Martin Hose
A striking spatial sociology characterizes Greek literature. On the one hand, it is shaped by poets and literary figures who are not tied to a particular place. Ancient Greek histories of literature saw Homer as a travelling singer,1 and “wandering poets” remain characteristic of the profession of poet in Greek literature from the Archaic period to late Antiquity.2 For prose writers, too, a life of traveling from place to place was not unusual. Herodotus is said to have read his texts in public in Athens, Thurii and Olympia3 and the so-called sophists such as Gorgias delivered their lectures in many different cities. In the Imperial period and in late Antiquity, too, the “virtuoso orator” who travelled from place to place is a prominent phenomenon of Greek literature’s sociology.4
On the other hand, these wandering producers stand in contrast to another characteristic feature of Greek literature, namely the fact that certain places drew in literary figures or developed their own distinctive literary culture. The history of Greek literature could be written as a history of places of production, beginning in the Archaic period with Sparta and Miletus, moving through Classical Athens, Hellenistic Alexandria and Pergamon, and on to Rome and Constantinople in the Imperial period and late Antiquity.5 This chapter offers a sketch of this “spatial view of literature.”
Urban centers will always offer better opportunities for developing any kind of culture. People and ideas flow into these centers and meet there, and the mere spatial presence together of different ideas and mentalities creates a constellation in which ideas can be discussed – whether in rivalry or collaboration – and thus altered or improved. A concentration of people means a concentration of talents, and creates competition between them. And a concentration of people also means that different interests come into contact, including interest in different forms of culture. An urban space is therefore an ideal laboratory for literature. All these general points apply to Greek literature, but it is necessary to add some specifications. For, at least in the Archaic and Classical periods, literature as a phenomenon in Greece is tied to opportunities for performance. Places that offered a rich festival culture and a correspondingly large number of opportunities for performance could make attractive offers to local poets to persuade them to demonstrate their skills, but could also attract poets from elsewhere. The agon as a performance form, which could include musical–poetic performances, automatically resulted in an improvement in the quality of the poetry presented.
Was Sparta an important location for literature? At first glance, it may seem odd to name Sparta alongside Athens and Alexandria, for there is a widely held view, which goes back to Greek literature itself, that Sparta was a crude warrior state in which every institution of social life was designed for the benefit of the Spartiates’ military prowess and the oppression of the helots. This image of Sparta has been changed by the research of the past 30 years. However, it must be admitted straight away that the same recent research has increasingly cast doubt on all our hitherto trusted data on early Spartan history. The Dorian invasion and the return of the Heraclids now appear to be the expression of “intentional history,” that is, a history that takes account of the ideas of the people who composed it. The wars, too, that Sparta supposedly waged against Messenia – up to four are mentioned in the ancient sources – are becoming ever harder to pin down chronologically. And finally the idea that, in an existential crisis during one of these wars (the second one?) in the seventh or sixth century, Sparta was transformed from a culturally flourishing Archaic community into a warrior state (with an iron currency) cannot be reconciled with the archaeological evidence of the early fifth century.
If we jettison the traditional Spartan image and look with an open mind at the culture of Archaic Sparta, a range of testimonia and texts give a picture of an impressively varied and productive site in the Greek Archaic world, and one that can certainly be ranked as an early cultural center.
A work “On Music,” attributed to Plutarch, reports that in Sparta a first school of lyric poetry was founded by Terpander, and a second one by Thaletas of Gortyn, Xenodamus of Cythera, Xenocritus of Locri, Plymnestus of Colophon and Sacadas of Argos, at whose initiative the festival of the Gymnopaedia was founded (De mus. 1134b = Thaletas Test. 7 Campbell). With the exception of Terpander, the poets cited in this report are known to us as little more than names. However, it is remarkable that they all – including Terpander, who is said to have been a native of the island of Lesbos – come from outside Sparta (from Crete, from Asia Minor, etc) and yet they are linked to the Spartan festival, the Gymnopaedia. According to the ancient chronology, this festival was founded in 668 BCE. If we take pseudo-Plutarch’s report seriously (and there is no reason not to), this means that a Spartan festival of the seventh century attracted poets from all around the Greek world. This appeal, we may conclude, probably rested on generous arrangements for the festival, both in the importance it was accorded in civic life and in providing prestigious prizes for the poets who contributed to it.
The Gymnopaedia mentioned by Ps.-Plutarch were a festival centered on competitions – agones – e.g. between choirs of older men, adults or boys. Comparable competitions were offered at other festivals, for example the Carneia, an annual festival sacred to Apollo; every fifth year it was conducted with special lavishness, including musical–poetic agones. The Hyacinthia, another festival devoted to Apollo, also featured musical–poetic agones.6
These three festivals formed a cycle of summer festivities from July to September. Their expansion to include musical–poetic agones can be detected from the early seventh century: the Carneia are said to have had this type of content since the 20th Olympiad, i.e. 676/3 BCE, the Gymnopaedia since a victory by Sparta at Thyrea in 546.7 This development of Spartan festival culture went hand in hand with the increase in the power of its state in the Peloponnese. It is not yet clear whether that was the only ground for the prosperity of the state and the festivals, or if Sparta was also an important economic and cultural stage on the route from east to west, as the archaeological evidence increasingly suggests.
Musical–poetic agones mean competition, and competition means rivalry and leads participants to strive to outdo each other. Though it is not possible to reconstruct the concrete organization of the competitions in Sparta, reports mention that choruses competed with each other, though foreign poets did not (thus Alcman F 10(a) PMGF). Nonetheless, the poets’ music and poetry was subject to state supervision and had to observe certain rules, as is shown by an anecdote reported by Plutarch (Inst. Lac. 17, 238c): to punish Terpander for breaking a rule, the ephors nailed his lyre to a wall.
This “agonistic” context of poetry is reflected in the scattered testimonia and fragments of poets and musicians who were active in Sparta. Terpander is cited as the originator of some striking innovations, namely the seven-stringed lyre, certain lyric forms like the nomos (a song sung to the cithara) and new scales and rhythms.8 We may surmise that the victories he won at the Carneia were due to innovations like this.
We can get a faint impression of Sparta’s innovative force in poetry and music from the fragments of the two best-preserved Spartan poets, Alcman and Tyrtaeus. Even in antiquity it was debated whether Alcman was a native Spartan or had emigrated there from Lydia, but the choral songs he created around the mid-seventh century came to have almost canonical status in Sparta.9 A large fragment of a partheneion (a song for a choir of girls) has been preserved on papyrus and there are other smaller fragments; they reveal the poet’s pride in his artistic skill. F 14a PMGF runs: “Come Muse, clear-voiced Muse of many songs, singer always, begin a new song for girls to sing.” This is evidently the proem, invoking the Muses, of a partheneion, in which Alcman gives special weight to the aspect of the “new.” At the same time, it can be seen from what remains of Alcman’s poems that they track a development from simple songs accompanying cult activities – in the case of the partheneia these are cult practices by girls, perhaps with an initiatory context – through to demanding and highly artificial works of verbal art with complex meters. This development is a clear expression of Sparta’s achievement as a site of literature in the seventh century.
Tyrtaeus offers a comparable picture. He created elegies that were performed at symposia, probably at the end of the seventh century. The fragments of his elegies reflect situations in male-military or civic life: several fragments and testimonia attest a major elegy called Eunomia which, with glances to Spartan history, sets out the right behavior according to the Spartan constitution (F 1–8 IEG; cf. Andrewes 1938). Famous (and infamous) is a fragment that presents a poetic paraenesis by a military leader exhorting his troops to courage on the battlefield: “It is a fine thing for a brave man to die when he has fallen among the front ranks …” (F 10 IEG, transl. Gerber). The elegies of Tyrtaeus build on an existing poetic genre, developing approaches that had been begun, for example, in the earlier elegies of Callinus.
It is not clear how long this “artistic Sparta” maintained its cultural dynamism (see above). The state probably hardened its line definitively in the year 464, when an earthquake and a simultaneous helot revolt presented a radical threat to its existence.
In contrast to Sparta, the end of Miletus’s era as one of the Greek world’s innovative cultural centers can be dated precisely: in 494 BCE Persian troops destroyed the city, which had led the revolt against the Great King, and so destroyed an intellectual laboratory that had begun to shape a new understanding of the world. In Sparta culture had blossomed on the basis of festivals, that is, by the will of the state which organized them (however that occurred in practice). In Miletus, on the other hand, the conditions needed for thinkers like Thales or Hecataeus seem to have been provided by what modern sociology of knowledge calls a “constellation.” One element of this was the city’s distinctive location on an Aegean peninsula sheltered from unfavorable winds and near the valley of the river Maeander, an important trade route from Anatolia to the coast. Miletus was thus a key point in the traffic between East and West. It had a tradition of settlement that went back to the fourth millennium BCE, in which Anatolian, Minoan, Mycenaean and ultimately “Ionian” levels were overlaid. According to tradition, Archaic–Ionian Miletus was the metropolis of over 90 colonies on the Propontis and the Black Sea coast.10 This is evidence that the city was capable of enormous logistical feats. Knowledge of suitable sites for city foundations must have reached Miletus and been evaluated there; and as the colonies remained linked to Miletus through their cultic ties to the mother city, more knowledge was continually flowing in from them. Miletus was also in close contact with the other cities of Ionia that founded colonies, contact that had a formal structure in a joint assembly, the Panionion, which united the cities in a federation. In the sixth century Miletus was thus the central point in a massive Archaic “knowledge network.” The objects of knowledge were the newly explored regions of the Black Sea and the lands along the trade routes to the East and into the Levant as far as Egypt. These had different cultural traditions and peculiarities of fauna and flora, and they also had different celestial constellations from those in the heavens over Miletus. At the same time Miletus came into contact with the ancient learned cultures of the Orient and Egypt and had to face internal and external challenges and tensions (Herdotus 5.28/9 and the various texts quoted in Athenaeus 12.523f–524c refer to social problems and difficulties with neighbors typical for Archaic poleis, which finally led to a tyrannis.11)
It was in this constellation that some members of the Milesian upper class evidently undertook not only to “store up” the knowledge flowing into Miletus, but also to order it. Thales, Anaximander and Anaximenes – scholars group them as “the Milesians” among the so-called Presocratic philosophers – developed hypotheses about the structure of the world, though it is unclear if this happened in an institutional context (e.g. a “school”) or if the ideas of these master-thinkers developed through unregulated connections with each other. It seems possible that Anaximander was so close to Thales that we may reasonably describe him as his student, but Anaximenes was significantly later than Anaximander (at least according to the chronology of Apollodorus).12
Thales and Anaximander, at least, made public appearances. Herodotus (1.74) reports that Thales predicted the eclipse of 585 to the Ionians and it has been plausibly conjectured that he did so at the meeting of the Panionion. Anaximander is said to have led the expedition from Miletus that founded the colony of Apollonia Pontica (thus Aelian Var. Hist. 3.17). These are hints that these Milesian “masterminds” played an active part in the politics of their city; their distinctive discoveries were thus not only owed to the favorable constellation in the city, but were intended to influence it in turn.
This is true also of the fourth important Milesian, Hecataeus; Heraclitus criticizes him in a famous fragment (DK 22 B 40) for his polymathy, which gives us a hint of the kind of constellation that existed in Miletus. Like the Milesian philosophers, Hecataeus13 attempted to order the information that flowed his way: he compiled the diverse geographical data available to him into a description of the world (as known to him). This work, Ges Periodos (Journey Round the World), stood in the tradition of the ancient periplous genre, which was designed to assist sea travel by giving a description of the world from the point of view of a seafarer, but Hecataeus went so far beyond this tradition that it has even been suspected that he made a map of the world. In addition to this ordering of geography, Hecataeus also attempted to form a coherent system out of the various traditions of Greek mythology. The result was a major work, Genealogiai, which organized myths according to the genealogies of the heroes and also criticized some myths on rational grounds. Hecataeus is usually regarded as a “proto-historian,” but it is clear that historiography and philosophy have a shared basis in the special constellation of Miletus.
Like Thales, Hecataeus too seems to have been a Homo politicus. Herodotus tells (5.36) that he was present when the council of Miletus decided in favor of revolt. He advised against it, based on his knowledge of the size of the Persian Empire, but his advice was in vain: in Hecataeus we meet world history’s first ignored political adviser. Catastrophe followed, and Miletus was destroyed. The city itself was soon resettled (and even better than before, thanks to the brilliant design of the urban planner Hippodamus), but it never again achieved the intellectual significance it had held in the sixth century. A last flicker of its former glory is found in a peculiar literary form, the “Milesian Tale,” a kind of novella that was picked up, for example, by Petronius (sat. 85–7 and 111/2) in the stories about the Ephebe of Pergamon and the Widow of Ephesus (cf. Rawson 1979).
The destruction of Miletus assisted the rise of Athens as a cultural center. After the overthrow of the tyranny at Athens in 510 BCE a development had begun that led in stages to a – by ancient standards – unusually broad participation of citizens in the administration of their city, which we conventionally call “democracy.” Athens’ double victory over the Persians in 490 and 480/79 gave the city a leading role in the eastern Greek world, after Sparta had withdrawn from the struggle. The successful expansion of the navy that was begun after Marathon and which had brought victory at Salamis secured the city’s hegemonic position in a Delian–Attic maritime league, which by the second half of the second century could appear like a tyranny. The importance of the navy also raised the standing of social groups that had not previously participated in the polis, but which got full voting rights in the so-called “Thetic democracy.” In this way Athens after the Persian Wars became the center of a political and economic structure that has sometimes been called the “Athenian empire.” The city became rich through trade and the tribute of the cities of the League, and was itself marked by an internal dynamism that kept its elites in constant flux and gave political power to broad strata of the population. As with Miletus, in Athens, too, we can speak of a constellation especially favorable to “literature.” On the one hand, the political dynamics leading to the emergence and establishment of democracy produced rapid developments in the field of oratory. In the assembly, intensely heated political debates were held; in the court, defendant and prosecutor pleaded their cases before a jury; as part of the public festivals, official speeches were delivered time and again in honor of the city and its citizens, such as at the state funerals for Athenian war dead. In turn, the high frequency of occasions for giving speeches improved the quality of oratory considerably, and, at the same time, the abundance of such occasions enabled the systematization of oratory and development of rhetorical theories. A sophisticated system had thus evolved by the fourth century BCE which differentiated between political (symboleutic), juristic (dicanic), and festival (panegyric) oration and offered formulae for each of these oratorical forms (see Edwards, ch. 13 in this volume).
On the other hand the same political dynamism led to a repurposing of festivals like the Panathenaea or especially the Dionysia, in which the polis celebrated Athens itself and so reaffirmed the new order (on this as a whole, see Pickard-Cambridge 1968; Baumbach, ch. 22, pp. 346–7 in this volume). Already, under the tyrants the festival of Dionysus had been organized as a lavish event with a new form of choral performance (probably in 534), but now it was turned into a central site in the creation of a political identity.14
The innovation introduced in 534 by a brilliant artist, Thespis, was to set a speaker opposite a chorus, which made possible a kind of plot. It quickly developed further, thanks to the agonal structure of the festival in the fifth century, and tragedy was born. Under its influence, a high-spirited cult play was developed into an analogous form, comedy, which became part of the Dionysia from 486. From 509 dithyrambic choirs also took part in an agon. A further festival, the Lenaea, was officially expanded in 440 BCE to include competitions in tragedy and comedy.
The performances every year at the Dionysia and Lenaea alone involved ten dithyrambs for adult male choirs, ten dithyrambs for choirs of boys, three satyr plays, 13 tragedies (three trilogies at the Dionysia, two dilogies at the Lenaea) and ten comedies (five per festival), all of them new works, because the re-staging of existing plays was only permitted from 386 BCE onwards. It has been calculated that around 1100 Athenians took part as choreutes at these two festivals every year. There was thus an enormous demand for suitable texts: the 20 dithyrambs needed annually at the Dionysia drew in poets from all over the Greek world,15 and poets like Ion of Chios16 made themselves available for tragedy, too. (Comedy, in contrast, was closely tied to internal Athenian affairs and so required knowledge that was generally only available to Athenians.)
As in the case of Sparta, in Athens, too, the competitive context of the performances led to enormous pressure to innovate, as documented in the changes in tragedy from Aeschylus’s Persians (472 BCE) to the last plays of Sophocles (O.C.) and Euripides (Ba. and Iph. Aul.). These continuous innovations extended from formal characteristics of tragedy, the so-called “structural elements” (Bauformen), through adaptations of other art forms, such as choral lyric in the choral songs of tragedy, to intellectual developments17 that were intensified by the so-called sophistic movement. In contrast to Sparta, Athens was not just a laboratory for the arts, but also for ideas about human life, society, and the gods. The democracy obliged the old elites to defend their interests in a public assembly (or in front of large juries of ordinary citizens), and political and social success was tied to the ability to speak in public. Various Greek intellectuals, whom we term “sophists,” responded to this need by coming to Athens and offering training in return for money. Plato’s Protagoras gives a literary presentation of a meeting of famous sophists in the house of the Athenian aristocrat Callias, and from this we may infer that in Athens of the later fifth century “modern” teachings were circulating not just in rhetoric but also in questions of intellectual principles.
Athens attracted visits from artists and intellectuals from the entire Greek world. We know or infer visits by Ion of Chios (see above),18 Herodotus, Parmenides and Zeno of Elea19 and Democritus.20 The ideas that reached Athens in this way were not always perceived as a gain in Athens itself, but could be seen as a threat, as is shown, for example, by the (admittedly problematic) reports of court cases against thinkers like Anaxagoras (Mansfeld 1979/80).
The intense intellectual exchanges that arose in this way made possible a kind of “self-observation” within this exchange, or, to put it differently, not only were poetry and philosophy “produced,” but there was also reflection on this production and it was contemplated as a historical phenomenon: early forms of “intellectual history” or “theory of science”21 had begun. An important condition for this was a development in media: the growth of writing and book culture can be traced throughout the Greek world, but in Athens it gained greater dynamism from the so-called Cleisthenic reforms that followed the overthrow of the tyranny, as their structures, linked to the democracy, required the ability to read and write (Missiou 2011). By the end of the fifth century, books were an upmarket, but nonetheless everyday phenomenon.22 The existence of books meant the permanent simultaneous presence of old and new poetry, old and new philosophy. This led to comparison and reflection on a body of material that was no longer limited, as it was in a festival agon, to what had just been heard: now “old” and “new” could be set in indirect competition. Books also removed the limits on the amount of knowledge that could be collected and applied in the present moment. In the Archaic period “wisdom” had been linked to lived experience (as embodied by Nestor in the Iliad, for example), but now the experiences preserved in books could be passed on independently of the people who had experienced them.23 Thus Thucydides (1.22.4) valued his historical work as a ktema es aei, the sophist Hippias (DK 86 A 12, B 6, B 4) compiled a collection (synagoge) of the great and important thoughts of poets and prose writers, and reflection on poetry prompted the first attempts at a theory of poetry (Gorgias, Helen § 9; Aristophanes, Frogs, and Sophocles’ book on the chorus: Suda ∑ 815).
In the second half of the Peloponnesian War the material basis of Athenian culture changed, but, perhaps, so did its intellectual climate. In Thucydides’ history it had still been possible to claim that a special delight in experimentation was a characteristic of Athens at the start of the war (thus in the speech of the Corinthians at 1.70), but the trial of Socrates in 399 reveals a more conservative attitude in the city. The fifth- and fourth-century innovations became institutions: at the Dionysia from 386 “old” comedies became an official part of the agon, and in the final third of the fourth century the theater itself was rebuilt in stone.24 Athenian drama became an institution with a history, and one worth studying, as is shown by Aristotle’s Poetics. The revolutionary thought of the sophists, which had encouraged Athenian aristocrats like Alcibiades or – in Plato’s Gorgias – Callicles to pursue an amoral political course, was transformed by Gorgias’s student Isocrates into a formal education. In 390, Isocrates founded a proper school, which produced important Athenian politicians and intellectuals: Lycurgus, Isaeus, the historians Ephorus and Theopompus, and even Demosthenes are said to have attended it. Philosophical thought about the basis of the world and human society also settled into an institutional context when Plato, to rival Isocrates, opened his school, the Academy, in 387.
As an organizational form, the philosophical school created a new kind of constellation, in which problems could be thought through with great intensity and whole systems could be worked out discursively. The Academy created the prototype of an institution that could suffer breakaways (e.g. the foundation of the Lyceum by Aristotle in 335) and could set up branches in other locations (this is evident for Alexandria at least). At the end of the fourth century there were four schools: as well as the Academy and “Peripatos,” Epicurus’s “Kepos” (founded after 305) and Zeno’s “Stoa” (founded around 300), attracted significant numbers of students:25 Epicurus is said to have had 200, and Theophrastus, Aristotle’s successor, 2,000 (Diog. Laert. 5.37). If we also consider the rhetorical training offered in Athens inspired by Isocrates, it is clear that Athens had been transformed into a “college town.” This change began in the Hellenistic period and later even brought Romans like Cicero (cf. De fin. 5.1) and Horace to Athens. It was anchored institutionally in 176 CE, when the emperor Marcus Aurelius set up a paid professorial chair for each of the four major philosophical schools (Cassius Dio 71.32.1; Hadot 2003). Thus the famous phrase that Thucydides (2.41.1) gives to Pericles in the “Epitaphios” became literally true: Athens had become the school (paideusis) of all Greece (and beyond).26
When Alexander the Great founded a city west of the Canopic branch of the Nile in 332/1 – like the other 20 or so cities that he founded, as far as the Hindu Kush, it bore his name “Alexandria” – he could not know that in the modern period this city would become identified with a certain type of literary culture. “Alexandrian” has come to term a literary style in which a poeta doctus creates the most refined poetry, characterized by concentrated form and choice expression, associated with the highest standards of erudition and produced for a no less sophisticated readership. That this arose in Alexandria, set up in 331 on the site of a small Egyptian village, is due to a series of fortunate circumstances beginning in the aftermath of Alexander’s death in 323. Ptolemy had been appointed satrap of Egypt at the time of Alexander’s death and, through smart and energetic maneuvering, he emerged from the struggles between the Diadochoi as king of a rich and stable land, Egypt. He transferred the capital from ancient Memphis to Alexander’s new foundation and, thanks to the wealth of the land of the Nile, he equipped the city lavishly. It appears to have been a magnet not just for Egyptians but also for Greeks, Jews and Orientals. A massive lighthouse on the island of Pharos secured access to the city’s commercial harbor by day and night; it was completed around 280 BCE and came to be regarded as one of the wonders of the ancient world.27 A brilliant court life arose, such as had been a feature of Greek tradition since Polycrates and other tyrants, and all forms of monarchical pomp were pursued. The Ptolemies founded lavish festivals such as the Ptolemaea, founded by Ptolemy II in honor of his father, who died in 279/8; every four years they took place with great pomp. Envoys from the entire Greek world participated. The brilliance of this festival is vividly related in a description by the Hellenistic historian Callixinus (FGrHist 627, F 2, cited in Athenaeus 5,196–203).28 Another festival was the Dionysia, which inspired an Alexandrian tradition of tragic poetry. Its poets were soon arranged into their own canon of seven “stars,” the Pleiad (Sifakis 1967). The Ptolemies competed regularly in the Panhellenic games in the contests traditionally important to monarchs, namely horse and chariot racing, and they had their victories celebrated by poets.29
Among the institutions founded by Ptolemy I and his namesakes who succeeded him was a grandly conceived sanctuary to the Muses, the “Mouseion”; scholars were invited from around the Greek world to become members of this cult community. It is likely that this was intended as a way to organize the education of the sons of the Greek elite, on the pattern of the Macedonian court. However, perhaps modeled on the Athenian philosophical schools, a kind of ancient “Institute for Advanced Study” came into being, which profited from a second measure undertaken by the Ptolemies, namely their efforts to collect in Alexandria all the knowledge of the Greek world (and elsewhere, as we can infer). Two anecdotes vividly reveal how intense these efforts were: ships entering Alexandria were regularly searched for books and a copy was made if any were found that were not already held in the royal collections. Also, Ptolemy III is said to have brought to Alexandria from Athens the precious official copy of the tragic poets, which had to be followed by re-stagings of their works. The king had to leave a massive deposit in Athens as surety (15 talents of silver), but the Ptolemies kept the original, sent back a copy – and abandoned their deposit.30 The giant collections of books gathered in Alexandria were housed in two large libraries (though unfortunately the indications in the ancient and medieval sources are not very clear on the point), one in the area of the royal palace, which is said to have held the massive number of 500,000 (or even 700,000) book rolls, and a smaller one outside the palace, in the area of the sanctuary of Serapis, with 400,000 volumes (Pfeiffer 1968, 98–102). (Whereas the large library was probably designed to impress simply through its size and holdings, but not through elegant reading rooms, the Serapeion library was evidently open to the public).31 All these figures are, of course, problematic (as is the question of what damage was done to the libraries by the fire started by Julius Caesar in Alexandria in 48 BCE; cf. Hatzimichali 2013). Nevertheless, these libraries were key parts of the distinctive Alexandrian constellation. They made available in a single place (almost) all the authors of Greek literature whose texts had ever been set down in writing. A massive quantity of ideas, histories and data was present, which it was necessary to survey and set in order, if it was to be used. This task was taken up by the “librarians” of Alexandria. In contrast to other libraries, in which important work was generally carried out by an anonymous army of industrious scholars, the names of the first seven “library directors” of Alexandria have been preserved, giving us a hint of the epochal significance of their achievement: Zenodotus, Apollonius of Rhodes, Eratosthenes, Aristophanes of Byzantium, Apollonius the Eidograph, Aristarchus, and Cydas.32 We also know of other staff, the most famous of whom is certainly Callimachus.
The surveying and ordering of the masses of text had two long-term consequences for the whole production of Greek literature. Firstly, the presence of many copies of the same text in Alexandria meant that, when they differed from each other, the question arose of what the author had actually written: this was the birth of systematic textual criticism. This came to be of immense significance in the subsequent transmission of works, especially those whose transmission showed wide variations, such as the Homeric epics or the Attic dramas, which were altered by actors’ interpolations. Secondly, the ordering of the texts required “cataloguing,” i.e., first a suitable description of each book and then a systematic order. This was done by Callimachus, who drew up a massive catalogue (Pinakes, “boards”) in 120 books (Blum 1991).
However, the staff in the library did not just undertake primary philological research. They were also intellectuals (and belonged to the Mouseion) and they themselves composed poetry, among other things. Their constant work with books deepened the tendency, already present in Hellenistic poetry, to reflect in their poetry the relatively new medium of the book and the literary traditions in which they situated themselves (Bing 1988).
Library, Mouseion, and court were all linked: the staff of the Mouseion and the library composed court poetry, educated the Ptolemaic princes and lived off subventions from the court. This constellation, too, had an influence on the poetry, which, being produced in the environment of the Mouseion and the library, was able to develop a high level of erudition and make great demands of its readers (Fantuzzi and Hunter 2004).
This constellation drew scholars and poets to Ptolemaic Alexandria in search of patronage (thus e.g. Theocritus, Idyll 17), but the close ties to the court could also be repellent: a famous fragment preserves the mockery of Timon of Phleius, who speaks of a “(bird-)cage of the Muses,” in which book-obsessives sit and constantly fight among themselves (SH 786, cf. Kerkhecker 1997).
The decline of the Ptolemaic kingdom, which ultimately led to the annexation of Egypt by the Roman empire, reduced Alexandria to the status of a large multicultural city with good research facilities,33 thanks to the libraries that remained available in the city through to late antiquity.34
The city of Alexandria had a large Jewish community with its own forms of organization; it even received (at an unknown date) the status of a politeuma, i.e. partial autonomy. Nonetheless, this community, like other communities in the diaspora, faced the issue of acculturation to the Greek culture around it. In this constellation, Jewish texts were translated into Greek, which is how the Septuaginta was created,35 and Jewish content was set in Greek literary forms, such as the epic fragments of Theodotus (SH 757–64) and Philo (SH 681–6), which drew on the Septuaginta, and the Moses Drama by Ezekiel (Jacobson 1983). Hellenistic Jewish culture also adopted Alexandrian philology (Honigmann 2003) and its interpretative methods. The extensive oeuvre of Philo of Alexandria in the early first century CE is a high-point of this productive engagement (summary in Borgen 1997): he commented allegorically on Genesis and composed biographies of Moses and Abraham on the Greek model. At the same time he is an important witness to a problem that arose from Alexandria’s character as a large ancient city in which various ethnicities and religions lived together and in which minorities might be exposed to repression. This happened to the Jews in 38 CE, when they were the target of pogrom-like persecutions which were tolerated or even supported by the Roman governor Flaccus (Smallwood 1976, 235–50). In the works In Flaccum and Legatio ad Gaium, Philo wrote about this and about the embassy that he undertook on behalf of the Jewish community to the emperor Caligula to ask for help.
That Alexandria remained a city of scholarship in the following centuries can be seen from its results: around 150 CE the brilliant mathematician Ptolemy, with his Mathematiké syntaxis (later called “Almagest”) produced a large, influential astronomical handbook that placed the earth at the center of the cosmos – the “Ptolemaic Model” of the universe (see Hübner 2000 with further bibliography) that persisted into the early modern period.36 With the same mathematical precision, he compiled a geography in which all the places on earth known to him were listed with their longitude and latitude.37
Early Christianity, too, developed its own tradition of learning in Alexandria, where it could rely on a large community. At the end of the second century Clement (of Alexandria) argued philosophically and eruditely for the intellectual superiority of Christianity over pagan culture. In his works, especially the Stromateis (“patchwork carpets”), he quotes from an incredible number of pagan texts, including many tragedies that are today lost (cf. Stenger, ch. 8, pp. 131–2 in this volume). The necessary condition for these quotations was access to such rare books – a sign of life from the cities’ libraries and their active use. At the start of the third century, Platonism was given a decisive new impulse by a philosophy teacher in the city, Ammonius Saccas, leading to Neoplatonism (through Ammonius’s student Plotinus).
Alexandria remained an intellectually important city after the victory of Christianity. The Christian Arius, presbyter at a church in Alexandria, devised a model of the relation between God the Father and God the Son that was oriented towards philosophical ideas; under the slogan “Arianism” it was one of the ideas immediately subjected to vehement attack by the Alexandrian bishop Athanasius. Traces of the Mouseion are, finally, to be found in the figure of its last attested member, the philosopher and mathematician Theon, who edited Euclid’s Elements and described the eclipse of the sun of 16 June 364 and that of the moon of 26 November of the same year.38 An ever more rigid Christianization of Alexandria’s culture led (probably in 391) to the destruction of the Serapeion and its library. Another victim of this fundamentalism was Theon’s daughter Hypatia (Deakin 2007), whose philosophical and mathematical teaching had attracted students like Synesius of Cyrene to Alexandria until the end of the fourth century. In 415 fanatical Christians murdered Hypatia in a church, and so set a bloody end to the history of the intellectual center Alexandria.
Pergamon’s rise as an intellectual metropolis in the Hellenistic and Imperial periods is above all the result of the diplomatic skill and prudence of the Attalids, a family with roots in Paphlagonia, a region on the Black Sea Coast that the Greeks tended to view as barbarian. That was the home of Philetaerus, a military man in the service of Lysimachus. In 302 BCE he was given command of the fortress of Pergamon and Lysimachus’s silver treasure which was sequestered there. By switching sides to the Seleucids, Philetaerus managed to make political space for himself, and in 260 his nephew and successor Eumenes made himself completely independent. The Attalids successfully established this new realm as a mid-sized power between the Macedonian and Seleucid empires. They pursued a clever political course that played on the conflicting interests of these empires and later also of the power of Rome. Among their political tools was a public image that presented Pergamon as the protector and supporter of Greek power in Asia Minor and Greece. Protection was certainly necessary, as Celtic tribes (“Galatians”) had migrated from the Balkans into Asia Minor in the year 280 and plundered and ravaged the country. The Attalids defeated them several times and used these successes for their public image in various ways. Eumenes’ son Attalus (I) declared himself king after a victory over the Galatians and adopted the name Soter (“savior”). The Attalids publicized their new role in the Greek world through generous benefactions and dedications of magnificent statues. Attalus I had equestrian statues of himself and his most senior officer Epigenes set up in the sanctuary of Apollo in Delos, and through similar dedications the Attalids were present in other Greek sanctuaries too. As the intellectual center of Greek culture, Athens was given special attention. Attalus II donated a grand colonnade at the Agora (a reconstruction of this stands near the site of the ancient agora), and we can trace an attempt by the Attalids to interpret Pergamon’s struggle against the Galatians as a parallel to Athens’ struggle against the Persians and so to “inherit” in the Hellenistic period the role that Athens had played for Classical Greece.
Pergamon itself was developed to match this notion, as it was transformed from a fortress into a royal residence. Eumenes II (the son of Attalus I) set up a massive altar with a frieze depicting a gigantomachy, a symbol of the victory of (Greek) culture over barbarism.39 In antiquity it was regarded as one of the wonders of the world;40 in the Book of Revelations (2.13) it is described as “Satan’s throne.” As in Alexandria, a large library was built, which was to demonstrate the city’s wealth and to rival Alexandria; in the mid-first century BCE it is said to have held 200,000 volumes.41 Intellectuals were tempted into the city to fill the library with intellectual life.42 Admittedly, it is scholars and scientists rather than poets43 who are attested at Pergamon, men such as the mathematician Apollonius of Perge, the natural scientist Biton or the travel writer Polemon of Ilium. Philological work was given a distinctive cast by Crates of Mallus. He was an important interpreter of Homer – in contrast to Alexandrian Homeric studies, which concentrated on questions of textual criticism, he seems to have interpreted the text of Homer allegorically.44 We may ask if this kind of philology was especially apt in a city that, in an “allegorical” interpretation of its own identity, wanted to be understood as a new Athens.
With the death of Attalus III in 133 BCE Pergamon’s brilliant years came to an end. In accordance with the King’s testament, the kingdom and its riches passed to Rome. Internal uprisings, the Mithridatic wars and finally the Roman civil wars threatened to ruin it. However, once the Roman Empire had been consolidated under Octavian/Augustus, and especially with the reorganization of the tax system, Pergamon recovered over the course of the first century CE. In the second century, promoted by Trajan and Hadrian, it again achieved intellectual importance: in the late first century, there was a major rise in popularity of the cult of Asclepius that is attested in a sanctuary west of the city from the fourth century BCE which was also supported by the Attalids. It became almost proverbial to talk of Asclepius (Edelstein 1945/1998) as “the Pergamene god” (Pergamenus deus: Martial 9.16.2). The sanctuary was expanded into a major healing center with infrastructure to match (Hoffmann 1998), in which priests, representing “temple medicine,” and doctors, as representatives of “secular medicine,” jointly tended the sick. The city’s colonnades, theater and large library were frequented by celebrities of the Roman empire, who sought out this “Magic Mountain” to find a cure for real and imagined illnesses. This ancient spa (or “Zauberberg”) is at the intellectual heart of the Sacred Tales of Aelius Aristides, who spent the years 145 to 147 there, receiving a complex treatment for an exceptionally difficult and numerous set of symptoms. According to the Sacred Tales, while he was there he composed a number of poems and orations,45 including his “Defense of Rhetoric against Plato” (or. 2). Pergamon and the Asclepieion were also where Galen (probably born in 129 or 131 in Pergamon) completed his medical training between 158 and 161, through which he became one of the most important doctors of the pre-modern world (see Hankinson 2008, cf. Fögen, ch. 17, p. 274 in this volume).
The victory of Christianity marked the end of the sanctuary, and Pergamon itself lost its importance in late antiquity. A plague of the mid-sixth century decimated the population. Towards the end of the seventh century, the city again became a fortress, which was to defend the surrounding territory from Arab attack, but in one of these attacks in 715 it was destroyed.
Rome (see König, ch. 7, pp. 120–3 in this volume) is in many respects an important site for Greek literature. Rome reveals the influence of Greek culture in its reception of Greek literature (Hose 1999b): the very start of “Roman” literary history, the Odusia of Livius Andronicus, written around the mid-third century, is a translation of Greek literature, and this pattern is continued in early Roman drama. And Roman historiography begins, with Fabius Pictor and Cincius Alimentus, in Greek. As Rome intervened ever more strongly in the Greek Mediterranean from the second century on, the presence of Greek culture in Rome became ever more intensive. Greek diplomats arrived on embassies, such as the famous “philosophers’ embassy” in 155 BCE,46 when Athens sent the scholarchs of the Academy (Carneades), the Peripatus (Critolaus) and the Stoa (Diogenes of Seleucia) to Rome to make the Athenian case in an internal Greek dispute (Plut. Cat. 22/23). Greek private tutors were also present in aristocratic families and, from the second half of the second century BCE on, Greek intellectuals show up repeatedly in the circle of friends (or cohors amicorum) of Roman aristocrats, either in Rome or while the latter were in the Greek world (Bowersock 1965, 124): examples are Panaetius with Scipio, Poseidonius or Theophanes of Mytilene with Pompey, Antiochus of Ascalon with Lucullus, and Philodemus with Calpurnius Piso. Some of these Greeks wrote historical works (or in the case of the poet Archias, panegyric poetry) treating the achievements of their Roman patrons and so guaranteeing their patronage.
However, Greek literature’s place in Rome was not always won by mutual consent. Rome proceeded violently: Polybius, for example, was brought to Italy as a hostage; and we may surmise that many of the Greek tutors were intellectuals whom Rome had turned into slaves. There is a similar picture in material culture: after Sulla conquered Athens in the First Mithridatic War in 86 BCE, he had the important book collection of the collector Apellicon (which included the famous library of Aristotle) transported to Rome as booty.47 Evidently for Romans, as for Hellenistic monarchs, possession of large collections of books had become a status symbol.48
Rome thus offered both books and high-spending patrons, at the time, at the end of the first century BCE, when the Hellenistic kingdoms collapsed and the cities of Greece became impoverished. It is thus hardly surprising that from now on many Greek intellectuals moved (or got themselves invited) to Rome, so that they could offer their services, show off their skills and, as teachers, pass them on to interested Roman aristocrats, for whom Greek education was a source of prestige. The late Republic saw the historian Diodorus move there from Sicily, the grammarian Philoxenus and the rhetor Apollodorus from Pergamon, and the rhetor Theodorus from Gadara (Kennedy 1972, 337–42). Augustan Rome (Bowersock 1965, 124) drew the historians Timagenes, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Nicolaus of Damascus, and Strabo (whose massive geography survives),49 poets like the epigrammatists Crinagoras, Antipater of Thessalonica, and Diodorus of Sardis, as well as Parthenius, who composed a collection of love stories, the Erotika pathemata, for his powerful friend Cornelius Gallus to use in his elegies. Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Caecilius of Caleacte (or, probably a little later, “Pseudo-Longinus,” the author of a treatise on the sublime) and others taught young Roman aristocrats the Greek language and Greek literature.50 Both Diodorus (1.4.2/3) and Strabo (14.5.15) explicitly note that this made Rome the center of Greek literature in their day.
This was a necessary condition for one of the most important shifts in direction in Greek literary culture of the Imperial period: in and with Rome (cf. Dion. Hal. De vet. orat. 3), probably through the literary critics and teachers gathered there, a paradigm of the best Greek style – Atticism – came to be applied to the entire Greek-speaking world. (It is not clear if this Atticism was “invented” in Rome or if it merely received decisive weight from the teaching of Greek tutors to Roman aristocrats, cf. Dihle 1977, Gelzer 1978, Hose 1999a for further references.) Atticism in rhetoric meant an orientation towards the stylistic ideals of Isocrates and Demosthenes (in contrast to the more lush style of rhetoric that is associated with the term “Asianism” and which was taught well into the first century BCE in the Greek east). It also meant an orientation towards the speech and dialect of the Attic “classics” like Aristophanes, Xenophon, and Plato. Throughout the whole of Greek culture down to the fall of Constantinople in 1453, a key mark of education would now be mastery of Attic in the form in which it was spoken and written in the fifth and fourth centuries.
Rome remained a site of Greek literature in the Imperial period: as the Greek east became ever more strongly part of the imperium Romanum and ever more Greeks entered Roman service and ultimately, as senators, joined the empire’s elite, the capital of the imperium became ever more bilingual (cf. Dihle 1989). Famous representatives of the “Second Sophistic” made public appearances in Rome, such as Aelius Aristides, who in 143 CE delivered his “Speech on Rome,” a grand panegyric of the city, before the emperor (cf. Oliver 1953). There is evidence of continuous Greek philosophical activity in the city from Philodemus in the first century BCE, through Epictetus (end of the first century CE) and on to Plotinus, who began to teach in Rome in 244 CE.51 Major works on the history of Rome were written by Appian and Cassius Dio in the second and third centuries. Even the lowbrow literature of Greece was centered on Rome: the Deipnosophistae (The Learned Banqueters) of Athenaeus, for instance. He composed this massive work at the end of the second century, probably using the huge library of the wealthy politician Larensis, in whose house he also sets the scene of the banquet attended by a Greco-Roman intellectual elite. To round things off, so it seems, the emperor himself made a contribution to Greek literature, with Marcus Aurelius’s – admittedly peculiar – work, the Meditations.
From the fourth century onwards, west and east grew apart and knowledge of Greek shrank in the west. Greek intellectuals still came to Rome, but now they wrote in Latin, like Ammianus Marcellinus, with his great history, and Claudian, who wrote panegyric and invective poetry with a political message. A new city had taken Rome’s place as the center of Greek literature: Constantinople.
It cannot be said when exactly Constantine took the decision to refound the city of Byzantium on the Bosporus as “Constantinople” (in this he was joining a tradition of Roman emperors who had refounded cities under new names). What is clear is that the building work began in 324, and on the 11th of May 330, upon completion of the walls, this “new” city was dedicated. There is no indication that Constantine had intended that the new city named after him would replace Rome: it is only through panegyric texts and Christian historiography that Constantinople became the “New Rome” (Dölger 1937 remains important on this). However Constantine’s activities did create a major Greek city that soon flourished and in which, unlike fourth-century Rome with its strong pagan traditions, the Christian church could achieve a dominant position. It was this position that in 381 made it possible for the bishop of Constantinople to be raised to Patriarch of the East (Soz. Hist. eccl. 7.9.3). The dynamism of the growing city and the political direction of the imperium Romanum under Constantine’s successors turned Constantinople into the new capital of the empire and of the administration of its eastern half. As in Hellenistic Alexandria, in Constantinople a large “imperial” library (see Wendel 1954, 246) was part of the facilities of the new imperial residence: Constantius II had it constructed in 356. Julian the Apostate left it his large private collection of books and donated an annex building, and in 372 the emperor Valens ruled that seven antiquarii (copyists of old texts – four Greek and three Latin) were to work for the library. It has been suspected that papyrus rolls were systematically transferred to codex form in the imperial library. In 475 it burnt down and with it 120,000 volumes. It was rebuilt, but in 726 – with 36,500 volumes – it burnt down again.
Attached to the library was a kind of imperial university, teaching grammar, rhetoric and philosophy, and from 425 also law, after a reorganization by Theodosius II, who made Constantinople the official capital. The structure of the teaching staff was also fixed: there were to be 31 professorial positions: three rhetors and ten grammarians for Latin, five rhetors and ten grammarians for Greek, one professor of philosophy and two of law (Codex Theodosianus 14.9.3, cf. Liebeschuetz 1991, 872).
In addition to the library and university there were also church and private libraries, as well as teachers not paid by the state. All this, together with the imperial court and the patriarchate,52 gave the city a powerful intellectual influence,53 but due to the great weight of the schools and the backward-looking work of the libraries, this influence was extremely conservative and focused on preservation and tradition. For example, the goal of the extensive rhetorical and philosophical work of Themistius (c. 317–88) was to comment on Aristotle; Themistius was the most important orator of his day and, as a pagan, he was even able to mediate between the Arian/homoean Christians and the orthodox.54 Among the grammarians, Priscian (end of the fifth century) stands out: his monumental Institutio de arte grammatica offers a synthesis of Greek and Roman grammar (Kaster 1988, 346–8). Around the mid-sixth century, the civil servant John Lydus (Kaster 1988, 306–9) composed antiquarian writings on the Roman months (De mensibus), Roman administration (De magistratibus) and on omens (De ostentis): these books show that the learning nurtured in the libraries of Constantinople was committed to Justinian’s idea that the new Constantinople would continue the tradition of Rome.
In ecclesiastical politics, a defense of Nicene orthodoxy was expected, and important theologians like Gregor of Nazianzus (bishop in 380/1) and John Chrysostom (bishop in 397–403/4) both failed in the attempt.
Poetry too appeared in the new city. For the most part it is lost, but from scattered reports about poets we can see that they produced panegyrics for emperors and high officials in large quantity.55 An unusual feature, which is at the same time an expression of the cultural turn to the past, are the poems composed by the empress Eudocia (c. 405–460): she wrote centos, that is, she made new poems that told bible stories out of a patchwork of lines from Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey (see Usher 1998).
Thus Constantinople became a great center in which the tradition of Greek literature from Homer on was “preserved” – in more than one sense.
Sparta: see Nafissi 2009, Hodkinson 1998, and (on choruses) Calame 1997.
Miletus: Erhard 1983, Gorman 2001, Greaves 2002. Burkert 2013 provides an overview on the intellectual relations between Ionia and the East; cf. von Fritz 1978.
Athens: Meier 1998 on Classical Athens; Habicht 1988 and 1997 on post-Classical Athens.
Alexandria: fundamental, Fraser 1972; on the library, see MacLeod 2000 and Bagnall 2002; on post-Hellenistic Alexandria, Sly 1996.
Pergamon: overviews are given by Allen 1983, Koester 1998, Radt 2011, and Thonemann 2013.
Rome: Rome and the Greek World, see especially Bowersock, 1965; on literature, Dihle 1989; on spaces, Mundt 2012.
Constantinople: an excellent overview is given by Berger 2006; on Constantinople and Rome, see Grig and Kelly 2012, on scholarship in Constantinople, see Wilson 1983.