Decades of studying Greek literature in the imperial period and the literary movement we call the ‘Second Sophistic’ have brought new insights and appreciation of Greek writing under the emperors. Focus is often devoted to the authors’ stylistic choices and how they found inspiration in authors from Classical Athens or Alexander's more glorious past – his conquest of most of the known world, when Greek cities were able to stir the political agenda in the Eastern Mediterranean. And so, Greek imperial literature is seen as way to promote the importance or superiority of Greek culture in a world where the political initiative was now in the hands of Rome. This approach to Greek imperial literature, most noticeably its sense of Greek cultural superiority, ties into a much larger debate of how Greeks, particularly intellectuals, were in opposition to Rome and Roman culture and did not see themselves as natural members of the large and culturally diverse collectivity of Rome, even if they themselves belonged to the political elite.
K. takes the study of Greek imperial writing to a different level. In this very stimulating book on narratives of the Roman Empire under the Severans, K. offers an interesting counterpoint to literature written in earlier periods, such as the Julio-Claudian and Antonine eras. K.'s focus is on Cassius Dio, Philostratus and Herodian – three writers who either experienced the reign of the Severan dynasty directly, or related to it from a distance of a few years after its fall. K. reads the narratives of his authors primarily as fiction, analysing how they construct the empire and how, in each text, the political world changed or continued, essentially from the Antonine to the Severan dynasty. Another aspect of the analysis is how the three narrators experienced the transition from the Antonine to the Severan periods culturally – particularly in the elite status they all enjoyed (pp. 8–9). Despite this literary approach and the range of Roman Empires it demonstrates, K. still seeks a historical answer to the question of how people understood and imagined their own past and present. His argument is that the political changes in the Severan age expanded a discursive space, where writers found new ways of expressing how the political changes affected their own situation (p. 11).
The book is in five main chapters. Chapter 1 focuses on the emperors from the Antonine to the Severan periods. Here, a nuanced account of the various reigns serves as a valuable counterbalance to the positive light in which the narrators see most of the Antonine emperors, or to the depressing accounts of the years after the death of Marcus Aurelius. K. focuses on how the authors shaped their own narrative in order to establish the link between the Severan dynasty and Marcus Aurelius, and so legitimised its hold on power.
Chapter 2 is dedicated to the narrative of Cassius Dio. The aim here is to place Cassius Dio in a Severan context, particularly by focusing on the books on the Late Republic and the reign of Augustus. K. sees the text as more unusual than it is often given credit for and as a compelling literary work, where the author reimagines or reconfigures the entirety of Roman history from his own Severan perspective. Dio's text is in clear opposition to the Severan narrative and K. wonders whether it can have circulated while Dio and the Severans were still alive – Appendix 1 suggests that it reached its final form in 229 c.e. This may well have been the case, at least when it comes to the books on the Severan dynasty (p. 146). For the rest of the books it is equally difficult to believe that the text would have been a work in progress, suppressed until Dio's death, and never handed over to some of Dio's associates or read aloud to friends. The books may well have been a part of an ongoing discussion among senators and members of the Empire's intellectual elite.
That the Empire's intellectual elite was preoccupied by the question of Roman power and the changes they experienced with the coming of the Severan emperors is evident from the treatment of Philostratus in Chapters 3 and 4. K. treats two of Philostratus’ works – Apollonius and the Sophists. Both texts address the tense encounter between the emperors and Greek intellectuals, whether it was the sage Apollonius or one of the many sophists who came in contact with the emperor or Roman power in broader terms. K. shows how in the narrators’ textual universe, Greek intellectuals assisted Roman power, such as when Apollonius confronted tyrannical emperors or helped to get the empire back on track, if only briefly, when advising Vespasian on how to become the ideal monarch. The story of the Sophists is rather different and less heroic, but the key position of Greek intellectuals works to show Philostratus’ readers that Greek civilisation was essential to the empire's well-being. In the Sophists, the Antonine emperors are seen to cherish intellectual and cultural excellence.
In Chapter 5, on Herodian, K. offers the reader an exciting analysis of an account of a dysfunctional form of rule during the reign of the Severans. K. draws attention to how Herodian tries to widen the gap between the Antonine and the Severan dynasties by idealising Marcus Aurelius. K. points to how Herodian, unlike Dio and Philostratus, shows no interest in identifying himself and how he distances himself and his readers from the narrative by keeping them unrelated to the period and the events.
K. offers an exciting new approach to the writing of three important authors and this volume will be the natural place to turn to for anyone interested in the authors and the Severan age in broader terms.
