There is much more that could be said about Plutarch’s multifaceted relationship with non-Greek cultures, particularly Roman. His (surely ironic) claim to know minimal Latin (Demosthenes 2, carefully unpacked by Zadorojnyi 2006) has been given far too much prominence, at the expense of such extraordinarily hybridized texts as On the Fortune of the Romans and the Roman Questions. Strobach 1997 opens up these questions interestingly.
9. A case in point is Veyne 2005, 195–310, magisterial but largely unencumbered by awareness of the voluminous scholarship on the complexity of Greek identity, and hence prone to unsustainable generalization (e.g., p. 238: “The Greeks are tacitly considered, in the Roman Empire, as foreigners. The Greeks equally considered themselves superior, which is why their identity remained irreducible”).
10. Goldhill 2001b is an exception, containing an excellent essay by Maud Gleason on Josephus.
11. König 2009 is exemplary in this regard; see also, from the side of Christian studies, especially Lieu 2004, Nasrallah 2010 (with 28–30 specifically on this issue), and now Perkins 2010 and Eshleman 2012.
12. Linked to the Second Sophistic by, e.g., Jaffee 2001, 128–40, with further bibliography at 202 n. 9, 203 nn. 24–25.
13. König and Whitmarsh 2007 represents an attempt to bridge this particular gap.
14. Galen receives a chapter in Bowersock 1969; see further Gill, Whitmarsh, and Wilkins 2009. Gleason 1995, 55–81, situates Polemo’s Physiognomics within rhetorical agonistics; for a fuller discussion of this question see Swain 2007.
15. A deficit that Steven Smith will correct in an eagerly anticipated study.
16. For an excellent survey of Hellenistic literature that adopts a more pluralistic perspective see Cuypers and Clauss 2010; the forthcoming Cambridge History of Later Greek Literature, edited by Robert Shorrock, promises to be a milestone.
17. The phrase used and explored in Karla 2009.
18. See especially Baumbach and Bär 2007, on Quintus of Smyrna and the Second Sophistic.
19. Whitmarsh and Thomson, forthcoming, covers much of this Hellenistic intercultural material.
PART ONE
Fiction beyond the Canon
1
The “Invention of Fiction”
“Invention” is one of the central tropes of classical, particularly Greek, scholarship: it seems that even in this methodologically hyperaware, post-postmodern age, we are still addicted to romanticizing narratives of origination (however contested). When it comes to the (discrete but interlocking) categories of fiction, prose literature, and the novel, recent years have seen originomania in overdrive. Can we attribute to Chariton, in the first century C.E., “the invention of the Greek love novel”?1 Or was Theocritus responsible for “the invention of fiction”?2 Or was it rather a question of “the birth of literary fiction,” thanks to philosophical innovations culminating in Plato and Aristotle?3 Or is “die Entdeckung der Fiktionalität”4 perhaps to be attributed to the development of relatively widespread literacy, in the fifth century B.C.E.? Yet a sense of fictionality has already been credited, by different scholars, to the poetry of Homer and Hesiod.5 “The invention of Greek prose,” meanwhile, might be sought in stories around and reflections on the figure of Aesop, which for us surface to visibility in the fifth century B.C.E.6 Clearly at one level these are merely rhetorical claims, façons de parler: few scholars, I imagine, would if pressed argue that fiction, the novel, or literary prose was actually “invented,” definitively, at a specific historical juncture. Partly because these are our categories, not those of the Greeks or the Romans, ancient ones map only inexactly onto them. It makes no more sense to ask when in antiquity “fiction” was invented than “economics,” “stress management,” or “technology.” More than this, however, fiction is a cultural universal, and storytelling is an intuitive human activity; all cultures have, and always have had, a developed sense of the power of fictive creativity. All literature is to an extent fictional. Its social and aesthetic role may shift at different times, as may the manner of its presentation, but there is—I suggest—never a point in any culture’s history when fiction is “yet to be invented.”
At the same time, however, literature does have its own history, and certain practices and constructions come into (and indeed out of) focus at certain times. Literary history, moreover, is not simply about the discovery of new techniques, genres, or conceptual apparatuses; it also has an embodied, physical, institutional history. For example, in the Greek world, shifting conceptions of literature are bound up with the changing relationship between orality and the book,7 with the emergence of an archival culture in Hellenistic Alexandria (building on foundations laid in Athens), and with wider shifts in the political culture of the Greek world.8 So while, as we have said, fiction is not “invented” like the process of uranium enrichment or “discovered” like the moons of Jupiter, it should be possible to track its changing inflection throughout Greek literary history.
In this chapter, I aim to describe how prose fiction emerged as a marked category through the classical and Hellenistic periods. In so doing, I am deliberately avoiding the familiar questing after the “precursors” of the Greek novel. The novel as conventionally understood—that is to say, the romance form as practiced by Chariton, Xenophon of Ephesus, Achilles Tatius, Longus, Heliodorus, and various fragmentary writers—is almost certainly a product entirely of Roman times.9 The formative work of modern scholarship on Greek prose fiction—still subtly influential—was Erwin Rohde’s Der griechische Roman und seine Vorläufer (The Greek novel and its forerunners), first published in 1876.10 Rohde’s interest lay primarily in the imperial romance, a phenomenon he sought to explain by revealing its “forerunners” in the Hellenistic period: principally erotic poetry and prose travel narrative. The novel, in his view, was the hybrid offspring of these two Hellenistic forms. Rohde’s work inspired a number of other attempts to locate the origins of the imperial romance,11 but in general this kind of evolutionary narrative has fallen out of favor.12 There are, however, two consequences of his argument that are still with us. The first is a general reluctance to consider Hellenistic prose narrative on its own terms. Despite a number of studies of individual works,13 scholars of ancient fiction have generally been too fixated on the paradigm of the imperial romance to acknowledge the existence of any culture of Hellenistic fiction. If, however, we cease to view Hellenistic prose culture teleologically—that is to say, simply as a stepping stone en route to the novel—then we can begin to appreciate a much more vibrant, dynamic story world, which we can understand on its own terms. As we shall see below, there are indeed elements of continuity between Hellenistic prose and the imperial romance, but the novel also marks a real break from its Hellenistic predecessors (see particularly chapter 2).14
The second fallacy I wish to identify is the belief that Greek culture was insulated from non-Greek influence. A veiled racism drives Rohde’s project, which seeks to defend the novel against the charge (as he saw it) of Eastern influence; like his friend Friedrich Nietzsche, he was keen to distinguish the idealized Greek Geist from the corrupting effects of the East, which culminated in the success of Christianity. “What hidden sources,” he asks programmatically (but, it turns out, ironically), “produced in Greece this most un-Greek of forms?”15 The identification of echt Hellenistic precursors allows him to preserve the Greekness of this superficially “un-Greek” form. Of course, few nowadays would formulate their views like this. Nevertheless, scholars of Greek tend (understandably) to emphasize Greek sources and hence tacitly to exclude the possibility of cultural fusion.
This chapter is principally designed to contest both these assumptions. The first half argues
