The noise-lovers: cultures of speech and sound in second-century Rome

This chapter provides an examination of an ideal of the ‘deliberate speaker’, who aims to reflect time, thought, and study in his speech. In the Roman Empire, words became a vital tool for creating and defending in-groups, and orators and authors in both Latin and Greek alleged, by contrast, that their enemies produced babbling noise rather than articulate speech. In this chapter, the ideal of the deliberate speaker is explored through the works of two very different contemporaries: the African-born Roman orator Fronto and the Syrian Christian apologist Tatian. Despite moving in very different circles, Fronto and Tatian both express their identity and authority through an expertise in words, in strikingly similar ways. The chapter ends with a call for scholars of the Roman Empire to create categories of analysis that move across different cultural and linguistic groups. If we do not, we risk merely replicating the parochialism and insularity of our sources.Accepted manuscrip

Roman Politics and the Fictional Narrator in Philostratus' Apollonius

Philostratus' eight-book work on Apollonius of Tyana begins with an elaborate frame narrative in which the narrator describes how the empress Julia Domna commissioned him to edit a recently discovered authoritative account of that sage's career, written by one his disciples. This narrative has clear marks of conscious fictionality, and identifies the Apollonius with such pseudepigraphic works as Dictys Cretensis and The Wonders beyond Thule. This article will explore how this claim functions within Philostratus' larger narrative self-presentation. Philostratus in effect presents the reader with two models of how one obtains authoritative knowledge about cultural phenomena. The first is seen in the frame narrative, and involves single key texts authorized by politically powerful figures. The second is seen in the rest of the narrative, and involves wide-ranging research and critical argument by cultural professionals such as the narrator himself. Philostratus, although he would appear more to endorse the second model, ironically undercuts them both. The tension thus created is crucial to Philostratus' portrait of his protagonist's ambiguously human or divine status. It also has a key political component, however, inasmuch as various members of the Severan dynasty, like Philostratus' Julia, were claiming for themselves the power both to re-write political history and to redefine their status within Greco-Roman cultural discourse. The frame narrative and narratorial persona of the Apollonius are a uniquely sophistic reflection on the relationship of political power to Hellenic paideia.</jats:p

Cameo roles: Dio's portrayals of earlier senatorial authors

Cassius Dio, as I think we've all figured out, had no problem talking about himself. He has lots of aspects of his life about which he's downright garrulous, including is political career and his literary endeavors. Nonetheless, as often happens with chatty people who have lived interesting lives, there are subjects one would really like to hear more about that it turns out to be very difficult to get him on to. One of these, I would suggest, is the intersection between his writing and his politics. While he does relate his writing to political events he lived through, it is often in opaque or unsatisfying ways. In particular, what continues to frustrate at least me is the question of how his various layers of criticism of the Severan regime relate to his political relationships with the various emperors, and to whatever larger world of clandestine dissent and opposition we suppose existed from the 190s civil wars right up to Alexander's reign. To what extent can Dio's history be read not as a retrospective memoir of a discontented individual, but as a document of the political culture in which it was written and circulated? In Severan Rome, what kind of political intervention did the writing of a history constitute