Cosmopolis : imagining community in late classical Athens and the early Roman Empire

291 Pages·2011·1.464 MB·English

by  Daniel S. Richter

Cosmopolis
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Cosmopolis
Imagining Community in Late
Classical Athens and the Early
Roman Empire
.
DANIEL S RICHTER
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Richter, Daniel S.
Cosmopolis : imagining community in late classical Athens and the early Roman Empire / Daniel
S. Richter.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-0-19-977268-1
1. Mediterranean Region—Intellectual life. 2. Rome—Intellectual life. 3. Community life—
Mediterranean Region—History—To 1500. 4. Cultural pluralism—Mediterranean Region—
History—To 1500. 5. Mediterranean Region—Ethnic relations. 6. Rome—Ethnic relations.
7. Mediterranean Region—Social conditions. 8. Rome—Social conditions—510–30 B.C.
9. Athens (Greece)—Intellectual life. 10. Greece—Intellectual life—146 B.C.–323 A.D. I. Title.
DE71.R53 2011
′
937 .07—dc22 2010029627
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
For Ann Marie
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Acknowledgments
This book began when, as an undergraduate visiting my parents’ home,
I found and read my father’s 1950s copy of Sigmund Freud’s Moses and
Monotheism. My fi rst thanks are to my parents Morton and Sara Richter
for raising me in a home that had such a book on its shelves and for
teaching me the value of intellectual curiosity. The question that oc-
curred to me when I read Freud’s arguments for the Egyptianness of
Moses is, in an important sense, the forebear of many of the questions
that animate this book: I wanted to know what purpose an Egyptian
Moses might have served for a Jewish intellectual in the years prior to the
Second World War. It was, in fact, a similar question about Plutarch’s On
Isis and Osiris that had led me to Freud in the fi rst place. In the D e Iside ,
written in the early second century CE , Plutarch had made another aston-
ishing, revisionist claim about Egypt when he asserted that “Isis is a
Greek name.” As with Freud, my fi rst question of Plutarch was, why this
claim at this moment? These questions led to a dissertation that I wrote
at the University of Chicago about ethnographic writing, in which I
worked through early imperial imaginings and constructions of the “for-
eign” within the context of an all-encompassing empire. My gratitude to
my teachers at Chicago, in particular Chris Faraone, Jonathan Hall,
Jamie Redfi eld, and Laura Slatkin, has only deepened over time. The
Chicago institution of the bi-weekly Ancient Societies Workshop taught
me the d ifference between interdepartmental and interdisciplinary
work. Many of the participants in these workshops demonstrated to me
the incomparable advantages of genuine excitement about and engage-
ment with the ideas and perspectives of others; I am grateful to Bill Stull,
Sarah Cohen, Kelly Olson, Anatole Mori, and Ian Moyer.
viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I spent the fi rst year of my dissertation writing as a fellow at the Seminar
für Nachleben der Antike at the University of Heidelberg. It was in Heidelberg
that I fi rst came into contact with sophisticated theoretical approaches to the
discipline of reception history. I began to think about early imperial intellectual
culture in terms of the history of reception—how and why did early imperial
intellectuals read certain texts as they did when they did? I am conscious of a
great debt that I owe to the faculty and students in Heidelberg, above all to
Glenn Most, the leader of the Leibniz Seminar; to Manuel Baumbach, whose
work on the reception of Lucian has proved invaluable; and to Bill Stull, Thom-
as Bartscherer, John Hamilton, and Donna Hamilton. I also had the opportu-
nity during my year in Germany to visit my teacher Fritz Graf, then in Basel,
with whom I had worked while he was a distinguished visiting professor at
Chicago. Many thanks to Fritz for his friendship and interest in my work.
M y second year of dissertation writing was supported by the far-thinking
Franke Institute for the Humanities at the University of Chicago. I am grateful
to the Franke for allowing me to live and work in Rome during the period of
what ought to have been a residential fellowship in Chicago. I owe a particular
debt of gratitude to Fred Brenk S.J. of the Pontifi cio Istituto Biblico for his gen-
erosity, learning, and warm friendship. Thanks as well to Adolfo (Dodo) La
Rocca for his warm friendship and inspiring attitude toward scholarship. I am
also indebted to several institutions and libraries in Rome and environs for the
use of their collections: to the École française de Rome, the American Academy
in Rome, the Deutsches Archäologisches Institut, the Bibliotheca Apostolica
Vaticana, and the British School at Athens. In fulfi llment of a promise, I would
like to publicly acknowledge the assistant librarian in Heidelberg’s Classics
Library, Klaus-Dieter Knoess, for fi nally agreeing to turn on the library’s over-
head lights.
The present book is a distant relative of the Chicago dissertation. While an
interest in the idea of the “foreign” once led me to ethnographic writing, an
appreciation of the complementary notion of “sameness” has caused me to
focus on cosmopolitanism. I have had the extraordinary good fortune to write
much of this book as a member of the faculty of Classics of the University of
Southern California. I have found in several departments at USC as supportive
and intellectually creative a group of colleagues as I could have wished for. Tom
Habinek, in particular, has taught me the necessity of intellectual risk taking
and the benefi ts of scholarly creativity. Greg Thalmann read the entire manu-
script and offered invaluable insight. I am indebted to several of my colleagues
at USC and elsewhere for having read, discussed, and commented upon parts
of this manuscript: to Tom Habinek, Greg Thalmann, Tony Boyle, Maud Glea-
son, Livia Tenzer, Ellen Finkelpearl, Sarah Iles Johnston, William Johnson,
Kathryn Gutzwiller, Vincent Farenga, Kevin van Bladel, James Collins, and
Claudia Moatti. My colleagues in History at USC, Peter Mancall and Lisa Bitel,
have read good portions of the book and I am grateful to both for their friend-
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ix
ship and insight. Thanks as well to Matthew Taylor for his help with the index
and formatting. In Los Angeles, I have continued to benefi t from the generosity
of libraries, from the Getty Research Institute and the Huntington Library. I
was privileged to fi nish this book as a fellow at Harvard’s Center for Hellenic
Studies in Washington, D.C. In fact, I write these acknowledgments on a return
visit to the CHS. I am delighted to have the opportunity to thank Greg Nagy,
Doug Frame, and the senior fellows of the Center for their continued support
for and interest in my work. Above all, I am grateful to my fellow fellows from
whom I have learned more than I can adequately express: especially to Pascale
duBois-Brillet, Patrick Lee Miller, Zena Hitz, Joe Rife, and Margherita Maria
F.R.G. Di Nino. Thanks as well to Martha Nussbaum for sending me some of
her unpublished and published work on ancient Stoicism and modern political
theory. I am happy to thank these friends and colleagues for saving me from
many grave sins of omission and the commission of numerous howling gaffes.
The errors that remain are, of course, mine to account for. In this regard, I am
also grateful to Oxford’s anonymous readers for their gimlet-eyed comments
and to my editor at Oxford, Stefan Vranka, for his support. Thanks to Stefan
and to Peter Mancall for their help with the book’s title.
I owe an unpayable and perennially forgiven debt to my grandparents, Lew
and Sylvia Lubitz, to my parents, Mort and Sara Richter, and to my brothers,
David and Matthew Richter, for their encouragement, example, and support;
my father, Morton Richter, has read and commented on every page of what
follows and helped me to clarify both my thought and my prose.
F inally, I dedicate this book with all my gratitude and love to Ann Marie
Yasin, wife, colleague, friend, and partner. I am, as I often have occasion to
ἐ π ε ὶ ὅ ς τ ι ς ἀ ν ὴ ρ ἀ γ α θ ὸ ς κ α ὶ ἐ χ έ φ ρ ω ν τ ὴ ν α ὐ τ ο ῦ
observe, a very lucky man:
φ ι λ έ ε ι κ α ὶ κ ή δ ε τ α ι
.