Hellenicity

This paper studies the ways in which – and the aims for which – ‘ethnographicised’ information or topoi are wielded across differing second-century genres in the Greek- and Syriac-speaking East. The paper’s source texts represent four second-century authors (Polemo of Laodicea, Claudius Ptolemy, Lucian of Samosata, and Bardaisan of Edessa), as well as referring to the rebuttal of Celsus by Origen, which casts interesting light upon the monotheistic doctrinal disputes within which ‘ethnicised’ themes became increasingly used during the Later Antiquity. Common to all of these texts is that they stem from the cross-pollinating exchange of ideas, theoretical structures, and rhetorical tropes which took place in the context of the Imperial Eastern Mediterranean, facilitated by common language and almost as widely shared common understanding of how ethnographical-seeming details could help to build a winning argument – no matter what the occasion. Inter-generic interactions are evident in many stages of the ancient tradition of ethnographical and ‘ethnographicising’ writing, but the often antiquarian-seeming elements about population groups that are time and again recirculated in Imperial literature have not been extensively studied in terms of their rhetorical and epistemic underpinnings. Their usefulness seems to be confirmed by their constant presence in a variety of registers, and essentialist – often physiognomic – arguments could be deployed both about individual characters and broader group characteristics alike. The orators of the ‘Second Sophistic’, represented by Polemo and Lucian in this paper, found many uses for the technique of keeping provincials ‘ethnic’ for the purposes of their own arguments. The technical literature represented by Ptolemy’s Tetrabiblos – and to a certain extent the surviving evidence for Bardaisan’s Book of the Laws of the Countries – found much use for essentialist representations of provincial character(istic)s. Origen, hailing from Alexandria like Ptolemy did, demonstrates in his rebuttal of Celsus’ True Discourse (Orig. Contra Celsum) the freedom with which the supposed ‘ethnic’ antiquities of a number of peoples could be put to use in expositions which had very little to do with ‘real’ ethnography. Identities and religious affiliations are also crossed among this selection of writers in ways that highlight important dynamics (and ironies) associated with the ‘conditioned co-opting’ of provincial backgrounds into the ranks of cultural/doctrinal insiders. Lucian and Bardaisan are Syrians, but while Lucian is in many ways comparable to Polemo, a native of Laodicea, in his approach to the cultural belonging as a ‘sophist-as-Hellene’, Bardaisan has some points in common with both Ptolemy (in terms of his astrological subject matter), and Origen (in the moralising argumentation that pervades his cultural critique). Social and personal interactions become thoroughly enmeshed in some of the examples of rhetorical one-upmanship and self-fashioning involved, whether we are dealing with sophistic set-pieces or doctrinal disputes. For such agendas, the cultural and phenotypic plurality of the Empire’s provinces formed a common pool of ‘embodied knowledge’, to be used when necessary by the learned writers.