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Beyond the second sophistic: adventures in Greek postclassicism

Of the fifteen chapters, two (11 and 13) are largely based on pre-2008 publications: ‘The Cretan lyre paradox: Mesomedes, Hadrian and the poetics of patronage’ in B. Borg ed. Paideia: the world of the second sophistic (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2004) AND 'Quickening the classics: the politics of prose in Roman Greece', in J. Porter, ed. Classical pasts: the classical traditions of Greco-Roman antiquity (Princeton: PUP, 2005). Those chapters have been updated and adapted to fit the concerns of the book as a whole, and the remaining material is all from 2008 or later.

This book (278 pages) contains some of Whitmarsh's recent research on the 'Second Sophistic'; it consists of fifteen chapters, two of which are re-worked from pre-2008 articles. Whitmarsh's conception of the 'Second Sophistic' has developed substantially since his 2005 book of that name: he now sees post-classical culture in much more pluralist terms, encompassing both subelite and non-Greek (e.g. Jewish, Egyptian) material. The book represents a position statement on 'postclassicism', a concept developed in conjunction with colleagues at Princeton, and more recently via a Princeton-funded global research collaboration network.