392 Adam M. Kemezis
Our main concern will be with an area that lies between these two extremes of breadth,
namely the urbanized, mostly coastal, region including the Greek mainland, but also
much of Anatolia and parts of Syria, Palestine, Egypt, and Libya. Within this region,
the rural population varied greatly in linguistic and cultural identity, but the cities, and
especially urban elites, functioned mostly or wholly in Greek. Even where the rural pop-
ulation also spoke Greek, privileged urban society marked itself by use of a distinctive
literary dialect (usually called “Atticizing” Greek) and by participation in cultural activi-
ties labeled as Greek, from both of which the rural poor were largely or wholly excluded.
It is among these urban elites thatpaideiafunctioned as a criterion of Greekness and that
the literary–cultural discourses of the Second Sophistic operated.
The World of the Sophistic
“Second Sophistic” is a technical term generally used to refer both to a body of writings
and to a set of cultural practices of which those writings are a part (Sirago 1989: 43–56;
this approach is critiqued by Whitmarsh 2013). The writings in question include most
of the elite Greek pagan literature produced between about 50 and 250CE. The expres-
sion was originally coined by the third-century author Philostratus, who was interested in
sophistic performance narrowly defined—that is, the giving of public extempore orations
in which the speaker usually took the role of a famous figure from the Greek past in a
historical scenario. Among his particular heroes are Herodes Atticus (fl. 165), the dom-
inant sophistic teacher of his generation; Polemo (fl. 130), the Ionian superstar whose
disdain came through both on the speakers’ platform and in his treatment of Roman
governors; and Favorinus (fl. 125), a native Latin speaker from Gaul whose outrageous
performances embodied the transgressive outsider just as his rival Polemo’s did the con-
summate aristocrat. Philostratus describes more than these men’s performances, though.
He shows how they engaged with the Greek past in every aspect of their lifestyle, and all
of the different ways they performed Greekness. Philostratus and his contemporaries saw
these performances not as merely displays of erudition, but as examples ofpaideia,an
all-encompassing cultural phenomenon based on a full command of Greek literature, as
well as the ability to speak and write a form of literary Greek based on a restricted canon
of Attic prose authors.
There was, however, much more to thispaideiathan a particular knowledge or set of
skills. A “man ofpaideia”(pepaideumenos) saw himself as not just a “learned man” but
rather a “cultured man,” someone whose entire character and way of life reflected a set
of ideals that were culturally coded as Greek. This included the moral, aesthetic, politi-
cal, and gender aspects of his self-image and self-presentation (although certain women
are also sometimes referred to by the feminine formpepaideumen ̄e). The knowledge and
skills one acquired in one’s education were necessary qualifications, but in practice one
displayedpaideiathrough all sorts of performances, few of which had an obvious direct
relationship to things one had learned in school. Many of these amounted to good man-
ners, good morals, or what an English aristocrat might call “good breeding,” an appar-
ently acquired characteristic that nonetheless can only be acquired by people with the
right sort of birth. There was a “cultured” way to throw dinner parties, have love affairs,
worship the gods, or govern a city. All of these were painstakingly learned behaviors,