Der Philosoph und sein Bild

The subject of this study is the relationship between a literature and a stylistic theory. The literature is the Greek literature of the so-called Second Sophistic, the renaissance of Greek culture which began in the first century CE and flourished through the second century CE, reaching a peak in the reigns of Hadrian (117–38 CE), Antoninus Pius (138–61 CE), and Marcus Aurelius (161–80 CE).1 The literary masters of this era are the great epideictic orators, the ‘sophists’ who gave the movement its name, such as Dio of Prusa, Herodes Atticus, Aelius Aristides, Polemo of Laodicea, Dionysius of Miletus, Scopelion of Clazomenae, or Lollianus of Ephesus. Few of their rhetorical works survive, with the exception of the extant speeches of Aelius Aristides, and most of our evidence for their careers and their works comes from Flavius Philostratus whose Lives of the Sophists dates from the early third century CE.

127The Message of the Second Sophistic (from Dio of Prusa and Plutarch)

Did Homer tell the 'truth' about the Trojan War? If so, how much, and if not, why not? The issue was hardly academic to the Greeks living under the Roman Empire, given the centrality of both Homer, the father of Greek culture, and the Trojan War, the event that inaugurated Greek history, to conceptions of Imperial Hellenism. This book examines four Greek texts of the Imperial period that address the topic - Strabo's Geography, Dio of Prusa's Trojan Oration, Lucian's novella True Stories, and Philostratus' fictional dialogue Heroicus - and shows how their imaginative explorations of Homer and his relationship to history raise important questions about the nature of poetry and fiction, the identity and intentions of Homer himself, and the significance of the heroic past and Homeric authority in Imperial Greek culture.

Facing the Challenges of Reconstructing Ancient Buildings

Five Letters Attributed to Dio of Prusa