394 Adam M. Kemezis
though in both cases the people from whom the “Hellenes” are distinguished are also
Greek speakers. Conversely, behavior or language that showed a lack ofpaideia, even if
displayed by Greek speakers, was identified with foreign or “barbaric” peoples (e.g., Dio
Chrys. 33.41; 36.25).
The use of “Hellene” in this way results in some ambiguity: Greekness does not work
quite as one would expect an ethnic category to work. As Suzanne Saïd has pointed
out (Saïd 2001: 291–2), people recognized degrees of Greekness, so that one could be
more or less Greek than one’s neighbors, and Greekness could be a source of distinction
as well as solidarity. Greek status was also always contingent: there was no one objective
characteristic that could make one indisputably or permanently Greek. Neither, however,
could Greekness function straightforwardly as a knowledge-based class characteristic, in
part because it had a large mimetic component. Was the objective ofpaideiato know
about the privileged Greek past, or was it to live that past, and tobecomea classical Greek,
in the sense of establishing cultural continuity and identity? The latter sense comes out
in the signature activity of the Second Sophistic, the declamation (melet ̄e), in which a
highly educated and trained member of the elite impersonated a figure of the classical
past. That sense of embodying Greekness through imitation extended to all kinds of lit-
erary practices—the historian Arrian (fl. 130), for instance, not only adopted a style and
subject matter based on Xenophon, but he actually refers to his narrative persona on occa-
sion as “Xenophon”—and to the performance of one’s cultural role more generally. Of
course, on some level, people knew that the imitation was a fiction, that the sophist was
not Alcibiades or Demosthenes but a contemporary giving a certain kind of performance
(see Schmitz 1999; Webb 2006), but that performance still required the preservation of
the dramatic illusion on the explicit level. For this reason, Greeks of the Second Sophistic
could not talk about their Greekness as an acquired characteristic, because that would be
to acknowledge that it was something radically different from what Classical Greeks had
possessed. The difference had to be expressed ironically, and the self-conscious play-
fulness of Second Sophistic discourses about Greekness stems largely from an unex-
pressed recognition of the disconnect betweenpaideiaas a learned skill andpaideiaas an
ethnic criterion.
The phenomenon of linguistic Atticism shows the many ways in which the discourse of
paideiaand ethnicity could function. On the one hand, the Atticizing dialect was clearly
a marker of educated aristocratic status, and as such it needed to be quite distinct from
the language used by non-elites, and by elites in their more casual moments (Swain 1996:
33–9). On the other hand, it was meant to assimilate the speaker to the Greeks of the
classical past, for whom it had been a living language used by the entire community,
and thus an index of ethnicity rather than class. It was possible to ignore this second
concern, and to treat Atticizing as a straightforward technical skill that could be taught
with manuals and lexicons, some of which we still have. For many authors, however,
exploiting the ambiguity over ethnicity turned out to be a profitable strategy. Because of
the “degrees of Greekness” phenomenon noted earlier, it was always desirable to connect
one’s own practice of Greekness ever more closely with the classical past, to claim that
one was in some sense more authentically Greek than one’s neighbor. An important trick
was to be able to claim that one’s own use of Attic was in some way natural and gave one
an organic connection to the ancients, whereas one’s neighbor’s usage was an incomplete
set of learned skills.