ABSTRACT
In the changingmatrix of emerging empire, signs of political and social adjustments also appeared in the cultural realm. The ancient novel offers an example of a genre that took shape as part of the move toward the larger world of empire (Whitmarsh 1998: 16). And in its hero, the Greek romance, a subgenre of the novel, was generating a new subjectivity, a particular self-understanding, for eliteGreekmales of this period. The emerging consensus on the chronology of the Greek romance allows it to be more definitively positioned as a production of the late republic and early imperial period.1 This dating closely aligns the novel with the period of the Second Sophistic. All the orators surveyed in Philostratus’ Lives of the Sophists lived between CE 50 and 250. And Dionysius of Halicarnassus (Orat,Vett., 3.1) credits the reinstitution of classical rhetorical standards to Rome’s influence in the Hellenic cities in the lateRepublican period.Both the novel and the newaesthetic of scrupulous mimesis appear to be literary effects coincident with Rome’s trajectory toward empire. The Greek romance and the rhetorical writings of the Second Sophistic also share stylistic and thematic commonalities. The historical emphases and themes, as well as, to some extent, the language of the romances, correspond with Second Sophistic practices. The earlier romances – those of Chariton and Xenophon – have been described as “presophistic,” but recent studies of Chariton’s language and style have placed him within the sophistic trajectory (Reardon 1996: 317-25; Ruiz-Montero 1991: 484-9), so it has become “increasingly untenable to divide the novels into a ‘presophistic’ Chariton and Xenophon and a ‘sophistic’ Achilles Tatius, Longus and Heliodorus” (Swain 1999: 27-8). The readers and authors of the romances likely coincide with those who studied with or appreciated the performances of the contemporary sophists or their students. In this paradigm, the SecondSophistic texts and theGreek romances – sharing chronology, style, and audience – can be seen as contributors to and the products of (in the dialectic dance typical of cultural change) a new epoch in which inhabitants of the eastern empire were coming to recognize, in Ewen Bowie’s words, that “Roman dominance was there to stay” (2002: 62).
