Contemporary scholarship on fandom explores how communities are created through affinities of taste. Drawing on that work, this chapter argues that Cicero’s account in De Finibus and Pro Archia of his and his fellow Romans’ investment in and debt to Athenian literature experiments with the effects of passionately identifying with another culture – thus opening up ways of thinking and feeling about citizenship as an aesthetic property that transcends the limits of ethnic or linguistic identity. Hellenistic literature, organiSed in part around the trope of Athens as a universalist model of human excellence – a trope used first by Athenian writers and appropriated by writers in both Greek and Latin in the first century BCE – helps make the concept of universal citizenship thinkable, not only for Romans like Cicero but for readers over centuries (including scholars and students of 'classics' today) who shared and sustained his investment in the Athenian Greek past. This fantasy of cultural belonging obscures the violence of Roman imperial reality and helps explain the persistent appeal of 'classical' Greek literature.

This chapter examines the culture of Homeric reception in the late Hellenistic period through the vehicle of one fascinating, important and under-considered text: the third Sibylline Oracle – a largely Jewish work which contains a fiery attack against Homer, where the Sibyl accuses him of lying about the Trojan war and stealing her verses and metre. After setting this passage in the wider context of local and cosmopolitan traditions concerning both the Sibyl and Homer’s constructed identities, I then use close reading to argue that the critique contained within the Sibyl’s anti-Homeric rant (much more sustained, erudite and witty than the scholarship has previously allowed) has much in common with both Hellenistic and imperial modes of Homeric response: it blends elements familiar from earlier Alexandrian exegesis and later Second Sophistic revisionism. Read in this way, the passage stands as a remarkable witness to the shared concerns and reading practices across different ‘periods’ (Hellenistic and imperial), genres (poetry and prose) and religious cultures (pagan and Jewish) during this pivotal time.

This chapter compares two reading lists of Greek literature, one from the Augustan Age and one from the Second Sophistic: Dionysius of Halicarnassus’ On Imitation and Dio of Prusa’s letter On Training for Public Speaking (oration 18). Although several scholars have argued that the two lists are similar, this chapter argues that they are fundamentally different. Dionysius prefers Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Herodotus and Demosthenes, he ignores Hellenistic and imperial writers, and he demands that his students work hard. Dio recommends Menander, Euripides, Xenophon and Aeschines, he includes orators from the Augustan Age, and he tells his addressee that laborious training is not needed. In many points Dio’s reading list corresponds more closely to Quintilian’s contemporary canon (in Institutio oratoria book 10) than to Dionysius’ On Imitation. Three factors can explain the differences between the reading lists presented by Dionysius and Dio: their audiences, the literary preferences of the Augustan Age and the Flavian Age, and the genres of their works. Dionysius’ reading list is part of a serious rhetorical treatise which foregrounds the ‘beauty’ of classical Greek literature. Dio’s reading list is presented in a light-hearted letter which adopts a more pragmatic (and at times humoristic) approach to rhetorical imitation.

Taking its inspiration from the ‘spatial turn’ in the humanities, this paper studies the representation of (imperial) space in the epigrams of the Garland of Philip. It analyses the ways in which geographical space is imagined and depicted in these poetical texts. Distant regions are no longer seen as completely unfamiliar and outlandish, but populate the imaginary map of an ever growing world. Italy and in particular Rome become part of the Greek landscape. The contribution examines different strategies that these texts employ to impose order on this vast world, such as stereotypical connections with myth or ‘classical’ Greek history. In the process, some place names are loaded with cultural significance and become Greek lieux de mémoire (P. Nora). This integration of a huge empire into the ways in which Greeks understood the(ir) world can thus be seen as an important example of an intellectual response to empire.

Although Plutarch is often regarded as a historian who believes in the power of providence and its influence on the lives of his protagonists, there is considerable evidence that his concept of history was more complex. His Parallel Lives feature numerous techniques of sideshadowing which confront the reader with the idea of history as a contingent, not a determined process. These narrative strategies, by means of which Plutarch frequently alludes to different possible outcomes of past events, offer short glimpses on what else might have happened.A comparison with Polybius shows that Plutarch drew upon concepts and techniques which had already been established in Hellenistic times and which presented a contingent past. But he did not simply copy these techniques, as is evident from a comparison with Polybius. He developed them further and took them to a new level by adapting them to the needs of his comparative approach to the lives of famous Greeks and Romans.

This chapter is a response to the volume’s arguments. It explores the book’s two central claims – that literary works must be seen as products of their time, and are best understood as being in dialogue with one another. It argues that ‘being of one’s time’ is a complex idea that requires a sophisticated sense of ‘situatedness’. Specifically, it first explores how the imperial and colonial conditions of Hellenistic culture produce contested performances of belonging that change over time as the imaginary of empire is constructed. Second, it looks at how ‘dialogues’ between texts are gestures of self-authorisation for ancient writers and for modern historians. Third, it draws attention to the physical affordances of the construction of belonging – from how a person speaks and walks to the material culture of empire. Finally, it suggests that the book’s unwillingness to discuss the full range of, say, Jewish Greek writing from the period restricts how we can understand cultural translation and cultural belonging in the Hellenistic age, and produces a potentially misleading literary history of the era.

This chapter explores the dialogue between civic rhetoric and literary texts, especially works of history and geography, in the later Hellenistic world. It argues for complex processes of mutual exchange and influence between the particularist civic ideology preserved in poleis’ inscribed decrees and the cosmopolitan ideas and projects of intellectuals. Citizens of some later Hellenistic poleis, such as Priene, strove to reconcile particularist and universalist perspectives, taking account of the cosmopolitan arguments and language of Hellenistic philosophers and other intellectuals. At the same time, later Hellenistic literary authors drew on, and reimagined, local civic ideals and institutions in order to give more concrete form to the abstract cosmopolitan ideals developed earlier in the Hellenistic period. The two main authors studied here, Diodorus and Strabo, were both deeply imbued with the values and forms of thought characteristic of the later Hellenistic poleis, which left their imprint even on those thinkers’ contrasting moves to transcend the small-scale polis and advocate more expansive forms of literary and political community. Whereas Diodorus strove to preserve aspects of the civic ideal within his cosmopolitanism, Strabo’s cosmopolitanism was more of a reaction against polis particularism – which remained, nonetheless, a foundational point of reference for him.

This chapter maps out some key themes and questions for the volume as a whole. Studies of late Hellenistic Greek literature have tended to focus narrowly on individual texts and authors. The goal of this volume is to generate a set of new readings that do justice to the intertextual richness of the writings of this period. The introduction also aims to move beyond rigid accounts of the start and end-points of the ‘Hellenistic period', bringing late Hellenistic literature into dialogue with its later imperial equivalents in ways which draw attention to both the similarities and the differences between them.

This chapter takes up the volume’s key notion of ‘dialogue’ by comparing – and thus bringing into dialogue – two periploi from the late Hellenistic and the imperial period, the description of the Red Sea in Diodorus’ Bibliotheke 3.38–48 and the island ecphrasis 2.17 in Philostratus’ Imagines. To the volume’s larger themes, the chapter adds the aspects of mediality and reader response. It shows how both texts employ a fairly similar ecphrastic technique characterised by contextualisation, historicisation and narrativisation, in order to afford their readers quite different experiences. The key element is their divergent strategies of mediality: the Bibliotheke is characterised by a marked ‘bookishness’, whereas the Imagines creates a feigned orality. Both strategies have their place in contemporary discourses and contexts. The Bibliotheke situates itself in the late Hellenistic debate on writing and reading history, and particularly in the discourse on the pleasures of reading historiographical texts, while the Imagines is part of a broader trend of enriching texts with structures and elements of oral communication in the imperial period.

This chapter draws on approaches from the environmental humanities in exploring the hypothesis that late Hellenistic literature was unusually positive in its representations of landscape alteration. It first sketches out the predominantly negative tradition of representing landscape alteration in ancient literature from Herodotus onwards, before examining the more celebratory versions that we find in Strabo and Diodorus Siculus. At the same time it points out, with special reference to the work of Diodorus, that even the most positive treatments of that theme tend to show signs of equivocation and ambiguity. That conclusion has implications for our understanding of the long history of human interaction with the environment: it helps to expose the risks of over-simplification involved in any account that seeks to generalise about the idea that ancient culture either anticipates or stands in contrast with modern anthropocentrism. In the process the chapter also explores some of the similarities and differences between ancient and modern representations of environmental damage, pointing out especially that ancient accounts anticipate in some respects modern concerns with the impact of environmental alteration on human populations.

This chapter explores how the experience of Roman power impacted Polybius’ image of the shape of the world under Roman rule. Developing further classical uses of the body as political metaphor, Polybius is the first author we know of to use the body to conceptualise the impact of Roman rule on the oikoumene. He thus foreshadows the metaphor of the corpus imperii, a core element of Roman concepts of their empire in the imperial period. This significant and innovative development was prompted, I argue, by Polybius’ experience of the nature of mid-Republican Roman power and its material representation in the cityscape of Rome. Crucial to this process is the interlinking of previously unconnected parts of the world through the expansion of Roman rule. Movement is key to this process and Polybius’ geographical ‘digression’ (3.36–9), which inscribes Hannibal’s march into a global perspective, illustrates this. Evoking archetypal representations of Roman order and control, such as milestones, itineraries and building inscriptions, Polybius’ text both exemplifies how large-scale movements interconnected different parts of the world in concrete and tangible ways and how those movements, even when initiated by Rome’s enemies, eventually resulted in the establishment of Roman power all over the inhabited world.