the Inscription as a successful attempt to discomfit?
Second, there is the deeper question of the identity of the original author. As Niklas Holzberg observes, it is quite possible that “Euhemerus” is merely the name of the fictional narrator rather than that of the historical author.17 The striking uncertainty over his provenance, we might tentatively suggest, may support this conclusion.18 That the later tradition did not distinguish the two is not in itself remarkable: as a parallel we could point to Photius’s attribution of one of the Ass narratives to “Lucius of Patrae,” the fictional narrator (Bibl. cod. 129 = 96b). Again, the ramifications are more complex. I argue elsewhere that the default position for the reception of Greco-Roman narrative was to assume that a homodiegetic (or “first-person”) narrator was also the author, even in situations where the narrative in question was obviously fictional; hence, for example, Augustine’s notorious assertion that Apuleius “claimed, whether truthfully or fictitiously,” to have been transformed into an ass (Civ. 18.18).19 Homodiegetic fiction is a particularly marked species within the wider fictional genus because of the deeply ingrained presumption that an utterance in the first-person singular is deictically indexed to the author of the utterance, or, in the case of a literary work, the author proper. It thus inevitably invokes the figure of metalepsis, the conflation of different levels of narrative such that, for example, a primary narrator enters a secondary narrative, or an author enters her own narrative.20 It may even be possible to speculate as to why the name Euhemerus (which is, admittedly, common enough)21 was chosen. A hēmeroas or hēmerodromēs is a courier; the latter is the word Herodotus uses, for example, of Phidippides the Marathon runner (6.105.1). So Euhemerus may simply mean “trusted emissary”—perfect for the role this personage plays in the text.
What evidence do we have for the identity of the author as (potentially) discrete from the narrator? The only credible allusion from the early Hellenistic period22 comes in Callimachus’s Iambi, where the revivified Hipponax commands the Alexandrian elite: “Come here, all of you, to the temple beyond the wall, where the man who fabricated [plasas] Panchaean Zeus of yore [ton palai Pankhaion . . . Zana], a blathering old man, scratches away at his improper books [adika biblia]” (Iambi 1.9–11 = fr. 191 Pf = T1A Winiarczyk). Sextus Empiricus associated this scratcher of improper books with “Euhemerus” (Adv. math. 9.50–52 = T23 Winiarczyk), and this seems right (notwithstanding the doubts raised above over whether the name attaches to the author or the narrator).23 But what else can Callimachus tell us? Not, for sure, the name of the author as distinct from the narrator, since the allusion is oblique rather than direct. But there is a further clue here. If the author in question was, in fact, Euhemerus the friend of King Cassander, then what was he doing writing in Alexandria, the capital of a rival kingdom? It is not, of course, at all impossible that he left Macedon for Egypt, or that Callimachus’s allusion is, in a way that we can no longer divine, figurative rather than biographically true. But it is at least equally plausible, and certainly more economical, to see the author of the Sacred Tale as an Alexandrian writer, well known enough to be identified allusively, who concocted the narratorial figure of the Macedonian Euhemerus.
The Callimachean allusion yields another couple of hints. The scratcher of improper books is said to have “fabricated” Panchaean Zeus. The verb for “fabricate,” plattein, is used for literary fictions too. As Arnd Kerkhecker notes in his discussion of this passage, we might take Callimachus to be alluding to the fictionality of the Inscription itself, albeit fixating narrowly on its impious theology.24 There may be an echo too of Xenophanes’s famous description of “battling Titans, giants, and centaurs” as the “fabrications [plasmata] of former men” (F 1.22–23 DK), a line that is conventionally (and plausibly) taken as part of a wider critique not just of Homer’s and Hesiod’s theology but also of their narrative trustworthiness in general.25 Is Callimachus—or, rather, his speaker Hipponax—turning the tables on the author of the Sacred Inscription, critiquing his divine fiction with the same language that rationalists wielded against theists? If we accept the extended sense of Callimachus’s plattein, then the passage offers further evidence that the Sacred Inscription was received, early on, as a fictional text.
The reference to adika biblia is also suggestive. I have translated the adjective as “improper,” which may be all that it means. But dikē also suggests legality, which might imply that the author’s works have fallen foul of the law. Lying in the background here are the asebeia (impiety) trials of Socrates and (perhaps) Anaxagoras, cultural memories of the penalties for religious heterodoxy. Maybe the aggressive Hipponax is implying that the author of the Inscription deserved such a fate. But is there a more direct allusion at work here? Could the “blathering old man” have been, in fact, Theodorus of Cyrene, known as “the godless” for his denial of the existence of conventional gods? The tradition surrounding Theodorus is confused indeed, but he seems to have been tried for asebeia in Athens at the very end of the fourth century and thereafter to have relocated to the court of Ptolemy Soter in Alexandria before retiring to Cyrene (Diog. Laert. 2.102).26 This can only be speculation, but it is not impossible that Theodorus was the aged heretic to whom his fellow Cyrenaean refers.27 Particularly suggestive is the fact that Theodorus was known in his lifetime as Theos, “God,” on the basis of a captious mode of argumentation (Diog. Laert. 2.102). If Theodorus could become a god through an act of linguistic designation, why not suppose that the entire pantheon came into being thus?28
THEOLOGICAL FICTIONS
I have argued that the Inscription is likely to have arisen from a particular commingling of cultural streams, the Athenian tradition of Sophistic/philosophical critique of divinity and the emergent literary self-consciousness of Ptolemaic Alexandria. This cultural hybridization, I suggest, lent itself to the development of modes of writing that were simultaneously highly allusive to earlier texts and radically innovative. I turn now to consider how the Inscription may have fused two particular kinds of writing while also rerouting them in new directions.
The first point to make is that the Inscription draws on the genre of the traveler’s tale, and more specifically the sailor’s tale.29 Strabo (1.3.1 = T4 Winiarczyk), picking up the phrasing of Eratosthenes (T5 Winiarczyk), may have called Euhemerus “Bergaean,” an allusion to the notoriously inventive traveloguer Antiphanes of Berge.30 Together with Pytheas of Massilia, Antiphanes and Euhemerus made—in the eyes of some ancient commentators—an unholy trinity of lying sea travelers.31 It is in general impossible to judge just how deliberately and knowingly these other lost writers played with categories of truth and falsehood, but there is surely a strong case to be made that unverified accounts of sea journeys carried a presumption of fiction.32
Indeed, the ultimate paradigm for the fictional sea voyage will have been the Odyssey, a resonant hypotext for the readers of the Inscription. Parallels can be detected between Diodorus’s account of the temple of Zeus Triphylios and Homer’s description of Alcinous’s palace in book 7 of the Odyssey. Diodorus’s insistent emphasis on magnificent architecture and fittings of gold, silver, and bronze looks to Alcinous’s palace.33 Closer still are the links between the trees surrounding the precinct in Diodorus, and Alcinous’s magic garden. Both are egregiously lush and fertile.34 In each description there is a list of trees and plants, with the emphasis on their size and variety (and with several linguistic correspondences): in Diodorus, cypresses, the inevitable plane trees, laurel, and myrtle—and then, in a second list, date palms, nut trees, and vines; in Homer, pears, pomegranates, apples, figs, and olives, followed by vines and a kitchen garden.35 In both cases there is a spring channeled so as to water the garden throughout; water also has a secondary purpose, for human use.36
There are of course other models woven into the Inscription’s locus amoenus, most notably the celebrated topography of Plato’s Phaedrus, yet the underappreciated allusions to Homer’s Scheria are crucially significant in thematic terms.37 The Phaeacians are, after all, “near to the gods [agkhitheoi]” (Od. 5.35) and indeed used to have the gods dining among them (7.201–3).38 They
