The authors ofGreek fiction also looked beyond the safe confines ofthe cities to peoples and places beyond the ‘‘inhabited world’’ (oikoumene). Stories of travels to faraway places were influenced not only by heroic journeys to mythic lands recounted by classical authors beginning with Homer, but also by geography, ethnography, and paradoxography, genres emanating from Hecataeus and Herodotus that flourished during the Hellenistic age. Moreover, the ancient notion of a Greek-barbarian polarity resonates in fiction under various guises, such as the Persian and Mesopotamian portraits in the novels of Chariton and Iamblichus. Against this traditional scenery, authors of fiction invented new places for their characters on the road. These journeys of exploration, pilgrimage, and self-discovery were not only exercises in literary imagination but also articulations of Greek cultural identity through the delineation of outsiders (see in general Romm 1992: 202-14; Bowersock 1994: 29-53).
The epitomized novel by Antonius Diogenes (Phot. Bib. 109a-112a) and the travel tales by Lucian (Ver. Hist. ) related fictitious travels to places far to the west of the
Mediterranean, beyond continental Europe and outside the Pillars of Hercules, as the ancients called Gibraltar (Bompaire 1958: 658-77; Morgan 1985; Fusillo 1999). After Alexander’s conquest of the Orient, Hellenistic and Roman geographers considered the western Ocean the next unexplored frontier. The choice of this realm as the destination of the brave voyageurs in both works granted the authors considerable license to roam freely in the borderlands of scientific description and pseudo-scientific fantasy. Diogenes’ The Wonders beyond Thule was not a formulaic novel but the amalgam of an itinerary, a romance, and a tale of persecution. Deinias is driven to travel not by love but by the pursuit of knowledge. He moves north past the Black Sea to Scythia, skirts the world’s edge, and reaches Thule, a land probably located in the North Atlantic (Iceland?) that was purportedly discovered by Pytheas of Massilia in the late fourth century bce (Strabo 2.4.1). On Thule his path converges with that of his lover-to-be, Dercyllis, who had fled her home in Tyre with an evil Egyptian sorcerer in hot pursuit. Most of the work’s novelistic decor - magical spells, false deaths, erotic attraction, jealous rivalry - fills the episode on Thule. But before he returns to Tyre to join Dercyllis, Deinias’ expedition continues westward beyond Thule, the end of the known world. In the great unknown he witnesses endless nights and even approaches the moon (Phot. Bib. 110b39-111a11). Diogenes offers both an entertaining variation on the traditional formula of the novel and a parodic expose of the slippery claims to scientific accuracy by prior geographers.
Lucian too chose the fantastic journey of westward exploration as a way to criticize geographers and historians who related make-believe journeys as true accounts. His imaginary travelers, driven by a series of tempests, see much more than Deinias: they reach the Moon, they are swallowed by a giant whale, and they visit the Islands of the Blessed and Ogygia. The satirist plays in many registers at once. Some of his humor, such as sexual obscenity and the invention of otherworldly creatures, is coarse and obvious. At other times he parodies other authors by casting absurd discoveries behind a transparent veneer of veracity. In his account of the battle between the forces of the Moon under Endymion and the forces of the Sun under Phaethon (Ver. Hist. 1.12-21), Lucian describes with mock precision the composition, size, and maneuvering of the armies, which are astronomically large and absurdly diverse, like an international coalition. He then reproduces the text of their peace treaty, modeled on the famous Athenian settlement with Mytilene (Thuc. 3.36, 3.49). In this way he blends Herodotean and Thucydidean historiography to narrate a war between celestial bodies as though they were competing polities in classical Greece. Later the travelers reach the Islands of the Blessed, where they encounter a menagerie of figures from mythology, literature, and philosophy, all mingling for eternity as though in a ‘‘School of Athens’’ centuries before Raphael (Ver. Hist. 2.5-28). The narrator even interviews Homer and resolves several uncertainties about the bard: he could see, he was Babylonian, he did write all the obelized lines, and he composed the Iliad before the Odyssey.
Philostratus also applied layers of literary tradition to an exotic landscape in his account of the journey of Apollonius of Tyana to India (Anderson 1986: 199-226; Stoneman 1995; Elsner 1997). Apollonius, accompanied by Damis, made a pilgrimage to consult the great sages, the Brahmans. He set out from Syrian Antioch (VA 1.18), passed through ctesiphon and Babylon, over the caucasus, and across the Indus to the city of Taxila (2). From there he crossed the Hydraotes and the Hyphasis into the uncharted land of the Brahmans, who occupy a citadel enclosed by a magical cloud, where he stayed for four months (3.1-50). Thereafter he traveled straight to the Arabian Sea and embarked for a return voyage along a coastal route to Mesopotamia and, eventually, Ionia (3.50-8).
The biographer relied on diverse sources to create his fictional India. At a basic level he imagined a real geography that could be accurately documented. India was not an unknown place, like Thule. Communication between the Mediterranean and the subcontinent had been established in prehistory, and commercial exchange with the Far East flourished during the first centuries of the Roman Empire. Philostratus used various devices to validate his account as documentation of a historical journey. He noted geographic features and gave their dimensions, and he included the text of two letters to the Brahman high priest larchas (2.41, 3.51). Moreover, Apollonius followed in the path of other famous travelers both mythical and historical, including Prometheus, Dionysus, Hercules, and, of course, Alexander the Great (e. g., 2.3, 2.810, 2.13, 2.20, 2.24, 2.33, 2.42-3, 3.13, 3.53). The conscientious biographer even corrected earlier writers on India, such as Scylax, Nearchus, Orthagoras, and Juba (e. g., 2.13, 2.17, 3.47, 3.53). Finally, he recorded the deltas and islands that Apollonius passed on his return journey along the southern coasts of Pakistan and Iran, naming the natural products of each region, from seafood to bronze, dates, and pearls (3.52-7). This section is very much like a merchants’ manual, such as one on trade between Egypt, East Africa, Arabia, and India that has survived from the first century CE (cf. Peripl. M. Ruhr. 36-7). In these carefully selected details Philostratus portrays for his readers an India that is credible.
On the other hand, even in the early third century CE India remained a land enshrouded in myth. Philostratus, as an educated author with no firsthand knowledge of the region, turned to three major traditions: geography and ethnography, ranging from early paradoxographical works by Ctesias and Megasthenes to more scientific accounts by Strabo and Arrian in the Roman era; the stories of Alexander’s conquests beyond Persepolis; and Neo-Pythagorean philosophy. The author devised a triptych structure within which passages derived from the first tradition typically resolved into passages from the second, and these concluded with a philosophical discussion. So, for example, early in Apollonius’ journey, Philostratus describes Mount Nysa and the crag of Aornus, then recounts the local legends concerning Dionysus and Alexander, and ends with a lecture on the intelligence of elephants (VA 2.8-16). In this way, the referential scheme of the Indian travels of Apollonius traces a narrowing series of concentric fields, like a bull’s-eye, with philosophy at the center. This organization also operates on the scale of the entire episode. Apollonius’ conversations with Iarchas and the Brahmans are the focal point; they are directly preceded and succeeded by reminiscences of Alexander’s journey; and before and after are extended expositions of geographic and ethnographic data. By superimposing layers of literary tradition in such a pattern, like an orator building an argument, Philostratus reminds the attentive reader that the central goal of the sage’s journey is not merely exploration or conquest but the acquisition of wisdom as embodied by the Brahmans.
Philostratus invented not only a fictional landscape with a realistic appearance for Apollonius to traverse but also a fictional people for him to meet. The Brahmans, who appear in several accounts of India, including the Alexander-Romance, were naked ascetics whose shifting persona preserves a kernel of historical truth, perhaps representing real Brahmans, Jains, or Buddhist monks. While Indians were known to Mediterranean peoples through occasional embassies to the Roman emperor, the Brahmans portrayed by Philostratus were completely fictional. They inhabit a philosophical utopia that is not alien but oddly Hellenized. Their citadel resembles the Athenian Acropolis, and as Apollonius ascends he sees statues from the local cults of ancient Greece (3.13-14). The Brahmans converse like sophists and speak impeccable Greek (3.12, 3.16), they sing a paean of Sophocles in a levitating chorus (3.17), and they keep in their dining room a statue of Tantalus in Argive dress and a Thessalian mantle and Pythian tripods like Homer described (3.25, 3.27). The Brahmans’ wisdom primarily consists in their transcendent knowledge of Greek culture, which enables them to interpret Greek mythology, morality, and history (e. g., 3.19, 3.22, 3.25, 3.30-2). Author and reader understand the exotic landscape and its people in terms of their own traditions. As in the case of Lucian’s fantastic journey, Philostratus’ fictional history of the Indian travels of Apollonius transports the reader to a distant land. In fact, the reader is never very far from the classical library.
Heliodorus, like Philostratus, preferred to view exotic peoples not as savages or curiosities but as cohabitants of a polyethnic world (see in general Bowersock 1994: 48-50; Whitmarsh 1998a). The Ethiopians in his novel are outsiders to Greek culture but sympathetic to its values. Just as Philostratus in his picture of India, the novelist describes the capital Meroe, which historically communicated with Roman Egypt, both as a real city on an island of known size and as a place full of marvels, like enormous date palms, giant elephants, and griffins (Heliod. 10.4, 5). When the king, Hydaspes, grants audience to delegations from his subject nations, he receives as gifts, among other things, gold produced by ants, silk textiles, and an impressive giraffe (10.22-7). Despite his foreign origin, the king Hydaspes is a good-hearted ruler who possesses Greek virtues. In skirmishes with the Persian satrap in Egypt over emerald mines, the Ethiopian king spares the life of the vanquished general, orders that his wounds be tended, and manages a peace settlement (9.21-2, 9.27; cf. 10.34). Hydaspes in court at Meroee, just like Apollonius in India, is advised by a council of naked ascetics (9.2, 10.4, 10.6, 10.9-10). Moreover, at the novel’s climax, Hydaspes bends to the will of the people when they respond vocally to his decisions (10.30-1, 10.38-41). He is a merciful and wise leader who values philosophy and appeases the masses, hardly a wanton, tyrannical barbarian.
The novel’s main female character, Charicleia, is another complex figure who transforms with the changing scenery. She grew up at Delphi, but she must embark on a long journey of hardship to discover her true origins. Eventually she finds that she is an Ethiopian princess whom the queen Persinna had orphaned at birth. Nonetheless, Charicleia is in every respect an idealized Greek aristocrat and an appropriate spouse for the hero Theagenes. She is a paragon of femininity, unfailingly devoted to Artemis, protective of her virginity, faithful to her husband, and surpassingly beautiful. Most remarkably, her skin is milky-white, not dark black, the complexion of her biological parents. This is explained by the arcane phenomenon whereby her mother at the moment of conception spied a painting of the pale Andromeda on the bedroom wall in the palace at Meroe (4.8, 10.14-15). Even when the protagonists reach Ethiopia, join in marriage, and assume the priesthoods of the Sun and the Moon, the astronomical counterparts of Apollo and
Artemis (10.41), they are fulfilling an oracle from Delphi, one of the most venerable of Greek religious institutions (2.35). It would be wrong to conclude that Helio-dorus’ view of the Ethiopians is Hellenocentric. He envisions a world marked by ethnic and genealogical ambiguity, and these tensions continuously challenge the reader’s perception of who the characters really are. The slippage between the ethnic categories ‘‘Greek’’ and ‘‘Ethiopian’’ seen in the figures of Hydaspes and Charicleia could be best exploited in a fictional medium.
World History
