Introduction: The Empire’s Second Language?

Aelius Antipater of Hierapolis received the best training available for a sophist in the late second century ce, but it seems never to have made him a first-rate declaimer. Fortunately for him, he found a more lucrative use for it. Instead of impersonating Miltiades or Demosthenes on stage, he impersonated Septimius Severus in writing. He became that emperor’s secretary for Greek correspondence and, according to his former student Philostratus, he was uniquely brilliant in that post. “Like a tragic actor who is a complete master of his craft,” Antipater could “give voice to what befitted the imperial role.”¹

The key phrase for our purposes is “the imperial role” (βασίλειονπρόσωπον). What Philostratus makes clear is that, by the early third century at any rate, the emperor’s communication with his eastern subjects was no longer limited to rendering Latin documents into the (perhaps deliberately) unidiomatic Greek of the Res Gestae Divi Augusti inscriptions.² Instead, emperors needed a distinct and parallel self-presentation in Greek, and it had to be an appropriate form of literate Greek produced by men like Antipater, whose other duties included writing a Greek-language history of Severus’ military campaigns and acting as teacher to his sons, the future emperors Caracalla and Geta.

One way to see this is as Roman power making an accommodation. Rather than impose its own language and style on its Greek-speaking subjects, the empire adapted itself to the older and more prestigious idiom.³ This view posits a basic continuity of Greek or Hellenistic culture, on top of which the Roman political structure sits lightly without making a deep impact. Evidence for this view might be found in the word—βασίλɛιος—that Philostratus uses for “imperial.” While αὑτοκράτωρ did exist as a translation of imperator, in most contexts Greek speakers still used the same word for their ruler that their ancestors had used for Hellenistic and indeed Homeric kings.⁴ On this view, Roman emperors simply step into the role created for them by their Macedonian predecessors, and Greeks are unconcerned with the ideological problems that their Latin-speaking contemporaries had in defining the monarchical state.

The issue can be framed the other way round, however. Instead of Roman power being translated into Greek, can we speak of Greek being transformed into a language of Roman power? Instead of saying that the Greeks assimilated the emperor to a preexisting category of βασιλɛύς, might it not be that they redefined βασιλɛύς to refer in the first instance to Roman emperors? After all, they surely had more occasion to think and talk about the living emperor than about any long-dead Ptolemy or Antiochus, and the use of βασιλɛύς relative to αὑτοκράτωρ increases rather than decreases in the second century ce, as Greek speakers become more accustomed to, and were incorporated into, the mechanisms of Roman government. The term is not a cultural misunderstanding, but an example of how Greek became a language in which emperors articulated their claims to power, and subjects affirmed, challenged, and reformulated those claims.

To return to Antipater, we know about his career because he is included in Philostratus’ Lives of the Sophists, a work that self-consciously uses the antiquarian glamor of performing sophists to define Hellenic culture more generally.⁵ But that career was defined by Antipater’s place in the imperial governing elite, which profoundly affected the role he played in Philostratus’ ostensibly autonomous Greek literary scene. It is not simply that the emperor provided professional opportunities to a sophist. That sophist produced kinds of literature that could not exist without the emperor: an apologia for victories in a uniquely Roman form of civil war; petition responses of the kind that defined the Roman monarchy; and, in Antipater’s final suicidal gesture, a speech of rebuke directed at that most Roman of characters, a fratricidally insane emperor.

Antipater is admittedly not a typical figure, but he is extreme in degree rather than anomalous in kind. The authors of the Greek literature of this period were (increasingly through the second century and into the third) integral parts of the Roman power...