A hundred years ago Chariton's romance Chaereas and Callirhoe seemed a poor thing. It seemed so, certainly, to Rohde, who found plot and characters tame, and did not veil his contempt for the sentimentality of the story, for its unheroic and passive hero and heroine, for the cheapness of its general effect; at the same time he did grant that there was something not unpleasing about its simplicity. Two decades later, papyrological discoveries began to be made which were to lead, if not to a revolution in our estimation of the literary form of the romance, at any rate to such a reversal in our dating of the extant texts as enabled the form to be seen for the first time in a comprehensible literary context and line of development. Chariton profited particularly: from Rohde's date of around a.d. 500 he was brought forward perhaps 400 years – nowadays some would put him a hundred years, or even two hundred, earlier than that; and there is general though not universal agreement that his is the earliest of the extant romance texts. Furthermore, the fact that several papyri of Chariton were found suggests that his story was popular. This advance in knowledge enabled Ben Edwin Perry, fifty years ago, to make of Chariton's story the basis of an already fairly well-developed theory of the origins of the form romance and its place in cultural history, a theory fully set out in 1967 in his magnum opus The Ancient Romances.

Horace's familiar aphorism Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit (Epistles 2.1.156) neatly summarizes two obvious and important aspects of Graeco-Roman relations in antiquity: the Greeks accepted Roman political supremacy, but the Romans acknowledged, even welcomed, Greek cultural pre-eminence. The numerous histories and handbooks of Latin literature bear out Horace's observation with countless examples of Roman dependence upon Greek models, commencing with Livius Andronicus' Latin translation of the Odyssey (third century b.c.). We know, moreover, that outside strictly literary circles many cultivated Romans were thoroughly hellenized. Among the acquaintances of Pliny, for example, Terentius Junior, a retired Roman administrator, was fluent in Greek and so well read that ‘one would think he lived in Athens’ (Pliny, Epistles 7.25); the Greek compositions of Arrius Antoninus prompted Pliny to exclaim, ‘Can a Roman really write such Greek? Athens herself, I am sure, could not be as Attic’ (Epistles 4.3). Greek speakers, on the other hand, apparently avoided acquaintance with Latin culture. No cultivated Greek has been pronounced by his contemporaries ‘as Latin as Rome’, and several generations of scholarly enquiry into the attitudes of Greeks toward Rome have discouraged us from ever expecting to find such a person. That Greek speakers were indifferent to any language and literature but their own has become virtual dogma. In this paper I hope to demonstrate that this view ignores significant evidence to the contrary.

Two persistent problems which otherwise enthusiastic readers of the Aithiopika have raised are the apparent contradictions, first in Kalasiris' character, and second in his narrative. The troubling aspect of Kalasiris' character, as some readers feel it, is the tension between his oft-alleged wisdom, piety, virtual sanctity on the one hand, and his outrageous mendacity on the other. Kalasiris is boldly and repeatedly deceitful, cozening anyone – and there are many – who might stand in the way of his success in getting Charikleia and her lover to Aithiopia. The second problem could be said to stem from the first: one particular lie which Kalasiris seems to tell in his long narrative to Knemon is that after exiling himself from Memphis he happened to arrive in Delphi and while there happened to discover that Charikleia was actually the princess of Aithiopia. But he later mentions that he had in fact already visited Aithiopia and undertaken at the queen's request to search for her long-lost daughter. This inconsistency, fundamental to his entire story and motivation, is usually regarded as a simple contradiction in the narrative which Heliodoros should have avoided. I want to suggest that this contradiction is not a mere oversight or poorly planned effect but more like a deliberate narrative strategy on Kalasiris' part, and hence an aspect of the larger problem of his honorable mendacity.

Studies of the Second Sophistic are necessarily founded upon the Lives of Philostratus, our source for the term itself: and it is now a decade since Glen Bowersock's Greek Sophists in the Roman Empire added depth and breadth to Philostratus' picture in an illuminating presentation of their cultural, social and political roles which has rightly become a standard work. Both Philostratus and Bowersock seem to present sophists as men who acquire political authority through their professional status. Philostratus lays out a mosaic of anecdotes and assessments without much that could be called historical analysis to give it shape: our attention is drawn to consular ancestors or descendants, city offices and benefactions, encounters and friendships with emperors in such a way that we gain the impression that they all derive from the practice of sophistic skills. Bowersock's investigation, by contrast, is carefully articulated and historically argued. Separate consideration is accorded to the sophists' origins in the city aristocracies of the Eastern provinces and their benefactions to these cities; to their acquisition of immunity from offices and liturgies; to their contact with emperors as ambassadors, friends and holders of equestrian and senatorial posts. Yet to my eye the perspective in which these marks of distinction are presented is sometimes distorted, and the distortion affects the truth or falsehood of Bowersock's insistence upon the historical (as opposed to literary) importance of the sophists.

Lucian is without doubt the most readily accessible of Second Sophistic authors; he exploits a wide cross-section of the movement's resources and capabilities, and he is a better advertizement for its achievements than most of its other surviving practitioners. He is also an author whose appeal is direct, and that has made it tempting to form facile judgments about him, and through him, of his age as a whole. My aim is to look briefly at several characteristic links between the sophist and his movement, and to note some of the pitfalls in passing judgment on either.

A sophist's choice of media

Part of Lucian's success undoubtedly lies in his lightness of touch, which often amounts to sleight of hand. He was a rhetorician who did not feel compelled to take the standard priorities of rhetoric very seriously: almost the whole of his output can be related to the elementary exercises, the progymnasmata, of the rhetorical schools, and it is the signal service of Bompaire to have explained his output largely in terms of the basic curriculum. But we should also note where Lucian's interests lie within that curriculum: this will supply the key to his literary personality.

The simplest of rhetorical exercises was no more than the re-telling of a story (mythos or diēgēma); Lucian himself has a predilection for it. Almost all the laliae contain at least one if not two self-contained narratives, so that storytelling accounts for most of Bacchus, Hercules, de Electro, Herodotus, Zeuxis, Prometheus es, Dipsades, Harmonides, and Scytha.

Of unknown authorship, uncertain date, and debatable purpose, the Philopatris is one of the more curious documents to emanate from later antiquity. Its frequently peculiar language and its attempt to fuse traditional elements of the Platonic-cum-Lucianic dialogue with the newer demands of Christian orthodoxy conspire to make it a work of considerable interest to the student of late Greek literature.

No time need be spent defending Lucian against the charge of writing the Philopatris. Doubts were evinced at least as long ago as the Florentine editio princeps of 1496; they have prevailed ever since. Three considerations rule out the satirist. First, the indifferent Greek, with its faltering syntax and confusion of dialects. Second, much of the piece is a cento of phrases and effects from genuine Lucianic works. Finally, the mention of an ἐξισωτής or peraequator, an official not attested before the reign of Constantine.

The last two of these points are equally fatal to the notion, found occasionally in the older commentators, that the dialogue predates Lucian. It has been assigned to around the time of Nero, on the basis of Triepho's claim (12) to have recently (πρῴην) had an encounter with the apostle Paul. But this is to impart to the dialogue a dramatic realism to which it does not pretend.

The present volume of Yale Classical Studies is devoted to essays on later Greek literature. The guiding intent which prompted this collection is indicated by the original advertizement for it, which was circulated informally in 1976: ‘A forthcoming volume of Yale Classical Studies will be devoted to “The Second Sophistic and Later Greek Literature”. We hope that the articles in this volume will highlight the literary excellence of undeservedly neglected authors, and help to attract readers and scholars to the riches of this era, which we might roughly define as reaching from Chariton to the Nonnians. Because so many of these later authors have suffered from a “bad press” and pejorative comparison with their classical predecessors, we will give preference to essays which sensibly correct such distortions. The history and text-history of these authors is, of course, relevant to such projects, but we are looking in most cases for solid general interpretations whose clear-sighted enthusiasm will spark interest and provoke discussion.’

The problem we felt then, that much excellent literature written in Greek under the Roman Empire was being chronically underrated, still exists, and it is still our hope that this volume will indeed draw more readers to the rewards and delights of post-Hellenistic Greek literature. The history of Greek literature is very long indeed, an ongoing story whose origins pre-date literacy and whose end is not in sight.

With the substitution of some less precious metal for Petrarch's gold, these lines, which open his 93rd sonnet, would provide an appropriate motto for the curious collection of fifty fictitious letters contained in a single Greek manuscript copied in the south of Italy about a.d. 1200 and now preserved (cod. phil. graec. 310) in the Austrian National Library at Vienna. This manuscript twice identifies its epistolographer as one Aristaenetus, but in fact the author's name is as uncertain as his birthplace and the dates of his career.

Merrier was the first scholar to observe that the first letter in the collection was imagined by its author to have been sent by one ʾΑρισταίνετος to one ϕιλόκαλος, and to suggest in consequence that ‘forsitan nomen inscriptum primae epistolae translatum ad auctorem huius rhapsodiae.’ The genre of imaginative epistolography to which this rhapsodia belongs appears to have been subject to a number of rules about such things as the exploitation of earlier writers, the choice and use of themes, and attitudes to sexual morality. One of the rules concerned the naming of the fictitious correspondents. Three kinds of name were tolerated. Real names from the historical and literary past were affixed to some of the letters in order to add a spurious touch of verisimilitude to the nostalgic evocation of a more classical past.

The names of the poet Cyrus and the Empress Eudocia have always tended to be linked. They were indeed the two most celebrated poets of the court of Theodosius II – and its two most conspicuous political casualties. In the past their fall has generally been seen as the collapse of a movement to liberalize the increasingly intolerant Christian culture of the age. This paper offers an alternative interpretation, beginning with the career and personality of Cyrus.

Panopolis

Like so many Greek poets of the fourth and fifth centuries of our era, Fl. Taurus Seleucus Cyrus Hierax (to give him his recently discovered full name) was not born at one of the traditional cultural centres of the Graeco-Roman world, but in Upper Egypt. His home town was Panopolis. Cyrus was indeed by no means the first or last poet to be produced in such a seemingly unpromising spot. The most famous of his fellow townsmen, and an approximate contemporary of Cyrus, was the remarkable Nonnus, perhaps the most influential Greek poet since Callimachus. The wily Pamprepius, philosopher, magician and adventurer as well as poet, was born there on 29 September 440, just three months before Cyrus entered upon his consulship. About a century earlier the poet and grammarian Horapollon was born at Phenebith, a village in the nome of Panopolis.

The emperor Julian's satire on the emperors that preceded him is well worth reading, though not for the jokes. Julian was an essentially humourless man, whose efforts at wit quickly degenerated into raillery or bitterness. He was aware of this weakness in himself; and when, in December 362 at Antioch, the festive season of the Saturnalia called for an appropriate entertainment, Julian had to confess he lacked the talent: γελοῖον δὲ οὐδὲν οὐδὲ τερπνὸν οἷδα ἐγώ. To an unnamed interlocutor who objected politely, he insisted that he had no natural affinity for jest, parody, or laughter: πέϕυκα γὰρ οὐδαμῶς ἐπιτήδειος οὔτε σκώπτειν οὔτε γελοιάзειν. By introducing in this way the work which is generally known as the Caesars, Julian disarmed his readers. Despite Lucian and Menippus, whose dialogues provided the models for Julian's satire, we must not look for humour here, but rather for insight into the author himself. Of Julian and his abundant writings it may justly be said, as it once was of Lucilius: quo fit ut omnis/votiva pateat veluti descripta tabella/vita.

The title of the Caesars in the manuscript is Συμπόσιον ἤ Κρόνια, alluding by the first term to the imaginary banquet of the gods which constitutes the setting of the satire, and specifying by the second term the Saturnalia (Κρόνια), which occasioned the work. Romulus invites all the gods and all the emperors to dine with him.