Eleanor Martin (Yale University)
Increasing (and well-deserved) attention has been paid to the thematic and structural commonalities of ‘Second Sophistic’ and early Christian literature. This scholarship has often been undertaken with the goal of identifying a broader intellectual and cultural landscape and disrupting traditional disciplinary boundaries that have obscured or effaced the existence thereof. Studies have focused on shared anxieties and modes of expression between the two genres (Perkins, 2009), overlapping conceptions of and interactions with space and the built environment (Nasrallah, 2010), and intertextuality developing out of and contributing to a cultural and literary koine (König et al., 2020). However, the intersecting ways in which both groups conceived of community and its dislocation and used traditionally civic language to express these conceptions have received comparatively little consideration. Scholars who have examined the topic (Whitmarsh, 2001; Pullan, 2007) gloss over the community-building potential of such discourses and maintain the separation between Greek and Christian texts by identifying aims and processes which are specific to each literary category.
My paper addresses this gap in the scholarship by assessing how ‘Second Sophistic’ and Christian authors in the first two centuries CE constructed their identities and defined the boundaries of their communities through the language of citizenship and exile. I build upon the assertion in Whitmarsh (2001) that “identity…is constructed and explored within the literary work itself” in examining how the same holds true for community, a concept adjacent to, but not coterminous with, Greek and Christian identity during this period.
I discuss passages from the First Epistle of Peter, the Letter of Diognetus, Favorinus’ On Exile, and Plutarch’s Moralia and argue that the conscious and flexible use of civic terminology in these texts forms part of a broader intellectual and literary discourse across the Roman Empire, and particularly in the eastern Mediterranean. In the globalized political landscape of this period, terms such as πολίτευμα, ξένος, πατρίς, and βάρβαρος and associated themes of community and exile are subject to rhetorical manipulation as a way of negotiating complex and layered identities. Both groups are affected by the tensions inherent to a liminal position within imperial society, as simultaneous insiders and outsiders within the political, socio-cultural, natural, and architectural spaces of the empire. After highlighting the similarities between both genres that derive from overlapping cultural discourses and literary traditions, I explore the divergent evolution of the uses of civic terminology and its consequences. In doing so, I highlight the relevance of my evidence and conclusions to the discussion of Christian and ‘Second Sophistic’ utopianism laid out by Perkins (2009).