Over the past fifty years a number of scholars (myself included) have argued that activities associated with the pursuit of an 'Attic' idealspeaking Greek in the linguistic idiom of Athens, adopting a certain rhetorical style, reading literary texts and even wearing clothing associated with Athens in the fifth and fourth centuries in the five centuries following the death of Alexander were tactics primarily adopted to reinforce 'Greek identity'. In this period Greek literature was spreading to regions where Greek was neither the primary language nor primary cultural identifier just as the Roman empire conquered those regions, so (the argument goes) memorialisation of past cultural glories could help compensate for the political subordination of the Roman imperial present.  As an explanation of what has seemed obviously a Greek cultural phenomenon, it might appear sensible to be content with a Greek-centred narrative about the significance of Athens and Atticism from the fourth century  onward.But just as the modern words 'classical' and 'Hellenistic' are defined by the political and cultural pressures of eighteenth and nineteenth century Europe and are thus best used with caution, as Jason König and Nicolas Wiater remind us in the introduction to this volume, so we should reconsider the assumption that the Hellenistic (and Second Sophistic) investment in Athens arises primarily from and shapes itself around 'Greek' objectives. Better, I argue, to see Hellenistic literature as a plural phenomenon, best understood as shaped and sustained by competing Mediterranean and eventually Roman concerns. At the beginning of his  Imagine quotation marks around the terms 'classical', 'Attic,' 'Greek' and 'Roman' throughout this essay, not because the terms lack meaning but in order to underline the fact that these terms are under investigation here. The fifty years of scholarship I refer to begins with Ewen Bowie's influential essay 'Greeks and their past in the second sophistic', Bowie  (revised from an earlier version first published in ); see also Swain 

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