Articles with keyword: Primitivism

Dio Chrysostom’s Euboicus as a rejection of Greco-Roman urban
civilization1
Ioannis Papadopoulos ioannispapadopoulos1987@gmail.com

ELECTRYONE 

2021
Volume 8, Issue 1

 | pp.

19-27

Abstract:

Dio Chrysostom’s Euboicus presents a unique case-study of a divergent voice that disrupts the rather smooth discourse of the urban dimensions of the Second Sophistic. The author, having experienced a rather turbulent period of life, during Domitian’s reign and observed alternative ways of life, unfamiliar with the Greek and Roman examples, produced a manifesto of a new view of social living. The ideas and examples presented in the aforementioned work rather reject some of the fundamental social principles of urban living during Classical Antiquity. The extent that Dio was a visionary of social change or a plain reactionary as a result of his personal calamities remains unclear. However, his treatise, describing a remote community in mountainous Euboea, consists not only of a call to a retreat to a more natural and ‘primitivistic’ way of life, but also includes a sharp criticism of the dominant problems of a Greek city during the imperial era. Through his reflection on such issues, Dio, appeared to have reached the fringes of civil disobedience, inspired by cultural otherness and the resistance to the monolithic Greek and Roman social norms.