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The Athenian And Roman Empires

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John Haberstroh HIST 211 Winter 2017 Dr. Salzman
Aelius Aristides on the Athenian and Roman Empires: Μόνος and Φιλανθρωπία in the Panathenaicus and Roman Oration
Introduction
By the first century BC, the Rome had become a Pan-Mediterranean Empire. Its imperial apparatus spanned from Britain to Egypt and included a diverse body of peoples. The Romans inherited in their eastern provinces a world with a long tradition of cities and urbanism.1 Cities were a major factor in how the Roman Empire governed, and cities formed a traditional locus of social, political, and economic organization. Thoughts on cities during the second century AD continued to be seen as important hubs of society within the Roman Empire. By the middle of
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1 (1968): 1– 223, except where noted. All references to the Panathenaicus are noted according to Oliver’s number as well as
Haberstroh 2
The Second Sophistic and Aelius Aristides
Despite being separated by over five years, Greek writers of the Second Sophistic discussed themes of Classical Greece with a sense of immediacy. The early third century writer
Philostratus coined the term “Second Sophistic” (δεύτερα σοφιστική) to describe type of oratory practiced by Attic orators in the fourth century BC, most notably Aeschines.3 Education, or paideia, is seen as a defining characteristic of the Second Sophistic, and as stated above, is most associated with oratory and rhetoric.4 Paideia was a cultural category, though one not completely detached from ethnicity, as Adam Kemezis has argued, but it was a “shared system of reference and expectation,” according to Goldhill.5 What is most important, however, is that paideia was a pursuit reserved for men in the elite classes, and Aristides embodies a man of such standing and cultural training.6 Adam Kemezis defined the Second Sophistic as “a technical term generally used to refer both to a body of writings and to a set of cultural practices of which those writings were a part.”7 Simon Goldhill has pointed to the various problems with the term, namely that there existed no uniform agenda of the writers, the lack of an agreed upon group of genres, and a

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