interests in ‘‘pure Attic,’’ or Galen’s comments on good Greek, or
Lucian’s angst- and humor-filled satires on obsessive interest in Atticism
(along with his own brilliant forays into Herodotean Ionic Greek), or the
critical essays on the prose style of orators by Dionysius of Halicarnas-
sus.^12 The profusion of normative texts on how to write and speak Greek
reveals the anxieties and hesitations of social intercourse as well as the
ideals and nostalgia of the Second Sophistic.
It seems to me that this fascinating interplay between literate training
and verbal performance has not been fully explored for the Second
Sophistic. But in this chapter, I am interested rather in pursuing what
seems to me to be a phenomenon that has not been much discussed in
classical studies or elsewhere, which I will call for the moment ‘‘the
anecdote.’’ By ‘‘the anecdote’’ I mean a short and pointed narrative,
often of a biographical nature and rarely attributed to an author. Before
I move on to look at what is at stake in such a term, and why I think it is
helpful for us in understanding both the circulation of knowledge in
Empire culture and the boundaries between literacy and orality, let me
clarify some of the formal constraints on what is meant by the term
‘‘anecdote.’’
The fact that it is a narrative and usually has no author distinguishes the
anecdote from the quotation. Athenaeus collects quotations: they are
metrical when in verse, attributed to an author, and any discussion or
use of them shows considerable attention to precise verbal usage. From
the fifth centuryB.C.E. onward the circulation of quotations is a sign of
cultured and cultivated performance, whether it is Demosthenes quoting
Sophocles in court or Plato’s Socrates quoting Simonides.^13 Athenaeus is
the limit case of the logic of the prestige of the quotation. Not only is his
book comprised largely of quotations, but he also quotes Clearchus, who
tells the story of Charmus the Syracusan, who would quote a verse or
proverb for any course of any dinner (‘‘Thus for fish he’d say, ‘From the
salt depths of the Aegean I come’ ’’—EuripidesTrojan Women1 [I. 4a]).
Ulpian would never taste any item without asking if a word was found in
literature or not. (He would askkeitai eˆ ou keitai: ‘‘Source or no source?’’
and hence was known asKeitoukeitos[I. 1e].) The practice of citation is
discussed in this text, just as citations contribute so much to its form. For
centuries of Greek culture, beingmousikosorpaideutosmeans having
poetry at your beck and call: and as the prisoners in Syracuse found,
it, too, can save your life.
14
Thechreiais closer to the anecdote, and this tradition has received
some attention, not least from the scholars exploring the relationship
- See Goldhill 1999, 69 76; Goldhill 2002, 60 107; Whitmarsh 2001.
- Fine discussion in Ford 1999.
- PlutarchNikias29. It should be no surprise that this story is a Second Sophistic
attestation not found in Thucydides.
100 Situating Literacies