stratum of the complete text were, however, Hellenistic: a bedrock of (creatively) historical narrative, an epistolary novel (manifested in the various letters that dapple the text, most notably Alexander’s letters to his mother Olympias, 2.23–41), and a work of Egyptian propaganda. The last is the motivation behind the identification of Alexander as the son, and hence continuator, of the last pharaoh, Nectanebo (1.1–12). The Persian invasion can thus be reinterpreted as a minor blip in the otherwise unbroken tradition of wise, powerful, and autonomous Egyptian kingship. On seeing a statue of Nectanebo, Alexander is told that a prophecy was delivered to his father: “The exiled king will return to Egypt, not as an old man but as a youth, and will beat down our enemies, the Persians” (1.34.5). Alexander’s pharaonic credentials, indeed, are more deeply rooted than this. He visits monumental obelisks set up by Sesonchosis (1.33.6, 3.17.17), is hailed as a new Sesonchosis (1.34.2), and even receives a dream visitation from the man himself, who announces that Alexander’s feats have outdone his own. These episodes function on two levels: Alexander is appropriated into Egyptian history, as the restorer of Egypt’s self-determination, and the Alexander Romance presents itself as a rejuvenated version of the Sesonchosis tradition.
In the substance of the narrative, however, Alexander represents a figure with whom all peoples can identify: a wise, brave, questing prince, seeking out the edges of the earth. As so often in Greek narrative of this period, he is also a lover: a section toward the end, perhaps originally a separate romance, details his (entirely fictitious) liaison with Candace, queen of Meroë (3.18–23). Here too there is a hint that the author is weaving together different traditions: Candace lives in the former palace of Semiramis (3.17.42–3.18.1). What is striking is not so much the tweaking of the Ninus and Semiramis story (which is not as great as one might suppose: the Ctesian Semiramis did in fact visit Nubia) but the author’s self-conscious concern to portray this section of his narrative as a metamorphosed version of it. If the fidelity to tradition is dubious, the negotiation of the anxiety of cultural influence is artful. The Alexander Romance presents itself as the summation of that tradition, outdoing each of its predecessors, just as its subject outdid all others in conquest.
Imaginary Worlds
The primary locations for such narrative confections were, then, Egypt and the Phoenician/Palestinian coast. Others did exist (e.g., the Black Sea littoral in the fragmentary Calligone, of uncertain date), but I want to conclude by focusing briefly on two “utopian” narratives set in imaginary worlds, the Sacred Inscription attributed to Euhemerus of Messene (early third century B.C.E.), mentioned above, and Iambulus’s Islands of the Sun (ca. second–first century B.C.E.).74 Each is preserved primarily in a summary by Diodorus of Sicily (2.55–60 and 6.1.3–10, respectively) that gives little flavor of the tone or style of the originals and moreover appropriates the content to suit Diodorus’s own agenda: a universal history in which all the individual elements cohere. Euhemerus’s and Iambulus’s narratives are geographically similar: both involve sea journeys beginning in Arabia (via Ethiopia in Iambulus) and continuing into the Indian Ocean. It is tempting, given our discussion above, to see these journeys as self-conscious attempts to outdo the Semitic and Egyptian narrative traditions, by progressing geographically beyond.
Despite the difficulties in peering through the Diodoran fug, certain features are evident. Euhemerus, as we have seen in “Epic and Fiction,” was concerned primarily to provide human, historical identities for the Homeric/Hesiodic pantheon. He seems not to have described the journey to Panchaea in any detail; the process of geographical dislocation is primarily a device allowing him to offer a perspective that is radically alternative to traditional Greek thought. In this respect, Euhemerus is a forerunner of authors like Jonathan Swift, the Samuel Butler of Erewhon and Erewhon Revisited, Edwin Abbott, Jules Verne, and Pierre Boulle.
Iambulus is more difficult. Some have detected a philosophical, even political, promotion of a communist society “according to nature [kata phusin].”75 Certainly the islanders “do not marry, but hold their wives in common, rearing any children that are born as common to them all, and love them equally. . . . For this reason no rivalry arises among them, and they live their lives free of faction, extolling like-mindedness to the highest” (2.57.1). Iambulus (or Diodorus) describes a society that embodies the ideals of Greek politics (no “faction [stasis],” only “like-mindedness [homonoia]”) by following the priciples of common property laid out in Plato’s Republic.76 Yet the sociopolitical aspects of the island in fact receive far less attention than its bountiful nature and the extraordinary health, size, and longevity of its inhabitants. Diodorus prefaces his summary by promising to recapitulate in brief the “paradoxes” (2.55.1) found on the island, a strong signal that he, at any rate, conceived of Iambulus as a purveyor of marvels rather than a systematic political theorist. Lucian too refers to Iambulus’s “paradoxes,” adding that “it is obvious to everyone that he fabricated a falsehood [pseudos]” (True Stories 1). Iambulus seems to have found room enough within a supposedly veridical genre, the geographical travel narrative, to create a “fictional” work.
As recent scholarship has noted, there is an intrinsic connection in the ancient world between travel and fiction: alternative geographies are home to alternative realities.77 Names of Hellenistic authors such as Antiphanes of Berge—who famously claimed to have visited a climate so cold that words froze in the air (Plut., Mor. 79a)—and Pytheas of Massilia became bywords for literary confection. It is important, however, to reemphasize that there was no firm generic dividing line between “factual” report and “fiction.” The writers we have discussed in this section inhabited the same literary space as more sober geographical writers, such as Strabo—which is why Diodorus felt licensed to include such material in his own purportedly historical work.
CONCLUSIONS
This chapter has partly been about how not to write the history of Greek fiction. I have argued against linear, “smoking gun” models that seek to pinpoint moments of invention or discovery. Fictionality inheres in all literary discourse; the question to ask is thus not when it was invented but how it was differently inflected over time. In particular, it is crucial not to attempt to write the history of fiction simply by reverse-engineering the imperial romance.
I conclude with two positive observations. My first is this: the kind of fictional discourse I have traced in this chapter (and I freely concede there are other types) is intimately tied to the emergence of a prose culture built around the book, which—in contrast to earlier poetic texts whose authority was predicated on that of the inspired performer, the maître de vérité—places the accent more on the power of language to create its own plausible world. Plausibility—to eikos, this concept so closely tied to the forensic culture of the law courts—at first sight implies realism, approximation to reality (the root verb eoika means “I resemble”). In this sense, a plausible story is one that coheres with what we know to be true about the world in which we live, and indeed, as we have seen, much of the fictional material we have been discussing emerges from critiques of the “unreality” of traditional poetic claims. Yet there is another dimension to to eikos: a plausible story is also one that is internally coherent, true on its own terms. In other words, plausibility is manufactured discursively, within the confines of the narrative itself. What is at issue, when fictional worlds are being made, is not realism but a constructed reality effect. The contained world of the prose book, then, makes for an entirely different experience of fictionality than that of the performed song.
Second point. When I write of a “world-making” power, I am doing more than invoking a classic text in the modern philosophy of fiction;78 I am also referring to the trend toward geographical relocation, moving away from the familiar urban landscapes that had served as backdrops for much earlier narrative and into spaces that were felt as exotic, whether for their distant, marginal location, for a perception of cultural otherness, or for their out-of-the-way oddity within Greece itself. This alienation of narrative setting relates to a historical process that we might call Hellenistic but in fact begins already in the fifth century B.C.E. (and the roots of which are indeed already visible in the Homeric and Hesiodic poems): a gradual mapping
