trating episodes from Homer and other poems of the epic cycle along with scenes from drama, mainly Euripides.

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Unlike Attic vase painting, which selected certain epic scenes and figures for representation, some- times with identifying inscriptions, the surviving bowls for the first time offer distinct illustrations of sequential scenes from epic texts, often accompanied by relevant quotations. It is likely that they belonged to a much larger set or sets, which aimed to provide its users with an erudite 2q Dating from the later second or early first century BCE. The Serapeion in Alexandria might also have contained a similar group and we know one early Hellenistic painting at least that depicted a similar subject.

See further Zanker and bibliography. Zeitlin compendium or a convenient aide-memoire at symposia 'produced for the edification and pleasure of the Ptolemaic court'. Unlike earlier rhapsodic performers, whose mimetic virtuosity we know, for ex- ample from Plato's Ion, these dramatic presenters, dressed in appropriate costumes and equipped with the essential props, brought Homeric scenes vividly to life on stage before enthusiastic audiences. These performances continued under the Empire to increasing popularity. Theocritus' Idyll 15, which turns on two women's visit in Alexandria to the pageant and ceremonies in honour of Adonis, and Herodas' Mime 6, reporting two women's visit to a sanctuary of Asclepius probably in Cos which contained a collection of statuary, paintings and other votive objects, are elegant vignettes that record the viewers' reactions to the objects meticu- lously described.

While there are precedents in earlier dramatic literature satyr play, tragedy and probably mime and like them, these Hellenistic spectators are presented as naive viewers on a day's outing, the differences are striking, not just in tonality, but in their status as independent pieces, whose major point is a little genre scene, characteristic of the newer kinds of literature. See also Webster ; Pollitt , with further bibliography. We know these bowls through Megarian replicas in terracotta, found in Boeotia. Of the sixty surviving specimens, half come from Homer and the epic cycle. The famous Iliac Tablets of Roman provenance probably first century CE also represented in miniature a number of scenes from the Trojan cycles inscribed with extensive quotations.

Sadurska ; Horsfall ; and Rouveret Incidentally, these small tablets were found at Bovillae outside Rome, the same place in which the Archelaos relief was discovered. See Husson and Nagy Visions and revisions of Homer By the time of the Second Sophistic, when under the influence of the rhetorical schools, ecphrasis becomes a highly developed exercise and the contest between word and image is a prized occasion for verbal pyrotech- nics, the emphasis shifts in the opposite direction to the pepaideumenos, who uses descriptions of works of art as a means of both instruction and display, as, for example, in Philostratus' Imagines, in which the framing device is precisely the sophist in the role of expert tutor to a group of naive youths in a gallery of paintings.

Now the cultivated man is expected to give proof in words of his aesthetic appreciation and skill in the inter- pretation of visual codes. Along with evidence of his knowledge of the mythological repertory and classics of the literary canon, his aim is to engender in his audience an emotional and cognitive response similar to his own.

Lucian's de Domo, supposedly delivered as a speech in the mag- nificent house he is describing, is a prime case in point. In its artful and subtle arguments as well as in its description of the house 'the greatness of its size, the splendour of its beauty, the brilliance of its illuminations, the lustre of its gilding, and the exuberance of its pictures' , this piece is a virtual prooftext of the passion for viewing and the passion for ecphrasis that so grips the writers of the imperial age.

Yet if the sophist, whose stock in trade is eloquence, proudly separates himself and those like him from the hoi polloi, who cannot, like him and others like him, respond to the paintings by commenting on 'the exactness of their technique and the combination of antiquarian interest in their objects' 21 , Lucian does not limit aesthetic admiration to the cultural elite alone. Indeed, the great common denominator of Greco-Roman culture was precisely the availability of spectacle and every sort of visual ostentation for the delectation and enlightenment of an entire public as a shared code of communication across economic, linguistic and regional bound- aries.

The rampant visual culture of Hellenistic and later antiquity served a number of general purposes, at whatever social level the spectator might be. It advertised the power of the rulers, enhanced the status of the elite, lent heightened visual energy to religious cult, memorialized the dead, or sustained in new and often composite forms the heritage of the past through the circulation and accumulation of themes and images increas- ingly reduced to a standard repertoire.

The Elder Pliny gives an important description of the latter: Furthermore, those whose portraits we don't have are represented by the imagination fingun- tur and a sense of regret engenders features that have not come down to us by tradition, as occurs in the case of Homer. Thus, in my personal opinion, there is no greater proof of felicity than this that all people always want to know what a human being looked like.

Pliny attributes the origins of this practice at Rome to Asinius Polio, "who first by founding a library made works of genius the property of the public in the 30s BCE. There is much of interest in this passage. But for our purposes I will focus on a few crucial details. First, the library is not conceived so much as a place for reading books which, of course, it was , but rather a priv- ileged location where one might commune with 'the immortal spirits' of their authors, who speak to us.

Even taking account of the fact that the act of reading was normally conducted viva voce, there is a notable leap between envoicing the w ords of others and the claim that these others can actually speak. Second is the fabrication of their images, motivated by the desire to see their features, despite the fact that their faces can only be represented through the imaginative skill of the artist.

Homer, we might note, is the only poet mentioned by name. He is the most famous, to be sure, but because he is also the furthest removed in time, no one could presume that a true likeness of him might have been transmitted to pos- terity. In this instance these two ideas are intertwined. The voiced words of dead authors which we can hear and the tangible representations of their faces which we can see might suggest an uncanny meeting between the present and the past, an encounter that brings the dead back to life, as it were, in our very presence.

At the same time, it is acknowledged that these visages can only appear before us as sculptured objects fashioned by the power of the imagination, phantasm or visio , we might say. Only in this way can we come to know these hallowed figures of bygone days, since portraits dis- play more than outward characteristics, but when properly executed, can give us a glimpse of the entire person. Visions and revisions of Homer as on forms of self-representation, in addition to the promotion of ideal and composite types.

I spoke earlier of Alexander's careful management of his various images, which was to have a profound effect on future styles and tastes, and the trend in portraiture develops to an even greater extent in a number of interesting ways.

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The science of physiognomies under the Empire also supports the significance of'reading faces' for the information about inner character and vital essence, an aim already adumbrated in Xenophon's fourth-century account of Socrates' encounter with a painter, sculptor, and armourer. Socrates leads the sculptor to acknowledge that his art ought not just be an exercise in creating a superficial resemblance, but must portray inner emotion as well, and even more, he must represent in his figures 'the activities of the soul' Xen.

It was the task of the rhetorician to convey in words the description of persons, verbal portraits, if you will, and it is a noteworthy fact that in the age of the Second Sophistic, the vogue for elaborate depiction of every kind seems to increase in sheer length and extent of detail. If proficient in these matters he will grasp every trait and his hand will successfully interpret the individual story of each person And he continues more generally with Gorgias obviously in mind: Description of bygone figures is also an important element in the Her- oicus of the elder Philostratus probably of the early third century CE and probably the same man to whom his grandson refers.

It is a dialogue between a Phoenician merchant and a local vinegrower, who has a curi- ously close relationship with the hero Protesilaus, the first to die at Troy 38 Onians and further in , argues ingeniously that the increasing fond- ness for description is in direct contrast to a decreasing naturalism in art, a tendency he attributes to the rhetorical education that trained the mimetic faculty of the imagination and insisted on more and more elaboration in the encomiastic genres.

His examples, however, are too selective and the links he proposes between rhetoric, perception, and the actual production of art are too abstract to be convincing. Zeitlin at the moment when the Greeks disembarked on the shore. Protesilaus appears to this fellow in the Thracian Chersonese on a regular basis as companion and guide, instructing him in the fine points of farming, med- icine, moral precepts and much else beside, including intimate knowledge of the other Homeric heroes and the whole saga of Troy, both before and after.

The Phoenician stranger wants the vinegrower to show them to him and describe exactly how they looked e. To oblige him, the vinegrower reels off descriptions of a long list of heroes, both Greek and Trojan, including details of their hair, ears, eyes, shape and size of body, style of clothing and armour, etc. The portrait of Protesilaus is a fine example of this style: I suppose he is about twenty years old. A light down grows on his chin as suits the age at which he went to Troy and he smells sweeter than myrtle in the fall.

He puts on his face a bright expression, because he loves a cheerful disposition, when things are serious he looks alert and intense, but if I find him relaxed, his eyes are amazingly charming and friendly. His hair is blond and of moderate length; it seems to overhang his forehead rather than cover it. His nose is angular, just like a statue's. His voice carries farther than trumpets, although his mouth is small. He looks handsome nude, for he is well proportioned and graceful, like the statues one sees at race-courses The Heroicus purports to give an account of actual face-to-face encounters with a hero from the world be- yond Protesilaus , who serves as an impeccable authority for the authen- ticity of his descriptions.

The ghosts of the past, in this rendering, are thought to return in material form and hover about the scenes of their former heroic existence, now endowed with the oracular prescience and power granted to those of the elite who have departed this life.

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In this fictitious work, we may note that the author's efforts to give an accurate picture of these figures often, as here, rely on comparison with statues, which he knows his interlocutor has seen. In this sense, therefore, the visual image has as much to do with the formation of mental pictures as the fact that statues' claims to verisimilitude are based on the degree to which they are convincing imitations of real models. Nevertheless, figu- rative art is here primarily a point of reference to enhance the sense of a vivid reality, whereas the younger Philostratus stresses the inventive skill of the artist, his praiseworthy apttti, 'to confront objects which do not exist as though they existed Even if both texts are products of consummate verbal practitioners and both satisfy the desire of sophisticated auditors - both external and internal addressees - to see with their own eyes what they can only hear, the two are by no means commensurate.

The Imagines of the younger Philostratus and even more, those of his grandfather are ecphrastic specimens of paintings, whose vividness of description may tease us with the uncanny possibility that the spectator might indeed cross the bound- ary between the imaginary and the real, to enter into the space of the painting, and conversely, to animate the immobile figures there into active and lively presences.

The operative principle here is the power of aesthetic representation and the sources of that power through the growing devel- opment of and theorizing about the faculty of the imagination phanta- sm , or perhaps more accurately, what J. Pollitt defines as 'intuitive insight'. They may take place in dreams or daytime reveries; they can occur at particular sites where those figures formerly walked or where their cults or tombs are located and their statues may be credited with supernatural activity.

The religious aspect of these 'sightings' as visually intense forms of communi- cation is augmented by beliefs, current in this age, in daimones, inter- mediate between gods and mortals, and combining both popular ideas and philosophical speculations. These immortal beings maintain influence over human affairs, and can either intercede for mortals or punish them 39 Pollitt On phantasia, more generally, in addition to the above named sources, I have found most useful Watson and ; and Manieri On the important distinction between aesthetic and religious considerations of images, even though these may at times overlap, see Eisner Zeitlin for moral infractions, and often as not, show their anger for neglect of their cults.

The entire Heroicus is set in such an atmosphere from beginning to end, starting with the Phoenician sailor's account of the reason for his presence in the Thracian Chersonese and ending with the vinegrower's detailed description of Achilles redivivus on the island of Leuke in the Black Sea. The Phoenician was motivated by a dream, in which he was 'reading the verses of Homer where he recites the catalogue of the Achaeans, and I started to invite the Achaeans to come on board the ship as if it were big enough for them all I interpreted it as referring to a long and slow voyage.

For to those who are anxious about something, dreams of the dead imply failure. The vinegrower was the first person he met, and he realizes the meaning of his vision as portending something quite different, since, as he concludes, 'cataloguing them onto the ship and collecting their stories before embarking amount to the same thing' 6. The vinegrower can congratulate him on this fortuitous happenstance: So vivid are the vinegrower's reports that the Phoenician can even- tually even exclaim, 'I feel as if I were one of the army which has sailed for Troy, so possessed am I by the demigods we were discussing' We will later return to a closer examination of this remarkable text.

Not every traveller to a famous site in antiquity in quest of viewing relics, listening to the stories of the local exegetes, or communing in some other way with the past, could hope to get the same kind of 'reliable' information as does the Phoenician merchant, even if second hand. Even less usual is the vinegrower's privileged access to such knowledge through his intimate association with Protesilaus.

But if the Heroicus is the most extended treatise we possess, it is by no means the only example in the literature of the Empire of the desire to gain more 'authentic' knowledge through some kind of pseudo-necromantic consultation that suggests, fictitiously or otherwise, not just the continuing existence and vitality of those figures from the past, but the possibility of direct communication with them in the here and now, in a spirit of piety or inquiry.

The journey is often the means, the most extreme form of which is a species of visit to the world beyond, whether to the Underworld or the Isles of the Blessed. The latter motif, of course, is already established in the Odyssey, not once but twice books 11 and 24 , and Antipater of Sidon can give voice to a painting of Nicias, depicting the Underworld, which is made to declare: Visions and revisions of Homer i am painted here an ever living city of the dead, the tomb of every age.

It was Homer who explored the house of Hades, and I am copied from him as my first original' archetypon; AP 9. Socrates himself looks for- ward to meeting Orpheus, Musaeus, Hesiod, and Homer in the Under- world after death. He will be able to compare his own fortunes with such heroes as Palamedes or Telamonian Ajax and any others, who, like him, met their death through an unfair trial. He will also continue in charac- teristic fashion the same activity as here in Athens, in 'examining and searching people's minds, to find out who is really wise among them, and who only thinks he is' PI.

The Pythagoreans seemed to have established the idea of a literary court, 'a paradise of intellectuals' with their master in first place and Homer in second, and the sophists exploited the topos, as we shall see, in varied ways. Chief among these sites is Troy, which is 'especially evocative', as Graham Anderson observes, 'as sup- plying the first Greek victory in Asia'.

In reviewing the three elements I earlier suggested the major compo- nents of visual culture as comprising theatricality, the visual arts, and 'close encounters'. Given that theatricality, in the sense of role playing and impersonation, on the one hand, and spectacle performance along with a heightened sense of framed reality, on the other, is an integral feature in sophistic literature, I will not therefore not treat the topic on its own, but will incorporate relevant observations, where appropriate.

I propose therefore first to look more closely at Homer's relations to the visual arts themselves and then turn to a fuller discussion of what I have called 'close encounters' in the light of its more complex implications for Hellenic identity. By way of transition and preview , I invoke an inter- esting variant of a felicitous use of a particular site and the possibilities for restaging there a scene from the past as exemplified in Dio Chrysostom's twelfth oration, which concerns the great cult statue of Zeus made by the classical sculptor, Pheidias.

The speech was supposedly delivered at 42 For the Pythagoreans, see Cumont , and cf. For a dis- cussion of the theme of encounters in the Underworld or its equivalent in sophistic liter- ature, see Bompaire Zeitlin Olympia itself in the very presence of the statue on the occasion of a Panhellenic festival probably in or CE.

The rhetor profits from the locale to bring Pheidias back in person before his audience in a fine example of prosopopeia to defend his artistic rationale in his own words, claiming its model was Homer's own verses in the first book of the Iliad Or. IV [On a painting of Odysseus] Ever is the sea unkind to son of Laertes; the flood hath bathed the pic- ture and washed off the figure from the wood.

What did it gain thereby? For in Homer's verses the image of him is painted on imperishable pages. Histories of artistic development were already in place by the end of the Hellenistic period, transmitted to us mainly by Pliny the Elder. The canon of the greatest artists, particularly in sculpture and painting, was firmly established, and the exercise of critical judgement with regard to aesthetic taste was a valu- able skill to be nurtured. Rhetoric drew upon the technical vocabulary of art in a metaphorical transfer to the arts of oratory e.

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The artist was finally elevated from a mere artisan to compete with poets and other intellectuals in wisdom and prestige of accomplishment. Plato's injunction against the lure of the mimetic arts as against poetry was still a matter for concern in some circles, including sophists, bul par- ticularly among the Neoplatonists, who strove to reconcile his views with their validation of vision and visionary experience, even as they and others did with regard to his critique of Homer.

The evaluation of the eye as a Visions and revisions of Homer significant means of perception had already been addressed by Epicur- eans, Stoics and Peripatetics, with different results, along with advances in the science of optics. A number of these strands are drawn together in the increasing concern with phantasia, as already mentioned, which shifted attention from the mimetic faculty and technical excellence in the pro- duction of images to the valorization of a kind of interior vision, which was capable of forming a picture in the mind through a combination of subjective intuition and intelligent contemplation, one that was meant to induce the same experience in listeners and viewers alike.

This is not the place to elaborate on these matters, which have been treated in detail by many others. I wish merely to point out that the au- thors of the Second Sophistic, so concerned with their own verbal artistry and performative style, continually draw upon the resources of visual representation, in both theoretical and practical ways. Beyond aesthetic criteria, the contest between word and image, the prestige of ecphrastic description, and the inculcation of subjective response to visual stimuli raise significant questions about the workings of memory, knowledge, visualization and language.

This happens, for example, in Apollonius of Tyana's confrontation with Thespesion, the appropriately named Egyptian, who prefers 'symbols of profound inner meaning' in his own culture to Greek norms of representation and asks mockingly whether 'your artists, like Pheidias and Praxiteles, leaped up to heaven and took a copy of the forms of the gods, and reproduced them by their art? But the problem of portraying the gods in a heightened atmosphere of both spiritual and aesthetic debate now heats up in popular and learned circles, and the gravity of its subject leads to the most im- passioned considerations, not only of divinity, but of the general merits of the visual and verbal arts.

This is a time, after all, when it is a common- place of dream interpretation that 'to dream of statues of the gods is the same as dreaming of them' Artemid. Goldhill, in this volume. This is the time too when the most famous classical sculptures of the past are not only found in copies everywhere, but are also 'quoted', as it were, as though their mere mention could stimulate the listener's visual imagination to recreate in memory a concept of the whole.

Alternatively, reduced to standard archetypes, they could simply be invoked in virtually any context for their metaphorical value. Collec- tions of art, in both public and private domains, would have encouraged the tendency to promote such canons of reference. Lucian's Imagines reels off a whole list of the best-known works for his composite portrait in praise of a beautiful woman, along with the masterpieces of the best- known painters, which the other speaker can be counted on to have seen in his travels.

Nevertheless, any other, even less touristed, spectator could conjure up the same images. And in his Philopseudes, the courtyard of a private house is adorned with statues, probably copies of Myron, Poly- cleitus, Critias, and Demetrius Philops. Again 1 call Aelius Aristeides to witness, in his claim that when he lay near death, Athena herself appeared in all her astounding beauty, just as Pheidias had sculpted her, breathing a scent from her aegis, which looked like wax. She assures him that the Odyssey is no mere muthos and that he, Aristeides, is Odysseus and Tele- machus, which is why she will come to his aid Hier.

Both verbal and visual memory coalesce in the dream, whereby this latter-day Odysseus recognizes the goddess through her most renowned representa- tion and identifies her words through his intimate knowledge of the poet's verses. If there is any single consensus in ancient sources as to the highest achievement in the visual arts, it would be the example of Pheidias' great chryselephantine statue of Zeus at Olympia, to which I have already sev- eral times referred. Countless testimonies survive, from both Greek and Roman authors, most often praising its supreme artistry in representing - even incarnating - the supreme deity, and expressing the awe, both spiri- tual and aesthetic, which it inspired in its spectators.

Menander Rhetor late third or early fourth centuries CE , in suggesting rules for describing a statue in a sanctuary, urges a comparison with Zeus at Olympia and Athena on the acropolis at Athens. Perhaps this statue fell from heaven' Two major themes can be traced throughout our sources, from Cicero 46 See the testimonia in Overbeck nos. See also Rouveret Visions and revisions of Homer to Plotinus, to account for the achievement of Pheidias' masterpiece. The first attributes the artist's inspiration to his own superior inner vision or phantasia, as exemplified in Apollonius of Tyana's subsequent reply to Thespesion's mockery of Greek ideas of divinity, cited above.

Pheidias contrasts the freedom of words to depict space, time, movement, and the entire range of emotions with the limitations of the artist, who 'must work out a design schema for himself that shows each subject in a single posture, one that admits of no movement, and is un- alterable', compelled to remain fixed in a single locale.

The artist's task is more difficult, he argues. Moreover, while a poet can 'excite and de- ceive the ear by filling it with mimemata under the spell of metre and sound', there is no such subterfuge for a work of art, since spectators are more demanding and 'require greater enargeia to be convinced', given that 'the eye agrees exactly with what it sees' Although Homer's genius, his 'godlike wisdom', is praised to the skies, Dio through his imagined Pheidias does not unequivocally bring off the poet as the victor in this contest, as most critics seem to think.

Rather, by various clever shifts in the argument, like the one just cited previously and cf. Yes, the sculptor must work with intractable and durable sub- stances marble and metal , a laborious obstacle in itself, but as to its 47 E. In making the definitive image of the god, which has eclipsed all predecessors, Pheidias is apostrophized as the one who by 'the power of his art first conquered and united Hellas' The tribunal he is to face ideally should not just consist of the 'judges directing the contests here in honour of the god' but 'a general court of all the Peloponnesians and of the Boeotians, too, and Ionians and of other Hellenes, wherever they are to be found in Asia as well as in Europe' Moreover, for all Homer's versatility in representing the many facets of Zeus's power, in both positive and destructive aspects, it is Pheidias, lim- ited as he is to a single image, who has chosen to show a more purified form of divinity.

His god is one 'who is peaceful and altogether gentle, such as befits the guardian of a faction-free and concordant Hellas'. He is 'a mild and majestic deity in pleasing guise, the giver of our material and our physical life and of all our blessings, the common Father and Saviour and Guardian of mankind', that is, 'as far as it was possible for a mortal man to frame in his mind dianoia and to represent mimeisthai the divine and inimitable nature' The implication is that Pheidias has grasped the true nature of the godhead in Zeus's powerful pose, while Homer, for all his dazzling reproduction of sights and sounds, trails behind the sculptor's truer, more stable, vision.

Dio can only concur in this conclusion, which emphasizes contemporary ideas about divinity current in his own day, and he caps his approval with his final highest accolade: The words Zeus is made to 'speak', however, acknowledges for the first time the gap between the lofty achievement of the past, as embodied in Pheidias and his magnificent statue, and the sadly diminished political situation of Hellenes today under Roman rule For while Zeus is imagined as praising the assembled multitude for Here Pheidias quotes Pindar fr.

It is not difficult to recognize in this passage echoes from Plato's Timaeus and the concept of the creator god as demiourgos, which was current also among the Stoics. Visions and revisions of Homer their fine and generous administration of the sacrifices and contests 'of physical condition, strength and speed', as well as their general adherence to keeping the customs they have inherited', he shows alarm for the peo- ple's decrepit condition, comparing them to a former king, Laertes, whose days of youth and power are over, fittingly in Homer's exact verses: Throughout Pheidias' defence of his art, he takes the occasion to praise Homer's poetry, which by definition is 'an extravagant thing and in every respect resourceful and a law unto itself He expounds on his lin- guistic versatility in coining neologisms, and his many sonic effects which imitate all sounds in nature and recreate the din of battle as well as the visual signs of Zeus's celestial role as dispenser of storms as of rainbows.

The sculptor could not reproduce the effect of thunder in 'a soundless image' or a lightning flash in the use of earth-bound metal 79 , but, as we have seen, his own conception of Zeus seems to embody a loftier, more idealistic, vision of the god. And while he refers to himself and to Homer as demiourgoi craftsmen in good Homeric fashion and grants Homer the credit or for his critics, the blame for giving the Greeks their images of the gods in human form, Pheidias falls short finally of granting the poet precedence in the pictorial arts.

This theme, however, is one we find on more than one occasion in our sources of this period. One in particular, the so-called Life of Homer attributed to Plutarch, but assuredly not by him , deserves to be quoted in full in this regard and cf. It is the final coda to the author's exhaustive compendium of the poet's virtues If one were to say that Homer was a teacher of painting as well, this would be no exaggeration, for as one of the sages said, 'Poetry is painting which speaks and painting is silent poetry.

He sculpted aneplase in the medium of language all kinds of beasts and in particular the most powerful: He dared also to give the gods human shapes morphea antkropon eikasai. Hephaestus, making the shield of Achilles and sculpting in gold the earth, the heavens, the sea, even the mass of the sun and the beauty of the moon, the swarm of stars that crowns the universe, cities of various sorts and fortunes - what practitioner of arts dSmiourgos of this sort can you find more skilled technikoteros than he?

See Moles Zeitlin For Dio's Pheidias, Hephaestus' fabrication of Achilles' shield was invoked to defend the sculptor's need to resort to earthly materials in the manufacture of his own divine image. Likewise, as we have seen, Philostratus' Apollonius of Tyana mentions it in reference to the won- drous votive masterpiece, dedicated by Porus in India. The Stoics trans- lated the artefact into a grandiose allegory of cosmic creation itself, with each element given symbolic value,52 while Lucian mischievously reverses direction from allegory to the opposite extreme of hyperreality, when he suggests in the Icaromenippus 16 that a bird's eye view of the world will reveal a physical topography, 'whose physical features were just like what Homer says was on the shield'.

But despite its assignment in the rhetorical handbooks under the rubric of ecphrasis to the category of mere hop- lopoiia making of weapons , the shield served as a regular, even prover- bial, reference to express the summit of artistry, and is granted its own detailed description in one of the Imagines of the younger Philostratus The same compliment is offered by Lucian perhaps some sixty years later, in the first of his two matching dialogues.

Paideia and Performance, IV. Rhetoric and Rhetoricians, V. Literature and Culture, VI.

Philosophy and Philosophers, and VII. Religion and Religious Literature , 43 chapters, and over pages, this volume constitutes an impressive testimony to the breadth, depth, and vivacity of contemporary research in the field. As is only natural, the quality of the single contributions varies considerably, but most of them are competent summaries of the state of the question, and many present some original research as well. For example, in ch. In less than twenty pages, Susan P. Mattern provides an astonishingly complete and coherent portrait of the towering and multi-faceted figure of Galen in ch.

There is one critical problem with the Oxford Handbook of the Second Sophistic , however: What is this Second Sophistic that it purports to be about? The nearly entries in their book stretch without interruption from the first century BCE to the seventh century CE.

This dubious terminology, however, did not deter Graham Anderson from writing The Second Sophistic London , the first book to feature the expression so prominently as its main title. The Oxford Handbook picks up this development and drives it to new extremes. Now, every literary and cultural phenomenon from the Greek and occasionally Roman part of the early empire and a few centuries before and after featuring some or none, as Pyrrhonism, pp.

Totally absent is the technical core of the matter, viz. Hermogenes of Tarsus, on whose works rhetorical teaching was based under the later empire, in Byzantium, and to a considerable degree even in early modern Europe, is afforded a scant two entries in the index and no chapter. This redefinition and inflation of the term have not escaped the attention of the editors and contributors—quite the contrary: Some contributors also admit that there is little sophistic about their specific topic.

In her treatment of imperial historiography, Sulochana R. Not surprisingly, the period is also considerably expanded chronologically. More often, such extensions take place tacitly through the inclusion of earlier or later material. Occasional attempts to sort out the conceptual mess remain halfhearted and ultimately fail. Was Horace, who recommended the same mix of prodesse and delectare , a Second Sophist, too? In most cases, however, contributors just nod at the problem in passing and then quickly get back to business.

Standards of production are as high as one expects from OUP. The erroneous repetition of a whole line in a citation p. The use of endnotes instead of footnotes is inconvenient. In sum, I warmly recommend the Oxford Handbook of the Second Sophistic to anyone looking for up-to-date information on a broad range of aspects of imperial literature and culture. However, the reader should be on guard against its tendency to lump all of these issues together under a heading that explains nothing and, worse, highlights certain fashionable facets in a way that detracts attention from the great amount of fundamental research that remains to be done in the field.