If, two thousand years from now, every walking guide to small English market towns, every £1 pamphlet on the historical monuments of parish churches, and every country house guidebook were to be lost, one wonders what the cultural historian of twentieth-century England would make of Osbert Lancaster's Drayneflete Revealed (1949). This po-faced guide to the fictional town of Drayneflete is, in fact, hilariously funny; but the humour is entirely dependent on the reader's familiarity with the kinds of texts that are being sent up. Drayneflete's architectural history, in Lancaster's telling, turns out to be staggeringly boring, the leading local families (the Littlehamptons, Fidgets and de Vere-Tipples) utterly undistinguished, and the town's literary products unreadably awful.Footnote 1 The satire works because all too many English local guidebooks really are exactly like this (or, more precisely, almost exactly like this): painfully earnest attempts to persuade the reader of the deep aesthetic interest and historical import of their mildly underwhelming wares. But for anyone who has not accumulated a knowledge of the wider sub-literary context through interminable Bank Holiday weekends trailing around National Trust properties, I suspect the whole thing would be totally mystifying.
For Roman cultural historians, Lucian's Hippias or The Bath poses a somewhat similar problem. This short text purports to be an encomium of an architect and engineer called Hippias (1–3, 8), with a lengthy ekphrastic description of one of his works, a substantial public bath-house (4–8).Footnote 2 The opening chapters are an elaborate formal eulogy of the architect Hippias (1–3), articulated around the thesis that ‘practice is superior to theory’.Footnote 3 Lucian begins with three illustrations of the thesis in other walks of life (medicine, music, generalship: 1), followed by four historical and mythological examples of ‘practical’ engineers (Archimedes, Sostratos, Thales, Epeios: 2), before finally turning to his main subject, the various excellences of the architect Hippias (3) and a particular construction of his, a bath-house which Lucian claims to have visited recently (4). The remainder of the text is structured as a tour of Hippias’ baths from a visitor's perspective (a logos periêgêmatikos), beginning (after a short account of the site and substructure) with the monumental entrance (5) and finishing (more or less) with the exits (8).Footnote 4 This ekphrasis has attracted a good deal of attention from architectural historians, as the only extant extended description of a Roman bath-complex.Footnote 5
In the high Roman Imperial period, epideictic speeches in praise of bath-houses were a recognized rhetorical genre. ‘Entire speeches’, says Menander Rhetor, ‘can be based on one part of a city; for example, one can deliver a speech on the construction of a single bath-house (ἐπὶ λουτροῦ μόνου κατασκευῇ) or harbour, or on the restoration of some sector of a city.’Footnote 6 Lucian's contemporary Favorinus wrote a work On Bath-houses, whose character is quite unknown (to judge from the title, it was not concerned with a single real-life bath-complex).Footnote 7 We have a host of short verse accounts of bath-houses in both Greek and Latin, the best known being Statius’ and Martial's poems in praise of the baths of Claudius Etruscus at Rome, none of which provides anything like the detailed architectural description which occupies the greater part of Lucian's Hippias.Footnote 8 For us, the trouble is that, since no unambiguously straight-faced Greek or Latin prose encomia of baths (or indeed other public buildings) survive, it is far from easy to judge whether the Hippias is, as it were, the real thing, or a Lancaster-esque parody of the generic quiddities of the real thing.
Until the 1990s, most readers assumed that the text should be read at face value as a serious encomium of a real architect and a real bath-house of the Antonine period.Footnote 9 Yegül seems to have been the first to suggest that the bath-house itself might have been a literary fiction or a composite of several real-life models, though he did not explore the consequences of this for the existence of the architect Hippias.Footnote 10 More radically, Cannatà Fera has argued that the whole text should in fact be read as satirical parody, though her specific interpretation of what is being satirized (luxurious Roman bathing practices) carries little conviction.Footnote 11 Dubel agrees that the Hippias should be read as ironical, but leaves open the question of what precisely the irony might be directed at.Footnote 12 Race thinks that the building and the architect are Lucian's own inventions, but argues that the rhetoric of eulogy has no comic or satiric colouring at all.Footnote 13 Most recently, Guast has suggested that the Hippias should be classified among a group of Lucianic works (including the mock-declamatory Tyrannicide) which ‘fatally undermine various sorts of cultural products by producing imitations that are close to the real thing yet flawed in small but devastating ways’, and which thereby ‘slowly but relentlessly confound our expectations of a genre until the work becomes absurd’.Footnote 14 As will be clear, any consensus about the tone and purpose of the Hippias remains some way off.
That Lucian's bath-house itself is a literary fiction seems highly likely, even if we do not accept the (rather tenuous) scatological and sexual references detected by Cannatà Fera or the satiric cosmic allegory suggested by Thomas.Footnote 15 Lucian has taken some care not to give his reader the slightest hint as to the location of the bath-house, beyond the rather unhelpful detail that it is situated on a steep slope.Footnote 16 The building is eerily empty: it is entirely devoid of people, activities, sculpture (aside from two statues in the frigidarium, 5) or other artworks.Footnote 17 Moreover, in the final sentence Lucian slyly promises his listeners that he is confident they will join him in praising the baths, ‘if the god were ever to give you the chance of bathing there’, εἰ δὲ θεὸς παράσχοι καὶ λούσασθαί ποτε (8)—an odd qualification to include if this were, as it purports to be, an oration delivered about a real urban bath-house.Footnote 18
What about the architect Hippias?Footnote 19 He is introduced by Lucian in the following terms (3):
Among these men [sc. exemplary engineers] we ought also to mention Hippias here, a man of our own day, who in his verbal training can fully match any one of his predecessors you might choose, who is both quick to grasp things and exceptionally clear at expounding them, but who has furnished works greatly superior to his speeches, and has fulfilled the promise of his technical ability, not in those kinds of practical problems in which his predecessors succeeded in achieving pre-eminence, but as the geometers’ catchphrase has it, in accurately constructing the triangle from a given line.Footnote 20 Whereas each of the others sliced off one part of universal knowledge, excelled in that alone, and so won the reputation of being a great man, he is visibly one of the foremost in engineering, geometry, harmonics and music, and despite this displays such mastery in each of these fields as if it were the one and only skill he possessed. It would take no little time to praise his theoretical expertise in rays and refractions and mirrors, and astronomy too, in which he has shown up his predecessors as mere children.
On a superficial level, the list of disciplines in which Hippias is said to have excelled recalls Vitruvius’ recommendations on the architect's educational curriculum (including geometry, music, optics, astronomy).Footnote 21 But in his alleged mastery of so wide a range of technical skills, Lucian's ‘Hippias’ also bears a marked similarity to the polymathic fifth-century sophist Hippias of Elis, who likewise laid claim to mastery across a startling range of theoretical and practical fields. The sophist Hippias’ breadth of expertise is ironically emphasized (and undermined) in Plato's Hippias Minor, in which Hippias is represented as boasting of being ‘the wisest of all men in the greatest number of fields’ (πλείστας τέχνας πάντων σοφώτατος … ἀνθρώπων), among which Plato singles out arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, poetry and prose, rhythm, harmony and letters—a list which closely overlaps with the range of skills which Lucian attributes to the architect ‘Hippias’.Footnote 22 The intellectual versatility of Hippias of Elis is a common theme in authors of the late Republican and Imperial periods (all of whom are apparently drawing on Plato): similar lists of fields are given by Cicero and Philostratus, and Dio Chrysostom takes Hippias as his jumping-off point for his seventy-first discourse, On the Philosopher, which is dedicated to the question of whether the philosopher can reasonably claim to be an expert in every craft.Footnote 23
The similarity between Plato's polymathic Hippias and Lucian's polymathic Hippias has often been noted, but the significance of the link remains elusive. Jones assumes that the architect Hippias was a real person, but suggests that Lucian chose to praise the architect in language that recalled the sophist, ‘as if he tried to blend the two figures together and thus to give the building an aura of antiquity’.Footnote 24 By contrast, Cannatà Fera thinks that Lucian's modelling of the architect Hippias on the fifth-century sophist shows that Lucian's Hippias is an entirely fictitious individual, part and parcel of the Hippias’ wider (if rather hazily defined) ‘ironic and parodic’ character; Race agrees that Lucian's Hippias is fictitious, but (contrary to Cannatà Fera) sees him as an ‘idealized’ figure rather than a satirical one.Footnote 25
I suggest that Lucian has a specific reason for modelling his (wholly fictitious) architect on Hippias of Elis—or, more precisely, on the caricature of Hippias of Elis found in Plato's dialogues. In Plato's Hippias Minor, Socrates illustrates Hippias’ polymathic expertise with the following anecdote: ‘You said that you once went to Olympia with everything you had on your body your own work. First, the ring you were wearing (for you started with that) was your own work, showing that you knew how to engrave rings; another signet was your own work, and a strigil and an oil flask, which you had made yourself. Then you said that you had cut from leather the sandals you were wearing, and that you had woven your cloak and tunic; and what seemed to everyone most remarkable and a display of the greatest wisdom was when you said that the belt of the tunic which you wore was like the expensive Persian ones, and that you had plaited it yourself’ (368c). This story caught the imagination of many later writers, including Cicero, Quintilian (Inst. 12.11.21) and Dio. But the most detailed elaboration of the anecdote is owed to Lucian's near-contemporary Apuleius, in his encomium of Sex. Cocceius Severianus Honorinus, proconsul of Africa in (probably) a.d. 160/1 (Flor. 9.14–29).Footnote 26 Apuleius passes quickly over Hippias’ tunic, belt, cloak, sandals and ring, before lingering in particular detail on the oil flask and the strigil: ‘I have not yet mentioned all that he had, since I will not be shy to mention something he was not shy to display: he announced to a large crowd that he had also crafted for himself the oil flask that he was carrying, elliptical in shape, with smooth edges and slightly convex sides, and in addition a handsome little strigil, with a straight-sided, tapering grip and a curved, grooved blade, so that the grip made the strigil steady in the hand, and the channel allowed the sweat to run off’ (Flor. 9.22–3, transl. C.P. Jones). Apuleius drily goes on to say that he cannot lay claim to such technical skills himself: ‘I purchase my strigil, oil flask and other bathing equipment at the market’ (9.26).
To my mind, it is these two items—Hippias’ home-made oil flask and strigil—which both clinch the link between Lucian's ‘Hippias’ and Plato's literary caricature of Hippias of Elis, and (more importantly) explain the purpose of the allusion. For Apuleius, the culminating piece of evidence for Hippias of Elis’ versatility was the fact that he crafted his own items of rather ordinary everyday bathing equipment; for Lucian, the key illustration of Hippias’ versatility was his design and construction of a rather ordinary bath-house.Footnote 27 The bath-house of Lucian's Hippias is a hyperbolic (and comic) extrapolation from the two modest items of home-made bathing gear in Plato's anecdote in the Hippias Minor.
The humour of Lucian's Hippias, therefore, derives not from any semi-concealed erotic or scatological hints in Lucian's description of the bath-house, still less from any implicit criticism of the Roman practice of public bathing.Footnote 28 Rather, the central point of the text is to dramatize the gradual revelation that this fictive bath-house, praised in such hyperbolic and rhetorically elaborate terms, is a completely standard example of a building-type to be found in any medium-sized city of the Roman world, with no unusual or distinctive features whatsoever—an Antonine Drayneflete, if you like.Footnote 29 Lucian in fact drops strong hints to this effect, through repeated use of the adjectives κοινός ‘commonplace’ and μικρός ‘small, minor’: ‘This particular project is a commonplace one, and very widespread in our own culture today, namely the construction of a bath-house—but even in this commonplace field of expertise, his ingenuity and intelligence are wondrous’ (4); ‘Let no-one suppose that I have chosen to take a minor work as my theme and add adornment to it through my oration; I consider it a sign of no minor wisdom to contrive novel examples of beauty in a commonplace field of endeavour’ (8).Footnote 30 Lucian's decision to model the architect of this building on the sophist Hippias of Elis was a particularly neat choice, since the historical Hippias too—in Plato's hostile account—used the most ‘commonplace’ and ‘minor’ objects to illustrate his polymathic genius, his little oil flask and strigil.
The real point of Lucian's Hippias is to parody the hyperbolic boosterism of contemporary prose encomia of bath-houses and other public works, which (we may infer) claimed that the most tediously standard, flat-pack buildings were truly dazzling masterpieces of design and execution. As with Lancaster's Drayneflete—and as with Lucian's own magnificently straight-faced Encomium of the Fly—the joke lies in the dramatic mismatch between the speaker's earnest over-the-top puffery and the exceedingly mundane object towards which his rhetoric is directed. Hippias of Elis’ disproportionate pride in his modest home-made bathing tools serves as a delightfully sly analogy for the heroic lack of proportion that Lucian shows in his own fictive ekphrasis.
