Introduction: Literature and Rhetoric 1n the Second Century CE

Abstract

Abstract 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.