BMCR 2015.07.

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Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2015.07.24

Adam M. Kemezis, Greek Narratives of the Roman Empire under

the Severans: Cassius Dio, Philostratus and Herodian. Greek
culture in the Roman world. Cambridge; New
York: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Pp. xii,
340. ISBN 9781107062726. $110.00.

Reviewed by Alexander V. Makhlaiuk, Lobachevsky State University of

Nizhni Novgorod (makhl@imomi.unn.ru)

Preview

Adam M. Kemezis’ book, which originates in his PhD dissertation1 but goes
much further in depth of analysis and conceptual coherence, continues the
Cambridge series “Greek Culture in the Roman World,” which has provided
readers with a number of stimulating investigations of cultural identities,
collective memory, and literary and ideological evolutions under the Empire.
Proposing a narratological approach, so fashionable now,2 to the works of
three Severan writers, Kemezis goes beyond formal literary analysis. He also
pursues a more ambitious goal: to illuminate the historical reality that was
reflected in four works of profoundly different genres and styles (that have,
nonetheless, much in common, above all their belonging to the Severan age
and Greek literary tradition) and in the narrative personalities of the authors,
each with his own relationship to the social and cultural milieu. Kemezis
aims to demonstrate that these Severan authors were aware of historical
developments, having been led to re-imagine not only the recent but the
entire past, and their works can be seen as responses on the part of Greek
culture to its changing imperial setting. This book is not solely about texts
and narrative techniques, but also about political realities outside literature, in
particular about the Severan era and its urban cultural elites’ world-views as
affected by the dynastic change from Antonines to Severans.

The book consists of seven chapters (including an introduction and

conclusion), three appendices concerning dates, scope and authorship of the
works under examination (these are intended, in the author’s words, “less to
add new material to existing controversies than to lay out various positions
and state [his] own preferred view” [281]), a valuable and almost exhaustive
bibliography, and index.

Kemezis raises crucial questions about how these texts, by means of their
rhetoric and through ideological assumptions, construct the Roman empire,
its cultural landscape and the relationships of past to present. An extensive
introductive chapter sets out the purpose and subject-matter of the book,
outlines its methodological tools and approaches (first of all, that of modern
narrative theories connected with Richard Koselleck and Hayden White),
including such concepts as a narrative world—a construct “influenced but not
determined by external reality as perceived by readers” (11) and cultural
geography. The second chapter (“From Antonines to Severans”), sketching
the general Severan background, focuses on the watershed between two
dynasties and on the historical circumstances that determined the new
emperors to have a different relationship to the past. It was those emperors’
efforts to find an ideological basis for promoting dynastic legitimacy that
served as a starting point for a general reassessment of narratives about the
past created by literate elites. One of the principle points here is the emphasis
on the obvious contrast between the second- and third-century, i.e. Antonine
and Severan, authors’ views of the past: if the former tended to exclude the
present and post-Augustan past from their narratives,3 the latter were much
more interested in contemporary or recent history and, at the same time, re-
imagined the entire Roman history. Kemezis discusses in detail how the
specific features of each narrative and authorial persona emerge from the
general Severan context.

In chapter three (“Cassius Dio: the last annalist”) Kemezis analyzes the
whole corpus of the “Roman History” in its particular cultural context, as a
commentary on the Severan period. To understand Dio’s narrative world and
overall rhetorical objective, Kemezis distinguishes and thoroughly describes
four “narrative modes” discernable in his work: that of the Republic,
the dynasteiai (this is a critical construct of Kemezis’ own, based on the
sharp differences between Dio’s mid-Republican and late-Republican
narratives), the Principate and the contemporary period (or “eyewitness”
mode), each with its own functions, literary technique and rules for picking
out and representing certain sorts of events and human motivation. Kemezis
is right to stress that in all these modes Dio’s story remains one of himself
and of the senatorial order as the locus of true historical continuity and
Romanness. Among interesting innovative ideas developed within this
chapter one should note the author’s use of the Agrippa–Maecenas debate in
Book 52 and of the excursus of Book 53 as interpretive keys to the Dio’s
annalistic history as a whole, also how Dio assessed Roman rulers not as men
in absolute terms, but as performers in the role of emperor, a habit that tends
to obscure differences of personalities between various holders of the throne,
and the idea that Dio’s views of continuity and transformation within Roman
political life are very different from the scripts Severan emperors wrote for
themselves. In his portrait of the monarchical world established by Augustus
the historian locates continuity and change not in a set of “Good Emperor”
attributes, but within institutions, above all magisterial offices, putting forth
his own story of how older senatorial traditions were appropriated and
adapted by new generations of provincial elites.

In two chapters on Philostratus’ “Life of Apollonius” and “Lives of

Sophists,” Kemezis proposes an insightful reading of these texts as a diptych,
a rare and innovative sort of historical narrative – a history without political
events that was a product of particular moment in the later years of the
Severan period. In his methodological remarks, he notes that Philostratus has
a double affinity with history, both as narrator of the events of the relatively
recent past and as participant in the larger discourse of his time about how the
present relates to the more distant past. Unlike Cassius Dio and Herodian,
Philostratus does not locate Roman rulers at the center of his narrative
worlds, but bases his stories around various forms of Greek cultural
excellence that could, however, be incorporated into the larger discourse of
imperial power. Treating the first composition as basically a work of fiction
situated in Roman historical time, Kemezis argues that Philostratus’ main
rhetorical aim is to transform the marginally Greek figure of Apollonius into
a fully accredited Hellene and a truly exceptional representative of Greek
culture, and to present him as a key causal factor in Roman dynastic history
at a specific moment “when the shared experience of tyranny has put
traditional cultural dichotomies in the background” (190). Kemezis is most
successful in his analysis of “Apollonian geography,” that is Philostratus’
portrait of three different geographical zones through which his hero passes:
the far periphery, the Hellenic center, and the imperial center.

If Apollonius represents a projection of a timeless and unindividuated Greek

world into Roman narrative history, the Sophists fill the recent past with
individual figures belonging to successive generations of teachers and
students. Neither work explicitly defines its temporality in dynastic terms. As
Kemezis points out, the world of the Philostratean sophists has emperors, but
not dynasties; it is also marked by a distinctive sense of cultural geography
with its key locations in classical Greece from which sophistic activities
move to the imperial center. By drawing a direct narrative link between
present-day sophists and the beginning of their movement in the fourth
century BC, Philostratus transcends his era’s conventional divisions of
ancient and modern. The narrative scheme used by Philostratus also allows
him to erase the distinction between sophists and their objects of mimesis,
wherein their mimetic abilities spread beyond the stage into less ephemeral
areas of civic life. In Kemezis’ view, the Philostratean texts can be read as
quite different depictions of how Greek cultural activity might have a
transformative effect in an imperial context and provide one of the elements
of continuity in the changing empire. The most Severan aspect of
Philostratus, as Kemezis sees it, is the way he offers multiple versions of his
culture and its past. In general, Philostratus offers a very singular version of
how Greekness interacts with geography, narrative history and elite identity.

Kemezis’ discussion of Herodian in chapter six gives us another fresh view

on the correlation between narrative style and cultural implications of the
Severan age. Herodian does not create a new literary paradigm, but uses the
static and orderly forms of historical writing typical of the Antonine age, with
the result that his heavily fictionalized historiography is constantly at odds
with the chaotic events after the death of Marcus Aurelius. Herodian is a
story-teller who, unlike Dio and Philostratus, has no grand schemes for re-
imagining chronology and geography. Nevertheless, his narrative style is the
result of his literary tactics rather than the consequence of mediocre literary
gifts. Herodian seeks to give his audience pleasure by describing the
dysfunction of contemporary life in polished literary forms characteristic of
the Antonine age. In his treatment of Herodian’s narrative Kemezis
underlines the key role of geographical contrast between center and periphery
(especially p. 245 ff.). But this approach yields conclusions that seem to be
somewhat exaggerated. He claims that the success or failure of principle
characters and even the general fate of the empire are determined by
geographical and cultural differences between imperial center and periphery.
So, for example, Alexander Severus’ failure is said to be mainly the result of
his movement from his natural environment in Rome to the uncongenial
atmosphere of the frontier (248–9); and even in the cases of Pertinax and
Julian, who never left Rome, there is still a geographical aspect to their
careers (251). The breakdown of Roman unity finds expression also in social
and rhetorical interactions, because when different groups of people within
the empire start to speak different languages, rhetoric loses its power to
describe and influence reality, and there arises fatal miscommunication as a
common characteristic of the post-Marcus world. It is difficult to get rid of
the impression that Kemezis here is importing his own interpretive constructs
and scheme into the ancient historian’s text, rather than revealing the genuine
intentions of its author. He sometimes ascribes to Herodian certain desires
that are likely his own suggestions (e.g., p. 264: “Herodian has no desire to
make either the narrative or the external world seem coherent”). Particular
cases and features are generalized and given universal meaning. Similar
ascriptions one can find in other passages of the book. For example, it is said
that for Commodus “Marcus was not so much a link to the past Antonine
tradition as a necessary precondition of the new order…” (48); “Philostratus
wants his readers to contemplate the idea of a narrative history of Greek
culture independent of political circumstances…” (203). Some of this is
perhaps the result of the narratological approach or of Kemezis’ manner of
writing, but in some cases the author seems to be pressing his case too hard.

These shortcomings, however, do not undermine the general conclusion that

whereas Herodian tried to remain an Antonine author while describing the
dysfunctional Severan world, Dio and Philostratus deliberately violated
second- century literary canons and created new kinds of grand narratives to
express their life experience; all of the works under examination, however,
“posit an unified elite identity as inherently desirable” (278) This very
readable volume, which is well-produced (with a very few insignificant
typos) is based on the successful use of novel approaches and original
questions. It will surely be essential reading for students and specialists in
Classics and Roman imperial history.4

Notes:

1. Adam M. Kemezis, The Roman Past in the Age of the Severans. PhD
Dissertation (University of Michigan 2006).
2. See, e.g.: Douglas Cairns, Ruth Scodel (edd.), Defining Greek Narrative,
Edinburgh Leventis studies, 7 (Edinburgh 2014); Anna Marmodoro, Jonathan
Hill (ed.), The Author’s Voice in Classical and Late Antiquity (Oxford; New
York 2013); Miltsios Nikos, The Shaping of Narrative in Polybius (Berlin
2013).
3. Here Kemezis relies on his excellent article “Lucian, Fronto and the
Absense of Contemporary Historiography under the Antonines,” AJP 131
(2010), 285–325.
4. The work is supported by Russian Foundation for Humanities, project 13-
01-00088.
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