The Romance Between Greece and the East

In the late Hellenistic and early imperial periods, a new Greek literary genre appeared: the prose fiction. Where did it come from? To ask the question in a more provocative form: did the Greeks invent the novel? Or, alternatively, was it imported from the Near East? This question has been around, in various forms, since the seventeenth century, but has gained new urgency in the 'culture wars' climate (of which Martin Bernal's Black Athena is, for students of ancient Greece, the most visible symbol). Any attempt to decide whether the novel, now seen as the most canonical and 'European' form of literature, came from Greece or the Afro-Asian world, will clearly have political implications.

Most approaches fall into one of two camps: either they are still determined by nineteenth-century nationalist models of Hellenism (which tend to present Greek identity as much more coherent, and indeed omnipresent, than it really was), in which case they tend to see novels written in Greek as essentially Greek; or they content themselves with observing (alleged) similarities between Greek texts and those written centuries (sometimes millennia) earlier, in which case as a rule they emphasise Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Persian or Syropalestinian origins.

This series of workshops takes a different approach. Rather than tracing the genre back in time, they explore the hypothesis that the Greek novels were written by people engaging with the world around them, in all its variety. The novel was - this is the proposition - originally a culturally hybrid form. Many of the novelists were from places where cultures met: Achilles Tatius, for example, was from Alexandria, the famously multicultural city on Egypt's Mediterranean coast; Heliodorus was a Phoenician from Emesa, whence the famous Semitic cult of Elagabal (imported into Rome under the Severans). It will also deal with a wider range of texts than most scholarship on the ancient novel considers, including e.g. the 'Alexander Romance' - a work of Egyptian origin, which casts Alexander as a Pharaoh - the more 'romantic' parts of the Septuagint (e.g. Daniel, Esther), and the numerous papyrus fragments that keep turning up in Egypt. If we remove the presumption that we know how to define a 'novel', then we end up with a much more interesting and culturally promiscuous picture of the story culture of Hellenistic and Imperial Greece.

The workshops do not only explore ancient novels, they also think about how we should conceptualise literary production and cultural interchange in complex, multiethnic societies. At a theoretical level, this involves serious engagement with postcolonial thought. How much can (for example) Homi Bhabha help us with ancient hybridities? But there are also questions of a more tradition nature, to do with the the mechanics of transmission. How did stories travel between cultures? Is there evidence that stories circulated not only as texts (which were expensive, and thus tended to be the preserve of the metropolitan rich), but also orally and in mimes?