Rhetoric in the service of politics: Panegyric and its role in the era of the Second Sophistic

Abstract

The fourishing of oratory in the East of the Roman Empire during the 2nd–3rd centuries A.D. is usually called the Second Sophistic — by analogy with the sophistical movement in Greece, mainly in Athens, in the 5th century B.C. The “teachers of wisdom” managed then to make rhetoric the most important instrument of political infuence on the life of the state and the society as a whole. The union of politics and rhetoric, state power and freedom of expression led to results that were completely unexpected and colossal in their signifcance: the fourishing of Athenian democracy, on the one hand, and the emergence of masterpieces in the feld of verbal creativity, on the other. The speeches of such outstanding orators as Isocrates, Demosthenes, and others had a tremendous impact on public opinion and state policy. In the Roman Empire, mainly in the cities of Asia Minor, where Greek cultural infuence predominated from time immemorial, the approach of the so-called “golden age of the Antonines” with its well-designed system of administration in the provinces and the extension of civil rights and freedoms of the population also contributed to a signifcant cultural rise in society. This was refected, frstly, in the appearance of a huge number of speakers and rhetoricians — sophists who traveled from city to city giving public recitations or reading lectures on rhetoric. Sophists made speeches on a variety of topics, and the most prominent of them were often granted the honorable right to deliver a solemn speech at a citywide celebration or a welcoming speech on the occasion of the arrival in the city of representatives of the Roman authorities and even the emperor himself. A typical example involves the two surviving “Smyrnean orations” by Aelius Aristides: their fame secured this orator a solid place among the classics of late Greek eloquence. Both speeches are addressed to Roman offcials and demonstrate well the close cultural and political ties between the Roman authorities and the Greek intellectual elite in the 2nd century A.D., strengthened, apparently, thanks to repeated trips of emperors to the East. This gives us reason to view the latter as the political underpinning of the so-called “phenomenon” of the Second Sophistic.