Last time I looked at an inscription from 4th century BCE Athens to show how a freedman had to negotiate his own representation of his ethnicity in face of the valorization and conflation of Athenian citizenship with Athenian lineage. Today I’m going to rather briefly look at a quote from Lucian, who in the 2nd century CE. This time period is outside of the range of my dissertation, but Lucian’s description of Greekness, which Hall rather elegantly terms Hellenicity, shows how much the idea has changed since Atotas’ time. Lucian’s own biography attests to this change: Lucian explains that he was raised as a Syrian, but learned Greek through his education at school. He practiced as a professional rhetor before taking the time to pen his humorous sketches by which we primarily know him today. However, not all of his work is directly satirical, as say his famous “True Histories”. Some works, like “On the Syrian Goddess”, do not aim to make the reader laugh out loud.
One such (seemingly) simple work is “Demonax the Philosopher”. This work presents itself as the “life” of Demonax. By “life” I mean a genre that seeks to elucidate the philosopher’s character and philosophy by recounting his altercations with politicians, religious leaders and other philosophers. These altercations are quite short; the proto-encyclopedic work of Diogenes Laertius gives many examples of the genre with some variations. Diogenes Laertius will occasionally supplement his descriptions of philosophers with original documents, such as wills or letters.
“A completely uneducated man called Polybius, who was prone to solecism, told Demonax, ‘The emperor has me with Roman citizenship honored.’ Demonax replied, ‘I wished he’d made you a Greek rather than a Roman.” (Demonax 40, trans. Keith Sidwell).
The joke here that Sidwell represents in Demonax’s awkward English is that Demonax is using Latin sentence structure rather than Greek. What does this have to do with ethnicity? Demonax’s jab is that even though Polybius has Greek lineage, because he is prone to misspeaking, he is not a true Greek. A true Greek is someone who can speak elegantly and show off his mastery of Greek literature and philosophy. What this means is that during the Roman empire, there was a Greek identity that was completely divorced from lineage, a very different situation than during 4th century BCE. Such a change occurred as the Hellenistic kingdoms fell to Rome and as the Romans were enslaving a large number of Greeks and as Greek slaves were educating Roman men and boys.
One such (seemingly) simple work is “Demonax the Philosopher”. This work presents itself as the “life” of Demonax. By “life” I mean a genre that seeks to elucidate the philosopher’s character and philosophy by recounting his altercations with politicians, religious leaders and other philosophers. These altercations are quite short; the proto-encyclopedic work of Diogenes Laertius gives many examples of the genre with some variations. Diogenes Laertius will occasionally supplement his descriptions of philosophers with original documents, such as wills or letters.
“A completely uneducated man called Polybius, who was prone to solecism, told Demonax, ‘The emperor has me with Roman citizenship honored.’ Demonax replied, ‘I wished he’d made you a Greek rather than a Roman.” (Demonax 40, trans. Keith Sidwell).
The joke here that Sidwell represents in Demonax’s awkward English is that Demonax is using Latin sentence structure rather than Greek. What does this have to do with ethnicity? Demonax’s jab is that even though Polybius has Greek lineage, because he is prone to misspeaking, he is not a true Greek. A true Greek is someone who can speak elegantly and show off his mastery of Greek literature and philosophy. What this means is that during the Roman empire, there was a Greek identity that was completely divorced from lineage, a very different situation than during 4th century BCE. Such a change occurred as the Hellenistic kingdoms fell to Rome and as the Romans were enslaving a large number of Greeks and as Greek slaves were educating Roman men and boys.