The central text to be discussed in this chapter is a short, strange, Greek prose work, about which the most fundamental questions remain unresolved. The text is known as Joseph and Aseneth, and it narrates the story of the marriage of the biblical figure of Joseph and his subsequent rule in Egypt. It has been stridently contested whether the work was written from within a Jewish milieu and can be dated as early as the second century BCE, or whether it is a Christian text from as late as the fourth century CE. Moreover, whatever the date or the provenance of Joseph and Aseneth, it is unclear even what the text is for – it cannot be determined what its genre is, or, more productively, how we should understand its function. This is a text that has proved highly provocative for classicists and religious studies scholars, for all that it has never entered the canon of classical literature or the history of religion. One aim of this chapter is not so much to reclaim Joseph and Aseneth for the canon, as to diagnose the ideology that has led to its exclusion.

The origins of the city are often traced back to the fourth millennium BCE Mesopotamian city of Uruk. Thus, we should not be surprised to find that cities were a feature of the eastern Mediterranean, in particular, long before the dawn of the Iron Age. Indeed, Mediterranean archaeology more widely could be described as an archaeology of urban contexts, since most sites that have been examined are of an urban nature, and for major settlements, it is usually the public spaces, including cemeteries, that have been the focus of fieldwork. Thus, we have considerable evidence pertaining to the complex built environments of antiquity. Yet the variability between the socio-political and physical characteristics of such places renders it difficult to define ‘the city’ or what it means to be urban for the Mediterranean past.

To enter the world of Nonnus’ Dionysiaca, the greatest and most influential Greek poem of the fifth century CE, is to enter an echo chamber of Greek literature and engage with a swirling repertoire of mythic narratives. The erotic narratives of Dionysus and his entourage have to be read through this formative poetics – and so it is here, with poetics, that I will begin my travel towards one of ancient poetry’s most bizarre scenes of lustful, fondling, inappropriate desire in action. If any writer of late antiquity reforms the form of epic, from within, as it were, it is Nonnus, whose forty-eight books add up to the forty-eight books of the Iliad and Odyssey combined, but whose narrative discourse, narrative structuring and even verse forms radically disrupt and remould what is understood by the tradition of epic.

In the previous chapter, we looked at a greatly under-appreciated piece of Greek prose that was articulated between the Septuagint and its critical readers, between Greco-Egyptian culture and Jewish anxiety about assimilation, between authoritative Jewish scriptural texts and later Christian readers and writers. It is a text that, whatever its origins, makes evident an arena where Jews and Christians were struggling to form and assert a coherent social self-understanding in and against dominant Greco-Roman culture. The recognition that the Roman Empire included citizens who were Roman and spoke Greek as well as Latin, and citizens who called themselves Greek and who felt conflicted about speaking Latin,1 and citizens of many different ethnic groupings, who spoke not only their own languages but also one or more of the privileged languages of the centre – Greek or Latin – and whose social standing and cultural positioning were articulated through these multi-lingual and culturally diverse interactions, has become a standard understanding of the transformations, translations and cultural interactions of late antiquity, although what the implications are for the study of the literature of the period still needs a good deal of work.

The trait that most characterises the Mediterranean Iron Age is the movement of groups and individuals on an unprecedented scale, particularly the Phoenicians and the Greeks. Their settlement around the Mediterranean is the focus of this chapter. Understanding the motivation behind any such mobility enables us to then characterise the nature of that movement. Scholars have therefore often sought overarching reasons, such as economic pressure on the Phoenicians to pay tribute to the Neo-Assyrians, or overpopulation in the case of the Greeks. Climatic developments are also cited as a push factor, building on recent evidence of more arid, cooler and unstable conditions around the Aegean and eastern Mediterranean between the thirteenth and tenth centuries, and efforts have been made to link such changes to very particular events. None of these can be applied broadly, however. As we shall see below, new data for Phoenician movement in the Mediterranean no longer supports the tribute payment theory, while for the Greeks, the only regions that seem to demonstrate population increase in the early first millennium BCE are those that do not appear to have established settlements elsewhere in the Mediterranean at this time. With regard to the environmental evidence for this era more generally, since most climate data are on multi-decadal to century-plus scales, it is extremely difficult to tie these results to a particular historical process. Furthermore, given the geographic microregionality of the Mediterranean zone itself, neighbouring regions may not have necessarily experienced the same environmental changes concurrently, if at all, although change in one area may well have impacted on another region because of response strategies in the climate-affected area. In short, no single explanation can account sufficiently for the variety of developments we see in the centuries around the turn of the first millennium BCE. The scenario was much more complex and multifaceted. Motivations behind mobility, therefore, must be assessed on a case-by-case basis.

Ecphrasis dramatizes a form of attention, the reflective gaze at an object. An ecphrasis also performs an interpretative process with which the reader is made complicit: the strategies of viewing comprehended by an ecphrasis are normative, even and especially when contested. When Marcel, Proust’s narrator in À la recherche du temps perdu, stands for almost three-quarters of an hour lost in admiration in front of paintings by Elstir, keeping his host and dinner guests waiting, we are invited by Proust’s prose not merely to imagine the entrancing paintings, but also to recognize and respect the aesthetic prowess and self-regard of the narrator – as well as to stand at some distance with the author from the narrator’s youthful fascination and social indiscretion. It is a passage that highlights aesthetic response as a function of modern social protocol, with Proust’s customary self-aware humour.1 How to stand in front of a picture, how long to look at it, what to look at, and, above all, in what language to articulate a response, are all expressive aspects of the cultural spectacle of ecphrastic performance, in antiquity as much as in fin-de-siècle Paris.2

First words, we know, matter. The Iliad’s mênin, ‘wrath’, the Odyssey’s andra, ‘man’, set the thematic focus of the narrative to come, the central question of each epic. What is more, the Odyssey’s silence in its opening sentence about the name of its hero and its periphrastic concealment and revelation of its subject is itself programmatic, in its form, for its hero’s performative strategies of deception as well as the narrative’s engagement with the ethics of identity.1 Homer’s beginnings are echoed and transformed throughout Greek writing. Sophocles’ Antigone – tragedy is a machine for rewriting Homer for the fifth-century polis – opens with Ô koinon, ‘O shared’: and the play goes on obsessively to dramatize not just the conflicting claims of commonality in the city and family, but also the dangerous power of the appeals to such commonality.2 Euripides memorably starts his Medea, eith’ ôphelon mê, ‘If only not’, and the play never escapes the lure of the counterfactual narrative, the wishing things were otherwise.

In this and the next chapter, I turn to a poetic form that plays a particular role in the aesthetics of late antiquity, namely, the hexameter narratives generally known as epyllia. In this chapter I will be looking specifically at how an epyllion narrates a story of eros. The parochial fights over definition – what precisely is or is not an epyllion, and is it a genre recognized in antiquity? – need not detain us here, though such debates have repeatedly vexed scholars.1 I have already indicated that questions of form need to go far beyond such restricted, formal perspectives. This chapter is primarily more concerned with the issue of scale, namely, what the effect is of taking a grand subject and renarrating it in the space of a few hundred lines. If scale matters, then the epyllion’s treatment of eros should prove to be a particularly telling space in which to interrogate how the scale of narrative – its form – affects its perspective. What can and cannot be said in a love story? How long should a love story be? How does size matter?