The Second Sophistic has recently enjoyed considerably more interest among classical scholars than in decades before, and this interest has manifested itself in a number of substantial studies published in the last few years. To name just a few: In 1993, Graham Anderson’s Second Sophistic appeared; its superficiality in many aspects,[1] however, served only to whet appetites and not to satisfy them. In 1996, Simon Swain’s much more thorough and solid Hellenism and Empire most of all looked into the question how the enormous literary activity on the Greek side between 50 and 250 AD grappled with the all-pervasive effects of Roman domination in Greek affairs; now, the study written by Schmitz (henceforth S.) approaches the second Sophistic from yet another angle: It tries to show how the cultural activities of the elites of the Greek East of the Roman Empire fitted into a bigger system one of the main functions of which was to uphold the workings of an aristocratic power establishment, in which the exhibition of literary (mainly, rhetoric) culture was to “symbolically” mirror and thus justify the real power structure. To prove this, S. combines an impressive range of ancient sources with interesting modern theories; these, however, may take one too far when the sources are lacking, as the present review will try to show.
The book is divided into seven chapters of substantial length and a short conclusion. The first section of the introductory chapter (9-18) discusses some general features of Imperial Greek (Prose) Literature: the (probably still lingering) disdain with which it was treated in classical studies for a very long time, its most important and prominent genre (the rhetorical declamation or melete), the declaimers and their historian, Philostratus, who coined the term “Second Sophistic”; some good pages are devoted to show that this term, artificial though it may be, nevertheless has a good claim to reflect a real literary-historical phenomenon (14-17). A second section (18-26) deals with a question that has been hotly debated before: whether this Second Sophistic is a remote ivory-tower phenomenon with little or no connections to the real world, or whether those connections existed after all. S. discusses several attempts to prove that there really were such connections, but he—quite correctly—concludes that these attempts account only for a limited amount of Second Sophistic literary production; the biggest part of it really is “weltabgewandt” (detached from the world).
Still, S. does not want to follow E. L. Bowie’s argument that there is simply a kind of resigned escapism and wishful longing for a better past behind all of this, but looks for another explanation, the first outline of which he presents in the important third section of this chapter (26-31: “Symbolic power and its reproduction”). Following the thoughts of the so-called “new historicists” and of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, who stress that cultural phenomena and sociopolitical reality do not exist independently of each other, but constantly influence one another—surely not a very new and revolutionary insight; already Aristotle and the Peripatetics were very much aware of this—, S. insists that Imperial Greek Rhetoric (being the expression of a kind of “symbolic power”) was intimately connected with the political power-structure of the society to which it belonged. Up to this point, things look reasonably straightforward, but then S. goes further and remarks that the culturally dominating stratum of society was very much interested in keeping these connections hidden and developed “strategies” to present its culture as autonomous and independent from the power-structure (28). Immediately afterwards, however, S. hastens to add that the people involved in fact did not employ these “strategies” consciously or as if belonging to a deep-reaching conspiracy; if so, however, it might be better not to use the term “strategy” at all, as that always evokes the presence of a planning master mind (at other places, S. talks of “mechanisms”, a word less prone to misunderstandings). S. adopts Bourdieu’s notion of “habitus” to describe a complex whole of interrelated actions which—though totally unplanned by someone—mysteriously work towards establishing a system of conservatively stabilizing values and attitudes. Isn’t, however, this “habitus” just a convenient term to explain what is really inexplicable and thus does not really explain very much? Unless we want to introduce a metaphysical puller-of-strings, which S. clearly isn’t inclined to do. On this—somewhat shaky—theoretical basis, then, S. wants to present the Second Sophistic within its historical context as a system of interconnected phenomena. Before doing so, he briefly outlines the scope of his study in the last section of the introductory chapter (31-38) and gives good reasons why it will exclude later Antiquity (i.e. the fourth century and beyond) and forms of literature destined for “private consumption” such as the Greek Romance, and why it will concentrate on rhetorical prose exhibited on public occasions.[2]
The second chapter (39-66) deals with the leading class in the Greek cities of the East and with its relationship to Greek paideia. A first section (38-44) describes the oligarchic governing structures within these cities: A group of (not very numerous) leading families, usually supported by the imperial government, determined the direction of local affairs and welcomed this system as both natural and beneficial for everyone. The next section (44-50) looks at the role education had in the eyes of those leading citizens: Apparently, paideia was regarded by them as a natural complement to the other virtues and values they prided themselves on, and even as a useful legitimization of their dominant position; a leading citizen simply had to have the reputation of being highly educated as well. S. cites a few exceptions of this (47-9)[3] as rather proving the rule. The third section (50-63) takes up the important question whether education might also have been a determining factor for upward mobility. In this regard, Bowersock[4] has given an affirmative, Bowie[5] a negative answer; S. comes very much down on Bowie’s side, stressing that excellent education by itself was not (apart from a few exceptions) sufficient to attain a leading position within imperial society (54f.). Further down the social ladder, however, S. is willing to see some potential for upward movement by education: There is evidence that money was to be made by professional teaching (55-58), and S. even envisages a higher social ascent by education over several generations that might eventually bring a family into the leading circles (59, 63). On the other hand, S. well documents that sophists who already belonged to the leading circles took some pains to stress their difference from those moneymaking upstarts (59-61).
Though on the whole this picture seems sound, in some cases the evidence may be more complex than S. makes it appear to be, e.g. in the case of Lucian: S. cites Rhet. praec. 2 as a serious admonition to a young man to get rich by acquiring a rhetorical education (56); he misses, however, the strong ironic undercurrent which undercuts most statements of this essay. Again, from Apologia ch. 15 is cited for the huge wages professional rhetoric might bring; however, S. should also have discussed Apol. 12, where Lucian claims to have reached an extremely high position in the provincial administration of Egypt[6] and moreover, to harbor hopes for getting the governorship of a whole province. Lucian, then, actually seems to portray himself as a selfmade-man who made it from way below to the very top just by paideia.
The concluding section of this chapter (63-66) adds a problematical touch to the picture that has been developed so far: Taking up the question why leading men chose to become sophists at all, S. rejects the answer given by Bowie that this resulted from a strictly personal preference, and argues instead that those members of the leading class who became sophists were somehow “delegated” by their class to legitimize the class’s ruling position by displaying their education. S. even talks of an “act of delegation” (64) and a “contract” (65) between the various members of the upper class, but adds (in a subsequent footnote on p. 65) that we must not understand this as a conscious (even conspiracy-like) decision-making process by this class. But why then use terms which imply exactly this (compare the similarly misleading word “strategies” in the first chapter)? When trying to explain how people really decided to become sophists, S. actually has to take “persönliche Entscheidung” (64), “persönliche Neigungen” (65) into account, i.e. personal preferences, and that is just what Bowie argued; the new historicists and Bourdieu, again, are not much help.
The third chapter tackles the importance of linguistic purity for the Second Sophistic (67-96). A first section (“Artificial Archaizing”, 67-75) establishes—against the already somewhat dated efforts of Higgins[7] and the lukewarm support given to them by Reardon[8]—that there really was a far-reaching classicizing linguistic re-orientation backwards, i.e. towards the main Attic authors of the 5th and 4th century B.C.; S. is not the first to say so, but he probably provides the most comprehensive and convincing arguments yet for refuting Higgins. The second section (“An artificial language”, 75-83) looks more closely at the linguistic situation that existed in the Greek-speaking half of the Empire in the first centuries A.D. and draws attention to the deep divide between uneducated speakers (evidence for them is mostly provided by private letters preserved on papyri, with additional light shed by the Greek lexicographers of the time) and educated ones who had to strive for the highest Atticist standards on formal occasions, but even in more relaxed situations there were plenty of blunders to avoid; the material illustrating this is wide-ranging and well-chosen. The third section (“Language as a sign of education”, 83-91) stresses the fact that a full command of correct Atticist speech was regarded as an indispensable condition for education and that everyone who made blunders in that respect ran the risk of being dismissed as an uneducated bloke who was not entitled to participate in the elite’s cultural discourse. Again, S. displays a well-chosen range of examples of epigraphic and literary texts to illustrate this point; again, one might quarrel only with the statement on p. 85 that the ruling elite was fully able to dictate the norms of linguistic correctness while in fact it had inherited it from earlier times.[9] The last section of this chapter (“The silence of the masses”, 91-96) looks at the other side of the coin, showing that the vast and uneducated majority of population simply lacked the means to acquire the linguistic refinement of the rich and therefore could raise no voice of its own; S. rightly adds that—as far as we know—those masses never really experienced a sense of deprivation regarding this situation and were quite content with the state of things.
The first section of the fourth chapter (“The quest for distinction as an abiding characteristic of Imperial society”, 97-135) establishes that the urban elites lived and moved in a constant spirit of competition among their members, well defined by the terms φιλοτιμία and φιλοπρωτία (97-101); in the second section (“Education as a means of competition”, 101-110) S. demonstrates—again using a welter of inscriptional and literary evidence—that this incessant competition was carried out not only by providing ever new euergesiai for the local community but also by stressing the preeminent degree of education one had attained; especially for the young competition by education was an important factor already in their schooling (108f.). The third section (“Situations of competition”, 110-127) describes a number of typical settings in which competition by education took concrete shape: 1. during festivals of the various cities, which included not only sports competitions, but also ἀγῶνες of prose encomia (110-112); 2. situations of what S. calls “implicit” competition, i.e. single rhetorical performances of sophists that (because of the great similarities in style and subject matter) could be—and were—compared with other performances of other sophists. Frequently, this might actually approach a kind of open rivalry in the debates that usually erupted after such performances about matters of content, of style, and not least of the command of the required Atticist idiom (112-127). From a wide range of sources (lexicographers, rhetoric handbooks, Athenaeus, Lucian, Plutarch, Epictetus, Sextus Empiricus), S. constructs a vivid picture of where the many pitfalls of these debates lay and how sophists tried to avoid them; how they—in order to appear as the most competent extempore speakers—sometimes used rather questionable means (which, when detected, might bring ridicule and opprobrium onto them). S. rightly points out that the many different opinions extant about what constituted the right Atticistic usage imported into such debates a high amount of arbitrariness; not rarely an admixture of brazenness might help to hold one’s own in tense situations. S. then ventures the idea (125) that the many differences and contradictions in Atticist prescriptions might not only derive from the fact that a language norm that was by now half a millennium old could never be revived in full accuracy (so Swain 52f.), but that the resulting uncertainties might actually be intentional (“funktional” he calls it in German). But intentioned by whom? Again, the specter of a far-reaching conspiracy lurks behind this suggestion and makes it sound rather improbable. More convincing is his opinion that these debates not only highlighted the differences between the well-educated participants, but also served to make them feel as members of a more or less homogeneous group that was, after all, able to communicate on such subtle matters. S. discerns a similar aspect in the social situation which he discusses in the next section (“Playful competition”, 127-133): the dinner and symposium which also provided a frame for discussion of language matters among the educated, as various sources (most conspicuously Athenaeus) show. Here the debates might sometimes approach the characteristics of an exam, when a new member of this educated high society had to prove his credentials; more often, however, the symposiasts simply enjoyed their discussion as it assured them of their belonging to the same elite group. A last section of this chapter (“Education as a centripetal force”) draws the conclusion that the paideia displayed during these more or less public occasions not only channeled the rivalries between the single members of this elite into acceptable (and controllable) situations, but also provided a uniting medium which held their centrifugal tendencies in check.
The fifth chapter (136-159) tries to bring out the basically aristocratic nature of the education that was at the heart of the representatives of the Second Sophistic: S. again assembles an impressive array of sources (inscriptional as well as literary) to show that it was very much regarded as an integral part of a noble character and much less as something which could be learned at schools (136-146); again, however, I would question the wisdom of calling this attitude a “strategy” (146) of the elite, as the notion of e.g. καλοκἀγαθία as the ideal of a virtuous personality in all respects, including that of education, is already present in classical times and is therefore of such long standing that it transcends every conscious and planned (even conspiratorial) activity which the word “strategy” implies. A second section (146-152) plausibly argues that this educational ideal was additionally defined by creating the counter-image of the pedant (often denoted by the word ὀψιμαθής) who flaunts his merely acquired skills at all (and mainly inappropriate) times. In a third section (152-156), S. tries to determine whether this counter-image corresponded to a real phenomenon (i.e. educational “upstarts” trying to push into higher society) or whether it was a more or less fictional creation by the “real” pepaideumenoi just affirming their own identity. With well-advised caution, S. finally settles for the latter: There are just not enough sources to establish that members of the educated elite really had to defend themselves against droves of upstarts. (Lucian might be an interesting case of such an upstart—but he would in no way fit the cliché of a pedant!). In the final section of this chapter (156-159), S, briefly develops the interesting idea that the ideal of an “aristocratic” (i.e. innate and not acquired) education might be mirrored in the ideal of extempore speech-making (αὐτοσχεδιάζειν) which was so highly praised during the Second Sophistic—but where would that leave an Aelius Aristides who was notorious for not being able of extemporizing?
Chapter 6 (160-196) turns to the public of Second Sophistic displays and first (160-168) tries to determine what it may have looked like. S. holds sophists were able to attract huge numbers of listeners (on p. 163, he talks of the “urban masses” being enthralled by those speakers), but do we really have to accept the claims of the speakers themselves in this regard? Are we really to believe that the elaborate productions of an Aristides were easily intelligible (and even enjoyable) for people not thoroughly acquainted with the minutiae of classicizing style? S. himself concedes that only a minority of urban populations had even a general schooling (p. 164) and that fewer children received it than in Hellenistic times (p. 165); still, he argues the innumerable performances and public displays enabled a very large number of people to acquire a wide-ranging knowledge of cultural and mythical traditions. One may, however, have to differentiate between the various kinds of performances: Already in Terence’s days a tightrope-walker drew much larger crowds than a comedy based on a Greek model, and in imperial times the bawdy entertainment of mime players was probably much more frequented than a linguistically-demanding rhetorical display. The size of the crowds sophists were able to draw may be indicated by their favorite places of performance: buleuteria and lecture halls. In Athens, the Odeion of Agrippa (originally designed for about 1000 people), which according to Philostratus was in use for sophistical performances, was refurbished after the collapse of the roof in the middle of the 2nd century, and its capacity was reduced to about 500;[10] this may give us an idea about the maximum numbers expected to attend a sophist’s lectures even in such a center as Athens. In the following sections (168-175) S. uses examples taken mainly from Dio and Lucian to argue that sophists consciously employed the best-known items of cultural knowledge (hackneyed myths, for example) to appeal to the largest possible audience, but one might in fact ask whether Dio and Lucian really are the most typical examples of 2nd century sophists. Would the same audience that enjoyed Dio’s and Lucian’s reworkings of rather common myths (and even for those at least some elementary schooling would have been needed) have taken pleasure in the sometimes over-subtle rephrasing of more out-of-the-way declamation themes which Philostratus reports (VS 572f.)?
Apart from these reservations about the possible size of the sophists’ audiences S. rightly stresses some basic strategies (and in these cases that term seems justified) by which sophists tried to capture their audiences’ interest and goodwill: ingenious reworkings of items taken from the common educational background of both speaker and listeners (171-175); emphasizing the “true Greek” lineage of the listeners and stressing the great Hellenic cultural traditions as a unifying bond, but without (usually, at least) trying to evoke anti-Roman sentiments (175-181). In a further section (“Language and local traditions as factors of identity-building”, 181-193), S. looks into the numerous efforts to revive (and sometimes even invent) local myths and family genealogies to (re)establish links with the great Greek past;[11] he draws interesting parallels between these efforts and the striving for a revival of the Attic language of classical times; to call this an “invented tradition” (p. 190), however, seems to go too far, for even if a man like Phrynichus sometimes was quite arbitrary in decreeing “right” and “wrong” usages, he still justifies his choices with real and not “invented” source material.
The chapter concludes with a section (“The past under the control of the educational elite”, 193-196) that contains some rather sweeping conclusions which one should not accept without qualifications: S. argues here that the sophists’ insistence on a Greek culture and a Greek language which both stressed the link with a great and heroic past not only served to establish a group identity of the leading elite vis-à-vis the ruling Romans, but also to stress and justify the elite’s superiority over the great masses of the Greek East; these masses, S.’s reasoning goes, on one hand felt themselves superior to Non-Greeks (and Romans in particular) when they heard their educated leaders praise the Greek values of the past in a classicizing language, and on the other hand happily acquiesced in their own inferiority vis-à-vis their educated and well-spoken leaders. But how in fact can we know this, when we have no real evidence which might enlighten us about the thinking of those uneducated people? No modern theory will help us overcome the gaps in our evidence. It may be just as possible that the really uneducated people (just as today) didn’t give a damn about all those busy cultural activities going on so far above their heads, because they had enough to do just to cope with their own lives. Moreover, S. too much stresses the alleged ability of the educated elite to manipulate just about everything around them: themselves, their underlings, and even the whole Greek past. S. states that in the 2nd century the writing of history was perceived as nothing more than a special form of rhetorical panegyric and that history itself was demoted to providing material for oratorical virtuosity (p. 192); but what about Lucian affirming in his How to write history that historiography’s foremost task is to tell about things “as they happened” (ch. 7-9, 38-9) ? Rhetoric certainly used history as material for its productions and performances, but rhetoric’s powers to “manipulate” the telling of history were not unlimited; meletai in fact would try to evoke and revive historical situations as plausibly as possible, and downright denials of “certain” facts (like Dio’s Troicus emphatically insisting on Troy’s never having been captured by the Greeks) were of course not taken seriously, but taken as the clever jeux d’esprit which they were intended to be. Thus it is too one-sided—to say the least—to regard the educated elite as a sinister group of conspiring manipulators; rather they themselves were in the grip of an overmighty past which on one hand dictated their every thought and feeling, but which on the other helped them (and here S. is very right) to preserve their identity within the Empire.
The seventh chapter (“Typical situations of communication”, 197-209) tries to elucidate the typical situations, in which sophists communicated with their audience, and what these situations meant (or symbolized) for their participants. A first section (198-209) graphically describes the pomp and circumstance of a travelling sophist’s appearance in public and the usual way in which his performance proceeded:[12] After the captatio benevolentiae by means of a well-devised prolalia, the “main course” was provided by an ample melete on a mythical or historical theme (preferably improvised and selected by the audience itself). The typical ingredients and characteristics of such a melete are then convincingly demonstrated by S. in well-chosen examples: Polemon’s pair of speeches ostensibly given by the fathers of the two greatest Athenian heroes in the battle of Marathon and debating which father might be worthier to give the public funeral speech for the fallen Athenians. S. well shows how these speeches presupposed a certain (and for the pepaideumenoi of the 2nd century AD typical) degree of cultural and literary knowledge, which the supposed “original” listeners of those speeches (the Athenians of the early 5th century BC) could not possibly have had. Two inscriptional examples then illustrate how specialists in mythical and local traditions in a similar way presented their “findings” in public speeches to (re-)establish connections between verious cities of allegedly long standing. In all this, S. concludes (209), the well-educated and also politically dominant persons in the Greek cities of the East demonstrated their intellectual superiority over the other members of their society.
So far this is very good; the next section (The Sophist as embodiment of power”, 209-214), however, moves beyond this and tries to argue that these performance situations were also manifestations of political power, i.e. the single sophist exhibiting his vast superiority in cultural and linguistic knowledge versus an amorphous and ill-educated mass of listeners and by his very skill of rhetorical presentation cowing this audience into submissive and subservient silence. Again, however, one might ask, whether all facets of this picture really hold up to closer scrutiny. First of all, the very existence of such a “mass” coming to listen to a rather artificial performance may well be doubted (in the just preceding section, S. himself at several places presupposes that listeners possessed a certain amount of education and culture in order to be able to follow Polemon’s arguments, and this would surely not have been the case in a mass audience). Secondly, it is by no means certain that the audience always kept mum in the course of a performance: Lucian’s tale in his Pseudologista how his enemy ran afoul of a considerable number of literary connoisseurs in the course of an allegedly “improvised” melete (S. himself mentions this incident earlier on in his book, p. 122) clearly shows audiences at such performances were knowledgeable and also quick to react when the performer somehow failed to meet their expectations (again see S.’s own hints on p. 199). That, in fact, performing sophists were not all-powerful individuals, but laboring themselves under a number of constraints, is shown by S. in the last two sections of this chapter (“The sophist under the pressure of expectations”, 214-220; “The sophist under the control of tradition”, 220-231). S. persuasively enumerates three sorts of constraints which held imperial sophists in check: the expectations of his audience (which, however, probably was not as big and amorphous as S. tends to think), the ethics of his own group and the resulting “peer pressure”, and the all-too-dominating influence of a cultural and educational tradition that every member of the elite unquestioningly accepted as his guide and controller. Taking the rather dull lectures of Maximus of Tyrus and showing some of their characteristics (p. 220-224), S. provides an interesting example of how much an overpowering tradition could control every thought (and even turn of phrase); but are we entitled to generalize on the basis of Maximus’ mediocre performances? That the authors and orators of the Second Sophistic looked back toward their classical models at every turn, has long been known; it is, in fact, a characteristic of long standing in Greek culture (regarding, e.g., classical drama, already Aristophanes complained in his Frogs [72] that the good authors were already dead and that the extant ones were bad) and not an invention of the cultural elite of imperial times. On the other hand, there were at least some efforts not to let oneself be stifled by tradition but to improve on it and to use it creatively (as far as that was possible): Aelius Aristides dreamed not only of approaching, but actually surpassing Demosthenes, and Lucian cleverly combined old literary forms to create new ones. Moreover, S. himself draws attention to the fact that teachers of rhetoric in the 2nd century actually dared to criticize what they thought were wrong usages in the Classics (p. 123f. 227). Thus the picture of a politically dominant elite that on one hand was totally conditioned by its traditional rhetorical education and on the other used this education to project its superiority by flaunting its culture in public (and, as S. would have it, even “delegated” its ablest performers to do this for the whole of its group) seems—even with its paradoxical traits—to be simply to neat and, yes, one-sided to catch all the facets of the Second Sophistic.
A short concluding chapter (232-4) once more stresses the systemic character of all the phenomena treated by the author, and—interestingly—it also takes note of remaining uncertainties: The theoretical models here brought to bear on the Greek culture of the 2nd century, S. states (233), may be fruitful as heuristic means, but lack of adequate sources prevents them from being proved empirically right. This is a very important statement; it should, in fact, have been made several times before in places where S. draws sweeping pictures which are greatly indebted to modern theory but much less bolstered by ancient evidence.
All in all, this is a very readable and important, at times even brilliant book (with very few factual mistakes and misprints[13]). S. admirably masters the whole range of ancient sources which must be used to elucidate the Second Sophistic, and his style of writing is fluent and vivid and in most cases avoids the obscurities of jargon. At times, however, he seems to forget that theories without sufficient evidence are not enough (a fact he shows himself very much aware of in his conclusion), and then his generalizations about the system of symbolic power held up by imperial sophists acquire the sometimes rather annoying ring of unmasking an almost machiavellian conspiracy by a scheming elite that used its culture only to bully its underlings into submission. Apart from that, the book is to be recommended for anyone interested in Greek culture of imperial times.
[1] See the reviews by the very author reviewed here (Gnomon 68, 1996, 545f.) and by the present reviewer (Göttingische Gelehrte Anzeigen 247, 1995, 217-233).
[2] As reason for his exclusion of poetry S. cites the “Zufall der Überlieferung” (36); one might do well, however, to remember that of almost all the once leading mainstream exponents of the Second Sophistic and their declamations only very little—compared with their original output—has survived, mainly in the form of small extracts preserved solely by the grace of Philostratus. The two big exceptions are Dio of Prusa and Aelius Aristides, and of those two, Dio was reckoned very early (i.e., already by Philostratus) as a rhetorician with strong philosophical leanings.
[3] Some of these are perhaps not wholly to the point: The addressee of Dio Chrysostom’s or. 18 may be a Roman (P. Desideri, Dione di Prusa, Messina 1978, 137-141 thinks of the future emperor Titus), and Lucian’s strictures against boorish patrons (who still want to maintain a cultured appearance) in De mercede conductis again is directed against Romans. Things may have been different in the Greek East.
[4] In: Greek Sophists in the Roman Empire, Oxford 1969.
[5] In: “The Importance of Sophists”, YCS 27, 1982, 29-59.
[6] On this, see Jennifer Hall, Lucian’s Satire, New York 1981, 7, 41-3; C. P. Jones, Culture and Society in Lucian, Cambridge, MA 1986, 20f.
[7] M. J. Higgins, “The Renaissance of the First Century and the Origin of Standard Late Greek”, Traditio 3, 1945, 49-100.
[8] B. P. Reardon, Courants littéraires grecs des IIe et IIIe siècles après J.-C., Paris 1971, 87f.
[9] There is also a slight inconsistency between S.’s well-illustrated demonstration (86-88) that philosophers put up a least some resistance against the rhetoricians’ all-encompassing claim to dominate education and the statement on p. 90 that there were no rivalling concepts of education apart from the rhetorical one.
[10] See, e.g., The Athenian Agora: A Guide to the Excavation and Museum, American School of Classical Studies at Athens, 1990 (4th Edn), 123.
[11] Regarding cities re-creating a mythical past, S. might have taken note of a book which describes the interesting case of Ephesus in great detail: G. M. Rogers, The Sacred Identity of Ephesus: Fundation Myths of a Roman City, London 1991.
[12] Here S. might have cited G. Anderson, “The pepaideumenos in Action: Sophists and their Outlook in the Early Roman Empire”, in ANRW II 33,1, Berlin 1989, 89-104 for another detailed and well-documented description of the sophists’ public displays of their art.
[13] Most of the misprints do not cause difficulties (I mention only the following: on p. 10, 2nd paragraph, 2nd line from bottom, I would add “von” before “der zeitgenoessischen Welt”; on p. 92, 2nd paragraph, line 2 from bottom, delete the comma after “haben”; on p. 128, line 8 and p. 130, 3rd paragraph, line 3 Plutarch’s Table-talk should be cited as quaestiones conviv[i]ales; on p. 138, 2nd paragraph, line 2, read “Tugen<d>vollkommenheit”; on p. 199 n. 6, line 1 and p. 216, line 1, stress προλαλιά, not -λία; on p. 216, 3rd paragraph, line 2, put a comma after τρόπον instead of a colon, similarly on p. 228, 2nd paragraph, line 5 after πεισθῶσιν). On p. 41, a substantial citation in English is without a reference; on p. 55, n. 50 Vivian Nutton should get his masculinity back. Some omissions or errors: On p. 67 n. 2, S. should not have overlooked Th. Hidber, Das klassizistische Manifest des Dionys von Halikarnass: Die Praefatio zu De oratoribus veteribus, Stuttgart/Leipzig 1996 about the role of Dionysius of Halicarnassus concerning the beginnings of Atticism; p. 185: or. 64 in the corpus of Dio of Prusa was probably written not by Dio but by Favorinus. The indices at the end of book are useful, but on p. 256 the entry “Dionysios von Halikarnass” is rather misleading: Of six references, only two actually concern Dionysius (67, 179), the other four Ps.-Dionysius’ Art of Rhetoric. S. translates all Greek citations into German, and these translations are usually both elegant and accurate, though in a few places some changes might be welcome: On p. 42, I would have translated the “historical” present not as present tense in Paus. 1,20,5; on p. 60, regarding Aristid. 32,16 I would not say “Tausenden Tausende”, but “Unzähligen Unzählige”; on p. 87 (translation of Lexicon Vindobonense p. 294f.) instead of “… kann ein Kind zur Vollkommenheit aufziehen, durch kunstvolle Erfahrung zur fehlerlosen Erfahrung der Sprache führen”, I would suggest “kann die Leistungsfähigkeit eines Kindes zur Entfaltung bringen, indem sie es durch erfahrene Beherrschung der Kunstregeln zu einer fehlerlos-erfahrenen Beherrschung der Sprache ausbildet”; on p. 122 (translation of Luc. Pseud. 5f., line 5 from bottom) “während der ganzen Vorstellung” should be transposed after “machten sich”; on p. 147 (second passage from Ps.-Dionysius’ ars, line 3-2 from bottom) “umgangssprachlich in Bezug auf ihre Wörter” would be clearer than “in Bezug auf ihre Wörter gewöhnlich”; on p. 191 n. 94 the final cola of the famous Thucydides sentence (1.22.4) are in my opinion not satisfactorily rendered into German (see, e.g., Erbse’s translation on p. 131 of the work cited by S. himself in this note). P. 206, last line: “sondern wir haben sie auch” is not in the quoted text of TAM 2.1.174 D a 7-13. Translating ISestos 1,2-7 (p. 217), S. starts with a causal clause (“Da Menas …”), without supporting it with a main clause; instead, he starts with a wholly new sentence (“Dies alles …”), while in the Greek text the long ἐπειδή-clause simply runs on (finally leading to the main clause which initiates the decree).