Second Sophistic

← Encyclopedia

The Second Sophistic is the name — ancient coinage, modern period label — for the great flowering of Greek rhetoric under the Roman Empire, roughly from the reign of Nero to the early third century CE, when professional speakers called sophists commanded fame, wealth, and civic power across the Greek East. The term comes from Philostratus, whose Lives of the Sophists (early third century) invented it to set the movement apart from the “first” sophistic of classical Athens, the age of Gorgias and Protagoras. He gave it a pedigree reaching back to the orator Aeschines, but its continuous history, in his telling, begins under Nero.

The coinage and its terms

Philostratus drew the distinction with care, and the distinction is the thing that has carried his label down nearly eighteen centuries. The older sophistic, he wrote, was a kind of philosophic rhetoric: it took the broad themes — courage, justice, the gods and heroes, the fashioning of the cosmos — and discoursed on them at length. The sophistic that followed, the one he proposed to call second, sketched instead the types of the poor man and the rich, of princes and tyrants, and argued the particular cases for which history furnishes the matter. Gorgias of Leontini, in his account, fathered the first; Aeschines, son of Atrometus — driven from public life in Athens after losing to Demosthenes and settling in Caria and Rhodes — fathered the second. The genealogy is a rhetorician’s construction, reaching back four centuries to lend the present movement an Attic forefather. The working history, Philostratus admits, begins later, with Nicetes of Smyrna under Nero. From that point the Lives become a connected chronicle of teachers and pupils, rivalries and embassies, declamations remembered to the phrase.

What he was naming was a guild and a culture at once: a recognizable profession of star performers, and the whole disposition of the educated Greek elite under Rome to live its public life through the recovered idiom of the classical past.

Declamation: the signature art

What a sophist did was perform. The signature art was declamation: a speech delivered in the persona of a figure from the classical past — advising Athens against Philip, debating whether Sparta should build a wall — composed in strict imitation of the Attic Greek of five centuries before, and judged by packed audiences with a connoisseur’s ear.

The discipline ran deeper than costume. The personae were drawn almost wholly from the fourth and fifth centuries BCE — Demosthenes facing Philip, the Athenian assembly after a defeat, a tyrant pleading for his life, an imaginary law tested against an imaginary case. The themes split by convention into the suasoria, in which a historical figure is counseled at a turning point, and the more technical controversiae of the law-court. The ground rule was archaism. A sophist of the high empire wrote and spoke a reconstructed Attic — the dialect of Thucydides, Plato, and Demosthenes — restored at the level of vocabulary, grammar, and rhythm, scrubbed of the living Greek of his own streets. This was Atticism, and the lexica that governed it (which words a pure stylist might use, which were barbarisms of the marketplace) were among the period’s characteristic books. The rival manner, the fuller and more ornamented “Asianic,” had its partisans, but the Atticist program set the standard against which performance was scored.

A first-rate declamation was an athletic feat of memory and improvisation. The most admired performers spoke extempore on a theme proposed from the floor, sustaining the diction without a fault while a trained audience followed every cadence. The setting was as much arena as lecture hall: rival schools, partisan crowds, a hush of expectation when a master rose, and applause measured by the technical ear. A faltered case or a barbarism in the diction could end a reputation; a flawless extempore could make one. Success was conspicuous. Herodes Atticus adorned Athens with buildings; Polemo dominated Smyrna and corresponded with emperors; Aelius Aristides made the praise of Rome itself a Greek masterpiece. Emperors endowed chairs of rhetoric at Rome and Athens, and sophists led embassies and tutored princes.

The profession was not confined to declaimers narrowly defined. The same imperial-Greek literary culture produced the moral-political orations of Dio Chrysostom, the genial speeches and lectures of Favorinus of Arelate, and the prodigious satirical output of Lucian of Samosata, who turned the whole apparatus of sophistic learning against itself. These men are not always counted “sophists” in Philostratus’s strict guild sense, but they share the formation: a paideia built on the classical canon, a livelihood made of public speech, and a sensibility tuned to the gap between the recovered past and the Roman present. The breadth is part of why the label is hard to fix. It can mean the narrow profession of star declaimers, or the wide literary disposition of an entire educated class.

Careers and civic power

The careers behind those names show how far the art reached into public life. Herodes Atticus (c. 101–177 CE), born at Marathon into the richest family in Greece, held the Roman consulship in 143 and counted Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus among his pupils. His fortune left a visible mark on the landscape: the Odeon on the south slope of the Athenian Acropolis, raised in 161 in memory of his wife Regilla; a nymphaeum at Olympia; the Panathenaic stadium reclad in marble. When a quarrel with the Athenians drove him into a brief exile around 174, it was the emperor himself who brokered the reconciliation — a measure of what a sophist could be in the order of the empire.

Polemo of Laodicea (c. 90–144 CE), an Anatolian Greek of consular stock who made Smyrna his stage, was the other pole of the profession’s prestige. He held privileges of free travel granted by Trajan and confirmed by Hadrian, advised Hadrian on the rebuilding of his adopted city, and was remembered by Philostratus as a man who treated cities as his inferiors, emperors as not his superiors, and the gods as his equals. The arrogance was a kind of office: the great sophist negotiated for his city with the central power, and his voice was a civic asset.

Aristides (117 – c. 181 CE) carried the art toward something nearer ideology. His Roman Oration turned the praise of empire into a polished Greek monument, an address to the imperial order delivered in the dialect of the free city-states the order had absorbed. The paradox is the period in miniature: a Greek of the high empire celebrating Rome in the recovered tongue of Periclean Athens.

What the label names

What the label actually names is contested. Some scholarship has treated the Second Sophistic as a genuine movement with social weight; other readings see only a modern shorthand for the Greek literary culture of the imperial centuries. A persistent line of interpretation finds in the declamations’ fixation on the free classical past a compensation — Greek identity rehearsed, generation after generation, under a Roman order that left the old cities eloquent but not sovereign. The debate has a shape worth tracing. One reading, associated with G. W. Bowersock, runs centripetally: it watches the sophists move toward central power, brokering between the Greek cities and Rome, drawn into the orbit of emperors as advisers, envoys, and tutors. The other, developed by Simon Swain and Ewen Bowie, runs centrifugally: it reads the obsessive return to the classical past as a project of cultural self-definition, a way for the Greek elite to hold an identity that the loss of political sovereignty could not dissolve. On the second view the archaizing is not nostalgia but strategy — Hellenism maintained as a portable patrimony, the more carefully curated for being detached from power. Tim Whitmarsh has pressed a further turn: that Roman conquest forced the Greeks to rethink the very terms of identity, and that the sophistic performance of the past is best read as that rethinking carried on in public, with imitation itself as the medium of a politics. Whether “the Second Sophistic” denotes a movement, a culture, or a convenient periodizing fiction is, on any of these readings, partly a question about what one wants the name to do.

The neighborhood

The movement matters here for its neighborhood. The same Greek world, in the same centuries, was producing the Hermetic literature, the Gnostic teachers, and the Chaldean Oracles; Aristides himself kept the Sacred Tales, a record of dream-prescriptions received from Asclepius at Pergamon; and it was Philostratus who wrote the life of Apollonius of Tyana, the wandering Pythagorean holy man.

The kinship runs through shared ground. The high empire that trained its elite to speak as Demosthenes and Aeschines was the same milieu in which the Greek revelatory and philosophical-religious literatures took their imperial shape. The Hermetica, the dialogues set under the name of Hermes Trismegistus, were composed in this period in Greek, in a register continuous with the schoolroom’s; Alexandria, where much of that literature gathered and where Philo had already wedded Greek philosophy to scripture, was a node of the same culture. The teachers later gathered under the name Gnosticism taught their cosmologies — and offered the saving knowledge, the gnosis, that named them — in the cities the sophists toured. The verse oracles ascribed to the Chaldeans reached the philosophical schools that would, within a few generations, become Neoplatonism. And the Pythagorean revival — the Neopythagorean reverence for number, abstinence, and the sage as a living icon — supplied the type that Philostratus poured into his Apollonius of Tyana: ascetic, miraculous, a holy man who argues like a philosopher and is honored like a god.

The schools themselves were part of this world, not outside it. Philosophy in the high empire was taught, debated, and performed in the same cities, often by men of the same education; the line between the sophist who declaimed and the philosopher who lectured was a matter of emphasis and pretension as much as of substance, and the two professions watched each other with envy and contempt. Stoicism had its imperial flowering here — Epictetus lecturing at Nicopolis, and the emperor Marcus Aurelius keeping his private Greek notebook of Stoic self-examination even as he endowed the rhetorical chairs and counted Herodes Atticus among his teachers. The Pythagorean and Platonist currents that would feed Neoplatonism ran through the same lecture rooms. The display oratory and the contemplative philosophy were two registers of one paideia, and a cultivated man might move between them in the course of a single career.

Aristides’s Sacred Tales sit at the seam most exactly. They are a sophist’s prose — voluble, self-aware, composed by a man who had spent his life performing — and they are also the longest first-person record to survive of incubation, the rite of sleeping in a god’s precinct to receive a curative dream. Across years at the Pergamene Asklepieion the orator set down what he took to be the god’s own instructions, dream upon dream, down to the cold river-bathings and the punishing regimens Asclepius prescribed. The same hand that could voice the honored dead in flawless Attic recorded a living correspondence with the divine. Reading the Tales beside the Hermetic dialogues and the Apollonius is an interpretive choice rather than a claim about cause; what it lights up is a single literate culture in which declamation, devotion, philosophy, and revelation were learned in the same schools and written in the same Greek.

Texts and scholarship

The foundational primary source is Philostratus’s Lives of the Sophists itself — the work that both records the movement and invented its name. The defining definitional passage, distinguishing the older “philosophic rhetoric” from the second sophistic’s gallery of poor men, rich men, princes, and tyrants, stands near the opening of the work and is available in the standard English of the Loeb edition by W. C. Wright (Philostr. VS 481). Philostratus’s companion Life of Apollonius of Tyana, commissioned by the empress Julia Domna and completed around the 220s or 230s CE, supplies the period’s most elaborate portrait of the wandering Pythagorean sage; G. R. S. Mead’s 1901 study Englished and interpreted it for a later esoteric readership, and is hosted here in the Library.

The modern critical literature divides along the interpretive fault described above. G. W. Bowersock’s Greek Sophists in the Roman Empire (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969) established the social-historical study of the sophists as mediators between the cities and central power. Simon Swain’s Hellenism and Empire: Language, Classicism, and Power in the Greek World, AD 50–250 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996) reframed the archaizing as a politics of Greek identity under Rome; the Bryn Mawr review by Thomas Schmitz sets out its argument and its reception. Tim Whitmarsh’s concise survey The Second Sophistic (Greece & Rome New Surveys in the Classics 35; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005) — reviewed at length in Bryn Mawr Classical Review — treats sophistic performance, the Atticism-versus-Asianism question, and the problem of identity, while his earlier Greek Literature and the Roman Empire: The Politics of Imitation (Oxford University Press, 2001) argues that imitation of the past was itself a mode of cultural politics. Together these works frame the period as both an ancient self-description and a modern category still under negotiation.

→ In the library: Mead — Apollonius of Tyana (1901)

→ Related: Neoplatonism · Gnosis · Hermes Trismegistus · Roman Empire · Aelius Aristides · Chaldean Oracles Tradition · Asclepius · Apollonius Of Tyana · Corpus Hermeticum · Philo Of Alexandria · Alexandria · Pythagoreanism · Neopythagoreanism · Marcus Aurelius · Stoicism · Gnosticism · Incubation Pagan Christian