This book uses literature, inscriptions, art, and monuments to explore the relationship of elite Greeks in the Roman empire to time. It challenges conventional thinking on the temporality of the so-called ‘Second Sophistic’ to argue that, rather than being obsessed above all with the Classical past, imperial Greek culture used the past to position itself within tradition as a way of addressing the future. At the same time, the book demonstrates the importance of taking an interdisciplinary approach to the elite culture of Roman Greece, since authors were often also responsible for monumental interventions in physical landscapes and cityscapes. The author shows how these two modes of cultural production in the hands of elites, such as Herodes Attikos, Arrian, Aelius Aristeides, Lucian, Dio Chrysostom, Polemon, Pausanias, and Philostratos, exhibit a shared rhetoric oriented towards posterity and informed by a heightened awareness of the fragility of cultural and personal memory over large spans of time. The book thus analyses the tensions, anxieties, and opportunities that attend the fashioning of commemorative strategies against the background of the ‘Second Sophistic’ and the Roman empire. This exploration provides new insights into our understanding of the cultural and political concerns of elite imperial Greeks.
Chapter 5 homes in on the honorific statue and examines the attitudes of Greeks in the Roman empire to its commemorative capacity. Expressly designed as a commemorative artefact and embedded within civic social praxis, a statue should be a desirable honour. This chapter argues, however, that imperial Greek literature and aspects of how statues are deployed in reality instead cast honorific statues as deficient honours and ultimately unsuitable for personal commemorative ambition. The chapter begins by establishing the place of statue honours in the Roman empire and their perceived commemorative limitations. It then turns to examine several literary and material strategies employed by imperial Greeks that are designed to counter these disadvantages. Topics covered in detail include how statue programmes on monuments are used to amplify commemorative claims; how texts are used to create tailored, imaginary, and inviolable spaces of honour for individual statues; how the replication of private portrait types can extend a carefully crafted reputation to a broader audience; and how literature can remove the limitations of the honorific statue by animating it and instilling personality. Herodes Attikos again forms the focus of material discussion, but the texts are drawn from a much broader field, including Favorinus, Apuleius, Aelius Aristeides, Polemon, Philostratos, Arrian, and Dio Chrysostom.
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