POTS OF HONEY AND DEAD PHILOSOPHERS: THE IDEAL OF ATHENS IN THE ROMAN EMPIRE

DISSERTATION

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for

the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate

School of The Ohio State University

By

Aaron Walter Wenzel, M.A.

Graduate Program in Greek and Latin

*****

The Ohio State University 2009

Dissertation Committee:

Professor Anthony Kaldellis, Adviser

Professor Tom Hawkins

Professor Richard Fletcher

Copyright by

Aaron Walter Wenzel

2009

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ABSTRACT

Athens was the most important cultural center of Greek antiquity and there have

been numerous histories written about ancient Athenian authors and about the city of

Athens. My work differs fundamentally from these in that it is an intellectual history in

which Athens is not the generator of this culture, but an object of this culture. In other

words, the literary culture to which Athens gave birth in turn made Athens into an icon

for that culture. Specifically, my work examines how during the second to fifth centuries

AD Athens came to denote not just a specific community but a larger idea that was

defined differently in the “culture wars” of late antiquity, whether as a symbol for Greek

culture as a whole, the glorious (and now-lost) classical past of Greece, a specific

philosophy, or (later) the errors of paganism.

“Athens” meant something different to everyone who invoked it as a symbol in

late antiquity. I have strategically chosen three case-studies which exemplify different

“axes of tension” which run through the debates over the meaning of “Athens.” The first

case-study looks at the differing views of Athens in two second-century figures, the

itinerant Roman emperor Hadrian and the Greek travel-writer Pausanias. Hadrian

attempted to establish Athens as a kind of cultural capital of the eastern Mediterranean,

but a capital which served as a proclamation of Roman imperial power. Pausanias, on the

other hand, used Athens as a way to remember Greece’s pre-Roman past and so maintain

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a sense of Greek identity which had no reference to the Roman empire. This chapter,

then, looks at two different positive evaluations of Athens as a cultural symbol, but a

symbol caught between Roman imperial power and Greek self-definition. The second

case-study focuses on the early third-century writer Philostratos, who displays a tension

between a localized vision of Greek culture based on Athens and a cosmopolitan,

universalized vision of that culture with no specific center. This chapter, therefore,

highlights debates over how and whether Greek culture should be based on the specific

locale of Athens or not, a debate which had been in existence since the time of Alexander

the Great. The final case-study looks at criticisms of Athens by an orator and a

philosopher: Libanios and Synesios, who postulated alternatives to a culture based on

Athens, namely the ideals associated with the cities of Alexandria and Antioch. This

chapter explores the objections to the utility of the ideal Athens. Because I see the

symbolism of Athens as something that is constantly changing and being negotiated in

different periods and intellectual settings, I situate each author’s works in their larger

social and cultural context in order to understand the part he played in the ongoing

construction of “symbolic Athens.”

The creation of an ideal Athens is bound up with issues of Hellenism and Greek

culture. I argue that imperial-era Hellenism was not necessarily an abstract phenomenon

based solely on the Greek language and the canon of classical texts, an idea that has been

expostulated by numerous scholars over the last two decades. Instead, I believe that

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intellectuals frequently grounded their Hellenism in the geographical locale of Athens,

the home of the texts they read so ardently. More importantly, I argue that the debates

over Athens’ cultural importance demonstrate that Hellenism was never a unified cultural

paradigm. Rather, Hellenism was internally divided and its adherents debated among

themselves as to its very definition and essence. These tensions inherent in Hellenism

were inherited by post-classical periods, up to and including our own, continually

informing how we view the ancient world. Indeed, my own dissertation itself is caught up

in this on-going process of the objectification of Athens.

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Dedicated to my parents

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank Anthony Kaldellis, who has guided this project since its

inception over lunch four years ago. Along the way, he has offered invaluable advice and

astute criticisms, pushed me to write clearly and forcefully, and shaped my thinking

about this topic and about the ancient world more generally in countless ways. This

dissertation would not have been possible without his gracious and encouraging feedback

and support. Thanks, too, to Tom Hawkins and Richard Fletcher for their continuous

comments and suggestions for improvement. The diverse viewpoints they have brought

to bear on this project have challenged me to think critically about my arguments and

conclusions. I am certain that this is a stronger dissertation because of that.

I would also like to thank those who have heard and responded to parts of this

dissertation: audiences at the annual meetings of CAMWS and the APA and, more

importantly, the faculty and graduate students in the Department of Greek and Latin at

The Ohio State University. Special thanks is due to my wonderful friends and colleagues

Chris Bungard, Kristen Gentile, and Yasuko Taoka. They have often shared in my joys

and frustrations as this project has progressed and I am grateful for their friendship along

the way.

There are also a number of people I would like to thank who did not have a direct

bearing on this project but who have still contributed by (perhaps unknowingly) laying its

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foundations. Thanks to Art Robson and Kosta Hadavas for helping me to unlock the door

to the ancient world and for inspiring me to become a classicist. Thanks to Michael

DeHaven, Robert Kiely, and Martha Regalis for first showing me just how fascinating the

Greeks and Romans can be. I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to my entire family for

their years of love and encouragement. I would particularly like to thank my parents for

instilling in me a life-long love of learning and an appreciation for the value of education

and for their unflagging support as I pursued a career in something as arcane as Greek

and Latin. Finally, I would like to thank Lisa Bevevino. Without her patience, kindness,

and love, the two years it took to write this dissertation would have been nearly

unbearable.

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VITA

September 2, 1980…………………Born – Freeport, Illinois 2003 ……………………………….B.A., Classical Philology and Anthropology,

Beloit College

2005 ………………………………M.A., Greek and Latin, The Ohio State University 2003-present……………………….Graduate Teaching Associate, The Ohio State University

FIELDS OF STUDY

Major Field: Greek and Latin

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TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Abstract…………………………………………………………………………………ii Dedication………………………………………………………………………… …....v Acknowledgments……………………………………………………………………...vi Vita………………………………………………………………………………….....viii Table of Contents………………………………………………………………….........ix List of Abbreviations……………………………………………………………………x Chapters: 1. Introduction…………………………………………………………………………..1 2. Arches and Gateways: Hadrian and Pausanias in Athens………………………......18 3. Athens is Everywhere: Philostratos’ Athens and Cosmopolitan Hellenism………..84 4. Old Soldiers and Pots of Honey: The Critics of Athens…………………………...153 5. Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………190 Bibliography………………………………………………………………………….207

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LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

The following abbreviations have been used in the body of the text or in the footnotes: Ail. Arist. Panath. Ailios Aristeides, Panathenaikos Basil Caes. Basil of Caesarea Dam. Phil. Hist. Damaskios, Philosophical History De praescr. haer. De praescriptione haereticorum Dom. Domitianus Ep. Epistle Eun. VPS Eunapios, Vitae Philosophorum et Sophistarum Greg. Naz. Gregory of Nazianzos HA, VAC Historia Augusta, Vita Antonini Caracalli HA, VAE Historia Augusta, Vita Antonini Elagabali HA, VAS Historia Augusta, Vita Alexandri Severi HA, VH Historia Augusta, Vita Hadriani HA, VS Historia Augusta, Vita Severi Hdt. Herodotos, Histories Him. Himerios Isok. Isokrates Jul. Julian Lib. Libanios Or. Oration Paus. Peri. Pausanias, Periegesis Phil. VA Philostratos, Vita Apollonii Phil. VS Philostratos, Vitae Sophistarum Plut. Plutarch [Plut.] Pseudo-Plutarch Syn. Synesios Tert. Tertullian Thuc. Thucydides, Histories

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CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

The fifth-century BC Greek historian Thucydides once compared the cities of

Athens and Sparta by asking his readers to engage in a thought experiment. “Suppose,”

he says,

that Sparta were to be deserted and that only the temples and the foundations of buildings remained. I think that, after much time passed, future generations would find it very hard to believe that it was as powerful as it was reported to be. ... Since the city is not regularly planned and does not contain extravagant temples and buildings, but is composed of villages in the ancient custom of Greece, its appearance would be somewhat lacking. But if the same thing happened to Athens, I think that one would conjecture from its mere external appearance that it had been twice as powerful as it really was.1

The conclusion Thucydides draws from this experiment is that “we should not consider

the appearance of a city rather than its power.”2 History has proven Thucydides right:

what little remains of Sparta today belies its ancient importance. In contrast, the classical

remains on the Athenian Akropolis give modern visitors an impression of an ancient city

with long-lasting power and resources, when in reality the monuments were built over the

1 Thucy. I.10.2: Λακεδαιµονίων γὰρ εἰ ἡ πόλις ἐρηµωθείη, λειφθείη δὲ τά τε ἱερὰ καὶ τῆς κατασκευῆς τὰ ἐδάφη, πολλὴν ἂν οἶµαι ἀπιστίαν τῆς δυνάµεως προελθόντος πολλοῦ χρόνου τοῖς ἔπειτα πρὸς τὸ κλέος αὐτῶν εἶναι ... οὔτε ξυνοικισθείσης πόλεως οὔτε ἱεροῖς καὶ κατασκευαῖς πολυτελέσι χρησαµένης, κατὰ κώµας δὲ τῷ παλαιῷ τῆς Ἑλλάδος τρόπῳ οἰκισθείσης, φαίνοιτ’ ἂν ὑποδεεστέρα, Ἀθηναίων δὲ τὸ αὐτὸ τοῦτο παθόντων διπλασίαν ἂν τὴν δύναµιν εἰκάζεσθαι ἀπὸ τῆς φανερᾶς ὄψεως τῆς πόλεως ἢ ἔστιν. All translations throughout this work are my own unless otherwise noted.

2 Thuc. I.10.3: οὐδὲ τὰς ὄψεις τῶν πόλεων µᾶλλον σκοπεῖν ἢ τὰς δυνάµεις.

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course of the few decades before Athens lost its empire, wealth, and military power in the

Peloponnesian War. Yet in another way, Athens continues to have power – the power it

has acquired over the centuries as a cultural symbol for a range of ideas, such as “the

birthplace of democracy,” “the home of philosophy,” “the excesses of paganism,” “the

glorious (and now-lost) classical Greek past,” to name a few. In the fifth century BC,

Perikles (according to Thucydides) called Athens the “school of Greece,” in the second

century AD, Ailios Aristeides said that Athens was the “common hearth of the human

race,” and in the fourth century AD, Gregory of Nazianzos described it as “golden” and

“the patroness of all good things.” The range of ideas that the name “Athens” can

represent are still continually debated, often contradictory, and always changing. In the

modern world, Athens has alternately been conceived of as the purest example of a

participatory democracy with a political engaged citizenry; as an impersonal society not

terribly different from a community in today’s globalized world; and as a repressive

society built on widespread slavery and the denial of female rights. This dissertation will

tell one part of the on-going story of Athens’ changing role as a symbol, focusing

specifically on the texts of five literary authors and the activities of one emperor, all of

whom date to the second through fifth centuries AD.

To be sure, the cultural resonance and power Athens maintains is a result of its

entire “external appearance,” not just its buildings, but the literature, philosophy, and

artwork produced in the city, and the reputation the city acquired for these various

activities. Indeed, were Thucydides writing today, he might very well say that we should

consider the power given to a city by its appearance. As the most important cultural

center of Greek antiquity, there have been numerous histories written about the

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“appearance” of Athens, that is, about ancient Athenian authors, about the city of Athens,

about its institutions, and about the culture to which it gave birth.3 My work differs

fundamentally from these in that I seek to write an intellectual history in which Athens is

not the generator of this culture, but an object of this culture, specifically an object of

literary and ideological debate. In other words, the literary culture to which Athens gave

birth in turn made Athens into an icon for that culture, one whose meaning and uses

proved to be highly malleable and debatable. In this sense, the following dissertation is

about the ideologies that accrue to “Athens” and about the part “Athens” played as a

contested cultural site in the Roman empire.

Surprisingly, the history of this phenomenon has not yet been written. Nicole

Loraux has written (at length and rather densely) that the Athens of the funeral orations

of statesmen like Perikles, Demosthenes, Lysias, and Hypereides was not reflective of

historical reality.4 Rather, Athens was presented as an ideal democracy which her citizens

should strive to live up to. Robert Lamberton has examined the way in which Plutarch

formulated Athens as a cultural ideal vis-à-vis Rome.5 Alfred Breitenbach has written

about the ways in which the third- and fourth-century Church Fathers Eusebios of

Caesarea, Gregory of Nazianzos, Gregory of Nyssa, and Basil of Caesarea depicted

Athens and what it represented.6 Along the way, he provides an extremely brief sketch of

the “image of Athens” in the early Roman empire, as well as a short overview of Michael

3 To name just a few: Cohen (2000), Anderson (2003), Boedeker and Raaflaub (1998), Ober (1989), Hurwit

(2004), Neils (1992), Winkler and Zeitlin (1990), Watts (2006), Camp (2001), Davidson (1997).

4 Loraux (1986).

5 Lamberton (2001) 61-69.

6 Breitenbach (2003).

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Choniates’ twelfth-century AD portrayal of Athens.7 Marco di Branco has used literary

texts to elucidate the cultural life of Athens from the second to sixth centuries AD. Yet he

is less concerned with the various ideal Athenses that these texts create and more

concerned with what these texts can tell us about the real Athens of the later Roman

empire, since he is writing as a historian of the city itself.8 These books look at different

problems and different aspects of the Athenian saga than my work. I have chosen to focus

on different ideological “axes of tension” on which the symbol of Athens was inscribed.

In a broader sense, few scholars have studied the process whereby ancient cities

acquired the status of cultural icons and came to stand for larger ideas. Elizabeth Rawson

and E.N. Tigerstedt have both examined the idea of Sparta from the sixth century BC to

the nineteenth century AD and in classical antiquity, respectively.9 These are rather

superficial books with little real analysis of the contested and changing meaning of Sparta

as an ideal. Unlike Rawson or Tigerstedt, I am not interested in producing a catalog of

occurrences of Athens as a symbol in a host of authors. Rather, I seek to highlight

specific ideological tensions that underlie the ways in which authors in a more coherent

historical period (the Roman empire of the second to fifth centuries AD) write about

Athens as a symbol.

Furthermore, Athens as an ideal was bound up at all times with broader issues of

Hellenism, Greek identity, and Greek culture after the end of the fourth century BC. Most

scholarship on these topics has tended to view Hellenism as an abstract and fairly

7 Roman period: Breitenbach (2003) 19-20; Choniates: Breitenbach (2003) 261-286.

8 Di Branco (2006).

9 Rawson (1969); Tigerstedt (1965-1978).

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uniform phenomenon, based on the Greek language and the canon of classical texts and

accessible to anyone who could read those texts.10 While the emphasis on language and

on the literary canon were certainly distinctive aspects of ancient Hellenism, my work

will stress the important and evolving role played by constructions of “Athens” within

broader versions of Hellenism. In other words, ancient conceptions of Hellenism were

based not only on a collection of mostly Athenian texts from the fifth and fourth centuries

BC. They were also based on different visions (some positive, some negative) of an

imaginary, ideal Athens. These “Athenses,” in turn, were not stable but were constantly

being debated and altered, meaning the Hellenism based on them was also continually

being re-defined. Modern scholars also have tended to view Hellenism as a more or less

unified system that competed with other paradigms, for instance, Rome, Christianity, or

eastern cultures. Recently, though, there has been a growing awareness of the

complexities of Hellenism, particularly in the Roman empire. This ideology was

internally divided, constantly being reinvented, and its adherents debated among

themselves as to the very definition and essence of what it meant to be Greek.11 My

dissertation has identified one of these inner articulations and fractures: the arguments

over the meaning and symbolism of Athens in particular, which alternated between local

and universal, positive and negative, ancient and “modern” commitments.

Athens was, not, of course, the only city or region which was objectified in

antiquity as an ideological construct. As Tigerstedt has demonstrated, Sparta was one.

For example, Plato idealizes Sparta as the home of the best political system and he uses 10 See, for instance, Swain (1996) and Whitmarsh (2001).

11 See, among others, Kaldellis (2007), König (2005) and (2007), König and Whitmarsh (2007), and Whitmarsh (2007).

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Sparta as a way to criticize what he sees as the failings of Athenian democracy. By the

time of the Roman empire, however, “Sparta” had largely fallen out of use as an ideal.

Another ideal was Rome itself, which many Romans took to signify manly martial virtue

in contrast to the decadent luxury of the Greeks.12 “Rome” could also stand for a peaceful

and inclusive empire which surpassed any that had gone before. This is an ideal

formulated by Ailios Aristeides in the second century AD in his encomium of Rome.13 In

the fourth and fifth centuries, Saint Augustine sees “Rome” as a symbol of the failings of

human achievements and opposes this symbol with “Jerusalem,” representing what is

possible for humans who know Christ. Indeed, we will see that for Christians,

“Jerusalem” was a symbol which was could be invoked to counter-act the ideal

“Athens.”14

A project involving changing and debated cultural ideals such as these is nearly

infinitely extendible in temporal scope and in depth. To write a comprehensive history of

the ideal of Athens would be next to impossible. It has therefore been necessary to restrict

the length of the historical period and the number of texts which this dissertation

examines. Because there has already been an (admittedly limited) amount of scholarly

work on the ideal of Athens in the fifth and fourth centuries BC and in the writings of the

Church Fathers of the fourth century and because of an emerging scholarly recognition of

the inherent divisions of the ideology of Hellenism under the Roman empire, I have

12 See, for instance, Cato’s (admittedly complicated) postulation of the relationship between “Rome” and

“Greece” in Plutarch’s Life of Cato the Elder and in Gruen (1992) 52-83. For a satirical diatribe against the detrimental effects Greeks have had on Rome, see Juvenal, Satire I.3.58-125.

13 Ail. Arist. Or. 62.

14 Egypt, too, was an ideological construct, although not one in direct competition with Athens. See Vasunia (2001).

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elected to focus my project on six strategically-chosen figures from the second, third, and

fourth centuries AD. This study may appear to be chronological, but that is not its

overriding organizational principle. A chronological appearance was not resisted, but it

was generated incidentally. Instead, I have chosen to organize my work around these

figures because I believe they illustrate three “axes of tension” that run through the

meaning and deployment of “Athens.” The first axis, in Chapter 2, is an ideal Athens

claimed by both Roman power and Greek culture. This axis is exemplified by the second-

century emperor Hadrian and the travel-writer Pausanias. With these two figures, we see

a Hellenism claimed both by a representative of the Roman imperial administration to

further that administration’s ideology of uniting the culturally Greek provinces and by a

Greek author to promote a sense of Greek identity which is independent of Roman rule.

This axis is further complicated by the fact that Hadrian and Pausanias were not purely

“Roman” and “Greek,” as indeed, nobody in this period was. Hadrian, although emperor

of Rome, was born into a family of Spanish extraction, while Pausanias, a native Greek-

speaker living in the Roman empire, was from Lydia in Asia Minor, an area that had been

culturally Greek for centuries, but not one that a fifth-century BC Athenian would

necessarily have considered “Greek.” Even so, these two men each created a different

positive sense of the ideal Athens and attempted to use that ideal to achieve different (and

in some ways contradictory) purposes. This chapter, then, examines the imperial

benefactions Hadrian bestowed on Athens and Pausanias’ highly selective portrayal of

Athens in his Periegesis to uncover two different ideal “Athenses” and the constructions

of Hellenism they represented.

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The second axis (Chapter 3) is exemplified by the third-century author

Philostratos and consists and is defined by the tension between a local Hellenism

(symbolized by Athens) vs. a cosmopolitan Hellenism (which needed no symbolic locale

because it was universalizing). To be sure, this tension had existed (in one form or

another) since the time of Alexander the Great, when Greek language and culture had

spread from its home in mainland Greece throughout the eastern Mediterranean world.

Intellectuals had to grapple with the question of how much of Hellenism should be

grounded in “Athens” (the city which gave birth to much of the literature they read so

ardently), that is, how “Athenocentric” it should be, and how much should be located in

the more universal notions of language and behavior (which were not tied to a specific

locale but were common to all who called themselves “Greeks”). But with Philostratos,

this tension of local/universal is turned to a new purpose particular to his own time:

counteracting a growing set of oriental ideologies, including the rise of Christianity and

the interest in and promotion of eastern religious cults by the ruling Severan dynasty.

Philostratos explores the definition and composition of Hellenism throughout his corpus.

As König has argued, Philostratos’ Gymnastikos and Heroikos can be also be read as part

of his “wider project of questioning exactly how Hellenic tradition as a whole should be

treated and defined in the present day.”15 Nevertheless, I have chosen in this chapter to

examine only two of Philostratos’ works, the Lives of the Sophists and the Life of

Apollonios of Tyana, because of their explicit references to Athens, which allows for the

exploration of the local/universal dynamic with reference to Athens specifically.

15 König (2005) 337-338. See König (2007) for a shorter, but largely similar version, of this thesis.

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The final tension, described in Chapter 4, is over possible alternatives to Athens

as a symbol of Hellenism and, indeed, over the usefulness of Athens as a symbol at all.

This tension can be found in the writings of two critics of the ideal of Athens: the fourth-

century rhetor Libanios and the fourth- and fifth-century philosopher-bishop Synesios.

Both of these figures were dissatisfied with “Athens” and sought to attack it, but for

different reasons. Libanios studied in Athens as a young man and hated his time there.

Upon his return to his native Antioch, he founded a school of rhetoric which put him in

direct competition with Athens for the attraction and retention of students. In his

Autobiographical Oration and his Antiochene Oration, Libanios denigrated Athens as a

symbol of rhetorical learning and, in its place, elevated Antioch, as part of his own

personal and institutional rivalry with the Athenian schools. Synesios, a native of

Cyrenaica who studied philosophy in Alexandria, disliked the snobbishness and holier-

than-thou attitude he encountered in the graduates of Athens’ philosophical schools. In

two letters written to his brother, Synesios mocks their pretentiousness, points out the

bankruptcy of the ideal Athens, and praises Alexandria (the home of his teacher, Hypatia)

instead. His dislike of Athens is based on a sense that real philosophers are now trained in

Alexandria, not Athens.

In focusing on these five figures, I will attempt to situate their works within their

larger social and cultural contexts in order to understand the part each author played in

the evolution of the symbolic Athens. I will always begin with a close examination of the

text, but will ask of it several larger questions. For instance, do the cultural and

intellectual currents of the period help explain why each author presents Athens the way

he does? To what earlier texts (if any) is he responding or alluding, and what can this tell

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us about his place in the negotiation of Athens’ symbolism? Because many of the

relevant texts are rhetorical works, I will also have to ask questions such as, to whom was

this text addressed, and why? What was its performative context? What role did the

symbolism of Athens play in the larger rhetorical strategy of the text? These questions

will help me get beyond simply stating that an author talks about Athens in a certain way,

and will help me answer the more important question of why an author talks about

Athens the way he does. I want to stress at the outset that the way I am reading these texts

differs from the way a historian might. I am not using these sources to look for the

information they might provide as to what Athens was “really” like. Instead, I am reading

these texts as a cultural or intellectual historian seeking to trace the evolution of an image

or an ideal. Therefore, the texts themselves, not the information they may contain, are my

primary object of analysis.

It is interesting to note that none of the five individuals on whom this dissertation

concentrates was born in Athens (although Philostratos was born on Lemnos, an island

some 150 miles from Athens which was technically part of Athenian territory). All of

them were outsiders who visited Athens. In fact, much of the history of the ideal Athens

can be written as an account of non-Athenians who are enamored with the city’s classical

past, recognize a gap between that past and its post-classical condition. They seek either

to create an ideal Athens to fill that gap or to criticize contemporary Athens as being

unworthy of its ancient glory, in part because they have alternatives to propose that

would play the role of Athens in new, competing ideologies.

The first chapter, however, in this on-going history of the ideal Athens, the

classical era, naturally involves mostly Athenians. In Perikles’ funeral oration (as

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reported by Thucydides), he famously calls Athens the “school of Greece,” making the

city a symbol for the kind of culture and lifestyle which all Greeks should emulate, in

other words, a symbol of Hellenism. Most has pointed out that by using this phrase in a

funeral oration for those Athenians who fell in battle agains the Spartans, Perikles

skillfully outflanked the Spartans. They might be able to instruct Greece (including

Athens) in military affairs, but Athens can instruct Greece in cultural matters.16 Political

leaders such as Demosthenes and Hypereides attempted in their funeral orations to sketch

out an “imaginary” Athens, an ideal that its citizens should strive to attain, while Plato’s

mock-epitaphios, the Menexenos, playfully subverts this ideal. In his Panegyrikos,

Isokrates makes Athens into the fount of Greek culture, saying that the city “has made the

name ‘Greek’ refer not to a race, but a way of thinking and those men are called ‘Greeks’

who have a share of our culture rather than our common nature.”17 Like Perikles,

Isokrates praises Athens as an instructor of culture, but Isokrates goes beyond Perikles by

having Athens instruct not just Greeks but the entire world, thereby making them Greek.

Just as Perikles had a political goal with his formulation of Athens as the “school of

Greece,” so too Isokrates had a personal and professional stake in his notion of Athens as

the teacher of the world. After all, Isokrates was a teacher of rhetoric who wanted to

attract students from throughout Greece to his Athenian school. These formulations of

16 Most (2006: 379-382).

17 Isok. Panegyrikos 50: τὸ τῶν Ἑλλήνων ὄνοµα πεποίηκεν µηκέτι τοῦ γένους, ἀλλὰ τῆς διανοίας δοκεῖν εἶναι, καὶ µᾶλλον Ἕλληνας καλεῖσθαι τοὺς τῆς παιδεύσεως τῆς ἡµετέρας ἢ τοὺς τῆς κοινῆς φύσεως µετέχοντας.

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Athens as a symbol of Hellenism, combined with the vast amount of literature and

philosophy – paideia - produced by Athenians in the classical period, laid the foundation

for later articulations of the ideal of Athens.

After the fourth century BC, there is a significant gap in the history of the

representations of Athens because of the scarcity of specific references to this ideal in the

extant literature. While it would be difficult to write a history of the ideal Athens in the

Hellenistic age, a history could be written regarding the views of Alexandrian

intellectuals towards the Athenian cultural heritage of which they were the heirs and

guardians. Such a history would undoubtedly find a tension between local, Athenian

Hellenism and cosmopolitan, universal Hellenism similar to what we find in Philostratos.

Along the same lines, a history could be composed of constructions of Athens by Romans

of the late republic (focusing on figures such as Cicero, Cornelius Nepos, and Livy) and

early empire as a symbol of culture and learning, in contradistinction to Rome, a symbol

of political and military power. A Roman-centric history would probably reveal that

Roman intellectuals concentrated intently on Athens’ classical past and denigrated or

ignored its contemporary present under Roman rule.

It is not until the second century AD, however, that we again find a wealth of

depictions of Athens in Greek literature. To reiterate, my study must of necessity be

restrictive and selective. Among the second century figures I have left out is Plutarch

who, in his Lives, conceived of Athens as a counterweight to Rome. As Lamberton has

argued, in Plutarch’s biographies, “Greek (and principally Athenian) men of action are

juxtaposed with Roman men of action.” Through this arrangement, Plutarch re-imagined

Athens “in a position analogous to that of Rome in the empire,” that is, “Athens was

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moved to the center of the Greek world to mirror Rome, the center of empire.”18 Lucian,

in his Fisherman, viewed it as a modern city full of philosophers who fall short of their

ancient counterparts. For Lucian, contemporary philosophers cannot live up to the

reputation of their classical ancestors and thus degrade Athens’ reputation as the

birthplace of philosophy, an idea we will see in the works of Philostratos and Synesios.

Ailios Aristeides used Athens as the subject of an encomium, drawing upon the example

of Isokrates to praise Athens’ history and its role as the foundation of Greek culture.

Unlike Isokrates, however, Aristeides does not use his speech to further an immediate

political purpose. Isokrates’ Panegyrikos was meant to convince the Athenians (and other

Greeks only incidentally) of their right to lead an expedition of Greeks against the

Persians. Aristeides is content to praise Athens’ past glories and the paideia to which it

gave birth and which now extends throughout the eastern Mediterranean, but there is little

for Aristeides to say about Athens as a contemporary political force.

All of these authors are engaged in a similar axis of tension, Athens between past

and present, which necessarily means Athens between classical Greece and contemporary

Rome. In traditional scholarship, this second-century tension is often implicitly

formulated as “Greek culture” vs. “Roman power.”19 Scholars have increasingly

recognized, however, that this dichotomy is overly simplistic.20 Indeed, an examination

of “Athens” in authors such as Aristeides and Plutarch would, I believe, contribute to de-

stabilizing the flawed Greek culture/Roman power dynamic. Aristeides, for instance,

18 Lamberton (2001) 68-69.

19 For example, Swain (1996).

20 See, for instance, Whitmarsh (2001).

14

spends the bulk of his Panathenaikos praising Athens’ military accomplishments from its

legendary protection of the children of Herakles down to their fourth-century BC

resistance of Philip, the father of Alexander the Great. Plutarch wrote a short treatise

arguing that the ancient Athenians were more famous for their deeds in war than their

accomplishments in literature, oratory, and philosophy. The two men’s views of Athens

are further complicated by their relationships with “Roman power.” Plutarch was friends

with several influential Roman politicians, while Aristeides composed an effusive

encomium of Rome and, judging by his tria nomina, he was most likely a Roman citizen.

The various imaginary “Athenses” of the second century AD, then, can help add

complexity and nuance to scholarly views of the Greece-Rome relationship of this period.

Another tension which I have been compelled to touch on only briefly is that

between Christians and pagans. In the late second and early third centuries AD, the Latin

theologian, Tertullian, famously asked “What indeed does Athens have to do with

Jerusalem?”21 The implied answer is “nothing” and, indeed, Tertullian uses the story of

the apostle Paul’s time in Athens to make the city into a symbol of a danguerous pagan

philosophy. Christians must reject “Athens” and philosophy lest they be led astray from

their Christian beliefs.22 In the fourth century, pagans such as the emperor Julian

continued to imagine an Athens which was founded on the pagan glories of its classical

past. In his Letter to the Boule and Demos of Athens of 361 AD, he appeals to an ideal

Athens to defend his war against Constantius. He says that the Athenians could decide on

the justness of his cause because “it is not easy to find an entire demos and city except for

21 Tert. De praescriptione haereticorum 7.9.

22 Paul’s visit to Athens is described in Acts 17:16-34.

15

yours who are lovers of just words and deeds.”23 In contrast to Julian stands the Church

Father Gregory of Nazianzos, who spent ten happy years studying in Athens, from 348 to

358 AD. In his funeral oration for Basil of Caesarea, Gregory refers to Athens as “the

golden” and as a city which was for him “a patroness of good things.”24 At the same time,

however, Gregory had to contend with the lure of paganism. He says that while Athens

was “rich in evil riches – idols – more than the rest of Greece,” he was “not damaged by

them” because he “had closed up and fortified [his] mind.”25 Gregory, then, sought to

sanitize the ideal Athens and the pagan learning it represented in order to make it safe for

his fellow Christians.

The story of the ideal of Athens, of course, does not end with the end of classical

antiquity, but continues through the Byzantine period. For instance, the classically trained

Michael Choniates became bishop of Athens in 1182.26 Within a few years, he wrote a

letter to Demetrios Drimys, the former governor of Hellas and the Peloponnese who was

(at the time of the letter) living in Constantinople. In this letter, Choniates articulates his

ideal Athens which was nothing like the real Athens he found up on his arrival.

Contemporary Athens no longer possessed renowned philosophers and political leaders

as it did in classical times. Choniates says that he sits alone on the Acopolis (the

Parthenon was his episcopal church) singing to himself and is answered only by echoes.

23 Jul. Letter to the Boule and Demos of Athens 269B: δῆµον δὲ ὅλον καὶ πόλιν ἐραστὰς ἔργων καὶ λόγων διακαίςν ἔξω τῆς παρ’ὑµῖν οὐ ῥᾴδιον εὑρεῖν.

24 Greg. Naz. Or. 43.14: ...Ἀθήνας τὰς χρυσᾶς ὄντως ἐµοὶ καὶ τῶν καλῶν προξένους εἴπερ τινί.

25 Greg. Naz. Or. 43.21: καὶ γὰρ πλουτοῦσι τὸν κακὸν πλοῦτον εἴδωλα µᾶλλον τῆς ἄλλης Ἑλλάδος... Ἡµῖν δ’οὐδεµία παρὰ τούτων ζηµία, τὴν διάνοιαν πεπυκνωµένοις καὶ πεφραγµένοις.

26 Kaldellis (2009) 145.

16

In the home of paideia, Choniates worries that he may descend into barbarism.27 Yet

Athens in his period was still a thriving town, not the desolate wasteland Choniates

describes.28 The ruins on which Choniates selectively focused symbolized “all that was

good about ancient Greece and all that was wrong with his fellow Romans, a symbol of

decline and a standing reproach of their inadequacies.”29 For Choniates, then, Athens was

a symbol with which he could lament the decline of the Byzantine Empire from its

former glory.30

The symbolic Athens still has resonances in the modern period. At the end of

Greece’s War of Independence against the Ottomans in 1830, the provisional capital of

the new nation was in Nafplion, a thriving commercial city. In 1834, the capital was

officially transferred to Athens, which at the time was a small provincial town with a

population of only 12,000. This decision to locate the capital in Athens (and the

subsequent moves to protect the archaeological remains of the city) was largely the result

of the symbolic importance attached to the city by the Bavarian royal family, by

classicizing Europeans, and by the Greeks themselves. The Bavarians and Europeans saw

Athens as the birthplace of Western civilization and it seemed natural that Greece’s

capital should be placed there. Many Greeks, meanwhile, viewed “Athens” and its

ancient accomplishments as a foundation of modern Greek ethnic identity, an identity

27 Kaldellis (2007) 318-319 on Michael Choniates, Address to the Praitor Demetrios Drimys 1-3.

28 Travlos (1993) 151, 160-162.

29 Kaldellis (2007) 334.

30 See Kaldellis (2009) 145-149 for how Choniates consoled himself with his devotion to the Parthenon.

17

which needed to be articulated and celebrated in order to forge a cohesive sense of

national unity. Even in the eighteenth century, the ideal Athens could be re-described and

re-packaged to serve different ideological goals.31

In this history of the ever-changing and infinitely-malleable cultural symbolism of

Athens, we should, I think, remember Thucydides’ words about appearances and power,

but with a twist. The “external appearance” of Athens has made it seem much more than

twice as powerful as it actually was in the fifth century BC. Yet its “appearance” has

given it a different, longer-lasting kind of power: the power of an icon for a host of

cultural tensions and debates. This power has allowed the ideal Athens to be constantly

re-worked, re-packaged, and re-inscribed for 2500 years and it will no doubt continue to

be for centuries to come.

31 For the symbolic importance of Athens and its classical past in this period, see Bastéa (2000) 6-14, 36-

40, 100-104, 127-131. On the role of archaeology in the formation of the modern Greek state, see Peckham (2001) 115-126, 134-136.

18

CHAPTER 2

ARCHES AND GATEWAYS: HADRIAN AND PAUSANIAS IN ATHEN S

Introduction

In about 140 AD, Pausanias, one of the most well-traveled men of antiquity, visits

Athens, taking notes for his Periegesis, his guidebook to mainland Greece. He climbs to

the top of the Akropolis and approaches the Parthenon. After gazing at the pediments,

with its depictions of the contest between Athena and Poseidon on one end and of the

birth of Athena on the other, he enters the temple and his attention is immediately drawn

to Pheidias’ massive cult statue of Athena, “made of gold and ivory.” On her helmet are

images of the Sphinx and griffins, “on her chest the head of Medusa made in ivory,” in

one hand a statue of Nike and in the other a spear, a shield at her feet, with the serpent

Erichthonios curling about the base of the spear. But Pausanias abruptly stops his

narrative and writes, “There I know that the only imperial statue I saw was of Hadrian.”1

Inside the cella of the most famous temple of the most famous city of Greece, looking at

a statue some six hundred years old that hearkened back to the golden age of Perikles,

Pausanias was confronted by a reminder of the present: an image of the Roman emperor.2

1 Paus. Peri. I.24.7: ἐνταῦθα εἰκόνα ἰδὼν οἶδα Ἀδριανοῦ βασιλέως µόνου.

2 My recreation of Pausanias’ visit to the Parthenon is based on Paus. Peri. I.24.5-7.

19

While the statue of Hadrian does not survive, it is quite possible that it was similar

to the headless statue of Hadrian discovered in a drain pipe in the Athenian Agora in

1931.3 This statue depicts Hadrian in military garb, with his left arm upraised and his

right arm extended. The breastplate depicts Athena, crowned by a Nike on each side,

standing on top the she-wolf of Rome, who, in turn, is suckling Romulus and Remus.

Twenty statues of this type have been found throughout the eastern Mediterranean.4 This

widespread distribution, coupled with the fact that an example of this statue-type was

found in front of the west side of the Parthenon, makes it probable that a statue of

Hadrian with this kind of breastplate would have been placed inside the Parthenon.5 For

an observer like Pausanias, this type of statue would have had several ambivalent

resonances with the cult statue of Athena. Imagine it: in front of Pausanias stands

Pheidias’ massive statue of Athena, one of the most important symbols of the city of

Athens, itself the most important locus of Greek culture. To one side stands the smaller

statue of Hadrian, whose breastplate shows Athena (the goddess of Athens and of culture

in general) supported by the she-wolf, the symbol of Roman political and military power.

Such a statue would proclaim to a visitor like Pausanias that the political structure of the

Roman empire provides a necessary foundation for Greek culture.6 Yet Hadrian’s

breastplate can be read the opposite way too, that is, Athena and Greek culture has

3 While the statue itself does not survive, an inscribed base exists which may have come from this statue.

See below, p. 25 and n. 28. For the statue found in the Agora, Shear (1933) 181 and Gergel (2004) 371.

4 See Gergel (2004) 373-374 for the provenance of these statues, and 377-402 for a typology of the iconographic variations. I am much indebted to his excellent discussion.

5 The current whereabouts of the statue on the west side of the Parthenon’s exterior are unknown. See Gergel (2004) 396.

6 See Gergel (2004) 404-406 for an interpretation of this iconography and for a discussion of earlier (mostly flawed) scholarship on the matter.

20

overcome the wolf of Roman power (or at any rate stands higher than it) and thus is being

crowned by two winged Victories. This reading would emphasize the primacy of

Pheidias’ statue of Athena, a statue one could not help but see out of the corner of one’s

eye, no matter where one stood in the Parthenon.7 The ambiguous “placements” of Greek

culture and Roman power possibly represented in the symbolic center of Athens thus

demonstrate the varying conceptions of the symbolic importance of Athens – does Athens

require the support of Rome, or does it stand above Rome? This chapter will examine the

different, yet overwhelmingly positive, views of “Athens” held by the philhellenic

emperor Hadrian (who was the most powerful representation of the Roman imperial

administration) and the travel-writer and lover of classical Greece, Pausanias (who was

an inhabitant of the Roman empire and a native of the thoroughly Hellenized Asia

Minor).

Pausanias described Athens’ topography, particularly its temples and monuments

dating from before the Roman conquest, as one way to mark a specifically Greek cultural

identity. Even so, he could not help mentioning Hadrian in his description of Athens and

indeed, in his descriptions of other parts of Greece. It made sense for Pausanias to do so,

of course, since Hadrian, like Pausanias, also had a deep-seated affection for Greek

culture and both men saw Athens as central to their definitions of Hellenism. After all,

Hadrian’s building program attempted to refashion Athens into the city he wanted it to

be. It would have been difficult for Pausanias to ignore this and, in some ways, his

description of Athens is a description of Hadrian’s Athens. Unlike Pausanias, however,

7 Gergel (2004) does not address this possible reading.

21

Hadrian wanted to use Greek culture to solidify the ties between the provinces and the

imperial administration. I will briefly introduce the two men before turning to the very

different ways in which they valorized Athens as the capital of Hellenic culture.

Hadrian, Pausanias, and Hellenism in the Second Century AD

Hadrian and Pausanias were roughly contemporaries, their lives bracketing the so-called

Second Sophistic period. Hadrian was born in 76 and died in 138.8 We have no firm dates

for Pausanias, but thanks to a comment at V.1.2 stating that the city of Corinth was re-

founded 217 years ago (i.e., in 44 BC by Julius Caesar), we know that he was writing in

174 AD, and probably for a considerable time before that. Bowie argues, on other

internal evidence, that Pausanias was born around 110 and probably died not long after

completing his work around 180.9 The century between Hadrian’s birth and Pausanias’

death was, in many ways, the high point of the Roman empire. This period witnessed the

reigns of the so-called “five good emperors,” the internal stability their rule provided, the

greatest geographical expansion of the empire under Trajan, and the widespread cultural

and economic benefits of the pax Romana.10

Pausanias’ formative years fell during the reign of Hadrian. As Bowie has pointed

out, Hadrian’s philhellenic program may well have influenced Pausanias in his youth and

8 Birley (1997) 10, 300.

9 Bowie (2001) 23, although for an argument that Pausanias was born closer to 115, see Habicht (1985) 12.

10 Jones (1964) 3-14. See also Gordon (1996: 8-42) for an excellent summary of the intellectual currents of this time.

22

“played a part in creating his personal perspective,” as reflected in his Periegesis.11

Indeed, in his description of Greece, Pausanias mentions Hadrian more than any other

emperor as well as his benefactions to Greek cities and conveys a consistently favorable

impression of him. One scholar has even gone so far as to say that for Pausanias “Hadrian

represented the zenith of prosperity, material and cultural,” for Greece.12

The families of both men came from fairly humble towns, far from the centers of

power and culture. Hadrian, while born in Rome, was the son of a Roman senator from

Italica in Spain, while Pausanias’ home town was most likely Magnesia ad Sipylum in

Lydia.13 Yet neither man is commonly associated with his rather obscure family home:

Hadrian, after all, became emperor of Rome, while Pausanias’ only work is a lengthy,

detailed description of mainland Greece. As one might expect of men who are not

normally associated with their home cities, both Hadrian and Pausanias traveled

extensively - indeed, Garzetti even speculates that Pausanias’ decision to compose a

guidebook to Greece was inspired by Hadrian’s travels.14 Hadrian spent about half of his

twenty-one-year reign outside of Rome and Italy.15 He made constant journeys

throughout the empire, touring at least thirty provinces and inspecting army outposts in

places as far afield as Britain, Gaul, North Africa, Greece, Syria, Asia Minor, Egypt, and

11 Bowie (2001) 23-24.

12 Arafat (1996) 215. For a discussion of Pausanias’ references to Hadrian, see Arafat (1996) 159-188 and 210-211.

13 Hadrian: Birley (1997) 10, on HA, VH, I.1-3; Pausanias: Habicht (1985) 13-15.

14 Garzetti (1974) 393.

15 Birley (1997) 1.

23

the Balkans.16 Similarly, Pausanias makes it clear from his writing that everything he

describes he has seen in person. Touring Attica, Boeotia, Phokis, and the Peloponnese

and taking copious notes on their monuments, statues, and rituals must have required an

extraordinary amount of time and effort on Pausanias’ part. Habicht estimates that

Pausanias spent twenty years traveling and writing, Bowie estimates fifteen years.17

Indeed, the very fact that Pausanias undertook such wide-spread travels also implies that

he came from a wealthy family. He would have needed a lot of money to travel not just

through Greece, but also to Italy, Egypt, and Palestine, places that he implies he visited in

his work.18 Similarly, Hadrian’s family too was wealthy. Hadrian’s father, Aelius

Hadrianus Afer, was a Roman senator, which implies that his family had substantial

assets in order to meet the property qualification for membership in the Senate.19

Throughout their travels, Hadrian and Pausanias were both interested in

monuments, Hadrian in building them, Pausanias in describing them. In Athens alone, for

instance, Hadrian completed the massive Temple of Olympian Zeus originally begun by

the Peisistratids over 600 years previously; built the so-called “Library of Hadrian” just

northwest of the Roman Agora; a new aqueduct for the city, which ended in an elaborate

cistern, and a bridge over the Kephisos; a gymnasium; a Pantheon, mentioned by

Pausanias and identified now as “a triple-naved building ca. fifty meters east of the

16 Thirty provinces: Birley (1997) 1; Britain and Gaul: 113-141; North Africa: 203-214; Greece: 175-188,

215-221, 262-266; Syria: 151-154, 226-234, 259; Asia Minor: 154-159, 162-172, 221-225, 260-262; Balkans: 159-161, 279-280; Egypt: 235-258. See also Kritsotakis (2008).

17 Habicht (1985) 11 (155 to 175 AD); Bowie (2001) 22-23 (165 to 180 AD).

18 Habicht (1985) 17.

19 Birley (1997) 13.

24

Roman Agora”; and a Temple of Hera and Zeus Panhellenios.20 Furthermore, Athens and

the eastern Mediterranean would have been littered with statues of and altars to Hadrian,

probably more than to any other emperor.21 Pausanias’ work, on the other hand, is, in a

way, a massive collection of the monuments and statues that he saw in the cities of the

Greek mainland. Nowhere is this better exemplified than in Book VI, the second of two

books on Eleia and Olympia. In the first two-thirds of this book, “Pausanias describes,

one by one, some two hundred statues of Olympic victors.”22 He also gathers together

stories about the monuments he sees and describes: who erected them, which artists

created them, to what god or goddess they were dedicated and why. Pausanias, then,

populated his text with statues and monuments reflecting the glory of the Greek past,

while Hadrian populated the eastern part of his empire with statues and monuments

reflecting the glory of himself and his reign.

Hadrian and Pausanias were particularly interested in religious monuments and,

indeed, this is a manifestation of their more general interest in Greek religious practices.

Hadrian was not content to merely build temples, he sought to situate himself in Greek

religious life through the promotion of his own divinity as emperor. After 129, Hadrian

was frequently called “Hadrianos Sebastos Olympios” or even “Hadrianos Sebastos Zeus

Olympios.”23 He visited Ephesus in 129 and was honored there with a coin which

20 Boatwright (2000) 151-153 (Olympieion); 154-157 (Library); 167-168 (aqueduct and bridge); 168-169

(gymnasium); 169-170 (Pantheon), quotation from 169; 170-171 (Temple of Hera and Zeus Panhellenios).

21 Statues: Hannestad (1986) 198; altars: see below, n. 26.

22 Habicht (1985) 149 on Paus. Peri. VI.1.1-18.7. See König (2005: 186-204) for the way Pausanias “orders the Olympics” through his catalog of statues and through the structure of his account of Olympia.

23 Birley (1997) 220.

25

proclaims “Hadrianus Augustus cos. III p.p” on one side and on the other “Iovis

Olympius.”24 Shortly afterward, he traveled to Miletos, where he again was called

“Olympian.”25 This title is not found only on coins. Benjamin has identified 95 altars to

Hadrian in Athens and another 174 scattered throughout mainland Greece, the Aegean,

and Asia Minor.26 Of these, 86 contain the epithet “Olympios.”27 Raubitschek noted an

inscription from the Athenian Akropolis that refers to Hadrian as the son of Zeus

Eleutherios and thus, implicitly, as the brother of Athena, something that would hardly

fail to go unnoticed by Pausanias if, as Raubitschek believes, this inscription was on the

base of Hadrian’s statue erected inside the Parthenon.28 Hadrian proclaimed his divinity

and encouraged the establishment of numerous imperial cult sites as a way to promote

what Ando has termed “an ideology of unification,” which would bind together the

disparate parts of the empire.29 Yet there is another dimension to Hadrian’s attempt to

situate himself within the pantheon of Greek gods. The Akropolis inscription stating that

Hadrian was the son of Zeus Eleutherios (and brother of Athena) indicates that Hadrian

wanted the Athenians to see him as equal in stature to the patron goddess of their city (if,

in fact, Hadrian commissioned the statue and its base). Just as Athena was the special

benefactor and protector of Athens, so too her “brother” Hadrian would be a divine figure

24 Birley (1997) 222.

25 Birley (1997) 222.

26 Benjamin (1963).

27 Benjamin (1963) 83, n. 45.

28 Raubitschek (1945) 129-130.

29 Ando (2000) 40.

26

bestowing kindnesses upon the city. The Akropolis inscription, along with Hadrian’s

other numerous building projects in the city, would remind the Athenians for all time of

his special interest and patronage in Athens.

In contrast to Hadrian, Pausanias was more interested in Greek rituals that

predated the Roman conquest, the temples and shrines at which they were practiced, and

their origins. A typical example of Pausanias’ interest in the archaic roots of Greek

religion (as opposed to Hadrian’s interest in linking that religion to the imperial cult)

comes from his description of Megara in Book I.43.4:

As you go from this point to the hero-shrine (ἡρῷον) of Alkathos (which, in my day, the Megarians were using as a place to keep records), they say there is the tomb (µνῆµα) of Pyrgo, the wife of Alkathos before he took Euaichme, daughter of Megareos [the eponymous founder of Megara], and the tomb of Iphinoe, the daughter of Alkathos; they say that she died while still a virgin. It is the custom for girls to carry libations to the tomb of Iphinoe before their marriage and to cut off a lock of hair, as the daughters of the Delians at one time cut their hair for Hekaerge and Opis.30

Pausanias notes the location of a religious structure (in this case, tombs), explains the

connection that structure has to historical or legendary figures (the early heroes of

Megara), and mentions a religious rite particular to that place (girls carrying libations and

cutting their hair before marriage). Unlike Hadrian, he was interested in temples and

religious customs that had stood the test of time. He was not interested in “modern”

religious rites, such as those of the imperial cult or Hadrian’s association with Zeus. In

his description of Corinth, for instance, Pausanias misidentified what is now called

30 Paus. Peri. I.43.4: ἐντεῦθεν πρὸς τὸ Ἀλκάθου βαδίζουσιν ἡρῷον, ᾧ Μεγαρεῖς ἐς γραµµάτων φυλακὴν ἐχρῶντο ἐπ’ ἐµοῦ, µνῆµα ἔλεγον τὸ µὲν Πυργοῦς εἶναι γυναικὸς Ἀλκάθου πρὶν ἢ τὴν Μεγαρέως αὐτὸν λαβεῖν Εὐαίχµην, τὸ δὲ Ἰφινόης Ἀλκάθου θυγατρός· ἀποθανεῖν δὲ αὐτήν φασιν ἔτι παρθένον. καθέστηκε δὲ ταῖς κόραις χοὰς πρὸς τὸ τῆς Ἰφινόης µνῆµα προσφέρειν πρὸ γάµου καὶ ἀπάρχεσθαι τῶν τριχῶν, καθὰ καὶ τῇ Ἑκαέργῃ καὶ Ὤπιδι αἱ θυγατέρες ποτὲ ἀπεκείροντο αἱ Δηλίων.

27

Temple E as a temple of Octavia, demonstrating that, when it comes to the imperial cult,

he was so uninterested in the particulars that he did not care enough to get his facts

right.31 Related to this is a passage in Book VIII on Arkadia. Pausanias mentions ancient

heroes like Herakles, Castor, and Polydeukes who became gods upon their death, and

then goes on to write: “But in my times, because evil has grown to the greatest extent and

has spread over all the earth and all cities, no human becomes a god any longer, except in

name and in flattery to the powerful.”32 Clearly, Pausanias is indicating here his distaste

for the imperial cult.33

A further example of his lack of interest in “modern” religion comes from the

same book, when he mentions a ruined Roman-era temple at Mantinea dedicated to

Aphrodite Symmachia and erected as a “memorial for later generations of the naval battle

at Actium which they [the Mantineans] fought alongside the Romans.”34 As Levi, the

translator of the Penguin edition of Pausanias, notes, it seems odd that a temple erected

after 31 BC should already be in ruins by Pausanias’ day.35 This oddity, though, can be

read in several ways. It can be a metaphor for Pausanias’ general lack of interest in

religious structures erected after the Roman conquest: to his mind they are all a ruined

wasteland, as opposed to ancient, yet still functioning, religious sites like the Temple of

Zeus at Olympia. Alternately, Pausanias may only have been interested in describing a

31 See Hutton (2005a) 306-309 for a fuller discussion.

32 Paus. Peri. VIII.2.5. This “evil” may be a reference to Roman power.

33 See Bowersock (1973) for Greek intellectuals’ views of imperial cult (without mentioning Pausanias, unfortunately).

34 Paus. Peri. VIII.9.6.

35 Paus. Peri., tr. Levi (1971), v. 2: 392, n. 69.

28

Roman-era temple if it was ruined, thus giving it an air of antiquity and making it an

easier fit with his landscape of pre-Roman sites. Or Pausanias could be using this ruined

temple in memory of the battle of Actium as a symbol for the ultimate transience of

Roman power, particularly when compared to the many Greek religious sites with

archaic origins that still attracted worshipers in Pausanias’ day. In the end, though, it does

not matter for my purposes how one reads this passage because it still leads to the same

conclusion: throughout his work Pausanias is interested in traditional Greek religious

practices and beliefs, not their Roman appropriations or modifications.

This discussion of similarities and differences between Hadrian and Pausanias

needs to be situated against the broader intellectual background of the second century

AD, a period when aristocrats took particularly great pride in their learning and

knowledge of the Greek classics. Hadrian and Pausanias were undoubtedly part of this

well-educated class of men. As a young man, Hadrian acquired the nickname

“Graeculus” because of his studies and Cassius Dio tells us that “by nature he was a

philologos in each language” (i.e., Latin and Greek). Indeed, Hadrian earned the

nickname “Graeculus” at a young age because he was “steeped in and rather devoted to

Greek learning” and because “his intellect was inclined to it.”36 The Historia Augusta

further states that he was inspired to travel by his reading: “He was so eager for travel

because he wished to learn first-hand all the things which he had read concerning the

places of the earth.”37 If this is so, and considering the large number of provinces he

visited, Hadrian must have been a well-read man. He was an author, too, composing an

36 Cassius Dio, Roman History LXIX.3.1; HA, VH, I.5.

37 HA, VH, 17.8.

29

autobiography (of which only one fragment is extant), love poems, and a short epigram

(quoted by the author of the Historia Augusta).38 He also seems to have enjoyed sophistic

performances, one of the most prestigious intellectual activities of the day. According to

Philostratos, Hadrian showed particular favor to Polemon, “adlecting him to the circle of

the Museum” at Alexandria, giving him 250,000 drachmae on demand, inviting him to

give the inaugural address at the dedication of the Olympieion in Athens, and allowing

his descendants to travel for free.39 Pausanias, too, displays an excellent knowledge of the

important classical authors, especially Herodotos and Thucydides. In Book VI, for

example, Pausanias describes a dedication at Olympia by the Myanians, and he

remembers that Thucydides lists among the cities of the Lokrians the city of the

Myonians. This leads him to the conclusion that the Myanians and the Myonians were

the same people.40 At the same time, Pausanias had no problems quoting even from

obscure poets like Hegesinos and Chesias, demonstrating that his knowledge of literature

extended beyond the canonical classical authors.41 This knowledge implies that Pausanias

was well-educated, one of the pepaideumenoi common in the Second Sophistic period.42

Hadrian and Pausanias’ erudition helps situate them within the Second Sophistic

period, when intellectuals boasted of their paideia, that is, their knowledge of Greek

38 Autobiography: Birley (1997) 3 on HA, VH XVI.1; love poet: HA, VH XIV.1; epigram: Birley (1997)

301 on HA, VH XV.9.

39 Phil. VS 532-533. See Bowersock (1969), especially 17-29, for the provincial politics behind this kind of patronage.

40 Paus. Peri. VI.19.4-5 referring to Thucydides 3.101.2, cited by Habicht (1985) 142. See Bowie (2001) 25-26 for Herodotos and Thucydides’ influence on Pausanias.

41 Habicht (1985) 142 n. 5.

42 See Rutherford (2001) for how Pausanias fits into a pattern of Second Sophistic intellectuals’ pilgrimages.

30

culture and learning. Indeed, the intellectual and cultural currents of the Second Sophistic

cannot be ignored when examining figures from the second century AD like Hadrian and

Pausanias. As scholars have shown, Greek intellectuals used paideia to define their own

cultural identity. While this use of paideia dates back to Perikles and Isokrates’ praise of

Athens as the promulgator of Greek culture, this definition of Greek cultural identity took

on a new dimension after the Roman conquest of Greece, when Greeks began to define

themselves in contrast to their Roman rulers by highlighting the antiquity of their paideia.

Roman elites, meanwhile had a complicated relationship with Greek paideia from the

time of Rome’s expanding political and military interests in the eastern Mediterranean in

the third and second centuries BC.43 For the Romans, the adoption of paideia by a

significant number of aristocrats could mark Rome’s entrance into the civilized world,

symbolize its conquest of that world and, at the same time, could be enlisted in the

constant internal competition among Roman elites.44 As Whitmarsh puts it, “Greek

learning was a commodity that could be bought and sold, displayed or excoriated for its

decadence,” and this reached a “new level” under the emperors of the second century

AD.45 Trajan and Hadrian “cultivated and promoted Greek intellectuals,” new imperial

building programs were undertaken in Athens, Hadrian and his successors were depicted

43 Whitmarsh (2001) 9-10. See also Gruen (1990) and (1992) and Swain (1996) 66-79.

44 Whitmarsh (2001) 14.

45 Whitmarsh (2001) 15.

31

“bearded in the style of Greek intellectuals,” and Marcus Aurelius composed a

philosophical treatise in Greek “and founded highly paid chairs of rhetoric and

philosophy in Athens.”46

The fact that both Roman and Greek intellectuals could claim paideia has led

numerous scholars to note that in the Second Sophistic period, one’s “Greekness” was not

dependent on having been born in Greece or to Greek parents, but was based precisely on

paideia. If an individual had read the right texts, spoke the right way, and was properly

devoted to Greek culture, he could be considered an heir to Greek cultural heritage, no

matter what part of the empire he hailed from.47 This necessarily made paideia a

contested set of ideals. Paideia could be used by individuals who thought of themselves

as ethnically Greek to mark their identity in contrast to those they considered Roman or

non-Greek while at the same time be used by those same Romans and non-Greeks to

define themselves as culturally Greek. Since Greek paideia could be claimed by anyone,

the Hellenism of the Second Sophistic period was argued over by intellectual

representatives of Greece and Rome, but belonged to neither specifically. Thus a Roman

intellectual like Hadrian and a Greek intellectual like Pausanias could deploy that

Hellenism in different ways for different purposes.48

This dispute over Hellenism marks an aspect of the Second Sophistic that I

believe has been often overlooked. Modern scholars have usually seen the arguments of

Second Sophistic intellectuals as being about relatively small things, such as one’s ability

46 Whitmarsh (2001) 16.

47 Swain (1996) 17-64; Whitmarsh (2001) 116-129; Kaldellis (2007) 30-36.

48 Although see Arafat (1996) 16-36 for the idea that Pausanias was not a “typical” Second Sophistic writer.

32

to speak and write proper Greek or one’s ability to adhere to the physical codes of

sophistic performance, and they view these arguments as an expression of inter-elite

rivalry.49 These scholars also acknowledge that these arguments are manifestations of a

larger debate over what the concept of “Hellenism” meant in practice. Yet I believe that

there is another aspect to this debate which has not been sufficiently recognized, namely,

Hellenism was not a more or less unified system, but rather, it was internally divided and

constantly being reinvented.50 Its adherents were not always in agreement about what

“Hellenism” meant, and they debated among themselves as to its definition and essence.

Hadrian and Pausanias epitomize these debates.51 By the same token, scholars often see

Hellenism as an abstract phenomenon, based on the Greek language and a canon of

classical texts. While this is certainly a distinctive aspect of Hellenism in the second

century AD, I do not believe it is as abstract as is commonly thought. Rather, intellectuals

firmly grounded their Hellenism in the geographical and physical locale called “Hellas.”

This, too, is frequently ignored in scholarly discussions of the Second Sophistic, but I

believe Hadrian and Pausanias are examples of intellectuals in whose Hellenism

geography played a major role, although they defined the geographical boundaries of the

Greek world differently.52 It is these two elements of Hadrian and Pausanias’ Hellenism,

49 Language: Swain (1996) 43-64; physical performance: Gleason (1995).

50 This view is beginning to change. See, for example, Whitmarsh (2007) 40: “Sophistic Hellenism was not monolithic: while all sophists were Greek, they were not all Greek in the same way.” See, too, Romeo (2002) 32, who recognizes that the Second Sophistic was “not a monolithic and ideologically homogeneous whole.”

51 König and Whitmarsh (2007) have written about the unstable and contested nature of the acquisition and dissemination of knowledge in the first three centuries AD, although they do not explicitly address the issue of competitive versions of Hellenism.

52 König and Whitmarsh (2007: 11) have noted that under the Roman empire, “an insistence on [intellectual] cosmopolitanism leads paradoxically to a strong sense of place, focused on iconic cultural

33

its disputed nature (particularly with regard to the Greek past) and its geographical

particularism, that I wish to explore briefly before turning to an examination of the role

Athens played in their respective Hellenisms.

The preoccupation of Second Sophistic intellectuals with classical literature,

language, and history as a determinant of behavior and value is one of the defining

characteristics of the period, and Hadrian and Pausanias are no different from their

contemporaries in this regard.53 Yet Hadrian differed from these contemporaries in a

fundamental way: he connected the classical Greek past with the Roman present through

the erection of monuments and statues in the history-rich cities of Greece. In this way,

Hadrian approaches the past differently from other second-century intellectuals and

rhetors. Those rhetors focused on the past in a more abstract way, through the

performance of declamatory speeches set in classical times. Hadrian, on the other hand,

constructed physical monuments celebrating the past. Indeed, Hadrian even went so far as

to insinuate himself into the story of the monumental past. As Boatwright has pointed

out, by completing the Olympieion in Athens and fitting it out with statues of himself,

while linking the temple to the newly-instituted Panhellenia games, “Hadrian’s

benefaction...brought the past into the present, celebrated its relevance, and established

means for its continued applicability and conferral of advantages to the favored city.”54

Hadrian’s interest in classical Greece clearly entailed material benefits for contemporary

Greece and for imperial Roman projects. Boatwright notes that Hadrian’s architectural

centers like Rome and Athens” but that these “were unusual cases.”

53 Bowie (1970); Gordon (1996) 8-16; Swain (1996) 65-100; Whitmarsh (2001) 1-38.

54 Boatwright (2000) 209.

34

benefactions mostly “went to cities boasting a distinguished past,” such as the most

important cities of Greece and Asia Minor or the ancient cities of central Italy.55

Furthermore, Hadrian’s “support for cities’ games and festivals,” which ensured a steady

stream of visitors and an influx of money to those cities, was largely confined to the

Greek cities of the eastern half of the empire, as opposed to, say, creating civic games in

the western parts of the empire.56

The motivation behind Hadrian’s personal interest in classical Greece (while

difficult to speak about with any certainty) marks an important difference between his

Hellenism and that of other Second Sophistic intellectuals, including Pausanias.

Hadrian’s admiration for and appropriation of Greece’s classical past was a way to create

a unified cultural foundation for the empire, bring together the disparate peoples of East

and West, and strengthen his own claim to empire, given the ambiguous nature of his

accession.57 Ando has argued that, beginning with Hadrian, there was a conscious attempt

on the part of the empire’s administration to promulgate an “ideology of unification” that

“constructed the empire as an all-embracing collective by minimizing differences in

culture and class and emphasizing the similarity of each individual’s relationship to the

emperor and especially the all-inclusive benefits of Roman rule.”58 This ideology could

be advocated in a number of ways, such as through the spread of the imperial cult and

55 Boatwright (2000) 208.

56 Boatwright (2000) 207.

57 Calandra (1996).

58 Ando (2000) 40-41. Boatwright (2000: 209), in the same vein as Ando, believes that Hadrian’s interactions with Greek cities were part of an attempt to propagate “Roman norms and values more peacefully” and to increase “the Roman imperial presence” in cities by establishing connections between the emperor and the aristocracy of the cities. See also Kaldellis (2007) 51-53 for an overview of Roman imperial ideology in the high empire.

35

imperial images or the use of a standardized calendar throughout the empire. Certainly,

Hadrian’s promotion of a kind of universal Hellenism, a culture theoretically accessible

to anyone, would be one way to level out the differences between Greeks and Romans

and more thoroughly bind Greeks in loyalty to the emperor and the empire. Ando further

argues that Hadrian’s abandonment of Trajan’s newly conquered Mesopotamian

provinces recognized the “limits of empire” and made it clear “that all those who had the

capacity to appreciate the benefits of empire now lived within its borders,” thus making

imperial ideology and policy match up “with the worldview espoused by provincial

intellectuals.”59 Hadrian’s desire to consolidate the already existing empire, rather than

add to it, could have served as a further reason for his promotion of a unifying Hellenism.

Yet, this use of classical Greek culture as a way to further Roman imperial interests on a

regional scale throughout the eastern Mediterranean stands in marked contrast to

Pausanias’ view of that same past.

Pausanias also wanted to make the past relevant to the present, but he did so

through the description of ancient monuments, rather than the creation of new ones, as

Hadrian did. Pausanias rarely mentions post-classical monuments, and while he gives

plenty of anecdotes dealing with Hellenistic history, he normally shies away from writing

about Greece’s history under Rome. Indeed, one scholar, who wrote an entire book about

Pausanias’ views of Roman rulers, concedes that “Pausanias does not avoid the

present...but he undeniably gives it a considerably lower profile than he does the past.”60

Another scholar argues that Pausanias, in the descriptive sections of his book, gives his

59 Ando (2000) 330.

60 Arafat (1996) 213.

36

reader the “impression of a classical past that is very close to the present,” by juxtaposing

events of different time periods, often out of chronological sequence.61 Yet at the same

time, Pausanias “had no need to evoke a Greek past by reference to what is no longer

there, since his purpose was fulfilled simply by description of what was there,” namely

the monuments and statues that he saw throughout Greece.62 Pausanias carefully selected

what he chose to write about and his Periegesis is therefore a carefully constructed

literary work.63

An example of how Pausanias deliberately structured his presentation by making

the landscape he describes fit into an ordered and balanced narrative can be found in his

description of the forum at Corinth. In writing about three routes out of the forum,

Pausanias makes their respective lengths seem equal by describing a roughly equal

number of temples, statues, and other sites along each road, but in fact the roads are of

very different length.64 Similarly, each of Pausanias’ books is of a roughly equal length,

despite the fact that some of the regions he describes have fewer important monuments

than others. Pausanias makes up for this fact by including more historical or mythological

anecdotes to ensure that each book is more or less of the same length.65 This selectivity is

also evident in Pausanias’ decision to describe primarily classical monuments. The

constructed and literary nature of Pausanias’ book has led one scholar to describe it as “a

61 Bowie (1996) 215.

62 Arafat (1996) 214.

63 This may seem a rather obvious point to make, but older scholarship on Pausanias did not recognize (or did not sufficiently emphasize) this idea. For some recent correctives of this view, see Alcock (1996), Elsner (2001), Hutton (2005b), Pretzler (2007).

64 Hutton (2005a) 313.

65 Hutton (2005a) 313-314.

37

carefully structured compendium of chosen regions, fashioned and ordered through travel

into a continuous narrative and rendered through ‘digressions’ (historical, religious,

mythological, art historical, ethnographic) into a careful portrait, a deliberate ideology, of

‘Greece,’” that is to say, of Hellenism.66

While Hadrian’s ideology of Hellenism was part of a strategic policy meant to

further provincial loyalty to Rome, Pausanias’ ideology of Hellenism is less easily

explained. Scholars have interpreted his Hellenism, rooted in Greece’s past and in the

connection between that past and the present, as a strategy for achieving one of a number

of objectives: to mourn the loss of Greek freedom; to remember that freedom and remind

his readers that freedom was once possible; to quietly resist the Romans by remembering

times when classical Greece resisted barbarians; and to preserve Greek identity, through a

focus on ancient religious sites, in the face of Roman rule.67 Implicit in all these

interpretations is the idea that Pausanias is somehow attempting to “resist” Roman rule

through the creation of a now-lost Greek past.68 One persuasive theory is that Pausanias’

expression of the “collective memory” of the Greek past functioned as a way to mark

Greek identity under Roman rule. Greek identity was no longer marked by one’s

birthplace or home city, nor by one’s religion, but by paideia. As discussed above,

though, Greek paideia could be appropriated by any educated person, regardless of ethnic

origin, as a way to define himself as Greek.69 For Pausanias, this paideia was dependent

66 Elsner (2001) 5-6.

67 Mourning lost freedom: Bowie (1996) 216; remembering freedom: Porter (2001) 75; resisting Rome: Alcock (1996) 260; preserving Greek identity: Elsner (1992) 19-20.

68 Porter (2001) 75 and (explicitly) Alcock (1996) 260.

69 Konstan (2001) 41.

38

“on a shared but not necessarily exclusive sense of tradition,” a tradition that stems from

the memory of the pre-Roman classical Greek past.70 Despite this emphasis on the non-

Roman past, Pausanias, by composing his Periegesis in Greek, seems to indicate that

anyone with a knowledge of Greek (which would have been a significant percentage of

the empire’s inhabitants) can choose whether or not to join him in his project of creating

a “collective memory” of the past to define Greek identity.71 Thus, Pausanias’ Hellenism

was restrictive in terms of content, not in terms of potential audience.

Pausanias’ selective description of the important historical sites of mainland

Greece and his creation of a version of Hellenism that is largely non-Roman thus stands

in marked contrast to Hadrian’s Hellenism, which the latter used as a unifying force for

the empire. Yet, in a way, Pausanias’ Hellenism could not exist without Hadrian’s. As

Hadrian appropriated aspects of Greek culture such as temples, athletic competitions,

even a Panhellenic organization, all for the purpose of furthering the spread of an

imperial ideology of unity, an intellectual like Pausanias could react by highlighting an

aspect of Greek culture that could not be fully integrated into the Roman power structure

(despite Hadrian’s best attempts), namely, the pre-Roman past. As we will see, Hadrian

tried to connect himself and his imperial administration with the classical Greek past, and

while Pausanias mentions a few of these attempts, he largely ignores the problematic

place mainland Greece occupied within the Roman world. Instead, Pausanias focuses

much of his narrative on the archaic and classical Greek past. In addition, this difference

70 Konstan (2001) 43. Konstan (2001:42) also argues that, contra Bowie, Porter, Alcock, and Elsner,

Pausanias’s Hellenism was not explicitly anti-Roman and that he did not harbor any hope for a united and free Greece.

71 See Habicht (1985: 24-27) for a discussion of Pausanias’ Greek-speaking audience living throughout the empire.

39

between the two men highlights my previous claim that modern scholars neglect the

internal debates over Hellenism. Hadrian sought to use the cultural achievements of

Hellenism’s past and his own achievements within that tradition on the most general level

to unite a culturally diverse empire, while Pausanias wanted to use his Hellenism in a

more restrictive way to define Greek identity with little reference to the Roman present.

Just as Hadrian and Pausanias’ Hellenisms were bound up with the idea of time,

so too was it connected to space and a conceptual geography of “Greece.” In Hadrian’s

case, this sense of physical space was manifested in his benefactions to numerous Greek

cities throughout the eastern Mediterranean.72 By creating a huge number of monuments

throughout the Greek east, Hadrian demonstrated his investment in the physicality of the

Greek world. The most famous example of Hadrian’s conceptual geography is his

creation of the Panhellenion, a league of at least 28 Hellenic cities in the provinces of

Achaia, Macedonia, Thrace, Crete-and-Cyrene, and Asia in 131/132.73 Representatives of

the Panhellenion’s member cities regularly met in Athens, and while their activities are

not completely understood, they seem at least to have been in charge of “a cult of

Hadrian Panhellenios” and the quadrennial Panhellenia festival and games; they set up

dedicatory monuments and bestowed honors on the emperor; and perhaps even acted as a

kind of court.74 The restrictive geographical scope of the Panhellenion is a good

indication of Hadrian’s conceptual geography. These 28 cities were the ones that Hadrian

72 See Boatwright (2000) for a discussion.

73 Date: Spawforth and Walker (1985) 78. Provinces and member cities: Spawforth and Walker (1985) 80.

74 Spawforth and Walker (1985) 82-83. See Jones (1996) for the idea that the Panhellenion’s purpose was almost entirely religious. See Kritsotakis (2008) for slightly different view, that it was meant as a Koinon of the Greek mainland.

40

(and intellectuals like Polemon, who may have helped Hadrian formulate the ideological

underpinnings of the Panhellenion) viewed as being Greek enough to be a part of the

assembly.75 Further, Hadrian’s mapping of his conceptual geography was not limited to

the Panhellenion. For instance, he erected an Athenaeum in Rome, a building meant “for

cultural and educational activities,” thus, in a way, bringing Athens (and all it

symbolized) into the capital of the empire.76 More famously, Hadrian named sections of

his grandiose villa at Tivoli after the “most famous provinces and locations” of the

empire, including the Lyceum, the Academy, and the Canopic branch of the Nile.77 In so

doing, Hadrian created a kind of microcosm of the empire, or at least, of the parts of it

that were important to his imaginary geography.

Pausanias, like Hadrian, created a map of his imagined geography, although

unlike Hadrian, he expressed his map through the composition of a ten-book guide to the

cities, temples, statues, and monuments of mainland Greece, rather than through the

creation of monuments and institutions. Also unlike Hadrian, Pausanias’ map was limited

to mainland Greece, rather than the Aegean basin or the entire empire.78 As we will see,

however, Pausanias included a brief but significant excursus in Book VII on the islands

and cities of Ionia. Yet even this excursus is tied to mainland Greece; Pausanias uses the

75 Romeo (2002) 31-37 and Kritsotakis (2008).

76 Talbert (1984) 120. See Palmer (1990) for a summary of the (few) ancient sources on this building. Athens could also serve as a comparandum for Romans (such as Livy) and a “way of thinking about both what Rome was and what she was not” (Dench [2005] 97-117)

77 HA, VH XXVI.5.

78 See Hutton (2005b: 61) for Pausanias’ “variable usage of the term ‘Hellas’” and his lack of “firm opinion as to its geographical connotation.” In this sense, “the question of what the Periegesis Hellados describes is...answered by the text itself: read the Periegesis and you will find out what Greece is” (Hutton 2005b: 61).

41

expulsion of the Ionians from Achaia in the years after the Trojan War as the starting

point for his excursus.79 Still, Pausanias did not provide as extensive a description of

Ionia as he did of mainland Greece and he chose not to describe Hellenistic foundations

like Alexandria and Antioch, or even his own homeland of Lydia. Much of this can be

attributed to his interest in archaic and classical Greece – Alexandria and Antioch would

fall outside of the temporal (and hence geographical) boundaries of his project.

Furthermore, Hutton has suggested that “Pausanias may have been aware of the

resemblance of his Hellas to the province of Achaia and also aware that the resemblance

was not perfect.”80 As a result, Pausanias’ “decision to set the borders of his topography

where he did may have been a subtle commentary on the difference between what Rome

defined as ‘Greece’ and ‘what was interesting to a Greek speaker about Greece.’”81

It is important to note that Athens was central to both Hadrian and Pausanias’

understanding of the geography of Greece. Hadrian visited Athens four times, was

eponymous archon there in 111/12, had a new tribe (Hadrianis) named after him and, as

noted above, undertook a massive building program in the city, while also making it the

headquarters for the Panhellenion.82 Pausanias, for his part, begins his description of

Greece with Attica and, more specifically, Athens (I.2.1-30.4). As Elsner has pointed out,

it is no accident that Pausanias starts with Athens, ends with Delphi (X.5.5-32.1), and

79 Paus. Peri. VII.1.3 – 2.1.

80 Hutton (2005b) 61.

81 Hutton (2005b) 61. For other examples of this intertwining of history and geography in Polybios, Poseidonios, and Strabon, see Clarke (1999).

82 Visits to Athens: Birley (1997) 62-65, 175-177, 215-219, 262-266; archonship: Birley (1997) 64 on HA, VH XIX.1; naming of tribe: Birley (1997) 266 on Pausanias I.5.5; building program: see above, n. 20; Panhellenion: see above, n. 73 and 74.

42

places Olympia in the middle (Books V and VI).83 Indeed, Elsner believes that Pausanias’

“choice of opening, close, and center” is “a deliberate kind of mapping – a marrying of

the actual topography of Greece with a ‘géographie imaginaire.’” 84 By placing Athens at

the beginning of his work, Pausanias highlights its symbolic importance in his conception

of Greece. For him, Athens is a kind of gateway through which one enters the rest of the

Greek world.

In the end, then, the Hellenism espoused by Hadrian and Pausanias fits well with

the intellectual trends modern scholars typically identify in the second century AD. Yet I

believe my discussion has brought to the fore two key aspects of second-century AD

Hellenism which are frequently overlooked. First, Hellenism is often seen as an abstract

phenomenon, based on the Greek language and the canon of classical texts and accessible

to anyone who could read those texts (hence the idea that Hellenism was no longer based

on one’s ethnicity). While this is certainly one of the distinctive aspects of Hellenism, I

do not believe it is as abstract as is commonly believed. Rather, intellectuals generally,

and Hadrian and Pausanias specifically, firmly grounded their Hellenism in the

geographical and physical locale called “Greece,” and in Athens in particular, as the

original home of the texts they read so ardently.85 Indeed, this contributed to Hellenism’s

overwhelmingly Athenocentric nature, something it maintains down to the present day.

83 Elsner (2001) 6.

84 Elsner (2001) 6.

85 Hutton (2005b: 37-38) notes that the Hellenism which “captured the imperial intelligentsia” was “an abstract Hellenism rooted in the distant past...not one that arose from Greek soil or from the continuing contemporary culture of the old mainland” and that Pausanias may have been trying “to produce a corrective to such overly idealized notions of Hellenism by portraying accurately, and with eyewitness authority, the contemporary (and often parlous) state of the physical symbols of Hellenic tradition.” This is undoubtedly correct, although I believe Hadrian, too, was promoting a more concrete version of Hellenism.

43

All the proof one needs of this fact is to note that Athens was chosen as the capital of the

modern Greek state in 1834 not because of its contemporary size or political importance,

but because of the continuation of the idea that Athens is the geographic home of Greek

culture.

Second, scholars tend to see Hellenism as a more or less unified system that

competed with other cultural paradigms, for instance, Rome or (in the fourth century AD)

Christianity. However, I believe that Hellenism was internally divided, constantly being

reinvented, and that its adherents debated among themselves about the patterns of

behavior and thinking that constituted Hellenism and how one could (and why one

should) display one’s Hellenism. This internal division is most fruitfully explored in the

arguments over the meaning and symbolism of Athens. Hadrian and Pausanias are

excellent examples of men whose Hellenism was geographically centered on Athens but

whose conceptions of Athens were very different from one another.

Having established the parameters of the discussion, we can now turn to a detailed

examination of the ways in which Hadrian and Pausanias viewed Athens and the axes of

tension between these views.

Hadrian and Athens

In this section, I will be closely studying the symbolism of Hadrian’s various projects in

Athens, tracing the new relationship he was fashioning among Athens, Greece, and

Rome. Hadrian’s projects were, I believe, two-fold: the building program and the

establishment of the Panhellenion. Furthermore, each of these activities highlights one

aspect of the “ideal Athens” with which Hadrian was concerned: the building program

44

tied Hadrian to the Athenian past, while the Panhellenion demonstrated the geographical

importance Hadrian attached to Athens. At the same time, these projects shed light on

Hadrian’s plans for the city’s future, namely, to use Roman imperial power to make

Athens a kind of “cultural capital” of the eastern Mediterranean, that is, he sought,

through the creation of buildings and institutions, to make contemporary Athens live up

to its ancient ideal as the home of Greek culture. In so doing, I believe he was attmpeting

to join more closely the provinces of the Greek world with Rome.

The most obvious of Hadrian’s various monumental constructions in Athens was

the completion of the Temple of Zeus Olympios, mentioned above. By finishing a project

begun by the Peisistratids over seven hundred years previously, Hadrian wrote himself

into the on-going history of the temple and unquestionably connected himself to the

Athenian past, especially through the erection of four statues of himself before the

entrance of the temple.86 It is important to note, I think, that this was a particularly

Athenian past. It was not a building at a historically panhellenic site, such as Delphi or

Olympia. Rather, Hadrian completed a temple begun by an Athenian tyrant in a period

before the first major panhellenic stirrings following the confrontation of the Greek city-

states with Persia. Yet, at the same time, the fact that the temple was dedicated to Zeus

Olympios, the highest of the Greek gods and one not specifically linked to a particular

locale, implies that Hadrian’s project was addressed to all Greeks. This is further borne

out by the placement (by whom exactly is not explicitly stated) of “bronze statues, which

86 See Boatwright (2000) 151-152 for a brief history of the Olympieion prior to Hadrian; Paus. Peri. I.18.6

for the statues of Hadrian.

45

the Athenians call colonies (ἀποίκους πόλεις), in front of the columns.”87 It is not

entirely clear from this passage what these statues were supposed to be. Some scholars

have argued that they were personified representations of the colonies of Athens or of

other mainland Greek cities, while others have seen them as statues of Hadrian dedicated

by the Greek colonies (since Pausanias’ passage occurs immediately after the mention of

the four statues of Hadrian in front of the temples’ entrance).88 Sadly, no trace of these

“colonies” survives, so the matter cannot be resolved. Whichever interpretation one

accepts, though, these statues, either through the cities they personified or the name

“colonies,” established a link between a number of Greek cities and Athens mediated by

a Roman emperor. This is symbolic, I believe, of Hadrian’s attempt to promote Athens as

the cultural center of the broader Greek world within the even larger political framework

set by the Roman empire.

Another of Hadrian’s projects which sought the same goal was his so-called

“Library.” This building, described by Pausanias (I.18.9) and located north of the Roman

Agora, contained not just books but a large central courtyard, auditoria, and an

ornamental pool.89 It has been noted that this Library was similar in design and

dimension to Vespasian’s Templum Pacis in Rome. With its collection of books and

artwork, the Library was also comparable to other imperial fora in Rome.90 The most

87 Paus. Peri. I.18.6: χαλκαῖ δὲ ἑστᾶσι πρὸ τῶν κιόνων ἃς Ἀθηναῖοι καλοῦσιν ἀποίκους πόλεις.

88 Personified colonies: Frazer (1965 [1898]) 182, Spawforth and Walker (1985) 93-94; statues of Hadrian erected by colonies: Benjamin (1963) 59, Willers (1990) 52. Slightly differently, Geagen (1979: 397) sees them as “statues of the emperor set up by cities throughout the empire,” with no reference to them as colonies at all.

89 Boatwright (2000) 155-156.

90 Shear (1981) 374-375

46

important point of difference between the Library and these fora, though, is the fact that

it did not contain a temple located on the central axis. In its place were the rooms used to

hold the books.91 Thus, the focal point of the structure was not a temple for the worship

of a particular Roman god but the structure containing the physical site for the study of

literary culture, with side structures containing auditoria, the physical site for the

sophistic performance of that literary culture.92 For this reason, one scholar has thought

of the Library as a Templum Cultus.93 In a similar vein, another scholar has interpreted

the message of the building as being “that the Athenians themselves, as scholars,

sophists, teachers, and students, were essential to the preservation and transmission of the

glorious Hellenic past.”94 Just as the Olympieion established a symbolic connection

between Athens and the rest of the Greek world through statues, so Hadrian’s massive

Library re-enforced the central role played by Athens in a conception of Greek culture

and paideia. Athens had been the home of many of the authors of the classical literary

canon revered by the pepaideumenoi, and now it was home to a magnificent site

dedicated to the study, performance, and promotion of that canon by the

pepaideumenoi.95

A third aspect of this institutional program of cultural foundations is Hadrian’s

establishment and promotion of athletic contests at Athens. Athletic competition had been

91 Shear (1981) 375-376.

92 Boatwright (2000) 156-157.

93 Shear (1981) 376, although see Calandra (1996) 93 for the argument that the central hall at the rear of the building was intended as a location for worshiping the emperor and his family.

94 Boatwright (2000) 157.

95 Willers (1990) 20.

47

a marker of Greek culture since archaic times and it continued to be used as a way to

construct Greek identity under the Roman empire.96 Cassius Dio, in a list of Hadrian’s

benefactions to Athens, says that he founded the Panhellenia in conjunction with the

establishment of a Panhellenion shrine (and thus, possibly, with the Panhellenion League

itself).97 Two other athletic festivals were founded at Athens during his reign, the

Hadrianeia and the Olympieia, and while no surviving source explicitly states that

Hadrian founded them, it seems likely that he did.98 Hadrian established all three as

“sacred contests (ἱερός άγων),” a designation which granted numerous privileges to the

victors in their home cities, and he elevated the Panathenaic games to the exclusive club

of iselastic games, meaning the victors were given a “triumphal entry to their home

cities.”99 Athens was thus the only city to host four “sacred contests” (the Panhellenia, the

Hadrianeia, the Olympieia, and the Panathenaic games), and Hadrian thereby made it the

athletic center of the eastern empire. In these three particular projects (the Olympieion,

the Library, and athletic competitions), then, we see Hadrian manipulating three of the

most important physical expressions of Greek culture: temples (and thus religion),

libraries (and thus the study of literature), and athletics. Through these projects, Hadrian

attempted to make Athens an important locale for religious worship, for the study and

performance of literature, and for athletic contests, and, thus, turn Athens into the cultural

capital of the Greek world in a physical sense, much as the city had been the symbolic

96 Van Nijf (2003) 283. See, too, König (2005) and (for a more satiric understanding of the importance of

athletics to the formation of Greek paideia) Lucian’s Anacharsis.

97 Cassius Dio, Roman History, LXIX.16.1-3, Spawforth and Walker (1985) 90.

98 Spawforth and Walker (1985) 90.

99 Spawforth and Walker (1985) 90-91.

48

capital of Greek culture thanks to its role as the home for many of the canonical literary

authors and for a staggering amount of classical art and architecture.100 At the same time,

though, Hadrian, a Roman emperor, initiated this program of monumental constructions

and athletic foundations, making it very clear that Athens’ role as cultural capital was

dependent on the power of Rome.

Much as his building program sought to make Athens the capital of Greek culture,

so too Hadrian’s creation of the Panhellenion League expressed the centrality of Athens

to his “conceptual geography” of the Greek world.101 As mentioned above, this was a

league of nearly thirty Greek cities throughout the eastern Mediterranean whose

representatives met in Athens on a regular basis. Scholars have emphasized the

Panhellenion’s religious nature, particularly its administration of a cult of Hadrian.102

One of the reasons for this emphasis is the fact that Hadrian turned the Delphic

Amphictyony into a Panhellenic assembly (at least temporarily) through a decrease in the

number of Thessalian votes and an increase in the number of Athenian and Spartan votes,

and so the Panhellenion is seen in analogous terms, that is, primarily as a religious

assembly.103 Spawforth and Walker even go so far as to speculate that the Panhellenion’s

rather restrictive membership was due to a “reluctance on Rome’s part to permit the

100 Spawforth and Walker (1985) 91; Spawforth (1989) 194; Boatwright (2000) 100. Indeed, Dench (2005:

159) has called Hadrian’s interest in Athens a process of “recreating an Athens that fulfilled Roman historical and cultural fantasies.”

101 Lamberton (2001) 63-64.

102 Spawforth and Walker (1985); Jones (1996); Romeo (2002); Kritsotakis (2008).

103 Romeo (2002) 24-25; Kritsotakis (2008). Hadrian’s change is recorded in an inscription, while Pausanias’ description of the Amphictyony includes a different configuration of cities and their respective votes. This difference leads Romeo to the conclusion that Hadrian’s alterations to the Amphictyony were not long-lasting.

49

permanent union of a large part of the Greek world within an organization administered

by the Greeks themselves,” and that therefore, the Panhellenion could have had little, if

any political role.104 This is almost certainly true, but at the same time, whatever function

- political, religious or otherwise - the league served, it was subsumed under the umbrella

of Roman power. After all, cities that wished to be admitted to the league had to submit

their application to Hadrian himself, making it clear that the Roman emperor was the

final arbiter for the Panhellenion, not the council itself.105

Scholars have pointed out, however, that Hadrian’s creation of the league was not

spontaneous, but in all probability depended on classical precedents. This should be no

surprise given the importance Second Sophistic intellectuals attached to the classical past,

intellectuals like Polemon, to whom Hadrian may have been partially indebted for the

idea and the nature of the Panhellenion.106 One precedent for Hadrian may have been a

plan of the fifth-century BC Athenian statesman Perikles, who, according to Plutarch,

induced the Athenians to invite representatives of “all the Greeks” to come to Athens in

order to

deliberate upon the Greek temples which the barbarians had burnt down, and the sacrifices they owed to the gods on behalf of Greece which they had vowed when they fought the barbarians, and the sea, how all might sail upon it without fear and how they might keep the peace.107

104 Spawforth and Walker (1985) 81.

105 Spawforth and Walker (1985) 81.

106 See above, n. 75.

107 Plut. Perikles 17.1-2: πάντας Ἕλληνας... εἰς σύλλογον πέµπειν Ἀθήναζε τοὺς βουλευσοµένους περὶ τῶν Ἑλληνικῶν ἱερῶν, ἃ κατέπρησαν οἱ βάρβαροι, καὶ τῶν θυσιῶν, ἃς ὀφείλουσιν ὑπὲρ τῆς Ἑλλάδος εὐξάµενοι τοῖς θεοῖς, ὅτε πρὸς τοὺς βαρβάρους ἐµάχοντο, καὶ τῆς θαλάττης, ὅπως πλέωσι πάντες ἀδεῶς καὶ τὴν εἰρήνην ἄγωσιν. At the same time, though, Perikles appears to have thought of this assembly as a one-time event, not a body of representatives who met on a regular basis, as Hadrian’s Panhellenion was.

50

However, nothing came of Perikles’ plan “since the Lakedaimonians were secretly

opposed to it.”108 Birley advances the theory that Hadrian was attempting to emulate

Perikles in completing his unsuccessful plan to bring together representatives of all the

Greeks in Athens, an idea that is supported by Hadrian’s completion of other ancient

projects, such as the Olympieion.109 Based on what Plutarch says it seems clear that

Perikles intended the assembly to deliberate primarily upon religious matters (though the

deliberations were clearly political as well), so if Hadrian really was emulating Perikles,

this adds further weight to the idea that the Panhellenion was a religious assembly.

Hadrian and Polemon, as well-educated second-century AD intellectuals, would

also have been aware of two other classical-era leagues mentioned by Herodotos, leagues

which may have provided a template for their ideas of what the Panhellenion should be

and how it should function. One is the sixth-century BC Panionion composed of twelve

Ionian cities in Asia Minor: Miletos, Myous, Priene, Ephesos, Kolophon, Lebedos, Teos,

Klazomenai, Phokaia, Samos, Chios, and Erythrai.110 These cities built a temple at

Mykale, also named the Panionion, held a regular festival there called the Panionia, and

seem to have sent representatives there for periodic meetings regarding matters of

common interest to the twelve cities.111 Hadrian may have imitated each of these

activities with his Panhellenion, which featured a temple to Hera and Zeus Panhellenios

and some kind of shrine called the Panhellenion, and a festival called the Panhellenia,

108 Plut. Perikles 17.3: Λακεδαιµονίων ὑπεναντιωθέντων.

109 Birley (1997) 218-219.

110 Hdt. I.142.3-4.

111 Temple: Hdt. I.143.3; Panionia: Hdt. I.148.1; meetings: Hdt. I.141.1 and I.170.1.

51

while representatives came from the Panhellenion’s cities to Athens meetings.112

Herodotos also tells us that there was a temple named the Hellenion at the Greek colony

of Naukratis in Egypt which was constructed by a group of Ionian, Dorian, and Aeolian

cities.113 Perhaps Hadrian wished for such cooperation between the various member cities

of the Panhellenion, which, after all, were spread across five Roman provinces and would

undoubtedly have had differing civic interests (although the degree to which these

differences would have been expressed in the forum of the Panhellenion is unclear).114

These predecessors of the Panhellenion (Perikles’ abortive assembly, the

Panionion, and the Hellenion) highlight, once again, the two important aspects of

Hadrian’s conception of Athens. First, the emperor wished to connect himself to Athens’

classical past by finishing uncompleted projects from that past (such as Perikles’

assembly) or establishing new cultural institutions with classical precedents (such as the

Panionion). Second, Hadrian viewed Athens as the geographical center of the Greek

world. The Panhellenion would embrace Greek cities from all over the Mediterranean

and not be an organization of local Greek cities (as the Panionion was) or of Greeks

living abroad (as the Hellenion seems to have been). Furthermore, unlike the Panionion,

which was based in Mykale, or the Hellenion, located in Naukratis, Hadrian’s

Panhellenion would be based in Athens, the most culturally important Greek city. It is

112 Hera and Zeus Panhellenios: see above, n. 20; Panhellenion: see above, n. 96; Panhellenia: see above, n.

96; meetings: see above, n. 74. Interestingly, Philostratos (VA IV.5) makes clear that the “Panionian sacrifices” were still being practiced in the time of Apollonios of Tyana (the mid- to late-first century AD), so perhaps the precedent of the Panionia was not as far in the past for Hadrian was Perikles’ attempted assembly.

113 Hdt. II.178.1-2.

114 For membership, see above, n. 73.

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important to note that Hadrian was not focused solely on Athenian precedents for the

Panhellenion, if he had the Panionion and the Hellenion in mind. Instead, he was

adapting models from elsewhere in the classical Greek word to fit his vision for Athens.

Thus we see that the twin themes of Athens’ past and its geographical importance are

entwined in the Panhellenion.

As noted above, the Panhellenion seems to have been primarily a religious

assembly, and scholars have bolstered this argument by connecting the Panhellenion to

the cult at Eleusis, based on dedications made there by “the Panhellenes,” that is, by the

representatives of the Panhellenion’s various member cities.115 There is also an

inscription erected on the Akropolis by Thyateira, a member city of the Panhellenion,

which ends by noting that the Panhellenion was convened in “the most brilliant city of

the Athenians, the Benefactress, which gives to all at the same place the fruit of the

Mysteries, that is, the most revered Panhellenion.”116 When read in conjunction with

Hadrian’s initiation and participation in the Eleusinian Mysteries (see below), it seems

that Hadrian wanted his Panhellenion to be connected not just with Athens but with a

very particular (and non-abstract) aspect of the ideal of Athens, namely, Eleusis.

Spawforth sees the connection between the Panhellenion and Eleusis as the reason behind

Hadrian’s abandonment of the idea of expanding the Delphic Amphictyony to make it a

Panhellenic assembly. Specifically, “the cult of Apollo at Delphi had long since declined

in influence” while “the Eleusinian mysteries were the most venerated aspect of

traditional Greek religion,” which meant that Eleusis could be “a focus for Greek

115 Spawforth and Walker (1985) 100-101; Jones (1996) 36; Spawforth (1996) 347.

116 Cited and translated by Spawforth (1996) 340.

53

religious sentiment in a way that present-day Delphi could never be.”117 While this is

possibly true, I believe there is a larger point to be made about the association of the

Panhellenion and Eleusis. By linking his assembly of Greek cities with the Eleusinian

Mysteries, Hadrian was attempting to highlight his view that Athens occupied the central

place in his conceptual geography of the Greek world. People already journeyed from

throughout the Mediterranean to Athens to be initiated at Eleusis, and now a group of

representatives from Greece, Asia Minor, and even North Africa traveled there to be part

of an ostensibly Panhellenic assembly. Yet through his creation of this assembly, Hadrian

made it clear that Athens’ centrality was, at least in part, dependent on the person of the

emperor.

As previously mentioned, Hadrian himself was an initiate of the Eleusinian

Mysteries, one of the oldest mystery cults in Greece and one firmly under the control of

the Athenians. Cassius Dio informs us that Hadrian was initiated, most likely during his

visits to Athens in 124 and 128, and Birley speculates that he participated a third time

during his stay in the winter of 131-132.118 The Historia Augusta says that Hadrian was

initiated “following the example of Hercules and Philip,” but does not explain why

Hadrian was following the example of these two figures in particular.119 Birley believes

that this line could have been simply copied from Hadrian’s now-lost autobiography.120

117 Spawforth (1996) 347.

118 Cassius Dio, Roman History, LXIX.12.3; Birley (1997) 175-176, 215, 262.

119 HA, VH XIII.1: Eleusinia sacra exemplo Herculis Philippique suscepit.

120 Birley (1997) 175.

54

Regardless, by citing these two examples the Historia Augusta is clearly demonstrating

Hadrian’s classicizing mentality. With Hercules, Hadrian was most likely attempting to

link himself to the foundational heroes of Greek mythology.

In much the same way that Eleusis linked Hadrian to Hercules, Hadrian connected

himself with Theseus through his building program at Athens and established himself as

a new ktistes for the city.121 Nowhere is this more evident than in the honorary Arch of

Hadrian at Athens, erected by the demos of Athens around the time of the dedication of

the Olympieion in 132 AD.122 Placed along the route from the city center of Athens to the

area around the Olympieion, the arch is inscribed on the side facing the old city, “This is

the former city of Theseus,” while on the other side it reads, “This is the city of Hadrian,

not of Theseus.”123 These inscriptions imply a demarcation between an “old section” of

Athens from a “new” Hadrianic suburb.124 The arch serves to mark Hadrian’s “renewal of

Athens” and his role as a second founder, following in the footsteps of Theseus.125

The association of Hadrian with Philip in the Historia Augusta, on the other hand,

is more difficult to understand, particularly because there is no other ancient source for

his initiation at Eleusis. Birley offers two possible explanations for why Hadrian would

follow Philip’s example. First, Philip “was regarded as a champion of Panhellenism,” and

perhaps Hadrian sought to highlight this similarity with Philip, particularly after his

121 Arafat (1996) 180-182; Adams (1989) 11.

122 Adams (1989) 14. See Willers (1990) 68-92 for a more in-depth discussion of the architecture, measurements, and archaeology of the arch.

123 Adams (1989) 11.

124 The existence of this suburb, however, has been challenged by Adams (1989) among others.

125 Adams (1989) 11.

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creation of the Panhellenion. Second, Birley argues that Hadrian may have wanted the

Athenians “to be reminded of authentic Greek examples of great figures from outside

Athens coming to be initiated,” as opposed to famous Roman figures like Augustus.126

Another explanation of this link between Philip and Hadrian is that a conflation has

occurred between the mysteries at Eleusis and those at Samothrace, since Plutarch tells us

that Philip was initiated there.127 In the Historia Augusta, Hadrian’s initiation follows the

comment that “after this, he sailed along Asia and through the islands to Achaia.”128

Samothrace may have been among the islands at which Hadrian stopped, so his

biographer may have confused Samothrace and Eleusis, and thus listed Philip as an

exemplar for Hadrian.129 No matter what the author of the Historia Augusta intended by

the remark, though, Hadrian’s biography clearly demonstrates his desire to link himself

to the classical Greek past additionally through initiation at Eleusis.

In the end, then, we can view Hadrian’s activities at Athens through the prism of

the inscriptions on the Arch of Hadrian. His construction of new monuments on the

margins of the Old City of Athens (such as the Library and the Pantheon) and his

foundation of new athletic contests and the Panhellenion League served as the

topographical and institutional basis for the “city of Hadrian.” Yet Hadrian did not

neglect the “city of Theseus.” He linked himself to figures of the Athenian past such as

Theseus (in the Arch’s inscription), Hercules (through initiation at Eleusis), and the

126 Birley (1997) 175-176.

127 Plut. Alexander 2.2.

128 HA, VH 13.1: Post haec per Asiam et insulas ad Achaiam navigavit…

129 See Lewis (1958) 92 for this line of argument.

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Peisistratid tyrants (through the completion of the Olympieion). At the same time,

Hadrian was not content merely to connect himself to Athenian past in some abstract

way; he had to write himself into that past and connect that past to the person of the

emperor. He insinuated himself into the “city of Theseus” by naming a new tribe after

himself and erecting statues of himself in the Agora and the Parthenon. Furthermore,

Hadrian’s creation of the Panhellenion in Athens attests to the central place that both

Thesean and Hadrianic Athens possessed within his conceptual geography of Greece. By

locating the Panhellenion in Athens, Hadrian attempted to enact that conceptual

geography as actual institutional geography, that is, he chose to place the headquarters of

the Panhellenic assembly in the culturally and historically important city of Athens,

rather than the politically important city of Corinth (which was the provincial capital of

Achaea, after all) or the economically important cities of Smyrna or Ephesos. At the

same time, though, we must note that through these activities, Hadrian was making

Athens an important place by using his power as emperor. Hadrian tried to make Athens

into a sort of cultural capital of Hellenism, but a capital dependent on the benefactions

and authority of the emperor. In so doing, Athens became a symbol of the Hellenism

which Hadrian sought to use to bind together the provinces of the empire in loyalty to

Rome. In this sense, Hadrian’s Hellenism is something entirely new, even though all of

its components have an Athenian (or more broadly Greek) precedent. Thus, we return to

where this chapter started: Athena (and therefore Athens, and through Athens, Greece)

supported by the Lupa Romana (that is, Roman imperial might).

57

Pausanias and Athens

In this section, I will examine the ways in which Pausanias carefully structures his

Periegesis to depict Athens’ past and its place in his own conceptual geography of Greece

in a post-Hadrianic context. Pausanias does this in several ways: stressing Athens’

historic role in protecting Greece from barbarian invasions, positioning his account of

Athens at the start of his work and relating descriptions of other sites back to Athens,

linking Hellenistic kings and their realms to Athens, and giving Athens an important

place within his account of the Ionian settlement of Asia Minor. Perhaps the most

obvious way that Pausanias focuses on the classical past, though, is by devoting a good

deal of Book I to the famous sites of the city such as the Agora, the Akropolis, and the

graves lining the road to the Academy.130 Hadrian looked to the future by building

monuments in Athens to memorialize himself and his version of Hellenism for all time,

but in his account of Athens, Pausanias looks backward by describing mostly classical

monuments or depictions of archaic or classical figures in these places. For instance, he

describes the images of Theseus in the Stoa Basileios, the statue of Demosthenes in the

Agora, then the Propylaia, Parthenon, and the Erechtheion and Temple of Athena Polias

on the Akropolis, and monuments along the road to the Academy for those who died in

the Peloponnesian War.131 Indeed, by devoting so much space to the graves and war

memorials along the Academy road, it is as if Pausanias has walked through the Arch of

Hadrian to the “city of Theseus,” a city which is so old it is populated only by the dead.

130 Agora: Paus. Peri. I.3.1-5, 5.1-5, 14.4-18.3; Akropolis: Paus. Peri. I.22.4-28.3; Academy road: Paus.

Peri. I.29.2-16.

131 Stoa Basileios: Paus. Peri. I.3.1; Demosthenes: Paus. Peri. I.8.2-3; Propylaia: Paus. Peri. I.22.4; Parthenon: Paus. Peri. I.24.5-7; Erechtheion and Athena Polias: Paus. Peri. I.26.5, I.27.1-2; Peloponnesian War memorials: Paus. Peri. I.29.11-13.

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This selective concentration on the monuments of the past (and, in particular,

monuments of the sixth and fifth centuries BC) is a manifestation of something all travel

writers engage in to one extent or another, what Hutton calls “cognitive mapping,” that

is, they tend to make a topographical locale fit with their own preconceptions of that

locale.132 This is particularly true for pilgrims who write about their journey (which is

what Hutton believes Pausanias is) because pilgrims are visiting and describing sites

“that form the physical backdrop for the narratives that play a large role in creating their

sense of religious and cultural identity.”133 Pilgrims “approach their destinations with

deeply held expectations, and their accounts are suffused with the tension between these

expectations and their on-site experiences.”134 Hutton has shown how these tensions play

out in Pausanias’ description of Corinth, an ancient city that was destroyed by Mummius

in 146 BC and re-founded as a Roman colony in 44 BC by Julius Caesar. Pausanias

describes primarily religious (not secular and governmental) buildings and, among these,

he often ignores Roman-style temples to focus on the Greek art inside.135 As with

Corinth, Pausanias’ description of Athens focuses on archaic and classical monuments to

the exclusion of most Roman monuments, such as the Temple of Roma and Augustus on

the Akropolis. I believe this demonstrates that Pausanias carefully selected which

132 Hutton (2005a) 297-298.

133 Hutton (2005a) 298.

134 Hutton (2005a) 298.

135 Hutton (2005a) 301-306. I should note that Hutton believes that Pausanias’ selectivity is an unconscious expression of his “cultural predilections” (316), but, in my view, Pausanias’ work is very consciously and carefully structured.

59

monuments to discuss in order to make the topography of Athens fit with his

preconceptions of what Athens should be, namely, a place full of monumentalized

memorials of Athens’ illustrious past.

But first, we must note that Pausanias does devote a limited amount of space in

his narrative to some of Hadrian’s buildings in the city, such as the Olympieion and the

Library.136 Arafat holds that Pausanias mentions Hadrian in connection with Athens and,

indeed, throughout the Periegesis because Hadrian represented “the climax of Roman

benefactions to Greece.”137 While this may be true, I think there is more to it than that.

Pausanias is trying to demonstrate that Greek culture, as represented by the monuments

of the past, is something to which anyone can be devoted, even a Roman emperor. For

Pausanias, Hadrian showed a proper respect and devotion to Greek culture through the

completion of ancient projects like the Olympieion and through new buildings meant for

cultural purposes, such as the Library (though he ignores the ways in which these

buildings marshaled Hellenism to further an imperial project). Because of his respect for

the same classical past, Pausanias maintains a generally positive view of Hadrian

throughout.138 This attitude is clearest in Pausanias’ summation of Hadrian’s reign, which

occurs in Book I when Pausanias mentions the addition of three post-classical

Eponymous Heroes at Athens (Attalos, Ptolemy, and Hadrian):

Hadrian was among the greatest in his respect for divinity and, in respect to happiness, he gave the greatest amount to each of his subjects. And he never willingly started a war, but he subdued the Hebrews beyond Syria when they had rebelled. He built some temples to the gods from the beginning, and others he decorated with votive

136 Paus. Peri. I.18.6-9.

137 Arafat (1996) 211.

138 Arafat (1996) 210.

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offerings and furniture and he gave great gifts to the Greek cities, and even to those foreigners who asked for them. All these things are written at Athens in the common temple of the gods.139

In this passage, Pausanias does not seem interested in Hadrian’s motives, just his

greatness. The mere fact that Hadrian admired the Greek past makes him an adherent of

Hellenism in Pausanias’ mind.140 Pausanias would not have been alone in the view that

anyone could be devoted to Hellenism in this way. As noted above, for many Second

Sophistic intellectuals, Hellenism denoted a way of properly speaking and acting Greek.

A Gaul like Favorinus could be “Greek” as could a Syrian like Lucian.141 Pausanias may

also be taking it a step further, that is, Pausanias is taking Hadrian as a symbol for the

entire Roman imperial system in order to demonstrate that, through a respect for the

Greek past, Roman power is bending to Greek culture.

Yet at the same time, Pausanias was either unaware of Hadrian’s attempts to use

Greek culture to further an imperial ideology (due to Hadrian’s subtlety) or ambivalent

about them. After all, Pausanias does not talk about Hadrian’s association with Zeus

Olympios and he takes a negative view of the imperial cult, as we have seen. With

reference to Athens specifically, however, Pausanias wants to highlight the fact that

Hadrian shared his Athenocentric vision of Hellenism, evidenced by Hadrian’s many

benefactions to the city. In fact, Pausanias may be using Hadrian’s building program in 139 Paus. Peri. I.5.5: βασιλέως Ἀδριανοῦ τῆς τε ἐς τὸ θεῖον τιµῆς ἐπὶ πλεῖστον ἐλθόντος καὶ τῶν ἀρχοµένων ἐς εὐδαιµονίαν τὰ µέγιστα ἑκάστοις παρασχοµένου. καὶ ἐς µὲν πόλεµον οὐδένα ἑκούσιος κατέστη, Ἑβραίους δὲ τοὺς ὑπὲρ Σύρων ἐχειρώσατο ἀποστάντας· ὁπόσα δὲ θεῶν ἱερὰ τὰ µὲν ᾠκοδόµησεν ἐξ ἀρχῆς, τὰ δὲ καὶ ἐπεκόσµησεν ἀναθήµασι καὶ κατασκευαῖς ἢ δωρεὰς πόλεσιν ἔδωκεν Ἑλληνίσι, τὰς δὲ καὶ τῶν βαρβάρων τοῖς δεηθεῖσιν, ἔστιν οἱ πάντα γεγραµµένα Ἀθήνῃσιν ἐν τῷ κοινῷ τῶν θεῶν ἱερῷ.

140 See above, pp. 29-31 and n. 71, for the notion that any reader of Greek could have partaken in the idealized version of Greece that Pausanias presents.

141 See n. 47 for references to the idea that “Greek” meant a way of behaving. See Whitmarsh (2001) 119-129 for Favorinus and Lucian.

61

Athens to prove his point, namely that Hellenism should be centered on the monuments,

institutions and history of Athens. If an emperor who was a well-known philhellene

thought that Athens was the capital of Greek culture, his view could support the claim of

a provincial from Asia Minor who made the same argument about Athens.142

Pausanias, then, had a conception of Hellenism based on the monuments and

culture of Greece, but there was another, military, aspect to his Hellenism as well. In his

text, Pausanias frequently stresses the Athenian role in defending Greece’s liberty in wars

against the Persians, the Macedonians, and the Gauls, a fact noticed by other scholars.143

For Pausanias, the Athenians were always in the lead against barbarian threats.144

Appropriately enough, his Athens is full of statues and monuments honoring the

Athenian victory at Marathon, and in particular, a temple to Eukleia, that is, to the

personification of Glory attained by the Athenians at Marathon.145 This temple was,

according to Pausanias, “an offering” for the victory at Marathon, a victory of which he

believes the Athenians “think most highly.”146 Pausanias is more forceful in his

description of the Athenian role at the battle of Thermopylai fought against the Gauls in

279 BC. In Book I, he says, “the Athenians showed themselves to the Greeks as most

worthy” and “they saved the Greeks,” while in Book X he writes that “the Attic

142 This is not to say that Pausanias needed Hadrian’s view to support his project, but such support may

have bolstered his claim in the eyes of some of his readers.

143 Habicht (1985), Alcock (1996), Konstan (2000).

144 Habicht (1985) 108.

145 See Alcock (1996: 251:253) for a list of the Athenian monuments to their victory mentioned by Pausanias.

146 Paus. Peri. I.14.5: ἔτι δὲ ἀπωτέρω ναὸς Εὐκλείας, ἀνάθηµα καὶ τοῦτο ἀπὸ Μήδων, οἳ τῆς χώρας Μαραθῶνι ἔσχον. φρονῆσαι δὲ Ἀθηναίους ἐπὶ τῇ νίκῃ ταύτῃ µάλιστα εἰκάζω.

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contingent surpassed the Greeks in prowess (arete).”147 Pausanias’ choice to describe the

Athenians’ valor at Thermopylai (as opposed to their valor at, say, Salamis or Marathon)

provides more support to his idea of Athenian martial glory. Any educated reader would

know the stories of the Athenian victories at Salamis and Marathon, so rather than cover

old ground, Pausanias decided to write about the defense of Thermopylai as a way to

attach even more martial renown to the Athenians. Furthermore, when Pausanias writes

that the Athenians “surpassed the Greeks in arete,” he is highlighting another way in

which Athens is distinct from the rest of Greece, even Sparta. For, as Alcock notes, any

reader of Pausanias who knows anything about Greek history would naturally connect the

battle of Thermopylai of 279 BC with the more famous battle fought there by the

Spartans against the Persians in 480 BC.148 In these passages about Athenian excellence,

Pausanias is showing his readers that the Athenians are in no way inferior to the Spartans

when it comes to their willingness to defend Greece against barbarians, and moreover,

unlike the Spartans, the Athenians won at Thermopylai. All of this makes the Athenians

stand out from other Greeks and highlights the importance which Pausanias attached to

an Athenocentric view of the Greek past.

Furthermore, Pausanias’ division of his narrative of the Gallic invasion between

Books I (devoted to Athens and Attica) and X (devoted to Delphi and Phokis) is a

manifestation of Pausanias’ textual conception of Greek geography, much as the

Panhellenion was a manifestation of Hadrian’s conceptual geography expressed through

147 Paus. Peri. I.4.3: ἔνθα δὴ πλείστου παρέσχοντο αὑτοὺς Ἀθηναῖοι τοῖς Ἕλλησιν ἀξίους; Paus. Peri.

I.4.4: οὗτοι µὲν δὴ τοὺς Ἕλληνας τρόπον τὸν εἰρηµένον ἔσωζον; Paus. Peri. X.21.5: τοὺς µὲν δὴ Ἕλληνας τὸ Ἀττικὸν ὑπερεβάλετο ἀρετῇ τὴν ἡµέραν ταύτην.

148 Alcock (1996: 257) for this and other similarities between Pausanias’ accounts of the defense of Greece against the Persians and against the Gauls.

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an institution. In placing the account of the invasion in the first and last books of his

Periegesis, Pausanias subtly points back to Athens at the end of his work, as if to remind

his readers of the primacy that Athens has for him, while at the same time connecting two

of the foci of classical Greek culture, Delphi and Athens.149 Pausanias makes this

connection explicit as he begins his account of the Gallic invasion in Book X: “My

account of the Athenian Bouleterion mentions the expedition of the Gauls against

Greece, but I wanted to continue the narrative more clearly in my account of Delphi.”150

Indeed, in the Bouleterion itself there was a painting of Kallippos, who was the Athenian

general at Thermopylai against the Gauls, and that is why Pausanias in Book I had given

a brief account of who the Gauls were and what the Athenians did against them.151 So in

narrating the Gallic invasion in the first and last books of his work, Pausanias

accomplishes a two-fold purpose. First, by emphasizing the Athenians’ defense of

Greece, he defines this as one of the major themes of Athenian history. Then, in the last

book, he points his reader back to the first book, demonstrating the importance Athens

has in his conceptual framework of Greece.

Pausanias’ conceptual geography of Greece, in which Athens played a central

role, is expressed in other ways throughout the text. As mentioned above, Pausanias

chose to open his Periegesis with Athens (in Book I), end at Delphi (in Book X), and

place Olympia in the middle (in Books V and VI), making each of these heavily symbolic

149 Amelling (1996: 146-147) notes this as a sort of ring-composition, but he does not emphasize the role

Athens plays in tying together Books I and X.

150 Paus. Peri. X.19.5: Γαλατῶν δὲ τῆς ἐς τὴν Ἑλλάδα ἐπιστρατείας ἔχει µέν τινα µνήµην καὶ ἡ ἐς τὸ βουλευτήριον ἡµῖν τὸ Ἀττικὸν συγγραφή· προάγειν δὲ ἐς τὸ σαφέστερον τὰ ἐς αὐτοὺς ἠθέλησα ἐν τῷ λόγῳ τῷ ἐς Δελφούς.

151 Paus. Peri. I.3.5 - I.4.6.

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locales an anchor for his conception of Greece and, thus, of Hellenism.152 By starting

with Athens, Pausanias made the city a symbolic gateway to the rest of Greece. This was

not necessarily the most natural starting point. After all, Strabon’s geography of Greece

starts in Elea and Olympia, moves west-to-east across the Peloponnese, and then shifts

northward to Attica, Boeotia, and regions farther north.153 Yet in another sense, Athens

was the most logical place to begin a tour of Greece. The literary, philosophical, political,

and military achievements of fifth- and fourth-century BC Athens provided much of the

foundation for subsequent notions of Greek culture and Hellenism. For Pausanias, there

was no better way to begin a description of Greece than with this most symbolic locale of

Greek culture.154

More particularly, the opening of Book I is different from that of every other

book. Pausanias begins abruptly, “On the Greek mainland, opposite the Cyclades islands

and the Aegean Sea, Cape Sounion juts out from the land of Attica. After sailing past the

promontory, there is a harbor and a temple of Sounian Athena on the summit of the

headland.”155 Scholars have long noted the fact that Pausanias begins with no

introduction but seems to imagine the reader approaching Greece across the Aegean on a 152 See above, n. 83.

153 Hutton (2005b: 77) comments on the fact that the generally east-to-west movement in Pausanias’ text is different from Strabon’s west-to-east movement.

154 Pretzler (2007) 75.

155 Paus. Peri. I.1.1: Τῆς ἠπείρου τῆς Ἑλληνικῆς κατὰ νήσους τὰς Κυκλάδας καὶ πέλαγος τὸ Αἰγαῖον ἄκρα Σούνιον πρόκειται γῆς τῆς Ἀττικῆς· καὶ λιµήν τε παραπλεύσαντι τὴν ἄκραν ἐστὶ καὶ ναὸς Ἀθηνᾶς Σουνιάδος ἐπὶ κορυφῇ τῆς ἄκρας. It is also interesting to note that in his description of Cape Sounion, Pausanias says nothing about the large temple of Poseidon which stands to this day on the actual summit of the cape (See Camp [2001] 305-309 for an overview of the archaeological remains on Sounion). Instead, he mentions the smaller temple of Athena on the far side of the promontory. In choosing Athena’s temple over Poseidon’s, Pausanias opens his work with the patron goddess of Athens and of wisdom and culture more generally. Simultaneously, he ignores the temple of the god who lost the contest to name Athens and therefore was not symbolically linked to the city to the extent Athena was.

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ship from Asia Minor, as he himself had.156 Bowie has even argued that because of this

sudden opening (which is unlike that of so many other works, both of Pausanias’ own

time and of those classical works he seems to imitate) there must have been a now lost

preface where Pausanias explained who he was and what he intended with his work.157

Hutton, in contrast, has found such an argument unnecessary and has read the opening of

Book I as a programmatic statement. In the opening, Pausanias demonstrates his

indebtedness to Herodotos and shows off “a highly original” literary style which “does

not conform to the dominant stylistic trends of the day.”158

This may be, but I would like to draw attention to the fact that Pausanias does not

begin Book I with an exposition of how the region of Attica came to acquire its name, of

its original inhabitants, and their archaic history as he does in every other book except VI

(which is only a continuation of his description of Olympia begun in Book V).159 By

opening Book I in a different way, I believe Pausanias is subtly indicating that, for him,

Athens (and by extension, Attica) is different from the rest of the Greece and should be

recognized as such. Pausanias may have chosen not to begin with the history of Attica

because he assumed his readers would already know it and not need to have it repeated

for them. This, too, is an indication that Athens is somehow different; in contrast to the

rest of Greece, Athens has a well-known history. Pausanias does, in fact, provide a brief

account of the first kings of Attica at I.2.6, but it occupies only one section of one chapter

156 Habicht (1985) 20 notes this, but does not comment on it; Hutton (2005b) 13-14.

157 Bowie (2001) 27-28.

158 Hutton (2005a) 175-177.

159 Hutton (2005b: 295-296) notes the lack of a particular and specific introductory history of Attica in Book I.

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(taking up just over a hundred words). This can be compared to the opposite extreme,

namely Pausanias’ treatment of the history of the kings of Sparta, which runs from III.1.1

to III.10.5 – ten chapters worth of material. This lack of a particular history of Athens at

the start of Book I can also be read as an indication of the idealized view Pausanias had

of Athens. The city had no peculiar history of its own for Pausanias because it had now

become a generalized symbol of a broad Hellenism which could be shared by anyone

with a love of Greek culture.

As noted above, Pausanias made each of his ten books roughly equal in length,

even if the region he was describing had comparatively fewer monuments. This,

however, might be a reason why he described Sparta’s history in so much detail: the city

had fewer monuments than Athens, and so Pausanias made up for the disparity by adding

more historical information. Yet Pausanias was perfectly content in his account of Athens

to deal at great length with the histories of Hellenistic kings such as Attalos and Ptolemy

which only tangentially relate to Athens (see below). If he had wanted to write about

Athens’ early history, he could have chosen to cut back on the Hellenistic material and

replace it with a discussion of Athens’ archaic past. He purposely decided to give short

shrift to the early kings of Attica. In so doing, he is effacing the particular history of

Athens and, thus, emphasizing Athens’ role as a symbol for a universally accessible

Hellenism.

Another possible explanation for why the opening of Book I is markedly different

from that of the others is that Pausanias wrote Book I first and had not yet settled on a

definite methodology for his work.160 Yet in a work as long and as complicated as the

160 Habicht (1985) 19-20 (among others) advances this argument, but see Habicht (1985) 7-8 for why

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Periegesis, with its myriad cross-references, I find it hard to believe that Pausanias did

not have a firm plan before beginning his writing or that he did not fully revise it

afterwards. I believe he intentionally chose to compose the opening to Book I in a

different way from the other books in order to mark Attica and Athens as distinct from

the rest of Greece.

Just as he begins abruptly with Cape Sounion, so Pausanias suddenly ends his

work at Naupaktos. The close of Book X is a story about the poet Anyte who cures a man

named Phalysios of an eye disease with a written and sealed tablet that Anyte was given

in a dream by Asklepios. Phalysios then builds a temple of Asklepios at Naupaktos.161

Porter has offered an interpretation of this story as programmatic for Pausanias’ larger

project, that is, it is “an allegory of reading – an allegory about the kind of work that

reading his periegesis performs, and its therapeutic value” by making “the dream of

Greece whole again.”162 While this is a convincing interpretation, I wish to focus on the

close of the Periegesis in a different sense to understand why Pausanias ends his travels

at Naupaktos. Some scholars have argued that Book X, while certainly the last book

Pausanias intended to write, may not be complete.163 However, I agree with Hutton’s

assessment that the text as we have it is a finished product.164 Pausanias intended to finish

Pausanias did not publish Book I separately from the rest.

161 Paus. Peri. X.38.13. Interestingly, Anyte was classified as one of the nine earthly Muses by Antipatros of Thessalonike (Anthologia Graeca, IX.26). Pausanias may have been thinking of that tradition and closing his work with a kind of invocation to the Muse Anyte.

162 Porter (2001) 91. Ellinger (2005: 212-215) has commented on the importance of Pausanias ending at a temple. Nörenberg (1973) has discussed the relationship between the sights of Naupaktos and Pausanias’ anecdotes about them, as well as noting that Pausanias’ ending may be a kind of imitation of Herodotos.

163 Habicht (1985) 6-7; Pretzler (2007) 8.

164 Hutton (2005b) 61. See, too, Porter (2001) 91, n. 116.

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at Naupaktos: just as Cape Sounion is the first indication of mainland Greece when one

approaches by sea from the east, Naupaktos (as one of the significant ports of western

Greece) is an indication that one has finally left Greece when sailing on to Italy and the

West.165

The question then arises, why would Pausanias’ ideal reader leave his textual

Greece by sailing from a town such as Naupaktos rather than a larger, busier, and more

significant port like Nikopolis or Patras? The answer, I believe, is two-fold. First,

Nikopolis and Patras were overtly connected with Roman rule in a way Naupaktos was

not, thus making it difficult for Pausanias to fit such ports into his de-Romanized

imaginary Greece.166 Granted, Naupaktos was placed under the government of the

Achaeans at Patras when Patras was established as a Roman veterans’ colony under

Augustus, and Naupaktos may have absorbed some Roman colonists itself.167

Nevertheless, this does not seem to have had a long-term effect on Naupaktos, and

Rizakis notes that “the attachment of the territory of a small city to a large urban center

did not automatically or always lead to the loss of its identity.”168 Furthermore, because

Naupaktos was not actually founded (or re-founded) by the Romans, it was easier for

Pausanias to conclude his tour of an ideal Greece at a thoroughly Greek location. This is

in contrast to Nikopolis, an obviously Roman foundation of Augustus meant to celebrate

his victory at Actium, and thus outside Pausanias’ cognitive map of Greece. 165 Ellinger (2005) 211-212.

166 Ellinger (2005) 211 compares the strait between Naupaktos and Patras to the Hellespont , believing that both separate Greeks from barbarians. Regardless of what one thinks of this comparison, Ellinger does not note that Patras or Nikopolis could not fit into Pausanias’ idealized version of Greece.

167 Rizakis (1997) 20 (on Paus. Peri. X.38.9).

168 Rizakis (1997) 20.

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Patras, on the other hand, while a veterans’ colony, had a history which stretched

back to the classical Greek period, a history which Pausanias could not outright ignore.

Indeed, in his description of the city, Pausanias writes more on its mythical and archaic

past than its Roman present, thus emphasizing the former and downplaying the latter.169

Just as with Corinth, Pausanias describes mostly religious buildings and gives several

substantial anecdotes about the origin of festivals or rituals in Patras that date back to the

archaic past, such as the festival of Triklarian Artemis.170 Yet Pausanias does not ignore

Augustus’ role in shaping contemporary Patras, and mentions him twice, once in

describing how he re-settled the largely abandoned site by bringing back inhabitants from

nearby towns, and again when explaining that the Patreans acquired a statue of Artemis

from Kalydon when Aitolia was “laid waste by Augustus in order to settle the Aitolians

at Nikopolis above Aktion.”171 A little later, Pausanias gives an anecdote about a statue

of Dionysos which he circumspectly says “was also transported from Kalydon.”172 So,

like Nikopolis, Patras was tainted for Pausanias by a great deal of Roman involvement,

and concluding with either of these places could not provide a suitable ending to his

vision of Greece. Naupaktos, on the other hand, as an ancient city that had not been

impacted by the Roman conquest, could provide such a conclusion.

169 Paus. Peri. VII.18.2-7 for these aspects of Patras’ past. See, Alcock (1993) 133-134 for the re-

foundation of Patras.

170 For Corinth, see Hutton (2005a). Triklarian Artemis: Paus. Peri. VII.19.1-10.

171 Re-foundation: Paus. Peri. VII.18.7; devastation of Aitolia: Paus. Peri. VII.18.8: Καλυδῶνος γὰρ καὶ Αἰτωλίας τῆς ἄλλης ὑπὸ Αὐγούστου βασιλέως ἐρηµωθείσης διὰ τὸ [τὴν] ἐς <τὴν>Νικόπολιν τὴν ὑπὲρ τοῦ Ἀκτίου συνοικίζεσθαι.

172 Paus. Peri. VII.21.1: µετεκοµίσθη γὰρ καὶ τοῦ Διονύσου τὸ ἄγαλµα ἐκ Καλυδῶνος.

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Moreover, Naupaktos was an Athenian naval base during the Peloponnesian War.

Pausanias mentions this fact in his account of Messenia, since Athens had seized

Naupaktos from the Lokrians and given it to Messenian refugees following their defeat

by Sparta in the Third Messenian War.173 Out of gratitude to the Athenians and dislike

for the Spartans, the Messenians then “offered Naupaktos as a base of operations against

the Peloponnese.”174 Pausanias does not explicitly mention this history in his description

of Naupaktos itself, but he alludes to it by saying, “these things [i.e., the history of

Naupaktos] were dealt with by me more fully in my account of Messenia.”175 The

attentive reader would remember that Naupaktos was, in effect, Athenian. In this way,

Pausanias can end his description of Greece with an outpost of Athens in the West (just

as he began with Cape Sounion, the south-easternmost outpost of Athens), thus tying the

beginning to the end of his work by relating it to Athens. Cape Sounion and Naupaktos

are appropriate bookends for Pausanias’ conceptual geography of Greece, as both remind

the reader of the central role of Athens in that geography. We see here, too, the

intertwining of Athens’ geography (Cape Sounion and Naupaktos) and Athens’ past

(Naupaktos as an Athenian naval base in the Peloponnesian War).176

Athens’ past and its geography are also intertwined, I believe, in Pausanias’

discussion in Book I of several Hellenistic kings. As noted above, the statue of Hadrian

located among the Eponymous Heroes in the Agora allowed Pausanias to sum up his 173 Paus. Peri. IV.24.7.

174 Paus. Peri. IV.26.1: τήν τε γὰρ Ναύπακτον ὁρµητήριον ἐπὶ τῇ Πελοποννήσῳ παρείχοντο.

175 Paus. Peri. X.38.10: τάδε µὲν ἐπεξῆλθέ µοι καὶ ἐς πλέον ἡ Μεσσηνία συγγραφή.

176 Ellinger (2005) 211 believes that Naupaktos, as a “refuge for the free Messenians,” symbolizes the freedom of Greece as a whole, but he does not make the important connection between Naupaktos and Athens.

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reign. In a similar way, Pausanias writes about Ptolemy and Attalos by using their

respective Eponymous Hero statues, since the Athenians had added two tribes named

after them to the ten original Kleisthenic tribes (Ptolemais in 224/3 BC and Attalis in 200

BC).177 Pausanias provides a long account of how Ptolemy established his rule in Egypt

following the death of Alexander and a brief mention of Attalos, whose greatest deed,

says Pausanias, was to push the invading Celts from the seacoast of Asia Minor into the

interior regions.178 After a brief description of a few other statues in the Agora, Pausanias

returns to the Ptolemies, since there was a series of statues erected in their honor outside

the Odeion.179 A statue of Lysimachos prompts Pausanias to give a history of his reign,

so too a statue of Pyrrhos.180 A little further on, Pausanias sees a statue of Seleukos in

front of the Stoa Poikile and he briefly describes how Seleukos won his kingdom in Asia

and how, when attempting to conquer Macedonia, he was assassinated by Ptolemy

Keraunos.181

As we have already seen, when Pausanias’ writes about the past, it is usually the

heroic and classical (i.e., fifth-century BC) past. This is generally in keeping with the

intellectual milieu of the Second Sophistic period; after all, orators’ declamations are

almost always set prior to the conquests of Alexander. Why, then, would Pausanias

provide fairly substantial discourses on five major Hellenistic kings? Pausanias himself

says that he has decided to narrate the deeds of Ptolemy and Attalos “because their fame 177 Habicht (1997) 182.

178 Ptolemy: Paus. Peri. I.6.2-7.3; Attalos: Paus. Peri. I.8.1.

179 Paus. Peri. I.8.6-9.3.

180 Lysimachos: Paus. Peri. I.9.5-10.5; Pyrrhos: Paus. Peri. I.11.1-13.9.

181 Paus. Peri. I.16.1-3.

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remains no longer, and those who lived with the kings in order to record the kings’

actions were forgotten still earlier.”182 Some modern historians take this claim at face

value, but at least one scholar believes that it cannot be true, because it is hard to believe

that the history of these two kings had been forgotten by Pausanias’ day.183 Indeed,

Plutarch had written biographies of Eumenes (a Hellenistic ruler of Pergamon, but no

relation to Attalos), as well as two other Hellenistic kings, Demetrios and Pyrrhos, so

why should Attalos and Ptolemy have been forgotten? In addition, as one scholar has

pointed out, Pausanias’ claim is especially odd coming from “an educated native of Asia

Minor, and probably a Lydian, a native of an area which had been within the sphere of

the Pergamene rulers.”184 He believes it is a “deliberate diminution” of the importance of

Ptolemy and Attalos in order to further praise Hadrian, the third post-Kleisthenic

Eponymous Hero.185 This is one explanation, but I believe there is more going on here.

Regardless of whether or not they had been forgotten, the historic fact that Ptolemy and

Attalos along with Hadrian were all benefactors of Athens and all had new tribes named

after them allows Pausanias to implicitly compare the three rulers.186 Indeed, Pausanias’

summation of Hadrian’s reign (quoted above) directly precedes his accounts of Ptolemy

and Attalos, and his list of the Hadrianic monuments in Athens comes not long after these

182 Paus. Peri. I.6.1: ὡς µὴ µένειν ἔτι τὴν φήµην αὐτῶν, καὶ οἱ συγγενόµενοι τοῖς βασιλεῦσιν ἐπὶ συγγραφῇ τῶν ἔργων καὶ πρότερον ἔτι ἠµελήθησαν.

183 Face value: Habicht (1990) 572. See, too, Hansen (1971: xvii) for the paucity of literary sources on the Attalids, although a now-lost portion of Polybios’ history contained “the last twenty-three years of the reign of Attalos I and the reigns of his two sons.”

184 Arafat (1996) 170.

185 Arafat (1996) 170-171.

186 For the Attalids and Ptolemies as political protectors and cultural benefactors of Athens, see Habicht (1990) and (1992), respectively.

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accounts. By structuring his narrative in this way, Pausanias is attempting to tie all three

men together as adherents of a Hellenism, centered on Athens, that stretched far beyond

mainland Greece to the lands that were once Ptolemy and Attalos’ kingdoms, Asia Minor

and Egypt, and, under Hadrian, to the entire Mediterranean basin.

Confirmation of this argument comes from the fact that Ptolemy and Attalos were

founders of dynasties that continued to emphasize their connection with Athenian culture

through the establishment of massive libraries in their capitals of Alexandria and

Pergamon. Indeed, Pergamon and, especially, Alexandria can even be said to have

consciously rivaled Athens in the Hellenistic period as the capitals of Hellenism.187

Alexandria was, of course, a metropolis that possessed a larger population and greater

political importance under the Roman Empire than Athens did. Its Library and Museum

were repositories for a massive collection of classical Greek literature (much of it by

Athenian writers) and its scholars were among the first to engage in textual criticism of

ancient works.188 At Pergamon, the Attalid dynasty was a great patron of paideia through

the establishment of a library which Attalos and his successors expanded through the

collection of books in rivalry with the Ptolemies.189 In Pausanias’ mind, then, the version

of Hellenism that spread throughout the eastern Mediterranean following the conquests

187 See Maehler (2004) for the Ptolemies’ “Hellenocentric cultural policy” based on the Library and

Museion (11). See Trapp (2004) for Alexandria as a Second Sophistic “cultural centre” slighted by Athenocentric authors (125-127).

188 MacLeod (2000).

189 Patrons: Hansen (1971) 397-433; book-collecting and rivalry with Ptolemies: Hansen (1971) 170, 214. See also Finkelberg (2006: 238) for the library at Pergamon as a serious rival to the library at Alexandria.

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of Alexander (and was continuing to spread following the accession of Hadrian) was still

tied to Athens and so he chooses to narrate the history of these kings in his book on

Athens, to emphasize that connection.

The other three Hellenistic kings symbolize, I believe, the geographical limits to

which Hellenism was extended following the death of Alexander: to the North, with

Lysimachos’ establishment of a kingdom in Macedonia and Thrace; the East, with the

solidifying of the Asian satrapies under Seleukos; and the West, with Pyrrhos’ kingdom

in Epiros and his invasion of southern Italy. At the same time, however, these three kings

additionally represent the martial side of Hellenism, in contrast to Ptolemy and Attalos,

who were known benefactors of Athens and of Greek culture more generally (although

they, too, waged war, and Pausanias does not ignore this in his accounts of their reigns).

Lysimachos, Seleukos, and Pyrrhos were all famous primarily for their military

accomplishments, and indeed, deeds in battle dominate Pausanias’ stories of these men.

Pausanias narrates Lysimachos’ victories over the Thracians, the Odrysai, the Getai, and

the Dromichaites, as well as against various other successor kings.190 Similarly,

Pausanias tells us of Seleukos’ triumph over Antigonos and of Pyrrhos’ many campaigns

against the Romans, Greeks, and Macedonians.191 The martial side of Hellenism is

something often missed by scholars interested in the cultural history of ideals and is not

confined to Pausanias. Ailios Aristeides, in his Panathenaikos, devotes an extraordinary

amount of time to Athens’ military actions, from the time of the Heraclidai to the fourth

190 Paus. Peri. I.9.5-10.5. There is also the possibility that Pausanias meant to set up in the mind of his

reader an implicit comparison between Lysimachos’ victories along the Danube with Trajan’s conquests there a generation before Pausanias.

191 Seleukos: Paus. Peri. I.16.1; Pyrrhos: I.11.6-13.9.

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century BC.192 And by mentioning these rulers in his account of Athens in Book I,

Pausanias is trying to establish a particularly Athenocentric vision of Hellenism that

extends throughout the eastern Mediterranean in both cultural and military terms, and is

not confined only to mainland Greece. In this way, Pasuanias intertwines Athens’ past

with its place in his imaginary geography: no matter where their kingdoms are physically

located, these third- and second-century BC kings are looking back to Athens as their

cultural capital.

This intertwining of Athens’ past and geography occurs again in the opening of

Book VII on Achaia. Here, Pausanias relates the legendary story of how the Achaians

drove the Ionians out of Achaia two generations after the Trojan War, and how the

Ionians settled in Athens. Shortly thereafter, following a dispute over the kingship, a

group of Ionians set out from Attica to colonize the coast of Asia Minor and the Aegean

islands.193 At this point, Pausanias begins an excursus on the various islands and cities of

the Asian coast.194 While he is careful to make a distinction between Ionians and

Athenians (and he notes that most of the colonists were Ionians, not Athenians), this

expansion of the conceptual geography of Greek culture still emanates from Athens, in a

much more direct way than the expansion instigated by the successors of Alexander.195

Furthermore, as far as I can tell, only one modern scholar has commented (rather

unsatisfactorily) on the fact that, in a work supposedly devoted to describing the old

192 Ail. Arist. Panath. 115-179.

193 Paus. Peri. VII.1.3-2.1.

194 Paus. Peri. VII.2.3-5.6.

195 Paus. Peri. VII.2.1.

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Greek cities of the mainland, Pausanias takes time to provide brief notices on the Ionian

settlements of the islands and Asia Minor such as Miletos, Klazomenai, Samos, Chios,

and Smyrna.196 In this excursus, Pausanias sets up a dynamic between center and

periphery. Greeks move from the mainland (the center) to the Aegean islands and the

coast of Asia Minor (the periphery), but Athens plays a curious role in this dynamic. In a

way, it is the cultural center of the mainland and a kind of capital of Greek culture. At the

same time, it mediates between the center and the periphery because it serves as the

gateway for the colonists as they journey out to Asia Minor. This is an interesting

reversal of Athens’ role at the start of Book I, where it serves as the gateway to the

mainland for those coming (back) from Asia Minor. As with his account of the

Hellenistic kings, then, Pausanias makes it clear that while Greek culture is no longer

geographically limited to the Greek mainland, it is still Athenocentric.

Pausanias’ fascination with Athens’ past and its geography is also apparent in his

own biography. Like Hadrian, Pausanias, too, was an initiate of the Eleusinian Mysteries.

While describing the sights of Eleusis, he stops short and says, “A dream forbids me to

write about the things inside the wall of the sanctuary, and naturally those who have not

been initiated should have no part of learning clearly things which they are prevented

from seeing.”197 The implication is clear: Pausanias himself had been initiated at Eleusis.

In general, Pausanias had a high opinion of the Eleusinian Mysteries. In Book IV, while

discussing Demeter’s rites at Karnasion in Messenia, Pausanias says that he believes

196 Miletos: Paus. Peri. VII.2.2-3; Klazomenai: VII.3.5; Samos: VII.4.1-5; Chios: VII.4.6; Smyrna: VII.5.1.

Hutton (2005b: 72) believes that this excursus is meant “to flesh out the descriptions of antiquity-poor regions, and thereby to maintain an approximate balance between the separate books.”

197 Paus. Peri. I.38.7: τὰ δὲ ἐντὸς τοῦ τείχους τοῦ ἱεροῦ τό τε ὄνειρον ἀπεῖπε γράφειν, καὶ τοῖς οὐ τελεσθεῖσιν, ὁπόσων θέας εἴργονται, δῆλα δήπου µηδὲ πυθέσθαι µετεῖναί σφισιν.

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them to be “second to the Eleusinian Mysteries in terms of holiness.”198 Since Athens

controls the holiest rites in Greece, Pausanias described it as the center of Greek religion,

just as he made it the center of literary culture and of military conquests. Furthermore, in

Book X, in his long description of Polygnotos’ painting of the fall of Troy inside a

building at Delphi, Pausanias concludes that some of the figures whom Polygnotos

depicted in Hades “in no way held the mysteries of Eleusis in high account.”199 He goes

on to mournfully say that “the Greeks of earlier times held the Eleusinian Mysteries in

much more honor than all other displays of piety.”200 Like Hadrian and his imitation of

Hercules and Philip, then, Pausanias recognized that he was connecting himself with the

classical Greek past by being initiated at Eleusis.

For Pausanias, Eleusis was closely tied, geographically and conceptually, to

Athens and a specifically Athenocentric Hellenism, just as it was for Hadrian. Indeed,

this connection between Eleusis and Athens was not confined to Pausanias and Hadrian;

it had been part of the ideal of Athens since at least the fourth century BC, a fact often

overlooked by scholars both of the mysteries and of Hellenic ideals. In Isokrates’

Panegyrikos, a speech meant to demonstrate that Athens should naturally be the leader of

the Greek city-states in a new war against Persia, Isokrates begins with an enumeration of

the many good deeds performed by the Athenians throughout history and the gifts they

198 Paus. Peri. IV.33.5: δεύτερα γάρ σφισι νέµω σεµνότητος µετά γε Ἐλευσίνια. He also mentions a

dream here (perhaps the same one he mentioned in Book I) that did not forbid him to name two objects kept at Karnasion. This implies that it did forbid him to write in detail about the mysteries there, just as at Eleusis.

199 Paus. Peri. X.31.11: ἐτεκµαιρόµεθα δ’ εἶναι καὶ τούτους τῶν τὰ δρώµενα Ἐλευσῖνι ἐν οὐδενὶ θεµένων λόγῳ.

200 Paus. Peri. X.31.11: οἱ γὰρ ἀρχαιότεροι τῶν Ἑλλήνων τελετὴν τὴν Ἐλευσινίαν πάντων ὁπόσα ἐς εὐσέβειαν ἥκει τοσούτῳ ἦγον ἐντιµότερον ὅσῳ καὶ θεοὺς ἐπίπροσθεν ἡρώων.

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have given to the rest of the Greeks. Under this heading, Isokrates tells the story of

Demeter and Persephone and how Demeter taught agriculture to humanity, through the

Athenians.201 Isokrates says Demeter gave the Athenians “two gifts which happen to be

the greatest,” namely, “produce” and “the holy rite,” that is, the Eleusinian Mysteries.202

He goes on to say that Athens “was so loving towards mankind that, being the mistress of

so many good things, she did not begrudge them to others, but she shared what she had

received with everyone,” that is to say, the Athenians taught the rest of humanity how to

farm and allowed them to participate in the Eleusinian Mysteries.203 This parallels

Isokrates’ famous claim that Athens gave its philosophy and paideia to the world.204 The

city is a cultural benefactor and a religious benefactor to the rest of humanity.

In the same tradition, the second-century AD sophist Ailios Aristeides mentions

the mysteries in his Panathenaikos, a speech praising Athens influenced by that of

Isokrates. Aristeides never explicitly ties together agriculture, Eleusis, and Athens as

Isokrates does but near the end of the work, he does use the fact that the Athenians shared

crops and religious rites (by which he presumably means the Eleusinian Mysteries) with

the rest of humankind.205 Aristeides praises Athenian religious rituals, particularly the

Eleusinian Mysteries. He writes that “some of the mysteries are honored as ancient,

others as necessary, and others as well-known to most people. The Eleusinian Mysteries

201 Isok. Panegyrikos 28-30.

202 Isok. Panegyrikos 28: καὶ δούσης δωρεὰς διττὰς, αἵπερ µέγισται τυγχάνουσιν οὖσαι, τούς τε καρποὺς ...καὶ τὴν τελετὴν.

203 Isok. Panegyrikos 29: ἡ πόλις ἡµῶν οὐ µόνον θεοφιλῶς, ἀλλὰ καὶ φιλανθρώπως ἔσχεν, ὥστε κυρία γενοµένη τοσούτων ἀγαθῶν οὐκ ἐφθόνησεν τοῖς ἄλλοις, ἀλλ’ ὧν ἔλαβεν ἅπασιν µετέδωκεν.

204 Isok. Panegyrikos 49-50.

205 Ail. Arist. Panath. 185.

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surpass them in all accounts.”206 He also mentions that Herakles (along with the

Dioskouroi) was the first foreigner admitted by the Athenians to the mysteries.207 This

clarifies why the Historia Augusta cites Herakles as an exemplar for Hadrian’s initiation;

Hadrian, like Herakles, was a distinguished non-Athenian initiated into one of the holiest

rites of Greece. In addition to these literary works, there is an inscription concerning the

Egyptian goddess Isis at Maroneia in Thrace dating to the Hellenistic period that links

Athens and Eleusis. It reads, “in Greece you [Isis] honored above all Athens...That is why

in Greece we hasten to gaze upon Athens, and in Athens, Eleusis, for we deem the city

the ornament of Europe, and the sanctuary the ornament of the city.”208 In this instance,

too, we see an explicit connection, in fact almost an identification, between Eleusis and

Athens. In a larger sense, then, Pausanias and Hadrian were the latest in a series of

intellectuals, from Isokrates to Aristeides, to view the Eleusinian Mysteries and,

consequently, Athens as the religious center of Greece, a fact overlooked by many

scholars. Pausanias and Hadrian took this a step further. Rather than merely highlight

Athens’ Eleusinian credentials, they both were actually initiated into the mysteries, while

making Athens central to their literary work (in the case of Pausanias) or to their

programs of cultural promotion and construction (in the case of Hadrian).

There is an irony to Pausanias’ initiation, though. Isokrates and Aristeides were

not initiates of Eleusis, as far as is known, and so were free to talk about Eleusis at great

206 Ail. Arist. Panathenaikos 191: ἀλλὰ µὴν τῶν γε µυστηρίων τὰ µὲν ὡς ἀρχαῖα τετίµηται, τὰ δ’ὡς ἀναγκαῖα, τὰ δ’ὡς πλείστοις γνώριµα. Πάσαις τοίνυν ταῖς ψήφοις προφέρει τὰ Ἐλευσίνια…

207 Ail. Arist. Panathenaikos 191.

208 See Grandjean (1975) 17-21 for the Greek text and translation, and pp. 93-98 for a commentary on the lines dealing with Athens. See, too, discussion by Fowden (1986) 47-48. For the origins of the connection between Isis and Greek mystery cults, see Henrichs (1984).

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length, albeit in a general way. Pausanias, on the other hand, was an initiate, and as such,

was forced to restrain himself in how much he disclosed about Eleusis. Thus, actual

initiation effaces Eleusis in the text and makes the mysteries’ connection with Athens

less explicit. But at the same time, Pausanias, unlike Isokrates and Aristeides, can speak

about Eleusis from a position of authority. As an initiate, he can personally attest to the

importance and holiness of the mysteries, and his statement that the Eleusinian Mysteries

are the holiest rites in Greece carries more weight than it might if he had not been

initiated. Therefore, Pausanias’ personal biography strengthens his implicit claim that

Athens, through Eleusis, is the religious center of Greece.

Pausanias, to conclude, like Hadrian, concentrated on the classical past of Athens

as well as its place in his imagined geography of Greece. He described mostly classical

(that is, pre-Roman) monuments in the city and he highlighted Athens’ historical role as a

defender of Greek liberty. He structured his literary work in such a way as to reflect his

conceptual geography by placing Athens at the start of the work as the gateway to the

Hellenism that pervades his book. Furthermore, he ties together the first and last book

through references to Athens, making Athens the beginning and end of his ideal Greece.

The geographical sites scattered throughout the “old” Greek mainland which Pausanias

describes make up the most important physical manifestation of his Hellenism. At the

same time, though, through discussions of Hellenistic monarchs and the Ionian

migration, Pausanias makes it clear that the geographical boundaries of his version of

Hellenism were not limited to mainland Greece but encompassed the whole eastern

Mediterranean. Like Hadrian, Pausanias enacts a vision of Hellenism which is centered

on Athens’ past and whose imagined geography (despite its far-flung boundaries) keeps

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Athens in the center as a kind of cultural capital. Yet unlike Hadrian, Pausanias could not

enact this Hellenism through the creation of monuments and institutions; it had to be

done through a text which could share his version of Hellenism with his readers.209 More

importantly, this version, while accessible to any reader of Greek, was not meant to

promote an imperial ideology, as was Hadrian’s Hellenism. Instead, it was meant to

create a sense of Greekness that was not dependent on the Roman Empire and, in fact,

sought to efface or subordinate the empire wherever possible. Pausanias wanted his

Hellenism to create a community of Greeks, no matter where they lived, whose sense of

community was based on the central role Athens played in his conception of history and

geography. Undoubtedly, Pausanias would have read the breastplate of Hadrian’s statue

in the Parthenon as Athena/Athens standing in triumph over the wolf of Roman power.

Conclusion

I would like to end this chapter as I began it: with an image of Pausanias in Athens.

Imagine Pausanias walking from the Athenian Agora to the east and south, skirting the

Akropolis, ending up at the gigantic Temple of Olympian Zeus, begun by the

Peisistratids and completed by Hadrian not long before Pausanias’ visit. Along the way,

he would have passed through the Arch of Hadrian (although he does not mention it in

his guidebook). As Pausanias walks down the street towards the arch, he has a clear view

209 This kind of enactment in the form of a selective guidebook to Greece is an example of the “ordering of

knowledge” described by König and Whitmarsh (2007), although unfortunately, they do not mention Pausanias once. Whitmarsh (2007: 44) has also argued that “the act of compiling, summarizing, and presenting is a gesture of control on the part of the author, and also an expression of the vast material resources of the culture in question,” and Pausanias’ text seems to bear this out. In Pausanias’ case, the Hellenism produced by his “gesture of control” runs counter to the Hellenism of the imperial administration of Hadrian.

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of the Olympieion through the opening of the arch. As he draws closer, he can read the

inscription on the architrave, “This is Athens, the former city of Theseus.” He passes

through the arch, and turns around to see the Akropolis framed by the arch’s opening. It

is then that he reads the inscription on the east side of the arch, facing the Olympieion,

“This is the city of Hadrian and not of Theseus.” This arch, placed squarely on the axis

between the Akropolis and the Olympieion, linking “old” Athens and “new” Athens (by

its geographical location and its inscription), serves as a refracting lens through which a

visitor like Pausanias can glimpse both the glory of classical Athens and the importance

given to the modern city by Hadrian. By taking a few steps and turning around, Pausanias

can see Athens’ past and present in a moment.210

Indeed, the arch can also serve as a useful symbol for the related, but different,

places that Athens holds in Pausanias and Hadrian’s Hellenism. For Hadrian, Athens is,

by virtue of its history and literature, the geographical and cultural center of Hellenism.

This center can be refashioned by the emperor with the completion of old building

projects and the initiation of new ones. This refashioning of Athens mirrors Hadrian’s

refashioning of Hellenism as part of an imperial ideology of unification to link the Greek

east in loyalty to the emperor. Thus the arch, through the Theseus inscription, displays a

Hellenism that looks back to the Athenian past, while its inscription about Hadrian points

to a route forward for that Hellenism, as something to be deployed by an emperor. For

Pausanias, like Hadrian, Athens is the foundation and gateway for a Hellenism that

extends throughout the eastern Mediterranean, but is based on a shared memory of the

pre-Roman Greek past. It is thus as if Pausanias ignores the inscriptions on the arch and

210 Route to the Olympieion: Paus. Peri. I.18.4-6.

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what they symbolize, to focus on what one can see through the arch: the Akropolis,

symbolizing Hellenism’s past, and the Olympieion, symbolizing Hellenism’s potential

future.

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CHAPTER 3

ATHENS IS EVERYWHERE: PHILOSTRATOS’ ATHENS AND COSMOPOLITAN HELLENISM

Introduction

We have seen the central albeit different roles that Athens played in the conceptions of

Hellenic culture and identity that Hadrian and Pausanias reflected and reiterated. For

Hadrian the city of Athens could be developed, through imperial patronage, into a

cultural capital for the eastern Mediterranean. Hadrian utilized Athenocentric Hellenism

as one component of his larger imperial ideology to strengthen the ties between the

provinces of the East and Rome. For Pausanias, by contrast, Athens was the gateway to

the Hellenism embodied in his Periegesis, a Hellenism that was meant to create a textual

and imagined community of Greeks (wherever they lived) based on the centrally

important place of Athens in the old Greek mainland. Further, by focusing largely on

Athens’ pre-Roman past, Pausanias was attempting to establish a Hellenism that was

oriented along different axes, sometimes parallel, but other times at odds with, Hadrian’s

Hellenism, to which Pausanias was possibly responding. Crucially, Pausanias’ Hellenism

was in no way overtly or consciously dependent on Roman imperial power and, in fact, it

sought to efface that power wherever possible.

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Athens, we see, possessed a different value for Hadrian and Pausanias, but it was

still central to both men’s conception and program of Hellenism; this, at least, they had in

common. Indeed, Hadrian and Pausanias stand in a long tradition of Athenocentric

Hellenism. As early the fifth century BC, Athenians were postulating their city as the

cultural center and model for the rest of Greece. Perikles, in the funeral oration attributed

to him by Thucydides, famously proclaimed that Athens was “the education of Greece.”1

About thirty-five years later, Isokrates, in his Panegyrikos, went a step further, making

Athens the teacher of the world and arguing that “Greek” denoted a way of thinking that

was not based on race or ethnicity but on Athenian culture:

Our city [Athens] has left behind other men regarding thinking and speaking to such an extent that her students have become teachers of others, and she has made the name “Hellenes” no longer seem to refer to a race but to a way of thinking and she has made those men be called Hellenes who share in our culture rather than our common nature.2

This Athenocentric model of Hellenism continued to have currency in the second century

AD and during the cultural revivalist movement known as the Second Sophistic, when

Greek intellectuals looked back to the classical past as a model for their own language

and writings. Contemporary with Pausanias, Ailios Aristeides wrote a Panathenaic

Oration that continues to praise Athens as the center of Greek culture. He claimed that

“all cities and all human nations turn towards you [i.e., the Athenians] and your way of

life and your language” and that “emulation of your wisdom and custom spreads across

1 Thuc. II.41.1: Ξυνελών τε λέγω τήν τε πᾶσαν πόλιν τῆς Ἑλλάδος παίδευσιν εἴναι. This is not the

place to expound on what Thucydides’s Perikles may have meant with this statement, but see Most (2006) for an excellent discussion of the topos of Athens-as-school-of-Greece in Thucydides, Plato, and Isokrates.

2 Isok. Panegyrikos 50: Τοσοῦτον δ’ἀπολέλοιπεν ἡ πόλις ἡµῶν περὶ τὸ φρονεῖν καὶ λέγειν τοὺς ἄλλους ἀνθρώπους, ὥσθ’οἱ ταύτης µαθηαταὶ τῶν ἄλλων διδάσκαλοι γεγόνασιν, καὶ τὸ τῶν Ἑλλήνων ὄνοµα πεποίηκεν µηκέτι τοῦ γένους, ἀλλὰ τῆς διανοίας δοκεῖν εἴναι, καὶ µᾶλλον Ἕλληνας καλεῖσθαι τοὺς τῆς παιδεύσεως τῆς ἡµετέρας ἢ τοὺς τῆς κοινῆς φύσεως µετέχοντας.

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every land by some divine chance.”3 Indeed, according to Aristeides, “there is no Greek

who would not wish to have been born an Athenian rather than a citizen belonging to his

native city.”4 For Aristeides, as for his model Isokrates before him, the widespread

supremacy of the Attic dialect and Athenian culture was the foundation of Athenian

glory.

While this view of Athens certainly had (and continues to have) great staying

power, Hellenism, like all cultural ideals at this level of abstraction, was complicated and

rife with inherent conflicts and contradictions. Men such as Hadrian and Pausanias could

advance competing ideas of the central role Athens should play in a conception of

Hellenism, but others questioned why Athens need be central at all. As we saw in

Chapter 1, the Ptolemies of Alexandria and the Attalids of Pergamon, through the

construction of libraries such as the Alexandrian Museion, consciously attempted to set

up their respective capitals as centers of Hellenism in opposition to or rivalrous

emulation of Athens. Yet as we saw, Pausanias pointed out the obvious irony in these

Hellenistic attempts: the culture, particularly literary culture, which was promoted

through these libraries and the Museion was largely based on Athenian authors. Indeed,

the Ptolemies and Attalids could never completely jettison Athens as the font of Hellenic

culture, and both families constructed buildings and erected dedications in Athens in

order to enhance their own prestige and cultural standing in the broader Greek world,

which resulted in the creation of the Athenian tribes of Ptolemais and Attalis in

3 Ail. Arist. Panath. 180: ἅπασι γὰρ αἱ πόλεις καὶ πάντα τὰ τῶν ἀνθρώπων γένη πρὸς ὑµᾶς καὶ τὴν ὑµετέραν δίαιταν καὶ φωνὴν ἀπέκλινεν.... ἀλλὰ πᾶσαν τὴν γῆν τύχῃ τινί θειᾷ ζῆλος ἐπέρχεται τῆς ὑµετέρας σοφίας καὶ συνηθείας.

4 Ail. Arist. Panath. 183: Ἀθηναῖος δὲ οὐδείς ἐστιν Ἑλλήνων ὅστις οὐκ ἂν εὔξαιτο µᾶλλον ἢ τῆς ὑπαρχούσης πόλεως πολίτης γεγονέναι.

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recognition of these gifts.5 So their attempts to surpass Athens were fundamentally

entangled with the legacy that they sought to emulate. No subsequent Hellenism could

avoid coming to terms with the cultural-imperial claims of Athens. It did not matter with

what city critics replaced Athens; they had to acknowledge Athens’ place within the

Hellenisms they were critiquing. This very act of acknowledgment meant that the critics

had to engage with and react to the ideal of Athens. It could not be ignored.

In this chapter and the following, I will examine several of the more strident

critics of the ideal of Athens in late antiquity and look in particular at how they attempted

to fashion alternative visions of Hellenism and how these alternatives were ultimately

bound up with the Athenian legacy. The first is Philostratos, a third-century author who

wrote the Life of Apollonios of Tyana and the Lives of the Sophists, both of which are set

largely in the first and second centuries. He was also the man who coined the term

“Second Sophistic” and stands as one of the major sources on that period of intellectual

history. Yet Philostratos is something of a liminal figure, looking back to the

Athenocentric days of Hadrian and Pausanias but clearly reflecting the contemporary

issues of the early third century. After all, most of Philostratos’ adult life was spent under

the Severan dynasty, who were drawn to the cultures and religions of Egypt and Syria.

Philostratos probably lived to see the beginning of the third-century anarchy, when the

structure of imperial succession broke down, leading to numerous short-lived emperors

and near-constant internecine strife. Such political uncertainty may have caused

Philostratos to look back nostalgically to the stability of the second century, a stability

5 See Habicht (1990) and (1992) for a more detailed discussion of the role of these two dynasties in

Athens itself.

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which produced the cultural efflorescence he describes in the Lives of the Sophists.

During his lifetime, too, threats to traditional Hellenism began to emerge, not just from

the Severans themselves, but also from the steadily increasing importance of Christianity

and other eastern cults.6 For this reason, Philostratos attempted to deploy a universal

definition of Hellenism (a definition that had existed in one form or another since the

time of Alexander the Great) which could beat back these challenges and incorporate

more of the provincial elites (e.g., those of Egypt, Syria, and eastern Asia Minor) into

Hellenic culture. We will see, though, that (much like the Hellenistic kings mentioned

above) Philostratos had an ambivalent view of Athens. He was born on the Athenian-

controlled island of Lemnos and studied in Athens, and he recognized its cultural

importance as a center of sophistic education. At the same time, in order to make his

Hellenism truly universal, Philostratos had to emphasize that one did not necessarily have

to go to Athens or study Athenian authors in order to become Greek. For Philostratos,

Athens verges on becoming one of several centers of Greek culture scattered throughout

the contemporary world, despite its unparalleled importance for the Hellenic past.

For a different and more radical set of critics of Athens, in Chapter 3 we jump

ahead first to the fourth-century rhetor Libanios. This was a man who, in many ways,

stood as the embodiment of pagan Hellenic education and culture after the official

recognition of Christianity by the imperial regime. Libanios studied in Athens and was

loyal to Julian the Apostate (who himself studied in Athens and even wrote a letter to the

Athenians praising their city’s past and asking for assistance against his cousin

Constantius), so one would expect him to endorse a fairly traditional Athenocentric

6 See below, Swain (1999), and Whitmarsh (2007) for these threats.

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Hellenism. Yet he did not. Instead, he became disenchanted with Athens when, as a

student, he saw the gap between the real Athens of his experience and the ideal Athens of

his boyhood reading.7 In fact, Libanios turned down a job teaching rhetoric at Athens to

return to his native Antioch, where he spent the rest of his life teaching and trying to

make Antioch the preeminent center of Hellenism.

Slightly later than Libanios, at the turn of the fifth century, lived Synesios, a

philosopher and, at the end of his life, bishop of Ptolemais. In two letters written before

and during a visit to Athens, Synesios notes that there is nothing of interest in the city

and that the real philosophers are all in Alexandria.8 Synesios had studied under Hypatia

in Alexandria, so it should come as no surprise that he denigrates Athens in favor of

Alexandria. Like Libanios, then, Synesios came to Athens, realized that its claims to

greatness rang hollow when compared to its current state, and attempted to find an

alternative center for his Hellenism. Unlike Libanios, though, Synesios seems to have

found that center before coming to Athens. Also unlike Libanios, Synesios criticized the

philosophical schools of Athens for being in a state of decline. Libanios, as a rhetor, does

not mention the schools of philosophy and, indeed, he was concerned with the rhetorical

schools of Athens precisely because they were still successful and competing with his

own school in Antioch for students. These different perspectives on Athens seem to

reflect the bifurcation of higher literary culture in late antiquity between orators and

philosophers and may point to a shift in the education activity that occurred in Athens.

7 Lib. Or 1.17 ff.

8 Syn. Ep. 54 and 136.

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All of these men were from the provinces and all spent at least some time in

Athens. But unlike Hadrian and Pausanias (who also came to Athens from the provinces),

they were not seduced by, nor attempted to propagate, an Athenocentric Hellenism.

Rather, they were keenly aware of the shortcomings of Athens, as a symbol and as a

physical place. It is their recognition of and responses to these shortcomings that this

chapter will examine.

Philostratos and the Severans

Definitive information on Philostratos, the author of the Lives of the Sophists and the Life

of Apollonios of Tyana is elusive, not least because of the confused notices in the Souda

for three different generations of Philostratoi.9 Regardless, scholars generally agree that

our Philostratos was born around 165 AD, most likely on Lemnos; at any rate, he

certainly spent his childhood there.10 It is important to note that Lemnos was still

controlled by Athens in the second century (and had been since the fifth century BC) and

that the Lemnians (Philostratos included) possessed Athenian citizenship; indeed, there is

epigraphic evidence that testifies to the political activity of Philostratos and his

descendants in Athens: Philostratos himself seems to have been a strategos sometime in

the first decade of the third century, and he was also one of the prytaneis of the Pandionis

tribe.11 Philostratos was thus a politically important Athenian who was not born in

Athens, and the fact that he was, in a way, an Athenian-but-not-Athenian may be related

9 Souda Φ 421-423. See Flinterman (1995) 5-14 and Anderson (1986) 3 and (especially) 291-296 for a

discussion of the Souda’s information on the Philostrati and their work.

10 Birth: Flinterman (1995) 21; Lemnos: Anderson (1986) 3; Flinterman (1995) 15.

11 Lemnos and Athens: Flinterman (1995) 15; epigraphic evidence: Flinterman (1995) 16-19.

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to the ambivalent way in which he presents Athens in his writings, accustomed from this

childhood to viewing Athens simultaneously from inside and outside. A further indication

of Philostratos’ Athenian identity is that he traveled to Athens and studied there under

Proklos of Naukratis, whom he calls “one of my teachers,” though he does not name the

others.12 The Souda tells us that, following the end of these studies, Philostratos was a

sophist in Athens and then Rome.13 It was in Rome around 200 AD that Philostratos met

Julia Domna, the wife of the emperor Septimius Severus, and she commissioned from

him a biography of Apollonios of Tyana, a mystic and holy man who lived in the first

century AD.14 Philostratos himself claimed that he “belonged to the circle around her

[Julia Domna] – for she commended and eagerly embraced all literary studies.”15 The

exact nature of this circle is uncertain, but Philostratos was certainly closely connected to

the Severans, traveling with them to Gaul, the Balkans, and Antioch.16 Although

Philostratos’ life is not well-documented after Julia’s death in 217, he apparently

continued to have friends in high places: in 237 or 238, Philostratos dedicated his Lives of

12 Phil. VS 602: Ἀναγράψω καὶ Πρόκλον τὸν Ναυκρατίτην εἰδὼς εὕ τὸν ἄνδρα, καὶ γὰρ δὴ καὶ τῶν ἐµῶν διδασκάλων εἵς οὑτος. Anderson (1986: 4) states unequivocally, and with no apparent textual support, that Philostratos also studied with Antipater of Hierapolis and Damianus of Ephesus.

13 Anderson (1986) 4; Flinterman (1995) 16.

14 Meeting Julia: Flinterman (1995) 19-21; commission: Phil. VA I.3 and Flinterman (1995) 25.

15 Phil. VA I.3: µετέχοντι δέ µοι τοῦ περὶ αὐτὴν κύκλου –καὶ γὰρ τοὺς ῥητορικοὺς πάντας λόγους ἐπῄνει καὶ ἠσπάζετο. Cassius Dio (Roman History, LXXV.15.6) also cites the empress’ proclivity for intellectual pursuits.

16 For discussions of Julia’s “circle,” see Bowersock (1969) 101-109, Anderson (1986) 4-5, Flinterman (1995) 22-24 and Whitmarsh (2007) 32-34; Philostratos’s travels: Flinterman (1995) 25.

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the Sophists to Gordian, the proconsul of Africa and soon-to-be emperor (238).17 The

Souda puts Philostratos’ death sometime during the reign of Philip the Arab (244-249).18

While Philostratos wrote a number of works, his two major books (and the two I

will focus on here) are the Lives of the Sophists (the VS) and the Life of Apollonios of

Tyana (the VA). Based on internal evidence, Philostratos finished the VS sometime

between 232 and 238, and the VA between 217 and 238.19 Even though Philostratos

composed these works under the last of the Severans and at the beginning of the third-

century anarchy, they look back to the first and second centuries AD. The VS is a series

of biographical sketches of teachers and performers of rhetoric (and eight “philosopher-

sophists”) who lived anywhere from the fifth century BC to Philostratos’ own day, but

most of the lives Philostratos relates are clustered in the late first and early second

centuries. The ascetic philosopher Apollonios of Tyana lived in the first century AD and

spent time in Neronian Rome, disputed before Vespasian about the best form of

government, was tried by Domitian, and died sometime after the accession of Nerva, at

least according to Philostratos’ version of events.20

As Philostratos described the world of Pausanias and Hadrian (especially in the

Sophists, where Hadrian makes several cameo appearances), it is tempting to group him

with the Antonine-era about which he writes. Yet Philostratos was writing one hundred

17 Phil. VS 479-480; Anderson (1986) 7; Flinterman (1995) 26-27. As Flinterman argues, this was probably

Gordian I, not his son, Gordian II, whose concubines and library Gibbon (1994 [1776]: 195) once dryly remarked “were for use rather than for ostentation.”

18 Anderson (1986) 7; Flinterman (1995) 27.

19 Flinterman (1995) 26-27.

20 Nero: Phil. VA IV.25-37; Vespasian: Phil. VA V.32-36; Domitian: Phil. VA VIII.1-8; Nerva: Phil. VA VIII.27.

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years or more after many of the events he relates in the Lives of the Sophists and the Life

of Apollonios. While there are certainly some continuities between the early second

century and the early third, one cannot lose sight of the fact that Philostratos was writing

during the political and economic uncertainties of the third century, not during the pax

Romana of the “five good emperors.” His world was not the same as Pausanias’ and

Hadrian’s, and this is evident in Philostratos’ different view of Athens. As we saw in the

previous chapter, Pausanias and Hadrian saw the city of Athens and its classical past as

the foundation of Hellenism. Philostratos, on the other hand, tended to see Athens as only

one site among many where one could engage with Greek culture (and indeed, a site that

was open to criticism, not unquestioning adoration). For Philostratos, Hellenism was a

general way of behaving and speaking not specific to one geographical locale or

historical moment. As we will see, one could experience Philostratos’ Hellenism

anywhere in the world, even in India, not just in Athens or only by reading Athenian

authors. At the same time, though, Philostratos acknowledged that Athens was certainly

an important center of culture, but one that had neglected its noble traditions.

I will uncover this ambivalent and conflicted view of Athens through a close

reading of select important passages of Philostratos. In this way, I will move beyond

previous scholarship on Philostratos, which is often content with merely summarizing the

facts of his biography and his works.21 Some scholars use his writing as historical sources

to better understand the Second Sophistic, or mine his texts for nuggets that pertain to

21 E.g. Anderson (1986).

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“Greek views of Rome.”22 I hope to provide a more nuanced reading of Philostratos’

works as literary constructs that can shed light on the formation and complication of a

symbolic Athens in the early third century.

Philostratos is a key figure in the creation of the ideal of Athens in late antiquity

for two reasons. First, the ideal of Athens is invariably bound up with competing

conceptions of Hellenism in the later Roman empire and Philostratos is integral to

modern understandings of Hellenism in the second and third centuries AD. Through his

biographies of sophists and his “invention” of the Second Sophistic, he defined the

parameters of the discussion about imperial Greek literature, and his works have provided

a glimpse of the cultural background (through descriptions of the performative contexts

of rhetorical works and the professional rivalries between sophists) against which

surviving literature from the period must be set. After all, Philostratos coined the term

“Second Sophistic,” and it has become a commonplace of modern scholarship on the

period to begin with a discussion of the problems inherent with Philostratos’

terminology.23 Furthermore, Philostratos informs his readers of the sophists’

preoccupation with the pure forms of the Attic language, relates a number of interactions

between sophists and Roman governors or emperors (thus providing a description of the

relationship between “Greek culture” and “Roman power”), and describes what sophistic

performances were like, all of which have helped frame several major works of

22 Historical source: Bowersock (1969); “Greek views of Rome:” Swain (1996) 380-400.

23 Coinage of the term: Phil. VS 507: τῆς δευτέρας σοφιστικῆς ; modern scholars on Philostratos’ definition of “Second Sophistic”: Bowersock (1969) 2, 8-16, Bowie (1970) 3, Swain (1996) 1-2, Whitmarsh (2001) 41-44.

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scholarship on the Second Sophistic.24 For scholars of the period, Philostratos is

unavoidable. Because the parameters he created continue to frame discussions of the

Second Sophistic, his own peculiar version of Hellenism has been, I believe, largely

adopted by modern scholars as the paradigm of Hellenism in the Second Sophistic. Most

scholars recognize that Philostratos’ Hellenism is a largely abstract creation that can be

approached and enjoyed by individuals throughout the empire. Yet these same scholars, I

think, have not sufficiently examined the ambiguous role that Athens played within

Philostratos’ Hellenism nor have they fully explored the important role that Philostratos’

own times had in shaping his view of the Second Sophistic. As I alluded to in Chapter 2, I

think this model of an abstract Hellenism is overly simplistic, and thus, understanding the

role of Athens in Philostratos’ writings can help explain the shortcomings in modern

views of ancient Hellenism.25

Philostratos is important for a second reason. As noted above, he was writing in

the late second and early third centuries AD, a time when Hellenism as a widespread

culture of the elite was being challenged by the slowly-growing number of Christians as

well as by the political anarchy of the third century which made the intellectual and

cultural pursuits of the pax Romana difficult, if not impossible in some cases. First and

foremost, though, certain traditional constructions of Hellenism could be seen as 24 Philostratos on language: Phil. VS 503, 553, 594, 624 (among others); for interactions with emperors,

see, for instance, Phil. VS 488 (Dion Chrysostomos), 490 (Favorinus), 520 (Skopleianos), 524 (Dionysios of Miletos); for performances, see 491-492 (Favorinus), 537-538 (Polemon), 564 (Herodes Attikos). Modern scholars on Atticism: Swain (1996) 17-64; on relationships between sophists and emperors or, in a larger sense, Greek culture and Roman power: Bowersock (1969), Swain (1996), Whitmarsh (2001); on rhetorical performance: Gleason (1995).

25 Recently, there has a been a growing recognition of the complex nature of Philostratos’ Hellenism. For example, König (2007: 145) finds that there is “an acute sense of the paradoxes of contemporary Hellenic culture – which is to be opened up to analysis even as it has the potential to blossom most securely – which often characterizes Philostratos’ approach to imperial Greek culture.”

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threatened by the ruling Severan dynasty and its fascination with Egypt and Syria. True,

this orientalism of the elite was not new with the Severans. Hadrian had visited Egypt for

several months from late summer of 129 into the winter of 129/130 and was properly

fascinated with its culture.26 As part of the “microcosm of empire” that Hadrian

attempted to create at his villa at Tivoli, he named a “long portico in the southern part of

the palace, surrounding a pool” the “Canopus,” referring to the city of the same name on

one of the mouths of the Nile River, not far from Alexandria.27 Herodes Attikos also built

a villa near Marathon, complete with Egyptian-looking statues, a temple to Isis, and an

Egyptian-style sanctuary identified as the Temple of Canopus that is mentioned by

Philostratos in his biography of Herodes.28

The orientalism of Hadrian and Herodes seems to be largely of an aesthetic

nature, and, in the case of Hadrian, may have been another aspect of his cosmopolitan

ideology of a united empire. The Severans, on the other hand, were invested in promoting

specific “eastern” cults at Rome in a way that seemed to some intellectuals and Roman

patriots to displace traditional balances of cultural power. After all, Septimius Severus,

the founder of the dynasty, was a different kind of provincial from the Antonine emperors

had been. Trajan, Hadrian, and their “successors from the western colonial elite were not

only descended from Italian settlers but themselves thoroughly assimilated to the

metropolitan society, born and brought up at Rome.”29 Septimius, on the other hand, was

26 Birley (1997) 235-258.

27 Birley (1997) 192 on HA, VH 26.5. For a discussion of the symbolism behind the architecture and naming of Hadrian’s villa, see Calandra (1996) 179-277 (especially pp. 241-248 for the Canopus).

28 Tobin (1997) 255-263, Phil. VS 554.

29 Birley (1989) 200.

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from a wealthy provincial family native to North Africa (and probably of Punic origin),

and while his hometown of Lepcis Magna “had a thoroughly Roman outward

appearance,” it still had a largely Punic population.30 Indeed, Septimius, although fluent

in Latin, he had an African accent.31 According to the Historia Augusta, his sister once

came from Lepcis Magna to visit Septimius in Rome, but as she could “scarcely speak

Latin,” she was a source of some embarrassment for the emperor.32 This was not a man

whom intellectuals like Philostratos could assume would show the same deference for

and personal engagement in Greek culture that the Roman elite or an emperor like

Hadrian had traditionally shown.33 Instead, Septimius was “an addict” to and “an expert”

on horoscopes, was devoted to Serapis, consulted the oracle of Zeus Balus at Apamea in

Syria, and married Julia Domna, the Syrian daughter of the priest of El-Gabal in Emesa,

activities which would have been out of character for a traditional Roman aristocrat

(although they are a testament to the increasing importance of the provinces in the

empire, a process that had begun under Hadrian himself).34

Septimius’ successors continued this interest in the east. His son Caracalla was a

devotee of Isis. He “made magnificent temples to this goddess everywhere” and “he

30 Birley (1989) 34-35.

31 HA, VS 19.9. See Birley (1989) 35 for an idea of what this “African accent” would have sounded like.

32 HA, VS 15.7: Cum soror sua Leptitana ad eum venisset vix Latine loquens ac de illa multum imperator erubesceret.

33 Whitmarsh (2001) 15-16.

34 Horoscopes: Birley (1989) 75 on HA, VS 3.9; Serapis: Birley (1989) 138 on HA, VS 17.3-4; oracle: Cassius Dio, Roman History, LXXIX.8.6; Julia Domna: Birley (1989) 72. See also Ball (2000) 404-416 for a brief outline of the dynasty, with special emphasis on the role of Syrian women like Julia Domna and her sister Julia Maesa. For a more in-depth examination of the literary and epigraphical evidence for the Syrian women of the Severan dynasty and their orientalism, see Kettenhofen (1979).

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celebrated her rites with greater reverence than they were celebrated before.”35 The most

notorious orientalizer among the Severans was the grandson of Septimius’ sister-in-law,

known as Elagabalus, himself the priest of the cult of El-Gabal. After being made

emperor by the army in 218, Elagabalus imported the cult of his god to Rome, attempted

to supplant all other cults with it, and conducted a marriage between El-Gabal and the

Carthaginian (i.e., Phoenician-Semitic) Urania.36 He also apparently worshiped eastern

goddesses like Salambo.37 The excesses of Elagabalus led to his murder and the accession

of his cousin, Severus Alexander, but he, too, could not disavow his Syrian heritage,

supposedly building a personal shrine which contained statues of Christ and Abraham

alongside Apollonios of Tyana and Orpheus.38

In this environment of a Punic-Syrian imperial family with an interest in

promoting eastern cults, Philostratos could not assume (as Hadrian and Pausanias could)

that traditional ideas of Hellenism would continue to be embraced by the empire’s

intellectual elite. Philostratos’ response, as we will see, was to emphasize that his

Hellenism was less particular, more generic, and less centered on Athens. In this way,

Philostratos employed an old strategy (a universalizing, cosmopolitan Hellenism) in a

new context (the increasing orientalism of the early third century AD). Because of this

and because of his foundational role in scholarly conceptions of the Second Sophistic

period, then, Philostratos’ view of Athens must be examined in detail. 35 HA, VAC 9.10: Sacra Isidis Romam deportavit et templa ubique magnifice eidem deae fecit; sacra etiam

maiore reverentia celebravit, quam antea celebrabantur.

36 HA, VAE 3.4-5 and Cassius Dio, Roman History, LXXX.11-12. See Frey (1989) for an examination of Elagabalus’ religion and its effect on his political aims.

37 HA, VAE 7.1-4.

38 Elagablus’ murder: Cassius Dio, Roman History, LXXX.20; Alexander’s shrine: HA, VAS 29.2.

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The Lives of the Sophists

The Lives of the Sophists provides an excellent entry point to Philostratos’ non-

Athenocentric, more generalized Hellenism. Collectively, this text implies that one could

be a sophist almost anywhere in the empire. Athens, Hadrian’s cultural capital of the

Greek world and Pausanias’ gateway to Greece, is no longer a city unrivaled in cultural

pursuits. For instance, Philostratos relates how the fourth-century BC orator Aischines

left Athens following his unsuccessful prosecution of Demosthenes and settled in

Rhodes. According to Philostratos, Rhodes was “an island good to study on” and it was

there, not in his native Athens, that Aischines created a new “school of sophists.”39 More

importantly, Philostratos famously claims that Aischines “began the Second Sophistic.”40

Here, then, we have a foundational figure to whom Philostratos traces all subsequent

sophists back, yet he creates this sophistic movement not in Athens, the traditional home

of Greek culture, but in Rhodes. This is in contrast to Philostratos’ “First Sophistic,”

which resulted largely from foreign sophists travelling to Athens to teach. Interestingly,

Aischines’ biography also provides a parallel to Philostratos’, that is, both were Athenian

citizens on islands (Rhodes and Lemnos respectively) who “founded” the Second

Sophistic, Aischines through his school and his declamatory practices, Philostratos by

naming and describing it.

An ancient tradition existed, of course, according to which Aischines went to live

in Rhodes.41 Philostratos, therefore, was working with the facts available to him, but he

39 Phil. VS 509: ...Ῥόδου εἴχετο, ἡ δὲ νῆσος ἀγαθὴ ἐνσπουδάσαι, καὶ σοφιστῶν φροντιστήριον ἀποφήνας...

40 Phil. VS 507: Περὶ δὲ Αἰσχίνου τοῦ Ἀτροµήτου, ὅν φαµεν τῆς δευτέρας σοφιστικῆς ἄρξαι...

41 [Plut.], Lives of the Ten Orators 840D-E.

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seems to have re-fashioned those facts to explain why Aischines picked Rhodes and not

somewhere else. Philostratos justifies Aischines’ choices by labeling the island as “good

to study on.” But in a larger sense, Philostratos’ comments on Aischines and Rhodes

point to a view of Hellenism in which “Athens” collaborates with other regions and

places in the Greek world. Philostratos seems to be saying that Rhodes may be as good a

place to study as Athens, but the founder of the Second Sophistic is still an Athenian. In

one stroke, Philostratos acknowledges the vitally important role Athens and the

Athenians played in Greek culture, while simultaneously noting that one did not actually

have to be in Athens to promote and enhance that culture.

In a broader sense, the Hellenic culture to which Philostratos belonged and the

one that he set out to chronicle in the Lives of the Sophists was itself the product of the

transplantation of Athenian rhetoric into other locales (such as Doric Rhodes or Ionian

Asia Minor). The premise of his work, in other words, is an internationalization of

Athenian culture which surpassed even Isokrates’ hope that Greeks would come and

study in Athens, specifically in his own school. Philostratos’ premise, though, is that

Athenian culture is available everywhere and Athens is not necessarily the best place for

that culture to be practiced. In addition, it is worth noting that Aischines was exiled from

Athens after his failed prosecution of Demosthens and Ktesiphon.42 In Philostratos’

formulation, then, Athens rejects the founder of an important cultural movement based on

Athenian literature and history. As we will see, Athens similarly rejects Apollonios of

Tyana when he attempts to remind the Athenians of their ancient history and culture.

42 Phil. VS 509.

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Philostratos’ compliment to Rhodes fits into a larger pattern of praising non-

Athenian locales as seats of culture. When Skopelianos, a sophist of the first century AD,

declined to open a school in his native Klazomenai and chose to stay in Smyrna,

Philostratos notes, “even though all Ionia has been built as a temple of the Muses

(µουσείου), as it were, Smyrna holds the most perfect position, just like the bridge on

musical instruments.”43 As a mouseion, then, Smyrna and all of Ionia are better places to

establish a school of rhetoric as Athens (much as the Ptolemies’ mouseion in Alexandria

was established as a center of scholastic activity to rival Athens). Indeed, Skopelianos

was able to attract students from all over the eastern Mediterranean to Smyrna.

Philostratos says that he taught “Ionians and Lydians and Karians and Maionians and

Aiolians and Greeks from Mysia and Phrygia,” as well as “Kappadokians and Assyrians

and Egyptians and Phoenicians and the more famous of the Achaians” and, most

importantly, “all the youth of Athens.”44 Here we have an odd statement: young

Athenians left their home city, famous for its schools, and went abroad to study in

Smyrna. Similarly, in the second century AD, Herakleides of Lykia, after being forced

from the chair of rhetoric at Athens, established a school in Smyrna. Philostratos says that

Herakleides attracted “the youth of Ionia and Lydia and those from Phrygia and Karia”

and “the Greeks from Europe and young men from the east and many Egyptians.”45

43 Phil. VS 516: πάσης γὰρ τῆς Ἰωνίας οἷον µουσείου πεπολισµένης ἀρτιωτάτην ἐπέχει τάξιν ἡ Σµύρνα, καθάπερ ἐν τοῖς ὀργάνοις ἡ µαγάς.

44 Phil. VS 518: Σκοπελιανοῦ δὲ σπουδάζοντος ἐν τῇ Σµύρνῃ ξυµφοιτᾶν µὲν ἐς αὐτὴν Ἴωνάς τε καὶ Λυδοὺς καὶ Κᾶρας καὶ Μαίονας Αἰολέας τε καὶ τοὺς ἐκ Μυσῶν Ἕλληνας καὶ Φρυγῶν οὔπω µέγα, ἀγχίθυρος γὰρ τοῖς ἔθνεσι τούτοις ἡ Σµύρνα καιρίως ἔχουσα τῶν γῆς καὶ θαλάττης πυλῶν, ὁ δὲ ἦγε µὲν Καππαδόκας τε καὶ Ἀσσυρίους, ἦγε δὲ Αἰγυπτίους καὶ Φοίνικας τε καὶ Ἀσσυρίους, Ἀχαιῶν τε τοὺς εὐδοκιµωτέρους καὶ νεότητα τὴν ἐξ Ἀθηνῶν ἅπασαν.

45 Phil. VS 613: νεότητα µὲν οὖν Ἰωνικήν τε καὶ Λύδιον καὶ τὴν ἐκ Φρυγῶν καὶ Καρίας ξυνδραµεῖν ἐς

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Based on these two examples, it seems that for Philostratos Athens was no longer the

only or even the best “school of Greece;” Smyrna was one, too. Still, in Philostratos’

mind, where students studied is less important than with whom they studied. One could

learn just as much from a good teacher in Smyrna as one in Athens.

In addition to students, teachers, too, hail from throughout the eastern

Mediterranean, not just mainland Greece. Philostratos provides biographies of sophists

from Kilikia, Tyre, Naukratis, Assyria, Kappadokia, Lykia, Gaul, Ravenna, and even

Rome, as well as numerous cities on the Aegean coast of Asia Minor, a testament to the

international culture of the high Roman empire.46 Some of these sophists studied in

Athens and stayed there to teach, such as Philagros of Kilikia, Hadrian of Tyre, or

Proklos of Naukratis, much as the sophists of the “First Sophistic” of the fifth century BC

came to live in Athens, such as Gorgias of Leontini and Protagoras of Adbera.47 At least

one sophist, Ptolemaios of Naukratis, seems to have studied in Athens and traveled

throughout the empire, before finally settling in his native land of Egypt.48 And a few,

like Isaios the Assyrian, never studied or taught in Athens.49 By my count, Philostratos

wrote in the Lives of the Sophists the lives of thirty individuals who were connected in

Ἰωνίαν κατὰ ξυνουσίαν τοῦ ἀνδρὸς οὔπω µέγα,ἐπειδὴ ἀγχίθυρος ἁπάσαις ἡ Σµύρνα, ὁ δὲ ἦγε µὲν καὶ τὸ ἐκ τῆς Εὐρώπης Ἑλληνικόν, ἦγε δὲ τοὺς ἐκ τῆς ἑῴας νέους, πολλοὺς δὲ ἦγεν Αἰγυπτίων οὐκ ἀνηκόους αὐτοῦ ὄντας.

46 Kilikia: Phil. VS 568-576, 578-581; Tyre: Phil. VS 586-590; Naukratis: Phil. VS 592-593, 595-596, 599-600, 602-604; Assyria: Phil. VS 512-514; Kappadokia: Phil. VS 593-594; Lykia: Phil. VS 612-615; Gaul: Phil. VS 625-627; Ravenna: Phil. VS 627-628; Rome: Phil. VS 624-625.

47 Philagros: Phil. VS 578-581; he later was appointed to the chair of rhetoric at Rome (Phil. VS 580). Hadrian: Phil. VS 585-590; he, too, later moved to Rome (Phil. VS 589). Proklos: Phil. VS 602-604; according to Philostratos, Proklos fled the stasis of Naukratis for the “quiet of Athens” (Phil. VS 603); Gorgias: Phil. VS 492-494; Protagoras: Phil. VS 494-495.

48 Phil. VS 596.

49 Phil. VS 512-514.7

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one way or another to Athens (as students, teachers, ambassadors, and visitors) and

twenty-four individuals with no overt connection to the city at all. Certainly, based on

raw numbers, Athens was the single most important center for Philostratos’ sophists. Yet

it was not the only city in which one could be a successful teacher and sophist.

Philostratos is here giving us an Athens that was undergoing a transition from an ideal to

a more second-class reality. The increasing wealth and cosmopolitanism of the larger

Roman world allowed cultural pursuits to be undertaken in areas other than the traditional

centers of culture. Philostratos points out these alternative centers of culture, but unlike

Libanios or Synesios a century later, he is not willing to completely reject Athens’

importance as the “school of Greece”; rather, it remains one among many schools.

Philostratos’ remarks on Rhodes and Smyrna and his description of a significant

number of non-Athenian sophists are two strategies that implicitly de-center Athens

while still acknowledging its important role in the construct of Hellenism. But

Philostratos also explicitly removes Athens from the center of Hellenism by relating two

negative anecdotes about it. The first comes from the biography of one of the stars of the

Lives of the Sophists, Polemon. On a visit to Athens, Polemon, in his arrogance, “did not

deliver an encomium of the city, even though there were many things which one might

say on behalf of the Athenians,” (as, for example, Aristeides said in his Panathenaikos);

instead, Polemon “knew well that the natural character of the Athenians ought to be

reproved rather than roused up.”50 In other words, while the Athenians have much to be

proud of, they also have some natural vice that must be kept in check by others.

50 Phil. VS 535: οὐκ ἐς ἐγκώµια κατέστησεν ἑαυτὸν τοῦ ἄστεος, τοσούτων ὄντων, ἅ τις ὑπὲρ Ἀθηναίων ἂν εἴποι… ἀλλ’ εὖ γιγνώσκων, ὅτι τὰς Ἀθηναίων φύσεις ἐπικόπτειν χρὴ µᾶλλον ἢ ἐπαίρειν…

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It is not clear what it was about the Athenians’ character that Polemon thought

needed to be kept in check, but I do not think that is too important for the present

argument. The point of this story is that it took place in the context of the intercity

rivalries of the Second Sophistic.51 Polemon was closely identified with Smyrna, so

closely, in fact, that Philostratos takes pains at the start of his biography to dispel the

common rumor that Polemon was a native of Smyrna (he was actually from Laodikeia in

Karia).52 Polemon was a major player in the civic life of his adopted city.53 He was

appointed the head of Hadrian’s Olympic games in Smyrna and he was allowed to stand

on the “sacred trireme” as it was pulled in a parade into the agora.54 He established

concord between the ruling factions of Smyrna, was an advisor to the government of the

city, and served as an ambassador to Hadrian.55 Polemon became Hadrian’s favorite

sophist, and the emperor bestowed numerous honors on him.56 Most importantly,

Polemon represented Smyrna so well at court that “he converted Hadrian, who had

previous been devoted to the Ephesians, to the Smyrnans,” thus defeating his arch-rival,

51 The classic study of these rivalries is Bowersock (1969), especially pp. 30-58.

52 Phil. VS 530.

53 See Gleason (1995) 21-29 and Reader (1996) 7-22 for an account of Polemon’s life and civic duties.

54 Phil. VS 530-531: πέµπεται γάρ τις µηνὶ Ἀνθεστηριῶνι µεταρσία τριήρης ἐς ἀγοράν, ἣν ὁ τοῦ Διονύσου ἱερεύς, οἷον κυβερνήτης, εὐθύνει πείσµατα ἐκ θαλάττης λύουσαν.

55 Phil. VS 531.

56 See Chapter 2, p. 29.

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Favorinus, the sophist who represented Ephesos.57 Through all of his actions (even his

opulent mode of travel), Polemon brought glory to Smyrna, for, as Philostratos writes,

“not only does a city give a man fame, but it also gains it from a man.”58

It is in this context of civic rivalry that Polemon’s comments about the Athenians

make sense: as a representative of Smyrna – a city which Philostratos elsewhere presents

as a viable sophistic alternative to Athens - Polemon tried to show that his city is better

than all others, even Athens. Surprisingly, Philostratos, an Athenian citizen who spent a

significant portion of his life in the city, did not provide an editorial aside defending the

Athenians against Polemon’s charge, so it seems that Philostratos may have agreed with

Polemon on this. On the other hand, Philostratos explicitly told the anecdote as an

example of Polemon’s arrogance (ὑπέρφων), so perhaps Philostratos did not endorse

Philostratos’ position after all, or pehaps he agreed but thought it was arrogant for

Polemon to have made such a remark upon his initial arrival at Athens.59 Yet, if Polemon

was as arrogant as Philostratos says, there must have been plenty of other stories

Philostratos could have equally used to prove the point. Philostratos therefore may not

have agreed entirely with Polemon, but neither did he explicitly disagree.

Whatever Philostratos’ opinion on the matter, it is clear that he is more than

willing to record Second Sophistic rivalries among sophists and cities, but he puts his

own twist on that phenomenon. When the story of Polemon and Athens is read alongside

Philostratos’ comments on Rhodes and Smyrna, it becomes apparent that he uses

57 “Converting Hadrian:” Phil. VS 531: Ἀδριανὸν γοῦν προσκείµενον τοῖς Ἐφεσίοις οὕτω τι µετεποίησε τοῖς Σµυρναίοις; Favorinus and the Ephesians: Phil. VS 490-491.

58 Phil. VS 532: οὐ γὰρ µόνον δίδωσι πόλις ἀνδρὶ ὄνοµα, ἀλλὰ καὶ αὐτὴ ἄρνυται ἐξ ἀνδρός

59 Phil. VS 535.

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Polemon to make a statement to his third-century audience about the viability of other

sites of Hellenic culture, such as Smyrna. Instead of merely fighting for imperial

benefactions and funding, Philostratos shows us cities (and their representatives) fighting

over cultural preeminence. This becomes even more apparent when one remembers that

Polemon was a pupil of Skopelianos, the man whom Philostratos says attracted students

to Smyrna from throughout Greece and Asia Minor.60 In Philostratos’ eyes, Polemon was

merely continuing his teacher’s tradition of making Smyrna an important cultural center

and, as its representative, he felt no compunction about slandering one of its cultural

rivals, Athens. Indeed, the fact that Hadrian later chose Polemon to deliver the keynote

address at the dedication of the Olympieion is, in its own way, a sign of the reversal of

Athens’ cultural-imperial claims: the city is now subject to the perspective and criticism

of the Ionian cities, which it had once ruled.61

Furthermore, Philostratos tells us that Herodes Attikos, a man connected with the

city of Athens in much the same way as Polemon was connected to Smyrna, was an

ardent admirer of Polemon.62 When Herodes was governor of Asia, he went to hear

Polemon declaim, and paid him handsomely for the privilege.63 Philostratos continues,

From that time forward, Herodes continued to praise Polemon and admired him exceedingly. For in Athens, when Herodes had brilliantly declaimed a theme about war trophies and was being admired for the flow of his speech, he said, “Read Polemon’s declamation and know a man.” And at Olympia, when all of Greece was shouting to him, “You

60 Skopelianos’ student: Phil. VS 536. For Skopelianos, see above, pp. 101-102.

61 Polemon’s role in the dedication of the Olympieion: Phil. VS 533.

62 For Herodes’ connection to Athens, see below, pp. 108-109.

63 Phil. VS 538-539.

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are like Demosthenes!” he said, “Would that I were like the Phrygian,” thus naming Polemon, since at that time Laodikeia was part of Phrygia.64

We thus have Herodes, a spokesman for Athens, feeling inferior to Polemon, a

spokesman for Smyrna, and by extension, Athenians may feel inferior to the Smyrnans of

Polemon’s day. I think that through both stories about Polemon, Philostratos presents us

with a picture of Athens as a fierce competitor with Smyrna regarding which city is the

better cultural center and the “school of Greece” - and Athens loses both contests. In so

doing, Philostratos is demonstrating his ambivalent attitude toward Athens that we will

find more developed in the Life of Apollonios. He recognizes the city’s cultural

importance, while implying that it cannot be satisfied with its past achievements.65

The second and more famous anecdote about Athens occurs in the biography of

Herodes Attikos, the sophist who stands at the heart of the Lives of the Sophists. Herodes

is a central figure in a literal sense in that his biography opens the second book (of two),

with twenty-six biographies before his and thirty-two after. Herodes is also at the center

of Philostratos’ series of biographies in a figurative sense. In his summary of the

relationships between the various sophists in the Lives of the Sophists, Anderson finds

that the whole work is “little more than ‘Herodes and his circle’ - teachers, pupils,

64 Phil. VS 539: διετέλει δὲ καὶ τὸν ἄλλον χρόνον ἐπαινῶν τὸν Πολέµωνα καὶ ὑπὲρ θαῦµα ἄγων· Ἀθήνησι µὲν γὰρ διαπρεπῶς ἀγωνισάµενος τὸν περὶ τῶν τροπαίων ἀγῶνα καὶ θαυµαζόµενος ἐπὶ τῇ φορᾷ τοῦ λόγου “τὴν Πολέµωνος” ἔφη “µελέτην ἀνάγνωτε καὶ εἴσεσθε ἄνδρα.” Ὀλυµπίασι δὲ βοησάσης ἐπ’ αὐτῷ τῆς Ἑλλάδος “εἶς ὡς Δηµοσθένης,” “εἴθε γὰρ” ἔφη “ὡς ὁ Φρύξ,” τὸν Πολέµωνα ὧδε ἐπονοµάζων, ἐπειδὴ τότε ἡ Λαοδίκεια τῇ Φρυγίᾳ συνετάττετο.

65 Interestingly, in his prosopographical appendix on the Septimii and Julii of Emesa, Birley (1988: 222-223) postulates that a first-century AD ancestor of Julia Domna (Birley’s no. 47) may have been the brother of Julia Mamaea (Birley’s no. 40), the wife of Polemon II of Pontus. This Polemon was the ancestor of the sophist Polemon (see Gleason [1995: 21]). As we will shortly see, Philostratos connects Herodes with Gordian (see below, p. 108). So perhaps Philostratos also tells this story of Herodes and Polemon as a way to talk about the inferiority of his current patron, Gordian, to his previous patron, Julia Domna. However, the relationship between Julia Domna and Polemon II is too uncertain and too tenuous to be able to make much of the connection between Julia Domna and Polemon the sophist.

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friends, and enemies, in so far as they affect Philostratos’ interests directly.”66 Certainly

Herodes was important in his own right, as a skilled sophist, friend of Marcus Aurelius,

and wealthy benefactor to the city of Athens.67 More intriguingly, though, Philostratos

says in the dedication to his work that the family of Gordian, his dedicatee, “traces itself

back to Herodes the sophist.”68 Giving Herodes pride of place in the Lives of the Sophists

would give Philostratos a way to flatter Gordian, Herodes’ descendant (whether

biological or intellectual). Additionally, Philostratos himself sprang from Herodes’ line of

students: Herodes taught Hadrian of Tyre, who taught Proklos of Naukratis, who, in turn,

taught Philostratos.69 This may have given Philostratos further reason to devote so much

of his work to Herodes, while at the same time making Philostratos himself also

somehow related to Gordian, the future emperor.

Herodes, like Philostratos, seems to have had a deeply ambivalent relationship

with Athens. On the one hand, Herodes was an eponymous archon, supervised the

Panathenaea, and constructed a stadium and the Odeion in Athens.70 On the other hand,

Herodes killed his pregnant wife, was accused of tyranny by the Athenians and “offended

the Athenians” during the promulgation of his father’s will. 71 His father had left a

66 Anderson (1986: 83). See, too, Whitmarsh (2001) 105 for Philostratos’ characterization of Herodes.

67 Skill: Phil. VS 563-565; benefactions at Athens: Phil. VS 549-551; friend of the emperor: Phil. VS 560-561. For a more archaeological understanding of Herodes’ benefactions and life, see Tobin (1997). For the portrayal of Herodes in several Athenian poetical inscriptions and for a brief introduction to Herodes’ life, see Skenteri (2005).

68 Phil. VS 479: ὅτι καὶ γένος ἐστί σοι πρὸς τὴν τέχνην ἐς Ἡρώδην τὸν σοφιστὴν ἀναφέροντι. Philostratos does spell out the exact nature of Gordian’s connection to Herodes. See Anderson (1986) 297-298 for the idea that Gordian was Herodes’ pupil shortly before the latter’s death.

69 Herodes-Hadrian: Phil. VS 585; Hadrian-Proklos: Phil. VS 603; Proklos-Philostratos: Phil. VS 602.

70 Offices: Phil. VS 549; buildings: Phil. VS 550, 551.

71 Killing his wife: Phil. VS 555-557; charge of tyranny: Phil. VS 559; “offended:” Phil. VS 549: ἀνάγκη

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significant sum of money to be distributed to each Athenian. Herodes paid them the sum,

then began to call in the debts various Athenians had contracted with his father, and he

thereby cleverly regained most of his father’s estate.72 Because of his, the Athenians “did

not stop hating Herodes, not even when he thought he was showing the greatest

kindnesses to them.”73 Herodes’ conflicted interactions with the Athenians may have

made him an appealing figure to Philostratos, who himself was conflicted (as we will see)

about what role the symbolic Athens should play in the broader geography of Hellenism.

The specific anecdote I wish to focus on regards Herodes’ discovery of an eight-

foot tall rustic man. Nicknamed “Agathion” by neighboring farmers and “the Heracles of

Herodes” by the sophist’s friends, he lived in the interior of Attica and claimed that his

father was the hero Marathon (although Philostratos provides us with no indication of

how Agathion proposed to resolve the obvious chronological difficulties inherent in his

claim).74 Philostratos relates the questions Herodes puts to Agathion, and one in

particular is of interest:

“What about your language,” asked Herodes. “How were you educated and by whom? For you do not appear to me to be uneducated.” And Agathion replied, “The interior of Attica educated me, a good school for a man wishing to converse. For while the Athenians in the city receive for pay boys flooding in from Thrace and Pontus and from other barbarian peoples, and because of them, the Athenians ruin their language more than they build up the barbarians’ good speech. But since the interior does not have contact with barbarians, its dialect is healthy and its language sounds from the mountain-top of Atthis.”75

καὶ τὰς αἰτίας ἀναγράψαι, δι’ἃς προσέκρουσεν Ἡρώδης Ἀθηναίοις.

72 Phil. VS 549.

73 Phil. VS 549: παρώξθνε ταῦτα τοὺς Ἀθηναίοθς ὡς ἡρπασµένους τὴν δωρεὰν καὶ οὐκ ἐπαῦσαντο µισοῦντες, οὐδε ὁπὀτε τὰ µέγιστα εὐεργετεῖν ᾤετο.

74 Phil. VS 552-553.

75 Phil. VS 553: “τὴν δὲ δὴ γλῶτταν” ἔφη ὁ Ἡρώδης “πῶς ἐπαιδεύθης καὶ ὑπὸ τίνων; οὐ γάρ µοι τῶν ἀπαιδεύτων φαίνῃ.” καὶ ὁ Ἀγαθίων “ἡ µεσογεία” ἔφη “τῆς Ἀττικῆς ἀγαθὸν διδασκαλεῖον ἀνδρὶ

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Agathion goes on to express his disapproval of tragic performances, such as the one he

witnessed at Pytho (i.e., Delphi) while standing on the top of Mount Parnassos, and

athletic contests.76 In this one interview with Herodes, then, Agathion, a man claiming to

be the descendant of an archaic hero, derides three key aspects of contemporary

Hellenism (Atticism learned in the city’s schools, dramatic performances, and athletic

competitions), but his castigation of the Athenians’ language is the most important for

our purposes.

Scholars have tended to see Agathion as paradigmatic for Herodes’ (and by

extension, other sophists’ and Philostratos’) admiration for the untainted Greek past or

for an uncorrupted form of the Attic dialect.77 But Whitmarsh has seen that there is more

going on in this passage. He compares the Agathion passage to Philostratos’ description

of the Italian sophist Aelian, a man who never left Italy yet “Atticized just like Athenians

in the interior.”78 In these two passages, Whitmarsh finds a “marked tension between two

different modes of Hellenism: the ancient, ingrained authority of the land of Greece and

the modern, pluralist paideia accessible to all Roman elite across the empire.”79 In other

words, one kind of Hellenism is based on the native, uncorrupted traditions of Greece

βουλοµένῳ διαλέγεσθαι, οἱ µὲν γὰρ ἐν τῷ ἄστει Ἀθηναῖοι µισθοῦ δεχόµενοι Θρᾴκια καὶ Ποντικὰ µειράκια καὶ ἐξ ἄλλων ἐθνῶν βαρβάρων ξυνερρυηκότα παραφθείρονται παρ’ αὐτῶν τὴν φωνὴν µᾶλλον ἢ ξυµβάλλονταί τι αὐτοῖς ἐς εὐγλωττίαν, ἡ µεσογεία δὲ ἄµικτος βαρβάροις οὖσα ὑγιαίνει αὐτοῖς ἡ φωνὴ καὶ ἡ γλῶττα τὴν ἄκραν Ἀτθίδα ἀποψάλλει.”

76 Phil. VS 554.

77 Past: Swain (1996) 82; dialect: Anderson (1986) 14.

78 Never left Rome: Phil. VS 625; “Atticized:” Phil. VS 624: Αἰλιανὸς δὲ Ῥωµαῖος µὲν ἦν, ἠττίκιζε δέ, ὥσπερ οἱ ἐν τῇ µεσογείᾳ Ἀθηναῖοι.

79 Whitmarsh (2001) 108. In a similar vein, König (2005: 340-341) reads Agathion as an expression of Philostratos’ interest in how Greek culture “should be treated and defined in the present day” (338).

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(represented by the trope of the Attic interior) and the other is based on the kind of

learning one could acquire anywhere, whether it be in Italy or in cosmopolitan Athens.

While this dynamic is certainly present, the Agathion story (as well as the

comment on Aelian’s Atticizing abilities) presents another tension, namely that between

the corrupted city-center and port of Athens and the pure countryside of Attica. One does

not have to go to Athens in order to learn how to speak well, since rural Attica is “a good

school for a man wishing to converse.”80 Indeed, Agathion seems to say that, if anything,

one should avoid Athens, since it has been invaded by foreign barbarians who have

degraded the city’s dialect. Agathion thus postulates a distinction between the

cosmopolitan city and port of Athens on the one hand (with all its foreign visitors,

including its students) and the rustic interior of Attica (which is still controlled by

Athens) on the other. Athens is thus internally conflicted; not only can arguments about

Hellenism be framed as taking place between Athens and other cities, they can take place

within Athenian territory itself.81 Furthermore, Agathion’s argument that boys flock to

Athens to learn for pay and, in the process, ruin the Athenian language is a blatant attack

on and reversal of the notion that Athens is the school of Greece, as formulated by

Isokrates and Aristeides. Not only does Athens’ willingness to teach the world result in

the corruption of Athens, the interior of Attica is actually a better school than Athens

80 Phil. VS 553: ἀγαθὸν διδασκαλεῖον ἀνδρὶ βουλοµένῳ διαλέγεσθαι.

81 This dichotomy between Athens and Attica seems to be a new formulation within the tradition of the ideal of Athens. Both Isokrates and Aristeides, for instance, regard Attica as merely an extension of Athens. See Isok. Panegyikos. 107 (“we [the Athenians] possess a small territory [i.e., Attika] in relation to the number of citizens”, ἔχοντες γὰρ χώραν µὲν ὡς πρὸς τὸ πλῆθος τῶν πολιτῶν ἐλαχίστην) and Ail. Aris. Panath. 100 (where the topography of Attica is used to praise Athens) and 187 (where he says that while other cities’ countrysides have worse air than the city, the air of Athens is better than that of Attica).

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anyways, but only for those who grow up there and have no intention or ability to “study”

elsewhere. Agathion both exemplifies the sophists’ obsession with Atticism and

undermines their practice of it. We thus have a third non-Athenian “school of Greece” to

go along with Rhodes and Smyrna. Yet at the same time, Attica is a less viable school

than Rhodes or Smyrna. In Agathion’s formulation, Attica can only be a school if no one

goes to it, because if they did, they would corrupt the rural interior with their Pontic and

Thracian dialects, just as they have already corrupted Athens itself. Moreover, Attica is a

school whose students (such as Agathion) never leave and, thus, cannot be sophists who

perform and travel and teach. This further strengthens the notion that Athens is internally

conflicted; one cannot set up a functional rival to Athens-as-school within Athens’ own

territory.

Agathion seems to be a critic of the ideal of Athens, particularly its role as the

center of culture and as the home of the best Greek dialect, while at the same time

accepting the superiority of pure Attic dialect, one of the main pillars of the ideology of

the Second Sophistc. In a sense, Agathion outdoes the sophists by refusing to be a part of

their cosmopolitan world. But how much of Agathion’s critique can be attributed to

Philostratos? Obviously, it is impossible to answer such a question definitively, but it is

significant that Philostratos does not provide any sort of defense of Athens in the wake of

Agathion’s attack. He makes no editorial asides disagreeing with Agathion’s assessment,

nor does he have Herodes reject Agathion’s statements. In fact, Philostratos says that

Herodes “admired” Agathion.82 Furthermore, the story of Agathion forces the reader of

the Lives of the Sophists to ponder the corruption of the center of Hellenism by the

82 Phil. VS 554: ἀγασθεὶς οὖν ὁ Ἡρώδης.

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internationalism and cosmopolitanism of the second-century sophistic world. Yet at the

same time, the isolated and insular Hellenism which Agathion represents is not viable;

the only way one could be educated like Agathion is to be, in a sense, naturally Attic and

to have been born and raised in the Attic countryside. Philostratos thus leads his readers

to reject Agathion’s parochial Athenocentric Hellenism and embrace a universalizing

Hellenism in which Athens was an important, but not an exclusive, center of culture and

learning. Indeed, this type of Hellenism is itself perfectly represented by Agathion’s

interlocutor, Herodes, famously called “Attikos.” While his surname emphasizes his

connection to Athens, he was not “Attic” in the same way as Agathion. In Philostratos’

portrayal, Herodes fully partakes of the cosmopolitan world of Hellenism by traveling

throughout the eastern Mediterranean, competing with other sophists, and routinely

conversing with emperors. The story of Agathion thus serves both as a critique of Athens

and as a statement of Philostratos’ cosmopolitan conception of Hellenism.

In the Lives of the Sophists, then, Philostratos does not seem to have been terribly

invested in defending Athens’ role as the exclusive center of Hellenism. Instead, through

his comments on Rhodes and Smyrna and the stories of Polemon and Herodes, it seems

that Athens is one cultural center among many (albeit a historically important one). For

Philostratos, a man could become a pepaideumenos by studying in Athens, certainly, but

he could become at least as well-educated (if not more so) in the cities of Asia Minor, the

rural hinterlands around Athens (at least if one is born there like Agathion), or Italy, as in

the case of Aelian.

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The Life of Apollonios of Tyana: Apollonios and Athens

Philostratos similarly displaces Athens as the sole center of Hellenic culture in his Life of

Apollonios. This work purports to be a historical biography of Apollonios of Tyana, a

Pythagorean sage and mystic who lived in the first-century AD.83 According to

Philostratos’ account, Apollonios spent his formative years in rural Asia Minor, traveled

to Babylon and India before returning to Asia Minor and Greece, journeyed to Rome

where he defied Nero’s ban on teaching philosophy and faced down Tigellinus, the

prefect of the Praetorian Guard. Apollonios then left Rome to travel to Spain, Egypt,

Ethiopia, and Greece before returning to Rome again where he was tried by Domitian on

the charge of practicing black magic. Apollonios secured his own acquittal, returned to

Greece and Asia Minor, and either died there or ascended into heaven (Philostratos

reports several different versions of Apollonios’ end, but commits to none of them).

While there has been a great deal of scholarly argument over the historicity of both

Apollonios and of Philostratos’ sources, my concern here is not with the historical figure

of Apollonios himself or Quellenforschung, but with Philostratos’ portrayal of that figure

in relation to Athens.84 Furthermore, I agree with Bowie that Apollonios’ Hellenism is a

reflection of Philostratos’ own Hellenism. As Bowie says, “Some of Apollonios’

Hellenizing postures – postures which I should be reluctant to attribute to the historical

Kappadokian – are most convincingly interpreted as stage-directions of Philostratos.”85

Among the examples Bowie provides are Apollonios’ comment that the Olympics are

83 Phil. VA I.2. Sidebottom (2007: 62) prefers to see the work as “a picareque historical novel.”

84 For some of the arguments, see: Bowie (1978), Dzielska (1986), Anderson (1986) 155-197, Flinterman (1995), Swain (1996) 383-384.

85 Bowie (1978) 1680.

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being held in the wrong year (which accords well with the interest Philostratos shows in

athletics in the Gymnastikos); Apollonios obeying the strictures of the ghost of Achilles

to eject a descendant of Priam from his group of disciples (which fits with Philostratos’

re-working of the Trojan War story in the Heroikos); and Apollonios comparing himself

favorably to Demosthenes as a defender of Greek freedom (which relates to Philostratos’

role as a biographer of sophists).86 Bowie is quick to point out that the historical

Apollonios must have displayed enough affinity for Hellenism and Greek culture that

Philostratos would want to undertake his biography in the first place.87 But Philostratos’

Apollonios is a character, a “literary adaptation” of the traditions surrounding the

historical Apollonios, and as such, I believe that much of Apollonios’ Hellenism can be

attributed to Philostratos.88

Not only does the character of Apollonios serve as a mouthpiece for Philostratos’

Hellenism, he is also generally regarded by scholars as a representative of Hellenic

ideology through his actions and his Pythagorean lifestyle.89 Swain has discussed this

Hellenic ideology by postulating that it was primarily an ideology of the elite, of the

pepaideumenoi. But these elite claimed “that Hellenism was universal in its appeal” and

made that claim “part of the Hellenist agenda,” because “all elites must recruit.”90 This

led to “tensions” between the Hellenic elite and those they tried to recruit, that is,

86 Bowie (1978) 1680 on Phil. VA V.7, Phil. VA IV.11-12, Phil. VA VII.28 respectively.

87 Bowie (1978) 1680.

88 Literary adaptation: Flinterman (1995) 66.

89 Flinterman (1995) 90-99, Swain (1999) 169.

90 Swain (1999) 181.

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“between insiders and outsiders, including Greeks versus barbarians.”91 While there are

problems with this model,92 I believe Swain is right that “if Hellenism was to be the most

attractive system [and, thus, recruit new members], it must have the most secure

authority, and that meant having the oldest authority,” particularly in light of the

increasing Orientalism of the third century in which Philostratos composed the Life of

Apollonios (more on this below).93 One way to provide this kind of ancient authority was

by claiming Pythagoras as an intellectual ancestor since he was one of the earliest Greek

philosophers, gathered knowledge from barbarians and worked it into his own

philosophical system, and was an influence on Plato.94 Accordingly, Philostratos

emphasizes Apollonios’ Pythagoreanism throughout his biography. For instance,

Philostratos tells us that when Apollonios advanced into his sixteenth year, “he rushed

headlong towards the lifestyle of Pythagoras, stirred on towards it by some higher

being.”95 In living a Pythagorean life, then, Apollonios acquires “irreproachable

credentials for his own serious role as a champion of a Hellenism.”96 Therefore, it is

instructive to see how Philostratos presents Athens within the framework of the life of

Apollonios, Philostratos’ “champion of neo-Hellenism.”

91 Swain (1999) 162.

92 For instance, the fact that “Hellenism” was never a unified ideology; Greek elites were constantly arguing over its substance and meaning. Further, Greek elites never managed to turn their Hellenism successfully against any rival ideology, Roman, Christian, or barbarian.

93 Swain (1999) 162.

94 Swain (1999) 163-169

95 Phil. VA I.7: ὥρµησεν ἐπὶ τὸν τοῦ Πυθαγόρου βίον, πτερωθεὶς ἐπ’ αὐτὸν ὑπό τινος κρείττονος.

96 Swain (1999) 169.

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One way Philostratos approaches the problem of Athens throughout the Life of

Apollonios is to compare the city to various places that Apollonios visits on his extensive

travels (or, in one case, does not actually visit, but which Philostratos describes anyway).

For instance, while describing Apollonios’ journey to India with his disciple Damis (who

supposedly wrote a disorganized biography of Apollonios that Philostratos used as a

source), Philostratos says that they did not pass the “Birdless” ( Ἄορνος) rock in the

mountains of Iran.97 He then says that, according to Damis, “on the peak of the rock there

is a fissure which drags in those birds that fly over its top, just like it is seen at Athens in

the prodomos of the Parthenon and in many places in the land of Phrygia and Lydia.”98 It

is not clear what exactly Philostratos thought happened to birds in the Parthenon’s

vestibule, nor what places he has in mind in Asia Minor. What is clear, though, is that by

making a comparison between the Parthenon, a building with which any educated reader

would presumably have some acquaintance, and a rock formation in the distant east,

Philostratos is allowing his readers to better relate to Apollonios’ journey to the end of

the earth. Likewise, once in India, Philostratos describes the capital city of Taxila as

“divided by narrow streets in a disordered and Athenian manner” and he compares the

height of the hill on which the Brahmans (the wise men of India) live to that of the

Athenian Akropolis.99

97 Phil. VA II.10. For the historicity of Damis, see Bowie (1978), Anderson (1986) 155-173, and Swain

(1996) 383-384.

98 Phil. VA II.10: ἐν κορυφῇ τῆς πέτρας ῥῆγµα εἶναί φασι τοὺς ὑπερπετοµένους τῶν ὀρνίθων ἐπισπώµενον, ὡς Ἀθήνησί τε ἰδεῖν ἐστιν ἐν προδόµῳ τοῦ Παρθενῶνος καὶ πολλαχοῦ τῆς Φρυγῶν καὶ Λυδῶν γῆς.

99 Streets: Phil. VA II.23: δ’ ὡς ἀτάκτως τε καὶ Ἀττικῶς τοὺς στενωποὺς τέτµηται; Brahmans’ hill: Phil. VA III.13. See Anderson (1986) 208-215 for speculation on the actual “survivals of Hellenism” that Apollonios may have encountered in the east.

118

There are other examples of these kinds of comparisons of distant places to

Athens (such as the agricultural fertility of Spain to that of Attica or the scanty clothing of

Ethiopia’s “Naked Sophists” to that of Athenian sun-bathers), but I think the point is

clear.100 Philostratos is trying to make his descriptions more vivid for his readers by

comparing them to Athens, a city with which his readers would be more familiar from

their studies than any other. Furthermore, if Philostratos spent his later years as a teacher

in Athens (as is often supposed), he would have been comparing the ends of the earth to a

city which would have been immediately familiar to him because of his residence

there.101 These comparisons to Athens can also be read as indicating that for Philostratos,

Athens is everywhere, or conversely, everywhere can be Athens, from Spain to India.

Philostratos seems to be having it both ways. Athens is the standard by which everything

else is measured, thus betraying some measure of Athenocentrism. But at the same time

the ideal of Athens is universalized to the point that it can be applied everywhere,

implying a decentralization of the city. This is in keeping with what we have seen so far

of Philostratos’ conflicted approach to Athens in the Lives of the Sophists.

At the same time, though, Philostratos does not cite only Athens as a

comparandum. For instance, he tells us that Indian elephants are bigger than Libyan

elephants, and that Taxila is similar in size to the Babylonian city of Ninevah, so

barbarian facts and artifacts are compared to each other on occasion.102 Similarly, the

100 Baetica (Spain): Phil. VA V.6; sun-bathers: Phil. VA VI.6: φαςὶ...γυµνοὺς δὲ ἐστάλθαι κατὰ ταὐτὰ τοῖς εἱληθεροῦσιν Ἀθήνησι; comparing a song of the Brahmans to one written by Sophocles for the Athenians: Phil. VA III.17.

101 Philostratos as a teacher in Athens: Anderson (1986) 7.

102 Elephants: Phil. VA II.12; Ninevah: Phil. VA II.20.

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Indian river Hyphasis is described as nearly as wide as the Danube.103 Clearly,

Philostratos is comfortable comparing distant places and animals to places and animals

that his readers would probably not have been familiar with first-hand but would have

recognized as paradigmatic. There are also comparisons with more mainstream but non-

Athenian locales which his readers may have known better. For example, Philostratos

reports that the vines which grow along the Ganges “are small, like those of the Lydians

and Maiones,” both peoples of west-central Asia Minor.104 In short, for Philostratos,

Athens is just one of several paradigmatic reference points (both Greek and non-Greek)

for his readers, but one used more frequently than any other, indicating the city’s relative

importance to Philostratos’ conception of the world.

Although Athens may be a useful comparandum for Philostratos’ readers because

it was an identifiable and well-known reference point, when Philostratos has Apollonios

actually visit Athens, the city and its citizens are not familiar and not what Apollonios

expects. In fact, some of Apollonios’ most stinging rebukes are directed towards the

Athenians. On first coming up from the Peiraieus, Apollonios met a group of philosophy

students, who were reading books, practicing speeches, and disputing.105 They

immediately recognized him and welcomed him to Athens, saying that they were just

about to board a ship for Ionia to meet Apollonios there.106

103 Phil. VA III.1.

104 Phil. VA III.5: τὰς δὲ ἀµπέλους φύεσθαι µὲν µικράς, καθάπερ αἱ Λυδῶν τε καὶ Μαιόνων.

105 Philostratos (Phil. VA IV.17) writes that Apollonios “went up from the ship to the city” (ἀνῄει ξυντείνας ἀπὸ τῆς νεὼς ἐς τὸ ἄστυ). This is probably a reference to the famous opening of Plato’s Republic (327a), which has Sokrates saying “Yesterday, I went down to the Peiraieus” (Κατέβην χθὲς εἰς Πειραιᾶ).

106 Phil. VA IV.17.

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This warm welcome did not last long, however. Apollonios, having arrived on the

day of the Epidaurian festival, attempted to be initiated into the mysteries, but the

presiding priest denied him entry to both the Epidaurian and Eleusinian Mysteries

because of Apollonios’ lack of purity, a reference to the belief that Apollonios was

actually a wizard (γόες) who practiced black magic.107 After he was denied entry,

Apollonios predicted that he would be initiated by the priest’s successor.108 Much later in

his life, during his stay with the Gymnosophists of Ethiopia, Apollonios also said that the

Pythagorean views he adopted as a young man “were not very suitable to the Athenians

because they [the Athenians] slandered Plato’s work On the Soul, which he publicly

expounded in a marvelous and very wise way in Athens, since they professed views on

the soul that were opposite to Plato’s and not true.”109 Apollonios wanted to travel to a

city where “all ages professed the same doctrine regarding the soul,” and so his teacher, a

certain Euxenos, persuaded him to travel to India to complete his education.110 It seems

odd that Apollonios should decide against finishing his education in Athens, the

traditional “school of Greece,” in favor of traveling to India. Apollonios appears to see a

downside to the idea of Athens as a proverbial “marketplace of ideas,” namely, no one

107 Phil. VA IV.18. The Epidauria, a festival in honor of Asklepios, was instituted at Athens in the late fifth

century BC and took place on 18 Boedromion (i.e., mid-September), during the annual celebration of the Eleusinian Mysteries. See Parker (1996: 177-181) for a history and discussion of the Epidauria. See, too, Paus. Peri. II.26.8 for the idea that Asklepios himself was an initiate of Eleusis.

108 Phil. VA IV.18.

109 Phil. VA VI.11: Ἀθηναίοις µὲν οὖν οὐ πάνυ προσήκων ἐφαίνετό µοι ὅδε ὁ λόγος, τὸν γὰρ Πλάτωνος λόγον, ὃν θεσπεσίως ἐκεῖ καὶ πανσόφως ὑπὲρ ψυχῆς ἀνεφθέγξατο, αὐτοὶ διέβαλλον ἐναντίας ταύτῃ καὶ οὐκ ἀληθεῖς δόξας ὑπὲρ ψυχῆς προσέµενοι. As the Loeb translator, C.P. Jones notes on this passage, “On the Soul was an alternative title of Plato’s Phaedo. It is said that when he read this work in public at Athens, everyone but Aristotle left (Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Philosophers 3.37).”

110 Phil. VA VI.11: πᾶσα δὲ ἡλικία ταὐτὸν ὑπὲρ ψυχῆς φθέγγοιτο.

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can agree on such important philosophical doctrines as the nature of the soul. Because of

this lack of consensus on the part of his potential audience and because they do not share

his Pythagorean-Platonic view of the soul, Apollonios rejects Athens as a center of

education and journeys to India instead. Philostratos’ Apollonios is thus alienated from

two important aspects of the ideal of Athens, its role as the home of the Eleusinian

Mysteries and as a center of philosophy and intellectual discourse. This alienation

emphasizes the fact that Apollonios’ version of Hellenism was not particularly

Athenocentric.

The rather chilly reception by the hierophant may help explain why Philostratos

follows the story of Apollonios’ rejection at Eleusis with an account of two of the

numerous lectures which Apollonios delivered while in Athens. Philostratos briefly

summarizes the first discourse, which concerned “ceremonies, since Apollonios noticed

that the Athenians were sacrifice-lovers.”111 Apollonios attempted to show the Athenians

the proper way to sacrifice, partially “for the sake of his own wisdom and that of others”

and partially “to disprove the hierophant because of what he said blasphemously and

ignorantly, for who would think that one who philosophizes about how the gods must be

worshiped is impure with respect to divine things?”112

Not long after, Philostratos writes that Apollonios castigated the Athenians

because of their conduct at the festival of Dionysos, where he saw that they “danced

111 Phil. VA IV.19: ἐπειδὴ φιλοθύτας τοὺς Ἀθηναίους εἶδεν; cf. Acts 17:22, where the apostle Paul (who

would have roughly been Apollonios’ contemporary) says that the Athenians are “very superstitious” (δεισιδαιµονεστέρους), at least with respect to their own religion.

112 Phil. VA IV.19: ὑπὲρ σοφίας αὑτοῦ τε κἀκείνων, εἶτ’ ἐλέγχων τὸν ἱεροφάντην δι’ ἃ βλασφήµως τε καὶ ἀµαθῶς εἶπε· τίς γὰρ ἔτι ᾠήθη τὰ δαιµόνια µὴ καθαρὸν εἶναι τὸν φιλοσοφοῦντα, ὅπως οἱ θεοὶ θεραπευτέοι;

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twisting dances while the pipe played and during the epic poem and sacred words of

Orpheus they did things like the Hours and nymphs and Bacchantes.”113 In other words,

during what was supposed to be a solemn ceremony, the Athenians behaved like over-

sexed nymphs or like the insane and murderous female followers of Dionysos. For

Apollonios, just because the festival was supposed to honor Dionysos, that did not give

the Athenians leave to imitate the excesses of the Bacchantes. Apollonios went on to

remind the Athenians of their noble ancestors and implied that the current generation was

not living up to their ancient standards. He told them to “stop dancing away the men of

Salamis and many other good dead men,” by which he meant stop degrading the

reputation of their ancestors.114

In the next chapter, Philostratos presents us with a crowd of Athenians eager for

the gladiatorial games in the Theater of Dionysos on the south slope of the Akropolis.

Apollonios reproved this too and wrote a letter to the Athenians saying that he was

surprised “‘that the goddess has not already left the Akropolis, since you have poured out

so much blood in front of her.’”115 Obviously, gladiatorial shows were a Roman creation

and did not exist in classical Greece, so I believe the subtext in this passage is the same as

in Apollonios’ criticism of Athenian dancing. Contemporary Athenians were embracing a

modern and bloody form of entertainment, which disgraced Athena, the ancestral god of

Athens. Moreover, the Athenians were watching these games in the Theater of Dionysos,

113 Phil. VA IV.21: αὐλοῦ ὑποσηµήναντος λυγισµοὺς ὀρχοῦνται καὶ µεταξὺ τῆς Ὀρφέως ἐποποιίας τε καὶ θεολογίας τὰ µὲν ὡς Ὧραι, τὰ δὲ ὡς Νύµφαι, τὰ δὲ ὡς Βάκχαι πράττουσιν.

114 Phil. VA IV.21: “παύσασθε” εἶπεν “ἐξορχούµενοι τοὺς Σαλαµινίους καὶ πολλοὺς ἑτέρους κειµένους ἀγαθοὺς ἄνδρας.”

115 Phil. VA IV.22: καὶ θαυµάζειν ἔλεγεν “ὅπως ἡ θεὸς οὐ καὶ τὴν ἀκρόπολιν ἤδη ἐκλείπει τοιοῦτον αἷµα ὑµῶν ἐκχεόντων αὐτῇ.”

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the place where their classical ancestors had once gathered to watch the tragedies of

Aischylos, Sophokles, and Euripides and the comedies of Aristophanes. By substituting a

gory Roman form of entertainment for the more refined theatrical shows of their

forebears, contemporary Athenians had thus disgraced the reputation handed down to

them by their ancestors.

Philostratos relates a similar story toward the end of Apollonios’ life. Apollonios

has been acquitted by Domitian of being a magician, and he has come to Olympia, where

men from throughout Greece have come to marvel at his delivery from danger. Among

the visitors is an Athenian youth who loudly proclaimed to Apollonios that Athena was

well-disposed towards Domitian.116 Apollonios responded:

“Stop babbling about such things at Olympia and stop slandering the goddess in front of her father [i.e., Zeus].” But the young man continued his annoying behavior and said that Athena was doing what was right, since the emperor had been eponymous archon at Athens. “Would that it had been at the Panathenaea,” Apollonios replied. He silenced the young man by the first of his answers (since he believed falsely about the gods, if he thought that they were well-disposed towards tyrants). With his second answer, he showed that the Athenians voted inconsistently with their honors for Harmodios and Aristogeiton, if they thought they were honoring those men in the Agora for what they did at the Panathenaea, and then freely gave to tyrants a position of elected authority.117

116 This would seem to be in keeping with the tradition of Domitian’s devotion to Athena/Minerva.

Suetonius (Dom. 4.4) says that Domitian “celebrated the annual five-day-long festival of Minerva in his Alban villa, and he established a college of priest in her honor,” who put on “beast-hunts, stage-plays, and contests for orators and poets” (celebrabat et in Albano quotannis Quinquatria Minervae, cui collegium instituerat… ederentque eximias venationes et scaenicos ludos, superque oratorum ac poetarum certamina). Suetonius (Dom. 15.3) also mentions that Domitian “was accustomed to worshiping Minerva superstitiously” (Minervam, quam superstitiose colebat…). In addition, the temple in the forum begun by Domitian (but opened by Nerva, hence its modern name) was dedicated to Minerva (Claridge 1998: 156).

117 Phil. VA VIII.16: “πέπαυσο” εἶπεν “Ὀλυµπίασιν ὑπὲρ τούτων κροτῶν καὶ διαβάλλων τὴν θεὸν τῷ πατρί.” ἐπιδιδόντος δὲ τοῦ νεανίσκου τῇ ἀχθηδόνι καὶ δίκαια πράττειν τὴν θεὸν φήσαντος, ἐπειδὴ καὶ ὁ βασιλεὺς τὴν ἐπώνυµον Ἀθηναίοις ἦρξεν “εἴθε” ἔφη “καὶ ἐν Παναθηναίοις” ἐπιστοµίζων αὐτὸν τῇ µὲν προτέρᾳ τῶν ἀποκρίσεων, ὡς κακῶς εἰδότα περὶ τῶν θεῶν, εἰ τυράννοις αὐτοὺς εὔνους ἡγοῖτο, τῇ δὲ ἐφεξῆς, ὡς οὐκ ἀκόλουθα τοῖς ἐφ’ Ἁρµοδίῳ καὶ Ἀριστογείτονι ψηφιζοµένων Ἀθηναίων, εἰ τοὺς ἄνδρας ἐκείνους τιµᾶν ἐπ’ ἀγορᾶς νοµίζοντες ὑπὲρ ὧν ἐν Παναθηναίοις ἔδρασαν, τυράννοις λοιπὸν χαρίζονται τὸ κεχειροτονηµένους αὑτῶν ἄρχειν.

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Again we see the twin themes that run through Apollonios’ critique of Athenian behavior.

First, by making Domitian eponymous archon, the Athenians have sullied their reputation

for being haters of tyrants, a reputation which their ancestors (Harmodios and

Aristogeiton in particular) established for them. The subtext seems clear; the Athenians

cannot rest on their laurels but must continue to actively oppose tyrants at every

opportunity if they want to maintain their ancient reputation. This young man at Olympia

is a stand-in for the city as a whole, and his behavior indicates that in the eyes of

Philostratos, the Athenians had failed in this. Second, claiming that Athena, the patron

goddess of Athens, showed favor to a tyrannical Roman emperor degrades the goddess,

who would never favor tyrants, even if they were eponymous archons in her city. As with

the anecdotes regarding gladiatorial games, Apollonios seems to decry the increasing

Romanization of Athens. Making a Roman emperor a magistrate of Athens and then

claiming that Athena favors that emperor is as much a betrayal of the Athenians’ ancient

beliefs as the current fashion of putting on gladiatorial shows under the eyes of their

goddess.

Clearly, Philostratos was eager to show Apollonios attempting to correct the

excesses and abuses of the Athenians of his own day, but what was the background

behind this subtle cultural politics? One common explanation is that Apollonios’ rebukes

are “an expression of an ascetic philosophy” or “no more than a standard puritanical

aversion to public entertainments.”118 This is supported by the fact that other authors of

the Second Sophistic, such as Dion Chrysostomos, Lucian, and Ailios Aristeides, express

118 Ascetic philosophy: Flinterman (1995) 107; puritanical aversion: Anderson (1986) 137.

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similar feelings about gladiatorial shows and inappropriate behavior at festivals.119

Indeed, Dion tells the story of an unnamed philosopher who (much like Apollonios)

upbraided the Athenians for watching gladiatorial shows in the Theater of Dionysos and

was subsequently run out of town.120 Complaints about gladiatorial shows, and the

Athenians’ enjoyment of those shows in particular, is thus not limited to Philostratos. Yet

argung that Apollonios simply has a “puritanical aversion to public entertainments” and

noting that other authors make the same complaints still does not answer why they made

such complaints.

Alternatively, because Hellenism for many Second Sophistic authors (Philostratos

included) was based on behavior and culture, rather than birth, Philostratos makes

Apollonios criticize the citizens of Athens for not behaving like Greeks, and thus, no

longer being truly Greek.121 This explanation is more convincing, I think, but it fails to

recognize the inherent importance in rebuking a city like Athens (as opposed to, say,

Antioch, a Hellenistic foundation famous for its luxury and decadent practices).122 After

all, even though Apollonios’ visit to Athens took place in the middle of the first century,

Philostratos is writing against the background of Hadrian’s building project in Athens and

his establishment of Athens as a kind of Roman cultural capital. Any criticism of Athens

written in the early third century would, in some sense, be a reaction against this

119 Dion: 32.60; Lucian: Demonax 57; Ail. Arist.: Or. 34.60. See Flinterman (1995) 93-94, Francis (1995)

105, and Bowie (1978) 1668 for discussion.

120 Dion 31.122. Bowie (1978) 1668 identifies this philosopher with Musonius Rufus and argues that Philostratos may have modeled Apollonios’ words on Musonius’.

121 Flinterman (1995) 92-93; Swain (1996) 387-388.

122 Apollonios’ critique of Antioch: Phil. VA I.16. See, too, Julian’s Misopogon for criticisms of Antioch in the fourth century.

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Hadrianic vision of Athens. In a work dedicated to the wife of the emperor, Philostratos

seems to be arguing that Athens would have been better off without Roman interference,

because that interference has corrupted Athens and tempted its residents away from

behavior that made their ancestors great (in much the same way that we saw Agathion

argue that barbarians or even Greeks visiting from other provinces have corrupted the

ancestral dialect of the Athenians). Philostratos’ comments about Rhodes and Smyrna in

the Lives of the Sophists may be compared here. In those instances, it is as if Philostratos

is demonstrating that cities which did not possess the kinds of imperial foundations (such

as Hadrian’s Library) that Athens did could still successfully be centers of intellectual

and cultural activity. The case of Aelian (mentioned above) is particularly striking in this

context; here is a man who Atticized with the best of them, yet never left Italy.123 The

implied message seems to be that Romans can partake of Greek culture without living in

(and subsequently corrupting) Athens. Apollonios’ critiques of Athens, then, are a

reflection of Philostratos’ idea that Athens is not the one, untainted center of Hellenic

learning.

But Philostratos’ critiques are not meant solely for a Roman or imperial audience.

After all, Philostratos has Apollonios compare the Athenians negatively to their

ancestors. In so doing, he is reminding contemporary Athenians that while their

predecessors won undying glory, they are doing nothing to continue that tradition and in

fact seem to be undermining it. Furthermore, he reminds them that the tradition is

something that has to be actively claimed and is not passively granted. This accords well

with Philostratos’ comment in his biography of Polemon that the Athenians should be

123 See above, p. 111, n. 80.

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“reproved rather than roused up.”124 Philostratos thus seems to be rejecting the idea that

contemporary Athens should be venerated just because of its glorious past. Instead, he

presents Athens as an important Greek city with numerous competitors. If the Athenians

wanted to remain the cultural capital of the Greek world, they needed to work hard to

maintain the noble reputation created by their ancestors. If they failed to do this, they

should be prepared to accept the fact that other cities would claim to be Hellenic centers.

Philostratos’ Apollonios does not accept the notion that Athens should be revered

solely for its classical past, nor does he accept the idea that Attic is the Greek dialect par

excellance. Granted, Philostratos reports that Apollonios spoke Attic.125 Given

Apollonios’ origin in Kappadokia, a largely rural backwater in central and eastern

Anatolia that was not yet fully integrated into the Hellenic world, Apollonios’ choice to

speak the language of the educated elite of the eastern Mediterranean is hardly

surprising.126 Indeed, Philostratos even emphasizes that Apollonios’ home city, Tyana,

was a “Greek city in the nation of the Kappadokians,” which highlights Apollonios’

Hellenism and makes his life more understandable to a larger Greek audience.127 At the

same time, however, Philostratos says that Apollonios “thought an excessive measure of

Atticism was unpleasant.”128 This is an interesting position for Apollonios to take since

he would have been a member of the generation after Dionysios of Halikarnassos, a man

124 See p. 104 and n. 52.

125 Phil. VA I.7.

126 Kappadokian origins: Phil. VA I.4. For an overview of the history of Kappadokia and its relatively unimportant role in the empire, culturally or politically, before the fourth century AD, see Van Dam (2002) 16-28.

127 Phil. VA I.4: Ἀπολλωνίῳ τοίνυν πατρὶς µὲν ἦν Τύανα πόλις Ἑλλὰς ἐν τῷ Καππαδοκῶν ἔθνει.

128 Phil. VA I.17: ἀηδὲς γὰρ τὸ ὑπὲρ τὴν µετρίαν Ἀτθίδα ἡγεῖτο.

128

who praised the value of classical Athenian literature as a model for contemporary works

and to whom the Atticist tendencies of Second Sophistic rhetors are often traced.129 A

possible explanation for Apollonios’ avoidance of hyperatticism may be that Philostratos

wanted his readers to see Apollonios as a typical speaker of Attic, not one who

pompously flaunts his ability to Atticize (like the rhetor whom Lucian mocks in his

Lexiphanes for excessive Atticism).130 Yet Philostratos mentions in an aside that

Apollonios wrote his will in Ionic.131 When this is read in conjunction with Apollonios’

belief about excessive Atticism, I think that Philostratos is doing more than ensuring that

Apollonios does not come off sounding like a pompous Atticist pseudo-intellectual. By

showing Apollonios’ adeptness with both Attic and Ionic, Philostratos is trying to make

clear the fact that Apollonios was not tied to the idea that the language of Athens, Attic,

is the one and only Greek dialect, and, in the process, he emphasizes the universality of

Apollonios’ life and teaching.

Philostratos, then, presents us with an Apollonios who recognizes the historical

importance of Athens but who is aware of Athens’ shortcomings and is not carried away

by the ideal of Athens that has been built up over many centuries. At the same time,

Philostratos undertook in the Life of Apollonios an even larger program of geographically

de-centering Athens than in the Lives of the Sophists. In the latter work, Philostratos

demonstrates the possibility of becoming a pepaideumenos by studying in Asia Minor,

Rhodes, or even (in the case of Aelian) Italy. Philostratos’ Apollonios, on the other hand,

129 Swain (1996) 21-27.

130 Lucian, Lexiphanes 25. Swain (1996: 386) implies that this is the reason Apollonios does not hyperatticize.

131 Phil. VA VII.35: Ἀπολλώνιος δὲ τὰς µὲν διαθήκας τὰς ἑαυτοῦ τὸν Ἰώνιον ἑρµηνεύει τρόπον.

129

is a learned man with no apparent need for the Greek world at all. Apollonios was

educated in Tarsus and Aigai, hardly the important centers of culture like those in Asia

Minor or mainland Greece.132 After five years of silence spent in Pamphylia and Kilikia,

Apollonios traveled east, to Antioch, Babylon and India, not west to the Greek

heartland.133 Significantly, while at the Temple of Daphnian Apollo in Antioch (a

Hellenic city founded by Seleucus, after all), Apollonios railed against the “semi-

barbarous and unlearned people” he found there and attempted to correct the

Antiochenes’ religious practices.134 Clearly, Apollonios did not see Antioch as a pure

center of Hellenic culture either (in contrast to Libanios a century and a half later).

Instead, he takes every opportunity to preach his message of reform wherever in the

world he happens to be.

The Life of Apollonios: Generic Hellenism

Even though Philostratos’ Apollonios decided not to travel to mainland Greece to finish

his education, throughout his journey to Babylon and India, he found remnants of Greek

culture everywhere. Just before reaching Babylon, Apollonios came upon the town of the

Eretrians whom Darius had captured in the Persian War over five hundred years earlier

and settled there.135 Amazingly, these Eretrians managed to preserve some semblance of

their Greekness, at least for a time. Philostratos says that some eighty years after their

132 Phil. VA I.7.

133 Five years of silence: Phil. VA I.15; Antioch: Phil. VA I.16; Babylon: Phil. VA I.21-II.1; India: Phil. VA II.20-III.58.

134 Phil. VA I.16: ἀνθρώπους ἡµιβαρβάρους καὶ ἀµούσους.

135 Phil. VA I.24.

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capture, the Eretrians were still inscribing their tombstones in Greek and carving images

of ships on them (despite being hundreds of miles inland) to show that the deceased came

from a seafaring family.136 Later, Apollonios interceded on these Eretrians’ behalf with

the ruler of Babylon, in order to grant them some measure of protection against the raids

of neighboring cities.137

Not only did Apollonios meet transplanted Greeks on his journey east, but many

of the non-Greeks he encountered had a degree of familiarity with Greek culture, further

evidence that, for Philostratos, Hellenic consciousness and identity was not necessarily

tied to Athens (or any other specific geographical locale, even Greece itself, for that

matter – remember, again, Aelian in Italy). For instance, in the palaces of Babylon,

Apollonios saw tapestries depicting “Andromedas and Amymonas and, very often,

Orpheus.”138 Other tapestries contained images less flattering to the Greeks, namely,

Persian victories over the Greeks in the Persian Wars of the fifth century BC.139 These

painful reminders of Greek defeats notwithstanding, the king of Babylon knew the Greek

language “equally as well as his native language.” It is significant that, in the world

Philostratos depicts, Greek culture had permeated the Near East to such an extent.

Babylonian elites who are familiar with Greek mythology, Greek history, and the Greek

language exemplify the very kind of universalizing Hellenism Philostratos describes in

136 Phil. VA I.24

137 Phil. VA I.35.

138 Phil. VA I.25: Ἀνδροµέδαι καὶ Ἀµυµῶναι καὶ Ὀρφεὺς πολλαχοῦ.

139 Phil. VA I.25.

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the Life of Apollonios. A Hellenism which was not tied to Athens or even Greece itself

was much more likely to recruit new adherents from among the non-Greek elites then

gaining power within the Roman empire.140

There is another and more important reminder of Greek culture in Babylon. The

night before Apollonios arrived in Babylon, the king had a dream in which he was

transformed into Artaxerxes, a fifth-century BC Persian king. The day after the dream,

hearing that a “wise man” and a “Hellene” had come to his court, the king realized that if

he was to be equated with Artaxerxes, then his visitor, Apollonios, must be a second

Themistokles who could grant the king the same advantages that Themistokles granted to

Artaxerxes.141 This comparison between Apollonios and Themistokles is instructive.

After all, Themistokles was the Athenian leader who correctly interpreted the “wooden

wall” oracle, establishing the Athenian fleet which won the battle of Salamis against the

Persians and which became the basis for the Athenian naval empire.142 Yet this same

man, later in life, was ostracized from Athens, was accused of collaborating with the

Persian king, and fled to Persia to escape prosecution from the Spartans and Athenians;

there, he learned to speak Persian and became an advisor to Artaxerxes on Greek

affairs.143 Clearly, the comparison between Apollonios and Themistokles, an Athenian

hero-turned-traitor, was not necessarily a flattering one, but Apollonios, too, was

“driven” from Athens (albeit more voluntarily than Themistokles was), as was Aischines,

140 See above, p. 116 for the idea of Hellenism as an ideology that needed to attract new members.

141 Language: Phil. VA I.32; second Themistokles: Phil. VA I.29.

142 Oracle: Hdt. VII.143; fleet: Hdt. VII.144.

143 Ostracism: Thuc. I.135; collaboration with Persia: Thuc. I.135; flight: Thuc. I.137; learning Persian and becoming advisor: Thuc. I.138.

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another of Philostratos’ heroes, in the Lives of the Sophists. Perhaps, though, the

Babylonian king meant the comparison to be entirely straightforward, that is, he hoped

Apollonios would “betray” his Hellenic culture by remaining in Babylon to give him

advise on that culture. Of course, Apollonios did not do this, but continued his travels

east before returning back to the Greek world. Indeed, we may take the comparison to

Themistokles a step further, for Plutarch wrote that Themistokles refused to aid

Artaxerxes in his war against the Greeks in Asia Minor, preferring to commit suicide

instead.144 In the end, Themistokles remained loyal to his homeland by not fighting

against the Greeks, just as Apollonios remained loyal to his roots by returning to the

Mediterranean world.

On another level, though, Philostratos’ comparison of Apollonios to Themistokles

may also be a metaphor for his attitude towards Athens. As we have seen, Philostratos

presents Apollonios as castigating the Athenians for not living up to the reputation of

their ancestors, particular those who fought at Salamis.145 As anyone familiar with Greek

history would know, Themistokles was one of the major architects of the Greek victory at

Salamis, and so his appearance in Book I as a comparandum for Apollonios may point

ahead to Apollonios’ criticisms of Athens in Book IV.146 Thereby, Apollonios has already

been linked to the hero of Salamis when he compares the modern Athenians to their

ancestral heroes of Salamis.

144 Plut. Themistokles 31.4-6.

145 See above, p. 122-123.

146 Architect of Salamis: Hdt. VIII.57-63, VIII.79-83.

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At the same time, though, Themistokles’ life seems to embody that very criticism

of failing to live up to great achievements of the past. He established a glorious reputation

for himself early in his career, only to lose that glory when he defected to Persia. In a

way, his life can be read as a model for Philostratos’ vision of Athenian history, from

classical times to Apollonios’ day. Yet just as Philostratos’ Apollonios implies that the

Athenians can change their ways and regain the nobility their ancestors possessed, so,

too, does Themistokles repent of medizing at the end of his life. According to Plutarch,

Themistokles committed suicide largely because of his “reverence for the glory of his

deeds and his victory-monuments.”147 For Philostratos, then, if Themistokles could live

up to the lofty ideals of the early part of his life by killing himself in almost Stoic fashion,

so too could the Athenians live up to the glory of their ancestors. As we will soon see,

this is not the last time that the ambiguous figure of Themistokles appears in the Life of

Apollonios.

The examples of the king’s dream regarding Artaxerxes and Themistokles, of

tapestries, and of a conversation with the king in Greek show us an Apollonios who

found the Greek language, Greek artwork, and a knowledge of Greek history in Babylon.

In his trip to India, we see more of the same kind of awareness of Greek culture. For

instance, after an extended conversation with Phraotes, the ruler of the Indian city Taxila,

conducted through a translator, Apollonios discovered that he spoke perfect Greek. When

Apollonios asks why the king did not speak Greek from the beginning, the king explains,

“I was afraid that I would seem overly bold and seem to not know myself, and seem to

147 Plut. Themistokles 31.5: αἰδοῖ τῆς τε δόξης τῶν πράξεων τῶν ἑαυτοῦ καὶ τῶν τροπαίων ἐκείνων.

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not understand that it is decreed by chance that I be a barbarian.”148 Not only was

Phraotes familiar with the Greek language, he was also familiar with the Delphic precept

of “know thyself” and with the Greeks’ division of the world into Greeks and barbarians

and the Greeks’ denigration of barbarians. If Phraotes had spoken in Greek from the very

start, he implies, Apollonios might think that Phraotes was not respecting the “natural”

division between Greeks and non-Greeks. The king even “exercises himself in the Greek

way with a javelin and discus.”149 Similarly, Iarchas, the leader of the Brahman sages

whom Apollonios sought out in India, spoke Greek, as did the villagers who lived near

the Brahman’s mountain.150 It seems, then, that if Apollonios found the Antiochenes to be

not really Greek because they did not correctly practice religious rites, then a select group

of Babylonians and Indians were not really barbarians because of their knowledge of

Greek and, in the case of Phraotes, of Greek exercise habits. Thus we have a generalized

Hellenism that is accessible to the non-Greek elites of Babylon and India.

Philostratos develops Apollonios’ eastward journey “as a path of training which

will set Apollonios up for his later ministry as holy man to the Roman Empire,”151 but,

again, it is not the “path of training” one might expect: instead of traveling to Athens and

mainland Greece and learning about Greek culture there (as Pausanias or Hadrian would

have one do and as Philostratos himself had done), Apollonios visited locales of non-

148 Phil. VA II.27: “ἔδεισα” ἔφη “θρασὺς δόξαι µὴ γιγνώσκων ἐµαυτόν, µηδ’ ὅτι βάρβαρον εἶναί µε δοκεῖ τῇ τύχῃ.”

149 Phil. VA II.27: τὰ δὲ ἐφ’ ἑκάτερα δρόµοι ἦσαν, ἐν οἷς ἀκοντίῳ τε καὶ δίσκῳ τὸν Ἑλληνικὸν τρόπον ἑαυτὸν ἐξήσκει.

150 Iarchas: Phil. VA III.16; villagers: Phil. VA III.12.

151 Elsner (1997) 30.

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Greek wisdom. Yet there is a curious dynamic inherent in Apollonios’ journey. On the

one hand, Apollonios had a deep reverence for the Indian Brahmans, and Philostratos has

him go so far as to say that he believes “your things are more profound and much more

divine.”152 While Philostratos does not have Apollonios specify to what he is comparing

“your things,” the implication is that they are “our things,” that is, Greek culture. It may

appear that Apollonios is enthralled by Eastern wisdom, but it does not come at the

expense of his Pythagoreanism or Hellenism. Instead, his Hellenism subsumes this non-

Greek culture (more on this below). Indeed, there is a constant emphasis in Philostratos’

text on the importance of the essentials of Greek culture, such as language and athletics.

So Philostratos represents Apollonios as respecting non-Greek sources of wisdom while

still recognizing the primacy of Greek culture, albeit a non-specific, generic Greek

culture.

Apollonios’ generic Hellenism, however, still seems to include Athens and the

dignity of its past, even in the distant east. Alongside barbarians who speak Greek and

train in Greek athletics, Apollonios discovers traces of the ideal of Athens. For instance,

he vigorously defends the Athenians against a slander uttered by an unnamed Indian king

whom Apollonios encountered while staying with the Brahmans. This king had an

extreme dislike of Greeks and told Apollonios, “I think that nothing belonging to the

Greeks is worth discussing.”153 Later in their conversation, it came out that the Indian

152 Phil. VA III.16: σοφώτερά τε ἡγοῦµαι τὰ ὑµέτερα καὶ πολλῷ θειότερα.

153 Phil. VA III.29: “οὐδὲν,” ἔφη “τῶν παρ’ Ἕλλησιν ἔγωγε λόγου ἀξιῶ.” Whitmarsh (2007) seems to confuse this unnamed king with Phraotes, but Philostratos’ text makes it clear that these are two different people. In this regard, Phraotes, as a Hellenized barbarian, does not embody the kind of contradictions of Hellenism that Whitmarsh says he does, although the implicit comparison between Phraotes and the anonymous king does.

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king disliked Greeks because he believed that the Athenians had been conquered by

Xerxes, and this led Apollonios to expose his belief as folly.154 Again, Philostratos is

playing with the dichotomy of a less-than-perfect contemporary Athens and the noble

ideal of ancient Athens. Philostratos’ Apollonios is quick to correct misrepresentations

and slanders of Athenian history, but, when he is in Athens, he has no qualms about

condemning the Athenians of his own day for failing to live up to the burden of that

history. Indeed, Apollonios is willing to correct anyone anywhere. But it is worth noting

that his correction of the king of India concerns ancient Athenian history, an aspect of

Hellenism that was unchallenged in Apollonios’ mind or in his world.

Following Apollonios’ correction of his knowledge of ancient Athenian history,

the king admitted that a group of Egyptians once slandered the Greeks in his presence,

and he believed them, but Apollonios has just shown him the error of his ways; he will no

longer disrespect the Greeks.155 The leader of the Brahmans, Iarchas, who had been

listening in, added that, because of his own admiration for the Greeks, he would have

defended them, but he wanted an actual Greek like Apollonios to persuade the king of his

mistake.156 Thus, the non-Athenian Apollonios becomes a kind of spokesman for all

Greeks. Philostratos shows us that Athens and the Athenians were not the exclusive

representatives of Greek culture, even of a specifically Athenian history; other men with

154 Phil. VA III.31. It is notable that this anonymous king has an incomplete notion of Hellenism; he speaks

in Greek to Apollonios, but has not read Herodotos, Thucydides, or any other Greek source which would prove that Xerxes did not conquer Athens. Compare this king’s Hellenism to Phraotes, who practices Greek-style athletics, knows one of the Delphic precepts and is (unnecessarily) self-conscious about his ability to speak Greek.

155 Phil. VA III.32. See Goldhill (2001) 5 for the idea that “Herodotos found in Egypt a privileged origin of western culture,” but “before the all-wise Brahmans of the East Greek culture is vinidcated” by Apollonios.

156 Phil. VA III.32.

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no overt ties to Athens, like Apollonios, could be just as effective. This discussion brings

out the overriding point of Philostratos’ account of Apollonios’ journey to India. No

matter how far Apollonios is from the Greek world of the eastern Mediterranean - and

Apollonios had, after all, traveled farther than Alexander, thus, in a sense, pushing the

boundaries of the Greek world farther than the greatest Greek conquerer had - he can still

encounter both an awareness on the part of non-Greeks of a generalized Greek culture

and also of a symbolic Athens (albeit one based on a misunderstanding of Athenian

history).157

Philostratos continues this trope of finding paideia and Athens at the ends of the

earth as Apollonios’ travels continue. After Apollonios spends time in Ionia, Greece, and

Rome, he journeys to Spain. Following this trip, to the extreme west this time,

Philostratos narrates Apollonios’ voyage back east, when he passes through Sicily,

Athens (where he is finally initiated into the Eleusinian Mysteries by the successor to the

hierophant who refused to initiate him on his first visit to the city), Rhodes, and

Alexandria, and ends with a visit to the Gymnosophists of Ethiopia.158 Unlike his journey

to the Brahmans, however, which “was in search of wisdom,” these trips “are the

demonstration of the universal applicability of his wisdom,” since he instructed the

157 For Apollonios surpassing Alexander, see Phil. VA III.33 (Alexander never visited the Brahmans) and

III.43 (Apollonios and Damis pass the boundary markers of Alexander on the Hyphasis River). See also Elsner (1997) 30 for some discussion. Cf. Anderson (1986) 235: “Apollonios performs the labours of Heracles, the voyages of Odysseus, the conquests of Alexander, the trial of Socrates and the transmigrations of Pythagoras, all in one. ...[H]e goes further than Alexander, Pythagoras, or Septimius Severus: and his trial is not in Athens or Agrigentum, but in Rome.” See, too, König and Whitmarsh (2005: 19) for the notion that the VA creates an “empire of philosophical knowledge” and that Apollonios’ travels outside the empire allow Philostratos to present “a compendium of knowledge that takes its readers beyond the confines of Greco-Roman political, military and epistemological control.”

158 Initiation: Phil. VA V.19. Unlike his first visit to Athens, which was full of public chastisements of the Athenians, all Apollonios appears to have done this time is be initiated and to meet briefly with the philosopher Demetrios.

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inhabitants of Baetica (Spain) on the nature of tyranny, tried to encourage their governor

to revolt against Nero, and then later defended Greek customs to the Ethiopians.159 More

important than his teaching, I think, is the fact that Philostratos’ Apollonios found the

residents of Gadeira (modern Cadiz) in Spain to be an outpost of an explicitly

Athenocentric Hellenism in the far west. Philostratos writes:

And indeed, they say that the Gadeirans are Hellenes, and that they are cultured in our way; that they certainly welcome Athenians more than other Greeks, and that they sacrifice to Menestheus the Athenian and that, since they admire the wisdom and courage of Themistokles the sea-fighter, they have erected a bronze statue of him thinking and, as it were, fixing his mind upon an oracle.160

The farther away from Greece that Apollonios traveled, it seems, the more well-known

Athens was, and not other Hellenic centers. In the extreme east, the unnamed Indian king

knew about Xerxes’ attack on Athens, although he was misinformed about the outcome.

In the extreme west, the Gadeirans were extremely friendly towards Athenians and

seemed to know a great deal about ancient Athenian history. Athenocentric Hellenism

thus seems to be an ideology for the margins of Philostratos’s world, as opposed to an

ideology for the center of Hadrian and Pausanias’ world.

A few chapters after this introduction to Gadeira, Philostratos informs us that,

unlike neighboring Spanish cities, the Gadeirans understand what the Olympic games are,

thus bolstering their Hellenic credentials.161 We have in essence, then, an “Athens-on-the-

Atlantic,” but an Athens that, in at least one way, outdoes the original Athens.

159 Quotation: Elsner (1997) 31; tyranny: Phil. VA V.7; revolt: Phil. VA V.10.

160 Phil. VA V.4: καὶ µὴν καὶ Ἑλληνικοὺς εἶναί φασι τὰ Γάδειρα καὶ παιδεύεσθαι τὸν ἡµεδαπὸν τρόπον· ἀσπάζεσθαι γοῦν Ἀθηναίους Ἑλλήνων µάλιστα καὶ Μενεσθεῖ τῷ Ἀθηναίῳ θύειν καὶ Θεµιστοκλέα δὲ τὸν ναύµαχον σοφίας τε καὶ ἀνδρείας ἀγασθέντες χαλκοῦν ἵδρυνται ἔννουν καὶ ὥσπερ χρησµῷ ἐφιστάντα.

161 Phil. VA V.8.

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Philostratos says that the Gadeirans “are remarkable in terms of religious matters” and he

does not have Apollonios chastise the Gadeirans for improper religious practices as he

had done the Athenians.162 Philostratos’ language regarding the Gadeirans’ religion

recalls Pausanias comment that the Athenians “reverence the gods more than other men

do.”163 It is as if Philostratos takes Pausanias’ praise away from the Athenians themselves

and bestows it on their imitators, the Gadeirans.

Philostratos’ descriptions of Gadeira are a perfect example of his ambivalence

towards Athens. On the one hand, the Gadeirans (like Apollonios) have an exceptional

respect for Athens and its traditions. The Gadeirans seem to have this respect because of

the glorious past of Athens, based on the fact that they admire Menestheus, the leader of

the Athenian contingent in the Trojan War, and Themistokles, the hero of the Persian

Wars.164 On the other hand, Philostratos’ mention of Themistokles in the far west (just

like his mention of him in Babylon) is ambiguous; this was, as we have seen, a man who

began as an Athenian hero and ended as a traitor who defected to Persia. Again, this use

of an ambiguous Athenian reminds the reader that there are cracks in the ideal of Athens;

the city might not be as noble and glorious as others, like the Gadeirans, seem to think.

Finally, the Gadeirans outshine the modern Athenians in their conscientious devotion to

religion. This continues the pattern we have seen in Philostratos’ writing, whereby

contemporary Athenians are not living up to the glory of their ancestors – whereas a town

on the Atlantic coast of Spain can outdo Athens. Thus, Philostratos demonstrates the

162 Phil. VA V.4: περιττοὶ δέ εἰσι τὰ θεῖα.

163 Paus. Peri. I.17.1: ἀλλὰ καὶ θεοὺς εὐσεβοῦσιν ἄλλων πλέον.

164 Menestheus: Homer, Iliad II.552-556.

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importance of the ideal of Athens to Greek culture, while at the same time

acknowledging that Greek culture has spread to the far reaches of the world and does not

necessarily have to depend on Athens anymore.

After this trip to Spain, Apollonios journeyed back across the Mediterranean to

Egypt, and from there, to the Gymnosophists of Ethiopia. The Gymnosophists’ awareness

of Greek culture is slightly different from the Gadeirans’ awareness. Here, Philostratos

shows Apollonios spreading the message of Hellenism to a people who do not seem to

know as much about Greek culture as the Indians and Babylonians did. Despite some

familiarity with the customs of Delphi and Olympia, Philostratos’ Gymnosophists do not

exercise in the Greek way, nor is there any explicit mention that they speak Greek.165

Instead, during his first encounter with Thespesion, the leader of the Gymnosophists,

Apollonios listened to an extended attack on the Indian wisdom which he had absorbed

so adeptly. When Thespesion had finished, Philostratos has Apollonios respond by

saying:

I have come not to make you counselors of my life, since I chose long ago what seemed right to me. Since I have come here being older than all of you, except for Thespesion, it would have been more suitable for me to counsel you about choosing a type of wisdom, if I had not discovered that you have already chosen one.166

Clearly, Apollonios had nothing to learn from the Ethiopians and, even worse, could not

teach them as he had other peoples throughout the Mediterranean. Indeed, despite

Apollonios’ statement that he wants to learn the Gymnosophists’ wisdom in order to 165 Delphi and Olympia: Phil. VA VI.10.

166 Phil. VA VI.11: οὔτε γὰρ ξυµβούλους ὑµᾶς βίου ποιησόµενος ἥκω πάλαι γε ᾑρηµένος τὸν ἐµαυτῷ δόξαντα, πρεσβύτατός τε ὑµῶν πλὴν Θεσπεσίωνος ἀφιγµένος αὐτὸς ἂν µᾶλλον εἰκότως ξυνεβούλευον ὑµῖν σοφίας αἵρεσιν, εἰ µήπω ᾑρηµένοις ἐνέτυχον.

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share it with the Greeks and write about it to the Indians, his conversations in Ethiopia

are more of a propagation of Greek customs and beliefs than an absorption of Ethiopian

ones.167 For instance, Apollonios mocks the theriomorphic deities of the Egyptians and

defends the anthropomorphism of the Greek gods, defends odd Spartan customs (such as

the public flogging of citizens in honor of Artemis of Scythia), and describes Greek

laws.168 In all of these discussions, Thespesion is asking the questions, as if he is the

student and Apollonios the teacher. Only in discussing the definition of justice does

Philostratos present Apollonios as learning anything from the Thespesion, but even this

discourse is couched in Greek terms, with Thespesion using the Athenian politician and

enemy of Themistokles, Aristeides the Just, as an exemplar.169 Significantly, Apollonios

was identified with Themistokles in Babylon, and it is no coincidence that Apollonios’

verbal adversary Thespesion chose to praise Aristeides and his reputation for acting

justly.

Apollonios’ conversations with the Gymnosophists are mostly about a generalized

Greek culture, whether it be about gods, laws, or justice. For instance, Apollonios asks

Thespesion about the Egyptians’ theriomorphic gods, and inquires why they “seem to

honor speechless and unintelligent animals rather than gods.”170 Thespesion responds by

asking how Apollonios would describe Greek cult statues, and Apollonios says that they

167 Phil. VA VI.18.

168 Gods: Phil. VA VI.19; Sparta: Phil. VA VI.20; laws: Phil. VA VI.22.

169 Phil. VA VI.21.

170 Phil. VA VI.19: ζῴων ἀλόγων καὶ ἀδόξων τιµαὶ µᾶλλον ἢ θεῶν φαίνονται.

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are “the most beautiful and most pious way to fashion gods.”171 Thespesion then

mentions several of these “most beautiful” statues (such as the Zeus at Olympia, a statue

of Athena, the Knidian Aphrodite, and the Argive Aphrodite) and he mockingly asks if

Pheidias and Praxiteles “went up to heaven and made a cast of the gods’ forms” before

sculpting them.172 Apollonios replies that “Imagination made these images, a more

skillful craftsman than Imitation.”173 Apollonios continues to expound this line of

thought regarding imagination, before mocking the Egyptians’ cult statues. In this

discussion, Thespesion mentions several particular statues and sculptors, but Apollonios

only speaks in generalities. He is more concerned with arguing that Greeks are better

than Egyptians at creating appropriate cult statues than he is with articulating a particular

version of Hellenism. In the next chapter, something similar happens. Thespesion raises

the very particular example of Spartan sacred customs, but it only leads Apollonios to

mention the Eleusinian and Samothracian mysteries, cults that were more widely known

than anything religious that happened in Sparta.174

The Hellenism that Apollonios propagates toward the end of his career, on his

great Hellenizing mission, is thus not specifically tied to one particular place or region;

mainland Greece is not necessary for him. This comes out most clearly at the very

beginning of Apollonios’ visit to the the Gymnosophists, in a passage mentioned

171 Phil. VA VI.19: κάλλιστόν τε καὶ θεοφιλέστατον δηµιουργεῖν θεούς.

172 Phil. VA VI.19: ἀνελθόντες ἐς οὐρανὸν καὶ ἀποµαξάµενοι τὰ τῶν θεῶν εἴδη τέχνην αὐτὰ ἐποιοῦντο.

173 Phil. VA VI.19: “φαντασία” ἔφη “ταῦτα εἰργάσατο σοφωτέρα µιµήσεως δηµιουργός.”

174 Phil. VA VI.20.

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previously.175 At their first meeting, Thespesion angrily presented Apollonios with a

choice between “the wisdom of India and the wisdom of Ethiopia”, and in the process,

made it clear that Apollonios can only earn Thespesion’s respect if he renounces what he

has learned from the Indians and chooses to learn from the Gymnosophists.176

Philostratos has Apollonios respond by saying that the Pythagorean views he adopted

while still a young man “were not very suitable to the Athenians” because of their attack

on Plato’s ideas regarding the soul and that is why he did not complete his education

there but rather in India (thus rejecting Thespesion’s choice).177 So just as Apollonios can

find elements of Greek culture anywhere from India to Spain, so the Greek culture he

spreads is generic and not necessarily Athenocentric.

Philostratos has Apollonios sum up this generic Hellenism in two places. The first

occurs during Apollonios’ stay in Babylon. One of the king’s eunuchs told Apollonios

that the king would give Apollonios ten gifts of Apollonios’ choosing and that on the

next day the king expected his request. Apollonios’ disciple Damis anticipated that

Apollonios would politely decline any gift whatsoever, so he attempted to convince his

teacher to choose wisely lest he offend the king.178 Apollonios chastised Damis for his

greed, saying that an avaricious man “is hated as a combination of all kinds of

wickedness at once.”179 More importantly, Apollonios continues, “Perhaps you think that

going wrong in Babylon is less important than going wrong at Athens or at the Olympics 175 See above, pp. 120-121.

176 Phil. VA VI.10: τοῦτο ἡγοῦ παρὰ τὴν Ἰνδῶν σοφίαν τὰ ἐνταῦθα.

177 Phil. VA VI.11: Ἀθηναίοις µὲν οὖν οὐ πάνυ προσήκων ἐφαίνετό µοι ὅδε ὁ λόγος.

178 Phil. VA I.33.

179 Phil. VA I.34: µισοῖτ’ ἄν, ὡς ὁµοῦ πάσας κακίας.

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or Pythian games, and you do not consider that for a wise man, Greece is everywhere.”180

For this reason, Apollonios continues, Damis should act as virtuously among barbarians

as he would among Greeks. It is easy to take the quotation “Greece is everywhere” out of

context to mean that the whole world has been Hellenized or that a wise man can find

Greek paideia anywhere at any time.181 But I think the passage represents the kind of

Hellenism Philostratos wants his Apollonios to display. “Greece” is a way of behaving

and a set of ethical standards that a wise man carries with him, inside himself. These

standards are universal and should be adhered to whether one is in India or in Greece.

True, Apollonios mentions the three major physical sites of Greece, namely, Athens,

Olympia, and Delphi (not coincidentally, the same three around which Pausanias

organized his work). All three are also religious centers, where the gods might act as

enforcers of ethics. But Apollonios names these three major religious centers only to

reject the idea that they are the only places one should behave virtuously. As important

historical sites, Athens, Olympia, and Delphi may once have helped set the standard for

how to behave, but now they are functionally irrelevant and no different from any other

place. Thus, Philostratos’ Hellenism seems to be a portable phenomenon accessible to

anyone, based on the generality of the symbolic Greece, not the particularity of the

geographical Greece.

The second and more important passage in which Apollonios’ summarizes his

universalizing Hellenism occurs when Apollonios spends time in Smyrna, and it should

180 Phil. VA I.34: σὺ δ’ ἴσως ἡγῇ τὸ ἐν Βαβυλῶνι ἁµαρτεῖν ἧττον εἶναι τοῦ Ἀθήνησιν ἢ Ὀλυµπίασιν ἢ Πυθοῖ, καὶ οὐκ ἐνθυµῇ ὅτι σοφῷ ἀνδρὶ Ἑλλὰς πάντα.

181 In such a way, Swain (1999: 185) takes this statement out of context to understand “Hellenism as a universally appreciated ideal.”

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be quoted in full:

And seeing that the Smyrneans engaged in all manner of intellectual activity with seriousness, he encouraged them and made them more serious and urged them to think about themselves rather than the appearance of their city. For even if it is the most beautiful of cities which are under the sun, and even if the sea is nearby and has the springs of the west wind, still it is more pleasing for it to be crowned with men rather than with stoas and paintings and more gold than what is needed. For the buildings remain in this place, being seen nowhere except in that part of the earth in which they stand, but good men are seen everywhere and speak clearly everywhere and they make known the city where they were born to the same degree as they are able to travel the earth.182

The implications of this speech are clear. While Hadrian and Pausanias (say) were

fascinated by monuments, traveled to specific places to see them, and linked local

cultures and traditions with those places in all their particularity, Philostratos’ Apollonios

thinks that cities are unimportant as physical expressions of culture. Instead, it is the

inhabitants who matter, since they can make their city (and, by extension, their culture)

known anywhere in the world because of the virtues that they carry with them.

Philostratos’ Apollonios would have rejected the “localism” of Hadrian and Pausanias,

and questioned whether they were truly “good men.” Once again, then, we see that

Philostratos’ Hellenism (as expressed by Apollonios) is not tied to any particular place, is

easily portable, and is accessible to anyone.183

182 Phil. VA IV.7: Σπουδῇ δὲ ὁρῶν τοὺς Σµυρναίους ἁπάντων ἁπτοµένους λόγων ἐπερρώννυε καὶ σπουδαιοτέρους ἐποίει, φρονεῖν τε ἐκέλευεν ἐφ’ ἑαυτοῖς µᾶλλον ἢ τῷ τῆς πόλεως εἴδει, καὶ γάρ, εἰ καὶ καλλίστη πόλεων, ὁπόσαι ὑπὸ ἡλίῳ εἰσί, καὶ τὸ πέλαγος οἰκειοῦται, ζεφύρου τε πηγὰς ἔχει, ἀλλ’ ἀνδράσιν ἐστεφανῶσθαι αὐτὴν ἥδιον ἢ στοαῖς τε καὶ γραφαῖς καὶ χρυσῷ πλείονι τοῦ ὄντος. τὰ µὲν γὰρ οἰκοδοµήµατα ἐπὶ ταὐτοῦ µένειν οὐδαµοῦ ὁρώµενα πλὴν ἐκείνου τοῦ µέρους τῆς γῆς, ἐν ᾧ ἐστιν, ἄνδρας δὲ ἀγαθοὺς πανταχοῦ µὲν ὁρᾶσθαι, πανταχοῦ δὲ φθέγγεσθαι, τὴν δὲ πόλιν, ἧς γεγόνασιν, ἀποφαίνειν τοσαύτην, ὅσοι περ αὐτοὶ γῆν ἐπελθεῖν δύνανται. Note the resemblance to Philostratos’ comment in his biography of Polemon, which we saw earlier (p. 105), namely, “not only does a city give a man fame, the city itself gains fame from a man” (Phil. VS 532). Again, people are important, not buildings. Note, too, that Apollonios’ discourse is delivered in Smyrna, the adopted home of Polemon.

183 It is no coincidence that much modern scholarship on the Second Sophistic shares this view of Hellenism. Scholars have been forced to rely extensively on Philostratos in order to recreate the sophistic

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Elsner and Whitmarsh have both recognized this distinctive construction of

Hellenism in the Life of Apollonios. Elsner has noted that “the hagiographic world of

Apollonius has few actual locations particular to him, apart from the shrine at Tyana with

which Philostratus both begins and ends his Life, i.5 and viii 31 (no site of his tomb, no

clear narrative or even place of his death, for instance).”184 This lack of particularity is

not confined to Apollonios’ hagiography, but, as we have seen, is also apparent in his

Hellenism. Indeed, Elsner has commented on the “universal applicability of Apollonios’

teaching” and argues that “the Philostratean sacred Greece of Apollonius is depicted as

conquering not only its Roman master but also its ethnographic ‘others’ from Babylon to

Egypt, as well as attaining to the pinnacle of wisdom represented by India.”185

Philostratos’ geography as enacted through Apollonios also embodies “a universalizing

spread of Hellenic wisdom.”186 Whitmarsh, meanwhile, has pointed out that Philostratos

in the Life of Apollonios “universalizes the cosmopolitanism (particularly ethical

cosmopolitanism) that undergirds much Greek thought,” but, by having Apollonios learn

from the Brahmans and debate the Gymnosophists to a draw, he “challenge[s] the

characteristically Greek habit – which he is precisely perpetuating – of universalizing

ethical categories that are narrowly Greek.”187

milieu, so it should be no wonder that they have adopted (perhaps unknowingly) Philostratos’ version of Hellenism as the paradigm of Hellenism in the second century AD (as opposed to, say, the Athenocentric paradigms espoused by Hadrian or Pausanias that we examined in Chapter 2). See the previous chapter (p. 30-31) for scholarship on how anyone can be Greek in the Second Sophistic.

184 Elsner (1997) 35.

185 Elsner (1997) 32, 36.

186 Elsner (1997) 37.

187 Whitmarsh (2007) 42.

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As we have seen, though, this is only half the story. For Philostratos, paideia was

universal and accessible to anyone, whether they lived in Kappadokia, Babylon, India,

Spain, or Greece, but at the same time there was a sense of particularity in his

hagiography and his Hellenism. Although Elsner is right to note that “Apollonios has few

actual locations particular to him,” those that he does have could eventually become quite

important symbolically.188 For example, as a young man, Apollonios spent a great deal of

time learning philosophy at the temple of Asklepios at Aigai.189 During the reign of

Constantine, this temple was destroyed by Christians because of its associations with

Apollonios.190 In the same way, Philostratos was not willing to completely jettison

Athens as one center of Apollonios’ Hellenism. It was still an important locale, symbolic

of what it meant to be Greek, thanks to its historical importance to the construct of Greek

culture. This is evident in Philostratos’ use of Athens as a comparandum, in the

recollection of ancient Athenian history in the person of Themistokles, in Apollonios’

defense of Athenian history against the slanders of the Indian king, and in Apollonios’

desire to speak good Attic. But Athens was a city faced with numerous rivals (large and

small) to its claims of contemporary cultural and religious purity, from Gadeira to India.

As Apollonios’ critiques of contemporary Athenians make clear, if the Athenians do not

live up to the reputation of their ancestors and do not reform their corrupted and decadent

way of life, they should be prepared to become just one of many Greek cities in any

symbolic representation of Hellenism. It is the gap between ancient and contemporary

188 Elsner (1997) 35. In a similar vein, Whitmarsh (2007:42) says that the VA “presents a cosmic

philosophy that designedly transcends locality.”

189 Phil. VA I.7.

190 Fox (1987) 671-672.

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Athens on the one hand and between a localized Athenocentric Hellenism and a

universalizing one on the other that drive Philostratos’ conflicted and ambivalent view of

the city.

Conclusion

As noted at the outset of this chapter, Philostratos was writing during a period of

increasing political and cultural uncertainty, and we should consider this larger historical

context in order to understand the way in which Philostratos presents Athens in the Life

of Apollonios. Swain has convincingly argued that “deep problems in the Hellenist

ideology” began to surface during Philostratos’ lifetime, under “the Eastern-looking

Severan dynasty” whose members were not “fully committed to orthodox Hellenism,

precisely in the sensitive matter of religion.”191 Not only were some of the Severans

(such as Elagabalus and Caracalla) invested in Eastern religions, Christianity was starting

to become a more widespread religion, and some native peoples (like the Egyptians and

the Jews) had long maintained the priority of their culture and knowledge over that of the

Greeks.192 Philostratos decided to turn his Life of Apollonios into “a defense of Hellenic

values” and by emphasizing Apollonios’ Pythagorean way of life, he was able to counter

the claim that Greek paideia was not the oldest and, therefore, not the most

authoritative.193 More importantly, by having Apollonios visit the Babylonians, Indians,

191 Swain (1999) 159.

192 For the Severans, see above, pp. 96-98. For Christians and native peoples, see Swain (1999) 162 and 184-185.

193 “Hellenic values”: Swain (1999) 181; Pythagorean lifestyle: Swain (1999) 162-169. Swain (1999: 166-

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and Ethiopians, Philostratos is able to make Hellenism include or go on the offensive

against non-Greek culture and knowledge, depending on the circumstances. Philostratos’

Babylonians and Indians can speak Greek and know something about Greece’s history

and athletics, while Apollonios’ discussions with the Ethiopian Gymnosophists show that

he, as a paragon of Hellenism, has nothing to learn from their culture. In other words, for

Philostratos, Greek culture has been adopted (to some extent) by non-Greeks or is

superior to native cultures (in the case of the Gymnosophists). As Swain points out, the

fact that Apollonios outdoes Alexander by visiting the philhellenic Brahmans who claim

to be “the source of Egyptian wisdom, and therefore of Pythagoreanism” allows

Philostratos to show that “the acknowledged influence of the East is neutralized and

brought safely within Hellenism.”194 This notion, coupled with Apollonios’ statement

that the Athenians did not like his Pythagorean views, points to another contradiction in

Philostratos’ Hellenism, namely, not all wisdom (even something as Hellenic as

Pythagoreanism) need stem from Athens, or even Greece. Thus, Philostratos wrote about

“the acceptance of Eastern wisdom,” but a Hellenized version of that wisdom.195 That is,

Philostratos tells us that Pythagoras learned about the soul from the Egyptians, who, in

turn, learned from the Brahmans of India, but Pythagoras’ philosophy was still

167) also notes that Philostratos’ promotion of Pythagoreanism as a source of Hellenic authority is similar to Diogenes Laertios’ argument in his preface that Pythagoras, not a barbarian, was “the first to use the term philosophia and to call himself philosophos.” Similarly, Whitmarsh (2007) 38-39 points out that Severan prose authors were concerned “with intellectual genealogies as they related to Greek cultural identity.”

194 Swain (1999) 186, 187.

195 Swain (1999) 196.

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Pythagoreanism, not “Brahmanism” or “Egyptianism.” The lesson Philostratos’

Apollonios teaches us, then, is as old as the time of Plato’s students: “if Greeks

borrowed, they made the borrowing better.”196

Once again, however, Philostratos was attempting to find a “universal solution” to

what he perceived as the challenge posed to Hellenism by Severan orientalism.197

Hadrian’s Athenocentric Hellenism was based on the monumentality of Athens, and one

would have to travel to the city to see that. Pausanias’ Hellenism was also centered on

Athens’ monumentality and its local traditions, but his own personal engagement was a

kind of “textual travel” to the city. With their narrow focus on traveling to Athens or

reading about the sites of mainland Greece, neither of these approaches would appeal to

the wider audience that Philostratos needed to reach in order to redefine Hellenism to

cope with the changes of the early third century. Accordingly, Philostratos’ Apollonios

traveled more widely than Hadrian or Pausanias, and he did so “before” either of these

two men were born. Philostratos appears to have made his Apollonios outdo two of the

best known travelers of the second century, and in the process, come to different

conclusions about the place of Athens in his conceptual geography. Philostratos, by

describing the thriving cultural life of coastal Asia Minor, particularly Smyrna, in the 196 Swain (1999) 196 and his citation, in a similar context on p. 167, of [Plato], Epinomis 987D-E: “And let

us understand that whatever Greeks take from barbarians, they make it more beautiful in the end” (λάβωµεν δὲ ὡς ὅτιπερ ἂν Ἕλληνες βαρβάρων παραλάβωσι, κάλλιον τοῦτο εἰς τέλος ἀπεργάζονται). See Stroumsa (1999) 57-84 for early Christianity as a barbarian philosophy. See Momigliano (1975) for cultural contacts between Greeks and barbarians in the Hellenistic age.

197 Swain (1999) 169. For a stronger formulation than Swain, see Whitmarsh (2007) 43: “Philostratus’ vision of a cultural universalism, when placed alongside the Severans’, emerges as rather polemically Hellenocentrist.” Whitmarsh (2007:51) also sees Philostratos’ Hellenism as “a confrontation with the emergent challenge of Christian-centered intellectual literature, even if that threat is only dimly recognized.”

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Lives of the Sophists, recognized that there were now multiple centers of Hellenism.

Philostratos was broadening the appeal of his Hellenism to elites throughout the eastern

Mediterranean by postulating that Athens need not be the center of that ideology. We see

a similar process in the Life of Apollonios when Philostratos highlights the decline of

modern “Athens” from its ancient greatness, finds evidence of Greek paideia throughout

the world (not just in Athens or even Greece), and argues the more narrowly

philosophical message that cities are not important for culture, people are. Furthermore,

by having Apollonios travel into distant places like India and Ethiopia, Philostratos is

creating a strategy whereby Hellenism can strike back at the centers of Oriental mystique.

The “Athens” of Ailios Aristeides was too narrowly focused to be able to help

Philostratos in his aims. He therefore has Apollonios embrace a generic Hellenism that

could more easily trump barbarians’ claims of cultural primacy. In cogently and

persuasively formulating this generalized, universalizing, and portable Hellenism,

Philostratos critiqued the ideal of Athens without entirely abandoning it.

By criticizing but not abandoning the ideal Athens, we can see that Philostratos

maintained a conflicted view of that ideal. On the one hand, Athens was an important

standard to which one could compare other cities and cultures, and its ancient history

should be respected and honored, whether in Athens, Gadeira, or India. On the other

hand, contemporary Athenians had disgraced the reputation of their ancestors and had

become corrupted, for example, by Roman gladiatorial games and by an influx of

outsiders who destroyed the Attic dialect. Paradoxically, Philostratos attempted to deploy

a kind of generic Hellenism (one that had existed, in one form or another, since

Alexander the Great) that could appeal to any elites anywhere in the empire by

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downplaying the particular role of Athens within that Hellenism and emphasizing the role

of other cities, like Smyrna and Gadeira. Philostratos’ articulation of this conflict over the

role of Athens points to the growing anxiety on the part of Hellenic ideologues over the

rise of Eastern, non-Hellenic ideologies, most importantly, Christianity. Philostratos’

universalizing Hellenism also looks forward to the subsumption of Athens within a

broader, more inclusive Hellenism. In the process of creating this Hellenism, Athens was

effaced entirely, allowing men like Libanios and Synesios to postulate alternative centers

of Hellenism.

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CHAPTER 4

OLD SOLDIERS AND POTS OF HONEY:

THE CRITICS OF ATHENS

Introduction

We have seen three different conceptualizations of the ideal Athens. Hadrian’s “Athens”

was a cultural capital of the Greek-speaking world. This capital was filled with new

buildings, new games, and a new assembly of Greek cities (the Panhellenion), but each of

these was tied to Athens’ classical past. In this way, Hadrian’s “Athens” was reborn as a

symbol of a Hellenism subordinated to the Roman imperial administration in general and

to the Roman emperor (in the person of Hadrian) in particular. Pausanias’ “Athens” by

contrast was the gateway to and anchor for the Hellenism he sought to describe in his

Periegesis, a Hellenism based on a sense of shared Greekness and one not dependent on

the Roman empire. Philostratos’ version of “Athens” differed from those of Hadrian and

Pausanias in that it was not entirely positive. Philostratos used Athens as a standard by

which to compare other cities and cultures, but he also criticized contemporary Athenians

for failing to live up to the reputation of their classical ancestors. At the same time,

Philostratos articulated a version of Hellenism which was not as heavily dependent on a

symbolic Athens (as Hadrian and Pausanias’ Hellenisms were), although he could not

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completely abandon Athens as a source of Hellenism due to its role as the origin for so

much of the literature and philosophy associated with Hellenism. In this chapter, we will

examine a different kind of approach to the ideal of Athens. We will see two figures,

Synesios and Libanios, who were willing to reject Athens’ traditional place as the

wellspring of Hellenism and to replace “Athens” with alternative and, in their view, more

viable or more dynamic centers of Hellenism.

Because of his similarities to the second-century sophists described by

Philostratos, we will first examine Libanios. He was a man who was ardently devoted to

Hellenism and classical Greek paideia in a world that was becoming increasingly Roman

and Christian. As a pagan rhetor and a friend of the emperor Julian, one would expect

Libanios to have embraced “Athens” and the classical learning it symbolized. Julian, after

all, wrote a Letter to the Boule and Demos of Athens in 361 as he was preparing for battle

against Constantius. In the letter, Julian reminds the Athenians of their ancestors’ arete

and he seems to think that the Athenians of the fourth century AD possess the same

influence and power as the Athenians of the fifth century BC.1 Libanios did not share

Julian’s positive view of the city. Instead, we will see that Libanios’ negative experiences

as a student in Athens convinced him of the bankruptcy of the symbol of Athens.

Furthermore, Libanios wrote about his student days in Athens after he had established a

school of rhetoric in Antioch. His remarks on Athens were also suited to his professional

interest: he wanted to denigrate Athens as a center of learning in order to recruit potential

1 Ancient arete: Jul., Letter to the Boule and Demos of Athens 268A-269D; Athens’ apparent political

influence: Jul. Letter to the Boule and Demos of Athens 270A-B.

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students to his own school in Antioch. Libanios was attempting to create an ideal Antioch

(with his school of rhetoric in the center) which could be a new symbol of pagan learning

and supplant Athens.

The second figure we will examine is the fifth-century philosopher and bishop

Synesios. He was educated in Alexandria and was fiercely loyal to his teacher of

philosophy, Hypatia. Like Libanios, Synesios derided modern Athens and effectively

argued that the city had outlived its usefulness as a symbol. In his letters, Synesios made

it clear that he could not bear Athenian-educated philosophers who looked down their

noses at Alexandrian-trained ones like Synesios. As we will see, Synesios fought back by

hinting that Alexandria had surpassed Athens at producing philosophers and that there

was no need for students to journey to Athens to learn about Plato, Aristotle, Zeno, or any

other philosopher.

It is important to note that for both Libanios and Synesios, at least a part of their

distaste for Athens as a symbol of Greek culture sprung from their own personal

interactions with the city. They both visited Athens and found that the city’s reality fell

short of the city they had imagined based on their reading of classical texts and the stories

about Athens they had heard told in Cyrenaica and Syria. In a sense, this was true for

Hadrian, Pausanias and Philostratos as well, but they found ways to cope with this gap

between the real Athens and the imaginary Athens. Hadrian attempted to re-enact the

Athens he imagined through the creation of the Panhellenion and through his massive

building projects. By ignoring most post-classical buildings, Pausanias wrote a

description of the real Athens which closely mirrored his imaginary Athens. Philostratos’

Apollonios chastises the Athenians of the first century AD for not living up to the

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reputation of their ancestors and exhorts them to once again become the embodiments of

the ideal Athens the rest of the world knows. For Libanios and Synesios, however, the

gap between real and imaginary had grown too great and their commitments to the

schools of their home towns pulled them away from a valorization of Athens. Both of

these men, as we will see, seriously advocated (in the case of Libanios) or briefly flirted

with (in the case of Synesios) the abandonment of the ideal of Athens as the cultural

center of the Greek world and argued that their own cities, Antioch and Alexandria, were

better suited to be the educational centers and cultural capitals of the Greek-speaking

world.

Libanios

Born in Antioch in 314, Libanios lived in a very different world from that of

Philostratos.2 The reforms of Diocletian in the 280s and the rise of Constantine and his

family in the early fourth century brought a measure of political stability to the empire

that it had not seen in decades.3 At the same time, though, the empire’s centralized and

expanded bureaucracy and its new eastern Roman capitals, such as Nikomedeia,

Thessalonike, Antioch, and Constantinople, coupled with the legalization of Christianity,

meant that the empire of the fourth century was not the same as that of the Antonines. In

this new and changing environment, it might be expected that Athens, the long-standing

symbol of the Greek past and classical paideia, would be invoked as a way to cope with

or protest against these changes. Indeed, the emperor Julian did exactly that. In his Letter 2 Date of birth: Cribiore (2007) 14.

3 For Diocletian’s significance and his reforms, see Jones (1964) 37-70. For an overview of Constantine and his family, see Jones (1964) 77-137.

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to the Boule and Demos of Athens, he appeals to an ideal Athens to defend his war

against Constantius. He says that the Athenians could decide on the justness of his cause

because “it is not easy to find an entire demos and city except for yours who are lovers of

just words and deeds.”4 Yet all of the examples he cites of Athenian just acts are from the

classical past.5 In this instance, “Athens” could serve as a way to legitimize the dynastic

power struggles of the fourth century which stood in stark contrast to the peaceful

transfer of imperial power under the Antonines. Julian also attempted to protect classical

paideia and the canon of Athenian authors (such as Demosthenes, Thucydides, Isocrates

and Lysias) from Christianity by forbidding Christians to teach the works of pagan

authors.6 While Julian does not mention Athens by name in this proclamation, the paideia

he seeks to defend was founded on Athenian authors of the fifth and fourth centuries BC.

It is clear Julian was trying to protect his ideal Athens, the birthplace of Greek literary

culture, from being sullied by Christian teachers who did not believe in the gods so

frequently mentioned by the authors they taught.

Libanios, however, had a different view of “Athens” than Julian. Libanios was

familiar with the ideal Athens from a young age. In his Autobiographical Oration, he

describes how as a young man in grammar school in Antioch in the 330s he was regaled

with stories of the sophists who lived and taught in Athens. Every day, Libanios’ fellow-

student, Iasion, told him of the power of the Athenian sophists’ words and the “speeches

4 Jul. Letter to the Boule and Demos of Athens 269B: δῆµον δὲ ὅλον καὶ πόλιν ἐραστὰς ἔργων καὶ λόγων διακαίςν ἔξω τῆς παρ’ὑµῖν οὐ ῥᾴδιον εὑρεῖν.

5 Jul. Letter to the Boule and Demos of Athens 268C-269D.

6 Authors: Jul. Rescript on Christian Teachers 423A; forbidding Christians to teach pagan literature: 423B.

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by which they defeated or were defeated by each other.”7 Eventually, Libanios says, “a

certain desire for that country seized my soul.”8 In other words, he had already created an

“imaginary” Athens in his mind based on the fourth-century equivalents of the stories

Philostratos had told about the second century. This meant that his encounter with the

city itself could not be free of ideological preconceptions. At the same time, he was

besieged by the leading citizens of Antioch with offers to marry their daughters, but

Libanios tells us that he, “like Odysseus, would have turned down marriage with a

goddess for the smoke of Athens.”9 As Norman points out in his commentary, Libanios is

combining references here, the first to Odyssey 7.258, where Odysseus says that Kalypso

would never win his heart, and the second to Philostratos’ Imagines 1.15, where in a

description of Theseus’ abandonment of Ariadne, Philostratos says that the “smoke of

Athens” drew Theseus away from her. Philostratos’ comment is itself a reference to

Odyssey 1.58, where Athena describes Odysseus as “trying to discern the smoke rising

from his own land.”10 These heroic metaphors describe the high expectations with which

Libanios set out to continue his studies in Athens, expectations which were based on an

idealized version of the city. Indeed, through his allusions to the Odyssey, Libanios

seemed to imagine that Athens was a kind of homeland-away-from-home, an ideal home

to which he (like Odysseus) was bound to return.

7 Lib. Or. 1.11: οὗτος ὁ Ἱασίων...διηγούµενος σθένος λόγους τε οἷς ἀλλήλων ἐκράτησάν τε καὶ ἐκρατήθησαν.

8 Lib. Or. 1.11: τις ἐπιθυµία τοῦ χωρίου κατελάµβανέ µοι τὴν ψυχήν.

9 Lib. Or. 1.12: οἶµαι δὲ κατὰ τὸν Ὀδυσσέα καὶ θεῖον ὑπεριδεῖν ἂν γάµον πρὸς τὸν Ἀθηνῶν καπνόν.

10 Norman (1965) 150.

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Yet Libanios’ description of his journey to Athens reveals his apprehension about

leaving Antioch, foreshadowing the unpleasantness of his time in Athens. Upon leaving

Antioch, Libanios

began to realize how terribly bitter it is to leave behind one’s family. And so I bore myself with weeping and grieving, often turning around because of the desire to see the city walls. I was weeping as far as Tyana and from there I wept and had a fever.11

At this point, he was struggling with two desires, to return home or to study in Athens,

but the “fear of the shame” he would feel if he abandoned his journey convinced him to

press onwards.12 As he proceeds with his narrative, Libanios implicitly continues his

comparison between himself and Odysseus, as he begins to encounter a number of

difficulties on the road to Athens. First, there was his illness, which “was worsened by

the journey, and I sailed across the Bosporus not much different from a corpse, and my

mules suffered, too.”13 Once in Constantinople, Libanios learned that the man “on whom

I pinned by hopes to send me to Athens by the Imperial Post had fallen from his position

of power” and was unable to help Libanios.14 Next, Libanios tried to travel by sea, but it

11 Lib. Or. 1.14: ἐξεληλακὼς δὲ ἤδη τότε ἄρα ᾐσθανόµην, ὡς δεινῶς πικρὸν ἀπολιπεῖν οἰκείους. ἐφερόµην οὖν σὺν ὀδυρµοῖς τε καὶ ὀδύνῃ, πυκνὰ ἐπιστρεφόµενος πόθῳ τῆς τῶν τειχῶν ὄψεως. µέχρι µὲν Τυάνων δάκρυα, ἐντεῦθεν δὲ σὺν πυρετῷ δάκρυα.

12 Lib. Or. 1.14: ὁ τῆς αἰσχύνης φόβος. Libanios’ shame would have undoubtedly sprung from the fact that, as Cribiore (2007: 177) notes, “the Athens of Libanius’s times was an island of learning of exceptional reputation from which a return home was unusual and final.”

13 Lib. Or. 1.14: τοῦ νοσήµατος δὲ ὑπὸ τῆς πορείας αὐξανοµένου διαπλέω µὲν τὸν Βόσπορον µικρόν τι νεκροῦ διαφέρων, καὶ οἱ ὀρεῖς δὲ ταὐτὸν ἐπεπόνθεσαν.

14 Lib. Or. 1.14: ἐν ᾧ δὲ εἶχον ἐλπίδας ὡς βασιλείοις µε πέµψοντι παρὰ τὴν Ἀθηνᾶν ζεύγεσιν, οὗτος µὲν ἐξεπεπτώκει τῆς πολλῆς ἐκείνης ῥώµης.

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“was closed to sailors because of the season.”15 Finally, he “met a certain well-known

captain” who agreed to take him to Athens and Libanios experienced no further troubles

between Constantinople and Athens.16

Once there, however, Libanios found that the real Athens could not possibly live

up to the Athens he had imagined. On his first night in Athens, he was kidnapped by

older students and he was

in the hands of those with whom I wanted nothing to do. And then on the next day, I was in the hands of still other people whom I wanted no part of, either. I was not able to see him from whom I had come to learn, since I was imprisoned in a cell like a pithos, for such is what happens to new students upon their arrival.17

These older students kept Libanios locked up until he swore an oath to attend the lectures

of their teacher rather than of the one with whom he had come to study: “After I had

sworn to be content with my present circumstances, someone opened the door and I

attended his [Diophantos’] lectures as his regular student immediately.”18 Libanios

quickly realized, however, that these lectures were “nothing special, since the young

men’s training had been taken over by men themselves not much different from the

young men.”19 Because of this, his teachers came to believe that “I offended Athens and

15 Lib. Or. 1.15: κεκλεισµένην ὑπὸ τῆς ὥρας ναυτίλοις.

16 Lib. Or. 1.15: ἐντυχὼν δέ τινι λαµπρῷ κυβερνήτῃ. Libanios’ arduous journey (or at least his claim of such a journey) to Athens was by no means unique; Gregory of Nazianzos and Eunapius also dealt with storms and sickness (see Cribiore [2007] 175).

17 Lib. Or. 1.16: ἐν χερσὶν ὧν οὐκ ἂν ἐβουλόµην, ἔπειτα τῆς ὑστεραίας ἐν ἑτέρων αὖ χερσὶν ὧν οὐδὲ τούτων ἐβουλόµην· οὗ δὲ ἦλθον µετασχήσων, τοῦτον οὐδ’ ὁρᾶν εἶχον ἐν πίθῳ µικροῦ καθειργµένος, οἷα τὰ ’κείνων εἰς τοὺς ἀφικνουµένους τῶν νέων.

18 Lib. Or. 1.16: ὀµωµοκότι δὲ ἤδη τοῖς παροῦσιν ἀγαπήσειν ἀνοίγει τις τὴν θύραν, καὶ ἠκροώµην τοῦ µὲν εὐθὺς ἐν τάξει µαθητοῦ. For another contemporary view of these hazing rituals, see Eunapios’ description of his attempt to study with Prohairesios at VPS 485.

19 Lib. Or. 1.17: ἐγω δὲ ᾐσθανόµην ἐπ’ οὐδεν σεµνὸν ἀφιγµένος τῆς ἀρχῆς τῶν νέων ὐπ’ ἀνδρῶν οὐ πολύ τι νέων διαφερόντων ἡρπασµένης. See Watts (2006:52-53) for a discussion of teaching assistants in the Athenian schools of the fourth century.

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they thought me guilty of not respecting my professors.”20 But Libanios managed to

convince them that he was respectfully listening to their lectures in silence because an

illness made it difficult for him to speak. He also showed his teachers some of his

rhetorical compositions, which made them realize he was a skilled student, regardless of

his “lack of respect.”21

Libanios’ dislike of his teachers was not his only source of disillusionment. From

the time he was a child, he had heard stories about “the battles which took place in the

middle of Athens” between groups of students loyal to different teachers.22 He believed

that these students “were no less brave than those who took up arms on behalf of their

country” and he

prayed to the gods that it would happen that I would be the best in such battles and that I would first run to the Peiraieus and Sounion and the other ports to seize new students when they disembark from their ship, and then run to Corinth to be tried for the kidnapping, then quickly string together dinner after dinner and, having squandered everything I had, look for someone to borrow money from.23

Yet as a student in Athens, Libanios avoided these riots and was “uninitiated in the sallies

and campaigns and contests and battle-lines,” to which, Libanios says, “Ares came.”24

20 Lib. Or. 1.17: καὶ ἐδόκουν δὴ πληµµελεῖν τε εἰς τὰς Ἀθήνας καὶ δίκην ὄφλειν οὐχὶ θαυµάζων τοὺς ἄρχοντας.

21 Lib. Or. 1.17: οὐχὶ θαυµάσας. Libanios’ dislike of his teachers was apparently well-known. In his biographical sketch of Libanios, Eunapios charges that, although Libanios’ letters and orations are quite good, his declamations are “entirely without strength, dead, and lifeless, and it is clear that he had not had a teacher” (VPS 496).

22 Lib. Or. 1.19: Ἀκούων ἔγωγε ἐκ παιδός, ὦ ἄνδρες, τοὺς τῶν χορῶν ἐν µέσαις ταῖς Ἀθήναις πολέµους.

23 Lib. Or. 1.19: δικαίους τε οὐχ ἧττον τῶν ὑπὲρ τῶν πατρίδων τιθεµένων τὰ ὅπλα εὐχόµην τε τοῖς θεοῖς γενέσθαι καὶ ἐµαυτῷ τοιαῦτα ἀριστεῦσαι καὶ δραµεῖν µὲν εἰς Πειραιᾶ τε καὶ Σούνιον καὶ τοὺς ἄλλους λιµένας νέων ἐφ’ ἁρπαγῇ τῆς ὁλκάδος ἐκβάντων, δραµεῖν δὲ ὑπὲρ τῆς ἁρπαγῆς αὖθις εἰς Κόρινθον κριθησόµενον, δεῖπνα δὲ δείπνοις συνείροντα ταχὺ τῶν ὄντων ἀνηλωµένων εἰς δανείσοντα βλέπειν.

24 Lib. Or. 1.21: ἦν οὖν ἀτελὴς ἐξόδων τε καὶ στρατειῶν καὶ ἀγώνων, ἐφ’ οἷς ἔρχεται Ἄρης.

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This reference to Ares’ appearance at a street-brawl seems to be a sarcastic jab at the

importance and glory his fellow-students attached to these riots. Libanios goes on to say

that “during the great riot, when everyone was assaulting each other (even those whom

age released) only I sat where I was, far away, and heard what harm each one received

and remained clear of the blows.”25

In addition to remaining aloof from the riots, Libanios also says that he “kept

away from the revels and the gatherings of those who marched at night to the houses of

the poorer people.”26 Furthermore, he “declared that the singing girls (who have stripped

many), since they are heads of Skylla or, if you like, neighbors more terrible than Sirens,

sang in vain.”27 Libanios thus managed to avoid the sexual temptation of the Athenian

chorus girls, who had apparently seduced many of his fellow students.28 Given Libanios’

description of his disillusionment with student life in Athens, it is little wonder that he

took a job teaching in Constantinople at the first opportunity in 340, before even

completing his planned course of studies in Athens.29

Libanios’ dislike of Athens, which began in his student days, stayed with him for

the rest of his life. After two years working in Constantinople and then Nicaea, Libanios

25 Lib. Or. 1.21: κἀν τῇ µεγάλῃ µάχῃ πάντων σθµπεπτωκότων καὶ ὅσους ὁ χρόνος ἀφίει, µόνος πόρρω που καθήµενος ὅ τι ἕκαστος λάβοι κακὸν ἤκουον πληγῶν τε διεγενόµην καθαρός.

26 Lib. Or. 1.22: ἀποσχόντος κώµου τε καὶ κοινωνίας τῶν ἐν νυξὶν ἐπὶ τὰς τῶν πενεστέρων πορευοµένοων οἰκίας.

27 Lib. Or. 1.22: ἐπεὶ καὶ Σκύλλης κεφαλὰς ἢ εἰ βοὐλει γε, Σειρήνων δεινοτέρας γείτονας, ἑταίρας µελῳδούσας, αἳ πολλοὺς ἐξέδυσαν, µάτην ᾀδούσας ἀπέφηνα.

28 Cf. Greg. Naz. Or. 43.21, who says that when he and Basil of Caesarea were students in Athens, they, too, “left the feasts, the theaters, the public festivals, the symposia to those who wanted them” (τὰς ἄλλας δὲ τοῖς βουλοµένοις παρήκαµεν [ἐορτάς, θέατρα, πανηγύρεις, συµπόσια]).

29 Liebeschuetz (1972) 2, Cribiore (2007) 15.

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was made the official sophist of Nikomedeia, where he stayed from 343 to 349.30 He

portrays his school as being spectacularly successful, and he tells us that he took great

pleasure in “the fact that Athens cried out against Bithynia” because Bithynia “stopped

the flow of her students to Athens (something as old as the business of rhetoric)” and

because it “persuaded them [the students] not to take worthless goods from far away

since it was possible to get better goods from nearby.”31 In this context, we should

remember that Himerios, a contemporary of Libanios who taught in Athens from 352-361

and from 366 to the 380s, was from Bithynia.32 Indeed, Libanios was acquainted with

Himerios and wrote a letter on his behalf to the assessor of Armenia, Gorgonius, in

355/56.33 Libanios informs Gorgonius that while Himerios teaches in Athens, he owns

property in Armenia which was being harassed by certain enemies; Libanios hopes that

Gorgonius can protect this property.34 At this point in their respective careers, it seems

that Libanios did not regard Himerios as a threat professionally and so was willing to aid

him.35

Later in life, however, Libanios seems to have come to regard Himerios with less

goodwill. In a letter of 362 addressed to his student Celsus, Libanios relates a story from

this time teaching Bithynia nearly twenty years prior: 30 Liebeschuetz (1972) 2.

31 Lib. Or. 1.53: τὸ τὰς Ἀθήνας τῆς Βιθυνίας καταβοᾶν...οὓτω τὸν ἐκεῖσε δρόµον τῶν νέων παλαιόν τε καὶ ἐξ ὃσουπερ ἐµπορία λόγων, ἣδε ἒστησέ τε ἡ γῆ παρ’ αὑτῇ καὶ ἒπεισε µὴ πόρρωθεν πονηρὰ λαµβάνειν ἐξὸν ἐγγύθεν ἀµείνω.

32 Birthplace: Eun. VPS 494; dates: Penella (2007) 6.

33 Ep. 469. See Cribiore (2007) 54-55 and the notes to Norman’s translation (1992, no. 15) for more details on Gorgonius, who was apparently the father of one of Libanios’ students.

34 Ep. 469.1-3.

35 Cribiore (2007) 54.

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When I was enjoying that happiness in Nikomedeia (although not richer than others, I had leisure for speeches), Pompeianus was governor of Bithynia, an honest and just man who was in no way disgusted at poverty and who honored genuine eloquence and questioned its opposite. Surely you do not forget how he mocked that man from Athens, well-known for his clothes, and forced him (although unwilling) to speak since he wanted to display the man’s weakness.36

Barnes has connected this “man from Athens” with Himerios, based on Photius’

description of a now-lost speech of Himerios which was given in Nikomedeia and at the

insistence of the governor Pompeianus.37 Based on these two letters, it seems possible

that Libanios’ comment in his autobiography is a bit of revisionist history. When he

wrote it in 374, he wanted to include a jab at one of his leading Athenian competitors by

claiming that Bithynian students remained in Bithynia to learn from him rather than

journey to Athens to learn from a fellow-Bithynian who was a worse teacher.38 Libanios

had no problem bragging (and perhaps exaggerating) that he was attracting students to his

school who would otherwise have gone to Athens and, moreover, that he was doing so in

Bithynia, the homeland of one Athens’ most famous teachers.

Furthermore, when Libanios was invited in about 352 by the professors of Athens

(at the strong suggestion of the governor, Strategius Musonianus) to return to Athens and

teach there, he declined the offer.39 He explained his decision by saying that “it was

terribly stupid” to think that he would be welcomed by students “who took up arms 36 Ep. 742.1: Ὅτ’ ἐν Νικοµηδείᾳ τῆς εὐδαιµονίας ἐκείνης ἀπηλαύοµεν οὐ πλουτοῦντες µᾶλλον ἑτέρων, ἀλλὰ σχολὴν ἄγοντες εἰς λόγους, Βιθυνῶν ἦρχε Ποµπηιανὸς ὁ χρηστός, ὁ δίκαιος, ὁ πενίαν οὐδαµοῦ δυσχεράνας, ὁ λόγους τοὺς µὲν γνησίους τιµῶν, τοὺς δ’ οὐ τοιούτους ἐλέγχων· πάντως δὲ οὐκ ἀµνηµονεῖς ὡς τὸν Ἀθήνηθεν, τὸν ἐσθήµασι λαµπρὸν ἐκωµῴδησεν ἄκοντα ἐµβαλών, οὗ δείξειν τὴν ἀσθένειαν ἔµελλεν.

37 Barnes (1987) 211-212. Although see Penella (2007: 6-7) for the idea that the “man of Athens” may not be Himerios.

38 Composition in 374: Norman (1965) xii-xiii.

39 Cribiore (2007) 48-49 on Lib. Or. 1.82-83.

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against one another” and who had recently assaulted an Arabian and an Egyptian

professor.40 Instead, Libanios returned to Antioch in 353 and, a few months later, opened

a school there and remained in his home town until his death in the 390s.

It was in Antioch that Libanios’ disillusionment with the ideal of Athens reached

its full flower. One example is a letter written in 362 to a former student, Celsus, when

Celsus was governor of Cilicia. In it, Libanios tells Celsus about Titianus, a current

student and the son of Acacius.41 Apparently, Acacius wanted to remove his son from

Libanios’ school and send him to Athens. Libanios remarks,

It is no wonder if someone has come to love Attica. For the place is by nature most dear to those who have seen it and to those who have not yet seen it. And fathers think (νοµίζουσιν) that their sons will either bring back from there rhetoric or the reputation (δόξαν) of possessing rhetoric.42

Because fathers only “think” that their sons will be well-trained in Antioch and because

their sons might only gain the “reputation” for eloquence, Libanios goes on to say that,

“Because I respect Acacius, I would praise him if he should send his son to Athens, but

because I love him, I wish he would not send his child.” 43 He then raises the two major

sources of disillusionment he experienced while a student in Athens: poor teachers and

frequent riots:

For some of the teachers there because of their old age would need to sleep softly with a full belly. Other teachers perhaps need teachers themselves who would first teach them to settle things with words and

40 Lib. Or. 1.85: ἦν οὖν δεινῆς ἠλιθιότητος τοὺς ἐπ’ἀλλήλους ὅπλα αἱροθµένους...

41 Bradbury (2004) 163.

42 Lib. Ep. 715.1: Οὐδὲν θαυµαστὸν εἴ τις ἠράσθη τῆς Ἀττικῆς· φύσει γὰρ φίλτατον τὸ χωρίον τοῖς τε ἰδοῦσι τοῖς τε οὔπω. καὶ νοµίζουσιν οἱ πατέρες ἢ λόγους αὑτοῖς ἐκεῖθεν τοὺς υἱεῖς κοµιεῖν ἢ δόξαν γε τοῦ λόγους ἔχειν.

43 Lib. Ep. 715.2: Ἀκάκιον δέ, διότι µὲν αἰδοῦµαι, κἂν πέµψαντα τὸν υἱὸν ἐπῄνουν· διότι δὲ φιλῶ, βουλοίµην ἂν µὴ πέµψαι τὸν παῖδα.

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not with weapons. Now they form soldiers instead of rhetors and I saw many scars born from wounds incurred at the Lyceum.44

Although he says that Titianus would probably not take part in these brawls, Libanios

still asks Celsus to “prevent that journey [to Athens]” and to “hasten his journey back to

us.”45 In contrast to the schools of Athens, Libanios’ school would offer Titianus the

opportunity “to learn more rhetoric, if he wants.”46 In addition, if Titianus chose to study

in Athens, it would hurt Libanios’ pride because “another [teacher] would be honored for

my work,” that is, Titianus’ most recent teacher would receive credit for his entire

education.47 Libanios’ experiences in Athens, then, continued to inform his arguments for

why his school in Antioch was superior to any in Athens years after he had left Athens

permanently.

Libanios’ pride in Antioch and his disdain for Athens and its reputation are

particularly evident in his Antiochikos, a civic panegyric delivered before his fellow

citizens in 356.48 In this speech, Libanios uses Athens as a comparandum for Antioch on

several occasions.49 However, Libanios frequently references Athens only to demonstrate

44 Lib. Ep. 715.2-3: τῶν γὰρ αὐτόθι διδασκάλων οἱ µὲν διὰ γῆρας δέοιντ’ ἂν τοῦ καθεύδειν µαλακῶς ἐπὶ πλησµονῇ, τοῖς δ’ ἴσως δεῖ διδασκάλων, οἳ τοῦτο πρῶτον αὐτοὺς παιδεύσουσι, λόγοις κρίνεσθαι καὶ µὴ ὅπλοις. νῦν δ’ ἡµῖν στρατιώτας ἀντὶ ῥητόρων ἐκκροτοῦσι, καὶ πολλοὺς εἶδον οὐλὰς ἐνηνοχότας ἀπὸ τῶν ἐν Λυκείῳ τραυµάτων.

45 Lib. Ep. 715.5: πρόσθες δὴ τῷ τὴν ὁδὸν ἐκείνην κωλύσαι τὸ τὴν ὡς ἡµᾶς ἐπεῖξαι.

46 Lib. Ep. 715.5: ἐρχέσθω δέ, εἰ µὲν βούλεται, προσληψόµενος λόγων.

47 Lib. Ep. 715.4: ἐµοὶ µὲν οὐκ ἐάσας ἄλλον τοῖς ἐµοῖς κοσµηθῆναι πόνοις.

48 Date of delivery: Norman (2000) 4. Being a panegyric, one must approach such a speech with caution, particularly because Libanios, in his panegyrics, frequently focused “on the positive characteristics of a certain place or person” and he did not mention “less-positive qualities” (Cribiore [2007]: 219; see also Norman [2000]: 5 and Malosse [2000]). Still, in this oration, Libanios sketches an ideal Antioch, and that is what this study is interested in: the portrayal of Athens and Antioch not the reality of those cities.

49 In Menander Rhetor’s treatise on how to praise a city, he provides numerous examples of things said about Athens and other cities, but he nowhere advises his readers to compose praises of a city by comparing that city to another. It seems that Libanios is doing something different here – praising

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how inferior it is to Antioch. For example, he notes with distaste that those who compose

praises of Athens and Corinth prominently mention the battles for the devotion of those

cities between Athena and Poseidon and Helios and Poseidon, respectively. Libanios says

that these panegyrists

almost destroy the harmony of the universe in composing an outrageous story of the battle of the gods with the impious embellishments which they use to praise their cities and, because of their insulting attitude towards divine things, they show their thanks for the gods’ favor, not realizing that by this one lie they detract from the truth of their other praises.50

In contrast, “the gods were born to be lovers” of the Antiochenes “and there is no war

between them, for it is not proper.”51 Libanios concludes this contrast by saying, “Thus

while those in Greece and we here both have fame, for those there that fame would have

been better left unsaid and for us it would not have been dared to be spoken.”52 In other

words, it would have been more pious for the Athenians and Corinthians not to brag

about the gods fighting over their cities and no Antiochene would have impiously

Antioch not only on its own merits but in relation to the merits of other cities.

50 Lib. Or. 11.66: καὶ µικροῦ διαλύουσι τὴν ἁρµονίαν τοῦ παντὸς εἰς τὴν τῆς θεοµαχίας τόλµαν δυσσεβέσι κόσµοις κοσµοῦντες ἃς ἐπαινοῦσι πόλεις καὶ διὰ τῆς εἰς τὸ θεῖον ὕβρεως πληροῦντες τῆς εὐνοίας τὴν χάριν, ἀγνοοῦντες, ὡς ἑνὶ τούτῳ ψεύδει καὶ τῶν ἄλλων ἐπαίνων ἀφαιροῦνται τὴν πίστιν. It is interesting to note that Menander Rhetor (361) advises one to mention a city’s “piety towards the gods” (εὐσέβεια µὲν περὶ τοὺς θεούς), but he says that “instances of being loved by the gods are those things which are said about the Athenians, Rhodians, Corinthians, and Dephians” (τῆς µὲν θεοφιλότητος ἐκεῖνα [ἐγκώµια] ἃ περὶ Ἀθηναίων καὶ Ῥοδίων καὶ Κορινθίων <καὶ Δελφῶν> λέγεται). Libanios thus here seems to defy rhetorical convention by arguing that the encomiasts of Athens and Corinth disrespect the gods when they mention these battles.

51 Lib. Or. 11.67: ἡµῖν δὲ ἐρασταὶ µὲν γεγόνασι θεοί, πόλεµος δὲ ἐκείνοις πρὸς ἀλλήλους οὐδείς, οὐδὲ γὰρ θέµις.

52 Lib. Or. 11.67: ὥστε τὸ µὲν καλὸν τῶν ἐν Ἕλλησι καὶ τῇδε, ὃ δὲ καὶ παρ’ ἐκείνοις κρεῖττον ἂν ἦν µὴ ῥηθέν, τοῦτο τῇδε οὐ τετόλµηται.

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bragged about the gods’ love for Antioch (although Libanios does). So as far as Libanios

was concerned, the gods loved Antioch more than Athens because they did not engage in

any unseemly conflict over the city.

Another area in which Libanios says that Antioch outdoes Athens is accepting

immigrants. He says

The greatest praise of the Athenians is that they opened their city as a common refuge for those in need and foreigners flowed together from all places towards Athens, but we (as Homer says) are much better than our fathers in this respect; for there is no city from which we have not received some part.53

Libanios is referring in this passage to the tradition of Athens taking in foreigners, a

tradition expounded by Ailios Aristeides in his Panathenaic Oration. Aristeides praised

Athens’ acceptance of foreigners by saying, “There is no people of Greece, one might

say, which is unfamiliar with this city and did not live here on occasion.”54 Among those

Aristeides says settled in Athens are the sons of Herakles, the refugees from the attack of

the Seven against Thebes, Thessalians, Tanagrans, Dryopians, Pelasgians, Messenians,

and Plataeans.55 Because of its acceptance of these refugees from various wars,

Aristeides called Athens the “homeland and common hearth” of the Greeks.56

Libanios continues by enumerating the reasons why foreigners have moved to

Antioch. Some moved “because of a desire for luxury, others because of business

53 Lib. Or. 11.164: Οὐκοῦν µέγιστον µὲν κατ’ ἐκείνων ἐγκώµιον, ὅτι κοινὴν καταφυγὴν ἀνέῳξαν τοῖς δεοµένοις τὴν αὑτῶν, καὶ συνέρρεον πανταχόθεν Ἀθήναζε ξένοι, ἡµεῖς δὲ καθ’ Ὅµηρον µακρῷ ταύτῃ πατέρων ἀµείνους· οὐ γὰρ ἔστι πόλις, ἧς οὐ δεδέγµεθα µέρος.

54 Ail. Arist. Panath. 108: οὐ γάρ ἐστι γένος οὐδὲν τῆς Ἑλλάδος, ὡς ἔπος εἰπεῖν, ὃ τῆσδε τῆς πόλεως ἀπείρατόν ἐστιν, οὐδ’ἄοικον ἐπὶ καιρῶν.

55 Ail. Arist. Panath. 109-111.

56 Ail. Arist. Panath. 112: καὶ πρεσβυτάτη τῶν Ἑλληνίδων οὖσα τῷ δέχεσθαι τοὺς πανταχόθεν µᾶλλον ἢ τῷ προειληφέναι τῷ χρόνῳ τοῦ γένους ὡσπερεὶ πατρίς ἐστι καὶ ἑστία κοινή.

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reasons, others to display their learning, others to leave behind their poverty.”57 Then

again, some people migrate to Antioch because of their “contempt for their present city,

since it is inferior,” and still others “flee their own climate and love our climate.”58 All of

these reasons stand in contrast to what Aristeides said about foreigners moving to Athens.

Athens accepted refugees who were forced from their homes because of wars or other

upheavals, but, according to Libanios, people now choose to move to Antioch for

positive reasons. By attracting people who willingly leave their homes for Antioch,

contemporary Antioch outdoes ancient Athens. He further argues that Antioch is a

microcosm of the world because of its large and diverse foreign population.59 This is yet

another way in which modern Antioch surpasses the reputation of ancient Athens. In fact,

Libanios might have been using this trope of Antioch’s large foreign population as a way

to mark Antioch as an imperial capital. Between 333 and 354, Antioch had been the near-

continuous residence of either an Augustus or a Caesar, making the city a de facto

imperial capital.60 In his oration in praise of Rome, Aristeides said that Rome stood apart

from previous empires because the city “never refused anyone” and accepted immigrants

from every land.61 In this regard, then, Libanios’ Antioch surpasses ancient Athens and is

equal with contemporary Rome.

57 Lib. Or. 11.164: τοὺς µὲν τρυφῆς ἐπιθυµίᾳ, τοὺς δὲ κατ’ἐµπορίας λόγον, τοὺς δὲ κατ’ἐπίδειξιν ὧν ἐπίστανται, τοὺς δὲ ὡς ἐπὶ πενίας ἀπαλλαγῇ.

58 Lib. Or. 11.165: ἄγει δὲ τοὺς µὲν ὑπεροψία τῆς ὑπαρχούσης ὡς ἐλάττονος, τοὺς δὲ ἀέρων ἔρως τε καὶ φυγή· φεύγουσι µὲν γὰρ τὸν αὐτῶν, ἐρῶσι δὲ τοῦ παρ’ἡµῖν.

59 Lib. Or. 11.166.

60 Liebeschuetz (1972) 3-4.

61 Ail. Arist. Or. 26.62. This trope of praising a city for accepting foreign settlers is not mentioned by Menander Rhetor and so would not seem to be part of the standard rhetorical conventions to be found in civic encomia.

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Libanios can be even more explicitly derogatory towards Athens than by just

listing ways in which it was outdone by his native city. In concluding his recitation of

Antioch’s past glories, he says that “some cities, like old soldiers, stand in awe of their

past deeds while lamenting their present ones, but we see things that rival our past

glories, and we do not recite them but display them.”62 It is hard not to read the “old

soldiers” slander as referring to the cities of “old Greece” and to Athens in particular.

After all, what city had accomplished more awe-inspiring deeds in the past and had a

more lamentable present (by contrast) condition than Athens? In this passage we once

again see Libanios’ awareness of the gap between Athens’ reputation, based on its past

glories, and its present reality. As a student, this gap helped caused Libanios’

disappointment and disillusionment with Athens and now, some fifteen year later, it

allows him to denigrate Athens and praise his native city. Athens’ present could not

possibly live up to the weight of its past, but Antioch’s present can compare with its past,

making it the more glorious and praise-worthy city.

Libanios takes this argument one step further, however, and has Antioch outdo

Athens at her own game. “Just as Athens was illustrious in other ways,” he says, “in

terms of triremes, sea battles and a large empire, but the greatest was its desire and honor

and possession of wisdom, so with us everything is worthy of admiration, but all are less

62 Lib. Or. 11.131: αἱ µὲν γάρ, ὣσπερ στρατιῶται γεγηρακότες, τὰ παλαὶ σφῶν αὐτῶν ᾄδοθσαι τοῖς παροῦσι στένοθσιν, ἡµῖν δὲ ἐφάµιλλα τοῖς ᾀδοµένοις τὰ ὁρώµενα, καὶ οὐ διηγήσασθαι µᾶλλον ἔστιν ἢ δεῖξαι. It is possible that the phrase “we see things that rival our past glories” might refer to the presence of Constantius and his armies in Antioch, but the chronology of the oration argues against this. Petit (1983) convincingly fixed the date for the Antiochikos at 356 AD, but Constantius spent that year campaigning against the Alamanni and only made Antioch his base of operations against the Persians in 359 (Jones 1964: 117).

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important than our love of wisdom.”63 Furthermore, Libanios claims that just as in the

past Greece was divided between Sparta and Athens, “so now the virtues of Greece are

divided between two cities, ours and Athens, if Greeks are named by their language

rather than their race.”64 Libanios seems to be building on the claim Aristeides made in

the Panathenaikos, that because of Athens, “the entire world has come to speak the same

language.”65 Because of Athens’ reputation as the home of paideia, “everyone has come

to this dialect [i.e., Attic] thinking it is a certain mark of education, as it were.”66 In

Libanios’ formulation of the Greek- (and specifically Attic-) speaking world, however,

Antioch holds an equal place alongside Athens, the home of the most widespread

classical dialect. Athens now has to share its glory with Antioch.

Furthermore, Libanios’ implicit comparison between Antioch and classical Sparta

is telling since, after all, Sparta defeated Athens in war; Libanios seems confident that

Antioch can now defeat Athens in culture. In fact, not only can Antioch outdo Athens,

but “if Antioch triumphs over other cities in other respects, in the practice of wisdom

along with others, she even outdoes herself,” that is, Antioch constantly strives to outdo

every city, even itself, when it comes to wisdom.67 It seems, then, that in the Antiochikos,

63 Lib. Or. 11.182: ὥσπερ γὰρ τῶν Ἀθήνησι λαµπρὰ µὲν καὶ τὰ ἄλλα, αἱ τριήρεις, αἱ ναυµαχίαι, τὸ πολλῶν ἄρξαι, κράτιστον δὲ ἡ τῆς σοφίας ἐπιθυµἰα τε καὶ τιµὴ καὶ κτῆσις, οὕτω δὴ καὶ παρ’ ἡµῖν οὐδὲν µὲν ἔξω θαύµατος, πάντα δὲ ἐλάττω τοῦ τῆς σοφίας ἔρωτος. Libanios does not explicitly link this “love of wisdom” to his own school, but he undoubtedly was thinking of his school as an example of Antioch’s “love of wisdom.”

64 Lib. Or. 11.184: οὕτω νῦν εἰς δύο πόλεις τὰ τῶν Ἑλλήνων καλά, τήνδε τε καὶ τὰς Ἀθήνας, εἰ δὴ τοῖς λόγοις µᾶλλον ἢ τῷ γένει τὸν Ἕλληνα κλητέον.

65 Ail. Arist. Panath. 180: καὶ δι’ὑµῶν ὁµόφωνος µὲν πᾶσα γέγονεν ἡ οἰκοθµένη.

66 Ail. Arist. Panath. 181: πάντες δὲ ἐπὶ τήνδε ἐληλύθασιν ὥσπερ ὅρον τινὰ παιδείας νοµίζοντες.

67 Lib. Or. 11.193: εἰ τοῖς µὲν ἄλλοις κρατοῦσα τῶν ἄλλων, τῇ δὲ τῆς σοφίας ἀσκήσει µετὰ τῶν ἄλλων καὶ τὰ αὑτῆς νικῶσα.

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Libanios was engaged in a project of setting up Antioch as an alternative center of

Hellenism that could rival, and perhaps eventually supplant, Athens’ symbolic role as a

cultural capital of the Greek world.

Cribiore has remarked on Libanios’ hope “that Antioch could challenge” Athens’

“educational standing.”68 Beyond establishing a famed school of rhetoric, Libanios wrote

to Themistios, inviting him (unsuccessfully) to move to Antioch from Constantinople and

start a philosophical school which could complement Libanios’.69 Cribiore also notes that

both Libanios and Themisitos “thought that the fame of Athens as an educational center

was undeserved, and they regarded students’ ‘need’ to go to the source of eloquence as a

pose.”70 In addition to Athens, Libanios also struggled to keep Antioch competitive with

Constantinople (“a major center of higher education in the fourth century, and one of the

stepping-stones to reach Athens”) and to prevent students from undertaking the study of

Roman law in Berytus.71

These kinds of rivalries between academic centers were nothing new.

Philostratos’ comments in the Lives of the Sophists which we examined above were a

previous version of this rivalry between Athens and other centers of learning in Ionia.

But there is something more to Libanios’ attacks on Athens than a desire that his school

be taken as seriously as the Athenian schools. Libanios’ animosity springs, I think, from

the disparity he had experienced for himself when he came to Athens as a student. The

68 Cribiore (2007) 229.

69 Cribiore (2007) 63-64, commenting on Lib. Ep. 434 and 518.

70 Cribiore (2007) 178.

71 Constantinople: Cribiore (2007) 81; Berytus: Cribiore (2007) 211-212.

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stories he had heard about exciting rhetors and glorious street brawls turned out to be far

different from reality and Libanios became profoundly disillusioned with the symbol of

Athens. He therefore set about making his native Antioch into a viable alternative symbol

of Hellenic culture, with his school as the most important component.72 When his

school’s reputation was combined with Antioch’s large population, its significant

manufacturing and commercial sectors, and its important role within the imperial

administration (as the capital of Syria and a frequent location of the imperial court), it

would seem that Antioch had the financial base and sufficient imperial support to be the

kind of cultural capital of Hellenism which Hadrian had wanted Athens to be, but could

not fully enact.73

The irony is, of course, that Antioch could not be a new symbol of Hellenism

because it did not possess the one thing Athens did: a reputation based on a glorious past.

Athens was the home of the tragedians, Thucydides, Plato, and Isokrates, not Antioch.

Regardless of its latter-day circumstances, Athens would forever be known as the

original source of Hellenic paideia. Antioch could not compete with that reputation.

While his school in Antioch drew students from Anatolia and other neighboring

provinces, in the end, Libanios’ project failed: his students continued to leave for Athens

72 A classical parallel to Libanios’ project is Isokrates’ Panegyrikos. In this speech, Isokrates emphasized

the cultural importance of Athens (and his own school in particular) which, in his mind, justified Athenian claims of hegemony against the barbarians. See Kaldellis (2007) 18-19, Most (2006) 384-385, Usher (1993).

73 Population: Liebeschuetz (1972) 92-96; economic activities: Liebeschuetz (1972) 52-82; imperial administration: Liebeschuetz (1972) 101-118, Cribiore (2007) 84, although as Liebeshuetz (1972:4) notes, “After the departure of Gallus, Antioch gradually lost its pre-eminence in the East, which had never been official, to Constantinople. Constantius and Julian were to make Antioch their residence for short periods. Valens resided there for seven years. But Theodosius, Libanius’ last emperor, never came to Antioch at all.”

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and he was never able to permanently triumph over the city he disliked so much.74 Most

likely, these students wanted to study in Athens for many of the same reasons Libanios

himself had when still a young man. In this context, Libanios’ autobiographical oration

may have been at least partially intended as a warning to potential students that Athens

would not provide the educational opportunities they wanted. Libanios knew better. His

disenchantment with Athens was based on his own experiences there, but he was unable

to persuade others to see Athens the same way he did: a decaying modern city trading off

the glory of its past. Antioch would never supplant Athens as a symbol of Hellenism

outside of Libanios’ own writings. Still, even though Libanios’ attempt to replace Athens

with Antioch did not succeed, he was not alone in his desire to find an alternative symbol

of Hellenism.

Synesios

Much like Libanios, Synesios, too, recognized a gap between the ideal and the real

Athens and this recognition led him to criticize the ideal Athens. Yet whereas Libanios

focused on Athens’ schools of rhetoric, Synesios critiqued Athens’ place as the home of

philosophy. In addition, Libanios tried to establish Antioch as a viable alternative to

Athens as the center of Hellenic culture, while Synesios did not attempt a similar large-

scale project, primarily because he was not a professional teacher with a school for which

he needed to recruit students. Born to an aristocratic family in Cyrene in about 365 AD,

Synesios enjoyed a thoroughly classical upbringing as “a gentleman farmer and man of

74 Anatolia: Cribiore (2007) 177; student flight: Cribiore (2007) 179, 229. Cribiore (2007:82) notes,

however, that through the use of his large web of former students, friends and political connections, Libanios “made sure that Antioch could be at least the second station in the course to Athens.”

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leisure.”75 From about 393 till 395, Synesios lived in Alexandria where he was a student

of the famous philosopher Hypatia who was murdered by a mob of Christians in 415.76

These two short years sparked a life-long friendship with his teacher.77 In a letter

dated to 398 to his friend and fellow-student Herkoulianos, he praised Hypatia’s wisdom

and teaching, saying “We were eye-witnesses and ear-witnesses of the legitimate leader

of the rites of philosophy.”78 A few years later, in a letter to Hypatia herself, Synesios

lamented the devastation of Cyrene at the hands of nomadic desert barbarians.79 After

saying that he cannot abandon his city and his citizens in their hour of need, he closes the

letter by saying, “I think on account of you alone I would overlook my fatherland and

move from my home, should I have the leisure to do so.”80 Philosophy, then, could

provide Synesios with an alternative patris. In the past, many Greek intellectuals had felt

this way about Athens: recall Ailios Aristeides’ comment that Athens was “the common

country of the human race.”81 But for Synesios, Alexandria (the home of Hypatia) was

his second patris, not Athens. His affection for Hypatia is again manifested in a letter

75 Bregman (1982) 18-19. Bregman’s study of Synesios remains the best. I wish to stress here, however,

that unlike Bregman and others, I am not interested in the nuanced problem of Synesios’ religious leanings. As will become clear shortly, I believe his antipathy towards Athens was rooted in his loyalty to the schools of Alexandria and had nothing to do with his conversion to Christianity.

76 Synesios and Hypatia: Bregman (1982) 20; for the circumstances surrounding Hypatia’s death, see Dzielska (1995) 83-100, Haas (1997) 295-316, and Watts (2006) 196-203.

77 Bregman (1982) 38; Dzielska (1995) 47.

78 Syn. Ep. 137: αὐτόπται γάρ τοι καὶ αὐτήκοοι γεγόναµεν τῆς γνησίας καθηγεµόνος τῶν φιλοσοφίας ὀργίων; date: Roques (1989) 103, 251.

79 Roques (1989: 221, 251) dates this letter (Syn. Ep. 124) to 405. For this period of Synesios’ life, see Bregman (1982) 61.

80 Syn. Ep. 124: διὰ σέ µοι δοκῶ µόνην ὑπερόψεσθαι τῆς πατρίδος κἂν λάβωµαι σχολῆς µεταναστεύσειν.

81 Ail. Arist. Panath. 182: τὴν κοινὴν πατρίδα τοῦ γένους.

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from the very end of his life (in 413) in which he mourns the loss of his sons and his

friends.82 He says, “Now I am deserted and abandoned by all, unless you have some

power to help, for I think that you, along with arete, are the only inviolate good things.”83

Synesios’ devotion to Hypatia and his memories of his student days in Alexandria

informed his criticism of the symbolic Athens. This criticism is expressed in two letters

(Ep. 56 and 136) written to his brother, Euoptios, in 399.84 The first of the two letters was

written before his departure from Cyrene for Athens, a stop on the way to the imperial

court at Constantinople.85 He opens the letter with the cryptic statement that “many

among us, both private citizens and priests who mold certain dreams (which they call

‘revelations’), will seem to give me an evil reality if I should not happen to arrive

[καταλαβεῖν] quickly at sacred Athens.”86 Who exactly these dream-molders are and

what “evil reality” they will give to Synesios is not clear, although Cameron and Long

link them to acquaintances who were “presenting him with plans for the future” upon the

offer to Synesios of the bishopric of Ptolemais.87 More interesting for our purposes,

however, is Synesios’ choice of the word καταλαβεῖν. Translators usually render this

82 Syn. Ep. 81; date: Roques (1989) 221, 250.

83 Syn. Ep. 81: νυνὶ δὲ ἁπάντων ἔρηµος ὑπολείποµαι, πλὴν εἴ τι σὺ δύνῃ· καὶ γὰρ δὴ καὶ σὲ µετὰ τῆς ἀρετῆς ἀγαθὸν ἄσυλον ἀριθµῶ.

84 Roques (1989) 100-101. Cameron and Long (1993: 409-411) argue for a date of 410 for Ep. 136, just prior to Synesios’ acceptance of the bishopric of Ptolemais. For my purposes, the exact date of the letters does not matter. What is important is that they were written sometime after his time in Alexandria with Hypatia.

85 Notes 1 and 3 on pp. 161 and 162 in vol. 2 of Garzya’s edition.

86 Syn. Ep. 56: Συχνοὶ παρ’ ἡµῖν καὶ ἰδιῶται καὶ ἱερεῖς, πλαττόµενοί τινας ὀνείρους οὓς αὐτοὶ καλοῦσιν ἀποκαλύψεις, ἐοίκασιν ὕπαρ µοι δώσειν κακόν, ἂν µὴ τάχιστα τὰς ἱερὰς Ἀθήνας καταλαβεῖν µοι γένηται.

87 Cameron and Long (1993) 296.

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verb as “arrive,” but it can also mean “comprehend” or “understand.”88 With this

wordplay, Synesios implies that there are people who wish to do him harm if he both fails

to arrive at Athens quickly and if he fails “to quickly understand sacred Athens.” As we

will shortly see, Synesios had no patience for men who revere Athens. Perhaps this

opening sentence refers at least partially to individuals who held a grudge against

Synesios for his refusal to “understand sacred Athens” and the symbolism attached to it.

Next, Synesios tells his brother to send letters to him through the Peiraieus, as that

is where he will be receiving letters.89 He follows this with his critique of the reputation

Athens has acquired as the home of the best schools in the Greek world:

I gain not only this advantage from my trip to Athens, that is, removing myself from the terrible circumstances of the present, but also the advantage of no longer prostrating [προσκυνεῖν] myself before men who go there for study [ἐπί λόγοις], men who do not differ from us mortals (and therefore do not differ in intelligence from Aristotle and Plato), but who dwell among us just as demigods among mules (ἐν ἡµιόνοις), because they have seen the Academy and the Lyceum and the Stoa Poikile in which Zeno philosophized, a stoa which is no longer painted (ποικίλην). For the proconsul removed the tablets in order to prevent these men from thinking they were superior in their wisdom.90

Synesios clearly dislikes those who boast of their Athenian education and this dislike is

brought home with his use of the word προσκυνεῖν (“prostrate”). Furthermore, he

88 FitzGerald (1926: 125) translates καταλαβεῖν as “visit” and Garzya (1978: 73) translates it as “arrive.”

89 Syn. Ep. 56.

90 Syn. Ep. 56: ὀνήσοµαι δὲ οὐ µόνον τοῦτο τῆς ἐπὶ τὰς Ἀθήνας ὁδοῦ, τὸ τῶν παρόντων ἀπηλλάχθαι δεινῶν, ἀλλὰ καὶ τὸ µηκέτι τοὺς ἐκεῖθεν ἥκοντας ἐπὶ λόγοις προσκυνεῖν, οἳ µηδὲν µὲν ἡµῶν τῶν θνητῶν διαφέρουσιν (οὔκουν εἰς σύνεσίν γε τῶν Ἀριστοτέλους καὶ Πλάτωνος), ἀναστρέφονται δὲ ἐν ἡµῖν ὥσπερ ἐν ἡµιόνοις ἡµίθεοι, διότι τεθέανται τὴν ἀκαδήµειάν τε καὶ τὸ Λύκειον καὶ τὴν ἐν ᾗ Ζήνων ἐφιλοσόφει Ποικίλην, νῦν οὐκέτ’ οὖσαν ποικίλην· ὁ γὰρ ἀνθύπατος τὰς σανίδας ἀφείλετο, ἔπειτα ἐκώλυσεν αὐτοὺς ἐπὶ σοφίᾳ µεῖζον φρονεῖν.

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emphasizes that the only way in which men educated in Athens differ from anyone else is

that they have actually seen the sites of Athens; in terms of their learning, there is no

difference whatsoever.

There are, however, two more substantive ideas in this letter which are worth

examining. The first is Synesios’ association of men who study in Athens with demigods

and those who have not studied in Athens with mules. This comparison is obviously

meant to emphasize the false sense of superiority which Athenian-trained students feel

towards those educated elsewhere. Yet this comparison is also reminiscent of Plato’s

Apology. In the course of defending himself against the charge of disbelief in the gods,

Socrates proclaims that he believes in daemons. If daemons are a kind of god, Socrates

says, then the charge against him must be declared false.91 Socrates goes on to say the

charge must also be false “if daemons are a kind of bastard children of gods, either by

nymphs or from other women (whoever they are said to be),” since no man “would

believe that children of gods exist but that gods do not.”92 Such a belief, says Socrates,

“would be as paradoxical as if someone were to believe that children of horses and

donkeys (that is, mules [τοὺς ἡµιόνους]) exist but that horses and donkeys do not

exist.”93 Plato does not use the term “demigod” (ἡµιθέος) as Synesios does, but his

formulation “bastard children of gods...from other women” seems to imply that daemons

91 Plato Apol. 27D.

92 Plato Apol. 27D: εἰ δ’ αὖ οἱ δαίµονες θεῶν παῖδές εἰσιν νόθοι τινὲς ἢ ἐκ νυµφῶν ἢ ἔκ τινων ἄλλων ὧν δὴ καὶ λέγονται, τίς ἂν ἀνθρώπων θεῶν µὲν παῖδας ἡγοῖτο εἶναι, θεοὺς δὲ µή;

93 Plato Apol. 27E: ἂν ἄτοπον εἴη ὥσπερ ἂν εἴ τις ἵππων µὲν παῖδας ἡγοῖτο ἢ καὶ ὄνων, τοὺς ἡµιόνους, ἵππους δὲ καὶ ὄνους µὴ ἡγοῖτο εἶναι.

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might be classified as “demigods.” Synesios, then, is using the diction of Plato, one of the

founding fathers of the Athenian schools, in order to condemn his intellectual

descendants for an overweening sense of pride.94

The second of Synesios’ comments which deserves attention is his claim that an

unnamed proconsul removed the paintings from the Stoa Poikile, meaning that it can no

longer correctly be termed “Poikile.” Synesios is our only source for this fact and modern

scholars tend to accept his testimony. Frantz speculates that the proconsul Synesios refers

to may have been Antiochos and that the paintings may have been removed either

because of damage suffered during Alaric’s invasion of 396 or because of “simple

avarice on the proconsul’s part.”95 Meritt, too, believes Synesios’ comment that the Stoa

Poikile stood “denuded of its glory, both its philosophers and its paintings.”96

Because Synesios is our only source for the removal of the paintings from the

stoa, it is difficult to conclusively prove that they were or were not taken.97 The important

point, however, is that Synesios uses the lack of paintings in the Stoa Poikile in order to

demonstrate his belief that Athens was not what it might seem. Before he even arrives in

Athens, Synesios was indicating his prejudicial belief that the city had lost its luster. In

94 In using language from Plato’s Apology, particularly from Socrates’ response to the charge of impiety,

Synesios may be hinting at his own pagan beliefs. This would lend credence to Cameron and Long’s thesis that this letter should be dated to just prior to Synesios’ acceptance of a bishopric when he was experiencing grave doubts about his conversion to Christianity. Such a question, however, falls outside the bounds of this study.

95 Frantz (1988) 55-56.

96 Meritt (1970) 257. In his notes on this letter (vol. 1, pp. 164-165, n. 13-14), Garzya, too, accepts Synesios’ testimony.

97 Cameron and Long (1993: 410 n. 3) note that since Synesios mentions the removal of the paintings in a letter which he sent before he left Cyrenaica, this was “evidently a story he had heard at home.” If the rumor of the proconsul’s actions in Athens was so widespread, it would seem to imply that there is some truth to Synesios’ claim.

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Synesios’ mind, the Stoa Poikile is no longer ποικίλη (whether the paintings were there

or not) and Athenian-trained students are no better than those trained elsewhere in the

eastern Mediterranean (they are not “demigods among mules”). Indeed, Schmitt has

offered an argument along these lines. In contrast to Garzya and FitzGerald, he translates

the last sentence of Synesios’ letter as, “For the proconsul has caused the paintings to be

removed. Thereby he has prevented them from directing their senses towards higher

things.”98 Schmitt interprets this translation to mean “that it now was no longer possible

here (in the older customary way) to direct one’s senses towards wisdom.”99 In other

words, Synesios implies that students are not better educated in Athens than anywhere

else and, if anything, they are more poorly educated. Synesios is thus lowering his

expectations of Athens and displaying his resentment towards the city before he even

leaves Cyrenaica.

In this letter, it is clear that Synesios disliked the pretensions of those educated in

Athens and that he possessed a kind of inferiority complex about being educated in

Alexandria, not Athens. Synesios repeats many of his criticisms of Athens and its

students in Letter 136, written during his stay in Athens and again addressed to

Euoptios.100 He begins the letter by telling his brother that “I hope to profit from Athens

as much as you want me to, since I seem to have grown more than a palm and a finger’s

98 Schmitt (2001) 122, n. 205.

99 Schmitt (2001) 122, n. 205.

100 Note 1 on p. 395 in vol. 3 of Garzya’s edition. Schmitt (2001: 123), in noting the similarities between letters 56 and 136, argues that Euoptios failed to fully understand Synesios’ first letter and so Synesios clarifies his statements in letter 136.

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width in wisdom.”101 He says he can offer a proof of this fact and explains that he is

writing from the Athenian deme of Anagyrous and that he has visited Sphetos, Thria,

Kephisia, and Phaleron.102 Writing from Anagyrous might be a proof of Synesios’

increased wisdom because this deme was located on the slopes of Mount Hymettos and

was associated with the cave of Vari. Supposedly, Plato’s parents offered a sacrifice in

this cave to Pan, the Muses, the Nymphs, and Apollo shortly after Plato’s birth. The

members of the Platonic schools of late antique Athens may have engaged in some sort

of ritual there to commemorate this event in the life of Plato, and perhaps Synesios

participated, allowing him to “grow in wisdom.”103

This may be true, but I think a better explanation can be found in a comparison

between this letter and Letter 56, where Synesios implied that the only difference

between those who have studied in Athens and those who have not is that those who have

studied in Athens have seen the monuments and important locales of the city. Perhaps

Synesios is continuing this theme in Letter 136. He himself has visited several Athenian

demes and now can claim to be just as smart as anyone who has spent several years of his

life studying in Athens. Moreover, the demes Synesios says he visited are rather

unremarkable. This would seem to be Synesios’ way of mocking the pretensions of those

101 Syn. Ep. 136: Ὀναίµην τῶν Ἀθηνῶν ὁπόσα βούλει, ὥστε µοι δοκῶ πλεῖν ἢ παλαιστῇ καὶ δακτύλῳ γεγονέναι σοφώτερος.

102 Syn. Ep. 136. The word Synesios uses for “from Anagyrous” is Ἀναγυροθντόθεν, which, as Garzya notes in his edition (vol. 2, p. 395, n. 4) is a reference to Aristophanes’ Lysistrata.

103 Fowden (1988) 57 and n. 66.

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who have seen the Academy and the Lyceum. For Synesios, there is no difference

between the Academy and Sphetos, between the Lyceum and Thria. All are now equally

unimportant in his eyes.

Synesios makes this idea that Athens only consists of a series of hollow and

largely insignificant names more explicit as he continues his letter.

And may that evil captain who brought me here die an evil death! Athens has nothing holy but the illustrious names of its districts! Just as when a sacrificial victim is slaughtered, the skin is left as a sign of the once-living animal, so, when philosophy emigrated from here, those who visit can only be amazed at the Academy and the Lyceum and, by Zeus, the Stoa Poikile, which gave its name to the philosophy of Chrysippos, but now is no longer painted. For the proconsul removed the tablets with which Polygnotos of Thasos had established his skill. But now in our own times, Egypt maintains philosophy, since it has received the offspring of Hypatia [i.e., Synesios and his fellow-students]. And Athens – once it was the city which was a hearth for wisdom, but now the makers of honey make her famous. And then there is this pair of Plutarchean wise men, the very ones who gather the youth in the theaters not by the fame of their words but by the pots of honey from Hymettos.104

We see here many of the same themes Synesios employed in Letter 56. First, there is the

overtly pagan imagery inherent in Synesios’ metaphor of the sacrificial victim and its

empty skin. This is comparable to Letter 56 in which Synesios used the words of Plato’s

defense of Socrates’ belief in the pagan gods. In using this language, Synesios chose to

emphasize Athens’ role as the home of the most prominent schools of pagan philosophy.

104 Syn. Ep. 136: καὶ κακὸς κακῶς δεῦρό µε κοµίσας ἀπόλοιτο ναύκληρος· ὡς οὐδὲν ἔχουσιν αἱ νῦν Ἀθῆναι σεµνὸν ἀλλ’ ἢ τὰ κλεινὰ τῶν χωρίων ὀνόµατα. καὶ καθάπερ ἱερίου διαπεπραγµένου τὸ δέρµα λείπεται γνώρισµα τοῦ πάλαι ποτὲ ζῴου, οὕτως ἐνθένδε φιλοσοφίας ἐξῳκισµένης λείπεται περινοστοῦντα θαυµάζειν τὴν ἀκαδήµειάν τε καὶ τὸ Λύκειον καὶ νὴ Δία τὴν ποικίλην στοάν, τὴν ἐπώνυµον τῆς Χρυσίππου φιλοσοφίας, νῦν οὐκέτ’ οὖσαν ποικίλην. ὁ γὰρ ἀνθύπατος τὰς σανίδας ἀφείλετο, αἷς ἐγκατέθετο τὴν τέχνην ὁ ἐκ Θάσου Πολύγνωτος. νῦν µὲν οὖν ἐν τοῖς καθ’ ἡµᾶς χρόνοις Αἴγυπτος τρέφει τὰς Ὑπατίας δεξαµένη γονάς, αἱ δὲ Ἀθῆναι, πάλαι µὲν ἦν ἡ πόλις ἑστία σοφῶν, τὸ δὲ νῦν ἔχον σεµνύνουσιν αὐτὰς οἱ µελιττουργοί. ταῦτ’ ἄρα καὶ ἡ ξυνωρὶς τῶν σοφιστῶν τῶν Πλουταρχείων, οἵτινες οὐ τῇ φήµη τῶν λόγων ἀγείρουσιν ἐν τοῖς θεάτροις τοὺς νέους, ἀλλὰ τοῖς ἐξ Ὑµηττοῦ στάµνοις.

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The second similarity is Synesios’ comment on the Stoa Poikile and the loss of its

paintings, which we have already discussed. In Letter 136, however, Synesios explicitly

mentions Polygnotos of Thasos as the artist responsible for the decorations of the Stoa.

Schmitt sees this comment as a reminder to Synesios’ readers that Polygnotos painted the

Greek victory over the Persians at Marathon. Schmitt believes that this depiction of

Marathon is a visual version of Perikles’ funeral oration and is a symbol of Greek cultural

heritage which has been removed or destroyed by Roman power in the form of the

proconsul.105 Yet he believes that Synesios did not want to explore this issue too

carefully. For Schmitt, this sentence is “nothing more than a wordplay and expression of

a mood alternating between nostalgia and bitterness,” but it still demonstrates Synesios’

“reservation, distance, and his distrust vis-a-vis the empire.”106 In contrast to Schmitt, I

think the key point here is that Synesios sees these paintings in the Stoa Poikile as a

representation of a specifically Athenian philosophical (rather than a more general

“cultural”) heritage. For Synesios, visitors who come to Athens can be amazed at names

such as “the Academy” and “the Lyceum” and “the Stoa Poikile,” but they can no longer

marvel at the philosophical schools to which these locations were once home. The

“poikile” has been taken out of the stoa just as philosophy has been taken out of Athens.

As in Letter 56, Synesios implies in Letter 136 that the prestige attached to the Athenian

schools is unwarranted and Athenian philosophy is no better than the philosophy taught

105 Schmitt (2001) 126-128.

106 Schmitt (2001) 128.

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anywhere else – the honey-producers now make Athens famous, not the philosophers.

Again, it seems that Synesios is reacting to the pretensions of Athenian-trained

philosophers by belittling the schools in which they proudly studied.

The key difference between Letters 56 and 136, however, is that only in the latter

does Synesios mention Hypatia and her students. According to Synesios, Egypt (and

Alexandria specifically) should now be considered the true home of philosophy because

it is the home of Hypatia.107 It seems, then, that Synesios’ antipathy towards Athens was

informed both by a dislike for holier-than-thou Athenian students and by his loyalty to

Hypatia and her Alexandrian school.108 This loyalty is clearly expressed in the last

sentence of Letter 136. As Cameron and Long point out, the “pair of Plutarcheans” to

whom Synesios refers “must be Plutarch son of Nestorius (d. 431/34), the Athenian who

reestablished Athens as the center of philosophical study in the early decades of the fifth

century, and his disciple and successor Syrianus [the future teacher of Proklos].”109

Synesios’ disparaging comment that Plutarch and Syrianos can only attract students by

providing free honey is an indication of a professional rivalry between the schools of

Athens and Alexandria.

Synesios undoubtedly experienced this rivalry first-hand while a student at

Hypatia’s school in Alexandria. Hypatia had inherited her school from her father, Theon,

107 An interesting contrast to Synesios’ claim is provided by Ammianus Marcellinus (XXII.16.17-18), who

says that fourth-century Alexandria was notable for its teachers of geometry, music, astronomy, and medicine.

108 Another possible reason for Synesios’ dislike of Athens is his attachment to his Dorian-Spartan heritage. In Ep. 41 and 113, Synesios refers proudly to his Lakedaimonian descent. However, there is no mention in his letters of the Peloponnesian War or any kind of rivalry between Sparta and Athens. Therefore, I think Synesios’ dislike of Athens is founded almost exclusively on academic grounds.

109 Cameron and Long (1993) 56.

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a philosopher, mathematician, and teacher in his own right, who named her his successor

at some point before his death.110 As Watts notes, one of the primary reasons for this was

undoubtedly a need for “doctrinal continuity” within Theon’s school, particularly because

“the new adaptation of Neoplatonism created by Iamblichus was beginning to make

inroads in the later fourth century, and the teachers who were responsible for this growth

were often quite different from Theon and his daughter.”111 In contrast to Theon and

Hypatia, who were native Alexandrians, the followers of Iamblichos’ philosophy in

Alexandria tended to be foreigners: one prominent Neoplatonist in Alexandria,

Antoninos, was raised in Asia Minor, while another, Olympos, came from Kilikia.112

While it is not clear where Olympos was educated, Antoninos studied in Pergamon with

Aidesios.113 Through Aidesios, Antoninos could trace his intellectual heritage to Athens

through Iamblichos, Porphyry, and Cassius Longinus.114 Even though men like

Antoninos and Olympos may not have studied in Athens themselves, they probably had

connections to the Neoplatonic school there, since it was influenced by Iamblichos’ ideas

and since it recruited a number of prominent students from Alexandria (among them the

Syrianos to whom Synesios alludes in Letter 136).115 It seems likely, then, that Synesios’

criticism of Athens and its schools was a response to what he perceived as a double

110 Dzielska (1995) 68, Watts (2006) 187-188.

111 Watts (2006) 188.

112 Watts (2006) 188-189.

113 Eun. VPS 469.

114 Eun. VPS 461, 458, 456.

115 Watts (2006) 90-91.

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insult: the sneers directed against his teacher and her school by foreign teachers; and the

“brain-drain” of Alexandrian students to what they considered to be the more prestigious

schools of Athens.

Indeed, the other side of this Alexandrian-Athenian rivalry can be seen in

Damaskios’ Philosophical History. This fragmentary work, written in the early sixth

century, seems to have been a history of the last century or so of the Platonic school of

Athens. Damaskios portrays Hypatia as wandering the streets of Alexandria, “explaining

publicly the works of Plato, Aristotle, or of any other philosopher to those who wanted to

listen.”116 He further says that his teacher, Isidoros, “was very different from Hypatia, not

only as a man differs form a woman, but as a real philosopher differs from a

mathematician.”117 While Damaskios lived almost a century after Synesios (and may

have been responding to Synesios’ letters), these kinds of insults directed towards

Hypatia were probably current in the early fifth century.118 It is these kinds of attacks on

Hypatia’s teaching to which Synesios responded with his mockery of Athens.

For Synesios, then, Alexandria had replaced Athens as the most important

philosophical center of the eastern Mediterranean. Synesios was entirely comfortable in

attacking the reputation of Athens as the home of philosophy and in offering Alexandria

as an alternative. His project of supplanting Athens was less explicit and more narrowly

116 Dam. Phil. Hist. 43A: ἐξηγεῖτο δηµοσίᾳ τοῖς ἀκροᾶσθαι βουλοµένοις ἢ τὸν Πλάτωνα ἢ τὸν Ἀριστοτέλην ἢ τὰ ἄλλου ὅτοθ δὴ τῶν φιλοσόφων.

117 Dam. Phil. Hist. 106A: Ὁ Ἰσίδωρος πολὺ διαφέρων ἦν τῆς Ὑπατίας, οὐ µόνον οἷα γυναικὸς ἀνηρ, ἀλλὰ καὶ οἷα γεωµετρικῆς τῷ ὄντι φιλόσοφος.

118 Cameron and Long (1993: 56-58) believe that Damaskios was responding directly to Synesios’ letters attacking Athens, but Watts (2006: 192, n. 137) holds that “there is simply no evidence that Damascius ever read Synesius’ correspondance.”

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focused than that of Libanios, but much like Libanios, Synesios’ views on Athens were

shaped by his own personal experience. The two years he spent studying with Hypatia in

Alexandria laid the foundation for a life-long friendship with her and with his fellow-

students. Yet during those two years, he experienced first-hand the claims of superiority

and the insufferable pretentiousness of Athenian-trained philosophers and witnessed the

migration of talented Alexandrian students to Athens. In response, he portrayed Athens as

a city full of nothing but empty names and pots of honey. Synesios recognized the

inherent bankruptcy of the ideal of Athens. Through his metaphor of the Stoa Poikile, he

indicates that the city still possessed the monuments and memories of its past

philosophical glory, but those monuments (and by extension, the schools they housed) are

now empty and devoid of the significance they once had. The Stoa Poikile is no longer

“poikile” and is therefore just a stoa; Athens has lost its brand-name, so to speak.

Conclusion

Libanios and Synesios, then, were both engaged in an academic rivalry with

Athens. Their attitudes towards Athens were much like those a modern American

academic might have towards “Oxbridge:” its reputation and its past might be great, but

American schools can create scholars just as well-trained as any from Oxford and

Cambridge.119 Still, Oxford and Cambridge continue to provide students with a good

education, and the Athenian schools of the fourth-century surely did, too. But Libanios

and Synesios attack not so much the quality of Athenian-trained students as the

119 See Rhode (2006) for a view of this pursuit of individual and institutional recognition and status in

modern academia.

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reputation of Athens as the home of learning propagated by those students. Yet Libanios

and Synesios attacked this reputation in slightly different ways. Libanios wanted his

school of rhetoric to be more successful than any in Athens, which would demonstrate

that he was a better teacher than any in Athens; he wanted to outdo Athens at its own

game. Synesios wanted to defend the teachings of Hypatia against the intellectual snobs

who studied in Athens and then came to Egypt, convinced that they understood Plato

better than anyone else. Synesios did not seek to outdo Athens so much as insult

Athenian schools and students in order to establish the legitimacy of Hypatia’s

Alexandrian school.

Another key difference between Libanios’ and Synesios’ views on Athens is the

type of school they disliked so much. Libanios was concerned with outdoing the

rhetorical schools, while Synesios mocked the philosophical schools. This difference

could be due to a decline in the importance of a rhetorical education and the concurrent

increase in the importance of a philosophical education that occurred in the forty-odd

years between the time Libanios wrote his Antiochikos and the time Synesios wrote to his

brother from Athens. Such a theory would be difficult to prove, given the fact that the

works of only a handful of pagan authors survive from this period. Perhaps all that can be

said is that Libanios, as a rhetor, was naturally trying to rival the rhetors of Athens, while

Synesios, as a philosopher and bishop, was interested in putting down the philosophical

schools of Athens.

In the end, then, both Libanios and Synesios saw through the facade of Athens as

the home of classical paideia. Libanios experienced a profound disappointment when he

discovered that the reality of the Athenian rhetorical schools was very different from the

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stories he had heard as a young man in Antioch. Synesios endured the insults of

Athenian-trained philosophers who implied that he did not understand Plato as well as

they did because he had not been taught in Athens. Libanios responded by attempting to

establish a school of rhetoric in Antioch that would outshine Athens, which, for him, was

a city that could only revel in its past deeds and lament its present circumstances.

Synesios responded by showing that Athenian students gained nothing from a city that

was now famous only for its honey. These students were not “demigods among mules”

but merely mortals among mortals. Still, both Libanios and Synesios were forced to

acknowledge Athens’ past glory and its role as the source of Hellenic paideia. Because of

its place as the foundation of Greek culture, Athens could not be superseded by Libanios’

Antioch or Synesios’ Alexandria.

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CHAPTER 5

CONCLUSION

The story of the ideal of Athens does not end, of course, with Libanios and Synesios. In

the fourth and fifth centuries, “Athens” is contested between Christians and pagans.

While my study cannot examine this tension in detail, it is worth looking briefly at how

the ideal Athens is once again re-defined in the twilight of classical antiquity.

The basic groundwork for the intellectual fight between Christians and pagans

over “Athens” was laid down by the account of St. Paul’s visit to Athens (as told in

Acts). Upon arriving in the city, Paul found “that the city was full of idols” and this

inspired him to preach in the Jewish synagogue and in the Agora.1 Paul was then

approached by certain Stoics and Epicureans who invite him to preach to them on the

Areopagos.2 They are interested in hearing what Paul has to say because (according to the

author of Acts), “all the Athenians and the visiting foreigners spend their time nothing

other than speaking about or hearing something rather new.”3 After Paul’s sermon (in

which he mentions the Athenians’ Altar to the Unknown God and quotes from the pagan

1 Idols: Acts 17:16: κατείδωλον οὒσαν τὴν πόλιν. Preaching: Acts 17:17.

2 Acts 17:18-19.

3 Acts 17:21: Ἀθηναῖοι δὲ πάντες καὶ οἱ ἐπιδηµοῦντες ξένοι εἰς οὐδὲν ἕτερον ηὐκαίρουν ἢ λέγειν τι ἢ ἀκούειν τι καινότερον.

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poet Aratos), some of his audience “laughed at him” for his doctrine of the “resurrection

of the dead,” while others said that would like to hear more about it.4 Yet instead of

remaining to proselytize further, Paul leaves (although the author of Acts reports that he

converted Dionysios, Damaris, and unnamed others).5

This representation of Athens as a city full of idols, philosophers, and citizens

interested in “new things” continues to been in other early Christian authors. Among

them is Tertullian, the Latin Church Father who lived in Carthage between about 170 and

212 AD.6 Tertullian’s most famous statement about Athens is his oft-quoted rhetorical

questions, “What does Athens have to do with Jerusalem,” itself a reference to Paul’s

rhetorical questions in 2 Corinthians 6:14-16.7 Tertullian posed the question in a treatise

written in about 203 AD in which he attacks heresies as corruptions of the true word of

God.8 In chapter 7 of the work, Tertullian attempts to link heretical Christian groups with

pagan philosophy. He argues that heresy and philosophy are linked, because “this same

material is considered by heretics and philosophers, the same repetitions are involved:

where does evil come from and why? And where do humans come from and how? And

what Valentinus has recently asked: Where does God come from?”9 Tertullian says that

4 Sermon: Acts 17:22-31. Aftermath: Acts 17:32: Ἀκούσαντες δὲ ἀνάστασιν νεκρῶν οἱ µὲν ἐχλεύαζον, οἱ δὲ εἶπαν· ἀκουσόµεθά σου περὶ τούτου καὶ πάλιν.

5 Acts 17:33. For an examination of the implications of Paul’s sermon for the conversion of Athens into a Christian city (both real and symbolic), see Kaldellis (2009) 53-59.

6 Barnes (1985) 58-59. Barnes’ study remains the best examination of the few historical facts we possess regarding Tertullian.

7 Tert. De praescriptione haereticorum 7.9.

8 While the dating of Tertullian’s works is a notoriously difficult problem, Barnes’ chronology (1985: 55) is best.

9 Tert. De praescr. haer. 7.5: Eadem materia apud haereticos et philosophos volutatur, idem retractus implicantur: unde malum et quare? Et unde homo et quomodo? Et quod proxime Valentinus proposuit:

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the apostle Paul warned Christians about the dangers of philosophy.10 Paul would know

as well as anyone the worthlessness of philosophy, since “he had been in Athens and

from his conversations he had become acquainted with that human wisdom which strives

after and corrupts truth, and is itself divided into its own heresies by the variety of sects

repugnant to one another.”11 This mention of Paul’s time in Athens inspires Tertullian’s

three rhetorical questions: “And so what does Athens have to do with Jerusalem? The

Academy and the Church? Heretics and Christians?”12 After these questions and their

implied negative answer, Tertullian implicitly contrasts Christianity with Stoicism,

saying, “Our instruction comes from the portico of Solomon,” and not, presumably, from

the Stoa Poikile of Athens.13 He ends this chapter linking pagan philosophy and heresy

with a warning:

Let those who produce a Stoic and Platonic and dialectic Christianity beware! We do not need curiosity after having Jesus Christ nor do we need to seek after having the gospel. When we believe, we desire nothing beyond belief. For we believe this first, that there is nothing which we ought to believe besides.14

Based on this chapter, Tertullian seems to have no need for pagan philosophy. It foments

heresy and leads Christians away from the truth found in their beliefs.

unde deus?

10 Tert. De praescr. haer. 7.7.

11 Tert. De praescr. haer. 7.8: Fuerate Athenis et istam sapientiam humnanam affectatricem et interpolatricem veritatis de congressibus noverat, ipsam quoque in suas haereses multipartitam varietate sectarum invicem repugnantium.

12 Tert. De praescr. haer. 7.9: Quid ergo Athenis et Hierosolymis? Quid academiae et ecclesiae? Quid haereticis et christianis?

13 Tert. De praescr. haer. 7.10: Nostra institutio de porticu Solomonis est.

14 Tert. De praescr. haer. 7.11-13: Viderint qui Stoicum et Platonicum et dialecticum christianismum protulerunt. Nobis curiositate opus non est post Christum Iesum nec inquisitione post evangelium. Cum credimus, nihil desideramus ultra credere. Hoc enim prius credimus non esse quod ultra credere debeamus.

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In several of his other works, Tertullian rejects pagan philosophy and draws

heavily on his reading of Acts and Paul’s letters. For instance, in the De anima, a work

seeking to explain the Christian conception of the soul, Tertullian links philosophers and

heretics who both deny the truth of Christianity. He writes,

Indeed, philosophy was foreseen by the apostle [Paul] already in his own time to be a shaking of truth.15 For at Athens he experience an eloquent [linguatam] city and when he became acquainted with all the hucksters of wisdom and eloquence [facundiae] there, then he composed that premonitory edict [i.e., the warning that philosophy was a shaking of truth].16

Just as in the De praescriptione haereticorum, we see here the influence that Paul’s

condemnation of philosophy and the account of his visit to Athens had on Tertullian’s

thoughts on pagan philosophy. Tertullian positions himself as merely following in Paul’s

footsteps in rejecting the “eloquent” Athens and its “hucksters of wisdom.”

For Tertullian, then, Athens was not a positive symbol of Hellenism and classical

culture as it was for Pausanias, Hadrian, and Philostratos. Nor is Athens for Tertullian (as

it was for Libanios and Synesios) a representation of the home of classical paideia, a

place to which students still traveled, despite the availability of an equivalent education

elsewhere. Rather, Tertullian saw the ideal Athens as the home of falsehood and heresy, a

place to be symbolically avoided by upstanding Christians lest they be tempted to stray

from their faith. Tertullian’s Christian re-interpretation of Athens was a generalized

15 This a reference to Paul’s warning concerning philosophy found in Colossians 2:8, although Paul does

not use the phrase “shaking of truth.”

16 Tert. De anima 3.1: siquidem et ab apostolo iam tunc philosophia concussio veritatis providebatur; Athenis enim expertus linguatam civitatem cum omnes illic sapientiae atque facundiae caupones degustasset, inde concepit praemonitorium illud edictum. See, too, Tert. Apologeticum 46 for another form of his argument that philosophers and Christians are different and irreconcilable categories.

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symbol with little reference to its contemporary reality, unlike the other “Athenses” we

have examined to this point. Tertullian imagined “Athens” as a negative symbol, marking

a further break with pagan versions of “Athens.”

Tertullian’s re-imagining of the ideal Athens points forward to the fourth century

debates between Christians and pagans as to whether Christians could (or if they even

should) “safely” approach “Athens.” Pagans such as the emperor Julian continued to

recreate an Athens which was founded on the pagan glories of it classical past. He

attempted to make Athens into a symbol relevant to the contemporary power struggles in

which he was involved. In his Letter to the Boule and Demos of Athens of 361, he appeals

to an ideal Athens to defend his war against Constantius. He ways that the Athenians

could decide on the justness of his cause because “it is not easy to find an entire demos

and city except for yours who are lovers of just words and deeds.”17 Yet all of the

classical examples he cites of Athenian “just acts” are from the classical past.18 In this

instance, “Athens” could serve as a way to legitimize the dynastic power struggles of the

fourth century which stood in stark contrast to the peaceful transfer of imperial power

under the Antonines.

But there is a second strain to Julian’s portrayal of Athens in this letter, namely,

its inherent paganism. He says at one point that “you [Athenians] would justly drive out

those who dishonor what is just as being impious towards the goddess who dwells among

you.”19 In other words, he emphasizes the central place that Athena inhabits in Athens.

17 Jul. Letter to the Boule and Demos of Athens 269B: δῆµον δὲ ὅλον καὶ πόλιν ἐραστὰς ἔργων καὶ λόγων διακαὶων ἔξω τῆς παρ’ὑµῖν οὐ ῥᾴδιον εὑρεῖν.

18 Jul. Letter to the Boule and Demos of Athens 268C-269D.

19 Jul. Letter to the Boule and Demos of Athens 270A: τοὺς οὖν ἀτιµάζοντας τοῦτο δικαίως ἂν καὶ ὡς

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Julian also implicitly refers to Athena’s physical relationship to the city in the portion of

the letter which serves as an account of his life to that point. When Julian was summoned

from his studies in Athens to the court of Constantius in 355, he wept and “stretched out

my hands to your Akropolis… and begged Athena to save her suppliant and not to

abandon me.”20 He further says that he “begged for death at her hands in Athens rather

than a journey there” to court.21 Athena “did not betray her suppliant, as she showed in

her deeds; she guided me everywhere and set a guard from all sides, bringing messengers

from Helios and Selene.”22 For Julian, then, a pagan goddess was at the center of the city,

and indeed, she was an integral part of his own life-story. Such a conception of Athena as

the center of Athens would be impossible for a Christian admirer of Athens, such as

Gregory of Nazianzos, as we will shortly see.

Julian could also deploy “Athens” more polemically in his struggle against the

Christians. He attempted to protect classical paideia and the canon of Athenian authors

(such as Demosthenes, Thucydides, Isokrates and Lysias) from Christianity by forbidding

Christians to teach the works of pagan authors.23 While Julian does not mention Athens

by name in this proclamation, the paideia he seeks to defend was founded on Athenian

εἰς τὴν παρ’ὑµῖν θεὸν ἀσεβοῦντας ἐξελαύνοιτε.

20 Jul. Letter to the Boule and Demos of Athens 275A: ἀνατείνων εἰς τὴν ἀκρόπολιν τὴν παρ’ὐµῖν τἀς χεὶρας... καὶ τὴν Ἀθηνάν ἱκετεύων σώζειν τὸν ἱκέτην καὶ µὴ ἐκδιδόναι.

21 Jul. Letter to the Boule and Demos of Athens 275A-B: θάνατον ᾐτησάµην παρ’αὐτῆς Ἀθήνησι πρὸ τῆς τότε ὁδοῦ.

22 Jul. Letter to the Boule and Demos of Athens 275B: τὸν ἱκέτην οὐδὲ ἐξέδωκεν, ἔργοις ἔδείξεν. ἡγήσατο γὰρ ἁπανταχοῦ µοι καὶ παρέστησεν ἁπανταχόθεν τοὺς φύλακας, ἐξ Ἡλίου καὶ Σελήνης ἀγγέλους λαβοὺσα.

23 Authors: Jul. Rescript on Christian Teachers 423A; forbidding Christians to teach pagan literature: Rescript on Christian Teachers 423B. For the most recent discussion of this issue, see Kaldellis (2007) 143-154.

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authors of the fifth and fourth centuries BC. It is clear that Julian was trying to protect his

ideal Athens, the birthplace of Greek literary culture, from being sullied by Christian

teachers who did not believe in the gods so frequently mentioned by the authors they

taught. His was a pagan Athens that needed to be protected from Christians.

The rhetor and teacher Himerios was another pagan who continued to view the

ideal Athens through the prism of its classical past. Himerios taught in Athens from 352

to 361 and from 366 to the 380s.24 Himerios is an important figure because, although

himself a pagan, he seems to have taught both pagans and Christians, including Gregory

of Nazianzos.25 At the same time, Himerios seems to have been engaged in a professional

rivalry with Prohairesios, the most famous Christian teacher in Athens. This rivalry

resulted in Himerios’ temporary move to Boeotia.26 Among the works in which Himerios

displays his ideal Athens is a mock-funeral oration for the Athenian dead, set at the end

of the fifth century BC. This oration praises the martial glory of the Athenians and says

that because of their victories in war, “the Athenian name will always be ageless.”27 In

another speech, composed for a group of Ionian visitors to Athens, Himerios leads his

audience on a verbal tour of the city, focusing on the Polygnotos’ painting of the Battle of

Marathon in the Stoa Poikile; the olive tree and the spring of salt water on the Akropolis,

remnants of the contest between Athena and Poseidon for the city; and the Areopagos,

which he calls “the tribunal of the gods.”28 Himerios, then, seems to be following in the

24 Cribiore (2007)55, Penella (2007) 2-3.

25 McGuckin (2001) 58-60, 74-75.

26 Penella (2007) 5-6, 20-21.

27 Him. Or. 6.32, trans. by Penella (2007) 206.

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footsteps of Ailios Aristeides and Pausanias. He creates an Athens based on its classical

and pagan past with little reference to its present circumstances as a small city in the

evermore Christian Roman empire.

In contrast to Julian and Himerios stands the Church Father Gregory of

Nazianzos, who left an account of his student days there. In his funeral oration for his

friend Basil of Caesarea (composed in 382), Gregory describes the ten years he spent in

Athens (from 348 to 358) as some of the happiest of his life.29 His fond memories were

due partly to the friendship he cultivated with Basil in Athens, but also partly to his own

“pursuit of rhetoric.”30 He famously refers to Athens as “the golden” and as a city which

was for him “a patroness of good things.”31 Gregory says that Basil, on the other hand,

“called Athens an empty happiness,” and Gregory had to persuade him “that paideia is

not made known to those who attempt it for a short time.”32 In so doing, Gregory

demonstrates his devotion to the schools of Athens and partially explains his decision to

remain in Athens for ten years.

At the same time, though, Gregory was not blind to the negative aspects of

contemporary Athens. He charges that “at Athens, the majority of students and the more

28 Him. Or. 59.2-3, trans. by Penella (2007) 133.

29 Date: McGuckin (2001) x. See McGuckin (2001) 35-84, for a fuller account of Gregory’s education. For Gregory’s possible motives in this oration (such as his attempt to rehabilitate his own reputation, following his resignation of the archbishopric of Constantinople, by linking himself to Basil), see McLynn (2001).

30 Greg. Naz. Or. 43.14: καὶ λόγους ἐπιζητῶν εὐδαιµονίαν ἐκοµισάµην.

31 Greg. Naz. Or. 43.14: ...Ἀθήνας τὰς χρυσᾶς ὄντως ἐµοὶ καὶ τῶν καλῶν προξένους εἴπερ τινί.

32 Greg. Naz. Or. 43.18: κενὴν µακαρίαν τὰς Ἀθήνας ὠνόµαζεν....οὔτε ἦθος ἀνδρὸς εὐθυς ἁλωτὸν εἶναι λέγων, ὅτι µὴ χρόνῳ πολλῷ καὶ συνουσίᾳ τελεωτάτῃ, οὔτε παίδευσιν τοῖς πειρωµένοις ἐξ ὀλίγων τε καὶ ἐν ὀλίγῳ γνωρίζεσθαι.

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foolish ones have sophist-mania,” and compares them to excited spectators at horse races

who “leap, shout, send dust into the air, drive the chariots while sitting in the stands, beat

the air (rather than horses) using their fingers as whips.”33 Gregory tells us that (like his

contemporary Libanios) he and Basil avoided the normal pleasures of student life: “we

left the feasts, the theaters, the public festivals, the symposia to those who wanted them,”

he says.34 But Gregory found an additional challenge in Athens with which Libanios did

not have to contend: the lure of paganism. He says that “Athens damaged others in

spiritual matters” because “it is rich in evil riches – idols – more than the rest of Greece

and it is difficult not to be seized by those who praise them and defend them.”35 Yet the

two friends overcame this challenge:

We were not damaged by them, since we had closed up and fortified our minds. In fact, it was quite the opposite, if I can speak paradoxically; we were strengthened in our faith, because we perceived their trickery and falseness and then we despised these gods in the very place where they were worshiped.36

So in the home of pagan learning, Gregory found a way to be devoted to paideia and at

the same time to strengthen his Christian faith. It is no wonder he spent ten years in his

“golden Athens.” 33 Greg. Naz. Or. 43.15: σοφιστοµανοῦσιν Ἀθήνησι τῶν νέων οἱ πλεῖστοι καὶ ἀφρονέστεροι...ὅπερ οὖν πάσχοντας ἔστιν ἰδεῖν περὶ τὰς ἀντιθέτους ἱπποδροµίας τοὺς φιλίππους τε καὶ φιλοθεάµονας – πηδῶσι, βοῶσιν, οὐρανῷ πέµπουσι κόνιν, ἡνιοχοῦσι καθήµενοι, παίουσι τὸν ἀέρα, τοὺς ἵππους δὴ τοῖς δακτύλοις ὡς µάστιξι.

34 Greg. Naz. Or. 43.21: τὰς ἄλλας δὲ τοῖς βουλοµένοις παρήκαµεν [ἐορτάς, θέατρα, πανηγύρεις, συµπόσια].

35 Greg. Naz. Or. 43.21: καὶ γὰρ πλουτοῦσι τὸν κακὸν πλοῦτον εἴδωλα µᾶλλον τῆς ἄλλης Ἑλλάδος, καὶ χαλεπὸν µὴ συναρπασθῆναι τοῖς τούτων ἑπαινέταις καὶ συνηγόροις. This may be an implicit reference to Acts 17:16 and Paul’s discovery that Athens “is full of idols” (κατείδωλον οὖσαν τὴν πόλιν).

36 Greg. Naz. Or. 43.21: Ἡµῖν δ’οὐδεµία παρὰ τούτων ζηµία, τὴν διάνοιαν πεπυκνωµένοις καὶ πεφραγµένοις. Τοὐναντίον µὲν οὒν, εἴ τι χρὴ καὶ παράδοξον εἰπεῖν, εἰς τὴν πίστιν ἐβεβαιώθηµεν, καταµαθόντες αὐτῶν τὸ ἀπατηλὸν καὶ κίβδηλον, ἐνταῦθα δαιµόνςν καταφρονήσαντες οὓ θαυµάζονται δαίµονες.

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Gregory, then, was concerned with fitting Athens and the paideia it symbolized

into a Christian context. He was fully engaged with the contemporary question of Athens’

relationship to Jerusalem. Gregory was ardently devoted to classical Greek learning.37

But within the Christian community of which Gregory was a part, there was a tension

over how a Christian could (and whether a Christian should) reconcile paideia and the

Christian faith and so Gregory’s love of pagan paideia could not be free from

controversy. Gregory tried to meet this challenge and fend off Christian critics who had

no place for traditional paideia in their worldview and who would have repeated their

own form of Tertullian’s rhetorical question to Gregory. In this context, it is significant

that Gregory (unlike Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nyssa, or, for that matter, Tertullian)

never explicitly mentioned in any of his works the story of Paul’s experiences in

Athens.38 Rubenson has noted that when Basil of Caesarea discussed this passage, he

focused on “the widespread image of the Athenians as curious, idle and fond of new

deities and cults.”39 As we have seen, much of Tertullian’s condemnation of pagan

philosophy is indebted to his reading of Paul’s preaching in Athens.40 In contrast,

Gregory does not explicitly mention the story of Acts in his funeral oration for Basil (or

anywhere else for that matter) and so he does not allow a negative portrayal of Athens

based on this story to enter his corpus. Instead, his impression of Athens was formed by

the fond memories he had of his time there as a student, memories which undoubtedly

37 Kaldellis (2007) 158-164; McGuckin (2001). For specific examples of how this love of paideia played

out in individual works, see McLynn (2006) 225-227 and Kennedy (1983) 230.

38 Gregory of Nazianzos, Basil of Caesarea, and Gregory of Nyssa: Rubenson (2006) 127.

39 Rubenson (2006) 121.

40 See above pp. XXX-XXX

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seemed even more positive to Gregory when he wrote the oration in 382, given the

turmoil he had recently experienced. These memories, combined with “his appreciation

of the classical Athenian tradition, apparently left little room for the Athens of the

Apostle Paul.”41

Moreover, Gregory’s own biography provides another clue to his positive

evaluation of Athens. Gregory wanted to live a life of leisure and did his best to avoid the

responsibilities which were thrust upon him. Days after his father forcibly ordained

Gregory in 362, he fled from his church to spend several months with Basil of

Caesarea.42 Gregory attempted to avoid the problems with which he was faced following

his appointment to the bishopric of Sasima and he eventually resigned this post in 372 to

return to be with his father in Nazianzos.43 Following his father’s death in 375, Gregory

moved to Seleukia, where he spent several happy years in retirement.44 After his

tumultuous tenure as Archbishop of Constantinople (380-381), Gregory returned to his

church at Nazianzos, but retired in 384 to his villa at Karbala.45 Much of Gregory’s life,

then, was spent attempting to recapture those happy ten years he spent in Athens, free

from any responsibilities other than devoting himself to paideia in a community of

friends.46

41 Rubenson (2006) 127.

42 McGuckin (2001) 100-102.

43 McGuckin (2001) 194-203.

44 McGuckin (2001) 239.

45 McGuckin (2001) 394.

46 In fact, Gregory’s father seems to have cut off his student allowance in order to force Gregory to leave Athens and return to Nazianzos (McGuckin [2001] 85).

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Indeed, Gregory’s love of paideia (much of it based on a canon of classical

Athenian authors) lies behind the image of Athens he presents in the funeral oration for

Basil. After all, as numerous scholars have pointed out, Gregory sought to sanitize pagan

literature in order to make it safe for and acceptable to his fellow Christians.47 The

clearest articulation of this occurs in Poem 2.2.8, he says that readers of the classics

should see them “as a single plant” and “avoid the thorns but pluck the rose,” imagery

which is similar to that used by Basil of Caesarea in his treatise on how young men can

profit from Greek literature.48 I believe Gregory’s portrayal of Athens in Basil’s funeral

oration can be read in terms of this same imagery. Gregory avoided the thorns of Athens -

the parties, the theaters, the excessive love of sophists, and, most importantly, the

temptations of pagan religion – while managing to pluck the rose – a traditional education

in rhetoric which could be put to the service of his faith. In presenting Athens in this way,

Gregory is showing that the “golden city” is not a symbol for Christians to fear, but one

that can be appropriated and harmonized with Christianity. Indeed, Gregory (with his

embrace of the ideal Athens) and Tertullian (with his rejection of it) stand at the two

poles of a debate that has continued since antiquity: how can the classical tradition and

Christianity be most effectively synthesized? The history of this debate, and the place of

the ideal Athens within it, is a book in and of itself and I cannot attempt to begin it here.

*

47 See McGuckin (2001) 57, Kaldellis (2007) 159-164, and (to a lesser extent) Pelikan (1993) 10-13.

48 Greg. Naz., Poem 2.2.8.60-61: λόγους δὲ τιµῶν, ὥσπερ ἐξ ἑνὸς φυτοῦ / καὶ τὰς ἀκάνθας φεῦγε, καὶ ῥόδον δρέπου. Cf. Basil Caes. Address to Young Men on How They Might Profit from Greek Literature, 4.7-8. I am indebted to Kaldellis (2007) 164 for the comparison. See, too, Greg. Naz. Poem 2.2.8.38-44 for this idea of choosing the useful parts of knowledge.

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Instead, it is now time to draw some conclusions from the three case studies we

have examined and to sketch out the implications these case studies have for the larger

ideas of cultural symbols and the history of Hellenism. One thread that connects the five

figures we have studied is that all five experienced Athens first-hand. Hadrian visited

Athens at least three times and Pausanias spent time there in preparing to write his

Periegesis. Philostratos was educated in Athens and seems to have been a figure of some

political importance there in the early third century. Libanios, too, studied in Athens for

four years and Synesios visited the city briefly.

These first-hand experiences lead to a second, more important, thread. All five

figures recognized a gap between the classical Athens of the fifth century BC on which

(in one way or another) their ideal of the city was based and the contemporary Athens

which they had seen. Each of the five felt compelled to fill this gap somehow. Hadrian

tried to use imperial power to make second-century AD Athens into an actual cultural

capital to complement its role as an ideal cultural capital. Pausanias created a description

of Athens based mostly on its pre-Roman monuments, highlighting the remnants of the

ancient city as they existed in his own time. Philostratos approached the gap between

ideal and real in two ways. First, he has his Apollonios critique the Athenians of the first

century AD for failing to be as virtuous as their classical ancestors. Second, he embraces

a version of Hellenism which universalizes Greek culture and, while it is based largely on

the canon of classical Athenian authors, has no specific reference to the physical Athens

(as Hadrian and Pausanias’ Hellenisms did). Libanios and Synesios bridged the gap by

arguing that Athens may have been the home of paideia in the classical period, but now it

had been superseded by Antioch and Alexandria.

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All of these figures, then, created a version of the ideal Athens (and the Hellenism

which that Athens symbolized) which was grounded in or a response to the lived realities

of the city – its monuments, its institutions, its populace, and its students. As stated

several times through this work, I believe this is an under-appreciated facet of ancient

Hellenism. Hellenism was composed of a constellation of ideas, behaviors, and cultural

artifacts: the Greek language, athletic competitions, physical appearance and

comportment, classical Athenian literary texts, a syncretistic sense of Greek philosophy,

to name a few. The exact make-up of this constellation changed from individual to

individual, of course, as they created a sense of Hellenism out of the aspects that

appealed most to them. Scholars have done an excellent job describing this process and

the abstract ideas which went into the making of a person’s Hellenism.

But too little attention has been paid to the role that one’s conception of and response to

the physical city of Athens played in the creation of different versions of Hellenism. I

hope that my study has begun to rectify this situation to some small degree.

Just as the disconnect between the real and the ideal Athens is one component of

Hellenism, so too the debates over the ideal Athens are part of the larger debates over the

definition of Hellenism. Hadrian and Pausanias are indicative of the debate over whether

and how Hellenism could be appropriated by the Roman imperial system to serve its own

ideological purposes, or whether Hellenism was a way to subtly resist the “imperial

ideology of unification” by maintaining a (universalizing) sense of Greek identity.

Philostratos demonstrates one way whereby intellectuals could attempt to deploy

Hellenism (despite its internal contradictions) to respond to the threats posed by Severan

and Christian orientalism. Libanios and Synesios agree that Hellenism is based in large

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part on the canon of Athenian texts (as indeed almost any ancient would have), but they

exemplify the arguments surrounding the role of contemporary cities (such as Antioch

and Alexandria) as more prominent and more successful homes for that culture.

The objectification of Athens and the creation of an imaginary “Athens,” then,

serve as useful ways to talk about the contradictions and problems inherent in Hellenism

and about its encounter with other systems of thought such as Christianity. Indeed, in a

sense, any discussion of Hellenism must entail a discussion (however implicit) of the

ideal Athens. One of the pillars of constructions of Hellenism is the canon of classical

Greek literature, the majority of which is from fifth and fourth century BC Athens.

Anyone in any time period engaged with the classical tradition embodied by Hellenism

always possesses an imaginary Athens because our encounter with that tradition is

predicated on a knowledge of Thucydides and Demosthenes, Euripides and Aristophanes,

Plato and Aristotle. Based on their reading, Hadrian and Pausanias, Libanios and

Synesios created ideal Athenses for themselves as much as modern scholars do, myself

included. While we can never avoid fashioning these “Athenses,” I hope my study has

demonstrated the importance of a greater awareness of these creations (by ourselves and

others) in order to better understand the prejudices and predilections which lie beneath

any involvement with Hellenism and the classical tradition.49

As an example, we can think about some of the more widely-held versions of

“Athens” today. For many in the West, a mention of Athens or a picture of the Parthenon

49 It is interesting that in classical Greek, the name “Athens” is plural (αἱ Ἁθῆναι) while in modern Greek it

is singular (η Αθήνα). Undoubtedly, this is just a peculiarity of the history of the Greek language, but it is a useful way to symbolize a greater awareness on the part of the ancients of various conceptions of Athens.

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inspires thoughts of democracy, free speech, philosophical inquiry, aesthetically pleasing

art and architecture.50 In other words, this version of Athens embodies what the modern

West considers to be the hallmarks of its civilization and is not specifically Greek. In

contrast, modern Greeks often view “Athens” as the cornerstone of their culture and their

nation-state which just happens to serve as a touchstone for some aspects of Western

civilization. One Athens, then, tends to ignore the particular and local claims of the

inhabitants of Greece, while the other Athens represents a specifically Greek culture, but

one faced with the burden of living up to a glorious past.51 We see again the old debate

between a universalizing and a particularizing Hellenism. Yet both of these Athenses are

largely divorced from the reality of modern Athens, a metropolitan area with some four

million inhabitants facing the same mundane day-to-day challenges as any other major

world city.

These are only three of the many constructions of “Athens,” and indeed, the

history of the ideal Athens can never be complete because there are as many “Athenses”

as there are people seeking to define, represent, and engage with the classical tradition.

This is perhaps the most important characteristic of the ideal Athens, and for that matter,

of the classical tradition as a whole – its eternal malleability. “Athens” and the classical

culture it represents have been useful for thousands of years and will continue to be

useful for thousands more because they can be used to discuss contemporary problems,

50 For historical examples, see Marchand (1996) and Winterer (2002).

51 See in general Leontis (1995) and Hamilakis (2007). Hutton (2005b: 38) makes the analogy between the modern West’s “imaginary” Greece and the second-century AD Roman “imaginary” Greece, both of which largely ignore the contemporary inhabitants of Greece.

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tensions, and conflicts.52 As Lee Pearcy puts it, “The Greeks, to take them by metonymy

for the whole of classical antiquity, may have been able to speak to everyone, including

many Americans, because they are in fact no one at all.” In other words, Greeks and

Romans “take their character from the desires of those who study them.”53 Indeed, the

goal of studying the ancients is to use their culture, literature, and ways of thought in

order to better understand ourselves. To return again to the modern “Athenses,” the

conflict between universal and local can be read as an expression of the opportunities of

globalization and the concurrent anxieties over the homogenization that can be created by

globalization. I was drawn to this project precisely because of this enduring relevance of

“Athens” and classical culture thanks to its endless malleability and I hope that the reader

has taken away some sense of that relevance. In this sense, we should remember

Plutarch’s description of Perikles’ building program on the Athenian Akropolis. Plutarch

writes,

In beauty, each building was immediately and even then old. But in their prime and even up to now, each is fresh and newly-made. In this way, a certain newness always appears upon them, untouched by time and maintaining its appearance as if an ever-green spirit and ageless soul had been mixed in them.54

As the Akropolis monuments are always old and always new, so too Athens and classical

culture are forever grounded in the ancient past but always speak to modern concerns.

Such is the enduring value and legacy of the ideal of Athens.

52 See Goldhill (2002) for a few examples of this, from late antiquity early-twentieth century Britain.

53 Pearcy (2005) 141.

54 Plut. Perikles 13.5: κάλλει µὲν γὰρ ἕκαστον εὐθὺς ἦν τότ’ ἀρχαῖον, ἀκµῇ δὲ µέχρι νῦν πρόσφατόν ἐστι καὶ νεουργόν· οὕτως ἐπανθεῖ καινότης ἀεί τις, ἄθικτον ὑπὸ τοῦ χρόνου διατηροῦσα τὴν ὄψιν, ὥσπερ ἀειθαλὲς πνεῦµα καὶ ψυχὴν ἀγήρω καταµεµειγµένην τῶν ἔργων ἐχόντων.

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