Dynamics of Ancient Prose : Biographic, Novelistic, Apologetic

234 Pages·2018·1.94 MB·English

by  Harrison

Dynamics of Ancient Prose
Trends in Classics –
Supplementary Volumes
Edited by
Franco Montanari and Antonios Rengakos
Associate Editors
Evangelos Karakasis · Fausto Montana · Lara Pagani
Serena Perrone · Evina Sistakou · Christos Tsagalis
Scientific Committee
Alberto Bernabé · Margarethe Billerbeck
Claude Calame · Jonas Grethlein · Philip R. Hardie
Stephen J. Harrison · Richard Hunter · Christina Kraus
Giuseppe Mastromarco · Gregory Nagy
Theodore D. Papanghelis · Giusto Picone
Tim Whitmarsh · Bernhard Zimmermann
Volume 62
Dynamics of
Ancient Prose
Biographic, Novelistic, Apologetic
Edited by
Thea S. Thorsen and Stephen Harrison
ISBN 978-3-11-059605-2
e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-059443-0
e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-059371-6
ISSN 1868-4785
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018938837
Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek
The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie;
detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de.
© 2018 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Editorial Office: Alessia Ferreccio and Katerina Zianna
Logo: Christopher Schneider, Laufen
Printing: CPI books GmbH, Leck
www.degruyter.com
Preface
This book is the consequence of a memorial conference held at the Norwegian
University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Trondheim in 2013, organised pri-
marily by Thea S. Thorsen.
It has been a particular pleasure for both of us to gather these essays in
memory of Tomas Hägg, whom we were privileged to know increasingly well over
the last years of his life through our interactions with him at the University of
Bergen, in the case of Thea S. Thorsen as mentor and supervisor, in Stephen Har-
rison’s as colleague and scholarly collaborator.
Almost all the contributors to this volume knew Tomas Hägg personally in
various capacities, a number as close colleagues, and all have certainly been in-
fluenced by his writings. His remarkable capacity for academic friendship, col-
laboration and mentorship brought warmth and illumination to many of us,
while his gentleness, modesty and lack of self-importance, combined with his
passion for accuracy and mistrust of showmanship, made him an admirable role-
model for the true scholar. We hope that this volume will stand as a suitable trib-
ute to an outstanding academic and a fine human being.
We are grateful to the Freedom of Expression Foundation (Fritt Ord), the Fac-
ulty of Humanities at NTNU and the Research Council of Norway for financial
support for the memorial conference. We would also like to thank all of Tomas
Hägg’s friends who were able to join us at the occasion, and especially his wife
Henny Hägg and daughter Lotten Glans.
Finally, we are most grateful to Antonios Rengakos and Franco Montanari for
accepting this volume for the series of Trends in Classics Supplementary Vol-
umes, and to all those at De Gruyter who helped us on the road to publication.
Thanks are also due to student assistants Else Melvær Falkenstein and Edvald
Johnsen for their help with the manuscript.

Contents
Introducing the dynamics of ancient prose � 1
Part I: Biographic 
John Marincola  
The Strategies of Plutarch’s On the Malice of Herodotus � 19
Gunhild Vidén  
Bodily Attributes and Authority: Descriptions of the Body in Suetonius’
Biographies � 37
Thea S. Thorsen  
Power and paradox in the early writings of Marcus Aurelius and Fronto:
‘biographical sketches’ in laudes and letters � 49
Part II: Novelistic 
Gareth Schmeling 
The autobiography of Encolpius: Reading the Satyrica as the confessions of the
first-person narrator � 73
Ken Dowden / Amanda Myers 
The Visibility of the Author in the Ancient Novel � 89
David Konstan 
Apuleius and the Idea of Taste in Classical Antiquity � 105
Tim Whitmarsh 
The Flowers of the Meadow: Intrageneric Intertextuality in Achilles Tatius 1–2 � 115
Part III: Apologetic
Einar Thomassen
The rhetorical construction of heresy in the Church Fathers � 133
VIII � Contents
Philip Rousseau 
Hagiography and Displacement: City Readers, Desert Scenes � 145
Ingvild Sælid Gilhus
Biographical sketches of the heretical life: The Panarion of Epiphanius of
Salamis � 161
Part IV: Receptions 
Stephen Harrison 
Psyche amongst the Victorians: An Aspect of Apuleian Reception � 177
Ewen Bowie 
Captured moments: Illustrating Longus’ prose � 195
List of Contributors � 223
Bibliography � 225
General index � 239
Index Locorum � 245
Introducing the dynamics of ancient prose
The Greek δυναμικός, ‘powerful, efficacious’,1 lurks within a key word in the pre-
sent book’s title, dynamics, suggesting a claim to power on behalf of the ancient
prose forms treated in this volume. Such a claim would admittedly be something
of a paradox. When ancient literature is considered as a whole, poetry is normally
valued over prose, and when the focus is narrowed to prose literature, the three
genres of historiography, philosophy and rhetoric are generally valued over other
prose forms. Given, then, the fact that the uncanonical, less well-established gen-
res of biography, the novel and Christian apology appear to belong to the lowest
of the low forms of ancient literature, how can it be suggested that this prose is
‘powerful’ and ‘efficacious’?
In scholarship, few have done more to refine generalizations such as those
underpinning this question than Tomas Hägg (1938–2011). Throughout his aca-
demic career, Hägg made decisive and pioneering contributions to a scholarly
map that now fits the actual literary landscape of antiquity with far greater accu-
racy. Tomas Hägg first became widely known outside Scandinavia after the pub-
lication in English of his The Novel in Antiquity (Hägg 1983; the Swedish version
Den antika romanen had appeared in 1980), but his important first book, Narra-
tive Technique in Ancient Greek Romances (Hägg 1971), had already alerted the
international ancient novel community to his impressive intellectual virtues,
which combined careful and meticulous scholarship with a determination to pro-
mote (then) unjustly neglected texts and develop new and rewarding areas of
classical studies. Both in terms of narrative analysis and the study of the Greek
novel, Hägg 1971 was a very timely volume, and can be seen as setting the frame-
work for some crucial lines of research in the 1970s and 1980s. Hägg 1983 was
perhaps even more important, in that it provided for the first time a synoptic treat-
ment in English of the genre of ancient fiction which was both reliable and ap-
proachable, and was beautifully produced by the cultured publishing house of
Blackwell. Unlike Ben Edwin Perry’s The Ancient Romances of 1967, it was not
anchored in a pre-1945 world and was easily usable in a didactic context, and for
many students (and scholars) it has been a revealing gateway to the world of the
Greek and Roman novel. It also emphasised the reception history of the novel,
another way in which his work seems prescient of more recent scholarly develop-
ments, as well as looking forward to his own work on the reception of the Greek
novel in medieval Persia (see below).
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1 LSJ s.v. δυναμικός.
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110594430-001
2 � Introducing the dynamics of ancient prose
His concern to engage with non-classical texts and periods was also shown
by his consistent interest in Byzantine literature. His second major book, Photios
als Vermittler antiker Literatur (1975), was a penetrating treatment of the ninth-
century patriarch’s modes of citation and excerption in his Bibliotheca, the fa-
mous catalogue of his extensive reading in Greek literature; this is a vital text for
the history of the Greek novel, several examples of which exist only as Photian
summaries of their lost texts. This volume, which demonstrates its author’s im-
pressive competence in the field of Greek manuscripts and textual criticism, was
mostly written in visits as a Humboldt scholar to the University of Cologne in the
early 1970s, a sign of his natural internationalism; in a slightly more local inter-
nationalism, it led to his move from Sweden to Norway, from a lecturer post at
Uppsala (the site of his early career from undergraduate days) to a professorial
appointment (1977) at the University of Bergen where he remained until his re-
tirement in 2009.
At Bergen he arrived amongst colleagues who, like himself but from different
perspectives, had become interested in the late antique Greek culture of Nubia in
Sudan, the Egyptologist/archaeologist Richard Pierce and the classicist Tormod
Eide. Their joint labours (with the help of others) led to the generation of the four
volumes of Fontes Historiae Nubiorum, a collection of all the texts from the an-
cient world on the middle Nile area from 800 BCE to 600 CE, translated into Eng-
lish from Egyptian and classical languages and equipped with a detailed com-
mentary. This remains a crucial resource for the study of the area in this period.2
Other important Bergen colleagues were the Slavist Jostein Børtnes, with whom
he had common interests in late antique hagiography, and the historian of reli-
gion and patristics scholar Einar Thomassen, with whom he collaborated on a
major project on heresy, resulting in the edited volume Kirken og kjetterne,
‘Church and Heretics’, (Norwegian version Hägg 2008, German version Hägg
2010). When we worked there in 2003–7, the Bergen ancient studies department
was known as the IKRR (Institute of Classics, Russian, and the History of Reli-
gions).
Particularly impressive in collaborative terms is The Virgin and her Lover
(2003), co-authored with the Swedish Iranian specialist Bo Utas, a friend from
Uppsala schooldays, where it is convincingly shown that the fragmentary Greek
novel Metiochus and Parthenope served as a key source for a similarly fragmen-
tary eleventh-century Persian epic poem. The volume, generated over a period of
twenty years, contains full critical editions of both texts with reconstructions of
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2 It is now available digitally at https://digitalt.uib.no/handle/1956.2/3083.