Greek Ethnicity and the Second Sophistic 391the self-proclaimed Greeks of the Roman Empire often simultaneously identified with
categories that seem to us to be distinct non-Greek ethnicities.
Is “Greek” at this period therefore a strictly linguistic class or cultural category (short-
hand for “educated Greek-speaking elite”) without any of the additional factors that
constitute a specifically ethnic identity (see Smith 1986: 22–31)? Our sources will not
permit so simple a distinction: discourses of “blood and soil” are never dominant, but
they remain present. Simply put, Greeks of the Roman period thought of themselves
as what we would call an ethnic group, even though to us, who are conditioned by
nineteenth- and twentieth-century ideas of race and nationalism, they often do not look
like one. This chapter will give an overview of what it meant to be Greek in the Roman
Empire, within the elite literary and cultural milieu known to moderns as the Second
Sophistic. It will explore howpaideia(i.e., elite Greek education and cultural knowl-
edge) functioned as a defining criterion of Greekness, and how that criterion related to
the concepts (especially ancestry and geography) that we think of as making up ethnicity.
The central question will be how didpaideia’s two statuses, first as the acquired cultural
knowledge of an elite and then as the defining criterion of a self-proclaimed ethnic group,
affect each other’s functioning? What areas of Roman-era Greek culture can one usefully
illuminate by using the specific concept of ethnicity as opposed to other categories of
cultural identity?
Levels of Greekness
The form of Greek identity that will be addressed in this chapter is only one of many
that existed in the imperial period, and there is much that will not be discussed here. The
Greek language had several different and overlapping functions in the Roman Empire,
depending on where and by whom it was used. In its broadest application, it was the
political and administrative language of a region from the south Balkans to Iraq and
North Africa. For the most part, the Romans never tried to use Latin as the language of
government in the east, and Greek is predominant in all our sources. The Romans did
not simply retain the Hellenistic culture that they conquered. They also promoted and
even imposed the Greek language and certain aspects of Greek culture in areas where they
had not previously existed. This language use is often quite divorced from ethnicity: it
applied to many places whose inhabitants did not consider themselves Greek (large parts
of Judaea, Syria, and Egypt). They had languages of their own, and for them Greek was
alingua francain which one talked to foreigners, or the language of power in which one
talked to Romans. These people will not be our main concern, except when we see them
adopting Greek culture in non-administrative contexts, in order to assimilate into the
broad imperial elite. Another group who will not be our main concern are the non-elite
inhabitants of the Aegean basin, who usually spoke no languages other than Greek, but
whose primary ethnic identification would have been a much more local category than
“Greek,” since they were mainly concerned with distinguishing themselves from neigh-
bors who shared their language. They may have displayed a Greek consciousness when
faced with non-Greek soldiers, slaves, or colonists, but our evidence for this, as for much
of non-elite culture, is extremely slight.