LITERARY MEMORY AND NEW VOICES IN THE ANCIENT NOVEL, ANCIENT NARRATIVE Supplementum 29, 2022 (2025)

MODERN LITERARY THEORY AND THE ANCIENT NOVEL: POETICS AND RHETORIC, ANCIENT NARRATIVE Supplementum 30, 2022

Modern Literary Theory and the Ancient Novel: Poetics and Rhetoric, edited by Marília P. Futre Pinheiro, Stephen A. Nimis, and Massimo Fusillo, 2022

Modern critical terminology is full of references to ancient literary theory, whose precepts are often used as a starting point for new theories. Unfortunately, the opposite situation does not occur often. While there has been some progress in recent years in applying the methods of modern critical theory and the insights of related disciplines such as narratology, reader-response theory and modern and post-modern criticism to classical literature and specifically to the area of the ancient novel, only sporadically has classical literature been studied and analyzed according to these exegetical trends. The course taken by research in literary studies has also demonstrated that rhetoric is a fundamental discipline forTheory of Literature and for literary praxis. It is not only a science for the future but also a science à la mode, which finds its own place on the edge of structuralism, “New Criticism”, and semiology. In the Greek world under the Roman Empire, the tradition of rhetorical learning reached its heyday in the second century A.D., with the cultural movement named as “Second Sophistic”. Despite the emphasis on rhetoric, literary culture lato senso was was also part of it, granting a special place to poetics and literary criticism. In the wake of this hermeneutical and interdisciplinary approach, the papers assembled in this volume explore significant issues, which are linked to the narrative structure of the ancient novel and to the tradition of rhetorical learning, both envisaged as a web of well-constructed narrative devices.

THE ANCIENT NOVEL AND THE FRONTIERS OF GENRE, ANCIENT NARRATIVE Supplementum 18, 2014 ,

The Ancient Novel and the Frontiers of Genre, ed. Marília P. Futre Pinheiro, Gareth Schmeling, Edmund P. Cueva, 2014

Despite the fact that postmodern aesthetics deny the existence or validity of genres, the tendency nowadays is to assume that there was in Antiquity a homogeneous group of works of narrative prose fiction that, despite their differences, displayed a serious of recurrent, iterative, thematic, and formal characteristics, which allows us to label them novels. The papers assembled in this volume include extended prose narratives of all kind and thereby widen and enrich the scope of the canon. The essays explore a wide variety of texts, crossed genres, and hybrid forms, which transgress the boundaries of the so-called ancient novel, providing an excellent insight into different kinds of narrative prose in antiquity.

The Active Reader and the Ancient Novel

2015

This paper argues that the reading of novels in classical antiquity, like that of other texts, was a more active process than it is imagined to be in the case of modern fiction; rather than surrender oneself to the fictional world of the literary work, ancient readers were accustomed to engage in a dialogue with the text, arguing back, challenging, even accusing it. Various examples of ancient reading practices are offered, from Plutarch and Synesius, to school texts and scholia, along with Virgil, Heraclitus the Allegorist, the Historia Apollonii regis Tyri , and Philip the Philosopher (on Heliodorus’ Aethiopica ). David Konstan is the John Rowe Workman Distinguished Professor of Classics and the Humanistic Tradition, and Professor of Comparative Literature, at Brown University. Among his books are Sexual Symmetry: Love in the Ancient Novel and Related Genres (1994), and The Emotions of the Ancient Greeks (2006). He is currently working on a book on forgiveness in the classi...

Memory and Description in the Ancient Novel

Arethusa, 1998

Greek Novel and Greek Archaic Literature

Cueva/A Companion to the Ancient Novel, 2014

chapter 25 the Iliad and the Odyssey are the primary models for all the Greek novelists. In the language of modern literary criticism, we would say that homeric epos is a necessary hypotext for those fictional prose stories that Greek literature increasingly produces starting from the late hellenistic period. this is true in the first instance for the structure of the novel: a standard Greek novel is nothing else but a rewriting of the Odyssean plot. If we reduce the Odyssey to its nuclear core, the poem is the story of a man (Odysseus) who leaves his home and his family and fights for many years against misfortunes of every kind before coming back to his land and being reunited with his wife (penelope). the Odyssey obeys a principle of circularity both spatial (from Ithaca to Ithaca) and temporal (Odysseus' house after the hero's return regains its ancient splendor, as it was before his departure). the ultimate meaning of the poem is concentrated in the long scene of Book 23, where "he" and "she" are finally together in their wedding bed, as they were every night in the good old days, and tell in turn what they have passed through: the past and retelling the past become conditions for a re-appropriation of self-identity. thus, we have a first point: the "compatibility" of the Odyssey with the standard contents of the Greek love novel. Like the Odyssey, a Greek love novel tells about two lovers who are separated by destiny and undergo a long sequence of misadventures: they travel by sea, face terrible dangers, and must resist the attempts of insidious seducers until they are reunited and can enjoy a happy life together. No wonder the Odyssey has been called "the first Greek novel," and Greek romance has been considered a kind of new epic, adapted to the habits of a post-literate society (perry 1967, 44-54; hägg 1983, 111; reardon 1991, 15-16). the question now is: does the new genre define itself by borrowing themes, patterns, and situations from homeric epic, through a

de Jong, I. J. F., Nünlist, R., Bowie, A. (eds.) Narrators, Narratees, and Narratives in Ancient Greek Literature

Mnemosyne, 2008

"Open" texts and popularised biographical romances in the postclassical age (LIfe of Aesop, Alexander Romance, Historia Apollonii, Secundus, Contest of Homer and Hesiod, Syntipas). Select bibliography for a postgraduate seminar.

Within the multiform field of ancient narrative fiction, a group of anonymous works may be distinguished, all of which were composed during the first centuries of the Roman Empire and share a series of common generic traits. These texts are (according to the titles used in present-day literary-historical research): the Life of Aesop, the Alexander Romance, the later Lives of Homer (including the Contest of Homer and Hesiod), the Story of Apollonius King of Tyre, and the brief Life of Secundus, the Silent Philosopher. All these works are characterised by a linear biographical narration and an open textual tradition, comprising many different redactions and versions in parallel circulation. The central hero and biographee is a kaleidoscopic personality, combining metis and linguistic proficiency with various other roles from the traditional narrative repertoire. All the texts under discussion also operate as multi-collective repositories of all kinds of narrative and gnomic genres (animal fables, novellas, anecdotes, travel legends, fictional epistles, riddles and conundrums, occasional epigrams, wise sayings and commandments, proverbs), which are intercalated into the narrative on various occasions. Above all, the main feature of these texts is their quasi-popular (λαϊκότροπη, “in the folk/popular manner”) aesthetic: the plot and characters are formed on the basis of traditional legends and folktale patterns, while the manner of narration is founded on the techniques of folk storytelling. In the academic year 2022-2023, I am teaching a postgraduate seminar on these works. I upload here a select bibliography of editions, commentaries, and important studies for each one of them, which I have prepared for the needs of the seminar and its participants. I have also added to the aforementioned works the so-called "Book of Syntipas", that great epigone of "Ahiqar" in the medieval period, which shares a number of common features with the "open" biographical romances of late antiquity. In the course of the seminar, we aspire to comparatively investigate the common traits of these works. We will also endeavour to highlight leading motifs and themes which occupy a significant place in poetic texture of the texts under discussion, from the manipulation of time, space, and narrative suspense to eroticism, intellectual contests, travel adventures, and the sagacious attitude towards death. The participants will perhaps come to realise that the sagacity of popularised storytelling is a reflection of the tragic experience in the mirror of the collective imaginary.

"Homeric epic and Archaic Ionian novella". From Homer to Hatzi-Yavrouda: Aspects of oral narration in the Greek tradition. International conference, Danish Institute at Athens, 29 September 2018.

The study of orality in Homer usually concentrates on the oral composition of the Homeric poems, the use of formulaic elements in the epic language, or the connections with the foregoing traditions of epic performance. Another important aspect is often overlooked: namely, the relations of the Homeric corpus with the traditions of oral storytelling, the rich substratum of popular legends, Märchen, and novellas that were widespread in the people’s mouths, throughout the communities of Archaic Greece. An important narrative repertoire in this respect must have been the novellistica of the Ionian world, a thriving production of novellas characterized by piquant or morbid eroticism, suspenseful intrigues, and sensational adventures. This genre is indirectly known through the traces it has left in the works of Herodotus and other logographoi of the Classical period, as well as its influences on the ancient novel. Originally, however, the Ionian novella was a form developed and diffused by word of mouth, and must have flourished already from an early period, parallel to the evolution of heroic epic. The Homeric compositions draw story patterns and plots from the repertoire of the Ionian novella and rework them, usually as incidental episodes or inserted tales; in the Homeric text, of course, the storylines of the novellistica are projected onto the epic world of gods and heroes. In another study I have argued that the story of the adulterous amours of Ares and Aphrodite (Odyssey 8.266–366) and the episode of Hera’s erotic deception of Zeus (Iliad 14.153–351) are based on scabrous comic novellas, which the epic poet has transposed to the domain of the Olympian gods. In this paper I will focus on two other Iliadic specimens, which represent the genre of the “dramatic novella”, otherwise best exemplified in tales of Herodotus and other logographoi, especially in stories about oriental courts and their intrigues. Novellas of this type are usually set in a palace milieu and involve the king, members of the royal family, and courtiers. All these characters are enmeshed in dark passions, illicit love affairs, and disturbing emotions of desire, envy, or hatred; they become involved in complicated guiles and tortuous machinations, which often produce a sombre or tragic outcome. The Homeric examples under discussion, Bellerophon’s life-story (Iliad 6.155–205) and Phoenix’s brief autobiography (ibid. 9.438–495), conform to this narrative form and present many parallels to novelistic tales from other sources — both the early literatures of the Near East and the later romances of the Greco-Roman world. They seem to stem from the same fictional universe as the gloomy and sensational court tales of Herodotus. Bellerophon’s story gathers together a whole series of adventurous and romance-like motifs widespread in the narrative traditions of the ancient Orient: “Potiphar’s wife”, “Uriah’s letter”, and the ordeal of monster-slaying imposed as a result of a love intrigue (a common pattern in Iranian legends, e.g. in the cycle of Gushtāsp). Phoenix’s account adapts in a more solemn mood essentially comic motifs of the scabrous erotic novella: it begins with a variation on the theme of “father and son loving the same woman” (a favourite of later domestic comedy) and culminates with the hero’s sexual impotence and the concomitant personal and social pressures (another widespread motif of piquant storytelling, from the Hittite Schwank of Appu to the tribulations of Encolpius in Petronius’ Satyricon). An interesting aspect of both these tales is that, although they are summarily given, they are full of pregnant formulations and briefly sketched scenes of concentrated force and dramatic potential, which could be developed at greater length in a different performance context. In the Homeric compositions these stories have been condensed, so as to be incorporated as digressions into the epic plot. However, their form hints at an ampler narrative expansion and a wealth of further details, which may have characterized their primary oral diffusion in the context of Ionian storytelling.

The Ancient Novel in Context Syllabus

The concept of a "novel" is highly debated in literary criticism: the absence of a well-defined form or clear generic constraints have led scholars of the novel to postulate a number of different "characteristics" that constitute what a novel is: settings, themes, and plot types stand in for other clearer generic markers (e.g., meter). Even the term "novel" is problematic-as something distinct from a "Romance"-since other languages prefer to classify long extended, fictional prose works under the same heading (der Roman, le roman, il romanzo). This seminar will focus on the reading of seven ancient novels (or romances), five in Greek and two in Latin, all of which were written under the Roman Empire in the first four centuries of the common era. On the Greek side, these are Xenophon of Ephesus' An Ephesian Tale; Chariton's Callirhoe; Longus' Daphnis and Chloe; Heliodorus' An Ethiopian Tale; Achilles Tatius' Leucippe and Cleitophon; and in Latin, Petronius' Satyricon and Apuleius' The Golden Ass. The primary goal of the course is to increase your understanding of one of the most interesting literary genres of the ancient world. To this end, we will be examining the development of the "novel" and assessing each individual author's contribution to the genre. The social context in which these works were produced will be considered, as will their differences from and similarities to modern novels. We will also read some examples from the "fringes" of the genre, such as the Life of Aesop, the Ass, Lucian's True History and The Acts of Paul and Thecla.

On Literacy and Orality in the Ancient Novel