When it comes to the ancient Greek novel, The Incredible Things Beyond Thule is the big one that got away.[1]
It had it all: embedded narratives of such complexity that those of Plato’s Symposium (an important touchstone here) pale in comparison; a frame story featuring buried wooden tablets, à la Diktys of Crete, that are discovered by the entourage of no less a figure than Alexander the Great; a first-generation Pythagorean as a supporting character whose eyes wax and wane with the phases of the moon; an evil Egyptian wizard as principle antagonist who can send people into a catatonic trance by spitting in their face; a James T. Kirk of a hero who sails the world in a quest to expand the limits of human knowledge, and whose motive for exploration—he has left his home in Arcadia κατὰ ζήτησιν ἱστορίας—represents one of many learned shout-outs to the historiographic tradition; a descent to the underworld that begins among the Cimmerians (as in the Odyssey) who here in all probability are located in Italy (and presumably near Lake Avernus, the entrance to Hades where the Aeneid‘s katabasis is set); and of course, as narrated in the 24th and final book, a trip to the moon itself, where a Sibyl who has taken up residence there delivers prophecies and grants wishes to the intrepid crew who have boldly gone where no man has gone before.
For Photius, whose summary in Codex 166 of the Bibliotheca is our sole source for virtually all the above details, this last apiston is the most unpistevable of all. A sensitive exploration of how Antonius Diogenes’ novel engages with themes of fiction, truth, and credibility is just one of the many contributions offered by Schmedt’s exhaustive study, a revised version of her doctoral thesis. What constitutes roughly the book’s first half establishes a firm new foundation for the study of the novel by compiling, translating, and providing detailed line-by-line commentary on all the surviving fragments and testimonia, including several that have appeared or been identified since the 1995 edition and translation by Stephens and Winkler.[2] The second half offers a systematic treatment of topics covering the novel’s language and style; genre and the place of Antonius Diogenes among the novels; intertextual and thematic relationships with both Greek and Latin works (noteworthy here is that Schmedt follows Ní-Mheallaigh[3] in seeing Lucian’s True Stories as a deliberate sequel to and not a parody of Antonius Diogenes, 449); the role of philosophy and cult (asserting that in its treatment of Pythagorean themes the novel maintains an ironic distance, targeting personality cults that grew up around figures like Pythagoras, 483-492); and themes and motifs such as travel, silence, magic, letters, and liminality. The book concludes with three appendices: the first lists plot elements of the five surviving complete Greek novels and shows how they stack up against those of Antonius Diogenes, the second compares authentication fictions in ancient literature, and the third lists Pythagorean elements that appear in the novel and elsewhere in the tradition.
Schmedt’s treatment of the papyri—the two that featured in Stephens and Winkler as well as three new ones that Parsons has edited and attributed with varying degrees of confidence to Antonius Diogenes—is especially thorough.[4] Having examined all five in person, Schmedt offers for each a full diplomatic edition, literary edition, translation, and commentary. The section on PSI 1177, a fragment with 30 lines of Greek, runs to 65 pages (compared to eight in Stephens and Winkler). Among the new fragments, particularly noteworthy is the discussion of P. Oxy. 4760. Here Schmedt argues strongly in favor of one of the two reconstructions of the scene proposed by Parsons, namely that the wizard Paapis is being sentenced to be burned at the stake (a fate he somehow avoids, as we can infer from Photius), and that his satchel full of books with magic spells is to be tied around his neck and burned together with him. Schmedt (304-306) adds an additional example to the Roman legal sources already cited by Parsons to support this interpretation, which in a novel set in the ancient Greek past would make for an anachronism drawn from the Roman present (not exactly a rarity for the novels).[5]
Also included are discussions of three papyri that at some point or another have been wrongly attributed to Antonius’ novel. For one of them, P. Mich. inv. 5 (Stephens and Winkler’s “The Love Drug”), Schmedt also offers an edition, translation, and commentary, including a discussion of Stramaglia’s recent discovery that the scenario depicted in the fragment bears striking similarity to that of a declamatory theme mentioned by Pseudo-Hermogenes.[6] Thus, like the section on the genuine papyrus fragments, these chapters also provide a useful update to Stephens and Winkler: following Gallavotti,[7] they had tentatively included the so-called Herpyllis Fragment (P. Dubl. C3) as “Antonius Diogenes?” because it was “just possible” that the letters usually taken to form the name “Herpyllis” could instead be “Derkyllis”, the name of the heroine of The Incredible Things.[8] Schmedt cites several arguments and authorities that were either not mentioned in Stephens and Winkler or that have since been adduced for how such a reading is impossible on papyrological grounds, and that there is no reason to suppose any connection between the fragment and Antonius Diogenes (372-374).
Similarly thorough is the section on literary testimonia, including the passages in Porphyry’s Life of Pythagoras which Porphyry says he based on Antonius Diogenes. These, we learn from John the Lydian’s citation of the same, appeared in Book 13, halfway through the novel, when the Pythagorean theios anēr Astraios tells stories about his master. To the testimonia collected by Stephens and Winkler, Schmedt adds several that have been identified in the interim, including references to the Incredible Things in Eusebius’ Contra Hieroclem, Olympiodorus’ commentary on Aristotle’s Meteorologica, and the Indica of the 11th-century Iranian polymath al-Biruni (who probably deserved a gloss). The cumulative effect, as Schmedt emphasizes, is to underscore the extent to which the novel had become shorthand for unbelievable tales and fictions, although only Porphyry and Photius show any deeper knowledge of its content (19-20).
In the section on Photius’s summary—at over 100 pages almost a monograph in its own right—the Greek text follows for the most part the recent edition of the Bibliotheca by Bianchi and Schiano.[9] For some of the ambiguous passages, Schmedt differs from the interpretations of Henry[10] and Stephens and Winkler, while always providing an overview of the alternatives: at 109a9-10, Schmedt has Photius say that “when Antonius Diogenes lacks clarity, it is in his digressions”, as opposed to “never lacking clarity, even in his digressions”; at 111b21 she follows Henry against Stephens and Winkler, I think correctly, on the meaning of the epigram inscribed on the chest containing the cypress tablets on which Deinias’ report, i.e. the narrative of the novel, has been written. For 111a111 she proposes a new and convincing interpretation of ἡ Σίβυλλα τὴν μαντικὴν ἀπὸ Καρμάνου ἀνέλαβε as meaning “the Sibyl began her performance of prophecy with Karmanes,” (i.e., before proceeding to prophesy for the others) against that of Rohde (i.e., that after relocating to the moon the Sibyl ceased to utter prophecies and took the opportunity provided by the visit of Karmanes and his companions to resume), an interpretation which was followed in turn by Henry, Fusillo,[11] and Stephens and Winkler.
One major area where Schmedt declares a departure from Stephens and Winkler involves the vexed problem of the two letters that seem to precede the novel, as described by Photius at 111a30-111b2, namely those to Faustinus and “his” (Antonius’? Faustinus’?) sister, Isidora. Whereas Stephens and Winkler see the Isidora letter as “contained” in the outermost letter to Faustinus (103), just as the former contains the letter of Alexander’s general Balagros, Schmedt argues against such a “hypotactic” structure, and maintains instead that the letters to Faustinus and Isidora are “parallel” (556-558). There does not seem however to be that much daylight between their respective positions. According to Schmedt, Stephens and Winkler argue that the Isidora letter is quoted in the Faustinus letter, whereas she herself suggests that the latter possibly announced the former. Stephens and Winkler’s diagram (115) does indeed present the Faustinus letter as “quoting” the Isidora letter—but not without qualifying that word choice with “or prefacing”, and their arrangement suggests that the letter to Isidora is included in the Faustinus letter not between salutation and signature, as it were, but rather as an attachment. Their translation makes it clear that they understand Photius’ language at 111a33-34 in the same way that Schmedt does, namely that in the Faustinus letter Antonius Diogenes references the fact that he is dedicating the novel to Isidora, a dedication which duly follows in the prefatory letter that is addressed to her. They seem to have the same scheme in mind.
One might reasonably remark upon the length (655 pages) of a monograph devoted to what is, after all, a fragmentary novel. Schmedt provides rich, expansive context for interpreting the remains of The Incredible Things, and reconstructs the history of scholarship on a variety of relevant topics, including the Second Sophistic, Atticism, and the use of letters as plot devices throughout classical literature, to name just a few. The command of bibliography is impressive—it was exciting for example to see prominent treatment given to Filippo Ronconi’s game-changing work on Photius’ Bibliotheca[12]—but this comprehensiveness can occasionally be distracting, especially in descriptions of the earlier stages of a particular scholarly debate. For instance a discredited theory, the author of which simply mistook Photius’ explicit description of the death of the character Keryllos at 110a3 as referring to Astraios instead, could and should have been dismissed more expeditiously (508-509).
That said, it might sound perverse to suggest that a work representing such a massive and wide-ranging scholarly undertaking should have been expanded to include still more material. Nevertheless, some brief outline or summary of the narrative structure of the novel, even a diagram like that of Stephens and Winkler, would have been welcome.[13]
These however are minor remarks regarding a definitive study. With its Terry Pratchett quotation, Schmedt’s epigraph gestures towards an understanding of The Incredible Things Beyond Thule as the work of what today we might call an author of great imagination. It is a testament both to Schmedt’s scholarship as well as to her own imagination that she succeeds in guiding the reader through the fragments and testimonia to catch fresh glimpses of an intricate and intelligent novel, one that was in conversation with a broad range of traditions and discourses.
Notes
[1] With all due respect to Iamblichos’ Babyloniaka, which likely consisted not of 39 but 16 books; see Susan Stephens and John Winkler (eds), Ancient Greek Novels: The Fragments (Princeton 1995) 180-181.
[2] Stephens and Winkler 101-172.
[3] Karen Ní-Mheallaigh, Reading Fiction with Lucian: Fakes, Freaks and Hyperreality (Cambridge 2014).
[4] Peter Parsons, “P.Oxy. 4760. Antonius Diogenes,” The Oxyrhynchus Papri 70 (2006) 9-15; id. “P. Oxy. 4761. Novel (Antonius Diogenes?),” The Oxyrhynchus Papyri 70 (2006) 15-22; id. “P. Oxy. 5354. Antonius Diogenes,” The Oxyrhynchus Papyri 83 (2018) 54-63.
[5] Parsons, “P.Oxy. 4760,” 14.
[6] Antonio Stramaglia, “Temi ‘sommersi’ e trasmissione dei testi nella declamazione antica (con un regesto di papiri di papiri declamatori),” in L. Del Corso, F. de Vivo, and A. Stramaglia (eds), Nel Segno del Testo (Florence 2015) 147-178.
[7] Carlo Gallavotti, “Frammento di Antonio Diogene?” SIFC 8 (1931) 247-257 (257).
[8] Stephens and Winkler 159n4.
[9] Nunzio Bianchi and Claudio Schiano (eds), Fozio: Biblioteca (Pisa 2016).
[10] René Henry (ed.), Photius. Bibliothèque. Tome II (Paris 1960).
[11] Massimo Fusillo, Le incredibili avventure al di là di Tule (Palermo 1990).
[12] “The Patriarch and the Assyrians: New Evidence for the Date of Photius’ Library,” Segno e Testo 11 (2013) 387-395.
[13] Stephens and Winkler 115.