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This chapter examines how early imperial intellectuals thought about Atticism and how the early imperial elite used language and in particular literary Atticism to create a model of the unity of the oikoumenê—in other words, how the language defined its space. It begins with a few representative sketches of Atticism in action, moments at which the rules of the game are broken or the boundaries crossed. The chapter then turns to an extended discussion of Lucian of Samosata’s writing about writing as a way of exploring how an early imperial “outsider” intellectual used language as a mark of his insider status. Finally, the last section of the chapter looks at how certain post-classical authors thought about culture and acculturation as a process and takes as its subject a series of post-classical re-imaginings of stories surrounding the Scythian sage Anacharsis, the model of the Hellenized barbarian who, at least according to Herodotus, was defined by his failure to be both Greek and barbarian.

This chapter focuses on Aiolian communities and two interrelated episodes in the History: firstly, the first revolt of the island of Lesbos in the North-Eastern Aegean; and, secondly, the episode of Plataia in Boiotia and its clash with its mother-city Thebes. Here the scope of discussion widens, also encompassing kinship relations of the relatedness type, such as panhellenic kinship and the specially intimate relationship between Athens and Plataia. Through close attention to the role of myth in the shaping of perceptions and claims of the present, and vice-versa, and to discourse and narrative, the complexity of intercommunal kinship is explored in the quadrangle Plataia–Thebes–Sparta–Athens.

Christian authors, like their classical forbears, compare writing to painting. This chapter explores the implications of this analogy, especially relating to the concept of mimēsis—representation, emulation, or imitation. It then examines the literary techniques of ekphrasis and prosōpopoeia: they both involve the representation of reality, through an appeal to the audience’s visual or aural imagination. In using these techniques authors also emulate various literary models. Christians appealed to concepts of God as craftsman and Christ as artist of the human soul. Recent re-evaluations of mimēsis are also examined in relation to the concepts of the ‘Second Sophistic’, ‘Atticism’, and ‘Asianism’. Finally, this chapter examines the ancient concept of technē (art, craft, skill), defining it in terms of knowledge, a good end and learning by example. Fourth-century authors saw verbal composition as a craft, defined in these terms.

This chapter examines the ambivalent image of Classical Athens in Dionysius of Halicarnassus’ Roman Antiquities. This image reflects a deep-seated ambiguity of Dionysius’ Classicist ideology: on the one hand, there is no question for Dionysius that Athenocentric Hellenicity failed, and that the Roman empire has superseded Athens’ role once and for all as the political and cultural centre of the oikoumene. On the other, Dionysius accepted Rome’s supremacy as legitimate partly because he believed (and wanted his readers to believe) her to be the legitimate heir of Classical Athens and Classical Athenian civic ideology. As a result, Dionysius develops a new model of Hellenicity for Roman Greeks loyal to the new political and cultural centre of Rome. This new model of Greek identity incorporates and builds on Classical Athenian ideals, institutions, and culture, but also supersedes them.

As prelude to the discussions of the six chapters that follow, this introduction gives an overview of the evidence for the accessibility of Old Comedy—beyond Aristophanes’s extant plays—during the Imperial era. It also lays out what have been perceived as the two primary ways that Imperial-era authors approached the genre: as a linguistic source and as a problem. In doing so, it provides a survey of the scholarly approaches adopted by the lexicographers (Julius Pollux, Phrynichus, the Anti-atticist) and Athenaeus. It also considers the persistent influence that the writings of Plato, Aristotle, and Hellenistic critics exerted on how later Greeks understood the genre. As examples of this, it discusses Dio Chrysostom’s commentary on the comic poets in Or. 33 (First Tarsian) and Aelian’s account of Socrates’s trial and execution in Historical Miscellany. The chapter concludes with an outline of the structure and argument of the other sections of the book.

This chapter discusses Cicero’s most successful co-option of a Greek figure, Demosthenes. Cicero primarily associated Demosthenes with his Philippics, in which he painted himself as an opponent to the tyranny of Philip II of Macedon and the saviour of democratic free speech—even though Demosthenes ultimately failed at both goals. Yet it was this very failure that made Demosthenes an appealing figure for Cicero after his defeat in the Roman civil war. This chapter demonstrates that Cicero implicitly and explicitly compared his own oratorical career to that of Demosthenes in his post-civil war rhetorical works (Brutus, De Optimo Genere Oratorum, and Orator), as well as in his speeches against Antony (Philippics) because he believed that drawing a parallel between Demosthenes’ noble failure and his own offered an attractive light in which he could cast his own mistakes and still survive as an object of classical veneration.

This chapter consists of a reassessment of the activity and chronology of the Messenian sculptor Damophon arguably the best-known sculptor of the Hellenistic period. It evaluates his role as a public figure documented through honorific decrees and statues. A new inscription from the Asklepieion of Butrint and two honorary decrees issued for the sculptor by the cities of Leukas and Kranioi (Kephallenia) confirm that he was active in the Ionian coast of Greece in the second century BC. Historical and archaeological data seem also to suggest that at the time of Damophon’s work the whole area was under the control of the Romans. The sculptor’s activity and the cult statues that he either made anew or restored are therefore interpreted in the light of contemporary religious and cultural policies aimed at strengthening the links between Rome and Greece.