Adam
Kemezis Models of Hellenism in the Bithynian
Orations of Dio of Prusa
This paper explores the use of appeals to Hellenism as a
persuasive technique in certain key passages of the
Bithynian Orations of Dio of Prusa, especially in
Orations 43,44 48 and 47. In these orations, Dio is
trying to get his fellow-citizens to support him as a
person and certain plans he has made for buildings and
civic improvements. Through his repeated use of allusions
and paradigms from the classical Greek past, Dio is
suggesting to his fellow-countrymen not that they simply
imitate the classical Greeks, but rather that, by support
of him, they choose to adopt a cultural identity whose
most important feature is the proper understanding and
enjoyment of references to classical models. The
Bithynian orations (38 to 51 in modern editions) have
generally been seen either as important biographical data
(Von Arnim 1898) or more recently in terms of Dio's
relationship with Roman authority (Moles in Ethics and
Rhetoric 1997 177-93;
Salmeri in Swain ed. Dio Chrysostom
2000; Swain in Hellenism and Empire 1996).
This paper will see these orations mainly as a Greek
talking to other Greeks about what it means to be Greek.
The paper starts by examining a few key instances in
which Dio uses Hellenic paradigms for his home-town
audience. Dio consistently calls on his audience to be
"Hellenic," but this does not mean simply being more like
the inhabitants of fifth-century Athens. As will be seen
from the examples discussed in this paper of his encomium
of Prusa in Oration 44 and his deprecation of Athenian
civic monuments in Oration 48, all of the virtues Dio is
advocating are of a highly abstract nature, and often as
not the ancients themselves fail in his examples to
practice them. What he is looking for is not direct
imitation: instead the goal is that his audience should
embrace their "classical heritage" and take their place
in a wider cultural context.
Dio frequently uses this idea of choosing a cultural
heritage as part of his own self-portrait as an orator.
This paper will examine in particular Dio's extended
self-comparison to Epaminondas and Socrates in Oration
43, his defense in the same oration of the use of
classical models in general and, in Oration 47, Dio's
digression on Aristotle's attempt to re-found Stagira,
and later his dialogue between himself and an imagined
Prusan opponent. In all of these instances, taking Dio's
side is portrayed as choosing to be part of a broad
cosmopolitan Greek identity that is opposed to the
parochialism and pettiness with which Dio taints his
opponents. Hellenism is seen not as an innate national
characteristic but as an ethical and even aesthetic state
that one must choose to enter. Within that state, a great
value is placed on the ability of a figure like Dio to
see the past as fragmentary and manipulable. The actual
deeds or speeches of Pericles or Xenophon are less
important than what a figure like Dio can do with them to
amuse and educate a contemporary audience.
This view of Hellenism has important implications for the
idea that the cultural stance of Dio and his Greek
contemporaries represents either backward-looking
nostalgia or some form of resistance to or reaction
against Roman political domination. In these speeches,
the most important opposition is not between past and
present or between Greece and Rome. Rather it is between
cosmopolitan and provincial, between a world-view that is
capable of making the Hellenic past useful in the present
and one that is not. Thus in fact Rome and the Roman
Empire are on the positive side of the main opposition,
as representatives of a wider cultural world of which Dio
is a part. Dio's reaction to Rome is not to exclude it,
but to include it on distinctly Hellenic terms as opposed
to customary Roman stereotypes.
Univ.
of Michigan
akemezis@umich.edu