It’s All Greek To Everyone: Appropriations of Rome in the Second Sophistic

by Sulochana Asirvatham, Professor of Classics (Montclair State University)

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A major theme in the study of imperial Greek literature (or the so-called Second Sophistic) is mimesis, or imitation, of classical texts, which was at least partly conditioned by education in Greek classical rhetoric and literature. I am interested in the possibility of another kind of mimesis in Greek literature: the Hellenizing appropriation of perceived Roman strengths. This idea runs in the opposite direction of conversations in classics that focus on "appropriation" as something that Rome perpetrates on non-Roman subjects, and is the basis for studies I have done over the years on Alexander the Great in Trajanic/Hadrianic Greek literature, whom I tend to see as a Hellenized version of a Roman military and imperialist ideal. Here I consider a few other ways in which Greek writers may be seen to appropriate Romanitas: the use of andreia in Greek literature as a challenge to Roman virtus, for example, and the presentation of Roman political institutions, like the senate, as Greek in their origins.