The Second Sophistic: Some Problems of Perspective

Abstract

Abstract ‘Antonine Literature’ is easily defined by the chronological limits of a dynasty; but it is also tempting to characterize the Antonine period as the climax of ‘The Second Sophistic’. No one is likely to disagree, but it is not quite so clear with what we are actually agreeing. Again, when we are singling out figures in the cultural history of the Roman Empire it comes to us fairly easily to say that Plutarch, for example, or Galen, or even Tertullian ‘flourished during the period of the Second Sophistic’ or some such formula. The expression has an air of precision about it: we are all expected to know what we mean, and assume a similar knowledge in others. But we ought to be asking ‘What Second Sophistic?’ or ‘Second Sophistic what?’ In trying to work towards an answer, I have set out to avoid any spurious neatness or over-definition: the result has been a series of only partially satisfactory projections, no one of which can easily be made to include or exclude everything that we might wish. But if nothing else, I hope that in questioning the term we can stop and ask ourselves how wide or narrow our use of it is intended to be. Only after we have some notion of what it is, or might claim to be, can we perhaps begin to ask what contact with it can imply.

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