Beyond the Second Sophistic. Tim Whitmarsh
would later call plasmatic narrative: that is to say, stories based on neither historical nor mythical but on invented characters and events.20 This kind of plot can be found in mime and even occasionally in tragedy (see, e.g., Arist., Poet. 1451b), but is most prominent in comedy. Old Comedy often blends real figures (e.g., Cratinus’s Pericles or Aristophanes’s Cleon) with fictional and uses scenarios that are fantastical distortions of contemporary reality. Hellenistic New Comedy, however, is based entirely around invented figures and (at least after Menander) set in a hazy, idealized version of the democratic city.
Comedy is thus one preimperial literary genre that consistently handles people and events that are—and are recognized by the audience as—entirely conjured from the author’s imagination. The boundaries between fictive and “real” worlds are constantly and knowingly traversed: for example, in the parabaseis of Aristophanic comedies (when the chorus “steps aside” and addresses the audience directly), or in the scene in the same poet’s Women at the Thesmophoria where interjections relating to the here and now punctuate Euripides’s and Mnesilochus’s attempts to conjure the world of Euripides’s Andromache.21 Another case is rhetoric: the scenarios of invented declamatory exercises (progymnasmata like Lucian’s Tyrannicide and Disowned), acted out by a speaker who adopts the persona of another (a prosecutor, defendant, or famous figure from the past), involve impersonation and make-believe.22 Both set-piece rhetoric and comic drama are indeed, as has long been acknowledged, key intertextual reference points for the imperial romance, invoked as literary precedents.23
Whether such dramatic and rhetorical acting actually constitutes fiction, however, is a matter of definition. Certainly the reader is contracted into a willing suspension of belief concerning the text’s veracity, but that fictionality may be said to be a coefficient factor rather than central to the text’s purpose. Yet it pays, as we have already said, to remain aware that fiction is not an ontologically solid quality that either is or is not in a text. If (as I have claimed above) all literature contains an element of fictionality, then the history of fictionality is also the history of literature. That, clearly, is beyond the scope of a humble chapter, so for the present purposes, I will concentrate instead on narrative forms, particularly prose narrative. In fictional prose narrative, we might say, the fiction is embodied in the discourse itself rather than the performance. In drama and rhetorical logography, the founding “untruth” is perhaps the act of impersonating another: the fictionality flows from the brute disjunction between a performer with a real identity and the identity he claims. This is the case particularly, but not exclusively, when such texts are received through oral performance, a scenario that allows for complex “disjunctural” effects, such as in the famous case of the actor Polus, who carried his own son’s ashes when performing in Sophocles’s Electra.24 Fictional narrative, however, operates in a very different way: there is no disjunction between true and false identities, because (with the partial exception of the author)25 such texts contain no true identities at all. This distinction is, avowedly, slippery, especially when we accept that narrative forms sometimes may have been accessed through public recitation—that is, through a form of impersonation. But without wishing to shut off such avenues for future investigation, I shall for now keep the focus centrally on the fictional narrative book, which defines its fictionality in a distinctively absolutist and discursive way.
Epic and Fiction
Preimperial fiction, understood in this way, emerges not as a freestanding category but as an ontologically ambiguous subcategory of existing narrative forms. Of these, the most evident is traditional hexameter epic. I wish to turn now to consider briefly the reception of Hesiod and Homer from the classical into the Hellenistic period. Their poems became particular targets of scorn in the early classical period, when the so-called Ionian revolution shifted the burden of cosmic explanation from mythical narrative to physiological speculation. Xenophanes (early fifth century) mocks epic “inventions [plasmata]” about centaurs (fr. 1.22 DK) and naïve anthropomorphisms (frs. 13–14 West), chiding Homer and Hesiod for their depictions of divine immorality (frs. 10–11 West). Heraclitus too castigates his epic predecessors vigorously (frs. 42, 56–57, 105, 106 DK). This process of decentering the cultural authority of epic continued within the philosophical tradition, most notably in Plato’s famous critiques (in Ion and especially Republic II–III and X).
Much of the anxiety, as the above examples show, focused on the role of the gods, who were held to behave in ways that were either unbecoming or incredible.26 For some ancient writers, the Homeric gods themselves were fictions. In a dramatic (perhaps satyric) fragment of the late fifth century, Critias or Euripides has Sisyphus claim that “a shrewd and thoughtful man” invented the gods, in order to terrify other humans into social conformity (fr. 19.11–13 TGrF). Whether this heretical belief was disproved later in the narrative we do not know, but it is clearly designed to reflect (or refract) contemporary Sophistic beliefs, mimicking the patterns of social-constructionist anthropological etiology elsewhere attributed to Prodicus and Protagoras.27
This form of theological debunking is most fully realized in a Hellenistic text, the Sacred Inscription attributed to Euhemerus of Messene (early third century B.C.E.; discussed more fully in “Imaginary Worlds” below and in chapter 3), which survives principally in summary via books 5 and 6 of Diodorus of Sicily.28 The author claims to have visited the Panchaean Islands (supposedly off the eastern coast of Arabia), where he saw a golden pillar inscribed with the deeds of Uranus, Cronos, and Zeus, three Panchaean kings (Diod. Sic. 6.1.7–10). The Greek gods were, it transpires, originally historical mortals, who were accounted gods because of Zeus’s great achievements. As I argue more fully in chapter 3, the Euhemeran narrative predicates its sense of its own status as a fictional text on a knowing, intellectualized tradition of commentary on Homeric and Hesiodic misrepresentations, particularly of the gods.
This kind of fiction thus emerges as reflexive rather than autonomous, nesting as 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