CULTURE 211Oratory did not decline; it fl ourished. Indeed, profi ting from the absence
of distinguished exponents of the conventional genres of Latin literature,
epideictic oratory had achieved the status of the most popular literary form
by the mid- second century. Fronto, the leading littérateur at Rome in the
Antonine age, and the tutor of princes, was famous as an orator. It is
symptomatic that, unlike Tacitus, the foremost orator of an earlier age,
Fronto’s literary distinction extended no further than this.
However, the most brilliant representatives of second- century oratory,
the ‘sophists’ (also known as rhetors or philosophers) of the so- called Second
Sophistic, came from the Greek East.^4 These itinerant rhetoricians fascinated
crowds with their verbal pyrotechnics and won riches for themselves and
friendships with the great. Their eloquence was also harnessed to political
objectives, including the securing of favours and rewards for individuals and
communities from Roman emperors and their representatives.
The popularity of the sophists refl ects the general dominance of Greek
culture in the Mediterranean in the second and early third centuries. The use
of Greek as the medium for the Meditations of the Stoic emperor Marcus
Aurelius may perhaps be dismissed as an aberration, in the sense that the
depth of his immersion in Greek culture cannot be regarded as typical of the
western elite of this or any other period of Roman history; for this reason it
is unwise to talk in terms of the existence of a unifi ed Graeco-Roman literary
culture characteristic of a bilingual elite.^5 On the other hand, one can accept
that the superiority of Greek culture, long acknowledged, directly or
indirectly, by the elite of Rome, became more pronounced than ever in the
Antonine and Severan periods. The slump in Latin literature coincided with
a period of vitality in Greek literature, of which the sophistic movement was
only one aspect.^6 This Greek literary renaissance produced, among others,
genuine littérateurs such as Lucian, Alciphron and Philostratus, historians of
the calibre of Arrian and Appian, the antiquarians Pausanias and Athenaeus,
the novelist Longus, and the medical writer and philosopher Galen. While
many of these writers are remarkable for their self- conscious lack of interest
in Rome, stemming from a desire to preserve the integrity of their cultural
heritage, others were openly eulogizing Rome, or at least devoting their
energies to charting the rise and progress of the Roman empire. For the best
part of a century, from Appian to Cassius Dio and Herodian, Roman history
was written by Greeks or Greek speakers, in Greek. Greek schizophrenia on
the subject of the Romans was not novel, but reached new heights in the
second century. The benefi ts of Roman rule were never so obvious, the
vulnerability of Hellenic culture – the danger that bad culture would drive
out good – was never more clearly perceived. That both attitudes, and the
Greek literary culture in general, were able to fl ourish, was a consequence of
the sympathetic attitudes and policies of Roman emperors, and the political
integration of the Mediterranean that they achieved.
In the visual arts, the chief feature of the period was the development of
an offi cial imperial art with its own recognizable message and repertory of