Description
Focusing on the period known as the Second Sophistic (an era roughly co-extensive with the second century AD), this Handbook serves the need for a broad and accessible overview. The study of the Second Sophistic is a relative new-comer to the Anglophone field of classics and much of what characterizes it temporally and culturally remains a matter of legitimate contestation. The present handbook offers a diversity of scholarly voices that attempt to define, as much as is possible in a single volume, the state of this rapidly developing field. Included are chapters that offer practical guidance on the wide range of valuable textual materials that survive, many of which are useful or even core to inquiries of particularly current interest (e.g. gender studies, cultural history of the body, sociology of literary culture, history of education and intellectualism, history of religion, political theory, history of medicine, cultural linguistics, intersection of the Classical traditions and early Christianity). The Handbook also contains essays devoted to the work of the most significant intellectuals of the period such as Plutarch, Dio Chrysostom, Lucian, Apuleius, the novelists, the Philostrati and Aelius Aristides. In addition to content and bibliographical guidance, however, this volume is designed to help to situate the textual remains within the period and its society, to describe and circumscribe not simply the literary matter but the literary culture and societal context. For that reason, the Handbook devotes considerable space at the front to various contextual essays, and throughout tries to keep the contextual demands in mind. In its scope and in its pluralism of voices this Handbook thus represents a new approach to the Second Sophistic, one that attempts to integrate Greek literature of the Roman period into the wider world of early imperial Greek, Latin, Jewish, and Christian cultural production, and one that keeps a sharp focus on situating these texts within their socio-cultural context.
Table of Contents
The Oxford Handbook of the Second SophisticDaniel S. Richter and William A. Johnson, editorsI. Introductory1. Periodicity and Scope, William A. Johnson & Daniel S. Richter2. Greece: Hellenistic and Early Imperial Continuities, Tim Whitmarsh3. Was There a Latin Second Sophistic?, Tom HabinekII. Language and Identity4. Atticism and Asianism, Lawrence Kim5. Latinitas, Martin Bloomer6. Cosmopolitanism, D. S. Richter7. Ethnicity, Culture and Identity, Emma Dench8. Retrosexuality: Sex in the Second Sophistic, Amy RichlinIII. Paideia and Performance9. Schools and Paideia, Ruth Webb10. Athletes and Trainers, Jason Koenig11. Professionals of Paideia? The Sophists as Performers, Thomas A. Schmitz12. Performance Space, Edmund ThomasIV. Rhetoric and Rhetoricians13. Greek and Latin Rhetorical Culture, Laurent Pernot14. Dio Chrysostom, Claire Jackson15. Favorinus and Herodes Atticus, Leofranc Holford-Strevens16. Fronto and his Circle, Pascale Fleury17. Aelius Aristides, Estelle OudotV. Literature and Culture18. Philostratus, Graeme Miles19. Plutarch: Philosophy, Religion, and Ethics, Fred Brenk20. Plutarch's Lives, Paolo Desideri21. Lucian of Samosata, Daniel S. Richter22. Apuleius, S. J. Harrison23. Pausanias, William Hutton24. Galen, Susan Mattern25. Chariton and Xenophon of Ephesus, J.R. Morgan26. Longus and Achilles Tatius, Froma Zeitlin27. The Anti-Sophistic Novel, Dan Selden28. Miscellanies, Katerina Oikonomopoulou29. Mythography, Stephen Trzaskoma30. Historiography, Sulo Asirvatham31. Poets and Poetry, Manuel Baumbach32. Epistolography, Owen HodkinsonVI. Philosophy and Philosophers33. The Stoics, Gretchen Reydams-Schils34. Epicureanism Writ Large: Diogenes of Oenoanda, Pamela Gordon35. Skepticism, Richard Bett36. Platonism, Ryan C. Fowler37. The Aristotelian Tradition, Han BaltussenVII. Religion and Religious Literature38. Cult, Marietta Horster39. Pilgrimage, Ian Rutherford40. Early Christianity and the Classical Tradition, Aaron P. Johnson41. Jewish Literature, Eric Gruen42. The Creation of Christian Elite Culture in Roman Syria and the Near East, William Adler43. Christian Apocrypha, Scott Fitzgerald Johnson
