Text Networks

Abstract

S

Since Huet, modern study of the “ancient novel” has centered on single-authored texts such as Khariton’s Kallirhoē or Hēliodōrus’ Aithiopika, which more closely resemble the modern no­vel insofar as they plausibly descend from a single archetype. These, however, were not the most popular pieces of prose fiction in Late Antiquity. More widely disseminated, and arguably more typ­ical of their period, are what we might call “text-networks”, i.e., the vast corpora of compo­si­tions known today as the Alexander Romance, Barlaam and Joasaph, the Life of Ahi­qar, Kalīlah wa-Dim­nah; pseudepigrapha such as the Enoch corpus, inc­lu­ding ma­ny of the narra­tives—canonical as well as apocryphal—of the various Judaic (e.g. He­­brew, Samaritan, Arama­ic) and Christian Bibles. Often disparate exemplars of such texts are assigned a putative author such as “Callisthenes” or “Moses”, but such names affixed to the head or colophon of the manuscripts do not have the same “author function” as “Virgil” or “Kallimachus” or “Loukianos”—if anything, they are much more like the ascription “Ho­mer”. Not unlike the Homeric poems, in fact—though here we are dealing primarily with scribal culture—these texts have no known “author” and clearly do not descend from a unique source. Rather, they ex­ist only as a multiplicity of different versions, in a wide vari­ety of different lan­guag­es, retailored to fit a host of different cultural contexts; as we find them, the man­u­scripts were diffused (always in a multiplicity of directions) over much of the Asian-Af­rican-European land mass, and were in constant (re)production from ca. 450 BCE to ca. 1500 CE. One way to describe them would be as “translations without an ori­gi­nal”, which is precisely the sense of the Middle French romans in the works of, among oth­ers, Chrétien de Troyes, who constantly refers us to a definitively lost (i.e., obviously non-existent) Latin “source”. That the appreciation of such “text-net­works” has been relegated to the margins of the modern study of the “ancient novel” clearly has more to do with our own difficulties in discussing texts that lack a sin­gle author or a definitive form than with the realities of their popularity or historical diffusion. With this in mind, the paper offers an introduction to the study of the “text-network” as a characteristic and central type of Hellenistic world liter­ature, with the aim of introducing both greater generic precision as well as a set of crit­ical strategies that are better suited to the study of these literary phenomena.

Daniel L. Selden is Professor of Literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz. With Ralph Hexter has is author of Innovations of Antiquity (1992), and has written widely on Greek, Roman, Egyptian, Iranian, and Old Ethiopic literatures of the Hel­len­istic period.