Sandy, 'Ancient Greek Novels: The Fragments', Bryn Mawr Classical Review 9512
URL = http://hegel.lib.ncsu.edu/stacks/serials/bmcr/bmcr-9512-sandy-ancient
@@@@95.12.26, Stephens/Winkler edd., Ancient Greek Novels: The Fragments
S. A. Stephens and J. J. Winkler (ed.), Ancient Greek Novels:
The Fragments. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995.
Pp. 541 + xvi. $59.50. ISBN 0-691-06941-7.
Reviewed by Gerald Sandy, Classics -- University of British
Columbia
gsandy@unixg.ubc.ca
The editors have provided both the specialist and the
non-classicist with everything needed safely to navigate through
the previously insufficiently charted waters of the scattered,
truncated, sometimes misidentified and unidentified remains of
ancient Greek novels that have emerged from the sands of Roman
imperial Egypt during the past 100 years. They have also included
the summaries provided by Photius in the ninth century of
Antonius Diogenes' Wonders beyond Thule and Iamblichus'
Babylonian Story, the portions of the latter narrative
contained in two fifteenth-century manuscripts and a damaged
Vatican palimpsest and the numerous short quotations preserved in
the Suda that have been assigned with varying degrees of
certainty to Iamblichus' novel. The editors present the fragments
under two headings: "Part I: Novel Fragments" and "Part II:
Ambiguous Fragments." They also provide matter-of-fact
translations of all the fragments on facing pages. Appendices
include a very useful collection of testimonia and a "Chart of
Provenances and Dates."
The General Introduction surveys the qualities of the extant
ancient Greek novels--the "big five," as the editors refer to
them--in order to place the fragments in their literary context.
The presentation of each fragment follows a uniform format. The
introduction to each fragment attempts to interpret the often
obscure activities of the fragment and to reconstruct the plot in
which they might have appeared. This is not always easy. For
instance, in the fragment entitled Goatherd and the Palace
Guards the reconstruction of the plot will vary radically
depending on whether the "fresh wound" was suffered by a person
or a goat, whether the feminine plural participle in line 7
agrees with a missing noun or pronoun referring to women or
nanny-goats and whether the partially preserved verb in line 11
is restored to denote an attack against or the closing up for the
night of the fourteen-letter word "of the women's quarters" that
the editors have conjecturally restored from the preserved first
three letters. The introduction to each fragment is followed by a
short description of the scrap of papyrus on which it appears.
Information provided here such as the dimensions of the papyrus
and of the script and the presence or absence of hiatus is
valuable for defining the limits of conjectural restoration.
The editors state that they have been deliberately conservative
in reconstructing the fragmentary texts (p. ix). On the few
occasions when they appear to deviate from this policy, they
signal their conjectural restorations very clearly in the
apparatus criticus and the commentary. In column I, lines 6-7 of
Metiochos and Parthenope?, for instance, they print in the
translation "Parthenope." They and a previous editor have
restored the name from its preserved first four Greek letters,
which are followed by a badly broken letter restored as epsilon
and at the beginning of the next line (7) the letter nu. A lacuna
with space for four characters follows this letter. The editors
conjecturally assign to this space the last three letters of
genitive form of the name "Parthenope." These restorations may
not satisfy everyone's notion of "conservative," but they are not
unreasonable if the fragment belongs to the romance about
Metiochus and Parthenope, which is known from other sources.
The question mark that follows the title is the editors'. It
acknowledges that Zimmermann's restoration of the name
"Pathenope" and his assignment of the fragment to the romance
Metiochus and Parthenope was nothing more than an inspired
guess. Since the time of Zimmermann (1935) 372 lines of a Persian
poem of the late tenth or early eleventh century that was based
on the Greek romance have been published. The Persian poem
includes a character named Damchasinos, whose name has been
equated with the Greek equivalent "Demoxenos." On this basis the
editors propose that the preserved first four letters of that
name be supplemented with the unpreserved remaining four letters
of the putative Greek equivalent of the Persian name. This does
not strike me as conservative, but the editors fully describe
every uncertain step that led to their decision to print
"Demo[xenos?]."
In the Preface the editors state that they have combined "two
normally exclusive modes of scholarship: the edition of texts,
and literary interpretation." They have succeeded admirably in
accomplishing this. The General Introduction is a model of
elegant utility, setting out in only seventeen pages the major
issues of interpretation and the contributions made by the
various fragments to our understanding of the ancient Greek
novel. The introductions to the individual fragments are equally
helpful. To cite just one example, the introduction to Antonius
Diogenes' novel succeeds more than any other account that I have
read in recapturing its literary and structural qualities and in
clarifying the complex geographical, historical and philosophical
issues that stand in the way of understanding Photius' summary of
an extremely convoluted novel.
The General Introduction sometimes gives a misleading impression
of the five extant novels. The editors characterize them as a
monolith centring "on an erotic pair of high station..., who fall
in love at first sight,... undergo a series of harrowing
adventures and testings of their faithfulness--kidnapping,
shipwreck, slavery, even marriage to another party--before being
reunited" (p. 4). In fact, two of the so-called "big
five"--Longus' Daphnis and Chloe and Achilles Tatius'
novel--do not fit this mould. I also question whether the
parallels set out on pp. 322-3 between Lollianus' fragmentary
Phoenicica and an episode in Book 4 of Apuleius' Golden
Ass warrant the conclusion that "the two novels must be
deliberately interconnected" (p. 8). Their points of contact seem
equally understandable as the inevitable similarities to be found
in the works of two writers independently basing their fictional
accounts on the characteristic behaviour of outlaws--of art
imitating life.
The book is exceptionally well written. The introduction to
Nightmare or Necromancy ? concludes:
The narrator describes two coincident transitions: his passage
from life to death and his immediate realization of the identity
of the phantom. At the moment of fading or vanished
consciousness, the obscurity surrounding the image is
illuminated--an Aha-Erlebniss (p. 424).
The recognition "on which the rest of the novel must have been
built" could not be expressed better than that.
I noticed very few typographical slips, none of which will cause
problems. Stephanie West might, however, be surprised that the
possessive adjective "his" has been assigned to her (p. 423).
Something appears to have gone amiss in the printing of the short
"ambiguous fragment" the Inundation. The introduction (p.
452) assigns "the imperative 'Come!'" to column II, line 7, but
it actually appears in II. 11. The introduction (ibid.) also
confidently refers to the "daughter" in II. 12. However, only
five letters of the apparently reconstructed word are preserved,
and neither the apparatus criticus nor the commentary sheds any
light on the editorial process. The commentary, in fact, remarks
only on lines 7 and 19 of column II, which leads me to suppose
that a mistake occurred at the printing stage.
It would be altogether inappropriate to end on this fault-finding
note. Susan Stephens and the late Jack Winkler have written a
splendid book that is a delight to read and will be an
indispensable source of information for anyone interested in
ancient Greek literature or the history of the novel.