Chapter One
Truth in Lying
In the second century of our era, probably in the final decade of the reign of the philosophic emperor Marcus Aurelius (the years from 170 to 180), two very different Greek writers addressed a problem that conspicuously unsettled thoughtful people of the time. These writers both struggled to sort out truth from fiction in a world that seemed hopelessly to intermingle and confuse them, a world in which the boundaries between creative imagination and willful mendacity, between fiction and lying, often proved impossible to determine. At least from the age of Homer the history of the Mediterranean lands had been so encrusted with myth and legend that the Greeks and Romans, who came to control that world, found it hard to distinguish corrosion from the hard core. The time of the heroes merged with the achievements of Solon and Cleisthenes, and Romulus, Remus, and Numa were the predecessors of the Gracchi and Cicero. If a sophisticated author was aware of the difference, as Plutarch seemed to be when he undertook his biography of the Athenian hero Theseus, his awareness hardly deterred him.[1] He had already written the lives of Romulus and Numa.
The problem that confronted those two Greek writers in the time of Marcus Aurelius was therefore not a new one. But in their day it acquired a special urgency because apparent fictions about both past and present were proliferating at a rate that the classical world had scarcely seen before. The ease of communication and transport in the Roman empire meant that local marvels were local no more. They soon merged into an international conglomerate of fantasy and the supernatural. History was being invented all over again; even the mythic past was being rewritten, and the present was awash in so many miracles and marvels that not even the credulous or the pious could swallow them all.
The two Greek writers gave their works strikingly similar titles. Celsus, an eloquent and venomous pagan apologist, entitled his A True Discourse
, and Lucian, the most imaginative and stylish satirist that the ancient world ever produced, entitled his, an effervescent fantasy, True Stories
. This latter work is perhaps better known to students of literature by its conventional Latin title, Vera Historia (True History) . What is important is that these two contemporary writers chose to signal the issue of truth as they did: "True 
and "True 
." The fiction or lies that exercised them could not have been more different. Yet their
targets represented two extremities of the same spectrum of fabrication.
The fiction and mendacity that Celsus wished to expose in his True Discourse were nothing less than the Christian representation of the life and death of Jesus Christ. "We must examine this question," wrote Celsus, "whether anyone who really died ever rose again with the same body."[2] Celsus knew of course all the pagan parallels to the resurrection, but he considered them no less fiction than the story of Jesus itself. After all, as Celsus observed, Jesus did not help himself when he was alive, and yet (to quote Celsus's text), "after death he rose again and showed the marks of his punishment and how his hands had been pierced. But who saw this? A hysterical female, as you say, and perhaps some other one of those who were deluded by the same sorcery, who either dreamt in a certain state of mind and through wishful thinking had hallucinations due to some mistaken notion (an experience which has happened to thousands), or, which is more likely, wanted to impress the others by telling this fantastic tale, and so by this cock-and-bull story to provide a chance for other beggars."[3]
These belligerent words, along with much more of Celsus's text, have fortunately survived because the Christian apologist Origen saw fit a century afterward to offer a detailed refutation of them. The Church itself thereby saw to the preservation of a large part of the True Discourse , and it is from Origen we learn that Celsus chose a novelistic setting for his invective. He conjured up a Jew talking to other Jews who had been converted to the teachings of Jesus. It cannot escape the reader's notice that
[2] Celsus, quoted in Origen, Contra Celsum 2.55, given here and elsewhere in the translation by H. Chadwick, Origen: Contra Celsum (Cambridge, 1953).
[3] Ibid .
Celsus has launched his attack on Christianity by creating a fictional setting of his own. In other words, Celsus has created a fiction in order to expose other people's fiction. Of course he is not claiming that his Jewish interlocutor is a real person. His is the kind of fiction that we clearly know to be fiction. But he saw in the Gospel stories another order of fabrication in which there was a claim to historical truth. The truth of Celsus's discourse obviously does not lie in his scenario but in what is said in the scenario. The alleged truth is embedded in the fiction, and Origen understood this perfectly well.
By contrast, the satirist Lucian, although aware of the Christians of his time, was hardly concerned with them when he wrote his True Stories . But he was as much concerned as Celsus with the disappearance of traditional boundaries and markers between veracity and falsehood. His True Stories are all sheer fantasy, delightful to read and wildly improbable. They include a voyage to the moon, a sojourn in the belly of a whale, and a visit to the illustrious dead. Lucian draws on literary traditions as old as Homer and pays explicit homage to his ancient predecessors in the art of narrating the fabulous, Ctesias of Cnidos and Herodotus, the Father of History.[4] These two classic writers had spawned generations of other fabulous tale tellers and paradoxographers, all of whom served as Lucian's antecedents. Lucian himself said that the knowledgeable reader would be able to detect allusions to his many predecessors in what he was writing.[5] So Lucian's True Stories are meant clearly as a literary
[4] Lucian, Vera Hist . 1.3 (Ctesias and Homer), and 2.31 on those who told lies when they were alive, Ctesias and Herodotus being named explicitly.
entertainment in the first instance. As he wrote in his opening lines, serious literary people ought to relax from time to time with "such works as not only afford wit, charm, and distraction, pure and simple, but also provoke some degree of cultured reflection 
."[6]
Now cultured reflection points to a more serious aspect of the fantastic tales that Lucian has cheekily chosen to designate True Stories . The one thing they are not is true.[7] Lucian is very candid about this. "I had no true story to relate," he declared, "since nothing worth mentioning had ever happened to me, and consequently I turned to romancing. 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 .... My readers must not believe a word I say." Reincarnating the Cretan paradox of Epimenides, Lucian declares that the only true statement in his work is that he is a liar, and he knows perfectly well that this means that the reader has no basis for believing that statement either.
Lucian tries to pull down the distinction between fiction that we accept as fiction and fiction that is presented as a record of
[6] Ibid .
[7] Ibid . 1.4. The self-consciously false claim to truth in a clearly fabulous narrative recurs in a great twentieth-century work that owes perhaps even more to Lucian than to Gogol (its more obvious inspiration): M. Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita . At the end of Book x we read, "The time is approaching to move into the second half of this true story." In the first chapter of Book z a sentence begins, "I, the truthful narrator, yet a mere onlooker .... "(Note that Lucian's Vera Historia is also in two books.) The extreme, often grotesque fantasies of Bulgakov create a vivid feeling of life in Moscow in the 1920s and 1930s, and the suppression of this novel by Soviet authorities for more than twenty years after the author's death in 1940 is proof of its historical truth despite its literal absurdities. Much the same could probably be said of Lucian's Vera Historia as a document of its time.
real events. Everything, by his own admission, is lies. Yet what Lucian describes inevitably reflects, all too obviously, the world in which he lives. This can be no accident. The people of the moon are at war with the people of the sun, but eventually they conclude a peace treaty that mirrors in its terms and language, as well as in the oath that concludes it, the traditional peace treaties of the Greeks. The games of the dead in the underworld are a faithful reflection of the athletic and literary competitions that were the pride of the great Greek cities of the Roman empire.[8] Aristophanes and Homer are given reverential treatment that reflects their position in Lucian's own day.[9] All this means that when Lucian claims that his True Stories are all lies, that paradoxical claim itself must be included among the lies. Nor should this be surprising, inasmuch as falsehoods are always an integral part of the world in which they are disseminated. This is a truth that is as important for historians as for politicians.
It is symptomatic of the time that both Celsus and Lucian should proclaim truth even as they immerse themselves in fiction, that they should attack fiction by creating fiction, that they should confuse lies and admitted fabrication. Lucian makes it clear that it would surely be reassuring to his cultivated readers to know at the outset that what they are reading is all mendacious. Yet, as they read on, they discover that in some respects
[8] On all this, see the magisterial study by Louis Robert, "Lucien en son temps," in À travers l'Asie Mineure (1980), pp. 393-436, esp. 427-32 on Vera Historia ("Le concours dans l'Île des Bienheureux"). See also C. P. Jones, Culture and Society in Lucian (1986), pp. 52-55.
[9] Aristophanes: Lucian, Vera Hist . 1.29: "a wise and truthful man, whose works arouse undeserved disbelief" (in Reardon's excellent translation). For Homer, see esp. Vera Hist . 2.15 ("Homer's poetry being very popular"), and 2.20 on Homer's birthplace as "a bone of contention on earth to this very day."
it is not. This is the reverse of the experience of readers like Celsus confronted with the Gospel narratives. There they are under the impression that this is an accurate record of what happened, but, as they read on, they have the disquieting feeling that some of it may or must be mendacious. Celsus and Lucian thus give us two sides of the same coin, and this coin is perhaps the most important currency in the intellectual commerce of the Roman Empire.
Homer, Herodotus, Ctesias, Xenophon (in his account of the education of Cyrus), and many other engaging and less than reliable narrators had been familiar for centuries in classical antiquity. Myths and legends existed in a bewildering variety of forms. Hellenistic scholars at Alexandria were well employed in trying to sort them out. But, despite the protestations of Hecataeus long ago, who advanced his own claims to truth by denouncing the absurdity of what the Greeks were saying, fiction did not seem to be a problem.[10] In the first century B.C. , Cicero could proclaim Herodotus with equanimity as the Father of History and then go on to denounce him as the author of innumerable fabulous tales.[11] History had simply become the plot—what happened or what was said to have happened. It was different from biography, as Plutarch and others struggled to demonstrate;[12] it was the received account of the past that reached back into mythical times without a break. For Herod-
[11] Cicero, De Legibus 1.5: "et apud Herodutum, patrem historiae, et apud Theopompum sunt innumerabiles fabulae."
otus the word 
could mean a serious investigation or piece of research, but for the later Greeks and all the residents of the Roman empire, the word generally meant the story as it was known and told—the plot. Disruptions of history in this sense could therefore be highly disturbing, breaking the familiar patterns that linked past with present, and, at the same time, signaling changes for the future. The violation of history as plot or the rewriting of it constituted a rupture in the cultural tradition.
In a small but telling way an epigram of the Greek satiric poet Lucillius, from the time of the emperor Nero, illustrates this whole process. The poet addresses a dancer of female roles who afforded general pleasure to viewers by performing mythological ballets according to the stories that everyone knew: 
, "you danced everything according to the story."[13] But the satirist is vexed—very vexed—by the dancer's failure to enact the suicide of a figure who was well known to have killed herself after an incestuous affair with her brother. "You had a sword," says the poet, "but yet left the stage alive: that was not according to the story" 
.
This poem had a conspicuous resonance in the work of Martial, a Latin satiric poet of the next generation. Among the epigrams he wrote to commemorate the opening of the great Roman amphitheater that we know today as the Colosseum are some lines describing a representation of Orpheus on the stage.[14] Everyone knew, and presumably still knows, that Orpheus charmed the animals with his beautiful music. The Roman production staff created fabulous stage machinery, so, as Martial put it, "cliffs crept by and marvelous woods sped swiftly on." We read that every kind of wild beast was there, and Orpheus himself
[13] Anth. Pal . 11.254.
[14] Martial, Lib. Spectac . 1.21.
made his music as birds hovered overhead. But then a bear came out and tore him to pieces. This surprising dénouement, a poor recognition of Orpheus's musical talent, constitutes the point of Martial's epigram: haec tanrum res est facta
, "this thing alone was done not according to the story."[15]
Rewriting the past—the intrusion of fiction into what was taken to be history—becomes from this period of Lucillius and Martial an increasingly conspicuous feature of the Graeco-Roman world. Origen strained every nerve in the third century to confute Celsus's elaborate attempt to expose the Gospel narratives as fiction, and yet he had to admit that fabrication had already thrown the objectivity of what he considered the historical past into considerable doubt. "We are embarrassed," he wrote, "by the fictitious stories which for some unknown reasons are bound up with the opinion, which everyone believes, that there really was a war in Troy between the Greeks and the Trojans."[16] This remark from a man of Origen's consummate learning gives pause. "Everyone believes," he says confidently, "that the Trojan War really took place," but the tradition has been seriously contaminated in his View by the appearance of fictitious stories. In saying this he reflects a general indifference to the distinction between history and myth. And at the same time he reports on a phenomenon that can be well documented— the rewriting of the old stories.[17]
[15] For the brilliant and definitive establishment of the text of Martial in this line, see A. E. Housman, "Two Epigrams of Martial," CR 15 (1901), 154-55, reprinted in The Classical Papers of A. E. Housman , ed. J. Diggle and F. R. D. Goodyear, vol. 2 (1972), pp. 536-38.
[16] Origen, Contra Celsum 1.42 (trans. H. Chadwick).
[17] Note, in this regard, the important observation by J. R. Morgan, "Make Believe and Make Believe," in Lies and Fiction in the Ancient World , ed. C. Gill and T. P. Wiseman (1993), p. 176: "Whereas all novels are fiction, not all fictions are novels."
The dilemma that confronted Origen had troubled the philosophical writer Sextus Empiricus a few generations earlier. Sextus's analysis of the nature of historical or quasi-historical narrative drew on Hellenistic theories best known to us through Cicero, but Sextus formulated the problem in what is perhaps the single most important meditation on fiction and falsity from the time of the Roman empire.[13] In a polemic against the teaching of literature by grammarians in the imperial system of education, Sextus dwells at one point on what he calls "the historical part" 
of 
(grammar in the broad, ancient sense). This part of the subject is concerned with narratives, stories that are told—
. According to Sextus there are three kinds of such narratives: history, fiction 
, and myth. History, he says, is the presentation 
of truths and of what actually happened; 
, of things that did not happen but resemble things that have happened; myth, of things that did not happen and are false 
, such as stories of the Titans, the Gorgon, or Hecabe turning into a dog.[19] Several times Sextus links together the nonexistent
and the false, even as he raises the issue of truth in plausible fictions.
Sextus directs his polemic against the grammarians for the particular reason that these teachers have not supplied any criteria for determining truth in narrative. That means that it is impossible to say what reports can constitute history, inasmuch as history on his definition must narrate what is true and what has really happened. Furthermore, the absence of criteria for truth also means, as Sextus illustrates in detail, that it is equally impossible to say which divergent myths or fictions 
are true, and which are false. The significance of this criticism is manifest in an age, such as the late second century, so accustomed to the revision of old myths and the fabrication of historical romances. Sextus's criticism also provides the conceptual background that allowed a Lucian to talk about true stories while publicly acknowledging that he was telling lies. Lucian was playing upon the idea that fiction can be—although it is not necessarily—true. This idea was nicely phrased in the last decade by the French scholar Paul Veyne when he wrote, "Men do not find the truth; they create it, as they create their history."[20]
Serious Homeric revisionism spans most of the period of the Roman empire, beginning with several elaborate attempts to invent a pre-Homeric non-Greek perspective on the Trojan War. The works that have survived under the names of Dares the Phrygian and Dictys the Cretan are both important parts of this revisionist effort. Not long before Origen was writing, the sophist Philostratus and the poet Serenus Sammonicus had also taken further steps in this same heretical direction. In the early second century Philo of Byblos had produced a history of the ancient
[20] P. Veyne, Did the Greeks Believe in Their Myths? trans. P. Wissing (1988), p. xii.
Phoenicians that claimed to be a rendering in Greek of a Semitic account composed before the Trojan War.[21] As Philo liked to point out, his amazing discovery of this venerable text impugned the veracity of all the traditional Greek stories about the Phoenicians. So for a person imbued in classical Greek culture, as the Christian Origen most certainly was, these developments were nothing less than shocking. They also posed problems in trying to prove why the relatively recent, allegedly historical narratives from Palestine should not be construed as fiction when so much else could be.
For any coherent and persuasive interpretation of the Roman empire it becomes obvious that fiction must be viewed as a part of its history. We have long grown accustomed to hearing of late that history itself is a fiction, or rhetoric, or whatever. The ancients would not have found that a particularly surprising doctrine, inasmuch as they drew only a faint line between myth and history and, as Cicero put it, considered the writing of history an opus oratorium —a rhetorical work.[22] But the overt creation of fiction as a means of rewriting or even inventing the
[21] See L. Troiani, L'opera storiografica di Filone da Byblos (1974). The fragments of Philo may be examined in FGH III.C.790. Dares and Dictys will be treated later in this chapter, and Philostratus's Heroicus will be taken up in Chapter III. For the Res Reconditae of Serenus Sammonicus, cf. Macrob. Sat . 3.9.6, with other references cited in G. W. Bowersock, Greek Sophists in the Roman Empire (1969), p. 107.
[22] Cicero, De Legibus 1.5: "quippe cum sit opus, ut tibi quidem videri solet, unum hoc oratorium maxime." In the current debate, Hayden White's Metahistory (1973) is still central. Cf. the response by A. Momigliano, "The Rhetoric of History and the History of Rhetoric: On Hayden White's Tropes," Comparative Criticism: A Year Book , vol. 3, ed. E. S. Shaffer (1981), pp. 259-68, reprinted in Settimo contributo alla storia degli studi classici e del mondo antico (1984), pp. 49-59.
past was a serious business for many of the ancients, and for us the enormous increase in fictional production of all kinds during the Roman empire poses major questions of historical interpretation. There was as much truth or falsehood in fiction as in history itself. Fiction must necessarily include not only overt works of the imagination, such as the novels and Lucian's True Stories , but also the rewriting of the mythic and legendary past as part of the creation of a new and miraculous present. As Sextus Empiricus shows, all this belonged to the class of narratives 
, comprising realistic fiction and myths no less than history.
The immense body of fictional narratives that we tend to call novels today must be seen within this larger context of fabrication and rewriting. Some of these narratives are set in remote historical times, others in the present, but all are eloquent and detailed witnesses to the age in which they were composed. If they do not purport to be a historical record of facts in the same way as the Trojan narrative of Dictys the Cretan or the Christian Gospels, they nonetheless constitute a rich and essential part of any history that we might wish to write of the time in which they were composed. Nor are the novels themselves homogeneous. The Greek romances offer a look into the diverse and far-flung societies of the Mediterranean world that is very different from the much more narrow perspectives of the Latin writers Petronius and Apuleius (despite the probable Greek antecedents of both).
The richness and importance of fiction for the historian of the Roman empire has been little investigated or appreciated. This neglect seems largely to have been the result of the way philologists and literary critics handled it. For one thing the novels have tended to be studied independently of other fictional forms. In 1876 Erwin Rohde published his pioneering work Der griechische Roman , opening up the whole field and exploring it with
exceptional learning and clarity. But instead of provoking further work as creative as his own, Rohde's book only brought forth generations of scholarly sheep that either followed along faithfully or turned the other way but nonetheless lived entirely in dependence upon their shepherd. There were two principal problems in Rohde's conceptual scheme: first, he isolated the genre of the novel from everything else, and second, he overemphasized the problem of origins or antecedents of extant works. With works of imaginative literature there is nothing more ruinous for historical understanding than genre theory or a mindless search for antecedents, origins, and distant parallels. If Rohde could connect the Greek novel with tales of travel and Hellenistic eroticism (as he did) and throw in a generous dosage of rhetoric of the so-called Second Sophistic (as he did), he thought that in that way he had actually explained and interpreted the phenomenon of the Greek novel. Papyri subsequently proved the barrenness of his method by revealing that he had presupposed dates for the extant works that were far too late—erroneous by several centuries.[23]
Yet Rohde's schematic handling of the novels was infinitely better than the interpretations of his critics, of whom Eduard Schwartz is a good representative.[24] Schwartz, like Wilamowitz (who applauded Schwartz's lectures on the Greek novel), had so firm a preconception as to what Hellenism was that he was incapable of understanding it.[25] He believed that all novelistic
[23] Cf. E. Bowie, "The Greek Novel," in Cambridge History of Classical Literature , vol. 1 (1985), pp. 683-99.
[24] E. Schwartz, Füinf Vorträge über den griechischen Roman , with an introduction by A. Rehm, 2d ed. (1943).
[25] U. von Wilamowitz in Deutsche Literaturzeitung 23 (1902), 3219, claiming that Schwartz had destroyed the foundations of Rohde's work. Cf. M. H. Chambers, Georg Busolt: His Career in Letters, Mnemosyne Supplement 113 (1990), p. 59, n. 49. Of course, Wilamowitz had a deeply rooted antipathy to Rohde because of the quarrel over Nietzsche and Wagner.
fiction was completely un-Greek and had to be explained by degenerate influences either from the Latin West, as in the case of Petronius, or from the Semitic East, as in the case of Lucian and others. For Schwartz, who declared that true Hellenism among the Syrians penetrated no farther than their epidermis or that Greeks in Italy found an alien growth in their garden, the Graeco-Roman world and the Greeks themselves could only be grotesquely misrepresented.[26]
Prose fiction needs to be considered in a broad context, broader than the novel alone. To talk, as some do, of the world of the Golden Ass or the world of the Greek novel is to suggest that these works somehow have a separate, self-contained world of their own, whereas they ought to be seen as part of something larger, which is the Graeco-Roman empire. It is certainly necessary, as a first step, to identify the explicit historical references that can be captured and identified in works of fiction. Fergus Millar has done this expertly for Apuleius.[27] But this can be only a beginning. All these fictional works deserve to be considered in relation to a larger, kaleidoscopic historical context.
In the last few decades the novels have attracted the attention of a vigorous battalion of literary scholars, but not even their work has much percolated to literary criticism outside the clas-
[26] Cf. Schwartz (n. 24 above), pp. 149-50: "die gewandten, ehrgeizigen Syrer, denen das Echthellenische nur bis zur Epidermis ging .... "It is hardly surprising that Schwartz's lectures were reprinted appreciatively in 1943.
[27] F. Millar, "The World of the Golden Ass," JRS 71 (1981), 63-75.
sical field. As Bryan Reardon observed recently, Northrop Frye, in his important book on romance as a kind of secular scripture, seemed blissfully unaware of one of the most important and probably the earliest of the extant ancient novelists.[28] If Lucian and Sextus Empiricus serve to illustrate the complexity and significance of the growth of fiction in the second century, the emperor Julian, in the fourth, shows himself no less preoccupied with the problem. He complains in his puritanical way about a renewed popularity of fictional works composed in earlier times in the form of history: 
.[29] That word 
was, as we have seen in Sextus, the standard expression for fictions in Greek of this period, and it was also closely associated with dramatic works for the theater as well as with prose narratives.
Drama as we know it was, of course, another traditional area of literary fabrication, but the conventions of the stage and the verse in which the plays were written made them less easily assimilated to narrative history. Yet the scenes, dénouements, and emotional excitements of the two genres could be remarkably similar. Heliodorus's Ethiopian romance is shot through, as many have recognized, with the language and conventions of the stage.[30] In Greek the verbs for "to make comedy" and "to make tragedy" (
and 
) could be used without strain simply to mean "making fun of" something and "making grandiose exaggerations." In a memorable passage in the writings of Galen from the mid-second century, the great doctor
[28] B. P. Reardon, The Form of Greek Romance (1991), p. 17, with reference to N. Frye, The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance (1976). Frye totally disregarded Chariton.
[29] Julian, Epist . 89b, 301b (Bidez).
[30] E.g., S. Bartsch, Decoding the Ancient Novel (1989), p. 129.
discusses the cleverness of nature in making the body work as it does—to such a degree that, if you hadn't actually seen a particular healing take place, you would think that someone was making it all up rather than telling the truth.[31] The verbs that he uses are 
, "to make tragedy," and 
, "to tell the truth," clearly to express the idea of making something up in a grandiose way rather than telling the truth. This is once again the opposition between fiction and truth, expressed here by a striking theatrical term. Similarly Lucian finds no problem in using the verb 
, "to make comedies," as an expression for satirizing people.[32]
The second-century author of a remarkable book on the interpretation of dreams, Artemidorus of Daldis, illustrates even better this point about the relation between fictions (
) and drama.[33] He considers the interesting situation in which the dreamer imagines that he is composing (or perhaps performing in) a tragedy, or that he holds in his hands the text of some tragedies or some 
. The passage has given interpreters considerable trouble, and variant readings have been proposed; but 
is clearly what Artemidorus wrote, as the new Arabic translation of a lost Greek manuscript of his work proves once and for all.[34] These 
or "fictions" cannot be the same as the plays, because those are described as 
[31] Galen, De Usu Partium 16.4, 286 (p. 392, 1. 16 Helmreich).
[32] Lucian, Pisc . 25.
[33] Artemidorus, Oneir . 1.56, p. 63 (Pack).
[34] T. Fahd, ed., Artémidore d'Ephèse: Le livre des songes , Institut Français de Damas (1964), p. 117 (Arabic), sanaca[*] . Fahd's own Arabic translation of the Greek text shows that he has missed the problem here. See Appendix A below.
Artemidorus is an equally good witness for the relation of prose fiction to comic theater. After dispatching dreamers who dream of tragedy or tragic works, he contemplates those who dream of composing (or acting in) comedies. In this case he is careful to separate Old Comedy from New.[36] In other words he distinguishes the obscene and explicitly insulting style of comedy we associate with Aristophanes from the more gentle domestic comedies with their stereotyped characters that we associate with Menander. Once again, this time with both styles of comedy, he
mentions the existence of 
, that is to say, "comic fictions."[37] As in the case of tragedy, these fictions are clearly not plays. No one would deny that comic fiction in the Roman empire—as best represented by Petronius's hilarious and obscene novel The Satyricon , and the fantasies of Lucian in his True Stories —is deeply indebted to the satiric writings that preceded it; and satire had its own roots deep in comedy, as the Latin poet Horace explicitly declared in one of his most memorable satiric poems. There he singled out Eupolis, Cratinus, and Aristophanes, the three great masters of the Old Comedy—the comedy of obscenity and explicit mockery of individuals.[38] In fact, Artemidorus's recognition of the tradition of comic fictions in a context that also invokes Old Comedy calls attention to a change in literary taste in the second half of the first century and the beginning of the second. That is a return to enthusiasm for the Aristophanic style after several centuries in which Menandrian New Comedy was all the fashion. In the early second century the younger Pliny alludes to a friend, a playwright called Vergilius Romanus, who is said to have abandoned his former habit of writing plays in the style of Menander to devote himself henceforth to Old Comedy—that is, original work in the style of Old Comedy.[39]
[37] For the reading, the Arabic version is again our witness (cf. n. 34 above). See Appendix A.
[38] Hot. Serm . 1.4.1: Eupolis atque Cratinus Aristophanesque poetae .
[39] Pliny, Epist . 6.21.2-5, esp. 2, "Nuper audivi Vergilium Romanum paucis legentem comoediam ad exemplar veteris comoediae scriptam," and 5, "Nunc primum se in vetere comoedia, sed non tamquam inciperet ostendit." A. N. Sherwin-White's commentary ad loc . in The Letters of Pliny (1966), p. 381, is confused. Cf. Marcus Aurelius, Ad Se Ipsum 11.6 in praise of Old Comedy.
Literary scholars have tended to miss altogether this interesting phenomenon of the original composition of Old Comedy during the time of the Roman empire. The novelist Antonius Diogenes, who must have been an approximate contemporary of Vergilius Romanus, is also known to have written Old Comedy, by his own assertion as preserved in the writings of Photius. Unfortunately his explicit remark has been missed or misinterpreted by those who failed to recognize the nature of Greek dramatic writing at this late date.[40] Diogenes, in fact, embodies the nexus between drama and fiction. In the romance of Leucippe and Cleitophon by Achilles Tatius, a work that had certainly been written by the end of the second century, one of the more admirable speakers in the courtroom episode at the end of that novel makes a stunning impact because, we are told, he imitates the comedy of Aristophanes 
.[41] This means that he spoke his courtroom rhetoric using the mannerisms and satire associated with Aristophanic comedy. And, sure enough, Achilles Tatius goes on to describe the speech of this orator as delivered with urbanity and sarcastic wit.
Among the true stories that Lucian tells for the delectation of his readers is a visit to no less a place than the Cloudcuckooland 
invented by Aristophanes in The Birds .[42] This tribute to the great playwright of the fifth century B.C . is underscored when Lucian remarks that his sight of the mirac-
[41] Achill. Tat. Leuc. and Clit . 8.9.
[42] Lucian, Vera Hist . 1.29.
ulous place reminded him of Aristophanes the poet, whom he calls "a wise and truthful man, whose works have aroused undeserved disbelief."[43] To call Aristophanes wise and truthful, particularly with reference to Cloudcuckooland, is obviously insouciant but entirely consistent with the tenor of the True Stories . The remark turns upon the ancient view that fictions could be true. The praise of Aristophanes here is, despite Lucian's denigration of the opponents of Old Comedy, an entirely plausible index of the tastes and controversies of his time and, in particular, of the important relationship between Aristophanes' theater and the practitioners of fiction. We have here another example of the truth in Lucian's self-proclaimed lying.
If we step back to take a broader view of the fictional production of the Roman empire, it becomes apparent that this vast output encompassed four major types: fantastic tales, Homeric revisionism, tragic or romantic novels, and comic or satiric novels. These types were not necessarily exclusive. Homeric revisionism could easily accommodate tragedy or romance, and so could the fantastic or miraculous tales. Some fictions proclaimed their character openly, and some did not. It was, as Celsus and Origen discovered, often very difficult to separate fact from fiction, especially when an author had, either seriously or playfully, adopted a pose of historical veracity. All this had, as is often observed, many and varied antecedents in the classical literature and traditions of earlier centuries—in epic, in drama, in mythography, in travelers' tales, and perhaps even in a few romantic narratives about famous legendary characters such as Ninus and Semiramis or the biblical Joseph and Asenath.[44]
[43] Ibid .
[44] For the so-called Ninus Romance, see Sandy (n. 40 above), pp. 803-8, with bibliography. On Joseph and Asenath, see Stephanie West, "Joseph and Asenath : A Neglected Greek Romance," CQ 24 (1974), 70-81.
But there can be no denying that the explosion of fiction in the Roman empire represents something quite new. It is a part of the history of that time, in all probability not an insignificant part. Although it is hard to discover why it arose and what were the sources of its popularity and diffusion, it is not so difficult to see when it all began. That may ultimately provide a clue as to why it began. The beginning of the massive proliferation of fiction can be assigned pretty clearly to the reign of the emperor Nero, in the middle of the first century of the Christian era.
Nero was eccentric in many ways, but among his least destructive passions was his enthusiasm for literature and the arts. (He wrote poetry himself and performed on stage.) He encouraged the Greeks with a passion. Even the gentle Plutarch, who knew the worst about Nero, had to admit at one point that he deserved some favorable consideration because he was a philhellene.[45] It is perhaps not surprising, therefore, that his reign witnessed a resurgence of Greek creativity in literature as well as the metamorphosis of Greek comic themes in the Latin novel of Petronius. The reign of Nero has left four distinct markers for the evolution of fiction in the centuries that lay ahead. The first of these is Lucillius, the Greek satiric poet who influenced Martial later. The second is his contemporary Petronius, with whom he shared an exceptional mastery of the fantastic and the absurd. This will become apparent as we proceed, but it suffices now to say that the conjunction of Lucillius and Petronius under Nero laid the foundation for the comic 
to which Artemidorus referred a century later.
The third marker is the pre-Homeric Trojan fiction ascribed to Dictys of Crete, who allegedly fought in the Trojan War. It is entirely a fabrication of the Neronian period. The work, in Phoenician allegedly, was supposed to have been discovered in a box and made known to Nero when he was visiting Greece.[46] It was promptly translated from the original Phoenician into Greek, and today we possess not only a complete Latin translation of the Greek but even a papyrus fragment with some of the Greek text itself.[47] It goes without saying that the Greek was actually the original text created for the delectation of Nero, the Homerist, Hellenist, and patron of letters. The narration of Dictys turned Homer on his head, just as did another piece of fiction undoubtedly concocted later under the name of Dares the Phrygian.[48] Rewriting the Homeric stories was to become a fad. The amazing discovery of a pre-Homeric text in Phoenician, which was promptly disseminated in Greek, was to recur once again, only a generation or so after Dictys, in the history of Philo of Byblos.[49]
Of the four Neronian markers, Lucillius, Petronius, and Dictys are at least tolerably well known to students of the period. The fourth has almost been forgotten. That is a great pity. He was a forward-looking personality, although he perhaps did not realize
[46] Dictys Cret. Ephem., epist . and prolog . See now S. Merkle, "Telling the True Story of the Trojan War: The Eyewitness Account of Dictys of Crete," in The Search for the Ancient Novel , ed. J. Tatum (1994), pp. 183-96.
[47] The opening of the Latin version shows that this translation is of Severan date. For fragments of the Greek, P. Tebt . 268; P. Oxy . 2539.
[48] We possess the work ascribed to Dares (De Excidio Troiae ) in a Latin version from late antiquity, with a fictitious dedication to Cornelius Nepos by Sallust.
[49] See n. 21 above.
it. He is Ptolemaeus Chennus—Ptolemy called, for reasons we shall never be able to discover, "the Quail." He was a man who shared the lunatic imagination of a Lucillius or a Petronius and combined it with the rich fantasy of the author of the work ascribed to Dictys of Crete. He told lies as easily as he breathed, he adored the paradoxical and the miraculous, and he saw Homer as an arch-rival. In the whole history of imperial fiction there is no personality who combines so fully the talents of deadpan mendacity, Homeric revisionism, and extravagant narration. The Quail is truly an embodiment of fiction, and yet—for good or ill he inhabited and undeniably reflected the real world.
Ptolemy the Quail, son of Hephaestion, came from Alexandrian Egypt and made his career in Rome as a grammarian. He must have been the youngest of the four Neronian figures, since he taught and wrote at Rome from the time of Nero until the early second century. He was numbered among the great educators of the age.[50] Among his works, all of which are now lost, three are known to us by title in the entry on him in the Suda , and there is an extensive summary of one of them in the writings of the patriarch Photius.[51] Each of the three works represents a significant departure in Greek and Roman literary taste. The work read by Photius was an extensive prose account of ancient mythology. It was entitled most appropriately The Paradoxical History
. It was also known as the New
[51] Photius, Biblioth . 146a (ad fin .)-153b [190], pp. 51-72 (Henry).
History
. Both titles reflect the fact that it contained (as Photius demonstrates in many pages of summary) a completely irresponsible rewriting of many of the famous stories of the past. All this was accomplished with a completely straight face and in a pose of scholarly precision. Countless authorities were cited for the rectifications advanced, but it has long been apparent that almost all these alleged authorities are known only through Ptolemy the Quail and are mentioned by no one else. It is perfectly clear that he simply made them up. A number of the stories have strong romantic elements and make good reading on their own account. The whole must have been a dazzling tour de force . The popularity of Ptolemy's work may well be reflected in another of the compositions of Philo of Byblos, who seems to have been remarkably attuned to the latest literary trends. He too wrote a Paradoxical History .[52] Ptolemy's writing in this genre obviously gave a ninth-century patriarch like Photius a severe case of indigestion.
His other two important works are known to us only by title and a short description preserved in the Suda lexicon. But this meager information is of the greatest interest. Ptolemy wrote a poem in twenty-four books with the polemical title of 
, in other words, The Anti-Homer Poem —a confrontation of Homer on his own poetic turf. The other lost work bore an enigmatic fide, simply Sphinx ; but perhaps it is not so enigmatic for an author coming from Alexandria. The piece is described by the Suda as, in Greek, 
, which Albrecht Dihle has persuasively interpreted to mean a romance or romantic novel.[53] Certainly the word 
in the Greek of the Suda , combined with the word for telling stories 
,
[52] FGH III.C.790, F 12-13.
[53] A. Dihle, RE 23.2, col. 1862.
should mean that we are to interpret this as a narrative of some sort. It would be difficult to say on so little evidence what kind of narrative this was, but it might well have been a romance about the great legendary figures of Ptolemy's homeland, Egypt. We possess already on papyrus a substantial fragment of an Egyptian romance associated with the goddess Tefnut, in which Egyptian fiction is presented in the modes of Greek storytelling known to us in the extant novels.[54] Ptolemy the Quail has a good claim to being among the leaders in this kind of literature.
We know from Photius that Ptolemy dedicated his Paradoxical History to a certain Julia Tertulla.[55] This exiguous information is quite enough to confirm his high standing in Roman society of the period. Tertullus (or Tertulla for a woman) is a name that surfaces conspicuously in Roman onomastics toward the end of the first century and the first decades of the second, which is exactly the time of Ptolemy's later years on earth. This Julia Tertulla ought perhaps to be identified with a high degree of probability from an inscription in Asia Minor, where a woman of this name is revealed as the sister of the wife of a consul of the year 100.[56] One might have expected the aging Quail also to have known the equally aging satirist Martial, who survived into the era of felicity after the tyranny of Domitian. It is even possible that Martial made fun of his contemporary, master of so many different forms and styles. For at about this time Martial wrote a pungent epigram complaining of verses that were being illicitly circulated under his name, although he judged them far below the
[54] P. Lond . 274. For discussion of the Tefnut Romance, see R. M. Rattenbury in New Chapters in the History of Greek Literature, Third Series , ed. J. U. Powell (1933), pp. 226-30.
[55] Photius, Biblioth . 146b [190], p. 51, l. 10 (Henry).
[56] IGR 3.562 (Tlos). Cf. PIR , I 706, wife of L. Julius Marinus Caecilius Simplex.
quality that any discerning person should have expected in his authentic work. One would not, observed Martial, expect a parrot to speak with the voice of a quail: voce ut loquatur psittacus coturnicis .[57] The skill of the parrot was much admired in antiquity: it could imitate the human voice and language. The inhuman sound of a quail left, by contrast, something to be desired.
Ptolemy may not have been a very distinguished writer, but he was undeniably an inventive one. Perhaps the world is no worse off without his writings, but he was a portent. Even as he wrote his fabulous and incredible stories, no less fabulous and incredible stories were beginning to circulate in Palestine and the Greek East. These were the stories of miraculous healings and resurrection that were to exercise Celsus and so many others in the century to come. How was Ptolemy the Quail to tell that these were not the work of a writer like himself?
[57] Martial 10.5.7.