Greek Ethnicity and the Second Sophistic 399or “Hellene,” even if speaking to a non-Greek. Much more common answers would
include regional designations that might be subsets of “Greek” (Boeotians, Argives,
Dorians) or might be at least apparently non-Greek (Lydians, Syrians, Egyptians). All
of these categories did still need to be in some way reconcilable with the desirable sta-
tus of Hellene. This was easier in some cases (mainland Greek regions) than in others,
but it was never automatic, and it was always conditioned bypaideia.Thisistosay
that, in elite contexts wherepaideiawas valued, almost every identity people might
claim took its meaning largely from the significance of that identity in Greek history
or mythology. Anyone who wanted access to the cultural prestige of the Greek past had
to use that past as a guide for assigning meaning and value to places and communities in
the present. This meant, for instance, that the monoglot Greek and avowedly Hellenic
inhabitants of Sardis and its hinterland still found it useful to identify with the Lydian
kingdom of Croesus, but this in turn allowed others to foist on them the same negative
stereotype of effete barbarian luxury that Herodotus had expounded 600 years before
(Spawforth 2001).
Within mainland Greece, one might suppose that Greekness could be taken for granted,
and in a sense this was true. It is generally acknowledged that the High Empire saw a shift
in the center of Greek cultural activity from the former Hellenistic royal centers of Anti-
och and Alexandria (and to some extent Rome itself) to the cities of the Aegean Basin,
which are the main locus of activity in Philostratus’Lives of the Sophists(for Athens in
theSophists, see Puech 2002: 17–23; Kemezis 2011). However, the privileging of older
locations was not uniform. The prosperous cities of Ionia (which were mostly thought
of as Athenian colonies) were in practice more important centers than their counter-
parts in European Greece, Athens always excepted (see Bowersock 1969: 17–29). On
the other hand, even mainland cities were not all equally Greek, but were arranged in
apaideia-based hierarchy. On top, receiving the lion’s share of cultural prestige, and its
material benefits, were the great sites of memory: Olympia, Delphi, Sparta, and, above
all, Athens. Other cities and regions ranked lower, with the bottom reserved for regions
that in Classical times had been seen as too impoverished or primitive to count as properly
Greek. Undeniable as Athenian prestige was, however, the very global nature of that pres-
tige produced a dialectic with the traditional diversity of Old Greece. While the content
of empire-widepaideiawas homogenous and Athenocentric, there was still an authen-
ticity to be found in the local. Cities in Mysia and Bithynia deliberately emphasized their
supposed Arcadian heritage, perhaps as a counterpoint to the dominant Athenocentric
view (see Scheer 2010). Pausanias, for his part, embeds the great events of Panhellenic
memory in a rich structure of local meaning, but Athens and other great tourist sites
remain the most privileged locales. Neither end of the global–local continuum was priv-
ileged to the exclusion of the other (Woolf 2010). Because one needed apolisor region
to be Greek, that macroidentity could only manifest itself through microidentities, while
those microidentities have little discernable existence, to us at any rate, outside of the
networks of meaning (mythical genealogies, grand historical narratives) created by the
Greek macroidentity.
Central to the hierarchy of ethnicities was Rome and how “Greeks” defined themselves
relative to the ruling power. Roman imperial ideology accorded a unique value to Greek
civilization as the only conquered group identity that Romans were willing to accord
equal or even superior status to their own. The Greek-speaking eastern elite was, by the