Apologists on Trials: Justin’s Second Apology, the Literary Courtroom, and Pleading Philosophy

1 Introduction

Justin’s Second Apology has generally been considered the lesser sibling of his famed First Apology. Its disjointed nature means scholars have found more structural and thematic incoherence here than in the First Apology, itself no paragon of clarity.^[1] That has in turn fed unresolved concerns over its publication and relationship with the First Apology.^[2] As a result, this seemingly fragmented text has been treated as fragments, with isolated sections much-masticated, but the whole ignored.

Two narrative sections have received particular attention. The first, which comes after the opening, tells of a Roman lady of questionable morals happily married to a man of similar (un)ethical standards.^[3] Their salacious union foundered, however, because when “she learnt the teachings of Christ, she came to her senses, and tried to persuade her husband to come his.”^[4] He refused, putting his wife in a tricky spot, since she “considered it irreligious to sleep any longer with a man who tried, wrongly and against the law of nature, to make use of every opening for pleasure.”^[5] Convinced by others to remain with him,^[6] her view changed after her husband’s behaviour worsened on a trip to Alexandria. She “gave him what in your language is called a ‘divorce,’ and was separated from him.”^[7] He, described ironically as “That perfect gentleman, her husband,”^[8] not as grateful as Justin thinks he should have been, “brought a charge against her, saying that she was a Christian.”^[9] She, in turn, “submitted a petition to you, the emperor, praying that she be given leave to set her financial affairs in order first and to answer the charge later, after she had arranged her affairs,” which request was granted.^[10]

The husband, temporarily foiled—especially because his tactic was likely a ruse to avoid repaying the dowry, which the formal delay would now necessitate him doing—tried a different tack.^[11] He directed his anger at her Christian teacher, Ptolemaeus, who was arrested and asked if he was a Christian by a centurion crony.^[12] Ptolemaeus, affirming his identity, was chained and punished in prison. Brought before the urban prefect Urbicus, and asked and answering the same question in the same way, he was executed. A bystander named Lucius, “on seeing the judgement given in this irrational way, said to Urbicus: ‘Why did you order this man to be punished?’ ”^[13] This predictably led the prefect to suspect Lucius of Christianity, which once confirmed condemned him to the same end. This, in turn, catalyses a chain reaction: “And still another, a third, came forward and was sentenced to be punished.”^[14]

The second story concerns Justin’s own difficulties in Rome.^[15] Following a discussion of past Stoics who, Justin claims, were targeted for their ethics,^[16] and the worse treatment the even more rational Christians can expect,^[17] he adds: “I expect that I will be plotted against and impaled on a stake by one of those mentioned, or at least by Crescens.”^[18] Crescens, a Cynic,^[19] is Justin’s nemesis, and a torrent of vitriol follows, broken just long enough to reveal that the two have been in public dispute: “when I had been asked to solve problems put to me I in turn asked him certain questions, and so discovered and demonstrated that in truth he knows nothing.”^[20]

Both episodes have been discussed for the most part independently of the work in which they are embedded. The former has been treated as a stand-alone martyr narrative and mined for historical data.^[21] The latter has been read together with the Acts of Justin and Companions, which purports to describe Justin’s trial before Quintus Junius Rusticus, Rome’s urban prefect. This is due to Tatian’s comment that Crescens “set about involving Justin . . . in the death penalty” and Eusebius’ apparent confirmation of that,^[22] though Eusebius at least knew no more than what Justin himself says.^[23] Both stories are thus treated as straightforward historical fragments, extracted from their literary and rhetorical context. And predictably, given the influence of Justin’s “Martyr” moniker, both have been used primarily for the study of martyrdom—i.e. as part of a distinctly Christian tradition.^[24]

I wish instead to consider the roles of these two tales in both the Second Apology and their contemporary context. Justin wrote his petitions at a critical moment in provincials’ relationship with Roman law. He was not alone in so doing, since such petitions became both more normalised and more frequent in the 2d century.^[25] As the imperial period progressed, provincials became not just more accustomed to Roman rule, but more creative in mobilising it to their own ends.^[26] This was often done in literary spaces, and as much by Christians as non-Christians.^[27] Embedding Justin in this mid–2d century literary landscape reveals not just the highly literary character of these stories—and the connection between them—but the rhetorical nature and aims of the Second Apology as a whole. In turn, the latter is revealed as a highly contingent text of its particular historical moment. And that, I suggest, has consequences for our view of the genre of Christian apology itself.

2 Marriage, Trials and the Greek Novels

The inclusion of “The Martyrdom of Ptolemaeus and Lucius” in collections of martyr narratives prompts our first question—what is this story actually about? It is not unusual for such stories to have only terse descriptions of their subjects’ deaths, as here. But it is more idiosyncratic that even the witnessing scenes—the literal essence of martyrdom, and key to the literary form—represent less than half the total, the rest of which concerns characters that do not recur after its mid-point.^[28] That much of this story concerns an unnamed, unmartyred couple suggests that in treating it as an martyr narrative, divorced (so to speak) from the rest of Second Apology, we have missed Justin’s intentions.^[29]

I suggest instead that the first half of this story holds the interpretative key to Justin’s literary enterprise. The “certain woman” with whom Justin begins fades from view,^[30] and we do not learn her fate. This has led scholars to suggest that Justin is concerned either with the moral situation,^[31] or the husband.^[32] In fact, I suggest, Justin’s interest is in the contrast and conflict between the wife’s non-Christian husband and her Christian teacher, Ptolemaeus. It is thus typical of a familiar antique trope: a woman used as a literary motif to highlight male competition.

The specific form this takes here is also familiar. A marriage between two non-Christians disrupted by the conversion of the female partner influenced by a Christian teacher is a staple motif of the Apocryphal Acts. And, as is well known, these were echoing that same dynamic in the five extant Greek novels.^[33] Since marriage is the institution at the novels’ core, the threat of infidelity is a prime source of jeopardy. These tensions frequently come to a head in judicial contexts, and set-piece trial scenes (in which adultery is always indicated, even if the charges are different) recur as a stock impediment for the novels’ star-crossed young elite Greek protagonists.^[34] As Saundra Schwartz has shown, these serve as a space to publicly air private disputes over sexual morality.

Let us take an example from the novel closest in date to Justin, that of Achilles Tatius, written in the mid-to-late 2d century.^[35] The eponymous hero Clitophon, believing his intended bride Leucippe dead, is living in Ephesus with a young widow, Melite, whose husband, Thersander, is lost at sea.^[36] But Leucippe is found, living on Melite’s estate;^[37] meanwhile, Thersander returns home.^[38] Thersander, enraged, charges Clitophon as an adulterer;^[39] ironically it is only now that Melite, repeatedly rebuffed, finally seduces Clitophon.^[40] To square the amorous circle, Thersander falls in love with Leucippe,^[41] but is also rebuffed.^[42] Clitophon plans his defence on the basis that he was married to Melite;^[43] she defends herself privately to Thersander.^[44] Thersander bribes the magistrate to poison Clitophon pre-trial, and when that fails plants a mole in the prison to convince Clitophon that Melite has murdered Leucippe.^[45] Clitophon, desiring death, confesses in court, and is condemned to punishment in prison and death despite his friend Clinias’ intercession.^[46] But his death, and Melite’s trial, are postponed by a deus ex machina: the arrival of a priest of Artemis.^[47]

This convoluted episode encompasses the interlaced infatuations of four protagonists, multiple manifestations of marriage—actual (Melite and Thersander), thwarted (Leucippe and Clitophon), simulated (Melite and Clitophon) and denied (Leucippe and Thersander), as well as multi-layered suspicions of sexual immorality (Melite wanting to commit it; Clitophon feeling as if he has committed it; the two of them in fact committing it; Thersander’s desire to commit it; Leucippe’s refusal to commit it).^[48] Such messiness is typical. The novels’ trial scenes are rarely predictable, since they serve “to manipulate and confound readerly expectations with surprising twists and turns: in other words, to create paradox”—this is the stories’ entertainment value.^[49] Such trials often produce inconclusive or adverse results; indeed, they “tend to perpetuate social disorder as the conflict shifts to another, more momentous sphere such as the battlefield or, with the intervention of supernatural forces, to a cosmic plane.”^[50] But readers know where virtue lies, and this is usually vindicated by the end of the story, thus reaffirming traditional moral standards. Happy endings are achieved despite the courtroom, rather than because of it.^[51]

Justin’s story also constructs a judicial framework around marriage where two men are at variance over female behaviour.^[52] His reader too encounters crimes before consequences,^[53] with events sparked by the rage of a husband whose spurned advances trigger revenge on both his wife and the man who has led her astray. There are further literary echoes in plot progression—the husband being aided by a corrupt jailor, or the male protagonist’s punishment in prison. And the end result likewise echoes the novels: unresolved, for the wife; unjust, for Ptolemaeus. In the novels it is unusual for heroes to be found guilty,^[54] but Ptolemaeus, like Clitophon, is (and both, equally unusually, are in reality). One might even draw a parallel between Ptolemaeus and Lucius’ confessions and that of Clitophon; in fact, Donald Russell called that of the latter “ostentatious euthanasia,” almost a synonym of voluntary martyrdom.^[55]

Perhaps the closest parallels are the echoes between Lucius and Clinias, both filling the classic role of faithful friend. Both intervene when things look bleak for the hero. Clinias’ final lambasting of the jury—“Until you have ascertained every one of these particulars, it is not right, it is not consonant with your oaths, to condemn to death this wretched young man”—is very similar to that of Lucius—“Your judgement does not befit a pious emperor, or a philosophical Caesar—his son—or the holy Senate, O Urbicus,” down to the language of holiness and piety.^[56] And both draw suspicion on themselves by their interjection, with Thersander’s retort “I rather suspect that he too, being an accomplice in the murder, is afraid for his own skin” paralleling Urbicus’ “I think you also are one of them.”^[57]

Most interesting, Justin’s account also confounds generic expectations in inventive ways.^[58] In both tales, a husband is angry at his wife, but where Achilles Tatius’—as usual in the novels—is accusing his wife and the third party of adultery, Justin’s is accusing them of chastity.^[59] Adultery is in fact the norm for this couple; the plot is driven not by its discovery but its removal.^[60] Achilles Tatius would, I suspect, have enjoyed such farcical inversion; we might compare his comment via Clinias on Clitophon: “Was there ever so affectionate a murderer, or hatred so akin to love?”^[61] Achilles Tatius was himself unusual in portraying the cuckold as villain and third party as hero; Justin provides a further twist, since the “cuckold” is also the adulterer.^[62] Achilles Tatius has an innocent heroine and an adulterous wife; Justin has a wife who initially resembles the latter and subsequently the former, only found liable once she reforms. In both stories, justice outs eventually; in Justin’s case, in a final inversion, the vindication comes only in the death.^[63]

The trial scene in the Second Apology would thus have been simultaneously familiar and foreign to its 2d-century Graeco-Roman audience, recalling but confounding a well-known strategy of contemporary narrative in both content and form. Audiences expected the unexpected; in Justin’s case they got a total inversion that would presumably have been amusing or jarring depending on the reader. Schwartz talks of these trials as type scenes serving as “scripts”; shorthands for a bundle of cultural assumptions.^[64] Read thus, Justin has followed the more inventive novels in rewriting the standard script, using the same form but with culturally surprising alterations. Such destabilising intertextuality was rife not just in early Christian narrative texts but in contemporary literature more widely.^[65] That we find it in the Second Apology is a reminder that this alleged petition was a highly literary piece of writing.

In this rhetorical setting, Justin’s engagement with the novels was a clear attempt to make the prosecution he treated seem ridiculous, since it represents a mockery of a typical fictional trial concerning the sexual conduct of husband, wife, and outsider. Lucius’ commentary on the perverseness of proceedings can thus be read as a flag to the reader of the true theme of Justin’s story at its end. This is clearest in the opening gloss of his complaint that Urbicus has punished Ptolemaeus: “he is not convicted of being either an adulterer or a fornicator.”^[66]

Justin’s Second Apology has not to my knowledge previously been read in dialogue with the novels.^[67] But in fact they are natural bedfellows (so to speak); we need only think of Mikhail Bakhtin’s comment:

all the major moments of the novels are publicly and rhetorically high-lighted and justified (an apologia), and all those moments, taken as a whole, receive a final legal and judicial stamp of approval. If in the final analysis, we should ask what, more than anything else, defines the unity of the human image in a Greek romance, we would have to answer that this unity is characterised precisely by what is rhetorical and judicial in it.^[68]

As the nexus of sexual and judicial conduct in the novels enabled a more far-reaching reconsideration of the place of Greek elites under Rome, and their interactions with Roman justice in particular,^[69] so in Justin it serves a wider commentary on the Christian equivalent. In neither case is this a straightforward rejection.^[70] Schwartz’s concludes that “the fundamentally conservative nature of the ancient novels’ outlook is clear: rarely is the justice of the social order called into question.”^[71] Justin should be read similarly. He might question individual prosecutions, procedures, or judgments, but his writings demonstrate a broad acceptance of the structures and principles of the Roman judicial system.^[72] More important, the novels’ trial scenes reveal their fundamental belief in the power of educated speech in securing moral victory in the imperial legal landscape.^[73] That, I suggest, is also key for Justin.

3 Pedagogy, Performance and Apuleius’ Apology

Our next question is why Justin affords such prominence to this story—and the complex literary dynamics it evokes—in a text at least claiming to be a petition. The male competition over a woman on which this story focuses concerns their respective influence, and that of their two messages, immorality and continence. Justin initially emphasises the couple’s dissipation, and the wife’s dramatic volte-face, because it speaks to the power of the teacher who catalyses the change: “when she learnt the teachings of Christ she came to her senses.”^[74] Justin repeats that when trying to persuade her husband to change she was “reporting what she had been taught.”^[75] The core of the story is thus the comparative power of pedagogy. And since Ptolemaeus ends up accused and executed, it is also about the threats such teaching and teachers faced.

That this story is about the ability and fate of a teacher links it with the second narrative, Justin’s intellectual altercation with Crescens, and his fear of judicial repercussions. In both, an (allegedly) brilliant Christian teacher meets resistance to his pedagogy from an immoral non-Christian. In the first, that led to the teacher’s accusation and death; the jeopardy of the text is the possibility that the second ends the same way. Justin certainly fears that outcome. It is telling that when Eusebius considers these two anecdotes, he quotes the Crescens episode, then later the Ptolemaeus and Lucius story, and says after the latter, “To this Justin naturally and suitably adds those words of his which we have already recalled, saying: ‘I, too, therefore expect to be plotted against by one of those named.’ ”^[76] It thus seems that in the version Eusebius knew, the Crescens story followed that of Ptolemaeus and Lucius.^[77]

This close parallel has been almost entirely neglected. One exception is a recent article by Runar Thorsteinsson, who argued on this basis that Justin’s conflict with Crescens and anticipated martyrdom was the prime motivation for composing the Second Apology.^[78] He points to the disclosure formula, “For I would have you know,”^[79] a marker to an ancient audience that they had reached the crux, as well as to the prevalence of the second person singular (particularly compared with the First Apology).^[80] He is correct, I think, that Justin’s own struggle is key to understanding the Second Apology. But we should be cautious of pinning our interpretation on the presumed historicity of Justin’s martyrdom at Crescens’ instigation. There is simply no firm evidence for that connection (or even for reading the account of Justin’s martyrdom historically). And more important, this ignores the literary complexity and intertextuality of Justin’s writing, amply demonstrated in the previous section.

Further attention to these literary dynamics allows an alternative approach. The most obvious difference between the two tales is the presence of Lucius in the first. In objecting to the urban prefect’s judgement, he publicly “outs” injustice. In this he appeals to the emperors—the only judicial authority higher than the prefect. In the second story there is no Lucius. But the parallel, and the uncertainty of how this story will end, imply that this role needs to be filled, and that this is the audience’s role. Since it is likely addressed to Antoninus Pius, Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus, Justin directs them to do for themselves what Lucius had to do on their behalf.^[81] Hence Justin’s bombastic offer: “in the event that these exchanges have not been reported back to you, I am prepared to exchange questions with him again, even in your presence.”^[82] But in addition, though the implied auditors are emperors, the actual readers may have been closer to home, likely sympathetic others in the pedagogical circles in which Justin moved.^[83] Justin co-opts these too to serve in the pseudo-imperial Lucius-role—as authoritative judge. This also echoes a strategy from the novels, since there spectators in the trial scenes, like the chorus in Greek theatre, serve as a proxy for the implied readers who are thereby invited in.^[84]

Here though a difference between the stories becomes important. Where in the first Lucius was commenting on a judicial decision, here the audience, imperial or not, are invited to judge an intellectual debate. The implication is that we side with Justin. But that means judging Justin the intellectually superior, hence the invitation to repeat the debate “to show that I speak the truth.”^[85] Formal accusation and hearing are anticipated but not yet realised; the intellectual judgment against Crescens undermines any case he might make in future. In other words, the implied parallels between the stories make an equivalence between justice and rationality.

It is helpful here to sharpen our sense of Justin’s circumstances. Recent work has argued cogently that he was one private teacher among many catering to small numbers of pupils in Rome.^[86] He thus partook, alongside his contemporaries, in a complex landscape of intra-and inter-mural competition for pupils, prestige, power—and more fundamentally, for livelihood and survival. These rivalries could be bitter; in particular, like most disputes in this period, participants were not afraid to try to mobilise the judicial mechanisms of the Roman state to their own advantage. Justin’s rift with Crescens was one such messy philosophical spat among many; his worry that Crescens might accuse him of a crime to Roman officials one manifestation of an ever-present worry for those in his position. Indeed, he was not immune to the tactic himself.^[87]

Justin thus lived and taught in a world of constant intellectual competition, fought under the ever-present threat of run-ins with Roman justice. He invites his reader to acknowledge—as, no doubt, did his competitors—that his teaching is the best. But this was not a sterile ivory tower debate, but one with real world consequences. The carefully constructed parallels in the Second Apology between the competitive dynamics of the novelistic trial scene and those of Justin’s own pedagogic rivalries are designed, I suggest, to explore precisely this nexus between intellectual competition and real-world justice. We do not need to believe that the Second Apology was Justin’s real defence in his trial after Crescens’ denunciation to see that it is driven by such a possibility.

This prompts, I suggest, a further comparison with contemporary literature, to another author capable of writing in both novelistic and rhetorical guises.^[88] Apuleius of Madauros, like Justin an educated provincial who spent time at Rome, and author of the Metamorphoses, the only Latin novel fully extant, also wrote an Apology, delivered at some point in 158 or 159 in Tripolitanian Sabratha in Africa Proconsularis, before the proconsul, Claudius Maximus.^[89] As best we can reconstruct its background, Apuleius had married a wealthy widow, Pudentilla, a decade or so his senior, which prompted an accusation of magical foul play from Sicinius Aemilianus, brother of her first husband, made via his nephew Sicinius Pudens.^[90]

Though writing in Latin, Apuleius was part of the same 2d-century literary and rhetorical world.^[91] And there are again numerous parallels with Justin’s Second Apology. We have again a court case between two men over a (voiceless) woman and the question of legitimate marriage—Apuleius serving as both husband and interloper—with other charges a smokescreen for a financial dispute.^[92] This trial too may have been part of a wider dispute (Apuleius was in the assize centre for another legal case concerning his wife; Aemilianus may have been there for the same reason).^[93] Apuleius, like Justin, is an intellectual exploring in literary rhetoric a landscape where intellectuals stood in judicial jeopardy. Both include narratives of other, parallel accusations and trials (in Apuleius, a story about Sophocles, accused by his son of insanity, simply reading his own work as a defence)^[94] as well as large amounts of apparently tangential material.^[95] Finally, scholars increasingly doubt if Apuleius’ highly intertextual Apology, like that of Justin, can be read straightforwardly as an authentic trial defence.^[96]

There are also curious overlaps in personnel between the two. Apuleius’ judge, Claudius Maximus, and the judge before whom Justin appears in the Acts of Justin and His Companions, Quintus Junius Rusticus, Rome’s urban prefect, are both name-checked for their philosophical pedigree by Marcus Aurelius.^[97] Moreover, Apuleius references “the right honourable Lollius Urbicus,”^[98] then urban prefect in Rome, and judge of Ptolemaeus and Lucius.^[99] We should not make too much of the coincidences, but they do demonstrate that these texts were part of the same elite, intellectual, judicial world.

I am most interested here in Apuleius’ rhetorical tactics. Apuleius employs invective to ridicule his opponents.^[100] And his defence is tailored to his judge, “Claudius Maximus and you who are present as his advisers,”^[101] appealing to their “common intellectual identity.”^[102] Apuleius, one Roman citizen appearing before another in a provincial backwater, establishes his intellectual credentials, and their equal in his judge.^[103] He stresses that he is “very eloquent both in Greek and in Latin.”^[104] He refers repeatedly to their shared knowledge: “How lucky, Claudius Maximus, that you are the judge in the case. Learned as you are, you have certainly read Aristotle’s many different volumes.”^[105] And he aligns education and morality in a manner entirely characteristic of contemporary philosophy, as in his citation of the proverb “the good man skilled in speech,”^[106] a phrase he applies to Maximus’ predecessor Lollianus.

Simultaneously, Apuleius cultivates mutual disdain for the irrational beliefs of provincials. He systematically denigrates his opponents as intellectually inferior.^[107] He says to Sicinius Aemilianus “you were an obscure rustic and I was a busy scholar.”^[108] He says of Sicinius Pudens that “he gave up humane studies, shook off all control, and has taken his first villainous lessons by this prosecution.”^[109] And he labels his advocate, Tannonius Pudens, “certainly someone of no great eloquence.”^[110] They combine their idiocy with immorality. Aemilianus is “a man of evil character”;^[111] Rufinus has “absolutely no equal at all on earth for vileness, immorality and depravity.”^[112] Apuleius presents himself as intellectually and morally aligned with his judge, against his ignorant, intemperate accusers.^[113]

Justin’s Second Apology proceeds almost identically. He too aligns himself with his audience. The second sentence declares that Justin has written it: “for your sake, inasmuch as you have the same feelings that we have, and are our brothers.”^[114] Later he insists, “and now we are also eager to set you free from your unjustified prejudice.”^[115] And he signs off: “May it be then that your judgments will be worthy of piety and philosophy and—for your own sake—be just.”^[116] Like Apuleius too, Justin critiques his opponent Crescens, “that lover of noise and of empty praise,”^[117] targeting his opponent’s education and morality:

For it would not be right to call the man a lover of wisdom since, to gratify and please the erring multitude, he publicly testifies about things of which he knows nothing, namely that Christians are godless and irreligious. Either he has encountered the teachings of Christ or he has not encountered them. If he has not encountered them and attacks us he is altogether wicked, and much worse than common unskilled people, who are often on their guard against speaking of and misrepresenting things they know not about. If he has encountered them either he has not understood the majesty they contain or he has understood it and still does these things in order not to be suspected of being a Christian himself. This would show him to be vanquished by vulgar and irrational opinion and fear, and so much the more ignoble and thoroughly wicked.^[118]

As with the novels, Justin has not been read alongside Apuleius. But Apuleius was also exploring, from both periphery and centre, the implications of Roman judicial oversight.^[119] The comparison reveals that Justin’s alignment between justice and rationality is a familiar contemporary rhetorical tactic.^[120] In a world of competing intellectuals with no objective criteria of assessment, validation came in large part from successful self-presentation. Tellingly, it was entirely typical to label one’s opponent a Cynic.^[121] Justin did this explicitly; Apuleius also compared himself to “a philosopher, not one unlettered and ignorant like a shameless Cynic, but one who remembers that he follows Plato.”^[122] Both sought to establish common elite intellectual ground between judge and defendant, distanced from their prosecutor’s ignorance and duplicity. Both did so to establish their respectability against the possible weaponization of the blurred boundaries of philosophy—magic, for Apuleius; minority cults, for Justin.

There is more. This tactic in fact sought to convince a judge that they should trust shared intellectual status—and judge accordingly—regardless of the details of the case. When Apuleius says, in (tellingly) his first quotation, of Caecilius: “innocence is eloquence,”^[123] while the plain meaning is that the best defence is being innocent, a secondary meaning lurks—that rhetorical skill means acquittal.^[124] Justin’s juxtaposition of his two stories should be read in this light. In asserting his intellectual superiority Justin establishes a pre-emptive line of defence to any judicial accusation. The reader, invited to serve as judge in Justin’s dispute with Crescens—or any other rival—has been told how to judge piously and philosophically by the implied parallel with Lucius.^[125] Justin, in other words, in a move entirely typical of his day, tries to turn intellectual superiority into judicial defence.

4 Rhetoric, Scale, and the Defence of Philosophy

As well as the equation—even replacement—of justice with paideia, Apuleius also plays with the distortion of scale. He suggests that the particular accusations against him are a full-fledged attack on philosophy and philosophers. He expresses delight “to have been granted an opportunity and an occasion to clear the name of Philosophy, and to justify myself in the eyes of ignorant people, with you as my judge.”^[126] Later he compares his treatment to that of other well-known philosophers:

But thanks to an almost universal error of the ignorant, philosophers are often faced with this kind of reproach. They think those who investigate the basic, unitary causes of matter to be irreligious, and hence they accuse them of denying the gods’ existence, as they did Anaxagoras, Leucippus, Democritus, Epicurus and other champions of the natural order. As for that branch, however, which devotes particular study to universal providence and greatly honours the gods, people commonly label them “magicians,” as if convinced that they can cause things to occur which they know do occur; ancient examples are Epimenides, Orpheus, Pythagoras and Ostanes; and thereafter Empedocles’ Purifications, Socrates’ Guiding Spirit, Plato’s The Good came under similar suspicion. I congratulate myself, then, on being included in such a large and distinguished company.^[127]

The reference to Socrates is particularly important, since Apuleius implicitly aligns himself with that prototypical unfairly prosecuted philosopher throughout.^[128] Indeed the very tactic of framing personal circumstances as a defence of philosophy was right out of the Platonic Socrates’ playbook.^[129] Apuleius’ Apology exhibits extensive intertextuality—of content, structure, strategy and tone—with Plato and Xenophon’s Apologies (and further texts of both).^[130] And if Apuleius did title his work “Apologia,” that echo would be writ-large.^[131] Indeed, the playful on-off identification with Socrates may itself be Socratic.^[132] Combined with the stress on his credentials, it is clear that Apuleius’ defence involves presenting himself not just as a philosopher, but the philosopher, defending philosophy itself. This rhetorical stance means that Apuleius’ own circumstances take second place to defence of the movement. This in turn, I suggest, made his defence easier. False inflation of the charges both rendered them ridiculous, and made it difficult for any judge to convict, not least because they too would be implicated by the condemnation of philosophical behaviour. Finally, such a bold statement of Apuleius’ prowess as a philosopher was also an advertisement of his wares for the wider audience.^[133]

Apuleius was here echoing a common sophistic 2d-century activity. The study of Greek rhetoric revelled in its more advanced stages in so-called melete, or declamation—giving speeches in the persona of other past figures—including Socrates.^[134] Justin, I suggest, born of the same intellectual climate, made the same rhetorical move.^[135] But for him it had two stages. First, his own experience had to be made characteristic of his movement. The start of the Second Apology is worth quoting in detail here:

I have been compelled to put this discourse together by what happened so recently in your city under Urbicus, and by what governors are doing everywhere with similar unreasonableness . . . For, apart from those who have accepted that the unjust and licentious will be punished in eternal fire and that the virtuous and those who lived like Christ come to dwell with God in absence of suffering, apart, that is, from those who have become Christians, everyone everywhere who is corrected by a father or neighbour or child or friend or brother or husband or wife, because it is difficult to change and because of the love of pleasure and because it is difficult to turn toward the good . . . And our enemies the wicked demons suborn such judges as these—their subjects and devotees—to kill us.^[136]

Justin thus begins by jumping from the specific incident under Urbicus (the tale of the wife, husband, Ptolemaeus and Lucius) to a universal claim about a collective, the Christians (note the repeated use of πανταχοῦ). The latter is clearly extrapolated from the former, since it focuses on resistance to Christians’ conversion by those close to them out of stubbornness, hedonism or immorality. This opening is followed first by the tale of marital drama, and then by Justin’s contretemps with Crescens. We thus see a similar strategy to Apuleius, namely a general claim used rhetorically to strengthen the case of the author. This was tied to the equation of justice, rationality, and morality, discussed above, in Justin’s comment that governors are acting everywhere “with similar unreasonableness,” and his comparison of Christians with “the unjust and licentious”—linking ἀλόγως, ἀδίκους and ἀκολάστους.

The second stage was to present Christianity as a philosophy. This has elicited much more scholarly attention—indeed it is seen as the defining characteristic of early Christian apologetic. But for Justin the point, I suggest, was in part to enable the same bait-and-switch tactic as Apuleius. This is why his main interest is in the reputation philosophies had for being unjustly treated: “the followers of Stoic opinions were decent at any rate with regard to their ethical doctrine . . . And therefore they were also hated and put to death—Heraclitus, as we said before, and Musonius within our own times, and others too.”^[137]

His most repeated example, though, is Socrates, again always for his irrational and unjust treatment: “it is because of the workings of evil demons that the virtuous, such as Socrates and the like, are persecuted and are in chains.”^[138] The link with Justin is later made explicit: “Socrates . . . was accused of the same things as we are, for they said of him also that he brought in new divinities, and that those whom the city recognised as gods he did not.”^[139] Here Justin mobilises Socrates exactly as had Apuleius—as a philosopher misunderstood by the ignorant and accused of being irreligious. Most telling, Socrates’ first appearance comes as Justin tells of his own clash with Crescens and labels the latter “a lover not of wisdom but of vainglory who does not honour even the saying of Socrates—which should be held dear.”^[140]

This personal motivation is thus an interpretative key to Second Apology. Justin defends himself by employing what Apuleius reveals to be a familiar rhetorical tactic. Both he and Ptolemaeus are depicted as the pedagogic representatives of an entire philosophy, which converts the unnamed wife and shows up Crescens. Much of the rest of the Second Apology—seen by so many later commentators as superfluous—can be read as glosses of this.^[141] Chapter 11, for example, a digression on the benefits of virtue over vice, is not only directly related to the choice of the wife in the Ptolemaeus and Lucius story, but included here explicitly “to retail against Crescens, and against those as foolish as him.”^[142] Chapter 12 expands on this:

having become imitators of Zeus and the other gods in homosexual intercourse with males and shameless sexual intercourse with women, and then bringing forward as your defence the writings of Epicurus and of the poets? But since we persuade people to flee such teachings and those who do and imitate these things, just as even now we have been striving to do through these words, we are embattled in various ways.^[143]

This is constantly framed in competition: “Our doctrines, then, are shown to be more majestic than every human teaching through the fact that the whole rational principle became the Christ.”^[144] Other philosophies are inevitably inferior because they could offer only a part of reason; Christianity the whole. Justin can thus claim superiority over all possible intellectual rivals—“anything good that has been said by anyone belongs to us Christians.”^[145] His conclusion makes his goal clear: “According to sound judgement our teachings are not shameful, but superior to all human philosophy.”^[146]

Runar Thorsteinsson has in fact argued that chapters 4–13 is entirely based on the debate with Crescens (whom he considers a Stoic not a Cynic),^[147] since these are structured as answers to four hypothetical questions,^[148] all related to persecution and death.^[149] This is possible. But the point for our purposes is again not that the Second Apology necessarily reflects Justin’s defence in his actual trial, but that it represents a rhetorical pre-emptive defence—on the basis of the intellectual superiority of the accused—against any possible charge from any possible quarter. This is built on Justin’s implication that any such attack would be an attack on Christianity itself, and Christianity is demonstrably of a superior intellectual calibre to any other philosophy with whose denizens he might be in conflict. And as an added bonus, it also served as an advertisement of Justin’s intellectual “wares” in the Roman pedagogical marketplace.^[150]

5 Conclusion

There is thus much more to the two narrative portions of the Second Apology with which we began than meets the eye. They closely resemble contemporary texts, in multiple genres, in both Greek and Latin. Such comparison reveal that they were mobilised as part of rhetorical techniques familiar to Justin’s peers. Justin works to establish connections between pedagogy, morality and justice. The parallel between the two stories, and the omission of the external figure in the second, positions the reader as judge. The equation of intellectual prowess and innocence, and the hyperbolic expansion of Justin’s intellectual quality into that of Christianity as a whole, combine to make the Second Apology both a universal pre-emptive defence, and an effective pedagogical advertisement.

This has a number of consequences. First, it demonstrates Justin’s immersion in his 2d-century environment. Some mainstream voices still stress Justin’s intellectual mediocrity and cultural isolation. So Paul Parvis in a status quaestionis article can declare that “there is a great gulf fixed between his world and that of the cultural and philosophical elite of Antonine Rome . . . We are reading the work of someone who, for all his enthusiasm, remains an outsider.”^[151] This can no longer stand. This article further confirms both Justin’s deep immersion in his contemporary landscape, and the sophistication of his engagement with the literary motifs and rhetorical strategies of the day.

Second, this warns against uncritical use of this and other apologetic texts in our historical efforts to understand early Christianity.^[152] We have already seen the need for caution in reconstructing Justin’s own situation. But similar care is needed in studies of early Christian persecution more broadly. The Christian apologists are traditionally used as evidence of the widespread nature of Christian persecution. That is based on the traditional view of them as authoritative records of collective suffering. But the reading proffered here transforms the Second Apology into a highly personal text, one born of Justin’s own local pedagogical and judicial antagonisms. Moreover, it sees in it a familiar rhetorical tactic that transforms this individual threat into an unjust and ignorant broadside on an entire movement. Justin would not be the first to inflate a personal concern into an existential threat to an entire community. But he might be the most successful. No one has assumed after reading Apuleius that philosophy was genuinely under threat in mid–2d century Roman North Africa. But generations of scholars have assumed exactly that of Christianity after reading Justin.^[153]

Third, and most important for our purposes in this special issue, this impacts our view of Christian apologetic. Justin has usually been approached as the first Christian apologist, a literary pioneer who sparked a genre that would have a long and important afterlife.^[154] Again, we can take Paul Parvis’ judgement as typical: “he effectively invented a new genre—the apology.”^[155] But apology was not a new genre. Seeing Justin as the first in a new chain, rather than a link in one with a long history, is the result of that tendency to teleology to which early Christian studies has long been prone. This new reading of the Second Apology aligns it closely with a non-Christian contemporary example of the genre. But both were drawing on a long tradition going back, ultimately, to the Socratic defence speeches of Plato and Xenophon.^[156] Plato also used the woes of the individual as a launching board for a wider discussion of philosophy.^[157] And it is no coincidence that Justin speaks to—and offers to repeat—a philosophical dialogue with Crescens, which the text that follows may then précis, given Plato’s preference for the dialogic form. There was nothing new under the Son.