The Blurred Line Between Fiction and Non-Fiction in Antiquity

Tonight I led a discussion about the "Epistle" and "Prologue" to Dictys Cretensis' Journal of the Trojan War. I chose the text after the work was referred to by Antonis Kotsonas from the University of Cincinnati in a public lecture he gave last week at The University of Queensland. The lecture was about how Homer related to the archaeology of Crete and was extremely entertaining. I thought it would make for an interesting discussion given how I had previously discussed Vulture Epistles and Damigeron's work On Stones which features a letter at its start too. I normally don't plan to spend a lot of time preparing for these sessions, but I found this text difficult to prepare.

Both the "Epistle" and the "Prologue" (which don't appear together in manuscripts except in one exceptional case), give a description of the discovery of the text which follows. At its most basic, the text is found in the tomb of its author after it was found by luck (collapse through age or earthquake depending on whether you believe the "Epistle" or "Prologue") by shepherds during the reign of the emperor Nero near Knossos on Crete. The work and it Prologue are a literary fiction first written in Greek and later translated into Latin, and most of the current scholarship on it places it within the various Greek novels. Most of my discussion tonight was based on Nicholas Horsfall's discussion of the Prologue.

Yes, I agree that Dictys never existed, and that the discovery of his tomb and the stagnum (it's an alloy of lead and silver) box containing his account of the Trojan War is a fiction, but despite Horsfall's fantastic argument that it is a parody of scholarship I don't think that it was a terribly obvious parody. Horsfall's argument is primarily based on the sign posts within the text that it wasn't to taken seriously. The sign posts include the author's purported name: Dictys Cretensis - Dictys the Cretan. The name Dictys derived from the name of Mt Dikte on Crete, so the name is a bit "Cretan McCreteface". Cretans, from the time the Odyssey was written were described as liars of the highest order, so this was meant to tell the reader it was fiction. 

The majority of Horsfall's arguments are based on the literary tropes the text shares with numerous other ancient novels, and they are significant, but the focus on the fictional nature of the text doesn't address how it was later received as an historical text, especially among Byzantine historians. 

Horsfall makes the valid point that the discovery of marvellous texts was a popular fictional trope, but it also exists in non-fictional texts. While he cites numerous fictional examples, works which were considered non-fictional in antiquity were also wondrously discovered including Cyranides, a work which we consider magical but was seen as a natural history, that was purportly found inscribed on iron slabs in a Syrian language. While not as closely following this trope, in the Byzantine period there were stories recorded in historical works of men acquiring ancient Greek scientific texts in wondrous way. This trope wasn't limited to fictional works. 

The very idea of the use of "Punic letters" to write the work is placed into the context of a fictional trope by Horsfall, which it is. But it is also worth noting that Karen Ni Mheallaigh (2012) points out that the description of this use of alphabet fitted in very well with what was understood as the history of the development of Greek writing in antiquity.

Horsfall also notes the idea of shepherds finding ancient works was a common fictional trope, but we know this isn't limited to ancient fiction. The Dead Sea Scrolls were actually discovered by a Bedouin shepherd. In addition to this, an actual Bronze Age tomb was found in the last month by a farmer whose wheel fell into the collapsed shaft of the tomb. We know as an historical reality that these things can and do happen. 

Horsfall also states that the translation of a work to make it available to a wider population was an attempt to imbue the fiction with authority, but two examples which he provided, the translation of a Carthaginian text on agriculture and Mithridates' work on toxicology are both historical examples. 

It seemed, at least to me, that Horsfall's argument, utterly convincing to modern scholarship, is a little unfair to those ancient and medieval readers who took the work at face value.

The full text we now have is a Latin free-translation of a Greek text made by the author of the "Epistle", Lucius Septimius, and Edward Champlin (1981) provided a prosopographical study (that is he tried to identify who that was by reviewing all possible evidence) in which he identified this person as one Septimius Serenus Sammonicus, a member of the Severan court at Rome (he died in 211CE) who was known to be a little gullible. This identification is not a popular one, with the majority of current scholarship dating the translation to the fourth century CE, but it suggests that readers might not realise that this was a parody. Indeed, three Byzantine historians based their accounts of the Trojan war on this text: John Malalas (6th century), Joannes Antiochenus (7th century), and Georgius Cedrenus (11th century). In addition to this, Malalas and the Suidas both date an earthquake on Crete to the reign of Claudius because they mistook the full name of Nero for Claudius (it gets a bit confusing when you look at the full names of Roman emperors, and the shift to Greek doesn't help) on the basis of the "Preface".

At the end of the discussion, I was extremely pleased when the students seemed to agree that while the text never existed and that Horsfall was likely correct that it was parody, they did not think it was an obvious parody. One even suggested that the author might have even been intentionally deceitful. Upon typing this just now, I wonder whether some would argue that the very concept of such deliberate deceitfulness was in keeping with a work attributed to a Cretan author, so this post seems to be becoming an Escher print or the classical version of Inception. 

In any case, whether the author meant to or not, this text blurred the line between ancient fiction and non-fiction.

Bibliography

Nicholas Horsfall, 2008-09. "Dictys' Ephemeris and the Parody of Scholarship", Illinois Classical Studies, no. 33-4, pp. 41-63.

Karen Ni Mheallaigh, 2012. "The 'Phoenician Letters' of Dictys of Crete and Dionysius Scytobrachion", Cambridge Classical Journal, vol. 58, pp. 181-93.

Edward Champlin, 1981. "Serenus Sammonicus", Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, vol. 85, pp. 189-212.

Nathaniel Griffin, 1908. "The Greek Dictys", American Journal of Philology, vol. 29, pp. 329-35.

One report on the discovery of the tomb this month can be found here.

The only complete translation of the work attributed to Dictys Cretensis was made by R. Frazer, and can be found online here. I'm not a huge fan of the translation, but that is a bias based on his translation of stagnum as tin.