it does in the periphery of the epic tradition. The Sacred Inscription is in one sense the least “Euhemeristic” of such mythological rationalizations, if we take that label to point to the careful sanitization of traditional myth so as to exclude implausible elements.29 It does not deal at all, so far as we can tell, with the explication of Homeric and Hesiodic narrative; the travels of Zeus related on the inscription proper are not presented as the kernel of truth underlying traditional mythology. But there were plenty of other writers engaged in the project of stripping away poetic embellishment. Already in the celebrated opening of Herodotus we find the stories of the thefts of Europa, Helen, Medea, and Io presented in a pared-down, “realistic” mode (1.2.1–1.5.2). In an equally famous passage, Thucydides scales back the Greek expedition to Troy, arguing that while it may have been the largest up to that point, it was considerably smaller than anything in his own time (1.10). Significantly, Thucydides here makes mention of the principle of poetic exaggeration: “It is likely that, being a poet, he [Homer] adorned [kosmēsai] his poetry with a view to magnification [epi to meizon]” (1.10.3; see too the following section). This is an early example of the prose “position statement,” marking the rivalry between prose and verse as veridical genres.30
Herodotus and Thucydides were aiming at communicating a type of truth—even if, in Herodotus’s case at least (see the following section), in a strikingly polyphonic medium. We cannot, however, assume this of all such “rationalists.” It is extremely difficult to assess the tone of, for example, Palaephatus (possibly fourth century B.C.E.), whose jejune narrative style and simplistic procedure can, depending on one’s vantage, seem either naïve or ludic:
They say that Diomedes’s mares were man-eating. How laughable! Horses eat hay and barley, not human flesh. The truth is as follows. In ancient times, people labored for themselves and got food and wealth by working the land themselves. But one man started to rear horses. He took pleasure in these horses up until the point when he lost his possessions. He sold them all and used the money to feed his horses, so his friends started to call these horses “man-eating.” That is was happened, and the myth was generated thereby. (7)
The word laughable discloses the stakes: what version of the story we choose to believe will determine whether we laugh with or are laughed at. But is this radical banalization of the Diomedes legend not in itself ludicrous? Certainly the pretext has something of an Old Comedy plot about it: Aristophanes’s Clouds, notably, centers on the ruinous state of the household thanks to Pheidippides’s obsession with horses. But while it is always attractive to posit a hypersophisticated, self-deconstructive motive that will rescue a text like this from its own apparent inconsequentiality, there are no explicit triggers: it is invariably possible to read Palaephatus, as indeed most people have, as a simple monomaniac. Yet as I have hinted above and argue at greater length in chapter 3, the Sacred Inscription seems different: there is every reason to believe that the original text was avowedly and playfully fictional. This seems to go too for the work of Euhemerus’s successor Dionysius “Scytobrachion” (The leather arm), who in the second century B.C.E. composed prose versions of the Argonautic and Trojan events shorn of mythological apparatus.31 In both cases, as far as one can tell from the fragments and summaries that survive, there is a playful tension between claims to narrative realism and the outrageously bathetic treatment of canonical myth.32
Further challenge to the veridical authority of epic came from the development of forensic oratory, beginning in fifth-century Athens. Particularly critical was the role of “plausibility [to eikos]”: invoking or impugning the credibility of a particular account was a way of buttressing or assailing a speaker’s trustworthiness.33 Rhetoric opened up a new language for assessing narrative: Do we believe Homer’s version of affairs? Is he a credible witness? Questions of narrative plausibility thus become central to literary criticism (they are famously prominent in Aristotle’s discussion of tragic plotting in the Poetics). These debates persisted into the Hellenistic period. In the early third century, the scholar-poet Callimachus protests that “the ancient poets were not entirely truthful” (Hymn to Zeus 60) in their account of the gods’ drawing of lots for Heaven, Earth, and Hades: “It is plausible [eoike] that one should draw lots for equal things,” not on such asymmetrical terms (ibid., 63–64).34 Later, in the first century C.E., Dio Chrysostom would argue that Troy was not captured, making heavy use of the criterion of to eikos in his argument (11.16, 20, 55, 59, 67, 69, 70, 92, 130, 137, 139). Were such rhetorical confabulations promoted in the intervening Hellenistic period? We can, appropriately enough, appeal only to plausibility.
Let us return to late-fifth-century Athens. The decentering of Homeric authority also allowed Sophists to begin experimenting with alternative Homeric “realities.” Hippias claimed to have an authoritative version of Trojan events, based not on Homer alone but on a synthesis of multiple sources (fr. 6 DK). Gorgias, followed in the mid-fourth century by Isocrates, defended Helen on the count of willing elopement and composed a defense speech for Palamedes. Homer’s most notorious woman could thus be reappraised, and a figure who does not appear in the Iliad could be wedged into the narrative. Sophistry also fostered a relativistic approach to storytelling. Around the turn of the fourth century, Antisthenes composed versions of Ajax’s and Odysseus’s speeches for the arms of Achilles. Once forensic rhetoric had permitted the idea that a single event could be narrated from multiple perspectives, then the Muse-given authority of the epic narrator ceased to be wholly authoritative.
This development allowed for the possibility of versions of the Trojan narrative told from alternative angles. The best-known examples are imperial in date: in addition to Dio’s Trojan Oration, noted above, we also have Philostratus’s Heroicus (see chapter 7), which impugns Homer’s version of events for its pro-Odyssean bias, and the diaries of Dares and Dictys, which purport to offer eyewitness accounts of the Trojan War.35 This phenomenon has its roots in the numerous Hellenistic prose texts attempting to establish the truth of the Trojan War, now largely lost to us: philological works such as those of Apollodorus and Demetrius of Scepsis and synthetic accounts such as those of Idomeneus of Lampsacus and Metrodorus of Chios. Other versions seem to have come closer to the fictionalizing accounts of the imperial period. Palaephatus, whom we met above, composed a Trōika that seems to have been full of the wonders better known from his extant On Incredible Things. A particularly alluring figure is Hegesianax of Alexandria Troas, a polymath of the third to second centuries B.C.E. who composed a prose Trōika pseudonymously ascribed to one Cephalon (sometimes called Cephalion) of Gergitha. “Cephalon” was probably not presented as a contemporary of the Trojan action, as is sometimes claimed: his account of the foundation of Rome by Aeneas’s son Romus (sic), two generations after the war, seems to rule that out (FGrH 45 F 9). Nevertheless, the narrator certainly did pose as a voice from the distant past, and convincingly enough to persuade Dionysius of Halicarnassus, writing not much more than a century later, that he was an “extremely ancient” authority (AR 1.72 = FGrH 45 F 9; see also AR 1.49 = FGrH 45 F 7).
Hellenistic texts also demonstrate a different kind of relativization of narrative authority, based on the conflict between local traditions. Callimachus’s Hymn to Zeus begins by noting the clash over Zeus’s birthplace between two versions, the Cretan and the Arcadian. The poet professes himself “in two minds” before deciding on the Arcadian version on the grounds that “Cretans are always liars” (4–9). The rejection of the “lying” tradition does not by itself guarantee that the other is true; in fact, the more emphasis one places on partiality in traditional narrative, the less likely it becomes that any of it is true. “May my own lies be such as to persuade my listener!” (65), the Callimachean narrator expostulates when contesting the story of the divine drawing of lots, discussed above. A dense and cryptic wish, to be sure, but hardly one that strives to conceal the fictiveness of mythological narrative.
Let us note finally in this section that the poet Callimachus represents a rare intrusion into this predominantly prose landscape, and even he is adopting a prosaic voice at this juncture. This kind of fiction is intimately bound up with the questioning of verse and, in particular, epic’s claims to divinely inspired authority.
History
