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3

Belief in Fiction

Euhemerus of Messene and the Sacred Inscription

In this chapter I consider in more detail a figure who (as we saw in chapter 1) plays a pivotal role in the history of Greek fiction. Euhemerus of Messene is associated predominantly in the modern imagination with the rationalization of myth, of the kind that we find in the opening paragraphs of Herodotus, in Palaephatus, or in Dionysius Scytobrachion, and which may have had its ultimate roots in Hecataeus. Yet the Sacred Inscription¹ attributed to him seems to have had little to do with “euhemerism” in the current sense: so far as we can tell from the testimonies refracted in later sources, it made no attempt to launder traditional heroic narrative.² Euhemerus’s narrator claimed, rather, to have found an island in the Arabian Sea, Panchaea, where a tradition survived that the figures known to the Greeks as the Olympian pantheon were in fact once mortals, whose egregious acts had led to their divination. The text centers on a heterodox anthropology of religion, promoting a particular theory of Olympian divinities (as opposed to the “eternal and imperishable” sun, moon, and stars) as having originated in the deification of euergetists.³

What kind of text was this, then? The religious-philosophical dimension seems undeniable. A Herculaneum papyrus shows that Prodicus had already in the fifth century B.C.E. argued for two kinds of gods, the elemental and the deified culture bringers; Albert Henrichs in particular has argued for Prodicus’s direct influence on Euhemerus (and indeed their names are connected already in antiquity).⁴ It is also worth noting that Sextus Empiricus’s brief account of the Sacred History at Adversos mathematicos 9.17 (T27 Winiarczyk) quotes the opening line of the famous religious anthropology of Critias’s (or Euripides’s) Sisyphus: “Euhemerus, surnamed ‘the atheist,’ says: ‘When the life of humans was unordered . . .’ ” Even if the connection was Sextus’s own rather than explicit in the Sacred Inscription, that itself is instructive, given that Sextus knew the Euhemeran text better than we do.

So the Inscription is likely to have had philosophical content. It probably had a political point too, as has long been noted: the elevation of humans to gods for their euergesiai, their “great achievements,” seems highly likely to have spoken to the emergent practice of deifying rulers.⁵ Yet these observations tell us nothing about the genre and tone of the framing narrative. After all, Aristophanes’s Clouds and the Aristotelean Constitution of Athens contain both philosophical and political content, but they are very different types of text. Let us reemphasize the question: what kind of text was this? The tendency has been to classify it generically as a “utopia,”⁶ but while there clearly was an emerging interest at the time in the description of idealized societies (a tradition that began with Plato’s Atlantis and eventually led to Iambulus’s Islands of the Sun), this label is of course not an ancient generic category, and in any case, to the extent that it has any purchase on the three texts in question, it describes (once again) content rather than form. In other words, the bare ascription utopia is nonspecific and (more to the point) does not begin to disclose how earnest or ludic is the presentation. More precise is the claim, which goes back to Erwin Rohde, that the Sacred Inscription was a utopian novel, a designedly fantastic romance (even if “the fabulous is reduced to a subordinate role” relative to “more serious instruction”).⁷ What does novel mean in this context? The assumption, though it is rarely stated, is that the label is justified by a substantial narrative element, detailing among other things the narrator’s voyage to Panchaea (and perhaps back again). But as Sylvie Honigman observes in a recent article, the identifier novel also implies fictionality.⁸ To describe the Inscription in these terms suggests that ancient readers would have entered knowingly into a fictional contract with the text.

How fictional was the Inscription? And fictional how? Honigman’s argument is that, to the contrary, the text cleaved to the rhetoric of historiographical truth telling, which permitted a certain amount of elasticity for texts that conveyed general truths; it is thus a text that, while not necessarily true at the level of precise details, demands to be believed for the wider truths it encodes. Her discussion has, assuredly, taken criticism of the Inscription to a new level, drawing out the nexus of intertextual links to earlier literature, particularly Plato’s Atlantis narrative, which (following Thomas Johansen) she takes as the prototype for this kind of “general truth” historiography. Yet it seems wrong to assume that allusion implies equivalence. Even if it were true that the Atlantis story presented no self-conscious fictionality (which seems far from self-evident),⁹ it would not therefore follow that a later text that made reference to it operated according to the same principles. What is more, by limiting the framework of Euhemeran reference to historiography and (as she sees it) related genres such as the Atlantis myth, Honigman risks an etiolated account of the resonances that would have been available to readers at the time. My aim in this chapter is not, in fact, to argue straightforwardly that the Inscription operated in a register that was immediately identifiable as fictional, not least because (as we have seen) “fiction” was no more an immediately identifiable category in the early Hellenistic period than was “utopia.”¹⁰ Yet there are numerous hints at a more ludic reading, which will lead us to a more experimental and less normative assessment of this extraordinary text.

WHO WAS EUHEMERUS?

The matter is complicated immeasurably by the fact that we have not a single word of the original Inscription; everything we know about it is filtered through later sources, particularly Diodorus Siculus (with extra content provided by Lactantius, who filters Ennius’s lost Latin version). Diodorus, as recent scholarship has emphasized,¹¹ is much more an independent creative force and much less a compiler of tralatitious sources than he was once thought to be. We can test the principle with a brief sideways glance at recent scholarship on Ctesias, for whom Diodorus is again the primary source but where we have more evidence for the nature of the original. Here the tendency has been to resist the assumptions of earlier generations and to see much more of Diodorus in his account of Ctesian material.¹² By the same token, it seems dangerous to assume that Diodorus’s use of the Inscription offers anything like a pellucid window onto the original.

So what we can say with confidence about the original Inscription and its author? According to Diodorus (as paraphrased by Eusebius), Euhemerus was “a friend of King Cassander and required by him to fulfill certain royal tasks and great journeys abroad” (DS 6.1.4 = T3 Winiarczyk); one of these took him to the island of Panchaea, in the Arabian Sea. Cassander was the king of Macedon from 305 to 297 B.C.E., a narrow window that dates the supposed expedition. If we are considering the date of the text’s composition, this chronology evidently offers us a terminus post quem. It also provokes a fundamental question: are we to reckon that Euhemerus really was a historical figure in the Macedonian court? Or, to put it in crisper literary-critical terms, is the homodiegetic narrator of the voyage to Panchaea to be identified with the real-life author of the text?

This bears on the question of fictionality in a double sense. Let us first unpack some of the implications of the question that are more complex than they might initially appear. The author, of course, did not actually go to Panchaea, since the island does not exist and never has done.¹³ There is, then, even at an immediate level, a separation between the flesh-and-blood author and the narrator of this imaginary visit. Of course, it is possible to argue that this level of skepticism was not available to ancient readers, who might have taken the visit at face value, but this is, in general, not borne out by the ancient reception. Diodorus, for sure, seems to take the Sacred Inscription as describing real space, but primarily because it fits his philosophically antitheist agenda.¹⁴ It has been claimed that Polybius too put faith in the text’s veracity, but in fact the passage in question (a testimonium preserved in Strabo) is ambiguous to say the least and in fact seems to me to imply considerable skepticism.¹⁵ There are, conversely, explicit references to Euhemeran “lies” from Eratosthenes onward.¹⁶ Honigman’s explanation for this general mistrust is that the Sacred Inscription failed, methodologically, on two grounds: first, on the absence of external corroboration; second, in adopting a historiographically unconventional form. Both observations are true enough, but they invite the obvious, Occam’s razor objection: rather than as a failed attempt to persuade, could we not take the Inscription as a successful attempt to discomfit?

Second, there is the deeper question of the identity of the original author. As Niklas Holzberg observes, it is quite possible that “Euhemerus” is merely the name of the fictional narrator rather than that of the historical author.¹⁷ The striking uncertainty over his provenance, we might tentatively suggest, may support this conclusion.¹⁸ That the later tradition did not distinguish the two is not in itself remarkable: as a parallel we could point to Photius’s attribution of one of the Ass narratives to “Lucius of Patrae,” the fictional narrator (Bibl. cod. 129 = 96b). Again, the ramifications are more complex. I argue elsewhere that the default position for the reception of Greco-Roman narrative was to assume that a homodiegetic (or “first-person”) narrator was also the author, even in situations where the narrative in question was obviously fictional; hence, for example, Augustine’s notorious assertion that Apuleius “claimed, whether truthfully or fictitiously,” to have been transformed into an ass (Civ. 18.18).¹⁹ Homodiegetic fiction is a particularly marked species within the wider fictional genus because of the deeply ingrained presumption that an utterance in the first-person singular is deictically indexed to the author of the utterance, or, in the case of a literary work, the author proper. It thus inevitably invokes the figure of metalepsis, the conflation of different levels of narrative such that, for example, a primary narrator enters a secondary narrative, or an author enters her own narrative.²⁰ It may even be possible to speculate as to why the name Euhemerus (which is, admittedly, common enough)²¹ was chosen. A hēmeroas or hēmerodromēs is a courier; the latter is the word Herodotus uses, for example, of Phidippides the Marathon runner (6.105.1). So Euhemerus may simply mean “trusted emissary”—perfect for the role this personage plays in the text.

What evidence do we have for the identity of the author as (potentially) discrete from the narrator? The only credible allusion from the early Hellenistic period²² comes in Callimachus’s Iambi, where the revivified Hipponax commands the Alexandrian elite: “Come here, all of you, to the temple beyond the wall, where the man who fabricated [plasas] Panchaean Zeus of yore [ton palai Pankhaion . . . Zana], a blathering old man, scratches away at his improper books [adika biblia]” (Iambi 1.9–11 = fr. 191 Pf = T1A Winiarczyk). Sextus Empiricus associated this scratcher of improper books with “Euhemerus” (Adv. math. 9.50–52 = T23 Winiarczyk), and this seems right (notwithstanding the doubts raised above over whether the name attaches to the author or the narrator).²³ But what else can Callimachus tell us? Not, for sure, the name of the author as distinct from the narrator, since the allusion is oblique rather than direct. But there is a further clue here. If the author in question was, in fact, Euhemerus the friend of King Cassander, then what was he doing writing in Alexandria, the capital of a rival kingdom? It is not, of course, at all impossible that he left Macedon for Egypt, or that Callimachus’s allusion is, in a way that we can no longer divine, figurative rather than biographically true. But it is at least equally plausible, and certainly more economical, to see the author of the Sacred Tale as an Alexandrian writer, well known enough to be identified allusively, who concocted the narratorial figure of the Macedonian Euhemerus.

The Callimachean allusion yields another couple of hints. The scratcher of improper books is said to have “fabricated” Panchaean Zeus. The verb for “fabricate,” plattein, is used for literary fictions too. As Arnd Kerkhecker notes in his discussion of this passage, we might take Callimachus to be alluding to the fictionality of the Inscription itself, albeit fixating narrowly on its impious theology.²⁴ There may be an echo too of Xenophanes’s famous description of “battling Titans, giants, and centaurs” as the “fabrications [plasmata] of former men” (F 1.22–23 DK), a line that is conventionally (and plausibly) taken as part of a wider critique not just of Homer’s and Hesiod’s theology but also of their narrative trustworthiness in general.²⁵ Is Callimachus—or, rather, his speaker Hipponax—turning the tables on the author of the Sacred Inscription, critiquing his divine fiction with the same language that rationalists wielded against theists? If we accept the extended sense of Callimachus’s plattein, then the passage offers further evidence that the Sacred Inscription was received, early on, as a fictional text.

The reference to adika biblia is also suggestive. I have translated the adjective as “improper,” which may be all that it means. But dikē also suggests legality, which might imply that the author’s works have fallen foul of the law. Lying in the background here are the asebeia (impiety) trials of Socrates and (perhaps) Anaxagoras, cultural memories of the penalties for religious heterodoxy. Maybe the aggressive Hipponax is implying that the author of the Inscription deserved such a fate. But is there a more direct allusion at work here? Could the “blathering old man” have been, in fact, Theodorus of Cyrene, known as “the godless” for his denial of the existence of conventional gods? The tradition surrounding Theodorus is confused indeed, but he seems to have been tried for asebeia in Athens at the very end of the fourth century and thereafter to have relocated to the court of Ptolemy Soter in Alexandria before retiring to Cyrene (Diog. Laert. 2.102).²⁶ This can only be speculation, but it is not impossible that Theodorus was the aged heretic to whom his fellow Cyrenaean refers.²⁷ Particularly suggestive is the fact that Theodorus was known in his lifetime as Theos, “God,” on the basis of a captious mode of argumentation (Diog. Laert. 2.102). If Theodorus could become a god through an act of linguistic designation, why not suppose that the entire pantheon came into being thus?²⁸

THEOLOGICAL FICTIONS

I have argued that the Inscription is likely to have arisen from a particular commingling of cultural streams, the Athenian tradition of Sophistic/philosophical critique of divinity and the emergent literary self-consciousness of Ptolemaic Alexandria. This cultural hybridization, I suggest, lent itself to the development of modes of writing that were simultaneously highly allusive to earlier texts and radically innovative. I turn now to consider how the Inscription may have fused two particular kinds of writing while also rerouting them in new directions.

The first point to make is that the Inscription draws on the genre of the traveler’s tale, and more specifically the sailor’s tale.²⁹ Strabo (1.3.1 = T4 Winiarczyk), picking up the phrasing of Eratosthenes (T5 Winiarczyk), may have called Euhemerus “Bergaean,” an allusion to the notoriously inventive traveloguer Antiphanes of Berge.³⁰ Together with Pytheas of Massilia, Antiphanes and Euhemerus made—in the eyes of some ancient commentators—an unholy trinity of lying sea travelers.³¹ It is in general impossible to judge just how deliberately and knowingly these other lost writers played with categories of truth and falsehood, but there is surely a strong case to be made that unverified accounts of sea journeys carried a presumption of fiction.³²

Indeed, the ultimate paradigm for the fictional sea voyage will have been the Odyssey, a resonant hypotext for the readers of the Inscription. Parallels can be detected between Diodorus’s account of the temple of Zeus Triphylios and Homer’s description of Alcinous’s palace in book 7 of the Odyssey. Diodorus’s insistent emphasis on magnificent architecture and fittings of gold, silver, and bronze looks to Alcinous’s palace.³³ Closer still are the links between the trees surrounding the precinct in Diodorus, and Alcinous’s magic garden. Both are egregiously lush and fertile.³⁴ In each description there is a list of trees and plants, with the emphasis on their size and variety (and with several linguistic correspondences): in Diodorus, cypresses, the inevitable plane trees, laurel, and myrtle—and then, in a second list, date palms, nut trees, and vines; in Homer, pears, pomegranates, apples, figs, and olives, followed by vines and a kitchen garden.³⁵ In both cases there is a spring channeled so as to water the garden throughout; water also has a secondary purpose, for human use.³⁶

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 charitable way of interpreting some of the features of his text that Detlev Fehling and others have interpreted as deceptive.⁵³ My substantial point has less to do with the design of Herodotus’s text, how many “grains” it has, and which way they run. The crucial point is that in developing a series of devices for narrative legitimation, Herodotus also paves the way for the expropriation of these very devices for the creation of irony, distance, and fictional self-consciousness. After all, “I met some priests who told me what really happened to Helen” and “I found a stēlē that told me the truth about Heracles” are fundamentally the same trope as “I discovered a manuscript written by Adso of Melk.” Critics of ancient fiction refer to this textual strategy as “pseudo-documentarism,”⁵⁴ and it becomes widespread in later texts. Examples include Dictys of Crete’s Diaries of the Trojan War (supposedly discovered in the time of Nero, after an earthquake broke open a Cretan cave) and Antonius Diogenes’s Wonders beyond Thule, which claims to be modeled on a narrative found in a tomb by Alexander’s soldiers after the capture of Tyre.

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’ could be a fictitious name for the person of the narrator.”

18. Above, n. 1.

19. See ch. 5.

20. Genette 2004.

21. The online LGPN gives 115 hits.

22. Winiarczyk 2002, 3, 16–17, retracts the implication in his 1991 edition of the testimonia that T2 = Call., Hymn. 1.8–9 is genuine.

23. Aëtius, Plac. 1.7.1 (ps.-Plut., Plac. phil. 880d–e = T16 Winiarczyk) cites the couplet with khalkeion (bronze) in the place of Pankhaion, as does a Byzantine scholiast (Schol. ad Tzetz., Alleg. Iliad. 4.37 = T1B Winiarczyk). Yet it is surely right to see this as a reference to the Sacred Inscription rather than to a statue maker. For a start, palai makes no sense for a statue, whereas it works perfectly as an allusion to the historicization of the gods on Panchaea. Secondly, the archaizing form Zana seems to point to the inscription Zan Kronou, which, according to Ennius via Lactantius (Div. inst. 1.11.46; Epit. div. inst. 13.5 = T69A–B Winiarczyk), stood on Zeus’s tomb.

24. Kerkhecker 1999, 25.

25. See, e.g., Feeney 1991, 6–8, especially 7 (“This type of poetry is a πλάσμα, depicting not something real or actual, but something fabricated”).

26. The details are sketchy: see L.-L. O’Sullivan 1997, 142–46; more fully on the evidence for Theodorus’s life, Winiarczyk 1981 (largely a study in uncertainty).

27. If Theodorus really was the author of the Sacred Inscription, then the reascription from him to “Euhemerus” will have happened early on. By the time of Arnobius, Adv. Nat. 4.29 (T21 Winiarczyk), certainly, Euhemerus and Theodorus are classed separately in the list of atheists. Theodorus’s most famous work, On the Gods, is unlikely to have been the Inscription; this would be incompatible with the assertion of Diogenes Laertius (who claims to have read it and found it “not contemptible”) that “Epicurus is said to have taken most of his ideas from it” (2.97; see Winiarczyk 1981, 84, on this passage, arguing against emendation of Epicurus to Euhemerus). Winiarczyk 1981, 84–85, speculates on the nature of On the Gods, suspecting (largely on the basis of the Epicurean analogy) that it was a critique of Volksreligion rather than a statement of “extreme atheism.”

28. The dating initially may be thought problematic. The publication of Callimachus’s Iambi is usually placed around 270 B.C.E. Th e last attested event in Diogenes’s biography of Theodorus is his retirement to Cyrene, “where he lived with Magas and continued to be held in high honor” (2.102). Magas conquered Cyrene for Ptolemy I soon after 301 but revolted against Alexandria after the latter’s death (probably between 279 and 275). If Theodorus really was to be found working just outside Alexandria at the time of the composition of the Iambi, he must have relocated from Cyrene once again—perhaps in the aftermath of worsening relations between the two states. (Note that Diogenes refers to Theodorus’s expulsion from Cyrene in his youth with the phrase “when he was banished from Cyrene for the first time” [2.103]; does this imply that there was a second banishment, in later life? Or is it looking forward to his subsequent banishment from Athens? Or does “for the first time” [to prōton] simply mean “originally,” marking the analepsis?) But all the details are so sketchy that hypotheses are fruitless.

29. Winston 1976; Romm 1992, 196–202.

30. The transmitted passage of Strabo reads, “το Καλοντος μάρτυρα τὸν Bεργαȋον ἢ τὸν Μεσσήνιον Εὐήμερον”; editors delete “ἢ τὸν Μεσσήνιον” to yield the description of Euhemerus as Bergaean, but this is hardly certain.

31. Strab. 2.3.5 (T7a Winiarczyk); similarly Polyb. 34.5 (Strab. 2.4.2 = Euhemerus T5 Winiarczyk).

32. Romm 1992; Wiseman 1993, 131–32.

33. The analogies can be traced only in the original Greek: “χαλκεȋα μεγάλα” (Diod. Sic. 5.44.1–3 = T 38 Winiarczyk); “ἀναθήματα . . . χρυσȃ καὶ ἀργυρȃ πολλὰ καὶ μεγάλα” (Diod. Sic. 46.5 = T 37 Winiarczyk); “τὰ . . . θυρώματα το vαο θαυμαστὰς ἔχει τὰς κατασκευὰς ἐξ ἀργύρου καὶ χρυσο καὶ ἐλέφαντος” (Diod. Sic. 46.6 = T 37 Winiarczyk); “ἡ . . . κλίνη το θεο . . . χρυσῆ τὰ . . . θυρώματα το ναο θαυμαστὰς ἔχει τὰς κατασκευὰς ἐξ ἀργύρου καὶ χρυσο καὶ ἐλέφαντος” (Diod. Sic. 46.7 = T 37 Winiarczyk); “στήλη χρυσῆ” (Diod. Sic. 46.7 = T 37 Winiarczyk); compare with “χάλκεονον οδόν” (Hom., Od. 7.83), “χάλκεοι . . . τοȋχοι” (7.86), “χρύσεαι . . . θύραι” (7.88), “ἀργύρεοι σταθμοί” (7.89), “χαλκέωι . . . οδῶι” (7.89), “ἀργύρεον . . . ύπερθύριον” (7.90), “χρυσέη . . . κορώνη” (7.90), “χρύσεοι . . . καὶ ἀργύρεοι κύνες” (7.91), “χρύσειοι . . . κοροι” (7.100).

34. “εφυΐαν . . . πολυτέλειαν” (Diod. Sic. 5.42.6 = T 38 Winiarczyk); “καταγέμει” (Diod. Sic. 5.43.1 = T 38 Winiarczyk); “δένδρεα μακρὰ πεφύκασι τηλεθοῶντα” (Hom., Od. 7.114).

35. Diod. Sic. 5.43.1 = T 38 Winiarczyk; Hom., Od. 7.115–16. Linguistic correspondences (Diodorus first, Homer second): “παντοίοις” ∼ “παντοȋαι”; “καρποφόροις”/“καρποφόρα” ∼ “ἀγλαόκαρποι”; “κυπαρíττων . . . ἀξαισίων τοȋς μεγέθεσι” / “στελέχη μεγάλα” ∼ “δένδρεα μακρά”; “θαυμαζόμενον” ∼ “θηεȋτο . . . `Οδυσσεύς.”

36. Diod. Sic. 5.43.2 = T 38 Winiarczyk, where a stream waters the plain (“εἰς πολλὰ μέρη το ὕδατος διαιρουμένου”) but is also used for sailing; at Od. 7.129–31, one stream is used for the garden (“ἀνὰ κῆπον ἅπαντα / σκιδνâται”), the other for watering the populace.

37. Winiarczyk 2002, 93–96, discusses various sources for the temple/garden description without mentioning the Odyssey.

38. The phrasing is ambiguous as to whether the theoxeny has now ended: “‘have always in the past appeared <and still do>’, hence the present tense; see also 8.36. γε, however, raises the possibility that such divine appearances may have ended” (Garvie 1994, 205).

39. See Diod. Sic. 6.1.10 = T 61 Winiarczyk (“He went to Babylon and was entertained [epixenōthēnai] by Belos”); Diod. Sic. 6.1.10–11 = T 63 Winiarczyk for the war with Cilix.

40. Hom., Od. 5.36, 19.280, 23.339. “Honoring like a god” occurs relatively frequently in the Iliad: see, e.g., 9.155, with J. Griffin 1995, 93.

41. Kearns 1982; Louden 2011, 30–56 (reading the Odyssey against the Hebrew Bible).

42. See LSJ, s.v. “dios,” for its later, tragic meaning, “of Zeus.” Note too the adjective diogenēs, used in the Iliad particularly of Odysseus, Ajax, and Patroclus but in the Odyssey only of Odysseus (especially in the address formula “Diogenēs Laertiadē, polumēkhan’ Odusseu”).

43. See especially Goldhill 1991, 30–36; on the reception of the Odyssey as fiction see further Romm 1992, 182–96; Georgiadou and Larmour 1998, 23 n. 69, gives a fuller bibliography.

44. Hom., Od. 13.256–86, 14.199–359, 17.415–44, 19.165–202, 19.221–48, 19.262–307.

45. Most famously at Call., Hymn. 1.8, conventionally taken as an allusion to Epimenides (fr. 5 Kinkel). In an as yet unpublished paper, however, Stuart Thomson casts doubt on this ascription. This Callimachean line has, indeed, sometimes been taken as an allusion to the Sacred Inscription (see above, n. 22).

46. See in general Wiseman 1993.

47. Lloyd 1987.

48. A zētēma already implied at Hom., Od. 11.601–4.

49. On the prototypical importance to the Inscription of Heracles qua divinized human being see Winiarczyk 2002, 30–32.

50. Echoing the famous opening of Hecataeus that ridicules the “many ludicrous stories” of the Greeks (FGrH 1 F 1a).

51. Hdt. 2.102.4–5; see also 2.106. S. West 1992 argues that the Palestinian inscriptions referred to at 2.106 were in reality Hittite rather than Egyptian.

52. Similarly Hdt. 7.152. For a survey of places where Herodotus professes disbelief or belief in a given story see Asheri et al. 2007, 23. On Herodotus’s “nascent conception of fiction” see Kim 2010a, 30–37, at 33.

53. Fehling 1989.

54. See in general Ní Mheallaigh 2008, with the accent on ludic ironies; Hansen 2003; on the motif of the “discovered book” Speyer 1970.

55. Phot., Bibl. 72, 45a = FGrH 688 T13. If the phrasing is Ctesias’s own, the accusation has a particular piquancy, since logopoios is Herodotus’s word for “tellers of tall tales” such as Aesop and Hecataeus: see Kurke 2010, 376–82.

56. Phot., Bibl. 72, 35b = FGrH 688 T8.

57. Phot., Bibl. 72, 45a = FGrH 688 T13.

58. Stronk 2010, 47–48; more generally on Ctesias’s relationship to the novel see Holzberg 1993, 79–84.

59. See especially Feeney 1991, 5–56.

60. Sedley, forthcoming.

61. Müller 1993, 300.