5
The Anecdote
Exploring the Boundaries between Oral and Literate
Performance in the Second Sophistic
Simon Goldhill
It may seem paradoxical to focus on the period of the Second Sophistic to
try to understand the boundary between the oral and the literate. If any
era of Greek culture seems far removed from the world of Homeric bards
and the ideological investment classicists have made in orality as an
explanatory category, it must be the Greek literature of the Roman
empire. This is a world not just of the book, but of the very big book.
Athenaeus—to start with a paradigmaticmega biblionof this period
1
—praises Larensis, the host of theDeipnosophistae, because he has amassed in
his private library more books than anyone else in history (I.3a): ‘‘he
surpassed all those who prompt wonder for their collecting.’’ It is piquant
and telling thatthauma, the driving force of Herodotean history and its
heirs, should here be lavished on the book collectors of yore (named as
Polycrates, Peisistratus, Eucleides, Euripides, Aristotle—all figures who
had other, rather more pressing claims to fame, it might be thought). In a
similar vein, he praises Galen because he published more books on phi-
losophy and medicine than any of his predecessors (1.1e–f), and describes
the assembled company coming in to dinner dragging bundles of scrolls, as
if going to a picnic with piles of bedding (1.4b). Whereas Socrates stood
barefoot in the street before Agathon’s party, and Alcibiades crashes in
with a flute-girl on each arm, these diners, like parodic Classics professors,
struggle to carry their reference works in with them. And, despite its
Platonic framing device (‘‘Were you present, Athenaeus, at the noble
party of those known as the Deipnosophistae?’’ [1.1f-2a]), the dialogue
opens in the style ofHabilitationsschriftwith a summary of previous books
about dining and symposia—a gesture more reminiscent of the academic
polemic of a Strabo than the party fun epitomized in the dirty dancing of
Xenophon’sSymposium. This is a very bookish culture indeed.
- For an introduction to Athenaeus, see Braund and Wilkins 2000.