Philip II and Alexander the Great: Father and Son ... - Historia Antigua

194 RECEPTION OF FATHER AND SON
The Second Sophistic and the
Macedonian Past
Recent scholarship has borrowed Philostratus’ term “Second Sophistic”
for those classicizing writers who fl ourished under the philhellenic
emperors from the mid-fi rst to the mid-third century A.D. 8 Admittedly
they are a varied group, but we have good reason to classify them
together: each articulated his sense of being Greek under the Roman
Empire with regard to his status as a pepaideumenos, or a man possessed
of paideia. The latter word encompassed a somewhat subjective
and variable range of positive attributes that amounted to cultural
and ethical aretē, which replaced traditional warrior aretē for elite
imperial subjects who had no Greek wars left to fi ght. 9 Paideia was
the Greek bailiwick to counter the perceived one of the Romans—
military power. And yet the unavoidable fact is that these Greeks
were Romans: Roman citizens, Roman senators; and some, like Arrian,
even held leadership roles in the Roman army.
For writers wishing to test a combination of Greek and Roman
aretē, Alexander was an ideal medium. Like the philhellene emperors
who were promoting the sophists’ activities, Alexander—with his
ancestral links to Achilles and Heracles, love of Homer, education by
Aristotle, and conquest of the Greeks’ greatest enemy—could be seen
as a “Greek” imperialist. Thus he was a means by which a writer
might articulate his sense of existing between Greek culture and
Roman power and ultimately relate this to his individual conception
of paideia. 10 Very few writers, however, took advantage of this possibility.
There was an entire range of reactions to Philip and Alexander
in the Second Sophistic. This includes total rejection, as with Aelius
Aristides. 11 Anecdotal writers like Pausanias and Athenaeus, on the
other hand, mined the Hellenistic sources for juicy stories about
Alexander, Philip, and other Macedonian kings, but did not seem to
have any specifi c ideological use for them.
Why some writers and not others? Answering this question with
an admittedly broad stroke, what seems to distinguish writers like
Aristides, Pausanias, and Athenaeus from Dio, Plutarch, and Arrian
is that, unlike the latter writers, they show no urge to associate paideia
with militarism—that is, to luxuriate in the idea of “Greek”
world-conquest. One anecdotal writer, however, gives a hint as to
why the Macedonian past might be important to a Second Sophistic
writer even without an idealized Alexander. This is Polyaenus, who
wrote the Stratagems. He alone of Second Sophistic writers specifi -
cally confl ates his panhellenic stance with his “Macedonian” identity
12 —and this in a book dedicated to Antoninus Pius and Verus,