Greeks on Greekness: Viewing the Greek Past Under the Roman Empire

207 Pages·2006·19.468 MB·English

by  David Konstan (editor), Suzanne Saïd (editor)

GREEK AND GREEKNESS: VIEWING THE GREEK PAST UNDER
THE ROMAN EMPIRE
Karl Marx observed that “just when people seem engaged in revolutionising
themselves..., they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service.” While
the Greek east under Roman rule was not revolutionary, perhaps, in the sense that Marx
had in mind, it was engaged in creating something that had not previously existed, in
part just through the millennia-long involvement with its own tradition, which was
continually being remodelled and readapted. It was an age that was intensely self-
conscious about its relation to history, a consciousness that manifested itself not only
in Attic purism and a reverence for antique literary models but also in ethnic identities,
educational and religious institutions, and political interactions with - and even among
- the Romans. In this volume, which represents a selection of the papers presented at
the colloquium, “Greeks on Greekness: The Construction and Uses of the Greek Past
among Greeks under the Roman Empire,” held at the Center for Hellenic Studies on
25-28 August 2001, seven scholars explore some of the forms that this preoccupation
with the Greek past assumed under Roman rule. Taken together, the chapters in this
volume offer a kaleidoscopic view of how Greeks under the Roman Empire related to
their past, indicating the multiple ways in which the classical tradition was prob-
lematised, adapted, transformed and at times rejected. They thus provide a vivid image
of a lived relation to tradition, one that was inventive rather than conservative and self-
conscious rather than passive. The Greeks under Rome played with their heritage, as
they played at being and not being the Greeks they continually studied and remembered.
DAVID KONSTAN is John Rowe Workman Distinguished Professor of Classics and
the Humanistic Tradition and Professor of Comparative Literature at Brown University.
SUZANNE SAЇD is Professor of Classics at Columbia University.

CAMBRIDGE CLASSICAL JOURNAL
PROCEEDINGS OF THE CAMBRIDGE PHILOLOGICAL SOCIETY
SUPPLEMENTARY VOLUME 29
Editors
TIM WHITMARSH, CHRISTOPHER KELLY, JAMES WARREN
GREEKS ON GREEKNESS
VIEWING THE GREEK PAST UNDER THE ROMAN EMPIRE
DAVID KONSTAN AND SUZANNE SAID
Published by The Cambridge Philological Society.
www.classics.cam.ac.uk/pcps/pcpshome.html
© The Cambridge Philological Society, 2006
ISBN 978 0 906014 28 8
This book is available direct from Oxbow Books, Park End Place, Oxford, OX 1 1HN.
www.oxbowbooks.com
Printed by Cambridge University Press.
www.cambridge.org/printing
CONTENTS
Introduction ix
David Konstan
1 ‘Macedonian times’: 1
Hellenistic memories in the provinces of the Roman Near East
Tony Spawforth
2 Fiction, mimesis and the performance of the past in the Second
Sophistic 27
Ruth Webb
3 The rewriting of the Athenian past: from Isocrates to Aelius
Aristides 47
Suzanne Said
4 Choral performances 61
Ewen Bowie
5 The sincerest form of imitation: Plutarch on flattery 93
Tim Whitmarsh
6 Artemis and cultural identity in Empire culture: 112
how to think about polytheism, now?
Simon Goldhill
7 Playing games with Greeks: one Roman on Greekness 162
Greg Woolf

CONTRIBUTORS
Ewen Bowie has been E. P. Warren Praelector in Classics at Corpus Christi College
Oxford since 1965 and is Professor of Classical Languages and Literature at the
University of Oxford. He has written numerous articles and chapters for co-authored
volumes on Greek literature and society in the Roman Empire, and on archaic and
Hellenistic Greek poetry. He is completing a commentary on Longus, Daphnis and
Chloe, and (with Jás Eisner) is editing and contributing to a book on Philostratus.
Simon Goldhill is Professor of Greek at Cambridge University and a fellow of King’s
College. His most recent books are Who needs Greek? Contests in the cultural history
of Hellenism (Cambridge, 2002); Love, sex and tragedy: how the ancient world shapes
modern life (Chicago, 2004); and The Temple of Jerusalem (London, 2004).
David Konstan is the John Rowe Workman Distinguished Professor of Classics and
Professor of Comparative Literature at Brown University. He was President of the
American Philological Association in 1999. Among his publications are Roman
comedy (Ithaca, 1983), Sexual symmetry: love in the ancient novel and related genres
(Princeton, 1994), Greek comedy and ideology (Oxford, 1995), Friendship in the
classical world (Cambridge, 1997), and Pity transformed (London, 2001). His book on
The emotions of the ancient Greeks is in press.
Suzanne Saïd is Professor of Classics at Columbia University. She has edited
Hellenismos: quelques jalons pour une histoire de l'identité grecque (Leiden, 1989)
and published numerous articles on Greek literature (from Homer to Heliodorus) and
its reception. Among her books are La faute tragique (Paris, 1978), Sophiste et Tyran
ou le problème du Prométhée enchaîné (Paris 1985), Histoire de la littérature grecque
(with M. Trédé and A. Le Boulluec: Paris, 1997), Approches de la mythologie grecque
(Paris, 1998), and Homère et l'Odyssée (Paris, 1998).
Antony Spawforth is Professor of Ancient History at the University of Newcastle upon
Tyne. He has recently written a book on Greek temples (The complete temples of the
ancient Greeks, London, 2005) and edited and contributed to a book on aulic history
(The court and court society in ancient monarchies, forthcoming). He is currently
working on a book on Rome and Greece.
Ruth Webb is currently Honorary Research Fellow in the School of History, Classics
and Archaeology of Birkbeck College, London. The preliminary research for this article
was undertaken while she was Assistant Professor of Post-classical Greek at Princeton
viii DAVID KONSTAN AND SUZANNE SAÏD
University, and with support from the Center for Hellenic Studies. She has published
numerous articles on rhetorical theory and practice, on ekphrasis and enargeia, and on
performance in the Imperial Period and Late Antiquity. She is currently completing a
book on The late antique theatre and its critics for Harvard University Press.
Tim Whitmarsh is Professor of Ancient Literatures at the University of Exeter. He is
the author of Greek literature and the Roman empire (Oxford, 2001), Ancient Greek
literature (Cambridge, 2004) and The Second Sophistic (Oxford, 2005). His
forthcoming book is provisionally titled Reading the self in the ancient Greek novel
(Cambridge).
Greg Woolf has been Professor of Ancient History at the University of St. Andrews
since 1998, until when he held a series of fellowships at various Oxford and Cambridge
colleges. He is the author of Becoming Roman: the origins of provincial civilisation in
Gaul (Cambridge, 1998) and with Catharine Edwards recently co-edited Rome the
Cosmopolis (Cambridge, 2003).
INTRODUCTION
Socrates (discussing performers of epic poetry): ‘Can we say, Ion, that a man is
in his right mind when, though he is adorned with embroidered robes and golden
crowns, he weeps amidst sacrifices and festivals ...?’ Ion: ‘To tell the truth,
Socrates, why no’ (Ion 535D)
Ion: ‘I must pay strict attention to the audience, since if I make them cry, I’ll
laugh when I take their money, but if I make them laugh, I’ll be crying at the
money I’ve lost’ (Ion 535E)
Ion: ‘You speak well, Socrates, but I’d be surprised if you could speak well
enough to persuade me that I am possessed and mad when I laud Homer’ (Ion
536D)
‘Olivier is not Hamlet, but also not not Hamlet’ (Schechner (1985) 110, quoted
in Webb p. 40 n. 57 below)
Actors - and we may include among them the great orators, declaimers, rhapsodes and
rhetoricians of classical antiquity - have a complex relationship to the rôles that they
enact. On the one hand, they identify at least to some extent with the feelings and
attitudes of the characters they play; on the other hand, they do not do so to the extent of
merging entirely with the persona - were this to occur, they would be raving, not
acting.
Role-playing is not restricted to public performers. All people imagine themselves in
the guise of others, whom they take as models or as objects of identification. We
suppose that when Romans donned the imagines or masks of distinguished ancestors in
funeral processions, there was some sense of entering into the personality of the
deceased. This perhaps is an extreme case, but the Romans were highly conscious of
their relationship with the past. So too the Greeks, and never more so than under the
sway of the Roman Empire, when they might look back to the brilliant and dramatic era
of the independent city-states and fancy themselves kin and heir to the figures who strode
the stage of history half a dozen centuries earlier.
Not all epochs are equally given to such play-acting in relation to the past. Different
conditions elicit different styles of self-representation. Moments of crisis, in particular,
may evoke a tendency to imitate one’s forebears. As Karl Marx observes in the
Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, ‘just when people seem engaged in revolu­
tionising themselves and things, in creating something that has never yet existed,