William A Johnson

Biographic Data

ID312406
NAMEWilliam A Johnson
GIVEN NAMESWilliam A
FAMILY NAMEJohnson
SIGNATUREJOHNSON W A
AFFILIATIONSBrandeis University
ORCID0000-0003-4152-0865
VERIFIEDYes
TOTAL WORKS55
TOTAL CITATIONS210
AUTHOR COUNT26
EDITOR COUNT29
FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR1967
LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR2026
H-INDEX6

  • Papyrus Bookrolls with Jewish and Christian Content

    William A Johnson, Nicholas E WagnerARTICLEJournal of Biblical Literature2026

    This close study of forty extant fragments of papyrus bookrolls with Jewish and Christian content focuses on details like format and scribal habits that might suggest distinct scribal communities. The study isolates three groups. (1) Nine BCE-era Septuagint papyri from Egypt and the Judean Desert with striking similarities in high-quality script and generous formatting, suggesting a trans-Mediterranean community of scribes with definite ideas abo…

  • Typological Catalogue of the ancient Roman Scribal Tool Known as a Bone Rule

    Open AccessWilliam A JohnsonARTICLEJournal of Open Archaeology Data2023

    The dataset contains a typological catalogue of archaeological small finds of an ancient device known as a “bone rule” or “bone ruler” or “bone spatula,” together with scaled drawing and full metadata for each item in the catalogue. The ancient device has been identified as some type of scribal tool [8, 9, 13, 28, 45]. The dataset is assembled from publications; from online resources; and from individual scholars. The PDF Bone_Rules_Catalogue fil…

  • Cosmopolitanism

    Daniel S Richter, William A JohnsonBOOKThe Oxford Handbook of the Second…2017

    This chapter describes the how various intellectuals active in the Second Sophistic conceived of the unity of the human community, a problem with philosophical, social, political, and, perhaps most importantly, ethnic implications. Intellectuals of the period inherited a rich conceptual vocabulary with which to think about human unity; ironically, fifth- and fourth-century Athenian rejections of aristocratic privilege provided a means for later i…

  • Athletes and Trainers

    Jason König, Daniel S Richter et al.BOOKThe Oxford Handbook of the Second…2017

    Athletic activity was a major preoccupation of the Greek elite in the imperial period. This chapter looks at the relationship between athletic and intellectual activity, focusing especially on the way in which athletic skill could in itself be presented as a form of paideia. It looks first at day-to-day training in the gymnasium, focusing particularly on the use of athletics in the education of young men of the Greek elite and on the expertise of…

  • Retrosexuality

    Amy Richlin, Daniel S Richter et al.BOOKThe Oxford Handbook of the Second…2017

    This chapter argues that Second Sophistic texts express the erotic in terms of the past: retrosexuality. Starting from the all-male bilingual dinner party at Gellius 19.9, the discussion traces the eroticization of women, boys, eunuchs, cinaedi, and sophists, conditioned by slavery. Chastity armors women writers of the period, historians revel in past unchastity among Imperial women, and letter-writers pose with female icons; fiction invents wome…

  • Apuleius

    Stephen J Harrison, Shane Harrison et al.BOOKThe Oxford Handbook of the Second…2017

    This chapter considers the biography, literary career, and literary output of the second-century Platonizing Latin writer Apuleius, born in Roman North Africa in the 120s ce and recorded as active in Carthage and Africa Proconsularis in the late 150s and 160s. In particular, it examines the key features of his two most important surviving works, the Apologia or Pro Se De Magia, a forensic oration of self-defense against charges of magic and other…

  • Latinitas

    W Martin Bloomer, Daniel S Richter et al.BOOKThe Oxford Handbook of the Second…2017

    This chapter examines the idea of Latinitas, Latinity, the quality of writing and speaking a pure Latin, which in its history from the beginnings of Latin literature in the third century bce has been both a socio-linguistic and a literary critical, stylistic category. Constitutive influences have been the standardization of the language of the capital as the language of an empire, the development of Latin literary styles, and the teaching of Lati…

  • Fronto and His Circle

    Pascale Fleury, Daniel S Richter et al.BOOKThe Oxford Handbook of the Second…2017

    Fronto, the great orator of the second century and teacher of Latin rhetoric to the future emperors Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus, while not fitting Philostratus’s definition of a sophist, did practice some sophistic genres and shares with his Greek homologues an epideictic vision of rhetoric, a love for archaisms and an interest in similar themes. This chapter attempts to show the connections that Fronto maintains with the sophists whom he kn…

  • Poets and Poetry

    Manuel Baumbach, Daniel S Richter et al.BOOKThe Oxford Handbook of the Second…2017

    This chapter gives an overview of the production and reception of Greek poetry in the Second Sophistic. It addresses questions of its performance and “setting in life,” looks at the generic tradition and creative innovation of epic, drama, melic poetry, epigram, and fable, and takes into account different cultural backgrounds and literary functions. Poetry was at the core of Greek paideia, functioned as a code for the educated elite, was regarded…

  • Longus and Achilles Tatius

    Froma I Zeitlin, Froma Zeitlin et al.BOOKThe Oxford Handbook of the Second…2017

    This chapter pairs two Greek novels: Longus’s Daphnis and Chloe and Achilles Tatius’s Leucippe and Cleitophon, both generally dated to the second century ce. At first glance, they may seem to be strange bedfellows: Longus’s work is a pastoral romance, a small-scale miniature set entirely in an idyllic landscape on the island of Lesbos, where the young lovers enjoy conditions of unimaginable innocence and what adventures they have are limited to t…

  • Historiography

    Sulo Asirvatham, Daniel S Richter et al.BOOKThe Oxford Handbook of the Second…2017

    The historiographical writings of Arrian, Appian, Herodian, and Cassius Dio pose interesting challenges to how we characterize Second Sophistic literature. With its ostensible goal of telling the truth about the past, imperial Greek historiography seems incompatible with the large bulk of imperial Greek writing that is more obviously inspired by declamation and whose main goal is the virtuosic display of erudition, or paideia. Furthermore, inasmu…

  • Greece

    Tim Whitmarsh, Daniel S Richter et al.BOOKThe Oxford Handbook of the Second…2017

    This chapter considers the periodization of the “Second Sophistic.” Borrowing and adapting an analogy from quantum physics, it argues that we can understand the Second Sophistic both in “particulate” terms—as something with clearly defined boundaries in time and space—and as a “wave function” that ripples across space and time. In particular, the literary production of the Hellenistic near east shows striking similarities in certain respects: a c…

  • Professionals of Paideia?

    Thomas Α Schmitz, Thomas A Schmitz et al.BOOKThe Oxford Handbook of the Second…2017

    This chapter analyzes to what extent public speaking as a sophist can be defined as a profession. While a number of aspects seem to point in this direction (the importance of hard work and good craftsmanship, the acceptance of wages, and the establishment of endowed chairs of rhetoric), other aspects show that sophists were not professionals in our modern sense of the term: their performances were, above all, a public demonstration of social stat…

  • Schools and Paideia

    Ruth Webb, Daniel S Richter et al.BOOKThe Oxford Handbook of the Second…2017

    Education (paideia) was central to the development of what is now called the Second Sophistic, but surprisingly little attention was paid to the subject in the contemporary texts. This omission may have been deliberate, a way of implying that the status of pepaideumenos or educated man was acquired through sociability rather than by tuition. This chapter outlines what we know about the teaching of grammar and rhetoric in the schools of the imperi…

  • Aelius Aristides

    Estelle Oudot, Daniel S Richter et al.BOOKThe Oxford Handbook of the Second…2017Cited by: 1

    This chapter discusses how, despite himself, Aelius Aristides corresponds in many ways to the typical portrait of the sophist. It examines how his personality was both emblematic (practicing epideictic and deliberative eloquence as a counselor, declaimer, and formal speaker) and idiosyncratic: a man who lived in symbiosis with a god, Asclepius, in whom he found both a doctor and a mentor in rhetoric, and who refused to take on civic responsibilit…

  • Philostratus

    Graeme Miles, Daniel S Richter et al.BOOKThe Oxford Handbook of the Second…2017

    The variety of topics in the surviving works of Philostratus makes generalizations about the corpus as a whole difficult. Two biographical works take contrary approaches. The Lives of the Sophists (in which he coined the term “Second Sophistic”) constructs a partial history of Greek rhetorical culture, while the Life of Apollonius of Tyana transforms the portrait of a philosopher into a condensation of Hellenic tradition. In the Heroicus the foun…

  • Chariton and Xenophon of Ephesus

    Jamie Morgan, J R Morgan et al.BOOKThe Oxford Handbook of the Second…2017

    This chapter discusses the novels of Chariton and Xenophon of Ephesus. Both are engaged with central concerns of the Second Sophistic, in particular that of elite Greek identity. Chariton’s novel (composed in the second century and connected with the sophist Dionysius of Miletus) demonstrates the same empathetic recreation of the classical past as sophistic declamation, and defines the Greekness of his protagonists in antithesis to a Persia confi…

  • Early Christianity and the Classical Tradition

    Aaron P Johnson, Daniel S Richter et al.BOOKThe Oxford Handbook of the Second…2017

    Although frequently treated as a separate phenomenon in the Roman Mediterranean, the literary work produced by Christian intellectuals (especially Justin Martyr, Athenagoras, Tatian, and Theophilus) in the first centuries of our era is best appreciated within the literary, philosophical, and performative contexts of the Second Sophistic. Their adoption of a stance of free speech toward those in power was formulated as an extension of philosophica…

  • Greek and Latin Rhetorical Culture

    Laurent Pernot, Daniel S Richter et al.BOOKThe Oxford Handbook of the Second…2017

    This chapter discusses the role of rhetorical culture in the Second Sophistic. In the Greco-Roman world of the imperial period, rhetoric was an educational system, a social practice, and a mental tool. Public speaking was omnipresent. The figure of the sophist combined literary activity and political influence: rhetoric was their secret link. Encomium—the principal rhetorical innovation of the Second Sophistic—was a refined, coded instrument, whi…

  • Miscellanies

    Katerina Oikonomopoulou, Κατερίνα Οικονομοπούλου et al.BOOKThe Oxford Handbook of the Second…2017Cited by: 1

    This chapter discusses miscellanies, a type of Second Sophistic writing whose distinguishing features are variety of subject matter and loose organization. The chapter starts out by acknowledging the difficulty of grasping “the miscellany” as a genre: as it argues, socio-cultural approaches to genre are more appropriate than formalistic ones, if we seek to address the question of these works’ readership and appeal. Accordingly, the chapter links …

  • Pausanias

    William Hutton, Daniel S Richter et al.BOOKThe Oxford Handbook of the Second…2017Cited by: 2

    Pausanias’s Periegesis, an historically and culturally selective topography of the lower Greek mainland, is unlike any work produced in the Second Sophistic, but there are several features of the text that render it difficult to imagine it as the product of any other period. Pausanias shares with his sophistic contemporaries a nostalgia for the glories of classical Greece, a tendency toward religiosity, a moralistic outlook on history, and a lite…

  • Performance Space

    Edmund Thomas, Daniel S Richter et al.BOOKThe Oxford Handbook of the Second…2017Cited by: 2References: 8

    This chapter explores how public speakers of the second and third centuries ce, accustomed to extravagant physical demonstrations of their art, exploited the architectural spaces where they performed. Theaters, temples, and smaller roofed assembly buildings were all locations for oratorical performances and adapted to achieve stronger oral expression through sharper acoustics. As the demand for public speaking increased, halls were built speciall…

  • Was There a Latin Second Sophistic

    Tom Habinek, Daniel S Richter et al.BOOKThe Oxford Handbook of the Second…2017Cited by: 8

    This chapter considers how Latin authors roughly contemporaneous with the Greek Second Sophistic sought to differentiate themselves from the practices of Greek intellectuals even as they adopted many of them. Pliny the Younger’s accounts of declamation, Aulus Gellius’s performance of erudition, and Fronto’s self-presentation opposed (explicitly or implicitly) the conduct of “Greek” intellectuals such as Isaeus and Favorinus. With their emphasis o…

  • Atticism and Asianism

    Lawrence Kim, Daniel S Richter et al.BOOKThe Oxford Handbook of the Second…2017Cited by: 6

    This chapter treats two imperial Greek phenomena that have often been paired, usually in opposition: Atticism and Asianism. It first describes the theory, practice, and development of Atticism, the attempt by imperial Greeks to write in the language of the fifth and fourth century bce, treating its stylistic and grammatical variants and outlining its relation to imperial classicism. The second part treats the so-called “Asian” prose style associa…

  • Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity

    Emma Dench, Daniel S Richter et al.BOOKThe Oxford Handbook of the Second…2017Cited by: 3

    This chapter argues that certain traits associated with the Second Sophistic have attracted a disproportionate amount of scholarly attention in recent years: preoccupation with the past, Greekness, and the quirky performance of multiple identities. It emphasizes that these traits coexist with articulations of being and belonging that appeal less to early twenty-first-century sentiment, such as common descent, heredity, and “purity.” Finally, it f…