Second Sophistic

The recent renaissance of scholarship on the Second Sophistic has established Philostratus as a luminary of 3rd-century intellectual culture and “an ambassador for a distinctive brand of Hellenism” (Whitmarsh 2007: 39. Cf. Follet 1991, Swain 1996, Bowie and Elsner 2009). In the Imagines, Philostratus conjures up for his readers a luxurious picture-gallery in a private home in Naples, where he plays the docent to his host’s young son and a troupe of local youths, delivering 65 prose descriptions of paintings.

When second century CE Greek writers set about reviving the Attic Greek of Classical Athens, they looked to Aristophanes and his Old Comedy contemporaries Cratinus and Eupolis for vocabulary and usage. Terms unique to Old Comedy appear in Attic lexicons and grammars of the Second Sophistic alongside phrases characteristic of dialogue and rhetoric. The result is a latter-day Atticism combining multiple stylistic registers from fifth and fourth century BCE Athenian literature, based on the sole criterion of their historical attestation (Fischer 1974, Hansen 1998, Strobel 2009).

This paper examines the role of the Second Sophistic in the construction of Aesop as an educational author. The fables of Aesop have long been associated with childhood learning, from Philostratus’ ekphrasis of the paradigmatic pedagogue in the Imagines to the early modern fable anthologies of Jean de La Fontaine and Charles Denis. This perception of animal fables as children’s literature has led many classicists to characterize Aesop as a permanent fixture of classical schooling.

Sophists are commonly analyzed through literary texts and epigraphy. However, sophists also minted coinage under the Roman Empire, some of which even bears the title ‘sophist’ as part of the issuer’s identification on the reverse. This was the exception, not the rule: only coinage from Smyrna attests the title ‘sophist’. In this paper, I argue that far from being the default choice for sophists, the inclusion of the title ‘sophist’ should be understood as a deliberate way to advertise (cf.

Aelian’s Varia Historia is a is a collection deeply engaged with ancient debates over definitions of Greek, Roman and barbarian identity (on which, see Woolf 2011, Gruen 2011, Dench 2008, Whitmarsh 2001). While Aelian repeatedly commends Greek exempla to his reader, he also shows examples of outsiders more Greek than Greeks and, conversely, Greeks failing to perform Greek identity. Aelian himself embodied this paradox of marginal Greek identity: although never having left Italy, Aelian could speak Attic as well as any native Athenian (Philostratus, VS.