ABSTRACT
In many respects comparable to the age of humanism in early modern times, the intellectual movement known as the ‘Second Sophistic’ flowered from the beginning of the second to the middle of the third century. It is characterized principally by the demand that sound rhetorical training precede any kind of higher education, and by the choice of Classical Greece rather than the Hellenistic period as its source of literary models. Rhetors now held prominent positions in cultural life as school directors, itinerant lecturers and public orators. This was a development greatly furthered by the establishment under the emperor Vespasian (69-79) of state-funded chairs of rhetoric, and by the general philhellenic disposition of the second-century Caesars. Anyone active in the literary field during this period had, then, been taught by a rhetor how to write a prose distinctive in its use of rhetorical figures, complex periods and studied poetical expressions-a style first cultivated at the end of the fifth century BC by the sophist Gorgias. Stress was also given in such studies to elaborate descriptive pieces and digressions on the obscurest of subjects; these were to be woven into compositions.
