Collections of articles on Imperial Greek literature may be popular in Europe and the UK, but they remain rare on the other side of the Atlantic. The appearance of this volume, originating in a 2007 conference held at Laval in Québec City, is thus welcome, and evidence that the field is thriving in Canada; each of the fourteen contributors to this volume, eight writing in French and six in English, has an academic connection, past or present, to a Canadian university (p. xi). Is it possible to identify, then, a specifically Canadian way of perceiving the Second Sophistic on display here (or perhaps better un regard Québécois; ten of the authors have ties to Montréal, Québec or nearby Ottawa)? The somewhat anodyne title suggests a certain modesty of agenda, which is reflected in the predominantly literary, text-based approach favoured by nearly all the contributors, who tend towards strictly delimited analyses of passages, imagery or terminology from one or two ancient authors. No grand theorising or sweeping statements here. Such modesty, however, is one of the volume's virtues; the careful readings practised in the best of the essays make valuable contributions to our understanding of the complexity of Second Sophistic texts.Footnote ¹

One thematic concern that runs through the volume is the relationship of religion and the rhetorical ideals of the Second Sophistic. Christian rhetoric is prominent in the articles by Pasquier and Henderson: the former contrasts the concept of the image in Philostratus' Imagines with that of Clement's Protrepticus, while the latter usefully articulates a concept of early Christian oratory (e.g. Paul) as a ‘sub-’ or ‘counter-sophistic’ movement that consciously mimics or adapts aspects of the dominant, elite sophistic paradigm. F., Downie and Côté, on the other hand, discuss how various Imperial Greek authors employ religious thought and imagery in their attempts to define the place of rhetoric in the Second Sophistic imagination. F. identifies what she terms a second-century ‘resacralisation’ of rhetoric, drawing from discussions in Fronto and Aristides that link oratorical ability with Nature and the divine. Downie takes this one step further, showing how Aristides manipulates such traditional religious metaphors (orators as ‘initiates’ into the ‘mysteries’ of rhetoric) as well as athletic ones (oratory as competition requiring intense physical training) for his own particular ends. With remarkable finesse, Downie unpacks the complex cluster of religious and athletic imagery employed at the crucial point in the Sacred Tales when Aristides narrates his recovery from illness and subsequent rebirth as an orator; the deftness and care with which she details Aristides' rhetorical sleight-of-hand make this one of the best pieces in the volume. Finally, Côté emphasises the philosophical and religious aspects of Philostratus' description (Vit. Soph. 552–4) of Agathion, the so-called ‘Heracles of Herodes Atticus’, against previous scholars who overstress his Attic purity as emblematic of second-century Hellenism. While I take Côté's point, his model of Agathion (not to mention Protesilaus in the Heroicus) as embodying a Hellenic ideal synthesising sophistry, divinity, philosophy and primitivism seems less persuasive than the readings he is modifying (e.g. by S. Swain, Hellenism and Empire [1996], pp. 79–83 and T. Whitmarsh, Greek Literature and the Roman Empire [2001], pp. 105–8), which see Agathion as reflecting tensions and contradictions found at the heart of the Second Sophistic itself: between ancient and modern ideals of Hellenism and paideia, sophisticated Attic purity and primitive Cynic philosophy, etc.

Another focus of interest in the volume is more familiar: the centrality of the past to Imperial Greek identity, a topic already adumbrated in the discussion of Agathion. The essays by S., Mainguy and Auberger are explicitly grouped together under this rubric (‘Passé et identité grecque’), but Kemezis' ambitious interpretation of Philostratus' Lives of the Sophists could be read profitably in this light as well. Kemezis has many insights, especially in the conclusion, concerning the peculiarity of the Lives as a literary work and how this affects interpretation. But his main argument, as far as I can make it out, is less convincing. K. claims that Philostratus' literary objective is to show how Athens becomes the ideal site for both sophistic activity and the production of a particular kind of Greek identity, which was then disseminated to Ionia and Rome. Since this is described in Book 2, with the rise of Herodes Atticus, K. reads Book 1, which concentrates on Ionian sophists, as a long prelude whose primary moral was ‘that the Second Sophistic [could] not be exported from Ionia to Athens’ (p. 8). This seems like special pleading. And while there is no denying the centrality of Herodes, his students and Athens to Book 2, and even to Philostratus' idea of the Second Sophistic, I find it more plausible that the narrative structure that K. has identified is rather due to Philostratus' biases towards his own city and educational ancestry than conscious patterning. S., in perhaps the most important article in the volume, demonstrates that while Dio is aware of the traditional Greek–barbarian polarity and perfectly capable of employing it on occasion, he tends to avoid doing so, even in his works on Alexander the Great where the topic was de rigueur, and he rarely mentions the Persian Wars at all. What could easily have been a bland categorised list of data provides, through a sensitive and nuanced reading of context, real insight into both Dio's unconventional position in relation to his peers (like Plutarch and Pliny) and the complexity of Imperial Greek attitudes towards Hellenism and the past. Mainguy engages in a similar analysis – of references to ‘Greek’ and ‘barbarian’ in Athenaeus – but her interesting initial observation that Athenaeus' uses of barbaros vocabulary cluster around discussions of language purism (and thus often signify ‘Latin’, rather than more traditional ‘barbarian’ referents) results only in some general remarks about the diversity of opinion on the matter depicted in Athenaeus. Auberger's treatment of the idiosyncratic attitude of Pausanias to the Greek past concludes the section. Auberger is concise, accurate and a pleasure to read, but it would have been helpful to know how his position relates to some prominent recent scholarship on the issue; for example, E. Bowie in Pausanias historien (1996), pp. 207–39 and W. Hutton, Describing Greece (2005).

Relegated to their own two-essay section, the articles by Gurd and Schlapbach, on Galen's attempts retroactively to define his readership and the conception of dance articulated in Plutarch's Table Talks respectively, though valuable, seem somewhat tangential to the volume. Both authors forge valid connections with the Second Sophistic (Plutarch's privileging of old dance over new is consistent with Imperial authors' reverence of the past; Galen's insistence that he never revises his work recalls the improvisatory impulse of performance oratory), but such observations remain peripheral to each article's main objective: for Schlapbach, a careful clarification of the relation of Ammonius' ‘theory of dance’ articulated in Table Talk 1.15 to theories of language (not as dependent as previously assumed) and for Gurd, a similarly close and penetrating analysis, which shows how Galen's decision in On his Own Books to label certain (already circulating) treatises after the fact as πρὸς and οὐ πρὸς ἔκδοσιν (‘for’ and ‘not for publication’ = ‘for the public’; ‘for my inner circle’) reinstates ‘the division between public and private that the dissemination of his work had dissolved’ (p. 176). Both essays make significant contributions to topics that have inspired considerable recent scholarly interest – Imperial book publication and pantomime and dance.

The last three articles examine the reception (perception?) of Second Sophistic oratory in the so-called ‘Third Sophistic’ of the fourth century c.e. Johnson provides an informative comparison of Libanius' Monody for Daphne with Aristides' Eleusinian Oration, Vanderspoel speculates plausibly but inconclusively that the new library established at Constantinople c. 356 c.e. sparked an increased interest in Aristides' work, while Raschle succinctly outlines Themistius' modifications of earlier kingship oratory (like that of Dio) to the new political context of the late fourth century.

How, then, best to characterise the Second Sophistic upon which this volume casts its gaze? I was struck by the scarcity of emphasis on the parodic, ironic and paradoxical aspects of Imperial Greek literature that have contributed to its popularity in the English-speaking world (Lucian, perhaps tellingly, only makes a few cameo appearances). The Second Sophistic that emerges from this volume is thus rather muted and serious, but no less sophisticated, and just as deserving of the careful interpretation and analysis it receives here.