Search Results

Post classical rhetoricians applied and adapted philosophical and scientific ideas about the nature of the human soul and the human community to describe the world as they saw it and wanted it to be. This chapter explores the tension between the desire to order experience into tidy dyads and the need to confront the multiplicity and variability of an ever-expanding and diversifying world. In doing so, this chapter turns from philosophy to rhetoric. While the Hellenistic and Roman Stoa turned away, for the most part, from the dyadic classification of the world into Greek and barbarian, post-classical public speech tended to preserve classical notions of “us” and “them.” The question is, what happens to mutually exclusive and all-encompassing divisions of the human community in the increasingly plural and fluid Mediterranean? It is true that peoples had been criss-crossing the Mediterranean for millennia prior to the fifth-century BCE and that cultural exchange had long defined Mediterranean as well as Near Eastern and North African history. What is of interest here is a moment at which certain intellectuals in Athens came to rethink the meaning of these movements in an effort to define lines between insiders and outsiders.

This chapter discusses Dio Chrysostom, a wealthy Greek who was banished from Prusa and who was exiled to Olbia. It focuses on his construction and illustration of Olbia through his thirty-sixth speech entitled Borystheniticus Or. 36. This speech is assumed to be written during his exile in Olbia and was delivered on his return to Prusa. His Borystheniticus themes are ‘harmony, good order, and regular and predictable change on earth as in heaven’. His speech consists of a large introduction that narrates the location of Olbia. Out of the 61 pages of his Borystheniticus, 13 are devoted to the exterior setting of the city, the city itself, its inhabitants and its surrounding, giving the impression that the introduction was not intended as a mere introductory part. His account of Olbia in his speech was not just an indulging innocent reminiscence, rather it was a description aimed for a larger audience. Behind his illustration of the Obliopolitans as early Greeks lies a traditional and elaborate theory that suggest that the technical and cultural evolution, development and progress of civilization came at the same time as moral degeneration. He painted a gloomy picture of Olbia as a rhetorical strategy that allowed him to illustrate a society on the brink of extinction as a result of the severe threat to its historical and religious identity and yet still holding out because of the sense of unity of the community. This concept was aimed to remind the inhabitants of Prusa of proper and responsible behaviour.

Dio Chrysostom wrote about the Essenes in a lost work, Getica. This is known only from one small comment in the work of Synesius. However, it is very important in that it is an independent source on the Essenes being situated next to the Dead Sea, close to the traditional site of Sodom. Unlike Pliny, Dio uses the Essenes as an example of philosophical excellence. Dio’s Getica was known to sources used by Julius Solinus, who adds to his main source Pliny some additional information indicating that the Essenes were a group to be admired.

An appreciation of the Roman governor's position and responsibilities shows that he was the most important figure in provincial law and order; good governors clearly took an interest in protecting people and fighting crime, often using soldiers on their staff (officium) to do so. At the same time, complicated local politics, corruption, and other considerations constrained governors’ actual power. Many aspects of the governors’ role also apply to imperial procurators, whose importance in the provinces is hard to exaggerate. Particularly telling is an inscription from Asia Minor, Frend JRS 46 (1956), which reveals how successive procurators of an imperial estate managed a protracted conflict between two villages, partly by employing soldiers at their disposal as police.

This chapter explores the ways in which Josephus’ rhetorical style of historical writing was influenced by other Greek writers in the Flavian period. It is somewhat difficult to locate such writers at Rome precisely during Josephus’ residence in the city. The chapter underlines the prologue to the Judaean War, where Josephus responds to previous histories of the war, some likely to have been in Greek, which he thought of poor quality. It argues that Josephus was particularly influenced by Dio Chrysostom, the orator from Prusa in Bithynia, and Plutarch, the philosopher and priest from Chaeronea in Boeotia. Dio’s Alexandrian oration, for example, may have been used by Josephus as a model for his narrative of the tension between Judeans and Greeks in that city in his Judaean Antiquities. As for Plutarch, the chapter maintains that Josephus was particularly influenced by his imperial biographies. However, Domitian’s eventual persecution of Judaean sympathizers likely forced Josephus into literary isolation.

This chapter discusses Dio Chrysostom’s ‘Libyan myth’, which tells of savage serpent-women who ate any man they found, until they were destroyed by Heracles; Dio explains that this myth is an allegory about destructive passions in the human soul. The chapter discusses the narrative technique with which Dio tells a story which mixes mythic and historical time; the chapter also traces the intellectual roots of the essay back to Plato and discusses what it can teach us about how myth was understood and used in antiquity. In addition, the chapter considers the relation between Dio’s myth and the scenes in the Libyan desert in Apollonius’ Argonautica and Lucan’s Civil War.

This chapter will claim that Grotius seeks to reconceptualize the notion of custom as a fundamental feature of ius gentium precisely by challenging the notion of voluntarism as applied to custom and instead radicalizing its spontaneous, natural value. A crucial role in this process of reconceptualization is played by Grotius’ reading of Dio Chrysostom, whose oration On custom provides him with an integrated account of custom as a ‘normative argumentative practice’. ‘Custom as normative practice’ means conduct that is embedded in and at the same time emerges from a practice of judgment carrying normative value, because it is shared by a number of interrelated social participants. Thus, Grotius conceives of custom as consisting of arguments (drawn from both poetry and classical history) that only prove themselves convincing insofar as they are spontaneously used within a community of (international) actors.

This chapter examines the idea of Juvenal’s invisibility. The satirist deliberately avoids crafting any coherent persona in his Satires, instead veiling his identity through fast-moving textual disguises. The chapter begins not with Juvenal but with the Greek sophist and philosopher Dio Chrysostom, in order to examine a comparable, contemporary performance in which the speaker also uses dazzling rhetoric to hide his “true” identity. The chapter then moves to Satire 2, which it analyzes as preoccupied not with sex or masculinity but with disguise. The chapter concludes with Satire 9. Juvenal contrasts his satiric technique with the Horatian wit Naevolus. While Naevolus explains to the readers his appearance, his character, and his motivations, the invisible satirist lurks unseen in a household in disorder.

This chapter argues that Juvenal’s eighth Satire captures a paradox at the heart of Roman aristocratic identity. Aristocrats are expected to embody the values and traditions of their ancestors, and yet Juvenal brands one aristocrat a “living bust” for being merely a facsimile of the past. The first section shows that this paradox plays itself out at the level of poetic form: Is Juvenal himself, with his many allusions to Cicero and Sallust in this poem, also a “living bust”? The second section of the chapter compares the poem’s theme to speeches of the sophists, especially the fifteenth oration of Dio Chrysostom. The final section demonstrates the poem’s very contemporary edge: its anxiety about how to control the provinces expresses anxiety about border control typical of the early years of Hadrian’s reign.

In antiquity Homer may have been the most revered of poets, and the foundation of all literary criticism and philology; but he was also the most maligned and interfered with of ancient poets. He spawned entire traditions of literary critique, parody, subversion, and revision that kept his image alive down through the centuries and well into modernity. Homer lived on, in other words, both in the gutter and at the top tier of the literary and cultural canons of the West. Examples from Heraclitus to d’Aubignac will lay out the case for this puzzling bipolar reception, which throws a troubling light on what it means to be a canonical poet of the western world. Two case studies will then reinforce the consistency of these patterns of reception over the course of the tradition: Dio’s ‘Trojan Oration’ (Discourse 11) and Butler’s Authoress of the Odyssey.

This chapter re-examines the application of social memory theories and models to the study of honorific portraits and public sculptural programmes in Roman Asia Minor. Specifically, it argues that, while honorific and public portraits have been considered objects of both personal and collective memory, in the Orations of Dio Chrysostom they are presented as markers of immediate public recognition that are on a par with other transitory honours. In contrast, as carriers of memory, honorific portraits are seen as vulnerable to alteration, recycling, and forgetfulness. Moreover, even when elite public portraits are set within larger assemblages celebrating civic founders, the rationale for the inclusion of the portraits is not for the incorporation of the portrait subjects into the collective memory of a community’s past and identity. Rather, such juxtapositions advance metaphorical statements on the role of the elites as a city’s patrons and benefactors.

This chapter gives an overview of the book's argument and contents, stressing Plutarch's moral interest in his biographies and his intended special readership of highly placed Roman administrators as well as educated and politically active Greeks. A native of Chaeronea in Boeotia, but a citizen of both Athens and Rome and a priest at Delphi, Plutarch was deeply imbued with all aspects of Greek culture, especially Platonic philosophy, but determined to immerse himself as well in Roman culture and history. His interests can be differentiated from the oral performance culture of rhetors and other members of the second sophistic such as Dio Chrysostom or Aelius Aristides not only because only a few of his works appear to have been delivered orally but because he demonstrates immensely greater familiarity with Roman history, religion, and traditions than they do

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.