Rhetorical Practice in the Chreia Elaboration of Mara bar Serapion

This essay argues that the text known as the Letter of Mara bar Serapion is an example of a Greek rhetorical exercise, the chreia elaboration. The letter fits the paradigm of the chreia elaboration as it is found in Greek rhetorical handbooks, such as those of Theon and Libanius. Since it is a rhetorical exercise, the letter should not be read as straightforward evidence for the experience of Roman conquest in Syria, nor should it be read as evidence for Christian apologetic practice in early Syriac literature. Rather, the letter provides scholars with the opportunity to examine the interaction between Greek rhetorical literature and the rise of Syriac prose literature in late antiquity. [1] The Letter of Mara bar Serapion to his Son, known through a sixthor seventh-century manuscript (BM Add. 14658) edited in the nineteenth century by William Cureton, is a little-studied document in scholarship on Syriac literature.1 The difficulties involved in 1 William Cureton, Spicilegium Syriacum (London: Francis and John Rivington, 1855), 70–76 (English); 43–48 (Syriac); on the date, see pref. i. I am grateful to Michael Penn and Tina Shepardson for their critical comments and suggestions on an earlier version of this essay. I would also like to thank the anonymous readers for Hugoye for their suggestions, and 146 Catherine M. Chin dating the work and determining the religious and philosophical persuasion of its author, in addition to the general lack of philosophical creativity in the text itself, have relegated the letter to a secondary position in the study of early Syriac literature and Syriac Christianity.2 There have been strong arguments that the writer was not a Christian, but a Stoic sympathetic to Christianity;3 still, the examination of the letter by Kathleen McVey, presented in 1988, has to a certain extent re-opened the question of the author’s allegiances. The philosophical themes in the letter are not uniquely Stoic, as McVey points out;4 at the same time, the references to Christianity are marginal enough to the general rhetorical arc of the letter to cast doubt on McVey’s thesis that the author was a Christian propagandist.5 Studies of the letter have in the main concentrated on its philosophical, religious, and historical content, and the relationship between its content and its putative author, rather than on its rhetorical form. A closer examination of the form of the letter may help place it more firmly in its ancient intellectual context, which, I argue, is that of a standard Greek rhetorical exercise, the chreia elaboration. When the text is situated in this rhetorical context, the murkiness of the historiographical questions surrounding the text’s date and “religious” character becomes in Orval Wintermute, who first pointed me in the direction of Mara bar Serapion. 2 There have been very few studies of the letter in the past century. The major bibliography is: Kathleen McVey, “A Fresh Look at the Letter of Mara Bar Serapion to his Son,” V. Symposium Syriacum 1988, ed. R. Lavenant, Orientalia Christiana Analecta 236 (1990): 257–72; Friedrich Schulthess, “Der Brief des Mara bar Sarapion,” Zeitschrift der deutschen morgenländischen Gesellschaft 51 (1897): 365–91; and the comments of H. J. W. Drijvers in “Hatra, Palmyra und Edessa: Die Städte der syrischmesopotamischen Wüste in politischer, kulturgeschichtlicher und religionsgeschichtlicher Beleuchtung,” ANRW II.8 (1977), at 886–87. I very much regret that the most recent article to appear on the letter, Ilaria Ramelli’s “La lettera di Mara bar Serapion,” Stylos 13 (2004): 77–104, was unavailable to me at the time of writing and could not be incorporated into this article. 3 Notably those by F. Schulthess, “Brief,” 381–91. 4 K. McVey, “Fresh Look,” 261–62. 5 K. McVey, “Fresh Look,” 270–72; against this view, see F. Millar, The Roman Near East 31 BC–AD 337 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 460–62. Mara Bar Serapion 147 some ways easier to understand: if the author of the document is not an original Mara bar Serapion, but a later writer composing a prosopopoetic exercise in his name, the vagueness of historical detail in the letter and its relatively commonplace philosophical ideas become the stuff of classroom “general knowledge” rather than documents of individual experience or belief. This shift does not gain the historian any more evidence for a historical Mara bar Serapion, of course, but it does position the letter as further documentation for a tradition of interchange between Greek and Syriac rhetorical and educational traditions. I. THE CHREIA AND ITS USES [2] The letter as it stands is in two parts: the letter itself, and a short anecdote about its supposed writer, Mara bar Serapion. The division between the two is stark: the letter, written primarily in the first person and addressed in the second, ends with the words: “And if anyone grieves or worries, I do not counsel him, for there in the life of the whole world he will find us before him.”6 The anecdote immediately follows, written in the third person, as an account of a conversation between Mara bar Serapion and a companion: One of his friends asked Mara bar Serapion when he was bound at his side, “By your life, Mara, tell me what laughing-stock appeared to you, that you laughed?” Mara said to him, “I laughed at time, since, although it has not borrowed evil from me, it repays me.”7 [3] This anecdote is in the clearly recognizable form of a rhetorical chreia, a brief narrative, usually concerning a famous historical figure, that ends in a pithy remark or witty gesture. The secondcentury teacher Theon, in his Progymnasmata, lists several types of chreiai, among which are “chreiai that offer an explanation in answer to a question.... For example, ‘When he was asked whether the Persian king seemed happy to him, Socrates said: “I can’t 6 W. Cureton, Spicilegium Syriacum, 48.22–23. Unless otherwise noted, all translations from ancient texts in this essay are my own. 7 W. Cureton, Spicilegium Syriacum, 48.24–26. 148 Catherine M. Chin answer, since I can’t know what he thinks of education.”8 The story of Mara bar Serapion and his laughter seems to fit into this general type; it is difficult to imagine that ancient readers of the anecdote would not have recognized it immediately as an example of the genre. Indeed, as many writers on ancient Greek and Roman education have made clear, the chreia played a significant role even in elementary education in antiquity, being used to teach basic literacy, as well as to inculcate common social and cultural norms.9 As Ronald Hock and Edward O’Neil point out, many such chreiai take the form of a saying by a philosophical figure in answer to a question, and closing with a constrastive (usually, in Greek, men...de) response, such as, “When Diogenes was asked why people give to beggars, but not to philosophers, he said, ‘Because people expect to become lame or blind, but they never expect to philosophize.’”10 This is almost precisely the form of the Mara bar Serapion chreia, with Mara bar Serapion being asked a question and responding with a contrast (“although [time] has not borrowed evil from me, it repays me”). The chreia at the end of the letter thus initially suggests a possible context, as an anecdote typically found in literary schooling. 8 Theon, Progymnasmata, 3.52–54, text in James R. Butts, The Progymnasmata of Theon (Ph.D. dissertation, Claremont Graduate School, 1987). 9 The most useful works on the chreia now available are the two volumes of edited and translated texts on the chreia, with introductions and analyses by Ronald F. Hock and Edward N. O’Neil, The Chreia in Ancient Rhetoric, vol. 1, The Progymnasmata (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1986), and vol. 2, The Classroom Exercises (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 2002). A third volume is currently being prepared on the chreia in Byzantine commentaries and scholia. Other writers on education who comment helpfully on the uses of the chreia are Teresa Morgan, Literate Education in the Hellenistic and Roman World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), esp. at 186–89; and Raffaella Cribiore, Gymnastics of the Mind: Greek Education in Hellenistic and Roman Egypt (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 223–24; H. Marrou comments only occasionally on the chreia in his survey of primary and literary education in Greek antiquity: A History of Education in Antiquity (tr. G. Lamb; New York: Sheed and Ward, 1956; reprinted Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982). 10 R. F. Hock and E. N. O’Neil, Chreia, vol. 2, 16. Mara Bar Serapion 149 [4] The presence of a typical chreia at the end of the document takes on greater importance if the letter itself is also placed in a context of rhetorical exercises. As is well known, it was common for students of grammar and rhetoric in antiquity to compose themes both about historical figures, and centered on specific historical anecdotes in which these figures played a part.11 Perhaps the richest set of examples are those collected in the Suasoriae of the Elder Seneca, in which the embellishment of certain historical situations is standard to many of the exercises, such as the exercises on how to advise Alexander the Great on his battle strategy.12 It was at the same time common for students to compose speeches under the names of various historical figures as an exercise in characterization (prosopopoieia or ethopoieia).13 Book 8 of Theon’s Progymnasmata is dedicated to prosopopoieia, and includes in its description of this rhetorical practice the creation of speeches attributed to “specific people: for example, what words would Cyrus speak as he moved on the Massagetae, or what would Datis say, after the battle of Marathon, on meeting with the king?”14 This sort of composition was a familiar exercise for declamation, and Cribiore suggests, given the high rate of survival of examples, that such prosopopoetic writing was likely a favorite school pract