authority also had implications for the writing of history. Prose records emerged in the fifth century out of the same adversarial climate that produced cosmologists, scientists, and philosophers: a claim to speak the truth was at the same time a rejection of the falsehoods spoken by predecessors.36 As early as Hecataeus of Miletus (early fifth century) we find an author’s programmatic assertion that he will deliver “the truth,” in explicit contrast to the “many ridiculous [geloia] stories” told by the Greeks (FGrH 1 F 1a). Herodotus (1.1–5) and particularly Thucydides (1.1–22) begin with rationalized, scaled-down accounts of the Trojan War that programmatically announce each author’s factual reliability. Thucydides’s austere rejection of “the mythical element [to muthōdes]” (1.22.4) in favor of “accuracy [akribeia]” (1.22.2, 5.20.2, 5.26.5, 5.68.2, 6.54–55) marks his predecessors as inherently untrustworthy. Indeed, extant authors of Greek history (Xenophon, the Oxyrhynchus Historian, Polybius, Dionysius, Arrian, Appian, and so forth) do seem generally to replicate his fondness for relatively unadorned, linear narration.
Yet there was also a different tradition, stemming from Herodotus, which privileged storytelling, exoticism, and wonder (thauma). Thauma is, indeed, a key term in the history of fictional thought. Wonders occupy a peculiarly indeterminate epistemological position, between the plausible and the impossible.37 Moreover, wonders standardly form part of a discourse of geographical otherness, located at the margins of Greek ken.38 Thaumata within a narrative are culturally or physiologically exotic, or both: they thus serve as a challenge to “our” received ideas as to what is plausible and what not.
Collections of thaumata and paradoxes become a genre in their own right in the Hellenistic period (thanks, apparently, to Callimachus’s lead): such authors as Palaephatus, Antigonus of Carystus, Archelaus (SH 125–29), Aristocles, Isigonus of Nicaea, and Apollonius compiled catalogues of wonderous plants, animals, and events. Wonders also played an important role in the narrative texture of the now-fragmentary fourth-century historians Theopompus, Ephorus, and Timaeus. Dionysius of Halicarnassus remarks of Theopompus that “he tells of the inaugurations of dynasties and goes through the foundations of cities, he reveals the life-styles of kings and the peculiarities of their habits and includes in his work any wondrous paradox produced by land or sea” (Pomp. 6 = FGrH 115 T20a [4]). These writers—famously excoriated by the austere Polybius (12.4a)—seem to have raised Herodotus’s digressiveness (FGrH 115 T29–31 [Theopompus], 70 T23 [Ephorus], 848 T19 [Timaeus]) and prurience (FGrH 115 T2 [Theopompus], 79 T18b [Ephorus]) to new heights. Rather than seeing this habit of collecting wonders in Polybian terms, as a deficiency of seriousness, it is preferable to see it as the sign of a distinctive literary aesthetic celebrating narrative polymorphousness—an aesthetic that seems to have exerted continued influence in swaths of Hellenistic history now largely lost (composed by figures such as Eudoxus of Rhodes, Myrsilus of Lesbos, and Zeno of Rhodes) and whose influence can be seen everywhere in the imperial romance (particularly in Antonius Diogenes’s Implausible Things beyond Thule), as well as in the Alexander Romance (discussed below, in “Greece and Egypt”).
Allied to this textural experimentation was a willingness to embrace diverse content, including erotic narrative. Polybius’s disapproving gaze also falls on a more centrally Hellenistic historian, Phylarchus (third century), whom he famously accuses of untruth and of presenting his narrative more like a tragedy than a history (2.34 = FGrH 81 T3). What Polybius actually means here has been vigorously debated,39 but other sources indicate that the reference might well be to content as well as form. Phylarchus’s histories certainly included erotic, and indeed mythological, narrative. The manchette of one of Parthenius’s Love Stories (see next section), a distinctive version of the attempted rape of Daphne by Apollo, claims it derives from “Diodorus of Elaea and the fifteenth book of Phylarchus” (Parth. XV = FGrH 81 F 32). Plutarch attributes another of these stories (XXIII), detailing the love of Cleonymus of Sparta (third century) for his unfaithful wife Chilonis, to “Phylarchus and Hieronymus” (Pyrrh. 27.8 = FGrH 81 F 48, 154 27.9 F 14).
Undoubtedly the most “romantic” of historians, however, was Ctesias of Cnidos, who served as the doctor to the Persian king Artaxerxes II (ca. 436–358 B.C.E.). Ctesias’s principal compositions were the Persian Affairs and the Indian History, the former of which survives in summaries by Diodorus and Photius, as well as numerous fragments.40 These works were known in antiquity for their scurrility and exaggeration. Plutarch in his Artaxerxes, while using the Persian Affairs as a source for his narrative, refers to the “all sorts of nonsense with which Ctesias filled his book” (1.4 = Ctesias T 11d FGrH), which “turns away from the truth toward the dramatic and mythical [to muthōdes]” (6.9 = Ctesias T 11e FGrH). Lucian, in the prologue to his fantastical True Stories, cites Ctesias as one of his literary precursors: “He wrote things about India and its customs that he had neither seen nor heard from anyone truthful” (1.3 = Ctesias T 11h FGrH).
The surviving testimonia on Ctesias are uniformly critical of his mendacity, but he was clearly widely read in antiquity, particularly for his orientalizing perspective on Persia and the Middle East. (If more of Ctesias survived, then our understanding of the Persian scenes in Chariton and Heliodorus would no doubt be richer.) Nor is his significance confined to this. He is our earliest known source for the story of the union between the (historical) Syrian Semiramis and the (mythical) Assyrian king Ninus (FGrH 688 F 1), which captivated later writers including Cornelius Alexander “Polyhistor” (FGrH 273 F 81) and the author of the fragmentary proto-novelistic work that modern scholars call Ninus, probably of the first century C.E.41 This story clearly took on a narrative life of its own: Semiramis could be a hyperpowerful queen with divine elements, as in Ctesias, who makes her the daughter of the Syrian goddess Derceto (≈ Atargatis) and implicitly associates her with Astarte/Ištar; in the novel, she is transformed into a blushing maiden;42 elsewhere we read that she was a prostitute who tricked Ninus out of his kingdom (FGrH 690 F 7, 681 F 1; Plut., Mor. 753d–e).43
Ctesias is also the source of an erotic intrigue between the Mede Stryangaeus and the Sacian Zarinaea, alluded to in a later source (ps.-Demetr., De eloc. 213; see also P.Oxy. 2230 [= FGrH 688 F 8b]). This story has a range of motifs that will reappear in the imperial romance: threatened suicide, a love letter, the bewailing of fortune.44 Again, the influence on the later novels is arguably direct. Stryangaeus’s letter to Zarinaea contains the phrase “I saved you—and although you were saved by me, I have been destroyed by you” (ps.-Demetr., De eloc. 213). Chariton and Achilles Tatius (perhaps via Chariton) seem to have picked up the phrasing in their letters of aggrieved lovers (Char. 4.3.10; Ach. Tat. 5.18.3–4).
Works like these raise difficult questions. They are not plasmatic: they deal with figures and events that already existed within the broad span of traditional records of the past. Moreover, while Lucian may cite Ctesias as a liar, and Polybius may reprove Phylarchus for mixing lies and truth, there is nothing to suggest that such texts were “fictional” at the level of contract between reader and narrator. Ancient readers presumably turned to historians for truths, even if there were discrepancies between different kinds of truth and the different narrative registers through which they were communicated. Even so, neither is this history in the Thucydidean sense, of “realist” chronological sequence and meticulous accuracy. Ctesias, Theopompus, Ephorus, and Phylarchus, in their different ways, seem rather to have privileged (what they understood as) the Herodotean tradition of thrilling, episodic narrative; they reinstated “the mythical element [to muthōdes]” so famously excoriated by Thucydides (1.22.4; see also 1.21.1). It is in the margins of historiography that Hellenistic prose culture developed its most vigorous storytelling.
LOCAL HISTORIES
In order to approach Hellenistic fiction, then, we need—paradoxically—to set aside the concept of fiction and turn instead to the gray areas between history, mythology, and creative storytelling, for it is here that Hellenistic culture typically locates its most exuberant narratives. I want to examine first of all the local history of cities. (“Local history” is, of course, not a coherent genre but a modern label covering everything from verifiable recent history to the fantastic mythography
