Conclusion

Cultural identity is not innate, but constructed and vied for in social space. In Stuart Hall’s terms, it is ‘not an essence but a positioning’} Assumptions that Greek identity in any period stemmed organically from a single, integral radical risk complicity with nineteenth-century racial theory: the explicitly biological metaphors (‘blood’, ‘vitality’, ‘reinvigoration’) may have gone, but the familiar talk of a renaissance or ‘flourishing’2 of Hellenism in Roman Greece implies similar assumptions about the natural unity of a people and their articulation of their Geist in a coherent cultural aesthetic. What this book has sought to show is that Greek cultural identity in the early Roman period (the period often called ‘the Second Sophistic’) was an intense concern, but it was never taken for granted: identities were made, contested, masked, ironized, dissimulated, or disavowed, but not received as self- evident. Literature was not the medium of expression for the coherent and self-identical ‘voice’ of Greece, but both a site of conflict between different interest-groups and an opportunity for resourceful play on the part of some brilliantly imaginative writers.

Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Articulation (sociology) · Complicity · Epistemology · Expression (computer science) · Geist · Identity (music) · Literature · Natural (archaeology) · Period (music) · Political science · Politics · The Renaissance · Theology · Vitality · Classical Antiquity Studies · History · Law · Philosophy