Dio Chrysostom: Orations 7, 12 and 36 PDF
Preview Dio Chrysostom: Orations 7, 12 and 36
CAMBRIDGE GREEK AND LATIN CLASSICS IMPERIAL LIBRARY GENERAL EDITORS Proressor E. J. KENNEY Peterhouse, Cambridge AND ProFessor P. E. EASTERLING University College London DIO CHRYSOSTOM. ORATIONS VII, XII AND XXXVI EDITED BY D. A. RUSSELL Emeritus Professor of Classical Literature and Emeritus Fellow of St John’s College, Oxford Tam. Wom C AMBRIDGE ig UNIVERSITY PRESS Published by the Press Syndicate of the University of Cambridge The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge cB2 rrp 40 West 20th Street, New York, Nv 10011-4211, USA 10 Stamford Road, Oakleigh, Victoria 3166, Australia (Ὁ Cambridge University Press 1992 First published 1992 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Woolnough Bookbinding, Irthlingborough, Northants A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress cataloguing in publication data Dio, Chrysostom. [Speeches. Selections] Orations VII, XII, and XXXVI - Dio Chrysostom; edited by D. A. Russell. p. cm. - (Cambridge Greek and Latin classics. Imperial library) Includes bibliographical references (p. 248) and indexes. Contents: Euboicus (VII) - Olympicus (XII) - Borystheniticus (XXXVI). ISBN Ο 521 37548 7 (hardback). - isBN 0 521 37696 3 (pbk.) 1. Speeches, addresses, etc., Greek. 2. Speeches, addresses, etc., Greek - History and criticism. I. Russell, D. A. (Donald) PA3965.D2 1992 885'.01- dc20 91-36260 ciP ISBN O 521 37548 7 hardback ISBN Ο 521 37696 4 paperback AQ CONTENTS Preface Page vii Abbreviations viii Introduction I 1 Dio's world I 2 Dio's life 3 3 Dio's works 7 4 Euboicus 8 5 Olympicus 14 6 Borystheniticus 19 7 Text 23 8 Manuscripts and editions 25 DIO CHRYSOSTOM: ORATIONS 7 Euboicus 29 12 Olympicus 62 36 Borystheniticus 89 Commentary 109 Bibliography 248 Indexes 254 ι General 254 2 Proper names 256 3 Greek words 258 4 Passages cited 261 PREFACE The narrative part of Dio’s Euboicus has always been popular; I recall using it many years ago as a confidence-building text with first- and second-year undergraduates. The opening narrative of the Borysthen- ilicus has similar charms. The rest of this volume illustrates other sides of Dio's art: his moral and theological earnestness and his epideictic virtuosity. I hope that the selection here offered will thus make an attractive introduction not only to Dio, but to some important aspects of first-century thought and literature in general - the prevailing philo- sophical religiosity, the linguistic and historical classicism, and the burgeoning sophistic exuberance that mark this phase of Graeco- Roman culture. My debts are many. Various friends in various places where I have worked on this project - at Chapel Hill and Stanford as well as Oxford - have helped me enormously by discussion and advice. Dr M. B. Trapp read and commented on the whole, and made many useful contribu- tions. Rachel Woodrow and Stephen Colvin made my manuscript readable. Susan Moore’s invaluable copy-editing made it ready for the typesetter. Dr. D. C. Innes read the proofs, and saved me from much error. The editors of the series have been a source of help and encouragement from beginning to end. The flaws and faults that remain are all my own work. D.A.R. vii ABBREVIATIONS Arndt- W. F. Arndt and R. Kühner, Gingrich F. W. Gingrich, Ausführliche . A Greek— English Grammatik der lexicon of the New griechischen Sprache? Testament,‘ ini, revised by. Cambridge 1957. B. Gerth (Hanover Blass- F. Blass and 1898-1904) Debrunner A. Debrunner, NTG L. Radermacher, Grammatik des Neutestamentliche neutestamentlichen Grammattk, Griechisch, Tubingen 1925. Gottingen 1949. Reallexikon für Antike FGrHist F. Jacoby, Die und Christentum, Fragmente der Stuttgart griechischen Historiker, SVF H. von Arnim, Leiden 1923. Stoicorum Veterum W. W. Goodwin, Fragmenta, Leipzig A Greek grammar?, 1903-24 (reprint London 1894. Stuttgart 1964) GMT W. W. Goodwin, WS H. Weir Smyth, Syntax of the moods Greek grammar?, and tenses of the Greek Cambridge, Mass. verb, London 1897. 1956. Inscr. Olb T. N. Knipovic and E. I. Levi, Inscriptiones Olbiae, Leningrad 1968. viii INTRODUCTION l. DIO'S WORLD Of the three speeches in this volume, the work of the foremost Greek orator of the first century A.D., one (36, Bor.) was delivered in his native city, Prusa in the Roman province of Bithynia, one (12, Ol.) at the great Hellenic religious centre of Olympia, and one (7, Eub.) probably, though not certainly, in Rome (see on 7.145). This neatly symbolizes the three loyalties that Dio, like Plutarch and many others of his contemporaries, felt and reconciled. To his native city, he owed the duties of advice and generous use of his means and abilities for the public good; to Hellas at large the duty to proclaim its values and nurture its pride, even in its subjection to Rome; and to the Romans, the duties of a client and an educator. Inseparable from these, there was for Dio -- as, again, for Plutarch — an obligation often felt to address all his audiences in a philosophical mode, imparting moral and theological doctrines of universal concern and relevance. In all this, Dio is typical of the Greek men of letters who practised in the world of the Roman Empire, though not all, of course, shared his moral seriousness. They addressed themselves both to Greek and to Roman audiences. This had been going on for a long time. Since the second century B.c., it had been common ground that Greek was a necessary part of the education of Romans of standing. As patrons and figures of power, such people naturally became the addressees of Greek poets, philosophers, and historians. Indeed, many of them (like Dio's Stoic mentor, Musonius Rufus) themselves wrote in Greek as well as in Latin. The literature of the Empire is thus bilingual: Dio belongs to the same literary culture not only as Plutarch, but as Pliny and Tacitus.! It is important to keep in mind that, on the Greek side, this culture expressed itself, both linguistically and in choice of subjects, in very classical terms. At least since the time of Dionysius of Halicarnassus, who taught rhetoric and wrote history at Rome under Augustus, the 1 This perspective is now clearly seen in the synthesis by A. Dihle, Die griechische und lateinische Literatur der Kaiserzat (Munich 1989; Eng. translation in preparation). 2 INTRODUCTION principal vehicle in which Hellenic patdera was conveyed was a studied reproduction of the language and style of the Attic orators, historians, and philosophers of the fifth and fourth centuries. In varying degrees, most of the Greek authors of the following period tried to write like Xenophon, Plato, Demosthenes, or Thucydides, while Homer and classical drama were assumed to be *what every schoolboy knows'. Dio is one of the closer followers of classical models — very different in this from Plutarch -- and he clearly had a marvellous ear for the cadences and idioms of fourth-century prose. It is entirely characteristic that he is supposed to have taken two books only on his wanderings: Plato's Phaedo and Demosthenes' On the false embassy. In fact his debt to other works of Plato - especially Republic and Laws - and to Xenophon is more conspicuous; but the story is well invented none the less, and much in the taste of the sophists of the second century, of whose linguistic purism Dio is, in some ways, a precursor. Dio also quotes the poets -- we shall hear him on Homer and Euripides - but not more recent ones. In his only extant work that deals with rhetorical teaching (Or. 18), he emphasizes Xenophon, and only very tentatively suggests some modern orators for study ‘because we are not enslaved in our judgement before we approach them’. This is odd, and stands out as something controversial. This use of an ancient idiom, removed from ordinary speech and to some extent also from the speech of the cultured in academic contexts, did not prevent these writers from presenting moral and social lessons appropriate to their own time. Archaism is as old as Greek literature, and was never in itself a bar to profundity or originality of thought. For Dio and his classicizing or archaizing contemporaries, some ‘dressing up’ of contemporary things was demanded, as it were, by the genre- rule: Roman governors were ‘satraps’, the emperor basileus with overtones of the Persian monarchy. But Dio, like most of his fellow orators, was involved in local and sometimes in imperial affairs, and was as acutely conscious as, say, Seneca or Tacitus, of the moral, political, and ideological issues of the age. Yet ‘Longinus’ - probably Dio's contemporary, and certainly a sharer of his broadly Stoic philosophy - complains of the ‘cosmic dearth’ of any kind of literature that he could call ‘sublime’.? And he was surely 3. De sublimitate 44.
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