Writing Imperial Politics in Greek

Under the reign of the Severans, Christian intellectuals achieved unprecedented levels of prominence, gaining connections even with members of the imperial household. I contextualize the success of two Christian intellectuals, Origen and Julius Africanus, by focusing on the increasing amount of wealth that supported their activities, and their ability to exist and even to excel within the highly competitive cultural milieu of elite intellectual life.

Recent studies of the political life of Greek poleis in imperial period have tempered the long dominant scholarly view (e.g. Jones 1940; Gleason 2006) of a bouleutic elite in complete control of urban affairs. Pleket (1998), for example, has shown how aristocrats maintained power by co-opting novi homines into their ranks and managing the still potent ekklesia, and Zuiderhoek (2008) has emphasized the continuing power of the demos in an atmosphere of elite factionalism and the persistence of popular politics even in the face of growing oligarchization.

Dionysius of Alexandria’s brief hexameter poem surveys the geography of the oikoumene. In the Greek tradition of literary didactic, the poem’s epic style and its bird’s-eye perspective create an effect of timelessness, and Dionysius’ close engagement with the Hellenistic poets Apollonius of Rhodes and Callimachus, as well as the long Homeric tradition, seems to make this periegesis a tour for the bookish that has more to do with literary topoi than with real places in the contemporary world.

Tacitus (b. c. 56) was a slightly younger contemporary of Plutarch's (b. c. 50), but they are usually read as representing different political cultures, Tacitus that of the Senate and Plutarch that of the imperial Greek polis. It is therefore surprising how many similarities emerge when the Agricola in particular is read alongside Plutarch's political treatises, especially the Political Precepts (Praecepta gerendae rei publicae) and the Should Old Men Engage in Politics? (An seni res publica gerenda sit).

Philo’s Embassy to Gaius has often been regarded as an unhelpful source for the character and reign of Gaius (e.g. Colson ix) because Philo offers few historical details on those topics not found elsewhere, but the narrative priorities of the author himself have been left largely unexamined. In this paper I will show that Philo shapes his narrative to highlight the role of the emperor in rupturing traditional forms of political representation, which anticipates Tacitus’ assessment of the principate (cf.