Description
Book SynopsisThe Second Sophistic traditionally refers to a period at the height of the Roman Empire's power that witnessed a flourishing of Greek rhetoric and oratory, and since the 19th century it has often been viewed as a defense of Hellenic civilization against the domination of Rome. This book proposes a very different model.
Trade Review"Highly recommended." CHOICE "Beyond the Second Sophistic is a quietly passionate and intellectually complex book...The world of late ancient Greek literature is a profoundly exciting and deceptive one, and there is no better guide to it working today than Tim Whitmarsh." -- Edith Hall Bryn Mawr Classical Review "This collection of essays is a treasure-house of insights, shaped within a sometimes polemical template which will surely shift the discourse and the future of scholarship on imperial Greek literature." -- Calum A. Maciver Phoenix
Table of ContentsPreface Acknowledgments Abbreviations Introduction: Beyond the Second Sophistic and into the Postclassical PART ONE. FICTION BEYOND THE CANON 1. The "Invention of Fiction" 2. The Romance of Genre 3. Belief in Fiction: Euhemerus of Messene and the Sacred Inscription 4. An I for an I: Reading Fictional Autobiography 5. Metamorphoses of the Ass 6. Addressing Power: Fictional Letters between Alexander and Darius 7. Philostratus's Heroicus: Fictions of Hellenism 8. Mimesis and the Gendered Icon in Greek Theory and Fiction PART TWO. POETRY AND PROSE 9. Greek Poets and Roman Patrons in the Late Republic and Early Empire 10. The Cretan Lyre Paradox: Mesomedes, Hadrian, and the Poetics of Patronage 11. Lucianic Paratragedy 12. Quickening the Classics: The Politics of Prose in Roman Greece PART THREE. BEYOND THE GREEK SOPHISTIC 13. Politics and Identity in Ezekiel's Exagoge 14. Adventures of the Solymoi References Index
