Favorinus'Corinthian Orationin its Corinthian context

At some time in the second quarter of the second century AD, the controversial sophist–philosopher Favorinus seems to have delivered a speech in Corinth, complaining about the removal of a statue which had previously been erected there in his honour. In doing so he was addressing the inhabitants of a city which occupied an unusual – in many ways unique – position between Greek and Roman identity: Corinth had been sacked by Roman forces in 146 BC, and then refounded as a Roman colony more than one hundred years later, and even in the second century AD it was still sometimes represented as a Roman intrusion within the Greek world, even though it had been strongly influenced by the Greek populations surrounding it in the intervening years. My aim in this article is to examine Favorinus'Corinthian Orationin the light of the cultural ambiguities of its setting. Despite increasing interest in Favorinus in recent years, and despite an increasing volume of archaeological evidence for Corinthian life in the second century, there have been very few detailed readings of the speech's complexities, and even fewer which have recognized the way in which it is crucially anchored within its Corinthian context.