in Fiction
Euhemerus of Messene and the Sacred Inscription
In this chapter I consider in more detail a figure who (as we saw in chapter 1) plays a pivotal role in the history of Greek fiction. Euhemerus of Messene is associated predominantly in the modern imagination with the rationalization of myth, of the kind that we find in the opening paragraphs of Herodotus, in Palaephatus, or in Dionysius Scytobrachion, and which may have had its ultimate roots in Hecataeus. Yet the Sacred Inscription1 attributed to him seems to have had little to do with “euhemerism” in the current sense: so far as we can tell from the testimonies refracted in later sources, it made no attempt to launder traditional heroic narrative.2 Euhemerus’s narrator claimed, rather, to have found an island in the Arabian Sea, Panchaea, where a tradition survived that the figures known to the Greeks as the Olympian pantheon were in fact once mortals, whose egregious acts had led to their divination. The text centers on a heterodox anthropology of religion, promoting a particular theory of Olympian divinities (as opposed to the “eternal and imperishable” sun, moon, and stars) as having originated in the deification of euergetists.3
What kind of text was this, then? The religious-philosophical dimension seems undeniable. A Herculaneum papyrus shows that Prodicus had already in the fifth century B.C.E. argued for two kinds of gods, the elemental and the deified culture bringers; Albert Henrichs in particular has argued for Prodicus’s direct influence on Euhemerus (and indeed their names are connected already in antiquity).4 It is also worth noting that Sextus Empiricus’s brief account of the Sacred History at Adversos mathematicos 9.17 (T27 Winiarczyk) quotes the opening line of the famous religious anthropology of Critias’s (or Euripides’s) Sisyphus: “Euhemerus, surnamed ‘the atheist,’ says: ‘When the life of humans was unordered . . .’ ” Even if the connection was Sextus’s own rather than explicit in the Sacred Inscription, that itself is instructive, given that Sextus knew the Euhemeran text better than we do.
So the Inscription is likely to have had philosophical content. It probably had a political point too, as has long been noted: the elevation of humans to gods for their euergesiai, their “great achievements,” seems highly likely to have spoken to the emergent practice of deifying rulers.5 Yet these observations tell us nothing about the genre and tone of the framing narrative. After all, Aristophanes’s Clouds and the Aristotelean Constitution of Athens contain both philosophical and political content, but they are very different types of text. Let us reemphasize the question: what kind of text was this? The tendency has been to classify it generically as a “utopia,”6 but while there clearly was an emerging interest at the time in the description of idealized societies (a tradition that began with Plato’s Atlantis and eventually led to Iambulus’s Islands of the Sun), this label is of course not an ancient generic category, and in any case, to the extent that it has any purchase on the three texts in question, it describes (once again) content rather than form. In other words, the bare ascription utopia is nonspecific and (more to the point) does not begin to disclose how earnest or ludic is the presentation. More precise is the claim, which goes back to Erwin Rohde, that the Sacred Inscription was a utopian novel, a designedly fantastic romance (even if “the fabulous is reduced to a subordinate role” relative to “more serious instruction”).7 What does novel mean in this context? The assumption, though it is rarely stated, is that the label is justified by a substantial narrative element, detailing among other things the narrator’s voyage to Panchaea (and perhaps back again). But as Sylvie Honigman observes in a recent article, the identifier novel also implies fictionality.8 To describe the Inscription in these terms suggests that ancient readers would have entered knowingly into a fictional contract with the text.
How fictional was the Inscription? And fictional how? Honigman’s argument is that, to the contrary, the text cleaved to the rhetoric of historiographical truth telling, which permitted a certain amount of elasticity for texts that conveyed general truths; it is thus a text that, while not necessarily true at the level of precise details, demands to be believed for the wider truths it encodes. Her discussion has, assuredly, taken criticism of the Inscription to a new level, drawing out the nexus of intertextual links to earlier literature, particularly Plato’s Atlantis narrative, which (following Thomas Johansen) she takes as the prototype for this kind of “general truth” historiography. Yet it seems wrong to assume that allusion implies equivalence. Even if it were true that the Atlantis story presented no self-conscious fictionality (which seems far from self-evident),9 it would not therefore follow that a later text that made reference to it operated according to the same principles. What is more, by limiting the framework of Euhemeran reference to historiography and (as she sees it) related genres such as the Atlantis myth, Honigman risks an etiolated account of the resonances that would have been available to readers at the time. My aim in this chapter is not, in fact, to argue straightforwardly that the Inscription operated in a register that was immediately identifiable as fictional, not least because (as we have seen) “fiction” was no more an immediately identifiable category in the early Hellenistic period than was “utopia.”10 Yet there are numerous hints at a more ludic reading, which will lead us to a more experimental and less normative assessment of this extraordinary text.
WHO WAS EUHEMERUS?
The matter is complicated immeasurably by the fact that we have not a single word of the original Inscription; everything we know about it is filtered through later sources, particularly Diodorus Siculus (with extra content provided by Lactantius, who filters Ennius’s lost Latin version). Diodorus, as recent scholarship has emphasized,11 is much more an independent creative force and much less a compiler of tralatitious sources than he was once thought to be. We can test the principle with a brief sideways glance at recent scholarship on Ctesias, for whom Diodorus is again the primary source but where we have more evidence for the nature of the original. Here the tendency has been to resist the assumptions of earlier generations and to see much more of Diodorus in his account of Ctesian material.12 By the same token, it seems dangerous to assume that Diodorus’s use of the Inscription offers anything like a pellucid window onto the original.
So what we can say with confidence about the original Inscription and its author? According to Diodorus (as paraphrased by Eusebius), Euhemerus was “a friend of King Cassander and required by him to fulfill certain royal tasks and great journeys abroad” (DS 6.1.4 = T3 Winiarczyk); one of these took him to the island of Panchaea, in the Arabian Sea. Cassander was the king of Macedon from 305 to 297 B.C.E., a narrow window that dates the supposed expedition. If we are considering the date of the text’s composition, this chronology evidently offers us a terminus post quem. It also provokes a fundamental question: are we to reckon that Euhemerus really was a historical figure in the Macedonian court? Or, to put it in crisper literary-critical terms, is the homodiegetic narrator of the voyage to Panchaea to be identified with the real-life author of the text?
This bears on the question of fictionality in a double sense. Let us first unpack some of the implications of the question that are more complex than they might initially appear. The author, of course, did not actually go to Panchaea, since the island does not exist and never has done.13 There is, then, even at an immediate level, a separation between the flesh-and-blood author and the narrator of this imaginary visit. Of course, it is possible to argue that this level of skepticism was not available to ancient readers, who might have taken the visit at face value, but this is, in general, not borne out by the ancient reception. Diodorus, for sure, seems to take the Sacred Inscription as describing real space, but primarily because it fits his philosophically antitheist agenda.14 It has been claimed that Polybius too put faith in the text’s veracity, but in fact the passage in question (a testimonium preserved in Strabo) is ambiguous to say the least and in fact seems to me to imply considerable skepticism.15 There are, conversely, explicit references to Euhemeran “lies” from Eratosthenes onward.16 Honigman’s explanation for this general mistrust is that the Sacred Inscription failed, methodologically, on two grounds: first, on the absence of external corroboration; second, in adopting a historiographically unconventional form. Both observations
