not my aim here.16 That being said, there is certainly a primary intention to expand the range of material that scholars of the Hellenistic and early imperial periods have traditionally covered. Part 1 treats Greek fiction proposing that the span extends well beyond the “Greek novel” (or “romance”) as conventionally understood—that is, the works of Chariton, Achilles Tatius, and so forth. These, I argue in chapter 2, represent a very limited window onto the world of ancient fictional production, and indeed they play by very different rules than those of the generality of “novelistic” literature. My wider narrative of prose fiction begins early in the Hellenistic era, with Euhemerus (sometime after 300 B.C.E.), and gives a central berth to a series of texts too often relegated to “the fringe”:17 the Alexander Romance, the pseudo-Lucianic Ass, Philostratus’s Heroicus, and even the literary-critical writings of Dionysius of Halicarnassus. Part 2 attempts to remedy the general neglect of poetics in the scholarship of the early imperial period (a neglect that is certainly prompted by certain ancient sources themselves, which diagnose the imperial era as a prosaic one: see chapter 12). There are signs here and there that the corner is being turned,18 albeit slowly, but even so the emphasis is too often placed on subordinating poetics to a supposed context where rhetorical prose dominates, rather than reading the material on its own terms, as poetry. My chapters on the early imperial epigrammatists (chapter 9), Mesomedes (chapter 10), and Lucian’s paratragedies (chapter 11) seek to show how these cunning poems resonate against both the rich tradition of classical poetics and contemporary culture. Part 3 marks the end of the book’s adventures, in Hellenistic Judaism: Ezekiel’s tragic retelling of the Exodus story (chapter 13) and the various attempts to integrate the biblical and the Homeric traditions (chapter 14). This material is unusually rich and sophisticated, and with its concern to root a distinct identity politics in the revivifying and transforming of an ancient literary culture it can be said to preempt many of the concerns of the Greek Sophists of the early Roman Empire.
As will be clear, this book does more than simply expand the canon. My aim is to do away entirely with the idea of the culturally central, the paradigmatic, to dispense with hierarchies of cultural value. The Jewish epic poets Theodotus and Philo may be fragmentary, for example, and may not have spawned an entire tradition of Jewish epic poetics (although perhaps they did? We have lost so much Jewish literature of the era), but to me they are potentially as significant in cultural terms as Vergil. I say potentially because thinking more pluralistically involves a hypothetical rewiring of literary history: let us bracket the subsequent reception that made Vergil (in T.S. Eliot’s famous phrase) “the classic of all Europe” and Philo and Theodotus footnotes in literary history; let us recall instead that when each of these poets wrote, the future was entirely up for grabs. Philo and Theodotus did not know that Jerusalem would be sacked in 70 C.E. and that Judaism would as a result turn its back on the Greco-Roman tradition: for all they knew, they were composing poems that might change the world. This kind of utopian (or, better, uchronic) intellectual experiment with literary history seeks not only to unsettle our deeply embedded metanarratives of classical “value” but also to restore some of the local vitality, urgency, and conflict that is endemic to all literary production.
Issues of centrality and marginality cluster particularly around fiction and the novel, which is why part 1 focuses on this area. The issue here is not just the familiar one that the Greeks themselves apparently set little store by fictional production; it is, more pertinently, that there is a hierarchy of sorts among the novels themselves. The five “romances” of Chariton, Xenophon, Achilles, Longus, and Heliodorus seem to work together as a unit and hence as a bullyboy gang excluding all those that do not fit. Scholars, however, have been too easily magnetized by the imperial romances’ apparent generic coherence, so that we tend to read other prose fictions in terms primarily of their deviation from the romance paradigm (see chapters 1–2). The imperial romances do indeed work as a genre, but I propose that this sense of shared form coalesced only partially, gradually, and in a sense retrospectively: thus the first-century Callirhoe became a “romance” as we understand the term (that is, a participant in the genre) only as a result of the later formation of a tradition. We need a much more plural model of what Greek fiction is and was, a model that includes works such as the pseudo-Lucianic Ass, the Alexander Romance, and Philostratus’s Heroicus.
The book’s second major theme, already adverted to above, is that poetry gives us a very different point of entry into the world of the Greeks under the Roman Empire. Perhaps surprisingly, much of the poetry is written “from below”: whereas prose authors tend to project their relationship with empire in terms of parity—a projection that feeds the nineteenth-century preoccupation with noble Greeks preserving their cultural traditions—poets mobilize a stock of topoi, drawn from patronal poets such as Pindar, Bacchylides, and Theocritus, that emphasize a difference of status. Poets do not necessarily give us a truer picture of Greeks’ feelings about Rome: these we will never know. But they do capture a different facet of that relationship, where the hierarchy and exploitation are much more visible.
The third thematic locus is Hellenistic Judaism. Literary classicists have in general neglected material that is not perceived to be echt Greek; the lionization of Lucian, the Hellenized Syrian of the second century C.E., is the exception (but Lucian plays almost entirely by “classical” rules, apart, perhaps, for in On the Syrian Goddess). The reasons for this are in many ways understandable. We have lost entire cultural traditions: Greco-Phoenician culture is in effect represented only by Philo of Byblos, who is himself excerpted in Eusebius; likewise Greco-Mesopotamian literature, where Berossus survives (again) primarily in Eusebius’s paraphrase. Demotic Egyptian texts do survive (usually in fragments), and there were clearly numerous points of cultural contact between Egyptian and Hellenistic Greek culture, but the material is difficult to work with, given how much primary editorial work remains to be done.19 With Second Temple Jewish literature, however, we have (thanks to late-antique Christians, who treated biblical matter with predictable reverence) a rich, albeit incomplete, body of literature: it presents classicists with a wonderful opportunity to test the ways in which sophisticated Greek speakers deployed the traditional Greek forms of tragedy and epic as vehicles for non-Greek narrative traditions. These texts, indeed, seem to preempt much of the ingenious play with issues of identity, self-fashioning, and cultural bivalence that scholars have detected in the Second Sophistic. It may be a provocation, but it is no exaggeration to speak of a “Jewish Sophistic” already in the second and first centuries B.C.E.
There are other threads running through this book: the figure of metalepsis, the (dis)appearances of authors, the intersection between literary production and literary criticism, and my unflagging preoccupation with the power of the human imagination to transform. These are best left to emerge organically, in the reading. This book was, as I have said, conceived in an adventurous spirit; there are many alternative tracks and trails for “off-roaders.” With that same desire for openness and accessibility, I have kept the endnoting relatively light and used Greek letters only where they have seemed impossible to avoid (and only in endnotes). I hope the writing is accessible to nonspecialists.
1. I have benefited from rich and ongoing discussions with Brooke Holmes and Constanze Güthenke of Princeton University, and from contributors to the “Postclassicisms” seminar at Oxford in the autumn of 2012.
2. See especially Whitmarsh 2001, 42–45; 2005a, 4–10.
3. Philostr., VS 481, 507; see, e.g., Rohde 1876, which is in part a polemic against the hypothesis of Eastern influence on the development of the Greek novel. On the nationalist, and arguably anti-Semitic, context of Rohde’s work, see Whitmarsh 2011b.
4. Rohde 1914, 310–23, at 319.
5. So Swain 1996, Whitmarsh 2001, and Goldhill 2001b.
6. See the pertinent critique of McCoskey 2012, 93.
7. Witness the success of the International Plutarch Society, its multiple publications, and its journal, Ploutarchos. Let me stress that reflection on the phenomenon does not imply any criticism of this fine institution or its wonderful
