CHAPTER 26
Greek Ethnicity and the
Second Sophistic
Adam M. Kemezis
Introduction
Specialists and the general public alike usually think of “the Greeks” and “the Romans” as
two separate peoples who lived at different times, one after the other, and whom it is often
useful to place in conceptual opposition. Specialists will admit, if pressed, that it is more
complicated than that. After all, the whole eastern half of Roman Empire from the first
to the fourth centuriesCEfunctioned largely in Greek, and its inhabitants included con-
siderably more Greek speakers than the combined population of all the Greek city-states
of the fifth centuryBCE. The surviving literature of these Greek-speakers constitutes a
large portion of all the Greek literature of antiquity, and of all the literature of the Roman
Empire. It is not obvious, however, what social or cultural reality is represented by these
facts. In a polity as vast and diverse as the Roman Empire, one cannot expect the relation-
ship between literature, language, and ethnicity to be a simple correspondence. We have
people writing and speaking Greek, but does that necessarily mean one can call them
“Greeks”? What relationship do they have to the Greeks of previous (or indeed subse-
quent) eras? A large segment of Greek speakers in the Roman period called themselves
“Hellenes,” identified with the Greek past, and thought they were in some essential way
the same people who had produced theIliadand defeated the Persians. However, while
there are clear continuities between archaic/classical Greeks and those of the Roman era,
not the least of which is language, there are also significant differences. To our eyes, the
Greeks of the second centuryCEdefined themselves by very different criteria from those
of the fifth centuryBCE. In particular, our Roman-era sources stress linguistic, literary,
and cultural practices that are often restricted to the elite, as opposed to the factors of pol-
itics, geography, and ancestry that are more prominent in earlier sources. Furthermore,
A Companion to Ethnicity in the Ancient Mediterranean, First Edition. Edited by Jeremy McInerney.
© 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.