Abstract

Reviewed by: Frankness, Greek Culture, and the Roman Empire by Dana Farah Fields Anna Peterson Dana Farah Fields, Frankness, Greek Culture, and the Roman Empire, Routledge Monographs in Classical Studies, Abingdon, NY: Routledge, 2021. 236 pp. ISBN: 978-0-429-29217-0. In an ancient context, the term parrhēsia is most often associated with the Athenian democracy of the fifth century BCE, where free or frank speech became a key egalitarian and therefore democratic value. But it also featured prominently in Greek literature of the Roman period (1st-3rd centuries CE), a time when a single man ruled over the Mediterranean world and social hierarchies dominated life on a local level. Although parrhēsia has been a topic of recurrent interest over the past three decades (thanks in large part to the influence of Michel Foucault), later Greek literature has been largely sidelined in discussions of this virtue.1 Dana Fields's Frankness, Greek Culture, and the Roman Empire begins to fill this gap by providing a thought-provoking exploration of how Greek sophists, philosophers, and satirists of the second century CE deployed free and frank speech. Most importantly, Fields's study challenges the prevailing assumption that, after Alexander the Great, the connotations of the term shifted radically from a political right to a personal, ethical virtue. Instead, Fields argues, parrhēsia retained political significance in the second century CE, both in terms of local institutions and, more importantly, in the interpersonal relationships that so often defined politics at this time. Fields's discussion proceeds in six chapters, the first of which lays out the book's approach and establishes Aristophanes, Socrates, Diogenes, and Demosthenes as "icons of frankness" for later practitioners of parrhēsia. Chapter 2 further sets the stage by considering parrhēsia in the classical [End Page 95] period, where it was associated not just with citizenship but with further restrictive statuses, such as categories of social class and gender. Of particular interest in this chapter is Fields's discussion of parrhēsia and slavery, which considers not just the well-worn example of Roman Saturnalia but also Aelian's On the Nature of Animals, an often overlooked work. Following these first two introductory chapters, the next three chapters focus on different addressees of frank speech, specifically kings, cities, and elites. Chapter 3 explores how a speaker might adopt an adversarial style when addressing a king or emperor, a posture that Fields argues benefits both speaker and addressee by showcasing the former's courage and wisdom and the latter's self-control. As is the case with all but the last chapter, Fields does not focus on an individual author but instead draws on a variety of authors and texts. Chapter 3 consequently juxtaposes Dio Chrysostom's Kingship Orations with Philostratus's Apollonius of Tyana and examples of frank speakers culled from Plutarch's Parallel Lives. Dio and Philostratus's Apollonius remain the focus in Chapter 4, where Fields provides first a survey of Dio's civic orations before turning to consider how Apollonius offers frank criticism to cities both orally and through his letters. As Fields argues, Dio and Apollonius "occupy a space somewhere between rhetoric and philosophy" and present themselves as itinerant wise men (131). Dio and his appropriation of previous models (e.g., Socrates, Diogenes, and Demosthenes) is really the star of this chapter, and it is worth noting here that Fields might have also considered Dio's relationship to the tradition of iambic speech, particularly in the First Tarsian and Alexandrian orations, both of which are covered in this chapter. Our surviving sources suggest that urban elites navigated local internal hierarchies through delicately and carefully contrived speech. If the cities of the Greek east were in essence being run by oligarchic governance and through patronage relationships, parrhēsia and the language of friendship reduced the visibility of these social differences. Chapter 5 offers a fascinating read of Plutarch's How to tell a flatterer from a friend alongside Artimedorus's Oneirocriticon, Aelian's On the Nature of Animals, and other texts. Here, Fields challenges the conventional reading that parrhēsia in Plutarch's treatise is apolitical. As she convincingly shows, the text...