The High Imperial Period. 97Ad–267Ad

chapter 4 The High Imperial Period. 97ad–267ad

4.1 Introduction to the Period

The dates I chose to begin the three previous chapters—323bc (the death of Alexander), 197bc (Battle of Kynoskephalai), 31bc (Battle of Actium)—can each be thought of as ushering in a new historical era. It might therefore seem slightly odd that I have chosen 97ad as the start date for the period covered by this chapter. In that year the Emperor Nerva died and power passed to his chosen successor Trajan. The transition was a smooth one by any standards and life all over the Empire carried on much as it had before. This might not seem a particularly momentous event in the history of Greece so the choice of date probably requires some justification. As stated in the Introduction, the dates chosen to bracket all of my chapters are to a large extent arbitrary—they conveniently produce four chapters that cover periods of roughly equal length—each around a century and a half. It is, furthermore, one of the central arguments of this book that the transformation of the agora did not match neatly to particular political events but rather proceeded at an uneven pace over a period of several centuries. Nonetheless it should be clear enough from the discussion in the previous three chapters that the development of the agora certainly was affected by the currents of historical change. The rise of the Hellenistic monarchs, the coming of Rome and the transformation of Rome from Republic to Empire all created a new cultural and political climate and affected life in the Greek polis and life on its main public spaces. The periods are therefore real enough. The cultural and political climate in the second century ad Greece was very different from how it had been in the first; the difference is arguably far greater than between what I have called the early and late Hellenistic periods, or between the late Hellenistic period and the early Empire. Ever since Gibbon, the second century ad has been seen as the high point of the Roman Empire, a period of stability, peace and economic prosperity, a “Golden Age”.1 For the Greeks the period meant greater integration into the

1 For a succinct, and fairly recent, discussion of the second century as a “Golden Age” see Koester 1995, 304ff. For Gibbon this was not only the high point of the Roman Empire but of human civilisation; he famously wrote: “If a man were called to fix the period in

Roman circles, at least for the elite, and a revival of culture, which historians refer to as the Second Sophistic. Although these developments reached their peak under Hadrian and the Antonines it was under Trajan that they began. His ascension to the purple was, therefore, very much a turning point in Greek history. At its heart, as a cultural movement, the Second Sophistic centred on the rise of public declamation as an art form, a form of mass entertainment, and a mark of elite education or paideia.2 Our best source for the movement is Philostratus’ Lives of the Sophists, from whom the term “Second Sophistic” has been taken. Although Philostratus’ “Second Sophistic” actually began in the late Classical period, the revival of the Greek art of declamation on which his mass biography focuses really started with a certain Niketes of Smyrna in the reign of Nero and seems to have reached its high point in the mid second century ad when most of his subjects lived.3 No written work by Niketes survives but we do have an abundance of writing by two other men who might stake a claim to being precursors of the second century sophists—Dio of Prusa and Plutarch. Philostratus might state that he did not think of Dio as a sophist as such but he discusses him briefly as the teacher of men who were;4 though Plutarch is rarely thought of as a sophist he was a trained and accomplished rhetorician known

the history of the world during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous, he would, without hesitation, name that which elapsed from the death of Domitian to the accession of Commodus”—Gibbon 1996 [1776], 73. de Ste. Croix (1981, 470) says of this passage that he “can think of no statement by an ancient historian about the Roman world that has been quoted more often”; he characteristically puts the statement into perspective by arguing that the Golden Age was largely confined to the upper classes and that by no means everybody had it so good. A wide range of evidence contin- ues to support the idea of the 2nd century as the high point of the Empire’s prosperity as argued by Jongman 2007—“Gibbon was right” as the title of the paper has it. The best, and most up to date, overview of the history of the Greek East in this period must be Levick 2000. 2 Scholarly literature on the Second Sophistic has been growing apace in recent years. For good overviews see Whitmarsh 2005, Borg 2004 and Anderson 1993. 3 The term “Second Sophistic” (ἡ δευτέρα σοφιστική) was coined by Philostratus Lives of the Sophists Preface. 481. He uses the term to refer to a new type of declamation first seen in fourth century Athens. In modern scholarship, however, the term is generally used to refer to the period that is the main subject of Philostratus’ book—the late first to early third century ad— Bowie, E.L. “Second Sophistic”. Brill’s New Pauly: Encyclopaedia of the Ancient World: Antiquity. Ed. Hubert Cancik and Helmuth Schneider. Leiden, Brill, 2005. For Philostratus on Niketes see Lives of the Sophists 1.19. 4 Philostratus on Dio—Lives of the Sophists 1.487.