One of the most ambitious attempts to define ancient Greek narrative, and one of the most influential to date, is Erich Auerbach’s bookMimesis. In the famous opening chapter, written in Istanbul in 1942, Auerbach argues that Homeric narrative is all surface and illuminated detail, whereas the Hebrew Bible is elliptic, deep and demanding of its reader.¹ To this day,Mimesisinforms what modern readers see as characteristic of Homeric narrative,² and of classical Greek literature more generally: for that reason alone, it seems important to revisit it in this volume. I would like to take the opportunity to consider...

How do we define ancientGreeknarrative? The theme of this volume, and the conference on which it is based, is more than a timely one. Thanks to the efforts of many scholars – Walter Burkert and Martin West above all – classicists now take very seriously the role of comparative study in helping to illuminate the culture of early archaic Greece, usually by listing apparently parallel phenomena in the many civilisations of the ancient Near East (hereafter ANE).¹ Whilst the broadening of horizons in this way must be a welcome development, not all of the new vistas are equally fair, and...

This chapter will consider three aspects of Homeric narrative whose interaction produces characteristic and influential effects. The first, and most famous, is reliance on direct speech.¹ Homer accomplishes his characterisations largely through speeches (including speeches in which characters attribute motives or traits to each other).² By itself, Homer’s reliance on direct speech does not mark a uniquely Greek narrative tradition, since Sanskrit epic, for example, also presents many speeches. Furthermore, the evidence suggests that in this respect the Homeric epics were outliers in early Greek epic tradition (Aristotle,Poetics1460a5—11), and Apollonius uses direct speech far less than the...

‘Defining Greek narrative’ poses an interesting challenge for Homerists, like myself, committed to the proposition that the epics reflect the compositional practices of oral poetry the world over.¹ In terms of formal approaches, many scholars, including contributors to this volume, have found it productive to apply narratology to elucidate Homer, a methodology with greater universalising assumptions than oral theory. Nevertheless, an aspect of the epics that I believe is distinctive, and in certain respects unique, is the ways in which they manipulate traditional conventions so as to guide reception. Although Scodel rightly cautions against assuming homogeneous audiences of epic connoisseurs,...

This chapter investigates the role of what I shall call the ‘principle of alternation’ (the idea that no human life is free of suffering, that the best one can expect is a mixture of good and bad fortune) in (some) ancient Greek narratives. This is not a narratological study in the traditional, formalist sense, but rather reflects my own interests in Greek social and ethical norms and especially in the sociality of emotion in ancient Greek societies. In its broadest terms, its affiliations are with recent approaches, especially those influenced by the cognitive sciences, that see the human species’ storytelling...

If modern narratology has a point of origin, or its own aetiology, then Odysseus’ words to Alcinous at the start of Book 9 of theOdysseyhave as good a claim as any to take pride of place:

σοὶ δ’ ἐμὰ κήδεα θυμὸς ἐπετράπετο στονόεντα

εἴρεσθ’, ὄφρ’ ἔτι μᾶλλον ὀδυρόμενος στεναχίζω.

τί πρῶτόν τοι ἔπειτα, τί δ’ ὑστάτιον καταλέξω;

κήδε’ ἐπεί μοι πολλὰ δόσαν θεοὶ Οὐρανίωνες. 15

νῦν δ’ ὄνομα πρῶτον μυθήσομαι, ὄφρα καὶ ὑμεῖς

εἴδετ’, ἐγὼ δ’ ἂν ἔπειτα φυγὼν ὕπο νηλεὲς ἦμαρ

ὑμῖν ξεῖνος ἔω καὶ ἀπόπροθι δώματα ναίων.

But your spirit has determined to ask about my...

‘The second task required of a writer of an historical work (the first task being to select a suitable subject) is to decide where to begin and how far to go.’¹ The fundamental questions of ‘where to begin’ and ‘where to end’ must be as old as literature itself. They automatically pose themselves to any would-be poet or author. Moreover, passages such asOd.9.14 show that, from an early stage, poets openly addressed the questions ‘What then shall I recount first, what last?’ (albeit here in the voice of the character Odysseus at the beginning of his long narrative...

It is clear that Sappho’s poems, so far as we can reconstruct them, are not ‘narratives’ in the ordinary sense, even if we do not wish to accept the argument that lyric and narrative are naturally opposed.¹ There is an obvious difference between the kind of story being told in Sappho fr. 94, where the speaker asks a girl who is leaving to remember their gentle pleasures together, and the extended heroic narrative of theIliad. But how are we to frame that difference in terms of narrative? More specifically, can a poem like fr. 94 (already compromised by its...

Greek melic narratives are on the whole small-scale compositions and as a rule illustrate some aspect of the occasion for which they are composed, which is sometimes specified, sometimes implied and sometimes left totally unclear. In this chapter I focus on the occasion in order to explore the stimulus it offers for the composition of new narratives either for the same or for a related, subsequent occasion.

Pindar’s songs for the Emmenids of Acragas will serve as my main test-case because (1) they constitute an interesting sequence of songs which call attention to their occasion, thus allowing assessment of the...

This chapter sets out to look for what was distinctive about Greek practice in the staging of tragic stories. There is no doubt that this new art form of the late sixth and early fifth centuries was a highly original experiment, with no obvious model in other cultures, but of course the early dramatists did not have to start from scratch. The epic and lyric traditions offered them a great range of serious narratives which had already been shaped for performance, whether by rhapsodes or by choruses, and without this precedent it would be hard to imagine Attic tragedy having...

Scholars who work on Greek historiography tend to focus on the differences: Herodotus is the charming one who passes on local traditions; Thucydides is cynical about human nature and leaves religion out of history; Xenophon writes autobiographical history and peppers his work with intriguing dialogues; Polybius produced a handbook for statesmen, but is torn between Greece and Rome; Diodorus Siculus is only as good as his source; and so forth. But when we focus on these differences we often forget that, in fact, the works of Greek historiography, at least until the first century bc, are much more similar to...

At the end of his novel,Aethiopica, Heliodorus identifies himself thus:

τοιόνδε πέρας εσχε τò σύνταγμα των περί Θεαγένην καί Χαρίκλειαν Αίθιοπικών· ο συνέταξεν άνήρ Φοΐνιξ Έμισηνός, των άφ’Ήλίου γένος Θεοδοσίου παΐς Ηλιόδωρος.

So concludes theAethiopica, the story of Theagenes and Charicleia, the work of a Phoenician from the city of Emesa, one of the clan of Descendants of the Sun, Theodosius’ son, Heliodorus. (10.41.4)¹

There are many systems of identity at work in this single sentence, but the crucial point is that the author appears to define himself, in terms of race, city and religious affiliation, as something...

For as long as I have studied ancient historiography, one aspect in particular has been especially fascinating to me: the continual concern of many authors about their readers and the potential effect their narratives have on them. Or, to be more precise: what am I to do, howam I to write, in order to prevent the reader from becoming bored and –horribile dictu– from putting down the scroll and quitting communication with the author altogether.

Dealing with the reader in antiquity is, needless to say, always tricky, because our knowledge is far from sufficient to take an empirical approach towards...

For those working on ancient texts in a modern world which puts a high value (in different ways) on the ‘relevance’ and ‘impact’ of scholarly research, it is beguiling and seductive to discern ancient analogues or equivalents even for such seemingly modern forms as the novel,¹ as well as for genres whose antiquity is more transparent, such as the epic poem. A very understandable critical excitement has also been in evidence with regard to a special category of the novel, the novel in letters or epistolary novel (Briefroman), since there are several collections of Greek letters surviving from antiquity which...

Italo Calvino’s novelIf on a Winter’s Night a Travellerof 1979 famously revolves around a reader in search of a book that he has started to read but that turns out to be incomplete. The book’s opening sentences tell of a traveller arriving on a winter’s night at the small station of a provincial town. In the final chapter the reader ends up in a library where one of the other readers warns him that finding the book will be very difficult since ‘ once upon a time they all began like that, all novels. There was somebody who...