Greeks and Their Past in the Second Sophistic * †

This paper attempts to gather together and interpret the principal manifestations of archaism in the Greek world of the late first, the second and the early third centuries a.d. , a period known to literary historians by Philostratus's name ‘the second sophistic’. The archaism has been observed by historians of society and literature alike, but the most recent work on the sophists does little more than allude to it, while literary historians have seen it primarily in terms of linguistic Atticism, that imitation of fifth-and fourth-century Attic prose writers which was already the subject of controversy in the first century b.c. and which affected all Greek writers of the imperial period to a greater or lesser extent. This linguistic Atticism has been exhaustively documented by Wilhelm Schmid in his great work Der Atticismus. But Schmid sees the development of Atticizing fashions almost entirely as a movement within literature. ¹ This paper tries to show that the archaism of language and style known as Atticism is only part of a wider tendency, a tendency that prevails in literature not only in style but also in choice of theme and treatment, and that equally affects other areas of cultural activity.