Greek Ethnicity and the Second Sophistic 393and learning them required leisure and money.Paideiawas not precisely identical with
elite status, and nobody claimed that the highest social status and highest achievement
always went together, but anyone who claimed high social status also claimed at least
some degree ofpaideia, and all who possessedpaideiaclaimed at least to be above
the masses.
Paideia, Language, and Ethnicity:
Non-Ethnic Greekness?
Given the description in the preceding text, one might suppose that, in the Second
Sophistic, thepaideia-based category “Greek” had come to refer primarily to an acquired
class characteristic that happened to share the name of what had in earlier times been a
genuine ethnic identity. However, if one defines ethnicity (as is usual in current scholar-
ship) as a subjective phenomenon created through discourse, such that ethnic identity is
a function of what people believe and say about themselves and others, then one cannot
so easily reject the ethnic dimension of Imperial-era Greekness. Any attentive reading
of Second Sophistic literature will confirm that, with very few exceptions, contempo-
raries (Greek or non-Greek) didnotconsider Greekness as an acquired characteristic that
one could put on or off without any reference to one’s family and geographic origin.
Although the most commonly invoked criterion of Greekness is cultural achievement, it
is easy to find instances in which “the Greeks” are spoken of as a descent group, or com-
pared to other groups that seem to be ethnically defined. It would be a mistake, however,
to posit a dichotomy in Second Sophistic thought, in which some voices speak for a more
“ethnic” definition of Greekness in opposition to the dominantpaideia-based view. In
the great majority of our sources from the Second Sophistic,paideiais not opposed to
ideas of biological and geographical identity. Discourses explicitly aboutpaideiaoften
still incorporate ideas of descent; conversely, when individuals and communities in the
Second Sophistic do identify with descent groups, they still refer to concepts ofpaideia.
Greekness in the Second Sophisticwasan acquired class characteristic that had the name
of an ethnicity.
Even so, the names we give things do affect their function, sometimes profoundly.
Paideiadid in fact work differently from analogous types of knowledge in other cultures,
precisely because its possessors connected it with an ethnic identity. The connection was
not absolute.Paideiawas not automatically sufficient for Greekness, since it could be
possessed at least in some degree by people, such as the Jewish historian Josephus (fl. 75)
and the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius (d. 180), who did not self-identify as Greek;
neither was it completely necessary, since monoglot Greek speakers from the Greek main-
land would have been universally acknowledged as in some sense Greek, even if they were
entirely illiterate. Nonetheless, when elites discussed what it meant to be Greek, they did
so predominantly in terms of behaviors that come under the heading ofpaideia, although
they would rarely go so far as to define their ethnicity explicitly and wholly in terms of
those behaviors (Saïd 2001: 286–91). What they did routinely do was to use ethnic lan-
guage when discussingpaideia. A man who used conspicuously archaic diction in speech
could expect friends to call him “the Hellene” (Lucian,Lexiph. 23), and the followers
of a prominent sophist could be referred to as “the Hellenes” (Philost.VS571), even