‘In the Goddess’ Name I Summon You’: Byzantine and Modern (Greek) fortunes of the ancient novel*

Roderick Beaton

doi:10.1179/byz.1997.21.1.231

‘In the Goddess’ Name I Summon You’: Byzantine and Modern (Greek) fortunes of the ancient novel*

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 January 2016

Roderick Beaton

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Roderick Beaton*: Affiliation:
King’s College, London

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The prose fiction of the ancient world is the oldest that we possess, and historically marks the founding of the literary genre which, by some indicators at least, has outstripped all others in the European-derived ‘Western’ culture of the last two centuries. Yet even the recent upsurge of interest in the subject, and corresponding upwardly mobile evaluations of it on the part of classical scholars, has focussed on the ancient novel not as a beginning but as an end. In the eyes of the dwindling number of specialists who can read and evaluate these texts in the original languages, the novel makes a very late appearance on the scene. In aesthetic terms it frequently demands some degree of apology; its greatest and most productive feature of interest in recent years has been its very self-conscious belatedness, inscribed on every page of its texts in the blatant, comic, and often extremely subtle, re-use of older, culturally sanctioned material. The ancient novel is like those buildings of the late antique city in which the spolia of an earlier epoch are artfully put to new use. The ancient novel, precursor of so much that came later, has by its very nature little that is conspicuously originary about it. It wears its borrowings on its sleeve, proudly; and enough survives of the culture from which it borrowed that the classicist, exactly like his late antique and Byzantine predecessors, can have fun identifying them.

Type: Critical Studies
Information: Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies , Volume 21 , 1997 , pp. 231 - 245

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1179/byz.1997.21.1.231 [Opens in a new window]
Copyright: Copyright © The Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies, University of Birmingham 1997

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References

1. She omits, however, Dunlop, J.C., whose History of prose fiction (revd. Wilson, H., vol. 1, London 1888)Google Scholar was first published in 1814 and devotes six pages (77–82) to Hysmine and Hysminias, connecting it not only backwards to its evident Hellenistic ‘models’ but crediting it with some influence in the Renaissance.

2. Aurelius, Marcus, Meditations, trans. Staniforth, M. (Harmondsworth, 1964).Google Scholar

3. Cf. MacAlister, ‘Byzantine twelfth-century romances: a relative chronology’, BMGS 15 (1991) 175–210 Google Scholar: see pp.181–2 and n. 33, where ‘alien speech’ is described as Bakhtin’s coinage.

4. Bakhtin, M., The dialogic imagination: four essays, trans. Holquist, M. (Austin, 1981), pp.283, 285.Google Scholar

5. See Tonnet, H., ‘Roman grec ancien, roman grec moderne. Le cas de l’Orpheline de Chio de Pitsipios, J. (1839), Revue des Etudes Néo-Helléniques 3/1 (1994), 23–39 Google Scholar; the discussion by Tziovas, D., ‘Introduction’ in idem (ed.), Pitzipios, Iakovos G., (Athens 1995), 50–55; and pp.83–102 Google Scholar of the book under review.

6. To be precise: I Lygeri (published in serial form in 1890) was re-issued as a novel in 1896; I Fonissa, on its first, serial publication in 1903, was subtitled,

7. See now Voutouris, Pandelis, (Athens 1995), 109–198 Google Scholar; Gotsi, G., ‘Narratives in perambulation: Poe’s “The Man of the Crowd” and Metsakes’ , BMGS 20 (1996), 35–55 Google Scholar; and, most importantly: eadem, , Experiencing the urban: Athens in Greek prose fiction, 1880–1912 (unpublished PhD thesis,University of London, 1996).Google Scholar