Introduction

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Abstract This is a book about the Greek literary culture of the period from the mid-first to the early third century of the common era (CE), the revival of Classicizing ideals that modern scholars often call the ‘Second Sophistic’ .1 It seeks to analyse the various associations between ‘Greek literature’ and ‘the Roman empire’. Although my title echoes that of Bowersock’s influential Greek sophists in the Roman empire, I have forgone any preposition marking the relationship between the two. Greek literature was not, in my view, ‘in’ or ‘under’ (i.e. contained by, subsumed by) Rome; nor, for that matter, was it ‘above’ or ‘beyond’. Rather, it is the dynamic and mutually productive (and at times destructive) relationship between the two phenomena that forms my central area of interest. ‘And’, which equivocates between conjunction (‘man and wife’) and disjunction (‘chalk and cheese’) seems the most appropriate marker of that complex reciprocity.