Greekness. The uncertain degree to which such an observation depends
on contemporary cultural understandings or illuminates modern culture
is one of the many issues that makes generalizations about Greek myth
so dangerous.
There is also a back history to this trend toward the anecdotal. As with
so much in the Second Sophistic, it starts with one of their great heroes of
the classical city, Xenophon. Xenophon is the first word not just of Arrian
on hunting, but also of Eunapius’sLives of the Philosophers. Xenophon
is cited again and again in the Second Sophistic. He is a richly varied figure
in the imagination of Empire culture and admired for that very richness
of influence as much as for his specific qualities as a philosopher or a
historian. The big book on Xenophon’s influence remains to be written—
though Tim Rood has managed to write a very fine exposition of the fate
of two words of Xenophon over the ages.
27
The work of Xenophon that is particularly important for the history of
the anecdote is theMemorabilia. This is four books of stories about
Socrates, very loosely linked around the general claims that ‘‘Socrates
was good,’’ ‘‘Socrates was useful,’’ and with an explicit apologetic agenda.
Each story is short, rarely more than a long paragraph, and can be told in
any order. This unparalleled literary form is in striking contrast to Plato,
whose accounts of his master’s thought seem to have become longer and
longer and more and more complexly integrated. I would like to suggest
that the Memorabiliamight well have been designed for fragmented
sympotic use rather than just for reading. That is, any paragraph could
have been chosen and recited at a symposium, putting into circulation a
set of brief stories, any one of which could be told elsewhere. This is in
part how the image of Socrates built up in public discourse. The simple
language, often with achreia-like conclusion, is designed for retelling.
(The symposium is only one forum for such recirculation, of course.)
Plato gives one version of how dialogues start from oral performance in
hisSymposium, with its nesting of narrators: were you there, who did you
hear it from and so forth, which became atoposof dialogue writing;
but Xenophon offers another model of how a written text could enter
discourse: as fragmented anecdotes.
Plutarch’sSympotic Questionsreveals a different strand of what I am
calling the anecdotal.Sympotic Questionsis a very big book, Plutarch’s
longest, but, unlike Plato’sSymposium, it is completely morselized into
discrete elements that could be read in any order and that seem designed
for reuse in a symposium of one’s own. Like Athenaeus, Plutarch, too,
notes how there is a long list of predecessors, philosophers mainly, who
have thought fit to record what was said at a famous symposium (I proem
[612d]). But his is specifically a collection of ‘‘what’s needed’’ (ôa
KðØôÞäåØÆ) (I proem [612e]), and offered so that sympotic logos can
- Rood 2004.
The Anecdote 109