Further challenge to the veridical authority of epic came from the development of forensic oratory, beginning in fifth-century Athens. Particularly critical was the role of “plausibility [to eikos]”: invoking or impugning the credibility of a particular account was a way of buttressing or assailing a speaker’s trustworthiness.33 Rhetoric opened up a new language for assessing narrative: Do we believe Homer’s version of affairs? Is he a credible witness? Questions of narrative plausibility thus become central to literary criticism (they are famously prominent in Aristotle’s discussion of tragic plotting in the Poetics). These debates persisted into the Hellenistic period. In the early third century, the scholar-poet Callimachus protests that “the ancient poets were not entirely truthful” (Hymn to Zeus 60) in their account of the gods’ drawing of lots for Heaven, Earth, and Hades: “It is plausible [eoike] that one should draw lots for equal things,” not on such asymmetrical terms (ibid., 63–64).34 Later, in the first century C.E., Dio Chrysostom would argue that Troy was not captured, making heavy use of the criterion of to eikos in his argument (11.16, 20, 55, 59, 67, 69, 70, 92, 130, 137, 139). Were such rhetorical confabulations promoted in the intervening Hellenistic period? We can, appropriately enough, appeal only to plausibility.
Let us return to late-fifth-century Athens. The decentering of Homeric authority also allowed Sophists to begin experimenting with alternative Homeric “realities.” Hippias claimed to have an authoritative version of Trojan events, based not on Homer alone but on a synthesis of multiple sources (fr. 6 DK). Gorgias, followed in the mid-fourth century by Isocrates, defended Helen on the count of willing elopement and composed a defense speech for Palamedes. Homer’s most notorious woman could thus be reappraised, and a figure who does not appear in the Iliad could be wedged into the narrative. Sophistry also fostered a relativistic approach to storytelling. Around the turn of the fourth century, Antisthenes composed versions of Ajax’s and Odysseus’s speeches for the arms of Achilles. Once forensic rhetoric had permitted the idea that a single event could be narrated from multiple perspectives, then the Muse-given authority of the epic narrator ceased to be wholly authoritative.
This development allowed for the possibility of versions of the Trojan narrative told from alternative angles. The best-known examples are imperial in date: in addition to Dio’s Trojan Oration, noted above, we also have Philostratus’s Heroicus (see chapter 7), which impugns Homer’s version of events for its pro-Odyssean bias, and the diaries of Dares and Dictys, which purport to offer eyewitness accounts of the Trojan War.35 This phenomenon has its roots in the numerous Hellenistic prose texts attempting to establish the truth of the Trojan War, now largely lost to us: philological works such as those of Apollodorus and Demetrius of Scepsis and synthetic accounts such as those of Idomeneus of Lampsacus and Metrodorus of Chios. Other versions seem to have come closer to the fictionalizing accounts of the imperial period. Palaephatus, whom we met above, composed a Trōika that seems to have been full of the wonders better known from his extant On Incredible Things. A particularly alluring figure is Hegesianax of Alexandria Troas, a polymath of the third to second centuries B.C.E. who composed a prose Trōika pseudonymously ascribed to one Cephalon (sometimes called Cephalion) of Gergitha. “Cephalon” was probably not presented as a contemporary of the Trojan action, as is sometimes claimed: his account of the foundation of Rome by Aeneas’s son Romus (sic), two generations after the war, seems to rule that out (FGrH 45 F 9). Nevertheless, the narrator certainly did pose as a voice from the distant past, and convincingly enough to persuade Dionysius of Halicarnassus, writing not much more than a century later, that he was an “extremely ancient” authority (AR 1.72 = FGrH 45 F 9; see also AR 1.49 = FGrH 45 F 7).
Hellenistic texts also demonstrate a different kind of relativization of narrative authority, based on the conflict between local traditions. Callimachus’s Hymn to Zeus begins by noting the clash over Zeus’s birthplace between two versions, the Cretan and the Arcadian. The poet professes himself “in two minds” before deciding on the Arcadian version on the grounds that “Cretans are always liars” (4–9). The rejection of the “lying” tradition does not by itself guarantee that the other is true; in fact, the more emphasis one places on partiality in traditional narrative, the less likely it becomes that any of it is true. “May my own lies be such as to persuade my listener!” (65), the Callimachean narrator expostulates when contesting the story of the divine drawing of lots, discussed above. A dense and cryptic wish, to be sure, but hardly one that strives to conceal the fictiveness of mythological narrative.
Let us note finally in this section that the poet Callimachus represents a rare intrusion into this predominantly prose landscape, and even he is adopting a prosaic voice at this juncture. This kind of fiction is intimately bound up with the questioning of verse and, in particular, epic’s claims to divinely inspired authority.
History and Fiction
These cultural shifts in the nature of narratorial authority also had implications for the writing of history. Prose records emerged in the fifth century out of the same adversarial climate that produced cosmologists, scientists, and philosophers: a claim to speak the truth was at the same time a rejection of the falsehoods spoken by predecessors.36 As early as Hecataeus of Miletus (early fifth century) we find an author’s programmatic assertion that he will deliver “the truth,” in explicit contrast to the “many ridiculous [geloia] stories” told by the Greeks (FGrH 1 F 1a). Herodotus (1.1–5) and particularly Thucydides (1.1–22) begin with rationalized, scaled-down accounts of the Trojan War that programmatically announce each author’s factual reliability. Thucydides’s austere rejection of “the mythical element [to muthōdes]” (1.22.4) in favor of “accuracy [akribeia]” (1.22.2, 5.20.2, 5.26.5, 5.68.2, 6.54–55) marks his predecessors as inherently untrustworthy. Indeed, extant authors of Greek history (Xenophon, the Oxyrhynchus Historian, Polybius, Dionysius, Arrian, Appian, and so forth) do seem generally to replicate his fondness for relatively unadorned, linear narration.
Yet there was also a different tradition, stemming from Herodotus, which privileged storytelling, exoticism, and wonder (thauma). Thauma is, indeed, a key term in the history of fictional thought. Wonders occupy a peculiarly indeterminate epistemological position, between the plausible and the impossible.37 Moreover, wonders standardly form part of a discourse of geographical otherness, located at the margins of Greek ken.38 Thaumata within a narrative are culturally or physiologically exotic, or both: they thus serve as a challenge to “our” received ideas as to what is plausible and what not.
Collections of thaumata and paradoxes become a genre in their own right in the Hellenistic period (thanks, apparently, to Callimachus’s lead): such authors as Palaephatus, Antigonus of Carystus, Archelaus (SH 125–29), Aristocles, Isigonus of Nicaea, and Apollonius compiled catalogues of wonderous plants, animals, and events. Wonders also played an important role in the narrative texture of the now-fragmentary fourth-century historians Theopompus, Ephorus, and Timaeus. Dionysius of Halicarnassus remarks of Theopompus that “he tells of the inaugurations of dynasties and goes through the foundations of cities, he reveals the life-styles of kings and the peculiarities of their habits and includes in his work any wondrous paradox produced by land or sea” (Pomp. 6 = FGrH 115 T20a [4]). These writers—famously excoriated by the austere Polybius (12.4a)—seem to have raised Herodotus’s digressiveness (FGrH 115 T29–31 [Theopompus], 70 T23 [Ephorus], 848 T19 [Timaeus]) and prurience (FGrH 115 T2 [Theopompus], 79 T18b [Ephorus]) to new heights. Rather than seeing this habit of collecting wonders in Polybian