Athens was the most important cultural center of Greek antiquity and there have been numerous histories written about the city of Athens and Athenian authors. My work differs from these in that it is an intellectual history in which Athens is not the generator of this culture, but an object of it. That is, the literary culture to which Athens gave birth in turn made Athens into an icon for that culture. Specifically, my work examines how during the second to fifth centuries AD Athens came to denote not just a specific community but a larger idea that was defined differently in the “culture wars” of late antiquity, whether as a symbol for Greek culture as a whole, the glorious (and now-lost) classical past of Greece, or a specific philosophy.
“Athens” meant something different to everyone who invoked it as a symbol in late antiquity. I have chosen three case-studies which exemplify different “axes of tension” that underlie the debates over the meaning of “Athens.” The first looks at the views of Athens held by the Roman emperor Hadrian and the Greek travel-writer Pausanias. Hadrian attempted to establish Athens as a “cultural capital” of the eastern Mediterranean, but one which served to proclaim Roman power. Pausanias used “Athens” to remember Greece’s pre-Roman past and so maintain a sense of Greek identity with no reference to the Roman empire. This chapter looks at two positive evaluations of Athens as a cultural symbol, but a symbol caught between Roman power and Greek self-definition. The second case-study involves the third-century writer Philostratos, who displays a tension between a localized vision of Greek culture based on Athens and a universalized vision of that culture with no specific center. This chapter highlights debates over whether Greek culture should be based on the locale of Athens. The final case-study looks at criticisms of Athens by the orator Libanios and the philosopher Synesios, who postulated alternatives to “Athens:” the ideals associated with Alexandria and Antioch. This chapter explores the objections to the utility of the ideal Athens. Because I see the symbolism of Athens as being re-negotiated in different periods and intellectual settings, I situate each author’s works in their larger cultural context to understand the part he played in the construction of the “symbolic Athens.”
The creation of an ideal Athens is connected to issues of Hellenism. I argue that imperial-era Hellenism was not necessarily an abstract phenomenon based solely on Greek language and literature, an idea favored by numerous scholars over the last two decades. Instead, I believe that intellectuals grounded their Hellenism in the geographical locale of Athens, the home of the texts they read so ardently. Furthermore, I argue that the debates over Athens’ cultural importance demonstrate that Hellenism was never a unified cultural paradigm. Hellenism was internally divided and its adherents debated among themselves as to its definition. These tensions inherent in Hellenism were inherited by post-classical periods, up to and including our own, continually informing how we view the ancient world.