The oldest extant western novel begins like this (Chaer. 1.1.1):
My name is Chariton, of Aphrodisias, and I am clerk to the attorney Athenagoras. I am going to tell you the story of a love affair that took place in Syracuse. The Syracusan general Hermocrates, the man who defeated the Athenians, had a daughter called CalUrhoe. She was a wonderful girl. (Tr. Reardon 1989)
The palpable similarity of this opening to the prologues of historiographical texts like those of Hecataeus, Herodotus, or Thucydides is no accident. Throughout the novel Chariton makes his narrator speak like a historian, and a contemporary of the events he recounts (on Chariton’s narrator see Morgan 2004). So, for instance, he can write of the way that the Persian empire mobilizes its armies (6.8.6-7):
Persia can mobilize its forces very easily. The system has been in force since the time of Cyrus, the first king of Persia. It is established which nations have to supply cavalry for a war, and how many; which are to supply infantry, and how many; who is to supply archers; how many chariots (both ordinary and scythed) each people is to supply; where elephants are to come from, and how many; and from whom money is to come, in what currency, and how much. Everybody participates in these preparations, and they take no more time than one man takes to get ready.
The most plausible estimate of the date of composition of this novel is the first century CE, around five hundred years later than the setting of which the narrator writes in the present tense. The narrator’s persona is also historiographical rather than novelistic. He avoids effects of suspense and surprise by keeping his narratee fully informed at almost all times; so when the heroine is presumed dead and entombed alive, the narrator makes sure that we know at that point that her breathing has merely been disrupted, with the result that we are not surprised when she duly regains consciousness in the tomb.
The romantic story plays itself out in the interstices of real history. The heroine is the daughter of the Syracusan statesman Hermocrates, well known from the pages of Thucydides. Plutarch (Dion 3) tells us that he had a daughter, but does not give her name; however, she became the wife of the Syracusan tyrant, Dionysius. Not by coincidence, Chariton’s heroine becomes the reluctantly bigamous wife of someone of exactly the same name. The plot also features the Persian king Artaxerxes; he too is historical, although there is an anachronism in putting him on the throne of Persia during the lifetime of Hermocrates. Even more anachronistically, the last sections of the novel center on an Egyptian revolt from Persia, which is apparently intended for that of 360 bce, and in which the romantic hero Chaereas plays a role analogous to that of the historical Athenian Chabrias (Salmon 1961). Later this same Chaereas becomes a successful general and besieges the city of Tyre, so casting himself as a reflection of Alexander the Great.
Chariton is not plowing a lonely furrow here. Probably the earliest novel that we know of is the so-called Ninus Romance, from which we have a number of papyrus fragments (text, translation, and commentary in Stephens and Winkler 1995: 23-71; translation by Sandy in Reardon 1989: 803-808). The protagonists of this are the Assyrian princeling Ninus and his beloved cousin, whose name does not appear in the surviving scraps oftext but who appears to be Semiramis. These too are figures familiar from historical texts, although the author of this novel has subjected them to radical psychological treatment, transforming the fierce Semiramis into a chaste and demure little girl unable to speak for herself. One of the surviving fragments presents us with a historiographically nuanced account of a military campaign. Another novel, known to us both through papyrus fragments and through a medieval Persian adaptation, is partly set at the court of Polycrates, the tyrant of Samos. The male lead is Metiochus, the son of the Athenian general Miltiades, playing opposite Parthenope, the daughter of Polycrates (text, translation, and commentary in Stephens and Winkler 1995: 72-100; translation by Sandy in Reardon 1989: 813-815). Like Chariton’s Callirhoe, she seems to correspond to an anonymous historical personage, mentioned in Herodotus. The fragments include a dinner-time discussion in Polycrates’ palace, one of the participants at which is the philosopher Anaximenes.
In these early novels, then, there is a clear assimilation to and exploitation of the conventions and materials of historical writing. Early scholars of the novel assumed that this was evidence of a connection of some sort between the two genres, and concluded that the origins of the novel lay in corrupt historiography. This idea was knocked firmly on the head by Perry’s famous polemic (1967) against the evolutionary assumptions implicit in it. The borderline between fact and fiction, between history and novel, is (he argued) not one that could be crossed unawares. The writer of the first novel cannot have been under the illusion that he was in fact writing history. The affinities between the novel and historiography must therefore be read as a deliberate literary strategy on the part of the novelists.
The point of this strategy is not difficult to see, though it raises some complex issues about the reading of fiction. A fiction which presents itself as history is immediately more ‘‘believable’’ than one which makes no such effort. The fiction supplies itself with authority. The novel as genre also developed other strategies for authenticating itself. One was to provide a plausible provenance for its fictional narrative, thus facilitating the belief that there was some external authority for it, or at least exculpating the author from the accusation of having invented it. Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe - a novel which describes itself as a ‘‘history of love’’ and engages intertextually with Thucydides at a number of levels - begins with a prologue in which the narrator describes how he discovered a painting while hunting in Lesbos, found someone to interpret it for him, and then elaborated the exegete’s account into the four books of the novel. The device is given another twist when, at the end of the novel, the protagonists dedicate images of their experiences: these are clearly the same images that the narrator describes in the prologue, and his apparent failure to identify the two adds force to the conceit that the painting really existed; generations of scholars have in fact gone to Lesbos to try to find the site Longus describes. The most spectacular case of fictional provenance is the lost novel of Antonius Diogenes, The Wonders beyond Thule, summarized by Photius (Stephens and Winkler 1995: 101-172; translation by Sandy in Reardon 1989: 775-782). In this text Antonius purported to present a rediscovered letter home from a Macedonian soldier in Alexander’s army, in which he described the discovery of an ancient grave in which were cypress-wood tablets recording the protagonist’s oral account of his adventures to an Arcadian ambassador, and later buried with him. lamblichus’ Babylonian Story, on the other hand, another text summarized by Photius, had an equally elaborate apparatus of authentication in which a possibly fictitious primary narrator, an Assyrian with an autobiography to explain how he came to be writing in Greek, recalled a story told to him in childhood by a Babylonian tutor (Stephens and Winkler 1995: 179-245; translation by Sandy in Reardon 1989: 783-797; for the details of the argument cf. Morgan 1997: 3328).
Greek novels, pretty well without exception, strive, then, for historiographical authority and authenticity, for believability. However, the defining condition of any fiction is that it is an untruth which does not intend to deceive. Fiction is neither truth nor lie: both sender and recipient recognize it for what it is. No ancient reader with a copy of Chariton in his or her hand can seriously have thought that he or she was holding a work of history, or that the events narrated in it had really taken place. How can anyone be said to believe something which they know to be untrue? Coleridge’s famous phrase to explain this paradox is ‘‘the willing suspension of disbelief.’’ One way to describe the phenomenon of reading fiction is in terms of a conspiracy or contract between text and reader, that, in order to experience the full pleasure of the text, the reader should imaginatively ‘‘believe’’ the truth of what he is reading even while remaining intellectually aware of its fictional status (on all this see Morgan 1993). The features of the Greek novels that I have been describing both facilitate the ‘‘suspension of disbelief’’ and act as signs of the contract that demands it. In the twenty-first century, of course, we are used to reading fiction, and understand the protocols of doing so, almost instinctively. And although we generally have no problem with the concept of a ‘‘historical novel,’’ a fiction some ofwhose characters are historical personages and whose action takes place around or is constituted by historical events, we nonetheless maintain a strict distinction between fact and fiction and thus between history and novel as literary forms. In fact the earliest Greek novels might be termed ‘‘historical novels’’ (see Hagg 1987); but the modern historical novel is a selfconscious trope of‘‘pure’’ fiction, with quite a different relation to historical narrative from that of the ancient novels. In antiquity, however, it is hard to be sure exactly how fiction was read: it seems that the boundaries were somehow more permeable, drawn in different places and policed differently.
Ancient critics are infuriatingly silent about novels; there is not even a single word to express the concept in either Latin or Greek. The few scattered comments that can be related to novels are uniformly uncomplimentary. In the fourth century ce, for instance, Julian warns his new pagan clergy off reading novels (Epist. 89.301B; but cf. Whitmarsh 2005, who contests the identification of the texts mentioned by Julian with novels):
But as for those fictions in the form of history that have been narrated alongside events of the past, we should renounce them, love stories and all that sort of stuff.
Quite apart from their erotic content, Julian’s problem with novels appears to be not just that they are fictional but that, through their form of prose narrative, they masquerade as real history: in a way that verse literature, through its palpable textuality, does not, they blur an essential dividing line between truth and untruth. This criticism resides on a failure properly to understand what fiction is, to recognize that it has no intention to deceive. This failure is deeply embedded in Greek literary thinking. Plutarch (Sol. 29.7) tells us that Solon attacked Thespis, the inventor of tragedy, for telling lies in public. Thespis replied that there is nothing wrong with doing and saying such things ‘‘in play,’’ which comes close to seeing the point, but it is not until Augustine that any ancient writer explicitly formulates an idea of fiction that approximates to the modern one, when he subdivides falsehood according to intention (Solil. 2.9.16):
That which I call untrue. . . differs from the deceptive in this respect, that every deceiver wishes to deceive but not everyone who tells an untruth wishes to deceive; for mimes and comedies and many poems are full of untruths, more with the aim of delighting than of deceiving, and almost anyone who tells a joke tells an untruth. But that man is properly called deceptive or deceiving whose purpose is that everyone should be deceived.
Nevertheless, there is an occasional implicit recognition among earlier thinkers that there is a class of untruth whose function is to give pleasure, and that such untruths can even have a legitimate (or at least harmless) place in a text whose principal or ostensible aim is factual information. Strabo, for example, argues that the Odyssey is a serious work of geography, but that Homer added elements of untruth to make it more attractive to read, and thus convey his lesson more effectively (1.2.9):
Now inasmuch as Homer referred his myths to the province of education, he was wont to pay considerable attention to the truth. ‘‘And he mingled therein’’ a false element also, giving his sanction to the truth, but using the false to win the favor of the populace and to out-general the masses. ‘‘And as when some skillful man overlays gold upon silver,’’ just so was Homer wont to add a mythical element to actual occurrences, thus giving flavor and adornment to his style; but he has the same end in view as the historian or the person who narrates facts.
Pleasure, in effect, became a defining feature of untrue narrative. So, for example, in Lucian’s prologue to the True Histories the pleasure of reading fiction and knowing that it is fiction is strongly stressed. But at the same time the relation to historiography of this pleasure in fiction is problematized (VH 1.4, tr. Reardon):
So when I came across all these writers [i. e., historians who include falsehoods in their history: Lucian has mentioned Ctesias and lambulus by name], I did not feel that their romancing was particularly reprehensible; evidently it was already traditional, even among professed philosophers; though what did surprise me was their supposition that nobody would notice that they were lying. Now, I too in my vanity was anxious to bequeath something to posterity; I did not wish to be the only one to make no use of this liberty in yarn spinning - for I had no true story to relate, since nothing worth mentioning has ever happened to me; and consequently I turned to romancing myself. But I am much more sensible about it than others are, for I will say one thing that is true, and that is that I am a liar. It seems to me that to confess voluntarily to untruthfulness acquits me of the charge, should other people bring it. My subject, then, is things that I have neither seen nor experienced nor heard tell of from anybody else: things, what is more, that do not in fact exist and never could exist at all. So my readers must not believe a word I say.
Lucian here asserts a legitimacy for invention, provided that it does not claim to be that which it is not. At the same time he affects to employ this as a position from which he can attack writers who invented in illegitimate contexts: history and philosophy. And in suggesting that these writers supposed that no one would notice what they were doing, he actually denies the existence of any fictional contract in their texts: he assumes that they intended their readers to believe in the literal truth of what they read, and their failure to carry this belief marks them as unsuccessful liars rather than producers of fiction. However, the True Histories is a text that cannot be taken at face value: the bluff, literal-minded persona that Lucian constructs in this prologue (and who becomes the narrator of the most blatantly fictional narrative imaginable) is distanced from the author by all sorts of irony, so that in a curious way the text as a whole comes to mean nearly the opposite of what it says, and implies that anyone with any sophistication would not object to fiction in history on these grounds. The implicit point is made explicit in a passage of Strabo. Discussing Posidonius’ treatment of the implausible adventures of Eudoxus of Cyzicus, Strabo comments (2.3.5):
Now, really, all this does not fall far short of the fabrications (pseusmata) of Pytheas, Euhemerus and Antiphanes. Those men, however, we can pardon for their fabrications, since they follow precisely this as their business, just as we pardon jugglers; but who could pardon Posidonius?
Strabo here allows that some fictional license may be given to at least some writers of ostensibly factual narrative. Nevertheless, it is clear that he disesteems these authors, and would not extend similar license to ‘‘respectable’’ historians. This comes close to making a generic distinction.
We need to explore this question of‘‘fiction in history’’ a little more broadly, since it is clear that many writers of ‘‘history’’ in antiquity included in their texts material that they must have known to be factually untrue. Since the critical vocabulary of ancient literary theory lagged some distance behind the practice of the most sophisticated writers, and consequently there is no explicit discussion of matters such as the ‘‘fictional contract’’ by any ancient author, some inconsistency in the way this untrue material is received is only to be expected. In the following paragraphs I shall first examine ‘‘mainstream’’ historiography, and then look at some marginal and problematic sub-genres before returning to the novel by an act of ring composition.
Polybius’ strictures against ‘‘tragic’’ historians such as Phylarchus are well known. Motivated by a concern ‘‘that falsehood shall not be allowed to enjoy equal authority with truth’’ (2.56.2), Polybius accuses Phylarchus of trying to arouse his reader’s emotions by graphic descriptions of suffering, and of writing like a tragic poet. He continues (2.56.11):
For the aim of tragedy is by no means the same as that of history, but rather the opposite. The tragic poet seeks to thrill and charm his audience for the moment through the most plausible discourse possible, but the historian’s task is to instruct and persuade serious students by means of true actions and words. . . In the first case the supreme aim is plausibility, even if what is said is untrue, the purpose being to deceive the spectator, but in the second it is truth, the purpose being to benefit the reader.
Any reader who turned to Phylarchus’ history for the sort of pleasure that Polybius decries had already tacitly conceded that factual information was a secondary function, and if Phylarchus wrote his history in order to provide pleasure for his reader, some sort of fictional contract was already in existence. A reader, that is to say, who understood the protocols correctly would have understood that any belief he was being asked to entertain about the events narrated was itself a fiction; for a reader who did not understand, as Polybius clearly did not, Phylarchus was simply a liar. In a work that presented itself as a member of the genre ‘‘history,’’ these protocols must have been exceedingly delicate, but it is abundantly clear that during the Hellenistic period history as a genre became home to novelistic and sensational narrative. Even if the fictional contract was not explicitly articulated by such writers - indeed it never could have been without destroying the very illusion on which their texts were premised - it is the stress on pleasure as a function of historiography that tacitly but effectively activates it.
As we look backwards from Phylarchus, we can trace the leitmotif of pleasure through a number of stages. A crucial document is the opening of the history of Duris of Samos (FGrHist 76 F 1):
Ephorus and Theopompus fell far short of the events. They achieved no mimesis or pleasure in their presentation, but were merely concerned with writing.
This has been much discussed, but it does at least make explicit the proposition that one of the aims of historiography should be pleasure. ‘‘Mere’’ writing will not provide that pleasure. Partly Duris’ conception of mimesis is stylistic, but given that he was a second-generation pupil of Aristotle it is tempting to surmise some connection with Aristotle’s use of the word in the Poetics. In that case, Duris would seem to be arguing that a historiographical text should aim to present its readers with the illusion of a dramatic reenactment of the events it described and implying that the true essence of the past can be more successfully communicated through the exercise of some imagination than through rigid adherence to mere facts (see Morgan 1993: 184-185 for full argument). Some idea of what might be involved is given by a remarkably honest passage of the Roman rhetorician Quintilian (8.3.67), where he suggests that it is not sufficient simply to say that a city was captured, but that the writer should aim for a more vivid effect by including all the pathetic details that generically go with the capture of cities, even if there is no evidence that they occurred in the particular case.
Duris’ interest in the theoretical aspects of historiography no doubt goes back to his teacher Theophrastus, who is reported to have written a work On History Among the list of titles of his work preserved by Diogenes Laertius are such intriguing items as On the pleasure of untruth and On truth and untruth, at whose content, unfortunately, we cannot even guess, though their titles do at least suggest that questions relating to fiction and history were under active discussion in the Peripatos, perhaps as a result of Aristotle’s dismissal of history as less philosophical, because more factual, than tragedy.
Tracing the theme further back, we come, of course, to Thucydides’ programmatic statement in 1.22. In constructing his ideal of truthful, well-researched, and useful history, which may be less pleasurable because of the absence of any mythic (or could we say ‘‘fictional’’?) element, he implies a counter-type which paid less attention to accuracy but which offered its audience more pleasure precisely because it contained to mytheodes. In its context, it is clear enough that this passage is aimed directly at Herodotus, but for the present argument there are two striking but more general points about it. The first is that Thucydides frames the antithesis between his model of history and its opposite as much in terms of the texts’ effect on their audience as in terms of their intrinsic qualities. The second is that the polemical tone of his discussion is a clear indication that he is saying something new and even, to his first readers, counterintuitive. It is as if, up to this moment, Greek audiences were happy to accept the fact that ‘‘history,’’ as a literary form, had pleasure and fiction higher on its agenda than factual accuracy and utility. In defining his new genre, Thucydides is effectively articulating for the first time a writer-reader contract specific to historical texts as we conceive them. Before he penned this chapter, the hard and fast distinction between ‘‘history’’ and ‘‘fiction’’ that underlies the thinking of Polybius and is reflected even in the more intelligent writers I have cited simply did not pertain.
Thucydides brought these issues out into the open, but he clearly did not rout the opposition. Despite the indubitable intellectual power of his enterprise, it is abundantly clear that its influence was limited and that ancient conceptions of what differentiated ‘‘history’’ from ‘‘fiction’’ continued to be more elastic than he and (perhaps) we would like (for broader treatment see Gabba 1981). Not only did writers of historical texts continue to include in their work material which they knew to be untrue; we must also presume that some if not all of their readers received this material in the knowledge (perhaps not even consciously recognized as such) that it was untrue. We can think of the situation as a spectrum running from, at one end, ‘‘pure’’ history in the mold of Thucydides or Polybius, polemically resistant to the dilution of its accuracy, to, at the other extreme, unproblematic fiction such as the novels. In between come works which combine fact and fiction in varying proportions and to varying ends, and which impose themselves as true on their readers to varying extents and with varying degrees of success.
From the standpoint of Thucydides’ program we can look both forward and backward. The argument advanced in the last paragraph but one suggests that Herodotus’ first audience received his work within a generic contract which recognized and admitted but did not define fiction. This is coherent with the stress on wonders in his preface, an agenda which explains the inclusion and elaboration for its own sake of much apparently irrelevant and unhistorical material. Such a formulation might also allow us to sidestep much of the sterile debate on Herodotus’ veracity. (See Moles 1993: 91 n. 5 [with reff.], and his comment, ‘‘In fact, Herodotus’ concern for truth is complex and ambivalent.’’) At the same time, Herodotus’ patent concern for authority (as in the source citations subjected to polemical examination by Fehling 1989), and his ostentatious display of his methodology and critical acumen suggest an emergent awareness of the claims to primacy of historical accuracy. Herodotus is already, then, a transitional figure. One crucial difference from Thucydides and Polybius is, ofcourse, the interest in foreign and exotic places as locations of wonders. Although Thucydides’ rewriting of the historiographical contract inevitably altered the way that future readers were able to engage with Herodotus, compelling them to judge him as a historian by new criteria, in the succeeding generations distant localities continued to host fiction in the guise of historiography. A prime example is Ctesias of Cnidus, who had served as physician to Artaxerxes II and later wrote a history of Persia in twenty-three books, the last seventeen of which are summarized by Photius (Holzberg 1996a). Despite a developed rhetoric of authority and self-justification, it is clear enough that Ctesias was more interested in thrilling stories of love and intrigue than in historical fact as we might conceive it, and actually foreshadowed much of the thematic repertoire of the Greek novel itself; Ctesias is one of the lying historians fingered by Lucian’s True Histories. At roughly the same period the Athenian Xenophon was using a historical Persian frame for his fictional biography of Cyrus. Although the Cyropaedia famously houses the protoromance of Pantheia and Abradatas, its primary function was to demonstrate the art of ruling. Here too the deemphasis of a Thucydidean agenda of factual accuracy in favor of narrative excitement combined with an openly voiced moral purpose was eased by the distance of the setting.
It is against this background that emerges the important sub-genre of quasihistorically framed utopian fictions (Rohde 1914: 178-260; Kytzler 1988; Holzberg 1996b). Book 8 of Theopompus’ Philippica contained a lengthy account, summarized by Aelian (VH 3.18), of the life of men in the continent surrounding the ocean in which
Europe, Asia, and Libya are only an island (Aalders 1978). Although Aelian defies anyone to believe this description and calls Theopompus a ‘‘clever inventor of stories’’ (deinos muthologos), the fiction seems at least to have been distanced from the author by being set in the frame of a conversation between Midas and Silenus (though how that was introduced remains unclear). With two other utopian fictions, the situation is different, in that they were presented in a way that led Diodorus to include them, ostensibly as being factual, in his history of the world: in other words, they relied on tacit protocols of readership rather than explicit statements of distance, and, while both Aelian and Diodorus were - or affected to be - too naive to understand how to read fiction, the difference in their responses to these texts is illuminating and demonstrates the efficacy and dangers of an apparatus of authority in such works. The earlier of Diodorus’ two cases (5.41-46) is the Sacred Inscription of Euhemerus of Messene (Holzberg 1996b: 621 n. 3 raises the possibility that ‘‘Euhemerus’’ was a fictitious name for the narrator), who claimed to have made a number ofvoyages in the service of Cassander, including one to some islands beyond Arabia. It is on the largest of these, Panchaea, that his utopian description is set. It is not clear from Diodorus whether or not the account of Panchaea was presented as part of a travel narrative that would have provided entertaining reading in its own right, but the journey of the narrator did at least provide an apparatus to authenticate the fiction.
The second (Diod. 2.55-60) is an intriguing work by one lambulus, the second offender named by Lucian in the True Histories (again there is a strong case for guessing that ‘‘lambulus’’ is the name of a fictitious narrator; the date is uncertain). The narrator of this was a merchant trading in Arabian spices, who was captured by bandits and then taken to Ethiopia, where he and his companion became scapegoats in a ritual of purification and were cast out to sea in a small boat. After four months they reached a ‘‘blessed island,’’ characterized by a kind of utopian communism, but also by wondrous natural phenomena, including a sort of stripy tortoise with two heads and lots of legs, whose blood had the property of gluing severed limbs back into place. lambulus’ account included not only the outward journey: after seven years in this earthly paradise, he and his friend were forcibly expelled, and made their way back to Greece via India and Persia. It is unclear from Diodorus’ summary and other references to Iambulus how the proportions of travel narrative and utopian description were balanced, or even what the extent of the entire text might have been. At the very least, the apparently autobiographical travel sections served to authenticate the rest, and the implied reader-response appears to be a mixture of philosophical interest and pleasure in the fictional paradoxography. In the absence of the actual text, particularly its introduction, it is impossible to sense how the protocols of belief were negotiated. Of the ancient readers, Diodorus and Lucian, we seem to have one who accepted the work as literally true and another who regarded it as preposterous lies. Clearly neither of those is the correct response to the text, and in this slippery terrain we may suspect that in neither case does the author voice his true reaction. Lucian, in particular, certainly understood how fiction works, and the speaker of the prologue to the True Histories, who then becomes the narrator of his own explicitly fictional adventures, is obviously a fictionally constructed persona, subjected to authorial irony on several levels despite bearing the name of Lucian.
We have already seen that Strabo groups Euhemerus with Antiphanes and Pytheas as inhabitants of a possible literary space where license might be given to untrue narrative. Polybius also records (34.5.10) that Eratosthenes referred to Euhemerus as a ‘‘Bergaean,’’ a reference to Antiphanes’ home town: his work was so transparently untrue that Berga became synonymous with lying historiography (see Weinreich 1942; Romm 1992: 196ff.). The most striking of his few surviving fragments concerns lands in the far north where the climate is so cold that speech freezes in winter and can only be heard when it thaws out in summer (Plut. Mor. 79A). Antiphanes is emblematic of the issue this chapter seeks to address. The textual protocols are subtle and need careful investigation.
At one level, it was clearly possible to read his work within the contract of fiction. To do so would be to disregard the truth-value of his text, and to accept it as one which had no intention to deceive its readers. In this perspective to call another writer ‘‘Bergaean’’ would merely be to extend a similar license to him, which is what Strabo does to Euhemerus and Pytheas in the passage cited earlier. Similarly in another passage (1.3.1) Strabo criticizes Eratosthenes for accepting any information at all from a writer of this type: for him a ‘‘Bergaean’’ text was a wholly fictional one. At the same time, his remarks about Eratosthenes reveal that not everyone (and even Strabo himself is not consistent) was capable of making such a distinction. It seems that for Eratosthenes a ‘‘Bergaean’’ text claimed veracity, and indeed might contain true information: its untruths were therefore falsehoods rather than fictions, and laid their perpetrator open to moral attack. Polybius’ point is similar, though he is even less sensitive to literary positioning. The passage in question is an attack on the travel narrative of Pytheas of Massilia, elements of which Eratosthenes was prepared to take as factually accurate (34.5.9-10):
But Polybius says it is far better to believe the Messenian Euhemerus than Pytheas, for Euhemerus says that he only sailed to one country, Panchaea, but Pytheas says that he personally visited the whole northern coast of Europe as far as the ends of the world, a thing we would not believe even of Hermes himself if he told us so. Eratosthenes, however, he says, calls Euhemerus a Bergaean, but believes Pytheas whom not even Dicaearchus believed.
The polemic here is rather more convoluted. Eratosthenes was prepared to dismiss the testimony of Euhemerus as non-factual - and to Polybius that can only mean lying. But he gave credence to another text whose material and authority Polybius found incredible on narrowly rationalistic grounds. His argument that Euhemerus is factually more reliable than Pytheas because his frame narrative claimed a visit to only one foreign country is, of course, absurdly naive, but it illustrates his exclusive concern with facts and his inability to differentiate between different types of nonfact, except by quantitative measurement of them as lies. Furthermore, the use of the term ‘‘Bergaean’’ in such polemical discourse in effect rewrote the contract under which any new reader could read the work of Antiphanes. Knowing that one’s author had become a byword for lying would rather prejudice the possibility of reading him as a fiction with no intent to deceive.
Paradoxically, Antiphanes brings us full circle back to fiction. I have already mentioned the complex archaeological mise-en-scene that Antonius Diogenes employed to provide a credible fictional provenance for his novel, The Wonders beyond Thule. According to Photius he also cited a list of authorities for the content of each book. The only such authority that Photius names is none other than Antiphanes, whose work, we know, included material on the far north, though we do not know what exactly in his novel Antonius attributed to Antiphanes. Antonius’ was an oddity among the Greek novels of which we know: its love interest was less central, and its plot very much more episodic and travel-centered than was the norm, apparently providing a frame in which the wonders of foreign parts, perhaps extending to the moon, could be recounted. Some of its contents were authentic-seeming enough to find their way as fact into Porphyry’s biography of Pythagoras. It is clear that the novel was thematically concerned with the question of truth in fiction. The very title plays on the double sense of the word apista, conventionally translated as ‘‘wonders’’ but etymologically closer to ‘‘unbelievable things.’’ This can signify both things which are untrustworthy or false, and things which are hard to believe but true. A whole sub-genre of paradoxography depended for its effect on its readers being prepared to accept the truthfulness of its material as a precondition for the wonder which it invited as response (Schepens and Delcroix 1996). So, in a perverted way, for Antonius to draw attention to the incredibility of his text was a strategy to proclaim its truthfulness. At the same time, the whole structure of the novel was an exercise in fictional plausibility, and to call it ‘‘unbelievable’’ was to deconstruct its own ostensible premise. The citation of Antiphanes coheres with this ludic doubleness: formally it provides authority (though an authority logically incompatible with the fiction that the narrative is a rediscovered text allegedly predating the sources its author cites for it), but to a reader aware of the polemic and argument surrounding ‘‘Bergaean’’ texts it would self-referentially position the novel in a tradition of untrue narrative to which a fictional license could be granted. Antonius appears to have been having auto-deconstructive fun with the conventions governing the edges of historiography and fiction.
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Let us draw some of these threads together. To the modern mind history and fiction are virtually antonyms. Some ancient thinkers came close to conceptualizing fiction in the modern way, as an untruth that does intend to deceive, though more often they identified what we would call fiction with lying. Nevertheless, in practice space was often conceded to non-deceptive untruths within works that were generically historiography. It is only with Thucydides’ program that a strictly historical reading contract was formulated, and even then it was not universally applied. Particularly in relation to exotic localities transparently fictitious narratives were given the guise of history, and often the boundaries of believability were deliberately tested. The Greek novels, which clearly were fictions in the modern sense, despite the lack of critical vocabulary to discuss them as such, nevertheless position themselves in relation to historical texts in order to perform the tasks of fiction more effectively: in particular they are concerned to win a suspension of disbelief from their readers. By the time of the Second Sophistic, a few writers of fiction, notably Lucian and Antonius Diogenes, seem to have had characteristically sophisticated fun by gleefully crossing and recrossing the boundaries between plausible fiction and fictional history in such a way as to make their readers aware of the textual assumptions governing both genres. Above all, we must be careful, in reading both ancient fiction and ancient historiography, not to impose our own preconceptions on them.
FURTHER READING
Translations of the extant Greek novels and the more significant summaries and fragments are easily accessible in Reardon 1989. The best general introduction to the ancient novel remains Holzberg 1995; Schmeling 1996 is a useful and wide-ranging collection on all aspects of ancient fiction, including contributions on its borders with historiography. Ancient conceptions of fiction, across a range of literary genres, are examined in Gill and Wiseman 1993; Reardon 1991 attempts a generic definition of the Greek novel, and includes a chapter on ‘‘The Idea of Fiction.’’ Lucian’s theories of fiction, implicit in the True Histories and several other texts, form the subject of Nl Mheallaigh’s forthcoming book (2007). Romm 1992 is a fascinating exploration of the place of fiction in ancient geography, particularly narratives of travel to the furthest regions of the world. The idea that the ancient novel originated as a hybrid of travel narratives with Hellenistic love-elegy was expounded in Rohde’s great work (1914), which remains an indispensable repository of information about such texts, but cannot survive the onslaught of Perry 1967. Within the scope of this chapter it has not been possible to explore a myriad of fascinating fringe texts: there is a good introduction to paradoxography in Schepens and Delcroix 1996, and much pleasure will be gleaned from Hansen’s book on Phlegon of Tralles (1996). An unfortunately unavoidable omission has been fictional biography, such as Philostratus’ Life of Apollonius, to which Bowie’s essay in Morgan and Stoneman 1994 provides a good introduction.
World History
