Greek Ethnicity and the Second Sophistic 395The discourses of authenticity thus produced have important implications for the
inclusivity and exclusivity of Greek ethnic identity. People wished to liken their use of
Attic to that of native speakers who had never gone to school. In real life, unfortunately,
the language ofpepaideumenoino longer had native speakers, but it was possible to
invent them. Herodes Atticus, the ultra-rich Athenian sophist, associated himself with a
self-proclaimed “wild man” nicknamed Agathion (Philost.VS552–4, see also Lucian,
Dem. 1, where the same person is known as Sostratus) who claimed to speak the pure
dialect of his home in themesogeiaof inner Attica, a region unpolluted by immigrants.
This should not, given its source, be mistaken for a non-elite, ethnically based alternative
to the dominant elite discourse ofpaideia. Neither Herodes nor any other Second
Sophistic figure shows any interest in using ethnic criteria to identify himself with the
broad mass of uneducated non-elites to the exclusion of elites who possesspaideiabut
not descent. Herodes associates authenticity with a superhuman, somewhat freakish
figure who has little in common with the real-life inhabitants of the Attic countryside.
Their actual language would scarcely have resembled literary Attic, and Agathion can
only demonstrate authenticity by speaking his pure dialect to highly educated people
such as Herodes. In doing so, he adds an extra layer to their claim of Greekness (Swain
1996: 80–3). One can invoke ethnicity, in short, without including the vast majority of
what we would call “ethnic Greeks.”
The ironies of using elite cultural preparation to make one resemble a non-elite, but also
non-existent, native speaker are exploited to their fullest by the satirical author Lucian
(fl. 170). He would not meet a modern definition of an “ethnic Greek”: his birthplace
on the Euphrates had strong links to the indigenous culture of eastern Syria, and his
first language may have been Aramaic (Millar 1993: 452–6). He does not disguise his
origin (see hisOn the Syrian GoddesswithDouble Indictment27) but he nonetheless
asserts through language the authenticity of his Greekness, and the falseness of other
people’s. Lucian is a compulsively playful author who maintains an ironic distance
from his various literaryalter egos, but the irony does nothing to weaken his attacks
on any complacent equation between Athenian birth and true Greekness. Lucian’s
various personae are constantly rebuking his ostensibly more orthodox fellows (usually
stereotype fictional characters who may be stand-ins for actual cultural figures; see Jones
1986: 101–16) for rejecting full immersion in classical culture and instead reducing
it to individual skills. These targets use incomprehensible words in an effort to sound
archaic (Lexiphanes); learn catchphrases and shortcuts rather than actually read the
ancients (Rhetoric Instructor); or produce slavish and incongruous pastiche rather than
stylistic imitation (How to Write History). In refuting them, Lucian uses pointedly
ethnic rhetoric: his words are “born of the soil” of Attica, as with her mythological
kings (Pseud. 11), and any authentic Greek will automatically understand them (14). By
aggressively merging language and ethnic categories, Lucian gains a moral advantage
over his critics, but more significantly, by endowing words with a kind of ethnic
status usually reserved for human beings, he neutralizes any attacks on his own ethnic
background. One imagines that, in real life, native Athenians did look down on Lucian
for his Syrian background, but those Athenians had chosen to place inordinate weight
on language as an ethnic criterion. The discourses thus constructed allowed them to
exclude their non-elite neighbors from full Greekness, but they made it much harder
to exclude a figure such as Lucian and allowed him to take an ironic stance as an