T.

HÄGG: Parthenope: Selected Studies in Ancient Greek Fiction (1969–

2004). Ed. L. Boje Mortensen and T. Eide
Pp. 493. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2004. Hardback, € 47
ISBN 8772899077

Reviewed by M. Plaza, Göteborg

When I first saw this book, the years in its subtitle coincided with my life-
span; this made me feel acutely that Hägg’s Parthenope was truly a selection
from a lifetime of studies on the novel. When I finished reading it, I felt even
more awe. It is a handy collection of excellent, relentlessly truth-seeking and
broadly conceived scholarship, and, together with Hägg’s publication (with
B. Utas) of The Virgin and her Lover: Fragments of an Ancient Greek Novel
and a Persian Epic Poem (Leiden, 2003), it constitutes an excellent presen-
tation of this distinguished scholar of the ancient novel. The arguments in
Parthenope are logical and full of wise judgement, and part of their success
is their consistent interest in history and their insistence on keeping fact and
fiction apart. I am not that kind of scholar, but I have done my best to read
independently of theoretical biases, since I am convinced that we can under-
stand each other over the boundaries of our “-isms”. If, as I discuss the dif-
ferent analyses collected here, I occasionally suggest the possibility of an-
other approach, then this, it seems to me, is just as it should be.
In the first pages of this book, the articles proper are preceded by an
autobiographical sketch, “Forty Years in and out of the Greek Novel – A
Memoir”, and the complete bibliography of Hägg’s (hereafter H.) writings,
compiled by the editors of the volume, Lars Boje Mortensen and Tormod
Eide. The “Memoir” offers witty, refreshing reading for colleagues and non-
specialists alike: we can all admire the ever-curious, young-at-heart scholar
depicted here. Particularly enjoyable is the account of how an article written
“to order” for F. Moretti’s study Il romanzo, developed into a theory on the
birth of the novel – a thesis that H. did not know he had in him! (It is a pity
that, for copyright reasons, the article in question did not make it into this
volume; instead, readers are directed to Moretti’s collection, listed in the
bibliography.)
After the “Memoir” and the bibliography, the book is arranged in seven
sections, six thematical and one offering a sample of H.’s reviews of other
scholarship on the Greek novel. The thematic sections vary in scope and

Ancient Narrative Volume 4, 199–207

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time of composition, stretching from the text of Xenophon of Ephesus, the

first ancient novel to induce H. into analysis, to a previously unpublished
paper on the afterlife of Apollonius of Tyana. Let me now describe the arti-
cles in the order of their presentation, section by section.
The first part, entitled “A Hellenistic Philosophical Novel?”, comprises
one article on the Life of Aesop, an understudied specimen of Hellenistic
fiction, composed in many layers, with the last version (uncertainly) dated to
between the 1st century BC and the 2nd century AD. The topic is not typical
either of this book or the best-known ‘Schwerpunkte’ in H.’s novelistic stud-
ies, and the paper has perhaps been chosen by the editors with an eye to its
attractive title: “The Professor and his Slave”. As the subtitle indicates, the
question addressed is whether actual Greek conventions and values are mir-
rored in the Life, and here, in the approach and manner of the investigation,
the reader encounters what is typical of H.’s scholarly style. While throwing
light on several other pertinent issues, such as the dating and readership of
the text, H. traces his main problem throughout in a lucid, detailed, and logi-
cal line. The Life emerges as a text playing on the comic possibilities of an
atypical slave (Aesop) in typical servile conditions, illuminating, in the proc-
ess, what must have been conventional values about slaves, intellectuals
(Aesop’s master is a professor), and gender rôles (the relationship between
the slave owner and his wife).
The section on “Chariton and the Early Ideal Novel” contains three arti-
cles focused on the technical characteristics of the pre-Sophistic novels, and
one on the readership of this kind of Greek novel. The first piece asks
whether Chariton’s Callirhoe and the fragmentary Parthenope Romance may
be described, using a technical literary term, as “historical novels”. H. begins
by a much-needed review of the definitions, half-definitions, and misuses of
the term “historical novel”, and it then turns out (not for the first time) that
our colleagues in the field of the modern novel are content with vague and
partial explanations, agreeing mainly on the point that the “historical novel”
is a modern genus, beginning with Walter Scott. H. then resorts to accumu-
lating a minimum-requirement definition, enumerating such features as a
setting in a historical past, a mixture of historical and fictional characters,
and a degree of probability in the narration. Given some caveats, the main of
which is that H. regards the “historical novel” as but a tributary to the great
stream of the novel, H. decides that the label can be applied to Callirhoe and
to Parthenope. This leads to some illuminating comparisons, such as that
 T . H ÄG G : PA RT HE N OP E 201

between the use of a nostalgic past in Scott’s Ivanhoe (the Middle Ages) and
in the Hellenistic authors (Ancient Greece).
The next article takes a closer look at the details of characterisation in
Chariton, and reaches the conclusion that his introductions and later men-
tions of various personages are, above all, functional, and never allowed to
interfere with the narrative flow. Nevertheless, the author has paid some
attention to this aspect of his novel: so in direct speech, for instance, the way
in which a character is addressed varies according to speaker, situation, and
the relationship – at that point – between speaker and addressee.
In “Epiphany in the Greek Novels: the emplotment of a metaphor” H.
turns to the epiphany motif, again mainly focusing on Callirhoe, but also
adding a comparative discussion of Longus’ Daphnis and Chloë. The ques-
tion posed is whether or not the novelists actually believe in the epiphanies
as spiritual revelations. On its way, the discussion also sheds light on such
aspects as at which point in the narrative the epiphanies occur, who
sees/reports them, and how they are described. In the case of Chariton, the
epiphanies (mostly consisting of people mistaking the heroine for Aphrodite)
are found to be experienced by simple personages and not “endorsed” by the
author, but used at important points in the narrative in order to propel the
plot forward. In the case of Longus, the appearance of Eros in Book 2 is said
to be a “largely ornamental play with the concept” (p. 152). H. rounds off
with a brief treatment of Karl Kerényi’s claim that the gods in the Greek
novels reflect divine myths; H. reasonably dismisses Kerényi’s fragmentary
arguments in favour of what he calls a “secular-literary interpretation” (p.
153). While it is easy to agree that these epiphanies are not reflections of real
cults embraced by religious authors, H.’s use of the concept of “emplotment”
is less exciting than it could have been. There are other alternatives available
than a believing author on the one hand, and insignificant verbal beautifica-
tion on the other: the ideological-emotional universe of these works is rele-
vant. The personages in Chariton may not “really” see Aphrodite when they
see Callirhoe, but surely Aphrodite’s power is present in the novel as a rul-
ing principle, and especially as protection and inspiration for the female lead.
The “emplotment” of Aphrodite could be deeper still – she may be seen as
the Muse of the novel, invoked at crucial points, a double-levelled presence
reminding both characters (within the plot) and readers (viewing the plot
from outside) of the essence of the story. Such a view also applies, I believe,
to Eros’ appearance in Longus, where the epiphany has metamorphosed into
202 REVIEW

an idyllic vision with a tricky game of identification embedded in it. While

H. sees Philetas’ vision as largely irrelevant to Eros’ role in the rest of the
novel (p. 152), I would say that Longus’ novel is precisely about this – tricky
Eros hidden in the idyllic vision.
A very rewarding piece in this section is the major article on the “reader-
ship” of the earlier, popular kind of Greek novel – with “readership” in in-
verted commas, because one of the theses is that these readers may well have
started out as listeners. Through the unavoidable quirks of a volume of this
kind, this essay is more introductory and circumstantial than the ones before
it, yet it holds rich rewards not only for the eager beginner, the lector gulo-
sus, but also for the jaded lector scrupulosus. This is also the gist of the first
part of the article’s argument: a work such as Chariton’s, H. persuasively
argues, had it in it to please different audiences. Arguing especially from the
internal evidence of the early novels themselves, H. concludes that the “nar-
rative suspense, the emotional impact, the escapist function were there for
all, the rhetorical and classicising embellishment for some” (p. 119). He then
proceeds to an arresting consideration of, as it were, oral traits in these nov-
els, such as retrospective recapitulations of larger parts of the narrative and
their counterpart in foreshadowings (an old epic phenomenon, H. points out),
and other features that create redundancy and predictability in the plot. In
order to evaluate adequately the audience of the non-Sophistic novels, H.
says, we must free ourselves from the literacy/illiteracy dichotomy, and
rather think of the pair ‘true literacy’ and ‘orality’. A good part of the audi-
ence in this case is best described as “quasi-literates” and “listeners [who]
may have turned into readers because these texts were in some ways adapted
for what might most properly be called ‘the aural mind’” (p. 135). Thus, this
article is fascinating also because it shows how the study of the novel can
open up new views on more general problems, such as the question of read-
ership in antiquity.
The next section consists of two articles on Xenophon’s Ephesian Story,
on which H. first wrote when he was a postgraduate in the 1960s. One of
these articles describes Xenophon’s manner of naming his characters, and
bears witness to the minute argumentation of Hägg as a young scholar. The
main question asked here is what kind of names Xenophon employs, seeing
that he is a novelist who is unusually lavish with proper names as a means of
identification. H. shows that, although Xenophon uses his share of etymol-
ogically significant and literary names, his preference is for realistic ones. A
 T . H ÄG G : PA RT HE N OP E 203

comparison with relevant epigraphical material proves that he does not in-
vent quite unrealistic names even among the significant ones (which are not,
anyway, deeply symbolic), whereas the realistic names are decidedly com-
mon. Hence H.’s cautious conclusion is that the contemporary audience en-
countering Xenophon’s character-naming would have had an impression of
realism rather than literary fancy.
The paper entitled “The Ephesiaca of Xenophon Ephesius – Original or
Epitome?” was originally composed in 1966, in German, and has now been
translated and bibliographically updated for this collection. It is thus, in a
nice ring-composition, both the earliest and one of the latest pieces in the
volume. H. presents in detail the hypothesis that the Ephesiaca is an epitome
of a lost longer work, concentrating on Bürger’s version of this argument,
and authoritatively refutes it along the lines that seven bad arguments do not
make one good. At the time when this article first appeared, the communis
opinio was with Bürger, as H. states in the article’s introduction. H.’s refuta-
tion turned the tide, and even for those not convinced, it exposed the shaky
foundation of their theory-building, which is one of the noblest tasks careful
scholarship can accomplish. It only remains to be said that it is good to see
this early bold statement being brushed up and placed near the centre of this
collection – having changed its dress of language, this classic shines as
brightly as ever.
If the important early piece on Xenophon is used as a step-up to the cen-
tre, the centre proper of the collection is held by a section on H.’s latest oc-
cupation in the field of the ancient novel: the Parthenope Romance (PR) and
its afterlife. H.’s work in this field has recently been crowned by the major
edition-cum-study The Virgin and Her Lover (2003). In this book H. and the
Orientalist Bo Utas presented the public with editions of the Greek frag-
ments of PR and of the eleventh-century Persian verse romance which they
have shown to be PR’s descendant, as well as with studies commenting on
these texts. It is only, perhaps, the temporal closeness between the appear-
ance of that study and the collection under discussion that makes the
Parthenope material in the latter volume somewhat less stunning than it
would otherwise have been. Still, stunning it is in its essence, and the editors
of the present volume have marked the priority of this section by choosing
Parthenope as the overall title. The section’s four articles offer different
perspectives of the topic and combine to illuminate the variation in H.’s ap-
proach.
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The first of these articles, “The Parthenope Romance Decapitated?”, sets

out to prove that the Coptic tale of the martyr S. Parthenope, extant in an
Arabic version and a Coptic fragment, ultimately goes back to the PR – the
martyrdom is, so to speak, a decapitated version of the Greek novel, pro-
vided with a new, Christian head. Starting from the shared name of the
Christian and the pagan heroine, H. unravels a plethora of novelistic traits in
the martyrdom; first, novelistic features in general, then, circling in on the
particular ‘Vorlage’, minute but precise echoes of the PR. The resulting
strong case for the basic identity of the martyrdom and the novel will, says
H., explain the unusual plot of the former, and add another figure in the car-
pet for the study of the latter. The paper ends with a postscript which, in this
edition, reads as a piece of almost novelistic foreshadowing: “when the arti-
cle was already in press”, we are told, H. made the “surprising discovery that
Metiochus and Parthenope did in fact enjoy a prosperous Nachleben in the
east”, as his attention was called to the Persian verse romance Vāmiq and
‘Adhrā (p. 260). This was in 1984, and we the readers know the happy end-
ing of this scholarly adventure, published in 2003.
Another paper takes us to Polycrates’ court, the setting of the one over-
lapping episode extant in both the Greek PR fragments and the Persian
Vāmiq and ‘Adhrā. The main aim is to compare the two versions in order to
understand how far the Persian romance may help us to recover the Greek
“original”, but we also learn about other things on the way, e.g. about the
historicity of the PR. The author of this novel seems to have been a classicist
at heart and tried to follow his Herodotus, but he admitted some confusions:
by mixing up two similar names, for instance, he made the hero Metiochus a
distant relative of Polycrates, the father of the heroine Parthenope. In answer
to his overall question H. tentatively concludes from his discussion that the
study of Vāmiq and ‘Adhrā will advance the knowledge of the general traits
of the PR, such as setting and plot, but will not substantially help the actual
restoration of the Greek text. Nevertheless, he ends by some examples of
such possible restorations, the last of which is particularly noteworthy, reat-
tributing an utterance about “τÚν σÚν ο‰κον” (lines 23f.) to Polycrates, who
is now assumed to say it in welcome to Metiochus. This attractive restoration
makes use of the recovered common descent of Polycrates and his addressee,
and so happily uses the plot to fine-tune the reference of the words (‘ο‰κος’
meaning both ‘house’ and ‘family’).
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The article entitled “Hermes and the Invention of the Lyre: an unortho-
dox version” takes its beginning from the Persian novel Vāmiq and ‘Adhrā
and its (disguised) version of Hermes’ instrument invention. Unlike the case
in the Homeric Hymn to Hermes, the inventor here is an adult, and the other
essential divergence is that, rather than killing a tortoise and making a lyre of
its shell, this ‘Hermes’ finds a dead tortoise whose dried sinews emit music
when touched by the wind, and eventually manages to make a lyre in imita-
tion of this phenomenon. By close consideration of these and other Greek
and Roman versions of the story, H. is able to reconstruct what the story
looked like in the PR, and to suggest some consequences, both for this Greek
novel, and for the Hermes myth, whose totality (in our knowledge) is
slightly modified by this new-found version. The suggested consequences
for Parthenope are most interesting, in particular the observation that the
novelist’s inclusion of this elaborate myth brings him “closer than previously
suspected to Achilles Tatius, who among the extant novelists takes a special
delight in such material” (p. 338).
The Persian verse novel, the martyrdom of S. Parthenope, and the PR all
come together in “The Oriental Reception of Greek Novels: a survey with
some preliminary considerations”, the crown piece of the collection. To me,
as perhaps to some other readers as well, this is new ground, and H.’s expert
guidance is all the more welcome. Over the three subtitles ‘translations’,
‘adaptations’, and ‘creative borrowing’ H. investigates by which ways such
“light literature” as the pre-sophistic Greek novel managed to by-pass the
stern selection for translation into Arabic (from the eighth to the eleventh
century), generally ruled by a preference for “usable” subjects such as medi-
cine or philosophy. Under ‘translations’, the focus is on how the Greek PR
eventually reached 11th century Iran and the form of ‘Unsurī’s verse ro-
mance. Under ‘adaptations’, the Coptic martyrdom, that decapitated version
of Parthenope, with its long Christian Oriental afterlife is the primary exam-
ple. From the last, most elusive category of ‘creative borrowing’ H. chooses
to look at those stories in the Arabian Nights that have been identified as
owing their heritage, ultimately, to some Hellenistic novel. H. strengthens
the argument of this identification by some further observations, and then
ends on an unusually playful note, contemplating the frame story of one of
these Arabian tales as a possible fictional reflection of a Greeks novel’s
wandering to an Oriental milieu. This article is exciting, eye-opening read-
206 REVIEW

ing, which, through the vagaries of history, also gives echoes in contempo-
rary sensibilities with its discussion of cultural routes to Baghdad.
The following article, “The Black Land of the Sun: Meroe in Heliodorus’
Romantic fiction”, which constitutes a section of its own, is careful to steer
clear of any contemporary political debates. The thesis is that, if we only
allow for Heliodorus’ references to be to his contemporary reality rather than
to the Classical era he purports to describe, his descriptions will not be so
fanciful and biased after all. During this journey through the Meroe of fact
and fiction H. introduces us to his interest in Nubian ‘Realien’, but winds up
the last point of his discussion, that about the colour of the heroine, in a
rather Spartan fashion with the statement that Heliodorus would not even
have considered the alternative of making her black.
The last of the thematic sections presents four articles on the obscure
figure of Apollonius of Tyana, known to us through Philostratus’ biographi-
cal novel on him (composed at the beginning of the third century AD),
through Hierocles’ anti-Christian treatise, where Apollonius is compared to
Christ (c. 300 AD), and through (ps-)Eusebios’ answer to Hierocles (?begin-
ning of fourth century AD). H.’s first article in this section is “Apollonius of
Tyana – Magician, Philosopher, Counter-Christ: the metamorphoses of a
life”; apart from the “Memoir”, this is the only article in the volume which
has not been previously published in its present form. In it H. tries to look
for the “real” Apollonius, the historical figure behind the various philosophi-
cal/ religious constructions of him by the abovementioned authors. He finds
that there is a factual kernel for both Apollonius’ quality as a “holy man” and
his quality as a philosopher – both qualities that he was later fully invested
with in the writings about him – but that he was never as exciting a person-
age as later biography and mythography made him. In this case, perhaps, the
sober and Positivist approach does not do full justice to the material. While
H. criticises modern scholars for creating still more constructions of Apollo-
nius’ life in addition to Philostratus’ and Hierocles’ versions, it may be asked
whether his own dissolving reading of fictions to find facts behind them,
does not dismiss too much of the stories in the process.
H.’s sensible and sceptical approach is exactly right for the other papers
in the section. In “Hierocles the Lover of Truth and Eusebius the Sophist” it
is persuasively argued that Eusebius of Caesarea was not in fact the author of
Contra Hieroclem – a hypothesis that solves a number of difficulties about
the text. Next, in “Photius at Work: evidence from the text of the Biblio-
 T . H ÄG G : PA RT HE N OP E 207

theca”, H. uses the example of Photius’ treatment of Vita Appollonii to argue

that Photius did not compose his elephantine work from memory – this small
article may truly be used to teach how an argument should ideally be
couched. The last article in the book, “Bentley, Philostratus, and the German
Printers”, is a piece of philological detective work unravelling the secrets of
a Philostratus copy with the shelf-mark 679.g.13, and, as they write about
movies, the less you know in advance, the better!
The seventh section, which consists of reviews written by H., again pays
tribute to the broad expertise of this scholar in the spectrum of the books
under review, from critical editions to modern theory.
In conclusion, something about the edition as a whole. The editors are to
be praised for offering a representative and diverse selection of articles, and
for producing a handsome and typographically all but flawless book. Its use-
fulness is enhanced by a short general index at the end, but there is no cumu-
lative bibliography. As regards readership, this book of course faces the
problem of all collections of ‘Kleine Schriften’: since the individual articles
were conceived for different publications, they presuppose different readers
– some articles introduce their topics, while others zoom in directly on a very
specific problem. But the common problem has a common solution: it will
be read by different people. It is perhaps not a book best consumed from
cover to cover, but one to be read, re-read, and consulted, as the well of
learning and instruction it is.