There are of course other models woven into the Inscription’s locus amoenus, most notably the celebrated topography of Plato’s Phaedrus, yet the underappreciated allusions to Homer’s Scheria are crucially significant in thematic terms.37 The Phaeacians are, after all, “near to the gods [agkhitheoi]” (Od. 5.35) and indeed used to have the gods dining among them (7.201–3).38 They thus represent a significant literary prototype for the Panchaeans, who in their different way have historically offered hospitality to “the gods.”
If the general assimilation of the temple of Zeus Triphylios to the palace of Alcinous is accepted, then we may push further. The narrative on the golden stēlē, the Sacred Inscription itself, now corresponds to Odysseus’s apologoi; let us note too the formal correspondences, both being embedded analepses, (travel) stories within (travel) stories. The stēlē narrative is, like the apologoi, a first-person account, authored this time by Zeus. As one would expect, the correspondences between the two accounts are, in outline, suggestive rather than exact: each narrator establishes a family on an island (Crete/Ithaca), fights battles (with the Titans and Uranus / in the Trojan War), then proceeds on a long voyage, both receiving hospitality and encountering conflict,39 before finally returning home. Especially significant is the claim in Diodorus that Zeus “came among very many races, and was honored [timēthēnai] among all, and named a god” (6.1.10–11 = T63 Winiarczyk). This picks up on two Odyssean motifs. The first and most obvious is at 1.1–3, where the hero is said to have “wandered far and wide . . . and [seen] the cities and learned the mind of many men.” The second is subtler. At three points, the Phaeacians are said to “honor [timēsanto, or timēsousi in Zeus’s prediction]” Odysseus “like a god [theon hōs].”40 Indeed, Odysseus, especially in his traveling aspect, has much of the god about him. Modern scholars have studied the Odyssey’s theme of theoxeny, whereby the hospitality that Odysseus receives is predicated on the presupposition that he might be a disguised god.41 What is more, one of his epithets is dios; whatever the Homeric word actually means (and it is, to be sure, not used distinctively of Odysseus), the view that Odysseus might be “Zeus-like” had become available by the time that the Inscription was composed.42
Crucially, however, Odysseus’s narration to the Phaeacians also served as a byword for fictionality. Already in the Odyssey, there are strong metafictional signals suggesting that the account may not be straightforwardly true.43 By the time of Plato’s Republic, “an apologos to Alcinous” had become proverbial for an untruth (614b, with the ancient commentator’s scholion). For Lucian at the start of his True Stories—a homodiegetic narrative that is avowedly fictitious—“the leader of this crowd [of literary charlatans, the group Lucian’s narrator wishes to join] and teacher of such nonsense [bōmolokhias] is Homer’s Odysseus, who narrates to Alcinous and his court stories of winds in chains; one-eyed, savage cannibals; animals with many heads; his comrades metamorphosed by drugs—lots of that kind of thing, with which he bamboozled the uncultured Phaeacians” (1.3). Let us recall, finally, that the paradigm cases of Odyssean lying narrative are the “Cretan lies” of the latter half of the poem.44 Even more than Odysseus, Cretans were by the time of the Inscription’s composition proverbial liars.45 For the author of the Inscription to have turned an Odyssean Zeus into a Cretan, then, will have been a highly provocative act; in effect, this would double the covert insinuation of mendacity.
HISTORICAL FICTIONS
I turn now to the second intertextual thread. Honigman, we recall, argues that the Inscription should be taken as a variety of historiography, within the category of narratives designed to express general truths rather than specific facts. This claim, I submit, should be modified in light of the Odyssean resonances, which pull in the opposite direction, toward dissemblance and irony. Historiography forms a significant part of the Inscription’s weft, to be sure, but even here we should be cautious before assuming that this directs readers toward veridicality. Historians may have (usually) protested their truthfulness, but their works also had an inbuilt awareness of the possibility of critical counterreaction.46 In fact, thanks to the agonistic structure common to most “scientific” discourse in the formative classical period,47 it is in effect a generic demand that Greek historiography should balance truth claims with (implicit or explicit) attacks on the falseness of one’s competitors. Thus even as individual historians promote their own trustworthiness, the genre as a whole becomes more self-consuming.
The most important historical repertory for the author of the Inscription was book 2 of Herodotus’s Histories, a treasure-house of alternative perspectives on religion. Notable, for example, are chapters 42–45, which deal with the vexatious question of Heracles’s ambivalent identity as both mortal and god:48 “some sacrifice to him as an immortal, others as a hero” (2.44.5).49 Herodotus claims to have come across two stēlai in Tyre in a temple of Heracles, one of gold and the other of emerald (2.44.2); he then learns from the priests of the extreme antiquity of the cult site, from which he concludes that Heracles is indeed an “ancient god [palaion theon]” (2.44.5). Although there is no indication that the story of Heracles’s deeds is recorded on the stēlai (as at Panchaea), the passage surely will have formed part of the intertextual complexion of the original Inscription. What is more, this passage is one of a series of modifications of Greek cultural memory, especially in the religious sphere, reversals motivated by texts and traditions found in foreign places. Herodotus opines that the Greeks “say many things injudiciously [anepiskeptōs]” on the subject of Heracles and in particular cultivate the “foolish myth [euēthes . . . muthos]” of the story of his birth (2.45.1).50 Again we can see how the Sacred Inscription seems to have drawn on this rhetoric of encounter with an older, wiser culture (even if the theological conclusion in the Euhemeran text is much different).
This sense of paradoxical confrontation with alternative truths memorialized in stone intensifies as we proceed to Egypt, finally peaking in the section on the legendary conquering pharaoh Sesostris, beginning at chapter 102. Again we find this account legitimized by columns, this time inscribed: Sesostris, we read, set up stēlai whenever he was victorious, recording his name and his victims (with a depiction of women’s genitals if he thought they were cowards).51 This then leads into a rationalizing account of the sanctuary of “the foreign Aphrodite” (2.112), whom Herodotus takes to be Helen, when she was brought to Egypt during the Trojan War; as in the Sacred Inscription, we see a deity “unmasked” as a mortal. But most important of all, Herodotus now embarks on the famous “alternative” version of the Helen narrative, derived (so he says) from Egyptian priestly traditions: Helen ended up staying with Proteus as a refugee from Paris (chapters 113–20). As with the earlier revision of the myth of Heracles’s birth, this is presented as a corrective to received versions: the priests confirm that “the Greeks’ story is vapid [mataion]” (2.118.1).
Let us return to the theme of fiction, and take a step back to assess. I am not arguing that Herodotus is a fictional writer—although there is certainly space for a polyphonic Herodotus, well aware of the fictionality of some of his stories (“Anyone who finds this plausible is welcome to do so,” he says after the Rhampsinitus story. “My task is just to record the oral history of each people” [2.123.1]),52 and of course “fictionalizing” is a more