Greek Ethnicity and the Second Sophistic 397and held meetings of delegates along with religious and athletic festivals that were still
going on in Severan times. In some scholarship (Spawforth 1999; Romeo 2002), the
institution is seen as ethnically exclusionary, and thus a genealogy-based counterpoint to
the discourse ofpaideia. This is suggested by the geographical distribution of member
cities, primarily restricted to the Aegean Basin and excluding such major Hellenistic cities
as Antioch and Alexandria. Furthermore, in proclaiming the admission of new member
cities, the league would affirm the inductees’ collective descent from a city or region of
old Greece (Oliver 1970, nos. 5–6). This functioned, it is argued, as a crucial barrier to
cities that could not demonstrate such descent.
There is much in the evidence that complicates this model, however. The Panhellenion
included many cities that were marginally Hellenic (e.g., Aezani and Thyatira in Phry-
gia), but it did not include the great cities of Ionia (Ephesus, Smyrna, Pergamum). It is
hard to imagine that the latter failed an objective test that the former passed. It is more
likely that they had no wish to join, perhaps because they did not think their Hellenic
prestige would be increased by joining such an Athenocentric club (Boffo 2001: 293).
Furthermore, the discourse of Greek kinship myth more generally was ill suited to this
exclusionary purpose. It was usually an aggregative practice in which ancestry links were
inherently desirable, since they strengthened existing cultural relationships and rendered
cities’ collective memories ever richer and more meaningful (Patterson 2010: 162–4). It
was in everyone’s interest to accept claims that may seem to us absurd, and an excessively
critical attitude in any one case might call the whole discourse into question. The one
known example of a city questioning another’s ethnic fitness for the Panhellenion (Cyrene
vs. Ptolemais-Barca; see Oliver 1989, no. 120, with Jones 1996: 47–53) proves the point.
In our surviving inscription, Hadrian summarily refuses to accept the exclusionary argu-
ment. Instead he declares both parties Greek, but gives greater representation to the
city with the better-developed ancestry narrative, thus falling back on the “Greekness by
degrees” idea so often seen inpaideia-based arguments.
Rather than being a counterweight topaideia, the Panhellenion relied heavily on it.
The myth-and-legend descent claims described in the preceding text were not subject to
verification by genealogical records or city charters. They relied on what people believed
about their own origins and the significance of their civic and religious institutions. Those
institutions were controlled by priests and officials who came from the educated elite
and incorporated the correct performance of those roles into their idea ofpaideia.In
addition, getting one’s descent claim accepted by the wider world required reconciling
these local memories with Panhellenic mythology and history, and these were once again
the territory ofpepaideumenoi. When the sophist Aelius Aristides (fl. 160) talks in his
Panathenaic Orationabout cities’ true and spurious claims of Athenian descent (1.334),
the unspoken inference is that people such as him get to decide which is which. The
dominant ideology of the Panhellenion was not that of blood and soil, but the Isocratean
notion of redefining Greekness in terms of Athenocentric culture, updated to reflect
Roman conceptions of the cultural superiority of “Old Greece” (Oliver 1970: 131–8;
Ferrary 2011).
In the Panhellenion and the wider Greek world,pro formaancestry claims were nec-
essary for Hellenic status, but never sufficient. The validation of such a claim required