The line between history and fiction is further blurred in the case of Ctesias’s Persica, which sits chronologically (and perhaps generically) between the Histories and the Inscription. According to one later testimony, Ctesias accused Herodotus of “being a liar [pseustēn], calling him a fabricator of tales [logopoion],”55 apparently basing his claim on the grounds that he himself had had access to more accurate authentication, in the form of Persian royal records (basilikai diphtherai), and had been an eyewitness (autoptēn) of events he described and an “earwitness [autēkoon]” of Persians who took part in these events.56 Yet by raising the stakes in this way, Ctesias also increased the risk of rebound. Time and again ancient sources describe him as lying, mythologizing, inventing. Photius explicitly describes him as hoisted by his own anti-Herodotean petard: “As for myths, the pretext for his vitriol against [loidoreitai] him [Herodotus]—well, he does not abstain from these.”57 How self-aware Ctesias was, the extent to which he knowingly raised the question of his own fictionality, is a question we cannot address when we have so little of his writing. But it seems at the very least probable that he was attempting to artifice a new kind of history, which was stronger on narrative and romance than on source criticism.58
By the time that the Inscription was written, then, the device of the discovered source was already freighted with considerable fictional baggage—especially in cases where the line of transmission runs through a single figure. It is thus far likelier that the Inscription designedly provoked skepticism in its ancient readers than that (as Honigman claims) it tried and failed to persuade readers of a general (historical) truth. Does this mean that the text was presented as a mere fiction, a fantasy whose philosophical content might be discarded along with its fictional setting? This too seems wrong, partly because there was no strong sense within Greek culture at this time of fiction as an ontologically discrete category and partly because the work’s links to fifth-century Sophistic and philosophical thought are so strong. We should see the Inscription’s “fictionality” as ironic accentuation rather than in the full sense of a narrative whose untruth is its dominant feature.
Why, finally, might the author of the Inscription have chosen this form of fiction in which to clothe his philosophical experiment? Two interlocking answers suggest themselves. The first builds on Callimachus’s Xenophanes-like reference, discussed earlier, to the author having “fabricated” Panchaean Zeus. This observation, we noted, takes the language of literary fiction and cross-applies it to theology. But this was a short leap for Greeks, who often took Homer’s and Hesiod’s depictions of gods as the most conspicuous signs of their fictionalizing.59 The fictionality of the Sacred Inscription thus, so far from undermining, in a sense corroborates its philosophical content: the Inscription puts into practice, self-reflexively, its central claim that stories about gods are fictional. The second reason to opt for fiction was no doubt more pragmatic. Proferring a perspective on the gods that could be deemed atheistic was dangerous, as numerous philosophers had discovered to their cost (among them Theodorus of Cyrene, whom I have tentatively proposed as the Inscription’s author). Fiction offered (as David Sedley argues)60 a safer way of expressing philosophical ideas about the gods, in a “refined intellectual game”61 that disguised their full import. Still, if the Inscription’s philosophical significance lies primarily in its dramatization of older, fifth-century religious anthropologies, its importance as fiction is largely forward-looking, since it points the way both to more self-consciously fictive travel narratives (such as Iambulus’s Islands of the Sun, Lucian’s True Stories, and Antonius Diogenes’s Wonders beyond Thule) and to the pseudo-documentary imbroglios of Dictys and (again) Antonius Diogenes.
1. Hiera anagraphē, which I take to mean “sacred inscription” rather than “sacred narrative” (so Winiarczyk 2002, 17, with further references), since Diodorus refers to the inscription itself as an anagraphē: cf. anagegrammenai, prosanagegrammenai, 5.46.7 = T 37, cited below. Testimonia are cited from Winiarczyk 1991. Note too that there is divergence over Euhemerus’s origin, with some traditions claiming Messene (without specifying which particular Messene) and others Acragas (T1C Winiarczyk, with the note ad loc.); elsewhere he is claimed to be Coan (Ath., Deipn. 14.658e–f = T 77 Winiarczyk). See most recently De Angelis and Garstad 2006, arguing for Sicilian Messene. I suggest later, however, that Euhemerus may not have been the text’s author and that the confusion over his provenance may reflect his fictionality.
2. Winiarczyk 2002, 136–37.
3. Meteorological elements as aidious kai aphthartous: T25 = Diod. Sic. 6.1.2.
4. Henrichs 1984; further Winiarczyk 2002, 51–52. Prodicus and Euhemerus appear together at Cicero, DND 1.118–19 = T14 Winiarczyk (apparently deriving from the “atheist catalogue” of Clitomachus: Winiarczyk 1976); Minucius Felix, Octavius 21.1–2 = T9 Winiarczyk.
5. Winiarczyk 2002, 43–69, addresses the history of this line of interpretation.
6. Giangrande 1976–77; Kytzler 1988; Colpe 1995. For a reading of Panchaea in less flattering terms see Dochhorn 2000, 288–89; analogies with the Soviet Union, however, are distracting and potentially misleading.
7. Rohde 1876, 220–24, at 224. Holzberg 2003, 621–26, discusses the “utopian novel” interpretation and concludes that the Inscription was “a forerunner of the utopian novel” but not necessarily a travel novel (626). See also Winiarczyk 2002, 23–25.
8. Honigman 2009.
9. After all, this is a story told at the Apatouria festival (Pl., Tim. 21b). On the “fictional” elements in the Atlantis narrative, see notably the nuanced discussions of Gill 1973; Gill 1979; Gill 1993, especially 62–66; also K. A. Morgan 2000, 261–71, which argues that the Atlantis myth functions as a kind of “noble lying” charter myth for a philosophical Athens. Less inclined to concede fictionality overall is Johansen 2004, 24–47 (“not simply a lie” but “an illustration of a general truth,” 46). Vidal-Naquet 2007 genially discusses the reception of the Atlantis story.
10. A huge topic, of course. For orientation see ch. 1.
11. See especially Sacks 1990; Wiater 2006 argues that Diodorus has a cogent historiographical method.
12. Stronk 2010, 64–70.
13. On the misguided tradition of identifying Panchaea with Sri Lanka see Winiarczyk 2002, 21–22.
14. On which see Sacks 1990, 70–72.
15. Polyb., Hist. 34.4 = Strab. 2.4.2 (Euhemerus T5 Winiarczyk): “He [Polybius] says that it is better to trust the Messenian than him [Pytheas of Berge]. The former says that he sailed to only one land, Panchaea, whereas Pytheas toured as far as the limits of the cosmos.” This seems to me to be an a fortiori critique of Pytheas: even the author of the Sacred Inscription, Polybius implies, is more trustworthy than him, since one made-up land is less of an offense to historiography than many. See contra (but I think wrongly) Honigman 2009, 34: “Polybius . . . was convinced: in his view, the fact that Euhemerus claimed to have sailed to a single island constituted a parameter of credibility.” To the contrary, the very pairing of Euhemerus with Pytheas implies considerable skepticism.
16. T4–7 Winiarczyk (especially 7A = Strab. 2.3.5 [pseusmatōn]; 7B = Chrest. Strab. 2.8 [pseustai]).
17. Holzberg 2003, 621 n. 3: “‘Euhemerus’