396 Adam M. Kemezis
outsider who claims (however dubiously) to exemplify the insiders’ ideals better than
they do themselves.
Hellenic Genealogies
We have seen that when Greeks talked aboutpaideia, they often ended up talking about
ethnicity. What happened, one may ask, when they discussed ethnicity from the start,
particularly in its more descent-based forms? The answer is that they often ended up by
talking aboutpaideia. To explain this requires understanding how Greek ideas of eth-
nic genealogy worked. The Greek-speaking elite of the empire was a pedigree-conscious
aristocracy, and those such as Herodes Atticus (Philost.VS546) and Plutarch (Delayed
Divine Vengeance558A), who could claim that ancestors in the heroic past were not ret-
icent in doing so (see Jones 2010 for epigraphic parallels). However, such claims never
became a necessary component of upper-class Greek status: unlike “Norman” aristocrats
in England, these elites did not claim a collective descent different from that of their
non-elite neighbors. This would have been ideologically difficult, because the elite’s
classical inheritance included a strong rhetoric of the city and the citizen community
(Zuiderhoek 2008: 71–3). For anyone with a claim to Greek status, one’spatrisas a
human community remained the locus of the cultural institutions and emotive attach-
ments by which one expressed and validated that claim. Claiming to have a different
genealogical origin from one’s fellow citizens would have been in itself an un-Greek
thing to do. Thus, when ancestry and Greekness are connected in the Second Sophistic,
people do not usually say “I am Greek because my ancestors were Greek.” More often,
they say “I am Greek because I come from a Greek city.”
Cities in the imperial period were just as anxious as individuals to attain Greek status,
and they faced the same discourses of relative and contingent Greekness that individuals
did. This was true for established Aegean centers and for new foundations in Asia Minor
and Syria whose collective life also had a parallel indigenous component. One way to
attain that status was through collectivepaideia, expressed through the self-consciously
learned nature of the city’s public life, festivals, oratory, and so forth (Van Nijf 1999).
Cities, however, could also invoke descent in a way that few individuals could, through
the venerable Greek practice of genealogical myth and legend (Patterson 2010). Second-
and third-century cities were no less assiduous than their predecessors in publicizing and,
when necessary, manufacturing stories of their collective origins that connected them
with the people and places of Greek mythology and history. These might involve a single
mythological hero, or they might involve a whole set of colonizing families in histor-
ical times. Once such a connection was made, it was applied wholesale to the entire
citizen body.
In this sense, then, one can speak of a Greek ethnic consciousness, in that people saw
the Hellenic cultural apparatus of their city not as the cause of its Greek status but as
the manifestation, through collective memory, of a biological continuity. The workings
of civic descent claims are well illustrated by the Panhellenion, a league of cities founded
under the auspices of the emperor Hadrian (Cassius Dio 69.16.2). It was based in Athens,