periods when regional identity was under pressure from larger, “globalizing” (i.e., usually imperial) forces:45 I count in Jacoby’s Fragmente der griechischen Historiker (FGrH) more than eighty-five titles from the Hellenistic period alone that allude to specific locales. Here more than anywhere, however, we are hampered by the fragmentary nature of sources. In the overwhelming majority of cases we have only brief snippets preserved in later sources, and reflecting the interests (often narrowly lexicographical) of the transmitting author.
Nevertheless, there are good reasons to focus on local history as a locus for fictional thinking. Greek accounts of the past that survive intact from antiquity are as a rule the synthesizing overviews that were too culturally authoritative for Christian late antiquity and Byzantium to ignore. Below this visible tip, however, lies a huge iceberg of diversity. Many of these stories may have circulated orally, whether jealously preserved as part of local culture or intermingled with more exotic stories thanks to cross-cultural traffic among travelers, traders, prostitutes, and soldiers. Oral culture is of course lost to us now, but some of its vibrancy can be detected in written texts that survive.
The political organization of Greek society was highly conducive to generating stories. Each community advanced its claims to prominence through local myths, often in the form of ktistic (dealing with foundation) or colonial narratives. For the classical period, the works of Pindar and Bacchylides testify to this phenomenon in abundance. Epigraphy in particular exemplifies the genuine, ongoing importance to individual cities of ktistic myth in the Hellenistic period. Far from being simply a parlor game for intellectuals, as was once thought, local myth-history was a politically important medium, through which a city might advance its particular claim to preeminence. Poets might be commissioned to add the luster of verse: Apollonius of Rhodes and Rhianus were active in this field.46 Narratives might be inscribed on stone: an excellent example is the inscription recently discovered in the harbor wall of Halicarnassus, which connects the city’s foundation with the nymph Salmacis and Hermaphroditus, “the inventor of marriage.”47 Another medium for preserving and disseminating local history was religious cult. The guides (exegetes) whose role was to explain the sacred history of epichoric cult sites are more familiar from imperial texts such as Plutarch’s On Why the Pythia No Longer Prophesies in Verse, Pausanias, and Longus,48 but the practice is already attested in Strabo (17.1.29) and would almost certainly have existed in the Hellenistic period.
What do these stories have to do with fiction? The first point to make is that local myths are both endowed with an intrinsic cultural authority and conceded (at least by the elite sophisticates who tend to record them) a licence to confabulate, free from the rationalist strictures of more urbane narrative. Local history is expected to be bizarre, exotic: it tolerates stories of immortal intervention, of metamorphosis, of improper passion. It is no doubt for this reason, in part, that Longus’s faux-naïf Daphnis and Chloe (second–third century C.E.) is dressed in the garb of a local myth, as told to the narrator by the exegete of a Lesbian cult of the Nymphs.
There is also a recurrent linkage between erotic narrative and local history: sexual union seems often to betoken some kind of foundational event.49 Consequently, a number of texts emerged that used this form as a cover for scurrillity and titillation. The most notorious example is the Milesian Events (Milēsiaka) of Aristides: “lascivious books,” according to Plutarch (Crass. 32.3).50 Ovid refers to Aristides in the same breath as one Eubius, “the author of an impure history” “who recently wrote a Sybaritic Events” (Tristia 2.413–16). The Suda also attests to such works. Philip of Amphipolis (of unknown date) composed Coan Events, Thasian Events, and Rhodian Events, the last of which is styled “totally disgraceful” (Suda, s.v. “Philip of Amphipolis”; see also Theodorus Priscianus, Eupor. 133.5–12).
Late-Hellenistic prose collections of local narratives (by Nicander, Parthenius, Conon, and others)51 point to the fact that they were increasingly perceived to have intrinsic narrative interest, independent of their original (or supposedly original) function in local ideology. Such collections are often united by narrative theme: Parthenius gathers love stories (like the pseudo-Plutarchan assemblage, which is probably later in date), and other later examples include the collection of metamorphosis stories of Antoninus Liberalis. What this suggests is that local histories came to be viewed as repositories for arresting and alluring narrative, independent of their political, cultural, or religious value to their communities. Parthenius, indeed, dedicates his collection to his patron Cornelius Gallus for use in his (Latin) hexameters and elegiacs.
Local history is not “fictional” in the same way as the imperial romance.52 Its subject matter veers from obscure mythology to central mythology to recent history, with plenty of indeterminate areas between. It is not, however, plasmatic, like the novel or New Comedy: the stories are never presented as wholly invented. Indeed, the function of the manchettes that accompany many of Parthenius’s narratives is precisely to identify the sources of the stories. For these reasons, it is misleading to present local history as a genetic predecessor of the imperial romance.53 To grasp the fictionality of local history, we need to resist, once again, conceptions of fiction that are shaped by the imperial period.
Greek and Near Eastern Narratives
The forms of local history and mythology emerging into view during this period were not just Greek.54 We have already discussed the multiple versions of the story of the Syrian Semiramis and the Assyrian Ninus, which (for Greeks at least) stemmed ultimately from Ctesias. As the doctor of Artaxerxes II, Ctesias is likely to have had access to Persian narratives, perhaps even the “royal parchments” of which he makes mention,55 and he may well have spoken the language. Similarly culturally bifocal was Xenophon, whose experiences with the mercenary army of ten thousand who fought to support Cyrus—in his rebellion against Ctesias’s patron Artaxerxes—will have brought him into contact with different traditions. Xenophon’s most “novelistic” work was the Cyropaedia, an idealized biography of the king who united the Persians and Medes. Interwoven with the central section is a subnarrative dealing with the constant, enduring love between Panthea and Abradatas, before the latter is tragically killed in battle (4.6.11–12, 5.1.2–18, 6.1.31–51, 6.3.35–6.4.11, 7.1.15, 7.1.24–32, 7.1.46–49, 7.3.2–16). Critics have rightly emphasized the influence of this episode on the imperial romance, particularly on the Persian episodes of Chariton’s Callirhoe.56 We also have a report in Philostratus (third century C.E.) of a work called Araspes in Love with Panthea (Araspes being a suitor of the Xenophontic Panthea), which (so says Philostratus) some attribute to Dionysius of Miletus but is in fact the work of a certain Celer (Lives of the Sophists 524). Whether this was a “novel” (as modern critics mostly assume) or (more likely, in my view) a rhetorical declamation, it shows the iconic significance of the Panthea sequence in amatory literary history. We also read of a now-lost Pantheia the Babylonian by Soterichus of Oasis (writing under Diocletian), which was quite probably a romance (FGrH 641).
Indeed, erotic prose seems to have been associated with Eastern storytelling from the very beginning. Herodotus’s Histories begins with the intriguing assertion that Persian logioi—the term seems to mean something like “prose chroniclers” (see Nagy 1987)—tell the story of the Trojan War as an escalation in tit-for-tat woman stealing after the Phoenician abduction of Io (1.1–4). The Phoenicians’ version, Herodotus proceeds to tell us, is different: Io left willingly, having fallen pregnant by the captain of a Phoenician ship (1.5). Whether Herodotus is accurately reporting Persian and Phoenician traditions is simply unknowable: it is possible, but it is equally possible that this represents an Orientalist mirage. The central point for our purposes, however, is that he is presenting himself as someone with access to Persian and north-Semitic cultural traditions—and also, crucially, that these traditions are preserved in a form alien to the Greek generic taxonomy, as “realist” (i.e., nonmythological) erotic prose.
The allure of glamorous Oriental eroticism remains evident throughout the Hellenistic period. The Ninus and Semiramis story was undoubtedly the most popular “Orientalist” narrative, but we can identify others.
