The authors of Greek fiction wrote for readers of comparable socio-economic status with whom they shared similar literary tastes. As far as we can tell, these authors belonged to wealthy families and passed through a common educational system. The classical allusions and quotations in many works of fiction reflect not only the authors’ schooling but also their sustained interest in reading classical literature as educated adults. The novelists Chariton and Heliodorus, for example, regularly borrowed imagery and phrases from Homer and Demosthenes, while Aelian’s fictional epistles to Athenian farmers echo the poetry of Hesiod and Aristophanes. Lucian’s top-ten reading list, which has been painstakingly reconstructed from over a thousand passages in his voluminous corpus, resembles a curriculum in classical philology at a modern university: Homer, comedy, Plato, Euripides, Herodotus, Thucydides, lyric poetry, Demosthenes (Householder 1941). Such a high level of literary affluence presupposes material affluence. The families of these authors must have been prosperous enough to afford not only their children’s tutelage but also their free time.
The educational and professional background of writers of fiction is further reflected in their language. Many of them, particularly after the late first century CE, preferred the classicizing Attic dialect to the Hellenistic vernacular (koine). The linguistic and stylistic complexity of the novels varied, but even the technically simple novels by Chariton and Xenophon avoid hiatus and use simile. The later novels by Longus, Achilles Tatius, and Heliodorus display rhetorical virtuosity, including color, ecphrasis, suspense, narrative involution, and distinctly mannered prose. Moreover, all works of Greek fiction employ the portrayal of individuality through behavior and speech ( ethopoiia), a standard rhetorical technique. As students at the secondary level, future authors would have practiced the strategy of authenticating fictional accounts by expatiating upon obscure moments in ancient history in declamations ( meletai). These exercises required that students make up deliberations or debates based on known historical or literary episodes, as preparation for careers in the assembly and the courtroom (Russell 1983 for the context of rhetorical performance). Given these propensities in their writing, it is not surprising that many authors of fiction were orators. Chariton was a ‘‘lawyer’s secretary’’ (hypographeus tou rhetoros, Char. 1.1), not a prestigious post but hardly blue collar. According to Byzantine sources, the novelist Achilles Tatius was a rhetorician whose pursuits encompassed astronomy, etymology, and history (Eust. Comm. Od. 14.350; Thom. Mag. Selection of Attic Words s. v. anabaino; Suda s. v. Ach. {S}tat.). Lucian, Dio, and Philostratus are all known to have studied rhetoric and philosophy and pursued oratory for at least part of their careers.
The authors of Greek fiction were clearly distinguished from the uneducated masses as privileged individuals who enjoyed high social status on the local and regional levels. According to the authorial pendant at the close of his novel, Helio-dorus belonged to a priesthood of the Sun at Emesa in Syria (Heliod. 10.41), a distinction in the civic community. If the novelist Longus was in fact related to the Pompeii Longi attested in inscriptions from Roman Mytilene (IG 12, ii 88, 249), which is plausible but not certain, he belonged to long-standing nobility (for the lives of the novelists see Schmeling 2003: 307-653). In his rags-to-riches autobiography, the Dream, Lucian retold his difficult decision as a youth to pursue a life of culture rather than his family’s trade, stone carving. After his education, Lucian worked the lecture circuit in public and private venues from Asia to Rome to Gaul, often associating with powerful men, like the senator Sisenna Rutilianus (Alex. 30, 54; Laps. 12-13) and the emperor Lucius Verus, to whose mistress, Pantheia of Smyrna, he gave three pretty essays (Images, Concerning Images, About Dancing). It is perhaps fitting that an intellectual so well connected yet so bitterly cynical never himself achieved political prominence but ended up a minor bureaucrat in the Egyptian administration (Apol. 12-13; for his career see Hall 1981: 1-63; C. P. Jones 1986: 6-23; Swain 1996: 298-329). Dio and Philostratus, brilliant orators both, represent the highest echelon of Greek society who entered Rome’s inner circle (on Dio see Swain 2001; on Philostratus see Anderson 1986: 1-22; Bowie 1994a; Swain 1996: 380-400). Dio quickly rose to prominence in the coterie of the eminent Stoic philosopher C. Musonius Rufus; after exile and rehabilitation, he allied with Trajan. Likewise, Philostratus was an associate of the empress Julia Domna, who commissioned his work on Apollonius (VA 1.3; cf. Ep. 73); later he dedicated his biographies of the sophists to one of the Gordians (VS 479, 480).
To be sure, these various authors did not occupy the same rung on the social ladder. Chariton would have enjoyed far less prestige as a law clerk than the imperial courtier Philostratus, who criticized him (Ep. 66). Moreover, they came from different parts of the eastern Mediterranean - Alexandria, Emesa, Samosata, Aphrodisias, Lemnos, Prusa. Despite these differences, they all belonged to a supralocal elite class of‘‘cultured men’’ (pepaideumenoi) who shared the experience of a similar education and who appreciated a common aesthetic sensibility. Their learning, their artistic taste, and their personal style were deeply rooted in the cultural heritage of the classical world. These qualities were recognized among the urban aristocracies of the Roman East, but they also led to regional or international renown outside the home city, drawing the most celebrated individuals west to Rome. In other words, the cultural distinction of these individuals accompanied and even justified their social connections and political power, whether in the civic community or in the imperial government. Their creation of fiction was therefore an act of social and cultural selfrepresentation. Literary production was an expression of education as well as an emblem of wealth, achievement, and refinement.
The intended readers of Greek fiction were not unlike the authors in their academic achievements and artistic preferences (Bowie 1994b, 2003; Stephens 1994; Morgan 1995). The greatest enjoyment of fiction could be gained only by those who were fluently literate and familiar with classical literature. Moreover, the most ambitious works published in the second and third centuries ce, such as Lucian’s satires and the intricate novel by Heliodorus, drew their readers into a reflexive analysis of fiction as a narrative mode of mimesis. This demanded of readers not just literacy and education, which enabled pattern recognition and fostered appreciation, but also an elevated awareness of the creative process. All this does not mean that the illiterate could not enjoy fiction aurally through public performances, readings, or formulaic retellings, or that the literate who were ill-educated, uninspired, or uninterested could not enjoy fiction on the level of action and dialogue. Theoretically, fiction, and in particular the novels, could have reached a wide audience. It should, however, be stressed that there is no evidence for transmissions of such a kind, apart from the public delivery of oratory with fictional scenes. The main point is that fiction was not intended primarily for popular consumption.
The sparse evidence for the readership of fiction offers a vague but useful picture. First, as one might expect, individuals at the zenith of the social structure owned sophisticated Greek literature as a mark of prestige. Several works by Lucian and Philostratus were dedicated or addressed to powerful individuals at the provincial or Imperial level. The emperor Julian, himself an accomplished man of letters, discussed erotic fiction in a letter to the arch-priest of Asia in 363 ce (Ep. 89.301b). Philos-tratus wrote that Hadrian kept a few epistles of Apollonius in his villa at Antium (VA 8.20), and Nero supposedly had a copy of the Greek translation of Dictys’ account of the Trojan War (Dict. Cret. pr.). At a lower elite level, Dio and Lucian wrote mostly for eastern litterati and their western admirers, men of considerable wealth and status who did not necessarily occupy top offices. It is this faceless, nameless crowd of pepaideumenoi who read the novels. There is no substance or persuasion in the curious, once trendy theory that the novels were written chiefly for children or women. Their literary and linguistic artifice presupposes literacy, education, and participation in (or aspiration to participate in) elite culture and society, which largely excludes both those classes of reader. Undoubtedly certain women did read novels, but surely not as frequently as men, or with any favored status. The novels would have been accessible to children only through readings by parents or slaves, though this is nowhere attested. Students at grammar school were too busy reading their Euripides and Isocrates. The novelists provide some sense of their readers’ profile through the ideal characterization of their own fictional personae. The aristocratic, educated protagonists write, exchange, and read letters without the assistance of scribes. Antonius Diogenes dedicated his novel to his sister Isidora, ‘‘being a lover of learning’’ (philomathos echousei. Phot. Bib. 111a30-b31). In other words, she was an appropriate reader not qua woman but qua learned person.
Papyrology and archaeology provide concrete evidence for the social world of the novels’ readers. One index of the breadth of the novel’s readership is the distribution by author or genre of literary papyri from Roman Egypt written during the first six centuries ce. Of the total published sample, novels account for only 42 discrete texts, whereas over a thousand fragments are attributed to Homer and well over a hundred to Demosthenes. Sheer numbers prove that the novels could not have had a mass market, as was once argued. Rather, they constituted a narrow subset of all literature read by the educated. The excavation of two lavish villas near Syrian Antioch and Alexandretta has revealed four mosaic pavements depicting legendary figures who appear in the early novels, the couple Metiochus and Parthenope, and Ninus. These mosaics have been frequently cited as evidence that the readers of the novels belonged to the class of affluent landowners. It should, however, be noted that these same characters appear in mythology and drama, and it has also been plausibly proposed that at least some of these scenes might depict mimes. Even so, one can safely assume that individuals who were well enough educated to appreciate fully the literary sophistication of Antonius Diogenes and Longus were prosperous enough to own and decorate homes such as these.
Although Greek fiction was primarily written for an eastern audience, it was also read by westerners. Apart from Nero, Hadrian, and Julia Domna, who valued artistic refinement, philhellenism, or Orientalism at court, various Roman authors also responded to Greek literary currents. It has been cogently, if not decisively, argued that both the famous story of Pyramus and Thisbe in Ovid (Met. 4.55-166) and the burlesque exploits of the anti-heroes in Petronius’ Satyricon are parodies of the idealized Greek novels. Persius might have also known Chariton’s novel (Pers. 1.134). If these authors did have in mind the novels and not other realistic genres, such as New Comedy, then, remarkably, the nascent literary form in the eastern provinces was already influencing Latin literature in the first century CE. A century later, the Latin novel Metamorphoses, or The Golden Ass, rewrote the lost Greek novel Lucius or the Ass. The author, Apuleius, was a native African, but, like many aristocrats, he was immersed in the classical heritage during his ‘‘college years’’ at Athens. The appreciation of Greek fiction by western contemporaries of comparable social status reveals that the reception of the form was not restricted to a region but was a pan-Mediterranean phenomenon. Nevertheless, there is no indication that Greek fiction was ever written with the particular interests or tastes of western readers in mind.
Now that the nature of Greek fiction and the identity of its authors and readers have been outlined, it is possible to explore how authors of Greek fiction blended imagination and reality to entertain, educate, and validate a common identity. To do this, it will be worthwhile to discuss two distinct views of the world in this body of literature, one internal and one external. The novels and other fictional works of rhetoric, biography, and epistolography examine the society of cities and their surrounding countrysides where the characters reside, a sphere familiar to both author and reader. They also explore the exotic realms to which their characters travel, a sphere unfamiliar to both author and reader.
World History
