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.