Beyond the Second Sophistic. Tim Whitmarsh
beyond the famous reference to Genesis in the treatise On the Sublime (9.9)—which is itself impossible to date—there is little evidence for a “pagan” Greek readership of Jewish texts. It is, indeed, hard to see how the Jewish novels could appeal directly to gentiles: they primarily express faith in God’s ability to rescue his chosen people from foreign oppression. Even at the stylistic level, they manifest a certain intractability, their paratactic style (which renders the vav [“and”] constructions distinctive to the Hebrew language) marking their difference from “native” Greek. But direct influence is only one form of cultural contingency, and they do in fact share motifs with Greco-Roman story culture. In particular, the focus on the preservation of female integrity in the face of predatory monarchs (found in Judith and Esther) is a theme in both Latin (Lucretia) and Greek (Chariton, Xenophon, Achilles, Heliodorus) narrative.
Certainly, the Greek erotic tradition seems to have influenced Jewish narrative. Retellings of the erotic segments of the Torah by Josephus and Philo inflect them with Greek narrative motifs.64 The convergences between Greek and Jewish are closest in the extraordinary Joseph and Aseneth (perhaps Hellenistic), which elaborates on the biblical story of Joseph’s marriage to a young Egyptian maiden (Genesis 41:45; see also 26:20). The date is extremely controversial—estimates range from the second century B.C.E. to the fourth century C.E.65—but the safest guess seems to be that it is a Hellenistic Jewish text overlain with Christian material. Whatever the truth of the matter, the history of this text is clearly interwoven with the rise of the erotic novel. This narrative plays repeatedly on the substitution of erotic with righteous motifs. Aseneth is egregiously beautiful like a goddess (4.2); she is immediately stupefied by the sight of Joseph (6.1), grieves when they are separated after their initial meeting (8.8), and weeps in her room that night (10.2).66 Yet their relationship is built around not erotic obsession but pious reverence of the Jewish god. Although this text is aimed at Jews and is probably a translation from the Hebrew (it displays the same paratactic style as the Apocrypha, discussed above), it is clearly designed for a readership also familiar with the Greek literary (and particularly erotic) repertoire.
Greece and Egypt
The existence of significant Hellenistic prose stories on pharaonic themes, Egypt’s prominence in the later, imperial romance, and the significance of Hellenistic Alexandria as a point of intersection between Greek and Egyptian traditions67 have together led some to believe that the novel first developed in Egypt.68 (Traces of narrative motifs from the pharaonic period have even been detected in imperial romances.)69 While any crude hypothesis of a single cultural origin for the novel is unconvincing (in light of the evidence discussed above for local Greek and Semitic elements), it is clear that Egypt played an important role in the novelistic imaginaire.70
Two major traditions are of critical importance. The first is that surrounding the legendary pharaoh Sesonchosis (sometimes called Sesostris or Sesoosis), credited with numerous conquests in Asia and Europe. In addition to the various historical (or quasi-historical) accounts of this figure,71 we also have three papyrus fragments that seem to derive from a “novelistic” version of his story, composed in unassuming Greek.72 Two are military (one names the king’s adversaries as an “Arab” [i.e., Palestinian?] contingent, led by one Webelis); a third, however, is erotic, describing the handsome young king’s relationship with a girl Meameris, the daughter of a vassal king. This episode does not appear in any of the “historical” versions of the narrative, and the themes of young love, wandering, infatuation, erotic suffering, and distraction at a banquet (Stephens and Winkler 1995, 262) invite obvious comparisons with the imperial romance. Thematically, the narrative resembles the fragmentary, novelistic version of the Ninus romance (discussed above): each deals with a great national leader from the distant past, focusing on both military exploits and erotic vulnerability.
What we are to conclude from these similarities is less clear: is Sesonchosis an influential Hellenistic text (or, at any rate, part of an influential but now lost Hellenistic tradition)? Or does it represent a specifically local-Egyptian, populist variant on the imperial romance? A third alternative, no doubt the safest, is to rephrase the terms of the question. “The Greek novel” and “the Sesonchosis tradition” were not monolithic and wholly independent, nor was any traffic between the two necessarily unidirectional. As in the case of the Phoenician and Jewish material discussed above, Greek narrative prose proves to be a flexible and capacious medium, able to incorporate numerous cultural perspectives.
This is nowhere truer than in relation to the most important Egyptian-centered text, the text we call the Alexander Romance.73 The work survives in numerous recensions, some prose and some (Byzantine) in verse; in all, there are more than eighty versions from antiquity and the middle ages, in twenty-four languages (including Pahlavi, Arabic, Armenian, and Bulgarian). Different versions contain different episodes, sequences, and cultural priorities: the Alexander Romance is a prism through which cultural light is sharply refracted.
The earliest recension is referred to as A and represents a text probably compiled between the second and fourth centuries C.E. The raw materials for this earliest stratum of the complete text were, however, Hellenistic: a bedrock of (creatively) historical narrative, an epistolary novel (manifested in the various letters that dapple the text, most notably Alexander’s letters to his mother Olympias, 2.23–41), and a work of Egyptian propaganda. The last is the motivation behind the identification of Alexander as the son, and hence continuator, of the last pharaoh, Nectanebo (1.1–12). The Persian invasion can thus be reinterpreted as a minor blip in the otherwise unbroken tradition of wise, powerful, and autonomous Egyptian kingship. On seeing a statue of Nectanebo, Alexander is told that a prophecy was delivered to his father: “The exiled king will return to Egypt, not as an old man but as a youth, and will beat down our enemies, the Persians” (1.34.5). Alexander’s pharaonic credentials, indeed, are more deeply rooted than this. He visits monumental obelisks set up by Sesonchosis (1.33.6, 3.17.17), is hailed as a new Sesonchosis (1.34.2), and even receives a dream visitation from the man himself, who announces that Alexander’s feats have outdone his own. These episodes function on two levels: Alexander is appropriated into Egyptian history, as the restorer of Egypt’s self-determination, and the Alexander Romance presents itself as a rejuvenated version of the Sesonchosis tradition.
In the substance of the narrative, however, Alexander represents a figure with whom all peoples can identify: a wise, brave, questing prince, seeking out the edges of the earth. As so often in Greek narrative of this period, he is also a lover: a section toward the end, perhaps originally a separate romance, details his (entirely fictitious) liaison with Candace, queen of Meroë (3.18–23). Here too there is a hint that the author is weaving together different traditions: Candace lives in the former palace of Semiramis (3.17.42–3.18.1). What is striking is not so much the tweaking of the Ninus and Semiramis story (which is not as great as one might suppose: the Ctesian Semiramis did in fact visit Nubia) but the author’s self-conscious concern to portray this section of his narrative as a metamorphosed version of it. If the fidelity to tradition is dubious, the negotiation of the anxiety of cultural influence is artful. The Alexander Romance presents itself as the summation of that tradition, outdoing each of its predecessors, just as its subject outdid all others in conquest.
Imaginary Worlds
The primary locations for such narrative confections were, then, Egypt and the Phoenician/Palestinian coast. Others did exist (e.g., the Black Sea littoral in the fragmentary Calligone, of uncertain date), but I want to conclude by focusing briefly on two “utopian” narratives set in imaginary worlds, the Sacred Inscription attributed to Euhemerus of Messene (early third century B.C.E.), mentioned above, and Iambulus’s Islands of the Sun (ca. second–first century B.C.E.).74 Each is preserved primarily in a summary by Diodorus of Sicily (2.55–60 and 6.1.3–10, respectively) that gives little flavor of the tone or style of the originals and moreover appropriates the content to suit Diodorus’s own agenda: a universal history in which all the individual elements cohere. Euhemerus’s and Iambulus’s narratives are geographically similar: both involve sea journeys beginning in Arabia (via Ethiopia in Iambulus) and continuing into the Indian Ocean. It is tempting, given our discussion above, to see these journeys as self-conscious attempts to outdo the Semitic and Egyptian narrative traditions,