The subtitle of this book describes its aims better than the main title. It consists of fifteen interconnected chapters, ten of them previously published but now revised, and five new. All concern literary texts, both prose and poetry, over a period of roughly 600 years, from 300 b.c.e. to 300 c.e., though W. considers the Hellenistic period mainly in connection with his arguments for a ‘Jewish Sophistic’ in the last two chapters. The emphasis is not on the more familiar authors or works: there is no Philo or Galen, very little Plutarch, Pausanias or Aelius Aristides, of Philostratus only the Heroicus. The selection reflects W.'s somewhat grandly stated aim: ‘This book does more than simply expand the canon. My aim is to do away entirely with the idea of the culturally central, the paradigmatic, to dispense with hierarchies of cultural value’ (p. 6). The Second Sophistic, defined as ‘Greek literature of the time of the Roman Empire’, ‘has been a modern fantasy projected back on to the ancient world … an impossible idealization of pure, untouched aristocratic Greek tradition’ (pp. 2, 3, cf. 212).
The project is more revolutionary in its programme than in its execution. W. credits only Erwin Rohde for the ‘fantasy’ of the Second Sophistic as an assertion of Hellenism in an age of decadence, a response to Roman power and ‘oriental’ infiltration. E. Bowie in a well-known article, ‘Greeks and their Past in the Second Sophistic’ (Past & Present [1970], strangely absent from W.'s bibliography), reframed the argument in more political terms, proposing that Greek sophists fixed their gaze on the classical past and averted it from the ‘Roman present’, but there have been many arguments for and against Bowie's thesis in the forty-plus years since. If ‘beyond’ in W.'s title means that we are now to move beyond the views of Rohde, or even of Bowie, the exhortation comes too late to be helpful.
Fortunately W. does not spend time on misunderstandings of the term ‘Second Sophistic’, against which he has ‘inveighed … on a number of occasions’ (p. 2). Instead he offers what he calls ‘adventures’, forays into works that do not appear on most graduate or undergraduate reading-lists: Ezekiel's Exagôgê, Philostratus' Heroicus, the Alexander Romance, the poems of Mesomedes. W. does not bully his reader by insisting that his view is the only possible one, but uses phrases such as ‘I think’, ‘It seems to me’, or sentences such as ‘There are different models that we can adopt’ (p. 148), ‘I do in places experiment with possibilities’ (p. 216). The reader has the sense less of following a guide down a pathway than of watching a tree-climber testing the strength of long and sometimes slender branches.
Along the way there are some good and convincing discussions, for example on Mesomedes, considered as a poet writing for performance and perhaps accompanied by a chorus (Chapter 10), and on the opening of Lucian's Zeus Tragôdos (Chapter 11). At other times the branch seems unable to bear the weight put on it. Thus in his last chapter, ‘Adventures of the Solymoi’, W. uses a chain of authors – Homer, Hecataeus, Herodotus, Choerilus of Samos quoted by Aristotle, Tacitus – to argue that the association of the Homeric Solymoi (Il. 6.184, 204) with the Greek name for Jerusalem, Hierosolyma, goes back to Choerilus in the fifth century. There is no reference to the brief and sober section on Choerilus in M. Stern, Greek and Latin Authors on Jews and Judaism 3 (1984), pp. 5–7: ‘the identity of the people Choerilus really had in mind … remains an open question’.
In general, the least successful part of this book is the section that contains the chapter on the Solymi, ‘Beyond the Greek Sophistic’ (Chapters 14 and 15). Here W. conjures up a ‘Jewish Sophistic’, which in his view flourished particularly in Ptolemaic Alexandria and expressed the tension between the Jews' resistance to Graeco-Macedonian rule and their desire to assimilate Greek literary culture. This, he suggests, ‘offers a much better expression of what many critics seek in the Greek Second Sophistic, namely a coherent articulation of subaltern resistance through literature’ (p. 213). But neither this chapter on the Solymi nor the preceding one on Ezekiel's Exagôgê makes a convincing case.
Inscriptions – words written on stone rather than on papyrus or parchment – do not much engage W.'s attention, but a glance at them might have suggested some other avenues. Thus he finds ‘little evidence for a “pagan” Greek readership of Jewish texts’ beyond a well-known citation of Genesis in Pseudo-Longinus (p. 28). Louis Robert has proposed (some would say, proved) that a pupil of Herodes Atticus, Amphicles of Chalcis, borrowed phrases from Deuteronomy to protect a bath-house that he had erected: ‘c'est un témoignage inaperçu de la pénétration monothéíste juive … dans le milieu des rhéteurs, en principe tournés vers le passé hellénique avec toutes ses traditions’ (L. Robert, CRAI [1978], p. 250 = Opera Minora Selecta 5 [1989], p. 706).
Inscriptions also give a glimpse beyond the confines of what is preserved in the corpora of standard authors. Wilamowitz included Nero's speech to the Greeks in his Griechisches Lesebuch (Griechisches Lesebuch 2 [1902], pp. 395–6; J.H. Oliver, Greek Constitutions of Early Roman Emperors [1989], no. 296); more could be added, for instance the late second-century panegyric from Panticapaeum for a successful general (SEG 55, 862), or the speech of a fourth-century sophist at Ephesus (SEG 39, 1193). Consideration of Christian authors might also have helped to look ‘beyond’ the sophists who constitute Philostratus' gallery. B. Winter has argued that Philo and Paul should be seen in this context (Philo and Paul Among the Sophists 2 [2002]). Other candidates for the title of ‘Christian sophist’ are Tatian and Athenagoras; the second, an Athenian contemporary with Aelius Aristides, artfully frames his Plea for the Christians as a petition to Marcus and Commodus, and manages to justify Christianity without ever naming the Founder.
W. hopes that ‘[his] writing is accessible to non-specialists’ (p. 7), but one wonders what such readers will make of ‘honorification’ (p. 155), ‘Hadrianism’ (p. 162), ‘prosography’, a word of his own invention meaning ‘the marked, stylized use of prose’ (p. 190), or phrases such as ‘hypertrophic discursive self-reflexivity’ (p. 189).
These then are ‘adventures’ on which some readers will follow the author, while the less adventurous will prefer to watch from a distance.
