and Semitic culture. One striking example is the complex of narratives around Stratonice, the wife of Alexander’s successor Seleucus, and her stepson Antiochus (later to be Antiochus I): according to the story, he fell in love with her and began wasting away; the doctor Erasistratus diagnosed the problem, and then Seleucus ceded to him not only Stratonice but also his kingdom.57 Despite the historical characters, the main theme of the story is clearly folkloric: an inversion of the motif of the lusty older woman and the virtuous younger man, familiar from the Greek Hippolytus myth and the Hebrew story of Potiphar’s wife (Genesis 39). Lucian’s version strongly underlines the Semitic overtones of the story, segueing into an etiology of the cult of the Syrian goddess Atargatis at Hierapolis.58 It looks very much as though the historical story has been blended with a Syrian myth in order to explain the distinctive nature of the Hierapolitan cult.
This interpenetration of Greek and Semitic erotic narrative is paralleled elsewhere. A certain Laetus composed a Phoenician Events, including accounts of the abduction of Europa and Eiramus’s (Hiram’s) presentation to Solomon of his daughter (together with an amount of wood—presumably Lebanese cedar—for shipbuilding; FGrH 784 F 1[b]). The latter story was also told by Menander of Ephesus, who was widely held (no doubt on his own testimony) to have learned Phoenician to access his sources (FGrH 783 T3[a]–[c]). According to the Suda, Xenophon of Cyprus (undatable but probably Hellenistic and perhaps Ovid’s source for the relevant stories in the Metamorphoses) composed a Cypriot Events, glossed as “a history of erotic plots” including the stories of Cinyra, Myrrha, and Adonis. All of these figures are Semitic in origin and no doubt reflect Cyprus’s partially Phoenician heritage. We can point also to the Nachleben of the Phoenician setting in the imperial romance, in Lollianus’s Phoenician Events, and in Achilles Tatius’s Leucippe and Clitophon.
Another erotic story that may have a Semitic source is the notorious love between the children of Miletus, either of Caunus for his sister Byblis or the reverse. The major Hellenistic versions are in the fragmentary works of the epic poets Apollonius of Rhodes and Nicaenetus59 and the prose mythographers Parthenius60 and Conon.61 The Semitic case62 is based partly on the incest motif (which superficially resembles that of the Cypro-Phoenician Myrrha narrative) and partly on the name Byblis, which looks like an eponym for the Phoenician city of Byblos. It is also possible that Caunus is an originally Phoenician name, given that Caria absorbed Phoenician influence. (Armand d’Angour points out to me, additionally, the Phoenician town known to the author of the biblical 1 Chronicles as KWN [18.8].) Again, a Semitic erotic myth seems to have entered the Greek tradition; as it has done so, its etiological aspects have been gradually pared away to emphasize the erotic narrative.
A different kind of Semitic narrative hove over the Greek horizon with the translation of the Septuagint: a number of the so-called Apocrypha have been claimed as “novels” (including Esther, Susanna, Judith, and Daniel—the Greek version of which is longer than the Hebrew, having taken on a life of its own).63 Whether Greek gentiles actually read them is difficult to ascertain: beyond the famous reference to Genesis in the treatise On the Sublime (9.9)—which is itself impossible to date—there is little evidence for a “pagan” Greek readership of Jewish texts. It is, indeed, hard to see how the Jewish novels could appeal directly to gentiles: they primarily express faith in God’s ability to rescue his chosen people from foreign oppression. Even at the stylistic level, they manifest a certain intractability, their paratactic style (which renders the vav [“and”] constructions distinctive to the Hebrew language) marking their difference from “native” Greek. But direct influence is only one form of cultural contingency, and they do in fact share motifs with Greco-Roman story culture. In particular, the focus on the preservation of female integrity in the face of predatory monarchs (found in Judith and Esther) is a theme in both Latin (Lucretia) and Greek (Chariton, Xenophon, Achilles, Heliodorus) narrative.
Certainly, the Greek erotic tradition seems to have influenced Jewish narrative. Retellings of the erotic segments of the Torah by Josephus and Philo inflect them with Greek narrative motifs.64 The convergences between Greek and Jewish are closest in the extraordinary Joseph and Aseneth (perhaps Hellenistic), which elaborates on the biblical story of Joseph’s marriage to a young Egyptian maiden (Genesis 41:45; see also 26:20). The date is extremely controversial—estimates range from the second century B.C.E. to the fourth century C.E.65—but the safest guess seems to be that it is a Hellenistic Jewish text overlain with Christian material. Whatever the truth of the matter, the history of this text is clearly interwoven with the rise of the erotic novel. This narrative plays repeatedly on the substitution of erotic with righteous motifs. Aseneth is egregiously beautiful like a goddess (4.2); she is immediately stupefied by the sight of Joseph (6.1), grieves when they are separated after their initial meeting (8.8), and weeps in her room that night (10.2).66 Yet their relationship is built around not erotic obsession but pious reverence of the Jewish god. Although this text is aimed at Jews and is probably a translation from the Hebrew (it displays the same paratactic style as the Apocrypha, discussed above), it is clearly designed for a readership also familiar with the Greek literary (and particularly erotic) repertoire.
Greece and Egypt
The existence of significant Hellenistic prose stories on pharaonic themes, Egypt’s prominence in the later, imperial romance, and the significance of Hellenistic Alexandria as a point of intersection between Greek and Egyptian traditions67 have together led some to believe that the novel first developed in Egypt.68 (Traces of narrative motifs from the pharaonic period have even been detected in imperial romances.)69 While any crude hypothesis of a single cultural origin for the novel is unconvincing (in light of the evidence discussed above for local Greek and Semitic elements), it is clear that Egypt played an important role in the novelistic imaginaire.70
Two major traditions are of critical importance. The first is that surrounding the legendary pharaoh Sesonchosis (sometimes called Sesostris or Sesoosis), credited with numerous conquests in Asia and Europe. In addition to the various historical (or quasi-historical) accounts of this figure,71 we also have three papyrus fragments that seem to derive from a “novelistic” version of his story, composed in unassuming Greek.72 Two are military (one names the king’s adversaries as an “Arab” [i.e., Palestinian?] contingent, led by one Webelis); a third, however, is erotic, describing the handsome young king’s relationship with a girl Meameris, the daughter of a vassal king. This episode does not appear in any of the “historical” versions of the narrative, and the themes of young love, wandering, infatuation, erotic suffering, and distraction at a banquet (Stephens and Winkler 1995, 262) invite obvious comparisons with the imperial romance. Thematically, the narrative resembles the fragmentary, novelistic version of the Ninus romance (discussed above): each deals with a great national leader from the distant past, focusing on both military exploits and erotic vulnerability.
What we are to conclude from these similarities is less clear: is Sesonchosis an influential Hellenistic text (or, at any rate, part of an influential but now lost Hellenistic tradition)? Or does it represent a specifically local-Egyptian, populist variant on the imperial romance? A third alternative, no doubt the safest, is to rephrase the terms of the question. “The Greek novel” and “the Sesonchosis tradition” were not monolithic and wholly independent, nor was any traffic between the two necessarily unidirectional. As in the case of the Phoenician and Jewish material discussed above, Greek narrative prose proves to be a flexible and capacious medium, able to incorporate numerous cultural perspectives.
This is nowhere truer than in relation to the most important Egyptian-centered text, the text we call the Alexander Romance.73 The work survives in numerous recensions, some prose and some (Byzantine) in verse; in all, there are more than eighty versions from antiquity and the middle ages, in twenty-four languages (including Pahlavi, Arabic, Armenian, and Bulgarian). Different versions contain different episodes, sequences, and cultural priorities: the Alexander Romance is a prism through which cultural light is sharply refracted.
The earliest recension is referred to as
