Paideia: The World Of The Second Sophistic (Millennium Studies)

In the World of the Second Sophistic, education, paideia, was a crucial factor in the discourse of power. Knowledge in the fields of medicine, history, philosophy and poetry joined with rhetorical brilliance and a sumptuary outer appearance became the habitus of the elite of the Eastern Roman Empire. This habitus guaranteed both a high social status and political and economical power for the individual as well as major advantages for their hometowns in interpolis competition. Since paideia was related particularly to Classical Greek antiquity it was, at the same time, fundamental to the new self-confidence of the Greek East. This book presents, for the first time, studies from a broad range of disciplines on various fields of life and on different media, in which this ideology became manifest. These contributions show that the Sophists and their texts were only the most prominent exponents of a system of thoughts and values structuring the life of the elite in general.