Preface
The pages that follow constitute, with the addition of two appendixes, the revised and documented text of the six lectures that I had the honor of delivering as Sather Professor in the Department of Classics at the University of California, Berkeley, in the autumn of 1991. The term I spent at that great university was memorable for me in many ways, but perhaps above all for the hospitality and liveliness of the intellectual community that welcomed me there. I shall always feel an immense debt of gratitude to Mark Griffith, chairman of the department, and to his colleagues, as well as to the remarkably gifted students who participated in my seminar on Roman Syria.
Although my seminar was on a strictly historical subject, I tried to remember in delivering my Sather Lectures that the title of the chair is, in fact, Sather Professor of Classical Literature. I share very much the opinion of Keith Hopkins in a recent article: "Serious historians of the ancient world have often undervalued fiction, if only... because by convention history is concerned principally with the recovery of truth about the past. But for social history—for the history of culture, for the history of people's understanding of their own society—fiction occupies a privileged position" (Past and Present 138 [1993], 6).
I am conscious of two important predecessors who, in their own Sather Lectures, have touched on the themes I develop here. One was the inimitable Eric Dodds, whose Greeks and the Irrational first persuaded classical scholars that dreams, among other shadowy phenomena, deserved serious thought. The other was a pioneer in the study of ancient fiction, Ben Perry, who lectured in 1951 on The Ancient Romances , although his book on this subject did not appear until 1967.
Comment and discussion after my lectures were invariably fruitful, and I deeply appreciated the patience that my auditors brought to an argument that necessarily reached its conclusion six weeks after it began. Friends outside Berkeley have also contributed substantially to my thinking about fiction. I must give special thanks to Peter Wiseman for sending me, well in advance of publication, the text of the volume entitled Lies and Fiction in the Ancient World , which he and Christopher Gill edited together. Without the initiative of Elena Alexeeva I might not have discovered Bulgakov's great novel in time.
I should say that I presented the material on Philoctetes (Chapter III) in a preliminary form at a colloquium organized in 1991 by Siegfried Jäikel on the island of Seili, off the coast of Turku in Finland. The publication of that colloquium, Power and Spirit (Annales Universitatis Turkuensis, ser. B, vol. 199, 1993), includes a brief synopsis of my paper on page 63. The substance of Appendix B was offered to the Historia Augusta Colloquium held in Geneva in 1991. The first of my Sather Lectures was delivered, outside the series, as an independent presentation at the University of California in Los Angeles in late 1991.
During my stay in Berkeley a vast and terrifying fire swept over the Oakland hills, disrupting lives and destroying homes. Many Berkeley colleagues lived there. I offered to cancel my third lecture, which was scheduled for the second day after the
fire was brought under control; but students and professors alike wanted to proceed with the normal and proper work of the university. That lecture was (and is) largely devoted to the endurance of suffering. I can never forget the strength that I saw in the eyes of those who listened to me that night.
G. W. BOWERSOCK
14 JUNE 1993