Allied to this textural experimentation was a willingness to embrace diverse content, including erotic narrative. Polybius’s disapproving gaze also falls on a more centrally Hellenistic historian, Phylarchus (third century), whom he famously accuses of untruth and of presenting his narrative more like a tragedy than a history (2.34 = FGrH 81 T3). What Polybius actually means here has been vigorously debated,39 but other sources indicate that the reference might well be to content as well as form. Phylarchus’s histories certainly included erotic, and indeed mythological, narrative. The manchette of one of Parthenius’s Love Stories (see next section), a distinctive version of the attempted rape of Daphne by Apollo, claims it derives from “Diodorus of Elaea and the fifteenth book of Phylarchus” (Parth. XV = FGrH 81 F 32). Plutarch attributes another of these stories (XXIII), detailing the love of Cleonymus of Sparta (third century) for his unfaithful wife Chilonis, to “Phylarchus and Hieronymus” (Pyrrh. 27.8 = FGrH 81 F 48, 154 27.9 F 14).
Undoubtedly the most “romantic” of historians, however, was Ctesias of Cnidos, who served as the doctor to the Persian king Artaxerxes II (ca. 436–358 B.C.E.). Ctesias’s principal compositions were the Persian Affairs and the Indian History, the former of which survives in summaries by Diodorus and Photius, as well as numerous fragments.40 These works were known in antiquity for their scurrility and exaggeration. Plutarch in his Artaxerxes, while using the Persian Affairs as a source for his narrative, refers to the “all sorts of nonsense with which Ctesias filled his book” (1.4 = Ctesias T 11d FGrH), which “turns away from the truth toward the dramatic and mythical [to muthōdes]” (6.9 = Ctesias T 11e FGrH). Lucian, in the prologue to his fantastical True Stories, cites Ctesias as one of his literary precursors: “He wrote things about India and its customs that he had neither seen nor heard from anyone truthful” (1.3 = Ctesias T 11h FGrH).
The surviving testimonia on Ctesias are uniformly critical of his mendacity, but he was clearly widely read in antiquity, particularly for his orientalizing perspective on Persia and the Middle East. (If more of Ctesias survived, then our understanding of the Persian scenes in Chariton and Heliodorus would no doubt be richer.) Nor is his significance confined to this. He is our earliest known source for the story of the union between the (historical) Syrian Semiramis and the (mythical) Assyrian king Ninus (FGrH 688 F 1), which captivated later writers including Cornelius Alexander “Polyhistor” (FGrH 273 F 81) and the author of the fragmentary proto-novelistic work that modern scholars call Ninus, probably of the first century C.E.41 This story clearly took on a narrative life of its own: Semiramis could be a hyperpowerful queen with divine elements, as in Ctesias, who makes her the daughter of the Syrian goddess Derceto (≈ Atargatis) and implicitly associates her with Astarte/Ištar; in the novel, she is transformed into a blushing maiden;42 elsewhere we read that she was a prostitute who tricked Ninus out of his kingdom (FGrH 690 F 7, 681 F 1; Plut., Mor. 753d–e).43
Ctesias is also the source of an erotic intrigue between the Mede Stryangaeus and the Sacian Zarinaea, alluded to in a later source (ps.-Demetr., De eloc. 213; see also P.Oxy. 2230 [= FGrH 688 F 8b]). This story has a range of motifs that will reappear in the imperial romance: threatened suicide, a love letter, the bewailing of fortune.44 Again, the influence on the later novels is arguably direct. Stryangaeus’s letter to Zarinaea contains the phrase “I saved you—and although you were saved by me, I have been destroyed by you” (ps.-Demetr., De eloc. 213). Chariton and Achilles Tatius (perhaps via Chariton) seem to have picked up the phrasing in their letters of aggrieved lovers (Char. 4.3.10; Ach. Tat. 5.18.3–4).
Works like these raise difficult questions. They are not plasmatic: they deal with figures and events that already existed within the broad span of traditional records of the past. Moreover, while Lucian may cite Ctesias as a liar, and Polybius may reprove Phylarchus for mixing lies and truth, there is nothing to suggest that such texts were “fictional” at the level of contract between reader and narrator. Ancient readers presumably turned to historians for truths, even if there were discrepancies between different kinds of truth and the different narrative registers through which they were communicated. Even so, neither is this history in the Thucydidean sense, of “realist” chronological sequence and meticulous accuracy. Ctesias, Theopompus, Ephorus, and Phylarchus, in their different ways, seem rather to have privileged (what they understood as) the Herodotean tradition of thrilling, episodic narrative; they reinstated “the mythical element [to muthōdes]” so famously excoriated by Thucydides (1.22.4; see also 1.21.1). It is in the margins of historiography that Hellenistic prose culture developed its most vigorous storytelling.
LOCAL HISTORIES
In order to approach Hellenistic fiction, then, we need—paradoxically—to set aside the concept of fiction and turn instead to the gray areas between history, mythology, and creative storytelling, for it is here that Hellenistic culture typically locates its most exuberant narratives. I want to examine first of all the local history of cities. (“Local history” is, of course, not a coherent genre but a modern label covering everything from verifiable recent history to the fantastic mythography of origin narratives.) Such works were widely composed throughout Greek antiquity, particularly in those periods when regional identity was under pressure from larger, “globalizing” (i.e., usually imperial) forces:45 I count in Jacoby’s Fragmente der griechischen Historiker (FGrH) more than eighty-five titles from the Hellenistic period alone that allude to specific locales. Here more than anywhere, however, we are hampered by the fragmentary nature of sources. In the overwhelming majority of cases we have only brief snippets preserved in later sources, and reflecting the interests (often narrowly lexicographical) of the transmitting author.
Nevertheless, there are good reasons to focus on local history as a locus for fictional thinking. Greek accounts of the past that survive intact from antiquity are as a rule the synthesizing overviews that were too culturally authoritative for Christian late antiquity and Byzantium to ignore. Below this visible tip, however, lies a huge iceberg of diversity. Many of these stories may have circulated orally, whether jealously preserved as part of local culture or intermingled with more exotic stories thanks to cross-cultural traffic among travelers, traders, prostitutes, and soldiers. Oral culture is of course lost to us now, but some of its vibrancy can be detected in written texts that survive.
The political organization of Greek society was highly conducive to generating stories. Each community advanced its claims to prominence through local myths, often in the form of ktistic (dealing with foundation) or colonial narratives. For the classical period, the works of Pindar and Bacchylides testify to this phenomenon in abundance. Epigraphy in particular exemplifies the genuine, ongoing importance to individual cities of ktistic myth in the Hellenistic period. Far from being simply a parlor game for intellectuals, as was once thought, local myth-history was a politically important medium, through which a city might advance its particular claim to preeminence. Poets might be commissioned to add the luster of verse: Apollonius of Rhodes and Rhianus were active in this field.46 Narratives might be inscribed on stone: an excellent example is the inscription recently discovered in the harbor wall of Halicarnassus, which connects the city’s foundation with the nymph Salmacis and Hermaphroditus, “the inventor of marriage.”47 Another medium for preserving and disseminating local history was religious cult. The guides (exegetes) whose role was to explain the sacred history of epichoric cult sites are more familiar from imperial texts such as Plutarch’s On Why the Pythia No Longer Prophesies in Verse, Pausanias, and Longus,48 but the practice is already attested in Strabo (17.1.29) and would almost certainly have existed in the Hellenistic period.
What do these stories have to do with fiction? The first point to make is that local myths are both endowed with an intrinsic cultural authority and conceded (at least by the elite sophisticates who tend to record them) a licence to confabulate, free from the rationalist strictures of more urbane narrative. Local history is expected to be bizarre, exotic: