Download PDF | Kendra Eshleman - The Social World of Intellectuals in the Roman Empire_ Sophists, Philosophers, and Christians-Cambridge University Press (2012).
306 Pages
THE SOCIAL WORLD OF INTELLECTUALS IN THE ROMAN EMPIRE
This book examines the role of social networks in the formation of identity among sophists, philosophers, and Christians in the early Roman Empire. Membership in each category was established and evaluated socially as well as discursively. From clashes over admission to classrooms and communion to construction of the group’s history, integration into the social fabric of the community served as both an index of identity and a medium through which contests over status and authority were conducted. The juxtaposition of patterns of belonging in Second Sophistic and early Christian circles reveals a shared repertoire of technologies of self-definition, authorization, and institutionalization, and shows how each group manipulated and adapted those strategies to its own needs. This approach provides a more rounded view of the Second Sophistic and places the early Christian formation of “orthodoxy” in a fresh context.
kendra eshleman is an assistant professor of Classical Studies at Boston College.
Introduction
“Who are you?” The social formation of identity Asked for money by a man in the garb of a mendicant Cynic, the great Herodes Atticus, a man of consular rank and high culture, replies with a simple, devastating question: “Who are you?” The man responds indignantly that he is plainly a philosopher, but Herodes remains unconvinced. “I see a beard and a cloak,” he says, “but I do not yet see a philosopher. But indulge me, please, and say what evidence you think we could use to know that you are a philosopher?” (Gell. 9.2.1–5).1 There are no more basic questions than these: who are you, where do you fit, and how can we know? In this instance both Herodes and his hapless interlocutor speak as though it were easy to determine who deserved the “most holy name” (nomen sanctissimum) of philosopher and on what grounds (Gell. 9.2.9), but their very disagreement indicates otherwise.
The prestigious title “philosopher” was “not an absolute but a differential category,”2 maintained at the cost of an unending labor of discursive and social distantiation from the others who marked its boundaries (the layperson, the charlatan, the sophist, and, eventually, the Christian). The same is true of “sophist,” another notoriously slippery category often maddeningly entwined with “philosopher.” The right to either label could not be established once for all but had to be continually defended through assiduous self-presentation that in turn advanced implicit definitions of one’s own field(s) and its rivals. Contemporary Christians concerned to define the parameters of authentic (“orthodox”) Christian identity confronted similar problems of self-definition by pursuing a remarkably similar set of strategies.
The central premise of this book is that establishing and evaluating identity as a sophist, philosopher, or Christian was a matter not only of being – that is, conformity with certain cognitive, ritual, ethical, and/or professional standards – but also of ties to other members of the group, past and present – that is, of belonging. Demarcating these frequently intersecting categories from each other, as well as sorting out legitimate from illegitimate members within each group, was (and is) notoriously difficult. The dividing lines remained blurry and disputed and were too schematic to map fully the hybrid complexities of one person’s identity. Further, as is often pointed out, the Roman world possessed “few explicitly professional qualifications, institutional structures for controlling and guaranteeing expertise”; lacking these, ancient intellectuals leaned heavily on rhetorical means of legitimation and group definition.3
This fluidity placed heavier weight on social modes of self-definition as well, so that integration into the social fabric of each community, past and present, served as a vital index of identity and a medium through which contests over status and authority were conducted. That identity is constituted through social interactions has been widely recognized,4 especially for the ancient world, where individuals were embedded in networks of family, class, city, ethnicity, patronage, and friendship. The relevance of belonging to Second Sophistic contests over identity and status has been explored only in rather limited ways, however.5 Except in the symposium, where socialization and the cultivation of social bonds are foregrounded,6 the “groupness” of early imperial pepaideumenoi as such is not immediately obvious and is sometimes dismissed as unimportant.7 Yet to the extent that sophists and philosophers thought of themselves as belonging to an in-group distinct from various out-groups, they can be said to constitute groups.8 Philostratus represents his subjects as competing for recognition as “worthy of the circle of sophists” (VS 614, 625).
That circle was no more than a dispersed set of men engaged in roughly the same pursuits. It was metonymically embodied, though, in a myriad short-lived assemblages that formed and reformed in classrooms and auditoria, at public performances, and even more informal gatherings. Invisible, fluid, and contested as its dimensions are, this “circle” has a definite reality in the minds of Philostratus and his subjects. As for philosophers, taking belonging into account might seem at odds with the ideal of disinterested inquiry. In Lucian’s Eunuch, candidates for the Peripatetic chair are judged not on their personal connections or academic record, but on the degree to which they look and act the part, exhibiting mastery of Aristotle’s writings and a life consistent with them. Some scholars have justly singled out these criteria as core constituents of philosophical identity.9 Others, however, have shown that personal relationships too, either with peers or with the “golden chain” of philosophers stretching back to the classical past, played a role in establishing philosophical identity and status in the imperial period.10 While not sufficient, such bonds served to locate philosophers in what could otherwise be a vertiginously unbounded disciplinary landscape.
This category, too, was concretized in teaching circles, public performances, and learned soirees, any of which might become a literal site of contestation over who (and what) deserved to be counted as properly philosophical. The interpenetration of being and belonging is more evident in the early church, despite the institutional fluidity and wide internal diversity that characterizes it in its first centuries. From the start, Christians conceptualized themselves in communitarian terms, as a family or a “third race,”11 united by shared norms of belief, behavior, and belonging, even if disagreement persisted as to what those norms were.12 Perhaps as a result, the social dimensions of Christian identity have received more attention, in studies of conversion, congregational life, and the role of ritual participation in Christian socialization and self-definition.13 Despite a growing integration of Christianity into treatments of Roman religion,14 however, early Christian struggles over individual and corporate selfcreation have rarely been seen as relevant to the strategies of self-fashioning employed by early imperial pepaideumenoi. 15
Setting early Christian controversialists alongside Second Sophistic intellectuals helps to highlight the less often noticed dynamics of inclusion and exclusion among the latter. This project sits at the intersection of several lines of recent scholarly interest. In classical studies in the past two decades, interest in the selffashioning or “symbolic representations” of Greek sophists and philosophers has breathed fresh life into the perennial debate over what exactly it meant to be a philosopher or a sophist in the early Empire, and what distinguished them from each other and from Greek urban elites generally;16 this discussion has blended with broader investigations of the (re)construction of Greek identity under Rome.17 At the same time the formation of early Christian identity within and against the Jewish and Greco-Roman world has been incisively studied from a variety of angles in recent years,18 as has the rise of normative Christianity and the Christian rhetoric of authenticity, a process that intersects at many points with the first.19
Work in both veins has benefited greatly both from the “linguistic turn” in historical scholarship and from a greater engagement with social-scientific approaches to identity; both have encouraged scholars to eschew essentializing views in favor of understanding identity as socially and discursively constructed, always plural (and hybrid), and continually subject to negotiation. These studies have done much to illuminate the interplay of social and rhetorical strategies in Christian identity formation. On the whole, however, they have focused more on the construction of borders with (and within) the Jewish and Greco-Roman matrices, than on internal boundary construction as such, insofar as those things can be disentangled. While much labor has gone into mapping early Christian diversity at the regional and local levels,20 only fairly recently has the social articulation of Christian “orthodoxy” begun to receive detailed attention.21
The anecdote with which we began hints already at the interpenetration of personal authority, corporate identity, and social ties. The definitions of “philosopher” implicitly advanced by Herodes and the would-be Cynic are ostensive rather than descriptive: the Cynic defines the word by pointing to himself, Herodes by invoking Musonius Rufus; Aulus Gellius, meanwhile, records this story in part as a way of touting his own friendship with Herodes, and hence his own credentials as an evaluator of other intellectuals. The same holds for our other categories as well: what Christianity or sophistry is depends to a large degree on whom one regards as prototypical Christians and sophists, while authority to make those judgments rests in part on the social and intellectual pedigree of the judge.22 As a result, the self-presentation of individuals and the (self-)definition of the communities to which they belong are mutually implicated: a notion of philosophy oriented around Musonius Rufus will be different from one centered on a pugnacious mendicant Cynic. As self-professed members of each group jockey for position, therefore, they also seek to shape those groups in ways that provide meaningful and advantageous contexts for their identities and activities.
As a result, the present investigation will move back and forth between the level of the individual and that of the community, both smalland large-scale. Pride of place will necessarily be given to those individuals who sought to claim definitive authority for their vision of their community – and hence to secure their own position within it – through writing, but I will also try to compare these textual strategies with the real-world behavior of the authors’ colleagues, to the extent that that can be glimpsed through the textual record. A second aim of this book is to place the construction of Christian orthodoxy in the second and early third centuries within the broader context of the formation and (self-)regulation of intellectual communities in the early Roman Empire. I hope to contribute to an understanding that the formation of a dominant orthodoxy was not only an intellectual and theological project but also a social one.
The role of discourse, both oral and textual, in the crafting of Christian identity has been well recognized: as Averil Cameron puts it, “if ever there was a case of the construction of reality through text, such a case is provided by early Christianity.”23 Yet discourse cannot be divorced from social behavior; it arises out of and seeks to intervene in social reality. There is an obvious difficulty in trying to tease out from texts the social realities they address and seek to affect; the glimpses we catch of those realia can never be more than partial. Nonetheless, the historian must undertake that effort, if we are not to confine ourselves solely to textual analysis.
The works under consideration here both describe and prescribe ways of interacting with others who call themselves Christians. Their prescriptions were not always heeded, or not as their authors intended, as their frequent complaints make clear. Yet many of those complaints point to a widely shared assumption that social contact could and should be used to regulate the boundaries of the “orthodox” community, however understood. Rhetoric and action are mutually informing; I will argue that early Christian texts operated in a dynamic feedback loop with behavior “on the ground,” conditioned by and seeking variously to enforce or revise the social “rules” by which believers and congregations daily made and remade (their) Christian identity.
Treating second-century Christians within the world of the Second Sophistic offers a fresh angle on the Christian discourse of orthodoxy and heresy, especially as it played out in the life of Christian congregations. At the same time the more richly documented, self-conscious process of Christian identity formation can shed useful light on the strategies employed by pagan intellectuals to define their own communities. Examining early Christian self-definition alongside the authorizing practices of contemporary pepaideumenoi broadens our view of the cultural and social world of the Second Sophistic and helps to bring the stakes in play for intellectuals and their historians more sharply into focus. I do not propose that the parallels identified here arose through direct interchange between Christians and pepaideumenoi. Rather, the conjunction of their behaviors reveals a set of culturally available technologies of identity formation, authorization, and institutionalization, which early Christian modes of self-definition mirror, map, and transform.
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