Beyond the Second Sophistic. Tim Whitmarsh
in peering through the Diodoran fug, certain features are evident. Euhemerus, as we have seen in “Epic and Fiction,” was concerned primarily to provide human, historical identities for the Homeric/Hesiodic pantheon. He seems not to have described the journey to Panchaea in any detail; the process of geographical dislocation is primarily a device allowing him to offer a perspective that is radically alternative to traditional Greek thought. In this respect, Euhemerus is a forerunner of authors like Jonathan Swift, the Samuel Butler of Erewhon and Erewhon Revisited, Edwin Abbott, Jules Verne, and Pierre Boulle.
Iambulus is more difficult. Some have detected a philosophical, even political, promotion of a communist society “according to nature [kata phusin].”75 Certainly the islanders “do not marry, but hold their wives in common, rearing any children that are born as common to them all, and love them equally. . . . For this reason no rivalry arises among them, and they live their lives free of faction, extolling like-mindedness to the highest” (2.57.1). Iambulus (or Diodorus) describes a society that embodies the ideals of Greek politics (no “faction [stasis],” only “like-mindedness [homonoia]”) by following the priciples of common property laid out in Plato’s Republic.76 Yet the sociopolitical aspects of the island in fact receive far less attention than its bountiful nature and the extraordinary health, size, and longevity of its inhabitants. Diodorus prefaces his summary by promising to recapitulate in brief the “paradoxes” (2.55.1) found on the island, a strong signal that he, at any rate, conceived of Iambulus as a purveyor of marvels rather than a systematic political theorist. Lucian too refers to Iambulus’s “paradoxes,” adding that “it is obvious to everyone that he fabricated a falsehood [pseudos]” (True Stories 1). Iambulus seems to have found room enough within a supposedly veridical genre, the geographical travel narrative, to create a “fictional” work.
As recent scholarship has noted, there is an intrinsic connection in the ancient world between travel and fiction: alternative geographies are home to alternative realities.77 Names of Hellenistic authors such as Antiphanes of Berge—who famously claimed to have visited a climate so cold that words froze in the air (Plut., Mor. 79a)—and Pytheas of Massilia became bywords for literary confection. It is important, however, to reemphasize that there was no firm generic dividing line between “factual” report and “fiction.” The writers we have discussed in this section inhabited the same literary space as more sober geographical writers, such as Strabo—which is why Diodorus felt licensed to include such material in his own purportedly historical work.
CONCLUSIONS
This chapter has partly been about how not to write the history of Greek fiction. I have argued against linear, “smoking gun” models that seek to pinpoint moments of invention or discovery. Fictionality inheres in all literary discourse; the question to ask is thus not when it was invented but how it was differently inflected over time. In particular, it is crucial not to attempt to write the history of fiction simply by reverse-engineering the imperial romance.
I conclude with two positive observations. My first is this: the kind of fictional discourse I have traced in this chapter (and I freely concede there are other types) is intimately tied to the emergence of a prose culture built around the book, which—in contrast to earlier poetic texts whose authority was predicated on that of the inspired performer, the maître de vérité—places the accent more on the power of language to create its own plausible world. Plausibility—to eikos, this concept so closely tied to the forensic culture of the law courts—at first sight implies realism, approximation to reality (the root verb eoika means “I resemble”). In this sense, a plausible story is one that coheres with what we know to be true about the world in which we live, and indeed, as we have seen, much of the fictional material we have been discussing emerges from critiques of the “unreality” of traditional poetic claims. Yet there is another dimension to to eikos: a plausible story is also one that is internally coherent, true on its own terms. In other words, plausibility is manufactured discursively, within the confines of the narrative itself. What is at issue, when fictional worlds are being made, is not realism but a constructed reality effect. The contained world of the prose book, then, makes for an entirely different experience of fictionality than that of the performed song.
Second point. When I write of a “world-making” power, I am doing more than invoking a classic text in the modern philosophy of fiction;78 I am also referring to the trend toward geographical relocation, moving away from the familiar urban landscapes that had served as backdrops for much earlier narrative and into spaces that were felt as exotic, whether for their distant, marginal location, for a perception of cultural otherness, or for their out-of-the-way oddity within Greece itself. This alienation of narrative setting relates to a historical process that we might call Hellenistic but in fact begins already in the fifth century B.C.E. (and the roots of which are indeed already visible in the Homeric and Hesiodic poems): a gradual mapping out of a wider oikoumene, and its incorporation into the Greek imaginary. A work such as Euhemerus’s Sacred Inscription bears the same relationship to the Indian Ocean as The Tempest bears to the New World or 2001: A Space Odyssey to space. Narrative fiction has assumed the shape of real journeys of exploration, particularly in the context of the competitive imperialism of the successor empires (and we should note that Euhemerus’s expedition is explicitly cast as a voyage mandated by King Cassander of Macedon).
Yet Euhemerus’s phantasmatic projections of other worlds represent only one variety of prose fiction’s encounter with the other, and should not be generalized. Greeks did not merely peek at other peoples over the crenellations of their own cultural traditions. The prose literature of (particularly but not exclusively) the postclassical period also represents genuine contact zones, spaces where Greek, Egyptian, and Semitic discourses can hybridize to yield new, distinctive forms. The works discussed in this chapter do not simply rehash barbarian stereotypes. Rather, people with an impressive range of cultural competence composed them: figures like Ctesias, Laetus, Alexander Polyhistor, and the authors of Joseph and Aseneth, the Alexander Romance, and Sesonchosis. Matters, indeed, become still more interesting when the empire starts (to borrow Salman Rushdie’s phrase) “writing back,” when Semitic and Egyptian peoples begin to compose in Greek and insert their own priorities and values into the Greek literary tradition. Although (as we shall see in chapters 13 and 14) there certainly were Jewish poets, it is striking that prose fiction, with its in-built attraction to other worlds, proved the most fertile space in which to explore this particular variety of colonial encounter.
This chapter contains material drawn from Whitmarsh 2010d; I am grateful to Wiley-Blackwell for permission to reuse it.
1. Tilg 2010.
2. Payne 2007.
3. Finkelberg 1998. The extent to which Plato’s Atlantis story is self-consciously fictional has been much debated: see ch. 3, n. 9.
4. Rösler 1980.
5. See, e.g., Goldhill 1991.
6. Kurke 2010.
7. Here Karen Ní Mheallaigh’s forthcoming book on Lucian and fiction is keenly anticipated.
8. I attempt to follow many of these threads in Whitmarsh 2004a.
9. See Bowie 2002a, which places the earliest novels in the first century C.E.; there is also much useful discussion in Tilg 2010, 36–78.
10. Rohde 1876, which I cite below from the 1960 reprint of the third edition (1914).
11. Lavagnini 1921; Giangrande 1962; Anderson 1984.
12. Especially in light of the influential critique of Perry 1967, 14–15.
13. E.g., Lightfoot 1999 on Parthenius; Brown 2002 on Conon; Winiarczyk 2002 on Euhemerus.
14. See further Whitmarsh 2005b on the specific nature of the imperial romance.
15. Rohde 1914, 3.
16. Pavel 1989; Newsom 1988; Currie 1990.
17. Morgan 1993, 176–93; similarly Schirren 2005, 15–37.
18. Pratt 1983; Bowie 1993.
19. Finkelberg 1998; Rösler 1980, although the connection between textuality and fiction seems less