Short Fiction in Antiquity

Introduction

The urge to tell stories, and the concomitant desire to listen to them, are ancient and universal in human beings. Because stories are pleasurable, they require no motive beyond that of entertainment, but for the same reason they are extremely useful in celebrating the past, in inculcating moral principles, in explaining religious doctrine, and in various other endeavors. As far back as narrative storytelling can be traced, it has been used for such purposes, as well as for pure pleasure.

A story told for the purpose of keeping alive the memory of past events—a purpose that predates literacy—will inevitably be altered in the process of retelling as the teller perceives ways of improving it. One may doubt that it really took anyone ten years to return home from the Trojan War, as it took Odysseus, or that such a person was diverted and detained by supernatural beings such as Circe and Calypso, but there probably was something like a Trojan War, and there may well have been somebody like an Odysseus who had great troubles arriving home again afterward. Because scholars now attempt to preserve carefully the distinctions between history and fiction with a historical setting, they tend to regard the Odyssey (c. 725 b.c.e.; English translation, 1614) as a good story but as bad history. Such generic distinctions would not have occurred to audiences in antiquity. Long after Thucydides, the first rigorous historian, wrote his Historia tou Peloponnesiacou polemou (431-404 b.c.e.; History of the Peloponnesian War, 1550), storytellers saw no harm in altering history for artistic purposes. They altered freely the kinds of facts now regarded as worthy of respect; they were much less likely to tamper with the legendary characters of their heroes. Homer was more interested in preserving the truth of Odysseus’s shrewdness and resourcefulness than in the chronology of his travels.

What the modern world regards as literature—the very word implies writing—invariably has its origins in an oral culture. Stories existed long before anyone devised a way to write them down. Even after a people become literate, they are much more likely to use their newfound language for nonliterary purposes, most often for business; later, they may begin to write down their poetry and fiction. Because people today think of “real” literature as written, they often suppose the efforts of preliterate people to be primitive and unworthy of attention. The modern preliterates with whom people are familiar, after all, are young children and the culturally subordinated. The idea of preliterates including sophisticated artists and mature audiences now seems odd—but it is nevertheless true.

Folktales

Probably the earliest form of fiction is the folktale in its various forms, including ballad and folk song. A folktale is a short narrative that is transmitted orally,with various tellers introducing modifications as the tale is passed along to a contemporary audience and down to succeeding generations. It is clearly impossible to come into direct contact with this oldest form of narrative as it existed in antiquity, but it is possible to know with considerable assurance what ancient folktales were like. For one thing, folktales still persist; for another, a comparison of extant folktales from around the globe reveals striking similarities and suggests that paleolithic audiences doubtless enjoyed the same fictive themes and patterns that continue to engross their descendants.

Folktales are popular stories that can be understood by most people in a society, whatever their social status and level of specialized knowledge. Though folktales in pure form are difficult to find in ancient writing, they are frequently embedded within seemingly historical narratives. This is true of two tales from ancient Egypt. The tale of Sinuhe (c. 1900 b.c.e.) involves the adventures of an Egyptian who is exiled from his native country. As Donald B. Redford points out in Egypt, Canaan, and Israel in Ancient Times (1992), though the story of Sinuhe reflects plausible historical conditions, it is not certain whether or not it is fictional. In any event, the story of Sinuhe, a high-level bureaucrat at the royal court who flees after the ruler he has served is killed, goes off to the desert, where he lives and prospers among less “cultured” peoples, and then triumphantly returns to Egypt in old age, welcomed by the new king, embodies motifs of adventure and wish-fulfillment often to be found wherever stories are told.

The story of Wen-Amon (eleventh century b.c.e.) is, or appears to be, an autobiographical account of an Egyptian merchant who attempts to trade with the nations of the eastern Mediterranean coast. This short narrative contains a distinct historical background, as Egypt has declined in political power, and the name of Egypt no longer inspires awe in its inhabitants. Wen-Amon wanders forlornly, begging the Prince of Byblos, Zakar-Baal, to give him some wood to bring back to Egypt. The prince finally consents, but not before reminding Wen-Amon that the mountain slopes are littered with the tombs of former Egyptian traders. Wen-Amon finally returns home, though the final parts of the story have not survived in manuscript. The Wen-Amon story’s idea of travel and return, combined with the suspense as to its outcome and the vulnerability of its protagonists, is a splendid example of how narrative works in deploying concrete incidents that can be read in the light of general meanings.

Another interesting early narrative is the story of Idrimi (c. 1400 b.c.e.), a minor king of the realm called Mitanni or Hanigalbat, located around what is now the border between Syria and Iraq. This story traces the life of an exiled prince who, starting out as a young boy, eventually rallies the support of his people and attains his throne, under the patronage of a more powerful ruler. Although this could well have happened historically, the story also contains folktale elements, such as the theme of the rise of the powerless boy to a position of power. This theme is found through the ancient world—in the stories of the Hebrew leader Moses as an abandoned baby in the bulrushes; of the Akkadian king, Sargon, left in a boat as a baby; and of the Roman kings Romulus and Remus, suckled by wolves. All of the above were semihistorical figures for whom folktales filled gaps in their lives that history could not illuminate.

The story of Moses, the young baby endangered by Egyptian persecution of the Hebrews and saved by a benevolent Egyptian princess, is a good illustration of how the Bible is permeated by the folktale genre. Folktale strands persist in the biblical narrative of Moses and the Exodus, often coexisting with far more “sophisticated” modes. The tale of Davidand Goliath, although embedded in the larger political narrative of David, also has obvious folktale elements. The story of the young boy slaying the giant enemy champion and redeeming his people’s fortune has the inspirational air of a story told around the campfire. The idea of the unlikely hero, winning out against all odds, defying the greater strength of the opponent, has an obvious and perennial appeal. It also features the frequent folktale motif of wit winning out over sheer brawn. Not only is the David and Goliath story enjoyed by children today without any linkage to the rest of David’s saga, but also it is certainly plausible to think that the David and Goliath story was written as an independent unit and only later connected to the general narrative of David’s accomplishments. In other stories, David is a prince, a king, a warrior, just as the adult Moses is a leader and a lawgiver. In the folktalelike stories told about them as children, David and Moses are seemingly ordinary children, placed in grave danger at an early age and rescued only by the hand of God.

In general, folktales are more likely to be told by and about the common people, whereas myths and epics tended, in the ancient world, to pertain to the priestly and warrior classes. This means folktales often are more difficult to preserve; yet what has endured testifies that folktales indeed played a pivotal role in how the ancient world practiced the art of storytelling.

Fairy tales, myths, fables, and legends are forms of folktale distinguishable by their purposes and emphases. In literate cultures, folktales are likely to pass into written form, thus ceasing to be folktales. When Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, early in the nineteenth century, collected and published the fairy tales with which their name has become synonymous, they were both preserving and destroying the tales in the process. When the tales are written down, they become standardized, they do not change with tellers, and they come to their audiences in a different form. Even a very young child, listening to a parent read a fairy tale, knows that it is coming from the pages of a book. Only since the time of the Brothers Grimm, or roughly a half century earlier in the case of folk ballads, have printed texts competed with and, in most cases, replaced oral transmission. When educated people such as Bishop Thomas Percy, the first great ballad collector, and the Brothers Grimm become involved, folktales become contaminated by the literary culture—much more so in the twentieth century with its radio, television, and recording and playback devices. Children will not listen to grandmother’s stories if they can listen to (and watch) video presentations, and her stories will die with her. Meanwhile, the entertainment media choose, reject, and edit folk materials for their own, usually commercial, purposes, a process quite unlike the one that brought the folk material down through the centuries.

Myth

“The narratives of literature,” wrote Northrop Frye in Words with Power: Being a Second Study of “The Bible and Literature” (1990), “descend historically from myths, or rather from the aggregate of myths we call a mythology.” While perhaps too sweeping a generalization, this statement by a major critic demonstrates how important the study of myth has become. Myths are stories about gods which humans devise to explain creation, existence, death, and natural phenomena of all sorts. From one point of view, myths are religious truths; from another, they are fictions. These viewpoints are often assumed to conflict, although they do not if it is conceded that fictions can convey truths. Some of the most profound truths can perhaps be conveyed only indirectly. It is sometimes alleged that myths recede as scientific explanations of natural phenomena advance.

The Egyptians and the Mesopotamians were the first literate civilizations to produce imaginative tales that were written down as formal narratives. In Egyptian literature, mythic narratives, insofar as they are available to the modern world, existed largely to explain how the gods manifested themselves within nature. For instance, the story of the sun god Ra and his voyaging in both a day boat and a night boat is an explanation of the workings of the solar cycle and the alternation of light and darkness. Myth often has this conceptual, protoscientific side, where stories are used as modes to explain and speculate upon the cosmos. In Egypt as in other cultures, fictions conveyed truths.

The relation between myth and story in Mesopotamian literature is more complicated. Mesopotamia, the once-fertile land between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in present-day Iraq, produced the first literate civilization in about 3000 b.c.e. Ancient Mesopotamian literature actually comprises several literatures, that of the Sumerians, the earliest literate Mesopotamian people whose language cannot reliably be linked to any other group, and the Akkadians, Babylonians, and Assyrians, all of whom spoke Semitic languages somewhat similar to Hebrew and Arabic. Most of the ancient Mesopotamian narratives that survive are in Akkadian or Babylonian and were unearthed by archaeological digs in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Self-contained, relatively realistic stories like those of Sinuhe and Wen-Amon are rare in Mesopotamian literature. What is more typical is something like the Atrahasis epic. As Thorkild Jacobsen puts it in The Treasures of Darkness (1976), this is a story of beginnings, a story of the creation of mankind by the gods. The gods create mankind because they are tired of working and feel exploited by their supervisor-god Enlil. Man will take up the slack of laboring. Man does well at his task, so well that he reproduces a hundredfold, and there are so many men that there is a cacophony of noise, disturbing the rest of the gods. To reduce the noise, the gods send successively plague, drought, and finally a terrible flood. Atrahasis, a wise man, appeals to the gods to end these torments, but each time his success is followed by a worse natural disaster. Finally, the gods agree to employ demons to reduce the human birthrate, and gods and mankind settle down to an uneasy truce. As in the Egyptian story, narratives are used to explain the ways of nature, but specifically human themes, such as the need for population control, are threaded within the cosmic frame.

Greek myth is, to the modern reader, the best-known body of ancient mythology. Greek myths are important to the evolution of the short-story form in that the myths themselves, though constituting a massive body of work, are, in individual terms, not that long. Greek myths served to instruct, to explain, but also to entertain their original audience. This is in line with most ancient narrative, which had a compound purpose, and was for the most part not purely “artistic” in intent. In the myth of Tantalus, a man of only half-divine parentage is allowed to partake of the food and drink of the gods, only to think that that privilege makes him one of the gods himself. His punishment consists of being imprisoned in the underworld with appealing food and drink seemingly within his reach but perpetually evading his grasp, thus illustrating that human pride cannot accomplish anything on its own, without the good will of the gods. Tantalus’s punishment, in itself, illustrates the nature of his misdeed. This short, self-contained tale, even though interrelated to many other stories, involves a limited cast of characters and has a determinate point that the reader may interpret in different ways. Most Greek myths are like this; although displayed against a chronological story of the development of gods, heroes, and men, they are segmented narratives consistent with each other only in a very general way. Different versions provided by different poets and playwrights (Homer and Hesiod, Homer and Aeschylus) may supply very different endings or emphases. The fact that the ordinary word “tantalize” is derived from the story of Tantalus shows how thoroughly the body of Greek mythology has permeated contemporary language and culture; even people who have never read a word of Greek myth have used a word or a concept derived from it. Thus its literary impact remains long after the end of its religious or scientific role.

Greek mythology permeates Western literary forms as far back as they can be perceived, though differently in different genres. Epics, for example, allude to myths, but rather than retell familiar myths they tend to employ mythological characters, with their well-known attributes, to interact in various ways with human characters, as to assist them in crises or thwart them if they turn impious. Thus, in the Iliad (c.750 b.c.e.; English translation, 1611), Achilles’s goddess mother Thetis restrains him from imprudent retaliation against Agamemnon, who has appropriated a woman whom Achilles earlier gained as a prize during the Trojan War; while in the Odyssey, the sea god Poseidon frustrates Odysseus’s attempt to reach his homeland of Ithaca after the war because the latter has blinded Poseidon’s son Polyphemus the Cyclops. In later romances, the gods continue to perform such functions, less often by direct intervention in human shape, more often through the prayers of the hero or heroine, characteristically directed to icons in sacred places.

The first collector of Greco-Roman myths to endow them with high literary polish was the Roman poet Ovid in his Metamorphoses (c. 8 c.e.; English translation, 1567). This work weaves together a large number of more or less unrelated stories in one continuous narrative. Ovid begins with an account of the ordering of a primal Chaos and continues by describing an early golden age from which the earth has declined, after which he proceeds to the doings of the Olympian gods. In the eleventh of his fifteen books, Ovid turns his attention to “history,” especially the legendary events leading to the establishment of the Roman Empire under Augustus in Ovid’s own time. In unifying this disparate material, he used the technique of seizing upon a frequent, though not inevitable, feature of the old myths—the transformations or metamorphoses of characters into other forms of being: trees, animals, springs of water, and the like. In addition to this thematic unification, Ovid links the myths by associative devices, by stories within stories, and sometimes by quite arbitrary but ingenious transitions. Ovid avoids monotony by a modulation of tone from eloquently grand all the way to quietly informal. Enormously popular in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, Ovid influenced writers of fiction for centuries.

Fables and Parables

Of the ancient narrative forms devised to serve a nonliterary purpose, the fable is perhaps the most ingratiating. The fable is usually short, often features animals that portray human weaknesses and vices, and is told to illustrate a moral truth, which may or may not be explicitly stated at the beginning or end. Fables have been found on Egyptian papyruses, among the birth tales of Buddha, and in Sanskrit literature. The fables best known in the Western world, however, come chiefly from Greece, the earliest known being the story of the hawk and the nightingale in Hesiod’s Erga kai Emerai (c. 700 b.c.e.; Works and Days, 1618). About two centuries later, a slave named Aesop composed fables, according to Herodotus (a Greek historian who himself told wonderful stories, sometimes of dubious factual value). Subsequently, Aesop came to be regarded as the originator of virtually all ancient fables, the charm of which, along with their utility in promoting virtuous and sensible behavior, earned for them a popularity that they have retained throughout the centuries. It is a rare child who does not know the story of the fox and the grapes or that of the dog in the manger. Many proverbs are essentially fables in outline form.

Fables have been cultivated by professional writers since classical times, though Greek and Roman writers were inclined to work them into larger literary contexts, an example being the Roman poet Horace who, as part of his book of satires in the first century b.c.e., gave posterity the story of the town mouse and the country mouse. The medieval Persian poet ‘Ubaid Zakani told a cat-and-mouse fable with a satiric twist. A cat, conscience-stricken after eating mice, finds religion. All the mice in the neighborhood rejoice but later find that the cat devours more of them than ever—as a religious duty. Fables persist in Europe in Geoffrey Chaucer’s “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale,” and notably in the fables of Jean de La Fontaine and in the characteristically modern ones of James Thurber.

Another type of story with a nonliterary purpose is the parable. The details of a parable, such as Jesus Christ’s parable of the laborers in the vineyard, present a moral lesson, usually implicitly but nevertheless pointedly. Parables are common in religious prose around the world; they are, for example, a frequent feature of Hindu scriptures. The famous thirteenth century Persian poet Sa‘di of Shiraz in his Gulistan (1258; The Rose Garden, 1806) combines poetry and prose parables. One of the latter tells of a great wrestler who teaches a young protégé all of his holds except one. The overconfident protégé challenges the master to a match, but the latter uses that one hold to throw him. Parables are usually considered a species of allegory, in which the characters and actions make literal sense but point to another, usually moral, level of meaning. As a fictional form, allegory did not otherwise develop very far in antiquity but became extremely popular in the Christian Middle Ages.

Although fables and parables are created for nonliterary purposes, they hold a secure place in the hearts of story lovers. Furthermore, since fables such as Aesop’s and the parables of Christ are so well known, many subsequent writers have used them both structurally and allusively in making longer fictional works.

Epic

The Babylonian poem called Gilgamesh (c. 2000 b.c.e.; English translation, 1917), based on a Sumerian original, is the earliest work to be called an “epic” by modern literary historians, although it is rather short for an epic. The story of a hero, his self-definition, and his search for immortality, Gilgamesh contains a series of episodes that each illustrates a discrete point, though bound together by the overall theme of the epic. The story of how Gilgamesh meets his friend, Enkidu (whose death spurs Gilgamesh’s quest for immortality), symbolizes the divide between nature and culture, as Enkidu, a wild man, is enticed into entering the walls of the city through the wiles of a seductive prostitute. This short episode uses narrative to create an impression in the mind of the reader, and it can stand on its own despite its emplacement in the larger story.

Modern readers often think of Homer as standing at the beginning of Western literature; anthologies of ancient classics usually begin with those extended heroic narratives, the Iliad and the Odyssey, traditionally assigned to the blind poet. In an important way, however, the Homeric epics represent the end of a literary tradition, or at least an important turn in the literary road, for they came into being (or at least into the form familiar to posterity) around the time that the Greek alphabet was being devised and Greek literacy was becoming possible. A long oral tradition lies behind these folk epics. They could have been written down not long after they were composed, but initially they were listened to, not read, and they were transmitted orally like any other type of folk narrative.

There are important differences between the kind of story that Homer told and the others mentioned above. Anyone can learn a ballad or song or short fable, but the development of longer oral narratives required the memorization of stories as long as some modern novels. Inevitably, professional performers arose to meet this need. These rhapsodists, as they were called, accomplished the remarkable feat of memorizing whole epics. They would not have been able to achieve these mnemonic feats, however, without the assistance of techniques, such as systematic meter and verbal formulas, that could be plugged into metrical lines at strategic points. Thus epic narratives were embodied in beautiful rhythms that became available to reading audiences of later times only if they could read Homeric Greek, although skillful translators can imitate the effects of the original poems to a certain extent.

The many repeated lines and phrases and the fixed epithets attached to the names of characters in Greek epics are not affectations or signs of imaginative weakness but essential features both for rhapsodist and audience. Although later “literary” epic poets, such as Vergil, had considerably less need of such devices, the attractiveness of the hexameter line used in the Iliad and Odyssey led him and other Roman poets to adapt it to Latin, as well as other features originally devised for practical purposes in an oral culture. Vergil wrote his epic, the Aeneid (c. 29-19 b.c.e.; English translation, 1553), and expected people to read it, but in an age when people did not often have the privilege of holding that rare and expensive thing, the book, these oral features continued to enhance the memorability of the epic.

The Homeric epics purport to treat of a heroic era several centuries before the time of their composition (around the eighth century b.c.e.). Scholars disagree over whether the same poet actually composed both poems, but each is, in its own way, a narrative masterpiece. The Iliad focuses on a struggle of wills between two stubborn Greek kings, the commander in chief, Agamemnon, and the great warrior Achilles, whose refusal to take part jeopardizes the effort to seize Troy and return Helen, Agamemnon’s sister-in-law, to her Greek husband. The story develops systematically to the point at which the Trojan prince Hector’s killing of Achilles’ close friend Patroclus and subsequent dishonoring of his body drives Achilles to exact revenge on Hector. The fact that the Iliad does not deal at all comprehensively with the war but ends with the Trojan king Priam’s reclaiming of his son’s body from Achilles suggests the likelihood of other epics detailing other aspects of the conflict, especially its climax, which the Iliad stops short of recounting. Indeed, fragments of Trojan War epics from a somewhat later period do exist.

Whereas the IIiad focuses on the events of a few days outside the gates of Troy, the Odyssey covers ten years and takes its hero all over the Mediterranean world. It too is admirably constructed, paralleling the simultaneous experiences of son and father, Telemachus and Odysseus, then allowing Odysseus to describe his decade of adventures to a friendly people with whom he had taken temporary refuge, and finally bringing Odysseus and Telemachus together to plan and execute retaliation against the suitors of the former’s wife (Penelope), who have invaded Odysseus’s house and besieged her relentlessly during his absence. The device of allowing Odysseus to tell his own, often improbable, story serves the important purpose of preserving Homer from charges of lying—a handy protection that other writers of fiction were not slow to imitate. From the reader’s perspective, Odysseus’s narrative, covering four of the twenty-four books, fills in the prior adventures that the in medias res beginning (that is, beginning in the middle of things) has left hanging; it also delays and thus enhances the climax.

The Homeric epics, though much longer than Gilgamesh, follow the earlier work’s pattern of short episodic adventures within a larger narrative frame. Even though the Odyssey is unified by the theme of Odysseus’s quest to return home, each episode, each individual strand in his adventures, is self-contained, and it may be speculated that characters such as the Cyclops or Circe originally existed in legend outside Homer’s narrative and might have been brought in by the poet to add color to his hero’s narrative. These semiembedded narratives keep the reader motivated as the suspense of Odysseus’s ultimate fate is played out. In the Iliad, the episode in Book 10 involving the young, inexperienced hero Dolon, who is outwitted by two far more veteran heroes, Odysseus and Diomedes, has no overall relevance to the outcome of the work, yet it is invaluable in its study of character and motivation. Swift-footed Dolon volunteers to spy for the Trojans on the Greeks, his motive being to steal the horses of the great Achilles. Dolon, an insignificant man, is killed by the two Greeks on the spot, and his death is not given any great weight; and yet the insignificant and the great here come into contact and complement each other, setting the tone for much future story writing in its braiding of the ordinary and the extraordinary. Another aspect of Homeric epic that performs this joining of the mundane and the majestic is the epic simile, in which the feelings or doings of a warrior on the battlefield are likened to a motif in nature or in ordinary life. For instance, at the beginning of Book 10 of the Iliad the psychological tumult of the king, Agamemnon, is compared to hail or a raging thunderstorm. Two realms—nature in all its unpredictability and the uncertainty of the military leader in the midst of battle—are brought together in one phrase to shed light upon each other. This has always been one of the roles of short fiction—to contrast and bring into dialogue disparate spheres of existence.

The lost Greek epics include a cycle on the legends of Thebes (given dramatic treatment by the Greek tragedians) and a Persica, or epic on the Persian Wars of the early fifth century b.c.e., by Choerilus of Samos. Extant is a third century Argonautica by Apollonius Rhodius, an Alexandrian Greek whose narrative of Jason and the Argonauts takes the gods and religion much less seriously and puts a new emphasis on love, relatively unimportant in Homeric epic but central in the romances to come.

Roman writers imitated the Greek achievement in epic as in other forms of both literary and nonliterary art. The earliest original Roman writer of an epic, Gnaeus Naevius, composed an epic on the First Punic War (254-241 b.c.e.), in which he served as a young man, but only a few lines survive. Quintus Ennius wrote a more ambitious epic on the history of Rome up to his time, the Annales (c. 204-169 b.c.e.; Annals, 1935) in eighteen books, of which about six hundred lines survive. The most important Roman epic poet was Vergil (70-19 b.c.e.), who took as his subject the legendary career of Aeneas, one of the numerous sons of King Priam, who gathered remnants of the defeated Trojans and set out for Latium, the site of the future Rome. The Aeneid is in twelve books, the first six of which have been called Vergil’s Odyssey, or account of Aeneas’s journey to Latium, while the last six resemble the Iliad in concentrating on the war that Aeneas and his companions must wage to secure this site of future Roman glory. Epics commonly celebrate the supposed virtues of a people, and Aeneas embodies the Roman ideal of piety and civic duty. Vergil paints an unforgettable picture of a man who relishes war not at all but is obliged to prosecute one. Vergil would doubtless have been amazed at the influence that Book 4 of his Aeneid (his story of the Carthaginian queen, Dido, who expressed her love for Aeneas, and Aeneas’s dutiful rejection of her offer of herself and share of her African kingdom) had on subsequent fiction.

After Vergil, the most important Roman epics are those of Lucan, whose Bellum civile (60-65 c.e.; Pharsalia, 1614) deals with the civil war between Julius Caesar and Gnaeus Pompey, and Statius, who went back to the Theban legends for his Thebais (c. 90 c.e.; Thebiad, 1767). After these poets of what is called the Silver Age of Roman literature, the heroic ideal passed into prose romances as indicated below.

The folk epic reappeared in other cultures for centuries thereafter, usually with many features similar to those of the Homeric epics. The Old English Beowulf, first transcribed around 1000, seems to derive in large measure from fairy tales like the Odyssey; the Old French Chanson de Roland (twelfth century; The Song of Roland, 1880) resembles the Iliad particularly in its magnification of a relatively small martial incident, in this case one from the conflicts between Carolingian barons, into heroic proportions; the German Nibelungenlied (c. 1200; The Nibelungenlied, 1848), like both Homeric epics, shows signs of a long development from earlier oral narratives. All these epics memorialize feats of a heroic age from the perspective of a people who are tacitly confessing that the era of heroes has ended. Between these epics and the Scandinavian sagas, the chief difference is formal: The latter are normally in prose rather than in verse. Of the many sagas, one of the best is the Icelandic Grettis saga (The Saga of Grettir, the Strong, 1869), which dates from about 1300 in its present form. It incorporates many folklore motifs, including the hero’s battles with ghosts and trolls. Literary epics generally persist longer in a culture, with John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667, revised 1674) arguably the last great epic in English.

Eastern peoples also have their epics. Iranians, for example, treasure the Shahnamah of Firdusi, who composed his epic around the year 1010. It begins with the creation of the universe and proceeds through forty thousand lines to the rise and subsequent glories of the Iranian people. The great epics of India, the Rāmāyana (c. 500 b.c.e.; Ramayana, 1870-1874) and Māhabhārata (c. 400 b.c.e.-200 c.e.; Mahabharata, 1834), while resembling the Homeric ones in a number of respects, are, unlike the Iliad and Odyssey, sacred books. Only about one fifth of the Mahabharata is taken up by the main story, but the narrative portions are still longer than the two great Greek epics combined. Long as such works are, they incorporate many episodes and incidents, which are in effect short stories.

Comic and Satiric Fiction

Satire, which ridicules individuals, institutions, and sometimes other literary works for the sake of promoting better ones, also took narrative form in antiquity. Often, satire seems clearly allied with fables and parables in that the story is not told for its own sake, but some satirists are accomplished storytellers. In fact, Northrop Frye, in his influential Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (1957), identifies Menippean satire as one of the four characteristic forms that fiction has taken in Western literature. It is named for a Greek writer of the third century b.c.e., Menippus, whose works influenced a succession of Greek and Roman writers. The Saturae Menippeae (first century b.c.e.?) of the Roman author Marcus Terentius Varro exists only in fragmentary form. It is the work of a moralist who viewed Roman life critically in the tumultuous era leading to the establishment of the Empire. The chief Greek follower of Menippus, Lucian, wrote Alēthōn diēgēmatōn (second century c.e.; A True History, 1634), which parodies travelers’ tales, including the Odyssey, by describing a voyage that begins on the sea, continues in the sky, and even visits the Elysian Fields. Doubtfully ascribed to Lucian is Onos (The Ass, 1684), important as the basis of Apuleius’s masterpiece described below.

Satyricon (c. 60 c.e.; The Satyricon, 1694) , by Petronius is a long prose narrative interspersed with verse; only a substantial fragment survives. It is regarded as the ancestor of the picaresque fiction that arose in sixteenth century Spain, spread quickly over Europe, and remains viable today. Encolpus, the narrator, and Ascyltus are two young men wandering about the Italian peninsula living by their wits. In the most famous section, that of Trimalchio’s dinner party, the two take part in an elaborately ridiculous party given by a tasteless rich man. In the Trimalchio episode, Petronius is not primarily a satirist but a devotee of the art of purely entertaining fiction—an activity that professional writers of the ancient world scorned. Not only is the party, marked by a drunken brawl and even a dogfight, one of the liveliest works of the Latin Silver Age but also Petronius even manages to incorporate two ghost stories for good measure.

A century after Petronius, Rome produced its other genius of comic prose, Lucius Apuleius. His Metamorphoses (second century c.e.; The Golden Ass, 1566) alone among Latin prose narratives has survived the centuries complete. Like so many Roman artistic achievements, it imitates an earlier Greek work, but Apuleius’s adaptation is superior to its original. The hero, Lucius, fascinated by sorcery and enchantment, is by a miscalculation transformed into an ass, in which shape he remains for most of the eleven books. Apuleius greatly expands the episodes of his source and adds numerous stories of his own: adventure stories, tragedies, fairy tales, erotica—an enormous variety of types. Sometimes they support the main narrative, sometimes they are tonally inappropriate; they are there because Apuleius recognized them as good stories. He missed no opportunity to add action and surprises, and he excelled at vivid and dramatic details. Of the interpolated narratives, his story of Cupid and Psyche is the most celebrated. Psyche is a woman so beautiful that the jealous goddess Venus orders Cupid to make her fall in love with an ugly creature, but instead Psyche and Cupid become lovers. After a string of adventures brought on by Venus’s vindictiveness, Psyche, deified, becomes Cupid’s bride. Here Apuleius has reworked mythological material freely to produce a highly original narrative.

Even when incongruous in their context, Apuleius’s stories increase the pleasure of the literary journey and prolong the suspense. Eventually, Lucius finds an opportunity to eat roses, the one act that will return him to human form. As a whole, The Golden Ass foreshadows the rogue or picaresque novel, but in its particulars this work can be seen as one of the earliest collections of short—and not so short—stories. Because Apuleius could in his time exploit comically the mythological characters and motifs that Ovid, an exploiter himself by temperament, still took with relative seriousness, he created a highly original fictive work that would open new vistas for later satirists and comic writers.

Romance

Epic was “displaced”—to use W. P. Ker’s term (Epic and Romance, 1897)—by romance in the medieval world, but the distinction between them sometimes blurs, especially in the transitional romances of the early Christian era. The hero of a romance is likely to rival the epic warrior in such traits as strength, courage, and resourcefulness, but he is unlikely to serve as an idealized representative of a people or nation in the manner of, say, Vergil’s Aeneas. Rather, he is a private individual whose adventures do not culminate in the establishment of a state or the winning of a war but in winning a beautiful heroine—a character not generally found in epic. The titles of the early Greek romances—Chaereas and Callirhoe (second century c.e.; English translation, 1764), Leucippe and Clitophon (second century c.e.; The Loves of Clitophon and Leucippe, 1597), Poimenika ta kata Daphin kai Chloen (third century c.e.; Daphnis and Chloé, 1587)—signify the emergence of a female character equal in interest to the male hero. Although Vergil might accurately have titled the fourth book of his epic “Aeneas and Dido,” Dido disappears thereafter, only turning up briefly in the underworld after her suicide. Dido is not a woman to win or to please but an obstacle to be overcome. Although Odysseus does strive to be reunited with Penelope, neither Homer nor his audience would have dreamed of reducing even this less serious of his epics to “Odysseus and Penelope.” The later romances blend the beauty and passionate spirit of Dido with the loyalty and perseverance of Penelope to make heroines who become the be-all and end-all of the heroes’ existence.

Whereas epics perpetuate legends and old traditions and thus are bound in certain respects by what their devisers understood as history, romances are historical only in the manner of their modern counterparts; the authors are free to invent characters and adventures to suit their plot and, with the same end in mind, to devise fictional roles for their “historical” characters. Insofar as romancers work clear of allegiance to legend and create an unhistorical milieu, they create a distinctive genre. Another important difference is formal: the Greco-Roman epics are in verse—the literary form of the time—while the early romances are in prose.

The surviving Greek romances, which, in suitable modern translations, have finally been gathered conveniently by B. P. Reardon (Collected Ancient Greek Novels, 1989), feature lovers who are buffeted about in an alien world. Though usually of noble blood, they are often reared as foundlings. The heroine is likely to retain her virginity through a succession of captivities by pirates, lustful potentates, and others yet more savage. These romances’ concern with chastity often seems no more than deference to respectability of the sort that constrained Victorian novelists. In the face of Fortune, both hero and heroine often remain passive, and Fortune remains stubbornly bad until the happy ending. Prescient dreams, strange coincidences, presumed deaths (later explained away either naturally or supernaturally), and escapes from seemingly impossible predicaments abound. The hero and heroine are always ready to die rather than confront the prospect of the other’s extinction or marriage to someone else. Unlike both epic and satire, romance has no moral or historical lessons to inculcate, but it aspires to spiritual edification in its idealization of character.

Although fragments of earlier Greek romances exist, the first complete specimen is the Chaereas and Callirhoe of Chariton. It begins simply and straightforwardly: “My name is Chariton, of Aphrodisias, and I am clerk to the attorney Athenagoras. I am going to tell you the story of a love affair that took place in Syracuse.” Actually this narrative, slightly more than one hundred pages in modern translation, jumps briskly around the Mediterranean world. The hero and heroine, actually married early in the story, are separated by Callirhoe’s presumed death, and both she and her husband endure many perils before their reunification. Despite many quotations from, and allusions to, Homer, this work was probably scorned by intellectuals of the day. It is well constructed, however, and uses dialogue effectively. Although it exists in but a single manuscript, scattered fragments found on Egyptian papyruses suggest popular appeal. (It must be remembered that even a “popular” reading public was tiny compared to that of today.)

In An Ephesian Tale of Anthia and Habrocomes (c. 100-150 c.e.), attributed to one Xenophon of Ephesus, roughly contemporary with Chariton, a similar plot draws in several episodes of folk origin. Graham Anderson, in Ancient Fiction: The Novel in the Greco-Roman World (1984), has shown similarities between Greek and Oriental tales in this and other romances, which illustrate how widely such folktales were disseminated. Stylistically, An Ephesian Tale of Anthia and Habrocomes is rather crude and monotonous.

A more miscellaneous romance is Leucippe and Clitophon, composed by Achilles Tatius. In the first few pages, the author describes a meeting with his hero, Clitophon, who is then allowed to tell his story in the first person—though Clitophon becomes more or less omniscient in the process. Clitophon is unusual among romantic protagonists in failing to remain completely loyal to Leucippe during their lengthy separation; circumstances force her to become the consort of a foreign potentate for a time, but their goal is nevertheless eventual reunion. The style ranges from poetic to prosaic. Achilles Tatius can manage realistic descriptions of a storm at sea, psychological portraits of his characters, elaborate puns, and melodramatic incidents.

Around 200 c.e., a writer known as Longus composed the pastoral romance Poimenika ta kata Daphin kai Chloen (third century; Daphnis and Chloë, 1587), thus blending elements from a poetic tradition whose monuments are the eclogues of Theocritus and Vergil with prose narrative. Longus shows considerable ingenuity in accomplishing the difficult feat of combining features from the static, halcyon world of pastoral with the mobile and frequently menacing milieu of romance. The young lovers’ staunch relationship is traced from the time of their childhood as goatherds and shepherds through their sexual awakening and ultimate union. The story does not leave the island of Lesbos, famed as the home of the first great lyric poet (certainly the first great female poet) Sappho. Whereas the innocent Daphnis and Chloë must prevail over the wiles of more sophisticated enemies and even well-intentioned friends, this plot keeps them close to home, and unlike the noble lovers of other romances, these two desire nothing more than a fruitful marriage and the opportunity to continue tending their flocks.

The longest and best known of the Greek romances is Heliodorus of Emesa’s Aethiopica ( 225 c.e.; An Ethiopian History, 1569; also known by several other titles, including The Story of Theagenes and Charikleia, after its protagonists). It is an ambitious work by a sophisticated writer who was obviously eager to put romance on a footing with the still-venerated epics. Whether or not he succeeded, at times he loses interest in Theagenes and Charikleia as a result of his preoccupation with elaborate stories within stories and the fierce battles he stages among Egyptians, Persians, and Ethiopians. There is also a mystery to be solved about Charikleia’s parentage; she turns out to be an Ethiopian. Heliodorus is one of the greatest of Greek prose stylists, and he influenced such towering figures as Miguel de Cervantes, Sir Philip Sidney, and Jean Racine.

An excellent general account of the Greek and Roman romances is Ben Edwin Perry’s The Ancient Romances: A Literary-Historical Account of Their Origins (1967). Romance is a form that has flourished in many parts of the world. An Arabic example that has become especially well known in Europe and the United States is Alf layla wa-layla (fifteenth century; The Arabian Nights’ Entertainments, 1706-1708). Transmitted orally for centuries, it is a collection of stories that has existed in some form for more than a thousand years. Like many later literary works, the tales themselves (not always a thousand) are set within a frame story, in this case one about a misogynistic king who has vowed to kill all women. Two young women avoid his wrath by telling him a different unfinished story each evening, thus postponing their fate until he hears the end. Immediately upon finishing, they launch upon another story; the tactic goes on until the king finally abandons his homicidal program. The stories themselves—those of Aladdin, Ali Baba, and Sinbad the Sailor, for example—have spread all over the world since publication in various languages in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Clearly the work of various hands, they have been traced to India, Iran, Iraq, Egypt, and even Greece. The interested reader may consult M. I. Gerhardt, The Art of Story-Telling: A Literary Study of the Thousand and One Nights (1963). The combination of sophisticated technique and yarn-spinning dexterity that marks The Arabian Nights’ Entertainments collection makes it a milestone in the early development of the short story. Many college courses on the history of the short story in premodern times begin with this work.

The Near and Far East

Medieval Persian poets developed a verse form called mathnavi for long narratives. Nizāi of Ganja, who flourished late in the twelfth century, composed several of these, including Leyli o-Mejnun (twelfth century; Lailí and Majnún, 1836; also known as The Story of Layla and Majnun, 1966), a tragic poem akin to the courtly European romances of the same era.

Murasaki Shikibu prevails as the most illustrious of early Japanese romancers. Her Genji monogatari (c. 1004; The Tale of Genji, 1925-1933), composed around 1004, has been called the oldest novel in the world. It includes a series of delicately crafted love stories and forcefully depicts Japanese court life of her time, an atmosphere that Murasaki knew well. Since its translation into English by Arthur Waley in 1935, it has gained recognition in English-speaking countries.

Luo Guanzhong, who lived in the fourteenth century, coherent form to cycles of legends long popular in China. His Sanguo yanyi (fourteenth century; Romance of the Three Kingdoms, 1925) is based on historical events of the third century c.e., while Shuihu zhuan (translated as All Men Are Brothers by Pearl S. Buck in 1933) has also gained a following in the West.

Columbia University Press has done much to introduce English-speaking readers to Asian fiction, as well as other literary forms, with a series of translations and “approaches.” One example is Approaches to the Oriental Classics: Asian Literature and Thought in General Education, edited by William Theodore De Bary (1959).

Bibliography

Albrecht, Michael von. A History of Roman Literature: From Livius Andronicus to Boethius, with Special Regard to Its Influence on World Literature. New York: E. J. Brill, 1997. An exhaustive survey of Roman literature and culture and its influence on modern letters, this volume includes bibliographical references and an index.

Cairns, Douglas L. Aidos: The Psychology and Ethics of Honour and Shame in Ancient Greek Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. A historical and critical look at Greek literature and psychology in literature. Includes bibliographical references and an index.

Canepa, Nancy L., ed. Out of the Woods: The Origins of the Literary Fairy Tale in Italy and France. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1997. A historical study of the fairy tale as it developed in Italy and France. Includes bibliographical references and an index.

Dover, K. J., ed. Ancient Greek Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. A historical and critical study of literature in the ancient world. Includes bibliographical references and an index.

Foley, John Miles. Immanent Art: From Structure to Meaning in Traditional Oral Epic. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991. Examines the oral, epic, and folk traditions in literature. Includes bibliographical references and an index.

Harris, Joseph, ed. The Ballad and Oral Literature. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991. A collection of lectures, some of which were given at a symposium on the Child ballads held at Harvard University in November, 1998. Includes bibliographical references and an index.

Jackson-Laufer, Guida M. Encyclopedia of Literary Epics. Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABC-CLIO, 1996. A useful compendium of information about the epic tradition. Includes bibliographical references and an index.

Lazzari, Marie, ed. Epics for Students: Presenting Analysis, Context, and Criticism on Commonly Studied Epics. A good resource for the beginner, this volume includes a foreword by Helen Conrad-O’Brian, bibliographical references, and an index.

Putnam, Michael C. J. Virgil’s “Aeneid”: Interpretation and Influence. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995. Examines the place of the character of Aeneas in literature and the influence of Roman culture on modern literature. Includes bibliographical references and an index.

Rosenberg, Bruce A., ed. Folklore and Literature: Rival Siblings. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991. Focuses on folklore in medieval literature. Includes bibliographical references and an index.