Chapter Two
Other Peoples, Other Places

The peace of the Roman empire that Augustus established was purchased by monarchy, but it was a real and enduring peace. It embraced the entire Mediterranean world as no constitutional dispensation had ever done before. It was broken from time to time by imperialist campaigns of annexation, by hostile incursions on the frontier, and by occasional rebellions (of which two in Judaea were by far the most fierce and disruptive). But the unity of the Graeco-Roman world for some two centuries was essentially unquestioned, and its culture was essentially homogeneous. In the days of Augustus himself the poet Horace had observed, with epigrammatic precision, that the Greek captive had captured its captor, Rome.^[1] The standards of Hellenic culture, which the Greeks had long used to distinguish themselves from barbarians, were accepted for the most part in imperial Rome. There was no Cato to rail against the corruption of Roman morals by effeminate Greeks. If Juvenal could denounce a dirty little Greek, as he did, in the early second century, he could do no more than strike a literary pose;^[2] for, even as he wrote, native speakers of Greek were holding the consulate at Rome, and

Plutarch was compiling his parallel biographies of the great Greeks and Romans.^[3]

The consolidation of the Graeco-Roman world under the auspices of imperial Rome created a sense of security and cultural identity that had not been seen in this part of the world since the time of the Athenian empire, more than four centuries earlier. In that remote period (and we tend to forget just how far away it would have seemed to the inhabitants of the Roman empire) a Pericles or an Isocrates could proclaim in ringing tones the unifying force of Greek culture. The of the Greeks distinguished them from everyone else, and everyone else was called a barbarian. In the fragmentation of the Mediterranean world that followed the conquests of Alexander the Great and the creation of the Hellenistic monarchies, this vision evaporated in favor of more local nationalist ambitions—in Macedonia, in western Asia Minor, in Syria, and in Egypt. But once the nascent Roman state had dispatched its indigenous enemies as well as the rival power of Carthage in North Africa, the potent conjunction of Greece and Rome had only to await the conclusion of the civil wars that shattered the polity of the Roman republic.

The emergence in the Mediterranean of a coherent administrative entity that embraced the entire Graeco-Roman world reawakened the old feelings of cultural superiority. This new world was infinitely more diverse than the Athenian empire had ever been. Nonetheless, from the Rock of Gibraltar to the Euphrates, from the Rhine and Danube to the Sahara, in whatever direction one chose to move, the Greek and Latin languages provided a common denominator. Local deities were assimilated to the gods of the Greeks and the Romans. Local aristocracies

were absorbed into the Roman aristocracy, and platoons of tax collectors, governors, and soldiers enforced both law and order.

Yet inevitably, after unification and coherence, after assimilation and consolidation, the diversity of the empire would begin to assert itself—at first with reference to the so-called barbarians at its fringes but ultimately by affirmation of the widely differing traditions within the imperial fabric itself. Old Herodotus, five hundred years before, had chronicled the diversity of the Mediterranean world as he saw it when the Athenian empire was coming into being. Herodotus was far from being an Hellenic snob; and, if he had no compunction about using the word "barbarian," he nonetheless showed a great sympathy and curiosity for barbarians of every stripe. His reports of diverse peoples and cultures had inspired conquerors like Alexander the Great by revealing the worlds that remained to be conquered. They were of markedly less interest to Hellenistic monarchs and Roman senators, for whom consolidation and conformity were higher priorities.

The vigorous revival of interest in Herodotus in the time of the Roman empire must be related to the growing interest in breaking away from the cultural conformity introduced by Augustus.^[4] The writings of Hellenistic travelers, such as Pytheas of Marseille, joined with Herodotus in opening the eyes of Greek and Roman readers to the existence and diversity of many other peoples and many other places, both inside and outside the boundaries of the empire they inhabited.^[5] Like Alexander before

him, the expansionist emperor Trajan could even be incited to conquest by the enticing prospect of incorporating new peoples into the empire, and it may be no accident that the greatest surviving Greek historian of Alexander was a younger contemporary of Trajan.^[6] Everywhere new horizons were opening up. The alien and the exotic provided a refreshing perspective on the Hellenic standard to which the Graeco-Roman world had grown accustomed.

Fiction was obviously well suited to provide gratification for this burgeoning interest in other peoples and places. Fantastic fiction, such as we find in Lucian's True Stories , shows by its extreme distortions the kinds of topics that interested readers: travel into remote and unfamiliar territories (in Lucian's case the sky, the moon, and the underworld, for example), peculiar social and sexual traditions (in Lucian a society with no women in it or sexual congress without the conventional orifices), and creatures of the most diverse sizes and shapes (in Lucian, ants two hundred feet long, borrowed from Herodotus, or men who were part human and part horse).^[7]

Lucian's homage to Herodotus and other earlier writers of exotica should not be taken as an end in itself. Too many modern commentators seem to feel that they have done all the work that needs to be done when they find a literary parallel. The scholar who can annotate Lucian's True Stories or other highly allusive works of the imperial age with a display of parallels from earlier literature will no doubt go to bed at night with the comforting conviction that nothing more needs to be done. But such a commentator is like A. E. Housman's notorious lexicographer, who, unaware that he had missed the first instance of the Latin

word for "cat" in compiling entries for the letter A, retired to his bed, thinking to himself, "Well done, thou good and faithful servant."^[8] The question to be asked is why these literary antecedents are of such importance for the new writers of fiction. After all, one could have had domestic fiction—a kind of prose extension of the New Comedy. But one will look in vain for a Menandrian novel: it simply didn't happen in classical antiquity. Imperial fiction has a very special character. It is concerned with outsiders, with going away from home (or being wrenched away), and with brutal or occasionally agreeable confrontation with the unknown.

Greeks and Romans long had had a notorious taste for freaks. In the time of Augustus a boy with no arms ("a living herm") was put prominently on display, and some kind of fakir from India burned himself up in Athens, to the great interest of everyone around.^[9] There was a lively traffic in bizarre animals, such as ostriches and giraffes.^[10] The element of the circus in popular taste undoubtedly had some bearing on the turn that satire took in the early imperial period, but this was only because of a more significant development that we have already observed—the change

of taste from New Comedy to Old Comedy. This change can be assigned quite precisely to the reign of Nero; for even though Horace was aware of the roots of his own satire in Aristophanes, Eupolis, and Cratinus, he certainly did not write satire in that vein. By contrast, the Neronian epigrammatist Lucillius did. His epigrams constitute a dramatic turning point in the imaginative literature of antiquity. Writing in Greek for a philhellenic emperor, this poet (in all probability a Roman) reopened the Aristophanic vein of fantasy and outrageousness.^[11]

Not since Aristophanes' hero Trygaeus, in the Peace , had flown to heaven on the back of a dung beetle had there been anything like the epigrams of Lucillius. These epigrams not only look forward to the nonsense of Lucian's fiction: they also look sideways to the fiction of one of his own contemporary writers, Petronius, author of the one comic novel we possess, the Satyricon . Lucillius's poems on assorted human oddities are so bizarre, so utterly fantastic, that one would be inclined to describe them in modern terms as surrealistic. Timomachus was so tall that his house was five miles long to accommodate him when he lay on the floor. When he stood up, his slaves had to bore a hole in the roof.^[12] The tiny Hermogenes was so short that, when he dropped something, he had to pull it back down to himself with a pitchfork.^[13] Marcus the Thin Man once made a hole with his head in one of Epicurus's atoms and went through the middle of it.^[14] The same Marcus on another occasion tried to blow a trumpet but unfortunately went headfirst right into it.^[15] When thin little Proclus was fanning the fire, the smoke caught him up

and carried him through the window. He swam to a cloud and came down through it, wounded in a thousand places by the atoms.^[16]

This gallery of bizarre characters from Lucillius provides a cultural commentary on the odd people whom we meet in Petronius's Satyricon —the voyeuristic Quartilla, matching sexual partners according to their size; the egregiously bad poet Eumolpus, who prescribed in his will that his legatees eat his body; to say nothing of Trimalchio and all the oddballs that populate his banquet. Few writers have ever pandered to the exotic so brilliantly as these two writers. The tastes of the emperor they served must have had something to do with it; but Nero's personal tastes would have been no more than a passing eccentricity if they had not found an echo among readers in subsequent years. This kind of writing broke the banality of the Augustan peace and challenged both the traditional Greek and the Roman mos maiorum .

While Martial, writing in Latin, carried on the tradition of satiric epigram established by Lucillius, a Greek writer of fiction developed the exploration of alien and exotic peoples in a new manner, altogether different from that of Petronius. It seems that at the very time that Ptolemy Chennus ("the Quail") was fabricating his fictions about the legendary past, a certain Antonius Diogenes was writing his long and discursive novel The Wonders beyond Thule .^[17] This work, with its obvious roots in Hellenistic travelers' tales, introduces a complicated romantic plot that links the work closely to the erotic fiction of the extant novelists from antiquity. The mechanism by which the author secures a bogus

authenticity for his story is nothing less than the discovery of an ancient text in a grave from the time of Alexander the Great. Such a miraculous discovery of a long-lost text at a time so close to the reign of Nero cannot but remind the reader of the similar mechanism justifying the pre-Homeric account of the Trojan War in the work ascribed to Dictys of Crete.^[18]

In Diogenes' tale the principal narrator, Deinias, goes across Pontus into the area of the Caspian and from there out into the reaches of Scythia and beyond. For Scythia as a land of alien peoples and customs, Herodotus was again the great model, but the question to be asked here is why Antonius Diogenes found the Herodotean model so compelling at the end of the first century. The answer undoubtedly lies in the growing tendency to break free of the Hellenic homogenization of the Roman peace in the East. Interest in Scythia in particular has a precise historical explanation. During the reign of Domitian in the eighties and nineties of the first century, Roman troops had come into direct contact with the peoples of the Danube and beyond along the edges of the Black Sea. The Suebians, the Sarmatians, and the Rhoxolani were no longer merely names to them. Beyond the eastern shore of the Black Sea there were Roman troops stationed as far as Baku on the Caspian in this period.^[19] Scythia had, in short, a contemporary relevance.

When Photius the patriarch read Diogenes' Wonders beyond Thule , he judged that the work was among the earliest of the fictional works in his library.^[20] And he assumed, quite wrongly (as has recently been demonstrated), that Lucian's True Stories were deeply indebted to Antonius Diogenes.^[21] Lucian's work is simply and independently a development from the same Neronian beginnings as Diogenes' own. On the other hand, the combination of remote and fantastic travel with a romantic plot and the alleged conservation of it in a long-hidden grave conspire to suggest that this reflects the new-found interest in fiction and marvels in the later first century.

Photius provides a tantalizing reference to a letter from Antonius Diogenes to a certain Faustinus about the composition of his work on the wonders beyond Thule.^[22] We may conceivably have here some additional support for the placement of the novel in the time of Domitian or a little later. One of the poet Martial's principal patrons was a wealthy man by the name of Faustinus, who possessed comfortable villas at Baiae, Tivoli, and elsewhere.^[23] It is clear from Martial's many allusions to him that this Faustinus was himself a man of letters and,

above all, a patron of writers of all kinds. Martial's use of Greek in his epigrams makes it plain that he expected Faustinus (and others, for that matter) to be in control of that language. As Donald Russell has recently emphasized, bilingualism must have been relatively common among the literate public of the time.^[24] If we take into account Faustinus's literary and antiquarian interests and his association with Martial, who was the great heir of Lucillius, this Faustinus could well be none other than the patron to Antonius Diogenes. The name is not rare, but the novelist and the epigrammatist would have had much in common. Faustinus would provide an attractive link between them.

When Diogenes' hero Deinias sets forth to the Caspian area, he evidently begins his journey from his home city somewhere in western Asia Minor. He is said to have traveled across Pontus and then up into the territory between the Black Sea and the Caspian.^[25] This slight indication, together with the actual name of Antonius Diogenes, may give us a hint as to the homeland of the writer. Antonius Diogenes is not a widely attested name, although the two elements of it are individually very common. The man who bore it seems to have been a Roman citizen of Greek origin. The names Antonius and Diogenes suggest this. The conjunction of this nomen and cognomen occurs in only one place in the whole of the Roman empire on present evidence, and that is the city of Aphrodisias in the province of Asia. One of the priests in that city and dearly one of its most affluent and influential citizens in the Severan period,

that is to say, about a century after the novelist, was a certain Lucius Antonius Claudius Dometinus Diogenes.^[26] No one hitherto has ever thought to connect this man's family with Antonius Diogenes the writer, but there is now some reason to do so. A new and still unpublished inscription on a sarcophagus, discovered in 1990 at Aphrodisias, records other names that point to the same family: these include a Flavius Antonius Diogenes.^[27] Since it has long been evident that the priest Dometinus Diogenes represented the union of two families, one with the name Antonius and the other Claudius, we are now in a position to see, through Flavius Antonius Diogenes, the branch that bore the name Diogenes. The additional nomen Flavius points directly to the latter part of the first century as a time when this family achieved recognition and citizenship. If by this argument Antonius Diogenes the novelist could be assigned to the city of Aphrodisias, it would not be without interest for the historical evolution of fiction in the eastern empire. One of the greatest of the extant Greek novelists, Chariton, certainly came from Aphrodisias, as he states explicitly at the beginning of his work.

As the excavations of Aphrodisias over the last thirty years have amply shown, it was a city of extraordinary beauty and sophistication, imbued with Hellenic culture and richly favored by the Roman government. Situated as it was in Asia Minor, where Hellenism itself was joined to ancient indigenous traditions as well as remnants of the long period of Persian rule, Aphrodisias knew what other peoples were like.^[28] An inscription uncovered fifteen years ago shows that the city itself had a large

community of Jews.^[29] There is every reason to believe that a place like this could have readily inspired a narrative of cultural exotica. Perhaps more significant is the shrine of Aphrodite itself at Aphrodisias, since both Antonius Diogenes and Chariton place great emphasis on the role of this goddess in the romantic plots that they develop. Although most of what we know of Antonius Diogenes comes through the patriarch Photius and consists of a plot summary, fortunately with Chariton we are in a position to read the actual work. Like Antonius Diogenes, Chariton sets his tale in the historical past—in this case in the late fifth century B.C .—but, unlike Diogenes, Chariton places his characters entirely within the real world of the Mediterranean and the Persian kingdom.

The date of Chariton's novel, Chaereas and Callirhoe , is not immediately obvious, but the fortunate discovery of fragments of the novel on papyrus from the second century A.D. strongly suggests that this may be the earliest of the complete extant novels that we possess from antiquity. The relatively uncomplicated Greek style of Chariton is free from the rhetorical flamboyance of some other writers. Although this is a treacherous criterion on which to base a date, it would suggest that the novel had not been recently written at the date of the papyrus fragments, but rather that the fragments imply its popularity. At any rate, most scholars who have examined these matters would probably agree that Chariton belongs toward the end of the first century A.D. or perhaps a little later.^[30] This would make him an

approximate contemporary of Antonius Diogenes. If, in fact, they both came from the same city in Asia Minor, that item would join an already substantial record of literary production from western Anatolia at this time in both prose and verse.

Since the production of fiction belongs to history, it is worth looking at one largely unremarked characteristic of Chariton's novel, because it is a characteristic that occurs nowhere else in the extant novels. Whether it was present in Antonius Diogenes we shall never know, unless papyri restore his work to us. But from beginning to end Chariton lays great stress on the cultural superiority of the Greeks. His star-crossed lovers, Chaereas and Callirhoe, pass through a bewildering series of estrangements and humiliations, all geographically located between Sicily, where the story begins, and Persia, where it reaches its dénouement. The invocation of a Hellenic standard points up the chasm between civilization and barbarism. The world of Greek culture is very much the same world as that of the fifth century B.C ., so that these references to Hellenism and barbarism might possibly be explained as a part of the historical background. But no reader in the Graeco-Roman empire of the late first or second century of our era would have been able to read these passages without an identification with the shared Greek culture of that time.

Upon her arrival in Miletus after having been abducted from her tomb (where she had been placed in error in an episode reminiscent of Romeo and Juliet), Callirhoe addresses a rich man of Miletus with the words, "You are Greek, you live in a humane community, you are a civilized man—please don't be like the

tomb robbers."^[31] Subsequently Chariton brings in explicit references to Greek law, Greek clothes, Greek fashion, and the behavior of Greek women.^[32] All this occurs in a carefully worked-out counterpoint with barbarous customs, such as those of the brutal robbers or of the Persians. Greeks are contrasted with slaves and eunuchs, and barbarians are said, strikingly, to be characterized by their inordinate respect for the king: "They think he is a god among mankind."^[33] Since that particular delusion had permeated the Greeks themselves from the fifth century B.C . through the Hellenistic period and on into the Roman empire, this taunt leveled at the Persians is very probably a reflection of the skepticism of Greek intellectuals of Chariton's own day on the habit that Tacitus characterized so scathingly as "Greek adulation" (Graeca adulatio ).^[34]

In any case, the Hellenic standard is very obvious in Chariton. It implies a society in which other peoples and other places are certainly considered inferior to the ruling peoples and places. Yet Chariton's work is unusual in this respect. The Hellenic standard may well be another indication of its early date. The momentum of imperial fiction was clearly toward sympathetic, sometimes morbidly curious description of what was alien to the Graeco-Roman world. Nothing in Photius suggests that Antonius Diogenes applied the Hellenic standard, although we cannot be sure.

When Deinias went from Greek Asia into Scythia, we do not know what he thought of life there. Herodotus had, after all, reported that the Scythians were in the habit of eating their relatives, and this item was far too interesting for Lucian to ignore later. Diogenes may have had something to say about it too.

The Phoenician History of Philo of Byblos was roughly contemporary with the novels of Diogenes and Chariton. It belonged, as we have seen, to the revisionist movement that produced several invented accounts of pre-Homeric history between the reigns of Nero and Hadrian. Philo boasted that he was translating the long-lost chronicle of one Sanchuniathon, a Semite whose text showed the Greeks to be wrong on numerous points of ancient history.^[35] Yet, amazingly enough, Sanchuniathon appears to have talked about the Phoenicians as barbarians ^[36] Philo of Byblos was obviously unable to free himself of an ingrained habit of speech even when conjuring up an author who is supposed to have written before the Trojan War.

The Phoenician barbarians are quite enough, on their own, to impugn the credibility of Philo's claim to be translating an old Semitic chronicle.

It is Lucian to whom we must turn for a reflection of the great change in attitude toward the Hellenic standard. In a reprise of Diogenes but in a totally different key, Lucian explores the customs of the Scythians. In his dialogue entitled Toxaris , named for a Scythian interlocutor, Lucian presents a Greek and a Scythian in lively dialogue about their respective cultures. The main topic is friendship. The speakers are made to illustrate its importance in their respective cultures by each providing five fictional stories on this subject. The stories themselves have sufficiently novelistic and, on occasion, romantic elements that a connection between the Toxaris and the novel literature of the time has long been inferred.^[37] But what is more notable, in comparison with the novel by Chariton, is the complete refutation of the Hellenic standard that is represented by the Toxaris as a whole. At one point Toxaris is made to say to the Greek Mnesippus, "Listen then, you amazing fellow, and learn how much more generously than you Greeks we barbarians judge good men."^[38] Perhaps this is not such a surprise, since even Chariton could allow a character, accused before the Persian king, to praise the king's love of truth in comparison with the slanders of a clever Greek.^[39] But what is more surprising is that the Greek Mnesippus in the end accepts the idea that the Scythians have a culture just as advanced and civilized as the Greeks. Mnesippus declares, "This conversation of ours and the simi-

larity of what we strive for greater guarantees" than various formal rituals such as drinking cups of blood and the other somewhat surprising things that the Scythians do.^[40] The dialogue ends in a small orgy of good will and mutual respect. The atmosphere is totally removed from the world of Chariton, even though the stories told by the two speakers reflect the literary tastes of which Chariton is a prime example.

We have more than the opening of the Wonders beyond Thule to support the idea, first put forward by Rostovtzeff, that Lucian's Toxaris reflects romantic fiction with a Scythian setting.^[41] A papyrus fragment of the second century A.D., and therefore roughly contemporary with Lucian, preserves excerpts from a story concerning a heroine in distress by the name of Calligone.^[42] Another character bears the name Eubiotus, a curious name that also appears in one of the stories of Lucian's Toxaris . Eubiotus, it seems, has sent everyone out from Calligone's tent because she has had bad news about the Sarmatians, whose presence here suggests the Scythian background. We are then treated to a dramatic moment in which Calligone, in her grief and misfortune, attempts to stab herself, only to discover that Eubiotus had removed her dagger from its sheath. With operatic bravura she cries out to him, "Wickedest of men, you dared to lay your hand on my sword! I am no Amazon, no Themisto [a noted child murderess]. I am a Greek woman; I am Calligone."

The heroine's proud affirmation of her Greekness strongly echoes Chariton's harping on Hellenism as a sign of civilization

among barbarians. The Scythian romance on papyrus reflects a comparable sense of cultural superiority, whereas Lucian's Toxaris is at pains to wipe out that very sense of superiority. For Lucian, from the more or less barbarous city of Samosata on the Euphrates, civilization and dignity could be found on either side of the Roman frontier. The author of the work into which we have such a tantalizing glimpse through the accidental survival of a papyrus would seem to be on present evidence the last writer of fiction seriously to oppose Hellenism to barbarism.

If Lucian's Toxaris is a good representative of the toleration of diverse cultures and international diversity that characterize virtually all the extant fiction of the second century and later, other fictional forms, such as the dialogue composed by Philostratus under the name of Heroikos , show the same kind of cultural sympathies.^[43] In the Heroikos an itinerant Phoenician runs across a vineyard worker on the west coast of Asia Minor and has an amiable discussion about the Homeric heroes. Both are interested in this mythological past, and both preserve their own separate national identities in examining it. Something similar occurs in the treatise on fate from the early third century of the Christian era assigned to the Syriac writer Bardaisan. This is the work known as The Book of the Laws of Countries .

Bardaisan, the Christian sage of Edessa, is presented in conversation with his pupils at some date in the late second or early third century.^[44] The dialogue, cast clearly in the form of a Platonic dialogue (with an opening startlingly reminiscent of the opening of Plato's Republic ), treats the topic of fate in a suspiciously pagan way that gave considerable trouble to Christian

exegetes, such as Ephraem the Syrian, in subsequent centuries. The work, with its Hellenic form and pagan perspectives, citing both Chaldaean and Eygptian sources, is a good indicator of intellectual discourse in the Near East of the period. It confirms the impression one draws from the novels of a wide-ranging curiosity about alien customs and peoples and an exceptional tolerance of them. Here is Bardaisan to his pupils: "Try to understand that not all people over the whole world do that which the stars determine by their fate and in their sectors in the same way. For men have established laws in each country by that liberty given them from God, for this gift counteracts the fate of the rulers, who have appropriated something not given to them. I shall now begin to relate these, insofar as I remember them, beginning in the extreme east of the whole world."^[45] With that Bardaisan reports the more bizarre customs of the Chinese: they have laws that prohibit murder, fornication, and the worship of idols. Even so, says Bardaisan ruefully, there are rich and poor people there, sick and healthy, rulers and subjects. He moves on to the Brahmans in India, among whom killing, fornication, and the worship of idols are permitted, to say nothing of the grisly habit of "eating human flesh, as other peoples eat the flesh of animals."^[46]

Moving ever westward Bardaisan takes up the customs of the Persians, Medes, Bactrians, and ultimately reaches his home territory with the Edessenes and Arabs. At Hatra, we learn, anyone who steals a trifle—water, for example—is punished by stoning. Finally Bardaisan comments on the northern peoples, especially in the territory of Germany. His account of the cus-

toms there sounds like an excerpt from Petronius's Satyricon : "The boys who are handsome serve the men as wives, and a wedding feast too is held then. This is not considered shameful or a matter of contumely by them, because of the law obtaining among them."^[47] Summing up, Bardaisan gives eloquent expression to what we might call today a doctrine of cultural pluralism. "In all places, every day in each hour," declares Bardaisan, "people are born with different nativities, but the laws of men are stronger than fate, and they lead their lives according to their own customs. Fate does not force the Chinese to commit murder if they do not want to, nor the Brahmans to eat meat; it does not prevent the Persians from marrying their daughters and sisters, the Hindus from being cremated, the Medes from being eaten by dogs, the Parthians from marrying many wives ..., the Gallic men from having sexual intercourse with one another, nor the Amazons from bringing up their little boys.... In each country and each nation people use the liberty belonging to their nature as they please."^[48] The fiction that was widely read in the period in which Bardaisan spoke and his pupils recorded his words (or perhaps paraphrased them) demonstrates that his opinions were characteristic of their age.

This pluralist and multicultural perspective is nowhere more conspicuous than in the latest of the extant novels, the Aethiopica by a certain Heliodorus. His vast and extraordinarily vivid romance belongs, in my view, securely in the later part of the fourth century—roughly in the time of Julian the Apostate or perhaps even a little later. Despite recent arguments to the contrary, Heliodorus's adroit exploitation of the historical circumstances of the siege of Nisibis by the Persians in the year 350 establishes

a firm terminus post quem for the novel. As is well known, Heliodorus's description of the siege parallels in substance and language an account of the siege of Nisibis given by Julian himself in one of his panegyrics of the emperor Constantius. Recent attempts to show that Julian's description must imitate Heliodorus, rather than the reverse, cannot stand.^[49] It is clear, when Julian's words are compared with the original Syriac text of the report of the siege by Ephraem the Syrian, who was an eyewitness, that the emperor's account is reliable and not, as has been suggested on the insubstantial basis of a Latin translation of Ephraem, deviant and derivative.

In any case, there are other and much more interesting signs that Heliodorus represents a relatively late stage in Greek romantic fiction. Above all, we see the traditional opposition of Greek and barbarian brilliantly turned upside down in the Aethiopica . The heroine, Charicleia, is presented as a paradigm of Greek womanhood when the work opens. In the first book she herself is even made to declare to her beloved Theagenes, "It would be quite absurd if you really thought that I preferred a barbarian to a Greek."^[50] Over and over again, Charicleia is admired as a Greek by most of the other characters in the story, but it turns out that she is really a fair-skinned Ethiopian. Her virtues are those of the Ethiopians. The old Calasiris similarly appears as a Greek both in dress and in culture: in Book 4 he is described as "a man who is wise, a Greek, and ... a favorite of the gods."^[51] But he is an Egyptian through and through. The interchangeability of Greek and non-Greek is symbolized at the end of the novel by the jubilant celebration of the formerly

archetypal Greek couple, Theagenes and Charicleia. On this occasion the principals give up talking Greek and speak Ethiopic "for the whole assembly to understand."^[52]

Let us also look at Heliodorus's treatment of the kingdom of Aksum in Ethiopia. The historical context of the novel is apparently the sixth century B.C. Yet we find the king in Nubia, ruling over his kingdom known from its principal city of Meroe as the Meroitic kingdom, in contact with another great monarch to the south. This is explicitly the king of Aksum in Ethiopia. Now it is clear from coins as well as from inscriptions copied in antiquity that the Aksumite kingdom did not emerge into prominence until the latter part of the third century of the Christian era.^[53] By that time the kingdom of Meroe was in decline. By the fourth century Aksum became the principal power in this part of Africa. The role accorded to Aksum in the Aethiopica of Heliodorus is accordingly a clear reflection of contemporary conditions, despite the historical setting. In a much-neglected note, published as long ago as 1919, a distinguished Italian Ethiopic scholar, Carlo Conti Rossini, called attention to the historicity of the presentation of Aksum for the lifetime of the novelist.^[54] What we find there could not have been written before the end of the third century at the earliest.

The eighteenth-century English novelist Richardson composed his famous fiction Clarissa in the form of a series of letters. He wrote that he wished to maintain the appearance that the letters were real not because he wanted them actually to be "thought genuine," but rather in order "to avoid hurting

that kind of Historical Faith, which Fiction itself is genuinely read with, tho' we know it to be Fiction."^[55] Rarely has the interrelation of fiction and history been stated so succinctly and so lucidly, and in this case by an acknowledged master of the craft.

In reading fiction we must be able to accept the historical context, even though we know it is not real. It must fall within the boundaries of the possible and represent what for the reader would be credible. That is why Sextus Empiricus described fictions as describing things that resemble what really happens. Julian obviously understood this too when he denounced that were created in the form of history. Near the end of his life, in his rage against the city of Antioch, he was able to turn this understanding to powerful effect by writing a piece of satiric fiction himself. His Caesars— a savage review of the emperors of Rome, culminating with a licentious Constantine in the grip of Christianity—is as securely anchored in the fourth century as the dialogues of Lucian, to which it is indebted, were anchored in the second.

Among the most memorable of exotic folk in the Greek romances are the robbers in the Nile Delta who appear under the name of Boukoloi, "cowherds" or, as Winkler adroitly named them, "desperadoes" or "rangers." They first appear, in the extant literature, in Achilles Tatius and, very probably about the same time, in the Phoenician novel ascribed to a Lollianus, of which fragments survive on papyrus.^[56] These bold and savage

people were, it seems, good soldiers and cannibals—an ideal mix for fiction. They reappear later in Heliodorus's Aethiopica .^[57]

But with the Boukoloi fiction and history clearly overlap, since the sober historian Cassius Dio also gives an account of them under the year 172, when they undertook a revolt against Roman authority in Egypt.^[58] This revolt was noticed as well by the mischievous author of the Augustan History , who introduced Bucolici milites— "the soldier Bucoli"—into his biographies of both Marcus Aurelius and Avidius Cassius.^[59] Their fame lasted into the fourth century, when Jerome called them barbara tantum et ferox natio— "a barbarous and fierce nation."^[60] The notoriety of the Boukoloi in history seemed to provide a lifeline to scholars working on the novels. It was commonly, if imprudently, assumed that the revolt of 172 must have been so widely noticed that all literary references to the Boukoloi would have to reflect it.^[61] Hence we are supposed to have a clear terminus after which Achilles Tatius and Lollianus wrote.

Fiction, however, is not like that. It reflects a historical setting, a milieu, a way of life and thought, but not normally an event. The Boukoloi did not spring out of the void in 172. Their depredations, less bold perhaps, but nonetheless memorable, must

certainly precede that date. And now a carbonized roll from the Egyptian Delta proves this. In 166/67 they are seen to be at their deadly work. Achilles Tatius had specified a certain Nikochis as their base, and the new document confirms this by calling these brigands "the impious Neikokeitai" .^[62] The historical revolt of 172 immediately loses its force as a dating criterion. The Boukoloi were there all along.

Naturally they would form part of Egyptian episodes, just as naturally as eunuchs appear in Persian scenes. These are not stock motifs, inasmuch as they mirror the real world. But at the same time they are not necessarily indicators of a recent event. What they do indicate is the absorption of writers and readers in alien customs, the emergence of new standards of otherness—not only foreignness but social marginality as well. Fiction, and perhaps fiction alone, signals the disappearance of barbarism as a conceptual means of asserting the superiority of Graeco-Roman culture. The old standard of Hellenism broke down in the second and third centuries, and in doing so it made way for a new kind of Hellenism, an ecumenical Hellenism that could actually embrace much that was formerly barbaric. Heliodorus is a memorable example of this. The Hellenism of late antiquity was, in fact, to become the voice of the barbarians as they cried out against the tide of Christianity.