sophisticated: even a Plutarch, it is suggested, accustomed to shout ‘‘No!
Error!,’’ is like a rube before this paragon of uneducated learning.
So the biographical narrative here slips easily into neat packages of
anecdote, a story for repetition (as I have just done, of course); we have a
collection of discrete stories rather than a continuous tale of growth or
development of character. But the anecdote also works because it is a tale
that talks, like achreia, to the educated: it uses and plays with their
fantasies of escaping the taints of the modern city, and reaching back to
a lost past of purity, when men were men and Greek was Greek.
There are in the Second Sophistic amid the very big books a consider-
able number of volumes in what one might call anecdotal form—like
Aelian’sOn the Nature of Animalsor Philostratus’sLives of the Sophists.
Particularly interesting, I think, is the trend toward collecting mytho-
logical stories into consolidated volumes. It is always dangerous to gener-
alize about ‘‘Greek myth,’’ especially over a long time span. But one could
say that the literature of the classical city—drama and history and phi-
losophy—loved to explore the normative power of the inherited and
circulating stories of the past, whereas the Hellenistic poets in turn were
fascinated by the increasingly obscure and baroque details of the tradition,
and by the work of myth in the new Hellenic world of the Hellenistic
kingdoms. In the same spirit, it is striking that in the prose of the Second
Sophistic, mythic examples are generally taken from a far more restricted
range of stories, and told in a far more conventional manner. (The
danger of such claims would be instantly evident if one turned to poetry
and included Nonnus, say, in the literature of Empire.) In this period,
Apollodorus collects and attempts to systematize the vast profusion of
Greek myths within a coherent genealogy and narrative—reducing each
story to a bare and schematized form. Earlier, Parthenius had packaged
myths in neat parcels for a Roman audience. Ptolemaius Chennus seems
to have put together a collection of mythic fantastical trivia to titillate his
audiences.^26 I would like to suggest that there is a significant synergy
between these collections of mythic ‘‘anecdotes,’’ the restriction of
scope and range of mythic examples in use, and an attitude to the past
and the rhetoric of the past in Empire Greek culture. Forming a collective
mythic culture is important not just for the curriculum of theenkuklios
paideia, but for creating an empire-wide Hellenic identity. The value of
the local inevitably changes in Empire, and with it the value of local myth,
especially the more bizarre and disturbing stories. With the increasing
globalization of Greek culture—Hellenization—comes a broadening and
flattening of what is recognized as the shared knowledge that will signal
- TheNeworStrange History(Kaine Historia) also known as theParadoxos Historia,
‘‘Paradoxical History,’’ epitomized in PhotiusBibliotheca146a 153b [190] and put into
context by Bowersock 1994, 24 7, who reminds us that Philo of Byblos also wrote a
Paradoxical History(FGHIII, C, 790, F 12 13).
108 Situating Literacies