The contact zones between the Greco-Roman world and the Near East represent one of the most exciting and fast-moving areas of ancient-world studies. This new collection of essays, by world-renowned experts (and some new voices) in classical, Jewish, Egyptian, Mesopotamian and Persian literature, focuses specifically on prose fiction, or 'the ancient novel'. Twenty chapters either offer fresh readings - from an intercultural perspective - of familiar texts (such as the biblical Esther and Ecclesiastes, Xenophon of Ephesus' Ephesian Story and Dictys of Crete's Journal), or introduce material that may be new to many readers: from demotic Egyptian papyri through old Avestan hymns to a Turkic translation of the Life of Aesop. The volume also considers issues of methodology and the history of scholarship on the topic. A concluding section deals with the question of how narratives, patterns and motifs may have come to be transmitted between cultures.
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Twenty essays by renowned scholars explore contact between Greece and the Ancient Near East through the medium of prose fiction.
| Notes on contributors |
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viii | |
| Acknowledgements |
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xiii | |
| Abbreviations |
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xiv | |
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1 The romance between Greece and the East |
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1 | (22) |
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2 Greek fiction and Egyptian fiction: are they related, and, if so, how? |
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23 | (15) |
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38 | (21) |
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4 Imitatio Alexandri in Egyptian literary tradition |
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59 | (20) |
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5 Divine anger management: the Greek version of the Myth of the Sun's Eye (P.Lond.Lit. 192) |
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79 | (12) |
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6 Fictions of cultural authority |
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91 | (14) |
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PART II MESOPOTAMIANS AND IRANIANS |
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105 | (12) |
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8 The Greek novel Ninus and Semiramis: its background in Assyrian and Seleucid history and monuments |
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117 | (10) |
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9 Ctesias, the Achaemenid court, and the history of the Greek novel |
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127 | (15) |
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10 Iskander and the idea of Iran |
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142 | (23) |
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PART III JEWS AND PHOENICIANS |
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11 Josephus' Esther and diaspora Judaism |
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165 | (18) |
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12 The eastern king in the Hebrew Bible: novelistic motifs in early Jewish literature |
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183 | (13) |
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13 Lost in translation: the Phoenician Journal of Dictys of Crete |
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196 | (15) |
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14 Milesiae Punicae: how Punic was Apuleius? |
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211 | (14) |
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15 The victory of Greek Ionia in Xenophon's Ephesiaca |
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225 | (18) |
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243 | (18) |
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PART V TRANSMISSION AND RECEPTION |
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17 Does triviality translate? The Life of Aesop travels East |
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261 | (24) |
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285 | (15) |
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19 Orality, folktales and the cross-cultural transmission of narrative |
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300 | (22) |
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20 History, empire and the novel: Pierre-Daniel Huet and the origins of the romance |
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322 | (14) |
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| References |
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336 | (55) |
| Index |
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391 | |
Tim Whitmarsh is Professor of Ancient Literatures and E. P. Warren Praelector, Fellow and Tutor in Classics at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. He has published widely on ancient prose fiction, including Narrative and Identity in the Ancient Greek Novel: Returning Romance (Cambridge, 2011), and edited The Cambridge Companion to the Greek and Roman Novel (Cambridge, 2008). He is currently writing a book on religious scepticism in antiquity. Stuart Thomson is a doctoral student at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, specialising on Clement of Alexandria.
