Sacred Inscription bears the same relationship to the Indian Ocean as The Tempest bears to the New World or 2001: A Space Odyssey to space. Narrative fiction has assumed the shape of real journeys of exploration, particularly in the context of the competitive imperialism of the successor empires (and we should note that Euhemerus’s expedition is explicitly cast as a voyage mandated by King Cassander of Macedon).
Yet Euhemerus’s phantasmatic projections of other worlds represent only one variety of prose fiction’s encounter with the other, and should not be generalized. Greeks did not merely peek at other peoples over the crenellations of their own cultural traditions. The prose literature of (particularly but not exclusively) the postclassical period also represents genuine contact zones, spaces where Greek, Egyptian, and Semitic discourses can hybridize to yield new, distinctive forms. The works discussed in this chapter do not simply rehash barbarian stereotypes. Rather, people with an impressive range of cultural competence composed them: figures like Ctesias, Laetus, Alexander Polyhistor, and the authors of Joseph and Aseneth, the Alexander Romance, and Sesonchosis. Matters, indeed, become still more interesting when the empire starts (to borrow Salman Rushdie’s phrase) “writing back,” when Semitic and Egyptian peoples begin to compose in Greek and insert their own priorities and values into the Greek literary tradition. Although (as we shall see in chapters 13 and 14) there certainly were Jewish poets, it is striking that prose fiction, with its in-built attraction to other worlds, proved the most fertile space in which to explore this particular variety of colonial encounter.
This chapter contains material drawn from Whitmarsh 2010d; I am grateful to Wiley-Blackwell for permission to reuse it.
1. Tilg 2010.
2. Payne 2007.
3. Finkelberg 1998. The extent to which Plato’s Atlantis story is self-consciously fictional has been much debated: see ch. 3, n. 9.
4. Rösler 1980.
5. See, e.g., Goldhill 1991.
6. Kurke 2010.
7. Here Karen Ní Mheallaigh’s forthcoming book on Lucian and fiction is keenly anticipated.
8. I attempt to follow many of these threads in Whitmarsh 2004a.
9. See Bowie 2002a, which places the earliest novels in the first century C.E.; there is also much useful discussion in Tilg 2010, 36–78.
10. Rohde 1876, which I cite below from the 1960 reprint of the third edition (1914).
11. Lavagnini 1921; Giangrande 1962; Anderson 1984.
12. Especially in light of the influential critique of Perry 1967, 14–15.
13. E.g., Lightfoot 1999 on Parthenius; Brown 2002 on Conon; Winiarczyk 2002 on Euhemerus.
14. See further Whitmarsh 2005b on the specific nature of the imperial romance.
15. Rohde 1914, 3.
16. Pavel 1989; Newsom 1988; Currie 1990.
17. Morgan 1993, 176–93; similarly Schirren 2005, 15–37.
18. Pratt 1983; Bowie 1993.
19. Finkelberg 1998; Rösler 1980, although the connection between textuality and fiction seems less direct than he claims.
20. Sext. Emp., Adv. gramm. 1.263; for Latin versions, see Rhet. ad Her. 1.13; Quint., Inst. 2.4.2; see further Barwick 1928.
21. Ar., Thesm. 871–928.
22. Webb 2006, especially 43–44; Van Mal-Maeder 2007 explores the fictionality of the declamations while resisting the temptation to see them as genetic ancestors of the novel: see pp. 115–46.
23. Fusillo 1989, 43–55, 77–83; Whitmarsh 2005a, 86–89; see, however, Van Mal-Maeder, previous note, for reservations.
24. Aul. Gell. 6.5.1–8.
25. See ch. 4.
26. Feeney 1991.
27. P. Herc. 1428 fr. 19, with Henrichs 1975, 107–23; Plat., Prot. 320C–323A.
28. Testimonia in Winiarczyk 1991; discussion in Winiarczyk 2002.
29. Winiarczyk 2002, 136.
30. See ch. 12.
31. FGrH 32; Rusten 1982 adds three other fragments. For the influence of Euhemerus see Winiarczyk 2002, 139–42.
32. As emphasized by Rusten 1982, e.g., p. 112 (on the Libyan stories): “A work of fiction.”
33. Goldhill 2002a, 49–50.
34. On the wiles of this poem see especially Hopkinson 1984.
35. On this trend in imperial literature see especially Kim 2010a.
36. Lloyd 1987, 56–70.
37. Packman 1991.
38. Romm 1992.
39. Walbank 1960.
40. Text: FGrH 688; see also the Budé edition of Lenfant 2004 and Stronk 2010. On Ctesias’s importance in the history of fiction see especially Holzberg 1993 and Whitmarsh, forthcoming a.
41. Stephens and Winkler 1995, 23–71.
42. Billault 2004.
43. These traditions are discussed in Whitmarsh, forthcoming a.
44. Holzberg 1993, 81–82. And indeed the summary of the story preserved by Nicolaus of Damascus and, since Felix Jacoby, included among the Ctesian fragments (F 8C Stronk) is considerably more “romantic.”
45. For this phenomenon see Whitmarsh 2010a.
46. CA, 5–8, 12–18; Cameron 1995, 47–53.
47. Lloyd-Jones 1999a, 1999b.
48. C. P. Jones 2001a, and below, chapter 6.
49. Rohde 1914, 42–59.
50. Bowie, forthcoming.
51. See Lightfoot 1999, 224–34.
52. Ibid., 256–63.
53. As, e.g., Lavagnini 1921 does.
54. On this material see Whitmarsh and Thomson, forthcoming; Whitmarsh, forthcoming a, discusses Ctesias and the Cyropaedia in terms of cultural bifocality.
55. Diod. Sic. 2.32.4 = FGrH 688 T3, F 5; Diod. Sic. 2.22.5 = FGrH F 1b. On the question of the historicity of the “royal parchments” see Llewellyn-Jones 2010, 58–63; Stronk 2010, 15–25. For diphtheria as parchment books see Hdt. 5.58.3.
56. Perry 1967, 166–73; Reichel 2010, 425–30.
57. Val. Max. 5.7 ext.; Plut., Demetr. 38; Luc., DDS 17–18; App., Syr. 308–27; further sources at Lightfoot 2003, 373–74.
58. Luc., DDS 19–27;
