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Mapping the World: Justin, Tatian, Lucian, and the Second Sophistic
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 December 2005
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In the late 1960s, African American children in Boston were asked to draw maps of their neighborhood, near the old Mission Hill housing project. The housing project, largely white at the time, took up a large part of their hand-drawn maps, but was figured in various ways as a big blank: a no-man's land, a topography absent of marks or monuments. The streets around it, as well as schools, restaurants, and stores, were often carefully and clearly articulated, but the housing project itself was an open, unmarked rectangle. Recent critical geographers have been interested in the way “people's spatial behaviour is shaped by the hills and valleys of the invisible information and environmental stress surfaces over them.” Landscape and the built environment of the city are not neutral, but have their own rhetoric, exerting influence on the bodies of those who move through them. And humans map and interpret space, understanding and defining the limits of their known world through the movements of their bodies.
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In the late 1960s, African American children in Boston were asked to draw maps of their neighborhood, near the old Mission Hill housing project. The housing project, largely white at the time, took up a large part of their hand-drawn maps, but was figured in various ways as a big blank: a no-man's land, a topography absent of marks or monuments.1
See Peter Gould and Rodney White, Mental Maps (2d ed.; Boston: Allen and Unwin, 1986) 14–17.
Gould and White, Mental Maps, 108. See also their mention of perceived areas of safety and danger in cities, “invisible stress surfaces” which lie over cities and influence people's movements. For a more recent discussion of an approach to archaeology which “allows us to think about the ways in which landscapes and built forms were experienced, perceived, and represented by ancient subjects, working from the starting point of a contemporary body in the same space,” see Ruth M. Van Dyke and Susan E. Alcock, “Archaeologies of Memory: An Introduction,” in Archaeologies of Memory (ed. eaedem; Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2003) 5–6.
The idea that humans produce concrete place out of abstract space is not new,3
On space and place, see especially David Harvey, “From Space to Place and Back Again,” in his Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1996) 291–326. See the cautionary words of Henri Lefebvre on uses of the term “space” in his The Production of Space (trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith; Oxford: Blackwell, 1991) esp. 1–27. Also influential to my thinking about geography has been the work of another scholar influenced by Marxism, as are Harvey and Lefebvre: Edward Soja, Postmetropolis: Critical Studies of Cities and Regions(Oxford: Blackwell, 2000).
There has been a surge of interest in geography and space in the Roman world. See especially Claude Nicolet, Space, Geography, and Politics in the Early Roman Empire (Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan Press, 1991), originally published in 1988 as L'inventaire du monde. Géographie et politique aux origines de l'Empire romain. A quick sampling of other recent works includes: Colin Adams and Ray Laurence, Travel and Geography in the Roman Empire (New York: Routledge, 2001); Space in the Roman World: Its Perception and Presentation(ed. Richard Talbert and Kai Brodersen; Antike Kultur und Geschichte 5; Münster: Lit Verlag, 2004); James S. Romm, The Edges of the Earth in Ancient Thought: Geography, Exploration, and Fiction (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992); Katherine Clarke, Between Geography and History: Hellenistic Constructions of the Roman World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). See also aspects of Susan Alcock, Graecia Capta: The Landscapes of Roman Greece (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). For other scholars of New Testament and Early Christianity who have recently used geography and mental mapping as a framework for analysis, see, e.g., Loveday Alexander, “Mapping Early Christianity: Acts and the Shape of Early Church History” in Interpretation 57 (2003) 163–75; eadem, “ ‘In Journeyings Often’: Voyaging in the Acts of the Apostles and in Greek Romance,” in Luke's Literary Achievement (ed. C. M. Tuckett; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1995) 17–39; Judith Perkins, “Social Geography in the Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles,” in Ancient Narrative Supplementum 1: Space in the Ancient Novel (2002) 118–31. James M. Scott's Geography in Early Judaism and Christianity: The Book of Jubilees (SNTS Monograph Series 113; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) focuses on the reception of the table of nations from Jubilees 8–9.
Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon (revised and augmented by Henry Stuart Jones; Oxford: Clarendon, 1996), s.v. topomacew: “wage war by seeking or holding strong positions.”
Strabo, Geographica 1.1.17; The Geography of Strabo, trans. Horace L. Jones after J. R. S. Sterrett; (8 vols. LCL; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1960–1970) 1.37; see also Strabo, Geogr. 16.4.22.
Geogr. 2.1. Among Alexander the Great's workers were two road measurers who recorded distances between stopping places and described geography, soil, flora, and fauna (O. A. W. Dilke, Greek and Roman Maps [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985] 29; see also book 15 of Strabo's Geography).
On itineraries and fear in ancient Greek literature, see also François Hartog, Memories of Odysseus: Frontier Tales from Ancient Greece (trans. Janet Lloyd; Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2001) 88: “Designed as it was to produce an inventory, a periplous held the void (blank spaces) in horror.” On Strabo's particular attitude toward geography, see p. 92, where Hartog argues that Strabo, unlike Herodotus, “confines the geographer solely to an investigation of the ‘inhabited world’, to wit the space dominated by Rome.” Regarding Strabo, see also Dilke, Greek and Roman Maps, 62–64; and especially Nicolet, Space, Geography, and Politics, 8, who argues: “It is not a coincidence that the most complete geographic work handed down from antiquity, that of Strabo, is from the Augustan period.”
Writings in the Roman period that are labeled as geographies, like Strabo's, may contain some or all of the following discussions: ethnographic writing; lists of cities' longitudes and latitudes; descriptions of topography; land itineraries and merchants' accounts of voyages; speculations on the relationship between the mapping of the heavens, especially the zodiac, and the terrestrial regions governed by those heavens. Yet these same components are found not only in geographies. What I term “geographical thinking” thrived in a variety of texts and genres—like that of the first-century merchant traveling the Erythrean Sea, or the fantastic voyages of Greek novels9
Geography pervades many other discourses in the Roman world. For an example of the difficulty of defining geography, see among others Clarke, Between Geography and History. The range of sources that Nicolet treats in his Space, Geography, and Politics is a helpful reminder of the many aspects of thought in the Roman world that touch upon geography. It is worth noting that Greco-Roman novels tend to omit Rome entirely in their depictions of the world. Simon Swain explains this “world without Rome” in terms of a deliberate Greek blindness to the present and an assertion of Greek urban values apart from Rome; see his Hellenism and Empire: Language, Classicism, and Power in the Greek World AD 50–250 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996) ch. 4; quotation from p. 109. For the most fantastic of these travel novels, see Lucian's True Story. For a merchant's itinerary, see Lionel Casson, The Periplus Maris Erythraei. Text with Introduction, Translation, and Commentary(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989).
Here I agree with Nicolet's broad definition and exploration of geography in the early Roman empire: “This geography (representation through discourse, description, an account of a voyage, or an itinerary and geometric conceptualization) also comes with a cartography, or rather, it is cartography. In antiquity the same words specify discourse and drawings” (Space, Geography, and Politics, 4). For more on maps and cartography and for a survey of geographical literature from the classical to the Roman period, see Dilke, Greek and Roman Maps.
One aspect of geographical thinking is the evaluation of the relative locations and importance of cities, and the tracing of routes both real and imaginary between them.11
Claudius Ptolemy's Geography is basically an expanded list of significant cities, originally intended merely as a handbook for helping with the use of his astronomical treatise, the Almagest; it then expanded to a work in its own right.
The populations of Italy partake in equal measure of the qualities of both north and south, both with regard to their physiques and to the vigor of their minds, to produce the greatest strength…. Thus the divine intelligence established the state of the Roman People as an outstanding and balanced region—so that it could take command over the earthly orb.12
Vitruvius, Architectura 6.1.11 (Ten Books on Architecture [trans. Ingrid D. Rowland; commentary and illustrations by Thomas Noble Howe; New York: Cambridge University Press,1999] 77). For Vitruvius, architecture, geography, cosmography, and ethnicity are all part of the same complex of problems; see also Arch. 6.1.12. Arguments like Vitruvius's (or like those of others in the Roman period) presage Herder's and others' debates over Volk and land in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. On Herder, autochthony, and hybridity, see Robert Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (New York: Routledge, 1995) 36–43. For more on climate/region and ethnic identity, see, e.g., Hartog, Memories of Odysseus, 138–39. Nicolet (Space, Geography, and Politics, 194) mentions this passage and its engagement with “the imperial destiny of Rome.” He misses, however, the tension between this passage and the one I discuss next.
Yet first- and second-century geographical thinking about the Roman world is not stable—it shifts even within this one text. In the same passage, Vitruvius celebrates the man who is shipwrecked, the universal traveler: “An educated person is the only one who is never a stranger in a foreign land, nor at a loss for friends even when bereft of household and intimates. Rather, he is a citizen in every country.”13
Arch. 6.preface.2 (trans. Rowland, 75). Citizenship and displacement are discussed often in literature of the first and second centuries; one example is Paul's statement in Phil 3:20: “But our commonwealth is in heaven” (
). For an analysis of exile and elite male identity in the second sophistic, see Tim Whitmarsh, “ ‘Greece is the World’: Exile and Identity in the Second Sophistic,” in Being Greek under Rome: Cultural Identity, the Second Sophistic and the Development of Empire (ed. Simon Goldhill; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001) 269–305. On the traveler in Greek and Roman literature, see Hartog, Memories of Odysseus.
This article focuses on three second-century figures, Justin, his student Tatian, and Lucian, who are educated travelers like the shipwreck victim that Vitruvius describes. I investigate how they map their world, and in particular how paideia, or Greek culture and education, and the conditions of the Roman Empire inflect their geographical thinking. By using the term “geographical thinking” to talk about the works of Justin, Tatian, and Lucian, I do not refer to “authentic” psychological states, but rather to how these authors constructed their world in the context of the Roman Empire and the culture wars of the so-called second sophistic. The second century was perhaps a peak in the production and exhibition of an elite, antiquarian Greek identity14
On the construction of Greek identity in antiquity, see especially Jonathan Hall's Hellenicity: Between Ethnicity and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). Although Hall's book treats an earlier period, his concluding chapter mentions the way in which the second sophistic's interest in defining Hellenic identity in terms of culture borrows from certain definitions of Hellēnes in the classical period (e.g., pp. 225–26).
See Maud Gleason's neat formulation: “ Paideia, for both Greek and Roman gentlemen, was a form of symbolic capital” (Making Men: Sophists and Self-Presentation in Ancient Rome [Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995] xxi). Interest in (elite) male bodies and their representation in antiquity is widespread in scholarship today. Much of this work is excellent and has inspired and challenged my own readings, yet I want to signal the potential problems and politics of this turn, in which I admittedly participate in this article. Why are scholars today so interested in the construction of ancient masculinity, and especially in ancient males who are represented as melancholic in their exile, struggling to negotiate their way under the conditions of empire, benefiting from that empire and resisting it at the same time, elite but vulnerable? We may be interested in them because we conflate our understanding of their situation with perceptions of our own contexts of elite educations, participation in current academic struggles over “great books” and canon, the itinerancy of academia, feelings of hybridity. One danger is that studies of masculinity can draw from feminist research on gender, yet avoid the ethical turn that many feminists insist upon.
The term “second sophistic” is borrowed from the third-century C.E. writer Philostratus's characterization of those who had more recently imitated the sophists of classical-period Greece.16
See Swain, Hellenism and Empire, 1–7.
See Timothy Horner, Listening to Trypho: Justin Martyr's Dialogue Reconsidered (Leuven: Peeters, 2001) esp. 72–83, where Horner observes that Justin should be read within the context of the second sophistic.
In the context of a discussion of Parmenides and Lucian, Tim Whitmarsh writes: “Rather than confining him to his native land, Paideia offers him access to the whole world; and, in particular, access to the centre, Rome. Education offers a relocation from the parochial to the universal, from the particular to the general” (Greek Literature and the Roman Empire: The Politics of Imitation[Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001] 124). Of course, this image could be used of Justin and Tatian as well. On the idea of fluidity, see the work of Denise Kimber Buell, who argues that early Christians partook in the racializing discourse of Greco-Roman antiquity, in part by rhetorically deploying the idea of the fluidity and fixity of race or ethnicity: “Race and Universalism in Early Christianity,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 10.4 (2002) esp. 436–38; and Why This New Race? Ethnic Reasoning in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005).
See Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994). On state control of space and resistance to that control, see, e.g., Lefebvre, Production of Space, 23.
In what follows I have three intertwined goals. First, I seek to complicate the model of center and periphery that has often been used to talk about the Roman Empire or about Greeks and barbarians in the ancient world. Justin, Tatian, and Lucian do not merely contrast Rome and their marginal, eastern homeland. Their geographical thinking is far more complex: they are Vitruvian men, traveling between cities and accruing the authority that such cosmopolitanism lends; they weigh and debate the metropolitan claims of cities like Athens or Jerusalem or even Lucian's homeland in Syria, which he calls Hierapolis, the “holy city.” Second, in placing Justin and Tatian alongside Lucian, I remap the traditional scholarly approach that frames Justin and Tatian in terms of Christian apologetic and the boundaries of Christianity and Hellenism, and show instead that these authors engage in the broader debates of the second sophistic. Third, scholars have attended to issues of geography and space in the writings of Greeks and Romans. But insufficient attention has been paid to the same topic among Christians in the Roman Empire, despite the fact that Christianity has long been depicted as thriving because of cities and travels between them,20
To offer only one example, see Wayne Meeks, The First Urban Christians: The Social World of the Apostle Paul (2d ed.; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003).
Justin, Tatian, and Lucian
From their places within the influence of the second sophistic, Justin, Tatian, and Lucian offer similar self-constructions. They are philosophers (or at least truth-seekers) from the eastern ranges of the empire, struggling with what it means to be a rhetor, sophist, and/or philosopher in their common cultural context. Like Vitruvius's shipwrecked traveller, their paideia renders them universal travelers of sorts, but they tweak and question both this paideia and their imagined and real travels between cities. Justin not only famously constructs himself as a philosopher, but also does not challenge the appellation of sophist when it is applied to him.21
Justin, Dialogus cum Tryphone 3.3.
“Therefore are you some philologist, he said, who is not at all industrious or a truth-lover, nor does he attempt to be a practical man, but rather a sophist?” The edition is that of Miroslav Marcovich, Iustini Martyris Dialogus cum Tryphone (Berlin: W. de Gruyter, 1997).
Tatian, To the Greeks (Oratio ad Graecos) , 35.1. Unless otherwise noted, all translations of Tatian are from Whittaker (Tatian: Oratio ad Graecos and Fragments [ed. and trans. Molly Whittaker; Oxford: Clarendon, 1982]). When I offer my own translations, these have been helped by hers. I use the Greek edition of Miroslav Marcovich, Tatiani Oratio ad Graecos (Berlin: W. de Gruyter, 1995).
Tatian, Oratio ad Graecos, 3.3 (Whittaker, 9).
All three also present their philosophical quests by drawing upon a narrative common to the time: that of the truth-seeker who wanders through the philosophical marketplace,24
For reference to several such texts, and a discussion of the marketplace of mystery cults in antiquity, see Arthur Darby Nock, Conversion: The Old and the New in Religion from Alexander the Great to Augustine of Hippo (repr. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998) 107–22. On this as topos of the day, see Erwin Goodenough, The Theology of Justin Martyr (Jena: Verlag Frommann, 1923) 59–62, and especially Tessa Rajak, “Talking at Trypho: Christian Apologetic as Anti-Judaism in Justin's Dialogue with Trypho the Jew,” in Apologetics in the Roman Empire: Pagans, Jews, and Christians (ed. Mark Edwards et al.; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999) 64–66.
Dial. 8.1–2. For another promenade of philosophers, albeit in a different style, see Tatian's list in Oratio ad Graecos 2. After his introductory blow—“What that is distinguished have you produced by your philosophizing?”—he mocks the faults of Diogenes, Aristippus, Plato, Aristotle, Heraclitus, Zeno, and others, sometimes humorously, as in his account of Heraclitus's dying from having smeared himself with a poultice of feces.
Oratio ad Graecos 29.1. In Paul too we find discussion of Greek and barbarian, in particular the idea of obligation “both to Greeks and barbarians, both to the wise and to the foolish” (Rom 1:14).
See also his True Story (Vera historia), which mocks the travelogue and admits to being full of lies, even as it claims also to be spurred by the desire for travel in order to quest for knowledge: “Once upon a time, setting out from the Pillars of Hercules and heading for the western ocean with a fair wind, I went voyaging. The motive and purpose of my journey lay in my intellectual activity [
] and desire for adventure, and in my wish to find out what the end of the ocean was, and who the people were that lived at its end” (Vera historia 1.5; Lucian: Works [trans. Harmon, LCL, 1.253], with small modifications). Note that the phrase here translated “intellectual activity” has a sharp undertone of futility and needless excess of learning. Unless otherwise noted, all translations of Lucian are from the Loeb edition.
On the connection between travel and theoria, or seeing, see Hartog, Memories of Odysseus, 90–91. Hartog also discusses the way in which Maximus of Tyre depicts Anacharsis's tour of Greece not as a moment of gaining knowledge from Greece, but rather of testing its wisdom (p. 112).
All three also critique what we would call religion:
If anyone sacrifices, [the gods] all have a feast, opening their mouths for the smoke and drinking the blood that is spilt at the altars, just like flies…. Then too they [humans] erect temples, in order that the gods may not be houseless and hearthless, of course; and they fashion images in their [human] likeness…. Those who offer victims … deck the animal with garlands…; then they bring it to the altar and slaughter it under the god's eyes, while it bellows plaintively—making, we must suppose, auspicious sounds, and fluting low music to accompany the sacrifice! Who would not suppose that the gods like to see all this? And although the notice says that no one is to be allowed within the holy-water who has not clean hands, the priest himself stands there all bloody, just like the Cyclops of old, cutting up the victim, removing the entrails, plucking out the heart, pouring the blood about the altar, and doing everything possible in the way of piety.29
Lucian, De sacrificiis 9–13 (trans. Harmon, LCL, 3.165–169). For a critique of religious chicanery of the style of Lucian's Alexander the False Prophet, see Tatian's mockery of Heraclitus and Empedocles (Oratio ad Graecos 2.1; 3.2).
Reading this without attribution, one might guess that it was written by Tatian or some other Christian satirist bitter about other religious practices, such as Minucius Felix.30
See, for example, Justin, 1 Apol.4–5.
Rebecca Lyman's “The Politics of Passing: Justin Martyr's Conversion as a Problem of ‘Hellenization’ ” (in Conversion in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages: Seeing and Believing [ed. Kenneth Mills and Anthony Grafton; Studies in Comparative History; Rochester, N.Y.: University of Rochester Press, 2003] 36–60) also points to the limitations of the category of apologetic, which might distract us from Justin's broader cultural context (esp. 43–44). Those in antiquity, whether Christian or not, who debate education, myth, and cult often aim their critiques at non-elite cult practices and are part of a broader trend in “pagan monotheism.” See the introduction to Pagan Monotheism in Late Antiquity (ed. Polymnia Athanassiadi and Michael Frede; Oxford: Clarendon, 1999) 1–20, esp. 8–9.
I have called Justin, Tatian, and Lucian Vitruvian men because their rhetorical constructions of their lives echo Vitruvius's account of the shipwrecked traveler who needs only paideia to fit into foreign country or household. But in using this term I intend, too, to conjure up Leonardo da Vinci's famous drawing of the perfectly balanced man, inscribed within a circle, and the source that the drawing interprets—Vitruvius's comments about the ideal symmetry of the human body and the analogy of this body to architectural measure.32
See Arch. 3.1, esp. sect. 9. Vitruvius also understands human bodies and columns to be analogous, and genders his columns (Doric are male; Ionic and Corinthian are female); see Arch. 4.1.6–8.
Jonathan Z. Smith, To Take Place: Toward a Theory in Ritual (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987) 27–28; this emerges in a discussion of Kant. For an extremely succinct overview of the concept of space in the history of philosophy, see Lefebvre, Production of Space, 1–2; this is followed by a strenuous critique of postmodern uses of the term “space.” Smith has elsewhere reminded us of the importance of geography and space to the study of religion. In his “What a Difference a Difference Makes” (‘To See Ourselves as Others See Us’: Christians, Jews, ‘Others’ in Late Antiquity [ed. Jacob Neusner and Ernest S. Frerichs; Chico, Calif.: Scholars Press, 1985] 3–48), Smith discusses the power of Greco-Roman understandings of geography even over Christopher Columbus. Regarding religion, ritual, and geography, see also David Frankfurter, “Introduction: Approaches to Coptic Pilgrimage,” in Pilgrimage and Holy Space in Late Antique Egypt (ed. idem; Leiden: Brill, 1998) esp. 13–18.
This concept of the body's movement through space has also been developed by theorists such as Soja and Lefebvre, mentioned earlier (see above, n. 3), as well as Smith in To Take Place. See also Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (trans. Steven Rendall; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984); and Heidi J. Nast and Steve Pile, “Introduction: MakingPlacesBodies,” in Places through the Body (ed. eidem; New York: Routledge, 1998) esp. 1–6.
Thinking with and beyond Vitruvius, we can see that the human body is a site from which an understanding of space emerges, but that it is also a measure for defining the architectures, cities, and the spaces surrounding the body. For example, Vitruvius suggests that altars and gods be placed at various heights in relation to the human body in order to create the proper effects for awe and worship.35
Arch. 4.5–9.
For more discussion, see, for example, Elizabeth Wilson, The Sphinx in the City: Urban Life, the Control of Disorder, and Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992); and Dolores Hayden, The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1995).
On male bodies and concerns about integrity and penetrability, see, for example, Jennifer A. Glancy, “Boasting of Beatings (2 Corinthians 11:23–25),” JBL 123 (2004) 99–135.
Rebecca Lyman (“The Politics of Passing”) also offers an excellent discussion of Justin's relationship with philosophy under a colonial context and analyzes Justin in terms of hybridity and postcolonial theory. See also her presidential address to the North American Patristic Society: “Hellenism and Heresy: 2002 NAPS Presidential Address,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 11 (2003) 209–22.
In the sections that follow, I shall read Justin and Tatian—the latter of whom, I will argue, is not as lugubrious as has been thought—alongside Lucian, the David Sedaris of the second century.39
There are only a few brief linkings of Tatian and Lucian in modern scholarship. See Kathy L. Gaca, The Making of Fornication: Eros, Ethics, and Political Reform in Greek Philosophy and Early Christianity (Berkeley: University of California, 2003) 224, n. 10; Peter Lampe, From Paul to Valentinus: Christians at Rome in the First Two Centuries (ed. Marshall D. Johnson; trans. Michael Steinhauser; Minneapolis, Minn.: Fortress, 2003) 289, n. 19; Molly Whittaker, “Tatian's Educational Background,” in Studia Patristica 13: Papers Presented to the Sixth International Conference on Patristic Studies held in Oxford 1971, Part II: Classica et Hellenica, Theologica, Liturgica, Ascetica (ed. Elizabeth Livingstone; Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1975) 57–59; and her edition and translation: Tatian: Oratio ad Graecos and Fragments (Oxford: Clarendon, 1982); see also J. L. Lightfoot, Lucian On the Syrian Goddess (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003) 203. Lyman, “The Politics of Passing,” 40, mentions Lucian's parodies about paideia in the context of her discussion of Justin.
On ethnicity and race in antiquity, and especially on Christians' manipulation of the rhetoric of race's fixity and fluidity, see Buell, Why This New Race? Buell's work has influenced many aspects of my thought on the rhetorical deployment of ethnicity.
Hartog, Memories of Odysseus; Arnoldo Momigliano, Alien Wisdom: The Limits of Hellenization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975). In my approach I appreciate but differ from Guy Stroumsa's Barbarian Philosophy: The Religious Revolution of Early Christianity (WUNT 112; Tübingen: Mohr/Siebeck, 1999); Stroumsa understands Christians as developing “some kind of ethnological curiosity, or interest in exotic peoples” (p. 58). I read figures like Justin and Tatian instead as reworking barbarian identity from within.
Lucian
Lucian, born between 115–125 C.E. in Samosata,42
For background on Lucian, see Swain, Hellenism and Empire, 298–99. On the complexity and hybridity of Lucian's identity, see especially Whitmarsh, Greek Literature and the Roman Empire, 248–53; Ja Elsner, “Describing Self in the language of Other: Pseudo (?) Lucian at the temple of Hierapolis,” in Being Greek Under Rome (ed. Goldhill) 123–53. Only recently has interest turned to Lucian not as a figure whose bitter satire marks him as marginal, but as an intellectual player fully involved in debating the themes of his day. See Tim Whitmarsh, “Varia Lucianea,” The Classical Review 53 (2003) 75.
See Gleason, Making Men, and R. Bracht Branham, Unruly Eloquence: Lucian and the Comedy of Traditions (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989) 1–4 on oratorical performance in the second sophistic. On defining Lucian as a sophist, see R. Bracht Branham, “Introducing a Sophist: Lucian's Prologues,” Transactions of the American Philological Association 115 (1985) 237. Christopher Jones (Culture and Society in Lucian [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986] 12–14) argues that even if Lucian “converted” from sophistical oration to more philosophical dialogue (conversion is a problematic framework for such analysis, in my view, and Jones himself calls the situation “irrecoverable”), his work would have been performed orally. For a reading of Lucian using postcolonial and feminist theory, see Rosa Cornford Parent, “Mapping Identity in the Lucianic Corpus” (Ph.D. diss., Department of Classics, University of Southern California, 2000). Lucian discusses his own career turn in The Dream(Somnium), also called Lucian's Career (Vita Luciani), in which he depicts Sculpture and Paideia (both personified) competing over him in a dream, and his choice to attach himself to Paideia. In this work he admits that it is Paideia that allows him to travel and to see the map of the world from on high, literally: on Paideia's chariot, “I was carried up into the heights and went from the East to the very West, surveying cities and nations and peoples, sowing something broadcast over the earth like Triptolemus” (Lucian, Vita Luciani 15 [trans. Harmon, LCL, 3.229]. The barbarian Lucian claims that he cannot remember what he sowed, only the applause of those over whose heads he flew, but with this image he signals that he carried something like Triptolemus's plate of corn, a sign for cultivation and civilization in Greek literature. On the fatherland, see Lucian, My Native Land(Patriae encomium).
Although elsewhere in his writings he appears as the character of the Syrian, in On the Syrian Goddess, Lucian offers a more autobiographical tone: “I myself that write am an Assyrian.”44
De dea Syria1 (trans. Lightfoot, 249). All translations are from Lightfoot's translation and edition of Lucian's On the Syrian Goddess. Lucianic authorship of this piece has been questioned because of its Ionic dialect and its relatively uncritical presentation of a local cult. But Simon Swain has convincingly argued that the piece is indeed Lucian's, attributing the Greek dialect to Lucian's conscious imitation of Herodotus's ethnographic work, and the positive tone to Lucian's appreciation of his Syrian heritage. See Swain, Hellenism and Empire, 304–7; and Jones, Culture and Society in Lucian, 41. Lucian himself talks explicitly about a desire to imitate Herodotus—even if this is in a very particular rhetorical situation of introducing a speech in Macedonia—in his Herodotus or Aetion. Lightfoot, too, concludes that Lucian is the author, while also learnedly surveying the history of scholarship on the question of authorship (“The Authorship of De Dea Syria Revisited,” in On the Syrian Goddess, 184–208).
“These are the ancient and great sanctuaries of Syria. But as many of them as there are, none seems to me to be greater than those in the Holy City, nor any other temple holier, nor any country more sacred” (De dea Syria10 [trans. Lightfoot, 253]). Lucian's ekphrasis of the central cult is such that the city itself recedes except as a kind of platform for the temple and its festivals.
De dea Syria 60.
For a similar reading of De dea Syria, see Elsner, “Describing Self in the language of Other,” 123–53. This tendency toward hybridity and ambiguity is also true of Syria more broadly. Lucian's description of cults in Syria points to the sort of hybridity of religions and identities that occurred in the second-century Roman world, particularly in the Greek East: “There is another large temple in Phoenicia, one that belongs to the Sidonians. As they themselves say, it is Astarte's—I myself think that Astarte is Selene—but as one of the priests told me, it belongs to Europa the sister of Cadmus” (De dea Syria 4 [trans. Lightfoot, 249]).
De dea Syria 28.
De dea Syria 11 (trans. Lightfoot, 253).
De dea Syria 1–16.
This ambiguity and hybridity is woven into the very characters who are key to one of the holy city's stories of origin, which includes a castrated man who helped in the building of the temple and whose statue stands there “in the shape of a woman but still in the clothing of a man.”
51De dea Syria26 (trans. Lightfoot, 265). Stratonike is ordered by Hera to build her a temple in the Holy City. Upon the order of Stratonike's husband the king, she is accompanied by the beautiful Combabos. Sensing what might happen on the trip, Combabos “unmanned himself,” yet Stratonike still fell in love with him; his severed testicles, resting back home in a small casket with myrrh, honey, and other spices, serve as proof to the king of the innocence of his relationship with Stratonike. The story offers an etiology for ongoing sexual ambiguity in the city. Lucian slyly reports: “This sort of love exists in the Holy City and still endures today: women desire galli and galli go mad for women, but no one is jealous and they believe the thing to be entirely sacred” (22; trans. Lightfoot, 263).
De dea Syria 32 (trans. Lightfoot, 269). The statue itself embodies many things not only in its ambiguous reference to Hera, but also in its materials, which include precious stones “sent by Egyptians, Indians, Aethiopians, Medes, Armenians, and Babylonians” (32).
) by the Assyrians themselves, who have not given it a name of its own, nor have they anything to say about its place of origin and form.”
53De dea Syria33 (trans. Lightfoot, 271). See also the unusual bearded Apollo (34–35).
Elsewhere in his corpus, Lucian's mappings are again particularly focused on cities and ethnicities, and even more particularly on the alchemies of their intersections. Again, he is fascinated with the conjoining of things that are or seem different. He is interested in how Syrians, for example, perform in Athens, and how Greek identity performs in Rome. The former situation is played out in The Dead Come to Life (Revivescentes sive Piscator).54
It is particularly interesting to look at Revivescentes sive Piscator, since it performs a situation so often associated with Christian apologetic: trial and defense. The theme is also evidenced in The Double Indictment(Bis accusatus), which is set in Athens, on the Areopagus. A rhetor, called only “the Syrian,” is called up to trial for having offended both Rhetoric and Dialogue. The real offence, it seems, is the hybridizing of genres and the bringing of humor into dialogues. Regarding genre-mixing in Lucian, see, e.g., Branham, “Introducing a Sophist,” 237–43.
Lucian, Revivescentes sive Piscator 19 (trans. Harmon, LCL, 3.31). Revivescentes sive Piscator claims to respond to complaints about Philosophies for Sale(Vitarum auctio); in this earlier writing, Lucian had depicted various philosophical lives as being up for sale; in Revivescentes sive Piscator, the philosophers themselves seem to rise from the dead to protest Lucian's cheap sale of their philosophical approaches. Lucian also treats the theme of philosophy, the city of Athens, and the foreigner in his discussion of Anacharsis in The Scythian(Scytha)—a work in which, according to Hartog, Lucian himself is working out issues of paideia and patronage (Memories of Odysseus, 114). In Scytha 5, the city of Athens with all its seductive paideia-filled charms, and all of the glories of Greece, are walled within one man, Solon; to have seen Solon is to have seen all Athens.
Revivescentes sive Piscator 31 (trans. Harmon, LCL, 3.47). Although Lucian is interested in arguments about the difference between rhetoric and philosophy, and although he caricatures differences in philosophical schools and figures, ultimately he sees all philosophy as capable of unity: all who are not seeking for wealth and false claims to philosophy are truth-seekers. On wearing philosophical gear without deserving the name of philosopher, see Justin, 1 Apol. 4. In the Dialogue with Trypho Justin is recognized as a philosopher because of what he wears.
See especially the account of the second part of the trial, where “philosophers” are lured for judgment by the promise of gifts.
While The Dead Come to Life depicts Athens simultaneously as the polis of true philosophy and of fake philosophy, Nigrinus, set in Rome, offers a less ambivalent picture of Athens. It begins by measuring in terms of true paideia the distance on the map between Rome and Athens. Lucian writes, “The talk began with praise of Greece and of the people of Athens.” Athens is here praised not as a magnet of false philosophy, but as the ultimate philosophical and pedagogical city: when the nouveau riche enter, Athenians gently correct by mocking displays of wealth, and “disciplining” with “public education.”58
Lucian, Nigrinus (trans. Harmon, LCL, 1.113). For more on Rome and Lucian, see Whitmarsh, Greek Literature and the Roman Empire, chap. 5, especially for a discussion of the complexity of Lucian's construction of Rome in Nigrinus and its pair, the Apology, in which Lucian somewhat apologizes for his critique of the patronage system (291–93). Whitmarsh also discusses the difficulties of reading Nigrinus because of its complicated literary frame (265–79).
Nigrinus (trans. Harmon, LCL, 1.117, slightly modified).
Nigrinus(trans. Harmon, LCL, 1.125).
Rome is not only a center for dangers, temptations, and potential pollutions; it is also the site of a kind of voluntary slavery for philosophers hawking Greekness.61
Voluntary entry into a salaried post for a rich patron leads only to servitude: “Remember never again … to think yourself free or noble. All that—your pride of race, your freedom, your ancient lineage—you will leave outside the threshold, let me tell you, when you go in after having sold yourself into such servitude” (Lucian, De mercede conductis 23 [ On Salaried Posts; trans. Harmon, LCL, 3.449]).
On paideia allowing for a claim to Hellenic identity, see Hall, Hellenicity, 223–26.
Oratio ad Graecos 1.3 (trans. Whittaker, 5).
De mercede conductis 10 (trans. Harmon, LCL, 3.431).
De mercede conductis17 (trans. Harmon, LCL, 3.441).
[A]s you have a long beard, present a distinguished appearance, are neatly dressed in a Greek mantle, and everybody knows you for a grammarian or a rhetorician or a philosopher … it will make people think him a devoted student of Greek learning and in general a person of taste in literary matters. So the chances are, my worthy friend, that instead of your marvelous lectures it is your beard and mantle that you have let for hire.66
De mercede conductis 24 (trans. Harmon, LCL, 3.455).
Eventually, Lucian claims, the philosopher will become part of a Roman-owned collection, one among many performers for the rich Roman patron, juxtaposed perhaps with “an Alexandrian dwarf who recites Ionics.”67
De mercede conductis 23 (trans. Harmon, LCL, 3.459). See also Whitmarsh, Greek Literature and the Roman Empire, 280, on how this work maps power and the Roman house; Whitmarsh also states with regard to another writing, Somnium: “[I]t is notable, however, that Paideia offers a success premised entirely upon appearance [
]: the attraction is that he will be ‘in good repute’ [
] and ‘regarded’ [
]. The splendid clothing he will wear suggests concealment and deceit” (123), but his conclusion that “ paideia “ does not simply realize innate destiny: it transforms the subject, crossing sociocultural barriers” (124) does not sufficiently account for Lucian's ambivalence and mockery of paideia elsewhere in his corpus.
Some scholars understand the Roman Empire to have generously incorporated and given voice to a figure like Lucian.68
“It marks a certain degree of cultural self-confidence when a system such as the Roman empire can not only incorporate ‘foreigners’ like the Gallic eunuch Favorinus or the Syrian ‘barbarian’ Lucian among its major Greek writers but can also give the ‘other’ a critical voice in commenting on its own customs and attitudes” (Ja Elsner and Joan-Pau Rubiés, “Introduction,” in Voyages and Visions: Towards a Cultural History of Travel [ed. eidem; London: Reaktion, 1999] 10–11). While I agree with Swain's comment that “Lucian's attitude towards Rome is complex,” I disagree with his overall characterization of Lucian: e.g., “For most of the time Lucian's adopted cultural identity as a Hellene did not clash with his loyalties to Rome's Empire. But in cases where Greek culture was abused by Roman power, it is clear where he stood” (Greek Literature in the Roman Empire, 329). I think that Lucian is far more complex than this.
Tatian
Nobody likes Tatian. Eusebius, citing Irenaeus, says that Tatian introduced the “blasphemy” of Encratism.69
Eusebius, Historia ecclesiastica 4.29. Later, Eusebius is more positive in his representation of Tatian and lumps him with Justin, Miltiades, Clement, and others who speak of Christ as God (5.28.4). Eusebius considers Tatian's Oratio ad Graecos (and, incidentally, his Diatessaron) to be useful and appropriate (4.29.7).
Jerome, In epistulam ad Titum, praef; cited in Whittaker, Tatian: Oratio ad Graecos and Fragments, 83. Epiphanius calls the Encratites “Tatian's successors” (Pan. 47.1.1); translated in The Panarion of Epiphanius of Salamis (trans. Frank Williams; 2 vols.; New York: E. J. Brill, 1987–1994) 2.3. Tatian is famed and maligned for at least three things: first, for his Diatessaron, a gospel harmony; second, for being the founder of Encratism, which is understood as heresy; and third, for the bitterness of his late-second-century Oratio ad Graecos—the only of Tatian's works to survive in its original form. L. W. Barnard (“The Heresy of Tatian—Once Again,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 19 [1968] 1–10) reads Tatian's detractors uncritically and seeks to secure a timeline of the evolution of Tatian's “heretical” thought—that is, his Encratism—and the writing of his Oratio ad Graecos. Others read Tatian as tainted by his “Oriental” background; for a critique of this approach, see Lampe, From Paul to Valentinus, 290. On the dating of Oratio ad Graecos, see G. W. Clarke, “The Date of the Oration of Tatian,” HTR 60 (1967) 123–26, who argues that it may not be as late as 177 C.E.., as R. M. Grant has dated it.
Whittaker, Tatian: Oratio ad Graecos and Fragments, xiv–xv. Elsewhere, Whittaker proves herself slightly more a champion for Tatian: “Tatian is not an Oriental with an inferiority complex; the differentiation is one of culture, not of race” (“Tatian's Educational Background,” 59). For a newer champion of Tatian that takes him seriously in his context, see Emily J. Hunt, Christianity in the Second Century: The Case of Tatian (New York: Routledge, 2003).
On Tatian as Justin's student, as an apologist, and as a heretic, see, e.g., Barnard, “The Heresy of Tatian—Once Again.”
This reading of Tatian does serious injustice to the passion and humor of To the Greeks. Tatian's over-the-top critique of the Greeks is not the product of embarrassingly angry Christian apologetic, but draws upon satirical conventions of the second sophistic.
73On Tatian's education, see Lampe, From Paul to Valentinus, 285–90, where he argues that Tatian is less educated in philosophy than Justin, but more educated in classical literature and in rhetoric. Lampe asserts that Tatian was influenced by the famous sophist Dio of Prusa (pp. 287–88). On Tatian as a sophist, see Whittaker, “Tatian's Educational Background,” 57.
) whom he addresses. Like Lucian he makes himself into a kind of misunderstood Anacharsis: “You, who don't curse the Scythian Anacharsis now, also shouldn't be indignant at being educated by those who follow a barbarian code of laws.”
74Oratio ad Graecos 12.5 (my translation).
While the genre of Tatian's work remains elusive,75
Michael McGehee (“Why Tatian Never ‘Apologized’ to the Greeks,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 1 [1993] 143–58) has argued that the Oratio is protreptikos, advertising to students Tatian's philosophical stance and rhetorical skills. Molly Whittaker, too, understood Oratio ad Graecos as hortatory, but pointed to a different audience: “[H]is main concern is to urge pagan readers to leave the error of their ways in order that they may turn to the truth” (Oratio, xv). Robert Grant argued that Tatian's oration takes the form of a “ logos syntaktikos or ‘farewell discourse’ to the culture of Greece and Rome”; but instead of offering praise, as one usually would, Tatian inverts praise into
, “blame, censure” (“Five Apologists and Marcus Aurelius,” Vigiliae Christianae 42 [1988] 12). See, however, Annewies van den Hoek's “Apologetic and Protreptic Discourse in Clement of Alexandria” (in La littérature apologétique avant Nicée. Entretiens sur l'antiquité classique[ed. A. Wlosok; Vandœuvres-Genève: Fondation Hardt, forthcoming]), where she points out that protreptic is not a genre in antiquity. Part of the problem of identifying the genre of Tatian's work (and thus of understanding its tone) may be the tendency of writers of the second sophistic to mix genres, as we saw with Lucian.
Cicero, in the The Making of an Orator (De oratore), states that “all … who tried to teach anything like a theory or art of this matter [humor] proved themselves so conspicuously silly that their very silliness is the only laughable thing about them. That is why I think this accomplishment cannot possibly be imparted by teaching” (2.54.217–218; in Cicero [trans. Sutton and Rackham, LCL, 3.359]). On humor, rhetoric, and Lucian, see also R. Bracht Branham, “Authorizing Humor: Lucian's Demonax and Cynic Rhetoric,” Semeia 64 (2001) 33–48. Within Oratio ad Graecos there are many references to laughter and joking (e.g., 1.3, 2.3, 3.1, 17.1).
Oratio ad Graecos 30.1–2 (my translation). On Tatian's “conversion,” see Laura Nasrallah, “The Rhetoric of Conversion and the Construction of Experience: The Case of Justin Martyr,” in Studia Patristica 18: Papers Presented at the Fourteenth International Conference on Patristics Studies held in Oxford, 2003 (ed. E. J. Yarnold and M. F. Wiles; Leuven: Peeters, forthcoming).
Elsewhere, Tatian rhetorically turns as if to face an audience that does not understand which parts of his speech are funny and which are not. In a section on demons and disease, he states: “And you, if you do not stop your laughter, will enjoy the same punishment as the sorcerers. Therefore, O Greeks, listen to me when I issue my platform call, and do not in mockery transfer your own irrationality to the herald of truth” (Oratio ad Graecos 17.1 [trans. Whittaker, 35]).
With his biting critique of Greekness, Tatian maps his understanding of the Roman Empire, discussing not only his homeland and the travels he has made, but also constructing a topography of the relative values of knowledge in these regions, and of the peaks and valleys of epistemic violence. Tatian, moreover, directly engages geographical (and thus also what we would call astronomical) theories of the time, in a passage where he points to the superior knowledge of the (barbarian) prophets:
For heaven … is not infinite, but bounded and within a limit; and above this one are better worlds which have no change of season… but experience a wholly good climate and have a permanent day and light inaccessible to people from here. Now those who worked out geographies described the regions, as far as is humanly possible, but since they could not speak of the ones beyond, because they could not see them, they claimed that there were tides, and seas leek-green and muddy, and one area burning hot while another was cold and frozen.79
Oratio ad Graecos 20.2–3 (trans. Whittaker, 41). See Lampe, From Paul to Valentinus, 429, for a list of geographers to whom Tatian alludes.
The overlap between ethnic identity, geographical thinking, and knowledge becomes clear at important moments in his text at the beginning and end. Tatian ends To the Greeks in this way: “All this, men of Greece, I have compiled for you—I Tatian, a philosopher among the barbarians, born in the land of the Assyrians, and educated first in your learning and secondly in what I profess to preach.”80
Oratio ad Graecos 42.1 (trans. Whittaker, 77).
Oratio ad Graecos 1.1 (my translation).
Oratio ad Graecos 1.1–2.
With these pendants, we can see how Tatian dives into the contemporary culture wars; he addresses Hellnes and critiques them, putting them in their place as inferior to the so-called barbarian culture that, despite their sneers, the Greeks appropriate. Thus, his opening statement ossifies the categories of Greek and barbarian, but then immediately questions those same categories. Taking up the long tradition of discussing “barbarian” or foreign influences on Greek knowledge, Tatian argues that on every level Greekness itself is a fiction, born of miscegenation: Greek language appropriates words from other languages and dialects from other cultures.83
Strabo, too, admits that Greek language appropriates others' terms; see Geogr. 14.2.28. See also his intriguing comment (in a different context) about mixing in 14.5.25 (trans. Sterrett and Jones, LCL, 6.365): “And who are the ‘mixed’ tribes? For we would be unable to say that, as compared with the aforesaid places, others were either named or omitted by him [Apollodorus] which we shall assign to the ‘mixed’ tribes; neither can we call ‘mixed’ any of these peoples themselves whom he has mentioned or omitted; for, even if they had become mixed, still the predominant element has made them either Hellenes or barbarians; and I know nothing of a third tribe of people that is ‘mixed’.” This reference to a
is especially intriguing given Christian uses of that appellation. For a different direction in interpreting Geogr. 14.2, see Eran Almagor, “Strabo's Barbarophonoi(14.2.28 C 661–3): A Note,” Scripta Classica Israelica 19 (2000) 133–38.
If scholars refer to Tatian at all, other than to point to the rabidity of his prose or to his purported role as founder of the Encratites, they often mention his “conversion” and that he, like Justin, was attracted to Christianity through reading the Scriptures. Tatian frames the end of his journey for truth in terms of the antiquity, divinity, and simplicity of wording of “barbarian writings.”84
Oratio ad Graecos29.1.
In this passage on Tatian's apprehension of truth, Tatian's introductory themes of the false pretensions of Attic purity and the “arrogant and crazy talk” of pseudophilosophers
85Oratio ad Graecos 3.3, where we find a pun on philopsophos. While Justin, as we shall see, applied the term to Crescens, Tatian here contrasts it explicitly with (true) philosophers.
), is that those who consider themselves Greeks have mixed with expressions that are not “akin” (
)
86He precedes this by saying that he does not know “whom to call a Greek” in light of so many regional variations in Greek (Oratio ad Graecos 1.3 [trans. Whittaker, 5]).
Oratio ad Graecos 25–26. See sections 1–2 for the opposite ordering of argument. For Tatian, philosophy and language are always linked.
conjures up a ritual parade of prisoners and spoils of war—verbal pillaging. “Stop decorating yourselves with feathers that aren't your own, as if you're a jackdaw!” he says, using an image of linguistic pretension that also appears in Lucian.
88Tatian continues: “Why do you assert that wisdom is yours alone? … The grammarians have been the origin of your nonsense…. You are puffed up with opinions, but you are humiliated by misfortunes; you abuse beyond reason figures of speech…. Why do you get ready for a war of letters? Why, like boxers, do you strike together their pronunciations through Athenian stammerings, when it's right to speak more naturally? For if you atticize but aren't an Athenian, tell me why you don't ‘doricize’? Why does it seem to you that one [dialect] is more barbarian, while the other is more satisfactory for communication?” (Oratio ad Graecos 26.2–4; my translation). For second-sophistic play with dialect, see, e.g., De dea Syria, discussed above.
Oratio ad Graecos27.1. See also his critique of the fact that some philosophers receive salaries from the Roman emperor (19).
Tatian mocks Greek myths and superstitions and particularly critiques what we might call “ancient pluralism.” In the context of thinking about apology, it is interesting to note that Tatian employs the language of the courtroom to condemn the pluralism which undergirds “their” legislation: “Therefore I lay a verdict against your legislation. There should be a common constitution for all. But now, there are as many legal positions as there are kinds of cities, and what is considered shameful by some is considered good by others” (Oratio ad Graecos 28.1 [my translation]). For a different take on the theme of legal diversity in the Roman empire, see Athenagoras, Supp. 1, which indicates that the multiplicity of legal systems in the Roman empire marks Roman tolerance.
As part of his story of conversion, Tatian adopts another theme of the second sophistic: that of the traveler or ethnographer.91
The theme of the traveler in Greek literature of course predates the second sophistic. See Hartog, Memories of Odysseus, which traces these traditions. But the second sophistic, with its strong antiquarian interests, and its love of Homer, is particularly interested in picking up this ancient discursive thread. Its detractors, too, imitate and satirize the theme of travel. Lucian of course “describes” fantastic journeys to the moon, among other places, in Vera historia. See also Elsner and Rubiés's introduction to Voyages and Visions, 10–11, 15. Regarding philosophers/rhetors and exile and travel, see Whitmarsh, “‘Greece is the World,’” 269–305.
John Elsner, “Pausanias: A Greek Pilgrim in the Roman World,” Past and Present 135 (1992) 3–29. See also James I. Porter, “Ideals and Ruins: Pausanias, Longinus, and the Second Sophistic,” in Pausanias: Travel and Memory in Roman Greece (ed. Susan Alcock et al.; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001) 63–92; and Ian Rutherford, “Tourism and the Sacred: Pausanias and the Traditions of Greek Pilgrimage,” in the same volume, p. 45.
Geographical thinking infuses Tatian's tour; in reading these passages we are reminded of Pausanias, but even more of Claudius Ptolemy, the second-century C.E. geographer and astronomer famous for his cool mathematical calculations of the cosmos, who also wrote the Tetrabiblos, a book of what he calls “astronomical prognostication.” In this work, some of his references both to customs and to the effect of the fixed stars and planets upon various ethnicities remind one of Tatian's characterization of various nations. See, e.g., Tetrabiblos 4.10.
Oratio ad Graecos 28–29.1.
Oratio ad Graecos 29.1–2 (my translation). See also Dial. 8. And if we look more carefully, we see that Justin moved to this singular and true philosophy not by reading the prophets, but by their mere mention (Dial. 7). See also Tatian's critique of grammarians and of misuses of language in Oratio ad Graecos 26. On the topos of barbarians speaking simple truth, see Hartog, Memories of Odysseus, 112.
Oratio ad Graecos 29.1, 2.
In To the Greeks, Tatian also deploys one of the rhetorical techniques of the second sophistic: ekphrasis, or narrative description. Pausanias and Lucian, among others, describe statues and buildings in detail, in part to demonstrate the scope of their knowledge and the power of their rhetoric to recreate in words the skilled lineaments of artwork.97
See Jaś Elsner, Art and the Roman Viewer: The Transformation of Art from the Pagan World to Christianity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995) 15–124. On Lucian's anxieties about art and ekphrasis, see Gregory W. Dobrov, “The Sophist on His Craft: Art, Text, and Self-Construction in Lucian,” Helios 29 (2002) 173–92.
See the interesting analysis of Whitmarsh, Greek Literature and the Roman Empire, 122–24.
See Oratio ad Graecos 33–34; the last quotation is from 34.1.
I set forth these things, not having learned them from another, but having haunted much of the earth. I played the part of the sophist, using your goods. I met with much art and many ideas. Finally, having spent time in the city of the Romans, I thoroughly learned about the varied statues which they brought back from you as theirs. For I do not try, as is the custom of many, to strengthen with others' opinions my own, but I wanted to compile a record of all these things which I myself directly apprehended…. Therefore, saying goodbye to Roman arrogance and Athenian nonsense—incoherent teachings—I sought after what you say is a barbarian philosophy. Don't scorn our paideia nor busy yourself with a quarrel directed against us, full of nonsense and coarse jesting, saying, “Tatian is instituting anew barbarian doctrines, over and above the Greeks and the countless mass of those who philosophize!”100
Oratio ad Graecos 35.1 (my translation).
Tatian here places himself in the midst of the rhetorical conventions of the second sophistic and, like others, critiques its shallowness.
101Tatian uses the familiar argument that Moses is older: “So it is clear from the preceding arguments that Moses is older than heroes, cities, demons. We should believe one who has priority in time in preference to Greeks who learned his doctrines at second hand. For with much labour their sophists tried to counterfeit all they knew from Moses' teaching and from those who philosophized like him” (Oratio ad Graecos 40.1 [trans. Whittaker, 73]).
). He also offers a particularly biting comment “to the Greeks”: he learned Greek paideia and their patrimony by visiting Rome, where one can find Greek statuary, now spoils of war.
102And as we learn elsewhere in Oratio ad Graecos, in Rome one can also find philosophers salaried by the Roman emperor “for no useful purpose but that they may even be paid for letting their beards grow long” (19.1 [trans. Whittaker, 39]).
Earlier, Tatian provided a laundry list of shocking habits of Greeks, Romans, and others. This list should not be read as pure venom against “pagan” religion, but rather alongside the above passage as a mockery of the conventions of contemporary travel or ethnographic literature and as engaged in discussion with other writers who employ geographical thinking. Lucian did the same. Tatian, like Pausanias, presents himself as a traveler in the culturally elite realms of the Roman Empire. He frames the equivalent of a “Grand Tour” of his time not in terms of a description of piety, history, cult, or aesthetics, but in terms of cultic oddities and shame, insult and comparison. Tatian's travels, whether in his imagination or in reality, have allowed him to see how language, philosophy, geography, and paideia are conjoined. “What is the benefit of Attic style and sorites of philosophers and plausabilities of syllogisms and measurement of the earth and positions of stars and courses of the sun? For to be engaged in such investigation is the work of one who frames his own teachings as law.”103
Oratio ad Graecos 27.3 (my translation).
Throughout, Tatian's focus is on the Greek paideia and identity that elite Romans adore and seek to appropriate, and which Greek elites configure and market for their own and others' consumption. Like other writers of the second sophistic, Tatian meditates upon Greekness. And like his contemporary Lucian, he meditates upon Greekness in part in order to mock it, but he does so while using its tools and topoi with great sophistication. In Tatian's geographical thinking, Rome is important both as the guarantor of the authenticity of Tatian's view and as a scavenger city, location of the prizes of Greek cultural identity. But Tatian inverts the traditional importance of travel to Rome—with the prestige and higher speaking fees that this trip often yielded to a rhetor or teacher104
Hartog, Memories of Odysseus, 193. See below, p. 308.
Justin Martyr
Justin, writing in the mid-second century, begins both the First and the Second Apologies by marking Rome as the center of his map, both in terms of its political and philosophical importance. The First Apology starts:
To the Emperor Titus Aelius Adrianus Antoninus Pius Augustus Caesar, and to his son Verissimus the Philosopher, and to Lucius the Philosopher, the natural son of Caesar, and the adopted son of Pius, a lover of learning, and to the sacred Senate, with the whole People of the Romans, I, Justin, the son of Priscus and grandson of Bacchius, from the city of Flavia Neapolis in Syria Palestine, have made this address and petition on behalf of those of every race who are unjustly hated and abusively threatened, myself being one of them.105
1 Apol. 1.1 (my translation). See Thomas B. Falls, Writings of Saint Justin Martyr (Fathers of the Church; New York: Christian Heritage, Inc., 1948) 33, n. 1: Palestina was used as an adjective limiting the region of Syria to its eastern parts. Unless otherwise noted, all translations of Justin will be from Falls. I use the Greek editions of Miroslav Marcovich, Iustini Martyris Apologiae Pro Christianis (Berlin: W. de Gruyter, 1994).
Thus, unlike Lucian and Tatian, whose critiques of Rome are scathing, and whose geographical thinking tends to center on their barbarian home, Justin's Apologies emphasize Rome's centrality. He appeals to this center's claims to tolerance and addresses himself to Rome as one of its provincial elites, speaking the common language of Greek, of privileged philosophy, and of Roman subject-hood.106
In doing so, Justin participates in a long and continuing tradition of provincial/Greek elites who address themselves to Rome, such as Polybius, Josephus, and Aelius Aristides. Rebecca Lyman has argued in the context of her larger discussion of the creation of “orthodoxy”: “Justin's intellectual hybrid reflected his own attempt as a Christian provincial and a philosopher to portray universal truth within the cultural traditions of the second century” (“Hellenism and Heresy: 2002 NAPS Presidential Address,” 220; see also 221). Athenagoras Supp., esp. 1, 6, 37, presents a similar appeal to the Roman imperial family's piety and policies of toleration.
A thin wire of violence threads through the introductions to Justin's First and Second Apologies.
107The actual audience of Justin's Second Apology, which was probably written between 150 and 155 C.E.. as a part of the First Apology, is elusive, but it has the same inscribed audience as the First Apology, and it makes brief reference to its audience as the Romans and the emperor. See Marcovich, Iustini Martyris Apologiae Pro Christianis, 1–10; and Eric Osborn, Justin Martyr (Tübingen: Mohr/ rSiebeck, 1973) 10–11; but see, also, Goodenough, Theology of Justin Martyr, 84–87.
) by remaining with her abusive non-Christian husband in the hopes of persuading him to amend. Not only that, but she is forced into court proceedings when her husband accuses her of being a Christian. Her appeals to the emperor for time to prepare a defense ultimately result in the arrest (and imprisonment and punishment) of three others (her teacher, and two Christian bystanders), in a kind of domino effect of witness to Christianity. Lucius, one of the arrested, addresses the prefect: “Your judgment is not fitting to the Emperor Pius, nor to the philosopher, Caesar's son, nor to the sacred Senate!”
108Justin, 2 Apol 2.16 (my translation).
With the story of this Christian woman, Justin offers an illustrative and sharp situation of apologia within his own apologia. Moreover, he nicely dodges the need to critique the emperors directly by putting his assessment in another's mouth; it is Lucius who cries out that due process and imperial piety and philosophy are not being served by the courts. Similarly, by using the phrase “she does violence to herself,” Justin points to Rome as a location of violence, but avoids directly accusing the city of effecting violence. Yet in the First Apology, Justin directly states that “the rulers should give their decision in obedience, not to violence and tyranny, but to piety and philosophy.”109
1 Apol. 3.2;
. In the same passage, Justin alludes to Plato's Republic in which all rulers in the ideal city are philosophers; see Marcovich, Iustini Marturis Apologiae Pro Christianis, 35.
1 Apol. 5 (trans. Falls, 38): “And not only among the Greeks were these things through Socrates condemned by reason [ logos], but also among the non-Hellenic peoples by the Logos Himself, who assumed a human form and became man, and was called Jesus Christ.” Justin also presents himself as a kind of Socrates in 2 Apol. 3, where he says that he thoroughly examined Crescens and found that Crescens knew nothing.
Justin thus takes up Roman imperial propaganda about the emperor's household as philosophical, pious, and peaceful, and places Rome at the center of his plea that the empire live up to its own claims. But elsewhere in the Second Apology, it becomes clear that the very claim to philosophy can itself become a cause for violence in Rome, given the ongoing culture wars. “I too,” Justin writes, “expect to be plotted against and fixed to the stake, by some of those I have named, or perhaps by Crescens, that philopsophos and philokompos, lover of noise and din.”111
2 Apol. 3.1 (my translation). Tatian, too, uses the term philopsophoi in contrast to those who truly seek truth, as we have seen (Oratio ad Graecos 3.3). Moreover, he represents Rome as dimly open to violence, with his mention of Crescens's threats to Justin. The third-century account of Justin's martyrdom places it in Rome.
Hartog, Memories of Odysseus, 193.
On Crescens, see 2 Apol. 11.4 (also Tatian, Oratio ad Graecos 19.1 = Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 4.16.8–9).
Oratio ad Graecos 19.
Recensions of the martyrdom of Justin and his companions can be found in Herbert Musurillo, Acts of the Christian Martyrs (Oxford: Clarendon, 1972) 42–61. Lampe treats the Acta Iustini as if they offer a fairly straightforward account of events and yield prosopographical evidence regarding Christianity in Rome (From Paul to Valentinus, 276–79).
The defiant Christian response that Justin offers in the Apologies addresses civil injustice, yet implicitly praises the imperial family and the Senate, and confirms Rome's central place on the map: a location where violence is possible and likely, but where redress and justice are sought. Ashis Nandy asks, “Has the dominant idea of metropolitan civility, grounded in the vision of the European Enlightenment, itself been in league with that hidden record of violence?”116
Ashis Nandy, Time Warps: Silent and Evasive Pasts in Indian Politics and Religion (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2002) 219.
The Dialogue with Trypho, in contrast, offers an understanding of the world that differs from the Apologies. This is due in part to the texts' differences in genre: the Apologies take the form of an appeal and a direct address, while the Dialogue takes up the conventions of a philosophical dialogue. It is also due to the different implied audiences: the Apologies at least claim for their audience non-Christians in Rome, while the Dialogue has no clearly inscribed audience.117
Most hypothesize that the Dialogus is written for Christians or for proselytes who are wavering between Christianity and Judaism. Regarding the debate on audience for Dialogus cum Tryphone(Dial.), see Graham N. Stanton, “‘God-Fearers’: Neglected Evidence in Justin Martyr's Dialogue with Trypho,” in Early Christianity, Late Antiquity, and Beyond (ed. T. W. Hillard et al.; vol. 2 of Ancient History in a Modern University; Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1998) 43–52; see also his “Justin Martyr's Dialogue with Trypho: group boundaries, ‘proselytes’ and ‘God-fearers’,” in Tolerance and Intolerance in Early Judaism and Christianity (ed. Graham N. Stanton and Guy G. Stroumsa; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983) 275–78; Rajak, “Talking at Trypho,” 75–80; Judith Lieu, Image and Reality: The Jews in the World of the Christians in the Second Century (London: T&T Clark, 1996) 104–9 (she calls it a “bridge” audience). Marcovich states, “It is for such a group of Gentiles leaning towards Judaism that the treatise is primarily intended” (Iustini Martyris Dialogus cum Tryphone, 64–65).
On Justin's rhetoric of Christian universality and Jewish particularity, see Denise Kimber Buell, “Rethinking the Relevance of Race for Early Christian Self-Definition,” HTR 94 (2001) 465; eadem, “Race and Universalism in Early Christianity,” esp. 462–68. See also ch. 3 of her Why This New Race? Daniel Boyarin sees a debate over the Logos as the key to analyzing Dialogus cum Tryphone; see his Border Lines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity (Philadelphia, Pa.: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004) ch. 2, esp. 37–41.
“But we Christians are not only a people, but a holy people, as we have already shown: ‘And they shall call it a holy people, redeemed by the Lord.’ Wherefore, we are not a contemptible people, nor a tribe of barbarians, nor just any nation as the Carians or the Phrygians, but the chosen people of God” (Dial. 119.4 [trans. Falls, 331–32]). In contrast, in the Apologies the categories of barbarian and Christian were sometimes used as overlapping (1 Apol. 5.4; 7.3; see esp. 46.3, where philosophical models are set in parallel: the “barbarian” Abraham, Ananias, and other figures from the Jewish Scriptures are juxtaposed to the “Greeks” Socrates and Heraclitus). On the rhetorical deployment of the categories of the particular and the universal in the construction of early Christian ethnicity, see Buell, Why This New Race? In contrast, see the implicit method of someone like Nock, who, in his Conversion, contrasts universal (prophetic) and particular religion.
Buell, “Rethinking the Relevance of Race for Early Christian Self-Definition,” 465; eadem, “Race and Universalism in Early Christianity,” 462–68.
Although elsewhere in his writings his identity as a Samaritan from Syria-Palestine emerges,121
E.g., 1 Apol. 1.
In addition to this costuming as a Greek philosopher, further elements point to its allusion to themes of the second sophistic. Immediately in the dialogue, there is an allusion to Socratic techniques of questioning, and a reference to Homer (J. C. M. Van Winden, An Early Christian Philosopher: Justin Martyr's Dialogue with Trypho Chapters One to Nine. Introduction, Text and Commentary [Leiden: Brill, 1971] 22).
Dial. 1.3.
Regarding problems in Judea, see also Dial. 9. Judea as a real location is mentioned only sotto voce. As the group moves from one section of the colonnade to another to sit, Trypho turns to a companion to mention the war in Judea; in his introduction of himself, Trypho only alludes to location, referring to having escaped the “ongoing war” (1.3). The violence of the Bar Kokhba revolt is the background noise. See Shelly Matthews's “The Need for the Stoning of Stephen,” in Violence in the New Testament: Jesus Followers and Other Jews Under Empire (ed. eadem and E. Leigh Gibson; New York: T&T Clark International, 2005) 124–39, which discusses a situation analogous to Justin's construction of Trypho: Luke-Acts' construction of Jews as other and barbarous in the story of the stoning of Stephen.
On Justin's “conversion,” see Nasrallah, “The Rhetoric of Conversion and the Construction of Experience.” Attempts to find a concrete historical and geographical setting for this event of “conversion” (e.g., Oskar Skarsaune, The Proof from Prophecy: A Study in Justin Martyr's Proof-Text Tradition: Text-Type, Provenance, Theological Profile [Leiden: Brill, 1987] 245–46) miss the conventionality of the image of the philosophical seeker. Note Rajak's astute observation that “the narrative has to be set up in such a way as to pull the participants into the ambit of philosophy. The Jew is attracted by Justin's garb, and thus Trypho is temporarily constructed as ‘one of us’ ” (“Talking at Trypho,” 64). See also Horner, Listening to Trypho, 73–83, on Justin's self-crafting in relation to the second sophistic.
The Dialogue asserts Justin's universal appeal, but in the present, ties Jews intimately to Jerusalem and its environs. Jerusalem is not just another city, but it is the quintessential city over time, “God's holy mountain” of Zion, where Jesus Christ will appear again and will reign for a thousand years.126
Dial. 80–81, 85.
Dial.17 (trans. Falls, 173).
Indeed the custom of circumcising the flesh, handed down from Abraham, was given to you as a distinguishing mark, to set you off from other nations and from us Christians. The purpose of this was that you and only you might suffer the afflictions that are now justly yours; that only your land be desolate, and your cities ruined by fire; that the fruits of your land be eaten by strangers before your very eyes; that not one of you be permitted to enter your city of Jerusalem.128
Dial. 16 (trans. Falls, 172). Part of this passage is a quotation from Isa 1:7. See also 25–26, 40, 108. Some scholars, however, surprisingly do not recognize the undertones of violence here: Graham Stanton, for example, mentions the “moderate tone of the Dialogue as a whole” (“Other Early Christian Writings: ‘Didache’, Ignatius, ‘Barnabas’, Justin Martyr,” in Early Christian Thought in its Jewish Context [ed. John Barclay and John Sweet; New York: Cambridge University Press, t1996] 188). Demetrios Trakatellis argues that “Trypho was the noble vision of a refined Christian thinker” (“Justin Martyr's Trypho,” HTR 79 [1986] 297). See however, Rajak, “Talking at Trypho,” 60, who rightly understands that the Dialogue does not represent a pleasant exchange.
The Roman Empire's involvement in this violence is not recognized; the word “Rome” does not even appear in the Dialogue.
The Dialogue maps a world where violence is located on the edge, in a region that was once center: the ruined Jerusalem and weakened Syria-Palestine.129
Justin does allude to the future centrality of Jerusalem; see discussion above.
Dial. 1.1.
Dial. 9.3.
Conclusions
This paper has used a framework of geographical thinking to place Justin's and Tatian's references to travel and cities within the broader cultural context of the second sophistic, rather than marginalizing them as Christian apologists.132
Although, note that Martin Elze, while still holding to the category of apologetic, recognizes that Tatian's Oratio ad Graecos is not an apology (Tatian und seine Theologie [Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1960] 41). Johannes Quasten's Patrology ([3 vols.; Utrecht: Spectrum, 1964–1966] 1.186), however, categorizes Justin and Tatian as apologists, and further explains that “with the Greek Apologists the literature of the Church addresses itself for the first time to the outside world and enters the domain of culture and science.” We know, however, that even if Justin inscribes his audience as the Roman emperors and the people of Rome, and even if Tatian inscribes his audience as Greeks, these writings were probably directed to and popular with Christian communities, and inscribe or construct an audience of outsiders in their claim to defend Christianity. See Loveday Alexander, “The Acts of the Apostles as an Apologetic Text,” in Apologetics in the Roman Empire (ed. Edwards et al.) 21–22. My own thinking about defining apologetic was sparked in part by Annewies van den Hoek's “Apologetic and Protreptic Discourse in Clement of Alexandria,” and discussion of this paper at the Boston Patristic Society in September 2004; see also Lyman's “The Politics of Passing,” 43–44. For excellent considerations of the genre of apologetic, see J.-C. Fredouille, “L'apologétique chrétienne antique. Naissance d'un genre littéraire,” Revue des Études Augustiniennes 38 (1992) 219–34 and idem, “L'apologétique chrétienne antique. Metamorphoses d'un genre polymorphe,” Revue des Études Augustiniennes41 (1995) 201–16. Alain Le Boulluec, in De Justin à Irénée (vol. 1 of La notion d'hérésie dans la littérature grecque, IIe I–IIIe I siècles; Paris: Études Augustiniennes, 1985), argues that Justin's apologetic, in fact, invented the category of heresy. On Christian paideia and relations with Greek culture, see the seminal work of Werner Jaeger, such as his Early Christianity and Greek Paideia(Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap, 1961).
Quasten asserted that “we may speak therefore of a Christianization of Hellenism but hardly of a Hellenization of Christianity” (Patrology, 1.188).
In the recent volume Apologetics in the Roman Empire, apologetic is largely understood as a Christian phenomenon; only two of its ten chapters deal with non-Christian sources. Frances Young's learned and useful survey chapter on “Greek Apologists of the Second Century,” discusses only Christian authors, and states that writings like those of Justin and Tatian justify their authors' unpopular decisions to “turn their backs on the classical literature inherited from antiquity … thus abandoning the comfortable ethos of the Graeco-Roman synthesis into which they had been born, nurtured, and educated” (81). But, as we have seen, Justin and Tatian hardly reject “classical literature” or the “Graeco-Roman synthesis.” Some scholarship on apologetic does imply that the boundaries between (Christian) apologists and others are porous. See Robert Grant, Greek Apologists of the Second Century (Philadelphia, Pa.: Westminster, 1988) esp. 9.
Alexander, “The Acts of the Apostles,” 24. Van den Hoek (“Apologetic and Protreptic Discourse in Clement of Alexandria”) questions traditional definitions of apologetic and protreptic. If we try to explore what apologetic might be by searching for apologia and its cognates in what is usually termed early Christian apologetic, we find very little. Tatian's Oratio ad Graecos contains no such terms, and Justin uses apologia or its cognates only once in the Dialogus cum Tryphone, and only four times within his writings altogether.
See Alexander, “The Acts of the Apostles,” 20–21. Justin's first apology echoes aspects of Socrates in Plato's Apology; see especially the notes in volume 1.1 of Johannes Otto's Corpus apologetarum Christianorum saeculi secundi (Wiesbaden: Sändig, 1851–1969).
Van den Hoek reaches this conclusion in her “Apologetic and Protreptic Discourse in Clement of Alexandria.” See especially Hist. eccl. 4.3.
For first uses of apologetic in seventeenth-century English literature, s.v. “apologetic,” “apology,” Oxford English Dictionary. The concern about Hellenism and Christianity has long fuelled the question that scholars bring to the study of Justin—a question that often reveals scholars' anxieties about the relationship between Platonic philosophy and Christian theology in their own times. See Niels Hyldahl, Philosophie und Christentum. Eine Interpretation der Einleitung zum Dialog Justins (Copenhagen: Munksgaard, 1966); and Oskar Skarsaune, “The Conversion of Justin Martyr,” Studia Theologica 30 (1976) 56–59. These two argue that Justin understands there to be a rift between Platonism and Christianity . See Van Winden, An Early Christian Philosopher, 24, for a review of the history of scholarship on Justin's philosopher's cloak, and what it might indicate about the continuity or discontinuity of his relationship with philosophy. For a sophisticated reading of the categories of Christianity and Hellenism as they relate to Justin, see Lyman, “The Politics
In this article, I am engaged in my own shifting of the traditional scholarly map: Justin and Tatian should not be sequestered into Christian apologetic—itself a questionable category, but instead should be read as engaged in the broader cultural conversations, in which Lucian represents one satirical and strong voice. These writings take part in a struggle within (and against) the Roman Empire, whose conquests occurred not only through military means, but also through an uneven policy of tolerance that rewarded and at times demanded assimilation. We have also seen that Justin, Tatian, and Lucian teach us about one use of the sign “barbarian” under this Roman Empire: the person who has mastered Greekness and yet is ambivalent about that mastery.
This article has shown how Justin, Tatian, and Lucian are Vitruvian men in two senses. They remind us of Vitruvius's shipwrecked traveler, at home everywhere in the world with only paideia in hand. They rhetorically construct themselves as wandering truth-seekers from the empire's eastern ranges, struggling with their quests for truth in their common cultural context, and questioning the value of Greek paideia even as they have mastered it. Yet they are also Vitruvian men in that their bodies, which contain the perfect symmetry of their mastery of Greek paideia, become the measure by which they map the world. Because of their proximity to or embracing of barbarian identity, they are vulnerable in the Roman world. In the city of Rome, Justin and Lucian especially are vulnerable to real violence and to violence done to certain kinds of knowledge, and Tatian depicts Greeks as vulnerable to the city of Rome's appropriation of their cultural patrimony.
In addition to using the framework of geography to bring together the mental mappings of Justin, Tatian, and Lucian, three easterners with complex relationships to Greek paideia, this article has sought to complicate the model of center and periphery that is often used to talk about the Roman Empire, instead pointing to the ambiguous and complicated ways in which cities like Rome, Athens, and the barbarian homeland are mapped. It has used this model of mapping and geography in order to investigate how Justin, Tatian, and Lucian, two Christians and one satirist of everything, including Christianity, conceive of cities, geography, and travel under the Roman Empire. Key to their rhetorical constructions of these cities—Jerusalem, Rome, Athens, Hierapolis—is the issue of the dangers of travel, both to body and mind. These writers do not so much fear topomachia in the blank spaces of the map, but rather offer a kind of cartography of epistemic violence across the empire as they question whose sources of knowledge are trammeled and whose are falsely elevated. In the works of Justin, Tatian, and Lucian, the second sophistic's usual elevation of Greek paideia is challenged. Rome is portrayed as complicit in a sometimes violent consumption of purchased paideia and of enslaved goods—both statuary bodies and real live philosophers' bodies. According to all three writers, out of Syria, coded as barbarian, may come a purer, simpler knowledge.
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